* Posts by Trevor_Pott

6991 publicly visible posts • joined 31 May 2010

MacBook killer? New Lenovo offering sexed up with XPoint booster

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Re: Yet another myopic article on laptops

Can't speak to needing lots of disk, but Chrome gobbles RAM, so there is always a need for memory. Lots and lots of memory. The more the better.

Fscking Chrome...

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Re: Lenovo keyboards.....

@PTW: you can swap the ctrl and fn keys in the bios at least. Not the best option, but then, I'm much more upset with the shitty plastic chassis on Lenovo notebooks that disintegrates at the slightest provocation...

The Life and Times of Lester Haines

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Re: Thanks for the memories

Fantastic idea. Upvoted, and raised to the brass for consideration.

ClusterHQ? More like Clusterfscked: Cluster bombs, says it came to market too early

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Condolences for the employees. Hope they find a good next gig.

Twas the week before Xmas ... not a creature was stirring – except Microsoft admitting its Windows 10 upgrade pop-up went 'too far'

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A half-hearted non-apology from someone with no power to affect how Microsoft behaves in the future.

I won't even begin to trust Microsoft until Endpoint Antichrist has been fired with extreme prejudice and someone who isn't customer hostile is elevated to his position. Even then, Microsoft has a long - long - road to travel before trust can be rebuilt.

And in IT - especially as regards public cloud computing - trust is everything.

Strong non-backdoored encryption is vital – but the Feds should totally be able to crack it, say House committees

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Re: 'MURICA! FUCK YEAH!

@gerdesj I think you'll find my El Reg writing restricted to carefully researched technical articles from here on out. If you want more controversial stuff, creative epithets, discussions about emerging technologies or vendors, etc. then you'll have to hunt my writings on other outlets. No more "Chrome, stop being a RAM-gobbling bug dumpster!", reviews or delving into things I learned working with some new company 'round these parts. There will be a lot more "I encountered this problem and solved it in this manner".

If you actually want to read me screaming at Microsoft or cheering about things that tickle my inner nerd, you'll have to search out the other places I write, or follow me on Twitter. I really don't recommend following me on Twitter though. I'm largely incoherent and I manage to offend, apparently, everyone. You have been warned.

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Re: 'MURICA! FUCK YEAH!

"Doing uppers"? Whaaaaaaaaaaaaa?

If by "uppers" you mean "stimulants", then I admit to being comfortably addicted to caffeine, and drinking about 2 ups of coffee each day, with 4 cups on a very bad day. I used to (when I was in grade school) take Ritalin, because I have horrible, horrible ADHD.

I can take pharmaceutical doses of many stimulants (usually some form of amphetamine) without a "high", thanks to said ADHD - they affect us ADHD folks very differently than they do normies - but I haven't had a prescription for those in like two decades. (And have maybe had an out-of-prescription pill an average of once every two years, usually on extreme ADD days.)

I use a combination of coffee, meditation and tricks I learned from participating in the early 90's trials on what we today call neurofeedback therapy. (Playing videogames with your brainwaves.)

So I'm not sure where I "take uppers". Unless you're saying everyone who drinks coffee "takes uppers". In which case, guilty as charged. Coffee is life.

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'MURICA! FUCK YEAH!

What else?

Los Angeles to extradite bloke from Nigeria after scores of city workers fall for phish scam

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Re: Err,

Just because Timmy is shitting in the schoolyard doesn't mean it's okay for you to do the same.

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Re: Err,

Italian Referendum.

Brexit.

Australia running fucking concentration camps for asylum/refugee seekers.

Marnie Le Pen.

Going to go with "nope, western civilization is pretty much fucked".

Wassenaar weapons pact talks collapse leaving software exploit exports in limbo

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"Known for making deals"

Really? I thought he was known for multiple bankruptcies, not paying his contractors, bigotry and sexual assault.

He makes deals?

Cops, Feds spaff $100m on Stingray cellphone snooping gear – and there's sod all oversight

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Re: I just have one question:

The ones using the stingrays are the bad guys. Just take a look at their employers...

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Are you saying criminals and terrorists aren't tax-paying citizens? Because I have some news for you...

SK Hynix and Seagate exploring flash hookup

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Even if you put both SK Hynix and Micron together, you probably don't have enough Fab capacity to really start replacing Seagate's disk business. Planetary fab capacity needs to go up. Maybe Seagate is partnering when and where it can to ensure it has enough NAND to not get butchered by WD, Samsung, etc.

