Posts by Fenton

Swindon council promises townsfolk free Wi-Fi XTC

A god send!

Ahh. At least I can surf on the go in Swindon. There is F all else you can do there

Windows 7, Bing and mobile will determine Ballmer's future

Innovation

The main thing that is lacking at MS. Since Bill left even more so.

They are very much becoming a Me-too organization.

Bing will never become a verb i.e. to google,

their cloud initiative will take years to catch up with Amazon/google

They have no worthy web2.0 products.

Their Web based office products are noway mature compared to googles

Messenger/communicator is nowhere near to being a great collaboration tool, compared to google wave.

In the short to medium term they still have their monopoly position on the desktop to fall back on, but they are being attacked from all sides.

Desktop OS's are slowly becoming redundent for the majority of people who will only need a browser (even for office apps)

Linux/Solaris are far better suited to server architectures (x86-64bit).

SQLserver still does not scale across servers (compared to oracle & DB2)

They don't have any real ERP products to speak of (dynamics is nowhere near SAP/Oracle apps)

If they want to servive in the long term they need to come up with a killer application

IBM throws DB2 Power cluster at Ellison's Exadata

SaaS, SOA

In these days of SaaS and SOA are these big monolithic databases of this kind of scale really of that much relevance these days. 5-10 years ago this would have been great and usefull technology as individual servers did not have the compute power we have today.

As core counts go up (e.g. upto 48 cores on next years AMD 4 socket plattform), the need for such technology reduces yet again.

Ballmer mixed on Windows 7's success

OSX

I've been running the Win7 final beta for a while (64bit).

Personally I think MS should have released it as 64bit only.

However it really is time Apple release OSX as a standalone package and not tied to their own overpriced hardware. It might actually make MS and the linux community truely innovate

Tories would take an axe to Labour IT policy

Public sector and IT

Having done some contracts for the public sector and private. There is a huge difference.

In the private sector as a consultant I and my private sector co-workers are empowered to make decisisions (that is what we are paid for).

In the public sector, nobody is allowed to make any decisions of any kind. They are then made by commity by people who do not have a clue.

Government IT does need a complete overall.

IBM readies Exadata killer

It's all about balance

In my experience with both IBM,SUN and HP. It's all about balance.

On Sun I get great parallel throughput but to be honest crap single threaded performance, on IBM I get great single threaded performance and often bad parallel performance especially if I have a number of heavy single threaded jobs running.

HP often falls in between, with the best and worst of both worlds.

Now solaris on x86, has in most cases given me the best bang per buck, good single threaded performance and pretty good parallel performance, specially with 6core (AMD) or multi thread (intel).

In specialist cases (i.e. OLAP) I generally go for and IBM solution or for web type transactional loads I've gone for Sun

TPC slaps Oracle on benchmark claims

Still expensive though

Given that on a per socket basis, x86 will still outperform it with fewer cores

Does the Linux desktop need to be popular?

Too late...

Linux on the desktop is too late. If google have their way (and MS is starting to follow suit) then most apps will be provided over the web run in some sort of plug in (after all it's apps that people want).

Companies are increasingly installing client server Apps, with a web front end.

Defacto standard multimedia apps that have to run locally (photoshop, pro-tools, etc) only run on Windows/Mac, the last thing they want is to port to linux and have thousands of extra calls from users/companies where there are problem running on their particular distro.

There is one killer app that could help break MS if Linux was to be used as the thin client OS, is to make Office X compatible. i.e. some sort of middlewhere where on a Windows server you could set DISPLAY= and the office app appears on your desktop but runs on the server but with full OLE functionality intact.

Also what the linux community is lacking (cos it costs money) is research into ergonomics, MS and Apple spend vast amounts of cash on non programers looking directly at usability. The Linux community uses geeks.

I spend 80% of my time running various flavours of Unix. But when I get home I just want to plug my guitar into my digidesign interface fireup protools and go. I bought these in a shop and they worked first time in Windows. For linux I would have had to do loads of research on what interfaces have drivers in Linux, have to put up with the fact that these interfaces do not have the high sample and bit rates and software that is not a studio standard.

FSF launches Windows 7 anti-upgrade letter campaign

Training

All of my end users know windows. But the OS is only a 10th of the issue. It's all in the apps, we have spent millions over the years training our users how to use word/Excell/Powerpoint

Then you have the enterprise applications, written in Access, SAP, Oracle apps, Siebel, etc

all which have a windows front end. (these are the really high cost times).

If they have to use a unix/linux frontend or app, thats what X-windows is for.

I can get a windows support engineer for £30K a year the equivalent linux trained engineer would probably cost me £40K a year. I have 20 of them, so the costs already mount up.

The sever side is a different matter, yes we linux everywhere and HP-UX/AIX/Solaris.

