* Posts by inquisitive2014

16 publicly visible posts • joined 24 May 2016

Oracle tells Supremes: Fair use? Pah! There's nothing fair about 'Google's copying'

inquisitive2014

Copy Left

I don't have a dog in this fight but I am concerned that we are missing the point about Open Source Software. One of the key tenets of Open Source Software is the idea of "copyleft". As I understand it this principle says that you can use the Open Source Software in your original work but you must recontribute any changes back to the Open Source community. It is my understanding that Google declined to accept an Open Source licence for this but rather took the code and used it in their products which was proprietary and sold.

Copyleft is worth fighting for

Alibaba: There's a trade war going on? Could've fooled us – just check out these swollen digits

inquisitive2014

A Satisfied AliExpress Customer

Krammig I am sorry to hear that you have had a bad experience with Ali Express. I have bought over 30 items from Ali Express over the last 2 years and have no complaints. Items are as described, Shipping times are accurate. Deliveries have arrived.

Capital One gets Capital Done: Hacker swipes personal info on 106 million US, Canadian credit card applicants

inquisitive2014

Re: Ah...The Cloud...the solution to ALL business problems.....

Ah The Cloud .. What am I missing here?

Sir, You are missing the fact that Cloud or No Cloud, securing data is important and poor data management practices have consequences. Accessing data through vulnerabilities in misconstrued Firewalls is a problem for on-premise systems as well as Cloud.

My deep concern is that there is a lack of understanding of the "Shared Responsibility Model". The big Cloud providers are doing such a good job of resiliency and security for the infrastructure components they actually manage and control that there is a general sense of complacency and slackness from the Users/Admins who have to step up and manage the layers of the stack they control like Firewall rules.

Learn Bluespeak with IBM: Internal buzzword-bingo memo schools staff on this newfangled thing called The Cloud

inquisitive2014

IBM is famous for jargon

Many years ago IBM introduced the Air Movement Device for cooling. The TLA (3 Letter Acronym) was AMD which was the same length as the standard English word "fan" which described the exact same device perfectly. :-)

Firm fat-fingered G Suite and deleted its data, so it escalated its support ticket to a lawsuit

inquisitive2014

Re: Under a cloud

O, If you choose not to use a cloud solution then I am assuming you would use an on premise solution. If you delete files from an on premise solution there is a strong chance that you won't be able to get them back.

As someone with a long history in IT you would know that this story indicates two failings which apply equally to on-premise or cloud scenarios:

1. How did they "accidentally" delete their account? This is like del *.* on a root account for an on premise system - which has been done many times.

2. Why did they not have a backup that they could restore from? HA and DR principles don't change because you move to the cloud.

Hope you have a nice day.

Who needs a supercomputer when you can get a couple of petaflops on AWS?

inquisitive2014

$5,000/3 = $1,667 for a Supercomputer at Cambridge.

I am skeptical of the claim that Cambridge can do it for 3X less. I suspect that they are forgetting to add in a lot of often overlooked costs like rent on the Datacenter, all staff costs, redundancy etc. While it is true that it is possible to run IT systems for less than the major cloud providers it is extremely difficult to do it to the same standards. My experiences in Australia with the largest corporations and government IT systems has shown me that less than 5% of them are delivering to the standards of the major cloud providers regardless of cost.

Additionally I dont know of any Supercomputer project that has only spent $5K on infrastructure.

The case for on-premise IT is getting harder and harder to justify

Microsoft doubles Azure Stack's footprint, embiggens Azure VMs

inquisitive2014

Re: Four 9s?

Oracle and AWS also make claims for this capability. The devil is in the detail :-)

Amazon can't or won't collect sales tax in Australia

inquisitive2014

The main reason I buy stuff on Amazon is because it is not available in Australia. Most sellers don't ship to Australia or, if they do, charge a crazy premium. I use my free shipping option to ship to my forwarder in Florida who sends it on to me in Australia for a very small fee. I intend to continue with this arrangement into the future and will continue to avoid My Harvey's overpriced and and understocked stores in Australia.

Cloud is a six-horse race, and three of those have been lapped

inquisitive2014

Re: O.R.A.C.L.E.

