Posts by Tom 38
1565 posts • joined Tuesday 21st July 2009 13:02 GMT
Page:
Jimmy the Fail strikes again
The reason Wikipedia has problems with trolls:
1) Anonymous users can edit the site
2) They insist on not tieing usernames to real identities
3) No limit on the number of usernames you can use
If he actually cared, there are two or three simple technological solutions that would remove the vast majority of wiki trolls, but he doesn't care.
Plus, in most cases trolling is not illegal. Where it is illegal, get the police involved, but calling the fuzz because someone keeps calling you a tool on facebook is retarded.
Posted in BBC iPlayer to require TV licence
I really don't get this argument.
You don't really watch TV
=>
Not watching TV is going to be pretty easy and won't upset you
Since it does upset you, the only logical conclusion is that you do watch a bunch of TV, and being forced to pay for it will upset you. My heart bleeds for you.
Posted in Fasthosts downed by dicky Dell switch
Dell switches
They seem like a good idea - cheap, managed switches from the same supplier as your servers, your racks. Then you start putting traffic through them, relying upon them and then boom, its gone. Cisco kit is expensive, but Cisco kit having spent up on Dell kit first is even more expensive.
"""
Some governments block online services and content, imposing restrictive regulation, or incorporate surveillance tools into their internet infrastructure
"""
He's got first hand evidence of at least one...
Also lots of winmodems ran very happily under linux, particularly lucent ones. After all, a soft modem is really just a sound card that samples/produces the right tones and shoves it over an rj-11, so under linux you could actually do a whole lot more, like using it as an answering machine.
They were also super cheap, so you could get on the net for £15 rather than £75.
@PaulVD
It's not quite like that, is it. After all, he hasn't specified how he buys the computer, he could be buying components and building it himself. If that then doesn't work with your choice of operating system, then why shouldn't you get a refund?
Are you suggesting that BSD/Linux users should have to go and find a motherboard certified for BSD/Linux?
This isn't actually that far from the current truth, a lot of motherboard manufacturers write shoddy BIOS and ACPI tables that completely violate the specs, but work only within MS's loose interpretation of the specs.
MS don't mind this, they encourage it by getting paid to certify kit that violates the specs as 'Designed for Windows N' and adding workarounds to their own code. This reinforces their 'Open source is hard to use' FUD.
Posted in 97% of Three's network traffic is data
<3 Three
I use gigabytes of data per month on Three, I've had constant 3G signal in most places I've been with it, from London to the deep south-west. I get good signal inside my flat (E15) and inside my office (EC4), and I'm currently synching a couple of new albums to my phone from spotify over 3G.
Fuggedaboutit
Have they said why they want to re-implement this? Seems just like NIH-pettiness.
RabbitMQ is pretty damn tasty and on the money, I doubt they will get it any lower latency, reliable or interoperable than that.
IS that Amazon selling them from the UK, or is it 'Amazon Marketplace' shipping from the US?
Either way, they must have lots of stock then (or be fibbing), since ebuyer's prices compare with dabs (£108), scan (£100), overclockers (£100)…
Rare for ebuyer to be so much more than the others.
I'm not saying he did it right, but you can see why he did it. I consider most everything Mugabe did up till ~1990 as the best he could for his country, his people.
Since then, he's gone a little bat shit crazy.
20%? Chance would be a fine thing
3 months ago I bought a 2TB HTGST drive for £45+VAT. The cheapest 2 TB drive available today from the same supplier? £125+VAT.
277% price increase in 3 months. Please let it stop raining soon in Thailand.
Well, when the white farmers (<1% of population) 'own' 70% of the best arable land, and the former colonial power reneges on the buy back agreements (thanks Claire Short), I think he went a little nuts, to say the least.
Remember that until Mugabe, this was the attitude of Smith, and the other leaders right the way back to Rhodes:
"the native is to be treated as a child and denied the franchise. We must adopt a system of despotism in our relations with the barbarians of Southern Africa"
You can see why he's a little paranoid.
Forget Mugabe
Think about the 5 million Zimbabweans under the age of 15 who can benefit from this.
Read more about it, its not 'Apple' and 'Mugabe', its a pack put together by IADT to address the needs of rural Zimbabwean kids, so they can hopefully get a better education.
Conflating this with Mugabe is funny, since David Coltart is an MDC politcian, not ZANU-PF.
On the iphone 3G/3GS the GPS is provided by a separate Infineon chip, on the iphone 4 it is provided by a much more efficient Broadcom chip.
My iphone 3G would slaughter the battery if it couldn't find a 3G signal, my iphone 4 does not - similar deal, on the iphone 3G, the 3G radio was a separate chip to the 2G.
