Posts by GruntyMcPugh 1194 posts • joined 29 Sep 2016
"They just don't make any sense anymore...."
And they no longer make Servers, or Workstations, or Laptops,.... now they've farmed off the outsourcing, leaving core IBM with,.... Cloud and Z-Series?
I did a contract at a Bank, and they had a couple of Z-Series,.. only time I've seen one in the wild. I don't know anyone who uses IBM cloud.
They cut Notes / Symphony loose some time ago. As someone forced to use 'Symphony' it was more of a cacophony.
Just how do they make revenue?
At our place we did think to get the tank topped up after seven years in the new location, and it proved to be quite hard to arrange, as it had never been done since the place was built and equipped. The generator and tank were in the rear car park, which is quite small and tight to get a tanker into. I never did find out how they did it in the end.
Back in the noughties when I worked for an ISP, we were planning deploying our first Windows Active Dirctory infrastructure, and we looked at implementing Cisco dynamic DNS at the top level. The 'expert' arrived, with a photcopied version of the manual, never having installed the product previously. He wasn't even on prem long enough to sample the free tea and coffee.
A mate of mine used to work in Bristol, and live in in Congresbury, and one time I went to visit several years ago, we went for a walk around a nature reserve, then swerved bt Glastonbury for a look, as the last time we'd been there was 1986 I think,....the Market Cross was besieged by pseuds in brightly coloured clown outfits banging tambourines. I have no idea what you do if you live in Glastio, and need a bathplug or sink plunger, there didnt seem to be a hardware shop,... maybe you could learn a spell to unblock a drain,....
wrt Bluetooth, I've played with some 'Tile' like devices, little BT beacons that start alerting once your phone is out of range, and,... well, that's all they do. They'll mark a place on a map, which is the location your _phone_ was when it lost connection with the beacon, but as that has some range, it's only ballpark. None of them have had the option to calibrate range, so you can home in, so having said that, how does track and trace really know the 2m thing? Could be a wall attenuating the BT signal to make it look like 2m separation, when it's a wall,....?
@_LC_ : "go fascism go!"
You pay taxes. You pay for your goods. You drive on the appropriate side of the road, and stick to speed limits. You wear clothes, and don't defecate in the street. All of these things are part of living in a civilised society, just like wearing a mask to prevent the spread of a potentially deadly disease is. It's not fascism, it's civility.
I'm in no rush for 5G either, I'll adopt it once it's on commodity level phones and I really need a new handset. In lockdown, I'm not using my mobile that much as I'm WFH. I don't commute on the train any more, and I wouldn't be watching HD Netflix if I still did, I like to relax in a comfortable environment to do that, on a big telly, with a glass of wine and a dog to fuss.
What I really want,.. is more phones with a stylus. The new Note series are just too expensive. I'd consiter a Moto,.... but there are features I'll miss about my Note4, the IR blaster in particular.
"when mainframes were going out of fashion"
And now that's the only tin you can buy from IBM, oddly.
I'm now working in local govt, medium sized enterprise, there's nothing we'd buy from IBM any more. There was an AS/400 here back in the day, IBM desktops / laptops but now there's nothing in the mid range we'd have in the datacentre, and Lenovo do the rest. I really wonder what's going to emerge from the crysalis once all these bright young things have been absorbed? I don't know anyone that uses 'IBM cloud' either,.... where do they make their money?
I've been clean some five years, saw us circling the drain, and got out. Meanwhile, an IBM colleague of mine had been off with stress, macro managed by his boss like he was an Amazon packer. When he got back to work, he was given a PBC3 and put on a PIP, because you know, being told you're a poor performer in a company that sacks you for two grade 3s in a row isn't more stress. It's almost like they were trying to break people. He's out now too.
exactly this, 'Big Data' is as dumb as a bag of bricks. I use an ad blocker, and the few places I don't use it, when I see ads, it's for stuff I've looked at online, sure, but it's not demonstrating any insight or understanding, if 'Big Data' understood me it would show me adverts for dodgy rock music and army surplus, not whatever gadget I last looked at on Bangood.
I'd be more interested in unit sales, given vinyl is often sold at a premium / novelty price point. Also, the few vinyl albums I've examined often come with codes for digital downloads, so expensive vinyl is just a bulky gift card often, with little intention of it actually getting played.
Lastly, I still buy CDs, as I often go places that don't get a phone signal. Although, as I'm an old fart, I'm often picking up 2nd hand CDs that were released some time ago, by bands I'm late getting into. I use Spotify for the introductions, then buy the CD.
Given facial recognistion technology isn't mature, and performs really poorly, isn't this proposed ban just lip service? It's a rather convenient way to bow out of the arena, claim it's for human rights reasons (not that high tech companies have great reputations there) when really it's probably more about not seeing a return on the investment.
Zippy´s Sausage Factory: "Your third level contact,..."
Isn't _everyone_ a 3rd level contact on Linkedin? I don't have that many contacts, but I do have a few recruiters, so I guess that's where it all links up, but when I check out anyone I come into contact with through work, new people from new companies,... yup, 3rd level.
@Dr Syntax: "Everything goes in, out"
KInda, we had partitions and subsystems on our Mainframes and Midrange kit decades ago, long before full OS virtualisation, but it was the same idea I guess,.. before we starting hurling discrete tin at racks like there was no tomorrow..... but with cloud, getting your data back is going to be the sticking point I fear.
