* Posts by David Halko

468 publicly visible posts • joined 4 Aug 2008

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Arm rages against the insecure chip machine with new Morello architecture

David Halko

Silicon Secured Memory (SSM)

>> Code operating within one compartment has no access to any other area, which means that even if an attacker compromises one piece of the code or data, they cannot access other areas. Arm claims there has never been a silicon implementation of this kind of hardware capability in a high-performance CPU

The industry had Silicon Secured Memory (SSM) on SPARC since 2015, in the highest performing processors on the market.

https://www.theregister.com/2015/10/28/oracle_sparc_m7/

Looking back on a 2015 register article...

- SPARC Solaris actually used the MMU to separate User from Kernel memory by default, avoiding typical non-SPARC pointer security exploits by hackers (do OS's on ARM actually separate Kernel from User memory maps today? This is an OS issue, not a hardware issue, and OS's should have been called out.)

- There is virtually no CPU cost for SPARC Silicon Secured Memory (SSM) protection in hardware, making sure pointers do not exit their [already reasonably secured] MMU isolated area

- The SSM under SPARC really only needs to protect from stray pointers in a very limited MMU area, so 4 bits is more than enough, which the 2015 article did not understand

- "If it doesn't alert anyone" was a false fear in 2015, since violations immediately notify Oracle via ASR in real time, before app owners are aware

Claiming protection in hardware "in a high performance CPU" is a first of it's kind, is ludicrous... the register should have caught & compared it to what already exists.

MySQL a 'pretty poor database' says departing Oracle engineer

David Halko

Re: There is no reason not to choose Postgres

>> it's everyone else's problem to worry about why your SQL code, that you scraped off...

Isn't that the truth!

A small percentage of App Developers understand indexes & reasonable construction of SQL code.

It is practically a sin to pawn off to a DB to a DBA for anything outside of: backup, restore, and projecting performance on larger/smaller OS / H/W footprints.

I preferred encouraging our team to work on a small development box, to force developers to experience memory & CPU constraints, before placing code into production with much higher workloads & data quantities.

Yeehaw, y'all! Texas done got itself a honkin' new Samsung semiconductor plant

David Halko

Re: Because companies like Samsung

-- economic incentives

That is the way it works!

Taxes are a huge cost of doing business!

Taxes are normally a higher percentage than the profits a company makes.

If taxes can be decreased, then the incentive to hire lesser taxed labour decreases, and the perverse system of taxing jobs out of a country are reversed... but as you rightly quoted, saving the labour of smart people in your local neighborhoods is normally a "temporary mental aberration" as soon as a politician realizes they can get rich from a future job or gain temporary power through campaign donations from other nations wanting to ship those jobs to their country.

Turbine maker Vestas Wind Systems admits to cyber incident, refuses to confirm if ransomware is at play

David Halko

Glad they were not blown away during the attack

What if Chrome broke features of the web and Google forgot to tell anyone? Oh wait, that's exactly what happened

David Halko

Make things stop working

Well, once Microsoft released an update to an early version of Windows, they broke market leading applications, and became the dominate office application vendor quite literally overnight.

Google is counting on exactly this strategy, ignoring the standards committees. Google is now worse, by breaking their browser, making documents unusable around the globe, clearly violating their “don’t do evil” fake moniker.

TSMC to hike some chip prices 'by as much as 20%'

David Halko

When no one else can build it…

… prices go up

Samsung commits to 5 years of Android updates... for its enterprise smartphone users at least

David Halko

Re: Quarterly schedules won't work for Android

>> government… require… open up the firmware

Partners get access to source code, so no intervention is needed, unless it is to provide access to hostile actors

OpenFirmware exists and used for Sun, IBM, HP, SGI, Apple, etc. systems, for decades, with less system resources than modern phones!

If people really thought this was an advantage, developers would step up and use OpenFirmware in a phone, which many would likely choose to use.

‘Staggering’ cost of vintage Sun workstations sees OpenSolaris-fork Illumos drop SPARC support

David Halko
Thumb Up

Sun-3

Do you have any of the old Sun-3 hardware & software that ran SUNVIEW?

I loved those systems, with integrated mail, integrated dbxtool, etc.

Do those run in an emulator, now a days?

X.Org is now pretty much an ex-org: Maintainer declares the open-source windowing system largely abandoned

David Halko

X is Beautiful

The elegance of X is amazing!

The concepts of having an application leverage one or more X Servers (serving resources like Keyboard, Video Display, and Mouse) is wonderful, facilitating a simple multithreaded binary for multiuser applications & games is fabulous! The smooth integration into alternate operating systems of remotely running X applications has always been a bonus.

Sure, it was slower than SunView on a workstation, but it is certainly faster than windows apps with properly written native X applications (without the cruft of overweight took kits.)

While the world pushes back against COVID-19, Facebook has a pandemic of a different sort – medical misinformation

David Halko

Re: it's all bogus

WHO said, as China was kicking out foreign journalists...

World Health Organization (WHO) @WHO

Preliminary investigations conducted by the Chinese authorities have found no clear evidence of human-to-human transmission of the novel #coronavirus (2019-nCoV) identified in #Wuhan, #China

https://nypost.com/2020/03/20/who-haunted-by-old-tweet-saying-china-found-no-human-transmission-of-coronavirus/

as doctors in China who said otherwise were "disappearing"... we knew & know otherwise...

Uncle Sam courting Intel, TSMC to build advanced chip fabs on home soil – report

David Halko

Re: Aren't the Intel fabs mainly in the US already?

