Posts by CheesyTheClown

Google tries to lure .NET devs with PowerShell cloud bait

Jury is out?

I was pretty sure that Azure has kinda proven itself already.

The real question is whether public cloud will survive now that you can build an entire Azurr Stack in a few rack units capable of running ten thousand users. It's now officially cheaper to run Azure Stack instead of Azure, AWS or Google public clouds.

I have a 26U rack with eight 16 Core blades w/192GB each, 80Gb/sec networking to each blade, 8 terabytes of scale-out storage pumping over a million IOPs. I also bought a NetApp FAS2020 for near line backup storage.

The total cost of deployment for the entire system was about $10000 on eBay. I tend to only keep 3 blades running at a time since I only have 100 VDI users at a time. It spins up new VDI systems in about 13 seconds each. It has IIS, Load Balancing, SDN, SDS, etc... I tend to be at about 8% capacity for the three blades for normal office loads with 100 users.

Currently, it's a development pod and classifies as being able to run under the MSDN terms as lab equipment.

Getting Azure Stack up initially was a pain. Now, I've scripted the whole thing. A laptop with a fresh Windows 10 installation can download all the ISOs and deploy the entire Azure Stack in about an hour. I'm not using any fancy tools, just PowerShell. Since prepping ISOs as VHDs needs WAIK anyway, there was no point using anything except Powershell. I wrote it all object oriented and implemented a simple command queue pattern to implement the entire system with test driven development.

Now, Microsoft update does the rest.

'We already do that, we’re just OG* enough to not call it DevOps'

DevOps works... But only if you know how

Step 1) Avoid CVs/Resumes of people with DevOps on it

Step 2) Avoid technologies and products claiming to do DevOps

Step 3) Stop trying to teach IT guys how to code. They have more than enough to do just figuring out what should be coded

Step 4) There is no such thing as a DevOps degree. You're looking for computer science grads.

Step 5) Stop letting vendors try and tell you how to do DevOps

Step 6) Plan a project, build a high level design. Perform a PoC and document in detail step by step how to verify the system works.

Step 7) Write code to roll back the system when it fails

Step 8) On a whiteboard, make a REALLY clear plan of what changes are to be made and in what order

Step 9) Make the plan reflect zero downtime

Step 10) Write a script which can make the changes.

Step 11) Prepare for rollback, run the changes, verify the changes worked, verify the rest of the system didn't die, roll back when it screws up. Repeat until the change works without screwing everything up.

This is not complex. Any university comp-science grad can do this all day and night. We call it test driven development. Use Powershell to avoid stupid shit like 500 language syndrome. No don't use Python, Puppet, Chef, etc. You'll spend 99% of your time trying to figure out how to make Powershell work from inside them.

Solidfire is 'for people who **CKING HATE storage' says NetApp Founder Dave Hitz

Scale up vs. scale out

Scale out exists not because you want to have more storage. It's because storage array controllers and SANs are too slow to meet the needs of high density servers. Storage has become some a major bottleneck that it's no longer possible to populate modern blades and actually expect to have even mediocre performance of VMs because it's like running a spinning disk on a laptop. It's just horrible.

Local storage scaled out is far better. So internal tiered storage works pretty good. You get capacity and performance in a single package. It doesn't scale up as well as a storage array... unless you buy more blades. Instead, it's pretty damn good for trying to make sure that your brand new 96 core blade isn't sitting at 25% CPU usage because all machines are waiting on external storage to catch up.

Scale-out in a SAN environment is just plain stupid. Even with the fancy attempts by some companies to centralize NVMe which is performed using PCIe bridge ASICs, the problem is that you'd need to have dedicated storage centralized for each blade to make use of that bandwidth. Additionally, NVMe is quite slow. NVMe generally only uses 4 PCIe lanes. Using local storage, I can use 32 PCIe lanes which is a small but noticeable improvement.

Scale up is still quite useful. Slow and steady wins the race. Cabinets that specialize in storing a few petabytes are always welcome. You really wouldn't want to use them for anything you might need to read, but an array that can provide data security would be nice. So, maybe Netapp should be focusing on scaling up instead of out. Cluster mode was kinda of a bust, it's just too slow. 8 controllers with a few gigs of bandwidth each don't even scratch the surface of what's needed in a modern DC.

Is VMware starting to mean 'legacy'? Down and out in Las Vegas

VMware can have and eat well off of legacy

I am about to deploy a 120,000 user VDI POC on Hyper-V/Azure Stack. I never even considered VMware for the project since it's just not well suited for VDI. I work with about 40 customers in 15 countries and for new deployments 3 years ago, they were 100% VMware. Now, 75% deploy about 80% Hyper-V and 20% VMware. The last 25% are 100% VMware.

The first reason is simple. Price. If you have to pay $12000 per blade for Windows licenses and $7500 per socket ($15000 per blade) for VMware, you might as well use Hyper-V and skip paying for another VMM

Memory consumption. Linux containers and Hyper-V integrate tightly with the guest system virtual machine memory managers and allow substantially denser guest deployments than ESXi. VMware still insists on simulating the an MMU as an API for interfacing with the SLAT. Hyper-V and LXC instead integrate via "system calls" between the guest virtual memory managers and the host. This tends to cut memory footprint of VMs on average by at least 60% over ESXi.

Management. vRealize as a suite looks like an absolute joke written by a retro software freak next to Azure Stack and Ubuntu's OpenStack management systems. If VMware would quit competing against themselves and focus on doing it once and doing it right, they could get somewhere.

vCenter... Let's be honest... vCenter is the best tool on the planet if you plan on automating absolutely nothing. No other product gives you that "I'm an NT 4 sys admin" feel better than vCenter. But if you actually want to manage more than 50 VMs, you don't manage it from there. That's what vRealize, UCS Director, Nutanix, etc... are for.

Storage. Am I the only person who looks at VMware's storage solutions and wonders "Did EMC tell them they can't make anything that might compete with their stuff?" and "Did someone tell VMware that storage is something you can charge for?". Cisco released HyperFlex with a 3rd party storage solution which I think is just GlusterFS and pNFS configured for scale-out and a VAAI NAS plugin. It blows the frigging doors off anything VMware makes and most of it's open source and freebies. Are you seriously telling me that VMware couldn't have made that a stock component within a few months of work?

Networking. NSX was SOOoOooo cool 8 years ago. It was revolutionary. Then VMware bought it and kept it hidden for years and by the time it shipped, the entire world had moved on to far better solutions. It's not even integrated into VMware's other stuff. It's like running a completely 3rd party tool and what's worse is that it's REALLY slow and they ended up implementing Microsegmentation because the other VMware management tools were so broken and unusable that you couldn't have more than a few dozen port groups before things just fell apart. So, instead of fixing their other stuff, they basically just hacked the shit out of NSX to break the whole SDN paradigm. Oh did I mention that NSX costs an absolute fortune when SDN is free with every other solution?

Graphics. NVidia Grid is absolute-friggin-lutly spectacular on Hyper-V. It's like a ray of sunshine blown from the bottom side of angels every time you start a VM. RemoteFX is insane. I'm not kidding that adding a Grid to a host with Hyper-V nearly tripled my VDI density. When I tested the same card on VMware, it was agony. I got it working... Kinda. It wasn't too bad. Once you got the drivers on the guest to finally recognize the card, it was nice but they were generations behind and the improvement was about half that of Hyper-V. I speculate it's because on Hyper-V communication with the card is bare metal but on VMware, a software arbiter running on a single core is required which is killing the CPU ring bus or QPI. The behavior even suggests it might be maintaining cache coherency through abuse of critical sections which across sockets can be so slow it's almost silly.

