* Posts by Mr Atoz

41 publicly visible posts • joined 27 Mar 2008

BlackBerry Motion: The Phone That Won't Die

Mr Atoz
Thumb Up

What about the Keyboard

No one seems to mention the Motion's soft keyboard but that is why I'm going to get one, along with the hub and battery life. Currently have an S7 and typing on it, even with the optional add on keyboards is soooo frustrating I'm amazed I haven't thrown the phone yet. Used to have a Z30 and the soft keyboard was amazing with predictive text popping up over the next letter so you could flip the word up with your thumb. The Motion has this same feature which I have not seen on any other phone.

Another day, another load of benchmarketing, this time from HDS

Mr Atoz
Childcatcher

But EMC does do SPECsfs

"No Pure, no Solidfire, no Violin and obviously no EMC (“obviously” because they don’t play the SPC game)."

EMC is all over the SPECsfs tests with their silly and unrealistic Isilon lab queens, how is SPC so different? Aside from the obvious block vs file.

BlackBerry claims ugly duckling Passport mobe is a swan in the offing

Mr Atoz

Re: thought I'd counter the inevitable outright negativity

@RRoker, yes there are Google apps available. There is Cloud Explorer for Google drive and some others too. I don't use the app so can't tell you if it's any good but it gets four out of five stars from the reviews.

@AC, yes BB10 uses standard active synch and works seemlessly on my Z10

As a user of both BB10 and iOS I can tell you that I much prefer BB10. iOS is very awkward for me, controlls are spread all over the place and the multi tasking is horrible, not to speak of the unfriendly approach to anything non apple.

FIGHT! BlackBerry,T-Mobile US CEOs clash in 'inappropriate' ad spat

Mr Atoz

Agreed. I find the Apple iOS interface very clunky, navigating on an iPad is horrendous compared to bb10. I'm forced to use iOS devices by my employer but I would rather not. Doing the basics like transferring files to and from the device is a major pain and then getting access to those files by the appropriate app is another.

Got a BlackBerry? It may be telling your friends when you watch pr0n

Mr Atoz
Stop

Re: Losing the plot

Yes I agree some of the old profile functionality is missing but I am confident that will be back as the BB10 platform matures. Pretty sure that the older BB units also had the option to share what you are listening to. Otherwise I am quite happy with mine, I use it for work and it is solid despite having to use active sync because my employer has not upgraded the BES yet.

What I am most annoyed about is having to use WhatsApp because some friends have switched to iPhone. WhatsApp is whats crap....seems it wants to decide who my favourites are and won't let me configure it.

BlackBerry results not as bad as they possibly could have been

Mr Atoz
WTF?

Re: Chaotic mess

"They may be doomed, but not I think for years to come."

Not unless QNX fails too, which is pretty unlikely given that it is in millions of vehicles, infrastructure devices (Cisco, Adtran, others) and who knows what else. Heins indicated the direction of Balckberry at his recent launch event, the furure of the company is in the QNX software, not just the phone business.

BlackBerry CEO: Our vibrating devices will satisfy most needs

Mr Atoz
Happy

Re: Really ....

Well it's selling pretty well here in the Toronto area, I have a Z10 as do several of my friends and co-workers. I actually had to go around to several shops before I found one that wasn't sold out of them. Got it at a great price too. It's a pretty nice phone but takes some getting used to as would any full touch screen device.

As to the apps, it seems to have a good selection with a couple notable exceptions, Blackberry Travel and Metrolinx Go Train App. Why no BB Travel yet I just don't understand. WhatsApp was released last week and that's the one most Z10 users where waiting for....but I'm not a fan.

I do agree that the Q10 should have been first but I will assume that Mr. Heins had good reason not to do that.

Ten serious sci-fi films for the sentient fan

Mr Atoz
FAIL

What, no Alien?

How could you leave off that chest popping classic?

BlackBerry Z10: Prices pruned despite eager iPunter interest

Mr Atoz

I've had my Z10 for a week now and I do like it a lot. I didn't pay anything for mine after the store rebate, just locked into a three year contract. I've managed to find most of the apps I needed except for Whatsapp but it will apparently be available for BB10 sometime this month.

Big Blue beats off rivals to push out first LTO-6 tape drive

Mr Atoz

@Steven Jones Re: keeping the beasts fed...

Perhaps its you that is not familiar with the term "shoe shining" which was associated with older tape tech like DLT. Of course LTO drives will stop or slow down when ingest speed is slow and buffers get depleted. LTO was much better engineered to handle stop/start situations specifically so that it does not continuously forward and reverse over the same area of media to try and write a small amount of data the way DLT did.

