* Posts by Riku

57 publicly visible posts • joined 11 Sep 2014

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Spectra Logic: You can't, er, stick to tape forever

Riku

WTF?

Seriously? Quantum has around a THIRD of the global mid-range automation market, (a statistic that has been mentioned in this very rag by a Mr. C. Mellor on occasion). Apparently Enrico Signoretti hasn't heard of Hewlett Packard either (they've only been around, oh seventy-six years now). Not to mention Dell (they've been in the news a bit lately), even Overland and Qualstar manage to flog a library every now and then.

I have persevered as the editorial content of El Reg has declined into basically advertorial padded with tawdry innuendo, but this dreck utterly takes the cake. Sorry chaps but I'm going to follow in Magee's footsteps and take my eyeballs (and your associated ad-revenue, little though it is), off to the Inquirer.

Big Blue’s big storage iron gets bigger: DS8880 array uncloaked

Riku

Industrial design by "Batman" set designer.

These and their new mainframes would not look out of place in the Bale-era Batman movies. Maybe IBM is too classy to go for the blatant product-placement (and cameo) that Oracle paid for in Iron Man. They should though. This is totally the new "Batcomputer".

Let's check out Dell, doom and the competition

Riku

I've said it before and I'll say it again...

NetApp is the next Wang. <Insert wang joke here> (Yes, that's quite meta if you think about it.)

Google and pals launch Accelerated Mobile Pages project

Riku

Everything old is new again...

So basically, WML redux?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wireless_Markup_Language

Quantum sells so much product that its earnings might shrink

Riku

Re: Lots of orders in the last three days of a quarter?

Except in most companies, orders don't count against your quota until they ship/are signed off by the end-user. Hence doing what you suggest would be of exactly zero benefit. It would almost certainly result in dismissal and in certain territories it may also count as fraud.

Diskicide – the death of disk

Riku

It might always have a nice, but...

"But Nimble Storage says its hybrid arrays have replaced an IBM all-flash RamSan – because they had better sequential data access performance." - this is an important point I think. While a large part of the enterprise storage busioness is focussed on IOPs, there is a segment of storage folks (myself among them) for whom IOps matter not much but for whom massive sequential performance is what is required). Now while I appreciate all the DB, VM, et al folks out there who love their IOPs and represent the bulk of the cash to splash, it would be nice to see The Register (or any major publication) take a long, hard serious look at sequential storage workloads. For sequential workloads, disk still has its place, for now, certainly in terms of bang for buck.

As for "...flash could kick spinning rust out of the data center and disk become the new tape..." surely that begs they question, "Why does that make any sense?" Tape is already good at that role. Is that just disk fanboiism? If I'm buying bulk, a tape cart that is essentially, plastic tape, a plastic box, a spring and a plastic cog, is *always* going to have a lower cost per unit than a far more complicated to manufacture disk drive. Even factoring in the costy of the tape drives the overall solution cost shoul still be lower. Then there's the opex, which for archive will always be lower. Oh sure there's the whole MAID thing in archive, but Copan never went anywhere whith that and nobody I've yet encountered trusts disks to reliably spin up and down like that.

It will certainly be interesting to watch though.

BlackBerry emits Android mobe as biz goes down the Priv

Riku

Because letting go control of the platform worked so well for Nokia

Given how nobody, not even the giant Crapsung, is making money from Android except Google (for they sell the ad's, clip the ticket on the content and now the payments), I cannot see how this will help, if anything it'll accelerate things for the worse.

Nokia lost complete control of it's platform to the vagaries of Microsoft's development plans (or lack thereof), late shipping, pissing off 7 customers who wouldn't get 8 and so on.

Currently Chen's big plan to make them into a mobile security command and control powerhose looks OK, but that totally depeds on owning the platform end-to end and right through the vertical stack. Their entire security management stack is completely fungible and Google could easily take it away by chucking about a week's worth of their income and has manuy dev's as they like at it. Just like they're doing to streaming music apps, Twitch TV and so on. This is not new, it's similar to how MS took the market from companies like WordPerfect, Lotus and so on - sooner or later the platform owners will come for the companies that helped make their platform great, to feed the beast of "growth".

Bonkers. Just bonkers.

Brown kid with Arab name arrested for bringing home-made clock to school

Riku

Re: Hysteria

I do take your point and many of the larger "flag carriers" do have reasonable reserves, but not as much as you might think (or hope).

