Posts by Fenton

Object to #YearOfCode? You're a misogynist and a snob, says the BBC

At least give the kids some idea what "coding" is

At least they won't then come out with the crap that coding can be taught in an hour.

Modern coding is hard, especially for old gits like me, who grew up on BBC basic, Pascal and Fortran. I've just had to re-learn (just some visual basic and SQLserver), half the problem is finding out what is possible and already done for you, compared to having to do everything yourself like in the old days.

So by all means show kids some programming, they might get an appreciation of the work that goes into their favourite App/Game.

Also why not show kids something about electronics as well, alas another skill that is dying.

Show them what is out there, let them decide what they want to learn

For Windows guest - KVM or XEN and which distro for host?

Cloud?

How about build yourself a small gaming rig. Mid range CPU and a fast graphics card.

Get yourself an account with your Cloud vendor of choice with a nice Linux build on there.

Hands up if you have one good reason to port enterprise apps to ARM

Re: High performance ARM

@Gordan

The apps arn't the problem, (ok they have not released an arm port yet), as they are OS/DB independent

just we are constrained on the DBs as the Vendor only supports "Enterprise class" DBs.

Oracle is such a pain in that you have to migrate to a new OS, even on the same CPU architecture. I'd rather just replace the exe's and just read the database files.

High performance ARM

Is it not time we had a high performance ARM chip. In my scenario above of migrating from x86 for peak high performance load to off peak low perf requirements, if we had a 2 different ARM architectures, a nice lower power one and a 3.x GHz monster we could use Vmotion to move loads around.

Or just stick to x86 with xeons and Atoms.

Alas my apps only run on DB/oracle/SQLserver/Sybase

Database file compatibility

Now what would be interesting is a database with two sets of executables, one on ARM the other on x86 but can read the same datafiles.

During the day I might want to shunt my DBs off to a lower power farm running ARM.

So shutdown x86 VMs, start ARM VMs and attached to the same set of datafiles.

I don't believe that is supported by either Oracle or IBM.

In fact the only DB I know of that is certified to run on different CPU architectures using the same datafiles is SQLserver, on x86 or Itainium but who runs windows on Itanium these days?

Beauty firm Avon sticks spike heel into $125m SAP-based sales project

Plot thickens.

The front-end provider was Websphere. IBM have declined to comment.

Project Management and requirements

I've read about this particular project before. To me it smacks of lack of decent project management and proper requirements.

An issue you get with all software stacks. Would probably have had the same outcome with Siebel or any other ERP/CRM type system.

$125m for a CRM system even for SAP system is overkill.

The project was most likely run by the Finance team who's only thought was.

"How can I track what money I have coming in"

Nobody thought about who was going to actually use the system, i.e. untrained door to door sales people.

When did they bring in the actual users for UAT testing? I bet it was at the last minute.

I know SAP has it faults (I've been working with SAP for 20 years), but for years a user should never even have to touch a SAPgui.

Hey Linux newbie: If you've never had a taste, try perfect Petra ... mmm, smells like Mint 16

There is still something wrong with the look of Linux desktop

I can't quite put my finger on it.

Fonts never look quite right compared to Windows/OSX fonts.

The whole thing lacks a certain sheen and just looks a little home made.

Ballmer: 'We made more money than almost anybody on the PLANET'

Apple

Also Apple didn't do what could have been a deadly blow to MS.

They should have sold OSX as a shrink wrapped OS for OEMs to install.

Obviously with some sort of approval setup. i.e. no cheap and nasty boxes but not on systems

that could come close to iMacs

I know the arguments that it is designed for a machine with a known set of components, etc

but in truth OSX is really the only true consumer OS that is competitive with Windows.

Inside Steve Ballmer’s fondleslab rear-guard action

Compute Unit

Well this is what I'd like to see.

A tablet/phone, what-ever being just a compute unit with a touch screen.

In normal un-docked mode it works in a Touch UI mode, i.e. review docs, make minor edits, but mostly content consumption.

However when I dock it. I'd like it to revert to a productivity UI, the docking station will deal with multiple monitors, etc. In Docked mode the screen on the tablet will also work as a pen based input device.

Any true heavy lifting will be performed on the cloud, be it an internal cloud or external.

But I can see a point where mobile CPUs start to approach the speed Desktop/server CPUs we have today so I won't have to offload the processing power.

Now MS have almost thought this through, but alas have forgotten the Desktop mode. It should be up to app developers to develop apps to have a dual personality, touch and Desktop. Please give us the best of both worlds!

