Posts by JacobZ

IBM still not offering future revenue guidance, suffers yet another quarter of falling sales

Systems “driven primarily by product cycle dynamics”

Not that complicated. A big chunk of the revenue in the Systems business is driven by z (mainframe) sales. Whenever a new z machine is released there is a massive spike in revenue as buyers rush to the new machine. The following quarter there is typically a smaller but still significant spike in mainframe-attached storage. And as that machine generation ages, demand declines... until the next release and the next spike.

So if you want to understand what is happening in the rest of the Systems business - primarily Storage and Power - you need to factor out the extremely cyclical z impact.

We bought a knockoff Lego launchpad kit from China for our Saturn V rocket so you don't have to

In addition, as Tom Lehrer pointed out, he endowed many widows and orphans in London with generous pensions.

IBM made ‘top-down’ efforts to fire older workers, says US employment discrimination watchdog

Yes, they mean that Re: Do you mean that?

If the author is American, "could care less" is exactly what they meant. The phrase has a universally understood meaning in American English that decades ago diverged from the literal meaning of the words taken out of this context. "Understanding what the phrase should really mean".

Fun fact: I have a list of things called "More Wrong", where the people correcting others are actually incorrect. This is on the list

As promised, Apple will now entertain suggestions from the hoi polloi on how it should run its App Store

Re: hoi polloi

Um, actually... "the hoi polloi" is correct English.

Yes, "hoi polloi" means "the people" in Greek. However, we are not speaking Greek, and the phrase "hoi polloi" has been thoroughly assimilated into English entirely independently of the grammar of its Greek source. And "hoi" does not mean "the" in English. Hence, "the hoi polloi". That's how languages work.

For the same reason, the plural of "octopus" is "octopuses" and not "octopodes".

Linux kernel maintainers tear Paragon a new one after firm submits read-write NTFS driver in 27,000 lines of code

Re: Bit harsh

"Beware of geeks bearing gifts"?

IBM job ad calls for 12 years’ experience with Kubernetes – which is six years old

Pseudocode Re: HR droids...

By coincidence, I'm currently working on a pseudocompiler for pseudocode

A memo from the distant future... June 2022: The boss decides working from home isn't the new normal after all

Prove the rule (Re: New Normal?)

Fun fact: it's a common misconception that "prove" in "the exception proves the rule" really means test.

The original, original meaning comes from lawyers, in particular the Latin phrase "exceptio probat regulam in casibus non exceptis" - the last part meaning "in cases not excepted". When a sign says something like "Parking is allowed between midnight and 5am", this exception "proves" that there is a general rule against parking there; otherwise, why would there be a need to state the exception?

There, isn't that fun?

FCC boss pleads with Congress: Please stop me from auctioning off this spectrum for billions of dollars

No real danger

If this depends on Pai actually doing his job, we're all going to be fine.

ALGOL 60 at 60: The greatest computer language you've never used and grandaddy of the programming family tree

Re: No love for CORAL 66?

We used to call that the Pessimizing Compiler

It is unclear why something designed to pump fuel into a car needs an ad-spewing computer strapped to it, but here we are

Relief from the ads

If you mash all of the buttons around the display, you will usually find one that silences the adverts, and occasionally want that turns them off entirely.

Dell to unleash hybrid server/storage boxen that can run virtual machines

Re: Boxes

Kids today, eh?

Official: Office 365 Personal, Home axed next month... and replaced by Microsoft 365 cloud subscriptions

Re: Aduntgeddit

Algorithmic Interference, amirite?

I'll be here all week. No, really, I will. We're in lockdown.

Blow me down with a feather, well, storage server software update gone awry: Nest vid streams go dark for 16 hours

Tape FTW

After visiting one of Iron Mountain's underground facilities, I have a great deal of faith in the physical security of offsite tape. The onsite FBI office is quite reassuring, as are the submachines on the wall behind the receptionist.

Robbing-some Caruso and pal lived life of luxury using victims' millions in crypto-Ponzi scam, say prosecutors

Wasted?

So they spent most of the money on cars, private jets, and gambling sprees, and the rest they just wasted?

The winners and losers of infrastructure clouds revealed: AWS, Microsoft, Google and Alibaba get fatter

No surprise really

Is anybody genuinely surprised that the big are getting bigger? The cloud business is ideally suited to favor economies of scale. And like enterprise software business in the days of on-prem software, it's almost inevitable that you'll get 3 (in this case 4 because of geography and geopolitics) big winners and a host of distantly-trailing niche vendors. Look at the evolution of the markets for relational databases, Linux distros, application servers, ERP/CRM suites, and any number of other software markets...

