* Posts by richard 7

175 publicly visible posts • joined 22 Jun 2009

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A £30,000, 295bhp 4G MODEM?!? Must be the Audi S3 Quattro, then

richard 7

Re: Permanent 4 wheel drive

VW Golf 4x4 and similar, S3, RS3 = VW 4motion Haldex

Audi A4, A6, A8, all S and RS incarnations, and all 4motion VW's that arent Golf or Jetta = Quattro Torsen

The badge is shuffled according to marque, not the tech underneeth

I have an RS2 which is the older Torsen (Gen 2) system. I've also access to an S3 3.2 Quattro. Both cars are amazing to drive and Audi can wring every horse out of those engines, and MTM can squeeze a little more on top. Both drive superbly but there is a noticable, marked difference when you push the cars. The Haldex gets out of shape faster, BUT the S2 lets go in more spectacular ways. The S3 merlely landed me in the track gravel runs. The S2 went backwards, engine said "bugger this" as everything tried to get traction to at least one wheel whith grip, at this point, going backwards at about 60, it gave up and I steamed off the track backwards with no power assisted anything.

The S2 has however, laughed as the last heavy snowfalls with decent tires (Sottozero)

The A3 really is, in all carnations, a glorified Golf and in some cases the Golf is a better bet.

FWD 3.2 V6 A3/S3 is pant wettingly scary on anything than a flat, dry, perfectly smooth road. There wernt many to start and very few left.

New ransomware strain forces hapless users into becoming Bitcoin miners

richard 7

Re: W32 Trojan ..

If it WERE that easy...

Most of the time now with this you'll loose safe mode (various stop errors while trying) or it will actually run in safe mode. They also hook in more places and almost always will have been dropped by something else so you'd be expecting to find TDSS or similar too as well as the .js/.pdf/.exe.pdf etc that dropped it. And then you just *know* they will go and open that bloody email again when you are done....

Flattening the machine is always last option unless you know you have a backup. Although most programs play nice with backups, not all do (I'm looking at you outf??k)

Reports: NSA has compromised most internet encryption

richard 7

Re: Which begs the question.. @json 03:10

http://www.realitytech.co.uk/rich/anon.png

Something isnt right then...

richard 7

Re: Which begs the question.. @json 03:10

AC's can only use the mask, all other icons are unavailable to them. Try an AC post, dont even need to post, the icons get greyed out.

Torvalds: 'We're not doing Linux95 … for a few years, at least'

richard 7

Re: The Reg will assume...

4 year old Inspiron 1545 and 64Gb SSD with VMWare Workstation and Delphi 2007 still about half empty.

Blighty street has hottest Wi-Fi hotspot hottie in Europe: We reveal where

richard 7

Re: free- only at point of use

BT Fon, Openzone and the Hubs are an abortion unto God, and if you really really beleive you can trust your network security and segregation to a Home/Business hub that was built by the cheapest possible bidder then fair play.

Not one customer I have visited, home or business has been away that these steaming pile of fetid steaming badger dropping broadcast both Fon and Openzone, BT arent too forthcoming about this aspect of the Hubs. Some of the Business users have been quite rightly less than amused.

Screw you, Brits, says Google: We are ABOVE UK privacy law

richard 7

Re: You could try 1and1

The clue is the alternate server for mail

mail.kundenserver.de

been with 1and1 years, cant fault em.

New NSA tool exposed: XKeyscore sees 'nearly EVERYTHING you do online'

richard 7

YOU ARE FREE TO DO WHAT WE TELL YOU

WAR ON PORN: UK flicks switch on 'I am a pervert' web filters

richard 7

Re: @J.G.Harston

But we arent talking about home network security, which ye and me and everyone else knows is crap in 99% of cases.

There is no way for the local user information to get back anyway, and if it did, well lil bob who normally is an admin, just makes a new user account and gets asked again.

richard 7

Re: @J.G.Harston

Leaving aside the shenanigans caused by BT's own 'pay your biil' or 'buy this shit' that businesses get, the page is sent once, it doesnt check where the page was sent or what to and you cant do anything till is cleared.

Which is great when a web enabled printer/ / windows update or anything else using HHTP polls and gets that screen delivered instead of the response intended and just sits there and your net access is nailed until you work out wtf has happened.

richard 7

Well at least you didn't also type "Hutton" and "whitewa .... NO CARRIER

Premier League boots footie-streaming site off Blighty's interwebs

richard 7

Hang on...

"The judgment recognises the parasitic nature of the enterprise"

Was he talking about the site or the Premier league and its associated vastly overpaid wastes of space?

BT: Ofcom's planned wholesale price cap? Just a smidge too tight

richard 7
Mushroom

Good joke

BT, Invest in its infrastructure, excellent, I see what you did there.

Fact of the matter is, BT are so busy chasing the huge pork barrel that is rural broadband that they are stretched beyond the ability to cope and the old infrastructure is falling apart. Whatever the reasoning BT are following the money trail and its only when you did deeper the cracks appear.

Customer A and customer B are 200M apart.

Customer A is on a 62Mbit infinity line. No issues, reliable, fast and (bar some sod nicking the cable) stable.

