Posts by Ammaross Danan

Could a snapshot plug your backup window?

Snapshots

Your snapshots can't guarentee consistancy on an Application level. A snapshot, when started, acts like the power was cut to the server. If you had an MSSQL server in the middle of a series of transactions when you started the snapshot, you're likely to get data corruption. Fortunately, I believe snapshotting is smart enough to wait for (a) file-write(s) to fully complete first before drawing the line in the sand, but I wouldn't stake my business VMs on it.

Backups are good copies of your data, be it databases in a consistant state, or even files in a consistant state (you saving the word doc along with it's autosave hidden file too?), not to mention the Operating System in a consistant state. Snapshots are nice, when timed to hit during non-peak times, but I still wouldn't trust them on my SQL servers for "backups."

5 SECONDS to bypass an iPad 2 password

Patch

They'll likely patch it...about as quickly, and accurately as they did with the Daylight Savings Time shifts....

Linehan turns IT Crowd off but NOT on again

Ah, will be missed.

"What operating system is it running?"

"Um, Vista."

"We're gonna die!"

iPhone 4S: Our *hit list

@GrahamS

Great summary and answers Graham, but one thing overlooked:

"And you can always add some cloud storage on dropbox or box.net - physical SD cards are so 2009. box.net are currently offering 50GB cloud storage for free for life!"

Yes, start shoving /any/ of that 50GB across the 3G (oh, HPDSA+) of the iPhone with your "unlimited" (or not!) data plan. I'll take a high-speed microSD card any day of the week, since it will likely hold videos and music, or loads of snaps from that 8MP camera on the back....

In addition...

"Fine, but you can only access it via shitunes. FAIL!"

Perhaps that's why it "doesn't got a lot of stuff on it"

Samsung demands iPhone 4S ban in Japan and Oz

Obvious responses:

@Ainteenbooty: "In what possible manner did you determine that an iPad SHOULD be used in portrait?"

Just look at the unlock screen for one. Shows in landscape. Also, the camera (which should be on the top, right?) is only on the top if in landscape. Otherwise, your hand could potentially be blocking it (as it would be on the right or left, vertically centered). Then there's the whole connector locations bit that point it toward being meant for landscape. If you want to get software-specific, there are one or two screens that don't rotate out of landscape mode.

@patent argument:

If you notice something from the Netherlands case, the court ordered Apple and Samsung to reach a licensing agreement. What does this mean? It means APPLE WAS NOT PAYING ROYALTIES as it should have been. They've been using the 3G patents without having a license for them. Apple is definitely in the wrong there. Whether Samsung is asking a "fair price" is open for debate, but keep in mind the license amount has a range of "fair prices" set that they must abide by, so even picking the highest "fair price," it is still an agreed upon "fair price."

1m iPad 3s being built this quarter, says analyst

Don't worry....

Remember? The iPad2 was said to have a 2048x1536 display too. Knowing Apple, if you take the best screen resolution available for Android near the time of release, then knock a bit off or assume same resolution, you're likely going to be right:

iPad2 = 1024x768

Samsung GalaxyTab 10.1 = 1280x800.

Motorola Xoom = 1280x800.

So, the iPad2 falls into the "knock a bit off" category. (yes the Tab "released" a few weeks after the iPad2, but the Xoom existed well before).

MIT boffin: Salted disks hold SIX TIMES more data

For the obvious:

500GB-sized drive (assuming platter density gains of 6X as per the article) would scale and become a 3TB drive, based soley on same platter size with density gains.

Granted, for those who didn't catch this, the explaination will probably be lost on you as well.

Apple's US bid to ban Samsung tabs hinges on design

Well....

"Samsung have not gone out of their way to place obvious logos on any of their recent devices"

You mean, besides the fairly large, obvious "SAMSUNG" logo they slap on the back of their device? Or if you're talking phones, the "SAMSUNG" logo they put on the front at the bottom... My Samsung Droid Charge looks nothing like an iPhone, esp with the big logo on the face....

Valve chief says Apple will own your living room

Cant

Not only can you NOT play that, but you'll pay us $500 per device for the priviledge of us telling you "no."

Intel touts energy-use gadgetry for planet admirers

That and...

Rather than calculating electricity costs in car polution because of the coal burned to make it, perhaps having nuclear reactors providing most of the power for a country, we can measure cuts in pounds of waste (which is likely to be significantly less than the pounds of CO2 polution just cited in the article).

I/O holds up the traffic in virtual systems

Yep

VDI was designed to remove the cost of your end-points (including management and hardware) and put them in your datacenter. Considering each end-point in a "rendering" (read Maya or AutoCAD type renderings likely) saturates Gigabit ethernet to the desktop, why would you NOT assume that a measely bonded gigabit or quad gigabit would not get saturated when hosting tens of servers?

