"If you load a mud foot down with a lot of gadgets that he has to watch, somebody a lot more simply equipped--say with a stone ax---will sneak up and bash his head in while he is trying to read a vernier".
ok, that makes good sense. from now on i too shall dispense with the wasteful and tiring capital letters, even when spelling names like usa, eu, nato and ibm. maybe next week we can get rid of the annoying punctuation marks and spacing.
I can see how this decision fits in with modern fashion. The whole idea of a proper noun seems to grate - perhaps it clashes with the pervasive inverted snobbery of our culture. Many people's forum handles lower-case ordinary names, subtly suggesting that they are more sophisticated than old-fashioned upper-cased names.
As others have pointed out, there is in practice only one Internet: so it should be "the Internet". There are of course many intranets, and you can talk about different partial internets; but if they are not part of the Internet, the usage is merely confusing; and if they are part of the Internet, why use the same name for the whole and a part of it?
As for the Web, it was invented and freely given to the world by Tim Berners-Lee and his colleagues at CERN. Sir Tim has always emphasized that it should be both unique and world-wide, hence the proper name "the World Wide Web".
Here is his authoritative explanation:
Q: How in fact do you spell World Wide Web?
A: It should be spelled as three separate words, so that its acronym is three separate "W"s. There are no hyphens. Yes, I know that it has in some places been spelled with a hyphen but the official way is without. Yes, I know that "worldwide" is a word in the dictionary, but World Wide Web is three words.
I use "Web" with a capital W to indicate that it is an abbreviation for "World Wide Web". Hence, "What a tangled web he wove on his Web site!".
Often, WWW is written and read as W3, which is quicker to say. In particular, the World Wide Web consortium is W3C, never WWWC.
Q: Why did you call it WWW?
A: Looking for a name for a global hypertext system, an essential element I wanted to stress was its decentralized form allowing anything to link to anything. This form is mathematically a graph, or web. It was designed to be global of course. (I had noticed that projects find it useful to have a signature letter, as the Zebra project at CERN which started all its variables with "Z". In fact by the time I had decided on WWW, I had written enough code using global variables starting with "HT" for hypertext that W wasn't used for that.). Alternatives I considered were "Mine of information" ("Moi", c'est un peu egoiste) and "The Information Mine ("Tim", even more egocentric!), and "Information Mesh" (too like "Mess" though its ability to describe a mess was a requirement!). Karen Sollins at MIT now has a Mesh project.
"Ironically, the grave robbers was said to have been inspired by a British parliament member and phrenologist who'd promised 300 guineas for a chance to examine Shakespeare's skull, but who then reneged after learning it had been stolen from Shakespeare's grave".
Incidentally proving that the intelligence of politicians has not changed much in 200 years. Where did he expect Shakespeare's skull to be found - in the Taj Mahal?
In principle, yes. And in practice, also yes. Sure, there are serious difficulties; but as with almost everything else, the problems are people problems, not technology problems. How can you stop some people from cheating, skimping, cutting corners, profiteering? (I like the Chinese solution: shoot every proven offender "pour encourager les autres". Seriously: anyone who takes unnecessary risks with nuclear power deserves to be shot).
I'd like to suggest that our willingness (or otherwise) to accept nuclear power is a benchmark of our collective intelligence and competence as a species. If we cannot crack this problem, we deserve extinction. Two analogies that come to mind:
In "Swallows and Amazons", Arthur Ransome's novel of childhood life in the Lake District, the children want to go sailing on a lake without adult company. Uncertain, their mother telegrams her husband who is working abroad. Back comes the immortal reply: "Better drowned than duffers. If not duffers wont drown".
In "The Fourth Profession", one of Larry Niven's short stories about the alien Monk species, the Monks give the human species a limited time in which to build a launching laser to send their spaceship to the next star on their route. If we can't, or won't build the laser, the Monks will detonate our Sun instead, and that will give them the shove they need. Asked if that isn't unnecessarily cruel and inhumane, they reply that a species that either can't or won't perform such a simple task isn't sentient, and so its extinction doesn't matter. http://www.obooksbooks.com/boo...
