Posts by Tim99 2139 publicly visible posts • joined 24 Apr 2008
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:-
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...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
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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...
"and the odd Australian practice of topping up pay packets by a little when staff take their holidays" - Even senior people can get it as part of an "award". My first full-time Oz job Was as a "General Manager". I had bought a new car when I arrived a few months before, to be told that the award gave me an air-conditioned automatic transmission car, and that I was not allowed to take cash instead. After a year I took leave, and while I was away my salary was paid into my account - It seemed to have an overpayment of 17.5%, but when I queried it, I was told that I had "forgotten" my "leave allowance". A workers paradise indeed.
Hi Addie, see my self-aggrandising comment above. I liked and upvoted your post, but I suspect that I am more cynical than most, and I believe that my cynicism has been earned - Including being the senior chemist who did the analysis when ST was prosecuted by the relevant authority when THEY had polluted a major system (Admittedly that was before privatisation in 1989, I suspect that things have not necessarily improved).
And so has everybody who has worked in IT for a few decades, particularly when one of the customer's senior manglement lusers insists on "doing it now".
But my personal favourite was when I was asked to delete customer order data from the previous year in a live SQL database - I knew that a cascade delete would also run on the orderdetails table because I had designed the database. Obviously I checked that they had a backup (from the night before) and what was going to be deleted with a: SELECT COUNT(*) AS NumOrders FROM Orders WHERE OrderDate < "01/01/1999" - Then the phone rang as I was copying part of the line, just before I was about to paste it into a new command that I had started with DELETE FROM Orders - About fifteen minutes later I pasted what I thought I had stored in the paste buffer, just as the manglement luser came in and pestered. The paste added only the semicolon, but I still pressed [Enter] - The statement was therefore "DELETE FROM Orders;". Fortunately I was able to roll it back from the transaction log in spite of their system admin's new policy of saving storage space by truncating logs before they "got too big"...
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