* Posts by Prof. William Waterman Sherman

48 posts • joined 6 May 2010

US Congress finally emits all 3,000 Russian 'troll' Facebook ads. Let's take a look at some

Prof. William Waterman Sherman
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Re: Missing the point

Da–I mean–right on. The Russian game was to cast democracy as a disorganized, chaotic mess, as much for domestic consumption as its effect on the States. Regardless of who won, it was win-win for Putin. He gets to show Russians how superior it is to be run by a strongman, and cause America to doubt its own institutions.

I hear newscasts on both sides talk of how Russia "hacked" our election. They didn't hack the election, but they did hack our culture. They certainly tried to hack our election computers. They had about as much success as they did hacking our power grid. Not a call for complacence, but certainly a call for computer illiterates to stop overreacting and making policy in a panic.

Personally, I think the old hand ballots scaled well. That was ruined by a small number of Palm Beach morons who couldn't manage to puncture a pre-scored index card. Sorry, for saying, "moron". I'm no better than the trolls. I blame moose and squirrel.

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Virtual desktops won’t save cash in clouds or on-prem. So why care?

Prof. William Waterman Sherman

Latency is everything (damn speed of light)

Network latency is a double-edged sword. Sure, relatively high latencies (say, >80ms) can spoil the VDI experience with jittery screens and jerky mice. But even lower latencies (<20ms) can wreck transaction heavy, fat applications and drive them into the data center, so they live closer to their servers.

In standing up our own cloud service, our biggest revelation was the cost of VDI, both in licensing and hardware. MS license terms are confusing (intentionally, in my opinion) and lead to over-provisioning. And those fat apps–in aggregate–had a thirst for SSD storage that shamed our servers.

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Boss made dirt list of minions' mistakes, kept his own rampage off it

Prof. William Waterman Sherman
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Re: Fragile. Very fragile.

We run a load of VMware machines and the RAM is mostly hot-swappable.

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'Don't Google Google, Googling Google is wrong', says Google

Prof. William Waterman Sherman
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I'm not a coder, but I read a lot of code to gain insight into problems I'm tasked with fixing. I've learned to identify developers by their peculiar spelling and grammar quirks. For example, "thier" in a comment line indicates Andy wrote that particular routine, while "there" when he means "they're" points to Bob. And, if the code contains proper grammar and missing joins in an SQL query, of course it's Carl!

Bless their hearts. I love them all.

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Toshiba bowls out small but nippy enterprise spinner

Prof. William Waterman Sherman

Uh-oh. Did The Reg...

...just call a Japanese product "nippy?"

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Obama's intel chief says Russia totally tried to swing it for Trump

Prof. William Waterman Sherman

The biggest fiction is that Russian meddling in US politics and media is something new. Russians (then Soviets) routinely planted false stories in third-world press and patiently waited for them to be picked up by the AP, UPI, AFP, Reuters, etc. for an appearance of legitimacy. With RT they simply cut out the middle man. Google and other aggregators then give RT equal play with western news outlets, more even, because sensational stories get more clicks.

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Linus Torvalds in sweary rant about punctuation in kernel comments

Prof. William Waterman Sherman
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Ditto. I worked for a genetics research company that employed several Slavic geniuses (no sarcasm). No one else touched the "Russian" code because it was indecipherable. They probably felt cramped by non-Cyrillic character sets limiting their options for single character variable names.

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FATTIES have most SUCCESS with opposite SEX! Have some pies and SCORE

Prof. William Waterman Sherman
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Yeah, I hate those Canadians.

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City hidden beneath England's Stonehenge had HUMAN ABATTOIR. And a pub

Prof. William Waterman Sherman

Anyone who's seen Spinal Tap...

...knows those monoliths were knocked over when they were trodden upon by careless dwarves.

