* Posts by Duncan Robertson

5 publicly visible posts • joined 5 Feb 2009

Big Blue shipped Power6+ last fall

Duncan Robertson
Gates Halo

Makes perfect sense to me

IBM have done this in the past and it's all part of their "OnDemand" model - I think. We had an iSeries at a company I worked for and were sold on the fact that, if we wanted more power; simply call Big Blue and they'd send a wee update down the line to the machine to crank it up. Fantastic in the retail world where the bulk of your sales, and therefore processing, is at Christmas. The rest of the time, it all depended on whether Tricky Dicky in Merchandising was creating a desktop database or not... You know who you are!

Anyway, the reason you don't have one of these babies on your desktop running Crysis is cost and design. Sure you could run WinXP on a virtual machine on an i-, p- or probably even z-Series, however the machines are designed for out and out processing performance not 3D computation or multimedia. OLAP, OLTP, big database crunches are what they are good at: not replicating real-life environments through physics models.

The reason they aren't used more widely in the science and engineering world is that the software is not available for those sorts of applications. You can write C or even ForTran for an iSeries, so theoretically you can write applications for these sectors; it's just that nobody has really done it yet and to my knowledge.

Windows 7 gets built in XP mode

Duncan Robertson
Stop

@ Ian Davies

Mate, businesses that don't upgrade aren't being tight-fisted - more like cautious! If you have an application that cannot run under Vista/Win7 e.g. ERP, CAM or something else that interfaces with some legacy kit it may cost you hundreds of thousands even millions to upgrade or update. You cannot go passing comment like that from your ivory tower. Sharing your thoughts on your experience and knowledge of running a network full of MS Office processing folk that simply use Word and Outlook is not the basis for generalised comment and vindication of those of us that run a suite of disparate and complex applications.

Sheep ad not cruel, bleats Samsung

Duncan Robertson
Thumb Up

Funniest video in a long time

I thought this was the funniest video I have seen in a long time. Particularly struck a chord being a resident of North East Scotland - where men are men and sheep are scared!

Michael Dell licks chops over Bigger Indigo

Duncan Robertson
Pirate

Let's face it...

If you want reliability - go proprietary! It's always been the same, it always will be.

The Apple arguement of PC's always crashing and having buggy software is down to Apple being a proprietary box and the PC having to maintain compatability (backwards and forwards) with fairly loosely standard-compliant kit.

IBM's decent boxes are all based on Power chips and are hence proprietary. Yes, I know AiX is a bit of a bitch and AS/400 (iSeries) is a steep learning curve but they ARE great boxes.

Sun's SPARC architecture is great too - but again proprietary.

Surprised nobody mentioned HP's PA-RISC or DEC Alpha's... All good kit with their proponents, however, all proprietary and therefore expensive due to lower volume and ROI on the R&D to go up against Intel - whilst I am an AMD fan, I don't really consider them a player in the server space apart from x64 Opteron based kit and that isn't exactly high volume is it.

If you want cheap crap that you don't mind bouncing a few times a year - buy x86 Intel based kit.

If you want mission-critical, no need to IPL/bounce/shutdown whatever - buy proprietary. The downside is it will cost you.

Bottom-line is:

You get what you pay for!

Google's AOL stake walks the plank

Duncan Robertson
Gates Horns

Noooooo!

This will be the end to free coasters in the shape of AOL install CD's!

Oh well, confined to distant memory...

@Edwin - I wholeheartedly agree mate! I used to work from home and quality xDSL was a must-have.

However, I also feel that ALL xDSL should be quality rather than some of the muck on the market. Decent kit does go some way to a decent connection though!

Broadband HAS become a necessity rather than a luxury - think of all the things you can do online like tax the car, banking, supermarket shopping, etc. Some may think this trivial, however, when you live in a rural location and your nearest bank branch is 20 miles away, digital banking is a saviour.

Unfortunately, it is us rural folks that tend to get left behind in the infrastructure upgrades due to economies of scale. My village is enabled and I enjoy a nice 7.1 Mbit/s connection which is relatively uncontended due to the population being mostly ancient. However, this took me quite some time to campaign for and nigh on constant calls to our friends at BT. I shudder to think in what century I will have FTTH or FTTC! This latest report on "Digital Britain" seems to have missed the point entirely. 2 Mbit/s? Don't make me laugh! Once we all start pumping VOIP, TV, web browsing, streaming radio, VPN to work, etc. down our pipes, we'll need a little more than that Mr. Carter. You're the ones pushing us into this revolution, you're the ones that need to enable it. Cough up, lay fibre and the ROI WILL come. Think long term, not next week or election.