Posts by James Anderson 1174 publicly visible posts • joined 5 Apr 2007
"Climate Science" has become the green version of "Creation Science".
It is a cult devoid of science or logic. The basic premise being that if you can reduce, cancel or ban something therefore making someone uncomfortable then it must be a good for the planet.
Scientific studies are quoted endlessly when they support the hair shirt policies, but, when science supports the status quo it is suppressed or shouted down and the authors villified.
EDI is a classic case of bad standards being worse than no standards. A inexperienced and inappropriate standards body (the United Nations no less!), too much vendor input, scope creep etc. etc. led to confusing, over complex and ever changing standards.
EDI clings to life in some niche markets, the US where a commercial operation said ballocks to the standards and runs a pay for what you get EDI clearing house, and, the auto industry whose supply chain runs on an EDI standard from the last century, because at some point they just said no to upgrades.
Mines the one with the invoices stuffed in hte pockets.
So instead of burning pertrol in a reasonably efficient internel combustion engine we burn Polish coal or Russion gas a hundred miles away then transmit the power over hulking great pylons, transofrming it up a down a few kV on the way, transform it down to 12 volts stuff it into a battery that will only return 90% of the energy, then, expend most of the energy you do get out moving the batteries around.
If this is saving the planet I am off to see AManFromMars about a work visa.
The UK has the lowest road deaths of any country that has a reasonable number of cars:--
http://www.statistics.gov.uk/cci/nugget.asp?id=1208
Now the interesting bit which need to be deduced form various other stats:
Some 12% of accidents involve drunk drivers -- a highly illegal and severely punished offence.
Some 200 (approx 4%) fatal accidents involved uninsured drivers -- a highly illegal and moderately punished offence.
The statistics for accidents involving stolen vehicles or other crimes are strangely not available but a quick google comes up with dozens of local newspaper articles about fatal accidents involving stolen cars.
The statistics for for fatal accidents involving unlicensed or banned drivers are likewise unavailable. However take the claims "one in fifty drivers is unlicensed " and " unlicensed drivers ten times more likely to have an accident" and do some arithmetic you get perhaps 20% of accidents involving drivers who have never had a license or have had their license taken away.
An astonishing number of fatal accidents involve drivers who were already committing a serious crime and who were unlikely to be deterred by something as trivial as a speeding fine.
Taking out the 600 motorcycle related deaths (they do not have more accidents in total but if they do have an accident it is more likely to be fatal.) Of the remaining 1600 fatal accidents take away the 50% where the driver was already involved in a serious crime you are left with some 800 accidents which involved "ordinary" drivers. Given the high levels of road usage in the UK it is difficult to see how anything short of a total ban on private vehicles could reduce this number.
Diminishing returns have set in with a vengeance -- any further spending on road safety is a waste of money.
Bradford and Bingly a non-existant ex building society are still advertising (the green cutie with hte bowler hat).
The soon to be non-existant RBS had thier logo on Lewis Hamiltons winning car.
Those irritating full production number all singing all dancing adverts still advertise the non-existent Halifax ( we give you Extra nothing).
There was a party political broadcast thingy for the "Labour Party" the other week .......
Dawkins is merely jumping on a band wagon here.
IBMs current mainframe offering is probably the best hardware you can buy!
Its significantly better the the top end IBM unix boxes which are definately the best unix hardware you can buy.
It runs Linux images just as well as any other hardware, and the native z/OS does a pretty good job of impersonating unix in its spare time. (The Unix System Services are more POSIX complient than Solaris!).
Presumably you would need a re-compile to get your solaris programs to run on z/OS hardware, whereas a simple purge of Solarisisms and a recompile could get your C or C++ programs running natively -- so whats the point?
The SUN "roadmap" is for slower and less powerful chips than IBM has currently in producion. You can order a 64 core machine running at 5 gigahertz now and have it up and running in your datacentre in about six weeks.
Sadly the current SUN story seems like a made for TV version of the "Decline and Fall of the Digital Equipment Company", same delays, same market misjudgments, same fanatical band of loyal supporters.
Mines the asbestos one!
"Protect the team from unnecessary distractions" -- is fine if that means keeping the d*ckhead who looks after the timesheets from bugging them, or, fending of the pillock from HR who wants to discuss "personal goals" and "acheivments".
