Re: wup wa wop, wup wa wop
Maybe that should be wop wop wop waaaa, wup wup wup waaa .. you know how it goes.
142 publicly visible posts • joined 8 Apr 2011
Obviously a vendor can't keep supporting old stuff forever because (a) nobody makes the same components and (b) you would never sell anything new that supports the latest in IT fashions sorry standards.
I've seen companies running 20 year old hardware and literally getting spares off e-bay. Up to 1 application per 10 staff over 200,000 users. Procurement standards causes this problem.
I suspect the IRS may still be running 1000s of ancient PC blades as web servers for different application purposes, with no re-engineering and no doubling up of apps per server. Its easier to manage even if they are idle for 99% of the time.
And every time they replace a mainframe back-end with a mid-range system they find that after 10 years that goes off support, the middleware and utilities have been bought out and dont exist the same way, the libraries aren't compatible and the o/s isn't supported either.
If the current trend is to re-factor every application into K8s then there will be a big delay in solution architecture working with the latest in tax law. Good time to be in Gov cloud business.
Yeah nice response!
djnz is a great example - you can interfere with the value of the bc register pair mid loop and cause chaos.
Therefore the checks need to be done on the source code. Hence back into the old Ada vs. C debate now with rust taking over from Ada.
The proposal would require taking the ML up to 6 sigma.
One historical feature of CPUs is that a register can hold an address, which can be used for data or for code: Z80: jmp (hl)
In C you can declare a variable to be a pointer to a bit of data or a function mimicking the old CPUs.
We haven't needed to write self modifying code in 50 years, either.
So the point I'm making is that wouldn't it be nicer to have a compiler which does not act so dumb and instead of printing warnings actually calculates the possibility of creating bad addresses and erroring out at that point? It may be better to have a front-end to a compiler which intelligently examines the code we have in the language it was written in, instead of translating bad code.
I hate seeing warnings when I compile other people's code and hate being told to ignore them.
I implemented parallel zlib compression in 1999 on hp-ux , so not so new. It was easy because the vendor had some lovely simple #PRAGMA options for multi-threaded parallelism in C.
It showed up to 1600% cpu reported in top when running on 4 cores, totally destroyed the ability of the o/s to account for it properly.
One problem was compress (zlib) had a small 64k maximum block size, so it spent more time managing it's threads than actually doing stuff. If I could have changed that which would make it not backwards compatible I would have gone for 4MB or so, to limit the i/o ops and reduce the thread management. The actual speed therefore was not 16x faster but maybe 2x.
You could get 2x faster in the original single-threaded implementation by simply reducing the compression strength, so the whole exercise wasn't worth more than an academic investigation. De-compression was so fast that i/o was the bottleneck and it simply wasn't worth doing that in parallel according to my testing.
Including pre-installed servers and storage in rack adding up to 1 metric ton, being too heavy for the lift/elevator. On another occasion the machine room floor was strong enough but the ramp wasn't. At another site the rack was too tall for the lift and had to be tilted right over.
I think the Register needs to take some of the credit for helping destroy the credibility of the chip.
Be careful of who you diss Reg because 20 years later we are stuck with only 2 types of mainstream CPU with a 3rd only just coming in. Back in 2000 we had a whole bunch more to choose from and life was more interesting. The trend to make everything in software is going to hold back hardware innovation going forwards. You could point out how much is being offloaded to graphics processors these days but how many architectures of those do we have - 2?
Having said that, the first iteration of the Itanium really was poor. The 2nd was faster but very complicated.
The other thing that killed it was HP themselves. In the early post Compaq/Dec merger years I've never seen such a company where the management was so wholly set against each other. No wonder Hurd went to 'Orrible.
You are correct, the 68000 was an upgrade from the old Spectrum's Z80 in that it had a supervisor mode. The o/s simply wasn't pre-emptive in that way. I do know someone who programmed scheduling directly in assembler, with simulated trains going round a track with points.
I had an OPD at ICL. In parts of the company they were hot property and coveted, because they looked cool. In other parts, just meh, we've got better stuff to do all that, like a PC with MS Windows 1 or AT&T system 4 Unix.
Plus the OPD Microdrives were still bad. More reliable means they would break, tangle or stretch a tape after a month rather than a week.
Sir Clive's weakness was that he wanted to miniaturise everything on a tight budget, when it simply didn't need to be done in many cases.