Even at home Linux just does not do it for me. I run photoshop/Pro-tools/Cubase there are no Linux equivalents that come close in terms of functionality and professional support/communities that these have.

IBM touts Power Systems prowess on SAP tests

Thread vs Process

The problem with SAP and other ERP platforms is that in the main they are multi process and not multithreaded. Hence they cannot take much advantage of extra threads available but can take advantage of multiple cores.

Where threading does have an advantage is at the DB level, i.e. oracle 10 is multithreaded. In the past where processors where not multithreaded (but the database was) a process with two threads would take up two cores (if running full tilt) this would not have been available to the application. Now with Niagara/Nahalem it would use two threads on a single core thus leaving the other cores to the application.

However with the Niagara systems (and I know from personal experience, having be forced to migrate from 3Ghz windows machines to Niagara Solaris machnies) single threaded performance is terrible, the users where not happy. Most ERP systems usually run heavy batch load over night, e.g. extracts into BI systems, large interfaces, MRP runs, etc. If these have not been designed to work in parallel performance on slow cores suffers dramatically.

Unfortunatly SAP does not have a Java benchmark suite (e.g. for SAP portal, XI). Here Niagara does give you a massive benefit as Java is inherintly multithreaded and for web based applications single threaded performance is not so much of an issue as network and browser render speeds form the greater portion of the average response time.

SAP sizing

As somebody who regularly sizes systems for SAP and does performance tuning I can say that with SAP you need to balance number of CPU cores and CPU speed.

Lots of slow cores with multiple threads does not help that much as SAP is essencially single threaded (lots of individual processes but not multi-threaded).

CPU speed helps with single threaded performance. But not with throughput or number of users.

Be best balanced systems in my experience are highish core count with fast cores, i.e. x86-64 CPUs

People just not that into Blu-ray

TV and Player not the only costs

To me it's the whole HDMI crap that really upped the cost.

I have a nice home cinema setup complete with AV switching amp. I was an early plasma adopter and everything was connected via component (analog). I had to buy a new TV anyway as the old one suddenly went pop.

I already had Sky HD which worked well over component but got the blue-ray player thrown in free. But it did not have component outputs that work with upscaling or blue-ray disks.

So I had to buy a new av-amp. There are however some pros

1) Alot less cable clutter (wife approves)

2) HD-Audio really is a big step up in quality compared to compressed Dolby or DTS

3) Upscaling over HDMI on standard DVDs is a great improvement

4) SkyHD looks alot better over HDMI

5) Picture quality on 1080p is fantastic (just watch BBCs Planet Earth

Cons

1) Price of Blue-ray disks (although is getting better thanks Amazon)

2) Time to spin up. Grrrr

3) DRM big Grrrr

I am not however buying full price disks on current movies. What will however help Blu-ray sales is the release of titles like Star Wars, Lord of the rings, Aliens.

Yet to see how blue ray perfoms as a data medium. In my industry the humple DVD is just not big enough (10 DVDs required for a software install, like shuffling old 3.5" floppies)

Bandwidth in the UK is just not high enough for streaming of HD format and won't be for quite a while unless you are in a fibre cable area. When I watch a film it is a spur of the moment decision. I don't want to wait for a few hours whilst I down load a film that doesn't even have a 5.1 soundtrack.

Oracle tried to sell Sun hardware biz

Sparc an Itanium replacement?

It would not surprise me if eventually HP decide to buy the sparc business from oracle to replace Itanium. Investment in Itanium has been lacking for years (4 core still delayed, frequencies are still not above 1.6Ghz). Solaris would be licenced from oracle, HP-UX will be killed. If HP can't get hold of Sparc they will have to port HP-UX to x86-64 and try and compete.

But this will only delay the inevitable. Propriety hardware (e.g. i/p/z series, Sun Sparc, HP/intel Itanium) do not have a bright future. It will be x86-64 with either Windows/Linux/Solaris.

Big corporates generally only buy oracle/DB2/SQLserver for mission critical applications.

And they want to run it on an enterprise class operating system. Certainly in the UK most do not yet consider Linux to be enterprise class.

Sun Sparc guru splits for Redmond

Why would MS want a chip engineer

mmmmm Good question?

If IBM now does not want SUN which is the next company that could afford SUN.

MS maybe. Get the best talent on board. Buy the company and let go of the dross.

MS could wipe out java/mysql in one fell swoop that way. Get old of its own CPU architecture leading to more pressure on Intel/AMD.

Concrete-jet 'printers' to build houses, Moonbases in hours

Green Concrete

I though I saw an article a few years back about green concrete that actually absorbs CO2 and in the process makes it stronger.

Yes it takes more CO2 to make but over the lifetime of the building it will actually absorb about 2x the XC02 used to make it.

