Posts by Matt Bryant

Microsoft pulls plug on Intel's Itanic

RE: Matt Bryant

"....What do you mean with this? I dont get it. Please explain....." Sorry, Kebby, but after Allison's last FUDfest I took the liberty of christening her Ms Kebbabfart. Apologies if you thought the reply was directed at you, or if you thouhgt I was implying some sort of real-World relationship between yourself and the deluded Ms Park. I apologise unreservedly for any implication that your tastes would have such a low threshold of satisfaction as to be sated by the vacuous Ms Park.

"....BTW, when you talk about "Slowaris" do you have any proof of that?..." Been there, proved that. Do you really want reminding of SAP bench number 2008064? Where the hp ProLiant DL785 G5 8-socket posted 35400 SAPS, compared to bench session 2008061, where the similar Sun Fire X4600M2 8-socket only managed 29670 SAPS. Yes, I know the Sunshiners will start whining about how the hp server had the 2.7GHz 8384 4-core Opterons, whereas Sun's server had to make do with the 2.5GHz 8360 4-core Opterons, but it's strange that 8% jump in CPU clock gave a 20% jump in performance. The differentiator - the Sun box was struggling with Slowaris, whereas the DL was humming along with SuSE Linux.

"....Even during attacks 9/11, no single transaction was missed on the OpenVMS systems running financial systems in the twin towers...." One of the reasons many companies saw a DR failure during the 9/11 attack was they had their production systems in one Tower and their DR in the other. Anyway, I'm not sure it's really fitting to be bragging about DR successes from such an awful event. It's much more fun to go watch the video on the hp webby where they blow up a datacenter and time the failovers for OpenVMS, hp-ux and Windows! http://h71028.www7.hp.com/enterprise/us/en/solutions/storage-disaster-proof-solutions.html

As regards the comparison of Power vs Nehalem, you forgot to include the eye-watering expense of having IBM Global Scewups coming onsite to fix the "solution" that IBM claimed woul perform to requirments "out-of-the-box". My advice is always POC and bench at the vendor's expense! Getting IBM GS to do it afterwards is just a whole world of expensive pain.

/SP&L @ Ms Kebabfart.

RE: @mike 16

Sorry, Henry, I missed your post earlier. Hp offer a service to buy up old kit and put it through their Renew program, that reconditions and tests the old kit to factory standards so hp and their resellers can sell it with a full hp warranty, or so it can go into hp spares stores for their engineers. If you want to buy secondhand Itanium gear but not pay out for hp support or hp warranty services then there are third-party companies (such as Pheonix here in the UK) that will offer their own support and services. I hear even IBM will offer support and hosted services for hp Integrity, though I also hear they have to call on hp consultants to do a lot of any subsequent hp-ux work.

Like many geeks, I have squirrel tendencies and I currently have several bits of hobby kit at home rescued from one company's or another's clear outs. Amongst them is a two-CPU zx6000 that dual boots hp-ux and Linux and doesn't make too much noise or heat (less than one of my PCs which has an 125W Athlon x2 6000+ and positively glows!!).

RE: Superdome2 is only 16 sockets this year?

".....I just heard...." You just heard from where exactly? The voices in your head again? Unless you can post at least a source if not a confirmable hp document I'm going to assume that all you heard was your own wishful thinking.

"....Two cell board based chassis' can be hooked together next year for 32 sockets...." Hmmm, so that would be a 128-core SMP server, then, with real enterprise (and not weiner) cores linked in scaleable and high-memory-bandwidth solution. Ooh, sounds awful - not! Seeing as the current Superdome offering scales to 128 cores what your saying is it is terrible news that hp will be able to offer a solution of the same size that uses faster cores, more and faster memory, all linked by faster interconnects, and in a much smaller footprint, and that they will be able to double it later? I can't wait to see what the equivalent pSeries looks like if that disappoints you! Will it come with a built-in coffee machine and poptart toaster?

By the way, when will 128-core pSeries be hitting the streets? Doesn't the current Power595 stop at 64 cores? I hear (from the Reg article http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/02/08/ibm_power7_systems_launch/ <= please note the checkable source, not wishful thinking) thet the IBM big iron is not arriving until 2010 too. So even if what you "hear"/imagine does turn out to be even remotely true, the reality is IBM will have no advantage. Can I claim IBM are "getting out of the hihg end space" too seeing as they can't even match today's Superdome for socket scaling?

Please, can the IBM trolls try posting something that can't be shown up as sheer bunk in less than five minutes? It's hardly worth the effort of opening you to ridicule if you're not going to at least make a proper effort. I'm almost missing the days of the good old Sun FUD, which was at least a bit more inventive.

/SP&L

RE: @Matt

"....You should relax a little...." You obviously can't hear me laughing from over there. I enjoy a good game of whack-a-troll, and you IBMers seem to have taken over from teh Sunshiners in the rabidity stakes. At least I can salute your fervour, if not your nouse.

"....Facts are...." Why do I sense an imminent barrage of poorly though-out opinions presented as "facts"?

"....a) SPARC is crap. Solaris/x86 is tolerable. You are right on that...." Actually, I don't think much of Slowaris on x64 compared to RHEL or SLES. Try reading my posts before assuming you now what my prefs are.

"....b) Power is the fastest CPU around (of *all* CPUs)...." What, even including lab specials? Even those nanotube jobs? And how are you measuring fastest? Try and set the right boundaries for such a statement, such as saying "in my opinion, Power is the fastest CPU for commercial UNIX when running an application such as DB2". Please also try and give some supporting evidence (if you have any), otherwise you sound like you're evangelising rather than discussing, and the House of Sunshine will get upset at you blaspheming their Faith with your own! By the way, the fastest I've ever seen DB2 run was on a Superdome, but not as fast as it ran Oracle.

"....c) Itanium is dead in the water...." <Yawn> Another IBM troll that needs to read some marketshare reports. Please share the reading with Allison, she probably needs a hand.

".....and SPARC's sinking doesn't change that...." A pretty myopic view of what represents the largest migration opportunity available to both IBM and hp. Or could it be that IBmers just don't want to consider it since the EDS acquisition puts hp in the heart of the majority of those ex-Sun accounts?

"....e) x86 Methusalem and Power 7 will duke it out...." Careful of the religeous overtones, you'll be mistaken for a Sunshiner! Besides, I thought you IBMers thought BillG was the horned dude?

"....d) I am not working for IBM or any other hw or sw vendor...." Actually I can accept that fact given that it is hard to believe even a recession-hit IBM's standards have fallen that far!

".....According to spec.org....." Shouldn't that read as "According to my one-point feature sell based on a benchmark that tests only one tiny portion of the overall solution...."? Face it, I don't know any business that runs SPECINT for a living, and I'm betting you don't either. Until I test both in my environment, with my stack and apps, my LAN and my SAN, you're just blowing smoke. I would advise any customer thinking of buyiing Power7 or Tukzilla kit to do the same - test it at the vendors' expense. If they won't put up then it tells you all you need to know.

"....Still a tough sell to explain 40 % better single-thread performance to customers." Oh, so now single-threaded performance (on what test, using what data and appication?) is suddenly the key criteria for ALL computing requirements? Strangely, despite IBM's desperate performance feature sells on Power5, Power6 and Power6+, customers just didn't believe them - I wonder why? Instead, many of them tested the options and chose Itanium in hp Integrity. If what you claimed was true then hp would never have sold a single Itanium system (and we all know even IBM shifted 10,000+ Itanium units, even when trying thier hardest not to). Now, please tell me all those custoemrs were stupid, or just hated IBM, etc, etc, etc. Just to give us all a bigger laugh.

/SP&L

RE: Tukwila blades or Stuperdoom...either way a loser

Oh dear, didn't Ms Kebabfart get the memo about trying to raise the industry's perception of women in computing, not blow it with poor quality FUDfests? XD

"Bottom line: Microsoft is pulling the plug on Itanium....." Real bottom line - hp still makes more out of WIndows on x64 than IBM, and will benefit most as x64 continues to eat into the RISC space. And since Power can't run Windows the sum effect is no benefit whatsoever to IBM, just some frothing and FUD from their trolls.

"....HP is not dominating the highend market. Power 595 outsells superdome I think 3 to 1....." I'm beginning to see that thinking is not your strong point. Both Gartner and IDC disagree with your "thinking", and the average unit shipment values discussed in the thread http://forums.theregister.co.uk/forum/1/2010/02/24/gartner_q4_2009_servers/ show that hp is shipping the enterprise high-end boxes, not IBM. That is unless you want to contend that IBM are giving away top-end servers for $60K-odd a pop, which sounds even worse than the old Sun desperation.

"...Not sure why anyone would buy a Stuperdoom...." Well, I'll try and explain in small words so you don't get too confused. In our benchmarks, the Superdomes have been outperforming the pSeries offerings for years. I think you'll find there's quite a few other customers that came to the same conclusion (try here, for example http://h71028.www7.hp.com/integrity/w1/en/high-end/superdome-anniversary-case-studies.html). Please try and tell me in all those Superdome sales there weren't any head-to-heads with pSeries where Power didn't do the job as well as the hp package. If I remember correctly, even AMD chose Superdome over pSeries to run the software for Opteron manufacturing!

"....waiting for the joke which will arrive in August..." Sorry, are we talking about the new top-line Power7 kit now? After all, that won't be available to customers until "August earliest, more likely September", as told to me by our IBM rep. Please feel free to disagree with him, but unless you're in IBM I don't see how you could possibly know more than him.

"....The Tukwila blades will be a clear indicator that HP is divesting in Itanium...." Now that did make me laugh! How can hp taking advantage of its massive lead in the blades market be a bad thing or "divesting"? Everyone knows hp has been leading the blades market for years, even TPM will grudgingly admit it. And I don't see any talk of Power8 blades on the IBM website - has IBM given up on Power blades? They've already cancelled the Cell blades, as reported here on the Reg. Is IBM planning only x64 blades for the next gen BladeCenter? You IBMers really should learn to stay away from the blades topic, it just makes it too easy!

"....Ok HP can group 1, 2 or 4 together ....." Hmmm, so being able to plug modular blades into one larger SMP instance is bad (I'm guessing 'cos IBM can't do it with their blades), but good when IBM do it with their rack servers? Back to troll school for you!

"....but the low performance..." Again, please supply full details of the benchmarking session you have personally run to get any performance comparison (not holding my breath). Oh, was that an admission you haven't even seen the kit, let alone benched it? I suppose the next claim will be that you're a natural blonde, an athletic 5'6'' and with natural 34DDs?

