Posts by Bob H

AWS claims 50% of Azure workloads would jump ship if licensing costs allowed

Yup, it's super ironic of AWS to be complaining about Microsoft charging extra for their technology when it's used off their own platform. When AWS themselves are constantly evolving their tech stack to make themselves as sticky as possible. Heck, at least MS is licensing their technology to be used off platform!

But AWS is practically a cult at this point, you're expected to worship at the cardboard alter and if you're not getting the efficiency you expected from moving to AWS you just need to make sure you're maximising your use of AWS products. If you don't make all your workloads AWS native, then you're a bad acolyte.

Nvidia loses a cool $500B as market questions AI boom

Lots of Nvidia staff have seen their stock options mature, they're now multi-millionaires, so they're cashing out at a decent peak.

Simple.

Arm is so, so over this AI accelerator unit craze

It's delightful to hear some tempered mention of AI and not just hype. Great, we get some CPUs that can do fancy maths... While it also does everything else.

Ofcom attempts to thread the needle in net neutrality update

Re: Too late

Absolutely.

We pay for our internet connections and yet they want us to pay twice. It's not like the streaming services wouldn't have to pass on that cost to consumers.

Everyone needs to be against that kind of double charging, it's not good for the consumer.

UK flights disrupted by 'technical issue' with air traffic computer system

Re: Are you f**king kidding me?

Apparently the Flight Plan has to go through two other systems before it gets to NATS and would have been reprocessed by them as well. So it's M2M data, not user supplied data, however it may have featured something out of bounds for NATS. Just remember that that same flight plan also went to every other system in Europe at the same time and it was only NATS that Flop'ed

Re: always a network issue

It's all well and good to call your industry colleagues incompetent, until you f-ck up and everyone points at you.

Someone made a mistake, likely they made that mistake years ago and didn't anticipate something in the validation checking that years later is now possible. Calling people 'incompetent' doesn't help.

Linus Torvalds suggests the 80486 architecture belongs in a museum, not the Linux kernel

FDIV

It'll be great to see when the Kernel no longer looks for the pentium FDIV bug!

Huawei dev flamed for 'useless' Linux kernel code contributions

Huh?

It's utterly irrelevant to the Linux maintainers as to if the submitter is doing it to maintain internal KPIs or not. It's kernel maintenance that probably no one else wanted to do and serves to make the kernel better.

If the author happens to be doing scutt work or busy work and it produces something useful for the world? Great! Is it even Huawei's loss?

Don't get me wrong, Huawei has issues but in this context it seems more like the maintainer has an axe to grind. Want to talk about people being forced to work too hard? Let's also look at Samsung and others.

AWS is bursting with pride for its Arm CPU cores – so much it’s put them behind a burstable instance type

Re: Still, the missing ingredient

I have to agree, almost none of our cloud-centric developers are writing code that is compiled anymore and those few that are, are usually doing it in Java.

With the rise of "serverless", nodejs and python it's clear that not much is needed to be compiled. Yes, Rust still needs to target a platform but with LLVM intermediates you aren't talking about a major risk when writing.

CityFibre relieves TalkTalk of its FTTP sister biz for £200m – after Boris win blows away Labour's nationalisation vow

Disclosure: I previously worked for TT, but not in Broadband.

Many of their issues come from the fact that they are a mismatch of different companies which were absorbed and integration of those different businesses over the years has created massive legacy. Furthermore a more significant part of their issues with provisioning and maintenance comes down to OpenReach and the way they are integrated with them. The installation of my staff incentive phone line was a farce, but it all started to go wrong with an OpenReach engineer failing to check the right boxes, then rectifying that clerical error took too long and was too hard.

TT had invested substantially in their core network and its capacity was astounding, they had the fastest DNS cluster for customers in the market and the fibre core capacity was good. One area they struggled with was again BT, they are largely dependent on BT and even when they have their own kit in exchanges they often need to use BT's fibre to get to the exchanges. Some BT exchanges are just child exchanges of larger exchanges and so they only have limited data capacity upstream. That being said TT's ADSL2 kit was ancient and was desperately in need of retirement.