-- Intel want another handout

Taiwan Semiconductor was created when multiple chip manufacturers approached the Taiwanese Government for a handout, they basically told them no money was available for a bunch of little fabs, but they would make billions available if they all joined together - and they accepted the handout and this is where they are at today.

Fabs are so expensive that either huge multinationals must build them (which fewer can) or only governments can fund them.

Welcome to the world of nano-computing.

The rumor that just won't die: Apple to keep Intel at Arm's length in 2021 with launch of 'A14-powered laptops'

David Halko

"And of course, it could emulate 68k code faster than any real 68k CPU could run it"

That is not completely accurate. The first releases of the PowerPC chip did not have enough cache to run the 68k code faster. Power users, with more immediate needs continued to buy 68K models, which more future-leaning customers bought PowerPC models, feeling OK to wait for native code to arrive. Later releases of PowerPC bumped up the clock rate and added larger caches, to gain parity.

Faster 68K chips were being released, but never bundled into Apple systems. Apple killed third-party manufacturers from releasing processor upgrade cards, by restricting licensing of the Apple ROM's, when they offered Motorola CPU upgrade cards to out-perform the PowerPC architecture, on older systems. The 68060 was used in networking equipment, some workstation & gaming systems, and desktop accelerator cards), but were not used by Apple.

It is easy to compare newer machines which using later PowerPC release over the older technology without updates, which never received an upgrade, but suggesting PowerPC was emulating 68k code faster, is not quite accurate.

Date engraved onto net neutrality tombstone: June 11, 2018

David Halko

Re: The International element has been ignored in this debate

"you do realise that USA != world"

All network links & carriers are not only isolated to individual nations... some cross boundaries and partnerships also exist to provide consistent service.

"This changes what ISPs in the USA can charge their customers"

This also restores what international customer can get, as a service, from a US based location (I suspect that people outside of the US uses US based internet locations, right?)

This is more than what ISP's can change in the US, this is about being legally allowed to use features of the TCP/IP stack, an international standard.

Ending Net Neutrality merely restores what carriers can legally sell & implement in the USA: capabilities of an international standard!

As long as other nations do not outlaw using & selling features in international standards [uplifts for QoS & discounts without QoS], there are no boundaries to selling a product that crosses international boundaries, with a little cooperation.

David Halko
Go

Re: The International element has been ignored in this debate

"Net Neutrality" effectively made it illegal to sell a higher Quality of Service Internet connection to a customer willing to pay an uplift while selling a lower QoS to people who wanted to pay less.

For the Third World, Net Neutrality had the potential to "lock out" the masses from Internet Access, by forcing higher prices, and ensure lower & poorer performance [QoS] for mission critical applications reaching back into the US (such as remote robotic surgeries) for the most vulnerable in societies.

The lifting of "Net Neutrality" brings opportunity to innovate:

- IoT can legally use lower reliability & lower cost links for telemetry, advancing science at a lower cost & broader international scope

- Scientific & Medical applications can use higher reliability flows, from an internet uplift, which is a FAR LOWER COST than dedicated "Fast Lane" international links, without the possibility of those links getting swamped by internet streaming movies

- prioritization of low bandwidth & latency insensitive flows can be sold with different pricing, to ensure safe & real-time transportation information to vehicles, without getting swamped by regular internet content.

Overall - the potential for ending Net Neutrality has the potential to bring vast technological change in the Third World, as well as in The First World... by ending the need for parallel networks, for the rich, and enforcing the swamped internet [with no QoS guarantees] for the masses.

I am glad "Net Neutrality" is being abolished, it will bring an end to the "Fast Lanes" solidified by the former American Administration... that physical fiber can now be consolidated into the rest of The Internet, merging more bandwidth for the masses in the U.S., as well as to the nations who connect to it!

Intel's 10th-gen Core family cracks 5GHz barrier with H-series laptop processors

David Halko

Re: 5GHz

"core speeds had stopped rising once they moved the focus to multiple cores"

In the SPARC world, core count rose while raising clock speed:

2011 - T4 - 3.0 GHz - 8 cores - 1+ instruction per clock cycle

2013 - T5 - 3.6 GHz - 16 cores - 1+ instruction per clock cycle

2015 - M7 - 4.1 GHz - 32 cores - 2 instructions per clock cycle

2017 - M8 - 5.0 GHz - 32 cores - 4 instructions per clock cycle

These systems run at top speed, not just the occasional "boost".

Oracle and Google will fight in court over Java AGAIN and this time it's going to the Supremes

David Halko

Re: Why doesn't Alphabet just buy Oracle*

Alphabet did not want to buy the technical writers to re-write the headers documenting the code that they mostly re-wrote.

Buying Oracle is a large price to pay, for copying documentation (code headers) & redistributing it as their own work, to capture a majority of the world's phone market... but that is life

Official: IBM to gobble Red Hat for $34bn – yes, the enterprise Linux biz

David Halko
Angel

Re: kill exadata

[Freddellmeister] "Finally, now IBM can starve out the leech Oracle Linux and kill exadata for good. FTW"

Or... finally, Oracle can kill Oracle Linux and move ExaData to Solaris 11, with it's GNU User Land that feels like Linux.

Oracle offered Intel based Solaris 11 Storage Heads and SPARC Solaris 11 SuperCluster for a very long time!

