Posts by dubious

Google Cloud’s so-called uninterruptible power supplies caused a six-hour interruption

sounds about right

Over the years I've probably had more power outages caused by UPS failures than I have had UPSes saving the DC from a power feed failures.

Broadcom starts beta for VMware Cloud Foundation 9, the release it reckons will douse user anger

too late

Too late, we have already decommed our VMware platform, sorry.

What happens when we can’t just build bigger AI datacenters anymore?

Re: Emperor's new stilts

Yes, I was going to say that this doesn't seem to be a realistic as well.

Performance scaling isn't close to being linear even in a fully meshed system, and most HPCs are divided up into cells, pods, and racks that you already try to keep your job inside to minimise unacceptable latency. Few jobs are going to be suitable for going distributed-dc compute, certainly not current AI training.

Even Frontier classifies a large job to as one which takes up 1/4 of the machine, iirc.

UK prepared to throw planning rules out the window for massive datacenters

panels

Sure, but putting a few tens of kilowatts of panels on the roof of a DC isn't going to touch the sides. We're using 50-100kW a rack. Water cooled h200 systems are pushing 250kW a rack, and the next gen open rack standard is looking to double that.

It isn't pointless, but it isn't close to being enough.

Soft-reboot in systemd 254 sounds a lot like Windows' Fast Startup

VMs already boot fast, so probably more useful on physical server hardware running some wretched Linux distro like CoreOS that Redhat have managed to make more reboot-on-change happy than a BT router.

Cunningly camouflaged cable routed around WAN-sized hole in project budget

Re: Weather?

We had a laser link that worked fine for months, then started dropping out for an hour each day as the setting sun had moved round to where it was swamping the receiver.

Tried extending the hood and making comedy goggle type things out of pvc tube, but in the end we replaced it with a microwave link.

Gartner: Stop worrying and love the cloud, with all its outages and lock-in

multi-cloud

Was that essentially "Don't do multi-cloud and go all in on your one cloud pusher 'cause they're reliable, except actually maybe go ahead and build an entire separate system on a different cloud just in case your primary cloud fails."

LiquidStack CEO on why you shouldn't ignore immersion cooling

nope

We trialed immersion cooling years ago in our DC. It just made everthing more difficult. Swapping out a dead server was a horrible task, but it was the non-obvious things that were worse - any cables in the oil turned rigid as the plasticiser was leached out, and the oily coolant wicked up inside any cable. Fun when the leak alarms go off and you find oil dripping down the pdus and switches. Still finding that crap in places. Also with ours being a horizontal 40u-ish tank there wasn't really any overall space saving anyway.

Atos will be paid $29m over $1b UK Met Office supercomputer dispute

Re: atos

Not to forget Atos lobbied to get UK firms excluded from post Brexit EU HPC contracts which should automatically put them on the UK Gov's shit list.

The silicon goldrush is coming, but chip demand is evaporating

We had some servers that shipped with the wrong style of PSUs and have been waiting 3 months for correct ones. They've just not been available from the t1 vendor.

Next week apparently!

Pop quiz: The network team didn't make your change. The server is in a locked room. What do you do?

Re: Flip the breaker.

similar here - new server room with fancy pants biometric locks, or alternatively, open the cleaning store next to the server room door and unplug the security controller and all the doors fail open.

Beyond video to interactive, personalised content: BBC is experimenting with rebuilding its iPlayer in WebAssembly

full HD

Could I suggest they please get basic 1080 streaming working first before disappearing up their own arses in a cloud of techno-wanky?

For the marketeer that has everything – except a CPU fan

Windows 10 technically runs on a Pi if you absolutely have to go with Windows. Not sure I'd want to use it as a desktop, but it should handle throwing a webpage up.

Linux Mint emits fix for memory-gobbling Cinnamon – and future version may insist on some updates

bin merging?

Wait, wait, wait, when did we decide that /bin and /usr/bin merging was going to be a thing? But why?

If you think Mozilla pushed a broken Firefox Android build, good news: It didn't. Bad news: It's working as intended

Re: Positives and negative experiences

I blocked it but have been trialling the beta, and in the same way as when I was trialing w10, I can't believe they went ahead.

Is 'view source' avaliable yet? Has anyone managed to track down a way to kill the awful animations?

Indie VPN WireGuard gets the Torvalds seal of approval with inclusion in Linux kernel 5.6

great...

...maybe now they'll bother with creating some documentation.