Microsoft announces 16 years of support for Windows, SQL Servers

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Re: At last

With Endpoint Antichrist in charge? Fuck no, that'll never happen. He needs our tears to animate his zombie hate corpse.

Shrinkage!? But it's sooo big! More data won't leave storage biz proud

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Re: Cloud versus on-prem in depth.

Continued from previous post:

Issue #5: Speed isn't everything. In fact, speed isn't anything to a lot of people. Banging on about getting a few extra percentage points out of a database that uses tiered DAS and application-level replication versus the HA or replication you get from having your storage solution do the work is the exact sort of tone-deaf malarky that the NVMe of fabrics people are guilty of.

Yes, there are some people for whom database speed is all that matters. They want to run huge databases, distributed at a global scale and every microsecond matters. These are niche cases and they do not represent the majority of businesses nor the majority of workloads. If you want to go build something to grind out microseconds for them, have a ball. I'm sure the mainframe people will find you amusing.

Most companies who use a database, however, don't need that. They're handling functionally irrelevant transactions loads that can absolutely be handled on MySQL running off a consumer flash drive. What matters to them is ease of use. Oh, and cost.

What you - and the NVMe over fabrics people - don't seem to get is that the need for speed is niche. For most of us, speed is a threshold item. Workloads need to go so fast, and everything after that is irrelevant.

Issue #6 (because you started veering off into evangelism in 5): most orgs don't want to move to the cloud. Most orgs don't want to think about their apps. They don't just want what they have now to keep running and not bother them. "App modernization" is a thing pushed by nerds, usually because they have a "app modernization" service to sell. Businesses generally don't care until something forces them to, like the developer of the application going out of business.

Issue #7 (because you started veering off into evangelism in 5): Most organizations don't want to migrate to the cloud. Especially for their traditional apps. This is because it is way more expensive to run those applications in the cloud than on their own infrastructure.

Issue #9 (because you started veering off into evangelism in 5): Most organizations don't want to be "cloud and mobile first". They are cloud where it makes sense financially and where it makes sense from a regulatory perspective, and mobile only if they absolutely have to. (How'd that "mobile first" bit work out for your buddies at Microsoft, eh?)

Organizations can get continuous customer engagement, real-time analytics and the like from on-premises IT just fine. I'd be happy to teach you what happens when a developer and a sysadmin love their paycheques very much, and work together to produce something wonderful.

Issue #10 (because you started veering off into evangelism in 5): Most orgs don't need agility. They need to be better at what they do. The low hanging fruit in IT is still in grinding out human error from internal processes. Even small businesses can save millions every year simply by eliminating shipping errors with a small in-house middware app that integrated with logistics software. No cloud required. No databases that get millions, or even tens of thousands of IOPS. Bonus: eliminating shipping errors helps with customer satisfaction and gives them an edge over competition.

I'd love to give you a deep dive into how IT is practiced in the real world to show you why the myths you've convinced yourself are facts are nothing but taking the use cases of an extreme niche and incorrectly attempting to paint them as important - or even relevant - outside that niche.

Ease of use, cost and regulatory compliance are what matter. You might get some of this, some of the time from the public cloud. You get next to none of it by trying to run your on-premises IT like it was a public cloud. You do get it by fitting the best solution to problem and not trying to pretend you're someone you're not.

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Re: Cloud versus on-prem in depth.

I believe your "deep involvement" with public clouds has "clouded" your judgement. They don't have better architecture. Just different architecture. No one architecture fits all.

The idea that we should adopt hyperscale hardware and software solutions for on-premises IT is just flat-out bonkers. Hyperscale solutions are designed for hyperscale applications. They aren't inherently better, they sure as hell aren't easier to manage and they aren't cheaper unless you are buying and managing at hyperscale. That's before we talk about RPOs and RTOs. Something you conveniently didn't discuss at all, with the exception of a handwave that amounted to "rewrite everything you have because that lets you be more like Azure".

If enterprise tech hasn't changed a lot in 20 years, maybe you should start thinking that there's a reason for that. Like the fundamental designs are fit for purpose, and that changes will be incremental rather than foundational.

Regarding this bit: "if so many ppl left the cloud, it doesn't explain the surge in AWS and Azure revenue, i attended re:invent can tell you many Enterprise guys were there, some have a Cloud ONLY strategy ("CEO said we wont own any HW")"

I call bullshit. Why don't you go talk to Netflix or Dropbox about the cost of the public cloud? These are some headline names that have left for damned good reasons, and they are by no means the only ones.

