Posts by FathomsDown

Rave reviews at robotic robot-roaster raygun rollout

Yes but....

The range and shoot down capabilities are impressive but how long does it take to change its 30,000 AA batteries?

Neil Armstrong slams 'devastating' Constellation cancellation

Welcome USA!

As a citizen of the only nation to give up its near earth orbit lift capabilities I, for one, would like to welcome our American cousins to the second rate nation club!

PDF security hole opens can of worms

XPS for me then!

Well, I for one will be saving my documents in XPS format for extra safety.... no-one will be able to open them!

Xbox 360 firmware update coming on 6 April

So does that mean.......

That we are due to have a revamped XBox 360 without memory unit slots comming soon?

Fanboi site squeaks on crocked iMacs

Reliable?

I work for a company which rolled out a large number of iMacs and PCs (from a major PC vendor) a few months ago. The return rate of the iMacs was about 20%, the PCs less than 5%.

Ok, so that's an isolated case, a single installation but very interesting figures.

Microsoft's IE 9, Silverlight 4 and the whiff of lock-in

Erm, does anyone remember Flash's beginnings?

Back in the "old days" Flash was 100% a lock in product; it ran only on Windows and if you wanted to create apps, you have to use the Macromedia Flash tools. Since then, Flash Player has become available on other platforms but they still don't run as fast as Windows and Macromedia (now Adobe) still enjoy a massive head start in tool functionality over their competitors due to their original "lock in".

Now Microsoft have created something which is better in terms of accessibility, can be written without any special tools (but good luck if you choose not to use their tools; its possible but not all that practical) and add some Windows only extensions and people start howling about "lock ins" and "MS dominance". Looks like some people need to read their history books....

NetApp fully embraces FCoE

So....

NetApp, a company which specialises in NAS and offers systems which are optimised to efficient file storage are the first to offer a block based FCoE solution... which negates the benefits WAFL.

This is a bit like buying a Ferarri and using it to tow a caravan. What is the betting that most customers wait for FCoE to mature and go for cheaper, dumb storage arrays?

Bucks village repels Street View spycar

@Simon Painter

You and me both.

"Photo Paul Jacobs's house" flashmob anyone? ;-)

So....

So having Google Streetview images of your property assists crime but telling the press that you live in an affluent area which has seen a number of burglaries (ie you live in an area where the houses are easy to burgle) doesn't?

Somehow I think more burglars read the tabloids than use Streetview.

What would you pay for 400,000 new green jobs?

@Tim

"I must admit to being rather surprised to read that geothermal energy currently employs over 75000 people. Any idea what they all do?"

Peddle to generate electricity.

Mine is the one with the bicycle clips in the pocket.

Intel showcases 'transformational' Nehalem

Erm...

So under "certain workloads" (I'm guessing that we are talking single threaded ones here), the new processors are much faster than massively multi core processors from the competition?

Who'd have thought it? What's next, fire is hot?

Indian boffins mull zero-grav bhajis

Pot noodle

Onion Bahji Pot Noodle! That would be well worth the cost of the entire space programme!

Microsoft claims IE8 is 'a leap forward in web standards'

Pass the Benylin.....

*cough* SVG *cough*

Street View captures traditional British Christmas

Esprit de corps?

"We shouldn't overlook the strong supporting turn by his friend in the novelty antlers, however, who is displaying the kind of esprit de corps one only finds in the East End."

Really? It looks like he's trying to steal his shirt!

NASA CO₂ scan satellite launch fails

Ouch!

What was the carbon footprint of the project and launch?

- Mine is the one with the vague paranoia thermometer in the pocket (one end marked cool, the other end marked "Global warming - End of the world!").

Sony plans movie+game dual-media Blu-ray Discs

Ready... Set.... Go!

Queue the "My PS3 is better than your XBox", "My dad is bigger than your dad" comments. *sigh*

Large Hadron Timewaster

Is it run by plumbers?

I'm waiting for the "You bought one of these mate? I doubt I can get the parts these days. Tell you what, why don't I install a new one for you? I've got one in the back of my van which can be yours for £8bn. Cash only, mind"

Sun will Rock in 2009

They're waiting....

I know a number of enterprises who are waiting for the Rock. It could be such a massive game-changer they are happy to wait for it. Of course, if its a massive flop then they're just buy the SPARC systems they were going to buy anyway.

NetApp - just like perfection?

Erm...

So why would you want this built in? Under Windows there is DFS (and people like Brocade offer a more mature commercial version than ships with GX) and for NFS there is backup NFS targets.

Could this be a way of getting users to replicate more data at a local site level so you have to buy more storage tin? Surely not.

BT price rises go down well

Heh...

I stopped using BT two years ago and pay considerably less now than I was paying BT then!

I know a number of people who use Sky, TalkTalk and Virgin and who complain bitterly about the flakey service and poor customer services. So I just point them in the direction of where I went; cutyourbills.net :-)

Be Broadband doubles down on ADSL to catch cable

Interesting

It will be interesting to see how much they charge for the service and how long it will be before all the other broadband providers pile on to the scene and undercut Be!

