Posts by P. Lee

Didn't MS do something similar with the high-priority flag in IP? They turned it on permanently for Windows, thus destroying its purpose and spoiling it for everyone else?

Re: Why use Helion...

>Normal enterprises will be far better off with System Centre, or failing that then vCloud Director.

Perhaps, but this is HP running a cloud - the are looking for economies of scale, not costs which scale with usage. Given that they own the hardware too, performance shouldn't be an issue either. The aim of vertical integration is to cut the money going to other people.

Personally, I think I'd pour money into something like postgres on HP-ux. Get some of Oracle's business. The cloud is not reliable enough for it to be mission critical yet.

Re: Publishing the code?

Not just those who purchase but anyone who receives the bjnaries. I wonder if the missiles are linux powered too?. "I could give you the source code, but then I'd have to kill you."

Re: ARM

Surely the point of ARM is to avoid virtualisation - you make the chips cheap enough to ditch the complexity of virtualisation. There are a lot of people who want "always on; in the cloud" services but who need very little CPU. CDNs are a prime example. Also, (at least with vmware player) virtualisation turns idle CPUs into non-idle CPUs which are less power efficient. Perhaps the octo-core architecture is interesting, where processes are put on ultra-low-power cores when doing very little and migrated to faster cores on demand. Lower latency without having to load servers up so high you have to swap to disk could be a selling point.

With companies like Amazon and Google, just having a stick to beat Intel margins down with is probably reason enough to engage in such a project.

Re: My fondest gaming experiences have been two+ player:

Also, xScorch for turn-based multi-player.

Cow-race on Wii Play is just hilariously silly.

I think split-screen/multiscreen is where Valve should be going. There's a host of cheap/old games out there which could be run multiplayer on the same PC with a little bit of virtualisation and controller jiggerypokery. The thing about PC's is that its easy to change the config, whereas consoles are pretty much stuck.

Re: Premise is correct, conclusion is completely wrong

> The correct conclusion is: there is something seriously wrong with this definition of "productivity".

Too true. It appears he's following the economist/banker line of using "productivity" and "efficiency" to mean the productivity and efficiency of capital, not people- i.e. ROI. In the simplistic economist/macro view, people are just a "factor of production."

Thus, it is more "productive" to have 5 Chinese prison workers making a widget and ship the parts around the world, than it is to use 1 person and a machine.

Of course it is true that Australian wages are out of control, so in that sense, using people is particularly inefficient in Australia. Italian tomatoes shipped from the other side of the world are cheaper than Australian ones.

I suspect Oz is headed for a very uncomfortable late arrival at the GFC table. House prices are way out of control compared to salaries and salaries are out of control too.

Re: I call fake!

I hope even Asus could tell that there is no way she can see the screen at that angle. At best, she's showing her non-existent fingernails on to the webcam.

Re: Partly stating the obvious - SANs are I/O bound

+1

Over-enthusiastic pricing by vendors is partly to blame. It costs so much you have to spread the cost between machines. Ironically, it costs so much because you've tried to cater for so many VMs, loading on management features.

Re: What happened?

I didn't know Mr Rabbit was a member of the ACC or that the ACC was part of the flat earth society.

Or are you just spamming hate?

In other news, organizations seek more power and politicians interfere.

Re: Right, so ...

I suspect the way they want to achieve additional eyes is to simplify and normalise the code style to what is currently considered good practise and to get rid of cruft.

By forking/starting a new project, you get permission to break things and lose features because you aren't impacting existing users and refactoring the code is one way to get to grips with it and will involve some auditing on its own. This is probably a better way to go than to do a massive revision in the existing package, since there is still a good chance of breaking things.

Re: Fake sceince science too

> Correct, but science is peer-reviewed.

Just like the openssl code...

Nature reckons that 70% of what they publish turns out to be rubbish. That's an awful lot of science in one of the premier publications which just isn't true. If if we know 70% is wrong and only 51% are unsure if you're right, you've got much more support than you should expect.

As it is, didn't Hawking talk about the big bang as "before the laws of physics were formed"? In my book, that means it doesn't have to conform to physical laws - it's "supernatural." How is a physicist going to tell you what went on after he admits that its outside his field of expertise? That sounds like religion to me.

