Posts by DougMac

Google's ChromeOS Flex turned my old MacBook into new frustrations

Not sure what was expected..

To me, ChromeBooks already seem like fisher-price systems to give to the kids to write their school report in Google Docs on and nothing else.

Not sure why anybody would expect more out of it than that.

Fights, floods, and fortunes when cloud giants roll into town

Jobs jobs jobs

I love the "it'll bring so many jobs" for datacenter work.

You bring in a ton of construction from out of town, they work for the year it takes, and then gone.

A datacenter employees typically about 100 employees on an ongoing basis.

I know of grocery stores that employee more people, let alone a target or walmart of that ilk.

Ex-Coinbase manager charged in first-ever crypto insider trading case

>> first-ever cryptocurrency insider trading scheme in the US.

You surely mean the first one caught and scheduled to be tried.

Cryptocurrency is one big huge insder trading scheme to begin with.

Getting that syncing feeling after an Exchange restore

Re: Exchange

And anything before that was guaranteed downtime rebuilding all the time.

My favorite was the _bug_ that made a reboot a 5 hour affair on an exchange server.

That didn't get fixed for half a decade.

In that time frame, there were *lots* of calendaring options.

It just that all of them sucked so bad nobody wanted to use them. The users all demanded the wonky-ass Outlook calendaring as the only option they'd ever consider, hell to all the others.

I never found the facination with Outlook. Still don't. Its like here, have a program that you'll beat yourself over the head with a brick with, and you'll *insist* its the only one you'll use.

Ditching VMware over the Broadcom buy? Here are some of your options

Seems like lots of choices missing.

The two biggest ones I think are Azure Stack and AWS Outposts.

I don't think even Microsoft itself believes in Hyper-V on its own, or with VMM as a viable solution.

Cloudflare's outage was human error. There's a way to make tech divinely forgive

Rollback...

Apparently the author didn't read the indepth Cloudflare analysis.

But, they already _had_ a known good config fallback.

The biggest problem came about when different engineers kept falling back to different known good config states.

More than $100m in cryptocurrency stolen from blockchain biz

Re: Slush fund for hostile nations Vs ...

Is that about cryptobros or GOP bros?

Mars Express orbiter to get code update after 19 years

Re: It never ceases to amaze me ...

In the 70's, you'd be extremely lucky if your car lasted until 100,000 miles. Either the engine blown or being shaken apart/rusted through. Most people replaced cars well under that limit. I remember my dad welding sheet metal on the floor pan of his truck so his foot stopped going through the floor.

Now-a-days, it is routine to drive cars well past 100,000 miles.

512 disk drives later, Floppotron computer hardware orchestra hits v3.0

Re: tonal range

Not sure he (or anybody) would be willing to pay $200 and up for working 5 1/4" and 8" floppy drives.

Anything less than usually is "untested parts only".

How one techie ended up paying the tab on an Apple Macintosh Plus

And O and 0 interchanged quite often.

The early days of the world wide web you mean..

And it didn't take FrontPage to produce all the hideous homepages. Most people did it by hand.

Although one could tell instantly if it was a frontpage site just to the hideous layout methods used.

Tweaks to IPv4 could free up 'hundreds of millions of addresses'

Re: Party Line

Oh, you mean CGNAT.

Already done. Already causing issues for gamers and the like.

There are setups already using the rest of 127/8 for internal IP addressing.

Granted, they can all change over time.

But since the realistic time-frame of changing everything over is decades long, they'll have time.

VMware customers have watched Broadcom's acquisitions and don't like what they see

"offshore support"??

"offshore support??"

I regularly talk to VMware techs that are located somewhere in South America, Ireland, Australia, India, the US, somewhere in Eastern Europe. Etc. etc.

How much more offshore support can they get?

Global companies tend to use resources around the globe..

I'm mixed on the deal. I thought EMC was a weird way for VMware to go before, and it definately changed things around. I expect Broadcom will as well.

But, the compition all has major issues too.

Broadcom's stated strategy ignores most VMware customers

Re: Hyper-V isn't a replacement for VMware.

I have yet to see a "real" hyper-V solution (well, besides Azure I guess) in the real world, setup, working well, and able to have all the features of vSphere.

Hyper-V is regulated to doing a few VMs ontop of your existing server so you can get a little more bang for the bucks out of it.

