Kieron Bradley, one of my colleagues at Sun, during a piece of client consulting recently had reason to use financial option theory & language to justify why CPU’s in Sun’s large systems are more expensive to buy than those in the smaller ones. He and the customer had examined all the TCOO factors they thought were relevant and the fact remained that if one wanted to take a utility view of CPU supply, it was cheaper to buy and run smaller systems rather than larger ones. (This particular analysis did not perform a variable utilisation analysis. It was assumed, (or defined as policy) that all CPUs would run at a given % utilisation. Contradicting this assumption, it is a fact that large (and flexibly partitioned) systems are easier to keep busy.) …
Consulting! Profession or Trade?
Over the Xmas break, I had fun by reading Elizabeth Edersheim’s “McKinsey’s Marvin Bower”, a biography of the de-facto founder of “McKinsey & Co.”. He not only co-founded McKinsey & Co., but also arguably founded “Management Consultancy” as a profession. The book argues that McKinsey’s success is based on putting Clients first. …
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Laptop Diaries III
On my Sun/Oracle blog, I wrote an article about configuring my Laptop, primarily about getting X-Windows to work under Solaris. This documented some research, but not a solution, and as an easter egg, I pointed at some Gnome and Windows eye-candy. You can read it if you want, but its out of date; I wrote this pointer article in Feb 2016 and every piece of technology mentioned is obsolete. …
About: Risk
I was preparing a project proposal before christmas and we were trying to define what a risk was (Again!). Some mediocre (if the cap fits……) project managers think to improve their credibility by saying risk every other word. I offer you (& them) the following, although its not original,
“A risk is an event that is futuristic, uncertain and detrimental.
Its a new FUD! …
Some language nonsense
My younger son was doing his homework the other day and his word processor flagged “Armed Police” as a grammar error. We were hoping that it was an oxymoron like Military Intelligence or “Young Conservative”, but discovered sadly that it was caused by a double space between the words. …
Dragon’s Den & Flying Cars
The BBC are showing a TV program series called “Dragon’s Den”. Despite my interest in fantasy, this is about venture capitalism, not sword & sorcery, albeit with a very British spin. Yesterday, a show went out which sums up the crapness of British industrial management. Each week the show gets a bunch of self-made rich tossers into a loft and asks would-be entrepreneurs to beg them for money to invest in their business.
Yesterday, Kestrel Aerospace, who are building a personal air vehicle based on a proprietary and innovative engine within a craft that looks a bit like the aircraft flown by Arnie in the fim “The 6th Day”. …
Laptop Diaries II
How to build a triple boot laptop. First, I salvaged as much as possible. Fortunately this consisted of the whole of the windows partition, and some parts of the Linux partition, including some parts of $HOME & /opt. Most importantly it included /opt/install which acts a bit like “My Downloads”. This meant that I have a list of most of the products originally installed on top of RH Linux. (These include Star Office, Acroread & Mozilla (I also downloaded GNOCL, but only played with it). I used “Ghost” to save the windows partition. …
The Dark Side of HR???
Some comments based on High Stewart’s review of a book subtitled “Understanding and avoiding employees leaving, thieving and deceiving”. In Management Today, Henry Stewart reviewed Furnham & Taylor’s book “The Dark Side of Behaviour at Work”. Its an interesting reinforcement of the relevance of McGregor’s Theory XY model …