* Posts by Tom Samplonius

372 publicly visible posts • joined 28 Jan 2010

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Your top 5 liquid cooling quandaries answered, according to Omdia

Tom Samplonius

"What's more, unlike direct liquid cooling, immersion cooling is largely vendor agnostic."

Ok, but if it is vendor agnostic what about this:

""Not all companies are producing servers that are guaranteed to operate in immersion." This is a problem because the dielectric liquid used in these systems is relatively new and may breakdown or degrade certain components if they weren't designed to operate immersed in an oil or two-phase refrigerant."

Clearly there are problems.

Immersion cooling is extremely messy. You aren't going to be able to get support on any common server once you've immersed it, as it will be full of goop. Additionally, all fans must be removed from an immersed server, and fan monitoring disabled. You can't do this with all equipment. Additionally, servers need to be mounted with hot side up, so convection can circulate the liquid through the server. This requires special hanging racks.

And don't try using spinning disks in immersion cooling. The liquid will probably penetrate the bearing, seals, or drive motor. Anything with an electric motor in it, can't be immersed.

I loathe immersion cooling. The new non-toxic liquids perform well, but are hard to clean up. On one immersion trial that I was involved with, the circulation pump was leaking, and it was dripping this liquid. It created a huge mess. Plus, when equipment had to be pulled up from the liquid, you'd be covered with it. The particular liquid I was working with did not dissolve in most common detergents. The floor was slippery and we couldn't ever get it clean. You have to assume that anything you dipped into the immersion pool (ours was a long trough), was something you'd never want to lay an ungloved hand on again.

Watchdog slams Pentagon for failing – for a third time – to migrate US military to IPv6

Tom Samplonius

You will be waiting a long time for DHCPv6 on Android

Android will never support DHCPv6, because it is unnecessary. And a waste of battery in comparison to IPv6 auto assignment. Mobile networks are already 90% IPv6.

DHCPv6 is needed for prefix delegation, but prefix delegation is really just for service providers. If you are using DHCPv6 in an enterprise environment, you've just chosen to make it hard. Along with registering all devices in DNS via DHCP? That was cool 20 years ago, but who actually needs every host in DNS?

Microsoft blocked TSO Host's email IPs from Hotmail, Outlook inboxes and no one seems to care

Tom Samplonius

Re: What I do not understand is...

"Why do Microsoft's customers not get a choice of what to block? Surey they could let the messages be delivered into their junk folder instead of blocking them outright. This is a denial of service attack on their customers."

You may be surprised to know that, by volume, across the Internet, that 80% of email is spam. So mail providers are already just deleting or blocking 50% to 80% of all email they receive, and most users aren't aware. And a lot of spam is just deleted.

Captain, we've detected a disturbance in space-time. It's coming from Earth. Someone audited the Kubernetes source

Tom Samplonius

"Kubernetes... originally designed by Google, the company that loves to announce other companies security issues before they have time to release a patch."

If 90 days is not long enough to patch vulns, then your vendor is trash, and should be forced to close.

If unfixed vulns are not disclosed after a strict time limit, it would eventually lead to another NSA type of vuln hoarding situation.

BGP super-blunder: How Verizon today sparked a 'cascading catastrophic failure' that knackered Cloudflare, Amazon, etc

Tom Samplonius

Re: We could always just...

"tag all free peer and customer transit routes with "no-export". That would reduce the damage small peers could do."

That is not necessarily effective. All of networks strip all communities, including NO_EXPORT. It is pretty easy to configure a router to do that, which makes it pretty easy to do it accidentally.

Seagate passes gassy 14TB whopper: He He He, one for each of you

Tom Samplonius

Re: Secure erase

"Do these big drives have hardware assist? Multiple overwrites would get tiresome..."

There is still no evidence that a single overwrite with zeros would allow any data to be recovered. The unproven theory of reading data from gaps between tracks has been out there so long, it is an urban myth.

Router admin? Bored? Let's play Battleships using BGP!

Tom Samplonius

Re: Almost as useful ...

"Almost as useful as some of the Juniper (ab)uses of BGP... Actually more useful...

Anon... For obvious reasons..."

Double bullshit. First that JunOS has some horrible BGP abuse in it, when the whole thing has been, as they say in the UK, bog standard.

