Posts by richard 7
161 posts • joined Monday 22nd June 2009 11:17 GMT
Is this the same McAfee
That nuked all their customers PCs.....TWICE?
yeah, go for it, what could possibly go wrong, where do I sign up?
Re: fixed that for you
No, just Eadon, we normally ignore him and he goes back under his bridge in time.
Re: Units.
Vicious rumor that such a thing exists
As number 1 said:
"Hold your fire! Dont light a match!"
*sigh*
XP has been good after it got itself settled. Its doen a job, it still does a good job in some places. But its too far gone now. We are into the territory where you need to start kludging things to make them work with XP. We've also smashed the 3Gb barrier in day to day PCs now and if you've ever attempted XP64 you'll know thats not an option. Dspite what the Linux brigade would have you think 7 is not actually that bad, its a leap on from XP and not a leap backwards like Vista was.
I'm not sure where we will go now though. I think Microsoft is on its way to an almighty train wreck, there seems no direction or drive in Redmond now and they do seem to have lost the plot :(
And there we have it
"What I should do is send them to a local PC repair shop. The problem is that I don’t trust them. Judging from my own experiences when getting proper IT kit fixed by qualified engineers at registered service centres – all the time-wasting, cock-ups and rip-offs – I can hardly expect some back-street hoodlum to play fair with my nice neighbours."
Thank you for ruining my perception of you. I did like reading your articles, now I'm faced with the fact that I was enjoying articles written by a complete and utter tit.
There are a few small outfits that dont play by the rules yes. There are garages, builders, sparkies that dont either. The majority of us two and when asshats like you come out with ill considered bollocks like this it makes our lives a little bit harder. Most Indies are struggling right now, we'd expect help and support from fellows in our community such as yourself, not this crap. Why dont you bin the self satisfied, elitist air and do some research and find a reputable one, hell, tell me where you are and I'll find someone who will be happy to take on your neighbours and look after them.
On the other hand, there are large national companies whom I wont mention, taht everyone knows and trusts who *WILL* shaft your neighbours at every given opertunity, will sell them shit they dont need and will make their lives hell, odd you dont mention them too.
Re: Funny
Sky dont use traffic management thats why, I'm not sure they ever did tither, certainly not on the package I'm on in the last 5 years.
Re: Microsoft splashes coat of paint on Windows 8 comms apps
Use ZOC, it doesnt actually suck.
Well.....
Not overly sure what Numbula did, but farewell, was nice knowing you.
Re: AV is a malicious Peril
Can we have an Icon for Eadon posts?
Re: Distributed Denial Of Service?
Airwave is a different system and its O2
Re: *claps*
No, its because they are shit. They have utterly lost touch with their customer base, increasingly the only engineers left are the ones that dont have a clue and they continue to bleat and whine about EVERYTHING while still treating theyir customers with complete and utter contempt.
No I dont like them, but having cost me £1000s through complete ineptitute I think I'm entitled to.
You've never applied fro one have you? Have a go, go on.
Re: @bazza
I beleive a mechanical link is mandated by law on standard road veichles.
Re: Intel Desktop Mobos
Intel Garibaldi. I will say no more.
Re: uhu
""If they wished I would connect them to BusinessBB sales so they could move/upgrade their service to the same shit service, packaged as a business product for 5 times the price" disconnect them, break the line, arse up the bills, and finally to put the nail in the coffin, give then a businesshub.
All Fairness
Sky make this abundantly clear and will hand off commercial customers to the company that provides their service. If you say its for business use they will refuse to provide the service and they are not only very clear about this but helpful about finding you someone else.
BT are fast becomming a joke
I had this a few months ago, in an area that averages 8Mbit.
Two goddamn weeks to realise that a formerly 8Mbit line opearting at 256K might be wrong and needed looking at. Half a dozen engineers, hours on the phone, no end of buck passing and aggro before finally they sent out a broadband engineer (had had 3 phone engineers) Who acertained that the line was borked in about 4 points and ended up after 6 hours of cocking about, switching me to a new pair and redoing the last 200m of the line.
Only took another week to get the IP profile reset, all done, just in time for me to move office.
I wont even talk about the office move....
Stooped using Foxit
When the Spyware and Malware started creeping in with the installer.
could they also please
Stop bundling chrome with every bloody thing. At least once a week I have to remove it from a customer's machine, then spend five mins removing all the carp it left behind and then finally sorting out all the file associations chrome broke on its way out the door.
But...
"The MPs said HMRC needed a "change of mindset" on big multinationals and had to prosecute the ones that weren't paying the tax due in the UK."
HMRC are was to busy screwing small businesses/self employed to the wall for making stupid, trivial mistakes then fining them into oblivion. If they go after the big fish ....
