Posts by Alan Brown 15099 publicly visible posts • joined 8 Feb 2008
"end up with something made by VAG on its perceived merits."
Like the engine control computer in the bottom of the passenger footwell - where it's particularly susceptable to water pooling for any reason (leaky windscreen, heater matrix leak, or something as simple as leaving the windows open and getting rained on.)
Yes really.
"By classical type training standards, I'm doing it all wrong"
Which is probably just as well. "Classical" standards assume manual typewriters which give support to the fingers when resting. Computer keyboards (and selectrics) don't.
This is why "classically trained" typists have much higher levels of RSI injuries when using computer keyboards than untrained ones do.
"Once set up and going I would crank it up to full speed for the rest of the run."
As with copiers the important factor with bandas and gestetners was the quality and condition of the paper.
It had to be dry and the curl facing upwards so the pickups wouldn't get fouled. Most people simply left paper laying about once reams were opened (most reams weren't sealed anyway - paper is hygroscopic) and dumped it into the tray any which way up.
If you stored your paper properly and made sure it was the right way up, jams and output tray incidents were virtually unheard of. Doublesiding was always a dodgy practice without systems specifically designed to handle it.
"It cost more - each price list probably cost around 50p-£1p vs 10p - but it saved hundred of man-hours a year"
Believe it or not that kind of reasoning (it costs more, so we'll make people collate/staple/etc instead) is still with us.
As a result I'm not allowed to connect the digital copier to the network. People have to print what they want and then manually feed it to the copier.
All this talk of card decks reminds me of an anecdote about a USA-sourced program which would never arrive in an operable condition at the customer (in france) during the 1960s
After several attempts at shipping the punch cards, the company assigned someone to accompany the deck to see what was happening.
As the deck went through french customs, the officer grabbed a handful of cards from it, looked at them and threw them away. It turned out that french law allowed customs to take a sample of anything passing through - this was aimed at making sure produce was in OK condition but being french, they deliberately took parts from everything passing through.
The argument given by french customs was that several thousand identical cards were being shipped, so taking a few to check what they were didn't matter. Arguing that the entire deck was a single item and what they were doing was akin to randomly ripping pages from a book didn't hold water with the french bureaucracy.
In the end, the only solution which worked was to ship several decks together and accept that one would arrive trashed.
" I still get asked at least twice a year to complete a form telling them which machine is assigned to me."
I regularly encounter machines (particularly servers) assigned to someone who swears black and blue that he has nothing to do with them and they were handed over to Someone Else 2 years ago and stop sending him notifications about the system drives sending distress calls because SMART has failed.
Of course he and "Someone Else" never bothered to tell us that responsibiliities had been swapped around and "Someone Else" either doesn't answer mail or responds "Nothing to do with me, sunshine" - at which point unravelling the chain of custody gets to be time consuming. (Switching the offending device off and waiting for someone to scream usually results in landing on the Boss's carpet. Whilst $boss sees our POV on this, the environment is "rather political", so this method of discovering machine custodian is inadvisable)
"Dell and Lenovo have both tried to sell me machines with Linux on them"
For a long time Dell and Levono's "Linux certfied" systems were identical to 2-3 years out of date windows-systems, sold for more than twice the price of contemporary windows hardware.
Not to mention than when phoned up, Dell tech support's response was invariably "Install windows on it and call us back"
"when manufacturers make such an unforgivable hash of it."
My experience of Asus is that when users started complaining about hardware issues on customer forums, they deleted the posts and then deleted the forums when people started complaining about the deletions.
They were also singularly unresponsive to email.
I've had similar issues with an Asus R300 server supplied recently from a 3rd party (If I'd known it was a rebadged Asus I wouldn't have bought it). In this case the supplier gets to eat it as unfit for purpose (it kept powering off for no reason and so did its replacement. RHEL6.7)
"China doesn't have the technical capacity to do that"
They more than likely do - and if they don't, they'll buy it in. As many have pointed out, this kind of thing isn't exactly a unique occurance so experience in cleanup exists already.
With any luck this will lead to improved HSE legislation in the Middle Kingdom.
"Just in case you think this is in a 3rd world country: this is in the South of the Netherlands."
ISTR an explosives depot (fireworks warehouse) located in a residential area going boom in the Netherlands within the last 15 years.
There's a good reason many operations (not just HE manufacture/storage) should be well-away from residences and surrounded by berms to divert shockwaves upwards, but this routinely gets ignored by companies and planners alike in europe(*), let alone other parts of the world which are more cavalier about safety standards.
