Posts by Velv

Life Cycle

The tool used and the concept are tow entirely different propositions.

A "BACKUP" is a secondary copy maintained to permit recovery of the system/service/data in the event of loss or failure in the primary copy. An "ARCHIVE" is part of the data life cycle, part of the primary copy.

So if your BACKUP is only there to allow recovery of a failed system, you really should never need more that 2-4 weeks of backup.

Now there are people screaming at me in horror. However it does come down to your data life cycle. If you think you may have a need to go back 6 months, that is part of the primary life cycle, and you may need an archive if you don't want to keep the primary copy on your primary service.

The ultra-cautious might want to keep a backup for more than 4 weeks "in case we get a virus or corruption or something and we need to go back to how the server was 3 months ago". But seriously, if you need to roll back more than four weeks the backup is the least of your worries - you have got a "backup" of all the transactions/changes/business operations that took place since then, don't you?

The moral of the story is - get your backup, your archive and your data life cycle concepts right, and the choice and management of the tool becomes so much easier.

Advantages and disadvantages and who you're trying to pay...

Envisage a bunch of guys or girls going out for a meal. The bill comes to £26 (including tip) a head and everybody chucks in either £30 or £40 and nobody will admit they expect change. Plus you've all had to make that trip to the ATM beforehand, and you're going to need to go again as you haven't got enough for a round in the pub next door now that everyone's agreed with their better half they're staying out late.

Now image one person pays on their bank card, and all their mates pay them the right amount directly by their known, used and trusted phone number.

Zapp may be aimed at merchants in this iteration, but the scope for trusted or semi-trusted payments is very wide indeed. Who do you pay on a regular basis in cash? Window cleaner, milkman, car wash? Small value semi-trusted payments.

Make It So

What is your business? Are you a bank, supermarket, manufacturer, or IT Business?

In reality there is no longer such a business as a Bank. You are now an IT business. Don't believe me? Look at your personal money. How much each month do you take out in cash? I bet you move at least ten times as much around every month electronically. Welcome to running an IT BUSINESS.

Now scale it up to an Enterprise with millions of customers who expect it to be available 24/7/365. It's not about legacy systems. It's not about resilience patterns. Or DR, or software currency, or agility, business continuity, process, policy, RBAC, security, or testing the plans or offshoring or outsourcing or follow the sun or any one thing.

It is about EVERYTHING in IT working as one. Once your board of directors grasps the concept they are no longer a bank but an IT Enterprise then you stand a chance of survival.

Make it so.

If you're not paying for it, you're not the customer. You're the product being sold.

But sometimes it's nice to be wanted

Fixed Contracts

For proper consumer fairness short term consumer contracts should be fixed totally. No right to increase within a limit, only a clause that should an increase occur the contract can be ended immediately.

Since the rate of inflation is small there should be no requirement for the vendor to increase the price for the duration (12,18,24) of the deal unless costs and prices rise substantially at which point the option to end early comes into effect.

This is about fair consumer practise - who's going to be the first to provide decent service?

All Apple did was "negotiate with suppliers for the best possible prices" - good business sense. But when your negotiations include exclusivity of supply agreements you are preventing competition.

I'm not suggesting Amazon's attempts to corner the market were any better, but at least they left the market open for competitors to negotiate cheap prices and supplies.

What is really scary about Apple is that by restricting the market and publishers you are controlling what can be read and by whom it can be read. Very soon the world is only reading Apple sanctioned texts.

"Border Security, Economic Opportunity and Immigration Modernization Act"

Wot, no acronym? What were the Merkins thinking!

Who's paying?

The clue's in the first paragraph: data from his "now-defunct Megaupload business"

So if nobody is paying to host the data, why shouldn't they delete it? There was no court order to prevent them deleting it. If Kim felt it was crucial for his defence he should either of got a court order to force them to keep it (which is unlikely), or paid for them to keep it.

As an aside, this is another great example of the pitfalls of cloud - even if you've got agreements with your supplier, who has your supplier got supply agreements with.

There's nothing wrong with using cloud services. But clouds have a habit of being blown away.