The fusion reactor we orbit has supported almost all life on Earth from the earliest times until now, and can do so for the indefinite future. (As long as Earth and Sun last in their present forms).
The problem is that our consumption of energy has grown bizarrely in a handful of years. The Sun gives us adequate heat, drinkable water, and food in many forms. It doesn't give us central heating at the flick of a switch, transport, or TV - yet. It's questionable how much energy we can practically collect from wind and sunshine, and how sustainable it will be.
Incidentally, coal and oil and gas are also gifts from the big FRITS. They're just packaged to keep - sort of frozen energy. Apart from geothermal, nuclear and thermonuclear power are about the only type of energy we have that isn't ultimately derived from the Sun. (Although they, too, depend on elements that could only have been created in stars).
Either that or the banks will need to offer us huge incentives to come back much like they had to when the Y2K bug could no longer be ignored and they'd "rightsized" too many people.
But the difficulties of completely redesigning and reimplementing all those systems would make the Y2K bug look like just that - a tiny bug. When writing about that issue in about 1998 I asked Jerry Weinberg when he had first come across it. He replied that he had been warning management about the Y2K issue from the 1970s on.
If businesses were to focus on a core competency - the way Unix software tools are supposed to - their IT problems would automatically be greatly reduced. And if banks went back to being banks, instead of a cross between casinos and lunatic asylums, they would also have less trouble of that kind. But then it would take at least ten years to become a billionaire - and who can wait that long?
IBM's architecture is solid but the banks have 40-50 years of terrible ideas and shit code held together with duct tape and chewing gum.
Fair enough; I admit my knowledge is more of the systems and software than of the applications the banks have written. But Wall had nothing to say about the bank applications and their quality. I addressed the issues he did seem to touch on.
As it gets harder to find COBOL developers because people like me were discarded for having the nerve to want to be paid well we're going to start seeing some serious banking problems as a lack of staff forces system upgrades.
Yes, I can well believe that. The technical problems are rarely insoluble - whether it's a banking system or the Space Shuttle. It's the failure of executives and other decision-makers the understand computing that causes most of the trouble. I once met an IT recruitment company CEO who, quite seriously, told me that programmers were "like bricklayers". In other words, the difficult part was done by analysts and the like, and the programmers simply had to "code up" their designs. I managed to refrain from assaulting him, although it was difficult. FWIW, in my opinion it's more accurate to compare programmers to lawyers (at a coarse level, in terms of the difficulty, level of abstraction and appropriate pay level). But then lawyers are paid to obfuscate and confuse matters, whereas programmers do the opposite. No contest.
You may be interested to know that, legally, as soon as you deposit your money it belongs to the bank. In return, the bank now owes you money - but if it goes out of business, your debt comes way, way down the list of debts to be repaid. After, for instance, losses incurred trading in derivatives.
This article is just about what I would expect from the BBC. Apparently the writer has no domain knowledge or experience of his own, so he relies entirely on what a number of different people (some of them self-seeking) see fit to tell him. Then he tries to fit the pieces together, like a rather slow child attempting a jigsaw puzzle.
1. The title "Is old tech putting banks under threat of extinction?" is precisely the wrong way round. As we can all see, "old tech" has stood the banks in good stead and enabled them to run continuously and fairly reliably for 60 years or more. It's the addition of "new tech", and changes in the business, that add the risks.
2. '"For the next five years - and we're talking globally - every incumbent banking player who's been around for a while will have an increased risk of outages," says Julian Skan, managing director of financial services at consultancy Accenture'. The journalist adds no comment or criticism, because Accenture is entirely authoritative and reliable. For anyone who remembers that far back, "Accenture began as the business and technology consulting division of accounting firm Arthur Andersen". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... The new name, as far as I know, was deemed necessary to escape from the appalling connotations of "Arthur Andersen". The interesting thing about the quotation is that it gives no reason for the alleged increased risk of outages.
