Posts by Oliver Mayes
380 posts • joined Wednesday 19th November 2008 11:46 GMT
Re: Large UPS
"I think the batteries have to be internal."
Nope, the device just can't be connected to the mains. If you plug it into the wall socket it's considered to be a permanent fixture and so the building requires a license. So as long as you're wireless it's fine. Not sure how they'd react to a network cable though, I suspect that most of the people charged with enforcing this would have a hard time differentiating between a power cable and a cat6 cable.
Re: another 100m
40k a year for a programmer? Not sure where you work but I think I need to move there.
"a successful government IT project".
We should have it stuffed!
What am I saying? It will be by the time it's done.
Re: Fairly misleading article...
Quoted from his blog post
"I was stopped by a person who subsequently stated that he was a McDonalds employee"
"I noticed that Perpetrator 1 was wearing a name tag clipped to his belt. When I looked down at it, he quickly covered it up with his hand, and pulled it off and turned it around so that it was facing inwards, so that only the blank white backside of it was then facing outwards."
"The third person (who I will refer to as Perpetrator 3) was holding a broom and dustpan, and wearing a shirt with a McDonald's logo on it."
So that's the main assailant and at least one of the 2 people with him who are almost certainly restaurant employees.
Re: Fairly misleading article...
His blog said the one of the other 2 was holding a dustpan and brush. Not the kind of thing a customer would take to McD's.
Re: "asserted a copyright claim"
A video showing someone how to steal copyrighted content for free is a viable target for a takedown request.
Re: Question from the stupid person in the forum
It doesn't produce energy, just takes it in. One of the potential applications here is that when you fire enough energy at a small point, like they have done here with multiple lasers converging on a small area, you can ignite a fusion reaction which can then be used to generate lots of clean power, far more than you used to power the laser.
In this scenario the laser is simply the starter motor that kicks off the fusion reactor.
Re: Danger to people?
No, there's no danger at all. The planet's magnetosphere deflects most of the CME around the planet. Even the ISS is still inside that protective barrier so at most they'll see a slight increase in solar radiation.
Those of us on the ground or at the relatively piddling height of 40,000 feet won't see any difference at all, unless you happen to look up and see the pretty colours as the atmosphere gets all excited about it.
@dogged
I once caught myself coveting the ankles of my neighbours ox. What do I do now?
Re: 8am and still no o2 connection since yesterday afternoon
Hardly any BBC reporting? It was the second most read article on their mobile site when I checked last night.
That's how I found out about the problem, I assumed it was just my handset playing up until I saw their article.
Re: And in what public forum
How quaint, you think the government somehow serves you.
It's been a long time since any politician in power acted in the interests of anything other than their own wallet.
Re: meh
VPN wont' help here as they're trying to stop the content being published in the first place, not just block access to it.
Re: Simple fix?
Except if they do that they're actively interrupting the intended communications of the affected PCs. While now they're effectively invisible proxies, the second they start actively changing where the users get sent the companies who have to spend money on fixing the problem can start pointing fingers at the FBI for disrupting their businesses. Given the general technical knowledge of your average judge, trying to explain what's happening would be a losing battle for the feds.
Re: People have been given plenty of notice
1/3? You think there are less than 1 million pc's on the internet?
Sorry, but is there any evidence other than data from Anonymous? Somehow I doubt the group has everyone's best interests at heart and I wouldn't even consider acting on information from them without some pretty hard evidence to back it up.
Shock horror - human rights abuses found in China.
Western corporations ignore the abuse in favour of continuing to make huge profits on outsourced labour.
News at 11.
Re: Eh?
Or perhaps the mobile app had some debug code left in it that wasn't supposed to run on their live servers?
One rogue DROP statement can cause havoc if they don't have proper backups and DR policies.
Re: So hate me why don't you
I've got the double pack too. The first (only?) film is one of my all-time favourites.
Watched the sequel once, nodded solemnly, put it back in it's place and haven't watched it since.
Posted in Microsoft next-gen Xbox details leak
Re: all for a retail price of $300 (£191).
Ah, well you see there are difficulties bringing a product to market in a foreign territory and the distribution channels are far more expensive. Not to mention sales tax, import duty, window tax, backhanders etc. So it makes sound fiscal sense to simplify the process by charging the same numeric value in every country and only varying the currency symbol. Except in regions where the difference between the USD and the local currency would result in a loss for the manufacturer.
