eddie_catflap

I was working in a UK financial blue chip (FTSE 100/high street bank) from 1999 to 2008 where I got my main Sun exposure.

I loved the Sun kit and Solaris. Touched everything from Sparc workstations to E10K/E15K. It felt like home!

A random selection of areas where they went wrong from my viewpoint as a junior to senior unix admin at the time..

Biggest of all - IBM did a complete number on them in my workplace. Hugely aggressive presence. We had a regular Sun PS person onsite. IBM dropped a whole bunch of people in. Sales, pre sales tech, anything we wanted. Completely undercut Sun and leveraged mainframe deals to push their p5 kit. Before we knew it there was a 'unix consolidation project' and I found myself grumpily using a HMC and bloody AIX. Millions in lost revenue. Went from a tiny IBM presence in a lovely multicultural Unix estate (HP-UX, Solaris, AIX, even Dynix) to bland banks of Power racks in the datacentres. A complete capitulation.

That whole "attributing mysterious system crashes and memory corruption in SPARC Enterprise servers to stray cosmic rays" thing. They handled this really badly. I got called out so often for this. An open goal for IBM. Sun was so expensive and yet we'd be having to report

They should have made more of an effort with their estate management software or made stuff free to use. They had such good ideas around patching etc but everything seemed to cost money. Our Sun estate was a real mess of patch levels. Our poor PS guy would be sent along and try to get jumpstart implemented but would say it'll cost ££££. IBM ate their lunch (even if their stuff wasn't as good, or ever really implemented properly in our shop). They had Dtrace and it was never used in our estate despite being free.

They were unfortunately too early on a bunch of things. Such good ideas around open source and things like technical blogs! But the culture was different, certainly in corporate UK at the time (I started an internal blog in the Unix team and people thought I was insane). They should have given away compilers and stuff. Everything seemed to cost money.

They could have aggressively supported Linux as something to differentiate them from IBM. The battles I had trying to get Linux in the door for anything, but when it did arrive it was running on Power. Their whole Solaris x86 thing was just confusing.

ZFS seemed to be fumbled. We spent a fortune on Veritas products. I did love Veritas filesystem and their clustering stuff. Sun could have gone for that market and somehow it never happened.

This is up to October 2025 though, yes? Obviously things are continually moving but Opus 4.5 launched in November and that was a recognised step change in capability. An up to date comparison would be interesting.

Not according to our TAM who said that wasn’t possible, nor was a backout forthcoming and they had no inkling that this was going to happen. They didn’t even know it had happened until support tickets came in.

We’ve terraformed our way past this but that’s hundreds of man hours in the org today, god knows how many across their client base.

I had a call the other day with a consultancy to potentially pick up some infrastructure work/project type stuff. Asked about timezones involved and they said a lot of their clientele are US based startups. "So it's mainly Kubernetes work" they said.

I personally would suggest the vast majority of those startups do not need Kubernetes and certainly don't need to be paying a consultancy to then pay me to fix their issues for them.

We saw issues before 16:00 UTC - approx 15:38

Same. The incident calls I'm on this morning agree too

My son Oliver was born with mitochondrial disease and was killed by conditions associated with it at the age of 19. Some of the people mentioned in the report here were involved in his diagnosis and care.

His life deteriorated from that of a normal, fun loving intelligent kid to an isolated bed-bound disabled teenager, fed by total parenteral nutrition and suffering a variety of awful complications. His eventual passing was cruel and brutal. I'm not sure we will ever get over it as a family.

This treatment does now at least offer me a glimmer of grandchildren (my daughter having decided she would not risk children of her own until now). It's a remarkable achievement.

I remember the knowledge/idea of illegal opcodes for the C64 slowly making their way through the hacker/cracker community. Like secret knowledge being distilled back then via BBS

I love the C64 but the Atari 8-bit line was fine indeed (one of my first exposures to home computing was Star Raiders at a family friends house - blew me away). Archer Maclean, author of Dropzone (and other titles) famously labelled them the 'Porsche of home computers'.

Where I think the 64 had the edge was in the incredible SID chip and I'd argue the amazing hacks that were found for the system over the years that enhanced what the 64 was capable of.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dropzone#Development

I bought a Logitech MX Ergo a couple of years back and genuinely love it for many of the reasons other trackballs users cite in this thread - but I have noticed in the last few months that my thumb joint will get 'stuck' and makes a click when I unstick it. Definitely related to the MX Ergo and the thumb navigation like you say. I'm an older gentleman which likely contributes.

