Posts by Uncle Ron

Hubble Space Telescope sails serenely on in safe mode after efforts to switch to backup memory modules fail

Just Another Keyhole

Hubble is just a Keyhole spy satellite that's pointing up instead of down. I know that is a simplistic comparison, but Hubble was made in the same factory by the same company with the same basic components. We have ONE Hubble. How many Keyholes are there and just exactly what good do we get from them? How much stunning science and fantastic images and inspiring insight have we gotten from Hubble? And how much from the Keyholes? We could probably put up another Hubble with 2020's computers in 12 months if we only had some real leadership in this country. It makes me want to hurl.

Quality control, Soviet style: Here's another fine message you've gotten me into

Probably Not So Bad

Those other programmers in his team are probably now the heart of the Russian hacking of every Western country on earth. And maybe some of the assembly line workers as well. They were so good and hacking and messing around with their own systems it was only natural to hire them to destroy the West.

IBM quietly announces Power-powered private cloud in a rack to 'evolve' your apps

Huh?

Why does anyone buy anything from Oracle?

Completed Netflix? Indulge your inner nerd with a virtual talk from a computer museum

Stupid Netflix Reference

It would take several adult lifetimes of all waking hours to "complete Netflix." Why make this stupid reference?

Dell Wyse Thin Client scores two perfect 10 security flaws

I Know Nothing...

I don't know a thing about these Wyse clients, but if they use VNC for any part of their function I wouldn't be caught dead recommending it or using it. I use VNC at home to remotely control and use the PC's in my home network (8 of them,) and the performance is awful. Barely usable. So, No Thanks Wyse.

Trump administration says Russia behind SolarWinds hack. Trump himself begs to differ

Both Sides of the Coin

I'm no apologist for Putin or Russia's inveterate state-sponsored hacking, but the press and analysts and talking heads all over the place have all failed to mention that the US has exactly the same capacities and capabilities and efforts (if not much better) as they do, and has been probing and poking and infiltrating their systems (and many others countries) for YEARS. For example, multiple credible sources have stated that we (the US) have planted malware throughout the Russian power grid and can turn off the electricity all across Russia at will. The Russians know this. It is pervasive and sits in their systems today. Put there by us. They don't seem to be able to fix it. We actually want them to know we can hurt them if they go too far with their shenanigans. Apparently, reading our homeland security and treasury and health system records and e-mail is not too far. I haven't seen or heard of the lights going out back in the USSR... If the media would only get the story straight, it might lead to a discussion and debate on some kind of "arms" agreement that gets us out of this stinky business. Huh?

Oracle customers clamor for its hardware. Yup, hardware. It can't build Exadata fast enough

Why Not POWER?

I will never understand why companies buy HW from Oracle. Even heavily discounted, it's still just x86 servers with tons of Oracle (read: expensive) spaghetti code. This is a few years old, and heavily IBM oriented, but I don't believe they are lying. And I think still relevant: https://www.ibm.com/downloads/cas/WOZDNBYX

IBM ordered to pay £22k to whistleblower and told by judges: Teach your managers what discrimination means

Common Denominator

I worked for IBM for 4 decades. I am not exaggerating, in those 40+ years, there were DOZENS of instances, events, situations--call them what you like--where I could have been a 'whistle blower' but I was simply too much a coward to act. I was cheated out of commissions, I was discriminated against for multiple reasons, as a senior (expensive) person, I was given impossible jobs to push me out, and more. I was determined not to get pushed out. I will say this: I loved IBM and I still do. The vast majority of the people I worked directly for and directly with were first-rate. The company has some stink in various places, there seems to be a personnel rot-process that goes on up the ladder, in the middle zones, that upper levels are either unaware of, or simply ignore, or actively encourage in order to meet their own objectives. IBM is still doing wonderful things, is still technologically very smart, and continues, IMHO, to be indispensable to the industry. At the end of the day, I feel that the pressure placed on every company in the world by the capital markets has been very destructive. I believe more destructive for IBM than others, because IBM has had further to fall.