RBS MELTDOWN LATEST: 'We'll be the bank we should be ... next YEAR maybe'

What if

The trouble is, if everybody decided to switch, would this not effectively be a run on the bank?

Those people who are too slow will have to be bailed out (again) by the government.

We'd then have to write off our "investment" in the bank.

A shit situation really

Windows 7 outstrips Windows 8.x with small November growth

Aero

Have MS really tied the kernel and the UI so closely together that you can't have an

Aero or Metro option.

The desktop does look flat in desktop mode, why can't I have the Aero bling in there?

And what is it with UI devs these days where everything is going flat and boring, IOS7 went the same way horrid bright kiddie colours.

The industry seems to be ignoring the 30+ Male with money to spend and is going after WAGs and kids

China: 'JADE RABBIT' will be FOUND ON MOON

Sounds Like...

Something you can buy in the Adult toy department at Selfridges.

Surface 2 and iPad Air: Prepare to meet YOUR DOOM under a 'Landfill Android' AVALANCHE

ipad2 upgrades

Hi can see alot of people upgrading from ipad 2 after installing IOS7.

Mine has become very laggy after the update alas I don't have £500+ to shell out

for a new slap, no matter which brand.

Apple slams brakes on orders of (not so cheap) plasticky iPhone 5C

Want an apple but not the 5c or the 5s

Upgrade time from my 4s. I've invested in various apps so don't want to change OS.

I have two main requirements however.

4G connectivity and a larger screen. The screen on the 5 is just not big enough (but the Galaxy 4 is just too big).

I do like the look of the 5S, but don't want to pay for all the new stuff that I don't need.

I've thought about getting a SIM only deal and a second hand/referb 5 and selling the 4S, but contracts on a new 5c come out at the same price.

I get the feeling they have deliberately gone for kiddie/girlie colours on the 5C to ensure people not into those colours go for the 5S.

21st Century Elite remake to support Oculus Rift virtual reality rig

Never achieve Elite

Was it even possible to reach Elite status on the Electron, given that it did not have missions?

Was was probably the richest pirate in the galaxy but never got to "Elite"

How to design a storage array: NOT LIKE THAT, buddy

Re: My biggest beef with SAN/NAS storage

But why could the SAN not be setup up front before us App/OS guys come along.

Then it should be a matter of saying.

I want X amount of storage with this IOPS requirement for this filesystem and it should be replicated to the other DC.

The SAN guys should be able to do all of their forecasting in the background.

If they hit a certain threshold, they should order new disk/Cabinets.

The array should sort out any hotspots and tuning. In this day and age, it is still takes far to long to get anything done when storage is involved.

I can deploy over 300 VMs in a weekend, roll out front-end patches to 1000s of users overnight, automatically patch 100s of SAP instances in a weekend, but it still takes days just to make a change to a filesystem due to a requirement change.

My biggest beef with SAN/NAS storage

It is still far to granular and requires far too much manual configuration.

I would love to be able create a filesystem that automatically queries the SAN for available space and just allocates it.

But no I have to go the storage team who will manually assign Luns. Any change that needs to be made then requires either more or new luns to be assigned and if SRDF is involved, a whole heap of extra work.

All roads lead to Darwin ahead of solar challenge flag-fall

Air-con

If this is a cruiser class they also should have a maximum cabin temperature.

I'd hate to race across the outback with a cabin temp of 50C+.

So they need to have an air-con unit built in as well.

Full Steam Ahead: Valve unwraps plans for gaming hardware

Upgrade cycle

With the PS4 and the XBOX one and the new Valve stuff all being x86 based are we likely to see a more rapid upgrade cycle, i.e. no real custom chippery onboard, so when AMD/Intel release newer CPUs we could potentially see newer consoles hitting the shops with just a CPU/Memory upgrade.

iOS 7 SPANKS Samsung's Android in user-experience rating

Missing in action

Having spent the weekend playing around with an iphone, a samsung galaxy and a winphone trying to get a centralizes streaming network going, I've come to the conclusion that MS has really missed the boat in terms of creating a portable media device for the home.

The one thing I can do out of the box with apple devices is set up and itunes server and stream without any hassle what so ever.

I thought I could set up a MS media centre server for the winphone. Nope.

In the end I settled on PLEX as it was the only software that would service all devices, but I did have to jail break my apple TV.

The one device that really is crap for streaming from a home server of any kind is the XBOX360. Streaming from PLEX and the picture quality is truly crap, stream from Media centre the picture quality is ok, but it is sooooooooo slow navigate around.

