Film: Rounders directed by John Dahl

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0128442/

Great place to work - really?

If you did not already know the 2016 "best workplaces" in the United Kingdom has been announced.

http://www.greatplacetowork.co.uk/best-workplaces/best-workplaces-in-the-uk-large-category

In second place are McDonalds which may have some good ethics internally but is a blight on society by pushing unhealthy eating and leaving wider society with the bill.

Also high at fourth place is Cisco, claiming around 3200 people in the UK.  Most of these will be from the disastrous take over of NDS.  Most of those people are made to feel like the US corporate has a gun to their head - the minute results are bad they start firing.

I wonder how much employees are coerced into providing good feedback, I remember one time at Cisco the UK director leaving a global voice mail on everyone's phone "reminding" them of what a great culture Cisco was.

Nothing could be further from the truth!  Narcissistic self-obsessed management, too much internal infighting meant that the company was slowly dying and surviving off buying out competition that looked a threat and then proceeding to run that down!

Book read: Drone Theory by Grégoire Chamayou

I picked up this book as a bit of an impulse buy after watching Eye in the Sky.  It is a philsohpical take on the nature of drone warfare and the silent revolution that largely is going unscrutinized because it is generally seen as a "good thing"

Far from it as the book goes into much depth and analysis on the ethics and nature of drone warfare, and the asymmetrical and unfair nature of drone combat. 

A very dense and well argued text, well worth reading.

Film: Eye In The Sky directed by: Gavin Hood

An interesting film about modern day warfare with drones.  It depicts the stark differences between those in the decision making process, the pilot in comfortable isolation, and the country where the drone is operating


http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2057392/

I think in some ways the film made some points unknowingly.  The ridiculously long multi timezone chain of command which was made possible by ubiquitous communications.  We were perhaps intended to marvel how modern technology has made this possible, but for me it just felt like modern technology making a job ten times harder than it should have been.

Although it featured modern day drones it pointed to a future were micro drones are used for surveillance.  I am not sure how far this is off, but it just shows how fast the ideas in this area are developing.

NFS mounting on a NAS

I recently had very slow performance performing a simple rsync command to backup my laptop home directory to a home made NAS.

At first I assumed slow network, or slow disk storage.  But looking at the system monitoring showed under utilised network and the local write performance from "dd" was over 8MB/sec.

So something I should have remembered was the async flag in the NFS  filesystem /etc/exports file:


/media/2TBDiskRaid *(rw,no_root_squash,async)
/media/2TBDisk *(rw,no_root_squash,async)

Without this writing many small files is excruciatingly slow.  A quick edit of the file and exportfs -a - and the rsync starting to fly.  It feels like this should be a default, those needing synchronous behaviour are probably the minority nowadays...

Gareth Thomas Dies

Gareth Thomas of Blakes 7 fame has died:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-36041534

Anatomy of a US corporate: Acquisition Failure

The first question that entered my mind when Cisco bought NDS for $6bn was Why?

It certainly seemed like a shrewd move by Permira, who had being spinning a refloat rumour for a while.  But what better way to sell off the company than to another company with a lot of cash sitting overseas.  Looking back now it feels a lot like Permira saw Cisco coming.

What did Cisco think they were buying?  To me NDS was a company entirely based around the production of smart cards for digital broadcasters.   A lot of ancillary services existed for other areas of digital broadcasting - but NDS never really made big on this, it was all about enabling the per subscriber sales of smart cards.

That is not to say NDS was not looking at the future and the threat of over the top services taking over in the broadcast world.  They had some niche technologies for OTT playback increasingly in a cloud context, but again nothing big and never going to be what the company was going to make money out of.   They knew they had to adapt to stay relevant to the broadcasters, but were slow in doing so - just because you are too busy keeping what you have now working.

I think Cisco saw the OTT/cloud part of the business as bigger than it really was, and much of their valuation was in thinking it was all ready to deploy when in actual fact it was years away (by which time a more nimble competitor would have done it).

Cisco saw the opportunity to build another service provider business unit this time for video.  The belief being that the reliance on services now turning back to the service provider infrastructure, hardware sales would follow.  But really they ended up taking on a mid size company that was beginning to struggle to stay relevant, and inherited all of its problems rather than the expected cash cow that could serve the corporate giant with easy revenue.