Posts by Trevor_Pott

Re: Makes sense...

No they don't. You really don't know much about the medical profession, do you? Sterilizing and cleaning tools is it's own profession. Complete with it's own tools, rapidly evolving technology and techniques and more.

A Doctor might have some very basic idea of what' going on "they are removing physical detritus and trying to kill all the bacteria and viruses", but I promise you most doctors don't actually know how that's accomplished. What those doctors are taught is essentially history. "These were the ways we mostly/kind-of-sort-of killed off bacteria in the past". Things like ethanol, fire, etc.

Of course, it's 2016, not 1816, and we know little bit more about the world now. There are all sorts of nasties that can stay on instruments, even after what many would consider to be rigorous attempts at sterilization. This is especially true in hospitals, where the oogly booglies have been in a constant state of evolutionary overdrive in an attempt to survive.

So now we're in to things like pulsed sonic detritus removal, acid baths, ionizing radiation, silver and/or copper coating/recoating, plus like a thrillion layers of testing at different intervals. That's before we get into the procedures around length of reuse before replacement, order of operations, number of cycles between different events, etc.

As a general rule, no. The Doctor doesn't know that stuff. Certainly not to the level of detail you are clearly demanding IT folks "know" what is going on under the hood.

it's also a completely irrational position for you to take. Nobody - and I mean nobody, not even your own over-inflated opinion of yourself - can understand everything there is to understand about IT. No human brain is even close to big enough. The true "full stack engineer" is biologically impossible.

Real human beings in the 21st century rely on understanding the basics. We then understand specifics about things we need to understand in order to do our jobs. For everything else there's reference material. Usually a user manual and/or Google.

So climb down off your high horse, mate. You aren't fooling anyone who actually is an IT professional. Actually being a professional means a sense of humility. It's required in any profession because admitting what you don't know is absolutely critical.

The difference between the apprentice and the master is that the apprentice thinks they know everything when, in fact, they know nothing. The master thinks then know nothing when, in fact, they have forgotten more than most practitioners will ever know.

Re: Samsung updates

Assuming that Samsung are releasing those updates to anything other than the very latest models every month (and given the delays in getting Marshmallow onto the S5, I don't believe that's that case), there is still the issue of those updates not getting out to actual customers.

Pointing the finger at the carriers pointless. There are squillions of carriers and ISPs in the world and they have collectively proven time and again that they can't be trusted. Whether the issue is updating their Android images or delivering IPv6 connectivity in a G7 nation (like Canada), carriers and ISPs don't care about standards, security or usability.

So why are phone manufacturers like Samsung even giving these carriers the choice? Samsung (and everyone else) should be bypassing the carrier lockdowns altogether and allowing end users to receive (at least) monthly updates.

But, like everything else about their phones, Samsung just doesn't care. Minimum effort for the minimum viable product is the name of the game. :(

Re: The defaults keep the edge cases working

Or, hey, they could put contention sensing code into the links that would scale replication times dynamically. Hell, they probably have 95% of that code in a repository somewhere...

Re: Musk seems to be losing it

My wife, myself and everyone we count as friends would all go, without hesitation, even if we knew for a fact we'd last only days or months on the Red Planet.

For exploration. For humanity. For our future.

Some things are absolutely worth dying for.

Re: Nice engine

VASMIR (and other ion engines) have one critical design flaw: they need power. Lots and lots and lots of power. Solar ain't gonna get you there, so that means fission. Fission means fissionable materials. Fissionables can be used in two forms:

1) RTGs, which we can't do because we don't have any more plutonium, and hand-wringing is preventing us from making more.

2) Fission reactors, which we can't do because OMG RADIOACTIVE SPACE NUKES ARE GOING TO KILL THE CHILDREN.

Good luck with those ion engines. They're no match for the mighty NIMBY.

Re: How much is a IPv4 address worth

Er....my ISP assigns me one IPv6 address. Not a block. An address. I have to set up a sixxs tunnel and use my block from there to do anything useful with IPv6. An the other two ISPs in the area don't assign IPc6 at all!

So, yeah, that whole thing where ISPs will do whatever ivory tower intellectuals tell them to do? That's not how the real world works. People are shit. ISPs and ivory tower engineers alike.

Re: Bridging the gap

How's that elitism working out for you and your ivory tower douchecanoes?

In the real world, NAT has benefits. I don't give a shit if developers have to suffer through importing a handful of libraries that provide all the tools they'll ever need to work with NAT. There's no good reason whatsoever that my endpoints should have globally addressable IPs.

I won't speak for anyone else on this, but I'm super interested in this, and I thank Simon from bringing it to my attention. This like "by the way, fs.com is where you find super cheap cables that will save you tens of thousands of dollars". It's "infomercial" to fs.com's competitors, vital information to actual IT practitioners.

Heathen!

