* Posts by Matt Bryant

9690 publicly visible posts • joined 21 May 2007

Ex-Appler resurrects Mac-friendly RAID

Matt Bryant Silver badge
Happy

RE: Simon Breden

"...Well, I didn't use components out of a skip, if that's what you mean. Dual-core 64-bit processors are cheap now and so is 4GB RAM -- did you take a look recently?..." Yes, I build systems for myself and friends as a hobby, and the typical requrst for a home NAS is "can you make it for a couple of hundred quid" rather than "hey, I have a grand to blow". I have also made NAS systems for small businesses and at work for corporates - neither was keen to waste money. If they wanted a "proper" solution, they were willing to pay for it, and Slowairs and ZFS soon dropped off the table

"....What are you talking about?...." Slowaris is slower than Linux to start with, but when you bring ZFS into the game it needs even more processing power to keep up. How do I know? Because we compared Slowaris with ZFS to RHEL on HP blades, both with local and EVA disks, and the result was we needed more memory and RAM in the Slowaris blades to get close to the RHEL performance. During the tests only one build suffered corruption, and it wasn't the RHEL one. After wading through dozens of patches on the Sun website, we then had a totally unexpected slow-down where we could see ZFS was thrashing the disks. The Sunshiners eventually got it all working, but it was still slower than the RHEL install on the same hardware (BL460c blades), and the RHEL was good from the word go. Guess which one got chosen for production.... No, guess again... I'll give you a clue - it was the OS not from Sun....

"....CPU cycles are abundant and cheap these days, unless we're running on your skip-retrieved Pentium II from the '90s. Mostly the CPU cycles are idle so why not use some? Also, that way, you avoid using proprietary RAID cards which must surely gain your favour as it involves spending less too...." So your answer is you need more CPU power, and more RAM, and just forget the impact on the real processing task in the background? Real smart - not! Because everyone of those "abundant and cheap" CPU cycles also means more RAM activity, more disk activity (lots of paging was our observation with ZFS, even with large memory space). Hardware RAID is better because it doesn't impact the main memory or CPU, cards such as the Adaptec ones are also cheap, and you can make use of a dozen other software packages to get the other largely unneccessary features offered by ZFS without having to slow your system down with Slowaris. Besides, why would a Mac user even want to get an extra box with another OS when he can just use a hardware RAID solution? Duh!

"....Irrelevant, as ZFS uses software RAID....." How is it irrelevant that the user has to go get a new OS they don't know, one that probably doesn't fit with any of the management tools they already have, and then have to patch to the eyeballs (remember those 4510 ZFS patches)? And software RAID eats into CPU cycles again, or do you think the Sun Ponytail fairy just sprinkles the system with magic dust and makes it RAIDed for nothing? Would you like to buy some real estate in the Everglades?

"....Now have you heard of the Sun Fire X4500 aka 'Thumper' ..." Excellent! You go from an over-priced and unsuitable hobby system to an extremely over-priced and just as unsuitable Sun solution! It's like shooting fish in a barrel! Thumper is a NAS and not a Fibre Channel RAID array like the Active Storage XRAID which can be direct-attached or XSAN-attached. And Thumper also forces you down the Slowaris route, which means extra work and management tools compared to the Active Storage XRAID system. Why on Earth do you think any Apple admin would want to introduce a Thumper when he can have the much more flexible XRAID and not have to worry about Slowairs (and it's never-ending patch farce)?

And face it, the XRAID solution has the ultimate fanboi appeal - a widget that allows them to manage it from an iBone. You could tell him the Sun box would get him laid twice-nightly by Brazillian supermodels and the fanboi would still go for the XRAID solution.

/Laugh, point, laugh, hold aching sides.

Matt Bryant Silver badge
Pirate

RE: Simon Breden

"....This box says it uses 'Linux RAID kernel', which is clearly not ZFS, so I wouldn't trust it with anything valuable. If you know about ZFS you'll know why....." Because you have more money than sense? Or is it just the Sunshiner blindfold leading you to such nonsense statements?

Firstly, Linux RAID has been around for ages and is tried and tested, while ZFS is relatively new and still buggy (a quick search in the Sun patch database for ZFS throws up 4510 patches!). So kindly drop the hogwash about Linux RAID not being trustworthy.

Secondly, like the majority of Linux work, the Linux RAID kernel will work on a variety of new and old kit, not just the most powerful. As I have commented previously on your $1000+ build, your NAS solution is expensive enough to put it in competition with real commercial NAS gear. You have to use that powerful a build because you use Solaris with ZFS, anything less would grind to a halt under the load. There are a number of Linux NAS solutions with or without Linux RAID which will work on hardware costing a fraction of $1000. An even more sensible effort would be to use hardware RAID which has virtually zero impact on the CPU load, and gives access to any number of pre-approved and pre-tested PC or server solutions such as the Adaptec range of cards, without needing anything other than a driver added into the kernel. Of course, Linux support for these is a lot wider than Slowaris since Linux has much greater market share and has been around a lot longer. Of course, for fanbois there are Mac-supported RAID cards anyway, so still no need to involve the pain of Slowaris x86.

But let's leave the valid comparison of your toy with a Linux hobbyist NAS and instead look at your hilarious comparison with the Active Storage XRAID. The latter is a proper, rackable commercial solution with sixteen 1TB disk slots, with a warranty and support service, whereas your desktop-only toy has three disks of 750GB and comes with nothing more than your misplaced enthusiasm to back it up - you are waaaaaaaaay out of your league!

RIM officially unveils Javelin

Matt Bryant Silver badge
Happy

No 3G?

Forget that, then! I rate 3G as a must have, much more than a built-in camera, so I'd much rather stick with the Bold, thanks. Especially as I spent so long taking the mick out of the fanbois for the early, non-3G iBone....

Reg readers in the dark over extreme porn

Matt Bryant Silver badge
Happy

More worrying!

I'm much more worried about Mr McNally's picture of a young gent dressed only in a skirt and about to swing a golf club - very sado-masochistic!

/oh, it's a kilt? Same thing, innit?

RAF in plot against Fleet Air Arm again

Matt Bryant Silver badge

RE: pedant at work

The Fairey Fulmar was actually a classic example of the Royal Navy making a mess of things when left to their own devices. Most FAA fighters before then had been modified RAF designs, such as the Hawker Nimrod and the Gloster Sea Gladiator. When the Royal Navy got its way and drew up its requirements for a modern naval fighter pre-war, they included the assumption that any high-performance fighter would have to carry a navigator as well as a pilot. Seeing as the Sea Lords were also hopelessly biassed against twin-engined machines, that meant the resulting naval fighter would be hopelessly underpowered. The first victim of this was the Blackburn Skua II, which was actually the best naval dive-bomber of the day (scored the first combat sinking of a capital ship by dive-bombing in 1940), but was also expected to carry out the fighter role. This was fine for the Navy - they thought it would only have to face seaplanes and the odd bomber far out to sea, and not land-based fighters. This fallacy was exposed in the Norweigian campaign and later over Dunkirk, where valiant FAA crews still managed to notch up some air victories. The Fulmar was more fo the same, only with eight guns instead of four and a Merlin engine like the Spitfire and Hurricane, but was outclassed even by the Italians. It did have some successes in the Malta convoys, but apart from some work as a long-range recce plane, the Fulmar's best contribution was as a trainer for nightfighter crews for the only slightly better Fairey Firefly

The Seafire and Sea Hurricane were adaptions of the RAF's fighters, and neither was perfect (though the Sea Hurricane was superior to the Grumman Wildcat of the day in several areas). The Seafire was always too fragile, it's undercarriage broke on landing, the propellar tips tended to hit the deck, and the fuselage tended to bend under the forces of arresting. It wasn't until the Seafire III that it was really a naval fighter from scratch rather than an adaption, and a better interceptor than American offerings (it could outclimb even the Hellcat and Corsair).