Consumption of services which themselves consume the public cloud is increasing. Point solutions like HR applications, payroll applications, etc. These are applications that are like utilities to companies: every company needs them, but they aren't what make the company go. They aren't remotely attached to the core business, they're just a thing that the company has to have. Like phones. So they consume it as a service in order to not think about it. That is what's driving a lot of the public cloud growth.

But, like phones (or any other utility), there's a ceiling to that usage. Just like desktops and eventually tablets plateaued once everyone who had one wanted one, so too will SaaS consumption of these "software utilities".

Archival storage is another thing that's growing in the public cloud space. One look at someone like Backblaze will explain why. Public cloud storage can be very cheap. As long as you don't care about speed.

While I am certain that there are a few companies - usually American Fortune 2000 enterprises, or silicon valley startups - that are willing to go with a "cloud first" or even a "cloud only" model, these are niche. There aren't many of these companies. A fraction of a fraction of a many millions of companies in the world are willing to make that sort of commitment, and for good reason.

Now let's address the rest of your points...

Issue #1: You focus on Azure, but Microsoft isn't the be-all and end-all of clouds. I am aware that Microsoft's primary. storage is their own messed-up franken-glorp. I am also aware that they, like the others, will provide SANs as required to larger customers.

IBM is slightly different in that they aren't so circumspect with their provisioning of traditional storage. They're pretty up front about offering Storage-as-a-Service. For example, they offer Netapp. Indeed: if you need it bad enough, IBM will provide it as a service as part of their public cloud, no matter what it is, or who sells it.

Issue #2: while most data in public clouds today is in object storage and using "native" database services, most public cloud services today are the low hanging fruit. Stuff that was easy and cheap to move, or which was built new for the cloud. That doesn't make the public cloud ready to tackle the overwhelming majority of extant workloads.

Issue #3 (1, because you can't count): I never said JBOD wasn't cheaper. I said it was stupid, unreliable, problematic and way - way - more difficult to manage. It absolutely is cheaper to buy, which is the only thing that matters to hyperscale providers. Of course, when you're not a hyperscale provider, ease of use matters a heck of a lot more. So do RPOs, RTOs and other such things.

Issue #3 (2, because you can't count): File doesn't have to be slow. Until you get above 10M files (NTFS) or 100M files (ReFS, EXT, BTFRS). Then you have to get really creative with the OS an server design to prevent the whole thing from turning to glue. Object can be modest if accessed directly as object storage. It's a miserable pig if you have to use a shim (for example, filesystem access shim on top of object storage, block shim on top of object storage, etc.) There are some startups that have made solutions that almost don't suck on top of object storage, but as a general rule, object is slow when trying to use it as the storage backing for anything other than native object put/gets. Which is a huge problem for all those applications that don't speak object.

Issue #4: And here's you're back to "tear up everything you know and rewrite it because my religion says you should". Microsoft just announced 16 year support for SQL servers, bub. As much as you may get aroused by the idea of new database technologies, they're not helping companies with the software they have today.

Also, no matter how hard you scream, there absolutely are storage solutions that provide snapshotting for storage volumes that are tiered across multiple tiers of storage. I use them every day in production. I don't even need a fancy database to do it! My storage tiers the volume for me, and I run my old, boring databases on top of it. I get fantastic performance without tearing up everything I have and wasting - yes wasting - money recoding applications because some dude on the internet got religion.

I'm not missing background at all on this, mate. You are. You seem to assume that because a vendor supports something that you champion - in this case DAS storage tiering - that it is naturally better than all the other things they support. Here's a giggle for you: all the major databases from all the major vendors support multiple storage approaches, and multiple ways of doing things. Because they have customers. Not acolytes.

Continued in next post.

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Re: Storage collapsing into services

Also should say that I'm sorry for coming off so strong here. That was wrong of me, and I apologize.

The whole "public cloud is the solution to all ills" thing is one of those nerd evangelism bits that really gets under my skin. The True Believers are absolutely fire-and-brimstone about it...and they are demonstrably wrong. (Just as, you know, anyone pushing any IT solution as the be-all and end-all is demonstrably wrong.)

I believe the reason this grates on me so is the unrelenting - indeed, desperate - nature of the True Believers. Never-ending sales calls at all hours of the day and night. Unrelenting social media attacks against anyone not willing to invest 10x their annual revenue in recoding all their applications.

It's not a good reason to be a dick on the internet, but with some self-examination, it's likely that which set me off.

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Cloud versus on-prem in depth.

It's important not to be fooled by what large players are doing. Even in the cloud space. Not everyone is using JBODs, or relying on object storage. There is an awful lot of hyperconvergence and a lot of traditional SANs amongst cloud/service providers.

