Carefully parsed statements

"no evidence of controlled military goods exported from the United Kingdom being used for internal repression in the Middle East and North Africa".

Note the weasel word "controlled". It is unquestionable UK military exports are used in the brutal crackdown in Bahrain:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/feb/17/bahrain-crackdown-uk-arms-sales

Then again, Bahrain was for all practical purposes invaded by Saudi Arabia, so this might be "external" rather than "internal" repression.

Carriers use DPI to detect tethering

At least in the US, carriers use Deep Packet Inspection (DPI), the telco euphemism for snooping on your data packets. The chief intent is to build a database of what websites you visit for marketing purposes, but they also look at the browser User-Agent string, for instance if they see the Firefox for Windows UA string on an Android no-tethering plan, they will send you a nastygram.

If you use unofficial tethering, make sure you also use a VPN or limit yourselves to non-web use.

Great Convention

Face it: patent reform won't happen. Our legislature is terminally dysfunctional, and there are strong vested interests like lawyers opposing it.

A practicable solution would be for firms to group themselves in a consortium that pledges to retaliate against any firm using patents against a member. Sort of like the Great Convention in Dune: "Use of atomics against humans shall be cause for planetary obliteration."

It actually makes perfect sense

If you use Macs for high-end production work, an iMac with a fast external Thunderbolt array will still be much cheaper than a Mac Pro, despite the Thunderbolt price-gouging, and possibly even faster until the E5 Mac Pros finally ship.

The telcos should just bring M-PESA to the UK

Kenyans, fed up with the corruption of their banks, opted massively to use their (foreign-owned) phone accounts as a means of payment.

Any similarities to banksters in the UK not unintentional...

The Dutch had to because their incumbent telco is one of the worst in EU

When I ran ops for an ISP in Amsterdam, circa 1999, KPN (the incumbent PTT-era telco) was incapable of delivering even simple telephone interconnection in less than one year, and once they cheerfully announced my $100K a month 45Mbps link to the US was going to be down for 3 months.

The arrogance, incompetence and sense of entitlement of KPN is simply breathtaking, and that's why the Dutch legislature had to nip this in the bud.

SMS is a racket (over $80B revenues a year worldwide, compared to $10B for all of Hollywood at the box office), with utterly unjustifiable profit margins that are long past due to fall in line with actual costs, that are near zero.

Sun/x64 is just not competitive

I've been running Solaris/x86 in production for over 12 years, at first on Intel white box servers, then on Sun's excellent V20z and X4100 Opteron servers. Their x64 machines were competitively priced. In my new company I needed a quote for 40 servers, and they are now twice as expensive as HP, so we are going to switch. We'll still be running Solaris, but the OpenIndiana fork, since Oracle's support contract policy is unconscionable. And of course we ditched Oracle for PostgreSQL...

It's amazing, but Larry Ellison is even better at running Sun into the ground than My Little Pony was...

Questionable assumptions

I have a hard time believing that the inability to use a server GPU as a video card is what is hindering adoption. More likely, the difficulty in porting legacy applications to make full use of the hardware is to blame.

Not the same

My HP-15C is one of my most prized possessions (I also own the iPhone app version), and I use a HP-12C as an inferior substitute at the office. The current Chinese-made 12C is a pale shadow of the Corvallis or Singapore-made originals in terms of build quality, specially the keypad, and the Platinum edition is completely different under the hood, with a number of bugs introduced along the way.

Ah, the joys of byzantine failures

A fault-tolerant system that assumes the only failure modes are relatively well-behaved ones like total failure, is not really fault tolerant, as the Aussies discovered to their regret.

EBS is the issue

My company's service is hosted by AWS, mirrored across us-east1d and us-east1b, and we did not experience any disruption. That's because we do not use EBS at all, not even for the boot drive on our VMs, which use the older S3-backed format. The downside is all data on the system disks is lost if the VMs go down, which we guard against using active-standby replication across availability zones.

The problem with EBS is that Amazon overpromised (enterprise grade storage at very low prices) and underdelivered (mediocre and inconsistent performance both in terms of IOPS and MBps, and spotty availability). Enterprise storage is very exensive (several thousand dollars per terabyte), and Amazon's pricing of $0.10/GB/month means they must be cutting corners somewhere.