In general ticketing T's&C's, things like volcanic eruptions (acts of the great fairy-tale in the sky), mean they basically don't have to give you the money back. Most of the flights cancelled, being trans-Atlantic, would have been paid up well in advance. This is different to you not spending the money in the first place after giving up on flying. If people, en masse, decide to stop flying in general, then bankruptcy shall almost certainly ensue.

However, for several airlines, Eyjafjallajökull represented a close call:

http://globalinsolvency.com/headlines/airlines-warn-bankruptcy-and-call-end-restrictions

There is an excellent article on this at the FT, unfortunately it's locked behind their paywall.

Riku

Re: Hysteria

It (bombing crowds at airports) already has, in 2011, 37 people were killed and 173 injured in an attack at Moscow's Domodedovo International Airport:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domodedovo_International_Airport_bombing

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-12268662

As a frequent flyer and having formerly worked with a firm in London providing security to high-net-worth individuals, their residences and places of business, I can assure you that airport security exists for three reasons:

1. Security theatre so the general public can "feel" safe and thus continue flying in ever-greater numbers. This ensures most airlines stay in business (as most of them are leveraged to run on the edge of bankruptcy every day).

2. So that politicians can be seen to be "doing something" about it, ("Quick, here come the voters, everyone look busy.")

3. So that aforementioned politicians can transfer further wealth from the consumer/taxpayer (for they are one and the same) to the military-industrial complex who make and supply all manner of "security" equipment. Most of which can be defeated, (even THz body scanners).

Airport security will stop the casual nutter, but no government, no matter how much technology they gain, or how many of your freedoms they take away, will ever stop any individual suitably comitted to their task.

As for airport queues, it also scares the hell out of me when I see large crowds at the doors of the US "Black Friday" sales, those are easy pickings for the lone wolf or the organised group making simultaneous strikes. Depressing Christmas sales by keeping people away from stores and malls would seriously hurt economies where business balance sheets do indeed "go into the black" during the Christmas shopping spree.

LTO issues mighty seventh-generation 15TB tape format

Riku

Re: Ah.. tape..

The problem with storing data in a holographic medium in a space five atoms high, is that is a sparrow sneezes over in the next town and the laser mis-aligns. That's why it was so damn hard to commercialise. It works fine in the lab when sat on a one-tonne, vibration-isolated optical table bolted right into the building foundations, but a little hard to carry around in your pocket.

Data recovery plans? You're talking yesterday's use-case, come on sonny, catch up. Disk is for day-to-day recovery, LTO is for cost-effective archive (and a proper archive is _not_ a collection of old backups) and cold-storage of content, content that may yet be data-mined or re-monetised (how I hate that word). Hell, we're only using disk until solid-state kills it. SSD and Tape, there lays the future.

LTO does make for rather good backup though where off-site is a requirement but where bandwidth is low, at a premium price or non-existant.

Why OH WHY did Blighty privatise EVERYTHING?

Riku

I may have read that wrong, but what does the *age* of a technology have to do with its *utility*? Your knife, spoon and fork are even older, yet they serve a perfectly good utilitarian purpose. Indeed, there is something to be said for technology that has had the kinks worked out, fixed, trashed and proven to a point of great reliability. Rail - like a good many other things - is very reliable *when properly maintained*.

I do sometimes look at pieces written by economists and they often come across as written in total isolation with no consideration of external realities. All cities - without exception - will, once they pass a certain population, combined with local factors like geography *will* require mass transit systems, otherwise the result is gridlock. This is why even the car-fetishising USA is building-out or upgrading transit systems in several cities. Otherwise sooner or later you have to start demolishing city to make way for roads, which kind of obviates the point of the city. On an island in particular, this is also true (to a sparser extent), for the inter-city transportation systems. Otherwise the gridlock has an overall negative knock-on effect to a city and its wider economy. In this way, the public mass-transit system is the markets answer to the issue.

I think this is sometimes lost in the discussion; a lot of economic writing appears to be dead-set against government, yet failign to realise that government itself is a market solution designed by society - and that includes businesses (which of course are made up of people from the society) who rely on things like rule of law and benefit from the infrastructure. In fact I would argue that there is no such thing as business at all, there is simply society and that business is ultimately socialist.

