* Posts by Lusty

1683 publicly visible posts • joined 12 Jun 2009

NetWare sales revive in China thanks to that man Snowden

Lusty
Black Helicopters

ROFL

Thank goodness Attachmate isn't a 'merkin company otherwise they'd be subject to the same laws as MS...

Iron out the kinks and all-flash servers just might have a future

Lusty

Diskless

It's not diskless if it's stuffed full of disks! I assume you meant "spinning disks"

Windows 10 feedback: 'Microsoft, please do a deal with Google to use its browser'

Lusty

WTF?

Never mind Chrome vs Firefox, didn't we JUST finish moaning at MS to get spyware OFF of default builds on OEM systems? Why would anyone now ask for spy software to be included. Chrome isn't all that much better than IE, and at least IE isn't writing down your every move...

Re-light my diode: Trio of boffins scoop physics Nobel for BLUE LEDs

Lusty

Re: Curious

"Did Edison just go, hmm bit of wire, bit of electric, hey presto light? No he spent a long time trying out different methods."

Maybe not, but Edison wan't a physicyst either. As someone else said, another Nobel prize would have been appropriate for the outcome, but the physics of LEDs is well known already so this wouldn't appear to be much of a breakthrough in that field.

ARMs head Moonshot bodies: HP pops Applied Micro, TI chips into carts

Lusty

Re: Ubuntu - Seriously?

From what I was told on a course recently, replacing the OS may not be as easy as all that as these blades are pretty bespoke to the task. The idea being that if you need one to do X then they design one around X with hardware and software. If you have a software stack they can design and test you a blade in a couple of months ready for deployment so it's quite flexible despite the inflexibility.

Netflix bullish after six-country European INVASION

Lusty

Re: Scifi

Time to go Netflix then :) not sure they have Universe yet but I can only assume it's in their plans

Lusty

Scifi

seems pretty good on Netflix now, they have all of Star Trek, Stargate SG1 and Atlantis and several others I've forgotten. I never seem to get to the end of one series before they've added something else I want to watch. I'm still getting through Mythbusters after nearly a year of watching it almost every day.

iPhone 6: The final straw for Android makers eaten alive by the data parasite?

Lusty

Re: lets look at this in another way..

"My Android phone can do 100% of anything useful I've ever seen anyone do with an iPhone"

Try looking on fitness/running/cycling forums, there are quite a few happy Android users shouting the exact opposite of what you said there. Compatibility is the issue, with many and various bits of third party hardware. Primarily because until a few months ago Android didn't support Bluetooth LE at all, and so fitness hardware manufacturers have been slow to port any of their apps across.

Lusty

Re: lets look at this in another way..

@QXL I'll be interested to hear your comments after using the software on that phone which matches the specs of your iPhone. Hardware specs are very easy to replicate and improve upon but user experience is a whole other ballgame, and the reason Nokia used to be king of phones in the feature phone times. Many of us fell for the specs of competing models and regretted that we had to spend a whole year with a POS phone that had great hardware but couldn't use it. For instance, my Samsung D900 could take 1GB SD cards, yet their software only allowed me to play a maximum 20 MP3 files in total spread over a maximum 4 playlists.

That's not the only example of my poor purchasing decisions with phones so these days I'm much more careful about jumping ship. Luckily work have given me Android and Windows phones so I haven't needed to use my money to realise what I prefer for a while.

Lusty

Re: Really can't get this

"costs 50 to make"

You're confusing manufacturing cost with the cost of producing a device. The R&D budget required to produce a top end phone is enormous, and those costs must be recovered alongside the component costs. For example, the iPhone has two custom designed processors and custom memory chips (to reduce size) with a unique flash and custom designed camera. The people designing these things didn't do it for fun, they did it because they get paid to, and because Apple, Samsung etc. pay for the very expensive machines they need to design, prototype and produce them. In addition to those, someone needs to design the exterior of the device, the packaging, write documentation, support end users and many other costs. Every single phone design also needs to go through costly approval processes in every region it will be sold, otherwise it wouldn't be legal to sell them.

but yeah, they only cost like 50 bucks to make so why do they cost so much...

Stray positrons caught on ISS hint at DARK MATTER source

Lusty

Re: Pedant alert

Cartographers say datum all the time...

Bonking with Apple has POUNDED mobe operators' wallets

Lusty

Re: Apple pay...

"But what Apple will do except skim the cream????"

