Posts by dan1980

Try searching MS with Bing . . .

I did this for weeks but gave up. The most inexplicable part was that the site I had the most trouble getting usable results from was Microsoft! (Technet, KBs, etc...) I found myself using Bing through the day but switching to Google anytime I wanted to search for MS content. After a few days I realised I was cutting off my nose to spite my face and just gave in.

TL,DR: saying "test all updates in a non-production environment" is easy but actually DOING it is a massive task requiring a good deal of time, money, coordination and staff that not all business can afford that.

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There is a certain snobbiness with some IT people that shows up a lot in these comment sections. It's typified by the feigned incredulity that anyone would ever apply an update without full, rigorous testing in a parallel environment.

While I don't doubt that many people here really do adhere to every best practice and follow every white paper to the letter, please accept that not everyone CAN do that. There may be people here who finished uni and went straight into a Fortune 500 company, supporting business critical applications and able to budget proper solutions. Good for them. BUT, in this modern world, IT is not the sole domain of large multinationals with turnovers in the hundreds of millions. IT systems are at the heart of almost every business - regardless of size or budget - and not every business can afford the kind of systems that those best practices and white papers call for.

The expense of implementing a REAL test environment is enormous. You must have identical servers, with identical interfaces, processors and RAM, identical network switches and routers, identical SAN infrastructure including representation of all tiers, likely with multiple units for each tier to replicate any redundant/striped configuration. If you have replication - as is the case here - you need test versions of all that hardware too. Of course you have to keep all the firmware up-to-date as well - servers, HBAs, NICs, RAID, HDDs, switches, SAN, backup appliances, etc....

Ditto for the software on the servers themselves, though of course virtual machines can be copied over to ensure up-to-date versions. VM or not, though, you will likely need to LICENSE much of the test environment if you will be running it for any length of time (which you should). Some software licensing allows for this but much doesn't.

You also need the space in your data centre/server room for this equipment and to power it and cool it.

Don't forget internet connectivity or private links either. After all, how will you test that a router firmware/OS update (not to mention a reconfiguration) won't introduce some bug, such as a memory leak (has happened with Ciscos before) that results in decreased router performance to the point where intersite replication latency increases beyond some invisible threshold and the process fails? This is something you might not see in a back-to-back router configuration because the base latency will be negligible and therefore an increase of, say, 30ms might not push it over the edge but when combined with a WAN connection at 10 or 20ms, will.

THEN, after all that is done, you have to actually run a representative workload on it and do so for long enough that any problems become apparent because some bugs only occur in very specific, unlikely scenarios but when they happen can be critical. That means that you have to somehow have live data to work on in your test system because otherwise it's impossible to have users working on the test system with dead data.

Best practice is also to test updates in isolation. Great, but how many bits of software and firmware need updates? You've got firmware, hypervisors, management consoles, OSs, support software, user applications, databases, LOB apps, monitoring and deployment software, backup and replication software, etc... That's just on the servers of course; you still have to look after the client machines, keeping them patched and updated but ensuring they can still access the systems. To do that, you need representative samples of all client machines too because you never know when some Windows update will conflict with the NIC driver and effectively render a portion of your machines useless.

Also, anti-virus . . . so much pain.

But of course, best practice is also to keep systems fully up-to-date and more than a few software vendors will offer only limited support (if any) unless your system is running all the latest patches and hotfixes right down the chain.

Oh, and you must have enough staff to cover the extra workload, but all companies have plenty IT bods anyway so that's likely not a problem for anyone . . . right?

So that's what's involved in testing updates before applying them and will cost a significant fraction of the IT budget to implement and maintain.

Something like the update in question should of course be tested but the question is how much do you test it? It might be simple to test replication but the point is that you don't KNOW what a given update might break so you have to test everything. What if an update breaks USB redirection but only with large (e.g. 2TB) drives or those formatted with FAT32? (Granted, that's not likely to be too critical but you never know.)

And, as a last note, perhaps some people who installed this update actually DID have a test system but it was just a simple host and so they were not able to test more advanced features like replication as they did not have the budget for the extra hardware.

Re: Insane

The reason for almost all otherwise unfathomable Microsoft restrictions is that Microsoft wants to force people into purchasing and using their products in certain ways.

I am not even slightly defending their decisions or saying they are reasonable - because I don't think they are - but that appears to be what is happening. It may well backfire and may well hurt sales but they're trying it anyway.

This spreads right through, from features to UI, to marketing and to licensing and pricing.

Re: Stop trying to be funny - just make products people want to use.

. . . but then, what i was trying to get at was not so much 'unsurpassed' as 'not surpassed'. In effect contrasting their business dominance with other areas where Apple have or are looking to surpass Microsoft.

I accept that 'unsurpassed' was too ambiguous a word and lacked clarity but I like it in the comparative sense above, where the word doesn't imply that someone is the undisputed winner, so much as in the lead.