3. Next, under the heading "Legacy issue", we are informed that 'The problem is that the old mainframe computers - the workhorses of the global banking industry - have been chugging away keeping tabs on all our transactions for decades now. They're slow and reliable'. There are only two glaring, outrageous mistakes in this. First, the "old mainframe computers" themselves do not pose any problem at all. Second, they are very reliable but absolutely not slow. No doubt Matthew Wall has some dim idea that the same mainframes have been chugging away for 60 years, but surprise! IBM and others have continually upgraded their mainframes, and those of today are among the fastest and most powerful computers on the market. The IBM guideline for mainframe response time used to be half a second - with up to 1 or even 2 seconds allowed where the mainframe was remote (in one case, users in Australia were getting a 2-second response time from a mainframe in London). As today's mainframes are much more powerful, and comms are quicker, I can't see that this response time expectation should have changed much. In fact, it is Windows machines and even Unix servers that are much slower and less consistent in the response time they give. Since mainframes were designed, along with their tightly integrated software such as IMS and CICS, to handle transactions at the fastest possible rate, they are far more efficient at this kind of work than any other computers - which is why the predictions, starting before 1990, of the mainframe's demise have never materialized. Oh, and Matthew - "The definition of 'a legacy system' is one that works".
4. "But the world has changed. We've gone mobile and online. We expect real-time transactions and access to financial services around the clock". And mainframes obviously provide the best possible back-end support for those requirements (which aren't really new anyway - 24-hour ATMs have been around for decades, and going "mobile" doesn't make any difference to banking systems).
5. "The new computer systems and programming languages designed to cope with this fundamental shift in our behaviour don't interact well with the old, slower back-office systems". This sentence is so wholly and inherently wrong that's it's quite hard to pick out the individual wrong ideas from the overall mess. The "new systems and programming languages" (whatever they may be - we are not told) were not designed to cope with "going mobile and online". They were partly designed to make computing (and especially software development) cheaper and more flexible,
'The demolition company's CEO dismissed the incident as "not a big deal."'
I sincerely hope the victims of this piece of irresponsible incompetence sue his company into bankruptcy. Of all the utterly unprofessional, lazy, useless things to do...
Municipal authorities should also be sure to blacklist this man and any companies he is associated with so that he has no further opportunity to wreak havoc.
'On 8 November 2002, the Security Council passed Resolution 1441 by a unanimous 15–0 vote; Russia, China, France, and Arab states such as Syria voted in favor, giving Resolution 1441 wider support than even the 1990 Gulf War resolution.
'While some politicians have argued that the resolution could authorize war under certain circumstances, the representatives in the meeting were clear that this was not the case. The United States Ambassador to the United Nations, John Negroponte, said: “ [T]his resolution contains no "hidden triggers" and no "automaticity" with respect to the use of force. If there is a further Iraqi breach, reported to the Council by UNMOVIC, the IAEA or a Member State, the matter will return to the Council for discussions as required in paragraph 12. The resolution makes clear that any Iraqi failure to comply is unacceptable and that Iraq must be disarmed. And, one way or another, Iraq will be disarmed. If the Security Council fails to act decisively in the event of further Iraqi violations, this resolution does not constrain any Member State from acting to defend itself against the threat posed by Iraq or to enforce relevant United Nations resolutions and protect world peace and security.[3]'
As it happened, Iraq could not be "disarmed", as it had no WMD of the type discussed in the UN proceedings. And the resolution emphatically did not authorize the use of force, even if Iraqq had had any WMD.
The Interweb screamed "Oh Noes, War Crimes!" in it's collective ignorance of what a war crime actually is. But nobody (Nations) that actually matters or understands combat and the Laws of Land Warfare was upset. They understand what is actually a war crime and what is not.
Every single act of violence done (or provoked) by Americans and their allies in Iraq was a war crime, and that continues to be the case. The invasion was a perfect example of what the Nuremberg Tribunal called "the ultimate international crime" - an unprovoked war of aggression. The USA attacked and invaded Iraq, overthrew its government, killed more than a million of its people, and quite deliberately destroyed its infrastructure. Ask yourself what those Americans in that helicopter were doing even being inside Iraq. They had no business being in the country, let alone killing people for any reason at all. If Iraqis wish to carry guns in their country, that is their affair. (In any case, the objects were not guns - that is just what the bloodthirsty, highly imaginative US soldiers said).
