Posts by John Stoffel

BlackBerry DTEK 50: How badly do you want a secure Android?

So what about the belt holster options?

I'm one of those guys who won't put a phone in the back pocket because I'll destroy it. So a couple of questions: A) does it have a decent belt holster with magnetic flap? B) does it have the magnetic sensor so it knows when you pull it out to look at it?

This was one of the best parts of the Z10. A great size, good battery, great feel in the hand, and it just worked properly when you pulled it out to look at it, or put it away, the screen lit up or shutdown properly.

I still miss the Z10, a very underated phone IMO. And with an excellent keyboard and just good all around performance. Until it started crawling with later updates to BB 10.x releases.

John

Flying filers and Game of Thrones: Jon Snow? No, latency is dead

So where's the details?

It reads like marketing fluff. It's all expensive, but hey we made it work with this other product! I was at least hoping to read some techincal details of the environment and how it improved things, or even how the Avere XRVTDTY whatever thingies did so well. Obviously they're NFS accelerators with SSD/disk/magic cache to keep files local.

But the details matter. And since they did two seperate steps (migrate TB of data to Linux, then serve out via Avere), it's not clear what made the most difference! Also, they stated it was the slow render farm causing slowdowns, not disk.

I give this article a 3 out of 10.

Admin fishes dirty office chat from mistyped-email bin and then ...?

Why are you not teaching them to fish?

So why in the name of god are you not teaching your users to fish? Collecting mis-sent emails and forwarding them on is an exercise in futility. I have valuable time to be spent trawling the web for photos of cute kittens that would be *seriously* inconvenienced if I spent my time re-addressing email all day.

Delete it and ignore it, and just start bouncing email (especially for internal only!) emails back when they screw up the address. For externals, you can bounce or drop as you see fit.

Cutting edge security: Expensive kit won't save you

So who pays for this in the outsourced world?

So, the monkey in the room is who pays for all this? With companies under pressure to reduce costs, paying for a bunch of sophisticated and well trained guys (and gals!) to sit around monitoring logs and looking for threats is where on the priority list?

This all sounds awesome, but it's hard enough getting them to buy firewalls, but asking them for a central logging infrastructure and the software to collate, sort and mine this for threats is going to be tough tough tough. Or it will get just tossed at the regular IT staff as another one of the multitude of things on their plate.

Unless it's made part of PCI, or the insurance or regulators require this stuff, it ain't going to happen except in cindarella circumstances.

John

Google wants new class of taller 'cloud disk' with more platters and I/O

Re: Wishing wells are nice things

Smaller platters on the same spindle would be used for high(er) IOPs activity, because the head would have less distance to travel. Short Stroking in essense.

Now if you have different size platters on a spindle (think full height 3.5" drives like the old 5.25" FH MFM-506 disks... then maybe that would work, with dual arms... not sure.

John

Is tech monitoring software still worth talking about?

Re: SNMP

This is a huge issue, esp on Netapps, where if you add/delete volumes, the OIDs for a volume change, so tracking disk usage over time is ... challenging ... to say the least.

Monitoring tools suck... but it's defining the metrics that's hard

The hard part is getting everyone to agree on what is important to monitor and what isn't. And then the problem becomes finding a solution to measure that metric, and then to display it in a meaningful way. And then how do you do alerts so that they are meaningful? And at 3am?

Monitoring is one of the hardest jobs to do, because us humans are very very very good at filtering, until we get overwhelmed and we shutdown. Or just ignore it.

There's nothing worse than a monitoring system which screams at you or the users so much that you just stop paying attention to something you can't fix, adjust, or monitor.

But back to metrics. My personal bugaboo was a WAN accelerator appliance vendor who had/have a great product, it really does a good job. But when performance fell off a cliff because someone was pushing 100Mb/s through a 10MBit/sec pipe and causing all the traffic to get congested, it became hell to *find* that stream/application/endpoint-pair which was driving all the traffic.

There were all sorts of shiny knobs and buttoms and graphs, which all helped the developers I feel, but none that ever really helped the end user sysadmin who's dealing with an irate user saying "The WAN is slow again!".

See? It all goes back to the end-user-testing story I just finished reading about, where not understanding the end user's needs, and testing LIKE an end-user is the key.

John

Dell PowerEdge R730: Reg rack monkeys crack smiles over kindness of engineers

Re: R720xd

I'm curious why you think the SuperMicros are hard to work with. I admit the remote managment interface isn't polished, but it does the trick and doesn't get in the way when you need, which is when stuff is titsup and you need remote access.

