8 inch platters

Lets just go back to 8 inch platters from my mainframe days, problem solved!!

nice article

Nice article, even non-smart TV's are pretty diabolical.

My 5 year old samsung has a UI that is sluggish as hell. When selecting the input source there are no direct selections - you just have to keep prodding the button til you get the one you are after and it always reverts back to the built-in TV tuner when power cycled. If the source is offline then you cannot select it, so you have to go through all the sources again. There is no config option to set a default source on power up or to remove unwanted source that nicely clutter up the selection.

So my power up cycle for my PVR + TV is:

PVR on - wait til booted

TV on

press input source 5 times

press enter

This all takes about 20-30 seconds, if you goof then it can take a minute or two.

Whereas using a tablet is just a press of the power button, a swipe to unlock and then selecting the TV app - 5 seconds max.

And don't even get me started on my diabolical smart samsung DVD player, I have used the youtube function just once, the UI was slower than wading through a swimming pool full of treacle.

microserver N40L

Don't waste your time with any of these, an N40L with 8gb of ECC RAM and an intel NIC (N40L built-in does not do jumbo frames) will wipe the floor performance wise. It has an internal USB slot onto which you install FreeNAS and then you get ZFS.

ZFS + RAIDZ2 + ECC memory - don't trust your precious data to anything less.

ignorance

"I wrote a few crappy programs in Java that could do some basic things"

Hey, but that obviously didn't stop you speaking from a position of ignorance.

ebay final value cap almost doubled on 10th July

Well, ebay obviously feel comfortable enough to double the cap on the final value fee.

Before 10th July: £1000 sale, ebay get 10% of £400 = £40

After 10th July: ebay get 10% of £750 = £75

Plus, the paypal double dip of 3.4%

Plus the risk that paypal do not investigate a seller complaint properly, and take the whole lot

Wrong wrong wrong

"GPS interfering"

"the perception that it too could interfere with GPS systems"

"supposedly "GPS interfering" spectrum "

Check out the laws of physics and stop being so nice to lightsquared. GPS devices must have weak filtering to pick up a weak signal. Strong local signals will spill out onto the GPS band. No amount of shouting on behalf of lightsquared will change this fact.

Don't use RAID1 or RAID5

Use ZFS with mirroring :) - kill bitrot for good

Carry on asking questions

Is the cap 1.01 mbps? - NO

Is the cap 1.02 mbps? - NO

...

Take a look at Haskell

A truly beautiful and pure language that has little CV fire power, but will open your eyes to other languages and FP.

Capacity vs price

Pleasant to see some vendors gouging tech ignorant consumers by charging 3 times as much for a 3TB drive as a 1TB drive!

oooooooo!! 128mb of cache

Well that's really going to take the heat off a 256gb SSD isn't it??

volatile and synchronized

This whole article is peppered with technical inaccuracies, it's frankly embarrassing for the register to publish this nonsense. Just to clear up one of them:

Variables changes can be seen by other threads, you just use the volatile and synchronized constructs, this tells the JVM to flush out the cache so other cores can see the update. This is very expensive, that's why it's optional and has to be explicitly stated by the programmer, that's why all other languages will have a similar construct.

Java also has the java memory model, which ensures that multi-threaded code works the same on all processor architectures and types. From ARM to POWER7, be it NUMA or not.

Splashback on oracle

Very interesting article, let's hope that oracle see sense and realise that this could backfire on them. The consolidation of the Unix platforms strongly contrasts the proliferation of choices when it comes to databases. Oracle need to tread a bit more carefully.

Don't startup - you'll get sued

Just shows how patents only raise the barrier to entry for new startups, get anywhere successful and you'll get sued.

The sooner everyone (excluding patent hoarders) gets together to reform this nonsense, the better.

At last!!

Have been waiting for someone to do this for a couple of decades now, I suppose with really smart firmware it has the potential to more than treble random i/o since you can pick the head that is closest to a given request. However, with more moving parts - reliability may be less than current single head designs.

With the much larger HD capacities, this should keep hard drives in the game with flash for a lot longer.

sandforce - compare like with like

Sandforce relies on data compression to achieve it's throughput stats, call me old fashioned, but I would prefer my CPU to do the compression via a compressed file system. So, when comparing performance - make sure you compare like with like.

