Posts by LeoP

vSphere scales up, if you're willing to ditch a switch or server

tumbleweed it is, but the direction might be wrong

What we see here is indeed a move away from vSphere, but into different directions.

As a benefit of moving some workloads into the cloud, the size and managability needs for the on-premises part of the mix tend to be reduced, often allowing a move away from the full vSphere product with huge license savings.

With many users we know of, this is picked up by either ESXi (if the remaining workloads are small enough and no vMotion is needed) to leverage existing skills and kit, or more often by KVM introduced by a next generation of admins, who are natural with command line Linux administration and run virt-manager from their Ubuntu workstations, Macs via XQuarz or even Windows via Xming. These bring bcache, DRBD and friends to the table, providing quite a bang for the buck for the investment of a set of skills, that are much more easily available today than they were a decade ago.

Hyper-V (in all its flavours) doesn't see many vSphere converts here: The licensing model is not so different from vSphere as to be convincing, and asking an Admin to run Windows 10 as a hard dependency to administer his VMs is a very hard sell.

Firefox doesn't need to be No 1 – and that's OK, 'cos it's falling off a cliff

Times, they are a'changing

I hated IE in its high times - with a biblical intensity. FF was my thing.

Along came Chrome, and I liked it for casual browsing (i.e. ElReg)

Now I need to run a VM with WIndows and IE, if I want to use iLO consoles.

The only constant: Vendors don't care shit about users:

MS: Use a browser, that won't run on anything other than Windows

Google: All your data are belong to us

Firefox: Because we want.

It's a joke of history, that MS is the only one of them treating me as an adult, who is able to distinquish between an iLO console and a dodgy ad.

Expect the Note 8 to break the bank (and your wallet)

Making landfill Androids more attractive

I am a big fan of china phones: My current "Ulefone Power" is a 7Ah battery with a display and a perfectly usable SoC attached, gives me a whole heavy-use day of LTE to WiFi Hotspot at the summer home. Ah, and it cost € 130 last year.

Some back-of-the envelope maths tell me, a $1000 Samsung would buy me one of these every year for 6 years, realistically being a worse phone than the Note for the first 3, then a better one for the other 3 (The china phone experience is arguably something like the big name experience of 3 years ago). Now who thinks a Note 8 will really be usable for 6 years?

What is this – some kind of flashy, 3-bit consumer SSD? Eh, Seagate?

Tool for the job

Spinning rust is not dead, and might not be for years to come. The important part is to understand what goes where.

Broadcast cache for a production company? We add an 8T disk every week, would be quite costly to flashy that and completely emptied of any meaning - it simply doesn't matter if the material can be read at 20 or 200 times the running speed, it's needed at 1x.

Your MP3 collection? My experience tells me, it's much more likely the medium will die without warning if it is flash, when you plug it in after a few weeks of poweroff.

I have yet to see flash in grown-up sizes, that could give disk a run for the money on very sequential workloads. Could easily be, that Disk is still around, when flash is reduced to a footnote in history.

SQL Server 2017's first rc lands and – yes! – it runs on Linux

I beg to differ

The solution has found its problem - at least here.

Do not underestimate the number of legacy applications written in .NET (or even ASP classic) , many of them running on nothing newer than WIndows Server 2003 with an urgent need to move to a more sane and scalable foundation.

The biggest hurdle here is that they are quite often heavily tied into SQL server - and for many customers SQL Server is quite acceptable, while Windows is not.

Solaris, Java have vulns that let users run riot

At least Oracle's customers can be sure

Not only are they sort of raped on prices every time Larry wants a new Island, Yacht or America's Cup winner, they are also quite sure to get products that are very risky to actually use.

We do things rather easy here: If 'Oracle' is written on it, don't use it.

Intel's Optane in PCs is as good as it will get for years, says analyst

Only on new Intel processors?

bcache has been doing things like that with big disk / small SSD setups quite nicely ... on any processor the kernel runs on and with any type or brand of block device.

I use an NVM card as the cache device, which has of course zero wear to really speed up a DB, and with SSDs it gives quite a nice KVM environment.

