Posts by Ammaross Danan

Screeech... DRAM! Weak demand hits memory-makers as they slam on CAPEX brakes – analyst

100% think their weak sales is due to overpricing.

CableLabs' many hands make light work – at four terabits per second

@Wolfclaw

"The big question if it ever implemented and rolled out by Virgin Media, we probably still get buffered video playback?"

No, but you'll have a 500GB data cap. :P

Stripe in Bitcoin hype flight while fans blindly gobble up crypto-cash

Re: Trade deals with the EU

> when the bitcoin price falls below the cost of it's production.

Also, if people decide it's not economical to mine, they'll drop out of mining it and move to another coin (if they can). This will decrease the difficulty to mine (due to lower network hashrate) and raise rewards for those still in the game (since they'll solve more blocks due to lower difficulty). Eventually it will hit an equilibrium where it's still profitable to mine. It's the same with any proof-of-work crypto.

Boss swore by 'For Dummies' book about an OS his org didn't run

"Or possibly "Help once, forever deal with someone else's problems" ?"

Story of my life. Usually followed by "expected for free." Hope I at least get a pint out of it.

Miss Misery on hacking Mr Robot and the Missing Sense of Fun

Re: Seen some of the first season.

"The point was the data centre was so super secure that it had no outside remote access of any kind."

I think you're confusing the data center that was being attacked with the storage facility that stored Evil Corp's backups.

Windows 10 memory management changes to give Hyper-V more headroom

Re: Running Linux on top of Windows hypervisor ...

@quxinot: think of it kind of like adding cream to coffee. Maybe that will help. ;)

@OP: Windows as the base environment is useful for high-intensity apps that benefit from being closer to the metal (video rendering comes to mind). While Windows is more-frequently in need of reboots, it is more performance-demanding in many deskwork situations that it would be used for than a common Linux environment.

Seagate plans to bring down the 16TB HAMR... soon(er)

Current helium drives use 7 platters to store 8 and 10TB of data. Adding one more platter and hitting 16TB is a marked density increase and this is only Gen1. They'll likely be double even that density in 5-10yrs.

Donald Trump running insecure email servers

Re: ..and could we maybe discuss Lady McDeath's "stolen emails" instead?

Let's not forget the classified nature of many of those emails as well. Storing those outside of government servers alone was "gross mishandling of classified documents" in itself. "Generally unimportant?" Not in the slightest.

Chirp! Let's hear it for data over audio

The audio equivalent of a QR code. Modem-style.

Cheer up Samsung! You might get back $400m for copying the iPhone

Re: Samdung deserves to pay the fullest amount

Well, "...no good like Google and Microsoft!" makes for a different statement, assuming "no" isn't a typo of "not"....

Little top tech tip: Take care choosing your storage drives

Re: 'RAID is dead'

Software RAID is still RAID, even if it's abstracted by being called "chunklets," "pages," or the like and hidden behind a WebUI proffering data parity levels.

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

Re: Google is full of shit.

You missed the mark. They're not complaining that they can't access error rates in SMART or the like, they're complaining that when a read-error occurs, they don't get an API event that they can simply respond to which tells the drive to fast-ignore the read error rather than doing it's head-park, re-seek, re-read pre-programmed action 3 times before finally giving up and SMART logging an uncorrectable. This fast-error would maintain the performance of the drive, while also allowing Google et al to reconstruct the lost sector from other sources and relocate that data on the fly or the like.

Surprise! Leading 4-socket server vendor isn’t Dell or HPE

Re: And the Chinese are known for being truthful, of course.

Actually, he was calling into question the reputation of China as a country given recent news and all (which btw has nothing to do with individual organizations in said country). Perhaps your assumption of it being a jab at Asians (or at least those living in an area that could be considered "Chinese") that was the more racist act? Racism on the brain perhaps.

Bot-herders fire fake GPS co-ords at Niantic to collect Pokémon

Re: Damn

Ceiling fans induce GPS drift well enough though.

Loop Dreams: Top college talents showcase their skills … in cabling

Re: So where are these guys in the real world...

