* Posts by Big Ed

53 publicly visible posts • joined 25 Oct 2014

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Team Trump snubs Big Internet oligarchs

Big Ed

Consumers not Providers

Give the Donald some credit here.

He loaded the Forum with people that run businesses that actually use technology and those that advise on how to use.

Too often in the past decade we've had academic egg heads and providers to us what we need.

This is a much more pragmatic group.

Go Donald!

'Data saturation' helped to crash the Schiaparelli Mars probe

Big Ed

A Lot Like Interrupt Overload

Reminds me of a story about the deployment of an automated luggage handling system at Denver International Airport in the mid-90's. The airport opened to lots of great fanfare and hopes that the automated luggage system could do away with a large contingent of human luggage cart drivers. Only problem was that the robot luggage carts wouldn't stop, missed turns, and even ran into a few planes.

Programmers couldn't figure out how to fix, so airport management and United Airlines had to rip the system out.

Experts were brought in to do a post mortem analysis and reported that the programmers never did proper full-scale testing. And, oh yeah, they made a sh*tty OS choice... seems DOS 3.2 was not a realtime OS and was unable to handle the onslaught of interrupts, which led to all the robot luggage carts crashing into airplanes.

NIST: People have given up on cybersecurity – it's too much hassle

Big Ed

Re: The Problem is TCP/IP

@Charles 9

"...you want a stateful Internet: no more anonymity. Plus what's to stop state-sponsored impersonation?"

Yes, a stateful set of trusted communication protocols for business and government - no anonymity to conduct business.

And to stop "state-sponsored impersonation?" - our financial systems have trusted protocols at higher levels and by-and-large, they work.

Treaties can help. And countries entering into the treaty agree to abide and provide legal frameworks. And ISPs that want to participate - they can agree to shutdown untrusted traffic - or not participate. And if their customers are shutout from trusted e-commerce; they will demand and force the ISP to be a part.

Every major invention has gone thru this international treaty and standardization process: telecom, radio, aircraft, nuclear non-proliferation, etc...

Anonymous communication provides cover for criminals.

Take the criminals out of the e-commerce equation, and leave anonymity for social media.

Big Ed

The Problem is TCP/IP

Malware and Ransomware could be stopped by simply fixing TCP/IP to contain non-reputable identity and source information.

iPhone: Apple's Mac battle with Windows rebooted

Big Ed

Re: Same tired old (and wrong) "market share" meme

iOS continued success is all about the eco-system Apple has developed.

Yes their share is in the 12% range; but that 12% are people willing to pay the premium support and the value of the eco-system Apple grows.

I was at the Apple Store yesterday for support and it was packed; everytime I walk by, it's packed. I was able to leave my device and pick it up the next day; Apple customers pay for and appreciate that.

I have a Galaxy tab, and the best they can offer me for repair is to mail it in.

So is 12% bad?

Londoner jailed after refusing to unlock his mobile phones

Big Ed

Re: Hmm

@Slartybardfast, it's a US thing.

In the states, the gun control advocates' thesis is that more gun control laws will prevent gun violence.

So everytime a gun crime happens in strict gun control places, the gun rights advocates reference the incident and say "see, gun crimes happen regardless of control".

The very latest on the DNC email conspiracy. Which conspiracy? All of them, of course!

Big Ed

Just Proves Again That The Russians Are Smarter Than Clinton

Gotta love that the DNC and Hillary surrogates are blaming the Russians.

In doing so, they are freely admitting that the Russans are smarter than Hillary.

Smarter because their best crackers bested Hillary's best security.

GoToMYPC attacked

Big Ed

Re: So hot on the heels of that

Citrix was smart; no emails, just a notice of the issue with instructions on the login screen to press the forgot password link. Kudos to Citrix for their handling. They also have a second layer of security that requires another password on connection to the remote host with instructions to use a different PW.

This attack was enabled because people use the same login credentials for multiple sites. Hacker was smart... only those with bad password hygiene should have been affected.

Time for some bright bloke to create an irrefutable, low-cost biometric authentication scheme. And make a bazillion bucks.

