Posts by Trevor_Pott

Re: We can't tell them how much they should be paid..

I was actually talking about being willing to pay that per month. $100/month for proper, no-holds-barred investigative journalism? Sign me up. SIGN ME THE FNORD UP.

Re: Pushback

To be perfectly honest, I'm not sure more than a handful of publishers around the world have the financial reserves to push back. Everyone's running at the knife's edge. The advertisers hold all the cards.

The publishing industry, I think, waited too long. They've lost their power.

That's why a startup like Blendle is needed. To give the publishers an alternative. So that they can say "Microsoft, if you don't treat us right, we can and will use Apple!" Or something. The metaphor and mixing and understanding...

Re: Thank you for your honesty

Why thank you!

Re: What's Wrong with Slurp?

Office 2003 had everything I needed or wanted, except the ability to talk to the latest versions of the documents. 2010 had that fucking ribbon bar and ----++++CARRIER LOST

Re: Office likes to integrate with Window

Seems to nuke my configs every second or third update on Windows 7...

Re: Email alternative

Interesting. Does it do more than just mail when connected to an exchange server? I need that whole "calendaring and contacts to persist across devices" thing. And is it a locally installable client that caches all the data when the device is offline?

Re: Enjoying the pain?

Unfortunately, all the other housekeepers either shoot your pets or straight up light you, personally, on fire.

Fuck of a choice.

Last time I checked you only get mail off of POP3 or IMAP, and none of the calendaring, contacts and so forth that I actually need. Especially that I need to persist across multiple devices in real time.

Re: Semi-Obsolete concept: FTTH as an "Urban privilege"

Large urban agglomerations are different; the high density means that risk can be spread out. Also, existing infrastructure keeps the cost per unit the same or lower compared to rural runs for everything but labour...but your get a lot more bang for your buck from urban work than rural work.

Re: sociopathy: you're trying to justify conscienceless behaviour by saying that operating in a group removes the requirement to act like a human. You might believe that to be true, but I think that makes you a fucking monster.

As for the rest, I'm very glad I upset you. You seem to need to be upset. Yes, telcos care what colour your skin is. Every corporation of any size does. They care because the colour of skin, along with other factors (such as where you live) play a role in determining the statistical likelihood of your being a good investment, a likely customer and so forth.

Ultimately, what corporations want is your money. But no corporation of any size invests equally or blindly. They put their money where there is the greatest chance of the highest return, and every conceivable factor that can be plotted and sounded is analyzed in order to ensure that investments are optimal.

Maybe you should learn to disconnect your own political leanings from discussions. Clearly I've touched a nerve by bringing up the fact that corporations - and especially the people who run large ones - don't operate in a socially beneficial, altruistic or even colour-bind manner.

Now I, personally, believe that is deplorable. It is behaviour we, as a nation, ought to regulate against to ensure equality. If you wish to believe otherwise that's your choice. Your morals are you own; you've your own right to them, just as I've a right to think you a monster. I'm content to leave it at that.

If you are, however, going to deny that discrimination as a facet of investment optimization happens, then you're a fool. One who is part of the problem because ignorant attempts to defend the telcos prevents us from collectively addressing the problem.

At the end of the day the hard truth is this: unrestrained market capitalism is prejudiced because it magnifies the extant socioeconomic dichotomies inherent in society. Socioeconomic dichotomies present for the most part due to prejudice.

This magnification of socioeconomic divides reinforces them and in short order we have a feedback loop. Especially when dealing with critical infrastructure such as utilities significant efforts must be applied in order to level the playing field and overcome prejudice and the resulting socioeconomic dichotomies. To date, I am unaware of any society that has found a workable alternative.

It's also been pretty conclusively proven that simply wishing the problem away doesn't work. But you keep right on trying, if you feel that you must.

Cheers.

Re: Is it even possible to run fiber in muskeg?

Not done much work up north, I see. The ice roads are only needed for the heavy stuff. We have plenty of equipment that will haul less than a tonne of cargo (man + fibre) from A to B.

It's all about having great big huge surface area. They're based on the glacier crawlers that are enormous, but exert so little pressure they can run over your foot. Also good for not screwing up the ecosystems.

And why, exactly, would armoured cable need to be buried? What is going to harm it? This stuff is used to surviving oceans. This includes things like boat anchors and the like. A few caribou and some methane fires aren't really going to irk it much.

And if you did need to somehow bury it? Then bury it when you make the next ice road. Those are semi-permanent structures anyways; the next time they redo the corduroy they can cheerily run some fibre. Hell, we run pipelines all through hell and gone relatively easily; the cost of them is in the environmental assessment and the labour, not the materials.

