Posts by Steve Mason
73 posts • joined Friday 3rd November 2006 15:17 GMT
I used to "game" on 8088/8086 machines that a mate's dad had at home.
From Top Gun wireframe b/w to Joust and Mean18 Golf on CGA screens. I also used Windows 1.0 before 3.0/3.1/3.11, and DOS 3.0-6.22.
I never owned an ST or Amiga, and owned my first PC back in 386 days.
Great to see all this old tech, and what could be achieved on so few resources!
"Supersonic" ?
Supersonic jets? No S*** Sherlock!
... define the speed of sound in an almost total vacuum :p
failover
[quote]
Navitaire isolated the failure to the device in question quite quickly, but the decision to repair the device proved "less than fruitful and [it] also contributed to the delay in initiating a cutover to a contingency hardware platform." A failover process that should take around 90 minutes took the best part of a day.
[/quote]
There's your problem right there. Okay, hardware failures happen, we know this, that's why you build a failover / warm standby / whatever environment so that WHEN the completely unexpected unplannable for failure happens it's not a complete disaster.
Given that you've already got the failover environment, when the dreaded happens, USE IT! No point having it if you don't use it. Muppets!
(speaking from experience when our live storage decided to wipe all its config... 2 hours in we decided that a repair would take too long and switched all services to the DR site).
Posted in Orange mobile data chucks punters
Midlands down too
No 3G today at all, normally a bit slow but not too bad.
Posted in T-Mobile UK pumps out the iPhone 4
Desire...
It's the monthly cost that put me off (aside from the usual control issues ;) )... Desire cost £17pcm over 18 months and £100 for the handset. Considering mazuma were offering £94 for my old handset (N85 p.o.s) - that's essentially a free handset for a bargain monthly payment. Not a very heavy user so the free minutes/texts bundle with 750MB data is a steal!
David Willets
What a cunt.
That is all.
3.6.4
Odd, firefox auto-updated to 3.6.4 here this morning.
Bug has been fixed. BOLLOCKS!
Just checked my apps to block them, accidentally clicked on another app's link from the formers profile page (due to delays in remote desktop), and lo! their application was auto added with no confirmation.
Bug has NOT been fixed and yet again facebook are lying through their teeth.
Only major ISP...
"maintains its commitment to being the only major ISP not to... ‘traffic shape’ speeds on any of its network products"
Pardon me if I'm wrong, but Be* have been doing this ever since I joined them about 2 years ago.
nice concept
be great for anywhere crowds gather - say, town or city centres on friday or saturday nights.
I suppose these could also be rigged up to some batteries so all those daytime shoppers can power the lights for at least some of the night if not all, depending on how many lights are connected up.
Obviously you wouldn't / couldn't connect every single streetlight up in those areas which see virtually no pedestrian "traffic" - I don't think that's the point of the trial :P
Fail
Please, just stop linking to them. You're only propogating their sheer stupidity and ineptitude. If I want my blood pressure to rise then I'll go and read the fail myself - I don't need the likes of El Reg pointing out their shite for me!
no shit sherlock
about fucking time... had mine nicked a few years back - took them 9 months to figure out there was nothing on them and return them to me.
I know wheels turn slowly but christ.
Marketing
I'd rather they spent fuck-all promoting something nobody wants, than blowing millions of tax-payers begrudgingly donated.
I say this is good news!
Hell hath frozen over
For once I'm in complete agreement with MS - never thought I'd see the day!
Whilst sounding like a pipe-dream, a unified policy regarding ~anything~ let alone something as complex, fiddly, and politically sensitive as data retention can only be a good thing. Call me a dreamer, but the sooner all nations around the world start agreeing on single policies, the sooner petty disputes can be ironed out.
I don't blame them at all for trying this, and good luck to them! They'll need it cos I can't see it happening especially with the likes of China, Vietnam and the UK with their "different" takes on privacy ;)
Bye Bye Adobe
I moved away from Adobe reader a while back (went with Foxit) and have never looked back. No more crashing my browser or making it hang while I wait for the almighty bloat to do whatever the hell it was doing while my PC slowed to a crawl.
Crap bloaty software, good riddance.