Freeze, lastholes: USB-C and Thunderbolt are the ultimate physical ports

Big Ed

Find Me An Editor

Simon,

The picture on the front page over the article title doesn't look like a USB Type-C Connector - looks more like a micro to me.

Does production need some help?

1Gbps quad-antenna mobile broadband chip dives off Qualcomm's drawing board

Big Ed

Call Me A Crumugeon

Brilliant technical achievement, but who cares? I'm still waiting for my investments in quadraphonic music, laser disk, and bubble memory to pay off.

Why does anyone need 1Gb/s when the Cellcos charge a shed load of bucks for 20GB a month for devices that hold 16 to 64GB. I don't really care that a song in MBs takes a few seconds vs. instant download.

Maybe the technology drives down the cost per byte for Cellcos; but until they offer unlimited data and tethering, without throttling, this technology can join the bubble memory heap.

The Register guide to software-defined infrastructure

Big Ed

Spot on with SDS

Trevor, love your SDS analysis; yes to a certain extent it's about locking you into someone's software.

Some key concepts though. In my mind Software Defined Storage is a common, independant abstraction of the physical hardware from the management platform. And a true SDS platform can manage any physical hardware; JBOD through commercial disk arrays. And the SDS platform needs to be open and interoperable with open standards and popular software defined automation tools. Think about a platform that can manage JBOD, ONTap and Unisphere, and present the Share, Mount, CUU or LUN to vSphere, vRealize, zOS, to S3 with the same clicks.

I would look forward to seeing a 'round-up" analysis of different approaches and a with a grading scale to see how far the various SW defined vendors go with interoperability and openess.

Juniper 'fesses up to TWO attacks from 'unauthorised code'

Big Ed

I Can Hardly Wait for Self Driving Cars

Best lesson I learnt from a sage university prof, "it is mathematically impossible to prove a program is correct".

You can prove test cases. And even if you think your test cases test all conditions, failures, or paths; testing can't account for failure conditions never imagined, or errors in underlying hardware, firmware, Hypervisor, or OS. And then there's the possibility that the test cases themselves may be coded wrong. When I use to write MF security code, I sometimes made design choices and assumptions that were proved wrong in the real world.

All the QA in the world can't prove correctness.

Moral of the story, never, ever completely trust software.

Top VW exec blames car pollution cheatware scandal on 'a couple of software engineers'

Big Ed

Re: Somebody In Management Had To Know

Big John.

Current owners are screwed because the resale value of their cars has dropped. And they will get screwed again when the software upgrade gets applied and their cost of operation goes up because thier gas mileage has dropped.

And you can be sure that the state emmisions testors are going to fail their cars until the owners get the software patch applied.

Big Ed

Somebody In Management Had To Know

So VW Engineers create a design, and they know the levers to push and pull to affect mileage and pollution levels. They have phenominal testing labs and reams of test data. When they create a car design, they would estimate the expected mileage and pollution levels. When the car rolls into testing and the results come in so good; someone should have been comparing the actual results to estimated results. And given the variance, some engineering bean counter has got to be asking why the results are so good; if nothing more than to bottle it up for the next design. And then the great achievement makes its way up the management chain.

And nobody says great achievement and passes out bonuses and promotions for exceeding estimates?

So sorry Mr. VW CEO; your story of two rouge software engineers doesn't pass the stink test.

Me thinks the FBI needs to be brought in to find the scoundrels who got the bonuses and promotions. The evidence is all there in project files and in the reviews in personnel files if someone just looks.

The US Govt was defrauded with lying test results, and more importantly consumers who bought the cheating cars got screwed.

Strike one – First net neutrality gripe against an ISP is nixed by FCC

Big Ed

As A Consumer, I Should Not Be Forced to Pay Twice

I pay my ISP for download bandwidth.

My content provider pays for their bandwidth connection to the Internet; which should theoretically be an aggregate factor of all of their customers.

1-paid for bit down 1-paid for bit recieved - an equalibrium exists.

And under true net neutrality, all traffic should be treated equally and routed over the best connections available at the time. There are plenty of well established protocol standards to do that.

It seems all this complainant is saying is that it's Internet traffic should not be purposefully routed over slower connections. And it appears that TWC is purposefully putting CNS traffic on slower connections.

