Posts by Trevor_Pott

Re: "Data" versus "Big Data"

I accept that to you, personally the narrow definition you've espoused is what you, personally consider Big Data. That said, there are thousands of fairly influential people in our industry who disagree with you.

You are essentially arguing semantics about a marketing term that was long ago coopted. It's like trying to say "cloud" means "X and exactly X". That's bunkum. Cloud - like Big Data, Software Defined Storage or any number of other marketing terms - means essentially nothing. Like it or not, "Big Data" has become a catch all term that encompasses everything from analytic to automation to novel data mining.

I recognize that you have an emotional attachment to a specific definition of Big Data which has, as you put it, "captured your imagination". But I must humbly submit that what you are talking about isn't Big Data. It is data science.

Data science is a discipline related to but not limited to some aspects of Big Data. Similarly, not all things which fall under the moniker Big Data are relevant to data science. The buzzwords have evolved. The marketing people took over Big Data ages ago.

And no, you can't fight it. You can't be a definition hipster. You can't single handedly change what everyone is going to mean when they use a term. The tide of marketing in tech is simply too powerful. It will defeat your preferred definition of Big Data as surely as it defeated me with cloud.

So use a new term. Until that one gets coopted. Then choose a new term. And another. And another, and another, and another.

Welcome to the terminology rat race. Life sucks and then some fish eat you.

You are going to let your companies run without security updates for a year? Good luck!

Re: Shark jumped

"When having "only" 24 processors and 96 Gb of RAM is an "itsy bitsy"

Expanding from www.theregister.co.uk/2015/03/27/supermicro_twin_server_review/

I can cram 18 cores per socket by two sockets by two threads for a total of 72 threads with 1TB per node. That's all in 1U, or 2 in 2U, 4 in 4U, etc. (I haven't seen any of the 1/2U units do 1TB RAM quite yet.)

24 threads and 96GB of RAM is a joke. A joke. Especially with NVMe SSDs out and I/O able to meet pretty much any demand you can throw at it.

I'm not enough of an exchange admin to weigh in on the VMware versus Microsoft view here, but I will say that on this one thing - limiting exchange to such low core/RAM counts - Microsoft doesn't serve it's customers well. Even cheap-o Supermicro systems can spank those specs today, so there wasn't a heck of a lot of future proofing built in to Exchange 2013.

Which may be what Microsoft wanted. Who knows?

Re: Interesting article Trevor

I don't personally believe the mobile division will be annihilated entirely, but it will be restructured and made to come to heel.

Re: I'm gonna get flamed for this...

"Regarding tweeking the thinkpad ... no. Not unless they sorted out that FN+CTRL mess. There was an unofficial BIOS for the thinkpad to swap them, "

This is an OFFICIAL feature of all modern Thinkpad BIOSes for several years now.

Re: Monty....

"Its like owning a mechanical watch. Sure I have a phone that syncs to a time source so its accurate enough, but to think about what it takes to design and build a watch with 500 moving parts and fits on your wrist? Now that's a combination of art and function that I can appreciate.

Is there something wrong in striving to do the best you can do or have we become a society of where 'good enough' is the best we can do?"

The best timekeeping device would be the digital one that regularly synchronizes to the NTP pool, possibly with a backup to plug time from GPS signals. The mechanical timekeeping device, while nostalgic, is not better in any way.

You are confusing "better" with "requires more effort". Very protestant of you.

Re: "in the context of"

Get an XP boxed retail license off ebay.

Re: I'd be more suprised if they DIDN'T spy on us

"and didn't expect anyone to care"

Rightly so. What business does anyone have knowing whom he sleeps with? That's between him and the people he sleeps with.

Re: I SWEAR, some of you guys just don't GET this!!!!

" His company (Commercial Network Services) has a service which customers of TWC want to access."

Really? Because that's not what I get. My understanding is that very, very few customers of TWC want to access CNS and that CNS is mostly looking for free transit between the IXes, and possibly to a tiny handful of customers for the camera thing. If I'm wrong, please, do link me to the where. It's one of those issues that totally could go either way, it really depends on the details.

Re: And how many people realise goldfish can easily live to 20+ years if looked after?

A 50gal and a 200gal. They do just fine in both. There's nothing in either tank that really gets the red tail's Irish up. The 50 gal has an angelfish, a bristlenose, a cloud of raspies and a whole mess of cories. The 200 gal has the red tail, a bunch of bristlenose and an unlimited pile of cories. (I like catfish. They're cute.)