God forbid you don't buy the practically required iDRAC license to actually make it useful. SuperMicro includes it for free, no hassles or upsell for something at should be part of the system requirements right off the bat.

iDRAC is a scam, as is this review!

If you buy one of these, or any Dell server with iDRAC, do not believe them when they say that the basic license included with the system is actually usable. It's not. So you need to go back and update this review with the cost of the enterprise iDRAC license to actually be able to manage this system remotely. Which is a complete ripoff.

I've got a bunch of SuperMicro FatTwins and they rock. The remotemanagement interface is barebones, but it works from the get go, without any need for an extra license so that you can acutally manage the server remotely.

And HP is just as bad as Dell. The DL360G7 series (don't know about the more recent ones) would show you the BIOS console, but once the OS booted up, fuck you unless you paid the $300 for the full iLO3 license.

So just make sure you include that in the above quoted numbers, because it makes a big difference in the upfront cost, and really makes you look stupid when you don't bother to order it at the start. Fuckers.

Dragons and butterflies: The chaos of other people's clouds

It hard to make the case to management to spend the moolah...

This is all obvious stuff, and while I love to point out Netflix and it's Chaos Army of testing tools, it's just not valid for where I work. One, management doesn't want to spend money on anything that might (not will, might) save their bacon. Unles they've had their feet in the fire, then they won't spend it.

Two, for large Oracle installs, unless you get RAC or some other way to horizonatally scale your ERP system, it's just a nightmware to make work. The vendors don't support it out of the box, or if they do, it's so much $$$ that management just says no. Until the day something craps out and they can't book orders, then the spigots open for a small interval.

Three, getting management permission to *test* your DR, backups, etc is all a fairy tale. They either want it tested without any impact tothe business, or the test is so laughably basic and error prone that it's not even worth it.

Raise your hands if management considers the development copy of production to be thier DR copy? I see a forest cropping up. And of course the problem is that things *usually* work just fine, and generally we keep things going. Even when we know we're on the knife edge of falling off the cliff.

It's not an easy problem at all. And it costs money. Lots of it usually. And sometimes its not worth it. But it usually is....

How a power blip briefly broke GitHub's boxes and tripped it offline

They needed to use Chaos Monkey from Netflix

These guys need to use Chaos Monkey from Netflix to do fault injection more often to stress test the infrastructure. They already have horizontal scaling, so this type of testing is a perfect match for them.

Now not having the systems bootup because of BIOS problems (crappy BIOS maybe) ain't fun at all. I wonder if that's an uptime issue, since they said it could be solved by pulling the complete power from the system and then rebooting.

This is why you try to have multiple motherboards/vendors in your server center to try and spread out the pain when stuff like this pops up. It's not simple, it's not cheap, and it's hard to do at times.

John

SpaceX makes rocket science look easy: Falcon 9 passes tests

Re: How many times?

Actually, as I recall the shuttle main engines did have at least one failure where they had an abort to orbit happen. They ended up lower than planned, which caused some problems. A quick google shows it was STS-51F which was the failure.

John

Supermicro's ability to enable should worry IBM and Lenovo

Supermicro rocks...

I love the supermicro FatTwin systems. Simple, dense, cool running, big memory, big CPU, what's not to love? AND!!! They don't shaft you like HP does with an ILOM that shuts off the GUI once the OS boots unless you pay a bunch of money. I hate them. HP makes good gear, but they try to nickle and dime you to death for stuff that's just a bit flip away.

No one runs their server from the ILOM unless they have to, but when you do it's critical. And when it costs another $300/host to add that feature, it's just crazy.

For dense compute racks, and even ESX hosts, or heck any server you need, SuperMicro does the job. Why go elsewhere?

John

Getting metal hunks into orbit used to cost a bomb. Then SpaceX's Falcon 9 landed

Re: Shuttle vs Falcon comparison - politics not involved!

A big part of the problem with the shuttle is that to get Air Force support, NASA had to build it bigger than they wanted, so that they could launch Air Force payloads. Also why they had (and did) launch from Vandenbery in CA. The Air Force (CIA/NSA/spooks) wanted high inclination polar orbits with a high mass capacity.

NASA meanwhile wanted something smaller, but to get funding, made a deal.