Re: Not exactly

Sometime compute performance is not the over-riding issue. That's one reason why ARM has done so well in the mobile space - its very efficient at doing very small amounts of work or nothing at all.

While virtualisation is still all the rage, virtualisation provides in-house techies with something similar to heartbleed - RAM you thought was private is not.

Compliance can be an issue with PCI-DSS-type scenarios - you have to run different functions on different hosts - you aren't allowed to virtualise, so lots of smaller hosts are required.

Another issue with virtualisation is that most servers are now overpowered for any given application. In that case, why not drop back to a less powerful and cheaper CPU. Now we are trying to consolidate to justify the cost of systems which we only bought to aid consolidation. Spreading out the workload also drops the cost of networking if you can get back down to 1G network ports rather than 10G/40G switching. If you need 10G, all well and good, but that's not usually a single app requirement.

Then of course you have the issue that an virtual CPU which is idling doesn't translate to the real CPU idling. Virtualising workloads works best when you are actually doing useful work.

Some applications can't just be given more CPU. I saw a Dell paper on running 4 VMs with lync instances on a single host, because lync doesn't scale linearly. I believe Asterisk is similar. In that case, why bother adding virtualisation costs - why not run on individual hosts?

Then there are tasks which are memory- or network-bound rather than CPU-bound, or perhaps there's an instance where latency is more important that CPU throughput.

It may not be just the customers who want ARM. Companies like HP would far rather take a larger slice of the profit than give it to Intel. Stack-em-high plays like Moonshot bring lots of price-advantage to one box. You probably won't run a database on it, but DC-based (or branch-office equipment room-based) desktops are a different matter.

It is also early days for 64-bit ARM yet. We've seen a lot of Intel laptops go from quad-core to dual-core in the last year or so. CPUs are now a bit excessive and SSD and RAM have proved more useful. Perhaps Compute per Watt is no longer a useful measure in this scenario.

Re: @ Don Jefe - @Grikath

> Religion in Northern Ireland is purely used to provide a post hoc justification for the oppression of one group of people by another.

+5 To Insight

Constantine was already at war before his "conversion." Europeans were quite happily killing each other long before they were "Christian." Christianity was used as a justification in Europe for the wars the rulers indulged in despite Jesus himself is quoted as saying, "My kingdom isn't of this world" when asked if he was angling to be the next king of Israel. Trying to "take the holy land" in his name seems to have missed the point somewhat.

Despite the "christian" appellation taken Bush, Blair & co, there is nothing Christ-like in their Middle Eastern adventuring or their domestic policies - it's just the politics of greed.

Of course some religions do have violence written into their DNA - either through their theology or the behaviour of their founders. Other religions have gods who behave like people with super-powers. They don't really engender better behaviour nor do they offer any hope of justice, mercy or an answer to the problem of death.

It appears to me that the focus on the word of God drove literacy in Europe - initially among the monks/monasteries then universities, driving maths, science (history), unraveling the mysteries - which gave us far more efficient ways of killing each other. It turns out we are all tainted by badness - no-one is perfect. What we need is someone to demonstrate how to beat death and give us a compelling logical reason to be nice to each other. That sounds like a worthy goal.

Re: I'll just leave this here...

> http://theoatmeal.com/comics/game_of_thrones

Ha! A true classic. Although it somewhat misses the point. Shakespear's plays had some inherent meaning and point - you go to see a play for the play's content. The theatre understands this an allows a one-off purchase.

GoT is a advertising for HBO's cable. The whole point is to drive you to a cable subscription which you would not otherwise have. HBO knows you don't want a cable subscription so it tries to find something you do want and then makes you buy lots of extra stuff to get it.

Re: Erm...

> Or you could, you know, use a LAN cable...

Yes, that would give you full duplex too. However, think about an enclosed space without precise electrical contacts - e.g. put a phone on a charging cradle and a little LED in the cradle talks to the phone - no breakable USB cable connection (or RJ45 clip / optical connector) required, no interference from the wireless charging device.

Or my favourite idea - magsafe-type network connectors. No need for precision laser fibre connections, just an LED and a receiver in a reasonable dark little box.

Re: Thats the problem

> With laws

In England, the set up is that everything not forbidden is allowed, though I understand its often the other way around in foreign parts.