And TWC is saying that even though you paid once for your bandwidth to the internet, CNS needs to pay a higher fee to get taken off the purposefully slower connections. That means that CNS has to pay more, and consequently charge me more; in essense, I now need to pay twice; once for my BW, and once again to CNS,so that they can pay the TWC tax to be taken off slow connections.

Thanks FCC for the nice screwjob; too bad you, TWC, and payolla lobbyists are the only ones to enjoy it.

Google Chromecast 2015: Puck-on-a-string fun ... why not, for £30?

Big Ed

Google Can't Even Google - Google Content Providers

So I go to Google to find out what content I can get with Google Chrome, and all Google comes back with is bunches of entries for Apps.

Definitely not ready for Prime Time.

Big Ed

Real Men Use RJ-45 Connections

@Jim 59

WOW, what a bunch of haters out there.

In my place of refuge, I'm a hard-wired CAT-5 guy. I got too tired of wireless router placement, boosters, extenders and fighting with my neighbors and gamer kids for wireless bandwidth. Sure my iPhone and Pad are on wireless because the have too, but for the media entertainment center I've built in a decent CAT-5 switch, and all the kids games, and SONY TV fit nicely in with manufacturer provided RJ-45 ports.

Google would be wise to consider a CAT-5/6 connector.

Revealed: Why Amazon, Netflix, Tinder, Airbnb and co plunged offline

Big Ed

The Falicy of the Public Cloud is Exposed

This outage really exposes the falicy of the public cloud; everyone expects cloud capacity to scale infinitely and scale to handle any demand. The reality is that it can't.

Network folks have known this for ages; e.g. shared Internet bandwidth is unreliable; want reliability, buy private lines from different carriers with route diversification.

Time for the compute and storage folks to learn that lesson, or standup your own cloud with your own peaking capacity.

Volkswagen used software to CHEAT on AIR POLLUTION tests, alleges US gov

Big Ed

Re: Eco or Ego ?

@Werdsmith; and some day scientists will explain the correlation between CO2 levels and global warming, and the dawn and end of the ice age <not>.

There was a movement decades ago to limit population growth by limiting each family to one child. Sadly the civilized world gave up on the push and only China <yes those evil, godless, commies> has the vision to continue to pursue.

Apple's iPad Pro: We're making a Surface Pro WITH A STYLUS over Steve Jobs' DEAD BODY

Big Ed

Re: Value?

@thedarke. Sure VDI is a poor man's solution to containerization.

VDI's role in life is to get legacy apps in the hands of users quickly, and cheaply. And VDI on an iPad would be an immediate way to get desktop apps into the hands of iPad users immediately.

VDI also has some specialty use cases. For example it can function can be used to securely control access into test bubble.

Big Ed

Re: Value?

@Lusty. Most of the MS Office Suite does not have full function on the iPad; that alone justifies the need for View. And the iPad's ARM processor only does graphics brilliantly, but it sucks on the compute side.

I love my iPhone, my iPad, and my MacBook Pro; but unless Apple puts a strong Intel chip on the next iPad. I will buy a Surface Pro when my iPad goes toes-up.

Work has started on VMware's secret security disruptor

Big Ed

Re: Oddity? Labour intensive?

I think the point is that in Data Center Encryption is lacking in the following areas:

1. As data traverses the SAN from the array

2. As data traverses the LAN from the array

3. As data traverses from server image to server image

4. As data traverses from process to process

5. As data is temporarily stored in persistent queues

Google reveals OnHub WiFi router, complete with GLOWING RING

Big Ed

Ages Behind Linksys

No stats

No parental controls

Another cute sizzle with no pizzaz

Music curation site This Is My Jam to be marmaladed next month

Big Ed

Not to be Confused With...

"That's My Jam"

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=1YfvW0kYjXw

Just ONE THOUSAND times BETTER than FLASH! Intel, Micron's amazing claim

Big Ed

Re: No more loading of apps?

@Gordon 10 - Didn't make myself clear enough. The thought was that if you could load up your entire data lake persistent store into intel/micron hybrid memory, ala SAP HANA, you wouldn't need to replicate data into different storage locations to reduce storage contention as hadoop does.