But the FAA did receive three very good naval fighters during WW2 which Lewis seems to have forgotten about - the Grumman Wildcat and Hellcat, and the Vought Corsair. The Wildcat was taken on to fill the gap left by the Fulmar, becoming a firm favourite with FAA crews. Originally christened the Martlet, it scored its first kill on Christmas Day 1940. The Hellcat was also renamed by the FAA as the Gannet, showing the RN not only couldn't draw up fighter reqs but had no clue when it came to naming them either. But they did recognise a good fighter when they saw one, an example being how they took the Vought Corsair and used it from carriers (even escort carriers) after the USN had decided it was completely unfit for such operations. So the FAA did have a number of excellent fighters during the war, it's just most of them were American (in fact, some pundits rank the Corsair as the best fighter of the war).

More telling is that the FAA drew rank over the RAF in the case of the Wildcat. The RAF wanted the Wildcat, which was quite good, but instead got the awful Brewster Buffalo instead. The Buffalo was another Yank naval fighter, only not such a good one. Of course, the example of how the FAA scored one over the RAF completely exposes Lewis's ramblings as just the dark mutterrings of a poor old salt missing his rum ration. So with no further ado, let's look at the Joint Force Harrier issue.

This first came about after the Falklands War, when RAF GR3 Harriers operated from, amongst other ships, the Atlantic Conveyor, and RAF pilots flew Sea Harriers to help the FAA. Later, some bright spark in the civil service saw an opportunity to streamline, especially as the FAA's tired Sea Harrier FA2s were proving unable to take off and land vertically with a full weapon load in hot conditions like the Middle East. The Harrier GR7/9 can, and has since replaced the Sea Harriers as an interim machine until the F-35C/B is sorted. Some are of the opinion that this was simply because the RAF Harriers had had an easier life, especially as they don't have to deal with salt spray as often as the old FA2s. Of course, with the RAF supplying the GR7/9s, is it any surprise they should take over control of the HCF? Once again, this looks like just the Fishheads grumbling without cause.

Personally, I'd like to see Sea Harrier FA3 made from a developed GR7/9 with the Blue Vixen radar included in the future carrier plans, as it would be a relatively simple, low-risk development. It might even be useful for the RAF, which currently do not have a radar-equipped Harrier capable of firing the AMRAAM or Sea Eagle missiles, though that might have an impact on Typhoon II numbers, and an impact on F-35C purchases.

Networked multipack cruise missiles in successful test

Matt Bryant Silver badge
Boffin

Tanks obsolete again? Unlikley.

The 1973 Middle East War marked the first mass use of infantry-portable, guided, anti-tank missiles, and at first the Sagger used by the Egyptian infantry took a serious toll of what had previously been the rulers of the Middle Eatern battlefields, the IDF armour. Correspondents all over the world raced to their tripewriters and wrote long articles on how the tank was an anachronism and should be consigned to the dustbin of history. Then the Israelis rediscovered the correct mix of infantry and armour, trashed the Egyptians (and Jordanians, Syrians, and assorted "Arab" armies), and the tank was back at the heart of battlefield strategy.

As the battles in Yugoslavia have shown us time and time again, a guided missile is only as smart as the man guiding it. If the guider can be fooled into shooting at a decoy then the missile will happilly waste itself. If the guider is distracted or killed, the in-air missile is equally voided. As with any guided weapon, the accuracy and effect depends on the guider. Laser-guided artillery rounds (like Copperhead) have been around since the mid-eighties, are relatively cheap and a whole battery's fire can be guided onto tank targets by a single laser operator in the front-line. It still hasn't stopped the tank, it just spurred the development of more and more counter-measures (such as smoke grenades for near instantaneous smokescreens with IR-absorbing particles), and more work on close co-operation with infantry mounted in faster, better-armed APCs such as the M2 Bradley and the Warrior. The operator of a PAM system will be just as vulnerable to the same counter-tactics as the Sagger operators were in 1973 - even more vulnerable as it sounds like the flight time will be even longer, giving more time for the targeted tank to find and eliminate the guider.

So, the PAM system may be good for giving infantry a remote, precision tool for taking out poit targets (such as jihadis in a house), with a neat ability to replay the attack on primetime news to show how surgical and inncoent-friendly the whole affair was, but I don't see it making any nation drop tanks from their inventory just yet.

Tell Santa to bring more assault rifles

Matt Bryant Silver badge
Boffin

RE: Paul

Actually, Nancy Pelosi has been Speaker of the House of Reps for over two years now, which means the Democrats have had just as much say in all the "reductions in rights" passed by Congress if not more. To blame the Republicans alone id just blinkered groupthought.

VMware to cut desktop storage by 80 per cent

Matt Bryant Silver badge
Boffin

RE: Anonymous Coward

"....Seriously, your ignorance is astonishing." Well, your response is just brimming with eloquent technical insight - not! I actually use and appreciate VMWare products like ESX and see the value of VDI when applied to a desktop fleet on a corporate LAN, but for VMware's Jocelyn Goldfein to state that it will allow a user to seamlessly move from desktop to mobile netbook is just too much. Citirx kind of does it, but then if you've used Citrix (and I have, we still do, and I like the product) you will know it involves compromises even with high-speed broadband. And Citrix has a lot of advantages in its ICA protocol design that VMware is not even close to matching, which means user frustration levels will be off the chart. Much as I support the idea of VDI/View for the LAN desktop, I would seriously question the suggestion of trying to use it remotely.

Now, unless you can actually formulate a reply with a technical argument, kindly go suck a thin client.

Matt Bryant Silver badge
Pirate

VMware can't sell for brown-smelly-stuff

What an awful way to push VDI! It just makes it look like a thin-client replacement or Sun's Global Desktop, and if they sell it like that it will be a great big fail becasue just about no-one wants either of those. Most companies have realised that if you want to make a user truly mobile, give them a laptop. It's simple, it works, and the security issues can be avoided with secure logins, secure VPNs, automatic disk encryption, user education, etc. Laptops are cheap, they don't need oodles of new technology and - unlike the Sun offering - you get to keep all your old Office apps and they work! Even if you lose a few laptops a year, it costs much less to replace them than the license costs for most of these "virtual desktop" solutions.

Where VDI should be pushed is to replace static desktops, not mobile users. It will allow you to thin out their desktops and hopefully lengthen the time between desktop upgrades, allow users to move between desks without haveing to change anything, and yet give centralised control via the datacenter servers holding the image and apps. With fast internal networking this makes sense - trying to do it to mobile devices over even broadband is a joke. A remote user with a laptop is still productive even without a connection into the core - a "virtualised desktop" user without a link is dead in the water.

Snipers - Cowardly assassins, or surgical soldiers?

Matt Bryant Silver badge
Boffin

Snipers even save enemy lives - kinda.

"Peacekeeping" stories from mates in Iraq. Story one - they are at a roadblock, they don't have a sniper, they see a group of OMS militia (that's Sadr's Shia nutters, the ones we were supposed to liberate!), set up a mortar two-thousand metres out and have to endure an hour of incoming beacuse they don't have any long-range response available. The mortar team finally got plugged by the RAF dropping a bomb on them. Unfortunately, whilst it took out the five-man mortar crew, it also killed two unarmed locals who were just unlucky to be in the area.

