[Tubby Isaacs]

`Thanks. I did see some explanation of why they're often near London. I'll see if I can find it again.

[Boiler]

Maybe the much-vaunted Rolls-Royce mini nuclear power stations?

Like fusion which is always 30 years away, I suspect SMRs will always be 5 years in the future.

I saw someone BTL on the Guardian get very snotty with someone who said that re: fusion - "oh, are you an engineer in this field? Because I am." I waited for the "I am very intelligent", but it never came.

[Bones McCoy]

`Thanks. I did see some explanation of why they're often near London. I'll see if I can find it again.

Laziness. They want to hop in a cab and show their config guys where the kit lives.

They will feed you some bullcrap about latency.
But all current cloud works on a 3 copies in geographically distinct sites basis.
Where Geographically distinct is set to match the exclusion zones of a nuclear incident.

If your application is sensitive to tenths of milliseconds latency, then Cloud isn't the answer you need.
A good example of this would be the national grid, who have premises housing computers relatively close to major sites.
Hint: There's a lot of national grid that's in NotLondon.

And if you're running cloud stuff that is millisecond sensitive....
You're asking for trouble fomr black hats who learned their tricks during the high-frequency trading boom.

[Tubby Isaacs]

It was indeed something about latency.

[Boiler]

Isn't that what PTP (Precision Timing Protocol) is for?

[Bones McCoy]

It was indeed something about latency.

There's a third aspect to Latency which I through had been completely resolved.

Back in the decade of the 2000s, wide area networking became much more affordable.
And a viable generation of VPNs emerged that might allow you to tunnel international computer links through the Internet.

An example of "More affordable", a business with 150 staff in Glasgow and 30 in Edinburgh.
The smart money choice was to spend £125,000 on duplicating the important processing kit in the branch office.
Because buying sufficient bandwidth to let the Edinburgh staff connect to the Glasgow server was around 60 grand per year.
In a Lunar Module / smartwatch type comparison, that expensive bandwidth was about a fifth of what you'll get off a £30/mth fibre connection today.

Some people did tunnelling, it was relatively slow, and the industry observed massive performance differences between very similar applications.
We're off into database programming past this point, well beyond my ken.
But the answer for dummies was that some applications would transfer a tiny amount of data and await acknowledgement before sending the next tiny piece.
Sometimes these were old applications, where the database of the day had very limited buffer capacity.
Far more were relatively new, on the latest+greatest database, but the programmers had simply forklifted the old code across without paying attention to tuning.

You don't notice this sort of lag if you're on the next floor of the building and transmission takes microseconds.
If you're attempting to update HR records from Paris, France to a server is in Sunny California we're looking at a hundred milliseconds or so.
If your application is tuned to send an entire personnel record, you'll barely notice.
But if it sends 400 lines of data one by one, you're looking t a half minute before your screen updates.

I've picked pathalogically bad examples to illustrate.
I suspect the third driving category is "shit code".


Consider also that the cloud claims to be location independent.
You may have reserved space on servers in the Londona nd Dublin datacentres, with a recovery only backup in Kansas.
But the small print means you could be perfectly legitimately bounced to Kansas if another customer bids higher on capacity spot pricing.

I hope I've bored you all to sleep now.
Or at least to the point where "Nuke the place from orbit" seems the better option.

[Tubby Isaacs]

I hope I've bored you all to sleep now.

Not at all, I appreciate it. Might take me a while to go through what you've posted, but it's great to come here and learn things.

[Abernathy]

From Dillie Keane and Jonathan Ormerod of FB. It's interesting, at least.

