* Posts by DevOpsTimothyC

401 publicly visible posts • joined 3 Apr 2020

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How governments become addicted to suppliers like Fujitsu

DevOpsTimothyC

In a word "CashFlow"

Many of these contracts have invoicing happening 3-6 months after work has happened with a further 3 month payment terms. How many suppliers can afford to be paid in time frames of 6-9 months, while still paying their staff in that time?

Then we've got the proposal phase which can be another 3-12 months before even starting work

'Only 700 new IT jobs' were created in US last year

DevOpsTimothyC

Re: Damand for what?

We've got to remember there's always someone behind the (bell) curve and it seems that AI is the new blockchain

Is it time for 6G already? Traffic analysis says yep

DevOpsTimothyC

Perhaps if we were all on the same page...

It would help if we were all talking about the same thing rather terms being usurped and used for wildly different things.

Speak to the person in the street about 5G mobile phone networks and the response will probably be something about new handsets operating on different frequencies with more bandwidth. They might even throw in tidbits about cell sizes getting smaller in urban areas to increase capacity.

Speak to engineers or CEO's of mobile phone networks and you'll probably be told about how a 5G network is containerised and all the other elements that are changing in the core.

Then you look at the marketing and see things like "Fully 5G network". Which conveniently doesn't explain what the term means... It's both at once.

Even this article doesn't make it clear in some paragraphs referencing the network core and some referencing the handsets and bandwidth.

So back to the point... How about using different terms for the edge (frequencies, handsets etc, and the core systems);so people can follow what parts are meant and in scope.

SpaceX celebrates Starship launch as a success – even with the explosion

DevOpsTimothyC

Re: Weren't NASA also working with Boeing on a rocket?

In terms of the N1 going to NASA. I'm not sure if it was from the N1, but about 120 RD-180 engines (made by Russia) were used in the Atlas rockets.

The reason there are no more Atlas-V rockets is because the USSR only made so many RD-180's for it's space program before it fell apart in the 90's, radically downsized Roscosmos and started selling them off.

DevOpsTimothyC

Re: Self destruct

Having done a bunch of scuba diving the large lumps of metal are MUCH better for marine life than any amount of plastic.

Most wrecks are akin to oases in deserts.

DevOpsTimothyC

Re: Self destruct

There's atleast one video supposedly from Puerto Rico showing parts of Starship burning up.

The whole flight was suppose to be sub-orbital starting at Texas, over the Caribbean, down the north coast of South America, over the South Atlantic, over the north of South America. I cannot remember exactly where from there, or where it was suppose to re-enter the atmosphere, but it was supposed to end up just north of Hawaii. Possibly with belly flop and propulsive landing (above the sea) before dropping in.

Element users are asking for protection against government encryption busting

DevOpsTimothyC

Re: Contracts must comply with laws

If I read correctly the OSB requires tools to be used IF they have been developed. Couldn't the contractual clause be as simple as 'never develop tools that would allow messages to be decrypted by anyone except the sender and intended recipient?"

Millions of smart meters will brick it when 2G and 3G turns off

DevOpsTimothyC

So what is going to be the outcome here ?

I'm going to guess everyone is going to get a "Upgrade your old smart meter for £££, or you will be cut off (without power)"

In-memory database Redis wants to dabble in disk

DevOpsTimothyC

Client or Server issues

Oh please no.

My 2 major gripes with redis is that it ignores many of the memory settings (At the global level) in terms of pool sizes. I've had redis crash more times than I care to count because set a max memory side without how objects should expire. Including a case where they used persistent stores which caused a reboot loop where it would attempt to restore a dB that was too big to fit into RAM and be OOM killed over and over.

The other is where clients handle shared. The whole cluster mode on/off

That's before we even start getting into is this a cache / temporary store to speedup the application, or is it a permanent data store that is critical for the app to be able to start and run.