'Lightweight' UPS-style flywheels to power naval laser zappers

Re: My questions are...

"...I've heard that sailors can be quite immoral.."

You've heard of my brother then?

Re: F1 KERS flywheels ?????

A 300lb sailor has plenty of impact resistant cushioning...

Akamai on dragging 'em kicking and streaming to the edge: They might be public cloud giants, but we're, er, vids in

Re: Competition?

It's really good, but only available to use if you are using the GCP platform. One solution is to host your own Nginx cache in GCP which pulls from another hosting provider and then you can use the Google CDN.

Marvell: So, looks like Chinese buyers were cautious about networking kit...

"Total revenues for the quarter went up 9.5 per cent to $662,452m."

Is that a German decimal or is Marvell really turning over over $2.5 trillion?

First, Google touts $150 AI dev kit. Now, Nvidia's peddling a $99 Nano for GPU ML tinkerers. Do we hear $50? $50?

NanoPi Fire3

Arguable that the Friendly ARM Nano Pi Fire 3 could be considered the cheaper option, it has 8 ARM cores and a GPU. They are about $38?

I believe you can use OpenGL ES for accelerated Tensorflow?

Decoding the Chinese Super Micro super spy-chip super-scandal: What do we know – and who is telling the truth?

Re: 'None of the actors can be taken at face value

Embedding things in the PCB is really, really hard and the PCBs are made in a different facility to the assembly. Firstly it would be really hard to embed something in the substrate and require a completely different process at the facility it was made in. Then It would be totally random where those boards were inserted and they would possibly have to bypass the normal quality checks on arrival. They could only be targeted if multiple people along the supply chain were involved in the conspiracy and being coordinated.

Raspberry Pi supremo Eben Upton talks to The Reg about Pi PoE woes

Re: Works on my switch

Yes, it was a coil in his shed which was then converted for domestic use. It coupled so efficiently with the transmitter that they noticed the drain and changes in demand that lead them to investigate local properties.

Over priced

The PoE HaT is massively over priced, instead of re-inventing the wheel they should have just purchased one of the existing PoE modules that are freely available on the market and left headers for that on the Pi (or built a cheap Hat for them).

I think this smells like an engineer designing in-house because they can, not looking at the market and finding the best value for the customer. "NIH"?

Micron-Intel 3D XPoint split: It's not you, it's m... nah, it is totally you

Embedded

If they had been able to match DDR3 in performance and released it to other SoC vendors then there was a chance to make big inroads with embedded devices like STBs and tablets because they would quite quickly adapt to a unified memory architecture and their storage needs are relatively small. A TV manufacturer would easily buy +1m 1GB RAM sets and they don't have to be the fastest tech on the market.

Microsoft Azure Europe embraced the other GDPR: Generally Down, Possibly Recovering

Absolutely

Our business has a large part of our capacity in AWS but we have it spread across two availability zones with 100% resilience, two identical and parallel systems designed to balance and scale to the demand. If one goes out then a geographically distinct zone will take over with customers hardly noticing.

We can't easily expand to different cloud providers because some of the technology we use gets complicated at that level. But as our business expands we are further looking at to what extent we have eggs in baskets and what would happen if the whole of AWS went down (which probably won't happen, normally it will just be a geographical issue).

UK's first transatlantic F-35 delivery flight delayed by weather

Hang on a minute

But... But... Airwolf did it in a few minutes without a refuel?

If you have cash to burn, racks to fill, problems to brute-force, Nvidia has an HGX-2 for you

When was the last time you saw a dolphin?

So long and thanks for all the fish!

Go away, kid, you bother me: Apple, Google, Microsoft, Mozilla kick W3C nerds to the curb

Several responses, none of which actually address the question... What is the *technical* difference between the proposals?!

Elon Musk finally admits Tesla is building its own custom AI chips

Re: Overstretch

I expect they are probably buying something like Imagine's Power AI coprocessor tech and fabricating their own automotive grade chipset.

UK, you Cray. Boffins flex ARM in 'first-of-its-kind' bonkers HPC rig

It has a tiny cache, a nightmare for any complex routines to be programmed.

