Posts by Trevor_Pott

Psst. We've got 400Gb/s Ethernet working - but don't tell anyone

Re: I want a high speed version of 10base2

FDDI?

Women are too expensive to draw and code – Ubisoft

Re: non story

"No, you got to play as a male w*nk fantasy instead."

I don't know about you, but a badass with a pair of .45s and a worse attitude isn't any wank fantasy of mine...

HP starts a memristor-based space program to launch ... THE MACHINE

Re: Title change

1.21, not 1.32

Microsoft challenges US gov over attempts to search overseas data

According to my understanding, it is. There are lots of treaties that basically give the US carte blanche to ask for a foreign warrant for the data, wherein the foreign plod will see that warrant enacted and the data returned to the US. That's the proper way to do this, according to treaty.

This judge is saying "we don't need to do that, because MS is a US corporation. Our vague and general subpoena is enough to obtain data on foreign soil without involving that foreign government."

Not even Canada would agree to that...and right now, Harper is the POTUS's bitch.

Do you really have to slash and burn to upgrade your storage?

Re: Power and rack-space savings of virtualizing network gear

In opposition: I just compressed 12 physical hosts (each of which was already running ESXi 4.0 and several VMs) into two new servers. The new servers use half the power per node of the old cluster. Bonus: network visualization means I got to pitch almost all the network gear (was 6 switches and 3 routers.) That site is now 2 switches + 1 router + two compute nodes and finito!

And VMs move from that site to others without fiddling with the network! Doesn't that just beat all?

It's all about how you use it...

BILLIONS of digital dollars go AWOL to cybercrooks, says study

"in your profession you probably don't have to stick 1000+ cocks in your mouth per year"

Obviously, you've never worked helpdesk.

Damn you El Reg, Call me a Boffin, demands enraged boffin

Re: @stanimir

Did you just say a sociologist is greater than a Corydoras Elegans? Because I, and my passle of cute catfish, heartily disagree.

Let cloud apps manage your systems – if you have nothing to hide

Re: Thank you for your business.

100% correct. Which is why I don't believe in cloud storage for primary copies of data, or the use of cloud for mission critical apps.

It's a bit different if we're talking monitoring and/or config management, especially in the case of something like InTune where there is a locally installable alternative that the thing actually can work in tandem with.

Your company doesn't cease to do business tomorrow if your desktop management app provider turns into a pumpkin. It's extremely inconvenient, yes, but you are not absolutely screwed. (And the risk of this happening should be factored into the price, IMHO. Thus cloudy desktop management should always be notably cheaper than local.)

Your company does turn into a pumpkin if your financials app was under someone else's roof and they decide to pack it in. Or if the working copy of all your primary storage is there. That's where I remain a skeptic of the public cloud.

But each use case it it's own thing. If we haven't collectively learned that by now...

I don't think it depends on size, I think it depends on "company focus area." If your company manufactures biological weapons (or maintains samples of products that could be used for such) then expect them to watch you like a hawk, no matter how big you are. If your company deals in high-end infosec stuff, also expect that anything and everything you do is monitored by them at all times, full stop.

But I seriously doubt that my local construction company is being monitored, even though they are large enough that their top minds (and best builders) are brought in to do things like "create palm-shaped artificial islands in the middle east." They are absolutely a major economic competitor to US-based construction companies of all sizes, but the NSA's resources are finite, the magnifying glass of congress is upon them, and there's no "national security interest" that could be made up as rationale for economic espionage against the construction company.

Aerospace firm? Yeah, I get that. I really do; that tech could end up in drones, fighters, etc. High-end telecoms or silicon photonics? Again; this could be used to create guidance systems, etc. So there's a decent chance you have to worry about the NSA. Your local bakery probably does not...yet.

It'll be another decade before they have the AI to automate industrial espionage. Today, they can vacuum up all the data they want in an automated fashion, but you still need a human to review it and figure out what to do with it. The vast majority of what they slurp up is simply discarded. There's no place to store it (no, the Utah datacenter isn't remotely big enough), and they only have about 20K people working for them. How can they possibly review everything from every company/individual all at once?

