Posts by DougMac 161 posts • joined 16 Jul 2013
Its a dev and his boss.
The dev is trying to explain that sysops are dumb because they can't figure out all the correct versions of packages that play together well that the developer used to develop his app.
Boss's solution is that we ship the dev's computer out to run the app instead.
"Back in the day we have one big machine which successfully ran lots of programs for lots of people (safety and securely?). Then people wanted their own little computers."
"VMs and Containers just try and re-image the mainframe world with lots of little computers tied together with string (Ethernet usually, unless it's for HPC)"
VMs _started_ on mainframes, in order to partition all the resources into usable chunks while separating important processes. Much as they do now.
They are not just trying to emulate mainframe environment with enough resources.
|| "And containers show us that running a big fat operating system on every compute element is far from efficient. "
|| I'd argue that this is correct and that expanding from that point - which is really all that containers do - takes us to a much more efficient place in computing.
With the gigantic amount of resources available in server hardware now-a-days, does it really need to be super efficient? We are far past the days of counting bits and counting cycles like they had to do up until at least the 90's or 00's for every single program they developed. Then OSs/apps became super bloated because the resources were available.
So, I have a few OS kernels running in VMs on my 750GB of RAM on my server (times 5 or 10, or many more). They are a pittance compared to the databases, and web apps consuming huge amounts of GBs of RAM. Some customers I work with runup 256GB database servers as their norm.
I'm not worried about saving a few GB of RAM for OSs vs. fitting in a 256GB database.
Clearly Oracle had no pretense to keep Solaris running for anything but their narrow vertical market.
As much as I loath Oracle for almost everything, I think for this case, they have a pretty solid leg to stand on.
HPe signs up for one support contract, and then resells the benefits it receives to all it's customers as its' own maintenance, in clear defiance of the terms of service of the original support contract.
This story reminds me quite a lot of other manufacturers during the pandemic.
Early on, N95 masks were in short supply in the US due to other countries buying up all the production runs in China.
There were several US makers that said we can ramp up and do it, but the hospitals and health worker companies have to sign contracts so that the investments we make into our supply chain won't leave us holding the bag once your immediate need is over.
Guess what, they couldn't get a single new health care company to sign a single contract for long term masks suppliers.
It was more important to save that $1 a mask or whatever China could give them in the future vs. the US production cost, rather than invest into US companies that could offer a sustained production model. The cost difference was probably way less than one year of their CEO's salary.
Profit over all else.
I would peg it at much lower.
Take a $35,000 switch. I would estimate the BOM to come in under $1000. They might have to pay $5-$10 more for those expensive chips overall.
Or something like a 0.002% increase in their material cost.
Somehow I don't think they are talking about a $5-$10 price rise to the consumer.
OOTH, the labor of their logicistics people probably is going through the roof as they have to probably hire people to scrounge up the supplies they need.
Like the air bubbles in a garden hose, everything got slammed shut, and the JIT culture stopped everything. Now we have to wait for all the air gaps to escape.
Everything has firmware. Your coffee pot has firmware. Your electric toothbrush has firmware.
Your car has 100's of CPU chips each with firmware.
Anything that needs to talk USB has firmware.
Keyboards have had firmware since the days when they switched off matrix input in the 70's.
Almost everything since the 70's through early 2000's probably used an 8051 micro controller.
So much ancient code out there.
I'd agree that there's not a whole lot of need to hack on keyboard firmware, everything I want to do for remapping/macros can be done in the OS easily.
Except I've had my car broken into even with the crappiest radio I could get, and they still tried to take the $20 radio.
I'm not sure the bunch of carrots they pulled out of somebody's graden and left behind in my car quite made up for it.
Sure didn't cover the cost of the damage they did to the old beater to try to rip out a $20 radio.
Most people give away Ultra SPARC hardware now-a-days to other collectors.
The only people paying large amounts of money for any SPARC gear is the poor soul trying to maintain their mission critical whatever that company management is too shortsighted to pay for migration off of ancient museum level hardware that should have been migrated a decade ago, and they run around with their head chopped off shoring it up the dam that is about to burst with anything they can.
If they don't spec out the last generation of UltraSPARC that they want to target (ie. generally the last hardware that OpenSolaris supported) and looked for something slightly older, they'd find tons available for free or the shipping.
But I'd agree that there is no reason I'd look to run Illuminos on SPARC for any reason what-so-ever. No matter what version of Ultra SPARC they want to support.
Cricut reached their position in this niche market by changing the game plan every couple of years, aggressive licensing and patent litigation, and in general screwing over all their own customers over and over again.
