Recently posted by bulbul on Facebook: The Most Common Last Name in Every Country, by Barbara Davidson. Fun, but bear in mind these caveats from the FB post:
Slavomír Čéplö
Fun, but fishy. Just looking at our neck of the woods, I have doubts and they are confirmed when looking at their methodology section:
“To determine the most common last name in every country, NetCredit analyzed surname data from genealogy portal Forebears.io, various country censuses and other sources. ”
So the data set is heavily biased and thus GIGO / the grain of salt rule applies. Plus the data has not even been processed properly; this is immediately obvious when you look at the data for the Czech Republic: the form they give – Nováková – is feminine, thus it is clear that they did not do any normalization. The Slovak data then clearly shows the bias: the surname Varga is of Hungarian origin and thus predominantly found in the parts of the country with large Hungarian populations, i.e. mostly the South and especially South-East; fun fact: that’s where I’m from and Uncle Varga is our next door neighbor :).Scott Martens
I wouldn’t treat this as very definitive either. On the other hand… what important, meaningful decision is anyone going to make after seeing this infographic? A lazy author making up a fictional character from a Slavic country will screw up standard gender suffixes (“Yuri Ivanova always wanted to be a cosmonaut…”)? Fail to recognize that a Peruvian named “Quispe” is probably going to consider themselves indigenous more than Hispanic? Name an exile from Togo “Lawson” without realizing that “Lawson” is the name of the royal family of Aneho, and anyone with that last name is connected to the royal family and that has political implications?Besides, the most common family names in Canada have been “Li” (李) and “Singh” (ਸਿੰਘ) for eons, and it was “Tremblay” before that.
And while we’re on the subject of Slavo/bulbul, here’s his paper on diachronic Maltese (as second author; to appear in C. Lucas & S. Manfredi (eds.), Arabic and contact-induced language change: A handbook), courtesy of John Cowan, who says “Good stuff!”
They seriously got wrong Mongolia.
Mongolians don’t have surnames. They have patronymics and clan names.
Ganbold is a first name and can become patronymic “Ganboldyn” by adding -yn possessive suffix. Usually Mongolians don’t bother foreigners with details of their grammar and just write patronymics like first name anyway – so instead of Ganboldyn Baatar, in English they would just write Ganbold Baatar or Baatar Ganbold (you never know in what order they write first name and patronymic – it’s amazingly inconsistent).
Clan names are more like surnames. They are similar in genesis to Scottish clan names (think surnames like Macdonald) and some bigger Mongolian clans number tens of thousands of members.
By far the biggest is, of course, Borjigin – the clan of Genghis.
Mongolians also left open a possibility to start new clans.
General Jügderdemidiin Gürragchaa, the first Mongolian cosmonaut, decided to choose this option and started his own clan named, appropriately, Sansar (‘outer space’, from Sanskrit संसार Sansara).
It was worth making the post just to learn about Sansar!
Obviously I object to Wales being treated as an annexe of England … “Smith”, indeed!
Burkina is actually almost certainly correct, as the Mossi are the biggest ethnic group and they actually have surnames (they use clan names); about every third Mossi seems to be a Ouedraogo (“Stallion”), which is also the Mossi royal surname.
The Kusaasi don’t have surnames traditionally, like most northern Ghanaians, but the various Akan peoples of the much more populous south do; “Mensah” is entirely plausible as the commonest Ghanaian surname.
I suspect lots of the African ones reflect the fact that most people don’t have surnames, so that quite uncommon names per capita can end up winning. I have never met a Togolese called Lawson, but evidently I don’t move in the right circles. On the other hand, the head of the senior (currently much less powerful) branch of the Mossi royal family did once offer me one of his daughters in marriage; however, I am almost completely sure he was just trying to wind me up.
@de
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Englishman_who_Went_up_a_Hill_but_Came_down_a_Mountain
This excellent ethnographic study makes it clear that Jones is the first choice. I myself am partial to Evans.
“Kone” in Côte d’Ivoire is also highly plausible. I recall a school French textbook used in Ghana which featured an imaginary archetypal Ivoirian family called Kone.
I myself am partial to Evans.
My own family are Evanses (precious.) Both my great-aunt and my sister branched out by marrying Joneses. Mavericks.
The commonest surname here in Morgan-le-Fay-Land is actually Thomas; a good few Evanses, but remarkably few Joneses, for some reason.
Besides, the most common family names in Canada have been “Li” (李) and “Singh” (ਸਿੰਘ) for eons
…Now that I think about it, the same is likely to be true about many other countries with high rates of immigration and without an outrageously common local surname.
Mamedov (Azeri surname) is in the top 3 of most common surnames in Georgia. This is despite Azeri minority being only 6.5% of Georgia’s population.
They all went to America, where neighbors are typically called Jones?
Similarly, the most common first name for boys born in Germany has been Muhammad (& variants) for quite a while now.
I wonder whether the more-anglicised son-of-John form “Jones”, with its distinctly unWelsh initial consonant, is commoner in areas where the Welsh language has been weaker for longer?
(On average, at any rate. While my brother-in-law Jones is English, poor fellow, my great-aunt’s descendants inhabit Merthyr Tudful [sic] and are very Welsh indeed.)
Merthyr Tudful
My great-great-grandfather Capt. Arthur Oliver was from there!
The Kims in Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan are another example of the same phenomenon January First-of-May and SFReader point out. Koreans represent less than 1% of either country’s population. Similarly the Khans in Saudi Arabia and Qatar are guest workers from South Asia, who are almost certainly not citizens.
Most egregious is “Allah” in Jordan and “El Din” in Lebanon, which are components of names (like Abdullah = Abd Allah, Asadullah = Asad Allah, or Jamaluddin = Jamal El Din, Zaynuddin = Zayn El Din), not names themselves. It’s a bit like saying “Ov” is the most common surname in Russia, or “Ian” is the most common in Armenia.
I also don’t know why they thought the surname Mamedova in Turkmenistan “signifies patronage” whereas they correctly label the same name in Azerbaijan as patronymic. “Haji” in Brunei is also definitely not a place name, contrary to their claim. At least in Asia (and probably Africa), there is more misleading or downright incorrect information on here than not.
I was reading about a Chilean architect who has specialised in building concrete structures, called Víctor Gubbins Browne (b. Valparaíso,1932, son of Mary Browne Fernández and George Gubbins Beausire). He married Carmen Foxley Rioseco. In 1957 he started working in Santiago for an architect called Alejandro Cross designing a concrete factory for Betteley y Cía [all from Wikipedia]. Is this willful or mere coincidence? I have South American relatives with English names myself but it still seems odd to me that the Gubbinses have only associated with the offspring of British Émigrés. I expect Athel Cornish-Bowden can put me right, if he’s around. Perhaps Gubbinses are two a penny there and Browne is the local equivalent of Smith.
In the U.S., Jones has no Welsh associations at all.
Let’s not forget all the Poles in Ireland named Jazdy.
The names Pappas and Poulos are common in America but not Greece, because they are clippings of actual surnames.
One universe away, when the Riksfællegsskap government insisted that the citizens of all 24 constituent countries adopt patronymics and surnames, about 90% of Icelanders pushed back by adopting Íslendingur as their surname. The effects were interesting in Tsingdav as well: the well-known actress, singer, and international model Fan Bingbing is officially Fan Tao de Bingbing, as Tao was her father’s personal name.
Chilean Gubbinses inevitably remind me of the Chilean independence hero and Supreme Director
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernardo_O%27Higgins
Most egregious
That settles it then. It is not a study, just journalistic bullshit for generating sensational headlines.
I aspire to be a Most Egregious Supreme Director, though I would settle for being even an unegregious Supreme Director. Favourite “Maximum Leader” title I’ve encountered to date. (Somehow, I never came across it until now.)
Of course, the ne plus ultra is for your own actual name to become the style for Omega Lugals; but I can’t think of anyone but Julius the Dictator who has managed that.
Slavic word for king “kral, kralj, krol, korol” is derived from Charlemagne’s name.
Aha! Forgot that one.
Can’t think of anyone but Julius the Dictator and Big Charlie who has managed that …
Apropos of nothing (but THIS IS LANGUAGE HAT!) the four kings of the pack of cards are (I read somewhere) supposed to be Julius, Charles, David and Alexander.
Apropos of nothing
Ok, then I will share completely unrelated Mongolian kindergarten joke.
“How do you say flying hero in English?” (“nisdeg baatar”)
“Baatarfly!”
It seems to have a thing for female forms – which of course is perfectly possible numerically, if the pattern of women slightly outnumbering men holds across those countries. It just depends on what you think of as A Surname, I suppose.
Yeah. Not just in post-Soviet countries. They also put Devi as the most popular last name in India.
AFAIK, it just means Lady and is not a surname.
Though I have trouble formulating what it is exactly. Honorific?
I’ve never come across a Gubbins or a Browne in Chile, but no doubt they exist. Foxley is a prominent name — not because there are lots of Foxleys but because some of them are prominent. Edwards is a similar case — the family behind the principal newspaper, El Mercurio. A given name that is far more common in Chile than it is in England is Gladys (spelled the English way, not Gwladys).
A problem with lists of this sort is that they tend to be compiled by people who have no understanding of how much variation there is in naming practices even in Europe, let alone Mongolia, Ghana etc. England, Spain, Portugal, Hungary, Russia and Iceland are all different from one another. Even England and France differ in the minor respect that in double surnames (like mine) have the name of paternal origin last in England, but first in France. They are also far more common in Wales than they are in England, driven by the need to distinguish between all those Joneses, Evanses, Davieses etc.
