* Posts by Jim 59

2047 publicly visible posts • joined 24 Jun 2009

Do you use NAS drives? For work? One just LEAKED secret cash-machine blueprints

Jim 59
Stop

Don't understand. Corporate servers and storage units are generally not internet facing. Neither is your home NAS, unless you enable it and forward the necessary ports on your router.

Ex-Sony, Pearson chiefs tipped to oversee BBC. So that's all good, then

Jim 59

ROTM

Hmm. Any mention of the bot is quickly downvoted. Dear bot programmer, the grammar is impressive (correct) but you appear to be still miles away from the Turing test.

Jim 59

Downvoted by a robot. ROTM.

Jim 59

Re: Television Leads, Peoples Follow ...... Is the New Politically Direct Paradigm Shift ...

Welcome back amanfrommars, there's a good bot.

In case anyone is unaware, amanfrommars is a bot which parasitizes/polutes El Reg forums. Despite being an automated turdspurt, it is a bit more cogent than some BBC job adverts, eg this one for a taxi booker:

"Procurement is targeted with delivering savings on generic goods and services pan-BBC through a competitive management initiative and driving compliance. The Category Manager Logistics Ground Transport is responsible to the Head of Production and Logistics and Senior Category Manager Logistics".

Hey amanfrommars lets see what your AI engine makes of that.

Jim 59

The same S. Times story reports comments from Culture Minister Ed Vaizey that the trust’s structure – rather than personnel – is the problem, given that it has to act in two contradictory roles: as both the defender of the BBC, and the public’s “watchdog” over it.

Hear, hear. Sunday papers were all excited because a woman might get the top job, but what really needs reforming is the structure of the BBC, not the sex of the staff. Beeb needs to have proper balance between independence from the govt and and accountability to the public.

Birmingham's Computer Bookshops Ltd goes titsup

Jim 59

Tax

Hmm. Seems like a healthy business, strange it should fold. Could it be that Computer Bookshops actually paid their tax, while a certain competitor didn't bother ?

Anyway, kudos for reaching all the way back to '78 and sorry to see them go.

Hey, does your Smart TV have a mic? Enjoy your surveillance, bro

Jim 59

Sigh

Seems to be no universal solution for this problem. Add it to the growing pile of unacceptable privacy invasions which, sooner or later, the consumer will put a match to.

Is Trevor Pott-y? Nope – he's bang on about VSAN performance

Jim 59

vSAN / san

Comparing "vsans" against "server san" or normal SAN, it becomes a question of which model involves less overhead. The referenced article points out the inconsistency in VMware's argument - they say their hypervisor is perfect, but they also say Vsans are much more perfect because they avoid the hypervisor and run "in the kernel".

Wading through the morrass of sales terms, it seems that Vsan is running in "super" kernel mode, ie. at level 0, the same as the hypervisor, the highest privileged level in the whole platform. Normal storage (including "Server san") would run one level down from that, at level 1, in "kernel mode" within a VM.

If VMware claim Vsan is any faster, they are sort of saying it is more direct than the raw storage pass-through model used by their conventional VM SAN storage. Only they really know the answer. But it is hard to see how the vSAN can be much more direct than a simple raw device pass-through, or to visualise the ton of overhead that VMware are now claiming must be hampering one product but not the other. Any benchmarks ?

Server SAN software upstart Maxta gets Intel's cash inside

Jim 59

What is it

The technology is being hyped as if it contained new ideas or immediate benefits. But neither is immediately apparent. The concepts - VM appliances, local disk, clusters - are all pretty ancient. The solution - essentially clustered NAS - is complex, and potential benefits in performance, price, reliability are not obvious. Price is a possible advantage but may be undermined by clusters being labour intensive to maintain.

El Reg has not yet given a sober review of this tech, but commentards can find a reasonably helpful analysis here, complete with a handy guide to the Gartner Hype Cycle.

Sage's 63-year-old CEO says au revoir: 'Life's all about choices'

Jim 59

Not ageist at all but...

...was there any reason for headlining Berruyer's unremarkable age ? And then opening the article with his equally humdrum 17 years of service ? Just askin'

Google updates Maps app for iOS, Android, adds Uber support

Jim 59

Re: Offline functionality...

Well observed Shultz but Google isn't a software company. Their main function is to farm your life, and providing great offline functionality would undermine that. To survive they need you online, all the time, and full gouging rights. Not trying to have a go at Google, that's just how it is.

Personally I haven't used Google maps app since the permissions went through the roof. I use the Google maps website instead, slightly less convenient but no intrusive activity.

