* Posts by F. Svenson

38 publicly visible posts • joined 20 Aug 2010

Share your 2024 tech forecasts (wrong answers only) to win a terrible sweater

F. Svenson

Prediction: IT works for the betterment of mankind.

Corporations take a long-term view, and work to better understand the impacts of new technology before releasing it upon an unprepared world. Profit motivation becomes secondary to societal cohesion and environmental preservation.

Musk tells advertisers to 'go f**k' themselves as $44B X gamble spirals into chaos

F. Svenson

Re: more ads means more users ????????

It's not that punters want to see ads, it's that ads pay for the service the punters want to use.

Unless things change, first zettaflop systems will need nuclear power, AMD's Su says

F. Svenson

Half a terabyte?

> Nvidia's Grace Hopper superchips, while not integrated to the same degree, still co-package an Arm CPU with 512GB of LPDDR5 with a Hopper GPU die and 80GB of HBM.

512GB of LPDDR5 seems a bit much for an ARM, no?

Amazon drops battery-powered Echo speaker so you can play Despacito on the go

F. Svenson

Why a portable echo?

It seems that commenters here do not understand the possible use-cases of a portable echo. Let me see if I can help here.

1. The Tap has a friction cradle, so there is no plugging/unplugging. If you elect for the "listen for wake word" option, when it is not being used as a portable it behaves like a normal echo, but with far superior sound quality to the Dot. Since there is no way to transfer playback of a stream, it's quite nice to pick up and carry the Tap to continue listening to a podcast in another room (that might even have an echo of it's own).

2. Porch/patio. When going to spend time outside, the tap is convenient, as long as it is in wifi range. Because weather, it is not possible to leave a wired unit outside at all times.

3. It's a great bluetooth speaker as well.

4. When you are OK with others putting music on, it's a lot better than unlocking and handing someone your phone.

5. It's great for parties. When we use a community center for a kid's party, we bring the Tap and set a phone up as a hotspot. The little kids are familiar with how to use the Tap and it allows them to choose their own entertainment.

6. It sounds good. IMHO, the tap has a better sound than my 1st gen Echo (fullsize).

7. It works when the power is out. A moderate sized UPS can keep the wireless and internet up for 24+ hours. The Tap happily chugs along in non-listen mode for at least 10 hours.

8. If you are paranoid about having an echo listening all the time, the Tap is a great compromise. Push-to-use eliminates that feeling of being spied upon.

9. Vacation. Tap + hotspot = music on the beach

10. Small flats. Our second Tap is used by my MIL. Her apartment is quite small and she prefers keeping the Tap close to her at a low volume so that her neighbors don't complain.

Since it is apparent that most of the commenters are either too young to have owned a boombox, too affluent to have been limited to a single device, or too permanently glued to their phones to understand the concept of not using it for something, I doubt this will advance the conversation. It is nice to occasionally point out to those unable to understand that others may have requirements different from their own, that other people do in fact exist, and have their own preferences and modalities for technology usage (and that nobody requires the approval of the diaper-and-tide-pod cohort).

-OK X-er

F. Svenson

Um.....

I have a pair of Echo Tap units, they must have been delivered via a wormhole from the future.

The tap originally required pushing a button to give commands (hence "tap") but a software update allows it to listen at the expense of battery life. It's a great product that was seemingly discontinued for no reason. It still is a second-class citizen in the alexa ecosystem as you cannot use it to communicate or send/receive an announcement.

Either way, your research team needs a kick in the ghoulies on this one.

https://www.amazon.com/Amazon-Tap-Portable-wireless-Bluetooth-Speaker-with-WiFi-Alexa/dp/B01BH83OOM

Can Amazon's AI really detect fear? Plus: Fresh deepfake video freaks everyone out again

F. Svenson

Also, Seth Rogen, when he does that impression.

Google: Psst, hey kid, want a new eSIM? Our Fi has one right here

F. Svenson

It's not 10c/GB, it's $10/GB, just as it is in the US.

Plus, they bill by the fraction, ir you use 500MB roaming, and 500MB at home, you get the same bill for $10.

Finally, you can use hangouts dialler to make calls via IP and pay no per-min roaming for voice.

Amazon warns you have 30 days before Music Storage files bloodbath

F. Svenson

Avid user.

