Posts by toughluck

Cloud-happy Oracle dodges rumors it is axing its traditional hardware ... as sales of traditional hardware fall

Re: What traditional hardware?

I refer you to the post I made above. There were four options for Sun:

1. Go bankrupt.

2. Get bought out by IBM for IP and have all hardware and systems axed overnight.

3. Get bought out by Oracle for IP and have all hardware and systems axed overnight.

4. Get bought out by Oracle and have investment in hardware and systems axed increased.

Options 1 and 2 have been avoided. They would have happened if it wasn't for Oracle buying Sun.

Option 3 is something a lot of FUDsters from other vendors would have you believe. So far there were 26 quarters where they were wrong. If Oracle ever decides to end something, they'll be the first ones to go out and tell you: WE TOLD YOU SO! Even a stopped clock is right twice a day.

Option 4 is something going strong for the last 6 years. Oracle made money on the Sun acquisition, spent a lot on developing Solaris, SPARC and other hardware, and are still making money on hardware.

As long as hardware makes money for Oracle, why would they kill it?

Oracle is probably the only large IT company that does not lay off swathes of staff like IBM, Dell or HP[E]. Their latest large layoff was Project RAPID mentioned in the article -- 50 very experienced people when their project was terminated. They will have no problem finding a job in the Austin area or within Oracle.

Also, Oracle prefers to hire from within. If any layoffs are coming, there are usually positions to choose from and stay.

That's something that can't be said of other companies.

Why don't people give Oracle the benefit of doubt -- at least in this case?

I want to say something unconventional here. I admire Oracle for sticking to hardware for so long. It's been over six years since the acquisition completed and quarter by quarter, people have been predicting that it's the quarter that Oracle will drop all hardware.

So far it didn't happen. I think this is the first quarter where cloud revenue exceeded hardware revenue, and yet no, hardware isn't getting dropped. If nothing else, Oracle is on its way to become Oracle's biggest hardware customer.

FWIW, Sun would be headed for bankruptcy if it wasn't for Oracle. Sun could never made the decisions that Oracle made, and heaven forbid if IBM took over Sun. It would have outright destroyed everything years ago and laid everyone off. As it is, Oracle increased investment into Solaris and SPARC and gave it direction and focus for the last six years. And apparently Oracle intend to continue, since they denied all these rumors as soon a quiet period ended.

Oh, last but not least -- Oracle more than made back all the money it spent on Sun and hardware is still profitable. Who would willingly decide to just drop a 4 billion dollar business?!

HPE getting long-term archives taped

For it to set up this reseller deal there must have been significant encouragement from its customers and perceived market demand for on-premises archival storage on tape.

Spectralogic has been trying to spread with their libraries into EMEA and APAC for years now. This was totally unsuccessful so far. Until now?

Spectra may be eschewing much of their margin here and still coming out ahead.

LinkedIn officially KickedOut of Russia

Re: Linkedin has already sold, er "lost" user data

The larger question is why is your nation selling or worst yet giving your data away to the world?

My country did not sign me up to linkedin, it was my choice. If an individual doesn't sign up for any service where data is transferred outside the EU, how is their country giving away data?

Though that gives me an idea. There are >400 million people in the EU. How about generating a random database of 40 million records with plausible sounding names, addresses, phone numbers, e-mails and implausible national id numbers and then selling it for 1 cent per name? It would generate a nice profit and be completely useless and innocuous at the same time.

Countries could actually do that -- generate fake data and sell it.

HPE tape library permits unauthorised remote access

That's a modern tape library with three access paths: data path, control path and out of band management interface. The data path and the control path can conceivably be on the same SAN, but the management interface is Ethernet.

The vulnerability only affects the third portion above. Even if you have access to that interface, you still have no access to the control path or the data path.

In short, you can't access data over the library management interface. (In theory you could over TTI, but that is unusable for slurping data since the interface throughput peaks at some 10 KB/s).

Now, in a very stupid configuration, you could put the data and control paths on FCoE and then put them on the same LAN as the library management interface, but that has zero practical applications.

