* Posts by Trevor_Pott

6991 publicly visible posts • joined 31 May 2010

IDC downgrades sales outlook for PCs AND tablets

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You're wrong. The fact that the overwhelming amount of money from the "recovery" went to the richest few (instead of the working class) means that supply side economics will kick in any day now (if we'd just lower taxes on the rich!). The rich will reinvest in the economy. You'll get funding to grow your business and create jobs.

...won't you?

FTC to DirecTV: No more lies! Tell viewers what you really charge

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Re: Wut?

"But, you know, props to your hipsterness and all that, for being able to cut the cord."

Uh...I'm the least hipster human being you'll ever meet and I cut the cord 13 years ago. Methinks either your understanding of how easy life without a cable/satellite sub can be or your definition of "hipster" is completely whacked.

Pathetic PC sales just cost us a BILLION dollars, cries Intel

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Re: Mobile and Communications segment saw its revenues plummet by 85.3 per cent.

Have one, don't have one...it's not like an ARM license is expensive!

This ISN'T Net Neutrality. This is Net Google. This is Net Netflix – the FCC's new masters

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Re: Something to consider...

Bullshit.

1) Mobile data costs

2) Mobile data caps

3) Mobile data roaming costs (holy fucking pants!)

4) Inability to get decent uplink speeds for residential/SMB, especially with new the growing demands of new services (like cloud backups, etc.)

5) Lack of competition, especially for residential/SMB

6) Fixed line caps too low/can't get them raise/overage is punitive

7) Fixed line caps don't grow over time to accommodate growth in usage

8) Regulations preventing municipal broadband

9) Regulations preventing community broadband

10) Regulations preventing new entrants from laying cable

11) ISPs/Cable/Mobile providers blocking (or de-prioritizing) traffic to/from companies offering competing services (VoIP, VoD, etc) instead of traffic shaping the whole class (their traffic included).

12) ISPs/Cable/Mobile providers giving cap exemptions for services provided by them, but not for competing services in teh same category

Do you really need me to go on?

The whole goddamned model is broken. Net neutrality is needed because of decades of regulations - and lack of regulations - sprinkled about that aim to create monopolies, allow unchecked abuse of those monopolies and then prevent anyone from ever challenging those monopolies.

And yes, the problem absolutely can be too much regulation and too little at the same time. The right regulations restrict companies from discriminating thus prevent abuse of power. The wrong regulations prevent companies from competing, then encourage power to concentrate.

The right mix of regulations and hands-off treatments strongly discourage power from ever concentrating in one place, and provide checks to prevent abuse of power if it ever does manage to do so.

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Re: First part was better.

"Hasn't anyone ever read Atlas Shrugged?"

Sure I have. I've read the holy texts of many other religions too. They're all bullshit, but few are currently so globally dangerous as the religion that sprung up around that bit of madness.

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Re: First part was better.

"You can't own or control your own stuff. Which means there is no real functioning market for stuff. The terms of trade are set by others.

The tech oligarchs take the place of the market, set the terms, control the price, etc.

This has been their greatest achievement: persuading people to act against their own economic interests."

Funny how you rail and froth against tech companies for setting the terms of trade and creating a culture where you can't own things, but when it's the established intellectual property monopolies doing it, well holy fuck, that's just the best thing ever.

And, of course, the existing telco monopolies should be allowed to set the terms of trade by restricting access. That's good and fine. But not those tech companies. Damn them. Damn them to hell.

*snort*

Stuxnet Redux: Microsoft patches Windows vuln left open for FIVE YEARS

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Are you shilling for Microsoft here, or the NSA? Or is there a difference anymore?

SimpliVity claims fivefold sales boost, hugs Cisco tightly

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Re: I smell bullshit...

has been officially confirmed by the SimpliVity CEO to be 1500 units. Sorry it took so long.

