Posts by Art Jannicelli

H-1B fraud consultancies grow, with application abuse openly discussed online

Easy fix! Blind auction

I read about this solution elsewhere that is great for US workers...

Blind auction system.

US corps argue they NEED H1B to fill jobs in the US due to a lack of applicants...

BS. They have a lack of applicants willing to work for under market wages at the whim of their employer who can deport them.

So to fix this, you make US companies bid against each other in a Blind auction system. They would have to bid for open H1B slots. If a company truly could not find an AI engineer in the US for $300k... Shouldn't they be willing to $200k down to ensure they get a visa slot?

Like conservatives love to spew, Let the market decide!

This would incentivize companies to look harder onshore, but if they truly needed offshore help they could pay to secure it over a company just looking to underpay skilled labor.

SpaceX reportedly fed up with providing free Starlink to Ukraine

Let's be real here... How much does bandwidth actually cost?

Unless he is giving the dishes away for free at scale... I doubt this that much of an actual cost.

And of course there was the alleged meeting before he announced this with Putin...

macOS Server discontinued after years on life support

Re: If only...

Lest you forget irq's...

Surface Laptop Go: Premium feel for a mid-range price, but Microsoft's Apple-like range once meant more than this

Re: Shite warranty...

M$ told us we should have bought an extended warranty to cover physical damage. We are an American company.

Shocking no one, not enough foreigners applied for H-1B visas this year so US govt ran a second lottery

Re: Oh NOSSSSSS!

Makes US companies prove it.. Go from a lottery to a blind auction.

I consult and have been to well over 100 American IT departments big and small. The vast majority of H1B's are mistreated & underpaid who could be replaced by highly compensated Americans.

If companies had to pay a premium for a H1B allotment they would only use them as intended (for extraordinarily rare skill sets) and would value the people they hired on H1B's.

Detroit cops employed facial recognition algos that only misidentifies suspects 96 per cent of the time

4% of the time... it works every time.

Dell to unleash hybrid server/storage boxen that can run virtual machines

The rise of NVME...

I have seen this coming for 5+ years. They could be prepping the Datrium model to go main stream...

Picture running your VM's in NVME, with a copy/snapshot/journal being replicated down to SATA disks on the server, that is protected by Erasure coding, that is deduped and compressed in a global data map. Then your backups and replication jobs target this second tier of data to avoid impacting production.

Right now, a lot of the HCI vendors are still suffering from architecture written for Hybrid HCI, that still relies on a cache to receive the data before stripping it to disk. Of course with NVME this is completely unnecessary and backward since NVME is directly addressable as memory.

I think this is also why we are seeing the rise of D-HCI from HPE (Nimble +Proliant), Netapp (Solidfire Element + Server), and others... As again away to prepare to run VM's in NVME, and have another tier ready to offload Dedupe, Compression and EC.

So my prediction is Dell will be announcing a platform that is optimized for NVME as storage, and an additional D-HCI platform.

RAND report finds that, like fusion power and Half Life 3, quantum computing is still 15 years away

Re: Xpenology

Captcha is an abomination.

A programmer friend of mine, came up with a far superior solution 15 years ago...

He would challenge a user with 3 questions with text boxes...

What color is an Orange?

True or False, adding two and two, adds up to five?

True or False, False becomes before the word True in the dictionary?

A computer does not understand context anymore than an image. Asking simple questions that rely on simple content/text versus math are at least as effective as ridiculous captcha's but far easier for humans to use...

This is based on the computer science logic, that what is easy for humans is hard for computers, and what is easy for computers is hard for humans.

Of course... The PHB went with his gut that captcha was a better solution...

Samsung calls it a day on liquid-crystal display, says quantum dot is really hot

Is this a paid Samsung piece?

Go to a store and compare a QLED to an LG OLED. There is no question which looks better.

I actually own both (bought a QLED in superbowl 2018, LG OLED last black friday). High brightness on the QLED makes black more grey... Though the Samsung app store has more choices. I do HATE you have to login before you can launch any app, and sometimes it can take literal minutes for it to login; as a result I have either a roku or Chromecast on every Samsung to bypass this annoyance.

Yes burn in is a concern with OLED... But my LG and roku has screen savers that kick in minutes so I doubt that will ever be an issue for me.

Credit Karma's enriched: Turbo Tax daddy Intuit snaps up personal finance platform for $7bn

God damn it...

Credit karma rolled out a totally free online tax filing service this year, that I used and was equal to turbo tax. I was looking forward to never paying for turbo tax again.

They did this to kill a competitor.

Tech CEO thrown in the clink for seven years for H-1B gang-master role: Crim farmed out foreign staff as cheap labor

Re: Xpenology

I read an article a couple of years ago arguing the H1B system should be switched from a lottery to a blind bid auction.

If your company claims you cannot find the talent you need at any price in the US... you should have to put your money where your mouth is.

