Posts by An ominous cow heard 76 publicly visible posts • joined 22 Apr 2010
The SEC vs Dell case made it perfectly clear what was going on (Intel to Dell: "if you start using AMD you lose our 'joint marketing' millions"), and the biggest disappointment (although not biggest surprise) is that it's Dell not Intel that came off worst. It should have been Intel that got done for abuse of monopoly (aka blackmail) *as well as* Dell getting done for fraudulent accounting.
"my home country being turned into a Soviet-style satellite, ruled by strangers over whom the people have no control."
Yep, much of Europe is just a playground for the banksters now.
Austerity for the 99%.
Megabonuses for the 1%
e.g. £40M/yr each for the top table at Barclays:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1363790/Barclays-bosses-47m-head-pay-bonuses-Bob-Diamond-says-greed-good.html
Maybe you should get some experience in reading and logic, Matt.
You say you have "RHEL, AIX and hp-ux" virtualised.
Does that sound like the behaviour of a Wintel-dependent IT department?
Just because your IT department is not Wintel-dependent doesn't mean there isn't a huge quantity that is Wintel-dependent.
Don't forget also that, if appropriate, you can have >2GB of physical memory without a >2GB logical address space, just like Xeons used to.
"The only reason for Intel not killing Itanium is that they (apparently) use Itanium systems in their fab control systems."
Yes and no.
When I last checked, what was important to the automated fab systems at Intel wasn't IA64, it was VMS, because that's what the fab applications (commercial and home grown) use.
If VMS was available on something other than IA64 (e.g. AMD64 or Intel copy), it would be just as relevant to Intel's business operations (probably more so ) than it is on IA64.
The important bit is *enforced*.
The standards (the CE EMC standards) are here today but there are significant vested interests who prefer not to see them enforced (importers of cheap Chinese junk, BT Vision, powerline networking in general, the list goes on).
Long before the digital stuff (calculators, watch, MK14, etc) hit the market, Sinclair was selling a range of radio and hi-fi stuff. I still have a handy little IC12 amplifier in the cupboard (needs a new PSU).
http://www.nvg.ntnu.no/sinclair/audio/amps.htm
I wonder how many people realise that the current well known electronics test equipment outfit Thurlby Thandar also had its origins in the Sinclair empire.
(c) 2010. Submitted 3:30 pm ish, Saturday.
*Most* of the f-secure FAQ is a good read.
Their ignorance of the field of process automation shows, however, when they fail to spot the real significance of myrtus.
Any insider with a clue would know that this almost certainly originated as a reference to "my RTUs", where an RTU is a "Remote Terminal Unit", which in this context is a remote device which the PLC program uses for IO which isn't directly attached to the PLC itself.
Now it may of course be that there is a play on words going on here, and that the significance is *both* the biblical one and the industrial automation one. But for a self-proclaimed expert (and a recently arrived one at that) on the subject to not spot the industrial automation connection just makes them look ever so slightly silly. In their defence, obviously f-secure are not the only ones that have failed to spot this, and the rest of their FAQ gets a good mark for effort.
Symantec's writeups on the subject are quite good too (that's not a sentence I *ever* expected to be saying).
But the best I've seen to date comes from Herr Langner, in particular the level of detail in the entry at Oct 1st, 11:00, shows Herr Langner's team (unlike f-secure and many others) has some credibility wrt process control.
http://www.langner.com/en/
F-secure, if you choose to update your FAQ after reading this, please do it nicely.
Post Office Broadband is, as another contributor already speculated, provided for the P.O. as a "white label" service from BTwoolsale. Therefore any incompetence should come as no surprise at all, although customer-facing incompetence is probably down to the P.O. rather than BTw.
BT is of course the classic example of how privatisation automatically and inevitably cuts costs and improves quality. Isn't it.
http://www.thinkbroadband.com/news/3251-post-office-broadband-service-up-and-running.html
To anyone who like me normally only reads the most recent page of posts:
The "most recent page of posts" doesn't necessarily contain the most recent posts.
Because of this insanity, you may have missed out on some very relevant info on any multi-page topic e.g. here you may have missed the important posts from Brian Morrison, which El Reg's crappy forum software hides on the first page.
Because of this feature, readers wishing to reply to an "old" post and wanting their contribution to actually get read may prefer to ignore the "reply" button and instead just tack the post on at the end of the thread, quoting where necessary.
Thanking you.
They could look at Phorm's PR team, lobbyists, directors, etc. Surely the whole lot of them will be looking for other rewarding activities in a few days, once the most recent round of venture capital finance runs out yet again.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/07/07/phorm_shares/
That'll be 20% of first year comp as an agent's fee, please.