A) They may not win as they'll be up against someone that can afford to defend themselves
C) They'll loose all the perks they get given by the big boys
D) There may be work involved.
What no CBM?
The C64, PET and Amiga were all big game changers, arguably more so than some of the machines mentioned. Any particular reason that you've just ignored a massive chunk of history? See no Beeb or Atari either.
Discovery...
Do it quite unobtrusively with a QR code, yes the QR code globe does scan if you are quick enough.
Posted in Why is solid-state storage so flimsy?
A few points
We've been selling htese for a while now, especially on our Video editing suits. I resisted SSD for a long time as we've had run ins with the early IDE/CF ones and PC/104 drives before, not really that fast and last months under moderate use even with logging etc disabled. MTBF was too low as was overall life expectancy.
We push out a fair number now and have done for over 18 month, we've had one failure of a cheapie Team drive that even Team were at a loss to explain (decided it just wanted to be a 1Gb drive rather than 120). And maybe a handful of controlled failures on our test rigs. So...
Failures dont seem to be any worse in terms of numbers than hard disks. Correcting for skew as we push out more HDs, they are on a par, if not more reliable than 2.5" drives (they do fail more often than 3.5"s in our experience)
Failure modes are identical to HDs, these drives support SMART (not sure why people think they dont) and will give warning of an impending failure. Block remapping does the same as bad block reallocation on an physical disk so the warnings are there. The higher end drives will also fail read only long before they die totally. We've nuked a total of one test drive and that was days old (Bad drive to start). Yes they dont clunk, click screech and wirr, but if its doing that it was too late anyway.
If you are putting all your eggs in one basket, then you'll loose data, in this respect thats poor planning and the same as a hard drive. Using an SSD makes you no more or less of an idiot if you dont backup.
Some things will prematureley age a drive, using them as swap, cache or log drives would be the biggest culprits, read life wise they should well outlast any mechanical disk. We can kill an SSD in about 3 days, I've managed to nuke hard drives in under a day with one Samsung making its heads cease to exist and a Hitachi shattering a platter.
Cloud storage is great, until you need it. So your server is backed up to the cloud ok, cool. So your office burns down, how long is that rebuild going to take in real terms? Assuming you cant get help and have to wait for a new broadband connection thats a long wait, if you can get help a few 100Gb is going to take forever. A real backup? I'll have your server back in an hour or two at most. The cloud is still an answer looking for a question and a good place to store all your cat pics. Its not a business grade backup solution and wont be while most users connect to it by 'broadband over damp string' (tm)
Our standard setup in the editing systems is a properly sized SSD with NTFS junctions used to bring all the data to where Windows expects this. On top of this the SSD is imaged to a seperate partition on the hard drive every few days meaning that in the even of an SSD failure, the user gets told 'use F10, boot from the hard disk and we'll have another SSD out in a day' We knoe this system works, its just never been tested as one has never copped out. The Team unit was an Asterisk box that freaked.
Spamware
El reg need to test this stuff if they are going to link to it.
Nice app I can see uses. However I dont need the portion that sits in the tray and shows popups, for that sole reason its gone. When will the Ad agencies realise that all these peices of cretin ware do is make people remove the program and eventually the 'carrier' application gets shitlisted and removed on sight.
Reminds me..
Of all the people that turned out for the last flights of the Concordes
Re: "... or in front of a bridge ..."
I was thinking more on the line of 'They move?!' Come on, hard stats, how many people are mowed down by bridges each year and why isnt anything being done to stop this outrage!?
Venus The Flytrap
That is all
erm...
"Rather than innovate and develop its own technology and a unique Samsung style for its smart phone and tablet computer products"
Like Apple Invented (or claimes to)
Li-On battery Technology
Video Conferencing on Mobiles
Internet Browsing on Mobiles
Listening to Music on Mobiles
No one EVER did any of that before Apple said they did. The companies that Apple is picking on are generally innovators and have given us some major new technology. Apple have just subtley copied and reengineered existing technologies and then patented them, actual innovation there stopped years ago when they decided it was just easier to ride the PC wave than innovate. Lets not forget that the whole business is built on what came out of PARC and even then there were beaten to the market.
Apple make things pretty, thats about it. Samsung could have tried harder but Apple are aiming for 'if its a smartphone its our patent' which I think is unfair. You shouldnt be able to file patents as a weapon even ignoring software, process, biological and look and feel.
Posted in Ten 15in notebooks for under 400 quid
Re: Higher Quality Kit For Cheap
Had the Acer through the shop along with PB, The acer wasnt a bad machine, the PB, DEAR GOD!
