* Posts by Greg D

379 publicly visible posts • joined 2 Jul 2009

Page:

Blocking ads? Smaller digital publishers are smacked the hardest

Greg D

The problem with ads...

Is not necessarily the ads themselves, its:

- Embedded scripts running from 3rd-party untrusted sources

- Unsrupulous non-mainsteam advertisers pushing penis pills and the ilk

- The sheer volume and "in your face-ness" of most of the adverts

- Increasing complexity of ads, adding to page load, CPU load (and battery drain), and bandwidth use

- Swamped webpages where you cant see any fucking content

- Clicking through pages of ads just to read a fucking paragraph

Bollocks to them all, dont care if they lose revenue. I'm blocking all of that shit. Find another source of income. I pay for stuff I want, and dont care to read your articles if you stuff them full of ads.

I'd probably change my tune slightly if the ads were less of everything I just listed. A simple JPEG and a link, with some locally hosted code to work out page views/clicks. And ONE per page maximum.

Hue, not Three, could be Hutchison’s crown jewel as MNO model morphs

Greg D

Re: -

I count like 10 or something. But it does look like some of those are typos, or speech-to-text fails.

Doesn't really spoil the reading.

Hey Windows 10, weren't you supposed to help PC sales?

Greg D

Underplaying the responsibility of the hardware vendors

These guys need to pull their socks up. Can't just blame Microsoft squarely for any of it. Yeah their recent OS's suck - 10 is ok when you turn all the spying shit off. 8/8.1 was another Vista.

However, the manufacturers packaging this stuff are 80% responsible for their own downfall. They have relied FAR too long on repackaging the same old shit over and over again, and ensuring Apple take the crown for form, design and aesthetics each time, which is bizarre when you understand the stuff underneath the hood is the same.

Case in point: ALL laptop screens up until very recently were 1366x768. It looks shit, make the CPU/RAM etc as beefy as you want. If you package it in a plastic cover and stick one of those shitty LCD panels in it, no one is going to fucking buy it.

Try to provide something unique to your brand, hell even a simple skin on the OS would do something to differentiate. The way I see it, there are so many hardware people touting the same thing in a slightly different shaped box.

Give the punters some better screen options, some choice in CPU (i.e. AMD as well as Intel), give us some dedicated graphics options for gaming performance, slick looking cases with a bit of design forethought. ANYTHING to make you stand out.

Although that said I will always custom build my rigs. Have done for over 15 years.

Tor users are actively discriminated against by website operators

Greg D

Re: Understandable..

And the point of running the website would then be what? Since no one can access it :P

Unless you're running some kind of invite only service, with whitelists, that seems a little overkill.

Building a fanless PC is now realistic. But it still ain't cheap

Greg D

Re: HDD noise (a bit offtopic)

For me it was a sign the PC was actually doing something when there was no activity on screen to show anything happening. Or if it looked like it had crashed, hearing that noise would tell me it was just bottlenecking something on the disk.

Greg D

fanless is easy...

If you don't want a particularly powerful PC. And making a GPU fanless will void any warranty, and is a right pain in the arse to do, since removing the stock sinks and fans can damage the whole thing. All in all, not worth it IMO.

You'd need a huge, full tower case to fit most of these fanless coolers anyway. That Nofan one looks insane - wouldnt want to run a hot GPU with that in the rig thats for sure!

Linux Mint forums hacked: All users urged to reset passwords

Greg D

Re: tnovelli

With that logic extracted then, this becomes:

"Mint is fine, but their devs are noobs (despite writing an OS) because they use Wordpress?

Don't let your dislike of a platform cloud your views.

Greg D

Where it came from is irrelevant. It is a good, solid OS, and great for entering into the Linux world.

Ubuntu's UI became too "mobileified" (aka shit), and Debian too far behind the dev curve to be of serious use in the modern home (if you want stability its hard to find anything better, however).

Cinnamon is awesome as a window system IMO.

AMD emits fresh open-source GPU tools for HPC, game devs

Greg D

Re: New cover on an old book?

A bit like AMD's last 3 "generations" of GPU then....

HD7900 series

R9200 series

R9300 series

All the same damn GPU.

