Posts by Fuzz 989 publicly visible posts • joined 25 Jul 2007
+1 for outdoor cat5e. Personally I spent a little more and got some outdoor rated stuff but the regular stuff is probably fine.
I used to have some homeplug adapters, same ones BT give out but they couldn't cope with streaming 1080p and they use a lot of power for what they do.
If you have "All products" selected in Products and Classifications then you're asking for trouble.
It means that any software Microsoft decide people might like will start turning up on computers that you administer. That coupled with automatic approval is just a bad way to configure WSUS.
Other software Microsoft might decide to install for you if you're stupid enough to have All products ticked included the bing bar, bing desktop, Windows live photo gallery.
The thing to remember is that All Products means All current and future products.
The windows version of dropbox is using the standard windows autoplay functionality so if you've already told Windows what to do with your pictures dropbox won't try to upload them. However it did offer to upload a bluray for me the other day. It might have a job fitting that into the 2GB of free space.
I went through all the devices in my house I leave on and the only one that consumed a slightly significant amount of power was the DECT cordless phone base. It has a power supply that contains a transformer so that must be consuming a bit. I seem to remember it being as much as 20W for the whole thing which is a lot for a device I use at most once a week to speak to my mother.
I seriously hope you never have either.
The light switch on the wall switches the mains voltage. The transformer(s) are connected after the switch. If your switches are switching the low voltage you would also need to provide a means of isolating the transformer.
The only time the switch doesn't directly switch the mains voltage is when the lights are controlled by some sort of automation system then the switches control the controller which controls the lights but this kind of setup isn't common in a domestic setting.
Installed the software and it immediately set about updating everything it could.
Some stuff requires a manual update.
Then there's a list of all the other software on my computer all with green ticks informing me they are up to date. Except they aren't not all of them. So the software is useless because it can't be trusted.
So I went to Royal Mail and read up on their opt out service. You either write to them or email them and they send you a form to your home address. They do this, they say, for security reasons. Makes sense to me otherwise I could opt anyone out I liked.
So I sent them an email asking for my form to be posted out. About 30 minutes later I received my form by email I just need to print it off and post it back. So much for that "security" then.
and there lies the problem. My credit card whether I use the mag stripe, the chip, or the NFC chip works all the time. I can go out for a weekend and long after my phone battery has died I can still pay for a taxi home.
If NFC payments can't replace a card then there's no point, and they can't replace a card.
There is a place for putting other things on your phone but not important stuff like money. Reward cards could go on phones, maybe cinema tickets. I'd worry about having a train ticket on my phone because of the battery issue. A day out in a city could easily drain your phone, plenty of Google maps usage, a few photos, listening to some music as you walk around and then there's no ride home because a dead phone is less useful than a piece of card.
The problem is that none of the ultrabooks have a complete set of specs that justify the pricetag. The Asus is the only one with a decent resolution screen but it's let down by a poor touchpad and a screen with low contrast and limited viewing angles. All the rest have 768 pixels vertically which, on a laptop costing around £1000 is a joke.
The new Sony vaio Z is close to what ultrabooks should be (I know it's not technically an ultrabook) I almost bought one before I discovered that the if you want 8GB of RAM (should be standard in a machine of this cost) you have to get the 256GB SSD which costs an extra £400 over the 128GB model this at a time when you can buy a 256GB Samsung 830 for £150. The RAM is soldered onto the board so upgrading yourself isn't an option.
There is a market for these machines but the people that are prepared to pay £1000 for a laptop want one that is worth £1000 rather than a £500 laptop in a thin case.
the objective lenses on the DEV-3 seem very close together. I would have thought that to get a decent stereoscopic effect, especially at distances that would prescribe the use of binoculars, would require the lenses to be further apart. That being one of the reasons why binoculars have the objective lenses wider apart than the eyepieces.
so last week I was in a cottage with a few mates, we had a laptop with a bluray drive and a projector and a new bluray disc.
The bluray disc wouldn't play in the laptop because the bluray software refused to play it. However the bluray box included a second disc entitled digital download. Problem 1, disc requires an Internet connection authorise the computer so you can watch the file which is on the disc that you have that came in the box with the film that you paid for. So we set up some tethering on a phone and allowed the laptop to connect to the Internet, authorisation failed.
We played with this for a few minutes, in the end the way we got to watch the movie was by downloading makeMKV and ripping a copy of the disc, circumventing the copy protection, onto the harddrive of the laptop.
This is what's wrong with DRM, it's easier to bypass than it is to follow.
"...Google's next Android platform 'Jelly Bean' should also be available"
is there somewhere I can place a bet on whether on not my Motorola xoom will have been updated to ICS before JB is released?
