Posts by John Riddoch

Re: Opensolaris anyone?

I'd always found Solaris to be better to work with - it had >20 years of development making it an enterprise capable operating system, Linux had >20 years of people pulling it in different directions (desktop, server, embedded controller, etc). Live Upgrade was a great tool, allowing low risk patching/upgrades (we even upgraded Solaris 8 to 10 with it) with an easy backout, especially when integrated with ZFS. SMF sped up system boot times in the same way as systemd does, but it's also fallen victim to the same rabbit hole of integrating features it really shouldn't be, like moving resolv.conf into some complex svccfg commands.

That said, Solaris was dying before Oracle took it over. The flip flopping of support of x86 hardware meant no-one wanted to rely on a roadmap on cheap hardware and SPARC was expensive. OpenSolaris was an attempt to win back customers but it was too late to stop the exodus to Linux/x86. I still believe Sun should have aggressively pushed on x86 and worked with Intel/AMD to develop some of the SPARC features like hot-swap CPUs and hardware resilience, but they didn't want to lose the cash cow of SPARC servers.

It's an issue which will take years to balance the representation. Industry is mostly male, so women don't even start it and the few who do are often driven out for various reasons. Net result? Probably 90%+ of candidates for IT/tech jobs are men. If you take random samples out of those interview candidates, you'll have a lot of men-only interview sets. I'm not convinced it's entirely an employee screening issue.

There's a lot of work trying to get women involved in STEM work which will hopefully start addressing the imbalance in gender representation.

It could easily be that the company's systems had a configuration option which changed the reported message at one stage and the installer's logfile parser couldn't hack it. Or possibly some combination of install options broke the logfile parser's logic. Either way, the software vendor's QA department didn't catch it during testing.

"go through many eyes" - most likely, it doesn't. An AI system (more likely an automated set of if/else statements) will determine the outcome of whether you broke the vaguely worded rules or not, then your appeal will be reviewed by the same system with the same result. Getting a real human to look at any kind of complaint is pretty difficult in the big tech companies because people are expensive and there's profits to be made.

Re: Windows ME

About that time, Sun sold Solaris 2.6. At the last minute, before the release of Solaris 2.7, the next release was rebranded to "Solaris 7"; at the time it was assumed this was so it would have a higher version number than Windows NT 5 as was due to come out soon, then MS rebranded to "Windows 2000" leapfrogging Sun's version numbers by a margin. This was back in the days the two companies had a fairly solid rivalry going on, so it didn't seem that implausible they were fighting over version numbers...

So, not only was Sun's rebranding not worth the effort, it cause a bunch of problems in early releases of Solaris 7 because not all the developers had got the memo in time and some parts still mentioned "2.7" and generated issues in odd ways.

I've heard of someone's stolen bike being abandoned after a short drive, presumably their phone alerted them with the "someone's air tag is following you" warning. In that regard, they're a great idea, it's a shame horrible people have abused them for some awful purpose. My worry is that if Apple, Google et al come out with a "safe" implementation which prevents the stalking, other less scrupulous companies will still sell the stalker's version. In any event, there will still be thousands (millions?) of the old versions which will presumably not be made immediately obsolete.

Probably for some old games which don't play on newer Windows. I know Hogs of War is one which plain refuses to start on XP or newer; never managed to figure out a way to get it working, sadly. AWE32 and Voodoo3 were pretty much the gold standard in gaming specs back in the day, I think almost everyone used them.

Re: Edge

Technically it's Bing which shows the "There's no need to download a new web browser" bit, although as that's the default search engine on Edge, most people will get it pushed into their faces.

Trust Edge. Edge is your friend.

That's part of my argument. Let's assume we trust the Government of the UK to not abuse this (bear with me, I know it's a stretch...). So UK Govt, police, MI5 can read our messages but that's OK, because they're the "good guys". America sees this and enacts similar legislation, so they now have access to the back door. Hrm, Ok, but we're at least allies, so that's not too bad... Then China. Then Russia. Then a corrupt regime which is repressing its populace and arresting/killing dissidents. If you aim to allow the "good guys" access but not the "bad guys", you have to make moral judgements which companies are notoriously bad at.

Once you've hit that breadth of access, the backdoor isn't secure and the entire system is being snooped by, well, just about everyone.

As you say, anyone who is vaguely tech savvy will have a better, secure solution immune to these back doors.

Re: This surprised me

Desktops/laptops.

On-prem networking and internet uplinks.

Software licenses.

These are all on-prem costs and almost every company has them, so there's a baseline which can never go into the cloud unless everyone works from home and does BYOD.

There's also significant legacy on prem infrastructure which needs maintained, supported and occasionally upgraded; most large companies will still be running those for a few years, despite any cloud aspirations.

That said, I'd have thought the ratio would have been closer to 70 or 80% on prem.

Probably not, but 2 tons in a relatively small footprint will likely break many raised floors. You can't just wheel one of those cabinets into a standard data centre without extra planning and likely building works. Hence why these solutions work best on a "new build" DC where you can plan for the extra weight on your flooring.

Re: NIS+

In the 90s they were pushing everyone onto it, at least officially. In reality, no-one used it or recommended it because it wasn't unknown for it to break horrifically and irrecoverably so most folk stuck with NIS (with its extensive security issues - the product of a more civilised age when you could get away with that kind of thing).

I'm also surprised it's being kept, I can only assume someone is still using NIS+ somewhere they need to integrate into Fedora (or possibly Redhat, since removal from Fedora would lead to removal from RHEL eventually). That someone presumably has a loud enough voice to guide Fedora into retaining it.