VMM is a steaming pile. There's so much "if I wanted to, I _could_ use VMM, but I just don't need it". out there. I have yet to see anybody actualy using it, and running away in horror from it.

Without VMware, all I could see is more pushing up into the public cloud, or push into other technologies, the ways VMware is put to use would shrink to almost nothing.

Broadcom to 'focus on rapid transition to subscriptions' for VMware

Re: Hock Tan doesn’t really know anything about software

Sounds exactly like Oracle.

Financial vampire, cater to only a handful of the largest whales.

Not exactly a great business environment around Oracle.

Foxconn factory fiasco could leave Wisconsinites on the hook for $300m

What's worse, is that the town used the threat of emmenient domain to kick off all the land owners for this super factory that was total grift from the start. They bought out many families for much less than their houses and farms were worth.

Look, your brand new house is "blighted" so we need to tear it down, you got pennies on the dollar, and look at this awesome empty dirt field that we have to show for it!

The politician scum waived all environmental rules including virtually unlimited water usage rights (in a state that is largely tourism and forest), the TIF figures were given in the article, but with the spare population, it could have been up to the equivilent of the state paying up to $346k per job obtained.

All of that down the drain. So the town/Wisconson is out real money, not just the pie in the sky money that they were supposed to be rolling in it. And they now own a pile of dirt and a small building they supposedly build Google servers in.

I'm sure Walker and his cronies are rolling in it, but certainly nobody else is.

Beware the fury of a database developer torn from tables and SQL

Re: Just a quick question.

Google translate of english -> mandarin is horrible.

Chinese teachers cringe when seeing it, and tell classes to avoid it at all costs.

FreeBSD 13.1 is out for everything from PowerPC to x86-64

"standard pc?"

So, I've only used PCs since the 286 days, I ignored the original PC.

But what does ctrl-left arrow and ctrl-right arrow do?

Can't be that standard, if I've never used them?

Seems there's some bias about, FreeBSD is weird because it doesn't do things this one way the author is used to.

I've had too much horror with multi-boot OS that I would never attempt it, windows, linux, BeOS, whatever strange thing you wanted to do.

I'd always would devote a hard drive to a different OS no-matter-what. Its not a big deal that FreeBSD partitioning wants to take over the disk instead of try to cooperate with windows, which is just going to blast it away at Microsoft's next whim next upgrade.

Patch your VMware gear now – or yank it out, Uncle Sam tells federal agencies

Being in the company of many public clouds offering VMware products, I don't know of any of them that use vCF.

Yes, VMware keeps pushing it on us, but there's nothing in there that we wouldn't want to take control of oursevles anyway.

China again signals desire to shape IPv6 standards

Re: Sounds like a fantastic idea

My IPv6 networks all live behind firewalls, why would China be any different?

Supercomputer lab swaps lead-acid UPS batteries for alkaline gear

Re: What?

It sounds like the municipality limited their use of generators, and when you are talking lead-acid cells in a datacenter, building structure becomes a real issue for the shear weight you are going to have to support (I've seen buildings that have brought in many tons of steal beams that had to be bolted directly to building structure in order to support the battery bank, so major re-construction of the building).

So they may not have had much choice in expansion of traditional lead-acid cells, or generators.

If you had to choose, its best to triage your load, vs. than just throwing too little to support it all...

But I'd agree with other comments, there seems to be more behind the story that could be reported.

Immersion-cooled colo is coming to Ohio... via a crypto-mining datacenter

How legacy IPv6 addresses can spoil your network privacy

Re: Underwhelming

Since browser fingerprinting can pretty much zero in on anybody (ie. see https://www.amiunique.org/fp ), how is this study any different?

Just one more factor in the many dozens that can already uniquely identify you.

Client demo in 30 minutes. Just what could go wrong?

Re: It was BT for me

No fault found, but magicly working after the ticket is opened is world-wide telco problem.

Amazing how all those times it must be my fault just clears itself once they might look at their own setup.

Canonical puts out last update to Ubuntu 20.04 before 22.04

The last point release.

Not the last update.

WeChat, AliExpress added to US Notorious Markets list

Re: Top 3 are ....

Yep, I've received counterfeit goods from all of them, and then include NewEgg, and other computer resellers that are no longer around.

I'd say # one was Amazon for selling counterfeit goods though. eBay is more tame, only the deals that are too-good-to-be-true are bad. On Amazon, you could pay the normal price and still get shafted.