This is because there are a lot of different use cases to be met.

If you are rewriting everything from scratch as "cloud native", using microservices, using application-level redundancy that doesn't need shared storage, or rely on storage to provide the backups/DR/resiliency for you, then you can absolutely get away with what amounts to a bunch of individual nodes with some disks in them and some software that takes periodic snaps for DR.

But this is only possible because these applications are meeting their RPOs by disbursing data horizontally across multiple nodes at the application level. This flat out doesn't work for legacy applications: the kind most businesses are reliant upon, and unlikely to recode for decades yet to come.

Legacy applications are "pets", not "cattle", and trying to get them to a "cattle" state takes an awful lot of management software layered on top. Configuration management, desired state configs, some means to separate the application from it's data and make that data highly resilient.

Traditional SANs and more modern hyperconvergence have been solving the "make the data highly resilient" problem for ages. If your application goes down, or the node hosting that application goes down, the data is there, accurate to the last bit, ready to be reconnected to. RPO of 0, RTO of however long it takes to restart the application.

But when you look at cloud solutions really closely, a lot of this goes away. If the resiliency isn't in the application then you start to have to make compromises on the RPO of the data side. An HCI cluster or even a traditional SAN spread across multiple racks in multiple power zones with redundant switching can be done relatively cheaply and easily. This gets a lot more difficult with JBOD "clusters", and you flat out can't provide this sort of resiliency in a "everything is local, no shared storage at all" setup.

Now, all storage has limits. If you have enough network connectivity then you can do real-time replication of your data layer across metro areas. Keep the latency below 10msec, and you're probably good for 99.5% of real-world applications. HCI and SAN solutions have this taped. Not a problem. This can provide real-time RPO of 0 across multiple datacenters, and it honestly isn't that expensive, if you're playing the game at datcenter scale.

Beyond that metro area, however, and HCI/SAN suffer from the same problem as JBODs or the "all local" server solutions favoured by some cloud providers: all they can do it send periodic snapshots places.

This means that your RPO goes above 0. Any time you experience an unexpected failure you loose data.

For some workloads that doesn't matter. If you have a web server, for example, managed by a desired state configuration tool like Puppet, then the worst case scenario is that you fail over to some older version of that workload, Puppet detects that the config isn't the latest, and then sets about re-applying the most modern config. So far, so groovy.

But this gets a lot more miserable for databases, files and anything else you want to store. Here is where rewriting and recoding and redesigning everything becomes the thing that cloud providers want you to do.

If you can recode your application to use object storage instead of file storage then you can store images and the like in the object storage. Storage that – wait for it – replicates the objects over the network to provide resiliency. Just like a SAN or HCI does. It's just cheaper to the cloud provider to set up that storage. It's also usually dog slow.

Databases go on fast storage, but you're encouraged to set up complicated database replication schemas to ensure that data is replicated between sites. Replication that occurs over the network. It's just not using the SAN or HCI storage to do it. This is usually pushing the cost back on to the customer, who pays for network traffic, and now has to pay for multiple database instances and multiple storage instances. Great for the cloud providers!

So if you're running a great big globally distributed application that needs to be coded efficiently to run around the world, tearing up your old applications in order to make them cloud native makes sense. This is because no storage mechanism is going to provide an RPO of 0 across oceans. The speed of light is a problem.

But for the overwhelming majority of workloads run by the overwhelming majority of companies, this simply isn't a real-world requirement.

Most companies are happy if more of their workloads have an RPO of 0 for daily use and an RPO of 15 minutes for disasters. They are usually okay with RTOs of "hours" in recovering from disasters, because "disasters" in this case are affecting their customers as well. Some workloads (such as your website) you want up 100% of the time, but that is cheap and easy to do using a SaaS solution, and doesn't require the whole rest of your infrastructure to be a globally distributed solution that's always available.

Many companies who need more resiliency than "within the same datacenter" are just fine with "RPO of 0 at a metro level" clustering and "RPO of 5 minutes snapped to a different geo". Slightly higher needs, but again, if the city ends up flooded out or somesuch, customers will generally understand a brief outage, or a 5 minute data loss.

So this leaves us with the minority of workloads and the minority of companies who absolutely need completely bullet-proof workloads that have world-wide geo-resiliency. These companies with these workloads need to, should, will and are recoding their applications to take advantage of what public cloud has to offer.

Again: what's important to note here is that the extremes don't apply universally. Perhaps more critically...there is zero incentive for most companies to move the majority of their workloads to the public cloud. Not as IaaS, not by rewriting them as SaaS.

