Posts by Return To Sender 191 publicly visible posts • joined 27 Jul 2009
Actually, during the presentation the guy on the stand used his fairly heavily French accented English successfully. Personally not convinced about voice control in general, though - difficult not to feel a bit of a knob yelling at a piece of kit in public.
On the bright side, it's one more thing to get maudlin drunk about; "My [car | phone | fridge | tv | house...] doesn't understand me..."
Yup, me too. I've been entitled to upgrade since Xmas, but waited for the S3. In the meantime the missus has got an S2 (her choice, no pressure from me, she absolutely loves it) and my son's gone for a Note, which is bloody gorgeous but just that bit too big for me. Rumoured size of the S3 is about as big as I'd go for a 'phone. What I really want is the extra screen res over the S2
I'm with Tony - similar (empirical) experience here; I use a mix of Devolo and Zyxel devices (AV) and haven't had any interference problems with DAB or FM & LW (rarely use MW). I also have ADSL broadband and haven't seen any problems there, either.
That said, I know the wiring in the house is reasonably modern and tidy - I rewired the place myself when we moved in. The thick walls in the house make using wireless throughout awkward without putting several routers around the building, so Powerline is a good fit for me. I can even get a usable link down to the garden shed & garage, very handy when needing to hide away :)
Quite so; compression = smaller data = less time to shift. Lossless compression can be done by finding repeating patterns in data and replacing each occurrence with a token; reverse to decompress. Incompressible data just doesn't have any useful level of patterns; I've seen some simplistic compressors actually produce a bigger file than they started with.
All the go-faster goodness (fast CPUs, dedicated hardware, efficient algorithms) means that these days the overheads for on-the-fly compression are relatively low, so it can be a performance enhancer rather than simply a capacity enhancer as it used to be in the world of low capacity storage devices..
Not a downvoter, but yes, I do remember uuencoding. And used uucp as an e-mail transport. Fine as far as it went, which was basically to avoid borking 8-bit code transmitted through 7-bit links (anyone in the house remember modems? Prestel anybody?). MIME, or more specifically the clients that handled it, made life easier for my users (and by extension the admins).
As stated in several posts as well as the article, it may not be the best or most elegant or least Anglo-centric, but it's done a job sufficiently well to get widely adopted. Whilst that's a rather VHS vs. Betamax view, it's the 'real' world. Want something better? Make sure that adopting it is stupidly easy for consumers (and vendors), painless and better still gives a blindingly obvious advantage. Ideally, make the change totally invisible. Remember your major audience now is largely consumers, i.e. non-tech literate. When they ask "Why can't I do 'x'? The old system let me do 'x'!", wittering on about elegance, efficiency, egalatarianism, future nirvana and all the rest doesn't cut it.
Yup, same here. Still look at the Dabs site occasionally, can't remember when I last actually bought something though. They used to be my #1 go-to.
"At risk of redundancy" and "consultation" basically means "we aren't making numbers, management lacks the imagination to fix it, we've decided to take the easy option and get rid of a load of you, the decisions are already made so don't fool yourselves into thinking any differently - this is just a legal requirement so's you can't sue us later". Been there, done that, got the P45 (pink slip, I believe, for our friends across the pond).
Look, maybe I'm missing a point here, but surely you'd only tell the diffference between 'right' and 'wrong' way round on the 'phones when you're listening to something you're familiar with. I'd guess with music (non-orchestral at least) it actually doesn't make any odds.
I'd always thought that the point of stereo was to give the impression of separation or whatever, but does anybody give a flying f**k whether the bassist's on the right and the lead on the left or vice-versa? I can see that for something with a formal layout - like an orchestra - left & right might make a difference, but otherwise? Just a case of OCD if you ask me (CDO if you really must have the letters in alphabetical order, of course).
Feel free to enlighten me if there's more to it, of course; can always rely on Reg commentards :)
Hmm. Consuming a certain amount of salt in this household too. Son + self are holding off on upgrades right now in the hope of this baby landing fairly soon, mainly 'cos we want the screen real estate as much as anything.
Like many I guess we're grubbing around for all the hints we can get, most of which tend to be a mix of re-hash and wishful thinking. Not going to give much creedence to this one either, sounds more like the guy bigging himself up, TBH. On the other hand, if he's right, hot damn :)
Just checking - the folks with a Freeview HD box are using a good aerial?
