Posts by Haggis & Faggots

Kiwis get cracking with gigabit residential broadband

Yeah you're mostly right

The issues really are the lack of domestically-based content, and the inability to (legally) obtain tv/movie content. Sky TV has the digital rights to pretty much everything you'd want to watch but has no digital download service. Other services, like Netflix, Apple TV and even iTunes are geolocked (I know you can get around this in most cases) which eliminates or limits available content. Other than downloading the odd PS4/PC game, the rest of the web is just fine over my current 50Mb/s cable service. Given our geographic location, latency is more of a killer than sheer bandwidth.

So... Because I'm a (mostly) law-abiding citizen, I can't see the point of being a Giganaire until I can legitimately get video content not consisting of funny cat videos - and that will require someone to bust apart Sky's monopoly.

As far as our itty-bitty little pipe goes, your argument is not quite so clear. NZ is better served, on a bits per capita to the USA basis, than either Australia or Europe. Per capita, Europeans only have about 75% of the capacity we do. However when you factor in that so much more of our traffic has to traverse the pipe we may well be worse off - especially when you consider that Telecoms refusal to use WIX means that a fair bit of domestic traffic has to go to LA and back...

World takes notice as SSL-chewing BEAST is unleashed

Balls

Balls balls balls. There are HEAPS of industries where the cost of fixing a defective product before it hits the market is deemed lower than the cost to rectify it later. Motor cars for a start, but also mobile phones (and mobilephone networks...) buildings, toys, furniture, food at restaurants, banks (toxic loans bundles anyone?), the Tube, etc etc etc. Oh, and don't forget all manner of computer hardware as well. It's complete and utter nonsense to suggest that Software is the only industry to do this.

What they do is to ascertain the impact of the defect(s), the cost of the fix, and the likelihood it will be an issue. From there's it's all economics I'm afraid.

Meanwhile, I applaud you for your choice of flawless OS. Which one is it, by the way, I would love to have an OS with absolutley no defects at all. I look forward to your enlightening response.

Windows 8: First contact with Microsoft Touch

No, the original poster has a point

There are piles of people where I work that have tablets - and they get frustrated with shortcomings such as 'I can't access my documents' and 'where are my LOB apps' and 'why can't I open attachments to meeting invites' and 'why can't I book resources or see availability when I set up a meeting' - aqll shortcomings of a consumer device in a corporate world. These are issues that MS know about, and while they may not make such a dent in consumerland, corporates will be very keen indeed to deliver a seamless PC<->tablet experience for staff.

Whether it will 'own' is a different story, but they will have a compelling offering I think.

Amazon cloud fell from sky after botched network upgrade

BUT...

The reason why you might put your stuff in teh cloud is because you've been told it is 'better' and 'cheaper' than DIY IT.

Amazon's (and Google's (and probably others)) recent outages show that, in fact, their ability to keep complex, multi-tenated infrastructure up and running is no better than most businesses can do in-house. So, the 'better' claim is not that accurate. 'Cheaper' is an interesting concept as well. Having done cost modelling on Cloud for a sizeable organisation, the cost savings punted about by many vendors is quite illusory.

Don't get me wrong - I think there is a place for hosted solutions and 'on demand' infrastructure etc etc, but it's not for mission-critical production systems unless the service credits you can get from a provider equal or exceed the financial and reputational impact of an outage. And good luck with that one from an Amazon or a Google!

Amazon gets 'F' for communication amidst cloud outage

Promises promises

So one of the grrrrrreat promises of The Cloud® is that The Cloud™ is soooo reliable and you don't have to worry about all that annoying DR / BC stuff anymore. That's nice. But then you have outages such as this, and then I see that Amazon has a 99.95% uptime SLA. That's not good enough, and it's certainly not good when Amazon clearly doesn't want to be clear about what/how/why this happened. They're being quite cloudy about it really. And I don't want to single out Amazon - Google has had its problems as well, and as more stuff gets clouderised™, I'd expect that such services will become more and more attractive to ne'er-do-wells and hax0rs etc.

I shall heed the amazingly prescient words of that great prophet, Mick Jagger, and stay off of their clouds.