Posts by I Am Spartacus 459 publicly visible posts • joined 17 May 2012
I gave a talk in Houston about networking within the telco I was working for to a bunch of software developers.
Well, I found out that if you pronounce "routing" the way we Brits do it has a totally different connotation to Americans. Cue lots of guffahs and laughter at all the parts I thought were serious.
I used to do shelf stacking at a supermarket. First after school, and then in the first terms vaction from Uni. I was reading Computing with Electronics, but, fuck it, I was the best shelf stacker they ever had. The supermarket boss, who own the small chain, tried to get me to give up Uni to become junior manager of the branch I worked in.
The lady I worked with told me that her husband worked in an engineering company that could use some computer knowledge. He got me what we now call a minimum wage position, working on the IBM mainframes. After a bit, I managed to rewrite their Fortran simulation programs, link it directly to the graph plotter, and save them a couple of hours each run. So, I quickly got promoted to a reasonable wage and asked to come back each vacation.
Then, in the final term, when we were doing the milk round, trying to find a job when we left those gleaming spires, I got a telegram. "Got new computer, call me, Ray". So I duly called Ray, the new manager. He asked me what my best offer was, then added 50% to it, and said I would skip graduate entry and become a fully fledged Engineer. That got me stared on my career, 45 years ago!
Motto: Always do your best in any job, even if it trying to get that extra case of dog food on to the shelf.
You would use this because you want to have a scalable, supported, fast system to run your AI models on. That is, you want to do real work.
As opposed to designing, sourcing, assembling, installing, debugging your own hybrid cluster, that will almost certainly be slower.
This row has broken out because of recognised need for a language fit for the 21st century that has security and a robust architecture at its core. C is an old language, as in I first started working with it in 1977! It is designed to compile to highly efficient code that is as close to the machine core as possible. And in this it is highly successful. The problem with C is that it is very easy to write bad code. I will go further, it is very hard to write perfect code.
Rust has been designed to overcome a lot of C's problems with a compile time checker that prevent misuse of data structures. By eliminating race conditions, buffer overruns, etc but still allowing a code conversion to efficient machine code, Rust is less of a language like C and more of a High Order Assembly Language. There are, however, two big downsides to Rust. First is has a very steep learning curve. The concepts of borrowing are just so alien to large parts of the kernel community that it does seem like snake oil - it promises a lot, but getting there is a huge struggle. The second is that it is not best suited to dealing with device drivers, where raw access to registers and I/O ports is itself alien to Rust.
Is Rust the answer to the Linux kernel? Well, perhaps not. Yes, I think it can be a good tool, but maybe start by writing all the user functions that exist in the Linux operating system as small (sometimes not so small) applications. Going headlong in to the kernel is never going to work. The issue with the bindings is just one point.
What Linux should be looking at is the size of the kernel. Does everything that is in there really need to be part of the kernel? In my opinion, we have seen kernel bloat, with the memory foot print increasing. If we had more work being done in non-kernel services or applications, then the kernel becomes smaller. Rewriting the now non-kernel components in Rust is a much cimpler task.
But moving the whole kernel, that is premised on multi access to shared data structures, will be very hard to do in Rust.
Maybe what we really need is a much more rigerous C compiler. Something that takes the lead from the Rust compiler to prohibit, or at least warn, when non-safe operations are being attempted.
Anyone remember when routers were just routers. You booted your Cisco routers and they loaded from the master configuration. Not some botched implementation of FreeBSD. Oh those were that days. Sure they didn't do much more than, well, route packets. But they were secure (apart from the ones that the NSA installed their custom chips in, alledgedly). Mind you, I also remember some PFY deciding to "upgrade" the config files and losing all of them.
I live in a London Postcode, but BT can't get me FTTP. Not only that but they can't even give my a date by which they will be able to give me FTTP. They did have a date, that was over a year ago. Now they can't even give me a date when they can start planning to give me a date.
I have FTTC and I get 60+ meg. I can literally see the cabinet from my window.
But the new pub I spoke to that is closer to the exchange than me has been told that it can have only 14.4. So, no public wifi in the pub then.
