Posts by Matt Bryant

Network congestion?

Most modern corporate LANs I've seen are struggling with high network use already, with bandwidth throttling technology being used to stop network hogs. I wouldn't dare go tell some network admins they're suddenly going to have to cope with all the SAN traffic being dumped on to the LAN. I have seen offices with separate LANs just for network-based backups because they can't cope with more traffic on the main LAN but haven't got FC cabling to all their cabinets. For them, iSCSI is looking more attractive rather than less. Network admins were told first 100Mbit then 1Gb would solve all their problems - it hasn't. With the arrival of virtualised desktops imminent I know admins that are desperate to get 10GbE in and would certainly not welcome the addition of SAN over Etnernet traffic.

In the meantime, CISCO have taken a beating in the SAN switch market from Brocade, and thought FCoE would let them leverage their LAN installed base to return the favour. Whether Brocade can match them in the new consolidated SAN/LAN market is open to question. If Brocade does, then CISCO's installed LAN base suddenly becomes vulnerable, but if Brocade can't then CISCO will probably become the dominant force in consolidated SAN/LAN tcehnology, with iSCSI as a nice little side market.

Why Oracle keeps getting mentioned

Pavlov's dog reacted to the sound of a bell. No bells here unless you mean the Clanging Chimes of Doom (TM) that resonate with Sun's stock price - maybe it's time for SunAid? "Buy a box that can't do the job, because it's charity...."

Sun needs these boxes to keep old Slowaris customers buying Sun kit, for those old Slowaris 8 and 9 apps. The problem is majorityof those old servers were running database apps like Oracle. You may recall that Sun used to run around bragging about how it was Oracle's number one partner? Well, that was mainly on old SPARC with Slowaris 8 and 9, and a lot of those customers have already given up on Sun and moved to other commercial UNIX flavours or the dreaded Linux. Sun is desperate to retain that business as they know they have no chance of fending off x86 in the edge server arena, no matter how Sunshiners like Daniel Chapiesky sprout on about TCO. The fact is webserving is a Wintel/Lintel domain because you don't need a horde of expensive Sunshiners to run a cheap webfarm of Wintel or Lintel, you don't get stuck with a Sun-only solution with limited options, and you don't get stuck with Sun's rapidly deteriorating support.

And as for not testing enterprise Slowaris 8 and 9 apps but just dropping them into containers on Slowairs 10 - are you nuts!?! Many of these apps are still running because they are business critical or simply too difficult to port. There is no way a serious enterprise bizz would try droppign them into containers without a thorough round of testing, which means more cost which seems to never appear in those nice Sunshiner TCO studies. And that's long before we start looking at the real performance hit all Niagara systems suffer from being unable to handle heavy, single-threaded apps (like Oracle!), which means you won't consolidate many onto any Niagara box at all.

Oh dear, maybe it would be a better idea to let sleeping dogs lie in future....

Never say never....

When propellers and big piston engines dominated the airspeed records, some people claimed that planes would never exceed 500mph because they thought in the limits of the "current technology", which was how propeller thrust related to engine power, and along came jets and screwed that prediction! Not so long ago supersonic cruise without afterburners (aka "supercruise") was considered impossible, but just look at the F-22 today. And the old Lockheed Blackbird certainly showed high Mach speeds are possible even with sixties tech. If there is one thing history shows it's that as soon as one scientist/engineer makes a prediction there are a dozen more that will work to prove it wrong!

The spec does not exclude the use of rockets to get the plane up to the speed required, so a plane with a conventional jet engine for take-off and even supercruise, plus a rocket pack to boost it to say Mach 3 for scramjet start-up would fit, so a plane with three engines is not beyond possibility. Seeing as bodylift becaomes a big factor at Mach 3+, wings that retract as the scramjest come in would remove many of the aerodynamic problems, and vectored thrust would give the limited manouvering desireable at high speed (you would only want to make the gentlest of turns as anything else would risk the whole craft simply folding up!). And the space program has heat-resistant tiles for the shuttle which I believe meet the friction requirement (re-entering the stratosphere actually entails more friction than flying hypersonic at altitudes above 20,000ft due to the ozone layer, the speed of sound actually being higher in the ozone layer due to higher gas density).