Oracle's Ellison talks up 'ungodly speeds' of in-memory database. SAP: *Cough* Hana

Adabas/MaxDB/SAPdb

Well SAP has for quite some time (around 2000), had an in memory database that they used for their supply chain management solution (SCM), they basically put what was Adabas into memory.

Now if you can speed up certain queries 1000 times, it does not mean an existing business process was broken, but it does give you an opportunity to change your business process to take advantage of the speed up.

example. Your MRP process to replenish your store, probably ran over night and you sent out a truck the next day to replenish the store. Which meant that certain products might flow off the shelf in the morning with nothing left until the next day.

1000x speed up, means you can replenish certain goods before they even run out.

CSC boss post-NHS IT flop, Ford CEO 'pitched' as the next Steve Ballmer

Mike is post NHS screw up

And does have good form in turning IBM arounds when they were in the shit

Acorn’s would-be ZX Spectrum killer, the Electron, is 30

Two electrons

I ended up with two electrons both with plus 1 expansion packs, one with the plus 3 (3.5"" floppy drive).

I learned pascal and a pit of lisp via the cartridge slots.

Best thing was you could slave the two together via the RS423 port, use one machine for graphics (i.e. use the full 20k for modes 01,2,3 but still retain the memory on the other machine for your programs.

OK not good for real time graphics, but I cut my teeth on ray tracing with some quite complex models in memory. Took about a week to render.

Also one of the best keyboards I've ever used.

Don't let the SAN go down on me: Is the storage array on its way OUT?

The trouble with SANs.

We're using SANs (EMC) extensively.

Whilst on Paper they should be easy to use, in practice any configuration seems to take a long time.

Allocating Luns to volume groups, then allocating the same Luns to SRDF, then configuring in the Luns on the secondary site.

Then configurations of SNAPs and Clones. Everything has to happen at Lun/VGlevel level.

As somebody who uses the storage as a Service this causes considerable pain and time, every time we need to implement a change.

I would love to be able to grab a lump of virtual (and thin provisioned) storage allocate to my filesystems and then at a file system level be able to say what I want snapped/cloned/replicated.

SAP to make do with one CEO after two-headed hub halved

Password setting

Tis a setting in the system that allows you to adjust password length (unless you are on an older unsupported SAP system). Probably never changed as it was "to much hassle" to get users to change their passwords when the system was upgraded

Laser-wielding boffins develop ETERNAL MEMORY from quartz

Is glass not a liquid?

All-be-it one that is almost solid, over time it does very slowly deform (see windows in very very old buildings)

Why I'm sick of the new 'digital divide' between SMEs and the big boys

Don't shoot the messenger

The biggest problem is nobody wants to spend the money up front during the design phase and get all of the "relvant" subject matter experts in to do the design.

Just because I'm an Application specific technical architect with a bit of HW knowledge it does not mean I can architect and entire landscape, from storage, servers, networks to resliant DR fabric.

I can scream all I like "I need a storage Architect so work on the Array architecture", all you get is.

Sorry no budget. So out comes the "white paper" and if you can find it the latest manual.

Can I try things out whilst I'm designing.

"No you're an Architect, you're not allowed to actually touch anything, only the engineers"

Alas the Engineers are all stuck in the far east and have never seen the latest and greatest piece of kit that was ordered. They also want step by step instructions on how to configure the beast, just giving them a rule on what needs to be configured is not enough. If they had their way they'd have the architect writing every single command step by step so if it goes wrong it's not their fault.

Microsoft: Still using Office installed on a PC? Gosh, you squares

Interface with ERP system

Unfortunately at some point you may have to upgrade a blackens system (ERP) that uses and office product as a viewer, E.g exel as a front end to a BI system. You may suddenly find that your old office 2003 install is no longer compatible.

I'm finding this more and more the case these days.

To the point that ERP upgrade projects are put on hold waiting for desktop upgrades to complete.

Oracle and Dell forge worldwide server alliance

Microsoft

I bet Microsoft which they hadn't stumpped up the cash to help fund the Dell buy back.

HP preps Project Kraken for monster HANA in-memory jobs

Big SAP Databases

In this context he may well be talking about big SAP databases.

There aren't that may SAP DBs over 12TB.

The beauty of having your DB in memory is fast reporting without having to set up a dedicated data warehouse reducing server count and storage requirements.

Oracle and SAP are Big Software, but for how long?

SAP/oracle Don't blame the software

Blame the implementation partner/project management team

For every failed project there are 100s where putting in SAP/Oracle has been a success and has resulted in inefficiencies.

If they were truly crap enterprises would not by them.

Far too often certain individuals (mainly finance and bean counters), control the implementations with only their requirements being important without looking at the true business needs.