".....and 4core/65nm chips...." How is the chip size a problem if it does the job in real World situations? Can you even spell "feature-sell"? Ask my CEO if he's more worried about our next CRM system performing to requirements, reliably and to a good price, or whether he is concerned that the chips inside are 65nm, 45nm or 25nm? Since I'm also guessing you don't do much of that real business stuff I'm going to say you think he thinks the size of the chips is a really important issue. I'm hoping you're not going to be part of our IBM account team as I'd actually like to get some Power7 kit to play with, not have IBM get laughed out of the building.

"....and lack of sx3000 is a major problem...." What lack of sx3000? You're just making up stuff on the fly now. I can just as validly say that since the new top-end Power7 kit won't be here until August/September that IBM "must have a problem" with the new Power7 chipsets. Well, I would if I was a frothing troll without a clue.

".....Power is taking over the Unix market with HP and Sun being a very distant third place....." Maths is obviously also not one of your hot topics, but a quick check of the Gartner and IDC figures should show even someone as challenged as yourself the truth. Please also try and grasp the concept of what IBM call "leakage" - that's sales that go from being UNIX on EPIC/RISC to being Linux or Windows on x64. The reason this concerns IBM so much is they know the majority of those "leakages" go onto hp ProLiant, which means as the UNIX market shrinks it is hp that benefits most, not IBM.

"....Power7 is the successor for cell...." No, Power is a generic chip that cannot replace the specialised Cell, it is just IBM trying to cut costs as they can't sustain development and production cost of the two lines.

"....and the PS4 is proof of that...." Sony don't have a choice. IBM have dropped them in it, and - like Apple and PowerPC - they're only choice for the next gen PS will be an x64 chip as Power will be far too expensive to compete with other gamestations or gaming PCs. How much money will IBM be losing on each PS4 chip given that they flog the Power CPUs out at many thousands of dollars each? Sorry, I shouldn't really ask you that given your maths issues, it would only give you a headache as you try to reach a conclusion.

"....Intel does not like wasting money...." So who says Itanium is "wasting" Intel's money? Please provide the Intel business report that states that Itanium is losing Intel money. Oh, another surprise, not - you can't. Just more unsubstantiated FUD (I wouldn't accuse a lady of blatent lying). With the MIPS vendors long gone, Sun down on the matt, Fudgeitso on the ropes and IBM spinning like crazy, it looks like Itanium has been a cracking investment for Intel.

"....HP only leades in x86 because of Compaq..." <Yawn> Yes, and hp bought Compaq how many years ago? If hp had done nothing since to grow their x86/64 marketshare then they would have fallen back after all the years, whereas the reality is a constant stream of innovations and developments have not just kept Compaq customers loyal but also meant gains in marketshare at the expense of IBM, Dell, and Fudgeitso. What must really gall IBMers is that even the combined hp and Compaq was still a much smaller company than IBM, but they managed to outperfrom IBM in the market. Maybe that's because, unlike mainframes, x64 is not a monopoly.

".....losing that install base since they have not been able to have an 8 socket system..." Do you do any research before posting your waffle? The gartner report mentioned above says hp again shipped the most server units. And if you had even the slightest inkling about the market then you'd know that the biggest seller is not 8-ways but 2-socket servers (like the hp ProLiant DL380, again the largest selling 2-socket server for Gawd alone knows how many quarters). Your schpiel is all the more amusing given how hard IBM FUDed the 8-socket DL785 G5 servers over the last few years. I'm not surprised you're flipping 180 degrees now you're finally back in the 8-socket x64 market with an Intel-chipped server.

"....p7 is not simplified cores like Niagara..." Power6 saw IBM move ahead away from old-style RISC and out-of-order execution (just like EPIC), because even IBM had to admit RISC has had its day. But power6 had problems and had no headroom for development, after the minor boosts of Power6+. So now IBM have switched back to what is essentially a Power4/5 core with die-shrink and a few extra features. - hardly revolutionary. Scared witless of the growing core count of Nehalem and Magny Cours, IBM have done exactly what Sun did with Niagara - go back to an old core that was easier to manufacture and shrink it so they can get as many cores as possible onto a die. The end result is they get faster clock (by die shrink) and abandon any pretence to real development. The problem for Power is their RISC design has hit the buffers, there is nowhere else to go, and they can only keep doing die-shrinks for so long because they cannot compete with the the economies of scale of the x64 juggernaut.

"....x86 on the low end and Power on the highend with the added killer of Oracle pricing is what killed SPARC...." Power on the high-end? Debateable, especially as hp-ux on Integrity has outsold Power in the high-end for years. But seeing as Oracle's leading partner is hp (more new Oracle installs go on new hp servers than any other vendor) and hp is the leading Wintel/Lintel vendor by a mile, I can actually agree with you in that hp and Intel killed Sun (with a small helping hand from Armonk).

"....Matt....what happened? You were starting to move over to the Power camp...." Just because you confused my willingness to give both platforms a chance in real World tests does not mean I am going to act as an echo chamber for your vacuous FUD. FUD is just a way to turn customer off. And seeing as your FUD is the equivalent of you peeing in your shrinking pool I think I'll stay out here in the open sea, thanks.

/SP&L, though rather sad at the fall in quality of IBM trolls.

RE: No more growth for Itanic.

A new poster? Someone a bit vague and wolly in their "arguments"? The trolls sense fresh meat!

"....Everyone here can agree that the loss of Windows and the decline of HP/UX leave no growth markets for Itanium..." Oh dear, you really didn't think that statement through, did you? Agreement in a trollathon!?! Ignoring the existing hp-ux, OpenVMS and Linux on IA64 installed base that will consider the new Tukzilla kit ('cos it's always easier to upgrade the hardware than change to a new hardware, change the OS or app stack), you're forgetting all those SPARC customers that have been left little choice. Whilst Slowaris on x64 will do for some (and, going on x64 marketshare, more likley on hp ProLiant than any other x64 vendor's offerings), those needing large SMP instances really only have a choice of pSeries or Integrity. And EDS puts hp in the front running to convert those accounts to hp Inetgrity, hence a nice possibility for Itanium growth.

"....It could take a decade, but the sunset of Itanium is certain...." That's in the same logic class as saying "we're all going to die someday even if we get really old in the meantime". All chips will be retired eventually (yes, IBMers, even Power will go the way of the dodo some day). If Itanium does get retired in ten years time then it will be over twenty years old - not bad for a commercial CPU. But your reasoning as to it dying in ten years is a bit weak, would you like to actually supply some form of argument to support your opinion, or can we safely say it is just another unsubstatiated musing?

"....Desktop PCs may be on the wane, smart handhelds (and various thin-clients) are clearly encroaching on their market..." How does the future of desktop PCs impact large commercial server solutions? A bit off-target, aren't we? Is the presumption that low-end devices will alter IBM's and Intel's plans? Not really - after all, IBM can fab the new low-end chips, and Intel actually design and fab their own, so not really a major impact for either.

"....If you believe in cloud computing, user-configured servers are also on the wane....." Good thing I didn't swallow the cloud hype, then, isn't it? Cloud is just ousourcing, and there are always bits of the business (for large corporates at least) you just won't ever outsource.

/SP&L, just not meat in that post to chew on.

RE: Matt, Could you please Confirm

Sorry, looks like some other people beat you to it!

http://www.openmpe.org/OpenMPEBoardVN.htm

Besides, with hp-ux being the top enterprise UNIX, why would hp need to go back to MPE? I suppose MPE was one of the group of OS that smashed the IBM mainframe monopoly and made a big hole in IBM's profits, but then Non-Stop is doing that today already, so no need for MPE. Oh, I see - you were so busy fantasising about the death of Itanium you lost all touch with reality (again)!

/SP&L

Dear deluded posters

<Yaaaaaaaaaawwwwwwnnnnn!!!!> Aw, not another "Oh-I-really-hope-so-'cos-I-really-want-it-to-be-so" reporting of Itanium's death? How many is that this year alone? And how many times have you all been wrong before?

What, not having Windows (in eight-odd years time) means Itanium is suddenly dead? Puh-lease! By that measure, every one of Itanium's RISC competitor's has been stillborn (well, Rock actually was, but not because of not running Windows). Please remind me how many Power versions have run Windows....? And then go look at how hp-ux on Integrity is dominating the UNIX high-end, and how Non-Stop is taking sales away from IBM's mainframe party. Even the OpenVMS fanbois make IBMers worried - will anyone be as loyal to humdrum AIX after Power gets canned? Unlikely!

If you forgot to read the figures in the Gratner article as reported here on the Reg (http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/02/24/gartner_q4_2009_servers/), hp seem to be doing quite fine in the high-end. In fact, given the average server shipment value as discussed in the comments off the same article, hp are selling more top-end servers than IBM and much more than Soreacle. I'm betting Ponytail would just love it if Niagara could be as "dead" and make as much of a profit (Sunshiners, you will probably have to take a break here to check the dictionary definition of "profit", you're not going to be at all familiar with it)!

As for Dunked-in-the-brown-stuff Manor, I can quite comfortably say (since the new Integrity blades haven't hit the street yet) you haven't a clue and are talking from your nether regions. Please come back when you have actually had a chance to bench the real kit rather than just fantasised about it. Same goes for your hilarious conclusions about chipsets you definately haven't touched - from the poor qaulity of your FUD I assume IBM marketting is hiring from the Sun carcass?

I know you IBMers like to dream about Power taking over the World, but there's just two big problems with that. Firstly, Power's market is shrinking (it's happening to all the commercial UNIX markets), so IBM is fighting over a smaller pie every year and that smaller pie means less and less money to plough into Power (hence the imminent death of Cell - IBM can't afford to develop both on the shrinking profits). Secondly, Intel has the money from x64 - even if Itanium wasn't making a profit (and it is), they could afford to prop up Itanium for years and not blink. IBM can't say the same about Power, they don't have a partner product of the same scale, which does not bode well for its longterm future (and is the reason for a very short Power roadmap). The story is even bleaker for those Sunshiners still holding out for a rescue from SPARC64. Slowaris's only hope is x64, which is ironic given the years with which the Sunshiners poured venom on anything Intel.

And hp is the leading x64 vendor (and, amusingly, likley to soon be the leading Slowaris vendor with Slowaris on ProLiant sales!), so as the x64 tide sweeps into the RISC space it is hp that benefits most, not IBM, Soreacle or Fudgeitso. So hp also has the profits to keep developing Integrity. Which is the reason the IBMers FUD Itanium so hard, they know it's a two horse race now and the Power horse just doesn't have any more development room. Simply squeezing more and more simplified cores (AKA plan copy Niagara - wierd!) onto a die is not going to defeat x64, let alone stand against Tukzilla. Intel is going to win one way or the other, with AMD happy to ride along on their coattails. The pincer attack of Itanium in the high-end and Xeon from below has already killed Sun, why should Intel or hp let up the pressure on Fudgeitso and IBM when the tactics are working so well?

