Re: He's already being sued...
Oh yeah baby, he is: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-61589229
Oh, and then there's this: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-61526898
Stick a fork in him, he's done.
1269 posts • joined 29 Sep 2016
I did an audit at two Santander Datacentres,... .. er, seven years ago, and at the time, they were replete with kit. Santander had grown by acquisition, and had literally wheeled kit from companies they'd bought into their datacentres. So a small team of contractors were hired to compare it all to their asset inventory, and record all connectivity, power, network, disk arrays, etc, and add labelling where required. This is the only place I've ever seen an IBM Z-Series (well, there were two, as the DCs were mirrored) and I'd never seen one at Warwick when I was blue. So the notion that 80% of this kit has been decommed sounds a bit hopeful. it wouldn't just be a migration to cloud, but a migration off those legacy platform, and a merge into a new system.
If it is true however, I expect Santander to be leasing space in it's rather tasty Tier 4 data centres to recoup some of the money they spent on them.
I think the whole thing is just a vehicle (pun intended) for liquidating some of his Tesla shares, while trying to keep the panic factor in the markets minimised. If he just sold off stock, that could make people lose confidence, but if he portrays a need to liquidate, well, people might fall for that, and not panic. He knows his stock in Tesla is over valued, and it's a good time to cash in. He lost something like $17Bn when the Tesla stock price dropped, to cash out, $8.4Bn was it? So a 50% exchange rate from vapour to hard cash seems like a reasonable exchange rate. But the idea he sells shares in a profitable company to buy a loss making one doesn't make sense to me.
@John Brown. I'll take option C please! When I was blue, we were all encouraged to go work from home, so IBM could save costs on office space. Much of the old office space was sold off or rented out. The Nottingham office had East and West wings, then it was just one side, then eventually, just one floor. Warwick got halved in size.
Now I work in local Govt, and we're looking at flexible office space in the future, and continued wfh, as we can get out of leases and save money, and our tax payers kind of like that.
There's no such thing as no moderation. Without moderation, Twitter would be an even deeper cesspit. Twiiter has to moderate it's content to operate in many countries. It will need to moderate for illegal content, to prevent civil liability, etc. People will still get banned. Do we need to get the XKCD out again?
The 'Free Speech' goal will kill Twitter in Europe, that mandates hate speech be removed from social media in a timely fashion: https://www.npr.org/2022/04/23/1094485542/eu-law-big-tech-hate-speech-disinformation
AI will never be as good as a human, while it relies on sensors. A while ago, I was driving to work, and a van ahead of me was pulling off some dumbass 3 point turn at a junction. I saw something move through the van's wheels (road was on an incline) so I slowed down, and then the vehicle behind the van pulled out of the junction, despite not being able to see it was clear. AI will not make use of clues such as partial views of vehicles, it will not see reflections and realise a vehicle is present. it will not see reflections of headlights and work out vehicles are present. Even if other FSD cars had transponders to show where they were, pedestrians, cyclist and those darned e-scooters won't.
"selling what can't be delivered."
There is some truth to this. One our our sales teams sold a solution to a Govt Dept that was really convoluted and difficult to manage, and nobody would touch it,... so my team got lumbered with it. I hated looking after that environment. No data was allowed to leave, and we were not allowed to use any of our tooling or automation, so everything was done manually.
It's doubly annoying, as we had to re-certify each year, and do a 'Business Conduct Guidelines' course, and pass a little test, as well as complete export regulations refreshers etc etc. So doing the right thing was drummed into us proles, but it seems the upper echelons said one thiing, and did another.
Apparently Second Life is still a thing. A thing that has been going since 2003, and if we're being honest, is still rather niche. I guess because it's just not that useful. If I have spare time, I do things in the real world. I don't bother turning my web cam on for Teams meetings, nobody needs to see my ugly mug, and really wouldn't put much effort into designing an avatar. So I don't see what a metaverse brings.
Many years ago I got an interview for a technical sales job for a company in Leeds. I was given a psychometric test to complete before the interview, then shown through to the manager. He said "I've got some good news and some bad news for you. You're a nice chap, but I'm not giving you the job." and then went to explain his psychometric software had been a good investment, had always got characters correct, and that I just wasn't slimy enough to be a salesman. He said "I need someone that never had real friends as a kid, and has always been selling themselves, and that's not you."
