Posts by James Anderson 1243 publicly visible posts • joined 5 Apr 2007
Never going to happen. The whole corporate world is locked in to word excel and PowerPoint. Plus there is always at least one specialised app that’s only available on windows and perhaps a bespoke application written to twindows aAPIs that’s just too much trouble to port. MS has them by the short and curlies.
I think the main problem with VW and others are the complications involved in offering EV, hybrid and petrol as “options” for the same model when the only parts they will have in common are the seats and electric windows. Plus having to do this for Skoda, SEAT, VW, Cupra and AUDI versions of the same basic chassis.
Wierd set of comments. Linus is mostly interested in cars as a convenient means of transport, he does not claim any particular expertise other than as an owner and user of a couple of vehicles and as such finds the EV preferable to his old car.
The comments about the electric moter may be slightly off but actually the point is nobody has hundreds of years experience with EVs and it really levels the playing field allowing upstarts like Tesla and the various Chinese manufacturers to compete while Ford and VW struggle to enter what is effectively a new market for them.
Santander -- the Spanish bank not the old Abby National is just one of the banks migrating of Z-Series. UBS in Switzerland is actively moving its CICS/DB2 workload to Linux, Santander has already moved.
The major driver is not hardware costs but software licensing -- the whole zOS, tivoli, DB2, etc. etc. just gets too expensive. Plus the realisation that you have to pay for for the privilege of (not) using IEBCPY the worst ever copy utility ( well maybe DECs pip was worse!).
And if you are really modernising none of the newer core banking systems target Zseries.
The problem is you don't need to buy a new mainframe anymore. About 10 years ago x86 servers could handle the big workloads. But only if you were prepared to rewrite your system.
However recently there have been several companies offering a "lift and shift" service to transfer systems off the old iron.
Santander bank is just one example https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&opi=89978449&url=https://www.santander.com/en/stories/7-questions-on-how-gravity-is-transforming-santander&ved=2ahUKEwiAw5a5oauJAxWmWkEAHXBhJ3oQFnoECBoQAQ&usg=AOvVaw1WjPikADgGaOPt4979ofi2
It’s more than just a software change. Of the twenty or so IOT thingies in my house I don’t believe any of them support IPv6. So if my ISP tells me I have to use V6 I will just switch to another ISP rather than splurge over 1000 euros on a new “smart” TV even if I could find one that supports V6.
The proliferation of Things On The Internet has killed any chance of widespread V6 adoption.
I dipped a toe into this swamp when I wanted some dimmable ceiling lights. Bought some top of the range ones and surrendered my wi-fi password to some random web site and lo I could dim the lights and select the colour. For about a week. Than had to go through the whole initialise program again.
Ditched these for some bottom of the line cheapos from the local Chinese* which came with Thier own remote control and worked as soon as they were plugged in, and, have been working ever since.
* Not a restaurant! Spain has numerous warehouse size stores where Chinese manufacturers unload excess stock. May as well buy your cheap Chinese stuff direct from the Chinese.
I agree about Germans with their convoluted grammar and love of hundred word sentences.
However the Spanish language is both concise and precise. While they like to converse at a hundred words per minute for several hours written communication are usually so abrupt you wonder what you did to upset them.
Exactly. Most of these contracts involve supporting existing systems. You are basically stuck with the lazy unhelpful dickheads who have been supporting the system for the past n years as they are the only ones who know anything about the poorly documented system.
To be fair Apple knows the exact spec of every machine running MacOS. MS is supporting hardware from a hundred or so manufacturers using some permutation of 20 processor chips and god knows how many graphics chips.
It’s pretty much impossible for them to test for all the thousands of different hardware configurations out there.
Thanks for the tip.
Running a vanilla Mint/Cinnamon desktop and was surprised to see I was running cups-browsed even though I have no printer attached ( print over WiFi !)
So yes it is very likely that thousands of Linux desktops are running an unnecessary copy of this daemon.
