* Posts by Mike Pellatt

611 publicly visible posts • joined 17 Apr 2007

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It's about time Intel, AMD dropped x86 games and turned to the real threat

Mike Pellatt

Re: ARM train wreck is much worse

It's not a worse train wreck, it's a different one.

As the guy said, for him as an application dev, ARM is heaven compared with x86.

He explicitly said that for the OS guys (at least for system init/boot), x86 is heaven compared with ARM.

Mike Pellatt

Re: x86 Train Wreck

You've skipped the #ifdef hell that has also doubtless resulted.

Mike Pellatt

Re: x86 Train Wreck

Unimplemented instruction traps going off to software implementations can have interesting side-effects.

First, an aside. The actual O/S calls on Dec10 (if not earlier) were implemented via UUOs. Bu I digress.

In the late 70's/early 80's, the research group I worked for started their Dec10 replacement plan. Put in a VAX 11/780 with the Floating Point hardware. Soon after it was installed, I left.

Then it was time for another system. Was it to be a VAX or an IBM? Now, Rutherford Lab having an IBM was quite the draw in that direction as it made data exchange easier, FP formats not being quite standardised as yet. So, benchmarks were run (you know where this is going now, don't you?)

The IBM 370/whatever that was being contemplated won, so it was ordered. Some time (months??) later during maintenance, it was discovered that the VAX FP unit wasn't functioning, and the FP instruction set was being transparently emulated. Fixed it, the VAX now out-performed the IBM. Red faces all round.......

Mike Pellatt

Re: 16/32 bit

As long as its time_t has been fixed.

Mike Pellatt

Re: "We also have a 128-bits wide operating system READY TO GO"

No need to, apparently.

You just 3D print it at home and clock the thing at 10THz.

Nurse, nurse. Over there!! Quickly!

Post Office seeks more Horizon support as it continues hunt for replacement

Mike Pellatt

If recent evidence to the inquiry is to be believed (!!!), POL thinks it can get the assets (including the IPR) running Horizon off Fujitsu and contract someone else to do it

This further demonstrates the top-class management I place there.

Mike Pellatt

That's because his sole goal was to crawl out from under the bus Vennells threw him under and throw some others under it.

Well, that and it seems like it's the only speaking orifice he posseses.

Sysadmins rage over Apple’s ‘nightmarish’ SSL/TLS cert lifespan cuts plot

Mike Pellatt

Re: Follow the money

Whilst describing a task as a "Simple Matter Of Programming" is generally, correctly, taken to be ironic, in the case of certificate generation and installation it is.

Generally.

I'll make an exception for the Java certificate store.

Mike Pellatt

Re: Follow the money

OCSP is being deprecated, thanks to well-documented privacy issues.

CRL lists are hard to trust and potentially a major performance hit.

Reducing cert lifespan is, probably, the only mitigation possible for what is, at its core, a broken infrastructure.

Mike Pellatt

Re: Follow the money

If you're paying money for each certificate regeneration, you're using the wrong certificate supplier.

Post Office CEO tells inquiry: Leadership was in 'dream world' over Horizon scandal

Mike Pellatt

At that point,, he might actually understand the difference between a civil case and a criminal one.

Mike Pellatt

Just like Crapita, that's impossible to achieve in anything less than 5-10 years. Minimum. Their tentacles are far too deep into the UK's critical infrastructure.

Capita wins £135M extension on much-delayed UK smart meter rollout

Mike Pellatt

Re: A solution to a problem that didn't exist

The tinfoil hat brigade is strong here given the downvote on that.

The speed with which load shedding is required, once it is, means that doing it via the smart meter network rather than at the substations would not, you know, actually stop the grid crashing.

Mike Pellatt

Re: £5 a month saving

was about to downvote until you got to the last sentence.

Can't disagree with that.

Mike Pellatt

Re: What could possibly go wrong?

Suppliers to Gov don't like opensource because they're no-one to sue if it all goes titsup [i].

They don't understand the "if it breaks, you get to keep the pieces" principle of opensource.

[i] Yes, a supplier actually said that when I was in a discussion on secure email for local government, and a district council in the SW had built one using opensource. The potential supplier wasn't willing to take that on and run it as PaaS. Not that they called it that, this was 2005 and that moniker was hardly A Thing.

ServiceNow root certificate blunder leaves users high and dry

Mike Pellatt

I'm presuming Java's gothic SSL certificate management was involved somewhere in this cock-up. I still have the scars, in my case with ArcGIS.

Admins using Windows Server Update Services up in arms as Microsoft deprecates feature

Mike Pellatt

Re: MS seems to have lost it... big time

Nah, it was the launch of MSDOS 5.

Hands up anyone else who went to the launch event at London Olympia hosted by Jonathan Woss.

Mike Pellatt

I think I'd actually prefer 1990's Sendmail over Windows SMTP server, but with Exim or Postfix also available, not using it really is a no-brainer.

