Posts by Nate Amsden

Note 3/4 was peak note (for me)

Note 3 was my first Android phone, was my daily driver up until about 2 weeks ago(still works fine). Kept hoping newer Notes would get better, but after the Note 4 just a slow downward trend(towards form over function). I figured the Note 3 won't last forever so should jump at some point, it was getting slow in some cases. Never factory reset it after 6 years that may of sped it up again not sure but was worried it would not work after reset since it was old.

I "upgraded" to an S8 Active which may be the last phone of it's kind ever to be made at this rate. Still a decent number of compromises compared to the Note 3, but it was (for me) the fewest compromises.

Most important to me was: wireless charging, no glass back(which means plastic back I am fine with that), flat screen, normal bezels (S8 active is basically identical to note 3 for screen/body ratio at 75%). Replaceable batteries very important but not available. I replaced batteries in my Note 3s annually(just to keep them fresh). Trying to get all of those in one device is hard these days... the S8 Active is the closest I was able to come to. I was going to get the Motorola Z4(I think) which is similar I think but after much searching I was unable to find ANYONE that was selling the wireless charging back cover for it(new or used).

Battery tip for android folks anyway - I bought a couple of new devices called Chargie, they run inline on a USB charging cable and communicate with an app on the phone to cut power to the charging at a user defined level(no root required). I set mine to 79%. It works quite well. Combined with Accubattery I hope I can significantly extend the life of the stock battery(which is rated at 95% capacity currently, given the phone is probably 2 years since it was manufactured I think that is decent). I do have several Samsung branded replacement batteries for S8 Active in case I need them.

Android keeps removing features as well so I plan to avoid Android 9 completely on this device, as I was able to avoid Android 5 on my Note 3 for a good 4 years(still runs 4.4). I like security updates but keep me at the same major rev of the OS. I haven't had a known security incident on a computing device I operate since ~1992.

I have a 2nd S8 active (both phones "never been used") as a backup.

Been actively using the S8 Active since June on wifi, but only switched my main SIM over to it about 2 weeks ago.

I hope this phone can last 6 years like the last one(never needed a repair), mostly because I really hate the direction the market has been going.

first upgrade in ~5.5 years

In the process of "upgrading" from a pair of Galaxy Note 3s (daily driver being Android 4.4, it was my first Android device, prior I was using WebOS) to a pair of Galaxy S8 Actives. Bought the S8 Actives on Ebay "new never been used" (and they certainly seem that way anyway, though I believe they were used for a few minutes to apply updates as they are running patch levels from early 2019) for about $370/ea combined it seems about the cost of a S10e that I was otherwise looking at. Also have a Note 4 which gets some use when traveling(would get more but the wirelss charging thing I have for it is more clunky as it folds over like a book around the device).

It was a struggle for me to find a newer phone that was the least bad. Seems every year they remove more features and cripple things even more.

I was on gsmarena last month after getting excited about a new Motorola phone (Z4 I think?) turns out couldn't use that as it doesn't support wireless charging(there is a custom back cover for it but at the time it seemed nobody had it new or used, probably stopped making that cover a year or two ago as it was compatible with older versions of the handset). Anyway I input my parameters into gsmarena and basically out popped the S8 active as the most viable device on the list (may of been the ONLY device on the list I don't recall).

What sold me on the S8 Active as being the "least bad" phone for me anyway was:

- Plastic shell w/wireless charging

- "Normal" bezels (ironically screen/body ratio is only 0.2% different from Note 3 according to gsmarena).

- Similar size to Note 3 (is a plus anyway)

- Flat screen (both for less false touches and tempered glass protection)

- Big battery (still having battery anxiety issues mainly about longevity, I am used to being able to easily replace my battery once a year just to keep it fresh. I do have 5 "genuine" S8 Active batteries now though the replacement procedure is still scary, vast majority of times when I take small devices apart they never operate the same again). Installed Accubattery to track battery life(currently at 96%), and try not to charge it too much. Anxiety would go away if I had confidence future smart phones would not continue the trend of locking things down and removing features more.

- SD slot

- Previous positive experience with Samsung Note 3s excellent build quality, hoping similar good build quality from S8 Active over time

apparently the market doesn't care about most/all of those things anymore so those phones aren't being made.

