Posts by Noodle 56 publicly visible posts • joined 29 Sep 2009
Unexpected bills are nothing new, have these people never been through an Oracle audit before?
"Well Mr Customer, I realize you have paid an eye watering sum of money to have our supposed "Enterprise" edition, but it looks to me like you've used advanced compression on those indexes, so you better dig deep and hand over some more cash!"
An insurance company I worked at had a similar experience, tech showed up to service a UPS unit and was supposed to switch power away from UPS unit while keeping everything else on. Instead they managed to turn off all power to the entire server room. On a Friday. Absolute chaos ensued, staff were summoned back from holidays, one particular bit of Fujitsu kit would not come back up and required a tech from HQ in Japan to remote in and coax it back to life. A heroic weekend-long effort by IT team managed to get everything back on line by Monday.
A week or so later the IT team received an invoice from the UPS tech for his work. Suffice to say some colourful language and loud phone calls later the invoice was consigned to the rubbish bin, unpaid.
"People getting used to the idea that the car will simply sort everything out so there's no need to pay attention."
This is exactly the problem with Teslas. It's (mostly) not a technology problem, it's the way they are marketed. We all know that no-one reads the manual any more and if you give enough people a feature called "autopilot" then some of them are going to interpret that literally, leading to accidents like this one.
Primarily due to a huge increase in the amount of goods being shipped to the US from China, compounded by decades of underinvestment in the ports themselves so they had no spare capacity, and then the reduced availability of all kinds of staff such as port workers and truck drivers due to Covid-19.
With the limited facts available this sounds like a harsh but ultimately fairly predictable outcome from publicly sharing an opinion about anything remotely controversial in these hyper sensitive times.
Although why people persist in sharing these kinds of opinion and social commentary pieces on LinkedIn, which is supposed to be a network for professionals, is beyond me.
.. And also for bored programmers testing things, as we found at the company I worked for in the late 90s. We generated mailing address data that was printed on labels for catalogs and such. One client was very surprised to receive a sample catalog addressed to "Satan, 666 Devil Street" with various other occult references attached.
Fortunately they saw the funny side.
By way of contrast, I worked for a company a few years ago that had a monthly AWS bill of several million $. We were based outside the US but had a dedicated support manager and three technical consultants from AWS on 24/7 call, plus regular support meetings and NDA briefings on product roadmaps etc. On several occasions we ended up in direct contact with product teams to help resolve issues. We did have some issues with AWS but support definitely wasn't one of them.
Obviously there is no "spending cap" because it would be impossible to implement by stopping all possible activities across dozens of services that might incur a charge beyond some nominal spend limit. Even AWS cannot calculate total spend across a whole account fast enough to guarantee some process that might stop all services in time to prevent a limit being exceeded.
In my experience almost all users of AWS accounts for training or experimentation purposes have no issues keeping within the free tier limits. On the rare occasion someone does exceed the limit (and I have done this myself once by accidentally leaving a database cluster running) a message to support has been enough to have the charge reversed.
Basically if you don't do your homework to understand how free tier services work then you're responsible for the charges incurred, but even then you probably won't have to pay them.
"Setting a price on a product or service that is significantly higher than recent prices offered on or off Amazon"
In other words, if you offer your goods on your own or someone else's website for less than it appears on Amazon you can find your listing suspended or potentially your account banned.
Based on my own experiences with local Oracle sales and licensing teams this is completely in character, i.e. treating their own customers with complete contempt. We all know how hard it is for large enterprises to ensure they're compliant with licensing agreements, especially the byzantine arrangements favoured by Oracle, Microsoft et al. - the good vendors will understand this and work with customers to reach an amicable solution. The Oracle's of this world take a completely uncompromising approach - pay up or we'll pull the rug out from under you! This happens so much I can't understand why people still choose Oracle as a vendor.
The tragedy of efforts like this is that they come from a basically good place. Most people agree that having diverse teams in terms of culture and perspective is beneficial in terms of product design, customer experience and also for a healthy company culture. They understand that to achieve that we need talented people from all backgrounds to feel like they will have an equal opportunity to succeed and enjoy their work.
However banning completely context appropriate and neutral words like "illegal" and "native" doesn't further this agenda at all, the inherent ridiculousness of it undermines real and important work being done to improve diversity and inclusion. Associations like this are why diversity and inclusion efforts are so often met with scepticism and apathy.
Somebody already does pay. According to the last quarterly press release from Alphabet the revenue from YouTube Ads was over 5 billion dollars for that quarter alone. I don't know what their operating costs are for YouTube, but while I'm sure they're huge I'm also sure its not close to 5 billion dollars a quarter.
If you don't think designing and running a multi-player game infrastructure capable of hosting 10 million concurrent players qualifies them as a technology company then I'm not sure why you're reading this website. By that logic Uber and Tesla aren't technology companies either.
I've seen that happen in a union contract negotiation. The employer sent what it thought was a final draft for the union to sign, the union surreptitiously added a few extra clauses and sent it back signed.
The employer counter-signed, only discovering a few days later that they'd agreed to give everyone extra leave.
Well ok, I guess that explains it.. although it seems insultingly reductive to simplify the many and varied peoples originating from Africa and Europe to "Black" and "White" but I suppose not surprising given the creeping infantilism of culture these days rendering everything into simplistic binary concepts.
"the magic is in the free-flowing unlimited human interaction"
Maybe it's just the offices I've worked in over the years but that's not a description of an office environment that I recognise. Even in the most modern open plan offices, anyone doing anything technical spent most of their time focused on their own screen and relatively little time "interacting" apart from scheduled meetings and the occasional chat around the coffee machine, and everyone was fine with that. In fact the most regular complaint I heard was people wanted a more secluded environment so they could focus better.
