* Posts by Trevor_Pott

6991 publicly visible posts • joined 31 May 2010

WTF is the Internet of Things and how insurers will use it against you

Trevor_Pott Gold badge

Re: LAN of Things?

Simple: Big Data Analytics. Once my test rig is done I can work with hardware providers to grind down the price of the sensor kits and start distributing them along with a Rasp Pi and some appropriate software at the local fish shop. A simple setup involving entering some information into the configuration webpage by the aquarist and they'll have this thing *paf* ready to go.

The units will fire their information up to one of my servers which, in turn, will provide analytics, alerting and so forth to end users. More critically, we'll be able to provide real-time water quality mapping of the entire city's water distribution network. This will enable us to provide herd immunity to other members of the hobby.

To an aquarist, the water that comes out of the taps is of critical importance. Water in the taps can contain ammonia (bad) or nitrite (worse!) or other nasty chemicals. They can enter the distribution network at the treatment plant or anywhere along the way. Identifying breaches in the distribution network and getting the city to respond is critical, otherwise we have to do a lot of pre-procesing of our water (or chemical naturalizing of Bad Things) before adding it to fish tanks.

With my sensor suite firing all it's data up to the cloud we'll be able to see this in real time, feed that information back to the city and even send out alerts to aquarists that are likely to be affected by water quality issues even if they don't have the sensor package. As long as we know where they live, we can say "there's a quality issue upstream of you in the water distribution network."

We can also start doing science on a scale that we haven't previously been able to do before. If we get individuals with sensor packages to agree to self-report when fish illness or deaths occur in their tanks we can start gathering hard, empirical data on how different water parameters affect various species. At the moment a large quantity of this type of information available to aquarists is simply conjecture, or "well these parameters mostly work for similar species, they should work for this one..."

The data collected at the local level enables real-time monitoring and minor proactive environmental maintenance. At scale, however, the data collected becomes absolutely transformative, enabling us to do things we simply couldn't do any other way.

Trevor_Pott Gold badge

Re: Solutions looking for a problem

I enjoy watching my fish. Giving them treats. Playing games with them. Training them and scooping the younglings that inevitbaly occur into a breeder tank, raising them and getting them off to the store to be sold to another hobbiest.

I enjoy cross-breeding and getting new variations going. I enjoy watching my plecos om-nom-nom algea off the side of the tank or the wriggling hive cory cruise along the bottom and terraform the tank. I like how the guppies come up and say "hi" when I walk by, or how the Betta puffs up and does his tubifex worms dance.

I emphatically don't like losing fish to bad water conditions, testing, refilling the tank, making sure the snails have enough calcium or other bits of tedium. Automating that isn't a hobby, it's a tedious chore that I find bothersome...but less bothersome than keeping the water in parameters all the time.

There's an old joke amongst aquarists: we don't keep fish, we keep water. I prefer to keep the fish.

Want to reach out and touch your Chromebook? How does $299 grab you?

Trevor_Pott Gold badge

And does it whip the Llama's ass?

Trevor_Pott Gold badge

Re: Touch? Meh.

Oh, I always strip off ChromeOS and end up loading an ultra-lightweight Linux with Firefox. Sheild up, WiFi on standby...

Trevor_Pott Gold badge

Touch? Meh.

But C720 has without looks like a decent netbook. Assuming the battery life isn't utter shite...

Why Microsoft absolutely DOESN'T need its own Steve Jobs

Trevor_Pott Gold badge

Re: People are not nearly as locked in to iOS and Android as the author believes

I am surveying power users, certainly. I never once claimed that all users fell into the "costs hundreds to switch" category. You inferred more than was stated.

A significant portion, however, certainly do have over $100 in apps...some of those apps being made by Apple themsleves. (Thus wouldn't be paid out to developers.) iWork was a frequently purchased Major Application, weighing in at between $60 and $79 depending on purchase price! (And there's *still* no decent office package for Android!)

iWork uptake is significant amongst business users of iDevices. It was the #1 most frequently purchased app amongst those I surveyed. I emphatically did not restrict my survey to IT types, however, I very much so did survey individuals who were using their devices for work purposes.

The cost of switching apps alone for someone who is using the device primarily as a phone may not be that high, however, amongst phone-dominant mobile users I found that there was a significant usage of apps with no direct port to alternative ecosystems. This presented as strong a barrier as the cost of moving.

I also stated in my comments that the cost to move was predominantly from tablet users, as they buy more applications...which was also the focus of the article, as - quite frankly - tablets are where the money is in mobile. (The Smarphone market having largely been saturated, with new acquisitions predominantly coming from the poor who aren't much of a consideration anyways.)

