Posts by Tom Maddox

Teen student texter busts 20-second tongue-twisty SMS barrier

Given that you managed to misspell "sentence" in your post, I'm somewhat dubious about your claim.

So far, so SOPA: Web campaigners to protest world's biggest ever free trade deal

Re: I'm surprised.

Excellent Matt Bryant impression!

Microsoft: The MORE Surfaces it sells, the MORE money it loses

Re: Ah Gavin,

None of which changes the facts that they lost money, which is big news in itself, and that the Surface Pro 2 sales are in the toilet and are dragging down Microsoft's profitability. Don't let facts get in the way of your blinding fanrage, though.

Apple stuns world with rare SEVEN-way split: What does that mean?

Re: Yes, but...

Well, it's issued rolled-up on a cardboard tube, if that's any hint.

Got Windows 8.1 Update yet? Get ready for YET ANOTHER ONE – rumor

Re: If I were MS, I would be much bolder and replace icons with tiles.

9/10 -- Obvious, but you got plenty of bites, so congratulations!

A premium smartie lump: Oppo N1 CyanogenMod Edition

Re: Nope

This. The deciding factor between the HTC One and Galaxy S4 was the ability to add an SD card. I went with 64 GB initially, but I'll probably go with 128 when the price comes down.

MIT boffins moot tsunami-proof floating nuke power plants

Re: Security risks

I'm sure they'll listen to Reason.

Budge up VMware, array upstart Tintri's ramming in Red Hat Linux KVM

Sure . . .

. . . but the marketing guys have to justify their existence somehow. "It's fucking awesome, and now it works with Red Hat!" doesn't make good marketing copy. Also, it seems pretty clear that Tintri is doing something with the hypervisor (probably pulling in latency stats and other metadata about the VMs), so it's not as simple as just presenting an NFS export, and Tintri does have to make it clear that you can use a single VMStore with multiple hypervisors.

I would like to see Tintri make more of a big deal about the fact that they tell you how much capacity you can use instead of telling how raw capacity you get. One of the things that drives me nuts about certain incumbent storage vendors is that their cost per gigabyte is grossly understated when you figure out how much of that capacity you actually get use out of.

Puff on a hybrid – next thing you know, you're hooked on a public cloud

It'll have to come down a lot

We just ran a cost analysis of the price to migrate to AWS, and it ran to significantly more than our annual cost to support our environment, plus we actually own our servers, storage, networking equipment, etc., so we get long-term value out of that capital investment as opposed to paying year-on-year for a service which can be turned off at any time. Not to say that cloud services can't be valuable, but sometimes it's worthwhile to make the investment in capital and expertise.

Innovation creates instability, you say? BLASPHEMY, you SCUM

Re: Spaniard

My question would be, who are Had and Spaniard? Is this some UK auditing firm I'm unfamiliar with?

Anatomy of OpenSSL's Heartbleed: Just four bytes trigger horror bug

Re: OpenSSL is open source, most financial institutions don't use open source encryption.

I'm not even sure where to start on how this is wrong. Let's break it down:

OpenSSL is security library which is used in a number of products, some of which are "open," (openssh, Apache httpd) and some of which are proprietary (Juniper SSL VPN), and you can bet your biscuits that just about every major organization has OpenSSL deployed somewhere.

Verisign is a certificate authority. All it does is provide signed certificates (unless they have some proprietary security package I don't know about), which is irrelevant to this vulnerability.

Puking! protester! forces! Yahoo! 'techie! scum!' to! ride! vile! bile! barf! bus! to! work!

Blame Mountain View

It's interesting to me that San Francisco city government gets all the blame for the terrible state of transit in the Bay Area, when the suburban/commercial sprawl of Silicon Valley is largely to blame. Cities (and I use the word advisedly) like Mountain View, Sunnyvale, Santa Clara, etc. have restricted zoning so that the only possible construction is comparatively low-density, ensuring that housing prices remain high and traffic remains awful. If one wants a certain sort of amenity, for example great food, clubs, or a decent a bar scene, one has to go to San Francisco, Oakland, or Berkeley; there's simply none to be found in points south. Having a higher population density, especially of young, single people, would stand a better chance of creating a market for such things and thus encouraging people to live closer to their work. As it is, if Silicon Valley workers want to have fun after hours, they pretty much have to live far from work or commute to where the fun is. San Francisco's politicians should lean on the other cities throughout the Bay Area to step up and make themselves enjoyable to live in.

