A tracker mortgage with 0% interest? Computer says no

geir — Mon, 02 Feb 2009 23:13:24 +0000

In the good old days of the credit boom, back in July 2007, Cheltenham & Gloucester offered borrowers a tracker mortgage which would charge borrowers 1.01% less than the Bank of England’s base rate.

The Times Online now reports that on the 5th of February, the base rate might go from its current level of 1.5% to as low as 1%. This means that the tracker mortgage mentioned above would hit rock bottom, or zero percent.

However, Lloyds Banking Group, the owner of C&G say that:

because its computer systems could not cope with zero, it would be temporarily charging 0.001 per cent if base rate is cut to 1per cent.

Computer says no. Beautiful.

A 10 year old quote from Dennis Chao on Doom as a sysadmin tool

geir — Tue, 27 Jan 2009 18:03:01 +0000

On Hacker news, I recently came across this quote from Dennis Chao on the pitfalls of using Doom as a system administration tool:

[One] of the problems of using Doom as a tool for system administration: Certain processes are vital to the computer’s operation and should not be killed. For example, after I took the screenshot of myself being attacked by csh, csh was shot by friendly fire from behind, possibly by tcsh or xv, and my session was abruptly terminated.

Attacked by csh and killed by friendly fire from tcsh? What’s not to like?

Geir Freysson - The Internet Industrialist » Geek

A tracker mortgage with 0% interest? Computer says no

A 10 year old quote from Dennis Chao on Doom as a sysadmin tool