94% of Brit tech bosses just can't get the staff these days, claims bank

Jim 59

Re: Can't get the staff

Whoops. I withdraw that comment about feather bedding, as a pointless insult to AC.

Jim 59

Re: Can't get the staff

"[using offshored unix staff] you can have something 80% as good for 25% of the price.

The above statement comes to you from the large feather bed that the banks have been lying in since 2007. In the feather bed you don't have to worry about not going bankrupt.

In a few areas it may be true that more staff with less experience might be "good enough", which is fine. But they need to be 95% as good, not 80. Drawbacks are: the language barrier, lack of expertise, high staff churn and the increasing salaries of foreign workers, especially in India.

Offshoring an area that is too critical can lead to a steady degradation in the company's core systems. Offshoring is sometimes the result of a company who is deperately looking for a buyer trying to make its books look better. The damage may later threaten the company's survival but for a while is invisible to shareholders and buyers. Company gets bought, hooray! Too late the buyer notices a smell coming from the mainframes in the basement...

Jim 59

skills shortage

A cynic might think the regular chorus of "skills shortage!" is just a loop recording, part of the megacorps' ceaseless lobbying of government government to loosen the rules around employment, minimum wage, zero hour contracts, intra-company transfers, offshoring,...

Jim 59

Skills shortage

I don't believe there is a skills shortage in IT, the low pay belies it. There may, however, be a shortage in the odd combinations of skills which employers sometimes ask for. Things which rarely occur together and therefore rarely in the same person. Eg MS Outlook and Perl, or Solaris 10 and Blue Coat appliances and Powershell.

Adverts for random combinations started appearing in the last recession, I guess because employers were forced to get rid of expensive staff and instead recruit folks who could do both jobs badly for a third of the price. The UK is booming but not employers' appetites to pay recession wages. Can't blame them for trying I guess.

Jim 59

I regularly interview for consultant and senior consultant (sometimes known as solution architects) and the vast majority of people who think they are at this level really, really aren't

@AC "Consultant/senior consultant" is not the same as "solution architect". The problem you see in interviews - which you blame on candidates deluding themselves - might be caused by you confusing the roles, or advertising for one then interviewing for the other. A senior consultant and an experienced solutions architect would struggle to do each other's jobs.

Jim 59

"94% of Brit tech bosses just can't get the staff these days"

...well not at 1998 prices, anyway. Third Jobserve hit was a hopeful "tech boss" in Nottingham who will cheerily pay 21k for 18 month's experience in " Windows, MS Exchange, Active Directory, WMWare, SQL, Linux".

Just to clarify, 21k is numerically what the above candidate would have earned in 1997,or 32k after inflation adjustment. And the 2014 job isn't even permanent, so presumably no sick, no hol, no training.

Brit IT workers are so stressed that 'TWO-THIRDS' want to quit

Jim 59

Cool AC. Can we have pics of windows, scuba, bathers...

Ahem. Unfortunately, IT workers have caught the brunt of globalization. Also, I think the treatment of IT workers as lowest-of-the-low is a kind of UK culture thing. I would recommend staying away from generic IT if possible, which can be outsourced anywhere and is seen as a cost to be supressed not a tool to be invested in. Try to move sideways into hi-tech areas using your IT skills.

Jim 59

I RoCk !!!

Every so often somebody writes a post which basically translates: "I'm absolutely great, me!". Sometimes they are trolling. When they are not, that just makes it worse, somehow.

10 PRINT "Happy 50th Birthday, BASIC" : GOTO 10

Jim 59

?SN ERROR

Good article. There is no doubt BASIC is groovy and quick to learn. Coupled with colour and sound it made the first home computers into attractive and interesting items.

True it lacks structure and teaches bad habits, but so do stabalizers on a bike. If it had been Pascal, and not BASIC, nobody would have bothered to type in 1-line programmes in Laskys/Commet, or learned to program.

Google in NOT EVIL shocker: Bins student email ad scanning

Jim 59

Re: I remain sanguine on the email scanning

@AC truth is you have no idea how, why, or when Google is scanning your mail, or what part that plays in a larger surveilance of you. So it is nonsense to come up with "It's okay so long as..." scenarios.

Jim 59

Re: Targeted Advertising?

"Privacy" is a cousin of "freedom". When one is damaged, so is the other.

Top tip, power users – upgrading Ubuntu may knacker your Linux PC

Jim 59

Dogged very rude but right. This kind of grub breakage is almost an everyday occurance for dual-booting users, as is the well known fix. And muffing grub is hardly knackering your PC. Guess it is still a bug though.

Lost treasure of Atari REVEALED

Jim 59

Buried treasure

I demand that The Register sends a man with a spade to win this treasure for Blighty.