What I do/will miss:

- Replaceable battery (per above I tend to swap once a year, I hope these S8 Actives can last at least 5 years as well)

- Stylus (got a small stylus that attaches to the headphone slot though not as convenient as internal stylus)

- IR blaster (mainly for travel, compensated a bit by the fact that I will continue to take my Note 3s and Note 4 on trips which have IR blasters)

- MHL (I think the USB C devices have something similar have not looked into it but again Note 3s and 4s to the rescue mainly for travel)

- Android 4.4 UI - really really hate the "flat" UI designs, and I will be spending some time to try to extract icons from Android 4.4/5 packages to use on 8.0, after being unable to find similar icon packs for Nova launcher (the only launcher I have ever used)

- Android 4.4 samsung keyboard - I installed a "classic keyboard" which at least gave me dark colors(hated the default white) though the key spacing isn't that great(no gaps between the keys) which I think makes for more difficult typing than what I was used to.

don't care about:

- Rugged nature of S8 Active (I am very careful with my phones, my Note 3s/4 have never needed a repair)

- Waterproof/etc

- Headphone jack - it's nice to have though it's rare that I need it, only real time I do so is on airplanes, and if the S8 active didn't have a headphone jack I would use a Note3/4 to listen to music (and/or watch videos). I do not own any bluetooth headphones the only ones I have are wired. For my workouts I use a Sandisk MP3 player with my wired earphones (https://www.usa.philips.com/c-p/SHS3200_28/earhook-headphones are the only earphones I use - most comfortable and stay in place for me)

- running latest android (I would be happy to get the latest security updates but maintain the same major version of android(I'd even pay a subscription service to do that) but that doesn't appear to happen)

- currently running android 8 though there was I thought a 9 upgrade available but maybe I was looking at the wrong page before, currently AT&T's website says 8 is the current version (I don't want 9 and have blocked AT&T's and Samsung's update domains from my network so the phones cannot update, AT&T's site still says Wifi is required to download the updates.)

- bixby button - so far at least I have only accidentally hit it maybe a half dozen times, and apparently I can't disable the button without signing into Samsung's services which I'm not willing to do just yet.

would be nice:

- be able to root/unclock bootloader it (read on XDA developers I think it was that no unlocks exist, and previous Active phones were not rooted either)

(Never unlocked my Note3s/4 either but would be a nice to have ability)

Was real close to buying a Note 9 last year, but then I started reading complaints about curved glass(especially for using tempered glass protectors - I have ~20 tempered glass screens for my S8 actives now just in case they stop making them), and the glass backs being slippery (I don't use cases). Then was close to getting a S10e because it at least had a flat screen, but then of course I decided to look harder and hope to find something that wasn't encased in glass all around.

Been about a month since I got the first S8 Active, I have a new SIM card (old sim card is too big) but have yet to pull the trigger to transfer the service to the S8 active from Note 3 yet.

At this point I wouldn't have a problem dropping $2k on a phone that was in a Note 3 form factor/features with just the newer chips and stuff in it. It would mean that much to me. But that doesn't exist, so S8 active it is for now anyway.

fork it?

I have no interest in Go myself not being a developer. But after seeing what seems to be quite a number of articles and complaints from the Go community about google not agreeing to do stuff, I am curious how close is the community to forking the thing? Given it is open source(haven't checked what kind of license) I assume that is possible.

$30M

couldn't you get your own top level domain for that ? (e.g. ".voice" for example assuming that is not taken).

synergy

Curious why HP didn't just go the synergy route with this solution. I mean plug a module or two in for nimble controllers, plug one of those storage modules in(apparently can do 40x2.5" drives which is plenty for all flash), a couple more servers for the hypervisor stuff, and integrated networking. No need for having to ship a rack, or much cabling, and plenty of capacity to scale out inside and/or outside the enclosure.

I suppose the main reason is it would probably cost a bit more, so perhaps offer it as a option (I suppose the obvious option would be a Nimble solution that runs inside a Synergy enclosure which really should be trivial I think Nimble uses just regular servers no special hardware architecture).

been using bing for about 18 months

For web search at least, wanted to see what it was like. Haven't missed google at all. I have never, not even once gone back to google if I couldn't find something on bing. I tried duck duck go for a short while, but as I am not a fan of amazon cloud once I found out they were all amazon based (their shopping results were a big hint I suppose) I immediately stopped using it(and have since read that duck duck go uses bing for search anyway?). Would rather give my data to google. Though bing is fine. I do still use google maps, bing maps is completely unsable for me on Linux on pale moon browser anyway (can click on a business name and something appears in the side bar then goes away, just doesn't render at all, tried more than a half dozen times).