US prosecutors slam Autonomy tycoon's attempt to get charges tossed

DevOpsTimothyC

No they had proper due diligence, the issue was those in charge decided to ignore the due diligence

TaxWatch finds astute scheme minimizes Big Tech's UK tax bill by over $2B

DevOpsTimothyC

19% Corporate tax

Hasn't the corporate tax rate (for all but the smallest) gone up to 25%? Why isn't the story indicating what should be paid if those figures were for this year. After all HMRC keeps using projected figures for justification to change rules

Workload written by student made millions, ran on unsupported hardware, with zero maintenance

DevOpsTimothyC

Is anyone surprised?

Honestly is anyone surprised by any of this?

Remember that little thing called the Y2K bug that was only fixed because companies had no choice?

The two things that come to mind.

1) There is no such thing as a temporary fix, only a permanent fix that's replaced by another permanent fix.

2) Proof of concepts are final solutions until they need to be expanded with more features.

Gas supplier blames 'rogue' code for Channel Island outage

DevOpsTimothyC

Re: "because of the code"

Not to mention that code is often a reflection of the corporate culture.

DevOpsTimothyC

Incentives

I wonder if the supply issue would still be ongoing if every day the company isn't supplying consumers was a day the CEO doesn't get pay, bonuses or similar incentives

Norway wants Facebook behavioral advertising banned across Europe

DevOpsTimothyC

When the fines are no longer big enough

The point the strikes me is that Meta must be making more than the fines.

If the fines are not large enough to prevent a company from breaking a law then the law makers need to make a change to protect their citizens. The most obvious that come to my mind are larger fines, jail time of senior staff, or both.

I wonder if Meta would have the gall to create a role "Legal scapegoat"

Google 'wiretapped' tax websites with visitor traffic trackers, lawsuit claims

DevOpsTimothyC

You don't need to read the value of forms to get some really useful meta info.

Different pages manage different parts of your tax return. Adding additional sections or pages to stocks and shares portion, property, or employer give lots of useful info without ever saying what people earn. Not to mention how long they spend on each of those pages.

A license to trust: Can you rely on 'open source' companies?

DevOpsTimothyC

Re: This will be really unpopular, but

I was looking at the whole Amazon / Elastic thing and it seems to me that there are essentially four types of open source

a) Hobbyist: project where a person maintains a project for the 'love' of it

b) Opened source / corporate donation: These sorts of projects are where the source code was closed (private corporate repo) typically internal tools, 20% time type project or similar, often where a key developer wants to keep using the tool (legally) when they leave a company, so they convince senior management to make it open source. Some cases corporate abandon ware, Often being maintained in a similar way as (a) above

c) Corporate loss leader: Kubernetes would be a great example of this. the open software promotes a different part of the business, in this case GCP and by allowing others to use it there isn't competing standards, eg AWS's ECS before K8s came along. Yes I know about docker swarm, but that was a commercial product

d) Freemium : Both Hashicorp and Elastic fell into this model where a very functional product was available open and free, but there is a corporate behind the product(s) and there are premium features that require payment.

From what I remember of Elastic's licencing model change it was basically "We're not getting enough on the premium / managed service, and AWS is riding on our coat tails taking alot of this business without any financial compensation coming our way" Granted that there was no obligation for AWS to give Elastic anything, but elastic still has to survive. So when the licence changed AWS forked the last version.

It seems that a similar thing is happening with Hashicorp, specifically if you look at Terraform. There are paid alternatives to Terraform Cloud.

Sadly most people and companies don't choose to give away money if they don't need to. Yes there are some exceptions such as the Core Infrastructure Initiative, but that's still primarily a few key donors. Perhaps some of the open source projects should have non-mandatory suggested licencing costs to bring social pressure on some companies to pay a fair amount for open source projects.

Just declassified: US senator caught up in Section 702 FBI surveillance dragnet

DevOpsTimothyC

Jail Time

One of the core questions here that springs to my mind is related to

an FBI specialist broke the rules by running "a query using the Social Security number of a state judge

Why is the FBI specialist involved not facing a lengthy stay in a federal penitentiary ? If the specialist has a written trail of being instructed to run that search then he or she should have a cell mate. While the consequences of breaking this sort of law are a simple slap on the write then these sorts of issues are just going to keep happening.

