Follow-on?

Dear Chris,

"Atmos is EMC's object storage system for public and private cloud providers. It is a follow-on to the Centera content-addressed storage (CAS) product which continues in production."

Not quite. ATMOS provides a similar high-level function (store objects and get a hash for their location), but that doesn't mean it's a follow-on from Centera. ATMOS is actually quite a separate product line from Centera. The team that built Gen 1 and Gen 2 ATMOS, of which I know at least 1 in person, had nothing to do with the Centera Team. The ATMOS is not geared towards the core functionality of a Centera, namely archiving. The ATMOS is geared towards delivering BLOBs in environment where the end-user does not (need to) know where the BLOB is actually located. BLOBs may have certain parameters like store-three-times and the ATMOSphere (a number of ATMOS systems working together), will make sure that the BLOB is stored in three different arrays. One can also specify store one copy in London, one in Tokyo and one in New York. The ATMOS keeps all three copies in sync. Should the New York ATMOS have failed disks, it will ask either London or Tokyo to provide their copy instead, without the end user needing to know (so there's no referal information visible to the user).

You might wanna get some sort of confirmation of what it is that you're writing about in order to fully understand what you are writing.

I do not believe that el Reg is facilitating the communication between EMC and the customer. EMC certainly is old and wise enough to communicate with its customer themselves. El Reg is not an ombudsman or similar organization to actually try and make sure that EMC is doing the Right Thing. Neither does EMC need El Reg to understand what the Right Thing would be in this case.

EMC is clearly stating that as part of the product development, certain features were left for EMC Support to have access to. There have been discussions about these features and the Product Development Team would have said: We don't want end-users to be able to do that just yet. What is so wrong about that? We are after all dealing with data that in all likelyhood does not belong to the people operating the ATMOS systems!!! So a certain degree of care with regards to data and access to that data is actually a Good Thing(TM).

Best Regards,

Guus

Where is the optional 0.80 GiB gone, then?

Sir,

converting between gigabyte and gibibyte: multiply by 1000**3, then divide by 1024**3, correct?

I f do that with 32, I get (32 * 1000 * 1000 * 1000) / 1024 / 1024 / 1024 = 29.8023 = 29.80GiB.

Meaning their rounding algorithm is off... 29.80 should read 30GiB rather than 29GiB...

Just me 0.80 cents,

(or Just me 0.00 cents in Microsoft terms,)

Guus

Mythology is optional

Sir,

Why would one want to introduce religion or mythodology (which led to religion) into a scientific subject?

One might just as well go ahead and say: Sender: God, Receiver: Jesus, Eavesdropper: Maria Magdalena...

As with so many topics in life: Religion / mythodology should stay out of it.

Just my two pennies,

Guus

titles are for free

So google and their partners in the mobile device industry do not want to develop something by themselves (they re-use linux, without giving much back), but because of that they still want the community to maintain something for them??? Hilarious, really...

If HTC, Motorola (well, google), etc want google to maintain longterm android, they should ask google... if google then wants longterm kernel support, tough luck: do it yourself... You can backport fixes into your own kernel version, for sure....

Does everything have to be for free nowadays????

Guus

Best way to sort this crap yet

have a brilliant business model...

A new picture website will come along shortly...

watch this space... something akin unnamed.org or so...

RE: AC 10:05

The previous poster made abbundantly clear that in his opinion the law should state such punishments, so that you can be aware of them at the moment of committing the crime.

As is the case with all of your stated situations. The punishment is known before you commit the crime.

"not so much brains as earwax" I hear somebody say...

At any rate, we (society) can cut off one hand: It still allows the person to feed himself / hold up his hand, allows everybody to see what a person it is, etc. whilst it disallows successful engagement in any form of battle... Problem solved, all around. Oh, and the person would still get benefits, of course. Human rights? It doesn't say that you have to have a fully normal body to be counted as human, therefore, even if you have one hand less... oh... :D Well maybe there is a loophole somewhere to allow this sort of thing...

No, I am not a Muslim / Islamist. I just think that good ideas can be copied.

RE: AC 09:46

"which would then be obliged to re-house them"

Not quite. Once a counciltenant has become untenable by his own behaviour, the council has no obligation to house the tenant.

Incitement

Sir,

surely an incitement is BBC showing people mobbing and looting with the police standing by idly...

No?

Oh...,

Guus

Do you really think that you can do without title?

Dear Sir,

And a government operated ICT-based DNA database is going to improve the conviction rate how exactly? Oh you mean, this will be the ICT thing that the government can actually do?

Interesting point of view.

Or maybe it is paperbased, to circumvent screw-ups. And then the conviction is ever so (s)low.

