* Posts by Caff

272 publicly visible posts • joined 22 Feb 2008

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Kyndryl insiders say there's little new business

Caff

Re: Its separate consulting business, where it helps companies

Its not the hardware / software infrastructure that makes mainframe migration fail / difficult. Its the lack of correctly scoping the testing / implmentation overhead for the business code migration.

One I completed it only took 3 months to stand up the infrastructure but two years of testing and code fixes for the actual application itself to cutover

IBM says GenAI can convert that old COBOL code to Java for you

Caff

Its not the cobol programmer that is expensive - its a cobol programmer who understand the application/product that is hard to get. And that salary is unlikely to change much no matter what programming language the code is in.

If they want a banking application programmer to maintain code for mortgages they will need to understand how mortgage products work to know what the impact of a code change on an interest calculation is. Same with investment products and pensions.

Salesforce, Deloitte try to flog contact-tracing wares to a UK public sector that's already got a £12bn test-and-trace system

Caff

excel based

hmm looks like that covid tracking system needs an upgrade...

https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-54412581?fbclid=IwAR1tp2yEvxu5YT7-odOPACf1fy_k-0R1nD8eDGM0YiJ-foCVZHD1BbtbRxo

We won't CU later: New Ofcom broadband proposals mull killing off old copper network

Caff

reliability

Does fibre require less maintenance over the long term? Less risk of theft, damage from elements or lightning strikes etc..?

Googlers fired after tracking colleagues working on US border cop projects. Now, if they had monetized that stalking...

Caff

Seems to be their new tactic

They hired a union busting company earlier in the year and have already pushed out the previous organisers

https://www.theverge.com/2019/7/16/20695964/google-protest-leader-meredith-whittaker-leaves-company

https://www.theverge.com/2019/6/7/18656490/google-walkout-organizer-quits-retaliation-claire-stapleton

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/20/technology/Google-union-consultant.html

If there were almost a million computer misuse crimes last year, Action Fraud is only passing 2% of cases to cops

Caff

credit card

Would the credit card companies not have pretty good stats of the amount of fraud transactions they have refunded?

Royal Navy seeks missile-moving robots for dockyard drudgery

Caff

Railguns

They'll finish it in 30 years overbudget and behind schedule, just in time for them to say goodbye to explosive munitions for inert railgun fired ones...

Be still, our drinking hearts: Help Reg name whisky beast conjured by Swedish distillers and AI blendbot

Caff

Sweedish so Son instead of Mc

Whiskey Whiskerson Face

Hip and modern IBM can't beat legacy kit and services IBM: That's four consecutive quarters of revenue decline now

Caff

zcloud

Lot of banks and other finance companies are looking at z cloud but no one wants to be the first to take the jump as they are all very risk adverse. Once they finish off their current cycle of "digital" projects in the next 2-3 year I can see the adoption of z cloud getting bigger which should improve IBM's financials.

Elon Musk's new idea is to hook your noggin up to an AI – but is he just insane about the brain?

Caff

Gliosis

A number of neuro scientists have pointed out the risk of gliosis from implanting electrodes in nervous tissue. Musks presentation doesn't address how his neuralink would overcome this.

Banks bid legacy tech farewell as they sail to the cloud – but now all that infrastructure is in hands of the big three

Caff

Could be IBM zcloud

Caff

Legacy systems

I can see those "new" IT systems been legacy in 10 years time. Bank IT goes in cycles, big spend for a few years then cost cutting and decline, let go of staff who know how everything works and then a great panic a decade later because it costs too much to migrate it all.

Humans may be able to live on Mars within halls of aerogel – a wonder material that can trap heat and block radiation

Caff

Re: spacecraft

seems like NASA already considered this in 2013, no mention of curry though

https://ntrs.nasa.gov/archive/nasa/casi.ntrs.nasa.gov/20130012682.pdf

Caff

spacecraft

Sounds like it would be useful for part of a radiation shield sandwich for a spacecraft to travel to mars in the first place.

Akamai CEO: Playing games from the cloud? Seems too expensive to be viable right now

Caff

google curse

So you buy the equipment and then some games, five years later google gets bored of the experiment and kills the service. The hardware becomes a useless brick and your games are gone....

IBM accused of pumping staff retirement funds into a tanking stock... IBM's to be exact

Caff

Re: Bouncing Czechs

Yup sounds like they used their control over the pension plan investment decisions to use the pension money to inflate the price of the stock. Which cost the employees money when they used their ESOP options to purchase the stock at the inflated prices.