I'm sure there were probably a bunch of times when I could of found something faster on google than on bing I don't know. Or maybe my search terms are basic enough that it doesn't matter.

I use firefox on mobile and switched that to bing probably about a year ago, was too lazy to change it for a while.

I remember I switched to google from altavista I believe it was back when altavista first started showing banner ads. I remember emailing altavista or providing feedback or something saying I switched due to the banner ads, they replied and apologized or something.

diligent admins

Seems MS did their best to do away with those admins when they started pushing office 365/hosted exchange to begin with. Hard for anyone to complain now.

memories

The support contract required to get the patch reminded me of this..

Was at a company more than 10 years ago now that used Weblogic (back when it was BEA Weblogic). We used JMS for tons of stuff and had tons of bugs with it. At one point our performance/stability team tried to be proactive and asked BEA if there was any fixes for the JMS subsystem that we didn't have that we could get in advance given our troubled history with JMS on Weblogic.

BEA said there was no fixes we didn't already have.

Fast forward a month or two and we had a big outage with JMS, systems were down for at least a day or two. The customer that ran on this cluster was and still is a multi billion $ telecom(and a weblogic customer themselves). They were upset.

I'll never forget being in my manager's office after the first day or so of downtime, every high level software person in the room with the senior ops people(me). Manager asks a simple question along the lines of "does anyone have any ideas on how we can fix this". There was no answer, they had no idea.

We worked around the problem by basically dropping all of the data in the affected queues and things returned to normal but it took a long time for people to approve losing all of that data (in the end I don't recall it being too bad).

Fast forward a month or so(for the folks to find the root cause) after that and BEA admits to us that not only was that ~2 day outage caused by a known bug in Weblogic, but they had a fix for it at the time we asked them for fixes. But it was a policy to not tell customers about these one off fixes unless they were specifically affected by the issue. The multi billion dollar telecom stepped in and.. BEA changed their policy(at least for us anyway).

I suppose the upshot of Weblogic at that company(in reference to the article again) is it was never exposed to the internet, multi tier architecture apache terminated the http/ssl connections, then sent them to a tomcat tier over AJP, then tomcat did some things and for weblogic related things it sent requests to weblogic which was behind a firewall layer("app tier"). Learned a lot at that company, fun times..though could never repeat that experience (70-80hr+ per week for a couple of years, literally took me ~3 years to recover from that).

why now?

Their reason for yanking the apps seems valid but the timing is terrible. Why were the apps not flagged before, why were they ever approved in the first place?

I don't use IOS but looking at Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IOS_version_history) the most recent version of IOS was released 35 days ago(el reg article doesn't seem to indicate the version or the release date), and it says that is the version that had the screen time change. So Apple chooses to release the new feature, then immediately following(given the apps were just yanked and apple claims they gave the devs 30 days?) tells these app folks they are in violation and yanks their apps?

I'd think screening an app for whether or not it uses MDM would be a simple matter, especially given apple's apparent more robust screening process(vs google anyway)

for hdds

I like to harvest the magnets. hard disk magnets are so strong. I probably have 30 or 40 of them just from my own drives over the past 15 years or so. Most recently took apart 3 x 750GB drives that I hadn't used since about 2010 to get their magnets. Had to invest in a good torx set though(from PB Swiss tools in my case, I am far from a handy man and had only come across them trying to find good quality torx), as the cheap ones get stripped really easily. Before I had the good tools sometimes I would have to resort to brute force to remove the magnets and sometimes could not get to them at all. And before the recent tool acquisition I was never able to remove any of the hard disk platters.

I suspect my drives aren't very usable after I am done harvesting their magnets.

still seems flakey

Disclaimer I've never personally used any of the hyperconverged stuff.

I've been a vmware customer for 20 years (back when vmware was a linux product that ran on the desktop), Vmware GSX/Server and later ESX for 15 years or so now.

But I'm quite shocked to read complaints about simple stuff causing problems on VSAN, the one that sticks out to me the most is multiple comments from users running VSAN on Dell hardware where they have a hard disk or SSD fail and NEITHER Dell NOR VMware can figure out which physical drive it is! I mean that has got to be the most basic of basic things. Even doubly so for a company like Dell who basically own VMware. I mean the word shocking doesn't even justify how bad that is to me. I'm sure it doesn't happen all the time, and doesn't happen that way for all customers but still that is just so basic.

