* Posts by James Turner

55 publicly visible posts • joined 26 Oct 2007

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Spotted in the wild: Chimera – a Linux that isn't GNU/Linux

James Turner

Re: But why?

The sockets API that everyone decided to use came from Berkeley and is known as BSD sockets.

But the implementations are not derived from BSD code. Infamously around 2000 Windows was using a BSD-derived TCP/IP stack, but that was rewritten for Vista. There’s probably the odd utility they haven’t bothered to rewrite, but the core of Windows or Linux networking is not BSD.

Microsoft catches the Wi-Fi 7 wave with Windows 11

James Turner

Re: does anyone

If your iPhone 14 is only doing WiFi 5 then something is broken. Apple are reasonably quick to jump on new wireless standards and have supported WiFi 6 since the iPhone 11. Only the 15 Pros have 6E, but that’s had relatively little deployment.

The real significance of Apple's Macintosh

James Turner

Amiga had the famous boing ball demo at CES in January 1984. Their financial issues that resulted in being bought by Commodore might have delayed the launch until the next year, but they had a working GUI then so it wasn’t something written in the time since the Mac came out.

How thermal management is changing in the age of the kilowatt chip

James Turner

Or next to a pool?

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-64939558

Windows 12: Savior of PC makers, or just an apology for Windows 11?

James Turner

Re: Windows 12 ?

They didn’t.

One of their evangelists, Jerry Nixon, said it at a conference, but it was never an official position of MS.

Ofcom proposes ban on UK telcos making 'inflation-linked' price hikes mid-contract

James Turner

Re: Shocked, of Hamel Hampsted

Vodafone are also an exception. The device is a separate loan repayment unaffected by increases to the airtime contract.

UK facing electricity supply woes after nuclear power stations shut, MPs told

James Turner

Yes, Dinorwig can output 1.8GW at full power which would cover something like Hinkley Point C going offline suddenly. But its capacity is ‘only’ 9GWh, so after 5 hours it’s empty and you need to wait for it to be refilled.

Nicking from withouthotair.com, the situation you need to prepare for is a major lull in wind across the UK for several days. The number he uses is 10GW of wind power being unavailable for 5 days = 1200GWh. (And as the amount of wind capacity we build goes up that number only gets bigger).

So you’re looking at 100s of Dinorwigs, are there that many suitable sites in the country? Are people going to get upset when you start flooding valleys for reservoirs?

An international incident or just some finger trouble at the console?

James Turner

Re: always do the secondary

Depends what you’re doing.

If you’re updating a pair that does failover and there’s a bug in the new version, if you’ve updated the primary first then you’ll see the bug and you can failover to the secondary that’s still running the old code.

Whereas if you updated the secondary first you now have two broken boxes.

Only Microsoft can give open source the gift of NTFS. Only Microsoft needs to

James Turner

Re: Might want to check....

The later lawsuit by Symantec (who bought Veritas) was over their Volume Manager. That would tend to sit underneath the file systems rather than being a part of it.

I suspect a more likely source of encumbrance would be IBM depending on how the OS/2 and NT divorce was sorted out.

It's 2021 and someone's written a new Windows 3.x mouse driver. Why now?

James Turner

Re: Intel Itanium

The first properly released 64bit Windows XP. But that doesn’t mean MS didn’t have a version of 2000 internally which they decided not to release. You can find things like https://web.archive.org/web/20000301193850/http://www.microsoft.com/WINDOWS2000/guide/platform/strategic/64bit.asp which talk about what MS had.

In the same vein there are beta versions of Windows 2000 for DEC Alpha floating around. But it never got to the full release as Compaq killed that processor.

VMware shreds planned support for 'cheese grater' Mac Pro

James Turner

Re: Why were they even thinking about ESXi on Mac Pro?

I work in academia which is very much a mixed Mac/PC environment.

The common use case for a Mac VM is support/development. New bit of software comes out, or even just an updated version, you want to install it on a test machine first. With a PC it’s easy enough to have VMs running the standard image for testing, you can roll back and all the other good stuff.

But Apple insists on Mac hardware to run their OS, even in a VM. So do you have to give all your support people Macs so they can test things as well as a PC? Having a nice big host let’s you consolidate into one box which is one of the advantages of virtualisation.