Google need to get a grip on this, there's no point releasing new software versions with new features if most devices are unable to use them. Phones are still being released with 2.3 on them.
My Xoom is a perfect example of how stupid the situation is, if I was in the US I could have ICS but because I'm in the UK so I want a UK English dictionary on my device I'm still waiting.
People will get tired of this, they'll see the Apple users who receive updates as they come out. Apple are still updating their 3 year old 3GS
this different in a lot of ways. my electric toothbrush charger uses around 1W of power whether or not it's charging (it's actually slightly more when not charging). The battery on the toothbrush takes over 12 hours to fully charge. Part of the charger fits around the toothbrush.
The wireless power we're talking about here could (in the future) be built in to your coffee/bedside table, your desk, your car dashboard. Placing your phone on or near any of these surfaces would activate the charging circuit charging up your phone without you needing to worry about where you put the cable.
Of course, until it is built in to existing surfaces it's actually worse than just plugging in a cable since the charging unit takes up more space. If that wasn't the case then desktop chargers would be popular.
5GHz channel support
graph of all the collected data
power usage
how well does the router support moving clients between 2.4 and 5GHz as required by signal strength?
for routers with USB ports what filesystems do they support? What kind of speed do you get accessing the disk?
alternate firmware support, the buffalo comes with dd-wrt but do any of these other boxes support it?
These things aside though, this is quite a good round up, I think the screenshots of the UIs tell you a lot about the products. Interesting that the reviewer didn't like the TP-link interface when it's not far removed from most of the others.
Of course the real issue here is that 5GHz just isn't worth it for most people. My 2.4GHz N router happily gets to the 10-15Mbps my broadband provides, despite me being able to see 15 other routers in my local area. It runs dd-wrt and cost £30. When I need something more reliable or faster than 2.4GHz wifi I use a cable.
Whilst linkedin were at least hashing passwords there are countless sites out there not performing this simple task.
Those sites are easy to spot, they're the ones that have limitations on their passwords. I just signed up to a t-mobile.co.uk account to manage my dongle the password must be less than 15 characters and contain no special characters. The only reason for this is that the field they are storing the string in doesn't allow more than 15 characters or special characters.
"If there was some way to start a video chat simply by dialling the telephone number and choosing voice or video - I think a whole bunch more people would go for it."
isn't that how video calling works? A lot of 3G phones have forward facing cameras for this feature, the reason why it's not on all 3G phones is that no one uses it. The reason no one uses it is because it is not because it's difficult it's because it isn't very useful and it costs more than a voice call, most people simply don't want to make video calls.
is this the most stupid laptop screen ever?
The aspect ratio is there for watching movies, not any movies but specifically ones that are 2.35:1.
Lets start with the aspect ratio, where is this content for 2.35:1 screens? Almost all content for small screen viewing is produced in 16:9. Films that are shot in 2.35:1 are delivered to your screen in inside a 16:9 letterbox. I'm guessing that if you take this laptop and go to watch a film on netflix or lovefilm you will get a letterbox at the top and bottom and pillarboxes down the side. A lot of content isn't even 16:9 it's 4:3 with a letter box so that will look even worse.
Then you have the bizzare resolution 1792x768, if you're watching 720p video then you have 1280x544 which will need to be upscaled to fit the screen, if you've found some 1080p content then that will be 1920x817 so it will need to be downscaled to fit the screen.
Nobody is going to buy this laptop, if they sell 100 I'll be amazed.
As for the other two offerings, so what.
I think you could be right on the Me comparison, however this is very different to the Me issue.
Me was rubbish behind the scenes, it was unstable, driver support was poor, it was slow. However the interface was quite nice, it was the Windows 2000 interface which most people would only have seen at the time if their place of work was using it. It was familiar enough looking very similar to 98 that people were used to but with a bit of polish.
Contrast this with Windows 8 where behind the scenes the OS is great, it's stable, fast, I've no doubt driver support will be as good as Windows 7. The problem with Windows 8 is the interface.
doesn't mean they can't be made better, there are two main improvements.
1. The taskbar is now available on all screens in the monitor with options for whether the program buttons appear on all taskbars or just the one on the application screen.
2. Desktop wallpaper, you can now have wallpaper that spans your desktops or different wallpaper on each screen. There's even an option to automatically show landscape pictures on the landscape screens and portrait ones on the portrait screens.
"I really love having to slide away a screen with a big date/clock thingy on it after logging in too - really easy to do with a mouse."
I'm not trying to condone Microsoft's insistence on forcing the Metro UI on everyone but this screen is easily dealt with. It slides neatly out of the way when you press a key on the keyboard, so that's only one extra pointless keystroke you didn't need to use before.
