Home › Archive for History › Page 14

History

ID and Science, Religion and politics

Posted on by

In Ireland, as much as I can see, the Irish are viewing the ID (Intelligent design) arguments with aghast. And I personally am ashamed to have been born and raised in Kansas. Here the question isn’t that God exists, ask any Catholic here, it’s not even a question. Watch a funeral procession, everyone crosses themselves. Their devotion is not subject to questioning.

However, from their perspective, and mine, any argument about ID is not that there was one, but that what science reveals is how complex and how truly Omniscient and omnipresent God is. If someone pointed to a piece of the puzzle and said, I see God putting these two things together, and see, a mousetrap. Their response would be, why have you made God so small, and weak. Or better yet, why do you make yourself as great as God as to assume you can detect his/her/it’s hand.

All these so called christian ID folk are the hight of arrogance as to assume they know all the ways of God, and in the same breath, diminish him at the same time. They make God, human, and therefor subject to their own designs.

As an IT person, more or less a Computer scientist, I can appreciate complexity, but I don’t have to invoke Deus Ex Machina to explain the universe around me. I marvel at it, and I seek to understand it in all of it’s complexity.

This scares me that the President of the United States is of this ID belief. If he thinks that Deus Ex Machina will get him out of the mess in Iraq, he has another thing coming.

Hero’s and Patriotism

Posted on by

I was watching the movie ‘A Clear and Present Danger’ and it came to me. We have no hero’s. Wouldn’t it be great if someone in the U.S. government stood up, and gave us an honest, truthful perspective on things, while standing on a morally grounded position. Someone who you would know, in your heart, was telling the truth. Not from some paid for perspective, not from some religiously biased, self-rightistness. No Spin doctoring, but from truth, simple truth.

Watching movies makes me fantasize about a better world, movies like ‘An American President’ or ‘Dave’ or maybe even like the ‘West Wing’

Someday the truth will be a wonderful thing to behold.

Globalization and Irish Culture

Posted on by

My last rant spoke of the tourist trade in Ireland and the rip off label that Ireland has acquired. And it really speaks a great deal more about why tourism happens in Ireland. I always though of Ireland as a ‘quaint’ rural culture. Small villages, friendly local pubs laid back friendly people. And that’s what draws in the tourist. They are reminded of simpler times, less hectic, and frankly less Mad.

And now here is the rub, the Irish government long ago established laws to help prevent the local shops and farmers from being put out of business by large food chains, fast food shops and multi-national corporations. But the outcome of this, is that while some of the small shop owners are protected the large chains are using the protection to increase profits generated by their bulk purchase power to expand into every little town. There was even a law to prevent large furniture stores like Ikea by preventing the construction of the giant buildings Ikea is so fond of.

This all gets back to the globalization issue, the Irish public want cheaper prices, it needs tourist, wants the vast choices that the Multi’s offer. But are also interested in preserving the Irish way of life, the one the tourist want to remember.

Thus hangs the dilemma. To get a less ‘rip off’ Ireland, Ireland will have to give up Irish culture, and the Tourist trade.

Frankly when I came here more than three years ago, I missed the American choices and prices, and I wasn’t an anti-globalization person. But I am now, why travel to other countries, and see new places if they all look alike? None! Where’s the Crack in that? I’d rather live in the Old Ireland, the one shown in ‘The Quiet Man’, ‘Waking Ned Devine’ and the ‘Matchmaker’

Did I mention, I’m an Irish citizen now? And more proud of that, than I can say.

CRM, BS and real Customer Relations Management.

Posted on by

A new article on CRM Forrester: CRM Market Rife with Dissatisfied Customers Does not surprise me in the least. An particularly as Seibel is mentioned The article states

Overall, Forrester found that Siebel continues to lead the pack by offering the most comprehensive software for enterprise-class organizations and the largest array of front-office technologies tailored to specific industry challenges and opportunities.

Having witnessed Seibel in action, I can state without a doubt this is BS, as in BULLSHIT!!!

When Seibel arranged to be used as a CRM replacement at AT&T Wireless a few years ago. The arrangement was through the CFO not the CTO, a deal that could only happen when palms are properly greased. The ‘Goal’ of the CFO pushed on the CTO was replacing the ‘Cadilac’ in-house CRM (thing) with a ‘Volkswagen’ simpler, cheaper and easier to maintain.