Actually the UK is getting much worse with overly broad laws apparently specifically designed to ensure that everyone breaks the law and then the powers that be can just pick and chose whom to prosecute.

I guess it goes back to "is it a feature or a bug?" It looks like a deliberate breach of privacy policy to me! ;)

Re: Damned if you do..

> Who knows, she may actually KNOW something about security!

Awww! How quaint!

Appointed for her security expertise and absolutely not because she has friends in high places and know who needs in government and industry needs to be given a free lunch.

Re: An old dog

> A HUGE number of projects & designs do not need even as powerful as the Pi,

Indeed, but I think that's the point of the original poster. It looks as though this design is to increase chip density. RPi's are useful for the places you can put them, not compute density. If you need compute density, this isn't the chip you are looking for.

OTOH, it might just be about repackaging to provide better IO or the start of a standard ARM CPU interface (I jest :) ). Here's Pi v2. When Pi v3 comes out, swap the DIMM or pop an octo-core +GPU on a DIMM and insert.

Re: Because they didn't believe in it

> f you have FOSS you can just continue to support it yourself, and you automatically pool your efforts with everybody else still using that software.

That rather assumes that your replacement software is FOSS too, not just proprietary on top of FOSS.

If you can't recompile, you'll run into the same issues as XP end of support.

I find it so inconvenient whenever I hit proprietary licenses - it pushes IT into all sorts of contortions to try to minimise costs. I've a project to run a couple of internet-facing sFTP Servers in an MS shop. Haha!, you want how much for a server OS and how much for patch management? Its really low throughput but we need dedicated HA through-out, so double the ftp servers, double the AD servers for authentication, network management servers. It's all for a function which could run a couple of atoms in terms of throughput. It's just madness!

Re: Cheap NAS controller?

No, NAS without drives aren't at all cheap - at least probably not cheap enough to make a big impact on the home market.

I might be more interested if there were 8 sata ports on there. Call me a luddite, but SATA 1 would be fine, still faster than any of my spinning disks. Dual Gig Ethernet too please.

Still no temptation to shut down the core2 in the garage.

I predict some more fail. Still not cheap enough for a throw-away device and not enough features for a server. I suspect the same problem as MS with RT vs FullFatWindows: they don't want to cannibalise their market.

Re: Mr. Trevor Pott's analysis is correct

> they want world domination.

Too true. I doubt the issue is profitability of XP and associated support programmes. I suspect the real issue is ecosystem upgrade. You need W7 for Outlook 2013 which needs Windows Server X which means Lync needs an upgrade and sharepoint. If XP doesn't need upgrading, none of the rest happens either.

As far as W8 goes, it was an attempt to ram the windows mobile interface into the marketplace by leveraging the desktop. The XP drop dead date is there to force upgrades to the new interface in the hope they will pick up new mobile market-share as people get used to it.

Then there is the problem of mono-culture - from MS' point of view, the lack of it. XP and W8 aren't all compatible (despite "compatibility mode") MS doesn't want dev's to have to code for multiple Windows platforms nor do they want new features OS features to be ignored as dev's seek to provide a common experience across all platforms. Even worse would be devs deciding that something like QT provides a better way to do apps which cross Windows (and other OS) platforms than native apps. With OSX, IOS and Android eating away at consumer GUI mindshare, MS has problems in almost every direction.

Then there is the obvious - why just get paid for maintenance when you can slap a new GUI on and call it a new OS?

The W8 thing must really hurt. A failed mp3 player is one thing, but an OS that no-one wants is a shock to their core business.

None of this is to say that MS is dying, but they do have a lot to lose and as PC's continue to be replaced by more appropriate mobile form factors, MS knows it has to do something to break out of the traditional business desktop, and they need to do it quickly before ARM chips move up-market into PC-class devices.

Re: Head to head

Nice. But legal?

Any dlls brought across from a windows installation?

Re: EOF

I humbly propose anti-social, with "anti" in the earlier Greek meaning: in front of, in the place of, in opposition to, real-life social activity.

So if you use skype to reach those on the other side of the world, that's social. If you use skype to IM your spouse in the next room because you're too lazy to go and see them, that's anti-social.

I may have the wrong meaning there, but this is the internet - someone will correct me.