Posts by Trevor_Pott

Pirates not to blame for Big Media's sales plunge

Re: R&D

Sure there is! They each in turn became obsessed with something or someone outside the company and allowed it to distract them. Nokia kept SHIFTING FOCUS of its R&D. It would invest in it...but it would get impatient and pull the funding before a final product could ever really be reached.

They were cashing the market leaders instead of trying to simply make one product and make it well. Constantly trying to be someone else (multiple someone elses!) ended up with them in fact being nobody.

If you want to succeed, then get a skunkworks going, DON'T give them direction every quarter, fund them to whatever level you are capable fo doing so, and let them produce you something novel. Don't Microsoft up a Courier and then kill it.

If you can't stomach R&D yourself, then send out your scouts looking for the new and the novel, not the “it’s more or less like what that other major competitor has on the market.” By the time you get your copycat product on the streets, they will have 80% of the market and you’ll be fighting an uphill battle.

Microsoft had the right of it with Kinect: buy the technology from some third-party research team, make a few minor tweaks, and bolt it on to your console…presto! Something nobody else has. Don’t make a different version of the motion controller that Nintendo has. Nintendo already stole the market for it!

No, the issues here are manifold. Treating R&D like a cost center, quarterly revenue based short-sightedness, and focusing on someone of something external to the detriment of understand what it is you do, and making sure you do it really well.

Take Apple; they make a comparative handful of products. Far fewer SKUs than Microsoft, HP, or pretty much any of the other tech titans. But they had a megalomaniac with severe OCD fret over every single detail of every single product for over a decade. It created a corporate culture that caused runaway success. Focus on the product, ignore the competition.

Where do Apple start to fall down? The Jihad against apple was a personal vendetta, there was no business sense to it. Cook is looking for a way out and for a damned good reason.

Not listening to customers. Every time there’s a real complaint against Apple, it boils down to treating customers like the enemy. (Final Cut Pro X!) If Apple would take customer issues to heart – and be a little bit more friendly with their customer engagement – then they would own the emotional loyalty of the majority of the population as well.

They could get away with treating their customers like cattle for a long time because they simply made better widgets than the next guy. The growth market there is ending; they have addressed the needs and desires of the bulk of the bell curve, growth now lies in addressing the corner cases.

The beauty of it is that their ardent refusal to talk about products until they are ready to ship is one of the smartest moves in tech. Sure, journalists hate it, but fans LOVE it. You can speculate all you want, but you know that when an Apple product is officially shown, it will be ready to BUY right away. No Asus MeMO that looks like sex on roller skates then quietly disappears, never to be heard from again.

But they are learning. They backed down on Final Cut Pro X. Mountain Lion looks to address as many of the complaints about Lion as possible while still keeping the overall direction that Apple is aiming for. They are a ruthlessly efficient corporate megalith that already understands everything I wrote about here.

Red Hat is another I would throw on the pile as “getting it.” To a greater or lesser extent extent, Rackspace, Arista, Intel, Palo Alto Networks, F5 and Citrix all seem to grasp this as well.

Do what you do best. Don’t chase after the seemingly tantalising treasures that others have already claimed. Don’t get caught up in CEO catfights with other companies. Don’t lose sight of the long term while chasing quarterly gains.

Don’t treat your own customers like the enemy. Listen to your customers and do your best to meet their needs. If you can’t or choose not to meet the needs of your customers, respect your customers enough to tell them why.

It’s not that hard to understand. But it does seem anathema to modern megabusiness.

German scientists link two labs with ‘universal quantum network’

Re: Higher species FFS!

As a general rule, "socially conservative" has a very strong statistical correlation to various (indeed in many cases nearly ALL) flavours of science denialism. Santorum just happens to be a great poster boy and a good subject. He is certainly smart enough to understand the science (in terms of ra6w processing power,) however he seems to honestly and truly believe something else.

If you take the time to dive into the science of why some people don’t believe science, you start to understand why. The article I linked to is a good introduction. Here’s another good one: http://motherjones.com/politics/2011/03/denial-science-chris-mooney

Now, you are correct, “conservative” doesn’t automatically correlate to science denialism. But very frequently this is the case. What’s more, the trend is increasing, as the polarisation between “right and left” rapidly degenerates into “science versus god.” The gap is getting bigger…and the Al Jazeera article actually has a good dose of “why progressives are having a piss poor time explaining things to conservatives.”

So yes, when you talk about someone like Santorum in combination with science denial and/or stupidity, the first thing that leaps to mind is this sort of research. Maybe it is because my province is in the middle of an election. Maybe it is because the Alberta version of the Tea Party (the Wild Rose party, also a popular flavour of tea,) is poised to win a majority.

They want to completely dismantle our health care system, turning it into a tiered for-profit, American style system. (Over my rotting corpse!) They want to defund and privatise education. They want to slash environmental and arts funding down to zero, and they plan to defund and privatise public transportation as much as is possible. Lower taxes for the rich, fewer tax breaks for the poor. Far fewer royalty taxes on resources extraction companies. Nonexistent environmental fines for non-compliant entities. 66666666It gets worse, but this isn’t really a fiscal conservatism argument.

The issue here is social conservatives. And yes, the correlation here is damned near 100% on the “batshit nuts social conservatives” and “science deniers.” How am I gauging social conservatism? Let’s look at some of the most popular issues raised by Wild Rose supporters:

- Force immigrants to adapt to “Albertan values.” (WTF are “Albertan values?” How are they different from values in any other province? And half your damned party came from Ontario, Newfoundland and America to begin with…)

- Impose “conscience rights;” doctors should be allowed to refuse contraceptives, refuse to do abortions, refuse to treat gays, blacks, etc. Marriage commissioners should be allowed to refuse to marry gays, interracial couples, etc. (Really? Getting on that time machine and pedaling hard for the past, eh?)

