Even IF you are correct, and touch becomes more prevalent than it is now for interacting with a computer, it won't kill anything of itself.
I am about to put a new 12AX7 valve into a new guitar FX pedal. Who would have predicted that valve technology would still be here - albeit in a more specialised application.
Maybe that's the clue - all technologies will be available for those who need them. Voice input works well for certain people. I sold VoiceType to legal folks, whose time was precious; I sold it to histologists, cardiologists and pathologists who wanted to input data into a computer without touching - in the case of the histologists whilst staring down a microscope. However I wouldn't use voice input in the office!
I used to use a light pen, before mice were commonplace, for inputting schematics into an electronic design system. I still have one here somewhere! I imagine that there are still some computer users - Air Traffic Control people, some CAD/CAE users who still wouldn't live without one.
I'd have to have some sympathy that it was an intermittent problem. They can really cause confusion to automated systems that are designed to cope with hard failures. I've had many occasions in my latter career in Service Delivery and support where it's taken human conviction to sort out issues caused by the cluster software trying to cope with intermittent connections
Isn't that the way most frauds are cracked - by finding out where the money goes? Or is this particularly nasty SPECTRE-like extortion not illegal in the country of origin?
Do you think there will be a majority vote by three police officers to decide whether or not to take a child's DNA? Actually why would they bother.. just do it at the first sign of trouble (nicking brother's lollypop would qualify - obvious klepto tendencies).
Why not give management a go in your current employment? If you don't like it, chances are that they won't fire your ass, but they will give you a chance to slip back into a technical role. I was a manager for five years, and decided after that it wasn't for me, so I 'dropped' (some would say rose) into a Solutions Architect role. The company knew my capabilities, and were willing to cut me a little slack.
If I'd taken a management role with another company, I may have been paid more, but they might have let me go rather than try me in a technical role.
YMMV
I've spent a modest amount of money during the last few years buying (faulty, repair) items from eBay, and fixing them. Though I know I am in healthy auctioning competition with many other individuals for this or that kind of device, I have had some really good wins; synthesiser keyboards, rack mounted music effects units, big valve PA amps, test equipment (I collect HP), home cinema audio; schematics can be tough to find, but the former Soviet Union is excellent hunting ground, and a PDF for all kinds of obscure devices can be downloaded for just a few bucks. Recently my wife struck a very good bargain for a mobility scooter for herself - unaffordable at new or pre-owned prices, but with the magic word Faulty on the eBay listing, got it for a song. Turned out to be a crack in a pcb due to damp ingress. (Did you know that mobility scooters use PIC microcontrollers?) She is now whirring round our home town at 5mph happy as a pig in poo, and I am delighted that she is mobile at an affordable price.
I had an Acer LCD widescreen that developed a bizarre fault - the colors became inverted. Where the screen should display black, it was white. Blue came out yellow. Yellow became blue - and so on. I did the usual 'factory reset' kind of things, but it persisted. So, I went to the Acer web site, and filled in their form.. (nearly went blind trying to use Firefox with the monitor) and there was no option for saying that I was running Linux. I was all ready for the fight about the fact that I couldn't demonstrate the problem on one of their supported OS (Windows, Mac OS X) when they replied saying I could return the monitor to them, at their cost (picked up by a courier), and they would investigate. When they demonstrated for their own satisfaction that the problem was not related to my running Linux, and couldn't be fixed, they replaced it free of charge with an improved model - an extra inch of display, higher resolution and with DVI.
Stunned and gratified. "A++++ manufacturer, would recommend" as they might say on eBay.
I recall that D/A converters were much more common in the 70s and 80s than A/D converters - especially more accurate ones. (we were using 6-bit flash converters for video). When we were working on graphics displays in the local lab, we used D/A converters to generate a ramp, and then the ramp voltage was compared (in a comparator, duh) with the voltage from the pot wipers from the joystick. Since the joystick was carrying relatively few signals (ground, power, wiper x2, trim pots x 2, a couple of switch outputs), the cable could be thin.