Microsoft just got its Linux Foundation platinum card, becomes top level member

Re: Lot of foxes in that hen house, huh.

The company names mentioned do not write Operating systems (not at least to remotely the same degree as Microsoft does).

Um, HP-UX, IBM AIX, IBM z/OS, Solaris -- all of these are operating systems to me (and I only mentioned the major ones in active development, there are others).

And about Surface and app exclusivity, okay, but there are two sides to that coin. Why would Microsoft be persuaded to offer some functionality if they don't control the hardware? Think about Surface Studio and its special flavor of Windows 10. There is special functionality to the puck and the stylus along with special applications that only work on the Studio. Who's complaining? I don't see any other company offering anything remotely similar to the Studio that would now complain they were left out by Microsoft. They will only have a valid reason to complain if they agree with Microsoft to make Windows 10 studio edition to work on their hardware and then have Microsoft renege.

IoT worm can hack Philips Hue lightbulbs, spread across cities

You're right about the mood setting. I really like how Hue can interact with Ambilight. Although it stops being neat when you notice that each bulb (used to) cost some £50.

Re: Hands up who is still a fan of IoT?

Even if you disconnect YOUR WiFi, what's to stop someone else setting up one from outside your premises that your devices can nonetheless reach, and indeed they may be able or even REQUIRED to do so as a Whispernet, which you'd have no ability to turn off unless you'd like to live TEMPEST-style with no windows.

I'd open up the bulb and cut the antenna. Not possible to open it up? High enough induction current will fry it anyway. Plus the added bonus of returning it just before warranty expires -- can't open it up, can't prove I did anything nasty.

@Steve Davies 3

Think of all those hours of Nooky that the FBI will have to listen to before they hear the words 'F*** Trump'...

Man, that's a really disturbing fetish. Did you try seeing a professional psychiatrist? There may still be some hope for you...

Browsers nix add-on after Web of Trust is caught selling users' browsing histories

Re: Naming

@nichomach: Let's go by that link you gave:

Many conservatives accuse Hitler of being a leftist, on the grounds that his party was named "National Socialist." But socialism requires worker ownership and control of the means of production. In Nazi Germany, private capitalist individuals owned the means of production, and they in turn were frequently controlled by the Nazi party and state. True socialism does not advocate such economic dictatorship -- it can only be democratic.

That definition is contradictory -- either the party is the will of the people or it's a separate non-democratic entity. Going by that definition, Communist Russia was in fact right wing because control of the means of production was in the hands of the party.

Hitler's other political beliefs place him almost always on the far right. He advocated racism over racial tolerance, eugenics over freedom of reproduction

Racism/racial tolerance is not a question of political affiliation or even ideology, it's foolish to assume that it is in any way a right wing view. At its 20th century apex, Ku Klux Klan was an avid supporter of the Democratic Party.

And eugenics over freedom of reproduction? It seems like it's the domain of left-wing parties these days (how many countries have laws that allow eugenic abortion, for example?)

(...)even held friendly relations with the Church, even though he was an atheist.

If by "friendly relations" you mean putting priests in concentration camps, and/or executing them, I shudder to think what "unfriendly relations" would have been.

Nationalism doesn't tell left from right. Note that the Soviet Union was nationalist (despite the propagandist internationalist stance). Soviet Union invested huge amounts into nationalist propaganda, such as sports, national pride, etc., and this carried on to socialist states within the Comecon. Furthermore, if it was internationalist, borders would not matter. However, Soviet Union did form a federation of Soviet Republics where internal borders were still controlled and where the Russian Federation had overbearing majority vote over all theoretically sovereign states.

Now, was Soviet Union left wing or right wing?

Accessories to crime: Facial recog defeated by wacky paper glasses

Re: Solution is simple

Works every time. If it's not broken, don't fix it.

Solution is simple

Shoot on sight.

Hell Desk's 800 number was perfect for horrible heavy-breathing harassment calls

Good Luck Mr. Gorsky

You should have ended the conversation with "Good Luck Mr. Gorsky".