Cisco’s 'intuitive security' tool can’t handle MAC address randomization out-of-the-box

James Turner

Not just a Cisco issue, this is going to cause havoc for any vendor of Network Access Control that's keying the device off the MAC address

At least Apple backed away from their original proposal to periodically change the MAC address within an SSID. That would make managing wireless utterly horrific.

The virus curing the mobile industry's chronic addiction... and sparking an impressive algorithmic price experiment

James Turner

Pah, AWS are newbies at this conference lark. Cisco have been doing Cisco Live for 30 years now.

Though they just had to cancel the one scheduled for Melbourne next month due to Covid-19.

Strewth! Aussie ISP gets eye-watering IPv4 bill, shifts to IPv6 addresses

James Turner

Re: Another IPV6 article which exposes issues with IPV6

You don't need a specific allocation for the IPv6 network. The IPv6-only host doesn't need to know about IPv4 at all.

NAT64 is usually combined with DNS64. An IPv6-only host will do a DNS request, the DNS resolver will see if the response only includes IPv4 addresses. If so, it rewrites the response to an IPv6 address that points at the gateway and encodes the IPv4 address. The gateway then has the smarts to spot this IPv6 packet is actually for an IPv4 host and translates it.

NAT works in both directions, you publish your service on a public IPv4 address and translate it to the IPv6 server sitting behind the gateway.

Happy birthday, you lumbering MS-DOS-based mess: Windows 98 turns 20 today

James Turner

Re: I remember

That second CPU was completely wasted under Win98. Only the NT-based Windows did anything with more than one CPU.

Have to use SMB 1.0? Windows 10 April 2018 Update says NO

James Turner

Re: Yeah, but...

That's not entirely true. https://twitter.com/NerdPyle/status/876880390866190336 states there is an option you can set in recent builds of Windows 10/Server 2016 to have SMB2/3 without OpLocks.

Essex drone snapper dealt with by police for steamy train photos

James Turner

Re: Fair cop?

Article 95 lists the 50 metres rule if you don't have a licence that exempts you.

Global IPv4 address drought: Seriously, we're done now. We're done

James Turner

Re: The bad decision that keeps on biting back

NAT64 or 464XLAT allows you to have IPv6-only clients. Do translation at the gateway and you can keep your internal network IPv4-free.

You can also invert it and have IPv6-only datacentres.

UK Home Secretary signs off on Lauri Love's extradition to US

James Turner

Re: Extradition

Wrong, the US-UK extradition treaty was ratified by the US a decade ago. US citizens have been extradited to the UK.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UK–US_extradition_treaty_of_2003

Alleged hacker Lauri Love loses extradition case. Judge: Suicide safeguards in place

James Turner

Your recollection is about a decade out of date - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/UK–US_extradition_treaty_of_2003

Google: There are three certainties in life – death, taxes and IPv6

James Turner

Re: Bridging the gap

It exists in theory, called NAT46.

There are two bits you need, first is your gateway to generate IPv4->IPv6 mappings on the fly so that your IPv4-only hosts have an address they can communicate with.

Next is you need your DNS server to rewrite queries from IPv6 addresses into these dynamic IPv4 addresses.

VMware flings vCenter Server away from Windows, if you want

James Turner

Update Manager

The elephant in the room, you still need a Windows server for updating your hosts.

Double-negative tweet could be Microsoft Surface Phone hint

James Turner

Re: Um...

No, those processors are too chunky for a phone. Intel previously did Atom in phones and you're looking at more like 1-2W max power consumption.

Sony wins case over pre-installed Windows software

James Turner

Re: "without pre-installed software"

If that's an Enterprise licence of Windows you're installing, it's generally only an Upgrade version. So you still need a Windows licence attached to the machine to upgrade from.

Why are there so many Windows Server 2003 stragglers?

James Turner

Re: Lack of 32-bit Server platform

32bit applications work fine on current 64bit Windows, using WoW64.

If they're using browser components, MS are still shipping both 32bit and 64bit versions of IE on their 64bit OSes.

Ill communication delays NHS England's GP data grab for six months

James Turner

Re: Why does anything identifiable need to leave the GP?

Because they're matching it against the hospital records they already have. So you can do things like spot everyone prescribed a certain treatment later turned up in hospital suffering a particular illness.