Story two. Similarly, they spot another mortar team moving into position, but this time they had a sniper team with them. The sniper team put down harrassing fire (it was too far away for accurate shooting), and the OMS packed up and went home. No-one died. If the sniper team hadn't been their, they would have called in another airstrike, so ironically the sniper actually saved the mortar crew's lives as well as possibly any innocent locals in the area.

Matt Bryant Silver badge
Boffin

RE: Nice article, pity it is so poor hystorically, and TW Burger

RE: AC

Oops! Nice comment, pity it is so poor historically. Present your rear for hoisting on your petard, pronto! The Fins were officially using their Lahti L-39 20mm anti-tank rifles as a counter-sniper weapon and for long-range fire before the Russians did the same with the PTRD and PTRS. The Lahti used both the standard AP round and HE, the latter being very popular for targeting machinegun nests. It's likely because the Fins did so with success that the Red Army started sniping with their obsolete AT rifles.

And both the Brits and Germans in North Africa in early '41 often used obsolete anti-tank rifles for harassing fire, though not as an official sniper function, so that again pre-dates the Soviet use mentioned. There are some accounts of British troops using up the heavy Boys .55in AT rifle ammo for long-range harrassing fire on the advancing Germans in France in 1940, but that seems to be more of a case of the Brits looking for an excuse to lighten their load!

RE: TW Burger

On the point of pointy-nosed bullets being too sharp for laser lens, I had an interesting chat with a clever MoD gent a few years back about the same topic, namely using laser-guided .50 cal bullets to target the thinner armoured parts of tanks. When I raised the pointy-nosed point, he said this would apply to a bullet designed to look for the laser splash on the target, but a bullet could be designed with a laser lens in the base that looked backwards at a laser projector on the rifle, and steered the round to ensure it stayed in the beam. This would allow the nose to be the aerodynamic point required, and the rear lens could be shielded by a cap that fell off after leaving the muzzle, much like the jacket on a discarding sabot round. His problem was not the laser guidance, but that he didn't think the idea of using the same round for sniping humans "would be economically viable" for her Majesty's forces!

Lego terrorist threatens democracy

Matt Bryant Silver badge
Stop

Oh come ON!

I mean, a broomhandle Mauser!? FFS, it's the twenty-first century, can't they at least have Makarovs? Of course, the Iraqi version would have a Glock (supplied to the Iraqi Police by our gormless EU politicians, up to 70% are thought to have been passed straight on to Shia militias).

Mohammed Shaffiq is just typical of the attention-seeking lobby groups common on both sides of the pond which go around looking for things to get incensed about to get a little publicity, and - face it - it works, otherwise there is no way you would have heard of him or his outfit. True, he does usually take a stand against extremist Muslim groups (they did condemn the Glasgow airport attacks last year, for example), but he's getting a rep as Rent-A-Quote. Surely he should be too busy condemning the recent Mumbai attacks and "reaching out" to British-based relatives of the Mumbai victims to have time to attack Lego mods?

So what will happen to Sun?

Matt Bryant Silver badge
Happy

Rock is coming...?

Reminds me of the old Spitting Image skit of David Steel and David Owen, where they are wating for the Liberal Wave to Rise and sweep them into power, and David Steel's puppet keeps ecstaticly wailing; "It's coming, David, the wave is coming!"

Of course, the wave never did come.

Just for the Sunshiners with very short and selective memory, UltraSPARC V was canned after it had taped out, after "beta" units had gone to seed sites, and after Sun had assured us all it was "revolutionary" and would be better than all the competing chips, etc, etc.

/Laugh, point, yawn, laugh some more.

Matt Bryant Silver badge
Pirate

RE: Joshua Goodall

Apple is an interesting idea, but probably not too realistic. If we are going into a recession, manufacturers of luxury goods will suffer as customers save money by buying budget brands. Apple is very much a luxury consumer brand for the majority of its range, so I expect Jobs and Co to be carefully hoarding cash for the coming lean period, and not investing in a whole herd of white elephants.

"....If you look at the subtext of the engineering direction for 2009, they're gearing up for a crack at the general (rather than media) mid-sized enterprise market...." They don't have the channel presence reqired, unless they try the old Dell sales model and go only online. This has the downside of zero feet-on-the-street, and nobody out there talking customers into trials. If they buy Sun just for the channel then they'll be disappointed. And if they did they'd have to service all those existing Sun SPARC/Solaris customers, a phenomenal drag on any buyer. If Apple were to want anything from the Sun firesale they'll wait for the bargain clearance rather than paying the type of over-inflated price the Sunshiners will want. And what do they need to buy? They already have very skilled x86 engineers quite capable of matching Sun's designs. So maybe a few Sun refugees will end up at Apple, but I can't see Apple making a home for the lot of them.

"....They have successfully productized and monetized an open-source Unix and could easily absorb the best of Sun's R&D people. They're already cherry-picking bits of Solaris (Dtrace, ZFS &c). Apple could give Solaris the makeover it deserves....." True, but in a narrow niche of the desktop, not in the enterprise space. Making and selling desktops is completely different to even Wintel edge servers, let alone real enterprise servers. Currently, as I understand it (feel free to correct me if I'm wrong as I am not a MAC OS guru), MAC OS doesn't scale beyond sixteen cores, and Apple have no experience in making multi-socket servers with mroe than four CPU sockets. It's a bit of a leap to think they would suddenly push out a new multicore OS and server design in short notice without some info leaking or being leaked to the press. And they wouldn't want any of the current Sun designs as the real ones are Fujitsu's, not Sun's.

"....They could do with a decent x86 server series. But they've never been afraid of using non-Intel processors, either....." But they already have a skilled engineering team that have Intel experience, so why pick up Sun's, especially when it comes with all the baggage of the SPARC and Solaris business.

Since the FSC divorce broke, Sunshiners have been desperately looking for a new white knight to replace Fujitsu, and several have minetioned Apple because they see synergies in their "non-conformal" designs and because they faltter themsleves that Sun and Apple are "innovators". Unfortunately, it's a bit like expecting Ferrari to buy a company that makes three-wheeled delivery vans - yes, they both are different to the rest of car/van makers, but that doesn't make them in any way alike enough for it to make sense for Ferrari to buy them.

Matt Bryant Silver badge
Happy

RE: AC

"....http://blogs.computerworld.com/sun_revenue_loss_q308...." Nice puff piece, maybe Arun Taneja got asked to turn a favour for his old buddies at Sun. I can't see Jeff Byrne, who has much more experience than Jeff Boles in how the large vendors work, writing such twaddle as "....what makes me think Sun is well positioned - I am hard pressed to pick out visible technologies that are not well aligned..." - if Sun was so well-aligned its sales wouldn't be in such a nose-dive. And pretending it's just for this economically slow period is hilariously blinkered or just downright dishonest - how many years is it since Sun had four profitable quarters in a row? Compare to HP or IBM, which can both answer quickly enough. And maybe Mr Boles would like to compare notes with Gartner or IDC, both recognised names in the market, who both disagree with Mr Bole's point of view. I don't even have to guess which one customers would value.

"....http://www.redmonk.com/jgovernor/2008/11/26/what-should-sun-do/...." This is a great article for Sunshiners, the rest of us simply don't believe lines like "...The retooling of a tired mess into a clean and solid portfolio is complete..." - complete!?!?!? Hold on a sec, weren't you Sunshiners saying it would be complete when you got Niagara? Oh, but then you had to buy in a low-end SPARC64 design from Fujitsu because Niagara didn't fill the hole at the low-end, and you're losing market share to Lintel/Wintel, low-end Power and low-end Itanium. Hold on a sec - even with the M3000 you're still losing at the same rate, and now just have a mess of non-compatible Solaris versions and overlapping chip designs! And weren't you telling everyone to skip the Mx000 series and go to Rock? Oops, no Rock! Suddenly the Mx000 series is just fine. Laughable! And don't get me started on the Sun blades, which are the most comic offering in the blades sector. As above - if Sun is so "complete", why are you redlining, and why have you been redlining for so long? All in all, the blog is a nice quote from an unknown, hope the memory keeps the Sunshiners feeling loved as they wander down to the dole queues.

