Posts by Steve 366 publicly visible posts • joined 9 Aug 2007
"Surely no one at The Register believes this is truly a well respected news site amongst the professional IT community?"
Well, at Oracle Open World last week, after Larry's keynote, the Oracle website went titsup again. It was amusing to watch all those IT pros in their booths first trying oracle.com, and then, when they got an error, heading straight for theregister.com to see what was up with Oracle :)
"The original "standard" working hours of 09:00 to 17:00 were chosen so that even on Midwinter's day, when the sun does not rise over London until 08:00 UTC, a man (for it was only men, in those days) would have some daylight by which to shave and dress for work."
Fine for London, what about Edinburgh, or Belfast? Don't forget that until the coming of the railways and the need for standard time, each part of the country kept it's own time based on local midday, and if that meant that Old Amos had to get up at 4am to milk t'cows, so what.
The best thing about all this modern computer stuff is flexible working hours, which translates nicely into "go to work when it isn't rush hour"
EMC SRDF? Timefinder?
Hitachi TrueCopy? Universal Replicator?
StorageTek AVS?
DRBD?
and more, many more. All can be used locally (Sync mode) or remotely (Async, over IP links) for DR.
Maybe I'm mssing something, but why is this any different from what all the storage vendors have been doing for years?
Besides, just put ZFS on your disks, and take regular snapshots, and you don't even have the overhead of copying the blocks.
Well, let's hope that they make that crappy new URL bar optional, fix the postscript printing on Solaris/Linux, and get the performance back to snuff, else I'm staying on FF2.
I didn't realise how slow FF3 was until I went back to FF2 because of the first two problems, and boy did FF seem fast :(
> To the best of my knowledge, no company has EVER sold an asynchroneus terminal.
VT52s & 100s? Wyse? Newbury?
I remember the days when my asynchronous terminal had more processing power (a Z80 in the monitor and another in the keyboard) than the RML380Z it was connected to...
I'm only 100 miles or so from CERN, so if I see a great tsunami of proton porridge, quark quorn, or even strangelet gazpacho coming this way next Wednesday I'll drop El Reg a line.
Of course, if I were a scientist at CERN I'd have a webcam pointed at the main building, an on-screen countdown, and a timer on the "video off" button, just for laffs :)
Last time I had a UK PAYG phone (2-3 years ago) that was exactly the situation. If I bought £5 of credit it activated the phone for outgoing calls for a month (incoming for 6 months). If I didn't make calls during that month I had to buy another topup.
When did it change?
I also find that US hotels do not always offer free wifi, and the more expensive the hotel the less likely it is.
The trick, though, is to sign up for the frequent guest programs with all the chains. Often that gets you free wifi, even if you're not actually staying in the hotels. Works very well for Fairmont, for example.
> not easy making ends meet...
ain't that the truth. I was having lunch overlooking SF Bay last year, and this *very* nice yacht cruised past. Half the folks in the restaurant were looking and asking the waiters "who owns that?".
Yes, you guessed it. Larry on his way for a little afternoon outing. $20m will probably barely cover his increased lunch and fuel charges.
No, I'm not jealous or anything...
I can buy a book in an airport shop, and drop it in the recycling before I leave my hotel to go home. Or I can have my Kindle fondled by security gorillas looking for the latest Al Quaeda manifesto, dropped in the bath, nicked from the hotel room, and I'll guarantee the batteries'll go flat 3 pages from the end of a thriller while I'm still waiting for my connection in Heathrow T5.
Another technology-led 'innovation' like mobile-phone TV...
People seem to forget that a lot of 'card fraud abroad' is the result of cards being skimmed *in the UK* and then used abroad where there is no chip&pin to prevent it. Not taking the card abroad won't change that.
As to taking cash instead, that is plain daft. When it gets nicked you have no comeback, at least with card fraud you have bank guarantees and travel insurance to fall back on.
You DO NOT vote for the party, indeed it is only very recently that party affiliation was allowed on the ballot form.
You vote for your local representative, as an individual.
Of course since most people are too thick/uninterested to care about the people, putting the party on the form makes the choice easy, hence the bunch of tossers we have at the moment. Then again, as the "Literal Democrat" incident showed, some people are too lazy to even read the form properly, never mind research the candidates.
"a small download of about 4MB"
Who the hell thinks 4MB is small? 32K is small. 100K is middling. 4MB even before you get the actual web page itself is fscking *enormous*.
That's the flash mentality, and it's going to kill the web for anything useful. Yesterday I tried to look up some info on new cars. Ford and Opel websites are nothing but 100% solid flash. I have a 34MBit/s network link and a multi-GHz desktop, and I still gave up after screenfuls of "loading......." followed by useless animated crap. It is actually easier and much more pleasant to drive to the garage and pick up a paper brochure which contains REAL INFORMATION". Not very environmentally friendly, though...