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TEEN RAMPAGE: Kids in iPhone 6 'Will it bend' YouTube 'prank'

Prof. William Waterman Sherman
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Re: breaking news

Let's take a moment to recognize the crowning glory of material science: Corning Corelle dishes. These laminate glass wonders are as close to indestructible as anything you'll throw or drop (of course the rare failure is catastrophic and spectacular). I wish more stuff were made out of it.

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Who needs hackers? 'Password1' opens a third of all biz doors

Prof. William Waterman Sherman

I don't see how GPU driven password crackers are a legit threat. They might be able to try a million combinations a second, but most authentication mechanisms disable the account after a set number of failures or introduce an increasing delay between attempts. Or, does the doomsday scenario require the crackers be in possession of the encrypted string, in which case they can plow through candidates offline until they find a match? The latter presumes an earlier breach of security and knowledge of the encryption algorithm. Either way, I'm staying away from "aaaaaaaa", "aaaaaaab", "aaaaaaac", "aaaaaaad", "aaaaaaae", and "aaaaaaaf".

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Mosquitoes, Comets and Vampires: The de Havilland Museum

Prof. William Waterman Sherman
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Re: apples and oranges

Comparing apples and oranges is not futile. It's quite easy. Whilst both are delicious, sweet, round and grow on trees, they taste quite different. Apples can be baked in pies, but oranges cannot. Apples come in a variety of colors, but oranges are almost uniformly the same color (a kind of reddish-yellow).

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The LUN must DIE. Are you with me, storage bods?

Prof. William Waterman Sherman

spoken like a lazy storage admin

This article safely reinforces the worst prejudice of storage admins, which is the belief they can do their job and remain ignorant of the applications that run on their systems.

I'm a DBA (Sybase, Intersystems Cache) and a storage admin (ZFS, NetApp) for a cloud company. As a vertical market software vendor, I also deal with our premises customers' myriad other storage systems (EMC, Compellent, Hitachi, etc.). I've seen a lot of good and a lot of bad. The storage system, more than any other component, determines application performance.

There can be a real need for multiple LUNs in a database, even though they ultimately sit astride the same physical disks. Separating data from log I/O in RDBMs is axiomatic. The OS kernel may effectively serialize I/O to a single LUN whereas multiple LUNs have multiple software channels. In other words, you are clearing a software not hardware bottleneck. There could be other considerations in regards cache policies, tiering, etc. that justify multiple LUNs.

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Apollo 17 Moon landing: Shock revelations

Prof. William Waterman Sherman
Boffin
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Not possible!

No way those were Photoshopped. The last moon landing was in 1972. Photoshop didn't come out for another 18 years! Man, do your research before making wild accusations.

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Hey Commentards! [This title is optional]

Prof. William Waterman Sherman
Headmaster
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Grammar Nazi, heil thyself.

Technically, it's "sex" not "gender".

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Piles of unshiftable HP fondle-slabs choke Best Buy

Prof. William Waterman Sherman
Mushroom
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Re: Looting

One electronics shop was looted, and afterwards counted 32 more HP tablets than they started the day with.

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Jon Bon Jovi accuses Steve Jobs of murdering music biz

Prof. William Waterman Sherman
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denied the frisson...

or, in other words, piloerection. And it's only Thursday.

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Utah to honour Browning M1911 semi-automatic

Prof. William Waterman Sherman
FAIL
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you've got the wrong state...

Surely the firearm that goes with incest is the Kentucky long rifle!

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Unix dynamic duo awarded Japan Prize

Prof. William Waterman Sherman
Megaphone

It's called "K & R C" for a reason...

Bet Brian Kernighan is miffed.

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MOSSAD SPY VULTURE seized in Saudi Arabia

Prof. William Waterman Sherman
FAIL
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...well actually...

The Brits tried to pull a fast one and turn Jerusalem over to the Arabs before they were scheduled to bug out. Didn't work too well. There was considerable animosity between Israelis and Brits at the time. The only reason the latter did anything to benefit the former was Truman twisting their arm.

