Posts by William Boyle

A nail in the coffin of major labels

If they drop the CD and only allow downloads (likely heavily DRM encumbered), I think the labels will soon face a major customer backlash, especially after the first time one of their DRM servers crashes or they decide to shut down the service, resulting in a lot of people losing their property. Also, it will make loading on different players a serious problem - something that downloaders are already discovering. At least with a CD you can easily make a backup copy (a burnable image on a storage drive or CD-R) or rip the contents to a variety of formats such as Ogg, mp3, flac, etc.

So, no CD's, the labels will get no $$ from me!

Tastes great, less filling

I've been a vegetarian for over 40 years. I haven't missed dead animal flesh one bit!

Lies and Statistics

As some wise pundit once said, "There are lies, damned lies, and then there are statistics."

Network congestion?

It sort of gives new meaning to the term "network congestion", doesn't it? Or would that more properly be "network constipation"? ;-)

As I boycott Sony, so will I boycott VMware

Sony's abuse of there customers has forced me to boycott all Sony products and services. This sort of anti-customer behavior (seemingly) on the part of VMware will force me to boycott all VMware products and services as well, and advise all of my clients to do so likewise.

Good for them!

Science is kind of like breathing. If you stop doing it, you die. If a society today stops doing science, research into fundamental processes and expansion of basic knowledge, the society will die. IE, the conservatives in our government are killing us...

HTC vs MS

One can only hope that HTC will repudiate their "patent agreement" with Microsoft, and challenge them as well in the courts/media! $15USD per android device is nothing more than highway robbery!

DRM and media "ownership"

Great article, and excellent questions. Anytime you purchase media with DRM, you are ONLY purchasing a license to use/listen/watch - not ownership of the instance of the media itself. This is why I NEVER purchase media that is DRM-encumbered, and never will do so. If I want to sell/lend/give my legally purchased copy to someone else, then I will do so, and the copyright owners be damned!

Religion and bricks

I always said that before I became "religious" you'd have to hit me over the head with a brick... Interestingly enough, I got religion when god hit me on the head with the planet... :-)

Just another reason

Just another reason why I no longer purchase Microsoft products. All my systems run Linux, and I only run an old copy of XP in a virtual machine when I have to do something with MS cruft, like restore backup data from XP of my daughter's since her new Win7 system cannot restore XP backup images and her old XP system died a cruel death (disc failure).

Duplicate high security keys?

I'll wonder if they can duplicate high security keys as well. You know, the ones with little holes and dimples in the key instead of hills and valleys on the edge for the pins?

Why I don't buy Apple products

This is just another reason, as far as I'm concerned, to boycott Apple products. On my Dell D630 (and old D600) laptop, removing 2 screws allows the drive to be removed by sliding out of the case, and easily replaced. In fact, I have 2 drives for it, with different operating systems. To me, this is sensible.

And in case you are interested, my phone is an unlocked Nexus One Android phone running the latest Gingerbread OS. Unfortunately, it will be a cold day in Heck when I can get my wife to give up her iDevices.

Waaaay-back machine in action

Boy, does this bring back memories, such as when my wife and I (much younger then) were visiting her aunt and uncle in Oregon, and I spent a Sunday afternoon with him writing a tape drive operating system (in BASIC) for his C64, in the kitchen! It gave him a (text-based) UI that allowed him to select his applications, and command-line options, to run in order to manage his sheep farm.

Not a chance!

Before WinPhone7 gets 37% market share, Nokia will be toast! JMHO, but it just ain't gonna happen, IDC's Nostradamus impersonations or not...

Correct decision

I have to agree wholeheartedly with this decision. There's enough bloatware around as it is. However, I would agree that they should allow proprietary hardware drivers for stuff like wireless when there are no open-source alternatives for the devices installed on a user's system. It is such a PITA to sort all that out. I spend an inordinate amount of time on the LinuxForums helping people get their wireless cruft working on Ubuntu. It has to be easier! I should be able to purchase any mainstream laptop, plug in my Ubuntu installation disc, and go! Since they usually do that with the Live DVD's, they should be able to install those drivers when you install the system as well.

Liability?

