Posts by Skoorb
139 posts • joined Tuesday 25th January 2011 23:55 GMT
Re: Don't buy an Xbox One
Unfortunately, yes. This has been happening for a few years now; even the major players who don't go bankrupt are not immune.
For example, Microsoft used to run a service called MSN Music that let you stream and download songs, but when they launched the ill fated Zune, they killed off the old MSN Music, including the DRM servers. You could only listen to anything you had bought on "authorised" devices that you had already played them on. There was no way to move them to another system.
Even better is, as some people discovered, Windows Media DRM is sensitive to the hardware configuration of the system - if you add, change or disable a new piece of hardware (which can sometimes include changing BIOS settings) the DRM system kills itself and requires re-authorisation, which you now cannot get.
All in all a bit of a failure all round.
Re: We need fewer registers not more!
Dear lord. The main problem with x86 chips is that they are register starved. How many general purpose registers (GPRs) does x86 have? 6. But the x86_64 chips manage to get as high as 14 GPRs. Whew!
Even 32 bit ARM chips manage to have 16 GPRs for goodness sake. SPARC has 31 and Itanium 128 GPRs.
As any electrical engineer or anyone who has had the misfortune to have to do any Assembly programming will tell you; only having 6 usable registers is a massive pain in the behind.
Re: Too late to opt out?
You can 'opt out' of all sorts of stuff if you want to. See here for SCR.
As for the Big National Database of everyone registered with the NHS:
"There are a small number of patients who feel that the existence of a database containing their contact details may place them at increased risk and may want to have details within their records restricted and flagged.
It is important for healthcare staff who are approached with requests for a patient's record to be flagged to understand and communicate to patients that flagging a record should not be undertaken lightly, because of the potentially significant impact on the ability of the NHS to deliver joined-up healthcare.
Flagging a record as 'sensitive' will mean that local NHS IT systems will be unable to retrieve your address, telecomms details, registered GP Practice and alternative contacts (such as next of kin) from the PDS. The information will still be held nationally, however.
As a patient, if you require your record flagged you should contact your GP. Similarly, if you wish to have a flag removed from your record this should be done through your GP. Further information for healthcare professionals is available on the NHS CFH nww (N3 connection required) site (N3 connection required)." See the HSCIC's site for more information.
I don't understand how this is different from the existing systems that everyone has had repeated hissy fits about then refused to use.
Have a look at The Electronic Prescription Service and Summery Care Record and tell me what the difference is between these and Mr Hunt's plans?
Re: Ummm...
Well, NHS Direct doesn't even exist anymore in England, and when it did exist it wasn't available in Scotland or NI.
And there are a lot of 'needs an account or phone number to go further so we have no information' as well.
Re: Hmmmm.
Yup. Even now, how is that whole "tape is dead" thing going? And that's for an extremely limiting medium that can't even do random reads and writes. It's going to be a while before disk dies off.
2.5" is finally taking off now that Perpendicular recording has settled down properly.
(For more fun, there's also this).
Re: Inquiring minds want to know
Hmm. Well.
Seriously though, how long before this Kernel appears in mainstream distributions like Ubuntu, and how long before it gets to the stable 'enterprise' distributions like Red Hat and Debian?
Posted in Amazon launches own currency
Re: Marketing gimmick
Is this basically another gift certificate? Apart from not being able to transfer it to another person I'm not sure I see the difference.
Re: Happy with mine
Variable pricing. Here we go!
This already happens in parts of North America. Have a look at The Ontario Energy Board's Time of Use prices for an example of what smart meters enable.
Posted in Japan begins planning exascale super
Re: Sparc
Well, the Fujitsu SPACs aren't too shabby for certain calculations. If they are intending to do plain floating point calculations with numbers that fit into a 64 bit register though; no integer or hugely long string work then yeah, just stick with Intel or AMD.
However, there are a few big reasons when designing a massive systems like this that you may take the performance hit and go for SPARC. If I recall correctly (do say if I'm wrong or out of date):
- SPARC should use less power for the same flops output,
- The memory controller is not on the CPU, so it is easier to have lots of memory accessible at once, and to move stuff around the system without blocking up the CPU.
- Better standard interconnects for shoving lots of data around.
- It also deals with threads differently to x86, which can be useful in some cases, but I can't remember the details now.
Remember that SPARC stands for Scalable Processor Architecture; it (used to be) easier to engineer big systems, though it is clear you can do this with x86 now.