As for isolation between availability zones, I remember reading somewhere that zones with the same prefix (like us-east-1d vs. us-east-1b) are in the same physical data center, but different rooms with different power supplies. The challenge in replicating across different regions is packet latency induced by the speed of light (a minimum of 30 milliseconds between East and West coasts. That's an eternity when compared to the response time of a disk, and most database replication systems perform poorly across WAN links with high latency, even the asynchronous ones. On very high volume sites, it is often not feasible to do so, apart from backup-shipping as a disaster-recovery measure, where data loss would be measured in days.

You need advanced software smarts to use Flash as a cache

Flash is still too expensive to replace HDDs entirely in the storage hierarchy. In the meantime, it has to be inserted as an additional tier between RAM and disk. Intel tried to add flash as a cache on the motherboard, but failed, and high-end storage HBAs have had battery-backed RAM or NVRAM write caches for years, but the block device semantics of hard drives make it hard to get good performance out of the cache.

The reason why Sun and NetApp succeeded where the others couldn't is because they both control the advanced logging filesystem technology, in the form of ZFS and WAFL respectively (and the fact ZFS and WAFL are very similar, to the point of NetApp suing Sun, is no coincidence). Flash inserts itself very neatly into the filesystem's log like the ZFS Intent Log. SGI could have done much the same with its XFS, but was too busy with its death spiral (as opposed to Sun, which did not cut R&D despite poor financials).I suppose we could also mention Legato's PrestoServe as sold by DEC and Sun, which worked at the same layer, using NVRAM rather than NAND Flash.

The only other place in the software stack where flash SSDs are a big win are the database transaction journals of relational databases like Oracle or PostgreSQL, and until Oracle bought Sun, RDBMS companies were not in the hardware business. The exception are data warehouse appliance vendors like Teradata or Netezza, but those products are very expensive and because of their low volumes, do not command the same attention from the IT press as mainstream servers. Teradata has used SSDs quite a bit in its appliances, for instance.

As for virtualization being a better way to multitask than UNIX or Windows, that's just plain wrong. UNIX virtualization solutions like Solaris zones or Linux' OpenVZ/Vserver/User mode Linux have far lower overhead and introduce less latency than hypervisors. The great benefit of virtualization is configuration management, i.e. containing DLL hell.

Most enterprises have shockingly poor configuration and change management, both in documentation and processes, and when an IT manager or sysadmin has to do something about a poorly understood legacy system set up by someone who left the company, usually the safest thing to do is P2V it into a VM rather than try to reinstall it on a new machine.

Few CIOs

Are stupid enough to lock themselves into Larry's price-gouging factory. If you're going to do that, you might as well outsource to the cloud entirely.

Bad experience with tape

At my previous startup, circa 2000, we had purchased an expensive StorageTek 9730 Timberwolf automated tape library with 4 DLT4 drives. The drives had a MTBF of roughly one month, and we chewed through them at an alarming rate. When the first year's support contract ended, we wrote it off and bought a pair of Apple XServe RAIDs for the same price as the support contract renewal. Those units lasted us for 10 years with no troubles whatsoever, and no wonky tape software to deal with. I don't know if this was just bad luck, but I have been leery of tape ever since.

Makes you wonder

How secure the popular Secunia PSI patch checking utility is, since its update servers could just as well be hijacked. Hopefully they check for signed executables, but still, it's pretty embarrassing for a security company to be caught like this.

That's probably what will kill the Vertu

Some people won't balk at the $7000 cost for a glorified Nokia, but won't pay for one since it falls flat compared to a bog-standard iPhone.

Oh, I have a BMW, but the car I dream of is a Tesla, not a Porsche...

Latency will kill SAN, or the DAS strikes back

The latency of a SSD is 0.2ms, and will improve when we stop using legacy interfaces like SATA or SAS and adopt memory-interconnect ones like PCIe, and when NAND is replaced by faster technologies like FeRAM or phase-change.

At these speeds, the latency of the FC/FCoE/whatever switch, and queueing delay for an array controller, will dominate the latency of the devices themselves. SAN arrays will find themselves at a considerable performance disadvantage. Ultimately, storage will migrate back to be directly attached to the CPU, as close as possible to high-bandwidth, low-latency memory interconnects, and the database software will have to handle the distribution and manageability formerly offered by the SAN. In other words, the likes of FusionIO will destroy the high-performance storage market for existing SAN vendors. No wonder 3Par was in a hurry to sell itself, as they had the weakest SSD story of all the major vendors.

SAN arrays will still exist, but will be relegated to the role tape libraries occupy in the data center - cheap but slow bulk storage for backup and archiving purposes. I hope we have rid ourselves of the Rube Goldberg contraption that virtual tape libraries are by then.