Hackintosh maker bites back at Apple

Are Apple missing an opportunity

Given Apples marketing skills, surely they'd make a fortune by selling OS-X standalone to run on any PC.

It would put the wind up MS for sure.

Their own hardware would still sell by the bucket load (nobody else I know of puts so much into the case design).

Shrinking Sun under the gun

Reliability

is actually one of its biggest problems.

The number of times I turn up at a customer site to do an SAP implementation and they roll out an old E15K with 72procs. Beggers belief. Yes it will run the required number of users, but the end user experience will be a system running dog slow.

I've had customers who have migrated from 3.0ghz Xeons based blades to old Sun kit and yes the customers were not happy.

Also the latest Niagra chips are great for multithreaded apps were single thread performance is not an issue (serving web pages, java,etc) but your standard ERP system is mainly dependent on number of CPUs (multi-process) and CPU speed.

Mayor Boris to cover Porsche costs in CO₂ tax brouhaha

Even small cars would have fallen into the £25 bracket

People who say poor people don't drive cars in the high tax bracket are completly wrong.

Do you know what cars fall into that bracket. A 2001 beatle 2L Auto (they didn't make the newer 1.4s then). Do you look at those and say gas guzzler. No its a hippy car.

Remember that was 7 years ago. So a person may have bought a car then without even thinking about the environment/tax costs, etc. It was just not on the agenda.

Alot can happen to a person in 7 years, they may have over stretched themselves in buying the car in the first place and may need the car for work, £25 quid a day is a massive hike in costs on top of the general increase in cost of living. Changing the car would cost a bomb too.

IF Ken had said, £25 on all newly registered cars, then yes it would have been fairer at least people then have the choice in what car they buy.

Research: Wind power pricier, emits more CO₂ than thought

Cow farts are carbon neutral

Cows eat grass which extracts CO2 and then fart some of it out (the rest turns into yummy meat and milk).

I wonder what the impact on large scale energy generation would be if we all had small micro generation plants at home (wind turnbines/PV cells, methane capture from compost) that was used to pump water into community based water tower than could be used during peak times to generate power

What about heat pumps in the local sewer. Just think 8m people in london pissing a few litres a day at 37C. That must be usable.

Blighty joins killer robot club with Afghan strike

Future scenario

In an unprecended diplomatic negotiation between the two waring nations, the decision has been made to depense with the physical hardware and they have decided to join the two command computers together.

Thus ending the true warfare and it's associated finanction and human cost

Sun gives servers an Opteron quad job

If you need storage on a server

One generally uses a SAN or a NAS. I know very few companies these days who store data on local drives. Local drives are just used for the OS and Swap

Red Green Ken v Porsche in battle of the polls

This is a tax pure and simple

If this had been a charge on newly registered cars, I'd be happy but the fact that it is back dated to cars registered after 2001 is a real kick in the teeth for a lot of people.

I don't particulary care about the Porsches and 4x4, but there are alot of average cars that will be hit.

Example, My wifes 2l Beetle automatic.

So we either stump up the money (upto 6K a year) or pay lots of dosh trading the car in.

This policy will totally deflate second hand car prices, will increase the amount of polution in making new cars. At the same time it will not reduce congestion, in fact I think it may well increase congestion as anybody who has bought and expensive car will likly keep hold of it and buy an additional car leading to more parking problems in London.

Ken needs to make his mind up what kind of charge this is.

Its obviously not a congestion charge, otherwise clean cars would not be excempt from the charge.

Its not a pollution charge as CO2 is not a pollutant, if it were pollution he'd target diesels (his beloved taxis)

Its a tax on the rich, but called a congestion charge as he doesn't have any tax raising powers, why else would he extend the zone to the rich west rather than the poor east.

Porsche to challenge London CO₂ penalty in court

Kick em while they are already down

This isn't really going to hit those with the top end of the car market. Yes they probably could afford £25 a day. Then again they may just go out any buy another car that doesn't cost, thus adding to congestion even further as the Gas guzzler will be parked up in London.

The people this is going to hit are those who got a fairly sensible car over the last few years, i'm talking a Saab 93 2l, an Astra 2l, an Audi A4 V6, even a VW Sharan 2l (all these cars are in Group G)

Why do people buy these cars? To travel in relative comfort over long distances for work and play.

They are already being hit by increases fuel costs, Car tax costs, etc, etc.

Now they are being hit by this TAX on relative success.

So now they have to waste even more money in trying to change car.

Here's another statistic. If you took your G-Wiz car and put an equivalent powered Petrol engine in it, rather than battery the CO2 emmisions would be even less than the stated 65g/KM (even that figure is bogus as it is calculated completly differently to a normal car). Why because your local power station is less efficient than a car engine. Plus the G-Wiz weighs so much because of all the batteries