Posted in BioWare Baldur's Gate
2nd gen RPG imo
The one that got me hooked was Dungeon Master (+Chaos Strikes Back) for the ST. Genuinely weeks of playing time.
MAGNETS
Hard drives contain some wickedly strong magnets. About 2 minutes with a screwdriver will have you inside the innards of the beast, extract the magnets. Once its been open like that, its unlikely to be able to recover any data from it, unless you work for the NSA.
Hit it with a hammer, and even they will have a hard time getting much off there.
Also, you end up with loads of magnets. Magnets are fun.
"All our drives are encrypted"
I call BS.
Yep, I meant Honeycomb. Act in haste, repent at leisure.
Fact: No SE 2010 phone is scheduled to get ICS.
Oooh, its coming "soon" is it? Can't wait for "soon" to get here. Do you think it will be the same "soon" that the Gingerbread source will be available "soon"? (then "maybe", then "never")
Did you even read the links you posted? Rather than prove your point, they backup mine:
"Beyond Gingerbread 2.3.4, we plan to upgrade our 2011 Xperia smartphone portfolio to the next Android platform made available to us"
2011 phones are new phones. 2010 phones are not new phones. Not new phones are not getting upgrades from SE. Has this made it any clearer to you?
Contrast with iOS, the latest version of which could be installed on the 2009 version of the phone (3GS), from the moment it was released.
Blame the Chinese
Every time 'industrial espionage' is mentioned, it is nearly always blamed on the Chinese. Whilst I don't doubt they are 'at it', I would have thought that almost everyone else is as well (and we are at them). Trying to scare people with the yellow menace is a regression.
Julian, my heart bleeds for you
Poor guy, stuck away in his mate's country house. All he wants is to tell the world the truth (and get paid), stick it to the man (and get paid), be worshipped as a demi-god* (and get paid) and philander his way through Europe (and get paid).
The Anonymous fellas seem pretty adept at releasing information without requiring £1.75m a year to do so.
* You should have seen him at St Pauls the other week, to certain portions of the population it seems he already is a demi-god.
How is that FUD? If it isn't FUD, when/where can I get the ICS update for the ZTE Blade/Orange San Francisco?
Oh wait, no source, no new firmwares except for new phones. Colour me shocked.
Posted in UK shamed in high-speed broadband study
Lets see, typical "dont talk to each other modern family" use case:
1) Mum in lounge, watching 'Enders on iplayer - 1.5Mb/s
2) Dad in study, watching cricket on Sky Go - 3 Mb/s
3) Spotty youth #1 in bedroom, watching 'adult educational' films - 1 Mb/s
4) Spotty youth #2 in (different) bedroom, downloading movies from itunes - 10 Mb/s
5) Pre-spotty youth in bedroom playing Wow - wants pings below 50ms
I don't doubt that 2Mb/s is enough for an office of 5 people, who probably rarely stream content over the intertubes, and mainly read email/web pages. 56k was enough once upon a time.
Posted in UK shamed in high-speed broadband study
I live in one of those aforementioned large apartment blocks. BT have fibred up the entire area, and whilst every single typical 2 up/2 down terrace in Newham has fibre available, the ostensibly simpler apartment blocks are being ignored - I'm stuck with 'rubbish' 17Mb/s.
Posted in Apple updates MacBook Pro laptop line
They won't do a swap
They might give you an itunes voucher if you ask persistently enough.
Posted in Netflix announces UK debut
Use a decent ISP. My ISP couldn't care less how much bandwidth I use.
Posted in Dell Vostro V131 13.3in Core i5 notebook
Business laptops with widescreen panels
Title + Icon
One word
Cocks.
This whole any TLD idea is stupid. It was clearly thought up by marketing rather than technical types.
Posted in iPhone 4S: Our *hit list
I understand your concerns, but if you live somewhere with decent net connections, you really can store most of your music content in the cloud. All of my music comes via spotify*. I have about 20GB cached for offline play, the rest I stream directly from spotify. I also don't have to fire up itunes or connect to a pc to sync music, just flick a switch in the spotify app. I can do this just fine over 3G, and it takes a couple of minutes to synch an entire album,
I get through about 10GB of 3G data a month, mostly spotify, which is all covered within my plan.
The only content that I need to store on my phone is videos, which itunes collects automatically from an RSS feed and synchs to my devices.
* Well, apart from the few artists who aren't on spotify.
It sounds good
However they are talking about stackoverflow.com
Source?
Will we get the source for this yet?
Well, technically speaking almost nobody would have actually hit Apple's servers to get IOS 5, all but a few will have been served from one of Akamai's edge caches.
Running your own CDN is just daft these days.
