Posts by Pahhh 211 publicly visible posts • joined 5 Jul 2010
A new term for the marketing boys to get stuck into now that everyone is sick to the teeth with "Cloud".
Like Cloud, Big Data could be so many different things its tantamount to useless as term.
Still , it’s an easy way to immediately work out that someone is going to be spewing bullshit as soon as they declare “We provide Big Data solutions”
The conclusion of the article and the immediate assumption that the firmware was written by some spotty kid without proper testing is plain dumb. I have no doubt that car electronics dont go through the same rigurous testing and backup systems that planes do, but I'm fairly confident that they will be given a professional effort. Will it catch every event? No, but again seems that they dont with aircraft either.
Modern car electronics by and large hugely improve safety. Both ABS and Traction control. The use of traction control is more subtle as at times it comes in without you realising (unless you like staring at the dashboard) and helps to keep the car straight. This of course dumbs down driving but thats actually not a bad thing.
Now, saying all that, I do have my misgivings of traction control. I was in a situation with an Infinity G35 Coupe (its like a Nissan 350Z but 4 seats) where the traction control did something very unexpected. I was comming off a ramp on the highway and there was torrent of water going across the slipway. I eased off the power before I got to the stream expecting at the worse to aquaplane. What actually happened was that the car spun violently right and so harshly that I immediately hit the side wall making a pretty bad mess of the car.
I am certain that the traction control detected one of the back wheels spinning and applied breaking causing the spin. I have over the years been in situations where there is a full or partial aquaplane and never experienced anything like it.
On the flip slide my wife's Focus has traction control. I think it works spectacularly well. There are some performance cars that are undrivable without traction control.
Conclusion: ABS / Traction control systems arent perfect but are better to have than not.
Absolutely great. The price is amazing. An Arduino board with a single attachment cost more than this. The down side of course compared to the Arduino is its size.
Definently getting one if they maintain that price.
I do agree with some above posts that put into doubt how effective this really will be in the classroom. It just isnt that easy to get started with programming now. For all its ills, BASIC which was designed to get you started in programming, was so much more accessable.
PS: COULD SOMEONE EXPLAIN WHY FOR A UK CHARITY THEY KEEP REFERING TO THE PRICE IN $??????
1- Battery - yes absolutely it is a limitation, but its a compremise over the form factor. By making the battery not removable it allows the iPhone to pact more in that space.
Secondly, most people dont carry extra batteries. The road warrior now tackles this issue by having differnet methods of recharging the device on the move.
Your comments on the reasoning to why apple to provide removable batteries demonstrates an incredible lack of understanding to the reason why they never have.
2- The memory card on the surface sounds like a great argument but in reality its totally flawed. If you have an Android phone, many of your applications are TOTALLY reliant on the on phone memory. So much so that even though you can put a massive SSD card in your phone, you dont have enough space to install more applications because your on-board memory. Secondly, revisit point 1 - not having a slot for a card means you cram more in a smaller form factor.
3 - This Wall-garden is actually developer heaven. Ok, just in case you are confused, re-read my statement, "developer heaven". In one shop, you have access to the WHOLE of the Apple iPhone customer base. In return Apple get a cut. But its not an unreasonable cut.
4 - Not a great phone? Really? I've had several Blackberries , Nokias and a few Motos. The Nokias have to bed set were the best phones. All the others werent that good. I was very pleased with the iPhone performance.
5 - Scarcely Marks You Out As One Of The Cognoscenti - well I can argue against that. If you need to be special and unique and you do that because of the device you own, I think the iPhone is no longer for you. Frankly, you have other issues.
6 - Stephen Fry Liikes it - ok, that one is kind of compelling argument.
7 - Very, Very Expensive For What It Is - Yes it is. But many people believe its better an are prepared to pay for it.
8 - Antenna is Badly Designed - But in reality its been blown out of proportion. I've tested this and the problem is real but I had to make it work.
9 - You Don't Get Much Screen Considering How Big It Is - Its the best resolution screen on the market but yes it could use more real estate.
10 - If You Must Buy One, For Pity's Sake Not Now - ....whatever.
