Posts by DBAosaurus

Intel interrupts work on $25B Israel fab, citing need for 'responsible capital management'

Re: Wasn't a good idea

AC be careful, your mask has slipped and revealed a bigot. Kiryat Gat is inside Israel proper, within the pre-1967 borders, so is definitively not under any sort of military occupation, brutal or otherwise.

You are one of those people who want any excuse to attack the one democracy in the region, and America's most steadfast ally. Perhaps you could vent a little less against those who find themselves in an impossible situation following the Hamas atrocities, and perhaps focus on their sponsors?

Microsoft whips up unrest after revealing Azure AD name change

Socrates said:

"The name of a thing is not the same as the thing itself."

India's major IT outsourcers slow hiring and fret about deal pipelines

Good for business?

I used to dread working with the big Indian outsourcers - HCL, TCS and IBM India in particular. At first I felt sorry for poor saps sent to replace me as a skilled freelance DBA. But I resented their lamentable quality, education, training and language skills and the stupidity of any client who could only see the bottom line of the day rate In the end I realised the outsourcers were actually good for business, because businesses recognised they needed proper work. You ended picking up shedloads of contracts fixing and generally putting right the rubbish software and systems they'd left behind. More often than not you just threw away their work and started afresh, because they lacked even basic foundation knowledge. Some of them even turned up with 'borrowed' CVs - I'll never forget one so-called DBA who turned up with a CV claiming 7 years' experience of Linux and the first question he asked is 'So is this Linux like Unix?'

So glad to be out of that game now.

60% of Germany's 5G network is Huawei, says Chinese embassy

Re: Proof???

Stop picking on Israel please. It's like an unthinking kneejerk reaction to a complex dispute in a tough neighbourhood, one in which both sides are the victims of their own actions.

Draft climate law threatens fines for datacenters that don't cut their carbon count

Progressive taxation

It's in the communal good to penalise crypto datamining, and the tax evasion, criminal assets, fraud, hidden assets and socially useless speculation that goes with it. In short I see no legitimate reason to hold cryptocurrency.

As for the AWS and other datacenters, they may be more legally and socially acceptable but consumer capitalism and targeted marketing on that scale lead our species and planet down a very dark path.

Malwarebytes blocks Google, YouTube as malware

They're OK, really

I've been using Malwarebytes Premium for years and it's always been an excellent, reliable tool. Occasional goof-ups are permitted.

Google contractor HCL America accused of retaliating against unionized techies by shifting US jobs to Poland

Re. Unions

The main purpose of a union is to protect and improve its members' work lives, and the dignity that goes with that. But it' goes beyond just that:

In my younger days I worked for a small telecoms company called BT - at first was very grateful to them, they took me off the unemployment register, paid decently and gave superb technical training. A few years later in 1991, they reported £3 billion in profit, a lot of money in those days; and at the same time announced that for the first time in their corporate life they were going to the City to borrow a further half billion - not to improve the network, or to pay for the next generation of telephone exchanges or for any other infrastructure, but to finance a redundancy programme!

Capitalism is sick and it makes people do sick things - on my floor everyone over 40 was 'offered' redundancy - never mind that they were the most experienced members of the core billing system; they'd been there longer than younger people and their salaries had progressed, so they were targeted.

Whoever made this decision were quite possibly decent people at heart, who loved their homes and children, but the twisted logic of the situation drove them to it.

If you just accept that this is natural and normal and make no protest, then it seems to me that a small part of you dies with that acquiescence. You need an organised voice to have any hope of combatting obscenities like this. For whoever's left on the payroll, no surprise, BT's shaft-the-staff mode is regarded as completely 'normal' and natural, and continues to this day.

PS Re. With HCL No Surprise here!!!

Heartily seconded! After 2 years' exposure to their work 'culture', Hermann Goering's saying comes to mind: "Whenever I hear the word 'Culture' I reach for my revolver."

HCL finishes its year with 15 percent growth, 100 million minutes-a-month Teams usage

Not the only crock of doo-dah they bought from IBM ...

I would wish HCL on a worst enemy, but not on nice people!

Also had the misfortune to deal with them quite closely over two years on UrbanCode, another product they acquired from IBM along with Notes, Domino etc.

It is fair to say they knew nothing about basic database design and relational principles, but they were very good at dragging their knuckles on the floor, missing SLAs and holding management meetings. HCL were unable to provide any technical skill, support or experience for certain supported platforms and were largely incapable of engaging technical support from outside. The end customer was just left to flounder, strung along with meaningless promises. I found HCL to be arrogant and unwilling to listen and learn.

Just personal experience, but in the sheer awfulness stakes they are still pipped to the post by TCS and IBM India.

Black Horse Down: Lloyds Banking Group goes TITSUP*

Horto Osario's latest shag

The rot at LBG set in long before the IBM outsource. I can never forget or forgive them for announcing one set of redundancies and layoffs in 2015 as 'a strategic replatforming to better align with business towers'.

There will be a special pit in the seventh circle of hell reserved for anyone who can think, talk or communicate like that.

Lloyds online banking goes TITSUP*

Well, I've been saying this would happen all along.

Once you work on Lloyds Banking Group's internal systems, this news will come as no surprise. Any bank capable of describing layoffs, offshoring and outsourcing as 'strategic replatforming to better align with business towers' deserves what it gets. Unfortunately its customers don't.

Day 2: Millions of HSBC customers still locked out of online banking

Entirely predictable

None of this should come as a surprise. Retail banks present a glossy and slick exterior to their online offerings. But from direct experience of those where I've held contracts as a DBA, the underlying systems and software are dated, poorly architected, understood, maintained and documented.

These systems are badly developed and tested and held together with pieces of string and chewing gum. The innate conservatism, internal bureaucracy and short termism of banking culture generally prohibits any desire to grasp these nettles. Specifically systems development and testing is invariably outsourced to large teams of incoherent offshore contractors, most of whom struggle with basic literacy and clarity of expression and have no concept of method, data governance and quality, programming technique or how to actually write a performant SQL query.

The whole shambles is then nominally under the control of layers of dysfunctional management, many of whom are simply not up to it. But they can count beans and tick boxes. Expect similar borks from HSBC's competitors this year.