* Posts by trevorde

982 publicly visible posts • joined 2 Jun 2015

Google CEO Pichai: We need to up productivity by a fifth

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Re: Meeting Tax - Corporate Events

* if you absolutely require someone at a meeting, you have to pay for them

If you're invited to a jolly in Las Vegas, and your attendance is optional, it's still going to cost you

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Re: Depressing

Worked at a company (1992) where the accounts people pointed out that it cost them $1000 to process a $100 expense claim. The bean counters still insisted they process every claim rather than just paying it out.

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Re: Meeting Tax

We had an hour long, 200 person, division level meeting which could be summed up as:

Company is doing fine and we're getting into cloud

They should've just sent an email and saved £20k

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Depressing

Worked on an NHS project where there were a *lot* of pointless meetings and people whose raison d'etre seemed to be attending meetings.

After one particularly pointless meeting, I looked at the number of people in the room and said:

"That meeting just cost us £1200. Just think how many cancer treatments that could fund."

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Meeting Tax

Worked at a company where my manager was in back to back meetings 8hrs a day, 5 days a week. I suggested the idea of a 'meetings tax':

* 10% of your salary is allocated as a 'meetings allowance'

* any meetings you attend are charged at £100/hr from your allowance

* first 15 mins of a meeting are free, after that it is chargeable

* you can leave a meeting at any time

* all meetings are optional

* if you absolutely require someone at a meeting, you have to pay for them

* at the end of the year, you get to keep anything in your 'meetings allowance' as a bonus

The idea is to incentivize:

* short, focused meetings

* emails not meetings

* only going to meetings if you can contribute or get value

* only call meetings if absolutely necessary

He thought I was joking. I wasn't.

Open source biz sick of FOSS community exploitation overhauls software rights

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New concept

Paying for things you use!

California passes bill requiring salary ranges on job listings

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Red flags

* wide salary range eg £40 - £120k

* 'competitive salary'

* no salary mentioned

Apple Silicon takes a back seat at iPhone-heavy launch event

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Summary

* marginally improved phones

* improved headphones

* new watch (same as Garmin)

* still ignoring 'The Register'

SiFive RISC-V CPU cores to power NASA's next spaceflight computer

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But can it run Crysis?

Dead people could be designated authors of Atlassian Confluence docs and that can't be changed

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Long service award

At one company I worked at, there was a bug which had been in the system for over 10 years. We thought about giving it a glass plaque for all those sterling years of service. AFAIK, the bug is still open, so it must be getting on for 25 years now!

Man wins competition with AI-generated artwork – and some people aren't happy

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"All art is quite useless"

- Oscar Wilde

Terminal downgrade saves the day after a client/server heist

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Remote development

Went on an MS Azure training course many years ago and the MS trainer pointed out that his dev machine was actually a remote desktop, running in Azure.

It was very handy when his laptop was stolen as he just got a replacement and carried on as if nothing had happened.

Braking news: Cops slammed for spamming Waze to slow drivers down

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Speedcam roulette

In Perth, Australia, there was a *lot* of backlash when mobile speed cameras were deployed as they were seen as just a revenue raising device. In response, the police used to broadcast the daily location of *half* of the mobile speed cameras.

Python tops programming love list – but if you want a job, learn SQL

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Obligatory xkcd

https://xkcd.com/327/

Solaris is in maintenance mode – but Oracle added a significant feature anyway

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Not what I was expecting

I thought the only 'significant' feature Oracle would be interested in adding would be an impenetrable license agreement

Google shuts off IoT Core services shortly after announcing API stability commitments

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To quote the Great Man

"I felt a great disturbance in the Force, as if millions of voices suddenly cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced. I fear something terrible has happened."

―Obi-Wan Kenobi, sensing the destruction of Alderaan

Apple to compel workers to spend '3 days a week' in the office

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Re: UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson, who insisted...

... it's not possible to have an affair if you're working from home

Microsoft's Teams goes native on Apple, retains a human touch

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Still waiting ...

for some decent software for macOS

Linus Torvalds releases Linux 5.19 – using Asahi on an Arm-powered Mac

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Finally!

Some decent software for macOS

Apple plays the supply-chain card to explain Mac, iPad revenue shrink

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Red flag

Any company that offers a Mac (laptop/desktop) as an alternative raises an immediate red flag for me. Same as any company with the C-suite using Macs shows they're more interested in image than getting work done.

Psst … Want to buy a used IBM Selectric? No questions asked

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Anything else we should know about

Friend of a friend once got some 'warm' laptops and had a visit from the police. They questioned him in his flat for a while, which made him a bit nervous, so he asked to get a drink of water. He was taking a while, so the police went looking for him, only to discover him trying to hide his very large stash of marijuana!

He ended up doing time for the stolen laptops *and* the drugs!

Is the Apple car real? These patents suggest yes

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Trollface

Apple's new business model

Patent troll

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Oracle to hike support fees in line with inflation

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Oracle to hike support fees in line with super yacht price rises

FTFY

India's big four services giants bemoan rising labor costs

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Drastic action needed

Quarterly Resource Actions!. After all, it's worked so well for IBM.

Russian ChessBot breaks child opponent's finger

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Incorrect behaviour

Once the robot realised it was losing, it should've upended the board!

https://www.vocabulary.com/dictionary/upend

Your job was probably outsourced for exactly the reason you suspected

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Don't get mercenaries to defend your castle

Inherited a project which had been outsourced and then brought back in house. It was the *worst* code I have seen in 30 yrs of professional development. It had every anti-pattern imaginable and a few I'd never seen before.

Turns out the outsourcer's devs were expected to write 200 lines of code per day and were punished if they didn't meet this target. Their motivation was to write 200 lines of code; not to write nice, clean, intelligible code.