The $35 android tablet, a snip at $50

Form Factor

Careful though, the device is reasonably rectanglish and has rounded corners and a black frame surrounding the screen. Better not tip Apple off!

What's not in the iPhone 4S ... and why

Or...

Just use your iPhone as the glorified iPod Touch that it is....you know, those things Android, et al users refer to MP3s? (iTunes converts them, so they can't be referred to as MP3s at that point).

AMD Llano vs Intel Sandy Bridge

Also

Let's not forget that this was a 1.6ghz amd vs a 2.3ghz intel. AMD is already behind on a per-cycle performance standpoint. This "comparison" was flawed from the start.

Microsoft, IBM tussle for tech value runner-up

"Where he is taking the company"

Because the world would be a better place if all the Wintards moved to MacOS? Sorry, I'll stick with the lesser of two evils. (no linux people, Ubuntu or otherwise would not become the "next big OS." You know as well as I they'd run to Apple because "their iPhone is hip").

Mozilla forces Firefox 7 on memory diet

Reading...

You did read that the memory reclaimed was due to a framework or methodology of detecting and squashing memleaks, right? It's not that they unload pages that are in the background or the like, simply fixing buggy code that leaves allocated mem floating unreferenced.

Mac malware uses Windows-style PDF camouflage ruse

Yes, but...

Another reason the lay computer user can't/won't use Linux. If they download their lovely Chrome installer, how are they going to know they have to go into the properties and mark the file as executable? Perhaps have a helping info page "You're running Linux! Let me show you how you can run this program. Oh, you're running XFCE? Here's the instructions. Oh, Gnome, here's the OTHER instructions. Unity? Bah, open a terminal window (if you know how, or hit ctrl+alt+F2), and do a chmod u+x on the file (if you know where it is, likely somewhere in your ~ folder), then open it."

More secure? Sure. It just saves people from themselves because it doesn't hold their hand while walking them into an oncoming train.... But only 25% of /actual computer users/ would even be able to use it to a decent degree.

I do give Apple credit at making a *nix box that is at least usable by the masses. I just don't like their "culture."

Neil Armstrong: US space program 'embarrassing'

Manned Space Exploration

Manned space exploration is all well and good, but with focusing primarily on robotic exploration, to be eventually followed by manned exploration, we could do so much more. Robots can withstand Mars, likely Venus (but not for too long), Titan, and a dozen other places, and do so at astoundingly cheaper mission costs, even if they sent TWO of each robot, just in case one failed/blows up/etc. We could do tens of missions simultaneously for the same cost as having an astronaut golf on the moon....

Once we get a decent set of building bots on Mars putting together a habitat or digging/finding a hole, THEN we can send some 'nauts up to put boot-prints on top of rover tracks. This will likely be the best method of space exploration. We won't even mention how horridly overpriced the monopoly of space launches has been. Elon has shown us that.

Cloud startup's business model defies laws of physics

Same "template" base?

Even if they use the same template, the resulting file will be different, so file-level matching is out based on hashing of the encrypted data. It says if you share even a single slide between ppts, they dedup it, which means perhaps block-level dedup with understanding of filetypes to a degree. likely they "stripe" intelligent chunks (slides, pages, or simply data-blocks) across hdds and match those chunk signatures. They may not know what's in the file server-side, but I'm sure the client-side is quite aware to pull this off.

Apple seeks product security boss after iPhone loss

New Security Policy

Put all prototypes on a Kensington lock lanyard. But don't give the employee the code.

Done and Done.

Satellite gives better picture of solar flares' effects on Earth

Question of a question

"do typical variations in the sun's output have a greater or lesser effect on global climate than the accumulation of CO2 from all that fossil burning we're doing?"

One hates to answer a question with a question, but just consider what the CO2 in the atmosphere causes to be "trapped?"

Toshiba outs 'world's thinnest, lightest' tablet

Fat Tablets

There's a couple "run a full Win7/Linux" tablets out there. Two of the better ones are the MSI Windpad 110W and the Fujitsu Q550. Check them out before complaining about "glorified phone OSes" for your only options.

Samsung outs MacBook Pro lookalike laptop

Trade dress or no....

"Samsung didn't say how much this spec will cost you, but you can save a bit by settling for a 14in screen or a Core i5 CPU."

Trade dress or no, it will likely "save a bit" compared to buying the Real Thing(tm).

Windows 8 ribbon entangles Microsoft

Ribbons and statistics

Since the "most used" commands are likely Ctrl+C and Ctrl+V and the Delete key, I'm sure that will skew the weights for how often New Folder is selected from the context menu or Send To -> USB drive. I know that I WON'T use a fancy button on a ribbon for cut and paste, just because it's the "most used" commands or hotkeys. Newbies might love the visible button, and I know it will be a great feature to add to (listen Microsoft!) the touch GUI (yes, imagine that: a GUI designed for touch, as opposed to the "regular" GUI for keyboard+mouse). But we know MS doesn't listen to anything but TechNet subscribers....