LaCie adds fire to Fuel: Revs Wi-Fi external storage gadget to 2TB

Re: Wot?

Why bother?

Satisfy my scroll: El Reg gets claws on Windows 8.1 spring update

Re: As if this will make people happy!

I'm not sure whether to go with, "Lighten up, Francis," or "Calm down, Beavis," as both seem applicable.

Anyway, there are a few points that you fail to address, ones which I've made before, and which the rabid MS fanboys can't seem to grasp:

The main problems with the Start screen are:

1) It is non-hierarchical; i.e., everything in creation gets splattered all over the screen. When an application installs multiple shortcuts, it's nice to have them associated with that application, not put on the top level by default.

2) It is unsorted and unsortable. I find it logical to sort things in some kind of order, say alphabetically, automatically, without having to shuffle everything around by hand.

3) It is hideous. This is, of course, a subjective viewpoint, but the default available color schemes are wretchedly ugly.

Now, to address the inevitable counter-points:

1) Yes, I know you can re-arrange icons by hand. That's fine when you have only a few applications, but I have dozens of applications with probably over a hundred icons among them. Some sort of default order is called for.

2) I don't care whether my complaints seem like minor objections to you. They constitute a non-trivial impediment to the optimal setup of my primary workspace.

3) I also know that you can install programs to return the Start menu to its pre-Win8 configuration. The availability of those programs does not negate the criticism of the Windows 8 Start screen; if anything, they support the criticism because they indicate that there is a significant market for the return of the old configuration.

Apart from those points, you make repeated references to using keyboard shortcuts on a touch-screen interface. If you fail to see the irony here, you are beyond help.

Finally:

"Shame on the fucking lot of you."

Bite me, fanboy.

Tegile's tech trajectory: All-flash function in hybrid mutant body

Competition

I'm not sure that I see Tintri as a competitor to Tegile. They're both hybrid storage, true, but Tintri is purpose-built for virtual machine storage, and Tegile is presumably for general-purpose block storage. Tintri would arguably not be suited for high-volume, high transaction workloads. Conversely, the other vendors are right in Tegile's sights, although Nimble is arguably lower-end as an iSCSI-only array. EMC and NetApp, on the other hand, are ripe for the picking, since they have both failed to deliver a really compelling hybrid storage product so far, and most pure-play flash storage is still too expensive for people who need high capacity. I think Tegile's approach is pretty compelling, although, as always, one has to discover how the product performs in the real world.

'Mommy got me an UltraVibe Pleasure 2000 for Xmas!' South Park: Stick of Truth

Girls

"Just saying, but it would have been nice to play a girl as I am like, you know, a fucking girl."

This is clearly impossible, as I have it on good authority from the Reg commentariat that women (or girls) do not and should not use computers and should instead be where they belong, taking care of the kids and making chicken pot pie for the menfolk. I refer you to any comment thread involving Marissa Meyer's pregnancy or any reference whatsoever to feminism. Exceptions possibly made for dead women such as Ada Lovelace and Grace Hopper.

Chillax, cranky commentards: Anger can KILL YOU

Re: Who gets emotional over text?

"Just remember that I am allowed to point out the stupidity of said commentardery, if and as needed, in my opinion."

Quid pro quo, Clarice. Quid pro quo.

Re: Who gets emotional over text?

Who gets emotional over movies? They're just images on a screen.

Who gets emotional over plays? They're just dressed-up people on stage.

Who gets emotional over spoken words? They're just noise coming from the flapping gums of your inferiors.

Meanwhile, back on planet Earth, it turns out that human beings communicate with each other through a variety of media, of which the "written" word (now taking the form of text on screens as well as ink on paper) is but one. PROTIP: people often have emotional reactions to things they read, regardless of the specific medium via which those words are conveyed.

