Posts by theblackhand
130 posts • joined Thursday 1st October 2009 12:56 GMT
Re: Just blame BP
I believe there is a Hollywood film about to be released showing Britain subcontracting patrolling of the Atlantic during WW2 to the Germans so it is likely that BP or at least Britain was responsible.
Fortunately, there is a surprise twist at the end and America saves the day....
This film is hailed by US critics as being the most historically accurate film Hollywood has ever produced about WW2.
Re: So how do you break the subject to a 5 year old?
You can't teach 5-year old's sex education! It's immoral!
Can't we just teach them some things are good and some things are bad and they shouldn't do the bad stuff?
If the politicians don't have to qualify what is good and bad, why should I?
Should I add a disclaimer that I'm not being serious or is it sufficiently obvious - I guess the down votes will tell...
elaar Re: I'm going
Re: performance. It was my experience.
I had BT for around 3 years using the first version of the Home Hub and I was quite happy with the performance at 10Mbps/1Mbps. BT upgraded their exchanges which resulted in 2-3 days loss of service for me on 3 separate occasions over the course of 3 months and I moved to Sky.
Sky gave me a new router and I've had 16Mbps/1Mbps ever since.
In all likelihood the same Sky router used on a BT line would yield the same result but from a service perspective, I saw a difference.
Re: I'm going
My opinion?
Talk Talk - poor performance, terrible customer service, cheap
Sky - free with Sky package, poor customer service, pretty good (16Mbps/1Mbps) DSL performance
BT - expensive, poor customer service, average (10Mbps/1Mbps) DSL performance
If you are going to get poor customer service, why pay for it?
I can understand Be customers who were used to good customer service and business support being upset by the company being sold, but as the price people pay for their Internet connections continues to fall, smaller companies that provide niche services will find more profit in selling their user base than continuing to operate if they are just re-selling BT Wholesale products.
Re: Smoke and mirrors
As a listed company, they freely provide all of this information.
It should be here:
http://corporate.sky.com/the_bigger_picture/reporting/ourperformance/financial
A cached version is here:
http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:RSf8rtRWOBwJ:corporate.sky.com/the_bigger_picture/reporting/ourperformance/financial+&cd=4&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=uk&client=firefox-a
Approx £330m of taxes borne. Profits before tax at £1148m.
Approx. £1086m of taxes collected by Sky. No figures provided for the cost of collecting the tax.
Really?
I'm expecting marketing people to come up with 5G/6G/7G/8G/9G etc phones for the conceivable future. There will be slight feature differences (i.e. 6G phones will have a picture of the company CEO mooning people while facing left etched in a microdot while 7G phones will have the CEO facing right etched in a microdot....) but will perform close to identically for end users....
The only reason for ending the mindless drivel will be:
a) consumers stop falling for it
b) something even better comes along
Re: Strokes big fat pussy and laughs.
He had a similar systems upgrade issue - his key systems were outdated and unable to provide the plans for world domination that he needed.
Unfortunately (or fortunately, depending on your point of view), he used <insert which ever consulting firm you dislike the most> and he has been unable to do any evil for the last 30-odd years.
Re:Requiring custom ASIC's
Google "10GbE Merchant Silicon" - most vendors are already using off-the-shelf ASIC's to avoid the time-to-market delays of creating your own.
Regarding the software - these switches are designed to provide the large scale data plane for your OpenFlow/SDN to manage. It won't be as fully featured as a comparative enterprise switch, but it probably has all the features that a typical data centre actually uses....
Re: Arista is already doing it
Replace "server with a multi-port NIC" with a custom Broadcom switching ASIC that does all the heavy lifting and a suitable (at present x86) CPU running some form of Linux for management functions and you have almost all of the 10/40/100GbE switches on the market covered with only a few exceptions (Cisco have their own custom ASIC's but increasingly rely on other vendor ASIC's to keep up with the market, Arista use Fulcrum).
This means the differences between data centre switches largely come down to product release dates and the software features offered.
Go to consumer and low-end corporate switches and you have the same with cheaper ASIC's and a lower end management processor.
