Posts by Stu J 299 publicly visible posts • joined 5 Aug 2009
...which is a far bigger problem than "boat people coming over here taking our jobs" - at least some of that money would stay in the economy at least and drive other jobs. Offshoring is the worst of all worlds and should be outright banned, unless it's a capability that genuinely doesn't exist in our own country. In which case incentivise onshoring it.
You literally don't need to add in mid-contract price rises. If you decide you want to effectively put it up by £2/month after a year, just put the entire 2 year contract up by £1/month.
Treat it like you would a currency hedge - you don't get to wait-and-see and then say "oh actually we want a bit more from you". Put your cards on the table on day one and stick to it. If after 12 months you need more cash, raise prices for new contracts.
It's really not hard, if everyone is forced to play by the same rules, and the rules aren't so full of loopholes you could drive a truck through them.
The fact that you're referring to people's feelings as "fee fees" just backs up your pathetically childish black-and-white view of the world.
It doesn't take much humanity to consider that your fellow humans are fallible, and we put systems in place to cover for that. If the systems don't work for whatever reason - including if there's a culture of bypassing heavyweight SOPs because they're not working for the business on a day-to-day basis - then that's not necessarily the fault of an individual.
You also need to consider that people learn from their mistakes. If you only ever hired extremely competent, very expensive, senior staff, who had made their learning mistakes elsewhere, then that's your prerogative - but it's not a luxury most businesses have.
Should Steve and his boss have been subject to some form of disciplinary process - yes. Should they have been fired on the spot as you claim - no. Should Steve have been fired - probably not, because he was there at his boss's request, and he's just made a mistake which he's undoubtedly learned from and will now never make again. By firing him you're immediately losing some of the little positive value gained from the outage they caused.
Generally speaking if Steve worked for you, and this happened on your watch, and you enabled it (implicitly or explicitly, culturally or process-based), YOU should be the one carrying the can for it, not one of your underlings. That's what you get paid the megabucks for. If your first reaction is to sack your people, then you're a pretty toxic manager.
Sorry if I've hurt your "fee fees".
Tosser.
If taking out one seemingly minor box took the entire company down, there are bigger issues at stake.
As other people have said, why wasn't it clearly labelled if it was so important? Which moron had "architected" it such that there was a clear SPOF? Or which bean counter had nixed the resilient approach that an architect had come up with?
If anything there should be more chaos monkeys like Steve in organisations, because then things will be architected and built properly, instead of corners being cut all over the place.
Your average enterprise IT deployment is full of bits like a Brazilian favela that's been built with badly mixed concrete and is now held up with sticks and duct tape. Stuff that wouldn't pass building regulations in a million years. Yet even though western society has relatively stringent building regulations for physical buildings, we outsource design and build of critical IT systems to the cheapest, and don't apply any engineering rigour to any of it. Sacking people like Steve who are trying to make do with the sticks and duct tape doesn't fix the underlying problem.
Steve's boss suggested they go. It's not wholly unreasonable for Steve to assume that it's a sanctioned trip. Combined with some COVID lockdown stir-crazy-jumping-at-the-chance-to-see-a-different-four-walls mania I can see how he might have not asked as many questions as he perhaps he should have done.
If anyone should be carrying the can for the escapade, it's Steve's boss, not Steve.
The chances of up-to-date and accessible/discoverable documentation for a piece of kit that's *powered off* in a large organisation is relatively small. Documentation should be kept up to date. But that doesn't happen as diligently as it should.
It's generally a pretty safe assumption that if something that appears to be an active piece of kit doesn't have power then it's not "active".
I've never come across a piece of powered hardware yet that effectively acts as a patch panel passing network connectivity through even when it's disconnected from power. Power cord plugged in and device "off" is a different matter. But no power cord at all - the mind boggles at what this piece of hardware was doing and why it had been designed that way.
So Steve identified a presumably undocumented single point of failure, caused an outage that presumably didn't kill anyone, and learned an important lesson meaning he'd almost certainly do things differently from now on, making him a more valuable employee......
And they fired him. Bravo.
Unless this was genuinely a pattern of reckless behaviour that had already been called out, I just don't get some companies' attitudes to throwing techies under the bus like this, especially where their own line management is complicit.
