Posts by elip

AWS launches fresh challenges to on-prem hardware vendors

Now I've seen everything. The first cloud provider, realizing most of its 'valuable' customers are hybrid-cloud, and are likely to stay that way forever, is going after their on-prem competition. This will not end well for Amazon, but I'm glad they're at least trying. Google is doing the same thing, but is pointing their customers looking for a physical 'as-a-service' offering to HPE. Much more pragmatic move in my opinion.

"Selling the Gateways through the channel means AWS has the muscle to challenge on-prem storage vendors like never before."

^^^ This is a bit of a stretch. Amazon's storage box cannot hold a candle to any existing large storage array. They're decades behind.

Google cancels bi-annual performance reviews, shifts to GRAD system

Always strange to see this line parroted

"The Great Resignation, which began in spring last year and continued until the fall when the quit rate in the US climbed to a two-decade peak, is forcing companies to consider ways to retain valued staff."

Ways to retain valued staff are varied, but mostly boil down to this one thing: give your people raises to *at least* match the real-world inflation. In the US this would've been between 12-16% last year. I work at one of these tech behemoths, and by and large, everyone got 2% (unless you threatened to quit). Why would I not scale down my productivity by 10-14% in such a market as dictated by market conditions?

Oracle creates new form of free Solaris

Re: Slowlaris? Seriously?

hehe. Only on the most critical of workloads.

Oracle offers migration path for Solaris 10 apps

Re: A lot of Solaris boxes still around

Yes, still developed and aggressively. They put out a new SRU for Solaris 11.4 monthly.

Review: Huawei's Matebook X Pro laptop is forgetful and forgettable

Re: Come on

I agree, this struck me as an odd way to start this review. As if setting us up for the rest of what is to come.

Frankly, if my choice of network kit (some bits I'm in charge of currently) comes up and it's between Cisco (way overpriced, and with known backdoors, and a very poor security record) and Huawei (moderately priced, "alleged" backdoors [none alleged by actual infosec pros but by beaurocrats], and *some* bungled releases from a security perspective), it'll be an easy one to make.

'This is the new normal,' Microsoft tells US workers: Work from home until further notice

Re: Wow.

Don't worry, COVID's not that bad for 99.6% of the population. I assume you've been living right, sleeping right, treating your body like the temple that it is, and making sure your immune system can fight off relatively benign infections like any sane person would have...right?

Hmmmm. The best thing for *everyone* for the *long term* (as in hundreds, thousands of years) is no vaccination, and very little medicating of society period (yes, that means people will die). If you want targeted vaccines for the feeble among us, go right ahead, but it makes zero long-term sense to mass-vaccinate healthy people, especially the young.

Re: Leftanistan

Probably had something to do with at least a majority of people understanding death and dying from a young age due to experiencing farming/raising animals/slaughter etc. It's a deranged society that believes in striving for absolute "bio-safety" as if it's a possible goal.

Re: Leftanistan

You continue to have a higher likelihood of dying from a fall than from COVID. I know!! I was shocked too!

Re: Leftanistan

Ahhh yes, but COVID is not smallpox or polio is it? Not quite a fair comparison.

Google's newest cloud region taken out by 'transient voltage' that rebooted network kit

Re: My personal computer could survive this

Nah...I was involved in helping google figure out basic data center power, DC cooling, Linux, UNIX, storage issues after they acquired a company I worked at, and proceeded to screw the pooch on a thoughtlessly executed data center migration (that was wholly based on marketing of the new location [in their words - "to enable us to hire younger engineers"], *NOT* on any technical requirements post-acquisition). They truly don't know what they're doing when it comes to data center ops compared with companies who had been doing it 6+ decades. Their engineers I worked with believed all workloads were easy to understand and troubleshoot. It was beautiful watching them scramble as they failed to understand one protocol after another. :-P

Sysadmins: Why not simply verify there's no backdoor in every program you install, and thus avoid any cyber-drama?

Re: We Just Advise, We Don't Implement

>For just one, where are all of these new experts with access to every app's source code supposed to come from?

I was one of these "experts" as you call them. It was part of my sysadmin gig. Maintain the tool chain, audit new toolchain requests, continuously audit the infrastructure, move slow especially when devs want you to move fast, etc. This wasn't exactly a safety-critical industry either - we made consumer electronics - tvs, computers, phones, cable set-top boxes, walkie talkies, etc.

Most of us were laid off, I suppose you can just re-hire us from the unemployment lines?

The goal is not to get access to *every app's source code*, the goal is to not even allow the app onto your network to begin with. It's really not that hard man. This place where I worked at was around 2004 timeframe, and it was for sure happening decades before then in safety-critical work spaces. Lets stop making excuses for doing the responsible and prudent thing, for the sake of cheap, low-quality and often unsafe goods.

