Posts by Trevor_Pott

Re: @Sandtitz Some nice ideas @poopypants again @Trevor

Let me me more clear, given that my usage of lolcats-like meme grammar didn't spell it out clearly enough for you:

How is the average user - you know, the mindless consumer to whom Windows 8 was targeted - supposed to update if the store download is borked? Blah-blah-blah something .iso is to them what someone saying "you just [in comprehensible static] CV joint [Charlie Brown adults] the googenplexit" when telling me how "easy" it is to fix my car.

Re: Anecdotes.

Funny, there are plenty of ways to build an App Store that enhances the install experience without giving Microsoft a means to remotely control your computer, remove applications without warning or delete your data.

A great example would be Ninite Pro. The Ninite One installer is basically an App Store that installs free software and it works like a goddamned champ. It can even push those applications out to every PC on the network, update every PC on the network and more.

And yes, my dear old "Aunt Tilly" does use it, despite never having learned what the right mouse button was for, or how to use a USB key. So take your "on message" bullshit and GTFO.

Re: @Sandtitz Some nice ideas @poopypants again

How to upgrade to 8.1 when store are broke?

Re: PCs are much faster than they were 3 years ago

For what purpose does a consumer of content require anything more powerful than a Pentium III with H.264 offload?

Re: Public cloud barriers

Okay, I need to print 4TB of high-resolution photographs per day at my photolab on printers the size of cars. Please explain how I am going to run all my servers in the cloud and stream the images I need back to my photolab. Consider that the lab in question probably clears about $5M a year and wobbles on the edge of profitability as is. It can't afford a bigger pipe than it has now. What magic do you use to make this work?

Now, let's look at my machinist shop which has the same sort of requirements; data that must be delivered to local equipment in a timely manner from the cloud. The next-generation stuff does a closed-loop between the manufacturing equipment, sensors and analysis software which needs ultra-low-latency in order function properly. Am I going to run all of that in the cloud?

I also have bakery that falls into a similar category. These folks do a million samples a second from their sensors across the whole of the factory then crunch that data in real-time and feed the results back to the machinery for real-time modifications of the environment. Are you going to do that all in the cloud?

I have remote drilling teams that are doing real-time seismological analysis, modelling and simulation based on feedback they receive from on-site sensors. This information helps them decide where to drill, how and when. Their access to the internet is via an orbiting dirigible with an LTE booster. Are you going to put their workloads all in the cloud?

I have a storm chaser that collects over 50 billion samples a minute from over 1000 sensors and crunches that in real time to determine how storms are going to evolve. He is often driving between mountains where even cellular signals won't reach and satellite is thready to the fact that he drives into tornadoes for a living. Are you going to put his workload into the cloud?

I have a journalist that deals with Chinese dissidents, pursues human rights violations by the American government and is currently trying to uncover some unspeakable horror in Burma. Even if you could put all his workloads in the cloud, would you?

I have a fire hall that absolutely has to have the diagnostics and maintenance systems for their equipment running 60/60/24/7/356, no exceptions. They need 100% uptime and access to a number of emergency systems and are increasingly using sensors ranging from deepscan sonar to thermal sense drones to determine safety. Are you going to put their workloads in the cloud?

I could go on and on and on, but suffice it to say you're talking utter fucking bullshit. Some workloads can be put into the cloud because they have no localized mission criticality. Some workloads absolutely can not. Even for SMBs - like my 10 man bakery - there are workloads that will run local and some that could be moved to the cloud.

But the cloud is a tricksy thing. If I have workloads that I must run local - and despite your propaganda this will always be a truth of the world - then I have a floor cost of investment in local IT that I must make. If I am already balls-in on some local IT, then the question becomes "do I have the spare capacity on my local setup to run $_workload or not?"

If I have the spare capacity to run $_workload locally I do. Period. It will be cheaper to do so than farming it out to the cloud. If I don't have the spare capacity to run it locally then I ask myself the next question "what is the cost of running this locally versus the cost of running it in the cloud?" I already have local systems, local nerd and the rest...if the TCO of adding that workload locally is lower than farming it out, it gets added locally.

The cloud is great for DR. That way I don't need to light up a DR site. Provided, of course, that everything is encrypted at rest as well as in flight, and that data sovereignty issues are dealt with. And that I can download the data to my local network - where it will inevitably reside once I light my factory back up - in a quick and financially painless manner.

