Posts by Denarius 2228 publicly visible posts • joined 20 Jun 2009
I remember these sort of reports preY2K. Worst was outdated systems that were bought new that could not handle Y2K from IBM IIRC. IBM advised at time that life of IT was limited to 1999 and was unable to do upgrade. Book "Safety Last" from 1970s still seems to be accurate enough.
you are confused. Capitalism has lifted every body. It is communism that behaves with rewards for top psychopath leaders and starvation for the worker. As a compromise, how about making bosses bonuses illegal. If one has to be bribed above a salary to do well, then clearly one needs to sacked immediately and with prejudice. As for article contents, this raises the same problem of all the LLMs. Private work being copied in training material. For the originators a serious issue. For those who like intelligently written prose, it means the continuing slide into irrelevance of publications as other posters have noted
Odd but probably not well expressed I suspect. As in the YouSS of AA and ruins of Europe, any improvements in Open Sauce get taken without any reward, assistance, ie money to OS coders. However corporates and their national equivalents like to use free stuff. One of them being middling kingdom. Helps with snooping
Wont work. Too many on side of Putin because he is seen as not Western . Any country with a grudge against Europeans, Yanks etc. Not hard to find articles supporting Russia in those countries. Russian currency good in pats of middle East, Chjina, India. Thats how Russias hydrocarbons are being traded.
Unless upper manglement removed, an engineer CEO will be stymied at every turn, leading to another Board reshuffle to appoint a bean counter. ie sack board also and appoint technically trained members. As 4 Michael, whats wrong with weeding out addicts, especially those addicted to unearned bonuses ?
@wolftone: Manglement do understand one thing. "Those who control the past, control the future". This current event will be swept from corporate memory, if it ever gets there, be "redefined as IT admin failure at best and forgotten, suppressed, distorted out of recognition. Nothing will change. An IT monoculture will be even more enforced to allow simplified, centralised control. Then the real outage will occur, for which this was the dry run according to my suspicions. Who benefits from seeing outage happen on this scale ?
some minor flunky maybe. But some failed senior manglement will be kicked upstairs and one or two will get incredible golden parachutes for saving $5K and costing billions. This, after ElReg story about $MS being called inadequate by , of all things, USA bureaucrat.
yes, agreed. Believers in the various marxist cults are unconcerned with murdering millions. Pol Pot, Mao, Stalin. Their fellow totalitarians like inhuman riots activists, lawfare practitioners also white ant representative governments. I wont mention the common epithet applied to those who also had same beliefs but oddly, are damned.
I have suffered under systems where very high transaction rates required unique ID numbers, generated combination of source companyID, date and time. Absolute local time to millisecond or less, This meant multiple transactions from a single client could have multiple non-unique transaction IDs. Even then sequence numbers based on an integer in memory was required. And daylight saving reversions required a full hour long shutdown of mainframe. Which meant systems feeding it, consisting of multiple layers of applications and OS required an orderly shutdown and start up so no transactions were lost. Took an hour, even when automated, though I think it was down to 20 minutes eventually thanks to some good coding between the Windows and Unix admins. Mainframe programmers, try not to strangle them.
Perhaps a better long term approach is the 1950s SciFi imaginings of 3 or more large manned geosynchrous satellites relaying signals. Hardware upgrades could be done as technology changes or stuff wears out. These days maybe only manned when upgrade work being done. For rapid response have more satellites about 400 km up, also in-orbit refuelable. In meantime, investigate and develop satellite deorbit technologies like solar sail. Changing materials also. I suspect the bamboo idea worth looking at as Japanese have already tested it. AFAIRC it worked OK. As for de-orbitting dereived soot, how much dust and gravel hits the atmosphere each day ?
Don, religious nutters having a big effect? Odd. In China as well as the rest of the world barring a few sane places (Denmark) the practical politicians stuffed up entire economies with teh consequences still being worked thru. Dont see any group but devout official atheists in China leadership who really just worship power and ego.
Don, you realise that movies are fiction, right ? Stupid fiction showcasing the contempt of the clever film makers for ordinary citizens. Having been in a few emergency situations, mostly it goes the other way at least in my mostly sane country. Studies of emergency mangement now show that supporting spontaneous local leadership has best outcomes. Remote centralised "manglement" usually precedes stuffs and ineffectiveness.