Anybody know if it is still worth using SPARC for systems like this?
Re: where do they get these numbers
They are probably thinking about the higher utilisation you (should get) with public clouds.
Lets assume that instead of you buying a 'rack' of servers you rent each *VM* for $0.30 per hour that it is active. You are now likely to design your systems to have fewer VMs active at any one time, but when they are active use them more.
Re: The true costing model
To a certain extent, yes. Having a serious quote from a competitor is the way to go each time you want to buy a license, and to strongly consider buying at least one component from someone else anyway (like the DB for example).
If someone else can do what you want, even if it is something like Microsoft Dynamics, don't force yourself on SAP.
It doesn't matter how hard you push though, SAP are notoriously inflexible on pricing and terms compared to other vendors.
Posted in Attention large Linux workloads
MMOs and the like? See the GameFrame: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gameframe
Basically a mainframe with a job lot of blades hanging off the side for the CPU intensive bits.
Posted in Attention large Linux workloads
Re: OTOH
Bull sell a load of IBM like stuff under licence from IBM, including Power/AIX and Mainframe systems. They're also very big into Open Source. Also a company to look at, if only to get a quote to wave at IBM to get a discount.
Re: They'll just go offshore
This is a similar to the solution selling stuff into the EU from just outside the EU, normally from a country with a free trade agreement signed. However, you have to be careful here, as even where NAFTA is in place you still have some items rated for customs duty, and even where items are duty free, some are still liable for customs clearance at the border, slowing things down and increasing costs.
Shipping things from across the border may help in many cases, but is not a universal panacea.
Posted in Amazon releases cloud Support API
This could be useful in a few different ways.
I saw this slightly differently. It shouldn't be too much work for this to be integrated with your ticket management system, so you can just run your support requests directly through your internal procedures, handy for ITIL if nothing else.
I'm honestly not sure how much use automatically opening tickets would be though - you have to remember that Amazon will at no point actually *do* anything; the best you can expect is them telling you what you've got wrong and leaving you to fix it.
Re: Promises, promises
What I am going to be interested in is the bang per buck. How much would an equivalently performing Intel / Nvidia or AMD combo cost for a laptop? If the Intel chip is cheaper, then it becomes very interesting for users that don't do any serious 3D gaming or major CAD works.
If it is more expensive though, or years behind, then I agree that something is amiss.
Re: Independent ISP...
A key point you need to know about PlusNet; they are in fact, BT. Simply with lower prices and better support, but fully owned by BT. This means you are basically getting the standard BT Wholesale fibre offering, just like BT Infinity, just without the home hub and free wifi minutes.
Posted in A10 ships new iron, OS
Re: You know you are getting old...
Basically, why A10 think they are a better bet than paying a third party to filter your traffic for you.
Re: It's worse than you think.
Adobe will, in fact, give you a plain EXE or MSI directly linked from a simple HTML page, with no bundled anything.
Annoyingly, if I gave you the direct link, they would sue me.
The only way to get it is to fill in the rediculous form at https://www.adobe.com/cfusion/mmform/index.cfm?name=distribution_form&pv=fp and get them to email you the link. Yes, I can barely believe it either.
Re: Not a Dropbox replacement... yet!
Heck, I had a webDAV server running off a home broadband connection in 2004 (and very useful it was too), but it it certainly didn't do any automagic synchronization.
Posted in Linux kernel 3.9 lands
Re: yes
Seriously, why would you use Debian Stable? Even a Red Hat clone should be more up to date than that, and they certainly don't crash!
Re: RF jamming ?
I've seen a microwave link get messed up by a judiciously placed pane of glass. Of course, if you look down the line of sight you can see the other aerial, so that was a particularly fun one to work out.
A guide for the UK.
There is an excellent guide written by Andrews and Arnold (the ISP) about how to manage late payers, what to put in your contract, and what you can do without special terms in your contract (more than you think it turns out). As an ISP they mainly sell non-tangible services, so this guide is very useful indeed!
Have a read at http://www.paylate.co.uk/
Re: $10k is not a bad number
There are plenty of places that will give you a 'private cloud' for a lot less than AWS on demand if you sign a contract. http://mediatemple.net/helix/ is a great example.
Heck, even Fujitsu will give you a Windows cloud for better rates than AWS on demand.
Re: 16Gbps going mainstream
And, more people getting involved may mean that prices stop being quite as eye watering. Though that may be wishful thinking.