But those "Sales and Marketing" droids are your clients. They know what they want! They may not be able to expalin it in a UML diagram but you really need to communicate with your customers/users/victims.
One of the most common reasons for failed/substandard projects is that requirements have been fed from the original requester, to a consultant on to a busines analyst, translated into use cases by a technical analyst and implemented by developers who have never spoken to any of the four or five people in the communication chain.
Like any good historian you should rely only on original source -- always try to find the real "requiree"s and check with them what is actually required -- up to 30% of requirements can be dropped as they were inserted by the analysts who werent paying attention and cloning the requirments from a previous project .
The credit crunch and banking crisis will have almost no effect on British SMEs bacuase they got no financial support from the banks anyway.
Britian is a medium sized country with an Imperial sized financial infrastructure, yet, UK businesses have always found it hard to raise capital or get reasonably priced credit.
Even in the boom times a request for funding say a new software business would always be met with an "Of course you can have the money we, just need your house for security and that will be an extra two percent interest as you are self employed".
As banks are now funded by UK tax payers can we please make it ilegal for banks to give all our money to the next American con man who bamboozles them with a power point presentation.
At least they havnt fallen into the old false prescision trap.
Given that the model can only be approximate, and, that most of the available data is out of date, inaccurate and out of sync. there really is no point in putting everything through a supercomputing grid and calculating everything to fifty decimal places.
A correctly programmed dell work stationreally is good enough for this work.
A triumph of intelligence over gimmicry!
The trick is not to have large scale projects.
The best manager of large scale projects I ever came across did it by identifing
the most important parts of the project, then identifing his most talelted resources
and only four of five of them and letting them loose. In the meantime he
managed the other 100 people while they muddled through hte non core
pieces of the project.
In ten years it has had control of Symbian, it has turned it from the best small computer os and the only one with a usable interface into something indistinguishable from a cheap phone.
There is no longer a community of Symbian app developers and even MicroSoft does a better smart phone. Nokia have fallen so far behind its difficult to see how thye could catch up, escpecially as the current management are the ones responsable for the current crop of unusable smart phones.
HTC are the only ones who seem to be doing it right these days.
I absolutely agree on the exposure of the Orwellian machinations of the Wonkypedia.
However as far as short selling goes I still think Byrnes position is fairly dodgy. Naked shorting only works on a f**ked company. It certainly hastens the decline of a failing company and
this is good or bad depending on your idealogical viewpoint.
No one can make any money naked shorting a healthy company!
Put options are a different matter. Its up to the companies management to offer and sell these.
Bear Stearns offered put options for sale as part of an enromous bluff to pretend the company was healthier than it was, when the bluff was called they had to pay up, depleting the operation of ready cash it desperately needed.
The US in particular has a vast number of protetions and subsidies which protect corporations at the expense of thier customers, tax payers and even shareholders.
e.g. Chapter 13 bankruptcy -- where a large badly run company can survive at the expense of it smaller and probably well run suppliers. Banning short selling would only add to the number of corporate welfare measures already in place.
"You can't judge a University on one paper/course/professor"
Why not the person who set the course either had not read the paper or worse read it but did not know his subject well enough to realise it was gibberish.
The tutor on the course by his own admission had not read the paper, yet was still prepared to mark answers on question about the paper.
When these filures were pointed out the OU as an organisation refused to admit there was anything wrong and implied the student was somehow at fault.
So we have a gibberish papers included in a course, tutors who have never read the material and mark students down for pointing out that a paper is giberish, and an organisation that refuse to admit or correct obvious failings.
One gibberish paper creeping into a course may have been forgiven, a lazy and unhelpful tutor may have just been bad luck, but an organsation that pockets a thousand quid for a sub standard course and tries to imply that you are just too thick for the course or are being unreasonably awkward when you bring these matters up tends to suggest widespread problems.
Would you go back to a restaurent where only one person at your table caught salmonella?
They were caught sleeping on the job and are caliming they were just stress testing the sofa.
Verity should take this up with the trading standards office. She paid good money for a course whose materials had clearly never been read by the author of the course and were clearly not fit for purpose!
I hope this runs and runs!
P.S. Sorry Verity, but, somehow I think you are going to fail this course for disturbing your tutors sleep.
Have you as a legitimate credit card holder with money in hte bank ever had a transactions turned down?
