Posts by phuzz
340 posts • joined Tuesday 23rd February 2010 12:15 GMT
Re: NSA Snoops on YOU
Eadon is actually a sock-puppet of Microsoft PR, he spouts hyperbolic nonsense and makes linux users look like loonies, and he brings out the rational voices in support of M$.
It shouldn't work as well as it does.
Re: Nothing needed...
It's not about what a wonderful country Ecuador is or isn't, they enjoy poking the US in the eye as much as anyone else. Assange is that poke in the eye*.
Basically, they're trolling the US, and to a certain amount the UK as well. I'm not sure what Sweden thinks about the whole situation.
* (stop sniggering at the back there!)
Re: Security?!?! We don need no stinging security!!!
Why bother with doing it at a software level? Just go round and glue up all the usb ports with a hot glue gun, that's 90% of the risk gone right there.
Re: Technology changes ..
"You want to connect your iPhone 5 to your existing iPhone 4 cabling? £20 for the Lightning adaptor. "
You want to connect your Nexus 4 to your existing five year old Nokia brick cabling? Same Micro USB cable....
In fact, I'm still using the micro USB cable from the aforementioned nokia brick to charge my new phone, my kindle, my tablet, and the phone of anyone who pops round, except iphone users because the usb to dock connector cable I had fell apart after a couple of years of use.
Re: The apple tax...
You could try having pictures of the ports that you do use with large type reading:
If your laptop doesn't have a port on it that looks like one of the above, you will have to bring your own adaptor.
Obviously people will not bother reading it and turn up without, but then you can really patronise them by pointing out that the ignore instructions most children could follow. And patronising self-important arseholes is one of the joys of IT, right?
And what about the down-votes from us country folk, got a poorly thought out argument for us too?
Not everyone in the countryside agrees with everything the Countryside Alliance spouts.
Re: Most not realistic
I'm a straight bloke, but still, David Tennent, I would.
Re: Web adverts
It's those annoying pictures that people who don't use an adblocker get to see right?
Re: Really??
I've spent the last few years saying "this year will be the year that there's a big virus attack on Macs", and every year so far I've been wrong. Perhaps there won't be a widely spreading attack, just exactly the same kind of phishing attacks aimed at users of all platforms.
Re: Also...
You want an easy way to create a RAM drive? Just boot off your Workbench disk and there's one there on the desktop.
Oh, you mean for an OS from the last decade, erm, google it?
Phlebas the Phoenician, a fortnight dead,
Forgot the cry of gulls, and the deep sea swell
And the profit and loss.
A current under sea
Picked his bones in whispers. As he rose and fell
He passes the stages of his age and youth
Entering the whirlpool.
Gentile or Jew
O you who turn the wheel and look windward,
Consider Phlebas, who was once handsome and tall as you.
TS Elliot.
GCHQ
And wouldn't you know it, they've been passing the info on to GCHQ as well:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2013/jun/07/uk-gathering-secret-intelligence-nsa-prism
Remind me why we need the snooper's charter again? We can just let the yanks do all the work, and foot the bill...
"successive landlords casually slapped multiple coats of cheap satin magnolia over once-intricate Victorian ceiling roses"
Some ignoramus has turned what was probably quite nice molding all round the room, into a series of shapeless white blobs using this method.
I grew up round that way, and a lot of my friend's parents worked there, (the usual euphemism was "I work for the civil service in Cheltenham"). There's a few local legends not mentioned in the article, take these with a pinch of salt:
One reason I heard given for the Oakley site being shutdown was that the SAS had been asked to come have a look at the security. They pointed out that it would be easy to blow up Hewlett's reservoir so that the water would flow down the hill and flood the Oakely site.
There's also always been rumours about the underground parts of the site, certainly the houses around the edge (let out to staff), often have interesting looking vents in their gardens. Allegedly there was a tunnel between the Oakley and Benhall sites that was used to transfer equipment that was too sensitive for the overground roads (even in a covered lorry?).
I also have fond memories of the fields overlooking Cheltenham, just below the radio masts, but I can't mention *that* story :)
Posted in Let's get graphical with Hyper-V
Re: RDP to the server itself?
