Posts by Alain
83 posts • joined Wednesday 5th September 2007 05:04 GMT
Posted in Review: Disgo 8400G 7.9in Android tablet
Correction: Ultimate Rotation Control isn't a free app
It's an excellent little app that does the job nicely and I have bought it. It's cheap, but it isn't free
Posted in Oracle's hardware wing keeps on bleeding
Yes, and their DB customers as well
We have a bunch of Oracle DB-based apps whose cost to migrate them to another DB would make my head spin (provided it's even technically feasible) so we're stuck with them.
Despite paying ridiculous amounts of money for this service, their support is slowly approaching the point of being unusable. Unless your DB has crashed and burned, chances to get a reply from requests made on their dreaded Metalink (the slowest thing on Earth) within a week are close to nil nowadays.
Re: Love Swiftkey
So do I. With proper training, it feels like the bloody program reads in your mind. Almost scary.
My only gripe is about the two separate versions: phone and tablet. I'm sure there's no good technical reason for this. The same program could certainly handle both. It's more like a marketing trick to force people who have both a phone and a tablet to buy two licences.
Re: An application restart is required
Indeed, I get "an application restart is required" every bloody time I go back to the welcome screen from the app using the home key and want to enter it again. Then, 3 times out of 4, I'm greeted by an "Unfortunately, The Register has stopped"... and back to the welcome screen where I have to start the app once again. Won't stand this for long, the app is likely to be heading towards the recycle bin soon and me back to the mobile site, I guess.
Ployer Momo9C tablet, Android 4.0.3 stock.
Waze ? for what ?
This information, if true, puzzles me. What Apple really needs at this point is good quality maps. This definitely isn't Waze's strongest point. Its maps are only barely usable in areas of high user density. No satellite views or reconstructed 3-D views either (well in the version I use at least). Just flat road maps.
Also there's a long way to go for Waze to match Apple's "it just works" religion. It's still kind of buggy.
Don't misconstrue me. I am a Waze user and and find this little app extremely useful and fun to use. I'm just wondering what Apple would find in this product they can't do in-house.
No innovation anymore in the server business
HP... they used to have unique, innovatively designed server blades. Although the P-series (BL20p/BL30p...) and such had some design flaws (especially the BL35p was quite unreliable), they were a dream to manage compared to whatever existed at that time.
Then came the C-Series. The BL460c especially had a mature, clean hardware design, excellent reliability and much improved and more integrated ILO (hardware management and remote console).
Then... nothing. The newest models have inferior hardware design IMO and nothing significant has happened in terms of integrated, centralised administration.
In the meantime others have come up with much more advanced concepts like virtualised WWN/MAC addresses (eg. Cisco).
HP are lagging behind now.
Trevor, this has to be the best comment I've read on El Reg for quite a while. Thanks for the reading.
I could I written every word of it, except I couldn't (English isn't my native language).
You've perfectly summarised the amount of frustration we've reached, us IT professionals, seeing our everyday work tool becoming less and less usable. We are sacrificed by MS because we are considered as not significant compared to the consumer masses. Someday this timebomb will explode in their faces, or so I hope.
A bit more generous here in France ?
30 € voucher, eligible to all buyers from the major distribution chains (Darty, Auchan, Boulanger etc.) as well.
However shipping charges are not covered.
Lenovo just gained a bunch of new customers...
Me included... and I was a long-time HP buyer, both as an individual and in my business.
Re: It's impressive
XNU itself is based on Carnegie Mellon's Mach, another open-source project.
Dual-SIM phones are very common in Asia. Cheap no-name chinese (not too)smartphones such as iPhone look-alikes are almost all dual-SIM. Even real brand phones (I've seen several Samsung Android dual-SIM models sold).
Re: You get what you pay for
Care to give us the company name and model name anyway?
Re: On the plus side..