So... should VMware be scared? Are they obsolete? Hell no. They are legacy. I work with hundreds of people who like installing Windows by hand over and over. I work regularly with a team of 150 people who are paid to work 8 hours a day manually provisioning virtual machines as change requests come in. They are kind of like people being paid by a company to lick stamps and put them on envelopes because peel and stick is too "fancy and fangled" and they don't want to figure out this new stuff.

VMware will be needed and loved and sold so long as people are 100% focused on "it's always worked for us doing it this way." Think of VMware as the COBOL of PC virtualization. Microfocus is still banking big bucks on COBOL. I think the worst thing VMware could do is to be better. There are still tens of thousands of small-organization mind sets and a VMM that can be fully configured to a "good enough" state in 30 minutes should always be around.

How many zero-day vulns is Uncle Sam sitting on? Not as many as you think, apparently

The department discloses... What about the hackers?

Seems to me that hackers are asked to hack. As such, they may or may not be asked to make the hack used part of the official catalog. So a simple work around to this is that you tell the hackers to only report the zero days that were low hanging fruits.

NASA peers through its SpeX: Aha! Jupiter's globe-warming hotspot

Can't get internet?

If NASA can communicate with the probe and NASA has Internet, shouldn't it be possible to route it there?

Ex-Citibank IT bloke wiped bank's core routers, will now spend 21 months in the clink

Caused congestion?

Unless he configured new links/routes, then the routers and switches in the network should have been run in pairs and the links should have been somewhat redundant in their design.

It appears that someone on the network team was doing a REALLY poor job if the loss of a link causes congestion. Don't get me wrong, this guy should be shot, but... I would be seriously embarrassed to publicly pronounce that the lost of a single link would cause my network to become "unusable" due to congestion in the banking industry. I know he shut down 9 routers... but unless there was a total rats nest in the infrastructure, the congestion would reoccur if a single link went down.

Sue the guy for intentionally threatening the stability of the network, don't air your dirty underwear like this.

Third time unlucky? HPE in redundancy talks with UK services staff

What's left of HP?

HP - Sells laptops that doesn't fill needs. Kind of a Packard Bell. Sells printers which don't really work. Their consumer line has endless problems burning ink. Their large format printers (until the Latex series) score amazingly low on cost and quality.

HP (then Agilent, now something new) sells the stuff which made HP awesome to begin with.

HPE sells class servers like Non-stop and HPUX, Superdomes, etc... They sell substandard blade servers which don't function for shit in the data center (Java 6 required to manage the blades). They sell two dozen different and most incompatible network equipment lines. They sell storage that is so hellbent on fiber channel that they perform at about 1/10th the speed of a similar NAS solution from respectable companies. They sell management software suites that universally increase CapEx and OpEx by so much that ROI is not achievable.

CSC - Sells services that are provided by an organization that is so silo driven that the network guys can't even spell hard drive.

Isn't it time HP dumps someone who has a nice wardrobe in favor of someone who has some actual knowledge?

Starbucks bans XXX Wi-Fi

What?

Honestly... Who sits in a Starbucks surfing porn?

Blighty will have a whopping 24 F-35B jets by 2023 – MoD minister

Re: Why?

It could go into westernizing immigrants to assimilate themselves to Western European behavior and financing the growth of a financial empire that will profit England by allowing immigrants to establish British businesses and move product through the UK (at least on paper) and strengthen ties with middle eastern and eastern companies as well as strengthen economies of Africa (which will have to become emerging at some point) and South America.

Alternatively, they could use the money to cover the massive financial issues of trying to alienate themselves from the rest of the world via Brexit. The U.K. clearly does not understand that the rest of the world sees brexit as an elitist movement that denounces the rest of us as "less than a Brit". As a result, it drives us to avoid business with the English for fear that they will consider defaulting on our agreements as justified because they "want to screw us before we screw them".

Norway bought 50 of these planes as a membership fee to NATO. I don't know for sure, but I believe historically we have never owned so many arial war machines as we would prefer to not be paranoid assholes. Of course, now we'll have them and we'll probably put them on display as they are so damn expensive to operate that it's just not worth keeping more than a handful in the air. So 10 to play with and 40 for spare parts.

On the other hand, the jobs created by dumping trillions of dollars into the world economy probably is worthwhile.

Finally an F-35 article that represents it properly

The F-35 program has been wildly successful to date. They have basically made the most useless plane ever. By the time it actually is in proper full production, remote contolled unmanned drones will have far surpassed their capabilities and based on recent testing, autonomous drones consistently outperform all human flown jets in dog fights. The problem with drones is that they're too easy and don't require so many people to produce and maintain. It won't be long before drones can be strategically positioned in high atmosphere on Zeppelin drones or solar powered propeller drones. When this happens, it should be possible to launch an attack and reach targets eliminating F-35 hosting carriers before even one jet has a pilot in a cockpit.

So why is the program wildly successful? It's because as the article says, the U.K. government can employ 1000 people for each F-35 which translates to a realistic number of about 8000 jobs per jet if you include the guy working at the local 7-Eleven who is in business because the workers need coffee. The U.S. and the U.K. instead of embracing socialism openly create jobs through programs oriented on fear. The US and UK are so scared of building and supporting me private sector companies that in order to feed their citizens, they need to make up bullshit excuses related to fear and hate to feed their people. So long as the US and UK can continue to negotiate favorable terms with other nations regarding their expansion of their national deficits and forcing a devaluation of their currencies (hence why you can sell your house for more than you paid), the US and UK and spend trillions on new prisons and on new militaries and such. The people just have to be scared enough into thinking they need these services or at least can't do anything against the government forcing it on them.

The F-35 program has nothing to do with defense. More or less every first world country can easily build drones to obsolete the F-35 completely. The program is about job creation and government sponsored economic stimulus.

Good job author ;)

Wannabe Prime Minister Andrea Leadsom thinks all websites should be rated – just like movies

Nice idea and good spirit but impossible to implement

There are web site rating systems already in place from companies like Checkpoint and Cisco as part of their firewall services. In a modern web, with the advent of HTTP v2.0 and also with primarily randomized URLs, it would require application later inspection and filtering to implement such a system.

Even with data center scale computing, deploying clusters of tens of thousands for firewall instances, it would be computationally impossible to filter all we traffic effectively to make such a thing matter.

Add "dark web" resources (which I think means Tor) which simply requires the download of a free and public web browser to use and inline filtering would be absolutely impossible.

This sort of solution would depend instead on DNS filtering which doesn't work since most users don't actually use British DNS servers.

In the end, while she has a good heart and spirit and is trying to recommend something she believes could have a healthy and positive impact on her country, it would be simply wasted breath and resources to try and push such legislation into effect.

SPC says up yours to DataCore

Why use and array of any type anyway?

I definitely want near-line storage and for that I'm trying to design a new controller with power control so that a full 42U array shouldn't be consuming much more than about 400w at any given time.

What I don't understand is why anyone would want to run centralized storage anymore. It was a terribly failed experiment on so many levels. With a theoretical average of 90,000 IOPs per SATA SSD and an average of 24x drives per server configured as mirror, let's assume a little less than 2 million IOPs per server. Then, distribute that out using RDMA over Ethernet with SMBv3 and Scale-Out-FS. Then consider that the servers themselves will have 4 or 8 40GbE Ethernet ports.

Centralized storage doesn't have the performance to cope with modern data center servers. The goal of data centers is higher density and lower power foot print. I'm in 12U these days what used to us take 6 racks even 3 years back.

