Posts by Mikel

The plot to kill Google cloud: We'll rename Windows Azure to MICROSOFT Azure

Re: When will the next name change be?

$500,000? If they spent so little I would be truly shocked.

Re: Money well spent

Bob, how could any enterprise cloud vendor predict such an unlikely confluence of events as leap day occurring on February 29th? You might as well expect them to anticipate their SSL certificates expiring. This is way out there type unpredictable stuff. Acts of God and whatnot.

HP exec: 'It's our GOD-GIVEN right' to rule the world of biz fondleslabs

Leading with Windows tablets again

And they say Apple has a reality distortion field.

Entry-level HP SAN array stoops to conquer small biz bods

Foreboding

Implies "requires IE8 running as Admin on Windows 7".

NAS and SAN

Traditionally NAS is file based storage, like Windows and NFS file shares. SAN is block based storage - network attached disks, not folders. Of late they are tending to merge, with one device providing both.

AT&T and Netflix get into very public spat over net neutrality

Re: Fees for requiring unneeded trips

By taking the free boxes the ISP also saves millions against their own internal network costs, and makes their customers perception of the quality of their service go up. Against this power and cooling are nothing. Why Netflix and not some other? Netflix is 1/3rd of peak network traffic. Where else are you going to get these returns

Fees for requiring unneeded trips

"As we all know, there is no free lunch, and there’s also no cost-free delivery of streaming movies. Someone has to pay that cost," Cicconi said. "Mr Hastings’ arrogant proposition is that everyone else should pay but Netflix.

The remarkable thing here is that Comcast and AT&T are generating the requirement for this traffic. When you and your 500 neighbors all gorge on the new season of "House of Cards" in HD, it only needs to be sent to each network the first time, and cached for everyone else. It doesn't change from your house to your neighbor's house. You could all be watching the same copy, rather than downloading it from Netflix separately. Netflix has these cache boxes, and provides them to the ISPs for free. But AT&T and Comcast refuse to take them, instead insisting that Netflix stream each copy separately from Amazon's datacenters - multiplying by thousands the bandwidth unnecessarily. This is as bad - worse - than streaming video, pictures, audio over the Internet in uncompressed formats, consuming bandwidth unnecessarily. It is the ISP creating this need by insisting on doing this the worst possible technical way.

So no, nobody needs to pay that cost. It is an unnecessary cost. AT&T and Comcast insist on creating this need for bandwidth to their network that does not have to exist. They do this to drive up the cost of Netflix, drive down the quality because Netflix competes with their cable TV. It is pure unrepentant greed.

Reg tries out Google's Chromecast: Yep, we even tested smut sites

Netflix quality

If you have Chromecast and the right ISP in the US, the difference in quality can be remarkable. Chromecast can use the new VP8 encoding, which saves a lot of bandwidth or ups quality, depending.

Re: Next stop...

Our kids like to sit around with their tablets and take turns throwing funny YouTube videos to it.

Microsoft exec: I don't know HOW our market share sunk

At least they know they're looking for something

They don't know what it is, but at least knowing you're looking is a start.

Microsoft alters Hotmail policy amid blogger inbox probe outcry

Re: You should assume all providers will do this

Ah the everybody else woulda defense. Except that this thing is so abhorrent that it demands deliberate intent. It needs volition. It needs a desire to be evil.

All better now. Rest easy.

They're going to employ a former federal judge and some outside counsel to officially rubber stamp their future Hotmail account snooping. That is so reassuring. For a moment there I was afraid they might just not do it any more. This is SO much better. Does the Mailbox plundering team have an official name yet? May I suggest "Global Mail Account Investigation Legal Team", or "GMAIL Team" for short?

Microsoft frisked blogger's Hotmail inbox, IM chat to hunt Windows 8 leaker, court told

Brilliant

Let the whole world know you are snooping their Hotmail just to jail the one employee who got the info out before the other twenty. Spend six months paying astroturfers to pretend you were the wronged party and acted within the TOS, as if that makes it all better now. I can't wait to hear Frank Shaw's spin on this.

It is all better now

Microsoft has assured us that they promise to employ a former judge and outside counsel for the purpose of rubber-stamping their Hotmail snooping. So. No worries.