Remeber buying any of the DSGi/Aldi specials you are asking for a world of hurt, thats PB, Medion, Advent or Zoostorm. Sure its cheap, it'll also be shagged *if* it makes it to the end of the warranty. Parts for these machines are almost non existant so if something goes wrong you are on your own
Someone mentioned the awful Keyboard on the Pavillion, not seen that machine but I have noticed this on a lot of the newer HPAQ machines, not overly sure why this is.
As always, boot it up start in oem mode (CTRL+SHIFT+F3) and nuke all the rubbish from orbit before you ever boot it properly.
Re: ABS as well?
ABS is designed to help you retain control NOT stop you faster. Common misconception. Its a PITA on snow though as it destroys the snow wedge that forms and helps you stay in control/stop
Why cant they be honest?
'We hate Indies'
'You build shit pcs'
'You can't come to our party'
<Toys Ejected>
I'll reserve further ranting till we find out what this will do for us but I have a bad, bad feeling about this if you arent Tier 1
Re: Oh won't someone etc...
Yeah cause they worked so well didnt they
Re: Unfair criticism
Just as well you got out then.
Re: I'm thinking of buying a new PC
Or you could stop lining the pockets of these companies whi will inevitably sell you crap that wont outlast its warranty and get a decent PC from an Indie that will last. Just a thought.
For my ten penneth worth. My monitors are on a vesa bracket about 2' from me, so yeah, really suited to using metro and touch. Thats not a disconnect with reality thats just a fact.
Posted in Ten budget inkjet printers
You arent mentioning...
The software for ANY HP product and especially inkjet printers is complete total and utter crap. Common cause of horrific boot times, takes forever to install, puts a ton of un-needed services etc
Kodak isnt much better
Oh and Hp, Kodak and especially Lexmark, get used to being shafted for inak as there are no good alternatives.
Re: Irony
Thats because I have 'failover to GPRS' on the firewall :P
Portsmouth
Waterlooville, Cosham and Central exchanges are/were affected. Modems all showing Showtime but CHAP authentication is being thrown back, bizarrley I can see the authentication going through then the process restarts and throws the firewall for a loop as it was told the login was ok.
BT Broadband customers are popping back up onto our radar but no Infinity users have come back up yet.
Get off their Ivory tower
and stop tarring all small PC manufacturers with the same brush. Those of that care always make a point of using decent quality, reliable parts, hence why I'm one of the few small OEMs that issues a 3 year warranty as standard. I
How about you write software that doesnt actually suck and we will carry on building machines (that unlike the known brands) wont combust/die from known defects/have al manner of lockouts/are made by the cheapest bidder.
Lets see...
Dell - all manner of lockouts to standard parts, a whole slew of defective machines, unbeleiveably poor build quality and no wiggle room to upgrade.
HP - Sued nVidia for xx million then lie through their teeth about there being an issue with pretty much every machine they sold with that chip in it. Driver support for HPO is godawful and and lets not forget batteries
Acer - Veriton PCs, nuff said
Sony - Batteries, loads of lockouts to doing anything
I'll stop now....
What everyone in the industry knows already...
We looked into this a few years back and actually seriously looked at it, IE we used these weird things called meters, put a device on, recorded the comsumption, used it a bit (if it was something load sensitive, recorded data, then put it to sleep and recorded the data again.
What we found pretty much confirmed what we thought, its a non issue. We had some devices well down in the tens of milliwatts range in standby. A few older transformer based bits of kit wernt so good but end of the day it amounts to a tiny tiny amount of power draw, 80 odd watts is just silly.
We stay at the pub we run during the week, the power bill there is so horrific we dont pay attention to it as in the grand scheme of things when your baseline draw is 9KWH peaking to 13KWh 1W makes no odds. However this means back home the fridge is kept company by the sky router, the Sky box, TV and AV amp, all in standby. We had an issue with the fridge a few months back wich resulted in it dying horribly (and stinking the house out) But in doing so it took its fuse out, giving us a baseline load figure of a whopping 4 watts, a little chasing (while I should have been shovelling the contents of the fridge into bin bags) showed that 2.5W of that was the Sky router leaving the TV (an older LG TFT), the Audio amp and the Sky box at 1.5W each. The thing is even that could be in the noise of the monitoring unit sat on the meter tails too.
We make equipment to run in veichles and we have to be very aware of power draw in these situations. We arent a world class company and we arent working with bleeding edge parts, but our standby currents are in the nA range, if we can do that I'm sure a multi biillion pound company like Lg, Sony or Netgear are pretty good at it by now.
Ric
Re: One, two, three, jump! But where?
Nationwide. That would be the bunch of asshats that stranded me on the wrong side of the world with no money because of an 'inputting error' 'Yes sir, I apreciate you are in the middle of no-where* and need to buy fuel with the money in your account but it will be at least 3 days to get it sorted'
LLoyds have been allright for us thus far. Seems the ones to really stay away from WERE Halicraps and HSBC, the list seems to be growing at an alarming rate...
