Posts by Tom Maddox

AdBlock blocker biz bought

One word

Ublock.

SaaS biz 'made up 99% of sales and defrauded investors of millions'

What's the problem?

This is just the activity of the free market at work. Caveat emptor, I say, and keep the intrusive hand of government out of path of these creative, disruptive entrepreneurs!

Do you agree with our fee hike? Press 1 to answer Yes; or 2 for Yes

Yes and no

Bummer. One day, someone will invent a computing device that handle binary computation and storage. Until then, I guess ICANN will just have to rely on what they have now.

'Miracle weight-loss' biz sued for trying to silence bad online reviews

Re: US T&C strikes again

"Whether or not your rights can be taken by T&C in product 'contracts' is a matter of State law. Some allow it, some don't."

IANAL, but I would suspect this is only true when the company does no business across state lines. At that point, it would become interstate commerce, which is governed by federal law. Since the company has a Web site, I think it would be very difficult for them to claim they were not engaging in interstate commerce.

'To read this page, please turn off your ad blocker...'

We'll see what happens

I run Firefox with uBlock on my phone because autoplay video ads are so disruptive and ABP wasn't getting the job done. If the advertisers would play nice instead of using autoplay and other bandwidth-sucking approaches, I could be convinced to use a less-forceful ad blocker, but for now I guess I'll have to forgo the dubious pleasures of the Washington Post.

DARPA adds 'sense of touch' to robot hand

Re: "There are some threads that are, destined to become smutty."

And one giant step forward towards reducing overpopulation!

Honor 7 – heir apparent to the mid-range Android crown

Re: I have an "Honor" 6

"Do they spell honour correctly when attempting to sell these things outside the US of A?"

Yes: "Honor."

BOFH: An architect and his own entirely avoidable downfall

Going soft

Sounds like Simon and the PFY are going soft. After all, three "accidents" occurred wherein the victims survived!

The most tragic thing about the Ashley Madison hack? It was really 1% actual women

Re: Why the percentage shock?

Speak for yourself, dipshit. I'm a human being, not a computer, and I'm not programmed to do anything. I may have certain drives, but they influence my behavior, they don't govern it.

Prof Hawking cracks riddle of black holes – which may be portals to other universes

"its just a theory (sic)"

You mean, like gravity?

Sony Xperia M4 Aqua 4G: The Android smartie that can take its drink

Re: SD Storage question

I want to both upvote and downvote this post for the following reasons:

"There are big changes on this front coming in the next version of Android, Marshmallow, which will make SD storage transparent . . ."

Yay!

"No doubt this will receive the update, so I wouldn't worry."

Boo! In the sense that one cannot take for granted receiving an update to Marshmallow.

FAO EVERYBODY: From the Legal Outreach Team at Bong Ventures LLC

Re: I'm sorry I misconstrued it for comedy

"Stuart, you did understand that it was satirical didn't you ?"

Conservatives (the American kind, can't speak for their British counterparts) don't understand satire. Many of them appear to believe that the Colbert Report, which was specifically created to mock conservative newscasters, was an actual news show, so it's unsurprising that the satire in this piece went unobserved.

Brussels taxi union to disrupt the disruptors over Uber service

Ridiculous

"In France, new laws directly target Uber by making it illegal to show the real-time position of available cars on the smartphone app."

So, basically, the French are preserving the incompetence and inefficiency of the existing taxi model through legal protection. Suck it, French taxi riders!

Boffins raise five-week-old fetal human brain in the lab for experimentation

It's ALIVE and ROAMING FREE!

Apparently it's already figured out how to post on the Internet and indeed in this forum, under a number of different alts.

Cheers, Bill Gates. Who wouldn't want drinking water made from POO?

Good jorb, guys

I came in here expecting to see a bunch of anti-Microsoft hate trivializing the importance of this invention, and I'm happy to see that most posters understand why it's such a big deal. Sincere thanks, guys, for helping to restore my faith in humanity, at least a tiny bit.

