Posts by Roland6

Re: Hmm

You mean I can change my water supplier and magically the water coming out of my tap will be sparkling and from Buxton Spa.

Re: 20% operating margin is huge

For Q1 2023, Infosys reported 17.5 percent year-on-year growth in revenue to $4.4 billion. Operating margin was 20 percent,

Assuming a typo. Wipro - a direct competitor, reported an operating margin of 17.7 per cent for 1Q 2022...

Re: Waste

> I’m sure we would have seen more such reactors than the light water reactors that we currently have.

No, design doesn't really matter, it was still nuclear and politicians didn't want to approach the public/voters and since the energy problem will only happen some decades down the road, they simply kicked the nuclear energy ball down the road...

Re: Musk has about 44 billion reasons

I wonder if he collected the evidence to support his claims whilst he was working at Twitter...

I assume he has passed those documents on to someone who can securely store them until they are needed in court (ie. beyond the reach of any search warrant Twitter might serve). Otherwise, this is just heresay.

Re: Heating

>(Icon only applies for its intrinsic appearance)

But it does bear some resemblance to a i486 without heat sink...

If memory serves me correctly, the i486 was the last Intel CPU without built-in thermal protection.

Re: Obvious question

>Because when I had a go at implementing a programming language, I made damn sure array accesses never went out-of-bounds

Did your programming language support dynamically sized arrays?

One of the problems with K&R C was the behaviour around some library operations wasn't clearly defined. So is a write beyond a boundary always bad, or is it legitimate; just that the developer wasn't practising defensive programming, so implemented it poorly?

>If no one else bid then that should have been a red flag

To whom?

I suspect the Police were happy to award the contract to Fujitsu, but because of the monetary value they had to go out to public tender.

The interesting contract is going to be the one that migrates applications and data off the Fujitsu mainframe...

Re: Disaster waiting to happen

However, they were installed on the same roof with the assumption that the ambient air temperature and movement would always permit the conditioning units to work. The high temperatures have proved that to be an invalid assumption...

Round me with temperatures of circa 41C+ in the shade, on many industrial parks, businesses had removed the side panels and were enhancing the cooling effect by spraying the condensers with water.

What I found interesting with an ambient room temperature of 38C (outside 41C) was how hot things got in the office. So a client had WiFi AP's crashing because they had case temperatures of circa 43C - obvious really given hot air rises... They also had PoE switches faulting (which also caused APs to fail), I suspect because the temperature was causing the thermal protection to operate. Interestingly, the equipment was only specified for use in 0~40C, but I was recording case temperatures of 42C. My takeaway is that if the ambient room temperature goes above circa 35C, expect equipment to start faulting for no obvious reason. I'm glad I had put temperature probes in all their core data cabinets as they enabled me to quickly link the equipment faults to the temperature.

Re: $2/kwh is a lot of money

>I'm not sure I understand how your payback can be so slow..

Firstly, this was for a pure solar panel installation, no batteries. So the only saving was on my then current daytime electricity usage. As the feed in tariffs were being removed, I assumed all surplus electricity would effectively earn me nothing. Finally, as you note the utilities 'love' solar panels as they enable them to put such customers on special low user tariffs ie. significantly higher cost per unit.

Secondly, the installation price I was using was a raw quote obtained without all the usual sales b*llocks(*).

Thirdly, I was wanting the then newly available higher efficiency panels, which would have raised the price..

(*) It is surprisingly difficult to get a reasonable quote for anything major like solar panels, double glazing in the UK, without the provider insisting that all people with an interest in the property are present so that they can comply with the law and send a salesperson along. Meaning the initial price can be x2 the actual price, giving the salesperson room to negotiate their commission and offer "sign now" discounts...

Re: Sharing documents

>we would simply send a DOCX or a XLSX file or both as part of the initial negotiations

Much depends on what you mean by "initial".

Personally, if I was not expecting an email from you, I'm highly likely to regard it as spam and simply delete the message.

Once we have some level of contact, I'm more likely to save the attachment to HDD and rely on the AV scanning it to find anything untoward. However, it is not uncommon for such invitation documents to be sent from some random email address rather than from the contact I've been communicating with...

Well given the discussion around the lower temperatures of CO2 and the power output levels for the size of equipment they are using, I suggest they have an eye on lower temperature heat sources such as solar-thermal and geothermal, at worst 60C is well within the capabilities of a domestic gas boiler and on packaging it into something that would sit in a corner of a shed/garage. IE. an environment where high-pressure steam would be dangerous...

Re: "and by making sure employee behavior is driven towards best practices."

>If something cannot detect eicar or a test script payload, how do I know it is working?

That's only the beginning...

I'm p***ed off with a major provider of cloud security to businesses, their product seems to be doing its job, however, it keeps sending me "you are under attack" alerts, go to the dashboard to investigate and find there is no detailed information, not even the IP address'es of where "the attack" is originating from. So I'm unable to do anything to mitigate "the attack". For one "attack" I did do some legwork, only to find (and subsequently confirmed by reproducing the alert) the source was myself having finger problems logging on as admin, so taking a few attempts to get the password right in quick succession; I decided to ignore the advice to set up a VPN...

>Is OpenIndiana that bad?

To be attactive to enterprise, it really needs a business behind it; like what Red Hat Inc has done with the RedHat distribution.

