Posts by TheDude

Brits get to fondle Google Nexus 7 slab in just a fortnight

My 16GB tablet is already full, and it's all apps- no music or video!

Not sure how 16gb could be enough for a tablet: my 16GB Asus Transformer is full of apps and without an external drive or SD card I cannot load any music or movies! All it takes is a few large games, a decent bit of email and you're done, the latest gameloft titles and Max Payne are over 1GB each.

Google Play music is a dumb idea for a tablet that doesn't have 3G.... No idea why you'd want to mash all your nice FLAC audio through a transcoding step either.

69,000 sign petition to save TV-linker O'Dwyer from US extradition

Create a petition on http://epetitions.direct.gov.uk please?

Could someone that knows how to write nicely please create a petition on http://epetitions.direct.gov.uk?

thanks

Ten... high-end Android tablets

@Chris Gray 1

Yes to both SD cards and Mass storage, both work fine in Honeycomb - I used them often.

Dear Dell and Microsoft: You're not Apple

Agree

I always favoured Netscape over IE. IE pissed me off every time, right up until today when I'm forced to use IE8 on my corporate desktop. It still force closes itself and stops responding with no explanation.

Zomm wireless leash

...ohh yeah

and my SE MBW-150 watch lasts 10+ days on a charge instead of 2 days.

Rip-Off!

That £80 can buy you a Sony-Erickson bluetooth connected watch, which gives you the same alerting when you go out of range as well as possessing a screen to show you texts and who's calling, plus it's a watch!

Every phone these days has speakerphone built in, I just don't see the point.

Keene USB FM Transmitter

Linux?

Are there any devices like this that work under Linux?

Court bars charges against teen who posed semi-nude

not the woman's problem...

it's not the woman's problem for looking provocative. If you, as a man, can't keep control of your libido then you shouldn't be allowed out in society!

Intel wants vintage x64 servers on rubbish heap

I/O and everything else?

And pray tell, where is this magical giant leap in I/O performance for your applications going to come from when you consolidate 50 servers into 3?

Are we all meant to trust and afford 256GB SSDs in our servers now? I think not.

Steve Jobs Flash rant put to the test

Flash is the life-raft that Adobe clings to

Let's face it, Adobe isn't a big player any more. They're in danger of losing the kudos that they bought in a series of mergers a few years ago. Photoshop is massively pirated and other image editing software can offer a similarly useful feature set for peanuts of free.

This is their last stand before they go the way of Real Networks and Yahoo.

Adobe sounds off on iPad's Flash slap

Hurray! Flash dies!

At last we can say goodbye to Flash, along with animated GIFs and inverse video text.

It sucked, and now it's dead.

Elgato Video Capture

Old old technology

This has been around for years! Why would you bother to convert your VHS tapes now if you haven't bothered to for the last 10 years?? You can use a £20 TV card to do an uncompressed capture and easily convert to MPEG4. What a pointless product and one that is at least 5 years out of date!

VMware's ESX Server 4.0 lost in the clouds?

View 3 can already work without a network connection

Wrong, View 3 can do this already. You can "check out" a VM from the server and sync changes back as and when you have a network link.

"Moreover, the approach to desktop virtualization currently sold by VMware as a product set called View, which is an example of what is called virtual desktop infrastructure, or VDI, has its limits. Like you need a network connection to do anything - no network, no PC. VMware View stores virtual PC images on a server back in the data center running ESX Server and runs them there, streaming video and audio down to thin clients and PCs at the end of a network connection. A bare metal hypervisor running on the PC will allow software to be streamed down to one or more virtual machines - perhaps one for work and one for play - and then run applications even if there is no network connection."

VMware to cut desktop storage by 80 per cent

@The whole concept breaks down if you're actually mobile.

Try reading the product brief before flaming ol' chap!!

As it happens VDI is capable of syncing to a portable VMplayer installation on a laptop for remote users and the thin clients that we have here in the office (XP embedded and otherwise) all incorporate a browser for that initial connection. So you're wrong. Twice.

If you use SVI to sync your desktop to a player image when you're not in the office then you also get the benefit of a full backup of you're desktop on the office server should anything happen. It can also diff the changes to enable you to make small updates to your server image whilst on the road. This also gives you a security "silver bullet" as player is as secure as you want it to be and removing the laptop's hard drive won't necessarily help you to get at the data. Forget bitlocker!

So there, it's rather neat actually and the latest 3.0 version does a lot of cool stuff like this SVI and in-build de-dupe by storing user and OS data separately and rolling a fresh OS for you everytime you login.

Hell, of course I'm biased but I've used Citrix before and this is much easier. Take it with a pinch of salt but try it if you can.

Ahhh, so that was the product launch!

Not much actually, you can enable or disable things as you see fit. It's useful, you can synch your iPod should you so desire but as you can separate user and OS data into different locations within VDI you're pretty safe against viruses. Add a few thinstall apps and you're away with a tiny tiny footprint. And, let's face it, if you make your users local admin without thinking then you've got more problems than this!

On another note, now I know what all these journalists were doing around our office yesterday. I was the VMware techie eyeing up the snack buffet they had :)

Go VMware!

Stratus tolerates faults on Windows HPC

Stratus doesn't live up to the marketing

This would be great if Stratus was a clean and transparent hardware solution; but it isn't.

The Stratus Windows 2003 install relies on a *lot* of proprietary drivers and is hooked into Windows on such a fundamental level that upgrading Windows patches can break the Stratus drivers! I have seen nodes randomly rebooting *both sides* of an FTserver after installing a regular set of patches. Stratus' software is also only rarely updated, which means you have to wait for Stratus to give you a thumbs up on any Microsoft updates you want to install.

Not to mention that a Stratus server with 2-year old hardware (2xdual core Core 2 Duo and 4GB of RAM with SATA, yes, SATA disks) costs over £15000!!! How is that scalable? Why not buy 10 commodity servers instead? Not to mention that your pathetic 4 core server is taking 4U of rack space!! I can get 8 cores in 1U, why do I want this?

All in all I cannot support Stratus and having worked with them for a couple of years I have seen no reason to approach them again whatsoever. They happen to be the only vendor in this particular market but that doesn't mean that they have a good product.

All in all another case of good marketing, bad product. Stay well away....