Posts by Lorribot 452 publicly visible posts • joined 13 Jul 2017
"We are not about making money, we are really very concerned we are making record profits and feel really truly sorry for our gamers who we need to support against those very naughty coin miners who we will give a good telling off and send to bed early."
Hmmm, might be me but I think Nvidia may not care all that much about the plight of poor gamers.
Now if AMD sold a Ryzen 5 or 7 with a built in 580, vega 64.....
Also an iPAD has no concept of the 300 different users that might logon so can't save to a specific childs area.
Apple iOS products are designed for single users which makes sense when you are talking a phone, but an iPad in education is a a much more complicated thing and the concept of an Apple server is something that could tie it all together is something Apple gave up on about 10 years ago.
Apple are learning that when you jump on a bandwagon you had better put your full effort behind it or you will end up looking a bit pathetic.
I have many interesting conversations with non tech people about storage costs, "I can go to PC World and buy a 1TB disk for £30 why dou you charge me £4200 pper year?"
Good question. Weel there is teh primary storage, that cost £1500, then there is backups, that is £600, then there is the DR and the offsite copy of teh backups which doubles it.
"But why does it cost £1500 for 1TB of primary?"
Ah, software and all teh controllers and stuff to move all the bits around......Software to manage it......
Cost per GB of individual disks is quite different, but no one buying storage buys a disk, they buy a storage system and the cost of flash become a small componetnt of the overall cost. Software, replication funtionality, support costs etc all make the small difference in cost of SSD around 10-20% of teh total, which tips the balance in favour of SSD given it responsivenes and generally speed improvements.
Storage is due another disruptor, Nutanix is trying its hardest and Pure, Tintri and Viloin (amongst others) have all had go with varying degrees of success and impending doom, but it is all been different form factors which the big boys don't feel comfortable with and dont work for every scenario (unstructured data anyone?). Ultimately it needs something to break the monopoly of the big boys (EMC, HP, IBM, Netapp, Hitachi) with their "value added/should be standard" extras which may actually see spinning disk regain ground on a cost basis as other components are comoditised included as standard, but no one has really gone after them in their own space with a proper purpose built SSD based system against their stick some SSDs in an old Clariion mentallity.
Pantaloons comes from a French word Pantalon and refers to typically baggy leg coverings,
Trousers is an English (possible Irish origin) word that refers to a more close fitting garment.
Underpants originally were loose fitting undergamment for the legs somewhere between long johns and boxer shorts.
Over trousers are common in Motorcycling and refer to, often waterproof. trousers that may also ofer some element of protection from surface impact and abrasion.
Google have been doing this kind of stuff for years.
If, like me you are forced to use Hangouts for work, not only are you forced to install Chrome but any links in Hangouts automatically open in Chrome not your choosen default browser because Google knows best.
But hey, Google do no evil (like store your every move on the internet) so all is good.
So they bought it because it looks good, just as well because it's likely to cost them more to support it and manage their relationship with Google which as everyone knows when it come to negotiation, comprimise or anything it is a one way street than just sticking Office on a users desktop.
I know this from experience. I ahve also seen service interupions and random glitches on Google servers that sees one user ok and the person next to them suffering extreme latency, but have no way to have a conversation with Google about it.
Good luck, they are brave.
These sorts of decisions are based on percieved cost cutting and other stuff that has nothing to do with keeping the IT lights on. Google as company works Google's way and you better too.
We have one (smaller) part of our company fully in Google land and the other (larger) part in house Microsoft. The Google part is more demanding (ie cost more to support) and more difficult to manage and integrate with the other IT stuff than the in house MS environment, it is a hidden cost you don't know about until you do it, its bit like integrating SAP with everthing, you end up integrating everything with SAP.
Then there are the bits that are missing like mail relay for your other application that you have to replace for more hidden costs.
I wish them well, but for a big company to do this with many other systems is madness, as a startup you can make it work but a company like Airbus, it may break them.
Negligence falls at many levels. Using your example of the phantom US missile strike, the negligence there would have fallen on the designer of a system that relied on a single source of information with no corroberation, you would want at least 3 sources of information and go with the majority to prove a reasonable response. Something Car manufactures should be looking at for their autonomous systems, but cost will always come in to it, lidar is not cheap.
Responsibilty with programming has already been tested in law with the whole Dieselgate thing, where it was proven the software coders were acting under direction of management who specified the system, the grunts on the frontline can only be accused if it proven there were working out side the design brief otherwise it is the people at the top that cop for it as it was their design and signoff, its why they get paid the big bucks..