At the moment the H1B system feels like it is for companies looking for DBA's, Devops, and Architects they don't want to pay over $30 an hour for.

If companies had to bid for this talent, they would look onshore first with fair compensation.

China changes its mind on Bain's Toshiba chip takeover plans

Vulture capitalism

If Bain follows their usual MO...

Borrow against the name, extract massive consulting fees... Then liquidate... They will not be competing for long.

You know 'Americanize' them.

https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/greed-and-debt-the-true-story-of-mitt-romney-and-bain-capital-20120829

Spy-on-your-home Y-Cam cameras removes free cloud storage bit

Farking FTP!

What really grinds my gears...

Look for FTP support...

When IP cameras first came to market they all supported FTP alerting and storage.

So for us advanced users who do not want to pay for additional cloud services we could just use our own NAS. For me, I had a sweet setup where my cameras would send all alert images to my Synology, then it would sync those to S3, OneDrive, and google cloud.

This black friday I wanted to add a doorbell cam, and 1080p cams. Almost none of them support FTP, they all advertise cloud for pay storage. One camera I bought even advertised FTP support... Then when I got it their latest firmware removed the feature in favor of pay for cloud storage!

I get it Cloud is the easy button for 99% of consumers, but for business and advanced users cloud is unnecessarily insecure and expensive. FTP is easy to implement and can be kept off the internet.

Woman rescues red pepper Donald Trump from vegetarian chilli

Re: I'll trump that ...

Heil Cheetolini!

IT security pro salaries: Silicon Valley? You'd be better off in Minneapolis

Re: Xpenology

I have also worked in California and Minnesota for over a year in the later, most of my life in the former...

I can tell you... even with the pay bump I only lasted a year. It is COLD there. When I lived there in 2013 we had 3 days over 20 degrees between October and February... How do I know? Car wash lines are wrapped around the block when temp reaches over 20 and you can wash the salt off.

There is a thick layer of frost on everything for what feels like half the year. I wore heavy boots every day and still fell down at least once a week from slipping on ice.

The taxes are also pretty close to California. Rent is not cheap. Also the traffic is TERRIBLE in rush hour, like california bad in the Twin Cities. The city is setup with 4 N/S and 4 E/W freeways and they will be dark red at 5pm...

Another thing to note is your employer will have no sympathy for snow days. I had clients I had to visit with more than a foot of snow on the freeway and was still expected to be on time and from talking to other people working their my experience was not unique. So you will need a good snow vehicle; and by the way studded tires are illegal so you pretty much have to go AWD. Also don't forget your boot's and long john's.

On the plus side there is good food there. The people are very friendly, and enterprise grade IT people are in short supply so it is an employees market. By the middle of your first winter 20 degrees will become tshirt whether. The big muddy is a lot of fun in the summer too.

So good to MN, if you love snow, don't mind cold and think the pay bump is god enough... but do not take it lightly... MN gave me a new definition of cold, your nose hair's freeze instantly at -20...

Scale Computing is a tiny fish in a small pond. Fancy its chances?

Re: Xpenology

Thank you Trevor. He reached out to Scale and determined my client was running a different pre-scribe OS and experienced a known issue of that particular OS that is not applicable to this product.

Back in the late winter of 2013 I had the displeasure of dealing with a Scale disaster, the client lost a single disk in the array. No problem, they got a replacement disk and inserted it. The whole array locked up and would not respond on a Friday night after 5pm. We spent the entire weekend on DR, Scale support tried a different disk, sending us a whole new node, nothing would bring the array back online.

Long story short we had to take the disk to an expensive drive rescue place to have the platters relocated to a new disk. Scale support was then able to get the array back online without any data loss (other than what we had to reintegrate from DR). Scale never came back with a good answer on why/how it happened. My client migrated off ASAP and it is now used as dumb storage.

After that horrible experience with support and their hardware I'd think hard about using them for production data.

Data breach at biz that manages Cisco, F5 certs plus many others

Monopoly

Observe the free market in all it's Monopolistic grandeur!

According to a manager at VMworld who handles their certification program, prometric is getting out of the IT cert business... So Vue has told VMware go funk itself it will Procter the exams it wants too.

What does this mean? Well other than VCP the more advanced VMware exams were mostly lab driven. This manager told me Vue has informed them they most roll back lab questions because their testing computers are not capable of running labs; ergo the 85 question in 85 minutes VCP 6 exam. VMware's future plan had been to switch to a mostly lab based model for all certs.

I agree certs are a crock of shite and demonstrate only the most basic understanding of a technology, especially the low level ones. But I was optimistic with the VCAP exams that at least one vendor was turning the corner toward meaningful certs. Thanks to the VUE monopoly we are doomed more of the same... marketing tests indefinitely.

This breach is also indicative of a company that knows they have a monopoly why worry about a breach? Not like they have any other choice consumers or vendors.