(*) EG: Oil depots. I was a little surprised when first I moved to the UK and noticed noticed that none of the major storage depots have containment berms.
> Of course, in both cases here it was "Oh, this A/C isn't even venting outside so it's wasting electricity"
Hunting down and killing said fucktard is not an option?
Failing that, being hauled into the Provost's office to explain why they've rendered a department unable to work?
"Surely the story should have been about who it was that made the f*cktarded decision to remove the A/C in the first place"
Janitor disengaged brain. Contractors disengaged brain.
Fucktard should have the repair bill (and the bill for lost working hours) subtracted from his salary, but that will never happen, so he'll never learn. (In my experience people learn very quickly if publically humiliated or hit hard in the wallet, otherwise clue never sticks.)
" They couldn't block the hole; they couldn't remove or modify the guard rail; they could do nothing about educating teenagers not to walk in the road."
Bollocks - sheer unmitigated bollocks.
DfT guidelines state that guard rails (actually "pedestrian guide fencing[*]") should be removed immediately if pedestrians are walking on the "wrong side" of them as the danger is increased well beyond whatever point the guard rail was intended to protect from.
There are a number of UK govt publications pointing out substantial council misuse of guide fencing and berating councils for continuing to position the stuff to address non-issues, or making safety substantially worse. (The #1 complaint of the DFT is use of the stuff when bollards would be more appropriate)
At least 50% of fencing installations are unsafe and inappropriate. TFL has instituted a policy of removal of as much of the stuff as possible and is facing resistance from councils because of entrenched attitudes miscontruing the purpose of the stuff, despite long-term evidence showing that it's killed far more people than it's ever saved.
[*] Pedestrian guide fencing was created to try and guide pedestrians away from spots where it was dangerous to step onto the road. The moment people start walking around or jumping over it, its purpose is negated.
It's not "guarding" anything, nor is it "safety" fencing and it provides negative protection from vehicles - the negative stemming from the fact that it offers _zero_ protection from vehicular impact over 5mph and if a vehicle hits the stuff, anyone nearby is likely to be hit by the fencing as it breaks away from its mounts. This _has_ happened.
In addition the stuff kills cyclists/motorcyclists trapped between it and cars
I cringe when I see the local school yobs all clustered behind fencing on a dangerous corner and pushing against it/leaning out over it. It's actually encouraging them to loiter in a spot where they're in greater danger than if they were 20 feet away.
"Legionnaire's disease?"
The day you catch that from a modern split-cycle system is the day you'll be in the Guiness Book fo Records.
Legionnaires requires a very specific set of circumstances (and lack of hygiene) to proliferate. Being a soil bacteria it doesn't get into evaporative water cooling systems without assistance and won't spread if the water is disinfected/chlorinated. From there you need cross contamination from the chilled water to the ducted air system which carries cool air around the building.
Decent ducted-air systems include air filtration and UV sterilising lights. Failure to maintain those is when trouble starts.
As for fans blowing cold air onto someone: Simples: Don't do it. Anyone being blasted by a fan (AC or not) has ample reason for complaining already.
"that's why any decent air conditioner will aim UP at the ceiling and let you divert the flow left/right too - normally from the same damn remote control that you use to turn it off!"
The best way of dealing with AC idiots is to set it up correctly, then hide the remote.
We had problems some years back in the data centre because the security staff would turn the AC off at night. Sending the security firm a $30k bill for repairs solved that one pretty fast.
WHOIS policy has _always_ required the use of real names and provision of a "legal address for service" (which means, "where court papers can be served by a bailiff") and that has been on the basis that a domain owner is responsible for what appears on their domain and must be legally accountable for it.
Over recent years this has been relaxed to only those domains used for commercial purposes but in general registrars themselves have masked personal data for non-commercial domains (This is widely abused. I filed more than 100 complaints with Nominet in the last 5 years over companies masking their registration data and every single complaint was upheld - with the masking being removed. In some cases domain owners immediately changed their registrations to an overseas post-box.)
The most common commercial use of proxy registration is for criminal enterprises. The use of proxies is legally questionable and this has been debated ever since Godaddy created the first one.
I'll ask one simple question for the readers: WHY would a _commercial_ domain want to anonymise its domain name holders and address for legal service? This can as easily be the company office (usually an accountants office) as a home address.