They can spy on anyone they please in a heartbeat if they decide you're worth spying on. Make no mistake. They've automated that. But "who is worth spying on" still largely requires human decision-making. ECHELON (and descendants)' keyword detection is only going to pick up the most obvious targets. The rest requires honest-to-god legwork and actual spying to determine who is of value to target.

That means a good chunk of those 20K people aren't even sitting around making decisions about the data crossing the NSA's spy network. They're out trying to figure out who they should be spying on in the first place.

This will become less of an issue as time goes on. They'll be able to automate "who to spy on" and eventually "how to deliver relevant data to friendly American companies." A decade from now, the only barrier to getting the results of large-scale economic espionage will be "does your company/industry association have people in it that can be trusted with ultra-high-level security clearance so that they can be trusted to receive the data without Snowdening the fact that it is occurring."

Thus, to my mind, the large construction company that works on hyperscale international projects is safe today. 10 years from now? Not a chance. But the bakery probably still be.

Re: How big is the block of salt.

I have 2 nanotech firms and one pharmaceutical company in my stable alone that I promise you would be targets for economic espionage. It isn't the size of the company, it's what you're working on that matters.

That said, eventually, I expect that all companies of a certain size will be subject to economic espionage, regardless of area of endeavour. I just don't believe for a second that the NSA has the raw manpower to handle that today. There's a lot of automated decision-making that needs to get born first.

Microsoft poised to take Web server crown from Apache

Re: So.. They are going to release IIS as a standalone app?

A) Prove "Besides, it's cheaper to license and has a lower TCO in most uses than say Red Hat or SUSE" is true.

B) Prove it's cheaper than using instances of RedHat for Dev/Test but CentOS for production

C) Prove it's cheaper than CentOS front to back.

Don't rush, I'll wait...

A huge chunk of those SharePoint licenses were SBS. Which Microsoft murdered. And now you get SharePoint for free with Office 365...not that many people use it.

DOCX disaster recovery: How I rescued my wife from XM-HELL

Re: Yup, got this particular T-shirt

Nyet. Chrome comes up with a completely WTF location that has nothing at all to do with the tags. Not the point in the XML where the closing tags should be, not the beginning where the hyperlink tag starts. What chrome reports as a location is disconnected from reality and utterly baffling.

Re: Culprit

With this lot, neutrality doesn't matter. If you aren't fellating Microsoft you're absolutely against them. There is a pack of absolutely rabid anti-open-source types that occupy the comments, and I'm sorry if I inaccurately lumped you in with them. I think it's fairly easy to understand why I did.

Really, however, it's this comment that does it: But why go to so much trouble trying to pin this (in the reader's mind's eye) on MS - by the headline which strongly suggests the problem will lie with yet another DOCX issue and by "the most famous example" which is still pretty obscure to be honest - when what you are really up against is an OfficeLibre Write bug?

10 points for style but minus a couple of hundred for mendacity.

You outright accuse of my lying by somehow attempting to "pin this" on Microsoft. What the fuck? The article in no way attempts to "pin this" on Microsoft. There's absolutely nothing in that article at all that says "Microsoft Word is bad" or "LibreOffice is better". I mention - in the article and in the comments - that Word and LibreOffice can both give rise to errors where you might care about this kind of fix...and I go to some length to discuss the different ways it can occur, with examples using each product.

It doesn't really get much more neutral than that. Yes, the error I personally experienced was with LibreOffice writer, but that is completely irrelevant; the error class can be caused by multiple products, and thus mentioning that - with examples - is in the public good.

Yet you come out and accuse me of lying to people and somehow trying to "blame" Microsoft. So yeah, you know what? You get lumped in with the batshit-crazy Anonymous Coward and LDS as "rabidly and irrationally pro-Microsoft", to the point where I can't - and won't - take anything you have to say seriously. There's no neutrality or objectivity present in what you said there, there's a massive assumption followed by an attack.

The majority of people who read this article didn't walk away with a "Trevor was trying to blame this on Microsoft" vibe in any way shape or form. Some folks, however, see monsters where none exist. I've no time, patience, or respect for them.

I don't feel the need to "imply" Microsoft - or anyone else - is at fault for things. If I think Microsoft fucked up, I say so openly. If I think LibreOffice is better and you should buy that, then I say so. There's no pussyfooting around.