So it would be difficult, but I wouldn't say never possible.

Can't wait....

... for the inevitable counter - slime-seeking missiles!!! Mind you, the slime ships could just eject salesmen and politicians as decoys!

RE @Matt and other Cowards

RE: @Matt

"....You just disqualified yourself. Well, maybe it's time to get your hands dirty instead of only talkin..." Admittedly, it is years since I had to do any serious coding, but then I work with Windows, Linux and hp-ux, where I can usually find a well-supported and tested off-the-shelf app that does the bizz for me. In the instances where we haven't had an app to hand, it seems to have been a lot quicker job with hp-ux. A simple case study for you - we had to write some management plug-ins to get hp-ux, AIX and Slowaris talking to a management suite some beancounter thought was a better idea than OpenView Operations (which wouldn't have needed the extra plug-ins). The AIX bit took six man-days of coding, hp-ux took four, but the Slowaris couldn't be done in the month available despite direct Sun involvement trying to help our Sunshiners find a solution. In the end the beancounters had to relent and we got OV Ops.

"....With Zones I need only about 30MB, and ressource management is much more finegrained..." With Zones you don't get real isolation of the OS images, which means there is very limited RASS, so no real comparison to either VMware or other UNIX solutions. 30MB for the wrong solution is still the wrong solution. Compare it to a real UNIX solution like WLM and PRM in hp-ux's VSE and you start to see how fundamentally limited, disjointed and difficult to manage the whole Slowaris approach is.

"....Oh, wait... IBM just started the copiers with introducing workload partitions in AIX6...." Cough *mainframes* cough? Ignoring that massive case of prior art, I think you'll find IBM were stung into copying Xen onto AIX to try and meet the hp-ux offerings of hardware partitioning, software partitioning, PRM and WLM which appeared YEARS before Slowaris finally got zones/containers. And that was before hp introduced the VSE suite, which still offfers much better control and management than Sun can dream of. Try again!

"...You mean that bloatware called HP Openview or IBM Tivoli? I have never seen a environment beeing happy with these monsters. And I've seen a lot..." Obviously you missed the fact that OpenView is stil the most common management platform for Slowaris envionements? That even last year Sun presales still had to admit to customers that it was their recommended management colution? Good luck in finding the Sun equivalent, it doesn'y exist. Oh, and as an aside, did you know the core of the Tivoli management tools is based on licensed OpenView code? You may have "seen a lot", but you were wearing the Sunshiner Blindfold (TM) at the time and missed the reality.

"....Maybe you should ask the guys over at Smugmug how the like Solaris....." Lol, the very first lines is "There’s remarkably little information online about using MySQL on ZFS, successfully or not...." - hardly the ringing endorsement for a thriving community or even of Sun documentation for what you Sunshiners keep bleating are Sun's two biggest products! Just searching for Linux and MySQL implentation sites I get over 11,000 hits! And a Sunshiner website is hardly a ringing endorsement, would you care to talk about serious, industry-valued analysis like Gartner Magic Quadrants? Care to shoot yourself in the other foot?

"....Come on Matt. We both know that HP hasn't had any inventions since they dumped VMS and True64. And HP/UX is dying a painful dead...." "We both know"? Well, I obviously know more than you, but then that was obvious before we even got that far in your post. And last time I checked, hp-ux was still taking market share from Slowaris in the datacenter core, and Linux on hp Integrity and ProLiant is eating up Slowaris even faster. Sounds to me like hp have invented a much better way to make money than Sun, as is amply shown by a comparison of their stock values. And as for "inventing", you mention ZFS and Zones as Sun "inventions", but the former is a copy of NetApp's WAFL (even Sun engineers admit this, patent trial or not), and Zones is a late answer to other vendor's virtualisation products. You slag off Dell for making me-too products, but that's exactly what you hold up as examples of Sun greatness! Where's the invention in Sun's me-too products? Niagara is about the only real case of Sun inventing a new product, and that has been such a limited success Sun have been forced to expand their x64 range and take on more Windows and Linux supported options. Your denial of reality is amusing, but only that.

