Posts by Muppet Boss 243 publicly visible posts • joined 20 Jul 2018
>Also, while banging on about terminology, I think El Reg should stop using the word "stablecoin". ... Unless they're crapto coins that can be used to pay for horses or caring for horses, in which case I'm fine with it.
Stablecoins = Coins minted in a stable using a horsemint process. Beer, anyone?
>"Team Rule Of Law" comprises the USA and like-minded democracies that believe in free and open online environments and collaborative governance. ... without Russia, China, Iran and the likes because we banned these evil crooks and their evil scientists can no longer abuse our free and open online environments. Same old Land of the Free and We'll Bomb Authoritarianism Out of You song. Where's Team Humanity on this list?
>I bet those nice juicy contracts are in place still.
>Same goes for Ericsson, who said nothing about the support side of it.
Talking about mobile, most Russian mobile carriers use Procera (now part of Sandvine) as their DPI solution for the Internet censorship and this relationship went full of mutual love for many years. I would be very much interested to learn about plans of these US/Canadian companies to continue selling censorship tools to the Russian dictatorship and providing subscriptions and support.
Not the least surprised anyway as it recently came out that the EU companies continued selling the Russian dictatorship "riot control agents" after 2014 and Russian tanks in Ukraine have all-new navigation systems from Safran and Thales. Pecunia non olet they say, now the Euro smells of blood.
>Bad jokes aside, WTF? Why on Earth would you outsource to a nation with which your home country has at best an uncomfortable relation with?
It happens all the time. While the politicians hate each up the .., the businesses seek better value. At a time having software R&D in Russia, Ukraine or Belarus offered fantastic returns. Things changed too quickly now, we'll see research centres and key developers being evacuated to Europe as already happened in 2014.
The Russian government understands the risk of brain drain and dropped corporate income tax to 0% for the next 3 years for IT companies, advertises subsidized mortgage for IT specialists. I expect there will be a lot of fakers shortly and yet another exodus wave of qualified IT people.
To clarify any misunderstanding, by now any form of peaceful protest is criminalized in Russia with retroactive law. When people stay silent it does not mean they support the government, it means they are victims too.
>> would hurt ordinary Russian citizens and business who have nothing to do with the invasion
>Yes. That's usually how sanctions work.
Just today I heard on the Russian state TV in some Two Minutes Hate talk show, 'We have too many self-restrictions regarding the civilian population and civilian infrastructure.'
Do you understand that the Russian people protesting the war are being detained across the country for simply holding "Stop the War" signs for "illegal gatherings" and more than 7'000 were detained already including children? That the Russian authorities threaten the Russians with treason (20 years in jail) for any help to Ukraine including humanitarian? That the Russian TV and newspapers are being censored and are not allowed to call the invasion "a war", only a "special military operation" and several of them were closed already in the past few days for not being obedient enough? That there are special classes now introduced across Russian schools where pupils are taught that Russia is "liberating" Ukraine? That there is a new Russian draft law with up to 15 years jail time for "spreading fake information about Russian military operations"? The Russians have been oppressed internally for the past decade but no other country dared to meddle with Russia's "internal matters".
Now you can see the results. If the Russian people are further isolated from the rest of the world as you seem to wish for, what stops Putin from preying on them? If they see that the West abandoned them, who do they turn to? It is like the opposition radio station, Echo of Moscow, yesterday being censored and disconnected by the Russian authorities for "spreading fake news about the military operation in Ukraine" and the same day banned by Youtube/Google for being "sponsored by Gazprom". A wonderful day for the Kremlin.
There are millions of Russians being held hostage by the Russian regime, risking jail time for simply going out to protest again the war. Please remember about it when trying to de-humanize Russia as a whole.
Peace to all, war criminals will forever burn in hell.
"from": "carter@...",
"to": "stern@...",
"body": "...earlier because of new orders, there were several for Rocco and Alexis, then Brooks ordered VPSes, Alexis ordered VPN, I just wanted to ask if I can take short leave for 4 days, I need to sort out the documents back home but I will log in daily"
>No, I don't know how much they are dependent on "the cloud", but the thought is entertaining.