It's more likely to drive people into covering things up when they make mistakes, rather than being open and honest.
...and that's when planes were being bombed and hijacked on a semi-regular basis, far more people were dying of lung cancer from passive smoking, and flying wasn't generally affordable to the masses beyond a once-a-year package holiday if you were lucky...
In 20 years from the mid-90s to the mid-2010s, UK passenger numbers alone increased from ~140 million a year to ~250 million a year. That simply wouldn't have happened if everything was still paper-based.
So with the greatest respect, kindly take your cancerous (literally) "nostalgia" and shove it up your arse, as it's irrelevant naval gazing bollocks.
The "compensation" you are talking about is paid in advance in the form of the lack of another zero on the end of your fare.
There's so much regulatory stuff to jump through, and so many critical calculations, not to mention stuff like routing baggage on connecting flights and so on, that if you wanted a robust and resilient non-automated backup plan that would be so slick that it wouldn't inconvenience qnyone, they'd have to charge so much they'd go out of business.
It's an uncomfortable truth but many businesses are only viable by strategically cutting a few corners here and there. I'd rather airlines and airports cut a few corners on the resilience of their passenger processing systems if it means they don't start trying to shave costs off safety-critical systems.
If he's committed offences here, he can be tried here for the offences.
Only after we're done with him should we even entertain an extradition request, and part of the condition of agreeing to a request should be - if found guilty in the US - that any US sentence gets tacked on the end of whatever we sentence him to, and he should serve the whole lot in a US jail to save us the prison space.
Not necessarily - wouldn't be the first time the "obvious" and "important" problems have been fixed in terms of future cashflows, but turns out there's some code on the periphery that uses today's date that will blow up the application or cause invalid queries to be generated...
Now we just need Google to limit the ability for spammers to add non-Google addresses to Google Groups on hacked GSuite domains.
Every few days it's another avalanche of auto-reply shite coming from legitimate businesses in response to messages that the spammers have sent "from" a group e-mail that they've subscribed god knows how many people to - and because it's coming from legit businesses via Google's infrastructure, it's much harder to elevate the spam score without capturing too many false-positives. Pain in the arse.
I feel deep unease that this is being negotiated behind closed doors between one set of companies with vested interests, and the abusive monopolist, Microsoft. Any outcomes will benefit CISPE only, not Microsoft license-holders.
The best outcome for everyone else is if CISPE tell MS to feck off, support the antitrust/monopoly complaints to reach their inevitable conclusions, and get both the playing field levelled, and a massive settlement for literally every MS customer/hostage who's been adversely affected by their shitty practices over the past 10 years.
If they can get this working with electric motors (or at least hybrid) then another plus is the definite potential to improve safety and air quality on the ramp - although I love the smell of burning jet fuel - engines often burn oil and other crap when starting up, and if you're working on the ramp every day it's probably going to take a toll on your health.
If each aircraft just has to start a relatively small APU with an exhaust that's high up, rather than starting two or more jet engines down at person-height, I'd expect that would make a difference. Don't start the engines until you're on the taxiway out in the open and the startup smoke dissipates where there's nobody to directly breathe it in.
Could also reduce the likelihood of foreign object damage, as well as reducing the likelihood of workers being ingested into running engines.
All low probability, but high cost/impact issues which probably add to the overall business case.
If they have expired / died well sucks for for you for a lack of planning.
If they are expiring / required in the next week, we'll it sucks for a lack of planning
Take it you've never worked for an organisation where the Finance bods sit on everything until the very last minute...
The techies can plan perfectly well, give management/procurement all the right paperwork, weeks ahead of time...and they'll still sit on it until 11.59 for "cashflow purposes", seemingly regardless of operational risk.
Should the CEO be directly involved with people fixing underlying faults - hell no. And a good management structure that acts as an umbrella to shield the workers from senior management is invaluable and always appreciated in a crisis.
Should the CEO be directly involved in making a judgement-call decision, i.e. "shut the airport until 11pm" - that will cost the business - and it's customers - tens of millions in disruption - abso-fucking-lutely.
You're conflating different types and scales of decision-making here. They should have sent someone to get him out of bed to make the decision, and held off making knee-jerk decisions for the hour or so it would have taken. Even if you've got nobody local to him, you send a taxi local to him to go and hammer on his door.
