Ah right, decomissioning doesn't cost anything, just stick up a fence round the reactor and bury the waste in the ground.
And before you mention the lack of effluent, bathing in the irish sea or eating fish caught there is now considered a "risky activity".
Ah, but after you have been outsourced
on
Does IT Matter?
·
· Score: 1
*Your* business needs are to sell more technology to "the customer". That means whatever the latest fad is. Java, Windows,.Net, Grid, Linux, whatever, it doesn't really matter and the more the better. The more complex and convoluted you can make the environment, the more money you can get out of "the customer".
You'll find that most management are fairly incompetent, especially the IT management who have outsourced their operation, they are by definition incompetent, it's easy to sell them large white elephants which they can claim to their bosses will improve productivity or reduce costs. Especially when the media are harking on and on about how wonderful the latest IT gadget is. Of course, it does nothing of the sort, usually with marginal benefits and large increases in complexity but they have to hide the fact to avoid looking incompetent and to hold onto the empire of underlings they've built.
The beauty of the outsourcing situation is that other managers seeing these projects get jealous and implement other similar large white elephants.
I mean, really. They've obviously just taken the T off of Titanic, they know it's going to crash and sink but are trying to pull the wool over your eyes wi this bit of alphabetic subterfuge.
Crossed them out, initialled and dated the modifications and then signed the contract and gave it back to my employer. There have been no problems, I'm still employed, so they've accepted the modified terms without question.
You don't think they actually read the contract after you've signed it do you? They just sign it and file it. You could demand all sorts of stuff in there.
The new airships like the Zeppelin NT and the ATG machines can use vectored thrust to reduce the number of ground crew required, the power/size ratio and construction methodology is also enough to allow flight in much stronger winds than the first generation machines at the start of the 20th century. They can operate within similar weather conditions to other aircraft like helicopters and light aeroplanes.
The airship wasn't killed from long range travel just by the film of the Hindenberg disaster, though it certainly didn't help. The much higher speed and lower cost of the aeroplanes did more damage and I don't see that changing for A->B travel in the near future.
I think however there's a niche similar to the one cruise liners operate within which I believe airships could fill. A world cruise on something like the Hindenberg would be absolutely fantastic. Then there's the obvious military/police patrol and observation platforms.
"Every nation has the government it deserves." -- Joseph de Maistre
If you keep voting Conservative and Labour like they are the only choices I have no sympathy. Find out what the parties stand for before voting for them.
I prefer the slightly larger Compact Flash cards because of the higher capacity but also because they are less fiddly.
Both are too small to write anything on. I have dozens of the buggers with three letter abreviations of the content because the names are too long to fit.
They're talking about corporate desktops. Linux is arguably better suited to that desktop environment than Windows is. Not to say there isn't the occasional thing which needs careful consideration.
I'm currently managing several hundred Gnome desktops on Solaris for engineers at the moment but there's absolutely no reason it couldn't be Linux instead. Using the right architecture and using the workstation edition of redhat for the login servers and execution nodes you can scale to thousands of concurrent sessions fairly easily on very modest hardware indeed and with a significant saving in support and licensing costs.
User phoned up, "I can't minimise anything and can't switch windows, can you fix it?", after the 15 minute wait while he raised the trouble ticket, I ssh'd into the login server he was logged into, killed gnome-panel, nautilus and metacity. The session manager restarted them and he was working again...
He couldn't log out because he had something he'd been working on all day and hadn't saved it. I saved the business $500 right there and for a business which is only 10% profitable, that's $5,000 less sales they have to make to remain as profitable.
The sysadmin doesn't explain how to deal with troubles. They just fix them. Course Sun could do with putting a more up to date version of Gnome into Solaris.
I suspect that the human population will go through a similar cycle. Exponential growth, exceed the carrying capacity and then population crash. We're seeing it at the local scale but with globalisation, I don't see anything to stop it on a global scale.