As an IT professional I diustrust any new technology that has not had extensive testing backed by provenance. AI is right up there with the worst technology possible.
I had to give a talk on a few astronomy issues to my local amateur group. Running out of time I asked ChatGPT to summarise the research paper and give me a 2 minute summary that I could read out. And it did. It was very readable. And totally wrong. It was only when I scanned the text that I realised that the original paper was based on Hubble imagery, whereas the ChatGPT version calimed that ALMA, the radio telescope in Chile, was responsible. This isn't a simple mistake - it is out and out fabictaion. Nowhere in the paper did it reference ALMA at all. I actually called one of the UK researchers (as a fellow of the Royal Astronomy Society I can do this) and he went from disbelief, through astonishment to anger - his work of several years was being reported incorrectly.
After that I asked ChatGPT how many books or papers I was responsible for. It gave me a nice list of books. None of them anything to do with me, but it had added my name to the accredite authors. It would have been nice to get the publication payments!
My real worry is when I see AI being used for medical diagnostics. Can we trust it to make the correct diagnosis? Well, we know that we can't. A skilled professional has to validate each positive diagnosis and check the findings. But what about the false negatives - when AI tells the clinician that there no sign of cancer, and that message is just repeated verbatim to the patient. If the patient later dies of cancer, do their heirs have a case to make against the clinician? The AI? The people who built the AI?
Some many years ago I was PM on a project to collect data in a database, and use BI tools to create reports that would be distibuted to customers. As we only had six connections to the database was internally priced the Oracle licenses accordingly. Oracle informed us that not only would they use the number of clients, but would also include the number of people in those clients who saw the data, even if it was printed. The costs spiraled out of control.
I was asked to look for an alternative and came up with using DB2 instead. IBM would give us the DB licenses if we used their consultants. As I needed a team anyway, whether I paid contractors or IBM made no difference.
Oracle took this to our CTO. The Head of Oracle Europe told him that "We didn't have the balls to switch DB suppliers" and the price of over £3M would stand. Infront of him the CTO called me up on speaker phone and asked if I had the IBM quote in front of me. On being told it was on my desk, he instructed me to sign it immediately under his name, and also to inform all other non-completed projected that they too would switch to DB2 with immediate effect. I heard him then turn to the Oracle VP and say "I think you can go now".
RESULT!
4" pipese are quite common if you have water mist fire supression system.
This happened to me: The high pressure pipes failed and sprayed water everywhere. One stream of water went into the Sequent, which immediately shutdown. The other steam hit the window and went stright into the cooling slots of the AS/400 -which was not at all happy. The Tandem non-stop ignored all of this, and the data centre manager pushed the big red emergency power down button. It just kept going. Truly non-stop!
IBM were not at all fased - they turned up with 4 hours with a specialist water repair team.
But it was a bit of a shock when I got a call early saturday morning saying the data centre was flooded - "WHAT on the 4th floor?????"
In the 1980's we had one where two sections of busbar were bolted together. Well, they were supposed to be bolted. The installers had not put sufficient torque into the bolts and there was a small gap between the two connecting busbars. It worked for years until one morning it decided to fail - and it was dramatic. About a metre of copper just vanished. Fortunately no-one was near it at the time. Took is offline for a couple of weeks.
Way back when Cray computers were the ultimate in super computing processing, the company I worked for had one that was doing oil seismic processing. The CRAY-1 was a beautifil machine. Shaped like a torus, it stood aprox 2m tall, with a circular bench seat around the base which held all the power and cooling components. And it is extremely tactile. People would walk past and just run their hands over the cabinet.
But we kept getting crashes. When this happens 20 hours into a 23 hour job, it gets a toiuch annoying. The onsite Cray engineer had no clue. It happened at different times of day, different days of the week. No pattern at all. So he did the only thing possible and watch the computer like a hawk. All was fine until one female operator from the tape handling room walked past, touched the CRAY and crash. It only happened to her. Turns out that her nylon work coat (think lab coats, but cheaper), rubbing against her nylon tights was causing a static buildup that she discharged through the sensitive electronics.