- Dissolve the Alberta Human Rights commission and replace it with a ridiculous bureaucratic process that by all estimates will be functionally impenetrable and completely incapable of resolving issues.

- Allow “citizen referendums” as a means of bypassing the legislature and avoiding politically difficult topics. (Want to force all gays to receive psychiatric treatment? Don’t bring up a bill, get someone to create a “citizen referendum.” Then if there is public blowback, it doesn’t hurt the party…but liberties can still be removed by special interest groups.)

I could go on. For days. But you get the point, I’m sure.

Now this group of people is also the most adamantly anti-science you could imagine. More so in many ways than the American Tea Party. It’s terrifying.

So when people start talking Santorum and science, yes…the research comes to mind. The whole shooting match is far – far – too close to home.

Re: Higher species FFS!

Being conservative does not mean you are stupid. There has been actual science done on this, you know. It does mean that your brain works in different ways. (There are even genes that have been linked to conservative thought patterns, etc.)

Give this a read: http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2012/04/201241195538365112.html

It's a great review of a great book on the topic. It looks at exactly how conservatives and progressives think differently. It also emphasise that one is not “smarter” than the other. The raw intellectual capacity of individuals can and does exist on both sides of the spectrum. It is simply that this capacity uses different filters to perceive the world and make judgements about the importance of issues and data.

If you have any interest in the topic beyond griping on the internet and/or a massive persecution complex, both the article and the book it references are 100% worth your time to read.

Re: Because

So I take it you don't maintain a zombie preparedness kit? Guess I know who's going to be one of the zombies that needs killing when the apocalypse comes...

Dot-London squeaks under ICANN deadline

I wonder what the city of London, Ontario, Canada thinks of all of this. At 300,000+ people, it isn't exactly "irrelevant," and is in fact a major part of Canada's economy.

I can't speak for "people," but I sure as fnord oppose these GTLDs. Becuase of places like London.

Who gets .salem? .springfield? Does my hometown lose out on .Edmonton because it is a burough of London, England?

Messy.

Google answers less than half of watchdog's privacy tweak questions

Re: Righty...

Apple's reply: "nice country you have there. Shame if we stopped selling iTat into it and told your citizens it was all your fault..."

IPv6 networking: Bad news for small biz

Whilst TCP/IP [was] inferior...it worked and was readily available...

You mean, people choose simple, easy and extant over complicated, expensive and reliant on future technologies and products that "the market will deliver?"

Colour me shocked.

</snark>

Sorry, but I've been debating this topic (and BYOD!) with enough purists for the past few weeks that I'm a tad bitter. The divide is interesting. The purists rarely get the point of the article at all: they see only the technical arguments. They simply can't see past "but that's not right!"

Worse, they are terrible are articulating why it isn't right, because they have been surrounded by people who think exactly like them for so long that they have simply never had to explain their position in a comprehensible fashion before.

I was really hoping this article would spur a few of them to be able to defend their take better, maybe even produce the relevant products and technologies. Instead, they've made the same old mistakes over again, and I still fear we will end up with a NAT66 world.

How sad.

Re: Written off in 3-4 years?

Amen.

I find it completely fascinating how stark the divide is on this topic. Individuals from large enterprises, government departments or academic institutions all burble with uncontained rage. Flinging ad hominem attacks left and right, they demand retraction of the article followed by seppuku and erasure of all traces of my bloodline from the face of the earth.

SME admins and business owners meanwhile nearly universally show support and understanding. I have had far – by a wide margin – more people thank me for writing about this topic and bringing the issues to light than I have had people demanding my blood for sacrificial use at the next Cisco Core Router christening.

The issue at hand was never a question of what is technically correct. Obviously IPv6 the way it is designed now was designed by the brightest networking minds of three generations.

The point that needs ramming home however is that this is completely irrelevant. SMEs and consumers who are living on the frugal edge don’t care about the technical purity of the solution. They don’t care about the “right” implementation versus the “wrong” one. They are not interested in anything except making their equipment do what it needs to do right now, today. They’ll cross whatever other bridges need crossing when they come upon them, if they happen to encounter them.

What’s the net result? The net result is that a bunch people have started to buy equipment and implement technologies that save them money. How?

1) The upfront cost is essentially nonexistent. A pfsense firewall works on that beat up old P-III…

2) The maintenance cost is nonexistent. No retraining, no “replace things every 3-4 years,” no flag days for renumbering, no having to baby firewalls on every single device...

Businesses demanded this stuff. And suppliers acknowledged this. Then they went to the IETF and shoved the NPT66 RFC down their throats. Now we have NPT66 working in the real world.

Why? Because the SMEs and consumers in question aren’t just consumers of content. You’ll see a great deal of posts here in this thread about “just plug it in, and you can get on the IPv6 internet!”

Not good enough. There’s more to it than simply accessing the internet. These people want to host things. They want control over their own servers without having to configure each and ever individual server’s firewall and remap the edge system each and every time the address assignment changes.

Note that “they want control thing.” It doesn’t matter if you believe they shouldn’t have complete control. They want it. Cheaply and simply. And they won’t buy any solution that removes the control they have, degrades ease of use on establishing and maintaining that control or costs more than what they currently use.

But the thing that doesn’t matter is the opinion of “right” and “wrong” held by nerds. And the fact that the nerds cannot understand this…that their only solution to this dilemma is to deride, belittle and launch ad homenim attacks means that businesses have taken the decision about what the future of the internet will look like out of their hands. They don’t get a say any more. The people with money have spoken, and that is the only group of people that matter.

The technical point of view? It doesn’t matter.

So get ready to welcome your NPT66 overlords. They’re here to stay. And no, these companies won’t be going out of business because they refuse to implement IPv6 the way that nerds feel it should be implemented.