Apple wrote the software stack, spent years researching how people want to use their phone to pay, designed the hardware and brought to market a working solution where many, many others have failed. They will also do the ongoing support of the system and possibly reduce the number of cards the credit card companies need to issue, thereby saving them some money.

The banks on the other hand simply change two lines in a database...

Lusty

Re: Apple NFC

" the iPhone's Bluetooth stack is so limited as to be useless"

Compared to Android which only started supporting BTLE 4 in version 4.3 this year and even then only on a limited number of handsets?

Lusty

Re: Apple NFC

"Useful things like tap to pair Bluetooth speakers"

No need, Bluetooth 4.1 includes tap to pair and doesn't require NFC to do so. Apple have the hardware in iPhone 4S and above to achieve this and will probably update iOS to allow it as soon as the standard is complete later in the year.

NHS grows a NoSQL backbone and rips out its Oracle Spine

Lusty

Re: NoSQL I thought was Not Only SQL

"Normally, no. Hence the name...."

You mean the name which is short for "not only SQL"?

Apple's big bang: iPhone 6, ANOTHER iPhone 6 Plus and WATCH OUT

Lusty

Re: Few questions

Really, I didn't realise the Nexus 4 now had a separate low power processor which monitors movement even when there are no apps running. Does it have optical image stabilisation in the camera too alongside the white balance flash? And an integrated payment system which uses fingerprints to confirm identity while storing no card details in the phone and allowing configuration of new cards by simply taking a photo?

Maybe I will look at Android alternatives when my contract is up after all...

Apple's ONE LESS THING: the iPod Classic disappears

Lusty

Perhaps

perhaps they looked at their list of every customers iTunes library of legally purchased music and found zero people had paid for more than about 30GB of music. I'm sure by now they are able to extrapolate what a heavy user will require based on spending habits of their top customers. Given the classic doesn't really do video there can't be many who even filled one with music let alone legally.

Obviously there will be some nerd along to explain how much better lossless MP3s sound through their iPod headphones, and that they only get 37 tracks on their iPod before it's full...

Fedora gets new partition manager

Lusty

Derfag

My new fav word, thank you.,

It's official: Vendors are NOT shifting that networked storage

Lusty

Curious

Do we count NetApp being at the bottom of overall storage market share as actually a good thing given their preference for dedupe and compression?

Square Kilometre Array reveals its 1.6TB-a-day storage and network rigs

Lusty

Re: Not quite...

Plus with tapes you don't have 1000 electricity sucking disks spinning all year, or the intern whose job is permanently seeking out duff drives, or the engineering team trying to scale a RAID solution instead of just adding another shelf of tape to the robot library.

Lusty

Tape

There we go then..tape isn't dead, official. For those who really really need it...

Zuck: Yo, Mexico! My $19bn WhatsApp could connect THREE BEEELLION people

Lusty

Re: Stopped..

Wow you're so cool. Not only have you stopped using Facebook but you're also telling EVERYONE you don't use it. Just think how cool you'd be if you stopped using other mass communication services like phones, email and the Internet too! You could go back to writing cheques and using postal services too to make sure you're properly retro.

You'll have to trust me when I say that Facebook and Whatsapp are much better when people accept your friend requests.

HP busts out new ProLiant Gen9 servers

Lusty

Re: Phone?!

The messages don't go out of the LAN interface, they go out of the non fire walled management interface, iLO or Drac for instance.

Loss of unencrypted back-up disk costs UK prisons ministry £180K

Lusty

Re: Pointless fine

You can fire them if you like but they'd only get another job straight away because they'd have experience in government and there is no way to confirm they were fired these days.

VMware's MARVIN emerges as 'EVO' for branch offices and web-scale rigs

Lusty

"Who needs a Nimble or Lefthand or converged Nutanix when you can get something like marvin?"

Oh I don't know, perhaps the people who use more features than the ability to share disk? Perhaps those who use SAN for backup purposes too.

Linux Foundation says many Linux admins and engineers are certifiable

Lusty

Re: No googling?

"From what I know of MCSE (not much admittedly), it's all still a multichoice memory test "

Not so much any more, there are quite a few simulations these days which require you to navigate the interface. There are also design questions which easily catch out those who don't know their stuff. Although you'll find a lot of techies knocking the MCSE, you won't find that many of them actually hold one...

Lusty

Re: No googling?