It's quite simple: Assange raped a Swedish woman, and sexually assaulted another one. And now he refuses to face the court. He's a refugee from justice.
In fact, Assange raped no one. He slept with two Swedish women, both of whom were so eager to do so that they bragged about it to their friends for days before and after. He raped neither of them, and in fact neither of them has ever said that he did. When the charges were first brought, Assange waited in Sweden - despite his busy schedule - until it was made entirely clear that the charges were dropped (because the women said he had done nothing wrong). He then travelled to Britain, at which point a wholly new prosecutor popped up (obviously politically motivated) and began saying Assange should be charged (again).
There are a couple of things missing from this timeline, however. They happened before the BBC's record of events begins.
"In April 2010, WikiLeaks published gunsight footage from the 12 July 2007 Baghdad airstrike in which Iraqi journalists were among those killed by an AH-64 Apache helicopter, known as the Collateral Murder video. In July of the same year, WikiLeaks released Afghan War Diary, a compilation of more than 76,900 documents about the War in Afghanistan not previously available to the public". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
April 2010: WikiLeaks published gunsight footage of the murders in Baghdad. July 2010: WikiLeaks releases "Afghan War Diary" August 2010: Assange charged with rape (although he had never before been accused of any such behaviour)
The pattern is all too familiar to those of us who are familiar with the US government's methods in moving against anyone it wants to destroy.
Come on Mats, you guys are still just smarting from the Battle of Poltava, when you got as far into Russia as (roughly) modern Novorossia, and then were sensationally obliterated in one of the great battles of history. Matter of interest, why did you feel the need to invade Russia? It's not smart and it's not funny, and everyone who does it regrets it.
Unfortunately, they often end up with a lingering, festering hatred of Russia. Which isn't really fair, because all the Russians did was defend themselves.
"Computer programming, for instance, used to be a relatively menial role done by women. But when male programmers began to outnumber female ones, the job began paying more and gained prestige".
As soon as you read those two sentences you are done. Nothing this person writes can be taken seriously, because she is hopelessly ignorant about the subject she is supposed to be explaining. And one can guess that she is also hopelessly ignorant of her hopeless ignorance.
Computer programming started as an extremely difficult and challenging job mostly done by people with advanced qualifications in mathematics, science or engineering. Early programmers wrote their own operating systems, device drivers, and primitive libraries. Most of their programs were algorithmic, so they had to be experts on algorithms too. And pay was (on the whole) very low indeed.
Gradually, as first assemblers and then compilers were introduced, more and more people began to be able to write adequate programs. Then languages like Cobol appeared, which were supposed to allow ordinary business people and accountants to program (they didn't really though). Followed by 4GLs, which promised the same (and still didn't deliver). And then Visual Basic and its horde of imitations, which lowered the bar a good deal by delegating all the difficult stuff to libraries and reducing many decisions to menu-driven choices. And now we have the Web, which once again makes programming dramatically easier by dint of vastly reducing its scope. Today, a few programmers (and designers and analysts and architects) command very high salaries; but mostly because of their ability to combine programming dexterity with excellent understanding of the problem domain (such as trading).
None of which has anything to do with men or women, as Admiral Grace Hopper could tell you if she were still alive.
Slashdot Mirror
Nukes are detonated high in the air and the land isn't contaminated.
Yes, because all the radioactive material magically goes up into space and falls into the Sun.
"If information wants to be free, why does my internet connection cost so much?"
Because information doesn't vote or pay. So nobody cares what it wants.
I can definitely see the use of small autonomous drone that can fly a perimeter around the soldier...
Thus giving his enemies a very good fix on his position.
"If you load a mud foot down with a lot of gadgets that he has to watch, somebody a lot more simply equipped--say with a stone ax---will sneak up and bash his head in while he is trying to read a vernier".
- Robert Heinlein (“Starship Troopers”)
"You are welcome on my lawn".