FFS. Read Letters from a Stoic, last chapter. Two thousand years ago it was known that the Earth was round, and the effects of gravity. Stop repeating that ill-informed myth invented by Washing Irving bigging up 19th century arrogance.. BTW, Senecas advice on life is well worth reading
really ? Because all the pollies I hear of outside Middle East are in practice full bore materialists. Bore in both senses of word. One suspects highly selective biases at work. BTW, references to concentrating mind derive from Dr Johnsons quote. When a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully
AIX had a habit of using /etc/inittab rather than /etc/init.d files. Also a system like SMF called System Resource Controller which let one group related services. I found it quite useful. Also light on resources. It wasnt a replacement for init. Digression. AIX ps aux command used to show the NOOP component of process table. On a quiet machine this would show up as high figures on process 1. User given root acccess by manglement killed process taking all that CPU. No guesses what happened.
Pity IBM is obsoleting AIX. Best unix like OS I have used for commercial activities. As for systemd, see Halloween Document
nonsense. Pandering to Big Bureaucracy is also a favourite pastime to get friends into all those overpaid taxpayer funded sinecures. And if Oz guvmint didn't sell coal, China might get upset at us and Oz couldn't afford to give subsides for windmills and solar panels on good farmland.
Nyet comrade to "Stopping every 150 miles for 5 mins to fill a small tank ". May well be true in small places like the patchwork of EU, but not true in real countries. What if there is no fuel or charging station ? Or worse, with the rise of unreliable electricity supplies, batteries at home are needed for essential services, like warm water or cooking ?. In Oz and other long highway places a range of 400 km to cater for winddrag of trailer or roof mounted cargo, is essential. At airfield in rural area only 100 km of national crapital, I have seen too many EVs, nipping into a nearby town to top up. Petrol and diesel vehicles just do 700 km between fills at a stretch. I suspect the market researchers are close in the distribution of battery and fuel capacities. By running the fuel engine at one speed improvements to efficiency, simplicity and emissions can be done easily, so IMHO, hybrids are probably the optimal way to go until a better technology comes along. Until I see full lifecycle costing, including disposal ,EVs are just another environmental disaster. Flame away
worse.
In my bitter experience with trailers, Oz and European made, LEDS fail faster, more often than incandescent bulbs, cost way more to replace if possible, are not repairable as they are part of circuit boards with ICs and spares are not available. The LED might be OK, but the components on circuit board fail. Ironic that I have leds in 20 plus year old IT kit that work fine. Also above about LED headlights requiring night driving glasses that block blue. The locals have an inability to turn off their oversize spot lights that would be appropriate on a Dakar Rally vehicle, let alone drop to low beam. Just waiting for summer night that some Dukes of Harzard wannabe sets long grass on fire. Attrib to Ettomogah Pub cartoons
The rise of the HR classification seems correlated to more insane manglement ? is this because despite HR cheerleaders saying HR improves quality of employees, it really creates places in the power hierarchy for lower level sociopaths to enjoy hurting people which is why CEOs like to introduce such company positions ?
If I ever got bored enough I would like to see what drop in company profits and growth occurred before and after the imposition of such groups, adjusted for technology change, inflation.
@Mach*. Still in larval phase, eh ? We greybeards have seen many companies deliberately take actions that damaged them. From local overworked national outposts being told by USA manglement to sack staff to satisfy Wall Street rather than increase cash flow, profits and customer needs, to insane purchases of software with no immediate or obvious use. Hi Leo !
I suggest the manglement class select for sociopaths and "sound candidates", ie fellow sociopaths rather than competence.
Notice what happens to companies when founders magic goes. What calls itself management and leadership becomes detached from reality, customer base, its own market sector. Bonuses, ie looting what legacy is left.
@doublelayer: There is the flaw, specially in large corporates including governments, that the user area knows what it wants but manglement get involved, especially higherups looking for a resume aimed triumph , who then add crap. Loss of focus, followed by changing requirements from PHBs usually, followed by user level failure.
bit of history here. When Dennis R went under the floor of his old computer room and retrieved stashed tapes of original source code for very early unix for ancient VAX . A tape drive was needed to read them. A bloke in Canberra, Oz, had a working VAX and drives to read off the tapes. Recompiled that early code I believe. Reference: Story on old ElReg.