The solution was to erect a small fence around the CRAY beyond which only male operators could venture. The unions went mad. Discrimination they yelled. Right up until the the situation was explained the the shop steward and he was told that women could of course tend the Cray, but only after the shift leader had checked they were wearing silk underware.
A lot of University mainframes in the 70's and 80's ran the Michigan Terminal System (MTS). This was a time sharing O/s from University of Michigan. It has several advantages over TSO or VM/CMS from IBM. First it could run a lot of cheap terminals, rather than the IBM 3270 consoles; and secondly is was considerably cheaper and came with source code.
This did NOT use REXX. But it did have a shell script of sorts, but I agree not Python.
It did however have a feature that could send a message to the operators console. It was meant for things like "Please load tape VT12345 on Tape Drive 4 with ring in".
This was used by my University colleagues to write a small assemble program that could send ASCII art messages to the OPERATOR. It was oh so funny when someone sent BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING to the operator in the remote data centre.
It was somewhat less funny when the operators decided it was a message that management were watching their every activity and, as good union members, all walked out, shutting the mainframe down in the process.
Even less fun was the poor undergraduates who authored the hack having to grovel to the operators.
It was during the exit interview that I was asked why I was leaving. When I said "well, two years and not a hint of a promotion", the HR lady was shocked. "But you turned down a really good job in the main computing centre, you never even asked about it. It was going to be a lot more money with great prospects". I was stunned, and said I knew nothing about it. So she showed me the application form that I had "signed" to say I knew about the offer but was turning it down for personal reasons.
Not my signature. It was my bosses signature. He didn't want to lose me so faked a signature.
After that, the exit interview turned into HR gathering evidence for a major disciplinary action about said boss. Mean while I went back to conside my BOFH response to stuff him up. Revenge is disk best served some weeks after you have left, but when served, the recipient should be in no doubt that he has been properly kippered.
We had a then very new VAX 11/780 installed in 1980. It powered the designed and engineering office, but also extended a terminal to the lab, on the factory floor. This used to run all sorts of funky electronic test equipment. The VAX kept blocking one of the async terminal cards. The engineer kept coming in, humming, harring, but replaced the card. We must have had 4 or 5 in the ifrst year.
The lab was a fair distance from the VAX. Rather than invest in long-line remote options for the async terminal from digital, the machine room manager decided to wire up a very long belden cable which was slung from the window of the computer room, over the heavy machine room, in tough another window to the lab. Fairly cheap, but definitely NOT in the Digital approved way to connect a terminal.
For reasons I didn't understand they used unearthed power leads to their oscilloscopes. All such plugs were colour red to alert people. They also had red painted un-earthed extension leads. And yes, it was into one of these that their RS-232 asynch terminal was plugged. The cable tended to float high, not being earthed. And eventually the high voltage would flash over to the other parts of the terminal concentrator board and blow its TTL circuits.
The solution was to plug the terminal into a properly earthed supply. We never did tell Digital why the problem went away!
Sadly, the computer room, lab, engineering workshop are all destroyed and are now a nice little housing estate on the banks of the Manchester Ship Canal.
I was visiting a SUN site in Germany. The techie I had travelled specifically to meet was coming in from a different site. He arrived, shook hands, and then said he had to leave. It seemed he had, with driving, done his alotted hours and could not continue the meeting.
So, my flight, hotel, time out of the officem was all totally wasted.
Once, I mistakenly, took down a database. It was quickly restored and the applications brought back on line. Outage was about 15 minutes. I was asked to go over to the trading room. When I go there the head of trading stood up, shouted over the floor "Hey everyone. Here is Spartacus, he is teh cause of you nopt being able to trade FX when the BoE changed base rates".
I barely escaped with my life and stll have scars.
I had one case with an application that worked everywhere, except on traders desk. London, Singapore, Switzerland, all perfectly fine. And New York too apart from one persons PC. So I get to fly business class to NY to see whats wrong. Plug in my machine and its fine. His machine, and its true the app fails and falls all over the floor with a BSOD.