DataCore, NetApp, Hitatchi.... they're all selling crap you just don't need anymore. Get 3 good servers for each data center, configure some proper networking equipment (stuff that accelerates DC tasks, I recommend Cisco ACI) and then just use the storage built into the hypervisors. And don't waste money on Enterprise SSD. Just buy a few boxes of Samsung 850's.

As for centralized storage, build a big ass server with lots of spinning 8-10TB disks and run Veeam on it.

I've been testing Windows Storage Space Direct in a small data center on relatively old hardware with relatively wimpy networking. It's still hitting insane IOPS. And that's 4 Windows Server 2016 Hyper-V blades with 6 SSDs per blade on an archaic Dell C6100 cloud system from ebay for $1500 (all blades included). Each machine as 8 cores and 96GB RAM, an Intel x520-DA2, 6xCrucial 250GB SATA SSD (deal of the day).

I will NEVER EVER EVER go back to centralized storage. Unless someone tells me a way I can guarantee network and IOPS scaling for every blade in the data center using centralized storage, it's just a crap solution.

P.S. On VMware, I use centralized... Virtual SAN is a little too 1990's or 1970's depending on how you see it. Their underlying storage architecture is simply not something I would be willing to depend on. When they learn what sharding is, I'll consider otherwise.

Non-US encryption is 'theoretical,' claims CIA chief in backdoor debate

From 55 Countries?

Let's be fair for a moment. Encryption standards as they stand today originate in the US. There are many many good encryption techniques, many which are likely stronger and better than AES, RSA and DH. The issue however is that nearly every product in the report about encryption coming from 55 countries is they use standards.

We use standard ciphers because at some point we believed they were strong enough to keep us safe. Some people who call themselves security experts think they're unbreakable, that is sheer vanity and silliness. There have been many enhancements made to AES for example which strengthen it, but the AES block cipher itself isn't particularly strong.

The reason we still use these ciphers has more to do with dependence on things like hardware and software for encryption. Intel and ARM CPUs have acceleration engines for the standard ciphers as well as some of the more popular non-standard ciphers. Processing the encryption in software is not practical for most applications. For example, running full disk encryption in software would take that awesome SSD and make it feel like MFM drives from the 80s.

For messaging and mail and basic storage encryption, software can be used. But which cipher should we trust?

AES became a standard after a massive amount of peer review and a great deal of experimentation by thousands of researchers, mathematicians and hackers. To find a suitable replacement would require a European or UN effort of similar scale. Even now, there is a certain belief that unless a cipher is blessed by the NSA or the Israeli Mossad, it's likely considered weak. There are many cipher researchers outside the US and Israel, but it is unlikely they are as public or well funded as thsoe guys are.

Is it time for something better? Sure... just need to run a competition like they did for AES, find a suitable review board and pass European laws to mandate that Intel and ARM can't ship AES acceleration unless they also support the new standard... this can take a few years.

Microsoft releases open source bug-bomb in the rambling house of C

Re: C is not an applications programming language

C and Assembler was the way to go for everything back then. Assembler was actually used as an application language by many people. When a CPU could realistic process 75,000 instructions per second, we counted cycles even when we were drawing text on the screen. When a language that when coded properly like C reached levels of perfomance that we could do less in assembler, we mixed the two. It wasn't that better languages for apps didn't exist. It was that they were too slow to be useful.

Freeze, lastholes: USB-C and Thunderbolt are the ultimate physical ports

SCSI anyone?

Wireless is nifty, but wired is and always will be better. As for connector types, there will be plenty of upgrades to come. I just hope they're not smaller

HPE bolts hi-capacity SSD support onto StoreServ

Purpose?

Where does a product like this fit?

While I think all flash is nifty, where's the value in array's today?

Distributed file systems far out scale and outperform arrays in every category. Even with custom ASICs, unless an array has 100Gb/S physical access per server, it will be a gigantic bottleneck feeding data to the servers.

Oracle and MS SQL have supported sharding for a long time. GlusterFS, ReFS as well as many others also have sharding now. Add data teiring for near-line on a hybrid array and HP's new product isn't just obsolete before even shipping, it's also far more expensive and less efficient than "hyper-converged".

A few NVMe drives on each server combined with a 160Gb/sec network will far out perform arrays with centralized storage.

I am training a major British corporation this week in precisely this topic. Shared drives and centralized storage just can't compete with distributed data. The interconnect is too slow, the lack of application support make backup unintelligent. The disk latency is too high. The scalability is nearly non-existent.

Better to spend money on good, solid, cheap, non-proprietary storage.

Let me guess... The system is super nifty 32gb/s fibre channel? That's ridiculously slow.

Windows 7, Server 2008 'Convenience' update is anything but – it breaks VMware networking

Re: I am not surprised at anything MS do anymore

So... This is a dirty trick? Can't possibly be that they fixed something in the driver model which incidentally broke VMware's driver?

I tried to obtain the SDK for VAAI NAS from VMware. This is probably about 13 pages of PDF when it should have been a simple public REST API. VMware wanted to charge me $5000 and force me to sign an NDA that would not permit me to open source my code. I would have paid $1000 without such a contract. But documentation and header files for 10 functions for $5000 and restrictive terms was thievery.

In case you're not aware, writing a network driver with good performance with the flexibility of VMXNET3 which is not so much a driver as an RPC mechanism to make networking function calls across protection rings takes something of a small miracle to make work if you don't have source access to the kernel of the guest OS. The same is true in reverse. You can't make a change to the kernel of the guest without likely breaking a virtual driver or two.

The end result is, VMware will release a patch within a few days. They just need to boot Windows Server 2008 in Workstation and run their unit tests via Visual Studio and they'll find what changes they have to make and they'll release a new driver ISO.

The real question is... Why hasn't VMware implemented a proper network driver for Windows yet? They still use almost archaic (and SLOW!!!) methods of implementing networking

SELECT features FROM bumf... What's new in MS SQL Server 2016

Re: I'm sure it's lovely but

Postgres and Maria are great products and if you are happy with them, good luck.

Some of us depend on things like full support for scalability. MSSQL scales like crazy. Postgres and Maria do pretty well these days too, but if you need to store 400,000,000 records replicated across 50 data centers and processed by 400 transaction servers for processing stored procedures... They're pretty lightweight. I suppose it could be done, but it probably would be almost impossible to manage.

MSSQL is actually pretty good for massive scale. It's just another DB for normal scale. It's sweet for embedded. What I don't know is why anyone would use Oracle.

Surface Book nightmare: Microsoft won't fix 'Sleep of Death' bug

stopped happening on mine.

I was an early adopter and got mine a few days after the i7 512gb started shipping... had the problem A LOT and now I don't. No idea why it went away, but ever since it did, it's been the best machine I've ever owned. I knew going in I should expect some bumps... I must admit though, I really miss Windows 8... it was the best OS Microsoft ever made :( Unfortunately, a bunch of whiner babies said "I'm too stupid to live without my start menu"... so Microsoft killed it with 10 :(

$10bn Oracle v Google copyright jury verdict: Google wins, Java APIs in Android are Fair Use

Re: Phew...

Agreed but... the code copied was a published API in the sense that it was open source at the time.

What makes this a problem is that so far as I know, the Java APIs are not published as header and source but instead as a simple Java file. I don't recall universal interface definitions being kept intentionally separate from the code which implements the API. So, while a script could easily extract 99% of the API from a .JAR file with no assistance, to get the whole thing probably required extracting it from code.

Re: Google must have paid big bucks...

Google is a REALLY REALLY scary company these days. There are endless numbers of ethical issues with Google... far too many to count. This is a case where they actually are doing something good instead of unintentionally evil. Others have covered the API things... I'll dig into some others.