The younger people are the ones making sense here, using the standard system of weight measurement used in almost every country on Earth apart from the UK and USA. As an ex-pat now living in a fully metric country I can tell you the rest of the world looks at the UKs continued use of archaic measurement systems such as "stones" and "pints" in bemusement and as confirmation that it's a country firmly stuck in the past.
Pretty sure 1995 was 25 years ago, not 30.. unless you're ready this in 2025 and it's all good.
Also, the early 2000s farce caused by those idiot market traders was hardly what held Britain back from adopting metric, considering the metric system was officially introduced in 1960s and I went to school in the late 80s where we were taught only in metric. I'd say more pure pig headed stubbornness in the face of change, which is a longstanding British tradition.
Same here, which my IT team discovered when we decided to implement an MS Exchange to regularly empty users Deleted Items to save storage space (it was the early 2000s). Cue wails of "where are all my "saved" emails?".
Deleted items restored, we decided to simply ask users to empty their Deleted Items in Outlook themselves. A day or so later I happened upon a nice older lady who was painstakingly selecting one Deleted Items email at a time and pressing the Delete key... she had hundreds to go. I gently pointed out the "right-click, Empty Deleted Items" option.
If "things might go wrong" is your reason for not using cloud based systems then you can't have been working in the same IT industry as me. Most on-premise software dreams of the kind of uptime most cloud software enjoys. Many companies I've worked at had systems that went down on a weekly basis, or worse.
This story is about a business who bought a POS product from MICROS (not Oracle), which has since been taken over by Oracle and slowly run into the ground in order to force customers onto their new POS service. I've worked at a different business in the exact same situation, it's typical Oracle tactics.
Landlines are a thing of the past for many here in New Zealand, thanks to ubiquitous 3G and 4G mobile coverage and improving DSL speeds (and soon fibre to the home connections) - certainly for those of us in urban areas. We gave up having a landline about four years ago after we realised we were paying about $30-40 a month for something we never used - we've never missed it. All ISPs here offer a "naked broadband" connection of a line that can only be used for broadband internet. Some offer VOIP style internet phone arrangements instead.
.. that the majority of people storing files on an upload site are doing so for pirated copies of movies and music. Is there any evidence of this? As far as I know Megaupload had a huge number of completely legitimate users storing personal and business files, who are all now being penalised for the alleged illegal behaviour of some other users of the same site. Whether or not Kim Dotcom knew about the alleged piracy is neither here nor there - you wouldn't confiscate the contents of an entire mall if you found one shop selling illegal goods, nor would you prosecute the builder or owner of the mall. There is a market for private online storage that is completely unrelated to piracy.
Lots of talk about programming and software but not much detail on what if anything is going to be covered regarding operating systems, hardware, networking and the like. I am not a sysadmin but I think anyone seriously considering an IT career needs at least a basic grounding in these areas.
I doubt MS will be killing off Silverlight any time soon - the new "Power View" data visualisation tool in the yet-to-be-released SQL Server 2012 is built on Silverlight and this is a new show piece feature that is bound to be supported for at least a couple of iterations of SQL Server.
The recent case of US drone control systems being infected by a virus:
http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2011/10/virus-hits-drone-fleet/
These systems were not connected to the internet (probably not on a network of any kind), the assumed path of infection being via USB drives being used to transfer updated maps etc. to the control systems.
I have to wonder what people who want "complete privacy" are doing using Facebook in the first place. The only way they are going to achieve that is not use social network websites at all. People need to realise that Facebook is a business and it provides a "free" service by mining the data generated by the relationships and attributes of its millions of users. You don't get something for nothing, so if people are not happy with the way Facebook does things, use a different network or don't use them at all!
Reminds me of a great quote I heard recently: “If you are not paying for it, you’re not the customer; you’re the product being sold.”
"Really? So Australia has no treason laws? Australia is not part of the war in Afghanistan? "
Australia has treason laws - Section 80 of the Criminal Code defines it and I think the relevant section is:
"A person commits an offence, called treason, if the person:
..
(e) engages in conduct that assists by any means whatever, with intent to assist, an enemy:
(i) at war with the Commonwealth, whether or not the existence of a state of war has been declared; and
(ii) specified by Proclamation made for the purpose of this paragraph to be an enemy at war with the Commonwealth; or
(f) engages in conduct that assists by any means whatever, with intent to assist:
(i) another country; or
(ii) an organisation;
that is engaged in armed hostilities against the Australian Defence Force.
The key phrase there is "with intent to assist" - it would have to be shown that the guys behind Wikileaks deliberately and intentionally published information for the purpose of assisting "the enemy". While you might argue that it was unwise to publish *some* of the information they have uploaded, I don't think it would stand up as treason.
I think these are internal industry standards for banks, and other institutions that print cheques, aimed at reducing fraud and speeding up processing, therefore they probably don't apply to your average punter. Are previously noted a cheque can legally be printed or written on anything as far as I can make out.
Unless I am misreading this, the filter applies only to websites / URLs. So it will have no effect on any other method of obtaining dodgy material, e.g. peer-to-peer networks, so whats stopping anyone of a mind to from just using bittorrent or whatever instead?
Seems like a huge amount of bureaucratic meddling to produce a pretty negligible result in the end, while simultaneously shuffling in a secretive piece of government censorship that is potentially open to abuse in the years to come.
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