Re: Great, so if i stick Windows 10 in JOP

BeOS

All hail Ikabai-Sital! Destroyer of worlds and mender of toilets

Re: “airline crack”

Fucking homophones, how do they work?

Android faces SECOND patching crisis, on the same scale as Stagefright

Apparently OEM only

Some cursory reading about the vulnerability seems to indicate that, at the moment, only OEM/carrier remote support tools expose it, so if you're running stock Android or an AOSP-based build such as Cyanogenmod, you should not be immediately vulnerable.

Sengled lightbulb speakers: The best worst stereo on Earth

Missing the point

Clearly, these speakers are intended for sale to practical jokers. Just slip into a friend's house, change a lamp or covered light bulb when he's not looking, and off you go. You can start small, with barely audible music, and then move on to the big stuff, transmitting messages from God. For extra points, install multiple lightbulbs at various points throughout the house, so you can follow your intended victim from room to room, ensuring that his sanity is thoroughly eroded. Sure it's expensive, but can you really put a price on that kind of entertainment?

Progress source replenishes international space station

Re: El Reg units...

Actually, the reason is much simpler: it's just to annoy the French.

Linux Mint 17.2: If only all penguinista desktops were done this way

Sad and lonely troll is sad and lonely.

BOOM! Stephen Elop shuffled out of Microsoft door

Re: Well that confirms it...

"You can't make an assumption like that, it's entirely possible that in a company that size there are several more!"

Indeed. They should start by trying their offices in The Netherlands.

AT&T fined about 3 days of profit ($100m) for limiting 'unlimited' plans

Re: what is The Reg

I'm going to go out on a limb here and guess "No."

BlackBerry ponders putting Android on future mobes

Re: Not a terrible idea

"People don't buy phones for the OS, they buy them for the user experience, apps and hardware (in whatever order) It doesn't matter if the phone is running Android, QNX, iOS or Windows 10 underneath, if the phone is well designed and you like the GUI and can run your apps."

Heresy! Burn the infidel!

Carbon nanotube memory tech gets great big cash dollop

Cloud

"Perfect for Cloud Storage!"

Net neutrality starts this Friday! Kinda! Sorta! It's a little complicated ...

Re: How would we ever detect that our traffic is throttled?

Citation, or at least evidence, needed.

Config file wipe blunder caused deadly Airbus A400M crash – claim

Re: "trying to fly on one engine would make the aircraft very difficult to control or land safely."

"It barely reached 2,000ft before calling an emergency and tried to land, but hit an electrical pylon and crashed shortly afterwards."

That sounds like a "sub-optimal option" all right.

The blandness – or madness – of King George of NetApp

"Do you have an ONTAP courtier who steps aside from the rest and diffidently suggests that ONTAP Edge – the ONTAP-V product turning a server’s direct-attached storage into a virtual SAN – could actually become a real EVO: RAIL system, that NetApp could make an EVO: RAIL template like its FlexPod scheme?"

For the love of god, this. There's a mountain of potential locked up in OnTAP Edge, but the 10 TB limit is a show-stopper for use in core storage deployments or even reasonably sizable branch deployments. With software-defined storage on the rise, NetApp has a huge opportunity to appeal to the NetApp faithful, who might want to leverage familiar technology and features without deploying additional physical appliances, and to new potential customers, who see the appeal of the technology but who want to avoid the physical hardware footprint in the first place. As mentioned in the article, it would also enable a hyper-converged play with a richer feature set than Nutanix or Simplivity. Unfortunately, NetApp seems wedded to the idea of selling boxes rather than decoupling hardware from software, and that model seems to be less sustainable in the current market than it used to be.

Virty servers' independence promise has been betrayed

Re: What am I missing?

What Alistair said. There's a fairly straightforward workaround to the disk-locking issues, which is to use in-guest iSCSI, but many organizations either don't have iSCSI support for block storage or have fear and loathing about using iSCSI for performance-oriented applications.

BOFH: Step into my office. Now take a deep breath

Fess up

Which Reg commentard is the new Boss? My money's on jake, but there are so many possibilities.