As an employer I look for a mix. My background by the way is a bedroom coder (albiet from the 80s-90s) that then became a computer graduate when i came of age.
What a degree says to me is that you got a combination of ability/dedication. Its impossible to say whether you got your degree because you were a superstar or you just worked damn hard (or obviously somewhere in the middle). What it does tell me is you not a complete muppet.
I then get REALLY interested in what the candidate does as home projects. This tells me if the candidate has a passion for this art.
Lastly once past all this I give them a simple practical. This can be quite revealing. I've had so called experienced people that really couldnt even code yet alone structure a solution. I've seen the rough end of bedroom coders which actually produced a work solutioning but was so fundermentally awfull , you knew they were never get out of their ways of working without either going on course or being mentored continuously.
I also found that being obsessed with the language was unecessary. In fact when I was looking for C++ programmers I actually found it better getting Java programmers than so called C++ programmers that had a background of C as many never ever became true OOP they just used the C++ syntax.
Again I echo the "i'm not a sky viewer" point of view and actually think they too expensive BUT I 100% agree with your reasoning. Restricting what Sky can publish will only hurt the consumers that use the service.
I'm not interested in football but that whole sky/santana thing was just plain crazy.
I've seen your post downthumbed but havnt seen a single worthwhile counter argument although I am sure we going to get a lot more anti-Rupert bias. Not that I'm pro Murdock, but at least if you going to lambast him do it for a reason thats on topic and makes sense to the consumer.
... I would have ordered it, made a few and sent them to the local plod.
Still, its pretty cool. I think my son has enough lego to pretty much make anything you can hold so I'm still tempted to get this.
Good on El'reg by the way for advertising this, i wouldnt have been aware of its existence otherwise.
This vote on benefits and housing is futile. Where do you think these scumbags will go? How will they survive without handouts?
Will they get jobs? I doubt it. Sure some will have a bit of life rethink and try to compete with the immegrants but I suspect most will just turn to crime. Drugs / Muggings / Theft.
To get most of out of people you need to have a Stick and Carrot approach. For many of us the fear of doing wrong is enough for us to do right. The carrot is we know if we work hard we will generally get our just rewards.
These people have neither the stick or the carrot to guide their lifes. The state cannot offer them the discipline they deserve and they dont have any belief they can succeed and generally think the dice is loaded against them (which with their attitude, it is).
Probably the only thing tha will get us out of this is a more authoritarian approach to dealing anyone that doesnt want to play by what we define as civilized. At schools, in the street, in pubs, etc. This will be draconian and goes against the very fabric of liberal beliefs. It will also take more than a generation to turn this around. As someone that leans to the left, it dont sound to good but I at a loss to alternatives....
Recent browser updates will need to be rethought. Now many have merged the URL and Search entry into a single box, how will the browser know if you want to goto the site called "chocolate" or want to do a search on "Chocolate".
This is annoying already as it sometimes wants to go to a URL when you actually want to search and vice versa.
It also makes things on intranet or accessing local computers more problematic. If someone has a web server working on their machine, its convinient to use the host name. Yes in the perfert world you should use fully qualified name etc, etc, etc but its just not necessary for small business or home use.
Lets keep the .com, etc. At least you know that something is a URL then. If you own the domain "fred", you can really communicate on paper that the web site is "fred", so you have to use "http://fred" . At the moment it would be "http://fred.com" but if you put down "fred.com" people would immediately know its a web site.
Lastly we will open up a massive bidding war on every URL we know of. But of course current domain holders will be fighting to hold their current domains also for the new scheme.
Crazy state of affairs......
Manic Miner was ok but really there were a lot of better games at the time. I was a BBC owner so going to be a little biased. Nether the less, companies like Ultima Play the Game on the Speccie produced some great games.
Althought the BBC had some amazing games, like the original Elite, Revs, Planetoid (version of Defender), the best games really were on the C64. The sound and graphic chip worked make it a fantastic games machines.
I wouldnt own a C64 given I was a BBC owner of course, as the machines were just computers, they were a religion. After all you cant be a Hindu, Christian and Muslim at the same time. ....
Funny old days. Golden age of home computing.