Quite the opposite: companies that refuse to supply these businesses with the goods they want won’t sell equipment, and they will go out of business. Websites that refuse to play ball simply won’t get users.

The money is what talks. And the disharmonious chanting and warnings of doom heard in the distance?

Nobody cares.

[expletive] typothetans.

Quit = quite. There are others, I am sure. I blame the lack of coffee. In fact, that sounds like a great coffeecoffeecoffeecoffeecoffeecoffeecoffeecoffeecoffee...

Note to those folks who feel I am "recommending NPT66" here.

I'm not. In fact, I only have the one network with it at the moment; one I set up specifically so that I could figure out how it worked for the article. At the moment I have 16 IPv6 networks up, 4 of which are isolated testbeds. (8 new networks planned for this year alone!)

The article exists for one reason: to let the high priests of the internet know “oh, BTW, that NPT66 thing that? It’s in products and in use in SME shops all over the damned place already.” In other words: the utter failure of the priesthood to engage care for the issues faced by SME outfits resulted in them (shockingly!) going out and choosing the cheap and simple alternative that actually already existed! Note the two key words: “cheap” and “simple.”

“Right” and “wrong” aren’t in there. Surprisingly, SMEs and consumers don’t give a damn about IP morality.

I see a lot of talk about “use link local or ULA for internal addressing, and that solves everything.” No. It doesn’t. You would still have to re-address all your external-facing servers. I don’t think you quite grasp what that entails. Let me spell it out for you:

For ages upon ages, the big thing holding any SME back from spewing an unlimited number of servers all over the internet has been that they just can’t enough external IPs. They had to be conservative. They had to put time and effort into using as few servers as possible to use as few IPs as possible.

In an IPv6 world, we have functionally unlimited addresses at a time where we also have the ability to spin up hundreds of VMs on a single physical box. So what do these people do when you give them this ability? They spin up an instance of $server for every conceivable need, attach it to $external_ip and virtual sprawl sits on the internet to a magnitude you cannot possibly comprehend.

Renumbering these servers is an absolute bitch. It’s lunacy. Madness of the sort that makes SME admins pale, and then spontaneously vomit. “Flag days” are simply not allowed in 2012.

In a NPT66 environment, you don’t have to renumber. Ever. Because none of those servers have an external IP address. The only thing holding an external anything is the firewall. It holds the external subnet. It then 1:1 maps addresses back to the servers. The address issues NPT66 solves are not for internal use, but the addresses they will use to serve content to the outside world. Cheaply and simply.

Could you sit there and berate these admins for being “wrong?” Tell them they “aren’t doing it right” and that they need “education” to understand your point of view? Well…you could try. They don’t – and won’t – ever care to hear what you have to say. They are generally overstretched, working against impossible budget constraints, and usually have IT as a secondary or tertiary job.

The article is an exercise in pointing this out. That 13 years of belittling and berating instead of addressing cheap and simple are now biting everyone in the ass. Do I want the high priests angry? Yes. I want to slap each and every one across the face with their own hubris. That is 100% the intent.

Mocking and belittling me will earn you nothing. I am one individual. There are millions of SME admins out there, and I seriously doubt that the priesthood has the time to chasten and belittle each and every one of them thoroughly enough to cause them to change.

No; quit the opposite. The solution to this problem must come from the priesthood itself. You need to get your nerdrage on. You need to get out there and solve cheap and simple with extreme prejudice. You need to advocate and educate that your cheap and simple solution works, works well and works as easy as the alternatives.

Because cheap and simple IPv6 has shown up on our doorstep. And it is NPT66. 13 years of abject failure to address the practical issues have resulted in NAT being the easy choice for millions.

So hey, insult me if it makes you feel better. Question my manhood, technical ability, parentage, DNA sequencing and whatever else gets your happy on. I’m from the internet, I can handle it.

But when you’re done venting your spleen…please go make those cheap and simple products that the SME space needs, okay? Otherwise NAT will quite simply never die.

Cheers!

One in Five IT Pros Thinks Their Job Will Be Gone Within One Year - Cloud to the rescue?

Latin America is becoming "a thing" here too. Service jobs are leaving in droves. Good high-paying white-collar jobs are heading south where the labour is cheaper, and they speak the same language (and have the same culture) as the ever-growing Hispanic-American population.

Naturally, this is a bigger issue in the US than Canada. Here in Canada we are being tugged at by three sides: the first is a loss of manufacturing jobs to China. (Big ouch for Canada, manufacturing was huge here until just recently.)

Secondly, we're losing our resources post-processing jobs to America. This is a massive blow to our economy. Something like 25% of our workforce is tied up in resources post processing. Unfortunately, the American jobs-creation and economic security strategy appears to be "demand that Canada export all its jobs to the US or they won't buy our resources." When we say "okay, piss on you then, China will buy them" the US ambassador issues a very angry statement and three days later our government pulls a 180.

The third prong of our job loss is to Europe (Ireland!) We're positively bleeding white collar jobs to the cheaper European markets here. We’ve had some exporting of things like call centers to Manila (who hasn’t,) but in truth the bulk of the non-resource jobs don’t go to Asia, they go to Ireland.

The hell of it is, the Americans are so desperate for Oil that despite all of that we’re still one of the strongest economies in the world. So long as people south of the border still fry half their brain cells before they’re 18 and vote republican, we’ll just keep cutting down all our trees/pulling oil out of the ground/pulling rocks out of the ground and selling it to them.

It’s literally the definition of a boom and bust economy. We have outsourced any form of economic diversity and redundancy we had. Eventually it will come back and bite us in the ass in a truly monumental fashion, and we will start to envy Greece.

That in mind, I – like everyone else in my country – hope the boom lasts long enough to hoard money/resources/property/etc. before the crash. Retire young, be super-frugal and then watch the whole thing burn down around us.

