Posts by Wanda Lust 205 publicly visible posts • joined 13 Jan 2010
Cool, a couple of years ago I made the decision to rip all my CDs to FLAC as a "gold" reference, it being the only open lossless solution. This has meant running a FLAC capable, transcoding DAAP server (Firefly & now forked-daapd) behind iTunes.
ALAC might make life a little simpler but I like a challenge & I've a number of (legitimate) FLAC media sources now.
Choice is good. If I care to burn a few days CPU cycles & help heat the house I could transcode all from FLAC to ALAC.
In our "open systems" world, storage has always been something external to the OS.
DAS, iSCSI, FC, FCoE, etc: there's no fundamental difference, It's simply a target at which an OS throws SCSI commands in order access logically addressed blocks over some sort of 'wire'. Even under NAS, it's the same story. Everything the storage industry has done to date is an attempt to make the handling of the block servicing operations more intelligent (or, perhaps, improve the guesswork of what's likely to happen next).
Protocols, that's it, common protocols.
If the protocols changed, or were thrown away, then you have an opportunity to go somewhere different. To realise that goal the server has to come to the storage or the storage to the server & bypass the established protocols.
We used to do storage on servers, we outgrew that & begat the storage array business.
Now servers are just boxes of cpu cycles & memory servicing an OS or hypervisor.
Ah, yes, the hypervisor. It hasn't found its home. Yet.
Over the weekend I had two FAIL experiences with telcos.
I tried to call a friend who's on a Virgin land line from my O2 mobi: as is frequent, the connection failed to complete as a two-way conversation when they answer & their line appears to remain "off-hook" for some time afterwards.
Sky's voice & LLU broadband service failed across various areas in Northern Ireland. No dial-tone on outgoing call attempts, straight to voice mail on inbound and no RADIUS login on broadband for about 18hrs.
Not sticking up for BT the Sky experience certainly deserves a mention.
How many .london URLs would end being traded as is.gd or bit.ly shortened URLs?
About as useful as typing HTTP://WWW.blah.com into your browser - the www being totally redundant as yer already on t'web.
What about ten.downing.street.london - wouldn't that be a memorable domain name?
Boris is involved? Explains a lot, buffoon!
The UK's whole stupid numbering scheme was predicated on ancient clackedy-clackedy mechanical switching systems and when the system transitioned through various stored program control systems such diversity became less and less necessary.
Of course, the legacy scheme gave the operator the means for charging on an area code basis: the more areas your call traversed, the more it cost. Anyone, recall linked number schemes where local, adjacent areas had a short 9- code.
Transitioning to 2 digit area codes & 8 digit numbers (Cardiff, N. Ireland, etc) helped & they should've kept going with that but the previous mimicing of the US 800 free "area code" format has rendered a whole scope of numbers unusable for general use.
Given the current technology there should, of course, be a flat rate for calling within the country but, hey, then BT wouldn't make any money & that's the game.
Maybe there's a reason why it was called STD, just as hard to get rid of as a dose of herpes.
I'm sure 7-Digital offered FLAC in the past & then it disappeared. Great to see them picking it up again.
I decided to go FLAC for "gold" copies as it's the proverbial "open" standard. In my gaff forked-daap serves a large FLAC library out to iTunes clients over a network & I transcode a copy to AAC for portable devices. Sure, isn't storage cheap these days.
My aged ears might not discern the difference between lossy & lossless but it's the principle that matters.
I've been using SIPgate for quite few years, flawless service & they're open enough to use a range of SIP devices, in my case a Siemens Gigset VoIP unit. I believe they'll port numbers now.
Haven't paid BT, directly, any money in nearly 18mths but my ISP is using their wholesale FTTC service but that's OK, it's their retail service that's to be avoided.
[No interest to declare other than as a satisfied customer).
GMA - Graphically Mismatched Architecture
Two things have screwed the netbook format: a) Intel 'enhanced' the later Atom CPU specs to include integrated GMA (which is not up to the job) and so the manufacturers moved away from Nvidia Ion based configurations and b) Microsoft coerced the manufacturers to bundle W7.
I'm writing this on an Asus 901 running Ubuntu - a very useful combination. It'd be perfect if it had Ion based gfx. Two & half years ago it cost only £240.
Remember: it's not about what the punters want to buy, it's about what the global megacorps want to sell.
ps don't flame on battery life: unlike usable wireless networks, I'm rarely far away from AC power for long, ymmv.
Two & half months is a long period over which to establish some facts & spin it up.
The fundamental problem is that a nuclear reactor does not fail safe. Any fossil fuel energy source for a turbine generator immediately burns out when the fuel feed stops. Nuclear requires constant control that requires power: no power = loss of control.