1) Cartography.... we are so insanely dependent on Google maps these days that if Google shut them off, there would be airplanes completely lost.

2) Search... they're the only company which understands that people want search results that actually give what they're looking for. As a result, they mine data no matter how unethical that data mining is in order to establish a search result listing that prioritizes what you mean instead of what you say. As such, Google watches absolutely everything you do and makes it a secret as long as it can because they don't even want you knowing.

3) Broadband... Google already carries insane amounts of data worldwide. In addition to being what may be the biggest or second biggest tier-1 service provider at the moment, they're running fiber to data centers and to the home and supplying predatory pricing to get you to switch. Their prices are so low the packages so good that no business with responsibility to it's shareholders can justify not switching. If Google shut down their transport network, the Internet would actually break.

4) DNS servers... by this time, changes are you or your ISP, your ISP's ISP, etc... are using Google's DNS servers. As such, Google is tracking absolutely everything everyone does whether they use Google or not.

5) Google car... Google will probably give away 90% of all their self driving technology to as many vendors as possible to ensure as much guaranteed information tracking as possible in exchange.

6) Google Docs... if you start using them and you really use them... you're locked in... you can't move them back home again. OpenOffice/LibreOffice etc... suck terribly and there's far more to Docs than just what's compatible and open. An open file format doesn't mean every program which implements it implements every feature. It's pretty much guaranteed lock in once you start.

7) Google Mail... awesome service most of us couldn't live without. But Google doesn't give this service away for free out of the goodness of their hearts... tracking tracking tracking.

I can keep going for a LONG WHILE!!!

Google is basically big brother. For the moment, Google is run by a group of people who seem to be someone with good intentions. So long as the company grows and turns a profit, this will stay like this. Once the stock stagnates etc... the board will step in an replace CEOs with shareholder representatives with no interest in the customers themselves. Things like selling your tracking information to others will sound like a good and profitable idea.

What's worse is, Google's too big to fail now. It makes absolutely no difference what Google does. We honestly can't manage in 2016/2017 without dependence on them. There's no alternatives and no replacements and if Google went bye bye and just shut off all their toys... there wouldn't be much left of the Internet. It would be far more devastating than when Infoseek changed their search engine back around 1995 and we couldn't find ANYTHING anymore. There are major systems around the world which simply will stop working of Google shuts down.

Re: @tekHedd - I haven't downvoted a post in a long time...

Actually, unhandled exceptions seem to be the problem here. The stack trace in this case might be the only means of this user to get support from Cisco TAC in resolving the issue.

This case in my opinion is that :

1) The sysadmin has a point but doesn't know what his point is and therefore is not well suited for problem solving. He's the type that simply asks the wrong question due to lack of knowledge. Instead of learning more about what stack traces are and finding the right thing to complain about, he's simply picking the first thing he doesn't understand and focusing his hate at Java unfairly

2) Cisco as always has done a shit job on writing code. I can see a mom and pop operation or open source project dumping a stack trace without an exception handler. But Cisco should have enough developer resources to not only implement program flow, but also implement error management even if it's just a top level exception handler for 'Unknown exception'.

3) Cisco ACS is an old product that only receives update begrudgingly. It was written during the dark era of Cisco which means their products were meant to be used but never seen by anyone. Cisco has a long an glorious history of absolutely disgusting user interfaces. They're getting a little better.

4) This won't be a big problem in the future. Cisco has more or less moved to Python. Cisco does programming languages like a flake does religions. Java used to be king... now Python. The marketing and management at Cisco know even less about what an API is than Oracle's lawyers. Believe it or not, all new Cisco courses this past year have at least one slide making a huge deal about what a northbound and a southbound API is. They also all seem to try and fit a plug on programming Python in. So... without exception, Cisco HAS NEVER made a single point as to why someone would need an API, but instead makes a huge point out of making incredibly bad scripts that do absolutely nothing in a programming language that is not particularly well suited for calling the APIs as opposed to implementing them. You should see the shitload of new information on "YANG" which must be the most insanely lazy and somewhat sloppy approach to API development in history.

Java is a perfectly ok language... it's not particularly good as a runtime environment anymore. JVM could use a massive update and Google did a little with that in Dalvik. Sadly, there are no good and modern extensions to Java regarding things like assisted auto-vectorization... or things like OpenMP style multithreading assistance. Their libraries are impressively bad for things like threading in general. There are far too many conflicting models in Java for multitasking programming. Due to REALLY REALLY bad GUI support in Java, there's no decent runtime for handling calls to the UI thread. Microsoft "solved this" in C# by building a serialized delegate mechanism which doesn't suck... too badly. Even better was the Task<> structures attached to the language async mechanisms. Java has sort of died in this place. There are solutions, but you can't find which one to use or how to intermix them when needed.

After this case, Google should probably make a replacement for Java which operates on the Java class libraries but fork them substantially enough that they can extend and improve the language as much as possible

Q. What do you call a sales-growing letdown? A. Pure Storage

Re: Oh, calm down

Not sure if you're responding to my earlier question or not. I was honestly wondering what the benefit of Pure's systems are.

It's been about 5 years since any data center I've worked with would benefit from increasing storage performance in such a centralized fashion at insane costs per byte and more insane costs per IOP. This whole market simply died at almost the precise moment that Cisco bought Invicta.

Hyper-converged isn't new, I've been deploying it for years... though back handed since VMware isn't very good and we had to wait for vendors to stop locking into VMware. It's been years since I've built a rack that would operated suitably on such incredibly slow systems like Pure... I mean, it's fast for one or two servers, but for a rack filled with 88 core/6TB servers, it doesn't even have the bandwidth to serve one server let alone 12 in a rack. To run proper servers, hyper-converged is the only possible way as it requires local dedup and compression to overcome the bandwidth limitations of Ethernet and Infiniband.

So... who would have the money to buy Pure and simply waste it by buying Pure as opposed to building their data center properly so they can get more performance with less hardware and cost?

Where is the value?

Is Pure depending entirely on VMware's horrible software define storage offerings to boost their value or at least sustain them?

Hyper-V 2016 is entirely hyper converged and insanely fast. OpenStack has a dozen different high performance hyper-converged solutions.

What's their value point? Is their product intended for companies who would rather spend a million dollars more instead of two million less?

Microsoft and Facebook, swimming in the sea,
N-E-T-W-O-R-K-I-N-G

Re: Meanwhile

I want to thank you...

25 years ago was the last time I experienced this feeling. I was intoxicated on interesting external substances of questionable origin while visiting New Orleans.

There was a little Cajun woman who would string together long chains of words in such a way that would cause an artist to weep while appreciating the beauty of having found such a diamond in the rough.

What was unique about her speaking is that she believed beyond a shadow of a doubt that she was speaking some coherent tongue, possibly some derivative of English. In fact, I'm sure if we recorded her and hired and expert to transcribe her speech, it would be composed mostly of English words.

We however had absolutely no idea how such words could be combined as she used them into sentences and how such sentences could be used to communicate a thought as opposed to simply conveying sound.

You have allowed me to experience such a feeling of joy again. By reading and re-reading your writing, I have absolutely no idea what you're talking about... I have no idea if there is any conceivable connection to the article.

But I have a wholehearted, honest and well intentioned reply to what I believe is your pain. Here it is :

Bunny! Flipping chicken or palm fried nackerwillies.

I hope this helps to heal you.

Sky! Blue!, Oceans! Wet!, Yahoo! Overvalued!

Failed to turn around....

