Posts by John Riddoch
166 posts • joined Monday 12th January 2009 17:30 GMT
Possibly - I avoided the iPhone at the start because it was tied to O2/Cellnet which I'd moved from due to crap reception. If it had been unlocked/available on Vodafone I'd have snapped one up and probably been a convert from the get-go. As it is, by the time it was available all over, the hype had died down and I wound up on Android.
Re: I believe...
"Curvy is Pervy"
"Bendy is Trendy"
It depends if HTC asked/pressured ST for it specifically, but yeah, ST should be feeling some heat from Nokia as well, certainly I'd be surprised if many tech firms trusted them to build kit for them for some time.
Re: lol
Power 7 is 8 cores per socket, so you're getting double the number of cores in a T5-2 vs a 2 socket Power 7 system. Of course, performance isn't just about core count so it'll depend how each platform runs your workloads. I suspect Power 7 would blast single threaded workloads better, the T5-2 would chew up multi threaded apps better.
Also, who ever pays list price? Cost comparisons will depend on how much you can barter down Oracle & IBM against each other...
Core performance on the M5 should be far better than the T5 systems; it's got much more L3 cache per chip (48MB vs 8MB), fewer cores (6 vs 16) so a massive boost to L3 cache per core (8MB vs 0.5MB). Obviously, you need more of them to match the T5 equivalent system for raw compute capability, but anything which is memory intensive will prefer the M5 boxes.
Re: Hmm...
Depends on your use case. If your backup strategy is "rebuild from build server on fail", you don't care about Networker, Netbackup or whatever. The Hyperscale model is to have 100s of small servers, backing them all up individually would be a pain.
Re: Excellent
A lot of it could be geography - The US has a lot of wide open spaces where a falling payload won't cause any more damage than a few broken twigs, but the UK is a bit more cramped. Add in the fact that predicting where the payload might go and ensuring it doesn't end up somewhere inaccessible (e.g. in the North Sea, up a mountain, etc) is a bit harder.
Finally, let's add in that there are lot more US kids than UK kids so it only makes sense we hear more of them having fun & playing with this kind of tech.
To look at the numbers another way:
The laptop market is more mature. Many people who want/need a laptop already have one, hence they aren't selling so well.
The Tablet market is new & growing, so people who want them have to buy them rather than make do with an older one as they don't have an older one.
Give it a year and we'll see how the numbers run as everyone who needs/wants a tablet has one and you only get the newcomers & upgraders.
That said, it does seem as if tablets are taking over. Most people don't need anything more as they're just browsing the web, email & some light games. Given the cost of games on tablets (free-£3 in most cases), it's a cheaper proposition than a PC with £30+ games the norm.
WTF?
'It's also simple to find married people who "liked" prostitutes'
Er, seriously? The mind boggles:
First, that prostitutes have Facebook pages (I can see the status update - "OMG, got the clap!!!! lololol!!!! Best get yourselves checked out, boys!")
Second, that a married man would be insane enough to "like" one of their pages, given that would be visible to anyone on his friends list (and probably some not on his friends list).
Re: Remember...
Glad some of you got the reference :)
I did spend some enjoyable time re-acquainting myself with Badvoc, Aulus et al on 4oD a while back.
"They call me Mungo the evasive"
"Why's that then?"
"Who wants to know?"
Re: Not in the UK I don't think.
Jason 7 has the point - the PS3 is massive in the far East and Xbox reach is negligible in comparison. My guess is the Japanese "buy local" and get PS3 (or possibly Nintendo) and don't bother with that American thing. Not so sure why Brits go for Xbox, though.
Remember...
Bendy is trendy...
Re: 3G
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/727831.stm - £22.47bn ($35.4bn) - back in 2000.
See also http://www.ofcom.org.uk/static/archive/spectrumauctions/auction/auction_index.htm for some good olde schoole website design :)
Re: AltaVista.digital.com
Yup, Altavista was pretty much guaranteed to give you 5 porn links in the top 10, no matter what you were searching for. If you added "-sex" to the search, you might get a better set of results, but it wasn't great. Unfortunately, it was still one of the better search engines at the time until Google raised the bar on search quality.
Ewww....
"Subsequently however legal action was taken by an investor against a bunch of HPers over the handling of the Autonomy buy, and named as a defendant was among other hapless Apotheker, who until now maintained a silent vigil."
That sentence needs taken out and shot so it's put out of our misery. I've had to read that about 5 times and I'm still having to make assumptions about what it's actually supposed to mean.
Re: Niggardly?!
Wasn't there a US senator accused of racism when he used the word "niggardly"? Some googling also finds this - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Controversies_about_the_word_%22niggardly%22
So, in short, the word shouldn't be controversial, but never underestimate human stupidity.
Re: "Environmental Impact "
"Vast portions of the oceans are desserts"
I think we need more information here. What are we talking about, Jelly & Ice Cream? Cheescake? Sticky Toffee Pudding? Inquiring minds need to know, the mining possibilities are endless!