... has seen Microsoft promote Teams, and tbh, now we've been WFH I've been using it a lot more, and I've quite warmed to it. MS have been advertising Teams, and how it is keeping people working together, and collaborating. IBM were advertising before Covid 19,... haven't seen the ads recently,... and well, what have they got to offer us in our hour of need? Give it ten years and IBM will be beyond recognition, living off patent royalties, and possibly still alive in the mainframe market,... although I'm in the middle of a presentation by Microsoft at the moment, as we're moving more to Azure, and well, on prem compute is looking like it doesn't have much of a future, bar maybe banks and research establishments.
@Captain Scarlet: "Don't forget the fireworks..."
I wish people would NOT let off frikking fireworks, ... two reasons, first, many key workers work shifts, so if people really give a hoot about key workers, stop waking the poor buggers up every Thursday,... second, this Thurs we were out in the garden as it was sunny,... out wth our dogs, and I wasn't paying attention to the time, then some idiot started letting off fireworks, so the dogs ran inside, one went and hid under the dining table.
@Quantum Leaper "A maned mission can do far more Science than an Uncrewed mission."
Horse puckey son. Manned missions are very limited in scope to the very few trips we've have to the Moon (although we'd already had regolith reruned to Earth via a lander, and there's a long list of non-manned missions), plus Skylab, Mir and ISS time. Manned missions have told us nothing about Mars, nor any of the other celestial bodies probes have visited. We've been further, and done far more, sans meatsacks.
I agree completely, I have no interest in a moving mugshot,... most video conferencing apps allow you to use a static pic, and that's good enough, file and screen sharing are far more productive than stacked up rows of faces, like that composite they used to have in 'University Challenge'.
Anonymous Cowherder: "What you wear is irrelevant" - Have an upvote.
I worked for a company, that got bought by a larger company, that then outsourced it's IT to another company, so have seen some management fads. First company, formal attire, shirts and ties. Tie was mandatory. We got bought, casual wear, jeans are OK, Express Yourselves! So jeans and long sleeved tees it was. We got outsourced, 'smart casual', so shirts polos, chinos, dress trousers, tie was not mandatory. At no point did I look at my self in the mirror, and think 'what would the guy in the tie do?''
.... given drones must be operated withing Line of Sight of the operator, and should not be flown over populated / built up areas, not within 50m of people and buildings etc, for safety concerns,... they are throwing drone safety out, when as mentioned, they could just use a megaphone. That is a rather poor example to set. Can we revisit the word 'Essential',.. is it 'Essential' to be flying a drone to get the message over. No. So, stop please.
There's a pandemic happening, it's real. What you've pretty much said is that everyone is stupid, has no self control, and can't use resources sensibly. I know we've seen panic buying of toilet roll and tinned goods, but really, do you need to panic stream Netflix when you're suposed to be working? Somebody else has to manage us, because we can't behave ourselves in a crisis? That we are sheep?
If we can't act sensibly during this crisis we've really quite failed as a society. I have higher expectations of people than you, but feel free to carry on holding those 300 million people in contempt.
I think this is more about being seen to do something, than the something actually mattering. Streaming services automatically adjust quality depending on bandwidth, so if a household os battering it's Internet connection that's going to happen anyway, and if bandwidth were an issue, I'd expect ISPs to step in and ration all traffic, not just one provider to throttle one source. We'd need all the streaming services to pitch in if we expect endpoints to solve this 'problem' so, NowTV, Prime, iPlayer, all eth freeview catch up services, etc etc.
@YetAnotherJoeBlow: "not relevant"
I now work in a medium size enterprise, some 6000 seats, and we have a decent IT budget,.... but there's nothing we'd buy from IBM. Back in the day, we had an AS/400, bought IBM desktops and laptops, but now there isn't an IBM product we'd want, and it seems IBM just don't want our money. How IBM can turn their back on all of those small and mid sized businesses baffles me. Betting on cloud doesn't seem smart, 'cos we're Azure/O365 and a little AWS.
@AC Training,... oh dear, when we were TUPEd in the early 2000s, the guy that came to tell us how brilliant is was going to be working for IBM told us we'd get two weeks training a year, not necessarily classroom, but at least CBT. In the 15 years I was blue, I got on two courses, one because there was cash for training while I was benched (and to my knowledge this happened precisely once) and one other time because someone dropped out of a course and we couldn't get a refund, so I went.
So, CBT,.... well, no. We were pressured to make all time booked chargeable to customers, in fact, if you had a 'flat' quarter, and didn't bill overtime to a customer, you'd get a nag about that, so using admin or training codes on our timesheets was a definite no no, any 'training' would have be done in our own time, or billed to a customer. One year there was a training goal set for everyone, that we all had to complete 40 hours of training (a fad that lasted precisely one year) but conference calls discussing the deployment of new centralised server management tool counted,..... so no actual training.
@AC: "Statutory minimum is sure to encourage lots of people to go voluntarily. Not."
Gotta admit, it was this that pushed me over the edge to take VR, I knew the more than stat min offerings wouldn't last forever, so cashed out, and it turns out my redundo round was the last to offer more than stat min.
@Pete4000uk: "Any staff left?"
Any contracts left? I was hoovered up into Big Blue in an outsourcing deal, as were many local employment options,... one poor bugger I worked with left IBM, only for his new employer to outsource to Big Blue and he was back in again. I just had a virtual mooch around Linkedin, and it would appear all the people I knew that were working on outsourced IBM contracts now appear to work directly for the company.
@EricM
As usual the politicos haven't thought this one through, if they weaken encryption it will get broken, and quickly, and then all of those WiFi web cams people have for home security will actually become a liability. We've already had snooping scare stories that WiFi cams have been hacked (https://www.silicon.co.uk/networks/m2m/hacked-ring-camera-323651), it's only going to get worse, so, will nobody actually think of the children?
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