Re: How can you trust them
Umm. Yes. How do you think the NHS works? It's an internal market.
See the price list at http://hospital.blood.co.uk/library/pdf/price_list_2013_14.pdf
You may wish to avoid reading http://www.hscic.gov.uk/sus then, as audit and research based on anonymized data have been going on for decades.
Re: Tumbleweed
Yup. These days PostGreSQL is likely to be a better choice anyway, with both a better licence, better documentation, more features, and even a version directly drop in compatible with Oracle (EnterpriseDB).
MySQL's main advantages - ease of deployment, setup, and speed on simple databases - really just aren't there anymore.
It's a real shame that if people need an SQL database, they generally choose between a MySQL version and a big vendor (Oracle, IBM or MS) version and ignore the rest.
Caldicott is back!
I'm glad that Caldicott is updating her guidance from the 90s.
You should see the mess that is Information Governance in the NHS. Despite them having ridiculous amounts of data (medical records, financial records, performance records, etc) IG is still seen as a manual process following guidelines laid down by Caldicott after her review in the 90s.
CHALLENGE: Try and make it though the mandatory IG training at https://www.igte-learning.connectingforhealth.nhs.uk/igte/index.cfm?guest=open
Apart from being deathly boring, it's also out of date, using examples like faxing things to India, and recommending password management policies that are simply not usable with the number of systems staff have access to these days.
Updating this to cope with networked computers and databases is A Good Thing and The Right Answer.
BT already do, sort of.
BT run the 'Personal Demographics Service' on the Spine. The PDS is a big database containing the demographic (non medical) details of everyone in England.
See http://systems.hscic.gov.uk/spine and http://www.globalservices.bt.com/uk/en/casestudy/nhs_spine.
To be fair, it is necessary, otherwise how would:
- Screening services know which address to write to you at
- Your hospital know who your GP was to send clinic letters to.
- Your children be able to receive routine immunisations, even if they change school.
etc
Re: They have focused on pretty much everything and not a single one of them has worked properly.
@h3, whilst it is not quite as bad as you are making out, and Ubuntu is a good choice if you want to stay up to date, if stability and long support of old versions is what you are after, then a Red Hat clone is the way to go. Also, Ubuntu has a design choice that you should, as a preference, upgrade the whole OS if you want a new or updated feature - that's why their versioning is the way that it is. If this is an unacceptable approach for your environment, go use a Red Hat clone.
Rather surprisingly, the Oracle clone is one of the better ones, if you can stomach it.
Re: When is an appliance not an appliance?
Well, a pre-configured and supported stack of commodity hardware and software is no bad thing, as long as it is properly configured and supported by the vendor.
An example would be the Erastore filers (http://shop.erastor.eu/), basically an x86 box running Nexenta. Nexenta is an OpenSolaris based distribution that runs ZFS. Rather than you building your own server and configuring a BSD on it, you get someone else to do it for you and pay them for support. If later you feel like doing it yourself, you can take over any or all of the stack. It's certainly cheaper than a NetApp if you want a NAS rather than a full blown SAN.
As for things like Exadata, if you push hard enough, quite often you can get some hefty discounts on the hardware if you wave a quote from Dell or HP for compatible boxes at them. Likewise with IBM (though not quite as effective) you can go get a quote for Mainframes or Power/AIX systems from Bull
I do agree though that there are vendors out there that just bodge stuff together with default configurations on a whitebox from SuperMicro, and charge and arm and a leg for the privilege.
Lock-in
"Of course, AWS can lock you in to Amazon by sheer volume of data: it’s easier and cheaper to upload data than to remove it. Once it’s there, you need big enough pipes to extract it - and you'll have to pay Amazon to do it."
This should not be forgotten. You should always have a current price pinned to the wall for bulk extraction of all your data through Amazon's 'Import/Export' service (http://aws.amazon.com/importexport/). If you can't afford to pay it on any given day, realise you are locked in.
Re: System watchdog?
This is a rather interesting idea...
These days what scares me isn't flashing a BIOS (it's a lot more reliable than in the 90s and every system I've come across also runs at least one verification check to ensure it worked), it's flashing other firmware; especially storage. Egads you are taking your life in your hands when you try that even sitting next to the machine.
IG In the NHS
You should see the mess that is Information Governance in the NHS. Despite them having ridiculous amounts of data (medical records, financial records, performance records, etc) IG is still seen as a manual process following guidelines laid down in 1995.