Customer B is struggling to maintain 2Mbit, unreliable, unstable and BT to be frank, don't give a crap.

Both are in the center of Portsmouth close to the exchange they are served by, you can see each premises from the other. However a number of premises round Customer B have the same issues. The cause is Aluminium lines, and general lack of maintenance and care taken adding customers. There are NO plans to deal with this according to BT, 1Mbit in the middle of a city is enough.

Customer A are nice, touchy, feely people (oh err missus) and have allowed us to install a Class C AP and Infinity line on their premises and bridge to Customer B.

This is NOT a one off

BT are creaming off the grants and doing the absolute bare minimum they can get away with and still avoiding an investigation (look out boys the FSB are coming btw)

So I ask again? WHAT investment?

They day they manage to actually run a reliable, stable service, live up to their promises, maintain the network and CARE about customers, stop peddling crap to customers to get 'the biggest wireless network' and all the other borderline legal crap they do, I *might* shed a tear. Seeing as they cant maintain their network, why shouldn't someone else be allowed to try and do a better job.

Cue the downvotes

Osbo jacks up spending on spooks to keep us safe from TERROR

richard 7

Of course....

all of this has to be increased. I'm becimming increasingly convinced this is all going to go bad really fast. Something will trigger it and BOOM. So they need to be ready.

Oi, butterfingers! Drop your mobe in a pint? Hope it's not an iPhone

richard 7

Re: Destruction tests

We had some CF25's in that *had* to be destroyed. That was actually easier than said and we had great fun trying to disable them. Even the prehistoric Hyster gas forklift driven over them didnt do much more than cosmetic damage.

Extreme over voltage killed one (10Kv @ 200mA)

Two more fell pray to a wood chipper

Of the remaining three one was beaten to deat with an IBM keyboard (sort of which would give out first) not sure how we killed the remaining two.

BT Tower is just a relic? Wrong: It relays 18,000hrs of telly daily

richard 7
Mushroom

Re: AM I the only.....

I remember talking to the boss in reception one day when the elderly, and possibly insane caretaker walked out the front door with henry and an extension lead. When quizzed he reponded he had spilt some petrol in the van and was cleaning it up. We both nodded, the required 10 seconds resumption of our conversation followed by silence and then 'he said what!?' and a mad dash into the car park to find it raining bits of Henry.

McAfee all-in-one security suite covers PCs, tablets, and smartphones

richard 7
Joke

Is this the same McAfee

That nuked all their customers PCs.....TWICE?

yeah, go for it, what could possibly go wrong, where do I sign up?

NASA boffins: Space 'scope JUST missed dead Cold War spy sat

richard 7

Re: Units.

Vicious rumor that such a thing exists

Weary quid-a-day nosh hack fears colonal mass ejection

richard 7

As number 1 said:

"Hold your fire! Dont light a match!"

Windows XP support ends a year from … now!

richard 7

*sigh*

XP has been good after it got itself settled. Its doen a job, it still does a good job in some places. But its too far gone now. We are into the territory where you need to start kludging things to make them work with XP. We've also smashed the 3Gb barrier in day to day PCs now and if you've ever attempted XP64 you'll know thats not an option. Dspite what the Linux brigade would have you think 7 is not actually that bad, its a leap on from XP and not a leap backwards like Vista was.

I'm not sure where we will go now though. I think Microsoft is on its way to an almighty train wreck, there seems no direction or drive in Redmond now and they do seem to have lost the plot :(

I am NOT a PC repair man. I will NOT get your iPad working

richard 7
Mushroom

And there we have it

"What I should do is send them to a local PC repair shop. The problem is that I don’t trust them. Judging from my own experiences when getting proper IT kit fixed by qualified engineers at registered service centres – all the time-wasting, cock-ups and rip-offs – I can hardly expect some back-street hoodlum to play fair with my nice neighbours."

Thank you for ruining my perception of you. I did like reading your articles, now I'm faced with the fact that I was enjoying articles written by a complete and utter tit.

There are a few small outfits that dont play by the rules yes. There are garages, builders, sparkies that dont either. The majority of us two and when asshats like you come out with ill considered bollocks like this it makes our lives a little bit harder. Most Indies are struggling right now, we'd expect help and support from fellows in our community such as yourself, not this crap. Why dont you bin the self satisfied, elitist air and do some research and find a reputable one, hell, tell me where you are and I'll find someone who will be happy to take on your neighbours and look after them.

On the other hand, there are large national companies whom I wont mention, taht everyone knows and trusts who *WILL* shaft your neighbours at every given opertunity, will sell them shit they dont need and will make their lives hell, odd you dont mention them too.

ASA says 'unlimited' broadband can have 'moderate' limits on it

richard 7

Re: Funny

Sky dont use traffic management thats why, I'm not sure they ever did tither, certainly not on the package I'm on in the last 5 years.

Microsoft splashes coat of paint on Windows 8 comms apps

richard 7

Re: Microsoft splashes coat of paint on Windows 8 comms apps

Use ZOC, it doesnt actually suck.

Oracle acquires Nimbula, buys way into open clouds

richard 7

Well.....