Comments like Are you saying that after all the fuss of "don't use crappy Microsoft, use our better alternative" responding to an article in which I did not in any way shape or form recommend one product over the other would seem to indicate that you fall into the "you didn't fellate Microsoft, you're obviously an evil, open source economy destroying wretch" camp.

So no, sir, I don't accept your "neutral tone" argument. You waltzed in here an accused me of lying. When I said "bullshit", you doubled down. Maybe you aren't rabidly pro-Microsoft, but your presentation was in no way a "neutral tone". If you come in guns blazing, don't get all shocked and shaken if'n I fire back.

Re: Simple solution I've always used

And your proposed solution is?

Re: Which Office product is at fault?

"Which looks to be fixed since Office 2010 SP1"

what does that have to do with anything? The fault existed. Similar ones have existed in the past. More will exist in the future. Microsoft doesn't get a free pass because they fixed a fault. They're just as much of a risk for this type of issue as anyone else. Besides, I know of at least three others in Excel that can cause a similar XLSX corruption that, to my knowledge, still affect 2013.

Re: Which Office product is at fault?

"It is correct to stop loading a document you can't process properly and you could corrupt more."

No it's correct to open it in read-only with only the option to save to a different file name...so you can get what you can from it.

Re: Which Office product is at fault?

It takes more training to move from Office 2003 to "fucking useless ribbon bar" than it does to LibreOffice.

No macros here, or on any of my client sites.

File --> Print --> PDF Printer.

Re: Yup, got this particular T-shirt

"There are two ways to cheat. "

Where is the word "just" in that sentence. What am I, the fucking oracle? I am supposed to know every possible means of "cheating" that exists? I did talk about trying to grok the XML manually, without making it pretty...but apparently that's inadequate?

Tried it. It's integrated into a plugin for Notepad++. It refused to try to pretty the XML because of the XML error, and simply told me what line it was on. :( Got another IDE you use Tidy in that I can try?

Re: Simple solution I've always used

Since actually reading the article or any of the other comments in this thread is to tedious for you, I'll repost a previous comment here.

The document was open and unclosed for 30 days. It was saved repeatedly. Thus there were many versions of it in the version control document, however, the error would not be noticed until the document was closed and reopened.

In other words: the word processor - be if LibreOffice, Word, or any other that is capable of saving files with improper XML - is perfectly capable of allowing you to continue editing the document after creating the XML error, so long as you don't close and reopen the document.

This means you get as many versions as you want just by mashing the "save" icon on a regular basis, and/or using autosave...but they all will contain the error from the moment the error was introduced. Which, in this case, was around page 2.

Thus backups don't help. You have:

1) Initial document created.

2) Five saves until error is created on page two.

3) 600+ saves after that all that have [good document] + [XML error] + [more good document].

As long as it contains [XML error] it won't open.

Had your advice been followed we'd be back to "two pages of document" instead of "32 pages of document." Interestingly enough, those exact same two pages of document were what Writer could read before it encountered the XML error.

In other words, your advice doesn't prevent the problem is actually useless because of how Libre Office treats XML-flawed documents.

What's more, as was explicitly stated several times in both the article and various posts here in the comments, we did have a versionning system in place. We just don't have to do it manually, like primitives scratching on stone tablets. Applications can autosave now. And you can mash the save button. Any change you make gets sent to Sync.com/Dropbox/Livedrive/etc that then versions it for you.

In fact, the wife actually periodically WOULD save the document to the desktop, to Dropbox, to the local NAS, etc...all without the requirement to close the application.

Cheers.

Re: Simple solution I've always used

As per eleventeen squillion discussions about versionning in this thread; your solution wouldn't have helped.

Re: Which Office product is at fault?

Detail exactly what about Libre Office requires more time input than Microsoft Office? Please also account for the time that must be spent working out the licensing required to appropriately license Microsoft Office (both in VDI and non-VDI environments, where multiple devices are involved, where more than 5 devices are involved and where devices are used both at home and in an office environment.) Additionally, factor in the time require to manage said licensing as well as the time required to generate the income to pay said licensing.

...or are you just completely full of shit?

Re: Which is why...

"Microsoft Office is still miles ahead of the alternatives."

