Will nobody rid us of this meddlesome beast?
Posts by Spod
13 publicly visible posts • joined 1 Sep 2014
SCO vs. IBM case over who owns Linux comes back to life. Again
From landslide to buried alive: Why 2017 election forecasts weren't wrong
Tuesday 13th June 2017 08:44 GMT
Even if a poll prediction was accurate at the time it was taken, given the available data, the act of publishing and publicising the data could affect the outcome, assuming enough people object to the outcome and vote against it.
The fact that a landslide was predicted could have persuaded some people to vote Labour when they might not otherwise have been bothered to go and vote. And how would we know? Nobody took a poll to ask them...
Silicon Graphics' IRIX and Magic Desktop return as Linux desktop
Tuesday 6th June 2017 14:36 GMT
Why is HPC more difficult now?
Why is it that 20 years ago SGI could easily connect together 64 or more Origin 2000 HPC nodes with damn big fast switches and use them as one huge parallel shared-memory NUMA machine under a single, coherent copy of Irix - but today you need Linux running on every node and then a combination of MPI and SSH just to get the blasted nodes to talk to each other?
Microsoft has made SQL Server for Linux. Repeat, Microsoft has made SQL Server 2016 for Linux
Microsoft releases Windows 10 preview for Raspberry Pi 3
Become an Andre Previn in your time: DevOps for star conductors
Tuesday 23rd February 2016 15:04 GMT
Management comedians
One problem is that DevOps is becoming a bit like photography or web-site creation - just about everybody thinks they know how to do it, but most people's attempts are mediocre at best, and even fewer understand what it takes to do a good, consistent, professional job.
In essence, DevOps has been around for years, but it's only recently that it has been given a name and more formal definition. That has sparked a host of ideas and approaches, many of which conflict. At the same time, there's a vast slew of new tools available, each claiming to make life easier; but mixing the wrong set of tools can quickly create a system of unbelievable complexity, or force teams to work in counter-productive ways.
DevOps probably should be a stack, but in practice it's often a pile - that pile too often being a mixture of legacy systems, new and untested DevOps tools, hastily implemented automated testing and maybe a kludged attempt at continuous delivery.
If management isn't convinced of the need for proper investment in DevOps then it's a potential recipe for disaster. Becoming an Andrew Preview is only really possible if you have the full support of the management comedians around you ...
Whew! How to tell if a DevOps biz is peddling a load of manure
EMC's hardware 'quantum leap' is more of a brisk catchup stroll
Tuesday 16th February 2016 17:36 GMT
A "quantum leap" is actually a change of an electron from one quantum state to another within an atom - essentially an electron jumping from one energy level to another. That means an actual "quantum leap" is the smallest distance that it is physically possible for any entity to "jump". That would seem to be entirely appropriate for this announcement ...
This is why copy'n'paste should be banned from developers' IDEs
Holy SSH-it! Microsoft promises secure logins for Windows PowerShell
Monday 8th June 2015 14:57 GMT
But when?
Okay, so they've announced support - but no dates yet. Will it be in time for the Win10 launch? Will it be this year, next year or so far in the future that it's actually irrelevant?
I am pleased that they are finally acknowledging demand and catching up with 20 year old authentication protocols, but a vague promise that it will eventually become available is about as much use as an ashtray on a motorbike!
Biting the hand that feeds IT
