Posts by DougMac 252 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Jul 2013
In the 70's, you'd be extremely lucky if your car lasted until 100,000 miles. Either the engine blown or being shaken apart/rusted through. Most people replaced cars well under that limit. I remember my dad welding sheet metal on the floor pan of his truck so his foot stopped going through the floor.
Now-a-days, it is routine to drive cars well past 100,000 miles.
"offshore support??"
I regularly talk to VMware techs that are located somewhere in South America, Ireland, Australia, India, the US, somewhere in Eastern Europe. Etc. etc.
How much more offshore support can they get?
Global companies tend to use resources around the globe..
I'm mixed on the deal. I thought EMC was a weird way for VMware to go before, and it definately changed things around. I expect Broadcom will as well.
But, the compition all has major issues too.
I have yet to see a "real" hyper-V solution (well, besides Azure I guess) in the real world, setup, working well, and able to have all the features of vSphere.
Hyper-V is regulated to doing a few VMs ontop of your existing server so you can get a little more bang for the bucks out of it.
VMM is a steaming pile. There's so much "if I wanted to, I _could_ use VMM, but I just don't need it". out there. I have yet to see anybody actualy using it, and running away in horror from it.
Without VMware, all I could see is more pushing up into the public cloud, or push into other technologies, the ways VMware is put to use would shrink to almost nothing.
What's worse, is that the town used the threat of emmenient domain to kick off all the land owners for this super factory that was total grift from the start. They bought out many families for much less than their houses and farms were worth.
Look, your brand new house is "blighted" so we need to tear it down, you got pennies on the dollar, and look at this awesome empty dirt field that we have to show for it!
The politician scum waived all environmental rules including virtually unlimited water usage rights (in a state that is largely tourism and forest), the TIF figures were given in the article, but with the spare population, it could have been up to the equivilent of the state paying up to $346k per job obtained.
All of that down the drain. So the town/Wisconson is out real money, not just the pie in the sky money that they were supposed to be rolling in it. And they now own a pile of dirt and a small building they supposedly build Google servers in.
I'm sure Walker and his cronies are rolling in it, but certainly nobody else is.
So, I've only used PCs since the 286 days, I ignored the original PC.
But what does ctrl-left arrow and ctrl-right arrow do?
Can't be that standard, if I've never used them?
Seems there's some bias about, FreeBSD is weird because it doesn't do things this one way the author is used to.
I've had too much horror with multi-boot OS that I would never attempt it, windows, linux, BeOS, whatever strange thing you wanted to do.
I'd always would devote a hard drive to a different OS no-matter-what. Its not a big deal that FreeBSD partitioning wants to take over the disk instead of try to cooperate with windows, which is just going to blast it away at Microsoft's next whim next upgrade.
It sounds like the municipality limited their use of generators, and when you are talking lead-acid cells in a datacenter, building structure becomes a real issue for the shear weight you are going to have to support (I've seen buildings that have brought in many tons of steal beams that had to be bolted directly to building structure in order to support the battery bank, so major re-construction of the building).
So they may not have had much choice in expansion of traditional lead-acid cells, or generators.
If you had to choose, its best to triage your load, vs. than just throwing too little to support it all...
But I'd agree with other comments, there seems to be more behind the story that could be reported.
Yep, I've received counterfeit goods from all of them, and then include NewEgg, and other computer resellers that are no longer around.
I'd say # one was Amazon for selling counterfeit goods though. eBay is more tame, only the deals that are too-good-to-be-true are bad. On Amazon, you could pay the normal price and still get shafted.
The problem with Taxing them, is all taxes are based on income or gains at time of sale.
Rich people don't make most of their money via income. Its all investments, and other financial papershifting.
So, they could be worth a bazillion billion $$, but most of that is paper until it is excised out somehow at just the right time and rate to minimize their capital gains obligation.
OOTH, as a service-provider, I like the yearly renewal pace, because once a subscriber does 3 years or more, all knowledge of paying for it, or what it does is gone out of mind of anybody at the company. Be-it brain fade, or the people that handle it are long gone.
At least yearly will have somebody remember, oh yeah, we do need that.