The Vogon,

Be careful. Due to the nature of cloud there are a lot of things that you can't do in the cloud that are impractical/impossible to do on-prem. This means that it is not always possible to bring it back in-house. For example, Microsoft Azure Partner training cautions there are significant differences between Azure SQL and SQL on premise. This is a reflection of the enhanced functionality of the Azure version rather than an indictment of the on-prem version.

IMHO in 2018 there are significant challenges with migrating to the cloud and challenges with migrating between clouds. Migrations are being successfully delivered every day but anyone who tries to tell you the process is trivial or straightforward is being disingenous.

Don't read this, Oracle... It's the rise of the open-source data strategies

inquisitive2014

Oracle is still the best choice for the largest and most critical databases. The problem is that the alternatives are a lot better than they used to be. Most organisations dont need the scale and performance provided by Oracle with many alternatives that are "good enough" Also there is a blurring of the lines between the NoSQL and SQL databases. There are no "pure" databases anymore with many of the best features of all the different approaches (e.g. NoSQL features added to Oracle and ACID and resiliency features added to many NoSQL databases) going to producing better databases overall.

IMHO this discussion will become academic because Serverless computing e.g. AWS Lambda and SaaS will change who chooses the database any from the customer.

How is the big switch to the public cloud working out?

inquisitive2014

Whoever ends up winning it will take 5 years to sort itself out. In the meantime there will be a lot of people with "Hybrid Cloud" ie some applications on-premise and some in the Cloud. Getting this environment to work seamlessly is the big challenge facing IT - both in terms of products and services as well as policy and procedures. We saw a tiny preview of this challenge when the corporate world was forced to accept Dropbox et al. Many users don't understand the challenges of managing enterprise IT for availability, performance, and security within a tight budget.

Big blues: IBM's remote-worker crackdown is company-wide, including its engineers

inquisitive2014

Backflip

I left IBM just over 5 years ago after a 14 year career.

When I worked there IBM actively promoted remote working as a way of saving money on real estate costs and boasted about the high ratio of workers to office space. They introduced a whole lot of policies that enabled remote working and discouraged office based working with hot-desking policies that removed sense of community and collaboration that used to be generated by ad hoc encounters and meetings.

A lot us moved out of the office due to these policies - IBM then stood for "I'm By Myself". While it is true that a lot of dedicated folks contributed a lot while working remotely - a friend who was a single mother comes to mind - there were a lot of people who took advantage of the lax oversight from managers who were located thousands of miles away.

That's cold: This is how our boss told us our jobs are at risk, staffers claim

inquisitive2014

My previous company forced a single mum with two children under the age of 10 to leave her home in Australia and travel to India for a month to train her successor. She was told if she didn't do it she wouldn't get a redundancy - which was the legal minimum - she needed the money. She had huge challenges with finding someone to look after the kids.

Microsoft paid me $650 to scrub Windows 10 from my grandpa's PC, says man

inquisitive2014

Why not just download a simple skin?

My family where completely lost with the "new" interface but I wanted the stability and performance that is built into Windows 10. The answer was to install Start10 which provides the familiar interface that my family are familiar with while benefiting from faster loading and greater stability in Windows10 - problem solved. NB This is not an advertisement for Start10 - I know there are alternatives out there that all have their fans.

QANTAS' air safety spiel warns not to try finding lost phones

inquisitive2014

Jetstar specifically prohibit Samsung Galaxy Note 7 use

Last night, September 8th, I was on a Jetstar flight from Perth to Melbourne. The usual air safety announcement before takeoff had an addendum. I paraphrase - because of a worldwide recall of Samsung Galaxy Note 7 mobile phones this device was completely prohibited from being turned on during the flight. Other devices could be used in flight mode.

G4S call centre staff made 'test' 999 calls to hit performance targets

inquisitive2014
Happy

15 years ago a Royal Commission into the failure of the new computerised Ambulance Dispatch system in Victoria, Australia, reported that the staff had done exactly the same thing - made many internal calls to the emergency number which were responded to very quickly so as to improve the reported call answering statistics