Posts by TaabuTheCat

Retiring Reg hack explains how bass playing = tech reporting

...and work to overturn Citizens United v. Federal Elections Commission.

No finer goal than that. Good luck, and may I be lucky enough to join you in a few years.

Verizon threatens Netflix in video lag blame game

Re: Network metrics?

"Just FYI, TaabuTheCat, Verizon owns more than the last 100'"

Sorry I didn't make myself more clear. There are users connecting Netflix capable devices via WiFi, and that really isn't something Verizon can control. Don't misunderstand, I dislike Verizon with a passion and they deserve every bit of a beating they can get, but Netflix needs to be careful here or Verizon will dig up one actual case where the problem was the home network triggering the alert and their PR machine will go to 11 in an attempt to portray that as happening in every case.

Network metrics?

I do wonder though what Netflix is doing to isolate the problem to upstream provider (Verizon controlled) issues and only warn on those, vs. triggering the warning when the problem lies in the last 100ft of the connection...

Got VDI questions? Fire them at our expert panel

"Our VDI panelists are diverse."

Really? They all look like players there to talk about VDI performance. Where are the profile management and app management vendors? If you're in the non-persistent VDI world that's where some of the toughest challenges lie, not in accelerating 3D or managing boot storms.

If you can, you should add the likes of a Unidesk, VMware or Citrix to talk about how to handle some of the messier USER issues with VDI.

NASA agonizes over plan for Mars rock sample return mission

Serious question

What are they *hoping* to find in the samples that would justify the expense/risk of this sort of mission. I'm all for understanding planet lifecycles and core science (pardon the pun), but shouldn't we be spending money learning how to get further, faster so we don't have to limit ourselves to close-in dead (for us at least) planets to explore?

Sometimes I think we set the bar too low, and if we're going to risk money and time, let's take the risk for something more than a box of rocks. Maybe I'm proposing we run before we walk, but will bringing back samples from Mars help us get to someplace inhabitable any sooner?

Speedy storage server sales stumps sysadmin scribe: Who buys this?

VMware VFC - beware this bug!

This one bit me twice - once about three months ago before anyone at VMware could tell me what was happening. After five hours on the phone with support we just ended up rebuilding vCenter to get running again. And it happened again last week after upgrading my vCenter virtual appliance to U1. This time support was able to find this KB article after several hours on the phone - turned out to have nothing to do with the upgrade, it was the reboot afterwords that triggered it.

http://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/microsites/search.do?language=en_US&cmd=displayKC&externalId=2072392

Yosemite National Park bans drones

Bzzzzttt.... Fail

Won't hold up. Read the language of that CFR - it talks about "delivering or retrieving" something. That doesn't describe what people are doing with their drones, not at least if all they're doing is flying a camera around. All it will take is one person willing to spend the money and time to fight it.

Legislation is simply not there yet to deal with this new, cheap drone world. Look how hard the FAA is struggling to find ways to limit their use - no "commercial" purpose - just defeated BTW, as there is no regulation that actually says that. Flying limited to 400 ft ASL - again, not a regulation, just guidance that can be ignored (at your own peril of course).

I suspect before this is all over we'll have designated drone flying areas (drone "parks") where we can all go fly into each other on weekends, and they'll be banned everywhere else.

I want SDN and I want it now!

Re: Right on.

But if all your distributed controllers have the same bug or are sent the same commands with unintended consequences (in part due to their desired ability to hide the underlying complexity), then what happens? That's the big kaboom I think some of us are concerned about.

Just like it's a whole lot easier right now to take down 500 servers at once in a VMware environment with one wrong distributed switch config change than it ever was with 500 physical servers, same will hold true for SDN. Will the benefits of SDN outweigh the risk? Absolutely. The same way I;d never want to manage 500 physical servers ever again. I'm just not so convinced the road there will be as smooth as many (vendors) would like us to believe.

Right on.

"I can already see the mega-outages a bug at the controller level will cause..."

Totally agree. I bet we're going to see some spectacular failures that take down huge chunks of infrastructure, not only from bugs or poor design, but from good ole human mistakes. If you think understanding the network is hard now, wait until you can't understand it - where only the SDN controller truly knows what's going to happen when you make that next change.

Still, I really like the idea of SDN and it's uptake is inevitable. We're just going to need some really good modeling tools for SDN that allow you to test changes virtually before anything bad actually happens.

