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* Posts by Macka

146 publicly visible posts • joined 2 Jun 2007

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Sun rolls out OpenSolaris 2009.06 release

Macka

Project Crossbow?

Caveat: I have no knowledge of Sun hardware or Solaris, but ....

--"Before, a fast 10 Gigabit Ethernet or 20 Gigabit InfiniBand adapter card would be tied to a CPU or VM, which it could easily flood"--

I fail to see how virtualization in software would change this. Surely this depends on the hardware architecture. e.g. If a NIC is sitting on a bus that all CPUs have equal access to (SMP) then a modern multi-threaded kernel driver will allow all CPUs equal access to that NIC. If the NIC however is attached to an IO bus which is attached to a system/cpu "box" which is part of a larger NUMA type system, then IO for that NIC is tied to the cpu(s) in the system/cpu "box" and no amount of virtualization can change that. So this statement doesn't make any sense to me, unless Solaris has been sporting funneled NIC device drivers all this time and has only just got round to making them thread safe: and I can't believe that (it would be astonishing).

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Google Wave - interwebs idealism in real-time

Macka
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Re: Holy Crap

I'm with you, and AC @ 21:50 .... the people tossing their negative comments around in here either haven't bothered to really discover what this is about, or just don't get it.

Wave = Google at the moment because they're launching this, but Microsoft, Apple, Joe Bloggs or anyone else could write their own Wave server and deploy it anywhere they like. Where ever you find an SMTP/POP/IMAP email server today, you could install a Wave server right next to it. Years from now maybe those email servers will be switched off for good.

I know that most people are focusing on the social collaboration capabilities that Wave provides, but I'm more excited about the potential to improve project communication in business. As the years roll by I move from project to project, and company to company and I'm constantly horrified at the archaic, antiquated and user unfriendly methods some people use to drive team communication. Wave has the potential to change all that.

Watch the demo people ... 1hr20 is quite long, but it's worth it.

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Intel pushes Nehalem EXs into 2010

Macka

Re: Comparing systems

--"Details like core count, amount of memory, disk etc. - who cares*? If system A performs twice as well as system B, it doesn't matter if it has 2x as much disk or half as much. Unless of course disk space is part of your performance criteria."--

Those details do matter. It's not about disk space it's about IOPs ( I/O operations per second). A single 10K rpm SCSI disk can do (on average) 125 IOPs and Database performance is very sensitive to that. Performance scales considerably the more IOPs you can throw at it. Take a look at the specs of some of the configurations the vendors put together to achieve high TPM benchmark results. Many of them have thousands of disks. In real life of cause very few people (if any) need to build single systems as big as that, and where there is a need other solutions are available that are better suited to provide a good balance between cpu performance, disk performance and scalability.

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Macka

Apples .vs. Oranges

--"Last December, Fujitsu tested a PrimeQuest Itanium box with 32 of Intel's dual-core "Montvale" Itanium 9150M processors spinning at 1.66 GHz, and it delivered 2.38 million transactions per minute (TPM) of throughput on the TPC-C online transaction processing test. IBM's eight-socket, 48-core Dunnington box, a System x3950 M2, was able to hit 1.2 million TPM."--

So in other words you're comparing a 64 core (32 socket) PrimeQuest Itanium box, the size of an entire rack that deliveres 2.38 million TPM to a 48 core (8 socket) Dunnington box in a 4U package that delivers 1.2 million TPM. I strongly suspect that I/O bandwidth between these two very different systems had a bigger part to play than the CPU performance. In any case I wonder how many 8 socket IBM System x3950's you can buy for the price of the PrimeQuest box.

What I want to see next year is a matching core for core TPM comparison between a Nehalem EX system and a Tukwilla Itanium system, together with the price for both. They must have the same amount of memory, I/O cards and disks.

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SATA Revision 3.0 released

Macka

What's in a name

--"The standard is called SATA Revision 3.0, not SATA 3.0. There's no such thing as SATA 3.0"--

How much would you like to bet that 1 year from now, hardly anyone will be using the full moniker SATA Revision 3.0. People ( many journalists especially ) are extremely lazy with their tech talk and typing SATA 3.0 is just so much easier.

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Intel drags feet on Itanium quad-core (again)

Macka

Re: Please, no more obituaries just yet!

--"The last time Intel upset hp was when they were late getting the first dual-core Itaniums to market. As hp didn't want to wait (and they wanted to steal a march on the other Itanium vendors), they came up with the mx2 module that let you plug two single-core Itaniums into one socket. Now, wouldn't it be fun if they got tired of waiting and made a module to put two dual-core Itaniums in a CSI socket....."--

You really think so? Double the power consumption, double the heat, and twice the price. Don't you think that completely flies in the face of the direction the industry has been heading in for the past few years? Every new chip released increases horse power, but at the same time incorporates new advanced power management features to keep the power and heat footprint as low as possible. Then there's the technical challenges. Do you really think the current low and mid-range Integrity systems will just take a change like that without having their innards redesigned to create extra space, increase air flow and beef up the power supplies to cater for it? Sounds like a very expensive thumb in the dyke to me. Nah, I don't believe it.