Boffins say Mars had ocean covering 20 per cent of planet

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Re: @Ian Michael Gumby

"Probably factually correct, but why? Earth has four times the surface area but its dynamo has lasted 9 times as long."

When Earth was young, a planet roughly the size of Mars crashed into it. Much of the lighter elements splashed off into orbit and became the moon. All the heavier elements - like Uranium, Thorium and other radioactives - sunk to Earth's core. Earth has not the radioactive power of one planet, but two. combined with it's higher size, the remnant heat from that catastrophic impact and the fact that it was spun up both by Theia and the Late Heavy Bombardment, and, well....

Microsoft comes right out and says backup software is dead

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Re: Microsoft is wrong - (no news here)

"Which isn't hard to get these days.

Most enterprises would also have dual redundant internet connections, so at least half your bandwidth is probably unused..."

Sure it is. My 5 man company can't seem to afford it. But we generate 150TB of unique data a month? Oh, that's just an externality? Cloud is still cheaper?

Sure it is.

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Re: One thing cloud storage is NOT, is less expensive

Ignoring externalities again? Good little shill. Ignore the costs of bandwidth. Security. Liability insurance. Legal representation in a foreign jurisdiction. Etc. etc...

Cloud is cheaper my fat, jiggling ASCII. Next you'll try to convince me supply side economics works in the real world. Why, Alabama is doing just Jim frakking Dandy on that plan, ain't it?

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Banks (at least in theory) have regulation. For the "simple things" like your personal savings and chequing accounts there are piles and piles of regulations they have to follow. There are long standing international regulations about bank security, privacy, etc. (Not that they are generally good for the individuals, but...)

The public cloud - espeically the American public cloud - is the Wild West. there are no rules, and no certainties, save American Expectionalism driving ever more disheartening examples of extraterritorial jurisdictional overreach.

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Re: Cloud?

"Works just fine here for 50TB of data. Use a local StorSimple array to backup to and it automatically dedupes, compresses, encrypts and uploads to the cloud."

Well of course you do. Anyone shilling that hard for Microsoft is going to get all the good free. And since you clearly give no fucks whatsoever about security or data sovereignty issues, what's good for your customers is just pissed away because it's convenient to you.

Groovy.

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Re: Cloud, schmo id

"Maybe, how expensive is the reputation all risk that associates failure?"

Depends on who you ask. According to Sony: completely negligible.

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Re: oh really!?

"And even if you did back up 50TB of changed uncompressible data a week, that's still possible over a 1 Gbit link."

Can you restore before you go out of business? And don't say "just turn it on using Azure". Non-Americans tend to have rules about where they store data - especially live, unencrypted data. There are a lot of folks who can't "just light things up on Azure". Which means getting the data back. Ho hum. Bankrupt from waiting yet?

Oh..."just pay more"? But...but...the cloud was supposed to be cheaper! Oh, that's only if you ignore all the "externalities" like connectivity - especially redundant connectivity - security, liability insurance, potential need to litigate in foreign jurisdictions, etc?

Cute.

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Re: What I want

So...teamdrive?

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Re: They're not selling it to me

"So when say your premises catch fire, both your data and your backups get nuked?"

Then it's lovely that we have colocation facilities and regional cloud providers which provide cloud services and data storage by companies with a complete legal and jurisdictional chain of custody that means every aspect of the company I use for remote storage is 100% under the same legal jurisdiction as my own company.

Holy pants, Batman. It's like I can get all the benefit of cloud whatsit without Americans conducting economic espionage on all my clients' data and I can remove the legal uncertainty of having anything to do with a company that is at any point foreign being involved in my data sovereignty.

Bonus points: if I need all my data back, the colo can put some drives in a box and courier to me within the same business day. Sure beats trying to suck my entire existence down an ADSL straw!

Wait, why the hell would I ever choose anything else?

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Re: They're not selling it to me

1) Microsoft's Ireland Datacenter: oh, wait, that's apparently American now.

2) Microsoft's Canadian...oh wait, they don't have one.