"....A company without inventions is just becoming a box mover...just er... like Dell. And we all know how well things at Dell are...." oops - you've just hit the nail right on the head - Sun is not inventing, it is trailing the competition with poor me-too products. And tech analysts seem to think Dell has a much brighter future than Sun. You see, you may slag off Dell for not "inventing" products that make you and other Sunshiners go "wow", but then Dell make products that actually sell because they meet customers' requirements. Go ask any serious analyst which company he thinks will still be in a better position in three years time and I can guarantee you they will all think Dell will be in a better position than Sun, even if they think Sun will still be around.

All in, your post is just another example of the Sunshine Blindfold (TM).

RE: Matt - "....The one good thing about his whinging is that he whines most about something when it looks like a good thing, so he's actually becoming something of a positive indicator :) ...." Obviously the customers don't share your warped logic, seeing as how Sun's sales are in freefall. And even more obviously the investors don't follow it either, otherwise the Sun stock wouldn't be under threat of being delisted. When are you Sunshiners going to realise people aren't buying Sun out of spite, but because the products just aren't up to the competition, and we're really tired of you Sunshiners bleating that Sun somehow deserves special attention. No matter how great the company history is, today Sun's reputation is junk.

RE: Richard and tony trolle

RE: Richard - move to Luton? Having lived and worked there I can only say suffocation by halon is too good a punsihment for such a suggestion!

RE: tony trolle - "....Well drugs and women are cheap only bonus...." Have you seen the women in Luton? Seriously, you'd need the drugs first!

RE: Pierre

What, your sole argument is Andree McCloed's fishing trip? What a hoot! "I want to see all your personal email and telephone records as Governor for the period!" "No, you have no reason to." "Aha! You're hiding something! Summon the witchfinder general!" Boy, that's an original Dem line. Just imagine if someone had asked to see something of Obama's, like.... hey, hold on a sec! His birth certificate! You, know, the one that proves he's actually elligable to run for US Prez and which he seems desperate to hide. By your logic, since Obama refuses to show it, I can happilly declare him Kenyan and have him deported, wiht no need for legal duress.

In the meantime, the Dem-led witch-hunt into Troopergate has found no illegality yet still declared that Governor Palin "has abused her position because she PROBABLY had Monegan fired for not firing her bro-in-law", whilst admitting they couldn't prove anything, she hadn't done anything illegal anyway, and as she didn't gain financially it wouldn't even come under the corruption regulations the whole witch-hunt kicked off under! Wow, maybe David Kernall does have a future as a Democrat politician, it seems all you need is desperate fanatical zeal and zero ability (and probably zero experience, like Obama). So it looks like David Kernall just got a criminal record for nothing.

/Must stop laughing, need to concetrate for some server updates.

RE: Anonymous Coward

The problem would be making it retractable and then fitting it to current vehicles. If you look at the US and Isareli vehicles, most solutions are tacked onto existing designs. The US has a number of kits for Hummers including open-topped turrets with glass-armoured faces (still vulnerable to the old Molotov cocktail or grenade from above). The Israelis have a whole range of "engineering vehicles" which are basically old T-55s and Centurions with the turrets removed and replaced with square superstructures made predominantly of armoured glass. Modern lamintaed glass can even be made RPG-proof, but a dome would be very heavy and also not optically flat, which could cause some aiming issues. Flat bulletproof glass is relatively cheap and easy to make - curves are not. Mind you, a live feed from an overhead drone would go a long way to compensating for losing the cupola, and a palletised remote gun system could easily replace the turret on such vehicles as the Bradley APC.

I still prefer the option of having politicians scout ahead of our boys, it would probably make them a lot less eager to go to war int the first place!

RE: Pierre

"....Are you really talking bout the same McCain? The billionnaire who admitted knowing nothing about economy or technology?..." As I said, McCain is not perfect, but then a "perfect President" is unlikely seeing as history shows all previous ones have had faults or areas where they needed help and advice. But McCain has a far greater experience of working in politics, of the Washington machine, and has a track record that can be reviewed, going right back to his time as a US Navy pilot in Vietnam. Has McCain had to operate under pressure? Yes. Has McCain had to lead men, does he understand the military and the efefcts of military action? Yes. Has he stood up to corruption and tried to implement measures to restrict pork barrel politics? Yes. Has he experience of foreign policy? Yes. Did he foresee the economic disaster-in-waiting of subprime mortgages and the Fannie and Freddie setup, and try to stop it? Oh yes! Can Obama put a tick against any of those? No, in fact he was instrumental in creating the subprime mess. McCain at least has the foundations of a real leader, and has shown he has the gumption to seek advice and include those with specific knowledge in his work, such as Lieberman, even when it upset his own party. Obama does exceed McCain in one area, and that's arrogance, which does not mix well with poor experience. Will Obama have the humility to seek the right assistance when things get tough? If so, who will he turn to? His list of advisors so far - Ayers, Raines, Rev Wright, et al - don't exactly inspire confidence!