SANs, NASes and hyperconvergence will be around for decades yet. And they'll sell in good volume. Because they're simple. Because they do the job. And because, ultimately, "cloud native" isn't the solution to all ills.

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Re: Storage collapsing into services

"Oh, right another one of those IT guys that thinks Cloud would just go away,"

Actually, I think public cloud offerings will be around for quite some time as one amongst many options for use. The public cloud will not completely displace internal IT, except in niche circumstances.

" and we can keep messing with FC SANs.."

Fuck fiber channel. Companies don't make money resizing LUNs.

"IT shops are migrating to cloud,"

IT shops are adopting public cloud services (mostly SaaS) tactically. Point solutions for specific problems, which almost never includes IaaS. And the movement from the public cloud was almost as big as the movement to the public cloud in 2016. Companies are realizing just how many workloads are terrible fits for the cloud and bringing those back in house. A balance is being discovered where some workloads are best in the public cloud and some never will be.

You know, like every other "this will change everything forever" revolution in IT.

"and Cloud doesnt have SAN."

Yes it does. Public clouds absolutely run on SANs of some variety. Shared storage is at the core of all of them. Hell, in many you can even select your SAN vendor and get the management of that SAN exposed to you! If you're moaning about what a pain in the ass it is to manage LUNs (fuck LUNs!) try hyperconverged solutions. It's the same "there is no SAN" as you get in a public cloud.

" For guys like you they invented "migration services" to Seamlessly move your Oracle or VMware"

You mean the migration tools that require hours or days of downtime and then still get things wrong? Or require you to completely change how your internal networking is set up before migration, leading to a massive change program that provides ultimately no value to the business just to use a public cloud solution that costs the business half a dozen times more than running in house?

Awesome. Let's do that.

"those tools you are so fond of like Exchange, MS Sql"

What? Where am I fond of those? Fuck them both sideways.

"In Azure don't run on any SAN or HCI, and guess what they have the same or better HA,"

In Azure they run on JBODs attached to shitty Microsoft clusters which is why they both cost so goddamned much and why they have uptime that's two nines worse than what I'm providing in my shitty SMB shops that are held together with duct tape and the wishes of orphaned children.

"Global DR"

DR that never seems to work unless you're paying fuckloads of extra money for it? Pass.

"and consist snapshots don't require any coordination w storage"

Funny, all my hperconvergence solutions take snapshots just fine without coordinating anything with storage. Even the cheap HCI (Scale) can provide me lots of different solutions to solve this. Snap locally, snap remotely, DRaaS...all of it with a maximum of filling out two text boxes and three button pushes.

So what, exactly, are you blithering about here?

"Some just have hard time accepting the IT world would never be the same. The writing and financial report are already on the wall."

Clearly you're speaking about yourself. Your inability to read financial reports is making you oblivious to that part where the boom times for cloud are over, and things for cloud evangelists will never be the same.

"Yes, like Mainframes legacy won't just go away, it will stay for ever, but not sure you can grow a company based on it."

You can grow a company based on mainframes. Millions of companies are growing based on on-premises IT. What's actually questionable is how big a company can grow using public cloud IT, considering virtually all of the large players using cloud decamped off of public cloud solutions after a time.

Public cloud seems like a great plan for some workloads during some stages of a company's lifecycle.

But it sure as shit isn't the be-all and end-all of IT, nor will it ever be.

Just like you, Yaron, i run a public cloud (or more accurately "service provider cloud", as public cloud has come to mean only the Big Four) offering. I also consult with customers about how to optimize their on-premises solutions. Where we differ is that my livelihood isn't tied up in convincing the world that public/service provider clouds are the greatest thing since sliced bread. My livelihood is tied up in making sure that my customers' IT meets their needs. Whether that's in my cloud, someone else's cloud, in their own cloud, or not in any cloud at all.

Cheers.

Trevor_Pott Gold badge

Re: Storage collapsing into services

Oh, look, one of those people who ignore the part where the world isn't going to rewrite 40 years worth of applications in order to fit some pee-in-jars nerd's efficiency fetish, but they still want high availability.

Yeah, sorry (not sorry), shared storage is here to stay. And no, JBOD doesn't count.

Take your containers, and your cloud native, and your rewriting the whole goddamned world and crawl back into the tiny niche where money has no meaning from when you spawned.

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Re: Beyond misleading

There are a LOT of analysts pushing it. I really haven't seen many vendors succeeding with it yet, but they've got at lot of the expensive analysts convinced it's the next big thing.