I'm thinking this hybrid store could be a boon to big data analytics.

Big Ed

Re: No more loading of apps?

And if enough storage is provisioned, imagine the affect on big data applications... real-time faster than sh*t analysis; Hadoop's purpose in life totally nuetered.

FCC swamped by 2,000+ net neutrality complaints against ISPs

Big Ed

US Libs Love Regs

US Libs (historically the lawyers) love regulations and will use them to sue someone's butt into submission when it suits their cause. And liberal administrations selectively enforce the laws when they suit their politcal agenda.

Net Neutrality regs give the Obama administration a new kind of leverage; as long as they do not enforce the regs, Comcast/Verizon/AT&T and the rest have increased incentives to keep their political donations up.

There's a reason why the yanks rate lawyers as the lowest scum on earth.

Has NetApp solved the TLC for biz puzzle? We look at its MYSTERY SSD Mars sauce

Big Ed

Re: Log structured writes will eliminate write amplification

Former NetApp'er here...

Maybe these NetApp'ers ain't so crazy.

One thing that NetApp did very well in the past was predictive analytics.

A lot of perople think of write-cycle limits in terms of full-block writes. But what if you know what bits in a record actually change and only write the updated bits. Micron/Intel boffins claim their new spinless silirust can address individual bits, why not the other boys? And if NetApp has the partnership they claim it's in the realm of possibility that they could get a custom/nextgen controller that does bit addressing.

Think about it, past the initial write of a record, generally speaking only a few bytes change in a DB record update, and at the bit level there is a 50/50 probability that a bit actually changes in a given write, and for text fields; the printable ASCII character set reduces the odds across a whole byte.

NetApp may be on to something!!!

The French want to BAN .doc and .xls files from Le Gouvernement

Big Ed

Re: What's up DOC?

@admiraljkb And don't forget that Louis Lerner's IT Staff will erase all the backup tapes.

Big Ed

@eesiginfo And don't forget about those nasty windows coders that nested those silly VBA macros into excel worksheets; MAC excel - BARF, Office 365 on iOS - Hurl Again.

Yikes!!!

US OPM boss quits after hackers stole chapter and verse on 21.5m Americans' lives

Big Ed

Re: Banks Do It... Why Can't The Social Security Administration

@EddyIto.

I don't think you would get any arguments from many about the general incompetence of government bureacracies.

And I don't think that anyone would argue that in the US that easily stealable SSNs contribute to stolen identities.

Given these two factors, what would you propose to stop indentity theft?

Big Ed

Re: Banks Do It... Why Can't The Social Security Administration

Eddy, why not make the number space bigger? Eventually the SSA will run out of numbers. Virtually the entire free world did it for Y2K. The world is doing it with IPV6. Tell me the SSA can't.

Not all organizations that gave up personal info is incompetent; sometimes the criminals are smarter. Heck even RSA got hacked.

Virtually every American has multiple credit/debit/ATM cards; how does VISA, MasterCard, AMEX, and Discover Card cope?

Big Ed

Banks Do It... Why Can't The Social Security Administration

So if your credit card is stolen, banks will freeze the card immediately; and they issue a new card lickety split. If a Social Security Number is stolen the SSA yawns, and 21.5M people suffer the consequences.

The conspiricy theorist in me wonders why.

Laziness, cheapness, incompetence, stupidity, _______ - you fill in the blank.

Uber to drivers: You make a ton of dosh for us – but that doesn't make you employees

Big Ed

Re: @Big Ed - Call me a converted Fanboi

Anon, agreed; municipality run cab systems are unfair to the public, drivers, and car owners. Monopolies screw everyone except for the profitiers. When I worked in NYC, I read stories about taxi medallions selling for $1M; if true that's insane. And in all of the civilized world, NYC consistently has the crappiest cabs and the longest waits at JFK and LGA for a ride.

Progess and technology changes hit people hard. Years ago seats on the NY Stock Exchange and Chicago Commodity Exchanges sold for millions of dollars. This week the bulk of the remaining pits at the Board of Trade were closed because they did less than 1% of the trades.