If OpenFlow levels the software field for data centre switches, there will be a lot of casualties...
Re: As it's Facebook
Do you know this switch in a data centre on the other side of the world? [Add to network]
Re: This is why he's mister "I hate everything."
Yes - it goes with the title of SysAdmin...
A good SysAdmin knows:
- that all hardware sucks
- the amount of hardware suckage is dependent upon both vendor and model as some hardware sucks slightly less than others.
- all software sucks more than hardware.
- some software sucks significantly more than other software.
- carefully combining hardware and software may allow you to create an environment that only sucks a little. This usually requires a careful combination of design, bribery, threats and wet work to achieve.
At present, Adobe and Oracle Java software have the annoying combination of being required for many tasks and having the ability to suck a large bowling ball through a very narrow hose...
Re: Engadget noticed too
Rubbish. The Reg hit rock bottom around the turn of the century - the decline of the Reg was the real Y2K problem for IT.
However, hitting rock bottom hasn't stopped them digging and I look forward to the Reg continuing the search for the real bottom...
RE: Disability discrimination act
And if the department is prosecuted for breaking the DDA you know the money that was earmarked for upgrading the site would be used to pay the fine....
I'll go back to reading my copy of the Daily Mail now
I come here for the gags in the headlines...
"and we always try our best to add something that you won't get elsewhere, even if it's just a gag in the headline"
And occasionally stay for the story
But it's writing pointless crap in the comments that keeps me coming back....
Tax
I don't begrudge companies for reducing the amount of tax they pay via legitimate means. If a non-UK company pays tax in another part of the world that they use to offset their UK tax burden, then that is the price that the UK pays for other countries allowing UK countries to do the same.
Many of the methods of avoiding tax can be closed with further regulation or, even better, a complete overhaul of the tax system to get it to the point where it is consistent and understandable to avoid the complex loopholes that exist today.
Getting politicians whose families use similar methods of reducing the amount of tax their companies pay to lecture these "evil" companies in the hope that they will be shamed into paying more tax suggests hypocrisy and cowardice to me....
Hmmm
Most 10/40/100GbE switches currently consist of a Broadcom fabric and PHY ASICS and a low-power Intel CPU running Linux or a similar OS (Cisco excluded, but even they are starting to use merchant silicon now).
From what Intel are offering in this presentation, I can't really see where they provide an advantage as the competing Broadcom-based products have been in the market for 2+ years.
For the "virtual switch" option - again, there are already similar offerings in the market that run on the VM CPUs so I don't see the benefit of a "network CPU". The CPU-intensive stuff for SDN would be run on standalone controllers in a big environment and SDN wouldn't be needed in a small environment.
The cynic in me says Intel will charge more for a solution with less features and another Intel networking product line will gradually disappear....
Re: Please explain
My guess:
I'm sure there are some accounting tricks as well, but I think the economics of CPU manufacturing now provides less facilities, slower transitions to smaller process nodes and such a high entry cost that Intel can now use equipment while it delivers high profit chips and sell it while there is still significant value in the equipment.
Historically, Intel used to build new fabs to support new processes. If you have a look at there manufacturing sites, they still have 200mm 130nm production facilities. In addition, the older processes were used for things such as flash memory, support chip sets and peripherals which now either require the up-to-date processes for performance reasons or have been integrated into Intel's CPU's.
The combination of the cost of 14/22/28/32/40 nm process nodes combined with the demand for these facilities for manufacturing competing CPU's/SoC's based on 32/30/45nm CPU designs, it makes more sense to sell the older equipment and re-use space than it does to build new facilities from scratch.
Re: A sanitised input? What's that?
Are you sure'";GO;DROP TABLE AdBait;GO;
Re: Austerity Kills Demand
While austerity kills demand, this is a very one dimensional view of the economy as it doesn't take into account the state of a countries finances.
As certain countries are showing, you can't just keep running large deficits and hoping that things will get better, at some point you have to live within your means.
It would be nice to think that politicians would be able to discuss public expenditure in rational terms, but based on the UK where a government running some of the highest budget deficits in recent memory in order to maintain the growth in public sector spending can be demonised for making such severe cuts, I'm not optimistic.