As a (far) previous year winner, i can say I'm not working in telco. Air conditioned server rooms and an office is way better than a cable jockey or punch-down monkey. :)

Musk's Tesla to buy Musk's SolarCity for US$2.8 billion

Re: Power Wall

They already make fast-charging ports for home installation. The PowerWall is basically a whole-home UPS, so the car would indeed charge from it anyway. The advantage is you can have the PowerWall charge during low-cost/kW time periods, so even if you're charging your car during peak-cost times, you're only paying the low-cost kWs.

Intel still chip, chip, chippin' away at the European Commission's anti-trust fine

Re: Wintel...

I'm just waiting for a well-connected southbridge that has more than 4 PCIe lanes equivalent. Skylake doubled the data throughput for theirs, but that was barely enough to support a USB 3.1 alongside a couple active SATA3 ports.

Fedora 24 is here. Go ahead – dive in

Re: Not good enough for my use.

1) Why are you even looking at another distro (or complaining about one you had no intention on using at all anyway)?

2) You must not have actually read the article as there's a MATE spin of Fedora 24 so you can have your preferred GUI.

3) "gnome will become the text editor the systemd operating system...." Trolling and/or you have no clue what you're talking about. Likely both.

Re: I will wait for Fedora24 to work for me. It is not what I want to use as it now is.

I'd say most of your mid-to-upper range SSDs have capacitors in them to prevent corruption on sudden power loss. Maybe spend the 5 minutes to research your SSD to suit your need/worry rather than buying a cheap one?

You do realize that Fedora was meant to be a 6-month cycle as a proving ground for new software to eventually be rolled into RHEL upon success. If you want stable or long-term support, that's exactly what RHEL (or CentOS) et al is for. Fedora is for cutting-edge; the people that want containers, the latest KVM, etc. Do your research and pick the horse for the course.

Millions menaced as ransomware-smuggling ads pollute top websites

Re: @Destroy all monsters ... Firefox and NoScript

@adnim:

"Send form data to a php page to do the validating."

The point of using javascript to validate pre-send is to reduce submissions/processing server-side by rejecting bad/missing data client-side first.

You cite the best use of javascript actually: "Yes scripting does have its purposes, I find Ajax particularly useful." Now, what do you do with that AJAX JSON result? You create HTML content via javascript. Also, a common technique is to pass page data in javascript code and build it using javascript to prevent the need to send 100 table lines of pre-formatted (and highly repetitive) tr td tags. This optimizes data transfer and server-side processing as it uses the client's CPU to generate the necessary HTML to display.

Patient monitors altered, drug dispensary popped in colossal hospital hack

Re: Already emailed tips and corrections

We already know some of these writers have more typos than a document dictated to Siri and using AutoCorrect.

Seagate’s triple whammy: Disk numbers, costs, and flash

Re: Areal density

"The reality is that traditional mechanical HDDs are nearing their end of life due to physics."

You must have stopped reading about HDDs once you bought an SSD. HAMR alone will allow HDDs to hit 18TB by 2018 (see Toshiba's CEO discussion on the matter if you think I'm just personally speculating). Combine that with additional density advancements in HAMR and adding in SMR (for write-once-read-many situations [netflix, home media]) and you'll get a great density boost.

So no, HDDs aren't EoL at 10TB (current size).

That said, flash certainly has a greater potential to out-density (yay, new term!) HDDs, but likely at a significant price delta for a long time.

Re: There is money to be made.

If you think recovering a few hundred GB over the network is bad, just imagine how long the "go to the cloud!" punters will take to restore (not to mention if you're the unfortunate that has a data-cap or rate limit soft-cap). SSDs are markedly better for OS and applications, but for large, sequential storage like RAWs and vids, disk is still ideal (cost for size mainly, as speed is fairly moot). Those VMs would best benefit from an SSD though, just like an OS/app drive.

Boffins: There's a ninth planet out there – now we just need to find it

Re: If Pluto is taken.

"9" is a movie and the MPAA would sue them into the ground.

World's most complex cash register malware plunders millions in US

Re: Escape Route?

If steel beams are created using cheap material, the manufacturer is at fault for sourcing/using bad materials which lead to whatever disaster it caused. Ergo, if a POS vendor puts their software on Windows XP embedded....