Phones fall into two categories: individuals who purchase high-end phones outright and treat them like tablets (mostly Samsung users with Phablet-class devices) and contract-clangers.

Contract-clangers don't buy apps. They don't buy phones, either. They get a phone tied to the cycle of their contract and mostly seek out low-end-or-free stuff. They're cheap, and - to be blunt about it - they have fuck-all for disposable income. They are not using "a smartphone." They have an MP3 player with a web browser that can type texts and make phone calls. They emphatically do not use it as a portable general computing device and won't for at least another refresh, probably two or three. This category or user is completely irrelevant. There's no money here unless you're Google and going to advertise at them.

"I bought my phone outright" types typically can be lumped in with tablet users. They purchase applications. They use the device for more than just web browsing, Youtube and listening to MP3s. This is where the money is. It's also where the business usage of mobile devices comes in...and this category is fucking exploding at the moment. (Though that will change soon. Growth will taper off in two or three years.)

While survey work leads to generalisations and generalisations by definition don't address edge cases the following is largely true:

1) People who don't buy a lot of apps predominantly are "phone" users that treat their device as an MP3 player with benefits.

2) This category of people don't have money to spend and aren't worth chasing unless you have a long term strategy based on locking them in (or are advertising at them.)

Microsoft is never going to convert this group because:

1) This would require Microsoft to have a coherent long term strategy to attract, retain and then monetise the milled masses of people with negligible incomes

2) This would require Microsoft give lots of useful software away for free that would be better than what Apple and Google are giving away for free

3) Every passing day has the user's data increasingly integrated into someone else's ecosystem

4) Even a few low-cost apps are a barrier to changing providers if you have little money and the devices cost roughly the same

5) Familiarity with UI and extended ecosystem apps becomes a factor holding even "cheap-o" smartphone types in place

6) "Cool factor"

So you, personally may be both a Microsoft fanboy and have no problem moving from A to B. You are an edge case.

Device and ecosystem loyalty is strong, especially amongst tablet users and high-value smartphone users. It is increasingly strong amongst the low-end as well, though the reasons become less economic as you move down the value chain.

Trevor_Pott Gold badge

Re: "coast" for a decade, growing profits year over year by 15%

I don't particularly disagree...but look how many major companies tanked in those ten years, hmm? Even if all he could do was "coast" to 15% year-over-year, that's way better than most of the industry. Credit - and criticism - where it's due. Ballmer deserves a large helping of both.

Trevor_Pott Gold badge

Standards do exist, even for Linux GUIs. X11 was the standard display server for ages. This was replaced with X.Org. On top of the display server run compositors, Compiz, KWin, Xfwm, Enlightenment (E17) and Mutter. GUIs run on top of those.

Of those systems, Compiz and KWin are the primary compositors and any app designed for a given compositor should run in any GUI that uses that compositor.

Compositors are not mutually exclusive. Many KWin apps will run in Compiz and vice the versa. Xfwm and Enlightment apps seem to run just about anywhere and so on and so forth. Why? Because even though there are differences they still do work hard to adhere to standards.

Right now, the Linux GUI world is undergoing a major shake-up.

The X.org team has decided that X.org is a piece of crap that needs to be rewritten. So they did. The replacement is called Weyland. The reference implementation is Weston. Critical is that they have jettisoned ridiculous things like "network display", something that hasn't actually existed in X for years but the uninformed and change resistant still wail about being dropped.

The existing "network display" (which is actually a broken kludge in X.org) is being replaced with an RDP 7 compatible RDP server based on the FreeRDP code. Why? Because RDP is the best and it has become a standard.

Weyland is already supported in Tizen, with most major distros planning support soon. Major GUI projects such as Enlightenment, Gnome, KDE have planned support. In short: Weyland is the new standard that any rational distribution is migrating to.

...but there are irrational ones.

Canonical has ambitions to be Android. They have a Microsoft-like "we're Steve-Jobs-like visionaries!" arrogance about them. They honestly think Unity is a decent UI. So they aren't moving unity over to Weyland. They writing their own display server called Mir. It's a stupid plan and it will fail horribly.

Others play it very safe. Look at the Mint developers who write the Cinnamon UI:

"ATI/nVidia support Xorg, and Xorg is stable and functional. This is what matters to us. A lot of devs are working on Wayland and not on Xorg these days and some Ubuntu devs will probably focus on MIR more than on Xorg going forward. So it’s likely things won’t remain that way indefinitely. With that said we’re not in the business of picking winners. Good luck to both Wayland and MIR in trying to become the next big thing, we’ll look at all that when the time is right."

