
Re: "Pencil", Eh?
@scoot76
2B, or not 2B...
2002 publicly visible posts • joined 24 Apr 2008
As more people now use a phone/tablet to use the interweb, perhaps MS are concentrating on servers, the Cloud and their Office products. The way that MS are upsetting their hardware partners and SIs, I wonder whether they think that the Windows PC is unimportant, hence the iPad demo.
I have used a Troll icon, but maybe it isn't >>===============>
@Peter Campbell
As someone who uses both, I suggest that If you think that Windows 10 craps out less often than Yosemite you familiarize yourself with cognitive dissonance (Wikipedia link) - Yes, I did see the Troll icon.
Hang on a cotton picking minute ... aimed at the enterprise user? Is iOS actually enterprise ready now? When did that happen?
It probably started when they partnered with IBM - Who, I suspect, have been trying to reduce a reliance on Microsoft; even before they sold their PC businesses. Now they have a partnership with Cisco too.
I am retired now, but have noticed that small businesses now run on iPhones. As for big business, UNIX and the Mainframe never went away. As far as the MS Surface and desktop PCs are concerned, I worry that for most of the middle-level people in organizations that spend their time creating presentations with PowerPoint, writing internal documents with Word and "managing" by jockeying Excel is that their jobs are disappearing...
Having worked in the public service, and a public monopoly, and private industry. I have learnt a truth - That systematic incompetence exists in all of them. I am sure that the only consistent thing that drives incompetence is the physical size of the organization. A very large private company may even be worse because they rightly suspect that their customers have no realistic alternative, as their competition will be similarly bad. When BT was the PMG, its reason for existence was, nominally, to provide a public utility. When you privatize a public monopoly it is difficult to see how an adequately competitive market can be created. Once the enterprise has been sold its only declared purpose is to provide a profit. This is not helped by the tendency of executives to maximize their rewards, usually at the expense of the organization's long term future.
I'm not sure if the article's image is meant to show visual pareidolia, or not.
After reminding myself of the definition: A psychological phenomenon involving an image wherein the mind perceives a familiar pattern where none actually exists. I am still not sure if the image is apposite to the article, or not
Can anyone think of an aircraft since the de Havilland Mosquito that has been really good at a range of multiple combat roles?
Here you are: OpenBSD download link.
Thank you, thank you, Is that the door over there?
It's over 20 years ago now, but when I ran a technical business for someone else in Australia we outsourced our payroll. There was a wide range of jobs including scientists, engineers, technicians, sales and clerical support, and management. Many of the staff worked shifts at different rates, and different times. The staff were responsible for filling in their own timesheet (5mins?), the line manager checked it (1 min?) and the timesheet were picked up by an outsourced contractor who charged us $3 per person per week to process them, print the payslips and deliver them, transfer the money to the employees' bank accounts, and do the taxes and superannuation etc.
The average pay for an employee was about $30,000 p.a. so our total costs were <$40,000 for each person. The manager would have been on $45,000 so our manager's cost would be ~$55,000. We were up for a cost of <$40,000/52 x (5/40 x60) or about $1.60 for an average employee per week of their time (Generally as staff knew that they would not get their overtime pay next week if they did not submit their timesheet, they were pretty good at ensuring their timesheet were filled in by Thursday night). The manager's time for each of 20 employees would have cost <$0.50 so - In total ~$5.00 per employee per week.
As this was >20 years ago, allowing for inflation that would be ~$9 today - Most of the calculations would have been done on a 10 user Pick computer, so in real terms the $3 charged by the contractor would probably be less today.
If QLD was able to do what we did; they would be up for, at most, $5 per employee per week for the "computer based" stuff. Anyway 74,000 employees at $5 per week is less than $20 million a year. Using manual data input and obsolete technology, to get to $1 billion we are looking at a project life of 50 years. If we did a discounted cash flow (DCF) analysis and assumed an investment rate of 3% the same $1 billion would generate an additional $3.4 billion over 50 years.
So in conclusion, employ a few more people with spreadsheets.
