Posts by richardcox13 638 publicly visible posts • joined 19 May 2012
The Phoenix BIOS message on boot will be familiar to many, and the battery error suggests that whatever is keeping the BIOS settings alive is not long for this world.
But we know (as we see The T800's own view) that The Terminator runs on a 6502, and such BIOS's are not used by 6502 bases systems.
I've not had a problem forwarding emails to Gmail.
But then I don't think you mean that: you mean re-sending (SMTP level) to your Gmail account which is not the same thing as forward in an email client (or even Gmail itself).
That (SMTP) forwarding very much depends on the tolerance of the mailbox, and of the user: I do this for my domain emails, but not to Gmail (and I expect it would fail for other mass email hosts like outlook.com) simply because of their very low tolerance to "abuse"). Pick a different host to forward to, that is better suited to more niche requirements.
Go read the latest IMAP4 RFC! Both downloading a message from the mailbox and then deleting from the mailbox are both supported,
As is listing all the messages. So iterate through, download and delete.
I'm not aware of any email client's that do this directly: because having a local copy (remove dependency on server copy) is usually regarded as sufficient (you have a copy even if removed from the server by something else).
While ruining your own server seems a poor choice, I'll assume that was a typo :-).
Running your own server could easily be replaced by "paying someone to run a server for you" (which in most cases, eg. if you have other things to do, will be a better option).
Taking a hard dependency on a "free" service comes with risks, and for businesses (in particular) that is a risk.
RFC 1730 (which has been replaced b RFC 2060 two years later, itself then superseded by RFC 3501 after another 6 years, and then 18 years later by RFC 9051).
POP3 has been obsolete for over two decades, IMAP4 has worked well for at least that long.
POP3 was never a good choice for email delivery to a user's mail box, no-one has a good justification for complaining other than "I had a hack that worked: nothing is as permanent as a temporary fix": El Reg scraping the barrel here finding someone complaining about this.
Exactly.
If you want high resilience in the cloud you can have it. Use at least two regions in at least two different vendor's clouds. And make the choices of regions checking for not too much locality[1]. Also remember if you need two services, each with 99.9% SLA, to both be working the overall SLA is rather less.
You have to handle load balancing/replication problems that will arise. This will not be cheap.
[1] Because weather, earthquakes, ... can be significantly non-local. Eg. two DCs ~100km apart north-south in tornado alley could easily be hit successively by one storm system.
A contractor who did that should be told they're not working for the major company again.
For a junior employee, a formal disciplinary would be appropriate, for anyone at all senior there is no excuse.
This might seem harsh, but remember this would, amongst everything else, be a GDPR violation.
I don't see temporarily spun up installs [...] requiring a lot of backing up and updates.
Updates to tools happen a lot. Typically weekly. These need to be incorporated into the images you use to build temporary VMs.
Backups will depend on how much you end up on the pet vs. farm animal scale.
Your reference VM (apply updates, build new image, repeat for ever) you would likely want to keep around, and thus backup.
How much does it cost to:
- Somewhere to put them (rent etc.)
- Host (electricity, cooling, ...)
- Backup
- Admin (lots of updates in even quite a simple tech stack these days).
For those "one or two computers".
(This is open source using AWS, so reasonable to assume they don't have an office.)
I strongly suspect this is the case. Some aspect of DynamoDB (directly) or indirectly (other AWS services that use DynamoDB) depends on something in US-East-1.
Much like the Azure Central-US-1 (IIRC) region having a wobble breaks Azure world wide (I should note MS have said they are working to reduce this dependency).
Eliminating all single points of failure in a complex system is hard.
Utter nonsense
That's what I thought on seeing this headline yesterday,
But then I looked at https://github.com/Plan-Vert/open-letter (and particularly some of the—rejected—PRs) and I'm now sure that it is not utter nonsense. Anywhere politics creeps in, tempers rise and people say intemperate things and make threats; others find mechanisms to transfer dubious content..
So, while initially this does seem ridiculous, with a little thought questions like this, from non-IT people, shouldn't be rejected out of hand unless you are sure there are no deep park corners of nastiness lurking mostly out of sight. That this reflects badly on us* does not help.