Mr Atoz
Alert

Re: keeping the beasts fed...

Shoe Shinning is a DLT issue, not LTO. LTO does speed matching by stepping down the streaming speeds to alleviate this problem.

RIM shares bounce on BlackBerry 10 optimism

Mr Atoz

Re: RIM hardware is usually good ...

A few years ago my daughter's BB Curve got run over by a car on a rainy night. She had the wherewithal to gather all the pieces and present them to me along with her request for a new BB.....which she got. Just out of curiosity I put the phone back together a few days afterwards and despite having a cracked screen and external case it actually booted up successfully.

Oh, and by the way, the Playbook already runs BB10 and Balance already works well with personal web mail and Active Synch for business email systems. By the time the new BB phones come out next year, that feature will be nothing new since it is already proven on the Playbook.

I'm waiting until the new year to see if the new BB phones are as solid as the Playbook.....if not, I'll be moving to Android as I'm sure the last few holdouts will as well.

The 'experts' who never see BBM will never understand RIM

Mr Atoz
Alert

Re: Anecdotally...

I'm fifty something and me, my wife, our twenty one year old daughter and most of our friends use bbm. Why? Because it is the only texting app that is always on and logged in whenever the phone is on and also gives you instant delivered and read status. Whatsapp and any others like it that I've tried are just crap!

Some people just want a good communication device with good battery life and could care less about the miriad of apps other phones can run

RIM: We can't flog phones, would you like our nuke plant OS instead?

Mr Atoz
Happy

Re: "the Playbook is actually quite good."

Yes it is! For the price you can't beat it.

RIM delays BlackBerry 10 launch, bins 5000 bods

Mr Atoz
Stop

Re: Excellent

Not saying that restructuring is going to defineatlly save them but how does a company that turns $2.8 billion revenue in a single quarter just fail?

RIM’s Wake Up is a mini-manifesto

Mr Atoz
Facepalm

Come on Reg!

Your pointless bashing of RIM at any opportunity is getting tiresome. STFU already.

From server to end user: What's coming up for NFS?

Mr Atoz
Happy

Have no fear.....

Soon Windows will be running a linux kernel.

RIM's apps revolution swings on Blackberry 10

Mr Atoz
Stop

Tell you what....

If it had an email client I wouldn't use it. If I want mobile email I'll use the web client that's available from pretty much any email provider. It's such a stupid point that Blackberry haters keep going on and on about....STFU already.

RIM slashes BlackBerry PlayBook tablet prices

Mr Atoz
Thumb Up

I Agree....with the first part anyway

I can't speak to the last paragraph of your post but I agree 100% with the first part. The playbook is a great device, especially for the current price. I picked up mine just before Christmas and have not gone a day without spending several hours with it. I have to say the best feature of this device is how you transfer files to it, standard SMB network sharing...duh! No need for iTunes or a special cable.

The one thing I don't get though is why do most people think bridging to your phone is a bad idea? I know the cell carriers wouldn't like it but for consumers it avoids having to get another account or a plan that covers another cell device. Why not use the configuration and service already on your phone and give your tablet access to it? If RIM could offer this same functionality or close to it for non-BB phones, people might just get wise to the idea.

BlackBerry PlayBook in US price plummet

Mr Atoz
Facepalm

My Bad ....

Poor choice of words, perhaps I should have said "desirable" apps :-)

Mr Atoz
FAIL

I don't think you understand!

If you are ok with handing control of your data over to iTunes and iCloud then Apple products are the way for you to go. Anyone who has concerns about what these so called great features are actually doing will opt for Android and other more open platforms.

No argument that Apples makes great products but at what cost to the consumer in terms of financial cost and cost of data ownership. Read your EULA!

Mr Atoz
Thumb Up

Great Device if at the Right Price

I snagged a 32G unit for $299 and then I had to get the wife one too because she liked it so much. Got a 16G for her at $187 CAD. Despite not having an email client (which it sort of does if you have a BB) it is a great device. There are plenty of useful apps including Angry Birds and many productivity tools including file managers. The best feature is that with file sharing turned on it becomes a network share and you simply drag and drop items into the device. NO iTUNES or any such BS required. Battery life is great.

As/per a previous post, RIM's biggest mistake was going in at a high price, they should have started out low as they are now to seed the market. It's near impossible to find one on a store shelf here in Canada ever since they lowered their prices. Online ordering seems to be the only way to get one and for this price many people want them. For around the $200 mark this is a fabulous tablet, despite what the Reg and many of it's readers claim.

