Posts by Mark 65 3439 publicly visible posts • joined 11 Jun 2009
"Our IT team has identified the cause of the problem and has taken action to rectify it," TechRadar said on its site. "The forums have been closed and will remain closed until we are satisfied there are no further issues."
I read that as "Rest assured the stable door has now been firmly bolted".
From previous posts I believe Mr Hill is what's termed a creative professional. As such, and like other professionals, he wants to get on with his work and not be a part time hardware support professional. Drobo were very publicly advertised to such people as being a sort of Mac of storage - it just works, no hassles, no worries etc. It has turned out very different from that and so such people are right to question the capability of such devices. If you can't access your data you can't earn money - they'll have backups, but you've lost your primary so do you want to work on the backup copy?
Personally I chose the QNAP route as I didn't mind doing a little tech support having previously run a tower full of disks using Linux. The beauty of the QNAP is that, should the unit die (not the disks), I can use a new unit or any old PC with the requisite number of SATA connectors running Linux off a USB stick if need be - I have a choice. As previously stated the Drobo's 3 disk failure statement is caveated with "if" and "may". I prefer "will" when it comes to my data.
Mr Hill's speed issues are undoubtedly CPU related. Whether that's sorted in later versions or not is anyone's guess. However, I did find this about their attempt at a NAS on smallnetbuilder...
"The FS uses a dual-core ARM processor with throughput of 30 to 40 MB/s, according to company representatives."
Quite frankly that's shite - about level with a WD My Book Live and around 60MB/s short of a QNAP x59.
Yes, I am a QNAP fanboy and happily so.
"Certain East European countries are notorious for not paying parking fines, but there was a case about 20 years ago where such a stink was caused by the £'000's owed that the sponsor country withdrew the person concerned before a real diplomatic incident erupted by forcing a PNG case."
Have a look at the congestion charge hit-list...
http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2011/feb/04/london-embassies-unpaid-congestion-charges
US owes nearly £5m. Apparently they say it's a "tax" and they don't have to pay those.
"Asked why Assange has felt it necessary to apply for asylum in Ecuador, Gillard said the WikiLeaks founder has enjoyed extensive consular assistance from Australia and will continue to enjoy it."
"Received consular assistance" may be a better choice of words. From his statements it would not seem he has enjoyed it in any way Ms Gillard.
Can people here not read? I'm not saying "I already get X mbps and I'm OK" FFS, I am saying "I already get X and I don't see why the Government should spend $45bn on achieving ubiquitous X+ via FTTP when it could achieve it by FTTC for less cost". It is not about giving everyone less speed than I have it is about the base level being capable of greater speeds than I have via FTTC not FTTP. FTTP can then be added later if required, from the cabinet that's already been wired to.
Christ, is that so bloody difficult to comprehend?
Not at all a case of "I'm alright Jack". I'm pointing out those connections are available in the city to anyone who wants it. It comes courtesy of a Foxtel cable using Bigpond Cable Broadband. That's available in quite a few places I hear. I could pay less for ADSL and get 2Mbps at best (3km from CBD) but I decided to pay more to get the better connection. I then go on to state that FTTC would provide a similar speed for others where this is not available. Yet no, the Government wants to offer FTTP to everyone, retrofitted, and at huge expense.
The beauty of FTTC for existing builds is that you can then do the cabinet to the premises at a later date if required rather than, as another poster points out, build FTTP at great cost with outdated tech or insufficient capability to provide everyone with their purchased bandwidth or likely anything close to it.
This is not an "I'm alright" post it's an "I pay enough taxes already, try not to just squander them away in an international pissing contest" post.
It generally comes down to this...
It'll cost the tax-payers a fortune as Governments are notoriously bad at a) controlling costs on active projects, and b) getting value in the first place.
Some big businesses (already major players in IT, Comms, and internet etc.) will stand to make a lot of money once the NBN comes in as it'll open up new revenue streams and expand the value of others.
They will be paying fuck-all towards it.
They will be minimising their AU tax exposure as all shareholder responsible companies do so there is not necessarily a valid argument of "it all comes back through tax dollars"
i.e. The little man pays, the big man benefits.
