Posts by Trevor_Pott

Re: Can't wait

You get free speech. In case you missed it, your government rescinded it. Even talking about a "right" to free speech makes you a terrorist. Now turn yourself in, prole.

Re: If you could buy elections Ross Perot would have won

Why the downvotes? Because billions of dollars every campaign cycle goes into hiring the best minds on earth that are versed in the most up-to-date research regarding group psychology and metasociodynamics. Hundreds of billions is spent each year by advertising companies on the same minds, and on research into the fields in question.

If you believe "people won't vote for individuals whose message they don't like" then you're an uninformed rube. Yes, they goddamned well will. We know enough about manipulating individuals and groups that we absolutely can make that happen. In addition, it has been proven empirically that knowledge of these tactics doesn't reduce their effectiveness.

What's more, you are entirely expecting that the people running for office are going to tell the truth. There's nothing to force them to. So they can all send a different, targeted message at each group. On balance, those with the most money (and who hire the best brains in the relevant disciplines) will win.

Getting people to vote for you has fuck all to do with laying out an honest platform and then sticking to it if you are elected. It has everything to do with lies, damned lies and statistics. And...the bigger the group size, the more effective these tactics are.

So then Google writes a bigger cheque and gets C&W to lay more fibre. Simples. That's sort of what the Google does.

Re: Fe Fi Fo FUD, I smell the snake oil

I should also point out that my government absolutely has been thinking about this, and does give fucks about privacy.

Where UAVs are used for commercial aims, their use would be covered by the Personal Information Protection Electronic Documents Act (PIPEDA), and subject to the same requirements as with any other data collection practice. It is a common misconception that a company does not require permission to take an individual’s photograph in a public place.87 The privacy protections in PIPEDA are there to ensure that people know when their image is being captured for commercial reasons – whether by photograph or video - and what it will be used for. PIPEDA requires consent as a general rule, subject to only limited and specific exceptions. Collection and use of personal information can only be for purposes that a reasonable person would consider appropriate in the circumstances and there should be a consideration for employing a less privacy-invasive means of obtaining the information.

If cameras on drones are governed by the same rules as surveillance cameras under PIPEDA, then flying your drone over my property in order to surveil me in my own yard absolutely is an invasion of my privacy. Just as I would be well within my rights to remove a surveillance camera discovered on my property (and surrender it to the legal authorities of my jurisdiction, should I be asked to return it), so to would I be within my rights to remove a flying camera that was surveilling me on my own property.

Now, you want to sit outside my property and point a camera at me? Then I am entirely within my rights to whip out some triangulation gear, track down who is controlling that drone and sue you for invasion of privacy. And I will win. Just like you cannot place a surveillance camera on your own building and point it at my back yard or bedroom, you cannot hover a drone just outside the property line and surveil me.

Your drone just flying by and accidentally waves onto my property as it's doing wide area shots or taking pictures of crowds? That's not an invasion of privacy and I likely have no legal recourse to seize the drone, though I do have a potential case for trespassing, if I can track down who is flying it.

Also of note: you can't go taking pictures of those crowds unless you post notice that you are going to. That's part of privacy law here. Even if you have a surveillance camera on your own property, you need to post notices.

Thus, if you have a drone looking at me for any reason, in any place and have not posted adequate notice such that I may find out who it is that is operating that drone, you are in violation of the law. At least if you use the drone for anything even remotely commercial. Recreational use is a lot more iffy...but I'd be entirely pleased to be the first bloke to take that one to the Supreme court.

Short version: you don't get to point a camera at me, even in a public place, unless you post a warning about it. You don't get to point a camera onto my property without asking, and if you place a camera on my property you're violating criminal - not just civil - law, and I have the right to remove (but not destroy) the camera, and to only surrender it to the authorities.

So no, I don't get to shoot your drone down. But cross my property line with it, I do get to net the damned thing and only give it back when the cops are at your side. At which point you will have told me who you are, and I will press charges.

Thanks,

--A citizen with a reasonable expectation of privacy in his own home and behind his own fence.

Re: Only a lawyer

What are you on about? Hitler wasn't a terrorist, at least not by modern definitions in which "terrorist" = "non-government entity that uses terror to achieve it's aims". Hitler was the duly elected leader of his nation. He did not seize power through a coup. He did not run his nation with a junta. He was democratically elected to office.