* North Carolina, its scary out there.
Y'know....
Reading all the vitriol and diatribe in here is funny.
I have an HTC one X and use the build in media software, I use Winamp on the work desktop, manually manage my music, MCE on the home media centre and a handfull of other things I use to make things work the way I like.
I have issues with iTunes, most already covered but I understand people use it and like it and it is their right to do so. It doesnt do what I want so I dont use it. Thus ends my discussion of the relative merit of brand xx vs brand yy
Samsung are trying to gain a few more users by helping people out of Apple's playpen, bravo. Ultimately its going to end up with Apple lobbing a sueball or beliberately breaking it, but fair play to them.
On Another note. I'd like to receive all your old iPhone, Windows phones, Symbian Phones etc. Once I have a good number of them I'm gonna post them to Mr Shitpeas along with a copy of MS Bob in the hope he will spontaneously combust.
Beer, because its friday afternoon and for once, I dont feel like murdering anyone.
Posted in Apple's Retina Macs: A little too elite?
Re: I suspect Apple know what they are doing...
And given the number of dead Lacie NAS units we have......
Re: Good thing for Linux
The Linux crowd need to realise that it just isnt that simple.
Ok, so my office app issues are easilly solved by using Openoffice or whatever this incarnation is called BUT (and this is a big but) We went over from openoffice to office 2011 because openoffice wouldnt open some of the documents sent to us by customers and suppliers. So I'll start that ball game again.
No MPLAB ide on Linux and no suitable replacement
No Delphi (yes I know) on Linux and no suitable replacement given we develop for windows
No version of our bootloaders for Linux, and I cant rewrite them because of the above
Bar the odd fart and hiccup Windows *just works* Linux isnt even close. its better than it was but I dont want to have to know how to mess with compiliers etc just to use an application. Again, its better than it was but I've still looked at Linux apps, said f??k this and gone and paid for a Windows app thats working inside 30 seconds.
Till we get there it not home ready and not really close to enterprise ready. Although some businesses do = admin people and nothing else, many dont.
For the record I'm not a Windows Fanboi, both of our servers here are Linux Boxen as are all of then in our overseas offices, Linux just doesnt have a place on the dektop .... yet.
On topic, I can see this being the case but I'm not sure its a smart move. I dont think people will jump to Apple in droves I suspect they simply wont move on. That said a fair few of the people it upsets will be decision makers.
Posted in Windows 8 release preview imminent
Re: hoo ray
You miss the point, no-one bloody wants to have to do it. I have a desktop PC not a 6Kg phone with two external monitors.
Re: McAfee Security Scan Plus
McAfeee Security Scam Plus as installed by Adobe products
Yes the same one
The same one that Spots AVG/Avast/Bullguard/Esset and goes int o meltdown telling you the world is about to end and you MUST install a McAffee product to prevent global let down.
The same one that acasionally installs their bastard toolbar/scanner app
So what we have here is in fact....
We think one in 6 PCs isnt running our software so you should install it (so we can then delete system files whenever we feel like it and brick your PC/ Disable GINA)
No News here:
A) This info was gathered by nefarious means without most users permission
B) The software in question picks and chooses what it accepts as valid AV eg <>McAfee means no AV
C) In the real world out of just under 1000 machines through our door I've seen maybe ten with no AV
This read and white umbrella type image springs to mind
but I really cant work out why.
Re: Another Big Patch Day, and a Week of Start Up Repair Routines
Uninstall all the rubbish you have, get rid of the bloat ware and at a guess, change the hard disk. Maybe with all the crap and defective hardware gone you can safely blame MS for screwing it.
Re: RE: mmmm.......
You what?
You HAVE to be a troll, or someone let you out of day release.
Re: Once a year.
Kapersky are one of the better firms actually.
The Apple crowd really need to learn that the whole 'nah nah nah' fingers in the ears approach wont work. Historically its NEVER worked for ANYONE.
Not a Hater
Not A MS or Linux Fanboi
Just a realist. More people use Macs, the more of a target it becomes. The more people deny there is an issue the more likeley it is someone is going to stuff up and stuff up big. By being responsible now a lot of money and heartache can be saved down the road but it *might* damage Apple's image and at the end of the day thats whats this is all about.
Step down from your podium Apple and edducate your users. Take one on the chin and those same users will be crowing years from now, about how you prevented IOS/MacOS becomming the same mess Windows is now.
Or just continue denying it till something akin to Code Red or Mimda takes you down by force because it really is when, not if.
Icon, well reason never worked before.
