Posts by Pantelis

Only way to stop the iPad: Flash-disk mutant SPEED FREAKS

I had the 2.5" version of the momentus XT on my laptop for a while and it did make a difference to the boot of Windows but after that it was not much; perhaps as some mentioned the 4Gb flash is not big enough and the algorithms not as well optimised but I replaced it with a 240Gb SSD (€189) and the laptop is now a different machine all together! It even allows me to run a Win7 VM at the same time and both OS's run smoothly and fluently.

Anything I buy from now on will come with SSD, I can't see myself going back to spinning disks again not just because of the performance but also for the reliability and battery life!

Market dynamics being what they are, SSD's have come down in price considerably and will probably continue doing so making them more and more accessible and allowing for higher capacities and now that we have mSATA it means that you can have at the same time in a laptop a 128Gb or 256Gb SSD for windows, apps and important files and a spinning disk for secondary stuff. At the moment I use an external disks for that but next laptop will have mSATA and spinning disk most probably.

Apple pounces on Samsung doc as proof of 'slavish copy' claims

"I think of myself as someone who's pretty granular about looking at graphics, and I mistook one for the other."

For a given definition of granular possibly, but to mistake a Samsung for an iPhone the granules must be pretty damn large indeed....

Curiosity success 'paves way for Man on Mars by 2030s'

Far into the future

"and added that the landing would stand as a point of American pride far into the future"

And far into the future you will have those that will claim it never happened and that it was all staged in the desert and a studio and will reinforce their position by arguing about how things don't look right or the dust that was lifted didn't correspond with the conditions on Mars, its atmosphere and gravity and so on and so forth...

Congratulations to the all those that worked hard to make it happen; amidst a torrent of reasons to dislike the US of A these past couple of decades, this one stands triumphantly for!

Cisco bends UCS rack and blade metal around new Xeon E5s

Re: no AMD

Intel have their own memory controller on the Xeon's (yes AMD was first with that one of course) so I doubt this is the issue. They could just as well develop proprietary control chips for AMD as well...

Are you an ECO POET? Climate science needs YOU

Wrong Date????

I checked the data for this article and it said 2nd of April and not 1st...surely a mistake!!!

Huawei banned from Australia’s NBN: reports

Credibility

Downer has about as much credibility as a dead donkey when it comes to anything as far as I am concerned...

Acer unveils 'world's thinnest' Ultrabook

Taking the piss or what????

"MagicFlip I/O"?

ARM daddy simulates human brain with million-chip super

Rejoice...

"and how much drinking and brown acid they have done"

Don't know about the brown acid but according to recent studies the old notion of alcohol killing brain cells seems to be a myth...

http://health.howstuffworks.com/human-body/systems/nervous-system/10-brain-myths9.htm

Captain Marvell flops out mighty flash/disk hybrid controller

Probably not

Having just invested in a momentus XT hybrid drive such as the ones that this marvell controller may "stop dead in their tracks" according to the author, I think I can say that it probably will not. I put the seagate drive in my 2 year old Core 2 Duo laptop and the difference in performance is considerable.

As a result the Momentus Hybrid drive has the laptop market all on its own which is something that the Marvell controller cannot serve because most notebooks have a single slot for a drive and even if they had two, their connectors are in such a way that adding the Marvell controller will not be possible.

On the desktop space things are a bit different but again the simplicity of having a single drive rather than a controller, an SSD and an HDD will probably appeal to most users.

The last reason is probably cost. A 500Gb Momentus XT hybrid drive retails for around 120 to 150 dollars. To get the Marvell working you are looking at around 60 to 70 dollars for the drive, 20 to 30 dollars for an equivalent SSD plus the cost of the Marvell controller itself so it looks like they will cost more or less the same and have the same performance.

Judging by the all the above and the head start that the Seagate drive has, I think the Momentus is probably going to be the more prevalent of the two.

Sexy Hustler honeys unlikely to corrupt Croydon yoof

This article is useless without pictures

This article is useless without pictures

Enormous Paleozoic flesh-eaters created in lab

Pictures

This article is worthless without pictures!!

iPad users put tablet to netbook tasks

What abou the price though

The ipad may exhibit the same usage characteristics as netbooks but it comes at a price premium when compared to most of them. That fact may act against any possible dominance of the market now currently occupied by netbooks.

On the other hand, if the netbook makers get their act together and make comparable devices at a cost that is more on par with what current netbooks cost, perhaps with an OS like android which seems well suited like the iphone OS to touch only devices then apple may have to worry.

DIMENSIONAL PORTAL INCURSION AT THE LHC!

About time

I welcome our new transdimensional overlords...they cannot possibly do a worse job than what we have now anyway and they are fresh!

Google chief: Only miscreants worry about net privacy

Taking the piss

This is taken directly from the blog of Sarah Hunter, UK Policy Manager for Google:

"We fiercely protect the privacy of our users across the world and do not believe that fear of illegal activity somewhere on the Internet is enough to justify intrusion of activity everywhere on the Internet."

She is talking about the clause 17 if the proposed Digital Economy Bill and states the following:

"While we remain unsure of how this Clause 17 is intended to be implemented, we fear it could require the Government to start gathering more information about users Internet habits, even when no illegal practices have taken place."

You would think that they are from two different companies?!

Fault tolerance in virtualised environments

Correction for Adam Salisbury

"There are vendors who specialise in fault tolerant hardware on which to run your hypervisors but these are expensive to buy and even more expensive to code software for, an arguably cheaper option would be to invest in a blade frame for perhaps the greatest resilience and even cheaper option than that is fault tolerant software".

