Posts by DevOpsTimothyC 401 publicly visible posts • joined 3 Apr 2020
Last I saw solar cells printed 2 layers thick on a flexible film had a theoretical max of 43% efficient. That mans over half of the light is still there.
Our eyes can see quite well with about 5% of daylight so what's the problem with having solar cells over every building?
The repos aren't WORKING that way, the repos ARE BEING USED that way.
There's a difference between "What ever you have above version 2.0" and "I want the latest". The former will always be served from cache (so long as it has version 2.0 or later), the latter will go to upstream and only serve from cache if there isn't a more recent version.
I take exception to the following and think it's lazy and bad journalism on El-Reg's part.
This involves using high version numbers (e.g. 99.10.9) in the hope that internal npm private proxies – set up for fetching code from an internal registry – are configured to look for new versions of existing packages first from the public npm Registry before falling back to the local registry.
That statement implies the internal repositories and private proxies are setup in that way where it's the project where versions are defined. All private proxies I've seen or managed just do what the software projects ask them to do. That's typically If the requested version is in the cache it will serve it, if it's not it will attempt to fetch it
The developers, NOT the devops teams are responsible for that one. In all projects I've been on the developers have maintained package.json
How about rather than funding all the development they pay a 1st and 2nd place prizes for achieving various milestones.
As some others have stated if this about hitting the target or is it about transferring funds to the weathly via dubious job creation schemes.
Thunderbolt 4 has 40Gbps according to Intel.
If you check you will see that Intel owns the Thunderbolt brand so if Apple are claiming 80Gbps then it's not TB4
If so, can you point me to a study showing that?
Not a study per-se, but this is exactly what layer 1 and layer 2 cache is. What apple have done is put the ram on the same die as the CPU. The up side is that they can clock it faster and have more lanes. If you search for more info on the specs there's a bunch of places with more detailed info.
companies to pay for special high speed internet for each employee.
Never take this from your employer unless they force you. The network connection is part of the office and so any questionable material on it is grounds for misconduct and termination.
Most people's attitude to this is "Why pay for a second internet connection" so they will use that high speed one for their personal (or family) use.
Do you really want to bet your job that no one in your household would never access anything that HR might consider questionable> These days that could include being redirected to a .ru domain.
A Work From Home agreement and a Flexible Time agreement are two different things (that people often mash in together).
If an employer demands that you be available from 9am to 5pm or 6pm then fine I'm online "chained" to my laptop for that time (excluding lunch), Same goes if the employer has "core hours".
If an employer has a flexi-time agreement then why isn't starting at 7am and finishing at 8pm or 9pm up to the employee? The flexi-time agreement is "the employee does X number of hours a day at a time that suits the employee", just don't expect them to be available with no notice at any point in the day.
It may not have been a deliberate decision if the code in question is in a library that explorer uses.
Even if I accept that someone has made a decision to add the ad-slinging functionality to a core library, or to make one of those core libraries depend on the ad-slinging library. All you've done is shift that decision away by one or two degrees. The issue is that these types of libraries should be opt-in type, not opt-out.
While I can appreciate subscription services to update maps (provide updates rather than the use of maps already downloaded), wasn't there a court case somewhere that allowed people to bypass local lockouts? in this case something like enable lane assist because all the software and hardware was already on the car and all the remote enable would do is allow it's use.
I'm curious how this will go with the various right to repair groups. It would be great if others were able to sell lane assist (or similar) features, perhaps it just needs a class action monopoly case in the US.
Most of those Administrative expenses are probably licencing fees for being able to use the Amazon / AWS names and brands.
If the UK capped how much profits could be offshored to tax havens by that little loop hole then we wouldn't need the NI rise (or many of the other tax increases)
What is not so easy is replicating equivalents to the entire very sophisticated ecosystem of the current internet. Databases, APIs, software, services. Is it possible to maintain rewritten-from-scratch equivalents of google, AWS, azure? I doubt it.
Equivalents of google, AWS, azure? Do you mean like the Alibaba cloud? If you want to do similar yourself take a look at libvirt and kvm. There are plenty of tools to manage a kvm/libvert cloud (including Terraform Libvirt provider)
Very sophisticated ecosystem of the current internet? Everything that makes the core of the internet work (whois, DNS, BGP) is open source.
parallel software ecosystem - IOS? Not everyone wants to use Apple phones. There are plenty of Android ones and there are alternatives to the Google Play store.
parallel software ecosystem - Windows? As for Windows, does windows stop working if you NEVER activate it ? For the home user it's almost like shareware / nagware back in the day... You really should register this product so you don't have to look at this licence screen.
parallel software ecosystem - Office? Libre Office? I'm sure there are other open source equivalents.
parallel software ecosystem - Databases? Where to even start with this one. Most SQL databases are open source. Take a look at PostgreSQL or MariaDB for just the most well known. Yes there are also ones like CockroachDB which are propriety but I imagine that all it would take is one purchase for all of Russia, especially as Russia is decriminalizing software piracy. All of the main document databases are already open source.