Posted in Review: Apple iMac 21.5in late 2012
Er, what???
So, if your hard drive fails (which they're known to do...), you now have a very pretty (but very expensive) 21.5" paperweight/doorstop because you can't swap out the drive? That's bloody moronic, even for Apple.
I've never liked the all in one design anyway, I've got a monitor I've had for many years and has been passed between various PC's & laptops over time rather than having to be chucked out because the CPU is too old or a hard drive failed.
Re: Err, once again I misread it for Linda (Lovelace)...
"the idea of a Linda Lovelace programming language might appeal to a lot of us"
Yeah, but you know it would suck...
Re: Oldtimer alert!
Solaris used to have the tunefs snippet, long since excised unfortunately.
I seem to recall old versions of emacs having man pages for some odd subjects like "sex" and possibly "condom" - haven't used emacs in years so can't tell if they're still there.
Other fun error codes - does the linux kernel still have the "printer on fire" error? ISTR it was for a return code which would never occur....
I was thinking similar thoughts. Most of the advantages of the mainframe listed are enforceable on Unix, Linux or even Windows servers with sufficient political will. The difficulty is that *nix & Windows admins/users aren't used to such controls and would balk and the kind of barriers that mainframe methodologies put in your way.
Re: nexus device
Hahahahahahaha!! It took them until August to get 4.0 onto UK Xooms, even though it had been out in the US for about 6 months by then.
I'll probably look at rooting mine once it's out, the multi-profiles would mean I could share it with the other half if she wants to borrow it. Worth noting that the multi-profile support is a key benefit on Android, iPads don't do it yet, wouldn't surpise me if that's deliberate to ensure households have to buy multiple devices...
Films /never/ make a profit, at least for as long as anyone gets paid on a % of profits. Anyone entering into such a deal now needs to be very careful about what is allowable in terms of costs or they're stupid. Far easier/better to demand a share of takings which can't be massaged into a loss.
Cost estimates...
'It also admitted on the £1.8bn price tag that it was "difficult to estimate costs with precision over the long term"'
So, a typical government IT project, then? What's the bets they spend £5bn in 5 years and deliver 3/4 of feck all?
Re: Exchange rate?
$2000 is roughly £1250 at current exchange rates. 20% VAT pushes that to £1500, so there's a 33% markup on UK..
Posted in Red Hat pumps up Enterprise Linux to 6.3
*snigger*
"Like so many things in the computer biz, it lies." all too true...
Yes, Minister
I'm reminded of Yes, Minister:
Sir Humphrey: "Tax fiddles?"
Sir Desmond: "Well, they placed their own interpretation on Treasury regulations. Someone has to interpret them."
Sir Humphrey: "What about the Treasury's interpretation?"
Sir Desmond: "It didn't seem appropriate."
Depends if it's anything like New Town in Edinburgh - they steadfastly refuse to have any kind of bin on the street because it would spoil the place. So, instead, bags are left out. Which the gulls pick over and spread the garbage all over the pavement.
Admittedly, in Edinburgh's case, it is a Unesco Heritage site and they usually use the threat of losing that to prevent any kind of progress. There's pretty much zero double glazing in Edinburgh centre due to the planning regs.
Overused term...
The word "cloud" has been co-opted by so many disparate applications & uses that it ceases to have much meaning. Virtual web hosting, the likes of which I used 10 years ago would now be called "cloud web hosting" or something, your VMWare farm in your DC is now your "private cloud".
It's not so much cloud computing I dislike, it's the rampant drive to put the "cloud" label on anything and everything because it's hip & trendy. Then of course you get IT managers desperate to get on the bandwagon because it gives them something to talk about on the golf course, never mind if the strategy makes sense (to be clear - sometimes it makes perfect sense, other times it doesn't).
In this, at least, I can agree with Larry...
Re: Prohibited
Not entirely - the use of the term "Summer 2012" may be taken to indicate an association with the olympics, but not necessarily - "the 2006 Act specifies certain 'Listed Expressions' and states
that a court may take these into particular account".
So, if you have a "Summer 2012 sale" in your shop, that's probably OK provided you don't make it look as if it's related to the olympics.
Re: Thank you, El Reg, for introducing me to...
The Scots version is "stushie" with broadly the same meaning...
Interesting parallel in some ways. I still think Sun's flip-flopping over x86 support cost it. I still think Sun could have saved their Unix biz by investing in a solid, scalable x86-64 platform with decent RAS features and plonking Solaris x86 onto it. Bringing some of their RAS/scalability expertise to Intel or AMD would help get the chips into a better state while drawing on the ever increasing clock speeds & compute power they brought but SPARC under-delivered on.
They'd keep their SPARC business ticking over on life support for those that couldn't/wouldn't move until people migrated to Solaris on x86 which is still less of a wrench than moving to AIX, HP-UX or Linux on any platform.
On the flip side, HP already had two hardware platforms out there (we still have a bunch of PA-RISC servers chugging away as well as some Itanium kit) and adding a third wouldn't go down well in some quarters.