Unmanned, autonomous ROBOT TRUCK CONVOY 'drives though town'

It's all fun and games...

until they reach the Le Petomane tollway. "Somebody go back and get a sh!@load of dimes!"

Slurp away, NSA: Mass phone data collection IS legal, rules federal judge

He's right about one thing...

"...as nothing is more apt to imperil civil liberties than the success of a terrorist attack on American soil"

As 9/11 proved. We have fewer civil liberties now than ever before, and each additional attack, suspicion of an attack, the mere *thought* of an attack, and we lose even more.

Hint to judge: It's not the terrorists taking away those liberties.

Let... the SAN shine: 2013 – the year of virtual storage area networks

Licensing

Here's the problem I'm seeing with vSANs (from all the vendors), and that's the node licensing costs, especially in the SMB world. I may only need two nodes to carry all my compute/storage requirements, but from a redundancy standpoint that's not enough. So I pay VMware for more node licenses, more maintenance, etc. just to get vSAN reliability, and I start wondering if all I'm really doing is changing the name on the check.

Party's over in Waterloo as BlackBerry pulls plug on 2014 Live conference

"The last BlackBerry Live conference was held in May 2013 in Orlando, Florida."

Literally.

Who's the best-built bot that makes the US military hot? SCHAFT!

Hush yo mouth

You just had to put that song in my head, didn't you?

Internet Explorer 11 at it again, breaks Microsoft's own CRM software

Re: I'm sure you're right

"But when it's breaking things like Outlook.com, that's pure idiocy."

Nah - the IE team's just not ready yet to give up their GMail accounts.

CIOs, IT chiefs: ARRGH! What do you MEAN, HR just bought 400 iPads and didn't tell us

Not to mention contracts and costs...

Have you ever looked at the "deals" these non-IT guys make with vendors? More often than not they are getting screwed over royally by that slick sales guy, and even worse, they get talked into signing long-term contracts with god-awful T&Cs and exorbitant costs simply because 1) they don't understand all this stuff is negotiable, and b) even if they did understand it they wouldn't recognize when they were being screwed.

So forget the IT aspect. From a purely business/finance perspective they are making terrible business and spending decisions for the company, usually out of pure ignorance.

Dying HealthCare.gov bagged JUST SIX registrations on first day

Re: politics aside

No kidding. Talk about 9 women trying to make a baby in one month...

Three million Adobe accounts hacked? Sorry, make that 38 MILLION

Total failure from beginning to end

Not only did they get pwned, I got one of the lovely letters from them saying they were so sorry my info had been taken and here's an authorization code to sign up for free credit monitoring. So I go to the Experian site to sign up and guess what, the code doesn't work. Thanks for your concern.

FYI Adobe... I just finished uninstalling the last copy of Acrobat on our workstations at the office. It won't be missed.

Z30: The classiest BlackBerry mobe ever ... and possibly the last

Gone without carrier support

We were a big BB shop and have gradually moved everyone over to BYOB this year. Can't say I miss supporting all the BB users but for the most part the devices just worked and we were confident in the security they provided.

I still haven't given up completely on BB but I'm close. The real killer for us has been lack of carrier (Verizon) support for upgrades. We tested the Z10 when it came, then the Q - both decent devices that desperately needed updates to get better. Nothing from Verizon, and I fear the same for the Z30. No carrier support = no BB for us.

Hey, how'd that guy get to be a BAZILLIONAIRE?

Re: So what about vFRC?

It's absolutely the beauty, yes. And as of Saturday night I'm seeing exactly what Proximal will do for my environment. :)

Fascinating and cool? You bet. Without that I'd of long ago found other work.

So what about vFRC?

Trevor, you don't say much about VMware's vFRC. It's going to be tough to compete with free (assuming you already have Ent Plus, and many of us do) and supported so what's the future for the Proximals of the world?

I guess I'm wondering why I'd buy Proximal if vFRC is free? Have you played with vFRC yet?

Adobe hit by 'sophisticated' mega hack ransack

This will end well.

All those security issues in Acrobat that Adobe couldn't be bothered to find? I think that problem's just been solved. Unfortunately, not by Adobe.

Circling the RIM: BB10 becomes chamber of horrors for BlackBerry

The carriers had their hand in this too.

