Gallery

Into the Azure?

Posted on 4 Mar 2009 at 10:56

Jon Honeyball poses some tough legal questions about cloud computing, and wonders how much Microsoft really cares about your security.

In order to give WHS a seamless file system in which you could just bung in another physical hard drive to grow the entire store, it was necessary to make a decision: they could have junked NTFS altogether and gone with some leading-edge file system such as ZFS from Sun (I don't need to mention the drawback of that), or they could have come up with some kind of virtual file system sitting on top of the physical NTFS partitions that presents itself as a single volume, which is what they in fact did. Strange how this trick hasn't appeared elsewhere, unless I've been looking in the wrong places. Given that this was a somewhat radical design idea, perhaps it isn't surprising there were a few glitches, the nastiest of which was one that randomly deleted files from the store (somewhat less-than-optimal for a home server into which you're supposed to decant your whole life). A fix arrived, yes indeed, but it took months and months after the problem had been initially reported, and for this Microsoft gets several minus points.

On the plus side, though, I've been running one of these HP boxes for a while now, fully stuffed with several gigabytes of disk storage, and I'd have to say it's turning into a really useful little companion that just sits on my network and works. So the news that a new version is about to launch has set my chequebook a-twitching, as it would make an ideal NAS (network attached storage) device just like its older brother, and for a very low cost. It's certainly comparable to any of the serious NAS boxes that offer true standalone functionality. HP has beefed up its motherboard specification and moved from an AMD to an Intel CPU, while adding a bunch of cross-platform support that includes Time Machine services for Apple Mac users. Microsoft's Home Server, in its Hewlett-Packard incarnation, might well turn out to be the must-have home-networking device for 2009.

Adobe woes

Readers with long memories may recall I don't get on particularly well with Adobe. I'd have to be honest and add that I don't get on well with most firms, but Adobe really did manage to make me see red thanks to its outrageous UK versus US pricing policy a few years back. That, and its offensively bad support for products that had just gone out of production and which had been purchased online. At the time, I said I was going to boycott the company's products, and this I did (apart from a Photoshop CS3 licence for my Mac, which had to be bought for a specific project).

The recent swings of the dollar versus the pound have deflated Adobe's price gouging somewhat and, although it still isn't right, it's nowhere near as intolerable as it was when there were two dollars to the pound. Plus, I noticed I was still able to download my Photoshop CS3 install package from the website, so the company appears to have taken on board my criticisms of some of its more unpleasant customer support issues.

However, I recently needed to print out some files that were created back in 2000 using InDesign 2 for Windows, and while I still have the package and licences, I felt that trying to accomplish this under Vista was likely to cause untold grief. InDesign has always had a somewhat strained relationship with the printer drivers under Windows, and I could foresee all sorts of problems, so I went to upgrade my InDesign licence to the current CS4 version only to find that it was too old. At this point, I was backed into a corner with only my credit card for defence, so I purchased a download licence for InDesign CS4 for Windows. Being VAT registered, I'm not too bothered that it charged me 21.5% VAT - because it claims the sale and download comes from Ireland (although it would be fun to trace-route the delivery server to prove or disprove that claim).