or you could use all that spare run time doing something useful... like bioinformatics or some other other processor hungry number crunching which you sell on to your research departments at bargain basement pricing, on the understanding that in the event of a failure then your cycles are toast.
Posts by TRT
9611 publicly visible posts • joined 11 Sep 2009
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And so we enter day seven of King's College London major IT outage
Uber's robo-truck makes first delivery of ... Budweiser in Colorado
Job ad asks for 'detrimental' sysadmin
Google flying car spotted?
Nintendo's new console-tab
Re: I really only...
Well, you have a point. But I can't just keep shoving consoles under the TV indefinitely. I didn't replace my failing PS2 with a PS4 - I got a second hand PS2 instead. As for the Switch, it looks pretty good. What's wrong with putting a DVD drive in the base unit and imaging the game disks into an emulator?
There are older games which are really very playable indeed still. Enjoyable even. Retro gaming is a huge thing. A helping hand from the manufacturers might make their new offerings more palatable - owners with an existing collection of games may consider upgrading hardware if their investment in software isn't written off.
Mind you, it didn't work that well for the Wii-U. Perhaps they should have made a bigger thing of that compatibility.
Oh joy. You can now buy a gold plated quadcopter drone
Sysadmin flees asbestos scare with disk drive, blank pay cheques, angry builders in pursuit
Re: Call Girl Principle
Do you mind a little advice? Starfleet captains are like children. They want everything right now and they want it their way. But the secret is to give them only what they need, not what they want.
Yeah, well, I told the Captain I'd have this analysis done in an hour.
How long will it really take?
An hour.
Och, lad. You didn't tell him how long it would *really* take, did ya?
Well, of course I did.
Oh, laddie. You've got a lot to learn if you want people to think of you as a miracle worker.
Is this the worst Blockchain idea you've ever heard?
An immutable record, you say...
Dead Monkeys are to split up again, according to their manager, Lefty Goldblatt. They've been in the business now ten years, nine as other groups. Originally the Dead Salmon, they became for a while, Trout. Then Fried Trout, then Poached Trout In A White Wine Sauce, and finally, Herring. Splitting up for nearly a month, they re-formed as Red Herring, which became Dead Herring for a while, and then Dead Loss, which reflected the current state of the group. Splitting up again to get their heads together, they reformed a fortnight later as Heads Together, a tight little name which lasted them through a difficult period when their drummer was suspected of suffering from death. It turned out to be only a rumor and they became Dead Together, then Dead Gear, which lead to Dead Donkeys, Lead Donkeys, and the inevitable split up. After nearly ten days, they reformed again as Sole Marnier, then Dead Sole, Rock Cod, Turbot, Haddock, White Bait, the Places, Fish, Bream, Mackerel, Salmon, Poached Salmon, Poached Salmon In A White Wine Sauce, Salmon Marnier, and Helen Shapiro. This last name, their favorite, had to be dropped following an injunction and they split up again. When they reformed after a recordbreaking two days, they ditched the fishy references and became Dead Monkeys, a name which they stuck with for the rest of their careers. Now, a fortnight later, they've finally split up.
Just what Europe needs – another bungled exit: Mars lander goes AWOL
Donald Trump running insecure email servers
OK, so this is how I learned about firewalls...
Hmmm...
PA-7080. Country of origin: USA
Type: Hardware
Year of Manufacture: 2016
Connections per second: 1,200,000
Firewall Throughput: 200Gbps
Max Sessions: 80,000,000
Base Price: $300,000
I'm going to pick... price.
What've you got?
Sonicwall TZ600 Country of origin: USA
Type: Hardware
Year of Manufacture: 2015
Connections per second: 12,000
Firewall Throughput: 500Mbps
Max Sessions: 150,000
Base Price: $1,800
Is it lowest wins on price? Highest? Shit. OK. You've won that one too.
New UK National silicone database will help avoid boobs
German regulators won't let Tesla use the name 'Autopilot'
RRS Sir David Attenborough construction goes full-steam ahead
The IRS spaffed $12m on Office 365 subscription IT NEVER USED
Dell to reveal 'micro data centres' for outdoor use
Soylent bars farting recall
Re: PEOPLE!!!!
The Soylent tours were incredibly popular. Unfortunately the cause of this popularity was a slight typographical error in the brochure which read "The Soylent Factory employees will make a very good meal for visiting tourists", instead of "The Soylent Factory employees will make a very good meal OF visiting tourists".
Google DeepMind 'learns' the London Underground map to find best route
It grew more and more awesome until one day the answer came back...
The best way to get from King's Cross to Manor House is to create a rotating artificial singularity around the Coram Fields area and fold the fabric of space-time allowing instantaneous transfer between one place and another... hang on, I'll just do that for you...
Re: I don't know how I managed without it
One answer might be:
God was like totally awesome, but there wasn't anything around to be awesome at. So he made a universe and filled it with stuff, and from the stuff he made all kinds of things, and some of those things were given life, free will and intelligence that they might discover just how awesome He is. He knew He'd have to give them a little poke every now and again, create the odd prophet here and there, make it rain a lot every now and again, do a bit of smiting, his creations were going to smite each other quite a bit, usually in arguments over Him... but eventually, EVENTUALLY, there would be something else that would say "Woah, dude! You are AWESOME, man. Just mind-blowing. Woah. Far out." And being an immortal, the eventually part wasn't going to be a problem.
Eventually. But did He also make time? Oh man, I'm going to have to go and think about this... Pass the bong, brother.
WD flashes first SanDisk drives: Blue and Green
Re: I've never...