Not knowing much about social security numbers I expect them to be a quite easy regex to match against and so anyone searching by one should be facing criminal charges

UK government faces calls to end IR35 double tax anomaly

DevOpsTimothyC

How about tax law follows employment rights (or employment rights follows tax law) rather than allowing the current "You're an employee for tax purposes, but not for employment rights / benefits"

Why do cloud titans keep building datacenters in America's hottest city?

DevOpsTimothyC

Re: 4 cents?

The "Problem" with Power (specifically electricity) prices in the UK is that they are function of the price of Gas. If the government broke that link then electricity prices could (and probably would) go down while gas prices would go up.

I've written to my MP a couple of times suggesting that

a) They propose a private members bill to break that link

b) They propose a private members bill that states that 60% (or more) of oil / gas / coal (I know we don't dig up coal any more but lets cover all bases) must be sold to the UK energy market (not for resale to other countries). My thought is that by creating a UK energy market the costs cannot be any higher than the global energy (Oil/Gas) market.

My MP has stated that while she will propose them to the energy select committee next time they review this, that she is a "Local MP and not interested in Westminster Politics" :(

Producers allegedly sought rights to replicate extras using AI, forever, for just $200

DevOpsTimothyC

The core point how ever is in the UK you can film where ever and unless the person is regularly selling pictures of themselves (has established that their likeness has worth) then it's all fine.....

That being said taking pictures of random people and then re-creating those likenesses in a completely different setting (as far as I know) hasn't had a legal precedent set. I would hope that if that came about the various studio's would lose the case.

Red Hat's open source rot took root when IBM walked in

DevOpsTimothyC
Trollface

IBM ?= I Blame Microsoft

Another redesign on the cards for iPhone as EU rules call for removable batteries

DevOpsTimothyC

Re: UK specific model?er

I'm a scuba diver' all of my kit has removable / replaceable batteries. Granted I'm not taking a mobile phone with me under water, but my club has both a hand held gps and marine radio with batteries I can swap (while at sea).errproof

Don't buy the marketing hype that it must be sealed. Sealing it makes it harder to repair, not waterproof

FCC questions ISPs' selective memory about data caps

DevOpsTimothyC

Re: Which century are we in? Data caps on residential connections?...

If you get a new computer and the old one is still about you can either copy the folders, or steam has an option to share yo the local network as a download source.

Professor freezes student grades after ChatGPT claimed AI wrote their papers

DevOpsTimothyC

Re: Artificial Irony detector required

One of mine would stand at the front and read through the notes from the OHP. He had obviously written the notes up from I don't know how many years before and part way through he'd pass around copies of the notes he was busy reading through

Autonomy founder Mike Lynch flown to US for HPE fraud trial

DevOpsTimothyC

Re: If it smells like a rat....

The rats seem to be

a) HP's accounts advised it's board that something was up and they were over paying, but the board ignored their advice

b) It was a UK company purchased in the UK, it's just that the purchasing company (HP) is based in the US and for the facts of this case the USA laws are more likely to conclude that what happened in the UK should benefit a US company

DevOpsTimothyC

Re: HP snowflakes

Nonsense. “Even if he massaged…”
You forgot to add, "and HP's accountants found it and advised it's board against the purchase at the agreed price and the board are on record of ignoring that advice and proceeding anyway", per most of the previous stories

Spain gets EU cash to test next gen network, and US 'scrum for 6G' already under way

DevOpsTimothyC

4G, 5G etc for telco's might not be what you and I think it is

From some presentations I've seen from major Telco's:

<p>A Fully 4G Network has visualised kit at it's core (and edge) to better allow selling capacity to virtual providers eg Tesco Mobile, GiffGaff etc. and to provide dedicated networks eg to the police.</p>

<p>A Fully 5G Network makes use of containers microservices & K8s to bring further efficiencies scaling up and down capacity as needed even to the extent of powering off capacity when there are very few people around eg cell sites servicing a football stadium.</p>

The different frequency bands aren't exclusively the 'G' the the man on the street typically associates to 3G, 4G, 5G

UK watchdog blocks Microsoft's Activision Blizzard acquisition

DevOpsTimothyC

So how would it work if by UK law the sales (of games, subscriptions etc) happen in the UK and due to this decision Microsoft UK (and probably by extension any company wholly owned by Microsoft) is not allowed to make that sale? Taking a step further the game cannot be hosted in Azure?