When it comes to hacking societies, Russia remains the master at sowing discord and disinformation online

Is it Time?

I'd really like an opinion on whether it's time to cordon off these evil state actors like China and Russia from the world wide internet. Russia has taken steps to cut it's own people off, and China has been filtering the web from it's people for years. I feel China and Russia (and Iran, and well known scammer domains) need to be cut off. Huh?

Once considered lost, ESA and NASA's SOHO came back from the brink of death to work even better than it did before

Thanks

All I can say is Thanks So Much for this great article. A very nice read. Well Done.

FYI Russia is totally hacking the West's labs in search of COVID-19 vaccine files, say UK, US, Canada cyber-spies

Is it Time?

I'd really like an opinion on whether it's time to cordon off these evil state actors like China and Russia from the world wide internet. Russia has taken steps to cut it's own people off, and China has been filtering the web from it's people for years. I feel China and Russia (and Iran, and well known scammer domains) need to be cut off. Huh?

Microsoft announces official Windows package manager. 'Not a package manager' users snap back

Junk

Junk.

Back from the dead: Appeals court resurrects lawsuit claiming IBM stiffs its own salespeople on commissions

Not News

This is not new at IBM. Thirty years ago, I was part of a 3 or 4 person team that sold a huge deal to a university. My share of the commission would have been 10's of thousands. In today's dollars--probably $60 or $70K. I got nothing. The branch manager simply didn't like me. So he cut me out. They didn't give more to the other guys, they just didn't pay me. I didn't fight it because it was a time in my life when I didn't want to lose my job--part of the calculation I'm sure. The quota letters were the same then as now: "Not a promise or a guarantee. Not a contract." "At will employment." I heard many stories of guys earning million dollar commissions that simply weren't paid. They just couldn't stomach paying a salesman a million dollars. An IBM Director once actually told me, "The product sells itself. We don't really need sales people." The IBM Company and it's shareholders have been paying for this attitude for decades now.

NASA told to get act together on commercial crew vendors as chance of US-free ISS rises

Please !!!

El Reg: You said, "Auditors minced no words in their assessment of NASA's Commercial Crew providers: overdue, overbudget and overpaid." To my knowledge, the auditors ONLY called out Boeing. Not "Commercial Crew providers." Not SpaceX. Huh? If I'm right, why did you write this?

Shock! US border cops need 'reasonable suspicion' of a crime before searching your phone, laptop

Re: No problem

I'm not so worried about my case being thrown out, as I am worried about some low-paid CBP or ICE agent clawing through my personal info and using it for some nefarious purpose. Don't forget that every tin-pot county sheriff's office clerk has access to NCIC and every other data-base about you, your kids and your ex-spouse's personal total history. There is no public interest in allowing warrentless, casual, low-class free-for-all access to your private finances, health, employment, information.

SpaceX flings another 60 Starlink satellites into orbit in firm's heaviest payload to date

Think

Think for a few moments: 1) The orbital PLANES (remember it's 3D up there) are HUGE. There are 9 Billion people here on the Earth's surface, about the same size as one of these sats, and we barely ever see one (joke) so I don't think a few thousand small sats are going to be more than a pin drop, and 2) The ESA had to move it's sats TWENTY EIGHT times in 2018 to protect some imaginary "exclusion" zone. The press never covered even ONE of those movements. Why do you suppose el Reg and others keep mentioning and ridiculing StarLink for this one movement?

Internet service is (currently) one of the most profitable industries on earth. The fat, cushy, regulated fees and charges and prices and MONEY the semi-monopolies charge for this service is hugely threatened by StarLink. The incumbents have billions to protect their safety with the press and governments. I believe they even have astronomers up in a lather about space clutter (space is HUGE.) I refer you back to point 1.

Some of the coverage of StarLink represents the real reason the term "fake news" was invented (long before Donald Trump.) I feel you should be VERY skeptical of this coverage. Waddaya think?

