Jim @sullybiker@sully.site
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@kinetix Have not had to so far, thankfully.
Jim
boosted
Some observations on "the cloud" and data centres
I was reading a very interesting presentation and technical article by LANL and Honeywell on "Thermal Neutrons in Airplanes"¹ which I remembered downloading a while back.
The reason was the recent incident with turbulence and I remembered that there had been an issue with SEE ("Single Event Effects") on a Quantas flight causing it to lose altitude abruptly.
The original reason for downloading it was somewhat historical - SEEs had been plaguing our first three DEC Alpha machines at Imperial College (1993…) over weekends or, rather, the machines were inexplicably crashing with a machine check error over the weekend, and only over the weekend. At the time it turned out that a particular experiment in the Physics department next door to us (Mathematics, proper stuff ;P) ran over weekends and "might produce some stray neutrons." We did not deploy tinfoil (hats or otherwise) but there was an "environmental change" to the experimental setup²
The bottom line is that if you have neutrons hitting your chips it is Not Good™
Now, in avionics and, in particular on the poor Quantas 72 flight, this had rather dire consequences³ but this can be expanded to other systems.
In a previous life I was loosely associated with the Centre for Software Reliability at City University and got a bit of a hammering on the subject matter of dependable computing (actually, this should be hammered in the heads of so many people we'd cause a hammer shortage world-wide) and this is still something very close to my heart: in everything I design I always try to include "fail safe" and "dependable" as parameters.
Now, as more and more data is moved into the cloud and with it the associated processing I think we have an interesting problem coming up.
__
¹ "TINMAN Thermal Neutron Detector for Aircraft", 2021 - https://www.osti.gov/biblio/1783494 - !!rabbit hole alert!!
² a particularly contrived combination of British understatement and burocratese.
³ see "Ghosts in the code: the near crash of Quantas flight 72" - https://admiralcloudberg.medium.com/ghosts-in-the-code-the-near-crash-of-qantas-flight-72-b4faebc90e27 (Medium, sorry)
Some observations on "the cloud" and data centres
@cynicalsecurity This is incredibly interesting.
There is almost no way to do it without the employee feeling picked on, but they're fucking up, no two ways about it.
I have to have a performance/absenteeism chat with an employee tomorrow. Easily the worst part of any job.
@ParadeGrotesque it's a lot more than it used to be. That's as much as I can say.
@HebrideanHecate @Flick Of course it is totally irrational, but the real issue is the belief it doesn't matter.
@HebrideanHecate @Flick I used to work with someone who straight up told me he thought everything was about 30 minutes away. He lost job opportunities because of it.
@HebrideanHecate @Flick I am an absolute tyrant about it.
Jim
boosted
People are spun-up about the new Epoch of ARM computers. Their power consumption is the good news. The bad news is that it will likely further enshittification of software toward the 'mobile paradigm'
@bcaligari@mastodon.scot @countcol@mastodonapp.uk Shhhhh
We just got our revised Broadcom tarriff. $employer is furious.
@Mitsu Damn right I am
@Mitsu In a while crocodile
Is there any more frustrating evidence of the state of US driving culture than these two stickers:
i) Vehicle speed monitored by GPS
ii) This vehicle does not turn right at red lights
Both are there to try and persuade impatient assholes to not be themselves for a minute. It's depressing.
Jim
boosted
I have a rare gap in my work schedule while waiting for feedback and upcoming meetings... who wants me?
- blog
- media.sully.site
- Cancer
- Survived
- UK >>>>>
- USA
Admin
FOSS, motorbikes, and photography.
Joined Nov 2018