Scare-tactics are the last refuge of the conman.
I'm am still not swayed by the argument of FTTP over FTTC. FTTP makes sense for new estates but to retrofit is ridiculous when, for example, I already have a 30Mbps connection in the city. FTTC would provide a similar deal for others. 100Mbps just means things I download might arrive it 3mins rather than 9mins. So what?
I think you'll find it's not "in the way the shareholders want it run" it is "for the benefit of the shareholders". More precisely...
<quote>
The Companies Act 2006 confirms previous case law and requires company directors to act in a way most likely to promote the success of the business.
You must exercise a degree of skill and care. You must:
show the skill expected of a person with your knowledge and experience
act as a reasonable person would do looking after their own business
You must act in good faith in the interests of the company as a whole. This includes:
treating all shareholders equally
avoiding conflicts of interest
declaring any conflicts of interest
not making personal profits at the company's expense
not accepting benefits from third parties
You must obey the law:
company law requires you to produce proper accounts and send various documents to Companies House
other laws include areas such as health and safety, employment law and tax
you may be responsible for the actions of company employees
</quote>
I would therefore conclude that minimising (legally) the tax bill will promote the success of the business by lowering the outgoings.
I wouldn't mind them removing the ethernet port if they had the common decency to give you the thunderbolt-ethernet adapter with the £1800 machine you just bought. I can understand perhaps not doing it with the cheaper Airs but not when you're at this price bracket - it's just plain rude.
I don't think it does defeat the point. The whole thing with a portable laptop (rather than fat arsed desktop replacement) is that you are willing to make a compromise of size/weight versus other capabilities. In this Apple are giving you lightning fast storage, hi-res screen and highly capable graphics and CPU. In order to have this in a convenient package you therefore have to accept you cannot get it with terabytes of storage. If they hadn't upped the battery size people would be whining about that instead.
For video editors to be happy you'd need to max-out the drive which is, on a 2.5" form HD, currently 1TB? In my experience these drives aren't terribly fast, especially when data rates really are an issue such as in video editing. Therefore, as the OP said, it makes sense to use very fast USB3 or Thunderbolt drives containing more capable storage media. In fact the most reasonable complaint about the storage size was from a video editor that stated on another thread that it was his apps that pushed the 256GB boundary (Adobe bloat) and not the data, which he indicated was edited on external media.
My complaint, which I (naturally) think is more reasonable is the one the article makes about the upgrade prices being too high. Ideally in a "spec it at purchase change it never" machine I'd like the middle-ground of 512GB. The RAM upgrade is now better priced, whereas the SSD is not. So having no spinners - not an issue. Fiscally raping the customer - bit of a problem.
To answer your question about who edits video on a macbook pro rather than a mac pro - it's normally when editors have to go out on location (conferences etc) and get something done ASAP, so I'm told.
I'm guessing that, if they're going to stick with it, the Mac Pro will go to the latest and greatest E5 or E7 chips. Perhaps they've be waiting for something suitable to come along or perhaps they couldn't be arsed yet as other sales are going so well. Two 10-core E7s or 8-core E5s would probably go well. Not sure how well the typical editing software threads though.
I know it's not ideal, but I think the idea is more that you use very fast thunderbolt attached storage (as shown on their site) to edit your video on leaving the OS + software (+ caching?) to run on the SSD. Otherwise you'll always be short of either space or cash. From their bumpf, the SSD is there to help eliminate bottlenecks and allow for a faster pipeline. I doubt they'd intend you to edit HD video on it for space reasons alone. Pricing will be interesting though. Memory is where I think they'll jam it in you as it looks like it's fixed in so it's a one-shot opportunity at purchase.
It gets worse. Try configuring a Dell XPS 15 or XPS 15z and basically you just cannot get what you want. One version has the processor but doesn't let you upgrade the screen resolution past the now ridiculous base level. Another lets you upgrade the screen but not the processor past an i5. It's just pointless.
Your title is incorrect...
http://www.telstra.com.au/mobile-phones/coverage-networks/network-information/4g/
"Typical download speeds in capital city CBDs, associated airports and selected regional areas are from 2Mbps to 40Mbps"
That's way short of your 100Mb/s.