I.E. for now, X.org is the standard and has the best support. When Weyland is out of Alpha and most of the heavy lifting is done, they'll probably port Cinnamon to it. (If they don't, they can kiss their UI goodbye.)

This is how standards work in Linux. Democracy. I can run a Gnome app on Cinnamon no problem. I can probably run it in XFCE and KDE as well. Hard work goes into that kind of support. But I do get to choose my UI. The guts underneath it all is very modular and changes either have strong community support or they get forked.

X11 doing stupid things? Fork it and create X.org. X.org getting crusty? Fork it and make Weyland. The bulk of the community will move towards a single solution, or at worst two or three.

The only real place where a massive diversity exists is UIs. Which, frankly, is as it should be. Everyone is different. We all learn different, understand space and data differently and are more productive on different UIs.

The interface should be customizable, dynamic and tailored to the user. The plumbing is what needs be standardised...and by and large, it is. Even if that standardisation is "voting with our feet" instead of by fiat.

And that, sir, is why Linux - and choice - has everything to do with freedom of speech.

Trevor_Pott Gold badge

If my company could "coast" for a decade, growing profits year over year by 15% I would be quite content. Alternately, a net income of $23bn would be...desirable.

Trevor_Pott Gold badge

Re: People are not nearly as locked in to iOS and Android as the author believes

I have looked at stats, and asked a lot of people, talked to experts.

You would have been correct if we were having this discussion in 2010. In 2013, a huge number (100% of my sample size and over 50% of mainstream, according to the last stats I had checked) had over $100 in apps.

Factor in the cost of devices and rebuying (in some cases) your media and suddenly it's expensive enough to deter people from shifting. Your numbers are simply out of date. App prices are going up. People are buying far more apps, and tablet users especially are buying more expensive, complicated applications that drive the average app loadout far - far - above the "nobody buys apps, Q_Q" surveys of a few years ago.

Trevor_Pott Gold badge

Re: $1000s to replace apps?

RTFA. Apps and devices. And every single iOS or Android user I've encountered in the past 12 months with whom I've discussed the topic (at least 100 people by now) has had well over $100 in just applications alone. Many have had several hundred, especially tablet users.

Get into media libraries and you can cheerfully get into the thousands, for the iOS types, without getting into devices.

Apps are getting more capable and more expensive and many people are buying them. Just as it was on the PC. The longer this goes on, the higher the barrier to switching.

"Does the Surface have X app?" Even *if* the answer to all apps required is "yes", after running the numbers on what rebuying everything - from apps to devices - is going to cost, I've not seen a single person switch ecosystems. Not from iOS to Android, not from Android to iOS and nobody has gone back to Microsoft after they've left.

I've been purposefully looking for this information. Collecting data since at least March. (Got interested int eh topic when I was in Redmond.) My methodology and sample size are not absolutely conclusive, but they are good enough to convince me that a larger and more detailed effort would validate the hypothesis presented.

Sysadmin job ad: 'If you don’t mind really bad work-life balance, this is for you'

Trevor_Pott Gold badge

I've done that job for the past 15 or so years of my life. That is a young person's job. Dear me, I'm too old for that shit now. </18 with 12 years experience>

KILO-MACH SONIC BOOM probed in fireball embers of 1572AD SUPERNOVA

Trevor_Pott Gold badge

2-3000 light years

is not that far away.

Cow flatulence, gas emissions much worse than thought - boffins

Trevor_Pott Gold badge

Re: Good work

...just capture the methane and sell it.

City of London cops arrest 6 suspected to be Microsoft counterfeit ring

Trevor_Pott Gold badge

Re: £100k

Except for the part where "£100k" means "full retail pricing with the maximum possible inflation of cost presuming that everything was bought under the most customer-hostile processes."

Which probably means half to a third of that in real-world dollars. Or about year's salary for one person. Also known as "the difference between an SMB with 10 employees folding and everyone losing their jobs or just managing to barely stay above water."

Context. It is lacking. But hey, OMG THINK OF THE STARVING MILLIONAIRES IN REDMOND *sob*. That's always a hit with the crowd and the logic is a hoot.

Trevor_Pott Gold badge

Re: £100k

Kinda comes off like someone who "pirated" Server 2012 and a copy of SQL. Maybe a few copies of Office and Win 7. OOooooOOoooOOOOoooooooOOooo....

Four teachers indicted in Steubenville social media rape case

Trevor_Pott Gold badge

Answer your own question, prole.

Obviously, not nearly enough people see this as a problem, otherwise it wouldn't be so.