I worked in IBM until 2005.. and I hadn't been paid overtime since 1990. It wasn't IBM UK policy to pay overtime to people who achieved a certain grade. I must admit it's a whole lot more equitable outside Big Blue, but there are still some dyed-in-the-wool attitudes where people don't think you have done a good day's work unless you are staying late. It puts undue pressure on the individual if you are expected to work late, and you are not paid for it - makes for difficult conversations with those close to you in your personal life.
You're working late, and not getting paid for it? Are you mad?
Re:Chicago was vaporware for years, true
on
In Search of Stupidity
·
· Score: 2, Informative
One of IBMs biggest mistakes was venturing down the OS/2 route (CPDOS in its development days) in the first place. IBM was ignoring the fact that it already had a 32-bit capable, virtualising, multiuser multitasking operating system that could run on 386 hardware. It was AIX. Now think about that, in the decision matrices going on in Boca Raton in 1986. I can recall when people came over from Austin, TX to demonstrate AIX to the CPDOS development team in Building 227/229.
Think about it - we might have had a five year head start on GNU/Linux... !
> Name one top tier vendor other than IBM that ever offered OS/2 2.0 or above as a preloaded operating system.
Europe had more, much more success than North America. Escom and Vobis both preloaded OS/2 2.1 and later. HPs desktop division in Grenoble, France even toyed with the idea. I put that success down to a fanatical bunch of people in Basingstoke, UK who thought nothing of jumping on planes and working round the clock with vendors to work through issues with device drivers, preload images and bundled applications. The Basingstoke team stuck with OS/2 preloads on ATM machines well beyond the point of extinction.
If I could add another reason - there was a problem with critical mass that sunk IBMs efforts to keep OS/2 successful. That was the huge cost of maintaining device drivers for all of the disparate hardware that was the 'IBM Compatible' platform. Since Windows had that critical mass, Microsoft could rely on hardware manufacturers to provide Windows drivers for their swiftly changing graphics cards, sound cards, motherboards and chipsets. The DDK was written so that Microsoft 'owned' the binaries developed. IBM had to practically buy that same support, or attempt to provide it themselves, or limit the range of hardware that could be guaranteed to run OS/2 without problems. Apple never suffered the huge problem of the multiplying quantity of device drivers that needed to be written and supported, since by and large it controlled the core hardware platform. The sheer weight of providing a huge support team for a piece of software was beyond IBMs willingness to compete; executive management saw that the division had spent enough money to launch another Hubble space telescope, and go repair the thing without gaining more than a few points of market share.
RFID tags on my clothing wouldn't bother me. Tracking my mobile phone wouldn't bother me. Store cards that track my purchases wouldn't really bother me. Cameras that can recognise my face, my vehicle index.. well they kind of bother me. How about my car insurance company wanting to track my vehicle movements so they can gauge my risk?
(I would at some times welcome a way of having an ID card - have you tried opening a bank account lately, with having to prove you are who you say you are, and you live where you say you live ? Waiting two weeks while they run $DEITY knows what checks on you ?)
Having to go through a criminal records check to get a job as an IT architect in London.. that doesn't bother me that much. However, when all this data starts to join up - now I start to get scared. Maybe I have been watching too many movies, but the prospect of data being joined together is far more scary - the whole being much, much greater than the sum of the parts. The technology exists - all it would take is a bit more 'anti-terror' legislation and a good ETL and ta-da!
Add to that a little identity theft, the possibility of others' criminal activity corrupting your data; your digital footprint being messed up with cross-references and data duplicates that shouldn't be there; laws that assume guilt instead of proving it; laws that can put you away for two years for forgetting a password; and bugger me, it is time to leave the country.
According to e-health insider, all of the consultancies involved in the programme in the UK put together haven't billed so much as a few hundred million yet, despite having spent three years working on it so far. Since the project is so tightly managed by the contracts, and payment on milestones being reached, it really hasn't cost the British Government very much yet. Big winners so far are the hardware vendors (IBM, HP, Sun) who have been stocking the machine rooms with kit - at the expense of the big consultancies who are delivering. This is a *very* long term business transformation project that happens to have some IT technology at the heart of it, and the companies involved really won't make much money at it until a few more years have elapsed. Let's not mention 12 Billion again for a while, hmmmmmmmmmmm ?