Leaked pics: Motorola to add 'unpatriotic' 5G to 4G phones with magnets

David Halko
Happy

buy new vs upgrade

[Sureo] "Why would they upgrade an old product rather than sell you a new one?"

Same reason people buy new memory or hard drive or cards for a PC.

Otherwise, they buy an Apple.

Confirmed: Oracle laid off 964 people from former Sun building

David Halko

Re: I need new glasses..

Anon>> So the market for 16- or 32-socket servers are diminishing as x86 gets more powerful. And that is the problem.

Korev> No long ago if you needed 32 cores then you'd have to buy a 32 CPU server; these days a dual socket Intel server can give you the same core count.

2005 - Sun released a 32 vCPU processor... this was truly the beginning.

MongoDB quits Solaris, wants to work on an OS people actually use

David Halko
Go

Solaris 11.3 vs Solaris 12

-- "Morrow says one of the difficulties MongoDB has encountered is figuring out Solaris' future, which he describes as “murky at best."

Solaris 11.4 will roll significant Solaris 12 features

-- That's a reference to Oracle's decision to bin Solaris 12 in favor of rolling updates to Solaris 11.3."

CI development is hardly a "bin" - no suffering through side-grades!

Solaris 12 disappears from Oracle's roadmap

David Halko
Go

Re: "...I'm not sure if this is a major deal"

Anonymous> Wim Coekaerts has suddenly started actively tweeting about Linux on SPARC.

Linux on SPARC has been coming since 2010, at least… with Oracle hiring people to re-write Oracle VM Server for SPARC documentation to remove the exclusive Solaris support in 2015q4.

http://netmgt.blogspot.com/2015/10/sparc-oracle-linux-coming-soon.html

The real question is whether Solaris 11 is the Control and Service Domains or whether Oracle Linux is...

Solaris 11.next plan brings continuous delivery of OS upgrades

David Halko

That is Solaris 11

Tesla to charge for road trip 'leccy, promises it will cost less than petrol

David Halko

Re: hint to Tesla owners

>> "Better to have a Lead Acid battery system for your PV panels"

> How so?

Recycling... Lead Acid Batteries have been recycled quite easily for decades.

You buy batteries, you return them back to the same place you buy them.

They chunk 'em, float 'em, skim 'em, and make new batteries.

Newer batteries are constantly being invented and I am not convinced that the poisonous components are truly being completely recycled on a global basis. I wonder if they are just poisoning our land & water.

Oracle's on-prem cloud plan is mostly Engineered Systems

David Halko

Re: SPARC

> My source tells me that these Engineered Solutions will be SPARC based.

With hardware crypto & decompression engines, could be a good choice!

There was an Oracle job posting some time back, asking for OVM for SPARC training course material to be re-written to support Linux on SPARC...

I wonder if this is the time for introduction?

Containers rated more secure than conventional apps

David Halko
Thumb Up

Re: Wot?

I used Containers/Zones under Solaris for ~10 years... Zones/Containers are:

- Secure, based upon Trusted Solaris extensions, very well tested.

- Not really a Layer, OS Resource Controls make Container/Zone.

- Open Sourced from OpenSolaris, code was vigorously reviewed

Security is improved when Containers/Zones are:

- Deployed on ZFS, corrupted/injected disk blocks are automatically repaired.

- Deployed on ZFS, disk blocks in memory & disk are checksummed

- Deployed on ZFS, disk blocks in memory & disk can be encrypted

- Deployed on ZFS, encryption & correction from memory to external storage

- Presented on Read-Only file system, root in zone can not inject into binaries.

- Holding the Application, migrating a Container/Zone to a new Chassis automatically performs upgrade or downgrade of OS/Application, so only migration permissions are needed (not root in the Zone/Container.)

- Using network presented by Chassis, Zone can't change network to promiscuous mode.

- Running older OS's, since older OS services can be supplied by newer/supported Chassis Global Zone

Security is enhanced with Branded Zones/Containers for legacy OS's:

- Chassis DTrace supports runtime visibility to legacy branded OS's

- Chassis ZFS from Chassis will auto-correct disk blocks experiencing corruption

- ZFS encryption in Container/Zone reduces visibility to data from Chassis

- ZFS encryption in Container/Zone secures data from Chassis to Cloud

Various vendors tweeked Containers/Zones over the past decade to include:

- Containers for: Solaris 8, Solaris 9, Solaris 10, Linux variants

- Docker Support from Samsung/Joyent today and Oracle's roadmap

The Performance & Capability benefits of Containers/Zones are outstanding, never mind security. I deployed my first applications in Containers/Zones back ~2005 because of the cost benefit (cheaper to use Containers/Zones than physical servers and still cheaper than VMware.)

Fujitsu picks 64-bit ARM for Japan's monster 1,000-PFLOPS super

David Halko
Thumb Up

Re: Legacy code in scientific computing

Programming VAX Macro was a dream...

David Halko
Happy

Re: This is why AMD and NVidia are making ARM chips

Windows / ARM = WiRM

Rhymes with Squirm....

Big Cable uses critics' own arguments to slam set-top box shake-up

David Halko
Mushroom

Re: War on Jobs

[DougS] Your argument is stupid and backwards

Anonymous just made a statement. Let's see your argument.

[DougS] If a company makes a lot of money, they aren't going to hire more people

So, if a company loses money or only makes a little money, they can hire more people?

That does not make much sense. I don't see a lot of poor people hiring others.