Your ugly mug may be scanned yet again – but at least you'll be able to board faster at Gatwick

Re: Hope they've ironed out the bugs

Flew into HIA once just behind a flight from Korea. The immigration system also had the 'open eyes!' thing which took down a gate as the staff couldn't overide it. All the staff thought this was hilarious. You could actually see the supervisor switch to panic mode as the Koreans started reaching the other desks.

That was a particularly long evening in Qatar's already legendary immigration queue.

New lows at Bose as firmware update woes infuriate soundbar bros

we got you, fam

HDMI has you covered: 1.4 introduced ethernet over HDMI.

Thankfully approximately none of the AV makers took them up on that.

If I could turn back time, I'd tell you to keep that old Radarange at home

Re: Pesky microwaves

We had a laser link between 2 sites that started failing for ~15 mins early every morning. It was an IR laser, and as the seasons progressed, the rising sun became close enough to swamp the receiver.

Microsoft: Like the Borg, we want to absorb all the world's biz computers

target?

Who's this aimed at? Even without sms/sccm, with pxe bootable re-imaging, GPOs, roaming desktops, and folder re-direction, I've never found managing hundreds of desktops to be what me or my team ever spent significant time on anyway.

Official: Google Chrome 69 kills off the World Wide Web (in URLs)

Re: Reg

It's an irrellevant annoyance that Google insists on using in [whatever Google Now Cards Are Called This Week] as far as I can tell.

Amp pages are so slow to load on my mobile that I can normally edit the amp out of the URL before the page has loaded and get to the proper site very quicky. And which inevitably works just fine anyway. And includes all the content as the site designer intended. (not always a good thing.)

Used to infuriate me but then some kind soul made https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/amp2html/ and I can carry on blissfully unaware of amp for a bit longer.

Come on elReg, do the right thing and dump amp instead of just bitching about it.

Re: A question

I'd assume they'll do the same annoying thing they did when they last started hiding bits of the URL such as 'http[s]' which was that when you copied the host bit of the URL to paste into a shell window they'd "helpfully" add the invisible protocol bit back and you'd find yourself trying to, say, ssh into "https://example.com/"... Genius.

Ditched Chrome after a bug report for this crappy protocol and path hiding of essentially 'this is v.stupid and at a minimum please for the love of Dog have a flag to disable it' was closed with wontFix and an arrogant retort from the Chrome devs.

London's Gatwick Airport flies back to the future as screens fail

Re: 4G

I'd suspect that what they really should have done was run the screens off a pair of on-site servers preferably split over server rooms at opposite ends of the airport, but CxOs don't get lauded for not racing to (public) cloud.

Phased out: IT architect plugs hole in clean-freak admin's wiring design

Re: Bad power setups

We once had just moved to a temporary site using a particular building for the main servers because that was where the previous occupants had their server room, and it had a genset.

Shortly after moving, one evening I get a call from my guy covering the late shift that there was a power outage, and although miraculously the vintage generator managed to start itself, both UPSes were screaming about not getting a feed. He'd done all he could reasonably do, including manually switching over to the generator feed, but no joy.

When I get on site I'm met by my guy looking a little sheepish and a strong smell of burning. Turns out that whatever the previous inhabitants had considered valuable enough to provide generator power to, the server room wasn't one of them. The single plug at the photocopier station just up the hall, though...

Bless his heart, but he'd strung together 4 or so extension cables and evicted the Xerox.

Red hot cables, an exciting scorch mark all along and up over the hall walls, and a smoking and now eternally dead socket, plus the knowledge that perhaps the fire alarm should be re-tested but by someone competent this time.

Architects? Power-hungry GPU fiends? HP has something for you

desktops in a rack?

Why would you want to jam 56 PCs into a rack?

You'd never fit people's desks around it for a start.

British Airways' latest Total Inability To Support Upwardness of Planes* caused by Amadeus system outage

outsourcing

It seems properly odd that a company the size of IAG, especially if you get their 20-25% owners Qatar Airways on-board too, would outsource something so critical to their operation and reputation. The licensing bill must surely be fearsome.

But what do I know, my clothing sense is as deeply unfashionable as in-house IS is in this era of perpetually renting some cloudy 3rd party webservice saas bollocks.

Tech support made the news after bomb squad and police showed up to 'defuse' leaky UPS

upsea are evil

Once upon a time in Bahrain yours truely was helping service a large UPS. This included replacing the 4 large shelves of large batteries while the DC was fed through the much smaller backup UPS.

We were just 3/4 of the way through when there was a national power outage. The backup UPS kept the critical systems up, but it would only hold for 15 mins.

