HP?
HP partnered with Fusion IO to make their "Storage Accelerator" product years ago. They even have it in blades. Best to leave them out of this one.
BTW: The reason is obvious. They all sell disk SANs that run millions of dollars each.
Posts by Mikel
2643 publicly visible posts • joined 19 Oct 2008
Page:
Server vendors and the dead hand of commoditisation
Google donates a billion cores to boffins
Intel to pay OEMs to build Atom-Android tablets?
Microsoft Phone man offers guarantee-free glitch pledge
Thursday 14th April 2011 12:01 GMT
It's not Microsoft's fault?
@cornz 1 - you cant hold them responsible for the crap that the network operators insist on putting on the phone..
You can't be serious. After all the millions they've paid in marketing to brand Android as "fragmented" by irregular update versions now we can't blame Microsoft for failing to deliver consistency on their own phones? Why not? Turnabout is fair play. They promised consistency and they didn't deliver it. How are people not entitled to feel cheated? They didn't get what they were promised.
Wednesday 13th April 2011 21:54 GMT
This evolution is amusing
It's entertaining to watch them thrash about like this with their updates, but it's pretty harmless really. Remember that in six months after release they've sold barely a few days worth of iPhone or Android phone sales. It's not like their bumbling is hurting a lot of people.
And remember that pre-NoDo update? 90% of the time it didn't brick the phone at all. From the reportage you can see that was a stroke of good luck.
This is not a big deal - especially if you choose the right phone.
Feds commandeer botnet, issue 'stop' command
Thursday 14th April 2011 10:42 GMT
Annoying if it's your machine
>Annoying to say the least if its your machine...
And disastrous if it's the server for a defense contractor or organ bank, the PC of a small family practitioner or local police department, or an errant laptop from a major national law firm or advertising agency.
Since we're talking millions of infected Windows PCs the odds of something like that being in the pool is not just likely, it's certain. No, that just won't do.
If only there were some way to avoid your Windows PC catching a Windows virus and joining a Windows Botnet this long nightmare would be over. It has been many years, but we don't seem to be able to find a common thread that would help us develop a best practice for avoiding Windows exploits. We've tried keeping up to date with all the Windows patches, and even updating our IE to the latest version. Even with Windows firewall turned on some of our PCs seem to fall ill from Windows malware problem through zero-day Windows exploits and Windows user error. Once one Windows user is infected on our networks the plague always spreads - often directly from Windows PC to Windows PC through the network, but sometimes through Windows shared folders or common Windows applications like Outlook and sometimes just with pen drives or burned CDs.
It's a shame that there's nothing to be done. I guess software will always have these risks, and one time in three any of our info put into a PC will be available to some anonymous stranger to do with as he will. The alternative is to adopt the lifestyle of Thoreau and live in our own Waldens: sans running water, electric lights, flush toilets and the bustle of modern commerce.
If only there were a third choice...
Can Bing ride IE and WinPho to Google triumph?
Tuesday 12th April 2011 11:28 GMT 
No. Not gonna happen.
WinPho is tanking, having lost one fifth its market share in the trailing three months. Another year of that and it's at zero. No help there.
IE9 is niche at best. If it gets 100% of the installed base it can run on, it will hit 30% of desktops and 1% of mobile where the growth and money is. We all know it's more likely to get 30% of those, and that means it can't dominate the web and drive server-side technologies to the exclusion of standards-based browsers. It runs on effectively none of the 40-60 million tablets projected to sell this year. It can't reach what James Plamondon, Microsoft Chief Evangelist, called "critical mass". There is no possible control of the hearts and minds of developers, no chance to take ownership of the Web's protocols, formats and servers - which is the purpose for IE.
So what we have here is Microsoft spending several billions of dollars a year to rent market share as if a temporary monopoly on the loser's corner of search was some corporate trophy their shareholders should care about. They're killing off all the remnants of failed search providers - some of whom had interesting alternative views on how search should be done. But Microsoft is not gaining any ground against Google and has no hope of doing so because Google search results are and always will be more relevant because to Google that's the top priority. Google is and always will be more trusted because Google doesn't have the long and sordid corporate history that Microsoft lays claim to.