@Tony S
You are right that the heavier traffic causes damage. The amount is proportional to the 4th power of axle weight. As an example if a largish private car has a weight of 2 tons that is 1 ton per axle each of which to the power of four is equal to 1 unit of damage or 2 units of damage in total. A Large Goods Vehicle can have a weight of 48 short tons or 8 tons per axle, so each axle will cause roughly 4000 times the damage of the car axle or 12,000 times the damage in total.
If we assume that the car excise is £200 and we wanted a "fair" system based on the amount of damage caused,t the LGV would be subject to an excise of £2,400,000. Obviously they don't pay their fair share, unless we include some societal benefit of running large vehicles. I understand that Jeremy Corbyn wants railways to be back in public ownership :-) Maybe he could subsidize them to a similar extent to the societal subsidy given to the road transport lobby?
Cat's pupils are nearly round at night and only go to narrow slits in in bright light. This shape allows them to change the area of their pupils by about nine times more than if they were round, so they see well in light levels from near darkness to full sunshine and can hunt at any time.
'different for the sake of being different' which I worry is Apple's real reasoning in using it.
It came from NeXT and the software tool OpenStep (from NeXTSTEP) when Steve Jobs went back to Apple when they bought the company. Originally it was used by scientists, military and spook types (where up-front cost is not always a primary concern) to write relatively secure GUI stuff using OO in networked *Nix environments. It predated Windows NT, and avoided the insecurity of DOS and earlier versions of Windows. The platform was used by Tim Berners-Lee to create the first web browser (Wikipedia Link).
I liked the functionality of an old B&O answering machine. It had 3 answering options: a formal "business" message; a different message for your friends; and my favorite, for people that you did not like, it did not pick up so they would have to keep dialing you, and were not able to leave a message.
Presumably Apple could implement something similar?
@Dazed and Confused
Apple confirms production Mac Pro production has started in Austin: Statesman.com.
We could buy the then newly released IBM AT on a Volume Workstation Agreement and quickly issued them to about 100 of our users. The standard distribution procedure was to unpack them in the office, check them and load up the necessary software before taking them to the user. To save time we carried them. You unplugged the mains cable, put the keyboard on top of the CRT monitor and lifted the computer to waist height with the glass of the screen against your chest, this allowed you to stop the keyboard falling off by trapping it between the top off the screen and your chin. I would only carry them up 2 floors of an 8 floor building, if it was more than that you hoped that someone would be there waiting to open the lift doors and then let you out at the correct floor.
A few years ago I met a government employee in the car park, I had to wait until he had unloaded a trolley from the boot of his car, unfold it and then place his lightweight Toshiba notepad on it before wheeling it across the car park to to the office where I was installing a server. I asked him why he did this, as the weight of the trolley was more than the notepad - If he was going to be injured it was more likely to happen when he lifted the trolley out of the boot and put it on the floor - 'Health and Safety' he said 'The regulations state that all computers have to be moved on a trolley.'
Yes, now I am retired, I do have a bad back...
BSD on Sparc:-
Icon: the only BSD (distantly) derived one El Reg has: >>==============>
Click Home Button to close Safari. Double Click Home Button to display running apps and swipe Safari towards top of the screen to close it.
Open Settings and use Airplane Mode to turn wireless off. Open Safari Settings go into 'Advanced' and turn JavaScript off.
Now the slightly tricky bit - Open Safari and quickly touch the 'View open tabs' double square icon in the top right corner and close the offending tab.
Remember to turn Airplane Mode on.
How about going back to just "inform, educate, entertain" (Lord Reith: Wikipedia) - In that order, and get the politicians out of it.
If Tim and @The Axe are correct with the idea that "the burden of taxation always falls on individuals, never on corporations" why don't we legislate that corporations do not pay tax?
Any profits paid to individuals would be taxed at their normal tax rate. Profits shipped abroad are taxed at the highest rate of personal taxation. Foreign purchase/lease arrangements where a company gets product from another (foreign) division of the same corporation for sale within its home country by buying the product from a country with a lower tax rate is a current problem - The company is acting as a private individual might act to avoid paying VAT or corporation tax, so incoming purchases could be subjected to an import duty (just like a private individual who buys an expensive item while on holiday). Profits that are banked for more than a year within the country could be taxed at the VAT rate too.