––––
*Just because 99.99% of IT folks wouldn;t have anything to do with trying to push nasty content to children, doesn't mean the 0.01% (or whatever it is) are not very damaging.
The photo for this feed on Bluesky was of Sagrada Família (well worth a visit).
However Sagrada Família is not a cathedral! Barcelona already had a cathedral (also well worth a visit), since medieval timers, and Sagrada Família is not replacing it.
Someone needs to check what photo they are associating to these articles to avoid looking ignorant.
More a case of: do not assume there is infinite capacity in the provider. You won't always be able to freely scale up instantly.
Or have some kind of resilience plan.
This 100%: if you are assume any one thing (one thing could be a WAN connection, a server, a server room, a cloud region) has 100% up time you are either deluded, or accepting of downtime.
(It is a reasonable business decision to say: the cost of going from 99.9% to 99.95% is is not justified.)
My local pharmacy has a sign up that says they refuse to accept notes from the Bank of Scotland. Is that legal?
Yes. But it is not why you think.
"Legal tender" as a concept exists in English & Welsh law, but only applies to payment of a debt (there are some restrictions like you have to offer the exact amount: you cannot demand change). And retail sales do not create a debt (but a bill at a restaurant, where you pay at the end of a mail, does). Assuming you have a debt to pay, then the creditor has to accept legal tender. However (1) for small change there are maximum limits (eg. the creditor only has to accept 20p in copper coinage), (2) Bank of England notes are legal tender, (3) All other bank notes issued in the UK (eg. Bank of Scotland) are not legal tender (they are not even legal tender in Scotland: only £1 and £2 coins are for an unlimited amount).
For retail it is up to the vendor... and providing they clearly state limitations on the payment types they accept.
How can it take more than six months to go through what was said in court?
Because what was said in the inquiry sessions—the verbal evidence—is a small fraction of the evidence being considered. There are over 250,000 documents (over 2 million pages) as well. (See background and statistics about the Inquiry (PDF).)
which means plenty of your user populations now have an inkling about the power of sudo
This was well documented years ago: https://xkcd.com/149/
Not sure where I would put this as a reply, so I'll put it here.
As the title says: each technology/approach/... should be evaluated on its own merits.
Some factors (eg. existing skills) can be mitigated (training). Attitudes of "I don't want to change" may need stronger action: if you are a developer you should expect change. All the time.
Sometimes not changing should be chosen, just remember the clock is ticking and how much are you willing to pay for support/fixes/.... for older platforms with few other users?
Just keeping things the same is just stasis. I'm sure many in my great-grandparents generation felt the same about oil lamps and candles over this new fangled electrickery.
Often changing from a limited hacky approach that while it works it is very much bailing wire and chewing gum. It "works" with constant intervention from developers.
The new way allows integration with diagnostics (with zero effort: work already done) so requires less support.
Reality this often isn't about anything expect an older developer trying to quietly make himself (IME always a man) invaluable.
People are against it because, so highly ironically, a lot of people involved in the ever-changing world of high tech...are personally resistant to change when said change means they must change.
This 1000%.
I've seen multiple times "senior" (in nominal experience, but not in ability) keep repeating the same approach. Even after training and all the support they needed. That the approach was based on an already unsupported platform using a hack to integrate. The (then) current way would have been less effort, but require a little thinking.
I have started to think that this disconnect: "meetings are key" vs "meetings are a waste" is really down to different job functions.
For managers (especially) and others: the work is meetings. That is where decisions are considered and mode; where progress on follow up is considered.
But for many others, including most individual contributors you real work is done working on your own (with as little distraction as possible. Meetings need to be as limited as possible (some choices need to be discussed/agreed, work in a team needs some coordination) for productivity.
The problem is too many managers not realising not everyone's (likely not a even a majority) of work is done in meetings.
In some cases the lack of agility is an unwillingness to do the feedback step and make changes to the way of working.
In others it is an assumption that "agile is cheaper" which has never been a claim of the agile movement (rather than those making training/consultancy money off "agile"). Agile is about getting the customer what they need now (not what they through they needed some years ago).
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