3) The NSA's Utah Datacenter: hey, where's my user panel to get my data out? If you're going to store it, I want access in case of emergency...

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Re: All your data subject to US courts?

"Windows had fewer security holes last year than the Linux Kernel (let alone a distribution), and OS-X so it's likely not the worst choice..."

Windows is the most popular consumer OS created by a company which is beholden to a government obsessed with spying on consumers. There's no possible way it can be trusted. Now, there's an argument to be made that no OS can be trusted...but Windows is the Big Fat Target, and American corporations can never be trusted. Just ask Cisco about how the government has helped them "enhance shareholder value" through their foreign and domestic espionage programs...

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Re: All your data subject to US courts?

"RMS BYOK capability allows you to match the security properties of an on-premise RMS deployment generating your own tenant key on your premises per your IT policies. Transfer your tenant key securely to the cloud-based Thales nShield HSM hosted by Microsoft. "

Wait. WHAT? So your solution to security issues in Microsoft's cloud is to use an encryption service that lives on Microsoft's cloud?!?

A service where my encryption key will have to go over the internet. A service where the thing that encrypts and decrypts data is not something that I have a 100% chain of custody on. A service where there is more than ample opportunity for the bad guys (and yes, the US government are the frucking bad guys, just as much as any hacker) to get hold of the keys and unlock my data?

Fucking nooooooooooooooooooooooooooope.

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Re: All your data subject to US courts?

"As a corporate, you can take steps to make that very difficult on Microsoft's cloud if you want to . You can use Azure RMS and 'bring your own keys', and set them so that they can't be accessed from the USA:"

And this costs what? What's the entry price? Is it available to the mass market? Has the code been inspected so we're sure it's free of backdoors? Is it randomly audited? By whom? Who pays for the audits? Who checks the credentials of the auditors? Where is the chain of trust in the bullshit you're peddling, and how universal in applicability is it to market?

I see sales and handwaving. And your links don't answer the hard questions.

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"You keep the latest copies locally too on your Microsoft StorSimple device. You only need a full download if you loose the whole site. At which point you would be failing over to your DR site anyway."

Which costs what? There are way - way - more SMBs out there than enterprises. And how do we know we can trust Microsoft with our encryption keys? Or what's on that Storsimple device? Has it been audited? How do we know there aren't backdoors? Or backdoors in the cloud?

How can we ever trust an American cloud provider? And for that matter, why should most companies consider this as a solution, given the entry level price?, Especially if you want proper security? (Assuming such a thing is allowed to even exist.)

Lots of talk and marketing and sales going on here, AC. Not a hell of a lot of hard, tangible proof that this is applicable, trustworthy and safe to the mass market. Especially the non-American mass market.

Trevor_Pott Gold badge

"Of course, back in the day we had service bureaus offering utility computing, and they did a nice tidy bit of business before mostly being run off by people who thought every firm could do a good job of managing its own IT. Just like every firm does a great job of generating its own power, running its own transportation infrastructure, providing its own physical security, running its own custodial service..."

I have better uptime than amazon. And I build my shit out of the IT equivalent of used coconuts and duct tape. I have better security than megaliths like Sony, or Anthem, or...

...wait, why, exactly is it a great idea for me to hand my data - and with it, my business, livelihood and the ability to pay myself and my staff - over to an outsourcer?

And even if I did think cloud computing was a great plan - and I do, for certain workloads - why the metric donkey fuck would I have all my bits of digital precious over to Americans, of all people?

I mean, yes, the Brits and the Aussies have far more deplorable privacy policies - and hey, Canada is a member of five eyes and all that - but if I'm going to get my data stolen, why not get it stolen by my own government? At least then it's up to my own courts in my own nation to sort out liability, not some byzantine backroom international horror.

American cloud providers can't be trusted. Ever. Maybe no cloud providers can. But if that's the so, then the case for keeping your data managed by a supply chain of companies that are answerable only to your own legal jurisdiction is made all the stronger by that reality, not weaker.