I am an avid user of the service. It's been around for a long time. It's allowed me to have one app for all of my music. Much of my music is not available on Unlimited, and using the service also allowed for the Echo to play it. Now that it's going away, I don't know how you get from a CD you own to streaming back if Amazon doesn't sell it to you again.

Definitely unhappy.

Google's cell network Project Fi charged me for using Wi-Fi – lawsuit

F. Svenson

An actual Fi subscriber here...

I'm a Fi subscriber, and I know from metrics gathered by my router that I am not being charged for data received over wifi. Last month I was billed for 1.35GB, and used 22.75GB over wifi.

Now, by no means am I saying that Fi is perfect, but this problem certainly is not universal. Also, using an Android One Motox4, I can tell you that mobile data is disabled by default when connected to wifi.

Samba 4.8 to squish scaling bug that Tridge himself coded in 2009

F. Svenson

Re: "....get Samba working on HP-UX....."?

Yeah, 10.10 had LanManager/CIFS support waaaay back in the day. It integrated with NT better than early versions of Samba did.

In its current state, Ubiquiti's EdgeSwitch won't have much of an edge on anyone

F. Svenson

Love the products, the support... not so much.

I'm fantastically happy with the EdgeRouter and UniFi access points, but their support stinks.

However, the community is very responsive and my setup has been rock solid.

This is just the Googleification of support. Try fixing a problem on an OnHub or Google Voice and you'll be familiar with ubnt's support.

Mark Zuckerberg's Twitter and Pinterest password was 'dadada'

F. Svenson

Wait.... How does this prove 2-factor has a problem?

The comment about 2-Factor doesn't make any sense. How does a weak password, a hack of linked-in, any of that reflect on 2-Factor back to a mobile phone?

The PC is dead. Gartner wishes you luck, vendors

F. Svenson

Glad I wasn't the only one stumped by revenue under $1 per unit shipped.

WIN a 6TB Western Digital Black hard drive with El Reg

F. Svenson

Entrant #303.

Intel engineers cunningly designed a project they felt certain would finally mean getting females on campus.

Upstart brags about cheaper-than-Amazon private cold data cloud

F. Svenson

Any idea what OS this runs on?

IBM: We gave nothing to the NSA, stateside or elsewhere

F. Svenson

David?

Is David Snowden related to Edward?

Apple's Windows XP moment: OS X Snow Leopard left to DIE

F. Svenson

Re: 2007 hardware obsolete?

I have 3 "vintage" macs which are not capable of running 10.8+.

It's one debate to have about the decision to have 32-bit firmware on 64-bit machines, but Intel (whom y'all love to pieces) deserves some of the gong for that. It is wholly another debate about how long to support a discontinued piece of hardware.

The older Intel Macs support LION, and LION is still supported. So, it's not like the Snow Leopard folks are being given short shrift. If my car has bald tires and I continue to drive on them, it's not Oldsmobile's fault I'm in peril. I can buy new tires.

Look folks, at some point they have to stop supporting things, and I think N-2 is not bad. I'd rather the (sadly) finite resources be spent supporting a fair number of releases, and developing new ones, than to have them only plotting the future by the limitations of the past. If MS had dropped 16-bit support in XP, it'd have been smaller, faster, and more stable and have inconvenienced not that many people. Reg readers would have bitched about how Visicalc ran just fine all the way from DOS 2 through WinME, but it's because you're not getting laid enough.

You can't buy new tubes for your Hallicrafters.

You can't buy new batteries for your Noka 2001.

You can't buy a new engine for your Wright Flyer.

Move on, people. Buy Lion, install Linux, or buy a new computer. If you really must get Mavericks running on your polycarbonate MacBook, start writing the driver. Send me a copy, I need to upgrade.

PS: Just for shits, grins, and giggles, I ran the same HandBrake job on a MacPro2,1 (quad-Xeon 2.6) and a new 2013 MacBookAir (1.3Ghz i5) and they finished within 3 seconds of each other.

New shit > Old shit

Rest of world can now get hold of IBM's secret China-only storage tech

F. Svenson

V5000 is new, the v3500 was and is still China only.

StorNext gets revamp, Quantum claims 5x data throughput boost

F. Svenson

Was this article typed on a phone?

I know I'm always worried about mall file performance, which good. Give him an A for efforst.