WordPress.com ditches PHP for Calypso's JavaScript admin UI

Re: wordpress is bloatware

Fifteen tables is certainly reasonable. I take it you didn't actually pay attention to what those tables were used for?

I'd also assume your website design template (if you actually abstracted it from your display script) was terrible in-line styling or poor CSS at best? Perhaps you were not even escape-checking your input fields or base64-encoding enabled? Compared to a quick whip-it-out setup, it may feel bloated, but it's versatile enough to be used by more than the one person you wrote for.

Muted HAMR blow from Seagate: damp squib drive coming in 2016

Re: The slow death of the HDD

You are making the mistake of assuming HDDs are trying to compete on IOPS. They're not (at least since SSDs went mainstream). They're large data drives. Your new 30GB game (most games are large indexed archives), multi-TB video collection, TBs of photos, etc. You don't get 8TB of spinning rust to put your OS and apps on.

Hard drives are still excellent with the one thing they're good at: large sequential writes and reads. HAMR will even improve the other thing they're good at: offline (or nearly so) data storage, as NAND requires data refresh cycles (similar to RAM, but with a larger timeframe between refreshing), which means data on an SSD that's tossed in a drawer will (most likely) not be readable in 3 years.

128TB SSD by 2018? Toshiba promises much, delivers ... a little

Re: "and a few enthusiasts looking for speed in such things a gaming."

"Most data on people's hard drives isn't accessed enough to make access time even an issue for the most part."

Yes, but it's Windows and program files that matter. Picture folders benefit substantially too. If you think putting media on an SSD is a waste of bits, try explaining to an "older person" how to use a "D" drive...

Tegile's new faster fatter flash box flings self at big data analytics

Re: it's not about the hardware

No, their array does not lose data. It has, for us at least, struggled under a write-heavy ~800 IOPS load with 2 hybrid shelves. Lesson learned: don't buy their lower-end (weak single proc) shelves if you are using dedup+compress with ANY flash in your system.

Pirate MEP: Microsoft's walled garden is no consumer pleasure park

Re: Unauthorised peripherals?

Did everybody miss that they merged their XBOX and Windows policies? The "peripherals" bit is a carry-over from the XBOX preventing things such as modding, "game genie" type devices, aimbots, etc, unlicensed knock-offs, etc. Now, the fact they left it in the Windows policy is throwing the door wide open, but it's way more likely they just left it in the verbage rather than having any particular device range (or walled garden) in mind.

Proxyham Wi-Fi relay SUPPRESSED. CONSPIRACY, yowl tinfoilers

Ubiquiti

Ubiquiti makes some decent kit. Shame their company name is misspelled in the article.

Apple store staffers probed like 'criminals', lawsuit claims

Re: Amazon set the precident

6? Try SIXTEEN.

http://seekingalpha.com/article/1246081-apple-does-not-have-137-billion-in-cash

Nude celeb iCloud hack: Feds seize Chicago man's computers

Re: Someone else?

They're likely looking for a C&C bot or somesuch on the hardware. Any hacker worth his weight (or even most skiddies for that matter) will have a small gaggle of zombies they can proxy through. They'd have to find the C&C hub and access logs for THAT (or just monitor it) in order to find the real culprit.

To your point, that sort of activity could/should have raised a flag at the least. However, a large company (or even a hotel) would easily exceed 500 iCloud accounts by merely having guests on their wifi. I fain to think what a Starbucks or metro open wifi NATs in a day.... Even with flags, they could be red herrings. I'd still do it if I was the sec bod, but I'd also start whitelisting some.

HGST shimmy shimmy shingles its way to a 10TB spinning rust drive

Re: Cannot imagine wanting under any circumstances

You must not be familiar with HAMR. Shingled is a stop-gap while HAMR drives are matured. The predicted density of HAMR drives is certainly higher than 20TB over the life of the technology.

Sex disease surge in US state partly blamed on hook-up apps

Yep

iClapApp

That is all.

Major London rail station reveals system passwords during TV documentary

Re: All too common unfortunately

Could be worse....in an office with a clear view of the monitor from outside the window....

