Posts by SeymourHolz

"Surely this is the beginning of the end for NetApp..."

You've been pitching that line for at least ten years now, Reg...

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Why would warring parties not ignore the Digital Geneva Convention the same way they ignore the 'Analog' version?

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" ... [the] feeling that you have sold your soul to live in an unsustainable bubble society built on delusion and bravado ..."

Nothing exceeds like excess.

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Your first question was a technology question. Then you switch to market questions.

Why does the market need Burger King, McDonald's, Wendy's, and Hardee's? Why do each of these places have 10 different brand names for the same meat paired with the same bread? They aren't appreciably differentiated in any dimension.

It is because buying decisions are never merely about facts, whether nutritional or technical. Buying decisions satisfy emotional needs too, that's why you hire salespeople with good teeth and pleasant demeanor. There were relevant facts in the SolidFire case, which had a good book of business and an attractive price; the acquisition decision was not based on technology factors. But NTAP also wanted to satisfy an emotional need to 'look modern' by getting a young name on the board. Which satisfies the emotional needs of pundits like Gartner, El Reg, et al.

Parochialism is not your friend. Just sell whatever has traction, wherever it has traction.

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If you are surprised that ANY kind of error can happen In The Current Year, then hubris may be your real problem.

?

You talked to Alex McDonald and don't know what Flashpool is? Really?

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There needs to be a longer interview with this fellow.

I'll wager this is neither the first nor funniest rage incident he's been involved in.

of course,

... it is company policy to use the indefinite article 'a' dildo, not YOUR dildo...

El Reg getting in on the Fake News action

Neither the type-o nor Podesta's gullibility had any impact on the election.

The content of the eMails and the exposed character of Hillary's team is what did it.

Let's dispel the myth that anything except the corrupt character of Hillary's campaign cost her the election. Hillary's corruption is exactly what cost her the election.

lol

The only time people show any enthusiasm for voting reform is when the candidate they supported lost under the extant rules.

If the situation were flipped, Trump supporters would be talking about voting reform, and the Hillary supporters would be insisting the current system is fine.

Let's dispel the myth that anyone cares about 'fairness' in elections, no one gives a hoot about 'fairness'.

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MOAR SALT

kek kek kek

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All these salty and spicy comments are delicious.

M A G A

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The US has been saved from the prospect of Crooked Hillary getting POTUS powers.

It is a great moment for America and the world.

M A G A

“... and throwing it away when keeping it is no longer legitimate or relevant”

In the context of data, this platitude has been proven to be bunk, a myth, a fool's paradise. You'll be stepping over pounds to pick up pennies. You'll lose money chasing that dream just as surely as you would at the craps table.

Data appreciates in value faster than the cost of the underlying storage. The only "savings" are associated with some form of de-duplication, whether you are talking at a physical-block or a logical-copy level. In terms of post-dedup'd unique data, the only winning strategy is to keep it and work it. Data appreciates in value over time, as the envelope of tools and metadata that surrounds it grows. Correlation allows data to make data more valuable; it's a domain where 1+1 > 3, it's not like any other asset. The cost of finding the rare data elements that didn't appreciate will exceed any potential cost savings from deleting them (losses that will be compounded by lost-opportunity costs of missed future correlations).

Beware the siren's song.

There was never any chance that general-purpose processor designs were going to compete with ASICs in switching-performance. These results should surprise no one.

WEW LAD

Stay Tuned ...

for the continuing adventures of Florida Man!

/r/FloridaMan

Really?

Is it really so hard to imagine how a massive subscriber of AWS cloud services would be interested in acquiring a mature toolset "to track and analyze infrastructure reliability for increased uptime and optimized efficiency"?

Independent measurement of the quality of AWS services as-delivered is massively important to salesforce.com; they not only want to ensure that services are being delivered as-promised, but they also need empirical data to support negotiation of better SLO/SLA parameters.

People who have bank accounts still maintain their own transaction journal to reconcile against the reports sent by the bank and support financial analysis that goes beyond the parameters documented by bank records.

Cubicles are not designed nor equipped to facilitate pair programming, the required workspaces are fundamentally different.

People fart, belch and don't eat enough breathmints. Workspaces generally need more ventilation, in addition to different layouts and equipment.

PP is a tactic that has good reproducible results, yet is nevertheless difficult to implement and scale.

unworthy argument for such a worthy topic

An analogy comparing 20th century aircraft carriers to 21st century data management would be odd even if well-executed, and this was not well-executed. NetApp may be doomed for good reasons, and it's a shame this article didn't explore some of them. Give Pott a mulligan on this one; let's see another attempt at the topic, this time without quite so many pints of Stella.

Remember

When drones are outlawed, only outlaws will have drones.

violin memory, "industry-wide significance" ?

Was someone at El Reg hitting grandma's sherry a little early this morning?

