Posts by CloudlessSkies

Australia’s government spent the week boxing Big Tech

Re: "off limits until kids turn 16"

Re Vaping in Oz

Yep, the government is restricting sales of vapes to by prescription only - at a chemist. Government has raised the price of cigarettes so high that most smokers buy black market tobacco. Vapes are becoming so hard to get that people are reverting to black market cigarettes.

The comment was about the current situation in Oz, so it was not ludicrous.

Intel's processor failures: A cautionary tale of business vs engineering

Re: Engineers and MBAs

Worked for one such as you 20+ years ago. Now retired but if he rang tomorrow and said "Come work for me again." I would - even if it meant international relocation.

He said "I don't understand what you do but I know you do it well so keep doing it, and if you have any problems or need anything let me know.".

Good engineering teams require good managers; one cannot exist without the other.

NCSC CTO: Broken market must be fixed to usher in new tech

Bout time

About to retire - got sick and tired of the "ain't broke, don't fix it" mentality of manglement.

1500+ lines in one function of 30+ year old C code, with single and double letter variable names, reading unsanitized input from user supplied files - just one example. Nobody even fully understands what those lines of code actually do and nobody has ever heard of unit tests. Pure luck that nothing serious has gone wrong yet.

Just because "it ain't broke" doesn't mean it shouldn't be updated. And nothing will change until somebody at the top gets serious trouble because it is quicker/easier/cheaper to just ignore it.

Almost as bad is the "just hack it in and we will do it properly later" - except later never arrives.

Google Cloud blunder sinks Australian fund for a week

Quick response times

I am a member - they are a fairly good, cheap, popular superannuation company. Unfortunately the outage was more like 10 days (Mon until Thurs the following week).

So why didn't they just restore the old environment and databases and have it up and running in a day or two?

Even more amazing was that there was not even a whisper in the local media - smells suspiciously like a multi-party cover up to me. Major damage to several companies reputations?

Full disclosure - I have never been a fan of 'in the cloud' anything.

Dell to color-code staff based on how hybrid they really are in RTO push

Re: Not the only ones affected

Yes around Y2K a big 2 letter removed my access to the computer room housing several 'nix systems - forgetting that I had remote root level connectivity. "rm -rf /" would have been more anonymous than hitting them with a sledge hammer.