firehose

Apparently even the government can have too much cloud capacity. The Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA) has announced that it is putting the brakes on a $450 million commercial cloud-computing contract because of a lack of demand from within the Department of Defense.

In a notice posted by the DISA to the Federal Business Opportunities website, the agency's contracting officer Scott Stewart wrote, "Initial indications are the demand will not require a contract with the ceiling estimated in [the] draft solicitation. We are currently revising our acquisition strategy."

The contract, for which the DISA began drafting a request for proposals this summer, would have picked up to 10 cloud providers to supply Internet-accessible file storage, database hosting, Web hosting, and virtual servers—allowing the military to offload public, non-sensitive systems from its own infrastructure. As it turns out, the various military services and other DOD agencies that the DISA serves aren't terribly interested in doing that.

Sony has issued a statement following reports of faulty PlayStation 4 units among early shipments.

The company said that 0.4% of units thus far sent to consumers have been reported back as having faults. Over the past 24 hours, two media outlets as well as a small number of consumers who had received early units reported failures, variously tied to HDMI ports and software updates.

"A handful of people have reported issues with their PlayStation 4 systems," offered the statement, sent to Polygon. "This is within our expectations for a new product introduction, and the vast majority of PS4 feedback has been overwhelmingly positive. We are closely monitoring for additional reports, but we think these are isolated incidents and are on track for a great launch."

A Sony spokesperson added that, "the number of affected systems represents less than .4% of shipped units to date, which is within our expectations for a new product introduction."

We announced the coming of an Introductory Box Set way back in February, providing some solid details on why we’re doing a box set and an overview of its contents. So I’m not going to spin our wheels going over that again.

Instead, I’m going to start showing the box set off, as this should be heading to print in less than two weeks. Here’s what the full lid wrap looks like as we send the file to the printer (make sure and click on ‘em for a much bigger view!):

“What? It’s just going to print now?! Why so late!” I’m sure those questions are bubbling and they’re very valid. Primarily we ran into two issues:

1. I’ve said this many times before, but it’s worth saying again…we tend to be too ambitious for our own good. Now, at the end of the day, more often than not, that ambition turns out some really cool stuff…but it often can bite is in the short term. And our ambitions for the launch of Shadowrun, Fifth Edition were almost limitless, trying to do all at once what not even FASA ever did for Shadowrun. So while it took us longer than we expected, I believe the final result will be well worth the wait and provide a fantastic way for new players to leap into the Sixth World. There’s a ton of stuff piled into the box of goodies, after all…

2. Second was manufacturing. Again, I’ve mentioned before, we’ve tried very hard to move as much printing as possible back to the States. Just 5 years ago everything but softcover black & white work was printed outside of the US. Hardcover, full-color books were printed in Thailand, hardcover, B&W books were printed in Canada, and anything with plastic, wood or punch-out components was printed in China. We’ve managed to move all but the very last bit back to the States.

That works absolutely great for books. However, for items such as the Introductory Box Set that have a variety of different types of items, you can’t just pile it all into one domestic company (at least not yet). Instead, you have to take those elements that are all alike and match it up to a domestic printer that specializes in that work to ensure you’ve got the lowest price for best quality ratio.

For example, for the Shadowrun Introductory Box Set, we’re using 5 different printers: All the booklets are printed at one location, all of the laminated maps/character sheets at a another locale, the spells/gear cards at another printer, the dice still sourced from overseas (simply cannot find what we need domestically), and all of that shipped to the company printing the rigid set-up box for final collation and casing to ship to the warehouse.

Now that’s a lot of extra shipping, and even the costs of printing are still slightly higher…but all of that roughly comes out to printing/shipping in from China. Actually, honestly, it still doesn’t. China is still cheaper. However, the price is close enough that it’s worth dumping an extra month off of the shipping time and not having to deal with foreign manufacturing to suck up the difference (yup, that’s right, our experience is all of that coordination across all of those companies is still less of a migraine than dealing with foreign manufacturers).

What does all of that mean? It means some items we’ll publish still have to be done overseas…but we’ve managed to get this one printing domestically It means the Introductory Box Set is hopefully, finally going to print in less than two weeks now that we’ve got everything lined up. When is the Street Date? Sorry, as always, we never give that out until it’s in our warehouse…we’ve learned that lesson the hard way too many times.

However, in the coming weeks I’ll keep posting blogs surround the guts of the box set and how you can use it to introduce new players to the world we love.

Randall N. Bills

PS: Do not miss the latest update on Crossfire’s Decking System!

In one of his first days on the job, Federal Communications Commission Chairman Tom Wheeler has asked the CTIA Wireless Association to move quickly toward unlocking phones for consumers.