The invasion of Ukraine is basically telling everyone "if you border Russia, and you're not in NATO already, Russia may invade you".
It's probably a don't even consider joining NATO and if there is any press about joining deny it strongly.
In terms of A.P. Vennings comment Ukraine was looking to join NATO
Ukraine actively contributing to NATO-led operations and missions
In September 2020, President Volodymyr Zelenskyy approved Ukraine’s new National Security Strategy, which provides for the development of the distinctive partnership with NATO with the aim of membership in NATO
The thorium cycle isn't just a scifi fantasy. There was a successful trial with one built in the 1960's by Oak Ridge National Laboratories. The prototype was successful and did produce energy, but the whole "cannot be used to make weapons grade nuclear material" (which the US DoD wanted at the time) meant it never received funding to go past the prototype phase.
Now days it's just inertia and the fallacy of sunk costs that keeps the uranium based reactors as the dominant type. Even though weapons grade nuclear material is no longer desired too many companies have invested too much into uranium to change direction. Companies without uranium reactors and governments are investing in fusion instead. From a scientific point of view there's still plenty of unknowns in that area and people can make a name for themselves and get their names in the history books
I think you'll find it HMRC who are depriving contractors of employment rights. EVERY contractor I know has the same view. If you want to tax me as an employee then give me the same rights as any other employee.
Contracts knowingly agreed a business to business relationship with their clients transferring most of those responsibilities from the client to their own limited company. In exchange for a higher daily rate employment is shifted from the client to the contractors limited company. The contractors limited company is then on the hook for things like holiday and sick pay etc. The client's who agree to this are happy to pay that increased day rate. Much of the time it's what the company would be paying for an employee any way once you take into account holiday, sick pay, pension contributions etc.
HMRC is wanting to impose all the taxes of an employee into the business to business relationship without address any of the employment rights that were shifted. Go setup your own limited company, try contracting, then share informed opinions.
as a pretend loan
The contractors who did that closed their companies in bankruptcy and defaulted on their loans. That was always tax evasion and possibly fraud (they never intended to pay the money back). HMRC has been going after people who did that to pay all the taxes, ban then from being company directors, bad debt reports on credit records etc.
While some contracts may say they are self-employed, they say that because it's easier to explain to the vast bulk of people who don't understand how LTD's and taxation works when you're an owner and director of a small limited company.
The vast majority of contractors are Directors of their own PSC's. They typically receive a minimal salary with the rest of the money being paid through dividends. HMRC is getting somewhere between 19%-25% from the companies profits before dividends are paid and then you're taxed the same as anyone else filling out a self assessment, which these days means the tax you pay to HMRC is similar to what a permie pays + corporate tax.
Yes a contractor can redirect funds into their pension in the same way a permie can, and they can choose to leave funds in their limited company so their company will be an additional source of income like a pension. That's just deferring their tax for a few years
Generally yes it operates that way in the UK. Typically the client will have a contract with an agency and then the agency will have a contract with the PSC often naming the consultant and always naming the end client.
At the bigger or smaller ends of the spectrum the client will run their own in house recruiters so will have direct contracts.
It gets "amusing" when the the agency isn't paying attention and the terms are no aligned. I'm been on contracts where I only need to provide 1 weeks notice yet the agency needed to provide 4 weeks to the client.
In terms of NI, log into HMRC's web site and check your NI record. In terms of income tax, same as a permie, you'll get a P60 (or P45). Either you use the figures in a self assessment (if you're getting other income as well) or it will do for HMRC (you'll need to tell them that you're not filing a self assessment).
In terms of the actual ££££ going from the client to HMRC? That's an issue between HMRC and the client. You have the paperwork to say it's been done.
Unless someone is planning on not being a contractor any longer, and probably not looking at perm work either, you would be insane to engage in legal action with the names mentioned or any of a similar size. Just look at how career limiting it has been for permies to take their employers to court over things like sexual harassment.
To have a hint at a fair trial the person or company initiating these sorts of claims should have their name suppressed otherwise damages should include "The amount I would receive over the rest of my career"
Mobile sites are constantly optimized to ensure they load quickly, mobile networks have sped up
From my last 5 years experience working beside web developers they may optimize a web page so that it will load and render on their laptop when the developer tools are open and they have clicked the mobile icon to make the screen smaller. The vast bulk of them didn't notice that there was also a connection speed drop down in most browsers!
People using phone and tablets, sure no problem, but they are all on wifi at home or work with 50Mb connections, or the equivalent 4G right?
