Posts by Graeme
42 posts • joined Thursday 19th March 2009 00:10 GMT
Posted in NBN collapses* into chaos*
Re: Bye, bye copper!
Downvoted purely because of the jealousy triggered by your final paragraph. Our Perth suburb isn't due to get connected for another 3 years or so.
Re: You guys just let that "3 Strikes" metaphor go through untouched?
You're right, it's scandalous! I await the "3 Strikes-gate" headlines with bated breath.
Re: What IS direct buried cable?
At a guess, cable buried without being run through conduit/ducting. That how it's run to my house, or it seems that way. My reticulation control wiring runs in conduit about 1' underground and starts level with the phone cable entry point. Having dug down 1' the phone cable did not appear to be run through any conduit.
I wonder if using fibre for the connection will negate the requirement for a "certified installer" to do comms work in your house. The primary reason given for this requirement is that it is to protect guys up the line from getting buzzed if your work wasn't up to scratch and shorted to mains power or similar. If it's 100% fibre at the end then that reason goes away.
A bag of quick setting cement down the bog would go some way to either encouraging her to pay up or at least make the plumber feel partially revenged.
Re: No.
Hmmm... sounds very like an encounter a bloke I knew had when he went on a whitewater kayaking trip there. If I remember correctly, a rifle was also involved. He learned afterwards that this was common behaviour for her.
Posted in Driverless trucks roam Australian mines
Re: As far as I'm aware, "GPS" won't work underground.
Oh they can, and do, get McDonalds. If you ever have the misfortune to get on one of the flights to a FIFO site, you'll be accompanied by many malodorous boxes of their product. They are so treasured by the remote worker that there are some who are willing to eat them cold/reheated. Same goes for carrying Krispy Kreme doughnuts from Sydney airport to Perth (WHY?!?!).
Posted in Sinclair BASIC comes to Raspberry Pi
It won't be the same unless it replicates the rubbery multi-function keyboard. It would take a while to get out of the habit of typing things such as "RUN un" though.
Australian Tourism advert/warning...
http://youtu.be/eNEeq5qGh8I
Re: Only a flesh wound
Yes, I now have the amazing ability to wield a spray can of pesticide.
Only a flesh wound
Nice timing on the article. I was bitten by a red back a couple of days ago. I've required no treatment other than an ice pack and a beer or two (I seem to have gone native). Yes, it hurts a fair bit (like a bad burn), but in the vast majority of cases that is pretty much as bad as it gets. I wouldn't want the kids to get bitten, but they seem to be pretty clued up and just leave them alone whenever they find them. The one that got me was hiding in a shirt I'd left on the floor. Sneaky little bugger. If I didn't know better I'd swear my wife put it there to teach me to pick up my clothes.
Posted in Vote now for the ULTIMATE BACON SARNIE
Re: The Horn!
The Horn was one of the reasons I was more than happy to make the trek up the A90 from Edinburgh to Dundee to see customers. I always allowed an extra hour or so for the trip, just to be safe. I do remember thinking the sign used to look more like a leg of ham than a horn though, but that's perfect for this article. Not been there for over a decade though.
Posted in Holden considers electric Commodore
Commodore a muscle car? Even the powerful versions are barge like family cars. I've had a Commodore over here and the UK equivalent (the Vauxhall Omega) back home. They're quite nice cars, but definitely not "muscle cars". Maybe the Monaro was what you were thinking of?
HR1 form
Wonderful bit of legislation that is. It would be even better if the detail contained on it weren't reported on before those affected were told. I well remember having to listen to the radio on the way to work just to check if I still had a job to go to. Twice I heard that they'd announced multiple redundancies at Compaq, but managed to avoid the chop. They got me the third time though, but I just ended up being redeployed to do the same job but reporting to a different division.
Re: Tape this !
A tie? If you use more current tape technology than DLT-S4 (6 years old) such as LTO5 (a couple of years old) then the figures look a lot better.