Palin has a track record of leadership (mayor and state governor) and anti-corruption and anti-pork-barrel measures, and the experience of running a real business. Obama just seems to have exaggerated his "poor, black and deprived" background to cadge a free ride off some less than savoury parties all the way from law school through the backstabbing politics of Chicago (Google up on Alice Palmer for an eye-opener on Obama's style) to the Senate. Have you even checked his voting record, as you don't seem to disagree with my assessment that he has NEVER dealt with a real issue, ever? Or were you just going to vote for whichever candidate seemed more "fashionable"?

And regarding female relatives, I think you'll find the surname Bryant is quite popular, the Bryants must have got busy with quite a few people. There was even a US Senator for Tennessee (Ed Bryant, a Republican, naturally), an actor in M.A.S.H. ("Scully"), a psycopath (Australian Martin Bryant), an actress from Doctor Who (Nicola Bryant - yummie!), and a North Carolina Court of Appeals Judge (Wanda Bryant) to name a few. Unfortuantely, I have been unable to track down any reference to a Bryant "with great tits done by the froggies", maybe I should check the type of publication that passes for reading material in your household - Playboy, perhaps? As you say, nothing to do with Palin or even McCain, but then I notice you can't offer any argument for Obama or Biden as a better choice.

And don't you Yanks have to put on body armour and take breaks every five seconds to play your poor rugby clone "American football"? If I recall correctly, your own rugby team isn't anything to shout about.

Tech angle?

Maybe you should have included a line wondering if the unfortunate lady stocked the USB vibrator (I kid you not!) as seen at http://gadgets.fosfor.se/the-top-10-weirdest-usb-devices-ever/ (strangely, the wife said she'd rather have the USB slippers....).

Shocker handcuffs?

For a moment I thought this was an update on the poor Canadian woman whose sex store products got stolen!

/Forgiveth me, for tis after the noon of Friday, and the pub doth calleth!

Nothing better to do?

Worldwide economic meltdown, countless other issues such as terrorism, trade, immigration, etc., and these muppets are spending our tax pounds/euros on flags, anthems and motos? Just goes to show the complete farce of the Ego-pean Union.

RE: Dr. Mouse

$83m compares on a profit compares very nicely to the wedge our banking CEOs have taken home yet left the economy and their companies in the tank. Would you prefer he was paid on a commission bassis based around company performance? Consider that all $83m is for returning $5.5bn in revenue and his "commission" is a very small percentage compared to what salesgrunts get on the average Oracle sale. And then compare Oracle to other IT companies such as Sun where the stock value is so unpredictable it's like Russian roulette at best, and TBH, if I was an Oracle shareholder I'd be beating Ms Westcott round the head and telling her to shut up!

Containerise it?

Come on, where's the Sunshiners? They should all be bleating about how we can just buy umpteen Sun white-trash IT containers and stick them in the back of existing Lockheed Hercules transports along with some wing-mounted electrickery sensor pods as used on the old EA-6B Prowler.

Hey, hold on a sec.... not such a bad idea! The Herc has the range and more than enough space, it has wingmounts already (currently used for droptanks). it's already in service and buying more would just enjoy better economies of scale over a new and role-specific jet, and the ability to simply load or unload the core container and pods and stick them on ony other RAF Herc with minor modifications sounds useful.

Hold on a sec.... no BAe involvement with Hercules.....