From the outset there was trouble. As I was working for the Infrastructure Architecture group at the time, we were brought in early to assist in the prototype environment. And in the first meeting the Seibel Tech team, and Anderson consulting it was apparent that the System the Consultants had configured, a Sun server, had never been used by Seibel, and over the next three YEARS the Seibel team ported a PC-NT application to Solaris. An operating system they had never used. The Other shoe in this story is the BS I mentioned earlier. They had Absolutely no knowledge, or understanding of the Wireless business, or any other telecommunications business model. So between the hundreds of junior programmers, and roach like consultants querying the AT&T staff about what the existing systems did, or were supposed to do the system grew and grew.

Now to make matters worse the CTO saw the writing on the wall and quit, and was replaced with an ‘Outsourcing Genius” who thought that he could outsource the entire ID department. So he brought in foreign staff to shadow the already harassed staff. This so called Chief Technical Officer was also the genius who declared that “Any computer with more than 4 CPU’s was a waste of electricity” and refused to purchase any of the Sun E10K systems that were required and order only 4 processor Sun systems to fill the place of the 8 (then 12 and then 32) E10K’s that were originally required. Yes you read that correctly 32 E10K’s!

So the original in-house CRM system that only need 8 (with 8 hot backups) HP-K Class systems was replaced with, in the end, more than 32 E10K’s (and no hot backups) bringing the total cost to about 15X (times) more expensive than the previous system. And to put the topping on the cake. After three years, when it deployed, it didn’t work. At least not as expected. It took 6 months of hourly hand feeding data in small batches to keep the thing running.

So NO don’t believe Siebel or any other BS that is being pushed about the virtues of the current crop of CRM systems.

The real business of dealing with Customer Relations are simple, know your business, know what you can and can’t do FOR your customer treat your customer in an ethical way. As noted also in blog space here A Networked World

Work Life and Retirement

Posted on by

I was doing some face time at my work site in Donegal and I was staying in a hotel as opposed to my usual B&B. It was a nice hotel, but what struck me were the tourist arriving in Buses and staying at the hotel. I noticed that most were retirees and a thought came to mind that this might be the last generation able to retire.

There is talk in the UK and Ireland for raising the retirement age to 67 or 68 to save the pension systems. I have quite a few years until my retirement, and by that time, the mandatory dates might continue to slide away from me as I approach my retirement, to the point I may never be able to retire. Or worse yet to not be able to afford to retire. That’s enough to scare you into an early grave, come to think about it, that may be the real plan all along.

Mactel points for Yohan/Pentium/Alpha

Posted on by — 2 Comments ↓
  • Jobs did not say Pentium, he said Intel
  • Apple said coding should work for Intel if the code worked for the G3 PowerPC. This places the Pentium 4 used in the devloper boxes in the same class as a G3 PowerMac. Making the Pentium a third class citizan in the Mac world. This could roughly be equated as a baseline for the Mactel.
  • Coding for the Pentium instruction set is not the same as coding for the Pentium CPU. The instruction set can be emulated by the alpha for instance.
  • The Pentium, by ALL accounts is out-of-gas at 4Ghz, this isn’t a future, it the past. any new procesor will have to have either a faster, or a much wider future. 128bit anyone?
  • And what of the Altivec thing, such a good idea should not go to waste

Bush orders himself to stop torturing.

Posted on by

This Reuters article takes the cake Bush says U.S. seeks to eliminate torture worldwide , This is like the kettle calling the pot black. The man that authorized the torture at Abu Ghraib and Gitmo should be ashamed of himself.

Update: If George W. Bush is so much against Torturing, why is he campaigning against formalizing it? Senate Moves to Protect Military Prisoners It’s because he is the one who authorized it in the first place.

Update 2: The seems to be in stark contrast to the first commitment White House Is Seeking Exception in Detainee Abuse Ban. What a bunch of lies, has Bush no respect for the American people?

Warfare and MAD Poker

Posted on by

Talking with my friend Raj, we got onto the subject of nuclear weapons and the problems with North Korea and Iran. He gave me a uniquely Indian opinion, he liked them! Before India and Pakistan had atomic weapons there was often bitter warfare between the two countries. But now there is none, because neither party wants the bickering to escalate to the point where either has to use their nuke’s. Sure there are disputes, just no serious warfare.