I thought Marissa Mayer was rocking her job. She's taken a company which was in theory a tech company and turned it into an investment company that seems to have rocked the scene by investinting in Alibaba and thereby increasing the share value of the company. She also managed to make the company look like two separate organizations which should allow her to sell off everything that made Yahoo a tech company for far more than it's likely worth to any sucker willing to buy it. She then will make the shareholders a pile of dough, they'll have their investments traded for stock in a profitable tech company that will show returns. They will also maintain ownership of shares in the investment firm which owns a chunk of Alibaba and be even richer from that.

At what point in time did she fail as CEO? Is there anyone else that could have possibly shown a massive return on investment like she's about to?

BTW... Did the author of this article seem to think the CEO of a company was supposed to actually fix the company? Do you even have the slightest idea what the responsibility of a CEO is?

Cisco should get serious about storage and Chuck some cash about

Cisco has storage

They have the C240 M4 which is a megabeast Windows Storage server or VMware virtual SAN or OpenStack Swift all SSD/Flash array with 24 drives and enough PCIe slots for massive cache. 8 of those will rip all the doors, windows and roof tops off of any competitor (I've tested).

They have near-line storage as well in the C3260 which is a 52 drive storage beastie for storage teiring. Again, Windows Storage Server, Virtual SAN or Swift.

For hyper-converged they have their own storage for high performance... No nutanix needed. They also have their own OpenStack mainframe with full storage built in.

Basically, Cisco did it right. Instead of wasting money on third party storage systems, they just waited for all the virtualization solutions to ship with their own software defined stacks and frankly, they just work better. With Veeam, they have all they need.

So while all the other vendors of storage will probably go tits up in the next few years, Cisco is able to avoid wasting that money.

P.S. Azure Stack on Cisco UCS gives a two vendor solution to nearly every major business problem and performance like no one has ever seen before. VMware's solution is about 6 years behind, and the #1 reason other storage vendors exist, but it's pretty good for an antique. Swift on top of GlusterFS is amazing.

Quit talking about thing you obviously don't understand.

Storage startups: Everyone's throwing money at you...

Storage spaces, virtual SAN, Swift

Why the hell do we need third party storage?

Is VMware the power it once was?

I think loyalty was key

If you have a system which appears to work for you... why not stick with it. I personally recommend against wasting the time, resources, money, etc... upgrading to VMware 6 (or the soon in beta 7) since it's really a whole lot of nothing particularly good. It's also really just not as stable as the old versions.

Customer loyalty or "lock-in" for others is VMware's biggest advantage. They were there first and people have grown comfortable with it. It works for most people and there's no benefit to building something new if what you have works.

For new deployments of systems, it's become very cost effective to use alternatives. Azure Stack which most companies already are licensed for and therefore is basically free simply requires a few more machines.

Ubuntu has accomplished more than any other company with regards to making OpenStack and out of the box experience. Unlike Redhat's normal "everyone wants python and the command line" way of doing things, Ubuntu has given an application oriented experience which feels similar to how we felt about VMware for servers. It might be that Ubuntu is a good solution for you to try for new systems and VMware 5.5 is good enough for legacy systems.

It's up to you... it takes a lot of resources to identify new technology and learn it well enough to comfortably use it. If the number of hours needed to learn the new product exceeds the number of hours you would save by using it, it obviously makes sense to stick with what you have.

I would recommend you consider taking a look at Azure Stack when it comes out though. If you can install and manage Windows, you can easily install and manage that.

P.S. Personally, I have never seen anyone do anything but lose money by using public cloud unless they were a service provider who would benefit from a global CDN.

Quick as a flash: A quick look at IBM FlashSystem

Hmmm... But why?

SAN is something with a relatively short shelf life.

Consider first why SAN is interesting to begin with.

1) Physical machines (VM hosts need to be boot, preferably without local storage) and as such a block based storage system is attractive. This means a single reliable 4-60gb image mirrored for every blade/server is desired. Using "thin provisioning", this is about 1.2gb of storage altogether.

2) VMware and storage guys seem to think that fiber channel is king. There is much legacy here and almost never any sensible reasoning for this thought process. Fiber channel is generally pretty slow. But it let's people do things how they always have. Most data centers based on FC almost never has NPV configured properly. But also consider that since vHBAs are NEVER hardware accelerated. As such, block storage places much silly wasteful overhead on host CPUs.

Ok, so what's the alternative?

With VMware, you're typically screwed because VMware behaves like a primadonna regarding their driver development tools. So, without paying $5000 and signing a ridiculous NDA with blocks open source, you can't use NFS on any home built system. Also, it's become kind of a religious thing for VMware users that the system should always be SAN boot. This is wasteful and basically stupid.

In modern times, whether for cache or other reasons, servers should always contain local storage. The performance difference is huge. Simply adding a few local SSDs make the servers scream compared to clogging a fiber channel pipe with swapping and nonsense reads. Therefore, there is no reason to boot servers from SAN. Instead, simply push via PXE an image of the latest boot to the blades. In fact, this makes management REALLY EASY. So bye bye block storage over a wire here. If you really need remote block storage, consider StarWind (much much less expensive than DataCore and quite usable and more manageable). Or from Linux, just create a glusterFS and use LIO to share via iSCSI. I've also used LIO for FC but SGST seems more reliable for this.

Second, scale out file servers have absolutely no limits on performance or scale as SANs do. I've been seeing million+ IOPS on generic hardware for a while now. With 8 servers running 20 cores and 384gigs of RAM as well as hybrid storage on Windows Storage Spaces you can fully saturate 8 40Gbe interfaces per blade. Unlike this cute little IBM SAN, that's 320Gbe x 8 servers for closer to 100GB/s. Add enough SSD to each server and it will fly.

What's more, unlike IBM's tech which requires hopes and prayers that Veeam will be nice to them or that customers have to use crumby generic backup systems, Linux GlusterFS and Windows Storage Spaces are first class citizens for backup.

The bigger selling point to DIY storage is that IBM now has like 12 different storage systems. I have dozens of customers who spend tens of millions of dollars constantly just to upgrade storage... Why? Because vendors make something new and the old stuff doesn't matter to them anymore. SAN loses 80% of its value the moment you place the order.

Mud sticks: Microsoft, Windows 10 and reputational damage

Re: I'm a bit confused

I would agree with you, but these days he can't even do his homework without a PC. So he's been using his grandparents' computer and my parents have been paying for way too many repairs (we're in different time zones and frankly I hate remoting into a PC that's so loaded with malware that clicking start takes over a minute). So, it was just cheaper to get him a PC that was little more than functional.

Re: I'm a bit confused

I honestly don't see this as an issue of stealing from the OEMs. This is more like what Cisco did when they made UCS. They tried to tell their partners what they needed to make data centers really work. The partners (IBM, HP, Dell) all told Cisco they shouldn't dabble in things they didn't understand and they should just be nice and make network equipment. Then Cisco reinvented the entire server market by simply not selling servers. They instead worked towards selling data centers. Even now, Dell, HP and Lenevo have no idea what hit them. It's not that Cisco's sales team are so good, it's that Dell, HP and Lenevo just really suck at making data centers.

Now enter Microsoft who year on year was losing market share to Apple who clearly understood that power users were not important. Power users account for a very small percentage of the market. What was more important was fashion and function. Apple spent a decade making one high volume device after the next after the next. Apple never once released a powerful device, they instead turned Jonny Ives into a brand and turned on the sex appeal. They hired marketing from Tag Heuer, Burberry and more to master the art of designing a top selling fashion brand that made simply owning one of these devices would make you special. They added features and presented them as if having access to them and using them would make girls or guys swoon at the knees to been near you.

