Despite this, for years, the carriers, including Verizon, resisted selling smartphones with stock Android. Verizon may not be ready to load pure Android with no Verizon specific changes on their smarpthones, but the company that they’re not making any friends, nor profits, with their pre-loaded apps.
n an IBM blog labeled “Keep Your Friends Close and Your Data Closer” by Matthew Drahzal, a leader in IBM’s Systems & Technology Group (STG), has announced a new storage server for bring super-computer data storage speed to a Commercial Off-The-Shelf (COTS), General Parallel File System (GPFS) storage servers.
The trouble these new servers is meant to address is simple. As Drahzal wrote, “The technology industry has a problem. Disk drives–devices used for over 50 years to store and retrieve digital information -move data too slowly. Companies regularly use 3 terabyte disk drives–roughly equal to the capacity of about 100 iPads–but the drives can only move data at 50 to 100 megabytes per second. Many organizations need to analyze data at 100 gigabytes per second–a difference of a few of orders of magnitude.”
To address that problem, we’ve long been spread our data across multiple drives to speed up access with redundant array of independent disks (RAID). RAID, however, and the drives that use it hasn’t kept up with our need for reliable speed. Yes, our drives are growing ever larger, but they’ve not become more reliable and even the highest level of data redundancy available, RAID 6, or the pairing of RAID 1, mirrored disk, with RAID 5, aka RAID 51, isn’t sufficient for data protection. Worse still, when a drive does fail, and they always do, rebuilding big data with RAID can take days.
I doubt very much that Lachowicz is the first serious online gamer to have won an election. World of Warcraft (WoW) alone, while not as popular as it once was, is still the top subscription-based MMORPG (massively multi-player online role-playing games) with about 9.1-million players. Other MMORPGs, such as Guild Wars II also have millions of fans. Surely, there are a few politicians among their numbers. Lachowicz may well have been the first office-seeker though to face a campaign targeting her for being a gamer.
PC companies call it downgrading, but many users just call it being sensible. You buy a new computer, and instead of using the bleeding edge operating system it came with, you move to an operating system you trust. With ordinary Windows 8 on Hewlett-Packard (HP) consumer PC, or any other vendor’s retail PC, though, you’re stuck with Windows 8.
HP’s Windows 8 FAQ reads, “Downgrading is supported only for HP commercial desktop and notebook products.” That is to say systems that come with Windows 8 Pro. In any case, “HP does not recommend downgrading on any HP consumer desktop and notebook products. After October 26, 2012, HP consumer desktop and notebook products will ship only with Windows 8.”
Why? Because “Windows 7 will not be supported on these new platforms, and no drivers, apps, or Windows 7 content will be available through HP. If users choose to downgrade their HP consumer desktop or notebook system, HP will continue to support the hardware but if there is an issue where HP diagnostics are required OR it is determined that the loaded software or upgrade operating system is causing the issue, HP may suggest returning the system to the original Windows 8 OS that shipped with the computer.”
In short, if you downgrade anyway, HP is saying you’ll be your own. Good luck with that.