The sharks just shark around. For the one in the big tank there's literally nothing that bothers her. Everything's albino except her and a couple of cories she probably never sees. (Though she will chase away anything that tries to park in her jar.)

In the small tank, the shark periodically chases a cory or tries to mess with the pleco, but the pleco is 1.5x her size and the cories are 5x as fast as her. So other than occasionally trolling something she can't bully for more than a few seconds she spends her time shooing cories from her jar and helicoptering upside down being a shark.

Right at the moment, she's busy chasing a massive bronze cory that's about 0.75x her size who has decided to turn around and chase her right back. None of them seem overly stressed by the arrangement.

Now, I have been toying with the idea of putting another jar in the downstairs tank and putting both sharks in one tank for a while. It would take some monitoring. 200 gal might be enough, but they're territorial. If it works, however, then I can get another shark for upstairs. Carpmouth! Nam nam nam nam nam nam nam...

After the news article went up and the original thread filled with a few other upset folks, yes. The real issue, however, is that this wasn't broadcast immediately via e-mail. Lastpass suffers a breach and I know about it via e-mail before it's made known to the press.

In the case of the Spiceworks breach, I was informed, then went to bed, woke up, had breakfast, coffee and then wrote the article. And there still was no e-mail from Spiceworks by this point!

I did not jump down Spiceworks' throat on this immediately. I'm sure my editors would have preferred it, but I had been up for 32 consecutive hours and couldn't write a thing without at least 8 hours sleep.

Spiceworks had been given time to do the right thing and to come up with a proper response. They failed. Miserably.

That Spiceworks chose to be a little more transparent after the issue was published and then broadcast over every social media channel available is closing the barn door after the horse frelled off, nothing more.

Re: God is bigger than the Bible

"just pointing out the obvious - that humans have always found God in the Unknown."

It's called "god of the gaps".

"so far no-one seems to have solved the underlying trust issue"

I thought some of the new blockchain-based technologies were the best we had on solving the trust issue.

Re: " they would require a far bigger effort and systems in a really miserable state"

"Too old to be secured ? What kind of cop-out is that ? You can always add a firewall in front of it, no ?"

Yeah, but you can't add two factor authentication or various other features. "Secured" may have a meaning here based in legislation or regulation that means something different to you and I.

Re: Freedom of Speech....

"So you are going to send profanities to someone for the sake of it?"

Fuck all y'all.

"sometimes comments here can get a bit feisty but nowhere near the level implied by the article"

Yo mama's data is so unstructured CERN can't write visualizations for it!

Re: What choice in network kit?

We have evidence for the NSA backdoors in Cisco Kit. Meanwhile, GCHQ has cleared Huawei as backdoor free.

I'm buying Huawei.

In Lenovo systems this is somethign you can change in the BIOS.

Re: Playing to the gallery

"Why?"

Because privacy isn't only for the privileged.

No. The lander was in fact awake before this, and it did some science. Unfortunately, Rosetta wasn't in place to receive it's data (and/or the comet's rotation means that Philae couldn't relay to Earth directly) so the data sat in the buffer, waiting to transmit.

This time around, the lander came online long enough to negotiate communications, but did not have time to empty it's buffer. We are hoping that future communications windows will occur, and will allow the lander to transmit it's data. After that, if there is power to spare, it will be assigned to do more science, again, in the hopes that we will have future communications windows for the data to be transmitted.

Re: No need

220 mail.example.org ESMTP service ready

EHLO myserver.fuckoffNSA.com

250-myserver.fuckoffNSA.com knows encryption won't actually stop the NSA

250 STARTTLS

STARTTLS

220 Go ahead

Re: That's not the point

"For people whose major asset is their Facebook account, it might not matter, but it does to the rest of us."

It matters to everyone, or it matters to noone. You do not get privacy for the privileged but not for the proles. That's how revolutions start.

You're right, I had gotten things mixed round in my brain. I was thinking of the Alliance Key Manager for Azure that everyone had been touting as the ultimate solution to Azure security problems (hah!) before Thales came around. What garbage.

Microsoft did have pre-thales stuff too. The previous generation's broken, expensive and Microsoft-vulnerable Windows RMS-based setup, for example. That's pre-Azure RMS that didn't use the hardware modules.

Oh, and the Cloudlink "we'll encrypt your VMs" offering that uses Bitlocker, which everyone is well aware was designed weak from the start and pwned by the NSA bloody ages ago. That was a laugh riot.

