Posts by Matt Bryant

RE: Come on Matt.....

"For someone hyping themselves as understanding Enterprise platforms..." Not just "understanding", that's "working with on a daily basis", which is probably something you don't do.

".....The platform is there to run the app...." Correct! Shame the rest is complete twaddle. The platform has to be a stable, supportable and predictable platform. When chosing a platform you look at the prior history of the vendor and the relationship you have had with that company as well as just performance figures. The problem for Snoreacle is most customers see "Oracle = software", and "Sun = hardware failure". Sun burned through just about all the goodwill generated by the good old days when SPARC-Slowaris was actually respected and trusted. Customers looking for a platform today to run biz crit apps on will consider IBM and hp much better choices, simple as that.

"...If the platform was the primary choice why the hell would people choose Linux over any of the mature Unix's like Solaris, HPUX or AIX?....." The problem for that complete pile of fail is that market figures show that Linux is not replacing UNIX wholesale. It is replacing a lot of Slowaris as ex-Sun shops simply don't have faith in Snoreacle's ability to deliver. But AIX and hp-ux seem to be very resilient to Linux. The growth area for Linux is still on x64 in replacement of or as alternative to Windows, not UNIX.

"....Unless you've got in-house code locking you to an OS / architecture then App licencing costs drive the platform choice...." Erm, no. Actually, what drives the enterprise platform choice is risk reduction, and Snoreacle is seen as risky. Customers that have enjoyed good relationships with hp and IBM (as we have), and seen a good relationship with Sun turn sour (as we did), will pay the extra to buy hp or IBM. This is very simply proven by the fact that Sun was selling solutions CHEAPER than IBM or hp during the final years of the Sunset, but still sales crashed because the customers bought the more expensive hp and IBM kit. Please try and explain how your theory can stand when the evidence of Sun's demise shows it is rubbish?

"....Please don't bleat about more cores...." Why, because it completely explodes the twaddle you present? Price per CPU doubled, but core core count also doubled, so the effective change is ZERO. Well, actually, seeing as the new cores are more powerful, it means the same licence costs for more power. You can try and cut it any way you like but you're still denying what is patently obvious.

"....24 cores Matt!...." Yes, but what will those cores be capable of? Xeon already has eight cores, but we buy Itanium kit because our PoCs show it outperforms the RHEL/Win/Xeon option, because the individual cores are more powerful. This also explains why Niagara is such a failure - large core-count but cores that can't compete. Please try and pretend it isn't so, but at the same time please explain why Niagara sales are a pitance compared to Xeon if mutli-core is the answer to everything? Oh, that would be because the individual power of each core is still relevant, and Tukzilla still has massive per-core advantages over Xeon or Opteron. Sure, there are cases where a 24-core Opteron will be the better option, just as there are a few cases (like webserving) where Niagara makes sense, but the market has shown that the majority of enterprise apps require real cores, AKA Pee7 and Tukzilla.

"....but it much more sense (financially) to run Oracle on Sparc...." Financially, as long as you don't consider (a) you will need more SPARC cores, and (b) you massively increase the risk, as shown by the history of Sun. And then, when those points are considered, you'll find the board buys hp or IBM. Or even Dell if it's x64, rather than Snoreacle.

"....& very attractive to run Oracle on Intel / AMD @ 0.5...." Which is surely an indication of why Snoreacle will lose the hardware battle? After all, Snoreacle is third tier when it comes to x64 and being out-sold by the whitebox vendors! Any sales of Oracle on x64 will more likley be on hp hardware, and that is simply a fact.

"....Yes, HP sells X64 gear, so does Oracle, IBM, Dell, CISCO, yadda yadda blah blah...." You forgot that hp sells a lot more x64 than anyone else. A LOT more. And that all has services and storage and software sales pulling theough with it. Not to mention the printers, which I know really uspets you frothing Sunshiners.

"....Still pointing and dreaming Matt?...." No, still pointing and laughing at you Sunshiners.