Wales isn’t treated as an annexe of England. England and Wales alike are treated as parts of the UK. If Wales should be treated separately, then how ever many parts of Scotland should be treated separately in order to show the prevalence of an individual clan surname in each? Of course not all cultural differences are shown on these maps, but showing them would entail a lot more regions. Catalonia, Galicia, Languedoc and the Basque country, for starters.
Wales isn’t treated as an annexe of England. England and Wales alike are treated as parts of the UK.
I struggle to find a meaningful difference between these formulations. If I may say so, the ability to do so is (perhaps) characteristically English. You help me to see the point of view of my Plaid Cymru friends more sympathetically.
Your implication that (all of) Wales is on a similar taxonomic level to a subregion of Scotland would not find much favour hereabouts.
AFAIK, it just means Lady and is not a surname.
One of the minor annoyances I have at work is seeing respectable Muslim ladies referred to as “Mrs Bibi” or “Mrs Begum.” You might think people would have noticed that you never seem to come across a Mr Bibi.
In fairness, I think a lot of Muslims have simply given up on trying to get ignorant Ukanians to understand that not everybody’s naming practices work like those of western Europeans and just go with the flow. “OK, Mr Ullah, then.”
Aha, first results of the Tory victory, I see.
Have to adjust my prediction then – Brexit followed by secession of Scotland, reunification of Ireland and secession of Wales.
I doubt that the secession of Wales is a practical possibility, but the ongoing zombie apocalypse is certainly likely to be good news for Plaid Cymru (though not for Cymru itself, alas.)
However, one doesn’t need to be an advocate of secession (I’m not) to be annoyed by the smug English assumption that Wales is just a “region”, like “Northeast England”, perhaps with a few quaint local customs (like having its own language.)
I think the other parts of your prediction are quite possible. The result for Wales would be something that reminds me of a review I once read of Of Human Bondage: “Reading it was like being chained to a corpse for three days.”
“OK, Mr Ullah, then.”
Ever been called “Mr. David?”
Happens quite often in countries where people are not familiar with Western Christian names (they even lack the concept.)
The only time in my life that I’ve never had to contend with my name being misspelt or mistakenly taken as double-barrelled was when I lived in West Africa, where all European names are equally exotic and there is no analogical pressure to misparse them.
{thinking} maybe it’s good place to copy Anna Korostelyova’s post on Iranian calendar which demonstrates how eerily alien other people’s cultures can be even today.
Context: Anna Korostelyova teaches Russian as foreign language in Moscow to students from various countries. Her recent lesson involving Iranian and Chinese students:
—
Amirreza: This is our great doctor. The word medicine itself comes from “Mada” – “to help” and “Sina” – his name.
Me: And in what century did he live? You somehow did not say that.
Maryam: Uh …
Me: Don’t “uh”. Don’t be like that. Farsheed, Maryam! Amirreza! Well, when was that?
Maryam: Uhh … Well, century … it’s a little complicated for us … Nine hundred years ago, he lived approximately.
Me: Well, what is the century then? Let’s first understand this issue. Is it the eleventh century?
Maryam: It’s just that this is not how it works with us! We just do everything differently! Well, in our opinion, he lived in the fifth century.
Me: Aha, so you are really different. And now you are just sitting here, looking at the blackboard (it is written on the board: “December 2, 2019”) and you think sadly: “And the month is actually not December, and the day is different, and the year is also not this year…”. Yes?
Iranians: Yeah!
Me: And what month are you living in now?
Farshid: Azar. Month of Azar.
Me: And what day?
Maryam: The eleventh day. And the year is one thousand … three hundred … ninety-eight.
He Xinyi (Chinese student): But this month of Azar – it is at least the last month of the year too, isn’t it?
Farshid: No! Of course not! There are many more. It’s still far till the end of the year.
Me: Yes, there will be Novruz festival in the spring, in March – that’s the end of the Persian year.
Guo Menjiao: How many months do you have?
Maryam: Twelve! Of course, twelve. How else?
Me: Well, who knows you? Maybe thirteen. But don’t they tell you at school that, won’t they say that in Europe they have different calendar and chronology?
Farshid: No. They just don’t teach that at school. But if you, for example, go to the English class, then they will tell you when it will be necessary to learn the names of English months.
Me: So, usually this is an information one learns in English class? And if someone doesn’t happen to study English, he simply doesn’t know?
(Farshid spreads his hands in embarrassment.)
Amirreza: Actually, we have French in Iran … French names of the European months are used, if necessary: janvier, fevrier … In the news on television, if you need to say what date something happened, they’ll say like that.
Me: And if you invite a French specialist to your company and bought him plane tickets, and you need to write to him in a letter that there are tickets for such and such date for him, then what are you doing?
Iranians (laughing): We surf the Internet and search there! We dig there for information for a long time!
I (looking at the Chinese girls): You see how good it is, how well it turned out that you and I have at least a calendar in common… now … (Chinese girls begin to nod zealously, looking happy)
—
The East African habit of having clock times six hours out of synch (noon is six o’clock) always strikes me as pretty Martian.
@David Eddyshaw, that would seem to follow liturgical hours. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canonical_hours#Daily_cycle_of_services
Day saved.
Somewhat less likely than reunification of Dál Riata.
Supported by 1/3 of the population of Wales in the latest poll, and rising sharply.
reunification of Dál Riata
Perhaps we could go for Welsh reincorporation of the Hen Ogledd. That would be a more viable state than Ourselves Alone.
We could offer our historic capital Llundain the chance to become an ally. That would leave the Rump of England to pursue its way in splendid imperial grandeur and Purity of Essence.
I thought the Rump of England was already prime minister.
Alas how true.
The East African habit of having clock times six hours out of synch (noon is six o’clock) always strikes me as pretty Martian.
Many years ago I went as a student to Mount Athos. I was puzzled to observe that in all the monasteries except one (the Great Lavra, I think, but it might have been another) the grandfather clocks in the entrance halls were all working but all showed the wrong time. Long afterwards I understood that most of them consider that the day begins at sunset, but one, following the practice of the Georgian church, consider it to begin at sunrise.
In relation to the well known Chilean family Edwards I should have noted that they pronounce it in a way that would make the Danes happy, ignoring all the consonants except the w: [‘ewɑ:]
I went as a student to Mount Athos
OK, I didn’t expect that.
The closest I got to Mount Athos was a few miles (took spectacular photo from a tourist boat).
We were told that Mount Athos is almost an independent state and they won’t allow anyone who hasn’t some serious business with God.
Perhaps I put it badly: I didn’t go to study anything; I was a student and I went: nuance. The only qualification was that you needed to have the right number of Y chromosomes. You just took the boat and on arrival you had to go to an administrative centre where they gave you a pass for three nights. They didn’t do any intimate checking, but if your face looked as if you had the right number of Y chromosomes that was enough. Simple tourism; no serious business with God. I’m not sure if I still regarded myself as an Anglican in 1964, but I was never a theology student, let alone Greek Orthodox.
I went to Greece with four friends from university. I was the only one who thought of bringing a guidebook, so I could give the others a censored account of what it said, with the result that we mostly went to places I wanted to go to — not only Mount Athos, but also Mykonos (not yet overrun with tourists), Santorini, Rhodes, Crete, Delphi.
Anna Korostelyova’s post on Iranian calendar
For the record, the original, in Russian.
SFReader’s translation skipped several introductory lines at the start (mostly irrelevant) and Anna’s concluding remark at the end (basically, that the Chinese calendar was similarly unusual as recently as the Ming dynasty; I don’t really have the language sense to translate it any more precisely).
That would leave the Rump of England to pursue its way in splendid imperial grandeur and Purity of Essence.
I’m reminded of a scene (in Russian, alas – I doubt I could do it justice) from Carmarthen School – Anna Korostelyova’s other, less linguistic-focused, long-form masterpiece…
— Это кто тут собирается отложить Уэльс от Великобритании? — еще строже спросил Мерлин. — Да я сам его, своими руками, пропесочу. Скорее уж нужно отложить от Британии Англию. Если кому-то интересно мое мнение. Да только куда ж ее теперь отложишь!..
Scandinavian has a doublet karl (man, often specifically an (agricultural) laborer) and Karl (first name) — where the first is probably directly from PG, the latter via Big Charlie.
*karilaz may be a diminutive based on *ǵorh₂-o-s, which makes him The Big Little Old Man. On the other hand, colloquial Swedish has reduced the non-name word back to /ka:r/, removing the old diminutive element and the connection to the name and its familiar form /kal:e/.
I’m reminded of a scene (in Russian, alas – I doubt I could do it justice)
Here’s my attempt:
“Who is it that proposes to unharness Wales from Great Britain?” asked Merlin even more severely. “I personally will give him what for. England should be unharnessed from Britain instead, if anyone is interested in my opinion. But I don’t know how it’s going to be unharnessed now!”
happy Danes — have no truck with eliminating anything, we just have a game of seeing how slight of a phonetic difference we can use to keep our phonemes apart.
I wonder how usual a surname Bakonyvari is in Japan (I don’t think gyōza has ever featured at languagehat):
Albert Kuwano Bakonyvari beckons me inside his factory’s steam chamber, where hundreds of plump, white, crescent-shaped gyōza dumplings are neatly lined on stacks of trays fitted in steel racks, waiting to be sent to the freezer.
https://features.japantimes.co.jp/gyoza/
Bakonyvari sounds Hungarian.
I can even parse it as “from Bakony castle”
It is indeed Hungarian; here’s an obit for Maria Bakonyvari, born in Budapest, Hungary on May 17, 1935.
happy Danes — have no truck with eliminating anything, we just have a game of seeing how slight of a phonetic difference we can use to keep our phonemes apart.
Do Swedes agree with that? Some Portuguese people claim that about vowels, but many Spanish speakers don’t agree.