You seem to have quite a blind spot for the Nehalem NX chips too. You can't keep ignoring this you know. It's a bigger threat to Tukwilla than any of your favourite targets. So is AMD's Magny-Cours for that matter.

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Macka

Just what HP didn't need

So bang goes Tukwilla's only real potential advantage - a modern up to date competitive processor for 4+ socket systems for HP to sell before Nehalem EX ships and steals its market. The window of opportunity is lost. Today's Montecito 9100s don't cut the mustard any more. AMDs shanghai processor already bests that in both integer and floating point performance at less cost, and Istanbul will just leave it in the dust.

I believe HP when they say they don't have a skunkworks project to port HP-UX to Xeon. It makes no sense. The cost would be enormous: an endian flip, porting and writing new drivers, etc, and would only serve to put HP-UX in direct competition with Linux. it would get eaten alive, what with the expensive cpu licensing costs levied on HP-UX customers. HP would never get the money back.

But what about a set of HP-UX compatibility libraries for Linux? Just install them, recompile your HP-UX apps and you're good to go. That would be far cheaper and quicker. Or maybe an HP-UX / Itanium run time binary emulator? Apple have done it with Rosetta (from Transitive) to successfully transition off PowerPC to x86 so it's a workable get out of jail card. In fact HP already have a relationship with Transitive to try and tempt customers off their SPARC Solaris systems, bringing their apps with them and onto HP ProLiants using Transitive software. So they already know how to do this. Only time will tell.

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Itanium: 'A special cause for optimism'

Macka

Re: Let's try to understand the processor market a bit

--" While Linux on itanium has scaled to a single image 512 processors in a SGI lab; it'll be a long, long while(even a decade) before customers start using linux on x86 beyond 4/8 processors. CIOs like to stay one step behind. And they matter, not a lab result "--

Perhaps you should take a trip to visit the Leibniz Computing Centre in Munich. LRZ houses Germany's National Supercomputer System, and runs an Altix 4700 with 4,096 Itanium 2 processors, 17TB of global shared memory on a single Linux instance. That got installed in 2006. NASA also have Altrix systems running Linux with 2K+ Itanium 2 chips in them. Big Linux left the lab and proved itself a long time ago.

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Macka
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Re: I think HP will change course

"Linux chokes at 16 cores now and it will take at least another 5 years to reach 64 cores"

Dear Anonymous idiot. What a load of FUDy old rot. Get with the times. Linux scales happily way beyond that point. Don't believe me, let me point you (with an ironic twist) to the Itanium Solutions Alliance web sight, which has a number of articles on Itanium solutions scaling Linux from 512 cpus and more. The SGI Altix 4700 for example scales up to 1,024 Dual-Core Itanium and 128 TB of globally shared memory: and runs a single Linux system image.

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Macka

Intel to blame

Intel have really screwed HP by slipping Tukwilla yet again. Right now the only Nehalem systems you can buy are limited to 2 sockets. If Tukwila had shipped in Feb of this year (and lets not forget even that date is over a year later than the original road map) then HP would have been able to pitch Itanium to any enterprise that was in the market for 4-core chips with 4+ sockets, without any competition from Intel's x86_64 line. That window of opportunity is shrinking rapidly and HP must be gnashing their teeth at the 100's of millions of lost revenue as a consequence.

2010 is going to be the year that really cripples Itanium. As you said, the 8-core Nehalem on 4+ socket systems is going to eat it alive. And don't expect that to be the end of the story, as 2010 is when AMD is due to ship its Istanbul based 12-core Magny-Cours processor, quickly followed with a 16-core version in 2011. So Intel will be forced to up the Nehalem ante very quickly to stay competitive. There just isn't enough of a market with Itanium for Intel to justify the investment required for Itanium to keep up with this. Especially as the bulk of Itanium sales in HP seems to be coming mostly from replacing legacy PA-RISC, not from new business. So even that growth has a limited shelf life.

It's a shame: Itanium is a really capable processor. But I believe the server market today is way too cut throat and moves too fast for it to survive more than a few years. If HP-UX were a compelling differentiator then that could make a difference. But Redhat Linux has matured quickly and is more than a match for that now too. I fully expect Redhat on Xeon 7500's in 2010 to give HP-UX on Itanium a very bloody nose. Quite how HP are going to respond to this threat to their Itanium business I have no idea.