"....PS: In our Bank all the HP DL's were dropped and it's all IBM x series. HP don't have it sown up." So, not Snoreacle x64 boxes then? There's a surprise - not! I'm also amused to see your example of an "enterprise" swap-out is purely Wintel. Guess that exactly places the limits of your enterprise experience.

/SP&L

RE: Hey, Coward

How exactly does ZFS "protects your data" in a manner in "which no other filesystem does"? Are we talking software RAID, something that predates ZFS by years and was even possible with a hack of Windows XP long before ZFS arrived? Just what is this magical, ZFS-only capability? Hate to bring some reality into your life, but ZFS is just a WAFL clone, so anything ZFS can do has already been done by NetApp and probably done by a dozen other conmmercial and free products long before ZFS.

RE: re: No more SP&C from Matt Bryant

"....Still Pointing and Caring?...." Well, I do try to care, honest! Someone has to take pity on the poor, ickle Sunshiners.

RE: It shows that Sun management is

Unfortunately, your Sunshiner blinkers meant you misread a leap in Snoreacle software profits as meaning SNoreacle was actually selling more of the old Sun kit. The reality, as reported here http://www.channelregister.co.uk/2010/12/02/idc_q3_2010_server_numbers/ show that Pee7 and Tukzilla are doing just fine, but Snoreacle is struggling to grow numbers despite the economic upturn. The article also concludes that the real drivers in servers are Windows and Linux, definately not Slowaris, and fields in which Snoreacle lags even Dell, let alone IBM or hp. The inescapable conclusiuons are that customers still don't want the old Sun servers even with added Larry Bluster (TM); that the old Sun installed base is shrinking and being replaced by non-Snoreacle kit from other vendors, which means the Snoreacle support biz is also going to shrink; Snoreacle is being outgrown in server shipments by whitebox suppliers, and so realistically has zero real chance catching IBM or hp.

Isn't funny how the Sunshiners have all come out of hiding now they think there's some good news about Snoreacle?

/SP&L

RE: with full support from hp and M$ and RH

Oh dear, it's alwasy amusing to see the tragic delusions of the Sunshiner laid so bare!

"For how long?...." Minimum ten years, even if they announced a halt to hp-ux today. And hp assure me they're getting ready for the next hp-ux 11i release next year, so more than ten years after that. Meanwhile, Snoreacle are dropping releases of Slowaris, locking down MySQL and and screwing over the Java community.....

"....And when will Intel stop throwing more money at expensive platform development...." But Intel makes massive profits and has co-development between Xeon and Itanium, which means Itanium shares from the massive advantage of the economies of scale of Xeon being the most popular server CPU. On the other hand, Niagara/CMT shares nothing with anything, has tiny share, and Snoreacle can't afford the development (because they'd have to replace half the development team that Sun fired as cost cuts for a start). SPARC64? LOL! Fudgeitso hasn't commited to anything beyond the current generation, depsite Larry's announcements, and Larry hasn't the ability to replace it seeing as all he inherited from the Sun carcass was the left-overs from a CPU team that failed with Rock. Looks to me that Itanium is a much safer development than anything coming out of Snoreacle!

"....HP-UX = [Defunct] OS....." <Sigh> Maybe you should try talking to someone that actually works in enterprise IT? The reason Red Hat decided to drop future developments on Itanium was because they weren't getting a big enough return as customers were choosing hp-ux over RHEL. Same goes for Windows on Itanium. Both RH and M$ decided to concentrate instead on x64. The IDC figures show Tukzilla is ramping up faster than Snoreacle's whole hardware biz, and if the number going out with RHEL or Windows is dropping that means more customers are buying more Integrity with hp-ux. Now, would you like me to repeat that in smaller words or maybe draw you a picture?

/SP&L

RE: Itanium...meh

"....When you have the vendors of the worlds dominant operating systems pulling support for an architecture, it's done...." Please post the Niagara, UltraSPARC, or Snoreacle SPARC64 servers that come with Snoreacle support for RedHat or Windows of any form. And you can still run current versions of Windows Server and RHEL on hp's Integrity Itanium servers with full support from hp and M$ and RH, it's just you won't get the new versions.