But I don’t know how it’s going to be unharnessed now!
Probably is good as it can be done, but отложить in the first part of the passage is an obsolete form for secede (I only heard it as отложиться, the active form in the passage is probably humorous invention by the author) and in the last sentence there is a word play on a modern sense of отложить, set apart (also, to postpone, but I cannot see how that might be relevant). In other words, in the last sentence Merlin wonders where he can put England after “unharnessing” it.
Maybe make it “But I don’t know where to put it without a harness now!”
Do Swedes agree with that — of course not, they are the old Enemy, remember? Suits us fine if they are not able to eavesdrop.
Maybe make it “But I don’t know where to put it without a harness now!”
Yeah, that’s better. But you’re right, it’s almost impossible to translate.
Bakony.
I remember the day after the referendum: #Londependence #Scotlond
In Soviet Russia, Wales secedes YOU!
If Wales should be treated separately, then how ever many parts of Scotland should be treated separately in order to show the prevalence of an individual clan surname in each?
This is on to something I guess: if you can divide a map like this further and get an entirely new batch of most common last names still, then it’s not really divided finely enough. Would it be nonsensical to just ask for the most common last name in the EU? If yes, why does the same then not apply to India as well?
Probably the level of subdivision where same names start to recur will be different in different places, but then wouldn’t that be a good way to demonstrate the total worldwide diversity of last names? If were to be the case e.g. that there are a hundred of them in China and a hundred thousand in Italy, very well, let us zoom in on Italy a thousand times more closely to give every last name an equal chance in the race.
Why are the Scots still asking Westminster’s permission to have another referendum? Independence requires volition, you have to just do it. Scotland, Northern Ireland & Wales should found a united republic with southern Ireland within the EU, shut down the UK, and leave England to be a royal tax haven or Switzerland or whatever it is they’re after (rich without having to manufacture anything, essentially).
There’s an article about the Irish Nolan clan in today’s Guardian in which the writer coincidentally discusses a few tangential items in this thread.
This sort of thing has in fact been done properly, for the UK, at any rate:
https://www.geog.ucl.ac.uk/news-events/news/news-archive/2013/may-2013/britains-most-common-surnames
I notice that I was right about “Jones” being relatively uncommon (for Wales) in Glamorgan, but wrong in thinking it was characteristic of not-so-Welsh-speaking areas.
(I say “properly”, but “Bibi” still appears as a common regional surname ….)
Why are the Scots still asking Westminster’s permission to have another referendum? Independence requires volition, you have to just do it.
Mainly because Catalonia tried the “just do it” way recently, it didn’t go over particularly well, and the Scots don’t want the same thing to happen to them.
“Who is it that proposes to unharness Wales from Great Britain?” asked Merlin even more severely.
This Merlin reminds me of the one in The Once and Future King. I have complained before that there is no good term for a region being forced out of a country against the will of the people there (and to be sure it rarely happens). The Malaysia-Singapore agreement used the neutral term separation.
seeing how slight of a phonetic difference we can use to keep our phonemes apart
Says the man with four schwas (okay, okay, one is an /ɑ/) and three glottal stops separating them in his name.
#Londependence #Scotlond
The Government has always done well to fear the London mob. That’s why it operates from Westminster (and if absolutely necessary, from Oxford).
Why are the Scots still asking Westminster’s permission to have another referendum?
In addition to the Catalonian affair, the Rhodesian Unilateral Declaration of Independence in 1961 drew an economic boycott, and the earlier UDI of 1776 was met with military force. No Scottish government would want to face either of those.
Scotland, Northern Ireland & Wales should found a united republic with southern Ireland within the EU
The Republic of Ireland might fear a return of the Protestant Ascendancy (9 million to 5 million) if that happened. I still think the United Kingdom of Scotland and Northern Ireland (“the UK” for short) would be a better idea, with or without Wales (and Cornwall). In the latter case the name “the United Kingdom of the East Celts” would work.
This Merlin reminds me of the one in The Once and Future King.
He’s not actually much like that, from what I can tell. In fact, judging by the Wikipedia description, the only thing they have in common is being named Merlin (and even that only barely, since one of them is actually Merlyn, and the other is sometimes Myrddin).
He does resemble Dumbledore, though – as expected, since their roles in the respective stories are very similar.
I have complained before that there is no good term for a region being forced out of a country against the will of the people there (and to be sure it rarely happens).
IIRC, there are some examples (one that comes to mind is Saarland) where a country was forced to give independence to a region as part of a peace treaty, against the will of both the country and the region; but I can’t think of any non-Singapore examples of “go away, we don’t like you”, where the country did want independence for the region, but the region itself didn’t.
They’re all really Myrddin, though, whatever the English make of it on any given day.
This reminds me of a news story about a petition for secession initiated in Texas after Obama’s election. it was quickly overwhelmed by signatories from Massachusetts. Maybe it wasn’t exactly like that, but the story is too good to check.
There are certainly examples of states transferring territories to other states, largely against the preference of the local population (to the extent that the residents actually cared; see below). In American history, both Florida and Alaska were acquired this way (Florida under significant pressure, Alaska freely sold). That’s not the same as forcing a territory out to become an independent state. Moreover, for both of the examples I mentioned, there were large indigenous populations (the vast majority in the case of Alaska) who probably did not care much about whether the transfer happened or not.
There’s the counterfactual non-event of the end of the Mexican-American War, where American racists objected to the incorporation of all of Mexico (as opposed to half) into the United States because of all the horrid Mexicans who might become citizens. (There were, I should say, also a great many Americans who objected on perfectly honourable grounds.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_of_Mexico_Movement
Reminds me of the “buffer” Far Eastern Republic which the Bolsheviks founded in 1920.
The local Bolsheviks after overthrowing White rule just wanted to join Soviet Russia and have same one-party dictatorship as in the rest of Russia.
But Moscow for their own geopolitical reasons insisted that the FAR should be an independent parliamentary democracy with participation of parties banned in Soviet Russia.
This strange republic of unwilling separatists lasted three years until the Kremlin and Washington together managed to get the Japanese military leave occupied Russian territory.
Not quite like the Saarland, maybe, but that thing in 1967-69 where Anguilla was being forced toward eventual independence from the UK as part of a multi-island combo including Saint Kitts & Nevis, didn’t like the new proposed overlords, and revolted under circumstances that, after the dust settled, allowed it to remain a fully British colony (ok, “overseas territory” – whatevs) while St. Kitts & Nevis proceeded to full independence w/o them.
There was an occasion in 1943 when the Canadian government ceded an Ottawa hospital’s maternity suite, though not to any one other country in particular. It became ‘extraterritorial’, so that Princess Margriet of the Netherlands wouldn’t be born on foreign soil. A nurse recalls the event here, saying with a smile at 4:40 “she still thinks of her[self] as being Canadian,” missing the whole point. Margriet’s residence nowadays is The Loo, in Apeldoorn. The Ottawa hospital story was the basis for Passport To Pimlico (it was my favourite Ealing comedy when I was nine or ten), in which a central London neighbourhood secedes from Britain as ‘Burgundy’.
Pimlico, of course, is perhaps best known in linguistic circles for its etymology: Pimlico (London) < the name of a 17th century resort near Hoxton < the nickname of its 16th century founder, Ben Pimlico < an alternate spelling of what is now Pamlico River, North Carolina < an Algonquian tribal name (apparently of unknown further derivation).
H.G.Wells apparently noted the resemblance between the names Pimlico and Pamlico, but he (apparently?) did not have the sources to figure out how exactly the resemblance could have occurred.
Since I’ve studied some Algonquian languages (mostly Plains Cree), I’ll take the mantle of an expert (until a real expert comes in).
In Pamlico, I can immediately recognize the Algonquian ending -ok/ak which means “people of”.
You probably know it from examples like Susquehannock (people of the Susquehanna river).
This gives as the root as “pamli” or “pami”.
Which again is immediately obvious to me as the Algonquian root with meaning of “grease” (“pimiy” in Cree).
English has a loanword from Algonquian languages with this root – pemmican – a type of greasy jerky often made by Indians and noted by white pioneers.
So, Pamlico might mean “people of the Greasy river” or something. There is a river Pamlico, I believe.
If somebody from North Carolina reads this, please go check if it’s still greasy.
four schwas — I think I’ll have to retract that in order to substitute a new discovery: Danish has a 3-way length distinction, though it’s not phonemic! kras [kʁɐs] ‘sharp’ / fars [fɐ:s] ‘mincemeat’ / fars [fɐ::s] ‘father’s’. (/a(:)/ generally moves to [ɐ(:)] next to /r/; the long and overlong versions occur as monophthongizations of of that sound with vocalized /r/ in /ar/ and /a:r/).
Kusaal has a three-way phonetic length distinction in diphthongs, though there is never a three-way contrast in identical contexts.
Still, yet another piece of evidence for the Scandi-Congo hypothesis.
http://languagehat.com/how-to-make-a-linguistic-theory/#comment-3267889
Pimlico (London) < the name of a 17th century resort near Hoxton
Pimlico is 4½ miles from Hoxton, a good hour and a half’s walk. Nor is it in southwest London (i.e. south of the River). SW postcode also applies to Buckingham Palace and the Houses of Parliament and everybody knows they’re not in southwest London (Richmond, Kingston or Wimbledon), they’re all in the middle, and north of the Thames. The thing about the beer may have been a hangover from the 18C Vauxhall Pleasure Gardens which I think were in Pimlico before it got that name, rather than in Vauxhall. They’ve come up too, when we discussed the railway station.
We went over this before, but the most likely story I found was that the current Pimlico was open land at the time and the walking path to Ben Pimlico’s second establishment at Chelsea went over it. Actual quote at the old thread.