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Next Ubuntu alpha reveals video change

Macka
Pirate

Can't happen soon enough for me

I'm one of the unfortunates who upgraded to 9.04 and got caught with the Intel graphics mess. My workstation went from a relatively slick setup to under 8.10 to a system that will no longer run Compiz, won't play any video formats unless I run the progs from the command line with flags to get round it, which is terribly slow. And scrolling down a lengthy slashdot discussion now whacks my 3GHz P4 cpu usage up to 50% and it lags visibly. Basically it's unusable. At least I had the foresight to backup my 8.10 build first, and will probably restore that this weekend. I had been thinking recently about purchasing a new laptop, with particular interest in those with Intel graphics chips as I thought they were well supported. No longer.

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Larry Ellison: SPARC buy means we're just like Apple

Macka
Pirate

Read the Disclaimer

Obviously no one bothered to read the whopping disclaimer at the end of the PDF: "Cautionary statement regarding forward looking statements".

My favorite bits are:

"Any such statement may be influenced by a variety of factors, many of which are beyond the control of Oracle or Sun, that could cause actual outcomes and results to be materially different from those projected, described, expressed or implied in this document due to a number of risks and uncertainties"

"Accordingly, no assurances can be given that any of the events anticipated by the forward-looking statements will transpire or occur, or if any of them do so, what impact they will have on the results of operations or financial condition of Oracle or Sun."

There's more. What it basically means is that Oracle reserve the right to do a U-turn on anything LE has said at any point in time if they think it makes business sense to do so. In fact the disclaimer also says:

"You are cautioned to not place undue reliance on forward-looking statements, which speak only as of the date of this document."

So buyer beware.

Personally I think that Larry is smoking something that's clouding his judgment. He seems to be overlooking one important fact about Apple and Cisco. In both cases the synergy they create with the hardware and software are something only they enjoy. Apple for example do not sell Mac OS X or the iPhone software to others to put on 3rd party hardware. Apple are the only source of OS X and iPhone software. That is not the business model that LE is proposing.

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Canonical punts Ubuntu Jaunty Jackalope

Macka
Thumb Up

The future of Ubuntu Server

Getting Ubuntu Server certified on vendor hardware is the first important step. Without that it won't even make any enterprise corporate short list. Next comes application support: is it certified for Oracle 11g RAC for example? Pass that test in a big enough way for vendors to see customer interest and then the vendors will start to front the support themselves and back it off to Canonical, just like they do with Redhat right now. When Ubuntu Server gets to this point then it's playing with the big boys and should be ready to start making money. There's just once last piece of the puzzle. What does Ubuntu have that compares to Novell's Zenworks, or Redhat's RHN Satellite, or the upstream Spacewalk? Automated installs with Kickstart is a great start; but strong patch management is the final piece in the puzzle. Corporations want to patch their systems in a controlled and tested way before rolling out into production. i.e. collect all patches for a quarter; load them onto a test server; test and QA and if it's all good then patch the production systems to the same level. Wash, rinse, repeat! When Ubuntu Server has all this, then it can compete head on with the best. I look forward to it.

An no (anticipating some smart ass comment) rolling your own via your own clever scripting (while perfectly possible) doesn't cut it. IT dept heads need to know that when you leave, the methods supporting their business are skills they can recruit against, or get people trained on. So it has to be a well supported solution direct from Ubuntu / Canonical.

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Apple rides fanbois to popularity crown (again)

Macka
Jobs Halo

Hey Rik

Envy is such a terrible thing !!

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SLED 11: a distro for businesses, not idealists

Macka
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Usual crap distro review

How about doing some real work for a change and digging into those features that really matter for businesses, like the tools Novel provide to automate installation and patch management for thousands of SLED installs? Where wasn't a single mention of Zenworks in that article. Show us your experiences using Zenworks to install and patch a SLED system; then compare it to Redhat's RHN Satellite (using Kickstart and reposync) or if you can't afford that (it's expensive) trying using the Open Source upstream Spacewalk server.

How about giving us something different for a change. Something that businesses can actually get some value from.

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EMC federates Symmetrix controllers in virtual matrix

Macka

Copying Linux

Sounds like GlusterFS on Linux (over Infiniband) but with a proprietary interconnect. Probably costs a dam sight more too.

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Slimline iPhone pictures unearthed

Macka
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Looks over substance

Created by an enthusiast with no brains more like. Unless Apple were to surprise the world with some miracle leap forward in battery technology, a device that thin would last a couple of hours between recharges at most. Considering how heavily the average iPhone gets used (email, web, music, games, phone) that would render it almost useless.

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Emulex and QLogic bring FCoE closer

Macka

No Solaris

Notice how Solaris is conspicuously absent from that list of supported operating systems. Maybe they should hold off on AIX too and wait for the new SolArix.