If you're interested in pensions, read this this. It's copied and pasted from Jonathan Ormerod who used to live in the village. We've kept in touch via FB and his posts are always interesting, well informed and sometimes challenging. This is a very interesting read about the thorny subject of pensions. It's quite angry and bitter in tone which is fine by me, but it is really really informative. Have a read. His words from now on.
I'm getting old, so I think more about my pension.
When company pension schemes first became a thing, most were defined benefits, aka final salary schemes. Many, particularly those managed by the public sector, were also index-linked. Then, a bunch of people born in the 1920s and 30s decided it would be a really good idea to retire at 55. When the pension funds were started, most people dropped dead a couple of years after retirement but now, the funds were being raided at ever-increasing rates for up to 40 years. Just to make things worse, inflation was in double figures and a few naughty people were sticking their fingers in the till until they very publicly got them trapped when it unexpectedly slammed shut. Final salary schemes became a millstone round corporate necks and they desperately looked for ways to get rid of them.
There is, of course, the state pension. Supposedly funded by National Insurance, this tax does nothing of the sort and its name is utterly misleading. Instead of being invested in something like a sovereign wealth fund, which would grow over time at a rate that would probably outstrip demand, NI just gets poured into the tax coffer. The government therefore has to pay ever-increasing amounts of state pension out of general taxation and find increasingly tortuous ways of keeping pace with demand.
And so we get to defined contributions. The pensions industry boomed and lots of people got rich - just not the people to whom the money belonged. As an example, my first company pension had a value of £3400 when I left the scheme in 1993. Last year, it was worth £3800. In real terms, it's worth about 10% of what it was in 1993. This, despite the fact that at the time I was in the scheme, growth rates were predicted to be between 18% and 28%.
To make things worse, Gordon "No more boom and bust - instead we'll have prudence and bust." Brown removed the 20% tax dividend on pension contributions. The idea was (although I can't think how it was supposed to work) that the move would make pension funds invest more in UK equities and employees would have to pay more into their funds just to stand still, which would provide a welcome boost to investment in Britain. It failed. Investment rates did not go up, because most people couldn't afford to put more into their pensions and fund managers didn't invest in UK plc.
Now we have Rachel Reeves - the woman who is "furious" that people are spending their pension pots before they croak, lest she get her grubby mitts on their savings. How dare they!
First, in an announcement that went largely unnoticed, she slapped a tax on any remaining funds in a pension pot after the individual has died. After all, why should children be allowed to inherit ANYTHING their parents worked hard for all their lives?
The next move will be to remove salary sacrifice. Under this scheme, employees' pension contributions are taken from gross salary and therefore give a handy boost to what one can afford to invest in one's pension. I'm saving like mad at the moment because I have gaps in my personal pensions and I don't own a house, so my pension pot must necessarily be larger. If this goes ahead, I'll have to pay an extra £10,000 a year into my pension just to stand still.
Next, she wants to control where fund managers invest our money. She tried to do this with ISAs, when she announced that she was intending to reduce the cash ISA limit and thereby force people to save more in stocks & shares ISAs. Apparently, she thinks she's better at picking winners than the people who do it every day of the week. Given some of the monumental clusterfucks the City traders have presided over in the last few decades, she may actually have a point although that's not the reason. She wants to use the money to back Government favourites rather than potential winners. I really don't want her investing all my money in MacQuarie Investments, Crapita, Price-Waterhouse Coopers and Group4 thanks.
Circling back to the state pension, the triple lock is also under threat and she's talking about raising state retirement age to 70, so even if you're one of those people who look down at rich cunts like me who choose to invest in a pension rather than spend 3 weeks a year in Shagaluf, you're under attack too.
Of course, none of this would have happened, if only those defined benefits pensions had stuck around. Rather than every individual having a pension pot that could be spent, saved or handed to the Donkey Sanctuary when said individual pops their clogs, the final salary pension payment stops the day the heart stops. Nothing in the pot, nothing to tax......
.....or is there?
In the final and most hideously cynical move, Reeves is looking to prevent companies with defined benefits funds from spending any surplus, so she can tax it at 25%.
So, to all the milennials out there who voted Labour in, well done. You'll be living with your parents until you're 35. Eventually, you'll scramble together just enough money for you, your partner and your two kids to afford a deposit on a 3-bedroom flat, sharing with a fabulous old school friend you've loved since childhood, their partner and their two kids. After a couple of years of living on top of each other, you'll want to split, but can't, thanks to a 95% mortgage, student loans and no inheritence from your parents. Consequently, you won't have to go through the pain of wondering how you're going to save for retirement now that pensions are worth shit, because you don't have enough spare cash to save for one.
PS, the alternative is NOT Reform.