No different from almost every piece of consumer wireless kit I've ever seen. They all come with a default password, it's usually on a sticker on the bottom, and it's not usually more than eight characters.

So the problem isn't the iPhone, it's the fact that the vast majority of users aren't aware of the risks of not changing it (or that it even exists).

Even if you do change it (say to a 40 character seemingly random non dictionary mix of upper, lower, symbols and numbers), most users will then rely on Wireless Protected Setup (WPS) to make adding new devices easy. And WPS can be cracked quicker than the default passwords being attacked here.

Oh ffs. The Merkins spy on the Chinese. THe Merkins spy on the Russians, the Iranians, the Israelis, the British, everybody. The Chinese spy on the Merkins, the British, the Iranians, everybody. Everybody spies on everybody.

And to paraphrase Yes, Prime Minister: we know they spy, and we know they know we spy; we know they know we know they know, and although they all probably certainly know that they all probably spy, they don’t certainly know that, although they probably spy, there is no probability that everyone else certainly doesn't know everyone spies.

NSFW Comment

In case you've never heard this radio prank:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sEZ4YbWSmb0

Good looking on Radio

"The advert did not say why it was important for a radio presenter to be good looking."

Because the first thing most listeners do when they hear a sexy voice on the radio is google the name. So one can understand why new recruits need to be considered good looking, since there was a reason some of the longer standing presenters were on radio. (And to be honest, the eye candy was usually rubbish at presenting radio, the not-so eye candy being the much more entertaining presenter).

Paris - example in point - eye candy = rubbish presenter.

Like all other religious wars, the participants will escalate their hostilities until they start taking each other out.

Somebody take a big white flag and get this lot talking to each other without the ecumenical advisor's (lawyers) being present. Draw a line under the patents and start working together. All parties claim to hold patents - do a quick swapping of cards and everyone wins (except the lawyers).

Question Authority, and the authorities will question you!

So the Chinese have a fixed date to perform government sponsored maintenance. At least as a sysadmin you can plan for it.

In the good ole U.S. of A. the Merkins have a much better system. They just shut you down whenever and wherever they like. They'll seize your domain name and replace it with the FBI seal. They'll spy on you even if you aren't a citizen or resident in the country, and ask foreign powers to do their dirty work. They'll force you out of business by putting pressure on bank and payment handlers not to deal with you. And they'll make exaggerated claims about losses greater then the entire world debt over those MP3s you stole.

OK, so America isn't China, and there is an element of free speech. But don't for one minute think America is either free or a democracy.

Vision

"Why?" "Why?" "Why?" "Why?" "Why?" "Why?" "Why?" "Why?" "Why?"

Don't any of the commentards have any vision? Much of the backbone of the telephone network is IP. There are various proprietary IP services out there. There are a multitude of other channels of communication.

UNIFIED COMMUNICATIONS starts with bringing things together one by one. So Skype now works for Microsoft users. Cisco are working on other business integration offerings. Telephony vendors see the benefits. Slowly the interconnects will join up and we end up all being able to communicate from anywhere (how you as a business manage that is up to you). The underlying stuff will be come irrelevant. Just because the user happens to be on Skype won't mean you need to be.

Moore's Law Theory

In the strictest sense Moore's Law is under threat - the number of transistors may not double ever two years. It indeed has hard limits in the size of not only the tracks but the transistor - can't go smaller than the atom (yet)

However perhaps more interesting is the correlation between the computing power in the same physical space and the cost of said computing power. How closely does that continue to match Moore's Law?

There's also other avenues of computational power on the horizon - quantum and optical processors might reduce the number of elements in a processor.

"Thou shall not speak words I do not want you to speak"

Censorship, be it governments, religions, or organised groups, is censorship. Anonymous are no better than the EDL in that respect. Intimidating the members of EDL is censorship. Vigilante action will go wrong, and has been seen in other places, the wrong people are named.

I don't like what EDL stand for, but I stand by their right to say it. By all means campaign against their arguments. But as soon as you censor, you radicalise.