Proxies (and the widespread use of Mailboxes Etc dropboxes) are a false security anyway. Once hit with legal papers the proxies will roll over and play dead without any further consultation with the domain holder and MBE franchisees will do the same, as the alternative is that that THEY are deemed to be the ones in the legal firing line - and shielding fraud/kiddyporn/drugs/criminal activity means they can be arrested on the spot as accompliances or named in subsequent civil proceedings (this has happened and they've been nailed to the wall every time).
I disagree with ICANN over a lot of things and feel that much of what they've been up to is outright criminal, but anonymity for business operations is not allowed in any other field. There is no reason to allow it on the Internet.
"I recall once in the 19th century, when they were private companies, many became protection rackets "
Like the City of London Police currently is and like what happens in a number of places around the world with real "free market" policies (as in, no govt intervention into anything)
This is the ultimate end-game of libertarianism. It's been tried before and the results are why most countries have state controls over how far things can be taken.
My bank has just dumped the RSA key. Apparently users found it too hard.
As for fingerprints: you (usually) have 10. The one which unlocks my phone isn't used for other things.
OTOH my wife has no detectable fingerprints. That makes any assumptions based on biometrics invalid and UKBA can't handle it at all. At least with phones there are alternate ways to authenticate.
" the figures mentioned are €30,000 for a 5.7 litre car."
If you're living in a country (as in have been there more than 1 year) then trying the 6 month trick will land you in a world of serious hurt with the tax (and other) authorities - including a conviction for driving without insurance in the UK if you get caught.
The wording of that exemption is quite tight and only applies to residents of another country whilst travelling, people temporarily resident elsewhere (for less than a year), or those who are moving - to allow them enough time to get the vehicle registered under the new regime.
"I told VMware that I couldn't do that. Money was a very real issue. I was subsequently given a not-at-all-subtle warning against YOLOing testing on VSAN."
Thanks. That's the kind of information we need.
I'll be making some phone calls in the morning to advise that a couple of pending contracts have VMware removed form consideration. If they're pulling this asshattery on reviewers then we can be pretty sure they're the kind of vendor which is "difficult to work" with when things go pear-shaped.
"And as such I'm not basing my purchases on FUD from any website, or person but just test the stuff myself before any PO leaves my desk."
If you're in a position to do actual real-world testing before you issue a PO, then you've got a mightier budget than most.
Benchmarks exist because we can't do that. Using the same benchmarks across a range of devices means they face a level playing field. If a vendor's kit can't handle that and they start dictating that their special little flower has its own unique benchmark then alarm bells should be ringing amongst buyers.
Of course, the flipside would be to accept Nutanix' benchmark requirements and run all the other kit on the same loads. If the kit performs badly with standardised benchmarks then it's quite like it that whilst it works ok with their preferred set, the others wil do even better.
As a potential purchaser I'm far more alarmed by Nutanix (and VMware) attempts to dictate the terms of the review. This is a pretty good indicatation of the kind of support I (won't) be getting when things go titsup.
As such the far more important thing to take away from the story is the vendors' attitude to failure than the performance of their equipment.
"Of course the truth is an absolute defense in libel cases, as long as you have $50,00 US to pay your lawyer."
Which is why defamation litigation is first and foremost a matter of who has deeper pockets.
It's the _only_ area of law where everything is turned on its head if you're accused (You have to prove innocence, vs the plaintiff having to prove everything) and is the modern equivalent of witchcraft trials.
"When reviewing technology products you are bound by the EULAs of those products - especially in the United States - which often state that you are not allowed to review that product without permission."
I suspect that such a term would never hold up in a USA court, if someone had the resources to fight it.
"StorageReview.com should be doing their own benchmarking"
You forget that outfits like StorageReview are dependent on:
1: Equipment loaned from the vendors
2: Advertising
This has always been a problem for these kinds of sites and magazines (in paper days). Them what are being reviewed have always tried to dictate conditions and in most cases we simply didn't hear about it.
#1 could be addressed by buying the stuff, but bad reviews of kit leads to reductions in #2, so they'd need to be a subscription model which simply isn't viable in most cases.
" most tech companies are horrible to work with"
Name and shame please.
As a customer who spends the best part of a couple of million each year, I prefer to avoid that kind of shit.
Anyone with large enough requirements knows the experience of systems which work fine on the bench or under mild load but hit a knee point and seriously crap out as real-world load is applied. We also know what happens when vendors refuse to deal with problems and run away when critical systems start breaking (I'm looking at you, HP and Suse)
It's better to give such outfits a wide berth BEFORE they end up eating several man-years worth of effort having to nursemaid fragile setups.