By not releasing updates - I'm looking at YOU Verizon - they all but guaranteed the experience on BB10 would never improve. Not sure what RIM did to piss them off so badly, but when your "partner" has direct control over the user experience on your phone, you'd better give them a reason to support you.

Reg hack battles Margaret Thatcher's ghost to bring broadband to the Highlands

I can hardly wait...

to see Bill's roof six months from now, covered with antennas. No good deed goes unpunished! :)

Apple big-screen TV rumor zombie RISES FROM THE DEAD

The only reason we haven't seen an Apple TV (and maybe never will) is because Apple haven't found a way to lock the content to their ecosystem. The content producers got burned once by Apple - it will never happen again. The future is controlled by content producers/owners.

Samsung sends gigabit '5G' signal TWO WHOLE KILOMETRES

Re: Lampposts....

Remember Ricochet? (Probably not.)

The old transceivers are still hanging from the lamposts in my town. Totally dead of course.

BlackBerry CEO: Tablets will be dead in 5 years

Here we go again...

"I see BlackBerry to be the absolute leader in mobile computing - that's what we're aiming for…I want to gain as much market share as I can, but not by being a copycat"

I know he has to say that but I pray to God he doesn't really believe it, or they really are dead. The only way to be #1 is by chasing consumers and that's never been what RIM was about.

/rant

Why can't companies be content knowing who they are and owning their own corner of a market? Why do they all believe it's world domination or nothing - and then proceed to drive a profitable business straight into the ground just to prove it?

/rant

Got a BlackBerry? It may be telling your friends when you watch pr0n

Losing the plot

So they have time to add this functionality to BBM, but don't have time to add Profiles, Level 1 escalations, redirection filters, and a host of other really useful features that were in BB7, 6, 5, etc. to BB10?

RIM just doesn't understand their place in the market. They had the world's best email client, with truly useful functionality that has been completely stripped out of BB10. I have a free Z10 that just arrived two days ago and I'm ready to scrap it. It can't do what my aging Tour will do - not even close, and as a useful work device the Z10 sucks. But I'm thrilled to know I can share my song preferences.

Rock on RIM - been nice to know you.

Public cloud will grow when experienced IT folks DIE

He's not totally wrong

I think the point he's making (though maybe doesn't really want to admit) is that the younger generation expects and is used to so much less they'll see no problem dropping their services there. After all, Facebook, Twiiter, Google, MS, etc. have outages all the time and it's no big deal. Just invent some cute corporate equivalent of the "fail whale" and you're good to go.

He is right about one thing. When those of who keep hitting management over the head with the reliability and security arguments are gone, and there are no throttling voices left to remind the beancounters about enterprise risk, this stuff will all move to the cloud. And you know what? If everyone does it and failures are common for everyone, will it matter?

I am the guy he's talking about, and the reputation I've built over the last 35 years protecting the enterprise is still worth something today. Ten years from now, who knows? Luckily for Rackspace, I'll be out of the way by then.

T-Mobile US announces 'no BS' rate plans, iPhones, LTE

Re: "Why are plans so expensive in the US?"

Mostly because people don't take the time to shop and match a plan to their needs.

I use Ting (MVNO on Sprint's network) and my phone bill last month for two phones (Nexus and Sprint Epic 4g) was $39.00 plus about $3.00 in taxes. Granted I don't use a lot of voice or data - that rate gets me 300 minutes of voice and 500GB of data shared across both phones - but the point is, it's a no-contract, pay-for-what-you-use plan and it's a whole lot less expensive than any other carrier. On Ting if you use more you pay more (what a concept!), and they automatically adjust your plan up and down each month.

There are decent plans out there if you take the time to look.

(No affiliation with Ting, BTW, just a happy customer that appreciates the value they offer. YMMV)

Indie array-flogger tries to tempt flash mob with COLD HARD CASH

And this is effective how, exactly?

Not sure I see the pitch here. There's simply no chance I would ever make a storage array swap without a serious in-house eval (30 days MINIMUM), running my workloads in my environment. Any vendor that won't let me do that is off my list immediately. Does Pure really think I'm going to fight with management for the funds, buy their product without an eval, and then return it if I don't like it? I'm sure that would instill confidence in the beancounters that I know what I'm doing!

Republican staffer fired for copyright reform suggestions

Re: There is only one answer to Washington's issues:

Nope. Once and done is the answer.