Employees then making a loss on both the ESOP shares and their pension funds once it became clear they stock was overvalued.

LzLabs kills Swisscom’s mainframes – but it's not the work of a vicious BOFH: All the apps are now living on cloud nine

Caff

Re: Yes but--

Generally a re-write is too expensive or risky, so legacy cobol is wrapped up for each function/feature. New applications then written to the new system and wait for the legacy parts to die off naturally. This bit the die off naturally depends on the lifescale of the business, bank/pensions products have such long lifetimes that the code lasts decades.

Caff

Re: mainframe switch

My only experience is with the enterprise server from MF, ran well could run JCL, batch and cics regions. Cobol was just exported and wrapped up as a DLL.

Would be interested to know what the pricing / features comparison is like but trying to get that out publicly from those companies is nigh on impossible.

Caff

mainframe switch

There is no power switch there on a mainframe...

Also how does the lzlabs mainframe migration/modernization offering compare to similar from microfocus or dxc?

China's going to make a mobile OS and everyone will love it, predict ball-gazing analysts

Caff

curation

Amazon's phone problem is the same as with amazon prime movies, their app store is full of crud. Its impossible to find anything decent in it. Amazon's store is becoming the same, unless you already know what you are looking for you have to trawl through tons of clones and other crap.

Fallover Friday: NatWest, RBS and Ulster Bank go TITSUP*

Caff

Re: Its really not that difficult.

Almost certainly will not have access to "having a good poke around in the system" in a bank to figure out what is going on in a system. Especially if no-one there already understands how it works.

You would first have to build a business case to allocate you time to documenting how it works then get access to the test system - hard as the test system will already be in use for production releases and patching. Likely you will have to apply to share the resources of the test system with devs who will not be happy if your poking around breaks it and delays releases.

UK getting ready to go it alone on Galileo

Caff

Re: UK has the resources

Re-use?

Are you mad! No, we need proper homegrown British pork none of those imported pork barrels will suffice.

What are the odds of Mogg, Farage or Jonhson having connections to aerospace consultancy firms?

Quit that job and earn $185k... cleaning up San Francisco's notoriously crappy sidewalks

Caff

Smart Cities

Obvious solution for this is for SF to embrace a Digital Smart Cities initiative.

Start with Smart Sidewalks using IoT networks that detect fouling and call upon the nearest Poop Drone Swarm to land collect clean and sanitize the area.

Abracadabra! Tales of unexpected sysadmagic and dabbling in dark arts

Caff

Re: For those in the UK...

Scotland?

2FA? We've heard of it: White hats weirded out by lack of account security in enterprise

Caff

Re: Extortionate costs

Great that you could do it for zero spend, but in a large audited financial services organisation you can either spend the money on an external company who already have certifications and audit completed or take the time and resources to do it yourself. There is never such a thing as zero spend when you take into account ongoing support costs and compliance.

Caff

Extortionate costs

I can understand the reluctance to roll out 2FA having seen the cost of fobs and soft token licences ( 300 a pop for a fobs adds up quick before adding in any of the other infrastructure and licence costs ).

Pretty good scope for a startup to disrupt it though they would have the uphill battle of getting their brand recognised

Score one for the bats and badgers! Apple bins €850m Irish bit barn bid

Caff

Re: Our lunatic planning process

Have you seen an ariel photograph of the site? Not much woodland on it, large patches of leeched land from a former confier forestry. The main objector was a guy from wicklow who was trying to get Apple to build the data centre on his land there instead.

The Java release train is moving faster, but will developers be derailed?

Caff

Re: Ugh, another Java bashing thread

There is a difference of experience between someone who uses JAVA to write and maintain programs and someone who uses JAVA in the sense that their business purchased a third party JAVA application.

There is a definite trend of application vendors providing very poor support in keeping their applications up to date with JAVA updates.

Life's a beach – then you're the comms nexus of the British Empire and Marconi-baiting hax0rs

Caff

Mr Cable

Also worth reading about the man who laid the cables

http://telecomsblog.ie/2014/02/16/robert-halpin-irish-pioneer-international-telecoms/

OK Google: A stranger with stash of pirated films is spamming my Google Team Drive

Caff

Copyright / Data protection

Would this open any of the business to potential prosecution? If they are using a service that essentially seems to expose them to illegal data without any way to remove shouldn't they be able to break out of the contract with goggle or claim any fines they receive back from them? They wouldn't have done it intentionally but the inability of google to resolve the issue in a timely fashion shows a level of incompetence and that as a business product it is unfit for purpose.