IBM stands for I Block Money, says sales rep: Big Blue sued yet again by its own staff over 'missing' commissions

This Has Always Been True at IBM

This is not new at IBM. Thirty years ago, I was part of a 3 or 4 person team that sold a huge deal to a university. My share of the commission would have been 10's of thousands. In today's dollars--probably $60 or $70K. I got nothing. The branch manager simply didn't like me. So he cut me out. They didn't give more to the other guys, they just didn't pay me. I didn't fight it because it was a time in my life when I didn't want to lose my job--part of the calculation I'm sure. The quota letters were the same then as now: "Not a promise or a guarantee. Not a contract." "At will employment." I heard many stories of guys earning million dollar commissions that just weren't paid. They just couldn't stomach paying a salesman a million dollars. An IBM Director once actually told me, "The product sells itself. We don't really need sales people." The IBM Company and it's shareholders have been paying for this attitude for decades now.

Scrambling for cloud relevance, Oracle hires... 2,000? Yes, that sounds like a nice round number

"40,000 cloud customers"

"40,000 cloud customers?" I don't know WTF that means. In the entire world, there aren't 40,000 enterprise businesses that I would cross the street to do sell to. If you're counting welding shops and insurance agents and funeral homes, at the very least, WHO CARES? Selling and supporting to those kinds of businesses is a loser. Oracle can have 'em. A much more meaningful statistic would maybe be "Enterprise Average Quarterly Invoice" or some such. If that was the metric, I bet IBM would be #1. Huh?

China and Russia join to battle 'illegal internet content,' which means what you fear it does

Dark

Soon, these countries will once again go dark, much as they were dark up until about the late 1980's. Their people will again be locked out of knowing anything about the "West" and to us they will once again be like Mars. This movement MUST be condemned by us and fought against. Sadly, our current leadership (and even some of our citizens) is not only clueless, but beholden to Moscow, and likely would love to implement the same kind of censorship. We're screwed if we don't get rid of these people.

HP to hike upfront price of printer hardware as ink biz growth runs dry

"Nevermore."

Whoever offers a printer that works and allows third-party ink will get my business. Not HP. They've eaten dinner off their distribution, and lock-outs, and clever tricks and retail spiffs and give-backs to procurement people, and not their product, for YEARS. Not any more--at least not for me. Just look at Sam's and Best Buy and all the rest and see the shelf space given to HP by devoted, loving buyers in their home offices. Build a long-lasting printer with quality ink at a REASONABLE price. The clever tricks they have used to disable third-party ink--with NO value-add for the customer--stink, and I will scour the earth to find vendors who use a decent business model.

Everyone remembers their first time: ESA satellite dodges 'mega constellation'

Telecom Companies Rule

All the telecom companies on Earth are stutteringly terrified by Starlink and others of it's ilk. Direct-to-home high-speed internet service threatens their fat cushy gravy train. Government regulated high-speed internet service is unbelievably profitable. So who do you guess is behind the promotion of this non-story? You guessed it. The fact is that the ESA had to modify the orbits of it various satellites TWENTY EIGHT times last year. This is not news. It is also not news because the orbits of the Starlink constellation are much lower than the vast majority of scientific and observation satellites to reduce ping times and for this very reason to avoid such conflicts. Look elsewhere for a good Danger! story. This isn't one.

Amazon: Carbon emissions from our Australian bit barns aren't for public viewing

Relatively Speaking...

It has only been recently that the DC industry worldwide has exceeded the energy footprint of the entire airline industry same/same. Combined, they're something like 3% or 4%. IMHO, we're chasing waterfalls here. Let's really focus on the rivers and lakes where the REAL opportunities lay. Also, why should -any- usage be public information? Reveal it only in the case of law-breaking. Just my $0.02 worth.

That this AI can simulate universes in 30ms is not the scary part. It's that its creators don't know why it works so well

Nobody Knows...

Nobody knows how it reached over and grabbed my sandwich either. Plus, it made a phone call over to Skynet for some reason.

Cram this in your Pai hole! New York, Cali, eight other US states sue to stop T-Mobile-Sprint merger

America, Inc.