The NY Stock Exchange goes down for hours because of a bad software upgrade. But buyers and sellers were able to do their business elsewhere because the NYSE had lost its monopoly to electronic traders. If the NYSE still had it's listing monopoly it had years ago, the headlines would have been about the billions of dollars lost and how Joe Pensioner sufferred. The mass media only knows how to publish tradgety and suffering side of any story.

People make bad investments all the time, I worked for a technology leasing company and had a pile of my retirement invested in company stock. Shorter technology lives and tax law changes put us out of business; and now instead of retiring at 62 I will work until I'm 70. It was my bad for investing so much of my retirement in a high-flying company - and it's the price I paid for a bad investment choice.

So yeah, technology changes have winners and losers. You feel for the little guy stuck in the middle, and perhaps the municpalities that benefited from insane medallion auction fees can refund a piece of the monies that they profitted on.

The question society needs to answer is whether you continue to offer crappy service (especially in the large american cities) or do you figure out how to tax the new world-wide car services and move on.

Big Ed

Ever Hear of Infrastructure?

So you criticize the mareketeers at Uber for trying to hit the right marketing cord to resonate with the public? How many times do you think Old Spice to Google have changed their messaging; Old Spice... decades, Google at the speed of light.

Amazon, Apple, Google, and Microsoft Azure have brilliant software and a boatload of infrastructure to pay for.

If you think Uber skims too much off the top, start your own ride service company with lower fares. That's how capitalism works.

Or you can sit back and whine... oh wait

Big Ed

Call me a converted Fanboi

The taxi cab cabal is a criminal run monopoly. Crappy-cramped cars, poor service, and drivers that get lost. Try to get a cab on a street in NYC. Flag an available driver and have someone up the street jump out ahead of you and steal the car. Or better yet, try standing in endless cab lines. And don't get me started on the cities that issue medallions and rip the drivers off with outrageous fees.

Uber Black: Chauffer licensed drivers, insured-late model comfortable cars. Uber drivers use a smart phone with Nav software and don't get lost, and they get you to your destination following the most economical route. Rides are dispatched fairly. When you book, the app tells you the name of the driver, and the make and license of your car. The Uber car knows where I am by the GPS in my phone; and they pull up discretely so noone can steal the ride. Uber has my credit card, so when I reach my destination, I just hop out of the car and I'm on my way.

I've used the Uber app in San Fran, NYC, London, Paris, Brussels, Dubai, the KSA, Toronto, Chicago, and beyond.

Uber keeps a flat 25% of the total fare for running the infrastructure and the drivers get the rest.

Someone please tell me why I should want to risk my life in a cab and support that criminal enterprise when Uber's out there with a dramatically better way.

If anything, cabbies should be auctioning off their medallions on ebay, ditching their hubcapless crap cars and signing up for Uber. Seems to me that this is a case of modern day horse and buggy drivers crapping on horseless carriages.

Big Ed

Rather than Criticize...

I haven't seen many comments in the media from the Uber drivers...

I have a friend who owns a car service; he and his drivers have chauffeurs licenses, licensed-inspected vehicles, insurance, and late model - comfortable cars.

The drivers fill thier gaps in bookings with Uber rides.

I'd bet a bunch that there are160,000 different stories out there sans the winers in Cali that took Uber up on their offer and are happy for the opportunity.

'It’s irrelevant whether Elon Musk is a dick or not. At least he’s trying to make things'

Big Ed

Re: Pretty laughable to think...

Elon Musk is the Preston Tucker and John DeLorean of our era; a charasmatic idea guy who is truly trying to do something different. The difference between the lot is that despite the odds and the industrial complex stacked against him; he is succeding.

A pause in global warming? What pause?There was no pause

Big Ed

Scammed Again

Credability is lost when you don't know who to trust or who to believe.

Back in the 70's there was a whole movement to curb population growth; e.g. one or two kids per family. The media lost interest, and save China, the movement died.

So you have to wonder, even though tangental, if carbon emissions are to blame for "global climate change", wouldn't it make sense to limit demand by limiting carbon users through population growth slowing?

Ehh, been there tried that, let's work another scare, er scam.

New US bill aims to zap patent trolls with transparency demands

Big Ed

Re: Or...