An out of control nuclear power plant is a fearful scenario.
It was inevitable that the reactor cores experienced "meltdown" pretty much immediately, that scenario was constantly avoided in the TEPCO/Gov Japan reports. Maybe they can be excused for that as a means of fear management.
To quote, "TEPCO has already stated that it expects to restart two of the Fukushima reactors in due course", is fine but those will be the two newer reactors somewhat separate from the destroyed units. Again, perception management.
Peeple buy what they're sold. Companies like Microsoft, Apple, Dell, etc, line up armies of incentivized sales people who go out and sell what's in the catalogue.
That's why there's so much crap out there, it gets SOLD to peeple who buy it. To keep selling things and maintain that all important revenue growth new things have to be developed to be sold.
Those of us exercising free choice are in the minority, often because we are actually informed about a requirement and, consequently, how to fulfil that.
The look the presenter got from the neurologist when he asked this question was priceless.
He also touched on the issue of location tracking. It's all about advertising, innit? We just need to stop buying. Wasn't Google supposed to destroy all that data they got from Wardriving? Seems like they still have my access point's MAC address - check yours here: samy.pl/androidmap
Cloud isn't about infrastructure, it's about consuming a service the way a consumer wants it, when the consumer wants it for a specific price.
Whether the infrastructure in a given storage as a service cloud is Atmos or a massive FreeNAS platform with a gazillion disk drives managed under ZFS is neither here nor there.
1) If Nokia was as adept at touting Meego to potential partners as they were trying to sell the N-series tablets & their only Maemo phone (!adept) then it's absolutely no surprise they failed.
2) Chairman Jorma Ollila's "strategy" appeared to be: let's throw as much crap as we can at the consumer, it'll all stick. Wrong! Focus & execute well is always a good strategy, can't do that with multiple competing resources.
3) Nokia's N-sereis Internet Tablet products based on Maemo (as Meego was then known) were the basis of a good platform but an operating system does not excite a consumer. Like "ttuk" found out, 'installing mp3 codecs and so on was a real pain in the neck'. Rather awkward that those sort of things are the basis of something useful.
Let's just move on, I think winPho 7 is quite nice.
Consumers buy cars, businesses buy planes. Ergo, cars are the equivalent to ITs iPads, netbooks, laptops, etc, while planes are the equivalent of ITs heavy lift data center platforms. One's customization at the car level is pretty much cosmetic and narcissistic but the plane operator can choose engines, avionics and interior fit (all high ticket & RoI sensitive items) from a range of options and even vendors. Probably not a good analogy.
Business should be wary of buying the IT stack from one vendor for the reasons posted above.
Trains are a good base for analogies with IT but mostly Joe Punter doesn't like trains,
I totally agree with Acer. The predominant use case is getting away from PC and computers - it's media consumption. Netbooks are getting too damned expensive anyway, I'll certainly be expecting tablets to get cheaper as the range of products in the market grows.
Personally (not professionally) I firmly believe that I'll have a tablet in a few months. I've been an netbook user for more than 2 years & the keyboard is really starting to get in the way for most of my use, the tablet/slate form factor wins for browsing web, media, etc.
The YouTube clips I've seen of Ubuntu Unity look perfect for my use case. Not yet convinced by Android 7 & iOS is simply a conduit to Apple's myriad revenue generation channels.
After a somewhat expensive experiment with a Nokia N800 I'm very comfortable that keyboards are optional. Unfortunately, it became evident that Nokia, too, was operating an experiment with the N-series tablets and Maemo hence withering into obscurity. They just don't seem to understand the soft stuff. Actually, they didn't seem to understand the netbook market either when they tried to sell a mediocre model for nearly £600!
Apple Express is the simplest here. Similar to Gorgehead (lossless approach) I've a FLAC library shared via a transcoding DAAP server through iTunes out to 5 Airport Express units. Can't tell the difference between this as a source & the original CD via Rega Planet source through my main Quad/Linn system but then my ears might have started to gel up ;-)
Couldn't they have demo'ed something more relevant than Office and a printer working. Personally, an Office application is the last thing I want to run on a small, portable form factor device. And as for having to install custom drivers for every printer device, in 2011 that's just idiocy: shouldn't we just have a standard page description and device control interface that exploits some of that small and cheap silicon built into the printer rather than suffering bloated "driver" installs.
Good example of example of why MSFT is losing relevance to the end user.
OK, this isn't specifically an Ubuntu issue but I think it's catastrophic that a whole class of current laptops just don't work with the current Linux kernel and its graphics code. Don't work, period, blank display, like... unusable.