NikS
I for one will be grasping the opportunity to leave and set up in business for myself. Interestingly enough, part of the separation package that IBM is offering volunteers includes a generous amount of time with an outplacement consultancy. Part of their remit is to support people and give guidance if they wish to leave to start up on their own.
It struck me reading the article that the term GSM has been anglicised, and I didn't know when it happened. The Reuters article defines GSM in the following way:
"Europe's single-standard GSM, which stands for 'global system of mobile communications' reaches a broader audience than America's multiple-standard system."
"GSM -- the committee
In 1982 the Conference of European Posts and Telecommunications (CEPT) formed a committee called the Groupe Spécial Mobile .
This committee was to develop a standard for mobile phones that would use radio spectrum efficiently, provide international roaming, give satisfactory voice quality, have low equipment costs, be compatible with other systems such as ISDN (Integrated Services Digital Network) and be ready to support new services as they were developed.
...
In 1992 GSM coverage was restricted to large cities, and around airports. The networks rolled out, more countries signed up to the system, and by 1995 rural areas were seeing GSM coverage. In 1995 Phase 2 of the GSM (by now renamed to Global System for Mobiles) was published, adding additional features and services. "
Fascinating, I know but we IT Architects are known for pedantry.
I agree very much on the argument that this deal takes IBM out of the realm of being in the same boat as many of its customers - that of knowing what a low-cost, high volume business with margins that grocery retailers are used to, is like.
This may be a very good thing, especially to IBMs accountants - oops, executives (the days of sales guys running the company have long gone - they are all bean counters now). In my experience I think that IBM has essentially lost money in the PC business every year since about 1987. The venture into MicroChannel based PS/2 systems was an effort to reclaim the heady days of 70% market share, and keeping the market in the modest volume, high margin end; they sold a million PS/2 systems in the first year, and it cost them 100M USD to do so (I recall Ed Lucente standing up and saying that).
But my observation is that the high volume business is where real innovation comes from. It gives the whole company an appreciation of the speed that product development has to run at, to make money in this world. We don't have the luxury any more of research efforts taking years, and product development taking years after that. I remember when IBM Greenock, Scotland was in the business of competing in the OEM marketplace (and if you think that retail PC is tough, wait till you sell components to PC manufacturers). Product development went to 6-3-3 (6 months development, 3 months ramp, 3 months volume production before End Of Life) and then to 4-2-2. It was scary stuff for a company who came from 3:1 or 4:1 price:cost ratios, but they were determined to succeed, and the effects of that transformation in the way product was developed and manufactured rippled down (up?) the company. Where exactly did PowerPC come from ? Sure - IBM had POWER - but the initiative to deliver huge performance in a commodity engine came from the joint venture with Apple and Motorola. Affordable 32- and 64-way machines like p690 and Squadron can trace their heritage to IBM trying to make it in the high volume low margins business. An absolute ton of appliances that keep our precious Internet running, are based on embedded PowerPC solutions. Apple clearly has survived in the epic struggle of the PC manufacturers with their machines based on that technology. Where is the next technology going to come from ? Without the striving to survive and to succeed; without the huge amounts of invention, self-reinvention that keeps a company making money by developing products in this IT world; unless you continue to compete in the high volume business, and invent to keep your margin and your edge, you are doomed.
As someone who was in IBM during the Cary, Opel, Akers, Gerstner and now Palmisano eras, I'd like to quote Shakespeare.
