Posts by chairman_of_the_bored

Opera

Sam was asked not to sing, but Samsung anyway. I'll get my coat...

Who, me?

When I worked as a systems engineer for a three-letter IT company in the UK, I had been assigned to the Healthcare team. Mostly boring replies to RFQs, but I had some investigation to do when a spate of health trusts started reporting crashes of of their critical Oracle database systems running on our **-6****s. Nobody could figure out what was the cause, until I spotted all the occurrences were within a circular radius of one of our engineering centres (glorified term for a kettle and parts depot). Turn out one of the the engineers would turn up for some preventative maintenance, hang up his coat and press the big yellow button on a live running Oracle database server. As his work usually involved replacing a minor part, he was out of the building before the anguished screams of the users (and DBAs) could reach him. I believe he was last seen being shipped in a cattle truck to Siberia for some re-education.

If you ever thought a smart fridge was a good idea,just wait until yours says "Have you not had enough, yet, you fat b*stard? And step away from the beer before I call Alcoholics Anonymous!"

Helpful Technical Support

"Have you installed the latest patches?"

Ahhhh.... brings back memories on my time in a large IT company (name not mentioned to avoid lawsuits etc). We were facing a number of mysterious crashes in a cluster of hospitals around the Midlands. Patient systems running on top of Oracle 7 (remember that anyone?) were crashing and forcing DB admins to go into horrible recovery mode. Turns out an HW engineer who had not been properly trained would turn up to apply some minor fix to a running server, and simply press the big yellow button to switch it off, apply the fix, press the big yellow button to switch it back on, and leave before the howls of anguish reached his ears.

Sic Transit

Hang on, I think I may have a couple of coins down the back of the sofa. Yes, I have! I'll use those to buy a beer, sit back and watch HPE! do! a! Yahoo! and! disappear!

Lack of R&D productivity

So nothing to do with slashing the R&D budget for years? Wow...

Fail on 2 counts

1) Unfortunately, monopolies of any type are Bad Things - Adobe (regardless of their incompetence) got away with it simply because in the media industries they are almost impossible to replace. Hobbyists can use cheaper or free alternatives, but pros are stuck.

2) I have always thought that "Cloud" was a stupid person's idea of an intelligent thing to do (The term cloud should be only loosely associated with the Adobe offering, as all the processing takes place on the user's PC, and only the licensing method relies on the cloud). Instead of wasting time attacking millions of low-value targets one at a time, hackers just have to go for the one single honey-pot. And they do. And Adobe will not be the last big name to wake up with a gigantic omelette on its corporate face.

Nothing new

This - if true - is an almost exact replica of what happened at HP a few years ago. In open-plan offices, if was hilarious to listen to the pings of incoming emails, especially from laptops left unattended by their users.

"Would you like Google to remember..."

A few months ago I visited a website - perfectly innocuous and SFW - that required a login. Because it was a trivial site, I happily allowed Google to remember the ID and password. I missed the distinction - I was not giving Chrome the local browser, but Google the "cloud", the right to keep my data. This only became apparent a few months later when on a clean Linux install I visited the same site, and to my horror discovered the ID and password fields correctly populated. Google may have brainy engineers and security people, but would I trust them to protect sensitive data against all possible attacks? No.

HP chases software companies...

...like dogs chase cars. Fun to do, but can't drive them when they catch them.

Predictable since 2003-ish

*SHUDDERING SOB*

Oh, come on...

Give bees a chance

Que?

" the racetrack memory's read head detects the edges of the magnetic stripes rather than their polarity" - that may be factual but is also exactly the way ordinary disk drives work: magnetic disk heads have always read the transitions between polarity regions. Without transitions, no signal. No signal, no data. So there is nothing new about detecting "the edge of stripes".

HP: Proudly...

...destroying shareholder value since 1996

I notice the share price is back to where it was 15 years ago. The only good news is that I don't have any!

Some turkey. Some Christmas.

They do have form

HP acquires companies like dogs chase cars. Fun to do, but can't drive them when they catch them.

No weight but momentum

Objects in a (stable) orbit have no apparent weight but still have mass and therefore manoeuvring a big container still requires care - once moving it will try to continue moving. Could make for an interesting insurance claim: "There I was, just minding my Canadarm, when this ruddy big Rafaello wiped out my solar panels!"

Paris, because you don't many of those to the Rafaello

One word missing - "enough"

For years Unix vendors made a very good living out of claiming that their systems had higher throughput, reliability and stability than the alternatives. Unfortunately, Moore's Law has caught up with them: if the systems are designed properly, a white-box X86 solution is more than likely to be reliable ENOUGH, have throughput ENOUGH and (except if running Windows), stability ENOUGH that a 3-to-1 price disadvantage just can't cover. Brandishing selective stellar benchmark figures for a particular processor is almost irrelevant - there are very few organisations that can make use of the full unbridled power of a single-image fully-loaded Power 7 or Integrity server.

No kidding...

Let's skip over the religious wars about which processor is better. It should be clear to any CTO and CIO that Itanium servers are now effectively single-source (I know, Oracle is also single-source, but give me the power to change the things I can) and it is a bad move for any customer to commit itself to only one hardware vendor.

Predictable

A little part of me dies every single time I see that stupid "HP invent" logo. It is a long time since HP has invented anything of any consequence. They should rebrand themselves as "HP Acquires". This is just another of the consequences of a completely disjointed approach to the marketplace, with product lines that torpedo each other with alacrity, and a lack of direction from the top managers who since Fiorina have been padding results by squeezing the supply chain and little else. As for Itanium... just port HP-UX to X64 and move on. I am reminded of IBM hanging on to OS/2 when everyone knew it was dead.

I can't resist it either...

If he had made more than one he could have had a gang bang?

Data Entry Systems

This will be the second time that HP has ditched Oracle. The first time when it moved to Siebel from Oracle CRM (also known internally as "The Data Entry System" because you could never get any useful data out of it) and then Oracle went and bought Siebel. Now if HP jumps ship to Salesforce.com I think Oracle should take the hint and go make a pass at Dell or some other maker of cheap consumer goods.

Paris, because she is only a "New Generation" fan who likes data entry.