There are likely better words, though perhaps 'still unsurpassed' would have made my meaning more apparent.

I like the Reg and I like you folks; it's nice to be able to simultaneously have a discussion about technology and language with people who have intelligence in both. On an unrelated note, my pain meds have just kicked in.

Re: None of the above

Voting is mandatory but moreover is a right of all Australian citizens. Having photo ID, however, is NOT mandatory as we are not (yet) a police state with internal passports and are not required to have our documents with us at all times.

I had an argument with one of the polling officials a few years back when they asked me for my driver's license. I told them I didn't drive (whether or not I do is irrelevant). He then told me I couldn't vote. I asked him if only people who drive were allowed to vote, which confused him for a bit. He then asked if I had a proof of age card and I told him that I didn't drink either. (I so do - far more than my doctor is comfortable with.)

He called over the person with the most impressive lanyard, whom I then continued to argue with off to one side. She confirmed that I needed photo ID and wouldn't budge from that position. I asked her what would happen if I didn't vote and she said I would get a fine. I pointed out that I was in effect being fined for not having a photo ID and that that was rather odd seeing as there is no legal requirement to have a photo ID.

I told her that I had never needed photo ID to vote before and she said that that those were the rules and that was that. I got a fine and replied with the explanation that my polling official had prevented me voting. Never heard a thing back.

Not that it mattered as my seat is about as safe as a set can be.

Now the real TL;DR....

It is fundamentally un-constitutional to require people to have a photographic ID in order to vote. While the question of whether the constitution does in fact guarantee the right to vote was up for debate for a long time, it was fairly much settled in the affirmative in late 2007; Australian citizens have a constitutional right to vote.

Section 41 of the Constitution states that no adult with the right to vote for at the state level shall be prevented by any Commonwealth law from voting in federal elections. That of course dates from the colonial period but taken with s7 and s21, and the (relatively) recent judicial interpretation that they do in fact guarantee the right to vote, the Constitution states that no law shall prevent people from voting.

Constitutional rights have legal primacy and cannot be changed or negated by legislation.

Passing legislation that REQUIRES people to show photographic identification has the side effect that anyone without such ID would then be denied their now confirmed constitutional right to vote.

You might say that the requirement to enrol to vote is therefore unconstitutional and that you should be able to vote without enrolling. It's not been tested but you can indeed vote without enrolling, which is called a 'declaration vote'. Exactly how that works I am not sure but whatever.

Sure, having photo ID might be a requirement of setting up a PO Box but then access to a PO box is not, so far as I am aware, a constitutional right.

Re: Fragmentation

Nice explanation - thanks. (And have an upvote.)

One question I've always had is how this logic applies to modern storage setups. Surely in even a basic RAID 5 situation the idea of sequential writes is a bit moot - no? Extend that out to a SAN arrangement with data distributed, striped and replicated across multiple already striped arrays and surely the idea of sequential data is even more confusing. Extend that further to TIERED storage systems, where different bits of the data are striped across different sets of arrays and may be moved back and forward from NL to SAS to SSD to cache and I just can't see the concept of 'sequential' even having meaning there.

I'm not contradicting you, I just don't understand exactly; how does this work in modern arrays, striping and replicating data in myriad complex and (allegedly) self-optimising ways. Of course, if you use a tiered system then I would assume that free space would be very important to allow data/block mobility across the tiers, but not for the reasons of keeping things sequential.

I very much get your point about free-space lists and that makes a lot of sense to me. Personally I always try for a MINIMUM of 10% buffer across pretty much anything that even vaguely looks like IT equipment and mostly aim for 20%. BUT, much of that is prudence on my part due to my acceptance that I don't understand all the ins and outs of every technology and so am better safe than sorry; I have always suspected that people with more familiarity with things could spec a solution with much less 'waste'.

Barring the sunsets (I'm sure they're lovely), I'm not confident you've refuted our cowardly friend.

$3.50 for 5900KJ (68% of a healthy adult intake). Of course, I concede that that may have been your point.

Re: Citation needed

I don't know Delran or the supposed phone company involved. I don't even really know exactly what 'configuration management' is.

BUT, I suspect the point is that the phone company didn't actually understand the configuration of their systems such that they didn't know that there was a server responsible for this process. Perhaps they thought it was handled elsewhere, by a third party.

The idea of implementing a 'configuration management' process is a bit odd but typical. The problem is that everything is managed by segmented teams with defined 'processes'. Sounds good but the result is that there is no one who really understands the system as a whole. Banging another 'process' over the top of that doesn't really address the issue.

If this is a 100% true story, I suspect that the phone company in question had lots of processes in place, managed by teams who didn't communicate with each other and this server just got 'lost' as it didn't fit neatly into those processes and/or teams.