"....http://www.cuddletech.com/blog/pivot/entry.php?id=988#comm...." Hilarious! The best post you can find is a piece admitting all the problems Sun have? "....In this tough economic climate I don't think anyone has the time or money to take on the problems of Sun...." Says it all - if Sun was such a great buy, it would be bought, if just for the cash in the bank. The fact is NO-ONE WANTS TO BUY SUN because it would be like buying a diseased sheep - you can't sell it on, the meat is unfit, you don't want it to mix with your herd in-case it infects them and reduces their value, and even if you skin it you may not be able to sell the fleece. Ben Rockwood may think Schwartz is doing a good job but note how he deflects blame to the board that appointed him - this is just silly, as that means the board makes bad decisions which somehow alleviate Schwartz of any blame for his continued operational misfires, yet they should take the longterm blame? I'm sure that Ben doesn't apply the reverse and congratulates the board when Schwartz does anything right. Mind you, Ben can't get stuck with that dilemma too often!

Oh, and I see from Ben's blog you have taken to posting under my name further afield too. Amusing to see that you find a little humourous needling such a threat you have to run all over the web posting rubbish under my nom de plume. I think a better use of your time might be learning Linux and applying for a job at IBM, HP, Novell or Red Hat, they might have openings for a semi-technical marketing droid.

Matt Bryant Silver badge
Boffin

RE: Kevin Hutchinson

Because of simple economics - Sun needs money to invest in product development and just to pay the running bills, including ongoing legal fees. Sun currently has four sources for such cash - product and services sales (declining overall, so more money going out than coming in), loans from the banks (and the banks aren't lending), sales of shares (nobody wants them, even at the low prices they are at), and by using the cash reserves. Sun has been burning through the latter just about continually since Y2K, and simply can't afford to continue doing so, not if it wants to pursue the patent troll route as it is doing with NetApp.

You want Sun to buy itself out? So, Sun uses it's cash to try and buy back shares, but what if Sun ends up unable to buy all the shares? It is still on the stock market, and now with no cash reserves. Which would make it even more of a basket-case, and the vultures move in for the asset-stripping in shorter time.

Or, Sun can wait it out, and hope the declining sales and cash reserves manage to last through the recession until some mythical boom time when customers aren't going to give a hoot about costs and just buy Sun kit for fun - unlikely, cue the vultures a bit later down the line.

Or Sun sells some assets to cut costs, maintains the current product lines but slims down on expenses, and hopes for that same mythical boom time. Only problem is they have very little assets of value left, even their patent portfolio would not raise a billion in cash, so they just end up opening the door to the vultures in stages.

Which brings us to what the market are really telling Sun to do - downsize and radically re-align.

And that means taking a long, honest look at the enterprise server business. Maybe keep the enterprise SPARC line for now whilst the majority of the development costs are footed by Fujitsu, but drop Rock and concentrate on x86 and possibly Niagara. If Niagara can't make the profits required to at least fund itself and future developments, be smart and drop it now. Talk to Fujitsu and find out what is really planned for SPARC64, and then make a grown-up decision about possibly porting to another architecture such as Power or Itanium (the former is now quite possible with IBM buying Transitive) if they want to stay in the enterprise high end.

If StorageTek can't make any money then take an axe to it and clear out the deadwood products. I have no idea why Chris thinks anyone would buy the tape bizz, especially HP (tape market leader)! Again, the patent portfolio is worth some but not much, but patents cost peanuts to maintain and can be easily sold later without including painful staff cuts, unlike hardware product lines. Tape is dying - apply investments accordingly, and treat as deadwood if required with calm hubris rather than the usual Sun posturing.

And Solaris - supposedly a crown jewel but one that can't seem to make Sun any money. Sun will just have to evaluate whether it can make money going head to head with Red Hat and Novell, and if not then be brave, drop Solaris and really partner with Linux and M$.

I can't see Sun selling the x86 business as Chris said, especially not to IBM who seem intent on selling their own xSeries to Lenovo. Besides, it's the Sun product line that would seem to actually make a profit whilst incurring the least risk/investment as the majority of the technology is not developed by Sun.

MySQL? Swallow the pride and sell it now, whilst it still has some goodwill value. Maybe Oracle would take it just to stop M$ buying up a competitor, or maybe SAP would like their own database. Either way, I can't see much of a buyer queue forming in a recession.

And a merger? Chris, with whom? HP or IBM are simply unlikely as neither really has the need, and if one proposed it the other would probably start legal/monoploy proceedings just to prolong the agony. Fujitsu seem off the buyers list - apart from the fact they're busy divorcing Siemens, there is the question of do they really want to buy anything from Sun. Remember, Solaris, and SPARC are "opensource", so if Fujitsu really wants to continue with either it doesn't have to buy the over-staffed and over-priced divisions from Sun. Fujitsu already have their own bigger x86 bizz and work with M$ and the Linux boyos, so they don't need anything there either, and a declining Sun customer base is probably not a big enough draw. Hence I am not surprised to see Chris leave Fujitsu - once seen as Sun's White Knight in waiting - right out of the picture.

And the EMC idea is so left field it should have come with a disclaimer. I cannot think of one reason why EMC would want any product from Sun's portfolio other than some of the patents, and with Sun opensourcing ZFS there is no need to buy Sun even if they thought ZFS was worth it. Would EMC pay good money now for the Sun tape bizz when they can simply wait and pick it up as a bargain later?

In summary, Sun needs to concentrate on the x86 business and make it such a core product range that skilled x86 people will want to work there just like UNIX and RISC people used to. But that means jettisoning the majority of the old SPARC/Solaris, MySQL and most of the storage business, otherwise it will simply drag the x86 part down with it. If Sun can survive as a "me-too" x86 business and follow just behind the bleeding edge of the market, then maybe it can survive long enough to look forward to a future where it can again move into being a tech innovator.

Red Hat searches for mainstreet in the City of London

Matt Bryant Silver badge

RE: re: Too much in the kernel already

Maybe that's exactly what is needed, a number of tightly integrated packages with as much in the kernal as possible so they can be run out-of-the-box for set application stacks. One of the reasons we buy hp-ux is they do the 11i v3 OS now in four bundles, which makes it easy to tie up all the patching, licences and support. It would be simple to create a "virtualisation bundle" for RHEL with KVM in the kernal, maybe a "cluster bundle", etc. Face it - making tight and lean kernal is fine for geeks, but lots of customers like the idea of just having something they can stick on a box and not have to fine tune. It would also allow differentiation in the pricing, so a cheaper support/licence bundle could be offered for a base bundle, then more expensive for one including clustering or KVM, etc. RHs big problem is not selling to the Linux fans, it's selling to Windows, Solaris, AIX and hp-ux users. Anything that makes that easier is a good thing, even if it upsets the fans.

MySQL creator kicks MySQL 5.1 team in the teeth

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Wating for Sunshine....

What, no Sunshiners posting links to unknown bloggers refuting any idea that Sun could even think of releasing a buggy bit of software? No squealing that anyone questioning The Great Jonathan's Legendary MySQL just must be a working for a competitor? Maybe they they're all too busy reading through their P45s....

HP cancels Christmas in the UK and Éire

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Guilty feelings....

