Posts by Skrrp
78 posts • joined Tuesday 6th October 2009 07:44 GMT
Re: Last year someone from talktalk ...
I had a TT cold sales call trying to sell me mobile. It became my record at 44 mins long. I spoke to 3 lovely Indian ladies, 1 of whom was a supervisor. I found out what the weather was like there, that the 1st lady was married with 2 children, had a pet dog and the name of the dog. Never bought a mobile contract though.
I also had TT send a charming but thick girl to my front door trying to flog me 'unlimited' broadband. I asked specifically "so I can light up an illegal torrent station and shift terabytes a month on this?" She told me that I could. She even phoned base and the idiot on the end of the line there told me I could indeed shift unlimited data in illegal torrents. I then read her small print and told her what a "fair use" policy means.
Audio on the cheap
I'm not an audiophile but I spend a lot of time walking and listening to mp3s on my phone. A mix of TNS, TNQ, Audible and music.
I've learnt a long time ago that headphones in the 3.5mm jack kills phone sockets in short order so I use a mix of a Jabra Clipper and cheap headphones. The Clippers last about a year and are replaced at £25 each from eBay.
The phones I prefer are £8.99 JVC jobbies from Carphone Warehouse. They last about 6 months and have surprisingly good bass response compared to the other manufacturers I've tried. I suspect most of my money on them goes into magnets rather than packaging or brand.
All in all I spend sub-£45/year on kit and have a happy experience, with the Clipper's ability to answer calls as a bonus.
I'd shell out on the full Jabra over-the-head unit if I thought I wouldn't destroy it in short order and have to pay somewhere near £200/year.
Note: my replacement cycle is not a negative statement about the products or the manufacturers, it is a symptom if the use and abuse I give my kit.
He doesn't need to go on a search for a better condom
They exist; Pasante Unique:
http://www.lovehoney.co.uk/product.cfm?p=3456 *
Non latex, silicon lube safe, thin and strong. Amazing things. G/f and I love them.
* Other shops are available, couldn't find the actual manufacturer on the first page of Google. Yes, I am lazy.
Mixed results here
I know that the T-Mobile network has been flaky for me recently. Some periods of outage of up to 20 mins where it shows signal bars but refuses to shift data.
Speed tests just now:
Bournemouth (physically closest): 2Mb down, 1Mb up
Maidenhead (closer to gateway): 3Mb down, 1.8Mb up
Re: PostgreSQL
Postgres for me too. It's the only sane choice these days.
Posted in Which qualifications are worthwhile?
A+
Having looked over the A+ syllabus it's a useful entry tool for helpdesk. Just don't believe the lying course providers. I looked at the skills taught then asked one what the target earnings were for someone with the qualification. He told me £35k+. Best joke I'd heard all year.
If you have a little money and intelligence I thoroughly recommend ISTQB Foundation in System Testing. There appear to be a lot of testing jobs around at the moment and good testers are like gold dust. Pay isn't too bad either.
If you have a lot of money and intelligence the Penetration Testing course is well worth a look. Pen testers are the high paid rock stars of the computing world.
Posted in Everything Everywhere prices up UK 4G
Re: ouch
Massive ouch.
I'm sticking with my £10/mo 3GB allowance on T-Mobile for now.
Fuck you EE.
Re: sod that....
"sod that.... just buy an off the shelf system ... hell of a lot cheaper then paying for developers"
Or use a free off the shelf system.
Apache OfBiz.
Re: FUD
I think things have changed. Since moving to Oracle I have noticed a couple of times during an apt-get upgrade that I have to manually accept a closed source binary blob for MySQL for 'security patches'.
Having any sort of interaction during an update is annoying enough but this sort of behaviour has led me to refuse to work with MySQL in production environments.
Pretty much as above. The aerial runs several times around the outside of the card.
A cut of about 1cm or less in the middle of the long edge that isn't the mag stripe should do it.
Google image search for 'mifare card' to see examples of internal layouts.
When you do cut, the aerial wires should be visible (may need a magnifying glass) as small copper dots laid next to each other.
Re: I don't get it
I have an alternate theory and it has nothing to do with Facebook themselves or the people paying for advertising.
The social data Facebook holds is hugely valuable to the marketing companies and some of them want access to a whole database of it, not just the promise that FB will target your ads at your demographic.
Hence a couple of years ago we saw penetration by the questions applications. "Does your friend X like thing Y?" X is then told someone answered a question about them and needed to answer a question back to see the answer. This was social data mining with a very thin veneer of being a fun game. It was also bad because as a third party to this I couldn't stop people answering questions about me and my data was in their database because my friends had added the application and guess what permissions it wanted.