(Yes, I know it's apocryphal, but I still love it.)

There are two possibilities

1. I would understand it if the number was 1-800-2448487, but what would a misbreasted lady look like? Oh, and shouldn't the number be some premium rate?

2. The guy on the other end of the line really loved Tivoli.

We're great, you don't understand competition law, Google tells Europe

We're great, you don't understand competition law, Google tells Europe

Translation: Our lawyers spent the last moth on that law to try to work out loopholes, but couldn't make head nor tail of it, so we're willing to bet you can't understand that law, either.

Your weekends may be safe, admins – IT giants tout 'zero outage' tech

Re: "Your weekends may be safe"

I guess they'll be partnering up with US Government and licensing SDI from them as well.

The digital world is increasingly dependent on IT. (...) Therefore manufacturers and service companies are growing a sense of urgency for an uninterruptible supply of their services.

About bloody time? They're growing this sense now?

Ghost of DEC Alpha is why Windows is rubbish at file compression

Re: The biggest problem with the alpha chip was yield

@cageordie: It depends. These days everyone sort of expects a new node to just work and to get 20%+ yields even from the first wafers. And 35% isn't bad as far as yields go.

Plus, even cutting edge process technology doesn't always mean starting with nothing, although it depends on the specific design.

Compare AMD's 4770 and Evergreen series to Nvidia's Fermi.

AMD first did a midrange chip to learn and understand TSMC's 40 nm process node and got good yields before going for larger chips.

Nvidia decided to go for a large chip as their first 40 nm design and got lousy yield, basically all of their GF100 chips effectively yielded 0% because they needed to fuse off portions of each manufactured chip. Starting with a large chip meant it was harder for them to understand the process, and the problem repeated when working on smaller GF104/106/108 chips. It still didn't bring them down at all.

Re: Obvious bull

@patrickstar:

Funny how none of the assume-everything-MS-does-is-crap crowd has actually read the article.(...)

This is not a design decision you can reasonably comment on without having a full view of the actual, intended, and possible uses of NT on various architectures in various configurations at that time - which you don't, and MS presumably did.

Well, assume everything MS does is crap and you arrive at the conclusion that they also didn't have that full view.

Re: Obvious bull

Yes, that must be why I can't use Zip or Rar files on a different PC than the one that created them.

Stop using floppy disks.

Hm, is that a minefield? Let me just throw my magic bomb-sniffing spinach over there

That's just the trick -- you mix seed with depleted uranium to make them heavier.

No nudes, bloated apps, Android sucks and 497 other complaints about Apple to the FTC

Re: Dear Editor...

This would probably be a proposition for a new unit of time:

TITATARQ: "Time it takes Apple to answer Register's questions"

1 TITATARQ=undefined, likely more than 100 years

(I'm sure a native speaker can and will come up with a better acronym)

EU announces common corporate tax plan

@LDS: You also have to be careful about roaming charges. There are spots where you can get cell coverage from three different countries.

But this will inevitably mean that smaller countries such as Ireland and Luxembourg will miss out compared to larger economies such as France and Germany

So what? It's about time. Tax havens had it way too nice over the years.

Wealth is created in one place, people work hard to create it, then spend their money, and instead of returning to circulation in the place where it was spent, it goes to a different country that just happens to have cozy corporate deals in place? All without having to participate in costs and risk of creating and accumulating wealth?

Apple grounds AirPods launch with shipping delay

@Wyrdness: You don't want to use Bluetooth in crowded spaces. People will, but it doesn't mean it's a good idea. A lot of interference will mean crap experience for everyone around. This is the reason that DECT headsets are very popular in offices.

Expect Apple to get rid of Bluetooth audio support next by introducing some proprietary version of Bluetooth or DECT.

By the way, if Apple said that a 3.5 mm jack would not fit in iPhone 7 because they wanted to make it thin, why not a 2.5 mm jack or thinner, but still a jack?

Oh, right, vendor lock-in.