Daily Fail
Just ignore it, hopefully it'll go away.
And Reg, I have to agree - the more recent spate of references to the Fail is worrying.
Posted in Intel crams four displays into one PC
games
guarantee they'll have some uses in games assuming the developers code for it... flight sims with extra instrument panels, racing games with side/rear mirrors, MMORPG's with statistics and chat windows just to throw a few ideas out.
WoW already does similar with the logitech G15 style keyboards.
Security & Re: Fail for the researcher
There's a simple mantra in computer security...
If you can't physically secure your hardware then you have no security at all.
In other words, 99.9% of all computer hardware / software can be broken if someone can get physical access to it.
This is not news.
Posted in Firefox 3.7 swivels glassy eye
@competing on aesthetics
the trouble with competing on aesthetics is it bloats the software more than necessary and 9 times out of 10 slows down the experience of using the app as well as consuming more resources as if Vista doesn't do that enough already.
dammit, you made me get on my soapbox again
Posted in Firefox 3.7 swivels glassy eye
Aesthetics
So purely look and feel, with added bloat and no more actual functionality or features ?
Don't get me wrong, I love FF, but I detest changing things for change's sake just to make them appear more sparkly. Give me Function over Form every day, not vice versa
/soapbox
could be worse...
Aunt Bessies are selling frozen jacket potatoes... I mean it's a potato... stick it in the oven, it's not rocket surgery :P
I wouldn't mind if you could nuke it in the microwave for 3 mins for a nice crispy spud, but no, you have to cook it in the oven for almost as long as you would anyway... basically, it's a frozen potato, sheesh!!
Posted in Sony Bravia KDL-37S5500
Shop Online
Seriously, I bought a Sony Bravia 40" about 12 months ago for £650... just not from Sony.
Shop around and you can get some nice deals - Sony were trying to punt my telly for well over 1k at the time, muppets!
www.avforums.com is a good place to start
Title Tatle
What I find most shocking is I agree with a Chinese DNA database more than the UK DNA database based on the respective reasonings behind it.
Whether or not the Chinese d/b suffers from mission creep the same way UK schemes do remains to be seen, or am I being too cynical.
What a frightening thought that the UK could learn from the Chinese Govt w.r.t privacy :(
no shit sherlock
I expect this sort of thing to start happening the world over. Fact is, there is a GLOBAL energy shortage as oil reserves dry up.
Global Warming is a huge fucking cover up getting us to lower our energy usage before we all run out. Now I'm not saying we shouldn't be more efficient and wasting leccy is actually a bad thing (tm) but at least be honest about it and the sheeple might take more notice than producing bad science to back your claims - only to be disproved / countered 2 weeks later when some other boffin notices the glaring holes in your THEORY!
It's nuke or nothing I'm afraid, I just hope against hope that we can get a fusion reactor (or 20) online and the quangos don't stick their big feet in because it's not "profitable" enough.
ROTM
I for one welcome our laser wielding Dell powered overlords.
BasTards
BT get advice on savings
BT claim advice is bogus and refuse to pay up
BT secretly put into practice all the advice for free - bargain!
BT being underhanded? Who'd have thunk it?
I wouldn't trust a single word that comes out of the BT PR/Tech departments.
Posted in El Reg suffers identity crisis
Re: What the Daily Fail says
Totally agree, I couldn't bring myself to every agree with anything the fucktards at the fail say, so voted for the guardian entry instead ;)
Posted in Large Hadron Timewaster
research not worth it
I suppose we shouldn't be "wasting" lots of cash in Nuclear Fusion either - nothing wrong with burning the inexaustible supplies of fossil fuels... oh wait... just maybe the potential rewards to the entire planet let alone the entire human race might actually benefit in some way that can't be measured in mere $'s.
Fuck off back under your prehistoric rock you total fucktard.
Packet Inspection
The only way to guarantee different service levels for different traffic is to use Deep Packet Inspection to see what kind of traffic is flowing. This all plays rather nicely into the hands of Phorm and collating information in the Uberdatabase.
I'm sick to the heart of this surveillance society already.
oil...
I've said it before, and I'll say it again...
