Re: Sadly
I agree - I love Hong Kong & its juxtaposition of cultures that is such an enormous part of its charm. It breaks my heart to witness it being ground down into just another chinese city.
Posts by pwl
47 publicly visible posts • joined 9 Dec 2011
Hong Kong hopes to trawl the world for tech talent to build IT city
Western Digital unveils 20TB OptiNAND hard drive, pledges 50TB to follow
Japan to start stamping out rubber stamps and tearing up faxes as new digital agency given Sept. 1 start date
Thursday 13th May 2021 23:56 GMT
Re: "The US still loves cheques"
a few years ago while we were passing through Los Angeles, my wife saw a pay wave terminal at the shop we were buying stuff from & just wafted her (australian) credit card over it to pay. The cashier seemed to have a brain meltdown - she’d never seen it before let alone known her machine could do it.
The inevitability of K8s: Pivotal CEO describes the pain and benefits of technology transition
It's a Hull of a thing: Private equity biz Macquarie to swallow KCOM
Go on, Skippy, spill yer guts: 10.5 million+ Australians' data was breached in past 3 months
Can't do it the US way? Then we'll do it Huawei – and roll our own mobile operating system
Identity stolen because of the Marriott breach? Come and claim your new passport
Watt the heck is this? A 32-core 3.3GHz Arm server CPU shipping? Yes, says Ampere
Oz retro computer collection in dire straits, bulldozers on horizon
Crumbs. Apple has tweaked the MacBook Pro keyboard
UK tech whale Micro Focus: Share price halves as CEO quits, sales slide
Monday 19th March 2018 22:21 GMT
ob. disclosure: i work for SUSE
the reason was marketing, timing, and locality
- SUSE got somewhat “buried” under the novell brand just at the time that linux became a Big Thing. By the time Attachmate took Novell private & split out SUSE as a separate business unit, a lot of the prior momentum had been lost
- being a european-based company, suse was less well known in the US & also less used for US military & government , leaving the space for redhat to build a comfortable base. conversely it probably contributed to the close relationship with SAP, where SUSE enjoys a big lead.
- being germany-based also affected the culture of not being proactive & demonstartive with marketing, but instead just focused on the engineering. as a result, SUSE Linux is *inside* a lot of other vendors technologies: Teradata, HPE hardware, VMware, Cray, and others. Pretty much every modern data centre has something running SUSE ... it’s just not on the label.
SUSE is now semi-autonomous division of Micro Focus - there are back-end shared services like finance & legal, but pretty much everything else is separate & growing
OpenStack 'Queens' struts into the spotlight
Stop us if you've heard this one: Apple's password protection in macOS can be thwarted
HPE inks object storage reseller deal in EMEA – with Cloudian
Linus Torvalds passed a kidney stone and then squeezed out Linux 4.13
Red Hat banishes Btrfs from RHEL
Wednesday 16th August 2017 23:40 GMT
@thames
"There's no market advantage to having it. I cant' see anyone one else stepping in to take over either. "
- every admin command on SLES including OS updates gets a snapshot before & after thanks to btrfs. any errors can be rolled back virtually instantaneously. downtime due to errors is significantly reduced. in the event of catastrophic failure, you can recover from a previous "good" on-disk version of the OS : no reinstall/rebuild needed. only SUSE offers this on enterprse linux
- redhat's contribution to OSS is always important, but the main contributors to Btrfs were always Facebook, Fujitsu, Intel , Oracle, SanDisk, Netgear, & SUSE ... none of those companies have announced dropping work on the project...
Wednesday 16th August 2017 23:32 GMT
probably shouldn't feed the trolls...
...but RedHat tends to follow where SUSE quietly leads without fanfare, such as providing xfs in the standard bundle (rather than 000's extra per cpu), using corosync/pacemaker for HA (after a 10+ year lag), showing an interest in Ceph (2 years after SUSE signed an enterprse deal with inktank), and properly supporting other platforms like IBM z.
Btrfs isn't going away from SUSE - it's a shame RedHat won't contribute anymore, but since most of the involvement was from Fujitsu, SanDisk, Intel, Netgear, Facebook, and others as well as SUSE, it probably won't slow things down too much.
Meanwhile, if you want full-OS snapshot/rollback on your Linux, it looks like SUSE will be your only choice for the forseeable future...
Canonical sharpens post-Unity axe for 80-plus Ubuntu spinners
VMware says users run away screaming after trying OpenStack
We pick storage brains: Has object storage endgame started?
Cloud will kill tech sales jobs
Wednesday 11th November 2015 02:33 GMT
Re: @Lost all faith... \
> As far as the lost sales job, I would be fine if they all were borded on
> Ark B along with the hairdressers and hand sanatizers of Golgafrincham.
...it was telephone sanitisers, and in the end Golgafrincham's population was wiped out by a disease spread through a dirty telephone handset... so be careful what you wish for.
> They are paid to lie, they serve no extisential value other than caring for their families.
