An article appeared on HN this morning. In it, the author noted that all was not well with the universe, as their backup, using Amazon’s Glacier product, wound up being quite expensive for a small backup/restore. The OP discovered some of the issues with Glacier when they began the restore (not commenting on performance, merely the costing). Basically, to lure you in, they provide very low up front costs. That is, until you try to pull the data back for some reason.

Linux containers are all the rage, with Docker, rkt, lxd, etc. all in market to various degrees. You have companies like Docker, CoreOS, and Rancher all vying for mindshare, not to mention some of the plumbing bits by google and many others. I don’t think they are a fad, there is much that is good with containers, when they are done right. To see how they are done right, have a good hard long look at SmartOS.

I find that, over time, my cell phone number has propagated out to spammers/scammers whom want to call me up to sell me something. The US national do-not-call registry hasn’t helped. The complaints I’ve filed haven’t helped. So I filter. My filtering algo looks like this: if (number_is_known_person_or_org(phone_number)) { take_call_if_possible(); else if (number_is_unknown(phone_number)) { filter_stage_2(phone_number) } function filter_stage_2(phone_number) { // I ignore 80% of numbers I don't know, let them go to // voicemail.

Short story here. I am not going to pour over their S-1 form to find interesting tidbits, others will do that, and are paid to do so. They are the first of several, though I had thought that Dell would acquire them before they hit IPO. I am guessing that the combination of the price for them, plus the EMC acquisition stopped this conversation. So now Nutanix is going to IPO.

This is remarkable if true, and if they follow through with it, it will change the landscape of Flash quite a bit. Right now there are 43 major flash providers, and a few smaller ones. Building flash fabs is expensive, even given the demand and process improvements, there is still quite a bit of investment required to set up a flash fab. Toshiba has some cool kit here, we’ve worked with it (and in full disclosure, we were talking about working more closely with them in the past).

Yeah, the headline says it all. The reason I rolled to GMail (and am paying for it for each user and then some) for the corporate services was, well, they promised to make running email easy, painless, and I wouldn’t have to worry about email management any more. Now I have to worry about pissed off customers whom are angry at me for not responding, even though I see the outbound emails in my sent folder, and from our ticketing system.

This one has been in the rumor mill for a while. NetApp has been needing something to play well in the all flash array space, and it now has something. This said, the array space is very much on the decline certainly with respect to dumb JBODs and smart “filer heads”. That design is being retired in favor of smarter and hyperconverged systems. Such as Unison with Ceph, Forte, and related HCI (hyper converged infrastructure) systems.

Not a how to guide, but a higher level meta discussion … about that market size discussion. See here. I’ve experienced the endless cycle of meetings over “size of market”. Not fun. These days, I have a very simple classifier with respect to investors. foreach investor (list_of_investors) { if (investor->says_yes_sends_term_sheet_and_check) { put_money_to_work_building_value() } else { add_to_list_of_investors_who_didnt_say_yes_and_follow_through_with_money() } } This is pseudo code for the algo you need. Any answer which is yes is good.

Seeing lots of these in my web server logs: https://scalableinformatics.com/?p=%3Cscript%3Ealert(document.cookie)%3C/script%3E which are sent there from a sentinel redirection mechanism on a different web server. A number, maybe 10 or so? Amazon hosts are now doing this. I am guessing this would be real darned easy to trace back to the sources. And either someone’s instance in the cloud is not under their control, or someone is paying Amazon to let them run bots.

I can’t even begin to describe the complete and utter broken-ness of this mess. This doesn’t look like systemd issue, its just the poor stack trying to get everything else working. But plymouth. Seriously. It should be given the old-yeller treatment. And watching udev not … settle … is … amusing. While its doing that, the dracut options of debug, drop to a shell, break, etc. aren’t working. This isn’t engineering at this point.