Posts by Neil Alexander 296 publicly visible posts • joined 19 Oct 2007
There are definite benefits to using multiple blades as hypervisors over a single large physical server as a hypervisor. For example, if you are running multiple blades, a single blade failure is not catastrophic and can be dealt with very easily (i.e. vMotion). You can pretty easily scale up or down, you can shut down blades that are not being used at a given time, and you can probably pack more raw processing power or memory into the same space. I'd rather lose 1 out of 20 blades at a given moment than for a motherboard failure in a single server to knock out every virtual.
What isn't clear from this article is whether the EFF are encouraging people to open their wireless networks and allow people access to the Internet using your subscriber IP address (regardless of whether on a separate VLAN to your own devices on the LAN side), or whether that secondary VLAN stretches right the way out into the subscriber network providing guests with a different subscriber IP (like BT FON does).
If the former, then they have got to be mad. At least a large network like BT have provided the capability to easily provide the latter, but a lot of ISPs won't.
In an environment powered by Exchange/ActiveSync and Lync, Windows Phone really is excellent. The integration with Exchange mailbox/calendars and meeting invites is seamless, as is joining Lync meetings. It just seems to fit together very well.
I'm not sure if I would fancy the challenge of trying to integrate Windows Phone into a non-Exchange environment though, especially given that IMAP support in Windows Phone seems a bit lazy (and lacking in IMAP IDLE) and I don't know if having to support CalDAV/CardDAV separately complicates things somewhat. (Maybe this is an issue for iOS and Android too?)
What's interesting though about the web vs. app debate though is the actual means in which we expose and transfer data. The typical webpage has just far too much presentational data woven in and therefore HTML is mostly meaningless to a computer. How is a computer supposed to know a news article from a weather report by just looking at HTML? (Hence the half-rising of "microformats", to try and allow computers to make sense of the kludge.) At least in an app-driven world, the web services are delivering structured data that is usually well-defined and exposed through somewhat organised APIs. We just need more of those to be open and well-documented instead of highly guarded commercial secrets.
If we can standardise the APIs and web formats of the web once again (like what we did with e-mail all those years ago), then we can start delivering information in a way that is easier for computers to process for a variety of tasks, allow the "apps" of the world to handle how to make that information human-readable, and let people choose which web service providers they want to mix with their "apps".
This seems to be a really common misconception about GPS. The handset is never "contacting" the satellites. Instead it just listens to them - pure GPS is an entirely passive technology.
(Admittedly this makes me wonder how manufacturers manage to get GPS so wrong - I realise that there's some fairly intensive number-crunching taking place on GPS chips, but the battery drain involved in doing so should not be that high.)
"One runs your app, one runs your antivirus or some OS stuff in the background, and the others do sod-all most of the time."
Not strictly true. The operating system scheduler will balance processes/threads across all available cores, even if applications themselves are not technically SMP-aware. There is no specific affinity by default for your antivirus or your background "OS stuff" to run on one single core.
No. Just no.
There are reasons that Linux does not dominate the desktop. The "YOU SHOULD USE LINUX BECAUSE IT IS BETTER!!!1" argument is getting exceptionally tiring. The average person and their family do not care about Linux, or your opinion.
Besides, all software has vulnerabilities. The only difference is that Microsoft vulnerabilities are more publicised.
Myst certainly holds a place in my heart, as one of the earliest games I played when I was younger (and frankly without any idea what I was doing), progressively improving my thinking as I grew older until finally one day reaching a eureka moment and actually progressing into and out of the Ages. It's total lack of direction can be boring to some, but it can also be frankly inspirational, much in the same way that Minecraft achieves. What I wouldn't give to see a version of Myst reimaged for today's high density displays and GPU power.
As a HP employee I was taken in by the discount pricing we get on the ElitePad 900, and whilst the Atom processor may not be a powerhouse, this is by far the nicest tablet I've ever picked up. It's a solid build with an aluminium case and Gorilla Glass, it's lighter than the Motorola Xoom that I had before it (and apparently lighter than the Surface too) and it gets decent battery life. I also find Windows 8 very intuitive with a touchscreen. I would easily have paid full price for it.
I almost did buy a Surface, but was ultimately put off Windows RT (and not wanting to pay the kind of money for the Surface Pro when it's so bulky/heavy and with such bad battery life).
"Yes, of course, the answer depends upon the add-ons. I use NoScript, Adblock, Flashblock, and Cookie Monster (yes, of course, you are correct, I am a Yank, so nothing less than overkill will do)."
You are modifying the pages and stripping out features. What else did you expect to happen?
Windows versions going back as far as XP, or possibly even 2000, have had the ability to prioritise background services over desktop applications. And as for Live Tiles, they can be turned off.
Just buy a Windows 8 laptop and have done with it. Why everyone has such a thing against it I have no idea.
Zune = iPod. Tablets = iPad. Fossil Watch = iPod nano (near as damnit). Kin phone = iPhone. Microsoft TV = Apple TV.
To say that any of the above ideas were "flops" is inaccurate - in fact, in different incarnations, the ideas you mentioned have all been a commercial success. The important factor here is time; these ideas were ahead of their time when Microsoft built them. The only reason that Apple succeeded with them is because they were more tuned to market trends of the time.
The only reason I don't mention Windows CE above is because Windows CE is more of an industrial embedded solution than a consumer one.
"Android was designed to run 'java', well, actually it's not 'java' it's just some propriatary thing that looks quite a lotl ike java but isn't. The glaring consequence is all that existing stuff needs a lot of work to port it when on symbian there wasn't such an issue."
Did you ever try programming anything on Symbian? It was awful. Making use of the Java language was one of the smartest things the Android development team could have done - make use of existing programming knowledge and remove a number of scary low-level considerations.
The problem with advertising online is that it's just distracting. On a full-sized webpage on a desktop or laptop computer it's less of an issue, because usually there is more than enough screen estate to sacrifice a little bit for advertising. On a mobile phone, the opposite is true. The mobile web-surfing population do not want advertising because it's already compact enough as it is. These ads that appear in apps and mobile web pages aren't useful or nice. They take up too much space, the animations are annoying and they are using up my already-precious-and-expensive data allowance.
What I actually mean is - if you can refrain from twisting my words for a moment - the average computer user has existing expectations of how their should work and what it should do, for example, the starting point to entering a task should be visible on-screen. Views like "fuck desktops just use a window manager guys! LINUX UNITE!" are narrow-minded and non-inclusive. Linux has failed to become an everyday desktop operating system for this reason; for a large number of people because these expectations are not met, and all Linux people seem to do is sit back and say "well gee just use openbox!" instead of fixing the issues at hand.
@M Gale "MS deliberately kept moving the HTML goal posts for no other reason than to shake off rival browsers and OS's (but claiming "richer browsing experience"). IE was the only browser which worked properly with many sites built with MS's own authoring software (Front Page I think it was)."
This is a weak argument though because the web is not, and never will be, fully standardised. The decentralised nature of the Internet simply doesn't permit it. Incidentally, FrontPage didn't need to guarantee cross-browser interoperability in the same way that Microsoft Word doesn't need to guarantee complete formatting consistency with OpenOffice. The people who chose to use FrontPage made a choice; they chose Microsoft.
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