Computer "hackers" will OMG NUCLEAR POWER PLANTS and CHILD PORNOGRAPHY and STEALING AMERICAN JOBS. If you don't support harsher punishments for them than for rapists (or those who knowing assist rapists) you just aren't thinking of the children. And really, what kind of person does that make you?

How much should an ethical phone cost? An extra penny? Or $4bn

Trevor_Pott Gold badge

@skelband

The question is not remotely meaningless and facile. It is a legitimate and very concrete question that anyone proposing to reshape a society must face. It is part of making the command decisions that all leaders of man are required to make.

Example: we have the technology to end all traffic accidents within our lifetime. All autonomous, human-driven cars could be eliminated; replaced by Googlecar-robotic minicabs or a complex virtual-rail system (strips of tracking material down each road, driven by robots festooned with sensors that avoid hitting babies, cats, etc.) No country in the world is moving towards building such infrastructure and banning personal vehicles, despite the multitudes this would save every year.

Why?

Simply put: it's too expensive. The cost is not simply money, but an aspect of personal freedom. You could not simply get in your car and drive somewhere. To enable freedom at that scale, every single lane on every single road and highway across the country would have to be retrofitted. So we could spend a staggering amount of money and some freedom to accomplish this goal, or we could spend an incomprehensible amount of money.

The point is that we choose to do neither. Our leaders - and by extension we, the people - accept the deaths everyone killed in a motor vehicle accident because the cost - money and freedom - are beyond what we are willing to pay. Those lives have a fixed value and saving them is just too expensive.

Oddly enough, I'm okay with that. That's a decision that we make as a nation about our own lives. We are saying "we accept this risk upon ourselves and our children and our loved ones in exchange for not expending our resources on that particular safety net." We all accept the risks, we all reap some part of the rewards for not spending those resources.

That is fundamentally different from "blood minerals" because here we are simply writing off people who have no say whatsoever in the process. We are faced with a very tangible, very real choice: how much are we as a society willing to pay to stop rape, torture, murder and maiming of other sapient beings in another society?

Our choice is simple: Is $32 /device too much to ask us to pay to put an end to that? Gather up the number of people murdered, raped, tortured and maimed and do the fucking maths.

When you say "no, that's too much to pay in order to stop this shit from happening" then you have discovered your personal threshold for the value of a human life. You are unwilling to pay $X / shiny gizmo to prevent the suffering of X people thus you value each life at ($X * number of devices shipped into your nation) / individuals involved.

This is completely different maths from a society accepting risks collectively (as in the balance between freedom and security), a doctor performing triage or a military commander making a command decision. This is us, with the power in our hands to stop the suffering of people who do not posses the power to stop it on their own.

Anyone who cannot understand the above is a sociopath. Pure and simple.

The only relevant question is "how much is too much for us to pay?"

Everything else involving this discussion becomes a two-step process:

1) Get the cost of action below the "how much is too much" line so that we can take initial action.

2) Continue to grind the cost of action as low as possible so as to weed out inefficiency.

For the truly hard-boiled sociopaths who give no fucks whatsoever, the "how much is too much" amount will be zero, or damned close too.

Indeed, there exists a category of disconnected number-nerd types who will seize upon the fact that taking action now might not be the most efficient possible action, cost-wise, and thus naysay and holler.

They might support action if that action could be "proven" to be the most efficient possible action to take, cost-wise. Of course, since that is proving a negative, it's possible for them to constantly demand action never be taken because it is impossible to be sure that we are being absolutely efficient, that not one penny of waste exists in the solution.

I have nothing but the utmost loathing and lack of respect for such individuals.

1) Determine "how much is too much" to pay to end the suffering of other sapient beings.

2) Get the cost of action below the "how much is too much" line so that we can take initial action.

3) Continue to grind the cost of action as low as possible so as to weed out inefficiency.

Any other path of action is quite simply saying "the possibility of cost inefficiency exists, which may make me pay more than the absolute minimum possible to resolve the problem. Thus we should not solve the problem."

Adding "until we have agreed upon what the most efficient possible means is and agreed to use that means" doesn't make you any less a goddamned monster than if you hadn't added it.

I'm all for efficiency. But we can work to make a process more efficient after we've implemented a more inefficient version of the same process. When the lives of sapient beings (especially those who have no say in the risk/reward balance whatsoever) are at stake, you work with what you have and then continue putting in effort to make it the process you have better and more efficient.

These are lives we're talking about. Not delaying some purchase agreement so we can grind an extra $0.10 per unit off the vendor.

Anyone who cannot get the difference really, truly is a sociopath...and I am completely unable to respect them at all. You can the lot of you call me whatever names you want, but on this I promise you you will never change my mind.

