* Posts by SirWired 1

113 publicly visible posts • joined 24 May 2010

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Microsoft makes some certification exams open book

SirWired 1

In the short term, it'll increase pass rates. In the long term, it'll make for a better exam.

I've been certified (all the way to Professional Architect) on all three of the major cloud providers, and of the three, MS's exams have been the heaviest on the sorts of questions that could be looked up easily in the documentation. (e.g. 'Which Azure SKU do you need for feature X' or 'What's the correct CLI parameter for option Y') In the short term, pass rates will go up as the percentage of people that answer those particular questions correctly, goes up.

In the long term? Those sorts of questions will either be asked less during Item Development, or their contribution to the overall score will go down as more people get them right during the Pilot Testing phase of exam writing. (There will be fewer of the questions and/or they'll simply be worth fewer points.)

While "Ability to find things that are covered in the documentation" isn't a skill without value, it makes the test better if it's not a major part of the test score.

Linux has nearly half of the desktop OS Linux market

SirWired 1

Re: ChromeOS is a fake linux

"The Linux world"? What even is that? Who decides? I thought the whole point of Free Software was that you get to use it however you like; even ways other people don't like.

Don't panic. Google offering scary .zip and .mov domains is not the end of the world

SirWired 1

"This is OK, because .com was used in MS-DOS!" Really?

This was monumentally stupid, and these pathetic "some other domain was already doing it!" excuses even moreso. Billions of Internet users were not even *alive* when MS-DOS was still in use (before being largely hidden by Windows95) and of the rest, how many remember that it was once an extension for an executable? (How many even knew that at the time? You never needed to actually type the extension to execute a program. And almost all software users actually used were (and still are) .exe files.)

.pl? .sh? .rs? Really? I'm sure I'm not the only one who has noticed that security scams often target the less-than-security-savvy, who are probably not going to think of any of those as file types at all. But everybody's downloaded a QuickTime movie or zip file at some point in their lives.

The domains should never been approved, but if they are going to be approved, fixing the URL display behavior would be a good start.

Rackspace racks up job cuts amid market downturn and talk of offshoring

SirWired 1

Can't have anything to do with that total ransomware fiasco; no, not at all.

It's silly that they won't admit the obvious that a bunch of the downturn in Rackware's sales specifically has to do with that complete ransomware disaster... truly a "You Had One Job!!!" situation. And of course it was compounded by the extended nature of the outage, and abysmally-poor communication. Ignoring the elephant in the room does nobody any favors at all.

AWS puts datacenter in shipping container for the Pentagon

SirWired 1

It's been done before...

Many years ago I did some minor work on a floating datacenter project meant for the Zumwalt-class destroyer. It was unit-built in a warehouse, with all the IT equipment already inside, and sealed and embedded in the ship as a whole during construction. While that class of ship was an overpriced disaster, the DC was still a neat project. The entire center was completely sealed and watertight, with even the data connections using special watertight military-grade connectors. (e.g. instead of RJ-45, it was a screw-in sealed stainless steel monster.) I saw a video of them performing shock testing where they towed it out on a special barge and then set off charges underneath to make sure it would still work after an explosion. During construction they even did their best to keep dirt out; there were adhesive pads you had to step on before going inside to make sure dirt didn't accumulate in inaccessible corners.

Binance robbed of $600 million in crypto-tokens

SirWired 1

Re: Explain to me how this is supposed to be better than the old way of doing things?

Bitcoin is not very decentralized; most of the power over the chain is held by the largest miners, and they can (and have) produced code forks. (Not to mention that because of the beyond-slow transaction rate, most BTC transactions are performed by centralized exchanges, not the BTC blockchain itself.)

SirWired 1

Explain to me how this is supposed to be better than the old way of doing things?

Lets look at a bunch of reasons crypto is supposedly better:

- "The transactions are immutable, no matter what! [Unless the people in charge decide they don't like your transactions, in which case they aren't.]

- "It's all decentralized, making your funds safe!" [Unless the ownership or other form of control is held by a small group of people.]

- "Everybody gets a say in how things are run!" [Explain to me how that's different than a corporation with voting shares again?]

- "Code is law! No ambiguity or wiggle-room!" [Unless the people in charge decide that they didn't like a particular piece of code, and retroactively apply changes to it.]