Microsoft: All RIGHT, you can have your Start button back

Depends on the user

However Linux in my experience had never been a hit with anybody but the geek.

I support a number of user types and have tried various OS's on all,

1. The wife. Form over function,

Likes win7. Dislikes win 8. Hates XP hated Linux even more. Loves her Mac.

2. 9 year old son. (Potential geek in the making).

Within hours was teaching me how to use win8. Likes win 7. XP is just boring. Linux (why does it look shit)

3. 14 year old step daughter. Brain washed by nerd dad that Linux was the way to go, but could not exchange files with friends. XP looked shit, win 7 great. Win 8 what's the point.

Mac. Looks good but can't exchange files with friends.

4. End users at work. Good generally care, but hate win 8 and must have office. Open office on Linux trial did not go we'll.

5. Me. Office a must for work. So win 7. Fire up and rdp session for redhat and suse for system admin.

Home. Win 7 for photoshop. And XP for a very propriety 8 in: 8 out recording interface. Which has never seen a Linux driver.

Conclusion. Give win 8, which I like from a stability and performance point of view a win 7 front end (by all means if a touch screen is available start with metro)

Gnome cofounder: Desktop Linux is a CHERNOBYL of FAIL

Consitency

It all comes down to needs.

I for one am glad that Linux has not won out on the desktop.

I move from customer to customer. The one thing that is consistent is the desktop operating system I have to use. Either XP or Windows 7. If I had to deal with a different Linux distro every time, I'd waste alot of time getting to grips with the environment.

Thankfully SuSE or Redhat have become the defacto Linux at the server end.

I tried Linux at home using my family as my test subject. They didn't like the look and feel and my son couldn't play the games he likes to play. My daughter uses office at school and regularly has to do her homework in office. He hated Libre/openoffice. Also reliability was an issue, which was not the case with XP on the same machine.

Now we also have a Mac. Yes we have the same problem with the games, but we have MS office on the Mac so daughter is happy. My wife likes the Mac (because it's shiny) and intuative and is more stable than either windows or the Linux distribution.

I know people will say. You should have used, gnome or KDE or ........ Or you should have spent longer getting linux to work, tweaking the desktop. That is exactly what I don't want to do with a home machine.

I want a consistent look and feel whereever I go. I deal with the differences between Unixes/Linux on the server end everyday.

Ericsson and SAP Megazord has no need for your PUNY human phonecalls

And why not?

What do you think is behind the iTunes Store?

SAP gets a lot of bad press due to shit implementations that have nothing to do with the software just shit consultants and SIs.

You never hear about the implementations that work. And there are many

Soak up CO₂ with sponges, says CSIRO

Send it somewhere sunny

Why not send the resulting fluids somewhere where the sun always shines, such as Austrailia (lots of useless desert there) or the Sahara.

A few thounds square miles of Solar panels and you could probably generate enough energy to seperate the C from the O2.

Actually why not ship loads of water out there and generate hydrogen for fuel?

Intel's new TV box to point creepy spy camera at YOUR FACE

Re: Camera watching me, watching them...

I can just see it. Hot summers day so you sit down in just your shorts. It recognises a certain amount of flesh, then replys. Hello Sir I know what you want to watch..........

SAP claims speeds record with HANA Business Suite revolution

To bust a few myths

Hana is not built on ABAP technology.

Hana is fully scalable (IBM have a 100 node test rig with 1TB of memory per node)

Given that it uses relativley inexpensive x86 nodes, prices for hardware will come down

year apon year, unlike Oracle hash job of exadata that still relies on aggregation and extraction

of data and uses propriorty hardware.

Australian State launches IBM probe

SAP Payroll

There is no real technical excuse for screwing this one up. I know some people hate SAP, but payroll is SAP bread and butter and has been a stable product for 15 years and SAP payroll consultants are two a dozen.

This sounds like a complete cock up at the requirements gathering stage and potentially a data migration cock up, project management and scope management the likely overall cause.

Windows 8 fails to revive world CPU biz

No problems with win 8

Well I installed win8 on an old Athlon64 x2 running at 2ghz. With 4gb ram. It runs perfectly. Think of thee new UI as a big start button and no problems with usability. The kids like the MS store.

If anything it has fewer problems in terms of stability than Win7.

Ok I do hate IE10 lots of compatibility problems with lots of sites, but a quick chrome install fixed the issue.

Not need to buy a new PC at all though. Run faster than XP or Win7.

Not an MS fanboy also run an iMac and a Solaris workstation at home.

'Perfect' INVISIBLE SHED stuns boffinry world

SEP field

No no no. Douglas Adams had it right.