[DougS] If every town had three cable companies to choose from there would be a lot more people employed in the industry

Multiple competitors exist through media only, today. Wireless, satellite, cable, copper. In the past, there was only Government Telco. We effectively have what you are talking about - there are jobs in all these markets. All are delivering audio, internet, and video services.

Federal Government regulations discourages cable from competing with one another.

http://arstechnica.com/business/2016/05/charter-wont-compete-against-cable-firms-because-it-might-buy-them-later/

[DougS] If cable companies can't force people to pay $200/yr to rent their crappy boxes...

Cable companies are not forcing people to pay for the boxes, today. I had a friend who just ordered Cable Internet, about 2 months ago, and he bought his own box. He just does not get the maximum bandwidth that is available. You can buy cable modems at electronic stores or internet.

[DougS] If you think the FCC shouldn't set standards, why do we have LTE?

ISDN was a set standard, DSL ate it alive after de-regulation. Innovation is the reason the government political appointees should not create standards. Political Government Appointees should register standards, not dictate them. Free Government should be a neutral arbitrator, not a dictator. Government control & dictatorship breeds horrible conditions - look at Venezuela, North Korea, Cuba, etc.

Freedom breeds innovation.

[DougS] ... LTE... AT&T, Verizon... switch to a different phone... iPhone would never have been created... wouldn't license proprietary standard to other companies...

The iPhone was released with 2G network capabilities. The first phones were tied to AT&T. A new iPhone was created for Verizon due to frequencies leased by the company and different network standards. Other carriers followed with different iPhones for different frequencies & protocols. The iPhone was created, even through the technologies were different between the carriers - the carriers DID license them because AT&T made so much money eating the other carriers alive with an innovative product. Your argument is not really solid.

Back circa 2000, I had an internet capable phone with a screen. The difference was the decision by Apple to abandon the WAP standard and adopt other standards.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wireless_Application_Protocol

- - -

I am not sure where you are trying to go with your reasoning. Vendors come up with a product, partner with the carrier, and produce something to be sold. They have always done this.

I had some friends recently released from a set top box manufacturer. High product costs enable high-salary designers & software engineers. Product costs, at $200 a box, is too low for manufacturing in high cost regions.

With human capital costs in Mexico, Eastern Europe, and Asia at 1/5th U.S. costs - Federal Government should not be encouraging the migration of those jobs any faster than they will occur naturally. $1 for every star in the Milky Way Galaxy was added to U.S. employers recently - U.S. Jobs were the casualties.

http://dailysignal.com/2016/05/23/20642-new-regulations-added-in-the-obama-presidency/

The same problem exists in Europe and Japan. The way all these nations tax their people is obscene. Income tax on businesses and employees outsources jobs to lower cost regions. Every time government increases costs through regulation or laws, more jobs disappear.

Where will the next generation of innovators come from, when all the newly trained workers are elsewhere?

The irony is that people vote for their own joblessness. It is a crying shame.

Anonymous was not too far from the truth.

Former Sun CEO Scott McNealy has data on 1/14th of humanity

David Halko

Stateless Client

Character terminals were pretty universal. Tek brought graphics. AT&T brought 1Kx1K monitors where apps could be downloaded into the thin client over the serial channel, which could be upgraded to ethernet. They were not truly stateless.

https://www.brouhaha.com/~eric/retrocomputing/att/5620/5620_faq.html

http://terminals.classiccmp.org/wiki/index.php/AT%26T_630_MTG

The stateless Sun Workstations provided an amazing workplace environment. Pull the box off of the dock, take the MAC address down for inventory, place the MAC in the server, and it worked when broken out of the box onto a desktop. If the server is booted, everything just paused, and continued where it left off. It was truly stateless. Thousands of developers in a warehouse could be maintained by a part time system administrator. All required management software was bundled. Productivity software like multi-media mail, chat/IM, editing, news, etc. was all bundled. High-end desktop desktop publishing was available. Local disks were not required. Network bandwidth requirements were high and WAN was not feasible.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun-3

X Windows offered a great backwards & forwards protocol for thin client computing, it was far superior to dealing with PC's on the desktop, and was in competition to stateless workstations. Maintaining the X Server as the only application on the desktop was fabulous for desktop publishing, trouble ticketing, network & systems management, and web browsing. The protocol was too chatty for WAN connections. Attempts were made with LBX for better WAN performance, state saving for better statelessness, but it was not truly stateless.

The SunRay was a dream come true. It encapsulated both Statelessness and WAN. If the network disconnected, everything was just where it left off upon re-connection. Power-Cycle returned one to a lock screen. Clients lasted practically forever, with keyboards & mice requiring more maintenance. Performance was as fabulous as the server. Multiple web browsers would run for months without ever needing a restart or a crash. Audio & Video were supported. Extremely power efficient. I still use SunRays, even though Oracle eliminated them from their line-up.

I hope for a suitable stateless thin client, in the future. The PC is too thick. IOS was looking fairly stable, but I seem to have issues whenever I do an IOS upgrade now a days. Web Browsers are still somewhat stateful, way too complex, always in need of constant upgrades & patching.

The Netbook concept and Chromebook were good examples of t an internet client, but the software was too thick, making them become obsolete over time, when the hardware was still functional.

I think pervasive internet is offering a good opportunity for a convenient appliance.

If you work on Seagate's performance drives, time to find another job

David Halko

Move to Capacity with Innovation

Rotating Rust manufacturers must find a way to innovate out of this problem.

- Possibly push technology from IOPS (losing war with SSD) into Bandwidth & Capacity (to eat market share from Tape) may guarantee additional years.