Some companies use online chats. I like this. Here in France Sosh (the low-cost mobile phone subsidiary of Orange) do almost all their customer support on forums and online chats. I've never waited more than a couple of minutes before having someone online, and the wait is free. Having written interaction also helps a lot having clear information passed back and forth and allows one to keep a record too (I certainly wish I'd recorded some phone conversations I've had with various customer support lines).
Of course there are situations where you can't use Internet, so they still have a regular customer service phone number, the same as Orange's so it sucks. I suspect Sosh's customers get a lower priority too. But they strongly push their customers to use their company-sponsored forums and live chats. That's part of the deal for having bargain prices on their monthly plans.
Re: KLM much worse since Air France tie-in, I wonder why?
Although I would tend to agree that the AF-KLM merger has taken the worst of both sides, this exact same story happened to me when calling Etihad's Guest (frequent flyer) phone number. They kept me on hold for about 5 minutes before telling me to try again later and they hung up.
You know, these middle-east airlines so much praised for offering much better service than our european legacy companies...
And when I eventually make it through, the person picking up is in the Emirates, so nothing to do with a French call centre.
Same DB as Orange's?
This outage coming just a few days after the 10 hours almost complete black-out of Orange in France looked a bit suspicious already. But now they provide the same explanation: customer DB failure with no apparent usable online backup of the DB. Weird, really.
Re: OS?
Don't blame HP for killing the Alpha. Blame DEC themselves. The have completely failed to promote and sell it and Alpha was very, very sick already even before Compaq bought DEC. Yes Alpha was great and insanely ahead of its time, but DEC has failed everything but its design.
I've been in a 100% DEC shop (mostly VMS, some Ultrix) for many years and they still are the best years of my (long now) career. VMS' tightly integrated clustering is unmatched by any *nix until nowadays as far as I know. Ultrix was OK, a true-blue BSD I liked. Spent several years in the board of our local DECUS chapter. Nostalgy, nostalgy...
Re: OS?
Do you actually work on HP-UX or are you basing your judgment on its state in the days of Tru64?
HP-UX 11iv3 actually is a very decent production-level Unix. I have worked on Solaris (a lot), AiX (quite some time), Tru64 (a little bit) as well as many variants of Linux and *BSD and why there are bits of HP-UX I strongly dislike such as the reboots still needed for way too many product updates, I have to say that it has generally become a mature and extremely stable O/S with everything I need: LVM/VxFS, ServiceGuard for clustering etc. On Itanium, its level of support for HP-PA legacy apps is awesome, with excellent perfs and the ability to import whole HP-PA systems as simili-VMs running at close to native speeds.
I do a lot of HP-bashing here so no fanboism.
Posted in Volkswagen Up!
Re: 52MPG ?!?!
Come on pals, this is a PETROL engine. My own 2011 Polo that likely sports a close cousin of this engine (3 cylinders, 1200CC) eats between 5.2L/100km and 6.0L/100. This converts to 54-47 mpg in your strange units if I'm not misled (most online converters seem to be for US gallons). I think it's pretty decent for a petrol engine, so at 50 mpg the Up is in the same ballpark.
Posted in Android activations near a million a day
Re: Do they know what they are doing?
Look at the /system/build.prop file on your tablet. Chances are that the chinese manufacturer has faked the device ID there in an attempt to make it able to download more apps from the Google Play Store.
Posted in Android activations near a million a day
My cheap chinese GB tablet must count for nearly a dozen activations ...
...because I've spent hours hacking into build.props, faking other device IDs to make it seen as compatible with more apps in the Play Store. At least Play Store certainly sees it as multiple different activated devices devices now :-)
No class action in France
...as far as I know. People keep calling for it.
Posted in Review: Raspberry Pi
Re: Linux computer? (AC@07:27)
`` practically all Android slates that sell for < ~£120 use ARMv5 processors''
Quite wrong. Most of the recent low-cost chinese Android tablets use the Allwinner A10 SOC, which has a Cortex A8 inside hence ARMv7.
ARMv5 ? haven't seen any in ages.
Posted in Review: Raspberry Pi
Re: Linux computer?