It'll be Intel's Cavium ThunderX CPUs.

Location boffins demo satellite-free navigation

Re: Possible yes, but probably not sensible

With then demo I saw a few years ago they didn't need to know the position of the transmitter but it helped. If they didn't know the location they just needed a few accurate references (e.g. starting GPS coordinates) and they could then use those to locate the alternative transmitters, when the GPS signal was lost they had enough information about the 'signals of opportunity' to carry on with some accuracy.

Re: Possible yes, but probably not sensible

WiFi might give you a location but it is never accurate. SOO can be used for accurate positioning in areas that GPS can't. I've seen a demo a few years ago by a UK military research company where the researcher was able to show continuous location tracking inside and outside a building. It spotted a single GPS satellite as he passed a window and otherwise used local terrestrial masts for its references.

I was amazed at the time, glad to see someone a few years later doing it again (*cough* its not new *cough*) but I'd really like to see someone commercialise the concept.

'Strategic' submarine cable to connect islands where locals just emerged from stone age

Re: "US$150m - a decent chunk of India's budget"

I was thinking that myself, the cost of a 1Gbps link is probably well over $2m per year, sure it will take a long time to amortise $2m into $150m but when you consider the military value and the potential improvement in healthcare or just GDP it will pay for itself.

I think the article is rather unfair to the locals, there are probably parts of rural Britain which weren't much better before the 70s, Margate for example.

Zuckerberg to spend $3bn+ to rid world of all disease by 2100 (Starting with Facebook, right?)

My first thought when I saw this? How much did the launch event cost and couldn't that money have been spent saving someone's life? I don't remember the Gates Foundations having big press launches for his initiatives other than when he wants to raise public awareness on an issue, not to announce he's spending money.

Vanity much? If it was true altruism they wouldn't need a PR launch.

Raving mad: Glow sticks are secret weapon in Facebook's 2.1Gbps laser internet drones

Re: Down, but up?

The lasers are directional and one way, so each drone will have both a send laser and a receive sensor. The question is, can a drone have more than one receive and send function to provide mesh functionality.

Internet exchange Linx cuts peering prices by 40% after rip-off claims

Re: per month per Mbps to 28 euro cents

People think that the public IXPs are important but the majority of most large ISP's traffic doesn't pass through IXPs. Most traffic is routed through private peering to people like Google, YouTube, Netflix and the CDN providers. Sure BT has 350GB of LINX peering, but I can bet that their total traffic volume is much higher than that.

This is also why I find the Netflix rant strange, they only have 80GB of LINX peering because most of their connectivity is private peering and the rest of Netflix content is delivered by on-net appliances within the ISPs themselves (providing 100's of GB of capacity).

OpenCellular: Facebook tests its open templates on base stations

Re: Yuck

Agreed, femtocells and other cellular nodes are already competitive commodity products in the business. The problem is that operators struggle to manage deployments of the available tools. What is facebook offering that isn't already in the market?

Huawei: Our fake phone camera pic shame

Re: Corrections and Clarifications Column

As someone spotted elsewhere the copyright notice in the EXIF says 2015, knowing the timescales of phone development I am not sure that 2015 is even the right answer. But perhaps the photographer forgot to change his template?

Boffins map Netflix's Open Connect CDN

They moved their processing, not their Open Connect delivery network.

Netflix picks fight with internet exchange industry

It seems a strange argument from Netflix, the majority of their traffic doesn't even pass through the IXPs. Any ISP who has a decent number of Netflix users will be using a Netflix CDN appliance inside their network. You might argue that this is necessary because of the limitations of the IXP system, but in reality for any larger ISP most of their traffic is through private peering to Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Netflix and the various CDN providers. Public internet exchanges are just there for the sizeable minority of more unusual routes.

https://openconnect.itp.netflix.com/deliveryOptions/

Meet the 1,000 core chip that can be powered by an AA battery

Reminds me of the Epiphany-IV 64-core Microprocessor by Adapteva, sure it has less cores but the architecture seems similar. The problem with the Adapteva and I imagine a similar problem for this 1000 core design, the on-core memory is tiny and so it is difficult to fit useful workloads in to them. So you spend loads of time on an external CPU with a bigger core scheduling the tasks to the tiny cores. The architecture is really hard to programme for.

http://www.adapteva.com/products/e64g401/

Who shot JR (that great Dallas broadband)?