Better training just about killed the OICW

Originally, the whole OICW "combined rifle" idea came about from one simple fact - the average US footslogger couldn't shoot for toffee! 1980s analysis had shown the average GI was shooting off over 1000 rounds per actual kill on the battlefield with the standard M16-A1, so the US government started talking about an M16 replacement, and some twit decided on the idea of a smart round (initially in 20mm) to ensure they got closer to a one-shot-per-kill optimum, thinking that technology could solve all problems. Cough *pork-barrel* cough!

Anyway, the US Army weren't too keen on the initial offering - the rediculously heavy Heckler & Koch XM-29 - which was basically an G-36 with a 20mm grenade-launcher and some elctronics strapped on top. Early on, the requirement was added that the soldier using the kit be able to split off the rifle and use it alone, which threatened Colt with the US Army taking up the G-36 wholesale to replace their M16s, and Colt had enough lobbying power to throw a spanner in the works there. In the background, the Army started some better marksmenship training, revised their battle drills, and noted the greater accuracy of the new SS109 bullet in the heavier-barrelled M16-A2 rifle, especially when fitted with optics rather than just iron sights. They also re-introduced the idea of dedicated marksmen for longer range engagment (with the M16-A4) for each rifle section. The result was much increased efficiency in shots-per-kill.

So by the time H&K had got even half-way to the requirements, the US Army was happily showing off improved kill ratios from the first Gulf War and involvement in UN "peace-keeping" ops like Somalia, which undermined the argument that one smart 20mm round would be more cost-efficient. Colt had happilly proven the horses-for-courses adaptability of the basic M4/M16, even capable of firing the old 7.62mm NATO round, and if the 6.8mm SPC round ever gets adopted it's likely to be with a modified M4/M16 rifle. So nobody was interested in the G-36 anymore. They were also quite happy with the 40mm grenade fired by the M203 adaption that fitted the M16-A2 and didn't take kindly to the idea of the 40mm being taken away. With it already looking ludicrously expensive and unlikely to hit weight requirements (soldiers in the hot and dry environment of Somalia cursed the relatively light M16-A2 as too heavy!), cue the death of the XM-29.

Desperate to save something from the fiasco, the politicians (not the US Army) started looking at making the 20mm grenade launcher into a separate weapon to replace the M203, hence the upsizing to 25mm and the XM-25. This ran into such opposition from the 40mm brigade they have switched to pushing it as a smart-rifle-cum-shotgun rather than the M203 killer they intended. The M320 has now been accepted as the M203 replacement, the US Army being happily wedded to the idea of the 40mm grenade. Meanwhile the Marines are pushing for the M32 revolver GL (which uses the existing 40mm ammo) to suppliment M203s. And the M26 clip-on auto-shotgun for the M16/M4 fulfills the small shotgun requirment not covered by several models of commercial shotguns already in use by US forces. So there is even less chance of the XM-25/29 being bought in any numbers if at all. The only reason I can see that anyone would continue the project would be for research purposes with an aim of using the fuses with future 40mm launchers, though the Mk 47 Striker seems to have already got there.

RE: bob, mon!

Seeing as the current US frag grenade, the M67, has a lethal radius of 5m, a casualty radius of 15m (i.e., you are so FUBAR you will not be taking part in any further activities that day), and is quite capable of delivering serious shrapnel wounds at 200M+, I'd be a lot more worried about the grenade than a little methanol fire!

A more likely problem is methanol is it's confusion with alcohol - I can see soldiers happily siphoning off supplies to make moonshine and poisoning themselves!

This is sorting, not collection

This whole database project is about sorting, storing and retrieving data. The Government already has the information in disparate sources, they just want to make it easier for spooks to match up all the bits of the jigsaw.

PGP encryption is a big "come look at me" sticker. However, it's just a sticker - they can eliminate you as a subject of interest pretty quickly. PGP + no other points of interest = paranoid, ignore. But PGP + visits to jihadi websites + emailing Achmed in Pakistan = intercept and mark for further attention. And if they want to decrypt they can order you to surrender the keys or face preosecution. Not smart.

And finally, for all idiots that want to spoof the system because they are irate at the expense, you should stop and realise spoofing will just mean more data recorded, stored and evaluated, which means more processing and therefore more cost. Grow up.