Picture 3 guys in close proximity desperately attempting to connect up the last load of huge 48V batteries, on earthed metal shelves, in a tight space, with no AC, no air circulation, a weak emergency light, and +40C outside air temperature. Humid as hell, and with every surface at nice cool DC temperature, heavy condensation was everywhere. On us, running down the walls, and... on the rubber-coated handles of our electrical spanners...

So many shocks.

So many.

UK.gov's shift to AWS: It's squeaky-bum time for small cloud pushers

"He noted that the Home Office still hasn't moved to Office 365 four years after the strategy was laid out."

That's a good thing, surely?

Flight Simulator's DRM fighter nosedives into Chrome's cache

Re: They are probably Android developers as well

It is concerning how much data apps can extract, either directly or as part of the analytics framework, without triggering a request for permission.

Don't use Android without xposed+xprivacy!

I don't suppose it is any different with ios though?

Why aren't you being arbiters of truth? MPs scream at Facebook, YouTube, Twitter

truth

MPs complaining about truth and lying? I am old enough to remember the good old days when, if an MP was caught in a lie, they immediately resigned and were never seen from again.

Good times.

Twilight of the idols: The only philosophy HPE and IBM do these days is with an axe

Every time they cut staff, reduce executive pay/compensation by at least the same %.

Unfortunately their pay is already so out of wack compared to most people, they might not notice.

IT 'heroes' saved Maersk from NotPetya with ten-day reinstallation blitz

Good job guys.

Don't get company values such as 'uprightness', and 'humbleness' at many other places.

I'd left the Big M group years before this, but we were well into a outsourcing and centralisation program, pushing lots jobs to India. Despite it being as unpopular with the users as these things always are, we went full steam ahead on Helldesk and desktop support, but the plans went much further. We were pushed to an expensive US company for HP-UX, Oracle, and Navis for example, which didn't seem particularly smart since Maersk had plenty of domain knowledge and was big enough to support centralised internal teams. Can't say they didn't know their stuff though.

There was also talk of centralising port infrastructure until the speed, cost, and reliability of Internet/IPLCs in many locations was brought up.

Why does no one want to invest in full fibre broadband, wails UK.gov

Yes the roll-out of fibre is expensive, but chances are once you've got a fibre to each house, that's pretty much all the cabinet/prem network investment you need for the next 20* years (copper has lasted +100 years after all). Amortised over that sort of time frame it really shouldn't affect bills. Unfortunately publicly listed companies rarely withstand shareholder pressure for short term profits, so strategic planning has become something of a rarity in large Western businesses.

Maybe I'm just salty that you can get pukka FTTP up in darkest Malham, yet the current place I am staying at while over here is 10 miles outside Reading, supposedly a UK IT hub, and I have the indescribable pleasure of 4M ADSL that drops packets like a meth dealer high on their own product when it's windy or raining... I'd say it's like going to a 3rd world country, except many of them have better Internet access than this.

* Maybe swap out transceivers now and again, maybe switchout PON for AON, but we're always told running the cable is the actual expensive bit.

Thou shalt use our drone app, UK.gov to tell quadcopter pilots

Re: Could they perhaps...

'Miniature' one and two way ADSB transceivers are already available which would enable your multirotor to participate in TCAS avoidance, but they are of the $2k region, eat power, and aren't really miniature enough for smaller than 450 class craft. The sort of proximity flying your typical 150-250 class is doing is not going to interfere with aircraft in any case, so it would just be dead weight and something else to break in a crash!

Oh lordy, WD just SCHOOLED Seagate in running a disk drive biz

Have found WD enterprise drives to not be especially reliable (5/6 dead in 4 years), and the warrenty not worth the effort - apparently no-one buys drives in one country then moves to a different one.

Not as bad as the Seagates before that, and 4 of them had the decency to fire of smart alerts a short while before dying.

Really hoping they don't fuck up HGST with the 'integration'.

Republicans want IT bloke to take fall for Clinton email brouhaha

I thought it was standard practise for US government officials to have multiple opaque email accounts and even off-site accounts for the purposes of attempting to avoid the records act?

In my opinion, each government office should have a published address and official business should be directed there rather than to the individual, whatever fake name they're using for their current email.

We also need to crack down on officials claiming not to use email, as first that is ridiculous in this day and age, and secondly a strong pointer that they're up to no good if they're trying to keep stuff off the official record.

Now UK bans carry-on lappies, phones, slabs on flights from six nations amid bomb fears

2 flight tiers

Maybe they could introduce two tiers of flights and have them active on alternate flights. One for the fearful where you can only fly with your passport and boarding card, and another where you can fly with what we used to, such as a laptop and a bottle of pop.