CHALLENGE: Try and make it though the mandatory IG training at https://www.igte-learning.connectingforhealth.nhs.uk/igte/index.cfm?guest=open
Apart from being deathly boring, it's also out of date, using examples like faxing things to India, and recommending password management policies that are simply not usable with the number of systems staff have access to these days.
Re: Azure has 4+ trillion objects...
I believe Hotmail (now outlook.com), Office365 and Bing all run off Azure, the image search cache alone should have rather a lot of objects in it.
A more reasonable comparison would be all s3 objects that aren't 'owned' by Amazon to all Azure objects that aren't 'owned' by Microsoft.
There being hardly any behavioural changes to an LTS release is kind of the point. Non security bug fixes and enhancements come out in the regular 6 monthly release cycle. If you don't want to upgrade the whole OS, but want a specific fix from a newer version you should be able to get it through the 'backports' option, which is quite deliberately not performed automatically.
"Backports offers a way to selectively provide newer versions of software for older Ubuntu releases. Most commonly, the Backports team will provide new versions of standalone applications which can be safely updated without impacting the rest of the system."
See https://help.ubuntu.com/community/UbuntuBackports for a full explanation.
Further, if you want a new version of something pulled back into an LTS release that has yet to happen, you can request that it is fully tested for compatibility at the above link.
Re: I didn't cancel my account because of one security mishap...
If you are leaving, and don't want to go to one of the big boys like AWS, have a look at https://www.digitalocean.com/price-comparison-chart, they're not too shabby for small deployments.
Re: CC numbers?
That's the point, these days you can simply make a first 'authorisation' payment with the three digit security code (which you cannot store under PCI regs), and 3D secure if you want, then receive a 'token' unique to that merchant, which you then use to perform any further recurring billing. The token is effectively useless if stolen, and there is no need for a card number to be stored once the token has been issued.
Posted in BT engineers - missed appointments
For goodness sake, just make a formal complaint already and start the 8 week deadline rolling: http://www.ombudsman-services.org/complain-now-communications.html
Re: I ask myself
It sounds very interesting indeed, but yes, if the agent process is the one that fouls up I can see a problem when it tries to throttle itself.
Re: Incestuous Virtual Circles which Generate Ponzi Wealth with the QE Supply of Pretty Paper
QinetiQ is the privatised, less classified parts of the old Defence Evaluation and Research Agency. The really sensitive stuff was kept in house at https://www.dstl.gov.uk/
Re: Oh yes....
Ring Ofcom on 0300 123 3333 and complain about an inability to port your number. As the mobile number portability regulations were changed last year, Ofcom should be able to advise you on how to get it done. Be prepared for a few weeks of farting about writing letters though.
Posted in Amazon slashes Windows cloud pricing
Re: Spot Instances
Yup, Spot Instances and Reserved Instances are *so much* cheaper than standard instances if you know you are going to need the capacity in the future (and you will normally know for the bulk of your workload).
Can we please have an updated table in the article above adding in, at the least, Reserved Instances? It will be a bit of an eye opener.
@SaveMefromeejits: If you use Spot Instances, go register for http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/spot-labs. It currently gives access to Spot Notifications, a feature that sends you notifications via Amazon Simple Notification Service (SNS) for Spot Instance provisioning events (which is very useful).
Posted in Microsoft releases Exchange 2013 update
Re: Reason's for 2013?
Jet (which came from MS Access 2.0) is being slowly replaced within Microsoft as the embedded DB of choice by a stripped down version of SQL Server called 'LocalDB'. See http://blogs.msdn.com/b/sqlexpress/archive/2011/07/12/introducing-localdb-a-better-sql-express.aspx for an everview.
I don't know why there has been no effort to move Exchange over yet.
Re: Simple
http://www.zoho.com/docs/
It's actually an older product than Google Docs, but has no real marketing.
Posted in Microsoft releases Exchange 2013 update
The pricing is what it is and the back end admin tools what they are because you are supposed to be moving to Office 365 hosted exchange for £2.60 user/month of course.
:-/
Exactly. I'm worried these may be 'forced' updates as well, that some companies (like Google) push out, where it is impossible to either stop an update, or to continuing to use the product until you update - this is not a good thing in a controlled business environment.
Saying that, dealing with security updates without a release cycle is perfectly doable in an organisation, as long as you get some form of advance warning; simply spewing out 50 critical security updates without anyone expecting it is PITA to push through change control.