List the 'features' in Microsoft Office that I, personally, my family or my clients care about that are available in Microsoft Office that are not available in LibreOffice or Google Apps. Present a solid commercial rationale for why these features are worth the price delta on a per user basis.

Please include an analysis of the "value" of my data being made available to the NSA/GCHQ/etc on demand so that they can scan it in order to send innocents to jail and/or steal whatever innovations I may have to to give their own companies commercial advantage. Please include an exacting means by which I can ensure that closed source software - let alone American cloud-integrated stuff - is free of such snooping, should I choose not to avail myself of the "feature" of governmental integration.

If you cannot provide a credible analysis of exactly why and how Microsoft Office provides a better value than the competition, in real dollars and cents for features that I actually care about then I have only two conclusions to draw:

1) Your absolutist statements are false because they do not apply to everyone.

2) You are completely and utterly full of shit.

Please not that both conclusions are not mutually exclusive.

Urine a goldmine for fuel-cell materials: boffins

Re: Costs? (@Pen-y-gors)

Platinum group metals are rarely mined specifically for the platinum group metals. They are recovered as part of "tailings processing" for a more mundane - but far more profitable - metal. You don't mine for platinum. You mine for copper, and post-process the wastes to get your few extra bucks of profit per tonne by pulling out platinum group metals, gold and a few other odds and ends.

In fact, until we discovered a use for them, platinum group metals were often discarded when they were dug up from gold mines. A great example of this is the Barkerville gold rush in BC, Canada. Some slaves would collect platinum group nuggets because they were pretty, but often left them behind. Years later, when the old camps were reexamined, containers full of platinum were found, left behind as they weren't worth anything, even to the slaves...tens of millions at today's prices.

Container-friendly Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 hits general availability

Re: Solaris clone

Yeah, but Oracle doesn't have to buy Red Hat in order to ruin it.

Pictures of elite 'Chinese military hacker' published

Feels a bit like a false flag op. You'd think a professional hacker would be better at social engineering bits.

Chrome OS leaks data to Google before switching on a VPN, says GCHQ

That said, I would counter that same argument by stating that the computer I use to post on Internet forums is not the one I use for work.

T,FTFY. 2001 says hi, it has some technology that can make this a lot easier for you.

Zuckerberg and other directors sued over gigantic packages

Re: company directors owe fiduciary duties to deal with the company's assets in an honest way

"...therefore you would presumably consider it honest behaviour to steal everything and blow it all on Champagne and strippers, provided that you first announce that's what you're about to do?"

If you announce to the shareholders at the next AGM that you intend to take all of FY 2015's profits and blow them on champagne and strippers they are then properly informed and have the option to vote you out. If they do not, then taking all of FY 2015's profits and blowing them on champagne and strippers isn't "stealing" at all.

You laid out a business plan. It was voted on. You enacted it. There is no law that says your business plans have to make sense, only that they can't break the law.

I could not, for example, blow FY 2015's profits on champagne and hookers, unless I was in a jurisdiction where prostitution was legal and both the jurisdictions of my company HQ and my primary personal residence did not have laws against my engaging sexual services for hire while outside those jurisdictions. (Some places will send you to jail for being a john if they find you you engaged hookers in another country, etc.)

However, I could indeed blow those profits on champagne and strippers, because I can easily find a jurisdiction where strippers are legal, and I know of no jurisdiction that will prosecute you for engaging their services while in another jurisdiction.

Next item on the agenda: our marketing plan for FY 2015 is to invite all prospective clients to our champagne and strippers binges to experience first hand our next-generation community-building techniques. With this bold new plan we hope to be able to drive greater revenue by ensuring potential clients understand how an excess of champagne and strippers can create company loyalty.

This brings us to a voting item. The FY 2015 business plan is to spend all profits on champagne and strippers. All opposed: <crickets>. All in favour: "me!". Motion passes.

Got VDI questions? Fire them at our expert panel

Re: UEM, LAYERING, ASSESSMENT, MONITORING, ACCELERATION should be included

There is going to be more than one Webinar. There has to be. The 1 hour basic infrastructure webinar turned into 1:45 minutes and we couldn't even get into user virutalisation, profiling, etc. This is a huge topic.