'The evil that men do lives after them; their good is oft interred with their bones'
IBM is a collection of individuals, no more than that. For which company individuals work, is a series of personal choices. After the instability in the industry of the past few years, key individuals who can make a difference to this extraordinary industry are still working at IBM, and there are some huge strides taking place there. However, there is a catch. IBM is run by accountants these days. They are working hard to cost-reduce the corporation using all those techniques that every other company with global reach is doing; offshoring, outsourcing, getting rid of long-serving skilled people with high salaries and experience, replacing them with cheap, young, less experienced people; divesting the company of its less profitable parts, selling crown jewels for short term gains. Accountants are not capable of looking at a talent pool and seeing the real value there. I don't know why - its something in the genes.
The time is here now where the economic recovery, post 9/11 has begun. Competitors to IBM are luring key skills away with higher salaries - Accenture, EDS, CSC, Cap Gemini... IBM will cease to be special in about 18 months.
We could always put another Citrix farm in, and run the Notes client on that.. and we could also run Internet Explorer on it for those dang stupid applications (like CRM Siebel) that require IE instead of a standards compliant browser..
Slashdot Mirror
My mouse died last week!
I am about to put a new 12AX7 valve into a new guitar FX pedal. Who would have predicted that valve technology would still be here - albeit in a more specialised application.
Maybe that's the clue - all technologies will be available for those who need them. Voice input works well for certain people. I sold VoiceType to legal folks, whose time was precious; I sold it to histologists, cardiologists and pathologists who wanted to input data into a computer without touching - in the case of the histologists whilst staring down a microscope. However I wouldn't use voice input in the office!
I used to use a light pen, before mice were commonplace, for inputting schematics into an electronic design system. I still have one here somewhere! I imagine that there are still some computer users - Air Traffic Control people, some CAD/CAE users who still wouldn't live without one.
I'd have to have some sympathy that it was an intermittent problem. They can really cause confusion to automated systems that are designed to cope with hard failures. I've had many occasions in my latter career in Service Delivery and support where it's taken human conviction to sort out issues caused by the cluster software trying to cope with intermittent connections
Isn't that the way most frauds are cracked - by finding out where the money goes? Or is this particularly nasty SPECTRE-like extortion not illegal in the country of origin?
Do you think there will be a majority vote by three police officers to decide whether or not to take a child's DNA? Actually why would they bother .. just do it at the first sign of trouble (nicking brother's lollypop would qualify - obvious klepto tendencies).
We could vote with our feet, and leave the country for one of the former colonies. It couldn't be any worse than it is here.
...
Oh, wait
We have. Join us quick while there is still room ..
The Peoples' Independent Republic of Hayling Island
Did I read somewhere in the article about these five-year olds being evaluated for their future criminal propensity by three submerged psychic women?
Why not give management a go in your current employment? If you don't like it, chances are that they won't fire your ass, but they will give you a chance to slip back into a technical role. I was a manager for five years, and decided after that it wasn't for me, so I 'dropped' (some would say rose) into a Solutions Architect role. The company knew my capabilities, and were willing to cut me a little slack. If I'd taken a management role with another company, I may have been paid more, but they might have let me go rather than try me in a technical role. YMMV
I've spent a modest amount of money during the last few years buying (faulty, repair) items from eBay, and fixing them. Though I know I am in healthy auctioning competition with many other individuals for this or that kind of device, I have had some really good wins; synthesiser keyboards, rack mounted music effects units, big valve PA amps, test equipment (I collect HP), home cinema audio; schematics can be tough to find, but the former Soviet Union is excellent hunting ground, and a PDF for all kinds of obscure devices can be downloaded for just a few bucks. Recently my wife struck a very good bargain for a mobility scooter for herself - unaffordable at new or pre-owned prices, but with the magic word Faulty on the eBay listing, got it for a song. Turned out to be a crack in a pcb due to damp ingress. (Did you know that mobility scooters use PIC microcontrollers?) She is now whirring round our home town at 5mph happy as a pig in poo, and I am delighted that she is mobile at an affordable price.
Stunned and gratified. "A++++ manufacturer, would recommend" as they might say on eBay.