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"With Microsoft's cloud backups you control the encryption keys on site - and it uses AES256 encryption:"

No I can't. I'm an SMB. I don't have $virgins to give Microsoft for special consideration. Even if I did, there's no guarantee that Microsoft or the NSA haven't backdoored some aspect of the solution. Microsoft is an American cloud provider. As such, they flat out cannot be trusted.

Euro ministers ditch plan to ban roaming charges

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Re: I smell lobbyists

"Bureaucrats unsurprisingly see more legislation as the solution to every problem. It usually isn't."

Free market capitalism is almost never the solution to anything either. Regulated markets are. Free market capitalism is a dangerous religion, nothing more. It should be treated like any other cult.

EU annoys industry and activists with net neutrality proposal

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Re: The problem is the infrastructure

The solution to which, of course, is to drop taxes on the rich, abandon the poor and have everything run by private corporations! Oh, and don't forget to drop taxes on the rich. It's really important. And zero taxes for corporations!

That's the only way to solve debt problems. An upside-down piece of candy corn in a wig made of used medical gauze told me so.

Trevor_Pott Gold badge

Re: QoS issues..

Badly thought out neutrality regulation is neutrality regulation that favours companies at the expense of the population. Amending legislation a year or two down the road with something that allows QoS for emergency services would be a simple sell and easily done.

Regaining civil liberties (like equality, privacy and so forth), once lost, is nearly impossible.

'Hi, I'm from Microsoft and I am GOING TO KILL YOU'

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Re: I recently got one of these..

I have a nice British lady's voice say "this call is being recorded" for every phone call I'm part of. Then it actually records the call. Very. Angry. Scammers.

Australia threatens to pull buckets of astronomy funding

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Re: Are you saying...

If you're in Australia all you get is one viewpoint but two parties espousing it!

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Re: Thus continues...

Better "everyone must have prizes" than "god did it because foreigners will kill you and take your jobs".

Storm in a K-Cup: My SHAME over the eco-monster I created, says coffee pod inventor

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Re: He's right.

"Real men drink tea"

Hipsters aren't men.

Coffee. Black. Strong enough to kill a horse!

Neuralytix report: Cleversafe fumes over classification

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Re: Report only covered appliances

Thanks for that, Adrian. I was starting to wonder about the lack of Caringo, given that my experiences with it showed it to be a fairly simple and reasonably capable product.

...which may be the nicest thing I've ever said about any object storage product, ever. :/

To InfiniFlash and beyond: SanDisk wheels out Big Data box

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Want.

Huawei preps to drop mobile & wearables lovebombs on U.S.

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Re: Chinese Concerns

Hunh. Wonder why i associated it with Israel. Must have gotten them all mixed up with another company.

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Re: Chinese Concerns

Um, wasn't the spyware in question Israeli?

Pebble Time Steel ready in May. Plus: Now you can strap on sensors, GPS ... Geiger counter

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Re: battry risks

Lots of people fall off buildings on purpose and are just fine. It's that part where you do it accidentally that's bad. If you are base jumping and know what you're doing, it usually works out just fine.

HP Services engineer dispatch tool 'broken', say engineers

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Re: Is it just me...

Laserjet III? The II was way better. Still have a few IIs in service!

US court rubber-stamps dragnet metadata surveillance (again)

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Re: You best hope they don't really stop any time soon

If the fellow in question honestly believes the tripe he's peddling, do you really think his vocabulary or vocal comprehension are in an upper percentile?

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Re: You best hope they don't really stop any time soon

Proof, ot GTFO, you fearmongering fuckpopsicle.

Bad movie: Hackers can raid networks with burnt Blu-Rays

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Re: Simple this,

"Piece of software that should be buried alongside Atari 2600 ET carts!"

Ars Technica dug those up.