Since their target audience just wants to get the thing done, rather than research the history of the horrible company, they keep going, suppressing any competition that comes up.
This is just same-old same-old as what they've always done.
Atari is a shell of a name bounced between a new different company every couple of years.
I doubt there is anybody around trying to defend Atari IP. While Nintendo is very active about defending its' IP.
I think the OP was pointing out that there is a very large community of retro-gamers looking for old game ROMs and IP, vs. a 30 year old program version that probably has had zero users in the last 20 years (but there's always going to be that one guy...).
Its not necessarily Outlook.
Its Calendaring. That is what everybody wants, but nobody else has any decent response to it.
There are some fringe 3rd party calendar solutions, but they are mostly here's something, do these 10 steps to set it up and hopefully it never changes/breaks again.
People could live with 3rd party email clients, mail setups, but they can't live without a working calendar, and the one built into Outlook/Exchange works too well compared to anything else out there.
Why is historical old flash client even brought up in the article?
Is it, "we never had problems with the old setup so it must be the new UI that is the issue"?
Sort of like the eternal IT quote "it always worked before you upgraded it".
People always forget that the old setup had its own issues all the time too.
The OP forgot the first rule of scheduling. Don't tell anybody your _real_ drop-dead date.
Tell the people you need things from your drop-dead date is several weeks/months before when you really need it, preferably at their minimum "request time" they require.
Always give extra time for your delivery than what you really need.
I'm not sure why people are complaining about a device that doesn't match what users have in their hands. Wouldn't you want to test your code against the hardware that has been shipping since last November?
I did think it was a weird move by apple to charge so much for a device rental, big enough to make people think they "bought it". I probably would have done something like rental of $100 month, and you get the first 4 months free. 4 months probably bridges you until the real units ship, but you'll still get plenty of hangers on that can't be bothered, so they'll just keep getting dinged until they've more than paid for a new one.
There's always going to be those that "lost them" as they put them into their collectables vault, and Apple can just keep dinging them until they find them.
I'm puzzled, why would Halon, an inert gas, need to be sealed off from the rest of the building?
If there is something burning in a building, _everybody_ should get the fsck out of the building immediatly, having seals between hoomans and burning toxic chemicals won't do diddly.
Halon doesn't kill you, the products of burning things kill you, especially all the PFTE and PVC byproducts as they burn. Halon at an effective dispersion is at 10% of the air at most.
Halon works by disrupting the actual chemical reaction of burning, it doesn't "displace all the oxygen" or "alter the oxygen to not be breathable" as so many common myths have it.
It is an Ozone depleting gas, so that is why FM200 was developed. Same things apply though.
Don't most datacenters have separate battery rooms?
All the ones I've been in do bigger than some enterprise that has 5-6 racks in the basement.
Although I can certainly sympathize with the horrible firmware on just about any management systems dealing with power.
Typically I have to firewall them off completely from anything else management, because things like APC transfer switches respond to any stray SNMP scans no-matter what, and start sending email alerts out. (APC/RARITAN/TRIPPLITE/etc/etc/etc) managed rack PDUs are horrendous security nightmares. Up to a certain age, they had open SMTP, FTP, etc. etc. Why do you need to manage your rack PDU with FTP? Because you CAN!
Source control for config files goes way way back. I was doing it in the 90's.
Just because git is only a youngster and it's the devops culture now, doesn't mean other solutions weren't around long ago. My favorite for the period was RCS (released in 1982), and I still to this day have some config management solutions writen around RCS (exclusive locking for the win for system configuration files, not so great for source code).
SCCS was around earlier (1972), but not as wide spread as RCS and later CVS got.
People just reinvent the same thing over and over again, shift it around, and call it the all new revolutionary way.
>> the dumb terminal look is just not causing me any excitement. I spent to many hours looking at the blinking cursor in the 70's and 80's.
I think a big consumer of these things are youngsters that want to experience more of what it was like back-in-the-day.
I think those of us who lived through it the first time don't necessarily need to have the full experience again.
Honestly, in this day and age, I'd *rather* information updates to the avionics systems came on something like floppy disk rather than tethering to the Internet.
Sure, they could upgrade to Flash disk or something. But then again, the 747 was first produced in _1968_
I'd imagine there have been quite a few package upgrades since then.
Double down on this.
I have to start jamming screw drivers in there in order to get some of the stiff plastic to release. Although I have ended up with unsuable switch ports because I couldn't get one of those stupid cables out of the port without more destruction than I wanted to attempt.