Accountant falls for sexy Nigerian email scammer, gives her £150k he cheated out of pal

Re: While the guy defrauded his friend, he's also a victim.

@Chris W: He cheated his friend out of 150 thousand pounds. There was no mention how much of his own money he lost.

Ho-ho, you're such a comedian. What a brilliant and astute comment. Certainly nobody ever made this joke before. Congratulations.

Re: While the guy defrauded his friend, he's also a victim.

@AC: Let's see what you have to say when dementia starts setting in and your brain becomes physically incapable of telling fiction from reality.

Re: Nasty. And nasty comment!

Seconded. While the guy defrauded his friend, he's also a victim.

Detective Kirya shouldn't be pleased with the outcome. It was pathetically easy to prosecute him. The outcome is at best bittersweet, and it's certainly not a win, it's not just and it should not be the conclusion.

Iceland's Pirate Party tops polls ahead of national elections

Simple

It's a solved problem, really. Everyone gets a unique ID and you submit that as a request along with yours. It then gets authenticated with you and with your significant other using a pre-approved phone number. After a week, you get a reply to a pre-approved e-mail address simply stating the request number and your relationship level. Requests against a specific unique ID can only be made after the previous request expires.

Who killed Cyanogen?

Re: "Wordperfect was crap compared to MS Word" etc etc.

Ok, I don't get it. Why the thumb down? Because I provided a perfectly reasonable explanation how alternative software used to be crap in late nineties/early noughties?

Re: "Wordperfect was crap compared to MS Word" etc etc.

Microsoft had working OLE and was highly and rightly praised for it. None of their rivals included it for years after it became available and when they did, their implementation was years behind MS Office.

For whatever it's worth, Microsoft had a superior office suite that worked fine, particularly if your language wasn't English. For some reason, everyone just ignored language localization and then they tried to cry wolf that Microsoft had a monopoly and demanded local regulators to do something about it.

FYI, when I was younger, I was campaigning against Microsoft on behalf of these companies here in Poland. I didn't look into the details and took their claims for granted (hey, it was Micro$oft, so it was trendy to hate it). Years later, out of curiosity, I tried late-90s versions of Wordperfect, Lotus and other office software of which I can't remember the name, and I realized I was had. They were utter crap. Oh, sure, some of the things were nicer, better done, performance was better, but all of that was quite meaningless if you ran into issues trying to write in native Polish. I can't remember which program had it, but its keyboard shortcuts were hardwired and you couldn't change or even disable them. One such shortcut was Ctrl+z which was undo. But AltGr+z is ż, which is a fairly common letter in Polish. AltGr registers as Alt+Ctrl, and trying to type ż resulted in undoing your previous action. AltGr+o is ó, another common letter, but it also brought up the open file dialog and you never knew if it would put ó in the document or as the first letter of the filename in the dialog popup.

That made it completely unusable. There were many different gotchas in everything except MS Office. I don't know and I don't care if they used undocumented system calls, I don't care if they optimized their OS to better serve their own software. In the end, Microsoft's software worked and their competition's didn't. Microsoft spent time and effort on making that software as opposed to others who didn't want to, but gladly campaigned to essentially force Microsoft to pay them money.

Wordperfect was crap compared to MS Word.

Lotus, same compared to Excel.

DR-DOS was niche and more expensive than Windows which did the job.

OS/2 was even more expensive than Windows.

If IBM released OS/2 with DOS and Windows compatibility for less than Windows, it would sell. As it were, it was corporate greed that killed it completely. In Poland, IBM desperately tried with advertising when OS/2 Warp was released, but trying to sell for twice the price of Windows NT (not to mention consumer versions) meant that even with mostly positive reviews, it was doomed from the start. Microsoft Windows also offered significantly better Polish language support as opposed to OS/2, where it was supposedly the only truly negative aspect.

IBM decided that they would compete on features, but having more features does you no good when you can't read the screen text because it's garbled.

Bad news, Trump. NASty storage is pretty popular, too

Um, where's the Trump angle?

The article looks like you wanted to ride the Trump hate wave, but realized you have no idea how to throw innuendo in there and gave up, but didn't change the title, hoping for a few clicks.