Where is the finish line? Where are the strawberry fields where the patient Microsoft shareholder reaps the reward for these investments? Nowhere. As soon as Microsoft stops pouring money down this hole we forget they ever tried. Google then owns in fee simple the properties Microsoft is evicted from. Google doesn't even have to be the bad guy for weeding out the interesting niche players as that chore is already done.
In one sense Microsoft is paying vast sums of their shareholders' money to consolidate the remainder of the search market for Google, because when they give up - as ultimately they must - Google inherits their share as the last credible search engine standing.
/I like badgers.
Nokia floats out a collection of cool concepts
Open source .NET mimic lands on Android
Microsoft's first Window 8 tablet app spotted
Google 'clamps down' on world of Android partners
Friday 1st April 2011 05:35 GMT 
Tempest in a teacup
The whole thing will be open in due course. In the interim this is a good thing because there are really well funded, connected and motivated people who will stop at nothing to ruin Android tablets. They want desperately to ship a Honeycomb spin that breaks security, ruins the customer experience and, if possible, implicates Google in some perceived wrongdoing. This very article illustrates how desperate and shrill they are becoming.
I doubt Google likes this necessary defensive posture either and is working diligently to correct it. In the interim you are free to select from any of the other available free and open source tablet operating systems, and install that on your Android tablets. Google is under no compulsion to open source any more of this code before they are ready to do so.
Google's 'clean' Linux headers: Are they really that dirty?
Tuesday 29th March 2011 04:44 GMT 
Weak sauce
So, anything at all to bash Google then? The opinions of Linus Torvalds, Eben Moglen and Richard Stallman aren't enough to put this non-issue to bed? That this guy won't even make an actual allegation, but instead hint at vague suggestions.
You're ruining your reputation with this tripe. I hope you're being compensated what that's worth to you.
Fukushima scaremongers becoming increasingly desperate
Monday 28th March 2011 08:56 GMT
5-6 Sievert is not invariably fatal
@Pet Peeve A whole-body exposure of 5 Sievert is LD50 if untreated (half a normal population dies). Death would be expected within 2-3 weeks if it happened. To get that level of exposure in a short period you would pretty much have to be in the room with a criticality accident, about 15 feet away, or bathe in a radioactive solution. Such an exposure limited to the feet indicates likely amputation. If not too much radioactive iodine was absorbed through the skin the patient might only experience nausea and recover - though their career in nuclear power is certainly over and they face a lifelong increased risk of cancer.
It hasn't been 2-3 weeks yet, and these workers certainly won't be untreated. They'll probably recover with agressive treatment. That doesn't make this a minor glitch. Aggressive treatment is going to involve a bone-marrow transplant.
Whole-body exposures above 10 Sieverts are invariably death.
This is probably a good spot to thank the Fukushima Team for their brave work at great personal risk to limit the harm to the outside world. Thank you all.
Monday 28th March 2011 08:56 GMT
The bar is ongoing criticality now?
A criticality accident rarely occupies more than a few seconds.
Some background, and this is going to be a vast oversimplification:
Almost all atoms split, but generally heavier atoms split faster. We don't know if any one atom will survive forever or not, but the average time it will take an atom to split is called its half-life. When a heavy atom splits, it gives up heat and becomes two or more atoms - usually losing some neutrons and electrons along the way. This is fission. The freed electrons become photons, which are heat and light. In atomic science the neutron is the heavy beast, containing far more mass than protons and vastly more than the third element of this trinity, electrons.