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Oracle and HP proposed joint Sun dismemberment deal

Macka
Pirate

The Vultures...

...are circling the carcase !!

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IBM 'in talks' to buy Sun Microsystems

Macka
Happy

Re: HP-UX release in 2007 DOH!!

"...Recompiling for a new OS and then releasing it does not a new release make...". Actually there was considerably more than just a recompilation that went into 11i v3. The list of new features and new hardware support is quite long, and has been expanded on again in March 2008. You can find it all in the release notes for 11i v3 in docs.hp.com if you're really bothered (I suspect not though). Admittedly some of the features in the initial v3 release were playing catch up: like native multipathing and a unified file cache, but over all 11i v3 is quite a modern Unix implementation now. I quite like it, though given the choice I still prefer Linux ;-)

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Unisys threatens Itanium with death

Macka
IT Angle

Tukwilla .va. Beckton

Itanium's fate really rests on how fast Intel and HP can deliver Tuwilla into the market and convert that into real server sales. If it slips again, it's going to run into the Beckton Core i7 release schedule, and that will really hurt its chances.

The Beckton Core i7, 8-core (16 thread) chip with 2.3 Billion transistors, 24MB L3 cache, up to 2 TB of DDR3-1600 memory, 4 memory channels and 4 Quick Path Interconnect links is a real monster. It's due early in 2010 and Intel can't drag their feet and wait for AMDs to bring their 6 core or 12 core MCM chips to market, so Beckton will have to release on time.

I struggle to see how Itanium is going to compete with all the high octane x86 contenders coming down the pipe. Beckton should blow it away on performance and cost. So where is the value in Itanium now? I just don't get it anymore.

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Apple condemns FileVaulters to seventh circle of Safari hell

Macka

Timing or function issue?

I've not seen this personally because I don't use FileVault. But I would guess that because Adium users have reported this too, then there's a function call somewhere in the guts of OSX that app invocations use to check which app is the default for specific operations, and it's not FileVault safe. It could be a timing issue, or a function that uses a non-standard / esoteric way of looking up the data.

Assuming you've already tried the traditional way of logging a fault with Apple (you know, on the phone to a human being) then I think you need to approach this by enlisting the help of a friendly Beta tester: one of the people Apple gives beta versions of their next point releases to. They look for feedback from these people before deciding if an update is ready for release. Perhaps you can get it on Apple's radar that way. Though where you find these mythical beasts I don't know.

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Google Android just five weeks away?

Macka
Jobs Halo

HTC + Google mail

Integration with Google mail and the ability to share contacts and calendars (birthdays, etc) between friends & family members via Google are very compelling features. Dunno why El Reg polemicist hacks are so anti this. It's all come a bit late for me though, as me and the missus forked out for a couple of 3G Jesus phones a few weeks ago.

Even if the Android roll out had been earlier, I doubt we'd have gone that route as the HTC Dream is such a bulky butt ugly looking device. Slide out Keyboard: phah! I love the silky touch-screen-only goodness of the iPhone, and will only consider Android in the future when there are phones available that do the same.

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Analysts slam iPhone security and battery life

Macka

Battery's not so bad. Cut & paste I's tho.

I've recently upgraded to a 3G and have found that draining the battery fully a couple of times, then leaving it on charge over night, plus the upgrage to 2.01 is now giving me much better battery performance than when I first got it.

I agree with the comment about cut and paste though. The lack is a real pain in the backside. For example browsing for a list of decorators to enter into OmniFocus, I have to write them down first before entering them into the iPhone. What's needed is a global cut & paste list buffer, so I can save multiple lines of text from an app (Safari) and then selectively paste the ones I want into another (OmniFocus). This would cut down on the number of times needed to jump back and forth between apps too.

The 2.01 update seems to have improved stability enormously as well. I've gone from 30 app crashes a day to 0 so far.

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Mono man accuses Mac Gtk+ fans of jeopardizing Linux desktop

Macka

Ubuntu 8.04 Desktop

"Linux on the desktop remains, as ever, stuck somewhere in the distant future."

I wouldn't be so sure about that. I've been a Mac OS X desktop user, exclusively, for about 5 years now and the only time I've touched GNOME is when I'm setting up or maintaining Linux servers. About a month back I decided I needed a small server farm at home, so I could experiment with things I don't get much chance to on customer site, and on a whim I decided to install Ubuntu 8.04 LTS Desktop on one of them. What an unexpected surprise that was. Once I'd got the restricted codex loaded, flash, all the MS fonts copied across (so web pages and Word docs render as the authors intended them to look) and Compiz Window Picker functions (aka OSX Expose ) mapped to my screen corners, I quickly discovered that the Ubuntu desktop is a very friendly and usable place to be. I was quite shocked actually. This is a world apart from the clunky old Linux desktop I used to know.