/Oh yes, I'm certainly SP&L at you clowns!

IBM raids Oracle-Sun hardware channel

Makes cents!

I know, terrible pun, but it is definately the right strategy to take. As Sun got weaker and weaker in the last few years it became more and more dependent on the channel to keep it in customer accounts. Indeed, Sun salesbods always used to brag to me about how tight the relationship was between Sun and so many top resellers. Many assumed nothing would change when Oracle bought Sun. A reseller rep even told me he was looking forward to adding Oracle products to his Sun portfolio.

Then Larry said he wanted to go direct and take all the top 4000 accounts from those same resellers that had been so loyal to Sun, but would leave them all the low-end and low-margin accounts to farm. Which was funny seeing as those resellers had the relationship into those 4000 accounts and Soreacle didn't have the salesforce to hand to unseat the resellers.

I expect hp and IBM to making cooing noises to all those ex-Sun resellers, and that is only good for us customers as more money from the vendors means more leeway for the resellers to drop prices and still make a profit! ;)

Apple's iPad - the device for execs who create nothing

Been there, suffered that!

A while back, as a tech exercise (alright, as an excuse to order a few of the original tablet PCs), we did a project to get as many business tools as possible onto the intranet so our execs could have all the information they needed, in pretty pic formats, pie charts and whatever, day or night. Most of our business apps had built-in web interfaces from which we could extract reports and then all we needed to do was build a protal to present them internally. A quick bit of web kludging later and it was done, and we had our excuse to saunter around with our mobile DVD play- I mean, vital network management tablet PCs. The execs could look at the pretty performance graphs on their Macbooks, laptops or whatnots from anywhere on our LAN or remotely, without having to worry about formats, as HTML was/is common and everything else was translated into GIFs. Until the execs asked if we could make a version that looked good on their BladckBerry screens. This was a bit of a nightmare due to the size of the screens, but we even managed that.

Now, that was more than eight years ago. If there are still execs today stupid enough not to know they can do all the stuff Roambi does with free web tools then they really do deserve to suffer the Apple tax. After all, even the iPad can run a browser! Well, if you stand close enough to the Wi-Fi router and it doesn't do dual-band signals.....

Israel using Facebook as 'spying tool' in Gaza

RE: Not sure if ironic...

Well, he'd be really in the brown stuff if he posted an aerial shot of his home from Google maps! Probably a bit more serious than the result when a twit at work did just that on their Facebook page, and then put up the dates she was away on holiday.....

Anway, I'm glad the Israelis have finally found a real use for Facebook. Strange that all those undernourished, energy-starved Gazans can even run PCs, let alone have the energy to wade through Facebook!

How Labour’s Web2.0rhea cockup helped the photographers

I find this all very insulting!

After all, I enjoyed the Eighties! :D

Oh, sorry, you were expecting a serious and frank exchange of opinions on just how stupid and petty our politicians have become? Don't worry, I'm sure the bod concerned will claim Parliamentary Privelege.

IBM tears up open source patent pledge, claims FOSS

Hold on a sec......

So, if IBM wins that means another bit of software won't be running on Power? Does that mean I can use the frothing IBMer logic and that Power7 is dead? LOL!

IBM takes drastic measures to protect the cash cow of the mainframe market, especially as the margins are shrinking as the competition hots up. Just look what they did to PSI, where an emulator running on Itanium Superdomes thrashed IBM mainframes, and for a fraction of the price. Bullyboy IBM sued them into submission, then bought them and killed the product. Not because there weren't people that wanted to buy it, but because IBM could make more money from the mainframe suckers.

The sad thing is I did actually think IBM meant what they said when they said they wouldn't troll FOSS. A sad day indeed.

Intel (finally) uncages Nehalem-EX beast

RE: Microsoft just dumped Itanium

Still looking hard for the link to "Micorosft announces support for Windows on Power"..... Maybe you could help me, Mrs Kebabfart, you seem to be very close to the IBM FUD department? OH, you mean it has never been supported on Power? Why, by your argument, what a complete failure Power7 must be!

/SP&L

Re RAS (@Matt)

".....Why do you assume that anyone questioning is a Sunshiner? I'm not....." But you have all the syptoms - inability to read a post and actually comprehend the content; no knowledge of how enterprise systems are used; no understanding of the business cycle; complete failure to actually do some research before posting; ability to contradict yourself in the space of three lines.....

"....As you well know yourself, and indeed have said here previously, AMD64 on Proliant does very nicely for hardware RAS thank you...." If you say I have said it before, why are you accusing me of saying "you need IA64 for decent RAS"!?!?!?

".....In fact now that IA64 systems and x86-64 systems are both Hypertransport based [1] there can't be much difference can there....." Except the one big difference you forgot - scale. Even Nehalem EX does not scale to the same extent as Power, Itanium or SPARC64 (though it already scales past Niagara). Whilst x64 is great for scale out, it cannot currently scale up as much as those enterprise UNIX chips with the same level of vendor support. Whilst there are ways to make it scale (after all, Unisys has been doing it for years), they are not mainstream, are expensive, and do not have 64-bit WIndoze or Linux apps to match. Until the whole x64 stack - hardware, OS and commercial apps - can scale to match Power, Itanium and SPARC64 there will carry on being a market for those CPUs in large SMP servers.

"....There'd still be a place for IA64 for a year or two...." <Sigh> Just give up now, you're not doing anything to help your cause. It will take a lot longer for the OS and commercial apps to appear for really large scale x64 instances. And then you will have to wean us customers off our SMP UNIX paltforms that we all like and trust. Believe me, I've done the research and the POCs, and we could strip out about 98% of our current UNIX and WIndoze servers and cobble together solutions using Lintel and OSS apps, but there is no way the business would get the same level of support which means risk, and the business is very adverse to risk. So we don't. At the current rate of development I'd say large SMP UNIX is probably safe for a good ten years if not more. And that's depsite my being a Linux fanboi. Should UNIX development stay ahead and we see a jump to 128-bit UNIX OS and CPUs then all bets are off and x64 is back to playing catch up again (though whether IBM, Intel or Fudgeitso have the will to make the jump to 128-bit is questionable).

"....But so much personal prestige at HP HQ and Intel HQ depends on it *not* happening....." Where do you get this stuff, from the bottom of a w(h)ine bottle? As it stands, Intel is the leading x64 CPU manufacturer, they would like nothing more than to have everyone switch to x64 because they would make MORE MONEY. And hp is the leading x64 vendor, so same goes for them, as it would seriously damage their opposition. What you fail to see is that hp has very cleverly balanced the two to meet the spread in market demand. Sun killed itself pitting UNIX against x64, whereas hp are happy to offer both. Whilst hp would be very happy to take the extra margin they make on all the attach on Integrity, they have realised that they need to be strong in x64 to stay strong in the UNIX field. What you mistake for "personal prestige" is just actually shrewd product management. When Integrity no longer makes money for hp then it will be retired, and likely enough hp-ux along with it as hp probably won't be as stupid as to go head-on with Linux and WIndoze like Sun tried (and failed) to do.

/SP&L

RE: Did Matt forget to log in?

Dear Sunshiner,

Why is it you poor, deluded fools feel the need to pretend you are someone else when posting? I know you spend many an hour pretending to have technical knowledge, or that the Sunset didn't happen or that Rock isn't dead (is it just sleeping?), so maybe it's just habitual. Anyway, you forgot to put on the SP&L ("still pointing and laughing") - you're as poor at forgeries as you are at IT!

".....Matt Bryant, perhaps, judging from the 'sceptical' content?...." Now, why would I be sceptical about Nehalem EX? If you had bothered to read my previous posts you might have realised I am looking forward to the uber Nehalem.

"....Matt, if that is you, how many of the features you list does today's Itanic have?...." Whilst I can see why TPM's attempt to turn the EX launch into an Itanium attack piece would appeal to you, the reality is Nehalem EX is going to take big chunks out of ALL the UNIX lines - IBM's Power, Fudgeitso's SPARC64 and Soreacle's Niagara. The difference in effect on those vendors is that it will be predominantly eating the UNIX market from the bottom up, so Niagara will be hit hardest, followed by SPARC64, then Power, then Integrity. You may disagree (without any logical argument to support your rabid rantings), but the recent Gartner market figures showed that Sun is selling nothing but low-end, pSeries seems to be spread across the midrange, and hp are dragging in the top-end deals (check the figures in the thread http://forums.theregister.co.uk/forum/1/2010/02/24/gartner_q4_2009_servers/).

Those low-end systems are going to be at threat from the standard Nehalem EX boxes that will be coming out and scaling to eight sockets, same goes for a chunk of the mid-range, but the high-end should be a lot safer (unless we see a tier 1 vendor making a 16-socket Nehalem EX box). So, at the monemt, it looks like Itanium in hp Integrity has the least to fear from Nehalem EX, and seeing as hp is the leading x86 vendor it is also likely that hp will also be the vendor to gain most from any eating of the UNIX low-end. And seeing as I am all for hp ProLiant and Integrity (in my opinion, they give me the best performance at the best price with the best management tools and support), that means I'm actually quite happy with the idea of more scaleable Xeon boxes. And I'm also sure pressure from AMD will keep the prices of those scaleable x86 boxes down too!

Oops, did I not sound sceptical then? Sorry!

/SP&L

Opera alerts EU to hidden Windows browser-ballot

I really, really hope someone form the Opera team reads this!

Becaue even if the Opera team managed to get the EU to force M$ to have a browser choice screen where the ONLY choice was Opera, I still wouldn't install their junk browser! I'd just cancel the screen, then install IE and Firefox. Opera offers me nothing I actually want or need over the other two. Whilst I'm sure Opera has plenty of fans I say let them install it and the rest of us can make our own minds up, thanks. And what has made me so ant-Opera? The constant whining.

Novell (not SCO) owns UNIX, says jury

RE: "It's a setback," SCO trial lawyer said.....

Anyone reminded of a certain Black Knight?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?gl=GB&hl=en-GB&v=dhRUe-gz690

"'Tis but a scratch; I've had worse!"

I'm betting stupid b*stards will still be threatening to bite IBM's legs off even after all their cases have been thrown out!