Trevor_Pott Gold badge

Re: @Tim

"Must make salary negotiations very hard."

Not at all. I pay my staff the best that I'm able. Everyone is aware of the finances of the company and we're all open about our needs. We discuss each individual's financial goals (such as paying off student loans, saving for a house, etc) and readjust our salary every year to take into account whatever profit growth we've made as a company. The staff get the bulk of the profits, I do not receive an increase higher than the lowest of them.

"Very glad you're not a doctor."

There is a difference between triage (or command decisions) and writing off people for convenience, sir. And you fucking know that.

"PS Thousands have died to make your life a bit easier. Getting frothy mouthed about it won't change the fact."

Bullshit. Working hard to alleviate the suffering of my fellow sapient beings is part of being human. Compassion, motherfucker, heard of it?

Trevor_Pott Gold badge

Re: @Tim

I'm so very deeply sorry that I don't view human being as commodities to be bartered and discarded.

I'll do my best to be more of of an amoral sociopath in the future comments, just for you.

By the way, just out of curiosity, what's the value of your life? How much is an equitable amount to ask society to protect it from exploitation, harm and an untimely end? How much is too much to ask? Why? Do you apply the same value to others?

Please, detail your cold logic for the world, skelband. I await your wisdom, in awe of your profound humanity.

Trevor_Pott Gold badge

Re: @Tim

If the choices on the table are "spend $10M to make the problem go away" or "spend $4B to make the problem go away" then spending $10M is more rational. Assuming it's possible given the political and economic realities that surround the issue.

If, however, the choice is between spending $4B to deal with the issue and not dealing with the issue at all, I say we deal with the issue and fuck the greedy "people" (and I use the term exceedingly loosely) that feel $32 per device is too much to pay for the lives of their fellow human beings.

Your presentation of the options on the table made it seem that the $10M option was not political feasible and that our choices had become "spend the $4B to deal with the problem" or "don't deal with the problem at all."

Alternative or more efficient solutions than $4B to solve this issue would be ideal. Unless you're a fucking sociopath, not dealing with the problem at all is absolutely unacceptable.

So hey, let's get viable options on the table and a means to move towards them. If, however, the more rational avenues are blocked, we still have an ethical obligation to proceed using whatever means are, in fact, available.

Trevor_Pott Gold badge

@Tim

So just exactly what is the cash sum value of a human life? Or a rape? ...a maiming?

When is it "too much to pay"? $0.10 per phone? $10 per phone? $100 per phone?

What if morality in this regard is a cost with no benefits expressed as a cash sum at all?

Fuck 'em if they can't cope with dying for our fondleslabs? I truly am curious.

$4B a year seems pretty goddamned insignificant if we're talking about 2B devices, which is about what this says is the global consumption rate. That's $2 a phone. Is $2 /device "too much?"

What if we're only talking about $4B to cover units shipped into the USA? That's $4B across 125M devices. That's $32 per device. Is $32 /device "too much?"

I'm legitimately curious. I would sure as hell hope that every human being on earth's answer to that question would be the exact same, but I am all to painfully aware of the number of sociopaths that inhabit our world.

I would surely love it if we could get the kind of international cooperation together required to have all the refineries and all the chip spinners do their part and turn Billions of dollars of regulatory cost into a meager few million in externally-monitored self regulation.

Unfortunately, we have no way to compel many of these companies to agree to such a scheme or to enforce their compliance. They are beyond our jurisdiction. So instead we have to act on the "little guy" and use their market pressure to keep the multinationals in check.

Shitty, but there you have it.

I will gladly pay an additional $32 per device to ensure my widgets are sourced from conflict-free sources. Frankly, I'm fucking appalled that there are people who wouldn't. I am ashamed to be a member of the same species as those individuals and I consider anyone who finds that "too much to pay" as no different in my mind from the bastards perpetuating these horrific crimes: both groups view the life and suffering of another sapient being as irrelevant to their own selfish, petty desires.

How much is too much? And isn't a solution - even if it is not the most efficient solution - better than letting this sort of shit continue?

We must each answer these questions for ourselves.

Leaked MS ad video parodies Chrome as surveillance tech

Trevor_Pott Gold badge

Re: "Great bit of advertising"...

Bullshit. Microsoft reads my e-mails in Outlook.com, Office 365, my chats on Skype, Lync, MSN Messenger, etc.

They've reduced the security of Skype to enable them to do so. So please, can the bull.

Dude, relax – it's Just a Bunch Of Disks: Our man walks you through how JBODs work

Trevor_Pott Gold badge

Re: Scott Lowe's article, bad link

Derp.