I had the first generation Z1. (Pictured here http://www.laptopfeed.org/2011/01/sony-vaio-z1-series-review.html the review date is bollox).
Last year, after almost 10 years of service I retired it. I still think that it was one of the best looking laptops ever made. Looked splendid in its magnesium body. It had good compromise between weight and screen size.
Its been around the world and probably suffered 50 long haul international flights.
I think at the time it cost a frigging fortune but really I cant fault the hardware. The downside is all the useless crap that Sony put on it.
Of course now Apple have joined the market and so the ante been upped.
As far as I can see this could be worked around quite easily and isnt applicable to most of the apps anyway.
The older patents have expired. Cant find any references to current in-payment systems.
The patent referenced however is current. The claims though in the current patent however keep refering to "information about the user's perception of the commodity". I interpret that the App much have the ability to provide feedback to a central location. If the App doesnt provide this feature, then the claim doesnt hold. As each of the core claims have this in it, any further claims that are derivatives of that claim are hence irrelvent.
The feedback on the Apple store is done via the store itself so this patent wouldnt cover that.
Basically, any App that internally has a method of providing user feedback needs to remove this feature. Not a big deal.
Of course it goes without saying , rant rant rant, leaches leaches, rant! Sooner the software patent system is destroyed the better.....
I remember an EMC guy telling me in 2000 that tape is dead. And I asked what happens if your data center is destroyed... he paused then he sheaplishly said you need to recover from tape then...
In essence nothing has changed but (take note Jim59), there are other ways of getting offsite redundant copies of your data. Tape is no longer the only option. Co-location, 3rd party cloud storage and even removable disk like RDX. Not saying that any of those are good for every situation but alternatives are opening up. Still , there are situations where tape is the only cost effective option.
I dont see any rightful justification for getting rid of Tupe. Firstly, if you outsource a department or company and then decide you want to downsize then you can anyway without any real hindrance. Hand out redundancy and if you are mean, you can pay the legal minimum. Getting rid of dead wood in that environment is easy too. T&C for most employees dont amount to much.
I do think it is legitamatly difficult to get rid of poor performing employees or employees that just dont fit in for whatever reason. Your options are to pay them off, fire them and then going through an expensive tribunal phase or the very worse, keep them on and let them drag the morale down. Almost without exception, the only times i've been critisised for firing someone was from the employees saying I left it too long.
The harsh trush is there isnt a job for life anywhere. The public sector just got a taste of what the private sector being going through for years. We are all in the same boat now. You need to do your job well but even if you do, circumstance could mean that good (even great) people need to be let go. We need some basic laws to protect the employees but I believe they gone too far or more to the point they being abused. This means that employers are more relunctant to take a risk on hiring someone. Now, not only do you face the cost of recruitment, resources required to get them up to speed, maternity liability but they could sue you on some jumped up charge when it turns out they arent right for you. Thats assuming they havnt sued you because you didnt give them the job in the first place. Its BS.
Use of Weapons is certainly one if not my favourite of Bank's culture books and probably one of my favourite SF books but like other posters mentioned I cannot see how it could be made into a film.
I do think the amount of votes is a bit odd too. Given this is an IT site I have to wonder if there wasnt a bit of uhm... cheating going on. Obviously the guy with the Use of Weapons script was better than the guy with the Mote script lol.... Maybe Anonymous were invoved in this!
@peredur
Complete sympathy for Jobs having gone through similar things.
If someone reports to me that a product that was just launched has issues and they are being worked on then its something you can deal with. If on the other hand it was presented as a finished product and it turned out its a pile poo then I have gone through similar motions to Jobs and lost my rag.
I approve in honest and transparent management, but it has to flow both ways.
As others have posted out your "Tape's cost/GB stored blows disk away" is way of the mark.
Appart from pure media cost which is getting close, you have to factor that you seldom get 100% utilisation from Tapes. Also disk being random access devices enable you to do some clever stuff to get utlisation way way up from tape. Tapes are not indistructable either. If you drop a tape , you are very likely to damage it, and guess what you will never know until you try to recover from it. Its easier to refresh disk based storage than tape. Its not just the tape drive you need to factor in the cost of tape but also the tape library and the effort in human intervention.