The second bullshit for suggesting that there was some big issue in JunOS BGP that you have to post anonymously. Nothing you can say or post about JunOS BGP could be of any consequence that you have to post anonymously. Juniper isn't Oracle, that forbids you from posting benchmarks in the shrink-wrap license. But hey, it is 2018, and conspiracies are more fun than facts.

Marvell cooks up 400* Gbps Ethernet chips

Tom Samplonius

"The chips also support long-reach serialisation/deserialisation (SerDes) on “system and line side interfaces”, the company's announcement stated, so OEMs can use the chips for wide area interfaces."

This is for direct attach cables (DAC). And these are typically limited to a couple of meters, which I would not call a "wide area". DACs basically connected the SerDes copper interface of one switch to another. So there is no modulation at all. But the SerDes need to support the longer cable.

Plus, some manufacturers will use the SerDes to tie multiple switch chips together to increase the port count.

Dropbox to let Google reach inside it and rummage about

Tom Samplonius

"I don't like this.

Guess I'll have to move all my stuff over somewhere else.

Bah and humbug."

For all of the freaking out about how bad this is, I've read the Dropbox announcement on this feature, and all it appears that Dropbox is doing is storing links to GSuite docs in Dropbox. So Google isn't reaching into Dropbox, but Dropbox is reaching into Google. It looks like you need to be a GSuite customer, and then add your GSuite API key into Dropbox, so Dropbox can show the Google files. In fact, it is basically the opposite of what the headline says.

It's begun: 'First' IPv6 denial-of-service attack puts IT bods on notice

Tom Samplonius

"With a few notable exceptions – like Facebook and LinkedIn – most companies that have started introducing IPv6 networks do so by running IPv4 and IPv6 in parallel, often with two different teams."

What is this supposed to even mean? There are only two types of IPv6 deployments that I've seen, dual-stack IPv4+IPv6 and IPv6 only (usually because of the lack of IPv4 addresses). Most of the top 100 sites are dual stack. What does "in parallel" mean?

Different teams? I've setup IPv4 and IPv6 peering with a number of different networks, and I've never encountered IPv6 run by a different team than IPv4. Do you have even a single example of an organization using different teams for IPv4 and IPv6?

Hubris, thy name is Oracle: So, cloud is still totally for nerds, right?

Tom Samplonius

Re: Call me a cynic..

"Also Somebody Else's Profit. Did anyone else notice the line in the article about DropBox's IPO; the one where they said how much they saved by building their own DCs instead of using AWS?"

They didn't buy their own DCs. They are still renting a DC, but now using their own servers. Once your growth becomes predictable, and if you have a good ops team, you can move from cloud to your own servers in someone's DC. It would probably still count as "cloud" though.

Hyperoptic's overkill 10Gbps fibre trial 'more than a clever PR stunt'

Tom Samplonius

"Looking around at people who actually have Gigabit suggests that the servers (or possibly, the hard drive) currently limits it to of around 230Mbps, so it's more like fourteen and a half minutes."

No. I can download Windows updates at ~ 900Mbps. Apple macOS updates are ~ 800ms. Google (Drive) uploads can easily hit ~ 900Mbps. The big issue with Drive is the transaction latency. Uploading 10GB of 18,000 files takes a lot longer than one 10GB file.

Yes, there are old servers out there with just 1Gbps Ethernet, so you only get whatever capacity isn't used by other users. But the big 4 (Microsoft, Apple, Amazon, Google), are already very fast. Time to get off of that dodgy shared web hosting.

Tom Samplonius

Re: Traffic volume maxed?

"STM that increasing the speed above 25Mbps or so is unlikely to increase the total amount of data downloaded or uploaded. People will get their movie downloads faster, but they will not download more movies per week. Being able to download a movie in 6 seconds means that there will "

You are right. Just because there is more bandwidth, people don't download that much more.

But there is a big difference. Gigabit Internet is Internet that "just works". You don't have to worry about your phone deciding to upload photos, and lagging your streaming video. Or Windows 10 downloading updates. You can finally do whatever you want, whenever you want. No more scheduling your Internet usage. That's gigabit Internet in a nutshell.

Fun fact: US Customs slaps eyeglass taxes on optical networking gear

Tom Samplonius

Re: Tax on Glasses?

"The answer is basic economics. Most frames are manufactured by a single company, named Luxottica."

Which not relevant to this discussion, as they only make the frames, not the lenses, so they would not be applied this duty.

