Posts by Dave 13

US Veterans Affairs hits brakes on $10b Oracle Cerner health record system

Uncle Larry sues everybody, eventually...

Has Uncle Larry sued the VA yet? He will. That's his business model.

Over a decade on, and millions in legal fees, Supreme Court rules for Google over Oracle in Java API legal war

Still true

A 2019 post of mine rings true:

"Sun had the beginnings of an Android-like experience when they purchased SavaJe but didn't have the money or the will to pursue it. When Oracle came along they also saw little value in the concept of a java-based universal mobile platform and gave it no love. Oracle is simply expressing their frustration at their inability to spot golden geese when they're presented with them and going after those with enough vision to do it. APIs are simply not copyrightable anymore than anyone can copyright the use of clutch, brake and accelerator pedals in a car."

Re: Wah Wah Wah! Oracle! They don't like the ruling!

A someone who was tangentally connected to mobile Java while at Sun, I'd say this ruling fell on the side of justice. Sun fumbled with mobile Java and handset SW in general (remember Savaje?) and Oracle decided it wasn't worth their time and money to pursue. When Android came out Larry and his swarm of lawyers saw blood in the water, and deep pockets. Oracle's nothing more than a patent troll and customer shakedown outfit these days. R.I.P Sun.

Texas blacks out, freezes, and even stops sending juice to semiconductor plants. During a global silicon shortage

Re: The Real Story from Texas

And in 1983.

NASA to launch 247 petabytes of data into AWS – but forgot about eye-watering cloudy egress costs before lift-off

Re: Just wondering

I've seen this cycle in customers already. Existing CIO had things humming nicely, gets lured away by better offer. New CIO hired with a "cloud first" mentality. Dumps on-prem gear because "it's really expensive to run at $1.5m per year" and moves all data and computing to AWS. 6-9 months pass and the economics of the AWS deal become apparent and the CIO flees in disgrace. Next CIO buys new on-prem gear and gets everything humming.

Lather, rinse, repeat..

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

Re: You've got to go into the weeds to understand.

Sun had the beginnings of an Android-like experience when they purchased SavaJe but didn't have the money or the will to pursue it. When Oracle came along they also saw little value in the concept of a java-based universal mobile platform and gave it no love. Oracle is simply expressing their frustration at their inability to spot golden geese when they're presented with them and going after those with enough vision to do it. APIs are simply not copyrightable anymore than anyone can copyright the use of clutch, brake and accelerator pedals in a car.

Amortize

Larry has to amortize his investments in lawyers.

Cisco slips on a Tolkien ring: One chip design to rule them all, one design to find them. One design to bring them all...

Magic sauce?

Honestly, there *is* no magic sauce in pushing packets around. Cisco has depended on the FUD that there *is* for decades. The rest of the world moves on..

This flash is too slow. This DRAM is too small. This bowl of data is just right. It's SCM flavored

HCI+SCM=?

Array-centric thinking is great.. but what if you actually stuff SCM into HCI nodes connected with 100Bbe or IB.. and lean on scale? I'm talking to you, ScaleIO (now VxFlex OS).

SPARCs fly as Oracle recharges Arm server processor designer Ampere with $40m

Play well with others..

Larry has *never* been one to play well with others. This from a former Sun/Oracle employee who watched him strangle priceless IP because the profit margins weren't as high as his legacy SW only to realize (always too late) that he'd killed golden-egg-laying geese one after another. I've moved on but will never be an Oracle customer because of this short-sighted attitude. Now he's moving ARM-ward because he thinks it's a cheaper route to server CPUs. He doesn't like anything he cant sue, shakedown or destroy. That's Larry.. he reminds me of another American businessman who's recently got into politics.. must be something in the Yank water.

This won't end well. Microsoft's AI boffins unleash a bot that can generate fake comments for news articles

Re: REALLY obligatory XKCD

Post of the week. You win the internet.

Bring in the clones..

You mean they're not already here? Hard to believe..

Oracle asks Supremes to snub Google's Java API copyright protest – and have a nice cuppa tea, instead

Eclipse?

So.. when IBM published Eclipse as a Java frontend, why didn't Oracle go after them? Oh, that's right - it was done as a nonprofit so there were no deep pockets to mine. Also, IBM had a mobile Java client but this somehow doesn't interest Oracle. Bottom line, Oracle is simply a shell company for legal actions against customers and competitors. If you think they're anything else, you haven't been paying attention.

As Red Hat prepares to become part of Big Blue, its financials look as solid as Linux kernel 2.4

Re: The 2.4 planets align!

So.. BB wants folks run RH on a $2m plus MF and not a $50k X86 server from Lenovo? How original.

