Posts by Denarius 2180 publicly visible posts • joined 20 Jun 2009
might have been a slow day. NSA might be running short of crypto to crack Amazon might have broken even that day at least, but it does suggest a lot of capacity is lying around. Just seems odd that after a career watching batch operation being derided by client server real time interactive enthusiasts that a solid batch job situation outside a bank is reported.
thanks Henry. I thought this was so familiar and you rattled off the details. And results. OTOH, Musk has a track record, so it may come off. If so, it might mean the telcos will begin to be nice to their customers a bit more, especially on data charges.
Run Clam on the Debian box because it mounts M$ OS partitions. Also, there are browser based attacks that hit most OS. Some chance of notification may help. I have amused myself when really bored by booting Linux and scanning my NT and FAT32 partitions and noting what is found lurking in the $DISK$\System Volume Information or a temp dir fifty directories down somewhere. Rebooting to windows and running one of the more recommended AV products which rarely spot the same suspect binary. So this BOFH is reality, not satire. None the less, a beer to Simon, because his monologue was well expressed. What I loathe about these free products is how, despite BigSwamps attempts to prevent infection by throttling the network, I still get massive download size claims for a mere 200 MB binary. In contrast, usable freebies like VLC updates are about the size stated on tin.
If I read article correctly, a Solaris container type of OS instance was described. Whether a sparse instance or a full copy via a snapshot filesystem was not clear. If it works as well as Solaris containers it is a good way to go. A Linux application container has its uses, but sometime users want the whole experience. Developer for instance.
After stalking fish stalking me around reefs in tropical waters in my well spent spear fishing youth I was amazed how hard it could be to fool some of the fish, some of the time. Bit like humans really...
A beer for the restraint in fish puns to editor and author. Note for the soft of heart, some of those fish had big teeth and were over 2 meters long. One was closer to 4 and tried to bite.
Perhaps an exercise in 3 categories: Moderate Enterprise, say small data center with some DR capacity for compute: 2 x 4 TB relational database backends, DC, file and print server 10 GB with backup of any kind., 10 GB center switches, dual Gb external gateways.
SMB: 1 TB database server, 5 TB storage GB network and a backup strategy
Single business person: 2 TB file store, excellent compute, say minimum 4 core, and print server, backup.
I know just being in right place and right time some real bargains and good free stuff can be had if one has storage until hardware required. Bring on the war stories. What could Trev come up with ?
@Bernard. Possibly, but we are at a unique time in whats left of human history. Assuming the future at least resembles the present (for sake of argument) it seems that natural population increase will level off due to rising living standards, which seem to be the most effective voluntary birth control developed yet. I know this has been disputed, but at no time in history have population increases trended down and become negative in many developed countries without a Maunder Minimum, seasoned with a plague or two and the next round of barbarian invasions. In short, a global good standard of living that is sustainable seems possible if energy costs are not made obscenely expensive.What does this mean for networking and computers ? The 1950s with Jetsons type 3D TV and video phones managed by an Orwellian Staasi ?
<tin hat>. Why do you think ebola has become popular ? And pensions and health care under bean counter attack while the top yourself now enthusiasts are increasing in stridency and publicity? Somewhere, some think tank decided upping death rate was a good thing. With the OMG, we all gonna die/terrorists are coming/environmental collapse/Carrington event Mk2/FUD of week, a few more people will be scared into dying, or eventually welcome some bureaucratic organisation to arrange it. It all fits the pattern !! Why not just bring back smoking ads for cigarettes with asbestos filters.<\tin hat>
I!Spartacus final para seems right. The expectations about aging have changed in some areas, but not in employment capabilities. I have noticed agism disguised as efficiency in my IT work, but also that those who can handle contracting seem to have bad patches but mostly do OK to very well. There needs to be changes in working life expectations, coupled with a change in expectations. Simplest solution might simply be to mandate all HR staff be over 65.
the feral HR departments who have a fixation on a degree for anything, whether relevant or not. Finally, what has coding got to do with basics ? Standard English, Maths and formal logic is more effective. Kids who cant read are not going to be good coders in _any_ language. And for that matter, just how many App coders does the planet/consumers need anyway ? No doubt this will be eventually shown to be another taxpayer subsidy for big end of town.
the Federal Public service, in general, is so far ahead of the bloated, rule bound, rigid, counter-intuitive process driven private sector in efficiency and rational decision making it is criminal that hockey puck and Co are destroying much more of the functioning departments. Like ATO tax auditors. Perhaps OHS and poisonel excepted. I have worked in large and small enterprises and departments with the same assessment. But, then, the donors must be repaid somehow, musn't they ? And Ayn Rand is the messiah. Pah, pigs just went hypersonic.
