Posts by Mike Timbers
27 posts • joined Wednesday 12th March 2008 13:16 GMT
Re: Fastest?
Then you need to negotiate harder with Oracle. Their position on hardware cores and VM's that are not based on Oracle VM is untenable when challenged. And in my experience they will back down every time to avoid providing ammunition to the likes of VMWare who will call restraint of trade if they could only get the evidence.
I moved large amounts of databases to bigger hardware using VMs and paid Oracle no extra money.
Social enterprise is not Facebook/Twitter
The Social Enterprise is not about using a Facebook site or Twitter for communicating internally. This is about using products like Yammer or Chatter to have a private internal social networking capability to allow an easy "stream of consciousness" update on what people are working on, what they have seen elsewhere that's relevant to work, what they need to know but don't know where or who to ask. It solves one of the problems that most companies have of carp intranet sites that are still Web 1.0 with no investment or interaction. Social Enterprises relocate communication from email (which is or should be to a closed group and therefore non-inclusive) to a noticeboard-type approach where anyone can ask a question or publish something interesting to anyone who wants to answer it or know about it.
It's not about publishing the pictures of who you did last night! And it's not spying.
Re: I kid you not
The vast unwashed majority of the minority who have been getting problems will just write them off as "Innernet stuff".
Of the minority who bother to check the forums, the majority will see something is being done and do nothing believing it will eventually get fixed and hence, stop worrying about it.
Of the minority of the minority who want to do something about it, a further minority not scared by technology will install Wireshark.
What's the problem with that?
Olivetti M21
Anyone remember these?
http://www.frontier-electronics.co.za/images/old_olivetti2_.jpg
Basically an M24 with a tiny CRT built in with the keyboard forming the front of the case when being transported. 15KG "laptop"!
g=c800:5 anyone?
Posted in So, what IS the worst film ever made?
Grease 2
Not even Michelle Pfeiffer could save it. Does it save the film that at one point (Michelle singing to her presumed dead ero who is visualised all in white standing atop a pile of (white) smashed-up motorbikes surrounded by (white) clouds) I fell out of my chair laughing?
No, I don't think so.
A bit late to expect a delviery then, to be blunt!
Expecting to get a near-Christmas delivery slot with five days notice shows an unrealistic expectation in my opinion. Christmas slots open on the 1st December and are usually gone by the end of that day. Regular shoppers are aware of this and ensure their order is placed by lunchtime on the 1st.
As for the rest, re-opening an order and failing to re-checkout releases the slot to be grabbed by some other lucky punter.
The supermarkets online operations are all over-subscribed at Christmas. This is not a failure in the IT but in the fulfilment that simply cannot flex vans for one or two days in the way IT can flex some servers.
Separately, mixing the two stories into a single one is disingenuous. The comments about Fortnums might lead on to believe that Sainsburys suffered from load issues which it did not. This year's Christmas rush was nothing on last year's that coincided with the snow.
Posted in Do we really want 100Gig Ethernet?
That happened to me too!
Yes, I remember early Ethernet, when TCP/IP was an add-on to Xenix and Excelan cards cost £800. Arcnet was great but yes, the terminators being different was a royal PITA.
IPX was easy until I got a batch of cheap NICs where two had the same MAC address.
And Thick-net was fine once drop-cables became cheap enough that my boss didn't force me to make them by hand with soldering iron in hand!
SNORT
Sir,
You owe me a new laptop. My lunch is now all over it!
FWIW, the DVLA clearly knew what it said when they sold the plate for £399 but they are entitled to change their minds I suppose. Words do change their meanings over time. It's now OK to sell clothes labelled FCUK but consider how rude it is to call someone a lawyer or worse, a banker!
HP did it to their customers with neoview
HP conveniently forget how they left customers high and dry when they dropped Neoview.
RLL/ESDI
debug
g=c800:5
God I feel old!
SCO Games
The early version sof SCO Unix (just after the name changed from Xenix386) included a diskette of Games, one of which was the magnificant Ularn. Despite being a qualified Xenix engineer (1989!) Ularn is the only positive thing I have to say about SCO.
Enterprise Apps
I don't know what Enterprise apps you're talking about, but most large-scale enterprises run applications which are massively multi-user where single-threaded performance is unnecessary. Do Java apps need single-threading? Try running a J2EE ecommerce app sometime and watch how fast Niagaras (even T1s) can blaze through jsp's.
can't be done
There are systems that look for high points; if a cashier did that, it would very quickly be spotted and is a sacking offence. The cashiers know not to try this.
