Posts by dinsdale54 40 posts • joined 16 Oct 2015
I spent 25 years in presales - the techie working with the sales folks. I have never seen a situation where a sales rep can price a deal at low margin without approval from a long way up the management chain. Salesfolks are often targeted just on revenue but the levels above them have a margin target as well.
I have on two occasions worked with sales reps who had recently joined from HP and were sueing HP for not paying commission. It's been standard practice there for a long time.
This is normal if you are serious about trying to provide enterprise level kit. You are selling kit with a support contract and with performance & reliability expectations
I had 10+ years at an enterprise storage vendor. Disk drive validation by our engineers took a lot of time & resources. It would usually take a couple of firmware revisions before a new drive actually worked satisfactorily. To quote the guy in charge of testing new drives/firmware - "You'd be amazed by the new and creative ways the disk drive manufacturers find to screw this up"
Back when I used to travel to the US frequently, about 1 trip in 3 would result in me needing a new credit card after fraud attempts. I now endeavour to use disposable credit card numbers for most transactions. As well as protecting me, I realise they will make fraud detection much easier as ANY second usage is a red flag.
Compared with what's available in many rural areas - and some urban if you're the poor schmuck at the end of a 70 year old bit of copper - the latency isn't even close to an issue. There's nothing that will push up your latency faster than running out of bandwidth and a lot of rural internet is shockingly bad - my parents never saw more than 2mbit/s in leafy Surrey.
I'm currently showing 10ms to theregister.co.uk and 15ms to bbc.co.uk over broadband in London. 40ms with decent bandwidth is just fine and will allow all the streaming services - Netflix etc. to work.
Yup, difficult to use.
I did some work with OpenStack a few years ago and found it incredibly fiddly to set up and with documentation that assumed a high level of pre-existing knowledge. It reminded me of Unix in the early 90s. If you have a room full of techies to understand it all and manage the configuration then I can see how it is a good cloud platform with a lot of functionality. Otherwise, no go.
Also, a company I worked for had a product where the entire management interface was OpenStack based. The techies referred to it as Brokenstack
Having worked for a number of companies that have implemented DPUs - offload cards as we used to call them - they nearly always ended up being more trouble than they were worth. Aside from very real "new batch of implementation flaws" the problem usually boiled down to having some connection state information on the card. This is a nightmare when you want to load balance/fail over etc as you have to find a way to move state information between cards - which you end up doing via the main CPU anyway.
If you are Amazon/Microsoft/Google you can work round these problems with tightly controlled configurations and if you are Joe Schmo running a single server in an office you probably aren't pushing any limits. For everybody else, you are opening the door to a world of difficult to diagnose network issues for the sake of a few % more free CPU cycles.
Unusually I find myself agreeing with Gartner. "Applicable to less than 1%"
Companies typically allocate a percentage of the revenue of the company to pay for selling it. It makes up much of the SG&A expenses on the balance sheet. A sales rep will typically have a base salary, a sales target - for example - $5 million and an OTE - what you make if you hit your target.
Once you have achieved your sales target you have in theory covered your costs in the company so commission rates normally jump. At my last place all sales over 120% of target were paid at 3x commission rate. So sell double or triple your target and you will vastly more than your base salary.
This is why people go in to sales. Being smart is not a requirement - merely a bonus. The one thing all the successful salesfolk I worked with had in common is they were highly motivated and not afraid of a days work.
And mine.
My Galaxy S8 didn't survive a 50cm drop when getting out of the car. It cracked from from one side to the other, and back again. It was in a Samsung case at the time.
As a result I am very sceptical of durability claims by phone manufacturers - especially Samsung.
At one of my former customers, one of the operations folk was referred to as 'The Chaos Monkey' for his ability to break any code the dev team wrote no matter how much testing they had done themselves.
He was always given the new code before anybody else. If it survived him, it was production ready.
Lync was always a festering bag of shite. Microsoft had two choices - fix it, or rename it to Skype for Business to try and hide its awfulness behind a rebrand.
