We phoned the “Alternative Genius Bar”, which is actually located on Waverley Steps and is across the road from the “iStore” that appears on map.We asked the reseller for its version of events and it said that its premises had always been listed under its business name, SimplyFixIt, and there was no link between the "iStore" icon on Apple Maps and its business.Stormfront operates three shops in Stirling, Dundee and Carlisle, but its bosses did not wish to talk to us.The opening of the Apple store in Glasgow proved too much for Apple reseller Scotsys, which shut up shop after it "took a hiding when the new store opened".So are the Scots as excited as Apple as they were about leaving the UK? Well, sort of, is the answer.A poll on STV, the Scottish telly station which occupies channel three, found that 50 per cent of grumpy tartan-botherers said "meh" to the new Apple store, whereas 44 per cent were excited to see a canny taxpayer pitch its tent in Scottish capital.If you remember, this is not far off the number who voted against Alex Salmond's secession plans.Am I the only person not excited about the Apple Store opening in #Edinburgh soon? It's just a phone/laptop/music player etc people :-sOne Scottish blogger was more positive and insisted that fanbois will give the new store a huge Scottish welcome. However, rather than using time-honoured Reg lingo, he referred to Apple lovers using the rather Scotch-sounding moniker MacHeads.
One thing we do know about Edinburgh is that the genteel folk of this tweet city hate Glasgow, which they see as being populated by riff-raff. Yet Apple clearly doesn't agree with this, having opened up a store back in 2007.Regardless of this vote of confidence in Edinburgh's rival city, some locals were glad they didn't leave Auld Reekie to travel through to The Weeg.Does anyone know when the #Apple store in Edinburgh is due to open? Don't really want to go through to Glasgow.The Apple store opens on 18 October in a building on the corner of Princes Street and West Register Street. This used to be a Woolworths between 1926 and 1984, after which it became the unhappy home for a number of shops including Boots, Waterstones, Burger King and Wimpy - none of which stuck around.There are two distinguishing features in this device: first, its display is square and very wide. Secondly, it has a capacitive physical keyboard. The questions are: is the square form factor more than a novelty? Does the new keyboard really improve the typing experience? Is a wide heavy device comfortable in practice, and if not, is it worth it? Or will it be remembered as piss-take fodder?
When I first glimpsed a photo of the BlackBerry Passport, I assumed it was a mock-up from a deranged BlackBerry fanboi (the web is full of such wacky Photoshop renders). BlackBerry had purportedly revisited the iconic keyboard that gave its devices (and eventually the company) its name. But this image had to be a fake: why only three rows with 31 keys? The Bold had four rows of 35 keys, plus the four making up the "toolbelt".Word quickly got out that it was no mock-up – but even more unusual is it being the first QWERTY device with a hybrid capacitive touch/physical design, allowing multitouch gestures across those physical keys. And it is this feature, rather than its striking shape, which is the most interesting thing about the Passport.The idea is that your hands don't leave the physical keyboard when editing or manipulating text, and they shouldn't stray far from that keyboard when performing common tasks. So you can swipe to scroll and edit: swipe left to delete a word, double-tap the keyboard area to bring up a "edit bubble", and then swipe the QWERTY to move it around. You should also be able to swipe through long emails or web pages without your finger leaving the keyboard.
A QWERTY keyboard isn't going to increase raw character input – today's glass keyboards squirt the letters into the device faster than almost anyone can type on physical keys. But those aren't always accurate, and the typo tree still needs to be fixed; the idea is that you gain on accuracy and post-entry processing what you lose on raw QWERTY speed.In my initial hands-on, I described the Passport as "weirdly larger and smaller than you think". With a 4.5-inch diagonal display, it's shorter than today's Android flagships, such as the Motorola X (2014) (5.54 inches/140.8mm tall), the Galaxy S5 (5.59 inches/142mm tall) and the Sony Xperia Z3 (5.75 inches/146mm tall). This is a shorty, at 5.04 inches – or to put it another way, it measures up at 128mm x 90mm x 9mm.However, the BlackBerry Passport is almost 2cm or 25 per cent wider, and it's also heavier than these flagships, at 196g. Still these comparisons don't tell the full story, because the Passport is distributing its mass over an outstretched hand. In one-handed use, that hand is trying not to drop it on the floor, so it feels far heavier than the raw numbers suggest.
A clenched hand conducts the weight down through the wrist far more comfortably than an open hand which is struggling to grip and balance a heavy, wide and flat object. So while a phablet (take the 306g Galaxy Tab 3) is half as heavy again, nobody tries to balance and use one like a phone – they're invariably gripping it like an iPad with one hand holding and the other swiping.There's no getting away from it – even though the Passport is 33 per cent lighter and two inches shorter than a typical 7-inch phablet – this new BlackBerry is a really cumbersome beast. In the hand, it's far more assertive than those numbers suggest. Although you can wrap your fingers round it and reach the power key and volume keys, you can't do much more than scroll one-handed, as a thumb barely reaches halfway across the screen.What do you think would happen if an iPad made sweet, sweet love to a Macbook? Just go with it please, for the sake of argument.It would give birth to a misshapen, outsized fondleslab, running a delicate and (probably) delicious integration of OSX and iOS. And a full suite of apps, naturally.
But it's not going to happen, is it? Well, it might not be such a far-fetched idea, if the latest rumour issuing forth from the Far East is to be believed.According to the Korean website Digitimes, Apple will release a 12.9-inch iPad next year that will run such an OS.Mysterious "sources in the supply chain" said Apple will introduce a normal tablet and a two-in-one device, both of which will be 12.9 inches in size.Apple's upcoming Yosemite desktop upgrade (OSX 10.10 – now out in developer preview) has features cribbed directly from iOS, such as calendars and a notification centre.So, will we eventually see this super desktop fondleslab, encompassing all the disadvantages of both an iPad and a laptop?Today's organisations must store ever-increasing volumes of digital information arriving in an ever-wider range of formats. At the same time, more and more data-hungry applications are coming on stream.
It is harder than ever for your storage to provide each application with the appropriate quality of service (QoS).How can you best organise your storage resources? How can you balance the provide users and applications with different levels of access to different types of data without letting some become those demanding noisy ones who drown out their important but unassuming neighbours?Or could it be that we need to fundamentally change the way we think about information retrieval?Suppliers like to say that it is all about enforcing QoS. Quality is a rather subjective and personal term, but in business and technology it typically translates as fitness for purpose. Other key aspects feed into that, including consistency, predictability, traceability and so on.As far as data storage is concerned, the basic measure of fitness for purpose is simple: it must deliver the I/Os per second (IOPS) that the application needs.That is relatively easy to measure at the host layer, says Adam Carter, vice-president of product development at SolidFire, which specialises in enterprise flash storage.
He warns, though, that you need to make sure when you make your measurements that your apps are actually requesting data. “So you need to monitor queue depth as well,” he says.The complexity comes when several applications are requesting IOPS, because applications are typically unaware of each other. This is especially true in multi-tenanted storage, where multiple users independently buy or book services.To make matters worse, many applications were built to consume as many IOPS as they could because they were designed with direct-attach storage (DAS) in mind, not shared storage.Indeed, some applications such as databases could not run on shared storage because its performance could not be guaranteed.Yet the ability to host multiple applications on a single storage platform or subsystem is essential for a storage consolidation strategy.Storage QoS is equally essential for consolidation because you need to prevent the actions of one set of users from affecting the QoS experienced by other users. In effect, it enables applications that could not safely run within a multi-tenant environment to do so.