fpp

IBM today is mostly a service provider - with those in the 50+ age bracket being "kicked out" there will be at least 2 groups:

(1)The ones with skills "to keep the lights on" for these services - those will be hired back as "consultants" - let's hope at twice the daily rate they worked before if they want to continue to work.

(2) The others - for them, the tax payers will pick up some of the balance, but generally, it will be dire for them to find new ways to continue.

Overall, age discrimination is a topic on which most companies and the public are mostly in denial while trying to please everybody else or demonstrate how inclusive they are.

Within many industries you will be excluded "quietly" during the selection for up to mid-level jobs when you are 50+ - quietly, because companies know that such discrimination openly could result in reputational or potential legal challenges.

On exec jobs, it is even more ludicrous - people who are much older than the candidates, block (competent) 50+ candidates based on their age to become their peers.

At the same time, often these companies also do not promote staff above a certain age e.g. when taking on new responsibilities that gets all others promoted (aka substantial pay rise / cost). As a result, while in a few countries here in Europe, 50+ workforce will have more holidays or pension contributions, the salaries of 50+ high achievers might be lower than younger staff in comparable roles. Give the above, some swallow that pill, but those that can afford leave (independent of age the old saying: good people leave, wood stays). Might not apply to most of the 50+ workforce, others might just have better employment contracts (historically), e.g. in the German car factories you have people on payroll with the company, some as contractors through 3rd party, and at the end of the food chain some with a low paid contract for work and labour with a body shop - all doing the same work at very different pay for the workers. In such setups, getting rid of the older workers might result in a higher bonus for top management, achieving KPIs for middle management, and certainly in high consultancy fees for restructuring advice from McKinsey e.a at daily rates per (senior) consultant at about the monthly salary of the worker made redundant - after these "cost" making younger or older workforce redundant becomes a marginal difference.

Overall, from what I've seen, where competence is key and valued, age and other things will not be used to discriminate the best candidates or staff. I've seen 70+ old engineers being hired by top-names for their knowledge, experience and achievements.

With aging societies in many western countries, TMK, in about 5 years the majority of the workforce will be 50+ in most of them.

In the west, during the last 40 years we have shifted from "engineering pride" to prioritising financial markets vs innovations & products. This has certainly created many activities, tasks /jobs particularly in large orgs, that will become "redundant" when the music stops or when some of these orgs fade away due to lack of product, market, leadership or competencies.

We need to look into how our "established" companies stay or become competitive and innovative again with their products and services in a global environment short / mid and long term vs. making most of their money on financial markets. Such companies don't need to care about the age of their staff - they care about skills and competencies.

With the baby boomers leaving the job market, low-birth groups / demographic change of those entering the job market plus technology advances there is now a chance that this puts pressure on companies (and employees) to re-invent themselves.

Are you not concerned that this move (relabeling the open source version different from how the product is known to the broader public) might further diminish the number of contributors that are now already down 50% / back to 2014 levels?

see https://www.openhub.net/p/docker for statistics on that.

same result - only one issue like that known to me So of course I could be wrong and this issue is not the only one in that protocol implementation / sys component(s)

sorry mixed it up.

If I look at glove & WordNet usage e.g. for topic extraction, bagging / clustering or semantic similarity would you say we would need to get rid of such a bias, e.g. create something like a Geiger counter for NLP.

Alternative view - when doing sentiment analysis / classification would you say that such a bias actually helps to identify a type of sentiment in a doc / sentence.

sounds familiar - we found that one 1996 when doing system programming on NT (NuMega SoftIce was your best friend together with material published by Mark Russinovich prior of him working with MS - remember when you were doing e.g. a file system driver at that time there was close to zero documentation by MS and half of what they provided was wrong). Demonstrated then how to use it to log onto remote Windows systems over the I-Net and gain Admin rights. I thought this one with all what was published about it long ago would be well known since.

Astounded that it took so long to fix and that it passed on through generations of Windows version.

Almost certain similar can be said of other low level "bugs".

very interesting topic - could you please share a link to the original paper.

best probably to read that one first.

The Brexit is just one of key changes hitting the UK tech working / start-up / corporate environments in the moment.