But I’m sure when it all blows up, they’ll solve it with tax breaks for the rich. I’m told that solves everything. I’ll have to take that one on faith though. I can't find any evidence in the past 50 years to back that assertion up. This being the internet though, a hardline "Palin/Santorum for planetary government" type will be along soon to tell me just exactly how it works.

Beer, because, well...ah **** it.

Windows XP support ends two years from now

Re: "We're not willing to classify Windows NT Workstation as a mainstream desktop OS."

Have you used Windows 8? Windows isn't a desktop OS at all anymore.

Keyboard, because you'll have to pry the keyboard, mouse and multitasking operating systems from the hands of my rotting corpse.

Samsung rolls out ultra high-speed microSD cards

Re: four times faster?

Random I/O versus sequential?

30-year-old global temperature predictions close to spot-on

Re: I'm confused...

Sure; that's fair enough. But Rik, Iain, Bird-Aine, Anna, Simon, Phil and above all Richard have done absolutely bang up jobs. Richard and Iain I want to single our for special praise: they make me proud to write for The Register. The science reporting they provide is absolutely top notch, going head-to-head with Nobel Intent, Christian Science Monitor, Mother Jones or any of the other major online science news sources.

I just can’t see any complaints of bias as valid, when I start looking at the actual body of work represented here. Individual authors may have their own individual takes on the matter. Who among us doesn’t have a given viewpoint?

But when I look at the past 6 months worth of Science reporting at The Register, I feel the overall quality has gone up significantly. And it continues to rise as people like Rik develop more contacts within the scientific community and gain ever more experience reporting on these difficult and complicated topics.

I think you’ll find a lot more good science reporting than past experiences have led you to expect. Even on the climate change topics.

I can’t and won’t attempt to “defend” this that or the next thing; offensiveness – like faith, truth and beauty – are ultimately in the eye of the beholder. But I will say this: by my very cynical and difficult-to-please standards, there is a far more excellent than questionable when it comes to El Reg’s science reporting.

That’s just my $0.02, of course. My opinions are mine and mine alone. In no way do my personal opinions represent El Reg, scientists, commenttards, cats, the beer icon, or sane/insane/differently sane/orthogonal individuals anywhere.

Re: I'm confused...

The Register does not impose editorial bias on her writers. Some of us disagree with others, especially as pertains to the interpretation of scientific evidence, the importance of overwhelming scientific consensus and the importance of (and requisite standards for) evidence-based legislation.

I suspect that if you trawl through the search history on this site, you will find examples of articles that present "just the facts, ma'am," with no discernable slant. You will also find articles that question the existence of climate change, the anthropogenic nature of it as well as those that accept the judgement of the IPCC on the matter and go on to discuss mitigation or consequences.

Say what you will about El Reg, but she lets her hacks speak their piece. I, for one, wouldn’t have it any other way.

Corny conversations prove plants 'talk'

Re: Those who are vegetarians because they don't want to eat something sentient

Relevant to your interests: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TmUXuoi_K4U

Game of Thrones Blu-ray disc set

Actually, the term is

GRRuMblers.

Hodor?

Hodor, Hodor, HODOR!!!

Thin-client giant Wyse gobbled by Dell

Now I has two sads. :( :(

I has a sad. :(

Is Pano next to be gobbled up by some large corp?

Steve Jobs biopic

Ballmer

Brent Butt: http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0125217/

He can dance like Ballmer too...

Coders' 'lives sucked out' by black-and-white Visual Studio 11

Re: "Let's see if Microsoft is listening."

...but it was all for your own good!

Workers worry about pay cuts from Apple, Foxconn pact

Re: I want one of those jobs

Hey...thanks for the insights! Learning is good.

Cheers!

Re: I want one of those jobs

36 hrs per month x 12 months / 50 working weeks year = ~8.64 hrs of overtime a week.

Assuming 40 hr std work weeks, that is ~48.64 hrs a week, or ~31.36 hours *less* than I work in an average week.

Even if China allows 60 hr workweeks before overtime pay kicks in, it is still 11.36 hours less than I work in an average week.

I sure as hell don't get overtime pay; and if I understand correctly, they are making so much above national average as to be reasonably considered upper middle class. (By the standards of their society.)

Sounds perfectly reasonable! Now, the n-hexane, child labour and other things are pants, (and someone needs to scream loudly about them,) but the hours and pay sound pretty damned good to me.

Yes, the raw salary seems low by our standards. But the cost of living (goods, property, services, etc) are so much lower there that there is no reason to suspect that someone making a middle-class chinese salary doesn't live a life roughly as affluent (in terms of posession of material goods) and horrible wasteful as my own.

If the cost of bread/rice/iPhones/rent/etc. is 10x less, you need 10x less income to achieve the same quality of life.

I can't claim to know enough variables about the Chinese economy to know if these folks are really getting a raw deal or now. The information just isn't available to me.

But harping on about how many hours they have to work isn't earning sympathy points here. They seem to work about as many as I do, maybe less.

(Understand that I am not complaining about my hours here; I do what needs be done to pay the bills. This is just a discussion of facts, not a whinge fest.)

And at least they have a job. 30 million able bodied individuals of working age on my continent can't say the same.

Perspective. We need it.

There are legitimate workplace issues in China to get out panties in a bunch over. Hours worked is not one.

Web hosting

Re: Web hosting

There's Terabyte in Edmonton: good people, no question. Datacenter at the bottom of the CN tower here; more fibre than a glass plant.

10dollar.ca offers hosting, I've used then for really minor stuff, no problems whatsoever. If it's a small/low bandwidth kind of thing (and legal!) I might just be able to toss it on one of my servers here. ("Mail the author" or twitter @egeekconsulting.)

Really, it's all about size and scale. I have some Big Data contacts, I have "well, it has to serve some static Web 1.0 content and gets two visitors and a goat" kind of contacts as well. The key is to have both DNS (easydns, no questions, see my article,) and hosting be not in the US. Problem is, even if they appear to be canadian/spanish/U.K/etc...in a lot of cases, they maintain hosting nodes in the US.

