Posts by TheVogon 3511 publicly visible posts • joined 17 Jan 2013
"...I would use LibreOffice and set up an OwnCloud server for sharing documents. That way, I would save $$$ and keep control over my own data."
Depends if you need to run business applications like macros, addins, etc. and to exchange documents with other companies, have centralised group policies, etc. If you are 1 man in a van Libre Office is probably mostly bearable. As soon as you need a proper enterprise grade solution the list of inadequacies is exceedingly large. Don't forget that licensing is usually only a small part of software TCO!
Did this (very good) article's headline just get out of a Delorian?
Microsoft have been wiping the floor with Google Docs for a couple of years now. There is a reason why you can get books on Amazon to help migrate from Google to Microsoft, but not visa versa....
"This is spot on. My game uses 1 (ONE) core of my expensive I7. The rest is idling around."
Quite - this seems to be mostly overkill. Scopio's custom 8 core AMD CPU only runs at 2.3 GHz and can max out a 6TFLOPs GPU (That's roughly equivalent to an Nvidia GTX1070)
"No deaths, no strange glows at night and no two headed sharks."
LOL almost perfectly safely?! It was one of only two International Nuclear Events Scale level 7 events ever recorded! The other being Chernobyl.
So you must have missed the 34 that died during the evacuation, and the hundreds that will eventually die from radiation exposure? http://www2.ans.org/misc/FukushimaSpecialSession-Caracappa.pdf
Not to mention the massive leaks of radioactive material into the groundwater, sea and air!
"The Antarctic ice-mass is increasing. It is at near record highs."
Antarctic Ice extent is at record lows: http://nsidc.org/arcticseaicenews/files/2017/05/Figure6.png
Global ice extent is also at records lows:
https://sites.google.com/site/arctischepinguin/home/sea-ice-extent-area/grf/nsidc_global_extent.png?attredirects=0
"Polar bear numbers are increasing."
There is no evidence to support that. We know that several populations are declining. We also know that global warming is reducing their habitat. See http://www.independent.co.uk/environment/polar-bears-arctic-global-warming-40-years-iucn-sea-ice-a7459531.html
"For RAC... which nearly all RAC customers use, "
Well I would hope RAC customers actually use it seeing as I seem to recall it's about $100K / CPU.
"all data writes to a single storage name space and losing the name space will take down the cluster... SPOF like I wrote."
It doesn't if you don't want it to. There are multiple ways of designing RAC with no single point of failure. Depending on your budget RPO and RTO.
"Oracle does have Extended RAC which, you are right, does fix the storage SPOF"
It's still RAC server.
"There is a reason why very few use Extended RAC though. First, and probably foremost, it is extremely expensive (even by Oracle standards). "
Plenty of places use it. If you can afford Oracle RAC then array replication licensing probably isn't a cost issue..
"Second, as you are basically creating one DB across two sites, you would need some third environment for DR"
No you don't. Please leave this stuff to people who understand how to do it right! If you also want to have fast recovery from replicated storage corruption (never seen it with Oracle, but technically it could happen) then you say use Dataguard and ship logs to 2 target servers - one in each DC - so you still have a completely separate failover system even if you loose either DC. (However you do need a simple quorum system in a third location to prevent split brain on the cluster.)
"The RAC manager evicts nodes and fails about as often as the DB itself so kind of a waste of effort"
Worked just fine for me in multiple companies on both Windows and Linux. What did Oracle say?
"All RAC nodes write to the same storage"
The same storage that can be Synchronously replicated to other arrays across sites and with a failure over time in seconds if it goes down. So clustering basically. Like it says on the box... Or you can automate failover and recovery to completely separate storage with Data guard for failover time of a few minutes.
"The way to do it is to shard and cluster a DB across multiple zones/DCs"
Like say Oracle RAC or SQL Server and presumably many others already can do then. But only RAC is true active active on the same DB instance.
"Google just released a DB called Spanner"
If I cared about uptime, support and the product actually existing next week, the last thing I would consider is anything from Google.
"the building does not run directly off the mains supply, instead, the mains was used to drive motor-generators to provide a very stable supply and in the event of a power cut, diesel motors would start up to drive the motor-generators instead..."
