Selective presentation

No doubt, in common wth other 'subscription' type models on Facebook, they'll only present users with a subset of the posts in an RSS feed.

Flipboard already.

Yes, dull, dull

Only 8 comments, that's how Dull this whole business about Dull is.

If the article was about a revolutionary user interface or the latest tweak of a fondling thing we'd be at 88 comments in no time at all.

FWIW, I think Mr Dell should be let get on with his plan (I believe he thinks he can do a Jobsian job on Dell but then he hasn't got the balls to do it while facing 'The Street' every 12 weeks).

iCan simply sees an opportunity to make money, isn't that the American way?

So earthshatteringly relevant

that only 3 comments ensued.

Opensauce is really cool stuff but it doesn't get sold. Peeple need to be sold stuff for things to happen. Hordes of expensively besuited sales, nay account, managers patrolling the mahogany sidled corridors gunning for c level targets. TCO models, RoI proof cases, non-committal commitments and win-wins. Can't do that for free beer, doesn't work.

The Meg and Dave Show

Too little, too late. Too little, as in 8GBytes, and too late, as in it's 2013.

The 'V' word

Might the reason actually be virtualisation? With consolidation ratios of 20:1, and even up to 60:1, this must have a impact on physical server deployments.

Nail on head

You hit the nail on the head in your opening paragraph, effectively posing the question: "can your infrastructure survive failure".

My day job exposes me to many IT shops who simply cannot answer that positively, it's really scary how many. They neglect to ask themselves, "what happens when 'x' fails?", and plan for the inevitable.

Few take an integrated, systems and services focussed approach. In regard to the rest of the article, I'd have liked to have read more more about what makes a storage system, be that block or file. In my book an array is isn't a system, it's just a pile of rust externally connected to a server system whereas a storage system has to be something that adds some considerable value to those little modules of rust: e.g. data integrity on top of the hardware redundancy, local & remote replication, efficiency, performance management, to name a few.

Keep these articles coming, they make for genuine discussion and an interesting distraction from the vendor fodder that has to make up most of El Reg's output.

Re-headlining

I misread the headline as "Pointless Internet Biz Pinterest....." and the first line as "Online crap repository".

Not far off the truth, eh?

Lawyers and shoes

So, do they all wear white shoes at the law firm?

Tiny point of pedantry (re coal cannot do that either)

Avgas != Jet A1

Avgas fuels aviation piston engines, Jet A1 fuels turbine engines.

Drops?

Don't understand the lingo old chap, "drops"?

In my little corner of the anglophone world the verb means to let go of, to let fall from one's grasp.

I nearly missed this story......

Splutter, cough...

£100m? For the UK? Scalextric probably turn over more than that.

Aircraft + fire

Just about the worst scenario you can have.

Engines throwing blades, yea, aircraft are designed to cope with that. The chickens attest to that & the more engines the better.

Fire... especially anywhere in the fuselage. Bad, bad, bad.

Boeing has messed up here, bad. I spent some around Boeing when they kicked off the triple 7 program & I was highly impressed at what I saw.

Failure: plan for it

Totally agree on the point made about understanding failure modes. It's a trait that I note is dangerously lacking in many 'architects' I have met of late.

Why 3G?

Tablets would be considered secondary mobile devices after a mobile phone/smartphone, right? I you agree with that why would 3G be necessary on a tablet? Oh yes, 'cause the cellco's want to up their subs count.

A MiFi (unlocked, of course) or a tethering phone is a much better plan.

We need to get back to network operators operating networks and nothing else.

Ofcom or ofdev

Maybe they should rule that the telco's provide network time & Joe Punter gets a lease agreement with a bank for the device of his choice.

That'd put some good, solid business back to the banks.

Wouldn't it?

All fail

Sum total of variance is 1.41 of something, is that a wow or a damp squib?

Servers just leave me cold.

Meh!

Pee eye

Back in 2008 Paul Maritz was CEO of PI Corporation which was acquired by EMC.

Is someone wedded to a PI idea? That's all.

Flash smash

So that 's STEC and OCZ looking like they've overcooked the FLASH game.

It's not everything it's cracked up to be...

Know your niche and stay there.

Delirious...

I baulked at the first paragraph then bailed out half way throught the second. Editor, help, please?

June 2011?

They acquired the company 16 months ago & still aren't clear on how to use its stuff?

I'll be expecting a humdinger of a strategy around that ( or not maybe ).

Dozens

I've only cursorily scanned the comments but dozens are very useful units. I can count to 144 using my two hands. No doubt if we looked at the history of weights we'd find some explanation why 14s and 16s were the multiples there.

But, today, even my pen counts so I don't need to use fingers, toes, staves on a barrel, whatever.

