* Posts by bigphil9009

242 publicly visible posts • joined 7 Jul 2009

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Voyager goes off a (helio) cliff

bigphil9009
Happy

Voyager - never was a spacecraft so aptly named.

Review: Google Nexus 4

bigphil9009

Re: Wot, no score?

Thanks for the explanation, Tony. :-)

bigphil9009

Wot, no score?

Strange review this one - acomes across that the review has made up his mind that he wasn't going to like it, then filtered the review through that decision. Also, why no score?

Latest exoplanet discovery is a virtual CLONE of Earth

bigphil9009

I hope it's been sysprepped.

Otherwise we're going to have all sorts of SSID issues if we ever meet up.

Buying a petabyte of storage for YOURSELF? First, you'll need a fridge

bigphil9009
Unhappy

Yawn

Please can we stop with this whole "spinning rust" thing? It's infecting Trevor Pott's articles too, and is a little bit too smug for my liking ("ooh, look at me - I know how things work"), not to mention completely incorrect - these days most magnetic medium on the platters of HDDs is a cobalt alloy, most definately not iron oxide...

Hero Playmonaut lost at sea as SPEARS ditches in Channel

bigphil9009

Re: But did it fire?

Agreed - it would be good to know if the mission goal was reached or not.

Adobe demands 7,000 years a day from humankind

bigphil9009

EULAs

I'd always thought that there was a little bit of give-and-take in all of these things. The software vendors just assume that your average Joe (and I include myself in this definition) will just tick the box, and your average Joe just assumes that he won't get taken to court should he fail to remove all copies of Flash from his mountain of backups once he's sold his old PC.

These agreements are mainly in place to stop massive abuses of software theft and copyright abuse, rather than impinge on what the other 99.9% of users are doing with their computers.

At last, a bionic arm that passes the Beer, Egg and Looks Cool tests

bigphil9009
Thumb Up

Incredible

The most incredible thing about this, is that during the segments when he is cracking the eggs and drinking a beer, he just looks like a bloke cracking an egg and drinking a beer - the prosthesis is so well designed and (more importantly) operated that it disappears into the background and we can just concentrate on what the guy is doing, not how he is doing it.

Curiosity rover hijacked by will.i.am to debut science song

bigphil9009
Thumb Up

Re: The Beagle 2 Mars probe

Excellent mate! I love it :-)

Microsoft pops preview of 'biggest, most ambitious' Office yet

bigphil9009
WTF?

No Graphics Driver

I've installed the preview and have used it for a couple of hours and the overwhelming feeling is one of being transported back to the times of Windows 95 and the terrible 16 colour icons and desktop that we used to be presented with when Windows didn't have a driver for the graphics card. I cannot understand for the life of me why they have chosen such a stripped back, bare look for the suite - and the bright white has started to give me eye strain.

They call this progress?

Korean telly factory power cut costs Samsung $30,000+ per second

bigphil9009

Does this part of Samsung make the "Retina" displays for Apple's gear? If so, I would be surprised if they remain loss-making for long - would spinning them off not make them an attractive target for an acquisition by the big A? Could this be Samsung shooting themselves in the foot? Or have i got the wrong end of the stick?

Red Bull races gamers for Grand Prix prize

bigphil9009

Re: Red Bull

I was just about to post the same thing! Definately a Torro-Rosso (and in last year's livery too, although that is explained by the requirement for F1 2011)

HTC handsets hit by grip of death

bigphil9009

Sounds like the same thing that happened with the Galaxy Nexus

The "spinning out" issue sounds suspiciously like the issue that occured on the Galaxy Nexus (ICS) when it was first released - it hadn't been fully tested on the 2G 900MHz GSM networks and when switching from a 3G band to the 2G one, it went crazy, vibrating and becoming totally unresponsive so that the only thing that fixed it was a battery-pull. The problem was patched pretty quickly though...

Study: The more science you know, the less worried you are about climate

bigphil9009

Hmmm

Let's see:

"Trick-cyclist" count = 4

"soft scientist" count = 2

"soft-studies" count = 3

Lewis is like a small child who has discovered a new word, or someone who once got a laugh out of something he said and is trying to regain the acceptance that that laugh once gave him. Sad really.

Smoke-belching flash drive self-destructs on command

bigphil9009

Lookout!