- A marketing push for MAID with SSD cache for backup purposes may be a great market to push towards, giving Rotating Rust a practical engineering effort to invest into SSD technologies.

- As odd as it may sound, perhaps engineering larger diameter (but lighter) platters could increase capacity substantially to compete cost effectively with SSD manufacturers [building $1B fabs every time they need to shrink.] Once again, not to replace SSD's, but leveraging SSD's for cache.

- Also, perhaps a focus on long term storage: WORM for 10-20 years. This could give Rotating Rust a way to chew up ladder to supply solutions that traditionally higher level storage providers handle today.

- With The Internet expanding ever so quickly, it must be archived somehow, it will be archived, and government agencies are able to pay a premium since they merely tax more to get their income. With the explosion of IoT, there will be more traffic to be captured than ever before. Seldom accessed, forever stored.

- Integrated storage hierarchy systems, bundling higher amounts of RAM, Super-Capacitors, Batteries, Flash, Rotating Rust in the same case in a modular way. Target long-term storage, again. Perhaps with hot-swappable sub-components (Some efforts being seen on including batteries in consumer items may be a first-step in a long term effort.)

- Push towards higher availability solutions for enterprise servers (i.e. press a button in the front of an integrated Rotating Rust drive to temporarily disable flash to perform a hot-swap in the hard drive chassis, similar hot swap of a thin/long integrated battery that could be removed hot.) Remove innovation support requirements from server OEM's or OS vendors.

Rotating Rust has opportunities, but investment & diversification may prove to be challenging and disrupting to people above & below them in the storage hierarchy.

Net neutrality: Email trail reveals how Prez Obama bent the FCC to his will

David Halko

Re: Nothing new here...except maybe the IT angle.

Within days of the FCC making it illegal to prioritize sensitive (i.e. voice, video) traffic, which could be dropped due to bandwidth hogging protocols (i.e. torrent, ftp, http) - a huge Obama donor decided to announce release their own internet video products.

Once again, Democratic President Obama used the power of his position to repay rich Big Business by raising the costs upon the poor people for their internet access... since the only option to optimizing traffic where enough bandwidth exists is building bigger infrastructure at the cost to everyone.

With Democratic President Obama advocating "pay lanes" with Federal Highway Funds all over the country, to soak the rich for convenience - this was a diametrically opposite result by the Schizophrenic President. It's just more Corporate Welfare, paid for by those struggling to remain out of poverty.

Let's shut down the internet: Republicans vacate their mind bowels

David Halko

Re: He's not completely wrong

@OpsGuy

> Orascom (an Egyptian company) ... have fiber in Syria, I'm pretty sure that they wouldn't have any qualms about letting ISIS use their links.

The Egyptian government control by the Muslim Brotherhood disappeared with the last "bloodless" revolution, to the disdain of Democratic President Obama - that Islamic State alliance dissolved.

The Islamic State is basically "at war" with Egypt now, fighting in Sinai & elsewhere, blowing up stuff. If an Egyptian company grants access, the Egyptian Government has a self-preservation motivation to disrupt it.

> ISIS has been known to create fake non-profits and charities and I wouldn't put it past them to use one to purchase a bunch of Sat Phones and internet subscriptions.

Track them down, shut them down, throw people in jail, fine others, follow money payments, keep it up indefinitely. When terrorist sympathizers understand sympathizing can result in loss of homes & apartments (making housing payments for families from prison is tough) - resolution begins.

Oracle hardwires encryption and SQL hastening algorithms into Sparc M7 silicon

David Halko

Decompression... more than just SQL

The application for decompression goes beyond straight Oracle RDBMS.

- Live migration of VM's (LDom's & Zones) between Hypervisors

- Speed up Open Source databases sitting on top of compressed ZFS filesystem

- Larger bandwidth of normal data communicating from a back-end system to a Cloud provider

- Reduced cost for syncronization between storage at diverse locations using hardware decompression

When compression/decompression is tied with hardware encryption/decryption - secure & cheap is hard to beat!

Solaris planned the compression/decompression prior the encryption/decryption engines in components like ZFS... so this has been getting done in software, for a long time. Nice to get a boost in CPU power AND get a higher percentage of that CPU back for application work!

Empires of the mind: Oracle digs deep on cloud

David Halko

"Oracle yesterday released its Big Data Preparation Cloud Service – Spark-based analytics..."

SPARC...

http://sparc.org/

Look, no handsets: How to do telephony without a phone

David Halko

SIP Trunks: Will Net Neutrality put them out of business?

Net Neutrality may put a hurting on SIP trunks over the Internet.

http://transition.fcc.gov/Daily_Releases/Daily_Business/2015/db0312/FCC-15-24A1.pdf

"A person engaged in the provision of broadband Internet access service, insofar as such person is so engaged, shall not engage in paid prioritization."

Phone or Cable Company now have been given a legal way to drive Americans back to lucrative voice billing. All an ISP has to do is upgrade their Internet infrastructure slightly slower than forecasted large frame data usage until large packets/frames interferes with QoS needs of small voice (or video chat) packets. SIP over Internet and VoIP providers (Vonage, Magic Jack, etc.) will not have a legal option to purchase priority or QoS, users will flock to Carriers & Cable as quality QoS degrades, those companies may experience poor customer performance, and go out of business... current falling voice prices will stabilize & rise.

