Posts by Wonderdog

VMware distributor Arrow says minimum software subs set to jump from 16 to 72 cores

Re: Open source?

Proxmox is the current darling of the open source virtualisation community if you want to take a look.

The big issue is that even small organisations often have specific security/compliance/compatibility/support requirements that can be a lot harder to achieve on less "enterprise" strength product stacks.

On the other hand, there is very much a service offering opportunity there to professionally centrally manage large numbers of small scale Proxmox deployments for a reasonable price, probably for less money to the customer than the VMware licences would cost...

The ultimate Pi 5 arrives carrying 16GB ... and a price to match

Not sure who this is for.

I picked up a complete Intel N100 based NUC style mini PC, with 16gb of DDR4, a 512gb m2 ssd (sata admittedly) and a seemingly legit Windows 11 pro UEFI embedded licence... for £99 a fortnight before Christmas from Amazon.

If they are going the cluster path - a caddy to hold a crap tonne of compute modules would seem like a better option surely?

I'm sure these will sell out to people who will leave them in a drawer or use them to run retroarch with no meaningful improvement in capability or performance over the 4 or 8gb varients.

Apple throws shade on pokey AI PCs, claims its maxed out M4 chips are 4x faster

To be fair, £599 for the mac mini isn't bad at all (by Apple standards), given its super neat (and has no external power brick!) and the base model finally ships with 16gb of memory - which has always been the biggest sticking point of the recent entry level macs.

Whacking a cheap external drive on a thunderbolt port and leaving the inbuilt drive for the OS should make these really attractive/capable little systems for casual video editing and productivity tasks.

Probably pretty decent for basic gaming as well (assuming there's a native MAC ARM build of your software available).

Might pick one up for the novelty.

Raspberry Pi IPO is oversubscribed multiple times

At the risk of sounding over dramatic...

...I fear they've now sold their soul.

While there may claims that a portion of profits will be reserved to subsidise some vague educational projects, due to the vast majority of devices in reality being sold to non educational users, (nerds like you and I) this will mean a likely mean an increasing shift in product design focus to cater to the profitable commercial market - shifting to products that are designed to "meet market expectations" rather than shipping a very low cost product that can be co-opted for other purposes, we'll start to see increasingly complex and expensive devices, and less likelihood of a shift to fully open source hardware components - I believe many of the the Broadcom drivers etc are are still largely closed source, which was regarded as an acceptable compromise to get an intial product out of the door for the right price early on due to leveraging Ebens contacts there from his past work. Given the size and influence of the Pi business nowadays, there are probably much more Open hardware options available if they really wanted to pursue them.

To be honest, the educational market hasn't been the focus since the Pi3 appeared anyway - the buildup to this IPO has been happening for a couple of years.

Mamas, don't let your babies grow up to be coders, Jensen Huang warns

Shock horror....

...company infamous for price gouging when their products reach a dominant/essential market position, encourage society to de-prioritise skills that would decreasee reliance on their product.

Think I'll pass on that gem of advice Jensen.

VMware's end-user compute unit reportedly headed to private equity firm KKR

Horizon has been overpriced (against the market) for years now. The likes of Azure Virtual Desktop (formerly Windows Virtual Desktop) is basically a value add feature on top of the Azure infrastructure cost of the server capcity, except its flexible (turn it off at night when not in use, or scale it up for summer temps etc), and uniquely, supports true Windows 10/Windows 11 multiuser, so no RDS CAL's required, and no software compatibility headaches trying to run stuff on a Server OS. The only licence required comes as part of the Windows Enterprise licence most business users will have as part of an M365 Bundle.

Combined with the existing exodus from onprem to cloud that's been a thing for some years, changes that make on-prem virtualisation (server and desktop) less commercially viable only serve to hasten the exodus.

Disclaimer: There's always going to be a case for on-premise/private cloud - predictable, constant workloads, locations with poor connectivity, etc etc - but for the majority of cases, whether your servers are sat on VMWare in your own remote colo, or in Azure/AWS, is going to have zero impact on the end user experienece - and is going to open a lot of capability and flexibility doors for admins.

VMware takes a swing at Nutanix, Red Hat with KVM conversion tool

Akin to offering free room upgrades to the newly vacated first class cabins on the titanic post-iceberg.

I think I've installed my last VMware product, ever. As with so many, the only projects I'm likely to be involved with now will be frantic customers tring to migrate away before their next licence/support renewal date.

Atari 400 makes a comeback in miniature form

Re: (64bit >> 3) Computer

Yeh, its just an ARM based mini emulator device with a modern UI and some licenced games preinstalled.

It's a low cost, turnkey solution for the many folks who dont have the knowledge or interest in setting up an RPI etc, and just want something that plugs into the TV and works for a bit of nostalgia.

The 400 is a bit of an odd choice since they didn't sell many of them (comparitive to the alternatives) in the UK, but maybe they're aiming for the US market. I suspect the board inside is the same design as the recent A500 / C64 mini's, just running an Atari emulator on the backend - so it probably didn't cost a lot in development time to get it out of the door, so maybe worth the risk of it not appealing to the same size of audience as the C64 etc.

Fun but not likely to be a big seller in the UK/Europe.

It is indeed an ARM based emulator inside a miniature recreation case, in the same vein as their recent C64 or A500 mini's.

It's intended as a plug and play way to nostalgicly play games of the era from Atari's 8 bit home computer lineup (and the ill-fated 5200 which utilised the same chipset as the micro computers rather than the VCS hardware branch used in the 2600 and later 7800).

It's bundled with 25 licenced classics, and the manufacturers (RetroGames Ltd) are smart enough to realise that these platforms are generally hacked immediately to add extra games, and instead of trying to block this (like nintendo etc did with their mini consoles) they embrace it and support sideloading via USB as they did with thier earlier devices - probably helping them sell more devices overall and keeping the nerdier end of the buyer spectrum a bit happier.

The 400 is maybe a bit of a wierd choice from a UK perspective, as they didn't sell many here (Spectrums, C64's, Amstrad CPC's, Dragons and BBC's/Electrons all comfortably outselling them) nor in the Europe, but they sold about 3m of the various Atari 8-bit's in the states, so there's probably a bigger nostalgia market for these mini machines over there.

Inerestingly, Retro Games' lawyers sent a legal C&D to a Polish company recently, who had announced a full size Atari 800XL "inspired" machine. So I wouldnt be surprised to see a full size Atari 800XL appear (similiar to the C64 Maxi) in due course running the same ARM guts and software as this 400.

What I (and I suspect many others) really want though is a bloody Amiga A500/A600/A1200 maxi, with a decent, fully working keyboard etc. I suspect we'd get an A600 or A1200 if we did, as they were a lot smaller than the massive Amiga 500.

Give this relationship with Atari (which doesnt overlap with neu-Atari's first party 2600+ and similiar devices) I wonder though if we'll see an AtariST Mini (or maxi).