The big three, about zero except some reliance on Cloudfront and some MS cloud services e.g. Teams. Russian businesses do not trust data to the public cloud and for good reasons, plus local regulations on data residency.
It would hurt unimaginably more if electronic components and integrated circuits produced with the US tech were banned Russia-wide but it would greatly benefit China at the same time.
Long time ago, during one migration the main DHCP server was switched off and on again. Turned out to be running the DHCP client itself, hence not getting the IP address and of course no one knew the local password. Like someday it got the IP address via DHCP, kept it after the old DHCP server was gone, eventually got promoted to the DHCP server role and no one spotted anything until the reboot who knows how much later. A temp DHCP server quickly got it back online but the whole situation was quite hilarious. It was probably seen too important to be rebooted at all.
>Which video and music were you downloading, and at which speed?
1995? Ghost in the Shell, Neon Genesis Evangelion in *.viv and *.rm. And people were driving the actual cars 100 years ago.
And Mark saw all that Internet He had made, and behold, it was very good. And there was Tuesday evening, not even 10 p.m and he was a little intoxicated, the year 2003.
Grow up mate, the Internet was so good before Mark and not the cesspool he left after. People loved it.
>Many fail to understand when IPv6 was designed. The first RFC is date December 1995 - meaning development started well before. The actual internet didn't exist then.
So this thing I used to download books, music and videos from and kill my time in chat rooms, IRC and (in 1996) ICQ was not "the actual internet"? It was "the true Internet" then! (technically it was called a modem).
>Interoperability was not an issue back then...
Lol that's the best joke I heard today.
>>"they've been sharing IPv4 addresses for years, via virtual hosting, reverse proxies"
>And that's a bunch of workarounds that actually makes everything more difficult to manage. Being able to assign a separate IP to each website even on a single server simplifies a lot of things.
Being able to assign multiple website names to a pool of reverse proxies is a godsend that simplifies a lot of things.
>>"In that case, it's cheaper and simpler to build and manage an IPv4-only network"
>Today is no longer simpler nor cheaper - depends on how many IPv4 addresses you need...
Let's say I need 16 million. I heard the US Army still hoard 14 /8s, maybe ask them politely? Or better, I can simply use 10.0.0.0/8 as most people happily do.
I fully support.
Not only that but the original IPv6 developers did not see the need for enterprise multihoming, until 2009 there simply was no equivalent of IPv4 PI (Provider Independent) address blocks. Combined with how painful public DNS change propagation was back then, IPv6 at the time could not provide network-level disaster recovery and was a huge ISP lock-in. Also, by the time IPV6 was well supported in hardware, exposing the internal network to the Internet was no longer in vogue. So migration to IPv6 was simply not worth the effort.
Nowadays IPv6 is mostly on par with IPv4 feature-wise (if one is good at remembering very long numbers). It also means that running dual-stack in the internal network does not make any sense, while implementing and operating IPv4 is still much more simple. I do have a client who are running out of RFC1918 even with VRFs and address reuse but it's a really, really big one.
For the Internet-facing services dual-stack is fine to maximize reachability.
One of the main arguments was about IPv6 faster to switch in hardware, well IPv4 is still switched just fine and SDNs are happy to hear that.
You seem to suggest that the leccy price quadrupling is justified by political gains. Ok then, it is all for the people's sake and for the greater good! By any chance, do you know what else is in the master plan?
>>Both events that can highly occur on German soil too....
It is only from this moment that I recognized sarcasm. Well done mate!
Option (1) is apparently worse than coal power stations for the greens, looking at you Germany. It's getting cold, fire up the solar panels!
Also this:
>>The Russian problem
>>Moscow could increase its fuel export, but hasn't...
In other news for the past few years: US imposes further sanctions on Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline ...
> There's something I don't get
>Whatever brought you to think that you should get paid for it ?
>Now, let me be clear that I am aware that there are many companies that are profiting from this, but you knew that there would be people using your code when you started. That is why you started. Why do you feel that you should be paid now ? Is it because there are companies making mint out of your work ?
Well, exactly, otherwise it looks like some perverted form of extreme philanthropy (where the poor sponsors the rich) or even some form of modern slavery.
>There should only be two categories of developers working on FOSS projects : the ones paid by their company to contribute code, and the ones doing it as a hobby after their day job.
