Posts by Korev 6375 publicly visible posts • joined 26 Aug 2016
And when they're in the cloud, they'll just have lock in and vulnerability to price gouging to AWS and Azure instead, unless they reimplement their projects twice* to make them work properly in both environments..
*Even if the application code is the same, bits of the infrastructure will need to be different eg networking, safe storage of keys etc.
There appear to be a lot of comments like this around here recently. People should remember that problems with offshoring and/or outsourcing are usually caused by penny-pinching PHBs signing up to crappy agreements. People's location and nationality are not good indicators of competence.
I believe he did exactly the right thing (pint for when he can sleep again ->). In this day of search engines and background checks you'd have to be very brave to do this. This is probably even more the case involving a straight man who often face hostility from people claiming to be feminists who seem to oppose anything that might benefit a man.
It doesn't say if he blocked anyone else from coming in and turfing him out. If that is the case, this reads a lot like "man uses vacant room"If he did inconvenience others by being there - fair enough.
Would you feel comfortable turfing your CEO out of a room? If half of what you hear about Uber is true then it could even be "career limiting".
£87k is a huge salary for the UK, what do these jobs actually entail? Our Cybersecurity people mostly seem to run around with Excel sheets of vulnerabilities found in scans and nag the system owner to fix it - an important job but not one that commands a £90k salary. Penetration testing etc is a lot harder, but I can't believe that the UK needs 350k of them.
Happy to be corrected on my assumptions above...
Meanwhile in the less-hyped and unfashionable HPC space we're dealing with "Big Data" on a daily basis and helping our companies make money. Think seismic processing for oil & gas, CFD for cars, genomics and computational chemistry for pharmaceuticals. I wish that people look beyond they hype sometimes :)
When I lived with a girl we used to put all the household expenses and shopping on a credit card. At the end of the month I'd pay the bill off in full and she'd pay me half - it made the end of the month calculations very easy and we even got s/Airmiles/Avios/g out of it.
SGI/HPE sell boxes just like that today. They're sold as boxes for SAP HANA rather than a monster server for things like metagenome assembly.
but soon started running IRIX locally to appeal to the graphics intensive workstation market (including pharmaceutical drug design).
I get the impression that the Computational Chemists have never quite forgiven us for getting rid of the SGI boxes in favour of HP workstations running Linux. We do still have a couple of productiveish SGI workstations running some software that "was ruined" when it was ported to Linux!
Given the chance, most of us will defend the systems we maintain (and by extension our jobs): it's human nature.
I had a tour around the Mercedes engine factory in Stuttgart a few years ago. Our guide proudly told us that they'd never made anyone redundant since the 50s and it meant that employees were encouraged to suggest ideas that would mean they'd need fewer people without worrying about their jobs. If more companies took their attitude then who knows how more efficient they'd be.
The biologically produced uranium can be mined, and is probably easier to mine compared to uraninite ores, since it's more soluble, Borch told The Register. This might be good news for mining companies but its bad news for environmentalists, as it means it could end up contaminating drinking water sources.
Isn't contaminated ground water a problem for everyone and not just for "environmentalists"?
There are theories about "gay genes" actually benefitting the female and then the benefit overweighs the "cost" of the odd gay couple who won't breed successfully. A sort of pattern would be Sickle Cell Anaemia where the "gene" confers resistance to Malaria when someone has one copy; but with a copy from both parents the effects are well known.
Before I left the UK I tried to improve my maths as was doing increasing amounts of bioinformatics etc. I tried to find somewhere in Surrey and Sussex offered A-Level maths in the evening; the only maths courses were for basic numeracy, there weren't even GCSEs on offer.
I'm sitting in Switzerland at my desk, France is 50m away and I can see Germany from here. I'll often cycle through all three countries at the weekend or decide to shop in another country (eg seafood is much better in France).
I have no idea how I could record all the times I've crossed the border since living over here.
We had a similar thing a few years ago in another Pharma. Every summer we'd get a batch of summer students who obviously needed a computer. Our PC team had none of the existing laptops in stock (Dell D620 I think), but then some new shiney black ones (E6300?) arrived which went straight to the students. Cue pissed off senior managers getting rather annoyed that they had older laptops (even they were just as fast).
This fuss was nothing compared to when iPhones came into use and suddenly the Blackberries they'd used became "useless" overnight or even kept throwing themselves onto the floor...