Plus, Luxottica generally produces about 10% of the frames sold. I don't know how Forbest get off calling that a monopolgy. They control 80% of the "brands", but do brands matter? I guess if you are slave to marketing, and you want something branded, you have to buy a Luxottica product. It is weird that brand control is called a monopoly, when the entire concept of a brand is consumer hostile. The simplest definition of a a brand, is a "perception of value". Not actual value, just a perception of value. So are DKNY frames over priced? Yes. But all DKNY branded products from underwear to jeans are overpriced, because DKNY is a designer brand.

No Windows 10, no Office 2019, says Microsoft

Tom Samplonius

"I expect not a lot of people will be willing to upgrade to Win10."

Windows 10 adoption was sitting at 60% at June last year. So I guess, most people have already upgraded.

Pour yourself a tall one, Juniper investors. It's lost money again

Tom Samplonius

Re: Financial Vs Product engineering?

"How about investing the money in new products that customers want to buy. If they did that then maybe revenues would rise in the longer term."

Juniper already makes a fulll lineup of routers and switches. What more do they need? It might be better for them to kill some of the more differentiated products, and focus on getting better margins on the higher volume general purpose products.

Cisco, particularly is overly differentiated. How many 1U switch models do they have? It has to be more than 30. How many different switch stacking technologies are they maintaining? Three that I know of.

Azure Event Grid goes live, gives world cloudy publish-subscribe model

Tom Samplonius

CORBA was just an RPC mechanism with an object oriented veneer. CORBA was created when object oriented was a must have buzzword. CORBA had nothing specifically to do with publish-subscribe. I've worked on a CORBA project a few years ago, and I don't think CORBA could do true public-subscribe. Long polling, yes.

Red Hat banishes Btrfs from RHEL

Tom Samplonius

"I think that, in response to malware, we might have to start looking at storage in a new way. Rather than letting any old application write to whatever lump of storage to which the user has access it will need to ask a service to do the writing and the service will ensure that the application has the appropriate credentials."

Congratulations, you have just discovered SELinux. SELinux can enforce file access on a per application basis, plus network access, ports, etc.

Hey, look who's rushing to weigh in on crypto-coins. Hello, United Nations and European Commission!

Tom Samplonius

Re: Congratulations, you're the proud owner of...

"* Math if you're American"

Or Canadian. Other than the UK, I've never seen or heard this pluralization before.

Trebles all round! Intel celebrates record sales of insecure processors

Tom Samplonius

Re: But surely...

"Joe public probably won't care, the IT crowd won't be listened to but I would wager the financial/legal bods don't just smell blood in the water - they're mixing it with Vodka, Tabasco and a dash or two of Henderson's (I'm from Sheffield)."

Especially among Intel's largest customers. The big four, Microsoft, Apple, Google, and Amazon, represent the majority of IT equipment purchases in the world. They all have significant in-house counsel, and a minimum they are going to want discounts on the their next round orders to compensate them. At worst, they will demand a complete replacement.

Intel's big issue is if Google or Amazon buy AMD. If an acquirer were to pump $5B a year into AMD's existing R&D budget for the next four years, that would be a considerable threat to Intel. The only reason why this hasn't happened already, is that Microsoft and Amazon won't buy from a Google AMD. And Google and Microsoft won't buy from an Amazon AMD. So an AMD buyout by one of the big four would reduce AMD's addressable market.

The other issue would be a new wildcard CPU. Something x86 compatible, but not Intel or AMD. There are various projects brewing around like this. How many $B would it take to bring one of these design forward enough? The advantage of this option, would that you could make a CPU optimized for the hyperscale use. Intel has already been making build-to-order variants for Amazon and MIcrosoft.

'There was no monetary incentive for this' = not what you want to hear about your tattoo

Tom Samplonius

Re: Life changes, tattoos don't

"As for those who get some unintelligible script tattooed down the side of their torso, (Mr Beckham?). What if, despite the tattoo artist saying it meant "We all live in harmony", it actually said "I'm a F*****g T**t"?"

I agree. Mr Beckham has been ruined by his tattoos. He is worth a meager $450m. He made only $65m in 2015. He's basically a pauper. He spent £2m renovating his home. £2m? What did he do? Throw some sawdust down? I mean you don't need to fly stonecutters in Sicily, but come on.

White box, anyone? Big Switch pumps Big Cloud Fabric updates as pretty Big Deal

Tom Samplonius

Re: I'm a network guy, have been for ages.

"If I have a very large scale setup where throwing a cheap box in the bin when it fails is more cost effective than downtime or a support contract with a vendor then I can see an advantage but not much elsewhere."