Why bring the banks into this?
Why do people insist on blaming the banking crisis for the current cuts? We spend (note the present tense) more on public services than we earn in taxation. We can't keep doing that or no-one will lend us the money to bridge the difference.
So we have to spend less.
Or tax more.
Given all the stories about waste I know which one of those two options I would prefer.
Act of God, apparently
So the airlines are apparently claiming this as an Act of God and any passengers on cancelled flights will have to pay again!
Posted in Xerox Phaser 6125
Cartridge life expectancy
I'd love to know how long one of these expects to last in a home environment where printing is not particularly high volume. Where many inkjets fall over is how quickly a cartridge dries out leaving page yields in a home scenario extremely low and therefore expensive. In theory, a laser shouldn't suffer from this but is that really true?
Posted in Dell Nehalem men badmouth your servers
9 down to one is great until it fails
No-one is going to compress 9 servers doww to one! 9 down to two each one of which is capable of taking the nine VMs if one physical server fails, maybe, but not nine down to one.
And if we must talk TCO again, what about the TCO of the new hardware, compared to a fully-depreciated 9 old boxes? What about the cost ot the VMWare or equivalent? Or the new skills required and the increased salaries of these increased-skills staff? Or the maintenance impact when 9 business services go down simultaneously because a VMWare patch needs applying?
Don't believe the hype!
No hackers here!
"OcUK is a hybrid hardware hacker enthusiast site and online computer kit reseller"
Any posts about "hacker" activity or warez software are immediately deleted! Where does the "hacker" allegation come from!
Government-sponsored gibberish
Sorry, but has no-one heard of multi-threading? Has anyone looked at what processors like CUDA-compatible PhysX or Sun T1/T2s can do when given massively parallel tasks? Tried running a J2E app on Niagara? Or SAP on an M9000? I cry "Bullshit!" and wish I could get a government grant to write gibberish
IT is not the problem for retailers
For big and small retailers the biggest issue is re-pricing on products and shelves. In a supermarket there may be as many as 50,000 products that need re-pricing both on the shelf and the individual items. Doing that at Christmas when every supermarket is already over-worked is madness.
In addition, the 2.5% cut is not particularly noticeable on an item-by-tem basis whereas giving every customer a 2.5% discount at the till gives them a clear picture of how much the government has knocked off their shopping.
But the retailers are being told to change their prices instead of giving a discount.
Posted in Beeb to resurrect Reggie Perrin
What's wrong with simply showing the original!
Why do people like this need to remake things? The original show could just be repeated. Yes, there are a few things that date the show - dictating letters to a secretary has sadly long stopped - but the mind-numbing tedium of his daily commute and repetitive day is a reality for most of us. CJ and his garbled cliches, the twerps with their "Great! Super!" double-act, Doc Morrissey, etc. It's all still valid and doesn't need an also-ran comic actor like Clunes who can't hold a candle to Leonard Rossiter.
Posted in Sun gives servers an Opteron quad job
Sun has serious reliability issues?
Care to provide actual data on that? I have a shed-load of both T1 and Opteron servers running constantly at high load and have had very limited hardware issues with them.
One huge disadvantage of Web2.0 is that comments like the first one are permitted without having to provide any accompanying evidence!
Posted in BOFH: On the brink
SCO Engineer here
Certified (1989) SCO Xenix Engineer here. It's very sad to see what has happened to SCO because the product was actually very good until they bought the rights from Novell and tried to make it all-singing all-dancing. As a multi-user platform for application deployment it worked very well and was extremely reliable. It was a damn sight easier to install than AIX on 6150s with the endless set of 5¼" diskettes.
But why anyone would buy it today or even three years ago is a complete mystery.
Oh, and I bought Warp when it came out too!
(There's an awful lot of very old techies commenting on this story)
Some of us were kidding.
I wasn't. Publicly audible John-Denver-Karaoke clearly justifies mass homicide. It's lucky for my neighbours that guns are hard to get in blighty.
everyone who is a jackass deserves to die?
It's one solution to over-population...
They had it coming...
From what I've seen on the Thai news stations, the local people are agricultural workers who go to bed and wake up with the sun. This doctor bought a house just for parties - she didn't live there - and these parties disturbed the neighbours' sleep which costs them money. The police wouldn't do anything because the doctor was "more important" than farmers. The killer had repeatedly complained about the noise and in a country where guns are not hard to get, you can justifiably argue that the dead had it coming.