Beware the big bang in the network room

Plus proper cable management.

Always plan out your racks with enough.

I can't imagine having to work through a waterfall of cables.

Raspberry Pis gain power to flash their own OSes with new network install function

Re: Only useful

Pishop has Ra4 kits in stock right now.

I just got one last week, and their website says instock for more.

No bare boards, but kits are.

Such is the nature of things.

Jeff Bezos adds some more overheads to his $485m yacht by taking down historic bridge

Re: Meh

The problem with Taxing them, is all taxes are based on income or gains at time of sale.

Rich people don't make most of their money via income. Its all investments, and other financial papershifting.

So, they could be worth a bazillion billion $$, but most of that is paper until it is excised out somehow at just the right time and rate to minimize their capital gains obligation.

Hardware boffin starts work on simulation of an entire IBM S/360 Model 50 mainframe

Re: Front panel as home decoration/art

I really liked Ben Eater's explanation of the 555 as well

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kRlSFm519Bo

Pop quiz: The network team didn't make your change. The server is in a locked room. What do you do?

Re: Locked in at night

Due to fire-code, there should always be a way to get out of a stairwell. Probably at the bottom on the ground floor, well away from any secure areas.

Re: Under the floor

Just watch Deviant's physical security videos on Youtube.

Plenty of ways around most locks.

Why should I pay for that security option? Hijacking only happens to planes

Re: On the topic of domain names expiring

OOTH, as a service-provider, I like the yearly renewal pace, because once a subscriber does 3 years or more, all knowledge of paying for it, or what it does is gone out of mind of anybody at the company. Be-it brain fade, or the people that handle it are long gone.

At least yearly will have somebody remember, oh yeah, we do need that.

A kitchen splashbork on sale at the Cardiff IKEA

Re: Biggest problem with PIs

It is hard to find a Pi SD card that will go the distance.

You certainly can't depend on a Pi Vendor for selling you a decent one, you have to do your home work yourself and source things on your own.

I think the answer really is for these embedded applications to really go with the CM4 with eMMC boot.

AWS power failure in US-EAST-1 region killed some hardware and instances

Re: Elastic

It is elastic, if you spend all the more money and engineering time to make it redundant yourself, buying additional and redundant services to make it so.

They assume everyone is a dev, and can rewrite all their apps to fit within their model. Ie. if you don't have multiple AZs, load balancing, EBS, backup EBS, etc. etc. etc. you are doing AWS wrong.

Whereas the rest of the real world expects to treat the AWS objects as a server in the cloud that runs as well as other setups.

There is a giant disconnect between doing AWS right, and what the rest of the world expects.

All these consultants coming into businesses and selling the cloud have no clue either.

Computers cost money. We only make them more expensive by trying to manage them ourselves

Re: Or getting an efficient dog.

It allows them a _one_ time shift of the column from capex to opex and make them look spectacular.

10 years down the road, they no longer have that one-trick pony in their stable.

Cisco thinks you're happy to wait ages for new kit, then pay premium prices

Re: cancellations are down

I know plenty of Cisco and Juniper shops still.

A little puzzled about Cisco not playing in optical or ethernet.

I see carriers still installing Cisco gear in the carrier hotels. I see Cisco GPON gear out there.

One thing different now vs. in the past, is there is a *lot* of commodity ethernet gear out there now, since the industry switched over to mostly commodity Broadcom chips than roll their own. So 2nd and 3rd string gear gets used a lot more.

But its not like Cisco's slice of the pie is greately diminished, just the pie got so much larger, letting others into the table too.

SOHO/SMB barely bought into Cisco in the past, and rarely do now. But telco, enterprise and alot of mid-range still buy a lot of Cisco.

Do not try this at home: Man spends $5,000 on a 48TB Raspberry Pi storage server

Re: "overall, the device's performance was ... mostly disappointing"

Plus, add on NIC port that can barely do 200Mbps.

The bang for the buck for the Pi is pretty amazing, and it gets by with so little because so many applications need so little.

But storage isn't one of those things.

Reg reader returns Samsung TV after finding giant ads splattered everywhere

Re: "you're also paying to be part of Samsung's global TV advertising network"

Why do you think TV makers would actually give you a discount because they get money from a different revenue stream. Why wouldn't they just have it both ways?

Cisco to face trial over trade secrets theft, NDA breach claims after losing attempt to swat Leadfactors lawsuit

Sounds like they took a look at it, said "wow, this is a piece of crap, we can do better".