No guesses for which approach they took.
As a general rule, the quality of software is inversely proportional to the frequency of name changes.
They removed the £1000 limit last year sometime but prior to that you had to have authorisation from the FCA to lend more than that to your employees. This typically meant that only companies which already had FCA authorisation (finance companies etc) would go over £1000.
The limit has been increased in particular to include e-bikes which typically cost well over £1000.
ZFS allows you to just check the hashes or do a full block verification. If you are using SHA-2-256 the chances of a hash collision are very very very small. According to the author 50 times less likely than an undetected & uncorrected ECC memory error.
https://blogs.oracle.com/bonwick/zfs-deduplication-v2
I'd more likely suspect multiple disk failures after a power outage forcing recovery from backup when the procedure hasn't been tested recently.
These days, "doing well" means not failing. As you say, the storage industry is mature and being commoditized. Investment is long gone. There are no storage startups being funded unless it's software only/cloud.
Way to miss the point.
The whole issue with IR35 is that HMRC wants to tax contractors as employees of company they are providing the service to while not allowing them the benefits that fulltime employees of said company receive.
Therefore making provision for sick pay etc has to come from income that has already been taxed for that purpose.
As it's a jet engine, the air must be subsonic to go through the compressor. Jet engines with supersonic airspeeds are SCRAMJETs and is still a very experimental technology.
So yes, it's getting slowed down a lot however this is relatively well understood.
I assume the impressive cooling is required for engine efficiency, including not melting immediately
After 20 years at storage vendors where you were competing with other storage vendors the competition is now cloud. Previously you just had to be better than the incumbent storage providers, EMC, HP, Dell NetApp, IBM etc. That's usually quite achievable for a startup with a half decent product - Pure has done this exceedingly well.
Now you are competing with AWS, Azure, Google etc and the move from CapEx to OpEx. Pure's announcement about targeting Dell/EMC refreshes is a tougher proposition than it was even a couple of years ago. Several of the existing storage vendors have better cloud offerings than Pure does so for companies moving that way. they are less likely to ditch the incumbent for another non-cloud vendor.
If the growth slows without a plan for being profitable, the share price is going to take a battering.
<edit> I just checked the after hours trading. The share price has taken a battering.
Dyson have been doing a lot of work on electric motors for the last few years, particularly permanent magnet motors. A lot of this should be directly applicable to EVs - witness Tesla's recent move to permanent magnet motors for the model 3. If you have already solved many of the difficult problems - control, efficiency - starting the motor in the right direction etc. then scale the torque up and revs down and you have a very efficient EV motor.
It's not the calculating the hash that's the hard work, it's scanning the hash table looking for matches for every incoming write. Say you have 1TB of data and 50% of the 4K blocks are unique. If you are using a 256bit hash (SHA-256) that's 8GB of space for the hash table and you have to search for a match for every incoming block. Hence the need for clever ways to minimize the above. Some implementations are much more efficient than others.
That's an overly simplistic example but points out where the issue lies
BA (well, IAG) is trying to sell itself to Qatar who want control. Therefore they are trying to bump up short term profits at the expense of everything else - reliability, quality, service, reputation etc - through the traditional methods of cutting costs like a bastard. It may well terminally damage BA's reputation but it will make the board members & shareholders rich in the short term which is the primary goal.
Far more recent than that!
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/03/01/aws_s3_outage/
Amazon might try some alternate reality and claim it's not a 'regional failure' but if you had any system that relied on S3 then you were SOL. AWS/Azure/Google are all very interesting and useful tech but reliable and cheap aren't words that can be used to describe them.
For all major markets, Netflix put their own hardware in to ISPs to deliver content. Basically a rack full of compute and disks. They push content updates once a day. For smaller countries, AWS makes a lot of sense, especially when you first offer a service. I assume there's a crossover point when it's worth swapping from AWS to your own kit.
The Register - Independent news and views for the tech community. Part of Situation Publishing
Biting the hand that feeds IT © 1998–2021