It's really important you understand that. The Nazis did not come out of nowhere and were suddenly in power. There was over a decade of bubbling, roiling, downright toxic social strife in Germany during which the Nazis went from fractional percentage of votes to running the place. This strife included clashes in the streets by the supporters of different political parties, with deaths during riots occurring on all sides.

Germany was a shambles and the Nazi party build a massive grassroots support system, which Hitler used to come to power. Once in power, he consolidated that power.

Hitler was a monster, and he utilized terror to achieve his aims, but he was the legitimate leader of a nation-state exercising power he obtained through the democratic process. It doesn't make what he did right, but if you want to include Hitler amongst "terrorists" then you have to open the door to the ruling administrations of all nation-states.

The Nazi rise to power's closest modern-day western equivalent is the Tea Party. Massively funded, relying on propaganda to drive a grassroots movement based on lies, xenophobia and fear of losing one's job. The difference is that enough people supported the Nazis to hand them the country. The Tea Party never made it that far.

Now, did Hitler's Nazi Germany use terror to achieve it's aims? Absolutely. But if we are going to include the legitimate governing body of a nation-state in the definition of terrorism then I demand that you include the United States of America. There are at least 10 different administrations that have used terror to achieve their aims, not the least of which were Truman, Nixon, Bush the lesser and Obama.

Your moral absolutism doesn't work when your chosen pillars of morality are also guilty of using the tools of terror.

Re: Ska

If you think Ska was hard to find in the 80s, try finding a Dixieland/Big Band Jazz band - a real one - in the 90s. There was a resurgence here in Canada in the late 00s, thank $deity, but still...few and far between.

That said, I like Ska. It's good music. There needs to more people playing in this world.

Re: Office 365...

Would you prefer a RIbbon? If so, kindly set yourself on fire. It'll improve the aesthetics of the forums. And the world.

As for your disliking French words...nique ta mere!

Re: What have I been missing?

75% of the infighting has been vBloggers of high status. Of that, almost all of it has been pro-VMware vBloggers pissing in the general direction of Nutanix. VMware also has internal propaganda on how to squish Nutanix, some of which was on their partner website...which was noted with some humour to me by folks at Nutanix as they are themselves partners and were able to see it. VMware banned Nutanix (and other direct competitors) from PEX.

The list goes on.

Some of the infractions are petty. Some (like the PEX incident) are what I would consider major. The grownups are not running this, the egos are. It's sad. It's ridiculous, and I've lost a lot of respect for people I once basically worshiped.

Re: Trevor, could we have that in PDF ?

The readers' wish is my consideration. But this is an easy one. I'll get my team to make you a whitepaper, sirs.

Re: some musty old parchment from late 1700s

Not that I disagree with most of what you said...but do take into account that said musty old parchment was written so long ago that many of the extant codified human rights are simply absent. Even were the land governed to the letter and the spirit of the laws it contains, it would still be a terrifyingly backwards and primitive nation.

Re: The future of Sysadmining.

Why is that a bad thing? Why should systems administrators have to know how infrastructure works, if the infrastructure is cheap enough to be disposable and there are things that easily configure it? Ideological purity?

Look, the point of IT is to make money. Your switch and your storage array don't make money. The applications they support do. If you can reduce the cost of managing and maintaining those switches, storage arrays, operating systems and so forth then you make more money from the use of the applications in question. If you are more efficient than your competitors, you win. That's business.

I could build you a car from scratch right up to the point that we stopped using carburetors. After fuel injection came in, I can't build you a car anymore, or even fix it. But I can still drive one. I've been driving one for a decade or more and I'll be driving for decades to come. The inability to repair all aspects of the car doesn't prevent me from using it and gaining value from it.

Systems administrators no longer need to know the sorted details of their disk arrays or how to futz with a switches command line. If push comes to shove on that, they can always bust out the manual, and that's available online. And we all have many ways of getting online.

I learned Cisco switches back in the early Catalyst 2600 days. Have I played with a Nexus from the command line level? No. Could I work it out after only a few minutes? Yes! The internet is full of knowledge and I only need to grok the basics before I'm off to the races.

Meanwhile, could I get 15 years of productivity out of that Nexus without ever dropping to it's command line? With Puppet, you're goddamned rights I could.

So on the one hand, I can orchestrate a delicate ballet of hundreds of thousands of devices using a tool called Puppet. I can be a highly efficient administrator that provides a good return on investment for my employer, but I fail in some ideologically "pure" fashion because I am not infinitely familiar with the details of how every single device works.