Bose customers beg for firmware ceasefire after headphones fall victim to another crap update

Re: Criminal Damage

It's only a matter of time before the small print nobody reads says that you don't really own your headphones, you merely have a license to use them and the manufacturer retains the right to update the firmware at any time at its sole discretion...

First Python feature release under new governance model is here, complete with walrus operator (:=)

Irony

I just wanted to note the irony that the entire discussion so far is about the specific feature, and barely at all about the new governance process...

AWS celebrates Labor Day weekend by roasting customer data in US-East-1 BBQ

Convenience of the cloud

In the old days we all had to be constantly alert for the possibility of power loss, network outages, server failures, and other physical disasters.

Nowadays you can pay a Cloud vendor to provide them for you.

Frontiersman Cray snags $50m storage contract for 'largest single filesystem'

Re: Underpriced

That's assuming they are using the formal definition of EB as decimal quantities. If they are using the technically incorrect but widely adopted practice of using EB, PB and TB as binary quantities then 1 EB = 1024 PB etc. Once you get up to PBs and EBs it starts to make a material difference...

There was a court case in the US some years ago regarding consumer storage that established that when the packaging said "MB", buyers had a reasonable expectation that this meant 1024 GBs (and so on down).

Gee, SEC, how did that get out?! 'Leaked' Tesla email claims big boost in Model 3 production

Perfect Storm Re: Tricky

My Christmas wish: Tesla goes under because of mismanagement, the assets are bought by a company run by adults that makes it a huge success.

Wrong

I see ludicrous numbers of Teslas around here, mostly 3s of course. And hardly any of them are black. Red seems to be the most popular color.

I'm no fan of Billionaire Bro Musk, but you're just on the facts on this one.

Pure Storage swallows Swedish filer biz for its, er, purely file storage software

Moot point

Nice usage of the rarely-seen usage of "moot" in the sense of "open to question" (https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/moot). Well done!

IBM so very, very sorry after jobs page casually asks hopefuls: Are you white, black... or yellow?

Re: Ethnicity != Race

...or they might be wanting this data so that they can comply with Federal law that requires them to collect it, and so that they can verify they aren't discriminating *against* anybody.

No brownie points or imaginary preferential hiring required to explain it.

But it's fascinating how easily trigged the "anti-PC" crowd are by anything that challenges their privilege.

Influential Valley gadfly and Intel 8051 architect John Wharton has died

Re: Intel Dev system

That was the first system I worked on professionally, close to 40 years ago. I was an apprentice programmer at Satchwell Control Systems writing very bad code for a building management system. We developed under ISIS and cross-compiled to RMX, if memory serves.

The offices were in Slough, just on the fringe of the famous Slough Trading Estate, and at the time we were a subsidiary of GEC.

VMware and Lenovo are about to hit go-go on Project Dimension beta

Well it's certainly fully buzzword compliant, I'll say that for it.

Punkt: A minimalist Android for the paranoid

Crazy old man

I may be just a crazy old man, but I want one. I still miss my Samsung T509, which was the last phone I had that felt comfortable in my hand or my pocket.

Now you can tell someone to literally go f--k themselves over the internet: Remote-control mock-cock patent dies

I read that as "patient"...

...not "patent", so I had entirely the wrong mental image

Hooray: Google App Engine finally ready for Python 3 (and PHP 7.2)

Re: App Engine is the OG of serverless

Apparently, "OG" means "Original Gangster", which apparently is a "hip" way of saying "first".

Honestly, there has never been an occasion where I looked something up in Urban Dictionary and did not immediately regret it.

Declassified files reveal how pre-WW2 Brits smashed Russian crypto

The clue is in the name

"By reusing one-time pads..."

There's a clue in the name, folks.

Trump wants to work with Russia on infosec. Security experts: lol no

Security cooperation? He's Putin us on, isn't he?

I'll get my coat. And umbrella.

Micro Focus offloads Linux-wrangler SUSE for a cool $2.5bn

Re: Cut-and-shut

Great story, but I think you mean "undamaged halves"?

Big Blue's Summit super sits, aptly, at the peak of official Top500 beast list

shout out for storage?

How about a little love for Spectrum Scale, which is the file system behind Summit and Sierra? It takes a lot of work to keep these blisteringly fast systems fed with data and to keep up with the pace of their writes.

Linux literally loses its Lustre – HPC filesystem ditched in new kernel

Re: IBM’s IBM Spectrum Scale

No, Tyler Perry

Unbreakable smart lock devastated to discover screwdrivers exist

Re: Devil's Advocate

Sounds like the lock is worth stealing

AIOps they did it again, played with your heart, new acronym shame

Autonomic computing?

So... autonomic computing all over again?

Don't we go through this about once a decade?

Microsoft patches problematic OS to deal with SSD woes

As a child, "Picked Last For Sports" was my Indian name.