It is hard to find a Pi SD card that will go the distance.
You certainly can't depend on a Pi Vendor for selling you a decent one, you have to do your home work yourself and source things on your own.
I think the answer really is for these embedded applications to really go with the CM4 with eMMC boot.
It is elastic, if you spend all the more money and engineering time to make it redundant yourself, buying additional and redundant services to make it so.
They assume everyone is a dev, and can rewrite all their apps to fit within their model. Ie. if you don't have multiple AZs, load balancing, EBS, backup EBS, etc. etc. etc. you are doing AWS wrong.
Whereas the rest of the real world expects to treat the AWS objects as a server in the cloud that runs as well as other setups.
There is a giant disconnect between doing AWS right, and what the rest of the world expects.
All these consultants coming into businesses and selling the cloud have no clue either.
I know plenty of Cisco and Juniper shops still.
A little puzzled about Cisco not playing in optical or ethernet.
I see carriers still installing Cisco gear in the carrier hotels. I see Cisco GPON gear out there.
One thing different now vs. in the past, is there is a *lot* of commodity ethernet gear out there now, since the industry switched over to mostly commodity Broadcom chips than roll their own. So 2nd and 3rd string gear gets used a lot more.
But its not like Cisco's slice of the pie is greately diminished, just the pie got so much larger, letting others into the table too.
SOHO/SMB barely bought into Cisco in the past, and rarely do now. But telco, enterprise and alot of mid-range still buy a lot of Cisco.
I already saw direct eveidence of this.
I gave up on USB boot/SD-card boot of any server (including many VMware hypervisors) after so many failures over time. I experienced this with all other OSs as well.
Sure, it works at first. And if you only have a few servers, you probably won't notice it that much. But if you have a lot of servers, you will see large #s of failures over time.
Most "appliance" PCs come with Flash DOM modules, which are a bit more robust, but I have still had to replace many a DOM module as well.
Full on SSDs have had a normal small range of failures from a large fleet of servers, well within my expected range. SC-card and USB flash boot failures are well over 50% over enough time in my environment.
Yeah, because your ISP didn't flush their DNS cache or install NTAs for slack.com after they borked themselves with bad DNSSec setup.
DNS at the top domain level is cached for a day or two with a TTL of 2d.
Google DNS (and other large providers) probably slapped some NTAs on slack.com to cut down on the complaint levels they were probably getting for slack.com's mismanagement of their DNS.
Its not necessarily that sysadmins didn't fix things.
As I saw in my iOS devices and my 3rd party email clients, the system level software decided to latch onto the old no-longer-in-use cert and associated it with many connections internally. When the old not-in-use intermediary cert expired, my devices decided that they should still use it and complain and refuse to connect.
Even though my Let's Encrypt certs were all good with the new roots for quite some time.
We have had root CA certs expire in the past with some fallout, but without them being as widespread as Let's Encrypt has been, they have not raised that much noise. We will have additional root CAs expire in the future, with the potential for more issues with system code.
Back when we were buying Apple desktops (didn't have any MacPros since the original intel tanks), it wasn't too difficult to get some decent (for Apple) discounts from the Apple sales dweebs.
And I was a very small fry.
I'd imagine any organization that is the type buying these machines would be also discussing said sales with an Apple sales team, and not depending on web or reseller pricing (which is pretty bad).
They'd probably have an MSP that would take care fo service as well.
Not too surprised about pushing Azure Stack HCl.
Hyper-V is one of those things that in the wild as I see it, people run a couple VMs onprem per server and no more.
To get the full virtualzation stack with System Center Virtual Machine Manager takes a sisyphean task of even finding the product, weeding it out from all the other System Center things, licensing, and figuring out how to actually get it running (no small feat).
I've _never_ seen any biz running SC VMM in the wild as a full stack virtualization solution.
I've also never seen anybody that realized there was a free Hyper-V Server product, because anybody that is looking at Hyper-V is looking at doing Windows VMs, and they'd rather pick up the 2 VE license that Windows Standard has.
I can tell on certain tracks.
(besides the rips that introduce horrible noise into the stream, which does happen 2-3% of the time).