This is causing a bit of discomfort as our HP account team are taking a bunch of us out for Xmas lunch. Not sure if it is coming out of their sales team's P&L, would not be too happy if it turned out this was still centrally funded when the grunts at HP aren't getting their do, especially as we see it as the grunts working hard behind the scenes that have made our relationship work.

MoD kit chief: Blighty unsure of supersonic stealth jumpjet

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Steam? Electromagnetic? Bah! Gimme rockets any day!

If it ever came down to it, as a last ditch choice, you could always just use F-35Cs with RATO packs. If they can make a loaded Hercules jump into the air on 250 feet of runway, an F-35C should be a piece of cake. I'm not sure how this could be done without using up at least one weapon station, but it would work. Or we could just use rocket catapults, like they used to use for launching seaplanes off cruisers and battleships, and even little merchantmen in WW2 (look up MAC ships), with a quick reload mechanism for the rockets. Of course, the number of rockets required would take up a serious chunk of storage space but they'd probably be a pretty cheap option until a proper steam cat could be added, and they could always be replenished at sea pretty easily.

An electromagnetic "rail gun" catapault would have serious implications for operational secrecy - an EMP spike just over the horizon would tell your enemy excatly where you were and that you were launching aircraft....

Matt Bryant Silver badge
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RE: Carriers? Who needs them?

Carriers allow you to project air-power into foreign backyards without having to ask permission from third parties for overflights and possibly use of air bases. Any time they want, the US can park a carrier fleet off Lebanon, Libya or Yemen, and effectively guarantee air superiority and pin-point strike capability over the entire Middle East. If they relied on the USAF, then they would have to ask permission from Turkey, Kazakhstan, Saudi, etc, etc. Carriers give you independence of action.

So why do we need them in the UK? We still have a both a number of friendly countries which we have defence agreements with (such as Sierra Leone), and foreign territories where we are obliged to provide defence (ever heard of a place called the Falklands?). Without a competant Royal Navy, including a naval air force, we can't do the job. We usually manage with half the naval force our sailors deserve, and robbing them of a proper air defence after the eye-opener of the Falklands would probably be the final nail in NuLabour's coffin, so expect the F-35B saga to drag on for now.

Matt Bryant Silver badge
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Navalising Eurofighter?

There is a lot of work required to navalise a land-based fighter, it's not just a matter of bolting on an arrestor hook as it was many years ago. IMHO, much as I'd like to see a navalised Typhoon (a Seaphoon?), it would probably be so expensive a project it would make the Tranche 3 Eurofighters look cheap! Any such project would be a real last resort for the beancounters, and would probably result instead in some NuLabour stupidity around an anglicised version of the Dassault Rafale naval fighter - eugh!

If we have to, can't we just use some navalised Hawk 200s (the Hawk 100 has already been fitted with arrestor gear, as has the fully-navalised T-45 Goshawk version) and put off ordering anything until it's clear the F-35B will do the job? Or do rolling take-offs and landings with the old Sea Harrier, maybe with the Pegasus 107 and bigger wing from the GR9? Would seem a much cheaper and better option, and both the Hawk 200 and a re-engined Sea Harrier would be good enough for the mainly policing type ventures we're likely to get into in the meantime.

US gun lobby blogs Thanksgiving gun 'facts'

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Opening salvo.

American friends tell me this is just a pre-emptive and defensive volley from the gun lobby due to Obummer selecting a number of rabidly anti-gun cabinet members. One of them tried to redefine the 2nd Amendment even after legal advice had told him he couldn't, so expect some interesting "scientific articles" aka propaganda from both sides as this heats up.

US Army in $50m video game upgrade

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RE: Aristotles slow and dimwitted horse

Oh yeah, there's so much oil in Afghanistan, isn't there? Or Bosnia - remember, that's the place the Brits (and the Yanks) went to protect MUSLIMS from CHRISTIANS? Get a clue, you prejudiced maroon.

Matt Bryant Silver badge
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RE: Iain

"....when confronted with a real foe the VR conditioning will make them think of the enemy as non-human?" Actually, that's exactly what you want. You want training to condition a soldier so that when the criteria (fits the rules of engagement for the day, does not conflict with orders such as to remain undetected, etc) are met, the soldier will then pull the trigger without further thought. The last thing you want is a moralising soldier thinking about whether or not he should kill or maim someone, that is why you have ROEs and officers' orders. Otherwise, your enemy could use the time taken up by moralising to kill you, your mate, or anyone else he has already set his heart on killing. Soldiers are conditioned to follow orders for a reason, so they react quicker and do not waste time and lives trying to make judgement calls. The armies of NATO (and many of the old Soviet armies) all spend a lot of time and money, with lawyers involved, making sure their training and ROEs are correct and as good a compromise between protecting the public, the enemy (yes, they have rights too!), and our soldiers.

Here's a simple (and on first sight, incredibly and stupidly PC) example from the ROEs for our troops in Basra. If they see a gent with a grenade, they cannot shoot him straight away. Even if he pulls the pin, he cannot be shot straight away but has to actually be seen in the act of throwing the grenade in such a way as to put members of the public or the soldiers at risk. If the soldiers do not act immediately and fire when he is in the process of throwing the grenade, THEY CANNOT SHOOT HIM AFTERWARDS as, legally, the threat of injury is transferred to the grenade, and unless the thrower then makes a separate attempt to attack (say aiming an AK) he can only be apprehended and arrested. So, training soldiers to react as fast as possible, without having to make too much of a judgement call, is what is required, and VR offers a very good way of doing this without the expense, mess and risk of injury of live ammunition training.

RISC daddy conjures Moore's Lawless parallel universe

Matt Bryant Silver badge
Boffin

Moore's Law still applicable thanks to big bizz.

Moore's Law will still happen because the main drivers for the chip companies are still corporates, and it is money spent on research there that trickles down into desktops and eventually home PCs. I have never met an FD who - when asked if they would like to be able to compute their payroll run, or end-of-year figures, or just daily financial activities, faster - answered anything other than "how much?". So, whilst big bizz keeps pushing for faster systems, chip manufacturers will design faster CPUs, hence Moore's Law will remain valid as shrinking chips to make them go faster for single-threaded apps will still be a valid design solution for a while, as it's just simpler than real parallel threading.

I would personally like to see more work on the infrastructure supplying data to the chips - storage, memory, and interrconnects. Having a rocket CPU upgrade without upgradign the others just means you have a faster CPU spending more time wating for data than before. This failure to ramp up the infrastructure is perfectly demonstarted by Sun's Niagara chips, where they have effectively given up on the idea of keeping a core spinning and instead settled for having lot of cores idle and waiting whilst a few work. Intel's approach (and IBM's) has been to massively increase cache and bandwidth to the chips to try and keep them as busy as possible so the increase in clock cycles is not just and increase in time spent waiting.

The other area of growth is still scale-up by coding for apps that may not be properly parallel but still spread threads across as many cores as possible. UNIX can do this, so can Windows (on Itanium at least) can too, and Linux is not far behind, so it is not beyond the pale to foresee quite soon versions of desktop Windows and Linux happilly making use of sixty-four cores in a single CPU, it's just the apps that will need the most work. And to go back to my FD example, if I asked my FD today if he'd like a PC that would run Excel faster by splitting the load over sixty-four cores, I'm sure his answer would be; "if the cost is right, yes please!"

HP rides EDS buy through Meltdown

Matt Bryant Silver badge
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RE: AC and links :D

Lol, I don't need to post any links, all the articles showing how bad Sun has got are all here on the Reg! Shall we review? Reg article on market share - HP good and growing; Sun down the toilet. Reg articel on results - HP very good; Sun like a lot of brown smelly stuff. And for the piece de resistance - HP number one vendor with a healthy share price; Sun's fast shrinking market cap, soon to breach the $2bn figure!