Virgin Media to dump neutrality and target BitTorrent users

@SSL FTW

Yes, you could use SSL but as that requires extra horsepower on both the client and the server, your downloads would be slower anyway which makes it pretty pointless.

If you don't like using an ISP which throttles you then use one of the numerous smaller ISPs which offer uncapped broadband with better support for less money. cutyourbills.net, zen or faster all spring to mind.

Virgin Media opens bandwidth choke for 50Mb launch

Oh dear.....

Yes, the short piece of fibre between you and the exchange may be running at 50Mb/s but I doubt that the rest of the line is up to it.

Most of my mates are on Virgin and are moving to the provider I use as I get 7.2Mb/s out of an "up to" 8Mb/s line (which will be upgraded to "up to 24Mb/s" in the new year). Thats probably because no-one has heard of cutyourbills.net ;-)

IBM, HP annoy server buyers less than Dell, Sun

IBM support? Ha ha!

Where did they get these figures from? IBM have the worst x86 support of any organization I have ever used. This month I have had a P1 call which took more than 14 days to resolve and I have a server with a fault which they still haven't fixed after six months.

VMware to cut desktop storage by 80 per cent

So....

This gives you the functionality that Unix based X clients have had for years with the extra danger of a golden image corruption, unsure hardware support and you still need to buy desktop OS images and CALs.

Genius. What else will they be working on next? A wheel that only works 20% of the time?

So what will happen to Sun?

Its a little more complex than people seem think

Sun have two main problems, as they are an engineering company they tend to get driven by technical innovation and as a consequence, products don't ever seem to get that final 'polish' that their competitors have on their products or they drop them become they come to fruition (the Solaris patch tools, Sun Management Center, PC NetLink are good examples).

Secondly, some of Sun's products are so innovative that customers don't 'get' them. For example, the T1 and T2 servers make fantastic web and DNS servers (as they are low power, have integrated crypto, come with LiveUpgrade, etc) but as customers are so obsessed with clock speed, they miss this fact. Considering that a single quad core Xeon based machine can run enough apache instances to flood most commercial hosting lines the T2 based machines make huge economic sense in terms of power and operational savings alone but its a fact that is missed by most sysadmins and IT managers; something that Sun can't really do much about.

'Jasper' Xbox 360 hardware rejig spied online

Oh FFS....

"Blah blah blah, I've got an X-Box", "Blah blah blah, I've got a PS3"

Can we have enough of the "My dads bigger than your dad" commentard ranting. May I suggest that anyone thinking of engaging in such childish banter have a look here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beer

InfiniBand and 10GbE break data centre gridlock

In other words....

"Data centre network pipes are getting choked up. Imagine Germany minus the autobahns or the US without interstate highways and you get the picture - cities trying to send goods and people by road to other cities and the single carriageway roads jamming up, consigning everybody to gridlock."

Or in other words, "like the Uk motorway network on an average day"!

Mine is the one with the Cones Hotline flier in the pocket.

EMC's preferred cloud architecture is Art Decho

Again?

So EMC are trying to shake off their "Worlds Most Boring Company" logo by going all Web 2.0?

Why am I reminded of this lovely piece of "hip, cool and down with the kids" marketing from them?

http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=HCPi_dLaKow

House key copied from photo

@ Dave B

Faster than keygen..exe is boot.exe!

Mine is the one with the battering ram in the pocket....

Fancy nipping for a quick two-thirds of a pint?

Sounds like a London pint

Sounds like you lot haven't bought a pint in London recently. You get beer served in a pint glass but its more like 2/3 of a pint of liquid!

Linux at 17 - What Windows promised to be

@ Edward Rose

Commodity hardware is "standard" hardware. i.e. x86 hardware that you buy from a standard vendor and you could well run Windows on. The point that I am making is that by the time you add an extra cost for OS and OS support, it works out on par if not more expensive than the hefty discounts you get from major Unix vendors. In addition, add the cost of staff training, migration apps, packaging systems and auditing tools and its nor surprising why major companies keep the majority of their systems on AIX/Solaris.

Cheaper? Erm, really?

"The lower price tag for commercial support compared to proprietary and Unix alternatives didn't hurt the commercialization of Linux either."

I must admit my sides are still aching from this classic. I run a large mixed estate and out Linux on x86 servers works out as probably the most expensive systems we have. By the time we have bought the tin, bought support for the tin, bought a linux distro and bought support for it the cost is usually over an "expensive proprietary" system. Add in the extra support time for supporting the commodity hardware and Linux starts to look very expensive compared with other systems.

However, the biggest problem that Linux has is the same issue that Windows has; it runs on OEM hardware. IBM, Sun and Apple are always going to be able to provide a more stable experience as they can test their OS and drivers against a known set of hardware options. With Windows and Linux, a single bad driver can really kill the reliability of a system.

