Posts by ElNumbre

Real World Practice

At least its prepping them for the real world of IT, where hours are spent on proposals, bids and strategy, only for it to become, at best shelfware and at worst disappear into a black hole with nary a thank you.

Open your brain.

Who is the creator of this invention? Bin Dunbefore no doubt.

Still, between this and their fitness push at the moment, it's not increasing their wantability in this tent.

Double Accounting.

So presumably will get the money from the original Google deal, then win again from people picking up Verizon LTE services from this new Google deal? And also do some clever tax trickery to avoid paying tax.

N.b. are the Pixels locked to the network, or can you use another provider?

Up North

I've not donned my coat and headed oop north for some years, but it does remind me of the Newcastle Metro logo.

Also, Morrisons Supermarkets, but I don't think they do public transport to any great extent.

Hello?

Hello IT, yes we have tried switching it off and back on again.

Consider your Country List

This product is great, provided the execs stay in the Westernized Countries of the G20 and old Europe. Stray south of the Equator and/or head east from about Italy and the competitiveness rapidly falls away (excluding Australia). We do a lot of business in the Middle East and Africa where monopolies and duopolies, usually under the control of the dear leader mean that you're still knackered for international roaming unless you buy in-country sims.

N.b, El Reg really should have a product placement icon for articles like this.

The future...

"I think there is a world market for maybe five computers." - Thomas Watson IBM*

*" 76% of all quotes found on the internet are made up." - Abraham Lincoln.

Murka!

Wonder if this is behind the recent rash of results that are America centric, despite using google.co.uk as my search engine. Not just me either, a few people have mentioned it to me. Although its not irritating enough to make us Bing.

Source Data

Whilst the Traveline data is good for routes, it sucks monkey nuts at interconnects. I just calculated a route from a Midland Metro stop just outside Wolverhampton to Birmingham Airport. Now, there are two real public transport options for this route (excluding buses)...

1) Take the Midland Metro to Birmingham City Centre, walk across town to New Street, then take the train to the Airport.

2) Take the Midland Metro to Wolverhampton, walk to the train station, take the train to the Airport.

For the latter, it tells me to take the Metro into Wolverhampton, wait 10mins for a bus, spend 15mins doing a tour of Wolverhampton shitty centre, then walk from the bus stop to the train station, before continuing the journey on a proper train.

Now, anyone that knows Wolverhampton will tell you the walk from the Metro to the train station is 5-10mins, depending on how briskly you're perambulating.

I guess that leaves me with two suppositions - a) their interconnection data is crap, or b) their data takes account of local crime stats and is keen for you to avoid roaming the streets.

8.1 Useable

I was an 8.1 neigh-sayer until I installed it onto my machine as another OS, and I have to say, its okay. I did have to take a deep breath, leave my Windows perceptions at the door and use it for 4 or 5 hours to learn 'the new way' but actually, its usable and functional. Its still a bit off-putting when some apps load to the desktop, and others load into Metro, but once you learn that Alt+Tab is your friend and the split screen thing can let you see the apps side-by-side it's actually perfectly functional.

From my multi-boot, Win7, Win8, ChromeOS and Debian laptop, Windows 8 ends up being the OS of choice most of the time.

Danger Will Robinson

Some of the instructions on this article feel a little close to the limit of legality with regard to licencing. I hope El Reg's lawyers have reviewed this article before it went to press.

FTLOG

For those commentards reporting that they've got great coverage or piss-poor coverage, PLEASE install one of the survey apps if you've got a capable smart phone and add the details to the maps. The more current data, the better these maps become.

Token

If you'd like to post a token to my home or work address, I can consume my pint from here AND limit the carbon impact of having to travel beyond the gates of Nodnol. One of those bluey/green or orangy/brown ones will be perfect, although a purply/blue or red one would be equally well received.

Family Guy

I'll be interested to see what happens to Family Guy - it appears that it's not allowed on iPlayer, so I assume Auntie will either punt it onto BBC Two or give up the rights to it.