And I must say, (being a fan of Ernest, Lord Rutherford), that only a chemist would have been dull enough to say there is no such thing.

DuckDuckGrow: Privacy search soars 600% after Snowden dumps

Riku

No, but Microsoft probably does.

Riku

Yup, Randall Munroe over at XKCD does.

Wolfram is a computational engine, more than search, it lets you find answers rather than URL's.

Wolfram is very useful for really hard problems like: https://what-if.xkcd.com/62/

Try this one: If you had to ingest 5000 8kB files per second all day and store them for 24 months as well as ingest 10,000 32kB files per second all day and store them for 12 months, then how many IOPs and how much bandwidth do you need, how big will the namespace (number of files) get and how much capacity will you need?

That's the sort of thing Wolfram can help you figure out.

Busy BlackBerry wheels out BB10 and QNX updates

Riku

Re: Brillo?

Indeed, some trademark holders can get quite Brasso'd off.

Large Hadron Collider gives young ALICE a black-hole ray gun

Riku

That's not ALICE

The article's headline image is of the ATLAS experiment's detector. If you do a Google image search for "CERN ALICE", it is generally recognisable as "the big red octagon". (ALICE is a customer of ours, nice folks too).

American Idle: Seacrest keyboard startup Typo goes nowhere after BlackBerry bust-up

Riku

Re: Seriously?

I was bitching (again) about my Androids (a personal HTC and a work Samsung) a few months ago so my wife (a Canuck), purchased a z30 for my birthday (to shut me the hell up).

Quite frankly it's the best damn phone I've ever owned.

I get good reception in places where my HTC got none. I've had no issue finding the apps I use, (except one, but they now have an excellent mobile web app that works just fine, so I don't really care about a native app anymore). The build and call quality is very good. Most tellingly, I haven't had the urge to hurl it at the wall like I do with the Samsung at least once a week.

So now I'm getting my wife to choose one of the new models (z30, Passport or the Classic) in return.

We really need a good alternative to the Silicon valley happsters and the Borg. Long live BlackBerry.

Chlorine gas horror leak at Apple data center puts five in hospital

Riku

Re: I hope

"Worse" is an understatement, flourine is the Devil's own gas. One of the most insanely vicious substances, after astatine that is, vicious *and* radioactive.

Shuttleworth delivers death blow in Umbongoland dispute

Riku

"Debian had best be careful lest they become dependent on UBUNTU and not the other way around."

If the whole "Startup Daemon Who Cannot Be Named" brawl is any indication, almost every distro has become dependent on Red Hat.

Meh.

Storm in a K-Cup: My SHAME over the eco-monster I created, says coffee pod inventor

Riku

Smart kettle and an Aeropress

An Aeropress coupled with a variable-temperature digital (smart) kettle (or an instant-hot-water tap that has multiple temperatures avaialbe), is just awesome - you get a great-tasting cuppa (coffee or tea) and save some cash by not having to boil more water than you use, or even boil it at all when you can get it at just the right temperature. Quite a bit safer too.

The BBC wants to slap a TAX on EVERYONE in BLIGHTY

Riku

Re: So

Arguably an independantly-informed public are essential to a functioning democracy and the BBC's educational output is phenomenally good by international standards.

You argument might work if you've ever watched TV in the USA for five minutes.

Riku

Re: @ Moeluk

Have you watched Fox News lately? Or any TV anywhere else in the world?

We had TV licenses in NZ when I was a kid and groups like TVNZ's natural History Unit were winning Emmy's. Then we got rid of licensing in favour of a "free" market (dominated by North American broadcasting powerhouses that no local company could ever afford to outspend) and we all went "Hooray, no more evil license fee!" Now people pay subscriptions to foreign companies to watch 24-hour garbage. Of course pay-TV was originally pitched as being "ad-free" - that lasted so well didn't it?

Whenever I visit NZ, I can no longer bear to watch TV. Britain, please learn from our mistake and please don't repeat it! Yes the Beeb has some issues, but, like a redneck's rifle - FROM MY COLD, DEAD HANDS!

Oh, and I don't think what was our Natural History unit ever won an Emmy-class award ever again.

Sigh...

Riku

Re: @ Moeluk

The BBC "are the biggest prosecutors"?, the last time I checked (about a minute ago), the vast majority of TV Licensing enforcement (a separate company) is done by Capita.