We know 'Linux is a cancer' but could CentOS chaos spell opportunity for Microsoft?

Mike Pellatt

Clearly, we're not there yet, but there is a tipping point that systemd may well reach where that does happen. It's not as if there aren't systemd-free distributions already to show the way.

Mike Pellatt

Re: $

But the GPL doesn't allow any restriction on what's then done with that source code.

Hence the "workaround" implemented by RedHat.

AI stole my job and my work, and the boss didn't know – or care

Mike Pellatt

If only, Remember this was elec eng. So thermodynamics as applied to semiconductors.

So a good dose of quantum thermodynamics. I've yet to find the cat.

Mike Pellatt

The great thing about being able to ask "why" is observing the times when the teacher has got it wrong...

You remind me of my time as an undergrad in Elec Eng at IC. Particularly in Y2 thermodynamics lectures, there'd be one of 2 or 3 students sitting in the front row who, occasionally, about 10 mins from the end, would ask the lecturer to go back to something and explain it in more detail as they didn't understand it. Within a minute or two the other 80 of us were completely lost. Probably 30-40% of the time it turned out the lecturer was wrong on some deeply esoteric point (but isn't all thermodynamics deeply esoteric??) At least this showed that lecturing isn't universally the lecturer:s notes being transferred to the students' notes without passing through the brains of either.

I believe all those students ended up doing PhDs at MIT.

I still don't understand how I passed thermodynamics.

City council faces £216.5M loss over Oracle system debacle

Mike Pellatt

Re: Can we copy one which work

Whilst your comment has some (considerable) validity, recycling rules probably aren't the best exemplar given that they will be dependent on the contract negotiated with the waste collection contractor. Now it you think there should be one single national waste collection contract, perhaps we could get rid of those variations....

Mike Pellatt

Re: Good timing

And in Conservativeland they blame the EU. Or the ECHR. Or, preferably for maximum effect, conflate the two.

Mike Pellatt

Re: Poor Oracle

By proper change control and management.

Next.

Angry admins share the CrowdStrike outage experience

Mike Pellatt

Re: Holidays

Ah, those happy days when I needed to use that probably 2 or 3 times a year, or more. Of course, it was LILO, not Grub back then. And it was local kernel builds.

Don't think I've needed to recover by booting from an old kernel in this millennium.

Microsoft 365 remains 'degraded' as Azure outage resolved

Mike Pellatt

He entirely predicted what AI is doing to us

VMware license changes mean bare metal can make a comeback through 'devirtualization', says Gartner

Mike Pellatt

Re: Network digital twins

Came here to say that. Reading it I thought... "Haven't these dorks heard of EVE-NG?" Or that the network engineers at my previous place did exactly that? I mean, it's not as if disconnecting tens of thousands of customers because you'd got your network changes wrong is a good idea.

Further proof that Gartner is a waste of money and oxygen.

Former Fujitsu engineer apologizes for role in Post Office IT scandal

Mike Pellatt

Re: Where were the tests?

Except..... oh, yes. ICL :-) :-) :-) (it was to avoid Retix' price-gouging stack for the Mac that we developed it)

Mike Pellatt

Re: Possibly controversial opinion...

On Monday, he said that if he'd received them, "of course" he'd have read them. He said he hadn't received them.

On Tuesday, it was shown he had received them.

Mike Pellatt

Re: Possibly controversial opinion...

Of course Nick Wallis is "partisan". If, that is, you mean a decade+ of trying to get to the truth is partisan. He's one of the good guys.

You, it seems, have been hearing what's been said but not been listening to it.

Jenkins lied to the court and, as the second morning demonstrated, has also lied to the inquiry. Not the first one to do that, either. Graham Ward is another, like Jenkins found out by the electronic trail of what had actually happened. Except this time an evening's work by the Inquiry tracked it down, so the lie was exposed the next day rather than a few weeks later.

That lie is enough to put all his testimony to the inquiry - every single piece of it - into doubt. It's known as being an "unreliable witness". If you lie once, you can lie repeatedly.

Mike Pellatt

Re: Unimpressed: false dichotomy

It seems, from his comments, that he's s**t-scared of having done the same thing himself :-)

Setting up his defence in advance!

Mike Pellatt

Re: Unimpressed: false dichotomy

No, you've fallen into the trap that he, having been well "lawyered up" (believe me, like all of them, he has been), he's set for the inquiry. Trouble is, Beer et al know exactly what's gone on.

Mike Pellatt

Re: Unimpressed

And keep them out of the boardroom

Mike Pellatt

Re: Unimpressed

It's the "thermocline of truth" (or as this blog post applying it to the Post Office Scandal - https://roblog.co.uk/2021/04/thermocline-of-truth/ - calls it, a vericline).

Same thing with the opening of Crossrail. Everyone on the ground could see it wouldn't be ready for the scheduled opening date, and that years of work were needed. But it was only weeks away from that scheduled date when it was finally admitted at the top of the project.

The referenced blog mentions some cultural stuff you need to do to try and stop it happening.