Re: It's looking that way in the U.S. too
I'll happily eat a burger of dubious quality, but I draw the line at a wannabe lawyer flipping it.
Shouldn't there be regulations to avoid lawyers/wannabe lawyers touching human foodstuffs to prevent contamination?
Re: Don't careabout dresses
It goes one step further - it finds the lady, checks she is single and displays your photo to see if she's interested.
For some reason it seems to always produce no results so nVidia went back to just matching dresses....
Re: A confused old fart writes....
Maybe they follow to find out where the latest store openings are so they can dress up in their finest trainers and baseball cap to attend these big events.
Or maybe they just want to find out how much horse is in their burgers......
Re: give me a £1 Million
You're actually planning on delivering a working system?
But that will remove the requirement for an inquiry into why the system failed and had huge cost over runs.
With dramatic cuts like that in the civil service, the whole system could fall apart....
A little more background...
From http://www.odt.co.nz/your-town/invercargill/206172/family-hopes-coke-addicts-death-will-be-lesson-others
"The family was hoping to gain compensation from Coca-Cola for the children, who were now in care. "
"Mr Hodgkinson said he had known Ms Harris since she was 16. She had always drunk Coke, but in the last seven or eight years she had increased her habit from several 1.5-litre bottles up to five bottles a day. "
"All her teeth had been removed because they were rotting out, causing a dentist to remark about drinking too much Coke. "
"Mr Crerar (the coroner) also suggested that even if Coke bottles had warnings labels on them, Ms Harris may not have heeded the advice, given she was a smoker, and cigarette packets carried health warnings. "
Re: What happens if
Exactly the same as if it is made of pure unobtanium valued at a bazillion dollars a tonne - absolutely nothing.
Re-read the article with two thoughts in mind:
- DSI want more funding for what is currently an unproven company (how many asteroids have they successfully mined or even surveyed?)
- PR people are expensive to have sitting around doing nothing. Maybe if they manage to get a few new investors interested in the company, they won't get fired this week.
Re: Dubious cable specs
The question is where are you intending to use 10GbE?
For server rooms using your existing, cheap Cat6 infrastructure to connect servers makes sense.
Re-wiring a building to the higher 10GBaseT spec might not make so much sense....
Re: "the servers giving consumers end-to-end encrypted push email - aren't supported"
Your honesty is refreshing....
Re: Electricity costs
I think the problem is the required output - 450MW is the output of a small coal-fired power station so you'll need both the available power source and the infrastructure to deal with this.
And then the cooling to get rid of all that heat.
Hopefully...
Will we be able to pay lots of tax to support this wonderful quango-type organisation to purify our thoughts and speech as well as what we write?
I think this is double plus good and only hope that it helps us win the war against global terrorism.
Re: uhu
"If they wished I would connect them to BusinessBB sales so they could move/upgrade their service to the same shit service, packaged as a business product for 5 times the price."
Check the differences between a Business Broadband SLA and a residential SLA.
From memory, residential is an engineer will respond within 3 days and repaired within 14 days while business broadband is an engineer will repair within 24 hours (or 8 hours with "premium". I'm not including compensation/refunds as they aren't worth a great deal if your business is down.
Re: Dodgy accounting
Surely any increase in value would be due to the brilliant turn around that HP have managed to execute at Autonomy?
What are these accounting irregularities you speak of?
Posted in Cisco sued by East Carolina University
Re: Try a quick Google
Re: Ah yes, but how many of those places are likely to have a bucket of spare cash to replace some funding that has gone AWOL?
AWOL or misspent on dubious legal advice?
Posted in USB 3.0 speed to DOUBLE in 2013
Re: how about
It's just a marketing number.... Without it Thunderbolt may look better.
As long as Thunderbolt and USB3 run at the same theoretical speed, USB3 will win on cost and those that need or are forced to use Thunderbolt will continue to do so.
See USB vs FireWire for additional examples.
Re: Really?????
Re: Seriously.... people get paid for this stuff?
I think you're underestimating the effort required to produce this report.