Royal Navy starts work on new, pointless frigates

RE: Critique is all good and well, but it does pose a question

"Not unusual for armies, navies, and air forces to plan for the last war, then get solidly trounced in the next one....." Which is why we see "multi-role" platforms like the new frigate, which try and cater for just about every possible role so we don't end up with expensive, one-role ships (cough*air-defence destroyers*cough). But Lewis overplays the RN's clout in actually making many of these long-term strategic decisions, many are settled by White Hall mandarins that have never served on a ship in any form. In wartime we can afford as many single-role, specialist designs as we like, with the Navy pushing for what is actually operationally required, but in peacetime it's just too expensive. So we end up with generalist ships that are sometimes exposed as not good when thrown into an unexpected situation (like having to protect a landing force in the close San Carlos Bay from continuous fast fighter-bomber attacks, with ships and systems actually designed to shoot at the odd Soviet recce Bear in open waters). Those generalist ships do the majority of peacetime roles quite well and to a relatively cheap budget. And I say cheap as we tend to keep them for many years, rather than refreshing with a new design whenever a new threat arrives (or ships are lost to action, as happens in wartime).

"....So I pose a question: What will conflicts in the next score years look like, how big will they be, and what fleet, army, and air assets does one need to hold one's own with some hope of trouncing the enemy?....." If we were truly planning independent large operations, then more destroyers and heli-carriers would make more sense. But the truth is our politicians are unlikely to ever commit us to another independent war again. Even the Falklands was completely unexpected. The intention is that our Navy will work either as a small part of an Allied fleet (which means playing a token role in support of the US), or as part of a combined European fleet (which means playing guess-the-role with a bunch of unelected Eurocrats with a level of rampant corruption that make BAe look like schoolgirls).

Looking ahead, the RN will probably be tasked with the following for the next twenty years:

1. Anti-smuggling ops, especially in the Carribean.

2. Anti-piracy ops, especially off Africa and possibly in the South-East Asian environment.

3. Fulfilling the anti-submarine and mine-sweeping roles as part of an Allied (US) fleet in a UN role (possibly against Iran as they do have a few subs and plenty of mines, very unlikley against the Norks, Russians or Chinese).

4. Acting as a deterent to a bankrupt Argentinian navy.

5. Supporting disaster relief ops, where actual shooting is unlikley to involve anything bigger than a Gimpy.

For all the above, even the current Type 22/23s are quite effective (especially with Lewis's other bugbear, the Merlin), so maybe we should spend more on modernising those old hull designs to stretch them for another twenty years rather than replacing the lot with a "do-all" new design. BAe does do a lot of open market design work at the taxpayers expense, but then that is because politicians let them as a way of safeguearding jobs in "deprived" areas. Having said that, it would be horribly expensive to buy up old merchantships and refit them (all different and individual refits with each having to be an individual redesign), and then maintain all those different designs with their different machinery, even if their combat systems were common. The only way round that would be a mass order of a single merchant design, and that would then probably lead to modifications being made to the design to suit the new role, pushing up the price as it moves away from be a merchantship to being a hybrid that probably does less but costs almost the same.

But I do disagree with the idea of the carrier being the multi-role solution to everything, as it is also an all-eggs-in-one-basket solution - we usually can't afford more than two or three at a time, which usually means only one in any outing. Should an opposing force sink the carrier then the rest of the one-role ships in the area will be sitting ducks, so they actually need to be capable of looking out for themselves.

/Pirate icon for obvious reasons ;)

Sun's IBM-mainframe flower wilts under Oracle's hard gaze

Not news?

Whilst it is tempting to say "toldya so!", the reality is this is just more theatre by those working on ex-Sun open projects, and equally political as what they accuse Larry of doing. In short, any project that thinks it is under threat from the Oracle profit machine is working overtime to get the open source crowd screaming blue murder, in the hope that Larry will then back off axing their project. I have had two emails this month from groups urging me to "protect the open source investment" (by which I assume they mean protect their investment in the future profits they think they can make off of servcies around said projects), presumably because I have at some point signed up to some Sun open source mailing list or other.

The reality is Larry is doing these people a favour - by killing unviable (and by that I mean unlikely to make profits for Oracle) projects now, Larry is stopping these people wasting more time and money flogging these dead horses. Whilst people in the community get very invested in their pet projects, it is often a good thing to have a real business brain come along and assess the proejcts money-making potential. Maybe not in keeping with the freetard dream of "coding for the greater good", but if no-one is ever going to use your code anyway where is the "good"?

Apple pries iPad moniker from Fujitsu

Is it just me....

..... or does the Kiwi iPad just look like a very artsy-fartsy trailer home? $125k and it doesn't even have wheels like a real trailer park special! OK, 125k Kiwi dollars so can't be much in real money, but still.....

Foreign Office changes tourist advice after Israeli inquiry

RE: Very inconvenient

"......I mean, they there were, enjoying life in their own homes, their own land, and along comes some bloke in a foreign government (clue: headquartered in London) who bows to a pressure group to accede to the founding of the State of Israel....." Hmmm, it seems the most inconvenient factor in your life is your total lack of any form of history learning in what you presumably assumed was an "education". I'm amazed anyone that could have got past Peter & Jane also has not at some point read the historic facts that debunk the "there were no Jews in Palestine before 1948" hokum.

First off, there have been Jews living in the area you refer to as Palestine longer even than it has been refered to as "Palestine". The Romans came up wth the name as a way of rechristening the then Judaic Kingdom which they had conquered, probably in relation to the even older race of Philistines that did occupy the area centuries before. When the idea of partitioning down population lines in the post-WW1 area known as the Palestine Mandate was originally drafted it was due to the belicosity of the Arabs, not the Jews. Some areas were quite distinct, but most of the large towns and cities had very mixed populations. For example, the census of Haifa in 1945 showed a mix of 33% Southern Syrian (Mulsim Arabs), 20% Christian (mainly Greek Orthodox Syrians) and 47% Jewish, and so was classed as "Jewish" even though 53% of the population wasn't! As it was a port and gateway to the Mandate, many Jewish refugees from Europe entered the area via Haifa and some stayed and boosted the Jewish population to 51% by the time the UN had a go in 1947. Both the Christian and Muslim populations also grew, and nobody was "displaced" by the growth of any party, Haifa itself growing. The British had several goes at trying to please everybody, then post-WW2 gave up and handed the problem over to the UN. Having decided that the Jews lived mainly in cities (60%) and the Arabs mainly in the rural areas (72%), the first UN draft gave almost all the cities to the Jews!

In all cases, the Arabs were the party that resisted any form of division and insisted on ruling over everything. To appease them, the area we now call Jordan was broken off and given to the Arabs in 1922 as guaranteed Arab land, leaving the Jews 26% to negotiate over. Jews were banned from owning land in Transjordan, which meant Jewish families already there had their land taken away long before Israel even came into existance. Nowadays we call that bit Jordan. But I guess we won't be hearing you calling for the right of return for Jewish refugees to Jordan.

Secondly, the Arabs nationalists kicked off several pogroms against Jews in the Mandate long before the Zionists got their state. Try reading up on the events in 1921, 1929 and 1936-39. In Jerusalem, both before 1948 and aftewards, Arabs tried their hardest to clear out any pockets of Jews. After 1948 this was orchestrated by the Jordanian government and was in direct contravention of the UN ceasefire. It also marked the one attempt at settling any Palestinian refugees - they simply drove whole Jewish neighbourhoods out and gave their houses to Arab refugees. Hilariously, many later took up an offer from the UN to register themselves as refugees even though they now had taken Jewish homes. Jewish neighbourhoods that had previously been marked as Jewish by both the Brits and the UN were thus ethnicly cleansed and became Arab neighbourhoods on the Eastern and Northern sides of what became the 1967 Green Line. Will you be insisting they are given back to Israel? I doubt it.

Thirdly, there is no real group of people with the historic name "Palestinians". The British and UN both recorded that the Arabs in the area predominantly classed themselves as Southern Syrian, Bedouin, Egyptian or Arabian. The idea to call themselves "Palestinians" is a bit of Arab nationalist theatre supposed to imply some form of historical and collective link to the land, when the reality was a mix of clans from several areas, some that had only moved to the area after 1922. The funniest bit of this is that the average Arab can't pronounce the word "Palestinian" as they don't have a hard p sound in Arabic, instead pronouncing it "Falestinians". Not surprisingly given the history, that was soon corrupted by critics to become "Fake-istinians".

Fourthly, the final UN division gave the jews only 14% of the original Mandate land, in a convolved and disjointed shape, and left large numbers of Jews in hostile Arab territory. This was much less than the Greater Israel dream, far less than the promise of the Balfour Declaration, and far less than the population balance suggests they should have had. But the Jews took that offer in the hope of peaceful co-existance with the Arabs. In response, not one Arab leader from any of the neighbouring lands asked for anything less than the complete destruction of Israel. Not one "Palestinian" Arab clan leader did either, they all advoctaed war. They massively outnumbered and outgunned the Jews, but they lost, and mainly because the Jews were fighting for their homes whilst the majority of the Arab fighters were soldiers from neighbouring countries.

Why was it so upsetting for the Arabs to have one tiny little bit of land, already shown to be predominantly owned by Jews, be classed as a Jewish country? After all, compared to the land mass of the Mediterranean and Gulf areas dominated by Muslims, even the larger Israel of today is less than 2% of the area that is ruled as various Islamic republics. More of a question, why do westerners like yourself repeat their hatefilled propaganda at every chance?

"....Forget that proposed holiday. Best to continue to keep well clear of Israel....." By the sounds of it, you probably wouldn't feel very at home in Israel anyway, so I suggest you holiday somewhere you're limited education doesn't pose any challenges, like Clacton or Blackpool, and leave the foreign travel to those of us more equipped to think for ourselves.

RE: Another way to destroy Israel

".....choose a microprocessor that isn't made by Intel for your next computer purchase...." Actually, if you really believe that's the thing to do, you should stop using or working with any products from any company that works with, develops and/or manufactures in, invests in, or sells to Israel. That means you can stop using any PC (whether it has an AMD or Intel CPU, including ARM chips, even if it doesn't use Windoze), anything from hp, Dell, IBM, Sun, Oracle, EMC, Bull, Fujitsu, CISCO, etc, etc, etc (to make it clear, just completely stop doing anything IT related, just to be safe). You can stop driving or travelling in a BMW, Ford, Jaguar, Volvo, Jeep, Chrysler, Mercedes, Fiat, Honda, - heck, by car fullstop! Most bus companies are on the list, or even truck (even Chinese manufacturers are trying to sell vehicles in Israel). Forget flying in anything other than a home-made glider, but you may be able to travel in rare cases by train, though you'll have to walk barefoot to the train station and check they are not using Diesel from any of the fuel companies that do work in Israel. Stop using any form of telephony. Stop buying at most major supermarkets (even if they don't have a subsidiary in Israel, most of them buy products from Israel and have investment portfolios including Israeli firms), make your own clothes from hemp and grow all your own food. Oh, and probably sort out your own drinking water and sanitation (yes, there's a global market for the water industry, and even US companies bid for and subcontract work to Israeli water projects - did you know the software that monitors the Israeli water pipelines was written in the UK?). Best not go to the hospital or doctor, seeing as Israelis have also made advances in the world of medicine and supply drugs to many Western countries. In short, welcome to the Middle Ages! Hope the satisfaction you feel in having a completely Israeli-free life makes up for your untimely death from your substandard diet and living conditions.