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New NASA model: Doubled CO2 means just 1.64°C warming

Prof. William Waterman Sherman
Flame
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Loopy Science

Why is it every alarmist warming scenario piles on an endless chain of positive feedback loops? If the realy world worked that way, the first dinosaur fart would have cooked the planet millions of years ago. Finally, we have a model that considers a possible negative feedback, and guess what? Things aren't so bad after all.

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'ALIEN' LIFE FOUND in California

Prof. William Waterman Sherman
Welcome
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Arse-nicker friends...

Good one. Best use of "I for one welcome..." leitmotif in a long time. I vote we retire the category.

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Wikileaks: Berlusconi useless, Pope Catholic

Prof. William Waterman Sherman
Pirate

Git a rope...

Sadly, not much can be done about the Aussie, but the source of the leak is another matter. If it turns out to be an American, well, treason is still a hangin' offence in these parts.

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How I invented Desktop Publishing

Prof. William Waterman Sherman
Boffin
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Maybe you invented the Internet, but I invented computer networks...

In high school I discovered I could get two TRS-80s to talk together by cross-connecting their cassette tape drive cables. The first machine thought it was writing a string to tape, but it was really read by the second machine, which thought it was reading a string from tape. I cooked up a BASIC version of Battleship to demo the concept.

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Disaster recovery blurs into high availability (or other way round?)

Prof. William Waterman Sherman
Coffee/keyboard

What about FT and BC?

There's also fault tolerance (FT) which is a very high level of redundancy, such that software is unaware of any failure. I'm thinking especially of Tandem. And then there's business continuity (BC) which is like DR but focuses less on the disastrous aspects. I'm thinking near line storage or data replication. The lines can blur but you really need prudent amounts of both. You don't want to fail over to the bunker just because one disk goes bad. And your RAID6 array doesn't help when it's under water.

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Seagate squirts out rectal cleaning spray

Prof. William Waterman Sherman
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Enough!

All those "thumbs up" icons are making feel very uncomfortable.

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Microsoft gets Speedos in a twist over half-naked 'Meter Maids'

Prof. William Waterman Sherman
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she's just not into you (and vice versa)

I've always felt I was a lesbian trapped in a man's body.

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Jobs offers relief for iOS 4-running iPhone 3Gs

Prof. William Waterman Sherman
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I need to read El Reg before doing anything else on a Monday!

I was so frustrated by 4.0 performance on my steam driven 3G that I downgraded it to 3.13. Not a hard process, but you can't restore apps, settings, etc. from backup. To stay on 3.13 you have to set it up as a new unit. I lost Exchange, VPN, etc. settings, not to mention Angry Birds progress.

Now I read of relief in sight. Crap.

BTW, iTunes won't let me restore from backup, even after a firmware upgrade because it's a different machine. I think I'll relax and read The Register until I calm down.

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Can replication replace backup?

Prof. William Waterman Sherman

database replication

When the data you're protecting is all in an object or relational database, the DBMS usually offers another form of replication. Database replication basically consists of replaying the primary's transaction logs on a secondary system. This is an attractive option because replaying transactions instead of physical device I/O prevents many types of corruption and maintains transactional integrity. The secondary system can be used for report generation as well or other read-only uses.

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Should your data centre look more like Google’s?

Prof. William Waterman Sherman
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I'm with Jake.

Technically, it might be a verb, but it sounds wrong to my ears. If we all agree to never use it as a verb, eventually (after a hundred years or so) the OED will delist it.

Let's dialog it some more.

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HP contractor 'surprised and saddened' by Hurd sacking

Prof. William Waterman Sherman
Alert

Hurd Sacking?

I haven't even figured out what a dutch lobster is. Now this!?

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HP's Hurd quits quickly on sexual harassment probe

Prof. William Waterman Sherman
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yeah

I guess your profile would be low if you're alway horizontal.

