Posts by phuzz
307 posts • joined Tuesday 23rd February 2010 12:15 GMT
Re: Carpe diem
It's not that bad, the worst case scenario is you'll end up going bankrupt, which means you won't be able to borrow money again for a while, but on the plus side, you won't owe anybody any money.
Re: I'm not sure what the point it.
There's one other reason:
The fact that the land speed record belongs to a Brit rather than an Yank pisses off (some) Yanks so much.
Re: That's some tin can!
Submariners would probably make good astro/cosmo-nauts, having prior experience of being stuck in a small tin can, relying on a life support system, and they're generally very well trained. (IIRC engineers on nuclear boats end up learning enough to build their own reactor pretty much).
Re: "not be able to open my old files"
I was under the impression that each new edition of Photoshop/Illustrator introduced changes to the file format so you needed to upgrade to open a file from a newer version.
Or that's what my users used to tell me to justify a new version anyway...
And yes, GIMP et al do most of what the average person uses Photoshop for, but I've not yet seen a free clone of Illustrator that is anywhere close.
Re: The only reason Google get any sales on their books?
It's easy to strip the DRM off a Amazon ebook as well*, and Calibre will then convert it into any format you could want.
It's more a case of which monopoly you feel like giving your money to this week.
*(For personal archive reasons only of course.)
Re: James Cameron?
Given his well known predilection for ocean bothering he'd probably have enjoyed being tossed off into the sea...
Tor
Running a Tor exit node is pretty easy to set up, however, you'll probably find yourself getting cut off by your ISP in short order. For some reason they frown on (and often explicitly ban in their ToS) running an anonymiser on a home connection.
You'll also get nasty letters from basically everyone and their lawyer, especially if you don't configure your node to block bit-torrent traffic.
Re: Grow your own
Laughing yes, but too much fruit in your diet and you might be doing it from the the thunderbox
Re: Just going to dump this handy URL here
Everytime I find that page, or just the links to the two versions (seriously, why do I have to update two versions Adobe?), by the next time I need it, they've moved them somewhere else, so thanks for that mate :)
Re: Knowing little about these things
I decided last night that I'd try buying books from somewhere other than Amazon, so I ended getting a couple direct from Penguin. They use the Adobe copy protection, which took me so long to work out how to activate (turns out you don't need an Adobe ID, you can just authorise one computer), that getting it into Calibre was the easy part of the deal (the same plugin works for kindle and adobe drm).
My kindle is about 3 years old now, so I might drop £30 just to have a backup device for when it dies...
Re: I wish...
Or to put it more simply, the atmosphere stops before the gravity does.
(because if there wasn't gravity, then the atmosphere would just float away)
LastPass
I use LastPass, so every account that matters more to me than a commenting account (I'm guessing that the standard of passwords used to comment on el'reg isn't that high) gets a unique multi-character string of gibberish.
I used the free version for a day, and was impressed enough to give them money.
I'm still trying to decide if I can be bothered to use Google Authenticator or a Yubi key to make it more secure.
(Lastpass also does a better job of entering passwords than the default firefox password manager).
Bloody Stross
Charlie Stross had a pretty similar idea to this he called 'CopSpace' (basically this combined with AR) in his novel Halting State.
Clearly he should stop giving them ideas.
You could do that, and the managers would make great speeches about it, about how "we're all part of a team" (only with more words like 'proactive' in there), and at the end of the year, everyone would get the same tiny pay rise, except those same executives would also be picking up their massive bonuses, for "performance".
Re: It Wasn't That Long Ago...
Getting a low-ranking swabbie to fast-forward through a VHS would be much cheaper than ANPR, but there wouldn't be as much scope for bribes, bungs and incompetence as there would be with a procurement project.
I guess the central question here is "what's the most back-arsewards way of doing things?".
Posted in The healing hands of guru Dabbs
It's a vocation
You say you don't have IT support skills and then you go and say, "when I go near a computer that a user says not working properly, it mysteriously seems to sort itself out without me doing anything.".
IT'S A SIGN!
You are one of the chosen ones, you ARE an IT support worker, you just don't know it yet! JOIN US!
Mind you, a few weeks ago I was in the pub, talking to a friend of a friend I'd just met. After hearing what I do for a living, his next question was "So why is my laptop so slow?".
He seemed to think that "How the fuck should I know?" wasn't a satisfactory answer.
Re: Wireless charger?
If you're going to be shunting energy around as EM radiation, why not just use a microwave transmitter and keep the electronics etc. warm just by zapping them with microwaves?
(semi-serious suggestion)
They're everywhere
I was at a customer's site recently, sat at someone's desktop computer, cleaning off a virus when they walked up to say hello.
I'd been having a lot of problems with the mouse not moving the cursor half the time, so I told the user that they ought to ask for a new mouse. "This one's crap" says I, "It's held together with sticky tape!".
"Oh, I'm used to it now" quoth the user, "and the tape is there to hold the coin on".
I flip the mouse over, and sure enough, there is a two pence piece taped to the bottom of the mouse, slightly lifting it and so spoiling the sensor's view.
"Why's that there?" I ask, already dreading the answer
"Oh, that's because I'm allergic to electro-magnetic radiation" says the user.
Rather than make a scene in the customer's office and start the user crying, I limited myself to "oh" and turned back and did my best to ignore how much the stupid was burning my brain.
Re: Nice work!
There's a more impressive view of Soyuz launching here:
http://news.discovery.com/space/astronaut-view-soyuz-launch-130402.htm
This one was taken from the ISS...
Copenhagen Suborbitals
What about Copenhagen Suborbitals?
Ok, so I'm not sure that any of their rockets has quite gone in the direction it's supposed to, but who else is building their own liquid fuelled rocket engine in a shed*.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bqASqda0ylc
*(quite a large shed yes, but they're not really using any advanced tools or materials)
Re: Is it me?