Federation promises to bring your storage under control

The problem . . .

The problem being solved by most storage federation/virtualization vendors is that their money is in your wallet. What they're really trying to figure out how to do is provide the minimum support needed for disparate storage resources so that they can lock you in to their own product. Software-defined storage provides a way out of that trap to a certain extent, but it has the disadvantage (largely perceptual) of not giving you a particular box to kick if something goes wrong. In truth, all storage arrays are "software-defined;" decoupling the software from the storage provides greater flexibility, but it feels more risky.

IMHO, of course.

Large Hadron Collider gives young ALICE a black-hole ray gun

Re: Famous Last Words

There are always a few parts left over.

I'll just leave this here.

Boring old Brocade just sits there making money. Damn them

Translation?

"a non-cash goodwill impairment charge from the strategic repositioning"

Can someone give me a translation in English?

It pays to fake it: Test your flash SAN with a good simulation

Re: Nick Slater makes the most important point of the whole article

I actually prefer unicorns for servicing my all-sequential workloads, since they also don't exist. Under real-world use conditions, I have never found a use case where flash storage in an array designed to make proper use of it was not helpful. Now, some vendors are more effective than others at making use of flash storage, but that's a different issue.

Why does Uber keep its drivers' pay so low? Ex-CFO: 'Cos we can'

Re: Just ONE MORE scumbag running a company.

While I don't condone Uber taking advantage of the drivers, you're living in a fantasy world if you think you're somehow better off or personally safer with cab drivers. To the contrary, at least taking an Uber, the Uber app is tracking your location, so you have evidence in the event that an Uber driver takes you off to some secluded location to have his way with you.

http://www.businessinsider.com/despite-its-problems-uber-is-still-the-safest-way-to-order-a-taxi-2014-12

This is purely anecdotal evidence, of course, but virtually every Uber experience I've had has been more pleasant than taking a conventional taxi would have been. If nothing else, Uber is putting pressure on the taxi companies and regulators to provide a better experience for consumers.

Reddit: Gonna SCRUB these TROLLS right outa my hair

Re: FTFY

You don't understand--their forum is pathetic and sad; my forum is cool and enlightened!

You're going to have stop calling people 'cold fish': THIS one is HOT-BLOODED

Well, that's great . . .

. . . but what happens when you stick one in your ear?

Home routers co-opted into self-sustaining DDoS botnet

Re: Class action?

"But then what happens when it's learned the cost to do it reasonable would price ANY home router out of the affordability range? What if the average home user can ONLY afford an insecure router?"

Your average home router is cheap commodity hardware presumably running a cut-down version of an open operating system such as Linux or *BSD. The effort involved to a) harden the OS and b) give each router a unique, difficult admin password should be minimal. These tasks are solved problems and should not raise the cost of a router by more than pennies. If they do, the vendor deserves to be priced or sued out of the market.

Time to get your babble on: Microsoft opens Skype Translator Preview to all comers

Lack of focus

They would have gotten the product out of the door much sooner if they'd focused more on languages which are actually in use. I mean, who speaks Welsh?

Red-faced Germans halt NSA cooperation after Euro spying revealed

Re: "Surveillance is a sensitive issue in Germany"

Surveillance pretty much is everywhere these days.

Or is that not what you meant?

Citizens denied chance to vote in local-government IT cockup

Re: is actually greater usage than 10 or 20 people on one bus

"Typical libtard statement."

You might have made a valid point, but no one will ever know since it followed this statement.

NSA domestic dragnet NOT authorised by Patriot Act, rules US Appeals Court

Re: I would comment but.........

If your work requires you to use a proxy server, they can log your http traffic . . . such as that which communicates with El Reg. Posting as AC is only a useful defense if your work doesn't care enough to do that. Actually, if they care enough, they can just capture all your network traffic. Using your work PC to do something your work doesn't want you to do is a losing bet if they want to catch you badly enough.

Apathy continues to overwhelm effort to create an internet ungoverned by America

Re: Expectations

Quite right! I prefer my current existence wherein governments and/or corporations wield no power over me whatsoever.