- "Everything's decentralized, making it extremely safe!" [Except for the fact that transaction costs are too high and/or the chain too slow, meaning many transactions aren't even done on the chain, just by the same sort of centralized structures that did them before.]

- "Inflation is strictly controlled!" [Except when somebody counterfeits funds because crypto code is wickedly-complex, and difficult to get correct; and you are kidding yourself if you think there aren't crypto coins where this is a feature, not a bug.]

Will optics ever replace copper interconnects? We asked this silicon photonics startup

SirWired 1

Wake me up when it ships, which will be about never.

I've heard talk of optical interconnects for, literally, more than a quarter-century, and they are *always* "just around the corner"; I expect they'll ship around the same time as laptop fuel cells, which have been promised for just about as long, with shipping product perpetually imminent, but never arriving.

Broadcom to 'focus on rapid transition to subscriptions' for VMware

SirWired 1

Well, the experience of Symantec hasn't been encouraging

I've been trying to buy a simple license upgrade for a Symantec security appliance, and not only has Broadcom been mind-blowingly incompetent, they've been *actively hostile* and stubbornly refuse to lift a finger to solve the problem they've created. (Okay, they've lifted the middle finger.) This was also a transition from perpetual to subscription licensing, and it's turned my H/W product into a brick in lieu of a $$$$ payment covering the whole company.

Brocade has still been okay, but that's an old-line H/W business.

Happy birthday Windows 3.1, aka 'the one that Visual Basic kept crashing on'

SirWired 1

Well, at least they disappeared in later versions!

Kudos to Microsoft for completely eliminating the General Protection Fault... by renaming it to Unrecoverable Application Error, and then Illegal Operation. Now if only they could have eradicated the Blue Screen of Death by making it purple or something instead.

SirWired 1

Windows 3.1 had a Registry? Huh; I had no idea.

I used Win 3.11 for a pretty-intense year when I was a freshman in college. I don't remember ever beating on the thing, whereas when I moved to Windows 95 (simultaneously with starting a job doing support for it) I spent countless hours in hand-to-keyboard combat with regedit. (Getting Novell to work on a mid-90's IBM Aptiva was a challenge, to put it mildly) I guess the Win 3.1 registry didn't actually do much, or at least didn't muck too heavily with the inner workings of Windows?

HP polishes the redundancy cannon, prepares to fire 16% of workforce

SirWired 1

What is the deal with buzzword bingo?

Do corporate executives genuinely not realize that generic buzzword-bingo (e.g. this example of "advancing our leadership, disrupting industries and aggressively transforming the way we work") actively turns off most of those that read it?

What sort of lobotomy takes place for somebody to think that this is anything *but* the exact opposite of useful (much less inspiring) writing? Heck, you could argue that passing around tequila shots and hiring Run D-M-C is *less* inappropriate than that anodyne garbage in a press release where you announce axing a fifth of the workforce.

What's that? Uber isn't actually worth $82bn? Reverse-gear IPO shows the gig (economy) is up

SirWired 1

It was a resounding success... For Uber, not their investors.

An IPO raises captial for a company that does not have to be paid back. Ever. Convincing a group of investors to pay more than what the market shortly thereafter says it's worth is a triumph! An IPO that leaps up in value means the company didn't get nearly as much cash as they should have for that share of the business.

Head of Apple's insider trading program charged with… you guessed it... insider trading

SirWired 1

WTF? He should *know* this is like shooting fish in a barrell for the SEC

Fortuitous large trades in your own employer's stock will get your broker's compliance department to send your account info to the SEC without even pausing for breath. You'd think the head of their Insider Trading program would *know*, with absolute certainty, how easy this is for them to find and prosecute.

Could have been worse, I suppose; he could have decided to pick up options trading.

Seeing as Bitcoin is going so, so well, Ohio becomes first US state to take biz taxes in BTC

SirWired 1

Paying taxes on credit *can* be a good idea

Sure, if you have the money, paying income taxes with a credit card is stupid. The transaction fees levied by nearly every tax authority out there are indeed spendy; usually 2+%.