Another problem with refurbishment was the OMS (Orbital Maneuvering System) which is in the two pods at the rear of the shuttle. To make sure it would always light when they needed it to light, it used hypergolic propellants which are might obnoxiously toxic to be around. This is why once the shuttle lands on the runway, you saw it just sit there for an hour or two because they needed to drain any remaning propellants in the OMS to make it safe enough to be around.

And I think for the tiles to cool a bit too, though it might be that I'm forgetting something. I think it might be that they needed to pump cooling air into the shuttle as the heat finally leaked through the tiles into the body of the orbiter.

Throwing away the main fuel tank isn't that bad, but having to re-do the solid rocket boosters each time also adds to the cost.

And think about how much testing you need to do when building something that MUST work. It can't fail. Then think about how you build something that you can incrementally test and check out before it has to do it's job? Ever watch How It's Made where they do initial tests on the production line to make sure things are working before they ship it out? Being able to launch a rocket stage, then bring it back down and look it over makes for a compelling case to be the second or third launch customer, instead of the first. Then you know with alot more certaintly that things will work as expected.

John

Behold, Backblaze’s public B2 beta blast off

They need a linux client

I love these guys and I'd use them in a second, but they don't have a linux client, which is a damn shame. For the price, and because they talk so frankly about their pod designs (been trying to buy one for work for cheap D2D2T staging) are so open, that I keep recommending them to others.

But again, they need a linux client. Heck, Dropbox does one, how hard could it be?

Seagate wears dunce's cap in hi-cap disk ship slip

Gah, that chart hurts my head!

Someone needs to go and beat the designer of that chart over the head, it's a total pain to interpret. I mean c'mon, all blue shades?

Sheesh...

And the reasons for buying new IT gear are as follows ...

Really, you can replace everything every three years?

I've been at a 50 billion dollar company for 12 years now and we're still runnig the same core switches in my local data center. And I just got rid of a rack of DC powered Rackable Dual CPU Opteron boxes (they were really nice for their day) with 16gb of RAM each. Talk about sweet!

But the myth that people upgrade everything every 2-3 years is just that. I used to be against leasing because it's a horrible way to waste money, but now I do it with a $1 buyout so that good servers are cheap to keep around (dual CPU, quad core, 144Gb of RAM... what's not to love?) but I do so wish we had done leasing on the core switches so we could have done an upgrade to a 10g core earlier on.

And of course the myth that all new servers come with useable OoB (Out of Band management) like ILOM is a crock of shit. I refuse to buy HPs if I can at all help it these days becasue they disable the ILOM once the BIOS is done unless you pay they're extortionate tax. Screw that.

Lately we've been buying the SuperMicro FatTwins with lots of RAM and it's amazing how cool they run, even in a dense 4U of space. The cabling is a bit annoying... but honestly I can stand that.

I honestly think that the average corporate refresh rate is much closer to 5-8 years, if they can get away with it. Esp once you've paid the tax to get a new ERP or othe business critical system installed. Then people become really really really hesitant to upgrade it. And god forbid you've customized it to do things your way. You're just screwed when it comes time to do the upgrade.

Heck, we're now in the position of having to upgrade a bunch of Oracle 6 (yes, they were writting back around 2000....) apps because we're moving from IE9 to IE11 and these apps just will not work no matter what. Whee!!!

So the basic presmise that only SMBs hold onto stuff until it dies is crap crap crap.

And in alot of cases, there's no need to upgrade aggresively. Most people aren't using all the features anyway... so why upgrade?

John

Boffins could tune telescopes to listen to lasers on Mars

It's the *wave* of the future...

I'm really *amped* up by this new *wave* in communication technologies!

128GB DDR4 DIMMs have landed so double your RAM cram plan

sweet sweet KVM hosting

Just think about all the VMs you can host on a big with that much memory? Most of them won't need the CPU... or even just the huge readonly DB replicas you could host on there for your blog? Have a master box to handle updates, and a ton of these facing the customers or running reports. Sweet!

Who cares how crappy my SQL queries are? What do you mean that doing 15 joins just to return the ID of the boxtop that matches the random query across your data wharehouse is stupid? Toss RAM at it and it's now fast again!

At least until the next upgrade of the software where the vendor has written even crappier queries...

Who's right on crypto: An American prosecutor or a Lebanese coder?

Re: Is a compromise possible?

If the data is un-encrypted at rest, what is to stop the bad person/goverment/corporation from just pulling the data off by shutting down the system at rest and hoovering up the data that way? Or from backups? Or just making a copy at the operating system level?