I'm not a lawyer (thank goodness!), but I have to believe that this is opening Google to really serious liability and charges of fraud. Someone over in Mountain View needs to remove their head from their nether regions PDQ.

Sauce for the goose?

What is to keep the bombers from using these as detonators? Or initiators? IE, set up the bomb so that one of these pulses will activate it, but the real trigger is a timer or some sort of proximity sensor... A good idea for sure, but not the panacea that I think the inventors believe it could be.

Don't count chickens

One thing to be aware of is that Cisco's advanced IOS software is based on QNX. From personal experience, QNX runs just fine on most virtualization frameworks (VirtualBox, VMware, xen, kvm, et al). Don't be surprised if they start selling a virtualized router at some time if they start seeing these things eat into their profits excessively. Cisco may be the 800 lb gorilla of routers, but they can also move fast when it suits them.

Not always reliable

Remember, that the current GPS satellite constellation is owned/operated by the US Department of Defense and that they can degrade its accuracy/reliability at any time. In fact, they have announced such activities in the southeast USA in the near future (or now, don't remember exactly) so they can do some "testing", and have issued a warning to airlines and pilots that they should NOT trust their GPS data until the testing is finished... Caveat User!

MS + HPC = SOL

Physics research requires real HPC capabilities and thousands of processing nodes. Hadoop/MapReduce ditto. I can say this from experience and personal knowledge that no one in the real HPC universe would even consider MS operating systems for a couple of good reasons. One, there isn't enough $$ in the universe to pay for them. Two is that MS operating systems are nowhere nearly reliable enough to handle such computing requirements. Today, it is commodity x86_64 processors running Linux, period. Open source is good. Free is better. Open source and free operating systems? Unbeatable.

Understanding why

After having been stuck on some levels for weeks I can understand the temptation to call in for air support... :-) However, to me that is the beauty of this game, that no matter how "impossible" one level seems, you CAN get thru it. I've been in my current situation for a bit over a week, coming very close to getting thru it, so that I know how to do it. After you figure out the method, it all comes down to execution. So far, my execution has been lacking... :-)

RAID != backup

It seems a lot of people, IT sysadmins in particular, have the attitude that because they have a RAID, they don't need to be quite so careful to keep their data backed up to off-line storage. In reality, it is quite the opposite. RAID's tend to be configured with drives from the same manufacturing batch, which means that when there is a drive failure, there are likely to be more than one drive going south for the winter. Bang! That was nice data while it lasted! :-(

So, after 30 years in the business of designing, building, and deploying large-scale enterprise critical systems for major manufacturers, my opinion is this.

1. Use RAID 5/10 for read-mostly performance. If you want write-mostly performance, go to the fastest devices you can find with the widest I/O channels and skip the RAID cruft.

2. Keep all critical data backed up on a regular (daily) basis.

3. Keep database transaction logs on devices apart from the actual data storage.

4. Make bit-image copies of system drives both before and after you do significant OS or application code updates/upgrades. If things go south with the system/boot devices, you can restore to the last known good configuration. If the update/upgrade fails, then you can revert to the image that existed just before you updated.

5. Plan for failure. Hardware fails. Software has bugs. This is life - live with it! But don't assume because something works today that it will work tomorrow.

I spent years designing and implementing the MES used to run most 300mm semiconductor fabs around the world. One of our major design elements was that the system be resilient to failure. NOT to be fault-tolerant, but fault-resilient. Provide means for automatic fail-over when software fails, computers fail, disc drives fail, controllers fail, networks fail. As a result, these systems run 24x365 with 6-sigma+ reliability. That's a bit less than 1 hour per year of unplanned down time (at 6-sigma reliability). FWIW, 1 hour of down time in a 300mm semiconductor fab is several million USD. So, let's just say that 6 sigma is not good enough... :-)

The devil's in the details!

No matter how "secure" a particular method or algorithm may be, it is ALWAYS the implementation that leaves holes for the smart attacker. IE, the fundamentals may be unbreakable, but a human always is doing the actual implementation, and issues such as TTM (Time To Market) mean that corners will be cut when producing the actual software/hardware that will implement the algorithm. Human factors - hard to get around... :-)

New meaning

This gives new meaning to that ageless term "sh!t happens"!