But if you *don't* have the money on-hand, most advisers *do* advise you to pay with a credit card if you have one because the transaction fees + credit card interest, while high, are a *lot* less than what the IRS is going to charge you.

US military manuals hawked on dark web after files left rattling in insecure FTP server

SirWired 1

Not really a big deal

Looking at the source article, these were not even For Official Use Only documents, just a mix of ITAR-regulated stuff (so, not for export) and similarly unclassified material.

This is embarrassing, and somebody might earn a mild reprimand, but not the sort of thing any sort of scandal is made from.

You just activated my battlecard: How IBM sales droids plan to whack flash array rivals

SirWired 1

Some minor comments

The V9000 also uses the SVC/Spectrum Virtualize/V7k/V5k code base (though maybe this FS9100 is the successor to the V9k? Looks like it...) The A9000/A9000R run on XIV/Spectrum Accelerate code, while the FS900 (which I believe is the internal fast-flash-storage building block for the V9k, FS9100, and A9k) runs an IBM-i-fied version of the original TMS code base.

I guess you could say that IBM has a current all-flash option no matter which storage array from them you've used in the past, but it's a fair criticism to point out that three entirely different flash storage lines is a little crazy, as each has advantages the other does not.

Really the V9k (and I think the FS9100) are a marketing bundle of the SVC and FS900. If you already own the SVC/Spectrum Virtualize, you can just put an FS900 behind it, turn on EasyTier, and call it a day; unless there's some sort of pricing games that make the FS9100 a cheaper way of doing that, and you have a good way to migrate between the two.

Another staffer at mega-hacked Equifax slapped with insider trading rap

SirWired 1

And another low-hanging fruit for insider trading

*sigh* Another inside-trader that didn't get the memo that a 1st-time short-term options purchase that pays off handsomely will have your account records sent directly to the SEC so they can look for the source of your foresight. Double-Bonus Points for not even going through an intermediary AND congrats on completing the Trifecta of stupid insider trading by doing it with shares of YOUR EMPLOYER.

If the SEC started the case in the morning they probably sent out the first nastygrams by lunchtime.

I guess going after small-fry like this is way easier than actually punishing serious misconduct resulting in $B's in losses.

Google gives its $1m Turing prize to, er, top Google bods: RISC men Hennessy, Patterson

SirWired 1

They do write a decent textbook

I remember my late 90’s Hennessy and Patterson, and I remember it being one of my better-written textbooks. Not quite at the level of sublime terse perfection that was the ANSI K&R, but still quite good, and the price was not completely ludicrous.

Talk about a MINER offense! Crypto-cash crafter clashes with T-Mob US in hipster haven

SirWired 1

Your tax dollars at work

The FCC's enforcement division literally has a fleet of vehicles equipped with direction-finding gear and spectrum analyzers to get to the bottom of problems like this one. They cut the roof off and replace it with fiberglass with the antennas hidden underneath.

Bored 'drivers' pushed Google Waymo into ditching autopilot tech

SirWired 1

This is not surprising in the least. I'm a big proponent of the idea that until 100% self-driving gets figured out, we can't really advance beyond adaptive cruise and lane-keep assist.

The Virginia Tech center for transportation (or whatever they call it) routinely does driver observation studies, outfitting ordinary Americans cars' with interior and exterior cameras, radar, microphones, the works. And they use this to develop stats on things like distracted driving, use of driver aids, exactly what happened during accidents, etc.

While they've produced a lot of useful information, the most striking point is how quickly people forget there are cameras pointing at the driver at all times. They didn't go into details, but have said that the undergrads they hire to review the footage have seen some pretty freaky things on those cameras, and even the "normal" ones routinely do some pretty unsafe things.

Google's Big Hardware Bet: Is this what a sane business would do?

SirWired 1

I don't think this is a marketshare play

I think this is more a case of Google wanting to bring it's "Model Phone" development in-house as a way of demonstrating to OEMs of what Google is thinking as a basic Android platform. Yeah, they'll sell some phones themselves along the way, but that's not really the point.

That said, you have to wonder why, if this was such a great idea, they unloaded Moto to begin with.

A storage giant wants to give you 46,763...