Not cool.

The Register channels jobs into jobs channel

Count me among Dominic's fans...

Baffling barcode-on-steroids stickers plaster the Earth

Re: Denso

I'll buy that for a dollar, but am unsure how to use it. I had always heard the term applied to the parent company, as with chaebol or conglomerate. Without using the word subsidiary, how do you use kieretsu in a sentance to decribe child companies? "Denso is an independant mid-tier corporate node in the Toyota kieretsu?"

Barring XML, I don't know that axequate descriptors exist. :)

Re: Denso

I am always curious about the threshold for the concept of "subsidiary," and how it may or may not differ per culture/regulatory regime.

Denso was spun off from Toyota in 1949. It is most certainly its own distinct legal entity, but Toyota still retains a ~24% stake in the company. What's more, Denso owns shares in a number of companies itself, many of which Toyota owns a significant chunk of. The two companies cooperate on nearly every level and are completely and inextricably linked together for all practical purposes.

I’m willing to accept that subsidiary might not be the exact correct term for use in this situation. “Partner” doesn’t cover it either. The closest anglicism I can come up with is “clan member.” Separate distinct entity, but unquestionable “part of the family.”

As to “use in day to day life,” well…that seems to depend on who you talk to. My Japanese friends claimt he things are embedded everywhere. From bus route info to advertising, passport baggage claims to all sorts of other things. Where we might use a regular 3of9 barcode or some form of reference number, QR codes seem to be used there.

Maybe that is different in different areas? (And why not? Different cities would certainly have different methods of representing transit info, etc?) But overall, it seems that QR codes are simply “a fact of life” in Japan whereas they are still largely a novelty everywhere else.

Interesting to hear a different take on the matter, though!

Recursion

What about...a QR code that contained only the URL for the image of itself? Does this break the internet?

IT departments need productivity plan: Gartner

Comment of course not directed at the author, but at any idea-ball wielding manatee that happens to agree with Gartner's solution to this particular problem...

Shadow IT can and does occur. BOFH or no BOFH. But suggesting that the solution to this is simply that IT "become more efficient" (I.E. "do more with less") is beyond farcical. IT isn't some charity, working ourselves to death for the good of our user base and an occasional "attaboy."

If there is more to be done than is currently being done then one of three things is the likely cause:

A) There aren't enough resources available to get all the things done, and IT is prioritising to the best of their abilities, but will never be able to meet everyone's demands.

B) The Manatees "up thataway" are being an impediment to actually expending the resources in place and nothing can get done. (Yet Another TPS Report?!?)

C) The IT staff are all lazy gits who just aren't pulling their weight.

While all of these are possible, I find it difficult to believe that C is probably in most enterprises. If you subscribe to the theory that C must absolutely be true, then I think I have a far more likely scenario for you:

While you consider them to be doing nothing all day, your IT staffs are probably burning themselves out right now trying to meet overwhelming demand. Their health is declining, their sanity is fading and they feel trapped with no way out. (Who has time to look for a new job when there are mortgages/bills/etc. to pay and $deadline is looming?)

When they are finally burnt out and become useless, you probably discard them like spent fuel rods and go shopping for new ones. Why those stupid IT people keep asking for raises, quitting, or getting debilitating stress-induced illnesses is quite simply beyond you.

Sound close to home?

Maybe the IT folks should instead stop working themselves to death and hold out for more money.

</harrumph>

Why Windows 8 server is a game-changer

Re: Apple in the enterprise

I stand by everything I've said here. I have set up my test labs for Server 8, SC 2012 (especially SCVMM), SQL 2012 and so forth. I am still running them today, running all sorts of tests for future articles.

But comments which state that I have an "unconditional love" for something or other really just defeat your own point. You are not only hyperbolising, but using entirely fallacious extrapolations to label me "a Mac user," state that I am somehow trumpeting "iPads for everyone," or that I, personally am holding up Apple as the be-all-and-end-all of a platform for graphic design.

Let me be entirely blunt here: you are full of shit and you don't have a clue what you are talking about.

If you care so much about BYOD, why Windows-on-the-endpoint is not actually a requirement of enterprise computing anymore or any of the other topics discussed here, then simply stay tuned. I am sure they will all be addressed in future articles. (I have several planned that cover these topics.)

As a side note: I am unsure why your inability to set up a cluster in a Microsoft environment (something for which there are many detailed walkthroughs available) should in some way be projected onto the entirety of the systems administration community. Nor do I understand why your inability to use previous generation software to do so has any relevance whatsoever to the ease of doing so in Server 8. There’s a push-button wizard for setting up private cloud clusters, for $deity’s sake!

I believe you should take some time to investigate the concept “theory of mind.” It is relevant and applicable to your comments.

Re: @Trevor_Pott (no s)

No actually, you haven’t really asked any questions. You've made a lot of statements and assertions and done a lot of name calling based upon false assumptions, but precious little of "here is something you said, can you clarify." I especially love the part where you make the presumption that because I support the decisions and choices made by my clients that I am advocating their position. As somehow correct in all circumstances.

So yes, I do believe you have stepped over the boundaries of polite conversation. I hold to the idea that folks should add something to the conversation. A bit of wit or humour here and there is fine – certainly a norm here on El Reg – but ad hom attacks based upon false inference in comments otherwise loaded with logical fallacies have no place in civilised discourse, sir.

Re: Hmm

Actually, I was referring specifically to the ones that were designed to be used with Server 8, and the new "all Microsoft" solution to providing HA in a two-node scenario. The reason that matters has more to do with the ability to add nodes later and expand well into "private cloud" fun based upon SCVMM 2012 offerings.