There's very little else on BBC Three I watch; Russell Howard's Good News and Bluestone 42 are really the other exceptions. And I'm in their target audience range. BBC Four however has some very good content, provided you enjoy being educated rather than being exposed to real life or actor peoples shouting at each other.

A vision

I see Office 365 in their future....

I'm not even related to Septic Peg either.

Sideloading and Rooting

This marls an interesting and obviously controversial tangent for Nokia, but I think its a good thing, particularly for the lower end of the market. My concern is that their 'apk' store will be as mediocre as many others that try to compete with the play store, to limited success. I'll watch with interest as to whether the play store can be easily side-loaded, and also if rooting and romming become an option. It'll be nice to have a cheap, but quality brand in the Android space to compete with the Asian megacorps and no-name outfits trying to float their elcheapo turds at this end of the market, but only if a full range of apps is available.

I also fear that Microsoft will kill or sell the X range all too quickly once their feet are properly under the table at Espoo.

FRY

Perhaps this should be called a 'Fry-Moment' but "few applications drain a mobile device's battery more rapidly than contacting satellites." is just wrong when spoken about in reference to GPS. Receivers listen passively to satellite signals, they don't contact them. I thought everyone in El Reg knew this by now? Or that just Microsoft redefining the standard again?

Thinking outside the box

Doesn't answer your original question about specific packages directly, but a good solution to home filtering on 'every' device is to have a proxy server sat between your devices and the internet.

I use pfSense (firewall), with Squid (proxy), ClamAV (AV-Filter) and DansGuardian (Dodgy site filter) which protects any device on my network, whether it has AV installed or not. The machine it runs on cost about £75 from ebay, and costs about £10 a month in electricity costs. Following some instructions on the net, it took me about 2hrs to get it all setup and working.

For my actual machines, I use Microsoft Security Essentials (Windows), ClamAV (Linux), and Avast (Linux), which seem to work quite well and have done an excellent job at keeping nasties away, and cover me when I'm off my own grid.

I've also heard good things about k9webprotection as a filtering web server, but that only does web filtering and is an install on every machine too.

CrapTastic

Just changed my password for Tesco as a matter of course.

Passwords can only be between 6 and 10 characters, and doesn't seem to support complex characters, only Upper, lower and numerical.

What year is this, 2002?

I can only assume the 'new economies' don't believe in the "nobody got sacked for buying Cisco" mantra that seems inescapable here in the UK. Whilst Cisco make some great core-networking gear, a lot of their other stuff has a perception of looking too proprietary, less functional (or conversely overly complex) and far far more expensive than their competitors. Plus they've really struggled to market themselves as agile vendors with lots of new idea's which is fine for big enterprise customers, but don't necessarily highlight their capabilities with start-ups and round 1 VCs.

They could have done so much more with Linksys as a Baby Cisco, but alas, the super-tanker is not for turning.

2FO

I don't mind 2FA when its relatively seamless like the Google Authenticator offering, especially as lots of websites now use this as an option, and the codes can be generated within a single app for these multiple sites.

I hope the 365 2FA works better than the two-phase authentication on the Xbox 360 platform which won't send me a text message to my UK mobile number (well, it apparently does, but disappears into the ether). I can cancel out of it, but every time I start the Xbox, install the latest patches, reboot, install the game updates and log into Live, I have to bin off several messages before it lets me log into the account.

I don't play Xbox much anymore.

The symbol

Just as in the same way that + has come to mean 'has a record function', perhaps there needs to be a 'catchup via the internet' symbol, for example Φ. So if you have a freeview Φ or freesat Φ you know that you can use it to iPlayer or 4player or STV player to your hearts content.

The complete renaming of platforms with similar functions only serves to confuse and scare the general populous.

"It's big, it's expensive and it's an audiophile's dream: The Sonos Sub"

The only thing I know about audiophilia is that you can't please any of them, any of the time.

The Phone Call....

Hello, IT? This is God calling.

I divided by zero again.