Face it, if anyone actually beleived all your Sunshiner links and their dodgy bench sessions then Sun would be the number one server vendor and not HP. But, as I take great joy in reminding you yet again, HP is number one, and Sun is nearly gone!

Matt Bryant Silver badge
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Interesting comparison.

"....As usual, the Image and Printing Group .... operating profits in this HP group came to $1.16bn in the quarter...." So that's the printer bizz that Sunshiners look down their nose at so much. Let's look at what Chris Mellor wrote on the 12th Novermber:

"....analysts are expecting Sun to lose $1.35bn on revenues of $12.8bn for its fiscal 2009 year...."

So, the HP printer bizz made almost as much profit in a quarter as the whole of Sun is expected to lose in the whole next year. Maybe Ponytail should spend the last $3bn in the bank buying someone like Kyocera?

HP missionaries paddled over mainframe convert claims

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RE: Tom Broussard

And you, sir, are just an Toliet Roll Factory Worker! Maybe the IBM mainframe customers switched to Itanium becasue it just costs half as much as running the same app on a mainframe? or maybe they just liked the dark grey HP paints the boxes, who knows. The fact is, IBM's golden goose is laying smaller and smaller egss every year, as more and more customers wise up to the fact that IBM has been treating them like suckers and charging a rediculous premium on mainframe products and support.

Supporting Linux on mainframes was a smart move, but it only slowed the decline, not prevented it. This is obvious from IBM's viloent reaction to technologies such as PSI's work on z/OS on Itanium (on Superdomes, much cheaper than IBM mainframes). After throwing law suits at PSI, IBM eventually tried to hide the problem by buying them up. But it hasn't stopped customers going through expensive migrations to get off mainframes, becuase Integirty (and Power) are just so much cheaper.

So why would a customer move off mainframe to Itanium rather than Power? Well, for a start, HP have better options - Windows, Linux, OpenVMS, NonStop or hp-ux on Integrity, as opposed to just AIX and Linux on Power. NonStop has particular appeal as it looks and sounds like a mainframe, just much cheaper. And, of course, they can mix OSs in a Superdome frame with hardware isolation, which Power can't do. And then there's the not so little issue that Power6 may not be able to host the app in question, which means IBM has to go to the table with older Power5, and then the customer has to worry about whether he has to retread his app again to eventually go up to Power6, and maybe again to got to Power7, whereas with hp-ux (and Linux, and OpenVMS, and Windows, and NonStop) there is a large level of binary compatibility between releases. And then we can look at the superior HP storage offering, better management tools, and the fact you don't have to worry about IBM Global Services doubling the cost over time.

As for being an HP wannabe - believe me, I'm too well-paid for HP!

Matt Bryant Silver badge
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All good fun!

"Sometimes, the server business reminds me of driving in a car on a long trip with a lot of kids in the backseat. You just want to reach back and start slapping and tell everyone to shut up and stop talking nonsense....." Oh, come on! Without the fun of all the fanboi rants, flamewars and FUD, fed by such sponsored research, computing would be a lot less fun. A long time ago a teacher told me a story about his first job in toilet tissue factory. All day he had to sit and watch the endless stream of toilet paper roll past. If it wandered too far to the left and was in danger of coming off the rollers, he pulled one lever to correct it, and if it went too far to the right he had to pull another lever to bring back inline. Of course, after several days of boredom, he let it run off one side "just to see what would happen", and the whole factory ground to a halt for the day. Without the fun of a little inter-platform rivalry to liven up the day I'm sure there are several businesses that would see admins letting stuff "go off the roller, just to see what happens".

Sun readies entry Sparc T2 kicker

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Failed chips?

Still think a whole product line being supplied by dud chips is unlikely, but the simplest way to check would be to check the part numbers for the CPU in the normal and budget models. Or just to take a CPU from the budget model and plug it into the normal model and see if the onboard 10GbE still worked. To actually cripple chips would probably be more expensive, so I'm sticking with the crippled m'board idea.

Oh, hold on a sec - sorry, I assumed that someone would actually buy some of these so we could compare the chip parts! :P

Matt Bryant Silver badge
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I can think of two possibilities....

One; they have an awful problem with chips coming out of the fab with dud onbaord 10GbE controllers, enough to supply a whole line.... unlikley, otherwise news of such a large failure rate would likely have leaked by now. Second option; they are putting ordinary T2+ chips into a simplified motherboard, maybe with some of the socket pins simply not connected through and the external 10GbE ports removed. A simplified motherboard would be cheaper to produce - less tracks = less cost. And seeing how the systems are undercut by cheap'n'cheerful NAS boxen, something had to be done.

Of course, a simpler way to lower the price, increase the capacity of the system, not cripple the networking advantage, and generally make the 7110 more competetive, would be to simply switch to using a mix of SSD and SATA instead of 10k SAS disks, as suggested by Phillip Fayers on Sun's Mark Hamilton's blog. Mark's answer is that "compromises" had to be made and that the SSD/SATA mix is available further up the model chain! Surely it would make more sense to put the cost-saving options into the entry model from the start? If a Sunshiner can see these things, why can't Sun?

Parallels 4 users want their money back

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RE: look, it's simple..

I have an hp-ux terminal (VERY old, but it was free!), several Windoze PCs, two Linux PCs and... oh, hold on a sec - I have no need for an expensive, over-engineered Mac!

Oh, and for the Sunshiners, isn't the Sun virtualisation product free because it's just Xen in drag?

US utilities moot huge electric vehicle order to boost car biz

Matt Bryant Silver badge
Pirate

Foreign dependence on Lithium?

Whilst I'm generally in favour of battery-powered EVs over most other solutions, the problem is the current tech is heavily reliant on Li-Ion (lithium-ion) batteries, as used in laptops and mobile devices. There is already a potential shortage in lithium supply - if we switched tomorrow to just EVs with Li-Ion batteries we'd exhaust the world supply FASTER than if we stuck with oil!- and that ignores competing lithium hunger from the computer tech industry. At the moment, battery research has some options other than Li-Ion, but they are not as commercially attractive just yet.

And then there's the strategic problem, especially for the US, of the fact that the largest exploitable lithium reserves are largely in South America, in politically-hostile countries like Bolivia.

So I'm expecting to see a lot of manouvering from the hydrogen fuel cell lobby to get the biggest chunk of any car industry bail-out being tied to greater investment in hydrogen fuel cell research and production. This will be intersting to watch as the biggest potential beneficiary of such a cash injection would be the US petrochemical industry the Dummicrats detest so much!

Meanwhile, here in the UK we can resign ourselves to more wasted opportunities passing us by courtesy of our inept politcians, before we end up belatedly buying nuke power from the French and importing expensive EVs and batteries from abroad.

Sun trumpets radically simple open storage boxes

Matt Bryant Silver badge
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RE: Dear Matt - shush!

Hey, I'm having fun here winding up the Sunshiners! If you insist on spoiling my fun I'm gonna have to remind them you said the Thumper boxen weren't real storage devices....

Matt Bryant Silver badge
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RE: RE: AC - Sorry, not 200 lines!

"....There are plenty of technical points made in previous AC posts....." My riposte was in response to your post, not theirs. You were being childish that time, as you admitted yourself.

"....how on earth your guessing the size & the history of our data center over a forum amazes me? Are psychic skills on your CV...." No, just going on my previous experience of Sunshiners. I interview plenty of them and the story is similar - Slowaris wall to wall, then the rot set in and Sun stopped delivering, and they had to accept more and more non-Sun kit, until the Slowaris was in the minority and they were competing for jobs with Windows or Linux admins whom asked for a third less money. Many of them are very intelligent and skilled, but few of them seem to be able to get over the Sun snobbery and accept they might have better chances cross-training onto another OS.