I just look at how long it's been since the analysts in question actually worked at the coalface, snort and go back to getting work done.

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Perennially overpriced market run by the most change-resistant people in tech to encounter price war after decade of innovation starts to penetrate FUD and have an impact on customer buying descisions.

Shocked, I tell you. Truly shocked.

Oh, and the solution to all of this, of course, will be NVMe over fabrics! Trust us! NVMe over fabrics will solve everything! Because the answer customers have been waiting for to burdensomely expensive, proprietary storage that's difficult to manage is urdensomely expensive, proprietary storage that's difficult to manage that goes really fast.

Because in a market where up top 60% of respondents reply that they haven't deployed hybrid or all flash arrays clearly speed is the thing that's going to save everyone. Not lower prices. Or ease of use. Or open standards. More speed.

Yeah, those legacy, change resistant vendors will right the ship with NVMe over fabrics all right. Just you wait. Massive return to growth! Tremendous! The biggest growth, believe them!

...any day now...

Latest loon for Trump's cabinet: Young-blood-loving, kidney-market advocate Jim O'Neill

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@Maffski

Reality: a reasonable higher minimum wage doesn't result in fewer living wage jobs. And non-living wage jobs are a huge problem because they trap the impoverished in a nasty cycle with no escape. And here we could get into debates about the structuring of employment insurance for the underemployed, and realities of beign able to "pull yourself up by your bootstraps" when you're working 3-4 non-living-wage jobs just to stay alive.

The weasel words given during the interview are just bullshit bafflegab designed to hide the fact that, overall, the man doesn't want to raise the minimum wage. He believes (as i deeply suspect so do you) in the stick: berate, belittle, chasten and punish people enough and they'll magically solve all their problems.

Reality doesn't work like that.

As for "global warming is solved": you're wrong. And you demonstrate that you not only don't understand science, but engineer and economics as well. Solar is nowhere near ready to take over for thermal. At a grid level, maybe, if you build enough of it, but it actually brings it's own problems when used at that scale.

At an individual level (for individual or commercial transport, for example), solar simply can't replace energy-dense fuels. Especially if we keep insisting on living such energy-intensive lives and structuring the very physical layout of our nations to be require ever increasingly energy expenditure per person.

Capitalism doesn't solve everything. In fact, it doesn't, ultimately, solve a lot of things. For the very same reason that pure communism didn't work: it completely ignores the reality of human nature.

In reality, the pure form of any economic, political or social system never works. Compromise and constant adjustment to new evidence is required. And this is the problem with people. They don't like change. Or learning. They prefer to have learned their "facts" about the world whilst young, and then never be required to ever reexamine those ever again.

Worse: people prefer to learn their "facts" from authority figures who, by and large, tell them what they want to hear. They align who they believe based upon how the information those people disburse makes them feel. So we not only end up with a bunch of people clinging to decades old "facts" with the death grip of eternity, but those "facts" were very likely demonstrably wrong even when they were internalized.

Look, it's a very, very rare person who wants climate change to be real. It's a very rare person who wants to pay more for a bagel because minimum wage was pegged at a living wage. Despite this, those individuals who are capable of objective analysis of evidence understand the science of climate change, no matter how upset it makes them.

Individuals capable of objective analysis understand the long term benefits of higher minimum wage, and the criticality of lowering income disparity within a nation, even though we too emotionally desire a better car than our neighbor, a more attractive mate and a larger domicile.

Using terms like "climate change denier" is correct, because there is no debate to be had about climate change. No more than there is debate to be had about "humans need to breathe oxygen of a given partial pressure in order to survive". Trying to create a debate is denying the truth.

And climate change is objective, scientifically verifiable truth, no matter how many people feel otherwise.

That's the key. That's the job of the journalist. To tell the truth even when it feels uncomfortable. Even when their entire nation would raise a cry against it, because it disrupts the illusion they've build for themselves.

The job of the journalist is to seek that truth, expose it, repeat it, and do so unapologetically. And at the end of the day, the truth flows from evidence. Not from some guy on Twitter guy with a Pepe avatar screeching "stop crying pussy libtard".

All opinions may be equal under the law, but they are not all equally informed or equally valid. And as regards the truth, your feelings count for absolutely fucking nothing.

Trevor_Pott Gold badge

@anonymous coward

The word "denier' is accurate.

Sorry (not sorry) that you don't like reality. Reality, however, doesn't give a rat fuck what you do or do not like.

Trevor_Pott Gold badge

Re: Your bias?