Ban dragnet surveillance data for use in domestic law enforcement

The compelling reason for dragnet surveillance is that it is a necessary tool against attacks from terrorists and rogue states. Fair enough, allow it to continue, stop any attacks when possible, but prohibit the use of any dragnet collection in domestic law enforcement actions. It is not admissible as evidence, either for prosecution or even for a criminal warrant. Make dragnet surveillance data 'legally poisonous' to domestic LEO, and most of the associated civil liberties problems vanish.

>> If you work in marketing or social and you see something written that you don’t like, the first reaction should not be to try and get that person "on-message"...

Well-intentioned advice, but perhaps impossible for large vendors to actually implement.

When a company exceeds about ~3000 people, it becomes a bureaucracy. When companies are small, they are similar to tribes, where cooperative behaviors clearly advance both selfish and collective interests. Bureaucracies are fundamentally different; conformity trumps results. Ceremony trumps outcomes. The contrast is nearly as sharp as the contrast between centrally-planned state economies and decentralized laissez-faire state economies. The latter is vigorous, progressive and chaotic, while the former is lethargic, stagnant and predictable.

Start-ups are perennially successful a penetrating all markets, even ones with very high barriers to entry, specifically because of this problem in scaling human organizations.

great idea

until you realize how buggy both software and human procedures are, and there will be phones getting wiped for no reason

because one guy at NYT who wrote one article equates to "world+dog"

none of those people use WinXP because of Microsoft "support"

none of them care that the support is going away

even though that really really bothers the El Reg staff

But wait, there's more!

As an added benefit, all generated binaries are guaranteed to be Patriot Act compliant.

Mouse movements are somewhat like handwriting; everyone expresses uniquely, and algorithms can be 'trained' to recognize noisy samples. When the husband logs into a service using the wife's credentials, the mouse 'telemetry' data can be used to detect the difference via statistical inference.

This sort of thing is handy for all sorts of situations.

Miley Cyrus did a backend-as-a-service advertisement on the video music awards last night.

On the bright side, you will now always have your cafeteria tray with you.

I love the writing at El Reg

I wish the newshounds in Murica were like you guys. This study is being reported via multiple outlets, but the others are cringeworthy dullards by comparison. And it is like this pretty much all the time.

I don't always agree with El Reg, but I always enjoy the read.

Funny how El Reg keeps flogging Microsoft Security Updates for XP, even tho the evidence clearly shows virtually everyone else considers that an irrelevant data point.

Give it up, El Reg, it's not going to happen.

Only temporary....

The Canadians are smarter than the Americans, they are choosing to *observe* the development of virtual currency initiatives before they clamp on regulatory controls. Even though virtual currency is an intolerable competitor to fiat currency systems, it is not clear how they can be killed, let alone how best to kill them. There are too many unknowns, to start driving anything underground.

The problem with "object storage" offerings is that they are all based on slow and bloated subroutine libraries intermediating data access, reducing performance to a crawl. Nobody wants that.

They are also based on opaque proprietary standards that transforms an otherwise-normal data storage system into a data prison you can never leave (or backup). No one needs that either.

Bleh, more Cloud UberHype, this read more like a paid advertisement than an objective piece.

Please start reading the Terms of Service for these cloud services, instead of just pimping them, and you'll find that there are some substantial problems actually worth writing about.

shelfware is the fault of the buyer alone

It is not the fork's fault you are fat.

It is not the seller's fault you failed to use the software.

If you bought something you really did not need, then you are an idiot.

If you bought a tool you actually need yet you plod along as if you did not have it, you are still an idiot.

Tis a poor craftsmen that blames his tawdry kitsch on the tool seller.

In-artful wording, perhaps, but not far-fetched.

* How does getting rid of older kit reduce capital expenditure except through accounting wizardry

Shutting down an N-1 production line is the shutdown of a *program*, not merely de-commissioning as-deployed assets. That program had a budget which programmed replacement activity, not simply maintenance, and the early termination of the program early returned capital budget allocations as part of the savings. No 'wizardry', just very ordinary consequences of similarly ordinary operations changes. Put the pitchforks down, lads.

3rd paragraph catastrophe

Para #3 might be one of the worst thumb-fingered messes ever published by The Register.

Maybe I'm spoiled, I normally think El Reg has good writing, whether or not I happen to agree on a point.

There's useful business and technology criticism of either FlexPod or NetApp, but honestly, what the heck WAS THAT?!?

BBC announcing new sit-com this fall

Bankers Behaving Badly

Leading a dead-end maybe

People do not want to write tapes anymore because (a) they cannot write them fast enough because they are drowning in file-level metadata, and (b) they are only used for data-burial, there is no useful thing that be done with them after that.

Data Domain is an electric casket; your data is still dead, but now you have to keep it plugged-in, too.

If you are going to bury your data, use /dev/null, it is a lot cheaper.

Yes, there are people dumb enough to buy electric caskets, but that still doesn't make it sensible.

...but when will they explain...

...the rings around Uranus?