"....I take it you don't use Linux very much if your not seeing these things?...." We use a lot of Red Hat, especially with Oracle, and it is not a problem I'm familiar with. Did you bother to ask your Linux vendor for assistance? But I'm guessing it's some out-of-date Sun FUD you've read off the Sun marketting pages, or just not a problem with Red Hat. Or maybe we've just been lucky and you weren't, who knows! Maybe you should let your local Sun marketting droid know he needs to update his FUD. In the meantime, I'd choose RHEL over Slowaris in 99% of cases.

"....My bet says Sun will lock people out of the OS...." Ah, so if the GUI fails you really do have to sit around and wait for a Sun engineer to come and diagnose the problem, let alone fix it. Seems a lot slower than a Windows or Linux NAS where I can get in and do some investigation myself, maybe even fix the problem without needing to call out an engineer.

"....so idiots don't stick extra services onto an OS meant to be running storage services only...." Ouch, not a very nice way to talk about your customers, I thought you said Sunshiners "have a very good understanding of IT equipment", but now you're saying they might be idiots? Are you also implying with all that hardware the Sun NAS boxen are so overloaded any extra load will kill them? Not a very good advertising point, does this mean you be forced to buy a second server for any other apps like backup? Wanna guess what I can do with my Windows and Linux NAS boxes....?

"....Your actually aiming at a genuine real-life company brimming with lawyers! Care to substantiate that sentiment in court? I very much doubt any sane person would...." Sounds like an (empty) threat to me. Are you really saying Sun are so dead set on silencing any criticism they'd get the lawyers out? Well, actually, looking back at their rediculous demands for a customer NDA before they fixed the onbaord Broadcom problems a few years ago, Sun seem very determined to silence any criticism whatsoever! But what are they going to do - threaten the Reg with no more scoops unless they delete all critical posts from their forums? Threaten a customer - yes, I still sign off on support for some of the old SPARC kit we haven't got rid of. Even more interestingly, seeing as it seems to wound you so deeply, are you making these wild threats from a position of knowledge, inside Sun? Very naughty! What is Sun's position on homophobia, might that not interest your own lawyers?

But I'm not worried, all those Sun lawyers are too busy fighting the NetApp lawsuit, or taking care of redundancy cases with employees, or maybe are even some of the 6,000 starter redundancies themselves! If Sun is "brimming with lawyers" not on the 6,000 list are you saying MrSchwartz has already given up on innovation and is just going to fire all the engineers and developers and stick with making money as a patent troll? Lol! Even if Sun ever wanted to take me to court I'm sure I could just spin it out for a few years until Sun finally runs our of money and disappears.

/WHILST Sun > 0

Laugh, point, laugh

/end.

Matt Bryant Silver badge
Happy

RE: Anonymous, Cowardly Sunshiner

Ah, another response brimming with technical genius - not! Just to really worry you, I've heard a whisper from a Fujitsu birdie that they don't actually need anything from Sun. After all, you open sourced both SPARC and Slowaris, so they don't need to waste money digging you out of the hole, they can just sit back and wait to pick up your best minds when the Sun sets. They don't need your patents, they don't need your wannabe storage business, and they wouldn't pay good money for MySQL. Probably not what you Sunshiners want to hear!

Matt Bryant Silver badge
Boffin

RE: AC - Sorry, not 200 lines!

"OK, it's a childish insult...." Don't worry, I don't expect a technical riposte or counter from a Sunshiner.

"....I'd love to know how the hell you have so much time to write...." Well, obviously, I'm just better at my job than you, steered the management into making the better product choices, and now have a much more reliable, resilient and manageable datacenter than you. At a guess, I'd say that's probably because you use more Sun products than we do.

"....I work in a mixed team, managing Sun and HP and Linux...." I'm betting it used to be all SPARC Slowaris and NT, but now the Slowris is being squeezed out.....

"... and they are offering management nightmares and linux is the least stable of the lot. It creates real pain in our teams at times...." So employ some better architects and some better admins. I'm guessing your core skills are around Slowaris? Linux is not new, it's been in the datacenter with real enterprise application support for years. Either you're doing something wildly different or just doing it badly, there is no reason why your Linux stack should be so bad unless you made it that way. I'm not saying Linux is perfect, but, I take it the fact that you persist with it is an indicator of how desperately you need to move off Slowaris.

"....this latest Sun product you've seen the GUI shots..." Yes, and what happens when the GUI stops working? How do you troubleshoot without Slowaris skills? When I have a problem with a Windows or Linux NAS I can troubleshoot the underlying problem either through built-in tools or the CLI - how do you do that on a Slowaris NAS without any Slowaris skills? Would you be happy to just wait around for a Sun engineer to arrive and diagnose the problem when that NAS box might hold data you really need? And if you want anything other than the default GUI tool then you need D language skills to interrogate DTrace.

"....so your an absolute arse bandit..." Well, that's new, a bit of homophobia thrown in with the usual Sunshiner paranoia. So, everyone who doesn't agree with you is now gay as well as a competing vendor employee? The wife will be amused to hear that. Not sure what the Reg Ts & Cs on posting state but I can't see them being too happy with homophobia, probably best you posted AC. Wouldn't want anyone getting the idea you were a biggot as well as a deluded, paranoid cultist.

"....Why the hell can't you either acknowledge your in HP Sales..." Because I'm not, I've never worked as a salesman. Wash your mouth out! I consider myself far too honest to be a success as a salesman, I personally can't stand liars which is one of the problems I have with Sun and there long history of FUD, lying and denial. I know they do it because they think it causes the "opposition" problems, but tit often just causes problems insde our team. We do have some Sun contacts I respect and trust, but they are the minority.

Inside Microsoft's 'New Xbox Experience'

Matt Bryant Silver badge
Boffin

Market figures, please!

I'm waiting for when these "game consoles" that are morphing into "home entertainment centers" actually get counted in the home computer class for market share figures. How long before M$ release MS Office for Xbox (just needs a better keyboard than the Messenger keypad), or supports Xboen with the online version of Office? At that point, people will suddenly wake up and realise that M$ is actually now a hardware vendor in the same class as Apple (if not larger!). So, El Reg, how do Xbox sales compare to iMac numbers?

What's lurking in your data centre?

Matt Bryant Silver badge
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UK compared to the US?

Maybe it's different in the US to the UK - I always hear how the US is about three years ahead in deploying new IT ideas - but here in the UK we don't seem to get rid of anything unless we really have to. When I was a young and naive graduate, I had this idea I would jump into a job with a company brimming with the latest technology, but my very first job entailed working on a system almost as old as I was!

The pre-Y2K period was a real eye-opener what with the number of dinosaur systems coming out of the woodwork, all having to be checked to see if they were Y2K compliant, the usual request being not to replace the old systems but to find ways to "temporarily" get round the problem - some of those dinosaurs I helped "temporarily" patch are still grinding away! The scare of my life was when I was working late with one of the contractors brought out of retirement (!) to decypher and write updates for in-house COBOL apps from the '70s, and - tired of my jokes about dinosaurs - the old fart faked a heart attack!

I'd be intersted to know from US readers if they see the same in corporates there, with re-use rather than replacement being king?

IBM gets into server transit business

Matt Bryant Silver badge
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RE: Efficiency

So, never heard of HP's hardware partitioning, then? It allows you to split their cell-based Integrity servers and Superdomes into multiple, hardware independent servers inside the same chassis, with absolutlely ZERO software overheads for the individual partitions, no shared resources, and no chance of one partition taking down another (as there is with the Sun partitioning/virtualising technologies). Just a bit more efficient than anything Sun has, even in the vapourware category.