These are Green SSD in the article. The Green HDD... I tried to use in a RAID. They kept spinning down, and when they had spun up again and synchronised, the time taken would often be beyond the allowed range for the controller, so error time... The same when they were used as boot drives or primary disks, just too damned slow (paging files I guess, I don't know - I didn't do the diagnostics just put them all to one side when I figured out they were no good for that use). As secondary storage, they were fine.
Mercedes answers autonomous car moral dilemma: Yeah, we'll just run over pedestrians
Re: "... idiots in Range Rovers who think they're indestructible."
I recall this scenario being played out in popular fiction once...
BT will HATE us for this one weird 5G trick
Re: I don't have a problem with cyclists..
It's better than nylon. Can you imagine the EM noise from 1.2 million sets of thighs rubbing against each other in a dynamodic symphony of cycling chaos if we had to go back to nylon? Still, it would probably reduce the need for street lighting, all those tiny blue sparks.
Nicole forces NASA resupply into Sunday launch: Crew must wait for their packet soup
I can imagine the conversation now...
Hope they've got some odds and sods on board, we're short of a few supplies.
Like what?
Cow's milk, ran out of that yonks ago. Fresh and dehydrated.
What kind of milk are we using now?
Emergency backup supply. We're on the dog's milk.
Dog's milk!
Nothing wrong with dog's milk. Full of goodness, full of vitamins, full of marrowbone jelly. Lasts longer than any other milk, dog's milk.
Why?
No bugger'll drink it. Plus of course the advantage of dog's milk is that when it goes off, it tastes exactly the same as when it's fresh.
Without new anti-robot laws, humanity is doomed, MPs told
The UK government would...
no doubt form an equivalent of 200 bytes encapsulating three elegant laws, but running to a checklist weighing in at around 4Tb.
Desktop budget wrangles: Whose device is it anyway?
Re: all admins
The IT guy in the other department *is* actually called Roger. I didn't realise it was a requirement.
But, yes, we do have a mix of BYOD, grants coming in at different times (there's no luxury of suiting a standard spec), people coming from overseas who want different keyboard layouts that they are used to... I've got people here writing their own device drivers for piezo-electric focussing devices used in their home-brew microscopes. We've got HPC clusters running fMRI data through experimental algorithms that make my eyes try to crawl out of my head to escape my melting brain...
I was agreeing with the article really. What does need to be standardised and supported wide scale, roll out as virtualised device/OS agnostic - keep it in your walled garden and if worse comes to worse you can't be blamed for the problems of a small group of users who have rigs so diverse and bizarre that even that doesn't work for them. What doesn't need to be standardised, controlled, safeguarded and supported, don't worry about - let someone else do that.
Re: In research...
Might surprise you to learn that I don't have to run around firefighting, that we do keep a lid on unlicensed software and we are very productive. I prefer educating users than locking them out. Manage the people, not the machines.
Like I said, it works for us. I understand that there are different approaches, but it's horses for courses.
EDIT
If it's your view that your end users are "lunatics", it's no wonder that a 'them and us' attitude develops. I'm finding the level of disrespect here quite upsetting. It's one thing to poke a bit of fun along the 'have you tried turning it off and on again' lines, but I'm sensing genuine contempt for what I would consider as colleagues though some refer to them as customers or end users.
Re: In research...
I'm genuinely surprised. Perhaps I didn't make it clear that we are a postgraduate research facility where people come and work usually for many years, even the bulk of their career. I'd take a different tack for undergraduates or places with a high throughput of casuals who have no ownership or investment in the department. I certainly insisted on fully locked down machines in the FE college I worked at previously.
Re: Not aways a wise choice
And the decision I made was to allow our people to do what they will. They deserve trust and respect - they are the elite with tens or even hundreds of thousands of pounds invested in their education. Even if they can't manage to put only glass in the glass recycling bin. But anyway, yes, so that's what works for me. I do capture disk images of equipment machines once the techs are satisfied that it's all installed and calibrated and ready to be handed over. But I don't tell anyone that because if they thought they had a get out of jail free card...
In research...
It's certainly the case that researchers come in, with their own budgets for their own IT expenses. To have an End User Services dictatorial about standardised this that and the other is damaging. IT services exist to service, not dictate. If another service provider started dictating what you could spend your budget on, you'd sack them and get someone else. On top of that, there's the value added to a researcher's career by having IT skills - if they need to create MATLAB scripts to deconvolve photographs from instruments in a new way, then they should be able to install MATLAB, not have to phone someone in central IT to come and do it for them because they don't have the password. Just this week I've had microscope engineers sat in a room at £500 an hour whilst I reinstall Windows 7 because the anti-virus clashes with their install and even the anti-virus uninstall has been locked with a password by the previous IT control freaks in a foreign university that aren't there at that time of the day... My policy is everyone is an administrator, you can turn your own anti-virus on and off if you wish, you can install whatever you want and if it breaks, then you're the one that's going to suffer, but I am there to fix it if you can't. You don't get on the network without my say so, and I'll check your machine over before you can. You can shape your own tools. I'm open for discussion on things like everyone having the same model of printer for the sake of consumable compatibility.
So please, PLEASE. Virtualise that which needs to be, leave the users free to splash the cash on whatever they feel they need and we all have the right (not necessarily the ability) to learn from our own mistakes.
Burger barn put cloud on IT menu, burned out its developers
Adventures in (re) naming your business: Fire up the 4-syllable random name generator
Command line coffee machine: Hacker shuns app so he can stay at the keyboard for longer
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