> Unfortunately, the disappearing sales jobs will be largely replaced by marketing jobs,
> who also lie, just to a broader audience (because it's all about scalability).
this flawed characterisation is grossly offensive: I'm sorry if you've had some bad experiences, but the vast majority of marketing & sales folk (which includes all those pre-sales technical folk who do tons of work for customers for free) just want people to be aware of & take advantage of all the great technology that's being developed.
in my experience most of the problems that organisations encounter is when they try to mash together incompatible systems, under-spec their original requirements in order to cut costs, or simply don't understand what they're asking for.
Who’s ready for an objective object lesson in object storage?
Thursday 8th October 2015 22:31 GMT 
ceph is not redhat
Ceph, like Linux & others, is an open-source project.
RedHat bought Inktank (or, really, some of its engineers) & is now trying to figure out how to jam a Ceph product in with its Gluster & other storage stories.
SUSE's involvement with Ceph pre-dates RedHat's & it also has engineers working on the project, including some ex-Inktank. SUSE Enterprise Storage based on Ceph has been part of SUSE OpenStack Cloud distro for a few years, and as a standalone product for about 12 months.
Red Hat rolls elastic Linux under SAP's HANA
Red Hat seeks cloud critical mass with Atomic Host
Australian ISPs agree to three-strikes-plus-court-order anti-piracy plan
Sunday 22nd February 2015 21:33 GMT
Re: If only....
let's also stop calling this "piracy" - which simply plays into the emotional argument framing people as blackhearted evildoers - and call it "unauthorised copying".
most of this copying /does not/ result in the downloaders making a profit by reselling - people are simply responding to the egregious pricing by old-world distributors who want to maintain gross revenue and rely on distorting markets through litigation and lobbying.
Brother from another: SUSE releases software-defined Ceph
Tuesday 17th February 2015 23:28 GMT
Re: Can you please confirm the price
Press release, which the article didn't point to, is here: https://www.suse.com/company/press/2015/suse-enterprise-storage-powered-by-ceph-now-available.html
Right there it says 0.1c/gb/month for the software component.
Yes you need your own hardware: but the point is it can be *commodity* hardware, and a mix depending on what's best value at the time.
Tuesday 17th February 2015 23:24 GMT
Re: Not really 1c the way Public Cloud means it...
Pricing is based on a server starter pack + capacity model, but can be as low or lower than 0.1c /gb/month for the software component based on the fact you get 4x storage nodes in the basic pack. The higher density your storage servers, the lower the per-gb price.
OpenSUSE tidies up disto model ahead of 13.4
Red Hat to Wall Street: I came here to chew FeedHenry and kick some ass. And I'm all out of FeedHenry
SUSE Linux owner Attachmate gobbled by Micro Focus for $2.3bn
Wednesday 17th September 2014 03:46 GMT
Re: This announcement worries me
SUSE (note capitalisation) has been run as a separate business since the Attachmate acquisition of Novell.
It would make sense for MF to continue with that same approach.
The speculation about some kind of sudden integration of COBOL with SUSE Linux kind of misses the point of this kind of business.
When EMC acquired VMware it didn't suddenly force VM's to only run with EMC storage...
Cloud? Nah, we're not bothering with that, say HALF of enterprises
Thursday 11th September 2014 04:33 GMT
where's the applications?
in terms of *private* cloud - i.e., changing your internal datacenter to use cloud concepts like policy-driven deployment, automation, templating and self-service, I'd argue a lot of enterprises _are_ lacking the operational maturity needed to fully realise the benefits (http://pwl-n-stuff.blogspot.com/2014/06/why-isn-cloud-taking-off.html). in particular, where the environments are outsourced, the big service providers have little incentive to make it easier to get things done with, e.g. self-service, if their financial model is based on getting lots of $ for performing additional but simple tasks that were left out of the outsource contract.
on the other side, though - where are the *enterprise* applications that support/require/capitalise on a cloud-type infrastructure? until they become more pervasive, there's less impetus for enterprises to adopt that kind of infrastructure & the complexity it entails. (http://pwl-n-stuff.blogspot.com/2014/07/cloud-high-availability-antifragility.html)
Container-friendly Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 hits general availability
Wednesday 11th June 2014 00:02 GMT 
good to see them playing catch-up
so they're offering samba-based windows domain integration & linux containers, have included XFS without charging extra like they used to, and have finally made it to a 3.x kernel. all stuff SUSE did years ago. congrats.
looks like they're also trailing on the btrfs front - although at least the tech preview means users will have a *chance* to include snapshots & so on, so long as they don't mind not having full support. i wonder if it's integrated into the system management tools yet, like it is in SUSE?