Wheels are literally falling off the MoD thanks to lack of cash

Caff

Re: As a Defender owner...

Over tightening the bolts by not setting torque correctly causing them to sheer off when driving

UK's NHS to pilot 'Airbnb'-style care service in homeowners' spare rooms

Caff

red tape

They'll complain about the difficulty of complying with background checks and fire certs etc...

Then there will be some kind of fraud or abuse scandal

Then a public inquiry about how this was approved

Beardy Branson chucks cash at His Muskiness' Hyperloop idea

Caff

Re: Journey time...

I think they plan to run them like ski gondalas, so each "train" would be able to divert off the main track to a loading/unloading mini loop.

Dyson to build electric car that doesn't suck

Caff

cyclonic filter

So he couldn't fit his cyclonic filter to the power plant itself?

The ultimate full English breakfast – have your SAY

Caff

Full Irish

none of this grilling nonsense

Fried soda bread x 2 slices

Fried eggs x 2

Fried smoked rashers x2

Fried sausages x 2

Fried tomato

Fried black / white pudding

Baked beans - haven't found a way to fry those yet...

Pot of Barrys or Lyons

Hyperloop One teases idea of 50-minute London-Edinburgh ride

Caff

Irish Sea

Wonder would a better route be Dublin - London ? Could also deliver freight if it took in fishguard and rosslare

Banking association calls for end of 'screen-scraping'

Caff

partially agree with the banks

Forcing the banks to support screen scraping could prevent them from fully securing their banking applications. However if screen scraping is banned they should be forced to provide a common open API that would allow 3rd parties to access banking information with a clients permission.

Boss swore by 'For Dummies' book about an OS his org didn't run

Caff

preventative

Could be easier at time for people to look for help with problems before they make them worse themselves.

Forget quantum and AI security hype, just write bug-free code, dammit

Caff

DbC

Coming of age time for design by contract?

Alleged HPE fraud man Peter Sage once ran dodgy pharma biz

Caff

due diligence

Have HPE ever done due diligence right? Autonomy......

Should el reg just look through their recent acquisitions for future stories

HMS Queen Elizabeth is delayed, Ministry of Defence confesses

Caff

drones

By the time its in service the F35's will have being replaced by pilotless drones

Google mistakes the entire NHS for massive cyber-attacking botnet

Caff

three ireland

Similar thing happened last year before christmass with google blocking three ireland traffic

Blue sky basic income thinking is b****cks

Caff

idleness

Why assume people receiving a basic income would be idle? Its not like the dole, you would get it whether you work or not. Therefore is would allow people to take risks and try out jobs they may have shied away from before due to fear of failure or lack of a safety net.

What should the Red Arrows' new aircraft be?

Caff

who needs pilots

Red Arrows should be rushed kicking and screaming into the digital era. No longer will they be expected to fly free in the air, instead they will co-ordinate elaborate aerobatic feats from the comfort of their drone command center in Waddington.

Is this the worst Blockchain idea you've ever heard?

Caff

CV's

Bitcoin for CV's and job applicants.

Use blockchain to record your previous work and education details, then through the magic of the blockchain previous employeers and education providers can verify your details and prospective employers can have greater confidence in the accuracy of your CV.

No, Russia is not tapping into Syria's undersea internet cables

Caff

landing site

If they have a base next to the landing site it would be far easier to simply install their equipment there than mess around in the water.

OK Google, Alexa, why can't I choose my own safe, er, wake word?

Caff

Campaign ads

It is only a matter of time before US election ads will try using the phrase

OK Google like <insert candidate> on facebook

British unis mull offshore EU campuses in post-Brexit vote panic

Caff

french law

Its probably the french employment laws that put them off

Caff

Ireland

They may think twice about Ireland unless they plan on building a vast number of student apartments to go along with their campus ( though considering the rent they could collect on them this might be the appeal )

Facebook, Twitter and Google are to blame for terrorism, say MPs

Caff

back in the good old days

So before the internet the world was a lovely place with no extremists or terrorism or people being radicalised?

oh wait...

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/16/upshot/is-terrorism-getting-worse-in-the-west-yes-in-the-world-no.html?_r=0

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