Re: The Sound Blaster was also the first means to connect a CD drive.

Yeah, I remember spending nearly £100 for a sound card/CD-ROM bundle and hooking it all together. Those were also the days when each CD ROM had its own drivers (PC makers hadn't standardised that either) so there was a fair bit of working getting them all working nicely together. Was still worth it, though :)

Here in Edinburgh UK, the Childrens' hospital is basically just known as "Sick Kids", e.g. "had to take the youngest to sick kids on fathers' day because they broke their arm" (true story...). Officially it's known as "Royal Hospital for Children & Young People" but I've never heard anyone call it that.

Re: Strange time to do an upgrade

I've mainly worked in banking and yeah, December changes tended to be verboten for obvious reasons - no-one wants the headlines "Xmas shoppers with $BANK unable to make purchases". That said, provided someone could shout loud enough and make a good enough case, changes did occasionally get through although it generally needed an extra sign off from a relevant manager. Wouldn't surprise me if the same happens at BA, especially if someone's bonus depended on project completion by a certain date, or the project team was due to disband at the end of the year and no-one was willing to sign off the extension.

Re: "restore it to a bright red hue"

Ah, of course - "high-security facility" and the 1960s vintage screams something related to government/defence, so we're talking civil service in all likelihood.

Not all VAT can be reclaimed by the company paying the fees; banks in particular can only claim a small portion as their income is VAT exempt (distinct from zero-rated). Banks in particular are generally hit with this as most of their products are rated exempt.

If a company isn't VAT registered, they can't claim back the VAT paid either.

In either case, not charging VAT is a loss to the treasury.

HP Laserjet 1300 here - 18 years old, 3rd toner cartridge, still printing good quality prints now.

Conversely, my mum has to keep replacing inkjet printers because they keep stopping working.

Hard to see how the planned/enforced obsolescence of inkjets is more climate friendly than laser. I can only assume they make more money off inkjet than laser because of their shady business practices.

Re: Hard Currency

The only "value" they have is some perceived rarity caused by the amount of compute power required to generate them. I think there's also an enforced rarity in that some parts of the blockchain can only get created after a certain date? That value then has a real world value associated with it because that rarity is worth something.

It always felt like a con, although I do wish I'd gotten in on the scheme 10 years and cashed out last year... Hindsight is wonderful, isn't it?

Re: Belt up

My old Dell laptop has a sensor for that too, it's about 10 years old.

Zawinki's Law...

“Every program attempts to expand until it can read mail. Those programs which cannot so expand are replaced by ones which can.”

Re: Close it Down and Get Out Quick

I'm wondering if you meant Rowan Atkinson the actor, or actually just Mister Bean...

Re: You get what you order

Yup, it is often worth it - thing is, using "law of diminishing marginal returns", the loss of say £20 for insurance is way less than the potential cost of £1000 if you don't have the insurance. Depends if you can absorb the cost of an insured loss by simply keeping the cash. Normally, house insurance is worth it, because losing £200k+ is more than most people can absorb, but £200/year is manageable. Travel insurance is the same, it's enough to bankrupt you in many places (not just USA) and often included in your current account.

On the other hand, I ditched the pet insurance because once you have enough of the furry critturs for long enough, you're likely to end up spending more on the insurance than you'd save in vet bills. YMMV, one friend had £6k vet bills on a kitten which got run over which thankfully her insurance covered.

Figures.

Older kit would have been over-specced to ensure it ran OK. With experience and cost saving measures, the capacitors were trimmed down to the bare minimum to make them work, so I doubt a similar "click-clack" recovery would work on a modern system. I know I've done the double click to save powering off at the wrong time (only on my desktop, not a server) so know it was possible.

Upvote for the nostalgia of the term "timesing" - haven't heard that used in many a year...

Re: RAM usage

We had CDE running on Sparcstation 4s & 5s back in the day - I think they only had 16MB or 32MB of RAM. Some of the SS5s only had a 500MB hard drive (that was fun shoe-horning Solaris onto...), let alone memory.

One part might also be a move to 64-bit which has a tendency to inflate binary sizes, but that should only be a doubling at most and probably much less.

Re: Nasty goings on

Late 90s/early noughties you could pretty much guarantee that ANY web search no matter how innocent would consist of about 50% porn links. It was fairly common to search for "search term -sex" to at least try and filter out some of it.

Re: Repair

I hope not. I've managed to extend the life of a few of the kids' phones by virtue of replacing the small part with the charging port. While USB-C is certainly harder wearing than micro USB in my experience, kids have a special knack of breaking stuff....

Re: It will happen . . .

That's fairly easy. "This is an EU initiative, but Brexit allows us to avoid this onerous red tape".

Oh, that old chestnut - many, many people have had useless backups because of a missing "n" in the device file....

Re: Cheers to that guy who hit the ENTER key!

We eagerly await the "Who, Me?" Column....

Re: Ethernet turned out to become the network winner

Back in the 90s, our uni lecturer was convinced that Ethernet was doomed and ATM was where it was all going. What changed was the move from coax, with all its myriad problems and relatively dumb hubs to fully switched networks. These helped reduce/remove the collisions which plagued early Ethernet networks and allowed it to scale up and out.

What is ironic is that Ethernet followed ALOHAnet which was a wireless protocol, making it wired. We've now taken Ethernet back to wireless with our wifi links. Everything turns full circle...