BTW, did someone forget to tell Larry that over 50% of all new Oracle instances go on hp servers? Maybe that's because hp can supply a more complete offering rather than just Larry's tiny and walled garden with it zombie server and storage products.

/SP&L

RE: @ Matt bryant

There is no doubting Soros's intelligence or guile, but it is amusing to see people blindly painting all "bankers" as evil, capitalist-cum-Fascists-cum-bloodsuckers. The financial industry is just like every other, packed with individuals with differing points of view. Whilst there are common themes - usually education and well-above-average earnings - they don't have a mold somewhere for making bankers. Indeed, one of the most successful I have met was born in Mosside into a family that had not worked for three generations, yet he pushed himself through Uni and now drives a Porsche (please note I didn't say all the "differing points of view" didn't leave them open to a few personal foibles).

Soros made his money legally, even the bit where he rooked the Bank of England of so much cash. He simply played by the rules set by the politicians. All the current press hoohah about blaming the recent economic depression on "evil bankers" completely forgets that all the bankers did was play in the sandpit made by the politicians of the day - those would be socialist Labour ones in the UK's case, and a Dummicrat-dominated (both houses) setup in the US (and Bush is on record in 2003, warning about the Dummicrat-inspired policies of Fannie Mac and Freddie Mac that led to the collapse of the US mortgage market that kicked off the depression). Dummicrat Barney Frank was one who publicly proclaimed that Bush's warning was simply a political move to discredit FM & FM, stating in 2003 that both were robust and solvent - I bet he felt stupid when the US taxpayer had to stump up for "$150 billion worth of stock in the enterprises and $1.36 trillion worth of mortgage-backed securities" in an attempt to avoid the economic crash only five years later (http://www.boston.com/news/politics/articles/2010/10/14/frank_haunted_by_stance_on_fannie_freddie/).

In the UK, the drive to blame it all on "the bankers" seems to be coming from Ed Miliband's camp, because they know nothing unites the traditional Labour base than slagging off rich people. It bears an uncomfortable similarity to the simplistic National-Socialist propoganda blaming Germany's ills on the "rich, capitalist Jews".

RE: Bored with stories about ASSange

I'm guessing you missed the one about how Grace Mugabe is suing a Zimabawean paper for repeating one of the Wikileaks cables that linked her and Mugabe's cronies to the massive appropriation of Zimbabwean diamond mining profits? No-one had really paid any attention to the matter until Grace Mugabe said she was intent on "clearing the Mugabes' good name"!

RE: Title

".....And then there's bankers and politicians who have a vested interest in the above things...." Yes, you mean like George Soros, allegedly the cash if not the mastermind behind the Obumbler's rise, and also thought to be funding Wikileaks, a "liberal" and also one of the most successful investment bankers alive. Oh, but did that blow a big hole in your spoonfed beliefs? So much easier to blame all the World's ills on "bankers" just because they have more money, isn't it?

RE: @evil

".....I now fully well understand why de Gaulle built the Nuclear Arsenal Of France...." Really? I thought it was more as a way of not having to ask the English or the Yanks for help the next time the Germans came round to give the Les Francais a good kicking. Of course, the fact that ickle France got to hide behind the NATO shield whilst squealing on and on and on about their independence does kinds undermine the whole argument. Maybe it was so de Gaulle could shoot really large white flags into orbit?

RE: Understanding rape

".....Doesn't matter what it is defined as in the UK...." Windrose is exactly correct. What is fine and acceptable or simply not criminal in one country can be a hanging concern in others. Just ask homosexuals in Iran. Or, for an even funnier example, what would you say if you caught your neighbour sh*gging a goat? Would you call the RSPCA or the Police first? Well, in the Sudan you'd only call the Police if the goat didn't belong to your neighbour, otherwise he can do what he likes to it.

In Sweden, it looks like Assange has a case to hear, whether certain posters here think it is a crime or not, and I suspect it is only the rose-tinted glasses of their political faith keeping them from accepting it. By all accounts, it looks like the Swedish Government actually wanted Assange to just go away as they didn't want to get stuck in the middle of an extradition battle with the US.