But I digress. A casual discussion around any mixed company event will illustrate that most of Oz's enterprises are as corrupt as any political fund raising organisation. I have nearly choked at how private sector behaviour which would get any public servant, (except in Defence) gaoled is SOP. Purchasing form instance. And we have not got the the Boards, mates and CEOs yet. Back to the cold shower, dark quiet room before another cardiac alert.
@MacRodent: What pile of scripts ? usually a few in /etc/init.d with links to start/stop/do_something in the appropriate /etc/rc[0-5].d directories. What is hard about simple scripts that can stop, start,reload a specifc set of binaries ? On some servers with a lot of dependancies spawning shells to run scripts can have a brief high load. Which is why Debian has dash shell, small, fast, light to do start/stop with minimal load and even less attack surface. Replace this well understood set of design and process with binary blobs controlling a black box with a huge attack surface. Pity OpenSolaris is dead. Later releases looked OK, even if I prefer btrfs to ZFS.
gender has nothing to do with being blinded by dominant cultural views such as Harvard Business college, trickle down economics and managment myths. The companies are doomed, but I seriously doubt even Dave and Bill could help HP now. Thomas Watson of any mark would be helpless in modern IBM with the stranglehold process has on it. The world and market has changed. No longer near monopolies in IT.
not quite full story. Remember PowerPC uses Si on Cu, a dead ended technology it seems. Good at time, just superceded. Intel has a better chip making technology. Accordingly, sell plant and contract output back. IBM have been encouraging Linux for a long time. How long do you think AIX has to run ? 10 years maybe ? Did IBM see this coming ? I think so.
Finally, it is an excellent illustration of the problem for _BIG_ industries as Tim writes. The cost of buying those chip writing machines, one supplier in Germany ITIRC, requires massive turnover at any unit cost to be worthwhile. Hence as CPUs and signal processing chips get more capable and complex one needs a bigger market. Even RISC like ARM is growing in size. Hence the steady erosion of architectures and profits outside the dominant one, if any. When did SPARC last make a decent buck ? MIPS ? PA_RISC, Itanic ?
In aviation Boeing and Airbus have same issue. How many flying cattle trucks does the world need ? Fortunately for Airbus, Boeing have employed, IMHO, a thoroughly modern merkin CEO and board, so they wont be around many more decades. Probably be bought out by Sukhoi around 2050.
Finally, I regard food miles, buy local food concepts as just another european or merkin greenie protectionist misrepresentation. Fortunately, chocolate and coffee have to be traded to the frozen wastelands of the North where these creatures have a heartland of sorts, so the slogans will never quite ring true.
a crap economy and great old buildings. IMHO, UTS seems to be ensuring we have only crap versions of architecture. A brown paper bag is an excellent symbol of NSW and Qld politics, so it is appropriately ugly. Thanks to said BPB economy, it looks like Oz will also have a crap economy. Nothing against Woz. Great engineer, but staff without defined duties seem to be an unnecessary overhead.
Our beloved telcos might not be able to persuade us to buy their low cost low bit rate smoke signals if you keep that up ! Don't you understand mobile phones are not for ordinary people? Only PR flacks, bribed politicians and mining moguls need them. The rest back to the coal mines, right now.
How I would love even a 3G connection that equalled my old 56K dialup modem. Nationalise the telcos infrastructure using the money from the superannuation of the fat fools who sold it off so cheaply. How else can the spooks spy on all and sundry if the network chokes every time they remotely turn on the mikes and cameras ? maybe that is already the root cause of the crap speed on the backbones.
fast dialup modems at 14.4 then 56 KB/sec, beating the 3G crap and choked networks of today. Still have a ~ 20 inch HPUX box somewhere with Mosaic and Netscape. Being that old, it will probably power up immediately. The sense of adventure reaching out across the Net and discovering that most sites were as dull as any other. Sigh. El Reg is probably the only news site I have used for over a decade. And in the drawer, a Netscape biro in working condition. Meanwhile, lurking in my Win32 archives for when I need pain (never, just packratting), Win3.1 with Cello and for intense suffering, indicating what would happen, Mosaic 2. Its ability to crash heralded the incoming Internut Exploder we all love to loathe.