I don't think there have been any major changes in payroll or procurement that could not be handled by existing systems over the last 30 years or so
Why go through the pain of deploying s new system to do the same as the old system if you are not being dragooned by a vendors refusal to support Thier product.
However much you dislike their cruel and authoritarian government you cannot deny that the have one of the richest and technically advanced economies in the world.
They are pretty good a techie stuff and are improving all the time. Western economies are caught up in short term capitalism that sees real research ( as opposed to market research ) as a waste of money.
Well you lot certainly had austerity!
45 % is actually about average for western europe. The USA gets away with 38% -- but health care costs are "private" if they were added to the government bucket so you can compare like with like the USA would then be about 60% of GDP.
Your comment just illustrates how damaging it is to follow the unproven theories of wacky libertarian economists
And you get third world service.
That’s the reality. You need to spend the money to maintain a decent service. In the case of the NHS it’s tax payers money. Up till about 2000 this was a bargain, UK citizens got equivalent health care for 10 to 50 percent less per head than other western economies.
Then austerity, efficiency and the unproven theory that low taxation somehow promotes growth kicked in. The resulting spending cuts over long periods have left the country with a crumbling infrastructure, the promised “growth” never appeared so there will never be enough money to recover from decades of underinvestment.
As IBM built the things and wrote the software I think they are entitled to name the various components as they like.
A lot of this is because of the long history of the 360 and its descendants. When they started using the term DASD as well as disks, there were drums, weird cone shaped things that were mounted and dismounted by a robot arm and an even weirder bucket full of mag tapes (sheets really) that were picked up and wrapped around a spindle.
Er. The visual is about “Power System Servers” basically AIX and OS 400 servers powered by the Power risc chips.
While these are pretty nifty high performance RISC chips, along with every other proprietary UNIX chip vender, they struggle to compete with the X86 and Linux combo.
C was the sensible choice. Given that bcc was free and open sourced. Practically the only language that had a mature, free and open sourced set of tooling.
If Linus had required contributors to buy a compiler licence from Borland or whoever LINUX would not even have made the “historical footnote” stage.
The open source community culture around LINUX was and is the key to its success.
Languages for courses.
C - if you are updating an existing large low level set of code written in C ( e,g. The Linux kernel ).
Rust — if you are writing a new isolated feature that requires low level access to the hardware.
GO — if you are writing a high performance multi threaded server app. Incidentally the existence of GO negates the old dog can’t learn new tricks argument — it was written by old guys!
Php — if you want a sever application up and running quickly and performance is not a major issue.
Java — if you work for a Dow jones listed company you have no choice.
Python — if you are doing something new and expect the project to evolve — but not if you need it to perform.
JavaScript — stuck with it if you want to run in a browser.
Swift — if you can’t stand JavaScript.
Good luck with that. The number of OSes used in the real world has been shrinking every year.
It’s Linux in all its incarnations AWS, chrome, android etc.
windows and BSD ( especially the MACOS variant ).
Plus the cluster of offerings from IBM — ZOS, AIX and whatever OS400 is called these days.
And a special mention for Wind River .. you probably have several copies running in you car. And there are a couple of instances running on the planet mars.
Sure there are still a number of live sites using UNISYS, Solaris, HPUx VAX etc. but these are disappearing with each hardware and or software upgrade.
Any new OS is going to face the same problem Linux faced in the 90s. No drivers for the thousands of possible devices and no support for popular applications only ten times worse.
This is particularly tricky with English. German, French Spanish etc. have precisely defined rules for grammar, spelling and interpretation governed by oficial bodies.
English has a loosely agreed set of conventions that vary constantly with "correctness" disputed by various experts. What is the meaning of "Rubber" carries greatly depending on context a nationality.
Is lowland Scots still a dialect if English or no, I dinnea ken.
Shopify is the platform of choice. They have the same attitude to scammers as X has to facists.
,er indoors saw what looked like a bargain on Shopify and ordered two for 59 euros. The nank app pinged her phone confirming the payment. 10 minutes later the bank app confirmed a payment of 99 euros, and two minutes later another payment went through.
