Posts by John Hawkins 222 publicly visible posts • joined 7 Feb 2008
Weren't computers in general and PCs in particular supposed to reduce the amount of office work? Does anybody remember that?
Haven't any suggestions how it will end up making more work - something to ask ChatGPT perhaps? - but going on past experience I don't reckon AI is going to reduce total work hours.
Tbh I wouldn't know - I first heard about the Book of Revelation at university back in the early 1980s and even read it out of curiosity. Haven't looked at it since so memory is a bit hazy; I do remember being impressed with the creativity of the author.
But yeah, the whole of that Book could easily be what you get if you "cross religious woo with ai woo", though probably AI would run out of ideas fairly quickly.
Got around to doing some googling on the subject - remembered that we used the term 'EEC' back then - and found this:
Who Are The Ten Kings of The Antichrist Kingdom? ~The Traditional View~
Scroll about three quarters down the page.
I suspect that Europeans are inclined to be a little more (but not as much as people like to think) sceptical of conspiracy theories because of their history, but the US and even my own country of birth are more open to such things.
YMMV
Back in the mid 1980s when I was at university, there was a lot of talk about the Book of Revelations (I read through it once – someone had clearly eaten some bad mushrooms). One of the things that kept turning up was that the EU or whatever it was called back then, was supposed to be the Beast referred to in the Book of Revelations. The logic behind that seemed a bit far fetched, but probably normal for conspiracy theories.
It had originated in the US so if Vance et al believe that, which is possible given all the other conspiracy theories that they appear to believe, then it might explain the negative view those people have of the EU.
Does anybody else remember that story about the EU being the Beast?
Younger people have lived a good part of their lives online and for them an online community is probably natural, while people in upper management belong to an earlier generation and can't get their heads around the concept.
When the next pandemic turns up - I believe there are serious efforts being made in the USA at the moment to allow a new dangerous virus to evolve - we'll be back working from home again anyway, so allowing WFH should be seen as precautionary rather than a privilege.
Much as I dislike Microsoft's business methods and software, isn't this an effect of companies and organisations locking themselves into the Microsoft ecosystem rather than anything Microsoft are to blame for? Companies might not have had a lot of choice of course if they using software that requires Microsoft somewhere in the stack, but ultimately it's their decision and they own the consequences.
Not that I've ever seen 'Microsoft software' as a bullet point on any project risk assessment, but I expect I'm not the only one who regards Microsoft as a potential risk.
Haha - the good old negative "too difficult and too complicated and it's bound to fail and we can't do that here" kiwi attitude - one of the reasons I'm never going to move back to the country.
Edmund Hilary and Bill Hamilton, to name a couple of kiwi blokes who gave things a go in the past, must be spinning in their graves.
Terraform is a bit hacky and pretty weird to code, but after using it for a few months I've found it surprisingly useful and relatively light weight compared to e.g. Crossplane which I have used in the past.
I don't trust IBM though - Oracle and Java spring to mind here - so I hope OpenTofu succeeds (I also hope they change to a better name; 'OpenTofu' is sounds like something a committee would come up with).
>>>
That this innovation isn’t happening isn’t because corporates are using Agile, it’s because the sort of innovation that’s big enough to be noticed is not the sort of innovation that a lot of tech corporates want.
<<<
I'm sure we've all noticed this at one point or another - lots of talk about innovation, but it's pretty scary and maybe not appropriate anyway for much of what is being done in any case. The most important thing is that stuff works.
Not that I've anything against innovation - great fun when you get a chance - but the word itself is becoming/has become part of the corporate BS vocabulary.
Here in Sweden there has been some discussion around why the bloke did a runner in the first place, i.e. to skip out on what looked to be a pretty water-tight rape conviction.
Lots of fawning and sighing about him getting his 'freedom' back though from various sections of the news media, including (or perhaps, particularly) from sections that are very critical of a well known orange haired rapist.
To me both blokes seem to be pretty sleazy, but that's just my opinion.
And in Sweden. Also here the payment system connects though a cell phone number and is a simple way of dealing with both smaller and larger payments directly from your bank account. Scan the QR and approve the payment in the smartphone app. Used by small and by large merchants as well as for private money transfers.
The app is linked to the main local MFA solution (probably others as well), which can be set up to use fingerprint authentication, a PIN or both.
Scammers get around the system by persuading people to sign off transactions that they're not fully aware of, but that's not very different from giving someone a signed blank cheque.
Dunno about Americanisation - 'meter' is the Germanic spelling while 'metre' is likely the Latin (aka froggy) spelling. While one of my distant ancestors was born in France (Alsace to be exact, though back then it was called Elsaß and was patriotically Teutonic), I regard myself as more Anglo-Saxon than French.
So I use 'meter' to refer to the unit of measurement - YMMV.
I reckon we can forget the Suez canal as a reliable transport route from now on - the Ukrainians have shown the world what can be done with seagoing drones that can carry a payload of hundreds of kg, so anybody capable of building and launching such things could pretty much shut down the Red Sea for shipping. The Iranians for example.
Hydropower dam collapse has killed more people than nuclear accidents so anything you say about the risks of nuclear power might also be said of hydro.
The Banqiao Dam failure of 1975 is probably responsible for most such deaths and like Chernobyl, it was poorly maintained Soviet Union technology. But anything that isn't maintained properly works until it doesn't so good the blokes got caught.
