Posts by patters

Is it a NAS? Is it a SAN? No. It's Synology's Rackstation 'NASSAN'

Latency

The IOPS and throughput may be there but the latency certainly is not. I bought a 12 bay one for non-critical stuff in 2012, and when it's in any kind of use VMware will warn about storage latency. And that was NFS, which should have minimal overhead.

Bring Your Own Disks: The Synology DS214 network storage box

Shameless plug

I maintain a few popular packages for Synology NAS. Serviio is a better media server than the standard included one, and CrashPlan works nicely for online backup. Take a look here: packages.pcloadletter.co.uk

Vulns 'like a hacker camped in the server room' all across the net

iLOs and iDRACs should be on a management VLAN, vulnerable or not.

Google tells Microsoft to yank its new WinPhone YouTube app

YouTube was built on rights infringment

Apart from the videos of chumps burbling into their own webcams, most of the rest of the YouTube clip library is copyright infringement of one kind or another - which Google is coining it from. And they have the nerve to talk about the ad blocking being like theft. Brilliant.

Now Curiosity rover beams back 3D snaps of Mars

I'm no physicist but I think radio waves travel at the speed of light in a vacuum.

Curiosity landing live from NASA's JPL: How the drama unfolded

Worked for me

I had no problem watching the Ustream feed. Maybe it was your ISP's fault.

What a cracking achievement. Did you spot the Douglas Adams reference in Curiosity's tweets? (So long and thanks for all the navigation).

Dimming the lights on smart(arse) TV

Shameless plug, but if you have a Smart-ish TV that at least has DLNA (say a mid to high range Bravia from 2009) then check out Serviio media server http://www.serviio.org which can proxy online sources and send them to your TV. iPlayer and 4OD work perfectly, even YouTube in 1080p.

Ten... dual-band wireless routers

The reviews should clearly signpost which ones are dual radio. The term "Dual band" means different things to different manufacturers. I have found it nigh on impossible to find a dual radio one with DSL modem without stability complaints from users. Shirley this is what everyone wants?

Ten... celeb headphones

Because they make a decent wedge on the affiliate links?

Oz sysadmin says Windows 8 not ready for business

GFX support

I'm amazed there's no driver support for the Intel GMA 500 GPU in my netbook. I can use the Win7 one but it runs like crap. Hardware assisted H.264 playback can't maintain 24fps which it could do perfectly on Win7 so something is definitely less efficient in the video department.

Chinese military contractor hits back at hacktivist Hardcore Charlie

Methinks the lady doth protest too much.

VMware taxes your virtual memory

easy to switch

Well I chose VMware when Hyper-V still couldn't do live migration of VMs so it was ahead on features. That difference has narrowed. I get academic pricing which is not that much of a discount for VMware, but a HUGE discount for Microsoft. Since it's trivial to convert a vmdk set between the formats I think VMware are playing with fire here. I can easily eject the SD card from one of my ESXi hosts and test out Hyper-V, safe in the knowledge that I can put everything back simply by swapping the SD card. They may end up hoist by their own petard.

Gun to the head

So all my hypervisors have 48GB of RAM and I'm licenced for vSphere 4 Enterprise. Now I'll have to 'upgrade' to Enterprise Plus. Having made the case to virtualize on the basis it would save my employers money I'm now going to look like a complete twunt by asking for huge sums of extra money we don't have budgeted. Wonderful.

Tritton AX Pro 5.1-channel gaming headphones

DSP > multiple drivers

I spent a good while researching before buying a gaming headset recently and most informed places (headfi.org and AVScience forums) tend to agree that the cheaper Tritton AX720s with their DSP-based surround are in fact better:

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Tritton-AX-Headset-Digital-Surround/dp/B002ZS6Y64/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1308829451&sr=8-1

There's fairly universal criticism for the Turtle Beach equivalents being too flimsy.

I have the 720s and they're great.

Shameless blog plug here but I wrote a post about Dolby Heaphone and I included some sound clips with it enabled for comparison. You can try it with normal headphones here:

http://pcloadletter.co.uk/2011/04/05/5-1-channel-audio-through-headphones/

WTF is... DLNA?

bad choice of renderer

The 360 is a pretty bad media player. It has extremely limited format support, heavily biased on Windows Media formats naturally, and it's not actually DLNA compliant - only uPnP. Any server that does support it usually has had to implement specific hacky workarounds.

It's not that bad.

The minimum DLNA formats a device must support to be approved is specified though. It's hardly all that useful admittedly since it's pretty much just JPG, MP3 and MPEG2 video. However, you'd be surprised how many formats devices do support when they are officially 'qualified' by DLNA to support a much smaller subset.

Sony TVs for instance don't do DivX, but they will play H.264 in an MPEGTS container, meaning many MKVs can simply be remuxed on the fly by DLNA servers such as PS3MS or Serviio. I do this on a 7 year old P4 with no significant CPU burden. What's irritating is picky renderers like the 2009 Sony Bravia's which only like certain resolutions of H.264 streams. The 2010 Sony bluray players are far less fussy though, and support MKV with subs and alternate audio tracks, DivX and more.

Serviio

Serviio is worth mentioning for being a very competent completely free DLNA server. It's currently the only non-commercial thing that really works for Sony Bluray players for instance.