Can't we set the environazis onto these people?
Capitol punishment? Would that involve being flogged on the White House lawn? That should get a good audience...
As far as the death penalty goes, I think only treason, and arson in a Royal Dockyard still carry that, and I'm not sure about the arson. Polls suggest that a majority of the population are in favour, especially for terrorist crimes (real ones, like planting bombs in restaurants, not the ones like downloading a DIY Osama bin Laden beard kit), but the politicians wimp out every time they're given a vote :(
> the students stopped setting fire to the toilet rolls when a fake camera was installed.
What's wrong with a smoke detector and powerful sprinker in each cubicle, and detention (or a good thrashing) for everyone who comes out soaking wet after the alarm goes off? Has the added benefit of better fire safety too...
However legally right or otherwise Ryanair may be in this, O'Leary has really shot himself in the foot with this one. Once a few people get turned away at the airport, or kindly offered the chance to re-purchases their cheap tickets for £300 a throw, this is going to backfire. The punters won't blame the resellers, or themselves. As far as they're concerned it will be Ryanair who turned them away, and Ryanair whose fault it is, and that's what they'll tell their friends.
There are many halfway-decent low-cost airlines like Easyjet. Ryanair isn't low-cost, it's cheap. O'Leary is about to learn the difference.
Definitely worth trying to get there. It's a publicly-funded facility and so the public has a right to visit. I have some great photos showing big info screens labelled "MAGNET TEMPERATURE(K) 1.9". Brrrrr.
If you can get a suitable techy group together and have CERN stand you lunch, so much the better, the restaurant isn't half bad. I've had much worse lunches from paying customers...
Canute's behaviour was intended as a demonstration to his sycophantic followers that he wasn't all-powerful. He knew what he was about.
I'm with the pedants, using accepted spelling is an indication of education, which is what universities are there to do. I too get very irritated about people who are too lazy or ill-educated to spell correctly, and my own spelling is impeccable.
I jsut wish my tyipng wans't so crpa.
SFR play similar tricks in France. They offer subscriptions with "unlimited" 3G use, but on investigation that's only unlimited from the handset itself, which uses an access point (APN) named "wapsfr" and handles HTTP(S) traffic only. The software that handles it also checks the browser's ID string, and only plays if it's a mobile browser. Using the APN "websfr" has no such restrictions, and allows the phone to be used freely as a modem, but SFR didn't originally point out that such use falls entirely outside the 'unlimited' subscription, on a pay-per-MB basis.
After numerous complaints from people with 1000+euro monthly bills, SFR now blocks "websfr" by default, you have to phone and ask for it to be enabled, at which point you get a lecture on the issue.
Of course there is no shortage of hacks on the web which will allow the use of a browser like Firefox with a changed ID string and a suitable tunnel or VPN through a proxy to bypass all that...
Traditionally the summer season is when the weirder ideas surface, but I wonder if the current US and UK governments have gone so far into incompetence with their normal policies that we're actually seeing some sort of cosmic wraparound phenomenon, where the wackier politicians have looped around into common sense again? Well done that congressman...
"How auditable is paper? You don't get a receipt there, you don't know how your vote was counted."
1) It doesn't matter how *your* vote was counted, it matters that *the* vote was counted accurately. If (a) you're happy that you voted for candidate "X", and (b) all the votes for candidate "X" were accurately counted, then all is well. Given the non-techcy nature of most people, even today, convincing them that a machine can do (a) is tricky, and satisfactorally proving that the machine does (b) is very difficult.
2) In the UK, at least, there is an audit trail. A ballot can be linked to it's stub, and the stub to a voter. It would take enormous legal work, and a lot of co-ordination, to do so, but in extreme cases it is possible. The concept of a secret ballot isn't necessarily the same as that of an anonymous one.
You make the mistake people have always done. That figure is EBITDA.
Most of that money will go in tax, and investment to keep the network running.
It's like expecting a taxi driver to set his fares according to his operating (petrol, servicing) costs alone. It'll work for a while, until his car wears out and he can't replace it.
BT have thousands of exchanges, which like any modern electronics have a life of 15-20 years before they are dead or obsolete (unlike old mechanical stuff that could last 30+). It's been a while since I was close to that industry, but assume 5000 exchanges. 20 years life, so that means replacing 250/year. That's one per working day. At several £m a time you'll burn £5bn very quickly.
It's a huge company, it has huge income and huge bills. By most measures they made very little money for their size, hence the hammering the shares took.
Sure, you can do phone networks on the cheap. Like my ISP, which is averaging 50+ hours of outage per month at the moment. Doing it right costs money.
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