Posts by bexley
174 posts • joined Thursday 27th August 2009 16:15 GMT
Re: Got off lightly
With the kiddie porn, was a he a pedophile or are we talking about some 4chan pictures?, i'm fairly sure that this lot are part of the 4chan crowd and one visit there will give you an idea of the sort of pictures that get posted for shock value, its not a CP den.
Sounds like they threw a net out and trawled to try and beef up their case as much as they could.
The prison sentences are shockingly long, regardless of how much time they might get off. Prisons have been around for an awful long time and we still have a problem with crime. It is reasonable, by now, to assume that prison is not a viable solution to crime.
These boys need helping to become more responsible citizens not locking up. There are better ways to deal with this than prison.
If one of them did turn out to be a pedophile though then I consider that the kind of thing that prisons are useful for, you cant cure or train somebody to not be a pedophile so locking them up seems the only way to deal with that particular problem at the moment.
Lulzsec, if nothing else, helped to harden the internet, some companies are taking better care of our data now.
Posted in Top tools for junior Linux admins
I like to use 'watch' quite a lot to give me a live output of commands like 'du -sh'
It's not very pure and it's been a while since i used it but when i was first faced with a linux server i found webmin to be a life saver until i learned how to do simple thing like add a user or restart a service.
I like 'iptraf' too for a quick look at whats going on with a nic.
'startx is also quite an amusingly obscure way to start the desktop, always makes me smile when a new person see's me do that when they have spent the past 45 minutes fumbling around trying to do something.
My advice to new comers is always to use linux as your main os for a while, no dual booting or having a VM on your windows laptop. The problem with that is that as soon as you hit a problem that will be faster to get around by going back to windows, you'll go back to windows and learn nothing.
Dive in, be prepared to do some reading to be able to get yourself up to the same level that you are with windows. Once your there then you will find that you can do an awful lot more with linux.
I found Debian to be a wonderful and easy to use linux, i recommend it to anyone and personally i find it much easier to use that the redhat's out there.
teaching is a skill in itself
I have met plenty of decent enough engineers who are terrible at training others.
If you know how to teach properly (and being a trained academic teacher does not necessarily mean that you know how to teach properly) and you can research your subject matter then you can teach anybody anything at all.
You don't need to have a degree in computer science to teach people computer related subjects, the ability to coach and train is way more important
Re: Ironic really
There are thousands and thousands of maya people who will be around to see it in 2012, who do you think lives in central and south america?
bit locker
.that is all
They ave gone too far this time...
...providing that the register is not being liberal with the truth that is.
The app is shite anyway, takes about 5 minutes (literally) to load. Uninstalling it is no hardship for me.
Good riddance
ads
OK so when do the compulsory ads come in to ruin it?
Imagine having a sidebar on all the time display targeted ads based on everything you looked at while wearing them or where you have been etc...
It's not actually designed for crossing the atlantic
A quick glance at his website shows that this Proof of concept design is intended to float on lakes only.
There will be other designs along the way to setting off to cross the Atlantic.
Re: sheilas wheels
Yes well...I've been working at the pointy end of the TV industry for 11 years now, i'll be sure to point out to everyone here that they have been doing it wrong and to give you a call.
PPM (i had hoped that this would be obvious) in this case does not stand for Parts per million.
It's Peak program meter you imbecile
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peak_programme_meter
with the chastising out of the way, it is fair to say that commercials have higher production values than most program material but it's far less sinister than your explanation. Ads pay, programs don't, therefore the ads producers spend more effort on setting the levels to peak without clipping.
sheilas wheels
The single most damaging thing to advertising is sheilas wheels.
That literally tipped me over the edge.
There are pretty strict ofcom rules to follow regarding audio levels. Your not allowed to exceed 7ppm. So what they do is set the program audio at about 5ppm and then ensure that the ads blast out at the full 7ppm, catching your attention.
I have not owned a TV for years now and only watch torrents or streams of a few programs like "The Walking Dead".
At the back of my mind i do worry that they might not make it any more if everyone just downloads it, but they only seem to pay attention to viewing figures in the US so it does not seem to matter how you watch it elsewhere in the world.
I block the ads on the register now after inadvertently finding my page changing to some fucking HTC desire website because i clicked in the dead space as i was scrolling down.
To return to topic, When watching TV, most of us are in a psychological state similar to hypnosis, Your mind is more open to suggestion that it is normally due to the comatose inducing affect of watching the idiot box for hours at a time.
Those brightly coloured, loud flashing ads are more likely to be embedded in your mind than they otherwise would be.
I think that this is both interesting and scary. If you find yourself coming home from the shops one day having purchased something with no idea what your going to do with it then perhaps it's time to stop watching the ads.