And sorry for the double post — at first it seemed that Akismet was down on IPA in name fields and disappeared it, but now it‘s there.
Or maybe our gracious host rescued it? In any case, please deduplicate it. (This is a strange chimera of a word, used for storage technologies where identical pieces of data are discovered and the ‘extra’ copies replaced by references to the first. Monoplicate, anyone?)
Uniplicate.
One has been restored, the other unplicated.
the ne plus ultra is for your own actual name to become the style for Omega Lugals
There’s King Kong, kong meaning ‘king’ in Norwegian, but I’m not sure King Kong was actually king of anything.
Something I found in my googling: 2-3,000 years ago while the Egyptians or perhaps the Akkadian Empire was coming up with the griffin, head of an eagle and body of a lion, the Sumerians introduced the anzû, also known as Imdugud, a deity with the head of a lion and body of an eagle. I think the ‘king of the beasts’ idea is medieval, so I don’t know why lions and eagles, but the griffin works much better graphically; although considering the millennia of work that have gone into making griffins, perhaps not quite as well as my favourite, the lamassu. Here’s a five-legged lamassu.
Actual quote at the old thread.
Thank you. And here is The Vauxhall at Pavlovsk.
One has been restored, the other unplicated
Along the lines of Fr. déplier, “deplicated” occurred to me but it’s too artificial, and might be confused with “deprecated” – although duplicates are indeed deprecated .. Hmm, “explicate” is to remove the folds or Vielfalt or Duplikate …
In the IT world of banks/insurance companies with lots of customers, record changes and transactions daily, records and transactions can become duplicated for various reasons. Usually there are “batch runs” at night (after turning off online access) to search for and “remove duplicates”. That’s the English technical term, the German one is similar.
… the 18C Vauxhall Pleasure Gardens which I think were in Pimlico before it got that name, rather than in Vauxhall
I don’t think that can be right despite what it says at the link. There is a map at the Museum of London site here which shows the Pleasure Gardens lying immediately north of Kennington Lane where Harleyford Rd branches off from it, just north-east of where Vauxhall station now is, south of the river. If you compare that plan to the 1751 picture in the book to which you link then the layout of the Gardens is clearly recognisable as the same (with the view looking eastward from about where the MI6 building now is at Vauxhall Cross). John Rocque’s map of 1746 also shows Vauxhall Spring Gardens in the same place. The park there is now renamed Vauxhall Pleasure Gardens. (Some of this is from the history here)
If somebody from North Carolina reads this, please go check if it’s still greasy.
Well, the upstream portion of the Pamlico river is called the Tar, and North Carolina began as a naval-stores colony: the pinewoods there were harvested for tar and turpentine. See this amusing story at WP (scroll down or search locally for “One account of the significance”), though it is obvious from internal evidence that the Tar was already named that in 1862.
four schwas — I think I’ll have to retract that
No need. Back in the day, when you challenged the Conlang list to figure out how your name was pronounced, I instantly posted [ˈləʔməʔəʔə]. You replied, “No, but it probably sounds like that to foreigners.” And here after 25+ years is the answer!
There’s King Kong, kong meaning ‘king’ in Norwegian
I read once, but have not been able to confirm, that when the 1933 film was shown in Scandinavia (presumably dubbed) the hero’s name was given as Kong King. His Chinese name is 金刚 Jīn’gāng lit. ‘gold/metal strong’, but obviously chosen for its phonetics.
25+ years – the gears of linguistic discovery grind slowly, but exceedingly fine.
@Stu, deduplication is when you want to see the same data in two different places / contexts, but only store one copy. The banking / insurance application is when you only want to see it once, I think, so “remove duplicates” is very precise. Also, going offline? How quaint. Even the tax authority website here is open 24/7 now.
(Last year in Berlin, every second public ad spot was showing a lady in an evening dress going “Wow, I can do my banking on my phone at the party because I have <whatever bank>.” For a Scandinavian that really brought home how conservative Germany is, we don’t remember when we couldn’t. (Not before iPhones, I think, but still). And doing your banking at the party is neither good style nor compatible with the alcohol you probably consumed.
Perhaps the “banking” in question is redemption of your portfolio so that you can pay for the products available at the cash bar.
Ian Preston, thanks. That’s convincing evidence. I have to remind myself that that reach of the River is running virtually North-South, so an 18C picture ‘from the West’ (for ex.) rightly shows the countryside at the horizon. And whichever side of the River, I’d always imagined the Pleasure Gardens on the Nine Elms side of Vauxhall Bridge (rather than the MI6 and Tate side) but I see that was also wrong.
JC in Scandinavia (presumably dubbed) the hero’s name was given as Kong King
It only really works in Norway, because it’s kung and konge in Swedish & Danish respectively, but once or twice I’ve asked my wife how it’s translated, and the question seems to afford me much greater enjoyment than it does her (she seems slightly irritated), so I’ll never know.
Well, konge is the the citation form, but it’s Kong before names. ODS claims that it’s the same in Norwegian.
Cf. Hr., for Herr but never spelled out (because {rr}), which is the common male honorific while the noun is otherwise herre.
The relation is reminiscent of that between strong and weak forms of adjectives, though I’m pretty sure it has another explanation — maybe the second syllable was backformed from the definite form.
That all said, the ape is King Kong in Danish, stressed on the first word, and I never thought of it as anything but meaningless syllables meant to sound impressive — he might have been Ding Dong for all the sense it would make, though it sounds sillier.
So at the risk of sounding like a pedantic tech guy, “deduplication” is a technical term for a particular storage optimization technique; “to deduplify X” means to perform said technique on X. (Incidentally, the OED’s sole definition is “Congenital division of one organ into two (or more)” from botany – delightfully contrarian).
I don’t want to be hard on Stu but his definition of deduplication is completely incorrect – it’s emphatically not a nightly batch run by banks to get rid of duplicate transactions and records.
Rather, it is a storage optimization technique – a way of making a given dataset use less storage space (and therefore cost less money). How is it done? By breaking up the dataset into chunks (this is the technical term), then checking if any of the chunks are identical to any chunks previously encountered by the system. Any duplicated chunks are replaced with a “pointer” to the sole full version of the chunk. This is a simplification but imagine you created 10 Word files and pasted some high-res photos in each of them, not even necessarily the same set in each file. Deduplication would figure out how to store those photos only once, even though to you they would appear to be stored separately in each of the documents.
And like Lars said, going offline is not a thing that happens, let alone for banks. A computer is either always online or never (eg nuclear reactor controllers are airgapped).
Anzu, now essentially a lion-tailed bird.
Not in Germany, where you really would pay in cash, quite unlike in Scandinavia. In Sweden cash is on its way to becoming obsolete altogether; in Germany it’s easy to walk into a place that accepts only cash, or at least only cash below a pretty high amount of money.
That all said, the ape is King Kong in Danish
I featured the Kong King story on my Twitter once, and almost immediately got a reply from an actual Scandinavian that it wasn’t actually true (despite the word kong(e), whose existence they confirmed); I have sadly forgotten whether I attributed it to Danish or Norwegian.
Same in German. And elsewhere, whence Donkey Kong (not a donkey, but another gorilla).
Wikipedia says King Ghidorah isn’t modified from English into German either.
Not in Germany, where you really would pay in cash, quite unlike in Scandinavia. In Sweden cash is on its way to becoming obsolete altogether; in Germany it’s easy to walk into a place that accepts only cash, or at least only cash below a pretty high amount of money.
I understood this was the custom at restaurants and barbershops and so on but on my last visit I was surprised to learn -to my frustration and the cashier’s visible annoyance – that even some grocery stores are cash only. It seems kind of perverse to make people withdraw cash just to buy groceries – if anything it’s even more annoying for the merchant which is why i struggle to understand why Germans are so married to this idea outside of the usual privacy and tax evasion contexts.
…Huh. In Moscow, we regularly pay with our card(s) at cafes (hadn’t gone to outright restaurants often enough to be sure), but some smaller grocery stores were indeed cash-only until very recently. (I think some still are.)
It’s a common enough situation that I tend to ask “do you take cards?” before I actually purchase anything (I don’t always have enough cash with me to pay for grocery purchases – though sometimes I do, if I plan to visit a store that I know is cash-only).
The really weird one is that one place over at the corner of my block that takes cards for everything… except cigarettes, which are cash only.
I’ve been told that this isn’t even supposed to be legal, but it’s been the case for years and I’m used to it by now. If I have to buy cigs* and don’t have enough cash, I just go to another store.
*) for relatives – I don’t smoke
I don’t want to be hard on Stu but his definition of deduplication is completely incorrect – it’s emphatically not a nightly batch run by banks to get rid of duplicate transactions and records. Rather, it is a storage optimization technique – a way of making a given dataset use less storage space (and therefore cost less money).
Both definitions are in actual use. Part of Oracle’s Enterprise Data Quality product is the Deduplicator, which is used to identify input records that are “the same” according to various rules, precise or fuzzy, and specify which one is to be retained.
going offline is not a thing that happens, let alone for banks. A computer is either always online or never
When I worked for $MAJOR_INTERNATIONAL_BANK, I could choose between two modes for my computer (not always the same one, we were using first-come-first-served thin terminals and randomly assigned pool computers): one online without access to bank systems, and the other offline with access.
On the server side, the NYPL’s systems are shut down when the library is closed (for a whole day, not just at night), so no online access to the OED on Christmas, for example. And I often see “Website unavailable for (un)scheduled maintenance” on all kinds of websites.
almost immediately got a reply from an actual Scandinavian that it wasn’t actually true
To know for sure, the dubbed version of the film would have to be found, or a poster. I well believe that the term, if it was used, did not stick in either language.
cash only
In the U.S. the maximum minimum is $10 since 2010, but that may not survive the present administration, as it is part of a consumer-friendly law. The reason to have a minimum at all is that that the merchant’s bank generally charges n% or the purchase price or k cents, whichever is greater, on each transaction For Visa and Mastercard, n = about 3, but AmEx and Discover charge more.
