Posts by Caoilte 68 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Dec 2007
In 1998 I installed Debian Hamm, Postgres 6 and JDK 1.1 on a new AMD tower and started learning them all. They weren't the most popular at the time (that would have been Slackware or Mandrake or Redhat / MySQL, Perl and Pentiums) but they felt like the future.l and I'm glad they've all done well.
Depends on the documentation. Lots of companies/government departments require you to create reams of documentation for each release that is completely useless as soon as it is written but which fulfills a box ticking exercise.
I think it comes from a time when releases required hundreds of manual interventions. If a system is properly architected and the release process is properly automated then there is very little which can go wrong and a lot less which needs to be documented.
Most people I know who went to work at Amazon left the moment their joining bonus stocks vested (usually 12 months). Mixture of tech and middle management.
The last paragraph of the story doesn't make sense to me.
>>> One insider suggests that the worst thing that could happen would be for AWS to get all the staff it wanted. "I think the company would slow down… because people would feel like they were able to take the pressure off themselves." <<<
Even if they got all the staff they wanted a quarter of them will quit from stress and overwork the next quarter anyway. These people aren't putting the pressure on themselves. :eyeroll:
The only thing which will slow Amazon down is people getting wise to the fact that the minor bump in appeal to your CV of having passed through their meat grinder isn't worth the daft interview process, below average comp and soul crushing work pressure. That or TRPF.
I wouldn't want to write a unikernel app in C for this reason, but MirageOS is written in OCaml and either that makes pointer mistakes impossible and the entire program simpler to verify correct before deployment or we're not ready for unikernels. Given how free Haskell/Scala code tends to be I can believe that OCaml is similarly reliably correct.
I've never heard of any problems with Nationwide, but do you actually have any evidence that their systems are any more modern than the other banks?
I got the impression this was an industry wide problem (exactly what you'd expect given the game of musical chairs played at board level)
I'm enjoying this level of openness. We didn't see it on previous government buildouts and I think that is why some of them managed to spend hundreds of times more before getting cancelled.
Every successful programme of work contains basket case projects that should get canned early and may not for political reasons.
This may be one of them. With the heat on like this, we may get to find out.
I just wish The Register wasn't so openly gleeful about solely pouncing on every misfortune and could give the balanced view as well. I guess they've read the clicks - but first dotcom boom around this (then: proudly) "rag" used to float above that sort of laziness and read between the lines.
Take your example from the book (which I haven't read). There are two problems,
1) You ignore the political capital required to support change. If the Canadian government are unable to offer jobs to local factories to produce the solar panels then they lose some of the support they require to pass legislation that will (inevitably) require higher taxes. This could be enough to prevent them from ever being able to pass similarly progressive legislation.
2) By introducing these feeder tariffs - Canada makes its own manufacturing economy less competitive compared to a country using (for example) just coal power. If it cannot protect its own industry from the losses it suffers because of this then the legislation will get rolled back in due course.
The WTO has created a race to the bottom. This suits financialists because they can play the ends off against the middle but it has disempowered individual country's ability to act unilaterally on a whole host of global problems (eg deforestation, pollution, global warming). Even if you force local actors to clean up their act - they'll likely just export all their bad habits.
If you weren't so blinkered you'd understand this. Honestly I don't know who thought it would be a good idea to get you to review any book at all (shouldn't there be a fondleslab you can drool over instead?).
1) Lower Inequality between nations and lower inequality within nations are not mutually exclusive.
2) If we're going to talk about rising inequality within our nation, why not talk about rising inequality within developing nations?
3) Since the 1% within our nation _runs_ our nation we have to contend with rising corruption that both undermines our growth and stability and feeds on itself in an un-virtuous circle of further growth in inequality.
4) The transfer of growing inequality between generations is as pernicious to our growth and societal prospects. Smart kids from poor families have no prospects. Below average kids from rich families end up running the country.
Your whole article read like a smoke screen. You knew your conclusion, "1% holding a third of the country's wealth is trivial" and you worked back from there.
Is good that you mentioned Branko Milanovic - but it also seems odd you didn't mention Piketty at all.
Could you elaborate on what's faddish about GDS, Andrew?
I've been quite impressed by their work (as shared on their blog https://gds.blog.gov.uk/) and I count them as one of the few successes of this government (as evidenced by the so far smooth rollout of the new polling database - in comparison to the recent e-borders payout).
I can't tell if your bile is aimed at GDS specifically or government in general, but I would be saddened if it turned out that a political bent for libertarianism undermined an appreciation for well managed agile engineering practices.