Mike Pellatt

Yeah, the latter - his insistence that the computer system he swore to be working correctly was the one the witness statement was written on, not the one he was writing about - would be absolutely f**king hilarious if the consequences of the witness statement weren't so awful.

There is no way to be kind to him about that.

Mike Pellatt

Re: Where were the tests?

It's so depressing to see people thinking, even in the late 1990s, that doing no proper testing would save money.

I was around the development of an OSI Transport Class 4 implementation in the late 1980s. One person independently wrote a test suite to validate conformance with the protocol specification. It meant that when it shipped, the amount of post-installation support needed was minimal. And that's where your costs are.

Now, I know business system specifications are generally a little more, errrr, loosely defined than comms protocol specs, but even so.

Mike Pellatt

Re: Distinguished engineer got trapped into doing things :o

I'm sorry, that just doesn't wash.

The idea that someone with sufficient intellect to obtain a Maths degree from Cambridge doesn't know the difference between a civil case and a criminal case - as he claimed - is utterly unbelievable. He's lawyered up to the hilt, in a failed attempt to present the scenario you describe. It's utterly, utterly false, and you've been suckered in.

Asda IT staff shuffled off to TCS amid messy tech divorce from Walmart

Mike Pellatt

Re: What could possibly go wrong ?!

See "TSB"

VMware revenue plunges $600M, but Broadcom assures investors growth plan is on track

Mike Pellatt

Re: Strong growth, huge cost cuts

A sign that the sheepies, sorry, investor community, apparently couldn't see given the market reaction to the quarter's performance, which apparently exceeded the herd"s expectations.

I'm so hoping Broadcom become the poster boy for acquisition accounting hiding tanking underlying performance.

Defiant Microsoft pushes ahead with controversial Recall – tho as an opt-in

Mike Pellatt

Hardly the first time, is it?

Hands up everyone who remembers ActiveX.

Everyone with the slightest bit of security knowledge, when MS announced it: "Don't do this, it's a security disaster"

Microsoft: "But our users are demanding it"

A few short years later, guess what had become a major malware infection vector on Windows. And users weren't demanding it quite as much.

BT chief blames regulations for UK lagging in next-gen network rollout

Mike Pellatt

Re: Telegraph poles

Roadworks permits are not planning permission.

Two entirely different things, with entirely different purposes. All they have in common is that they are issued by councils. In 2-tier areas, not even the same council - Roadworks permits from the County Council in its role as Highways Authority, planning permission from the district/borough council (except in National Parks where it's the NPA, deemed permission by the County Council for its own applications, and Minerals and Waste applications, also determined by the County Council)

Roadworks permits are for safety and traffic management purposes.

Planning permission is for, well, land use planning purposes.

CIO who dropped VMware 18 months ago now feeling thoroughly chuffed

Mike Pellatt

Re: Slogan!

Along with shafting the existing VARs. We were beginning to do quite nicely out of M-Link, had a good relationship with the company. CA:s acquisition of it terminated that as a business opportunity.

Mike Pellatt

Mind-numbing

if "Broadcom’s revised licensing strategy will please investors but not customers", then Broadcom's investors are stupid.

No company's long-term outlook is improved by pissing off its customers. Growth by acquisition is far too often financial engineering for a company's BoD to hide its underlying poor performance from its Investors.

RHEL stays fresh with 9.4 while CentOS 7 gets a Rocky retirement plan

Mike Pellatt

Maybe it's time to look at the RHL family again

Before containerisation in all its flavours took the world over, RH's abandonment of in-place version upgrades, along with the more-bleeding-edge-but-still-supported approach of Ubuntu, was the tipping point that drove me from the RedHat family (where I'd been since RedHat version 2, or maybe even 1) over into Debian land.

Recent dallying in the world of fibre telco OSS/BSS pushed me back into the RHL world and now that ELevate tool may make me look even more closely.

But..... GPL purity keeps me thinking Debian (and the decades have demonstrated that GPL purity IS a good thing - and at least in the Debian world, with Ubuntu you can dip in and out :-) )

AWS customer faces staggering charges over S3 bucket misfire

Mike Pellatt

Re: This is just one example

But.....

But.....

"Cloud" promised to actually, you know, reduce those costs by offering capacity-on-demand.

Didn't workout like that, though, so here we are.

Mike Pellatt

Re: This is just one example

"enterprise" customers massively over-provisioning is a key element of the cloud business model.

Starlink geofence appears to have some gaping holes

Mike Pellatt

Re: Isn't that the whole point?

Your "bureaucracy" is my "protecting critical infrastructure". Especially when it comes to licensing RF spectrum use.

Mike Pellatt

Re: All roads lead to roam

I reached out to someone once, he was just out of reach, reached out so far I lost my balance and fell over.

Mike Pellatt

Re: GPS is no protection

But, shirley, isn't (reasonably) accurate ground station positioning needed for it to beamform in the direction of, and track, a satellite?

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