Stards

I was quite interested in Sky's broadband as a secondary service to my main AAISP, but was put off because it seems they don't like you using your own router, and don't support bridged mode on their router. There are apparently ways around it, but it looked like a proper pain in the rear, so have given it a miss. I currently use a TP-Link router running OpenWRT bridging to a pfSense firewall. I trust community code more than a narrow team of developers with their employers interests at heart.

Mystery...

I don't understand why they need six private jets to conduct their business? Why don't they just use Hangouts?

Or don't they want their 'wheel greasing' pay-offs to international politico's and persons of power to be on the record?

A Christmas Tale

And lo, it did come to pass, that Linus came upon an inn, alone and in need of a power socket. And Linus did imbibe some refreshing beverages and reviewed some code, until it came to pass that he was able to perform a stable release, not entirely unlike that which was foretold 2013 years ago (depending on when your epoch is defined). And it was great and good and at least three wise men did install it upon their system.

Falala la la, la la la laaa.

SIM Cards & Numbers

"consider a SIM for the same network. It may be a little easier for them simply to swap the number to the new SIM."

This may vary between networks, but recent experience suggests this isn't the case for T-Mobile (not sure about EE) and Three. With those networks, I've actually had to PAC my numbers out to a third party network (A PAYG sim will do) and then back in again as apparently they don't have the systems to move numbers internally.

Namco Ridge Racer

I still remember an installation of Namco's Ridge Racer in a Blackpool Arcade, except they had a "real" car and a projector out in front. Proper 3D graphics and realistic control, but as a youf you could only really afford one go because I'm sure it was about £5 a pop.

Priorities

Its not the iconography of the puppies that worries me, its the increasing size of the cardboard inner which riles me; the rolls look the same from the outside, but you get less for your money. Bar stewards.

PUE

I'm not overly surprised about Microsoft's PUE which from what I've seen is what you can expect from a well designed 'off the shelf' build-out. Every behind the scenes video I've ever seen suggests Microsoft using such hardware, unlike big G and Facebook who roll their own, with the latter releasing their designs under the opencompute project/brand.

Fixed

I experienced similar problems with my S3, particularly the 'slow to wake' issue where you are never sure if its going to wake up after pressing the power button.

Still, I've managed to fix it. Just had to goto the CyanogenMod website, download the new Windows installer and associated app from the play store, letting it install CM10 (4.3.1) in about 5 clicks. Plus, it doesn't have all the Samsung crapware which is only a bonus.

Home Users

I wonder if I can convince my family to move 'to the cloud'? ~£22 for fully managed, 'unbreakable' desktops is an interesting, if slightly high price point. If it were around the £15 mark, or £20 with the office bundle, it would be a godsend, especially as to them its Windows. I'm guessing that the price is made up of something like 20% compute resource, 60% licencing costs and the rest left as take home.

Looking at the summary page, PCoIP so I'm guessing VMView clients may be the way this goes. But I think that a proper understanding of the access methodology is required - the big bugbear with VDI is you can end up paying twice, once for a local licence and once for the remote desktop. I see no mention of a Linux client at this time, and Id like to understand which browsers are supported.

I can see lots of use cases for this technology, and for small workgroups, its a damn sight easier on the CAPEX than Citrix or VMWare environments.

Chicken and Egg

The trouble is that without an end date for FM radio, manufacturers have to use DAB as a 'value add' upsell, rather than a 'you need DAB because otherwise this will stop working in x years'. But the MoF don't want to set an end date for FM because of the slow uptake of DAB.

Case in point; Cars. How many new car's ship with DAB as standard? Id venture <50% and that's probably optimistic. Most car's have a lifespan of ~12 years so if they cull FM in say 5 years, you're going to have a lot of vehicles on the road who have to fall back to CDs or learning what that aux port is for for a significant period of time, or force them to spend some money retrofitting the solution at a later date.

If they need to do it (and I've not yet seen the business case to support DAB) then it needs to be 10 years and a lot of promotion by both UKGOV and Retail plc.