3 is the magic number for HPE execs hopping over to AWS recently

Empty

Will there be anyone left at HPE to keep the lights on? Sounding a lot like IBM these days..

From hard drive to over-heard drive: Boffins convert spinning rust into eavesdropping mic

Back in the old Sun days

We screamed and yelled at arrays.

They sputtered and shook

for the trouble we took

And didn't come back online for days..

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tDacjrSCeq4

New claim dogs Oracle: After $11m of sales, I was unfairly axed before next big deal – because I am a 64yo woman

Oracle doing what Oracle does

Oracle wants bright, young, idealistic sales folk, not ones that know when they're being screwed.

Hands up who isn't fighting Oracle in court? HPE, for now, as Solaris support sueball tossed

Lawyers > Engineers

Oracle has always invested more heavily in lawyers than in engineers. Curious for an ostensibly technology company but their business practices have required it. Shakedown customers, sue the ones that argue then increase prices - lather, rinse, repeat..

Amazon throws toys out of pram, ditches plans for New York HQ2 after big trouble in Big Apple

Ditched

Amazon should have gone with Austin, Dallas or Raleigh - places that actually wanted them. Instead Amazon chose a toxic place simply to be near Bezo's NY home. Wonder what effect the divorce will play in any eventual HQ2 decision?

Santander hands over $700m to IBM in hopes of becoming incredible banking machine

Hollow..

IBM has lollowed itself out to the extent that all it can offer customers is hordes of offshore bodies and some H1-B visa holders in the US. Their sales force is competent but there's no there there anymore for implementation.

Now, hold on. This may shock you... Oracle allegedly juices its cloud sales with threats and shoddy on-prem support

Shaft..

Why *anyone* would willingly do business with Larry Ellison and Co is beyond me. Their track record of shaking down and abusing customers is the stuff of legend.

Euro bank regulator: Don't follow the crowd. Stay off the cloud

Reward vs risk calculation

It's human nature to value reward over risk and our financial institutions seem more in tune with that than ever. The real problem with reports like this is that those who ignore the stated risks and get caught with their knickers down never seem to get any real punishment. Stupid pointy-haired-boss decisions mainly affect customers and low-level employees - otherwise known as scapegoats.

IBM Cloud TITSUP: Techies investigate troubling storage underperformance

War

IBM, what is it good for? Absolutely nothing..

IBM turnover shrinks $28bn in 6 years but execs laugh all the way to the bank

Hollow

IBM has hollowed itself out with the knife of "shareholder value" while stiffing its employees and customer base. It's not difficult to see where this is going, and it's not going to be pretty.

No Falcon Way: NASA to stick with SLS, SpaceX more like space ex

All pork is local..

..and ULA is in *my* district, says the Alabama congressional contingent.

NAND chips are going to stay too pricey for flash to slit disk's throat...

Friends..

Friends don't let friends buy spinning rust..

Horn star Sudan, last male northern white rhino, dies aged 45

Well, they'll all be impotent soon enough, won't they? Poachers are steadily dwindling the rhino population as I type.

We should pass laws to make Google's life hard! Oh no, sorry, did we say that out loud? asks IBM

Anything

IBM is for any law that drags down successful 'upstarts' like FB, MS, Amazon and Google. They've painted themselves into a corner with the technology and business choices they've made, hollowing themselves out to the point where they offer little value to anyone but C-level suits in Armonk. The thinking there must be that if FB and Google are raking it in, and they're not, something must be illegal, or at least should be.

That said, the proposed laws on ad funding disclosure pose an interesting question - why would *anyone* be against that. Don't be evil, etc..

Twilight of the idols: The only philosophy HPE and IBM do these days is with an axe

Shrinky Dinky

Both HPE and IBM are rapidly shrinking themselves to irrelevance, having made poor bets on trends and value. Sadly, the folks at the top do *very* well while those who traditionally provided customer value don't.

Infinidat techie: Let me tell you a thing or two about ruler-format SSDs

BS detector

My B.S. detector caught fire while reading this article. "Too much storage capacity" (HDD or SDD) has a way of sorting itself out rather quickly, in my experience. What we *really* need it a compute-storage interface that's not disk based and not PCI based, running at memory bus speeds. CPU/memory/storage all want to sing the same tune at the same (or similar) speeds.

MY GOD, IT'S FULL OF CARS: SpaceX parks a Tesla in orbit (just don't mention the barge)

Mixed success?

Mixed success? I don't see it that way. There are *no* reusable orbital competitors at this point in time, maybe ever. The loss of the center core is pretty minor, in the scheme of things. SpaceX is so successful that Arianespace is cobbling together a FH clone of sorts. Imitation is absolutely the highest form of flattery..