Very kind. Does that extend to my tanks? (I have 5,000 of them).
ok, that makes good sense. from now on i too shall dispense with the wasteful and tiring capital letters, even when spelling names like usa, eu, nato and ibm. maybe next week we can get rid of the annoying punctuation marks and spacing.
I can see how this decision fits in with modern fashion. The whole idea of a proper noun seems to grate - perhaps it clashes with the pervasive inverted snobbery of our culture. Many people's forum handles lower-case ordinary names, subtly suggesting that they are more sophisticated than old-fashioned upper-cased names.
As others have pointed out, there is in practice only one Internet: so it should be "the Internet". There are of course many intranets, and you can talk about different partial internets; but if they are not part of the Internet, the usage is merely confusing; and if they are part of the Internet, why use the same name for the whole and a part of it?
As for the Web, it was invented and freely given to the world by Tim Berners-Lee and his colleagues at CERN. Sir Tim has always emphasized that it should be both unique and world-wide, hence the proper name "the World Wide Web".
Here is his authoritative explanation:
Q: How in fact do you spell World Wide Web?
A: It should be spelled as three separate words, so that its acronym is three separate "W"s. There are no hyphens. Yes, I know that it has in some places been spelled with a hyphen but the official way is without. Yes, I know that "worldwide" is a word in the dictionary, but World Wide Web is three words.
I use "Web" with a capital W to indicate that it is an abbreviation for "World Wide Web". Hence, "What a tangled web he wove on his Web site!".
Often, WWW is written and read as W3, which is quicker to say. In particular, the World Wide Web consortium is W3C, never WWWC.
Q: Why did you call it WWW?
A: Looking for a name for a global hypertext system, an essential element I wanted to stress was its decentralized form allowing anything to link to anything. This form is mathematically a graph, or web. It was designed to be global of course. (I had noticed that projects find it useful to have a signature letter, as the Zebra project at CERN which started all its variables with "Z". In fact by the time I had decided on WWW, I had written enough code using global variables starting with "HT" for hypertext that W wasn't used for that.). Alternatives I considered were "Mine of information" ("Moi", c'est un peu egoiste) and "The Information Mine ("Tim", even more egocentric!), and "Information Mesh" (too like "Mess" though its ability to describe a mess was a requirement!). Karen Sollins at MIT now has a Mesh project.
https://www.w3.org/People/Bern...
Ah, the downfall of spelling/grammar nazis, despite their bravado, they make just as many errors as everyone else. I love the irony.
Ha ha, there were NO TYPOS AT ALL in your post - that makes you a spelling/grammar Nazi. Tea hee.
That last few sentences were really inacceptable.
Could someone edit this?
OK.
"Those last few sentences were really unacceptable".
FTFY. There will be no charge.
The threat is real, it will blow again. The whole "we're overdue" stuff is BS though, that's not how geology works.
OK, "the probability of an eruption is steadily rising as time goes by". That says the same thing in "scientific" language.
"Ironically, the grave robbers was said to have been inspired by a British parliament member and phrenologist who'd promised 300 guineas for a chance to examine Shakespeare's skull, but who then reneged after learning it had been stolen from Shakespeare's grave".
Incidentally proving that the intelligence of politicians has not changed much in 200 years. Where did he expect Shakespeare's skull to be found - in the Taj Mahal?
In principle, yes. And in practice, also yes. Sure, there are serious difficulties; but as with almost everything else, the problems are people problems, not technology problems. How can you stop some people from cheating, skimping, cutting corners, profiteering? (I like the Chinese solution: shoot every proven offender "pour encourager les autres". Seriously: anyone who takes unnecessary risks with nuclear power deserves to be shot).
I'd like to suggest that our willingness (or otherwise) to accept nuclear power is a benchmark of our collective intelligence and competence as a species. If we cannot crack this problem, we deserve extinction. Two analogies that come to mind:
In "Swallows and Amazons", Arthur Ransome's novel of childhood life in the Lake District, the children want to go sailing on a lake without adult company. Uncertain, their mother telegrams her husband who is working abroad. Back comes the immortal reply: "Better drowned than duffers. If not duffers wont drown".