Microsoft's Pelican brief, MAID in Azure* and femtosecond laser glass storage

MAID to order?

I remember a lot of excitement about the potential for MAID about three years ago, but then everything seemed to go quiet. As I recall, one of the concerns was that repeatedly powering drives up and down would shorten their lives significantly.

Since Microsoft is talking about this publicly again, I assume something significant has changed. Perhaps what they asked of the drive manufacturers was disks that can sustain the power cycling better?

Seagate's HAMR to drop in 2020: Multi-actuator disk drives on the way

HAMR time!

You can't touch that!

Twilight of the idols: The only philosophy HPE and IBM do these days is with an axe

East India Company Re: Marx

The EAC is a pretty fascinating example. Although it started out as a trading company, and was certainly a very large corporation in every formal sense, before long it was hard to tell the difference between it and a country in its own right. It controlled a huge amount of trade, established rule in India (laying the foundation for the British Raj), and even fought wars with its French counterpart. Real wars, I mean, not just trade wars.

From Wiki: "By 1803, at the height of its rule in India, the British East India company had a private army of about 260,000—twice the size of the British Army. The company eventually came to rule large areas of India with its private armies, exercising military power and assuming administrative functions."

There are probably fascinating parallels to be drawn between the EAC and companies such as Facebook or Google, but I leave that as an exercise for people smarter than I.

Footie ballsup: Petition kicks off to fix 'geometrically impossible' street signs

Perfectly possible

Perfectly possible to have a ball made only of hexagons, all you need is a non-Euclidean space. If I remember my college math correctly, a positively curved space in the vicinity of the ball should do the trick.

P≠NP proof fails, Bonn boffin admits

I have a remarkable proof...

...that P!=NP is formally undecidable within axiomatic arithmetic. Unfortunately, the proof is too long to fit in this margin.

ThoughtWorks acquired by British private equiteers Apax

Re: Thoughtworks are good guys

And: ThoughtWorks is proof that you can have a company full of smart, curious people who deliver really good stuff without being assholes.

I once had the privilege of delivering a lunch-and-learn session at their Chicago office, with Martin in the audience. Probably the most intimidating audience I ever presented in front of, even without him -- I spent the whole time up there thinking "is there anything I can tell them they don't already know?".

Snopes lawsuit latest: Judge orders disputed cash can flow to fact-checking site

Buried the leed

So what I took away from this is that David and Barbara split up and I'm only just hearing about it.

U Vlad bro? Docker accidentally cuts off Ukraine

Ouch

At first I misread that as "Doctor accidentally cuts off Ukraine" and I thought, that's an odd euphemism even by El Reg standards...

Fancy a toothpicked-rollmop from our storage smorgasbord?

Rollmops

Great, now I'm craving rollmops. We just can't get proper ones with the toothpicks and the onion rings in this part of the US.

Oh yeah, and also something about storage.

Shared services centres flop: Only one UK.gov department uses them

Oxymoron

If only one department is using it, it's not really "shared", is it?

'Daddy, what's a Blu-ray disc?'

Re: quality..

some people clearly like something about vinyl (handling discs? bigger artwork?) enough to cause a revival.

I do think this is part of the story: the rituals and practices heighten the anticipation of the moment. The fact that many of the rituals are tactile (e.g. the special way they wipe the dust, the care with which they lower the arm) is important. Regardless of what it may (or may not) objectively do to the music reproduction, it really can change some people's subjective enjoyment. (Compare: tea-making rituals).

And then behind that is the opportunity for geekery: to know more than the average person about selecting and matching components for the "best" reproduction, to read endless magazine articles about the specs of the latest equipment, agonizing over whether to upgrade now or hold out for better: for many of this type, the equipment is more important than the music.

And third, there's the lure of exclusivity and collectability: vinyl, especially older vinyl, is a physical artifact that exists in finite quantities and is found in physical locations. The search for a rare copy in good condition of a particular edition can itself be rewarding in a way that finding an MP3 online really is not.

And to be honest, I have no problem with people who enjoy vinyl in any of those ways, so long as they don't insist that their end result "must" be better than mine and that I'm doing it wrong by listening to MP3s on a tiny SanDisk through ear buds to drown out the noise of the lawn mower.

World religions stake out positions on Pokemon Go

Revelation

It's "Book of Revelation", not "Revelations".

It's a common enough mistake: even Pratchett / Gaiman slip up in Good Omens when a character who should beyond a shadow of a doubt know better gets it wrong.

Jaron Lanier: Big Tech is worse than Big Oil

Must read

If you haven't read Lanier's "You Are Not A Gadget", you really, really should

Seagate revenue numbers rain on cloud after market misses

Re: Maybe if the drives lasted a bit longer...

Surely if the drives lasted longer, you'd need to buy fewer?