The people of the United States have lost their government over the last 2 or 3 decades to corporations. By bribing elected officials with unimaginable campaign money, and bribing appointed officials with promises of fat cushy jobs, corporations in America now rule America. Tax policy, trade policy, health-care policy and more are all being made by corporations. Laws being written by corporations. Regulation being done by corporations. Former corporate lobbyists running Federal agencies. Simply a glance at the Behemoth AT&T is absolute proof of this: AT&T now owns HBO. TBS. CNN. DC Entertainment. Warner Bros Pictures. New Line Cinema. DirecTV. DirecTV Now. Plus, the rest of AT&T. What possible public interest has been served by this obvious "Combination in Restraint of Trade?" I can remember jokes being made years ago about a merger of Exxon, Chipotle, and Verizon becoming now "One of America's 8 Great Companies." If Sprint (or T-Mobil for that matter) needs to go down in flames, so be it. But allowing them to set the rest of us on fire is completely out of the question. The purpose of the American government should not be to allow corporations to avoid failure by merging to avoid competition or to create monopoly or industry control. It needs to stop. And much of it needs to be reversed.

What's big, blue, and hands out pink slips? IBM on Thursday: Word spreads of job cuts

340,000 vs. 2,000

This is .005 of IBM's workforce. This is like a small business with 200 employees laying off one person. That doesn't make headlines, and certainly doesn't say -anything- about that small business. And some goofy commenter above made a crack about IBM's cloud. If I wanted to store my photos or back up my hard drive, or calculate when a baseball team should steal a base or how long a home run was, I'd use Amazon's or Microsoft's cloud. If I wanted to do complex and business critical data analytics in a secure and bulletproof environment, well, I wouldn't use those guys. Also, go to weather.com RIGHT NOW and see how long it takes to load. Hint: 'Bout as long as amazon.com. Bashing IBM seems to be fun for stupid people.

LTO-8 tape media patent lawsuit cripples supply as Sony and Fujifilm face off in court

Every Two Years...

The IT industry has been predicting the death of tape every two years for the last 50 years. But because tape offers characteristics that are not duplicated by any other storage media, it has survived. Some of these characteristics are: 1) Continues to be relatively cheap, 2) Movable from one (broken) machine to another (working) machine, 3) Easily movable offsite, 4) No RAID rebuild delay, which can be MUCH longer than recovery from tape, 5) Can easily and provably be made non re-writable, 6) Can be made archivally (30+ years) permanent . I like tape.

DXC: We axed 10k staff, shut nine data centres, closed 4.6m sq ft of office space... and sales tumbled, funnily enough

It Might Be Ending...

IMHO, the whole structure of capital formation in the West (Wall Street, investment banks, the bond market) is broken. It is causing self-immolation across the entire private sector. Capitalism is not dead, but it is killing itself.

Hours before Congress backs robocall blocking law, guess what the FCC boss suddenly decides?

The People of the United States Have Lost Their Government

The government of the United States is now owned by corporations, industry groups, lobbying groups, and by extension, the far right wing of the Republican Party. The Supreme Court, and much of the Federal Court system, does not reflect the rule of law, or the will of the people. Partisan and corporate-favoring decisions are being handed down in both civil and criminal actions. Our people have lost our government. We are no longer a majority-rule country. We now have a corrupt government at nearly all levels from the top to the states, counties and cities.

The Executive Branch and it's cabal of moron advisors is aiding Russia against it's adversary China by engaging in a no-win economic war that will leave both the US and China weakened. It is not only the moron-in-chief Trump. He is a dolt who doesn't know or understand what he is doing. He's a psychopath. From Bolton to Pai to Kavanaugh to Miller--the whole lot of them--are sending the US straight to Hell. The US has lost it's government. It is now owned by ideological and partisan and corrupt and greedy morons. We are headed to economic war with China, and military war with Iran and Venezuela and maybe more.

'Software delivered to Boeing' now blamed for 737 Max warning fiasco

Re: 'Software delivered to Boeing'

Private companies are not required to put anything "out to bid." And if they do, they aren't required to take the lowest bid. Further, highly complicated and highly engineered systems (either HW or SW) are extremely difficult to "spec" in a bid.