In "The Fourth Profession", one of Larry Niven's short stories about the alien Monk species, the Monks give the human species a limited time in which to build a launching laser to send their spaceship to the next star on their route. If we can't, or won't build the laser, the Monks will detonate our Sun instead, and that will give them the shove they need. Asked if that isn't unnecessarily cruel and inhumane, they reply that a species that either can't or won't perform such a simple task isn't sentient, and so its extinction doesn't matter. http://www.obooksbooks.com/boo...
The fusion reactor we orbit has supported almost all life on Earth from the earliest times until now, and can do so for the indefinite future. (As long as Earth and Sun last in their present forms).
The problem is that our consumption of energy has grown bizarrely in a handful of years. The Sun gives us adequate heat, drinkable water, and food in many forms. It doesn't give us central heating at the flick of a switch, transport, or TV - yet. It's questionable how much energy we can practically collect from wind and sunshine, and how sustainable it will be.
Incidentally, coal and oil and gas are also gifts from the big FRITS. They're just packaged to keep - sort of frozen energy. Apart from geothermal, nuclear and thermonuclear power are about the only type of energy we have that isn't ultimately derived from the Sun. (Although they, too, depend on elements that could only have been created in stars).
Either that or the banks will need to offer us huge incentives to come back much like they had to when the Y2K bug could no longer be ignored and they'd "rightsized" too many people.
But the difficulties of completely redesigning and reimplementing all those systems would make the Y2K bug look like just that - a tiny bug. When writing about that issue in about 1998 I asked Jerry Weinberg when he had first come across it. He replied that he had been warning management about the Y2K issue from the 1970s on.
If businesses were to focus on a core competency - the way Unix software tools are supposed to - their IT problems would automatically be greatly reduced. And if banks went back to being banks, instead of a cross between casinos and lunatic asylums, they would also have less trouble of that kind. But then it would take at least ten years to become a billionaire - and who can wait that long?
IBM's architecture is solid but the banks have 40-50 years of terrible ideas and shit code held together with duct tape and chewing gum.
Fair enough; I admit my knowledge is more of the systems and software than of the applications the banks have written. But Wall had nothing to say about the bank applications and their quality. I addressed the issues he did seem to touch on.
As it gets harder to find COBOL developers because people like me were discarded for having the nerve to want to be paid well we're going to start seeing some serious banking problems as a lack of staff forces system upgrades.
Yes, I can well believe that. The technical problems are rarely insoluble - whether it's a banking system or the Space Shuttle. It's the failure of executives and other decision-makers the understand computing that causes most of the trouble. I once met an IT recruitment company CEO who, quite seriously, told me that programmers were "like bricklayers". In other words, the difficult part was done by analysts and the like, and the programmers simply had to "code up" their designs. I managed to refrain from assaulting him, although it was difficult. FWIW, in my opinion it's more accurate to compare programmers to lawyers (at a coarse level, in terms of the difficulty, level of abstraction and appropriate pay level). But then lawyers are paid to obfuscate and confuse matters, whereas programmers do the opposite. No contest.
You may be interested to know that, legally, as soon as you deposit your money it belongs to the bank. In return, the bank now owes you money - but if it goes out of business, your debt comes way, way down the list of debts to be repaid. After, for instance, losses incurred trading in derivatives.
This article is just about what I would expect from the BBC. Apparently the writer has no domain knowledge or experience of his own, so he relies entirely on what a number of different people (some of them self-seeking) see fit to tell him. Then he tries to fit the pieces together, like a rather slow child attempting a jigsaw puzzle.
1. The title "Is old tech putting banks under threat of extinction?" is precisely the wrong way round. As we can all see, "old tech" has stood the banks in good stead and enabled them to run continuously and fairly reliably for 60 years or more. It's the addition of "new tech", and changes in the business, that add the risks.