Thankfully, that's why we have exams to separate the people who don't know anything but can google and try things until it works from those who actually know what they are doing. The vast majority of Linux how to's on the Internet are incorrect from a good system admin perspective. For instance almost every article about joining a Windows domain tells you to put the IP address of one or more domain controllers in the config rather than using DNS to look up the domain (and that's just the first massive mistake in these guides). Other guides I have seen have all had similar bad practice in them because at the end of the day, most people looking for the info are after a get it working guide rather than a do it properly guide. Doing it properly requires a much deeper level of understanding than Google will ever provide.

Of course, this all means that interview is the only way to see if someone knows their stuff, and exams are still irrelevant. The RHCE, like the MCSE, at least counts towards partnership requirements, and therefore is actually valuable (in money terms) to many employers...

Apple takes blade to 13-inch MacBook Pro with Retina display

Lusty

Re: I bought the last of the non retina range.

"and will have a nice fast SSD when the HDD dies."

Oh really? how will you match the PCIe bus speed with that crappy old SATA 3Gbps interface? I've tested mine at 4GB/s on the new Pro which was sustained for 5 minutes while the SATA interface isn't even capable of 400MB/s in ideal conditions. But hey, at least you can swap it out eh? Oh wait, so can I on the PCIe flash module in the Pro Retina...

UK government accused of hiding TRUTH about Universal Credit fiasco

Lusty

Re: Are there ANY success stories?

The problem is not really the government, its the requirement of the people that government is fair. The Gov has to ask for a project and three vendors have to bid, minimum. These bids are essentially random guesses since the spec is not written at that stage, yet the entire budget must be specified in detail along with hardware requirements despite knowing nothing of how the system will work. The reason they can't ask three companies to do the design is that that would allow the other two to undercut on the implementation and blame failure on the winning design. Because there is no design, the wording goes to the lawyers and everything gets very specific. Profit comes from changes to the spec, which was written before the design.

I've racked my brain and can't think of a better way which would be allowed to happen without MPs being accused of back hand deals with their IT supplier mates. We can either have open government spending on "failed projects" OR successful overpriced contracts to mates. The two are mutually exclusive because the design must be done by those who implement and the design should be done before the budget is set and hardware agreed.

Microsoft and HTC are M8s again: New One mobe sports WinPhone

Lusty

One Mate

Surely if HTC had any sense they'd have named the WinMo version One M8 and just called the Android one the One?

NetApp: Revenues are down – but own brand kit wasn't to blame

Lusty

Better?

"is not being evangelised as a radically better piece of kit, with the all-flash EF-Series products being shown in the slide above as a faster performer."

If your only concern is raw performance then you're looking at it wrong as far as FlashRay is concerned. The FlashRay is a vastly better piece of kit (or will be when the code is completed) because not only does it offer flash performance nearly as good as the EF series, it also will do everything the FAS can do - the business value and efficiency stuff for which NetApp is famous and generally trounces the competition. The EF series is quite dumb by comparison, so although it performs very well it's a bit of a one trick pony.

It's quite possible today to go out and buy a very fast SAN, but many of my customers are waiting for one which also manages the backups, DR and automation of private cloud functionality, and most importantly fits in with the company strategy which for many of my customers is currently NetApp FAS for these same reasons.

Since I don't work for NetApp the above is based purely on hearsay and speculation, but I believe it's the aim of the platform

BAD VIBES: High-speed video camera records your voice from trash

Lusty

"The pretty blue and green blinking lights on your routers, switches and computer monitors emitting electromagnetic frequencies tell us some interesting things too."

No need for LEDs, the monitor cable gives off sufficient EM to read the screen remotely if you're clever about it. El Reg reported this years ago.

Lusty

Re: Er....

The real question is, now that this is public what did the spy agencies just invent that's so much better?

Ancient pager tech SMS: It works, it's fab, but wow, get a load of that incoming SPAM

Lusty

Re: Hmmm

Indeed, any spam filtering would be much easier at the sending end - anyone sending a message with 10000 recipients ought to have some kind of permission to do so since it's unlikely to be an invite to the pub to some mates. Why the receiving end would need to look is beyond me - same as with the postal service, Royal mail offer filtering at a cost to individual households while also charging the person sending the bulk mail for delivering it. I for one don't want to see this same situation on mobile networks where everything is much more traceable.

DAYS from end of life as we know it: Boffins tell of solar storm near-miss

Lusty

Re: Just goes to show...

"No, success in death is having a large personal debt that is wiped upon you shuffling off your mortal coil."