Some workloads that are finicky and irritating, but not especially mission-critical - like email, instant messaging and so forth - I have no problems putting into the cloud. The world doesn't end if e-mail stops for a day or two because Amazon blew up. My company does stop working if the delicate dance of complex sensor-analysis interactions with the bakery machinery ceases.

And if I can't get the fire alarm notice, why then...people die>.

How about you get "off message" for a little while, stop thinking like a marketdroid and start thinking about the human impact of cloud computing. The cost in lost profits from downtime, the cost in jobs from lost profits or shuttered businesses and the cost in lives if some things go wrong.

Then tell me, with a straight face, that the future is to have all workloads in the cloud. Because if you can actually do so you are going on the blacklist of "IT professionals" that I will never, ever deal with...and association whit you wilt be the viral touch of death for any contracts, vendors and so forth that I deal whit in the future.

You have a whole great big box full of tools at your disposal. Don't keep using a hammer for everything because it's what you have in your hand at the moment.

Re: Mowing grass

/me shakes broom from rocking chair on porch

If it weren't Oil it would be our vast mineral reserves, diamonds, uranium, forestry, agriculture, growing educated population or even our limestone deposits. Oil's cheap-and-easy for now, but Alberta is huge. We've got enough environment to ruin that we can keep at this for quite some time.

Hell, we could just sit here, dam up all our rivers for hydro, set up eleventy squillion windmills by Crow's Nest pass, stand up a bunch of nuke plants, sell all the 'leccy to the states and live like kings.

Alberta's problem is now, and has been for decades, inadequate manpower. The socially conservative xenophobes that live in the middle of south buttfuck nowhere are so terrified of furriners that not only will the Tea Party have nothing to do with them the Baptists threw them out! We have low immigration caps and ridiculous barriers to entry directly into the province. This prevents us from growing our workforce and it is the brakes on our economy.

That said, we do indeed have laws here that say things like "thou shalt not contact people out of hours unless you pay them stupendous amounts of money. Certain jobs can be exempted from this if the employee agrees, but you can not discriminate against employees who actually want a work/life balance." We're crying for wetware to weld the pipes and twiddle the knobs and despite this we do just fine with our "draconian" labour laws.

The French have the right of this. And that's with my business owner's hat on; the one that actually does have 24/7 clients to support.

I believe this is why certain categories of worker are exempt (with the worker's consent.) Alberta's laws are not all that different, and we have one of the most powerful economies in the world. :)

Re: @Arnaut the less - @Tom Welsh

"Potts's Nietzschean view"

A) There is no S in my last name

B) Even is there were an S in my last name "Potts's" is all kinds of wrong. Grammer, motherfucker, learn it.

C) If you think I'm a follower of Nietzche, you're an idiot.

One thing we would both agree upon, however, is that the various supreme beings that our species has manufactured over the aeons are nothing more than myths. There are a few other minor points we'd be able to have friendly beers over, but from there he and I would diverge quite significantly.

Now, back in your box. Do 30 laps around your cage before you scream insanely into the aether. We need you tired out by bedtime, because the adults want to actually get some sleep tonight.

Re: No need to ask permission - @Trevor_Pott

"hyperbolic overestimation of homo sapiens sapiens"

Where did I estimate (over or under) homo sapiens? I said the purpose of sentience was to spread life to the stars. I never once said is was the purpose of sentience to spread sentient life to the stars and certainly not necessarily to spread it's own species to the stars.

I said the purpose of life was life itself. That we as sentients have a duty to spread that life. You inferred that I must mean the spread of our species and of sentient life.

You were also the one prattling on about holy books and theology without actually stopping for a brief moment to ask what I might have meant. I gave you a very well known book by a seminal writer in our history from which at least one part of the quote - the purpose of life is life itself - is derived. From there, you're off on an anti-humanist tear that I think stopped somewhere around the intersection of hope-shattering nihilism, bleak despair, self loathing and evangelical atheism. (Where it isn't enough that you believe there is no supreme being, you must purge that belief from others.)

Quoting one phrase form Nietzsche does not mean endorsing all of his teachings, nor does acknowledging him as one of the pre-eminent philosophers of our history. Our culture and our values are what they are because of the great thinkers of our past as well as those who acted upon those philosophies. Positive, negative, neutral...we are as a species the sum of our predecessors; genetically as well as culturally.