Re: Get the facts!

I think one of the questions with Google is: what do they do at the edges? How do they decide when to stop laying fibre? Most importantly: who gets left behind?

Our CompSci exam was full of 'typos', admits Scottish exam board

Re: By design?

@Tom 7

Indeed, twice been down the road of hearing from a tame person on the other side that it's a stitch up and we have no chance. Once my MD put in a bid below cost just to ensure that it caused problems for someone down the line.

O2 chief techie: Light up dark fibre and unleash the small cell army

Spare wavelengths.

It's not just about dark fibre, there is lots of under-utilised fibre which could be exploited. I worked for one company where we found that we had just a 2Mb E1 going to one site and we wondered what else we could use it for.

Lets look at what other wavelengths could be better utilised around the country and put them on the market.

England just not windy enough for wind farms, admits renewables boss

Re: Nuclear

We also need to explore more innovation in nuclear instead of relying on designs from the era of the atomic bomb. I like the Thorium designs and I don't think they've been given nearly enough investment. The Indians and Chinese are starting to invest in Thorium reactors and I think it would be really good if we didn't get left behind.

African IP address body exec half-apologizes for 'Whites are taking over' race-row email

Re: Email privacy

Busted... so make a quick half-apology.

You don't need no STEEENKING GPU, says Intel

Re: Or no doubt..

At $450 this chip costs as much as a decent GPU and I haven't seen a GPU that can do 15 HD AVC transcodes yet. Certainly there is nothing from the GPU market that can do this at such a low TDP.

Re: Bloody 'Ell

This chip really suits IPTV providers, streaming companies and broadcasters. Previously you bought an appliance that cost tens of thousands of pounds to do transcodes using ASIC chips, they provided excellent quality but the cost hurt. Many encoder and transcoder companies have been moving to software and cloud solutions in recent years which has hit the video ASIC market. With chips like this providing over a dozen transcodes in a 45W TDP for $450 I can see it being very attractive in my line of work.

The VDI business is interesting, but look beyond that to the encoding space and there will be people jumping on this chipset when it hits the street.

Google-backed solar electricity facility sets itself on fire

Re: Predicting Problems

It was a misalignment, so some of the mirrors that reflect light were off-point and no one noticed until it was too late.

Inside Project Loon – Google's megaplan to build a global internet

Sorry Google, Facebook has it right with Aquila. Your balloons are just hot air.

Smartmobes in spaaace: NASA deploys Android nanosats

I always wonder why Android needs to go in to devices like this? What value does it add compared to Debian or something similar?

The mantra of "Android all the things" seems wrong to me.

El Reg Quid-A-Day Nosh Posse spared chickpea ordeal

Re: Sorry to hear the project is on hold

@Lester,

In the article it wasn't particularly clear as to why you had suspended operations, perhaps you could look at the text to make that clearer?

ExoMars works! 2 Mbit/s link established and camera snapping

Re: Astounding !

@Mage

There are a variety of different DSL bandwidths/profiles depending on the customer need. There is however a 2Mbps/2Mbps profile which is called SDSL (and there is also SHDSL).

Also ADSL2+ Annex M allows for uplinks up to 3.3Mbit/sec, <sarcasm>but what would someone want with that much bandwidth is beyond me.</sarcasm>

South Korea to upgrade national stereo defence system for US$16m

Re: What is the point of this?

2.6% of defectors were apparently in military service at the time of their departure from the North.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Korean_defectors#South_Korea

http://www.reuters.com/article/us-southkorea-northkorea-defector-idUSKBN0OV04W20150615

http://edition.cnn.com/2012/10/06/world/asia/north-korea-defector/

Your broadband speeds are up by 6Mbps, boasts UK watchdog Ofcom

Further proof that measuring success by "average" numbers isn't relevant, it is all about the distribution.