There's nothing politically incorrect about anything you listed except "Maybe Israel is kinda fascist". Everything else is simply incorrect. Politics don't enter into it.

As for the Israel thing, well, Israel is run by horrible people who do horrible things. But "fascism" isn't the correct term. They're their own thing. And yes, I don't understand why it's politically incorrect to say "well, shit, the way Israel's government responds to pretty much everything - both internally and externally - is awful, and a lot of their problems would solvable if they weren't arrogant, xenophobic, nationalistic, control freaks."

Somehow, saying the Israeli government is peopled by monsters is immediately a condemnation of all Israelis or even all Jews (Israeli or not). I don't get how that works, but apparently it's a thing.

The rest of your issues, however, are just wrong. Way before politics gets involved.

Yeah, but if start settling for a donkey, what we'll actually get is...not very useful at all.

Re: Let me get this right!

Apprehend and rehabilitate. Vengeance is not justice.

If I have a 20% chance of chemo curing my cancer and a 90% chance of dying from that cancer then I'm going to take the chemo. That's just rational.

Woo woo crystals, magic water and the so-called "power of prayer" have exactly a zero percent chance of curing me. The power of the human immune system varied dramatically per person, and given the death rates from cancer do you really want to roll those dice?

The alternative to chemo or radiation therapy is generally death. And not the nice kind of death.

Re: Sorry but

Clearly you're not consuming as VMware intends (upgrading everything immediately). The past year has been a clusterfuck-class comedy of errors. I can't help but feel VMware are moving more and more towards a Redmondian QA model.

If you have to ask, you're not a "relevant" customer.

Welcome to tech.

Re: EBay

You want me to carry around a keyboard for my notebook.

The fuck, what?

Re: ISP's are the keyholders

Sorry, but I don't see getting trusted root certs as being all that hard. Pretty much zero effort, when you look at just how easily that particular scam has been pulled off before.

It takes a lot - a lot - to get browsers to pull trust for a cert, and comparatively little to set up a CA and get into the list. Especially for ISPs.

Designing a network and physically putting it in place is a lot of effort. It's stupid money, requires a huge number of people and takes crazy amounts of time. Becoming a CA and then abusing it, or using already abusable certs from generally trusted CAs, or any of many other techniques (you need to install our software in order to use our internet) is basically zero effort.

You make a choice about how you want to ruin your reputation and then you do the paperwork. You will eventually be caught, but you can absolutely spoof the TLS traffic quickly and easily.

As you state: Internet security basically relies on the system. Something you seem to think actually works.

I, however, view the CA system as completely broken and pathetically easy to manipulate, especially when compared to other very tangible considerations of running something as big as an ISP.

Cheers.

Re: Solving a problem.....

Except the services themselves. The API of those services isn't fixed or static. They can and will change as soon as viable competition offering the same APIs shows up and they see movement away.

It was ever thus.

Shot version: Pernix sold two product: FVP and Architect

FVP is server-side-caching. You buy an SSD (or multiple) and put them into the server. FVP then copies frequently read data blocks into the SSD to your apps can read them faster. It also buffers writes to the SSD so your writes happen faster and then slowly drains them back to disk. If clusters this across multiple servers so that if one server goes splork all your writes waiting to be drained are still stored elsewhere.

Architect is the thing that looks at your workload and makes sure that all your writes will fit onto the SSDs without causing a flush cascade and crippling your entire infrastructure. (I.E. your writes don't fill the SSDs up faster than they can drain over the course of an arbitrary period defined in part by the size of the SSDs and the speed of the storage you're trying to accelerate.)

To make FVP work you need to buy expensive SSDs + hella expensive software + OTHER expensive software (Architect). This is because it is way - way - easier to cause a flush cascade than Pernix people will admit.

The end result is that Pernix, while not a bad idea and actually decent software, simply cost too much. Why would you pay more to accelerate your servers' access to their storage than it cost to simply buy new storage in the first place, or to move to a hyperconveged infrastructure?

In many - but not all - cases it would have been cheaper to simply toss some SSDs into existing systems and enable VSAN (or Maxta) as an all-flash setup for demanding applications than to use Pernix. (Remembering that I could still use my slow storage for non-demanding applications in a VSAN setup.) By segmenting the workloads in such a manner I also eliminate the risk of flush cascades entirely.

And on, and on, and on, and on. The arguments can go up one wall, down another, 'round and 'round and 'round and 'round. Suffice it to say that while Pernix software works, and works well, you absolutely need to know what you're doing with it, you need to be pretty good at architecting solutions based on some pretty in depth understanding of storage and, well....

...along the way a bunch of easier solutions with lower knowledge requirements came along at the same or lower prices. Pernix as a product couldn't survive as it was positioned or priced.

But Pernix as a pair of features will be a powerful and enticing addition to Nutanix's offerings.

