Posts by Roland6

Re: Energy savings of up to £75 a year

>My fridge-freezer is now something like 20+ years old and uses about £50 a year more electricity than a modern equivalent.

Did you read the small print and have you measured it?

Also with fridge-freezers, location and ventilation play a small part in energy consumption.

My 2020 tumble dryer and dishwasher are, under real-world usage, only fractionally more energy efficient than the 17-year-old appliances they replaced (I've been using an OWL monitor for years). Yes, they do have an energy efficiency programme that is more efficient than the old models, but in general that programme takes twice as long to do the same task...

Re: Rust to the rescue?

You jest!

Rust has effectively exactly the same hole in it as Turbo Pascal had: don't like the limitations of the language then open a hole and do it in assembler.

You may object, but fundamentally, good coding relies on the programmer maintaining good practice and having a level of informed oversight to ensure such (useful) features aren't being needlessly used and abused.

Re: Construction?

I wonder if they upgraded their power supply after that incident:

"The SBG site is powered by a 20kV power line consisting of 2 cables each delivering 10MVA. The 2 cables work together, and are connected to the same source and on the same circuit breaker at ELD (Strasbourg Electricity Networks)."

Re: welcome to the new world...

>The difference is that the DR centre is only activated when you need it, not all the time.

The only way to ensure the DR centre is there when you need it is to regularly use it.

I panicked one customer by proposing to run a new system in active-active-standby mode with additional capacity in each active DC to handle the full load, with the standby largely being offline capacity to be spun up if an active DC had failed. They, having mostly come from a batch background (hence had operated a pair of traditional lights on and lights off DC's) hadn't fully appreciated the service level issues associated with real-time processing of large numbers of online customer transactions and having a relatively minor backend outage being made visible to customers.

Re: welcome to the new world...

>I have avoided the cloud ...All of your eggs in someone else's basket is risky.

Actually it depends on who 'all' is.

From a national viewpoint, there is an issue with having a significant number of businesses using the same cloud provider. For an individual business, there is little difference: either you are responsible or you've outsourced that responsibility - typically to a single provider.

With only a handful of cloud providers whilst we might be using IT more efficiently, we have also increased our dependency on things working.

Re: welcome to the new world...

>We always used to keep a set of trained attack dogs onsite! It was very successful at repelling the stoat invasions!

A grain of truth in that. Living in the countryside we have lots of small furry visitors. However, since we've had a Jack Russell, we've not seen any live ones and in recent years only occasionally a dead one. An additional advantage, the neighbours cats only enter the garden in a dire emergency with no intention of lingering...

Re: DR Plans

>That DR site is now sitting there, up and laughing at my futile attempts to get it to talk to the world.

If you want to scare your colleagues and managers, you could try asking: how long (with no IT and thus no business being conducted) before the company is unable to recover. Depending on the business, the window is to get some form of IT back up and running again can be quite short and may also vary depending on when in the accounting month/period it occurs.

Useful information to have when trying to get sign-off for your seemingly expensive business continuity plans...

>Of course, a chimney fire is less worse than a roomful of plastics and toxic chemicals going up in smoke.

The modern house is more flammable than a pre-war house with open coal/wood fire, because of all the

plastic, that s why you need good smoke alarms - in the home you don't have to get out quick because the Halon, it's the toxic smoke.

Re: "Yes sir, I'm downloading the DR plan as we speak..."

>When I asked what would happen if the building was permanently unavailable ...

Yes business continuity is difficult, it also seems to fall between traditional IT and "the business". I expect lockdown has enhanced many companies ability to carry on working whilst the office is unavailable.

Re: DR Plans

>But considering OVH has nearly 30 DCs all over the world

But only 11 physical locations/sites...

>Even if you did not know that all four Strasbourg DCs are effectively next to each other.

From the reports and pictures, it would seem the data centres are merely separate adjacent halls.

However, it is not clear whether OVHCloud had configured or sold the cluster of data centres as some form of DR offering. Just goes to show that even with cloud, physical location of your live and DR servers is still a necessary consideration.

Re: Intelsat

>You can't just put a consumer grade gizmo in a new box, strap it to a plane and expect it to survive the first take-off.

Depends on who SpaceX regards as their typical 'consumer'...

For some products "consumer grade" means individually boxed for retail...

Re: Why stick the terminal on top?

For one thing, unlike satellite radio -- Sirius XM for example --the internet requires a two way conversation. You need to use the antenna for transmitting as well as receiving.

WTF

If you look at the arstechnica pictures you will see the dish is supplied with a long interface cable to the 'router'/terminal ...

In another arstechnica article the teardown reveals all the antenna intelligence is on a circuit board embedded in the dish assembly.

>At least with an ICE motor, a friendly passed-by can give you a splash of fuel ...

Or give you a tow...

Re: Here is our shiny new 5G - Don't use it!

This seems to suggest to me that there is something fundamentally wrong in the 5G specification; I wonder if the writers actually considered the fact that for most of the time a phone isn't doing anything other than maintaining a "keep alive" connection to a mast and network...