".....Does Gaza receive any aid whatsoever, at the moment?...." Ignoring monetary aid (Gazans are the most subsidised people on Earth), they receive a constant flow of material aid, usually through Israel. Israel only ever closes the border checkpoints when Palestinians attack them (which begs the question why do they attack them, unless they WANT to be able to say the border crossings are closed). Even the Friday that Operation Cast Lead kicked off, Israel let 80 trucks of aid materials (inclduing fuel and gas) into Gaza.

But lets not stop there. The Palestinians in general are the only people in the World to have their very own permeanent UN refugee agency! No other group anywhere has anything similar. There was no similar agency created for the Yugoslavian civil wars, the Sudan, or even the massive refugee problems of the Rwanda/Congo/Uganda civil wars. Which goes some way to explain why UNWRA does nothing to actually end the Palestinian refugee issue, instead it concentrates on keeping them as refugees. Must look after all those UN jobs!

But, if you want a real laugh, ask yourself why is Gaza receiving more aid than Haiti? I was looking for a site which detailed the amount of aid flowing into Gaza (738,576 tons of humanitarian aid being transferred into the Gaza Strip in 2009 - did you get that, Mr Carnegie? ) when I stumbled across this page (http://daledamos.blogspot.com/2010/03/why-is-gaza-getting-more-aid-than-haiti.html) which explains that 1.5 million Gazans, having suffered at most 1500 deaths during Cast lead, got more aid than the whole Haiti relief effort (3 million people, estimated 230,000 deaths)!

So, Rob, why don't you go have a read and then try coming back with an educated post, instead of more blatant and lying propaganda. Oh, hold on a sec - you won't be able to post as you'll be living in your self-imposed Middle Ages! Don't worry, we won't miss your non-contribution.

RE: Reading too much "Zionist Today" ?

Nope, just a few more websites than the average poster here seems to. Some of the stuff above comes from a quick perusal of the BBC News webby (even the BBC seems to have lost it's unqualified love for Obama), some from the Huffington Post site, some even from forums of other tech sites. A little reading is a good thing, you get to see so much more of the wider picture.

As regards Iran, the longterm issue of the Arabs versus the Persians existed before the State of Israel was created. Using "anti-Zionism" is not a real issue, it is just a means by which Arab (and Persian) dictators have sought to garner public support from the Ummah, and simply reflects the built-in pejudices of Islam. Ignoring that, there is the fundamental schism in Islam between Sunnis and Shia, which also is completely of their own making, and doesn't even start to describe the problems of how Sunnis and Shias treat other Islamic-related religions such as Allawites and the Druze (even if you took the Maronite Christians out of the Lebanon you'd still have the fighting between the Sunnis, Shias, Druze and Allawites).

The problems of multi-faith Lebanon, a problem that does owe something to Imperialist meddling (the Fwench that time), has it's roots in the much older clashes between Christianity and Islam, rather than Israel. Of course, the multi-faith Lebanon did declare war on Israel in 1948 and is technically still at war with Israel. And how exactly do you blame Israel for Iraq's continual claims to chunks of Kuwait (please note, the UK sent troops to Kuwait in the '60s to stop Saddam's predecessor from invading, and even the new "friendly" Iraqi government still lays claim to chunks of Kuwait and Iran)?

Trying to pretend that US aid to Israel (much lower than the Palestinians receive, and very much lower than the annual US aid to neighbours such as Egypt) is somehow impacting on any of those is just laughable. Bleating about it is merely repeating the soundbites of those same "Islamic" dictators who seek to damage Israel, and even if the US was to stop all aid to Israel it would not change one iota of public opinion in the many Islamic states that have conditioned their people to believe the extermination of - not the limitting, not the "two-state" solution, but the complete and genocidal removal of - the one Jewish state in the World is the only acceptable solution.

After all, if the Palestinians really had any desire for a real peace they would have expressed unconditional joy at the announcement of the Oslo Accords (they didn't) and accepted the offer made to Arafat by Ehud Barack at Camp David, where Israel offered a much better deal than even Bill Clinton expected. Despite being offered 95% of what the PLO had demanded, a situation that is unlikley to ever be repeated, Arafat declined the deal, refused to negotiate and went back to Ramallah to kick off the Second Intifada. Even Bill Clinton, no great friend of Israel, is on record as saying he put the blame completely on Arafat. Did the Palestinians get upset with Arafat for junkng the best chance of lasting peace? No, they happilly went on the rampage.

Truth is, there is very little pressure on Fatah or Hamas to seek a lasting peace with Israel. Fatah receives plenty of cash from the US, EU, Russia and countless Islamic countries for doing nothing other than being in dispute with Israel. Hamas's whole existance is built on the eradication of Israel, and Iran pays them handsomely to continue acting in the manner. Should peace break out, even if it was by the destruction of Israel, all those benefits would disappear - would any of the Islamic countries be willing to send money to the Palestinians if Israel wasn't there? Unlikley. Bang would go all the UN, EU and US aid, UNWRA would be out of a job, and the Palestinians would actually have to get off their backsides and build something for a change. It is much easier for the Palestinian elite to maintain the stauts quo, lap up the plaudits and the aid money, and let their people suffer. After all, as Egypt and Jordan have shown, peace is possible with Israel, if you actually want it.

RE: People that live in glass houses....

"......because their government act like spoilt brats...." Hmmmm, and everywhere else is just the picture of calm, careful deliberation - not! Our own UK government is spinning like crazy to try and look tough in the run-up to an election which they know they have little chance of winning. Millygirl is simply positioning himself for the inevitable Labour leadership race that will follow our unelected PM's ejection from office. In truth, we have a lot more to lose from a break in relations with Israel than they do with the UK - we already import far more arms tech from Isreal than they buy from us (such as our drones). Gaza alone receives far more aid from the UK alone than Israel receives imports from the whole EU. And Mossad are far more interested in sharing intel on Islamic extremists than Fatah or Hamas. So who looks childish now in ejecting an Israeli "diplomat", when there really is little other than circumstancial evidence to link Israel to the Dubai killing?

Over in the ol' US-of-A, Israel-bashing is in full swing! Maybe the news the CIA blew away a whole building and four other people when it nailed a senior Taliban commander in Miranshah the other week stopped the Yanks getting too vocal about the neater Dubai hit, but then there was the Biden "insult" to consider. By coincidence, the Jerusalem municipality didn't announce (it was wasn't a public announcement, someone phoned every journalist they could think of to spread the news) that the planning for the 1600 homes, to be built in NORTH Jerusalem in a Jewish area the wrong side of the Green Line, had reached stage six of nine in getting approval, the same week that Biden arrived for his visit. So, no public announcement to rub Biden's face in it, no actual building work, not even the permission to start building.

But old Kneejerk Shrillary Clinton squeals about being "insulted" - insulted? You'd think after all those years of running around in her husband's lecherous shadow she would have grown a thicker skin. After all, she did originally applaud the Israeli announcement that they would "temporarily halt settlement buildings in the the West Bank EXCEPT Jerusalem". Which saved face for Obama after he originally killed off the recent process to talks by announcing that Israel should stop all settlement building without even checking with Israel! So what was there for her to get upset about? Do we get a calm and careful response from Ms Clinton? Of course not - she went off the Richter scale over a bit of minor beareucratic mis-timing that has been hyped to death, accompanied by serious growling from Obama's favourite astroturfer, David Axelrod (a bit like a mugger complaining of high crime rates). Having got herself back down off the ceiling she had to backpedal furiously in time for her speech to AIPAC - can't risk those Jewish-American votes what with Obama's old-style-Washington wheeler-dealing for his Healthcare program having stripped away a lot of his "hope'n'change" sparkle.

Of course, Shrillary was completely blase about Palestinian "provocations" that occured in the same week Biden was in Israel. Apparently, there is nothing insulting about the Palestinians announcing that they have named a square "in honour" of Fatah terrorist Dalal Mughrabi, who died killing 38 unarmed Israeli civillains (of which 13 were children) in an attack on a bus in Israel in 1978. Shrillary didn't even get upset that Mughrabi's other victim was American photographer Gail Rubin, so apparently honouring the killers of US citizens is also not insulting. Shrillary stated in her AIPAC speech that Hamas were the guilty party and she wasn't totally wrong - both Fatah and Hamas have announced they will name squares after Mughrabi, it's just Fatah got round to it first. It's also not the first time both have honoured Mughrabi. But, of course, the honouring of a murderer of women and children is neither insulting nor provocative if it is by either Palestinian party, compared to partial planning permission for homes, in a Jewish neighbourhood, that may never get built.

Or that, whilst The Obumbler was giving Netenyahu a toned-down meeting in the White House, today marked the day that the 333 occurence of a mortar or rocket being fired out of Gaza into Israel since the end of Operation Cast Lead just over a year ago. Apparently, that rate of just under one attempted murder of Israeli civillians a day is neither provocative nor insulting. After all, it is much less than the rate they were being fired before Cast Lead, so maybe Shrillary and The Obumbler think the Israelis should be grateful.

And all this hardball Israel-bashing routine has nothing to do with the on-going talks aimed at boosting the Allied (read "US") relationship with Islamic Pakistan. No, sir, nothing to do with getting the Allies out of Afghanistan ASAP so Obama has at least some good news to show the voters in the November mid-terms. Unfortunately, Obama has fallen for the old line that all the problems in the MiddleEast and Asia stem from the unsettled Israeli-Palestinian "issue" (like the Iran-Iraq War, or the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, or Egypt's invasion of Sudan, or Saudi's invasion of Yemen several times over, or even the Lebanese Civil War, none of which could in any way be blamed on Israel), and that if that Israel is somehow forced to a quick conclusion then the whole Islamic world will just start being the nicest place ever! Yeah, right.

In the meantime, it seems to be accepted by all Western politicians that bashing Israel has no negatives, just lots of good publicity. Self-serving politicians, using a friendly country as a scape-goat for a bit of publicity? Very principled and adult behaviour.

Not too likely.

Firstly, all the cloned passports are from people residing in Israel, not casual tourists, which implies the "cloning" did not happen via the Israeli Border Police and tourists are unlikely to be targetted. And any advice to tourists from the Foreign Office is usually ignored by 99.9% of travellers anyway, they simply don't bother to read the bumph, so I can't see a whole planeload all getting antsie with the IBP.

