Posts by A. Lloyd Flanagan

Atlassian's move to cloud-only means customers face integration issues and more

Re: Can't say I'll miss it

Never understood why some products search options are so bad. This isn't some new cutting-edge tech that's hard to get right.

Space Shuttle war of words takes off as senator blasts 'woke Smithsonian'

Still a waste

So it's "only" $5 million dollars? For a pointless exercise in ego-stroking? Glad our taxpayer's money is being well used.

California lawmakers pretend to regulate AI, create a pile of paperwork

Extra unnoticed restrictions in the bill

"or a model being able to deceive its developers to subvert its own restrictions"

Deciding this didn't go far enough to regulate science fictional devices, the law also establishes protocols for warp drives, and safety standards for matter-antimatter reactors.

Row rumbles on over figures in Oracle CSO’s anti-security rant

Does not reflect, my a**

"does not reflect our beliefs or our relationship with our customers" Many years experience with Oracle says that rant was a perfect reflection of their attitude and relationship with customers. If you're a clueless VP who can override IT purchasing decisions, it's a different story, of course.

Five years of Sun software under Oracle: Were the critics right?

Re: Yes. The critics were right

"where being fast seemed to trump being reliable."

But that's exactly the niche MySQL was designed for -- things like web applications where an occasional data failure could be tolerated but high performance was a must. If it sacrifices performance for reliability, it's playing catch up to PostgreSQL, and it has a long way to go.

Java is the new COBOL?

That's a pretty good comparison, actually. A huge base of installed software and siloed programmers, on top of a language that was long ago surpassed by a number of alternatives. Desperate attempts to stay relevant which are not gaining converts (anybody remember Object COBOL?).

UK.gov shuns IT support tower model. Now what the hell do we do?

I'm not from the UK

But this whole argument sounds like the things I've seen in industry, where management flounders around for a silver bullet -- because they don't want to spend the time and money to get competent IT management in place. You either run in-house IT with *people who know what they're doing*, or you outsource with the outsourcers managed by *people who are very good at it*.

I think what I'm trying to say is that the traditional bureaucratic approach is doomed here.

How good a techie are you? Objective about yourself and your skills?

Simply by asking these questions...

You've put more thought into the subject than 95% of the people getting paid to do this. Remember, you're facing a huge herd of people who learned what they needed to graduate, and have spent the rest of the time learning only what they absolutely had to to get by. Get out there and run rings around them.

And those of you reading online articles like this, you're ahead of many of your "peers" as well.

Once you've put in a couple decades, you too can be cynical about your profession, and still running rings around the youngsters.

Microsoft Surface: Designed to win, priced to fail

Office?

A stripped-down version of Office? Really? I'll bet it can't compete with apps designed for tablets from the beginning. Office needs a complete redesign, but you'll never convince MS of that while it's still selling. Which it will until some other company does to them what MS did to WordPerfect.

Global warming much less serious than thought - new science

Oh, right. Well, it's all right then.

Of course, if you're going to look at past warming events you might find this interesting: "There have been three major greenhouse phases in the time period we analyzed and the peaks in temperature of each coincide with mass extinctions," http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=mass-extinctions-tied-to-past-climate-changes

"Global temperature rose five degrees Celsius 56 million years ago in response to a massive injection of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.

That intense gas release was only 10 percent of the rate at which heat-trapping greenhouse gases are building up in the atmosphere today."

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=the-last-great-global-warming (sorry, subscription required for full article. I've got the magazine at my house, if you drop by I'll let you read it.)

seriously?

Billions of pounds? Really? I haven't found a source for England's budget for meteorology, but the entire Department of Health received 98.7 billion pounds in 2008-9.

Re: They don't have a choice!

Wow, that's a lot of words for a completely irrelevant post.

Wi-Fi starts getting chummy with its peers

Bluetooth has not taken off in US?

Maybe the lack of popularity in the US is less due to the carriers, and more to all the Bluetooth devices I've accumulated which don't actually work.

IBM Java defection leaves Apache sourcers shellshocked

The problem with patents

The reality is, that with the minefield that software patents is today, that freedom-to-operate analysis is of limited usefulness. Anybody can patent just about anything, and any large software project is going to violate a number of patents without meaning to. There's only so many reasonable ways to solve a particular problem.

There's no reason to reason to think Python is immune from this problem, just that nobody has bothered to sue yet. Until software patents are eliminated, we'll see more problems like this, until open source is just a fond memory of long-time programmers.

Oracle to webify mobile Java against Android

Open Source My ***

They can release stuff under the GPL all they want. If they make a habit of suing anybody they don't like over patents, nobody in their right mind will touch the stuff. Licenses like GPL rely on copyright, and as long as software is patentable open source has a big hole in it. Reason #15 of Why Software Patents Are a Horrible Idea.

Daleks poised to invade tour UK

Hey, I'm ready

All I've got to say is, if I see a Dalek, I'm hitting it with all the heavy artillery I can beg, buy, or steal. If it turns out to be a fake or a guy in a box, that's too damn bad. I'm not taking any chances.

Google's WiFi snoop - who knew and who didn't?

Uh, so?

I hate corporate misuse of data as much as anyone, but is there any evidence at all that they actually used any of this data for anything? I keep reading all these "Google Is Evil" stories and they all seem to concern something Google could do, or might do in the future. Yawn.

Microsoft's Windows 7 price gamble - and why it's flawed

Prices still way too high

If MS is serious about getting people (like me) to upgrade from Windows XP, they need to get the price below the "no-brainer" point, which for me is probably $20-30. There's just no good reason to spend $90 or more. (See http://www.codinghorror.com for a discussion of this).

As far as Linux: hmmm, I can spend $90 with Microsoft and get technical help from their website, or I can spend $50 with Canonical and get an actual human being to help me through the rough spots. Looks to me like MS has a problem.

Microsoft opened Linux-driver code after 'violating' GPL

What's with the headline?

The headline reads "after 'violating' GPL". The single-quotes are usually used to indicate there's an interpretation that is questionable or disputed.

But from the article: "a network driver in Microsoft's Hyper-V used open-source components licensed under the GPL and statically linked to binary parts. The GPL does not permit the mixing of closed and open-source elements."

That's pretty much open and shut, guys. The quotes around "violating" here seem to suggest you're not taking the GPL license seriously. Love it or hate it, it's a genuine license, and it's been upheld at every court challenge. So let's lose the quotes.

HP loads PC with nonexistent web browser

So now we know what it takes

... to fix the problems of the Windows registry. What a engineering disaster that thing is. Somebody had one good idea and then implemented it just as poorly as they possibly could.

Chrome-fed Googasm bares tech pundit futility

Is it too late?

Can we ban the term "cloud" as used in relation to computing? It's the most meaningless in a long line of useless buzzwords from those idiots. On topic, Chrome has some neat stuff that may make it a really useful product, eventually. And there's nothing wrong with that -- the whole "replace Windows" hype is extremely silly.

Secret mailing list rocks Wikipedia

Intenet worst invention ever?

Bryce Prewitt: "The internet is single-handedly the worst invention ever."

Wow, even worse than democracy? You seem to believe that power should be left in the hands of the Privileged Few who can handle it. Beware the unwashed masses!

Republicans hammer Brit artist's Bush

As an American, I'm disgusted!

What a sad waste of good porn. Oh well, I understand you can still get some on the Internet somewhere.