Intel Core i5 (Ironlake with Intel HD Graphics) and embedded DisplayPort panel interface: no worky. Intel haven't upgraded their Linux driver code in months. Many kernel changes alleging to fix it but no success.
Fail?
It's Friday evening, get me a beer.
The 'Tablet' is now a personal device. If y'all want productivity then Fujitsu been doing slatey tablety things for years for productivity. MSFT failed with theirs, it didn't rock as a productivity enhancer.
The magical & revolutionary thing is not about user/personal productivity, it's primarily about Apple's. Sure, it gets the punters all productively consuming the Chunes, the Yapps, the Buykes, the Moovies. There's more volume in serving up Chunes, Yapps, Bukes and Moovies than there is enabling the commutering masses to get the latest polished widget report done before CoP.
AoE - ATA over Ethernet. Easy, ATA doesn't offer much of a sophisticated command set, it's all master-slave stuff so the transport can be simple. I see resource locking is pretty coarse, hmmm, not good for performance. In essence a point to point topology that's exploiting that most all Ethernets are now layer 2 switched. Not much likelihood of collision there so traffic can assume the network to be deterministic. AoE can't be regarded as a storage network but it's good enough for simple configs (otherwise there'd be no CoRAID customers).
iSCSI - protocol heavy & exploited by LeftHand and Equallogic to build storage networks out of server bricks. So the thinking goes, Joe Admin's comfortable with NAS, let's do something similar but hook up via iSCSI. iSCSI ok its weight mitigated by network speeds but the "brick" concept.... I (personally) don't believe the brick concept, in all failure modes, can assure a write all the way through its appliance software, the underlying OS stack and the off-the-shelf RAID controller to the disks (it's only the last bit that has cache). Of course, Joe's use case might not be sensitive to a little bit of data loss.
FCoE - overcoming the reasons "ethernet" networks are not good for complex storage networks.
Simple, really, it's about choice & how easily that's ill informed. However, with run for consolidation on virtualised infrastructure Joe Admin needs to be confident of how he's managing his risks.
Michael D'lerious didn't revolutionise anything. He took the Southwest Airlines model from the US and planted it in Europe. Using his buses is only cheap if you're one of the small percentage of people who can book well in advance of travel. He then copied Richard Branson's personal branding style, adding his own brash approach to maximise the free PR.
It's not the lack of free pretzels that's the problem, it's the lack of any consistency with the conditions of service from other airlines that is the core of the problem. His rules are different to everyone else's, subtly in most cases, but enough that Ryanair can sting you for more charges if you transgress.
Will be interested to hear how the Equalogic deployment goes, another reason to keep away from ryanair.com
OK, sounds radical - like they've actually designed the software to run on a real-life silicon CPU?
Now, the plebs won't know that most of the PCs they buy from the Dysfunctional Selling Group for 399!!! or 499!!! have very little in the way of acceleration just like the Kia's and Hyundai's that they pull up in out there in the car park so IE9 will be a duck with a limp
So foot with smoking hole Microsoft, you'll never get the PC manufacturers to get their derrieres out of that race to the bottom as DSG 'names that price' for the cheapest glitsiest piece of poo that'll fly off the shelf like lemmings off a cliff
The real story is that 70% of US higher ed freshmen are choosing Mac - for now Stevie J's got it - he looks cooler than Stevie goon-boy Ballmer too, apparently the consumers like that
A&A aren't a massive ISP but since I switched to them I've had absolutely no problems with bandwidth and only one outage of a few hours that was BT's fault. My usage is pretty comprehensive: VoIP, VPN for business during the work day, frequent streaming audio & BBC iPlayer evenings and weekends - it works, plain & simple.
Prior to switching to A&A I'd made the mistake of assuming ADSL service, being ubiquitous, was now a undifferentiated commodity, bad mistake, far from it. Previous supplier, O2 (via BT IPstream), had become unusable with their traffic shaping &, obviously, massively over-subscribed Central pipes.
A&A comprehensively reports on service performance and charge for use graded by when you use it. - none of this "all you can eat" for a ridiculously low price that's typical of so many other retail & SME ISPs. They mix and match LLU with BT IPStream wholesale service on the basis of what's available but do remember that it's typically only exchanges serving large metropolitan areas where LLU is economical.
No disclosures necessary, simply a satisfied A&A customer of a company who provides the service they describe.
Just maybe this isn't about ISO containers, runways, modern day Mulberries, no. It's about global mega shipping corps whose global mega container ships aren't shipping quite so much gubbins round the world no more. So they need alternate uses for the global mega container ships that are laying idle in so many calm, safe havens.
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