So might be tempted by an all finger alternative - at the moment I'm attempting to up my use of a terminal window manager to minimise pointer use

It seems like a lot of the opposition to this I’m seeing online is because Trump is the one that granted it.

Ridiculous hyperbole about Ross ‘inventing the Dark Web’ or ‘Trump freed a sex trafficker’ is a great reminder that for some people, their ideological opposition can never do anything right and they’ll condemn anything they do without even a second of consideration.

I’m not an avowed Trump supporter (or even American) but believe this was the right call to make. The sentence was overly harsh and he has both served his time and reformed. I’m glad he has been released.

I was considering this just last night lamenting the state of my Twitter/X feed. The paid engagement incentive has had the unintended effect of ruining what’s on offer and clearly much of it is bot/AI created. Lots of threads of crap just to inflate engagement numbers. The funny, witty and sarcastic 140 char posts are still there but buried seemingly in a pile of templated and autogenerated junk.

As ever when new models come out I fully spec'd one out on the UK store. 128GB M3 Max, 8TB SSD. £6999 14", £7299 16". Ouch

There was quite the mystique around Ultimate in those early days. So much so in fact that when I was 10 years old there was a conspiracy theory going around that the colours of their logo were a secret nod to an amazing game they would only release if the company ever got into trouble. Yes, this collection of schoolboys believed that Ultimate had created something so incredible and mind blowing that it could only be regretfully unleashed under the most dire of circumstances.

We also sat in from of a Spectrum for 16 hours waiting for the mythical midnight boat ride in Jet Set Willy. We may have been rather gullible.

Ghost in the Wires is a laugh out loud read for me. I told him it should be a movie and he said there was a screenplay. Hope it sees the light of day.

'semianalysis' indeed

We were seeing issues earlier in UK South/West (Azure)

I agree. Honestly if I’m browsing for something new and it has several seasons it puts me off even starting. I don’t want to invest that much time into something when the quality is pretty much guaranteed to drop as time goes on.

I love how much development work is still going on for the C64 (and other old computers). There seem to be more game launches now than during some months during it's heyday

This book grabbed my eye too, but then I saw Matthew Sweet on Twitter (@DrMatthewSweet) kept questioning the studies used and suggesting that Hari has cherry picked results to support his point. I've no idea if this was the case but some interesting stuff to look at I think.

A good summary thread is here : https://twitter.com/DrMatthewSweet/status/147912591089697587...

Jeff is one of my gaming/programming heroes. Still doing great work today too.

I've recently been reading Galileo's Error by Philip Goff which covers a lot of this ground (he's a proponent of panpsychism). Quite an interesting look into the various arguments though I thought (I previously had no background in this type of thing).

One thing I don't see mentioned too much is just how slow it was. Not to mention confusing. I expect a lot of people were simply put off from using it after taking a look.

I’ll check that keyboard out! Many thanks.

I'm in the market for something like this for on call purposes. Something small/light enough to stow in a coat pocket but which has a physical keyboard and enough functionality for me to be able to triage most issues without having to resort to a laptop.

I've been trying the Gemini which almost fits the bill but doesn't quite cut it - the keyboard is OK but not backlit (I didn't think about how often that comes in handy when purchasing). I'll probably try the follow up 'Cosmo' when that comes out.

Would love to see any other suggestions.

FormulaPi is a robot car racing series along similar lines. Submit your own code and race against teams from around the world. I've participated in the last couple of seasons and it's been great fun.

https://www.formulapi.com

Compressing cracked games was a big thing too. There would be a lot of competition to get the smallest version of a game for faster downloading from a BBS, getting more games on a floppy disk etc. Getting the best compression software was a sign that you were an ‘elite’ cracker. (Disclaimer - was part of that scene as a young teen)

And also formulapi.com !

I’d heard of them, didn’t even know they were out yet and today I find they’ve already failed. Ho hum.

I enjoyed watching this but it felt a bit disjointed in comparison to his other productions.. almost as though he had ton of clips left over from his other documentaries that he didn't want to go to waste. The style remains eminently watchable though and the parts on social media were real head in the hands, 'what have we built?' moments for me.

Great soundtrack again too.