Guns and knives are industry standard devices used by assassins, many drug dealers and other enforcer types, to carry out their business.
Many industries have standards that are not beneficial to the their customers, Volkswagen (et al) used industry standard programming techniques to falsify emmissions data.
Soem of the previously industry standards around chemical plants are not particularly healty or benificial.
Using the term "industry standard" does not mean something is inherantly a good thing if that industry's aim is to screw people over, steal their lives and then sell it back to them or kill them.
It is the intent to harm or neglect of its customers welfare in order to make money that is the issue that Facebook seems to be missing.
Is there a reason that Gregg's was used through out this piece?
Such as "Gregg's explained on Friday".
Maybe I am a bit slow and misssng the joke but his name was Gregg, Gregg's indicates possesion as in "Gregg's hat" and not just a refernce to a person, you could, in the jocular, refer to him as Greggs of even Greggsy but Gregg's is just ugly and wrong.
Siemans stuff breaks as well, but apprently its not their fault for writing crap code its Micorsoft's for sending out patches.
Savoye said previously to us that they don't support patching the servers. I am frankly more worried about patching a savoye server than it being hacked so i guess it won't get done and teh business wont accept the risk. Probably endup trying to firewall it in some way. its just crazy that no one can write stuff properly these days.
With vCentre, ESXi patches, hardware firmware updates all before guest hardware updates and OS patches now required to implement the fixes it has become a monumental process from what started out as just an OS patch now known to be flaky and break many key applications (anyone brave enoght to patch SAP servers yet?) and no microcode.
Given they had 6 months to sort this out I would have hoped they could have got it all together and presented as one unified here's your plan and what you need to do, rather than drip feed patches and keep changing their minds as to what actually needs to be done and by whom.
Complete balls up by the the whole industry that really needs to get its shit together and realise they only exist because of their customers.
Have heard this from several Appliance suppliers like Kemp Load Balancers, "its a closed system that does not allow the running of any user code so is secure" so does not need to patched.
Seems a risky stance until you think about it.
Is your storage system the weakest link in security of your data? I would imagine the unpatched Windows box that hosts the data would or a user giving up there credentials to phishing be a far easier mark then the storage system to exploit.
Storage is likely to be in the last 2 or 3% of security patching.
What about older chipset and more importantly real workloads like VMware, SQL DB, SAP and IIS workloads? You know something actually useful. On all chipsets like Sandy Bridge, Ivy Bridge, Haswell and Broadwell. Sandy Bridge Xeon processors only went end of life in 2015 and were being sold in Gen 8 HP kit in 2013/2014 so are still relevant.
"Govt CIOs failing to scrutinize techies' spending – watchdog"
I am 100% sure no techie was involved in the decision on any of the contracts or the source of the original requirements. These invarible come from the "Busines" an entertity I have never managed to corner anywhere and pin down or put a name to.
No PM (IT or otherwise) could be labelled a techie, they are a best knowledgable users of IT and very good at doing paperwork, at worst living on a wing and a prey till they get found out, which from the techie side is around 5 minutes, from the business side is 6 months to a year depending on their contract.
It seems to me that Microsoft over the years has got a little confused as to what it was supposed to be supplying.
For most an OS should do the basics and provide an opportunity or platform for Application vendors to provide the experience.
Back in the days of Windows 95 and subsequant versions that experience was subsumed in to Windows until Windows 7. With windows 10 lots of work was don to uncouple teh basic OS from all teh peripheral detritus which is why the early copies booted almost instantly with the help of BIOS tweaks and SSD, unfortunately it came with a penalty of increased snooping and a need to sell services and become a hub and more and more has been added to the OS in the name of features and selling stuff.
I have no camera, microphone or mobile phone connection and yet i still have to have Camera, Recorder and Messenger installed, why?
OS as a service should be just that, an OS, a platform for others to build on, unfortunately no one (not even Linux distros) seem to offer that, MS could but choose to, but the everyone needs money to survive and its current business model precludes it.
What price a basic OS that is stable, free of snooping, light weight and secure by default and the only consequence of a badly written app is that it crashes its own little world?
Every year were I live 1000 new homes are buillt. Not one planning application has any stipulation around broadband provision. I know of one person who is on a 3 month rolling waiting list for a spare line at his local exchange and another who has a 3MB connection.
All new housing should have at the very least FTTC provision stipulted where te cabinet is no more than 200M from teh property and the exchange has sufcient capacity
If we can't even get the new houses right what hope is there to get all the existing housing stock done?
Actully Blair was replaced by Brown, you must have auto blocked him out.