not lived in tribal societies, have you ? Or read a dictionary. Despite the debasing of the word civilsation to mean any culture, no matter how unstable or nomadic, civilisation means city building. ie settled and organised on a large scale. Despite the efforts of modern education and mass media, it takes a few years to make true barbarians again. Or soccer in an afternoon.;-)
@ Trev, good post, have an upvote for making the excellent point about questions that Should Never Be Asked. Especially poignant for me as OZ Official Censorship by the so-called Right wing now equals the Censorship of the so-called Left Wing. Farewell freedom. However the reference to the Dark Tetrad alluded to in article made me think of multinational employed PHBs or local councils, not trolls. Must be a sign of age induced tolerance because the ElReg commentards dont have the viciousness of the newsworthy trolls. Even the materialist religion bigots are mild because of their predictability. BTW, where is aManFromMars lately ?
@bep, not really. As technology improved, cars got much cleaner. So did coal power stations. Pesticides are getting used less and are less damaging. In the developing world it is messier, but even that is changing for the better. As London cleaned up Thames because it ran under the noses of Parliament, Beijing will clean up its air, because even senior cadres breathe.
indeed. Political activity of any sort should only be funded by human party members with a top limit fairly small to ensure political parties must be believable and seen as relevant enough to attract members. In short, the legal fictions known as companies need to be kept away from all political activity on pain of confiscation of their assets and serious painful punishment of their management and boards. Reducing legal protections enjoyed by board members for major obvious stuffups might also sharpen manglements focus on the job at hand. Finally, deal with the legal situation that demands companies must be functionally psychopathic.
Jon was not the first suggesting doing something different. Robert X Cringely put up a modest proposal that he thought would protect the relatively innocent (and poor) while not rewarding the financial goblins. Instead of bailing out bankers, pay off the dodgy mortgages. Banks get money and stay solvent,, the debt clears (the sensible goal) and people remained housed. He argued it would be cheaper than bailing out banks. Probably was a better idea simply because the Fed has given the banks a steady income for doing nothing but storing large quantities of printed paper and failing to do what banks are meant to do.
well spotted veti. Compared to the mass killings of Tamberlaine and a few others around that dark time, Adolph Schicklegruber and his commie mate Yosef were schoolboys. The assorted plagues of the last 2 millennia are way bigger than 1918. The we get into the real eco-catastrophies. End of Maya with 30 plus year drought. Earlier South American civilisations wiped out by multiple eruptions that cleared 200km areas of all life. The Bronze Dark age and Thera around 1400BC. In SE Asia Indonesian volcanoes wiped out indigenous civilisations under 2 meters of ash.. We have never had it so good, even in the 20th century. All of this culling of homo sapiens without a single anthropogenic green house to blame.
I note the number of "Oh crap, we're doomed" stories are on the up from various sources, a few even credible. Might even be right, but for what it is worth, I agree with Tim W. It wont because we ran out of stuff. I suspect it the symptoms ElRegs noble commentards refer, such as risk and reward being disconnected are relevant, but mere symptoms of the underlying causes. I suggest the rise of materialism as a dogma rather than a useful approach might be a deeper cause for reasons materialists wont understand.
@yaac. Old view from vested interests. Designer has it right way round, otherwise humans would have a lot of internal reflection issues. Secondly, given we only have enough video CPU capacity to process about 5% in HD ITIRC, with the rest in (ahem) VGA quality, the design is quite efficient, stable and economical.
Matt, thank you for small mercies. Sometimes a little info is too much info. Bit like the esteemed Alistair this week I can do without some items of esoteric knowledge. He was unusually waffly this week. Perhaps his wifes' research was more unsettling than usual ? A full beer and upvote for Evil Graham. Spluttered coffee over lunch.
On a serious note (really) I wonder how many reader tech surveys are disguised hunts for targeted advertising.
what is the betting that any solution will require
(a) lots of record keeping and virtual red tape, needing to be "archived"
(b) at users expense
(c) charged to internet users and of course will require a special new quango filled with technically illiterate lawyers
(d) also funded out of a user pays levy of some kind
(e) which is also the standard excuse for slower network speeds to ensure everyone is on "Team Orstralia"
(f) unless one is subscribing to that waste of bytes, Foxtroll.
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