Posts by englishr 66 publicly visible posts • joined 15 Jun 2014
> This is a big deal because much of the internet is built on React
Surely none of the Internet is built on React, but applications built with a popular transport protocol happen to use it?
Repeat after me: "The World Wide Web is not the Internet - the Internet is a box with a tiny red light on top stored in Big Ben"
I used to work at s startup that purchased a significant number of Gateway 2000 machines, one batch of which had the hard drives making the dreaded "click of death" within a month or two of being put in to use.
We would normally just pop the drive out, package it up, call Gateway support, and they'd cross ship a replacement. However, one time my colleague and I got someone who was determined to stick to the script, and my colleague was feeling a bit grumpy...
My colleague: We've got another click-of-death drive, from machine <serial#>. Could you ship us a replacement?
GW2K: Is the drive installed in the machine?
C: No - it's packaged ready to return
G: Please install it in a machine - I need to hear it.
C: Seriously? We've returned a dozen of these so far, and no one has needed to hear it.
G: Please install in a machine - I need to hear it.
C: (Sits patiently doing nothing for 3 minutes). OK - it's installed in a machine.
G: Please turn it on so I can hear it.
C: (Make noise with mouth) Click! Click! Click!
G: You're making that noise with your mouth!
C: No I'm not.
G: Yes you are!
C: Nope.
G: (long pause) OK - here's your RMA number ...
Oracle have done exactly that. Here's their document defining the "core factor" (pdf).
Most Oracle licensing is "per named user" or "per core" (subject to the core factor) - SE2 is the exception with the "per socket" license, but it has baked in limitations such as a maximum of 16 CPU threads per database instance, and a maximum of 1 CPU thread for export/backup operations.
An Oracle SE2 license allows use on up-to two socket systems, with an unlimited number of cores. Each database instance is limited to using a maximum of 16 CPU threads, so in a 2 x 96-core EPYC system, so you'd need to be running 12 concurrent instances to get Oracle to use 192 threads. (There are other nasty limitations baked in, such as a maximum of 1 CPU thread can be used for exports/rman-backups, which makes them impractically slow for larger DBs).
I'm on board with the sentiment, but the bad old days of entering CRT resolution timings into the X.conf file (I think that's what it was called way back when...) prior to EDID being a thing, was fraught with problems.
The modern versions that just detect everything at run time look like magic to me :-)
In a high school chemistry class many years ago, the teacher stepped out for a minute and a fellow student decided to heat their metal pencil sharpener in a Bunsen flame "to see what would happen". As it happens, the metal was a magnesium aluminium alloy - the magnesium ignited, which in turn ignited the aluminium.
The eye-searing white light caused my colleague to panic, and he threw it (along with the tongs) into a stainless steel sink that happened to be full of water. This created a very Dr. Who like scene, with an astoundingly bright light shining up out of the sink, accompanied by the water furiously bubbling from the hydrogen as the burning metal stripped the oxygen from the water.
Alas, the spectacle only lasted a few seconds, but when it was done, there was a ghostly outline of a pencil sharpener made out of tiny spheres of iron (I think, from the impurities in the alloy) welded to the bottom of the sink.
While providing telephone support for my brother, whose printer was not working, the conversation went like this...
Me: OK - first let's check the basics. Is the power cable plugged in at both ends?
Him: Of course it's bloody well plugged in at both .... oh. It's working now.
The US CLOUD act allows law enforcement to compel US companies to turn over data whether that data is located within or outside the United States. So even if the data is stored in AWS solely within the UK, US law enforcement can still get their hands on it.
Hopefully the data will be properly encrypted with user-held keys.
As a student, I took a summer vacation job at IBM Chiswick in London. The group I was working with happened to be in a former machine room - the mainframes were gone, but the 10m long A/C built in to the external wall remained.
In general, then room was very pleasant to work in, however, one Monday AM when I arrived bright and early, I discovered that this massive A/C had be set to "max" and left on all weekend. The metal surfaces in the room were frosty. Took a while to warm up, English summers being what they are!
> I've seen apps under 30MB using this method
Oh, how things have changed since I were a lad...
I remember writing a "student database" program for a high school in the early '80s, on a dual-floppy TRS-80, using Z80 assembler. The machine had 32k of RAM, most of which was needed for holding data. The program ended up being about 10k, and now a 30MB app is considered small. Sigh.