HP targets supercomputers with Project Apollo

Re: What OS for Apollo

That doesn't make any sense! There's an anonymous coward here that assures us all on a regular basis that Windows dominates the server market and is installed on way more servers than Linux could dream of! Surely this would be reflected in the supercomputer racket with Microsoft's overwhelming presence?

Otherwise Anonymous Cowards on the internet might not be telling the truth about everything! Egads!

Redmond patches 66 flaws on Patch Tuesday

Re: Wow!!!!

http://www.pcworld.com/article/239634/how_to_speed_up_windows_7_installs_with_slipstreaming_and_usb.html. Hope that helps you in the future.

'Think of the children', Putin tells startup-land

"“every day a third of our population uses the Internet and of course, there has to be some regulation”, but that the government doesn't want to stifle a “5 trillion roubles” business."

"...we want to own it, and make sure that it can't threaten any of our other interests", he muttered under his breath.

You'll never believe it: Apple stock is going for CHEAP

"I can see little reason for someone to buy a Samsung over say a Moto G"

It doesn't matter if you can see the reason or not. People choose Samsung by an overwhelming margin. Samsung are a "name" now. The likes of HTC and Moto are not.

Re: @asdf

"Recently as well Apple's "new" yearly OSs feel more like service packs pushed out perhaps with a few new features but mostly to obsolete older hardware."

It's a yearly OS bump. What do you expect? XP --> Windows 7 every 12 months? Get a grip, man!

This is incremental development. It's somewhere between Facebook's "push out three new versions a day" and "take 5 years to get to the next version" of more traditional development. They are midlevel releases on a yearly basis. Mostly bug fixes, evolutionary improvements, and every few years a major feature (like Siri) will be released.

As to "outdated hardware"...why do you care about hardware? Smartphones today are where PCs were in 2006: "good enough". The year-on-year incremental change in hardware is utterly fucking irrelevant. If you're 2 cores instead of 4, who cares? 4 instead of 8? Oh well! Slightly lower clock? Well, darn! It doesn't matter.

What matters is fitness for purpose...and the iTat does the job, just like WinPho, 'Droid and BBerry.

Achievement unlocked: smartphone mediocrity. We've reached the point where if you want "wow" it's time to invent a new market.

Everyone can and should learn to code? RUBBISH, says Torvalds

Re: @Trevor

"give someone a fish (knowledge to change a tyre), and they eat for a day, teach them how to fish (logical thought, problem analysis), and they eat every day."

Teach someone to change a tire and they might think they know how, then try to do it when/where dangerous and get themselves killed...or at the very least make non-optimal use of their time. Teach someone about tires, flats, recognizing what needs be done and then telling them about the options for resolution to the situation and they can make rational judgements about pursuing learning to solve the problem on their own or always relying on an expert.

Teaching someone programming does not teach them logical thought or problem analysis. As much as many developers with it did, I know a hell of a lot of colour-by-numbers devs and devs who couldn't think logically if their lives depended on it.

I agree 100% that critical thinking needs to be taught in school. Just look at the number of people coming out of school who still believe in an interventionist deity! But teaching people how to program isn't going to teach them critical thinking. You have chicken and egg all mixed up here.

Critical thinking (and probably formal logic) needs to be a core course all on it's own. In Canada, at least at the schools I attended, Social Studies was that course. It taught us critical thinking and analysis, using history as the lesson guide. We also did learn formal logic there, boolean algebra and so forth. That is something I agree every child should learn.

But teaching them programming won't teach them sweet fuck all unless they have the critical thinking bit down pat first. If you want more colour-by-numbers devs then fine, give the poxy larva enough knowledge to be dangerous, but don't come bitching to me when you hand the keys to the kingdom over to a passle of brats that earnestly believe that the Earth is 6000 years old.

I just hope I'm not alive to see that world...

Re: @AC101 and in general

"In Canada and in large communities vehicle support may work as you describe. Where I live and much of the world, not knowing basic car fixing can kill you. "

Agree 100%. But that's my point entirely: there is no one universal knowledge set that every human being should have. It all depends on where you live, what you plan to do with your life, etc. And if you plan to go somewhere new - on vacation or to live permanently - you will probably need to learn new things to survive there.