Re: Linux proves that doesn’t work

Yet, I used to work for an organization just like this, and validated 3rd party code as part of my sysadmin duties *not* because somebody specifically asked me to do it, but at that time, it was just a standard part of the day job in my opinion. It was simply the right thing to do. Turns out society and our customers just wanted cheaper and cheaper shit, and eventually they got it. Enjoy the fallout folks!

Wanted: State-backed bandits planning cyberattacks on US infrastructure. Reward: $10m

Re: I would have thought..

Nike, Adidas, and Reebok of course.

Pyjama bottoms crew, listen up: In 2022 we'll still be at home

I would usually agree. Gartner doesn't know shit. However, it seems the lightening has struck on this one. They are correct, nobody I know is going back to the office 100% of the time.

Google cans engineering diversity training scheme after alumni complain of abysmal pay packages

Re: I don't think anyone is compensated fairly, maybe except the top

Hopefully you're speaking of Google and not tech industry in general.

With regards to Google, software engineers are some of the highest if not *the* highest paid people in the company. There are many making 700K+ in salary alone.

The truth is, like at all other places of business, a small handful produces most of the company's value, a giant several handfuls produces a little value, and another small handful shows up and putts around producing no value.

Hard cheese: Stilton snap shared via EncroChat leads to drug dealer's downfall

Chloe gets it! Never crime in a team. Only crime by yourself. Golden rule.

13+ years for some drugs bruh? Fucking amazing...I would think maybe in the US, possibly, but in Europe?!! When do we start locking up every sugar dealer - turns out its more addictive (and worse for your systematic health) than cocaine!

Tesla owners win legal fight after software update crippled older Model S batteries

Re: Carbon neutral

New Yorker city slickers see shit. Us out in the country, see life.

Re: Carbon neutral

Amen.

I have a feeling most folks commenting have not tried to buy a new car in the last few years. I drive a 2016 Honda Fit, because it was literally the only new car I could afford. Since then, inflation on new car prices has skyrocketed. The maintenance on an average EV is definitely lower in cost and frequency, and the performance cannot even be compared to an average ICE car.

With all that said, yes, absolutely, animal transport is by far the 'greenest' option...I think we should go back to that.

Activist millionaires protest outside Jeff Bezos' homes to support tax rises for the rich

Re: Absolute DREAMING

There is no generalization involved. Worldwide, we're *all* in a better place than we were in the 80s. Do you remember the 80s? I grew up in the middle of the revolution in Eastern Europe. I remember standing in food lines/bread lines and our currency collapsing overnight, twice. My kids have never even seen a soldier working a national curfew/martial law, let alone tanks rolling down the street. They've never seen completely barren store shelves. I've never seen the poor be so rich. Amazing how quickly our perspectives change.

Re: Absolute DREAMING

It's fairly tough for me to believe so many people are ignorant about the improving state of the world (especially poverty - which keeps shrinking and shrinking). Granted I didn't grow up in the US, but no doubt we're all better off now than in 1980. In 1980 my comrades were getting dragged into the woods and shot in the head. At least now some of us get a trial.

Fibre Channel is still around. And now it's end-to-end at a sizzling-ish 64Gbit/s

Not sure why all the calls to 'small numbers' of people still running FC or Infiniband. I've worked at 12-14 different companies of different sizes (from 12 person startups to 300K employee engineering behemoths) in the last 21 years and all were running critical workloads on FC, with some more scientifically inclined shops running Infiniband. Is the author suggesting that mid and large enterprises are running app and db workloads mostly on local storage? If so, that has not been my experience.

Basecamp CEO issues apology after 'no political discussions at work' edict blows up in his face

Re: Sex, Religion and Politics

And just like that, we live in a world where the obvious must be stated. Conversations are sure going to be long-winded from now on.

Re: Sex, Religion and Politics

> Yet some right-wing a-holes are so sensitive about this that they had to transform it into 'all lives matter'*.

What a weird assumption and attribution to make. I'm a left-wing anarchic communist, and I can only reasonably conclude that "all lives matter". Anything else seems highly suspect, and illogical.

Starlink creates risk of internet investment doom cycle, says APNIC researcher

Re: with so much head wind its obviously a good idea

I'm not arguing whether it's *possible* to have high quality ISP service to the boonies. I know it's possible, as I have a good friend running Fiber right now in Indiana without any issues at one of the last co-op ISPs in the state.

>....but the point is precisely that the best solution for everyone would be cheaper, good terrestrial broadband.

