SuSE
Many years since I last posted, but Open SuSE has saved me on several occasions because of snapshot rollback. I fully approve.
14 publicly visible posts • joined 21 Jul 2015
master
with main
across its services
The desktop patch slinger
The 365 trouser pocket partner
The penguin-clad wolf of Redmond (variation on another contributor)
The cloud-veined wallet stabber
The ginger-haired corp at the cloud party, Microsoft.
The beast in the cloud
The King that lost its crown
The open-source lube applicator, Microsoft
I have the 1Gbit service. I forgot how bad Virgin are.. for gaming the latency can sometimes be terrible and their official support appears to be forums which are not really serviced - I have a formal complaint letter for issues not being resolved for 8 weeks so I can nail them to the post.
Anyway, here is the BQM graph of yesterday:
https://www.thinkbroadband.com/broadband/monitoring/quality/share/5dc6f77555e9f71c0a68ebd078dd25b36e34d9e5-27-04-2020
and the small hours of Tuesday:
https://www.thinkbroadband.com/broadband/monitoring/quality/share/8ff331b5d5714ac3771aa1a19d3af028112c9025-29-04-2020
The only thing that shut up their poor latency was doing something to the connection whereby a stayalive is regulary affected. The download rate was 1GB early on in October - but nothing like that now. Trash really.
Not everyone, but the vast majority do not understand their value. You are a contractor.. you sadly mistake yourselves for having valuable skills. You do not. No, you really don't. You are not special. Permenantly employing you is special; a commitment of the firm to the individual whose sacrifices go way beyond the daily for a contractor who is likey to have to retrain and re-kill multiple times of their employed lifetime. There are a smll percentage of contractors that are special thuogh.. and I do feel a bit bad for them. Special though - their rate demands a solution to employment, E.g., paying that rate is not a long-term ideal or fixture, so in any firm 2 years would be a long, long time. Not known a special one that didn't know this.
IR35 is coming to end and employers and taking you on as permenants. Suddenly, you think you are not as well valued as you once where. Except, for the firm, you never where that kind of value. They have not changed what they are forking out.. just that you are getting less. You were *never* as valuable to them as your IR35 status afforded. Wise up.
Now lots of people simply don't see that, and moan and whinge, well I don't blame them. I work for a large multi-national not quoted in the article, I will tell you that 2, just 2 people in the whole of IT are retaining their IR35. They warrant it anyway and they can readily justify it and the firm is prepared to bend-over if the tax man cometh. True value. For the rest - I repeat, you are not as valuable as you think you are.
All these people quiting work.. well some are lucky and they can retire, more power to them. Swathes of people still need to earn to pay their bills, and swathes of work needs to be done. Hold out for a month, 3 months, 6 months if you will.. you'll be back and eating it. When the axe cuts across all industries equally, all you are doing is moaning.
Get yourselves on the permenant gravy train and benefit from being properly valued. Earn your way their if you are good enough.
For the vast mahjority, the complaints and posturing and moaning only.
anon@penet.fi is all I need to say. A fond memory!
Back in the day (early 90's) you must remember that grabbing files that may have been > 1 MB in size was a complete ass-pain, and with the bandwidth of a 14.4K modem you appreciated the efficacy of ftp over other emerging 'net protocols like http. The right tool for the job was critical back then. Ok things have moved on but there were good reasons for ftp.
I can understand (google) getting rid of it from Chrome, just not the reasoning. It would be better to say that they can no longer realistically support something that, frankly, a developer under the age of 40 will not wish to touch even if you paid them well. Why would you ?
It may have been Fedora, or it may have been Ubuntu I can't recall but around 5 years ago I thought to myself, well, it's been a while let me install Linux onto a spare partition.
After trying to install gfx drivers via the desktop install tool, I promptly deleted it and haven't tried a desktop linux again. I was outraged at the Linux distribution telling me how I was a bad person because I wasn't installing free stuff! Screw that, *I* made the choice to install the distribution and *I* make the choice to install what I want. How dare some drooling zealot chastise me for thinking otherwise.
On the server side it's great - I have a SuSE distro on my little micro server and I first used slackware way back in '93. Looks like in 25 years the idealogical zealots are still out in force - or just maybe, just maybe they are now realising that all they are doing is preaching to the converted and finally getting with it. Good luck and we'll see where it goes.
The culture of banking IT management is it's always a "success" even though it patently isn't. This has everything to do with protecting their own backsides and managing their career - nothing to do with executing the "right thing" that is in the best interests of the bank. This permeates down to the lowest levels and even team leads are not immune.
If the FCA is serious about banking stability they need to some rules to codify how IT management receive bonuses - measurable things, such as financial impact caused by change you are responsible, downtime & outages, number of impacted customers, number of trades that failed to book or settle etc.
OTOH that would require meaningful and measurable objetives tied to your compensation.. which doesn't happen in banking IT and that's why we get treated like dirt (better paid dirt that some but banks are no longer premier players on the pay front). Can you imagine a salesperson that didn't have this ? The day a bank wants to admit that you've performed better than "effective" is when you throw your resignation in and they beg you to stay.
"Reasonable steps" here is about the protection of the firm against the actions of individuals. If a firm can demonstrate that it has policies, training, records of this etc it would be unreasonable of the regulator to fine a company because an individual, depsite all the training and obligations still went on to break the law.
There is a lot of ethics and integrity training these days, not that it is visible to the wider world outside banking, and it frustrates us in IT when some ass clown in the front office has done something stupid again costing the bank millions of fines - it's our bonus up in smoke. Mind you I still think some of the regs make it easier to bash somebody that tried then slipped up, rather than someone taking the piss in the first place..
It's an interesting article, as over the years M$ have taken a lot of stick but they have always changed and evolved.. perhaps not at a rate we like to see or a competence we enjoy but nevertheless, change. For example, with the fullness of time and hindsight can anyone seriously dispute that something like Windows '95 took desktop computing (and indeed professional software development) to a different place? All I'm saying is be fair. However this modern stuff is nonsense.. can't even refresh a web browser properly without a ctrl-enter, what happened to F3 for next in a search menu context? GUI interaction has gone backwards, fine you want to change things, would it kill you to retain sh!t like F3 though ? REALLY! ? Even my vanilla-as-you-like hand-rolled budget spreadsheet runs like a dog and I all I have is a pivot table on another sheet.. pretty poor really. What annoys me the most though as a software professional you just know that it only takes a little bit more care, a small amount of care, and you've got a killer on your hands. I'm just more disappointed than surprised, half-a-dozen top rated devs and testers could knock it out of the park, it's just over resourced managed-by-morons shite that hits our desktops now.
Argh!
Some of us really old school people, we access the news from the subdomain news.bbc.co.uk and this has not been restored.
I would update my 20+ year old book marks but modern web browsers have made this impossible with their completely mindless/pointless fiddling with the browser UI, I can't find my bookmarks even when I try.
Hmm I read this thread with some interest - and to the guys that's quoting Quark on a Apple LC, it rendered well and one reason why it was the de-facto in the publishing industry, the principle reason being a proper understanding of CMYK and device gamuts and professional printing presses are all about those two.
However it was never particularly quick. x86's were worse, and even with VESA bios's coming along all that did was give you tricks like triple-buffering, you still had to calculate the whole lot in CPU, so for speed alone I fully understand doing this (back then). Then a year or two later from the 486 era onwards with the advent of graphics controllers plugged into the VL-bus the Mac dominance was broken. This was all done with ultra-quick 2D rendering, forget your polygons that was purely secondary back then, it's all about bezier curve calculations, also a key part of post-script level 2 (re: breaking apple dominance). The VL-bus was directly wired to the CPU so it isn't a surprise at all that this was all kernel mode. Aldus pagemaker and then quark moved quickly to the PC domain and that was that for Apple for many years. Back then you weren't even connected to anything by TCP/IP unless you'd installed a TCP/IP stack, security was a different world away prior to '95 so be careful at apply 2015 standards to back then.
Of course it's a load of cobblers to even remotely have fonts rendered in the Kernel this day and age and should have been dropped by the late 90s at the latest, but back then, it was commercially important.