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Google boss turns Wave demise into success of sorts

Prof. William Waterman Sherman
Joke
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Well stated.

Once the Web gets deduped, my 9600 Baud modem becomes viable again.

Reminds me of the joke about the Texan who passed away and was too large to fit in a casket. They gave him an enema and buried him in a matchbox.

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ET voted fave family film fodder

Prof. William Waterman Sherman
Alert

Maybe kids are the fodder for these family films.

For me, at least three of those films were emotionally scarring. Didn't stop me from showing it to my kids, but still.

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Wikileaks publishes encrypted 'insurance' file

Prof. William Waterman Sherman
Go
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Forget re-writing history. Try reading history.

The Taliban came after, fought, and displaced, the Mujahideen. The people we armed to fight Russian invaders were Mujahideen. Taliban largely sat out that fight, or were too young.

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Brigitte Bardot demands flying donkey action

Prof. William Waterman Sherman

Not the first time the Russians have suspended equines.

Isn't that how Catherine the Great met her end?

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Before the iPad, there was the Newton

Prof. William Waterman Sherman
Dead Vulture

Executive whirlygig

As a vendor SE, I had the misfortune of attending a meeting of LA Times execs after they all received their Newtons. The meeting was constantly interrupted by, "hold on!...(scribble, scribble)...okay, go ahead...hold on...(scribble, scribble)...". My comment about witnessing the human equivalent to XON/XOFF flow control was not appreciated.

Those in the room with Tandy Model 100s had no problem keeping up. Ah, the Model 100, stalwart of newsrooms everywere, that's a computer you should memorialize.

Tombstone, to represent beloved gear of day gone by.

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Cross-dresser shags mutt at historic castle

Prof. William Waterman Sherman
IT Angle

IT angle is quite obvious..

...if IT stands for Interspecific Transgendered.

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Thieves steal 3,000 laptops from US Special Ops contractor

Prof. William Waterman Sherman
Black Helicopters

eBay, Craigslist, or a slow boat to China

How many ToughBooks does Panasonic sell of any model, and how can the thieves expect to unload all that gear? Obviously a pro job, so they had to have an end game. Frankly, I'd be more worried if they spent nine hours playing with the laptops and then left them in the warehouse.

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Colt loads up factory-built data centres

Prof. William Waterman Sherman
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Finally!

Something of the future that isn't constructed of ISO containers! I wonder if they are fully compostable.

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iPhone 4 burns, hurts owner

Prof. William Waterman Sherman
Flame

Burnt his hand or his pride?

Is his pride anything like Navin R. Johnson's special purpose? I mean, was he holding it in his lap?

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El Reg marks Steve Jobs for termination

Prof. William Waterman Sherman
Pint

@ all Brits...

Surprised you Brits missed the significance of the red X. Clearly the X is the Cross of St. Patrick and Steve's mug replaces the Crosses of Saints George and Andrews. Hats off, and salute your new Union Jack (thumb-side down, of course)!

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Prof. William Waterman Sherman
Terminator

X-Man

I think superimposing the X-Men logo on Steve's hypnotic stare gives him a certain Prof. Xavieresque mien. Fitting for someone with the ability to produce shiny gadgets that control minds.

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.XXX to get ICANN nod

Prof. William Waterman Sherman
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All for it.

Parents and pornographers both have an interest in keeping kids away from the stuff. The latter if only because kids don't have credit cards. The former because they bought the damn computer to do homework on.

This kind of initiative is usually quashed by prudes under the misaprehension that a porn-only TLD somehow promotes the stuff.

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Approaching space object 'artificial, not asteroid' says NASA

Prof. William Waterman Sherman
Alien

Need a headcount.

Would someone please check on the Raellians?

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Lindsay Lohan to pull off Linda Lovelace

Prof. William Waterman Sherman
Thumb Up

Ha!

If El Reg is releasing this kind of story on Wednesday, then Friday's should be freakin' awesome! Don't let us down!

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