My point is, that's great that it's the *best* solution for everyone, however, it has been 30 years, they've gotten 250+ million bucks, and this "best solution" has not materialized anywhere that I know of. Starlink, as with Musk's other businesses, may just light the fire under their assholes to start running fiber out here. Currently, one of my friends a few miles away is switching from his provider - HughesNet - to Starlink, and is seeing impressive performance and lower latency. It is *literally* the current solution to his and likely my problem.

Re: with so much head wind its obviously a good idea

> In short, broadband operators will tell everybody living in the sticks "sorry, not interested, try Starlink". Regardless if people can afford it or not.

So do you want to know what the alternative for people like me out in the "sticks" currently is?

I'm currently paying $99/month for 3Mb down, and 56Kb up async DSL for Centurylink - my county's only ISP provider. I will gladly pay the same price for up to 10-20 times the bandwidth down (according to some current users).

You know what my "broadband" operator that received hundreds of millions of dollars from the federal government over the last 28 years in order to "serve the underserved" users tells me now when I complain about their offering?

"Sorry, not interested in offering you a better service. Are you saying you actually get 3Mb down where you live? That's very surprising, as you're so far away from our POP, we can't actually even guarantee that you get a signal out there. You're SO LUCKY!!!"

Under that pile of spare keys and obsolete cables is an IoT device: Samsung pushes useful retirement project for older phones

Wish I could give you more upvotes. I run an 8 soon to be 9 year old Motorola Droid 4, mostly for its unmatched physical QWERTY keyboard. I admit, I use it for texting, notes, and as an ssh client more so than a phone, but it certainly still handles phone calls without fail. :-D Assuming I can keep finding the batteries, and that I can keep builds of LineageOS booting, I hope to run it another 8 years. Yes, yes, of course completely 'insecure' if I can no longer update LineageOS, but then, I tend to use my phone as a largely publicly accessible device that all phones on our current mobile networks truly are.

Failed insurrection aside, Biden is going to be president in two weeks. What does it mean for tech policy?

Re: US (Affordable Care Act)

You're severely confusing the ACA and a nationalized healthcare as seen in Europe. The ACA aka Romneycare, was primarily designed to force *more* customers onto private insurance company plans. It worked, United Healthcare is steadily in the Fortune 5-10 since the ACA was passed. Thankfully the mandate has been mostly rolled back (at least the unconstitutional fees have). We desperately need a "nationalized" healthcare system in the US, though its much more likely to function if created at the individual state level.

Re: Old tech

The age is directly correlated with his senility.

Trump pushes anti-immigrant policy into Biden term with extended freeze on H-1B and other work visas

Re: Full rewrite of H1B is needed

Sure, but previous presidents have had 30 years to do something, *literally anything* to combat the abuse, and Trump has so far been the only president to utter the word H1B. So....maybe begrudgingly give credit where credit is due?

SolarWinds: Hey, only as many as 18,000 customers installed backdoored software linked to US govt hacks

source for this claim

"If you ever wondered how Putin’s Russia was having a disproportionate impact on global affairs.."

What does Kieren believe 'disproportionate impact on global affairs' means? I'm not seeing it.

US Treasury, Dept of Commerce hacks linked to SolarWinds IT monitoring software supply-chain attack

Re: And how stoked am I . . .

Your anger is misplaced. You should be cancelling your SolarWinds contracts, or at the least start questioning your infrastructure choices.

It's pretty common to find illegal activity/fraud around voting, it just usually takes a few months after it matters for the FBI or whoever to press charges. Here's a recent one from my state:

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/30/us/mccrae-dowless-indictment.html

Here's a recent case from my old state:

https://www.salon.com/2016/02/14/election_fraud_chicago_style_illinois_decades_old_notoriety_for_election_corruption_is_legendary/

Adios California, Oracle the latest tech firm to leave California for the wide open (low tax) Lone Star State

At least HPE is not. Their HQ building remains in the same place as always, nobody's forced to move. Other smaller offices (Aruba, etc.) might be closed, but mostly, not a huge sum to be saved in RE.

Re: they recently made it illegal for the police to "steal" remove or push out homeless tents

I imagine, the homeless.

Re: And in the year 2022

Tangent to this is at least one anecdote: my wife's company (a reigning Fortune 5-10 depending on the year, "Healthcare" provider) had stopped hiring out of California about 2.5 years ago. It simply did not make any financial sense. Her specific department hires a massive amount of RNs to work from home handling various triage duties that on-call doctors do not want to be bothered with. A typical experience level for this line of work is about 5-10 years of experience. Their RNs' salaries in California were somewhere around and often times *more* than most MDs in other states that they would be working on behalf of.

NSA: We've learned our lesson after foreign spies used one of our crypto backdoors – but we can't say how exactly

Re: How do you avoid US spy gear, it is everywhere.