You might call my above scenario a little far fetched but assuming Microsoft give CMA the middle finger. Then all any software house needs to do is reference this ruling in a legal dispute and that's probably going to be the conditions of selling the next Microsoft AAA game title in the UK

Microsoft may stop bundling Teams with Office amid antitrust probe threat

DevOpsTimothyC

Anti-trust not needed

Why is everyone jumping to a full anti-trust investigation when this can be easily dealt with by a small fine of 25% of the licencing costs charged by Microsoft to clients with any EU presence while teams was bundled with Office.

After all Microsoft have repeatedly shown they consider this sort of bundling a cost of doing business so why not put it into cost of terms that would make doing that sort of business too costly.

It would be even better if the EU enacted laws that ratcheted fines for repeat offenders

DevOpsTimothyC
Happy

Re: Are we learning yet?

The more accurate wording would be doesn't care that this is a cost of doing business

FTFY

Dual Tesla lawsuits pull Elon Musk into right-to-repair war

DevOpsTimothyC

Re: About time

If they were selling a driving as a service with a clear the car does not belong to you and will remain the property of Tesla then they might have been able to get away with it.

The problem is that they are selling their cars rather than only leasing their cars and so the first sale doctrine applies as well as all other laws and concepts that apply to cars. The automotive industry (in america) have already gone through the whole OEM servicing and parts vs generic servicing and parts lawsuits and the oem parts lost that one.

Datacenters still a boys' club, staffing shortages may change that

DevOpsTimothyC

Lack of Women

a boys' club would imply that the DCO's are quite selective with their hiring processes, however the following would imply the opposite.

And when datacenters can find staff, they're having an equally hard time keeping them. According to Uptime, 42 percent of datacenter operators said they were having trouble retaining staff, in part because they're being poached by competitors.

Still I do wonder what the other part of not retaining staff is. Could it be the noisy working conditions and heavy lifting? Could the poached by competitors imply that wages aren't all that good compared to that of an Instagram model ?

Lufthansa flights grounded by major IT snafu, 'construction work' blamed

DevOpsTimothyC

Ah the old risk & impact questions.

Low risk, high impact never gets the cash unless it's something the c-levels want.

DevOpsTimothyC

Not really. Most airlines know very little about IT with it still being seen as a major cost centre

Biden: I want standard EV chargers made in America by 2024 – get on it

DevOpsTimothyC

Re: Get the USB or HDMI standards people to sort this

Oh the joy of yet more proprietary cables and connectors where even the use of some pins have even more proprietary restrictions.

I'll stick to display port

New IT boss decided to 'audit everything you guys are doing wrong'. Which went wrong

DevOpsTimothyC

I've done overtime for employers, and have gone over and above my job description with the reasonable expectation that it'd be paid for either directly (via overtime pay) or indirectly (via promotion, pay rise etc).

In most places a "pay rise" isn't sufficient for what most employees have done. After all unless you're getting a pay rise every year that is line with inflation, then in real terms you're getting a pay cut. The only times I've seen people get a pay rise (in real economic terms) is when they switch employers

DevOpsTimothyC

I've had similar. My story was that the monitoring system was REALLY badly configured because alerts were constantly going off.

The ops team were regularly being told off for not fixing stuff or responding to alerts. Management's attitude was "On-call rota is part of their salary, that's why they get paid for". There was a good mix of not quite enough capacity to deal with spikes, alerts would go off if there was high load but it was only considered a problem if it didn't calm back down after 20 mins (alerts pinging every 2 mins the whole time). The ops team were regularly complaining about not having time to do maintenance. They were always tasked with feature work during the office hours and as such alot of what maybe considered housekeeping tasks never got attended to eg ensuring there was correct logrotation so disk space didn't get filled.