Obligatory "Now get off my lawn!"
Buying a new laptop and popping in a 16GB SODIMM and 1TB NVMe drive from somewhere like Amazon is vastly cheaper than purchasing that spec. from the manufacturer.
You also get a clean crapware-free installation of Windows/Linux on the new drive, and can quickly replace the original vendor drive if required by technical support.
Oracle databases have an optional embedded JVM, which is necessarily Oracle Java. The embedded JVM allows stored procedures, triggers, etc. to be written in Java rather than PL/SQL - and alas, if the vendor of your ERP platform requires an Oracle RDBMS with embedded Java, then you just have to suck it up.
I just updated my mother in law and next door neighbour from Win 7 Pro (OEM) to Windows 10 Pro, simply by doing a clean Win10 install and typing in the Win7 Pro product code. Worked like a charm.
I did hit a temporary snag though - one of the motherboards had a USB port failure, so I swapped it out for a replacement. Win10 said "hmm - this looks like a new computer" and de-activated itself, and nothing I could do would convince it to behave - other than "wait a few days". I left if off for four days (didn't have time to deal with it), and when I turned it back on ready to humbly call Microsoft customner serice, cap in hand, it magically reactivated by itself.
When I was in primary school (Wales, 1970s), it was quite common to here the expression "I could care less, but not much!" (with heavy emphasis on the "could"). I've always assumed that "I could care less" was a shortened version, with "but not much" being implied.
In the mid-90s I once received a $1000 video card where the outer packing box had a mysterious triangular hole (roughly 20mm per side) on both sides. Upon opening the box, the video card retail packaging also had a 20mm triangular hole on both side.
You will be unsurprised to hear that the video card exhibited the same defect; it looked like a pretty clean cut, and where the hole intersected chips, the chips were neatly sheared. Needless to say, I returned the card without actually testing it's function.
I have no idea what might have punched such a hole - any thoughts?
I can highly recommend the classic text adventure Bureaucracy (written by Douglas Adams) where the goal of the game is to have your bank recognise your change of address without having an aneurysm from elevated blood pressure.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bureaucracy_(video_game)
Thank you for the link, but my reading of the page is that it is contrary to your understanding. Could you draw attention to the parts that support your argument that orbital velocity in a solar orbit is a function of the mass of the orbiting body?
From the web page referenced:
So does the mass of the planet have a significant impact upon its orbital period (or orbital speed) about some star? Given that planets are by definition almost always much less massive than the stars they orbit, the practical answer is "NO."
While working for a software startup in the mid-90s, about a month after the company moved to new offices in a refurbished brick and poured concrete industrial building, I was hacking away at some code at about 9:00pm when the (locked) main office door burst open with an enormous crash.
Four burly firemen charged in, axes, oxygen tanks, full-face breathing masks - the works. They rapidly went office to office, checking for anyone still there - seeing me, one yells "You! Get out now! Can't you hear the alarm?" Now that the main door was open into the central stairwell / lift area, I could hear a very faint "ding, ding, ding...". I shakily beat a retreat (not enough blood in my adrenaline stream) out of the building, to find multiple police cars and fire engines in the parking lot.
Turned out to be a false alarm.
"Keyboards last about a year max."
Dang, you're hard on your keyboards; I'm typing this on an IBM buckling-spring keyboard manufactured in 1996, and used 8 hours a day, 5 days a week. I have the same thing at home, used for extensive gaming, and still going strong.
Maybe you should try one (I've no affiliation with UniComp)?
https://www.pckeyboard.com/
@Herby
My most common sudo use case is to allow users to become another non-root user in a logged shell, e.g.
%dba ALL=/usr/bin/rootsh -i -u oracle
So, the DBAs can become the oracle user, but the session is logged. If you have a better way to achieve this, I'd appreciate hearing about it.
"Those who give any kind of meaning to white-space in source code other than to separate one word from another is a heretic and has to be cleansed!"
But...but...what about the awesome programming language 'whitespace' ??
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whitespace_(programming_language)
"You forgot the cost for the accountant to figure out all of that, the auditor to make sure it's right, the executive review to change it, the accountant's time to revise..."
...and the printing costs of the 1000-page report, with 10% of pages marked "This page intentionally left blank".
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