And then they focused on building a market where the initial purchase wasn't even the sex appeal, but the accessorizing was. There are 3 year olds who are asking mommy for the new app or to buy an in-game add-on. Apple mastered the art of making sure that whether you buy the cheapest thing they sell or the most expensive was irrelevant, they would get $0.30 from this sale and $1.30 from that sale and then stand on stage bragging to everyone that they made hundreds of billions of $$$ by charging what is basically a 30% credit card processing fee... and then they cut out the middle man by starting their own payment processing system so now even VISA and the others won't see their 3%.

So... here comes Microsoft who realized that Windows could never have sex appeal if you leave it up to vendors like HP to do it. The problem with the PC world is that the PC vendors need to sell PCs. As such, if they deliver someone else's platform like Microsoft Windows or Android, their only path the profitability is through repeat hardware sales.

This isn't like the Android phone world where Samsung can make a profit by selling Google searches after the phone ships. HP, Lenevo and Dell have absolutely no possible way to make a profit following the sale of a PC to a customer. Microsoft has the option to insert music and video stores and such. But the PC vendor is screwed. If they can't sell you another PC, how will they make a buck.

So, the big PC vendors are terrible at sales. There was a time when there was a Gateway 2000 store in nearly every town and you could pay premium prices to buy a computer directly from the vendor. This meant the vendor could actually benefit from some money for supporting the computer or at least not having to split the warranty cost with the store like BestBuy. It didn't work because it just wasn't the right time and frankly Gateway 2000 overextended since they were basically selling other people stuff and the margins weren't good enough etc...

So, when Microsoft comes along and opens stores, sells their own computers and while they do show off computers from their OEMs, no one visits a Microsoft store to buy a Dell or HP. You go there to buy a Surface because it's clean and sexy. It's also supported and even now, I have no problem getting support for Surface Pro (version 1) devices from Microsoft. I still get firmware updates for it as well. So instead of some crap vendor like Dell, HP or Lenevo selling me a computer and basically telling me to buy a new computer the second I need a new BIOS or driver, Microsoft is supporting their devices long term.

Microsoft is still missing one major component... marketing. They can't keep sending Panos Panay onto stage like that. This guy is "soooo local" in the sense that he is REALLY REALLY Seattle. Watching him makes me want to gore myself with an over-sized cork screw. Steve Jobs was said to practice his speeches dozens maybe even hundreds of times before getting on stage in front of people. He would get every word just right. Panos Panay is actually as big of a disaster on stage as Steve Ballmer. You need someone up there who can sell sex. Panos Panay should be selling pizza. I'm sure he's great at what he does... just some people should never be broadcasted around the world. I can only assume that his creepy Seattle behavior lost Microsoft millions of sales because people were creeped out by him.

Microsoft should dig up some people who are great on camera and stage and make them co-VPs of their divisions and make their jobs nothing more than presenting the next products. Give them 18 months from release to release to do nothing more than stand in front of mirrors and perfect the art of selling Microsoft's next big thing. These people should be pretty but not too pretty. They should look like the person everyone wants to be or be with.

Basically Microsoft needs to learn how to market fashion. They now entered the fashion business, it's time to learn from the best and compete. Jobs is dead but there's thousands of hours of video of him out there.

Re: I'm a bit confused

Oldcoder,

I'm not sure how that would save me any money. Software licenses make up almost peanuts on the cost of a DC these days. Using retail pricing, It's like $12,000 per server for all Windows Server 2012 R2 licenses including the guests running on them. If you buy 72 Cores, 6TB per server, you put 3 into DC A and 3 into DC B... that makes it cost a total of $96000 for operating systems. And nobody pays retail. So it's like $40,000 instead.

The reason you use Hyper-V instead of KVM is that Windows is paravirtualized on Hyper-V and RAM consumption is more than halved on Windows Guests. That saves nearly $2 million on RAM. Add the fact that it appears that server 2016 will paravirtualize the scheduler as well and that saves maybe $500,000 on CPU. Then add to that for interconnect that Hyper-V has full RDMA support on Ethernet or Infiniband and you can save a ton of time migrating virtual machines.

I love KVM and Open Stack, but I have a business to run. OpenStack and Azure have grown to become amazing platforms. The main difference is that I simply don't want to hire 50 people to sit around dicking with making my systems run on OpenStack. I'd prefer to just download prebuilt, supported and maintained apps from a vendor who has ten thousand customers depending on that app, so when something goes wrong, the vendor works out not only a quick and dirty hack, but a solution that had some quality control on it.

I suppose the comparison is the C programmer and the C#/Java programmers. The C programmers want to reinvent the wheel every time they start a project. They want to have absolute control over every function and they're going to write a 5 million line system using all kinds of archaic methods that end up using things like GObject from Glib because instead of using an object oriented language, they'll reinvent the entire concept of an object and even emulate the C++ vtable using macros which are damn near un-debuggable. Their lack of dependence on a garbage collector which require them to invent a memory management system which is slow as hell because clean-up always has to be run immediately instead of during idle cycles. Their code will take 3 years and require 25 developers working full time to maintain and they'll constantly suffer from memory leaks, performance issues, lock-ins blocking refactoring etc... They will claim that their method of programming is pure and better and the buy paying them to write it will think he's getting state of the art awesomeness but in reality is just getting a headache.

The C#/Java developer will focus on the job which needs to be accomplished and make use of pre-built libraries, a great C#/Java developer will make use of asynchronous tasks and manage their garbage collector and limit wasteful tree walking when it's not needed. They'll use proven and optimized classes and interfaces which are used by a million other developers and are hardened like a rock. While primitive operations in the C code ran much faster, overall the C#/Java code accomplishes every business task faster as optimized C# and Java code tends to use far less complex algorithms and thanks to threading and delayed memory cleanup, the code can spread cores cleanly. And most importantly, they'll develop 50,000 lines of code and deliver code which is clearly written and maintainable. Oh and they were in production in a month or two.

There are simply no platforms currently on the market which actually facilitate delivering business on OpenStack with KVM and/or Docker. The tools themselves exist, but the packages simply don't. Azure is a hair better since Microsoft's has worked REALLY REALLY hard on making "applications" or packages easy to move and deploy in multiple places. The biggest shortcoming in my eyes currently is that I can't see how to legally (within the license) distribute Windows Server as a guess as part of a package unless you're Microsoft.

Oh.. and Hyper-V runs RedHat (which is obscenely expensive) as a guest. So, add to that that Windows has full Docker support as well, I don't really care what the guest OS is, Hyper-V and Azure has me covered. Unlike RedHat, KVM, etc... who will probably keep focusing on 10,000 new ways to deploy new apps, I'm pretty sure the Azure platform is pretty stable now. I'm pretty comfortable knowing that Azure Stack, once officially released will have excellent app support and that most vendors who offer their apps as part of the Azure Cloud library will support Azure stack as well.

It would of course be nice if Amazon or Google released their platforms for private clouds as well, but I don't see that happening. Since neither me or any of my customers can legally use public cloud or any cloud not on their physical premises or connected to any Internet connections at all, those systems are simply not in the cards for us.

I'm a bit confused

I do experience some hiccoughs but I haven't noticed anything fundamentally wrong with Windows 10. I really miss the Windows 8 start menu, but other than that, it's just another OS. It runs, it's fast, it's mostly easy to use. It's generally for the time being a much more user friendly experience than Mac OS X, but that's mainly because Apple treats OS X like a bastard step child these days.

I was under the impression that Windows 7, 8, 8.1 and 10 were killing the PC industry since there hasn't been a real need to buy a new computer anymore. Once you have an SSD, it works on almost everything nicely.