Intel details four new 'enthusiast' processors for Haswell, Broadwell

Sweet stuff

Hopefully this will bring down the price on mainstream CPUs. No way am I in the market for a $1000 chip.

The customer for these is going to have a GPU. Are they still bonding their high end graphics to the highest end CPUs that won't be using it at all and holding their midrange chips that would actually use it to the lower spec graphics? That was always counterintuitive to me.

GRAV WAVE TSUNAMI boffinry BONANZA – the aftershock of the universe's Big Bang

Re: "detected"

"Discovered" might be the word. This is the the first paper claiming an observation of gravity waves at five sigmas, which is the level required to use the word discovery in that field. There are many other implicit findings as well.

More detail

If you are interested in the topography of gravity waves let me suggest this primer.

http://background.uchicago.edu/~whu/polar/webversion/node6.html

Re: "detected"

I'm going to go ahead and speculate now that we are never going to directly observe a gravity wave. It is just too weak.

The scales - both large and small - are mind boggling. The discussion is at the level of planck lengths and planck time. We're talking about a time when the granularity of dimensionality itself leaves fingerprints.

You know the observable universe is big and heavy - hundreds of billions of galaxies a hundred billion lightyears across. Imagine you had two of them right next to each other. They would affect each other by gravity, right - at least at the edges? Now shrink the pair so small that trillions of the pair lined up would not span the width of a single proton and they're still right next to each other so the gravity is so much more intense by proximity. One of these is our observable universe, and one of these is a mass that has now fallen outside our "light cone". Now move the second one 16 degrees across what will someday be our sky in 1x10^-44th of a second. That is the scale of gravity wave we're talking about. Entire observable universes worth of energy density swinging whole degrees across the sky because at a scale that small, that is the indivisible increment of a meaningful distance.

It is horrifyingly beautiful.

Awesome discovery

Pints all around!

Here is an explanatory pic.

http://www.newscientist.com/data/images/ns/cms/dn25235/dn25235-1_1200.jpg

WebEx gets shiny Chromebook look

Microsoft is The Borg and don't you forget it

Borg Bill is an icon of our era.

As for Cisco embracing Chromebook, why not? Everybody else wants to hitch themselves to this success train. Except, of course, The Borg.

WTF is … the multiverse?

Universes beyond number

Well, 20 or so at least. Our visible universe is one of many such of course, or it would be different around the edges than in the middle. How many is an interesting question to ponder over a pint.

Say you go instantly to a galaxy on our horizon, then as far again, in an instant. This is a whole other visible universe on the edge of ours. It has the same cosmic background radiation, the same physical laws, the same structure from gross to fine.

Is it part of the same overarching Universe? Between the two there is no edge, no way to Balkanize them such that here one ends and another begins. To call them different universes makes as much sense as discriminating between the visible universe centered on London and the one centered on Beijing.

In the end it's all a matter of perspective. We are each the center of our own visible universe, sharing by proximity some part with each other in aggregate a greater whole.

Satya Nadella's first act may be to launch Office for iPad

Office for iPad

How about no? A new WinRT tablet maybe?

I'm thinking a Metro skin for iPad that keys into all of Microsoft's cloud suite. Office364 and Bing, IE and Outlook.com signin, XBox Live, DirectX and cloud hosted desktop all integrated into one glorious app that iFans have been craving [sic]. Naturally paid for to be preinstalled in glorious partnership with Apple.

The synergies. They are blinding.

Indian supremes demand $573m in Nokia-Microsoft phactory selloff deal

Left at the altar

Now would be a good time for Redmond to announce they've thought better of it.

Google's Drive SLASH, secret 'big upgrade': Coincidence? Hardly

Google is tearing up IAAS models

It is going to get harder and more costly to stay in this game.

Is Microsoft hinting at a fully fondleslab-friendly future for Office 365?

Re: What?

You make it sound like you have some problems even Office for iPad won't solve.

What if Microsoft launched iPad Office

What if Microsoft launched iPad Office - and noone cared?

We all owe our EXISTENCE to lovely VOLCANOES, say boffins

Turns out

Ice worms like a nice sauna too.

It's 2014 and Microsoft Windows PCs can still be owned by a JPEG

This is not possible

Trustworthy Computing pledge, since 2002. You're saying that in 12 years a company with Microsoft's resources can't figure out how to safely display a jpeg? That is not possible.