Free Neutrons are the bowling ball of nuclear physics. If they happen to strike a heavy atom that's already teetering on the edge of splitting, it will split too, releasing more electrons and neutrons. This is called reaction, and the devices constructed to use this are called reactors. If it's freed in an area that's densely populated with heavy atoms like a nuclear fuel rod, this is more likely to occur. If you measure this scale on the number of neutrons freed for each free neutron, it's a scale that goes from zero to over ten. But there are some interesting nuclear effects as the number approaches one. At room temperature and one atmosphere of pressure though, even U235 is mostly vacuum and many freed neutrons can get away without amplifying the reaction.
Masses where the average freed neutron will not collide with an atom and release more neutrons than you started with are "subcritical". Eventually their reactions will peter out. At exactly one on this scale, for every released neutron there is exactly one additional released neutron. This is called "critical" because at this point the reaction is self-sustaining until it runs out of big atoms. Since this happens at an atomic level, the reactions are very fast. Remember that in addition to the neutrons, they're also producing huge numbers of freed electrons, or heat. This is what make nuclear power work.
Now, if power nuclear reactors required criticality they would be much more dangerous things than they are. By carefully spacing the masses of the heavy atoms and adding other elements that slow the reaction called moderators, the reactor can do its business of generating heat by approaching, but not quite reaching, criticality, and the timescales can be reduced to something that humans can deal with.
If, however, the fuel melts and goes out of the operator's control then it can of course reach this critical mass as molten bits of fuel fuse to become the critical mass. The natural result is that the mass will get so hot that it will expand until the heavy atoms are so sparse that the reactivity falls again below one. This is called a criticality accident. When it happens the nuclear material typically becomes so hot that it expands until it's no longer critical. If in the process it becomes very hot it fuses with whatever mass is available and becomes diluted and is a new composition. This substance is called "corium".
By measuring the specific types of radiation released the Japanese government has announced that at least 13 criticality accidents have occurred on this site since the Tsunami. If somebody's trying to tell you this isn't a big deal, they're lying. Criticality accidents are as big a deal as they get in civilian nuclear power.
So why no boom?: There are elements like carbon, iron, boron and silicon that can absorb neutrons without splitting. They are reaction "poison". So containments are made of steel. Nuclear reactors are designed such that the corium if it occurs will alloy with these substances and damp the reaction. Also, the heat produced causes the radioactive materials to expand until they are not critical any more. Nuclear weapons lack these dampeners, and in addition are not only surrounded be reaction amplifiers (elements that give up more than one neutron per collision) but are surrouded by explosives that compress the reaction materials much closer together faster than they can expand through heat to trigger the explosion known as "supercriticality". This can't occur in nature.
So ongoing criticality? No. There is no such thing in an uncontrolled nuclear reaction. It can't happen. But does that make this event less serious? No.
Why US antitrust regulators should probe Google search
Saturday 26th March 2011 01:06 GMT 
Google's advantage
The thing about Google's dominance is that it's ephemeral. The day there is something better, more reliable, faster, more current, we will use it and drop them like a hot rock. They know this, and spend immense resources continually making their services better.
This has been going on for some time, and their pool of knowledge in the field is vast. Their services are amazing. They have invested remarkable sums in building and got good value on nearly every buy.
Others like Bing and Yahoo face this high barrier to entry: they have to be as good as Google to gain viability in the long run. They cannot assume dominance and then shut down all opposition and progress and then halt their own efforts in preference to rent seeking. I'm sure to them this looks like unfair monopolistic behaviour - that Google is preventing their dream by engaging in continuous improvement; by being so good they cannot compete or even buy the market.
That is hard for them. But I'm OK with it.
Ellison drops iceberg in front of HP's unsinkable Itanic
Amazon is best hope of a viable alternative to iPad
Microsoft+IE9: Holier than Apple open web convert?
Tesco heralds 2011 as YEAR OF ANDROID
HP lays cuckoo egg in Microsoft nest
Microsoft 'paid Nokia $1bn' for WinPho 7 deal
Wednesday 9th March 2011 19:35 GMT
Re: That's all?
