Posts by chris street 102 publicly visible posts • joined 10 Feb 2009
Considering what Fujitsu are up to - and historically have been up to -remember the great Fujitsu Hard Drive Debacle? https://www.theregister.com/2002/09/24/great_fujitsu_hard_drive_fiasco/
It's not only right and sensible for your wallet to not buy Fujitsu, but morally acceptable to boycott them as well. Until the Horizons disaster is fully uncovered and shown to the light of day, no one should ever
touch anything from these people whatseover.
I mean the number of times that the Ayatollah Khomeni, living at SW1A 1AA * logs in, you have to conclude there is zero checking of these details.... Mind you a little salting and pollution of their mailing lists is always a good thing. If they are harvesting valuable data, then it is not a "free" WiFi is it - so I give them non valuable data so they don't get nabbed for telling porkies.
* Buckingham Palace to save you looking it up
You can easily buy ram for the N40L though secondhand, and not something that is going to be unreliable if you get it from the larger server parts companies. I was paying about £8 a stick for 8GB ones with ECC that will go in a microserver, certainly worth the upgrade. They are a PITA to get the motherboard out of though for sure.
The fact that it was a heavy item of kit should have been enough to require two people to install, or remove it. Even with a hoist no one should be expected to be able to move that amount around safely on their own. I'd have to look but 18kg was the limit I think when I was racking and mving stuff in datacentres. Also we were not allowed to take all the HDD's out to reduce the mass either not after the Great Hard Drive Shower fiasco where we managed to spill a stack over over a hundred onto a concrete floor.
Robert I think is lucky that he also didn't get a interview without tea and biscuits, as there seems to be a distinct lack of the supervisory element here...
When Snap gives me something useful over apt - I might use it. But I dont want updates outside my control, I like a lightweight environment, and I dont like the bloat and increased startup time. I dont need cross distro working.
Now if it was an alternative that would be fine. But Ubuntu stuffs it down my throat and makes me use it - yes there are workarounds but if wanted to do that I'd be faffing about with Windows.
So I use Mint.
This is not an anti Ubuntu postion. It's just the consequences of their choices.
You mean like Zen internet?
Unlocked router - that gets firmware updates regularly.... and you can buy another unlocked one off the shelf if you want and mesh it out the box....
And they don't connect in... and encourage you to fiddle... as long as you are responsible they don't give a hoot what you are using....
There are still some good ISP's out there.
For many many years the introverted people have just wished that the extroverts would shut the f*** up and let them get on with work. And now that the extraverts cannot interrupt people at pleasure, they don't like it one bit...
Daily standups - why do we have these? Whats the point? It's to make sure that everyone has everything sorted for a days work ahead - a days uninterrupted work. Because thats when you get the most work out of people - clear the blockers out the way, plan the day, and if Bob needs some help, he says so at standup and Alice schedules time in for him and agrees it. If there are critical problems in the day, then Trudy goes to the scrummaster and Mohammed finds the duty person and passes the urgent cannot wait problem to the duty person Terry to sort out.
No one should need to be interrupted at the desk at all....
You pay us for our ability - not for some arbitrary distance I am from your office. Want to screw me on that. I'm paying for my own heat and lights and internet - you can pony up for that thanks then. Two can pay that game.
My contract is to do the work put in front of me. I had an employer chose to do exactly what you decided.
I left. And it wasnt amicable. That cost them a lot of consultancy fees to pick up after I was gone because their ego decided to summarily dismiss me.
That cost them a lump sum instead of wages - because their ego decided to summarily dismiss me.
Just remember when you think as an employer that you hold all the power.
You don't. Theres a big shortage in tech areas, and employees have the power now.
Theres enough detail in here for me to know exactly what server was being talked about nearly thirty years later...
Firstly, manglement wouldnt let us have a more expensive failover backup - so thats the first one. With the cost of the machines at the time it was hardly surprising either. Secondly, where is it writ that it must be the same size and specification? The failover box was designed to provide an emergency level of service so you could do the very basics, the custody suite always had the option of running on pen and paper, which they used to do when Oracle 6.5 took one of it's regular sulks and refused to work.
The problem with that is getting a copper to appreciate that emergency use might result in a lower level of service, and also getting them to care a **** about it when they did understand. They were some of the most, obstreperous and wilfully malicious users that I have ever encountered.
Have you ever used the phone as a hotspot? I can shift enourmous quantites of data about with no issue at all - think of downloading Baldurs Gate 3 in about three hours whilst out and about. Still plenty of battery left. As long as there is a somewhat sensible connection ro mobile data they work very well as a hotspot.
And then RHEL look at the source, note the changes that makes that copy of the source - you know the extra whitespace here, the bit there, an extra newline, all that... that makes the copy of the source unique.