Isn't that what our species does? Adapt? What's with this idea that we need to teach our kids an impossible amount of knowledge in their early years? And why the idea that they need to learn exactly what we like, instead of discovering who they are and who they want to become?

Re: @AC101

"I think a society of people who can 'change a tyre' is a far stronger society."

Why do I need to know how to change a tire? Tire goes flat, I call CAA and they're there in less than 1/2 hr with a spare to fix the problem. Meanwhile, I'm using that 1/2 hour to generate income by writing, checking e-mail, what-have-you. There are people who get paid to solve these problems. They specialized in solving them. Let them do their job.

Put another way: batteries going dead is "a thing" in Canada during the winter. I could whip out jumpers cables, flag a passing motorist and waste 45 minutes of both of our time trying to get the thing going...or I could call CAA, get in the queue for one of the battery trucks and wait. While I'm waiting, I'm not outside freezing my ASCII off. I'm inside, getting work done. When the truck driver arrives with his Jesus battery of ultimate jumpstarting doom, I'll pop the hood, he'll take about 30 seconds to get my car started and I'm off.

Unless you've an intention to be a developer, learning to program has no value to you.

Teaching kids to think is what social studies is for. It's where you learn the history of the world, along with it critical thinking. I don't know what kind of fucked up education system you have, but learning critical thinking was the whole fucking point of social studies for us. The ability to deconstruct our species history, to understand that logic is useful, but is only one method by which humans reason...that is what you need to be able to live and compete in this world.

You don't need to replicate that by trying to teach people "how to think" in a programming class as well. What you need to do is a better job of teaching them to think in the class that is already mandatory and designed specifically for the purpose!

Netflix agrees to end network warnings in Verizon slowdown spat

I love that you think it's "tinfoil hatting" to look at history go "wow, when given that kind of power over people's lives, in every single instance it was abused, abused quickly and abused horribly" and then turn to something like "giving carriers censorship-via-degredation power" and think "I believe this power will be badly abused."

You actively encourage people not to learn from the past. You're like anti-history. Subsume oneself into joy-joy happy thoughts based on [???] and just presume it'll all work out. It's as absolutely unreal as people who honestly believe that in economic terms humans are rational actors. Dangerously untrue, but something we all desperately want to believe, so those who feed the lie obtain enough power to cause damage.

I'm deeply sorry that my actually giving a bent fuck about "the little people" offends, but I am not burdened by some bizzare sense of morality that says one group "deserves" to have power over another. I'm a pragmatist. What matters is that we can find a balance of power and freedom that means we can all live together in the closest semblance of harmony possible until we hand the world off to the next generation for them to have a go at running the thing.

Based on both history and the rather unholy amount of science that I read, I am absolutely convinced that many [most] of the ideas about social organization you espouse are, in fact, in direct opposition to finding a balance between power and freedom that allows for societal harmony.

You and I are never going to see eye to eye on this, Andrew. Our fundamental beliefs are simply too different.

"You're still justifying "making stuff up" to get a policy through?"

No, I was mocking people by lampooning their arguments in a humorous fashion. They do have humour where you're from...right? I realise "people" might be a stretch to find there...but please tell me your species evolved humour...

[censored] [censored] [censored], [censored] [censored], [censored]!!!

If the ISP doesn't get to charge at least two different companies, maybe three or four, for the same bit of data then society has obviously failed, Google will kill babies and pirates are responsible for all of it. Anyone who disagrees is obviously lacking in understanding of economics, morality and ethics.

My my, Intel, that's one speedy NVMe flash card you have there

Re: They fail to "read-only" mode.

Consumer SSDs don't fail to read-only mode. Enterprise ones generally do. Micron Enterprise ones absolutely do.

Look inside ELON MUSK'S CAR! Tesla S wundervehicle has voom

Re: 'everyone going to a shopping centre...'

"I'm not sure making you stop for an hour where you used to stop for 2min is going to work"

Roadside diner. Welcome to 'mericuh.

Re: Still waiting to see where the power's coming from

Wind works great...where wind works great. We have scads of it out near Crow's Nest Pass in Alberta. Cheap and reliable power.