Or maybe the government leaks private data, and then the tabloid press screams bloody murder.

Regards,

Guus Leeuw

Free for all

Dear Sir,

what would worry me about such a platform is that is from google for google by google. Have we forgotten what google does best? Data mining, anyone? I wouldn't dare run my company on that stuff.

The fact that a Register reporter cannot use a Chromebook might not be because of the Chromebook, though. Even the reporter, supposedly using a normal book/laptop/desktop machine cannot use that, judging by the number of typos in his article.

"Chrome OS simplifies the operating system by moving ... malware at startup time.": That, to me, does not sound like a simplified OS. A simplified OS would be something akin MSDOS that can run 1 application which is browser, and does little else. Akin a simplified calculator which can only add and subtract... It sounds, thusly, more like an altered OS that does certain (specialised) things and does not do certain other things at all. You'd still need the basic things for an OS: Filesystem, Memory Manager, Scheduler and IPC. No Filesystem => How can they run the Flashdisk? No Memory Manager => No Memory. No Scheduler => Sounds like DOS. No IPC => How can the keyboard notidy the OS that somebody is tapping away...

Lastly, the whole thing probably is cheaper to many a user. I mean, thousand bucks for three years is virtually nothing. However not being capable of determining when the OS is updated may or may not be a disadvantage for many organisations, especially if updates start to go bad. In addition to that, I'm wondering what the additional ramp up of the Citrix Farm will cost and whether that evens out that cost savings on the front.

Certainly a change in pace and direction, which is also what google is good at. But will it stick? I would, at least for the time being, advise against it, unless of course, you're the organisation's web 2.0 twatbooker and the only thing you can do is twat and book all sorts of nonsense into a browser.

- Mine is the one with a Dell Vostro 3700 in the pocket

Regards,

Guus Leeuw

More pity the performance

Dear Sir,

So the idea that a VMAX would cost roughly $1,000,000 and an ATMOS only cost $10,000 is left behind: You buy ATMOS, you get a VMAX with Atmos software and it still costs $10,000???

I thought so.

Oh and by the way, stop calling it an App... App is a tainted saintly term from a fruitseller that has nothing to do with technology giants such as EMC.

Paris - because she is normally as confused as I am now...

Regards,

Guus Leeuw

PS: We need a thinker icon that is not Paris...

Messenger vs Skype

Dear Sir,

The best hing about Skype is that it can behave as a telephone with minimal call charges. A client of mine in the Netherlands gave me a mobilephone but then complained about the costs as I am in England most of the time. So, I setup a Skype landline number, and make them pay my Skype bill. The total cost of my telecomm solution has come down around 50%. Good for them.

My wife uses Skype to call her family abroad and this lowers her telecomm bill by about £100 a month. Which is a Good Thing(TM) Patent Pending.

Not sure how valuable it is to have Skype integrating into Office except for the communicator and the various address books, but then again the communicator is used for a quick chat or when someone's phone doesn't work, so that might a nice idea.

Skype on mobile seems, indeed, rather pointless:

1) You need coverage to receive a skype call on your mobile

2) It is annoying that when you're logged in to Skype on various devices all devices start ringing at the same time

3) You more or less have a calling plan on your mobile anyhow

I would want to see what Microsoft does, if anything, with the callcharges. It could be a nice milkmachine that can be turned on like a tap: more or less money depending on how cashstrapped Mr Ballmer feels any given month... This is where my greatest fear is, indeed: While I trust Skype to do the Right Thing(TM) Patent Pending, I don't quite feel the same about Microsoft...

Maybe now is the time, though to stop that silly credit card restriction that Skype is running: Only three top-ups per month with the credit card, otherwise use Paypal. From where Skype came from, I can understand that restriction, but now that Skype and Paypal are not sisters anylonger, we can hopefully start doling out cash in a more unrestricted manner...

Regards,

Guus Leeuw

PS: We need a thumb-iin-the-middle icon...

PPS: Beer, as there is no coffee icon...

Before and after

Sir,

once we were a people to whom the concepts of a smartphone, GPS or A-GPS did not occur. We were happy, and we were able to find the lost paraglider. People knew where I was, knew this only because they could see me there.

Access points, network SSIDs and the likes were known to people in the area, and they could connect if they had the right details / devices to do so.

We did not use location-based services simply because we did not have a concept of it. We were quite happy with that, as location-based services came through the frontdoor in the form of a newspaper, magazine, or other advertisement materials.