But I've found that the thing that really differentiates it for me aren't necessarily the raw single sound, but things such as the size of stereo separation, real low bass, or if different sounds are coming out L vs. R (such as Sonic Youth's Cotton Crown, there's a VU song that is similar, can't remember the name now).
If its a straight up centered single vocal, yeah, its near impossible to tell. Thats all that website shown is doing. So, even when they put that together, they already introduced some bias towards ones that aren't easily differentiated. Where there are others that are.
Another thing probably could be that many of the CDs mastered in the last 20 years were mastered like crap (turn the knobs _all_ the way up up up), and when they go and remix it down to a new hirez format, they actually put some effort into the mix. So you end up with a better mix overall than what the MP3 was probably mastered from.
Its a dev and his boss.
The dev is trying to explain that sysops are dumb because they can't figure out all the correct versions of packages that play together well that the developer used to develop his app.
Boss's solution is that we ship the dev's computer out to run the app instead.
"Back in the day we have one big machine which successfully ran lots of programs for lots of people (safety and securely?). Then people wanted their own little computers."
"VMs and Containers just try and re-image the mainframe world with lots of little computers tied together with string (Ethernet usually, unless it's for HPC)"
VMs _started_ on mainframes, in order to partition all the resources into usable chunks while separating important processes. Much as they do now.
They are not just trying to emulate mainframe environment with enough resources.
|| "And containers show us that running a big fat operating system on every compute element is far from efficient. "
|| I'd argue that this is correct and that expanding from that point - which is really all that containers do - takes us to a much more efficient place in computing.
With the gigantic amount of resources available in server hardware now-a-days, does it really need to be super efficient? We are far past the days of counting bits and counting cycles like they had to do up until at least the 90's or 00's for every single program they developed. Then OSs/apps became super bloated because the resources were available.
So, I have a few OS kernels running in VMs on my 750GB of RAM on my server (times 5 or 10, or many more). They are a pittance compared to the databases, and web apps consuming huge amounts of GBs of RAM. Some customers I work with runup 256GB database servers as their norm.
I'm not worried about saving a few GB of RAM for OSs vs. fitting in a 256GB database.
Clearly Oracle had no pretense to keep Solaris running for anything but their narrow vertical market.
As much as I loath Oracle for almost everything, I think for this case, they have a pretty solid leg to stand on.
HPe signs up for one support contract, and then resells the benefits it receives to all it's customers as its' own maintenance, in clear defiance of the terms of service of the original support contract.
This story reminds me quite a lot of other manufacturers during the pandemic.
Early on, N95 masks were in short supply in the US due to other countries buying up all the production runs in China.
There were several US makers that said we can ramp up and do it, but the hospitals and health worker companies have to sign contracts so that the investments we make into our supply chain won't leave us holding the bag once your immediate need is over.
Guess what, they couldn't get a single new health care company to sign a single contract for long term masks suppliers.
It was more important to save that $1 a mask or whatever China could give them in the future vs. the US production cost, rather than invest into US companies that could offer a sustained production model. The cost difference was probably way less than one year of their CEO's salary.
Profit over all else.
I would peg it at much lower.
Take a $35,000 switch. I would estimate the BOM to come in under $1000. They might have to pay $5-$10 more for those expensive chips overall.
Or something like a 0.002% increase in their material cost.
Somehow I don't think they are talking about a $5-$10 price rise to the consumer.
OOTH, the labor of their logicistics people probably is going through the roof as they have to probably hire people to scrounge up the supplies they need.
Like the air bubbles in a garden hose, everything got slammed shut, and the JIT culture stopped everything. Now we have to wait for all the air gaps to escape.
Everything has firmware. Your coffee pot has firmware. Your electric toothbrush has firmware.
Your car has 100's of CPU chips each with firmware.
Anything that needs to talk USB has firmware.
Keyboards have had firmware since the days when they switched off matrix input in the 70's.
Almost everything since the 70's through early 2000's probably used an 8051 micro controller.
So much ancient code out there.
I'd agree that there's not a whole lot of need to hack on keyboard firmware, everything I want to do for remapping/macros can be done in the OS easily.
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