Maybe they used ZFS and discovered reading not-quite-written data causes corruption, hehehehe.
Seriously though I suspect it is a cache-sync issue here. Same sort of idea but a different level.
I would like to see the cloud operators enter into a big mutual agreement where none charge egress data fees for backups to another cloud provider.
But I can't see them doing it, even though a simple API call on their platform could wipe everything.
If you are on M365 you have the option of independent backups to AWS or elsewhere from ISVs.
"ZFS is fast, more fully featured and totally safe"
" Oh, there's another teeny-weenie buggette that may corrupt some data but most likely not"
I'm still steering clear of this. From the description it sounds like multi-user / multi-process testing may be a bit lacking at the moment. Could all fanbois please volunteer.
When I went into a BMW dealership once and asked to look at their Z3 (it was 1997) they said sure, but after judging my scruffy IT worker just finished a weekend of changes unshaven look then asked how I expected to pay for it. I was a contractor... so I said cash and walked out never to return.
They seem to expect the customers to be mad fanboys, just like Ferrari. But BMW engineer the car's life at 4 years or 200k km, maybe less. Hardly anyone under 40 still thinks they engineer cars built to last. Thanks to the multitude of Youtube car channels people are better educated. So as well as trying to sell to the old fanboys, BMW are now creating cars for the aspirational wealthy demographic, the ones who cant actually afford it but want to flash the badge at their mates on the estate or on Instagram.
They are allowed to offshore provided that they keep the same controls over data as you have in the UK. The fact that the eyes on the data won't be in UK doesn't matter.
Sales has very little to do with common sense or impartiality. It is all about giving the customer a warm and fuzzy. Most of the clients know nothing at all about running IT and seriously cannot tell the difference between proposals. They just go with who schmoozes them the best. gives the most warm and fuzzy assurances, has the best apparent rates/terms and says yes to everything.
The old British computer company ICL in the 1980s had an internal information text system, which was nearly identical to teletext. This was a kind of fore-runner to an Intranet containing company announcements. It ran on series 39 mainframe. There was even a lonely hearts page, which I thought was hilarious because all the women in the office would try to work out who was looking for a date. You would see the pages scroll through on monitors in offices. I can't remember if you could log into it, too long ago now.
Even though cookies were the most accurate way of tying an ID to sites and adverts, what happens now instead is that every click-through and site visit is tagged with your ID and those clicks are themselves sent to analytical aggregators that use probabilities to tie your social media ID. The cookie laws are irrelevant and simply bypassed.
And yes - the way the opt in/out panes work is a simple logical OR of Allow or Legitimate Interest for you to be tracked.
Some of these opt-in/out tracking panes refer to a long list of 3rd parties who you have no direct control over whether they track you or not.
These analytical aggregators have strict NDAs with the social and search giants so they cannot publicise what they do.
As the researchers found out, the companies are complying with the letter of the law but not the spirit and in some case not even the former, through outsourcing of tracking under NDA and other contractual terms that keep them free from direct accusation of non-compliance.
A lot of my problems with this in the past have been around either bad software, interrupts, poor configuration or general capacity.
I used to use processor affinity to bind cores to network or serial cards interrupt servicing, making sure I left free cores for other tasks. I outsmarted myself a couple of times with that but it did work with heavy NFS.
Thankfully eventually the kernel got better than me and the speed and number of the cores meant I really didn't need task sets any more.
My USB music recording has never been perfect even with Ubuntu studio low latency. At least Ubuntu got Jack working which is more than I ever managed from source.
Thanks for the heads-up about Nvidia chips.
Actually I am far more likely to trust the civil servants than the politicians above them. I read somewhere that every prime minister up to Cameron used these services to snoop on journalists and political opponents and I don't think the incumbent mob will be much better. However in some cases even that is justified, because back in the 1970s labour and the unions were indirectly receiving money from the USSR in an effort to de-stabilise the country. Out of chaos comes opportunity for the fringe elements to gain power. I still suspect Haroid Wilson may have been a KGB agent especially as he canned TSR2.
Things are getting better, slowly. Remember the Chrysler vulnerability of a few years back which allowed root dbus calls directly from the internet with a default password, so that anybody could crash a car remotely?
Computer security as applied to the automotive industry is now being taught at the University technical colleges in the UK, so some cars of the future (e.g. JLR) should at least have better authentication and a chain of trust. But how much of this software development is being guided by this when the cheaper programmers are elsewhere in the world and the directors think that sales depend on features/benefits more than security?
