Posts by gitignore

Bill shock? The red ink of web services doesn’t come out of the blue

Dynamic load

Where cloud excels is if you have a dynamic or cyclic load - so you can spin up 500 nodes to process a sudden influx of workload, and then throw all but two of them away for the remainder of the day/month/year . Think the Wimbledon or Superbowl web servers for example. Where it sucks (financially, at least) is when you have a constant baseload of work, where you end up paying a flexibility premium for a service that is running at constant load 24/7 .

Oh, no: The electric cars at CES are getting all emotional

Re: fratzonic chambered exhaust

I do like the idea of the EV making a noise like a milk float tinkling away, while it accelerates from 0-60 in <4s . Maybe ice cream van sounds would be good too - can you imagine the doppler shift effect as it went past on the motorway!

Don't want to get run over by a Ford car? There's a Bluetooth app for that

Re: Alternative uses

-> It makes you wonder what would happen if a car encountered a "person" while screaming up the motorway?

what, like a passenger ?

Ransomware attack on UK water company clouded by confusion

Re: Passport scans and driver's licenses?

probably staff rather than customers?

Engineers on the brink of extinction threaten entire tech ecosystems

Pardon?

What is it with comms lecturers and the inability to make themsenves understood? I had two who you basically had to lip read from, even if sat in the front row - they spoke in standard RP but were so softly spoken you could only tell than in an anechoic chamber. Fascinating subject but damn, the lectures were hard going.

Europe proposes tackling child abuse by killing privacy, strong encryption

Book Ciphers

The trouble with book ciphers is that the interceptor can look at your encrypted text and come up with a custom 'book' as the key to claim that you sent whatever it is they want to pin on you.

UN mulls Russia's pitch for cybercrime treaty

My borders are your borders, for now.

"arguing that the language [...] violated the idea of state sovereignty." Russia owes me a new keyboard for that one.

Riverbed Technologies files for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection following pandemic 'headwinds'

Load balancers

IIRC they had a really nice load balancer product which they bought from Zeus, then palmed it off to Brocade who thoroughly shat on it. Shame really, traffic managers that aren't just skins on the Cloud equivalents would have a place in the market these days, albeit niche. WAN optimisers are beyond pointless these days - I commissioned a 40Gb link a couple of years ago for about £500 in equipment and £400/month in rental - didn't need it to be that fast, it was a few quid cheaper than a 10Gb link so I thought why not?

Laptop option on the way for ortholinear keyboard hipsters in form of MNT Reform add-on

cost saving

I assume the main driver for this is around ease of manufacture and cost saving rather than any ergonomic benefit.

In the lab: Robotic AI-powered exoskeletons to help disabled people move freely without implants

Why walking ?

There seems to be an obsession with walking for disabled people ; what in my experience is way more of a problem is not being able to use your hands, or not being able to sit. This invention requires good core control (which many people with cerebral palsy struggle with) and assumes you don't have contractures. For walking, for many (not all, obvs) situations, the wheelchair is an adequate tool. On the positives, getting yourself vertical has lots of benefits.