SirWired 1

Probably some government regulation

I have no doubt that if you ask Nutanix for pricing, the sales goon pulls up some internal website, selects the appropriate drop-downs, and out pops a price quote. But it would not surprise me if some government agency (or other large procurement organization) required published price lists in order to cut down on shenanigans with kickbacks.

It's probably easier to program the pricing system to produce this ridiculous document than it is to make the pricing system itself a publicly-available (and public-quality) service.

Symbolic IO CEO cuffed by cops, vanishes from his storage startup

SirWired 1

So I guess somebody else will have to be brought up to speed on their B.S product claims?

I guess this means that some new guy will have to learn all their B.S. claims well, so he doesn't conflict with the utter nonsensical and mathematically impossible crap they've been telling the press so far.

(Short version: They claim they "aren't doing compression", but magically have a way to "reduce" the amount of space data takes up in a fashion that works on all data, including random data. (This is mathematically impossible; it's referred to as the "pigeonhole problem.") And because that didn't raise ENOUGH B.S. alarms, they also claim you can take the output and run it through the compression engine of your choice to further reduce it. (Because they claim it actually "hasn't been compressed" yet, it's just been [insert arm-waving gibberish here.]

ElReg did an interview with these guys, but instead of asking difficult questions about how they are apparently they can violate the laws of mathematics, the idiot of an interviewer asked what the blinky lights on top were for, and why the Magical Hardware Module plugged in the back instead of the front.

GPS III satellites and ground station projects get even later as costs gently spiral

SirWired 1

Do you have any idea how GPS works?

"Broadly speaking, in Raytheon’s words, the ground system which collates signals from the satellites to deduce the user’s location is the 'brain of the entire GPS system'."

Raytheon didn't say anything like that (okay, the actual words in the quotation marks are correct, but that paraphrasing before that isn't.) The OCX system does not "collate signals from the satellites to deduce the user's location." An individual user's GPS receiver does that. This is kind of GPS 101 here...

The link to Raytheon does a pretty good job explaining what the OCX system is for; you might want to read it again, and pay attention this time. And Wikipedia can tell you all about GPS in general...

I've got a verbal govt contract for Hyperloop, claims His Muskiness

SirWired 1

This. Boring hundreds of miles of tunnels through widely varying geology is not exactly an inexpensive or easy undertaking. (Even if he develops a magical tunnel-boring machine, you still have to truck away all that volume of dirt/rock you are boring through.)

There's a reason rail systems run on the surface whenever possible; bridges and tunnels are difficult, expensive, and maintenance-intensive.

Ex-NASA bod on Gwyneth Paltrow site's 'healing' stickers: 'Wow. What a load of BS'

SirWired 1

Goop's always good for a laugh

"Our content is meant to highlight unique products and offerings, find open-minded alternatives."

More like "empty-minded alternatives"

I used to think Goop was some kind of ironic parody where Paltrow was plumbing the depths to which IQ's will sink when people read stuff endorsed by a celebrity. But in a world where Donald Trump can get elected president, I don't think that any more.

Silk Road boss Ross Ulbricht denied bid for new trial

SirWired 1

The murder-for-hire was an aggrevating factor

Courts are allowed to take judicial notice of evidence of unsavory things about the defendant when deciding which of an allowed range of sentences will be imposed. You need not be convicted of a crime for evidence regarding it to be used in your sentencing.

A switch with just 49 ns latency? What strange magic is this?

SirWired 1

Cut-through routing (where you don't wait for the whole thing to arrive before transmitting) has been used in switch products for years.

FCC kills plan to allow phone calls on planes – good idea or terrible?

SirWired 1

Yes, this would be bad, but it shows what a hypocrite Pal is

I agree that I can think of few things more annoying than some blowhard marketroid yakking on the phone while I'm confined in a small metal tube hurtling above the ground.

But this also shows what a hypocrite Pal is; when it comes to being a lapdog for his corporate masters, nearly any regulation at all is too loose; he's all too willing to strip anything even vaguely resembling consumer protections. But when it comes to HIS precious hide being annoyed on an aircraft, he's willing to do whatever it takes.

Symbolic IO CEO insists the IRIS i1 is more than a bunch of pretty lights

SirWired 1
WTF?

That interview was bizarre

He's claiming 95% reductions in memory usage and 75% reductions in CPU usage that are somehow universally applicable, and you are asking him about why the module plugs in from the rear? Why there's a *bleep*-ing window on top of the chassis?