And how would you know if that happened?

Superfish 2.0 worsens: Dell's dodgy security certificate is an unkillable zombie

re-installed from one of the other Dell services that starts up?

I bet it's re-isntalled by one of the other Dell services that starts up on bootup. Happy I don't have a dell to go through and check. Oh wait... I've got my wife's Windows 7 Dell to go through. Damn....

Taxi for NASA! SpaceX to fly astronauts to space station

Re: Boo, hiss

The problem here is that the simple statistics of 2 out of 135 and 1 out of 19 launches doesn't tell you enough to make a true estimate of reliability.

You also have to include other events in shuttle launches, such as when they had an abort to orbit due to one engine shutting down early, which left them in the wrong orbit. Also the other cases where that almost had burn throughs on the shuttle o-rings on other launches, but didn't quite fail.

And I'm sure SpaceX has had other near misses as well, I just don't know of them for sure. But back tothe main point, you can't predict future reliability from such a small sample size, esp when you effectively throw the sucker away after each launch. This is why new airline designs do ground tests, then taxi tests, then high speed taxi tests, then first flight, then flight envelope expansion, then flight envelope testing, to make sure that the operating restricts are safely inside the "oh my god we're gonna die!" feelings, and then inside the "crap the wing broke and fell off" levels.

But testing one off items that get used and thrown away is much much harder. You need to have a process where you test as you build, test and measure, feedback into the production, track each lot of production, etc. It's a hard thing to do. This is what when you build artillery shells, you expect to have duds, misfires and other problems. And which you trace back to a particular lot, then look at the process, manufacturing, etc. And examine the un-fired ones for clues as well. But in that case... you're building thousands, tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of shells and can do proper statistical analysis and prediction because you have so much data.

With rockets... not so much yet.

Roundworm infection increases female fertility

Trouser worm

And you thought my trouser snake wasn't appetizing ladies?

Network problems? It's not just you. Level3 outages reported in the US

The fibre's natural enemy...

... is the backhoe. It's only going to worse and individual fibres and bundles get more and more capacity per-fibre. It may not even help you to run the down seperate fibres if they're in the same bundle.

I remember once when we were having the roads resurfaced at the college where I worked at the time. One of those big road grinders managed to find and grab a 300 pair telephone bundle, which at the time was also the network link to the other side of Campus. There was a steam tunnel between buildings, so instead of running the bundle under it, they had run it over the tunnel, where it was only 4" down from the TOP of the road. Oops...

Some poor guy had to spend hours and hours splicing in a new cable.

Storm in a teacup: Wileyfox does Android cheapie, British style

Just needs moar battery and MicroSim!

I'm really starting to think that just getting Moar Battery! and MicroSim support on a phone like this would be the perfect end-all answer for 75% of all users.

Something that can seriously last 48 hours would be ideal.

Telecity's engineers to spend SECOND night fixing web hub power outage

Re: Cheap datacenter providers ......

All decent data centers have a UPS, it only needs to be online for 10 minutes at most before the generator(s) spin up to take the load. This sounds more like a transformer or two got fried somehow.

As for your claim about someone dying, care to post some particulars or point to a source for this claim? I don't doubt that it's hjappened at some point in time... but showing your sources before making claims like this is always better. Otherwise you get flamed.

Me? I'm just showing you the coals and saying "be a shame if they got dumped on you... accidentally like...". LOL

Telecity London data centre outage borks VoIP, websites, AWS...

Re: Back up often

This is one of those areas where you'd think they would be running tests on the system on a regular basis, with N+1 redundancy. If you don't test, you don't know.

But I've run into stuff like this before where we had a dodgy transfer switch that if you let it sit for a month or two, one of the phases would stick and not flip over the next time you had an outage. But once you tested it... it would be happy as a clam and would switch back and forth no problem. It took me doing monthly tests and metering the panel to finally find and prove the problem. Took over a year to find and solve this issue.

Ever since then... I test and check the voltages on the transfer switch.

Now in this case, if the loads are too high... then I suspect someone goofed and overloaded a singel phase or something so that too much power is being pulled from one leg at a time, which doesn't allow things to come up cleanly. Not a fun situation if you haven't planned for it and know how to shed load (i.e. turn off crap...) as you bring things up to let disks spin up one by one, instead of a huge thundering herd.