The same applies to debit cards, though the values of n and k are lower. There is also the risk of a reversed transaction with a credit card, which does not exist with debit cards or cash (banks will honor debit cards even if the account is overdrawn, and just slap a fee of $35 or so on the account).
In addition, street vendors rarely take cards, as they have no modern facilities for accepting them. NYC taxis were cash only until about ten years ago. Some stores with unique products don’t need to accept cards, because they have plenty of business without them. And lastly, banks don’t offer merchant accounts to just any business: they need pretty good evidence that you aren’t a fly-by-night operation who won’t deliver the goods or will sell shoddy ones. (Some banks care more than others.)
I suspect there are significant country-to-country variations in how large a %age of the economy (and which specific sectors) is encompassed by “the usual privacy and tax evasion contexts.” I am personally more aggravated by the recent arrival in NYC of businesses that are “card-only” and won’t accept cash at all. I suppose their rationale is that this frees them from the need for their employees to make change and also prevents certain potential modes of employee embezzlement, but I still find it aggravating.
In addition, street vendors rarely take cards, as they have no modern facilities for accepting them.
I think this is the usual explanation for cash-only grocery stores in Moscow – they haven’t come far from street vendor status.
I don’t think I’ve seen card-only yet (except in relation to online purchases, where it is obviously required); it would indeed have aggravated me.
The reason to have a minimum at all is that that the merchant’s bank generally charges n% or the purchase price or k cents, whichever is greater, on each transaction
…Huh. That must be a US thing.
(Or possibly a no-national-bank thing; for all I know, the reason Sberbank of Russia can afford to not charge anything is because it’s propped up by the government anyway.)
On second thought, I’ve had things like that happen with payments for the internet (just not at actual physical stores – which is convenient, because it often lets me calculate whether I have enough money on the card right down to fractions of a ruble).
In Mongolia, street vendors and some smaller shops go from cash to mobile* payments bypassing the card payment stage altogether.
*several different technologies in fact. Some of them I don’t even know how they work, for example that hissing phone Chinese thing, but apparently it’s not a problem to figure out even for a cigarette stand on a sandy street in a Gobi desert town.
It’s a sign how times are changing geography.
When I was young, Moscow was the center of civilization for me and Gobi desert in Outer Mongolia was absolutely the farthest thing from it.
Well, now the center of world civilization shifted to Beijing, China and these sandy desert towns in Mongolia are way closer to it than Moscow.
China is just across the border and Bejing is only a few hours away by bus (and the fare is just 25$).
No wonder they have technology people in Moscow (or Europe or America) never heard of.
I have worked in projects at banks and insurance companies in Germany for 25 years, and still do. Nightly batches still search for and remove duplicates. That’s just the way it is.
The purpose is to restore data consistency, not to save storage. The amount of storage recovered, if any, is nugatory. Audit trails must be maintained, so in principle nothing is ever deleted.
A computer is either always online or never
What a strange statement ! A computer is online when it can communicate with other computers. Cut the com channels, the computer is offline.
Street Vendors have been able to take cards for at least a decade now, guys – that’s how Square was started, they invented a little physical device that connected to your phone via headphone jack that turned the phone into a payment terminal. For some street vendors – food trucks especially – it would be unthinkable to not accept cards. And it’s been a while now that most farmers market vendors take cards.
In Brazil, even drug dealers take cards – erm….or so I heard – because cash can be a real hassle to access after business hours.
Card-only policies are pretty transparently a ploy to keep out undesirable (i.e. poor) customers – as if charging $20 for a lunch salad didn’t already do that – so it registers as gratuitous mean-spiritedness.
Taxis fought very hard against card payments – even after terminals were installed asking to pay with a card felt rather like asking the driver for a favor; at a minimum it was an uncomfortable situation and I strove to avoid hailing a cab unless i had the fare in cash on me. NYC’s solution was to mandate a unified monitor/payment system, and to mollify the drivers the default tip buttons were set at 20, 25, and 30 – a classic Sunsteinian nudge.
Is Beijing even the cultural center of its own immediate neighborhood? Tho I understand that from the Mongolian perspective the balance between it and Moscow has shifted to Beijing’s favor lately. But rest assured they don’t have technology you haven’t heard of – tho the AI fiasco suggests they think they do.
@John Cowan: Here in more cosmopolitan South Carolina, virtually every street vendor—even the ones who just pop up to sell bootleg DVDs—has wireless payment set up. The most popular provider is Square; they make everything from little (square) magnetic card scanner that you can plug into a smart phone or tablet up through small portable registers. (These days, even regular supermarket cash registers are actually low-end Windows machines just plugged into the cash drawers.) An increasing number of brick-and-mortar businesses even process their credit card business using these portable wireless payment setups.
@January First-of-May: If it was not clear, the fees charged by credit card companies in America are normally deducted from the payment to the merchant, not added to the purchase price. For most businesses, whether one pays cash or charge, the price stays the same. There are occasional exceptions, however. Some businesses will charge extra to use a card, but it is uncommon—except at gas stations, where one always gets charged a higher price if paying with credit. (Charging more for credit card users used to be explicitly against all the major credit cards’ merchant agreements, and the way it is done in practice at most places is still probably technically against the current merchant agreements, but the banks no longer care.)
I also wanted to comment on something from a couple days ago, about religious observance of the day beginning at sunset. If one is to live by Biblical principles, having the day begin at sundown is what is implied by Genesis. That is supposedly why Jewish religious observances begin the evening before each holiday. Of course, I say “supposedly” because (as with many aspects of a religion whose holy writ was set down in the Iron Age, but based on antecedents that extended back into the Bronze Age) it is not really known whether the structure of the rites or the textual justification came first.
The notion of the day beginning with evening comes from the most famous part of the Priestly Source, the creation in seven days. That section (Genesis 1:1–2:3) supposedly the origin of two other bits of Jewish lore—the seven-day week, and the existence of the demon Lilith*—that we know are actually much older elements of Levantine culture. As far as I know, how the scriptural statements that each day began with evening, followed by morning arose is less clear. The formula might have been entirely an invention of the P authors; it might have been included as a justification for existing rituals that took place at sundown; or it might have been a pre-existing (even pre-Jewish) way of delimiting the days, which P simply recorded.
* The bit about Lilith is an interpolation from the fact that Genesis 1 (from P) says that the first man and woman were created together, while Genesis 2 (Jahwist) states that that Eve was not created until Adam got bored.** One attempt to reconcile this marginal discrepancy was to state that Adam first had another wife, who became the demoness Lilith. However, the character of Lilith was significantly older—thousands of years, probably—and her role as a tormentor of children and pregnant women was already well established before it was suggested that she had been Adam’s spurned wife. The Adam story does give her a good motive for her evil ways though.
** I think this is the only place where P is less sexist than J.
Stu, i’m utterly unsurprised that German banks follow conservative or even outdated IT practices, which I’m sure they have very good reasons for following. In any case, what you’re describing is not what’s understood by the term “deduplication” as it is commonly used in the tech/IT/software industry today, the distinguishing characteristic of which is the use of metadata (ie pointers) to enable seamless reconstruction of the duplicated pieces (a process calld hydrating.
Perhaps it’s not obvious to you, but using audit trails to keep track of all changes is simply a slower, less efficient, more disruptive and more error prone method of achieving the same result.
At the risk of referring back to the subject of the post long after everyone has moved on, here’s a different sort of name counter:
Howmanyofme.com
It’s been useful to me in ground-truthing hypotheses about voter registration duplicates. And it’s fun.
i’m utterly unsurprised that German banks follow conservative or even outdated IT practices, which I’m sure they have very good reasons for following. In any case, what you’re describing is not what’s understood by the term “deduplication” as it is commonly used in the tech/IT/software industry today
The good reasons: large banking systems that have been around for decades hold their data in mainframe RDBs and hierarchical DBs (DB2, Oracle, IMS DB). Database schemes are the metadata, not “pointers”. This is true everywhere in the world. What you call the common use today of “deduplication” applies to different technologies. A whiz-kid approach to right and wrong usage will doubtless convince whiz-kids, but it doesn’t change the facts. You are pushing an Eloi mentality.
Perhaps it’s not obvious to you, but using audit trails to keep track of all changes is simply a slower, less efficient, more disruptive and more error prone method of achieving the same result.
It seems you don’t know what audit trails are. They are required by banking laws, and monitored very closely by regulatory bodies. Their purpose is to help identify fuck-ups and criminal manipulation. They are about money and liability, not deduplication or saving bytes of storage. “Eventual consistency” is not good enough.
here’s a different sort of name counter: Howmanyofme.com
It’s convenient for frequency of surnames and (somewhat outdated) frequency of first names, but the general stats are somewhat skewed by the fact that first and last names collocate significantly; their estimate for “Wei Zhang”, possibly the most common name in the world, is 1.
(To quote from the site itself:
“So, for example: The program assumes that the chance that your first name is “Juan” is the same, regardless of whether your last name is “Arteaga” or “Epstein”. Episodes of Welcome Back Kotter aside, we would hazard a guess that there are not that many people in the U.S. actually named “Juan Epstein”.”
For the record, their estimate for “Juan Epstein” is 26.)
I run your nickname through it and found the answer rather hard to believe:
January Firstofmay
There are 1,654 people in the U.S. with the first name January.
Statistically the 4019th most popular first name.
More than 99.9 percent of people with the first name January are female.