LTO5 (1.5TB worst case) = $70 or $46/TB
2TB SATA=$120 or $60/TB (though anyone using consumer grade HDD for long term data retention needs a slap)
You can also shove tape in the back of a cupboard and access it a few years later. If you do the same with a hard drive then the chances of it not spinning up properly are higher than I'd be comfortable with.
Re: (Not a) Daft question
Sugru is pretty good, but it has a crappy shelf life. I bought two packs of it but 90% of it had cured by the time I got round to using it (6 months or so after purchase). I've had reasonable success making an alternative out of silicone bathroom sealant and corn flour (make sure it's proper corn flour, not finely milled wheat flour as seems common). You can find instructions if you search for "make your own sugru" which will then point you to loads of DIY sites.
Re: @BristolBachelor
And speaking of Perth, a visitor from the mystic East decided to have lunch in the waterfront bar called "The Lucky Shag". His expenses claim was returned with a note saying "Please explain" stapled to it.
HP's Procurve lifetime warranty isn't lifetime either. They had to stick a specific length on it for legal reasons (whose life span do you base it on?) and settled on somewhere just over 30 years (can't remember the exact figure). So if your 10/100 switch you bought yesterday (yes, they still make them) dies in 30 years time you can get a replacement for it. Mind you, they do say it'll be of "nearest current equivalent" for EOL models, so the chances are that your 30 year old network card in your machine won't be able to connect to whatever it's replaced with.
Cisco's "Lifetime Warranty" seems to have been based on the life span of a mayfly.
Posted in TuneIn Radio Pro
Use this every day
I use this in place of my car radio. It enables me to listen to decent radion stations (mainly Radio 4) rather than the awful Australian stations (Radio National is pretty good, but not during my commute time). The time zone difference can work in my favour, e.g. listening to The Day of The Triffids on 4Extra on the way to work, or against me, e.g. Woman's Hour on Radio4 on the way home.
Posted in Printed jaw lets woman swallow again
@dgharmon
The reasoning may be along the lines of similar medical procedure developments I've heard of in the past, i.e. "at least if we fuck this up she'll not have to live with it for long, if we did it with someone in their twenties we'd probably have to fix it."
Aaargh!!!
When will people stop comparing the costs of manufacturing and selling a physical good (a high end car in this case, but could easily be a loaf of bread) with the cost of selling a stream of data? The costs are a lot lower and the original is still retained by the seller. If I somehow copied all of the iTunes catalogue how much would Apple et al have lost? Nothing, not even lost potential sales to me as I don't buy stuff from there anymore (yep, old fart here buys physical CDs and creates FLACs from them).
I'm not in any way claiming that makes downloading copyrighted content for free acceptable, just that your analogy is crap.
Posted in HP fortifies VirtualSystem arsenal
c6000
If it's a C6000 from HP then it's either a printer or a low end PC. The blade enclosure is the c7000.
Posted in Sea eagles menace Scottish children
Spelling...
I was going to pick you up on the spelling of Rum, but it looks like the spelling I'm used to, Rhum, has apparently been out of date since 1991. I really ought to get more up to date maps.
Posted in Gummint security is utterly hopeless
Bloody students!
A friend's son worked on this series of penetration tests (he hinted at doing someting interesting a few months ago, but only fessed up now. Good lad). The "Cyber Security" (yeuch) course he's on certainly seems to throw some interesting tasks at them.
Posted in Billionaire Zuckerberg kills to eat
Bags
"Personally, I didn't claw my way to the top of the food chain to eat vegetables!"
To be fair, you didn't do it personally, you just plopped into existence at the top thanks to your ancestors. "On the shoulders of giants" so to speak. Bet Newton never thought that'd be used as a reason for digging into a steak.
(beer icon, because I now know what I'm having for lunch)
Posted in RIM brushes off HP fondleslab innuendo
"And how does RIM get to copy HP when HP's pad is so far off?"
Beta hardware released to blabby early evaluators. Reading the tech press. Looking at patents then changing them slightly so not to infringe. Or they could just take the simple way out - read the glossy marketing releases that HP produced for the device months ago.