In large environments (Amazon, Google), you'd go so far as to write your own OS for your switches. Google has been doing this for at least a decade now.

But why does anyone find this strange? We've been doing this on PCes for 30 years. Intel makes a reference design, some integrator assembles the hardware, and then you install Windows 10 on it.

In the case of whitebox switches, the core is mostly Broadcom. Broadcom is the Intel of the network world. Broadcom creates reference designs. Integrators assemble whitebox switches from Broadcom reference designs. Network OS vendors test their OS on various whitebox switches. Yes, the support experience may be fragmented. But the Network OS may be sold via a reseller, who also sells the hardware and can provide support on both together as a unit.

And why would you do this? Well, a Juniper ACX5048 switch/router is about $35,000. The Juniper ACX5048 is Broadcom based. You can get the same hardware from a whitebox vendor for about $6000. You can get a network OS from various vendors, but IP Infusion is probably the comparable to JunOS and it is about $6000. So $12,000 versus $35,000. If you only need data center features, you can get a cheaper NOS.

Samba 4.8 to squish scaling bug that Tridge himself coded in 2009

Tom Samplonius

Re: Samba forks a process per client; is that bug fixed?

"Where I work, that's the biggest impediment to scaling.

If the VFS plug-in being used allocates 1GB, 1000 clients == 1TB of RAM. (Or 1GiB x 1024 clients = 1TiB of RAM.)"

You might want to read about copy-on-write. It has been around for the past couple of decades. When a process forks, only the changed portion is copied, not the entire process. Samba doesn't allocate a lot of buffers, and lets the OS do mostly everything. So the processes are pretty small to begin with. The stackable VFS modules are loaded before the fork, so there would never been any more than one copy in memory.

Dridex redux, with FTP serving the nasties

Tom Samplonius

Re: "compromised via DDE (a popular vector late last year); or in an Excel file"

"Any mail I receive from someone I don't know that has an attachment goes directly to the round file.

I find that that simplifies things enormously and saves me a lot of time as well."

And when your system is compromised, it will send itself out to your contacts from your email address. Possibly even re-sending email from your Sent folder with the malware attached. Malware writers figured this simplifies things enormously.

Supermicro crams 36 Samsung 'ruler' SSDs into dense superserver

Tom Samplonius

Re: Use Case?

"Why would I need half a petabyte of SSD storage dedicated to a single server?"

Obviously you aren't a hyperscaler. You know, those guys who now buy most of the computer components manufactured globally?

Tom Samplonius

Re: Hate to think about what this will cost

"AFAIK Samsung hasn't even released pricing on those SSDs..."

With Microsoft, Amazon, Google and Apple buying most of the computer component production these days for their respective clouds, pricing for distribution to the peasants may never be done at all.

Braking news: Nissan Canada hacked, up to 1.1m Canucks exposed

Tom Samplonius

"No personal banking information, such as card numbers, were taken"

Nissan sells through dealers as do most car manufacturers (except Tesla), so they would never have end-customer payment details. But they would have end-customer name, address and purchase details for warranty and recalls.

First Allied submarine lost in World War One, found near New Guinea

Tom Samplonius

Re: MH370

"Apples and watermelons, no comparison. The submarine is several hundred tons of steel, mostly intact on the seafloor. At 55 meters long, it's a relatively large target. MH370 was lightly-built of mostly aluminum"

The AE1 had a top speed of 15 knots, so the search radius from point of disappearance is pretty small. A Boeing 777 has a cruise speed of 481 knots. Plus, those aboard the MH370 disabled its transponder, and it was traveling in area beyond national radar systems, so the search radius is enormous. Plus, the intentions of those crewing the MH370 is unknown. But the AE1 was part of a fleet, with known orders, and likely a rally point if the fleet became separated.

Anyways, bits of the MH370 have been washing up along various coasts in the Indian ocean, so technically it has been "found", although the main wreckage (engines and heavier items) have not been. It is just a matter of time before someone finds a pair of badly damaged 777 engines on the ocean floor. I think it will be less than a 100 years.

Tom Samplonius

Re: Lest we forget.

"Where is all that steel going? It has to be at least 5,000 or 10,000 tons of steel made in the 1930s, and not corroded because its been sitting at the bottom of the sea for 75 years."

Sold? Steel is a commodity, so there is always a market for it. Yes, low-background steel fetches a higher price, but any type of steel is worth a significant amount of money.