XenData’s storage Jurassic Park: PC tape backup is BAAAAACK

Riku

Re: I wonder how that works from a technical standpoint

Full-height LTO-6 drives may have up to a 1GB buffer, half-height (5.25" CD-ROM size) can have up to 512MB. LTO-6 can stuff data on to the media at up to 160MB/s so you can have up to 6.4 seconds to get data flowing again.

So long, Lenovo, and no thanks for all the super-creepy Superfish

Riku

Re: McDonalds now serves lava? Probably not in polystyrene cups.

Damn right, those things should be used to ignite fusion reactors.

Now Samsung's spying smart TVs insert ADS in YOUR OWN movies

Riku

Re: This is why we need free software and open bootloaders

Because, China...?

Riku

I get the industrial versions

No tuner, no speakers, no soon-to-be-obsolete-with-next-year's-model proprietary "smart" crapola.

I can plug in whatever video source I want, HTPC, Apple TV, Tivo, Sky, Virgin, Chromecast, whatever and these always stay up to date, never get dumped when a new version of the telly comes out (I'm looking at you Panasonic...)

Then there's the potential for adding to home automation control by a real honest-to-goodness serial port or Ethernet and if I want a specific kind of input module (like DisplayPort), I can buy it as an accessory module and plug it in.

The units designed for video-walls also have wafer-thin bezels and no sodding lit logo (admittedly mosty of these can be switched off today).

They cost a premium over the retail kit, but I prefer the flexibility (and without the added perv-ware built-in to the retail units these days).

Apple CEO: Fandroids are BINNING Android in favour of IPHONES

Riku

Re: 1bn android activations

Is that just phones or does it include all sorts of things like chromecasts and fancy thermostats?

'Boutique' ISPs: Snub the Big 4 AND get great service

Riku

Re: Columbia Internet for Canuks?

When I worked at Earthlight back in NZ, we loved this strip and used to wonder where Illiad had hidden the cameras - many of the conversations and support calls were so close to our daily reality!

HMRC fails to plan for £10.4bn contract exit... because it's 'too risky'

Riku

Re: Fraud Vs Incompetence

The ability to summarily terminate (with no legal repercussions) the self-important head of any one of those internal fiefdoms is a mightily useful technique as well.

Except for that whole public-sector union thing.

Bugger.

Dark Fibre: Reg man plunges into London's sewers to see how pipe is laid

Riku

Re: Security?

Maybe. The smell alone and the possibility of (literally) drowning in shit would be a pretty strong deterrent for all but the most dedicated crims perhaps.

Right, we've bagged IBM’s X86 server biz... now what? – Lenovo

Riku

Oooh!

Someone else who Quantum could be rumoured to be bought by! After HP, NetApp and EMC (but only once the share price falls below a dollar, alledgedly).

Still need a primary storage product though. No sense in buying an HDD array, one of those hybrid/flash array startups...?

Shrinking tape, dedupe dumps... PAH! Just scale up scale-out – Quantum

Riku

Dedupe dumps?

I don't get the "dedupe dumps" part of the headline, if it's up US $1mil? Is that as in "down in the..." or "doldrums" perhaps?

Other than the OEM tape business, what's the branded tape business like, also shrinking, plateaued or growing?

What do UK and Iran have in common? Both want to outlaw encrypted apps

Riku

Debenhams porn

The missus was little amused while shopping for shapewear (Spanx and such, hardly pornographic to either gender) via Debenhams online to find that EE flagged the womens underwear pages as "adult content" and blocked them. Curiously House of Fraser was not blocked. Guess who got the sale?

Aren't ill-thought blunt instruments wonderful?

Toshiba tosses out uber-slim THREE TERABYTE HDD

Riku

Speaking of sexy names

Seagate ought to spit out a new Bigfoot-branded range. Say a 3.5" drive with lots of high-density platters spinning at something like 3.6 - 4.2k rpm. That'd be OK for the home NAS and nice and reliable.

Tax Systems: The good, the bad and the completely toot toot ding-dong loopy

Riku

Re: I wonder

But is it really deadweight? In order for the money raised to be actually useful, it has to be spent and it is, both through wages and purchases, rents, etc. Government pays staff who buy cars, groceries, etc. Government needs a cruise missile, it buys one and so on. Arguably government is very good for cashflow revenue and turnover in a way that savers (who lock up capital), are not.