Matt Bryant Silver badge
Boffin

Very smart move.

I bet the deal is causing a few nervous looks in Apple. So much a smarter deal than Sun's buys of StorageTek and MySQL, and probably at a fraction of the cost too! We've used Transitive to migrate old SPARC apps onto HP Itanium and it just works, so I'm hoping IBM don't stifle the Itanium side of the code-tree, but IBM have now made the Power series probably a first-choice for a simple migration platform with punch.

Ex-CEO says BAE's British future 'in doubt'

Matt Bryant Silver badge
Boffin

European acquisitions? And future role - services?

Let's see - BAe had a choice of buying into the organised, US market with virtually guaranteed US orders for the Iraq war, serving four monster customers (US Army, USAF, USMC and USN), long-term technical advantages, and all in one language. Or it could buy into the fragmented, highly-politicised, union-bound and unproductive European market, where they would have to battle with up to a dozen European agencies and governments serving minnow orders to local forces, all with different languages, laws and often incompatible agendas, and that's before we even get round to considering the French! To me, their move to the US market makes perfect business sense.

If we ever get round to a major shooting war again (what am I thinking, Obummer will bring peace and love to all mankind!), then we will actually be short of people - trained pilots and groundcrew. Aircraft could be sourced relatively quickly from the US if required, but trained people can take years to reach the point of usefulness. We could make a long-term investment in people if the UK government invested in and switched a portion of the RAF to a services model, and we actively sold our people's services to third-party air forces. We already sell them the kit and training, why not let them outsource their staff requirements to us too instead of letting BAe and semi-official mercenary outfits of the Sandline ilk do it? Plenty of ex-RAF types retire from the RAF and then go on to earn a very good living flying and serving aircraft for people like the Omanis, Kuwaitis and Saudis, why not offer them the same product whilst it is still fresh and young and at a uniform rate? And why stop at the RAF, we could do the same for the Army and Navy. Our European "allies" don't seem to want to send their own people and kit to support NATO or UN actions, why not let them fulfil their obligations by hiring them our people and kit at a fraction of the political and economic cost of maintaining their own forces? Hey, we could even hire Lou Gerstner to run it, and have International British Military Global Services.... (OK, maye that was a bit too far!)

Nvidia pitches Tesla GPU-as-CPU tech 'personal supercomputer'

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Not a rig for gamers?

I know a few enthusiasts that have spent over £4000 on their rigs because they have to be at the bleeding edge and wring every last fps they can out of their games. I'm sure if Alienware came out with a rig with Tesla cards programmed for game physics, graphics and sound assistance it would sell to the same types, or just Crysis owners..... oh, and Vista users (I know, old joke!).

Chrysler: the future's bright, the future's electric

Matt Bryant Silver badge
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RE: Chris Pasiuk

We have an unfortunate at work who bought a blue Prius "for his wife", yet seems to drive it every day whilst she goes shopping in "his" Discovery. Needless to say, we have made him very aware of Mr Dunham's work! ;)

BNP membership list leaks online

Matt Bryant Silver badge
Pirate

RE: Tom Paine

Nice collection of links, but as far as I can see none of them mention the BNP or even state the politics of the criminals concerned as right-wing. For all you know, Micheal Barton and Paul Taylor could have voted Labour, Liberal or Tory (or any fringe group like the Greens, UKIP, Communist Party of Britain). I'm sure it will surprise you to know racism is historically just as prevalent amongst left-wingers as the right. And ignoring the obvious comparisons with Stalin (probably killed more people than Hitler), Pol Pot and Robert Mugabe, violence is not solely a right-wing activity, There is plenty of violence by left-wingers in the UK, usually in concert with union activities. Do you think all those police turned out during the miner's strike for the fun? No, they were there because the unions were threatening violence to the non-union "scabs", co-workers who were simply following their perfectly legal right to work. Outside of the unions, we have such lovely groups as the Animal Liberation Front, whom are not specifically left-wing in group but seem to be univerally left-wing in the individual. Ignoring their fire-bombings, attacks on members of the public, and other such activities, they dug up a grannie's body in an attempt to force a farm to stop providing animals to a labs. Lovely people!

The BNP is a legal party, and whilst you and I may object to their politics they are just as protected by freedom of speech laws as the loons in the Communist Party of Britain. Simply assuming anyone to the right of your point of view is a violent biggot is just displaying your own stupidity and prejudice.

Lord Ahmed faces dangerous driving charge

Matt Bryant Silver badge
Unhappy

Non-starter.

I can just imagine his defence - "my wife/mother was using the phone, m'Lord." Should be just about impossible to prove otherwise unless they have CCTV footage of him texting at the wheel. Even a NuLabour Lord should be smart enough to work that one out!

25 years of Macintosh - the Apple Computer report card

Matt Bryant Silver badge
Happy

RE: @Matt Bryant - G4 Cube

It's actually a very good example, and you underline my point perfectly with the Google point. There may be plenty of Google hits now, but there weren't in the day, and not much choice in video cards either as the Cube's design stopped you using full-size cards because the space was too short. You also usually had to re-duct the fan to get around the poor cooling design for a carf of any real power. And as every upgrade was a special, unsupported by Apple, you effectively killed your warranty the minute you opened the case. Compare that to any number of off-the-shelf PCs where you could not only have vendor-supplied and -supported upgrades but also do your own and you'll get an inkling of the point - Mac's were not designed for longevity, they were point consumer solutions with the hope that you would upgarde by forking out for a new model. With PCs it was simply easier due to the flexibility and the greater number of options. In short, Mac buyers were suckers, and PC buyers showed more technical skills.

Matt Bryant Silver badge
Pirate

RE: Ted Treen

"....You however, are championing (with sophistry) items which are frequently cheap, inconsistent, shoddy, unstable and unreliable....." Really? So shoddy, unstable, etc, etc, that they just happened to become the number one choice and de fcato standard in business use? Ever tried to upgrade the graphics card in the over-engineered, over-priced Apple G4 Cube? Think carefully, mactard, there is a very good reason why PCs have won the war against the Mac, they just offer a better and more flexible solution. If that were not true then Apple would be the one being hunted by the DoJ and the European courts for monpolising the market.

In fact, whilst I have great respect for Steve Jobs both as a businessman and innovator, I notice the article skips over the failure of Apple to penetrate beyond the marketing department after VisiCalc had been out-done. In fact, Apple at one point in the '80s was the de facto desktop choice for business, schools and many home users, only Microsoft out-competed them with a better offering, better business sense, and better marketing. One of Steve's smarter move was to announce Microsoft Office for Mac in 1997, but by then it was too late for Apple to re-capture the business desktop market. Their efforts to create a server business are also not considered in the article, probably because that also is not such a pretty picture. Steve Jobs is probably one of the most foremost computing industry geniuses that not only got computing but marketing as well, but he has also had his failures.

And whilst the article disses Scully, remeber ttah his Aplle Newton and his other consumer-minded failures laid the groundwork for the Palm and the iPod and iPhone.

/Still got a Blackberry in my pocket, UNIX, Windows and Linux in my datacenter, and three PCs on my desk at home - no Apple products in sight.

Sun slashes up to 6,000 jobs

Matt Bryant Silver badge

RE: Bit harsh

"....Funny that these cuts are partly a result of the economic problems that Wall Street monkeys caused...." Yeah, stoooopid Wall Street for making al those dumb product and business decisions, nothing at all to do with McNealy nor Schwartz.

Get a grip! Sun dug its own gi-normous hole, Wall Street is just kicking the dirt back into the hole which is rapidldly turning into Sun's grave.