Infinidat decloaks, bulging with a BILLION greenbacks

Re: Don't worry, be happy...

In re: "multi-year TCO," I can well imagine that to be the case, especially when you factor in the cost of power and cooling. However, if you have a hybrid array which de-stages all cold blocks to disk and then idles those disks, your power budget may still be low enough to counter the cost of flash. Not saying that this is the case, just that it could be. I definitely agree that flash offers great potential to improve storage efficiency (dedupe + compression with massively reduced processing time, for example), but is it sufficient to bring flash storage into parity with spinning rust?

There's also the question of capex vs. opex. Operationally, there's no question that flash is cheaper than conventional hard drives from an operational perspective. OTOH, many vendors offer a tremendous initial discount precisely because they know they'll be making back that discount in maintenance costs, making it easy for a purchaser to go to management with a smaller purchasing cost. Obviously, yes, it makes more sense to go with the product which offers a better TCO, but that's not the way all organizations work.

Finally, from the perspective of the end goal of Infinidat, maybe they don't even care about the overall marketplace and carving out their niche in it. If they can show that they do a better VMAX than EMC or a better USP than HDS, one of those companies is likely to buy Inifindat, thus handily lining the pockets of the VCs and founders. Thus Infinidat becomes VMAX 4 or whatever.

"This is a disk drive array and surely, long-term, disk drive arrays are the new tap libraries and will not store fast-access data or, eventually, near-line data either. Enterprise on-premise arrays will go all-flash; that is what analysts such as the people at Wikibon are saying."

Yeah, about that . . . wake me up when AFAs have a price per GB that comes anywhere near NL-SAS or SATA. Right now, the sweet spot in price/performance seems to be with hybrid arrays which offer bulk storage on fat, slow drives and a fast flash tier with concomitant storage logic designed to maximize the performance benefits of flash. Contrast this type of design with a legacy storage array which has hybrid storage bolted on (e.g. NetApp FAS or EMC VMAX); those arrays do not make efficient use of flash storage, especially for writes, no matter what the vendors say.

"A second worry is that hyper-converged systems are attacking the idea of a networked storage array being necessary at all."

The hyper-converged space is still, you know, converging, with significant concerns about the strength of the overall architecture. Enterprise customers also often have an existing storage infrastructure investment (HBAs, cabling, switches, etc.) and a pre-existing architecture to support it, so slapping in a new, faster array is less disruptive and often cheaper than trying to migrate to hyper-converged. New companies may want to make use of hyper-converged appliances, but I suspect there's a significant addressable market of well-capitalized, profitable companies who would be happy to have a box which plugs into their existing infrastructure and makes everything go faster.

"A third worry is that on-premises data is going to the cloud."

This concern is valid, but I think it mainly applies to newer companies, as above, or older companies which don't have data that matters to them. And who knows, maybe Infinidat is targeting cloud providers as well.

There are multiple large companies still selling large frame arrays and making a tidy bundle doing it, indicating that there's still a profit to be made in this space. Most of the offerings in the space that I've seen have some woeful deficiencies in terms of price efficiency, manageability, and performance, so a fast-moving competitor certainly has an opportunity to steal somebody's lunch.

If hypervisor is commodity, why is VMware still on top?

What is this I don't even

I see the Microsoft fanboys are out in force.

Microsoft fanboys.

Microsoft. Fanboys.

Fanboys for Microsoft.

Hmm, no, I just can't wrap my head around their existence, no matter how I try.

Google it onna Google phone onna GOOGLE NETWORK. MVNO plan imminent

Re: Do you really want....

Your anti-Google paranoia makes me think of this.

Ad-blocking is LEGAL: German court says Ja to browser filters

Re: It's my computer

Then install an Adblock-detector on your site and refuse to serve content to people running Adblock.

VAMPIRE SQUID romps stun scientists: Unique sex lives revealed

Classified under . . .

. . . code name TENTACLE OPERA CLOAK.