Bottom line though is there is a place for tape and certainly is the final piece in a DR strategy but dont sell it as if its a cheap option. For customers that have multiple interlinked sites and can get geographical redundancy , all disk systems are looking more attractive than D2D2T.
It was only the other week when walked in to a re-run of the SJ adventures my son and wife were watching that I commented how good she looked for her age. But it wasnt just her looks and energy, it that was her general demeanour.
Not only did she look good and but she had "feel good" factor. Her character had positive traits which seemed geniune in a way that you know much of that came from the actor within.
I dont know whether she will be trully remembered for her thespian abilities, but I do think she will be remembered for someone we all geniuningly liked... and that I think goes a long way.
"We use DDs and we quite often see very good de-dupe rates on our daily backups due to the amount duplicated crap the users want to keep! Currently storing 250TB of NetBackup OST backups in around 30TB of raw DD disk space."
I somehow dont believe that this saving has anything to do with duplicated crap. I think its very much likely because you have 10 or more full backups that have been de-duplicated.
Tell us how much source data you have? If you have 250TB of data down to 30TB of backups I will be impressed.....
""usable capacity" code for if you can reach our unreachable dedupe and compression rates for your data."
Dont think that statement is fair. If you expect the de-duplication performance to be because of commonality of data between machines you will be disappointed. You probably wont get much more than you would with compression (de-dupe is after all a compression system that works over very large data sets).
Why you gain with deduplication because you wont have redudant copies of exactly the same data you've backed up. So if you have full 20 full backups you wont end up with requiring x20 the amount of had on the source.
This is Cofio's de-duplication calculator but exactly the same principle works for Avamar:
http://www.cofio.com/Capacity-ROI/
ILM was another bandwagon but an older one. One I thought had long died. Very few companies have come close to ILM simply because its so encompassing. When a product is a point solution you can pretty much guaranty that its nothing like ILM. Some products that really do move data to different places, manage it differently are getting close. Its not remotely what HP is offering now.
Think the term should die just to be on the safe side.
Oh and other terms that should die include:
- "Cloud"
- "Big Data" (this I fear will be 2011 buzzword)
@Sam... I think I may have to disagree with the "tocal cost of ownership" comment. TCO helps to put the price of things into perspective. My car was relatively cheap new and kicks a lot of horsepower and is kind of fun. However it has terrible TCO; it cost a lot insure, service, tax and drinks petrol. Think same goes for a lot of IT solutions. Now in fairness I knew what all those things were before I bought it and I knew I could afford it, but the point is if you were buying a car with a budget, you will check the cost of servicing, tax, fuel, insurance, etc. Problem with a lot of TCO stuff from IT people I grant you is that its done by marketing people and there isnt any actually math behind the numbers.
We got a PS3, 360 and Wii.
The Wii I dont talk about and it barely gets any use. Its the wife's console. Gets a bit of Wii Fit but other than that its a space wasting piece of white plastic.
Both the PS3 and 360 get a fair amount of use.
We got a lot of games for the PS3 and 1/2 dozen for the 360. The PS3 is probably the family console and mine, the 360 is exclusively my son as I'm not interested in playing Halo 3, Halo Wars, Halo Reach, Halo ODST, etc... which seems to be pretty much mostly what my son and his friends play.
Odd about your comment on GT5 but hey, whatever floats your boat. I'm a big fan of the GT series. Its not perfect from a game play point of view but I've had more than my value from it. Oddly enough so have all the friends that i know that got it too. But I can see its not your thing.
Regardless of my self professed fan-boi PS3 attitude, I geniuninely think the PS3 is a good console. Here is why:
- The console is locked down so if you play online you arent playing against cheats,
- Its multi-purpose - I use it a media player as well as console. 50% of its use is a media player
- Some of the games seem to look nicer on the PS3. We got Assassine Creed on the PS3 and Assassins Creed Brotherhood on the 360. The PS3 picture looks better. So much so that my wife commented on it. Could be our 360 setup but Ive seen other 360 and seems the same as ours. Who knows...
- The PS3 is a tidier piece of kit. Doesnt have the massive power supply like the 360.
- I can play online on the PS3 for free. I've had to subscribe to Live Gold to get my son playing with his friend.