On the other hand, I could learn every single detail of every single device I use and configure each and every one of them from the lowest level interface available, with zero orchestration across the entire estate. I will likely need 5x as many administrators to run that estate. I don't provide efficient IT services for my employer, but I meet an arbitrary "pureness" of philosophy.

If you view the second option as the desirable one, you are bad at business.

if your not a fan

If you're not a fan. Auuuugh!

Also: what, what, in the butt.

Re: Good for Nutanix, Bad for Dell

As usual, Nate Amsden's vision is clear on this. HP have Storevirtual. That's why the rumors about buying SimpliVity never made sense. Dell has nothing like it. Server SANs are going to be an important part of the future storage mix. Dell needs to be able to play there, but they want to do it without a lot of risk.

I see this is absolutely fantastic for Dell, with a huge amount of pros and virtually no cons. I can't see why you believe otherwise. The next generation of these units, as shipped by Dell will be build all on Dell hardware. But short of buying Maxta, where would they get the software?

If they did buy Maxta, they'd have to convince the world to care about Maxta, when there's Nutanix, SimpliVity and ScaleIO as established names and VMware's VSAN as the up-and-coming software-only solution to watch.

With Nutanix, Dell gets a pre-canned winner, with a proven track record and a massive established customer base. Nutanix has cleared the minefield. They have name-brand recognition all on their own. All Dell has to do is get it validated on their hardware configs, train their sales staff and sell the thing.

*poof* Dell has an answer to the converged space that is the equal of anything anyone else has, overnight...and you can be damned they're getting decent margins.

This Silicon Valley obsession with being the only player, owning the complete vertical stack and edging out all competitors is both tedious and pointless. The goal is to make as much money as possible with as little risk as possible. This is an absolutely excellent way to do exactly that for Dell.

Do you believe dell a "failure" because they don't write their own desktop operating system to go in all their nodes? What about their own hypervisor, or their own server OS? Why are they using x86 chips sourced from Intel when they could get an ARM license and build their own fabs. Wouldn't that guarantee them ever copper squeezed out of every sale?

The pittance of margin they give up to Nutanix to license their software is barely worth mentioning. It's a cost of doing business...a business Dell couldn't even be in if they didn't get Nutanix's IP, or buy Maxta.

Addendum: We need to draw a line between "converged" and "hyper-converged". To by "hyper-converged" you need not only storage and compute together, you need backup, WAN acceleration and so much more. VSAN on it's own isn't hyper-converged, neither are Nutanix, ScaleIO or Maxta. Only SimpliVity is shipping out of the box, ready to go with all of that today.

VMware's stack as a whole, when married to some other software EMC has and put on Supermicro servers to make MARVIN will be. Nutanix + Dell's various software offerings also will be. Neither solution is "there" yet. Even ScaleIO doesn't ship as a "hyper-converged" offering just yet, though I expect it to in short order. As for Maxta...give me a couple of months...

It couldn't possibly be because two different court systems came to two different decisions about whether or not trade secrets were violated, eh? And if they did, obviously the USA's judgement should supersede that of Canada's.

Aye sir, I do indeed have someone looking into that for me. I'll post back here once that's taken care of.

Re: Sony's AGM

You say that like it's a bad thing. I think someone should have.

Re: Outsourcing megatrends and overseas futures

If the money were good enough, I would. But it would have to be damned good money. There's a reason I'm switching to writing, and away from systems adminsitration. I think you've largely nailed it.

Sounds like you have some great customers.

Re: I wonder if today will be

I had to. Even before I finished the article. I adore Mr Dabbs' writing, and respect him an enormous amount...but alas, I am at heart an internet troll.

Sorry Dabbsy, I just couldn't control the troll.

Re: @Dan Paul

"People shouldn't be able to win the lottery from a lawsuit, without even having to pay a dollar for the ticket!"

Why not? Won't they "trickle down" that wealth? Or is that a comforting lie that only applies to existing wealthy people, and not to those who might become nouveau rich?

Those people were screwed over by the companies in question. The existing settlement will leave the companies in question with a net gain for having broken the law and screwed thousands of workers in a fashion that quite honestly could have cartel-class implications.

The companies involved deserve to have their metaphorical gonads crushed for this. They should be strung up and left for the buzzards as an example to future companies. Shareholders beware! Reign in the excesses of your board or your ill gotten gains will evaporate!

But of course, I don't expect that you would see it that way...

Re: effort [..] required to manage a fleet of Windows machines

The answer to "Need to run something that was coded for IE6/ActiveX ?" is always "kill yourself." :P

Re: I used to be a customer

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