The ITU did change the definition slightly.
"On 6 December 2010, at the ITU World Radiocommunication Seminar 2010, the ITU stated that LTE, WiMax and similar "evolved 3G technologies" could be considered "4G"."
The press release...
"As the most advanced technologies currently defined for global wireless mobile broadband communications, IMT-Advanced is considered as “4G”, although it is recognized that this term, while undefined, may also be applied to the forerunners of these technologies, LTE and WiMax, and to other evolved 3G technologies providing a substantial level of improvement in performance and capabilities with respect to the initial third generation systems now deployed."
http://www.itu.int/net/pressoffice/press_releases/2010/48.aspx
To me it looks like they caved in to pressure from the industry desperate for its next new buzzword fix. But change it they most certainly did by allowing non IMT-Advanced technologies to wear the badge.
Just curious, but what will SMBs do with this public cloud versus, say, using SaaS or are you lumping all such offerings together? For most SMBs I would have thought their main (non-desktop) concerns are:
ERP
Exchange type calendering and email systems
storage and backups
inter/intranet site
google docs vs office (MS, Libre, Open etc) - bit of a desktop one but fits in with SaaS.
I'm hoping to be enlightened as to their gain.
@Jeebus:So, if as you state Orlowski and Page are paid shills, what about the rest of the Reg staff and contributors? I would have expected probabilistically that in a group of such size you would expect there to be some people that held differing views, perhaps even vehemently so. That you do not agree with them is neither here nor there.
I, for one, am glad to see articles demonstrating the alternative side of the climate "debate" as just about every other organisation only puts the politically charged, tax-backed, subsidise my renewables company side of the argument.
In my opinion, and it is only my opinion, the climate change brigade would get a lot more people on side if they said "we need to build nuclear stations in the short term and plan for the longer term" rather than wanting power bills to triple overnight (pushing the poor into outright energy poverty), subsidies to be paid to support renewable sources that just don't work here (wind, I'm looking at you) and low and behold some of the biggest campaigners are on the board of company XYZ that stands to benefit. Modern society has corrupted itself beyond belief to the point where it is like watching some clichéd TV show.
Nothing like not investing in your power infrastructure and then finding some half-arsed measure to delay your inevitable failure. To me it looks like they realise they'll have no new stations online to make up the coming power shortfalls so they may as well get the remote off switches installed.
They certainly could do that. However the level of nanny-state behaviour it entails is, frankly, just embarrassing. If people want to piss their money away gambling then they will. I feel this is more about lost taxes than moral high ground.
@Seanie Ryan: Another thing that should be included on any car review are the servicing costs. For the warranty services you should be able to quote a figure (which can be shopped around on). Also when do the batteries need replacing and at what cost as this (to me) is part of the fuel cost as it occurs way before an engine needs replacing?
Let us not even get started on how electric cars that need mains charging are a ridiculous proposition in the UK with the power infrastructure over the next, say, 10 years. I'm not talking power outlets and their availability, I'm talking availability of electricity.
When I read this
"The Netherlands parliament has decided (Google translation) that the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement can be interpreted in ways that are inimical to privacy and Internet freedom, and that it therefore should not be signed."
my immediate thought was it has probably already been signed into law by the oh-so-compliant UK Government (party irrelevant, they're all the same).
You mean "it's safe to assume owners would like to spend hundreds, if not thousands, more to get the connectivity"? I doubt any of the above come cheap and wi-fi is just shit for anything other than web browsing - try syncing any data with a NAS compared to over Ethernet. USB3 is good, at last. No FireWire isn't good considering how long they pushed it for and neither is no Ethernet. However, if they did the unthinkable and bundled some adapters it may just ease the pain of spending the best part of 2k to lose connectivity.
My point is more along the lines of the PCs will access the network via a proxy, be networked internally on a LAN behind a firewall, therefore what is ipv6 really giving you? Its main advantage is the increased address space and routing. Yes there's security advantages but it just seems a bit of a headache to me when your key security issues are perimeter and meat sack and the current system works for intranets.
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