RE: Glaring omission?

"Well I'm level 85 already......" Grrrrr! I made the mistake of getting six chars up to level 80 whilst waiting for Cataclysm, and now I'm stuck slowly levelling all six plus a Worgen 'cos I can't make my mind up which one is more fun for smacking Horde with. If only I had the time needed to have a level 85 already, but then I have a smidgin of a social life. :P

MMPORPG OTY = WoW Cataclysm (apart from the Archeology profession)

FPS OTY = Black Ops, simply a ball for late night shoot-outs in the office.

Strategy OTY? None - the genre seems to have gone a bit stale, TBH.

RE: Another secret every man and dog know about .... and should know about.

Of course, Mark Stephens could claim anything he liked and people like you would lap it up unquestioningly. If it's a "secret" grand jury how would Mr Stephens know about it? And before you lot hyperventilate yourselves into space, the Espionage Act does not carry an automatic death sentence for the guilty.

RE: Nice to see

<Yawn> Oh, is that the I-see-a-conspiracy-behind-every-tree crowd flip-flopping again? First you lot claim that the nasty old Gov is banging him up so they can refuse him bail, stick him in solitary and hand him over to the Yanks at the drop of a hat. Then, when Assange gets bail, you immediately flip again and start saying it's only so the dreaded boogermen-assassins of the CIA can nail him in public! Please, just go lay down in a quiet, dark room for a while.

RE: Socialist?

Really? Someone oughta have told Stalin, Mao and Mugabe then!

RE: @Matt

The interesting thing with Windoze Server and M$ SQL is my company hasn't lost its appetite for either. Despite our taking up Linux , that has been used more as a tool to replace UNIX boxes and has made little inroads in the number of Win servers. VMware has been accepted as a cost saver, but only in that it allows us to consolidate and reduce hardware, if anything we end up running more Windoze instances! MYSQL has been passed over as M$ SQL has offered a better solution with superior support at a price the business can swallow. Through all our recent spending constraints, M$ still got plenty of money from us, and all going on x64 tin. Others I know see similar trends. You say you will only consider M$ SQL "enterprise" when it runs on your choice of OS, but you failed to notice the OS of choice for many companies is still coming from Redmond. Whilst good, old, anti-M$ snobbery is fun, it's smacks a bit too much of sticking your head in the sand.

RE: @Matt Bryant

But Kebbie, you assured us that Niagara doesn't need cache! Surely, as the chip gets developed and gets "better", it shouldn't need ANY cache? After all, that is what you originally posted. Or could it be that all those stalled threads means cache is vital, otherwise Niagara sucks even worse than it does already?

RE: Matt Bryant

Kebbie, just take a deep breath then go look at the changes between T2 and the new T3 chips - see all that added cache? It's there for a reason, and it ain't just decoration! Then please consider that you were assuring us not so long ago that the Niagara designs didn't need cache, that there was no way it would have more cache in the nect generation, etc, etc.

/SP&L

RE: Re: Allison/Matt

I'm not sure Ms Park has quite reached that level of desperation, depsite the amusingly strident tones of her posts!

RE: Wrong

".....Oracle just doubled the cost of all of their software on Itanium systems...." What a surprise, Allison can't even start without getting it wrong from the word go! Larry has doubled the price on the new Tukzilla kit only, which have twice the core count, so the per-socket price compared to the previous generation is the same.

".....The new cores don't have more oomph than the old cores...." Sorry, still wrong! I have some demo kit, I've benched it with several of our stacks (including Oracle DB), and we're seeing between four and six times improvement. You are forgetting that hp's Tukzilla Integrity kit isn't just faster cores, it's also DDR3 and wider bandwidth to storage, all of which seems to help in keeping things spinning nicely. I know you IBMers like to talk core speeds and avoid discussing the rest of the system so I'm not surprised the performance gains in the new Tukzilla kit comes as a surprise to you.