Selfies are so 2013. Get ready for DRONIES – the next hipster-cam-gasm

Jim 59

Top first sentence

"It's the social phenomenon that's taking self-obsession to new heights. "

Lol.

Storage management tools SUCK. We're getting what we pay for

Jim 59

As far as I know SAN admin/management tools were never designed to squeeze out the last drop of capacity from storage, they were designed to make management quicker and easier, and therefore cheaper. Capacity optimization was never a priority.

The SAN tools are okay but they don't address the complicated bits on the client, where the admin must be adept at VxVM, ZFS, LVM, SVM, multipathing, mkfs on the Unix side, and another set of complexities on the windows side.

@Ianalot there is/was a simulator for VxVM out there but little else. The manufacturers perhaps prefer to sell you courses at £1000 per day.

JavaScript guru slots into Mozilla CTO seat left empty by anti-gay marriage ex-boss

Jim 59

Andreas Gal

If Andreas hasn't got the right political views, he better get them PDQ.

Lost artworks by Andy Warhol found on 80s-era FLOPPY DISKS

Jim 59

Re: Sorry Neil McAllister.

No, as other news outlets and comments have said, the software was all pre-release, and the format had to be reverse engineered by the students. If it was simply a matter of starting an emulator or getting an Amiga down from the loft, there would have been no university involvement.

Minecraft players can now download Denmark – all of it – in 1:1 scale

Jim 59

Memory test

Who remembers the Cambridge University Doom wad ?

RIP net neutrality? FCC mulls FAST LANES for info superhighway

Jim 59

Re: A Very Strong Stink of Corruption

Seems to be overwhelmingly against the public interest. Imagine if they did this with the road network. People would be manning the barricades.

Shocking new low for SanDisk – 15nm flash chips rolling out its fabs

Jim 59

15nm

About the same distance a man's beard grows in 1/8 of a second ?

(1mm/day)

Dell charges £5 to switch on power-saving for new PCs (it takes 5 clicks)

Jim 59

Dell

Fair enough, it's a rip off. But just to be contrary, a techno-phobe who earns (say) £20 an hour might think it worth spending £5 to save 2 hours of his time.

It narks me more to see Comet selling Ethernet cables for £20

http://www.currys.co.uk/gbuk/computing-accessories/accessories-and-bags/power-cables/pc-cables/sandstrom-scat61512-cat6-ethernet-cable-15m-12567143-pdt.html

Google adds a sense of history to Street View with archive footage

Jim 59

Free chocolate !

Lots of excitement about what Google giving us. Not so much about what we give them in return.

Enterprise storage will die just like tape did, say chaps with graphs

Jim 59

Wikibon

I checked out Wikibon and their website. I love their excitement, enthusiasm and openness. In the interests of balance however, it is worth noting that they have only 5 employees and appear to be really just a small internet tech forum, founded in 2007. This does not make them a world authority on tech trends.

"server san" does not appear to be a thing outside of Wikibon (google), and their definition of it seems to be a renaming of "nearline storage" that people got very excited about in 2008.

Why would a small company puff such a feint idea ? Maybe I lack the vision thing.

EU: Let's cost financial traders $400m a day, because EVIL BANKERS. Right?

Jim 59

Re: Speculation

A complex issuue indeed, and with a whole fleet of vested interests circulating around. On the one hand we have the banks, who damn near trashed the western world a bit ago, facing off against the EU, a body which could drain an olympic sized swimming pool of gravy in 10 seconds. The EU is probably narked that London is Europe's biggest financial centre, so anythong to put the mockers on that is fair game for them. The traders, as Mage says, have never generated a penny of actual wealth in their lives, and make a living by digging holes and filling them in again. The pension companies continue to have it good, largely because, incredibly and uniquely in 2014, they are allowed to charge for pensions in secret and abstract whatever they want from your pot without even setting out the figues in an invoice. Whoa there I have reached MAXRANT, an algorithmic constant which stops commentards from going completely doolally and then--

Oh er, and yeah good article.

EE & Vodafone will let you BONK on the TUBE – with Boris' blessing

Jim 59

Alas for the El Reg headline writer

What happened ? Is it true he retired to become a bikini inspector in California ?

El Reg Editors' Lolz Lacking

- Comely Commentard Calls it out

Github cofounder resigns after clearance in sex-harass probe

Jim 59

No AC, too much tarring with the same brush there. Richards was an extremist nutter IMO but Horvath is reasonable. They are very different.

Ubuntu 14.04 LTS: Great changes, but sssh don't mention the...