IBM lifts its 22-quarter shrinking sales curse: Finally, a whole 1% uptick

Hollow

IBM has been hollowed out by years of C-level blindness and by shortchanging customers. Who wouldn't want to do business with a company widely known to over-promise, under deliver, overcharge and shaft employees? Maybe Larry Ellison can buy it when the stock plummets..

NetApp HCI: More converged than hyperconverged?

Re: Lipstick on a pig

All the good plays in HCI are already taken - this is simply CI in a shiny new BOX.

Spectre and Meltdown fixes: How will they affect storage?

Re: EMC would theoretically be affected

Letting unvetted code run on an [EMC/Dell/HPE/Hitachi/Whatever] array is extraordinarily unlikely. Patches will likely come out anyway but seriously, what attack vector would an exploit use?

Seagate's lightbulb moment: Make read-write heads operate independently

Zaphod

Friends don't let friends buy spinning rust - no matter how many heads.

Kernel-memory-leaking Intel processor design flaw forces Linux, Windows redesign

Re: VMware

Or Hyper-V. Potentially all host hypervisors are at some risk. Details will definitely sort this out in the near future and a lot will depend on what sorts of exploits this actually enables.

Re: Genetic Diversity?

Monoculture os a knife with no handle, incredibly sharp, but prone to the occasional loss of a finger.

Iranians resist internet censorship amid deadly street protests

Censorchip = malfunction

Regimes worldwide struggle to keep up with technology.

"The Internet treats censorship as a malfunction and routes around it."

--John Perry Barlow

America's 2020 Census systems are a $15bn cyber-security tire fire

The Census Bureau was moved under the executive branch on day one of the Obama Administration. Looking for scapegoats, at least be honest about it.

Keep your voice down in the data centre, the HDDs have ears! I SAID, KEEP...

Just say no..

Just say no to spinning rust. If you're still buying it today, you'll hate yourself in 6 months.

You can't find tech staff – wah, wah, wah. Start with your ridiculous job spec

Braindead hiring practices

Just had our new boss (less than 2 months in the job) hire 2 additional headcount without any input from us individual contributors. He was looking for folks with certs while if he'd have asked us we would have told him how little that actually benefits us in our jobs. What'll likely happen is those folks will land in our group and be clueless, requiring additional cycles to bring them up to speed. Go figure.

Intel bolts bonus gubbins onto Skylake cores, bungs dozens into Purley Xeon chips

Intel might want to glance over to the AMD server CPU site and see how easy it is to compare CPU features and performance. Chipzilla's shooting itself in both feet with the 'simplification'.

Tesla death smash probe: Neither driver nor autopilot saw the truck

Simple solution

The autopilot could, after warning the driver a few times, simply slow the vehicle down until they put their hands back on the wheel and show they're conscious and aware. If the driver continues to ignore, pull over on the shoulder and stop. Software can address some human stupidity but it's a hard problem and the human owns the blame when SW can't get their attention.

NetApp puts everything it's got into a hyperconverged box

Meh..

Meh. Too little, too inefficient a supply chain and too much competition. Just another SuperMicro reseller.

A tale of two conferences: AWS storms ahead, HPE seems to flounder

Bill and Dave

HP{E, Inc} lost its focus in critical ways, trying to be the bride at every wedding, etc. They're emblematic of the hollowing-out of first generation tech firms on the premise of increasing shareholder value. Bill and Dave were all about customers and the customer experience - not sure if that language is even spoken there now. IBM's pretty much doing the same thing, though more creatively. DellEMC seems to be trying to adapt to the new world in interesting ways.

Facebook hires Hillary Clinton to lead assault on fake news^*

MOT

So glad the Ministry Of Truth has arrived. Been expecting them for some time now..

Donald Trump running insecure email servers

Irrelevant

Irrelevant because he's not bound by law or US Government regulations on the subject, unlike Secretary Clinton was. If he wants to be an idiot on the subject - or any other - he's welcome to.

HPE: Come on in, cool cloud kids, we won't compete with you – unlike *cough* Dell

Shrinky

HPE's shrinking their way to success. Will the last boffin please get the lights as they leave? Thanks.

Don't want to vote for Clinton or Trump? How about this woman who says Wi-Fi melts kids' brains?

Weevils

Weevils in order from greater to lesser; Trump, Clinton, Stein, Johnson. Of the bunch, Johnson seems most reasonable and honest. Sadly, most Americans will vote for what they see as the lesser of 2 weevils when what they'll get is simply a (we)evil.

Oracle says it is 'committed' to Java EE 8 – amid claims it quietly axed future development

Reciprocity's a bitch

Oracle doesn't trust its own customers, why should they trust Oracle?