* Posts by Trevor_Pott

6991 publicly visible posts • joined 31 May 2010

Geo-boffins say 'quake lifted bits of New Zealand by 8 metres, moved at 3km/second

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Yikes!

Integrator fired chap for hiding drugs conviction, told to pay compo for violating his rights

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@David Pearce

Your country is fucked up.

Make Christmas Great Again: $149 24-karat gold* Trump tree ornament

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Re: Conclusive proof

"Name one politician in the last 50 years that wasn't corrupt? I can't think of any."

I can think of about a dozen, off the top of my head, but they're all Canadian. In the US? Sanders, probably. Maaaaayyyyyyyyyyybe Wyden. Maybe.

FYI: The FBI is being awfully evasive about its fresh cyber-spy powers

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Re: As opposed to...

In the US, they'll just torture you until you tell them whatever they want to hear. *shrug*

Australia is the US of the east. Both countries are run by ****ing barbarians.

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Re: As opposed to...

Bullshit. In the US they threaten you until you take a plea bargain, even though you're innocent. There is no justice in the United States.

Hasn't been for a long, long time. Maybe ever.

Stay out of my server room!

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Re: Ahhh...

Wait, have we worked together? That's my story. At least 5 different times.

Man, this industry is depressing.

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Re: The headline image...

It was int he way of my rockstar hair!

Who's in Peter's file? Moneybags Thiel hits up Silicon Valley brains to join his Trump think tank

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It's nice to see the valley doesn't have too many collaborators.

There's only one thing to be done with collaborators.

Why I just bought a MacBook Air instead of the new Pro

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Re: Surface is nice and all

"And how many of the users in your clients would you trust with 'full control' Trevor?"

Every single one. I serve my clients. I don't control them. The question is how many of my clients trust me with full control of their IT?

Their equipment. Their software. Their business. They make the decisions. I give recommendations. They live with the consequences of those decisions.

If you can't understand that concept, then please state your real name and employer so that I can avoid both like the plague.

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Surface is nice and all

...shame about the operating system.

Wake me when someone is shipping an OS where I, as the end user, actually have full control. Until then, I'll keep buying Eurocom and using Linux. It's an awful experience, but it's ever so slightly better than the rest of the festering shitpile that's on offer.

Forget 'shadow IT' – it's 'self-starting IT' now

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That is one of those situations for which man weaponized fire.

The case for a police-civilian cyber super-agency in Australia

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You need redundancy so you can have the various agencies investigate eachother. If you just have a single agency what you end up with is a bunch of out-of-control and untouchable witch-hunters.

Or maybe that's the intention?

We live in a shitty timeline.

NetApp's regeneration could be deep surgery or anti-wrinkle cream

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I don't suppose NetApp has considered making (or buying) solutions people actually want to buy? Additional question: have they thought about making (or buying) solutions people will want to buy tomorrow, instead of solving the problems of nine years ago two years from now?

Just thoughts...

NVMe SSD? Not yet, says Pure, but promises to deliver it

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Re: Upgrade

"Pure just swaps controllers, with no downtime. Find someone else that does that."

Uh...lots of companies? Especially the pure SDS ones.

Aw, snap: Independent disk drive failure rates from Backblaze

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Re: This is very helpful.

I'd love to do that sort of testing. Sadly, the drive manufacturers don't seem keen on giving me hundreds or thousands of free drives...

Open to practical ideas of how to get hold of enough units to do proper testing. I'm sure I could come up with something to fill them all with...

'Ultimate Team' scheme: EA hackers charged for stealing in-game coins

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Re: Viewed logically

But with bitcoin, stealing the bitcoin deprives the owner of use of the original. It's not just making a copy.

If you download an image off my website, you are making a copy. You are not depriving me of the ability to use the original. If you download an image off mywebsite *and then delete the file from my webserver*, you are depriving me of the ability to use the original. You have "stolen" it, effectively. (Ignoring backups.)

This is the difference. They convinced a server to emit copies of a digital currency that is effectively unlimited. If the owner of the algorithm wants more currency, they can push a button and generate as much as they want. Nobody is deprived of the ability to use that digital currency.