I've never had a tab break off unless I was trying to yank it back through 10'++ of tray.
In that case, I usually destroy the cable anyway, because screw it, my time is too valuable to sit and unbraid a single cable at a time through the tray. Just snip the end, pull it through, buy another.
It seems like its only there to pacify people that they spent $25 on this one cable it must last forever and reused 1000 times. Instead, buy 25 of the $1 cable and have extra on hand.
VMware works extremely well for those that are willing to pay the cost. I think there's a lot of options out there now-a-days for those that don't. I have a handful of other hosted VPS boxes out there that get forced rebooted a couple times of year each due to some problem or the other.
I'm not sure what you mean about their management being wonky behind a VPN, that's how I access our datacenters every day. No difference vs my local lab.
Anything needing windows for management is ancient history. Its all linux (proton) boxes all the way down.
vmotion is speedy.
So, sounds like you're remembering back a decade (ie. release time of VMware 3.x) and how much slower servers and networks were back then.
It makes me chuckle to see the colo people in other cages oh so carefully label and string up the server keys, paired with each server, to make sure they don't get the mixed up...
When Dell only changes out the lock/key type every 5-10 years or so and I have a bucket of keys that would fit any of their servers depending on how far down deep you want to dig for it.
The original MDL source to Zork has been out for a number of years.
Ie. see this github repo
https://github.com/itafroma/zork-mdl
Perhaps this is signifigant as to be closer to the epicenter.
I believe the main problem right now is that there isn't a original MDL compiler extant that can handle compiling this code, although I believe there was some work to create a MDL compiler that can handle this code.
I use FTP all the time in a variety of forms (if you want to call sftp doing FTP, but also use FTPS quite often).
Granted, I _never use_ a web browser to do FTP, I have a dedicated FTP client on the various platforms I use. It is extremely handy to move files in and out of disparate environments.
I wouldn't care if Firefox drops FTP support, if you want to use FTP, use a dedicated client.
Linux seems to have a lot more support than you think. Linux anyconnect download is here
https://software.cisco.com/download/home/286281283/type/282364313/release/4.8.03036
If you have something not-cisco, and don't have to do proprietary Cisco wrapped up SSLVPN that anyconnect is, Linux has a plethera of options for IPSec VPNs. IPSec is IPsec. While there are many options, there are also many solutions.
There are many RDP clients that work well on linux. I don't think anybody would tend to think VNC is the only option. My main day-to-day RDP option is built ontop of FreeRDP that works better than the Microsoft RDP client on windows.
Of course that still doesn't account for the RDP client license that Microsoft will make you get because you aren't using their desktop OS that conveniently bundles said license with it. Also a Microsoft auditor will come in and inform you that if there is any chance of non-windows desktops ever connecting, that you'll need to buy RDP client licenses for everybody "just-in-case".
Linux seems to have a lot more support than you think. Linux anyconnect download is here
https://software.cisco.com/download/home/286281283/type/282364313/release/4.8.03036
If you have something not-cisco, and don't have to do proprietary Cisco wrapped up SSLVPN that anyconnect is, Linux has a plethera of options for IPSec VPNs. IPSec is IPsec. While there are many options, there are also many solutions.
There are many RDP clients that work well on linux. I don't think anybody would tend to think VNC is the only option. My main day-to-day RDP option is built ontop of FreeRDP that works better than the Microsoft RDP client on windows.
Microsoft maintains their own, and all the big email players have moved to their own inhouse filtering/RBL. External filters and RBLs are only in use by companies that haven't migrated into one of the big players.
OOTH, Microsoft's Postmaster services actually can clear out blocks if you know how to work their system (which is draconianly difficult). As opposed to say, Google, which tosses their hands up in the air and say maybe it'll clear in a day, week, month, we dunno.
Anybody putting something in front of the Microsoft setup is probably not using it right as designed, which requires end users training it (ie. flagging SPAM, moving HAM out of SPAM folders, etc). Many users don't want to bother training their SPAM filter, so they throw something else in front.
I just wonder at what point that these software companies making signage think that a windows license is worth the cost of deploying these, and all the baggage that goes along with it.
I'd have thought everyone would flock to a linux digital signage or something with loads less license fees; although looking at the digital signage market, the license fees are not cheap, and the ones I've seen in the wild haven't been any more stable than windows anyway. There was one by my car park that turned from a bulletin board to a digital sign, back to a bulletin board for like 6 months until they finally seemed able to fix it again. I'm sure they were glad that they paid all that $$ so we have a nice smooth screen to tape their paper printouts to again.
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