At the moment, the western industrialised nations are fairly steady state but the developing and 3rd world nations are definitely not. We can look forward to wars over resources in the relatively near future (have they started already, iraq just the prequel?).
The disc is the slowest point, add plenty of RAM as buffer, but nothing makes up for having a fast disc.
15,000 rpm, 3.6ms access time, 8Mb onboard buffer. And an HBA to match.
I find it ironic that people buy cheap systems with slow discs, slow network and insufficient RAM and then try to make it faster by overclocking the CPU.
It's been patently obvious for several years that the Motorola management simply have no confidence in their own products.
They eat as little their own dogfood as they can in the products they sell and they don't eat it in their internal I.T. infrastructure at all. It falls into place when you see that they are getting rid of their microprocessor division entirely[1].
It also begs the question, why would anyone else want to eat their dogfood? Apple have answered that one by going to IBM for the G5.
I get paid lots more than the guys (yes, 3 of them) in the Windows team.
However. I look after 110 systems while they look after around 15. My 110 systems are centrally managed, highly available, load balanced providing massive computing power to the engineers in the department, while the windows boxes are barely highly available and have no credible way of distributing processing.
The engineers use a thin client (X11) to access the Unix systems and no longer have a desktop Unix workstation, meaning changes for all users can be done in seconds the windows guys put a PC on every desktop meaning changes for everyone take hours, days, weeks and require a whole separate team of 4 people (yes over and above the server guys) *just* for the desktop support.
Sure, it sounds good on paper, in practice it introduces massive complexity which introduces loads of opportunity for failure.
A better solution:
Move as much of the storage as possible onto a system designated as the server, add the backup device to the server and mirror the data on more than one drive. It'll be more secure, much simpler, better availability and faster.
Ah how I like to spend my time re-inventing what others have done many times before but in an incompatible manner.
How to distribute documents across a whole organisation in an available manner? I could install Usenet News servers and have them do it, or I could waste weeks writing wrappers round apt-get, hacking dselect and tie myself directly to Debian, and spend time installing apt on hundreds of machines.
Or I could just post the document to a newsgroup... DOH!
First, they castrated the PDA by removing the keyboard[1] and now they're attempting to screw people's productivity further by selling PCs with the same paradigm.
Handwriting is too slow. It is too slow on paper, why do you think shorthand appeared? It is much worse on PDA and tablet PCs to the point of uselessness. The tablet format is useful for single sentence notes and very little else.
For crying out loud just learn to touchtype, it *isn't* that hard...
[1] Psion Revo is still my number 1 PDA, I'm orders of magnitude more productive on it than my colleagues on their Palms.
"The problem you run into after a while is chaos theory."
*Exactly*. Hence my mention of birds and emergent behaviour. And the requirement for massively powerful processing before real advances will be made in AI. I would put money on human consiousness being the result of tiny tiny fluctuations in very simple equations which govern individual neurons.
I think you'll be right about variations in manufacturing as well.
BTW, These guys are attempting to build a brain. I reckon they have the basic idea about right. It isn't remotely realtime though. http://www.ad.com/
We're not going to see many advances on A.I. and therefore independant robots till we've got hardware capable of simulating in real time the emergent behaviour of *large* numbers of neurons.
Mm, nope. People are cheaper now because the robots are dumb and prototypes. Robots can be mass produced and one will do the job exactly as well as the next, will work 24 hours per day producing exactly the same quality product and only requires power and occasional maintenance.
Robots are going to make the Chinese look expensive.
Slashdot Mirror
Ah right, decomissioning doesn't cost anything, just stick up a fence round the reactor and bury the waste in the ground.
And before you mention the lack of effluent, bathing in the irish sea or eating fish caught there is now considered a "risky activity".
*Your* business needs are to sell more technology to "the customer". That means whatever the latest fad is. Java, Windows, .Net, Grid, Linux, whatever, it doesn't really matter and the more the better. The more complex and convoluted you can make the environment, the more money you can get out of "the customer".