Five SECRET products Apple won't show today

F. Svenson

Speling iz harrd.

Cincinnati.

1953: How Quatermass switched Britons from TV royalty to TV sci-fi

F. Svenson

Sealing wax?!??!?!?!

All this time I thought it was "Ceiling wax", and it made no sense...

This changes everything.

Optical archival system - where to buy from?

F. Svenson

Oh... and store 'em in a faraday cage.

Also, since you seem to have a concern with magnetic media, make sure you wrap them in tinfoil and store them in a faraday cage...

Just FYI -- As a test one day, I ran a Western Digital caviar (perpendicular recording) HDD through a tape degaussing machine. It flolloped and danced around, but 10 minutes later, we could still read the data.

I wouldn't be too concerned about stray cosmic rays and solar flares and media. Things today are pretty damn robust.

FInally, the MO disks... are made from glass. They are waaaaaaay more (physically) fragile than tape media.

And did I mention in my previous post that the MO drive failure rate is extremely high?

You've got to ask yourself:

1. Will the media still be in commercial use in 15 years.

2. Will the drive interface still be around on Ebay? (good luck finding a PCIe floppy card for a QIC-40)

3. Were there enough manufactured to be able to find them on Ebay?

You can still find SCSI QIC-02 drives: http://www.ebay.com/itm/Wangtek-5099EG24-QIC-02-BLACK-Used-or-refurb-/181044517526?pt=LH_DefaultDomain_2&hash=item2a27181a96

Not so lucky on SCSI 8" floppy drives.

F. Svenson

Optical is dead, dead, dead.

Way back, in the mists of time immemorial, magneto-optical was used for long-term archival storage. Many regulated companies used devices like the IBM 3995 optical library (with Sony drives). The appeal was:

1. An allegedly infinite lifetime for the media.

2. Random access VS linear access for tape (faster seek times).

3. Solid state/No power required/shelf stable.

Unfortunately, MO suffered from some major flaws.

1. Horrible storage density. (last generation I worked on was 2.6Gb media).

2. Single-sided media and drives (robots that have to flip over disks are more mechanically complex).

3. Very high cost for media and drives.

4. Drive failure rates.

5. Media failure rates (according to Sony, due to excessive mounts).

6. Very low performance (If I remember correctly in the 1-10MB/s range).

Evidently, the market decided that the cons outweighed the pros, because all of the 3995's I ever supported were replaced by LTO WORM and NetApp SnapLock.

For personal long-term archival storage, nothing beats tape. Old LTO3/4 drives are ubiquitous and readily available. Media is cheap, and it is relatively fast and very dense.

Fuji estimates that tape media can last 30 years. Since this is likely longer than the interface medium (SCSI, SAS, FC) will be available it would seem adequate.

( http://www.fujifilmusa.com/shared/bin/LTO_Data_Tape_Seminar_2012.pdf )

The industry standard/common sense method to insure against individual tape failure would is to write multiple tapes with the same data.

However, I would strongly recommend that you use a timeless format like TAR or CPIO. It'd be a shame to archive your precious home-made cat food recipes and be unable to restore them because Android for Desktops v107 can't run BackupExec.

Also, with LTO, keep in mind that there are rules for which drives can read/write which gen of media.(write -1 gen, read -2 gen). Since drives are really cheap on ebay, I'd recommend getting an extra drive, seal it in an anti-static bag and put it in the safe-deposit box with your tapes.

Breaking with your back-up supplier is a sticky business

F. Svenson

Agentless backup w/no CPU?

Unless you are storing all of your data on NAS (and running the backup from there), how would you perform an agentless backup that doesn't use host CPU?

As you stated, the big concern is long term retention. It is not uncommon to implement a new software, let's call it Tripoli Storage Manager, and then allow all the short term data to age-off from the old NerdBackup software. Using a partitioned tape library, you could then shrink the NBU partition until it only consists of a single head and just the relevant cart slots. You could also then just maintain a license for a single client and server. Not that big of a deal.

The other option is to use a conversion utility which utilizes the API of both titles and transcodes the data.

Finally, agent-based backups are becoming more not less popular. Many titles now perform (host) CPU intensive local deduplication to reduce LAN load and storage pool use.

Reading your article I get the impression your familiarity is with non-enterprise software like Backup Exec. The real kids play with both software and hardware that is more sophisticated.