9/11: The day we lost our privacy and power

Mr Atoz
Unhappy

@GM, So What Do You Suggest?

Should the moderator remove these comments?

There is only one reasonable explanation for the collapse of building 7 and it is not the one published by NIST! Why don't you point us to the debunking of this so called conspiracy theory.

EMC regains SPEC filer crown

Mr Atoz
Stop

Devil is in the details

The only impressive thing here is that EMC/Isilon can spend the $$$ to put a system like this together. It sure would be nice if the Spec tests categorised these systems by performance value in terms of list price or average system cost.

So...if you do the math they got an average of 346 IOPS per disk/SSD....wow!

Same test, NetApp FAS620 gets 662 IOPS/disk, BlueArc M100 and M100 Cluster both get 500 IOPS/disk, Panasas 406 IOPS/disk and the other monster system by Huawei Symantec gets 363 IOPS/disk. They all get more IOPS out of spinning disk with NO SSD!

Mr Atoz
FAIL

Huh?

Wasn't me....are you truly an "Anonymous Coward"?

Filer maker BlueArc refiles for IPO

Mr Atoz
Alert

Wonder what the other OEMS think?

I highly doubt that there was no reply because the answer is simple. What can NetApp do with the Engenio disk? Not much more than continue the OEM business because OnTap can't really use it other than with a gateway product. Engenio's business is OEM and BlueArc is not their only OEM customer. You might also ask IBM, Oracle, SGI and TeraData how they feel about buying disk from NetApp. It's business as usual, Engenoe sells an OEM product and BlueArc uses it as well as DDN and HDS.

Symantec and Huawei snatch storage benchmark crown

Mr Atoz
Alert

Let's Keep it Real

What is truly impressive is how these folks can turn $ into IOPS. The true measure of the Spec tests is not the maximum IOPS achieved, but rather IOPS achieved with a realistic configuration.

If you do the math, the N8500 achieved 368 IOPS/spindle which is actually pretty good. I doubt that the VNX could come close with a similar configuration and I know there is no way that Isilon could touch it. Isilon is not known for IOPS but rather for streaming in read intensive work loads.

By comparison, the BlueArc Mercury 100 single node achieved 72,921 IOPS with a mere 144 spindles of 15K drives. That equates to 506 IOPS/spindle. This is actually an affordable system!

NetApp becomes Quantum reseller

Mr Atoz
FAIL

@Anonymous Coward - You Are Delusional!

Isilon scooped up half of NetApp's customers? Where the heck do you get that data from? Isilon technology is cool but it too has it's holes and it certainly does not scale as well as they claim. Once you peel back the layers the Isilon story is not that rosy, trust me!

NetApp has several competitors breathing down their neck but they are still the leader and will be for some time.

Facebook moves towards more video-social networking tie-ups

Mr Atoz
FAIL

Great, well......

How about Facebook clean up the video virus issue first!

Researchers bypass Internet Explorer Protected Mode

Mr Atoz
Go

@ Deadly_NZ and @JoeTheAnnoying

If you would have invested a few minutes in searching for your solution on the net you could have saved yourself a lot of time and aggravation. Everything is doable with linux once you know how. Of course there is a learning curve but once you get past that linux is rock solid and very usable as an all purpose OS. Knowing what I know now, I can have a fresh Ubuntu desk top system up, running and configured in well under an hour and most of that time is spent waiting on formating and software loading.

Myself, I've been windows free at home for over five years but unfortunately still have to use windows for work.

For the record, I agree with Joe on most of what he said except his 6 - 8 hours statement and that you have to do everything form the command line.....that is just not true. Ubuntu Synaptic usually does everything, you just point and click.

Canada steps closer to legalising sex work

Mr Atoz
Thumb Down

To the writer of "The lies the media prints"

Gee thanks for the lengthy response but I stopped reading about a third of the way through. How is anyone supposed to take you seriously if you can't spell or form a coherent sentence?

EMC buys Isilon for $2.25bn

Mr Atoz
FAIL

BA Dosn't Scale Beyond Two Heads???

Where do you get your information? BlueArc currently supports up to 8 nodes in a cluster and up to 10 PB resulting in 1,600,000 IOPS, that not enough for you? CNS is for binding file systems together in a single name space. Their file systems currently have a 256 TB limit but does anyone really want a file system bigger than that? Isilon brags about their 1FS scaling to 10PB but in reality how many of those exist today.....ZERO I bet. Think about doing a consistency check or a complete restore on a file system over 256TB let alone 10PB.