These things are possible. I remember this talk covering some of how you can approach the solution,
http://skillsmatter.com/podcast/agile-testing/continuous-delivery-patterns-for-large-software-stacks
However, the best way to deal with the problem is not to have it. If you can adopt a component architecture (SOA, Microservices, plugin frameworks etc) with loose coupling then you should have a component simple enough to perf test for anticipated use and to be able to put it live without requiring downstream releases.
There isn't an application orchestration engine (that I know of) as mature as the Puppet/Chef infrastructure tier and this forces us all to a lot of painful in-house custom work. I've used Glu and Capistrano and both have problems. Asgard might work next time I'm on AWS again.
It's more efficient to use gas in homes than in power stations. Gas is an excellent store of energy and you get a lot more power out of burning it in your home than out of burning it in powerstation sending it to your home as leccy (losing 40-60% during transmission) and then turning it back into heat (and losing some more).
We should stop using gas in power stations. The only reason we do is because it's cheap and easy to throw up a gas turbine whereas it takes years of planning to build equivalent wind turbines or work out where you're going to bury nuclear waste.
Exactly,
which is why they need to be balanced by other sources (wind) across a continent wide smart grid (where the productive day is also longer) and storage solutions can be made use of (eg Norwegian water storage, but there are other ways).
The Against the Grain podcast explores this a little bit.
Because you can't imagine how the human race could beat global warming you refuse to believe in it. That's quite normal. It's not rational, but then few people can think rationally about such an abstract subject.
However, as a tech journalist, I wish you were more inquisitive and read the non-military news. We've just opened super-connectors with Iceland (Geothermals) and Norway (Hydro storage). Siemens (Desertec) is building super-connectors to Morocco where solar concentrators offer a rare-earth elements free method of generating vast amounts of electricity.
Against the Grain just broadcast a really good interview with Gar Lipow on this subject, where he goes into some detail on the technological solutions we already have and how we could pay for them here and in the global south. Simply put, If there was cross-border state investment in expanding the projects I described above we could generate 70% of our energy from renewable sources in less than twenty years.
http://www.againstthegrain.org/program/607/tues-91812-halting-global-warming
Also this week's Analysis explored the topic of political prejudice in some detail and why people have trouble adapting their opinions on these subjects
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b01mqmyw
Both would be worth while listening to and would offer a lot more of value to you and other readers than the sort of sensationalist pap that I'm more used to seeing in the Metro free-paper.
We're at our most adaptive and in a position to learn most when we're young.
At a university you are guaranteed to be challenged to a certain minimum level and to spend all your time constantly learning new things.
You might be so lucky in your first job, but you could easily get thrown in a corner and taught a lot of very bad habits.
If you are hugely ambitious (this probably matters more than smarts) and are confident that you can drive yourself forward then a degree probably isn't necessary. For anyone else, you might get lucky - but you'll probably drive yourself down a dead end career.
If I were an 18 year old today I would get a degree in agricultural engineering. Lots of very old farmers about to pop it and a huge shortage of fertilizers coming in the next 40 years. You stand to make a mint.
It's businesses which sell their IP down the river to China for a quick boost to earnings (no doubt linked to Executive bonuses). It's businesses which undermine the loyalty and pride that most employees want to have in their workplace just so they can save a few bucks that look good in one single quarterly earnings report.
And then government goes and copies all the worst things about businesses.
Why bother studying when it's increasingly just rote learning for the benefit of school league tables and of no benefit to your future career at all?
Why bother healing people when you can get them more ill and then squeeze more money out of them (or in the UK: why bother healing people when the most important government target of the week is empty beds).
These stupid targets are set by governments who think everything should be measurable just like in a logistics business or pizza restaurant.
Only the Germans and the Chinese (and a few other smaller economies) have a systemic respect for the complexity involved in and flexibility required in running a modern country.
And I blame big business for that because it was their policy to lobby for and support braindead governments less likely to oppose them.
We should be celebrating the ability of these companies to attract VC and even generate profits.
Where there are independently wealthy trust fund kiddies dabbling in trendy nonsense, they deserve to be skewered but there are far more of those types draining oxygen out of the talent pool through internships all across the city.
Name dropping Nathan Barley is a tired cliche that was already pretty old when the tv series came out five years ago.
The only thing which makes sense is to hook up the whole shebang with the EDF. Why would we want a navy which isn't integrated into Europe?
Alternatively, if you're an anti-European we should just get rid of the navy and rely on the Americans.
Either way, there's no more point going it alone. Hasn't been for years.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2025
