Posts by elip

Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses... but not your H-1B geeks, L-1 staffers nor J-1 students

Re: H-1B visas [*] Silicon Valley to fill engineering departments with top intl talent

Apartments are for the H1B's in the fancy FAANGs I think? At the fairly large corp I spent most of my career (about 28K employees worldwide), they *literally* bought a hotel (ex-Comfort Suites) right in the same business park as their global HQ, with a company-owned shuttle to bus them back and forth. Multiple people per hotel room. As an immigrant, and one that started life in the US helping my parents clean these same office buildings late at night (I was 9 years old, guess who 99% of the people still working at the office at 9PM were?) while they hustled to make their 3rd or 4th job on time, I find the H1B program highly disturbing.

Re: L-1

But surely you realize that college enrollment in the US is down significantly each year for the last 9 (mostly due to inflated tuition costs)?

I'm glad those elite enough to afford a masters graduate in engineering are getting *something* after investing 250K+.

Ardour goes harder: v6.0 brings 'huge engineering changes' to open-source digital audio workstation

Dude, if you were dragging in an mp3 for reference while doing audio engineering work, then you've been doing it wrong for 15 years. Some of us in this space can actually tell you which specific AD/DAs or pre-amps were used in a specific recording or instrument by hearing the final master. I suppose it all boils down to what kind of sound you're working with, but I have *yet* to meet an audio engineer or technician that would prefer to use lossy formats or one that would export a master in mp3 format. For what its worth, I cut records on the side with a decent lathe, and would *never* and will *never* accept mp3 masters from someone if we're talking about music production and replication. There is too much to lose in the process.

HPE's Black Thursday: Staff face pay cuts or the ax, office closures to save $1bn+ after coronavirus slams IT titan

Re: "products will be streamlined and rejigged to be offered as-a-service"

...and more importantly...hasn't HP/HPE tried this already with Hyperion (or whatever it was called), and failed miserably, after their cloud being owned half-to-death lost all credibility?

AT&T slapped down for its '5GE' ads: You don’t have a proper 5G network, so stop saying so, says watchdog

Speaking as someone who worked for years in this world (on handset engineering side) - because carriers have all manufacturers by the balls, they know it, and they don't mind showing it. Some of the most disgusting and non-professional behavior I've seen in my 20 year professional career, has been middle and upper managers at Verizon and AT&T.

Vodafone chief speaks out after 5G conspiracy nuts torch phone mast serving Nightingale Hospital in Brum

...and electrocuted them in the name of science!! Brilliant!

California emits latest layoff statistics. March's numbers are ugly. It's 19,000 total, including many in tech

queue...

Queue these same companies publicly decrying the shortage of skilled potential employees, and continuing to lobby for loosening of the H1B restrictions and increase in quotas.

HPE fixes another SAS SSD death bug: This time, drives will conk out after 40,000 hours of operation

Seems to be the case with my old EMC array, but all of my Nimble arrays have non-sequential serial #s and diff vendors across built-in shelf and expansion. Choose your vendor wisely.

OpenBSD bugs, Microsoft's bad update, a new Nork hacking crew, and more

Re: OpenBSD a little too true to its name?

...well, yes, but apparently only under a specific contrived configuration. :-)

Welcome to cultured meat – not pigs reading Proust but a viable alternative to slaughter

"Also, if the vat-grown products contain the same nutrients in approximately equal amounts to real meat, do you think your body can tell?"

Hmmm, yes? Do you believe the food you eat is only made up of chemicals and nutrients that we know about currently? We're not even positive about what proteins are and what most do.

"Eating vegetables vs eating meat is huge reduction in land use, energy expenditure, water use... any environmental measure you can throw at it, in fact, once you account for the agriculture required to feed the animals."

Hmmm. Perhaps when you're considering production as it currently is practiced in the US, vs. lets say, a village in Eastern Europe 30 years ago (or US in the 20's, 30s). You don't *need* all that agriculture to feed the animals. They were feeding themselves just fine without humans being involved. I raise both 100% of my meat, and 60% of our vegetables (family of 4). There's no way in hell we could ever raise *all* of our food if it was in vegetative form only - we wouldn't have the water for that (most of the wells in farming-country where I live have dried up...largely from growing plants)...not sure what we would do in the winter time either as far as attempting to grow. It takes a *vastly* less amount of land to feed goats and pigs for free, than it would for us to try to produce as much in vegetables pound-for-pound at a great environmental and labor cost. Not to mention the nutritional trade-off you make when eating only vegetables (especially if you're only eating "normal" vegetables as you would find in your local grocery store, instead of all of the random grasses, herbs and weeds we *should* be *still* eating) . Plant protein != animal protein. Short protein != long protein.

