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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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 :)
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.
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 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.