Posts by firefly
38 posts • joined Monday 1st March 2010 15:11 GMT
Pah
Surely 13,407,807,929,942,597,099,574,024,998,205,846,127,479,365,820,592,393,377,723,561,443,721,764,030,073,546,976,801,874,298,166,903,427,690,031,858,186,486,050,853,753,882,811,946,569,946,433,649,006,084,096 keys ought to be enough for anybody.
Re: Sega
I get riled at people who think Nike, both the sporting goods manufacturer and the Greek goddess of victory, only has one syllable.
Re: How much !
The articles I have read on NUC so far suggest around £220+VAT. On top of that you will need to shell out for RAM, storage and a wi-fi adapter.
Re: How much !
The NUC pricing is even more ridiculous than the Ultrabook platform. Goes to prove that Intel are addicted to ludicrously high margins on everything they sell, and that will probably be their undoing.
Re: I'm old enough
Me too, how I long for the days of blackouts, 3-day weeks, perpetual strikes, rubbish piled up on the streets and waiting up to a year to have something simple as a telephone installed in my home.
Thatch put an end to all that, Bitch indeed.
Well considering that MtGox stands for Magic the Gathering Online Exchange (seriously), I think your beans would be quite safe there.
Re: Units and comparisons...
Km/h for air or sea travel is indeed an abomination but not for the reason you stated. A knot is one nautical mile per hour, and a nautical mile is one minute of an degree of latitude. A pilot will know that for every 60 knots of groundspeed they travel east (or west), they will travel 1 degree of longitude every hour.
It's one of the few 'old' measurements that makes better sense than metric, and quite frankly any change towards km/h should be resisted.
It does indeed. A modest home NAS running ZFS demands a minimum of 8GB and 16GB is preferable if you're running any kind RAID-Z.
Re: Cojones
I don't see how the casino lost anything. In poker you're playing against your fellow players around the table and not against the house. The house makes its money by taking a small percentage of each pot, known as the rake, or in tournament play they will take 10-15% of the buy-in.
The only possibility is that the casino, so not to piss off some valued customers, voluntarily compensated the players who were scammed.
Linux, because...
Re: FAIL felt as far as Oregon
Try your local credit union. Many of them now offer debit cards and direct debits and while they don't pay interest, they often pay a dividend of 3% or more.
Posted in Keyboard, you're not my type
Re: Best keyboard?
Unicomp bought all the Model M tooling and kit from IBM and the keyboards they make are pretty much identical to the originals save for things like USB and Windows keys. They even have the thick steel backboard like the original.
I like the Model M but I'd get crucified if I used one in the office for the racket they make. Cherry have a nice range of keyboards that have fairly quiet mechanical switches.
Re: Genuine question
Absolutely. ARM is the Have It Your Way (tm) chip designer. You can licence entire SoC designs, or licence the ISA and build it in to your designs. Or licence anything else you like about ARM for that matter. You can then go to any chip-baker you like to build them for you be that TSMC, Global Foundries or Warburtons.
With Intel it's all or nothing, you can't licence x86, you buy entire CPUs from them or nothing at all. This inflexibility will be their undoing, not to mention their ludicrous pricing and addiction to 60%+ margins.
A number of people are pointing towards Intel's future designs with their potential to best ARM on performance and equal them with power consumption but it doesn't matter how good they are. Intel are late to the party, and in the the rapidly declining PC market it's hard to see how they can supply chips for $10 and still maintain their position as as a industry bellwether.
"They must invest heavily in their equipment"
Rubbish. I was an avid Quake/HL/UT player 'back in the day' and I knew several players of much higher ability than myself who went on to play in professional tournies. The striking thing was that many of them used old ball mice and CRT monitors for their rigs, long after optical and LCD became the norm.
People who insist on expensive 'gaming' kit remind me of golfers who think that a £5k set of clubs will cure their slice. The height of the lunacy was the 'gaming NIC' that would give you no change from 100 notes for a theoretical 0.1s reduction in latency.
Re: Who the hell uses shops these days?
So they say, but I've picked up several items from bricks and mortar stores in the last week that have been the same price or marginally cheaper than Amazon. And those shops pay corporation tax.
Did online grocery shopping once. Dented tins, bruised fruit and vegetables that looked like they'd been sat on and bread that had a day of shelf life left. At least in a shop you can pick out the nice looking undamaged stuff and do a 'reacharound' for the fresh bread at the back of the shelf.
Don't get me wrong, I shop online frequently for obscure or tech stuff, but those who shop for *everything* online are not getting the best value for money and are quite frankly, lazy.
Re: I wonder if there is a way to process atmospheric CO2 into graphite?
The problem with converting CO2 into diamonds is not technical, it's the inevitable cease and desist order you'd be getting from DeBeers.
Why stop at Turing?
Why not pardon those executed for witchcraft, the Tolpuddle martyrs or the victims of the Bloody Assizes?
Turing is one of my heroes but he was convicted under the law at the time however reprehensible we find that today. Let that conviction stand as a reminder of an age where we understood what makes us human a little less than we do today.
Re: Licencing hell
OK it's now clear that you're a MIcrosoft shill or you're just indulging in some good old fashioned trolling.
There's a reason why Linux powers 95% of the world's supercomputers and 80% of webservers. Clue: it's to do with scalability and cost.