Re: You could say that of anything factory processed.

I call bullshit. Home cooking worse offender than mass produced "food"? Do you have data?

Mark Hurd is dead

Re: With him gone from the company HP downfall started...

My Proliants keep on going and going and going...not quite for as long as my Sun machines, but, for the money...I'll definitely call them 'built to last'.

Stallman's final interview as FSF president: Last week we quizzed him over Microsoft visit. Now he quits top roles amid rape remarks outcry

Re: Mixed feelings

Don't be silly, the mob never read a thing he wrote on his blog.

What goes up must come down, and that applies to the server market in Q2 too

Re: If you no longer sell Intel Xeons for 10k apiece

Exactly this ^^^. Many vendors are just now starting to sell next gen EPYCs, and the performance and core-count gain from 1st gen is not insignificant. How many potential clients were waiting for this? I expect quite a few.

HPE may as well have stayed at home in bed: Biz turns non-profit as sales fall, costs rise

Because the hyperscalers are a book shop, an advertising company, and a software company? None of them are primarily in the low-margin business of making hardware. None of them have *any* clue as to how to engineer a piece of hardware (seen it first hand with Google).

Actually, buying Nimble Storage has worked out quite well. They're profitable, growing in sales quarter after quarter, and have a quality product that's actually *liked* by the folks that have to manage it.

We've read the Mueller report. Here's what you need to know: ██ ██ ███ ███████ █████ ███ ██ █████ ████████ █████

Re: Motive?

I can name at least one US President stupid enough to trust FBI/Mueller. Here's a clip:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OsKHBIB-Jn0

Look at his body language...he willfully lies to Congress...where's the prosecution?

Ex-Mozilla CTO: US border cops demanded I unlock my phone, laptop at SF airport – and I'm an American citizen

happens all the time to my dad

...and has been happening since my family moved to the states in the early 90s. Definitely not a new practice. There are *all* manner of people-of-interest lists which border systems automatically check and in-turn flag passengers if they happen to be on one of them. Every time we return back from our native land, my dad is detained for 4-6 hours while they question him about his friends and family (many of which, at one time or another, have crossed into the US illegally, been arrested on various felony charges, etc.). Giant pain in the ass, but there you go. All of us are regularly (90-95% of the time) put through "extra-screening" each time we fly national *or* international. Thanks Clinton, Bush, Obama, Trump, <whichever power-hungry nutbag is next in line>.

Hackers don't just want to pwn networks, they literally want to OWN your network – and no one knows they're there

Re: The usual suspects

Attribution on the internet is mostly impossible. Carbon Black, Crowd Strike, and others are full of shit (which these enterprises gladly pay for and hoover up).

Hitting Microsoft's metal: SUSE flings Enterprise Linux at SAP HANA on Azure

Win what? People no longer compute on computers. Its considered antiquated tech by most outside of our industry.

Cisco emits 25 security bug fixes for IOS, takes second crack at patching WAN router SNAFUs

quality stuff

Why are people still buying from Cisco?

Linus Torvalds pulls pin, tosses in grenade: x86 won, forget about Arm in server CPUs, says Linux kernel supremo

Re: "Intel has tremendous amounts of institutional [money]"

You may want to look into Go for a 'systems-programming' langauge, easy and relatively painless for some cross-compilation. Rust catches memory abuse bugs, so you can waste your time dealing with other issues you didn't have to deal with with C compiled programs.

What did turbonerds do before the internet? 41 years ago, a load of BBS

Ward

I met and hung out with Ward about 8 years back while he was still with IBM consulting for our company on a project. What an incredible person to meet and talk to - he never stops thinking of new ideas and is constantly inventing. Here's hoping he's still out there pushing bits around!!!

Foxconn denies it will ship Chinese factory serf, er, workers into America for new plant

Re: Wisconsin?

Why "Wisconsin?"? What exactly do you mean by that subject.