I don't remember the name of the bloke, but it was in a context about what construed harassment and I do remember his advice that was quoted in one of the Aussie morning papers.
The advice was "Don't be a dickhead".
It's not really something that can be defined by the likes an RFC, but like an old definition of pornography you know it when you see it.
Making Twitter a dickhead-free zone is probably difficult while Musk is in charge, but it is an attractive thought.
On the other hand if the EU ever managed to get around to getting something done, there'd be a lot of screaming and frothing of the mouth about abuse of power etc. Which might even be justified.
The current setup might not look like much, but it creates unnecessary work and expense for the companies in question and flags up a risk that their insurance companies probably regard as a justification for increasing the cost of the premiums paid etc.
So the process is the punishment, as it were, and I think I prefer this to the more direct method as that could easily get out of hand if the bureaucrats get a taste for it.
But in a year or two when it's time to renegotiate your Cloud provider contracts, would you rather be locked in or be able to migrate your infrastructure to a rival provider at a reasonable cost?
Given the amount of money one provider is throwing at a project I'm currently working with to 'enable' migration, marketing and sales have very deep pockets; that money has to come from somewhere and I'm guessing that locked in customers are at least part of the answer.
A lot can be achieved without having to use provider specific solutions - Kubernetes anyone? - and you're probably going to end up with a simpler solution as well.
I'm beginning to wonder if we've reached peak China and their leaders getting increasingly bolshy (for want of a better word) as they find themselves staring into the abyss.
Demographically China already has some serious issues - even a few years ago there were reports of labour shortages - and Covid has made much of the old developed world realise that they can no longer rely on China as a manufacturing site so have started to diversify. The current leader of the China seems dead set on rolling back the changes that Deng Xiaoping made and that enabled the country to become what it is today.
I think it is a real pity - a decade and a half or so ago I worked with quite a few Chinese colleagues as the company I was working for at the time had an office in Beijing and I found them to be open, honest and hardworking so I had high hopes for China.
Whatever happens, it will take a while to happen as China is so big, but I hope for the sake of people there that things do sort themselves out.
US based Cloud services with local data centers are already off-limits for some organisations I've worked with here in Sweden. The usual story is that their technical people start a discussion with us about hosting on Microsoft/Amazon/Google, but it stops once their legal people get involved. It would be interesting to know if anybody else within the EU (or any where else for that matter) has seen this pattern.
It does mean that there are opportunities for local cloud hosting services, though I guess pricing is an issue. One local hosting service I know of uses OpenStack, so they do exist and a customer doing medical research I worked with a couple of years ago hosted part of their operations with that local service for legal reasons.
I remember him; a bit 1980s for my taste - I had my fill of that with the university economics papers I took in the mid-80s - but interesting to read his columns even so.
His website is also interesting, even if it's too much 'stream of consciousness' for my tastes and hard work to read. YMMV.
> The chinese like to play the long game
This doesn't look like the long game to me - the long game is the Chinese stopping wasting resources being aggressive and instead building up their economy so that the Taiwanese decide they'd quite like to be part of China after all. To get there the Chinese will need to be a little less up-tight about freedom as well, so that issue will solve itself along the way.
The Chinese in the current scenario are acting like a short-term thinking Western country rather than a country with a multiple thousand year history.
Bees live with these already; we had beehives on the farm I where grew up and we used to find the grubs in old combs we'd stored in the shed. Occasionally we'd see grubs in the beehives, but only in odd corners where the bees weren't.
Wild bees living in hollow tree trunks would likely be a better environment for wax worms as bits of old comb and dead bees etc would likely build up below the colony.
Strictly speaking, the Finns were colonised first by the Swedes and later by the Russians after the 1809 war. Though the Russian colonisation didn't get heavy handed until a bit later on. Then of course there was the Winter War 1939 - 1940, when the Soviets basically tried to do to Finland what the Russians are trying to do to the Ukraine.
So the Finns have been on the receiving end of colonisation rather than the other way round and have more reason than most to be suspicious of Russian motives.
I hate office landscapes - always a lot of noise and movement - never enough rooms for meetings/calls so people take calls at the next work station.
Good enough reason to start looking for a new employer if my current situation of mostly working from home ever changes.
Workshops and some meetings can be taken in the office, I don't have any issues with that, but I prefer to leave office space for the poor sods who don't have room for a proper home office.
The Register spoke to Richard Dinan, CEO of Pulsar Fusion, who told us "2040 sounds about right" once one considers the infrastructure and sign-offs needed to build a power station.
"That's what's taking the time," he said, "it's not the fusion."
I'm not sure if this is a good thing or not, but it does suggest we're closing in on fusion reaching the business-as-usual state and getting bogged down the same way as other infrastructure changes do.
I agree also - I first came to my current country of residence when I was 23 and had the good fortune to work in an environment where few spoke English. After a year I was fully fluent and after a couple more people started wondering which part of the country I came from.
Learning languages at school felt pointless and a waste of time. A good comparison would be learning a new IT skill by taking a course and getting a certification as opposed to learning by doing.
Your mother was a hamster, and your father smelt of elderberries.
I am a little disturbed to see that even after a few hours there are no references to this quote, given the subject matter and M. Dabbs' country of residence - or perhaps I am just getting old.
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