It's still not quite a slick at Mac OS X, but it's bloody close. So much so that I'm spending more time in Ubuntu now than I do OS X. If I hadn't already invested my data so heavily in OS X apps and were able to easily start over, I'm pretty sure I could live in Ubuntu for my day to day needs.

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Brocade and Cisco squabble over future fabric standards

Macka
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Infiniband?

You've got to be kidding. Infiniband over copper has a max specified distance of 20m, but Cisco only support up to 15m due to bit-error rate issues. Even over fibre it maxes out at 200m. Modern 10 GbE ToE adapters have faster latency times than Infiniband and don't suffer from the distance restrictions.

iSCSI and FCoE won't really compete much either. Which one you will use depends on what you want to achieve. FCoE will likely be faster and more reliable because it's lossless, but it doesn't use IP Layer 3 therefore it's not routable, where as iSCSI is. So for local fast storage within the confines of a single datacentre FCoE will be the protocol of choice. But for storage networks over longer distances, iSCSI is better.

I'm not swallowing the whole marketing spiel on Converged Ethernet either. Not yet at any rate. Maybe when 40 or 100 GbE products are available I'll change my mind, but only a twit would push network and storage traffic over the same copper pipe if performance were any consideration at all.

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O2 starts 3G iPhone stampede - and runs away

Macka
Pirate

Don't use Safari, use Firefox

Well I got a bit further than my last post. Problem number 1, they've not tested their upgrade process using Apple's Safari browser. On a hunch, I tried using Firefox 3 instead of Safari. Having put my phone number in again and got a second upgrade number sent to me this time I got a screen with a field in it to enter the upgrade number. So I did, then got the same details form I've already filled in like 10 times. Dutifully filled that in; it thought about it for a while then dumped me back at the form page again. So I filled it in again, waited, and then got an error with an error code. So I reloaded the upgrade page and this time it jumped straight to the form page again. Filled it in AGAIN, then waited, then got another page which said: "There has been a problem with taking your order. We apologise for the inconvenience. Please try again".

Arrrgggghhh !!!!

And why the hell haven't they got this working with Safari. It's an Apple product. Don't they think there's an outside chance at least some Apple customers might actually use Apple products to buy it. Unbelievable !!

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Macka
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Tried and failed

I got the text at 8.45am and tried right away. It took a while for the site to get to the application form, which I filled in, but on clicking send just got a page telling me there was a problem and to try again. I went round this loop several times over the next 45 mins (when I actually managed to get that far) then eventually got the maintenance page, which has been up ever since.

I've seen three different variants of this page. Two of them want a form filling in, but the 3rd wants me to enter my phone number so it can text me an upgrade code (which I've now got) but is worded as if it's starting again. The text message says to enter the upgrade number onto the screen to continue, but there's no field to enter anything into, and no link to follow to go to the next stage. It's really confusing. O2 have really stuffed this up.

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Is SproutCore worth the Flash and Java iPhone snub?

Macka
Thumb Up

Nimble .vs. Clunky

SproutCore apps have the advantage that if application bugs are discovered, or new functionality added, it only has to be fixed/installed at the server side for the end users to get the benefits. Compare that to plug-in runtimes: for example the recent press about zero-day security vulnerabilities in Flash. When Adobe eventually pull their finger out of their ass and produce a fix, how long is that going to take for the world to catch up? Many months I'll wager. Plus the global install effort in man hours wasted and the extra download bandwidth consumed will be vast. Could you even begin to put a cost on that? Server centric apps using toolkits like SproutCore are nimble, easier to maintain, and more available to end users.

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The gold standard in data storage?

Macka

Player availability & connectivity?

And what are you going to plug your indestructible disk into in 25 years time, never mind 200? Blu-ray will be long gone by then. Assuming I still have access to a player, what would I connect it up to. SCART will be long gone, and Video On Demand over direct fibre or some new super Wireless tech will have killed the portable media market stone dead. Either that or it'll be some new alien format. And what about connecting a Blu-ray player to computers of the future. Think they're going to have USB, Firewire or ExpressCard slots 25 years from now? Not a chance.

This is the issue I have with things like DRM on wedding DVDs. I have a wedding DVD and the guy who created it tried to lock it up with DRM and copyright notices so I'd have to buy more from him, etc. Now I can understand why he wants to do that. He's protecting his business model; but that kind of leaves me in a pickle 10-25 years from now when me and missis want to reminisce over our wedding day, and we can't even find something to plug a DVD into, or that understands the file format.

Locking up data in one place and using one format is data death. The only solution is to regularly copy it a technology advances, and if a data format looks like its going the way of the Dodo, then migrate it onto something more current while translators still exist.