RE: Joe - ekronoplans

Like hovercrafts, ekranoplans are great over smooth water like inland seas and lakes, but most designs don't have enough clearance to cope with a heavy ocean swell, and with a range requirement of 1000 miles + the flying sub would likely have to be capable of crossing some open water with a large swell. The Soviet plans for a fleet of A-90 ekranoplans were scrapped after a wave strike tore the whole tail-section off of one of their prototypes. The Soviets thought the shear mass and strength of the A-90 design (140 tons unloaded, and one of their smaller models!) would allow it to batter its way across a serious swell, but it just wasn't so in practice. A DARPA design to carry just eight troops would be much smaller and therefore even more vulnerable to wave strikes.

Another note against military ekranoplans is the dubious claim they could duck below modern radar. Whilst true for air control radar, which has a minimum height, naval radar has often been used to find shallow-running subs by locating their periscopes, which is why most subs today have radar-absorbing tiles on their 'scopes and rarely use them anywhere near an opposing ship. The tall tailfin of an ekranoplan would be easily detectable by a modern warship from miles away, giving the warship plenty of time to fire an anti-shipping missile. Many nations also have static naval radar stations along their coastlines to detect smugglers, etc, which is probably why the DARPA request is for a submerged approach from 8+ miles out. An ekranoplan with a wing long enough for normal high-altitude flight (like the American Pelican design) would have to fly higher over the waves to avoid wave strikes and thus be even easier to detect.

A better solution might be a mini-sub launched from a stealth seaplane, maybe using the existing mini-sub design that piggy-backs on US nuke subs. That would allow the seaplane to get in quick, drop the sub, and then clear out to a safe distance, all with less compromises to the plane's design. Maybe something along the lines of the old Bell Air Cushion Landing System as used on the XC-8A, retractable to reduce drag and radar signature, but giving the capability of landing on the sea to drop off and pick up the mini-sub. Air-dropping the sub is a no-go as the impact of hitting the water would probably total sub and crew! Anything over 30 metres and it's like hitting concrete.

RE: The Cube

"....Each blade chassis design is out of date and needs replacement by the time you can buy it...." We still have some old HP p-class blades and some IBM HS20s in use, both over four years old and not retired yet. We will probably replace them with c-class at some point, but for now they do the job just fine.

"...they are all completely proprietary to ensure high margin...." Really? I thought it was so they could perfrom better in a more compact package with better power savings compared to rack servers. At least, that's what we see. If that saves us more money in the long run then I'm not to bothered if the vendor makes a smidge more margin.

"...thus appalling value for money...." Our saving point used to be around five blades in a chassis, at which the total cost (purchase, support, operational) became less than five racked servers. Currently, the saving point is at around four blades - if a "green-field" project requires more than four dual-socket servers then it's cheaper for us to go blades. Maybe you need to have a chat with your reseller about how much he's skinning you for!

"...and none of them play nicely within your existing data centre anyway...." What, they don't share they're sweets with the other servers? They interconnect via exactly the same cable types as racked servers, they use the same protocols, and they're easier to manage. In the case of HP, IBM, FSC and Dell, they use expanded sets of the same management tools that racked servers use, something Egenera definately can't claim, as PAN is for their frames only.

"....You may as well buy Verari or Egenera, at least these guys have done a little more than taking the case off 10 of their 1U servers...." I haven't any experience of the Verari kit so I'll take your word for it, but for the Egenera kit they certainly did more - they had to make a specially cut CD for each rack to boot off (not customer cutable), PAN couldn't manage more than one rack at a time, and they had storage bottlenecks through the virtualised fibre channel blocks because they spec'd two 2Gb FC cables for the whole rack. Egenera, though fascinating technology, just didn't meet our requirements, and that was before we started to look at branch offices where we needed just a small chassis to replace usually less than six racked servers. Given also that IBM and HP (and even Sun) could also put UNIX blades into the same chassis as x64 blades, allowing us to consolidate old UNIX apps onto new kit with much lower operational costs, and you may get an inkling as to why I smile at your post.

/still looking for pointing-and-laughing icon!

RE: Anonymous Coward - Maybe next year...

"....Oh, and I certainly will look at rolling out ZFS on our servers connected to EMC DMX boxes. With transparent compression I will double our capacity by 2.5x without paying EMC a dime...." Lol, that is until Sun is forced to admit ZFS is just a clone of WAFL, and then NetApp get to come round and smack anyone using it with a nice, fat licensing fee. I bet Warmenhoven's legal eagles are hoping next year is the year of ZFS too!

