Posts by fairwinds 15 publicly visible posts • joined 15 May 2017
Thank you for this very informative article. A quick check shows that /usr/lib/snapd/snapd is consuming a mind-watering 1.6GB of virtual memory, even though I don't use snap. So I've just updated the Ansible script to add:
- name: Remove snapd and other diseases
apt:
name: snapd
state: absent
It's now running across the fleet.
Now, if only I could figure out how to do the same for systemd...
While a good idea, I suspect the problem is in terms of the legal interpretation. If there’s even a hint of ambiguity between the terse text and the explanation, you have an issue (IANAL, BTW). So they tend to add text which states the terse version is the One True Version which means the descriptive interpretation information becomes next to useless as you again need lawyers and courts to decide exactly what was meant. I’m sure our ChatGPT overlords will come up with a far better system anyway, and all we need to do is wait…
Ford doesn’t have the tech to do this. Not even remotely close. So this is yet another example of “software” patent abuse. When someone *does* figure out how to do this, they’ll appear with their lawyers and their hand out. It’s a bit like being able to patent Park Place before the Monopoly game even begins. Not good.
Ugh, stop lying. It won’t be painful when you get a bonus for being “courageous” enough to fire people
This!
I am sure I'm not the only one to be sick to the back teeth of mea culpa CEOs telling us all how they take "full responsibility" blah blah blah, whereas in fact, they don't. If they took responsibility for their actions, they'd give up their bonus, take a pay cut, or even quit! "I take full responsibility for my idiocy, and am going to resign as CEO, drop out of the tech sector entirely, and become a Trappist Monk where I can do no further damage."
Instead, it's all this leadership training gumph, before nipping off to the bank to cash the bonus.
Ya know, I do I like Ansible. I like the fact you don't need a client. I installed the Chef client on a new machine once, and it did the equivalent of "apt install *". Just to get the config mgmt software on there!
But, in this day and age, do we really need a DSL written in YAML? Really? With developer costs being orders of magnitude greater than compute costs, surely they could have come up with a more robust configuration language, and a proper parser. Sure, yeah, you can write your own modules. But for everything else, you're shoehorning some sort of Turing-complete language into a file format best used for configuration data.
As for the actual topic (Hashicorp), I'm concerned that the three big tech outfits are hoovering up open source software for their own purposes, and little if anything is being fed back. I give you Elastic's latest move to try and get Bezos away from their cash cow. Also, Docker found it hard to make money while also giving away their software, ending up in Mirantis. I hope Hashicorp isn't suffering from the same pain.
<insert usual complaint about these companies, worth billions, built almost exclusively on OSS, and who won't even submit a minor patch>
Let's not forget the whole Final Cut Pro fiasco. Expensive software, terminated overnight. Some of us bought Mac Pro's just to use that software. That isn't even the worst of it. The "replacement" options can't read the old FCP project files. So the only way to modify/update an edit is to recreate it from scratch by looking at the final programme and working out where all the cuts and all the original source materials were. You could make an argument that the editors IP is encapsulated in a proprietary Apple format, never to be retrieved, again.
This isn't an Apple thing, either. Oodles of companies decide they don't want a product any more and just pull the plug. We've all either been on the sharp end of that practice, or worked on a team who've been told "you're not doing that any more. you're being re-assigned."
In short, the idea that commercial software doesn't vanish, and OSS does, is silly and suggests a deep bias against OSS.
This story seems a bit wide of the mark. Ireland operates a single electricity market with NI (oops! Brexit!). Power providers bid their *lowest* price to participate. The market purchases electricity at the price set by the highest contributor (it pays to low-bid). When demand is excessive or bids are high, the market requests the biggest users to drop out. Data centres switch to backup gennies. Less to do with brownouts and more to do with controlling the purchase price. DCs have been doing this for years. I suspect the "innovation" here is Eaton feeds into the grid at a high cost per MW, should the market price go above their bid.