Bill Gates is BACK... as CHIEF RICH human of PLANET EARTH

"his donations are inextricably tied to those receiving countries being forced to accept and purchase Monsanto products"

[citation needed] (Difficulty: may not reference naturalnews.com)

Something rotten stalks the Cloud Kingdom

The point Trevor is making, a point which is understood by everyone except for you and the one nincompoop who upvoted you, is that the license structure is so confusing that it is applied arbitrarily, meaning that the licensing is whatever the local enforcer wants it to be.

Also, when your licensing is so complex that you need a course to understand it, free or not, you have crossed a line into madness (or Sadness, as the case may be).

Facebook pays $19bn for WhatsApp. Yep. $45 for YOUR phone book

Re: why didn't the just buy Blackberry?

Because people actually use WhatsApp?

Snapchat bug lets hackers aim DENIAL of SERVICE attacks at YOUR MOBE

Old man yells at cloud

I believe this is where the Internet Geezer Squad (TM) piles on with comments such as "I don't even know what Snapchat is," "only loosers (sic) use social media," and "Ha, my trusty Nokia 6810 is unaffected!"

DARPA hands IBM £3.4m to develop SELF DESTRUCTING CHIPS

Sounds like . . .

. . . VAPRware. It'll never work.

Right, I'm going . . .

NetApp and Microsoft: We're 'close' to virtual ONTAP on Azure

Re: Microsoft FAIL

"other vendors can provide similar and sometimes better storage management solutions"

[citation needed]

Re: Microsoft FAIL

"Why one would put OnTAP 'in the cloud' when there are much leaner and meaner (and cheaper) solutions available is a mystery."

Data OnTAP is what gives NetApp its value at this point--there's no particular secret to building chassis with hard drives and slapping some management logic on the whole thing. OnTAP has a shedload of useful features, including high-performance CIFS and NFS presentation, deduplication and compression, application-aware snapshots, etc. There are also a great many NetApp loyalists who would no doubt find appealing the idea of a cloud service which runs familiar tools and features. The back end storage will, in fact, probably be lean and mean (or cheap and cheerful); OnTAP gives clients a powerful and feature-filled way to manage it.

HARD ONES: Three new PC games that are BLOODY DIFFICULT

Re: Nethack

Nethack did (and does) allow you to save to preserve your game when you had to go do something other than play Nethack, but death was permanent.

Obligatory:

http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2014/01/24

Aer Lingus opts for Tegile arrays, snubs EMC in shock move

Re: Capacity On-demand

Fundamentally, that's what you're doing anyway. You "buy" a storage array, and then you pay enough in service and support that four years later, you've bought it again. Sure, you can let it go out of support . . . as long as you don't care about your data too much.

Re: Not a Hybrid array

Interesting . . . in the sense that everyone else seems to disagree with you. From what I've read, the HA2800 is all-Flash by default but can be expanded with SATA disks to provide cheaper bulk storage.

Tech City UK boss legs it, dumps project in lap of BlackBerry exec

Re: Aiming high

. . . and he ordered a beer.

Scientists discover supervolcano trigger that could herald humanity's doom

So much for that idea

This should put paid to any sort of foolishness about an anthrocentric universe. Quite the contrary, Earth itself is just waiting to kill us.

Glassholes, snapt**ts, #blabbergasms, selfies and PRISM: The Reg's review of 2013

Re: Defenestration

Strictly speaking, "literally" means a thing which is true in a direct sense, while "figuratively" means something which is only true in a metaphorical sense. However, that battle has also been lost this year.

Meanwhile, dictionary.com defines defenestration as:

1 : a throwing of a person or thing out of a window

2 : a usually swift dismissal or expulsion (as from a political party or office)

So, if Ballmer happened to be thrown of out a window (possibly due to a bounced chair rebounding back on him), he would be doubly defenestrated, in both cases literally even though one literal definition is also figurative.

Confused yet? English is a hell of a language!

'F*** off, Google!' Protest blockades Google staff bus AGAIN – and Apple's

Yes, California is truly an awful place, with its beaches, redwood forests, wine country, culture, and cuisine. I would much rather move to Texas, where I can enjoy the delightful endless homogenized suburban sprawl spread across a featureless dull landscape. There are reasons that people move to Texas; for the most part, being a nice place to live is not among them.