Ideas: I've got a million of them. Good ideas are another matter.
Pfft. I can drive for two days from my home town in Queensland and I'm still in Queensland. Bigger place.
Pfft. Western Australia, is half as big again as QLD. My home, south of Perth, to Kununurra is over 2,000 miles. I admit that I have not driven it myself, but I did drive to Derby, which is only 1,500 miles. I made a couple of diversions on the way, so I clocked up over 5,000 miles on the trip.
Unless we have a motorist from the Sakha Republic, I claim this >>=======>
I have to say, since the moment Admiral Canaris was forcefully removed from office, german counterintelligence has been a bit lacklustre.
Probably not: See Wikipedia - Reinhard Gehlen who, apparently, died of old age.
@Dan Paul,
She has a Doctorate in quantum chemistry. I am a Chartered Chemist, and was one of the earlier adopters of computers in chemistry. I was (in a a very minor way) one of the people who helped move chemistry from minicomputers to PCs. Almost all chemistry relies heavily on computers, but physical scientists generally consider computing to be just a necessary tool and not an end in itself.
I started doing serious computing stuff when I had to write a laboratory management system, and a later a financial management system, that would run on a number of LANs connected by a WAN. This included specifying and purchasing and installing equipment and staff training. My "qualifications" were the experience of running a chromatography and high-resolution mass spectrometry laboratory for the organization. This involved connecting together systems that run on DECnet, Token Ring, RDOS, PDPs, VAXen, UNIX minis, PC DOS, CP/M, POS, the Apple ][, and a whole pile of other assorted equipment with serial ports. My recollection was that this was pretty easy compared to mass spectrometry...
Incidentally as a subtle, but good-hearted, dig at people who "know computing", I was put in charge of computing for 300 scientists (>400 computers) by an organization that did not believe in "putting computer people in charge of computing". Their rational was that people who "did computing" did not always see the needs of the business, and were just as likely to set up systems with a 4GL or Java or whatever was becoming cool at the time because "it was interesting" - Particularly if it helped their career development.
Angela is a bit younger than me; but back then, even in East Germany, she would have required a fairly detailed understanding of computers to get a Doctorate in quantum chemistry. I expect that nowadays she might be too busy to look after her own computer, so she probably relied on a professional [expert],[security officer],[self-important bureaucrat].
Disclosure: I learnt FORTRAN as an essential part of my chemistry course in 1969, so my mind is probably damaged - All of the above may, probably, be disregarded.
@Pomgolian
A you would be sure to be sure to know, whiskey (irish spelling) is older than whisky (Scottish spelling). American whiskey is later. It seems that Irish monks brought the method of distilllng to Scotland in about the C14th.
The oldest modern whiskey is probably Bushmills Irish and dates back to 1608.
The history of Scottish whisky is now lost in the mists of time, but perhaps the oldest of the popular single malts is Smith's Glenlivet which goes back to the 1820s.
Have a beer, unless you would prefer a proper drink >>===============>
Technology generally ages fast, people tend to think that they don't. A few years ago a friend of mine was appalled to find her gym-slip marked with her name-tag as an exhibit at the Museum of Childhood at Sudbury Hall, then she realized that it was over 50 years old.
I suspect that its main use at Google will be to enable them to run face recognition software to work out who is in your photos, and then see what other photos these faces are recognised in, producing a net of likely terrorists customers for the organizations that actually pay them.
Presbyopia has crept up on me and I can't read without glasses. My choices in the chestal area are to either go in close so I can peer at their name within the focussing distance of my glasses or if I am looking above the lenses I can move quickly backwards and squint. Neither option is likely to inspire the confidence of the owner of the chest.
True. but traffic within Oz is often OK. The problem is offshore data. Even the onshore sites tend to load their website pages with advert and framework stuff that has to come from halfway around the planet. So does that mean that our experience in Perth will be further degraded to support Melbourne and Sydney?
Subordinates multiply at a fixed rate regardless of output.
Professor Parkinson
Unless something else is going on here as well, it is unlikely to be Parkinson's Law - The formula for which generally only gives 5-7% staff increases per year. Oh dear, maybe the extra staff are lawyers?