Just replaced my fairly knackered old aerial with a nice high-gain Yagi (I pick up Mendip, with a few problems with local hills) and good quality downleads (CT100 satellite cable). Only a few quid more expensive than the bacofoil crud you get at B&Q etc and it'll last a damn sight longer. Net result, more channels and better signal - much less break up. Oh, and make sure you get some decent independent advice, experience suggests an awful lot of satellite / aerial installers are clueless cowboys...
As I understand the principle of selection, a population eventually adapts because something in the environment favours some individuals over others - so drug resistance etc favours a group that survives to reproduce. It's not necessarily the case that those individuals are 'better'; it may well be that they are in some respects less well adapted than the general population. The introduction of new factors to the environment (DDT, anybody?) may shift that balance.
In this case, the laser wall doesn't (appear to) favour select parts of the population - it doesn't kill big chunks of the population, so no selection pressure per se. In that respect it's exactly like the mosquito nets, and I'm pretty sure we don't yet have mosquitos that have worked out how to munch through the nets :)
I rather agree with other comments that this is somewhat OTT as a day-to-day solution; nets are generally pretty effective and easily maintained. It strikes me, though, that if the laser trick can be made to work over a large area then you potentially have a useful emergency response tool.
Without checking, I'm guessing that the amount of power required is pretty low (the mossies presumably are responding to the presence of the light rather than its intesity), so the laser rigs could be be solar powered - think about where malaria is prevalent -, would be mostly or wholly solid state (so robust) and conceivably quite compact. The last point being important when you're trying to decide whether to load your cargo plane with food, medical supplies or nets...
Don't forget that most (genuine) enterprise kit already has lots of redundancy tricks built in to cope with broken memory (or even processors for that matter). Same way as disks actually have a whack of spare capacity above their stated amount to allow for bad block relocation. They can just build spare capacity in the stack...
Yup, we definitely did that; basically it was testing the BIOS rather than anything else.
I worked for one of the first UK PC dealers (that was a bit of first for IBM-land too, dealers rather than using agents who just took a percentage). We inevitably had to start selling compatibles as well and one of the yardsticks for any new BIOS was whether flight sim would run. That was mainly because FS used every shortcut in the book, plus several that weren't, through BIOS to get the necessary performance. At one time the manufacturers would actually include 'Runs MS Flight Sim!' in their dealer presentations when announcing new kit.
Yep, there were always 'better' architectures / systems / whatever around than the IBM PC. What they *didn't* have was the sheer scale and presence of IBM. A bit like the VHS/Betamax thing (wikipedia if you're not old enough to remember!), the 'best' doesn't always win. Here's my take:
As a home PC, IBM's offering was 1) bleeding expensive 2) very conservative. But then, you're talking about a very new market; home users were still largely geeky hobbyists and not major spenders. Where this beast was selling was in to business, where it was mainly about running things like Visicalc, Wordstar, Dbase II et al. The first 'killer app' that we saw was Lotus 1--2-3; that was when the conversation shifted from 'what can I do with this PC thing' to 'I want to run Lotus, I'll buy a PC, what else can it do?'
That only gets you so far. Where IBM's scale really told was in the corporate market. PCs started getting bought in for the bean counters to play spreadsheets on, secretaries (remember them :) ) to run Wordstar / WordPerfect / IBM Displaywrite (and that was important to IBM shops, believe me). Then folks started thinking 'why do we have this PC *and* a 3278 terminal on the desk?'. Lo, the birth of the comms card and the terminal emulator. IBM's 3278 emulator wasn't that functional, but because of the open architecture 3rd parties fixed that. The (3rd party) IRMA 3278 emulator sold like hot cakes in to our corporate accounts, you could do things like data transfers instead of just screen scraping and even local printing (!).
So now what you're looking at is a large market that lots of players want to get in to. And that software houses want to develop for. And that hardware OEMs want to supply to (multi-function cards, disks, graphics cards, networks and so forth). And that IBM have decreasing control over as their competitors in the PC-compatible market establish good brand reputation (notably Compaq, for instance). Ladies and gentlemen, we have a commodity. And since commodities generally only get cheaper in real or relative terms, the market expands to the folks who think 'hey, I could have one of these at home'.
At first, the excuse is that we can do some work at home. After all, one of the most common reasons given to my salesfolk in the early days of home computers was 'I can do my home accounts on it, see'. And the games were a sort of bonus. Hmm, yeah... Amazing how many copies of Flight Simulator we sold for 'work at home' PCs. Things like MS-Windows (for better or worse, add your attitude here) make it all look easier and prettier. The graphics get better, the machines get faster, the games get better and the prices fall. The smaller competitors drop out or start building PCs, leaving eventually an x86/MS dominated market.
