Posts by Brett Weaver

Re: Real Time

Few will understand.. but remember the delay between the coding, peer reviewing, punching and testing.? Was over 45 hours...

I had an employee

I had a salesman who seemed fine. In hindsight he Used a lot of mouthwash though. I was too slow to fire him he hid his alcohol dependency well. He cost me a lot. The dope smokers I couldn’t afford to employ at all while dope was illegal. Most financial institutions and vendors had fits about drug convictions. They were our market. Funny how straight laced you are when your livelihood could be ruined.

A "boys" club?

The headline implies that there is a filter on membership of the "club". Its fashionable to assert that every underrepresented minority is that way because the Pale, Male and Stale people somehow caused this.

In IT I am pretty sure this has never been the case. If it was, then with the positive actions being taken by businesses we would lately see more minorities involved in IT professions.

In my experience we have less women, in particular, in software development and technical team leading than we did in the middle of the 1980's.

An observation about the 1970's and 1980's: Because no one had an IT degree, and degrees were more optional, aptitude tests were made available to all staff who thought they might want to "go into computers". Those that did well were offered positions in Data Processing.

Yes, the data entry operators (Punchgirls!) were mainly women, but programmers and systems analysts could be anyone and were a pretty good mix.

Maybe no one is worth 50 mill...

But the answer to your heart felt comment is to value the service worker more, not the bosses less, IMHO.

Nurses, doctors, teachers, care givers should all get bloody good wages. No argument.

How do we change society so it values the servant? Christians have been trying for 2000 years and failing badly.

We now have organised religion that institutionalises the same devaluation of the worth of service.

I don't know the answer, I just don't think paying the bosses less is going to fix the problem .

Re: Some evidence please?

No.. Proper systems analysis is required. In the olden days, before Universities did IT studies, we got into jobs by doing tests the IT companies invented. IBM's tests were highly regarded. Guess what? Biology Majors did better at Systems Analysis. When you think about it - It makes sense.

Maybe its Academia that has reduced the diversity.. There were a lot of women who moved from Biology, Stats, and Mathematics to Computers in the olden days...

Re: 'The Register purchased by Microsoft?'

So you are saying that its the opinion of Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols that MS is no longer evil. He bases this on "feelings" rather than metrics as he quotes no real metrics that can be measured.

Statements such as "So when Satya Nadella took charge of Microsoft as its new CEO and said: "Microsoft loves Linux," that wasn't just lip service." are interesting, as are opinions from other writers. They are not a strong support for the premise of the opinion article though.

His embarrassment in the future, IMHO, is assured.

In the mean-time, The Register knows that one of the ways to get readers engaged is to publish a sycophantic article about MS or IBM and all the commenters will sharpen their metaphorical pencils..

To be fair, a lot of times the comments are more entertaining than the article.

Re: IT is a cost center isn't it?

.. So the age of the CEO is the main thing eh? That's the sort of shallow, muddy thinking I have come to expect from young people ...

Re: The lawmaker problem

In my experience, the majority of business developers are "aging boomers" (Even Python and Node.js etc).This seems to be especially so around enterprise database development for some reason. Its a major issue for a lot of organisations. Outsourcing to India and attracting overseas applicants is one approach which is being tried, but for succession to work in the workplace, being tech savvy is going to have to become more attractive to younger participants to ensure support for the applications being developed now, let alone any legacy code the organisation relies on.

The business is bigger than one department

"Yes, we often feel that the business is not doing the right thing (from our view) but the business is much bigger than one department (IT)."

I'm afraid I disagree.

The IT department tends to be a microcosm of the whole organisation. If management is unfocused and drifting, with little in the way of objective measurement of projects and policy.. I'm afraid it will be the same in all of the departments.

You can't have a department driven by egos and knee jerk reactions in a vacuum. If it exists in IT it will be there in the C-Suite...

Re: Here's my list, and not just for banks...

While I pretty much agree with all of your points, I don't mind working with contractors that are technical specialists. Team composition should be around personality, skill and general capabilities. You generally need more than one type of tool in your belt to create a system.

The big unacknowledged issue is that banks have lost a huge amount of business knowledge. If you want to build a new system you need to know what and how and why the current system does what it does .

The staff in head office who have never been without the existing system and have not been in their current role more than 18 months are useless SME.

Re: First language

I guess your mileage may vary but RPG2 was an efficient language for the system /3, 32, 34 and /36. On the system/3 (1976) I had 12kb of memory, but could still write most business applications. There was a manual which told you how many cycles each instruction took so you could optimize your code. Obviously it had its day but, like cobol, it delivered a lot of business functionality. It seemed to have more popularity in the antipodes than Europe or the USA

Ah yes, democracy...

The USA has a torture camp in Cuba and yet it is supposedly a democracy.

That's one that I know of, I believe it's not likely to be alone.

Democracy has never survived except under a monarchy, where there was no large group of disenfranchised.

Re: Informal poll on whether you've ever had to do something like this

A S36 (5362) with external hard drive. Being decommissioned 33 years after installation in 1983... had to write a screen scraping program to run on a clone novell terminal emulator so I could export all the organisations fixed asset data. The computer ran smoothly from 1983 to 2006. There was quite an event to finally enter "POWER OFF"

Re: Politicians are screwed...

It may be true about the 1980's but I'd like the 1972 Christmas playmate to chat to, please!

Re: New El Reg UoM?

Just a Note: The IBM System 3 card was a 96 column card. Interestingly, the card was used, when printed, to print receipts in the early IBM ATMs.

Re: An honest question

The big thing about mainframes, apart from size and speed is reliability. OS and hardware is generally pretty bulletproof and with the backward compatibility your software investment is preserved to a much greater extent than Windows. Also braces and a grey beard are not required as much as they are in the Unix world.

Re: Back in my day

"my dad has had one for as long as I've known him"

..Its a wise man who knows his own father..

Re: What aren’t they saying?

To be fair you are reading The Register..

They can only afford 1.5 full time journalists because you readers wont pay them a subscription! They are forced to just regurgitate press releases for most stories.

Thank God for the BOFH...

It would be nice to once in a while find out what really went on and who the culprits were..

Unsnip?

The vasectomy reversal is by no means as reliable as the vasectomy. Even a successful reversal can reverse itself again fairly quickly through tube scarring etc. This happened to me. I believe there are only a small percentage of long term reverses.

Note that your wigglers go into your body after a vasectomy so your body develops anti-bodies to your sperm as well. There is a school of thought that this could reduce your sex drive.

I am happy that I have the IOFB tie, but when I got my vasectomy done I was told it was symptom free and "so much better than your wife getting her tubes tied"... I'm not as sure as I was then.

Re: Being on a placement myself...

RPGII was a great language - I wrote commercial applications in it for the S/3 Model 6, and Model 15, S/32 , S/34, S/36, RPGIII on S/38 AS/400...Have not used it much since 1993 though. It was brilliant for normal ERP applications but you would not write a game in it... Several international banking applications still have an RPGII core..

Re: I tried this

@David 132 - Thanks - I just wanted confirmation as I had a senior moment when HKLM\SOFTWARE\Policies\Microsoft\Windows\WindowsUpdate setting was missing

I like the trend in later posts towards punishing Microsoft developers - but also include the Google drongos who made a useless App out of an acceptable browser...