So I do a trawl over whats different and find LimeWire, DonkeyKong and an early betting application install. All, I might add, totally against company policy. I delete these, and HEY, the App works. I leave a note on his desk saying I have rfemoved the apps. I email him and his local head of IT saying these apps were removed, the business app he really needs to do his job now works, and reminding him of the companies IT policy.
I get as far as JFK to fly home when I get a call. Its broken again. Yes, you guessed, he had installed his apps again,
I gave up and went home. Couple of months later he got fired, but not for this.
Karma can be a real bitch, but sometimes it plays your hand for you.
Thanks to el Reg's team of reporters, you kept this in the public eye.
Pleased indeed to see the US Lawyers and HP's Due Diligence team reach for their latin dictionary to understand what Caveat Emptor means.
Knives out for Pritti Patel and the UK courts for ever letting this get close to a US court. Lynch is a UK citizen. Autonomy was a UK company. The deal was done in the UK. If there ever was a case to answer it should have been in a UK court.
Thanks for this. It is a nice trip down memory lane.
I used Ingress at University and loved the ability to do test finding paths around Berkely California on Goequels test data set. This was on the geospatial version of Quel, GeoQuel.
We also worked with relational calculus. But then we had APL keyboards so the symtax was easy to type. I do recall trying an early version of System R at the IBM research centre and was shocked that the single use terminal we had was commanding the full resources of a 360 mainframe!
I met Michael Stonbraker and Eugene Wong in London many decades ago. Lovely man to talk to.
Thanks for memories
Still with top loading washing machine type disk packs.
We had one which kept falling off line, and brining it back required a reboot. These were the days when there was a key that slotted in the top which set the bus address number The microswitches were faulty, so heavy use of the disk, with the heads moving in and out, caused the unit to wobble and shudder just enough for the address to change.
Oh, how I miss these.
Most probably X.25, which as a packet switch system in use between banks long before DECNet or TCP/IP, or even SNA.
We used them in the bank I briefly worked at. That was using Sperry Univac 1100. You remember those? The ones with 6-bit bytes and no lower case charcters. Solid as a pile of jelly.
I was also working with my team of Oracle DBA's. They had set up a backup programme using the Sequent supplied backup system. We were running on Sequent compuyters with Sequent disks. This is important. This was back in the 1990's
We also had a MASSIVE table. Gazzilions of rows that grew at a rate of round about a million per day. So we had a regime. Each month we create a new partition which we distributed over the disks. Older months tables were set to READ-ONLY, thus we knew queries would not take a lock. This all ran fine. Backups happened automatically. New partitions were created at month end and everyone was happy.
Right up until the Sequent engineer came in and wanted to takle a list of disk serial numbers. We thought he would know what he was doing, this being a vitally important (and not cheap) production data warehouse. He staretd at the front, and noted all the disks. We went round the back, opened the cabinet doors and knelt down to take the lower level disk IDs. And that was when he knocked the master power switch.
The disks all dropped off line, red lights flashed on the consoles, but he very quickly restored the power. The active partition was trashed, but thats OK, because we could restore from tape and roll forward. But the pervious months partitiions were not so lucky. But hey, we had Sequents backup program. Simply restore the damaged data and we are good, right?
WRONG! Most of our data was missing. It seems that Sequent does not backup a read only partition. We only kept about a months worths of backup because tapes were expensive, so when we restored and rolled forward we got tables spaces with loads of empty space. Major panic ensued because there was a regulatory reason for us having the data.
Sequent\'s did look into this. They scanned and scoured our backup tapes and eventually came up with a solution. Without any form of a lie, their solution to the missing data was to hand me, formally, an insert to our manual set that stated the backup solution they had sold us "Did not support readonly tablespaces".
And that was when we threw the Sequents out, ditdched Oracle and moved to DB2 on RS/6000 SP'2.
