BASIC on a VZ200 with a Z80 processor and (according to the ad), a "whopping" 8kb of RAM. Ah, peek, poke, gosub and goto, sigh...

They stop supporting me (Blackberry 10) so I stop supporting them. Not to mention they're not truly secure, vulnerable to the USA's increasingly lunatic and overreaching legislative, executive and judicial branches and value ad revenue over a paid subscription. Besides, it's become increasingly apparent that any centrally-controlled system, (creating a unique account on yet-another-walled-garden command-and-control server), is becoming obsolete in favour of distributed systems like Ricochet.im. WhatsApp is just going to become the dafault IM app for Facebook, so for those of us outside that particular cult, time to find another alternative.

Given that these sorts of events have consequences on a planetary scale and that little things like nation-states mean absolutely nothing if we lose the species, why the hell isn't this an international effort? Why does the USA have to do all the grunt-work? (I'm not a yank BTW). This really is something I could get behind the UN for actually doing something useful lately. (The UN has done SFA of use since eradicating smallpox).

No, no, you're thinking of Britain, a vassal state of the USA since, oh, probably the Suez crisis, and a good little lapdog it's been ever since.

To a BlackBerry z30 running BlackBerry 10 OS.

Yes, voluntarily.

The z30 is the best goddamn phone I've ever owned (and that's been: Motorola (last GSM brick model), Nokia, Motorola, Motorola (RAZR), HTC (Desire) and Samsung (Galaxy).

Basically I got sick of Android never feeling "finished", one annoying thing would get fixed but another introduced, or things that were useful got taken away. Constant bloody change for change's sake. (Don't get me started on grey text on a white background - WTF?)

Then there was feeling like I'd gone back to a Windows ME PC loaded with bloat/crapware and an apparent, "We'll do security last" attitude. I've never trusted Android enough to perform anything financial (like banking) with it. Particularly anything browser-based where the baked-in browsers only get updated with the firmware (i.e. never). Then there's the whole not being able to un-install the vendor or carrier's crapware to save space or bandwith use or to reduce attack surface. The utter lack of regular OS updates for ongoing, evolving security vulnerabilites, because you have to rely on the handset vendor and not Google.

I've used Apple kit and it's OK, (I'm not sure I like the new visual design ethos though) but the growing number of voices beginning to complain about the perceived drop in the quality of the software was off-putting, then there's the whole fashionista-cult-like nature and Jobs-worship amongst Appledom that's more than a little weird for a friggin' phone.

With the BlackBerry 10, I get around two bars signal in places where my HTC got none, the call quality is excellent. I could immediately un-install the bundled Facebook, Twitter and Box and installed (native) ownCloud and LinkedIn apps. I've easily found native apps or web-apps (excellent browser BTW), for everything I already use. Strong encryption, excellent security model and highly granular app-privilege controls, hell I can even un-install the clock app! Oh and the OS has a built-in traceroute and NSlookup app - that got me on geek-factor alone.

The desktop/tablet app "BlackBerry Blend" is like having my own personal cloud, without needing any third-party cloud provider - it just works and is really useful. Then new BBM app combines the best of (old) BBM, Skype, WhatsApp and Snapchat in one place.

My only worry is they might get bought by one of the big three and killed-off in favour of very inferior OS's or Chinese or Korean companies which means two things will probably happen, the security and privacy will go out the window and the elegant and business-like interface and design ethos will go all super-kawaii Hello-Kitty or Samsung/LG soulless conformity.

Yes, I'm evangelising, but what the hell, BlackBerry 10 is bloody awesome and the z30 phone hardware is a delight to use and the finish is excellent. More people need to sign their praises. That and we desperately need an alternative to the American big three (if you count MSFT).

A learned professor called Professor Learned! Ba-dum tish! :D

GNU or Gnome?

How is this even news? Symform http://www.symform.com/ acheived this commercially ages ago and has even passed from start-up to aquisition (by Quantum http://www.quantum.com/ last year. Even better, Symform has either quid-pro-quo or commercial options and doesn't appear to be some dodgy-looking coin-factoring operation.

Therein lies a big part of the problem, why should their be a "side". Science is about the finding of fact and facts don't care what side you're on. You might want to deny that a certain type of virus won't affect you because of your religious belief for example. Problem is, the virus doesn't care, don't have a "side" and will kill you just as well as everyone on the other "side". People can deny all kinds of things as much as they like, but in the final measure, it doesn't matter squat, the climate will change, you will get lung cancer, HPV will infect you, whatever...

Cost is subject to volume it's also relative. Consider just how overbudget things like the UK's Trident nuclear weapon system is or the JSF for that matter.
It wasn't so long ago that an energy transmission cable was proposed from Iceland to the UK and Continental Europe so that all that geothermal energy could feed the mainland beast. Having flown over that part of the world a fiar bit, let me tell you Iceland is a one hell of lot further than Scotland's minor islands.

Speaking as an Enterprise vendor: 1. Nobody ewver pays list. 2. You aren't just paying for the device, there's a tonne of development going on. One dedupe appliance I worked with had over 120 engineers behind it that all have to be paid, plus every time you put something into the market, you find all kinds of weird-ass coner-cases that have to be diagnosed, debugged and fixed. You have global manufacturing, logistics and 24x7 support infrastructures to pay for. We also try and engineer-in more reliability, redundancy and durability than you can buy off-theshelf. LTO, for example, is *two to three orders of magnitude more reliable* than consumer hard disks.

Fine, YOU ship an EMC VNX for $300 and then we can talk.

As LTO can compress (for free) and encrypt (usually licensed) in hardware, I'd rather hope that your NetApp compression (and deduplication) is also free or are you paying for that? Even there you get better reduction ratios for less money if you purchased a dedupe appliance from Quantum, HP or EMC.
Tape is seldom the bottleneck if you have sized it correctly. If the tape is running slow (e.g. an LTO-6 drive running at 60MB/s) then it is the disk array that cannot supply it data fast enough. If the drive is running at 160MB/s then it's maxxing out (assuming you get no compression which today assumes 320MB/s). The vast majority of business arrays are optimised for IOPS and backup is a _sustained_sequential_ workload and once you empty their cache's most arrays just can't keep tape drive buffers stuffed, but few storage admin have the testicular fortitude to admit their big-$ array can't do sustained sequential workloads very well.

One more reason SSD's are such an improvement is they seldom have trouble keeping tape streaming and thus make tape work far better than disk ever could.

Finally, at the hundreds of TB, or in the peta-scale, disk is simply unsustainable at volume, between purchase, licensing, support contracts, power and cooling and generation migrations every 3 to 5 years.

Your home NAS is not the same problem organisations with very, *very* large datasets have to solve and thus very different cost-structures.