Posts by wolf29 11 publicly visible posts • joined 20 Mar 2018
Cloud-costing seems to be designed to produce the loudest exclamation of dismay from your company's CFO every month. Since download quantity cannot easily be estimated (nobody in the Financial office ever having to have thought this way before) there is a tendency to under-estimate it wildly.
"The first written reference to tinnitus dates all the way back to Ancient Egypt. A medical text named the Crocodilopolis (dated to c. 1650 – 1532 BCE) makes a reference to a “bewitched” ear or “humming” in the ears. In an attempt to cure it the text recommends creating an infusion of oil, frankincense, tree sap, herbs and soil, and administering this to the external ear with a reed stalk. The Mesopotamians also referenced the condition and would chant to try and get rid of “whispering” or singing in the ears."
I think the "Blame the victim" explanations for tinnitus are just that.
https://www.hands-free.co.uk/a-history-of-tinnitus/ (not a peer-reviewed journal, but certainly a place to start as I sit in this little room with a branch-office server that sounds like Frank Zappa's grandmother's refrigerator. (has that constant dynamo hum) and my high-ringing tinnitus.
Not surprising. Companies buying tons of licenses for office suites, and who will be fined by the BSA for having unlicensed copies (or where the license cannot be located) are leery of shadow IT where end users buy whatever software they want. Microsoft is still working from the idea that "Really, all PC users are hobbyists who are running a little non-networked machine to play with Basic programming."
They are really pushing for the world of cloud computing where a lot of companies are unable to control department-level shadow IT. At least in the cloud model, the licenses are sorted.
"Lots of customers don't enjoy chnage - they know how to work the existing interface and if you force them to learn a new one, they could just as easily learn a competitors."
Judging from the continued desktop domination of Windows and Ubuntu Linux, users are much more likely to stay with the brand they have been with for a while, than to move to anything with a different brand name.
Short-term thinking naturally leads to short-falls in long-term initiatives. I reckon there will be an uptick in employment in the geriatric-hit field as soon as next Thursday. Watch the "help wanted" advertisements.
The obvious answer for the company is to sell out, and the new owner can sue to get the stagnant funds (unrelated to a living person) in the pension bucket out to pay for the purchase. This was how Bain Capital and other equity vultures operated, as I understand. The stagnant funds could be used to fund the ongoing pensions of currently living persons, but one way to claim a shortfall is to exclude such stagnant funds from your report as distributable. The stagnant funds are still accruing interest in the fund, but the money will never be distributed to pensioners. There could be billions in the fund that are being conveniently ignored to make the claim of an imminent shortfall.
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