Other concerns centre around our old friend, telemetry collection. With Microsoft's EU Data Boundary not due to be complete until the end of 2022 (meaning that some EU data might be transferred to the US) mitigations include simply accepting the risk until Microsoft is done and consider the use of pseudonyms where identities must remain confidential. Employee monitoring is also a worry, and the advice is to not enable Viva Insights and shut off functionality in Teams Analytics and reports.
So why aren't M$ being fined the GDPR 4% of turn over every day that this information is going to any of their US Datacentres.. It shouldn't be too hard for Microsoft to redirect that data to Azure in the EU, or have a GeoIP host so when anyone is in the EU then their data goes to EU DC's. I get the point of GeoIP's aren't perfect and when a European person goes outside of Europe their data would go elsewhere, but I'm trying to propose a realistic carrot and stick.
In a separate speech, Intel's software group senior vice president Greg Lavender said the company is the top contributor to the Linux kernel, and employed more than 120 maintainers of key open-source technologies.
Intel tries to get out kernel source code for new hardware support and feature enablement early ahead of chip launches
This is a cost of them doing business and they should be called out for trying to sound like they were "donating back to the community" (which is how it came across to me). If they weren't doing this then a bunch of their stuff wouldn't work and so wouldn't be sold.
They have almost certainly got people doing similar for Microsoft, and if they didn't with Apple, then perhaps this is why Apple went down the M1 route
So with America taking a strong anti-China policy with various sanctions against their tech companies, AND the US legal system being REALLY bias favouring US companies whenever they violate other countries patients wouldn't a more sensible approach be to get rid of software patients.
Once we get to hardware patients then put EVERYTHING into FRAND?
The existence of PRIOR ART should have prevented the award of the patent in the first place. But the US patent system has been issuing such patents for years. The problem is that you then have to litigate to get the patent withdrawn.
I'm surprised that the larger companies haven't lobbied for "The patent office who issued the patitent where prior art exists has to pickup the legal fees"
Same should apply when work is clearly a derivitave
Amazon has gotten too big to police the counterfeit themselves. After all why aren't trading standards regularly shutting down Amazon distribution hubs like they shutdown market traders who have counterfeit tat.
It's surprising that Amazon has gotten away with being able to charge a premium to brands to be able to police other traders on Amazon.
I keep thinking that if the government used the HS2 money on fibre to every house the return to the economy would be significantly higher then the return from continuing with HS2
I gotta disagree on that one. HS2 has people going into the office.
When people are WFH they generally don't stop off at one of the major coffee chains in the morning, they aren't going out to similar for lunch. With WFH there aren't as many people working at those coffee and lunch places who would be doing likewise (but at different times of the day).
Whoever thought Aluminium was a cost saving idea really needs a special place in hell!
At a time when Aluminium costs less than copper (when it was put in, I'm not talking about todays prices which I haven't checked), what is wrong with Aluminium for POTS?
You've got to remember that when most Aluminium was put in it was only for regular voice traffic. I'd imagine at that time a 14.4K modem would have been considered fast and a 28K only a dream.
I am not saying this never happens in closed source, but it is definitely less of an issue.
Most closed source software pulls in open source libraries to provide certain elements of functionality. Take a look at https://msrc-blog.microsoft.com/2021/12/11/microsofts-response-to-cve-2021-44228-apache-log4j2/ as an example
Just about any form of security hampers usability almost by definition. Security is something that gets in your way of doing something by making you prove who you are before letting you do that thing.As such every there is ALWAYS a trade-off between security and usability and as such there is no one level of security that is appropriate for everything. It depends on your analysis of the risks and the level of inconvenience/security you deem appropriate.
That's why we have things like single sign on.
I'd argue that it's ALOT easier for me to sign on once in the morning and then my access flows from there rather than having to sign on to random sites (some using http) through the day.
I've seen corporates which have had the "strong" password requirements (8 characters long, atleast 1 each of uppercase, lowercase, numeric and special, that needed to be changed every 3 months and not be the same for the last 3 passwords), but then have 5 or 6 internal websites on http which required your domain credentials to be re-entered to use. And of course for security the cookie time had to be short so if you spent 10 mins without interacting with the site you had to re-enter all those details.
Security has to be practical. There is no point in spending £5K on a lock for a £200 bicycle.
I’m still a bit puzzled why being stalked by these things only became an issue when apple launched them.
Marketing by a large well known company.
I hadn't heard of Tile before, but then I'm not looking for this sort of thing. It's not a difficult concept so IF I ever needed to do this sort of tracking I'd have done a google search. I'd have also expected it to be a niche thing so would have expected the cost and effort to be unreasonable. I'd also expect each one to have a serial number so if it was found doing bad things then the sale would be tracked to me.
With Apple making them I expect them to be easy to get and priced to sell by the handful at the apple store without providing any personal details. I'd also expect to be able to buy them with cash or a rechargeable credit card (that could be topped up with cash) and use a disposable account to track them
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