You'll find that most management are fairly incompetent, especially the IT management who have outsourced their operation, they are by definition incompetent, it's easy to sell them large white elephants which they can claim to their bosses will improve productivity or reduce costs. Especially when the media are harking on and on about how wonderful the latest IT gadget is. Of course, it does nothing of the sort, usually with marginal benefits and large increases in complexity but they have to hide the fact to avoid looking incompetent and to hold onto the empire of underlings they've built.
The beauty of the outsourcing situation is that other managers seeing these projects get jealous and implement other similar large white elephants.
This is corporate culture today.
I mean, really. They've obviously just taken the T off of Titanic, they know it's going to crash and sink but are trying to pull the wool over your eyes wi this bit of alphabetic subterfuge.
It's what I did.
Crossed them out, initialled and dated the modifications and then signed the contract and gave it back to my employer. There have been no problems, I'm still employed, so they've accepted the modified terms without question.
You don't think they actually read the contract after you've signed it do you? They just sign it and file it. You could demand all sorts of stuff in there.
A 1/3 chance of surviving a jet crash? Nope.
m .h tm
The new airships like the Zeppelin NT and the ATG machines can use vectored thrust to reduce the number of ground crew required, the power/size ratio and construction methodology is also enough to allow flight in much stronger winds than the first generation machines at the start of the 20th century. They can operate within similar weather conditions to other aircraft like helicopters and light aeroplanes.
http://www.zeppelin-nt.com/pages/D/bilder_u_thu
The airship wasn't killed from long range travel just by the film of the Hindenberg disaster, though it certainly didn't help. The much higher speed and lower cost of the aeroplanes did more damage and I don't see that changing for A->B travel in the near future.
I think however there's a niche similar to the one cruise liners operate within which I believe airships could fill. A world cruise on something like the Hindenberg would be absolutely fantastic. Then there's the obvious military/police patrol and observation platforms.
Or the Liberal Democrats, being more electable.
"Every nation has the government it deserves."
-- Joseph de Maistre
If you keep voting Conservative and Labour like they are the only choices I have no sympathy. Find out what the parties stand for before voting for them.
I prefer the slightly larger Compact Flash cards because of the higher capacity but also because they are less fiddly.
Both are too small to write anything on. I have dozens of the buggers with three letter abreviations of the content because the names are too long to fit.
They're talking about corporate desktops. Linux is arguably better suited to that desktop environment than Windows is. Not to say there isn't the occasional thing which needs careful consideration.
I'm currently managing several hundred Gnome desktops on Solaris for engineers at the moment but there's absolutely no reason it couldn't be Linux instead. Using the right architecture and using the workstation edition of redhat for the login servers and execution nodes you can scale to thousands of concurrent sessions fairly easily on very modest hardware indeed and with a significant saving in support and licensing costs.
Before posting silly articles. Saruman was a key in the first two films and therefore must be an important figure in the third?
Read the books and find out exactly how peripheral Saruman always was to the story.
User phoned up, "I can't minimise anything and can't switch windows, can you fix it?", after the 15 minute wait while he raised the trouble ticket, I ssh'd into the login server he was logged into, killed gnome-panel, nautilus and metacity. The session manager restarted them and he was working again...
He couldn't log out because he had something he'd been working on all day and hadn't saved it. I saved the business $500 right there and for a business which is only 10% profitable, that's $5,000 less sales they have to make to remain as profitable.
The sysadmin doesn't explain how to deal with troubles. They just fix them. Course Sun could do with putting a more up to date version of Gnome into Solaris.
Linux is so ready for the corporate desktop.
I suspect that the human population will go through a similar cycle. Exponential growth, exceed the carrying capacity and then population crash. We're seeing it at the local scale but with globalisation, I don't see anything to stop it on a global scale.
At the moment, the western industrialised nations are fairly steady state but the developing and 3rd world nations are definitely not. We can look forward to wars over resources in the relatively near future (have they started already, iraq just the prequel?).