Sneaky Seagate slips 'world's fastest' enterprise disk mutant into the wild

F. Svenson

The drive in the picture is a 3.5".

Editor?

Who's to be the next Dr Who? Sherlock beats Maurice - says you

F. Svenson

Idris Elba.

Patent shark‘s copyright claim could bite all Unix

F. Svenson
FAIL

Lame....

You can do better...

How about a story on OEM's using Itanium?

Apple sticks finger in dyke, cuts off Dutch flood of Galaxy S, SII, Ace

F. Svenson
FAIL

English, eh?

The definition of "dike" is:

dike 1 |dīk | noun

1 a long wall or embankment built to prevent flooding from the sea.

2 a ditch or watercourse.

verb (often as adj. diked)

provide (land) with a wall or embankment to prevent flooding.

---

"Dyke" is:

dyke 1 |dīk| noun

a lesbian.

---

Felled by homo(nym)s, are ye?

Enormous Apple market cap swells and swells ... like a bubble

F. Svenson

Nobody commented on the subtitle.

I'm kind of perturbed by the "Software-reskinning box designer" subtitle.

Not very objective, for journalism.

Not very true, either.

It come across as pretty damn petty to whinge and bitch about a company, which is shipping actual physical product to make their money.

Let's give them their due, no matter what OS you prefer, they've all been made better by Mac.

Any "bubble" status of Apple stock is being created by investors and brokers, not the company themselves. I'm pretty sure that if any PR department could gin up a $400 stock price, KMart/Sears would be a happier place.

Symantec: 'NetBackup 7.5 speeds backup 100X'

F. Svenson

Duh.... Quoting deduplication backup times is disingenuous.

That 3.6 minute is probably based on 1 byte changing in the file, which is not a realistic use case.

Also, there's no mention to how much additional CPU load is put on the backup client during this "client-side deduplication". Nice way to crater a VMware environment.

Also, TSM 6.2 had these features over 2 years ago.

Windows 8 to get self-healing 'Storage Spaces'

F. Svenson

It's not ZFS...

It's ADVFS from Tru64/DEC Unix.

...

Google opens Android music store in iTunes' face

F. Svenson

Google music is inferior to amazon mp3+cloud.

Googles android player blows, especially the ui...

Plus amazon offers unlimited music storage if you buy an album. Better player, better cloud, and the fire makes a nice ipod replacement.

Amazon's Kindle Fire burns iPad momentum

F. Svenson

better to thank click and clack...

Apple Mac OS X 10.7 Lion Part Two

F. Svenson

Gone but not forgotten...

Mission control is not a replacement for expose: All windows.

Big oversight.

Apple iMac 27in

F. Svenson

Apple OSX and network storage

To get the best performance with OSX and networked storage use AFP when possible. There is FOSS program called NetAtalk which works really well on Linux and FreeBSD. I can get 102MB/s transfers using jumbo frames.

NFS works OK, but your filesystem gets littered with .(dot) files, and when using coverflow or thumbnails finder does wonky things over NFS.

It's the oldest working Seagate drive in the UK

F. Svenson

What a stupid metric.

Comparing the "platter read speed" of a 5MB platter VS a 300GB platter is pure inanity.

Perhaps you'd like to compare the toilet flush latency of an Airbus 380 VS a Clipper? That will prove how airplanes haven't gotten any better in fifty years.

Come to think of it, the whole article is crap. I have a Selectric III in my office, perhaps you can run an article on Oxford counties oldest typewriter.

New York Times tucks skirt behind stilted paywall

F. Svenson
Thumb Down

Unlimited or 100 articles per month?

According to the page to link your dead tree account to your digital account, you only get 100 articles per month for your Unlimited service.

https://myaccount.nytimes.com/link/homedelivery

Fine print:

*Includes access to 100 Archive articles every four weeks.

DARPA orders VTOL robots for 'covert payload placement'

F. Svenson

Covert?

How many Mexican landscapers are there in Afghanistan, that they can plant their payload masked by Juan and his leafblower?

Is this a realistic scenario?

Osama: What is that buzzing noise?

Underling: It is Faisal edging the cave lawn.

Osama: Tell him to put the curbstones back this time.

Underling: Look sir! A candygram for you was on the doorstep!

Osama: I love the ginger chockies.

[BOOM]