Oracle and DTrace have some history (not in a good way)

Long before the Sun acquisition, Oracle tried to pressure Sun into giving it ways to disable dtrace-ing Oracle RDBMS, presumably because they don't want sys admins to know how inefficient the gobs of legacy spaghetti code in it perform. Sun refused (not sure if it was Cantrill or Leventhal). Obviously, they are now in a different position to enforce their diktat.

SSH and manageability

If you have SSH, you can manage it. It can be something as simple as Expect scripts (and autoexpect makes it really easy), or as robust as Puppet.

Even Google has insufficient economies of scale

They have a million or so servers. The x86 architecture has steamrollered everything in its path because it enjoys the huge economies of scale from a market of 300 million of PCs per year. Even Xeon lives at the sufferance of mainstream x86 processors. Let's not even talk about dead man walking, Itanic, Power and Sparc.

In comparison, even Google's vast server farm is small potatoes.

It's a minefield

I am no fan of Microsoft, but I can understand their position.

Ogg Theora is not a solution - they think they are not covered by patents, but nearly everything in video compression was patented at one point or another, and that assertion is both untested and likely to be false. Sure, that is an indictment of the patent system, but unfortunately this is also the law of the land, in the US as well as Europe, Japan, Korea and any other place that matters. A large, solvent company like MS is a magnet for lawsuits by patent trolls and they cannot risk the exposure on Theora unless their own patent attorneys do a thorough review, likely to be far more expensive than any royalties they pay MPEG-LA.

H.264 is an open standard in the sense that patent owners are required (by their participation in the standards group) to license their patents on a nondiscriminatory basis to all comers. MPEG-LA merely provides a convenient one-stop-shop for bundles of patents. Apple and Microsoft are just participants in the patent pool, so are companies like NTT, France Telecom, Thomson, Philips and so on. The system is fiendishly complex because the international patent system is fundamentally broken, not because of Microsoft (or Apple, or Google). Sure, it would be better to have a patent-unencumbered open codec, but that's unlikely to happen for another 10 to 20 years until the patents covering basic video compression technology expire (and new patents issued to cover the state of the art between now and then).

Software

Without control over software the stack can't be said to be integrated. The biggest optimizations are giving the filesystem/buffer cache layer visibility into the interconnect and disk/SSD hardware, as NetApp did with ONTAP and Sun with ZFS. From that point of view the only fully integrated stack is the Oracle/Sun one There is no reason why HP or Cisco couldn't make equivalents by making enhanced versions of the ext4 and btrfs filesystems optimized for their hardware or virtualization, but they have shown no inclination to do so this far.

Charlie has a novel to finish

Studies have shown that online newspaper circulation falls after a newspaper discontinues its print edition. People were literally paying for the paper, not the actual content in it. Then again, most newspapers dumbed down their content and reduced their own coverage to reprint cheaper wire stories instead. This coincides with the transformation of journalism from scrappy, somewhat disreputable trade to white-collar, respectable profession, i.e. tame and boring. The future of media is as a loss leader for other products or instruments of political pressure for special interests. They will survive in some form, but not as independent businesses.

Microsoft has an even worse record of treachery

As the media player manufacturers who were suckered by PlaysForSure can attest when Microsoft ditched them for its go-alone Zune.

Depending on your definition

Every single hard drive uses some form of logical block addressing, where a hard drive will pretend it has an implausible number of platters and heads to work around limitations in PC software. That is a form of virtualization.

Similarly, RAID arrays export a view of a bunch of drives, interconnects, RAM, NVRAM and SSD cache as a logical (i.e. virtual) SCSI unit. That is another form of virtualization, on a larger scale.

The Register article refers to a yet larger stage, where collections of arrays on a SAN are aggregated into a virtual LUN, i.e. three nested levels of virtualization.

You have to have a tremendous amount of old legacy hardware to repurpose to make the ROI case for expensive and poorly standardized SAN virtualization gear, or a spectacularly incompetent and inefficient sys admin group who is unable to manage the existing LUNs using OS mechanisms like volume managers or advanced filesystems like VxFS or ZFS to do this virtualization at the OS level. Large scale and incompetence is far from uncommon in the Fortune 500, but it is a limited market to build a successful business on.

Online only?

I'm pretty sure Dixons still has stores at Heathrow. They had three at Terminal 5 when I returned from London last week, including one under the "PC World" brand.

Electron cannon!

The laser had only been invented in 1960, the technology was probably not mature enough to be used in this system so they had to make do with TV CRT technology instead.