Brexit, IP Act, changes to IR35 (in / out), the £ drop, announcements of major city firms to reduce staff by 30%+, slowing global economies (real not what statistics are telling), UK service price increases of 10% - 20% as seen in the last months or to come with e.g. electricity, IT and communication services in the next weeks.

All these contribute to a climate of uncertainty and making the UK less competitive.

I've been closely watching various areas of the IT contractor market for the last months - these are normally very good indicators how healthy the industry is / how positive or negative forward looking is.

In more than 15 years I have never seen these markets being as bad as they are in the moment.

This might all sound very gloomy, but if the UK government continues with their path as seen in the last months, they are burning the ground we all in the UK stand on.

Out of personal experience hiring many new staff members, this might be true for entry level to mid-level jobs with broad supply of candidates being a good match with their (claimed) skill set.

Unfortunately even that oversimplifies the actual situation - there is not one type of job and there is not one type of organisation hiring.

The higher up the ladder you go the less likely it becomes that you would get a job based on your resume / skills alone. You will need an endorsement of some kind that might come from inside the company or through a trusted external referrer (e.g. a specialised senior / executive placement agency aka head hunter used by the company for pre-selecting candidates - sometimes this is visible when the agency is advertising the role, sometimes not when the role is advertised under the company name).

Many of these roles are still advertised like other roles mainly to follow process - advertising every vacancy to the public is almost always a step to tick off in hiring processes.

While some companies - mostly fast growing or start-ups - are more open to "outsiders", in others the public advertising while still providing some transparency has long become a complete illusion.

My most extreme examples here would be with government agencies for permanent senior or above roles. This can be best demonstrated with United Nations post advertising.

The UN has a series of job boards where the public can apply to any of the jobs and all posts vacant should be on these (not sure if they still include the most senior ones - you normally find these in the Economist).

What they don't tell you is that a lot of them only take internal candidates and are not really open to external applicants - this can go that far that even staff members from other UN agencies wont through the first selection round when applying.

Other (non-professional) jobs might only be filled locally, e.g. if you would be in the UK and the job is in Switzerland don't bother...

After that, applying for senior posts when you are not "part of the system" is a completely useless endeavour. Here even skills seem to become secondary - with most of them you will have to be endorsed by your government. There might be a very small number of people that made it onto senior posts in the last 10-15 years without government endorsement, but tmk all of them had very strong internal / organisation support behind them. And most of them had an enormously hard time to fight off the "cronies" after they got the post - no surprise that even less survived the first 2 years.

Overall, job boards might be a good starting point for entry level positions or contract work. It helps you to identify potential opportunities, but there is normally no direct road to get a job from the advert alone.

Often you have a better chance to apply directly on the company web sites, or on sites like Kaggle or HackerRank.

Most importantly you need to find a way to stick out from the crowd.

Running / monthly cloud cost and comparison to other options (e.g. run on a rented dedicated machine / co-location) should already been looked at when you do even the most basic business plan.

Generally most of the time the best approach is to create solutions that can scale out independent from the HW / infrastructure they run on. With frameworks like K8s / Docker / e.a. this is now relatively easy.

With that for example you can start of with a few small cloud machines / docker containers. When you get continuous load - migrate some of them to 1-2 dedicated machines. Same with peak load - just spin up more images.

All that of course depends on what kind of application you are providing. If you are running a data intensive apps you might start directly with a dedicated machine.

Easy in, expensive out. One cost with cloud services many forget is the cost to get out again. Have a look at the AWS / Azure price-lists.

I believe focusing on potential technical problems is the wrong approach.

What you have to look at is lock-in or no lock-in. Any responsible IT Manager should avoid lock-ins / silos as far as possible. This then allows to standardise and use multiple suppliers and much lower TCO.

Without having looked into details (but with some knowledge of the Munich IT environment), I'm sure that most of these technical issues stem from the previous lock-in situation with MS.

There are other solutions without migrating the desktops back to MS / upgrading to MS Win 10 - you could for example virtualise the apps with issues (Standard approach & working very well in large environments). But then Munich could not be locked back into the MS Stacks so easily.

And MS and Oracle are very good with locking their customers in and collecting vast amounts for that.

BTW - I've seen large government environments in the UK with completely virtualised application delivery / desktops to enable staff to work from home, BYOD, hot-desking etc while at the same time securing the organisation's data e.a At that point which desktop OS you are using has only limited importance.

additionally relying on specific applications / services that can relatively easy singled out with DPI and by that also stick out their users for "further inspection".