When a phone is unlocked, it can be used with any wireless carrier, provided its network is compatible with the phone. It became illegal for consumers to unlock phones on their own earlier this year because of a ruling by the Librarian of Congress, who is responsible for handing out exemptions to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.

In practice, carriers are often willing to unlock phones, particularly when the customer has finished paying off his or her contract. But the ban potentially creates problems for customers when they want to travel overseas without paying huge roaming fees or if their carrier refuses to unlock their phone. Wheeler said in his confirmation hearing in June that he wants to end the ban.

The Nexus 5 comes with a fancy new launcher, internally called "Google Home," that integrates the Google Search app and the home screen. All that means on the surface is that users have slightly easier access to search and Google Now, but under the hood there are huge changes—the entire home screen is being drawn by Google Search.

Despite being a headline feature of KitKat and being integrated into Google Search (which ships on every Android device), Google has stated that the new launcher is exclusive to the Nexus 5. We find that a little hard to believe—why would Google integrate something into its most popular app if it didn't intend to ship it out to as many people as possible? The "Google Home" version of Search that came with the Nexus 5 was version 3.0, while the version of search that most devices had at the time was version 2.8.

Late yesterday, a new version of Google Search hit the Play Store for everyone running Android 4.1 and higher—Google Search version 3.1. All the Google Home code was completely intact, meaning that Google just shipped its new launcher out to every modern Android phone. In order for Google Home to work, it requires a tiny enabler app that comes with the Nexus 5. The enabler app isn't being shipped out to these other devices, so while 99 percent of the code is now on everyone's device (or it will be when the rollout finishes), it's disabled.

By Jeremy Laird on November 14th, 2013 at 9:00 pm.

It’s been many moons since our last update on solid state of play. And now the SSD game finds itself in a bit of an odd spot. It seems like we’re on the cusp of a big transition, what with new PCI Express-based interfaces on the horizon. At the same time, existing SATA III drives feel like they’ve finally grown up, decided to give the ‘rents a rest and started behaving reliably and responsibly. The tech has matured and the end user experience is converging on something subjectively ‘good enough’. Just pick a drive at random from one of the decent outfits and you’re good to go. Then again, wouldn’t it be bloody annoying if you bought an SSD today only to find the entire market turned on its head by super-fast drives in the space of a month or three. What should you make of it all? Read on, chaps, read on…

The tl;dr bit
I reckon some of you are pretty pragmatic about this stuff. You just want the simplest possible advice for choosing an SSD and getting the benefits of solid-state storage. So, here it is.

1. If we’re talking about current SSDs, reliability and long term performance are what matter
2. The end-user experience from one decent drive to the next is very similar
3. Buy a recent-model Samsung, Intel, Crucial or SanDisk drive and you won’t go too far wrong
4. Bag a 240GB-256GB drive or bigger to get the best performance

And that’s pretty much it. Don’t worry about sequential versus 4k random access, compressible and incompressible, MLC and TLC, SandForce, LAMD or Marvell. It doesn’t matter. Just buy one.

Want to know more?
In that case, there are two ways of looking at this. One the one hand, we’re in the quiet before the storm of new storage interfaces. Peak read and write speeds of the latest SSDs have slammed into the wall that is the SATA III 6Gbps interface.

That’s why most of the sequential read and write benchmarks of the top drives typically show the same thing – 550MB/s or thereabouts. There are, of course, drives that plug into PCI Express slots that side step this limitation.

But what’s really needed is the next generation of storage-specific, hot- or at least warm-swappable interfaces. It’s called SATA Express and it’s on it’s way. Then again, maybe it’s called NGFF and it’s already here today.

Actually, they’re fairly closely related and here things get a bit confusing. NGFF drives are already shipping. None other than the latest Apple Macbooks have NGFF drives cranking out not a million miles off 1GB/s in raw bandwidth in some tests. But the status report for the desktop is a bit baffling.

Buy this one

The latest scuttlebutt, for instance, suggests Intel’s upcoming 9 Series motherboard chipsets won’t support SATA Express natively after all. This doesn’t mean you can’t have a board with an NGFF slot. But the attraction of SATA Express is that it’s backwards compatible with current SATA drives. NGFF is a whole new ball game.

Anyway, at this stage, it’s not really worth going into the details save for saying performance wise it’s a bit like the best bits of SATA and PCI Express combined and will allow, over time, for multiple GB/s of SSD bandwidth.

Back in the summer, some SSD outfits previewed some next-gen SATA Express products with impressive headline numbers. ADATA had a drive claimed to be good for 1.8GB/s in both directions and 200,000 IOPS courtesy of the upcoming LSI SandForce Griffin controller. I thought these products were slated to already be available by now, but things appear to have gone quiet.