A lot of WW2 wrecks are simply missing. Like they weren't even there. Others are missing sections that used to be there.

http://www.cnn.com/2016/11/16/asia/indonesia-ww2-ship-wrecks-disappear/index.html

Judge rm -rf Grsecurity's defamation sue-ball against Bruce Perens

Tom Samplonius

"Hmmm well, is it really the case that Perens can say what he's saying in perpetuity? If that does end up being detrimental to GR Security, how do they themselves cannot get a fair hearing?"

It is not about whether it is detrimental or not, but whether it is provable incorrect statement. Clearly there is not enough substance to the defamation lawsuit for it to continue. To prove the grsecurity license is not the mess that Perens says it is, you would have to prove that the grsecurity licensing is perfect. That is a very hard thing to do, as every non-trival software source code repository generally has debatable issues around certain contributions.

And many people have said a lot worse things about grsecurity. I'll also add to that, and say that grsecurity is junk.

VMware: Sure, you might run our stuff on bare-metal Azure, but we don't have to like it

Tom Samplonius

"Are people really that delusional about their stability, cost, and support?"

Significantly less delusional than those that use Hyper-V, I suppose? Hyper-V is "free", but you have to buy the Windows license. So if you aren't necessarily running Windows at all, ESX is less expensive. But KMV could be even cheaper.

Oh good, half of Defra's Brexit projects involve IT

Tom Samplonius

Re: Standard systems...

"The world changes and companies like google et al seem to cope."

The big advantage Google has, is that all of their line-of-business systems were developed in-house, and they have fully staffed teams to maintain and extend them. In fact, Google pretty much wrote all of their code. Billions of lines. There is a lot of open source stuff in there too, of course.

Gov'ts for the most part have various off-the-shelf and custom solutions provided by third party developers. Use of open-source is the exception, and probably just used for Internet facing applications. Gov'ts typically can't modify their own systems.

Cable Labs gives OpenStack, and itself, some help on the edge

Tom Samplonius

vSphere is a dead man walking

"Although vSphere and vRealize are vastly more suitable for the NFV-I and NFV-O scenarios, you just can't beat free goodies."

I think you might be the only one that thinks that. vSphere is rapidly becoming just an adjutant to Azure and AWS. They are putting a brace face on their ultimate irrelevance. The big public clouds don't use vSphere. Everyone will use some public cloud at some level, so they will want freedom of movement from private to public. Azure Private Pack has that. And it is a free download. No need to use vSphere at all.

DNS resolver 9.9.9.9 will check requests against IBM threat database

Tom Samplonius

> "and images X-Force has found to be dangerous."

> So it's a morality filter too?

There are quite a few ways of triggering buffer overflows in images. Plus, there are ways of wrapping executable code in an image wrapper. The image doesn't look like anything, but it is a good way to get an executable onto a system and then execute with JavaScript, Flash or Java.

But they probably means child porn. All of the police departments have hash databases of known child porn pics. There is probably an aggregated database of these available somewhere.

Windows Update borks elderly printers in typical Patch Tuesday style

Tom Samplonius

Re: backward compatibility NOT a thing with Micro-shaft

>> That's because stubborn bastards in Finance and accounting departments refuse to join the 21st century.

> It is nothing to do with 'Finance and Accounting". The dot matrix printers are in the warehouses to print out the legally required 4 part Hazardous materials forms, delivery dockets, manifests, customs forms and other necessary paperwork.

Hardly. There is nothing in legislation that requires impact printing multi part forms. You can just laser print multiple copies. I import a lot of stuff, and I've never seen customs paperwork printed on a dot matrix printer in the last 3 years.

The legislation and regulations are quite dated generally. For instance, three copies of a commercial invoice must be provided for shipments from US to Canada. A long time ago, this due to the fact that Canada Customs would take one, the customs broker would take another, and the final one would be for the recipient. However, Canada Customs and the brokers are all digital now (after all, who is really going to file millions of pieces of paper?), and the three copies are just left in the pouch. But they are still required to be there. Any everyone just laser prints them.

WikiLeaks is wiki-leaked. And it's still not even a proper wiki anyway

Tom Samplonius

Re: Tu quoque

"On a point of information, the tu quoque (you too) defence was found to be valid at the Nuremberg war crimes trials and got Doenitz off: see here."