AMD finally manages to snare a CEO: Lenovo man Read

Tim Cook

"...and Apple's Tim Cook, were approached by AMD and rejected the position..."

Well, we now know why Tim Cook rejected AMD's offer....

Microsoft unveils file-move changes in Windows 8

Space Remaining

Space remaining is simple enough to see. In Win7 Explorer, click "computer" and it shows the drives in the system with a bar showing used vs free space. Click on any of the drives and it shows "Space free:" in the status bar. Not as simple as always showing X free diskspace in the status bar all the time, but usually you should have an idea of how much disk space you have left....

What I hope they improve is the file renaming, so if you have, for instance a bunch of photos named "DCIM_0001", "DCIM_0002", etc, you could select all of them and rename them to end up being "Birthday2010_0001", "Birthday2010_0002" (retaining the original numberings/letterings in the part of the filename you didn't change), rather than renaming them all to your new name + _00X. It's even worse when you already have them all named, but wanted to add a short prefix to all 100 of them....

Lenovo ThinkPad Tablet goes on sale

Connector

At least it has microUSB, miniHDMI, and an SD card slot. At the same price point as the Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1, if the screen is as nice, this might lure me away....

New Apple move against Galaxy Tab on Euro front

Sueing

Sueing for using "F150" for a car name, I can give Ford that. But sueing because a car is black with chrome accents and has "aerodynamic" (read: "rounded") corners and you drive it with a circular device (steering wheel) and a gear-shift.... I propose that all car manufacturers sue for injunctions against each other for obviously stealing each other's "look'n'feel" and failing to be "innovative." Perhaps when we're all riding in horse-and-buggies again, bureaucrats will wake up and realize that the world could be a better place without such petty wastes of (consumer) money.

(yes, it is us that eventually have to pay for all these lawyers)

Piles of unshiftable HP fondle-slabs choke Best Buy

Re

"will know that the Apple device will work, and be easy to use"

I think the biggest thing Apple has going for them is the iPod. A lot of people has/had one. They're used to being forced to use iTunes to manage their device. They like the idea of their iPad having the same interface, being able to use the same apps, etc. Everyone thinks "iPad" when they think of a tablet now, simply because it's "the thing to have." I've talked to a lot of people that want to use a tablet for everything an iPad CANT do (very well at least...), but they still want the iPad because they think it will do it "best." They won't even hear alternatives. It's quite sad really...like trying to give someone purified tap water as opposed to the bottled water at the store... "It's just not my <insert brand here>"

Mozilla strokes coders with Firefox 6

Plug-in developers

You mean plug-in developers have to, in advance, test their plug-in semi-regularly (every 6 weeks) on a beta build of Firefox and release at least minor updates to keep up with the current compatiblity versioning? Heaven forbid! 10 year-olds do as much and more with their World of Warcraft addons.

Mozilla to auto-block unwanted Firefox add-ons

IE

even better, IE needs to have this auro-disabled option. to make it even better than that, make them have to click though a non-autopop menu to actually enable the toolbar. people end up with toolbars get them because they just have to hit yes to a popup: and thwy always hit yes.

Video CAPTCHAs target cyberbaddies

Forget Averages

Why not just isolate the video clip background? It should be the /exact same/ each time, unless it too is randomized (such as the bubbles example).

Either way, the high contrast and wildly different colors vs the background should make any program that is intelligent enough to pull individual frames out of the animation easily able to figure out the characters.

Samsung and STEC flash their sizzling SSDs

Likely....

...when HDDs are on par with SSD performance perhaps? There's a reason Core i7s cost more than Core i3s. Same applies to the performance difference for SSDs vs HDDs. Horses for courses and all that.

Apple injunction startles Samsung

Yes....

"If Google/Samsun had bothered designing some slightly different icons, they wouldn't be in this mess"

Yes, because everyone knows a button should be a triangle, not a square with slightly rounded corners like the one I'm going to hit for "submit"... oh wait...

Hackers crack crypto for GPRS mobile networks

Encryption

Likely, the "feature phones" or the even dumber ones would lose battery life having to encrypt/decrypt 128+bit comms. Perhaps this is a way to mask the battery drain from having signal towers too far apart?

SMART unveils smarter, faster, fatter SSDs

@Tony: write wear

Since your TB written increased as your time range decreased, thus making your info fairly illegible, lets go off the assumption you write 14.5TB over a 3 month period of time...