Thinking about this does raise the question why HP haven't done this and got into bed with SPARC International, given HP court battles with Oracle.

Aside: A quick look at the OpenIndiana website, indicates they didn't get rights to the full system documentation - the document list and contents does seem to be thinner than I remember the box of documentation Sun shipped.

Re: This raises a lot of questions...

But was real data actually transferred?

Because if it was, I suggest the Trusts have potentially lost a lot more, as that data is now "in the wild".

Re: Not the same.

>you'll need a bunch of power supplies, enough cabling to get them all talking which would probably end up being a big network switch, some structure for holding them all so their heat doesn't slow down the nearby nodes, and at least one device with sufficient storage so that all nodes can boot from it and store data on it.

Seems an old 4U server chassis/tower case might be a suitable platform.

Which actually raises a question about the Aaeon Epic, namely is it available in a blade package, so that a number of these could be slotted into a single chassis, enabling them to be used as server blades or even individual workstations(*).

(*)Back in the 1980's there were products that enabled this style of working, using the PC motherboard to manage disk access. If I remember correctly, up to 4 blade PC's could be fitted to the expansion slots in an AT chassis, with the ports (monitor, keyboard, mouse and headphones) externally accessible.

Re: Why not RAID 10 on SSD

Well, the article isn't particularly clear, but I suspect the servers were on GCP, so the SAN options are limited to what Google offered.

It does seem the team at Discord had a hard lesson in fundamentals of design for transactional performance, with solution design being made more difficult by the use of cloud.

Re: Government procurement

>he found that the new spec he'd approved didn't have webcams.

Mind you in the various laptop purchases I've made these last few years, I found it a little irritating how in the tech specifications vendors will give full details of the CPU etc. yet simply list the webcam either as yes it has one or HD Compatible/Ready. As for the sound processing, they are doing well to list the mic and phono ports...

Likewise the various tech reviewer publications, go into great detail about the CPU performance, yet nearly touch on the webcam and sound system.

My research discovered very few laptops (including top end systems from the majors) had anything better than a 720p webcam and basic audio. Mind you this was a blessing, the iPad not only has better webcam and audio but also can be mounted on a stand to give a better view, whilst leaving the laptop free for note taking etc.

Re: UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson, who insisted...

>... it's not possible to have an affair if you're working from home

I suggest you research former US president Bill Clinton...

Re: Comparison

>The observed data is that Tesla's 'autopilot' system is significantly better than the global average

It hasn't occurred to you that perhaps the wrong benchmark is being used?

I suggest rather than the global average which is obviously going to be very low and open to interpretation, the benchmark needs to be something a little more precise. I suggest the average UK Advanced Driver. It will be only by achieving this level of competence will we actually see a significant drop in accidents etc.

Why? Because if we accept the current state-of-the-art (and we are talking about art and not science when it comes to machine learning) that the system is "roughly equivalent to the UK (average)", the result is equivalent to taking all the above-average drivers off-the-road and thus we can expect the number of incidents to increase; potentially double. By setting the benchmark at the Advanced Driver level, we effectively take-off-the-road all average and below drivers, significantly reducing the number of incidents.

Re: Disingenuous!! Misdirection!!

"no attacking a country's emergency services"

Suggest you reread the article ose 'norms'...

""They agreed that states should not intentionally damage other states' critical infrastructure or otherwise impair the operation of critical infrastructure that provides public services,"

Doesn't say they shouldn't 'probe' or 'attack', just don't stop it working...

Additionally, the focus is on the infrastructure not the services that use the infrastructure...

Re: 38 percent - maybe - it depends on how you count

Funny that, some of the last smart NICs I saw and handled in the late 80's were from Motorola, forget the board numbers but they were for 802.3 and 802.4 and supported the MAP/TOP variant of OSI and fitted the Sun-3 pedestal.

I think those last smart NICs had a faster CPU than Sun had used on the Sun-3 motherboard.

Re: Never gonna happen.

>Just for a corporate rollout, there is still a need for an equivalent of Outlook.

Well there is Zimbra...

Should have looked it up before posting...

Zimbra Desktop went "end of Technical Guidance" in October 2019, so whilst Zimbra Server is an alternative to Exchange, they no longer ship a supported alternative to the Outlook desktop client...

Re: leave SMS alone!

The trouble is that the iPhone only provides the iMessage application. With Android I have a choice, I can use the built in Text Message/SMS application or I can use a functionally richer third-party application.

If memory serves me correctly, on earlier versions of iOS (think iPhone 5) you could make iMessage send a message as an SMS, but it wasn't easy/obvious.

Re: America

>Yet if a girl regrets getting a puppy, and smashes its skull with a hammer, she could be prosecuted and sent to prison?

Yes, because the option, without time limit or justification, to take it to a vet and have it either adopted or put down, is available.

Part of this case is about such irregularities. If the baby was still born ie. the girl had a miscarriage, we have to ask why she (seemingly) wasn't taken to the doctor/hospital for a check-over - if only to ensure her womb had fully evacuated the placenta etc. and for the dead baby to be recorded.

Remember giving birth isn't without risk to the mothers health, hence why in the UK there are searches and public announcements for the mother to come forward when newborn babies are discovered left in shop doorways.