Kids today are so stupid they fall for security scams more often than greybeards

Re: Scams?

@John Brown (no body). I don't get it. Is preinstalled iOS any different from preinstalled Windows? And if the price of a computer with Windows installed is the same or lower than without Windows, does it mean it's free or value add?

If Linux comes preinstalled on a PC and this option costs, say, $10, does it now count as a sold product or as a service?

Just because an OS can be compromised, it doesn't mean it's unfit for purpose. It can execute code, how is it supposed to tell that it was not your intention to run a particular piece of malware?

EU legal eagle: Euro court should review Intel's €1.6bn fine

Re: Judge not, lest ye be judged

You won't see me crying for Cyrix, Transmeta or Via. Nevertheless, your assertions about AMD and Intel are simply untrue.

AMD didn't shit at Nvidia. Nvidia made crappy and buggy chipsets that a lot of people got burned on. Seriously, nForce? Go and die. And Nvidia never treated its partners equally. If AMD tried to continue to accommodate Nvidia's temper and willingness to screw everyone over, it would have brought down AMD ten years ago.

ATi was up for grabs and AMD needed to coordinate efforts on new chipsets. ATi's chipsets maybe were behind Nvidia's in performance when they worked, but were also stable and generally not buggy.

Oh, and could you enlighten me how this alienated a significant gaming segment? Yes, I know that AMD bought ATi after their lackluster HD 2000 series while Nvidia was in its glory days, but it didn't alienate anyone. Intel's advantage in CPU cores at that time played a much bigger role.

--

As for Intel, I disagree with the notion that they won through technological superiority. Bulk discounts are perfectly acceptable and justified.

However, Intel was caught paying bribes to OEMs to demand that they do not carry AMD CPUs in their lineups and threatened to void OEMs' negotiated discounts if they carried AMD.

That is neither acceptable, nor justified and Intel paid a billion dollars to AMD in an out-of-court settlement.

Oh, and this part?

Intel won simply because they did not give up, and because they knew when to grab onto something, and when to let it go.

Hillarious.

- StrongARM/XScale/PXA. Intel sold it off to Marvell. Stupid move.

- Intel740. A failed attempt to compete in the GPU market. A classic example of Intel turning everything it touches into turd.

- Itanium. They should have seriously taken it behind the shed years ago.

- Mobile x86 attempts. Another example of completely missing the boat.

No, Intel has absolutely no notion of managing anything that's not x86, whether it's giving it up at the right time or holding on to it despite setbacks.

Re: The history is the best judge

Cyrix was the first one to leave the market. The reason was lack of interest from major OEMs and Intel's shenanigans, locking up Cyrix in court over supposed patent infringement (which was proven to be baseless, but at that time, Cyrix ran out of funds).

You're right that their example is not indication of Intel's wrongdoing. However, it's a very visible symptom. Via offered nice, clean and power-efficient x86 CPUs and pushed interesting new form factors. Left to their own devices, they could have carved a niche in HTPCs, low-power desktops and laptops as well as home servers.

No OEM picked them up, Via effectively disappeared years ago. While planning my first NAS box seven years ago, I was looking for them, and they were only available imported, in very limited quantities and with implementations that left a lot to be desired.

Transmeta -- I've seen only one laptop offered with an Efficeon CPU. It was interesting, but laptops were out of my financial reach at the time, so I never got one. Still, it got several reviews which rated it pretty well, especially for the price. One area where it stood out was power efficiency assuming light-average use. Trying to force it into heavy workloads and efficiency dropped off a cliff -- performance tanked and power usage shot up. They would have been excellent CPUs for low-power devices assuming they could compete on a level field.

As for AMD, they have the edge in price:performance and always had. Even when they offered $1000 CPUs, they were significantly faster than Intel's equivalents, and afterwards, they continued to offer higher performance at lower price points than Intel (where Intel continued and continues to offer a high-end consumer CPU for $1000, AMD had to give up that price spot for years now).