If politicians didn't start raising re-election cash the very first day on the job, lobbyists wouldn't have nearly the influence they have now. Take away the re-election incentive and maybe these guys would behave in *our* interests and stop working for the guys with the biggest wallets.

I know, I'm dreaming. The very guys that could enact term limits...

Microsoft Surface with Windows 8 Pro gets laptop-level price

MS is missing where business desktops are headed

A lot of us are virtualizing our desktop environments, and it just doesn't matter how powerful the endpoint is. We have users with iPads and Android tablets who routinely do work remotely running the View client (against a Windows 7 desktop in the datacenter). Citrix users have been doing this forever. Obviously connectivity is the key, but it's getting to the point where not having connectivity is the exception.

I was on a Southwest flight a month ago that had WiFi, gave them my five bucks for the privilege, and spent the next three hours using a View session on my laptop to actually do work. It wasn't the smoothest experience, but the fact that it worked at all was impressive and just signals where we're headed.

You don't need powerful endpoints in the business world (which is I assume where the Surface is trying to fit). All you need is a decent display, keyboard and mouse, plus some low bandwidth connectivity, and you're all set. And you don't need $1,000 or Windows 8 to get there.

4K vs OLED: and the winner is...

Exactly

Give us 4K TV and the cable companies will just find a way to compress the hell out of it like they do the 1080p stuff, to the point where all you'll be able to see with more clarity are the artifacts.

I wonder how many people have seen uncompressed 1080p content (other than by viewing a Blu-Ray) on a decent set? Bet they'd really be surprised just how good the quality can be when you don't screw with it so you can offer more shopping channels.

Happy birthday, Compact Disc

Re: Sony Cdp101

"Dous Anybody Know what the Blue Ribbon Socket on the Back was For ????"

Not sure. The connector is labeled "Accessory Connector" but I don't recall what the plan was was for that port. I'll have to see if I can dig out the instruction manual.

BTW, I still have my CDP-101 and 30 years later it still works!

It's not just crap PC sales: Dell's storage revs are also slipping

Equallogic... the good old days.

As a really long-time Equallogic customer (all the way back to the PS100), I can tell you Dell has lost the plot on storage for guys like me. For what they are offering (slow spinning disk) their pricing is ridiculous, and they've stood by and watched as others have innovated, the way they used to.

Went to a Nimble presentation a couple of months ago and all I could think of was "Wow, this reminds me of Equallogic 10 years ago." So sad to see it end like this. Something about big companies buying small, innovative companies and then sucking all the life out of them... What a shame. I know I won't be buying any more of their gear unless something changes radically, which I doubt can happen.

Merde! French Prez palace blueprints nicked from cable layer

It's France.... "Encryption" is for the dead.

RIM: We can't flog phones, would you like our nuke plant OS instead?

Re: How times change

"If, back in 2002, you told someone that Nokia and Blackberry would be dying..."

Which is why Warren Buffet won't invest in any of this stuff.

'Apple is corrupting App Store downloads', warn angry devs

GMC

Talk to Good Technology about this. They went through a week of hell starting June 20 trying to get their Good Mobile Control app re-published after a corrupted update. I was getting email from them every four hours with status reports about how they were trying to get Apple to republish the app to fix the problem, which they finally succeeded in three days later. In the mean time the app wasn't available at all - not even the older working version.

What was interesting was how they tested the fix. They only released the app in one country (Poland), and then slowly released it to other countries as users were able to download and install without any issues.

AWS CISO needs permission to visit his data centres

Unannounced?

So he's the CISO and not allowed to drop in unannounced? Then who is, because someone had better to able to just show up without warning to see what security is *really* like.

Leaked Intel roadmap reveals PCIe flash kit

Chris does it again...

OK, after reading yet another interesting storage piece from Chris, I have to say it: The man covers storage like no one else. I've leaned more about storage companies and products I didn't know about in the last three or four months than I have in quite a while, courtesy of Chris's great reporting.

Keep up the good work, and don't do an Ashley and leave just when it gets really interesting!

(Reg, increase the man's pay immediately!)

Google 'Do Not Track' extension preempts feds, Mozilla

Lipstick on a pig

Behavioral tracking should opt-in ONLY.