So, what's this all about with WIndows only and newest Intel CPUs only?

A very Canadian approach: How net neutrality rules reflect a country's true nature

Derogatory Term du jour

I have had MASSIVE success by replacing every instance of "America" with "Trumpistan", "american" with "trumpian", "USA" with "UST", ... you get the drift.

This tends to rellay lighten up (and lively up) interaction with our star-sprangled friends, especially if you make really sure they understand, that they pay a hefty Trump-tax for your services (and can do exactly nothing about it).

Ubuntu splats TITSUP bug spread in update

Lucky here

Had a failover on this one, then the second node went, but the primary had installed the updated update in the meantime so the failback actually resolved it.

Now I know why.

Linux-using mates gone AWOL? Netflix just added Linux support

Not about the 3 users

IMHO this is not about Captain Hogwash, me and the third Linux desktop user. This is about HTPCs, whether they come from geeky friends or from chinese manufacturers.

I have yet to see a sub €100, easy to setup, easy to use media player device (such as the one I installed at my MIL to allow her to watch Images of her grandchildren made with one of these new digital cameras, that do not actually give you a paper copy), that is NOT based on Linux. And more than half come with a HTML UI.

Now think what a market his is for Netflix.

Linux, not Microsoft, the real winner of Windows Server on ARM

Re: Funniest Thing I've read today

Seeing a lot of Win->Lin transitions as well: There has been a time, when businesses would easily accept a biggish app based on MySQL (or Postgress) and Java (or PHP), "as long as it runs on Windows", so that "our Admins can do the day-to-day stuff".

These Admins are now gone (e.g. selling Buzzwords to even less adept Tie-wearers), resulting in the next upgrade cycle bringing a new OS.

MAC randomization: A massive failure that leaves iPhones, Android mobes open to tracking

Re: "I presume"

You have an oldish MTK SoC and a carrier, that has recently converted old 2G frequencies to 3G (or 4G). You stumble over a hardware bug (as did my oldish father, my tech-challenged wife ...).

Manually turning 3G off (2G only) fixes it, but there is no way to have 3G data without GPS on former 2G frequencies.

While I do not at all want to down-talk the surveillance state (far be it from me!), this special incident ist just a plain old bug, (C) MediaTek ca. 2010.

Oracle effectively doubles licence fees to run its stuff in AWS

Acquiring customers for Oracle's cloud?

Maybe a handfull.

Finally deciding to ditch Oracle? Quite a lot, methinks.

Corporate momentum may be a factor, big companie's corporate momentum might be quite large, but there is no such thing as a lock in for life anyomore. Maybe somebody should alert Larry to this fact.

Oracle's Coach Larry needs Microsoft plays to beat Amazon

Image problem?

One more: Of all vendors out there - would it really be Oracle, whom you would chose to forge a business relation, that per definition is designed as a lock-in?

What about "You clicked on the handy button saying 'Analyze' and invoking 'Enterprise double platinum plus analytics' and after 'discovering' this during one of our complementary audits, you now owe us your firstborns. No twins? Bad luck, because now you owe us a gazillion PLUS your firstborn"

We ain't in 1996 anymore, Dorothy: SQL Server 2016 proves it

I propose a challenge

A few rules:

- Fixed Volume of data (say 3TB)

- Fixed application requirements (what the DB don't do, you must do in the application)

- 10 year lifecycle

Now in the blue corner:

MS SQL Server 2016 (Whatever edition suits you, as long as you pay for it)

And in the red corner:

Anything from the open source camp. (PostgreSQL, MySQL, whatever)

Let's see, who delivers the better TPS/$

Rock solid.

A bad day for DBAs: MIT boffins are replacing you with a mere spreadsheet

More automatically generated SQL

Is surely what we need. This will lead to performance problems, that we then need a DBA to diagnose and fix. A real DBA of course. He could even be named Siegfried.