Re: Should be safer than rock climbing
Yes but they are not top roping and there is no belay. They have to free climb / clip a sling on every few steps. It would take so long to get to the top that there is not enough time to complete the task and climb down again in one day if they climb and clip each step.
They dont even use ropes so cant ab down afterwards.
I'd actually rather be doing this for a living that sitting behind this desk telling other people to do it!
Re: Reasons not two watch BBC?
Because some people use sign language as their primary communication method.
and....
It's not up to them, the government make them do it.
"The Communications Act 2003 requires broadcasters meet the legal requirements either by:
programmes being translated into sign language
programmes being made by or for deaf people and presented in sign language
The target is for five per cent of programmes to be signed using the same target dates as subtitles.
The BBC website has a dedicated Sign Zone area on its iPlayer, allowing access to all signed programmes."
http://www.direct.gov.uk/en/disabledpeople/everydaylifeandaccess/leisureathome/dg_4018341
bc are useful...
...for buying things that you would prefer nobody could ever find out that you had bought. Simply, like bit torrent, it is a perfectly good system that can be sued for anything but one that is best used for less than legal transactions.
If your in favour of anonyminity then bit coins are for you.
@AC 11:22
What a prick
Re: @pinky
QOS
and another thing
I think the ad model for this website is pay per view, as in, when the ad is loaded on a page, the reg get paid.
So the more people that load this page of rubbish the more money the reg get in ad revenue.
Perhaps that has something to do with such blatantly provocative tabloid stories
Balance?
Is there any chance of some more balanced articles on these matters, Lewis clearly holds a controversial opinion, one that most believe to be abhorrent.
How about letting another writer tackle the work to provide some balance.
That is unless the house view is that humans have nothing to do with the changing environment and that the staggering abuse of natural resources and pollution is somehow justified?
5GB per month?
I already struggle with the 7GB a month i get on 3G and I'm not sharing that with 5 other people It's not enough any more.
unrealistic data caps need to go away. How can they tout 4G as a next gen mobile internet 'more suitable for things like video streaming' if your only getting 5GB a month?
Re: whitelists
There are free apps for that. Since i applied for a loan about two years ago i have been getting about 10 spam texts a day and several cold calls from scammers and marketing companies.
The TPS does not work. Thing settle down for three months and then it flares up again. You see, registering on the TPS confirms that your number is a good one that works.
Also, replying STOP to the spam sms's just confirms that your number is real and is resold again and again.
I was forced to install a spam filter and blacklist app and it's been great.
Posted in Ten... in-car gadgets and accessories
Re: Where should I start
It will charge my galaxy s but if I'm using satnav, the screen and GPS use more power than the charger can supply.
It lasts about 3 hours from a full charge.
I use a power monkey extreme on longer drives now.
broadcasting
I work for a broadcaster and we use quite a bit more than 6km for a transmission system. However to have 6km of cat-6 out in the field is quite a lot, the data centres that they are sending back to will have a hell of a lot more.
A standard outside broadcast truck will have about 1Km of cat-5e, about 3Km of IMG-1000 for video and a few hundred meters of CT-100 for the RF stuff oh and 1Km of IMG-360 for black and burst reference to the broadcast kit (cameras, vtr's, etc...).
It is true that this is all very boring unless you work in the industry, then it's only slightly less boring.
I wonder how they are powering it all out there, must have a massive genny
Re: Re: Re: Linux is just a kernel
you know that the only reason apple used bsd instead of gnu linux was because of the licensing? They would not have been able to resell linux but then can make more money from using bsd. It has nothing to do with security or stability.
I am so sick of people telling me that osx is so fucking awesome like it's the purest or pure OS's and apple designed it all because they are the bestest.
It's just a flashy interface and some programs on top of someone elses work.
To return to topic, I'm with Torvalds on this, the end user should not need to know the root password in a corporate environment. Not being able to print or join a network without root is indefensible.
Its called loperamide
and is available over the counter is the UK, they sell it in petrol stations.
Imodium is the brand name in the UK.
Back to the mushrooms. The ban something that grows naturally is quite abusrb, nobody has ever been hurt by magic mushrooms. There are plenty of mushrooms out there that can kill you but they are not banned. The magic ones however are banned. This makes no sense at all.
You cant get addicted to mushrooms, it is simply not possible as anyone who has taken the will confirm.
Do reacreational concerns then it mattters not what the government ban and dont ban, people will continue to ignore them in any case. That war on drugs that they have been waging for sometime does not appear to have made much progress.
The sad thing is that when a clinical reaosn is found to help people with a real problem, they wont hear of it. I dont think that goverments are qualified or approriate to make medical decisions.
battery life
android 2.3 really helps with battery life on the old galaxy, in fact it's a much better operating system and far less buggy, my phone does not lock up when someone call's me anymore, making answering calls actually possible.
