Posts by dl1jph

FAA grounds all US departures after NOTAM goes down

Re: Old clunky system goes down

You've conveniently forgotten some of the more important categories - temporary restrictions on airfields, for example. Most of that is short-term and known only a few hours to days in advance, yet it can very significantly alter the flight plan for the pilots - a mayday fuel isn't fun at the best of times but getting into one because you didn't know some low-hanging clouds and a precision approach system down for maintennance would prevent you from using the airports you expected to be safe to use is just stupid. Thanks to the NOTAM system providing this kind of info in one place for every bit of airspace around the world, it's also trivially easy to avoid.

Techies try to bypass damaged UPS, send 380V into air traffic system

Re: major fuck-up I reckon

As a matter of fact, that sentence should give you some confidence that they know what they're doing. They fully understand that any system can fail and they've come up with a plan to keep everyone safe regardless. After all, that's what makes aviation as safe as it is - there are backups for everything and backups to the backups for anything critical.

Exactly what the procedures are depends on precisely what's broken, but "irregular operations procedures" exist for any situation where the kit ATC should have isn't fully operational. Usually it's along the lines of "back to pen and paper", but in a worst case scenario it can be "make sure everyone knows we're down to visual separation and onboard collision avoidance systems for all aircraft". These procedures exist in every country and will be drilled somewhat frequently.

Microsoft's Lennart Poettering proposes tightening up Linux boot process

Re: "Someone points out"

There's one crucial question you've forgotten - "Does the proposal actually fix the problem?"

So yes, there is an issue here, at least for large companies running large linux server fleets and trying to keep their ducks in a row (let's not forget that M$ are one of those now - not something I ever expected to say out loud). The more paranoid among us wouldn't mind a decent solution either.

Is the proposed solution a good one - Yes, because it's simple and gets the job done.

Are there other solutions - Possibly, though I'm not aware of any that aren't some (older) variant of this one.

Does is actually fix the problem - Only partially. We still have to put an undue amount of trust in a single, far from neutral, actor with a long history of extremely shady behaviour. As long as secure boot does not allow for the authentication keys to be changed by the machine's owner, this problem will remain, no matter how much the remaining process gets secured. Even if that were to be fixed, we still have to trust the hardware itself, though that's a bit less bad (more options/competition).

CEO told to die in a car crash after firing engineers who had two full-time jobs

Re: So what about the rules ?

That's extremely inaccurate. Your employer can not deny you permission to take on another job, as long as two conditions are met - you can't exceed the total permissible working hours (10h/6d with at least 11h rest in between and at least 45 Minutes of breaks during working hours) and you can't violate your contract's non-compete clause (if it's in place, which it almost certainly is). It is, however, correct that you have to inform both employers of your other job, so they don't accidentally ask you to work over the mandatory rest periods - if they do, they get into some serious trouble with insurance.

These rules only apply to employees, not self-employed people. This means that they do, in fact, apply to upper management in most larger companies, but not to most family businesses. They also don't apply to what you do during your recovery time, as long as that doesn't severely impact workplace safety or performance. So your employer could, in fact, require you to step back from volunteer work if they have reason to believe it's putting you or others around you at risk.

$2.8m gene therapy treatment is America's most expensive drug ever

Re: Covid "vaccine" is gene therapy

Please learn the differences between gene editing and abusing the cell's protein synthesis machinery - the latter is what the COVID vaccines do and there's no way for that to permanently change anything, since our cells have no way of turning RNA to DNA. In your code analogy, what actually happens with the vaccines is closer to someone getting creative with an API that can't affect global state than messing with the binary itself. It also affects only a small number of muscle cells - those get killed off quickly by the immune system (since they appear to be infected by a virus as far as that's concerned) and get replaced within a few days.

What the article discusses is something completely different, because it actually does alter the DNA in such a way that it gets copied along during cell division and they're doing it across most of the cell population responsible for a life-sustaining functionality. This is obviously far more risky - if it goes badly wrong, it's going to create a situation in which survival is unlikely. This is potentially a risk worth taking in a situation that's life-limiting anyway, but there's no way anything close to that level of risk is ever going to get regulatory approval for preventative purposes.

The time you solved that months-long problem in 3 seconds

Re: Fuck that

As a matter of fact, being one of those lazy people myself - the only people who actually do that are the ones who are "too busy" to do a proper job and they annoy the heck out of me - their screwups eventually end up on my desk and I end up dealing not only with the issue itself, but also their bodge and an irate customer.

If I have to deal with something, I want it gone for good and go back to doing stuff I like. The only way to reliably achieve that is to actually solve the problem.

IBM files IP lawsuit against mainframe migration firm

Lawyers and Tech...

For anyone else reading the article and thinking that the entire "instructions" thing seems odd, you can find everything you'd need for a clean-room implementation in the IBM guides - "z/Architecture Principles of Operation" is a complete guide to the instruction set and the "z/OS MVS Programming" series of books have all the OS services. Similar documents are available for almost everything else in z/OS. All of these are public, though with IBM changing their link structure every few weeks there's no point in me linking them directly. If you want to find them, use a search engine like anyone else trying to stay sane while working with IBM products...

What I suspect they're actually talking about are other products IBM wants to sell for a lot of money (think CICS, IMS, Db2 and the like) - they tend to be far less well documented, using includes or assembly macros for anything the customer isn't supposed to mess with.

IBM Cloud to offer Z-series mainframes for first time – albeit for test and dev

Probably not. Considering just how bad of a job they've been doing in getting educational, testing & dev resources out there that would have been a lot cheaper, I can't help but expect this one will be yet another disaster. It's unfortunate, really, since the platform itself is quite impressive if one ever gets to try it...

Beware the big bang in the network room

Re: Maintenence window, gosh how quaint

To be fair, the problem in many cases isn't that it can't be done, but that it's far more expensive than the people making all the promises realized... Usually, the math on that only gets done after the promises are made.

'Boombox' function sparks Tesla recall

Re: Uh

Watch where you're going is IMPOSSIBLE for some people (no functioning eyesight)! And that's precisely the point. Those people can do just fine by listening instead, as long as nobody messes with that for whatever reason. If you object to that, you're basically asking for a significant minority of people to be imprisoned for your pleasure. And yes, you can absolutely hear an ICE running. Usually, I can roughly tell the direction and speed it's going and get an estimate of the vehicle size - all without ever seeing the vehicle. And I'm not even blind, just paying attention... Blind people usually do this WAY better than me.

Website fined by German court for leaking visitor's IP address via Google Fonts

Unfortunately, that's only half true - the only icon font that's reasonably widely available is practically useless, so the choice comes down to using either images or a remote icon font. The font is significantly more compact. However, hotlinking from google fonts (or similar) is inexcusable - if your own webserver is set up properly, it's a minimal overhead to deliver the font (ideally stripped down to the parts you actually use) once, with a long cache timeout. The chances of needing to change it more than once every few years are slim to none.

Either way, if your site breaks without javascript and external resources, you're definitely doing something wrong, big time. If it's just a bit of design and a few nice to have details not working, that's how it should be.

IBM confirms new mainframe to arrive 'late in first half of 2022'

As someone currently working with a fairly large Z installation, I can confirm - these machines are ridiculously quick if workload management considers what you're doing at the time to be important. If not, join the queue, it might be a while.