The disc is the slowest point, add plenty of RAM as buffer, but nothing makes up for having a fast disc.
15,000 rpm, 3.6ms access time, 8Mb onboard buffer. And an HBA to match.
I find it ironic that people buy cheap systems with slow discs, slow network and insufficient RAM and then try to make it faster by overclocking the CPU.
It's been patently obvious for several years that the Motorola management simply have no confidence in their own products.
8 .html
They eat as little their own dogfood as they can in the products they sell and they don't eat it in their internal I.T. infrastructure at all. It falls into place when you see that they are getting rid of their microprocessor division entirely[1].
It also begs the question, why would anyone else want to eat their dogfood? Apple have answered that one by going to IBM for the G5.
[1] http://www.arstechnica.com/archive/news/106550218
"sh script syntax is tortorous. So much easier and maintainable to write perl scripts"
WTF?
I get paid lots more than the guys (yes, 3 of them) in the Windows team.
However. I look after 110 systems while they look after around 15. My 110 systems are centrally managed, highly available, load balanced providing massive computing power to the engineers in the department, while the windows boxes are barely highly available and have no credible way of distributing processing.
The engineers use a thin client (X11) to access the Unix systems and no longer have a desktop Unix workstation, meaning changes for all users can be done in seconds the windows guys put a PC on every desktop meaning changes for everyone take hours, days, weeks and require a whole separate team of 4 people (yes over and above the server guys) *just* for the desktop support.
Tell me again why Unix/Linux is more expensive?
Sure, it sounds good on paper, in practice it introduces massive complexity which introduces loads of opportunity for failure.
A better solution:
Move as much of the storage as possible onto a system designated as the server, add the backup device to the server and mirror the data on more than one drive. It'll be more secure, much simpler, better availability and faster.
Ah how I like to spend my time re-inventing what others have done many times before but in an incompatible manner.
How to distribute documents across a whole organisation in an available manner? I could install Usenet News servers and have them do it, or I could waste weeks writing wrappers round apt-get, hacking dselect and tie myself directly to Debian, and spend time installing apt on hundreds of machines.
Or I could just post the document to a newsgroup... DOH!
The hardware is quite nice, the software is damned near unusable for day to day PDA features.
First, they castrated the PDA by removing the keyboard[1] and now they're attempting to screw people's productivity further by selling PCs with the same paradigm.
Handwriting is too slow. It is too slow on paper, why do you think shorthand appeared? It is much worse on PDA and tablet PCs to the point of uselessness. The tablet format is useful for single sentence notes and very little else.
For crying out loud just learn to touchtype, it *isn't* that hard...
[1] Psion Revo is still my number 1 PDA, I'm orders of magnitude more productive on it than my colleagues on their Palms.
You might as well go the whole hog and spend 78 million and do it properly
. ht ml
http://www.ussubs.com/Luxury_folder/lux.phoenix
That's the sound that Open Source makes as it screams at high speed over your head...
"The problem you run into after a while is chaos theory."
*Exactly*. Hence my mention of birds and emergent behaviour. And the requirement for massively powerful processing before real advances will be made in AI. I would put money on human consiousness being the result of tiny tiny fluctuations in very simple equations which govern individual neurons.
I think you'll be right about variations in manufacturing as well.
BTW, These guys are attempting to build a brain. I reckon they have the basic idea about right. It isn't remotely realtime though.
http://www.ad.com/
:)
We're not going to see many advances on A.I. and therefore independant robots till we've got hardware capable of simulating in real time the emergent behaviour of *large* numbers of neurons.
Emergent behaviour.
Given the complexity of the brain, it's about the only thing consciousness can be. We're like a flock of birds.
Have we got anything which can run a 100 billion cell neural network in real time?
Mm, nope. People are cheaper now because the robots are dumb and prototypes. Robots can be mass produced and one will do the job exactly as well as the next, will work 24 hours per day producing exactly the same quality product and only requires power and occasional maintenance.
Robots are going to make the Chinese look expensive.