- I dont think the 360 in real terms is any cheaper. Could be the 360 caught up but when we got the 360 it came without wifi, hard drive, blu-ray, controller didnt have rechargeable batteries. All those are standard on a PS3 - so price comparison isnt right.
- The blu-ray player isnt just about playing films. Its also about playing without changing disks. Its seem very primative playing a game and having to change half way through on the 360. I believe that some games you can install on the HD (if you've bought one) but some you still have to insert the disks... doohhh
- I would like to mention reliability of both consoles. Actually from personal experience, the 360 been fine, the PS3 blue-ray died on US but I had one of the orignal fat / 4 USB consoles. Statisticially though, the PS3 is more reliable. Out of all the people I know that own a 360 , I only know one other person other than ourselves whose 360 hasnt died. Some have had several 360s.
So there, here is the first serious salvo on the 360 vs PS3 fan-boi wars lol.....
Uhm.... Fois Gras is a tricky topic. It involves force feeding a duck using a funnel several times a day. Its very very wrong.
No sane person would approve that type of farming. The tricky part of this is fois gras is incredibly tasty and people turn a blind eye .... me included. Hopefully someone will save my sole and have the whole process banned soon.....
As much as I would question anyone that shoots an animal for a hobby, these are licensed culls. They sell the right to shoot an animal that needs to be culled. One way or the other, the animal was doomed.
I cant comment on alternative ways of dealing with the problem. I know that licenses are often given for animals that need to be put down for humane reasons.
I am not pro hunting in the least, never having killed anything bigger than a wasp, but it appears that most game hunters are actually ecologist and ironically also love animals. Hunting to them is about doing the primitive thing and they are generally very big on keeping nature as it was.
Mind you, images from South Park are still engraved in my brain "Its comming right for us..".....
Thanks for the thumbs down, somehow I think a lot of you are full of bull....
Firstly, if ANY of these devices had any chance of interfering with emergency services then I was be AMAZED if OFCOM didnt pounce on this. So I will take those comments as irrelevant noise (ha! cheap pun)
Secondly, PLC are sold in the US. This is the country that has crazy regulations on RF inteference. Thats why anything anything sold to the US has a metal cage around it just in case some RF might interfer with something.
Yes of course PLC will emmit. They couldnt work if they didnt. I just cant believe that its such a big problem that it warrants the banning of PLCs.
"but as the mains wiring isn't shielded those signals leak out and can knock out sensitive radio users such as HAM operators."
I have two thoughts on this, firstly:
1) Really? It surprises me that a low frequency signal thats travelled across half the world will be knocked out by a device that works at very high bandwidth and hence wont travel far
2) Do I care? I know this is selfish, but really how many HAM operators are there? And more to the point, how many might be near (in fact incredibly near) a supply that might be causing interference?
Well done Ofcom for exercising some common sense for a change methinks.
I dropped my previous iPhone, a 3G, from headheight. I had it craddled between shoulder and ear on a call while trying to get stuff out of a car at the same time. Phone did a suicide jump onto tarmac.
I think it landed facedown. Amazingly no scratches to the glass , only a bit around the silver bits.
Thing is still functioning and handed it down to my wife.
Now, what would frigten me is getting the thing anywhere near water.....
I like Apple products but I cant say I like the company at all. Think the company is hyprotrical as it will shameless use other company's trademarks (e.g. iPhone, Apple) yet they will pursue anyone that uses a term that sounds remotely like theirs.
In fact, I will go so far as to say I hate Apple. Problem is I still like the iPhone....
Oh yeah and as far as Amazon are concerned, they are bunch of shitsters as well. Uhm.... lets use a browser cookie so you can remember who the person is (thats the whole reason why cookies were invented) so when I press Buy I dont have to enter my details again.... I will call it "1-Click" and put a patent on it. Thats a FARCE!
Indeed. One important note however, Cloud "stuff" doesnt necessitate the change in ownership model. You can have "Private Clouds" where you still own everything. But that re-inforces your point of "what's new". "Private Clouds" are clustered / grid services.