I recall that D/A converters were much more common in the 70s and 80s than A/D converters - especially more accurate ones. (we were using 6-bit flash converters for video). When we were working on graphics displays in the local lab, we used D/A converters to generate a ramp, and then the ramp voltage was compared (in a comparator, duh) with the voltage from the pot wipers from the joystick. Since the joystick was carrying relatively few signals (ground, power, wiper x2, trim pots x 2, a couple of switch outputs), the cable could be thin.
you fill your suitcase with RFID tags?
You're working late, and not getting paid for it? Are you mad?
Think about it - we might have had a five year head start on GNU/Linux ... !
Europe had more, much more success than North America. Escom and Vobis both preloaded OS/2 2.1 and later. HPs desktop division in Grenoble, France even toyed with the idea. I put that success down to a fanatical bunch of people in Basingstoke, UK who thought nothing of jumping on planes and working round the clock with vendors to work through issues with device drivers, preload images and bundled applications. The Basingstoke team stuck with OS/2 preloads on ATM machines well beyond the point of extinction.
If I could add another reason - there was a problem with critical mass that sunk IBMs efforts to keep OS/2 successful. That was the huge cost of maintaining device drivers for all of the disparate hardware that was the 'IBM Compatible' platform. Since Windows had that critical mass, Microsoft could rely on hardware manufacturers to provide Windows drivers for their swiftly changing graphics cards, sound cards, motherboards and chipsets. The DDK was written so that Microsoft 'owned' the binaries developed. IBM had to practically buy that same support, or attempt to provide it themselves, or limit the range of hardware that could be guaranteed to run OS/2 without problems. Apple never suffered the huge problem of the multiplying quantity of device drivers that needed to be written and supported, since by and large it controlled the core hardware platform. The sheer weight of providing a huge support team for a piece of software was beyond IBMs willingness to compete; executive management saw that the division had spent enough money to launch another Hubble space telescope, and go repair the thing without gaining more than a few points of market share.
(I would at some times welcome a way of having an ID card - have you tried opening a bank account lately, with having to prove you are who you say you are, and you live where you say you live ? Waiting two weeks while they run $DEITY knows what checks on you ?)
Having to go through a criminal records check to get a job as an IT architect in London .. that doesn't bother me that much. However, when all this data starts to join up - now I start to get scared. Maybe I have been watching too many movies, but the prospect of data being joined together is far more scary - the whole being much, much greater than the sum of the parts. The technology exists - all it would take is a bit more 'anti-terror' legislation and a good ETL and ta-da!
Add to that a little identity theft, the possibility of others' criminal activity corrupting your data; your digital footprint being messed up with cross-references and data duplicates that shouldn't be there; laws that assume guilt instead of proving it; laws that can put you away for two years for forgetting a password; and bugger me, it is time to leave the country.
According to e-health insider, all of the consultancies involved in the programme in the UK put together haven't billed so much as a few hundred million yet, despite having spent three years working on it so far. Since the project is so tightly managed by the contracts, and payment on milestones being reached, it really hasn't cost the British Government very much yet. Big winners so far are the hardware vendors (IBM, HP, Sun) who have been stocking the machine rooms with kit - at the expense of the big consultancies who are delivering. This is a *very* long term business transformation project that happens to have some IT technology at the heart of it, and the companies involved really won't make much money at it until a few more years have elapsed. Let's not mention 12 Billion again for a while, hmmmmmmmmmmm ? NikS
I for one will be grasping the opportunity to leave and set up in business for myself. Interestingly enough, part of the separation package that IBM is offering volunteers includes a generous amount of time with an outplacement consultancy. Part of their remit is to support people and give guidance if they wish to leave to start up on their own.
It struck me reading the article that the term GSM has been anglicised, and I didn't know when it happened. The Reuters article defines GSM in the following way:
.. so I did a bit of research. Here's what I found ..
...
"Europe's single-standard GSM, which stands for 'global system of mobile communications' reaches a broader audience than America's multiple-standard system."
Whereas my recollection was of a French phrase
(from http://www.mobileshop.org/history/digital.htm
"GSM -- the committee
In 1982 the Conference of European Posts and Telecommunications (CEPT) formed a committee called the Groupe Spécial Mobile .
