Posts by Simon Bramfitt

UK hospital meltdown after ransomware worm uses NSA vuln to raid IT

Re: >You might not now but in medieval times it was the best way of becoming rich.

I'd be more than happy to vote for all of the above

Citrix really needs to get its act together, and soon

VDI and related technologies is pretty much the only revenue stream Citrix has.

A bit like saying Cars and Trucks are pretty much the only revenue stream Ford has.

Except its just not true, is it?

Citrix Revenues: Three Months Ended March 31, 2015

Product and licenses $183,281

Software as a service $169,364

License updates and maintenance $371,297

Professional services $36,860

Or if you'd prefer, from the same quarter's earnings call

"... in delivery networking, total revenue decreased 3% in the quarter to $161 million.

... revenue from our Mobility Apps business grew 8% to $169 million." - David Henshall CFO

We can give servers more memory, claims Diablo. Well, sort of

Re: Why volatile?

The Diablo MCS storage that SanDisk uses in its ULLtraDIMMs is non-volatile. I'm guessing that Memory 1 drops the backup power circuitry that protects again incomplete writes in the event of power failure.

Re: Seems like quite an expensive NAND

If you want to comparing memory channel storage with NVMe, you have to look at the lower latency it offers, there a more to it than just $/GB, and Diablo claim 4 TB in a standard 2 socket server, not 1 TB.

Windows 7 and 8.1 market share surge, XP falls behind OS X

does this mean Windows 8.1 is now more popular than Bob?

Apple Watch HATES tattoos: Inky pink sinks rinky-dink sensor

So how's this work if your limbs are of the carbon fiber and plastic variety rather than the usual fleshy substance?

Not so good I guess.

SkyHawk array swoops down, 136TB claws extended

Re: projecting much

Makes you question some of their other predictions doesn't it.

Samsung’s SUPER-speedy SSD is a real power-sipper

>> So is the idea that SSD drives are now *designed* to only work for a few years?

Not so much designed only to work for a few years, more a case of a technology that will only work for a few years before wearing out. More accurate to say can only be written to so many times, read operations don't affect drive life.

Worse as cell geometry shrinks (and IOPS goes up) endurance falls off.

Desktop virtualisation: Yes, it's cheaper

You really don't get it do you?

That $5867 per year is the total cost of ownership of a desktop.

Think

Operating system and application software license maintenance\renewal.

Support agreements for the operating system and application software, perhaps also and on-site hardware maintenance agreement.

Power and cooling for all those PCs, yes even PCs in the office need cooling as well.

Network infrastructure costs, switches, routers DNS and DHCP servers AD etc.

The full cost of the salary, health care, 401K (or whatever), vacation, training, office space, car perhaps, cell phones, perhaps over time for extended hours support, lab equipment, and let's not forget their manager or managers if it is a large organization.

It's starting to add up now is in it?

Now if you wanted to poke holes in the position taken put forth in the article, you could point out that the the USD5,867 figure was Gartner's estimate for an unmanaged environment. Gartner estimated that a better managed environment would cost only USD3,413 per year. Oh yes, the Gartner document is three years old, and that it has revised its numbers downward since then, and that staffing document, that was 20 years old.

Really?

I'm not sure where you're getting your data from, but it is seriously wrong. Entry-level thin client devices can be had for as little as USD100, about one third of the price of and entry-level PC.

There are a number of thin client vendors that have gone out of business, but their are many more that have been in business very successfully for many years - surely you have heard of Wyse? No? what about Dell and HP, IBM perhaps.

For the most part, thin clients tend to match the capabilities of PCs when it comes to display output. Almost all thin clients will support a dual monitor configuration, and some can accommodate as many as eight screens. Few today ship with HDMI interfaces, but at the same time how many enterprise PCs (Note: Enterprise PCs, not laptops and not Home PCs) ship today with HDMI interfaces. More to the point how many PCs do not have a VGA port? When HDMI is a requirement y thin client vendors will adopt it en masse.

And your understanding of remote display protocol operation and the ability to update the firmware on thin clients is I'm afraid equally inaccurate.