Posts by lordminty 181 publicly visible posts • joined 18 Jul 2017
When I worked for an organisation that took card payments we had to pass internal and external audits for PCI/DSS, and if we'd ever failed we'd have lost or ability to process card payments.
An out of date OS with no support contract would have failed. Even with a support contract we'd have had an auditors recommendation to get the OS up to date.
Does this not apply to TiPJAR? How can it not?
If you are monitoring whether your staff are "away from their keyboard too much" then you are measuring the wrong things anyway, unless they are working in a call centre or similar role where availability is key.
Brilliant managers should care about outcomes. Results. Meeting targets. Deliverables.
Measuring how much time someone is at their keyboard is as stupid as measuring lines of code produced (rather than whether the code does what its supposed to do).
Years ago I worked for a company that had 30+ IBM mainframe sites, each with its own local support teams, of which mine was one. After various restructurings we all ended up u der the same national manglement who decided to report on call-up and on-site call-outs.
Of course they focused on the wrong things, and bigger numbers are better. Then they started rewarding those with the highest calls, and giving them monetary pats on the back for getting called out for the simplest of changes.
With predictable results. One guy became a national hero because he got called every single weekend. This didn't go down well with me or my team as we had almost a 100% faultless record.
It took quite a bit of moaning that they were measuring and rewarding the wrong thing, errors not succes, but ultimately the hero himself provided the evidence when he quite obviously and deliberately messed up an incredibly simple change. A change nobody else messed up.
He didn't last long after that.
Forklift? The mainframes I helped get installed needed cranes! [*]
Our machine room was on the first floor, and we could only get something the size of a single 3380 disk controller through the doors at a time.
CPUs had to disassembled and reassembled once ever was in the room. Most of the kit was moved on rollers.
* In one instance the crane operator and delivery guys managed to drop an EMC array before it even got into the building...
If your mainframe performance "went off a cliff", your mainframe Sysprog(s) wasn't doing their job properly!
There are shelves full of books on mainframe performance tuning. And I'm guessing your Storage team weren't up to much either, in terms of distribution of LUNs across the storage arrays.
Mainframe performance only goes "off a cliff" its its not configured and tuned correctly. Yes its an almost lost 'dark art', but a very necessary one. You don't just shovel your OS, page/swap, software libraries and DBs all on a few disks like on an average server. Its simply not how they're designed to work.
"the complaint I hear about most even with the Pi 5 (except for price, thanks AI) is their lack of performance"
What?
A Pi 5 with a PCIe hat and an NVMe SSD has more iops than an enterprise class Exadata storage server from 2010.
And CPU wise it has comparable performance to an intel Xeon Gold 6126 from 2018. Those were commonly fitted in Dell PowerEdge Gen14 (e.g., R640, R740, T640) and HPE ProLiant Gen10 (e.g., DL380, ML350) servers.
Hardly a "lack of performance".
Its bad enough with just accessing websites.
I'm aware of UK banks who's online banking portals goes off polling and downloading god knows what from various CDNs, Google Analytics and various external managed chat bot providers.
WTAF are they doing that? Everything for online banking should only come from the bank's servers. How long is it going to be before a bank website gets compromised due to the embedded sh*t they are dragging down from sites that really cant be trusted?
You can just flood the car CAN bus and inject whatever you want?
Open the doors? OK, done.
Start the engine? Done.
https://kentindell.github.io/2023/04/03/can-injection/
As usual, the UK government is trying to solve problems when they've been superseded by new techniques.
"Nutanix's answer is an expansion to the hardware compatibility list (HCL) of servers it certifies to run its wares.
... Outfits making that move may want to reuse existing hardware rather than replace it."
Going to be interesting if hardware vendors start extending EOSL dates. With the right (expensive) hardware support.
I bought a £30 Nook too.
Brilliant device and was the best ereader of its era. Better than either a Kobo, which runs a close second (I've got one if those too) and the dreadful Kindle Touch (my wife has one of those).
I've simply no idea how the Kindle got to own the market, as they were technically a very much inferior product.
A Tandem box a "mainframe"?
Of the same era an IBM 3081 was a mainframe, with masses of disks, comms controllers, tape drives etc. And if the air-conditioning and chilled water supply (a 3081 was water cooled) went off, the machine room would get very hot, very, very, very, quickly. Like 40+°C.
Don't ask me how I know.
And said 3081 would be bleeping its alarm very loudly, just before it turned itself, and everything else, off.
If only such information were in the public domain, and there were a tool that allows you to search the Internet for such information? We could call it Google. Other names are available.
Anyway as you're too lazy to search and have clearly swallowed the whole NHS "poor" pay rhetoric, here you are.
https://www.nurses.co.uk/nursing-pay-guide
And don't forget to add on the 23.78% employer pension contributions to ensure you can compare the pay to the private sector on a fair and equitable basis.
For example, take a nurse on £39,959, they get an employer pension contribution of £9,502.25. That's a total renumeration of 49,461.25.
For comparison, for someone in the private sector, employer pension contributions are on average around 3% to 4.5% of qualifying earnings, with 3% being the mandatory minimum.
Using the above example, that £39,959 with 4.5% pension contributions gets just £1,798.15, a total of £41,757.15. Nearly £8k less.
And of course, NHS workers get all sorts of lucrative 'blue light' discounts everywhere, on anything from shopping to new cars.
Exactly.
"Our" NHS is the national institution who's motto is "Not invented here. We do it like this, the way we've always done it. And we'll fight anyone who wants to change or improve things!"
Despite all the money spent on "improving" the NHS, and NHS IT, my local hospital still runs on mountains of paper. Records in brown folders are still ferried around on big trolleys. Every day.
And conveniently bits of those paper records go 'missing' when problems arise.