Android (up to Gingerbread) runs on ARMv6 CPUs too (e.g. the Telechips TCC8902). It's kind of slow, though, especially with only 256M RAM.
I expect to see a port of the CyanogenMod fork of Android ported to it someday.
Posted in VIA outs $49 Raspberry Pi-alike
Re: Compared to Raspberry Pi
Hmmm... I have an ARMv6-based tablet clocked at 800 Mhz running Gingerbread and it's a real dog.
It can't run a significant amount of software for Android too (e.g. Skype video) because of the CPU's generation. I don't know how better than the Telechips TCC8902 in my tablet this VIA CPU could be, but I wouldn't expect it to be a performer compared to more recent (and very cheap too) SOCs like e.g. the Allwinner A10.
Re: Chrome or Chromium?
I use Iron too, been using it since the very first versions and I love it. It seems to leak memory significantly less than both Firefox and Seamonkey when I leave it open for days with a handful or windows each having 10+ tabs.
It feels so good to have all the niceties of Chrome without Google spying on me (well, spying a bit less since I use Gmail and I have an Android phone and tablet).
Long life Iron, keep up the good work our German friends at SRware. I hope they will continue maintaining it.
Beer, because Iron is German-built.
Re: Personal Experience (Nortel can die as far as I'm concerned!)
``Their kit can't be crap, because even cheap stuff which breaks all the time is more expensive to operate than expensive but proper technology.''
Well, this statement is only true if you take the beancounters out of the overall picture. Unfortunately they tend to go for the cheapest offer disregarding the cost of our time.
That's the precise reason why I'm stuck with Nortel (now Avaya) crap where I work. They were the cheapest tender and now we have to bear with their brain-damaged L2/L3 switches for the next future due to corporate-level contracts.
I've had the "opportunity" to witness things happening on these boxes that I'd never seen in my 25+ years as an engineer, such as MAC address jumping from one VLAN to another in bridging or ARP tables for no good reason, loop detection kicking in and taking down links when there's no loop in sight and much weirder and equally harmful nonsense. Despite the incessant firmware updates, of course.
How good is their gear nowadays really?
I really wonder. Back in 2000 or so I was working for an ISP in a S-E Asian country and Huawei was trying hard to sell us dial-up access routers (ADSL was unknown there at that time).
We were using very expensive Cisco gear that wasn't flawless either, but the evaluation boxes brought by a handful of "engineers" they had sent to us were really pathetic wannabe copies. They looked like hand-made prototypes and the software had a very incomplete but servile imitation of IOS' command-line interface.
Their boxes were crashing like hell, needing constant power cycles. I don't think any has never been put in production, despite their being less than 1/4 of the price of the Cisco routers.
And the "engineers" :-) ... they really looked like they were coming right from some remote rural area in China. Not speaking a single word of English of course (many people speak Chinese in this country I was living in, so that wasn't so big a problem). Didn't have a clue, really.
I see Huawei gaining big markets nowadays, so I presume they've gone a long way since then.
Posted in BOFH: Dawn raid on Fort BOFH
Ah... old OSes on big floppies :-)
A breathe of nostalgia... the last OSes I've booted from these things were:
- UniFLEX 6809: such a good tiny Unix on a 8-bit processor, don't know if anyone here knows it, it was serving half a dozen ASCII terminals in 512K of memory (OK, when running on faster storage than floppies I have to say)
- C-CP/M 86 (Concurrent CP/M): the first non-Unix really multitasking O/S I've seen on x86, long before M$ had anything to offer. It had the same kind of virtual consoles Linux has.
Posted in BOFH: Dawn raid on Fort BOFH
Re: Cynical; moi?
8 1/2-inch floppy disk? dont' think they ever existed. That's 8-inch in my memory.
"...can still be thought of as RHEL-ish" (R-hellish ?)
Good one.
Re: Lets be a little realistic here...