Re: Two points

Company A buys pacemakers to hold them in stock as it is a warehouser or retailer of medical supplies to the Americal private medical industry.

Company A goes out of business and has its assets sold off to pay creditors.

Company A assets which cannot be immediately sold via reputable channels are sold to scavengers who specialize in offloading anything and everything on the secondhand market.

Company B buys pacemaker on ebay from scavenger hawking remains of Company A's assets.

If you look hard enough, you can find anything excepting better-than-university-grade fissionable material sold in this fashion, but if you work at it you can get some gas centrifuges and ------++++++CARRIER LOST

Re: Ok, someone has to say it...

Android does just fine without most of the GNU stack...

Re: ?

If someone commits a crime in the name of Christianity, tell me why Christianity shouldn't do anything about it?

Re: More nonsense trash-talking on the SPC/TPC benchmarks...

So you're upset because you're considered one of the top independent storage industry analysts in the world? Perhaps you might consider actually doing something worthy of note.

Oh, right, it's far easier to snipe anonymously in a forum. Here's an idea: you can start being of note by using your real name, coward. Then we can start to compare your achievements to Howard's, and see whose advice about the necessity of a proper storage benchmark we should be trusting.

Re: I'm not sure this is going to work....

Some good points, some not so good.

The first: a community will hopefully get born around this. I've been spending quite a bit of time nerding about the implementation details personally. With any luck, Maxta will be implementing them and it won't go horribly, horribly wrong. If you've ideas in that regard, please do share. I personally promise you they will get discussed with the relevant execs and the CEO. Every single point raised.

Second: MsXP has come a long way. I'm not quite done my review of the latest version, but it's at the "you have to actively try, and try hard, to botch the install of this". That isn't to say there aren't gotchas. The installer gobbles a disk for the VSAN VM, for example, and doesn't tell you that you'll lose a whole disk in this fashion, or let you pick it. (At least not in the heavily automated GUI version of the installer.)

There are a few of these small issues, and they are ones I will personally beat them over the head with a clue-by-four until resolved...but they're small issues. When I first tried MsXP years ago I must have had to go through the installer 4 times - with a few e-mails in between - to get it all working. This time, no such issue...and that's not because I was better at the installer. (I had completely forgotten how the thing worked.) It's because they made the installer suck less.

So yes, Maxta still has work to do in order to make this a great freemium product. But it's all work I honestly think can be done before the end of the year. What's more, they're actually listening. This is important, and fairly rare in the storage and virtualization community.

Is going freemium going to be enough? I don't know. What I do know is that MxSP is one of the few HCI products that has traditionally "just worked" for me. The idea that I can now build a demo cluster without a pile of red tape to demo to skeptical clients has some appeal to me. I also know that the statistics and analytics package they've developer speaks deeply to the nerd in me.

So I say: let's seize the opportunity. A vendor is willing to listen to our criticisms, requests and fears. Let's speak and be heard. Let's get a product, a community and a support infrastructure we want. It's not often that the little guys get this kind of a chance.

Re: Blame the Russkies

If the Russians want in to your network they will get in. Period. Believing anything else is hubris and arrogance of the most overwhelmingly egotistical type.

The NSA couldn't keep the Russians out if they were determined to get in. There is absolutely no way a charitable foundation or a political party's IT team could keep out a state actor with that kind of ordinance and experience.

The only thing that the Clinton foundation could have done - that any of can do - is try our damnedest to raise the cost of success beyond the value that success brings to the attacker. Success is measured in many ways, meaning that for some strikes the value of success is worth nearly any cost.

In this case - and in the DNC case - I personally don't believe that Russia (or whomever) approached the target with a "success at any costs" valuation. Most likely they regularly probe such high value targets and stumbled upon a target of opportunity.

The truth is, we'll likely never know. What exploits were used, if classified ordinance was deployed or merely public vulnerabilities were exploited. I'm not sure it matters.

The question is what can we - what can anyone reasonably expect from these organizations for security? Perfect security is impossible, and the costs of raising the cost to attackers rises disproportionately fast for the defenders. At what point is it irrational to expect increased spending on IT security, on end user training, or to expect that human beings operating in various positions won't make errors?

"They were asking for it" or "they had it coming" or "maybe they wouldn't have been attacked if they didn't dress (their IT security) like that" aren't acceptable responses to this. Collectively, we can't keep blaming the victim for not spending irrational amounts of time and money on defense. Most of us simply can't afford it.

And where does it stop? Where does this attitude of "security is everyone's individual responsibility so we all have to pay and pay and pay and keep paying and pay some more" end? At what point do we start to see this as an issue we need to band together on and start pooling our resources so that we can come up with defenses collectively that, quite frankly, we'd never afford individually?

Mocking, victim blaming and traditional unrestricted capitalism have all failed to win this war. Maybe now that it has impacted some of the elite we'll see some fucks given and new approaches taken. I can only hope.