Muskeg sucks, but it's not the 80s anymore. We have managed to master certain types of year-round travel.

And all of this is before I begin my discussion of the modern hoverbarges. Field tested primarily in Minnesota, these units are beginning to see increasing deployment in Canada's northern reaches. The two big factors that have restricted hoverbarge deployment in the past have been cost per hour to operate and a lack of reliability in the coldest winter months.

The latter issue has been solved by a couple of different companies and the current theory is that if the extraction industries in Canada start to buy into the hoverbarges then the overall costs will go down. A lot of this has to with the fact that the next-gen hoverbarges are using better components than the current LCAC hovercraft most militaries use, and there is an expected convergence resulting in lower component costs, etc. But that's really another discussion entirely...

Re: Semi-Obsolete concept: FTTH as an "Urban privilege"

Sorry, but you're wrong.

A) "Middle class" isn't enough to justify running Fibre To The Bush. A household income of $100k, while certainly fitting in the upper end of "middle class", is enough to justify it. That does, however, leave most of "middle class" households not remotely worth the time and effort.

B) A little over 10% of Canada's population is Asian. (That number including all of Asia (including India) and not just pacific Asians.) The overwhelming majority of these individuals live in urban agglomerations of over 1M people. They also are not equally represented amongst households making more than $100k; that is still disproportionately dominated by white people.

Based on your screed, I am going to presume you are from Vancouver. In part because you talk about BC issues, and in part because you seem to believe there "plenty of Asian people". Vancouver being, of course, where individuals of Asian descent are dramatically over represented compared to the rest of Canada's major cities, to say nothing of the smaller towns.

Regarding BC's smaller communities, you couldn't be more wrong. A lot of what I wrote is due to first hand experience that I and others I know well have encountered in trying to get broadband into communities in BC. Mostly communities not too far off the Transcanada, and usually considered to be nice vacation destinations.

The rest is based on efforts here in Alberta, and working with people in Saskatchewan, Ontario, Nunavut, Quebec and the Maritimes. Of those, only SK is really different from the rest.

Lastly, I disagree entirely on your personal take on the work "sociopath". You are, once more, incorrect. A sociopath is an individual possessed of the capability to turn their ability to feel empathy on and off at will*. This is abnormal. Most human beings are unable to stop themselves from feeling empathy.

Normal people are not rational actors in an economic sense. This is one of the very first things that economists are supposed to learn! This is Econ 101 stuff right here!

Human beings don't always do what is objectively "best" for themselves, assuming your only criteria for "best" is greed. We will pass up economic opportunities to care for friends, loved ones and pets, for example. We donate to charities, support social programs like universal health care and even do things like spend hundreds of hours a year updating wikis online. None of which are economically "rational" activities.

The purely economically "rational" actor is a sociopath. No empathy. No remorse. No guilt. No anything that doesn't directly benefit the actor. So yes, the telcos are absolutely acting as model rational actors, but in doing so they are acting like sociopaths.

As for "with telcos' goodwill"...dream on. Never going to happen. They will be forced to behave with some form of compassion at the point of a gun only. It goes into law, and those laws are enforced with guns. Until the day the last appeal is exhausted, they will strip mine our populace for every last bent copper.

Like the unrepentant sociopaths that they are.

*Depending on who writes your definitions, the difference between a sociopath and a psychopath is that a sociopath is capable of empathy, but can dismiss it at will, while a psychopath is incapable of empathy at any time. The linguistic validity of this depends entirely on which school of psychology you happen to follow.

Re: Semi-Obsolete concept: FTTH as an "Urban privilege"

Wrong.

Take the politics out of it and look at this from the "objective" viewpoint of a coldly calculating market sociopath.

In Canada, as in the US, rich white neighborhoods tend to have more money than any other demographic over the period of time necessary to invest in long term infrastructure. Whatever your personal or political beliefs are, the facts show that rich white people only like being around other rich white people and that with very few exceptions mixed neighborhoods will lead to white flight. This leads to a couple of problems.

The biggest issue is that non-whites don't make up a particularly large percentage of the population raking in $100k or more per household. Across all of Canada there might be enough folks who fall into that category to put together a small town, or a couple of decent sized neighborhoods. The problem is that they aren't all in once place; they're scattered about the country in smallish lumps, mostly moving into predominantly rich, white neighborhoods. (Just like any other rich person, regardless of colour is likely to do.)