Isilon does NOT scale effectively because they cannot mix disparate disk types and capacities in the same cluster and that is why most of their customers have multiple clusters. BlueArc supports multiple disk types within a cluster and also has an HSM option.

But hey, it's all good because Isilon took the bullet and now EMC won't be interested in buying BA when they finally do go public.

Mr Atoz
Dead Vulture

Done Deal Now

It's now official as/per both EMC's and Isilon's web site, $2.25 Billion.

I don't get it though, yet another odd ball product for EMC to throw in with it's vast and muddled product set. I think that Isilon's architecture would have made sense for Dell since Isilon is a clustered server technology. EMC should instead have looked at BlueArc so that they could put their existing storage products behind BlueArc servers. That would also have put a wrench in the works for HDS. Do the Hopkington boys know what they are doing?

RIP Isilon.

EMC in Isilon 'takeover talks'

Mr Atoz
Terminator

Celerra is still a weekling

You are correct that Cellerra might not scale as much, but they are not even close to what Isilon and BlueArc can do. When you're talking that kind of scale, performance is pretty important and I think that's where the Celerra architecture falls apart.

I'm sure that EMC will take the IP they want and discard the rest. It is too bad for the general employees at Isilon, I hope they have a good stock purchase plan. No doubt that it will be good for BlueArc.

.....no significance to the picture....just liked it better than the others.

BlackBerry tablet boots from 'floppy disk OS'

Mr Atoz
WTF?

Floppy Disk?

No kidding.....it's a pretty misleading title.

RIM lights a candle for the BlackBerry Torch

Mr Atoz
Thumb Down

Canadian Spy Agency?

US spy agency maybe but Canadian? The UAE position on banning Blackberry because they use Relay servers based in other countries is primitive and oppressive. It is the UAE that want to monitor the traffic themselves so they can spy on their own people, that is the issue!

Fedora 13 - Ubuntu's smart but less attractive cousin

Mr Atoz
Megaphone

Not That Far Behind

Citizen Kaned, I'll agree with you on pretty much everything you've said except your last point. I don't agree that linux, Ubuntu specifically, is that far behind at all. Ubuntu 9.10 is great and installs so easily, I prefer it over any flavor of windows. As a long time lnux user I've come to appreciate that with every new release there is less hacking I have to do to get the system configured the way I want it. I have found windows to be an absolute nightmare in regard to drivers and unrecognized devices and when I install Ubuntu on the same hardware it has no problems supporting everything as is. Granted that has been my specific experience and will vary for others depending on the specific hardware. If by chance there is a problem, there is plenty of info on the web to help you get it fixed. For the few things you still can't do onUbuntu there are plenty of free hypervisors available so you can run XP or 7 if you absolutely have to.

For the record, I've been windows free for my home systems for over five years!

Isilon flashes up NAS clusters

Mr Atoz
Paris Hilton

FUD?

Nick,

There is a big difference between supporting multiple drive types and using them effectively. How does your software RAID stripe across disparate drive types? How do you handle drive upgrades? That must be a slow painful process.

Of course your file system is designed to be consistent, most file systems are, but the point is that the larger you scale, the more likely it becomes that some sort of trauma will occur that effects the entire file system. I much prefer the multiple file systems approach and binding them into a common name space. That way if bad tings happen they are compartmentalized and recovery is much easier and faster.

Paris cause it looks better than it really is.

Mr Atoz
Unhappy

Missing Details

So can the SSD nodes be mixed with non SSD nodes in a cluster.....I'm guessing no since they use software RAID. They don't do well when mixing drive types.

BTW, clusters up to 10PB in size? Please.....word has it they have severe issues going above 10 nodes in a cluster. They make such a big deal out of one FS but why would you want one FS to be multiple PB in size? With any kind of corruption....guess what? You lose it all and then you have to rebuild or restore. I wonder how long it would take for a consistency check to run on 10PB?

Canadians go out clubbing

Mr Atoz
Happy

But what about the poor lobsters? (they're not cute)

This ridiculous article makes it sound like all Canadians take part in the seal hunt or at least support it, which obviously is not the case. As a matter of fact, many Canadians are opposed to the hunt. Farley Mowat, the author, not the ship, is one of them. So while you're at it, why don't you comment on the lobster, cod or salmon trade? These industries I'm sure are much more detrimental to the maritime environment than the seal hunt. But....oh ya....we love our lobster and fresh fish don't we? Oh but the little seals are so cute and cuddly! Me thinks Mr. Haines needs a good whack up side the head with a seal club!