* Posts by The BigYin

3080 publicly visible posts • joined 25 Mar 2008

Osborne urged to end islands VAT-holiday by small-biz group

The BigYin

Yeah

Cuz Joe Blow/Wahid Ahmed who run your local IT shop/corner store can afford to operate their own warehouse on the Channel Islands. It's Joe and Wahid who realise profits in this country, pay taxes in this country and add to the social value of this country. The multi-nationals don't.

This law was meant to help flower sellers? Fine. Then change the law to explicitly state flowers!

Programmer gets 8 years for theft of stock trading software

The BigYin

Do I understand this correctly?

Steal some code.

Social cost of crime: negligible.

Punishment? 8 years in jail.

--- Vs ---

Trade in dubious products, mis-sell loans, misrepresent assets, evade taxes, evade regulatory controls.

Social cost of crimes: massive to the point of being incalculable.

Punishment? None. Instead you get bailed out by the people you ripped off and can still pay yourself billions in bonuses.

Microsoft Kinect hacked to control the PS3

The BigYin

How long before...

...Sony being a law suit for lost "Move" sales or something? Or by-passing security controls or some other clap-trap?

Fans face freezing Apple MacBook Pros

The BigYin

Weren't...

...the latest Macs slammed for poor build quality? One comment being how the heat sinks etc were attached and the amounts of thermal past used?

[Not dig - genuine question]

Sapphire Edge HD

The BigYin

Nice looking

Is it USB 3? Article does not seem to say. A big plus is that it is not encumbered with Windows, which would have just been too bloated for an efficiency demanding device such as this.

If it was for the frame drops (shouldn't happen at this price), this could make a good front-end when loaded with Myth, XBMC or simialr.

AT&T ends illicit handset tethering

The BigYin

@Ammaross and @ Mechman

Well the answer is simple, isn't it? Don't sell "unlimited" if you cannot provide "unlimited". As I said, how the end user uses their bandwidth is no one's business but theirs.

So AT&T should perhaps just sell capped contracts (not this tethered/untethered crap). If people buy a 5Gb contract and blow it by letting their friends leech, then that is entirely their lookout. They should also be able to tether their phone to their own devices to avoid having to buy extra contracts and dongles just to get connection.

They want to re-sell? Still not a problem, so long as they have purchased enough down speed/data allowance to cope.

The BigYin

@david wilson

Thing is, the tap has been taken on the house side of the meter, so the extra gas is counted. The gas company should just charge the home owner for the total. Owner's problem.

If the gas company was dumb enough to sell at a flat rate with no caps, then it is the gas company's problem.

Unlimited means unlimited. Pure and simple. We should not let companies alter our language to suit their own needs. I have no issue with caps, just don't sell a capped/restricted/limited service as f***ing "unlimited".

The BigYin

@David

But you insurance was not advertised as "unlimited", was it? How pissed off would you be if you bought "unlimited" insurance and then discovered weasel-words in the micro-print?

Unlimited is unlimited - don't sell it if you cannot provide it.

The BigYin

Sorry, what?

People pay for a service (the connection). So long as they do not exceed whatever the agreed limits are, how they use that service is no ones business but their own.

If they are exceeding, AT&T should just charge them more.

Saab-spotter blogger poached by the company

The BigYin
Joke

Two questions

1) Are you an architect?

2) Are you ignorant of what a "Vectra" is?

If you answered "Yes" to both, go buy a Saab.

Dell Inspiron Duo

The BigYin

Why wait?

There are some good touch screen implementations around, they're just no Windows.

Patent-pimping pair attacks Apple, PayPal, Victoria's Secret

The BigYin

129 page patent

In the sweet name of zombie jeebus, no wonder the USA patent system is ballsed up.

Police just rubber-stamping US data slurp

The BigYin

What was said?

USA: Jump!

Europe: Yes SIR! Jumping SIR! Jumping higher SIR!

USA: All your data are belong to us.