And then they did.

We have some sad news about Facebook. It has returned to the internet after six-hour mega outage

Re: it saved a single network administrator over eight hours of work each week

If you don't pay for the product, you _are_ the product.

VMware to kill SD cards and USB drives as vSphere boot options

Re: Nanny

I already saw direct eveidence of this.

I gave up on USB boot/SD-card boot of any server (including many VMware hypervisors) after so many failures over time. I experienced this with all other OSs as well.

Sure, it works at first. And if you only have a few servers, you probably won't notice it that much. But if you have a lot of servers, you will see large #s of failures over time.

Most "appliance" PCs come with Flash DOM modules, which are a bit more robust, but I have still had to replace many a DOM module as well.

Full on SSDs have had a normal small range of failures from a large fleet of servers, well within my expected range. SC-card and USB flash boot failures are well over 50% over enough time in my environment.

Xero, Slack suffer outages just as Let's Encrypt root cert expiry downs other websites, services

Re: Slack slacking off

Yeah, because your ISP didn't flush their DNS cache or install NTAs for slack.com after they borked themselves with bad DNSSec setup.

DNS at the top domain level is cached for a day or two with a TTL of 2d.

Google DNS (and other large providers) probably slapped some NTAs on slack.com to cut down on the complaint levels they were probably getting for slack.com's mismanagement of their DNS.

Its not necessarily that sysadmins didn't fix things.

As I saw in my iOS devices and my 3rd party email clients, the system level software decided to latch onto the old no-longer-in-use cert and associated it with many connections internally. When the old not-in-use intermediary cert expired, my devices decided that they should still use it and complain and refuse to connect.

Even though my Let's Encrypt certs were all good with the new roots for quite some time.

We have had root CA certs expire in the past with some fallout, but without them being as widespread as Let's Encrypt has been, they have not raised that much noise. We will have additional root CAs expire in the future, with the potential for more issues with system code.

Oracle loses appeal against $3bn payment to HPE over withdrawal of Itanium support

Re: I needed some good news this morning...

How could you tell when Oracle is raising your rates due to this? Or when Larry needs a new yacht?

VMware shreds planned support for 'cheese grater' Mac Pro

Re: Workstation Prices

Back when we were buying Apple desktops (didn't have any MacPros since the original intel tanks), it wasn't too difficult to get some decent (for Apple) discounts from the Apple sales dweebs.

And I was a very small fry.

I'd imagine any organization that is the type buying these machines would be also discussing said sales with an Apple sales team, and not depending on web or reseller pricing (which is pretty bad).

They'd probably have an MSP that would take care fo service as well.

Microsoft sinks standalone Hyper-V Server, wants you using Azure Stack HCI for VM-wrangling

Re: Hyper-V role

Not too surprised about pushing Azure Stack HCl.

Hyper-V is one of those things that in the wild as I see it, people run a couple VMs onprem per server and no more.

To get the full virtualzation stack with System Center Virtual Machine Manager takes a sisyphean task of even finding the product, weeding it out from all the other System Center things, licensing, and figuring out how to actually get it running (no small feat).

I've _never_ seen any biz running SC VMM in the wild as a full stack virtualization solution.

I've also never seen anybody that realized there was a free Hyper-V Server product, because anybody that is looking at Hyper-V is looking at doing Windows VMs, and they'd rather pick up the 2 VE license that Windows Standard has.

THX Onyx: A do-it-all DAC for the travelling audiophile

Re: Loudspeakers

I can tell on certain tracks.

(besides the rips that introduce horrible noise into the stream, which does happen 2-3% of the time).

But I've found that the thing that really differentiates it for me aren't necessarily the raw single sound, but things such as the size of stereo separation, real low bass, or if different sounds are coming out L vs. R (such as Sonic Youth's Cotton Crown, there's a VU song that is similar, can't remember the name now).

If its a straight up centered single vocal, yeah, its near impossible to tell. Thats all that website shown is doing. So, even when they put that together, they already introduced some bias towards ones that aren't easily differentiated. Where there are others that are.

Another thing probably could be that many of the CDs mastered in the last 20 years were mastered like crap (turn the knobs _all_ the way up up up), and when they go and remix it down to a new hirez format, they actually put some effort into the mix. So you end up with a better mix overall than what the MP3 was probably mastered from.