Re: Phones & Cameras
She states on her blog that it isn't a phone, she was taking a small camera in with her specifically to take these photos for her reports.
It's a moronic law written by people with no knowledge of the technologies involved. It's practically unworkable as it stands and will hopefully be dropped entirely shortly. If not, at the very least lets hope that ignoring it becomes commonplace. Like how it's illegal to park your car on the pavement but the police are unlikely to prosecute you for it unless you're causing a problem for others.
Re: Radiation, the new terrorist paedophiles.
The Sun were already reporting on radioactive paedophiles long before this:
http://www.thesun.co.uk/sol/homepage/news/2276130/Radioactive-paedophile-on-the-run.html
Re: Advice for his legal team
Ah but you're making the classic mistake of expecting the law to apply in the same way to a politician and a prole. If a politician breaks the law it's simply because they mis-interpreted the law. If a prole breaks the same law it's because they're a criminal.
Re: "..monitoring all of the web sites registered in the city,"
Really? A Government that doesn't understand how technology works? How preposterous!
Mine was up and down all weekend, in the year since I moved into this house and got VM installed I've had the connection speed drop to 1/2 what it was to begin with, they forced out a firmware update to the router that completely broke the wifi, cut me off for a week due to a 'fibre issue' and then over this weekend I couldn't get to half of the sites I tried. In every instance they've provided absolutely no support beyond telling me to continually reboot my PC and modem until it comes back. I doubt there's a single support worker left with them that knows how anything works, they just read scripts at me and refuse to actually fix the problems.
My only other option is a 1Mb ADSL service with BT, so for now at least there's no reasonable alternative.
"People were charged for months — sometimes years"
Knowing RealPlayer, it probably took that long for the charges to buffer.
Re: Can't fault their stance
The same can be said for Microsoft, or Linux, or any popular brand. Say anything bad about them and expect the foaming-at-the-mouth weirdos to yell at you.
Re: If its wrong most of the time...
Marketing overrides maths.
Posted in Game goes titsup in Australia
I read the same thing, I've also heard that several competitors are offering the games at a big discount for anyone who pre-ordered at Game and didn't get their copy.
Re: Really??
" I don't know what crappy spec machine you must be trying to run it on?!?"
Dual core CPU @ 2.6GHz, 4 GB RAM, recent nvidia card (1024MB, can't remember the model), Creative 5.1 sound card. All latest drivers.
Video stutters, random coloured pixels flicker across the screen, menus and buttons flicker then disappear leaving artifacts behind.
None of these problems manifest in Windows on the same PC. Just Ubuntu.
Make it opt in only, it's the responsibility of the parents to apply to their ISP and have it switched on for their connection. The parents need to start taking some responsibility for raising their own children instead of dumping them in front of the TV/PC/iPad and expecting the government to supervise them.
Re: Linux
Mine can't handle a refresh rate of more than about 10 FPS, so DVDs stutter and flicker.
And that's with a fairly decent spec and recent nvidia graphics card installed, Ubuntu just can't handle anything more complex than running OpenOffice yet.
Re: 7 hours
Perhaps the camera wasn't within his reach while he was airborne. Might have needed to land and get into the camera to get the card out.
Re: Public sector
The accountant who questioned it.
I thought it was fake too, mine had a spelling error in it.
So that was actually a genuine email? Damn, that makes 5 times in the last 18 months that a website has lost my details. I only found out about the last time after someone tried to charge a hotel room in Paris to my credit card.
Re: Can I...
@Voland's right hand
Except that the fact that he waited 15 years to enforce the patent shows that this is purely a money grab. If he had a genuine claim then he should have made that claim back when someone else produced a touchscreen device. Apple is just the big money target.
"claiming that the intrusion had been justified as it was "in the public interest" and that the hacking had led to criminal charges being brought."
Since when has this been the job of news reporters? Breaking into someone's personal communications in search of a story is never justified. In fact, isn't it illegal to prosecute someone based on evidence obtained illegally?
If someone is tortured into giving up evidence then that evidence is inadmissible in court so surely information stolen would be as well.
Either way, this is yet another example of the rotten Murdoch empire ignoring the law in their search for more money. It's about time he was held accountable for the actions of his minions.