No, it is not.

The Foxconn deal was being negotiated *way* before Trump got into office. This is a Scott Walker deal. Please stop associating Trump with it.

Microsoft's Azure Kubernetes Service mucked my cluster!

Re: blame

"It has to be able to cope with an unplanned node failure and recover swiftly and in an automated fashion. It has to be able to cope with transient network connectivity problems including partitions, one way packet loss, variable latency etc. Ideally, it needs to be capable of distribution across multiple availability zones or even regions, as failures at these levels are not unknown."

^^^ Show me such an app. I've been doing this many years, and haven't seen it.

Azure is a pile of unfinished garbage (like most software these days seems to be), take it from someone who's migrated multiple data centers to it (including HPC workloads) and was not in the least bit impressed by any single part of the experience.

LabCorp ransomed, 18k routers rooted, a new EXIF menace, and more

Re: Dark hole in home IT security.

Dude, Huawei is no different than Linksys, Netgear, Cisco, etc... they all have flaws that they won't fix, especially for consumer gear. Linksys, before they got purchased by Cisco, refused to release fw updates for my modem about 12 months after releasing the hardware, despite known exploit PoC code being publicly available. This was the straw that broke the camel's back for me - OpenBSD on a small embedded platform as a router since then on any network I operate.

'It's legacy stuff brute-forced in': Not everyone is happy with Citrix's cloud

Venerable?

How are yall still writing venerable and <insert any Citrix application name here> in these articles?

Et tu, Gentoo? Horrible gits meddle with Linux distro's GitHub code

Re: Now that GitHub is a M$-shop

Gentoo hopped on systemd as soon as every other distro. The only difference with their effort, as always, is they provide you choice and an easy method of running without it.

Citrix.com 404s mentions of F5 Networks

Maybe they're self-censoring their own BS?

Did you catch that sentence in the archived screen grab? "Most cloud users have gone hybrid multi-cloud"??? What world do these guys live in?

Brave Brave browser's hamburger menu serves Tor onion routing

Re: Who are you hiding from?

Not sure why the downvote. Maybe for the word *all* in your comment? There are *some* known FBI exit nodes for sure, and there will likely be more. Don't forget the Onion protocol is a DoD baby.

Amazon staffers protest giant's 'support of the surveillance state'

Re: According to IBM's latest TV show on AI...

Nothing has changed from Obama to Trump when it comes to border detention, keeping mothers away from kids in detention centers (jails), etc. Did everybody just sleep through Obama's presidency and "woke" when Trump took office? Obama *still* holds the record for most deportations by US president.

Democrats need just one more senator (and then a miracle) to reverse US net neutrality death

Re: Go stateless

What? Are you implying service/content providers will throttle AWS, Azure, GCP? When most of them serve *from* those locations already? Hmmmm.

US, UK cyber cops warn Russians are rooting around in your routers

Re: Aren't we doing the exact same thing to Russia?

Well of course. How else do you think the US knows Russians are on the routers...they run 'w' in their existing sessions. :-P

Slicker servers, heaving racks, NVMe invasion: It's been a big week in serverland

Too little too late

These guys are late to the party, and I don't see this concept working in the long haul.

"If you have racks of commodity server and are currently re-purposing servers between applications quite often, then having that process automated by products like Supermicro’s RSD could be seen as attractive."

^^ This is downright silly for 90% of the world's workloads. What everyone should be pursuing in a quest for effective utilization, is plain-old, boring compute clusters, where app (and other) folks can simply deploy a service, a process, a micro-service, a jvm, an instance of work, etc. Easy to manage (some of us have been doing this for 20 years), easy to maintain, and vastly cheaper than dedicating whole systems to a single app or a bunch of thick-provisioned VMs.

'Disappearing' data under ZFS on Linux sparks small swift tweak

Lee, of course testing is happening, at the OpenSolaris derivative distros (two of which looked like they peer-reviewed the code [supposedly] before commit). A trend I've noticed with Linux-first-and-foremost devs is that they tend not to hold much value for testing, or portability, or security, or quality, etc. Yes, my brush is wide enough.

How machine-learning code turns a mirror on its sexist, racist masters

Re: Mathematical modelling of sterotypes?

> How did we become so effing arrogant?

