I'm in the future. Like hundreds of years in the future. I've been dead for centuries.
Oh, lovely, you're a cheery one aren't you?

Tuesday, March 31

Rant

Well, Poop, Part 37 Or Something

The new Xeon 5500 dual-processor Nehalem has been announced.

So too - if you look hard enough - the single-processor Xeon 3500.

SuperMicro (and SoftLayer exclusively uses SuperMicro) have announced over 30 new Xeon 5500 motherboards.

And no new Xeon 3500 boards.  Meaning that all they have are their existing Core i7 boards, none of which support registered memory, so they're limited to 12GB.

Which means that to go beyond 12GB I'll still need to pay the dual-processor-motherboard tax of at least $100 per month per server - and then pay for the extra memory.

And the dual-processor CPUs themselves are substantially more expensive than the single-processor equivalents.

Dammit, SuperMicro, pull your finger out.  Even Gigabyte managed to get this one right, and they hardly have a presence in the server market at all.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 08:44 AM | No Comments | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Friday, March 20

Rant

History Is Accelerating: Now The First Time Is Farce

Or, This Post No Links

So, our present and bountifully incompetent federal government is bent on censoring this internet thingy, though it appears that they have yet to work out quite what it is.

The ACMA (which apparently stands for "petty-minded bureaucrats") has a list of a thousand-odd sites which are banned in Australia.

This list is secret.

Also, it's just a list.  The sites are banned, and viewing them is illegal, and linking to them incurs an $11,000-a-day fine, but no-one is allowed to know what is on the list, and the banned sites aren't actually blocked in any way.

So when, for example, popular Australian technical forum and news site Whirlpool found itself featuring a comment linking to a banned site, it also found itself facing a huge fine, and understandably removed the comment.

This even though the site in question has not been shown to be in breach of any law or regulation - except, perhaps, for the wonderfully vague clause other material dealing with intense adult themes, something that would be struck down as unconstituionally broad inside of thirty seconds by the US Supreme Court, bless 'em - and that the details of the site were made public by the original complainant, which is also not a breach of any law or regulation.

The secrecy of the list must be maintained, regardless.  And for that reason I can't link to Wikipedia any more either, because the Wikipedia article regarding the ACMA itself contains a link to a banned website.  (And was the subject of a 24-hour revert war as the inevitable result.)

We know some of what is on the list, of course, because after Wikileaks published similar secret censorship lists from other countries (Denmark, Finland, and Thailand, to be precise) Wikileaks was itself banned, and so was linking to the relevant pages on Wikileaks.  So I can't link to them.

Indeed, now we know all of what is on the list, because the list has been leaked to the banned Wikileaks.  Which, as I say, I cannot link to.

It gets better, though.

The leaked list (which, of course, I haven't seen, and won't reproduce, because to do so is to face ten years in jail, never mind the fines) reportedly contains over two thousand banned sites, some of which are reportedly legitimately illegitimate; others including tour operators, religious sites, online gambling sites, and one unfortunate dentist.  None of which, of course, can I link to.

I gets better still.

The Minister for Communication, the estimable Stephen Conroy, claims that the leaking of the list is irresponsible, illegal, and inaccurate - that it is not the real thing at all.

Wikileaks is still banned, of course, and it is still illegal for me to link to or reproduce the not-the-real-list.

So I won't.

I'll just link to the ABC, The Courier-Mail, The Brisbane Times, IT News, news.com.au, The Australian, Computerworld (twice), The Sydney Morning Herald, The Register, Slashdot, Forbes, Wired, ZDnet, Gizmodo, CNetArs Technica, and Google News.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 12:10 AM | Comments (7) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Tuesday, March 10

Rant

Ugh

Ugh.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 09:09 PM | Comments (2) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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