Cisco untroubled by mega-clouds fleeing its proprietary ASIC grip

Trevor_Pott Gold badge

Re: The only way to take cisco down

http://www.opendaylight.org/

Google underwrites Firefox another year, even as Chrome outpaces it

Trevor_Pott Gold badge

@bigtimehustler

Text ads are fine. Static images are fine. Moving images are...well, I find them annoying enough that I block them most places, but I don't have a strong technical argument for it and I recognise the moral argument against it.

Anything that uses a code base which could execute code on my system is flat out not allowed. No Flash, no Java, no JavaScript. Those are only ever going to be enabled manually by me on a case-by-case basis, such as "I want to watch this specific video."

I'm sorry, but the "moral rights" of advertisers simply don't extend to "opening a security hole on my system through which I could be infected."

I also totally randomise my browser informaiton for each session and tab so their tracking is useless. I'll allow them to display ads to me, but my privacy isn't for sale.

Trevor_Pott Gold badge

Everything is justified because

AMERICA, FUCK YEAH!

NSW privacy exemption shares personal data with private sector

Trevor_Pott Gold badge

Re: Canada was first

Canada isn't quite so cavalier with privacy as the commenter above makes us out to be. There is a difference between "a targets and specific breach of individual privacy in order to save that selfsame individual's life" (medical records at an ER or with explicit permission to private medical facilities) and giving wide ranging access to the kinds of information that can ruin a person's life.

The insurance company is a great example. So, for that matter, is allowing an employer (or a jury) to review a record of accusations/juvenile misdemeanors, etc. This is why many items (especially for minors) "fall off"* a person's record after a given amount of time. (At least here in Canada.)

*All items on your police record are, in fact, permanent. That said, many are considered "inaccessible" after expiry for the purposes of background checks, etc. Police can still view your juvie record when investigating, and it will probably be taken into account if you go for a serious security clearance, but the insurance company or bank isn't going to get to see that you had a red light ticket 7 years ago or were accused/arrested for (but never convicted) of any number of things. Which, frankly, is as it should be.

Trevor_Pott Gold badge

It's easy to make an "investment" involving privacy...

...when the privacy you're investing is someone else's.

Who will recover your data if disaster strikes?

Trevor_Pott Gold badge

Re: And what about the DR plan if a critical supplier goes out of business?

Pano's stuff eventually got bought up and support was provided to existing clients. I think that's a far more common scenario in the IT industry than simply vanishing into the void. "An established client base" is still a valuable commodity; someone will buy it.

The bigger issue is those transition periods. What do you do between the point where a Pano Logic (or a Nirvanix) goes off the air and the point where the deals are done and their customer base is purchased during the fire sale?

Personally, I advocate the "keeping spares on the shelf" policy as much as possible. (Licenses, physical devices, etc.) How does one do that with Cloud Computing??? The only "keeping spares on the shelf" version of Cloudy computing I can see is Microsoft's CloudOS (on prem, service provider, Azure trifecta making it unlikely you'll lose access to all systems capable of hosting your infrastructure) or VMware (same deal as CloudOS, just less refined.)

Whether or not that constitutes "industry standard best practices" depends entirely on who's paying whom. Cloud providers will say such concerns are unwarranted and unnecessary. "Get of my goddamned lawn" coalface sysadmins like myself generally prefer the paranoia route. Each person will have to decide on their own.

Those Xbox One first-day glitches: GREEN screens of DEATH, disc crunching

Trevor_Pott Gold badge

My Alienware MX18 still uses the original OS install, runs like stink and works like a charm. Don't know what you're on about, Windows 7 solved a lot of the crap that keeps endpoint weenies employed.

Though there's good money in "where the fuck is..." regarding Microsoft Tiles 8.11 for fondlegroups.

Native Americans were actually European - BEFORE the Europeans arrived!

Trevor_Pott Gold badge

Re: Oh dear

There's plenty of evidence of pre-Clovis cultures.

Microsoft touts SCROOGLE merch: Hopes YOU'LL PAY to dump on rival

Trevor_Pott Gold badge

Re: I want Google

No shit. I'd buy a few hundred, I think. One for each of the vExperts, at least. ;)

Even Better: Google could donate all profits to a charity. The EFF, say?

Who wants a Xeon-powered, 12-core, RAID 10 … LAPTOP?

Trevor_Pott Gold badge

Re: I estimate

Funny, I was thinking of buying 4...

Microsoft zaps self in foot with WinPho/Office remote control app

Trevor_Pott Gold badge

This app does not work with Office 2013 RT

So why the fuck should anyone else code apps for that platform, is Microsoft can't be assed to do it? Hmm?