Although there is a possibility that man-made emissions / deforestation / etc has had an affect on the planet's atmosphere and climate, they are absolutely NOT the reason for all the media hype - that's down to the planet running out of oil and is being used to frighten the masses into cutting down our energy consumption until another form of power production can be found.
Of course people are wary of this nuclear fusion technology as there's not enough profit to be made from "unlimited" power.
/tinfoil hat
baloney
let's not even go into gamers needs ;-)
seconded
Be do seem to be a refreshing change to the norm of ISP's... they acknowledge when they have issues, have support staff that actually seem to know what they're on about *shock* and above all provide a truly uncapped and fast service!
16meg down 1 meg up for £16 pcm, uncapped, can't complain at that!
very interested to see if this bondage (is that obscene ?) kicks off, and for how much.
constant acceleration
given my limited understanding of angular momentum, the fact the jets would need to fly in a circle would mean they need to be undergoing constant acceleration - thus burning even more fuel than standard supersonic "cruise", ie, in a straight line.
I'm skeptical though as I'm pretty sure this would already have been thought of, it's not rocket science ;)
The Teddyphone is the one on the left
Best, Caption, Ever.
Genius!
Posted in Half of Brits abuse apostrophe's
bugbear
Just about my biggest bugbear with the world's apparent growing illiteracy is the inabiltity of people to differentiate between the words "lose" and "loose"... the former being another word for misplace, the latter being used to describe a knot shortly before I tighten it around their scrawny little illiterate necks!
the internet: My god! It's full of tards!
/rant
Posted in Coppers nab more mobe-yapping drivers
punishment
and double those fines for those "stuck" in yellow box junctions.
wankers!
DR
The most important part of any DR process is the testing.
Doesn't matter how resilient your networks/hardware/processes are, if you don't test them, you may as well not bother.
awesome news for bikers
Motorcycle leathers and so-called "waterproofs" are never entirely waterproof despite what manufacturers claim - and only get worse over time.
Can't wait for this to hit the shelves!
Posted in OpenGL 3.1 promise follows gamer revolt
branching
why don't they simply branch the code tree?
OpenGLG3.0 for gamers
OpenGLC3.0 to keep the CAD camp happy
seems like an easy solution to me, if you can't keep both camps happy with the same codebase.
Posted in UK.gov misses deadline on EU Phorm probe
Bravo!
Bravo TheRegister... keep up the astoundingly good work!
Be Unlimited - it really is
Another thumbsup for Be... yes they've had some DNS issues - but I switched to OpenDNS a long time ago.
16meg down, 1meg up, almost zero downtime, hardly any latency, tech support that speak english and understand technical questions! *shock*
I often download large amounts of data, and often have 2 or 3 machines on 24x7 - and I've never been throttled or had any kind of correspondence asking me to limit my downloads.
All this for £18 pcm... I can't recommend them enough, switch now if you can!
Posted in Is green storage a dead end?
finite resources
whilst I agree with the gist of what this guy is saying, there is a finite amount of energy available to any industry, and the human race in general (at least until fusion reactors are realistic, if politics ever allows them off the ground due to tumbling energy prices, hence tumbling tax income).
As such, all industries should be working toward a more efficient use of said energy, getting more for less before the oil runs out.
Posted in The Moderatrix will see you now
The Environment Agenda
Is global warming behind the latest drive to cut energy usage? Or is it simply that we are running out of oil (my preferred explanation behind the CO2 crap flying around) ?
Much obliged!
choice of words
"HP is working diligently with Microsoft on a software update and will be proactively distributing"
2 things wrong here... if they'd been "diligent" the cock-up wouldn't have happened.
Proactive would imply they are fixing something before a problem occurs, clearly this is a REactive distribution of an update not even written yet.
Marketing tossers need a dictionary :P
Posted in No sense of humour? Avoid Bootnotes
APPLAUD
sorry for the caps, but
/cheer!
I have nothing more to say.. if you don't like it, don't read it.
PS. Fucktards was coined by me over a year ago, and I demand royalties ;)
PPS. I am now putting together a "Motivation Poster", so fasionable these days, of a Monolith with the caption "The Internet: My God! It's full of tards!"