Secondly, the Israelis are keen to get tourists to their country, and are unlikley to be as heavy-handed as you suggest. The standard response to you not providing a valid passport at the entry point is simply going to be a polite refusal to let you enter the country. If the airline decides to let you back on their jet is another story. Unless you have a real desire to reprise Tom Hank's role in "The Terminal", I can't really recommend the arrivals halls of any Israeli airports I know as particulalry fun places to while away the hours.

IBM kills off second-gen Cell blade server

Erm.... sales figures?

Despite the flowery send off from TPM, the reason IBM are canning the product is becasue they haven't sold enough to make it economically attractive enough to carry on production. Instead, they'll simply use generic cores on multi-core Power chips on standard J-series blades to do the job, though how well is debateable given that those Power cores are not going to be specialised in any way like those in a Cell arrangement. What should worry IBMers more is a little birdie tells me the driver is partly the not-so-brilliant sales figures for the Power-based J-series blades.

UK.gov blames Israel for cloning passports in Dubai hit

Just political posturing.

Millygirl trying to look tough? Yeah, like MI6 has NEVER used fake passports before! I suppose a suitably Biblical quote would be "Let he whom is without sin cast the first stone".... The argument from the civil servants is that by abusing the integrity of Birtish passports, Israel has put all UK travellers at risk. Personally, I'll feel much safer on my next trip to Israel knowing MadBoob is not around to send suicide bombers anymore.

IBM chops high-end Power6 server tags

RE: Oh, let me repeat myself yet again

Jesper, whilst it is fun beating up on Kebabfart with benchmarks, it's a bit dishonest to pretend customers are guaranteed even three times the performance just going on vendor benchmarks. Sure, Power6 is much faster than Niagara in most cases in the real World, but reality does involve a lot more than just chip speeds. You also have to take into account the rest of your hardware (is it a memory intensive app rather than CPU intensive, is it heavy on disk access or LAN bandwidth, etc, etc), the app and OS stack, and the other systems it has to interact with. We had Power6 kit that trounced Niagara in one of our shoot-outs by a factor of two, which is lower than we expected, but was lower due to non-IBM parts of the overall solution so not IBM's fault. In day-to-day use we are actually seeing performance averaging about 10% less than what we saw in the shoot-out as it was very hard to mimic our real environment completely, and we didn't correctly predict an impact on one of the other parts of the solution. Again, not IBM's fault. So, for us, in this case Power6 in production turned out to be about 1.9 times faster than the best result Sun's reseller could get out of Niagara in the shoot-out. Still much better, and at a very good price too, so we're not too upset, but we might have been if we'd just assumed we were going to get 4+ times better performance as the original IBM reseller's pitch suggested.

Just to keep Kebabfart happy, I would like to point out we did have one shoot-out around a web-based project where Niagara outperfromed Xeon, Itanium and Power6. So, as they say, different horses for different courses.

If you already have Power6 in production, or have a very good idea that it will perform to the level you require, then this price-cut is great news! Power6 is proven and stable, and if you buy Power6 now you can let others find the bugs that are probably hiding away in the new Power7 and the new version of AIX, then upgrade later when IBM has fixes for them. Still, it will probably pay to pretend to the IBM salesgrunt that you are thinking of holding off until Power7 arrives to see if you can get a few more percent off the price.... ;)

/Shoot-outs - fun for everyone except the salegrunts!

Sunshiner cross-over?

Dear oh dear, poor ickle jlocke has given up championing SPARC and started singing the Power song. Ah well, just goes to show even he's not quite as thick as he comes across, even he realises SPARC in any form is a lost cause. Not surprised he's jumped for the safety of "big boy" IBM and Power after what must have been for him the very shocking Sunset. Anyway, on with the fun!

"....Couldn't the high clock rate generate a black hole and swallow the earth ?...." I suppose that, after the years of Sunshine and SPARC vapourware, it's not surprising that your grasp on reality is a little weak. I hope you don't post under your real name as your employer (even if it is the local McDonalds) probably wouldn't be too impressed with your deluded ramblings.

"....Safety is on the side of Itanic !" Well, safety is on the side of Itanium, Power, Xeon and Opteron users, as none of those chips are in doubt, whereas just about anything left from the Sun carcass is vulnerable to Larry's demand for profits. Maybe I should take time to explain the word "profit" seeing as most of today's Sunshiners have never known a time when Sun actually made a profit? Then again, seeing as most of them have serious problems comprehending even the most simplistic business, economic or technical facts, it would probably be time wasted!

IBM's price-cuts are very understandable - they need to shift existing stock as most customers will understandably want to wait for Power7, and those holdouts could put a dent in IBM's revenue figures for the next two quarters. I'm also pretty sure it's becasue the DDR2-equipped Power6 doesn't stand much of a chance against DDR3-equipped Tukzilla, and seeing as hp might get their Tukzilla top-end kit out before the Power7 top-end arrives IBM is going to need every help it can get to stop those more lucrative top-end deals going to hp.

Intel Labs unveils PC power plans

Well, bang goes my idea!

Ever wonder what you're going to do with a six-core desktop? I know I do, seeing as most of the desktops in our business are used by users doing little more than email, Word and browsing (well, web-interfaces to nasty stuff like SAP, but not really heavy use) - hardly requires the dual-cores most of our users already have. Yet the purchasing cycle grinds on, and soon we will replace the current crop of perfectly adequate desktops with new, even more powerful desktops. So, my idea would be to use all those cores more effectively.

In particular, I'd like the OS to run three copies of the same thread in parallel, compare the three results for an error, check if the result is likely to cause a problem and only go to the next cycle if it is all looking good. Not new stuff, it's how NonStop does it in high-end computing. But I will probably have lots of CPU cycles going spare in my new desktop, and the idea of a Windoze that doesn't ever blue-screen or apps that don't crash sounds good. Only problem is that would require more power as more cores would be kept active, and everyone seems fixated on reducing power consumption.

Gelsinger stuns analysts and colleagues with storage pool plan

Split brain?

"....You are assuming multiple masters. That is incorrect. There are multiple copies...." Multiple masters or multiple copies, it matters not - both cases require lots of communication to keep every copy up-to-date with changes otherwise you could have two copies with different data both being offered to users that could affect a decision or calculation. For example, suppose we have an online ordering system which allows companies to order off one global account from multiple countries (think something like DHL courier services). If Customer A's global account has an order limit of $1m, and they hit that limit in their Brazil branch, you need to get all the local copies of Customer A's accounts updated fast otherwise an order could also be processed in the UK which could take them over their limit. Or, worse, consider an ordering system where you are offering a finite resource - not having all the copies updated could lead to an over-commitment. In either case, as each transaction came in, you would want to lock the account so other orders couldn't be made until a commit had completed on the first order, which means not just update traffic (which would mean latency) but also lock messages to all copies (more latency). Multiple masters or multiple copies, the speed of light rule still applies.

".....If you want to get interesting, think about allowing multiple writers when the sites are out of communication. Then bring the sites back together....." Sounds like what I would refer to as a "split brain" problem, where you don't want a cluster which normally shares a single database instance splitting and both sides thinking they have the active copy of a database - both sides could commit conflicting changes and would not be able to be synched back together when the cluster recovers. Which does bring us to the point of would you use such a distributed system for a high-speed, low response time database system such as a billing platform? Probably not. But if you had a simpler task where a higher response time is not an issue, like a records store for a CRM system, then you probably could afford to use file locking to make sure the central record is only being updated by one user at a time and most users wouldn't notice the lag on a query. I suppose it all boils down to what applications EMC see this being used for.

As for hardware, I can see EMC using CISCO's UCS seeing as they have already said nice things about it, then they could offer a pre-built appliance. They could offer it as software to sit on anyone's blades or racked boxes if customers are resistant to the idea of CISCO hardware but I can't see that being an issue (the EMC badge buys a lot of trust). No, the bigger problem is that I don't see this as particularly unique, especially if it is SVC-based, as both IBM and hp could cobble together competing devices pretty fast, possibly even Soreacle. If there proves to be a big enough market to make it attractive, that is.

Multiple masters = worse!

".....but the YY code can do distributed RAID-1's, so access to data does not need to all go to a single site - multiple copies of blocks can exist at multiple sites....." So, then that's multiple master copies that all need to be kept in synch. Having multiple copies does not get round the problem that signals can only travel at the speed of light, in fact it makes it worse as you now have lots more signals to keep all the masters up-to-date. And if all it does is RAID1 copies, how is it better than any of the current crop of block copying software such as EMC's old SRDF? Whilst I can see this working in a city-wide or continental cluster, any greater distance is going to mean massive lag on commits. Imagine sitting in front of your Word doc, pressing "save" and then having to wait ten minutes for the commit to complete, and then having a message coming up saying "saved failed" because another user on the other side of the World has beaten you to the save by a few milliseconds. Strange, I never thought of Gelsinger as the type to start thinking the laws of physics just don't apply to him, but maybe I was wrong.

Mole-cruiser planned to attack Iranian nuke bunkers

RE: @Matt Bryant - spot the obsessive Sunshiner

".....we are desparate for your massive 1.7 GH !!" Well, if you were reliant on Rock for your plans then you probably are desperate for a real enterprise CPU like Tukzilla.

How sad that you have to bring your petty vendetta into a forum which has nothing to do with CPUs. I mean, it's a pretty sad thread with the amount of geek Sci-Fi worship going on, but at least that's funny, self-deprecating geek stuff, whereas you're obviously just bitter. I suggest you take a long hard look at yourself in the mirror and ask yourself if your Sunshiner life really is so empty that you have to drag it into every discussion.

I suggest a lot more time spent either getting out and meeting real people (no, Second Life "people" don't count), or at least more time watching the Sci-Fi Channel. The former would probably be better for you but probably a big shock to your system, but at least the latter would allow you to join discussions on these forums in an equally geeky, humourous and not quite so bitter fashion.

Can't resist.....

If it was made General Atomics it could be the Autonomous Robotic Subterranian Exploder Reaper....

/I'm going, I'm going, no need to push!

Shame on you all!

Have you all forgotten the tunnelling Twister missile used by Judge Dredd in The Apocalypse War (Part 5) to take the war to the nasty East Meg? Dredd took the warhead out so he could sneak a team of Judges into the East Meg's bunkers and launch the East Meg's own missiles against them.

/Yeah, I've got an anorak, so what?

Hedge fund suitor denies Novell asset sale rumors

SAP needs an OS? Really?