Cisco's reverse mentoring plan helps middle-aged managers grok Gen Y

Trevor_Pott Gold badge

"Engaging" with the younger generation...

...is useless if you don't actual listen to anyone, regardless of age.

Let me be loud and clear to Cisco, and they won't need social media to grok it:

Cisco, the world loathes you and your worthless, overpriced products because they are (drumroll) worthless and overpriced. There are a handful of things you make that noone else can touch. That's your anchor. Everything else is being undercut left and right.

Cisco, if you want to stop bleeding customers, lower your prices and make your products dynamic, admissible via API and maybe even advance to the point that your interface is something other than a requirement to memorize 500 pages of arcane CLI. I don't know if you noticed, Cisco, but nobody actually likes CCXXes. They're arrogant, egotistical pricks who cost way to much. When your competitors are offering widgets that are as fast as yours, allow companies to bin the expensive douchnozzle (running networks with any old sysadmin or developer) and do it for a quarter the price...why the fuck would anyone buy from you?

What? "Huawei is backdoored by the Chinese government" you say? How - exactly - is that different from you? China, the USA, it's all the same. Both foreign powers trying to turn the rest of us into serfs. So that doesn't work.

"Stability, reliability, blah-blah enterprise something marketing gobleddy gook?" Hate to say, buddy, but Juniper works a hot damn, so does HP, Arista, Dell...even Supermicro! Most don't need - or want - the majority of shit in your routers and those that do would can get it better elsewhere.

You exist on inertia and some core routing products that noone else can duplicate. Soon, Arista will take the latter part of that away from you. After that, where are you? Relying on your religious fanatics to advocate on your behalf? That's only going to get you so far.

...we hate the religious nutjobs evangelising your overpriced tat almost as much as we hate the tat itself.

If you need social media to figure out the above, you're doomed.

Space tourist Dennis Tito begs US to BANKROLL HIS manned Mars flyby

Trevor_Pott Gold badge

Re: A Wasteful Stunt

Bull. Robotic terraforming of other worlds is worth 1000x any manned mission. We should be taming these worlds for our use. Starting with a permanent installation on Ceres to provide fuel for our ships.

No more Service Packs for Microsoft Office? HA! Think again, Ballmer!

Trevor_Pott Gold badge

Re: Oops. I'm ten years behind

Nah, gotta say, LibreOffice has done for me for the past few years. Office 2003 is still on my main VM, but when I upgrade to Fedora 20 - Weylan/Weston/FreeRDP, baby.! WOO! - it will be Libreoffice.

Ballmer: Microsoft stronger without Bing and Xbox tinkering

Trevor_Pott Gold badge

Being better than Ballmer isn't hard. But a government/military teat-sucker doesn't know the first thing about providing anything to the mass market. If what you want is bulletproof software that only the top 10% of companies and individuals in the G8 can afford, then your advice is sound.

If, however, you want to see Microsoft provide quality software for the majority of the world then you need someone like Nadella.

What you preach would turn Microsoft into something even more restrictive than Oracle. Maybe that's what you want...but it would certainly be a complete and utter clusterfuck for ht rest of the world that currently relies on Microsoft. The transition to "a vendor they can afford" would be messy, it would be expensive and it would be full of security holes and missteps that could well set IT innovation back a decade.

The whole world would be so busy reinventing the wheel that they wouldn't have time to innovate...and there would be IT for "us" and IT for "them." A digital divide that even generations of effort would be unable to erase.

Like it or not, Microsoft of today is one of the only vendors bringing enterprise-class software to the masses. They are a major force for commoditisation. I'm pretty sure plane boy would end that virtually overnight.

Trevor_Pott Gold badge

Nadella or bust. Can the rest of the fuckers in charge and bring in proper engineers. Focus on making good products better and delivering what the customer wants. If you need to use metrics, use them to inform decisions, not to justify them. Above all, listen to your customers and potential customers. Build what people want and they will buy.

How the hell is a government/military-teat-suckling handout baby going to deliver any of that?

Trevor_Pott Gold badge

Re: any bets on how long EOP will take to bin the good bits?

Wait, wait wait...Elopologists actually exist in the wild.

Whaaaaa?

Samsung to throw fat wad of Won at rare earth alternatives

Trevor_Pott Gold badge

Re: Help

Actually, China owns most of the decent prospects for rare earth mines in Canada, especially tantalum.

Salesforce boss Benioff foretells grim, unrelenting hyper-capitalist future

Trevor_Pott Gold badge

Indeed. I am absolutely in awe of Jack for this one. In. Awe. Unbelievable work.