The problem here is that most of these attack vectors involved hacking the manufacturer and getting hold of the credentials from the inside, so it doesn't matter if you have a strong password, trusted certificates or even blockchain tech, people get to your car and account through the front door with that.
So it's more a matter of if, rather than how, hence the PR efforts to prevent widespread panic about car security.
Happened to me once.
The only thing more evil than being laid off is being told you are not being laid off but there isn't a job for you any more. Basically forcing the employee to find themselves a new job without being paid redundancy severance.
Ironically I had just saved the company over a million pounds in the previous 4 months.
So I went contracting and doubled my salary for the next 15 years. Ironically my contracting roles tended to last longer than all my permanent roles... a lack of staff appraisal system is probably the reason.
Techies are bad a selling themselves, always better to have a recruiter sell you.
April's big price increases caused a few companies to jump to AWS. GCP also offers some good deals. Azure's growth is partly because Microsoft are forcing customers into it by putting more features into Azure AD and associated products, such as Purview and Sentinel, many of which need Azure AD P1 or P2 to get the full features. Its very hard to fight that in the Enterprise and means a lot of companies feel forced to keep at least a minimal Azure account to integrate all identities.
Sorry, that should be kill -9 $ME and I don't care what gets left open and hanging.
or in WSL: sudo systemctl stop $MYSERVICENAME and maybe it will stop it or maybe it will complain and leave it running.
Now if systemd could go a bit further into Windows it could improve the powershell horror
Crypto.com have been laying off staff.
Interesting to note that for a large sum of money they are willing to go to the court to get refunded in dollars, yet when a user of their exchange makes a mistake that loses tokens Crypto.com are unwilling to accept any liability.
For example I transferred my last 1 Eth from Crypto.com to my coinbase Eth wallet, something I had done a few times before - except that being very tired I stupidly accepted the "default" option of using the Crypto,com owned chain "CRO" which means that my Eth magically vanished from the world.
Yes I accept it is my fault for not being careful enough to assume they would try to dupe me.
The fact that the same target wallet address on the cro chain isn't owned by anybody individually means that Crypto.com have my Eth by default and will not send it back.
You cannot reverse crypto transactions. It's also very hard to get support from any crypto exchange and harder to start legal action when they are based offshore.
Some good advice came from someone above, always test transfer the minimum amount and check it gets there before you send the rest.
In other advice, I'm right out of crypto now, back into shares - caveat emptor.
No it's 2 different organisations in France with >2 times the consequential bureaucracy. For them to communicate directly would be far too simple for the French - who would audit the data etc.
The detail required in the forms for the two types of property tax in France (fonciere and habitation) is unbelievable. Unchecked rampant snooping to counter a culture of personal secrecy. They want the size of all the rooms, corridors, number of bathrooms, size of attic space, cellar, square metres of patio area - yes they charge you for that, size of pool, whether an inflatable pool can be considered permanent, number of outbuildings and purpose of each one, size and purpose of all land, whether you have a terrestrial TV aerial which is I suppose their version of a TV licence tax.
Every week I hear of users who _demand_ to open any email and attachment they receive. Regardless of all the security training they get. Then they say it's our fault for allowing malware through. The question is... what legally constitutes enough protection these days - 3 different AV scanners, sandboxes, what else?
As stated it will be bring proof that a transaction has taken place. Hopefully a weapon against fraud and corruption by officials and private individuals. But only if it has been designed properly with no single control over the chains.
The 1 party system puts all the power in 1 place with 1 single version of the truth, including re-writing history.
I dont understand why Broadcom think VMWare has a future. I heartily agree that it will probably be stripped of cash, geared up to the point of no investment and used as a means to deprecate non-Broadcom chips in the VMWare market. Medium to long term WMWare are going to be replaced by a mixture of cloud, HyperV, Docker and HCI. In my opinion engineers starting now should start with infra as code such as Nutanix and Terraform along with cloud qualifications.
Yes I've seen that too - 9-12 inches of solid cable under floor. They could barely get the tiles down on the top layer. At the bottom of it all was the 40 year old analogue phone system and alarm. At least that building was being powered down and decommissioned.
As opposed to the 2 electricians I once saw arguing over 3 black cables connected to my shiny new HP Superdome (64 kilowatts) arguing over which black cable was the blue phase....