Microsoft Office 365, Azure portals offline for many users in Europe

Greg D

Fucked for us too....I would love to have avoided this

But I'm surrounded by a management team of penny pinchers and "architects" that think they know what they are doing (they don't, they are lazy fucks - "designed" a system that basically meant not designing anything).

I have been STAUNCHLY against using Office 365 since the first day someone on my team mentioned it. This is just one of a few outages recently and other shitty problems that would never have occurred had we stayed on-prem.

Star Wars Battlefront: Is this the shooter you’re looking for?

Greg D

A fine specimen of graphics over gameplay

So EA think it's cool to charge £40 for a £20 multiplayer-only, dumbed down COD/Battlefield clone with pretty Star Wars visuals?

Not cool EA/DICE, not cool at all. You might as well be pissing in Star Wars fan's mouths.

Quite surprised you rated it above a 3. Better games have scored less.

Mozilla annual report shows risky Google dependency now risky Yahoo! dependency

Greg D

Re: The problem

This is indeed the problem and the reason I switched to Chrome. But then Chrome pulled NPAPI support, which broke all my web interface management pages for stuff like VMware, Solarwinds, iDRAC, Cisco stuff etc. Not to mention all the sites that still enforce NPAPI.

So I went back to Firefox, but am getting pissed off again at its slowness. Its really fucking slow these days!!

Then something that I didnt think would impress me, impressed me; Microsoft Edge.

Running a side-by-side comparison, Firefox is a bloated beast, even on my SSD Windows 10 gaming rig (which is v. highly specced) it took about 5-10 seconds to show my homepage. Edge took 0.5 seconds consistently.

And then there's how Firefox handles Flash. What a joke. Every 5 minutes whenever I flick through Facebook, hangs for at least 30 seconds while it does god only knows what with the Flash plugin.

US Presidential race becomes Wi-Fi password snark battle

Greg D
Megaphone

Come on El Reg, that's clearly an SSID, not a password.

*slaps wrists for tech faux pas*

Riding on the memory bus: Micron brings out 8GB flash DIMM

Greg D

Re: So this uses an already scarce RAM slot on the MoBo?

This is why I am interested. The performance boost sounds great, but given the complexities of server RAM, and the propensity to require matched DIMM pairs/triplets in order to even boot, I dont understand how it would work.

One assumes a memory controller firmware upgrade would be required at a minimum? (that'll be a new CPU then).

Greg D

Re: So this uses an already scarce RAM slot on the MoBo?

I'm with you here. The only application I can think of is a dual socket server board - these normally have a shed load of DIMM slots (particularly if it's triple channel).

HOW DOES THIS WORK DAMMIT?

Greg D
Paris Hilton

so...

Will this be used instead of normal RAM? On a board with extra DIMM slots?

Will it work alongside RAM?

The site doesnt work. I have no idea how this would work. Someone help.

Microsoft now awfully pushy with Windows 10 on Win 7, 8 PCs – Reg readers hit back

Greg D

I actually opted in for the auto update...

"Windows 10 will download when available" it said. It still says that.

It basically won't download on my machine, despite my valid license etc.

If they are pushing it like this, why am I the only one not seeing it?

Amazon Echo: We put Jeff Bezos' always-on microphone-speaker in a Reg family home

Greg D

Yes, yes, thats nice...

...but what the hell is it? What is it's purpose?

I'm so confused.

El Reg keeps pushing Apple's buttons – its new Magic Keyboard

Greg D

This is quite easily the worst review I've ever read...

But also quite indicative of Apple culture and the weird reality their users place themselves in.

Greg D

Re: "So, overall, an improvement."

No, this is how Apple product users think.

So what if he gets RSI, or it's worse than the old one, or it doesn't have a numeric keypad, and is actually not very good for typing, as long as the thing looks good on his desk it's all good! (IMO it looks shit, but my opinion probably counts for little when it comes to Apple products).

Asus ZenBook UX305: With Windows 10, it suddenly makes perfect sense

Greg D

Re: Checking it out under Linux is a good idea.

"Not Mint. A few reviews on the net show that Ubuntu is the way to go. Most can't get Mint to get past the boot loader no matter what they try."

Well 'most' in your case are too noob to try installing Linux, otherwise they'd have had it working if they had a teeny tiny iota of how to use a computer.

I have it running on a plethora of machines of different ages, shapes, sizes, and in some cases dual-boot with various Windows. It's by far better than Ubuntu, and the UI is much nicer. Unity is awful.