What the hell is going on with you and this company? This is your fourth (at least!) article about these guys, and you have yet to, even once, dig into the most fantastical claims for their product.

Symbolic IO reveals tech bound to give server old guard the willies

SirWired 1

RLL was just encoding, not compression

RLL (Run-length Limited) is just a data encoding scheme. HIgh-speed serial data storage and transmission don't work if you just dump your bits on your media... you run into a couple problems:

- Clock signals are never 100% accurate or synchronized. To get around this, all data receivers use something called a Phase-Locked Loop to "lock on" to the proper timing. But for this to work, it needs some volt transitions to detect. Encoding usually forces a certain minimum number of bit transitions onto the wire; without it, a string of all 0 or 1 would cause the loss of clock sync.

- The threshold for the receiver can drift. This is called "DC Offset". If there's a continuous stream of, say, 1's, the receiver will start to have problems telling the difference between 0 and 1. Encoding tries to nudge the number of 0's and 1's to be roughly even.

What RLL isn't is compression. Not even a bit. Under any circumstances. They merely allow data to be transmitted faster/stored more densely than might ordinarily be the case. (In this context, "storage density" means "can cram more physical bits on a given area of magnetic media"; it doesn't refer to compression.)

SirWired 1

And again, how is this not compression?

Every time these guys get asked "how is this not just compression", all that comes back is a bunch of ridiculous arm-waving. 95% reduction in RAM usage? Seriously? This is at least the second time you have written about these guys, and STILL not prodded them for answers to these basic questions. I'm rather concerned that every single skeptical B.S. detector you have isn't on full-alert with these folks.

Pure Silicon Valley: Medium asks $5 a month for absolutely nothing

SirWired 1

Yeah, overall their content is a bunch of circle-jerking

I read a blog (The Billfold) that happens to be hosted by Medium, but yeah, overall their content is awful. I figure either the lions-share of their most popular content consists of SV-types congratulating each other on how awesome they all are, or their engine for recommending content for me to read is awful.

On another note, I WOULD like to say the business model of "We lose money on every one we sell, but make up for it volume" applies here, but that actually requires selling something.

I thought the "eyeballs-only" so-called "business model" kinda died out with the 2000 .Com Bust... where did they find the VS's to invest in this?

Cutting Hewlett-Packard Labs down to size

SirWired 1

Memristor, Photonics, and The Machine all MIA... shocker.

How many years have we been hearing about the Memristor, and seeing absolutely no progress towards actually shipping?

And I didn't know that HP Labs was even pursuing photonics, but Sun/Oracle has been promising those for a couple decades now, and has yet to deliver, so it doesn't surprise me that HP jumped on that particular vaporware bandwagon.

Don't get me started on The Machine; it always seemed like a bunch of nebulous crap criminally light on details as to exactly what it was, other than something to do with memory-mapped I/O, which is not exactly a new innovation.

IBM: Yes, it's true. We leaned on researchers to censor exploit info

SirWired 1

Re: I don't see any "shaming" or "censoring" here...

They weren't calling for the report to be pulled entirely; anybody that cared to look could plainly see that the exploit existed.

SirWired 1

I don't see any "shaming" or "censoring" here...

IBM's request was made informally, but it was polite, and not phrased as a demand or threat. Perhaps both you and the researcher are reading a little too much into it.

Ted Cruz channels Senator McCarthy in wrongheaded internet power grab crusade

SirWired 1

There's some real questions, and they didn't get asked

There were some real questions that could have been asked of ICANN and the DoC about the transition, specifically persistent issues in ICANNs accountability.

Instead, it appears Cruz decided to hijack the hearing so he could well, do whatever it is he does.

Since not even his GOP brethren like him (dickish individual grandstanding is par for the course for him), and since nobody even asked the important questions on accountability, we can guess that there will be no rider preventing the contract handover, and it'll happen at the end of the month on schedule.

Google's become an obsessive stalker and you can't get a restraining order

SirWired 1

Yes, you can view everything Google has on you; it's called Google Dashboard. They've had it for years. And Dashboard can also be used to tell Google to stop collecting things.