What these reviews fail to consider is that android phones suffer a major performance drop the longer you have them.
I have a freind who litterally cant answer calls on his and the interface crashes when somebody calls him
data would be nice
A bit of internet browsing down there would help pass the time. However, anyone who has ever tried loading a web page at a busy train station will understand the futility of it.
I get 4 bars of 3G at waterloo, cant even send an email on it though.
As for voice calls on the underground, for gods sake no, please no. All you have to do it take a look at peoples faces down there to know that the place is miserable enough as it is.
Invest in filtering the shit out of the air, far more trains to ease the crowding, finally solve the how to provide adequate cooling to the carriages problem that for some reason has still not bee solved, rocket surgery it is not.
There is some wifi on the some underground platforms now, but you have to pay for it, and it's not cheap.
Also, the fares had better not be rising to cover the maintenance costs associated with this, it's already horrifically over priced.
All in all, i vote no
useless items
I can kind of understand him stuffing the pills up there but what was the other stuff for, surely he could get all that inside if need be.
Quite how he managed to sit down or walk around with a needle up his arse beggars belief.
Mind you, i have seen an x-ray of a vicar with a can of coke stuck up his arse.
or if you only have mobile broadband....
....where downloading a gig costs an arm and a leg
mind control
He's not being unreasonable about it, he's asking them, not demanding it.
I thought i saw a kind of mind control computer interface in TV a few years ago, i guess it does not work very well since it's not on the market yet.
Ahh, here it is
http://www.emotiv.com/
wonder if he can get a demo headset
I see nothing wrong with this guy asking and think if the developers would bear disabilities in mind when ... well, developing games and consoles then the tech might move fast
T
re: Deployment Question
I imagine they would have thought of that.
I would use some kind of channel hopping algorithm.
Rotate frequencies on a super top secret algorithm.
Rouge carriers are not really a problem for this unless somebody jams the whole band
Posted in India calls RIM's bluff on email access
So this is the same India that all of the consumer supplier companies have outsourced...
...account management to?
The same companies that have our bank details, date of birth, address etc?
So it seems that those indian call centres of which there are many may not be so safe after all
gone are the days...
...of propriety phone operating systems that nobody was interesting in attacking, these things are running full blown linux and windows now.
They must be updated and supported like any other distribution.
Phone vendors have to get much better in providing updates (samsung currently dont update android at all) or make their phones hardware to a standard and pass the operating system responsibility to the end user - like most other hardware.
I predict that sooner or later we will be treating phones the same way we treat pc's. Install the OS of our choice and take responsibility for our own updates
re:I've never understood...
I think it serves to highlight the fact that targeted advertising is not benign and often offends.
You might not care but lots of others do.
For example i received an email about my Aunties funeral some time ago on gmail and the ad's were all about death and coping and such.
Really pissed me off that i was being harrassed by ads while dealing with a death in the family.
Installed 'customise google' so now i see no ads on gmail (or any part of google)
Posted in Your call is not important to us
Hmm....
Most out of the box it departments still block msn with group policy, however, I agree that the current call centre model does not work, customer service is far worse because of it.
Be internet reduced my girlfriend to tears of frustration (she was trying to sign up) and three mobile have reduced me to loosing my temper and throwing my mifi router in a draw never to be used again due to the csr's total inability to escalate my problem to somebody who can help.
What is wrong with your country?
....that makes you feel the need to carry a semi automatic pistol around with you?
who are these people that you need to 'defend' yourself from and *have you evere wonderd why no other country has this issue?
I find the american penchant for firearms both amusing and disturbing
*with the exception of countries such as afghanistan, iraq etc
Posted in US cyberwar firing range to demo by July
Bt?
Wtf? They want a network simulator not a shitty network designed to provide the absolute bare minimum bandwidth.
There are far better, more capable companies out there to deliver this, at a fraction of the cost i'll bet
Posted in O2 to fling out free Wi-Fi for all
Sms ads?
I have been getting sms spam for months now and I can tell you it is intensely anoying.
I have installed a spam filter but all it really does is disable the alerts
Why cant they put the ads on web pages?
This is a service I wont use.
Shit
Wonder if .gov.uk will make use of this
sneaky bastard
dont blame him for trying though
shes a doctor for crying out loud
She's not a cynical IT professional. She / He ( i cant tell from the name) is researching cancer as well, so cut her some slack.
Einstein for example was known to have 7 sets of identical clothing, his brain could not cope with such mundane matters as dressing himself.
It's not her fault but the IT dept where she works, although i would lay odds that becuase she insisted in using a mac, their IT did not have a group policy they could use on it, so she just went without backup's and they let her.