Ouch. Not end users maybe, but for the rest of us dealing with thousands of desktops and a whole bunch of terminal servers in our businesses, that's bad news. Or any kind of server for that matter. Which 2003/2008 server doesn't have RDP turned on nowadays? we don't manage these from the console anymore. Of course many desktops have RDP turned on too, because "you know, when I'm away but on the company's intranet, I *do* need to access my computer to work". This vulnerability does seem to have all the ingredients for the popo to hit the fan.
Busy approving the updates on our WSUS and planning reboots of the server farms now... because the darn thing *does* require a reboot, of course.
Re: Irony?
Believe it or not Thailand *is* a prudish society. I know this sounds weird for a country known to be the favourite destination of sex tourists of all kinds, but this is the truth.
Precisely because the youth are kept in a state of ignorance of sex things and are incredibly sexually frustrated, prostitution flourishes and youngsters tend to do all lot of silly things like unprotected sex. Don't mix the prostitution for foreigners and the one for locals, though. They're two completely different businesses with the latter going on much more underground.
And yes, I've lived there for many years far, far away from the foreigners' ghettos so I kind of know what I'm talking about.
Re: In my limited experience*,
This and having a shock-proof screen.
Capacitive? hence glass? First time drop or walk-over will be fatal.
Re: Bigot
Surnom = nickname
Nom de famille = surname
Re: Re: Office in the cloud
Does Wine run the latest incarnation of Office flawlessly nowadays? Last time I've checked there still were serious glitches
Re: Windows is NOT dying.
Agree with the main point of the post i.e. Windows not dying, but OTOH I think that the desktop *is* dying. Look in IT stores around you, how many of them still have towers on display? apart from hardcore gamers, no home user seems to buy desktops anymore nowadays. As for the business world, I know IT buyers who seriously consider phasing out the desktop. Notebooks/netbooks/tablets fit the "mobile office" and "shared cubicle pool" schemes better, they save office space. Yes, they still cost more money for the same specs, but the gap is narrowing.
My crystal ball tells me that Windows will outlive the desktop computer.
@Wundebar1
I made it clear that what I wrote about IBM x86 blades was based on second-hand experience. Your mileage obviously varies. People I trust a lot told me that they had sour experience with large farms of IBM blades in 24x7 production, and that their KVMs were much less advanced than HP's ILO, making administration kind of a pain.
Whatever. HP's C-class were/still are good stuff. They probably were bleeding edge when released but they haven't evolved much and they're being seriously challenged nowadays. Maybe this has do to with HP's R&D in a sorry state as mentioned by another poster.
I saw presentations on Cisco blades that were really convincing. They've gone further especially in the virtualization of LAN MAC addresses and SAN WWN's, making the replacement of a failed blade a zero-configuration work business. Furthermore, regarding the "Cisco premium": as someone who's locked into using really poor and not so cheap Nortel network gear by silly corporate-level contracts, I wonder if the time we waste working around the huge deficiencies of their stuff wouldn't pay for the extra margings made by Cisco.
Cisco eating up their blade business, Itanic might become the fatal blow
As a large HP customer, we've had less trouble having the right hardware delivered on time to us than some people here, but OTOH we mostly order very mainstream blade servers. What really makes me hate HP these days is their customer support whose quality is a shame for a so-called top-notch vendor for big corporate customers. It would hardly be appropriate for the average home user. The experience certainly is very similar whether you call them as Joe Inkjet Buyer or someone running a 24x7 data center with 100's of blade servers and several clusters of HP-UX boxes.
Anyway, I think the future of their server business at least looks very grim: their line of blade servers that had matured to a good product with the C-class is now being seriously challenged by Cisco. IBM wasn't such a serious competitor based on 2nd hand experience I've had, but they certainly have to worry a lot about Cisco. They have pushed the integration much further than HP in terms of administration, monitoring, LAN and SAN connectivity. HP hasn't made much progress in this since the C-class were released.