At worst, it's digital counterfeiting. It is emphatically _not_ theft.

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I would be okay with using the term digital counterfeiting to describe the activities of the miners. But counterfeiting is not STEALING. Stealing deprives the owner of the ability to use the original.

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If you convinced my bank to give you a COPY of my money, without depriving me of my money, go hard! Why would i care about that?

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Explain how you "steal" something by convincing a computer to emit copies of some code. "Steal", my ass.

Cheer up, world! AWS instances just got cheaper

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Re: Your move Microsoft?

Why would they? So long as the cost to migrate is higher than the price delta...

The sharks of AI will attack expensive and scarce workers faster than they eat drivers

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"Now, how about someone creates WebLawyer ? How long do you think it will be before people are logged in by the millions to search how to divorce (continuously trending topic), how to write their will, etc ?"

http://www.lawdepot.ca <-- this site has functionally been my lawyer for years now. What do you mean "when"?

The hated Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal will soon be dead. Yay?

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@Doctor Syntax

You should feel that way about CETA. Canada was trying to fuck you hard, and you should have told us to go the hell home.

Harper was obeying orders, sneaking in the nasty provisions the US wanted in TTIP into CETA, "because Canadians are nice, and they won't screw the EU, promise". It was a shit deal for you, and a shit deal for Canadians. It was great for American corporations. That's all CETA was ever supposed to be.

I'm super bummed that our dancing monkey of a Prime Fuckwit actually signed it. That spineless coward hasn't kept a damned one of his promises to actually benefit Canadians in the past year, but he's sure managed to proliferate Harper's vision of a corporatist hellhole that crushes ordinary workers (of all nations) under the heel of the elite.

That's what Canada gets for electing a human sock puppet. *sigh*

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@jamesb2147

How fortunate that we have entire organizations dedicated to explaining exactly that! Rather than flood with propaganda, I'll leave you with this rather concise summary from one of the world's leading experts in intellectual property: http://www.michaelgeist.ca/2015/06/why-canadians-have-good-reason-to-be-wary-of-the-tpp/

There, nop you can probably ignore the rest of this post.

Really short version: at a minimum, Canadians would end up paying significantly more for medicine, and any laws we put in place to protect our environment, or retain control of our resources would be struck down by corporations.

Outside of medicine and IP, the big one that does it for me is fresh water. Without fresh water, we're fucked. Any of us. All of us. Everywhere on the planet. Already, too many of Canada's fresh water reserves are polluted beyond the ability to use for human consumption. The toxins spread into those waters bio-accumulate, making the reasonably significant portion of our population that still rely on hunting and fishing unable to maintain their traditional lifestyle. That might not matter to some, but it matters to me.

Beyond the lovey-dovey feels portion, however, is that fact that even though Canada is one of the most water-rich nations in the world, we suck hard core at managing it. MY home province of Alberta is already seeing subsidence and other nasty effects of our severe drain on underground aquifers.

Right now, today, that maybe doesn't matter so much; we have spectacular amounts of water coming down out of the mountains, and we can divert rivers and other fun things. The problem is that even 10 years from now, the amount of water coming down off those mountains will be a lot< less. The glaciers are shrinking, most of them are almost gone.

Canada's potable and accessible freshwater reserves are something that I believe we need to manage. We need to manage it in order to provider for our own people. We need to manage it because of the raw economic reality that it fresh water is the oil of the 21st century.

In my opinion we simply can't enter into agreements that would treat access to our fresh water as something the government isn't allowed to regulate, tax, or otherwise get a piece of. We can't let a bunch of Americans waltz into our country, pollute and/or export all our fresh water, and stick us with the bill.

I don't give a rat's ASCII if it means we're left out of some oogly-boogly trade bloc. In 30 years, over half the world is going to be begging for access to our water, and we need to maintain the ability to milk them for every last rotten cent. Saudi Arabia created a financial empire on the back of oil, and we need to retain the ability to do the same on the back of water.