"Do any Reggies here have the 3G tool? And if so, have you performed some destructive testing on it, possibly whilst bored or drunk? Any observations? : D"
I have one on my desk, I wasn't aware of its construction method but have always been intrigued by it. Although it's just a little bit of metal I couldn't find any injection seam or evidence of cutting so I was baffled as to how it was made without lots of effort being put into finishing.
As for it's properties, it's pretty rigid and resistant to flexing or mild bending. I haven't gone the whole destructive testing route yet because it seems wrong somehow to damage a nice shiny things, I'll wait until I've had more to drink.
Posted in iiNet wins High Court trial
Re: Fixed.
"I was going to say It's like watching a runner fall at the first hurdle, but it's probably more like watching a runner false start, run over to the official and shoot themselves in the foot with the starting pistol."
...and then attempt to sue the official for not stopping him from doing that.
I'm still waiting for them to stop Virgin from touting their 'fibre-optic broadband'. This is quite clearly just a length of coax running into my house, not fibre.
Can someone explain this to me?
They advertised their product as being 4G capable. It isn't.
What exactly is this discussion about? Surely they should simply be banned from making that claim again and made to compensate anyone who bought the product without knowing that the 4G claim was incorrect.
Why are they having to 'come to an agreement' with anyone? Do Apple decide what the law is or how it's enforced now?
Huh, does 'as Seen On TV' actually mean something? Everything is on TV these days. Most channels devote 10% - 20% of their time to showing various products that you can buy. How does this sticker somehow make any difference? Are people specifically buying things because the same product has been shown on television at some point? If so I think time should be devoted to analysing and restricting those morons instead of the advertising.
Re: Lets be realistic shall we.
"The Police have enough to do catching criminals than worry about which porn sites you visit."
Except that they don't, they're so obsessed with arrest figures that the majority of police work these days seems to be focussed on parking fines and minor speed offences. The police stopped caring about actual crime when they realised that it looks far more impressive to 'catch' people illegally downloading music form the internet.
Re: hmmmm...
Like how councils were granted powers to spy on people with the promise that only benefit cheats and tax dodgers will be targeted. Fast forward 12 months and they're using it for anyone they suspect of doing anything wrong from littering to not clearing up after their dogs. Emphasis on 'they suspect'.
Re: Down with this sort of thing
Careful now
Posted in Game chain sold
Re: WHY!?
@southern
"So send it to your work address and have them take receipt of it and set your downloads to run at night instead of daytime. It really is not that difficult to overcome your two main objections."
My employer won't allow us to have things shipped here, why should they pay for the reception staff to sign for and store my property for me until I collect it?
And downloading overnight would require me to leave my console or pc on overnight which is a waste of power. I put everything to sleep at night, the noise of my PC fans alone would keep me up all night.
@wild bill
"My house has this amazing device installed called a letter box. Google it, I think it's going to be the next big thing."
Yes, and I love receiving those "While you were out" cards when I get home every day. Almost as much as I love having to go collect my ever-so-slightly-thicker-than-the-average-letterbox parcel from the post office depot that closes every day at 7:30 am.
Posted in Game chain sold
Re: WHY!?
Not everyone can wait in all day for the postman to deliver Amazon packages. I'm at work between 8 and 6 Mon-Fri so my only option is to book the day off or have it left with a neighbour. Now they're lovely people next door but I feel a bit bad relying on them this much. Plus, downloading a game can take several hours at peak times, compared to going into a shop and buying a physical copy that I can play right away.
Prior art?
That looks like either a Nintendo or xBox avatar, and the interface is almost identical to the once used in The Sime 2 & 3 to create your Sims.
Only an idiot would think that this was in any way enforceable.
Siri can do any of the following things for me:
Open the weather app and show the location I ask for (about 50% of the time)
Tell me the time in other time zones (about 40% of the time)
Tell me what the time is 'here' (about 10% of the time, it uses the GPS to figure out where 'here' is and keeps getting it off by about 20 miles then telling me it doesn't know the time in *address across town*
Do a google search (roughly 70% accuracy)
Play songs or albums from my library (pretty good 90% accuracy but then there is a set word list there)
When I see the advert that shows people checking their email and messages or asking where their brother is (presumably he had to check into the place first?) it makes me angry that they can blatantly lie about it's capabilities like that and get away with it.