We eventually succeeded in killing the card but only after 5 payments had gone through. It took two weeks and endless phone calls and visits to the bank to get the money back.
Shopify’s response was “Please contact the merchant if you have problems” from an obvious chat bot. They were happy to continue hosting an obviously criminal setup.
Sounds like the guy ended up in his perfect job. Morally bankrupt money grabbers with some crappy AI.
The phone company no longer listens to you conversation and sells info to a third party. (See the history of automatic telephone exchanges and Strowgers motivation for inventing the first one.)
The mail man does not open your letters and stuff them with advertising leaflets related to the subject.
So no it's not the same X and Facebook read your messages and select adverts and connections to other users based on the contents of your message. If they can identify me a a potential lawn mower customer based on my moans about long grass they can easily identify racist and illegal content. They just don't want to as they make too much money from scumbags.
Not usually a great admirer of the the French mais Continuez votre bon travail.
Given that it was a low budget cheapo machine it's unlikely that they wired the voltage toggle to an external case mounted switch. These things cost pennies and you have to pay for people who know how to use a screwdriver and a soldering iron. So you would need to open the box to find the PSU manufacturer's default toggle.
As far as I can see the only practical use case for AI in a typical business is the customer complaints chat bot.
Just teach it the run around excuse verbiage so beloved of help desks on the other side of the world.
Then your disgruntled customer will give up after 20 minutes of "helpful" suggestions and you can close the ticket as "solved".
In the case of IBM mainframes most shops replace the kit every five years or so.
The latest Z-Series is probably the finest hardware you can buy ( and you really pay for it! )
IBM's historical obsession with upward compatibility means you can run a binary compiled circa 1972 on the latest hardware, or run the latest JEE crap on the fastest platform, or recompile some POSIX compliant C code and run it in USS after your UNIX box has fallen out of support.
So really the only problem is an old, much changed code base in an older version of a language that has moved on.
Replacing such a tested complex and working system -- which will have undergone numerous upgrades and extensions over the years with variable quality documentation is a nightmare. You have about a 50% chance of succeeding and a 100% chance of going massively over budget. So perhaps the IRS is doing the right thing.
Me 2 on the cynical view. I think it goes like this. Propose s popular law/regulation to stop unscrupulous business practices. Receive campaign funds from said businesses. Win the next election^hhhhhhhauction. Quietly bury proposal in permanent "consultation" phase.
Given that most programming languages and OSes were developed on and for US keyboard it makes sense to use one all the time. Depends how often you use the £ key really.
Next time you visit the Trumpistan pick one up. Or Bangkok or Dubai as the western characters on their keyboards follow the standard US layouts —- and you get lots of extra cute looking symbols on the keys.
Sun were pretty solvent when they put themselves up for sale. The cash or cash equivalents number was eye watering.
Scott McNeally knew he could not compete with Intel, AMD or IBM for the next generation of SPARC do he didn't.
Not buying Sun after the company had standardised all software development on Java was the first of many serious mistakes by IBM.
When non tech people are surprised that I dis AI.
I explain to them that they just automated the approach taken by a lazy student.
Student is asked to write a paper on Vulcan Archtecture.
Student Google’s “Vulcan Architecture”
Choose a few articles that sound academic.
Cuts and pastes a few paragraphs from each article.
Accepts Words grammar recommendations.
Prints it if and hands it in.
Assignment completed. Proffer scums paper and gives it a C+.
Student is happy but still completely clueless about Vulcan archtecture or anything else.
Student gets a degree which leads people to believe he is intelligent.
These ERP packages require so much customisation that you are effectively programming a complete system using a wierd config file syntax or if you’re lucky a proprietary and substandard scripting language.
What’s worse you need to repeat the exercise whenever the software vendor decides you must upgrade to the next release.
Just pointing out that at least the first option produces a usable if problematic system. The second option will just get the project cancelled.
The worrying thing about agile is the obsession with code above all else.
Requirements come first and the project should have a deep understanding of them, the business and technical environment the system will run in and establish communication with all the major stakeholders before any UML is rendered let alone code.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