Software snafu let EU citizens get referendum vote, says Electoral Commission

Other countries' referendum

Don't be so sure about most Germans, French, Italians, Austrians (as yours humly) would vote Bremain - there is a lot of cherry picking with the EU going on right now, and Britain might be a good example to make. This includes making as few concessions as possible in the negotiations after the Brexit - make sure, everybody understands, that leaving the EU is ... ahem ... leaving it. Not sort of keeping the good stuff while getting rid of the bad.

Actually, I'd be quite pleased if a referendum in a member country would automatically trigger a referendum in all others as well: Only if both vote for the status quo, it would remain in effect.

My money is on Brexit - and quite a healthy dose of spanking for the UK economy following it.

Modular phone Ara to finally launch

So much pessimism?

First of all: @jzl - have that missing upvote.

Yes, there is reason for pessimism - all that "Ara 1.0" stuff is probaly true, as is the price point and availability of modules.

Initially. Just as the Android Phones of the 1.x and 2.x era were everyone's laughing stock.

Now just think of "Ara 2.0" developing enough critical mass, that millions of busy hands in Sheng Zhen start producing modules the way they are now producing perfectly usable throw-away phones, most possibly after Mediatek created a Mipi-to-sane component, that is cheap as .. ah .. chips.

Think of being able to physically unplug your GPS - let that sink in for a moment.

Think of being able to unplug everything and attach a 10.000 mAh battery instead.

IMHO the success of this idea is not to be measured by the $999.99 enthusiast camera module made by Leica, but by the $9.99 gadget module made by Hing-Fang-Ho. Sheng Zhen has forced the big players to actually give us something for our money, why should they not be able to repeat that stunt?

The pirate icon, because maybe a tiny fraction of that Mipi-to-sane chips might not actually be fully licensed.

Router hackers reach for the fork: LEDE splits from OpenWRT

Not just as a router OS

I am a heavy user of OpenWRT, and I do feel the pain with the community process.

For me the most important part is not the ability to transform a router into a router, but to transform a €15,- matchbox sized something from china into something useful: Still have a physical machine somewhere because it needs to talk to some USB/Serial/whatever? Take a "tiny white box" and OpenWRT, virtualize that box and do USB/IP.

One of these days someone is gonna call it an IoT-thingy and my day will be spoilt.

Microsoft wants to lock everyone into its store via universal Windows apps, says game kingpin

Year of the Linux Desktop?

Oh what irony!

The biggest (some might even say only, but tastes differ) advantage Windows on the Desktop has over Linux/BSD/YouNameIt and to a lesser extent OSX is the availability of Applications. And by Applications I do explicitly NOT mean "Universal Apps".

If Microsoft were to give up this advantage, they might provide the critical mass for a migration.

Screwers screwed?

Intel shows budget Android phone powering big-screen Linux

I'd buy one immediately

- SSH ... check

- PHP/HTML/CSS/PERL/BASH/whatever IDE ... check

- Mono ... check (and have Xamarin as a goodie)

- Grown up browser ... check

A VM somewhere and a carry-around terminal to it seem like a nice proposition.

DataCore pushing parallel IO, and puts the cores to work

And of course ...

... never ever has anyone else thought to profile this.

Problem: This could actually be true with VMware - racks and racks of poorly utilized servers are like a money-printing machine for them.

Diskicide – the death of disk

Failure rate

Simple stat from last year: % of storage devices becoming catastrophically defective within a year of deployment:

Disk: less than 1% (1 Disk)

SSD: 15%+

Vendors: Come back, when you have finished your homework.

Thanks for open sourcing .NET say Point of Sale villains

Re: out of control

>> Java VMs are backward compatible so only one version is required.

You owe me a keyboard.

Just for the BMCs of a rackfull of servers, I need 5 VMs with different Java Versions. Would be delighted to hear, that those problems have now gone.

Apple and Samsung are plotting to KILL OFF the SIM CARD - report

Re: And the carriers smile

>Uh, what makes you think that a new system wouldn't make

>switching virtual SIM cards easier than switching physical SIM cards?

Experience with mobile carriers!

And the carriers smile

So now your device is finally and truly locked to a network.

El-cheapo prepaid local SIM for data in the holidays? Forget it - please hand over the roaming fees!

