Posts by Brett Weaver 171 publicly visible posts • joined 11 Apr 2006
Disagree. In the 1980's it was quite usual to open the booze cabinet (Yes, every office had one ) if the meeting was going after 5:00.
I started businesses with folk after discussing opportunities over a drink
Some Koreans famously will not do business with people unless they have seen them after they have consumed a bit. They are big believers in ""In vino vertitas" or at least using alcohol to pick up the true nature of someone...
I had a salesman who seemed fine. In hindsight he Used a lot of mouthwash though. I was too slow to fire him he hid his alcohol dependency well. He cost me a lot. The dope smokers I couldn’t afford to employ at all while dope was illegal. Most financial institutions and vendors had fits about drug convictions. They were our market. Funny how straight laced you are when your livelihood could be ruined.
The headline implies that there is a filter on membership of the "club". Its fashionable to assert that every underrepresented minority is that way because the Pale, Male and Stale people somehow caused this.
In IT I am pretty sure this has never been the case. If it was, then with the positive actions being taken by businesses we would lately see more minorities involved in IT professions.
In my experience we have less women, in particular, in software development and technical team leading than we did in the middle of the 1980's.
An observation about the 1970's and 1980's: Because no one had an IT degree, and degrees were more optional, aptitude tests were made available to all staff who thought they might want to "go into computers". Those that did well were offered positions in Data Processing.
Yes, the data entry operators (Punchgirls!) were mainly women, but programmers and systems analysts could be anyone and were a pretty good mix.
But the answer to your heart felt comment is to value the service worker more, not the bosses less, IMHO.
Nurses, doctors, teachers, care givers should all get bloody good wages. No argument.
How do we change society so it values the servant? Christians have been trying for 2000 years and failing badly.
We now have organised religion that institutionalises the same devaluation of the worth of service.
I don't know the answer, I just don't think paying the bosses less is going to fix the problem .
No.. Proper systems analysis is required. In the olden days, before Universities did IT studies, we got into jobs by doing tests the IT companies invented. IBM's tests were highly regarded. Guess what? Biology Majors did better at Systems Analysis. When you think about it - It makes sense.
Maybe its Academia that has reduced the diversity.. There were a lot of women who moved from Biology, Stats, and Mathematics to Computers in the olden days...
How do you have people from all walks of life in a cyber security team? I don't know security well, but I know a bit about software development. What you suggest is that employing florists and mechanics will improve cyber security? If not, what exactly do you mean? Are the IT folk not going to learn the same things at the same places?
But are there ANY peer reviewed papers to support the following statement? "The infosec community — still mostly male (76 percent) and mostly white (72 percent) — needs diversity to produce better outcomes, Palmore said. "
I keep seeing statements like "The more diverse a company is the more successful it is"
As someone who has run teams but is crap at managing a lot of people at one time, people who can communicate well and have a common understanding seem to me to make more efficient teams. Even within the stale, male, pale group in IT we get folk that are on all sorts of curves so off the wall suggestions can be common..
That being said, I always recruited for the bright eyes and attitude regardless of sex, race or football team preferences. In the '80's I had about 40% women in my professional services team and the team was mostly Poms, Yanks, Aussies and Sri Lankans with a handful of local Kiwis. Since the '80's it seems to have got harder to attract woman into business IT roles. Maybe its just my experience though.
You want historical transactions available in your new system?
A rare and novel concept indeed!
Tell you what, we've had a talk with our techies and they can get the data loaded if you format the data into this CSV file with about 2600 columns. They have put useful column headings (limited to 8 characters) above each one so you will know what to put where.
Otherwise you will have to write a program which keys all of your transactions into our system via the pretty web interface..
Another great episode, and for me, timely.
So you are saying that its the opinion of Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols that MS is no longer evil. He bases this on "feelings" rather than metrics as he quotes no real metrics that can be measured.
Statements such as "So when Satya Nadella took charge of Microsoft as its new CEO and said: "Microsoft loves Linux," that wasn't just lip service." are interesting, as are opinions from other writers. They are not a strong support for the premise of the opinion article though.
His embarrassment in the future, IMHO, is assured.
In the mean-time, The Register knows that one of the ways to get readers engaged is to publish a sycophantic article about MS or IBM and all the commenters will sharpen their metaphorical pencils..
To be fair, a lot of times the comments are more entertaining than the article.
In my experience, the majority of business developers are "aging boomers" (Even Python and Node.js etc).This seems to be especially so around enterprise database development for some reason. Its a major issue for a lot of organisations. Outsourcing to India and attracting overseas applicants is one approach which is being tried, but for succession to work in the workplace, being tech savvy is going to have to become more attractive to younger participants to ensure support for the applications being developed now, let alone any legacy code the organisation relies on.
What a great story to read. Co-operation between nations. Hard science. Stuff that has not been done before, lights in the sky..
Fantastic! Bring on more of these!
I could be boring and say how the automation is delivering neat stuff to Earth based systems.. But thats not so important as the success of the mission, however wrought!
I love the fact that its going on for another 10 years too!
Well done all the folks involved.
I'm sorry
But I like the fact that Bill spends the majority of his money on things a a fairly bright committee thinks are good for this word.
As someone who has had success and failure in business I think its great if the lucky ones share the love.
Everyone gets frustrated by Windows. Especially us folk who have programmed against proper enterprise class OS's..
But I get frustrated by a lot of products and their bosses don't do good in the world.