ACPO is not a social club

The US Consulate in London requires green card applicants in to submit a criminal background check issued by the ACPO. It's an internationally recognized public policy body, and it's past time it should be regulated as such.

The French government proposed to do just that

Nathalie Kosciusko-Morizet, the French cabinet secretary for the digital economy suggested exactly this one week ago when she talked up a charter to establish a "right to forget" applicable to social network sites such as Facebook. French citizens already have a right of access and correction to databases with personally identifiable information, this goes further to suggest a right of deletion.

Couldn't have picked a better target

Even my the lofty standards of the California legislature's windbaggery, Tom Ammiano stands out as a spectacular waste of oxygen. He was a dismal chariman of the SF board of Supervisors, elected and pandering the the shrillest and least representative special interests around.

PostgreSQL is the real competition to Oracle

Takeshi Tachi of NTT is on the record saying they are switching from Oracle to PostgreSQL for some mission-critical apps and they expect to save $10M a year. PostgreSQL is not owned by a corporation as MySQL was, and if Oracle kills, starves or smothers MySQL, they will only clear up space for a far more technically capable competitor product, albeit one until now not as well marketed as MySQL.

Incompetence, not sabotage

This article has more details:

http://www.roughlydrafted.com/2009/10/15/microsofts-pinkdanger-backup-problem-blamed-on-roz-ho/

It seems the data loss was due to a trifecta of failure to maintain adequate backups to save a few bucks, combined with incompetent management, and staff turnover at Danger leaving few people qualified to manage the system. If true, the level of incompetence is shocking, but not all that surprising, after all we are talking about Microsoft here.

Anyone entrusting their data to a cloud service had better ensure they have an ironclad SLA with substantial penalties for noncompliance. Most cloud services do not offer anything like the level of transparency into their architecture and operations that customers need to assess its trustworthiness. You can't damn cloud services from all providers, some of them are competent, unlike Microsoft, but prospective customers need to start asking more pointed questions from would-be suppliers.

Amazing

I didn't think anyone could top Network Solutions for incompetence, until today.

Silly hoops

At one point Oracle was flagging people with Middle-Eastern sounding names and requiring them to verify their geographic location. It's nothing but bureaucratic CYA to avoid liability under export control laws.

IETF should stick to technical standards, not policy

Policy issues are a minefield, just witness all the posturing that goes on with ICANN.

ISPs are between a rock and a hard place. They bear the costs of botnets (bandwidth, staff, beefed up resources in mail servers, customer support staff), but they have no control over the root cause of the problem and risk damaging their relationship with their customers when they break the bad news. The immunity OS vendors have been able to get away with is properly scandalous.

Class bias?

These names suggest American influence. Is it another form of social prejudice against supposedly TV-brainwashed plebes?

One of the two partners is disengaging in 2 years' time

I used to work for FT in the second half of the nineties, during the time of the so-called DT-FT-Sprint alliance. There was really no operational cooperation between the individual companies, the DT-FT alliance had been wished for by the French and German political leaders, but grudging at best at the base. This also led to some unfortunate side-effects like a demonization of BT in an effort to rally the troops around a common enemy, to no avail. The alliance later dissolved in acrimony.

One of the two partners is disengaging from the UK market. The 50-50 arrangement is purely here to save face, but this is not a sustainable solution. You would think FT is the stronger party because of Orange's stronger position, but DT is the one pumping cash in, which is not something a disengaging party does.

There are creative options open to the EC

Quite a few companies use MySQL as an embedded database and cannot use a GPL-licensed version because that would force them to release their own source code. Any fork of MySQL can only ever be GPL unless Oracle agrees to relicense MySQL under a less restrictive license, e.g. Apache or BSD. One remedy the EC could adopt short of requiring Oracle to divest itself of MySQL would be to to force them to relicense MySQL in such a way as to make non-GPL forks possible.

I agree MySQL is not capable enough technically to compete with Oracle directly (PostgreSQL is the open-source RDBMS to watch in this respect), but it is commercially and has fairly effective marketing. Purely non-commercial projects like PostgreSQL do not command the same marketing muscle as MySQL did, which partly explains the lower adoption. Perhaps Ingres will be a winner from this, but more likely a company such as Percona, since I can't imagine open-source database users to have much trust in Oracle staying honest (I certainly wouldn't). Oracle would end up being a distro of MySQL just as Red Hat is a major contributor yet only a distributor of Linux.

It's not Python but Expat that is vulnerable

Expat is a popular XML parsing C library that could have buffer overflow errors in it.