Just generate an SEP field.

It's Somebody Elses Problem

Apple to ditch Intel – report

AMD buy?

How about this for an idea.

AMD and ARM get a 64bit ARM processor out the door with the new seamicro architecture.

i.e. x86 and ARM on the same board.

AMD is on its death bed, and get snapped up by apple (gets them into the enterprise market at the same time)

New iMac comes out with x86 APU which is nice and slim with decent graphics performance, and an ARM co-processor they can then slowly migrate apps over to ARM. All of a sudden 5 years down the line x86 get dropped but they now have an nice ARM+Radeon 64bit APU.

AMD smacked by channel slump in Q2

OEMs are the problem

In that the Llano chips are seen purely as a way of reducing cost (i.e. cheaper motherboards without dedicated graphics) and thus they go into low end laptops without much thought to design.

Take the new Piledriver based Trinity chips. Which do outperform the intel 4000 Graphics chips, now add a dedicated AMD GPU and you can crossfire the APU with the GPU which will outperform most mobile GPUs.

BMW, Toyota to build fuel cells for sports cars

Diesel range extender

Now the best possible hybrid would either be a diesel+Battery hybrid (diesels tend to give the best economy at cruise speeds to charge the battery). However you do need a heavier engine and a turbo for when the diesel needs to drive the wheels directly and provide the power required.

However even better would be a full electric car with the diesel generator just charging the batterys rather than driving the drive train directly.

Viviane Reding says imitate US and form FEDERAL EUROPE

A managed economy aka USSR!

The biggest difference between a federal Europe and the US is that the US was a reletivley new Country able to come together under one flag with roughly similar values and the same language.

Now a federal Euroupe would be much closer to what the former USSR was, older countries with a long history, different values, different languages. The USSR was controlled by fear from Russia, who didn't have a clue how to manage their own economies, with some countries being forced down a single economic route with no diversity, so when it split up most countries where in the shit.

It would become a two tier federation with the rich north, exporting the cheap low value jobs to the southern countries (A bit like Germany post reunification).

The Italians/Greeks/Spaniards will never have the same work ethic/values as the Germans, so they will never be able to compete internally.

Intel slaps Xeon Phi brand on MIC coprocessors

ERP/Webserver

About the only place where I can see this could be of benefit over a GPU style co-processor is in ERP/Web type loads, where you have highly threaded/highly parallel small integer type work loads.

i.e. Large parallel payroll jobs, or very dense web servers, where each thread does very little workload wise but you have alot of users.

But for HPC not a chance.

AMD's Hondo APUs ready for Windows 8 Q4 launch - report

All in the memory!

For general office use an old Athlon x2 64 is totally adequate for your day to day needs.

It's memory which is the bottleneck on most office machines. Most companies still roll out laptops and desktops with 1GB of memory 2GB if you are lucky this is what really slows down productivity.

Add in a modern GFX (even a cheap one for £30) and you get good performance with modern browsers (thinking IE9).

Now build the GFX into the processor which AMD are doing, even with a lowly dual core or quad core and plenty of memory (64bit OS helps) and an office machine should last for years.

Workstations are a different matter, but they really only make up a very small proportion for standard business use.

Wind farms create local warming

Thermodynamics

mmmmm sounds wrong to me.

Kinetic energy is converted to electrical energy hence energy is taken out of the wind.

This has the concequence that

a) The pressure behind the blade will be lower

b) The temperature behind the blade will be lower.

Think of a turbine in a Gas turbine engine. Hot fast air flows in and turns the turbine (windmill blade) the air exits at a lower pressure and lower temperature.

The mixing of air is going to be insignificant except maybe for the local environment.

Tablets are the future of the PC, says researcher

Tablet to become the desk top

How about the tablet will become (a few more performance iterations will be required) the desktop.

All you need is a docking station with a decent monitor/mouse/keyboard.

You plug in your tablet (or compute unit) the OS then switches to desktop mode (aka Windows 8) and you use it in the traditional way.

Undock it and it switches to tablet mode. Most of the recently used info will be cached locally on the tablet with a sync to "the cloud" via wi-gi/3G.

Obviously the one thing that will be required will be a docking station standard.

Punters want BBC iPlayer in TVs, not 3D

Just a screen is all I need

AV amp has all the HDMI inputs and proper surround sound outputs I require.

Just need a set top box with all those bits (maybe with integrated bluRay).

Current bugger for me is. Apple TV and sky box don't have iplayer, but blueray player does.

Bluray player does have media capabilities to stream from a PC but interface is crap.

Not a problem for me but family gets confused which source they should use.