It's not like we have the manpower or military to otherwise defend ourselves. Controlling access to our resources and what's left of our environment is the only card we have to play.

And I, for one, am 110% against handing that to the Americans. Not for a trade deal. Not for anything.

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The TPP is a bullshit trade deal that would fuck Canada and Canadians hard, and I, for one, will cheer its demise.

The exportation of American law to other countries is cracked, pure and simple. We don't want your insane approach to intellectual property, your lack of environmental protection or any of the other corporatist fuckwittery.

Death to the TPP and all other attempts to bypass national law. Trade deals are okay, but using trade deals as an end run around parliament to destroy the ability of the people to control their own laws, protect their own environment or strike their own balance on things like copyright is simply not okay. Lock that shit hard.

We're going to have to start making changes or the adults will do it for us

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Re: Tabs != n*spaces

Excuse me sir, do you think in fractals? I've heard such people exist, but I've never met one. You strike me as someone who might fit that description.

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Re: What an awesome read

For the record, you should have used "it's".

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Re: Sonar

I got me a rope made out of tangible hatred, let's do this!

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I'm on the spectrum. ADHD. No aspergers or direct autism here, though I can reach stimulus overload at a conference. (Or a really crowded shopping mall.)

The weird part is, I'm the functional ASD fellow in my group of evil compatriots. Most that I know are on the ASD side of the serotonin spectrum. We don't mix well with those on the schizophrenia side of the spectrum.

And yes, there are a LOT of ASD people in tech. The ASD side of the serotonin spectrum was for a long time naturally attracted to tech. It never seemed to appeal as much to the schizophrenia side.

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TO ARMS, MEN! REPEL THE INTRUDERS!

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Re: Tabs != n*spaces

Anyone who edits sendmail.cf by hand is several orders of magnitude more pee-in-jars than I could ever work with. I wouldn't know how to communicate with such a person. It would be like talking to a circuit board.

I'll stick with the M4 editor, thanks. Sendmail.cf...what the blinking...that's like writing an e-mail by first coding a new mail client in assembler!...

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Re: Because they are the most important things in your life, today.

I'm going to build a wall and make spaces pay for it!

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Re: Of to argue about spaces vs tabs is to miss the point of the article. However… (Bruce Hoult)

"though tab-using heathens should burn like the vermin they are"

I'll fight you! :P

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Since when are all votes cast equally? And the mechanism by which they manage to force tabs on me is somewhat irrelevant. The end result is what I fear, not the means.

Think GitHub and Git but for data – and you've got FlockerHub and fli

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Re: GitHub for Data

<Lurch>You boinged?</Lurch>

Microsoft flips Google the bird after Windows kernel bug blurt

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Terry Myerson: "boo hoo hoo"

Who gives a rat fuck what Endpoint Antichrist thinks? He is the most customer hostile non-Oracle executive on the planet!

20 years to get Amiga Workbench 3.1 update, and only a fortnight to get first patch

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Re: We should take bets...

Windows has hostages.

Amiga has users.

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

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Re: @Trevor_Pott FAIL?

Except I don't buy that vendor-service axiom at all. We can all of us name plenty of instances in which the cheaper gadget was the superior one. We can all equally name plenty of instances in which you end up paying a fuckload for a brand name, getting nothing better than the competition, because they're both selling the same damned thing.

You don't get what you pay for. In fact, everyone is trying to screw you and you pay whatever people can scam out of you. Some times the cheaper stuff is the shit choice, and some times it not. But there is little evidence whatsoever that increased price provides a superior product.

That's why reviews are important. To share knowledge, and to hold the feet of vendors to the fire.

Vendors can scam some of us some of the time, but so long as free speech exists, they can't scam all of us all of the time.

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Re: Ubiquiti Rep

Thank you for posting some cables you believe work. Will Ubiquiti certify their functionality corporately? Also, a few nits to pick:

1) It would maybe help if these were on your "community list" of supported cables. And, you know, publicly listed as supported on a per-model basis.

2) This cable you recommended, a 2.5m DAC is $50, which compares pretty poorly to it's $20 counterpart, especially in bulk.