SirWired 1

"What the FCC did this year, with little fanfare, was cripple telecoms companies and wireless networks from doing what Google and Facebook do. That’s a very odd decision. ... If behavioural advertising is so bad consumers need an opt-out, how come you can opt out of your ISP's profiling, but not Google’s. "

Really?

Then what do the steps here do?

http://lmgtfy.com/?q=google+targeted+ads+opt+out

It actually will be Obama who decides whether to end US government oversight of the internet

SirWired 1

I don't see why it shouldn't be delayed (or stopped)

I find the arguments that it would be a good thing to see how well the very latest round of accountability reforms work before handing it over to be very persuasive. Previous rounds of reform have proven to be utterly ineffective, why should we believe that these will actually work?

And, in any case, what's the rush? Why is this happening at all? What problem is ending the DoC contract trying to solve? To my knowledge, the DoC/US Govt. in general, has done precisely nothing to interfere with ICANN/IANAs operations.

Bad blood: US govt bans bio-test biz Theranos' CEO for two years

SirWired 1

Denial: It's not just a river in Egypt

It's astounding that they are continuing to act as if Medicare/Medicaid suspension, the closing of their largest lab, the disappearance of their largest source of customers, and the CEO being banned from the industry is no more than a minor setback. I guess since Holmes herself firmly has her hands on the reigns, and is apparently delusional, the luckless PR flack is just along for the ride.

News Flash: Nobody gives a $hit that you are allegedly overhauling the CA lab to meet the standards you should have met to begin with (had you actually hired people that knew what they were doing) when said overhauled lab will have pretty much zero customers. No insurance company would touch your lab with a ten-foot pole at this point, and no doctor would refer patients there. (And where would the patients go? All those Walgreens centers are gone.)

It would be one thing if they had a huge pool of cash with which to complete a promising technology, and then turn themselves into an IP licensing business. But given the HUGE liability from all those tests they had to throw out, I'd say any cash they have is already spoken for. And there's no evidence they have yet to reveal that the technology IS promising.

What I don't get is how she got all that money to begin with. I mean, she was hailed as some sort of visionary, despite there being no evidence that she had any actual product plan beyond a rhetorical question: "What if we could run a bazillion tests with a drop of blood?" Yes, that would be a wonderful thing, but at no point has she managed to demonstrate that she (or anybody she hired) had the least clue how to achieve it.

If I get my wife to dress up in black turtlenecks, have her enroll in a fancy school to drop out of, can she also get billions of dollars in funding by holding a press conference? "What if you could drive an SUV 100 miles on a single gallon of gas, and no batteries?"

What if? Indeed.

InfiniBand-on-die MIA in Oracle's new 'Sonoma' Sparc S7 processor

SirWired 1

You know what else is MIA? The mythical optical interconnect Sun/Oracle dusts off every year or so for what, the last twenty years?

Maybe it'll ship at the same time MS's DB-based FS does.

Big Pharma's trying to kill us, says man with literally millions to lose

SirWired 1

His conspiracy theory makes no sense

"He also cited mysterious forces in "the world of medical insurance" and "the people in government who are going to be very much affected by a really cheap, really effective, wonderful solution."

Errr... why on earth would insurance want Theranos shut down? If anything else, this would give them leverage to extract cheaper prices out of the incumbent providers, even if they had no interest in buying Theranos tests themselves. And if, in fact, Theranos COULD deliver cheaper tests, well, insurance companies are all about saving money on medical costs (leaves more room for profit.)

And "people in government"? What dog does the FDA have in that fight? If he has some evidence of links between the FDA and incumbent testing companies, he'd do well to present actual evidence instead of vague conspiracy theories.

'Limitless enterprise storage'. Really? Digging deeper into Symbolic IO

SirWired 1

Re: Do your homework.

Nobody's expressing rank incredulity at the idea of a performance improvement; it's the hard-to-believe data reduction claims that are "not compression or deduplication, and are guaranteed" that are either impossible, or suffering from a bad game of Telephone from a clueless marketing hack.