Their suggestion to use TOR does not really help - Turkey for example has today started to block TOR ( http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-38365564 ).

With DPI hardware having dropped substantially in price while at the same time expanded functionality, TelCom providers / gov. agencies can relatively easily / quickly deploy such censorship / surveillance at the edge or in the TelCom core.

From a first cross-read, this article is bluntly discrediting UBI.

Starting with numbers: about 204M working age population in the US - hence the USD10K to each of them example would just make somewhere what is spend yearly for military and banks - the 8 times numbers cited in the article of what is spent today does not make any sense.

The linked article does not mention any amounts that Finland wants to provide to the 2k people - instead it is referring to Swiss calculations - last numbers I've heard with Finland were on par with current social security / poverty level pays (~EUR600 p/m) - this of course does not enable most of the key effects intended with an UBI (money into spending, freedom of choice for work etc) - it only continues the current system (with some potential savings within the administration).

To get a better understanding we have to at least repeat the Canadian experiments from the 1920s (proven that it is substantially beneficiary for the economy overall) - more money than poverty level, people must gain freedom by the possibility to live.

Given that soon a large proportion of people will not have a chance to find a job that will allow them to survive, we either go back to lords and serfs or actually look into potentially sustainable solutions.

To better understand changing house prices in London you first might want to look at longer term development of prices - one UK estate agents chart at http://www.winkworth.co.uk/articles/30-years-of-house-prices and a newer but shorter term overview at http://www.telegraph.co.uk/property/house-prices/the-state-o...

Don't forget all these charts provide averages across all central London areas - some more real-life examples:

A terraced house in Earls Court cost you about £150-£200k early 1990 - now £1.5M+ - similar in Fulham etc.

A double fronted house in Worlds End (now considered to be part of Chelsea) was about £350-£500k at the same time - now about £4-6M.

Many people working in central London until about 20years ago bought themselves property from bonuses - these properties (first time buyers) were mostly used for self-occupancy - now there are very little bonus payments for younger people working in the City and a large proportion of people working in offices in London commute between 2-4h each day (when the 9-5 becomes 5-9).

Now (since at least 6 years) most property is cash-bought - i.e. no mortgage was taken out. You are looking mostly at "investment buyers" and with these, prices are far more sensitive to changes like the Brexit. Look around in central London and you will realise how much residential property is actually empty - for some of these "investment buyers" it is cheaper (tax) not to rent and the government is not doing anything about this since many years.

Most property development - to my knowledge - is now "to-rent" vs. "to-buy" - what we are seeing is a reversal of policies supporting people (latest Thatcher) to become property owners back to pre-WW2 when only the rich could afford not to rent.

On current central London price level you will have to have best at least £500k cash for a down-payment and then earn at least £200k p.a. to be able to pay your mortgage for a family size property.

I'll see from your reports that you're migrating 1000s of 2TB drives to 8TB drives - what is actually happening to your old 2TB drives?

Guess you are not throwing those away so what are you doing with them.

similar also with magarine / chemical industry vs butter / farmers - for decades they paid for favorable research to say that magarine is better for you than butter.

The date (14-Jun-2013) would fit.

"... The disclosures were published by The Guardian and The Washington Post on June 6, 2013. Subsequent documents have demonstrated a financial arrangement between ... "

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PRISM_%28surveillance_program%...]

"... and from Monday, the official language of the USA will be Swedish. In addition to that, all citizens will be required to change their underwear every half-hour. Underwear will be worn on the outside so we can check. Furthermore, all children under 16 years old are now... 16 years old..."

(adapted from Woody Allen's Bananas)

Their example dedicated host adds up to $2'226 per month - had a quick calc on the retail HW cost for a machine like this - should not be more than $6.5k with 2 * E5-2670 v3 12 cores.

What I understand so far - it is physically bundling a fixed amount of virtual machines to a physical host - in the example "dedicated host" 22 * m4.large.

Bundling your virtual machine to one or a series of physical hosts / on the same network segment is a service you can have from quite a few hosting providers (if you ask).

If you opt for a solution like this, it is also most likely that you will run an enterprise scale solution and you will do so for quite some time - at least 6 months upwards.

