Posts by LeoP

Times, they are a'changing

I hated IE in its high times - with a biblical intensity. FF was my thing.

Along came Chrome, and I liked it for casual browsing (i.e. ElReg)

Now I need to run a VM with WIndows and IE, if I want to use iLO consoles.

The only constant: Vendors don't care shit about users:

MS: Use a browser, that won't run on anything other than Windows

Google: All your data are belong to us

Firefox: Because we want.

It's a joke of history, that MS is the only one of them treating me as an adult, who is able to distinquish between an iLO console and a dodgy ad.

Making landfill Androids more attractive

I am a big fan of china phones: My current "Ulefone Power" is a 7Ah battery with a display and a perfectly usable SoC attached, gives me a whole heavy-use day of LTE to WiFi Hotspot at the summer home. Ah, and it cost € 130 last year.

Some back-of-the envelope maths tell me, a $1000 Samsung would buy me one of these every year for 6 years, realistically being a worse phone than the Note for the first 3, then a better one for the other 3 (The china phone experience is arguably something like the big name experience of 3 years ago). Now who thinks a Note 8 will really be usable for 6 years?

Tool for the job

Spinning rust is not dead, and might not be for years to come. The important part is to understand what goes where.

Broadcast cache for a production company? We add an 8T disk every week, would be quite costly to flashy that and completely emptied of any meaning - it simply doesn't matter if the material can be read at 20 or 200 times the running speed, it's needed at 1x.

Your MP3 collection? My experience tells me, it's much more likely the medium will die without warning if it is flash, when you plug it in after a few weeks of poweroff.

I have yet to see flash in grown-up sizes, that could give disk a run for the money on very sequential workloads. Could easily be, that Disk is still around, when flash is reduced to a footnote in history.

At least Oracle's customers can be sure

Not only are they sort of raped on prices every time Larry wants a new Island, Yacht or America's Cup winner, they are also quite sure to get products that are very risky to actually use.

We do things rather easy here: If 'Oracle' is written on it, don't use it.

Only on new Intel processors?

bcache has been doing things like that with big disk / small SSD setups quite nicely ... on any processor the kernel runs on and with any type or brand of block device.

I use an NVM card as the cache device, which has of course zero wear to really speed up a DB, and with SSDs it gives quite a nice KVM environment.

So, what's this all about with WIndows only and newest Intel CPUs only?

Derogatory Term du jour

I have had MASSIVE success by replacing every instance of "America" with "Trumpistan", "american" with "trumpian", "USA" with "UST", ... you get the drift.

This tends to rellay lighten up (and lively up) interaction with our star-sprangled friends, especially if you make really sure they understand, that they pay a hefty Trump-tax for your services (and can do exactly nothing about it).

Lucky here

Had a failover on this one, then the second node went, but the primary had installed the updated update in the meantime so the failback actually resolved it.

Now I know why.

Not about the 3 users

IMHO this is not about Captain Hogwash, me and the third Linux desktop user. This is about HTPCs, whether they come from geeky friends or from chinese manufacturers.

I have yet to see a sub €100, easy to setup, easy to use media player device (such as the one I installed at my MIL to allow her to watch Images of her grandchildren made with one of these new digital cameras, that do not actually give you a paper copy), that is NOT based on Linux. And more than half come with a HTML UI.

Now think what a market his is for Netflix.

Image problem?

One more: Of all vendors out there - would it really be Oracle, whom you would chose to forge a business relation, that per definition is designed as a lock-in?

What about "You clicked on the handy button saying 'Analyze' and invoking 'Enterprise double platinum plus analytics' and after 'discovering' this during one of our complementary audits, you now owe us your firstborns. No twins? Bad luck, because now you owe us a gazillion PLUS your firstborn"

I propose a challenge

A few rules:

- Fixed Volume of data (say 3TB)

- Fixed application requirements (what the DB don't do, you must do in the application)

- 10 year lifecycle

Now in the blue corner:

MS SQL Server 2016 (Whatever edition suits you, as long as you pay for it)

And in the red corner:

Anything from the open source camp. (PostgreSQL, MySQL, whatever)

Let's see, who delivers the better TPS/$

Rock solid.

More automatically generated SQL

Is surely what we need. This will lead to performance problems, that we then need a DBA to diagnose and fix. A real DBA of course. He could even be named Siegfried.

Not just as a router OS

I am a heavy user of OpenWRT, and I do feel the pain with the community process.

For me the most important part is not the ability to transform a router into a router, but to transform a €15,- matchbox sized something from china into something useful: Still have a physical machine somewhere because it needs to talk to some USB/Serial/whatever? Take a "tiny white box" and OpenWRT, virtualize that box and do USB/IP.

One of these days someone is gonna call it an IoT-thingy and my day will be spoilt.

Year of the Linux Desktop?

Oh what irony!

The biggest (some might even say only, but tastes differ) advantage Windows on the Desktop has over Linux/BSD/YouNameIt and to a lesser extent OSX is the availability of Applications. And by Applications I do explicitly NOT mean "Universal Apps".

If Microsoft were to give up this advantage, they might provide the critical mass for a migration.

Screwers screwed?

I'd buy one immediately

- SSH ... check

- PHP/HTML/CSS/PERL/BASH/whatever IDE ... check

- Mono ... check (and have Xamarin as a goodie)

- Grown up browser ... check

A VM somewhere and a carry-around terminal to it seem like a nice proposition.

And of course ...

... never ever has anyone else thought to profile this.

Problem: This could actually be true with VMware - racks and racks of poorly utilized servers are like a money-printing machine for them.

Failure rate

Simple stat from last year: % of storage devices becoming catastrophically defective within a year of deployment:

Disk: less than 1% (1 Disk)

SSD: 15%+

Vendors: Come back, when you have finished your homework.

Been there, done that

I live in Austria, where Orange was swallowed by 3 (and its Yesss! MVNO by bad old Telekom) a year ago, going from a 4-way to a 3-way market.

Prices have gone up 58% in this year according to the Telekom watchdogs, and the EU bureau for mergers and bribes issuded a statement vaguely saying "this might have been a mistake".

Don't do it.

NO CHANCE OF WINNING a nuclear exchange ...

.. seems quite natural: Nobody has.

What we don't need

is more Software by Oracle, SAP and friends tying up IT budgets with exorbitant yearly licensing costs. See, some of that IT money is needed to do real work.

Battery life and so on

I now have the 3rd "Chinaphone" - MTK chip, running close-to-stock factory-rooted Android, cheap as dirt.

#1 developed a speaker defect, after I slept through it running as an alarm clock with the loudest ringtone I could get hold off for hours. I sent it off for warranty repair, but was convinced to never see it again, so bought another one. As it happens, it came back with a friendly note and a replaced speaker now my father is happy with it

#2 fell from my jacket two floors down to the pavement - display broken with an unreadable coin-sized part in the middle, where it hit a small stone, but still functional.

#3 Now (at 0:39 in my time zone) has 72% battery left after a normal day - something like 2hrs of speaking time, everything switched on (Data, WiFi, GPS, Bleutooth and 2 SIM cards). If I really drain the battery once a year, I replace it (yes, that's still possible). It came with 2 batteries, which I swap every 2 months to keep them in shape.

So: Producing a very usable Android phone seems to be a quite achievable feat. Might be some of the "value added" software many brands add are to blame for part of the battery drain.

Flash

... works in CM7 on the Orange SF, which happens to be my main phone.

Just google around for the apk - I don't dare to redistribute it lest a black helicopter lands on my lawn. Don't expect speed records, but that silly website with the flash-only menu will work.