I think I had one issue with a laptop running a RAID 1 array - it wouldn't recognise the disk. Then again the RAID array was a cobble of 2 different disks using a crappy Intel controller.

US gov to Apple: COUGH UP iMessages or FEEL our FEDERAL FROWN

Greg D

Well...

Apple should win this, and I really hope they do.

Otherwise, we're fucked.

Web Interfaces/Web Apps - opinions

Greg D

Good points, well made.

I guess I'm coming at this from the Enterprise Sysadmin side of things, as opposed to the IT department forcing this down. Big name vendors, not outsourced IT depts (companies that do that deserve what they get).

Why vmWare thought a web app would be better than native, I do not know. I'm still using native, but they removed support for VM hardware above version 8 on the native client. The web interface is HORRID. As you say, its a perfect app to be native. Clearly they don't think so!!

In my experience, I've noticed that web is always slower, no matter where the database is stored. E.g. our Solarwinds platform is 2500miles away from us, but used to be much faster through the native app we used. Now its on web, the web server is basically slow, and dont forget the vendor is effectively forcing the customer to install MORE hardware (i.e. a web server), to run the damn thing, and the spec of that creeps up and up.

Greg D

Re: Web Interfaces/Web Apps - opinions

"If somebody chooses to use Mozilla or some other hideous browser to run it, that's their problem, you didn't inflict it on them."

Well therein lies my beef with the browser. As a developer, you are basically pushing the problem on to the customer (over which application to use etc) and removing their personal choice. Once the collection of web apps, designed to run in their supported browser, builds up, you are left with a customer machine running 4 different browsers, which is a nightmare in an Enterprise environment (like mine).

My ethos has always been, you are providing a service to a customer, therefore your service should not have to rely on the customer using a specific browser, which is a personal choice and there are many. If there was a single browser for the entire internet, and it was really good, stable and well maintained, there wouldn't be a problem.

To me the main issue with web interface is it just seems outright lazy, and a quick way to save a few quid. I get it can be a pain to patch (a fat client), and get working cross-platform, but thats the industry you're working in, so deal with it :) You [insert software/hardware company here] knew the risks, dont start pushing the problems on to the customer to make life easier for you.

Greg D
Megaphone

Web Interfaces/Web Apps - opinions

So a discussion came up at work, with a friend of mine talking about building an app for his services, but making it a web app to save costs.

Personally, I hate them. They are the devils own idea. They suck harder than a hard sucking thing. The main reason for my diatribe against web apps/web interfaces is web browsers themselves, as well as the uselessly written and un-maintained plugins used by big-name vendors to jerry-rig them to work with their hardware. Browsers suck down memory at a silly rate, they crash often, and most of these web "apps" use poorly coded plugins to make them work properly.

What makes it worse, is the big-name vendors jumping on the bandwagon. For e.g. recently we upgraded our vSphere environment to ESXi 5.5, which forces you to use the web app to manage the fucking thing. To say its horrid, and unfit for purpose is being nice. It actually relies entirely on Flash! What annoys me is that they had a perfectly good, respected, and fully functioning native app, which is STILL miles better.

This story rings true for many others - Solarwinds is another big one - we went from an awesome native app, to a horrible mess of a web version, and they completely pulled support for the functioning and nice to use native jobby.

The thing is everyone and his dog is doing it (switching to web browsers for their apps). What am I missing? When did native apps become so unloved by vendors? Is the cost saving THAT big? If so, WHY!?

Where do you lot sit on this one?

All aboard the Skylake: How Intel stopped worrying and learned to love overclocking

Greg D

Another new socket

Are they getting a payout from component manufacturers from forcing users to upgrade everything else when they buy a new Intel CPU, or is there a legitimate technical reason they keep switching sockets, that couldn't be achieved by any other means?

It's literally the only reason I switched to AMD. Okay, also from a bang for buck point as well, but that's becoming a bit of a bigger chasm these days with AMD's performance dropping enormously, whilst still sucking down all the power.

Mozilla testing very private browsing mode

Greg D

Re: Works for me, too

Well said GregC.

More often than not, I can deal without half the content I look at. They are mostly clickbait ad-servers anyway, which is a fucking lazy, 'cheap' way to make money. Fuck the fuck off with that bullshit. If this destroys a few incomes, good.