What about free bots?

I have seen other MMORPGs killed by too many bot users, but the problem there was often that the bots concerned were passed freely between players so they spread very quickly. The companies concerned withdrew their games because they didn't have the staff to keep finding and defeating the bots and so many non-bot players stopped playing and paying. If someone "open-sources" Glider or another bot that WoW cannot automatically detect, what does Blizzard do then? Can they afford to go after a free Glider? Probably one or two, but without the ability to claw back some money represented by pay-to-use bot programs even Blizzard may have trouble in the long run.

RE: Ben

"....in England we never Mix Faith with politics...." Erm.... actually, we created a whole new branch of Christianity just so King Henry could fulfill his political requirment of siring a male heir. This involved divorcing and killing several wives, which upset the Catholics of the day, hence the need to create a new Church of England so Henry could retain his "divine right to rule" whilst shopping around for more mating material. Eddie Izzard has a perfect summary on the Church of England's creation at http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=Ope-1Zb5t-k&feature=related (which, incidently, was sent to me by a Catholic friend from Atlanta who thought it was hilarious).

RE: What about laser guidance?

Laser guidance is not some magical cure-all, you still need to detect the target and then track it whilst you aim the laser which guides whatever missile you are firing. Laser guidance is itself usually optically guided - the operator has to see the target and then line up the laser to illuminate it, and at night they usually use a thermal or infra-red scope to do the laser aiming. As the parawing is thermally-neutral (see above), that means you will instead need a large image intensifier scope to amplify latent light (moonlight) to allow you to see into the dark sky. Most of the infantry scopes available even to advanced forces don't have the range to pick out a parawing at several thousand metres, they are usually designed to pick out a tank at several hundred metres, and anything less than several thousand metres is likely to put you well within striking range of any US perimiter guards. You would need something like the image intensifiers used with tank sights, which can see several thousand metres but are heavy, bulky, and require external power, to get the kind of acquisition range required, which means you probably need a vehicle to move it and a large hide/bunker to conceal it - the chances of such surviving long near a major US presence is in the snowball-in-Hell range. And even if you did have a large image intensifier and did manage to avoid detection long enough to launch and guide a missile, it would still be vulnerable to decoys.

RE: RE : Eion, Matt & sunsucks

"....Also I work for a UK telecoms now and we moved away from RedHat...." Really? Strange, I have friends and aquaintances who work on the development and support of BT, Orange, Vodafone, T-Mobile and 3 biling systems here in the UK, and we swap information (and salesgrunt-baiting stories) regularly, and not one has mentioned anything about T2 with any billing system, especially not one using Oracle. Are you talking about some tiny web-based ring-tone provider?

"...., you never counted support costs, you never mentioned support quality either...." Hmmm, consensus seems to be Sun support has sucked for years, and RedHat/Novell/Mickey$haft support is better and cheaper. The rise of Linux and the drop in Sun Slowaris and SPARC sales would seem to support this. But, I suppose there is always an exception to the rule, and you may be one of those rare and lucky individuals.

".... We ran a benchmark comparison of Sparc T2 vs your current Itanium's in the same price bracket and it wasn't Itanum who won....." Damn, I could really use that pointing-and-laughing icon right now! Please, the older generations of Itanium even beats T2 on Java on the many SPEC benchmarks, and T2 would need a massive discount to match the current Integrity range, so I'm pretty comfortable in suggesting your benchmark may have been squewed to provide a Sunshiner result. Still, if your business really runs like your benchmark then T2 would seem to be better, so enjoy. It's just your business seems to be unlike the overwhelming majority of businesses out there.

"....As an aside, Matt Bryant, who do you really work for? HP? A HP reseller?..." Whilst I'm not comfortable revealing whom I work for (sorry, I really don't need any more spam emails, thanks), or even if Matt Bryant is my real name, I can confirm I don't work for HP or an HP reseller. Hypocritical question given your posting as AC, but please feel free to post all your own details and prove your impartiality.