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Hyper-V climbs into Windows

Macka
Gates Horns

@AC - Novell SuSE....

It's called divide and conquer. Anything that MS can do to cause one Linux faction to start fighting with another will keep Gates and chums sleeping soundly at night. And you just got suckered into it.

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HP throws Tru64 code to Linux fanciers

Macka

@Matt - porting AdvFS to HP-UX

Actually Matt, if you download the source code and look in the README file in the advfs_gen2_src_v1 directory you can see that Compaq/HP completed the port of AdvFS to HP-UX. Reading elsewhere in docs it's also clear that not only did they port it, but they improved on it: hence the "generation 2" moniker. Here's the contents from the README:

"This directory includes the source code for a second generation implementation of AdvFS, including the kernel modules, commands and utilities.

This is the code that was ported to HP-UX. It is functionally complete and went through fairly extensive functional and stress testing. However, it should be considered beta quality and so you may spot bugs. It is recommended that you review the design documentation which is also available at this site as it will guide you through the major subsystems.

This code will not build on HP-UX because it requires a specialized build environment. HP-UX users are discouraged from attempting to build or use this code on HP-UX as it will not be supported by HP."

The lack of inclusion of AdvFS in HP-UX was not a technical one, it was a business decision. Veritas did not want AdvFS included in HP-UX, especially with the TruCluster CFS code rolled in as well. That would have killed their own product. I suspect they presented HP with a tasty business case that they just couldn't refuse.

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Macka

@Evil - the engineering effort answer

CNET have a good write up about this titled "The many lives of AdvFS". In it they answer the question: What file system project(s) could make use of AdvFS?

Their answer: "In the relatively near-term, ext4 is the next new file system that we're likely to see widely deployed on Linux. It's a largely incremental enhancement to the ubiquitous ext3 that focuses on larger file and file system sizes as well as various performance tweaks. Versions of ext4 are starting to appear in community releases such as Fedora 9. HP, among many others, has been involved in ext4 development, but AdvFS itself won't have a big impact here. Rather, it's Btrfs (pronounced "butter f s") with which HP is looking to hookup AdvFS."

Have to confess I've never heard of BTRFS before now, but it looks very cool (http://btrfs.wiki.kernel.org/index.php/Main_Page). It's actively being worked on by Oracle and is still early enough in its development cycle to benefit from an injection of AdvFS to implement some of the planned features. With both Oracle and HP working on this, it should shape up quite nicely in the next couple of years.

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Macka

@Lennart Sorensen

16TiB is the max supported (tested) filesystem size, not theoretical size

255 byte filenames (not absolute filenames) is bigger than anything I've ever used. Anything bigger than that is stupid.

AdvFS != LVM. It doesn't do RAID1 for example, nor does it slice up disks in any way. It takes either whole disks, or (BSD) partitions of disks, or logical disks presented by a Volume Manager or SAN and then combines them into a virtual disk pools (domains) which it then uses to host seperately mountable filesystems (aka filesets). You can grow or shrink space available to filesets by adding or removing virtual disks in the pool on the fly and while the filesets are in use.

Snapshots at the volume level are great if you have unused disk space to throw at it not already allocated to a filesystem. But AdvFS clone filesets are instant (seconds) and use existing free space already available in the pool. Actually clones start off very small and only grow as changes to the source f/s cause data blocks to be copied to the clone before being modified. In addition, you can freeze and unfreeze an AdvFS domain, so there's nothing stopping you from doing volume level snapshots if that's what floats your boat. It gives you the choice!

Lets make this very clear to anyone who hasn't read the press release properly. It isn't HP's main purpose to release this so it can be ported to Linux and join the filesystem stable. Though I'm sure that would please them just as much. The main purpose is for f/s developers to look at some of the cool features AdvFS has, and if they choose, to take the source and use it to either improve existing Linux filesystems, or create new ones. How, in anyone's world, can that be a bad thing?

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Macka
Thumb Up

@Evil: You don't get it

This is a fast, efficient, rock solid filesystem, and the source code is very well documented and commented. If it's not imported lock stock and barrel into the Linux kernel, then there's an Aladin's cave useful algorithms and code examples that can be used to enhance existing Linux filesystems.

This is a real gift !

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Reding would OK charges to receive mobile calls

Macka

Not on your nelly !

She can sod off. And so can anyone else who thinks the British public is prepared to accept that charging model. We've never had that in this country, and will not accept it.

As a country we tend to lie down and take a lot of shit handed out to us by government and corporations. But there are limits, and this is one of them.