Phone and Cable now have a way to offer high-definition video (over a dedicated, non-internet channel) which Internet providers may find it impossible to compete with. Once again, the ISP merely has to choose not to upgrade their Internet infrastructure and only upgrade their own Video delivery infrastructure.

Video chat companies (like Microsoft and Apple) may not be able to provide a quality product, while the the ISP can provide their own "dedicated" non-internet channels! It feels like pre-internet ISDN networks all over again, maybe we'll get Video Phones like the old AT&T monopoly days!

Amazing feat of political engineering, at the highest levels of the government, immediately after a huge election disaster - to tilt the playing field against from SIP over Internet, VoIP over Internet, Video Chat over Internet, and Video over Internet providers. With Net Neutrality, there is no longer a legal way for QoS dependent service providers to "purchase" their way out of capacity constraints.

Capacity constraints WILL happen with 1080p, 4K, and 3D streaming! Hopefully that content will come soon, but now the new high-capacity content will most likely be guaranteed to occur over monopoly ISP providers, instead of by innovative small providers.

When the government makes it fiscally beneficial for ISP's to delay infrastructure upgrades to the competition, in order to make more money, and in order to put competition out of business - that can't be a good thing. The opportunities for consumer abuse and innovation suppression are endless.

I am only on page 7 of this 400 page document... not looking forward to the other "goodies". :-(

The internet just BROKE under its own weight – we explain how

David Halko

Re: IPv6 like OSI is far more complex than necessary

> Give each country its own unique 2 byte address prefix for additional connections once the IPv4 range is used up then additional values for large countries when their first prefix is near full.

Sounds elegant, with exception to cellular phones with internet connectivity, vehicles which drive across bondaries, phones & cars sold between countries, light bulbs & door locks inside the cars & airplanes & mobile homes crossing national boundaries, equipment on artificial satellites around the earth, equipment on The Moon, equipment on Mars, ships at sea, airplanes in flight, equipment on the surface of the ocean in international water, space probes floating to/outside the edges of the solar system, ip addressable key fobs for every lock on a every person's key ring, every smart component on an airplane checking into satellites, ISIS carving out new countries from old while killing off lots of formerly potentially used IPv6 address block holders along the way, etc.

Are the items I mentioned show-stoppers? Absolutely not. There are countless proprietary protocols, in conjunction to NAT, to network these devices today. I am merely suggesting that artificial boundaries associated with nation-states may not necessarily be the best way to handle address allocation because of the expansion of intelligent devices. I personally don't think it is a bad idea, but it may be "short-sighted", and complexity will grow as DNS does (which this article criticizes in some large quantity of words.)

One may suspect "Ivory Tower" engineers had discussed analogues to these possibilities. Once the IPv6 address space becomes universal - one might not expect it will not be long before all those proprietary ways of networking (and hiding under TCP/IP) of individual devices or device components will dissolve. NAT is only one such hiding mechanism. M2M not dependent upon IP will consolidate into IPv6... and those devices dwarf the number of people in the world.

Gartner mages throw deduping backup appliance bones, claim EMC's in lead

David Halko
IT Angle

Where is Oracle/Sun/StorageTek? CommVault?

This Gartner magic quadrant looks really out of left-field.

Where is Oracle/StorageTek?

Oracle/Sun had been doing dedup ZFS for about a decade and Oracle/Sun's StorageTek released deduplication back in 2008...

http://vmblog.com/archive/2008/04/07/sun-adds-new-de-duplication-capabilities-to-leading-virtual-tape-library-storage-portfolio.aspx

What happened to CommVault?

The Reg was wondering why others were not doing Tape DeDupe back in 2011, mentioning IBM and Quantum were theorizing at the time (yet these companies appeared in the Gartner list?)

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/07/06/tape_industry_lacks_innovation/

CommVault have been recognized in Gartner as a backup leader for nearly a half-decade.

http://www.commvault.com/itleaders?mq=cvm_i

No haters please, just really curious...

Report pegs Apple for October smartwatch release

David Halko
Meh

Apple basically had a Smart Watch years ago and disco'ed it

"Seems to me Apple are recognising users really won't be interested in horizontal market general purpose smart watches."

Apple released an iPod Nano 6th generation in September 2010 with a 24 hour of battery life during constant music playback (as long as there was a full charge, no EQ enabled, and stock headphones were in use!)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ipod_nano

It was sold for 2 years and people would buy an wrist band for it in order to turn it into a watch.

http://www.hdaccessory.com/servlet/the-5056/Apple-iPod-Nano-6th/Detail?gclid=CNmEgI6d7b4CFeIWMgodxnIATw

I knew students who would run around with these things in schools all day long, they eventually bought real iPod Touches and then bought iPhones... and these wrist-mountable units were discontinued 2 years later.

"For now wearables have to be focused on a real and enduring need. Health and fitness tracking is highly valued by those who do it."

One might suspect the iPod Nano 6g was the first widely circulated smart-watch commercial prototype... here we are, 2 years later, and Apple is thinking about another. I have friends with iPhones strapped to their arm during exercise, and they absolutely love how it measures speed, steps, mapping progress, etc.

I don't really know whether this device without a GPS and high-resolution display will be able to replace an iPhone. There will have to be something competitive included in an Apple Smart Watch that the iPhone does not offer and that a competitive mobile phone will not offer... I frankly don't know what an Apple Smart Watch can offer than an iPhone will not, even in fitness.

US.gov - including NASA et al - quits internet. Is the UN running it now?

David Halko
Paris Hilton

Subsidy & access to insurance... not quite what it seems...