What level does the counterfeiting run to?
Presumably these are a different kind of drive that has been relabelled most likely drives that have failed some kind of test; that would be easy enough to do. The thing that is going to be harder to do is change the firmware on the drive so that it reports the correct model number. If that has been done then it's an impressive forgery, however if the counterfeiters are clever enough to perform this feat then you'd think they'd also be clever enough to spell the name correctly on the label.
Of course you have to ask what the warranty situation is on these drives, I would guess that WD would expect their drives to be imported through official channels and probably don't expect them to be hoping across the Atlantic.
Similar, but a lot more detailed, a wifi scanner shows you all the nearby wifi networks. It shows you ones that are broadcasting their SSID and ones that aren't. It tells you their relative strengths and the channels they are transmitting on. If multiple instances of the same network are available with the same SSID but different MAC addresses then they are shown separately. They can be useful for planning wifi network deployments, positioning antennas etc.
It's a very useful tool but if it's something that you can't live without then an Android phone is probably a better way of getting there than a jailbreak.
I don't think they do want the spam to stop, they'd much rather that the spam continued flowing in a way that was easy enough for them to identify with 100% accuracy so they can keep selling their product.
I didn't realise people still used pipex, I used freedom2surf years ago and the service was great. It continued OK when they were taken over by Pipex. Then the whole lot went to Tiscalli, it was fine for a while then one day, my Internet speed nose dived. I checked my router and sure enough I had been moved onto Tiscalli's LLU service without any consultation. I started my migration the same day.
There hasn't been a release candidate, we've had an early developer build which had the reg hack you mentioned and then a beta (consumer preview) release which doesn't. Of course there is still a chance MS will put the switch back for the upcoming release candidate.
format obsolescence is not generally caused by manufacturers.
Tapes became popular alongside vinyl because they were portable. The quality wasn't as good and all that rewinding was a pain so they never took over from vinyl.
CDs are considered better than vinyl by most people because they are easier to use and allow you to jump forwards and backwards across the disc accurately and instantly. They didn't completely replace tape because they weren't as good on the move.
mp3s have replaced tapes because they're better in every way. For some people they've replaced CDs, for others CDs are still useful as a way to buy uncompressed DRM free music.
DVDs combined with PVRs have replaced VCRs because again in almost all use cases the new product is better.
examples of products that are their purely to line pockets are minidisc, DCC and bluray, these are products that have benefits over their predecessors but not enough to warrant going out and repurchasing music or video collections to take advantage of.
If you go to the Sony website you can order one. No idea how many ports it's got although I know it definitely has at least hdmi and 1 each usb 2 and 3. There is an add on dock with an optical drive and some sort of AMD graphics. I'm guessing this connects over thunderbolt so there must be one of those onboard too.
Standard display is 1600x900 the 1080p screen is an extra £40.
Standard disk is a 128GB SSD (listed as 3rd generation I'm guessing one of the newer sandforce based drives) 256GB is £410 512GB is £1100!!!!!
Standard RAM is 4GB you can opt for 8GB for an extra £110 but only if you also get a 256GB SSD
The 3G option is 14Mbps for £110
backlit keyboard is an extra £25
If you go and look at the Sony store, you can configure one of these latops. The standard screen is 1600x900, the 1080p is an optional extra.
However the cost of the 1080p screen is only £40 and this is on a price list where doubling the size of your SSD from 128 to 256 (would be about £100-150 in the shops) will cost you £410. So this just shows how stupid the whole 1366x768 screen issue is.
I am very tempted to order one of these, it's exactly what I want, shame about the cost.
same stupid issue, after all these years the ctrl + fn keys are still the wrong way round. Lenovo have fixed this on their other laptops but the thinkpads are remaining the same.
If it wasn't for this stupid mistake the X1 looks great, would have prefered 1680x1050, those extra 150 pixels make a lot of difference.
The problem here is that 4G isn't a properly understood standard. When 2G phones came out, no one called them 2G, they just said they supported GPRS.
When 3G phones came out, they were clearly different from everything else, they were big and had lousy battery life. The LTE phones that have come out so far are nothing like this, they look and perform similarly to 3G phones.
For Apple this is just about advertising, it's not possible to look at the 4G label and decide what that means. I don't understand why Apple don't simply advertise the product as "80Mbps mobile data" or what ever speed the ipad can reach when it's sat next to an unused mobile cell.
The whole labelling things as 2G, 3G 20G etc. is stupid. It started off seeming like a good idea, but it very quickly gets out of hand. Much the same as the naming for USB, does anybody buy USB devices looking for ones that are super speed, hi-speed or full speed?
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