Nowadays, some service organisations find it attractive to be able to tell people that "ITPassion" is a wireless network located at 5 Anstice Close. Who should know this? Did I agree for them (and their followers) to know this? Should I care? Not so much... But: when it comes to tracking my location based on GPS data *readily available to non-government parties*, I feel very different. I don't want to be tracked by just about anybody, and the fact that the Telecoms Act indeed protects me in that way (so that only government bodies can find me, should they have the need to do so (that is proven beyond reasonable doubt in front of a judge)). Do I want that Google / Microsoft / Apple / Nokia / Samsung / Sony / Motorola / Blackberry / Somebody-knows-who-else can invariably track my location and use that to provide me with a ping that the restaurant I'm standing in front of, is actually rated 4.59 by 1239993 voters? Do I care what other people think of that particular restaurant? Should I care? Maybe they are kitchen-and-food nitwits and in fact the restaurant is crap?

I do agree that there are, indeed, situations in which it would be desirable to *know* where somebody is, mountaineering, paragliding, road racing, diving, etc come to mind. But then these situations would require *local* knowledge (think of how air traffic control works on a local basis). They would not need knowledge held by a third party that has no value in knowing these things. The ruse "but it is valuable to you that we know" is deemed in Europe (especially Germany) as Brown Thinking (because the Nazis also told the people what was good for them, or worse what they should be thinking).

Besides, we *all* readily state the Governments should know as little as possible. However, we seem to shed the reasoning behind that point of view aside when it comes to for-profit organisations. Or are you saying: I like CCTV everywhere, and therefore I don't mind Google / etc... knowing of my whereabouts... Shouldn't the reasoning be more akin to: I'd rather have Government knowing, because I (collectively ;)) elected them, rather than somebody else, because I (uncollectively(!)) did not elect them.

People should be more vigilent, and should have more common sense, and people should stop falling for marketing ruses. But then again, marketing is forceful, simply because people belief what they are being told (Google does not do evil, Google is good)....

Guus Leeuw

Better late than never

Sir,

the thing that gives me an uneasy feeling about this all is that there are indeed mission critical services run inside a bookstore, glorified as it may be... Why people choose to do that is really beyond me, equally as it is beyond me why people would store confidential data at the site of a known data miner...

I know it is the aspects of it being cheap and readily available to the nitwits, but aren't business owners supposed to take care of their data anymore? What happened with the stance that IT is merely a replacement of the good old secretary pen?

Also, what nobody seems to pick up, even fellow passionate IT professionals(!), is that most things that happen in the IT industry is merely a way to try and lure money from people without giving them anything back... In the grand scheme of things, we had a mainframe; then somebody decided that central wasn't good enough, and built an open system; now, some 30 or more years onwards, the IT industry is trying its hardest to build a mainframe on open systems, thereby going back to the centralised infrastructure we started out with.

Anyhow, Dear Clients (potential or otherwise): You have to remember that if you want disaster-resistant services, you better do IT in a way that suits your business, not in a way that suits somebody else's business... Or focus on the cost, but then, please, keep quiet when things fail. If you don't want to spend the money, fair enough... Just remember: Only the sun rises for free... Anything beyond that carries a service fee!

Regards,

Guus Leeuw

CEO - ITPassion Ltd

Re everything

Sir (Matt Asay),

the term "virtualized storage" actually means something else entirely than the used meaning of "storage for vitualized systems".

So again, I have to say that the IT Field of Storage is something not just about anybody can fiddle with. Taking your bootnote into account ("Matt Asay is senior vice president of business development at Strobe, a startup that offers an open source framework for building mobile apps") I would have to say that you either have no technical knowledge of storage or that your technical knowledge of storage applies to either the opensource software field or the mobile app field.

Having had a brief look on tintri's website, the problem with tintri's offering is that it is highly dedicated and nowhere near a brandnew idea. EMC's VMAX with Enginuity 58.75 (for example) can do exactly the same thing for many more application behaviours than tintri. tintri is thusly a niche player targetting the lower end of the storage market. Not really a market up-ender in the semantics that you proclaim.

Sir (Joshua Goodall),

I fully agree with your sentiment, and we both know that storage vendors actually try very hard to make storage virtualization a real reality (IBM's SVC, EMC's VPlex, HP's (rebranded) MPS200, Brocade's Application Module for which they sell a Data Mobility Blade to name just a few).

Having been around the block for nearly 12 years now, I must say that storage still is a huge barrier to virtualisation. Countless SMB's either use internal storage or a smallish mostly NAS-based diskcontainers as storage. True, most of those SMB's don't really have virtualization requirements, which is reflected in the 70% of enterprises that do not or did not yet virtualize their services.

There is also no offering available currently, that allows an SMB to outpace server-slice growth with storage growth: Hosting providers offer a direct link between amount of GB disk and amount of CPU&RAM.

