Posts by regadpellagru

hardware refresh, but probably not more

"The investment pot is the same one that RBS talked about this summer when it said it would be spending an additional £450m on top of its £2bn annual IT spend for a "complete refresh of the mainframe"."

Seems to me they're frenetically spending millions on hardware to tick the box, but nothing to update the old stuff written in Cobol 68, which happens to still run, no-one knows how, on modern mainframes, and is an explosive waiting to blow up.

I'm sure we'll discover more, as each incident is reported here, in the 2 coming years.

As as been said above, move banks, they're not all the same, and the time spent to move on is well spent. Did that myself 8 years back, and I never regretted any of the hours spent for this.

Not an engineering company, no

"Her last observation was that HP's core competency is engineering and that the company must focus on that discipline."

I completely missed that over the last 15 years, for whatever reason.

Maybe because any bit of software sold by HP (except maybe OVO, and the awfull data protector) has been from a less than 2 years old acquisition, any tape lib is resold, any storage array since EVA is either resold or is from an acquisition. Even consulting is from an acquisition (EDS).

OK, the C7000 stuff is really HP home made, but that's all I can think of ...

At contrary, IBM is still en engineering company, in software, hardware (all the line), systems etc ...

The important point is ....

Apple hardware is very expensive, and they have been able to indulge charging for OS upgrade so far.

And they still have a good market share, and turning a lot of profit.

Forget the emotional comments, they still sell and do profit, FFS, there is a reason for this.

Now, with a fully working OS, and some very useful free apps, and free upgrades, this is gonna be a extremely painful blow to the Redmond zombies and Windows 8.

I don't see any relevance to Windows on the desktop, now ...

more chequebooks

"If you have ever received more chequebooks in the post from a certain retail bank, I can only apologise."

For so many years, I've been after the guy responsible for sending that parcel of 2^32-1 chequebooks from my bank.

Hero

"He was then summoned to meet Bill Clinton to explain the first vicious DDoS attack. "

That sums it up as being a f***ing hero, then. How otherwise you'd explain that to a wig ?

Human IT interface problem

In France, everyone that has learnt car driving more than 15 years ago have done it with:

- a manual gearbox (5 gears) + left clutch pedal

- a key that mechanically turns to start/stop the engine

- a mechanical steering wheel

- a central brake pedal, based on piston + brake fluid

- a mecanical manual handbrake lever

- mechanical lights control

Now, in a f***ing Renault, you have:

- a card you insert (or not, can be proximity based) + button to start and maybe stop the engine. Is no longer mechanical, so f*ck knows what happens in the unlikely event you want to emergency stop, if at all possible.

- a bizarre device, different in each and every model, implementing handbrake. Maybe.

- SW controlled lights. What a great idea ! I've seen that having 1 second latency when activating it. Handy to put the full lights on/off when you encounter someone.

- a power assisted brake pedal. Just touch it lightly and you'll stop the car at 100 KM/h in 30 meters.

Given the amount of cheap ridiculous complexity, how is it a suprise that it fails every now and then and that people are not prepared to read 20 pages to learn the magic procedure to reset the hand brake/lights/cruise control/starter ???

Creepy indeed

"More controversial is the plan to use a camera on the box to look outward, to identify the faces staring at the goggle box... telescreen-stylie. Intel will use that to present personalised options and targeted advertising, in a process which seems immediately creepy but ...^"

Well, yes, it bloody does ! Am I the only one to think some analisys of behaviour will be done at one point, in order to provide adapted ads ? I don't think this is the number/type of faces they're after ... And surely, the SW will be remotely adapted at whatever is marketable.

And would everyone be really happy to see a porn movie pop out of the screen, with an all-scream lady, when having a good rumpy-pumpy with the Missus ?

I'm not even talking on the said rumpy-pumpy fully sent to porntube ...

Really, who on their right mind, would buy this ???

All too true

"All of which should provide some comfort to those organisations that have been struggling to find data scientists to analyse their data. It may turn out that the "mythical data scientist" is actually Lily who works one cubicle over. "

Really, it is. And so many of those companies trying to find the "mythical data scientist" have so often let go Lily already !

Kudos to him, really

I'm not religious, and I certainly never was a big fan of this Pope (I never cared really, since I'm convinced universe was created by a couple of dices thrown). But geez, get the negationists back in church, for Pete's sake !

However, I think the guy needs our hats off for having the courage to resign, as this is not really the fashion of the company. I can imagine all the court faces around him when he announced that ...

I'm sure I would do the same if being forced to do my current job, when I'm 85 ...

So long mate, have a deserved rest !