I suspect that all this 'clickfraud' is bots run by these database creators, scraping the pages of the people that have allowed the mining applications in to their profiles and following links to see what FB targets at them.
Not even I believe that 80% of hits come from NS + ABP, much as I like and recommend the tools.
Fucking whiners ITT
Don't know if I'm just lucky but I live in a house with a 30Mbs Virgin cable connection. Speedtest constantly gives me a rating of 31.5+Mbs down and 3.1+Mbs up.
There are 5 of us living here and I've never seen a speed cap. Maybe we don't hit the 70GB/day mark but we stream videos and download games and play online all the time with no problems. My Steam downloads are always at a nice 3.7MBs speed. Netflix never has a problem.
We don't torrent illegal stuff and we don't hammer the bandwidth all the time but we do get our fair use out of the connection but never have problems. Compared to the clusterfuck that is anything to do with BT twisted pair copper we are more than happy.
This isn't really a real-world threat yet
Firstly, oblig: http://xkcd.com/538/
All these things are well and good but take a long time to mature into in-the-wild attacks. Speaking in a professional capacity* we saw the breaking of the Mifare encryption many years ago but we are still yet to see any serious determined effort in the wild to exploit the knowledge.
We are still selling standard Mifare cards to customers who are quite happy and don't report problems with attacks many years after the cracking method became public knowledge.
These breaking of methods seem to be good for theory in that when a standard is broken it forces manufacturers to up their game and come up with the next more secure solution but outside government level spook games this stuff doesn't seem to have a real world impact.
*Full disclosure: I work in the plastic card security business, not the encryption business. I understand the article but not the encryption engineering behind it.
Posted in Jabra Clipper
Love this headset
Been using it for years now, mainly because it will play audio from the Android music player.
Ignore the price in the article, you can pick them up for about £25 online.
Re: The (low) price of ad-free TV
Advertising in general is a waste of time. As you said, if I want a product I'll search around and word of mouth is more important to me than advertising.
I used to work for a now defunct crap computer maker (named after something that a clock helps you with) and we were once told their stats on adverts. It was £50 per customer footfall and another £150 per computer sale. That's a large chunk of the margin so it was no wonder we were pushed to sell the extended warranties. I guess they were making a loss on a base computer sale. Coupled with that, the computers sold were shite. Factory refurbed and refitted HDDs in new units. They were sold on the basis of advertising alone, while I knew full well where you could buy from a local supplier for the same money and actually get some decent kit.
Now to companies who famously don't advertise; Bentley and Rolls Royce. You heard of them?
If a product is good enough on terms of quality and price you'll have customers beating a path to your door. If your product is sub-standard, you need to advertise.
Re: This could bite them in the arse
Of course none of the science can be directly attributed to a sky wizard but a lot of the great scientists have had religion and felt it was important to them.
Galileo - imprisoned for heresy by the Catholic Church
Newton - Christian(ish)
Darwin - Christian, clergy
Columbus (not a scientist I know) - Christian
As to the Arab world, al-Khwārizmī brought us the number 0 (by the grace of which computers work) and algebra.
/not a god-botherer myself
Re: the twatters
They were fending off a massive DDOS attack and you were worried about a status page?
I'd rather they were putting in all their resource to fending off an attack.
/Happy UK2 customer for many years
//Other hosts are available
I've said it before and I'll say it again ...
Get your damn kids off my Internet.
A better solution would be to set up an alt DNS for the kiddies and just not list smut sites there.
This would make it easier to hunt the grooming paedos too, as their IPs will be connecting to both real and kids' DNS.
Not on mine
Nexus One with Cyanogen installed, no sign of this .apk file on my phone.
Browser with no JS support
Lynx.
Choppers?
To be fair, the news channels did a frankly shite job of reporting the news.
I was watching News 24 on Monday night and they had their chopper hover over the places that were on fire - where the rioting had been and was no more. I was getting better info from friends who live in London than the news was letting out.
Every time they interviewed a reporter it was by phone and the chopper was never overhead to show us what the ground situation was like.
Posted in Apple will 'own games industry'
He's right and he's wrong
He's right in that digital delivery is set to become the dominant model.
He's wrong in that it will be Apple taking the prize. The ifs and buts he uses are a faulty premise. "If Apple's growth continues in the way it is." No. It won't.