Scottish beavers (and Cali cacti) get their chips

Only when...

I'll only support the Scottish beavers when they are fitted with frikkin lasers!

Mine is the one with the watermarks and singed sleeve.

Carpetbomb bug tarnishes Google Chrome

Re: Richard Stubbs

Why? Have you read the EULA?:

http://tapthehive.com/discuss/This_Post_Not_Made_In_Chrome_Google_s_EULA_Sucks

Skype ignores PayPal siphoning hijack scheme

I'm an ex-Skyper

About 18 months ago I moved away from Skype after they cancelled my Skypein number with almost no notice.

I'm now using another VOIP provider, I don't need to keep a PC on all day, it costs much less for outgoing calls (and its still free for VOIP to VOIP calls) and the call quality is much higher.

Skype was good in its day but the other providers have caught up fast and now offer a better service IMHO.

Intel adds cheap dual-core, quad-core chips

Marketing slogan idea?

"Four times the cores, four times the cache misses!"

/mine is the one with the pockets sewn shut

VPN security - if you want it, come and get it

Erm?

"Like many small and medium sized businesses, El Reg is too cheap to equip its grunts with any sort of VPN"

Even the most basic of ADSL routers come with a reasonable VPN server these days and for the most advanced business, Windows SBS or more expensive routers come with more feature rich versions.

Surely, if VPN access is so critical to a business then surely its better to go for a commercial offering and buy support for it than run a freeware product on a desktop?

EMC blogger tears into HP and NetApp

Erm...

It seems that this is a case of the fact that you can prove anything with statistics. I'm not a fan of any of the above storage systems but one thing jumps out at me... with the NetApp OnTAP recommendation for reservation space, this is a very old document and that now NetApp recommend not using any reservation space with OnTAP 7.2.x

Its a bit like saying "because Windows 3.1 doesn't natively support IP, Exchange 2007 is unsuitable for a modern corporate deployment"! ;-)

Intel stuffs Nehalem chips with joy

Marketing FUD....., Argghhhhh!

More cores != better performance.

More cores are only a benefit if the software that are running on them is properly multi threaded. For single threaded software there is usually a performance hit as multi core CPUs usually run at a slower clock speed to keep power use and heat production down. In addition, the more cores there are, the longer the memory latency can become as the memory buses get clogged which leads to a core stalling for longer.

And Just to really add some confusion to the mix, some OSes don't scale as well over multiple cores.

Dell cloud computing™ denied

I'm not so sure....

"few of us think 'Dell' when we think of 'cloud computing'"

For some reason I always think of a cloud of smoke when I think of Dell servers... Especially when you plug them in for the first time and an "unexpected manufacturing defect" (i.e. a self tapping screw through the power tracks on the motherboard) causes the server to catch fire.

I love Dell, me.

Yahoo! knows! where! you! are!

I remember something like this....

There was a company which used to run a text service in major shopping centres where you could text them to say you had arrived and text them the say you had left. Between those texts you would be bombarded with pointless marketing texts for offers like "50p off an electric combined cheese grated and sock darner in the shape of the Taj Mahal. RRP £999.99".

Oddly enough it doesn't seem to be around any more....

Anonymous relaunches fight against Scientology

So what have they done?

So what have the Church of Scientology done to upset Prof. Hawking so much?

Mine is the one with a Thetan in the pocket.....

Apple DNS patch doesn't patch Mac clients

Well I'm not going to patch....

... I'm waiting for the upcoming release of iNames which does name lookups in a much cooler way!

Google buys vid editing firm to spice up Youtube

RE:

"Iz on your Yoo Toob, pimpin ur videeoz!"

PS Why isn't there a LOLcats icon yet? ;-)

Blu-ray to rule by 2011

I remember in the old days...

In the good old days we had small TVs with VCRs and the video quality was good enough.

Then TV quality improved and wide screen came out making VCR quality look poor.

The DVDs came along to improve the viewing quality.

Then TVs went HD ready and gave larger screen sizes making DVD quality look poor....

Just how long do the manufacturers think they can keep doing this before people cotton on?

Science MPs horrified by UK bio-lab management

A logical conclusion

"the Government should know the location, capacity and capability of all high containment laboratories in the UK"...

.. so that the data can be put on a CD and left on the backseat of a minicab in Croydon?

Bloke crams 13 into Volvo S70

I think he should get an award.....

.... for "Greenest car sharer". It would certainly be a way of beating the Congestion Charge as well!

Mine is the one with the five passengers in each pocket.

US woman sues over exploding thong

No IT angle but....

... I can see the PH angle.

RSPCA calls for dog chipping

Re: @Those who are against chipping dogs don't own dogs.

"How do you know it's painless, if YOU haven't been chipped?"

Maybe we should give Kevin Warwick a call on this matter? I think he would say it was well worth it because your dog would become..... a cybermutt!

Mine is the non-shedding Aibo coat.