@Mark2410 best billion ms may have ever spent though
To be money well spent Microsoft would have to see a net benefit from the spend, and they would actually have to spend it. This is more like the "ecosystem" marketing numbers for Windows Phone, where they net spend is $500B, but that includes makers and carriers sharing some of the burden. And it's a five year deal. Since there's likely no phones at all for the first two years of the deal, it's likely there'll be no Nokia to pay for the last two.
But there's no benefit to Microsoft here. They get some phone IP. They know no more what to do with that than my toddler does an arc welder. It may as well be 47 tons of soybean husks.
Tuesday 8th March 2011 10:20 GMT 
The story... It's not true.
It's not even close to true. And it's not new either - it's been floating about since in the days after this trainwreck the market recoiled in horror. It's been "suggested" and "hinted". But the story is that it's a commitment to engage that level of engineering and marketing resources, not to transfer funds. Not the same thing at all.
And considering the scale of this mess, not a good value. Consider that according to El Reg's own reportage the announcement wiped over $17 Billion from Nokia's market value in ONE DAY and it has continued to decline in the month since.
No, not a good deal at all.
MS smartphone share falls despite WinPho 7
Microsoft blows Windows Phone update, again
iPad 2? Let's be kind and call it iPad 1.5
Microsoft plans June Windows 8 tablet tease?
Tuesday 1st March 2011 22:57 GMT 
Apple releases products
Tomorrow there is a new iPad. Where's the Apple preview? Nowhere but a single event invite. When they show it, it will be made and ready to buy.
And yet here, years before potential release, is a Microsoft tease about yet another tablet product that may never see the light of day - which, in fact, cannot contain technology contemporary with the software that is itself over a year from release. Such is the pace of progress in mobile.
Why not just rerun previews from the 2010 CES keynote? We haven't seen those products yet either.
Microsoft teases. Apple delivers.
SeaMicro drops 64-bit Atom bomb server
Monday 28th February 2011 09:44 GMT
An interesting reply to Godson
http://forums.theregister.co.uk/forum/1/2011/02/25/ict_godson_3b_chip/
A complex metric, compute density. It's a balance of dollars, MIPS, Watts, cubic inches. Must not neglect storage and connectivity. Each customer has different needs. Manageability is key. There's a huge opportunity to become irrelevant here.
The X86 instruction set hasn't that much pull, but it has some. The folk who want this stuff own the source code for their apps. They would recompile them to work on an array of Xoom tablets if that was the best solution to their problems. But X86 has a huge legacy that does create some reluctance to shift.
Intel Atom needs to gain Imagination Technologies' SGX554MP16 to be a slam dunk in HPC and continue the line to stay there. Shoot, Intel should just buy Imagination Technologies and be done with it if they can get away with the antitrust issues. Can they be that bold?
Quad-core Atoms with 16-core IT graphics chipsets at 16nm could be the server win in 2013. TSV for 32GB of RAM in the SOC package, 16 CPUs with PCIe interconnect on the board and multiple Thunderbolt channels to the chassis.
In 2013 we'll need that for VDI, as the client side is going mobile.
And as long as I'm dreaming, somebody to sell the thing who has a freaking clue what the hell he's doing.
Godson: China shuns US silicon with faux x86 superchip
Microsoft bricking lesson bodes badly for Elop's Brave New Nokia
Thursday 24th February 2011 21:03 GMT 
Beautiful
A botched update was expected of course, and up to 10 percent failures? Delightful. To blame both the users and the handset makers was a stroke of genius. Over the top. Please wait 4-6 weeks for a direct ship replacement for your phone? A work of art.
A shame there's no way to way to blame the carriers as well for the trifecta. That would have been perfect. Hopefully there's a way to work that into the main update.
Windows Phone 7 gets 'goodie' update
Tuesday 22nd February 2011 10:07 GMT 
The updater is a core piece
And now we find it shipped with one that's barely good enough to download a newer one before the update can be performed. And this is the crew that's going to port Windows Phone to a basket of Nokia platforms they've never seen before, with the assistance of a crew of Nokia engineers who've never seen Windows Phone before, before the year is out. Thanks for the heads up. Any word on multitasking, and customizable ringtones?