If you want to sit in a corner and whip yourself for the sins of other people's grandfathers, you go right ahead. Have fun with that. You can hang any tag you want on it, I'm going to go with "beating yourself up over 'original sin'" because that's exactly what your tedious antihumanism appears to be from the outside.

Why don't you do you reset your neurotransmitter levels by smoking a huge bowl and just going and getting laid. Chill the fuck out, man. It's only life; noone gets out alive.

Re: No need to ask permission - @Trevor_Pott

The book I have to back my "theological" claim isn't from the iron age, but it is one of the most celebrated pieces of philosophical writing in all of human history. maybe you should go read it.

And I think Frederich Nietzsche would be a might upset about you calling his writings a work of theology. But hey, have yourself a ball with all that unbridled rage. Just don't break anything important, hmm?

Re: No need to ask permission

If they can do it, let 'em. Hell, cheer 'em on. Someone should escape this pathetic mudball. If we're not interested, more power to the Russians, the Chinese and anyone else who cares to try.

Quod ad astra. The purpose of life is life itself, and for sentience, to take that life to the stars.

Re: The race is on!

The problem with the interplanetary hyperloop you suggest is that if we want to launch people along that thing it needs to be a lot longer then the prairies. Length wise, from northwest Alberta to southwest Manitoba might work, but A) you can't build on muskeg and B) the yanks would have some nasty words with us lobbing ballistics over their nation at hypersonic speeds.

That means something long and south. Crow's Nest Pass in southern Alberta to Thunder Bay Ontario, or even the Quebec border. This puts it far too close to the covetous hands of the yanks, which poses all sorts of it's own problems.

Canada absolutely has the technology, the manpower and the money to build such a device, but we never would. The biggest reason being that it would violate all treaties regarding the treatment of international territory and severely weaken our claims to sovereignty in the north. There's a metric "holy shit" worth of unexploited - hell, unexplored - resources up there, and we're just not ready to pass them up in exchange for some airless rock that has fuck all to offer except nickle, silicon and iron.

If you poor buggers really need He3 that much, go hard. We've got enough Uranium to last us the next 10,000 years and when that's up, we'll just build some Lagrangian satellites with massive bussard ramscoops on them rather than trying to "mine" He3 from regolith.

I'm all for space exploration, but #occupyluna is the single stupidest idea I have heard of in my entire life. If you really want to be trapped in a gravity well, choose Ceres. Everything you need is there, including stupendous amounts of water. The gravity well is enough that plants will point their roots downwards when they grow, but easy enough to make getting off the damned thing and exploring cheap and easy.

Fuck Luna. If y'all want it, you can have it. We're Canadian, we need plenty of fresh water and spectacular amounts of valuable resources to make us happy. It's what we know how to work with.

Re: Just think of all those landfill firewall routers and modems out there...

Shame, there are plenty of good open source OSes you could run a 54G that would be just fine.

Also: why would you care if your router has an SSL vulnerability? Are you insane enough to leave it's management port open to the WAN? Why the fnord would you do that? Get a real OS on the damned thing, then you can VPN in to your home network for administrative tasks instead of leaving the henhouse tied up with a piece of string and a blinking neon sign visible from space advertising said fact to the local wolves.

Primary website appears to be in the US. In fact, the site hosting the client download appears to be in the US as well. (CDN, I suspect.) The servers the client talks to after install are in Toronto. (I've been watching them all night.)

Re: Sure . . .

Oh, hey, I'm not knocking the integration with KVM at all. They talk to the hypervisor, pull in stats, marry up the image on their datastore with information from the hypervisor. Someone spent a lot of time in a dark room with a bunch of APIs and they should be proud of what they've accomplished.

My issue is with that one very specific statement. The ability to - for all intents and purposes - recognize extensions on their own datastore tarted up as though it were some kind of superpower. If that is an example of the breathtaking innovation coming out Silicon Valley today that should be getting us all hot-and-bothered, it's time to scour everything within 50km of the 101 right back to bedrock and start over.

Re: Choose your poison @Trevor Pott

Now Talisker I have tried, and compared to Glenrothes it might as well be turpentine.

Next time you're in a decent liqour store, do yourself a favour and buy some Glenrothes.

Re: Choose your poison

Well, on your recommendation, I shall try it.