I can assure you it is embarassing, inconvenient and annoying.
The credit card industry cannot apply fraud controls too strictly or thier product becomes worthless. I have dropped at least one card company in the past because thier "Artificial Stupidity" based fraud detection viewed booking an airline ticket on the last plane home as "uncharacteristic spending".
As soon as you refers to one piece of kit as "backup" you instantly diminish its importance. After all you are better off concentrating your efforts on the "main" equipment.
In this scenario the backup becomes worthless, you know you neglected it so you are reluctant to use it even if you relly need to.
The way out of this problem is a never use the "main/backup" even "A/B" semantics but something like "currently active/ready". And switch over regularly! Once a week/month/quarter switch systems this way you can be sure the failover procedure works ( and works now this week not 18 years ago when it was last tested!) and it also gives both systems an equal mindshare.
Running a flakey insecure unreliable OS on 99.9999% reliable hardware is not going to result in a reliable system.
The reason for the popularity of UNIX based multisite HA clusters is that they protect you against all the "biblical" failures (fire, flood and electricity famines). Coupled with a reliable OS and well written software you have ninty nine point something reliability depending on how much money you have to spend (as a rule of thumb each extra 9 will double your budget!).
The sad fact is that a modern unix HA cluster is probably more reliable than the company that owns it. We dont have the technoligy to protect the systems from their management.
PS. @Soloman Grundy -- keep taking the dried frog pills!
There are software development methods where everything is formally defined and there are procedures to test and correct requirements, definitions and implementations at every stage of the project. The best example probably being the methodoligies used by NASA and JPL (Jet Propulsion Laboritory) when wring software for spacecraft. (Even they have bugs!).
The problem is that these methods are painstakingly slow and expensive.
Most corporate/business software is developed using much sloppier "good enough" methodoligies which relies greatly on common sense evaluation and lots of informal communication between the business, analysts and developers.
Specs are just good enough but the authors were known, and, any innaccuracies could be cleared up when you were both at the coffee machine.
This informal communication is completely lost when parts of a project are outsourced.
Sending the same spec to another country to be evaluated by a developer who has
never met the author and who must route all queries through an account manager
just does not work.
When you outsource a project you should be prepared to triple the amount of time and money spent evaluating and revewing all your requirements and specification documents. Except in most cases this will not happen because this willmake it more expensive than an in house development and management will not want to hear that.
A large part of this stems from the "separation of church and state" bit of the US constitution.
This was/is an excellent idea, but it was disaterously applied to the tax code.
Churches go tax free, this status has turned relifion into a cash cow which has attracted many and various unsrupulous operators.
Churches use this free cash is to pomote themselves and thier views. Hence drawing more suckers^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hbeleivers and even more tax free cash.
A large amount of this cash is spent ensuring that only religion friendly polititians get elected.
Palin seems to sharp an operator to really beleive in palin-toligy, I think she just felt if she agreed with the creationists she would get an easier ride into the governors office.
The big problem is that the younger generations who have been taught superstion rather than science wont be equipped to make such descisions.
A real separation of church and state would tax churches the same as any other business!
Well this one wave anyway, off the Cornish coast, unless of course we are offending you in any way or upsetting your view perhaps in which case the wave is yours.
We will just carry on with our mission to defend the right of the Public School boys at the Foriegn Office to behave like prats. After all without the extra money from the KGB they can barely afford the Opera these days.
Tim beavers are actually extremely "creative" in environmental terms.
The sure they mow down a few trees and muddy up the waters, but the dams slow down the flow of water and reduce erosion downstream. Longer term the dams silt up forming small fertile meadows which become rich in plant life and provide excelent habitat for many species.
Apparently theres good eating in one of those as well.
Well not exactly flawed as far as google is concerned. But distinctly flawed from the business user's perspective.
Google offers excellent services such as search and gmail which are funded by advertising and appeal to Joe Public.
The problem lies in "funded by advertising" have a look around at other services soley funded by advertising: Network TV, Free Newspapers on the Tube, mainstream radio etc.. They all have one thing in common: low cost, low quality, low production value content. The sort of stuff thats OK for free but you wouldnt want to pay for.
Any future "Software As A Service" has is with "salesforce.com" type subscription services. Services that you pay for in return for an enforcable contract with the service supplier and a meaningful service level agreement. In this environment reputation and quality count for much, so, firms will ensure thier services are reliable and available and have all the features thier customers require.