Acer in alleged Chrome OS monitor plot
Intel boss searches planet for post-Nokia MeeGo spouse
Spanish whispers on Microsoft and Nokia
Friday 18th February 2011 10:30 GMT
Over a year for cut and paste
Yes, they knew they needed it over a year ago and it's not here yet. Yet somehow Microsoft is going to both integrate full multitasking - infinitely harder - and also port their phone OS to a diverse basket of Nokia platforms by the end of THIS year. It is to laugh. Not. Gonna. Happen.
IMHO Microsoft doesn't intend to actually deliver a working OS to Nokia. Ever. They never did deliver for Sendo, and came out of that deal well.
Five Reasons to be cheerful about Nokia-Microsoft
Thursday 17th February 2011 23:54 GMT
This is grand for almost all
First, it killed WinMo deader than Canasta. Having now betrayed every single player in Mobile tech, including Nokia they have no entry into mobile. If they can't get into the market they can't dirupt and dominate it, which means the following step, halting progress, is out of the question too. Obviously we all benefit from that.
Second, it puts Nokia's market share "in play". Android and iOs will continue their gains because they cannot now have a credible offering until Microsoft launches a future version of their desktop OS that runs well on a phone. ETA on that is: never. Young upstarts in China and India are even now spinning up factories for downmarket phones and tablets, bringing real tech to this vast pool of humanity much sooner than I had thought likely, even if it's years slower than I would have liked. It gives the slimmest of openings for Meego and WebOS if they move fast and true.
Third, like almost every company its size, Nokia's. Stock is tied up with slow-moving institutional investors. It provides one of those rare opportunities to get in and eat their lunch, instead of the other way around.
Finally, with the demise of Microsoft's mobile efforts comes something some of us have been waiting for for a generation: The opportunity to be free of their control and. Obstruction of progress for good and ever. Google doesn't tell people what to not invent. They don't throw their partners under the bus. They don't engineer their platforms to work poorly for their app. Competitors. Their apps are freestanding, but work well with each other and others. They don't use proprietary secret data formats to lock in customers. Google trusts us to keep choosing them every day based on quallity. Google trusts in themselves that they can deliver the quality every year so they don't need lock in.
It's good for lots of reasons.
Qt sees its future in Microkia
Intel pushes password-pumping mojo
Intel defends MeeGo after Nokia defection
Grief and disbelief greet Elop's Nokia revolution
Friday 11th February 2011 19:28 GMT
Lovely
Nokia is going the way of Sendo. Lots of money to be made here yet, for the bold investor. This suits Microsoft too, as they have to get Nokia down to a chewable size before they eat it.
Interesting is what this does to all of the other Windows Phone partners. Nokia gets to customize, or "fragment" WP7. Will HTC, Samsung and the others? Probably not. They've been betrayed.
Ballmer's Bing man to 'define' Microsoft's server future
Thursday 10th February 2011 08:40 GMT
Now we see why Muglia was cut
Bob Muglia was making money and growing the business. A guy from Bing with top-level certifications in burning high multiples of revenue while achieving nothing is just the type to get the division to stop making money, make it the laughingstock of the industry and invite competitors to come and take some market share.
I'm pleased to see that SteveB is still on target, bless him. They couldn't have found a better CEO to accomplish this job. He seems to be picking up the pace lately. Scuttling Nokia is a stroke of genius. Nobody will ever trust ex-MS execs again.
Apple under threat from ... Windows tablets
Wednesday 9th February 2011 11:54 GMT
Fondle slab botherers?
It doesn't seem likely. The odds of the next version of Windows arriving on time and being any good are both remote, and the two are probably mutually exclusive. We're more likely looking at 2014 for Windows+ARM and 2019 for the decent one. By then we won't remember what Windows was, nor care.