If you hate Bill, go out and prove him wrong by the quality of your software and market it intelligently so that the market knows...
"Yes, we often feel that the business is not doing the right thing (from our view) but the business is much bigger than one department (IT)."
I'm afraid I disagree.
The IT department tends to be a microcosm of the whole organisation. If management is unfocused and drifting, with little in the way of objective measurement of projects and policy.. I'm afraid it will be the same in all of the departments.
You can't have a department driven by egos and knee jerk reactions in a vacuum. If it exists in IT it will be there in the C-Suite...
While I pretty much agree with all of your points, I don't mind working with contractors that are technical specialists. Team composition should be around personality, skill and general capabilities. You generally need more than one type of tool in your belt to create a system.
The big unacknowledged issue is that banks have lost a huge amount of business knowledge. If you want to build a new system you need to know what and how and why the current system does what it does .
The staff in head office who have never been without the existing system and have not been in their current role more than 18 months are useless SME.
I guess your mileage may vary but RPG2 was an efficient language for the system /3, 32, 34 and /36. On the system/3 (1976) I had 12kb of memory, but could still write most business applications. There was a manual which told you how many cycles each instruction took so you could optimize your code. Obviously it had its day but, like cobol, it delivered a lot of business functionality. It seemed to have more popularity in the antipodes than Europe or the USA
A S36 (5362) with external hard drive. Being decommissioned 33 years after installation in 1983... had to write a screen scraping program to run on a clone novell terminal emulator so I could export all the organisations fixed asset data. The computer ran smoothly from 1983 to 2006. There was quite an event to finally enter "POWER OFF"
I acknowledge that SQL may not be intuitively associated with AI. I do need my data stored, accessible and secure. I need this in an environment of multiple technologies, business drivers and performance requirements. What are you recommending we use to store data which will be further processed?
The big thing about mainframes, apart from size and speed is reliability. OS and hardware is generally pretty bulletproof and with the backward compatibility your software investment is preserved to a much greater extent than Windows. Also braces and a grey beard are not required as much as they are in the Unix world.
To be fair you are reading The Register..
They can only afford 1.5 full time journalists because you readers wont pay them a subscription! They are forced to just regurgitate press releases for most stories.
Thank God for the BOFH...
It would be nice to once in a while find out what really went on and who the culprits were..
Why not give them a decent fine?
Agreeing to a slap with a wet bus ticket... It wasn't hard for Telstra to agree.
Why not publish the name of the dishonest chief manager responsible?
A least list the board members who were there when this was going on.
Better still, charge the firm with racketeering and close them down if guilty..
Would straighten up a lot of corporate practices and might even serve as an example to the Aussie cricket team...
The vasectomy reversal is by no means as reliable as the vasectomy. Even a successful reversal can reverse itself again fairly quickly through tube scarring etc. This happened to me. I believe there are only a small percentage of long term reverses.
Note that your wigglers go into your body after a vasectomy so your body develops anti-bodies to your sperm as well. There is a school of thought that this could reduce your sex drive.
I am happy that I have the IOFB tie, but when I got my vasectomy done I was told it was symptom free and "so much better than your wife getting her tubes tied"... I'm not as sure as I was then.
I just have 40 years experience in IT. The CEO should be fired (After he fires the CIO)..
Actually I am sick and tired of organisations insisting that issues that have been addressed successfully for generations are somehow new, and different and they could not have anticipated....
The article says that flights from Heathrow and Gatwick are affected. BA flies from a lot of other locations so presumably the systems are not down but the local delivery of GUI...
CEO should be fired just after he fires the CIO for allowing this to happen. No excuses. Airlines are computer system reliant companies. Unless a super hero or other unworldly event is involved, management should be frog marched out today.
RPGII was a great language - I wrote commercial applications in it for the S/3 Model 6, and Model 15, S/32 , S/34, S/36, RPGIII on S/38 AS/400...Have not used it much since 1993 though. It was brilliant for normal ERP applications but you would not write a game in it... Several international banking applications still have an RPGII core..
The range of comments on here highlight an issue in the audience. When The Register started, you could expect that the audience could all write a program or complex script and had technical knowledge. Now people who work *with* computers like Project Managers and Service Desk types have become involved.
Attitudes to the products being discussed are going to be different because the worlds they are existing in are different
Its an EBCDIC processor, which makes it bloody secure :-)
Yes, Ascii terminals could be attached through a RS-232 port, but they were emulating ebcdic terminals.
I remember being pretty impressed when they were marketing them as air traffic controlling machines in '78.. A lot flasher than the S/3's 32's etc I was working with
@David 132 - Thanks - I just wanted confirmation as I had a senior moment when HKLM\SOFTWARE\Policies\Microsoft\Windows\WindowsUpdate setting was missing
I like the trend in later posts towards punishing Microsoft developers - but also include the Google drongos who made a useless App out of an acceptable browser...
Its really important to me that Microsoft not try to upgrade my Dad's Laptop. He's 85 and not going to have the energy to learn a new OS. All he wants to do is check E-mail.
Its bad enough the changes made to Outlook 2013.
I'm not sure about the HKLM part of those registry entries.. On my Win 8.1 machine I don't see anything similar.. Is it an acronym I can't see?
Also on my Win 8.1 machine Google Chrome has "upgraded"itself to a buggy, frustrating App.. Anyone know how to load Chrome classic?
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