This is one of those ‘remember your history’ issues, this is MAD (Mutually Assured Destruction) on a small scale. You want to control the North Korean nuclear threat, arm the South Koreans with nuclear missiles also.

In the case of Iran, they have stated as much, they are uncomfortable with Israel having Nuke’s, so they are trying to ‘protect’ themselves. This isn’t new, the Israelis have had nuke’s for years, and the U.S. has made no fuss about it. But what floors me is the fact that when the Shah was still in power in Iran, He was attempting to build Nuke’s, as far back as 1974 and the U.S. didn’t mention a word. The Iranians have had the technology and the materials to build one for years. (Building Nuke’s is easy if you have a bit of Plutonium or some pure Uranium)

Why the big stink now. The only thing I can think of is to continue to make the citizens of the U.S. (maybe the world) feel insecure. Neither of the two countries has the missile technology to strike anyone other than their neighbors. The threat of a suitcase nuke has not gotten any worse, the threat has always been more because the U.S. and the Former Soviet Union together have lost more nuclear materials than either Iran or North Korea could produce in a century.

I’m reminded of the Sting song ‘Russians’ I hope the Russians love their children too!. I hope he writes another song I hope the Muslim’s (and Americans and Koreans) love their children too!. It would be downright un-neighborly, to do otherwise.

The Future of Technology

Posted on by

I recently watched the latest Star Wars movie and while the plot was well known to me, I was very happy that the threads in the movie did a fair job of connecting the movie to the original three episodes. I have observed that the technology displayed in the movies is also interesting in that it does two very interesting and different things. The first is something that should be in everyone’s requirements documents during any IT project, or for that matter any software or technology project.

First in the movies there is a common use of technology, very high tech, but not intrusive in that the technology is what used to be called ‘Appropriate Technology’. Often this has been used in third world countries to describe technology that fits the situation. As in use of solar electronic devices in an area where distributed power is not common, or skipping the ‘Industrial Age’ in favor of the Digital Age. In any case the technology is enough to help, but not enough to intrude. Making the technology a comfortable chair rather than a large lounger/vibrator/bar/desk object that takes up half a room. This could explain the iPod fad, it’s not intrusive, and does only what it was designed to do. The technology should just work for you, you shouldn’t have to work at the technology. This could apply to most things, Operating Systems, entertainment systems, IT information systems. Always available, doing just as needed, and not intrusive.

The other point gleaned from the movies is related but different and that is culture, the technology reflected the various cultural differences, but still provided similar benefits. The spaceships reflected the culture of the planet that operated them. In Ireland, and Europe in general, that is reflected today in automobiles. The cars here are smaller, shaped differently and in some cases are dead ugly functional. Even the heavy equipment here has identifiable differences to those in the U.S. Some of this is due to the environment in which they operate, smaller streets, more expensive fuel, ect. Even McDonalds has adapted their menus here. The one size fits all is not, and should not be a requirement of the technology. It should recognize that there are different cultural and environmental elements to accommodate in the development of technology. I cannot count the number of E-Commerce systems that attempt to sell in Ireland and require an area code or a street number. Here a house address could be a proper name, associated with a village or an estate name, no zip code and no street address. The mapping sites operating on the Internet are going to go crazy here, where the only real way to find some houses are GPS coordinates and the help of the local postman.

Anyway, the point is this, development of technology is as much an element of culture and lifestyle as any other object in use today, and should be incorporated into any requirements analysis for future development. The shape of a computer case, the color of a keyboard, the data entry screen, the controls on an MP3 player must all be taken into consideration. Apple more or less knew this with the creation of colored iMacs and iPods. And the PC industry has often copied this with no real understanding as to why one should do this. This is why! Discrete useful, culturally integrated technology is the goal.

On Microsoft Longhorn

Posted on by

Just a thought, all this talk about Intel and hardware. The question comes to mind, is the long delay to the release of Longhorn really due to software development?

Or is it to stretch the current hardware platforms running XP at customer sites and homes to the breaking point where everyone will have to upgrade hardware just to get Longhorn, without it looking like Microsoft is requiring the hardware upgrade to get Longhorn to run?

Makes sense, Microsoft sense.