BlackBerry Priv: After two weeks on test, looks like this is a keeper

Z10 user forced to iPhone... wishing for Priv I think

So I just migrated from my work Z10 which I really liked, to an iPhone 6 with a Pelican case and holster on the belt. After using it for about a week now, I'm really missing the great blackberry features. But I'm also liking some of the Apple features...

1. It has the magnet in the case, so it lights up automatically when I pulled it out to glance at it. So useful! I'm still finding myself waiting for the Jesus phone to respond when I pulll it out. Win, BB.

2. The apple keyboard, esp in a good case, isn't as good as the Z10's. Win BB.

3. The fact that I can get at the camera, flashlight, etc without unlocking the phone makes the iPhone easier to use in some situations. Win Apple.

4. I'm in a love/hate relationship with the thumbprint reader. It's nice and quick and let's the get into the phone easily, but the phone itself seems just a touch big. And I worry it's going to be a problem point. I've already got some crub on my screen and it's been a week with it!

5. I played with a Priv for about 10 minutes. Seemed nice and fast, and felt good in the hand. One nice thing was the grippy back, which means it doesn't slide around like a bar of soap in your hand or on your leg when used in map mode. Win BB Priv.

6. As someone who's never used Android for any length of time, I *still* think I miss that back, home and menu buttons. Having all of these functions in one button (or in a randomly moving part of the screen) drives me a little crazy. I think this is a Z10/Android win.

7. The slide up keyboard of the Priv finally fixed the issue that the old 9800 slider had, and the other BB slider, which was that there was never enough grip for your thumb to slide it up without touching the screen and such. And after having using the Z10 for so long (I think three years?) going back to the physical keyboard wasn't what I really wanted. But at least the BB soft keyboard was still there and still working just as well as before. So I'd really like to have a Z50 come out, which is Android, touch screen, BB software. Then I'd be even happier!

8. Apps, apps apps... the iphone wins for now over the Z10. No idea about the priv, but I suspect it will be a tossup and won't really matter in the long run.

Debian daddy Murdock joins the unstoppable Docker crusade

management does suck for techies...

I note he's gone from management higher up, down to techie, where I suspect he'll be a higher up, but one who does more of what makes him happy.

Good for him!

Reg reader achieves bronze badge, goes directly to jail

obligatory commentard comment for bronze wanna-be

I want my broze too! Hold on officer... be right with you.

JURECA! Germany flips big red switch on 2.2 petaflop supercomputer

Ob question...

So how well does it play crysis? Oh wait... I'm way too late with this trope, right? By like something near four years or so? Dang... I'm such an old fart.

I do find it interesting how water cooling has made such a comeback. You never seem to hear about the systems like this which develop a leak and short out like crazy, causing fires. Now that would be a great ElReg set of articles/pictures to show.

Intel's Omni-Path InfiniBand-killer debuts at sizzling 100 Gb/sec

and I thought 10gb/s ethernet was fast...

This is some sexy tech... but so far beyond most web server, horizontally scalable services that it's not funny. I'm looking at your Netflix. Though I admit it would make a dandy backend for their storage servers.

Having worked in ASIC chip simulation support for the past 12+ years, it's nice to have a fast network, but even more important to have lots of RAM on your systems.

John

Hubble finds lonely 'void galaxy' floating in cosmic nothingness

Iain M. Banks wins again!

It's just like the star system in "Against a Dark Background" but different.

John

Refined player: Fedora 23's workin' it like Monday morning

I hope that DNF is as good as apt-get...

As a long time Debian user, but a long time RHEL/CentOS user at work, I still have the hatred of RPMs for some insane reason. I just like how apt-get works... so much better than yum. But this is making me start thinking that I need to play more aggresively with Fedora and see how well it goes.

Esp since I've been installing mint on all my desktops at home, which works a treat!

Caption this: WIN a 6TB Western Digital Black hard drive with El Reg

Now Hal...

Now Hal... I know you want to goto space, but it's MY turn first!

WIN a 6TB Western Digital Black hard drive with El Reg

Dammit Wesley, I still can't find that Ferengi on the holodeck! These disguises are useless. Get me my phaser.

Umm Dad.... why is a cougar nibbling on me leg?

NetApp's customers resisting Clustered ONTAP transition

Re: CDOT fail

I'm in the middle of a 7-mode to cDOT transition, and it's not easy. But... once you've made it, the benefits really are there. It's just that the cost of the storage is still way too high. And for simple NFS only file shares, the new cDOT is *much* more complex and harder to do the simple things.

