Posts by David Dingwall

Milk IN the teapot: Innovation or abomination?

And has been grown on the Channel islands. I had heard a few months ago South Wales is getting warm enough, and a development agency is looking at it

Reg readers battle to claim 'my silicon's older than yours' crown

Launch Alliance

Someone in El Reg USA needs to have a chat with Boeing et al at the "Launch Alliance", they have a HUGE inventory of ancient kit they need to keep running, it all cannot be done with hardware emulators.

Most SAP HANA installs poppable with default keys, hacker says

So not a lot has changed then? SAP R/3 releases 1.2, 2.X, and early 3.X did not force OS service account password changes, nor forcing changes to Client accounts SAP* and DDIC in each and every Client. As a consultant we TOLD customers to change them, WE CHANGED them manually where we could, but still there were test and QA systems with copies of production data still running defaults.

Your typical bang-head-on-concrete-post situation.

It took a two step product install addition to fix this, and all of a sudden things went very very peaceful for on-call BASIS consultants, and database architects.

The downside of a product technology swap are all the lessons lost by the old support group not taken on board by the eager new product team.

We're not, er, 'cut-throat' capitalists – VC formerly known as ISIS

You have to feel sorry for Oxford University, who have been using the name ISIS in their commercial development arm.

Mars rover harangues empty landscape with loudhailer

Now hold on there - actually how did it sound?

Noticed the NASA replay was Earth normal almosphere.

Some geek out there must be able to run the speech through a wiggle-scope and replay it as it would sound at Martian atmosphere pressure.

Just saying.

Laser used to cool semiconductor

Sundiver

The human wolflings use a primitive refrigeration laser to eject "waste heat" away from the spacecraft, rather than the approved GalTech from the Library

Acer Iconia Tab A500 10in Android tablet

keyboard - not - says marketing dept

Although the kit itself is the same, the keyboard dock is reserved for the W500 model only, and not the Android A500 edition. Accessory sales suggest to us users bluetooth option only.

USB sockets for flash memory only, and reports say not all types work. We're all waiting for the new Honeycomb update in June/July to see what other devices will be supported.

In the meantime v. happy with experience on the move, however thinking about a A501 with 3G when they come out soon.

Julian Assange™ applies to trademark himself

Classic (TM)

What a nice end to a loooong day, El reg has a Classic(TM) moment, with your Assange(TM) commentary.

level 3 giggles, and I'm buying the next round (complaint: what happened to the pint of beer logo?)

HP strikes back at Oracle with SAP CEO pick

Who cares if he's visionary?

"A remarkable leader he's not, and he's certainly no visionary."

probably isn't the point. Whatever you might think of Mr Hurd's tenure, (and I'd suggest his one and only vision was "biggest swinging axe in the business") the emphasis for each divisional VP was to own their own product lines numbers and promote the visions for these lines, rather than expecting the CEO to be grand-standing at each and every product launch.

In the search for the new HP CEO, the press was bigging-up the skills and achievements of these VP's. You could argue HP only needs two or three years from Leo, then see which of the internal candidates matures enough to fill his shoes

Geek tech firm loses Jedi credentials

The Force is strong with you -

but you are NOT a Jedi yet

Future quantum computers could be made of... silicon?

Blake's Seven anyone?

better still assemble in a clear plastic box, the design requiring flashy lights, and call it ORAC

Microsoft pulls plug on Intel's Itanic

RAS Xeon 7500

As soon as the latest Xeon 7500s were announced on 30th March, Itanium was bound to be toast

See the formal announcement here

http://www.intel.com/pressroom/archive/releases/2010/20100330comp_sm.htm

El Reg also covered it somewhat.

Red Hat moved it's high end teams here instead

NASA coughs $57m for another year's HPC support at Ames

Not announced today

. . . and host NASA's own larger, faster copy of EVE Online

Red Hat pulls plug on Itanium with RHEL 6

HP Itanium market share is tiny

I agree with A. C. #3

HP is the largest x32 & x64 server provider in the market workdwide. Xeon and Pentium familes.

HP-UX/Open VMS on Itanium has tiny market share for 2009/10 new server sales. Outside the USA, where Linux is not suitable for a specific extra-large SMP we see AIX is winning, HP-UX second, and Solaris SPARC nowhere. My worldwide customers ARE asking for Linux on HP Itanium now, but this is only so they can get off HP-UX, convert the hardware to Linux to and simplify their training and supprt costs. Decent sized server buys are Xeons and AMD, and most of those are virtualized.

The interesting next data point will be what will VMware's position be going forward, with say vSphere 5?

Steel-woven wallet pledges to keep RFID credit cards safe

High School physics anyone?

"so if the wallet became magnetically charged would it not fubar all your credit cards? I remember when I was young i put a magnet on one of my mums cards and it stopped working."

and I was taught static charge stays on the outside. Assuming the thing is closed all the way around, your cards should be safe.

Parking spot flies to International Space Station

not trru the whole thing will be de-orbited, says other websites

"...it isn't _that_ long until the whole thing is due to be deorbitted "

Space.com and other sites say the Rusians have plans to continue, even if they have to disconnect the US sections, and let them de-orbit. With this component connected, they now have the lego connections to do that.

BBC: Top Gear Tesla didn't run out of juice

Lies, damn lies, and editing

"Now we can reveal the answer: according to the Top Gear spokeswoman, the tested Tesla was filmed being pushed into the shed in order to show what would happen if the Roadster had run out of charge."

Hmmm. Not how it was presented on the programme. From a "crap - no power" cut scene to being pushed into the hanger. There was no attempt to show the power level meter going down, nor any warning lights flashing at JC on the track.

So now they tell us that point was staged as dramatics? The duration of charging, however, was a fair point

To be fair on the rest of the segment later tho' the focus was on reliability issues (which we saw/were told about) as the main reason not to buy the car, and it's price.

Linux on the WinXP MSI Wind netbook?

OpenSUSE works but no wireless

If you want wireless, you'll have to download the linux kernel. OpenSUSE finds the LAN straight off, but the RPM for the wireless from the MSI website needs the full kernel.

Out of the box SuSE Enterprise WS runtime install cannot find the LAN, and needs a full kernel re-build.

Sony PRS-505 Reader e-book

Got One

OK, hand up, I have one, bought in the USA in January.

This is my second Sony Reader, and it's not a Rev 1 product :-)

No back light, but neither does a deadwood-paper book.

Kinda confused what all the who-ha is about, ebook readers have been around 10 years (anyone remember Rocket readers?)

And remember, there's lots of other websites selling books around the £2.00 mark that people were asking about.

IBM to shove ads onto DVDs

Grrr - purely on technical terms. CA Cert Time Bomb

Certificate - yuck!

OK I have a DVD, all is well accepted the premise of why it's there (let's imagine), the movie assigned cert is fine, and later the root CA expires after five years.

All local, no network required. Cert check fails because the CA chain fails: instant adverts.

Permission to flame on?