Glad to be of service.
It's a week later. They had, according to the calculations, two weeks or so. Are they nearly bust yet or has the white knight arrived?
Are the techies (well, those that remain now that CTO Stratis Scleparis is long gone [1]) ready to relocate to (say) Cheltenham?
[1] Did you know that before he was CTO at Phorm, Stratis Scleparis was CTO at BT Retail, including at around the time of the denied trials... small world, isn't it.
So they lost say $2M a week, roughly.
Using your skill and judgement, how long will £2M last them?
Answers on a postcard please to Stratis Scleparis, wherever he may be.
He used to be on LinkedIn.
He used to be BT Retail's CTO at the time of the denied trials.
He used to be Phorm's CTO after the trials.
Now he's invisible.
How odd.
I assume whoever wrote that doesn't do software, or even overall system design?
You can get more work per instruction with ARM than with other modern CPUs; ARM has better code density (down to ARM architectural features like the Thumb instruction set, and various other code-density helpers such as instruction predication not found in most other embeddable CPUs).
More work per instruction means fewer Megabyte for a given workload, and also means a lower clock frequency for the same work rate (because more work per clock cycle) and therefore less mW for a given performance, and therefore lighter batteries for a given battery lifetime, and and and.
A handy set of features, one which Atom or anyone else will struggle to compete against (but the Wintel empire has the business clout to "encourage" their important customers to stay Wintel).
ARM also has handy little system-on-chip oriented features like the ARM on-chip bus (AMBA?), and lots more besides.
In summary there are lots of good reasons why ARM is the 32bit CPU of choice in pretty much all modern consumer electronics and why anyone wanting to play catchup is likely to have a hard time.
[just an observer, not an ARM employee, or even a shareholder]
D'ya think he's a David Lynch fan and has seen the Straight Story ? Not yer average David Lynch movie, this beautiful work is the true story of Alvin Straight, who drove across two US States on a ride-on lawnmower for a reconciliation with his brother.
If you haven't watched it, you need to.
"The allocation rate of IPv4 addresses continues to increase due to the growing number of devices that require IP addresses - mobile phones <snip>"
Don't want to be pedantic or owt, like, but isn't IPv6 support a requirement for 3G phones? Or is he saying they need an IPv4 address *as well* as an IPv6 address?
All enlightenment gratefully received. After all, it's been twenty years or so since I did my first "IPv6 is the future, IPv4 is dying" training course. Oddly enough, IPv6 still is the future.
iPad soon?
O, da Psion?
I liked my Series 3.
I also liked (for only slightly different reasons) my Jornada 720 (if you don't know it, think of it as a netbook precursor).
On the other hand my iPaq was rubbish, and looking at the iPad it's not just the spelling that's close to iPaq, the usefulness (zero, for me) seems to be close too.
No iPad soon for me then. Maybe an HTC with Android later in the year, once the prices come down a bit.
Can we have a dinosaur icon please? Till then, Bill, obviously (in an ironic kind of way given that it was him that wrecked the J720 concept).
Are the Berlin Phil contracted to Sony as a record label ie is this deal exclusive ie if I want to watch the Berlin Phil do I have to have a Sony?
Or have the Phil seen sense and realised that they will make more money by having a non-exclusive deal with a wider addressable audience?
Interested potential punters want to know. Especially those with no interest in buying a Sony TV (despite the nice ads).
Zwei bier bitte.
"last time I opened up a server and looked inside there was MORE IN THERE THAN JUST A PROCESSOR! "
Well, like, yeah!
But so what?
Intel's Hypertransport knockoff is now used on both Xeon and Itanium ranges, and the memory technology is fundamentally the same too.
So, what's the difference between a "system" based on IA64 and a system based on AMD64?
Answer: cosmetics, vendor politics, and, in the bigger picture, the OS. Quickpath and common memory technologies mean that there are no fundamental technology differences between AMD64 and IA64 systems, and sooner or later the sole remaining IA64 system builder will have to acknowledge that.
You could argue (they certainly will) that there is still a difference in ultra high end scalability and that IA64 is the only platform for huge-SMP huge-memory systems, but when AMD64 Proliants are already up to 48 processors and (half) a terabyte of memory, does much of the market really see that as a limitation? And who knows where AMD64 will be in 12 months time...
The only news here is that this is news.
Google Maps for Mobile listens for SSIDs [1] if your phone has WiFi. Does it also report SSIDs (or whatever) back to HQ, to keep their database up to date?
[1] It presumably isn't SSID alone, otherwise a lot of places would have SSIDs of Netgear or whatever, and that would not be helpful.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