I'll see your 120 pin EDAC and raise you the complete back plane of a VAX 11/750, when the massbus started playing up. Me (sysop for the VAX) and a Cray engineer (very bright guy) spent a happy early morning with a pulse mode oscilloscope trying to figure out why the VAX occasionally crashed the Cray it was connected to. Yup, two bent pins on the backplane. Feeling of achievement when we tweaked a pin by less than a mm and everything was rosy,
Mines the one with the HP Oscilloscope manual in the pocket.
The pair that we had delivered were a bit of a palavar. First the freight elevator didn't quite make it to the 5th floor (I know, who puts a data centre at the top of a building), so we had to unload all the disks, take them up, then take the frame up. EMC then had a type of hover cushion that they used to make movement through the office easier. Mind you getting them up the step that allowed us to have the raised floor was fun.
Hold on their Tiger.
Fujitsu bid against others for the Post Office Horizon contract. Reports are that they came very well down the scoring matrix, scoring just 7/10 as likely to succeed. And yet they STILL won the bid. Because they were the cheapest.
Not looking so cheap now, though, is it.
As I kept saying when looking at IT contract bids, its not the original bid price, its the TCO that counts.
If you have every admistrated and As/400 system you will have realised that SLS is a double edge sword. It is wonderfully easy to work with. It is responsive giving you near linear access times to any data, where as directory designed storage (think VMS, Linux, Windows) you have to navigate the directory tree.
But weher it breaks, and breaks very badly, is upgrading the storage. Our system used RAID-5 as the underlying disk access, but implemented in hardware. To add a new array of disks you have to shutdown the system, off load the data to tape, add the new storage, reconfigure the RAID system and then restore data from tape. When you have a couple of 100 GB of data on a year 2000 version of AS/400 with DLT as a backuop, that is painful. And risky!
I think this is one of the lessens that Stonebreaker is bound to address.
Indeed dress sense matters. At one data centre in the very early 80's we had machine room operators, who changed tapes, watched the pretty lights, and occasionally types a command into one of the many consoles. We had a lot of problems with our Cray-1, which was running some very long jobs, often for days at a time. It would just stop. Needed a reboot and was fine, but we lost the whole of that job.
After some investigation we found the a number of the lady operators were walking past this iconic and very tactile machine, and just ran their fingers over the outer panels. It seemed that the use of a nylon overall, and nylon tights created quite a static charge.
The unions were furious when all female operators were banned from going close to the cray, but when the data centre manager explained that the alternative would be a check that they were wearing silk underwear it was decided to go with the first option.
Was with someone in the early days of DOS. She put in the dreaded "del *.*" on her C: drive. But its OK. She realised the error "OH, God, I didn'y mean to do that".
DOS prompts "Are you sure?"
And she replies, whilst talking to me, "Yes I am sure I didn't mean to do that".
Sorry - But I did laugh
I agree. I see no benefit, other than to reduce banking charges for business. For consumers and the general retain public we already have digital currency. We use every time we tap to pay, either with a card or a phone. We use it when we send money via EFT. Why would we need, or even want, a blockchain backed currency with a separate wallet that we have to manage?
For business, which pays a much high transaction cost than consumers do via high street banks, then there MAY (and I stress the MAY) be some advantages if this reduces banking costs and improves transaction speed. But that is very marginal.
I am assuming that the lawyers have now amassed a large amount of paper, probably several ring binders full per tweep, what with personal statements contracts of employment, severance notices, legal filings.
Can I assume that these are now known as the X-Files? The truth will be out there somewhere.
I'll get me coat. Its the one with the Catatonia CD in the pocket.
That send you an email for something that can easily be done next week, or even next month
And then send you a whatsapp "did you get my email - its been 60 seconds and you haven't responded"
And then calls you to see if you got the WhatsApp?
No, Blair, I am just ignoring you because you are irritating
Exactly this. Years ago, Oracle tried stitching my company up with a £3.5M bill for using a small Oracle database, claiming that everyone who saw, or who could poentially have seen, a printed report from the database was in fact a user, and hence had to be licensed.
After a protacted set of increasingty fractioius arguements we did a corporate transition to DB2. Oracle were told to leave the building.
Sucks to be you, eh Oracle?
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2025