Going to to jail for 10 years doesn't count as "get(ting) off". And I don't see any evidence that Doenitz successfully used the "tu quoque" defense either. The actual factor in his defense was that the civilian merchant marine ships were typically armed, and therefore legitimate military targets.

Though, saying someone used successfully used a tu quoque defense at Nuremberg is basically a tu quoque defense: The US justice system in 2017 is not influenced by what happened in Nuremberg in in 1945. Nuremberg was an international tribunal, so it can't even be cited as jurisprudence in the US.

'Sticky runway' closes Canadian airport

Tom Samplonius

Re: Self interest?

"The airlines that use that runway already pay for the privilege. In the case of west-bound refueling stops for short-haul aircraft bucking the jet stream (757, I'm talkin' 'bout you ...), it's a "normal" stop, and the "

References? There is very little scheduled commercial traffic at Goose Bay. It is an unusual airport, in that there is more unscheduled traffic than scheduled. So if re-fueling stops by scheduled was actually a thing, that wouldn't be the case. The only planned re-fueling that you would have, is ferry flights, of medium-haul aircraft that are being moved being continents. Airlines would use the correct airplane for scheduled intercontinental flights.

And one of the sticky runways has already been returned to operation:

http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/newfoundland-labrador/goose-airport-reopens-four-hours-1.4397066

Why are we disappointed with the best streaming media box on the market?

Tom Samplonius

Re: agree completely

"I am waiting for some of the usual cable channel providers to de-couple themselves from cable and allow direct subscriptions. "

Probably never going to happen. Cable channels that license content, only get a license for broadcast. They they sub-license the channel and content it to a cable system. Cable channels that make their own content (ex. HBO) are a bit trapped. They would like to direct steam to subscribers, but it kind of cuts the legs of their licensing to cable systems. So they do this weird thing, where you if you have HBO on a cable system, you can stream it direct from HBO too. What is going to happen, is new guys will have to start making their content, and direct stream it, as Netflix and Amazon are doing. As soon a significant percentage of available content is produced this way, the other content producers will have to go full on with a digital-first strategy. Basically, cable networks will have to die.

It is going to take a while to sort this out. Plus, a lot of license deals have to expire. Some of those licensing contracts can be renewed perpetually, as long as the licensee keeps paying (right of first refusal). In Canada, we have this weird issue where Bell Media has direct licenses for broadcast AND streaming for vast amounts of US TV content, but doesn't stream anything except to cable customers. They are basically paying yearly to to ensure the license doesn't fall to someone else, like Netflix. It isn't sustainable to pay to prevent people from watching stuff, that you can't fully monetize.

Juniper Networks grabs silicon photonic developer Aurrion

Tom Samplonius

"Good luck with that strategy for 10Gbps. All the vendors authenticate the optics to make sure they're genuine."

False. I have multiple different 10Gbps switches, none of which which verify model numbers. SFP+ lock out is extremely rare these days.

Chinese whispers: China shows off magnetic propulsion engine for ultra-silent subs, ships

Tom Samplonius

Re: MAD!

"Wouldn't magnetic anomaly detectors have a rather easy time spotting this sort of thing, or is there a submarine-friendly way to shield giant magnetic fields? Lots of mu metal?"

MAD systems aren't as popular as they once were. The old P-3 Orion had a MAD, but the newer P-8 Poseidon (UK is buying these) does not. MAD requires a low pass over the water as well. It is not clear how effective MAD really is or was. I might have to brought back if magnetic drive becomes popular.

Even more warship cuts floated for the Royal Navy

Tom Samplonius

Re: You do realise that this "colony" overwhelmingly voted in favour of remaining British?

"I've always thought that was shameful, but your argument seems to be that because we've done the wrong thing on one occasion, we shouldn't do the right thing on another. Which is the opposite of what I'd like to see happen."

Aka the Chewbacca defense. Or Ignoratio Elenchi. Or just plain old just MIssing the Point.

You may not have noticed, but 'superfast' broadband is available to 94% of Blighty

Tom Samplonius

Re: The need for speed?

"I can't see 1Mb/s cutting it when I want to watch Netflix (preferably in HD, as that's what I'm paying for), and the kids all have YouTube "

Probably because the OP is trolling you and says he/she has "1MByte/s", which is about 8Mbps.

Tom Samplonius

Re: Great

"The problem with '100M' is that many websites do not go that fast... :/"

It is not 2001 anymore. There are no servers left with 100Mbps ethernet ports, and if by some miracle some where still operating, replacing them would be cheaper than the electrical operating cost.