If it isn't compression or dedupe, then what are we to make of the "data reduction" claims? You know, the ones where they both claim they can get "deterministic" results AND run the output through a compression scheme afterwards to get further reduction? (Given that they allege that the output is encrpyted, color me a deep shade of skeptical at the idea it can still be compressed afterwards; unless their "encryption" is ROT-13, you cannot effectively compression encrypted data. Certainly the patent reads like a generic description of compression/dedupe to me.

If anybody's going to be convinced, it's going to take a lot more than

Q: "How is this not compression/dedupe"?

A: "Well, yeah, it sounds like compression/dedupe but isn't."

Q: "But what is it then?"

A: "[Unexplained phrases that look a lot like technobabble] It's so amazing, you just wouldn't understand."

Compression scams that look a lot like this one are literally decades old in computing, and have likewise featured credulous testimonials by investors/beta testers that had been hoodwinked.

SirWired 1

This smells very strongly of B.S.

"Data can be ingested from a local memory channel or any wire such as USB, Direct Wire, TCP/IP Packets, Fibre Channel, InfiniBand, iSCSI, etc."

Huh? I was not aware that "TCP/IP Packets" were a way to ingest anything. Somebody needs to go back and fill in the blanks on his OSI chart. And what's "Direct Wire"?

" The conversion process consists of primary data (D’ [prime]) that is dismantled into substrate components called “fractals” and processed into SbM (Symbolic Bit Markers). Unlike other technologies an advanced algorithm allows for substrate fluctuation."

This reeks of something a Star Trek scriptwriter would toss together. It appears to be word-salad that hints at data compression.

"One of the most compelling elements of Bit Marker technology is that it is lossless and does not require any additional overhead, unlike traditional compression schemes. The output of the conversion process is to store, transmit or both depending on use case. This entire conversion process does not require any delayed post-processing and happens in real-time for the end-user.

Symbolic IO refers to the ingestion conversion process as the “constitution” of data; whereas the data being stored or transported has been converted into this proprietary and unique language format and will remain in that state until a recall or read-back/read-request is received from the system. "

Errr... explain to me again, and please use smaller words, how this is different from Real-Time Compression?

Ahh... here it is (well, not really): "Symbolic IO’s patent is based on being a non-compressive algorithm. Compression is a non-deterministic algorithm that requires many CPU cycles and no guaranteed results. By reformatting binary we see consistent results that de-duplication and compression cannot achieve. There is nothing stopping either us or a customer from applying additional compression techniques to further reduce data, if that is the sole primary focus of the end-user, and they were willing to accept the performance penalties associated with standard compression."

BZZZZTTTT!!!! Wrong answer. If you claim you can reduce data size (with "guaranteed" results), for starters, that is, in fact, "compression" in any sense of the word. When you claim you can then further compress the data afterwards? That's the classic compression scam, with a lot of fancy words around it. There IS NO SUCH THING as "guaranteed" compression (this is not a difficult concept to understand or prove); you cannot ever compress random data. Claiming you can further compress it significantly afterwards using another algorithm is just icing on the B.S. cake (all but the lousiest compression algorithms produce data that cannot significantly be further compressed); again, this is classic compression-scam material.

Bank in the UK? Plans afoot to make YOU liable for bank fraud

SirWired 1

Re: Huh? Consumers aren't liable for online fraud in the US

I won't deny that your specific example was a scam and illegal, but it is also entirely irrelevant to the topic at hand, which is liability for fraudulent online purchases.

SirWired 1

Huh? Consumers aren't liable for online fraud in the US

"UK banks - unlike those in the US - routinely cover the costs of online fraud, at least in cases where customer negligence (such as sharing PIN codes or cards with third parties) is excluded."

What are you talking about? There is not a single US bank I'm aware of that charges consumers one penny in the case of fraudulent purchases. (Technically the law allows up to $50 in liability, but in practice precisely zero banks do this.)

Your next server will be a box full of connected stuff, not a server

SirWired 1

Yeah, about those photonics-based chips

Sun (now Oracle) has been promising optical interconnect as being "just around the corner" for something like twenty years now. Still waiting...

12,000 chopped: Intel finds its inner paranoid

SirWired 1

Minor correction needed

Robert Noyce did not win a Nobel Prize. At the time it was awarded to Jack Kilby (of Texas Instruments) Noyce had passed away. (If he had been alive at the time the prize was awarded, he probably WOULD have been a co-recipient...)

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