Camron did the the whole EU referendum thing and then ran away when he lost and was followed by may who seems Marvelesque in her ability to absorb massive hits, i believe she may even have given Ali a run for his money, or maybe just no one else actually wants to take on her job.
Also Alex Salmond was followed by an even smugger Nicola Sturgeon
So I think that all holds up pretty well.
Every now and again one Politician does something quite useful and good that the bar gets reset though it is often requires the integection of realyl bad person or a world war and we have to ignore everything else bad they did, normally porn, groping, tax fidlling, philandering or general abusivness and abnoxiousness.
It maybe me misunderstanding but it would appear from what was described that the effect of the shield is to increase the useful life of the battery, so instaed of say 1000 charges you may get 3000 before the the capacity of the battery degrades to say 50% due to described failing of teh electrode. This will be a major benefit for people who buy 5-10 year old electric cars.
This tech does not actually increase the capacity of the cell so will not extend the range of a vehicle as described in title.
BT should be allowed to reduce its prices were housing density high, this would make it more atractive for new entrants to fibre up the low density and rural areas that are desperate for reasonable broadband instead of te City areas that are awash with connectivity
They should force Virgin to open its network to other companies.
They should enforce FTTP or at least FTTC to a new cabinetor a Virgin Media cable on all new housing developments, the current situation for new developments is laughable.
So son two has a One:5t or whatever it is called and his twin brothers' face unlock his phone, go figure the weirdness of an accurate representaion of a persons face working in this way, probably the easiest to copy or simulate, can unlock a phone.
Can we go back to finger prints, vein scans or eye ball recongnition for the important stuff now?
"Android has been revised to no longer phone home"
It may well have but what version of Android do you have to be on to have got that update given how infrequantly most phones are updated?
I find Google blase about their relationship with their customers and somewhat cavalier with their data.
At some point we will sure be looking over teh precipiece, it just needs enogh people to relise they are being abused by a faceless corporation and decent alternative to to their product. Its shame there is only Android and iOS as they are not a good choice, maybe/hopefully something wil come out of left field.
Allowing strangers to enter your home when you arn't there.with just some third rate, built down to a price tech equipment to make sure all is well?
Someone seriously thought it would end well?
You have to Amazon 10/10 for trying everything to actually make a profit, but 0/10 for reality awareness.
Anything financial based on the coding skills of humans is likely to end in tears.
Anything that involve loss in the US is likely to end in a court.
Any recompense for a misdemeanor for anything complicated in the technology sector will take around 10 years to sort out as the law catches up with things and works out who owns what and how dissed who.
The South Sea Bubble for the 21st century any one?
So apart from EMC Isilon that uses Infiniband on the backend, I have yet to come across anything that supports Infiniband direct to the server.
It amazes me no one seems to be putting this in their HCI solution as back end vSAN replication or front ending their SSD arrays.
Someone is using it as it is still around, can be real high end stuff, probably Node to node in big super computers.
Anyone know?
The controller of the vehicle is responsible for the speeding ticket, in case of an autonomous car it is the software which was written by the car manufacturer so they would have to be responsible as they are the only ones who can change behavior of the car and would be keen to not exceed speed limits..this is the point of fines.
If they could prove the council had made the signage difficult to read then they could pass the fine to the council.
As for patching i would hope that any software was designed to be patched on the fly and not requiring excessive downtime.
My main concern is that so far car companies have shown complete ineptitude of a magnitude that is bordering on criminal when it comes to security, so hacking, both for performance and malicious intent, is highly likely and could be by a simple drive by hack OTA of hundreds of vehicles.
.....the OS bit.
Why Samsung thought it could license an OS to other OEMs when MS failed miserable (though extenuating circumstances of complete ineptitude on MS part) when they have no eco system or Apps to speak of is beyond me. I can understand where Huawei is coming from (megalomaniac control freak) but outside of China I doubt it will float for the same reason as MS and Samsung failed and an unwillingness on their part to push it out there for others to do stuff/run with is not going to work
Imagine if MS released a version/image file of Windows Phone 10 that would work on a Samsung S8 or indeed any/all other Android phones.......
So a company that scans everything you search for and view on the web and emails that go through their systems then uses that information to target advertising at you on some kind of weird stalker like way and is responsible for an OS that has the least effective updating mechanism (relies on third parties to validate and distribute, if they can be bothered), and circumvented the security of other software manufactures in order to get their software on to those systems (Chrome and Google earth install in to the users profile rather than program files if you don't have admin rights) and allows any one to write a program to run in that browser, is trying to use FUD to destroy another company tell them they are not doing security right.