What we get instead is a bunch of companies like Dell and Asus holding up mockups as if they were actually going to be products one day. Here's a clue: if they can't even build a working model of the thing they sure as heck aren't anywhere near production on it. HP's new boss, Apothaker, has promised to stop doing that - which is good - HP used to be one of the worst about this.
Oh, and we get a bunch of people shouting "Don't buy anything yet! The REALLY good stuff is RIGHT around the corner." For years. They were saying that in January 2010, and they're no closer now to a good product than they were then.
You know what? If it makes you happy and you have the spending cash, go get yourself a fondle slab from whomever is selling one that suits you now. You deserve it. They're not that much more than a nice camera. They make great gifts. And if you take it to work you may find that these things come with a bunch of enterprise apps that let you do almost everything. It's good for the economy. If you don't care for it you can always take it back or find someone dear who craves it.
Yes, better ones will be out this month and next, and the month after, and all summer and so on. If what you require in a technology device is that it halt progress for everybody else the moment you buy it, you're being silly. When it wears out or the new version is just appealing enough, upgrade.
You've plenty of time to do that two or four times before we see the next reasonable version of Windows, so why wait?
Samsung and IBM in patent pact
Smartphones 'out sell' PCs for first time
Wednesday 9th February 2011 10:05 GMT
Profit dollars
It would be interesting to see how these different markets compare with each other in terms of dollars of profit per year. I understand the margins on traditional PCs can be razor thin. Smartphones pull several hundred dollars each in profits for the hardware vendor, and many hundreds more for the carrier that subsidized the price.
Android's on top – will Nokia and RIM let it in?
Tuesday 8th February 2011 09:43 GMT 
Oh dear.
And now we're not allowing comments on Nokia stories at all. Tsk, Reg, tsk.
Ok, prediction time: MWC 2/11/2011 (four days from now). Nokia puts Windows 7 Enterprise on Intel Medfield PHONE and TABLET with a custom small-screen touch UI and tablet Kinect UI, abandons mobile operating systems altogether on high-end devices planned to ship by Christmas. Steve Ballmer declares victory over mobile to quizzical stares, stunned disbelief, and the rare snort.
Microsoft reinfects Chrome with closed video codec
Thursday 3rd February 2011 11:08 GMT
If you want one, make one
Like I said when this brouhaha started. Chrome's got an open interface. If you want an H.264, make one. And they did.
Of course it's only for Windows 7. Why would they make one for XP? They don't sell XP any more.
The purpose for H.264 is to ensure that no free systems can play video, by threatening patent suits and injunctions. That war was lost on the day Google bought ON2 Technologies.
BTW, apparently Microsoft pays more into MPEG-LA than it gets out in licensing fees - by about twice. This despite contributing to the patent pool. So obviously their efforts here are about control, not directly about money.
Hardware accelleration of VP8 is well underway, with systems shipping any day now. But if you must have your H.264 and you run the rather bizarre combination of Chrome browser on Windows, here you go. Be careful what you click on from here on out - Microsoft's been known to make some curious decisions in software design, particularly when integrating their products with a competitors'.
Sales show WinPho 7 off to a flying start
Marry Microsoft, analyst tells Nokia
Yahoo! blasts Microsoft over WinPho 7 bug blame
Gates: Killing the internet is easy
Wednesday 2nd February 2011 12:00 GMT
Yes, mesh networks.
Agree with the original post. The cure for this is mesh networking.
http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/news/2011/01/researchers-enable-mesh-wifi-networking-for-android-smartphones.ars
Next we'll need base stations to anchor the mesh - something like a ShivaPlug with wifi. It should be along presently. Oh, wait. There it is: http://www.thinq.co.uk/2011/2/1/new-it-announces-dreamplug-arm-box/
A quick port and it's all good. Let's see men with guns unplug that. They'll need to cut off the power - and probably blot out the sun as well, since the things are miserly with watts and will run on a small solar cell. Oh, and it happens to be a handy media server as well, in case you need a legitimate purpose for it.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