The identifiers are then kept separately and the data released only has the things you mention.

Wi-Fi Alliance takes grid place, revs engine in race to 802.11ac

James Turner

Re: Can someone explain...

Because we got to z and have wrapped round.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IEEE_802.11#Standard_and_amendments

There is more than just your main wireless types, standardising QoS (which can apply to any of the types) is 11e, 11i is more commonly known as WPA2...

Are the PCs all getting a bit old at your office? You're not alone

James Turner

Reason to upgrade...

Power consumption anyone?

I upgraded from a Athlon64 X2 4200 last year to a Core i5 3550. The old system used to idle at 100W (measured at the wall). The new one is less than 50W.

Newer machines won't be quite that dramatic a difference, but there are still some savings that can be made by replacing older desktops.

BT copper-cable choppers cop 16 months in the cooler

James Turner

Re: Simple solution

Except the thieves are too stupid to tell fibre and copper apart. I've seen several cases of BT fibre infrastructure being ripped out by thieves who thought it was copper.

Intel debuts 'Haswell' chippery: from tablets to servers

James Turner

Re: Not to throw a damper on this lovefest...

Do you have a source you can cite for that? All the articles I've seen state Haswell supports OpenGL 3.2 and OpenCL 1.2.

AMD puts network, chip guru in charge of Opterons

James Turner

Re: take a leaf from ARM

Isn't the process migration something the OS should be doing? AMD and Intel already shut down many bits of their CPUs (including whole cores) when they're not in use.

AMD are already doing that with their latest generation graphics cards, they're calling it 'ZeroCore'.

The problem with lots of small servers is the overhead. Even your dinky little ARM servers are going to be using some power all the time. Whereas in a virtual environment you'll have fewer servers so the base load of them sitting idle will be less. You can even shut down servers completely if the load isn't sufficient for them all to be running.

OCZ RevoDrive 3 X2 240GB PCI-E SSD

James Turner

Really the end of sata?

I'd say these PCIe flash cards merely reaffirm sata/sas, as they all seem to be made up of sata drives and a raid controller, it's just instead of a sata cable, it's a trace on the pcb.

HP frogmarches new Xeon, Opteron chips into ProLiants

James Turner

Re: New?

That was presumably the E5-2600 version of the DL360 Gen8 (which appear to have gained a p suffix), whereas these are DL360e Gen8 (note the different suffix).

Nice way to confuse people HP. At least Dell are giving their systems different numbers (their equivalents are R420 (E5-2400) and R620 (E5-2600).

Intel goes wide and deep with Xeon E5 assault

James Turner

Re: Intel thoroughly missing the point here

I don't think Intel are missing the point, they just see gaps in their line-up that need filling. (i.e. between single socket and a full-on dual socket, and between dual socket and their big E7 quad setup).

Intel cores are currently faster, clock for clock. For example, lets take anandtech's review of the E5-2600 ( http://www.anandtech.com/show/5553/the-xeon-e52600-dual-sandybridge-for-servers/ ). In that they take a simulated E5-2630 (6 cores, 2.3GHz) and they reckon it beats an Opteron 6276. Thats a $616 CPU beating a $788 CPU (list prices for both).

But still, the Opteron reaches futher down than the 2600 series does, so Intel knocked off a few of the extras to produce the 2400 series to compete with those. Likewise, the E7 is overkill for many where you just want 4 sockets-worth of ram and cpu, so bump up the E5 to fit there.

Browsium rescues HMRC from IE6 – and multimillion-pound bill

James Turner

Really a fix?

I may be wrong, but I was under the impression that these things are essentially still using IE6, but hiding it round the back. What happens when XP support goes? You're still stuck using components that MS aren't supporting, so you'll be stuffed in just the same way as soon as a bug comes up.

Cisco Nexus ports stretched to take 40GE and 100GE loads

James Turner

Indeed. They've typoed the name (It's a 6904 card, not a 6094). And the 44 ports is for a full 6913 chassis. It's 4 ports per card.

http://www.cisco.com/en/US/prod/collateral/switches/ps5718/ps708/data_sheet_c78-696623.html if you're into your hardware porn.

Chrome browser 'is becoming Number Two'

James Turner

Why would you assume that?