Even four years ago, which was AMD's worst year in terms of performance, it was still competitive with Intel:

http://news.softpedia.com/news/Blind-Test-Shows-AMD-Machines-Run-Better-than-Intel-s-248202.shtml

In the high-end comparison, it was AMD's first generation Bulldozer vs. Core i7-2700K.

In the mainstream, it was AMD's Llano APU.

Both of them were widely considered inferior to Intel's offerings in "professional reviews" based on benchmarks, and the first generation Bulldozer required several iterations for the highest spec version to be considered competitive with Core i3, maybe i5 if the reviewer felt generous.

<hr />

If anybody considered Intel to be an upstanding paragon of virtue in terms of fair competition, I have a bridge to sell you in London.

Sysadmin flees asbestos scare with disk drive, blank pay cheques, angry builders in pursuit

Re: Windows NT

QIC vanilla or QIC-MC (Maximum Crap)?

Re: Windows NT

ESDI was only in use until mid-nineties and by that time, the interfaces were finally pretty standard.

I'd say this happened in late eighties which would make DDS/DAT unavailable yet (and believe it or not, DDS/DAT has a pretty good track record in terms of recoverable data).

I call DLT or Data8. Although the latter format was fairly new in the time frame, it was already infamous for its crappy compatibility track record (pun intended).

Galaxy Note 7 flameout: 2 in 5 Samsung fans say they'll never buy from the Korean giant again

Re: When will they learn...

@Lotaresco:

My phone gets hammered during the working day. I use a satnav application during my commute for traffic alerts. I phone and text people all day long. I used office apps to write and edit documents, I scan documents to PDF using the camera and in the evening I use social media, use the phone as a remote for my TV/media box and spend time on the administration of a Linux server using SSH from the phone. The battery reads 50% by midnight.

I call bullshit. What is that wonder phone?

If I'm going somewhere where access to an electrical outlet is unlikely then I carry a powerbank battery and I can recharge the phone four times before that is exhausted.

4 times from a power bank means that it's either a huge capacity power bank or a typical one, but the phone itself has a low capacity battery, which further makes your claim of day-long endurance completely dubious..

Micro SD? My phone has 256GB of storage, why would I need a card? I can store all of my music and several videos on the phone as well as my entire photo collection.

Except you can take out the micro SD card out of the phone and copy files to and from the phone without the use of additional software.

Your phone may have 256 GB built in, but the vendor has the final say in what you can use to access it (good bye USB mass storage) and what goes into the phone (want to copy your legally-owner music and videos? No. You have to buy it from the Appgle Play App Store.

All-flash storage: Tech's ready, is it safe to move yet?

All-flash storage: Tech's ready, is it safe to move yet?

No.

-- Betteridge's law of headlines

Wi-Fi baby heart monitor may have the worst IoT security of 2016

Re: "Utmost importance"

I wonder when companies start getting sued for statements like these which are blatant lies.

I would really like to see a judge hand a verdict saying that while their security is terrible, there's no law against it. Nevertheless, the company will be fined $millions due to the outright lie that safety, security and privacy were in any way important when evidence clearly proves otherwise.

At least maybe then we would get true statements such as:

We are deeply sorry that we got caught releasing a product which was clearly unfit for purpose. We don't give a rat's ass about our customers' safety, security or privacy. In fact, we will make damn sure to sell them whenever we have a chance to make a quick buck and we will cut corners to reduce our costs, suckers.

Linus Torvalds admits 'buggy crap' made it into Linux 4.8

Re: Mouse bug ?

@Mr Flibble: Have an upvote. It's really a great explanation.

Re: Mouse bug ?

Neither of these worked and they were the first ones to try. As I mentioned, there was a key+right mouse button combination that sometimes did the trick, but oh boy, it took a long while to work out what was causing that (using that headset button was totally unconscious).

Re: Mouse bug ?

@Apprentice: Please get off your high horse. The bug affects all desktop environments, although it may have different manifestations in each of them. I understand you may use CLI exclusively in which case it's not a problem for you.

