osullivj

24 ms·

271.
by osullivj 9y ago
Strongly agree on the inordinate number of features point. Which other mainstream OO language supports dynamic & static dispatch, single & multiple inheritance, interface inheritance via abstract classes, generic types and functions
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by osullivj 9y ago
Software development is applied metaphysics, or practical ontology.
273.
by osullivj 9y ago
Wonderful film that stands up to repeated viewings. I love the scene where Ellie gets the first hint of a signal and blasts across the desert in her T-bird shouting to her crew through the CB. An early Matthew McConaghy appearance where he
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by osullivj 9y ago
If you like Inception, check out Interstellar. They're both directed by Christopher Nolan.
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by osullivj 9y ago
Blog it! Vendors uniformly crave +ve blog coverage, and fear -ve coverage. If you put together a blog post full of vendor and product names and tech detail on the vulnerabilities, designed for high PageRank, you'll soon have their atte
276.
by osullivj 9y ago
It's not simply the holding of power that corrupts. 10 years ago I was a tech Director at an investment bank. The politics were brutal, so I quit. I returned a couple of years later as a contractor, and found some people treated me dif
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by osullivj 9y ago
25ish years ago I was driving my Toyota MR2 along the Cowley Road in Oxford on a Sunday morning, heading for an out of town supermarket, to pick up some groceries. Two teenage girls ran out from behind a bus that was waiting at a stop on th
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by osullivj 9y ago
IMHO those traits may well be a handicap to becoming high status. Especially in an organisation like an investment bank that selects for promotion by perceived characteristics like driven, goal oriented, focused...
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by osullivj 9y ago
Committees impose compromises and conditions on funding, so govt or public company money won't work, as Kay points out. It must be pvt money, like the Medicis funding the renaissance. Something like the Gates Foundation. It could be a
280.
by osullivj 9y ago
Two stack pointers! Great fir Forth impls. In the early 80s UK home micro mkt the Dragon was 6809 based.
281.
by osullivj 9y ago
The Greek Govt wanted to negotiate a restructuring of the debt. That outcome would have yielded economic growth, and real servicing of the restructured debt. But that rational and realistic outcome was ruled out by the political requirement
282.
by osullivj 9y ago
Well argued POV. However, the article overlooks the role of the Profumo Affair in ending the MacMillan govt. Another relevant precedent is the EZ negotiations with the Greek Govt over the sovereign debt crisis.
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by osullivj 9y ago
Good point. UK & Denmark both have formal de jure opt outs, negotiated on launch of the EUR project. Sweden is a de facto opt out. By not entering the ERM trial period and managing SEK into a band with EUR, SE never enters the Eurozone.
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by osullivj 9y ago
In terms of political philosophy it's a fundamental issue. What is paramount? The sovereignty of the individual, or the government?
285.
by osullivj 9y ago
Ability to code in one of the languages used for the Bitcoin or Ethereum reference implementations: C++, Rust, Go...
286.
by osullivj 9y ago
FWIW my own experience is that cost savings are a much harder sell than revenue gains.
287.
by osullivj 9y ago
All points aligned with conventional wisdom, IMHO, bar one: that it's easier to sell cost savings than revenue gains. Revenue gains can be quantified accurately, because revenue is recorded in all businesses. Cost savings, especially f
288.
by osullivj 9y ago
I've seen that repeating pattern many times too, and I've been the IT guy as well. IMHO the solution is to serverize and automate the Excel models. See my profile for links to my product that does just that, even for sheets with V
289.
by osullivj 9y ago
Thanks for the kind words on the blog. Yes - PricingMonkey gets the prices via the BBG API. The dev told me he'd coded it in Python.
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by osullivj 9y ago
Story 1 sounds totally nuts, but Story 2 is a common setup in my experience. Using Bloomberg prices on the desktop is a lot cheaper than BPipe - the server side solution for BBG market data. And quoting indicative prices on BBG from Excel i
291.
by osullivj 9y ago
Yes - Excel is deeply embedded in actuarial modelling.
292.
by osullivj 9y ago
How was it squandered? Pre Brexit the UK was EU #1 for SW startups. Obviously the US is #1 globally in SW, but UK has been strong for a long time in many verticals: gaming, fintech, mech eng, petroleum eng. I started coding in Basic on a Pe
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by osullivj 9y ago
Exercise: run twice a week. Do weights. Diet: mostly vegan/vegetarian. Two meals a day - lunch & dinner, no breakfast. Zero dairy - no milk, butter or cheese. Zero refined sugar - no cakes, biscuits, chocolate. Never buy anything &
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by osullivj 9y ago
By the time I learned my times tables at primary (elementary) school in the UK in the mid 70s, decimalisation was well under way. The old money system of 20 12 penny shillings to the pounds had been replaced with a 100p pound. The metric sy
295.
by osullivj 9y ago
Brad Cox: Planning the Software Industrial Revolution. A classic from the creator of Objective-C. Incredibly far sighted in 1990, and still very relevant today. [1] http://bat8.inria.fr/~lang/hotlist/free/lice
296.
by osullivj 9y ago
Being British I love the branding, but I am something of a WWII obsessive. WWII, the Battle of Britain, "the few", fight them on the beaches etc is a huge part of national identity in the UK. But it seems to me that WWII flavoured
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by osullivj 9y ago
My tip: avoid products or services that require face to face sales and support. I've found it impossible to reconcile with the day job.
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by osullivj 9y ago
I had been planning to replace my faithful 5yr old Samsung Ultrabook with a Dell XPS. But I like the idea of buying from a UK supplier based in Bletchley Park and using a lot of WWII branding. I do need a win32 dev env, but I guess I could
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by osullivj 9y ago
Agreed. But a different way of working the same trick is to have an alternate run time that can execute .xls[x|m] as a headless server process.
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by osullivj 9y ago
Also because Excel is both an IDE for developing spreadsheets, and a GUI container for operating them. Splitting dev time and run time environments would help with control. When a dev supplies a user with a traditional .Net GUI app, they do

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