I'm thinking

Where are all those things gonna crash, at the end of their short service period ?

It is pretty tricky to forecast the landing of any orbital object (when unpropelled), so, hopefully, they'll leave some fuel in, to ensure landing outside of, say, middle of London.

Empty shell

"Hasbro Interactive bought what was left of Atari in 1998 and sold that to Infogrammers Entertainment in 1999 for $95m in stock and $5m in cash. Atari SA was the name eventually adopted by Infogrammers, which promised to revitalize the brand."

At which point, it was already an empty shell doing just vid games production, and no longer any development, state it never left ...

So corporate politics, marketing and greedy salesmen only ...

They also had quite some IP and exclusive rights (D&D vid games exclusivity for example), which they used and abused, often detrimentally to the games (Neverwinter Nights, FFS !), which eventually pissed off a number of players and companies, led to boycott Atari entirely.

But anyway, this ridiculous behaviour led Bioware to never rely again on publisher's IP, create their own, and we got Mass Effect and Dragon Age, so this had a good effect.

Now, I think this is time, for Atari, to rest in peace ...

UK kilogram

"But the Brit boffins' findings aren’t conclusive because they are based on tiny changes to the UK’s kilogram prototype ..."

You probably mean UK pound and not kilogram. No such thing as metric units in the UK.

final blow for Windows

"That will undoubtedly suggest to some - as has been mooted in the past - that the Steam machine will run Linux rather than Windows."

Well, quite an understatement IMHO. This is a sure thing for me ... Why putting it on Windows and incur all the usual MS burden (costs, security issues, management) ?

This move, that will probably be followed by other companies (EA anyone ?) indeed, will probably be the final blow for Windows. In a couple of years, when office-like products will be on all tablets, there'll be absolutely no point in having a PC with Windows.

As far as I'm concerned, my games portfolio has already moved to Macos and I'm looking forward to seeing it on my TV, with a box !

enjoy exploring Windows 8 and TIFKAM

"Our small sample therefore seems to indicate that civilians will occasionally strike trouble, but will generally enjoy exploring Windows 8 and TIFKAM."

Well, for people that like that, "exploring OSes" and researching how things work, that is OK.

But the world contains also a number of people at work that have to be productive, and spending

half an hour to find out where the hell is the print button, shutdown button, or hidden menu, is

not popular to them, when put on top of business as usual.

I know very well why/how I should invest time to learn a new UI and MS should really be cautious

about imposing change for change in the hope of keeping the computer at home locked on the office

one (which is Windows), otherwise it's gonna backfire at them.

Another quarter ...

another X thousands job cuts at HP.

Same goes for acquisitions ... Hardly any scoop here as the HP budget exercise has always gone this way:

- positive = another acquisition

- negative = another round of layoffs

So each quarter would exhibit one of those ...

Interesting Wikilink here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_acquisitions_by_Hewlett-Packard

Shame the same doesn't exist for layoffs ...

See,

our QA dept is in the US, so this went totally unnoticed ...

Appaling parallel

Just to make a parallel, the UK took their time to extradite Ramda. 10 years.

But of course, it was nowhere near the gravity of the Assange case, it was suspicion of complicity in the 1995 Paris Bombing (10 deaths, 200 injured).

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/france/1504576/Terrorism-suspect-extradited-to-France.html

Appaling.

F**k me, really

I understand raising money is tough, and a number of bad/devious solutions can be in sight, which low mind people could follow.

However, promoting real weaponry, through a video war game, for a charity for people killed (likely via the same mark) is just insane to me, geez.

Of course, in the U.S of A, where everyone and their dog has a firearm, this looks like Business As Usual, but elsewhere, think about it, people from USA, this is just like promoting a condom maker through a rape video game, to support for raped women !

Mad

"But BGL, which owns a trademark on the phrase "Compare the Market", ..."

/me rush to trademark the word "Market".

20 mins of vigorous activity

"20 min of vigorous-intensity physical activity on at least 3 days every week;"

I particularly like this one, which presumably happens in bed :-)

Sadly, the distribution of low activity across countries matches what I see in terms of overweight people distribution, across the various countries offices of my employer. This is especially true for women.

Paypal is now history

Being a buyer only, I stopped Paypal when they started to refuse electronic Visa cards* numbers, and demanded my real visa number instead. In essence, this "secure" provider was imposing unreasonable risk on me, probably with the intend to steal money (couldn't think of any other reason). And this was before all the phising problems.

There is no point, today, if your bank is from this century, to even consider PayPal.

* Totally secure way to pay online: virtual VISA number, limited to a certain amount of money, limited to 2 months duration, generated by your bank portal. Very popular in France.