Gads, that computer is rather precariously balanced on the desk!

Why GM slammed the brakes on its $10m Facebook ads

bigphil9009

Re: @SavageNation

Erm, you know, when typing you don't have to type the word "PERIOD"; the little punctuation guy directly after does that for you....

Netgear Powerline Nano 500 Ethernet-over-mains adaptor

bigphil9009

Re: When?

Uh-oh - Someone didn't get the Powerline job they applied for, did they?

Quitting your job? Here's how not to do it

bigphil9009

Re: I like the way these articles are getting less accusatory,

Agreed - It's almost like he realised that there was a better way to get his points across. Great article Dominic.

Revealed: Google's SECRET London office

bigphil9009
Happy

Bloody brilliant!

An excellent Playmobil reconstruction chaps! What, with this and the excellent BOFH, the decent weather outside (in London anway) and the clocks going forward this weekend, it almost feels like the heady days of Summer are just around the corner :-)

Tourists follow GPS, drive into sea

bigphil9009

Re: Punctuation

It's best to use the "submit corrections" link to point this sort if thing out.

Oracle starts peddling Exalytics in-memory appliance

bigphil9009

Damn Larry, so close...

The Exalytics appliance has what Oracle CEO Larry Ellison called a "heuristic adaptive in-memory cache."

He could at least have snuck a "logical" after the second word...

Lenovo ThinkPad Tablet

bigphil9009

Re: Typo

Hi Drew,

I did look for the "Send Corrections" link, but I don't think it is exposed on the mobile version of the site.

bigphil9009

Typo

"...inside a quite room" should be "...inside a quiet room "

Seems to be typo day on The Reg this morning :-)

Windows 7 squeezed into Android tablets

bigphil9009

US only at the moment

Looks like this is only available to our US cousins at the moment, maybe worth updating the article? (although I do note that you quote the price in US$)

From server to end user: What's coming up for NFS?

bigphil9009

Server-Side Copy

Is this just a fancy new name for FXP?

Fallen DRAMurai warrior Elpida files for bankruptcy protection

bigphil9009

shame

As an ex-NEC Semiconductors (scotland) employee I am saddened to hear this. Mind you, they did shaft an awful lot of people when they *ahem* mothballed the Livingston operation...

Jabra Halo 2 Bluetooth headset

bigphil9009

Re: Re: Yay - decent stereo headset!

Hi, they look quite good! Do they have an onboard mic though? I can't see on in the pictures on the linked page...

HP caught with SIX Windows 8 PC packages up its sleeve

bigphil9009

Technet

I've never understood why someone would pay $239 for Windows 7 Ultimate when for $199 they could buy _all_ of Microsoft's software from Technet? Yes, I know that strictly speaking the license is for "testing and development", but still, it's pretty good value...

Drew's Cookie Jar - psst. want a forum upgrade

bigphil9009

Me too please!

Please can I be awarded these special powers too?

Steelseries SRW-S1 PC gaming steering wheel

bigphil9009

Re: Re: No flightsim pilot would use this

Flight-simmers:Serious

Microsoft probes IE8 dll AWOL hell

bigphil9009

Wow! That was brilliantly incomprehensible.

T-Mobile's Full Monty speed 'capped at 1Mb/s'

bigphil9009

Sorry, ambiguous acronym alert!

I mean mobile Broadband rather than BlackBerry; sorry for the confusion...

bigphil9009

What plan are you on?

The best I could get was £15 for one month's mobile BB usage - I would love to get your deal, is it PAYG or contract?

Symantec: 'NetBackup 7.5 speeds backup 100X'

bigphil9009

Puredisk

They've just taken the Puredisk dedupe engine and stuck it in Netbackup. Nothing really new here...

BT Vision throws Microsoft Mediaroom under a bus for Linux

bigphil9009

OTT?

I thought it was good documentary and journalistic practice to use the expanded version of an acronym in the first instance, and then use the acronym thereafter. I can't see anywhere in this article an explanation of "OTT", and then to add insult to injury, the author goes for it at the end and uses the damn thing three times in two sentences! I realise that this piece was originally published elsewhere, but some editorial oversight would be nice.

New Earth-observing satellite snaps 'blue marble' shot

bigphil9009

World Citizens

Or we could all just be proud to be Earthians...