Money....lots of money is on the line. Grants or otherwise. We're 100% positive we're correct *this time*, honest!

Donald Trump jumps on anti-tech bandwagon, gets everything wrong

Check for the story where he said Amazon and other retailers will have to disclose full shopping histories of their customers to the government on demand, if X legislation goes through. It was based on dubious understanding of the law at best. I wish I could find the article for ya, but I can't.

World celebrates, cyber-snoops cry as TLS 1.3 internet crypto approved

Re: And yet still...

They have enough metadata to infer the content on *many* occasions. I don't have the URL handy currently, but MS researchers had done some nice work regarding key stroke reconstruction based on TLS traffic metadata alone, back around 2009/2010 I believe.

Recording Industry Ass. says vinyl and CD sales beat digital downloads

Re: You'll thank yourself later on.

Neither needed. Backups, backups, backups.

Trump’s immigration policies costing US tech jobs says LogMeIn CEO

But would somebody please think of the SHAREHOLDERS!!!

Bingo

I've trained my replacements so many times now, that I'm thinking I may just turn it into a one-man business.

Container orchestration top trumps: Let's just pretend you don't use Kubernetes already

Rancher anyone?

Am I the only one running Rancher in production?

Women of Infosec call bullsh*t on RSA's claim it could only find one female speaker

I agree, increasingly, rationality and reason are becoming more of a special and unique trait among the populace. Especially among the tech bubble crowd... and then there's California.

Look at stupid, sexy Kubernetes with all the cloud firms hanging off its musclebound arms

Re: Supporting Kubernetes is good, but how long for?

"Literally no one does that."

^^ Hmmm, whaaa? Sounds like you haven't been around too many "enterprises", small or large. I once worked for an extremely technically-advanced hardware sensor company (NASA one of our main clients), where I was lucky enough to work with some of the brightest engineers I've ever gotten a chance to be around, yet, unlucky enough to be responsible for "support" and "maintenance" of a load balancer that hadn't been patched (and couldn't be, cause no support) in over 12 years. Just one example of many in my career. I once saw a Sun box with a 14 year uptime.

Newsflash: Car cyber-security still sucks

So wrong it hurts.

"These ECUs turn out to be poorly protected because they've been designed to prioritize simplicity."

Sorry, I disagree completely. These ECUs as well as the larger whole of the vehicle, has been re-designed in the recent decade+, to prioritize complexity (as has every other piece of technology). Worse yet, this new generation has been brainwashed into believing, the best way to secure something that has grown (largely needlessly) in complexity, to fulfill a bizarre, self-destructive human craving for convenience, is to throw yet MORE complexity at the problem. Example of this backward (or forward depending on your perspective) thinking:

"As a mitigation, the researchers suggest car makers implement an intrusion detection system that operates even when the vehicle is off, though they acknowledge this could tax the car battery."

Brilliant.

H-1B visa hopefuls, green card holders are feeling the wrath of 'America first' Trump

Go Trump Go.

Sure he's a fuck-up, and we all despise almost everything he stands for, but Trump is correct on the H1B issue.

Here I am, my final week at my current gig, training my India-residing "replacements". I am on a technical team of 25, all living in the US, as the only "American". I put American in quotes, as I'm also an immigrant turned US citizen! :-) For what it's worth, *all* of my US-residing Indian colleagues, despise the H1B system, its abuses, and the generally shitty-quality H1B colleagues which we're then forced to train, and re-train, and re-train, and re-train. We just taught the 'ls' command to one of our Indian Senior DBAs, with "15 years of Oracle experience on UNIX-like systems". Yep.

Meltdown/Spectre week three: World still knee-deep in something nasty

Re: Intel "shouldn't be selling CPUs?"

I'm more than a little bit distressed by the fact that Intel, ARM, AMD, Google etc. knew about this flaw for half of a year, but kept Oracle and IBM (and other smaller RISC vendors) completely in the dark. I understand, and completely disagree, with software-only security embargoes, as it effectively penalizes the smaller developers and open source projects, which ultimately hurts users' security. However, in this case, the owners of 80-90% of the world's running machines, in my opinion, *colluded* to keep these older RISC vendors out of the loop, while they developed mitigations and designs to improve their future products. They did this knowingly, and willfully. I have a feeling and hope, some very large, very reckless companies are going to be facing legal battles.