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British Gas sues Accenture

Macka
Flame

Re: B. Gas billing - A nightmare

Me too. Though in my case I wasn't even a customer. I was with Southern Electric Gas when I got a surprise letter bemoaning the fact I was leaving them. Stunned, I phoned up to ask what it was all about. They informed me that BG were taking over my account. I was furious and told them to put a stop to it right away. I then phoned BG to complain and told them to stop what ever they were doing.

I thought that was the end of it until I received a bill for a "Mrs Mallone" at my address. I called BG and explained that Mrs Mallone doesn't live here (never has) and grilled them to discover what was going on. Turns out that someone called Mrs Mallone somewhere else in my neighborhood had agreed to switch to BG, and the slimy git who hood winked her on the doorstep wrote down the wrong address. I explained in no uncertain terms that they'd made a mistake, and the rep on the phone assured me it would be sorted out and I wouldn't hear from them again.

Well, they cancelled Mrs Mallone's service, but then sent her a bill for £19 for the service she'd used while she was connected.

To cut a very long story short: after 18 months, several more phone calls, several more letters to Mrs Mallone from BG, and even a letter from the Bailiffs (chasing the £19) I finally managed to put the whole thing to bed.

BG have blown their chance of ever landing me as a customer, and they never did get their £19.

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Triple play puts iPhone ahead of Android

Macka

Re: 100%

Good luck pulling in the eyeballs and wallets on your 100% no-name website, that's never going to attract anyone unless they're specifically looking for it. If Apple have got their predictions right, then by the end of 2008 there will be 10,000,000 iPhone users trawling the iPhone App Store looking for Apps to please and tease. 70% of a good slice of that could make you very rich indeed.

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Cometh the hour, cometh the iPhone SDK

Macka

$99 not annual

Seems that in his haste to spew vitriol all over the iPhone SDK announcement, silly Billy Ray tripped over the facts.

The $99 cost is NOT an annual fee; it's a one off, per application purchase for an authentication certificate, required before developers can upload their applications to the iPhone App Store.

This should help to reduce the volume of tat being pushed onto the App Store. But more importantly will also provide per application accountability, in the event that a rogue app causes your iPhone to go into melt down.

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Europe too cynical for iPhone

Macka
Thumb Up

Thoughts from the converted.

I was a naysayer, ranting on about how I hated the lock in, and how lack of HSDPA would be a pain, etc, etc. But having played with a friends for a bit and first testing to make sure that it's Bluetooth worked with my built in car kit, I took the plunge and got one last week. It was worth it.

I was on an over priced plan at Orange for the number of minutes I was using anyway (my fault really) so £45/m at O2 will be a cost saving. And I've discovered that the iPhone user experience is just not given justice by any of the reviews I've read. It's so slick, and the level of calendar and contact synchronisation with my MacBook has given me a noticeable productivity boost.

Text entry is also much much quicker than before. For me, the trick is to peck at it with one finger. I don't know why all the pics and demos seem to insist that you have to use two thumbs, as being the biggest digits you have they just get in the way and are more prone to touching keys you don't want. On my old K800i I had to use thumbs because the keys require a certain amount of force to be activated quickly. The iPhone doesn't suffer from that, so you're only limited by how fast you can tap. After a bit of practice it becomes like touch typing; and though mistakes creep in, the iPhone's error correction (for me) is about 95% accurate. Once you learn to trust it, you just don't slow down and let it do it's thing. It's not as fast as typing on a keyboard, but is way faster than any other phone I've ever used.

I also like the fact I can do stuff around the house while listening to my music or an audiobook and not worry about missing a phone call because I couldn't hear the phone on another room.

Carrying 400+ wedding photos around in my pocket all the time has proved to be a real boon too. I've always got them with me friends want to take a look.

There are some things I'd like to see improve a bit, but I'm sure that Apple will address those in time. And I expect that this time next year I'll be looking to upgrade to a much more capable device.

As for the usefulness of EDGE, I can't say yet as I've not done that much traveling with it. Email doesn't seem to be much of a problem as I've got it syncing once an hour, and I don't care how long it takes to download an email as I'm not being charged per minute. At home over my WiFi, it's very quick. And browsing with Safari is so much more usable than I expected. I used it to book a couple of film tickets via the web the other day.

Would I give it up having had one for a week? Not a chance. It's too much fun and I'm getting too much value out of it.

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Skype founder quits

Macka

Also @ Walter Mellon

Typical rabid fanboi rant. Tell me what other single app gives you all the usual VoiP services + free cross platform voice conferencing between systems + free cross platform video chats?

My mate's sister (who lives in Australia) can see my mate's baby child (in the UK) over a vid chat for free courtesy of Skype. He's got an iMac and they've got a regular PC. Can Gizmo do that? Didn't think so. Skype is number one for a reason.

