* Posts by Howverydare

26 publicly visible posts • joined 26 Feb 2014

Latest Intel, AMD chips will only run Windows 10 ... and Linux, BSD, OS X

Howverydare

Re: Can you spell lawsuit?

Wow, not all that bright.

Whilst I'm not a fan of this 'plan', it's more an unintended consequence of someone finally (finally!) deciding it's time to stop dragging legacy shit around for a free ride. UEFI has been out long enough but we still seem to have options to run legacy BIOS. xHCI has been out long enough but we still seem to drag around the legacy *HCI interfaces to support 'native not USB3' ports.

For Microsoft, this is a no-brainer. If they say it's supported, but you need the *right* installer then you have far too much of the population with the wrong media stirring up a storm over their lack of understanding. If they say it's not supported, people stay on Windows 10 and get over themselves or move on to Linux. Still cheaper to lose a few from the fence than it is to staff the support desks for the onslaught of the morons.

After all the sound and fury, when will VVOL start to rock?

Howverydare

Customer in a sea of SEs

VVOLs are of no use to man nor beast whilst that part of the VASA specification completely ignores one of the most interesting things VMware has to offer to enterprises; SRM - specifically array-based, as vSphere Replication isn't good enough.

Another chance to win a 6TB Western Digital Black hard drive

Howverydare

Well, this bites.

Revealed: The AMAZING technology behind Apple's $1299 Retina MacBooks – a lot of glue

Howverydare

Re: macbook keyboard

"And I just don't get the Retina thing at all. For the last ten years, I've not been able to identify individual pixels on my screen without getting so close that I can't see the whole screen at once. I don't even understand what I'd be buying there, beyond the equivalent of "PC HD"."

You get the wonderful inability to play any game at it's native resolution because you need SLI'd GTX Titan X cards to be able to run anything more than Minesweeper.

Rand Paul puts Hillary Clinton's hard drive on sale

Howverydare
Coat

Re: I believe...

And there was me thinking that El Reg commentards wouldn't be so SCSI.

Bollocks. Someone beat me to SCSI. Teach me for having work to do. I'll go now.

The BBC wants to slap a TAX on EVERYONE in BLIGHTY

Howverydare

"universal levy could be put on every household"

Bite me, BBC. I watch one program on BBC and if I had to pay for it, I'd just watch it later on another channel.

The sooner we can be rid of the BBC's belief that we should fund them regardless of whether we want them or not, the better.

Ugly, incomplete, buggy: Windows 10 faces a sprint to the finish

Howverydare

Got to love someone that doesn't read.

TALE OF FAIL: Microsoft offers blow-by-blow Azure outage account

Howverydare

Re: All this flighting???

So what did you say to your customers when AWS went down?

They've all had issues. Amazon screwed up a few of my customer VMs before when they changed hypervisors. Performance on the old tier was abysmal at best for a good while, too.

EE's not-spot-busting small cell trial delights Cumbrian villagers

Howverydare
Paris Hilton

Re: What’s the opposite of a NIMBY?

I'm sure I don't need to justify the choice of icon here.

The Great Smartphone Massacre: Android bloodbath gathers pace

Howverydare

Re: "... Microsoft always had a reasonably good back end, "

Kernel and driver stacks.

The most unreliable element on any WinMo device was HTC's (other manufacturers are/were available) pretty but awful skin. Sony's Xperia X1 wasn't too bad for reliability, but it was still a bit of a hog. Without it though, WinMo5 was no different to WinCE2003 and even it's predecessors. It was hateful, ugly, overly complicated but rock solid.

WinPhone7 sort of fixed it, and WinPhone8 did it properly, with 8.1 and the more recent GDR1 with Cortana makes it everything every Fandroid and iLoser wishes their device could be. Just with no applications. Which is it's only significant problem.

Howverydare

Re: Profit margin

"the Microsoft road of "we know best""

Sadly for all of these handset makers, categorically the best user experience for a mobile device is provided by the above. Google and Apple have sat around polishing the back end whilst Microsoft always had a reasonably good back end, and now Microsoft have set about the UI you can tell it's a much more modern and sensible phone operating system than either of the above.

It's a sad day in IT when genuinely the best offering is from Microsoft, but credit where credit is due - and Microsoft deserve it in this instance far more than the competition.

The magic storage formula for successful VDI? Just add SSDs

Howverydare

God, where did the 1990s come from in here?

The views on VDI and what is achievable in here are, frankly, laughable. Perceptions of what is possible, beliefs about how complicated it has to be, all of it screams "I don't know the subject matter, but I'll post anyway".

Every day I build desktop virtualisation solutions for hundreds or thousands of users. Every day they deliver better than desktop experience to users who are very pleased with the results, with IT departments thinking that VDI is magnificent and delivers exceptional soft benefits to them.

If you haven't a clue what's possible with VDI, I recommend having a look through the nVidia GRID vGPU for VDI pages, and seeing what today's VDIs can do.

Jony Ive: Flattered by rivals' designs? Nah, its 'theft'

Howverydare

Re: And Samsung

"Given the number of products Samsung releases, it is a cinch they'd have something that matches almost anything. I'd be not at all shocked if Samsung has released something like that goofy square Blackberry phone at some point."

With some artistic licence in terms of how similar they look, they did.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/06/26/review_samsung_p300/

Thanks El Reg for the article.

Aggressive HGST hurls flashy humdingers at online archiving

Howverydare
FAIL

Pedant/Correction Alert

Just a quick point:

"NAND has its basic access latency - say 70ms, and PCIe adds 10ms to this whereas FlashDIMM adds perhaps 2ms - meaning no significant difference in overall data access latency; 80 ms vs 72 ms."