Riku

Re: "Tax and tax, spend and spend, elect and elect!"

Well, yes, but the definition of productivity shifts during wartime. It would hardly be fair to say that the war effort wasn't productive.

Big Blue stuffs data into backup at GIGABYTES/sec

Riku

Er, StorNext?

Quantum StorNext has been capable of ingesting data at these sorts of speeds for some time now. Is this news simply because the whale finally caught up with the minnow?

Yotaphone 2: The two-faced pocket-stroker with '100 hours' batt life

Riku

Re: Chile

By that reasoning the English would have stopped rubbing the German's noses in it years ago. If the English can stop mentioning the war (which would no doubt mean the demise of a few TV channels whose programming seems almost entirely devoted to the state of Hitler's bowels or whatever), maybe we can get on with dealing with the pressing issue of today's world then?

Yes, you heard me – the storage infrastructure WARS are over

Riku

Mainframe zombies?

Forgive me, but it sure does feel like virtualisation, cloud apps/storage are merely LPARs, thin-clients and bureau computing dressed up in PFY app-isim-ness.

From the old greybeards to the new beardy hipsters. Everything old is new again.

It'll all end in tiers: HP tosses small biz another 3PAR-flavored bone

Riku

Re: So The Small 3PAR Is Further Delayed?

While it may be DotHill functionality, given the likelihood it (and just about everyone else these days) runs on a Linux kernel, I'd be interested to know how many of them are just enabling Linux's bcache or btier utilities and calling it "innovation".

How small do you want? Do you need equipment smaller than a 7000-series or just a smaller price?

PRAISE the $DEITY! Quantum preaches the joys of StorNext for religious video folk

Riku

Which Quantum?

Was the "houses of worship" link to QTI-AV, rather than Quantum intentional or accidental? It's a bit ambiguous.

My HOUSE used to be a PUB: How to save the UK high street

Riku

Re: With you on this

Then they'd just ban cars and you'd have a perfect-zero accident rate1

Riku

Re: With you on this

That (EU regulation), is because UK gummint, (both local and national) use it as a revenue generating exercise. By interpreting EU directives rather more rigidly than most other members, it's easier to penalise, criminalise and fine just about anyone for anything. UK councils are so desperate for cash, being shortchanged by the Westminster control-freak, regulations are leveraged as fee-and-fine-paying goldmines.

All the while the local politicos get to blame ye olde EU whipping boy and be all slopey-shouldered. That's how the Brits end up saying "The French don't have to do this!", because the French (or anyone else), usually enacted it within their local framework.

Data protection laws come to the rescue of poor, underpaid UK MPs

Riku

Single Recoverable Proxy?

http://aardvark.co.nz/rproxy.shtml Opinions? (Not that we're short of them around here...)

Microsoft has Windows Server running on ARM: report

Riku

Re: Real Windows 9 and servers on a phone?

Funny, that's exactly the vision Canonical has been outlining for Ubuntu for the last three-ish years.

IBM storage revenues sink: 'We are disappointed,' says CEO

Riku

As one of the last remaining LTO drive manufacturers, I wonder what it could mean for LTO.org? Quantum already fit IBM drives by default and there have been lots of job changes from HP's LTO group (if the LinkedIn data is any guide).

Google ordered to tear down search results from its global dotcom by French court

Riku

Whither "les immortels"

Surely the language fundamentalists at the Académie Française would simply insist the French simply would not use any English language website anyway?

Or, given this ruling, they could simply insist every website in the world be in French as well.

ARMs head Moonshot bodies: HP pops Applied Micro, TI chips into carts

Riku

Re: Ubuntu - Seriously?

Why would it get removed? What would be your technical reasons as a paid professional for enacting such a wholesale change?

Given that it's based on Debian (which is used by a great many as a solid server OS) and Canonical builds on Debian's solid foundation with some pretty good enterprise-scale deployment and management tools, where does your problem lie?

Do you have an actual technical reason? Did you only ever use the desktop version and it didn't support your WiFi card? Or just distro-specific bigotry?

Because if you took a working commercial solution on an infrastructure that while you may run, isn't actually your property and ran the risk of endangering shareholder value with a wholesale OS change simply becuase "I don't like it.", then YOU would be "the first thing to get removed" at my shop.

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