"Perceived truth" is only bias if the journalist's perception is incorrect. Where the journalist is correctly perceiving reality, but you (along with umpteen others) prefer to believe in a different reality the journalist isn't being "biased" to call things like they are.

In fact, when society enters one of those phases where a powerful minority demands that the truth be censored, "washed", or otherwise altered in order to make that powerful minority feel more comfortable...it is in exactly that moment that speaking the unbiased, unfiltered truth matters most.

The fact that you feel a need to demand that people outside your safe space add false balance to the blunt truth so that you don't have your illusions shattered means that shattering your illusions is critically important.

The author isn't in the wrong here. You are.

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Re: Your bias?

@ivan4 false balance is not the job of the journalist. Truth is. And truth isn't determined by opinion, no matter how many people hold it.

I'm sorry the you find reality having a "bias" you don't agree with, but that's what happens when you come out of your safe space.

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@ToddR

"It's the "denier" part which shows your bias. Just report facts please, e.g. "sceptic" works"

Awww, you're triggered by reality! It would be cute if it weren't so fucking horrifying. Maybe you should join Ivan in his safe space.

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@Ivan4

Aw. diddums, did the mean man expressing his opinion trigger you? Do you need a safe space? Is the tantrum going to last long? We can try soothing music to calm you...

Has Samsung, er, rounded the corner with Apple court win?

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Re: Yes, but

The rust belt he just told to go to hell?

I was a robot and this is what I learned

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Re: It can never succeed beyond the novelty stage

The problem with this is that the show floor isn't the only reason people go to conventions. There are the lectures, the hands-on-labs and the parties to consider as well.

The real advantage is the ability to interact with other human beings in and adjacent to your career path in informal settings. This human-to-human interaction is hard to fully replicate in a virtual setting...although with proper VR, we just might get there. I honestly don't see why a second life-style VR conference wouldn't work, except that we straight up don't have the code written yet.

Given Microsoft's keen interest...a use for Hololens at last? :)

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Re: Event capacity?

I once stayed at a hotel where the most paletable thing on the menu was "fried ceasar salad". Intrigued, I ordered it - $40! - and I was, I shit you not, just a small head of romaine lettuce someone browned in a pan, and 20g worth of shredded parmesean cheese sprinkled on top.

I was not impressed.

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Re: It can never succeed beyond the novelty stage

That's a much longer conversation, but really boils down to "the presenters are just not set up for it."

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Re: Fascinating read.

So, this comes in layers.

First: the robot is plenty fast. It is able to go probably 5x as fast in a straight line as I was using it. The problem isn't the raw speed of the device, but the constant start/stop.

I think that better algorithms could actually help this. A more advanced unit could handle the start stop better then a human, and perhaps maintain a better long-term speed than manual driving could. You plot the course, use the UI to show the robot how fast you WANT to go, and it could then do its best to start/stop and/or navigate around obstacles. Here, technology can solve part of the problem.

The second part of this equation really does involve humanizing the robot. The robots need to be more "Android-like". We've had plenty of research to show that people can form emotional connections will all sorts of robots, from robotic garbage cans to semi-autonomous receptionists. The key is to make it approachable. Cute and non-threatening helps, but quirky helps too.

I think the hardest part is honestly that the robot has a human fact on the screen whilst traveling. If it didn't, if it had an animated robot face during traveling, it might actually elicit more sympathy. (The face would suit the body, and we are less disconcerted by that.)

More research would help here. I hope I get the chance to help do some of it.

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Sort of. I ineffectually tried to stalk her. Then I'd lose sight of her. Then she'd appear out of a portal with that frown. She'd tap her foot in an exasperated fashion and shoo me along in the direction she was wishing to travel.

I think saying I was stalking her implies a level of success at following her around that is completely unwarranted. :)

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Re: Event capacity?

Meals, too. No $50 per person for "Les Foo Foo's 'Death of a lettuce leaf'". You could eat things you bought and prepared yourself.

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Re: Event capacity?

What's wrong with paying to use one? I would.

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Re: Mobility

Lots of reasons!

You can't take most powered chairs/scooters large enough for me through the airport. Especially if you are heading internationally. Something something batteries, folding.

If you want to get a powered chair that I could use, it costs about $35k USD, and takes something like 15 minutes to fold. Also, lots of reports of Airline baggage handlers in the US trashing them.

Powered chairs and taxis don't work very well at all. US ADA regs for very, very narrow chairs; too narrow for me to use. Thus the "wheelchair cabs" (on the exceptionally rare occasion a city has any) don't suit. Manual chairs can be folder and shoved in the trunk of any old towncar, or into the back of a van.