As a contractor I ensured that the oncall rate was good and that an alert was a paid call out. While I only managed about 3 hours sleep a night for that week it was a VERY well paid week and strangely for the next 2 weeks the entire team was tasked with ensuring all the housekeeping tasks were sorted out and that the monitoring was appropriately tuned.

Google dumps 12,000 employees after project probe

DevOpsTimothyC

Re: Competition

The non-compete clauses are typically unenforceable

Ireland’s privacy watchdog fines WhatsApp €5.5 million

DevOpsTimothyC

Teeth

How about making the fine €55 million and then €5.5 million per day if this isn't resolved in 6 weeks

FTX audit finds $415m in crypto mysteriously vanished

DevOpsTimothyC

Re: So someone steals something that doesnt exactly exist

Go look up The Bretton Woods agreement. It's from 1944.

Native Americans urge Apache Software Foundation to ditch name

DevOpsTimothyC
Joke

While they are at it...

* New York change it's name and pay reparations to the city of York,

* The state of New Hampshire change it's name and pay reparations to Hampshire

* The New England area stop calling itself that and pay reparations to England

* All those calling themselves *-American (eg Irish, Italian, Greek etc) stop. It's been enough generations now...

I could go on, but I'm sure people get the point

New York gets right-to-repair law – after some industry-friendly repairs to the rules

DevOpsTimothyC

Shame on El Reg

Shame on El-reg. Not only for commentary like "so you may end up being offered a large bag of parts rather than individual pieces", which is just wrong. The bill allows manufacturers to ship sub assemblies aka daughter boards, which is what many of them are already doing with some of their own diy repair services.

The story has also done exactly what (in the linked video) LR said the media would do by celebrating it as a win for the right to repair movement rather than the status quo that it is.

About the only positive change this law will have is that independent repair shops should be able to buy the sub assemblies directly rather than having to go through grey channels. Who knows if that will be enough with security keys still being restricted by the manufacturer which may still mean that you've got to buy multiple sub assemblies due to them being cryptographicilly tied if a single part of one dies

Pentagon is far too tight with its security bug bounties

DevOpsTimothyC

IT's going to cost MSFT more than $13.7M to fully test and fix all their software to the point there's no bugs. Who was it that came up with "80% of the users only use 20% of the features"

Scientists, why not simply invent a working fusion plant using $50m from Uncle Sam

DevOpsTimothyC

Will $50M even cover the certification costs

I'm going to guess the $50m on offer won't even cover all the regulatory costs associated with getting a fusion plant to the point where it can commercially feed into the grid.

Apple exec sues over 'ageist' removal of $800k stock bonus

DevOpsTimothyC

Most employment contracts I've seen are generally "See HR handbook for bonuses, incentives and pension plans"

It's also quite hard for a company to argue that certain parts of it's workforce don't qualify for ad-hoc discretionary or incentive awards if those parts of the workforce are legally protected from discrimination.

NASA, SpaceX weigh invoking Dragon to take Hubble higher

DevOpsTimothyC

at no cost to the US government

I'm guessing that little snippet includes "at no cost to NASA". I'm just wondering how they will convince anyone to shell out millions to do this on their own dime

Nvidia will unveil next-gen GPU architecture in September

DevOpsTimothyC

Re: Good!

I wonder just how many people are also looking at the cost of electricity and the specs of the new cards requiring even bigger power supplies and thinking the GPU isn't worth the TCO change

General Motors charges mandatory $1,500 fee for three years of optional car features

DevOpsTimothyC
IT Angle

How fast is the data connection?

I noted that the features included unlimited data and Wi-Fi hotspots. With OnStar costing $1500 for 3 years it equates to $41.67/month.

My question is what's the internet speed aka how does that compare to other means of connecting to the internet.

Here in the UK a noticeable minority have ditched DSL / Cable etc for unlimited data plans with their mobile phone acting as a hotspot.

Security needs to learn from the aviation biz to avoid crashing

DevOpsTimothyC

Preaching to the chior

While C-level exec's aren't personally liable for security breaches the problem is not going to be fixed.

The only other way I can see going forward is if governments vote with their wallets either penalizing companies with poor security records through not buying their products / services, or simply through linking the corporate tax rate to security.

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