Europe: Of course SIR! No question SIR!

And here was me thinking it was just the UK that was the pathetic little lap-dog of Imperial America.

Skyhook vows to take Google suit to bitter end

The BigYin

Skyhook got a patent...

...on working out where you are from what you can see/sense? Dear gods. Did no one mentions the old shipping navigation system (forget name, sorry) that uses known, fixed masts and figures out where you are by looking at the signals?

Foreign Office endorses 'free' Microsoft travel advice API

The BigYin

And...

...MS will wait a while for devs to to use their new API and become dependent on it, then suddenly start charging for access. Like I said "Free != Open".

And why is this page trying to snoop on us with "RioTracking2.jsp"?

The BigYin

If they published their data...

...in an open format, then I am sure that people would spontaneously develop APIs and apps. But that wouldn't get the civil servants their free meals at top restaurants and "fact finding" trips to the Seychelles.

The BigYin

Free != Open

Why is our government turning over what should be public information to the hands of a private company? One that is hostile to open standards?

MS embraces/shuns Google's open video codec

The BigYin

MS loves open!

And by "open" they mean "open your cheque book and cough up, suckers". h264 is not an "open" codec it is "closed with a no-cost (for now) license to decode and, in some cases, to encode". The only reason MS likes it, is that they are part of the group that holds the patents and stand to make millions from it.

One must remember that MS is actively hostile to any concept of "open". Hence their repeated patent threats (although they never mention which exact patents).

I for one am glad to no longer be beholden to the Beast of Redmond. (Nor and I beholden to the Monster of Mountain View".

Microsoft and Mozilla edge towards web privacy consensus?

The BigYin

Go one further

Install something like "Privoxy" and nuke them at source (well, nearer the source)

The BigYin

Trust

I already do a lot to stop the marketing parasites from tracking me by blocking the hell out of their cookies and scripts. I am supposed to trust these people to not track me when I ask (sprinkles and a cherry on top)?

We are talking about the kind of people who wouldn't lift a finger to save their own drowning granny without first showing them some targeted ads for swimming lessons and aids.

I'll switch on the "do not track" (because is won't be on by default as is should be) but I will continue to block the hell out of as much tracking stuff as I can.

Bloke with hammer fixes London's Olympic clock

The BigYin

Why...

...in the name of buggery would you need Apache/MySQL for that? (Isn't "201" a stanard error code anyway, not related to the server?)

A couple of quid for a standard PCB (found in any washing machine, VCR...) and a few more quid for a display, done. Heck, they could have got a local tech college to make it and promoted UK training, skills and people.

Oh wait, the Olympics is about corporate shcmoozing not people. I forgot.

Make streaming a felony: Obama

The BigYin

@Andrew

You just prove the point at how ridiculous this is. Applying geographic territories to a network that doesn't give two damns about geography is an exercise in futility. If using a VPN or similar, then you *ARE* at that end point.

I too have used "illegal" source from time to time, often because I cannot find the media on the legitimate source (due to bad UI) or the legit source is such terrible quality.

Only two models work; 100% ad supported, 100% subscription supported (third-way being a mixture of both). That's it, nothing else will work. You know that, I know that but it does not fit the existing business model of Big Media, and rather than change that model they would rather change the world.

Their attempts are just seen to the Internet as a blockage, and we all know what the Internet does to blockages, don't we boys and girls?

Footnote: There is a fourth way, and it has been tried before with various degrees of success. Get the viewers t fund the show directly. At the moment the amounts are small, but this could be away for people to get what they want direct from the creators with some media exec snorting most of the profits up their nose.

The BigYin

Umm....

Surely the offence is committed by the person making the copyrighted work available?

And that it that person and their server are outside of the USA?

And how does the USA check whether or not, under local laws wherever the server is based, if the person has the rights to stream?

So once again the USA seems to think that their laws are the world's laws and that we must obey their pathetic little whims.

I thought the USA was the land of the free - not the land of corporate imperialism.