While these comments are often quite well populated by people who are about doing everything exactly by the book, I'd wager almost everyone who's been is IT long enough has 'lost' or 'found' a server they never knew existed. Usually it's during a change - often a migration but sometimes a failure.

As one of the posters remarked - there's really no substitute for a dedicated sysadmin (or team) who understands the system and makes it his/her job to ensure that things work. The larger the system, the less that is possible but processes will never be able to replace the efforts and first-hand knowledge of that one odd dude with the ill-fitting shirt and abrasive attitude complaining about every change to the system.

And, regarding the specific question of the "£30 switch", perhaps it was some power switch? Or perhaps he meant 'network interface'?

This reads like a suicide note from Alex Jones.

Re: Selfie, Girl Crush, Twerk

I suppose the thing to remember is that 11 year olds will one day be in their 40s and 50s and may well still use words like this, if not actually partake of the practices. (Let's hope . . . )

I mean, it might be cliched but who hasn't heard a grandparent (or parent, age depending) refer to something as 'hip'. It might evoke images of Grandpa Simpson but my own grandmother has said that in reference to some young people.

The word 'hip' would have at some stage seemed very made up and confined to young people who didn't use proper English, but those young people grew up and the word stayed with them, even though it was superseded by new words that the next generation of young people coined.

When it comes down to it, by the time Miley Cyrus is 70 and her grandchildren are (hopefully) good-naturedly humouring her when she tells them how she caused quite a stir in her day 'twerking', those grandchildren will have their own words for a whole host of things and Miley may be wondering how those can even be considered words.

Re: No improvements in chip architecture for economic reasons?

Even if it proceeds exactly as you say, that still breaks Moore's law, which essentially says that the cost per-transistor will effectively half every two years.

The reason Moore's law has been so unerring is at least partly due to Intel baking it into their road-maps and business plans. And the reason they have done that is because process shrinkage leads to bigger profits. This is important as increasing the 'speed' or 'power' of their chips does not necessarily make good business sense whereas shrinking the die very much does.

That's why Moore's law has continued - economics. Once the economics of reducing die size looks unfavourable, Moore's law fails.

That's not to say that CPUs won't get more powerful, just that they won't double the "complexity for minimum component costs" ever 18-24 months as is currently the case.

Re: Shows the danger of encrypted voice communications

Remember as well what we have seen with the revelations of the NSA passing information to the DEA. No reason to think they don't do exactly the same thing with other 3-letters like the SEC.

Re: But.... but...

Illegal?

Probably not. One of the most worrying things is that what is being done is perfectly legal. The problem is that it is is legal based on:

* Legislation that was passed in private

* Continuing resolutions by publicly-elected members subjected to secrecy restrictions

* Secret judgments made by a secret court not subject to any oversight

So the problem is not that this behaviour is illegal, it's that the various governments have secretly voted themselves ridiculously broad powers enabling them to essentially do what they like. Further, where (in the US) they might fall foul of the fourth amendment, the have side-stepped that pesky stricture by invoking 'national security' - you can't challenge the government in the supreme court if you are never allowed to now what's going on.

In fact, legally, you can't ever challenge the legality of the system. In other words, even the government has acted illegally, it is still illegal to try to stop that behaviour.

Re: Nuts

@AC - 6:42

> "Under Irish law, a company is where its management team is. This is an anti-avoidance measure which means you can't set up a company in Ireland, and run it from Ireland, and register and pay taxes in Andorra. It keeps Irish companies resident here for tax purposes."

Not quite.

What you say is true, but only for certain values of 'Irish companies'.

What happened was that a few decades ago, British and Irish tax law allowed for locally incorporated companies to be tax resident wherever their 'effective management' was. In other words, an English or Irish company could be tax-resident in a foreign country. About 20 years ago, the UK abolished this to keep local profits at home, forcing companies incorporated in the UK to also be tax-resident in the UK. Ireland followed suit but made a crucial exemption for foreign-owned companies.

That is the key piece of the puzzle as it allows a foreign company (like Google, Apple, etc...) to set up an Irish company that is tax-resident in some offshore tax haven like Bermuda.

Now, to be able to do that, the foreign company (e.g. Google) must have an actual presence in Ireland. This is why the arrangement is called the 'Double Irish' - it requires TWO Irish companies.

There are many complications in this system and it does indeed require the use of a particular piece of US tax law that allows this to be packaged up neatly but the point is that it is the legislation in Ireland that supercharges this, resulting in truly miniscule amounts of tax being paid.

Skipping steps and simplifying a lot, the relevant US code allows two companies to essentially be considered as just one company - the parent company - under certain circumstances.