It is very easy to spec a window air conditioner or a fork lift in a request for proposal, and easy to accept the lowest bid. Public sector agencies spend enormous energy fulfilling their mandates in this regard and the more complicated the product and/or service is, the more likely that they will get a camel when they open the bids. They very often fail to achieve the desired results.

There are multiple companies on earth that supply aircraft automation systems, flight management systems, auto pilots etc., and Boeing isn't one of them. So Boeing works very, very closely with their suppliers, contractors and partners. I believe it is absolutely true that one or more lower level Boeing engineers or teams should be shot for this failure, but Boeing senior management needs new processes to assure it never happens again.

Boeing needs a MUCH better communications team that better projects their recognition of these facts, and exactly what they are doing every day to solve the problem. They are not doing this now. However, neither Boeing, nor the MAX product deserves to die because of this failure, as tragic as it is.

Windows 10 May 2019 Update thwarted by obscure tech known as 'external storage'

Clever Mr. Bond, Very Clever. I expect you to DIE...

IMHO, MS wants you to ditch ALL external storage: USB drives, thumb drives, CD/DVD storage--ALL OF IT. They want you to use (and pay mucho dinero for) THEIR CLOUD. What better way to get you motivated than to issue an "update" that borks your system unless you detach all that good, inexpensive stuff, and then 'retach' it as a penance for attempting to be self-sufficient. Finally, when you are sick and tired of this time-consuming, attention-consuming routine, you just give up, and pay them. This latest debacle isn't embarrassing, it's their STRATEGY. Huh?

"Windows as a Service." Servicing the MS wallet since July, 2015.

So you've 'seen' the black hole. Now for the interesting bit – how all that raw data was stored

More?

I may sound like an old coot here, but please tell me that there is more benefit to this huge effort than just a fuzzy picture of a bagel that appears to be getting too toasted on one side. I'm not a physicist or a mathematician or even a photographer, but I'd like to see bullet points as to what is being learned from whatever else this Mount Everest of data shows. Like, why do they keep referring to it as a "shadow" and not an actual view into the gaping maw of eternity itself. What's going on here?

Amazon consumer biz celebrates ridding itself of last Oracle database with tame staff party... and a Big Red piñata

Sale of the Century

Isn't it true that Amazon is "simply" removing Oracle products from it's own business? AWS customers will continue to use, and pay hundreds of millions for, Oracle instances in the Amazon cloud, yes?

Don't be too shocked, but it looks as though these politicians have actually got their act together on IoT security

Huh? Are you Kidding ?

Politicians don't know shit about IoT or even what it stands for, or much of anything else, IMO. It is the staffs or lobbyists that pump all this stuff into their voting habits. If there is MONEY in getting something fixed, partisan bickering goes out the window. Sure, they'll come together and do something because the 'industry' is funneling money into their greedy little campaign chests, of both parties. And maybe into other places as well. The politicians themselves probably don't even know about it. Just my $0.02 worth. Huh?

Thought you were done patching this week? Not if you're using an Intel-powered PC or server

Focus

Is all these guys ever do now is fix security "bugs?" Does anybody ever focus on software performance or broken stuff in new versions? I'm still trying to get Windows to fix Network Discovery in 10. Windows 10 1807 or 1809 or "Anniversary Edition" or some damn thing (I just now "upgraded" from 7) broke Network Discovery and I can't see the other 7 PC's in my home network. This is a real pain and MS has (so far as I can tell) done NOTHING to fix it. I have done ENDLESS googling and read ENDLESS dead ends. My home network is essentially useless if I can't easily share files with the other PC's in my network.

I wonder if there's something else going on here (with all this focus on "security...) Huh? Thoughts?

IBM hunkers down for no-deal Brexit, warns of disruption to supply chain, data transfers

Huh?

Isn't it fair to say that those who were "knowledgeably" in favor of leaving in the original referendum, and those who -still- support Brexit after so much more truth has come to light, are essentially evil, hateful, destructive morons?