"....Ask HP for their Performance Query Reporting Tool (PQRT) report ...." Seeing as PQRT is an hp internal only (which I would have thought an IBM marketting drone would know), you know it's very unlikely that anyone outside hp will be seeing it, so you can sprout whatever rubbish you like and claim it is gospel. But, I've alwasy put much more stock in benchmarking in our own environment with our own stack, and there we are seeing increases in performance. Sorry if you're not used to hearing results from the real World rather than some IBM benchmarking session.

".....Ellison Says Oracle Will 'Go After' H-P...." Yes, please do point out one area where Larry has made one actual and tangible move that could be considered even remotely hostile? Has he removed hp ProLiant or Integrity or NonStop from his list of supported platforms? Has he even ramped up theri licensing? No he hasn't. The changes for Tukzilla licensing mean zero real-World changes as they just balance out the core count increase. It's all marketting bluster to grab headlines. And why is he making the most noise about hp and not IBM? Well, if you want people to think you want to be number one you don't start carping on about number two, do you?

".....HP didn't exactly half the price of HP-UX they just decided to price per socket...." Hmmm, that sounds like the most pointless evasion of the truth I've heard in a long time! It's even too lame for a politician. Seeing as most upgrades start on the rule-of-thumb that you will want to have at least the same number of cores to ensure at least the same performance, the majority of new hp Integrity servers replacing old ones will be at most on a per-core basis, so that means the hp-ux licensing costs for the replacements will be half the replaced servers. Even a marketting droid like yourself should be able to follow that maths. But then we also have to look at power and coolling savings - Tukzilla means more cores for less of both - and savings in rackspace as the new Integrity blades are not only more dense than the old Integrity rack servers, they also save space by using the embedded switches in the C-class chassis, removing the need for top-of-rack switches. And I don't think you want me to point out the savings in admin costs and advantages of hp's Virtual Connect technology, especially compared to IBM's weak offering!

".....given the poor market share and declining business...." Newsflash - Allison is wrong again! Actually, I'm waiting for Allison to ever be right! The recent reg article here (http://www.channelregister.co.uk/2010/12/02/idc_q3_2010_server_numbers/) on Q3 results from IDC included the line "....The Unix midrange, bolstered by new products from IBM and HP, showed both shipment and revenue increases in Q3....", so it sounds like hp's new Tukzilla kit is doing quite nicely. I'd also like to remind you that the same article still puts hp top of the server heap (with more than twice the growth of IBM), top of the blades heap (how many quarters in a row, I've lost count!), and that's in an article from TPM who seems to just hate having to say anything nice about hp almost as much as you do!

Have a good Christmas, Ms Park, but lay off the eggnog, OK?

/SP&L

RE: You just don't get it dude...

Whilst I agree that Oracle DB is the enterprise DB of choice (despite MS SQL being the faster growing in overall market share), you're forgetting that a lot of us have previous experience of Slowaris on SPARC and the failings of Sun, both in product delivery and support.

".....If Oracle Sell you an completely integrated stack, tested at every level, which outperforms anything else for a given price point both in terms of cap-ex or support costs, who the hell care's if the thing is is using a larger number of weaker single thread cpu's than an IBM/HP box which has a smaller number of meatier cpu's???...." Here's the problem for you - a lot of us used to buy Sun SPARC, we used it for Oracle, and we saw it fall behind to plain-Jane Xeon, let alone Power or PA-RISC and Itanium. But Sun dropped their pants and sold us kit at a loss just to get the business, so we carried on buying. Then the losses meant they had support "savings" which caused us pain, and promised products never arrived, and things got to the point where even offering kit at a loss and free for a year couldn't interest the board. What you don't get is that peoples' jobs ride on the kit they recommend their companies buy, and a lot of them got burnt by Sun. The massive decline in Sun sales in their last few years of Sun's existance was despite the fact Sun was offering solutions cheaper than IBM and hp. But when your board looks at a Sun solution that is 20% cheaper than the equivalent hp solution and still buys the hp one you begin to realise how deep the loss in faith is.