Snapdragon 810 chip doesn't overheat, jilted Qualcomm sniffs at LG

Re: I think phones might be getting a bit over-powered

8-cores does not mean power. eMMC is not the same as a workstation SSD. But you are right, throw more hardware at it and coders can get lazy.

How do you sell fewer hard drives but make more profit? Let's ask ... Western Digital

Re: Why are Seagate's profits down?

Gets even more costly when it's enterprise drives. :)

Windows 10 Device Guard: Microsoft's effort to keep malware off PCs

"But if an enterprise is saying 'Hey, sign this for me,' it will be done with a key that only works for that company."

This would allow businesses to get a hash for a specific version of Java they must have. Home users are likely more SOL for that aging copy of Starcraft however....

Re: Why do I get a bad feeling about this...

You also forget that the K-branded i-series CPUs (e.g. Core i7-4790K, et al) do NOT have VT-d (as opposed to the non-K CPUs such as the Core i7-4770 which do have VT-d). Fortunately, people interested in K-branded CPUs are likely intelligent enough to not need this particular form of malware protection.

"But if an enterprise is saying 'Hey, sign this for me,' it will be done with a key that only works for that company."

Now if it can be done for individual users that have some legacy software (such as the original Starcraft....), I think this would work well for home users. Otherwise, you'll severely limit the amount of software one is able to run...

Infosec bod's brag: Text editor pops Avaya phones FOREVER

"Indefinite"

So, he's claiming the "indefinite" compromising was due to his assertion that: “My definition of firmware updating is trading known vulnerabilities for unknown ones,” thus still finding some way into the device through currently-unknown means...thus "the industry needs the ability to retrofit arbitrary devices with operating-system agnostic host-based defences" of which he happens to own a company that does exactly that.... I see a conflict of interest in his assertions (read: points made are likely exaggerated for a sales-pitch opportunity).

Hyper-convergence: Whither the alternative stack, VM lads?

Or XenServer

Or the unmentioned XenServer which is "good enough" and offers the whole hog for free (with the obvious optional support contract fee).

Trading Standards pokes Amazon over 'libellous' review

Re: Perhaps

Actually, the review is correct as stated: it blocks emergency services callbacks. If those said services follow the prompts, they can get through, however, so it is a omission in the review for that point.

As for telemarketers, some DO have the ability to directly interact with the dialer (to hit that 5* combo) if desired. However, telemarketers are incentivized to talk to people who don't want a sales call so much they buy hardware to block such calls, as it likely won't lead to an actual sale. I'd certainly result the call as a "no answer" and move on as quickly as possible. (Yes, telemarketers enter results of a call after each one and nearly all the time pick "no answer," even if you just pick up the line and hang up). Best thing to do is "please remove me from your calling list." The marketers are required, by law, to remove you when requested. Be cordial though, because even then, you might get resulted as "no answer" just to piss you off when their system calls you back after the ~3hr retry window.

Want to go green like Apple, but don't have billions in the bank?

Incorrect

You're just assuming all energy (such as bio-burning) originated with something that grew from the sun. You're forgetting chemical-based energy (exothermic reactive metals for instance).

Dot-com intimidation forces Indiana to undo hated anti-gay law

You really need to read a dissertation about logical fallacies. You're referring to "reductio ad absurdum." Here's a starter poster: https://yourlogicalfallacyis.com/poster

Ding Dong, ALIENS CALLING

Re: Don't they know anything?

Just ask Tom Cruise about the Space Corps. It was ALREADY real....

Gigabit web streaming in 2016? Live tests say yes

Re: Who cares!

"... When the roommate and I download a 30GB game on steam, that's 20% of our cap gone..." of "my 300 GB cap"... that's just 10% if my maths don't fail me.

Also sucks for you to be in a test market like that.

Super SSD tech: Fancy a bonkers 8TB all-flash PC?

"Assuming pricing were affordable, such SSDs could basically kill the PC and notebook disk drive market in a couple of years"

The NAND market is barely able to keep up with demand for smartphone chips and the desktop "C Drive" demands. You start replacing ALL desktop drives with this and there won't be enough chips to go around.