Maybe the difference is that some guy put the random "cloud" term to scalable provisioning and the moronic press found nothing else to write about. Then we got a whole bunch of born-again-cloud vendors that realised that actually they been doing this for years and get more limelight for their goods by waving the "cloud" banner.
There isnt much not to get really. I actually think you pretty much covered it well to be honest.
Some things lend themselves to running somewhere else, other things dont. I would be happy to use an external service for anything I dont want to manage myself and in doing so provides value.
I keep mentioning Salesforce as I think its one of the success stories of something you can get as a service. Its great because geographically dispersed people can share the application. As an application its pretty straight forward to use and to customise. I dont have to worry about managing a server for it. I pay for what I use. I wouldnt go back to something like Goldmine.
You could say the same thing about email services. Thats something I want to get completely shot of. We all already use ISP to deliver emails, wouldnt it be easier if we left it all up on a server at the email provider? Let someone else sweat keeping the email servers running etc.
I would certainly consider using Sage as a service also. Why not?
Now I'm not big on the idea that office productivity tools should be used as a service. For a lot of us it doesnt work. I like Word / Photoshop / etc running on my machine as its something I can do unshackled to a network. But bare in mind though some organisations work completely in the opposite fashion. Their users are super tightly constraits to what they can run, the machine they run the things on dont even store any of the application data and in fact they can log onto any console and resume their work. Effectively, for those environments have a "Cloud" *spits blood* service to deliver application makes 100% sense - but doesnt work for me.
Now I'm not advocating anything other than there applications where bandwidth / security / trust where there are alternatives to the traditional setups and it makes sense. The truth is where it makes sense, those services are being used with gusto.
What really pisses me off though is then endless promotion of cloud as the answer to all things. It isnt and the term gets on my nerves.
"EC2 is just a damn cloud. You pay some money and you get some compute time/bandwidth. How is any other cloud going to be any different?"
Ok, let me explain it in the same way I would explain it to some school children. "Cloud" stuff is a way to provide a scalable computing service.
Some people offer the ability to run whatever applications you want on what appears to be a limitless amount of hardware. Its like having your own computers , as many as you want to do what ever you want on. That would be offerings like EC2.
But other people offer a complete application which again is scalable and appear limitless. Its all managed and you dont have to worry if you need to use it a lot, it will grow with you. That would be applications like Salesforce.
Now, there are things in between. Like buidling blocks. Some are storage others are application frame work.
So the term Cloud can mean a lot of things and because of that it makes sensible people quite annoyed as it doesnt very well describe anything. But it makes marketting people and generally very silly people, very very happy as they can talk about things in vague terms and use trendy language.
Unfortunantly, the people in between like AC 02:33 GMT just get mad as they just dont understand, errr anything.
So there children, thats the danger of using the term "Cloud", think of it like a naughty word. Don't use it.
"SaaS doesn't work. It never did. Any questions?"
Really? Look at applications like Salesforce. Works incredibly well if you ask me. Most web hosting companies seem ok. Gmail / Hotmail seems to get used by a few people. You could argue pros and cons, but one thing for sure some SaaS are successful.
To quote Oracle's Larry Ellison:
"The interesting thing about cloud computing is that we've redefined cloud computing to include everything that we already do. I can't think of anything that isn't cloud computing with all of these announcements. The computer industry is the only industry that is more fashion-driven than women's fashion. Maybe I'm an idiot, but I have no idea what anyone is talking about. What is it? It's complete gibberish. It's insane. When is this idiocy going to stop?
"We'll make cloud computing announcements. I'm not going to fight this thing. But I don't understand what we would do differently in the light of cloud."
Also, one of the few times I agree with Richard Stallman when he said:
"It's stupidity. It's worse than stupidity: it's a marketing hype campaign."
Lastly of course we really couldnt have a more rounded analysis of Cloud computing if we didnt quote Raul Castro when he said:
"Cloud Computing is for capitalist pigs."
..... somethings you just cant make up .... lol
Cloud....if I never hear the term again it will be too soon....
Mostly, Cloud services are renamed business models that have been around for a long time. How many people host their own web sites? How many have shunned their our email servers for an outsourced one? Who uses CRM applications like Salesforce?