The problem is that the USPTO is funded by patent application fees. It's in their best interest to consider and award as many patents as possible.

Until the USPTO's funding system is changed they will continue to award patents for non-unique adaptations of prior works, and self-obvious uses on new technologies and screw us all with higher cost of goods and services.

Hardcore creationist finds 60-million-year-old fossils in backyard ... 'No, it hasn’t changed my mind about the Bible'

Big Ed

Re: Evidence.

I'm perplexed by how the creationists came up with the age of the earth. You have to wonder about their analytical skills and whether they actually even have read their own bible beyond the old testament. And I'm even more perplexed that they have the audacity to deny power to their own God.

First, how do creationists come up with the age of the earth? By assuming that the 7-day story of creation is based on a 24-hour day, and then by trying to piece together gaps in family lineages from the early old testament.

The last chapter in 2nd Peter says God's day is "like" a thousand years; i.e. God's day is not 24 earth hours in length. Since the story of creation is based on what God did out of the nothingness, a 24-hour day did not exist and therefore can't be used as a measurement.

Creationists also assert that evolution didn't occur as scientists would have us believe. They insist that God directed the changes along the way. Wouldn't their God be more powerful to have created organisms that could adapt and evolve on their own? I guess they would rather have a neutered God that has to direct everything in real-time.

Galeleo convinced the knuckleheads in the Catholic Church that the earth was not the center of the universe, it's time for the "creationists" to accept God's word in 2nd Peter and give their God the power to have created organisms that could evolve on their own.

Hypervisor indecisive? Today's contenders from yesterday's Hipsters

Big Ed

Re: IBM VM/CMS

A bit of nuance... VM/CMS consisted of two components. CP, the control program, and CMS; they were seperate components. Guest VMs were defined to CP and could run virtually any MF OS of the day or CMS.

End users were given CMS accounts, the virtual desktop of the day primarily for text editing, email, statistical analysis and early data warehouse analysis along with a smattering of light-weight applications. Operations departments and developers would run production and test MF OSes in their VMs.

CP itself without a guest (MF OS or CMS) could not do anything useful, and I would argue that it truly was a hypervisor.

And I would also argue that CMS was an early predecessor to today's VDI desktops and apps.

The VM/CMS environment was an early experiment in open source. All of the code was distributed in source MF Assembler which was modified and hooked by many. There was a rich community in the day and a lot of contributions were made to the base; the email system for example was written by programmers from Standard Oil. A lot of early client/server concepts between VMs were developed too; although at the time we hadn't quite figured out asyncronous persistant queues.

As CP evolved, the code was moved to "microcode" that became the basis for LPARS on the z-series, p-series, and i-series.

VM/CMS died with the proliferation of the IBM PC along with IBM's move to Object Code Only. The OCO move stiffled innovation as IBM would only provide exits for reasons it deemed worthy.

I feel blessed to have lived so long to see computing history repeat itself. And the mistakes of the day with IBM's OCO policy reborn in the form of active open source communities.

Have it all: BlackBerry to port crown jewels to iPhone, Android

Big Ed

About Time!!!

Great to see that BB has figured out that the true value of BB's IP is software and not hardware. I can't wait for BB's superior Calendering function for my iPhone; no more waiting to get online to see Free/Busies.

Big Ed

About Time!!!

it's about time that BB realized that people valued BB for software and not hardware. I love my iPhone and I love BB's Calendering and eMail capability.

Fibre Channel's looking a bit flat. Bad news for these three firms

Big Ed

Re: Eliminating tape

Tape is barely acceptable for only some of the long-term retention use cases. I tried in vain this past summer to find a DLT based library with new drives to scan a couple of million archive tapes only to be severely disappointed by the lack of a hardware market for these obsolete drives. Resellers offered used and re-manufactured drives but told me that I needed to get a large supply of spares, and be preparred for downtime between drive mis-behavior, diagnostic, replacement and verification. And oh yah, your replacement might have gone bad, so start the cycle all over again.

And some of the US regs in the health and drug industries are going to require lifetime plus 10 retention periods. Think of the impact of 300 million citizens with hundreds of HC records; factor in population growth and there you go... a problem prime for a better solution...

