"Mokhiber, who was stepping down having reached retirement age..."
flathead
joined 1 year ago
you're right. I wasn't necessarily disagreeing with you, sorry to come off that way. I just think that any money from the public treasury given to an entity associated with Elon Musk is going in the wrong direction.
I understand that having lousy internet service sucks. I'd just prefer if no part of public spending whatsoever was going to an individual as malodorous as Elon Musk, who already has abundantly more than his fair share.
SpaceX becomes NASA’s second-largest vendor, surpassing Boeing
NASA obligated $2.04 billion to SpaceX in fiscal year 2022.
SpaceX’s Starlink satellites are about to ruin stargazing for everyone
With the naked eye, stargazing from a dark-sky location allows you to see about 4,500 stars. From a typical suburban location, you can see about 400. Simulations show that from 52 degrees north (the latitude of both Saskatoon and London, U.K.) hundreds of Starlinks will be visible for a couple of hours after sunset and before sunrise (comparable to the number of visible stars) and dozens of these will be visible all night during the summer months.
Boondoggle
McDonald’s sent its own letter to its restaurant system on Monday, which was viewed by CNBC. Responding to the bill, the company said it and other franchisee groups “worked tirelessly over the past year to fight these policies and protect Owner/Operators’ ability to make decisions for their businesses locally and protect their restaurants and their crew.
...
Our very-well-paid lobbyists are frantically schmoozing to ~~bribe~~ donate to whoever will take our money to vote to protect our crew from these egregious wage increases.
Your McDonald's franchises are unsustainable? Oh well.
Ugh. The number of vacuous conversations endured/overheard in offices about sports. And the insufferable adages, analogies and idiotic motivational speeches comparing sports and wage slavery. Where's my fucking stapler?
Oh by no means am I suggesting it was reasonable to do this. Musk would be a fucking nightmare as an employer. As a customer probably not much better but you know what they say about a fool and his money. This fool would be a great customer as long as you had a good lawyer to write the contracts.
I do suspect that some of the details of this story are somewhat embellished though, if only for the sheer joy of it, which I'm all for. It's a great story. I don't believe, for instance, that they could possibly have moved 5000 racks - or even 5000 servers - as I think the story was intimating. It sounds like they filled a few semis, which would be a small fraction of the systems. Maybe this was just the last of it that was too hard to move earlier. As for the rack configs at the other end, they would need power and services and an empty space if they are just rolling the stuff in. That's only a few weeks of lead time in a properly run facility.
If they had their reservations set up correctly they wouldn't need to change hostnames or even addresses, just wheel in the racks, brace and connect them. Ideally stuff would be shut down gracefully, but it shouldn't really matter if they just pulled the plug. The software should be resilient enough to restart ok. Again, no idea if they had anything thought out, probably not, given the way it was done. But I have seen a big tech co move several rows this way when they basically couldn't be bothered figuring out how to logically migrate them. Of course they weren't doing it with a coked up CEO at 2am on Christmas Eve, but it wasn't as difficult as you might imagine. But yeah not 5000 racks at once. Not even close to possible.
Well, yes. If nobody left has a clue then it's going to take a little longer but you could physically move just about anything in a few weeks with the right crew, even if you had to bring them in cold. An open checkbook solves a lot of logistical problems.
The proof is more or less self evident. If this idiot and his cousin were able to pull it off without breaking anything critical, then it stands to reason that a properly managed team would have been able to do it in a more orderly way in a few days.
I get that everyone wants to paint this as completely irresponsible, but apart from the fact that it was done so haphazardly in the dead of night and gate crashing the data center security (nobody is going to refuse access to the CEO), there's really nothing here that's completely out of order. Locking the gear in the trucks is pretty standard for intact secure data transport. The real mistake is the infra manager sandbagging the move estimate - or not understanding how to plan and execute it.
The Rocky or Alma (red hat clones) installation provides a set of hardening options to make the system compliant with various published standards. https://www.cyberithub.com/step-by-step-guide-to-install-rocky-linux-8-4/#Step_13_Security_Policy
At the risk of sounding like an apologist for this prat, the frustration at being told it will take months to move systems is understandable. Also, the idiot developers who hard-coded the data center location deserve to be fired. Data center floor tiles can be removed easily with a flat blade as a lever instead of using suction cups.
Obviously a coke-fuelled man-child doing it in the middle of the night is ridiculous but if you have unlimited resources you can move any number of servers in a few days, easily. In some ways it's impressive that he was able to pull this off on a whim without a catastrophe (the DeSantis fiasco notwithstanding). It definitely should not have been suggested by a competent data center engineer that it would take months to move anything if the CEO wants it in weeks. Even though he's an ass, I don't blame him for being annoyed about that.
idiot corporate managers who insist on the word 'huddle' instead of 'meeting'. Ugh.