Windows 10 1809 looks unlikely to overtake prior build before 19H1 lands

My Own Voyage of the Damned

I have 9 laptops and desktops in a little home network. Hobby stuff. Movie servers, backup servers, email, etc.--sandboxes. They are all Windows 7 and all humming along. Due to the impending 2020 abandonment/betrayal/departure of Win 7, I decided to bite the bullet and do an in-place upgrade to two machines. The two least valuable--from a content standpoint. It was not pretty. Lots of stuff didn't work. (I use VNC to pop around to all the machines from one place. Worked like a charm on Win 7 but with WIn 10, I got blank screens, freezes, and more. Days of research to fix that.) One of the machines repeatedly froze very early in the boot and only multiple power button restarts would bring it back. Looked at the critical errors in the logs and fixed something that didn't fixed anything. More research, and I'm still not sure if it's fixed and what fixed it. I use a screen recorder to record live stream sessions and it doesn't work with the laptop cover closed. (I know the settings are all correct...) More days of research and I finally bought VGA emulator dongles to fool the machines into thinking there was a 2nd display attached. The USB wireless dongle needed to be uninstalled and SW and drivers reinstalled to stop it from messing up. There's more. The point is, I now feel I could have done a clean install of almost ANY Linux distro, learned Linux, and solved all the problems in about the same time. I swear to god I don't know what a "civilian" does when they want to do this. Oh wait, yes, they just buy a new PC. I feel that Microsoft really really sucks. Oh and BTW, IMHO, there is NOTHING better about Windows 10. Nothing better. Some things were needlessly changed, and some things are absolutely worse.

Disk drives suck less than they did a couple of years ago. Which is nice

My Feeling:

I thought I wouldn't comment on this post, as the topic is really enterprise oriented and I'm just a home user with variously 12 or 15 drives installed in or connected to variously 6 or 7 PC's and notebooks in a home network. But I see other small-time users commenting below, so I felt I had to jump in.

Everything I have is always running 24/7.

Everything I have that came with a hard drive, I immediately replaced the drive with a higher capacity Seagate drive. Always. 1 or 2 TB 2 1/2 inchers in the notebooks, and 2 or 4 TB 3 1/2 inchers in the desktops. I guess I standardized on Seagate years ago because of the free DiskWizard cloning thing they provide. DiskWizard has been totally bulletproof for me for cloning. Never a hiccup.

I have never had an ounce or a blip or a jot or tittle of trouble with a Seagate drive--ever. My AFR has been zero. Even if I had one go tits-up and screech itself to death tomorrow, I would still be high on Seagate. (Maybe the next one, not so much...) It does, in fact, surprise me that these unbelievably complicated $100 products work so well.

The reason I felt compelled to make this hearty endorsement here (I don't work for Seagate, etc. etc.) is that it seems to me that bellyachers and bad-mouthers are often the main people that ever post anything. Some people love to boast that, in their huge profound experience, a wide-spread, huge volume, successful product like a Seagate drive is crap. An AFR in the 1% range, to me, for something like an HDD, either absolutely or relative to competitors, is totally fine with me. If the price is right, I'll keep buying, even as an enterprise user. IT'S THE ENTIRE REASON FOR A SOLID BACKUP REGIME. To call Seagate drives "crap" or "shit" (same thing) is fairly unintelligent. Huh ?

We did Nazi see this coming... Internet will welcome Earth's newest nation with, sigh, a brand new .SS TLD

NAZI is already Not See

Headline is wrong: It should read, "We did NAZI this coming."

Epyc move: Supermicro plunges into Cascade Lake’s Optanical waters

Revolution/Evolution

1) When it happens, and is fully supported, Storage Class Memory will be a Big Deal. (Relatively huge, nonvolatile, fast memory with a direct, fast pipe to the CPU--no SATA interrupt bottleneck bus.) 2) Pricing, as well as performance, will have to be somewhere between Main Memory DIMM and SSD/Flash Memory. 3) "Full Support" means both the Processor and the OS need to be aware, and to be fully realized, the application stack needs to exploit. This will not happen in the next two years, but over time, it will offer 10x to 100x or even more, performance boost. To me, Storage Class Memory architecture (HW, OS, and Application) is the next revolution in computing. So far, IMHO, Optane is an evolution, and nothing more than a nonvolatile DIMM. Huh?