The problem isn't the peak demand wind. It's that we still have all this goddamned coal around. What we need to be doing is tearing out our coal plants and replacing them with Nuclear. Especially in Canada! We have proven reliable technology, the best engineers and craftsmen in the world and enough Uranium to last until we can start mining asteroids for more.

At least Ontario has the Bruce Power nuke plant. Bloody hippies got the natives all riled up when Bruce tried to build one up by Athabaska and they murdered the project. Bastards.

Nuclear and Hydro for base load and wind to supply peak. That's a decent setup and it's where the bloody money should be going.

EU privacy A-Team tells Google: Get a grip and obey OUR laws

Re: I don't get it

They are also dumping money into lobbying to have the law overturned. Good money bought those laws, so anyone trying to get them reversed is automatically suspect!

Don't believe the hyper-converged hype: Why are we spending stupid amounts on hardware?

Re: @Trevor Potts

I've no idea. The cynic in me suspects that our dear storagebod finds Nutanix and SimpliVity to be simply outside his comfort zone. Which, in IT is exactly when it should be investigated. It's the stuff that lies outside our comfort zones that will define the future of computing.

Hey, I know great people at Maxta, Nutanix and SimpliVity. If Storagebod wants to meet and greet, I can absolutely arrange it. I think that a laying of hands needs to occur. Sitting down with this stuff and actually using it will, I believe, change the fellow's mind in a right hurry.

All of these companies offer right proper kit, damn solid and easy to use. It is not a toy. It's not a joke. It's not some attempt to grab margin from the stupid. Server SANs absolutely, without question are a critical element of the future of storage.

"Object storage verses Server SANs" will be the new "block storage versus NFS". With all the added fun that Server SANs are typically object stores in their own right! They will be the primary storage mechanism of the next 15 years, with disk arrays and filers replacing tape as an archival medium. (The age of MAID is upon us! Tremble in fear!)

That means that if you do storage for a living and you aren't learning about Object stores, ranging from Hadoop to Caringo as well as Server SANs ranging from Nutanix to Maxta then you're cutting your own throat. Your understanding of the intimate details of LUNs, cache tuning and the vagaries of the NetApp and EMC operating systems are about to mean sweet fuck all.

We've entered an era in which the storage systems don't come with nerd knobs, because we've got software smart enough to look after itself. Those people needing full-bore nerd-knobby access to everything will be in the extreme minority, and they can afford to hire a room full of PhDs to keep their precious snowflake ticking along.

The future belongs to Object projects like Swift, Server SANs like Maxta and whiteboxers like Supermicro shifting Openserver-like tin...and you can quote me on all of that. That's my prediction, and I'm sticking to it.

"Surely the value has to be in the software: so have we got so bad at building our data centres that it makes sense to pay a premium for a hardware platform?"

Wish granted. Meet Maxta. Hyper-converged infrastructure as a software-only layer.

Nutanix and SimpliVity simply remove the burden of haggling with vendors, verifying against an HCL and waiting for the HCL to catch up with new hardware. For that, they charge a price.

Is that worth money? IIRC, cher Storage bod, you are the fellow who talks about EMC, Netapp, HP and so forth like it's a good thing...and what are they doing except packaging up hardware and software and selling it as an appliance? I can buy Supermicro fully redundant arrays and add my own software. From Windows Server to Nexenta to what-have-you it's absolutely no different than turning to EMC/Netapp/HP/etc. Except that I'd be rolling and configuring my own instead of pushing an RFQ to my vendor pool.

So, do you build from Supermicro, Huawei, Quanta and so forth? Controlling every level of the stack intimately? Or do you use RFQs and your pet vendors? Why? What value do you see in EMC over Supermicro?

Now, how is that same value different from converged stacks like Nutanix or SimpliVity?

The future is here. The storage admin is non-requisite. If you want to employ one, then by all means make them work for their money and make sure they control capital costs by tightly integrating everything. However, you can just punt them out on their arse now and buy converged infrastructure, letting the virtualisation admin handle everything. Hey, with NSX they can even handle networking too.

Where's the value? In reducing headcount, or at least reassigning those same bodies to different tasks that could be producing ROI greater than the cost of having someone else do the integration for you. Same as it always was.