Many companies already run their own routing and some switching on open source OSes (Linux, OpenBSD, etc.). Would love to see some larger server/network gear vendors start certifying those stacks on their platforms. For now, I'll just stick to my OpenBSD, on top of Coreboot, on small embedded platforms. :-)

Re: How do you avoid US spy gear, it is everywhere.

Some of us are old enough to remember, and come from countries where not all that long ago, our overlords, err representative governments took our fellow citizens to the woods for a chat and put one in their heads. Just one literal example from my childhood in Eastern Europe.

Work life balance? We've heard of it. Pandemic means 9-5 shifts are a thing of the past for many

That sounds a lot like me now. In my younger days I'd be that 'go to guy' that everybody went with their questions. I was oddly psychopathic (or extremely dedicated) about figuring things out and solving the roots of company problems, even if they weren't 100% related to the dumpster-fire at hand, knowing someday this ancillary breadth of knowledge would come in handy. It usually did. The amount of self-induced stress I took upon myself as a result, caused massive psychological problems through my 20s and early 30s. I basically didn't know my kids until about 2 years ago (they're 13 and 11 now), even though I've worked 50-100% from home for 15+ years now. In the last two years I've realized I am to blame for all of this, as none of these were expectations of my employers, just mine. I work identical hours wether I'm in the office now or not. I give about 10-15% effort compared to my previous ways, and somehow shit still gets done and done at a high quality, my manager is happy as hell, I keep getting raises and decent bonuses when/if the company makes them available. It took me 40 years to reach contentment and psychological security, but boy does it feel good.

Re: How about post apocalypse kitchen landscapes?

Absolutely rings true here. Jobs are slavery. I wish people realized how little work relative to current job expectations, it is to subsistence farm and make your own food (assuming you enjoy it). I'm 1 year away from paying off this house/land I'm on, and then its good bye rat race. I can finally farm full time.

Oracle starts to lose patience with Solaris holdouts

Re: Thank you Sun.

"Linux has become the fabric of standard computing."

^^ I'm curious what the cost of this currently is and has been, and would love to see an attempt at quantifying it all. Is it cheaper in the grand scheme of things to pay for overengineered, overpriced SPARC systems, or is it cheaper spending lots of engineer time (and in turn, money) battling highly dubiously tested (or not tested at all) Linux distribution code? I've managed Solaris and various Linux distros over 20 years+ now, and as poor as *some* Solaris efforts have been at times, the general stability has been only second to OpenBSD. Linux kernel 2.4 was stellar. 2.6 started showing some lack of QA, though at great perf boost, so people lived with it. These days, I don't see thorough testing from the Linux community. I could be wrong, as I live in the enterprise, large server + large storage space.

Re: Spend your money now, says Larry!!

To add more context. Our company's been around almost 100 years. Not claiming to be perfect, but I have a feeling we'll survive another 100 with our stingy methodology. We may be running things in a way that the current generation doesn't agree with ("not best practices" they say), but we haven't laid off groups of people since 2004. So....it is what it is.

Re: Spend your money now, says Larry!!

That's the point though. This hardware is way past 'expired', but it keeps on keeping on. We have a whole storage/IDF closet full of spare systems, all for less than 3-4K total. How much for a new Proliant 360 these days??

Supposed CPU architecture change, but doubtful.

Re: Spend your money now, says Larry!!

Eighteen years later, ours still run our core business, which is engineering hardware. We have around 28K employees to give some context. In all of the most critical functions of our infrastructure, you might even find an Ultra10.

Re: Why?

That's always been Sun's curse though ey? Too high quality, and no reason to update what works as a customer. These machines run forever, and when they do break, I get a stack of 10 year old machines off Ebay for less than 500 bucks.

Re: Why?

Oddly enough (or not), for certain targeted workloads, stuff (NFS ops, some crypto ops, etc.) on old Solaris machines is *still* 2-3x faster than on x86, that's both in Linux and Solaris/x86. Currently testing Solaris and Linux for a living, on machines ranging from 3-12 years old. I am guessing, this is mostly because nobody's actually cared to look that closely at some of the code from a perf standpoint. "It's good and fast enough".

SAP S/4HANA rollout at Queensland Health went so well that hospitals bent over backwards to avoid using it

doesn't sound too bad

Considering less than 2 years ago HANA running on Linux would still routinely corrupt its databases during exit. Good stuff.

Meet the ‘DPU’ – accelerated network cards designed to go where CPUs and GPUs are too valuable to waste

interesting

All of the real life DPUs I've seen used in the marginal-workload/start-up storage world, require a proprietary interconnect or other out of band 'network' (usually 100% blackbox with no admin/user visibility). With this, the value proposition quickly diminishes. Interesting that there's no mention of this in many of the cheerleading articles on the topic.