And as for a world power? Give it a few more years, the USA is a debt-ridden minnow compared to the might of China.

UK boffins to develop 'Solar Squaddie' electro-uniform

The BigYin

Umm....

...if it is working on the temperature gradient between the inside of the battle dress and outside, won't that have the effect of chilling the soldier? Their heat energy has to go somewhere.

Why not just go down to the local camp store and buy them out of the solar/wind-up chargers, solar back-packs etc?

This seems like a lot of money for stuff that (basically) already exists.

Twitter ad play chokes third-party devs

The BigYin

identi.ca

'Nuff said really.

London's Olympic clock claps out

The BigYin
Flame

Oh gods...

...18 more months about this jumped-up sports jamboree.

The 64-bit question

The BigYin

Why...

...do I need 64-bit beasts on my desktop if I have virtualised said desktop? From the past few days on El Reg it seemed like everyone and their donkey had a hankerig for virtualised desktops, so I am a bit puzzled why the 64-bit question even arises.

Outside of a few niche uses (e.g. video editing, large image manipulation and maybe some devs) who really needs more than 4gb chuntering along on their dekstop?

Microsoft releases IE9 for chip happy Windows world

The BigYin

A monoculture is the real handicap

"Rivals like Chrome, Firefox, Opera, and Safari – which spread their bets by working on different operating systems – are handicapped. According to Microsoft."

So let me get this straight. MS's browser is restricted to some versions of MS's own OS due to dependency linking etc (and no doubt the OS is dependent on some browser classes) and it's the *others* that are handicapped?

What?

The fact that the other browser can run on multiple platforms is a massive boon to consumers and companies. If their services are web-based (and done to the standards) they can switch to the best platform for their needs, not be hamstrung by MS. So if spec'ing a new web-based solution, demand that it be cross-browser; that way you increase cost-saving opportunities.

It's also massive props to the engineers of Opera, Firefox, Chrome, Safari et al to get their browser working on MS, given MS's active hostility to standards and open source in general.

The BigYin
Flame

And another thing

"web apps built on web standards like HTML5."

HTML5 is *NOT* a standard, so please stop calling it one (and most of what people call HTML5 isn't HTML5 anyway, marketing destroying truth and clarity once more).

There will be pain ahead when the standard is actually set and MS refuse to update IEx to meet that standard. We'll be back to people having to create sites for the actual standards compliant browsers and then again for IE. Straight back to the bad old days of IE6. Urf.

Iran to attend Olympics, despite 'racist' logo

The BigYin

Just boats and bikes?

Pfft. You really don't give Great Britain credit. This is the *modern* Olympics and Great Britain stands to take home a clutch of gold medals in *modern* competitions:

--- Lager relay chug-a-thon

--- 100m blunder and chunder

--- Tag-team street brawl

--- Fake tan slop and slap

--- Kebab chucking (contains no identifiable meat products)

Microsoft compares Amazon cloud to 'horseless carriage'

The BigYin

It's a "new paradigm"...

...to MS. MS are ramping up to compute like it's 1980!

The BigYin
FAIL

Huh?

MS, who were late to the Cloud just like they were late to the Internet, are claiming OTHERS don't get it?

The Cloud is a modern take on the old mini/main-frame idea, except with a mini-main-frame that can (if you have it set up to do so) expand/contract as demand permits and even move itself over to another data centre should the need arise (fail-over etc).

Working in such away requires an OS that is perfectly happy to live "on" the network as it were and not expect to be a series of monolithic installs with a local user (probably running as an admin). It also helps if any GUI is network transparent, this means the server can do what its good at (crunching the data) and the client can do what its good at (making it look pretty). Perfect for low-power clients like smartphones, netbooks and tablets.

In summary - the Cloud demands everything that the MS stack isn't, it demands a Unix or a Unix-a-like way of thinking, probably with a x-windows a-like to boot.

MS's Azure is the horseless carriage, they've put it on a motorway already populated by articulated lorries, X5s and S1000RRs; and for some reason this is everyone else's fault.