Re: To web designers

"So visual clarity is good, borders and clear separation of page elements are dead useful - as well as being basic good design. And modern, flat, low contrast designs suck farts from dead cats! Stop it!"

Applies to all software, especially stuff from Microsoft who years back had a decent UI and wrote a design guide to encourage people to use it; they then decided such a useful UI was "old fashioned" and replaced it with "modern" UI's like TIFKAM...

From the leaks about MS's proposed changes to the UI/UX in 10X things are going to get worse, even for sighted people.

Re: Its amazing..

>"Best viewed in 800×600..."

Shame more developers don't allow for this screen size when designing window layouts, it would probably massively improve the UI/UX as they would have to think more about how they used the more limited real estate. MS Windows 7 and 10 are prime examples of software with dialog boxes that are too tall to display on a netbook's 1366x768 display, giving problems accessing the Okay/Cancel buttons....

This company had built a dedicated talking sat nav. It was brilliant. But imagine how many sub menus you use when setting your destination and requirements. You needed to be an IT genius with the memory of an elephant to use it.

Going back circa 20 years, we found when developing a spoken interface to an application, that it was much easier if the application/webservice had a WAP interface. This was because the WAP interface being so reduced, meant the developers had to think about what users wanted and how they would want to interact with an application to get what they wanted out of it.

Re: SSD

>Even modern cheapo laptops often come with only 4GB, which is woeful these days.

Agree.

Been playing around with W10 x64 and had the opportunity to experiment with RAM on a couple of business desktop systems (had several dead systems, so pulled out the 4GB SIMMs).

4GB and you can just about run stuff because Windows idling uses ~2.1GB of it, 8GB and normal MS Office apps run and work, 16GB only notice the 'slow' HDD on file load or save. Obviously, with the 8 and 16 configurations performance is further improved through dual-channel memory access. However, what is irritating is how many desktop systems now only have two SIMM slots, if one already has a 4GB SIMM installed, going beyond 8GB becomes expensive.

Re: When you say "pants",

>I had 3 pair of caving pants. I had to wear them all at the same time ...

I thought they only did that because ripping pants was cheaper than ripping wet suits.

Re: Not as dumb as it seems

>but at least the IT department knows what software is being run.

There are asset monitoring tools that do that much more reliably...

Re: Return of the brick sized phone

>Who could ever have predicted that much higher processing requirements would use much more battery power?

Not necessarily as power requirements per 1mm^2 of silicon have tended to be constant. Hence why Huawei's HiSilicon/Kirin 7nm and now 5nm SoCs can be both faster and consume less power than a 10nm SoC. But then you can only get Huawei SoCs in Huawei phones, which given the US government currently has a major downer on Huawei....

The major power consumer on 5G phones is really the radio and the number of frequency bands and antennas that need to be concurrently handled.

Re: report demolishes Lynch's defence ... not sure.

But if it is admitted it wouldn't be so much a demolition, more like a total obliteration.

Of HPE's case!

From your summary of the report, nowhere does it support HPE's contention that the intention was to specifically mislead HPE in bidding for Automony.

Once again HPE are in the business of creating FUD to obfuscate their Board's failure to do due diligence.

Re: report demolishes Lynch's defence ... not sure.

>Similarly and specifically to this case , if a business employs an auditor, the business is nevertheless responsible for any consequences of relying on the resulting audit.

Well HPE only need to look to their own board room - they employed auditors and relied on the resulting audit by telling everyone they were conducting due diligence etc. and assuming it would find everything in order and so didn't bother actually reading the reports...

Re: Choices

It would be interesting to know just what the hurdles ISPs have to get through to resell Openreach FTTP;

as on the face of it, it should be like the xDSL services and just another product line on their sales system. But given how long its taking for the pool of ISPs reselling FTTP to grow beyond BT and Zen there must be some major hurdles and/or costs involved.

>I wonder rather than splitting this half a billion between the consumers and getting nothing, the government should take it and spend it all on something nice.

6 months of HS2 construction ?

Re: Not impressed

Not that is all they have made public, what we don't know is how long they had access to the FTA. Given the reasons why you would deploy an FTA style solution, there will be plenty of 'interesting' information passing through the hub...

>Hah! Is that an oblique reference to the...

Yes, it was also an oblique reference to all those who reflash their own kit; reflash and you take on the update responsibility.

There is a surprising amount of information available on Accellions website - just search for "FTA"

Interestingly, it seems fewer than 50 customers are running FTA.

I like this observation, based on their recent experience:

" In 2021, every software security provider must not only demonstrate secure software architecture but must also be proficient at cyberwarfare."

From the article it was a "Accellion file-transfer appliance" that was breeched. I suspect from the rest of the paragraph, Bombardier failed to maintain (apply security updates) or upgrade the appliance.

This is a real problem, I suspect many people install appliances and simply run them until they fail. For example, when was the last time you checked for firmware updates to your home router? I also wonder how many ISP's actually maintain their routers ie. how many people are still running a 10 year old ISP supplied router which hasn't had any over-the-wire updates for some years...