Posts by Smoking Man 111 publicly visible posts • joined 18 Jul 2008
Got a laptop, which is a neat little machine, quite handy when I'm travelling. Just not eligible for Windows 11, due to the processor it got soldered to the mainboard.
Now when Windows 10 gets unsupported next october, I just switch over to Linux Mint. Which already runs in a dual boot configuration next to Windows.
Maybe I'll keep Win10 as virtual machine with no connection to the internet, just in case.
At the time of the Autonomy deal I worked for HP (only in the lowest ranks, of course). When I read about the upcoming deal, and having the fabulous Compaq deal still in mind, I tried to find out, what and where's the value behind Autonomy. My conclusion? HP dramatically overpaid. By a factor of 10:1, at least.
But who am I to give advise to those high ranks..
I would think the first and most important step to achieve a meaningful concept of accessibility is A WORKING AND USABLE OS.
Listen, MS, GET YOUR FREAKIN', F*CKING UPDATE CONCEPT IN ORDER!
The current concept of repetitive Patch download, installation, reboot and rollback ain't funny by any means.
Nor are the useless "0x8002<something> error messages that seem to be spit out by a random number generator.
If your Update Repair Tool thinks that the Windows Update Database needs a fix, THEN HAVE YOUR UPDATE REPAIR TOOL FIX IT.
And don't leave it to the user to repair it <somehow>.
Volkswagen cheated with their software, and they got caught pants down.
Nobody died or was injured because of their software.
Still it cost them some 35 Billion dollars fine.
Boeing screwed up their software, big time.
Almost 400 people killed.
What will fine will Boeing have to pay 1 Million?
At least for those products I used to work with for years and decades.
Name of the company developing and selling those products: Oracle.
You could (and can) basically install and use all of their products (at least around the RDBMS thingy), with all named features.
No need to apply a license key.
And still they're making _some_ money with that type of business, don't they?
I remember a customer engineer connecting hist notebook to a server vga (and keyboard/mouse) port with this device:
https://www.startech.com/Server-Management/KVM-Switches/Portable-USB-PS-2-KVM-Console-Adapter-for-Notebook-PCs~NOTECONS01
Enables a laptop to act as a KVM device. Nice and useful gimmick, just not the cheapest one.
Ahh, those were the days.. when a Sun workstation came with an optical mouse and some sort of glass panel, a special pattern printed on it, to be used as mousepad.
It took most people a while, some never understood, why their mousecursor went sidewards when moving the mouse up or down.
The stared at you with eyes and mouth wide open when you told them to rotate the mousepad (back) 90 degrees..
[Quote] They've been building Windows for over a quarter of a century, and it isn't finished yet? [/Quote]
So you thought the deep knowledge on how to configure the underlying DOS system would keep your job safe?
And using more than 16 MB of memory is just a waste of resources?
You gotta be strong now: Things and conditions develop. Different from what you were thinking. Sometimes.
Just dreamin':
[Quote]
Linux is like a sleek F1 car, each part is self-contained and held together with screws. It can be hard to get the components working together at first, but they're easily swappable.
[/Quote]
Then there was systemd: https://youtu.be/hYOWIdPHXts
Leaving DXC and its magagement out of discussion for a small moment, I would just like to point out, that it's certainly not the brightest idea to post company internal data, names, and structures on a public discussion board. These are competitive information.
Such sort of data contains -at the end- company confidential data.
If you worked or still work for DXC, you signed a contract to keep such information for you.
Decades ago, when I worked in tech presales of a somewhat bigger system supplier, I learned in a discussion with one of our director folks, that a LCD display on the front panel _and_ on the back panel of system sold for more than a million £/$/€ was way too expensive and by this would never happen.
I thought of and described the same sort of LCD display that was used in those days in "our" laser printers..
In old days, USB sticks with some dozen GB of sensitive data on them tended to get lost on trains, cabs and such.
I think the fun really starts when such a snowball device with unencrypted mass data in the 100 TB range disappears in the street.
"Boss, I really don't know how this could happen, I wanted to take some files with me just to work with them at home later today.."
Next year or so, license and support cost will stay the same, just not per server though, but per Oracle licensed core.
All cores in a system to be licensed, as long as it isn't running Oracle VM.
Oh yes, of course, Vmware datacenters as a whole.
And no, it doesnt' matter how many or few cores in that datacenter actually run Java SE.
Theoretically, you could run it on all, couldn't you?
So here's your new license and support contract, adding 8192 cores * 25$/core/month * three years...
How do I know?
When reading something like " “virtual data optimizer” that applies “de-duplication and compression of data before it lands on a disk.”", I keep thinking "Dear OS, just place my data quick and safely on disk. Otherwise just leave your fingers off. I'm not interested by any means in a new and shiny layer you want to place here and there."
'nuff systemd'ed.
Had a customer call me why the disk of one UNIX workstation filled up to 99, maybe 100%.
Lucky me, I could connect via modem and kermit to that system.
Turned out that during the managers two weeks vacation his secretary started the daily backup.
Backup device: /dev/rmt/0m
Since she was used to a PC keyboard, not to that somewhat special UNIX keyboard, she specified the backup device file as CTRL-7devCTRL-7rmtCTRL-70m
The backup ran until the disk was full..
But it was quick!
That you can easily do much more damage to a wider set of data in almost no time.
I remeber quite well when I had messed up several directories with thousands of files of old, older and newer versions, a huge set of files with the same name etc.
It was already late int he evening, when I hacked a small shell script that checked various directories for file duplicates.
And, as expected, I somewhat messed up the check ("test, []"), which at the end kept all duplicates and deleted the single files that should stay untouched. Job well done.
Mines the one with the backup tapes..The ones with "tar: read error".
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2025