Regards,

Guus

The untitled title of the untitled article response message

Sir,

the problem with Google is not exactly that they favour their own services in search results, but that they have the ability to not show results linking to preceived(!) competitors. And "perceived" is meant to state that not only does Google not have competitors, it also can be arbitrary in that Google can make the choice of which company / website it doesn't like on its own. Case in point: FoundEm.

The problem for world at large, then, is that a virtually unbeatable marketing trendsetter cannot be trusted to behave fairly to all parties interested in reaching the same audience, because it has stakes for itself in reaching these audiences.

The only way out of this conondrum would be to find a not-for-profit organization that builds up and maintains a search engine to the same quality standard that is being displayed by Google. That would require massive private donations whereby entities that have vested business / political interests would not be allowed to donate (thereby missing quite a big chunk of available money).

Any for-profit organization building up a new and better search engine would seek to profit from it at some point in time. The only way to do that is by data-mining searches and connecting them to web behaviour from searchers so that, ultimately, targetted advertising becomes a possibility. And then the world at large ends up with Google II, which is no solution, as it will be the same "do no evil" Godfather that Google already is.

ITPassion would be willing to step into this market, provided, as a start, all ElReg readers donate £2 per month, so that:

a) a tier 1 CDN can be build up across the globe;

b) quality software (crawlers, indexers, crossreferencers, result rankers) can be created;

c) a database CDN can be setup and operated on the required scale;

d) public facing webservers can be setup to provide result showing capabilities.

ITPassion will guarantee, in return for the mentioned £2 / month from *every* ElReg reader, that this search engine will never ever track your IP address, online behaviour, or other useful bits that enable it to present targetted advertising. The only thing the search engine will track is click-through behaviour to favor search results that people clicked on, so that they get a crowd-pleasing factor in the rankings; all this withou knowing *who* clicked-through.

Open the email floodgates, I am more than happy to provide donation details to all interested parties.

Guus Leeuw

Title is spelled correctly

Joe Fay -

1) "which has the Cloud its over-arching theme this year" - plain wrong.

2) "accomplish the goal of "every European Digital"." - What Digital? Digital Telephone? Digital Internet? Analogue Internet?

3) "for the ten per cent that are delayed" - It appears to be assumed that ten per cent are delayed. Where did you get that figure?

4) "This will be followed buy a " - Will be following a buy? Will be followed by a?

OMG

Opt out? Opt in!

Why is everybody talking about opting out of this? Hasn't it been google who opted us all in? In which they took our freedom, forced something upon us that we didn't have a say in whether wanted it or not... Looking at Egypt / Tunisia, maybe a revolution is what we need and get rid of google alltogether...

In which case it should be google who opts us all out of any advertising... though luck if that breaks their operational financial model... I never asked google to show me shit everywhere.. Hell, I've got Sky to get rid of the shit (and don't tell me that you have Sky too and that you are still watching advertisements...)

People should have the freedom to say: I don't want that or I do want that. Now we don't have the freedom, and the freedom is not when one can only say "I don't want that". Freedom is choice. Choice between three or more things: 1) Status Quo 2) More shit 3) No shit at all...

And then who cares when sites that merely run on adverts all of a sudden cease to exist... If you're clever you can show on your landing page that this site is operated using adverts. Leave if you have to, or else accept and be silent... That would be something for the reg.... Akin pron sites that will ask you to either enter and be 18+ or just leave... I i then *want* to read el reg, I'll stick up with the ads...

Do we need tracking? No of course not. When I buy a newspaper, nobody knows whether I acted upon a printed ad... On TV? Nobody knows whether I acted upon a shown ad... Why do they have to know for the web? Just because??? Bullshit! and do they know? No of course not. Only google knows...

Stupid dictators.

titles should be optional at all times

FAIL, is all... Linux != Gnome && Linux != autofs

Nitwits

Remember me on this computer!

Quote:

"Oracle has blamed a lack of scarce resources (...)"

Isn't that supposed to mean something along the lines of there being plenty of resources?

A lack of something: some is scarce

scarce resources: a lack of resources

A lack of scarce resources thusly means a lack of a lack of resources. And that, by any means, means that resources are aplenty.

Editor / Journalist... Please read before posting....

Equally:

* when the paper (The Economist) has an article with a linguistic error, I stop reading that article.

* when an executive manager churns out garbled emails, I stop reading them emails

* Writing about a developers' environment, and thus, by a stretch, writing about a language kind of makes me think that language is important enough!

Guus

@ DZ-Jay: Spell checker? pott blames kettle...

'Nuff said.