While Windows 7 wobbled, AI continued its relentless march at Microsoft

AI ?

"Microsoft has spent the last few years slapping the AI moniker on pretty much anything it could." What MS is doing is AI in the same sense that what my toaster does is AI.

xHamster reports spike in UK users getting their five-knuckle shuffle on before pr0n age checks

Reason?

I'd like to get a good, comprehensive reason for doing this. Other than religious or moral outrage from people not gettin' any. That -cannot- be enough numbers to get attention from "the authorities." I mean really, where are the damage estimates? Who is really getting hurt? Isn't this just politicians caving (or campaigning) for a (maybe small) minority of voters who actually believe that smut hurts us more than, say, guns or drugs or banks? Aren't the real damaged parties strip clubs, prostitutes, and pimps? There are hundreds of thousands of cam-girls (and -boys) around the world who actually make a living dancing and playing around on cam sites. The only difference between puberty and 18 is 4 or 5 or 6 years. Any real children aren't that interested anyway. I'm guessing smut-on-the-web deters unwanted pregnancies, rapes, and psychological distress more than injury to minors. IMHO, this whole effort is stupid. Could the real parties behind this be ISPs and backbones who feel their pipes are being dragged down by these sites and don't feel they are being justly compensated?

The solid state of storage in 2018: Latencies, they are dwindling. On-premises, the kit is glistening...

Revolution/Evolution

1) When it happens, and is fully supported, Storage Class Memory will be a Big Deal. (Relatively huge, nonvolatile, fast memory with a direct, fast pipe to the CPU--no SATA interrupt bottleneck bus.) 2) Pricing, as well as performance, will have to be somewhere between Main Memory DIMM and SSD/Flash Memory. 3) "Full Support" means both the Processor and the OS need to be aware, and to be fully realized, the application stack needs to exploit. This will not happen in the next two years, but over time, it will offer 10x to 100x or even more, performance boost. To me, Storage Class Memory architecture (HW, OS, and Application) is the next revolution in computing. So far, IMHO, Optane is an evolution, and nothing more than a nonvolatile DIMM. Huh?

Intel hands first Optane DIMM to Google, where it'll collect dust until a supporting CPU arrives

1) When it happens, and is fully supported, Storage Class Memory will be a Big Deal. (Relatively huge, nonvolatile, fast memory with a direct, fast pipe to the CPU--no SATA interrupt bottleneck bus.) 2) Pricing, as well as performance, will have to be somewhere between Main Memory DIMM and SSD/Flash Memory. 3) "Full Support" means both the Processor and the OS need to be aware, and to be fully realized, the application stack needs to exploit. This will not happen in the next two years, but over time, it will offer 10x to 100x or even more, performance boost. To me, Storage Class Memory architecture (HW, OS, and Application) is the next revolution in computing. So far, IMHO, Optane is an evolution, and nothing more than a nonvolatile DIMM. Huh?

HCL picks up Notes, spanks total of $1.8bn at Honest John's IBM software sale

Do the people at El Reg...

Do the people at El Reg actually not know that IBM has been paid back -many- times it's original investment in Notes? Whether you like the product or don't like it, it has generated huge revenue and profit for IBM. The headline that, "IBM received $1.X Billion but paid $3.X Billion is just silly--and irrelevant.

DXC: Everything is going to plan, too well in fact... we've chopped so many staff, our IT projects are now behind

What If ?

Suppose for a second that the "New Normal" in US Presidential behavior (bald-faced, pathological lying, exaggeration, con-artist-style hyping, bragging) that has clearly been accepted and applauded by his core followers, becomes a commonplace occurrence from corporate leaders. Wouldn't that be something? Have you seen it already?