Not so sure about that. SAP can currently garner support from IBM, hp, Microsoft and the Linux crowd by offering their software with equal gusto on all fronts. If it was to buy Novell it would be seen as giving preference to Linux (SLES) and the other OS vendors would suspect SAP would start to give Linux preference over others. That might mean SAP starts finding support from other sources starting to be a bit hedged. And to defend SAP's marketshare against Oracle, SAP will need all the friends it can get. Sure, Microsoft and IBM both make competing products, and the Linux crowd are also pushing "free" alternatives, but at the moment they all see Oracle as an enemy given Oracle's new-found love of SPARC Slowaris, and the enemy of my enemy is always my friend in the software market. Staying OS agnostic is probably the smarter bet for SAP.

IBM, on the other hand, has a long relationship with Novell, has a reason to go up against Microsoft, and has the money to spare. I think far too much of hp's revenues are linked to being Microsoft's BFFL, and they're still sorting out the EDS mess. Any move by Microsoft to buy Novell would have the EU competition authorities going ape, let alone the US one, and probably the same for an Oracle purchase attempt. I see IBM

Female porn director turned pol grabs Kent by the ballots

Two thumbs up.....

..... just probably not where she'd stick 'em in one of her films! At least, as she says, she is a successful businesswoman in a male-dominated industry, and she has done so through hard work rather than simply toeing the dominant, male line. Whatever you think of her "work", it is legal and highly competitive, so she can't be thick. I suspect this is actually a quite shrewd move by the Libs as she does compare very favourably to many of the vacuous "Blair's Babes" that NuLuddite stuffed their party with just to try and grab the female vote. Looks like poor Adam Holloway will actually have a real battle on his hands, though she may end up stealing votes from dissatisfied Labour voters tired of Broooon the Goon and keeping Holloway in the seat.

And I thought everyone knew feminine ejaculation existed?

Is EMC looking away from STEC?

Ooops!

Looks like someone at EMC bought the SSD hype! I'm guessing they fell for that usual supplier line "You'd better order plenty now 'cos all your competitors have said they're gonna order LOADS, and you wouldn't want to be left out, would you?" Meanwhile, back in the marketplace, us customers said "Hmmmm, nice and fast, but at that price we just don't need that many."

If anyone from EMC purchasing is reading this, have you heard about the latest and greatest, sure-thing investment - Florida Everglades property investment! Just make sure you have $millions to spare and dial 800-IAMASUCKER....

IBM's Power7 pitch deconstructed

"Leakage"

I'm thinking IBM are more worried that migrations to x64 mean a lot more going to hp than IBM's x64. On the other hand, I am eager to get some Power7 kit to play with, see what it can do in the real World. It should give a nice boost over some of the older Power6 kit we have.

Employers call for end to Mickey Mouse degrees

RE: Re: right people for the job

I sympathise but the problem is usually not the actual person that's going to employ the recruit, it's the gormless HR people that do the adverts and the selection. I get really frustrated when I see jobs I need filled advertised as "graduate-level". I know that there are plenty of people that could do the job but their applications will be binned because some know-nothing HR drone has decided you need a degree just because it's a certain paygrade. I once interviewed eight graduates put forward by HR for a sysadmin role and found all to be unsuitable, only to find HR had binned an application from an experienced admin because he had no A-levels.

Gartner report card gives high marks to x64, blades

RE: NO, BAD MATT, BAD

Aw, Vicky is really throwing a whobbler over this one! Calm down, Vic, get a grip! I know the recent Sunset was just so upsetting for you Sunshiners but you really need to put it all in perspective. Life goes on, even for those like you spending most of it in your Mom's basement.

"....Obviously, "many years ago" means it's not up to date with the times...." Nope, I still hear even noobie users refer to it as Slowaris. The thing is, once you get a bad rep it's hard to shake, and Sun did nothing to undo the damage. If anything, mistakes like UltraSPARC V and Rock just made Sun in general look more incompetent.

"....Typical Matt response, avoid the question....." How is it avoiding the question to state the bleedin' obvious? No-one is investing new fab plants in SPARC, not even Fujitsu. Have Texas Instruments broken ground on any new fabs for SPARC? Oh, sorry, I forgot - TI ditched SPARC years ago. Well, how about Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Corp, the supposed new 45nm fabricators for Fujitsu? Hmmm, they haven't announced any new fab plants either, which doesn't sound like good news for SPARC64 VIII, let alone the 45nm T3. Indeed, the only announcement of planned new manufacturing capability from TSMC is for a plant to supply wafers to National Semi, not Fujitsu. And please do answer the bit about Southern Asset Management losses, just to give the rest of us a good laugh.

"....SPARC International is the organization behind the architecture and it was founded nearly two decades ago..." By Sun. For the sole purpose of generating licensing money for Sun. Big surprise, not - it hasn't made a profit for Sun. Nice try pretending it was some sort of independent association though.

"....such a LEON (SPARC v8)..." LEON, a 32-bit one-use processor only found in ESA space junk. It doesn't even run Slowaris, just cut-down real-time OS offerings based on Linux. Yeah, a great commercial success! Well, at least it actually got made, unlike Rock. Please, give us another example to keep the laughter rolling in!

"....with which you can take full advantage of the SPARC architecture with no strings attached...." Apart from the fact you have to buy the SPARC system from Sun (or Fujistsu, or actually probably from Fujitsu and badged as Sun). No, no strings attached at all, unless you want hardware support (for which you have to pay Sun or Fujitsu, or likely pay Sun to pay Fujitsu), or software support (guess what - from Sun again!). Yeah, nice and "no strings attached" -LOL!

"....Matt, if you are going to reply, please do so within the context of the information contained in my post..." Well, go away and chew on my response whilst I catch up with "Two And A Half Men" on Paramount. It's almost as comic as yourself but so much less tragic - why does Alan remind me of the average Sunshiner?

Face it, Vic, you were doing just as bad earlier when you were trying to paint the dismal Sun results as some miraculous success. Trying to drag the conversation off into some happier tangent, far from the fact that the figures show Sun is dead outside the webserving niche? Please do take the time to try and post the magical maths by which you somehow make the average unit sale price of $26K into the sale of mainly high-end systems.

/SP&L

RE: Poor Sunshiner

And here we see the typical Sunshiner response to a reasoned and logical argument - denial, whining and name-calling!

"To help you on your ignorance - It is spelled Solaris...." As we've discussed before, the moniker Slowaris was coined many years ago by dissatisfied Sun customers. Much as I would like to take credit for it, the truth is it originated in the States and naturally progressed around the World as more and more users became less and less enamoured with Sun's offerings.

"......Get yourself a copy of the source code and burn yourself your very own SPARC!...." Even if I had a fab plant I wouldn't be burning SPARC as that seems to be a sure way to burn your company. Just ask Southern Asset Management, the last bunch of suckers that fell for the "only Solaris on SPARC" line. Remind us, excatly how many millions did they lose? Over a billion?

As to all the download links, why wouId I go to all that bother and expense when I can just order an x64 box, download Linux and get far better stability, performance and the same business apps? Oh, I think I just spotted what killed Slowaris when it was a stupid Sun idea, and what will kill it again now it's a stupid Oracle idea.

"....Poor mattie probably can't program...." Probably true, I haven't had to do any serious coding for years now, but that's because I manage projects and hire underlings like yourself to do the coding. Well, those coders with relevant skills - Slowaris just isn't relevant anymore.

".... in addition to being unemployed...." Lol, you wish! Unlike you Sunshiners, I work with tech that has a future and I have skills that will be in demand for many years to come. I suggest you practice saying "Would you like fries with that?"

"....ignorant armchair commentator in every sense of the word." Sticks and stones! Aw, did diddums throw a tanturm? Well, get an adult to pick up your toys and put them back in the pram for you and maybe someone will let you play with a real computer when you get grown up enough to do something useful with it.

/SP&L

Dear Novatose

"....Open SPARC..." There is nothing "open" about Slowaris on SPARC, it is completely proprietary, just as are AIX on Power ands hp-ux on Itanium. For Soreacle to claim it is "Open" is laughable, they just don't like admitting that Linux on Power or Itanium is a lot more open.

"....has been the dominant per-unit market leader in RISC for years... " <Yawn> Selling at a loss is not good business, just look at the SUN results for the last four years. SPARC has had high volumes just through churn of the installed base, it has lost overall share. And SUN only kept customers on-board by dropping their pants to negative margin levels and making promises of a real enterprise SPARC CPU to come - with Rock dead and SPARC64's future outside HPC uncertain, and Niagara just unable to run the type of enterprise apps to the performance of even old SPARC, those loyal SUN customers will be forced to go elsewhere. Going on the info SUN released last year, T3 will still not be a suitable RISC replacement for enterprise apps.

"....the value leader in the mid-range arena...." Yeah, selling your systems at a loss will keep your customers interested but not your shareholders, as shown by the steep and terminal decline in SUN market cap from $200bn in 2000 to less than $4bn in 2009. For your angle to be true then Sun would have to be selling their mid-range boxes for half the price of IBM and a third the price of hp, and we all know that isn't happening. Cutting your own throat more just means you bleed to death faster, and Larry seems too smart to want to emulate SUN's stupidity. Larry wants profits. Now look at the revenue numbers - hp and IBM thrashed SUN. Revenue means profit means longterm security. Remember, us customers are not stupid, and even the Sunshiners have to face reality sooner or later.

"...Unless we have a specification of average number of sockets per box, there was not enough information in this article to come to this conclusion...." Really? Looks like revenue divided by number of units gives an average value, and that is a good guide. After all, if SUN had really sold lots of M8000s or higher as you pretend, then the average unit value would be a lot higher. The list price for an entry-spec 8-socket M5000 without any bits is $45k, and that's with only two CPUs! That's still a lot more than the average unit value arrived at above. SUN would want to be selling lots of spec'd out M5000s at $149k list, so even with best discounts that would be a unit price of around $100k, not $26K. I know you Sunshiners have a really hard time doing the maths when it blows big holes in your carefully constructed pipedreams, but the figures show SUN didn't sell much of anything bigger than an M3000 last quarter.

"....Sun/Oracle sells proprietary AMD & Intel platforms, as well... customers shifting from one sales channel to another is not a substantial problem....." It is when your marketshare in x64 is so tiny it doesn't rate mentioning in serious conversation. SUN customers switching to x64 will be going to hp, Dell, IBM, Fujitsu and just about anyone else before they go to Soreacle. Quit trying to pretend that SUN was or Soreacle is in any way a competing tier 1 x64 vendor, it's just too delusional for words. Just about every SUN customer moving to x64 is a lost platform sale for Soreacle, and with hp and IBM being the leaders in x64 that means Soreacle's biggest competitors are winning with every lost Soreacle platform sale.

"....That is truly a success story..." There is no-one as blind as those that do not want to see! Your level of self-delusion is just frightening.