There are fewer than 123 people in the U.S. with the last name Firstofmay.
January Firstofmay
There are 1 or fewer people in the U.S. named January Firstofmay.
Fake online name frequency counter site. Another smart new way of making money in the 21st century…
religious observance of the day beginning at sunset
This is true in Islam too; I don’t know if that reflects adoption of Jewish practice or was an areal thing which applied to the Arabs in pre-Islamic times. I wonder what the Aramaic-speaking Christian practice is/was?
It’s not an indigenous thing in West Africa, anyhow: only Muslims seem to begin the day at sunset. In Kusaal you greet someone first thing in the morning by asking how they slept yesterday.
David M.: Anzu, now essentially a lion-tailed bird
Gobsmacked. So, possibly, 3,000 years ago, someone in Mesopotamia found the fairly intact skeleton of a dinosaur and explained it as a god in the form of a lion with the head of a bird [or vice versa, but the griffin could also have originated there]? I was wondering why these mixed creatures came about.
The idea of reptilian humanoids has appealed for longer than I thought. Gods are a subtype of aliens.
Howmanyofme.com
There are fewer than 1,654 people in the U.S. with the first name Athelstan
There are fewer than 123 people in the U.S. with the last name Cornishbowden.
The estimate for this name is not absolute. There are 1 or fewer people in the U.S. named Athelstan Cornishbowden.
I don’t believe that there are as many as 1, so it’s fewer.
It’s curious that the numbers 1654 and 123 also apply to January Firstofmay.
Igor Sfreader
There are fewer than 1,654 people in the U.S. with the first name Igor.
There are fewer than 123 people in the U.S. with the last name Sfreader.
There are 1 or fewer people in the U.S. named Igor Sfreader.
OK, it’s even more fake than I thought.
My German bank does not charge me for withdrawing cash at any ATM it or another part of the “Cash Group” owns. Paying by debit card is free (and pretty common for larger amounts in supermarkets), paying by credit card is not.
The German-speaking Christian practice is to celebrate Christmas in the early evening of the 24th, and to eat and rest on the 25th. The 24th is what people look forward to; it is a school holiday and has special schedules on public transport.
All possible, except for the “Mesopotamia” part: the whole area consists of mud that was deposited approximately yesterday. No oviraptorosaurs in there.
There’s a good argument that griffins actually go back to Protoceratops from Mongolia (in Antiquity they were associated with the Scythians, nobody ever claimed to have seen a live one, they’re associated with gold whence the name of the Altay Mountains…), though the original presentation of the argument went too far in including details that simply don’t line up.
Looks like they’re percentages of the US population.
OK, it’s even more fake than I thought.
There are fewer than 1,654 people in the U.S. with the first name Slavomir.
There are fewer than 123 people in the U.S. with the last name Ceplo.
There are 1 or fewer people in the U.S. named Slavomir Ceplo.
(The site couldn’t quite deal with “Čéplö” when I pasted that in, and interpreted it as “Pl”, which got the same number.)
[EDIT: incidentally, my own real name got the same figures as well.]
Looks like they’re percentages of the US population.
That (i.e. being a percentage in the original source) would explain the exactly 1624 for January.
David,
On griffins, I see that Dutch linguists by the name of Robert S.P. Beekes and Lucien van Beek may have proposed (everything academic is couched so circumspectly) that the Greek word griffin (γρύψ, Herodotus, Histories 3.116,) may be cognate with cherubim, from כְּרוּב (kerúv). It’s something to do with the Hittites in Anatolia and that both are guardians of treasure. But the m. genitive γρῡπός is translated by google as ‘aquiline,’ so as usual I’m a bit lost.
One thing that struck me about the photo of the Protoceratops is that its form is closer to some of the earlier chunky lamassu than to griffins with their sleek bodies. Incidentally, later on (by c.800 bc?), there’s confusion both by the creators and the museums about what’s being depicted: the BM’s lamassu has lion’s paws whereas the Louvre’s lamassu, aka “winged, human-headed bull” has cloven hooves. What’s more despite their different feet, both have the same hat or so-called ‘bull’s horns’. Someone ought to sort these discrepancies out.
Interesting. Seems possible to me.
Howmanyofme.com — more
I couldn’t edit (though my 15 minutes hadn’t run out), so I’ll add a comment here. I think there is probably only one Cornish-Bowden in the USA — my daughter, who didn’t change her name when she married, and her own daughters have a different name. I have no idea how many people called Athelstan there are, but there are several places. No Athels, but there is an Athol near where Hat lives.
And it is the butt of many jokes.
Ah! Probably a good thing I write it with an e, not an o. When I went to a meeting in South Hadley 15 or so years ago someone I know who is based in Boston took me and my wife and another lady for a drive to some place near the border with New York, and I noticed the sign to Athol. If I’d had a functioning camera I’d have asked to take a detour, as it wasn’t very far off our route.
I think the only famous Athelstan in the USA was Athelstan Spilhaus. Not a relation, but not a coincidence either, as his parents were friends of my great-uncle, who was also Athelstan.
I had an impression that Athelstan was a long forgotten name which Sir Walter pulled up from history books to give some Anglo-Saxon color to Ivanhoe.
Were there really people named Athelstan in, say, 18th century?
virtually every street vendor—even the ones who just pop up to sell bootleg DVDs—has wireless payment set up
I’ve never bought a DVD on the street (seems like a good way to get ripped off), but definitely hot-dog vendors can’t take them. Again, they’re bumping up against the minimum: even in these Latter Days of the Law, $10 buys more hot dogs than most people can / want to eat at one sitting.
An increasing number of brick-and-mortar businesses even process their credit card business using these portable wireless payment setups.
That I have seen.
I strove to avoid hailing a cab unless i had the fare in cash on me
In the early days that was wise: the card terminals were frequently broken. The only time I’ve run into that lately, the driver warned me as soon as I got in, and I had to get out again.
conservative or even outdated IT practices
That’s not confined to German banks or even to banks: Stu’s exactly right. Any business that deals with other people’s money (I don’t mean VC money) and has been around a while has a great many legacy systems that cannot be rewritten cost-effectively, and a great many formerly siloed operations. This is especially true in banking because of the huge mergers that have been underway for decades. Regulatory and fiduciary requirements mean that mistakes simply aren’t tolerated: they lead to huge fines and/or lawsuits.
There are still more unique lines of Cobol running in various computers than any other language, and mainframes are still far and away the most profitable kinds of computers to their manufacturers. Mainframes don’t get viruses, either.
whether one pays cash or charge, the price stays the same
My corner convenience store, however, has a sign saying “3.3% discount for cash”; these discounts have a history much longer than credit cards, and they have never been against the banks’ agreements.
how the scriptural statements that each day began with evening, followed by morning arose is less clear
The Greeks, and more significantly the Babylonians, had a day-begins-at-sundown system, so the change (if there was one) may have come during the Exile, when the current calendar was adopted. The quality of the evidence isn’t particularly good, but what we have suggests that the Romans’ day began at sunrise until the Julian reform of 46 BCE.
In all these cultures the first hour began at sunrise, however, and a daylight hour was 1/12 of the time between sunrise and sunset and a night hour was likewise 1/12 of the time between sunset and sunrise, so timekeeping within the 24-hour day varied sharply with the seasons and almost never agreed with candle or water-clock time. When the NT speaks of something happening at the eleventh hour, it means just before sunset and the normal close of business.
However, there are still some suggestions of a sunrise-first system. In Judges 19:9, YLT (a good proxy for the Hebrew) has a man saying: “Lo, I pray thee, the day hath fallen toward evening, lodge all night, I pray thee; lo, the declining of the day! lodge here, and let thine heart be glad — and ye have risen early to-morrow for your journey, and thou hast gone to thy tent.” Here it is clear that tomorrow means “the following sunrise”, and therefore that a new day begins then. Similarly, in 1 Sam 19:11, Michal says to David, “If thou art not delivering thy life to-night — tomorrow thou art put to death.” This is plainly the same story: the next morning is the next day.
It’s not like there’s reason to expect 100% consistency. We have known the facts of the Earth’s rotation for some time, but we still speak of sunrise, not Earth-horizon-rise.
SFReader: Yes, I think Sir Walter Scott was to blame, and I doubt whether there were any in significant numbers before Ivanhoe. Nonetheless, Æðelstan was said to be the first king of all England, and I expect there were people who knew that before they read Ivanhoe. There was a vogue for the name in the 19th century, but in most families it didn’t last.
Stan certainly flourished.
Were there really people named Athelstan in, say, 18th century?
Of Wikipedia’s list of notable Athelstans, the oldest is Athelstan Riley (1858-1945), an English composer. Ivanhoe was published in 1819; note that Scott uses the spelling Athelstane.
However, my eye was of course caught by the name of Athelstan Cornish-Bowden, a surveyor born in Devon (predictably) in 1871 who moved to South Africa as a young man and worked there as a surveyor, becoming noted in his profession and eventually a member of the Royal Society of S.A. The amaryllid Nerine bowdenii was discovered by and named for him: its common names are Cornish lily, Bowden lily, Cape flower, and Guernsey lily, although properly the Guernsey lily is N. sarniensis.
The Jersey lily on the other hand is the related Amaryllis belladonna; though they do grow in the Channel Islands, these species are all native to S.A., and are only distantly related to true lilies. The name “Jersey Lily” was also applied to the actress (and royal mistress) Emilia (Lillie) Langtry (1853-1929).
My great-uncle and friend of the parents of Athelstan Spilhaus.
I wonder if any Jewish Edelsteins anglicized their surname to Athelstan.
I expect so, because Edelstein and Athelstan have the same meaning in German and Old English respectively: Noble Stone. I’ve sometimes been (jocularly) called Edelstein, and when people who know German ask me about the name I tell them that in German it would be Edelstein.