WRT the legal disputes, I'm waiting for the evidence to be revealed in the trial to find out what's really going on (or at least most of it) - at the moment, it's two spoilt children repeating "he said this" "he said that" "wah, wah, wah!"
Depending on battery life...
this just might be my next phone - contract on the HTC Desire is just about up and this is looking like a new standard.
Posted in Ten... two-bay Nas boxes
Re: Green Power
That's why I bought a NAS box - I worked out the hardware outlay would save me enough money in power bills within about 18months to justify going for the NAS over a recycled PC in the corner, particularly as my old PCs were fairly power hungry being ex-gaming rigs.
I'm tempted to get a Raspberry Pi with two USB drives to replace it, though; the downside is the disk performance over USB is likely to suck and the added power draw for the drive enclosures won't help.
Re: A large Investment bank I talked to
LDOMs would be fine, but requires the tin to run Solaris 10 natively. If T5 doesn't run Solaris 10 natively, you're still SOL unless vendors support Solaris 10 branded containers on Solaris 11.
Re: Just Goes to Show...
Nostalgia was better in our day!
Re: "follows a particular digital path"
The fact that "ordinary online users had still found this content" suggests it wouldn't be simply typing in www.example.com/kiddieporn, rather more likely to be "visit pages in this order then click link X". This could use cookies, session IDs or simply dynamic pages based on Referrer: headers to set up the "breadcrumbs".
Reminds me of the port knocking security method in a way.
Posted in Chrome beats IE market share for one day
Re: "Chrome catching IE slowly"?
Firefox portable may be partly the reason - work users on locked down desktops can still run Firefox rather than IE without admin rights just by using the portable version of Firefox. Installing Chrome requires (I believe) admin rights. This would allow users to have Firefox at work & home more easily.
Posted in Apple iPad 3 Sim-only contracts compared
Someone needs a dictionary...
"Unlimited Wi-fi" and "limited to 10GB/month" are contradictory. If you're putting a limit on something, surely it's false advertising to call it "unlimited"?
Re: This guy again?
Yup, I remember uuencode/decode - when it worked, I found it really neat but by $DEITY, it could be finicky and broke regularly. Some mail clients could handle uuencode fairly well (ISTR Eudora did an OK job of it), but MIME mail clients worked far more reliably in my experience.
When the system was announced, I reckoned the system could be made to fly and do some really cool stuff, but would take the programmers some time to adjust to the mindset. My expectation was that PS3 games would technically lag Xbox for a year or 2 before taking the lead.
The main issue is that if something is difficult, people generally won't do it. When you add in cross-platform games (Xbox/PS3/PC), you want to generate as little custom coding as possible and keep the app as similar as possible across all 3 platforms. Coding to take advantage of the power of the Cell CPUs runs counter to that approach.
Microsoft were actually fairly clever in a marketing sense by making the Xbox run DirectX - they had a massive pool of devlopers ready made for the platform who already knew how to use and exploit the platform.
And the crux of the matter: "Proview hopes to use the IPAD trademark to extract cash from Apple" - the most honest assessment of the court case yet :)
Re: Leap years
Seriously? You'd think people might realise leap years exist, they've only been around for a few centuries after all... The confusion around 2000 being a leap year was vaguely understandable as the rules about centuries are marginally more obscure, but even then...
Re: Do people *really* not go and read these things?
"Patent examiners are not thick" - I beg to differ. These are the same examiners who signed off the patent for sideways swinging. Your "good reason" for granting a payment comes down to two facts:
- The patent examiners have a bias towards authorising patents and letting the courts sort out the mess later
- The patent office gets a fee for every patent accepted
Whether this is a valid patent or not will end up decided in the courts as ever, not on el Reg.
Posted in Oracle extends Linux support to 10 years
Re: RHEL6 & Oracle Products
More to the point, they haven't certified any of their products against OEL 6.x. Oracle are shipping an OS which doesn't run any of their product set...
I've heard a speculation that there's some bug in RHEL/OEL 6.x which breaks Oracle products, there was apparently something in the gcc compiler in the early RHEL 5.x days which got fixed in 5.2 and it /may/ be similar. Of course, this is all speculation and it could simply be corporate incompetence/laziness.
Obviously they wouldn't pick guys for this... http://xkcd.com/779/
Virgin media did something similar, I think they were trying to get me to upgrade to 100Mb broadband. Told them I wasn't going to give personal information to them as I didn't know who they were. "But I really am from Virgin" wasn't sufficient...
There was one company which was pretty good; you gave them a bit of info (e.g. two characters from a password), they confirmed it and gave you another bit, thus setting up the 2-way trust. Can't remember who it was, might have been Amex.
Lloyds TSB do some of it
Lloyds text me every time I use my card abroad; not entirely what you're after, but it's something. They don't charge for this service.
Er, what?
"but it hadn't really examined the need for the devices or how they should be used." - so they went out to buy a pile of expensive kit without any plans for what to do with them or even ascertain if they were required? Sorry, but that kind of process needs someone to get a good kicking.