I've read a bunch of other stuff from VSAN users over the past couple of years but that one stood out the most. I even brought it up with my Vmware rep recently when he asked me about VSAN and he didn't even try to defend it, just said it is likely just because Dell and VMware are different groups so they still have issues figuring it out.

In my mind at least especially for a Dell platform with VSAN, that should have full integration with DRAC and/or whatever else is storage related to immediately identify the bad storage resource, should not have to hunt it down.

I haven't read much about Nutanix by contrast but that is mainly because I don't follow anything Nutanix related, I do follow some Vmware stuff and VSAN often pops up as a result of course.

Hyper converged storage has always sounded nice on paper, the concepts and cost savings and stuff sound really nice. But my personal experience with storage over the past 15+ years tells me storage is really difficult to get right. And while HCI tries hard to simplify the management aspects of storage by abstracting it more the underlying complexity goes up quite a bit, which just invites bugs. Whether it is in software, or firmware, or interoperability etc. It just scares me (for anything beyond single digit numbers of servers).

cooling the drives first

"This means cool air from the fans blows over the drives first, and then the CPUs – which wouldn't make any sense in a compute server."

I don't think I've ever seen a server that didn't have the drive bays get cooling before the CPUs. I have seen some server designs that have drives on the rear as well as the front(only in situations where they are getting the most drive bays they can in a single system), but don't recall seeing any where they are only on the rear.

"other suppliers"

Like Dell+VMware w/vSAN.

I'd be a little curious to be in a room with teams from both groups and see how the conversation goes.

the ultimate form of compliance?

Q: What information do you have on me and how do you share it?

A: Here is the IP of the database, no authentication needed take a look for yourself

couldn't get one or couldn't get one in time?

There's a huge distinction between being rejected and not getting a visa in time because of a backlog of requests. I don't know if there are restrictions as to how far in advance you are able to request a visa. I poked around and it seems the main form is the DS-160(which I helped someone with a couple of years ago) though I don't see at first glance anyway whether or not you have to file within X number of days of travel.

The article implies the person was not (yet at least) rejected they just hadn't gotten the visa processed in time for the event.

so confusing

so many top level domains.. I got on a support call recently and they said go to <vendorname>.support. I asked them to confirm as I expected something longer like <vendorname>.support.somethingelse.[some well known TLD]. But nope the actual TLD domain was .support.

I guess I must admit I have yet to encounter many of these TLDs in real world usage.

Per the .dev stuff I assume if people use .dev and host their own internal DNS they could override the behavior ? Provided of course the browser isn't sending DNS requests directly to the interwebs. I don't use Chrome nor do I use .dev so not sure, but am curious.

DD goes to cloud too

I don't use DD, I use HPE StoreOnce. But DD has a cloud tier option, looking at their specs it ranges from a usable capacity of 96TB on low end to 3PB on the high end.

HP on the low end starts from 94TB usable cloud capacity to 5.2PB on the high end. On the HP end there are some restrictions on how this can be used. e.g. all of my usage of StoreOnce is over NFS, which means no cloud tier available even if I wanted to use it.

I've got no idea what if any restrictions there may be on the DD stuff.

(I haven't used the HP or anyone else's cloud backup stuff)

working fine for me?

I have been a wells fargo customer since the 90s.

I don't use the online stuff often maybe once a week or something. But I just logged in, no issue(8:40 PM pacific time). Someone mentioned they couldn't move funds between accounts(2 checking accounts though the transfer doesn't use wells fargo it uses Zelle or something?? but it's fully integrated into the UI). I just did no issue. I don't really use the online banking for much more than viewing the balance and seeing the transactions.

From those aspects everything seems perfectly normal. I even clicked on a check I wrote and the image for the check came up immediately.

No errors anywhere.

I do not, and have never used their mobile app maybe that is more impacted I don't know.

don't understand

How is a DNS issue related to Century link (a telecom provider, and I guess colo too) ? Probably will never find out

(not a customer of either, just confused what kind of DNS setup MS would have that would have their internal services reliant upon an external DNS provider).

