Posts by GruntyMcPugh 1169 posts • joined 29 Sep 2016
@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?
@T F. M. Reader
My first setup needed the Psion Gold Card modem, 'cos my old Nokia 5110 didn't have IR. The modem was a CF card that sat in the top slot. It came with an adapter so it could be used in a PCMCIA slot also. My laptop didn't have a built in modem so this came in quite handy.
Then I got a 7110 with IR and downsized the Ipaq to the monochrome model, and it was about half as thick, but yeah, I was thinking the same thoughts about the two merging into one device. My first smartphone was an Orange SPV M2000 (Qtek 9090), which was very similar in looks to the first colour Ipaq I had. I could web browse, make calls, and I had a curated music collection on several SD cards for my commutes.
@Martin Gregorie: "Compaq iPAD"
Freudian slip there bub, "iPaq" : -)
Yeah, I had one, well two, I had the colour one, and I got that hooked up to my Nokia 5110 via a Psion gold card modem, so I could access my emails while I was on the train, and then I had the thinner monochrome one, and used the IR interface on my Nokia 7110.
$150Bn doesn't seem a lot for the Apollo program, but it puts that scam by Bas Lansdorp 'Mars One' in perspective, and his attempt to fund a Mars mission using reality TV and crowdfunding. Endemol who licensed 'Big Brother' reality TV was sold in 2000 for just €5.5Bn , and then ten years later was reported to be €3Bn in debt, and the most successful crowdfunding has raised ~quarter of a $billion (I'm excluding blockchain vapourware from that list). He was never going to raise enough money. That reminds me, I should go check the share price,.... oooh, what's that telling me, share release, a spike, then zero, then no trades for several years,.... did they get booted off the market?
@Nate: "more than a phone division"
Indeed, I used to work in IT/Telecoms and we had a few Nokia phone switches. During that time I spent a fair amount of time assimilating other companies, and stayed in a number of Travel Taverns, and often the Telly in the room was a Nokia.
,, and I'm pretty sure I made comment at the time about Lloyds staff being culled as soon as the two years was up.
Meanwhile, that new 'bonus' scheme, I'd have rather had the cash, thanks. We didn't get payrises, so we looked forward to the bonus (Although Ginni rolled us over one year, and grade 2's were denied). But this looks like a snide way to buoy up IBMs share price, by taking the dirty old cash they used to pay in bonuses, and buying up stock,...I was in a share reward scheme once before, similar deal, had to wait two years for the options to mature, and then could only realise 20% of each allocation year on year. One guy I worked with was a paper millionaire (nearly) thanks to having 30 years of TUPEd service, ... except by the time the two years came up, our $100 shares were worth less than a dollar, the dot com bubble burst on us.
On an unrelated note, I was watching a bit of Telly on Tuesday, on a slightly backwater channel (UK Channel 5) whilst eating my dinner, and during the ad break, there was an advert for IBM, 'IBM create solutions' or somesuch,... now, I've worked for IBM, I still work in IT, and we've just got budget approval for some more big spends, and we just spent a considerable sum on hardware a few months ago, and you know what? There's nothing we'd buy from IBM, so just who the F! are they advertising to? We are a medium sized organisation (6000 odd seats), we don't need Watson AI, or Z-Series, or IBM Cloud (we're largely an MS house, so Azure and O365), IBM don't make consumer end stuff any more, nothing for the corporate desktop, they don't make servers anymore, so why advertise on Ch5 in the middle of a program about dog training?
@CliveS: "One of the 17.4 #Brexiteer"
After Mr Brown's hilariously uneducated tweet, the Gammon army were quick to describe his account as a 'parody' account, but I too went and read back through his tweets, and there wasn't a single hint of parody to be found anywhere,... the guy is a brexiter who likes football and despises cyclists, it's not funny, or entertaining in any way, and falls far short of 'parody'.
@AC: "Swearing at a police officer is not, however, a public order offence"
Which is a point I've made elsewhere at El Reg concerning this case. His mistake their was accepting an on the spot fine, this case would never had gone as far as court if he'd opted for trial, So the chap made two mistakes, first, he should have just politely declined the invitation to show his face and not given the Police any excuse, and he shouldn't have accepted the fine after he failed the first.
We just need to get this story straight though, he was not fined for not showing his face, he swore and voluntarily accepted a fine over that. Seems a lot of downvoters aren't grasping this.
As I stated earlier, British citizens are under no obligation to stop unless the Police officer intends to perform a search for weapons or drugs, or perform an arrest. So if they stop you, be polite, ask them why they stopped you, explain your rights and walk away. If you don't exercise your rights they get weak.
@AC: "to catch criminals"
Yet again the Police prove they are failing the 'Nine Principles of Policing', the test is that the Police deter crime, not solve crime once there's a victim.
We need visible Police on the beat, not technology, not Police armed with Tasers, but real approachable people, being seen to Police the nation.
@Kabukiwookie: "the guy not wanted to be filmed and received a £110 fine for 'disorderly conduct'?"
He swore at the Police officer who detained him, and the fine was for that. If he's just politely told them to 'no thanks' and walked away, he'd have been fine. He accepted an on the spot fine also, that would never have been taken to court if he'd opted for that.
@AC I'm not reassured by Dick stating facial recognition is only going to be used for 'serious crime' , it means the response from the Police is unlikely to be an 'excuse me Sir', but they'll be prepared to go in hard, just like they did when they murdered Jean Charles de Menezes.
I also suspect this to be true, I seriously doubt anyone with the engineering chops to scratch build a rocket wouldn't realise that 1500m isn't going to prove anything, and that you could walk up a taller mountain and get a better view, and still not see the curvature from up there.
Also, the cost of the rocket,... for about that amount he could have got an 'Edge of Space' flight in a MiG 29, and actually seen the curvature from the passenger seat. So again I suspect this was all about making rockets, and the flat earthers were being ridden.
@Barrie Shepherd: "The Met, ,,,, are forgetting that policing should be balanced and with public support."
I think the modern police force have pretty much torn up the nine principles and are now just using a paramilitary handbook. OK, so they have some right scrotes to deal with, but I'm not prepared to be treated like a scrote because of that. Even scrotes need habeas corpus.
@Lich: "ID Card gate? Its one thing I would bring in"
Ah, see, the problem isn't ID cards per se, although we do have a little bit of a problem with folks who stop us and ask us for our papers,.... but that aside, the very real problem is that successive UK govts have proven themselves utterly incapable of delivering large scale IT projects. There have been failed MoD projects, National Police Computer projects, Child Support Agency #1 (abandoned) #2 (more expensive to implement than it recovered in funds), NHS national patient database, Database of children (for child protection, abandoned), the projects that haven't utterly failed have gone vastly over budget and been delivered years late. Case in point, when I turned 16, (in the mid 80s) I was issued with a National Insurance Number card, a plastic credit card bearing my name and National Insurance Number, so all the data that held was name, NI number, DoB and address. They stopped issuing these a few years later because they were deemed too costly. let that sink in. How would they manage a wider data gathering / ID verifying system? There would be a cost to us citizens? Managed by whom,.... the previous verification platforms used by Govt systems haven't been a success, with one private provider bowing out and leaving all of it's users unverified. We can't have a private company cease trading and leave our citizens in limbo, so it must be a Govt project, and our Govt are just incapable.
Maybe you could send your guys over to help?
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