The real kicker, of course, is that you’ll need a new motherboard to enjoy the SATA Express performance explosion, and as I indicate above, it’s not clear when this might be possible.

When you combine that with my general feeling that the latest drives are pretty darn good from a subjective experience point of view, I’m pretty comfortable with the idea of buying an SSD today.

Not a bad time to buy
Which brings me to the other side of this debate, which says SSDs have generally come of age. We’re now at the point where you can rely on certain brands to give you a drive that performs well out of the box and keeps doing so for several years. What’s more, you could say that random access performance is more critical, day-to-day and that’s not really limited by interface performance.

Because of that, the actual end-user experience is pretty similar across those brands. I’m not saying there aren’t any remotely worthy SSDs outside the quartet of brands mentioned above. The likes of Plextor and Seagate, among others, are worth a shout. There might even be the odd Corsair drive I wouldn’t kick out of bed on a cold morning.

What I am saying is that among the currently available newish-model and vaguely sensible-money SSDs, what matters is that the latest drives from those brands will give you a similar end user experience in terms of performance, have good reliability reputations and give you enough choice to be getting on with.

Or this one. It doesn’t really matter

Having said all that, some of you probably want a very short shopping list of drives to think about buying. So here they are and in no particular order:

Samsung 840 EVO and 840 Pro
Crucial M500
Intel 335 or 530
Sandisk Extreme II

If you want to really narrow it down, my two top picks are the Crucial M500 and Sammy 840 Evo. I personally wouldn’t bother to spend more.

Generally speaking, among those drives, the more expensive, the higher performing. I’m not convinced you’ll be able to feel the difference. But if you want to hedge your bets, you have the option of a faster drive like the Samsung 840 Pro.

One final caveat is that performance for some drives can fall off a bit with smaller capacities. Personally, I favour the 240GB to 256GB segment as a bare minimum capacity wise. Prices start at roughly £120 on a good day and it just so happens that this is the size at which the performance limitations generally drop away, so it’s win-win.

And that, folks, should have you covered. Sensible SSD advice for a happier populace. Until next time!

On paper, Katie Longua’s Rök might not sound like it’s going to be good. It is, after all, a comic starring a fictionalized version of the character’s roommate and her magical destiny, full of inside jokes about homework and things said roommate carries around in her purse. I mean, seriously, I’ve read enough comics that “It’s about me and my friends but as superheroes” is a gigantic red flag that usually scares me off toute de suite. The thing is, when Longua set about telling that exact story, she somehow managed to make it super fun.

Of course, it probably doesn’t hurt that she calls it “the manliest magical girl comic around,” and that the contents of her roommate’s purse are “two knives and mace.”

The premise of Rök is that the Norse gods have lost their final battle and been cast out of Asgard by Loki, landing on Earth in a significantly depowered form. Robbed of their godly abilities and the worshippers that they need to really get things going to mount a counterattack, they do exactly what you’d expect a bunch of vikings to do: They form a death metal band and use the energy of their dedicated fans to regain their godhood.

That’s where Elaine, the character based on Longua’s roommate, comes in. She goes to see a show that, of course, gets attacked by Fenrir. Odin gets killed and Elaine ends up getting possessed by Odin’s hurdy-gurdy, giving her the ability to transform into a burly, horn-helmeted viking version of herself to fight against the bad guys. For the record, Longua also appears herself, but has too much homework to join in on any adventures.

It’s a pretty simple premise, but Longua knocks it out of the park with her clean, expressive cartooning, giving everything this big, slapstick weight to it that reminds me more of a show like Dexter’s Laboratory or The Powerpuff Girls than anything else, just with all those sharp Tartakovsky and McCracken angles replaced by circles and speed lines. It’s fun to read, and it’s exactly the kind of thing that I keep an eye out for at conventions.

The one big flaw to it is that it feels a little thin — as dense as Longua makes her action scenes, there’s not a whole lot that actually happens in the first two issues, which total up as 40 pages of comics that are mostly devoted to setting things up for future adventures. That said, that’s ameliorated pretty thoroughly by the fact that you can grab both issues for as little as one dollar. Rök #1 and #2 are available as digital downloads on Gumroad, with the first one as a pay-what-you-want title and the second for $1 or more. That’s a deal that’s almost impossible to pass up, if only because you get to check things out absolutely free (although it’s worth noting that the .cbr version of #1 has the pages out of sequence, which leads to a pretty confusing first read).

For the more print-minded among you, Rök #1 – 4 are also available at Longua’s website as physical issues for $5 each. If you like magical girls, vikings or the hurdy-gurdy, it’s definitely one to grab. And if you like all three of those things in equal measure, well, you’re probably in this comic already.