If NAND plus PCIe has 80ms latency, how do Fusion IO and HGST's Virident acquisition deliver µs latencies on a PCIe card?

Virgin Media boss AND ex-Murdoch man: BSkyB broadband is 'lousy'

Howverydare

Happy VM customer

As many did, I had to jump ship to Sky for the TV service for the soft porn and Formula 1, but left Broadband and phone line with Virgin. Even prior to, running all three with Virgin, I could call them up all manner of the night and someone would be doing their best to help, and only twice have I been without a service for any length of time and I didn't even have to ask for money off the bill; it was default - no service, no charge.

Whilst Sky's sales side of things have always been pleasant, I've not had cause to call them. I'm sure there are plenty of people who have had shit experience with Virgin - excluding the SuperFail tragedy - but I know many folks who have nothing but praise.

My only complaint would be that they cap me at a miserable 6Mbit upload if I have a bit of a session uploading files. Such a terrible hardship, given that anyone outside of a VDSL or leased line environment can't get close to that anyway!

207 thousand lights-out boxes are STILL hackable

Howverydare

"risks had been heeeded"

Everyone should take heeed of any risks.

Nvidia, VMware join to pipe high-quality 3D graphics from the cloud

Howverydare

You have to laugh...

...at some of the rubbish posted here about needing Terabit bandwidth and nanosecond latency to do anything meaningful. Yes, latency can impact user experience when gaming but even on a residential broadband on a more modest 720p resolution it's plenty usable. I'm already rolling this kit out to CAD users who think it's possibly the best thing ever because the many gigabyte datasets they're used to waiting for are much closer to the horsepower, which makes 10Gb and 40Gb links more accessible.

Microsoft DirectX 12 pushes gaming code closer to GPU bare metal

Howverydare
Holmes

What odds is it if it's 8 upwards only?

The majority of gamers (note, not knobs who play a game once a quarter and proclaim that they're a gamer who doesn't use Windows 8) use Windows 8 because the DX11.x support in Windows 7 is only partial, which when coupled with the performance improvements pretty much across the board on Windows 8 make it ideal.

There's a lot of reason to find 8.x frustrating, but there's a lot of misinformed, opinionated shite spouted on here about it too. What ever happened to Eadon?

Toshiba baby OCZ flings open coat, bares PCIe flasher to world

Howverydare

Re: Pricing.

Of course it isn't. The ones it replace are thousands of pounds. Why would this halve that?

Snowden: You can't trust SPOOKS with your DATA

Howverydare

Re: I know the Reg hates Google but

I don't see the poster saying that at all?

I see the poster saying that Google weren't willingly handing stuff over left, right and centre. That's decidedly different to them denying that Google slurp data.

Definitely a tinfoil hat subject though. Whilst I agree we should be making it difficult for these agencies, I doubt what I do on the internet really interests them that much. And if you think your internet activity is that interesting to them, might I suggest a room with nice, soft walls and a big jacket?

Who loves office space? Dell does: Virtualization to banish workstations from under desks

Howverydare

Re: My Pet hate

What on earth are you doing when you're running 3,000 PCs that need workstation-class graphics (to the order that these boxes are designed for)? I'm not aware of any deployments in that sort of order - but I'd be happy to be wrong.

I suspect what's happened is actually that you've managed to completely miss the various developments of VDI of the last 5+ years.

Howverydare

Re: Gee...

Well there's a view from over a year ago.

nVIdia have been working on VGX technology for a while now and it's publically available. Internet connection does play a part in it's usability but it's usable for a few users on a decent (FTTC/Cable) residential broadband connection. On premise virtualised workstations are now easily as good as their under-desk counterparts, as you don't have to run 10GbE down to the workstation to shift multi-gig files out to your edge network and it's cheaper in the majority of cases.

Software needs meaty cores, not thin, stringy ARMs, says Intel

Howverydare

So you've not got maximum memory installed, and complain that you're memory limited? Do we have another contender for a Darwin award?

I've got a server with 2x E5-2680v2 processors in it (like yours, but newer, faster and with more cores) and 256GB of RAM (with spare slots). 8 VDIs and it's struggling for processor, and with four 1GbE links and eight sTec SSDs it's not troubling. The memory isn't even fast memory, it's only 1600MHz stuff.

Ignorance to what happens outside of your (small) server cupboard doesn't mean that it doesn't exist. There are dozens of implementations of fast, multi-core processors that are bottlenecking systems. I work with many.

Howverydare

Re: Rubbish

Yes, citations. CAD applications (the most likely to be multithreaded) are barely able to drag their sorry backsides across two cores, Microsoft Office isn't particularly multithreading and the only reason browsing the internet manages to be multithreading is by spreading tabs out across threads and because everything requires a damned plugin.

That stuff just doesn't count.

Howverydare

Entirely dependent on the workload. We have customers brutally murdering some older quad-10-core Xeon servers with less than maximum memory installed. Even VDI installations can become massively processor-limited.

But then, as you say, a set of generic servers on a virtualisation environment certainly from 6 years ago, you couldn't afford the memory to use all of the processor available.

Howverydare

Re: Intel will be happy to know I have 6 beefy cores all rated at 3.5GHz

Intel will be even happier to note that I have 12 beefy 3.46GHz cores in an old machine, and 20 beefy 2.8GHz cores in the new one. And they're all Intel.

AMD always lose at Billy Big Balls. You just have to pay for them - or find someone else happy to do so for you.