So here are some of the issues with tape:

1. Tape vendors will not guarantee supply or even 15-year backwards compatibility, let alone be able to cope with projected 100+ year retention requirements on the horizon.

2. DB vendors do a nice job of saying that it can process old releases of DBs. But if your programming bits, hardware and OS bits are different; can you absolutely gurantee the same result today compared to the day when it was created?

3. Tape is linear and offline stored, if you need to access the last block on a many tapes, it could take days, weeks, or even months to re-assemble a file system.

4. And when you have hundreds, thousands to millions of tapes; there really are no effecctive solutions to regularly read-in, re-validate bits, delete, re-write, and the data files. Some software solutions say they do logical deletes, but don't have a efficient way to do physical deletes.

5. Application reality... you may start off with good intentions with a tape solution, people change, priorities change, and it gets too easy to get lazy and a tape solution grows, gets stale, backup/archive meta-data gets lost or obsolete. And then your stuck with a bunch of tape that you are paying a fortune to store.

6. Tape bits degrade over time and are not periodically scanned or rebuilt.

7. Tape don't dedupe

8. In a world of cheap spinning rust; putting anything, ANYTHING on tape is just plain STUPID.

And any IT Professional that puts anything on tape should be drawn and quartered. Horses make nice pets and should be around for a long time.

Sony post-mortem: Obama lobbies for new legal powers to thwart hackers

Big Ed

Solving the Identify Theft Problem will be an Interesting Obama Charade

Part of the Identity Theft Problem can be traced to stolen Social Security Numbers. And Obama does not want to solve that problem because it will disrupt his drive to amnesty illegal immigrant workers. It will disrupt it because many illegals workers use stolen SSNs. So if the FBI cracks down on stolen SSNs, the FBI will also have to prosecute the illegals that have them.

Gotta love politics... Obama would rather let legals unravel bad credit problems from stolen indentifies than go after the root cause.

Windows XP beats 8.1 in December market share stats

Big Ed

And I Love Driving Stick Shift Too...

MS needs to behave more like the auto industry. They have platforms that they build cars and trucks off of. On top of the platform they build sexy, sleek, fast, economical, and funtional. MS OS guts are the platform that gives phone, tab, desktop, and server. MS should seperate the UI from the platform and run seperate code branches to let people and orgs choose their own sexy, sleek, ... And for that matter, let 3rd parties build custom Shelbys and Taxi cabs. At my age, I love my stodgy old XP UI; it aint sexy, but it sure is fast, funtional, and economical.

Hilton, Marriott and co want permission to JAM guests' personal Wi-Fi

Big Ed

There's a Flipside to this Story that Requires a Comprimise Solution...

The painful reality is that there is limited channel space and in a convention hotel there can be literally be hundreds of people competing for a limited slice of channel time. And if I pay the hotel for access to their network and maybe pay a premium for access to the higher speeds and I don't realize the benefit of what I paid for, I'm going to be pretty pissed.

Question for the wireless protocol experts, if 100 people are on a wireless network, and 100 people set up individual Mi-Fi hotspots, do all 200 people have equal access?

Loved-up 'frictionless' EMC bods slide ScaleIO into VMware kernel

Big Ed

Chalk another one up for EMC and another loss for NetApp

Nearly six years ago, NetApp suffering from a fit of not invented here fired the founders of ScaleIO; Boaz Palgi and Erez Webman; now they are on their way to doing great things in virtualization and storage. Oh wait, the axman was none other than Guy Churchward - can anyone spell consipiricy? Looks like Tucci scored on another soon to be brilliant acquisition.

EMC CEO Joe Tucci tries to win hearts and minds from VC backers

Big Ed

Re: VCE run rate

So here's the deal. When VCE was a standalone entity; they could talk about their annual revenues; and that included compute, storage, networking, services, and packaging. And EMC would report the storage it sold, Cisco, their compute and network, etc.

But now that VCE is a wholly owned entity, you can't count twice. The storage in a vBlock either gets counted in the Core Technology Division tally or in the VCE tally, but not both.

So I think when Joe is talking revenue for VCE, he has to take the storage component previously reported twice into account.

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