Hot Stuff! NASA mulls 'urgent' space walk as ISS cooler conks out

Re: DADDY COOL!!!

Or some Boney M.

Microsoft's licence riddles give Linux and pals a free ride to virtual domination

Re: Missing components

Believe me, I'm supporting your primary thesis, just making the point that the situation is even worse than your article makes it appear.

Also, I'm guessing that the usual AC Microsoft shill will not have the stones to respond to this point.

Missing components

The article fails to mention one important element: management. VMware's Virtual Center Server is a relatively cheap investment, with most of the cost being in the hypervisor licenses, so any serious business will buy Virtual Center. With Microsoft, by contrast, serious management is done through System Center 2012 Virtual Machine Manager. Anyone who has ever tried to license SCOM knows that SCOM licensing makes Windows licensing look sane and approachable. Nor is it cheap. In theory, Hyper-V is free, but if you want the enterprise-level features offered by VMware, you'll pay heavily for it.

Furthermore, if you want service and support, you will then pay even more for a Microsoft (or, more likely, a reseller) support contract and then pay even more for Software Assurance. I have not crunched the numbers, but it's simply unbelievable that Hyper-V offers a reasonable TCO on a feature-by-feature comparison.

Quadrillion-dollar finance house spams Reg reader with bankers' private data

There's no reason to assume the BOFH in question wasn't also getting the emails. PROTIP: many systems which send email allow more than one email address to be specified as recipients.

'Don't hate on me for my job!' Googlers caught up in SF rent protest ruckus

Re: What about CalTrain?

Caltrain is not particularly near Google, but running regular shuttles to the Mountain View campus would not be too hard. The bigger issue is getting to Caltrain if you don't already live near it. There's virtually nowhere to park at any SF Caltrain station, taking Muni to Caltrain is utterly unreliable, and even taking BART to Caltrain is not great, since, if you miss your train by three minutes, you may have an hour wait until another one comes along. On top of all these factors, Caltrain is not especially reliable and is already overcrowded during commute hours, and it's not clear that it's possible to increase the frequency of Caltrain due to the limited number of tracks and limited right-of-way down the peninsula. I'm not saying these factors can't be mitigated, but the issues with Caltrain are a key factor in the implementation of the employer shuttles.

Also, this is not just about Google. Genentech, VMware, Cisco, and a number of other companies run shuttles, and Caltrain doesn't necessarily go close to their campuses, nor are the public transit options amazing.

Re: A couple of root issues

To continue on the theme:

I agree that the buses are not making rents go up, but they are a contributing factor: if workers can be whisked to work by comfortable, air-conditioned, Wifi-equipped bus, the long commute becomes much less onerous, especially if one's employer counts transit time as work time.

I also agree that there are opportunities for people to live elsewhere in the Bay Area, but commuting from the Berkeley/Oakland area to the South Bay is even more hideous than commuting from SF proper, so East Bay development is not a panacea.

Finally, there are definitely artificial limits on growth in SF. First, there's a legal limit on how many square feet can be built in San Francisco in a given year. Second, there are soft limits on growth in the form of the aforementioned permit processes, etc. Also, San Francisco's sewer and power infrastructure need an overhaul to support increased population densities; without significant investment in these things, there's a very hard limit to additional construction, and it's precisely this kind of improvement which is opposed by "old school" San Franciscans. It's clearly possible to achieve that kind of density (see Hong Kong, Singapore, Manhattan), and it's the only way to keep prices from skyrocketing, but as mentioned above, there's significant opposition. Actually, there's one other way to reduce demand, which is to make San Francisco unliveable, which the army of homeless people is working on, facilitated by a lack of desire to anything substantial about that issue, even by so-called progressives, but I digress.

A couple of root issues

The availability of corporate shuttles, of which the Google bus is one of the most prominent is down to terrible public transit infrastructure, congested freeways, and ridiculous commute distances. To get from San Francisco to Mountain View by way of public transit, one has to use an infrequent and unreliable commuter rail system which is serviced by an unreliable bus/tram system or by BART, which is generally reliable, but whose connection with the rail system is so tight that even a two-minute disruption significantly delays commute times. Driving to any connection point is also pretty awful, and driving to Mountain View is thoroughly wretched. While the ideal solution would be to improve public transit infrastructure by means of taxing the big corporate employers, I'm sure the big corporate employers have managed to avoid most taxation, and the public transit agencies themselves are often woefully mismanaged, leading to the current unsatisfactory situation.