2. '"For the next five years - and we're talking globally - every incumbent banking player who's been around for a while will have an increased risk of outages," says Julian Skan, managing director of financial services at consultancy Accenture'. The journalist adds no comment or criticism, because Accenture is entirely authoritative and reliable. For anyone who remembers that far back, "Accenture began as the business and technology consulting division of accounting firm Arthur Andersen". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... The new name, as far as I know, was deemed necessary to escape from the appalling connotations of "Arthur Andersen". The interesting thing about the quotation is that it gives no reason for the alleged increased risk of outages.
3. Next, under the heading "Legacy issue", we are informed that 'The problem is that the old mainframe computers - the workhorses of the global banking industry - have been chugging away keeping tabs on all our transactions for decades now. They're slow and reliable'. There are only two glaring, outrageous mistakes in this. First, the "old mainframe computers" themselves do not pose any problem at all. Second, they are very reliable but absolutely not slow. No doubt Matthew Wall has some dim idea that the same mainframes have been chugging away for 60 years, but surprise! IBM and others have continually upgraded their mainframes, and those of today are among the fastest and most powerful computers on the market. The IBM guideline for mainframe response time used to be half a second - with up to 1 or even 2 seconds allowed where the mainframe was remote (in one case, users in Australia were getting a 2-second response time from a mainframe in London). As today's mainframes are much more powerful, and comms are quicker, I can't see that this response time expectation should have changed much. In fact, it is Windows machines and even Unix servers that are much slower and less consistent in the response time they give. Since mainframes were designed, along with their tightly integrated software such as IMS and CICS, to handle transactions at the fastest possible rate, they are far more efficient at this kind of work than any other computers - which is why the predictions, starting before 1990, of the mainframe's demise have never materialized. Oh, and Matthew - "The definition of 'a legacy system' is one that works".
4. "But the world has changed. We've gone mobile and online. We expect real-time transactions and access to financial services around the clock". And mainframes obviously provide the best possible back-end support for those requirements (which aren't really new anyway - 24-hour ATMs have been around for decades, and going "mobile" doesn't make any difference to banking systems).
5. "The new computer systems and programming languages designed to cope with this fundamental shift in our behaviour don't interact well with the old, slower back-office systems". This sentence is so wholly and inherently wrong that's it's quite hard to pick out the individual wrong ideas from the overall mess. The "new systems and programming languages" (whatever they may be - we are not told) were not designed to cope with "going mobile and online". They were partly designed to make computing (and especially software development) cheaper and more flexible,
'The demolition company's CEO dismissed the incident as "not a big deal."'
I sincerely hope the victims of this piece of irresponsible incompetence sue his company into bankruptcy. Of all the utterly unprofessional, lazy, useless things to do...
Municipal authorities should also be sure to blacklist this man and any companies he is associated with so that he has no further opportunity to wreak havoc.
From the Wikipedia page you cited:
'On 8 November 2002, the Security Council passed Resolution 1441 by a unanimous 15–0 vote; Russia, China, France, and Arab states such as Syria voted in favor, giving Resolution 1441 wider support than even the 1990 Gulf War resolution.
'While some politicians have argued that the resolution could authorize war under certain circumstances, the representatives in the meeting were clear that this was not the case. The United States Ambassador to the United Nations, John Negroponte, said:
“ [T]his resolution contains no "hidden triggers" and no "automaticity" with respect to the use of force. If there is a further Iraqi breach, reported to the Council by UNMOVIC, the IAEA or a Member State, the matter will return to the Council for discussions as required in paragraph 12. The resolution makes clear that any Iraqi failure to comply is unacceptable and that Iraq must be disarmed. And, one way or another, Iraq will be disarmed. If the Security Council fails to act decisively in the event of further Iraqi violations, this resolution does not constrain any Member State from acting to defend itself against the threat posed by Iraq or to enforce relevant United Nations resolutions and protect world peace and security.[3]'
As it happened, Iraq could not be "disarmed", as it had no WMD of the type discussed in the UN proceedings. And the resolution emphatically did not authorize the use of force, even if Iraqq had had any WMD.
Thanks!
The Interweb screamed "Oh Noes, War Crimes!" in it's collective ignorance of what a war crime actually is. But nobody (Nations) that actually matters or understands combat and the Laws of Land Warfare was upset. They understand what is actually a war crime and what is not.