"Checking the other cameras she found a figure walking past the front of her house that bracketed the time of the attack. As a council economy had switched off the street lights - all she had was an unidentifiable infrared blob."
Which just shows the cameras were uselessly positioned (hardly unusual) and that there weren't enough of them (also hardly unusual)
My local One Stop got targetted by armed robbers a few weeks ago. Despite a bunch of CCTVs around the premises, not one of them captured their faces and as only one was outside, whatever they were driving didn't show up either. The following day a complete new system with twice as many cameras was installed. Hopefully that won't get the same kind of test.
High-mounts are useful for capturing what's going on overall, but there's no substitute for putting a few at eye level or lower.
"Said cell also releases hydrogen when charing or discharging"
The fun part about current lithium batteries is that when overcharged they precipitate out metallic lithium as well as venting.
Water and lithium don't mix and guess what people will attempt put a fire out with.
WRT HFl: nasty stuff. Peter2 is understating how dangerous it is. Seriously. If you get a drop on your hand you'll probably lose your arm.
If the register was to be socially responsible and pass those documents to EE's in-sewer-ants company they may well find that they've blown their liability cover.
And the HSE may well decide that the management who pushed them out despite safety warnings have personal liability for prosecution, given there's been an injury.
Pigs might fly too.
"Makes you wonder if they dumped all the IT solutions and went back to pen, paper, interdepartmental memo's and people filling in forms in triplicate it would save money and probably be more efficient...."
Honestly: It would do.
UK civil service computerisation has almost entirely been done in a way as to not reduce staffing requirements.
If done right, then staffing numbers should be slashed by half without affecting the coalface and without imposing more crap on them.
Any time more work is dumped on the coalface or ends up requiring more people to make it all go, the project has failed.
"There is no hardware compatibility hell. I'm serious, you can find plenty of stories of people running into problems with some computer or other, and it makes it sound like hardware support is an utter basket case. "
The only time there are problems is when people buy systems blindly and then try to make them work afterwards. People do this at home because they buy as cheap as possible. If you do that when you're purchasing a fleet of systems then you deserve to have your arse bounced on the sidewalk outside the front door as security eject you from the building.
"You've never seen a clusterfuck like a combined public/private sector clusterfuck."
The best way is to first of all work out what the current system does and needs to do better.
That isn't done by talking to management, nor is it done by committee.
A classic example is the businessman who set a design committee to provide a device to allow hikers to be rescued if they got into trouble. It ended up as an all-singing, all-dancing map, smart-phone device that would have lasted half a day on batteries - not the EPIRB unit he usually chucked in his backpack when hiking that has batteries lasting 6 months or more.
He knew they'd do that. The object of the exercise was to establish why committees are one of the worst possible ways to design systems.
I've yet to see researchers for any "overhaul" of a system sit down individually with people who actually have to work with the existing system and ask what they need to do and what's needed to do it better.
"Is Oracle the problem, or is it the symptom of the problem?"
Well you might ask.....
The primary reason that projects are screwed up is because targets are poorly defined and goalposts constantly being moved (not to mention being changed along the way form simple wooden uprights to something not out of place on a Mod's scooter)
Most of the time, the project won't work as specified, however any vendor who says that will be summarily ejected from the bidding process. Those who keep quiet can hit the original target on budget, then charge a fortune for all the extra work required to make it go.
Dealing with incompetents is a wet dream for any large vendor. They get to write their own contract conditions and then charge whatever they want for as long as they want. Whether it works at the end or not is irrelevant - what matters is getting the most profit and as long as you hit the initial poorly designed targets you're on the gravy train for life.
If you want to fix this kind of thing, you need to sack the career civil servants who skip merrily from clusterfuck to clusterfuck with glowing recommendations because that's the only way to get rid of them. Ordinarily a set of glowing recommendations should be a big red flashing warning sign and klaxon for any potential employer, but these people are hired according to who they know not how good they are (a really good employee can pretty much command his/her own salary if they're that critical)
Having proper service definitions and competent people working out what's actually required is more expensive up front, but better long term. Because of that, it will never happen in the UK.
If 1Tb of extra memory is cheaper than ram, then losing sales in database farms will be more than made up by sales in other arenas (researchers will leap at the opportunity for holding more stuff in (slower) ram over having to page to disk.)
On the other hand, if the database farm can do the same with fewer systems, then it can do much more with the same number of systems. Many of the larger players will increase capacity/capabilities rather than cut down on hardware.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