The article author writes, "The reforms came into force today, allowing millions of poor Americans access to low-cost, state-backed health insurance."

Millions of poor Americans already had government-backed health insurance for generations - it is called Medicaid.

Millians of poor Americans already had state-backed health insurance, offered on a state-by-state level, depending on where they choose to live, and how they choose to vote.

The first Federal Government funded Health Insurance plans for the "uninsurable" were offered many months ago. The subsidy funding "dried up" with weeks, and the plan was already closed to new participants. This exchange is for a class of people that were once considered "insurable".

The law actually compels employers (who did not get a waver by The President's appointees) to offer health insurance to full time employees. This has been forcing government, educational, and cost sensitive retail institutions to force employees to part-time status, cutting their wages.

The law actually compels non-poor people, through a tax penalty, to purchase health insurance, who might not otherwise have health insurance. This means, the people who used to be working middle class, but not poor enough for Medicaid, to be taxed at the end of the year, placing additional pressure on former middle-class families.

The law raises the cost of medical devices (i.e. splints, machines, etc.) consumed by people. This raises the cost of medical care for everyone.

Sure, there will be a subsidy for those families, but will it be the equivalent to the 25%-50% of the salary, that they lost due to The Affordable Health Insurance Act?

Sure, there will be a subsidy for some families, but will it be the equivalent of the taxes they will pay for the medical devices that they need in their treatment process?

The Federal Government "taking over" student loans and encouraging students to take out more loans for college/university, regardless of aptitude or likelihood of being able to complete their degree, was supposed to be a major source of (guaranteed) funding for the Affordable Health Care Act. Was this a reasonable thing to do?

The number of uninsured, in the United States, is projected by the Congressional Budget Office, to remain about the same after the law. Some people are asking, why all of this cost & effort, when there will be no-net-change in the people being covered?

The President exempted the Federal Government from the Affordable Care Act, which cut into a guaranteed funding source. It is illegal for Congress to pass a law, exempting themselves, but it is not corruption for Congress to pass a law and have the Executive Branch exempt them from it, drying up subsidy funding (tax) sources?

Over 50% of polled Americans disagree with Obamacare, many of them for may more reasons that above, but The Republicans taking the "populist" role may not be as politically expedient as they desire.

David Halko
Angel

Strange Reporting... Seemingly Opposite Positions!

The writer suggests, "Republicans wanted to see a public healthcare scheme dubbed Obamacare delayed by at least a year - something the Democrats just wouldn't agree to"

ummm... not exactly...

Actually, aspects of the bill have already been delayed by the Democratic President, meaning President Obama is technically breaking the law, but the Democratic Senate have not impeached Democratic President Obama for not following the law (which the Democratic Senate penned.)

Ironically, the Democratic Senate and Democratic President Obama refused to pass the suggestion by the Republican House of Representatives, the proposed extension, which would allow The President off-the-hook for technically breaking the law. The legal "relaxation" of the law was rejected by the Democrats, wholesale, leaving President Obama legally liable, and allowing the government to be partially shut down!

Does the Democratic Senate want to follow up with articles of Impeachment, for every law item that has been illegally delayed by the President Obama, of their own political party? Will the media hold the U.S. President accountable, for the illegal delays instituted by the Democratically controlled Executive branch?

Honestly, this is beyond crazy! Why can't these people just do something according to the letter of the Law and their Constitution, instead of always doing things illegally?

If it was a Republican President, one might expect the EXACT SAME THING to play out: Republican House trying to pass a law to give their President legal wiggle-room, and a Democratic Senate trying to block it... but the Democratic Senate would already be moving to impeach the Republican President.

This comedy never ceases to amaze me!!!

Sun sets on Oracle VDI products

David Halko
Thumb Down

Re: workstation price, entry-terminal functionality.. was redundant on day one.

> didn't even 3278 have graphics terminal support.

IBM 3278?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_3270

The SunRay was a 100% graphics terminal.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun_Ray

You can even use web browsers and watch YouTube on an original 1999 SunRay 1 units - today!

Try to watch a YouTube video on a 1999 era off-the-shelf PC, today, never mind an IBM 3278.

SunRay - very graphical, virus-free, low power, silent, solid-as-a-rock.

David Halko
IT Angle

Re: Architecture

Once you set them up, they just run.

I have 3 on my desktop at the office and another at my home.

- at the office, all 3 run operation center displays, shut off the sleep functionality, and draw very little power

- at the home, the 1 goes to sleep, draws nearly no power (the UPS has a power meter) and when I strike a key, instantly appears with a login prompt, with a small jump in consumption on the UPS.

SunRay's enabled beautifully implemented architectures with very simple lifecycle support.

When Sun decided early on to create Servers and abandon Workstations, the SunRay line was separated too far away from Solaris. Oracle had an opportunity to fix this as well as a variety of other broken initiatives.

http://netmgt.blogspot.com/2012/07/detecting-sun-in-solar-system.html

A SunRay GUI should have been built right into the "root" administrative consoles of Solaris Servers, instead of using install scripts as part of the SunRay Software. This lack built-in integration into the other product sets (i.e. Sun Solaris... and later Oracle Solaris & Oracle Linux) probably contributed to the demise of the SunRay.

Review: Belkin Thunderbolt Express Dock

David Halko
Thumb Up

Thunderbolt: External PCIe awesome, Cables Expensive

The external PCIe ports that Thunderbolt offers is really awesome.

http://netmgt.blogspot.com/search/label/Thunderbolt

Thunderbolt is kind of like the eSATA solution for hard drives, but is far more flexible (i.e. extending the systems PCI bus, not just extending a low-end SATA storage bus) - and people pay $$$ for it.

