Re: Sounds Awful
Yeah. The likes of Azure run on a 36 hour release cycle. Something that you're using might simply not work tomorrow. That's "cloud" and "progress" for you :)
76 publicly visible posts • joined 21 Oct 2007
Loving all this cloud bashing folks :)
People also don't realise how important backups are when you look at the cloud provider's SLA - with 'cold' Azure or Google storage you're only guaranteed a 99% chance that your read/write will actually work - https://azure.microsoft.com/en-in/support/legal/sla/storage/v1_5/ / https://cloud.google.com/storage/sla
If I had a RAID array or similar only guaranteeing 99% success of a read/write operation I'd be sending it to landfill immediately!
Twitter was surprisingly quiet on this problem yesterday - drove me mad! Waiting hours for a 2FA email or something before it eventually makes it through. Maybe not many people use it any more - I remember back in the day, Messagelabs was the email filter of choice! Makes me smile how it's still called Messagelabs all over the place and not Symantec.Cloud.
I still love my Z2 Play - the wireless charging back is the one that's normally on, but if I'm going to be out all day/night I'll put on the extra battery in efficiency mode and won't worry that I'll be too drunk to remember to charge the phone the next morning. The phone's showing its age now though with its built in battery not what it used to be, and the USB C connector rather choosy on what cables it'll accept.
I wish they did a more of a jump in spec to the Z3 Play, I might be quite tempted by a Z4!
I had one many moons ago where I had to go to the CEO's second home in Paris to fix his home WiFi, so off I go onto the Eurostar, traipse across Paris and find his amazing 'apartment' (floor of a huge building) and see his hilarious outdoor WiFi antenna (complete with lightning arrester) and he's there complaining it's got no range. As I test I find it's an amazing signal, walk down the corridor still amazing, then all of a sudden it drops to zero. Confused I look up and see I'm now in line of sight with a large window and filling the view out of that window is the rather large transmitter (bit bigger than his router and even his outdoor antenna in the hallway) - the Eiffel Tower. Then he proceeds to tell me taxi's radios don't work here either and even TV/radio is hit and miss.
Not much I can do apart from tell him try installing cat5 everywhere and put at least one access point in every room on that side of the property!
I was on holiday in Dublin a few hours later so three capital cities in about 12 hours.
The software has had regular updates since launch - I believe at least one major upgrade (in 1990) to make it more autonomous has taken place. It's also a small amount of code (64KB RAM I think on them, with a tape drive for storage!) so when picked apart by a team at NASA you'd hope all bugs are caught early in development.
Many moons ago I worked in a local computer shop and we started noticing that when we built new PCs a Freeserve icon would appear on the desktop after a fresh Win95/Win98 installation. Turned out to be a particular motherboard (probably PCChips) we started using somehow installed an icon onto the desktop during the Windows installation. Pretty clever for the 90's!
In a previous life I installed a dozen TVs up on the walls around the office displaying various monitoring information running via HDMI over Cat5 adapters from a PC 30 metres away in the comms room. I couldn't work out for ages why the TVs would randomly go blank for a few seconds then back on again until I stayed late one evening and found they worked perfectly when the office was empty. Turned out to be interference from the IR motion detectors that kept the lights on in the office was somehow inducing enough noise into the Cat5 to upset the HDMI signal when people moved! Shielded Cat 6 rather expensively fixed the problem.
I wonder how hot it got in there! My little rack in my shed is currently 42'C in the nice weather we're having (28'C in my garden in Essex at the mo) and I have four PCs, switch, home theatre amp and a CCTV DVR unit in there and they're all running fine. The APC UPS is emailing me every minute with an over temperature alarm but it's still working. The Cisco 2960 switch fans are screaming but it's also working fine.
I had an awful Apricot (what happened to them?) NT4 server once at work that the RAID controller went nuts and decided to break any drive that was connected to it. I thought it was a bit odd that all three drives failed at once, so replaced them and the new ones also failed almost immediately. Put the drives into another server and they didn't work there either - no idea what the controller was doing to them. Decided to scrap the controller and use NT4's built in disk mirroring - at least if the onboard SCSI controller dies then any old PC can read the disks in the future! Worked this way for years.
Many many moons ago I did a del *.* not realising I was in c:\win directory on my dad's work IBM PS/2 P70 luggable he used to bring home at the weekends. Spent an hour or so with undelete making slightly educated guesses at the first character of each file! I got Windows 3.1 back up and running though in the end and my dad never noticed.
I don't 'live in the sticks' (Rayleigh, Essex) but have a power cut probably on average once a month, lasting for a second up to an hour - my couple of UPSes keep my kit running happily each and every time.
I love UPSes, especially the danger element. If I ever get a power cut at night I'll pop a spanner across the 48V battery pack and sit back and watch my new MAN TORCH light up.
Had similar with a load of old racks in the comms room had 10+ year old APC units in the bottom of them where the battery had less capacity than a potato and were just being basically used as multiway plugs, with a building-wide UPS having been installed years ago. Cue a black building power down test. Turn it back on again and not a single 10+ year old UPS turned back on (how dare they). Cue running down to the local Robert Dyas/Maplin to buy a load of 4/6/10 way adapters and kettle leads.
I love the prelim root cause analysis and fix: "Engineers determined that instances of a backend service responsible for processing authentication requests became unhealthy preventing requests from completing.
Mitigation: Engineers performed a recovery of the impacted backend service . "
So no info at all. Someone unplugged something and plugged it back in? Someone shut down a service and restarted it? Someone ran too many copies of Doom II on a 4mbps Token Ring IPX/SPX network then went to lunch once victorious?
I remember in my days working as a teenager in the 90's in a local PC shop I put a floppy ribbon cable on one pin out (can't remember if it was to the side or just connected to one row of pins) and when I turned that PC on a few of the wires in the ribbon cable lit up like a light bulb.
A few years before that I remember putting in a random 4mb 72 pin stick of RAM into an IBM PS/2 model 70 and when turning that on the RAM caught fire and a thick, heavy, flow of purple smoke ran across the motherboard, onto the table and nearly made the floor before dispersing. That smelt nice.
Maplin's first shop was opposite it's current Westcliff store on London Road in Southend in the 70's I believe - I know it from the late 80's. A blatant rip off of Bi-Pre-Pak (in West Road) from whom my dad bought components for his Heathkit style radios and amplifiers. These days they're just a bit too expensive, but still the only actual shop you can really get components from. They should be doing astronomically well with the PIC/Arduino/RaspberryPi world we're in now, just they seem to be failing at this.
They're the type of outfit Alan Sugar should be interested in - same home town as where Amstrad once were :)