This, in itself is not helpful. After all, if there were two Irish companies, both tax-resident in Ireland then who cares if one is a subsidiary of the other and charging royalties? In the end, an Irish company is earning profits and subject to relevant tax. The loophole only reaches its potential when coupled with the Irish loophole that allows a foreign-owned corporation to setup an Irish company that is tax resident elsewhere. THAT arrangement is why there is value at all in the US ability to disregard the Ireland-based Irish company in favour of considering only the Bermuda-based Irish 'parent' company.

> "The "problem" for other countries is that they don't have this anti-avoidance measure. They allow under their laws for local companies to be registered elsewhere."

That's also not correct.

Google US cannot be registered in Ireland. It doesn't work that way. However, Google can create a subsidiary company called Google Ireland and incorporate that in Ireland. That kind of subsidiary law is the same in almost all countries because subsidiaries, by definition, are legally separate entities. Without that, multinational business pretty much couldn't function.

Remember that subsidiaries don't have to have anything to do with the parent company's business. For example, I could be an ISP in the UK and then set up a subsidiary company in the US that owned a chain of florists. That US florist chain would be governed by US tax laws but any profits it returned to my parent company in the UK would be taxed in the UK. That's the normal state of things and that has nothing specifically to do with the Irish-based tax avoidance strategy.

Both the US and Ireland have anti-avoidance measures that prevent locally-incorporated companies being tax-resident in foreign jurisdictions (almost always tax havens). The difference, as explained above is that Ireland grants an exemption to this when the locally-incorporated company is owned by a foreign corporation.

To make the difference clear:

* If an Irish company creates a subsidiary in the US, US tax laws will force it to be tax-resident in the US and subject to US tax at ~35%.

* If a US company creates a subsidiary in Ireland, Irish tax law allows that subsidiary to be tax-resident in Bermuda and so subject the Bermuda's tax laws and subsequently taxed at 0%.

Hope that makes the Irish loophole clear.

If the problem was simply the US then there would be nothing special about Ireland and you would have all kinds of great names like the "back-to-back British", the "Indian iteration" or the "duplicate Danish"

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Please note, I am not passing judgment such tax avoidance strategies. Opinions vary as to if this is a good or bad thing with some claiming that these strategies, which allow Google to pay less tax, also allow them to invest that money back into the economy, building data centres and headquarters and employing thousands of staff, construction workers, contractors, etc...

Re: That is "NoRelational", not NoSQL.

Well put.

The current love for NoSQL is due to the 'big data' idea, and ties into a previous Reg article about SANs apparently being not long for the world.

The thing that many comments there ignored was that a big Hadoop cluster tied up with a NoSQL database all running on distributed DAS is just one component of a full solution. That giant data-crunching platform requires data to be fed to it from somewhere and that somewhere may well be an application (or 20) running on . . . RDBMS - be it a web platform or an ERP like SAP.

In addition, to be any use, the output of those wonderful, distributed compute clusters must be somehow presented to the world and that presentation platform will, again, likely have some form of RDMBS running behind it.

Not to mention that those systems will require backup solutions which, again, may involve an RDBMS.

If NoSQL is 'taking over' from RDBMS then that really only represents the type of workloads that are currently being employed. Just remember that these 'big data' workloads are only possible due to the massive amounts of information being collected, processed and organised by other applications - applications which are quite likely to be relying on an RDBMS.

Re: The trouble with SANs.

@AC 14:56

Did I miss something or just not read between the lines? Where did the poster (fenton) say they had tiered storage or a 'storage support team'?

Of course they MAY, but those are things that are only feasible for large, high-end deployments so it's not necessarily as simple as that. Or maybe it is.

Re: Xbox Two

With the disclaimer that I don't own a PS3 and wouldn't have used the OtherOS feature if I did own one, I think their scrapping of it was a good idea. Over all.

Why?

Because they have made their platform infinitely more secure than Microsoft's offering and, in doing so, virtually eliminated piracy from the console. No need to make any drastic, unpopular moves to always-online DRM and mandatory game installs, just make the console more resilient to pirated games.

That Sony have effectively stopped piracy on the PS3 shows us that MS's claims of activation to stop piracy are bunk. There is no need to resort to such measures and there is proof through Sony's success.

Re: "The chances are, however, that terrorism legislation was used simply because..."

. . . which is exactly the problem that every civil liberties group has with every such legislation across all affected countries.

Each time, the Government of the day makes reassurances about 'safeguards' and 'reviews' and 'independent commissioners' and implies that anyone worried about the law being used indiscriminately is misinformed or paranoid.

Each time, a predictable bunch of people will repeat the fallacy that "if you've got nothing to hide, you've got nothing to fear" and completely miss the point.

And, each time the laws will be misused and all the warnings of the civil liberties groups proven to be accurate.

And yet, nothing changes.

You can vote out the mob that put the legislation in but the laws are never repealed due to law enforcement saying that (despite them not having it a few years ago) it would be a major setback and cripple their operations.