This committee was to develop a standard for mobile phones that would use radio spectrum efficiently, provide international roaming, give satisfactory voice quality, have low equipment costs, be compatible with other systems such as ISDN (Integrated Services Digital Network) and be ready to support new services as they were developed.
In 1992 GSM coverage was restricted to large cities, and around airports. The networks rolled out, more countries signed up to the system, and by 1995 rural areas were seeing GSM coverage. In 1995 Phase 2 of the GSM (by now renamed to Global System for Mobiles) was published, adding additional features and services. "
Fascinating, I know but we IT Architects are known for pedantry.
I agree very much on the argument that this deal takes IBM out of the realm of being in the same boat as many of its customers - that of knowing what a low-cost, high volume business with margins that grocery retailers are used to, is like. This may be a very good thing, especially to IBMs accountants - oops, executives (the days of sales guys running the company have long gone - they are all bean counters now). In my experience I think that IBM has essentially lost money in the PC business every year since about 1987. The venture into MicroChannel based PS/2 systems was an effort to reclaim the heady days of 70% market share, and keeping the market in the modest volume, high margin end; they sold a million PS/2 systems in the first year, and it cost them 100M USD to do so (I recall Ed Lucente standing up and saying that). But my observation is that the high volume business is where real innovation comes from. It gives the whole company an appreciation of the speed that product development has to run at, to make money in this world. We don't have the luxury any more of research efforts taking years, and product development taking years after that. I remember when IBM Greenock, Scotland was in the business of competing in the OEM marketplace (and if you think that retail PC is tough, wait till you sell components to PC manufacturers). Product development went to 6-3-3 (6 months development, 3 months ramp, 3 months volume production before End Of Life) and then to 4-2-2. It was scary stuff for a company who came from 3:1 or 4:1 price:cost ratios, but they were determined to succeed, and the effects of that transformation in the way product was developed and manufactured rippled down (up?) the company. Where exactly did PowerPC come from ? Sure - IBM had POWER - but the initiative to deliver huge performance in a commodity engine came from the joint venture with Apple and Motorola. Affordable 32- and 64-way machines like p690 and Squadron can trace their heritage to IBM trying to make it in the high volume low margins business. An absolute ton of appliances that keep our precious Internet running, are based on embedded PowerPC solutions. Apple clearly has survived in the epic struggle of the PC manufacturers with their machines based on that technology. Where is the next technology going to come from ? Without the striving to survive and to succeed; without the huge amounts of invention, self-reinvention that keeps a company making money by developing products in this IT world; unless you continue to compete in the high volume business, and invent to keep your margin and your edge, you are doomed.
As someone who was in IBM during the Cary, Opel, Akers, Gerstner and now Palmisano eras, I'd like to quote Shakespeare. 'The evil that men do lives after them; their good is oft interred with their bones'
IBM is a collection of individuals, no more than that. For which company individuals work, is a series of personal choices. After the instability in the industry of the past few years, key individuals who can make a difference to this extraordinary industry are still working at IBM, and there are some huge strides taking place there. However, there is a catch. IBM is run by accountants these days. They are working hard to cost-reduce the corporation using all those techniques that every other company with global reach is doing; offshoring, outsourcing, getting rid of long-serving skilled people with high salaries and experience, replacing them with cheap, young, less experienced people; divesting the company of its less profitable parts, selling crown jewels for short term gains. Accountants are not capable of looking at a talent pool and seeing the real value there. I don't know why - its something in the genes. The time is here now where the economic recovery, post 9/11 has begun. Competitors to IBM are luring key skills away with higher salaries - Accenture, EDS, CSC, Cap Gemini ... IBM will cease to be special in about 18 months.
We could always put another Citrix farm in, and run the Notes client on that .. and we could also run Internet Explorer on it for those dang stupid applications (like CRM Siebel) that require IE instead of a standards compliant browser ..
I'm sure IBM wouldn't mind selling PowerPC to HP if they are short of a decent engine family ..