
Re: "Python creator [..] joins Microsoft"
No, keep the C# people away from him...
2002 publicly visible posts • joined 24 Apr 2008
I too use Parallels, but these days, only occasionally (Windows XP and 10) to run Windows software I wrote over a number of years, and the occasional specialised technical application. We may be OK: Parallels on Apple Silicon.
I was the front line IT person for some scientists and engineers at a large UK public utility. One Monday morning I had a call from a department who said that "nothing is working". Obviously I got the blame as I had been in there on Friday updating their network and installing their new kit (a couple of ATs and XTs). Two computers wouldn’t boot, another seemed to come up but nothing showed on the screen and a couple of the rest gave various ominous boot chimes. After a brief investigation I realized that the bad computers all had bits missing. Someone over the weekend had taken stuff from most of them - Enough to build two complete XTs with Hercules graphics cards and an AT with VGA, and 3 10-Base2 network cards. I guess they sourced the cases and monitors from elsewhere. We could never prove it, but we think the bits went out with a cleaner or security person. I wondered why they hadn’t nicked the complete PCs, but a colleague thought that "It would be too obvious, or maybe they thought that no-one would notice?".
I had a colleague who took all of the 1,2,3 functions seriously:-
1 - Spreadsheet - Yes that's what we bought it for.
2 - Database - Sigh, it saved him having to keep logging into the Rdb/VMS database. OK until he added stuff and didn't put them back into Rdb.
3 - Wordprocessor - So he didn't have to learn WordPerfect. Yes he wrote multipage technical reports in 123 without headings, then printed multiple copies with his local small dot-matrix sprocket printer...
There is a useable NIX OS for the corporate desktop. IBM use two. I posted this earlier:-
———-
...At the end of 2019 they (IBM) had ~290,000 Apple devices of which ~200,000 use macOS. At the same time they had 383,800 employees, obviously some employees will use more than one device. I have a relative who is a very senior IBM techie who told me that in his (large) part of IBM far more techies use Linux than Windows - He was also of the opinion that a number of IBMers elected to go to Apple rather than move from Windows 7 to 10.
According to IBM, Mac users cost less to support with about 1/3 of the support personnel and are generally happier and more productive.
https://www.zdnet.com/article/ibm-cio-mac-users-perform-better-more-engaged-than-windows-users/
https://www.jamf.com/resources/press-releases/ibm-announces-research-showing-mac-enables-greater-productivity-and-employee-satisfaction-at-ibm/
https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/IBM/ibm/number-of-employees
————
OK - MS Office runs on OSX but not on Linux, but I’ve suspected for some time that MS really, really, wants more punters to use the web "friendly" Office 365 in a browser, and they themselves are now using some of their traditional back-end products like SQL Server on Linux. With the expected rise of ARM chips, perhaps there isn’t so much future for the traditional Windows PC?
It must be a standard set of requirements by now... My late father was the Treasurer to our (smallish) local authority. He was responsible for the installation of one of the first local authority systems (in the mid/late 1960s, Burroughs?). It’s main job was to look after the rates, and pay bills and salaries - It worked. I was just getting into science/technology then, and was allowed to go and see it working in its own room. The manufacturer was sufficiently pleased that it was used as a reference site, and for some reason "gave" them an ANITA calculator to "check everything was OK" - I think that cost about £400. He took early retirement when local authorities were reorganised in 1973. He predicted that the new large authorities would become an inefficient bureaucratic mess, so he grabbed the pension and left. When he left he was allowed to buy the ANITA for £5, and was still using it in 1991.
Some commentators seem to think that the main purpose of these projects is to get working systems that are able to do a job. Sorry people, it isn't - The main purpose is to shovel large amounts of taxpayers' money to a government's friends - If it "sort of works" it's an unexpected bonus. If it works well someone probably failed - It's hard to ask for even more money to patch up something that does the job...
So, the handprint and forehead references were probably intentional?
'John of Patmos - Revelation: 13 (King James Version)' : "... And he doeth great wonders, so that he maketh fire come down from heaven on the earth in the sight of men" (Blue Origin?) ... "And he causeth all, both small and great, rich and poor, free and bond, to receive a mark in their right hand, or in their foreheads: And that no man might buy or sell, save he that had the mark, or the name of the beast, or the number of his name".