However, I'd like to point out one thing: people with oddly behaving HID devices probably outnumber CLI purists by a few orders of magnitude.

Scale-out sister? Unreliable disks are better for your storage

Re: Not so new

There's one problem with that. When I bought disks for my array, I chose WD's Green 1 TB (WD10EARS). I didn't know or care about TLER (that's time-limited error recovery) and I had no idea those drives had physical 4K sectors, but reported 512b sectors to the OS.

What did WD offer?

- WD10EARS with no TLER and no way to enable it, and with 4K sectors reported as 512b logical and physical sectors -- for 50€.

- WD10something with configurable TLER and with 4K physical sectors reported as 512b logical and 4K physical sectors so that the OS or the HBA could choose what to do with them -- for 150€.

Your choice is to live with limited features but spare that 100 euro on a drive. What Google did is they bought the cheapest drives available, realized that some features were missing but available in more expensive models and they are now asking drive manufacturers to add them back for no charge.

Good luck with that.

Re: Not so new

Google are talking out of their asses again. I built a homemade NAS array with Western Digital's Green 1 TB drives without having an idea of TLER or failure rates (or that it's a 4 K drive pretending to be 512 b). You have to take that into account when later using the array.

What Google should do is realize that the drive is going into recovery mode and recreate data from parity or mirror on the fly.

By all means, if they feel like it, they can even divide the disk into a billion partitions and span them per disk (leaving some as spares) before adding spans into an array. That way, if there's a failure in such a partition, they can simply mark that partition as invalid and move it to a spare partition on the same disk.

But that's difficult and would require that they modify some software or administer it in a different way. I would have thought that of all companies, Google would have had the people to do it.

And yet, array controllers or control software are dumb.

Suppose an array is resyncing and is at 20%. You want to read data at 40-50%. What does the controller do? It will slow down the resync and thrash heads to read the data at 40% with the active spindles while the spare is continuing rebuild at 20%.

What it could do is jump to the data you are requesting and resync there, returning to 20% later when read/write activity has died down.

--

There's a similar case with RAID 1+span where a single large drive mirrors multiple smaller drives (e.g. one 3 TB drive mirrors a span of three 1 TB drives). If a read request comes into the area already resynced, bam, the array will use the rebuilding spare to read data from it.

--

There are a lot of such small niggles in various software that are very annoying without you even realizing it.

Stickers emerge as EU's weapon against dud IoT security

Nothing wrong with no security.

Suppose it's not connected to the internet and air-gapped. What's wrong with a "D" label?

-

As for home appliances, physics don't work that way.

Dishwasher tablets are standardized to work in a certain volume of water. I think it's something like 5 liters. Heating up 5 liters of water from 20 °C to 70 °C will always require 0.3 kWh. Pumping water with a 500 W pump for 2 hours will always require 1 kWh.

An AAAA model will require exactly the same energy in that intensive wash cycle as an A model. And that A model might actually have more usable low energy programs which might end up saving power in the long run.

I have an AA-qualified dishwasher. The newer model with AAA qualification was an extra ~50 euro. The testing method requires that the very first program after turning on is the one used for testing.

I used it once for only slightly dirty dishes. I didn't even bother removing them from the dishwasher since they were stained, and still dirty and wet (despite 1.5 hours of washing and 2 hours of "drying"). Using the same detergent, I set it for one hour quick program (same temperature of 50 °C), and the dishes were completely clean.

--

As for fridges, same physics apply. Assuming the same insulation, it requires the same amount of energy to remove 1 kJ of heat regardless of the energy saving features. I do have a nice AA model that works pretty well, but I bought it for the warranty (10 years for the pump which is the digital direct drive version). It's nice and quiet as long as it's running on gear 1-2 out of five. At 3 it's already as loud as my older fridge and at 4-5, it's loud enough to be heard, although fortunately it's just a humming noise.

I realize people buy into the hype, but standardized labels are for standardized conditions for standardized people in a standardized world.

Sadly, in the real world, there are no standardized conditions or standardized people. But standardized labels exist.