Icahn't let you do this: Stock botherer fires off sueball to scupper Dell's 'coercive' deal

Please

Please someone give me one example of anything that Carl Icahn has ever been a value-add to anybody, anywhere ever. He has been nothing but a gadfly and loudmouth and ignoramus, and a destroyer of companies for decades. It is trite to say it, but he is the inspiration (I guess) for Gordon Gecko. He has made loads of money for himself and his inner worshipers, but has lost far more money for employees, communities and the long-term interests of our country. He pounces on companies in near-term trouble and sells off the pieces and puts them out of business. He is the human analogy to masturbation: Short-term gratification in exchange for eventual dissipation and irrelevance. (Maybe a lousy analogy--doesn't give enough credit to masturbation.) The only good news I will ever hear about Carl Ichan is that he has been deemed mentally incompetent, or that he is gone from among us.

30 spies dead after Iran cracked CIA comms network with, er, Google search – new claim

Of Course...

"Because for the CIA the Cold War never ended..." The Cold War didn't end and will never end because there is no international law. The United Nations is impotent and almost irrelevant. It only exists because there is a non-zero chance--just barely--that when people talk, there is less chance of war. And miscalculation is just a tiny bit lessened. That's it. There has always been and will always be a Cold War between and among all nations--not just the "west" and the Ruskies. Countries will always act in their own interests, even to the extent that they cooperate. And always act to protect their god-almighty "sovereignty." So don't blame or insult the CIA because it spies on everybody--even our friends. Reprehensible, unjust, and immoral things are done by all nations against all other nations, because, well, they can. But you -can- blame and insult the CIA for being inept, lazy and overfed. And -very- self-protective. Even at the expense of our own interests. IMHO, we are definitely not getting our money's worth out of them. Nations are not accountable to each other, and the CIA is not accountable to anyone. Congress?? Hahahahaha. ROTFL.

Talk about Micron-aggression: US charges Chinese biz, staff over DRAM chip secrets theft

Culture

Feel free to flame me at will, but I have been to China on business multiple times and I can tell you that my experience is that Chinese culture simply does not recognize an outsider's intellectual property, as, well, property. Chinese culture looks upon anyone outside their culture as, well, not real people. It is not wrong to take whatever you can get your hands on from any outsider. They do this freely and openly (music, movies, books, designer labels, designs and processes, and more) and think nothing of it, in the streets and in offices and factories all over the country. It is not stealing when you are stealing from foreigners. Even among each other, there are concentric circles of honor and the farther one is (Chinese or otherwise) from their own center circle, the less honor there is between them.

A few years ago someone (who apparently didn't have any babies in his own circle) actually made baby formula with no protein but was filled with some (cheaper) substance that -tested- as protein to the food safety people. Hundreds or thousands of babies died from malnutrition.

The Chinese are not going to change thousands of years of cultural inheritance in only a few decades. The only way to get them to stop screwing us is to slap them as hard economically as we possibly can. Even if it means we suffer a bit too.

The farther you are from the Chinese border, the less your property means to them. We are the 'tribe over the hill' and we have no intellectual property or rights. None. That's my $0.02 worth.

McAfee says cloud security not as bad as we feared… it's much worse

Jumble

Either this article in general is full of confusing "averages" or the McAfee report was a totally fishy and confusing jumble of self-serving scare mongering not worth covering in El Reg. Which ?

Official: IBM to gobble Red Hat for $34bn – yes, the enterprise Linux biz

"can leverage red hat tech for free..."

Nothing is free. Not now, not ever. If IBM is true to form, transfer prices for support, services, subscription fees and all the rest between Red Hat and IBM will be at the same prices they were before this outrage. IBM doesn't fuck anybody more than it does internally. Between departments, divisions--with a healthy uplift going to the "procurement" department for it's "services."

The way IBM does "costing" and "pricing" is totally fucking outrageous. One internal uplift after another, plus an adder in case our forecast is wrong, and nothing ever succeeds. Once these internal processes infect the Red Hat operation (not to mention travel rules, no raises for years, no project money, no budgets for any departmental purposes, and consolidation of all advertising and promotion to Armonk, and Red Hat will be road kill--a stain on the highway.