I'd put money on it that the CEO - had he been awake - wouldn't have decided to close the entire airport for 20 hours when the fire had only been burning for an hour or so.
I also can't imagine that that level of detail of decision is codified in the big red "oh shit" book.
Aircraft that were inbound on long haul, and still 6+ hours away from needing to make a decision about landing ended up turning back to their origin. For BA and Virgin in particular, they've now got lots of passengers and tens of planes on the wrong side of the world, and a massive logistical headache that will take days to unwind.
Heathrow's Ops Director likely doesn't give as much as a damn about the knock on effects as the CEO would. The Ops Director will have been in tactical mode; the CEO would likely have taken a bigger picture strategic approach to decision making.
Terminal 5 could have been accepting flights from mid-morning onwards, so the long hauls still airborne could have continued and arrived more or less on time, those that had diverted to other UK airports could have shuttled down to Heathrow, and a large percentage of the knock-on disruption of having people and planes in the wrong places would have been avoided.
Choosing to close the airport for the entire day was demonstrably the wrong decision, and wholly unnecessary. The only thing that will have saved the Ops Director's bacon is the fact his boss screwed up by being uncontactable and sleeping blissfully ignorant until 6am.
And I still imagine boss's first words to the Ops Director will have been along the lines of "you've fucking done what!?"
The CEO was fast asleep with his phone on silent and they couldn't raise him. Why someone wasn't dispatched to wake him up, who knows...
Which meant it fell to the Operations Director to handle the incident, and he made the call to shut the airport for the entire day, the best part of 24 hours.
Which doesn't appear to have been remotely necessary as several areas - including Terminal 5 - had power sufficient to handle passengers safely before the morning was out.
So aside from not testing their power resilience, their chain of command fell through, and the person left in charge by default made a poor decision that actually caused much of the financial harm.
Now they're pointing the finger of blame at others to try to deflect from their own failings.
Exactly - Oracle's lawyers will go after relatively low-hanging fruit that are likely to be a slam dunk. Not the kind of case that will be difficult to win and will play out badly in the court of public opinion.
They're good lawyers, not idiots, and the last thing they want is case law that potentially damages the rest of their shakedown scam.
Make all students and staff (barring a specific procurement team) sign up to something that says they are individually liable for any Oracle licensing costs that may be incurred if they install Oracle products on any of their devices.
Explicitly declare that said students and staff do not have the right to enter into any contracts or license agreements with Oracle on behalf of the organisation or any of its related institutions, and do not have permission to use Oracle products in the course of their work or studies.
Explicitly inform Oracle that this is contractually enforced and that unless licenses are agreed to in writing by specific named individuals, there is and will be no agreement between Oracle and the organisation or any of its related institutions, and no liability for any licensing.
Then, tell Oracle to fuck off whenever they send a bill. Simples.
It did look like a mid-field takeoff based on ADS-B data from FlightRadar24, but that appears to have been a data issue rather than reality.
There's video footage showing it already at a reasonable speed going past that intersection, so a mid-field takeoff can be ruled out, though there is a turning circle that's about 2/3rds of the way down the runway, so that's still a possibility that it wasn't a full length takeoff - but that would be a very strange decision for any pilot to have made in a heavily laden 787 in nearly 40 degree heat.
You've somewhat missed the point here that if you start off small on-prem, and have to grow, there is either additional up-front cost (i.e. buying more expensive chassis and/or controllers that can handle potential future expansion), or significant additional cost as you go both in terms of replacing kit that is no longer fit for purpose and migrating data across.
Additionally, you can't just click your fingers and magic new kit into your datacentre. Procurement, shipping, and commissioning takes time, and if latency stymies your ability to scale then you're potentially leaving money on the table, or you're delivering a suboptimal experience to your existing customers.
I could launch a startup in the cloud tomorrow and literally be paying pennies for storage for months until subscribers ramped up. And if they ramped up rapidly (e.g. after a rave review online or by some influencer) the cloud would just keep scaling the storage for me, and I'd only be charged after the fact.
Yes, once I've got a zillion users it might be cheaper then to repatriate my data on-prem, and because I'd then be buying hardware in bulk it'd likely be cheaper overall than if I'd bought all the hardware piecemeal. I've still probably paid more overall than if I bought all that hardware up-front, but crucially I didn't have to gamble any CapEx on day one, and started off with extremely limited OpEx, giving my startup the best chance of survival.