Goes to ACME and says - hey that source leak came from you. Are you sure you are not going to agree to a large uplift in your support contract next year. Be so sad to lose you...
Wait for the employment contracts with severe penalties for leaking "open" source to appear. Won't be long.
My first WFH "office" was a cramped table with no space and a bad chair in a back to back house with crap internet. Going into the office would have been prefereable but you know, lockdown.
Now I've moved I have a large room just as the office and it's well kitted out, private, quiet, and I get tons of work done with no distractions. You are going to find it hard to beat that unless the office comes with a personal masseuse and I get paid a 20k bonus to come in.
The biggest problem with open plan offices is open plan offices. If you dont get that, congratulations. You are part of the fortunate crowd that doesnt get distracted and annoyed by every single f****r coming past and interrupting you. But you are going to run about 2/5th of your workforce very suboptimally if you insist on battery farming them, compared to their nice distraction free spaces at home.
Also if you are going to insist on people coming in, I do hope the company is going to offset the carbon. And report it on the accounts.
Lets look at it this way...
Product X doesn't work because distro has library issues etc...
Vendor can either fix these issues and get it included in the distro, or build a repo for it.
Or build a snap, that screws up home folders, takes control away from the end user, is a fecking PITA for secuirty, is slow, is bloated, gobbles disk space, is not transparent and doesn't follow the unix ethos.
Why would snap ever be considered a good idea? Just deploy the thing properly in the first place FFS. It is MY system - if you want me to use it, you need to remember that.
ZFS solves a problem that needs solving - raid 5 write holes. Copy on write, checksumming, very large file sets, all useful good stuff. Btrfs does the same thing and despite being complex as hell. I'll even allow that systemd is a good thing overall, despite it's tendancy to reach out tendrils everywhere, it does solve problems.
What precisely does the abominal problem children called snap and flatpack solve? They bloat stuff up, and take control away from me. I want updates WHEN I choose - not when some faceless gnome decides to push shit out to MY servers and desktops. They offer nothing beyond apt or yum for my convenience.
Im not actually that bothered about telemetry, advertising, forcing Snap on us, even charging for updates etc. All those are avoidable with some work.
When they start making it deliberatly awkward to remove the stuff though, thats a different matter. Canonical take the Debian base, FOC naturally, and use it to make something improved, and make money from it (fair enough they have done considerable work on Debian) and then make it so that you are less able to fiddle and tinker with it. That is, no matter how small, a closure of the openness of the software and directly contrary to FOSS principles. That's the real issue in my mind here.
Yes I'm a user. I contribute to the ecosystem. So thanks for self rigteous high horse. What have you done for things FOSS lately?
I don't want spying software thanks. I don't want nagging messages thanks. I get enough of that shit trying to just buy groceries online and Tescos 5 clicks to get out of the upsale and actually to checkout is as annoying as f*** as well. I certainly don't need it every damn time I run an update.
Combined with adding it into a core blob you cannot remove? Fuck you Canonical - you just jumped the shark and made the decision easy, Ubuntu is toast and LMDE is going on the laptop this weekend.
However did people cope before the lazy and intrusive option of telemetry came along? I assume that no one managed to write good code at all and delivery features without focus groups, without feedback and forums, hell without even knowing what the pain points were without writing in the language themselves...?
"Without the telemetry, the slow drip-drip of confusion and inefficiency will cause those resources to rust away anyway?" - because that stopped Rossum writing Python since 1990, and Java never evolved beyond version one in 1995, and C of course is stilll primitive and inefficient (ok bad choice).....
But we will take the easy way and slurp the data, and hey it's the users data but they are just scummy users, we are the *developers* so we are gods and rockstars and get to do what we can... I wonder how the users will feel about their data being stole away - no - the one thing I can be sure of is that the Chocolate Factory never even considered what the users feelings were. Just how much they can screw them over.
You want to try this - go ahead. I'll be doing what I do to all the data slurping - writing an app to poison the well and truly trash the data that you get from me - beause it will bear no resemblence to reality.
Well, the cold side is going to be down about say 60C if you use CO2. Thats a much more useful temp - it's a longer working range than SC H2O and it's just the right temperature for district heating as well - I can see one of these plants generating electricity and the waste heat from it being piped around for a communual heating scheme. Not a very big thing in the UK, but for the USA with a small community in the middle of nowhere having process heat and electric from one plant is quite attractive.
" I closed down primarily to retire but I had a long-term employee who'd be entitled to a redundancy payment greater than the annual profit." - and you failed to recognise this liability, and decided to foist it off onto us the taxpayer?
HMRC should throw the book at you.
"the website is back," - and you think they didn't have BC in place?
It seems they did and they worked. Although the PR droids apparantly seemed to be totally absent telling people what was going on, they appeared to recover a total disaster ina weekend. Thats not that bad TBH
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