Name also found in Iceland. I have the feeling the name went into disuse in Germany because there is no saint.adalstein or Edelstein (there is a saint adalbert).
https://de.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/A%C3%B0alsteinn
The name “Adalstein” immediately reminds me of DS Haakon Adalstein – the ship that Karel Čapek (him most famously of the word robot, though that was really Josef‘s idea) had travelled along Norway in, as well described in his Travels in the North.
(The ship was named for Haakon Adalsteinfostre [i.e. “Athelstan-fostered”], aka Haakon the Good, a 10th century king of Norway who was supposedly fostered in his childhood by Æðelstan of England.)
Čapek reports that – as the captain supposedly wrote him to tell – the ship was transferred to freight operations shortly after his trip; other sources confirm that this would have happened in 1936. I was sadly unable to find the name of said captain.
Edelstein and Athelstan have the same meaning in German and Old English respectively: Noble Stone
Well, Edelsteine are “gemstones” or “precious stones” in English today. The German prefix “Edel-” is very productive, but now just means “better than your average”. In advertising copy it’s employed to sell sow’s ears as silk purses. The man on the street uses the prefix in a sarcastic way, as in Edelnutte – this may be partly a consequence of its overuse in advertising.
I happened to Google up a document from the Danish Central Bank about cash payments the other week. It turns out that the law is unambiguous, a store has to let you pay cash, if they don’t you can in principle just give them your name and address and ask them to mail you an invoice. (You have entered into an implicit contract with the store by shopping there, but by refusing your cash the store has in principle kept you from fulfilling the specific payment terms of “before leaving premises”, so general rules on contract fulfilment take their place). And in these GDPR times, the shop does _not_ want to have your name and address in writing…
That doesn’t keep shops from insisting on card or mobile only, though, and I wouldn’t trust a random police officer to know the rules if the shop accuses you of theft. Besides I only hold cash to give to homeless people selling their paper — and even they do mobile payments — so I have no motivation to test the law. Shops generally take cash if they want to sell to school children.
😮
????- the organization behind the paper has a setup with the mobile payment provider so that each seller gets a recipient number, and the local branch can pay out the individual balances in cash or as new copies of the paper (the seller gets them at half the cover price). The individual homeless person does not have to have a bank account — unlike Sweden where everybody with a state ID number has the right to a very basic bank account with no fees, in Denmark you (still) have to have a fixed abode to get a bank account.
Under American law, any debt can be settled in cash. (It says so right on the dollar bills: “This note is legal tender for all debts, public and private.”*) However, that does not obligate a merchant to accept cash payments; just entering a store and shopping does not constitute an agreement to actually sell anything. If a potential customer picks out what they want, the merchant does not have to agree to an offer for the objects if the offer is not in a form of payment that the merchant likes. In contrast, at a sit-down restaurant, where the customer is served before paying, the establishment is obligated to take payment in cash, since at that point, the payment is covering a debt.
* Fake American money (that is, things printed with the dollar bill pattern—whether erasers, towels, or whatever) replaces this sentence with, “This is not legal tender for all debts, public and private.” It is also illegal to make fake bills that are too close in size to real ones.
@Brett, it turns out that there is a law in Denmark, sales personnel have to accept cash from 6am to 10pm if they accept any other sort of instant settlement (cards or mobile). No ifs, buts or limits, except if you suspect money laundering.
It’s mostly cafes and similar enterprises that don’t want to handle cash, anyway, so you’d typically be in the ‘debt’ situation.
Withycombe’s ‘Oxford Dictionary of English Christian Names’, after mentioning King Athelstan, says that ‘It was a common Old English name, but seems not to have survived the Norman Conquest… It was revived in the 19th century, perhaps as a result of Scott’s use of it in ‘Ivanhoe”.
large banking systems that have been around for decades hold their data in mainframe RDBs and hierarchical DBs (DB2, Oracle, IMS DB). Database schemes are the metadata, not “pointers”. This is true everywhere in the world. What you call the common use today of “deduplication” applies to different technologies. A whiz-kid approach to right and wrong usage will doubtless convince whiz-kids, but it doesn’t change the facts. You are pushing an Eloi mentality
An “Intro to Data Science” course would really help you clear up your conceptual confusion about this matter. At the very least you might ask yourself whether using a DB schema as a pointer is an efficient or error-resistant approach.
zThere are still more unique lines of Cobol running in various computers than any other language, and mainframes are still far and away the most profitable kinds of computers to their manufacturers. Mainframes don’t get viruses, either.
It’s true there is a lot of Cobol code in various legacy systems and applications especially in the financial sector. But that’s not an indicia of quality or value – but of resistance to change. Companies who manufacture mainframes don’t manufacture other kinds of computers so I’m not sure what they’re more profitable compared to? Mainframes sell – by and large – to businesses that would save time, money, and hassle by migrating to the cloud. As with Cobol, clinging to old and outdated ways of doing things isn’t an endorsement of them, but simply a large scale manifestation of status quo bias.
Anyway the point – contrary to what you and Stu seem to think – is not that legacy systems don’t matter, but that the process described above is not deduplication, analogous to deduplication, nor an application of deduplication to a particular industry, much like how using an eraser to remove duplicate entries from a notebook is also not deduplication (even if the definition could be stretched to include it).
John Cowan says “Both definitions are in actual use”; if that’s true, that’s all that matters in a linguistic sense, regardless of whether you think only one of them should be in use.
Yes, there are two concepts. I described one thing, and the confusion arose when Stu said, “I know what you mean, it is this other thing, but we actually call it ‘removing duplicates.'” Personally I have never seen deduplication used for Stu’s concept, but John has and that’s good enough for me. When database schemata as pointers (or not) were introduced, I was lost.
(In fact, what I wanted Hat to do at the time was an instance of Stu’s concept, removing a superfluous copy of a transaction that appeared in the list because of insufficient synchronization between agents. I just got sidetracked (“ooh, shiny”) when I started thinking about the semantics of the term deduplication).
I just got sidetracked (“ooh, shiny”) when I started thinking about the semantics of the term deduplication
The Hat Effect strikes again!
I guess I’m struggling to discern a concept in Stu’s example – it sounds like a very particular way of doing things mandated in large part by banking regulation not something that could be meaningful to apply in other contexts. There’s a suggestion that regulations forbid banks from deleting anything; but then why remove any duplicates at all? It’s unclear how removing duplicate entries in Stu’s scenario improves the integrity of the dataset – quite the opposite in fact. Dedup, on the other hand, preserves the integrity of the filestream/dataset.
Like I said, this isn’t obvious or intuitive for non-technical people, but then again so much of technology is like that.
why remove any duplicates at all? — at a guess, one side of a transaction might be duplicated and the other not, and then your sums don’t — also daily transaction volume is a thing you might want to get right.
I assume there are audit streams where the multiple registrations and the eventual removal of duplicates all have their own entries.
Mainframes sell – by and large – to businesses that would save time, money, and hassle by migrating to the cloud. As with Cobol, clinging to old and outdated ways of doing things isn’t an endorsement of them, but simply a large scale manifestation of status quo bias.
nemanja, you are in thrall to Trumpoid “drain the swamp” attitudes.
There is no clinging to, and no endorsement of, outdated practices, and no managerial “status quo bias” at the banking system I have worked with (not as an employee) for 20 years. It is the largest in Germany in terms of numbers of customers. It has spent many hundreds of millions of euros over those years modernizing its software and hardware – with some, though limited success.
I am peripherally involved in one or two of those projects. When millions of customers and billions of their euros are in the balance, caution is advised. The software is so intricate, the databases so denormalized (“for speed”), that the bank has no choice but to proceed cautiously.
Startups can play around with Docker and the cloud all they want. That’s a different business.
My theory on howmanyofme.com is that because it uses 1990 census data it adjusts the number of persons having a name by the US population growth from 1990 to 2009 (the copyright date in the footer), which is approximately 23%. So if a surname doesn’t appear on the list of those with more than 100 occurrences in 1990, it will say that fewer than 123 people have the name. But it’s hard to be sure. In any case, it seems clear that 123 and 1,654 are the numbers of persons for the least common surname and given name in its list.
Banks are not permitted to let something like this happen, and then leave the clean-up to the account holders:
Remove Duplicate Entries in Paypal Xero Bank Feeds
Stu, i’m not in thrall to anything – I should clarify that I’m a director of compliance at SAP. You’ve heard of SAP I’m sure? We’re a tad larger than your average startup – in fact we have more employees than any German bank? And yet we are a minnow in the cloud computing world. I’m not trying to “pull rank” just want to establish that I happen to be familiar with German business practices.
I appreciate that billions are at stake when it comes to banks. Guess what – billions are at stake in other industries as well. You think banks are cautious, try aircraft manufacturers – forget billions, human lives are at stake. But Airbus uses the SAP Cloud Platform to keep track of every last screw and rivet – how do you make sense of that?
It’s understandable but wrong to view the metal box sitting in your basement as the safe and reliable choice compared to deploying in the cloud. It makes no more sense for a bank than it does for a hospital or a law firm.
I’m unclear what you were driving at with your example – but I feel compelled to point out that “letting something happen then leaving the clean up to the account holders” is literally the bank business model. But anyway – every piece of software in history, cloud or not, has bugs. If anything, cloud delivery makes it much easier to push out updates and bug fixes.
You have entered into an implicit contract with the store by shopping there
Classic Roman vs. common law difference: for us, contract formation doesn’t even begin until you put the item on the counter, or moving belt, or whatever. From the store’s viewpoint, everything up to that is a solicitation of an offer to buy, for which they counter-offer a price at which they will sell.