...and the right tool for the job when they were scaling up probably was S3. It's pay-as-you-go, and you don't need to go out and spend $1.5M up-front on 18PB of storage that you may or may not end up needing.
Once you're mature enough to evaluate the true needs to run your business at scale, then the right tool may well be an on-prem solution. That's fine. It might be a hybrid solution, or still a cloud-based solution. That's fine too.
What pisses me off about DHH and all these 37signals articles is that they always gloss over the first part and focus solely on the second part. Would his business have been as successful and profitable in the first place without the flexible economics of the cloud allowing rapid growth without significant CapEx? Maybe? Maybe not...
We had a problem once with an airport-based customer complaining that when they were printing from our software (using Okidata dot matrix printers) it was fine a lot of the time, but was intermittently inserting garbage into the printouts.
They swapped out the PC, the printer, the cables, but still no joy, until we sent someone to site to diagnose it.
Turns out the serial cable from the PC they were using was running next to a baggage injection belt at a check-in desk - and if someone activated the injection belt while a print job was on the wire, that was the cause of the data corruption. Bought a network card for the printer and chucked the serial cable in the bin.
Given how appallingly Fujitsu have behaved over this, and given the recent precedent re British Steel, could the government not consider enacting emergency legislation to take ownership of the Horizon code, and to TUPE anyone currently supporting it across to the Post Office...?
And then legislate to make damn sure in future that public bodies have full rights to do whatever they want with IP produced by any 3rd party as part of any public contract, and that any licenses to use software are perpetual regardless of what the contract itself might try to enforce. Then 3rd parties might have to focus on actually adding value continuously rather than milking the public teat for years whilst doing the bare minimum.
Wiped billions of dollars off the value of several funds by running an UPDATE without a WHERE clause. Full-on stomach-sinking P45-anticipating panic.
Fortunately we had triggers on every table writing every single change off to audit tables, so managed to use those to undo the screw-up in less than an hour.
Important lesson learned - any manual SQL goes inside a rollback transaction, verify number of records updated first, then switch the rollback out for a commit. Or just avoid having to run manual SQL on production DBs...
"Azure has a functionality that AWS or GCS cannot match, same as the other way around."
No, it doesn't. It's not a functionality. It's an artificial licensing restriction which is an abuse of monopoly.
If you decide to use a proprietary AWS or GCP service that has no easy exit path to another provider, that's a decision you're making with your eyes wide open. Most sensible people don't box themselves into a corner when architecting cloud-native by using services for which there isn't an almost drop-in equivalent on other platforms.
If you've been running Windows servers on prem, from the era of dedicated physical tin, then moved to virtual machines, there's no technical reason at all why you can't move those servers to AWS, or GCP, or Azure, or Oracle Cloud, or any other cloud that provides IaaS services.
If Microsoft had a rule that said you can't move on prem licenses to the cloud full stop, that would be annoying, but fine.
It's the fact they treat Azure as a special case that is blatantly an illegal abuse of a monopoly in one sector being used to gain an illegal advantage in another sector.
It's not rocket science, and they deserve a massive fine, an immediate cease-and-desist, to pay compensation to customers that have overpaid to use Microsoft products on other cloud vendors, and to waive egress charges for anyone that was affected who subsequently decides to abandon Azure to migrate to another cloud vendor.
This is precisely why boards of corporations only having a responsibility to shareholders is wrong.
If the boards of corporations had an additional fiduciary duty of care to consider the impacts of their decisions on their employees, their customers, the communities in which they operate, the environment, and the long-term value of the business, the world would be a much better place.
Instead we've learned the hard way that late-stage short-termist capitalism shits on everything it can (including the corpse of it's own granny that it sold a while back) to make a few bucks.
If you don't have a Signal user in your phone contacts, their name shows up based on what they've set it as.
If you do have a Signal user in your phone contacts, their name shows up based on what you set it as.
In both cases you can override the display name for a contact within Signal.
If you're not confident that a contact is definitely who you think it is, you can view a cryptographically generated shared "safety number" for that contact, and verify it offline with them.
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