I think you are talking about Pillar rotary UPS systems. Jut a different type of UPS.
" The process of switching hundreds, maybe thousands of sustenance to a secondary site is extraordinarily complex. "
It shouldn't be. You would normally have it prioritised, documented and or scripted and tested. Or ideally for a company the size of BA - running active active - or active passive and clustered with automatic failover.
"catastrophic SAN failure would potentially take out dozens of systems in an instant, and require a massive co-ordinated recovery effort"
Both of the independent SANs fail at the same time? Seems unlikely. Especially as we already know it's some sort of power failure...
"So a power outage, recovered from, did not "recover" as expected?"
An educated guess tells me that they have lost a hall or a datacentre. And probably only then found out that vital systems are not fully replicated / key stuff doesn't work without it. Most probably systems that were DR tested were tested in isolation without a proper full DR shutdown and someone overlooked critical dependencies.
Once you are in such a situation and find you would need to redesign your infrastructure to fix gaping design holes, it's usual faster and safer to fix and turn back on the broken stuff.
"like Oracle RAC... which is not a "real application cluster" despite the name."
If your application is a database it is. True real time active / active. Oracle are a horrible company that I would never use unless I had to, but there are not many real equivalents if any to RAC server.
It seems clear that you don't understand how the NHS, pensions and Social care are funded. And hence why Labour's policies are unsustainable.
There is a good and politically neutral summary here http://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2017/05/27/aging-population-creaking-liability-working-population/
"The NHS is "cradle to grave", and every single one of us pays for it"
The NHS is a compromise between what we can afford versus what we would want in an ideal world.
.We pay for it through a variety of taxes - largely income related like National Insurance. This is a just another way of taxing the rich for using the NHS.
"has been systematically destroyed by a Conservative agenda where they want to implement an American-style health and social care system"
It was Labour that introduced PFI contracts and wanted to privatise the NHS - and has landed us with many very expensive shiny new hospitals that we will be paying inflated prices for over decades. The Conservatives have significantly increased healthcare spending over the last government, and have made no moves to privatise the NHS over what Labour already put in place with PFI.
"We have all the money in the world to go to wars to murder innocent people, but we can't spare a few quid to keep Dorris in heating and condensed milk?"
Pensions have been increasing above inflation for a while now, so not the case (unless you are rich and don't need the heating allowance - which was for instance being paid to rich OAPS living in the Canary Islands!)
"It's called society"
No, it's called basic economics. The Healthcare and pensions system is supported in real time by tax payers. People are not contributing into an investment fund they will draw off against later like a normal pension fund. In an ideal and sensible world we would have done this like Norway has, but we have not. Therefore those still paying tax have to support those that do not. So maintaining the same level of benefits in an aging population has an ever increasing load on those that still work and pay taxes. So the money has to come from somewhere - and those that are old and well off sharing the tax burden makes sense to me.
" we're talking pennies per month. It's nothing"
No, it isn't. Welfare, Health and Pensions together account for 52% of UK public spending. The winter fuel allowance alone costs a couple of billion, and social care costs are over £20 billion.
"Strikes me she's a clueless bitch."
Seems pretty on the ball to me. And she is certainly way ahead of Corbyn in credibility and ability.
"if you have dimentia the state will claim your home and assets above £100,000 to "pay for your care"."
They made you pay up to £72K before anyway if you were well off. Seems perfectly reasonable to me that the well off pay for their own care - and why should a valuable home be excluded. The money is taken from your estate. Seems rather generous to me excluding the last £100K.
We have an aging population, and the current approach (and the pensions triple lock too) is unsustainable - and anyway why should the working be subsidising the well off and retired?
"And you expect her to get the best deal for Brexit?"
Yes, she's a hard nosed bitch.
"Can't the government just require all ISPs (including VPNs) to perform man-in-the-middle interception on all secure traffic?"
Many applications these days pin the correct certificate and will fail to work if you try and substitute a fake.
I do so hope Google, WhatsApp, Facebook, etc. etc just refuse to cooperate. Which seems likely - otherwise North Korea, Iran, Israel, China and every other human rights abuser on the planet will be saying me too, me too...
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