Re: @Trevor_Pott (no s)

So not only do you make the logical error that "because something is infrequently used for an application, it is irrelevant," you hold up a series of decade-old prejudices as absolute fact in the same post.

Your entire interaction with this thread thus far boils down to "everything run by everyone in the entire world should be run exactly the way I do things, based up on my archaic prejudices, experience from a decade ago, some things I read in a magazine and the technologies, applications and configurations I am personally familiar with."

Any individual who might step outside your comfort zone is someone you feel the need to attack, and belittle. Not with handy things like evidence, science, case studies, statistics or anything that might possibly be of value.

All you have as bald assertions, anecdotes and the internet-given ability to take snippets of a comment completely out of context, make a load of assumptions and then apply the whole kit and caboodle as though it were somehow "fact."

That is called trolling. You’re quite lucky I’m not a moderator here, I’d have given you a vacation. You border on violation of The Register’s rather lax forum rules. Personally, I subscribe to a slightly different theory about forum behaviour, and I am a great believer in having the rules rigedly enforced.

Some people just don’t have anything to contribute to a conversation. Your comments thus far have demonstrated why. Attempting to alter what I wrote to say something other than it does so that you can set up a series of strawmen to knock down is simply not constructive.

If you are in fact using your real name, then I will take the time out to remind you of an imoporant fact: these forums are indexed by Google. You may want to consider that before you continue to post.

Re: Apple in the enterprise

At this point, you're not even making sense sir.

A) I never argued which was "better" for graphic design/video editing/whatever. My customers have told me what they want. I support them.

B) I have many photographers as clients. Some quite large school/grad/sports shooting houses. Some small portrait shooters. I have customer that run video rendering farms, customers that do graphic design for print media, customers that do graphic design for web work, customers that do video editing, 3d editing and more. Nobody "became" anything here.

I think you are just skimming posts in a frothing rage looking for things you disagree with and then rolling your face around on the keyboard while screaming invectives before hitting post.

Not a good look.

Re: Drewc - courtesy makes the world go round

Where - once - did I argue Macs were better for graphic design? I said my customers believe this. I don't care what is "better." I care that my customers are comfortable using whatever they want to use and that they feel it increases their productivity.

I believe my customers are in the best position to assess their own desires, needs, workflow and requirements. I can provide assistance and advice, but at the end of the day they are the ones who have to use it. If they believe that Apple is the best choice for them, I will support them.

Re: Windows 7 is probably the fastest EVER generalist UI

Windows 7 will not be available for years. Downgrade rights applicable to OEM copies of Windows 8 will face the same sorts of time restrictions that Windows 7 did. OEM copies of Windows 7 will cease more or less at the same time as Windows 8, and retail Windows 7 will dry up soon thereafter.

Large corporates with SA agreements will be able to downgrade, but that doesn't let Joe Bloggs who bought a Dell at Future Shop turn his computer into something that allows basic functionality like multitasking. (Well, more than 33/66 two-tile side-by-side, anyways!)

Smaller businesses who can't afford SA - ones for whom the purchase of the raw hardware with the OEM sticker is already a major expenditure - are pretty much boned here too. They won’t be seeing “years” of Windows 7 availability.

That’s okay. Windows simply isn’t necessary for them anymore anyways.

Re: @Trevor_Pott (no s)

Um...what the fuck?

A) I'm not a journalist for my day job. I'm a sysadmin. Small and medium enterprises are my specialty, but I do consult for larger organisations ranging from post-secondary education institutions to some of Canada's largest companies to government agencies.

The journalism/writing/columnist/blogger/whatever this gig counts as is a fun side endeavour.

B) I have no idea where you get the idea that I am a Mac user. That would imply owning a Mac. I support Macs in the field. More and more every month. I have a Mac in the test lab of my largest client that I can remote into from anywhere should I need to figure out how to get X done. Based on Windows 8 client, my next PC will almost certainly be a Mac…but that is quite a was down the road.

My Alienware M18X does me just fine on the desktop. (Win 7 Pro, Server 2008 R2, Win 8 Client, Win 8 Server, CentOS 6.2 and Fedora 16 /w Cinnamon are the installed OSes, just in case you are wondering.)

My Netbook is a Samsung NP-NF210 (Fedora 16 /w Cinnamon and Win 7 three-legged-dog edition.)

I also use a Galaxy Tab (original 7”: rooted, but stock gingerbread,) an ASUS Transformer TF-101 (unrooted, Ice Cream Sandwich,) and two Android phones. (Samsung Galaxy S II and HTC Desire, both rooted, both CM 7.1.)

My consulting company runs on Windows Server 2008 R2 as the virtualisation and storage layers, CentOS 6.2 to provide web services, and Google Apps + Libre Office for collaboration and communications. We maintain a strict BYOD policy regarding endpoints.

I support customers with many and varied policies regarding servers and end devices such that I see Windows, Linux, and Mac both in the datacenter and on people’s desks. I support Blackberries, iOS devices and Android in the field…with nary a Win Phone 7 to be seen, and the last Win Mo 6 gone ages past.

So what – exactly – makes me a “Mac user” amidst that background, sir? I’m quite curious. I'm rather proud of the diversity of my experience, and I go to great pains to broaden it every chance I get. New hardware, new software, new operating systems, new cloudy, SaaSy services.

An open mind seems to me far more likely to capture knowledge than one that is welded shut.

Time for a beer!

Re: @Trevor_Pott (no s)

Script-based software (as with most HTML 5 applications) is not x86 in nature. It can run on any architecture for which all the apps to process it exist. I have several ARM servers, customers of mine have deployed SPARC and Power infrastructure.

In addition: I did say “traditional x86 applications.” As in client server, client must be Windows-based, lots of configuration information, etc. lives on the client, etc.

More and more, for any locally-installed apps, I am seeing deployments where

A) the app exists across a broad range of platforms

B) the config and all the data live in the cloud. (Private, public, or a mix.)