Posted in MacBook case fabs kick up a right stink
one hundreed meeelion
100m RMB is about £10m pounds. So a decent wedge, but not Dr Evil sized.
Direct access to Google's search results
I get this from the homepage. Silly academics.
On the other hand, its probably more due to the fact that from 1920-1933 all alcohol production was illegal in the US, and the vast majority of breweries were permanently shut down.
Native linux client
Yeah, it looks pretty nice, however it uses Qt (I'm a Gnome man), and it is, as you say, a native _linux_ client, and I'm running FreeBSD and don't fancy trying to locate all the necessary Qt libraries to run it under linux emulation.
I've been using despotify for now (also needs a premium account).
"""Apple and others have tried to do is work with content creators, but against existing content operators"""
Precisely, and its an utter fail. The kind of person who would buy an AppleTV (or a gTV for that matter) is going to want it instead of a STB, not as an additional one. Imagine a Sky box/AppleTV combo - or for that matter a 'Freeview' version.
I've been predicting the homebrew PVR to go mainstream for several years, perhaps this year will be when this actually happens.
Eeek
Adobe are planning web-loadable native code plugins for AIR. I can't think of anything more scary than an Adobe implemented version of ActiveX.
If Adobe stuck to creating tools that produced open standards compliant JS and CSS the world would be a better place. It would be better for Adobe as well, as they would stop being the first entry point for all targeted phishing.
Stevie J wasn't right about everything, but with Flash he was bang on - it needs to die.
Not only have they sold their soul, but the bastard version of spotify with facebook integration now crashes when you run it under Wine. Bastards.
Posted in Google loses battle for goggle.com
I like how goggle.com loads its jquery from the google supplied caches :)
Record company greed?
I'm not saying it doesn't exist, but 90% of the time, the reason a band's music will disappear from spotify is that they get in a huff and demand it to be removed.
A good example of this is Bob Dylan, who had a monster entire back catalogue on Spotify when I joined, but a few weeks later withdrew 99% of it, leaving one 'best of' album.
I'm sure record companies are more than happy to thrash the last few pennies from any material they can lay their hands on.
The other 10% of the time music will be missing because the artist sold their rights early on to a third party who doesn't have a deal with spotify. A good example of this would be Oasis, who sold the UK rights to their music very early on. The company with the UK rights either refuses to license them to Spotify, or is asking way too much. Oasis tracks are on Spotify if your billing country is not UK…
Posted in iPhone 4S pay-monthly tariffs compared
"""The pick of the bunch for me is Three's One Plan"""
However, you don't point out that Three do not offer visual voicemail - where you can see a list of the voicemails you have received, who called you, when and how long the message is.
Instead, you have 90s style voicemail - "Press 3 to delete this message, press 7 for the next message, press star to accidentally override your greeting with 'erm, what did I just press?'".
Well, it pissed me off after I switched from O2 to Three. AFAICT, only O2 and Vodafone have visual voicemail.
Posted in iPhone 4S pay-monthly tariffs compared
Three coverage
I've found it pretty good - much more 3G coverage than O2 for example. Driving from London to Plymouth a few weeks back, I had 3G on Three right down the M4/5 corridor, where as my old man on O2 had only GPRS except when we went past a big town.
Sir
You're having trouble writing at GigE speeds? 125MB/s is not exactly superfast, I'm surprised that even a single spindle can't keep up with that.
Even so, if you need more speed, you need more spindles. I'd recommend something like ZFS with a 3 x 2 disc mirror (3 mirrors, striped), using 15k spindles, with a couple of mirrored SSDs as a cache device. Should get you close to around 10GigE speeds.
@Phil
And that's exactly how it does work. Now work out how much RAM you need per TB of deduped data.
Deduping is not free, it requires masses of memory to keep checksums in, slows down disk writes and is often a false economy. Unless you are expecting dedupe rates of >5, you probably are going to spend way more on RAM than you would on having much more disk capacity.
Given a choice between a 2 x 6 x 3 TB deduped raidz server with 128GB of RAM and a 8 x 6 x 3 TB unduped raidz with 32GB of RAM, the latter will perform faster and have more capacity.
Posted in Premier League loses footie decoder case
Narrow beam satellites
Sky are broadcast over Astra 2D, which has quite a wide, unsophisticated narrow beam - you can pick it up in Spain quite easily -
Astra 2D will be replaced over the next few years by 1N, 2E, 2F, all of which will have much more sophisticated narrow beams. In fact, 1N is currently moving to 28.2E, and has a much tighter narrow beam that solely covers the British Isles, and will be used by ITV's HD channels when it gets into position.
1N has three beams, see this page for maps of the beam footprint.
http://www.astra2d.com/astra1n.html