Jim 59

the look and feel of an OS designed for a 5-year old using a laptop or tablet.

Surprising how many distros are still following the "make-my-pc-look-like-a-giant-iphone" design model, even though release after release shows the folly of it, including the recent Windows 8 / Metro debacle.

... the Mir graphics stack which Canonical is hoping will one day support both its desktop and mobile offerings.

Stop it Canonical. Stop it.

Most Americans doubt Big Bang, not too sure about evolution, climate change – survey

Jim 59

Americans == totally thick

...and they've got the Nobel prizes to prove it.

Jim 59

Rant bait

14:02 El Reg baits headbangers

14:03 Headbangers successfully baited

WTF happened to Pac-Man?

Jim 59

Play on emulator

eg. mame. It's the only way.

Spanish village called 'Kill the Jews' mulls rebranding exercise

Jim 59

Re: This message brought to you by religion

it's not the "religion" part, it's the "organized" part that's the problem.

Darned right. Which is why I went to the disorganised church today. First off, half the congregation were facing the wrong way, then the priest started off reading his dry cleaning list before the PA system broke down, people were bumping into each other on roller skates, somebody was throwing confetti for some reason and then a big bag of flour fell onto--

Jim 59

Re: @ Don Jefe

To all those blaming "religion" for all badness, you might as well blame shoes. Shoes have been present at every atrocity, and have enabled every evil act, have they not ? Failing that, perhaps blame science, which gave us the hydrogen bomb. Or blame engineering, without which we would not have the machine gun, tank, warship, or Exocete missile. No. We fall to evil becuase we are human beings, that's all. Accept it, and stop trying to pass all the blame to some vague external agency.

Jim 59

Re: 14th century?

Hi Register you have come close to commemorating Good Friday by publishing a story that could, to an unsympathetic eye, appear designed to provoke sectarian divisions in order to generate clicks. Being a long term fan of both Haines and El Reg, I know this is the last thing you would want to do. I hope your advertisers see it in the same way.

Virgin Media so, so sorry for turning spam fire-hose on its punters

Jim 59

Re: Spam

Yes I know about email client filtering. I was making the point that spam was once used only by scammers but is increasingly used by legitimate companies.

Jim 59

Spam

An increasing amount of spam comes from legitimate businesses. Buy a windscreen wiper and the garage will spam you. Often you can turn off the spam but sometimes not. Paypal has lost customers by spamming them unwanted "activity" reports monthly. Where you can deactivate the spam, it always involves jumping through hoops and the company always has an incentive to start spamming you again at some point.

Parent gabfest Mumsnet hit by SSL bug: My heart bleeds, grins hacker

Jim 59

Not sure if you are aware of Mumsnet's solid left-wing credentials, but founder Justine Roberts is married to Ian Katz, BBC Newsnight editor and ex deputy editor of the Guardian, the paper from which Newsnight takes its senior staff.

While at The Guardian, Katz (says wikipedia) oversaw a campaign to influence the outcome of elections in Clark County, Ohio to help swing the 2004 US Presidential election against Bush and in favour of Kerry. It was not successful and it was not popular with Clark County voters who, surprisingly, don't like foreigners interfering in their election process.

Roberts studied "PPE" (Politics, Philospohy and Economics) at Oxford, a fairly new subject also studied, at Oxford, by Labour MPs Angela Eagle, Maria Eagle, Ed Balls, Yvette Cooper, David Milliband as well as PM David Cameron.

Funny how many of our leaders went to the same school, lived in the same street, studied the same (slightly naff) subject at the same place, are in business together, living together, are related to each other, (often concealing the fact with maiden names). It perhaps explains how come much party policy, large swathes of the BBC, media public institutions are papered over with an unthinking groupthink so uniform you can't see the join. Sorry for the lengthy off topic rantathon.

Batten down the hatches, Ubuntu 14.04 LTS due in TWO DAYS

Jim 59

Re: @asdf The desktop deadend.

Can I do a major version upgrade of Mint yet without backing up/reinstalling from scratch/restoring? No? Bye then!

Just my view but version upgrades are naff, better to wipe and install. A mega upgrade tends to leave behind a patchwork.

Jim 59

Re: @asdf The desktop deadend.

Good news, looking forward to Mint LTS. Install it, get everything working then look forward to several years of stability. I recently started running a business on my PC and regretfully must say good bye to Fedora after 6 years. The bleeding edge is not compatible with business use, where any instability is an utter bloodpressurey nightmare rather than an inconvenience.

Red Hat bets on 'Project Atomic' for its container-loaded server future

Jim 59

Docker

I am struggling to see the difference between this and other lightweight containers, eg Solaris zones.