".....Growing Networking biz?...." yeah, it's called ProCurve, it's the number two in the market behind CISCO, and is growing whilst CISCO's share is shrinking. Juniper isn't even close. Try reading some industry news rather than relying on Sunshine. But please do supply details of Snoreacles nertworking bizz, I seem not to be able to find any such beast anywhere on the Web?

"....Leading Network Management tools...." As an example, Network Node Manager still maanges more of the Internet than any other management product. Please name the Sun/Oracle network management tool that even made a dent in NNM sales? You can't because most Sun shops run CA, OpenView or Tivoli, all non-Sun products. In fact, for many years Sun's own salesforce resold hp's OpenView products as they didn't have a product of their own to market.

".....buy SAP.... it's all about the software son...." Ah, the typical fixation of the Sunshiner - one product and one product only, a bit like that old mantra of "Solaris on SPARC and nothing else" - that worked out well for you! Instead, I suggest you look a little further afield and consider a statement by Steve Ballmer - "Developers, developers, developers!" Sun's Slowaris used to be the development platform of choice for many software companies, but now it's just about dead. What hp have done different was think not one OS on one platform, but as many options on as many platforms as they can make money on, and then as many applications on top as possible, which is what the developers like. Instead of one CRM vendor, hp can flog you solutions around Oracle, SAP, IBM, Microsoft and even open-source solutions. Hence why hp is making moeny out of hp-ux, OpenVMS, NonStop, Linux and Windows, whilst Snoreacle is struggling to get anyone interested in Slowaris. Which is why hp made $3.92bn in servers sales in Q3 whilst Snoreacle only made $0.78bn, because hp offered better products, with more choice, and with more applications and more developer support. Oh, and also why hp is the number one IT company in the World and was the first to report revenues in excess of $100bn. Should hp buy a CRM software company such as SAP, it would then still only have one real competitor, and that's IBM. But I expect that instead, hp will continue to be the software whore of the industry and continue being number one. If anyone is going to do any mopping up, it's not going to be Snoreacle, it is more likely that Snoreacle will become an acquisition target for one of the bigger players.

/SP&L

RE: About time...

Oooh, goodie, a new Sunshiner to poke fun at! They've been rather thin on the ground since the Sunset.

"Well, can't say I'm surprised...." Seeing as the move had been widely predicted/leaked for the last few months?

"....and the Sparc T3's/T4's and a decent roadmap...." Erm, isn't that just a mild rehash of the old Sun roadmap, still full of optimism and just as unlikley to happen as it was under McNeedy and Ponytail? And still with a Niagara hackjob that can't provide the single-threaded performance that you Sunshiners insisted Niagara didn't need (just like you lot insisted it didn't need more cache - LOL!). So what happens when Fudgeitso stops making SPARC64? All those customers will be looking at Pee7 and Tukzilla kit, and with hp taking advantage of their massive installed base of C-class blade chassis they are well positioned to mop up Larry's customers as they migrate off SPARC. I'm not surprised you forgot the vast majority of that installed SPARC base is on eight-socket or smaller UltraSPARC servers which can easily be out-performed by a dual-socket BL460c G7 running Linux.

"......HP don't make their own chips, no Enterprise DB, no real middleware and no standout business app's so hence no integration and poor relative performance compared to Oracle and IBM....." Just the biggest server seller on the planet, the number one database server provider (Oracle and M$ SQL), the number one enterprise CRM server provider (SAP, Oracle and M$), and still making more profit in a quarter from printer sales than Snoreacle makes in all hardware sales in a year. Even IBM will grudgingly admit more IBM software goes on hp servers than on their own! Don't let those little facts upset your rickety applecart of an argument. Truth is, despite Larry's grandstanding, he has done zilch to really threaten hp's postion in the market because Larry knows he is dependent on hp to provide the platform for over 50% of his Oracle software sales. Even doubling the per-core pricing on Tukzilla just matches the doubling in core count over the previous generation, it doesn't even take into account the increase in per-core performance.