On the other side of the coin, people like living in San Francisco because it has amenities like restaurants, museums, bars, and nightlife, unlike the South Bay/Peninsula, which is largely a godawful expanse of bland suburbia, so there's not much appeal for the young, affluent tech worker. Unfortunately, San Francisco is so awash in NIMBYs that actually getting new housing or infrastructure put in to offset the growth in demand is a nightmarish process of permitting and hearings which usually takes several years to resolve and which can easily be blocked by anyone who cares to raise a ruckus. The result is huge demand for an artificially-limited housing supply, leading to gross price inflation. It's also worth noting that the entirety of San Francisco fits inside seven square miles, so the available space to build upon is much more limited than many other urban environments.

The solutions are clear: build more housing, improve public transit, and have people live closer to their jobs, all of which would yield benefits to the public at large, not just employees of the big corporations. Unfortunately, those solutions are so challenging that the short-term symptoms are pretty much inescapable. Equally unfortunately, I have yet to hear a grown-up debate about the underlying issues, just name-calling and hand-wringing. Until there's a meeting of the minds between Bay Area politicians and the corporate executives of Google and the other big tech companies, no real solution is likely to be forthcoming.

Spinning rust and tape are DEAD. The future's flash, cache and cloud

Bah

Excuse me if I don't send flowers.

Two million TERRIBLE PASSWORDS stolen by malware attackers

The BOFH knows about bad passwords

http://bofh.ntk.net/BOFH/0000/bastard07.php

HAPPY 15th BIRTHDAY, International Space Station! NASA man reveals life on-board

Re: To boldly go......

Hmm, if only you had access to some global network of public human knowledge that you could search. Ah well, failing that, try this link:

http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/station/research/experiments_category.html

Helium-filled disks lift off: You can't keep these 6TB beasts down

Mechanical vs. SSD

And significantly more expensive. If you need (or want) bulk storage, spinning rust is still the way to go.

Revealed: Stealthy hybrid upstart Maxta's vSAN domination plan

Excellent rant, Trevor. There's one very welcome addition to the storage arena that the new vendors seem to be bringing as well, and it has to do with the answer to the question "How can you tell when a storage vendor is lying to you?" Even more recent startups like Nimble and Violin seemed to be following the old guard that way, but my dealings with some of the companies on your list have been refreshingly honest and forthright.

Microsoft boffins test rival 'Google Glass' geek goggles, say insiders

Correction . . .

But the kind of portable heads-up display, usable by the general public and embodied by Google Glass, seems to have been beyond the imagination of authors, which makes it either truly innovative or a really stupid idea.

David Brin included technology very like Google Glass in Earth and at least one short story . . . back in the 1990s. He, in fact, included them as a key component of a universal surveillance society in which any sort of anti-social behavior was immediately recorded and reported by little old ladies wearing the glasses. Initially, of course, Google Glasses and whatever imitators will be worn by the technorati, but I think it's not a far leap to see them becoming commodity eyewear and thus used to enforce social norms.

Chrome turns five, gains new 'desktop apps'

Re: Netscape won the browser war

Quite right, old chap! Why, looking at my work PCs, I can't say that I have more than a few dozen discrete applications installed on each of them, and a few dozen more besides on my home system. What's 100+ applications installed across three PCs between friends? Everything is Web apps! Everything!

VMware's latest trick: Virtual gyroscopes and compasses

Late release

The reason for the late announcement is simple enough: about 90% of the potential technical attendees were off in the Black Rock Desert, so there was no reason to release anything but marketing fluff at VMworld.

Mobe SIM crypto hijack threatens millions: Here's HOW IT WORKS

Re: the numpty with the SIM tattoo?

"Could the Reg not find someone with a clue to right about these things???"

I'm in your post, destroying your credibility.

US town mulls bounty on spy drones, English-speaking gunman only

For hunting armored zombies. Or Terminators.