wumbernang

Realistically everything is mostly shitty architecture and nearly on fire all the time.

The best critique is surviving production and constant iteration and tackling limits and problems as they become apparent.

If you see a problem, research solutions and hit the cycle again. Sometimes things don't work.

There's not much science in it I'm afraid.

The mid-range HP stuff is pretty reliable. We had a DL380p Gen7 survive the switch underneath it catching fire. Had zero chassis failures on about 500 nodes in the last 12 years as well. Lose disks and power supplies all the time and the odd Ethernet interface but nothing else.

Agree with ebay. I still look around for Sun Ultra kit now and then but the wife has other ideas because it's noisy and expensive to run.

Sounds reasonable but three points:

1. It's not anonymous. The ledger is enough to identify someone.

2. It's not 100% better than my current spreadsheet (one tab a month for the coming 6 months).

3. There's no motivation not to close it after a month I.e. no contract

No no no no. This is not right.

1. If you debug with this, you're debugging different code to what blew up in production for example. Subtle timing issues wiped out instantly and memory ballooning masked etc.

2. If you leave it in for prod, it's going to have masses of call overhead.

You can debug well with assertions, logging and unit tests. There is no need for this. I rarely have to spin up a debugger these days.

Interesting - thanks for posting.

He's waiting for a surgeon to have a meeting about him now. Not sure what the state of things is TBH.

It isn't happening until it has happened.

Also sure a compiler may drop but its useless without a pile of libs.

We had 11 years of uptime on a VAX cluster at a company I worked for in the late 1990s.

They took it down in 2001 to replace it with something that took up 2U of rack space, about 2kw less power and ran windows 2000.

I turned up in 2012 to replace it again with something cloudy and it had 11 years of uptime (well done NT!) again[1] so YMMV.

The cloud based version has gone down about 10 times (thanks Azure!).

[1] not a great position but this was on an isolated network with locked down everything so less of a problem than a normally networked system.

Transferred to another hospital overnight (this time a competent one). CT again. Found a small bleed and are currently waiting for a surgical opinion. He's in a shitty mood unsurprisingly!

Thanks for the uplift; appreciated.

Indeed. Thanks for the kind words.

Glad your friend got through it. Terribly traumatic but a good outcome looking at your other post. Happy to know someone who got through it against the odds.

Comedy timing for me.

My father was taken into hospital 4 hours ago after collapsing and turns out he's got a brain bleed. They stuck him in a CT straight away and are now doing a lumbar puncture to see if there is any blood in the spinal fluid. They don't know what has precisely happened but they suspect an aneurysm that went undetected. The mortality rate of this event is 50% in 30 days. He's had a long history of hypertension and a couple of surgeries to clean out arteries in his neck.

Not sure why I'm sitting here on HN but it was taking my mind off things. Fail :(

Anyway, moral of the story: Don't smoke and dint eat piles of shit; it'll get you one day.

Edit: Ordered the book as well now like an idiot. Scary tale when you're close to it but I find comfort in knowing things rather than ignorance.

Thanks for posting this.

Ah yes. A guy I know designed a simple voltmeter based on a uC and a 3 digit LED display for some radio equipment. Shipped the design out to china.

Look on ebay or aliexpress now...

Boy is he pissed about that.

Interestingly though the product that contained this ended up being built in the UK for only about 20% more. Shafted on import costs of components though.

I'd be surprised if they did and don't forget that it's serialized/deserialized from something which will be hanging around in the GC in the form of a memory backed stream or something too.

Basically, when an object goes out of scope, it isn't de-allocated instantly.

Immutable strings aren't standard; they're an implementation choice.

You're right and I glossed over most of it but the killers are concurrency, substitution and fixed deliverables. With concurrency, if you can prove that during the contracted period you had billable work outside the contract then that goes in your favour if you get nabbed and the contract is borderline. With substitution, the contract should state that you can provide a substitute on demand so you're contracting out services and yourself. The third is fixed deliverables; that's always a killer. Rolling contracts as non distinct labour are how to get shot.

For ref I had a small battle on this front and concurrency won it for me.

TBH get a good solicitor and get them to take a look at the contract paperwork. That's better advice :)

Yes. Specify an early termination charge of at least 50% of the contract total.

It's better than nothing and likely better than something without source.

Using the CLR which has no guaranteed memory zeroing and has immutable strings and GC and an exposed profiler and debugging APi is a larger concern IMHO.

They're all pretty good as an ex-contractor in the UK. Even getting paid is quite easy if you sub your timesheets quickly.

The killer is simply making sure that if you do the entire 6 month contract in 2 weeks that you still get paid for the rest or have a massive termination fee in the contract.

The agents don't care; they pass all costs on.

They do all the annoying paperwork for you at the registration service like the initial transfer of directors capital and appointments and crap like that. It's worth it.

(I've killed 5 limited companies now so I have lots of experience ;-)

IR35 is the only PITA IMHO of doing all this and that's easily sorted by doing the odd phone/laptop repair at the same time and invoicing it.

When I'm paying the bill, its my network and responsibility as a parent so I'll take whatever measures I need and track what I want. This is partially to protect my arse from misadventure by proxy and partly to establish healthy use of the internet.

This is done openly and with agreement only. My eldest disagreed so she doesn't get a handset paid for.

The phrase "circling the drain" comes to mind. Last ditch attempt at pretending to be relevant by gaming the search industry.

You're an idiot.

I've only ever bashed my head on the ground at very low speeds. You'd be surprised the damage you can do falling from head height. A bike merely increases the probability of that happening.

High speed; forget it. I drive a car now after I was totalled by a taxi.

It's not about you following the rules. If someone else doesn't, your head is going to hit the ground.

I've been cycling for 22 years. I've smashed my head on the ground 5 times now.

NEVER was it my fault. Just because you're not a dick doesn't mean someone else isn't.

Just watch fail army for ten minutes and play count the heads hitting the ground. No thanks.

Well it's always someone's fault.

In this case there are only so many combinations of MIL-DTL-22992 out there.

It wasn't even our harness. No idea where it came from. Serno didn't register, wasn't shipped with the device and wasn't approved (I know as I wrote the asset tracking software).

I still reckon they lost the official harness, rigged this one up and FUBARed it but the moment you point a finger, the professional cockroaches scurry away.

Ah yes my favourite people.

So our radios and avionics go out with a test set. The wrench monkeys install it in the airframe and it doesn't work (the term used by the guy on the phone). So we say take the thing out of the airframe, plug it into the test set and run the test cases. We get a call back saying it doesn't work and can we come out.

So I haul my arse up to the other end of the country by plane and arrive at the facility. What do I find?

They haven't used the test set (because it didn't work), opened the avionics unit and piddled with the power supply and managed to blow up both the test set and the GPS. This is blamed on a design fault on our part.

So I get the units shipped back and we post mortem it and find that they were using the wrong harness. The one we get bak is from a completely different unit and serial.

Design revision: Support 200v AC on the DC-DC converter input that expects 48v DC

This was my life for three years.

That's also why so much cash gets pissed out of the window in the defense sector...

Hence why I suggested the student manual which is a little more forgiving.

TAoE isn't something you read cover to cover anyway, it's a reference book.

I'm not talking about construction here; design approach. I don't have any schematics for what I'm working on; they get drawn up later when it's all working.

I have to reverse engineer deadbug and Manhattan stuff which is a downside which is my point.

True.

I worked for a military contactor and had to deal with what RAF 'engineers' did to our radio kit.

My current main scope, a Tek 453, was ex military and it had some after market repairs done by a monkey with soldering kit. Took me a couple of days to clean it up properly.