People have to go out and actively get Opera mini for their smartphones. Whereas the huge number of people waving iPhones about will all be using Safari by default.

Adobe rushes out emergency fix for critical bug in Flash

James Turner

They're only following in Apple's steps. You had noticed that as soon as Lion released, Apple stopped bothering with any more updates for Leopard? The last PPC-compatible version...

Apple finally purges Mac OS of disgraced DigiNotar certs

James Turner

There's a paper http://www.thoughtcrime.org/papers/ocsp-attack.pdf on how the protocol can be MITM attacked.

Rather than bandwidth usage, resource usage of the server running the OCSP service might be an issue if you get millions of requests. If it takes a while to respond, people will complain their browsing is slow (you're waiting for OCSP to respond before trusting the site). If it fails to respond at all, do you block access to the site? (That'll be disabled if people want to get to their stuff). Or allow access, risking people going to a site that shouldn't be trusted?

VMware taxes your virtual memory

James Turner

Re: Gun to the head

Are you actually maxing out the ram on all your hosts? As long as your VMs are collectively using less than 32GB x number of CPU sockets, your licences are good. If you're just over, you might be better buying a few additional Enterprise to get additional licences than upgrading to Enterprise Plus

AMD gets in Intel's grille with desktop Fusion rollout

James Turner

Sandy Bridge gaming

The problem for AMD, is the pricing of the new kit appears to be higher than for a basic Core i3. With the difference, you can buy yourself a nice discrete card as good as the integrated unit in AMD's APU.

So, a faster processor and similar graphics for the same money. Only if you absolutely have to have it integrated does AMD look a winner.

Intel charges premium for Xeon E7 scalability

James Turner

Re: AMD has them beat for Virtual Machines

Is that still the case? I know HT used to be a bit of a dog, but the current versions are much better.

VMware's vSphere best practices guide states "For the best performance we recommend that you enable hyper-threading".

Anandtech have some benchmarks from when Opteron 6100 and the Xeon 7500 were new and the Xeon was faster ( http://www.anandtech.com/show/3894/server-clash-dellr815/10 ).

If the E7 is faster still...

Seagate takes a terabyte of the storage apple

James Turner

Re:Hm?

The Western Digital drive is presumably a Scorpio Blue, which is a 5400rpm drive. The article is talking about this being the first 7200rpm 2.5" 1TB drive.

Cameron: Carriers tomorrow, bombers today

James Turner

The title is required, and must contain letters and/or digits.

There's a flight of Eurofighters permanently stationed on the Falklands now.

Mail on Sunday inadvertently bolsters annual smutfest

James Turner

Not Richard Desmond

It's the Express and the Star that are his papers.

Doesn't stop them being rubbish though :)

Microsoft throws Office 2010 at shoppers

James Turner

For ac.uk types

http://www.software4students.co.uk/default.aspx is what you want.

Broadband boss: 'The end of freeloading is nigh'

James Turner

Sustainable pricing

The suggestion of the article is that most of these providers are only 'happy' for you to download that much because most of their customers don't.

If everyone was maxing out their connections they might have to charge something closer to what BT Wholesale want.

Intel wants vintage x64 servers on rubbish heap

James Turner

Re: Imitation is the most sincere form of flattery

If you put it into the server chips, you start to make it more attractive to do your load balancing with nice cheap servers, rather than buying expensive black boxes from the aforementioned vendors.

If you want it on the desktop, buy a Core i5 (or a i7-980X).

Via may have had acceleration for a while, but Intel chips were probably still faster even without.

James Turner

Re: why?

The 8-core chips from Intel aren't entirely comparable. (aka Beckton, Nehalem-EX or Xeon 7500)

They're more akin to being a pair of 5500s in a single package. So they don't have all the architectural advantages of the 5600s.The other main difference is they use different sockets. 5600s go into boards that only take 2 processors, Beckton will go into 4-way and above.

Intel's redemos six-core Gulftown

James Turner
Jobs Halo

Mac Pros

Mac Pros use dual-socket Xeon 5500s, rather than the single-socket Core i7 line.

So the upgrade would be likely to be the dual-socket Xeon 56xx range rather than a i7-980X. Going from a pair of quad-cores to a single hex-core would normally be considered a downgrade.

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