Lastly, I had an issue earlier this year with my VMwareID was not matching up with vue ID. So I called Vue support, the Indian gentlemen told me over and over 'The problem is your VMware ID should be the same as your VUE ID.' I replied 'Yes that is why I called, please fix this' his reply 'Sir your ID's should match' my reply, 'Please fix it' 'Sir your ID's should match' this went on for 5 minutes. I asked so speak to a supervisor he said he could not.

So I tried their chat support... They told me to call support.

I had to executive email bomb via linked in their international support and the Head of VMware training & certs. VMware was able to track the problem and get VUE to fix it. Evidently when VMware integrated with VUE for VCP6; VUE used the same cell on their DB for CISCO and VMware ID's they assumed no one would have both *FACEPALM* so it took time for VUE to realize this and then make a new column... in the mean time if you had an existing ID for both there was a good chance it was messed up in the process and VUE left it up to the consumer to contact them to TRY to get it fixed.

VUE is a terrible company with a terrible product. But hey we have no other choice.

NetApp revenues and profits decline again despite positive spin

As a consultant I have seen the opposite in the field. Our customers buy Netapp because they already have it or they get a promotional price.

I love the cluster mode cli but the transition is expensive and it is not an easy learning curve.

Most importantly to your point though, no IT shop seems to have the dedicated man hours for a dedicated storage admin let alone architect to implimentation let alone managed the advanced snap features, replication, dedupelication. Yes in theory all of those are easy to setup... but there is always a learning curve along with care and feeding to leverage advanced features... then there is the dreaded Netapp scheduling conflicts that must be carefully managed or you risk dragging performance to a crawl.

Lately QA has not been very good on new releases eitheir.

If Netapp customers cannot afford to run advanced features then they might as well buy the cheapest competitor.

Netapp still does not have a good option vs Nutanix which is my current favorite platform.

Synology systematically soups up filer software

Re: Xpenology

They actually have Mon-Fri phone support, and next day hardware replacement.

On a cost per/gb with Phone support & next day hardware replacement, plus an excellent OS they are hard to beat at home or in the office for commodity NAS.

Cisco network kit warning: Watch out for malware in the firmware

Paywall downside

Hey Cisco... This is why you need to release your updates from behind a pay wall. If admins could download updates and even the Cisco VPN client without having to go through TAC hell for access... Maybe kits like these would be a non-issue since admins would not be trying to download updates/clients from random places on the internet.

HP is in the process of making this same mistake.

Virtualization software to crush server market

Small Business and the short sited

The last company I worked for had a farm of about 75 Virtualized Servers. It saved the company a lot of money by allowing us to transition off of older platforms and consolidate rack space and power. As mentioned above because we ran our VM's from our SAN we rarely had any down time even in the event of hardware failure on a host node. For this company it was a great thing.

However, in small business and/or companies where non-technical management holds the check book and is most concerned with quarterly numbers; VM just doesn't add up to them. In these companies they would rather get a bottom of the top of the line server from Dell or HP that can be upgraded later if needed. As opposed to dropping the large investment required to purchase an ESX box capable hosting 10 VM's plus licensing. Not to mention the need to have failover capability and optimally a SAN. Moving to VM is an enterprise level upgrade.

Therefore, I would be curious to know what percentage of low end servers are purchased by small business vs. enterprise customers. If anything I think Dell and HP can depend on small business to maintain their demand for low end servers indefinitely. Small Business and the short sited are just not interested in making the upfront investment required to create a solid VM infrastructure.

If Google is a Russian spy op, when will it buy U-Haul?

The other low cost Self-service hauler

Don't forget about Budget truck rental they have comparable prices to Uhaul and much better service.

I actually met a regional sales manager for Uhaul and he admitted that Uhaul makes it's money doing commercial rentals, so they put their very best equipment and people on making commercial customers happy.

However, rather then having worthless stock left over when a truck no longer meets commercial standards it is demoted to the consumer fleet. This all makes sense why Uhaul treats consumers like crap with poor service and trucks.

We just have to hope Budget doesn't get itself too wrapped up in commercial clients before it starts doing the same thing.

For the record I have rented Uhaul 3 times and every time it was a fiasco, problems with the vehicles and they rented the truck I had reserved online cause someone arrived before me needing a truck, so essentially they got to hold my money and I got to wait a few days till they found me a truck.

I have rented from Budget truck rental many times and there service, reservation, and trucks have been outstanding. i have actually had more problems with Budget car rental.

Microsoft Silverlight to copy Flash video tricks, Adobe responds

DIVX forgotten

If you haven't already you really ought to download the DIVX player. The quaility and compression are vastly superior to Flash or WMP. They even have their own web 2.0 site.

It's a shame they haven't been noticed by the main stream. After using this player you'll never go to youtube again.