So, after all that, what are we celebrating? Not the sheer brilliance of a manufacturer blessed with miraculous oracular powers, but rather the appearance of a machine which as much by accident as design laid the foundation for what we have today. Could it have been better? Quite probably. But 30 years later, we still call 'em PCs, even though IBM don't make 'em any more.
Presumably shiny, as in cat-like ability to be distracted from the task in hand by the appearance of a new shiny object. As in, "I've got three seconds to decide which wire to cut to stop this bomb going --- ooh, shiny pliers! Yay, ni<BLAMMM>"....
Rule #1 of shiny circle club - don't let the real world impinge on your pursuit of the latest and shiniest
Agree that it's not a simple as some posters are thinking. I suspect the improvement in single vs. increase in expenditure tends to zero very rapidly, though.
Picture this: many years ago wandering around major audio event, browsing a high-end kit builder's stand. Notice interconnect cable to speakers on the demo system, an unusual colour for audio cables. Collar engineer type on stand and to paraphrase;
"That bright orange cable. Is it what I think it is?"
"What, 13 amp mains flex? Yeah. Works a treat..."
So £stupid/metre for homeopathic ley-line aware directional oxygen and intelligence-free cable, or pay just as much as you need to to get the job done... FWIW my HDMI cable runs are mostly short and cheapo 1-2m cables work just fine.
My missus used to run the QA lab for a lingerie manufacturer. Trust me, where bras are concerned it's not as simple as it seems to make something that a) fits properly and b) is comfortable for as many customers as possible, all of whom of course are varying shapes... try sitting in a pub for a couple of hours surrounded by underwear designers, amazing what you'll learn if you don't get embarrased easily. Nearly as bad as nurses!
Excellent! So now when I get home without my keys, I can run off a set on my 3D printer which is in my spare room... oh, hang on...
Mind you, something like this issued to the RAC/AA/ whatever rescue service with secure access(!) to a database of car key patterns might be handy for anybody whose locked their keys in the boot (yes, like me...)
"... new windows instead of tabs"
Yeah, I thought it was doing that from right-clicks; until I finally noticed that "Open Link in New Window" and "Open Link in New Tab" on the right-click menu have swapped around (c/w FF3). Still trying to educate myself to stop making a small down & right move with the mouse when right-clicking a link.
Guess it just goes to show how ingrained some habits become.... old dog / new tricks etc.
Not sure which comment you picked up, there. Possibly the one about 5.2 LPAR migration to WPAR (which IBM are calling System Partitions, I think). Anyway...
Two distinct features here. WPARs on 6.1 (and 7.1, natch) have Live Application Mobility (checkpoint / resume between different AIX global instances - probably in LPARs, but not necessarily). This is distinct from Live Partition Mobility which lets you flick entire LPARs between separate physical servers. The latter requires support in the silicon, so only works for Power 6 / Power 7, whereas WPARs (and the mobility) will work all the way back to Power 4 / 970.
"Until your home broad-band/computer goes down, at which point mail starts vanishing into the ether.."
Nah. Your server's unreachable for a while, so the sending servers queue the message. Once you're back up, the messages will begin to arrive again when the servers retry at intervals. It's the way the mail system's designed, to cope with broken/busy systems. The length of time a message is queued is configurable, but three to five days is common.
People have kind of got used to the idea of e-mail being all but instantaneous; those of us closer to our bus pass than our first legal beer know better!
Like lupine, I run my own mail server (with spamassassin, ClamAV etc). Pretty much self maintaining, I have a schedule set to train SA with new junk periodically and the amount that leaks through (compared to an unfiltered account) is acceptably trivial...
"Sure you can put together a small pc cheaper and use it as server, but in the end I bought a QNAP NAS and am happy with it:"
And I'm just about to do the same. Been considering a NAS box for while, this is the first one I've seen that ticks all the boxes for me.
I've actually got most of the services running on a couple (or three) PCs under Linux already. However, our sixth power cut in the last month has highlighted how much use the whole family makes of the servers, not just yours truly. So one of these, a small UPS, a couple of 1TB drives that I've already got (had been planning to upgrade a server anyway) and that should be the last time I have to talk the wife through restarting the servers. And I get my playpen servers back!
"I'm taking my business elsewhere. Any suggestions for a competent bank? Please?!"
Hmm. Can't say you'd be any better off elsewhere. Experience (and a quick poll round the office) suggests they're all a pain in the bum in various ways. Consider that all the banks seem to be busily cutting IT staff, then ask yourself what that's going to do to service delivery. For a hint, check the headlines!
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
