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).
Posts by Alain
123 publicly visible posts • joined 5 Sep 2007
All you need to know about nano SIMs - before they are EXTERMINATED
Google's Nexus 7 tabs 'can't perform' if flash RAM crammed
Airline leaves customer on hold for 15 hours
Saturday 4th August 2012 08:13 GMT
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.
Saturday 4th August 2012 07:52 GMT
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.
O2 outage outrage blamed on new Ericsson database
HP asks court to force Oracle to obey Itanium contract
Thursday 28th June 2012 04:44 GMT
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...
Thursday 28th June 2012 04:35 GMT
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.
Volkswagen Up!
Tuesday 12th June 2012 18:40 GMT
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.
Android activations near a million a day
Tuesday 12th June 2012 06:41 GMT
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 :-)
Microsoft forbids class actions in new Windows licence
Review: Raspberry Pi
VIA outs $49 Raspberry Pi-alike
Tuesday 22nd May 2012 17:27 GMT
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.
Chrome spends a week at the top of the browser charts
Tuesday 22nd May 2012 17:06 GMT
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.
Huawei banned from Australia’s NBN: reports
Monday 26th March 2012 18:27 GMT
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.
Monday 26th March 2012 06:48 GMT
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.
BOFH: Dawn raid on Fort BOFH
Saturday 24th March 2012 18:44 GMT
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.
Oracle revs home-tweaked Linux kernel to 2.0
Microsoft warns of RDP attack within next 30 days
Wednesday 14th March 2012 05:59 GMT
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.
Facebook blamed for getting Thai teens up the duff
Saturday 3rd March 2012 09:59 GMT
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.
Archos touts Android tablets for toddlers
Weeing Frenchman sues Google over Street View photo
Death to Office or to Windows - choose wisely, Microsoft
Friday 24th February 2012 20:28 GMT
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.
HP earnings fall 44% on Whitman's debut quarter
Thursday 23rd February 2012 08:56 GMT
@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.
Thursday 23rd February 2012 07:15 GMT
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.
What's in the box, Windows sysadmin?
Friday 10th February 2012 07:19 GMT
@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.
Thursday 9th February 2012 21:34 GMT 
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...
Thursday 9th February 2012 20:11 GMT 
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.
iPhone 4 incapable of handling Siri, says chip chap
Deep-fried planets discovery offers hope for Earth’s future
A simple HTML tag will crash 64-bit Windows 7
Wednesday 21st December 2011 13:17 GMT
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
Four Romanians charged with hacking 150 Subway shops
Oracle gives Solaris 11 final spit and polish
UK CB radio crowd celebrates three decades of legality
Friday 28th October 2011 15:57 GMT
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 :-)
Thailand PM's Twitter account breached
EMC exec flames El Reg
Saturday 24th September 2011 19:16 GMT 
At EMC, our technology, our customers, and our results speak for themselves
Well, I am one of your bloody customers, and I'm must say I'm quite unhappy if I may "speak".
If it weren't for running contracts signed in my (government) organisation well above my head, we would have dumped EMC by now where I manage things.
Your tech support sucks big time these days and keeps going worse, especially the response times, qualification and spare parts logistics. I don't know if it's specific to EMC France, but support used to be quite decent 2 or 3 years ago but it's been going down the drain since then. Nowadays the kind of service we get for the (expensive) maintenance and support contracts we pay for is plain and simply unacceptable.
H/W reliability isn't what it used to be either. We keep replacing drives on our latest Clariion and we have a lot of failures on our Centeras.
Brit ISPs shift toward rapid pirate website blocking
HP may NOT spin off PC biz
Thursday 22nd September 2011 16:21 GMT 
Desperate HP Employees, season X episode Y
This is beginning to look like episodes of my favourite TV series.
It would really be fun if it weren't tragic for HP employees to be aboard a boat with different people trying to turn the wheel in different directions and which obviously has started to sink already. I *really*, *really* wouldn't like to be working for HP these days...
On the other hand, if they kick Apotheker out and put people at the wheel who might have a clue, that could possibly be the light at the end of the tunnel. I do hope that Ellison's wraith will start easing up and that the death sentence against the Itanium might be reconsidered (especially since we've bought some of these beasts).
Staying tuned for the next episode...
Dell woos rattled HP PC sales partners
Thursday 8th September 2011 17:16 GMT 
Wake me up when HP stops shooting themselves in the foot
This is getting really tiresome.
Just every attempt they've made to communicate with the world lately has been a blunder or telling the exact opposite of what they just told a few weeks (days?) before.
No captain at the wheel of the boat, really.
HP-UX stretches over new Superdome 2
Wednesday 7th September 2011 08:22 GMT 
Who's going to buy them?
I'm afraid HP has lost most of its credibility as a company with a vision. The NY times and WSJ can't be wrong when they point out the big mess their strategy has been during the last year or so. All along the lines of "WebOS is strategic and we'll make a new, real iPad-killer"..."After all we dump tablets and WebOS altogether"..."Oh wait, after all we kind of keep WebOS"..."We're the most profitable PC manufacturer and it's a strategic maket segment for us"..."Well, after careful thinking, we shall get rid of that business" etc.
In the challenging times the Itanium market definitely is facing, who can still trust HP when they claim their commitment to that line of products? Who can still invest big bucks in that iron when there's a significant risk of HP suddenly deciding to dump that line of products?
And I'm not even speaking of their customer support going down the drain, with the tech support for their HP-UX line of products now in the same (outsourced overseas) hands that (fail to properly) manage customer calls for consumer products.
Good luck as a software company with the new toy you've bought yourself (Autonomy). As a server and PC manufacturer, I'm afraid you're no longer a credible contender to me.
Pre-paid Chinese users still anonymous despite new law
Malware attack spreads to 5 million pages (and counting)
Help! My Exchange server just rebooted
Sunday 19th June 2011 17:58 GMT
Large Exchange installations?
My employer (large institution) is about to switch over 80,000 mailboxes from an old Sun iPlanet-based cluster to Exchange. The Sun thing has a terrible web mail and is kind of slow sometimes but I've never heard of any long outage or data loss. The move to Exchange *really* scares me and pisses me off too, because for much less than the amount of money they're going to shell out to MS they could hire a bunch of good system people and run a good old open-source Unix-based mail system. I'm having a hard time believing Exchange can reliably handle such a large number of mailboxes anyway and I'm prepared to the worst. Has anyone had an experience of such large Exchange installations?
Tux, because Unix/Linux rules for mail servers IMO.
A sysadmin's top ten tales of woe
Wednesday 15th June 2011 19:36 GMT
Re: the emergency switch
A variant of this one: in a very large computerised hospital, due to an electrical fire in a transformer room (that was mid-August of course... Murphy's laws at work), we had been doing several complete system shutdowns and startups (6 Unix clusters, 20+ Oracle DBs, 50+ blade servers) over a few days. This was required by frequent and mostly announced (but on very short notice) blackouts due to problems on the generator trucks they had parked on the street next to the building. At some point, totally exhausted after 3 almost sleepless nights, we were doing yet another system start-up after just receiving a confirmation that power was back and "hopefully" stable. A guy taking care of just a couple of not-too-important Windows servers came into the room to boot up his own boxes. He almost never comes here, doing his work remotely. After being finished, he goes out and ... switches off the lights of the room. None of us instantly died of a heart attack, but that was close.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