Balanced, neutral journalism is RUBBISH and that's a FACT

The BigYin
Flame

@Trevor 3

"PFI" is a way to fund government projects off-balance sheet (thus hiding the true cost from proper scrutiny). As a general rule PFI is very high-risk for the tax payer and costs a lot more than just doing it the old fashioned way. It also ties public expenditure into fixed contracts for decades that can only be varied at increased cost.

So if one used PFI to build (say) a hospital, then didn't need that hospital for whatever reason, one is screwed. One still needs to pay. If it turns out the hospital is too big, one's screwed. If the hospital gets the wrong kind of patients, one's screwed. Etc ad nausea.

The only things PFI is good for is ensuring MPs (or their pals/partners) can get cushy directorships and forcing future generations into crushing debt.

The BigYin

Except...

...a politician would never say that. They would say "That is a hypothetical question and I really won't be drawn into answering. There are many aspects to 'two' that must be considered holistically and how they interact with society at large. This is why we have engaged in a public consultation to find out what the public wish 'two plus two' to equate to."

Or, if discussing costs "That was done under PFI and thus is commercially sensitive."

World's bees face multiple threats

The BigYin

Bees are cool

Can't beat a spot of honey on the old porridge (lowland dwelling jessie that I am).

Wasps, on the other hand, are utter bastards and serve no function.

KILL THEM ALL!

I'm no great fan of spiders either, but I tolerate them as the EAT WASPS!

Phobic about wasps? Me? I wouldn't call it a "phobia" as such, more of a pathological hatred.

Google contradicts own counsel in face of antitrust probe

The BigYin

Not likely

This is the EU, run by unelected committees who meet in secret, publish no minutes and can't even get their accounts approved. Google will just grease the correct palms and the problem go away.

BT vs Sky vs Virgin

The BigYin

@Gansta

"The UI is maybe a bit slow ( but not as much as you say)"

Yes, yes it is as slow as I say. I know because I spent a frustrating time trying to set up recording for WSB by searching for "motorsport" under the "TV Channels"

"You can't watch LiveTV while searching OnDemand (Probably a marketing decision rather than a technical one)"

Yes, I know this and I really don't care why it is that way; it's a PITA and affects my experience as a user.

"You can't hide Unsubscribed channels - So what? If you're on the V+ package you probably have XL anyway."

I can't view them and I don't want to have them cluttering up the guide, that's why.

"Why would you need to use Ethernet and USB? The software has no function for that - the recordings are encrypted for a reason."

You assumed I want to lift media off the V+ box and you assume wrong. I want to view media I already have on my network. The V+ box is running on a Linux distro, including "smbfs" would have been a snap.

"Have you heard of a Wireless Router? Never trust bundled routers."

I'll agree on that, I'm using the bundled one at the moment but considering buying another one and chucking DD-WRT on it.

Most of the above will be moot once I get around to setting up Myth with Freesat. The V+ box will either be returned or can just gather dust.

The BigYin

Minor correction

It's 80hour of storage, no 80gb. So that does match what El Reg got - everything else still stands though.

And a few more I forgot: Schedule information is incomplete, it does not tell you if the show is a repeat or not, often misses the year and there is not quick way to jump to other showings. You cannot search on the summary, actor or anything else (and have I mentioned the search is slow?). The UI is fugly. Really, really fugly (and there's just now excuse for that).

And the inability to use Ethernet means you cannot consume media you may have on another other networked appliance (e.g. a NAS). Hello....Virgin...this is the 21st century calling. Get with the sodding program.

The BigYin
Thumb Down

Virgin on the ridiculous

I am a new Virgin customer and I wonder just what kit they sent you. Firstly, my HD (Samsung) only have 80gb of space. The UI is slow (ask it for "motor sport" and it takes 15+ minutes to search the schedule), the search feature is hidden in a sub-menu you cannot access without losing live TV. All the "on demand" features are fragmented into sub menus that make perusal difficult and cause you to lose live TV. You cannot hid channels you do not subscribe to, all you can do is "favourite" some and that means favouriting everything that you subscribe to. The box (despite having the ports) cannot use Ethernet or USB.