Can I play complex MMOs on an iPad? Even with the advent of streaming game services it'll be pretty difficult to play complex games with touch screen controls more suited to Angry Birds.
I personally predict that Steam will become the dominant delivery system, for consoles too. But that's just my opinion.
Please do something about this
Everyone who reads this and lives in the EU, please land email on your MEP's desk:
http://www.writetothem.com/
<3 SwiftKey
Best app I've ever paid for.
Works amazingly.
--sent from my Nexus One
Virtual desktops
Gnome 3 provides 2 by default, in a vertical configuration.
Since it is so raw I haven't found the settings area to change this, but I did notice that as soon as I started working in the 2nd workspace it automatically added a 3rd empty one below it.
QBasic?
Does this still ship with MS operating systems?
If not, a simple Linux install will give you access to PHP (via the command line - no need for a full webserver) which is a very forgiving and accessible language for new learners.
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El Reg, please please do a Playmobil enactment of this, to the tune of Yakkety Sax.
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Or just block iFrames in NoScript.
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Get the children off the adult internet. Easy.
OS-free computers
overclockers.co.uk
When you look at their systems they are all listed as without an OS and you choose to add any of the current flavour of MS builds, clearly listing the cost of the component.
Sadly, their laptops are still forced to have an OS.
Up to 5 devices?
Amateurs. I can connect unlimited* to my phone in tether mode.
*address space allowing.
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Needs permissions for -
Read messages - so it can read your inbox and train itself on the common sentence formations you use.
Network comms - to download the base language packs that contain the base sentence formations.
Phone state - no bloody idea, but a lot of apps ask for this in general.
Best 60p I've ever spent.
Customer satisfaction?
What Apple users want: Shiney and smug
What Apple users get: Shiney and smug
What Android users want: A damn powerful computer platform that can do everything their desktop can
What Android users get: Almost all of it
Customer satisfaction is an indication of expectations vs actuality. Since Apple users generally don't want to stretch their units, they are happy.
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Thanks for reminding me of this.
Tested it out on my 600Mhz netbook and with the game data directory farmed off onto the SD card it installs and runs fine.
Posted in Flash finally finagled onto iPhone
Bad Bill, bad!
"Lord it over android users"?
You know full well we have full flash on android and I'm guessing the gnash build I have running under Ubuntu has more features than this iPhone hack.
Design be buggered, I'll keep my power and freedom thanks.
T-Mobile
Check your terms of service. T-Mobile bans VoIP on my £15/mo data contract, you have to pay £30/mo to get it. They still haven't been able to tell me why.
Linux
Nope. There are negotiations for android to re-enter the Linux fold.
Read the Reg more.
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Where exactly do these women think that their precious snowflakes came from anyway?
They're going to find that out one day.
The horror!
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I think everyone should just mess with the operators. Make the word 'PERV' in blu-tac and stick it to your chest with a bit of superglue.
Ad blocking is all well and ok
I'll need a NoScript replacement before I totally leave Firefox though.
Crossbow not needed
A can of spray varnish unloaded into the incoming air filters should do it.
Google bashers with short meories ITT
Lot of people here saying that Apple have never used their kill switch. They have.
Admittedly, on a misappropriated advance model and not a consumer owned device, but they have.
Also to note: Google here pulled 2 apps. The Apple kill switch use completely disabled the device.
For the really paranoid android users, go into the settings menu and have a look at the permission sets of some of the deep OS level apps.
Posted in Google to relieve AdSense webpage drag
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Excellent.
Now my NoScript will just prevent them from loading, speeding up my web even more.
Thanks Google.
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I notice that we're chasing to have the fastest network in Europe, not the world.
Posted in Firefox comes over all cloudy
Worked on my boxes since day 1
... but I never save passwords down to a browser (who does?) and opening my tabs from home in a work environment is unthinkable.
Games
Please please tell me how to run all my games (and audible) under Linux and I'm sold. I have 1 win box left and it's for games.
When wanting to do work I switch to Linux and agree with the rest of your sentiment.
Faster?
He wants to make it _faster_?
My 600Mhz netbook boots into Gnome with mobile broadband in under a minute already. This pisses on my 2.something dual core Windoze machine from a great height. Actual to browsing times on that box is greater than 5 mins.
Posted in Mozilla spills plan for, yes, Firefox 4
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"Something UI designers have known for a long time is that the simpler an interface looks, the faster it will seem,"
LittleFox FTW. I first got it for the small screen on the Netbook, it's on all my installs now. Clean and simple.
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They already know that. It's donkey midget porn, duh.