Russian supply ship heads for ISS, space garbage crashes into Pacific

bigphil9009

Erm....

Only on one side of the planet at any one time; the other would experience something of a rise...

Boffins dig up prehistoric popcorn in Peru

bigphil9009

Are you sure that's maize? It looks far more like something i used to enjoy during my university days :D

George Lucas: 'No more Star Wars'

bigphil9009

NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!

Microsoft raises 'state of the art' son of NTFS

bigphil9009

Dunno, the storage admin part of me quite likes being away from the "state of the art" when it comes to filesystems. Tired and tested > New and funky

Olympics volunteers urged not to blab online

bigphil9009

God, the cynicism on display here is breathtaking. Granted, the games have cost a shed load more than was first intended, (and as Londoner I have seen my council tax increase in order to partly fund it ) but is it any wonder that the rest of the world increasing see Britain as a nation of whiners and moaners given the attitudes on here and other places? Let's at least try to take some pride in what should be a cause for celebration!

Raspberry Pi Linux micro machine enters mass production

bigphil9009

Bad form to repy to one's own post, I know. But as the commenter below me, and a very enlightening article on the RaspPi website says, there seems to be a typically British tax law that penalises anyone wanting to manufacture electronic systems in the UK. I would encourage anyone that has the slightest interest re-igniting Britain's once world-class manufacturing industry to sign the petition in the post below.

bigphil9009

British Manufacturing

I wonder how much they would cost if they had decided to manufacture in the UK. I can (kind of) understand Dyson's POV where a 20% increase in costs would add to an already expensive product, but the same kind of percentage increase here would make a much smaller total difference.

I know they are going for cheap-cheap-cheap, but I can't help thinking that it would have been much better if the board that was designed in Britain, and will be used by a generation of British kids was actually built and engineered in Britain too - something to be a little bit proud of, perhaps.

Footie club sacks striker for homophobic tweet

bigphil9009

Homo-phobia

Homophobia - the fear of homosexuality. That tells us that a homophobe is frightened of homosexuality. This is what it comes down to - they are afraid of people who are not like "them". Fear can be conquered through education, can't it?

Or are attitudes such as those displayed by the footballer (and many others) not related to fear, but rather prejudice and hatred? These attitudes are somewhat harder to overcome.

NASA's twin GRAILs reunite in lunar orbit

bigphil9009

MoonKAM - Moon Knowledge Acquired by Middle school students

Gads, that's an ugly bakro-acro-whatsit-nym...

EMC hikes drive prices, blames Thai flood tragedy

bigphil9009

Well done to El Reg for acknowledging in the sub-headline that the repercussions of the flooding are going to be felt a lot more keenly by the Thais themselves rather than us IT chaps and chapesses.

The Best of El Reg 2011 now on Kindle

bigphil9009

I do worry that this is going to become an ongoing trend - a move towards all of the investigative-style articles becoming paid-for ebooks, and the more lightweight articles being dispensed on the ad-supported website.

I have actually purchased the Jobs and VMWare articles, and whilst I found them enjoyable and informative, there wasn't really anything in them that we didn't get to see on the ad-supported site in the olden days....

I wonder if this is the start of a stealthy paywall-esq model?

Voyager probe reaches edge of Solar System's 'bubble'

bigphil9009

It makes me feel tremendously proud of us as a race that these voyagers are out there, so far from home and still going. They will continue to travel, and outlast us all, even though at some point in the next decade or so their RTGs will decay to the point where they generate insufficient power to allow them to keep communicating with the miniscule dot surrounded by other tiny dots that is their view of the place we all call home.

Mozilla denies OS X Leopard 2012 kill

bigphil9009

I've thought about this; there are too many instances of people using that version of the phrase for them all to be wrong (gosh, how optimistic!). I suspect that the full version of the phrase should be something like:

"I could care less about that, but I'm not going to"

and the last bit has been forgotten about over the years.

However, it may just be that some people are just stoopid...

Samsung Galaxy Note

bigphil9009

Me Fail

Actually, I might be the FAIL here, I misunderstood what was meant by mass-storage. I have the Galaxy Nexus, and can connect it to my PC and drag and drop any kind of files onto it, but I don't think that is considered "mass storage".

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