If my external DNS went down(Dynect) completely or got corrupted or whatever,the worst thing that happens is users can't resolve the names or resolve to the wrong place and end up not being able to use the services. Internal DNS has dedicated zones(even duplicates of a dozen or more external zones to override external IPs in some cases with internal), so nothing would be affected internally. Certainly wouldn't cascade database failures or data loss or anything remotely like that.

$35 million in funding

So, just about $465 million short of what might of been needed..(seeing the crazy unicorn investments flying around recently..)

what kind of apps were impacted?

From the previous article https://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/11/06/amd_sued_cores/

"it claims it is impossible for an eight-core Bulldozer-powered processor to truly execute eight instructions simultaneously – it cannot run eight complex math calculations at any one moment due to the shared FPU design"

This article seems to be referring to desktop processors though I assume the Opterons at the time were affected as well ? (I have several Opteron 6176 and 6276s in service still as vmware hosts - though checking now at least Wikipedia says only the 4200/6200 Opterons were bulldozer).

So if desktop processors were affected I am curious what sorts of apps would be impacted seriously by this? I mean I expect in most games and 3D rendering type apps that GPUs are far more important than FPU for math calculations. Perhaps media encoding ? I think that is often accelerated by the MMX/SSE type instructions.

I would assume that CPU(FPU) based math would be more common in the HPC space (even with GPUs), and I can certainly see a case for an issue there - however at the same time I would expect any HPC customer to do basic testing of the hardware to determine if the performance is up to their expectations regardless of what the claims might be. Testing math calculation performance should be pretty simple.

I want to say I was aware of this FPU issue years ago when I was buying the Opterons, and then, and even now I don't care about the fewer FPUs, I wanted more integer cores(for running 50-70+ VMs on a server). I really have had no workloads that(as far as I am aware at least) are FPU intensive. Though it certainly would be nice if it was possible to measure specifically FPU utilization on a processor, much like I wish it was easy to measure PCI bus bandwidth utilization( not that I have anything that seriously taxes the PCI bus(again that I am aware of) but having that data would be nice.

I think back to when Intel launched their first quad core processor, or one of the first, I think it was around 2006-2007. They basically took two dual core procesors and "glued" them together to make a quad core. I remember because AMD talked shit about Intel's approach as AMD had a "true" quad core processor.. fast forward a decade and it seems everyone is gluing modules together.

how about

turning off UPnP

https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/11/08/upnp_spam_botnet_broadcom/

Never have had a router that supported UPnP myself, well my home broadband connections have always had bridged modems with either Linux or OpenBSD(past 12 years or so) as my gateway.

low priority traffic?

Routing something that far away will of course kill latency and perhaps short of something like residential broadband or mobile connections would result in the customers seeing that drop in performance/throughput and reporting it.

I was involved with one such incident that I kept the traceroute for in 2004, the story I was told was there was a fiber cut in the midwest of the U.S. that caused some previously unused BGP broadcasts to route traffic for the company I was with(AT&T customer at an AT&T facility near Seattle) to go through Russia. Packet loss got as high as 98%, and being we were an online application had to take our site down since it was wrecking havoc with transactions. Took AT&T and friends 6-7 hours to put the filters in place etc to resolve the issue.

Traceroute from the time (source and destination addresses both in Seattle area)

http://elreg.nateamsden.com/funkyroute.txt

32 hops, 98% packet loss and 280ms later arriving at the destination.

sad

sad to see such big companies splash such massive amounts of cash while simultaneously practically strangling themselves for profits.

I mean IBM could invest $1 billion more in their cloud stuff every quarter for the next 8 years with that kind of cash, and I'd hope they'd be able to get 10X out of it relative to what they may get from Red Hat in that time frame. Maybe they just aren't capable of doing that kind of thing(if not then that is sad too).

If I was an IBM customer especially looking to use their cloud stuff I'd certainly be more impressed with an 8 year big investment push for their cloud stuff than a one off purchase of a services company whose software is all pretty much open source anyway. Everything I have seen claims IBM's cloud abilities are distant from the big guys. I can't imagine how Red hat can change that, with their software readily available to IBM this whole time.

I haven't been a Red Hat customer in 13 years (though used CentOS more recently than that, last time I used it was about 2010). I could see Red hat being bought for $5B or something, but $30+ ? Just insane, such a wasted opportunity. I haven't been a customer of IBM stuff since about 16 years.

Not that HP(who I have used a lot) is a whole lot different. If they had taken that $10B they dumped on fraud Autonomy and put it into mobile/WebOS that could of been something great.