I just bought a Lenevo Ideapad ($150) for my nephew who felt that smashing the gaming laptop I bought him during a hissy fit was a good idea. It's an Atom with 2GB of RAM. While it will never run Crysis, Windows 10, Chrome and Office ran like a champion on it. If anything, PC downgrading has made a lot of sense since Windows 7 and SSD drives came out.

So, PC companies are whinging because Microsoft has reached the point where optimizing and tuning is what they're focusing on. Meaning today's computers will likely run just fine for another 5-10 years. They're all upset that their glorious market based on new features in software needed new hardware. Well... that time is over. Not only that, but now Microsoft is making their own PCs which is great because that means there is finally a reference platform. If the other guys can't keep up, screw-um.

Now I'm waiting for Microsoft to finally make servers. I would drop $5 million on a new data center if I could get Azure Stack in a box.

Dodgy software will bork America's F-35 fighters until at least 2019

Re: Can someone please...

How about Norway? We bought 50 of these and were told "It's the cost of membership to NATO... We don't need them or want them and we can make remote controlled drones for 1/100th the price but America says we have to buy them or build our own damn military".

I personally would prefer to simply see a small fleet of remote controlled drones piloted by some gamers who can control 10 at a time each. It's not like we actually need pilots in the cockpits. The pilots in the F-35 don't really see what they're fighting or aiming at. We simply moved the game console into the cockpit and spent trillions to do so. Every aspect of the F-35 is electronic. There isn't a single connection between the pilot and the plane. So far as I can tell, most of the flaws related to the F-35 are related to the human being actually in the plane. So why not just retrofit some C-130s to have consoles where the pilots of drones sit to keep the latency relatively low. Then drop drones out of the back of the cargo planes and have 100 smaller planes for each F-35?

I guess it's the bravado factor. The rednecks running the militaries think that you have to feel the G forces to be able to fight. It's pretty funny to think that a few guys in a maker space and some talented video gamers could probably out do the biggest defense contractors and the fanciest pilots.

A guy at my local maker space has been doing some great projects with small scale jet engines. It might be fun to see what would be born if he made a drone :)

Hackers crack OS X, Windows, web browsers' security to net $460,000

Re: MS edge

Theoretically impossible to secure a web browser.

In all honesty, Edge (and I'm no fan of Edge) is holding up pretty well for software which is so massive and so new. Having worked for years as a browser developer, I can't possibly imagine many good ways to both implement functionality as well as harden a browser except through a reactive method of closing holes once they are found.

Microsoft SQL Server for Linux is a brilliant and logical idea

Re: Why

I wondered the same. I don't think it's that simple. SQL servers are made up of three distinct components (of which I may be clueless to proper names for) which are the front end, the query engine and the storage backend. This is common for most systems so far as I know. To achieve redundancy and scalability, it makes sense to have three or more of each type of node. This allows one node to be in maintenance while two remaining nodes are providing high availability. That's 9 nodes for a base configuration. It also means that platform related performance issues are probably less relevant than the core pipeline structure of the SQL server itself. So I would speculate that performance should in theory be equally optimized for each platform because of the base nature of how the SQL server would have to have been built to distribute work loads in such a farm.

There are likely many reasons to choose different SQL servers. This is similar to how I commonly use SQLite for local RAM oriented tasks vs. SQL Server for enterprise tasks.

Microsoft has a great strength on their SQL server platform because it's impressively well documented and a great deal of thought has gone into manageability as well as security and scalability. It's actually possible in an MSSQL environment to clearly calculate Big-O for different queries and stored functions. Other engines are commonly a black box. SQL Server is also a bit of a beast that hoes far beyond simple query processing and ISAM. It's more compatible to Oracle than MariaDB. It has excellent blob storage and is actually well suited for object storage.

Does this mean that SQL is a clear winner over the open source alternatives? Probably not in many normal cases, but it is a system that could simply add up to a more agile platform overall if employed properly. Microsoft also offers superb and structured training for nearly all facets of SQL Server which makes it very attractive to corporations. You can probably achieve the same things on other platforms, but operators, users and developers alike can learn nearly every component of SQL server without just hacking around and googling it to death. That's worth A LOT.

As for a Linux version, I believe Microsoft must intend to deploy additional management and services on Linux and while SQL server is probably best hosted on Windows, many products will benefit by having an MSSQL express environment native to Linux and Microsoft probably justifiably believes a partial port doesn't make sense if they can productize and maintain on Linux as well. So, I'm pretty sure the goal of this exercise isn't to build a mass market product, but instead to provide the storage solution for some other cross-platform products.

No Kinetic energy at DataDirect Networks: Ethernet drives snubbed

Poor design

The protocol was designed by developers for developers. Developers don't buy hardware, IT guys do. As a result, the protocol is scary and cryptic to anyone other than DevOps. Even DevOps have too many things to work with that using Object/Key storage is a less than optimal solution.

Sea gate and others have done a very poor job of seeding drives to DevOps guys and as a result there is simply no interest. This is an awesome example of absolutely terrible marketing.

Cisco to partners: We're all doing services now – resistance is futile

Cool!!!! Christmas early!!!

In two weeks I'll be delivering a full DNA workshop on Prime 3, ISE 2 and APIC-EM as a single product. Full network deployment with Plug and Play, Compliance Manager, Network Automation and Dot1x etc... It's gonna be awesome ;)

Cisco CTO: Containers will ride to private cloud's rescue. Oh yes!

It's about cost

Public cloud makes sense because it's damn near impossible to get all the features and stability of a public cloud service like Amazon or Azure in house. Expertise are expensive and IT staff is a bloody nightmare because they have specialties and finding a data center expert is nearly impossible. I know I have never met one and I train 300 "data center experts" a year.

Private clouds make sense when it becomes possible to buy a single finished solution which mostly updates and manages itself. 3 solutions nearing this have been released this past year. Cisco's open stack solution is pretty close but more or less useless unless you're only deploying containers and have no real world needs. Dell and Microsoft's solution is excellent but is only a quarter finished and lacks support from a good organization (Dell sells servers, they suck at cloud).

If Microsoft ships servers (could happen), game over. Private cloud rocks. Of course, Cisco and Microsoft could make it happen too.

HTTPS DROWN flaw: Security bods' hearts sink as tatty protocols wash away web crypto

Kyle Lady says...

Did we need a "Security Expert" to tell us that "We need to implement security"?

Ok... so step 1... if you want to secure your network, learn how to secure your network. Some numb nuts from a security firm can charge you $10,000 a day to run free tools off a Kali Linux download and print a report for you and tell you 10,000 places you need to fix... and btw, I can sell you this tool.

Or, you can do your jobs, run Kali yourself fix the obvious and mitigate the problem children like appliances which have HTTP but not HTTPS since they run on 1KB of RAM (think about your PDUs).

Remember security experts don't know how your network works and they don't really care. They just run scripts, print reports and sell stuff. You can skip them and move on.

VMware licence changes put users on upgrade treadmill

Disagree

With Microsoft we blame Satya or Bill

With Oracle we blame Crazy Larry

With VMware we have no idea who to blame. I'm pretty sure it's a team of guys wearing ties and one fairly attractive girl wearing shoulder pads who don't actually know what a VMware thingy is but think by saying words like synergize and pointing to nifty Gartner graphs they can run a tech company.

I can't really say for sure when VMware took the nose dive, but I think it was around the time that EMC bought them out. VMware propagated the entire market like wildfire because it was the only functional choice. More and more people used it and the people running the company treated it like it was oil or water... after all, if you make a bad business decision with oil, water or VMware, your customers will still be forced to use you and you can always pump more right?