Yank fires up iPhone-controlled beer cannon

Bud 66, MGD 64, Select 55, et al...

= used beer, rebottled.

That is all.

Amazon preps upmarket US Android app emporium

Interesting leap of faith...

needed on the part of developers. Amazon could pretty much gut the market for your app by giving it away for free (or very low cost) and only paying you 20%. I suppose the argument is that volume would more than make up for the missing 50% of revenue, but it seems the risk is all on the developer, and more importantly, you become nothing more than a cog in Amazon's overall marketing strategy regardless of whether that has any benefit to you.

Plenty of stores offer "loss leaders" to get people in the door, but I don't know too many vendors who would willingly take a 50% haircut to be a part of it, no matter what the volume. Guess Amazon views the cost to produce as zero, so 20% is still a profit to the developer.

If I were producing apps for the Android market I'd sure want to think real hard about Amazon's ability to have so much control over my margins, their ability to instantly marginalize my product to promote their goals, and the "new low" this is setting for revenue sharing.

Amazon invites 5 terabyte mondo-files into the heavens

It costs...

According to the AWS Calculator (http://calculator.s3.amazonaws.com/calc5.html) it costs about $1,000 per month to store 5Tb and move 1Tb of that in and out.

But forget the cost of the storage - imagine the cost of the internet connection needed to move that kind of data!

Microsoft dives into cloud as resellers ask: 'What's in it for me?'

He's dreaming...

"We’re seeing an upside as customers see the price and say right, now I’ve got some budget for training..."

Uh, yeah, right - maybe in the first year when the budget is still intact.

The whole point of a customer moving to the cloud is to save money, not pretend they just found money to spend somewhere else on IT. It's the rare organization that reallocates savings year after year to something actually useful. Usually it just heads straight to the paychecks of the guys on top, and I doubt this time it's going to be any different.

Let's see how this partner is doing in three years.

Diary of a Not-spot: One man's heroic struggle for broadband

Fascinating!

You sir, are one persistent man. I hope you get rewarded soon.

And here I am bitching and moaning about Comcast throttling my *upload* speed to 1mbps. Guess I should stop complaining.

Calls for US nudie perv scanner 'opt-out day'

Informed risk-taking

OK, let's make this fair. Hang these same example images up where everyone can see them while waiting to be abused in the security queue. Then see how many people agree to go through the machine with their kids, wife, mother, etc. I suspect most flyers have no idea how invasive these searches have become, and for little benefit.

We keep fighting yesterday's war. Go ahead and lock down the airports air-tight (which is a joke - just look at the cargo loophole for starters). The bombers will just head to our schools or malls. You can't protect it all, and what makes airplanes so worthy of all this special security? More people have been killed by bombs in cars, buildings, etc. than all the airplane terrorism combined. We lose thousands of innocent people each year to drunk driving. Where's the outcry and government intervention over that?

Life involves risk. Allow us to weigh the risk of flying vs. driving vs. the train vs. staying home holed up in our homes because we're scared to death of everything. Sorry, but given the risks of living today vs. even a hundred years ago when a bad infection could kill you and the life expectancy was 30 years less, I'll take whatever risks are out there now, sans government "help" thank you very much.

Cisco jump-starts home 'telepresence'

Why the monthly charge?

I was moderately interested right up until the monthly charge part. WTF is that about? What am I getting for my $25/mo? The right to give you more money? A listing in your directory so other people can find me? Uh, I think some other services already do that for free.

Maybe you're going to get Comcast to bump up my upload speeds so your gear actually works? Doubt it.

The monthly charge just looks like a way for Cisco to get their gear from being "are they out of their minds" expensive to merely overpriced. No thanks.

IPv6 uptake still slow despite looming address crunch

Connectivity issue - between humans!

One other barrier to entry, and I don't think it's a small one, is the difficulty of communicating an IPv6 address between humans. It's frickin' LONG, it's in hex, and even if you're just telling someone what the host part of the address is, I can only imagine the typos and transcription errors that are going to drive a lot of us mad when we're troubleshooting connectivity issues.

There's something elegantly simply about an IPv4 address. Maybe it's just because we've been doing it for so long, but I'm sure not in any hurry to be setting a static IP of 1a33:43b6:d435:9045:8acc:34f0:29bd:2910 and then calling someone on the phone to tell them what it is. Even pinging an address like this is going to suck!