3) Your products page lists no transceivers or cables for sale. That you sell such things is not mentioned on the community-supported list that your help reps point people to as "the list of things supported". I can find no mention of them in the official help documentation.

4) In selling your own modules, I fear you may be engaging in giving away the razors at cost and squeezing customers on the cost of blades. If that is the play...

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I whitelist infrastructure that I work on. I don't whitelist public web sites. For security reasons.

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Re: FAIL?

I don't have any sort of Ubiquiti vendetta, and will continue to buy and use their UniFi equipment. But the EdgeMax stuff is now three for three on "not working out of box" for me. I think that's worth letting people know about.

Musk outlines plans for Mars

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Re: In other words

"The first humans sent to Mars won't be coming back"

Who'd want to?

Thanks, IoT vendors: your slack attitude will get regulators moving

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National regulation won't do a damned thing.

National regulation won't do a damned thing. International regulation is required.

The problem is, political negotiations get caught up in corruption. There is a very clear goal here, with a defined problem: define security and update standards for devices, as well as labeling, punitive measures and enforcement for networked devices.

Unfortunately, if the politicians are to be relied upon, they'll end up pissing away a decade trying to fight off the Americans' attempt to extend copyright and patents as part of the treaty, the Europeans' attempts to get a bunch more common goods renamed so that only those coming from a particular region can use the common name, and $deity only knows what India and China will try to worm in. I'm pretty sure Russia would just try to torpedo the whole thing for funsies.

Sadly, standards bodies are equally ineffectual in these circumstances. It took how long to agree on 802.11n?

TL;DR: This is why we can't have nice things.

The man running HPE's Microsoft Azure biz says shiz this... after eight months

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My marketing hurts. Ow.

Google's crash canaries' muted chirping led to load balancer brownout

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Or a really bad case of butts disease.

US vs UK: Who's better prepared for AI?

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Re: It must be easier to do AI in the US

Are you implying Trump is intelligent?

Open-source storage that doesn't suck? Our man tries to break TrueNAS

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Re: You keep using that word . . .

Trevor go to conference. Vendor throw conference party and guilt Trevor into going. Trevor try to escape. Many drinks, many shake hands. Music too loud. Talk about breaking tech. Trevor finally allowed to escape.

Parties no have coffee.

*thud*

^ Pretty much like that.

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Re: @TP

If you need me to connect you to the vendor, you know where to find my e-mail. ;)

Mars by the 2030s: Obama

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Re: Something in the coffee or....?

*shrug*

So he's somewhat uninspiring. At least he's not Trump. Or Cruz. Or any of the other sack of social and/or cultural conservatives why so desperately want power so they can oppress groups they don't like.

When the choices are "kinda meh" and "completely fucking whackadoodle", "kinda meh" starts to look okay.

It's time for Microsoft to revisit dated defaults

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Re: Urgent replication flag

There are ways to manually trigger immediate replication, yes. So what? How is that solving the problems discussed?

I am not responsible for your ailing memory nor your inability to comprehend what you read. As usual, the so-called "inaccuracies" you detect are entirely in your personally errors regarding merging of what's read with what you think you "know".

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Re: I call bullshit on that marketing exec

"Regardless of the rest of this article I call bullshit...The exec would have to get their vanity items working for it first, load it with all their music and then make sure they had their really important power points available before they walked into that meeting...So how did this exec know to register their device? Clearly they were told and given instructions to do so otherwise the exec would never have been able to do it..."

A) Do you know anything about Microsoft endpoint solutions? From client software to the tools built into Windows Server such as Roaming Profiles and Folder Redirection? If they had logged in, they'd have all their stuff made available with rapidity and all their customization intact. If you know what you're doing, that part works reasonably okay.

B) The "how to register" was made available through the company intranet which, if I recall, wasn't checked by the marketing exec before the device purchase. There was some kerfuffle about screeching at the local store staff to pull up the info as the marketing exec was "in a hurry", and then scrambling to follow all the steps. War stories swapped over beers revealed hilarity...