There are few secrets in the hardware world. Apple manage the secrecy side of stuff reasonably well, but even they have to pre-release information to third parties to enable all the fluffy crap that goes around the product to be ready in time for release.
Poor bugger
If the experience of Bill Sampson is anything to go by, the Canadian government will do sod all to help and plenty to make things worse.
Who's in charge at HP this week anyway?
Just wait AC, just wait. In a few weeks it'll be your turn and you can implement whatever changes you want. You'll need to be quick though, I think it's my turn the week after and I plan to move the servers over to Z80 processors.
Posted in HP bids $2.4bn for 3PAR
Patents
Trevor, even if Dell did take all the 3PAR employees then any "3PAR' like alternative they created would almost certainly infringe HP's newly acquired patents. If you use the same brains to create a solution to the same problem, they're going to come up with a remarkably similar method (or at least similar in massive chunks of it). Unless you're going to wipe their memory somehow (I vote for Friday night drinks every day).
Posted in Aussie opposition will scrap firewall
Possibly keep NBN and no filter
By the sounds of it, the election may well be a close run thing and could be a re-run of the UK election, but with the Greens holding the balance of power. If Labour win they won't be able to push through the filter as both the Greens and now the Liberals are against it. They will however continue with the NBN as they've gone too far to stop without loosing face (long way still to go though).
Me, I'll probably vote Green. They place the Australian Sex Party ahead of both Liberals and Labour in their preferences in WA, so at least they've got a sense of humour.
Nice
A sporty little model that wraps itself around a pole. Where do I slip the fivers, under the saddle?
Posted in Want to stiffen your rack?
Wrong target market
If the IT bods don't fall for it, then there are untold thousands of hi-fi "purists" that will buy these rack to isolate their overpriced record players.
Posted in Guy Kewney dies at 63
Sad
I remember being interviewed by him when we were launching a new piece of kit a few years back. I don't think I've ever felt so in awe of any tech journalist as I did of Guy. He asked a couple of very insightful questions which had us floored for a moment until I replied with a decidedly un-company line response. I may have stunned my colleagues, but at least I got a laugh from Guy. He'll certainly be missed.
Posted in Experts rubbish iPhone for health use
Big surprise
So a device aimed at the consumer market is crap in a specialised industry with very particular requirements. Perhaps we should be clamouring for reports on how Rolex watches are totally useless for time sync between GPS satellites.
Picked a wrong un there then
The talk is that iiNet had backing (financial and man power) from a number of other Australian ISPs, including the ex-public monopoly Telstra. The idea being that if iiNet lost then they'd be the next in the firing line. Not sure if this rumour is true, but it almost makes you feel slightly more positive towards Telstra (*almost*).
My choice?
Get a big post hole borer, dig a nice deep hole and shove me in it, don't care which way up. Plant a tree on top and I'll be happy. Alternatively, leave my arse near the surface and shove an acorn up it. I don't care two hoots as I'll be dead.
Humpty Doo?
Lovely place, but it would have been far more apt if it happened in Koolyanobbing (there are some wonderful place names round here!).
Grenade because... well it says "Suck on this" when you hover the mouse over it.
I'm with Alexei Sayle on this one...
"Anyone who uses the word 'workshop' who's not connected with light engineering is a wanker."
"and observe through the windows"
Do you get a lower mark if you lick them at the same time, or is that an advanced skill?
£5,000 bottle of Coke?!
Bloody philistine! Everybody knows it's Pepsi with whisky.
Steorn Orbo
Was that not a free publicity device rather than a free energy device?
Posted in TinyURL, your configs are showing
You get what you pay for.
Or in this case, far more than what you pay for as it's an incredibly useful service. Tinyurl started out as a way for people to reliably post links to a unicycling newsgroup and was created by one of the unicycling readers/posters. I'm not sure why people get so wound up when a hobby project that states "This service is provided without warranty of any kind" on it's main (only?) page does not conform to best practices. Unless, of course, "security consultant Rafal Los" is using this purely as a way to advertise his services. Way to go Rafal, pick the easy targets first.