So, for the last several years while Microsoft and others have been working towards the goal of operating one of the biggest and most reliable data centers in the world, the VMware guys have operated with no leadership or direction. As a result, they make 10 competing and incompatible products whenever a new buzzword arises. They keep increasing their prices for products people already have and insist that bug fixes should be paid for by buying entirely new infrastructures. They don't really innovate anymore, I can't think of anything they've done which is even moderately more than **snore** since VMware 4.

The #1 reason we still use VMware is that we can pretend that we're running 20 year old server in a Window and that's easy. The other tools require us to plan and read something to make them work. VMware can be installed really badly in 30 minutes... and it will let you run it like that for years.

AWESOME!!!

I LOVE IT!!! I just called my wife and let her know 'Baby, we're going to Disney!!!"

Thanks to the anti-upgrade called VMware 6, I moved away from VMware because of this specific nonsense.

1) Any version less than Enterprise Plus is a REALLY BAD IDEA!!!!

2) Networking isn't an add-on in the data center, it's a selling point. Microsoft and OpenStack have networking and they both did it REALLY REALLY REALLY well. NSX did it kinda ok and VMware tells all my customers that in order to run kinda OK networking, they would have to pay almost 10 times as much for the license. NSX should be part of standard.

3) Nearly half the new features in VMware 6 cause unfixable errors unless you intentionally deploy those features half assed.

So... I moved completely to Hyper-V now and while it hurt really bad at first, it's been by far the smartest move I've ever made. So now I go from class to class, company to company, government to government and convince them to stop blowing their budgets on VMware and instead make use of those Microsoft Enterprise licenses they already are paying for and actually use them. Like... "Why are you paying $7500 per CPU socket for VMware when your enterprise license from MS already gives you everything you need?"

Oh... you wanna know the best thing about switching to Microsoft? I was able to get updated drivers for all my hardware (been a big problem on VMware lately) and build, test and troubleshoot my network in a clear orderly fashion. When I domain joined all my Hyper-V servers and Azure Stack, the CA simply pushed certs to all the servers and I had easy installation of certificates. Oh and the management tools for Hyper-V were just plain better. As long as you avoid ever trying to deploy applications from within SCVMM, it's 1000 kinds of awesome.

Nearly a million retail jobs will be destroyed by the march of tech, warns trade body

Why so long?

Using current tech, there is no reason you couldn't require people to scan their payment method (phone, card, etc...), weigh the shopper and then require they weigh the same when leaving and scan the items necessary to make up the difference. Alternatively, RF tag everything and just require payment for the items scanned.

It's really not hard to do with modern tech. Maybe the cost per RFID tag would be less than the cost of a human to process the checkout.

FBI v Apple spat latest: Bill Gates is really upset that you all thought he was on the Feds' side

Re: Wasn't Gates...

I use a term which I don't if it's mine or someone else's. I call it "Journalizing".

Journalizing is when a journalist performs and interview or "research" and digs up enough information to create an article. They will for the purpose of "integrity" ensure that decent journalists will always be able to identify references and provide proof that they aren't actually lieing that someone said something. But they don't need to say the whole thing.

As proof that my daughter has an excellent future in journalism, when she was three, she told the nannys at the day care that "Pappa drinks a lot". She was quoting her mother who told her that "Pappa drinks a lot of coffee". This meant we had to spend an hour in a meeting/counseling because I, a person who drinks approximately 5 liters (little more than 1 bottle a month) of beer annually was being accused of alcoholism. And of course, when a 3 year old accuses you of drinking a lot, you can't ever argue against this because then it's just denial.

I've worked with journalists over the years and I've learned that you should pretty much never take anything the say on face value because 99% of what you find interesting about them is journalizing. You always have to ask yourself "Was this the whole quote or a partial quote which sounds more fantastic when presented this way?"

Prison butt dialler finally off-hold after 12-day anal retention marathon

Hmm... strange... no butt plug phones

I googled and searched on eBay for butt plug phones and came up with nothing.

It seems like prisoners would probably pay out large amounts of cigarettes to get their... hands (maybe other parts) on a phone shaped to be "safely stored" in their asses.

Maybe HTC should work on one of these... it seems to be an optimal fit for their business model... I think it might be best to refer to it as a disposable model... preferably not for recycling.

NASA's Orion: 100,000 parts riding 8 million pounds of thrust

Re: The march of technology...

I have to admit, I was at one point of my life obsessed with the technology behind space flight. I join you in your sentiments and agree with you completely. While the technology has progressed substantially in new rocket designs, as a technologist (self proclaimed) I am thoroughly disappointed with the rate of progress.

I believe that last 15 years of space travel has been a massive success for no other reason but having attempted to move past the nonsense related to the archaic model of development of space travel. I believe strongly that we have made far more progress since privatization of space flight has become a reality. Companies like SpaceX and Scaled Composites or even just John Carmack's endevours into vertical takeoff and landing has been a huge improvement.

SpaceX is likely to begin losing their agility before long. They are slowly letting NASA and the government in general have too much say in their development. Orion is a scary project because there is too much of the old model involved in their business.

I think that SpaceX and Bigelow combined could be wonderful. They could in theory open the path for making it possible to begin making far better space craft... in space. Maybe within ten years we'll see companies like Virgin shuttling people to and from a space station where they can construct large scale space transport without first needing heavy lifters like Orion. It would be optimal to launch large spacecraft as pieces on top of smaller vehicles, assemble them in space and then launch them. The next logical step wouldn't be going to the moon, but instead going to lunar orbit and establishing an orbital station that could be used as a station to ferry people too and from the moon using light weight vehicles well suited to the task.

The idea of Orion has always been scary because it suggests that we need to be able to reach our chosen destinations directly from the earth's surface. Building a rocket that can go directly to the moon always sounded stupid to me. A space station in earth's orbit and another in lunar orbit could make this far more efficient. Then there's mars and beyond. Just the cost of launching directly from earth to the moon is outrageous. The massive amount of fuel required is unacceptable.

How about the additional benefits of being able to keep rescue vehicles on the ready at the stations we build? As a result, it would pave a path that could truly limit the dangers of being stranded because all rescue missions would have to be launched from the earth's surface. I don't think we'll see personal space ships like those in the TV shows like FireFly any time real soon, but I do think we can see vessels making regular trips from earth to the moon to mars and back within 20 years.

Things are really improving and it's certainly a good thing to have another player in the game to reach space. But a massive vessel like Orion just seems like the wrong way to do it :(

Feds spank Asus with 20-year audit probe for router security blunder

Asus is Asus... it's not Cisco, Aruba, Meru, etc...

Asus is a cheap home wireless router that you plug in, turn on and you're done. If you're concerned about security, it really just doesn't even matter what brand you use, if you don't properly monitor and configure patches and updates you're screwed.

These days, the best solution would be a Windows based router with automatic updates turned on. At least then every now and then there's a chance a security patch will come in. So far as I know, Asus isn't doing weekly or monthly updates of their firmwares. They aren't doing daily updates of their firewall rules. They aren't running a security management center or even contracting someone else. They simply sell a wireless router and occasionally offer a feature patch which next to nobody installs.

There's just no point to this. So far as I know, there's never been any claim by asus to be a secure device. I was pretty sure their selling point was "Any idiot can plug one in".

German mayor's browser tabs catch him with trousers down

Is there a website for this?

How about a web site which offers convincing lies for people who get busted like this? I've always been a fan of "I clicked some strange thing a while back and ever since, my browser keeps automatically opening these links. I don't even notice them anymore".