When a tipping point is reached, the rich white folk take off. The formerly rich white people neighborhood fills up with less rich people (I can't believe I can live here!). Suddenly, the neighborhood you put all the time and money into feeding because it was full of rich people isn't.

Some patch of forest in the middle of nowhere that almost noone has ever heard of and is populated pretty much entirely by rich white people? Gold mine. The chances that "others" - be they poor people or non-whites - reaching the tipping point in that community to trigger the flight of the rich white folk is pretty slim. Great place to invest.

Now, you find Telus or Bell or whomever a neighborhood full of rich non-white people and they'll happily invest there. More so than they would in a rich white person neighborhood because, statistically, the chances of a bunch of rich non-white people block moving out are small.

Again: this is Canada. Not the US. There just aren't enough rich non-white folks out there making up entire towns in the middle of nowhere.

Look, prejudice is bad. Whether it is from companies or individuals. But "ability to pay" is usually determined on predictions of demographics over a 25-30 year timeframe, not "who lives there today". And "ability to pay" is all that matters.

Unfortunately, Canada absolutely is one of those countries where you need to factor in the innate racism of the populace when calculating your demographics over time, because that racism provably impacts demographics over time.

I, personally, would love to deny it out of existence. The kinds of people who make hundreds of millions and/or billions don't.

Re: Semi-Obsolete concept: FTTH as an "Urban privilege"

Except they're not. The telcos have no interest in laying cable to anywhere that isn't full of lots and lots of rich white people. Some resort town filled with rich white people? Okay, they'll plumb a line. And they'll charge a testicle and a half to do it, too.

Town full of poor white people, or indigenous peoples, or immigrants? Hell no. And if they try to run it themselves, the telcos will throw up barrier after barrier after barrier. They're a monopoly, see? And just because they choose not to serve a community doesn't mean they'll let anyone else do it.

With the maritimes in a box - a history of kicking corporations in the junk until they complied had a hand in making things viable there - the rest of the country follows the above model. Pulling fibre may be relatively cheap today, but that doesn't mean the telcos are going to do it, and it sure as hell doesn't mean they'll let anyone else do so.

The backbones need to be opened, and the telco oligopoly needs to be broken. There are no other acceptable alternatives.

Re: Is it even possible to run fiber in muskeg?

Why not? Use armoured cable like they do for oceanic pulls. If it gets wet, who cares? Not like anyone is living on that muskeg, so just run it across at ground level.

Re: Don't need one million people per town...

I am aware of Aliant, and the very complicated legal history that allowed that particular oddity to exist. Are you?

Also: the maritimes are tiny. In population, but also in size. Start looking at whether or not you have FTTH in Labrador, eh? Or rural areas in pretty much any other part of the country. (Olds notwithstanding.) Then, where and when it does exist in rural areas, why don't sit down with the groups that put it in place - pretty much never one of the major telcos - and talk to them about backhaul.

They'll use words that are in your translation app.

Re: Boo fucking hoo

"And people wonder why we voted to leave"

Absolutely nobody wonders why Leave voters voted to leave. Quite the opposite, the entire world knows why.

It's just that most of us don't respect you for it. That isn't going to change. Ever. So just get used to it, eh?

Re: so, dell does not do refurbished.. well...

Dell sells refurbished gear under their own banner. They just don't move it in adequate volume. More gear enters the refurbished channel than they can clear on their own. Hence the existence of xByte and their ilk.

So no...Dell doesn't really do refurbished very well at all.

Re: One teeny issue

I think you'll find they've got a decent business set up. I was fortunate enough to get a peek at some of their roadmaped stuff and I think they'll do alright.

That said, if anyone does have questions or otherwise wants to poke xByte I am going to point folks at Mike Rigo (mike.rigo {at} xbyte.com). Apparently he's the designated lightning rod, so by all means let hm have it!

I find the whole xByte thing fascinating, and I wonder how many other weird little niche businesses are out there occupying other ecosystems that I haven't discovered yet.

Marginally off topic: another vendor I've recently discovered: Fibrestore. Suddenly, I can afford SFP+ cables! Hurray!

I really need to make a list of these SMB/SME friendly vendors...

Addendum: Whilst I was happy to learn Fibrestore existed, I was also dismayed that it had been around for so long and I didn't know they existed. The amount I could have saved on cables...

Some things we should be told.

Re: C51 product of Harper's Conservatives, .: loathe Trudeau's Liberals

I don't loathe all politicians. I have some level of passionate disagreement with Elizabeth May regarding her stance on fission, but otherwise seem to agree with her on most things. There are some NDP that I agree with some of the time (Cullen, Duncan, a few others). There are some Tories and ex-Tories that I agree with some of the time (Rathgeber, Chong).