Youtube does not limit bandwidth. Due to Google's size, they are everywhere. If they could get you to download more that you already do, they would.

Fast.com is a Netflix tester, and basically stops measuring beyond the speed that Netflix could actually use. On Speedtest I can get speeds of 900+ Mbps, but not on every server as a lot of test servers are still on gigabit ethernet.

After the initial Windows 10 uproar died down, I was able to download the Windows 10 at over 800Mbps peak (took 50 seconds in total). I'm able to get Apple updates at around 500Mbps. It is harder to find something substantial at Google, but Drive is able to do hundreds of Mbps at uploads and downloads.

Onwards to Valhalla: Java ain't dead yet and it's only getting bigger

Tom Samplonius

Re: It occurs to me...

> Web is just not what Java is good at.

It is the only thing Java is good at.

> Java lives on the desktop, and the back-office. Not on the web.

You are the only person that believes that Java even belongs on the desktop, let alone lives. And your back-office is probably web anyways.

Aw, not you too, Verizon: US telco joins list of leaky AWS S3 buckets

Tom Samplonius

Re: Usability is to blame

"AWS and S3's permissions system has got to be some of the most baroque, over-engineered and complicated permissions format ever devised. It's not surprising so many fail to get it right."

Yes, it might take an entire hour to read the S3 permissions docs, so obviously it is a usability problem. It is way too hard.

http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonS3/latest/dev/how-s3-evaluates-access-control.html

Boffins: 68 exoplanets in prime locations to SPY on humanity on Earth

Tom Samplonius

Re: @Lee D Fait accompli, mate

""The planets and systems you're looking at are billions of years old."

Many of the exoplanets we've found are less than 100 light years away, none are billions of light years away."

Not all of the stars were formed at the same time. Stars are still forming now. The Sun is middle aged, by galactic standards. There are some stars that are much much older. That is the basis of the Great Filter theory, which is since there are so many stars and planets, and some of them are very old, why isn't the galaxy full of von neuman probes (self replicating sub-light automated ships)? Given the current pace of development, Earth can probably launch a von neuman probe in less than 200 years. But many planets in the galaxy should reached our level, millions of years ago.

New Azure servers to pack Intel FPGAs as Microsoft ARM-lessly embraces Xeon

Tom Samplonius

Re: And the Bromance rolls on......

" And the Bromance rolls on...... It's like an old couple renewing their wedding vows."

The Wintel alliance is over. Apple, Google, Amazon, and Microsoft are the top 4 direct purchasers of Intel CPUs. Intel just needs to keep delivering marketable features at a cost that is less than these four could build their own CPUs. And manage the roll-out in some way, as everyone wants to launch the new feature first.

Some positive news: LG, Hitachi, NEC charged $65m in li-ion battery price fixing shocker

Tom Samplonius

Re: Oh, yes

"As well as make Class Counsel a large pile of swag without having to do any more work for it, while the class members each get a check for 67 cents."

That is the problem with class actions. With thousands of clients, the lawyers run the whole thing. As soon as they have a settlement offer that covers their fees, they are done. In the US, the chances of collecting 100% of the damages plus punitive damages is very likely, but would not be bring the same proportional benefit to the lawyers. A judge will review the bill, but the standard hourly rates and margin for lawyers are pretty high. It is a risk punching out this early, as judges have faulted class counsel for not pursuing cases aggressively in the past.

India responds to internet shutdown criticism... by codifying rules to make it legal

Tom Samplonius

Re: This is a Good Thing

"This is a big step forward. Why are we complaining?"

Because making Internet shutdowns illegal would be easier from a regulatory point of view, and better.

Google routing blunder sent Japan's Internet dark on Friday

Tom Samplonius

"This, and email. The last two vestiges of crappy protocols running the world and everyone knowing they're rubbish but NOBODY moving towards fixing them."

Just because you are not aware of it, doesn't mean things are not happening. Most carriers have prefix filters set on network-to-network connections to filter our this type of thing. Clearly Verizon did not have this setup on their peering links with Google in Japan. But it doesn't mean that isn't getting done. The future is digital signatures on the routes themselves. This is happening, but progress is pretty slow.

As far as email, not much can't be done about it. DKIM was the last major advance, but many small mail servers don't support it yet. BGP is easier to extend, as it has plenty of knobs. And there are fewer parties, and all of the relationships are known in advance, unlike email.

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