But don't get me wrong, this is the transition they needed to make, they just should have made it five years ago, and done it with more of a break IMHO, so that they could really encourage people to move.

Now you can snapmirror volumes from 7-mode to cDOT, it's not impossible like one of the posters said. Is it simple? Yes. Do you run into problems? Yes. I tried doing this over a WAN link and we ended up having to stop it because of major problems with volumes locking up. But for short term quick copies/migrations, it does work. And it might also be that the newer version we're on will have fixed those issues.

The other big issue which has been fixed with cDOT 8.3 is that you do NOT need to dedicate entire disks to the root aggregate and volume any more, they now spread that across multiple disk using that magic technology... partitions! This fixes a major issue lotso f people had, that on small systems, you lost alot of disk to core OS overhead. It's still not perfect, but it's better.

So on the whole, I'm happy with cDOT and I really like how I can setup virtial filers for seperate groups and consolidate stuff and yet not worry about someone bringing down other groups when they screw something up on thier Virtual Filer (SVM). It's liberating, sorta like early VMware/Xen/KVM was. IT's still rought around the edges, but it's getting more polished all the time.

Now they just need to bring down the price so as to encourage sales so they can amortize their sunk costs across as big a base as possible. Really, they can do this, it will just take time. And they need to in some ways also simplify their offerings and work hard to provide value again. Stop trying to be everything to everyone, just provide the best NFS/CIFS/iSCSI/FC storage they can, with emphasis on the first two like in the past.

SpaceX Dragon crew capsule in 'CHUTE ABORT drama – don't panic, no one died

That second paragraph is bollocks!

I like how NASA holds everyone else to that high standard, but then relaxes it when it came to the shuttle. The first couple of test flights had ejection seats, but after that they were removed. This is what I don't like large solids for manned launches. A) you can only test fire them once, B) they're hard to shutdown when problems arise. With a liquid (or possibly a hybrid solid/lquid Oxidizer) you have more of a chance to shutdown cleanly.

Look at how various Saturn V launches had problems but kept going because they could just shutdown one of the engines. SpaceX had one like that too if I recall...

As did the shuttle, post booster seperation where they had one engine shutdown early and they just ran the other two longer to get into almost the correct orbit.

Win! El Reg exceedingly fine mug collection

Can I get Tetley British blend instead?

I love Tetley's british blend... can I get that instead? LOL

The rest looks awesome, maybe I'll even win something some day.

Good news for gamers who don't leave the house: SanDisk debuts 24/7 Extreme PRO SSD

I agree, the longer warrantee now makes it much more likely that I would buy one of these for my home systems, as well as work systems. But it does come down to the number of writes in the specs, which I haven't touched yet.

Don't you all look at warrantee length when you buy spinning rust too? The extra money is well worth it when/if a drive dies 4 years down the road. You might argue that it will be obsolutete by then, but it probably will still be useful no matter what.

John

BlackBerry makes its devilish Android trickery official in OS update

I've had a Z10 from quite early on, and now I'm also carrying an iPhone 5 and I have to say I prefer the screen size and feel of the Z10 over the iPhone. Somethings are better on the iPhone, but the Z10 gets alot right as well.

The soft keyboard on the Z10 is better, or at least I can type faster and more accurately on there than on the apple. I've got bigger hands, so I find the just a bit bigger Z10 a real advantage. I'd probably go Android otherwise because of the physical size I'd prefer to have.

I also like that I can expand my Z10 with an SDHC card for more storage room, as well as replac the battery with a new one or a spare if need be. And the iPhone's email is *horrible*. Maybe I'm dumb, but not being able to group emails by sender and quickly and easily select multiple emails at once is key, and the oiPhone (running iOS 7) just doesn't do that.

I do like iIOS7 though, it looks much better to my eye and seems to work quite well overall.

John

Prince Opteron unloads on AMD, Intel and the future of memory

Wow, remembering the Encore Multimax...

Wow, this brings me back. My school brought in an Encore Multimax to reaplce a DEC-20 as the general computer for the school. 20 processors, 64mb of RAM. A real screamer! Cost us $250k at the time.

I helped move it in and it worked well with a bunch of DECstation 3100s as the front ends, replacing VT100/220s.

Three years later, we ditched it for $25k... talk about depreciation!

It was a pretty decent machine, watching compiles fly by with 'make -j 8' was cool.

John