You think so? Should all other categories starve by definition?
>So, this Netflix Open Connect content delivery that saves ISPs so much bandwidth. How does it work? Why would Netflix offer to supply and install it for "free"? What do they get out of it? ... Is there a catch?
This is a simple private peering agreement where Netflix pays for the private circuits and in return gets transit for free (can send and receive traffic to the ISP's customers over these circuits for free). SK Broadband is a direct competitor of Netflix so it makes no sense for them to go for it. They would like Netflix to pay for the transit which despite every mentioning of it being heavily downvoted here is a standard negotiation item among service providers.
For example, the big 3 cloud providers not only charge for server resources (e.g. VM instances) but also for transiting traffic across their infrastructure to the Internet (and Lord, they charge a lot), effectively acting as ISPs. And if you want the private peering, easy, just pay us more. And people pay without asking!
In this case SK Broadband have a very valuable asset (8+ mln connected households) that Netflix want access to for free. SK Broadband want to monetize this asset and being direct competitors they are not trying to make friends with Netflix too.
>It is irrelevant where the packets are coming from, SK have sold their customers a service that they can't provide when a large number of customers use that service.
It looks like you are coming from the fabulous BT world where one is guaranteed 67Mbps on average or get your £20 back. They never failed to deliver, didn't they?
SK Broadband sell plans like "up to 10Gbps for £32/mo". Unlike BT who absolutely always respect the minimum bandwidth guarantee, SK Broadband do not promise their customers that they always get 10Gbps or whatever (1Gbps seems to be the minimum they offer) so your point suggesting the breach of contract from the ISP does not seem to be valid.
When SK Broadband's 8+ mln subscribed households start watching Netflix in 4K while playing games and video calling friends, the Netflix traffic might look impressive enough and growing to start asking if anything needs to be done about it. The fact that Netflix is SK Broadband's direct competitor for IPTV does not help either (to date, Netflix user base is South Korea seems to be only half of SK Broadband's).
What we seem to witness here is a large South Korean company trying to stop a large US company from taking hold of their South Korean user base by suing them in a South Korean court of law—or at least charging the hell out of them for doing so. Take it easy, no customers were harmed in the making of this drama.
>They would prefer to blame a competitor at the distant end of the pipe and hope a court will be dumb enough to hand them a pile of someone else's cash which their executives will then pay to themselves as a bonus instead of improving the network.
Sorry mate but SK Broadband's network is much faster, better and cheaper for the customers than anything any UK ISP has to offer. South Korea consistently ranks among the best for the Internet access, while the UK... well... it's a bit of a shame really, maybe as you said it's all about the bonuses.
As for the court, you see, S. Korea has some sort of different mentality (like chaebols, "Koreans buy Korean" etc) and the courts there do not really appreciate when some American company tries to get other's piece of pie from the local market. I would say, SK Broadband have very good chances at the Korean court against the US company.
Sorry mate this is not how ISP peering agreements work. The article says that the SK Broadband's Netflix traffic peaked to 1.2Tbps, which is very large load (e.g. BT's typical evening peak is ~15Tbps for all of the UK traffic). Upgrading the ISP's core network is very, very expensive and SK Broadband want Netflix to contribute to that because the surge is caused by Netflix commercial traffic. Peering agreements are a very common thing between telecoms, hosting providers etc, what is unusual is being unable to agree and then get sued.
In fact, BT and EE have been asking Ofcom to do the same, change UK's current net neutrality rules to be able to "officially" charge Netflix, Amazon and Google for traffic since these 3 generate 60-70% of all traffic at peak times.
Historically, peering agreements more or less worked from the dawn of the Internet but large streaming providers changed that because they generate lots and lots of traffic and leverage their size and influence to use the ISPs transport network "for free", and the ISPs are unwilling to shift the upgrade costs to the customers and would rather charge for traffic at source.
>The analogue in the physical world would be an airline overbooking its flights and then demanding that a destination city compensate it for putting on a festival that made people want to go there.
Or rather someone putting on a big event in London with lots of spectators and people wanting to go there and then wondering why TfL wants to charge them for extra trains required to maintain the adequate service for all.