How d'ya make a JPMorgan banker cry? Ask him questions on Twitter

Trevor_Pott Gold badge

Intelligence and morality have nothing to do with one another. Each can exist entirely independently of the other.

Indonesia turns Twitter into very leaky diplomatic bag

Trevor_Pott Gold badge

Re: cold southern comfort

@Irony Deficient Out treaties basically state that because our justice system is determined to be "equivalent" to the US, deporting people to the US becomes a miserable mess. If we don't want 'em then the US doesn't want 'em either and they would much rather that we pay the bill for banging the bastards up.

As for pursuing extradition, it's pointless. American's give zero fucks whatsoever about Canadian laws. Where we are supposed to to have jurisdiction, they repeatedly don't care. They even put immense political pressure on our politicians resulting in them breaking our own laws and having innocents tortured.

The prevailing view seems to be one of pointlessness. Canada must comply with American legal demands and Americans will only ever comply with Canadian requests if they are politically expedient for America. Sometimes they'll even deny our requests seemingly just to keep us "in our place" (if the comments of their ambassador are anything to go by.)

Even worse, the barbarians still have the death penalty and they murder our citizens, even we offer to repatriate them and keep them locked up for life. (Texas especially seems enamored of this.)

There is no justice in working with Americans. There is no point in asking them for help either. We are not "allies". We are a servitor nation. Allies would not treat each other the way America treats Canada...or individual Canadians. It is really as simple as that.

You don't ask your owner for favours; he'll take said impunity out of your hide.

So yeah, I think my province did right. The bastard is American's problem now. If he ever sets foot on Canadian soil again, we'll arrest him and $deity I hope they'll sent him to a jail cell in fucking Nunavut.

He's not worth the massive amount of political capital it would take to extradite him. Anything Canada "wins" that resembles justice will come out of our hides in the fullness of time. We might win an extradition of this man...but at what cost? American playing stubborn on Softwood lumber rights during the next pissing contest, costing hundreds of thousands of Canadian jobs (again)?

What price, justice? And what is the tax that must be paid on it to America's ego?

Trevor_Pott Gold badge

@Iron Deficient

Not all of those 9,414 people are criminals. There are, however, more than enough who are bothering the city that I personally live in, thank you very much. If you were really interested you could talk to the police departments from all of our major cities and ask them about Americans and their involvement with organized crime. Long and short of it: they are bringing a great deal of it here, and they are bringing a great deal of expertise in "picking up the pieces" of broken organizations once our cops smash one.

For every crime ring we dissipate it seems two well-trained Americans come up and establish new ones. Apparently crime is so very profitable in the US that they are establishing international franchises. Wonderful.

Trevor_Pott Gold badge

What's the US got to do with building a nuclear plant in Canada?

Massive US political pressure to wind down our nuclear estate and huge funding of the local NIMBY cliques to shout down the Bruce power proposal.

Deep beneath melting Antartic ice: A huge active volcano

Trevor_Pott Gold badge

Re: Ooops. Can you say "Tipping point"?

The concept of the "Icelandic hotspot" is heavily disputed. I personally don't buy into it as there seems to be no indication of a connection to the mantle. What's more, there's a negligible temperature delta between the so called "hotspot" magma and the rest.

Iceland is more productive largely because there is more tectonic activity and the plates are diverging at a faster rate. That's really it. If there is some element of "hotspot" - which again, the evidence leads me to doubt - then all it is doing is providing additional raw magma. Is is the forces of the divergence boundary that causes the explosive eruptions. A hotspot connection would only mean they have more to work with.

The volcano discussed in this article does not appear to be on a divergence boundary and thus there is no rational region to assume that it would behave any differently to the nearby Mount Eerebus or Mount Terror. (Or, for that matter, Hawaii.)

FBI sends memo to US.gov sysadmins: You've been hacked... for the past YEAR

Trevor_Pott Gold badge

Re: (Not lice, not fleas but) Poly Ticks What's the big deal?

What party politics? I'm Canadian. I have no "party" within the US. They're all bloody nuts, but some have recently been demonstrably more nuts than others.

Supreme Court can't find barge pole long enough to touch NSA lawsuit

Trevor_Pott Gold badge

Re: Et tu, Trevor

If the system worked as designed those in power would never need fear upstarts or shifts in power. The "new rich" have been a problem for ages and power has changed hands frequently enough that those in power are not guaranteed their status for the duration of their own lives, let alone multi-generational aristocracies.

The system doesn't work for anyone. Not those in power and not those being governed.