Interesting stuff. I'm going to the stag do of a former colleague at the weekend, who is now an associate professor at Warwick University, who does work tracking space debris these days. It will be good to get his take on this. Maybe Woz should get over to Warwick as they are hosting NAM this year.
Many years ago I got a call from an account I used to work on. They'd had some recommendation to reduce the number of enterprise adminsistrators they had, and use one time access to the built in admin account, using some app they'd been sold. So they removed everyone's admin access, and then realised they didn't know the Admin account password to get the ball rolling. So they called, as me and a couple of colleagues had promoted the first domain controllers back in the day and asked if I knew the Directory Services Restore Mode password,... which, luckily I had ingrained in my memory (and that we had lodged somewhere safe, but our jobs were outsourced, people left offices, safes were disposed of, etc). So they had to roll back their AD to before the fudge-up.
It was cost driven, but I guess some PHBs targetted older costs. I left in 2015, after that packages were statutory minimum for a while, so it was a good time to leave. I'd managed to keep a grip on my job as some of our customers required UK support (and I required Full SC / UK Eyes Only clearance) but that customer went shopping elsewhere, and 'UK support could mean EU' (as this was pre-Brexit) started being said, and I knew which way the wind was blowing, and it was offshore.
Still, the pension is performing OK, so I can't gripe too much.
Well, no. Staff in shops are paid whether they are serving customers or not. I do recall a news story several years ago where a memo was leaked proposing KFC workers should clock out if there were no cutomers in the shop, and KFC got rightly berated for that. So what's the difference here? If Uber staff refuse to takes rides, fair enough, they shouldn't get paid, but if they are genuinely available, it's their exmployers responsibiity to keep them busy.
Exactly this, I've been a Virgin Media customer on and off for over 20 years (and I worked for them for a while too), but I've never used their email service (I mentioned I used to work for them, maybe that's a clue as to why,....) but why would you want to be tied down to your ISP, to keep your email address? With a Mobile, we can port our number if we change supplier, but email, change and you're boned. So I have a selection of Yahoo and Hotmail addresses for various tasks.
When my venerable old Note4 died, I exited the premium phone space. Not that I ever considered it to be one, it just ticked the boxes (S-Pen pun), as I'd only ever had one smartphone without a stylus, and I missed it, so adopted the Note series. I now rock a Moto Pro Stylus. It's priced as a commodity item, at a very reasonable ~£200. I don't feel I'm missing out on anything with it being rigid, so a folding device will not tempt be back to premium prices, I think they are barking up the wrong tree there. I don't know what would tempt me to spend significantly more on a phone.
Mine died recently. :-( I am now rocking a Moto G Pro Stylus. It's not quite as good as my old Note4 (with the exception of the camera, which is better) but it was only £200. It does have a headphone jack and an SD card slot,... no replaceable battery though. Stylus works OK, although not quite as good as the S-Pen. But then, it was only £200. Oh, the sound is _much_ better out of the Moto too. It's just I have lost the IR Blaster, and the heart rate monitor, and I made good use of both on the old Note. Ho hum.
Exactly this. There are a few places not that far out of town I go to walk my dogs at the weekend, where I can't get 4G. I presume there are many more rural locations. Hell, there are places I visit in Cornwall which invite me to pay for my parking using an App, but I can't get _any_ phone signal.
Most hardware refreshes are not to get extra processing power, or to gain some mythical lower cost per transaction (who runs their infrastructure at 100% 24x7 anyway?) but because maintentance costs for ageing hardware become significant. I'd be happy to sweat my assets, if support didn't become prohibitive.
I never used a 'mainframe' either,... but a decent sized VAXCluster, and IBM AS/400s. Only place I've seen an IBM Mainframe in the flesh, was at a bank. (they had two, as they had mirrored datacentres). so I think there aren't many niches for such. Never saw one when I was IBM, in IBM datacentres, was mostly P series iirc.
We had a perfectly functional HR system at my place. OK, it was a bit 'Web 1.0', and wasn't single sign on, but it worked. It was replaced by a new HR system, which sucked. We fell out with the supplier, and I understand there was some litigation. We then panic bought yet another HR system, which also sucks,
Now, I'm no HR expert, but do HR requirements change so often, to make coding an HR system so difficult?
Indeed, during the Summer months, I usually check that to see if the ISS is coming overhead, so I keep an eye our for it if we're sitting in the garden. Once you've got your eye in, it's fairly easy to spot. I live near a busy airport, but the ISs is quite distinct, once you know.
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