But in essence these are services that successfully lend themselves to being delivered via the internet (yes I know that there are intra-cloud etc).
What we dont need is more pseudo analysis on this. There is a lot of cloud that doesnt lend itself to being "Cloud" and putting everything under the one term doesnt help anyone. I wish the term would just FRIGGING die and we can talk about the specific tasks we want to solve rather than bundle everything under the completely nebulous term "cloud".
But on this topic nothing more gets more on my nerve then people asking "what's our cloud strategy?" which to me translates to "how do we on get the latest bandwagon so I sound cool without understanding anything what im trying to solve?."
I went to check to see where the Ruddles brewery is based and got THE BLOCK.
I'm on a contract. Why I need to confirm any this is beyond me. As a contract holder, I ought to be able to as least to log on to the web site and select "Dont nanny me".
I must admit as a parent, I'm all pro "what about the children" but they have a duty not restrict things without making me aware first and give me the opportunatity to either register or opt out of the service breaking the contract free of charge.
They restricted my use post contract and I think that I ought to be able to opt out of their contract. Its only fair!!!
I dont care about the 130mil but what I do think is unfortunate is that its unfair to traditional high street retailers or , if they were any left, your local corner shop.
I've been using Play.com since it was called play247 for many more years than i can remember. So although I have benefitted from VAT discounted internet purchases, I find it sad that its at the cost of loosing dedicated shops. Of course, I'm as selfish as the next man and will continue to buy from somewhere that is cheaper until that legal loophole is closed.
Ive recruited engineers for over 16 years and I consider myself to be pretty harsh but no way near as draconian as some of the posters above.
I expect people to make an effort dressing for an interview. It dont have to be a great suit but you ought to wear one. You dont need to look good in it (most programmers somehow look wrong in them) but you need to try. Like other people said , if you cant be bothered why should I.
Again I expect people to put some effort into their CV but I also recognise not everyone is that good at spelling / grammar so I accept that some things may slip through. I'm not that good myself. I've got some great developers who can't spell to save their lives and other than some mispelt variables in the code which can be irrating, doesnt interfere with their work.
What I cant accept is BS or plain lies on CVs.
The 60D seems ok to me other the special effect gimmics. Thats got me baffled.
Interesting hearing the two sides of the story about camera body construction , size and weight.
I've got a 450D and 5D MKII and sympathise to the arguments. The 5D MKII full frame sensor and solid construction is obviously great but at times you just dont want to carry the weight and bulk around and the 450D is a blessing.
Also the full size sensor of the 5D is double edge sword. Yes it is very good and you can give you quite dramatic shallow depth of field. The downside of course is if you dont want shallow depth of field it becomes problematic. Found macro photography a bit of pain with the 5D for that reason. Of course the full frame is great for landscapes but then you loose out when you need to shoot telephoto. Plus as another poster pointed out, there are some pretty good wide angle lense now for cropped sensors.
Think though when its time to upgrade, I will move from the 450D to 600D rather than the 50D/60D.
No-one was saying it is there to replace SANs did they? The purpose of stuff like Fusion-IO is to get a massive performance increase for certain applications.
SANs and SAN attached RAIDs are great workhorses but it doesnt necessarily make it the best fit for all application.
You are also making a nieve assumption that the only way to get redudancy is through storage. There are other ways. Applications like Casandra for instance, manage redudancy by having different nodes each deciding how often and where data is replicated. This provides massive scalability for both performance and capacity. In fact, using a SAN for such a system creates an unnecessary amount of complexity and greater chance of failure.
" Will it supplant them? No."
So this statement is Yes for certain applications but No for general use.
Fairly silly statement there Dwayne. Yes its another form of DAS but nothing wrong with DAS. Putting things on SAN doesnt make anything faster and the whole purpose of the FusionIO stuff is to make random data accesses incredibly quick. Its not just because its solid state its fast, its also incredibly fast because there isnt a traditional interface like FC SCSI / SAS /etc . The device is directly attached to the motherboard bus thereby having massive transfer rates and small propergation delays.
Good for lower volume datasets that require amazingly good performance. Databases which typically arent huge are a great candidate for this.
Obviously due to cost, not ideal for large file servers.
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