Common-law people are shocked by the idea that if you see a sign on a European museum saying “Open 1000-1400” and you show up at 1300 but they’re closed, you can sue the museum (though of course it has defenses). The sign is itself considered a unilateral contract to sell admission to the museum during certain hours, and pacta sunt servanda; if admission is not sold during these hours, it is in effect an anticipatory breach. (I’m papering over some pretty important differences here.)
Companies who manufacture mainframes don’t manufacture other kinds of computers
You mean IBM, and it’s true that IBM doesn’t sell x86 machines any more. The Power line, however, is roughly comparable to x86_64 boxen, with the advantage that IBM can tweak the architecture without worrying about compatibility with everyone else. IBM has never been a commodity provider, which is why they got out of PCs with their razor-thin margins.
But then there’s Hibachi, which sells all kinds of computers from consumer systems right up to mainframes (which are not z/Architecture compliant).
so I’m not sure what they’re more profitable compared to?
25% of IBM’s revenue comes from mainframe hardware and software, and 50% of their profits.
Mainframes sell – by and large – to businesses that would save time, money, and hassle by migrating to the cloud.
z/Architecture machines aren’t actually sold, they are rented by the CPU-month, with different prices for Linux-only (lower) and z/OS-capable (higher) CPUs. (All IBM systems run Linux in full virtualization as opposed to paravirtualization.)
True, some businesses do save money by migration, but it’s no trivial matter, and many consulting companies bring in the $$$$$$$ by making it happen (or trying to). And almost nobody contemplates rewriting their millions of lines of debugged Cobol into C++ or Java or who knows what. These are systems that are truly and exactly mission-critical: if they falter, orders aren’t processed, employees aren’t paid, inventory is unavailable or overstocked, and other disasters happen that can and do take a company down, sometimes in a single day when there is a surge of business.
Are you aware, for example, of the difficulties of running large serially-dependent batch jobs in the cloud? It isn’t easy.
As with Cobol, clinging to old and outdated ways of doing things isn’t an endorsement of them, but simply a large scale manifestation of status quo bias.
Old doesn’t mean outdated, says the 61-year-old programmer. And status-quo bias is clinging to the way things are in spite of the evidence. Quite apart from the cognitive and informational limits that often make “good enough” status quo the best choice (“if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it”), you also sacrifice many present advantages of those “old and outdated” systems, including:
The ability to process (with a fully-built-out leading-but-not-bleeding-edge z13 box) about 30KTPS.
Unmatched computer security, both in the form of bug and virus resistance and in the form of unmatched ability to encrypt/decrypt in a commercial system.
Static RAM and an extremely high-performance internal bus.
Non-commodity disk hardware with huge capacities yet extremely high performance.
Reduced floor space (modern mainframes are refrigerator-sized) and need for cabling.
Incredibly high reliability including hardware hot-swapping without performance impact.
The great simplicity of writing software under the assumption that your jobs will succeed as opposed to the cloud assumption that they will fail.
Cost savings of 35-50% in the right situations from converting to mainframe operation.
I could go on, though this isn’t MainframeHat.
When database schemata as pointers (or not) were introduced, I was lost.
I actually was lost earlier at “metadata (i.e. pointers)”. Stu simply said that database schemes/schemas/schemata (take your pick) were metadata, not that they were pointers.
a very particular way of doing things […] not something that could be meaningful to apply in other contexts
It’s removing inconsistencies from multiple sources, an incredibly common kind of processing when dealing with that very old-fashioned thing, Big Data. It would be fair to say that the financial services industry invented Big Data, and certainly their datasets are the biggest. What is more, they have to process them exactly, not approximately and statistically, hence the
Pyramidsmainframe. And so we go in gyro-gyrorondo.In the 1960s when million-transaction days became common, half the firms on Wall Street went broke because their ad hoc, improvised systems couldn’t handle the sudden demand. The rest had prudently computerized (which meant mainframes) in advance of when they absolutely had to and sailed through. They are still sailing through now, when 6 billion transactions per day would be considered an extraordinarily light trading day.
Have you ever noticed the marked resemblance between web browsers and 3720 terminals?
I should clarify that I’m a director of compliance at SAP
Well, I concede that you know more about enterprise software, and possibly mainframes, than I had originally supposed. On the other hand, your employer has a vested interest in the suggestion that mainframes (for which they sold software and services that used to make money) are an inferior technical solution to one or another cloud system (for which they sell software and services that presumably do make money).
Those things only need to be kept secret from terrorists. Bank data need to be kept secret from a whole lot more people.
I don’t know if “SAP Cloud” is normally on-premises or something you buy from a provider — but of course you can build a cloud solution that will give you the reliability and performance guarantees a bank needs, if you know what you’re doing and are selling to people who know what sort of price tag that implies. And I’m sure it helps if you only want to allow a single software suite to run.
But building the equivalent of a traditional banking infrastructure on commodity cloud capacity (Amazon, Azure, and their ilk) — from what I’ve seen, you would need man-centuries to develop a system that works as well as a simple batch queue, or to restructure all your programs to work in parallel and with no ordering — and you’d need a prohibitive amount of overprovisioning to compensate for the operational model of the provider. (Which is, roughly — if you run your website on our computers, it’s usually up. Don’t worry, be happy).
In my previous job, our risk analysis went roughly: If Amazon is down, people will be angry about 20 other things before they notice we’re down, and their SLA monitoring probably runs on Amazon too. Don’t worry, be happy. We were not a bank.
David, an application being hosted in the cloud does not imply that the data is public. Of course, hosted solutions are vulnerable to hacking but no more than your basement mainframe, so the real question is how your security team measures up to the one at AWS or Google.
John – SAP’s primary concern is staying in business – on balance our customer base is wary of change and has a minimal tolerance for technology-related risk. This is especially the case with mid-sized customers, particularly ones involved in manufacturing. (Larger enterprises are more amenable since they are more cognizant of the risks of not migrating). We are doing our best to accommodate them and ease their transition. But in many ways our own hand is being forced so there’s not that much room to maneuver. These companies used to buy SAP ERM, install it on a dedicated machine, and it would work on the same hardware and OS for 7 years – that is not a realistic scenario in the cloud computing world – we could not provide that even if we wanted to. I certainly sympathize with the notion that having a tool and dye business should not require you to build out a serious IT department – but the new reality is that your choices are either to effectively outsource this functionality and place your faith in hosted solutions, or to try and go it alone (which in reality means praying you don’t get hacked).
hosted solutions are vulnerable to hacking but no more than your basement mainframe
Is there published evidence for this claim? (To make my personal situation clear, in my first job I was on the minicomputer rather than the mainframe team, and I have zero personal experience with mainframes.) My understanding is that while privilege-escalation attacks are definitely possible, few people have either the skillz or the toolz to make them, and they pretty much require an account on the mainframe to proceed.
“Never use your own cryptographic algorithm unless (a) your cryptographic and cryptanalytic skills are second to none, and (b) you trust absolutely nobody.”
There are always vulnerabilities and exploits – especially if you’re running a more old fashioned type of mainframe with a non-Linux OS. These days servers are more typically configured as “bare metal” – effectively they are a mini-cloud provider, but certain types of customers are really married to this idea that their computing resources should take tangible physical form.
Of course no one is safe from hacking – the value proposition of hosted platforms is that the responsibility for protecting the infrastructure is shared (on a mainframe it’s entirely down to you); Amazon can spend literally billions on securing and updating their platform, which frees you up to focus on your core competencies. Amazon or Google present a very hard target from a hacker’s perspective – like a heavily fortified villa surrounded by an alligator moat and patrolled by armed guards – your own mainframe is more like the house from Home Alone in relying on household items, except it’s not a movie so it doesn’t end well for you.
No computing paradigm can protect you from your own carelessness or stupidity. By far the most common ways for attackers to gain access to your data is by phishing and stolen credentials – i.e. squarely within your zone of responsibility whether you deploy in the cloud or on premise. As I said I’m sympathetic to my customer’s concerns but ultimately there’s no hiding from this no matter how averse to change you are. “It ain’t all waitin’ on you” , to quote my favorite movie
Whenever anyone talks about cloud computing outages, I think of this.
Yes, platform security and perimeter defense, those I’d happily outsource to Google or Amazon. But when your application is built for a single node with huge throughput, it’s hard to move it to a mesh of individually unreliable, smaller nodes.
And even when you’re building new stuff — as long as we can’t get the developers to make a test case for reconnecting to Active MQ if its IP address changes (or rather, get the PM to allocate the time) — we are keeping it inhouse.
“It ain’t all waitin’ on you” , to quote my favorite movie
Great scene. I’ll have to try to watch the movie sometime.
My favorite line from another movie: “They ain’t all listening to you. They got work to do.”
Google can’t find that one.
Of course not – but it’s physically accessible at least to the owner of the cloud, so the encryption better be really, really, really good.
Really, really, really, really good encryption is straightforward nowadays; that’s no longer an issue, unless you are trying to keep “state-level actors” like Mossad or the NSA out. The weaknesses are now all related to social engineering, key misuse, etc.
I certainly sympathize with the notion that having a tool and dye business should not require you to build out a serious IT department
So do I. But as I was told when I went to work for a bank, whereas the manufacturing department of Yoyodyne Tool & Die produces tools and dies, the manufacturing department of a bank is the IT department, because a bank’s products are IT applications.
“produces tools and dies.” How said that these workers do no not enjoy a period of retirement, where they may rest from their labours and direct their minds to higher things!
Yoyodyne has never been distinguished by its high regard for the welfare of its workforce.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Adventures_of_Buckaroo_Banzai_Across_the_8th_Dimension
Almost as bad as Weyland-Yutani …