>Oversubscribing any resource you sell should be illegal unless your contracts create explicit tiers of access. ... Accept that you'll sometimes get nothing.
Oh, the Tube again!
There's such thing as fair use policy: if you consume too much at the expense of others, you will be asked to pay more. Well, Netflix in this case.
>The ISP is just being greedy. If they can't supply the bandwidth the customers paid for, then they should change their pricing structure.
Well... The "greedy" + "ISP" + "UK" combo is still unbeatable by a large margin! In the UK the ISPs generally can't supply the bandwidth in principle... 10Gbps for £32/mo is greedy? I am happy to pay £50, take my money!
From ispreview.co.uk:
Rank - Country - Avg. Mo - Avg. Down - Avg. Up
3 - South Korea - £25.51 - 114.31 Mbps - 90.2 Mbps
27 - United Kingdom - £31.27 - 55.14 Mbps - 12.72 Mbps
---
SK Broadband (price converted from KRW):
- Giga Premium X10: up to 10 Gbps for £31.27/mo,
- Giga+WiFi: up to 1Gbps for £24.72/mo
BT:
- Fibre 900: up to 900Mbps for £60.99/mo (where available lol)
- Fibre 1: 28-36 Mbps up/5-7 Mbps down for £26.99/mo
It is rather that SK Broadband is also the 2nd largest paid TV broadcaster in South Korea with almost 9mln subscribers and they do not want to lose them to Netflix for nothing.
There is a very nice article on the Russian science news website N+1 with event analysis.
It states that the docking procedures were about to switch to manual but the system was able to correct itself, that the ISS tilt was reported by the Russian mission control to reach 160 degrees and that the mission control tried to stop the Nauka docking & stabilization engines for 45 minutes but they only really stopped when they simply burnt all their fuel, about 500 kg.
https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&u=https://nplus1.ru/blog/2021/07/30/misfire
...But positioning these new CPUs as a workstation CPU? Intel offers Cinema 4D as the use case (3D rendering application) but could it be that they just failed to achieve low enough power consumption and TDP for high-density server builds to market as such?
These new CPUs seem to be really power hungry, especially considering dual-socket systems.
>On the flipside, do we have databases that could utilise that much ram?
Sure, legacy applications that are difficult to scale horizontally, large OLTP, DWH installs greatly benefit from that much RAM. Think Oracle, SAP in large corporates that used to run on AIX/IBM P series and now transition to Intel because they want more on the cheap. Or tasks with large computational models like weather forecast where poor agencies that cannot afford proper supercomputers have to use P series clusters, maybe they can improvise with Intel as well.
One large environment I worked in recently still had an E880 with 192 cores and 4TB of RAM (upgradeable to 32TB I should add) as the main OLTP platform and they did not complain about too much RAM available. But the P series is like space tech from the Shuttle age, properly designed and build, hot-swappable everything, CPU, RAM, hardware virtualization from the age even VMware was not born yet, and costs as much as the Shuttle.
So, it makes financial sense for some to downgrade to the latest Intel stuff.
>That person (persons?) needs to be in a mental institution, and the quicker the better.
Further clarification in the aforementioned Github issue states that there was a knife attack and the victim perceived it as the intent to kill. A lone psycho or a criminal gang, this seems to be serious and worthy of police investigation.
Kubernetes is all about getting traffic _inside_ the cluster and orchestrating the workload among the nodes. Which mostly scales well only inside the public cloud because there is no load balancer implementation in the public Kubernetes code base (something that MetalLB is trying to address).
If someone is stating that someone else is using Kubernetes to orchestrate a massive workload with lots of _outbound_ connections, I would love to get my hands on the implementation because out-of-the-box Kubernetes is simply not good at it, this is not what it is designed to do.
If the only reason to use Kubernetes is to dynamically scale the number of workers, they could have chosen quite a few options that are easier to deploy, support and maintain. Could the proverbial Russians simply PAYG and run managed Kubernetes in AWS, GCP or Azure clouds? That would explain this weird choice quite well!
Risking to sound (un)pleasantly pedantic, I still have to say that the examples given are not only completely predictable, these are simple textbook examples of bad system design. Taleb does not need to be involved at all.