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Oracle's got a giant Red Hat fork coming, says spaceman

Macka

The road to Hell

--< Shuttleworth, however, sees Oracle gearing up for its own, full-fledged version of Linux that would compete with software from Red Hat, Novell and others .... "I think it would be great," Shuttleworth said. And we happen to agree, given that Novell seems a rather ineffectual competitor against Red Hat." >--

And you're all stark raving bonkers. A move like that will have a disastrous effect, not only on Redhat, but for all the commercial Unix variants. CIOs would jump at the chance to have their database tightly knit with the underlying OS and supported under one contract and one roof. IBM, HP and Sun would be relegated to the position of box shifters with most of the software, licensing and service revenue from the bare metal upward going into Oracle's coffers. Oracle mean time would get even fatter and more powerful, and as their Linux grew in popularity they would expand beyond their traditional market into the landscape occupied by Redhat, SuSE, and commercial Unix vendors. And they would all be crushed by it.

What you describe is doomsday for the Unix and Linux market. It would likely result in the death of Sun, and the Power and Itanium platforms would become unsustainable without a viable vendor Unix to drive them.

Son of Raw Iron, this time based on Linux would not have the server proliferation draw back of its predecessor. Oracle would succeed this time round and we'll all suffer the consequences.

And you welcome this Ashlee. You've completely taken leave of your senses!

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HP challenges staff to help it go green

Macka

HP can start with their packaging

HP would do better to review the amount of waste they generate on the packing they use, shipping kit to their customers. I was horrified recently to receive about a dozen cardboard boxes for Integrity Virtual Machine software. Each one was A4 sized in height and width, and about an inch or more thick. Only one had a real kit in it. The rest just contained a single sheet of A4 stating that there wasn't actually any media required, and informing me of my right to use the product. So I filed the sheaf of papers (which could have been sent in a single paper envelope) and disposed of the huge pile of useless cardboard they'd sent them in.

It never ceases to amaze me how much computer vendors waste when they send equipment to customers. The first thing you do when unpacking it all is sift through the piles of duplicate instruction books and assorted paraphernalia that comes with it. Buy a server with 4 HBAs and 4 TX cards and you get 8 copies of all the manuals (one per card). So you keep one each and throw the other 6 in the recycle skip. Buy 10 servers and the problem is 10 times worse. You'd think they would see this as a way of cutting costs?

I'm really looking forward to the European driven proposals that will enable local UK councils to charge for waste disposal based on volume. I hope they hit businesses hard with it. Right now there is no pressure in the system, no financial incentive for businesses to really pay attention to what they thow away. If customers start getting charged for disposal of their computer vendor's rubbish, then it'll provide an incentive for them to complain. Maybe then we'll see some real change and companies like HP will package in a more environmentally responsible manor.

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Jobs: one more thing... a browser war

Macka

Like puppets on a string ...

Well done Jean-Baptiste. I see your emotive twist on events has produced the rabid frothing at the mouth you were obviously aiming to evoke. Is that a sick twisted humor kind of thing?

For the record SJ didn't say anything about taking over Firefox market share, just to "try" and grow Safari's. But that doesn't sound very exciting does it, so stealing from Firefox is a much better spin on events.

As for the iPhone, yeah it's disappointing. I'd love to see Tomtom Navigator on it right now, and even more, OmniGroup's up and coming killer GTD app: OmniFocus. But I guess that Apple have their hands full entering a new market with new business partners, while readying their October push in the OS wars, and developing the next ramp up of their system portfolio to deal with the uncertainty of a real SDK for the iPhone right now. Apple are not omnipotent or omnipresent.

One thing we can all be sure of, Jean-Baptiste. Apple are smarter than you; are more patient, and have demonstrated of late that they know their customer base very well.

The iPhone is a new platform for Apple at the beginning of its life cycle. It'll develop over time, and an SDK is still a strong possibility. But only when Apple are sure they can do it right.

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Microsoft demos mind-bending photo app

Macka

The ultimate thing to do with your holiday snaps

What I find quite exciting about this is the possibility that I could go on holiday somewhere, take a load of snaps, upload them to the net and then marry them up with every other photo ever taken (on the net) of the same locations. I could then view those locations in loads more detail than I've managed to capture, and very likely see things that I missed on my trip.

I'm genuinely impressed. I just hope that the technology doesn't get locked into one single company and we all get to benefit from this years from now whatever OS we choose to run.

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Spyware mum foils pervert

Macka

UK Homosexual age of consent

Some of you are mistakenly assuming that the age of consent in the UK for homosexual sex is the same as heterosexual sex. It's not; it's 18 not 16.

As for Rolf's comment: man you're in irresponsible idiot, and probably dangerous to boot. If you've not already had kids (god help them if you have) then you deserve to have your nuts removed before you can do any damage.

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