/SP&L

Mystery of alleged MI6 traitor's data theft

RE: Silly Question

"....send document to printer and put in bag....." And leave a electronic paper trail of the action that would be easy to trace, even with an unsecure OS like Windoze, let alone a hardened Linux. You can also make documents unprintable unless you have a certain level of clearance. You can lock down an OS in such a manner that even if you try and take a screenshot the IT admin knows about it and the security buys get the rubber gloves and the graphite grease out even before you have collected the material from the printer. Printers too can have security fitted that means users have to login before they can print out a document sent to them, making the paper trail not only more complete but making it much harder for the suspect to deny it was printed by them. Scanners can record docs they scan and even old photocopiers can have monitoring cams to watch for unauthorised copying. I suspect the twit tried something similar, either that or he did something really silly like pinch a drive from the PC of another user with higher clearance. In any of these cases, unless the material was smoking-hot top secret, they'd probably just put him under surveilance whilst they worked out whether he was just a twit or a traitorous twit.

"....They don't make a habit of strip searching people as they leave the building you know!...." Depends on the security level of the building. As a contractor, I visited secure establishments where they conducted random searches and reserved the right for an "intimate search if deemed required". Such sites demanded you surrendered any communication devices such as mobile phones, any cameras, and any data storage devices. Just being caught inside a restricted area in possession of a thumb drive would have been enough to get the red tops stripping you down. You'd be taking a real chance if you ran the gauntlet (or rubber glove) on the chance you wouldn't be randomly chosen for a search. Which does lead me to suspect the twit in question was working in a pretty low security role and the data wasn't that particularly bad, maybe some training manuals.

"...The whole point of vetting or proper line management is to figure out whether someone is trustworthy or not...." Correct, this is the hardest bit, which is why we had people like David Shayler getting in. The good news is that such events are very rare and the vetting is usually good. But I'm told that even after you join they do random checks just in case - a really good spy would be prepped to get through the vetting interviews and have a carefully prepared background story, but they might relax later and get caught out by a random check into their out-of-hours activities. Vetting is usually best for filtering out the amateur twits with an agenda. If we can believe John le Carre, such random checks are even used by MI5 as training exercises to break in noobie counter-spies.

"....Either way, he is a totally uthrustworthy jackass!" A real jackass, for sure. He would have been a lot better off (and probably better paid) if he'd offered the docs for sale to a newspaper such as the Guardian, which loves any opportunity to embarrass MI5 or MI6, and then he would also have the Shayler excuse that he was only trying to expose "slack security" rather than just make a profit.

US 'Anubis' stealth assassin robo-missile nearly ready

Job done.

This isn't just about retribution, it's also about deterence. If your enemy sniper, mortar team or whatever have to leave the area the minute they see the missile launched then it has effectively neutralised them as a threat and probably saved Allied lives. My suggestion would be to give it two modes - silent, and damn noisy. The noisy option is to make sure the enemy is aware a winged Terminator is hunting them from above and thus scaring the brown stuff out of them. Of course, if you've already spotted them then you go for the silent mode and the kill. It would also be simple to fit a parachute so that, if no threat has been detected by the end of the fifteen minutes, the drone can be flown back to the controller and then descend safely for retrieval, refueling and re-use. If you had two and the means to refuel them (or replace batteries?) then you could fly them in relays for permeanent top cover.

Interpol issues arrest warrant for fake passport hit team

RE: A one-sided condemnation to a one-sided conflict

"Red Bren" - strange how being anti-Israel is so popular with the left, especially considering that Israel has always had more socialist tendencies than any Arab country. In fact, when it was originally established, Israel had such good ties to Soviet Russia, Czecheslovakia and Yugoslavia that the US and UK worried it was going to join the Communist sphere. The Kibutz is still closer to the socialist ideal of a cooperative than anything in the Western or Arabian worlds. But then I suppose that's quickly forgotten when you have someone else doing all your thinking for you.

"One side has one of the most advanced military forces in the world. The other has primitive pipe bombs....." Ignoring the large amount of sophisticated weaponary that HAMAS has to hand (including the latest anti-tank missiles and artillery rockets), the fact is Israel does not use even a fraction of the force available, otherwise Gaza would just be one long, smoking crater. There is also a simple reason Israel has much better weapons - Israel has a developed population with an economy that thrives on innovation (want to guess where some of the bits in the PC you used to post came from?). On the other side you have the Palestinians, herded into and kept in refugee camps by Arab governments determined to use them against Israel. As someone once observed, winners don't need suicide bombers (or pipe bombs) 'cos they have real bombers.

"....One side uses 4 to 6 times the amount of water per head than the other...." Maybe the above statement should be changed to winners have modern irrigation and sanitation systems.

"....One side demolishes the infrastructure of the other as a collective punishment....." Seeing as the destruction is the direct result of HAMAS's own policies of terror attacks on Israel, you could say it's completely self-inflicted. And please see the point above - if Israel really wanted to "punish" the Gazans then they could do a lot, lot worse.

"....One side has suffered 6 times the civilian casualties of the other and 10 times the child casualties....." By who's figures? I'm guessing the comic ones that come out of the PA, HAMAS or UNWRA. Like the figures for the 2002 Jenin "massacare", where the Fake-istinians claimed a "genocide", with official spokesperson Saeb Erekat claiming 3000 dead, a claim trumpeted around the World by such guillable idiots as yourself. Of course, it wasn't true, with Fatah being caught on video staging a funeral with a living "martyr" (http://israelinsider.com/channels/diplomacy/articles/dip_0204.htm, very funny stuff). Even Fatah had to finally admit there were only 52 dead compared to 23 Israelli soldiers killed, and some of the Palestinian dead had been killed by booby-traps set by their own side. Any claim since made by any Palestinian-linked entity has been treated as suspect as they have a history of lies and propaganda masquerading as fact. Yahoogle Pallywood for a few more examples. Still, 23 dead soldiers was too much for Israel (they actually care about their people, not their "martyrs"), and they retrained and introduced new methods to limit the effects of the Palestinian tactics of hiding amongst civillians in built-up areas where Israel could but will not use the full force of their military. Hence the much lower loss ratio in Operation Cast Lead, figures which I'm sure will have really upset someone like you that hopes to see Israellis dying.

".....Do you honestly believe both sides deserve equal condemnation?" No, I don't. I think the Israellis deserve very little if any, whilst the attitude, lies and tactics of the Ummah, the Palestinians and sundry morons like yourself should be exposed and publicly shamed.

I could suggest a list of reading material to try and remove some of the innaccuracies in your education, but I sense they would be blocked by your prejudices.

Bulgarian airbag absorbs semi-automatic rifle round

Low-powered weapon or a ricochet?

The only description I can find is that the weapon was a ".30 caibre assault rifle", which covers everything from an AK-47 to an old M1 carbine, and several stocked guns firing pistol rounds. Given the media phobia for even .22 calibre clones of the AK I'd expect any variant to be described as an AK rather than as a ".30 caibre assault rifle". An M1 Winchester .30 carbine round I can believe as being slowed by an implant given that it isn't the hottest of rounds, but the word "fragments" does imply it had either come through some part of the scenary and was already slowed or was broken up on a rib or breastbone. At short range an AK slug would have gone right through the lady even after passing through a plasterboard wall or office divider, unless it hit a large bone. Still, she sounds like a very lucky lady given how worse the affair could have been.

As for Jordan, I suspect a headshot would have a hard time finding anything vital to damage.....

Supersonic stealth jumpjet makes 'short landing'

RE: @AC, "Cool but"

"....for which a jet can get to a target faster than a helicopter...." So, surely a supercruise capable Typhoon2 can get there even faster and more economically than a chopper or a Harrier, loiter over the target longer, and carry a much heavier load of bombs, rockets and cannon shells (if the RAF are ever allowed to use the Typhoon's Mauser).

".....The Typhoon is a good plane, but it's a classic example of fighting the last war...." Which is why making it into a real multi-role jet, as is virtually done with the Tranche 3 kit, would seem a very good idea, so it is even better at dropping guided munitions accurately on those Third World baddies (whenever the UN lets us). Then we can get rid of most of the old Tornados too.

"....Any aircraft the RAF come up against are already outclassed by the current Harriers..." Really? So all those secondhand MiG-21s, MiG-23s, even the old MiG-19s, all available cheaply on the arms market and common to many of the not-so-nice countries of the World, would you really like to go up against them in a Harrier? Sure, the Harrier, especially the RN's FSR2, was very good at dogfighting with a good air-control system directing the action, but in anything other than low-level CAP I'd much rather be driving a Typhoon2. Do remember that the Argies avoided combat with the Harriers over the Falklands as they didn't have the fuel load to allow them to indulge in dogfighting and get back home. The majority of the Harrier kills were tail-chase attacks on Argies making low-level bombing runs. Had the Falklands been even a few dozen miles closer to Argentina then their Mirage pilots would probably have been much keener to mix it and results a lot less single-sided.

But you do make a good point in that we could buy a much cheaper airframe and kit it out with the required bomber and air-superiority kit to do the UN policing role. After all, the US ground forces prefer the slow A10 Warthog, flown by pilots trained for close support, over F-16 drivers that usually have a problem getting in to the tight Afghan valleys. My personal fave choice would be the single-seat version of the BAe Hawk 200 series, which has already had all the development work done. It would even keep the work in Blighty (more so than the Typhoon2 or F-35B), and share spares with the existing Hawk trainer fleet, and cost peanuts to run even compared to the existing Harrier. So, cancel the F35-B; halve the Typhoon2 fleet but make them all Tranche3 plus cannon; then buy twice the number in Hawk 200s to give us actually more capability. We could even put cat launchers on the carriers with the savings and let them take a mix of Typhoon2s, Hawk 200s and Hawkeyes (for proper air-control) to sea.

It's easy, innit, doing this armchair General stuff?

HP at storage crossroads

RE: Ball Dropping Penguins

I've seen some NDA info on the new EVAs "coming soon", but I'm not sure if they address the single biggest problem I see in the current EVA range, namely that any upgrade between models is a controller swap. I don't understand why hp can't just make the controllers with pluggable modules to add the extra ports etc for adding fibre loops? Then you could buy one controller pair as an EVA4x00, when you need just upgrade them in-place to EVA6x00 and then finally to EVA8x00. Sure, if you upgrade from an EVA4400 to a 6400 or 8400 you can leave the current shelves in, but you have to re-jig the cabling, and often re-site the controller pair if you ordered the 4400 with less than nine shelves.

Otherwise, EVA is still quite decent, and easily managed. The replication is good provided the link is good, the cloning/snapshot abilities are actually well beyond what we regulalry use, and the multi-OS support makes it popular for us, especially how it integrates with VMware and SRM. I suppose it just needs a refresh and a bit of overall storage strategy.