Lenovo: We SWEAR we're done with bloatware, adware and scumware

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Bullshit. Drivers can only be disseminated through windows update if they've gone through the amazingly long validation process. This typically means drivers that are ages behind...and Microsoft won't qualify all driver types to begin with.

Next, Lenovo can't submit drivers to Microsoft for validation: the manufacturers must do this. Do you think Ricoh have the money and resources to validate every driver release for their smart card reader? Do you honestly expect nVidia, AMD and Intel to slow their GPU driver releases to Microsoft speeds?

And how, exactly, do you download all those Windows updates without network or wifi drivers? Or are you saying that we should all be limited to network devices that ship with Windows? No upgraded units until the next version? And how, exactly, does the "next version" theory work with the new Windows release scheme?

And yes, the "extra keys" need software. The function keys and non-keyboard keys don't all work with Windows 8 or Windows 10.

Sorry, mate, but you haven't a clue what you're on about.

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If I'm being fair to Lenovo here, most of the Lenovo applications that are actually written by Lenovo are useful and even nessesary. Plus, they do have to load up third party drivers, etc. So what your Lenovo will probably look like is:

Windows 10

Intel/AMD/nVidia/etc software that comes with their drivers

Lenovo support tools to help Lenovo keep your drivers up to date, and allow them to remote your PC if you give them the code

Lenovo tool to make special keypresses (such as turn on/off keyboard backlight, tweak monitor brightness, etc) not only work, but show an icon on the screen when you push the button.

I will be following this up over time and seeing just what they mean by all of this.

FCC says cities should be free to run decent ISPs. And Republicans can't stand it

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How is it a "threat to the free market" or otherwise interfering with the free market if what is occurring is the removal of regulations that restricted how many different entities could compete? I simply don't understand.

Intel, Apple and Cisco crossed off Chinese Gov's kit list

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Re: One possibility we're not considering....

Why does China "snooping" on my network affect me? I don't do business in China. I don't plan to go to China. For the most part, I just don't care about China or it's antics at all.

But US/UK/Oz snooping does affect me. I go to these places. If they detect me believing the wrong thing, or supporting the wrong political party, or thinking things that are "antisocial" or "radical" this can affect my ability to travel and to do business.

I'm not fond of any country snooping on civilians, but if we have to choose who sees our dirty laundry, I'm going to pick the governments that won't be in a position to taser me to death. But hey, to each their own...

Storage modernisation reality check

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Re: Moving Target

Don't forget "it is believable that the company is trustworthy enough to stick to the given plan". Most companies just lie outright now*, so trust is hard to come by. If you need modern features, go with a startup that can supply them, and looks like there's a reasonable chance they'll still be around at the end of the refresh cycle. Don't sit around and wait for dinosaurs to notice the local space rock population, late alone care about it.

*There are no consequences for them to do this, so why not?

Give us a week to gut Superfish, begs Lenovo CTO

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Re: I still dont get it.

Yeah, I gotta say you're full of shit. Lenovo basically has the lowest prices amongst the various tin shifters for everything. When you really get to comparing like for like, Lenovo have dropped the margins to damned near nothing...and they paid for it.

FalconStor blows clouds into FreeStor software rewrite

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Re: Son of IPStor?

From the lengthy briefing I got on the matter, that's not my impression at all. It looks like there was a great deal of R&D to go into this and that it is basically a new product.

There's more than one way to back up your data

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Re: MPIO?

Which is usually when you combine MPIO with other protocols. Like link aggregation. MPIO + LACP can mean "more speed", even with multiple switches...but that's LACP/LA that is providing the speed, not MPIO per se.

Nutanix to release 'community version' of its secret software sauce

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That VMware marketing...I see you like it more than marketing from others. Carry on.

How good a techie are you? Objective about yourself and your skills?

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Re: Degree qualifications

"If raising awareness is helpful, demonstrating that there is real reason for hope is even more important."

...goddamn it.