And then comes the Integrity... the IA64 blades really have a lot to offer for a cost-effective migration path from clusters of Superdomes, but they're clearly doomed, Intel made it clear that the days of the Itanic are counted. Even if HP provide a convincing port of ServiceGuard to Linux on x86, the migration of existing application will be such a pain that there will be few reasons left to stick to HP anyway.
Posted in What's in the box, Windows sysadmin?
@Tom about Hiren's
Sorry for the plug but ... use UBCD4Win instead. You can rebuild an ISO with updated software on it (and extra too) whever you please.
Disclaimer: I have nothing against Hiren. I've used it for many years since version 6 I think. It still use it from time to time to run DOS-based programs like Seatools.
Posted in What's in the box, Windows sysadmin?
How could I forget these?
Might well come in first in terms of usefulness in my toolbox: Windirstat... such an incredibly handy tool to find disk hogs (portable, too)
Windiff: old stuff but good stuff to compare files.
Imgburn, CD Burner XP, Daemon Tools (v3 or Lite): these 3 cover all my needs for CD burning/imaging/mounting.
Registry Tookit, WinHex, FileSync: these aren't free (although FileSync works unregistered without any time limit)
Last but not least: Unlocker and Teracopy...
Posted in What's in the box, Windows sysadmin?
UBCD4Win is my Swiss Army knife
UBCD4Win (or BartPE which it's based on) is vastly superior to Hiren as a sysadmin tool IMO, mostly due to the ease of making a completely customised boot CD with whatever drivers and programs you want aboard. I can't count the times it has saved my day.
The Sysinternals tools don't get the emphasis they deserve in this article. I couldn't live without Filemon, Regmon, Procmon, Procexp, TCPView, the PS tools, Autoruns, NewSID of course... They should have come way before PDF or image viewers, GIMP, VLC, uTorrent etc. which certainly are quite useful, but hardly are tools a sysadmin uses daily.
Other tools that would have been quite worth mentioning: XXCOPY, USBDeview, the Windows ports of some extremely useful Unix commands like less, grep, sum, awk, sed, chown, find (yes I'm a command-line guy)... and also SetACL, OpenedFileView...
Last but not least Notepad2 which is way lighter than Notepad++ and has all the features that make my life easier (I especially love the easy switching between two schemes that allows editing with the DOS VGA fixed font in a snap, the easy encoding/line format conversions).
Just my 0.02 euros.
Ahem
My good old Nexus One has it too... and it works pretty well I must say.
We know of a brown dwarf that possibly did that
Since he's French, I wonder if he might be referring to Sarkozy?
@AC 22-DEC 09:54
> I wonder if HP have one (not WebOS. not PH-UX. What's the other one called?)
VMS? it belongs to HP nowadays.
Re: X Server still requires root privileges
Except running as root != running in kernel mode
@Bullseyed
I don't do any online banking from Safari neither any other browser running on top of Windows. No way. So your comment is entirely irrelevant.
Secure browsing on Windows is an oxymoron, anyway.
Why would anyone use SafarI on Windows ?
I do quite a bit because :
- I don't trust IE
- I strongly dislike what Firefox has become
- I still like Seamonkey but it leaks memory like hell
- I like Chrome but not enough to let Google know every move I make (so Srware Iron is my friend too)
- In my experience, Safari is rock solid, keeps a reasonable memory footprint, very seldom renders sites wrong and still has an UI classic enough to fit my old timer's taste
POS from the Internet? Huh?
How on Earth can a point of sale computer be visible from the Internet and allow any kind of incoming connection? no NAT, no router with outgoing-only connections? do the IT folks at Subway have any common sense?
HP-UX 11 on old iron
Last time I've checked, HP-UX 11 was perfectly happy on a 2002 vintage Superdome.
Only hams used SSB ?
Well, I must have dreamed spending full days seeking DX on my President Grant 120-channel 25-watt AM-FM-SSB set (of course always using SSB because that's the modulation that works best by far for DX) in the 80s...
Of course real DXers were using SSB even in the CB 11-meter band.
Yes, that was quite illegal by then in France as well. Just part of the fun I guess :-)