I think this is a link to the free version of HyperV:
http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/server-cloud/hyper-v-server/default.aspx
As it's a hypervisor, it doesn't have a GUI, so you can't RDP to it (as far as I know, not played with it yet).
The single management tool for Hyper-V is to use Powershell, which if you're coming from linux you will either love (because it's a commandline based scripting language), or hate (because it's not identical to *your favourite* shell). Personally I like it and think it compares well to Bash, but ymmv.
Either update your documents to newer standards as you upgrade (and given the increase in storage space/decrease in costs you can keep the original as well), or keep a VM with (for example), winXP and office 2003, or whatever you need to read it.
Re: First female Doctor
Tilda Swinton, she already looks a bit alien.
Re: ORLY?
Between them, don't they basically rule the world anyway? And if they wanted to have a secret conspiracy, wouldn't telephones be a bit more secretive than all meeting at the same location and publicly announcing the meeting?
Aliens, because, well, you never know eh?
Re: Which lobby group are paying Cameron for this?
Corruption is a problem, but I don't care who they have sex with, as long as it's someone who wants to have sex with them.
Hell, if they were all getting laid regularly, maybe we wouldn't get into so many wars.
After spending the week dealing with a fsckup between BT retail, BT Wholesale, Openreach, and BT Enterprise, I'm not sure that rolling them all back into one organisation can be any worse. Mind you, if anyone can fuck it up, BT can.
Re: People In Glass Houses
And who sold them the bullets, CS gas etc.?
Re: Ahhh EVE
I believe it was an Eve player that first gave us the sage advice:
"There is no RL, there is just extended AFK."
Re: Whooaah dude, this is heavy!
There's laws against using a mobile phone when driving as well, and they don't seem too effective.
Re: shells, configs, editors etc
You can just use a flat text file for things like a list of hostnames in Powershell, which is what I usually do for something that's just a list.
If your data is a bit more complicated (eg, a list of RSS feeds with title and update schedule), then XML makes a bit more sense (to me) over a flat list (or csv or something). I tend to use Notepad++, so XML is human readble/editable.
Yes, it would have been nice if Microsoft had implemented a proper scripting language 15 years ago (and we'll ignore how many cries of "they're just copying *nix" there would have been), but as it stands, they've got a proper scripting language now, isn't that a good thing?
Re: Never received it....
My old boss, who in all other respects was a competent and sensible IT professional also used to use the deleted items folder as his slush pile and only keep important stuff in his inbox. He was not happy when I emptied his deleted items, although I did point out he didn't keep his files in the waste-paper bin.
Yes Malc, I'm talking about you ;)
Little known fact:
Little known fact: Mt Gox isn't named after a mountain, it originally stood for "Magic: The Gathering - Online eXchange".
The more you know...
Posted in Review: Sony Xperia SP
Re: It's a Sony
Would this be the same Sony that have a page listing the phones that you can unlock the bootloader on (including the SP)?
http://unlockbootloader.sonymobile.com/supported-devices
Allowing customers to do what they want with their phones? What a bunch of arseholes amirite?
Posted in Review: Sony Xperia SP
As a comparison, how much was a mid-range nokia or ericcson back in the day? (I've just had a quick google but it's surprisingly difficult to find out).
I seem to remember paying £100 for a nokia 7110, on a fairly pricey contract back in about 2000, which is approximately what you'd expect to pay for a high end handset today.
Re: Downside of retro-rockets
As far as I know, the retro rockets on Dragon are also used as an emergency abort system if there's a problem during lift-off.
Assuming there's no problem, then you might as well use them on landing right?
Re: Paraglider and helicopters
Korolev (the daddy of the USSR space program) also fancied the idea of a rotor based landing system for Vostok. Despite being in charge, he was over-ruled and they ended up with the relatively well tested parachute and rocket system.
Re: Smart watches are still pretty dumb
People put up with all of those issues with smartphones, compared to an old brick nokia. I reckon there's a decent sized market for these, which will get larger as the bugs get worked out
Mind you, on thing I will guarantee, in twenty years there'll still be people complaining about all of these problems, and refusing to wear anything except their rolex.
c'est la vie
Re: Please start being parents...
You're girlfriend is an infant?
;)
Re: They forgot the predicate
"only earning £40k a year"
Sucks to be them eh?
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)
