Posts by Phil Koenig

Take that to it's logical conclusion...

Yes, it's true that a large portion of ICANN's revenue comes from sleazy businesses that provide no value to anyone but a tiny handful of stupid opportunists.

Now that ICANN's CEO has just learned this obvious little detail, it's time to do away with the various ICANN policies that are anti-internet-user and pro-opportunist-value-destroyer.

Eh, where's my flying pig icon...

Because the UN Security Council works so well...

At the UN, the primary qualification to being on the Security Council seems to be the fact that you possess lots of nuclear weapons.

I'd imagine in this scenario the "nukes" would basically amount to access to lots of wealth. Eg the "World Economic Forum", the true champions of the commonfolk!

Black Hats, White Hats

It must be so reassuring to live in a world where all the regimes on "our" side are good, and all the regimes on the "other" side are bad.

Data Recovery

A monkey could tell you that performance on most things improves with an SSD. That's the easy part.

The less obvious part is what happens when an SSD fails. As others here have mentioned, with HDDs you often get some kind of warning, and that can be in the form of SMART statistics, slower performance or just good 'ol "funny noises" emanating from the vicinity.

Whereas not only is it less likely you'll get any advance warning of an impending SSD failure, when it does fail, what do you do? There is likely no expensive practitioner to send it off to to replace the controller board or swap the platters into another HDA and read the imperiled data that your hardware suddenly became incapable of interacting-with. If the NAND goes bad, I'd imagine in most cases you are simply SOL.

In the course of my work I have had many cases of data on failed HDDs being recovered in precisely that way, so this is not a theoretical question for some of us in the biz.

At the very least, I think it is more critical than ever to have an effective and tested backup strategy in place, if one is storing important data on SSDs.

Some clarifications

No, it doesn't bridge with the Playbook (device was end-of-lifed last year) but it does BLEND with either an Android or iOS tablet, as well as Windows or OS-X desktops. (I've personally been waiting for Blend for a long while as among other things I really want to have a desktop client for BBM, which I believe it will provide)

And to the person who claimed OS 10.3 is running "ICS" - no actually, it runs 4.3, which is a version of Jellybean, and has one feature that even newer Android builds like KitKat do not: "App Ops", which allows selective revoking of Android app permissions - one of my longtime serious gripes about Android. (It's a 'hidden" feature but various tools exist in the form of free Android apps to enable this functionality)

"More from wikipedia than shame"

So what was that particular PR hack expecting, a nice fresh cookie on his pillow for being a fraudulent, deceptive twit?

I suppose when you've been covered in excrement for such a long time, your sense of smell stops working.

Merkel's compromised phone not a BlackBerry

I believe the device she was using at the time was a Samsung, and a very poorly-secured one at that, it is rumored.

Not too smart.

Whitman lives up to her reputation. Hello Lenovo...

HP has steadily become a stupider and stupider vendor for commercial products, and this is the final straw for me.

Most of the businesses I support are smaller businesses who inevitably have some hardware in use older than 3 years old, and who don't see the value in paying half the cost of a server every year for support which is mediocre at best. With the older stuff, we can just keep a used spare and swap it out if need be, far cheaper than buying a whole raft of new hardware every 3 years and re-configuring everything.

As soon as I saw the new generation of Proliants were designed with "pretty faceplates" like Dell used to do, I figured it was only a matter of time before Whitman completely ruined the enterprise products division. That day has come in my opinion.

This is exactly what Oracle did when they took over Sun's hardware division, and Oracle has been driving customers away from almost all of Sun's product lines ever since. I only wish I had seen the Reg article about this back in December.

Yes, companies like Cisco and Juniper do this, but they have outstanding products with unique technology that cannot be obtained anywhere else, and they do an excellent job of support if you're paying for it. But they also are not draconian about things like firmware updates, the restrictions are not designed to be bulletproof.

Excellent timing though - may as well light a bigger fire under Lenovo's rocketship, after their recent announcement about taking over IBM's x86 business.

I've never been much a fan of Dell or IBM servers, Dell because there's no engineering behind them to speak of and because its a stupid organization, IBM because of their convoluted and arcane bureacracy.

I was skeptical of Lenovo's buyout of IBM's consumer PC division but as it turns out they have done an excellent job with it. I think Lenovo has gained an early adopter of their new server products.

Lenovo is not a One-trick Pony

Among other things, I believe that Lenovo is now one of the largest smartphone vendors in the world, though we in the West don't see much of their products in that area because their target market is mostly in China.

