Posts by Surrey Veteran 17 publicly visible posts • joined 27 Jun 2022
You don’t seem to have a clue about infrastructure…. Back in the 90’s a National Bank could run all their core systems in a single IBM/390 Mainframe , do you really think that lots of lots GPU’s running in the back your house is more efficient than a Data Centre?
The whole of the blockchain is not efficient, slow a best of times, honestly have a look on how the whole thing works.
We use to do the joke to interns that they Oracle queries were slow due to hot weather :)
Jokes apart and leaving the excellent discussion about DC design above, I wonder if also is not an issue of the Application's Architecture?
As supposed most cloud providers provides things such as geo replication and any good DevOps would even be able to automate the fail-over procedure to an alternative region if you lost an UK DC. Of course in most cases is not automatic and is something that you need to factor in your Architecture and DR.
A few years back, I used to work with diverse content management systems, however I never seen something like BorkingPoint.
We have a project for a "Scan-to-workflow" solution and it was decided to use SharePoint. The architecture is horrible, any custom code makes it a nightmare to upgrade and infamous Microsoft Workflow Foundation to under pin automatic processes is a drop in the ocean. The search engine was a CPU eating thing, horrible and unsecure.
At the end we ended up using a third party BPM tool for SharePoint based on J2EE just to make it at least functional.
Ahh! Another bonus feature, it you wanted to publish the SharePoint site to the internet, Microsoft would proscribe the now defunct Forefront ....another nightmare of tool.
Celsius pretty much created the conditions to trade at margin which with real money is incredible risky at least. Add the fact that Cryptos don't have an intrinsic value and you have the perfect storm.
Is clear after reading the post-mortem of various crypto funds and platforms that the only priority was to make cash whilst they go enough people to fleece, security and sustainability were not in their plans.
Take the NFT's for instance, so only the transaction gets in the ledger ....is cost prohibited to store a small JPEG in the ledger .... Take the airdrops when they give you free digital assets (on the exposure of your wallet ID) then you pay more for the "Gas" to process the transaction that the actual asset value, is a industry designed for scammers.
Stay away from it, is not such thing as a free lunch ....
Never attribute to malice that which can be attributed to laziness, stupidity or ignorance.
Or even worse a Junior Minister or Middle manager trying to show some IT acumen!
I seen it some many times, somebody decides to install certain software probably developed in the back of a Garage in Seattle or some cloud service of dubious reputation which of course only the bosses of that somebody are aware and even congratulate it the person for his/her idea.
But then finally becomes an IT problem when you need to break the news that actually that solution is a danger to the business ..... and is your fault because you are being negative! Not missing my old life in corporate IT.
On top of that is a cottage industry of “investment gurus”, special software to analyse the market and of course the wallet apps that happily takes a cut of commission when selling / buying.
And of course the brain washed drones repeating ad-Infinitum that is all lies because the governments are slaves of the financial institutions and they don’t want you to move the money away,
So if anyone remembers the big economic crisis of 2008 the guilty bit was the derivatives, an asset composed of prime and sub prime debt that nobody seems to understand the risk, but as long as had two digits returns everybody was happy, until it burst.
Pretty much Celsius created the same, you borrow backed by more estable coins and trade at a margin more risky crypto assets, except that opposite to the formal financial industry on which arbitration and regulations are in place nothing like that exist in the crypto world. Not to mention the risk of trading at a margin, specially when the lender starts doing margin calls because of the risk of default, you can by en debt in no time.
DeFI is criminally stupid plus the total lack of security made it a picnic for hackers, these people needs to end in jail.
Back in the 90's I worked in a Global US Bank offices in South America, they were rolling Windows NT 4.0 Workstations and with that a "Selected" group of users will have Internet Access. My job was to ensure that they agree with the Usage policy and install the TCP/IP stack for Novell (those were the days).
Of course the Internet came with Cache/Proxy and the infamous Border Manager part of the Netware suit for Internet ... Despite our warnings (well only to a selected group of friends, the rest were pedantic juniors exec types) they fall into the Venus' temptations.
To cut a long history short, we started to see a wave of sackings, including the walk with the security guards. The finings in some cases involved the police as well.
In a adjacent building they set a particular enforcer to monitor the Proxy logs, she was a weirdo that tagged her name on any piece of stationary, like a mixture between Theresa May and Lucretia Borgia. She seemed to enjoy her job, but like any reign of terror is always an abrupt ending: In her case apparently she took the job so seriously that launched a campaign against the C-Suite, she ended up doing the walk of shame.
It makes sense now, because we use HPC a lot, the Azure Reps were insisting last week in using "Spot" Instances which is unchartered territory as its give you 30 seconds for stop the job gracefully before "eviction" .More funny was when I asked how it works with their own HPC product and they couldn't elaborate.
What will be interesting, those who committed to the 3 years discount will be able to burn those hours?
In general is incredible and is not our industry, look at the airlines selling tickets and then cancelling because of lack of staff, capitalism destroying itself, big corporations and the cult of middle management.
Interesting article, Meta may be pleased on the introduction of Web3 by stealth.
However not bad news, the once safe walled gardens of meta are opening the door to the Web3 hell, hopefully Zuk will be a bad memory in the times to come.
For instance a crypto bank based on Metaverse was already hacked, lost 3.8 M USD in ETH.
And things are getting better, is somebody remembers DIEM (formerly Libra and now formerly NOVI)? https://web3isgoinggreat.com/?id=meta-hammers-another-nail-into-the-coffin-of-libra-announcing-the-shutdown-of-their-novi-project
Any serious organisation needs to stay away of the crypto madness, is not just hacking is reputation too.
All these bring me back to the days when the old Soviet Union used to manufacture clones of popular Western systems such as Vax or IBM.
What will be interesting, if Rusia is going to “import products without the maker authorisation” they opened themselves to import dodgy copies whit lots of security holes, will be fun for sure and I will stay away of any electric plant just in case.
BGP’s are the sort of things that you only remember that exist once that is broken. Specially those pretty old Linux boxes on comm rooms , I remember horror histories.
Anyway more than algorithms, what you really need is a sensible approach to change management, I.e. make sure that you backup config files, etc and specially regression testing,
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