People in glass houses throwing stones.
Personally I find Chrome an unpleasant experience and Google a far cry from their do no evil roots. As a company they are worse than Microsoft was at its worst.
Superfast Broad band is not available to 94% of the country, Fibre to the cabinet is.
These are two entirely different beasts, one is so missed named that Broaband providers should be sued for misrepresentation and false advertising. My FTTC is nether super nor fast at a paltry 13Mbs and less than I got on "slow ADSL" at my previous house (20Mb and much lower latency).
Also in my locality there around 12-15,000 new houses being built, none are being provisioned with FTTC let alone the FTTP that the developers should be obligated to install on all new housing estates.
Broadband was a shambles and still is a shambles, sold to politicians and us using wonky statistics and misselling using their best snake oil hyperbola.
My wife's less than 1 year old Lenovo Yoga tablet has not had any patches or version updates, indeed the one update that is available is known to break it badly, it is still being sold with Android 5.1. No other updates seem to be in the offing.
Many Andriod devices are offered as sell and forget by the builders and Google has abdicated responsibility to OEMs to support the OS. Imagine if Microsoft had said well do patches but it is up to Dell/HP/Lenovo/Walmart/boutique builder/cornershop to distribute updates and patches?
Windows Phone had one advantage in that all installs are pretty standard (the OS is designed to enable patching by move code out of the kernel, a route Andriod is following, all be it slowly) so patching could be done centrally by MS compare that to Android devices where patching and updates is the responsibility of people who are only interested in selling you new kit.
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/09/11/blackberry_admits_we_could_do_better_at_patching/
And Google actually distribute mailware
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/09/15/malware_outbreak_googles_play_store/
Google should grow up and spend more time fixing its own issues rather than trying to destroy MS, its a pointless fight that does no one any good, It used to champion doing no evil, it seems more hell bent than Apple on world domination at any cost which is saying something.
Android is nightmare OS from as security perspective. getting updates at all is a best hit and miss even if Google released the fixes for older versions of its OS, getting version updates to the latest version is nigh on impossible unlike Windows.
Microsoft made it free and simple to upgrade (still is if you use assistive tech) and have supported pretty much any configuration of hardware you could find in a PC with their latest version, there is no reason not to upgrade other than personal preference or lack of understanding. Can Google say the same about Android?
They should point their team at their own OS in all its various incarnations before they start trying to throw mud at Microsoft.
They have been doing this stuff in the good old US of A for many years, it used to be snake oil and quack doctors, once in while it works (Coke) but most times some one gets a pot of money and many people lose a lot for no benefit.
Would have thought a regulator or two would get interested but if you pitch right you can fall between the cracks.
I believe that BT Internet and Yahoo were linked in some way, can't recall details but defo my btinternet.net email was with Yahoo, and I suspect other ISPs may have been providing email accounts through Yahoo. Plus when do you delete a user account when the number of accounts is how you measure/boast how big you are? Plus all those spam mailboxes that got created in the 90s but not deleted, 3 Billion accounts or email address is a possibility, but there were only probably 1 billion real users, and on 30 active ones.
There's three ways to do patching
Control just the software and spend years refining the patching process with vast amounts of in house testing to ensure 90% compatibility and then if anything breaks you did your best
Abdicate responsibility for the delivery of patches to 3rd parties who are only interested in selling new stuff and customize your OS so everything will break, then its their fault when stuff does break or their customers get hacked.
Control Hardware and software so patching is simple and pushed to every device (except where they pass control of patching to third parties for some hardware who ......)
Two of them work, one doesn't, take you pick
Class action anyone?
That won't be Windows pro it will be Windows on ARM.
They should have got in bed with Intel and made a proper x86 phone and run a full copy of Windows so legacy Win32 apps could be used, you can't even run Windows Server admin tools on it, if you can't engage with the techies then what hope is there?
Its only use would as a dumb terminal connecting to a virtual windows desktop or Terminal Server in its current state.
Microsoft took too long to get stuff out the door then then killed development.
I still have 4 year old Nokia 925, company won't get me a new Windows phone as we are now an iPhone only company, which is weird because i can have a Windows or Mac desktop or laptop but no choice of phone as it is too hard to support, really?
They would be better spending (investing) the money on 2 million more green cabinets for the benefit of those of use who live miles from their current one, it would benefit far more than the 10 m premises and also would increase capacity on the network. if 80% of the population were withing 100 meters of their Green box most could easily run up to 1Gb with fibre to the prem, that should be reserved for those in very rural areas or really need a full 1-10Gb connection.
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