Google loads Red Hat Enterprise Linux into its cloud
Monday 7th April 2014 23:19 GMT
fwiw, follows last week's SUSE announcement of the same...
so now you can get both enterprise linux distributions on Google Compute Engine.
https://www.suse.com/company/press/2014/4/suse-linux-enterprise-server-now-available-on-google-compute-engine.html
except SUSE Linux Enterprise is, ah, less expensive for small workloads & large workloads. https://developers.google.com/compute/pricing#premiumoperatingsystems
SPARC and Solaris will live until at least 2019
Monday 7th April 2014 23:29 GMT
Re: Linux is the answer
The scalability discussion is no longer relevant.
HP's "Kraken" server is a single-system-image machine with up to 240cores and 12TB of RAM (24TB once bigger memory modules are available). It's designed to run SAP HANA, and that's developed on and only available on SUSE Linux.
http://www.v3.co.uk/v3-uk/news/2268742/hp-teams-up-with-sap-to-release-kraken-inmemory-big-data-system
On the insane side, SGI's Ultraviolet systems can scale with a single system image of 2048 cores and 64TB RAM. Again, the biggest of these systems have been run with SUSE Linux.
http://www.sgi.com/products/servers/uv/
So, from a former Solaris OS ambassador: the scalability discussion is no longer relevant.
SUSE's new OpenStack is Havana good time with VMware and EMC
Sunday 23rd February 2014 21:51 GMT
Re: Looks attractive...
Vanilla OpenStack can be painful to set up, that's why SUSE Cloud also includes the Crowbar project mentioned in the article: basic infrastructure nodes (control, storage, etc) set up in ~20min; new servers can be just plugged into the network to be automagically discovered & allocated to roles.
OpenStack in general is targeted at public & private cloud infrastructure: last user survey had about 65% of respondents doing private. It also has the advantage of being hypervisor-agnostic: so you don't have to waste valuable vsphere licenses on basic stuff that can be satisfied with xen or kvm on linux.
Malcolm Turnbull throws a bone to FTTP boosters
Sunday 3rd November 2013 23:53 GMT
not unexpected
this was always going to happen.
remember how this started out? Labor said "we're going to build this fabbo network", Abbot then immediately countered (without talking to anyone who had a clue) with "that's a bad plan, because, Labor bad".
from that point on, Turnbull was painted into a corner. I think it's pretty clear that to him, the concept of FTTP (implementation notwithstanding) was always going to be the preferable solution - but due to Australian politics he couldn't immediately come out & say that - he had to support the party line or else end up not being in any position to change it.
Instead he has been slowly slowly manoeuvring away from the original "NBN bad" towards one where universal broadband is acceptable. eventually once the coalition won government, he was able to implement "a review", which is often political-speak for "make it look like we're going to make sweeping changes, but instead take the heat off for a bit, while we work out a way to do the thing that we know is right, but that we have previously argued against for no good reason".
his recent comments hint that he's confident that they've found some technical loophole that allows fttp in a way that is "better" than the previous proposal - or at least a way to package it in enough gobbledigook to make it seem that way to the mainstream.
the next phase will be the announcement of the review's findings, indicating that there will be mostly fttp possible due to something special that the Labor govt "ignored", or something like that.
Australian politics as normal - at least Turnbull seems interested in the subject.
Mind out, Apple: Ericsson leads charge against the SIM
Tuesday 12th February 2013 21:04 GMT
Re: leave my SIM alone!!!
not requiring a physical sim means that you could easily have multiple operators for your phone without having to fiddle about swapping little bits of plastic. you could then select from a menu who you want to use at a given point in time, maybe have different networks for voice vs data, have one handset for work and personal numbers, etc. it also means you could order an international account *before* you arrive in a country & have it activate the moment you step off the plane (no need to find somethere that sells the right-sized piece of plastic to fit in your device).
also, if you have a subscription with a network operator, you should then be able to use any device simply by authenticating yourself: dropped your phone in the ocean? no problem, grab the old handset in your cupboard, reactivate it & your old number is still available to you. or add your own number to your friend's hadset for a while so people can still contact you on the trip back from the beach.
preporly executed this seems like a great idea (but then, you can say that about a lot of things...)
Analyst says vendors offer pretend reference customers
Behold: First look at Office 2013, with screenshots
Tuesday 17th July 2012 22:39 GMT
Re: Why - Oh Why waste so much money when Open Office & LibreOffice are free?
MS office skills? really?
retraining? really?
how much training actually happened when office 2007 came out & confused the hell out of everyone with its changed user interface? the swearing & cursing around the place went on for years, but no-one got trained. everyone's just expected to know.
here's the rub: if you're not spending $$$ on the software, you *can* afford to train people and they might (gasp) become more productive!
Enterprise IT's power shift threatens server-huggers
Tuesday 17th January 2012 21:31 GMT
merry go round
i hereby predict & coin the "IT reaggregation" trend of 2017-2020, where organisations "Precipitate" data and apps back from the cloud into central systems. the motivation will be partly security, but mostly for speed of service, efficient interaction of the widely-dispersed business apps & data, and improved control of the information environment for user groups frustrated with the huge number of disparate saas providers.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