I don't suppose we'll find that in the Washington Post.
Partial invoices - About 15 years ago the customer using our SQL Server based system that we had written for them as a franchiser (and including local systems for their franchisees) "suddenly remembered", just as I was leaving for lunch on Friday, that they needed partial invoicing and the ability to accept a single (partial) payment that could be applied to several invoices. As I recall, it needed a new field in one table and three in another, an extra pick box that also showed the relevant invoices sorted by date descending with Yes/No boxes, a check that all of the payment had been allocated, and that any invoice that was fully/partially paid was receipted with the relevant outstanding balances, a couple of triggers, and a new report. I had it working and tested on dummy data by Monday evening and implemented by Tuesday lunchtime. Two weeks later, they asked if they could roll back some of the paid/partially paid invoices so that they could reallocate the payments to new invoices - That only took another day, as I suspected that they might need it, and had set up the fields to accept a rollback. I’m probably not a genius, and the franchiser's turnover was "only" about $70 million a year, but...
No - They didn’t pay me for it as they had a service contract that I reallocated, but their MD did take me out for a nice lunch.
Yes, took about 4 months. Typical UK Public Service purchase embargo/cock-up. The instrument was covered by one bill that was signed off; but between the Data System being specced/quote agreed and the final purchase order being sent, the Department ran out of money so it was deferred to the next period.
Our original kit was a magnetic-sector mass spectrometer with a capillary gas chromatograph. To start with we had no data system at all, so it used an oscilloscope, oscillograph and a 3 order 3 pen chart recorder. After a few weeks the manufacturer lent us a Nova 3C with a removable Phoenix drive while we got the funding for “our” data system sorted out.
When D9 serial ports started to disappear, I found that most of the problems were *from* USB serial ports. Now I'm retired, most of my time spent on a "modern un*x" machine" is in an iMac CLI, so if the GUI does go TITSUP, I'm probably stuffed (although Target Disk Mode, or SSH from an iPad, has saved me on occasion).
DG stuff was generally OK - It made a change from rooms full of PDPs. The main reason we had them was because they were a "standard" for control and data acquisition with some very expensive analytical kit. As a price guide, an earlier instrument had a Nova 4 with a Winchester, tape and floppies for ~£50,000. The instrument it connected to was ~£400,000. By the mid-1990s, the data system was PC based, and cost at most £5,000 - The instrument's technology had changed and they were ~£150,000. Today something that "does the job" much more reliably, and with better performance, costs about £90,000 "all up". So allowing for inflation, the current stuff is about 450/(90/3)=15 times cheaper (Still a lot more expensive than Moores Law suggests - Because much of the kit is still fairly large, has precision engineering and low production runs).
Yep, I loved the VT220. The later 320 was neater and took up less space on the desk. I still remember how we thought the 330 with 4010 graphics looked better and was "cheap" compared with the Wyse/Tektronix kit at the time. Eventually most of them were replaced by IBM AT/PS2s with terminal emulation software. I think the only "terminal" that I bought after that was included with a Data General DG30, but the DG30 included an Intel Board with a custom version of PC-DOS that could be run in parallel.
For 90%+ of the businesses out there...
How about two nice big hardware boxes (and an additional spare) located wherever you like? One with OpenBSD and relayd/httpd (and Python?) - Connected to the other running PostgreSQL on OpenBSD. Before I retired, my consultancy rate for something like that would have given you a nice report with lots of pretty graphs, and sufficient management-speak to look good for $10,000.00. I would even have worn a jacket and tie for some customers. Training would have been at my "bargain rate" (say another $25,000.00). A couple of jobs a year, plus ongoing consultancy; a few odds and ends; and plenty of time on the beach, or in the coffee shop - Sorted.
Cheap at twice the price :-) OK, an exaggeration, but not that much of one for the 90%+...
".. that are considered to be too old or not up to the job, there was a clear correlation with negative factors such as poor performance and availability issues" - So, not much to do with replacing experienced in-house operators with children, outsourced from wherever the outsourcer can make the most money, then?
I had a colleague who told me that 3.5s would never take over from 5.25s "because they weren't reliable enough" - I pointed out that at least people wouldn't staple them to their covering letters - Then I showed him what I thought the real killer of 5.25s was likely to be: I put a 3.5 in my shirt pocket...