14.5TB x 1.6 (for write amplification) x 1000 (convert to GB) / 120 (120GB vertex 2 drive size) = 193.33 full drive writes every 3 months. 3000 (expected cell endurance) / 193.33 (full writes from above) * 3 (months: time period) = 46.55 months (3.88 years) expected life span on a 120GB vertex2 SSD, not accounting for overprovisioning. Put a couple of 240GBs in a RAID1 and you can double that and have redundancy. If you're waiting more than 5 years to replace your primary DB server disk drives, you dont care enough to bother with SSDs.

Lessons about "wear" and "ware" and "their" and "there" are for another post.

Belt and braces stop the network falling down

Nah

My modem uses USB.

George Lucas defeated by Stormtrooper helmet man

@NomNomNom

"A FYI time travel is now officially impossible so don't pull that one"

Only time travel that requires going faster than the speed of light to achieve it. There are still other ways.

OCZ samples twin-core ARM SSD controller

Indilinx

Indilinx is OCZ's "cheaper" controller; the one they put in their low-end drives. Thus, they're either moving up to replace SandForce in their high-end, or their bringing up the low-end to spec with their current high-end drives in preparation for even more next-gen SandForce controllers.

Either way, should make acquiring a 120GB boot/progs drive a bit lighter on the wallet.

Chinese lecturer demands his students acquire iPads

Teaching

Who'd want to learn finances from a guy who supports giving out shovel loads of cash for horridly overpriced devices? Sounds like the same teacher the US Gov't had when they drafted the bailouts....

(Don't believe me on "overpriced"? Just look at their operating costs and profit margins)

Amateur claims crack of final Zodiac Killer cipher

Actually...

"claims to have deciphering [sic] the final"

"only one of which has ever [sic] been decrypted."

See? Plenty to do with IT. Don't rely soley on your spell checker for your article. Try proof-reading it once in a while.

Seagate beats Street, but outlook's bleak

Or....

Don't use DRAM (like Intel) in the SSD. SandForce controllers use flash cells as their "workspace" so anything that's on the drive-side is essentially non-volatile. Now, whether the controller/hostOS knows how to handle recovering from a sudden power loss is anyone's guess....

World o' Flash: El Reg roundup report

Wafers

Intel puts out 220mm wafers for their Core-i series chips. Does this mean each CPU is ~8.6in? Nope. The wafer gets cut up into the individual dies.

Probably the same IQ as Paris?

Fujitsu installs Windows 7... on a phone

Well...

"I also note the "Two-year Microsoft® Office Personal license" - so what happens after 2 years? Do you have to buy the whole thing again?"

Answer is: likely, yes. Although I doubt you'll want to continue using Win7 on a 1.2Ghz Atom after 2 years. If you do feel like continuing, just install LibreOffice instead. It will likely support Microsoft's next office format before MS makes a readability plugin.... (remember the conversion to docx?)

Major overhaul makes OS X Lion king of security

One Problem....

Even these new security measures won't protect Joe User from himself when he clicks the fake antivirus message which prompts him to run a downloaded file which then in turn installs the virus with user-level permissions, which can then use <insert vuln here> to escalate priveledges (or simply be happy with user-level-priv keylogging) to install the "virus" (read: fakeAV or its ilk)

Complexity killed the IT quality of service ...

Also

Budget constraints and performance metrics are part of the problem, yes. However, an even larger elephant in the room is that of compartmentalization. Often, you'll have a group of IT guys who specialize in one thing. You ask the "Network Infrastructure" guy to fix a syslog error on the Win 2003 server and he'll likely not know how. Ask the server guy to fix a syntax error on a jsp page and he won't know where to start. Diverse skillsets in even one person will help diagnose a "slowness" issue more than having 3 whole teams on the matter. Why? Because, chances are, they won't be able to see outside their scope. They may not even know you're running that tomcat webapp server in a VM that was only given a single vCPU without any MHz reservations, but happens to coexist on the same physical machine as the reporting server...

vSphere 5.0 – up close and virtual

Transcript

Any way we can get a RegCast transcript?

Heat sink breakthrough threatens ventblockers

Mass Kinetic Energy

@bazza "I was thinking of the whole machine": Just how much mass do you think this heatsink has? From the picture, it's no where near the mass required to harvest kinetic energy to power a complete rig. Perhaps if it was on the order of Scythe's Mugen R2, then you might be able to help an SSD clear its cache (Intel SSDs and the like, since Sandforce doesn't use DRAM caches). But to help the whole machine, you're looking at several kilos at the least.

Intel 320 SSD bug causes forum despair

Do you know nothing?

"What happens if the datacentre aircon fails and the SDDs get too hot ?"

I take it from this statement that you know nothing of SSDs. However, to feed the conversation for those honestly seeking answers, SSDs can work well within the range a server room would hit if the "AirCon" goes out. I'd be more worried about your CPUs tipping over and sending garbage to the SSDs than that the SSDs would continue to function normally.