The way the flag above the cockpit is identical on the two craft just approaching the beach was the give-away for me.
I grew up just over the hill from Cheltenham (and therefore GCHQ), so probably just out of insta-death range, but very much within slow-painful-death-due-to-radiation range.
What a cheery thought :(
Are there any German speakers here who can comment on how well that joke* translates?
*(Mien hund hat kneine nase etc.)
Re: DAT MAINFRAME!
Although the book doesn't cover any of the interesting stuff about Blue Steel or selling to the soviets, so I enjoyed this article as well.
"What you want and what customers want are quite obviously at odds here."
That pretty much sums up the current microsoft strategy right there.
Posted in Are your servers PETS or CATTLE?
Re: Windows Server is a dog
Sever 2008 and upwards is ok, and I say this as someone who's been on both sides of the fence.
Re: So what, indeed...
They're getting better with the reboots. Admittedly there's always at least one update every month that requires a reboot, but it's not every single update now.
At this rate they should have caught up to your average Linux distro by, I dunno, 2020?
I used to get a similar problem, on the sea front in Clevedon (on the Severn estuary near Bristol), my phone would often ignore the cell tower on the inland edge of the town, and instead connect to one across the way in Wales. This would result in calls failing to connect, but could be fixed by turning off 3G connectivity.
I mentioned it to Vodafone a couple of times, but nothing came of it, turning off 3G saved battery anyway.
Re: 35 Kms
The is The Register, here they use SI units*:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/10/17/spb_metric/
*(except for beer and the altitude of an aircraft)
blimey
What's that? A desktop laser scanner? What a novel idea! For 1990:
http://www.rolanddg.co.uk/products/reverse-engineering/lpx-1200_600_60/
(other laser scanners are also available, and have been for ages)
He's told someone that they're wrong. On the internet.
Re: 3.2 Million reasons to love speed cameras
"Bet those children soon add up as well."
Nope, have you seen the recent results for maths GCSEs?
Re: SR-71
The SR-71 was a follow on from the CIA's A-12 OXCART which came from work started in 1957.
The A-12 was slightly smaller, but visually almost identical to the SR-71, it was slightly faster and could fly higher than the SR-71.
You could be forgiven for calling the SR-71 the OXCART mk 2.
Live music?
I think I probably spent approximately as much on live music as I did on recorded last year, and I probably bought something like 20+ albums last year.
(Spread out between CDs from amazon and local shops, and mp3s and flacs from amazon and whereever else.)
Re: blip?
You can pick FLAC when buying from Bandcamp, which is nice.
Re: Anotherone looking for a new ISP
We've been with Virgin for a number of years (just plain faster than anything else) and they've been ok. It can get quite congested in the early evening, but from what I hear that's true for most of Bristol on any ISP.
On the few occasions I've had to deal with their customer support it's been a pain, but again, same as most any ISP.
I'm willing to forgive a lot for a 50Mb connection that got doubled to 100 for free.
Re: Where to go then?
BT Enterprise use PlusNet, which is very confusing.
Why not use Lynx?
No flash, no HTML5, no images...
Plastic bag over the top works just as well, and not as like to get you done for vandalism. It'll usually take a few days for anyone to notice and remove it, and our taxes don't get spent.
For those that would like a link to the full installer:
http://helpx.adobe.com/content/help/en/flash-player/kb/installation-problems-flash-player-windows.html#main-pars_header
That should make life slightly easier if you have many PCs to update.
Re: Same google
Security through Obscurity is fine as an additional measure. It's just a problem if you're relying on it as your only defence.
Re: Give me the child for his first seven years
Sorry buddy:
"By years nine and ten students will be tasked with “creating an interactive web-based project that provides enterprising opportunities and complies with accessibility requirements, for example using fragments of JavaScript to create dynamic content that supports interactivity.”"
Re: China
From TFA:
"Mandiant claimed APT1 is just one of 20 computer spying crews in operation in China, and is among dozens it is tracking worldwide."
Lets face it each different branch of the Chinese military probably has it's own more or less competent crew of hackers, probably all working at odds with each other.
Bureaucracy and military incompetence are universal.
Re: "Trustworthy" and "Wikipedia" in the same sentence
"It's as though Congress (s/Congress/$YOURGOV/g as needed) were run by simply allowing anybody who gets off on that sort of thing to to wander in and do whatever they want to do. Guess what!? the first thing they do is lock the doors after themselves and insure they cannot be removed."
You mean a system where all politicians come from the same schools and universities and nobody else gets a look in?
Thank fuck that could never happen!
Re: I'm interesting
Depends on the bat, as a general rule of thumb herbivore shit smells better than carnivore shit smells better than omnivore shit.
eg pig shit is much worse than cow shit.
Not in the same league
It's not really a home lab, but I do have what used to be my old gaming PC, re-purposed into a storage server, mainly by ramming as many harddrives and fans into the case as possible.
However, as I sold my old CPU, it's currently running with a water-cooled Sempron. I suppose I could have pulled the water cooling out, but why bother?
Now I come to think about it, I don't remember topping up the water in the last few years, better check that out...
Re: MS did not even cover pre-orders in some cases, so they could say "SOLD OUT"
Hanlon's Razor: Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.
ie, it's more likely they simply didn't build enough of the 128Gb version, rather than deliberately try to cripple their sales.
Re: Error in title
It's taken me until reading that comment to realise the joke Charlie was making there, and I must have first read Accelerando about 5 years ago.
Still, I'm sure there's some other joke in there I haven't got yet.
Cyanogen
Basically this is going to have to compete with Cyanogenmod (or similar). And once I have a terminal app, and an SSH client, what more do I need for a proper computer?