Will Unison want to lose those trolley pushing members? Or the ones that file away the brown folders?
Of course not.
I can't get the NHS app as I don't have photo ID, but it doesn't seem like I'm missing much!
Others in the family do, and frankly its worse than useless. Test results turn up on it months later, well after paper copies in the post. Its impossible to book GP's appointment through it. One family member has to log into a particular hospital's portal to see communications, despite them alerting them with an email!
My GP surgery has its own system. I'm sure it works great for the staff, but it's user hostile for patients. It's completely counter intuitive. It's pretty clear they never asked any patients for feedback on how it doesn't work.
Allegedly you can book appointments through it. It only shows a calendar for the next 2 weeks. And there are never any appointments! We have to ring up, or physically go in, in person.
"where the hell has all the money gone!!"
To the employees. And squandered on waste. Look what happens when the NHS gets more money. The unions go on strike for more pay and/or changes to T&Cs.
My local hospital is still shuffling barrow loads of physical paper around in brown folders.
Its like going back to 1948.
She wouldn't get 23.7% employer pension contributions in the private sector though.
You'll find it difficult to find many private sector employers giving double digit employer pension contributions.
And the nursing pay scale goes to a mere £129,783. With zero employee pension contributions.
The NHS machine would still work against it.
We need to realise that the NHS, currently at least, is the last refuge of a large scale, heavily unionised workforce, and those unions, from the BMA down to Unison, will block any improvements or reforms that might slim down NHS staff numbers or improve efficiency.
This is the largest single employer in Europe, with more than 1.5 MILLION employees.
Patient outcomes are irrelevant. The NHS is run for the staff and the unions first, patients are a distant second.
Remember Blair's flagship NHS National Programme for IT (NPfIT), launched in 2002?
Its considered one of the largest ever public sector IT failures in the UK, costing over £10 billion. And it failed because of the unions. That was given to a number of players, including BT, Accenture, CSC and Fujitsu.
It just wouldn't matter who it was, the unions will block IT.
I'm a bit rusty on my mainframe stuff, but you are way off how it works. Its a LOT more exciting than KVM, ESX or anything in the x86, Sparc or Itanium worlds.
The current IBM mainframe CPUs are the Telum II.
Linux on mainframes is achieved via two ways, under the z/VM OS or via the hardware IFL (Integrated Facility for Linux). I'd expect the ARM virtualisation will be done in z/VM.
z/VM is THE great grandparent of virtualisation, developed between 1965-67, culminating as CP/67 (dating from 1967, Control Program for the IBM System/360 Model 67, the first computer with hardware dynamic address translation, known as DAT). Under z/VM the Linux guests run as a VM, and a single z-Series mainframe can run over 6,000 Linux VMs.
z/VM additionally uses a feature called saved segments. This is where a single copy of Linux can be held, in upper memory. Think of it as a read only RAMdisk, which multiple Linux VMs can boot from.
Then we have the IFLs, and a z-Series can run 200 Linux images.
And just to confuse you further, the z-Series comes with hardware partitioning. This allows you to run up to 85 LPARs (Logical Partitions), and each one can run a copy of z/VM.
Lloyd's are still using a very secure database on backend mainframe, with the online transactions almost certainly provided by CICS. They've been secure for absolute decades.
This is very clearly a fault in the 'modernisation' they've done to bolt on a sexy online banking and app web interface as a front end.
Not for servers.
Most datacentre servers are sold purely on the ability to swap out failed components easily, and to upgrade in place. Unless they were very, very, very cheap, no-one is going to buy a server with soldered in, non-upgradable RAM, or non-replaceable or expandable storage.
Apple have a longer term dilemma given their direction of travel. When do they fold the Mac, Macbook, and iPad into a progressively single product line?
For the rest of the PC market there is still a long way to go, and competitive platforms, PC/Windows, Tablet/Android, Tablet/Chrome book, PC/Linux.
My guess is that tower type PCs will move towards server componentry. Expensive, but expandable.
"unless they can get a revenue stream to replace GPUs"?
They've got one. AI. They're going to milk that one for all its worth while they can.
Also, NVIDIA kit isn't just in the consumer space. Their GPUs are used in datacentres to provide graphics capabilities for virtual desktops. That business won't be disappearing as quickly.
How will my phone report my location when I can't get a reliable mobile signal in my village to receive a text, never mind make phone calls or use data?
It will need to force my WiFi to be on as well as a mobile signal!
And how is location services going to work when my phone is switched off?
And I mean powered off.
Other alternatives to circumvent tracking are available. Some are technologically very simple, like lead lined containers.
It always makes me laugh on TV shows when criminals let the police easily track them via their phones, when turning them off is such a simple way of preventing being tracked.
How will location tracking work if I turn my phone off?
They really haven't thought this through have they?
For the record my phone stays offline, WiFi off, data off, phone off, location off, unless I want them on. Living in an area with poor/no signal saves the battery from being drained by the phone hunting constantly for a signal.
If they bring anything like this in, it'll be completely powered off most of the time. Try tracking me then!
Coming from an IBM mainframe background you used dedicated Page disks (real huge spinning rust) normally, and dedicated Swap disks only when you were right in the sh**.
I was told stories of a British electrical/electronics retailer (which still exists) that was so tight they used to create Page and Swap datasets (files) all over data disks. With entirely predictable results. There were tales of their entire online system stopping when the OS swapped, leaving store terminals hung until it sorted itself out.
When I got a home PC one of the first things I did was fit a second hard drive, a cheap secondhand one, as a Page disk. The difference in performance was noticeable. Since then I've carried on doing it on my Linux PCs, until SSDs started arriving. I even used USB sticks for page/swap.
Looks like its time to start doing it again!