That makes “what operating system you run on your desktop” functionally irrelevant. Every year we are getting closer, and companies that aren’t dragging along the cruft of 20+ year old applications are finding themselves able to just walk away from Windows.

And many of those who do have the 20+ year old apps are finding that App-V and RDS are perfectly acceptable for provisioning of these few remaining legacy applications.

Microsoft Windows as a client operating system exists to provision legacy software, period. Their success or failure over the next 10 years is not guaranteed. A lot depends on how well Metro is received.

And they know it.

If you disbelieve me, then I invite you to please contact Microsoft directly and try to get the ear of Mr. Ballmer. If you are successful, I am certain he will detail to you exactly why it is that Microsoft is going “all in” on the cloud. They are quite literally betting the farm on the concept, because they know that for the first time since the company’s inception, there is a very real chance of losing the desktop.

Cloudy service provisioning is Microsoft’s plan B. And rightly so! If they ever get their licensing sorted, then they have a realistic chance of remaining a big player. Their server stack is fantastic, and it is increasingly ready to both provide private cloudy awesome and integrate with Microsoft’s public cloud offerings.

And soon, I will be able to get Office on any device I choose via HTML5. Microsoft Dynamics, too. IN fact, pretty much everything they offer is being prepared to operate in a platform agnostic fashion as a cloudy offering.

Just in case. Why is that, I wonder, if Microsoft on the desktop is such a sure bet? A slam dunk that can’t be questioned? Why waste the R&D, make the capital investments and risk alienating thier entire developer and reseller base with a cloud play if Windows is so utterly unassailable?

Answers on a beer mat, please.

Re: Apple in the enterprise

I have plenty of Windows photography clients. I have some Mac photography clients. The Windows ones are almost all universally moving to Mac. Not at any urging of mine; but of their own volition, after examining the alternatives for themselves.

So I have to ask; who are you? What are your credentials? What makes your personal experience, your anecdotes, your bold assertions backed by nothing all so without flaw? Why should anyone believe what you have to say? Especially when you make several repeated errors and assumptions in your posts, ones that could have been avoided by simply reading this very thread?

To top it off, instead of cogent arguments backed by statistics, science, surveys, or…anything, really…you supplement your case with vigorous ad hominem attacks.

You have done nothing but severely harm your own credibility. I will continue to provide my customers with the services they request. From my large render farm clients, to photographers; consulates to bakeries. Straight through to the hosting companies and colo facilities I consult with.

Individuals and organisations will continue to examine the options, and choose that which is the best fit. Be that Windows, Linux...or even Mac.

In the meantime, go get yourself a pint. You seem a little worked up.

Former Yahoo! Hadoop honcho uncloaks from stealth

I hate this meme, really I do...

but...#firstworldproblems, much?

"Twitter takes to long to update!" ++spilt milk and screaming ADHD is what I get as a rational for the billions that will be pissed away on this.

While that (sadly) may be commercially viable enough of a reason to invest in "being able to process all the datas in a hadoop cluster in real time," I am really scratching my head trying to find a single useful application of the technology.

Hadoop batching and the like today gets us the ability to comb those structures somewhere around the 15 minute mark for largish datasets. So your news webpage would be 15 minutes behind. Egads!

15 minute lag time isn't going to be the end of the world for medical storage, geographical data storage, astronomical data, particle physics data, or anything else I can come up with. In fact, there are only two things I can think of that might be non-ADHD related that this innovation might enable.

Predicting earthquakes (highly unlikely, even with the proposed technological improvements outlines here,) and tracking everyone, everywhere, in real time. Not just online, but using image recognition, GPS, voice transmissions, etc. Sifting the mountains of “publicly available” information in real time to track a few billion people, find out what they buy, who they interact with, what they believe, how they vote and so forth.

Are we really proposing handing that technology over to our ever increasingly paranoid and unscrupulous governments in exchange for a quicker goddamned Twitter update?

What hath our obsession instant gratification wrought?

Musk muses on middle-class Mars colony

Re: Simplify the problem - make the first trip one way

Me too. Give me the opportunity for a one way trip to Mars, and I'd jump on it. Even knowing that in all likelihood you would run out of supplies before the next ship arrived. I can not think of a more noble end than to expend one’s life assembling the components and doing the dangerous, risky preliminary work necessary to establish Earth’s first self-sustaining offworld colony.

It is worth lives to ensure that this colony (and others like it) get born. If this man succeeds in pulling it off with the expenditure of mere money…

…then he will prove to be the single most important individual of our era.

Pirate Bay plans sky-high flying proxy servers

Re: Meh...

I shouldn’t bite…but I’m legitimately curious. “Get over myself?” What exactly could you possibly mean by that?

If you are attempting to implicate me as a pirate, I should inform you that I am Canadian. The “digital locks” legislation is only a very recent thing in my country, and under certain circumstances, downloading media here was indeed legal. We even pay a blank media tax to the media corporations to compensate for the possibility that we might copy some of their works. Until just recently, we could format shift to our heart’s desire.

I have paid for my media collection. I pay my Microsoft Action Pack and Technet licenses. I have terabytes of media, but I also have the originals discs. (Put them in the same boxes as my software licenses.) I don’t fall into the category of “pirate.”

So either are misinformed, and believe I was “defending my own piracy,” or you have a problem with what I wrote. If so, I’d like to know what.

I’ve spent years talking to people about piracy. Pirates, media stooges, unaffiliated ideologues…I am fascinated by the entire debate. Indeed, in many ways it seems to me to have a close relationship (in participation, ideology and the vicious pro-status-quo propaganda thrown against it) with the occupy movement, and with net neutrality.

In Canada, I see a lot of crossover with the anti-telco-monopoly movement, the electoral reform movement and the election financing/campaign transparency movements.