Our in house devs had the exact opposite motivation. They were paid regardless, so could concentrate on writing good code.

We've got a photocopier and it can copy anything

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Re: Years ago....

Remember reading a story around the same time about some people who were using an early colour photocopier to print money. They didn't keep up with the payments and were rumbled when the copier was seized!

Demand for smartphones is drying up

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Meanwhile at Apple...

Tim Cook: iPhone sales are down. What can we do?

Marketing1: A new 'innovative' colour!

Marketing2: Remove the charger!

Marketing3: Remove a port!

Marketing4: Increase the price!

Tim Cook: Great work! Make it so.

Big Tech bosses call for computer science to be taught in all US schools

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We need more graduates!

Salary up to $25k USD

No holidays

60 hr week

No health insurance

No pension

Impossible performance targets

Early professional hires only

Yours sincerely

IBM

Meta asks line managers to identify poorly performing staff for firing

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Meta is the new IBM

Next up: Resource Actions to remove dinobabies

Apple's new MacBook Air: Is the jump to M2 silicon worth another $200?

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No horse race

Lack of any decent software makes it all a bit pointless

Boris Johnson set to step down with tech legacy in tatters

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Only one person can save is now

Dido Harding!

One of the first RISC-V laptops may ship in September, has an NFT hook

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NFT angle

It has to be a scam

Trouble hiring? Consider loosening your remote work policy

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Remote Deskcrap

Working remotely for a 'big data' company where they provide me with a remote desktop to a VM running in their data centre. The supposed advantage is that it is colocated next to the data lake/swamp, so there is minimal latency in retrieving 'big data'. Only problem is my VM is dog sloooow and struggles to run the IDE, let alone get any data. Looked at the VM specs and it is literally half the machine from my previous company!

Amazon fears it could run out of US warehouse workers by 2024

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Alternative headline

"Amazon to run out of warehouse workers it hasn't p1553d off by 2024"

McKinsey thinks quantum computing could create $80b in revenue ... eventually

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Quantum inflation

Now just need those experts at Gartner to assess the market at $100B

Bill Gates says NFTs '100% based on greater fool theory' amid crypto cataclysm

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NFTs explained (again)

> imagine if you went up to the mona lisa and you were like "i'd like to own this" and someone nearby went "give me 65 million dollars and i'll burn down an unspecified amount of the amazon rainforest in order to give you this receipt of purchase" so you paid them and they went "here's your receipt, thank you for your purchase" and went to an unmarked supply closet in the back of the museum and posted a handmade label inside it behind the brooms that said "mona lisa currently owned by jacobgalapagos" so if anyone wants to know who owns it they'd have to find this specific closet in this specific hallway and look behind the correct brooms. and you went "can i take the mona lisa home now" and they went "oh god no are you stupid? you only bought the receipt that says you own it, you didn't actually buy the mona lisa itself, you can't take the real mona lisa you idiot. you CAN take this though." and gave you the replica print in a cardboard tube that's sold in the gift shop. also the person selling you the receipt of purchase has at no point in time ever owned the mona lisa.

> unfortunately, if this doesnt really make sense or seem like any logical person would be happy about this exchange, then you've understood it perfectly

https://imgur.com/NJirDQp

Adobe apologizes for repeated outages of its Creative Cloud video collaboration service

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Obligatory xkcd

https://xkcd.com/908/

DARPA wants to refuel drones in flight – wirelessly

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Next project

Fitting those lasers to sharks

Oracle cloud growth up 19% but it's still a market minnow

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Oracle playbook

Incomprehensible licencing terms followed by inevitable/regular licence audits

Record players make comeback with Ikea, others pitching tricked-out turntables

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Digitised nostalgia

Went to a friend of my father's house many years ago. He had some jazz CD playing music from the 40's. It was a technically very poor CD as it had all cracks, pops and whistles of the original LP. However, if you closed your eyes, you could almost imagine yourself back in the 40's, listening to it on the wireless.

That said, CDs are far superior.

Apple’s M2 chip isn’t a slam dunk, but it does point to the future

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Biggest problem

No software

Indian developer educator Scaler moves to America with $11k online courses

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Digital certificate is not worth the paper its written on

Interviewed a lot of developers and, invariably, the worst ones have the most qualifications (MSCD etc)

Google calculates Pi to 100 trillion digits

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Numerical approximation

Worked with a mathematician many year ago. I'm a mechanical engineer and he was horrified that I said both Pi and e could be approximated as 3

Windows on Arm users finally receive Native PowerToys

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Both users reportedly happy!

Microsoft shows off Windows updates at Build dev event

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Project Volterra

Most devs will be installing Linux on it

Beware the fury of a database developer torn from tables and SQL

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If only our app supported...

Worked on a desktop app many years ago with a *lot* of fancy UI. We localised it into the usual languages (English, French, German & Italian) and some not so usual ones (Polish).

About every 18 months, sales would come in and say:

"If it only it supported Arabic, we could sell thousands of licenses and make the company loadsa dosh!"

Arabic is a RTL (right to left) language which *really* messes up the UI. Supporting this is non-trivial.

We would then spend a lot of effort, translating all the UI strings, testing, finding and fixing all the bugs.

Number of additional sales: zero

Will this be one of the world's first RISC-V laptops?

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I want a RISC-V laptop

said no one ever

Apple scraps 3-day return to office amid COVID-19 cases

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Double Speak

Apple told The Register it had no comment at this time.

Does that mean Apple actually replied or just ignored you (as usual)?

OpenVMS on x86-64 reaches production status with v9.2

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Oldie but a goodie

Worked at a company about 20 yrs ago which had single customer on their sole, remaining VMS product. The customer enacted the escrow provisions and took over maintenance from the last, disinterested developer with VMS experience. The system is probably still going and hasn't been rebooted!