Spending 2-3 nights a week in bars watching woman in high heels and fending off bouncers is harder than it appears when you have to do it week in and week out for the duration of the study.
And the beer doesn't drink itself...
Re: As Mr ChriZ said
Maybe a picture showing a plane flying over someone head.....
Re: I am currently pricing up for new offices
I'm assuming that these lines will have the standard home SLA's on them (upto 3 day response, best effort to fix within 2 weeks and the possibility that you may get offered an alternative service if the line cannot be fixed within this timeframe).
Your £12k a year gives you a slightly better response and beating up the telco might even give you more...
Posted in Intel insists Mac Mini HDMI fix inbound
Re: nope
The lack of choice won't stop this sort of thing happening - it's a third party driver issue.
The problem for Apple is how quickly they can test and integrate the fix.
If it takes a week, I'd say well done and minimal harm done.
If it takes a month, I'd say please try to do better in future.
If it takes longer.... Well....
If it's anything like their network driver issues (WLAN or LAN), will they even acknowledge the problem?
Re: Great ruling!!
I assume the Apple comment is related to losing ground to your competitors in the market place, so attempting to address that through the courts.
Posted in New Oz road rules forbid touching mobes
Re: Silly.
Steve I - but prosecuting careless drivers under existing laws does not allow politicians to be seen doing something about this widespread menace killing billions of people each year!
Also, adding a new law gives journalists something to write about when it is added and six months later when it is subsequently thrown out after being tested in court....
Re: Avoidance != Evasion
And in a similar vein, despite all the evidence to the contrary, maybe even some politicians understand the concept of tax.
From http://www.metro.co.uk/news/914685-david-cameron-gives-ed-miliband-tax-lesson-at-party-conference#ixzz290rGOFvg:
But David Cameron chided: ‘Ed let me explain how it works. When people earn money, it’s their money. Not the government’s money: their money.
‘Then the government takes some of it away in tax. So if we cut taxes, we’re not giving them money – we’re taking less of it away. OK?’
More importantly...
Does he have a new name for "not invented here" syndrome?
Intel can compete with ARM....
Power, size, performance - they all look to be in the right range.
What about price?
Re: Bootnote
Why do you think El Reg implemented the voting system? When the revolution comes, your up votes will determine your share of the fortune.
If only we could figure out how to get those with a negative rating to pay back what they owe...
Re: Maps a deal breaker?
If Apple can sell a phone that don't work reliably as phones, what makes maps a deal breaker?
Bravo
Ever since IBM launched the PC, Microsoft has always benefited from having hugely expensive hardware that has limited the uptake of their software and I am pleased to see this trend continuing.
I don't need to add sarcasm tags do I?
Re: Why would an exploit on newer versions NOT work on older ones?
Because the vulnerability affects functionality that was not implemented in the older browsers?
IE10 isn't just IE6 with some of the broken bits fixed. It's a whole new turd sandwich - the bread maybe the soggy, mouldy exterior that we are familiar with, but you can notice the smell isn't quite as bad and the brown colouring of the filling is more pleasant on the eye.
Re: He is not quibbling over 2%
Re: 35% average efficiency? Didnt they look at Scottish wind farms over a year and work out it was around 22%?
I know of one large utility company that uses 12% average efficiency in their budget calculations.
And that isn't including the wind farm (purchased as part of a larger purchase) that has a average utilisation of less than 1% as it was built where there was no wind. The funny thing is that the government subsidies in these countries actually make all the wind farms profitable in the first 5-10 years of operation....
Posted in UK ISPs crippled by undersea cable snap
Re: Seems like a system designed to cope with nuclear war...
The idea for surviving a nuclear war was that there would be some way to communicate - the idea wasn't to preserve every part of the network.
Just consider yourself nuked :-)
Re: execution, not engineering ????
Since around 2007, AMD's problem has definitely been in execution.
Their first generation chips (Barcelona, Bulldozer) have had performance affecting bugs or have been delivered late (Magny-Cours, Bobcat) or both. Each time AMD have failed to execute, they have fallen another 1 or 2 quarters behind Intel and lost a few more points of market share.
That's not a marketing issue.