Yup, ultimately the only way to make a profit is to die in debt, any kind of assets or savings would technically be a loss...

US judge: Yes, cops or feds so can slurp an entire Gmail account

Lusty

Re: sigh

"doesn't Google Mail T&C stipulate that you shouldn't use it for business purpose?"

Not their corporate mail offering, no. It would be subject to the same court order, as would an internal Exchange system.

Apple 5S still best-selling smartphone 8 months after launch

Lusty

Perhaps

Maybe it's because the iPhone adverts concentrate on how the device can improve your life, while Samsung adverts concentrate on slagging off the competition. Apple show me how to use my phone to do stuff like making music, educating kids, getting fit etc. while Samsung tell me the stuff Apple devices can't do which I haven't noticed by myself while out using them for all that stuff. Yes, call me a wall hugger if you like, but I still have no idea why a Galaxy is more use than an iPhone.

10Gbps over crumbling COPPER: Boffins cram bits down telco wire

Lusty

Re: Wire up my home?

Surely your home already is wired up - that's the point of this.

What I want to know, is why nobody is ditching the requirement for legacy telephones to share the wires, surely that will give massive gains in bandwidth as the frequencies available increase. I don't know many people who feel a desperate need for a house phone these days but most people would love streaming 4k video!

Conformist Google: Android devices must LOOK, WORK ALIKE

Lusty

Re: Google, your megalomania is showing

"What Google is doing is denying any design or creative input from any source other than themselves"

What Google is actually doing is trying desperately to prevent Android being stricken down by the same crap that made those same manufacturers fail without it. Phone manufacturers and networks have a long history if ignoring user needs and randomly changing things to get some imagined competitive edge while actually making the experience worse for the end user. What Google are saying is that the platform will succeed because people are familiar, just like with Windows, and that the hardware people just need to make nice hardware which is what they are good at.

This is one of the things I quite like about Apple - they may not advance very quickly but they are oblivious to the competition and so user experience is pretty stable as a general rule. Even when they completely changed their interface recently all they did was skin it. I realise many people think the opposite, and I guess change and chaos is what Android is there for so maybe Google are wrong after all.

Psst. We've got 400Gb/s Ethernet working - but don't tell anyone

Lusty

Re: Reg's standard for this?

"I suspect industry may skip 400Gbps as they pretty much did 40Gbps"

I think you'll find 40Gbps is incredibly popular among those who need it. The reason you may not have seen much of it is that very few people do need it. 10GbE is sufficient for the vast majority of infrastructures with 40GbE and 100GbE only really necessary when connecting up lots of large switches, for instance in data centre use or at very large companies. It's occasionally useful on very fast flash based SAN too, although this is also pretty rare.

Canon offers a cloud just for still photos, not anything else. Weird

Lusty

Re: Marketing bollocks

"Yeah, quite - what's it doing new that Flickr doesn't?"

Anyone who has ever read the T's and C's on Flickr could probably answer that. All Canon need do is not require your firstborn child in exchange for picture storage and they are winning. I'm not usually the kind of person to even read conditions of use, but somehow I've decided against Flickr several times due to their legal jibber jabber.

Confirmed: Salesforce partners with 'evil empire' Microsoft

Lusty

Re: ms dynamics crm

Dynamics, like Sharepoint, is an excellent product which is almost exclusively installed on inappropriate hardware (usually WAY too much memory and insufficient disk) and crippled by badly written customisation code added by IT staff.

Often the main driver for bringing this type of thing internal is to make sure the information is locked down locally. Usually as a result of a recent breach where a salesperson leaves and takes all the customer info with them. It rarely works, but that's what I see happen :)

PEAK NAS? Peak NAS. I reckon we've reached it

Lusty

Where would you suggest is more appropriate than massive cheap drives? NetApp customers tend to be the types who don't want legacy tape systems about the place...

Lusty

"something that intelligently stubs files according to a policy and puts them on media that isn't backed up like active data"

Not used NetApp much then? This actively works against their best practices of using humungous BSAS drives for primary storage and simply keeping the backups online. It would also break their integration with VSS horribly in NAS scenarios, and that's one of their customers favourite features! The only media I can think of that would be cheaper than 4TB BSAS (SATA) is tape, and tape only works out cheaper if you have a F&*^ ton of data to offload, like the good folks at CERN, or people taking pictures of the whole planet for instance. For almost everyone else big cheap disk now works out cheaper in the long run as well as offering a better feature list. NetApp can even make your disks into WORM if you like, although I hear that often ends in tears because admins refuse to read the manual and end up locking the drives for eternity :)

HP breaks ranks: Foresees data archiving on Flash

Lusty

Re: For marketroid values of "archival"

The fact that it took several months is the reason it's done so rarely. As I said, with SSD that process wouldn't take anywhere near as long and could be an ongoing background process to ensure the data is always fresh, therefore the security of data is potentially much better on SSD.