I honestly don't think the internet will be any worse off for it.

Greg D
Thumb Up

I like! Is nice!

Where's the Borat icon?

Sounds almost like what I'm achieving through ad-block plus and NoScript, but supported natively.

Apple's AirDrop abused by 'cyber-flashing' London train perv

Greg D

Re: Violated from looking at a dick pic?

Well no, actually you've made some assumptions there that are incorrect.

It's a dick pic. Not an actual dick. Its an arrangement of pixels that represents a body part. No one is being violated, no real rules are being violated, and that's not my lack of empathy, its my annoyance at the abuse of the English language.

If said dick was in close physical proximity, or touched you, then you can feel violated and that be a correct use of the word, since they violated your personal space and probably a few laws at that point.

Greg D

Violated from looking at a dick pic?

Dont be a silly sod. The language people use sometimes is so over the top.

If you installed Windows 10 and like privacy, you checked the defaults, right? Oh dear

Greg D

Re: 'Cheap' in terms of food, now means selling your privacy too.

AFAIK a number plate is not private information.

Greg D

Re: It's pretty bad... Really

Thanks. Once I'm up and running in Windows 10 land I'll write a little .ps1 script to do all that :)

Fanbois designing Windows 10 – where's it going to end?

Greg D

Not entirely sure why this has caused so much butthurt?

The default behavior in Windows 7 has always been to not show all running tasks.

You have to go into the taskbar options and turn that on.

I don't think Microsoft have that much hubris (at least since Ballmer left) that they wouldn't make it a configurable option.

Microsoft's magic hurts: Nadella signals 'tough choices' on the way

Greg D
Thumb Down

Re: Apps + Windows Phone

Awww that's not very sporting. 4 downvotes and no one replied explaining why I am probably wrong.

Ok, Windows Phone isnt full fat Windows - and runs on an ARM instruction set instead of x86. And has less CPU grunt.

But the general gist of my point was that there is a huge back catalogue of Windows software, and that's still growing. If they can get some kind of decent x86 emulation on ARM, then that's solved that problem, no?

*prepares for more downvotes*

Greg D

Apps + Windows Phone

I dont understand why they are saying developers don't want to develop apps/programs/software for a 3rd ecosystem. Haven't they been developing programs for Windows for the past 20 years?

Microsoft U-turns on 'free' Windows 10 upgrade promise for ALL previewers

Greg D

Re: At least go to Windows 7

Well other than saying there are other means of getting it cheaply these days, that is a fair point. Although I don't know of anyone that bought Vista separately - it was one of those OS'es that was foisted on anyone buying a computer before Win7 was released.

Not sure on the tyrant description. They are not forcing you to switch or upgrade or even use Windows 10. Incentivising, yes.

I dual boot with Linux Mint - and I'm finding more and more games work well with Linux/OpenGL - however, OpenGL is lagging way behind DirectX now, and that gap is only widening. So for gaming it kind of has to be Windows. Although that's not really Microsoft's fault - general lack of actual competition.

Greg D

Re: Prefer to stay on Vista

My friend, why would you torture yourself so much?

At least go to Windows 7, which was the working version of Vista.

I get your sentiment, but I can tell you with a modicum of certainty, there will be an option to create a local account without having an MSA set up. Although, they will try to obfuscate that option, meaning you'll need to look around for it.

To be honest, what's the harm though? You don't have to hand over your life story when setting up an MSA. I have one, but mostly for certifications, ISO downloads and the like (I'm an MS/Linux systems engineer).

Disk is dead, screeches Violin – and here's how it might happen

Greg D

No, I didn't downvote.

I read it all and couldn't work out the analogy, since flash disk is so obviously superior in every way it doesn't seem to draw any parallels with CED/Laserdisc standards battle.

Disclaimer: I was only born half way through the 80's, so I'm using anecdotes and wikipedia for my information on CED. I was also going to point out that both formats pretty much lost out to CD in the end anyway, followed by DVD.

Greg D

Again flawed reasoning. Laserdisc was superior in every way except cost.

The RIGHT format won out. Unlike the VHS/Betamax argument.

Also happened the correct way with Bluray/HD DVD. Although it required refitting fabs to build blue lasers and new discs, and was more costly in EVERY way than HD-DVD, it was the better format and had more potential for future improvement.