But in a nutshell - I don't think Lenovo is quite as "wholly reliant" on the PC market as the article suggests.

Inaccuracies and misconceptions

Re: this part of the article:

"The service, most often referred to as BlackBerry Messenger..."

Not true. Blackberry Messenger (or "BBM") is a separate service, a proprietary Blackberry-only instant messaging service. Whereas PIN-to-PIN messaging is basically Blackberry-specific email.

One advantage of these proprietary services is that in many countries (in the developing world in particular) they have been bundled into inexpensive "BIS" (Blackberry Internet Services) data plans, which is a key reason why Blackberry remains popular in countries like Indonesia and South Africa.

There have long been misconceptions about BIS, including the security of services like PIN-to-PIN messaging and BBM. While back in the days when BIS was new, even its low-grade "scrambling" was much better than the mostly completely insecure alternatives, these days encryption (typically using SSL or TLS) is becoming more the rule than the exception for online services, not least due to all the hacks and exploits that have become so commonplace.

The truly secure Blackberry communication system has always been its Blackberry Enterprise Service or "BES", and that remains the case to this day.

Not exactly a slam-dunk

While I give Microsoft credit for doing a decent job with its Office products overall, starting back in the DOS days, it's not all down to their competitors dropping the ball.

I don't know if any of you remember this, but there was apparently an old adage at Microsoft that ran something like this:

"DOS isn't done until Lotus won't run"

I believe there is substantial credible evidence that Microsoft has historically engaged in some highly questionable tactics to make their application competitors look bad or throw roadblocks at their apps running on the OS platforms Microsoft controls. Particularly back in the DOS days and the early days of Windows when vendors of traditional DOS products had a serious developmental disadvantage compared to a competitor who had intimate knowledge of and resources pertaining to this brand-new platform.

Novell had some particularly damning material that they were planning to use in a lawsuit over exactly that - but Microsoft settled that case with a large, secret payoff to Novell literally the day before the case was scheduled to go to trial. I believe Attachmate (Novell's new owner) is apparently interested in reviving either that case or a similiar one, so these very detailed allegations may yet see the light of day.

Stuff should just WORK

Kudos to the Samba team for getting this done, even if it did take some "coaxing" from the antitrust authorities to make it happen.

And while Jeremy Allison's comment about source code availability is important to some people, and there are organizations where the cost of M$ software is not a significant limiting factor, cost is indeed a factor for many organizations. (especially in these economic times)

But to reiterate what someone commented earlier - I view one of the biggest advantages of an OSS solution to be independence from the usual commercial pressures that push organizations to spend lots of time/money constantly replacing things that work perfectly well, with new buggy junk just because you won't get the time-of-day from them if you don't.

I had a Netware 3.2 server at one client years ago that ran 2.5 years without a single reboot. No web/java/flash/complex document renderers/etc etc etc to make the box exploitable, no need to keep patching it, it just sat there and served files and queued print jobs for something like 1,000 days straight. I keep saying basic I.T. stuff should be like a toaster or a refrigerator - just sit there and do its job, leave you to spend time/money on more important pursuits, until such time you decide you truly need something the existing system isn't providing you. Not just because Evil Vendor Du Jour has proclaimed that stepping off the continuous I.T. Expense Treadmill of Doom is prohibited by the EULA.

No one probably would have cared if it weren't for the fact that analysts have been upgrading their outlook on RIM lately, and WP8 hasn't exactly been taking off like wildfire.

RIM these days is the primary competitor of Nokia and WP8, they are going to fight for the #3 smartphone spot, so it's no big surprise Nokia is eager to shoot them down any way they can.

What I'm curious about is what they are asking for these ancient patents, and whether they're going to claim RIM has to pay them for every device they've shipped since 2003 or not. Because if it's only for currently-shipping devices, considering RIM's current marketshare, I'd imagine that paying a royalty on a few thousand devices wouldn't be so bad. ;-)

I agree with the comments about Acronis support and lack of transparency.

To me, the A-1 most important factors that would weigh in my decision about a commercial file storage service are the kinds of factors that Acronis has a poor reputation at: reliability, privacy/security and support.

The last time I purchased a server system image product I went with Symantec because even if the product has inferior functionality in some ways compared to the Acronis equivalent, and even if Symantec support isn't the greatest, Acronis support and reliability are the worst. It's great when their stuff works, good luck to you if it doesn't.

And that's not even mentioning the sales team - who remind me of used car salesmen.