"....HP will soon be finished in the High End...." Yes, and weren't you Sunshiners singing that song around the time you were expecting UltraSPARC V? And again when waiting for Rock? And when Niagara debuted? And all that happened was Sun disappeared. Please, try and grasp the fact that despite the strength of your delusions, just because you want it to be so doesn't mean it's going to be so.

".....because in this new highly integrated hardware/software world we are heading in to, they have nothing to offer...." Apart form the leading server platforms, a growing networking bizz topped by the leading network maangement tools, one of the leading storage offerings, and really integrated management and deployment tools for hp-ux, OpenVMS, Linux and WIndows that Snoreacle can only dream of. Oh, and lets not forget the ink, 'cos I know that really winds up you Sunshiners!

"....Enter Matt Bryant..." Well, when you paint that large a bullseye on your forehead it's hard not to resist showing you up!

RE: Admission of defeat by Oracle?

Actually, this is a bit of a non-story, just more of TPM's "bash-Itanium-at-any-cost" mantra. Seeing as the core count on the new Tukzilla Itaniums has doubled per socket compared to the older Montecito/Montvale dual-cores, Oracle is simply maintaining the status quo. In fact, seeing as the new cores have more oomph than the old cores, which means you can do more Oracle grinding with less cores, Oracle will probably see LESS money per socket out of the new hp Integrity servers than the previous generation even after the new pricing. And as hp has halved the price of hp-ux licences the result is overall a lower cost for new Oracle instances on hp Integrity reagrdless. It's simply non-issue, as TPM should know. What would have been a declaration of war is if Larry had quadrupled the per-core cost of Oracle on Tukzilla and also doubled it on the older Itaniums. Cutting the costs on SPARC was an obvious and long-expected tactic. Can I suggest TPM looks for some real news?

/yawn tbh.

RE: Rush of Blood to the Head

".....people with a large pimple to brain ratio...." Genius! That is all, please remain calm and carry on.

RE: take it!

"....Why are these people irresponsible?...." Voluntarily signing up for a botnet that spams some of the most powerful financial institutions in the World? Naive. And then being stupid enough not to check that it's not broadcasting your own IP address? Incredibly dumb. Not realising your trendy political stunt (which you stupidly assumed was at no personal cost) could leave you with a criminal record? Priceless!

I'm betting any botnet code that leaves the IP address unprotected is also poorly coded, allowing any of the experienced botnet masters out there to gain control of the self-infected PCs and load them up with all types of less-noble zombie software.

And a crim record to boot.

This is what happens when the politically naive jump on the latest trendy bandwagon and try a little dig at "The Man" - they haven't a clue what they're doing, download some program because someone tells them it's safe, and end up with a criminal record which will affect their future job prospects. Political conviction is no defence against the law.

RE: Donations via Iceland

"......supporting a terrorist organisation...." Until it is designated a terrorist organisation you can donate as much as you like. I'm also not sure the US or UK could designate it so seeing as it hasn't expressly commited a terrorist act nor have they made any form of statement supporting terrorism. Even should Assange and Co be somehow tried for "treason", simply donating to their site wouldn't be enough to get you in trouble unless the authorities could prove you donated to aid a criminal act, i.e., more "treason". But, seeing as the NSA can probably track donations from Western bankaccounts going via Iceland or even Outer Mongolia, your name is likley to end up on some lists you really wouldn't want it on!

RE: Letting your petticoat show

Well, seeing as I'm not a journo or someone that has to maintain an air of impartiality, I can call it as I see it. But I'm guessing what really upset you was my opinion jarred with your own political preferences, in which case I'll probably upset you even futher to say that;

(a) Liebermann seems to have at least the capability to work with the Republicans, whereas The Obumbler seems to think "working with the Republicans" means they get to kiss his rear in the same way most Dummicrats do, and

(b) I'm looking to retire out to Florida or Texas in a few years, so I have just as much right to comment on US politics as anyone else, up until the point Ms Bee disagrees.

Now, do you have anything even remotely on-topic to say, or are we through seeing the limits of your analytical capabilities?