That statement is unfortunately false with regards to the "expensive to code software for" part. There are FT systems that can run VMWare ESX and then you can run on top of ESX other OS's and any application that can run on those OS's without any extra coding, let alone "expensive" coding. Both NEC and Stratus have such xeon based FT systems and though pricewise they are more expensive than standard Xeon servers, they do offer complete hardware redundancy and uninterrupted operation even if they experience a failure on any component (cpu/memory/chipset/video card/netword card etc) without the need for any extra or special configuration, or coding, or software because the fault tolerance is built into the hardware.

Keep in mind that they don't offer cluster type continuous operations because in a cluster you have what is called failover time. For such FT systems there is no failover; it is true uninterrupted operation in the event of failure.

Get your facts straight please before posting erroneous articles which may mislead others!

MySpace confession sinks car-death conviction appeal

Ridiculous

This is not making much sense to me. I was under the impression that in most countries in the world, if someone driving behind you and has an accident it is their fault. If you slam on the brakes and they hit you it is their fault. If you slam on the breaks and they loose control of their vehicle, again it is their fault; the reasoning behind this is that it is the responsibility of the driver behind you to make sure that they leave enough room between their car and your car to be able to react in case of an emergency.

Apple bars Google's Voice from iPhone

Translation error

The Google statement according to the article read:

"We will continue to work to bring our services to iPhone users - for example, by taking advantage of advances in mobile browsers."

The Translation: "We're not happy about it, but there's nothing we can do."

I have to disagree with the translation, at least the second part. To me, saying that taking advantage of advances in mobile browsers to bring services to iPhone users sounds more like "We're not happy about our app being rejected from the Apple store so we are going to take advantage of the browser and bring the application through it rather than with a separate app and lets see you b******* try to block it then!"

6.5m vehicles to be tracked by 2012

Or not

According to El Reg...

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/05/21/gao_predicts_gps_failure/

If the predicted GPS failure of 2010 materialises then the tracking will not materialise and that will be one investment down the drain...

California: Cisco gives out some details, finally

A DVD Drive?

A DVD drive on a blada? Either Cisco has lost the plot or your reporter needs to run a system diagnostic. Chassis have drives and the not all of them. Most of the time you go for remote media because nobody wants to stand in front of a blade chassis in a datacentre swapping disks. Besides the DVD drive would take up extremely valuable real estate in the blade server for no real benefit unless Cisco has not been able to work up a remote media solution in which case I would not even go close to those boxes no matter how much RAM they can pack in.

Drunk sorority girls quaff booze 'to impress boys'

Clueless

I think this is another case where a clueless researcher tried to match a hypothesis to a phenomenon and failed miserably by focusing just on that hypothesis.

The phenomenon here is increased drinking amongst university girls...the hypothesis of the researcher is that they do it to impress boys. The hypothesis is clueless and should have been a question.

Why is there increased drinking amongst girls? A bunch of well placed questions later would have driven them to make the link between the fact that guys get girls drunk because when drunk they behave more like paris hilton and all which that entails (you can each use your imagination from here on).

NASA CO₂ scan satellite launch fails

Well what happened to it?

The article talks about the failure to reach orbit but it does not clarify whether the payload was destroyed or whether it was salvaged (if that is possible). Regardless of what happened to the payload though, this should keep conspiracy theorists happy and busy for a while!

Yes! It's the cardboard PC!

Unlikely

It is a nice idea but I doubt it would pass EM emmision restrictions to be commercialy used

Geekerati brace for Unix timestamp milestone

You are all WRONG

Everybody knows that the world will end in 2012! It has been foretold and prophesized making this article and all subsequent comments mute and irrelevant.

Extreme porn law goes live - are you ready?

@SID

SID old boy,

It is an undeniable fact that your views on this law differ substantialy from the views of the rest of the people who have posted in this forum to voice their displeasure at it. Such blatantly deviant behaviour cannot be tolerated.

Furthermore not only are your views deviant from what is obviously the normal view in this forum but it has been deemed by a group of your peers to have caused harm and distress to numerous members of this forum; this being a very open forum we fear that this distress could affect just about anyone as there are absolutely no warnings posted anywhere on the register as to your deviant views and their publication here.

Regretebly there is no law currently in effect that could be used to bring you in front of a formal jury of your peers so that you can answer for these crimes; we are so very happy though to see that by passing the Extreme Porn Law, the United KINGDOM is proudbly paving the way for the introduction of laws that will punish deviant behaviour until there will come a time when ALL deviant behaviour will sieze and we will all live in complete peace and harmony without a shred of deviance to soil the uniformity and compliance!

Pro-Palestine vandals deface Army, NATO sites

Edit

I have to take back my comment that you are completely ignorant on the regions politics and apologise for it Anonymous Coward after reading your last two posts, the ones titled "@ Mike JVX" and the one titled "Promised Land?" because both where prety much spot on.

Never the less I still disagree with your statement that if Hamas stoped firing the rockets Israel would have no escuse. If a country wants to go to war but is not in a position to reveal the real reasons for the war they can simply fabricate them. This was superbly demonstrated by the US/UK with the weapons of mass destruction and Iraq.

@ Anonymous Coward

Your statement:

"If Hamas stopped firing the rockets into Israel then Israel would have no excuse to be in Palestinian territory."

clearly indicates a complete ignorance on your part with regards to the politics of the region.

But it still comes as a surprise to read, even from someone who has little grasp of what is going on in the region that, that in the face of the death of more than 280 children in the past 16 days, all you decide to mention is the alleged falsificaiton of videos of people dying? That is the problem for you? Not the fact that they died but the allegations that they falsifieds video's showing it to happen? That just goes beyond ignorance and is simply contemptible.

Wikipedia COO was convicted felon

Unlawful?

I had no idea that wounding someone in the chest could be unlawful and therefore presumably lawful as well! I wonder what contsitutes lawful wounding of someone on the chest...