Every single act of violence done (or provoked) by Americans and their allies in Iraq was a war crime, and that continues to be the case. The invasion was a perfect example of what the Nuremberg Tribunal called "the ultimate international crime" - an unprovoked war of aggression. The USA attacked and invaded Iraq, overthrew its government, killed more than a million of its people, and quite deliberately destroyed its infrastructure. Ask yourself what those Americans in that helicopter were doing even being inside Iraq. They had no business being in the country, let alone killing people for any reason at all. If Iraqis wish to carry guns in their country, that is their affair. (In any case, the objects were not guns - that is just what the bloodthirsty, highly imaginative US soldiers said).
It's quite simple: Assange raped a Swedish woman, and sexually assaulted another one. And now he refuses to face the court. He's a refugee from justice.
In fact, Assange raped no one. He slept with two Swedish women, both of whom were so eager to do so that they bragged about it to their friends for days before and after. He raped neither of them, and in fact neither of them has ever said that he did. When the charges were first brought, Assange waited in Sweden - despite his busy schedule - until it was made entirely clear that the charges were dropped (because the women said he had done nothing wrong). He then travelled to Britain, at which point a wholly new prosecutor popped up (obviously politically motivated) and began saying Assange should be charged (again).
Here is the BBC's "timeline" of the charges against Assange: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/worl...
There are a couple of things missing from this timeline, however. They happened before the BBC's record of events begins.
"In April 2010, WikiLeaks published gunsight footage from the 12 July 2007 Baghdad airstrike in which Iraqi journalists were among those killed by an AH-64 Apache helicopter, known as the Collateral Murder video. In July of the same year, WikiLeaks released Afghan War Diary, a compilation of more than 76,900 documents about the War in Afghanistan not previously available to the public". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
April 2010: WikiLeaks published gunsight footage of the murders in Baghdad.
July 2010: WikiLeaks releases "Afghan War Diary"
August 2010: Assange charged with rape (although he had never before been accused of any such behaviour)
The pattern is all too familiar to those of us who are familiar with the US government's methods in moving against anyone it wants to destroy.
Note to Facebook administration: we really badly need a moderation score of "Irony". It's used a lot, and I feel all too often unrecognised by some.
Come on Mats, you guys are still just smarting from the Battle of Poltava, when you got as far into Russia as (roughly) modern Novorossia, and then were sensationally obliterated in one of the great battles of history. Matter of interest, why did you feel the need to invade Russia? It's not smart and it's not funny, and everyone who does it regrets it.
Unfortunately, they often end up with a lingering, festering hatred of Russia. Which isn't really fair, because all the Russians did was defend themselves.
"Computer programming, for instance, used to be a relatively menial role done by women. But when male programmers began to outnumber female ones, the job began paying more and gained prestige".
As soon as you read those two sentences you are done. Nothing this person writes can be taken seriously, because she is hopelessly ignorant about the subject she is supposed to be explaining. And one can guess that she is also hopelessly ignorant of her hopeless ignorance.
Computer programming started as an extremely difficult and challenging job mostly done by people with advanced qualifications in mathematics, science or engineering. Early programmers wrote their own operating systems, device drivers, and primitive libraries. Most of their programs were algorithmic, so they had to be experts on algorithms too. And pay was (on the whole) very low indeed.
Gradually, as first assemblers and then compilers were introduced, more and more people began to be able to write adequate programs. Then languages like Cobol appeared, which were supposed to allow ordinary business people and accountants to program (they didn't really though). Followed by 4GLs, which promised the same (and still didn't deliver). And then Visual Basic and its horde of imitations, which lowered the bar a good deal by delegating all the difficult stuff to libraries and reducing many decisions to menu-driven choices. And now we have the Web, which once again makes programming dramatically easier by dint of vastly reducing its scope. Today, a few programmers (and designers and analysts and architects) command very high salaries; but mostly because of their ability to combine programming dexterity with excellent understanding of the problem domain (such as trading).
None of which has anything to do with men or women, as Admiral Grace Hopper could tell you if she were still alive.