The router (a re-badged NetGear) reboots for every single change. Want to set a fixed IP? Reboot. Want to change the SSID? Reboot. Want to... Reboot. Pain in the bloody ass.

I'd give Virgin at most 50%.

If thinking of getting BT, Sky or Virgin, don't waste your money on the TV packages. It's 100+ channels of utter crap. Use the catch-up services instead.

Internet Explorer 9 pulls on best pants for 14 March release

The BigYin

@AC

Err...you rolled out an unstable beta to the whole enterprise? Really? Really, really?

Or do you mean that you and one or two other techies key to play with the shiny?

Yes....I thought as much.

The BigYin
Flame

IE9. Yawn.

Microsoft welcomes you to 2005.

Oh, and HTML5 isn't a standard yet, do you think MS will update the browser when the *actual* standard gets fixed? Will they cock.

So it's welcome to 1998 and "This site works best in..."

Meanwhile corporates are still running IE6 as their proprietary code on the proprietary platform is too critical, too brittle and too badly documented to be touched by anyone.

We know who we have to that for that catastrophe don't we? So unless IE9 can run IE6 ActiveX controls and render non-standards IE6 pages perfectly, no one will upgrade to it.

The most up-to-date browser I am aware of any enterprise using is IE7. If they had made the right decision a decade ago (i.e. follow the feckin' standards) they could have had a near-seamless upgrade path. but no. The consumed the MS Kool-aid and screwed themselves over.

And they will do it again if they ever start using IE9.

Router-rooting malware pwns Linux-based network devices

The BigYin

The new routers...

...are NetGear. They're still a bit crap though.

If I didn't rely on it so much, I'd risk DD-WRT install. heck I may buy a second router so if I break it I am not stuffed.

Retailer warns anti-pirate 3DS firmware imminent

The BigYin

@Anon

Why? Does the 3DS come with an "Other OS" option?

Canonical pares Ubuntu down to 2 editions

The BigYin

Never had any issues

On an old Compaq that would blue-screen in XP when trying wireless, Ubuntu was perfectly happy.

Edimax PCMCIA card worked a treat too.

You probably have a Broadcom chipset and they ARE a clusterfsck. The fact that they don't work is not a fault of Canonical or anyone else, it's the fault of Broadcom and their crappy drivers.

Do yourself a huge favour and get an Edimax dongle/card. They work right out of the box (Windows, any Linux distro) and have yet to let me down. Cheap as chips too.

As others have said - did you log a bug with the logs and hardware specs? Did you look into the forums for anyone else with the same kit? Did you ask for help on Launchpad?

Building Windows 7 skills - will we need another 10 years?

The BigYin

@Richard 22

I've had mixed success with "ProcessExplorer" in the past, but it is way better than what XP does by default!

Why they make it so hard beats me....

The BigYin

"Safely remove" makes sense

Well, it makes sense when you know why it is there. It's to make sure that all writes are complete and that you don't trash the file system by yanking the drive. This is why some devices (e.g. mice) can be safely yanked, there is no writing going on.

What pisses me off is when it says "I can't something is locking it" but never, ever tells you what that "something" is. Then you play a game of hunt the app/process in order to get your drive out safely; sometimes necessitating a reboot to get the friggin' lock removed. Win7 seems to be a bit better than XP, but not by much.

Anti-religious campaigners smack down census Jedis

The BigYin
Flame

The state should not be funding...

...faith-based schooling. If parents want to stunt their children's ability to critically assess evidence by forcing them to believe in some mythical sky-fairy, then they can do it at their own expense; not mine.

Feeling heat from Macs, Microsoft sells PCs sans crapware

The BigYin

Also...

...any recent Linux install CD.