The majority of vendor parties (or for that matter, hotels!) that I am expected to go to won't support either form of chair. They especially won't have doors wide enough to support non-folding power chairs. If you have to leave something abandoned at the front desk and hope noone steals it, which would you rather a $35k power chair or a $2.5K manual chair?

Either form of chair adds a crazy amount of hassle to airports, cabs, hotels, events, you-name-it. Now, that said, I have tried the manual chair thing. There is a problem with that too: I don't need one for my regular life. This means that I am nowhere near fast enough or powerful enough pushing that thing myself to keep up with people. (Also part of the reason is my arms are too short for most manual chairs; the wheels don't come high enough and i have to contort weirdly, which reduces power.)

For some events you could hire scooters/chairs (powered or unpowered) at the event, but not at all events. Even then, these may or may not meet size/weight/whatever requirements of the passenger, and sometimes are only rentable for the duration, not just for the event floor. (Leading back to the issues above.)

So it's not that events are undoable, it's that the logistics really, really, really suck.

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No and no. That said, there are two cameras on the unit: one facing forward, one looking down at your "feet". It's not all that hard to advance cautiously...but it is still possible to run into people too.

So. A new tech upstart wants 'feedback'. Um, maybe it actually does

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Pint

I said "change", not "go completely fucking crazy". ;)

Body cams too fragile for Canadian Mounties – so they won't be used

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Re: Hmmm ...

The RCMP operate in a lot of places urban police forces don't.

systemd free Linux distro Devuan releases second beta

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"Lennart isn't some cartoon devil. He's a guy who writes code. He's a perfectly nice guy"

No, he's not. He's an asshat.

Maybe Lennart is nice to his family. Maybe he even draws that circle around him just large enough to accommodate close personal friends. What he doesn't do is draw that circle large enough to encompass users. To them, he's an asshat.

Lennart isn't just hated because he wrote some code. People write bad code all the time. Most of the time we hate the people that constrained their resources and prevented them for writing something better, or saddled them with stupid requirements.

Lennart is hated - personally - for the lack of care, consideration and respect he has towards users. Especially those with valid grievances. His condescension, arrogance and overall public-facing demeanor have earned him the bile and vitriol he receives.

Lennart has set out to be more than just a developer. He's set himself up to be a moral guardian of what are the right and wrong ways to do things. When you put on that mantle, climb up in front of your congregation and damn the heathens, don't be shocked and shaken when those very same heathens get all bolshy in turn.

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You do realize Lennart's a real person, right?

No he's not. He's a homunculus, made out of disdain, arrogance and evil. A golem, animated by his own sense of self importance.

Blimey, I think he's got a real chance of being the next president of that miserable country.

Doctor AI will see you now: US military vets will be diagnosed by deep-learning bots

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"xkcd really isn't that funny"

Jealous much?

Super Cali goes ballistic, considers taxing Netflix

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Re: Tax what?

"Uncle Sam is very keen to repatriate foreign earnings, I would expect Trump to go after Apple and Microsoft"

Trump is the ass cancer that killed Uncle Sam.

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Re: VAT

Why would Netflix need to know where I live? Rechargeable credit cards are easy to obtain. Even ones based in other jurisdictions.

Canadian cops cuff 11-year-old lad after Grand Theft Auto gets real

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Re: Sorry to sound like an old grumpy.. ..

"Guns & violence ok but not sex ??? I am happy to reference almost any cartoon; it is the same content, just the art form used is different."

You mean American cartoons, the ones that perpetuate their cracked view of the world?

Pass.

Just because it's on the TV doesn't mean it's a good plan to base your morality, ethics or culture on it. Same goes with listening to them as thump a holy book and preach obedience to their interpretation of words written by dead men long ago.

There's nothing at all wrong with sex.

There's a fuck of a lot wrong with violence and killing.

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Re: Sorry to sound like an old grumpy.. ..

"Guns and killing are okay, but sex is the devil!"

You make me physically ill.

Creaking Royal Navy is 'first-rate' thunders irate admiral

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Re: Duh? Wuh?

You missed India and Pakistan. Last I checked, they had pretty well developed militaries, albeit mostly preoccupied with killing each other. China likely has strike capability in the middle east as well, as they have allies in Africa and the ability to put boats with things that fly on them out there.

The Internet Society is unhappy about security – pretty much all of it

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There was never an era where all hats were white

Though there certainly were some where all the people in positions of power were.