IBM bets the farm on big data in annual report

Big Blue is not stupid

They never "bet the farm" on anything.

Nice to see them touting Linux.

What do you mean there are no Surface Pros? HAND 'EM OVER, yell Microsoft resellers

I know the manufacturing constraint

His name is Hank. He lives in Torrance, California. He's a semi-retired VCR repairman. He's making them as fast as he can at 15 hours a week, but the repetitive motion is aggravating his arthritis and he's just not willing to give it more than that and ruin his health. He is thinking about giving it up actually, he shared over a pint.

Dell thuds down low-cost lap workstation for cheap frugal creatives or engineers

Re: low cost?

$1,199? So that's £1,199. You forgot the transatlantic markup and VAT. In Australia that's AUD7,250.

VSAN emerges at a WHOPPING 32 nodes and two MEEELION IOPS

Say what?

Openfiler is free. You can buy support if you want it.

Dark matter killed the dinosaurs, boffins suggest

Milankovitch and the Galactic Year

People have already made these connections. The "dark matter" is in this case more likely ordinary rocks left over from the collision that formed the solar system on a galactic year collision course, than some thing we can't even agree actually exists yet.

Hey doc, what's the PC's prognosis? A. Long-term growth below zero

Gloomy winter of the PC or Springtime in mobile

How you look at it is up to you, but change is happening.

Windows XP market share GROWS AGAIN, outstrips Win 8.1 surge

Windows 8.x shrank

Shrinkage? Unpossible! But there it is in black and white.

Steve Ballmer: Thanks to me, Microsoft screwed up a decade in phones

The man is a priceless treasure

I can only hope that in his new role he provides as much entertainment as he has this last decade.

Facebook: We want a solar sky cruiser comms net that DARPA couldn't build

19 Billion for whatsapp

I asked then "How many wifi blimps for that?" It seems he's on it.

The third world is going to get broadband! Hooray. Hopefully we can get them to sell us everything that isn't nailed down. Seriously though, it will be nice to hear from them first hand.

Bill Gates is BACK... as CHIEF RICH human of PLANET EARTH

Re: @Mikel

@AC - I was not being critical of the man there, nor the rate of his giving. I wrote above there that he is both generous and humble. I have praised him here before for his work. It is not being critical of the man to say he could divest from one of his many investments without causing serious turmoil - it is only an assessment of the market situation being responded to. I didn't say he should sell it all and gift the proceeds. It is not for me to say he should give or not at all, let alone how fast. It's his money.

I am still not fond of his Beast. But that is a different thing.

Microsoft stock

Bill Gates has been selling Microsoft stock and diversifying since the 1980's. It is nowhere near the majority of his holdings. He could divest completely now and the available stock would not cause a problem. The emotional issues might though.

Re: Toilets

>I reckon its easy to be philanthropic when it doesn't hit your lifestyle or bottom line in any meaningful way.

Bill Gates himself said the same thing in his Reddit AMA. That his efforts are not as significant as those of others who have to sacrifice to give. Imagine that: generous and humble too.

Software needs meaty cores, not thin, stringy ARMs, says Intel

8 VDIs

Your VDIs are GPU limited. Congratulations on pouring a ton of money into solving every problem but the one you have.

Energy firms' security so POOR, insurers REFUSE to take their cash

SCADA and Windows

If the subject doesn't make you feel ill, you don't understand the situation.

Pine trees' scent 'could prevent climate change really being a problem'

Re: Specific Pacific Heat Capacity

They better hope not. The oceans can absorb enough energy to chill the entire atmosphere by 60C without warming the seas by one degree.

Re: Physics, Chemistry, Biology

It was biology that made the planet this cold in the first place.

Chipzilla just won't quit: Intel touts 64-bit Atoms for Android phones, tabs

Imagination Technologies

Here's hoping they got a serious commitment to Linux GPU open APIs from Imagination Technologies. That will be critical to their success with these chips, and IT has been reluctant on that score in the past. "It's not our fault the GPU vendor won't provide that info" is not going to work. Ever. You chose the GPU. They didn't sneak into your engineering lab and insert it without your knowledge. It is your fault if the thing has no decent software support.

Say WHAT? Qualcomm, MediaTek scrap over who has best 'marketing gimmick' octacore

Desktop class processing

All day battery life

The times. They are changing.