I am seriously tempted to buy one of these, I have a 160gb G2 from intel and it has never let me down.

lots more £6 fares for TFL

I have had several incomplete journeys where I have definitely touched at both ends, most of the time it happens at rail stations. The oyster helpline will not give you a refund unless you call them within 6 weeks, so you still need to check your account at a station every few weeks, the online webapp does not show you incomplete journeys.

But hey, by the time most people receive their credit card bill and scrutinise it, the 6 weeks will be up and TFL will be quids in!! trebles all round

Words of wisdom

Excellent article, I'm sure anyone with even pass lay knowledge of economics would realise this.

Also, food is much more expensive to store/hoard than other commodities. A lot of foodstuffs degrade over time, are consumed by pests (try keeping a grain silo free of mice without tainting the grain), run the risk of being infected and rendered worthless by moulds or insects and are an extremely bulky way of storing value.

The ceefax of the mobile internet

I really liked WAP and appreciated it's thriftiness with bandwidth and processor resources, and the concept of decks within cards was very nice as the browser could easily prefetch the next page.

Thinking back. it strikes me how bloated most web pages are now, taking so much time resolve all the various DNS names, load the page, load the ad networks ads, start up flash animations etc etc and then the page is so busy with crap you have trouble finding the link you are after.

Here's to a simpler, but far faster web...

fantastic

please keep us updated on any more home improvements! I'd never heard of aerogel, but will certainly look at trying to use it in the future

look at the patents

Look at the patents, they are generic enough to apply to just about any other language runtime. What utter bullshit.

Hunger for data

Show's the hunger for the data, other government departments and organisations - TAKE NOTE - we want our data!

ooooooo!!

Elbow patches at dawn...

too many pixels

Sorry, 18mp is way too much for my liking. I think canon are racing too far ahead on the pixel count, and they need to slow down and let some aspects of the sensor technology catch up.

HA!

In soviet romania, shed lives in you!

print preview PLEASE

please!

2009 just called and they want their rate cuts back

are they fucking serious?

has no one told VM the job market is well into a spring thaw? and rates are back up again?

I hear the sound of 400 contractors suddenly logging onto jobserve

all shopping sites try it on

Check the refund policy on your favourite shopping site, chances are they contradict the distance selling regulations.

Take Amazon: "We can only accept the return of opened items if they are faulty. Please note that we reserve the right to send back items to you that have been returned to us after 30 days unless they are faulty."

Bzzzzzt!! wrong ... you can open the item, play with it, try it out - the whole point of the regulations are that you cannot see the item and try it out like in a shop, therefore you get the chance to do this at home for 7 days. You just have to take reasonable care of the item and return it in working condition.

The shops usually assert that they cannot resell opened goods as new and therefore you cannot return them. This is *not* your problem as a consumer.

(some items are excepted of course: CD's/DVD's/software/underwear etc)

XXXX takes XXXX extremely seriously

If I here another company say that again, I will go postal.

Obviously, you didn't take it seriously, you didn't even consider it all, and didn't put safeguards in place, otherwise it wouldn't of fucking happened in the first place.

BBC PR Profit

1. Threaten closure of previously sacred service providings

2. Reprieve previously threatened sacred service providings

3. erm, PR profit!

Meanwhile the board are paid millions for doing sweet fuck all

Is this a real story?

Is this a real story? or just Murdoch fantasising and wanking in public?

What is the world coming to?

What about the hamas guy, he was on a false passport - I guess that's OK since dubai is the premier centre for islamic terror finance. And are you telling me that MI6 have never used false passports?

I mean, what is the world coming to when you can't travel around on a false passport, doing some casual arms dealing without getting bounced off?

eclipse base

it's all written atop of eclipse now and is actually rather good, although I couldn't work out how to integrate the symphony plugins into my existing eclipse install, that way I could stay in eclipse all day!

corp tax helpline constantly engaged

Wow, this report is very timely. I have been trying to get through to the corporation tax helpline, have been trying 8/9 times a day for the past 8 days - CONSTANTLY ENGAGED.

please please please please please have a fold out keyboard....

My g1 fold out keyboard is the most usable portable device for typing I have had since my psion 5mx.

ARM + Android

My money is waiting for the first ARM & Android netbook

I don't see any reason why Android's GUI can't scale up to a netbook, yes it'll take a while for popular apps to optimise their usage of the new size, but we have already seen demos of android on netbook.

Java is fast enough for a lot of apps, but android will start to support native apps also - but, I am still confused about multi platform support of native apps.