RE: Rob Elliott

That would be the "fictional war on terror" that included a fictional set of bombs in the London on 7th July 2005? I'm sure the fictional bereaved of all the fifty-two not-really-dead-at-all commuters (not one armed Imperialist Yankee Soldier in sight, note) would be quite happy to tell you which of your over-used orifices you can go shove your fictional intelligence up.

Nice to see Obama can't string a sentence together without his teleprompter on real matters like the economy and world affairs, but he's just fine suggesting more uncontrolled spending which will of course mean more taxes (where did you think the money will come from?). Not to worry, if Obama hasn't wasted it all on a National Community Organiser Gazebo Program (for those that don't ge the joke just check out his one lasting "accomplishment" as a CO in Chicago), I'm sure Al Gore will veto it on the grounds that if the rockets aren't wind-powered they'll be very nasty for the old environment.....

Hmmmm......

So, all the hardware is non-proprietary and available off the shelf.... The Oracle licences cost the same? And it's on Oracle's RHEL-knock-off Linux.... So, unless Oracle are subsidising the hardware or Oracle licences, what's to stop anybody just copying the build and making their own using RHEL, SuSE or even the dreaded Slowaris x86 and probably doing it cheaper?

About time too!

For all those stuck on Solaris that haven't departed for another OS, this will be a welcomed and much needed gap-filler to replace the old Netra type of Sun server. Just by bringing this out (and I reckon it was an FSC driven development) Sun are admittign Niagara can't fill the old SPARC shoes, let alone compete with Itanium, Power, Xeon or Opteron.

RE: @ "No 1 already" comments

Wasn't there a BT service wherebye you sign up to allow other BT Openzone wifi users to grab a secure 256k pipe off your wifi access point (a VPN?) when they're in your area, and you in return can do the same for all other BT wifi access points that have signed up? I can't remeber the name but it was a European-wide project. All Boris has to do is force the same from all wifi suppliers in London. No need for additional kit, probably just router firmware upgrades. If BT can implement it how hard can it be?

RE: John Chadwick and MySQL fantasists

"....a T5440 does actually pack a hell of a lot of processing power into a small box...... More like an E25K...." Having had to produce builds to replace fully-loaded E25Ks I can quite confidently say that the T5440 running Oracle in the real world would get stomped all over by an E25K!

I'd also like to address the Sunshine fallacy that Oracle is just upset because Sun bought MySQL - Oracle work with other partners that have much more competitive database and application server packages just fine, such as IBM. The reality is Oracle sees less and less reason to work with Sun seeing as they are falling further and further behind the other main vendors. A simple measure of the Sun decline is that both IBM, HP and Dell have more Oracle instances running on their kit than Sun, mainly because of their massive lead in x86 server marketshare, and that is where Oracle see the growth and the need to compete fiercest against rivals like M$ SQL.

RE: Ashley Pomeroy

My experience is nothing industrial gets built in any area of India without copious amounts of bribes and wheeler-dealing. There will be interested parties - likely in the local government - that will want to ensure any such behaviour is a one-off, and they will think nothing of locking up 63 peasants on the one murder charge. Mind you, before any socialists start screaming about corrupt capitalists throwing bribes about, one of the first groups you have to "induce to your line of argument" is one or more of the communist trade unions that dominate Indian labour. Believe me, the teamsters are pretty average compared to some of these guys!

Rack servers a bad comparison.

Rack servers did not follow any common standards other than the 19inch rack sizing, and seeing as blade server chassis are usually 19inch that makes them similarly compliant there. PCI, PCI-X and PCI-e came about for interconnects, yes, but everything else like motherbaords was proprietary. The CPUs, RAM and disks were common but they are too on blades. And switches/routers for interconnection were external to the rack servers so could be anything with no promise of commonality (10base-T, 100VG, FDDI, 100Base-T, 1Gb FS, ESCON, etc.). There was no lack of completely proprietary interconnects with rack servers either, such as HP's Hyperfabric.

The real big reason that there are no real standards for blades is because they would stifle innovation. HP and IBM have carved up the market through making blades better than Sun, Dell and smaller players like RLX, by innovation aswell as market muscle. Standardisation too early would have crippled developments like HP's Virtual Connect. In the meantime, lack of standardisation seems to be a very effective Darwinistic means of development - unpopular or innefficient designs just don't get bought.