CED had literally nothing. It was a novel use of vinyl technology and from it's inception was already at the peak of how good it could get.

Greg D

Not something you can compare IMO. Flash has WAY more advantages than you give it credit for, with perhaps the only drawback being longevity and reliability.

Fact is, magnetic spindle storage has limits, and it's reached those limits in terms of data throughput. It just can't keep up with modern demands.

Flash is cool, yes. But it's also lighter, smaller, orders of magnitude faster (and getting faster still), and less unfriendly to the environment (less materials required to build, not sure on fab process!).

Firefox preps processor revamp under Project Electrolysis

Greg D

Switching back from Chrome

Will be switching back when this makes it in final release.

Chrome has annoyed me by removing NPAPI support by default, when 2 thirds of the internet still uses it. I get it's a deprecated thing, but tell that to the web devs and admins still running it, not the fucking end users trying to use the sites.

Yeah you can turn it back on, but why?

And they are removing it fully by August apparently.

It's 2015 and Microsoft has figured out anything can break Windows

Greg D

Do people still think Linux is invulnerable?

I thought we stamped out that moronic thinking a while ago.

Any OS/Kernel/software/code is vulnerable. It's just a question as to which platform/vector will yield the most results for a malware developer scumbag.

Usually that question boils down to ONE thing, and one thing only: market penetration.

Anyone that tells you Windows is inherently insecure and anything else isn't, is an outright liar.

HTC One M9 Android smartphone: Like a M8 with a squinty eye

Greg D

Re: Just give people what they want

Made all the more ironic by the fact they think they are being "different" and "visionary" by owning such common hardware.

What's broken in this week's build of Windows 10? Installing it, for one

Greg D

Right, cos rational people base their OS decisions on test releases?

Spoiling staff with toys could turn against your business

Greg D

Thats actually a really bad reason. Why would a company IT dept be interested in that? Microsoft maybe, but not typically data anyone needs.

Greg D

Re: Don't treat users like children

Again, form my perspective (a lowly enterprise systems & network engineer), security is not the problem. My earlier posts hint at that.

The problem is support and standardisation. I'm not even going into it any deeper than that, the problems are numerous, and one would think, obvious.

Greg D

Re: If you dislike change, you're going to dislike irrelevance even more

As someone else already pointed out, this is mostly laziness and penny pinching.

Or legacy applications that no longer have any development behind it, that a company relies upon. Again, that should be phased out before it gets to that state. Mostly due to cost saving or inability to afford a new solution to replace the legacy crap.

Throwing home devices into the mix is going to do precisely NOTHING to resolve that situation. Ever.

In fact, it will make it way worse. And already is in many cases where BYOD is taking over.

Greg D

Re: What are we trying to prevent?

That whole attitude with customer contacts is utterly flawed. It's ludicrous to think sales staff won't have a copy of at least some of their contacts in that classic storage medium - the brain.

Sales team boss: "Oh I see you've handed in your notice. Could you pop by the neuraliser on your way out so you forget everything you did here? Thanks"

Greg D

Re: If you dislike change, you're going to dislike irrelevance even more

This entire point is a pipe dream that the BYOD pushers want you to buy into.

Fact is, work is HELL in a BYOD environment. Ok I agree with some of your points - e.g. the employees effectively make the money, but you can't pander to all their whims. Most of the time, they are bollocks anyway. Companies need a stable and common infrastructure to allow efficient support and day-to-day running.

If some employees can't work with that, they need to adjust, rather than push for filling up the entire fleet with home bought crap.

Greg D

Re: What are we trying to prevent?

Another very good point. If you have put enough trust in a person to employ them, then what exactly are you preventing by making data hard to take off site, or transfer to non-company equipment?

There are obvious use cases where that will be a requirement, like GCHQ, or the FBI. Even the Police force need to be very careful.

But for us day to day enterprise level peons, the risk simply doesn't exist. You don't need military grade IT security policies to run, say, a construction firm.

In any case, I don't even think it's possible to truly prevent if someone really wanted to do it. You can put deterrents in, but that aint gonna stop someone on a mission.

From experience, BYOD generally provides most (if not all) headaches in the form of hardware and software compatibility with existing enterprise systems, and of course. the well known woeful reliability and build quality on consumer grade tat.

Page: