Those numbers seem low even if it's not London.
A relative started on 40K straight out of University as a junior dev and was on 60K within 18 months. That was 5 years ago.
133 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Oct 2015
While learning about security is a sensible precursor to getting in to crypto, I'd start with considering the complete lack of any value to start with.
A friend is a greybeard programmer and at least 20 years older than anybody else he works with. All his team were in on crypto except him. At their last meeting he discovered that every one of them was out a decent amount of money from their 'investments' I think the smallest loss was about £8000 up to >£30,000. Somewhere somebody made money from them but the net is a large amount of energy was expended to move money from them to somebody else.
At least Charles Ponzi had a believeable story he was touting around the markets. Crypto doesn't even have that.
Gartner generally aren't wrong because they ask their customers what they plan on doing, then write a report saying 'this is what everybody wil be doing'
The people they interviewed then have an 'independent' report to support doing exactly what they were already planning on doing.
Nice work if you can get it.
I agree with some of this. He does seem to actually be trying to answer questions and isn't suffering from the intermittently faulty memory of many of the witnesses.
However on the technical side - which I guess is why most of us are here - the issue I have, and this was the same with his colleague Anne Chambers, is the clear assumption that the system was working fine and if they couldn't find a problem in the data after a cursory check then there wasn't a problem and it was somebody else's fault. To find bugs you have to actually go looking for them.
The whole culture of the PO and ICL/Fujitsu seems to have been to see everybody else as the problem when a good hard look in the mirror was needed.
Early systemd looks exactly like a copy of the Solaris SMF - which fixed a number of issues with the init system - dependencies, parallelism etc.
I recall there was discussion at Sun about whether it was too big a change to the traditional init system. Systemd took that big leap as a starting point and has spent the next 15 years trying to devour all of Unix.
I have no idea whether that was always the plan or it's just a case of feature-itis.
The issue that forced me to learn about this (referred to in another post) was a customer backing up data from Tokyo to Singapore IIRC. Plenty of bandwidth but significant packet loss.
My company ended up re-writing the data transfer protocol to use multiple tcp connectrions and making the send windows proportionally smaller. Packet loss then caused much smaller retransmits.
I see lots of comments about how Starlink is fantastic - which I agree with - but it's not what Geoff is discussing.
I've put in more time than I ever wanted to dealing with high latency jittery networks with packet loss. You can get in to all sorts of issues with large send and receive windows causing enormous retransmits at significant jitter or small amounts of packet loss. ~1% packet loss on a high latency network will pretty much remove your ability to to large data transfers, regardless of the theoretically available bandwidth.
The congestion control algorithm makes a big difference here. There are lots of them - which is a sign that none work well for all use cases. The author is making sensible suggestions as to which ones are well suited to Starlink.
A friend who did a couple of years working in Japan for a large computer manufacturer described their decision making process exactly like this. Meetings are where decisions are communicated, not made.
It does put the onus on the manager to ensure they talk to all the relevant people and listen to them but get that right and it's an efficient process.
A couple of IT projects I worked on for the military were similar. It took a while to understand the culture but it worked well - If you had a good manager.
The AES spec determined that all entrants would use a 128 bit block size and at up to at least 256 bit key size. I believe Rijndael did offer larger block sizes but once it became AES that feature was dropped.
At the time, encryption was very CPU heavy. No custom functions in mainstream CPUs like today. We sold quite a few nCipher cards to customers wanting to run VPNs and suchlike. Limited use cases for them these days.
Yes, that's generally a good policy. The time to find out whether a system restarts is not when you are trying to restart everything after a power outage.
Yes, there are likely caches in RAM which need to be rebuilt and will increase latency for a while.
Some years back I had an angry customer (investment bank) to deal with. One of our servers had crashed and taken down a trading application - despite being in a failover cluster. What the bank then discovered was that they didn't know how to restart the service - about 20 applications on a similar number of servers. The services had to be restarted in a specific order - which they didn't know since everything had been running for several years uninterrupted.
This is when I also learnt the lesson that the more somebody shouts at you, the more likely that it's their fault.
Some years back, a colleague who had just joined from another Unix server company recounted a similar story.
They were running benchmarks on the soon to be released next gen systems and up to their neck with both hardware and software issues needing to be fixed before anything would run successfully. His WTF moment happend when the CEO passed him in the corridor and said 'I hear you are getting great benchmark numbers on the new systems'
It had only taken about 3 layers of management speak for the message to completely reverse from the truth.
In my many years in presales I dealt with a - thankfully - small number of really unpleasant organisations and individuals.
I once suggested a sales incentive where the top sales rep in the company won the right to tell a customer of their choice to go fuck themselves - regardless of the financial consequences.
I have never seen such enthusiasm from the sales reps for a reward scheme!
Here's the code and the explanation of why it's moronically stupid.
This extract from EPOSSCore.dll has been written to reverse the sign of a
number and is equivalent to the command :-
d=-d
Public Function ReverseSign(d)
Ifd<o Then
d= Abs(d)
Else
d=d-(d*2)
End If
ReverseSign = d
End Function
Whoever wrote this code clearly has no understanding of elementary
mathematics or the most basic rules of programming.
Read this witness statement / watch the testimony. It's depressing.
https://www.postofficehorizoninquiry.org.uk/evidence/witn00620100-david-mcdonnell-witness-statement
TL;DR :
The part of the system that was core to subsequent issues was known to be a badly written POS before launch.
The guy brought in to assess the system and remedy issues wasn't allowed to rewrite it and was moved on when he complained.
The was pressure from government to launch on schedule.
You might want to check on that.
Uber have been pissing money away for years but they are now profitable.
https://investor.uber.com/news-events/news/press-release-details/2023/Uber-Announces-Results-for-Second-Quarter-2023/default.aspx
Sadly, this profitability appears to have coincided with their service getting much worse - in London at least.
If somebody says they have a new architecture and part of the pitch is 'we can fix problem [X] in the compiler' - You should probably run rather than walk away.
At the couple of places I've worked where there was a compiler team - they were usually very cautious about what was achievable. It was the processor architects with some clever pet project who handwaved away significant problems as something for the compiler.
Or an 'error of judgement' :)
TBF this is actually largely how tax law works. If you are found liable for a tax bill, the govt just wants the money. If you pay up, you generally are in the clear (apart from little people doing their tax returns obviously)
The important bit is not to keep evading tax after being investigated, that's when they throw the book at you. See Lester Piggott / Bernie Ecclestone. In Bernie's case, it was more of a leaflet they thew at him, in exchange for another £650 million.
My main memory is that they were noisy. I flew pre refurbishment and sitting in a window seat you had to speak up to the cabin crew in the aisle. Excellent wine list! I believe the work of Jancis Robinson.
The interior was small but once sitting down it was fine. The seats were comfortable, if a little vintage looking and you were only there for a bit over 3 hours.
I was booked for a 2nd flight when they were grounded.
I also cycled to Heathrow to watch the last commercial flights land there - 3 Concordes landing one after the other. It was VERY busy on all the perimeter roads.
Oh yes, the windows got hot to the touch.
That's getting in to the weeds. There was evidence given during the enquiry that testing was taking place, concerns were raised about the quality and it was signed off for release anyway. The module that came in for the most criticism was the 'cash accounts' module that deals with --- in branch transactions.
Get a second hand Thorens TD150/TD160. Should be possible at that price.
If you also spend a bit more for a better arm then you effecively have a Linn Sondek with at least one zero missing from the price.
I ripped all my remaining vinyl and sold my TD150 to a mate so he could do the same thing.
Sun converted from BSD to SVR4 to try to end the Unix wars which set Unix back several years. On balance this was sensible.
Given that a lot of SVR4 IS SunOS, it wasn't a major technical challenge but it did result in a fair bit of change for existing users without any immediate benefit.
Sun was very innovative for many years. SunOS and then Solaris introduce a load of advanced features - some mentioned previously - so if you were on Solaris, you could do things that other people couldn't. In the early years there was NFS, NIS, RPC and then later SMF, Zones, ZFS, DTrace etc.
Working with Solaris was a good place to be for a long time.
To be fair, Google discontinued offering an email service to ISPs (which VM were using) so VM had no choice but to move it.
I had mostly moved to gmail many years before that when blueyonder were only offering a 30MB mailbox and gmail was offering 7GB. I still have some historic emails on VM that I need to dip in to once in a while. While I can now log in again, all emails before Monday evening are absent. As usual VM have offered no explanation or ETA that's anything other than $TIME+6hrs.
Don't forget the Horizon bit of Fujitsu is ICL as was. You would have to travel a long way to find a more useless bunch of fuckwits still operating.
My guess is that there are a bunch of entrenched systems that only they have the people to manage/develop and therefore they are still winning business.
Snap.
Virginmedia, despite their sewage level customer service and constant price gouging have, until now, provided a fast, reliable broadband service for the 20+ years I have had them. It's their one redeeming feature. I am now in the position that 2 of the 3 worst outages in 20 years have happened this week.
Communityfibre called to ask if they could cable up our block of flats. They are currently offering 4 times the performance for half the price. Like you, I'm off as soon as the new fibres are installed.
Many years ago when at working for a large computer manufacturer, I saw a presentation given to the operating system development team, who were extremely skilled but also very Ivory tower. One slide was in the form of problem/solution.
Problem : The sales team only sell what we pay them to, not what we want them to.
Solution : THIS IS A FEATURE, NOT A BUG.
Unsurprising.
I've posted this before but cloud is very good for lowering Capex. Opex? not so much. For known demand it's little more than expensive hosting.
At a previous job we had a customer who moved their SQL Server production databases in to AWS. Successfully. This is quite an achievement. They then discovered they were Amazon's biggest customer in the country (many million $ per year) So moved nearly all of them back on prem.
The cynic in me says that the speed this is progressing means the aim is to give the various parties a quick slap on the wrist and then pretend it didn't happen. There are too many supposedly smart people looking really dumb who would like all this to go away.
I _really_ hope to be proven wrong.
Some good advice - although obvious - from an investment fund manager was "decide before you start whether you are investing or speculating because the stock market is a very expensive place to find out.
The crypto market has proved to be an even more expensive place to find out.