Its diffcult to see how Google can enter into this market, other than throwing massive amounts of money at it. Microsoft tried this with search and "content" and it didnt get them very far, so, its difficult to see Google doing any better.
So if you want to live in a world ruled by advertising budgets, surrounded by messages from our sponsers, where critisism of any company with an advertising budget simply dos not happen -- then by all means download chrome.
Me I'm sticking with Firefox.
I went on an Internationisation seminar last year. One of the lectures was "Dangers of Cross Cultural Misunderstangs".
For the non-UKians out there the P45 is the little form your ex-employer gives you so you can claim unemployment benefit.
I suppose the next chipset will be called the UB40.
Reading between the lines they seem to have been trying to prove that you can read information on an RFID chip.
This is not very surprising as this is what they were designed to do.
Why do people panic and apply a totaly different set of criteria when a computer or chip is involved.
My paper/cardboard passport is designed to be read as well, and read it has been , by immigration, check in staff, hotel receptionists, spanish supermarket checkout operatives etc. etc.
Furthermore its very easy to obtain a copy with a photocopier -- something European hotel receptionists seem to enjoy doing.
So whats the big deal if you can buy an RFID reader and read the data on a passports RFID chip?
If they could alter or update the data on the chip that would be a bigger issue, although this does happen quite regularly with paper documents (but dont try this at home doctoring passports requires considerable skill and expertise!).
Its like the fuss over MiFId chips - no one seemed bothered that any school child could forge/alter the tickets when they were bits of paper -- but suddenly it was an issue when Phd students with access to specialist equipment could forge/alter the electronic version.
When I read the strapline I was prepared for the usual end of civilisation, behead the bankers tosh. But it turned out to be a good review of a well reasoned and original book.
Housing markets desparately need a mechanism that prevents bubbles or at least bursts them early.
Also why is everbody so glad when house prices go up? They would get pretty pissed of if the price of bread or beer went up 100% every year. Housing is a basic commodity everybody needs, long term, cheaper housing would make everybody better off; Gods knows I would rather spend my wages down the pub than giving them to the bank manager.
NatWest obviously outsourced thier archiving to GraphicData who then proceeded to give it away on e-Bay.
I think the legal liability (such as it is) for this is still with NatWest.
This is one of the great hidden costs of outsourcing, offshoring etc. You have unloaded the operational expenses to the lowest bidder. But you retain the legal liability for any screw ups, plus all the "reputation risk" -- no will will remember it was Graphic Data who were responsable for the leak.
IBM and now Levonos supply chain/marketing is heavily geared up twoards corporate customers. They dont have any meaningful consumer channels. You can buy a thinkpad online but without your corporate discount they end up shcokingly expensive.
I bought mine as a three year old second hand ex corporate machine - its probably the best computer I own in terms own (it does run unbuntu so it has an unfair advantage over the newer HP kit, and a Dell of the same vintage is starting to struggle.
My ASUS EEE is gradualy elbowing its way up to number one most used PC in the house. Fast bootup and genuine portability are a hard combination to beat;
Not if you are in europe.
An extensive search of the dell uk web site uncovers on rather unispired desktop box which you can buy with linux preinstalled.
The Belgian site has no unix options whatsoever.
Dell should either offer boxes whith Linux pre-installed ( or at least without a compulsary Vista install ) or stop claiming they do.
Microsoft's lawers are usually amusingly incompetent at best and godawful cringemaking embarasingly bad if anything actually gets to court.
There is a level of competance in Microsofts handling of this case, they have troused pretty much the entire settlement from Sony and in exchange poor old Immersion gets to join Microsofts "Partner Program". Pretty much the modern equivalent of razing your city and selling your women into slavery.
What if MS demonstated a similar legal accumen in thier next anti-trust case? They might convince a Judge that yes Bill Gates did write the Linux kernal in his spare time but mislaid the diskette under a sack of dollars, or, core parts of the GCC compiler were written while R.M. Stallman was working for Microsoft. Sacry!
Anyone looked at ORACLE cluster or DB2 Sysplex recently.
They obviously use some variation of MapReduce internally to spread the laod over several machines, its just not exposed in hte API.
And as I said at the time Google's BigTable does support an SQL varient, among several options for accessing the database.
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