Writing 30 years on the side of a tape box does not guarantee that the data will last 30 years on that tape, it simply states that the data might last 30 years. People rewrite their tapes because their data is valuable, not always to move to a new format. The only way to know your data is good is to read and write it regularly.

Since we have no data on how long static information lasts in SSD yet I find it odd that people are arguing against it. SSD dies due to write cycles, and for archiving even if we rewrite all of the data every week those cycles won't run out for decades, and given the lifespan of computer hardware I suspect they would be replaced once a decade just to reduce power consumption if nothing else.

Lusty

Re: For marketroid values of "archival"

You'd be right apart from the bit you're ignoring which is that the medium is NEVER considered reliable in long term archival. Tape archives are re-cycled every 5 years to make sure the data is there. Tape makes this process a right PITA too because some junior IT person needs to move them about unless there is a room sized robot to do the work, and even then replacement tapes and cleaning tapes need loading etc.

With Flash, the logistics are somewhat better. You can re-cycle every week if you like because everything is always online. Flash drives don't require cleaning like tape drives do, and when the capacity goes up you can usually put the new drive into the old slot whereas with tape you need to change the tape drive to use higher densities.

People who think archiving is write and forget on any medium are generally not trusted with data more valuable than lolcat pictures!

Google: 'EVERYTHING at Google runs in a container'

Lusty

Re: about to deploy a few containers

"I believe there are several projects aiming to either migrate a process to another kernel (i.e. host) or write a process and its state to disc, and then restore it later on.

However, I have no idea if they're actually usable...."

I doubt it. For a start, the system you're migrating to would have to have the exact same patch level in order to properly execute the running code. It's likely it would also need the same drivers in many instances too, and this is what virtualisation is there to solve - move the OS at the same time and you have none of these issues.

For the above poster who said Google have solved this - when they said portability I believe they meant porting the code to give a single API, not porting the containers. Google have no use for moving a running container since everything they do is highly available, they simply move the workload to a different container somewhere else. That's why Google don't need virtualisation, the benefits don't suit their workloads. For everyone else on earth without a factory full of quality code monkeys though, virtualisation is often the only way to manage workloads sensibly.

Lusty

Re: Back to the Future?

" I wonder if we'll see this amazing new feature in Server 2015, or whatever the next new release is"

App-V is basically most of this functionality and has been available for a while. The manageability aspect makes full virtualisation far more attractive for most normal workloads. Google can make use of this because their workloads are massively parallel, automated and redundant so the management aspect means far less to them.

This is also why Virtuozzo didn't catch on as well as the marketing guys hoped. Although it does give better density and performance, the drawbacks for the average IT department far outweigh these benefits.

Microsoft: Pssst, small resellers, want to sling our cloud?

Lusty

Re: It's what you might call a limited offer....

I was actually referring to your previous reference to you dealing with fairly unique verticals, but smashing rant nonetheless. I'm not really pro Microsoft, I work for a Gold partner but we're also a Red Hat partner as a result of my pushing for us to become one to meet a demand and I use Mac and Linux at home. Linux has a place, as do most systems, and it's excellent at what it does. Many of our Linux customers still integrate it with AD though for security reasons since almost everyone has an AD domain.

I didn't actually quote any statistics specifically so not sure how I'm cherry picking. Again, nice rant though :)

I should point out, I'm actually not your nemesis - I think a lot of what you say is useful and clever, and my earlier reference to you was only to respond with a useful definition of a "server". The MS one actually is very good if you care to read it. I'm not aware of anyone else even trying to define in clear terms what a running system is but if you care to offer one the industry uses I'm happy to read it.

Lusty

Re: It's what you might call a limited offer....

"Bingo."

Not sure what you're trying to say there. The published statistics and my experience are completely in line with one another so as far as I'm concerned that's reality. By your own admission on these forums and in your articles you deal with a fairly niche market so it's expected that your experience wouldn't line up with the global statistics.