Keeping that in mind together with a lifetime of at least 2 years for such HW, you will be paying 8 times the HW cost for a 2y lifetime for a management layer (storage / connectivity you pay per GB with EC2).

I guess everybody will have to see how this fits into their business model for non volatile / predictable resource demand or a set of when physical iron might be a better choice (colo or rent).

"They" can get these almost unlimited monies basically for free from the Chinese banking system while similar funding in the US and Europe ends up with so called investment banking or similar where it will never arrive with new entrants or is allotted to a small group of established players and special interest groups.

China is acting similar to what successful (new) raising economies have been doing in the past when they disrupted established (industry) players - my best historic comparison on this would be the transition of Germany from a farm based economy to one of the key industrial nations after the first industrial revolution. While the leading industrial player - the UK - was blocked from progress by overstretched copyright / patent / other protection mechanism of the established special interest groups, Germany provided top down support and access to all necessary means to forward technological progress.

Then - while most people in Germany still gained only limited benefits and just a few became very influential / rich, Germany as an overall entity / nation gained massively. At the same time the situation / influence of the UK overall deteriorated - these are of course all longer term developments often spanning more than one generation (30 years).

Do understand that your target with this setup was to load test the Swarm manager and 30K is quite impressive.

Did you do / are you planning to do a test with other than the low end T2.micros to see how much of the API latency might be related to the type of nodes used.

In other words - if my intention would be to minimise the API latency - how would you approach this.

Planning to run a Swarm test (with a few 100 nodes) on Digital Ocean where we have 2 nics per machine - by this we can test latency / response time of the containers to their external work load plus to the API / Swarm manager on separate networks & nics.

"...The report identifies stark gender and race gaps, too. The 10 largest retirement packages belong to white men, for a total of $1.4 billion. The funds of top female CEOs adds up to $280 million, while the top 10 executives of color have a combined fund of $196 million. The disparity is even greater at the bottom of the income ladder: while about two-thirds of white workers have at least some retirement savings, 62 percent of African-Americans, and 69 percent of Latinos of working age do not..."

The price is quite a disappointment particularly when comparing to the Shield pricing (and how long NVidia has taken to present the kit - the X1 was introduced now almost a year ago / Shield on the market since early this year).

Let's see in the next days how performance of the board stacks up once the embargo on publishing test results is over.

Remember that the 1TFlops published is FP16 not FP32.

Not at all a good salary - they will most likely get developers that have tried out some of these technologies and they will have to train on the job - people with these skills are sought after (£50K+ outside of London). Guess most important will be your personality profile, math skills and willingness / ability to quickly acquire skills.

Problem is that government organisations in the UK (and elsewhere) have to "grade" the post / position they are hiring for. The grade then defines the maximum salary they can pay on permanent positions.

Outcome of that is that there are armies of contractors where the posts then can be graded similarly but the pay can be much higher.

I believe it is more incompetence, lack of technology understanding and / or complete ignorance. You can't explain otherwise how a person like Oettinger can be put in charge of such an important part of the economy.

I'm still waiting when they suggest that airline pilots can be replaced with bus drivers to stop them going on strike / industrial action - it's called an Airbus so there shouldn't be much difference, after all it has bus in the name.

just half true - you're right with regard to recorded broadcast, but...

Do you drive a modern car, do you have surveillance cameras at your property / your offices? - Bang you have to have a TV license in the UK even if you don't watch any TV.

Every year thousands of people in the UK are pulled to court / persuaded to pay thousands of £s to settle enforcement cases against them (or even go to prison) because they only look at half of the rules.

wrong - you need a TV license for "ANY" live broadcast in the UK - as mentioned in another comment here this includes any live camera feed (surveillance / in cars / etc) - so even if you never watch any TV (recorded or live) there a plenty of cases where by the law (under threat to go to prison) you have to sponsor the BBC.

The BBC is the only recipient of TV license fees in the UK - of course after plenty of cost created on the way between the consumer / license payer to the BBC / payee.

BTW the BBC is also the TV licensing authority in the UK and is authorised by the government via the Communications Act 2003 to collect and enforce the TV license fee. One of the companies in the Capita conglomerate has been "entrusted" by the BBC / the government to collect the TV licensing fees.