Switch carriers but keep the device (and I am not talking carrier-sponsored devices!) - nah, your lock-in costs now include the hardware and the hassle of setting it up.

The carriers end up allowing only devices they chose on their network, something they have been longing for - and ofcourse preloaded with firmware of their chosing. Tethering? We have an add-on to your plan for that.

Tell us, do you enjoy the thought of BT-EE's sweaty fourplay?

Been there, done that

I live in Austria, where Orange was swallowed by 3 (and its Yesss! MVNO by bad old Telekom) a year ago, going from a 4-way to a 3-way market.

Prices have gone up 58% in this year according to the Telekom watchdogs, and the EU bureau for mergers and bribes issuded a statement vaguely saying "this might have been a mistake".

Don't do it.

America's super-secret X-37B plane returns to Earth after nearly TWO YEARS aloft

NO CHANCE OF WINNING a nuclear exchange ...

.. seems quite natural: Nobody has.

That 8TB Seagate MONSTER? It's HERE... (You'll have to squint, 'cos there are no specs)

Re: Now you can lose 8TB of data in one shot instead of just 4!

Totally agree - I have had a 60% p.a. failure rate on 1 and 2 TB Constellations, until I started using dirt-cheap WD blacks. Not a single one has died on me - in exactly the same Storage.

HANA has SAP cuddling up to 'smaller partners'

What we don't need

is more Software by Oracle, SAP and friends tying up IT budgets with exorbitant yearly licensing costs. See, some of that IT money is needed to do real work.

AMD's 'Seattle' 64-bit ARM server chips now sampling, set to launch in late 2014

Apple

So Foxcon is now branching out into chip making?

MySQL daddy Monty talks up Fusion-io's data-stuffed flash

Enterprise grade

In the sense of only really big ones have a large enough legal department to work out licensing, the pockets to foot the bill and the manpower to restart from new every 3 years.

In the meantime, the not-so-enterprisy DB is humming along nicely on some el-cheapo boxes running CentOS or whatever.

What can Microsoft learn from 'discontinued operations' at Nokia?

Battery life and so on

I now have the 3rd "Chinaphone" - MTK chip, running close-to-stock factory-rooted Android, cheap as dirt.

#1 developed a speaker defect, after I slept through it running as an alarm clock with the loudest ringtone I could get hold off for hours. I sent it off for warranty repair, but was convinced to never see it again, so bought another one. As it happens, it came back with a friendly note and a replaced speaker now my father is happy with it

#2 fell from my jacket two floors down to the pavement - display broken with an unreadable coin-sized part in the middle, where it hit a small stone, but still functional.

#3 Now (at 0:39 in my time zone) has 72% battery left after a normal day - something like 2hrs of speaking time, everything switched on (Data, WiFi, GPS, Bleutooth and 2 SIM cards). If I really drain the battery once a year, I replace it (yes, that's still possible). It came with 2 batteries, which I swap every 2 months to keep them in shape.

So: Producing a very usable Android phone seems to be a quite achievable feat. Might be some of the "value added" software many brands add are to blame for part of the battery drain.

India restricts SIM sales

Change of vacation plans

I allways wanted to visit India. I thought next spring would be the time to finally go. But alas - will have to take my money to a country, that doesn't ask me for proof of my grandmothers show size, before issuing me a b***y SIM card.

It was the same with Croatia for 2 years: In the first year my not-yet-expired (12 months) SIM still worked, so I didn't bother. Next year, I just went to Italy.

How to... re-energise your Android smartphone's OS

Flash

... works in CM7 on the Orange SF, which happens to be my main phone.

Just google around for the apk - I don't dare to redistribute it lest a black helicopter lands on my lawn. Don't expect speed records, but that silly website with the flash-only menu will work.

NetSecure SmartSwipe credit card reader

Keyloggers etc.

So this helps you foil Keyloggers, but only if you use Internet Explorer ... what a deal for 70 quid. I can really see that improving my security, just ignore those keyloggers trojans and whatever, as long as I use the 70-quid-egg and IE we are perfectly safe ...