With Thales HSMs enterprises with Azure subscriptions and which have Thales hardware on their premises can secure (quoted from https://technet.microsoft.com/en-ca/library/dn440580.aspx)

application that integrates with Azure RMS. This includes cloud services such as SharePoint Online, on-premises servers that run Exchange and SharePoint that work with Azure RMS by using the RMS connector, and client applications such as Office 2013

You cannot secure Exchange online, general VMs, general storage or, well...most of the stuff on Azure with Thales HSM. The things you can secure with Thales HSM you are trusting Microsoft that the key can't be extracted, intercepted or used because, well, it's pretty much Microsoft's own applications that use it at this point. (Though, to be fair, non-Microsoft applications that integrate with Azure RMS could in theory benefit.)

So you're still back to trusting Microsoft (and Thales, who are slightly more trustworthy), though you can't use Thales for a lot of things. It's a start. And maybe once it can be used for every element of the public cloud computing experience and we can guarantee every nanosecond of the chain of custody for the keys from you to the hardware device on Microsoft's premises can't be spied upon Azure will be ready for mildly sensitive workloads.

Amazon probably never will be.

Better still to just run the workloads on a regional service provider that lives in your own legal jurisdiction and not take the risk. You'll be less likely to sued into oblivion, probably get better service and you won't be putting your testicles in the vice of a convicted monopolist! Win/win/win.

Re: Surely...

"And the major alternatives like OS-X and Linux have vastly more security holes in than current versions of Windows."

Except they don't. Because - again, like a goddamned broken record - you are counting every security issue in every package of a distro against the core Windows OS, without regard to vulnerability type or severity.

Linux distributions include hundreds if not thousands of applications whereas the Windows operating system only includes dozens to low hundreds. Windows does not, for example, include a full productivity suite nor a full suite of vulnerability assessment tools, multiple web servers and databases, multiple development environments and IDEs and so forth.

Windows' issues tend to be far more severe, and they take far longer to get fixed. Open source's issues are mostly that issues can (and do) go unnoticed (sometimes for years) because there simply aren't enough penetration testers willing to test open source. (Bounties are paid by proprietary companies!) Of course, Microsoft will gleefully discover a bug then sit on the damned thing for years, so that is somewhat moot.

You are correct in that it is harder to not run Windows in the specific circumstance where you are already deeply wedded to the Windows ecosystem and have critical Windows only applications. It's been a long time since that was a universal experience for all businesses, and more and more are getting out...and staying out of Microsoft's clutches.

Microsoft and Windows absolutely have their advantages. But you, sir, purposefully and knowingly distort statistics and facts to turn complex - but quantifiable - truths into blatant lies.

Re: ...and has 3,900 employees...

Give me three good sysadmins and budget enough for Puppet licenses and I'll show you how to run Twitter without needing a large IT staff.

Re: Linux on the desktop debates

"Visio I *personally* have not found a *decent* replacement for - but that may again be a learning curve and *I* may be being stubborn."

No, there's no good substitute. There are a few SaaS apps that are browser delivered that are getting close, however, they are likely still a year or two away from "good enough".

"linux sucks as a desktop"

Quite right. But then, so does Windows 8, and Windows 10 isn't really all that great either. The real issue is "are the apps i need available?" Right now, the answer for most SMBs exploring Linux is - surprisingly - "yes". Enterprises will not get the same answer to that question.

Fast forward a few years. X11 will have been replaced by Weyland/Weston in production and available as a first class display system in enterprise Linux environments. This will have FreeRDP server baked right in to the display layer, offering full remote access as good as anything Microsoft delivers.

The Gnome team have - after years of acrimony - found their own asses, KDE shows faint hopes of maybe one day being able to find theirs, XFCE has seen a surge of development and both Mate and Cinnamon have exploded in uptake and development.

Red Hat is pouring muchos money into making sure that if your application runs on Windows it will run on Red Hat. You'll be able to make your Linux behave however you want. Application developers are increasingly embracing OSX and/or Android, both of which make the jump to Linux trivial.

Perhaps most critically, Microsoft doesn't really seem all that interested in making a desktop environments that's actually good anymore, they're only interested in making one that is passable enough that enterprises might consider migrating.

So just as Windows 7 is about to turn into a pumpkin Linux looks set to have it's shit together. Will Microsoft?

Today, Microsoft is the dominant player, but they have nowhere to go but down. Linux's adoption is so low any upward gain at all is a victory.

So, as you say, "right tool for the job at hand". And if you've two tools to hand, both capable, pick the one that costs less and you can trust more. It's up to you, the customer, to decide which that is for any given workload.

Re: Simple answer why usage is growing

I don't disagree. That said, you can run OSX in a VM. Just sayin'...