Geography and lottery

Satellite comms work on a big geographic scale, the UK is smaller than Texas with quite a few thousand telephone exchanges so there's more local loop coverage. Too few punters UK to really make satellite services viable for consumers.

Camelot, lottery and sat comms: they needed reliable comms, preferably under one contract for the whole country from the Scottish islands to Cornwall and all points east to west across England, Wales & Northern Ireland - only option was satellite. They must have upwards of 50,000 locations, not a big throughput requirement, sat works.

Like the enlightening AC, above, I have past professional knowledge of a network required to service a 'retail' business network that covered the UK, top to bottom and side to side. It required landline, satellite and mobile service providers. The services are there if you need them but as with anything, 'pays your money and makes your choice'.

Puzzled

So £13.7, or so, for Belfast? BT has already had chunk of cash from devolved government for fast b/band rollout in NI in 2 tranches I think. Most Belfast exchanges are now 21CN and FTTC enabled, 'orrible big green cabinets everywhere, plus some FTTH. Virgin's all over the city too.

Don't quite get what that dosh is gonna buy, not complaining mind you, I've got 80/20 FTTC from the cab a few metres up the street & I live in a medium sized village that's benefitted already.

Too many pockets

These things all have too many pockets. I've recently acquired a Cocoon Grid-It to corral the loose stuff so all I need is 2 compartments: one for the lappy/tablet & one for the Grid-It.

Enough

Enough already about the start button. More whinging than a baby after losing its dummy.

What goes around

Sir Peter Gershon who did all the efficiency stuff for dear old Tony & co (you remember, the last lot of story tellers we subjected ourselves to) described the Civil Servants who try to do real stuff like IT as "talented amateurs".

So true.

Actually, the worst is that some of the cast offs from "Talented Amateurs" are finding their way into the commercial sector & that's really funny!

Market making

So DD seems to have done a pretty good job of owning the disk based dedupe appliance market. But that really only goes out to 100s of TBytes (raw) primarily for recovery purposes?

Petabyte archives? Different use case & in this big data world, sure, only tape can handle that: pure economics, simple.

But how many shops have multi-petabyte requirements? Some yes, but not as many that can make use of disk based dedupe.

Who's pulling the strings

BT has history here (hasn't everyone?). They had public money to roll out ADSL2 for 8mb to every exchange & then they got funded to roll out FTTC just about everywhere too.

Wanda likes 80Mb broadband.

I have a vague recollection that BT-Openzone rolled out a city wide WiFi network not so long ago but hey, who could be arsed to pay for that & the steeple BT Broadband customers won't be up to working out how to use that.

So the cynic in me suspects that this City Centre WiFi net will be provided by BT-Openzone as a means to recoup their outlay from someone.

Wanda about

I believe the idea for Windows 8 is that you have something like an Acer Iconia W500 tablet or that outrageously expensive Samsung Series 7 touch & pen-tastic slate.

Either drops easily onto a dock at one's desk or gets carried around, well, like an iThing.

So it's a multifunction device - desk bound and pret-a-porter. I kinda like the idea but the lack of any software worth a poo is rather frustrating, I actually do like the Metro tile with active content idea. Sheeple don't like complex ideas though & this might just be perceived as neither one nor the other.

I think the play will be for the new corporate mobile "paradigm". BYOD (Android or iPad) isn't going to work in so many places.

The last thing we, the people, should do...

is agree to such junk.

Vertical vs horizontal models

It seems to be accepted that Sky has a monopoly on most sports.

British Gas, British Telecom, Electricity Boards, etc, used to have the same monopoly through end-to-end, vertical, integration to provide those old style utilites. They were re-regulated to introduce competition.

Do the same with Sky - break 'em up, change the regulation. Leave them with the wholesale layer to deal with the Premiership, the FA, Bernie Ecclestone, the PGA, etc, but keep them away from the consumer.

Then reseller can trade what he wants & provide a more flexible feed to the consumer. Maybe not pay per view but get what you want, not what the platform proscribes. If I want the F1 channel I buy access from an intermediary: maybe my cellco, maybe my ISP.

Consumer choice.

US telecom form factor maybe

19" is the EIA racking form factor that telcos may have standardised in N America but I started my career in UK telecoms and the racks were definitely wider and higher, so much so that each aisle had a fun travelling ladder. A big thick copper busbar fed -50V DC along the aisle.

Interesting to see the mould/mold being recast but when you're defining technology at this industrial scale you do have the freedom to make the rules at triple rack level.

In my day job nowadays I see few environments that require more than one commercial blade chassis (not to say there's still many over provisioned CPU & memory shops out there).