1. ISPs. They already charge you for a pipe. With NN rules, they're not allowed to look into the pipe with a view to throttling back some services in favour of others. It's not that "if you want Netflix it'll cost you more" so much as "Why not try *our* streaming service, which streams at full HD rates, unlike Netflix with their grainy, low-res videos. You can watch 1970's reruns in 'high def'." If a well-funded upstart wants to make their mark in the on-demand market (hello, Jeff Bezos), they can do it by buying up the bandwidth rather than producing better content.
2. Those services which won't pay bribes^H^H^H uh, tributes^H^H^H^H, uh, uh, priority service tariffs to the ISPs. As for the last part of your question, there is already a tiered pricing scheme for bandwidth. This is about selective filtering within that pipe. Some sites load very quickly, The Register takes ages to load.
So, you pay Netflix $10pm for content and the a*holes who provide the rickety, unreliable pipe $50pm and you think it's Netflix's fault? Netflix works with all of the large ISPs to provide local cacheing servers, which *they* pay for and *they* manage, which alleviates backhaul traffic for the ISP.
Let's look at this another way - without the content providers like Netflix, Google, Facebook, AWS et al, that IP connectivity which is so expensive and so flakey, would be pretty useless. But yeah, make the ISP argument for them; "we could provide so many more connections against the same backhaul, if only those pesky users didn't actually use the connections for real stuff..."
Your prejudices are showing. Actually, they chose the site because the Irish climate, unfortunately, doesn't require a lot of cooling. Hence Microsoft's extremely large DC in Dublin, Facebook's second new DC in Clonee, the Google one and not to mention the huge capacity Amazon has in EU-WEST (aka Dublin). On top of that, there is a new transatlantic fibre which has just landed in Belmullet and is being plumbed to Dublin via Athenry, the M6 motorway to Dublin which bypasses the site has fibre on each side of the carriageway, the ESB fibre (they wrap fibre around the high tension lines) passes through Athenry, as does the rail system which also also has a fibre network. On top of that, Derrydonnell includes a very large wind farm. They also wanted it to be near a motorway (for some reason) and that site is beside the intersection between the M6 from Galway to Dublin and the newly-opened M18 to Limerick/Shannon.
But feck it, say it's for tax avoidance. That's much easier than actually doing any research.
I went to Capetown (SA) for a week. My phone rings and it's one of those "Yes, I did detect the international roaming ring-tone, but I'm important so I want to talk about my trivial problem" muppets. I ignored the call, and about 5 minutes later, the Voicemail thing pings. I leave the long, drawn-out VM message until I get back home.
I get back to find I have 5 minutes of "roaming call-received" minutes, and 5 minutes of "international phone call minutes", both at exhorbitant prices.
Does anyone believe the voice traffic actually went to South Africa and back? No, me neither. That little bit of pseudo-extortion cost Vodafone a customer.
First off, taxis are heavily regulated. The vehicle must be tested annually, to a higher standard. It must have a taxi plate, which means they have to pay a stipend to the local council or whoever, for the privilege of operating a taxi service. Then they need insurance. That's going to be a cut above your average "I just commute to work and back" car insurance. On top of that, the driver has to have a special license and in some cases has to be vetted. In London, that driving test is legendary. Finally, they put a lot of wear and tear on their cars and who'd buy a second-hand taxi?
By way of contrast, if I set up a stall in Fisherman's Wharf in San Francisco, selling crisp, new $5 for a mere $4 each, you can bet that Uber would undercut me and sell them for $3. Uber is coining it, and yet they are losing money at a phenomenal rate - that's because they are undercutting the market. Your savings of 30 quid were paid for by a generous venture capitalist. Not to mention the lack of payments to the local council et al. But don't expect Uber to do that forever. Their intent is to force out the competition, until they're the only game in town. Then you can expect any savings to disappear overnight. Not to mention their peak pricing algorithms.
I'm just waiting for the insurance industry, particularly in Europe/UK, to decide they won't indemnify anyone who has an accident while carrying paying passengers. That ought to bring Uber down to earth in a big hurry, if nothing else does.
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