In short: no political party represents me very well. (Which my position on the Political Compass explains. I believe strongly in both individual liberty and that the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few (or the one).

There are times where it is necessary to subsume our personal interests or liberties in order that the common good be served, but - by and large - these times should be kept to the absolutely minimum required. Unfortunately, no ideology survives contact with humanity, and the fact that people are dicks to one another necessitates a certain fluidity of implementation.

Where I clash with most political organizations is that I prefer both the crafting of legislation and the implementation thereof to be rational, logical and backed by as much evidence as possible. Politicians get elected through appeal to emotion and the application of evidence is not frequently beneficial to their long term prospects for employment.

So call me whatever "wing" you want, but don't try to marry me to any of Canada's mainstream political parties. Except maybe the Greens. May and I can debate energy policy over beer and still be friends, I think. She seems like good people.

Re: How about the US?

Openmedia works with the EFF on a lot of things. Hopefully their collaboration can help you too!

Re: Endurance

I abused the piss out of those things for two months and they have since moved into regular lab use. Josh has two in his video editing desktop that he abuses all day long. I have them scattered about the lab in every server I can find. I have yet to see them go below 99% lifetime, according to the diagnostics.

Re: cratered during file copy?

Windows rarely give me issues until I hit 2.5M files. Around 5M you really start to notice it. By 10M it usually starts behaving very oddly.

Re: Use a benchmark or compile a large project

If you had read the review you would have learned that I tried rather a lot of things. For months. Here are the benchmarks I've used.

Databases

Hammerora http://hammerora.sourceforge.net/  Microsoft SQL, MySQL, Postgres, OracleDB (if you have it).

OStrell http://blogs.msdn.com/b/psssql/archive/2014/04/24/version-9-04-0013-of-the-rml-utilities-for-x86-and-x64-has-been-released-to-the-download-center.aspx Microsoft SQL, as part of the SQL RML Utilities.

SQLIO http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=20163  This writes all zeros. It tells us a very specific thing about how "zero blocks" are dealt with. It's tricky. Follow http://www.mssqltips.com/sqlservertip/2127/benchmarking-sql-server-io-with-sqlio/ and http://www.brentozar.com/archive/2008/09/finding-your-san-bottlenecks-with-sqlio/

SQLIOSIM https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/kb/231619?wa=wsignin1.0  this is to test stability, not performance. https://www.simple-talk.com/sql/database-administration/the-sql-server-sqliosim-utility/

General disk tests

FIO http://freecode.com/projects/fio Read http://support.sas.com/resources/papers/proceedings13/479-2013.pdf and all will be revealed.

Iometer http://www.iometer.org/  Various configurations

Exchange

Jetstress 2013 http://www.microsoft.com/en-ca/download/details.aspx?id=36849

Jetstress 2010 http://www.microsoft.com/en-ca/download/details.aspx?id=4167

Background work tests

Using iometer determine your peak global IOPS as per above test. Load the system to 25%, 33%, 50%, and 75% of IOPS capacity. Now run various common administrative tasks and time them.

1) Full VM backup using VM backup software

2) Snapshot

3) Clone

4) Creation of VM from template

5) SQLIO test runs on a single VM (testing mixed workloads!)

6) Exchange Jetstress (testing mixed workloads!)

7) SQLIO and Exchange Jetstress (testing mixed workloads!)

Re: Software RAID impact - ZFS?

Both ZFS and Storage spaces were unable to cope with these units any better than regular Windows or Linux software RAID. Well, actually, that's a lie. They coped "better", but not "better enough". The software "lash it all together" solutions were clearly bottlenecks in all cases.

Re: NVMe devices

SHOULD work...but I'd need to test to confirm. Ping me by e-mail and I'll see about getting you remote access to a node with some cards in, you can then test before you set about buying.

Thank Micron! They supplied the RAM for this little endeavour. I will be reviewing it separately. The full lab is here: http://www.trevorpott.com/thelab/

Re: ZFS etc

Tried ZFS. Same problems as any other software RAID.

Re: cratered during file copy?

Hey guys, I did buffered, I did unbuffered, I did every kind of copy I could imagine. I tried multiple operating systems, I even used LiveCDs in an attempt to remove the local disks and the SATA controllers from any use whatsoever. I tried every conceivable kind of anything I could imagine and i regularly ended up with the SSDs faster than any of the operating systems in play could talk to before running out of CPU.

Huw! How ya been, ya crazy son of a gun? Long time, no flaming beverages!