Let The Market Decide - that's the Republican way, right?

Brit smart streetlight bods Telensa named 'global market leader'

Re: speeding fines

But that's just it, the speed you can go on a particular bit of road is already variable. The posted limit, which used to be set at the 95th percentile of best case, is the _maximum_.

If it is rainy, or foggy, or kicking out time at the school, you probably should not be at say the 50 limit that stretch of road otherwise warrants. Unfortunately there are many retards and unobservant drivers around who can't or won't drive to the conditions. This leads to situations where we have limits being artificially reduced on broad swathes of road, just to cope with one slightly tight bend near one end, and ultimately to generally slower and slower limits being imposed.

This in turn leads to devaluing the lower limits, driver resentment of said low speed limits, and then more 'speeding' because people drive to the perceived risk of the bit of road they are on.

The better action is to engineer that bit of road so that the speed the majority of people would drive below is safe rather than attempt to force lower limits. If you want engage drivers in slowing themselves down, you need to have road engineers redesign the road so drivers believe it to be riskier. For instance, planting trees down the edge of the road leads to a significant decrease in driver speeds, as do things like pedestrian refuges in the centre of the road.

Sony: Get out Comedy Central, MTV – we've built a wall around Vue, the greatest wall ever

Yay cloud.

Oh, look, an online service provider that unilaterally changed the terms and capabilities of its service with no consultation or interaction with its consumers.

Now you can be tracked online by your email addy. Thanks, Google!

Addy?

I didn't know anyone over the age of 14 used "email addy" for "email address". Next you'll be telling me you also use "mobe" instead of "mobile"!..

<shudder>

How much of one year's Californian energy use would wipe out the drought?

thermal de-sal

If you already have thermal power stations, then even after the 2nd or 3rd stage turbines the steam still has heat to help boil off seawater, and as you need to cool the steam off anyway the combined power and water plant can work out cheaper overall than RO.

Combine that with using TSE for agriculture and city planting irrigation.

The nice thing about TSE is that as the city grows, you get more of it. You can see this in action in Oman where the trees along the side of the highways reach further out of town every year.

The ME's municipal planting is almost exclusively watered with TSE, since they have a decent amount of it and Islam apparently has some restrictions against using it for crops (I have been told).

Windows 10 Start menu replacements shifting like hot cakes

Microsoft doesn't need to ask users any more - the amount of telemetry and spying Windows 10 does obviates it!

No, Microsoft: Your one-billion Windows 10 goal is just sad ... really sad

Re: Haters gon' hate

You've had no problems with Win10? Seems unlikely!

Guess you haven't changed your wi-fi PSK yet, or used Edge to go to youtube.com/tv, or tried to select all emails in a folder, or tried dragging a window between monitors without moving it at 1,000kph, or set the system sounds to a lower volume and rebooted? etc., etc. Admittedly, I've hit nothing really show-stopping, but it looks like a perfect example of Agile development done wrong.

Also, I dunno about you, but I'm getting snowblindness from all the white. No themes, no dark colour schemes, no user colour schemes, removal of keyboard shortcuts and most right click actions. It's getting to be as annoying to use as OSX, and even Apple started to use the right button a few years back.

MORE Windows 10 bugs! Too many Start menu apps BREAK it

Re: what's the point in having it available if it's not a good idea to use it?

Nah, releasing buggy crud is how the Agile development methodology works!

Five data centres you can't live without

would this be AWS's Dublin Facility 2?

https://www.google.co.uk/maps/@53.4003902,-6.2200976,396m/data=!3m1!1e3

with dry air you also start to run into issues with static electricity.

We tried using Windows 10 for real work and ... oh, the horror

Re: Useful review

Everything is not really blue, it's an optical illusion with there being so much white.

Win 10's so overwhelmingly white, only an anti-Desiato is going to feel comfortable using it.

Thinking of adding an SSD for SUPREME speed? Read this

The important question to ask when buying flash-based storage is what happens when the spare area is used up.

Intel rather obnoxiously brick the drive ensuring that data recovery is impossible. Why they wouldn't fail to read-only I don't know. At least that way you could recover any data off the thing.

DWARF PLANET Ceres beams back SUNNY north pole FROWN

Hope they're careful - we don't want to wake the Inhibitors.

No Santa, no Irish boozers and no regrets: life in Qatar

Re: Driving...

While Doha's driving is atrocious it is also quite liberating. My inner knobhead would be in heaven if I was an Audi driver!