However I now know why my shed has such a strong pull toward it and why it is so hard to reduce the piles of IT stuff on shelves. Anyone need a working 300 MB SCSI disk from a CDC or a HVD DLT1 tape drive ? Do piles of dead SCSI and IDE drives kept for the magnets cause climate change or Earths magnetic field to wonder ?
Biohazard from farming? Nah, more, more ! I seem to be more resistant to bugs than the townies. Dirt, manure are full of immunity inducing safe bacteria. However, an evening shower and food hygiene are essential. I also avoid the foul bug infested self service dont work "touch" screens at fast food outlets when reduced to them being the only option, usually when traveling outside inhabited areas.
@aerogems: you have not worked for USA IT outsourcerers in last 30 years have you ?
nearly all CEOs and boards seem to be incestuous business and political alliances worse than the old aristocrats, at least here in Oz. AFAIK, the EU rules on a maximum number of boards a parasite can sit on is A Good Thing
if its personal data WTH is it online ? Air gap everything that does not have to be online. Further, bastion hosts, data diodes and so on so it becomes obvious when GB of data is going out door and no direct path into organisation exists but snippets for a single users session can be passed thru with validation. Oh, and change company law so CEO and board become personally liable for big data breaches. Nothing catches spreadsheet jockeys attention like their own wallet.
Lastly, minimal information gathering for the rest of activities. No stored CC. If one is too lazy to type in credit card info and its equivalents, one shouldnt be trusted with an interactive IT device. But that would hurt G%%gl% and facebitch so no hope
by breaking basic rule for all OS. Keep the OS and all application files and processes separate. Read some OS data for performance monitoring etc. eg Very old versions of a common manglement inflicted monitoring software broke this rule often, especially in databases. Wanted database admin rights when the required stats were available for ordinary user with minimal read permissions.
Baa coded ? You mean voice recognition. And yes, as sheep grazier in very small way, they do have different "voices" Also different baa calls for a few situations. Mostly "I am here", alarm calls and "Food!" when I bring fresh bag of sheep nuts (feed nodules you perverts) to fence
Jake, please do enlighten us. Granted earlier Hebrew and the tribal refugees out of the superpower of the day had a very different culture, if one could call it that. You will not steal appears (how does anyone now know what was in someones mind 3500 years ago ?) to have started as including kidnapping for selling into slavery. But then, when teaching, one starts with the simple stuff. Dont do X, Do this etc. Not sophisticated but neither was the intended audience. Context is nearly everything.
As for lying shamans, given the last 50 years of failed predictions and assertions from, (drum roll please) Science), let along the various failed Utopian nightmares inflicted in the name of justice, equality etc, then the current ruins of Western culture has many more BS artists in authority given robes and titles than any previous attempt at civilisation. For an insiders view of current science process, the erudite Sabine Hassenfelder has a video on her despair at how the research community works now. Trigger Warning. German deadpan humour ahead.
so right. Note the history of this thought. CPM/DOS/Win9[5,8] to various PDP11 OS, Unix, Windows NT and descendants, Plan9, Oberon, QNX. None of provable correct OS grew out of niches. I wonder if the huge efforts in memory safe languages and the disaster of Itanic compiler redesign could have been better spent in developing a cross compiler that could generate applications onto small fast OS. I have a preference fpr QNX, but maybe Oberon might be better. Linices are not the answer as it is now so bloated its getting hard to tell difference except one has a choice of desktops.
The obvious objection is the effort to create provably correct libraries for OS primitives. Who wants to create a screen handler for each applications, device drivers, et al. This also assumes hardware is similar enough for some compatibility.
Given the $Gov and corporate demands for inbuilt snooping, such a project[s] would have to be written and run entirely by a well funded dedicated nonprofit based in a country that sneers at lawfare demands from the big players and totalitarian states. Any takers ?
Laz, bad short sighted move to taxpayer fund politicians campaigns. Simply empowers duopolies in political parties. See mess in Oz for starters. New movements are outfunded from start and old guard well funded. Better to limit size and frequency of donations and ensure at cost of deregistration that only adult citizens of country can make donations or _any_ political assistance. In short, block damage to effecting the will of the citizens by nonhumans, aka companies, trusts and other legal fictions who are to be firewalled off from politics. Until political funding bodies learn to live in poverty, ensuring they focus on relevance to majority of citizens, special interests will continue to own parliament and bureaucratic elites discourses.
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