If your not going to educate your users then make sure your backing their data up for them. Dont blame them though when their laptops get nicked and they turn to you. It's your job to make sure they are backed up
Posted in Palin's email snooper sent to prison
Constitution
yup, thats a Constitution with several 'ammendments'
Just change it when it no longer suites the people in charge.
A year in prison for this beggars belief, hopefully he will appeal and get a more appropriate punishment, one that teaches him right from wrong, not how to survive in prison.
All he;s going to learn is how cruel people can be and to
A: fight his way out of everything
B: Get ass raped a lot
Put him in a half way house and make him work for free helping people.
secrecy
I remember when i was in the ATC as a kid, sometime in the mid 90's i went to RAF / USAF mildenhall for an airshow.
They had the newish f117 on display but it still had a team of armed guards around it so that nobody could get within 50 meters of it for a closer look.
This was after that aircraft had been deployed in the field.
So for the Chinese to be parading this around a hundred meters from a busy road and allowing video to be taken and uploaded to youtube lends it's self to the idea that indeed this may well be a feint.
While all eyes are in this potential export they could be developing something far more potent away from laughing chinese men with video camera's.
Makes sense that they would be. It would be unusual at beat for a country like China to be so public in displaying it's new military technology.
While this article is good, it misses this discussion / speculation point.
I too doubt that China will need to engage the US in a shooting war anytime soon but as the US grow more and more desperate to retain their economic empire, the chances of the two meeting in combat over energy or trade is not all that slim in the next 50 years or so.
America will fight for oil, we have seen that, will China?
I for one hope that we dont get involved.
three
dear god they may have the best network when it works but dear me i would not wish a phone call to their 'customer contact centre' on my worst enemy.
Just when you think you have seen it all....
My local transmitter had a problem in November, they are now saying that they will not be repairing it until the 7th April 2011.
That simple fuck you statement from them took 9 x 20 - 40 minute phone calls and several call backs from people who can barely speak english to come up with.
bye bye three but who to go to? Oranges 3g network is appalling and just about everybody else seems to be too expensive and have ludicrous caps on 3g usage.
What is the point in having fast internet to your phone if you cant use it to watch video and stream music? everything else can be done on 2g speeds.
Posted in Assange bailed again
convict
I suspect that you may have misinterpreted this as a fact, actually it's a British slang term for an Australian. Some Australians are descended from the convicts that Britain shipped there when we used the whole place as a prison.
They call us Poms, we call them convicts, it's just a bit of fun.
20 year old hacking form not withstanding
buttons
my galaxy s has a menu button, a volume up / down button and a side button for power.
Same as the jesus phone
i think this is awesome by the way,. dual boot ios and android 2.3
needed
google should be doing this themselves, the amount of shit on the market hides the good stuff.
the almost complete lack of filtering makes it impossible to filter out all the shite.
I'm not a fan of Amazon as a company but if this will allow me to peruse an app store without broken apps, soundbite apps and otherwise pure shite then ok.
268Kbps here
For the love of god just upgrade them all. For crying out loud i dont see why i should pay the the same as somebody getting fibre speeds for my 269Kbps which for all intents and purposes in the literal sense, is really no more useful than dial up. The packet drop out makes it unusable most of the time.
As much as i would like a fibre connected house, i'd rather they spent the money on brining the rest of the country up to standard first.
What i would do for 8Mbps!
BT need some competition
i will not add a title to a forum repsonse
I'll bet that's because the other 249k 'cables' are out of date and irrelevant, we;ve seen the more recent ones and considering the amount of political / legal pressure they are under, if they have any significant bomb shells to deliver, now is the time, in fact a few weeks ago was the time.
Notice how it's all fallen out of the press of late?
They dont have anything, if they had they would have released it by now. Aside from some opinionated emails, those cables just are no the right forum for anything decent to be discussed in.
Talk of aliens, illuminate conspiracies, plots against the public etc just would not be discussed in those channels.
I bet all they have is more ambassador opinions on their international counterparts which make interesting reading for anyone interested in mindset and attitudes of the US political ambassadors, have little of substance to mount a serious challenge to the awful US foreign policy or whatever it is that they are challenging.
To return to topic, seems to me it's been a successful year for lawyers, with all those patent / IP law suites going on.
Posted in Queen set to outlaw ID cards today
thank god
I am pleased with this anoucement.
The cynic in me thinks that the security services will be making backups of it all as we speak for future use but hey.
I'm also suprised that the right wing party have chosen to be more liberal than labour as well. Thought the tories would be worse but this is great, if they could do something about the absurd volume of cctv cameras next that would be great.
The UK firewall thing that people are worried about, dont worry about it, they cant afford it anyway and it wont work, it's just an MP saying something for the sake of saying something, he does not understand how it works, one of his minions will set him straight.