Configuring 2 NTP servers is a Bad Practice because 2 NTP servers cannot form a quorum to protect against the standard problem of a false ticker. The recommended and optimal minimum is 3, however 1 is still better than 2 because if the 2 differ significantly, it is difficult to impossible to determine which one is the false ticker.
Some badly designed black box systems only allow for a maximum of 2 NTP servers being configured; in this special case the importance of the system might prompt using a cluster of monitored anycast NTP servers for high availability; for less demanding cases using a single DNS record to something from pool.ntp.org will ensure enough availability without false tickers (while adding the Internet access and DNS dependencies).
Having a split-brain failure scenario in a geographically distributed firewall cluster is so common that it is usually specifically tested in any sane DR plan. This, again, is a glaring example of bad network design, implementation or operation. No black swan magic is necessary, just build better systems or hire a professional.
Real-world problems with highly available systems are usually multi-staged and are caused by a chain of unfortunate events, every single one of which would not have had the devastating effects. Simple, non-trivial failure scenarios, however, do exist. Something from personal experience that immediately comes to mind:
- A resilient firewall cluster in a very large company is exposed to external non-malicious network conditions triggering a bug in the firewall code and the primary active firewall reboots as a result. The firewall cluster fails over, the secondary firewall is exposed to the same conditions and the same bug and reboots as well while the primary firewall still boots up. The process repeats resulting in noticeable outage until the unsuspecting external influence is removed.
- A well-maintained but apparently defective dual-PSU device in a large datacentre short circuits without any external cause resulting in 2 feeds tripping and powering off the whole row of racks as well as a few devices not surviving through it.
Cheers to all the IT infrastructure fellas, whichever fancy name you are called now!
>It looks like the CCP has decided that the phrase "Pictures, or it didn't happen" is a valid way of rewriting history. Just get the picture to go away, and ergo, no evidence.
I would really like the CCP to be more open about it. I understand this tragedy is still a huge embarrassment and a taboo topic to the Chinese political establishment however I think enough time has passed to justify historical interest. Though, as recent events show, China remains to be very secretive about their sensitive topics.
I would be very interested to learn about the CIA and MI-6 (because Hong Kong) role in the protests. It is hard to imagine that Operation Yellowbird ("to form a Chinese democracy movement in exile") came out of nowhere; there were clearly prior interests, contacts and agent networks even when using mafia for the hard work.
I would be very interested to learn if Chai Ling's revelations in an interview to Philip Cunningham on 28 May 1989 were true, about the protest goal was "hoping for bloodshed,.. to make the Square awash with blood ... to wake the Chinese people up" or they were just little girl's Communism-inspired fantasies, despite her being one of the key protest leaders.
I would be interested to learn if the protest leaders tactics of breaking down negotiations, personally insulting government officials and causing international embarrassment to the CCP during Mr. Gorbachev visit was deliberate to escalate the conflict and cause the blood to be shed.
Then, again, it does not lessen the tragedy of innocent people being murdered, it is just that it would be right to know and name all responsible.
>Let me explain how Democracy works to you, because you don't seem to get it...
The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society.
Edward Bernays*
Propaganda, 1928
*The father of PR, a great mind behind the United Fruit Company, US tobacco industry, GE, Procter & Gamble and a few CIA projects abroad including Guatemala.
When they calculate the damage, they take the maximum possible undiscounted list prices no sane person or company would buy for. And of course the guy sold on Ebay for a tiny fraction of the stated amount. Same approach as when they report drug busts.
>a brew with the prospective hiring manager
Agree, passing through the HR defences right to business should be a no-brainer after a couple of years. In fact, for a reasonably skilled professional, the demand these days far exceeds supply.
Also, if the recruiter has no clue that "I-can-do-it-all" candidates usually turn out to be "I watched how they do it on Youtube" kinds then is it really the right company to work for?
Yeah they simply changed the theme again, and again it feels horrible, everything is slightly bigger and takes valuable space. I wonder why they keep pissing off people by changing the UI, is this a part of the Google deal?
Update: they seem to remove toolbar compact density option, bloody people, why?
Update2: about:config -> browser.compactmode.show = true -> Options -> More Tools -> Customize Toolbar -> Density = Compact (Not Supported).
F**kers... You'll make me switch one day.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