Posted in Ten four-bay NAS boxes
Re: Absurdly Expensive
First of all I call bullshit on your figures, 12x2TB drives would cost at least £800 alone, an MSA shelf would be another £800 and that's before you've bought your HBA and server. Secondly the NAS devices reviewed here are designed for homes and small offices and are designed to be quiet and consume little power. Your disk shelf, drives and server would consume around 300w and would make a hell of a racket. And thirdly, these devices are designed for simple storage where transfer rates, especially writes, are relatively inconsequential.
Apples to oranges doesn't really begin to describe it.
Posted in Ten four-bay NAS boxes
Re: HP Proliant Micrpserver
Totally agree, the price of these NAS devices is ludicrous considering a Microserver is £120 after cashback, comes with 2GB of RAM, a 256GB drive and supports ECC. The 5.25" bay is also useful if you want to install an optical or tape drive or even another 2 HDs for a total of 6.
Granted they don't work out of the box, so you're going to have to fill it with drives and install and configure your favourite OS, but I don't think that's beyond most Reg readers.
Re: I can't say
Ah yes Kirbys. As faithfull to Murray Spangler's original pillow case and fan design as you can get. Love the way all the dirt has to go through the fan and that lovely grinding noise you get when if you happen to suck up a coin. Not to mention the dusting you have to do after you've finished vacuuming because ninety percent of what you've sucked up has been blown back into the room.
Re: Bah!
Henrys are great machines that will go on forever but like any suction-only cleaner they're utter shite at cleaning carpet due to the lack of a brush/beater bar. Yes I know you can get a power head as an option but I've never seen one in the wild.
Re: Learning from XP
Looks like the Microsoft upgrade treadmill just started turning a bit faster.
Re: Nnnnng
"The simple truth is that interstellar distances will not fit into the human imagination" - D.N.A.
Small servers
We have a number of branch sites, some with no more than half a dozen workstations. All of them have some hulking great tower server sitting under a desk making a racket and helping to keep the place uncomfortably warm. Most of them just act as a DC, serve files and printing and the CPU is idling 99% of the time. I've always thought that this would perfect application for a low-power, fanless ARM server.
Microsoft have missed a trick by wasting their ARM licence on Windows RT. They should be porting Windows Server to ARM. Though Intel might have something to say about that..
Re: Actually quite like it
I agree that Brian is probably giving an honest account of his experiences. The downvotes are probably due to the suspicion that he is one of the legions of astroturfers in the pay of Microsoft. The problem is so bad on many web forums that any post with even tacit praise of Microsoft and their products will be down-modded.
Quite sad really, but you can only blame Microsoft for such marketing tactics that seem to be backfiring.
Slippery slope..
Quite rightly, this little slimeball has been condemned for his vile, disturbing comments. But what people should be finding more disturbing is that in 21st century Britain people are now being jailed for expressing an opinion. Previously you could only be brought to book if you incited violence but now it seems an opinion that's at odds with the mainstream can earn you a stretch in the clink. How long is it before this is extended to religion or even politics?
Sorry, but I'm with Voltaire on this one.
As a 'proper' bass player
That is a 'proper' bass being one being one made out of dead trees, I demand that you remove this article and destroy any review units you have in your possession.
Posted in Cloud on the rise (Love JANET)
When I worked as a university sysadmin a decade ago I must have downloaded the entire internet several times over, often the 100m connection to my desktop being the limiting factor. This when consumer broadband was in its infancy and you had an 0.5 meg connection at home if you were lucky. Happy days.
Titties are required
As far as I'm concerned the billions amassed by Gates, Allen & co were aquired through anti-competitive and monopolistic practices. Billions that have ultimately come from our pockets. Even if you've never bought a Microsoft product in your life it's certain that a portion of the taxes you pay end up in their coffers through government purchases.
I'd rather have that money in my pocket and *I* will decide which charity benefits from it.
Flame away.
Gameplay spoiler
After that amazing intro you are given your first quest:
Collect 10 rat tails
Posted in Dim Brits think TARDIS IS REAL
I'm pretty sure..
..that people take the piss when it comes to dumb surveys like this. I know I would.
Ask stupid questions, get stupid answers.
Posted in Buffalo Linkstation Pro Duo 2TB Nas
Good thing about Linkstations..
..is that they are very hackable. First thing to do with them after you take it out of the box is get rid of Buffalo's OS and install Debian. Or if that is too much for your needs then there is a choice of custom firmware if you want extra functionality. Community support is excellent, dare I say better than Buffalo's.
I love Currys
They give me the opportunity to touch, feel and try out goods before I order them online for 30% less.
Christians
They've been promoting myths, superstition and irrational behaviour for over 2000 years, so who are we to argue with them?
Posted in Halo: Reach
I've never played a good console FPS
..and of course it all boils down to the control system. No matter how good the graphics, story and gameplay, the frustration of getting shot in the back while i'm slowly panning around to do a 180 makes me rage. No console controller is as fast or precise as a keyboard and mouse.
But don't listen to me, I'm just a grey haired old bastard that still plays Q2 over 12 years since it came out. I seriously doubt that people will be playing Halo in 12 years' time.
Great but..
..can they keep Wayne Rooney's face in lo-def.. please?
Posted in Rare NES title takes $43,000 at auction
AVGN?
Who else thinks that the Angry Video Game Nerd has bought this and that we should expect a review soon?