Technology like I/O expansion cages was previously only available on higher-end systems, mid-range servers, and mainframes. Now, external bus cages can be attached (i.e. ExpressCard), left behind on a desktop as if the person has a desktop unit, but just pop out the Thunderbolt cable on the laptop when ready to go home. Great for audio, video, performance studios, traveling performance studios, etc. This is really pretty interesting technology!

Thunderbolt is pretty clearly not aimed at least-common-denominator computing - external I/O card cages, heavy MIDI cabling, large numbers of monitors, etc. with the ability to have a portable form-factor are not the norm.

Cables are expensive though, that is a bummer... but bidding on eBay starts at $0.99 for budget minded! :-)

Oracle to resell Fujitsu 'Athena' Sparc64-X servers ... worldwide

David Halko
Go

Re: What's the point? - roadmaps completed!

Mad Mike --- Sun couldn't come up with anything intelligent around roadmaps (at least ones that stuck!!) Now, Oracle are doing the same.

It looks like the roadmaps from Sun are pretty much being completed by Oracle... and the Oracle roadmap appears to be getting completed.

While the in-fighting and apparent under-funding of Solaris (vs Oracle Linux) seems to be an interesting discussion (uncertain of the references), it seems pretty clear that the SPARC / Solaris road map has been executed upon very well over the past number of years.

This being said, being the fastest out of all the competition is nothing to sneeze at, especially if it was done on "the cheap"!

When IBM catches up with the Power 8 and Intel releases their 8 socket capable chip - it will make things more interesting. (Oh yes, you can make 8 or more socket Intel platforms, but they are very expensive, with a lot of latency to deal with... and Power 8 was on the roadmap to be released in less than a year, but I suspect it is unfortunately farther off than that.)

Oracle and Fujitsu have released some nice processors recently. It is good to see the competition return to the marketplace!

Ellison aims his first Oracle 'mainframe' at Big Blue

David Halko
Go

SPARC T5 - Well Done!

Single thread speed on a T5 S3 core is 30% faster than the previous T4 core...

Double the sockets per single glue-less chassis from 4 to 8...

Double the cores per single socket from 8 to 16...

Double the threads (vcpu's) per socket from 64 to 128...

Quad 10-Gigbit Ethernet copper twistet pair per chassis...

A single piece of T5 SPARC silicon (v.s. gluing together multi-chip modules)...

There is really nothing like this in the industry - truly ground-breaking.

This is really an amazing processor, an amazing platform!

(The M5 processor has me curious, what is the use-case for big-cache with fewer cores?)

JBoss is juicy, but Vert.x could bring sexy back to Red Hat

David Halko
Go

Vert.x and Node.js

> Vert.x could also eclipse the industry’s most recent best hope, Node.js

It is sad that Server-side JavaScript from Netscape never took-off in popularity - it ran everywhere. Perhaps JavaScript was too immature, at the time.

Node.js has an unfortunate & unhealthy dependance upon Google's [non-portable] V8 engine while Vert.x sits on Java. It is great that Node.js sits on Joyent cloud, but Vert.x has the potential to sit on more public & private clouds than Node.js can ever exist on.

Fujitsu says sayonara to semiconductor biz, thousands of staff

David Halko
Facepalm

Re: meanwhile, at Oracle...

swscrad> Sun Microsystems pretty much gave up its own chip development and server manufacturing a few years ago, letting development partner Fujitsu do all the heavy lifting

Not quite correct. T4 and T4 Servers release illustrates continued non-Fujitsu SPARC development.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SPARC_T4

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oracle_SPARC_T-series_servers

The purchase of Afara Websystems facilitated continued the lower-end SPARC servers development.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Afara_Websystems

Oracle's mighty Sparc plug fries Fujitsu, bigs up new processor

David Halko
Happy

Re: Good for customers? YES!

apleszko, I prefer Solaris over Linux on SPARC - you are not the only one who prefers the binary compatibility.

Fujitsu seems to be taking more of an early Sun approach. Fujitsu's educational wins will foster a developer ecosystem on SPARC Linux. This is a good sign, since these investments will be in place for years with many thousands of students finding their familiarity with it.

This being said, it could be a different ecosystem in 8 more years.

David Halko

Re: Lies, damn lies and marketing - Look at the Numbers: Cores & Threads

Jesper posts, "if you state that your current hardware has 6 times the throughput of your previous generation, that doesn't mean that for one single application"

ZFS on Solaris on SPARC (M4 & T5) are not "one trick ponies" like the T1. Did you follow the link?

http://netmgt.blogspot.com/2012/11/can-oracle-really-increase-throughput.html

The need to move the RDBMS to the storage system is not required. Run ZFS, add a PCIe write cache, add a PCIe read cache, apply ZFS with hardware compression for I/O throughput , and ANY database will get massive read, write, and I/O acceleration benefits. Other applications will see the benefit, too.

The question really is: can each SPARC M4/T5 thread be engineered for equivalent throughput to SPARC VII+ thread?

Oracle demonstrated 6x per-thread improvement with the T4. Yes, it seems possible with M4.

Will Oracle drive "8+" sockets with the M4 processor? I doubt Oracle will dash high-margin "8+" socket machines to the rocks, so once again, it seems possible.

What technically do you see as the problem?

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