I’ve done the leg work on this. I know what I’m talking about here. I am seriously considering a book or two on the subject. I think my comment presented the facts of the matter without unduly vilifying any of the many sides in the piracy debate

Given the above, I can only conclude you’ve made some very false assumptions that have led you that have led you astray. That, or you have bought into the propaganda from one of the factions in this debate so thoroughly that so cannot accept that the reality of this world is not as it has been thus far represented to you. Good and bad, right and wrong, black and white.

I understand the allure of such a thought process; simplicity breeds clarity, helps to hide or dismiss other uncomfortable concepts that might be raised. There may even be some personal ego thing involved wherein you feel any discussion of viewpoints opposing the one you support is a personal attack; an attempt to validate them and discredit you.

In either case, I heartily recommend avoiding exposure to the internet, and tech sites in particular. The internet is (for the moment at least) a treasure trove of diverse opinion, experience and belief. Tech sites in particular are a veritable cavalcade of those very worst of intellectual sinners: individuals who question everything, including (in some cases especially) the propaganda handed us by others.

If you are unable to stomach dissenting opinions, I recommend you go find yourself a largish edifice and create within its walls a temple to your beliefs. Attempt to attract followers, seek a tax exemption.

That is where rigid and inflexible thought patterns and beliefs belong. The internet belongs to the rest of us. You have your sacred halls and your golden calves. We clain this space for our own.

Re: Meh...

Buy a film, chances are you won't legally be able to view it excepting under very narrow and limited circumstances. Pirate it, and it is yours for life.

No matter what the RIAA - or certain media bods - would have you believe, piracy isn't about the money. For some, it is about the challenge. For most, it is about convenience. The raw # of people who pirate "because they are too cheap to buy x" is pretty damned small.

So why would they do this? Because they can. Because it is an interesting challenge. Because the real, live, flesh and blood human beings who are on the wrong end of the "consumer" ecosystem feel they have no other recourse but to do radical things like this in order to have their voices heard. Because a century's worth of propaganda has turned copyright from something we viewed as a balance between "the needs of the creator" and "the rights of society" into the natural, moral, ethical and god-given right of corporations to exert to maximum profit for eternity with zero restrictions or consideration of the common good.

People pirate because it is easy. They pirate because it gives them a feeling of striking back against a corrupt system, of breaking the rules and because they feel they simply have no other recourse.

They are aware of the pedantic arguments. "You can always just not watch/listen to/buy X!" that misses the point. It is based on a false assumption that pirates simply don't believe in: namely that "the market" - including everything from the 'laws' of supply and demand through to the idea that 'voting with your wallet' ever matters - works.

They don't buy it. Capitalism is broken. Democracy is dead. The golden rule is all that matters, and most pirates view piracy as one of the only forms of civil disobedience they are capable of.

And yes, some few - the rare few - do pirate because they are cheap But not the kinds of people who put the kind of time and effort into sites like TPB/Demonoid/etc. These folks have all sorts of other motivations.

But that is a difficult message for many to hear, even harder for they to believe. For this to be understood, it would mean accepting that not all humans are motivated by the same things. That our genetic variations are so great - and our upbringings so diverse - that the fundamental motivations that underpin our behaviour and beliefs can and do vary per individual.

It means accepting that avarice isn't the fundamental motivator for all people, and that black-and-white economic, social and political approaches (including everything from the perpetual expansion of copyright to failure to address the wealth gap) will never work. They will always alienate largish chunks of the population; to the bafflement of the simple-minded, this includes "haves" as well as "have nots."

Many people are motivated by a sense of "fairness;" even if an action would benefit them, they would decline as they do not consider it to be "fair." Similarly, others seem to lack this altogether; fairness means nothing, only gaining an advantage.

Piracy is a bizarre theatre of society because so many beliefs and social moores intersect and overlap. "The Man is a douche" meets "think of the creators!" and they both intersect with "I'm poor," "I want to do this seeming perfectly reasonable and logical thing but am not allowed," and "you don't own what you buy, you only license it.

Attempts by one side or the other to resolve the issue almost always boil down to childish name-calling (freetards, MAFIAA), dehumanisation of those with differing beliefs and propaganda, propaganda, propaganda. It is a staple of this particular societal impasse that each side paint the other as completely irrational and lacking any semblance of ethics.

But the issue of piracy surrounds a larger debate about the role intellectual property should play in our society. This in turn is linked to dissatisfaction amongst the hoi polloi with the extant plutocracy and the emerging corporatocracy.

If it costs 10 million$ to make this happen, and there are people willing to oversee the project through to completion, $10 million will be found.

Because it isn't (for most) about the money. It isn't about getting things "for free." It is about fairness, having a say in the decisions and laws that affect out entire society, and it is about respect

The topic is not simple. And it is not easily resolved.

If there were even an outside chance that this project would succeed, money would appear. Because (most) pirates are perfectly willing to pay good money for content. A fact few seem to understand.

Re: Meh...

I've built loitering dirigibles to pump directional WiMax out one end and backhauling across the HSDPA network on the other for just under $75K. (Admittedly, the prototype did have a tendency to wander half a province away and then crash, but that's a detail.)

There are people that have this stuff commercialised, ruggedized, with excellent warrantee and support somewhere around the $100K price point.

How the heck else are you going to get mid-bandwidth comns out into the middle of the fscking bush? Drilling platforms need communications, and loitering UAVs (in dirigible form) are a fairly well proven technology.

There are even a number of companies working on solar powered blighters that can go for years instead of the average 3 weeks we get from our shed engineered toys. This isn’t science fiction. It’s done and dusted and well into "now, how efficient can we make it" territory.

Windows 8 tablet freezes in Microsoft keynote demo

Re: Were they just holding it wrong?

Maybe they were trying to multitask, and Win 8 decided to minimise distractions.

For their own good, of course.