Not overly sure what Numbula did, but farewell, was nice knowing you.

iOS 6.1 KNACKERED our mobile phone networks, claim Vodafone, Three

richard 7
Mushroom

Re: Distributed Denial Of Service?

Airwave is a different system and its O2

Plunging BT sales hit every branch of the biz on way down

richard 7
Mushroom

Re: *claps*

No, its because they are shit. They have utterly lost touch with their customer base, increasingly the only engineers left are the ones that dont have a clue and they continue to bleat and whine about EVERYTHING while still treating theyir customers with complete and utter contempt.

No I dont like them, but having cost me £1000s through complete ineptitute I think I'm entitled to.

Pop tix touts slung in the cooler for 4 years after £3m web scam

richard 7

You've never applied fro one have you? Have a go, go on.

Boeing 787 fleet grounded indefinitely as investigators stumped

richard 7

Re: @bazza

I beleive a mechanical link is mandated by law on standard road veichles.

Intel to leave desktop motherboard market

richard 7

Re: Intel Desktop Mobos

Intel Garibaldi. I will say no more.

Greedy Sky admits: We crippled broadband with TOO MANY users

richard 7
Mushroom

Re: uhu

""If they wished I would connect them to BusinessBB sales so they could move/upgrade their service to the same shit service, packaged as a business product for 5 times the price" disconnect them, break the line, arse up the bills, and finally to put the nail in the coffin, give then a businesshub.

richard 7

All Fairness

Sky make this abundantly clear and will hand off commercial customers to the company that provides their service. If you say its for business use they will refuse to provide the service and they are not only very clear about this but helpful about finding you someone else.

Is this possibly the worst broadband in the world?

richard 7
Flame

BT are fast becomming a joke

I had this a few months ago, in an area that averages 8Mbit.

Two goddamn weeks to realise that a formerly 8Mbit line opearting at 256K might be wrong and needed looking at. Half a dozen engineers, hours on the phone, no end of buck passing and aggro before finally they sent out a broadband engineer (had had 3 phone engineers) Who acertained that the line was borked in about 4 points and ended up after 6 hours of cocking about, switching me to a new pair and redoing the last 200m of the line.

Only took another week to get the IP profile reset, all done, just in time for me to move office.

I wont even talk about the office move....

'Better than Adobe' Foxit PDF plugin hit by worse-than-Adobe 0-day

richard 7

Stooped using Foxit

When the Spyware and Malware started creeping in with the installer.

Google to scan Chrome extensions, bans auto-install

richard 7

could they also please

Stop bundling chrome with every bloody thing. At least once a week I have to remove it from a customer's machine, then spend five mins removing all the carp it left behind and then finally sorting out all the file associations chrome broke on its way out the door.

Clap Google, Amazon in irons to end tax shenanigans - MPs

richard 7

But...

"The MPs said HMRC needed a "change of mindset" on big multinationals and had to prosecute the ones that weren't paying the tax due in the UK."

HMRC are was to busy screwing small businesses/self employed to the wall for making stupid, trivial mistakes then fining them into oblivion. If they go after the big fish ....

A) They may not win as they'll be up against someone that can afford to defend themselves

C) They'll loose all the perks they get given by the big boys

D) There may be work involved.

A history of personal computing in 20 objects part 2

richard 7
Thumb Down

What no CBM?

The C64, PET and Amiga were all big game changers, arguably more so than some of the machines mentioned. Any particular reason that you've just ignored a massive chunk of history? See no Beeb or Atari either.

Fujitsu beams URLs to mobes through your TV

richard 7

Discovery...

Do it quite unobtrusively with a QR code, yes the QR code globe does scan if you are quick enough.

Why is solid-state storage so flimsy?

richard 7

A few points

We've been selling htese for a while now, especially on our Video editing suits. I resisted SSD for a long time as we've had run ins with the early IDE/CF ones and PC/104 drives before, not really that fast and last months under moderate use even with logging etc disabled. MTBF was too low as was overall life expectancy.

We push out a fair number now and have done for over 18 month, we've had one failure of a cheapie Team drive that even Team were at a loss to explain (decided it just wanted to be a 1Gb drive rather than 120). And maybe a handful of controlled failures on our test rigs. So...

Failures dont seem to be any worse in terms of numbers than hard disks. Correcting for skew as we push out more HDs, they are on a par, if not more reliable than 2.5" drives (they do fail more often than 3.5"s in our experience)

Failure modes are identical to HDs, these drives support SMART (not sure why people think they dont) and will give warning of an impending failure. Block remapping does the same as bad block reallocation on an physical disk so the warnings are there. The higher end drives will also fail read only long before they die totally. We've nuked a total of one test drive and that was days old (Bad drive to start). Yes they dont clunk, click screech and wirr, but if its doing that it was too late anyway.

If you are putting all your eggs in one basket, then you'll loose data, in this respect thats poor planning and the same as a hard drive. Using an SSD makes you no more or less of an idiot if you dont backup.

Some things will prematureley age a drive, using them as swap, cache or log drives would be the biggest culprits, read life wise they should well outlast any mechanical disk. We can kill an SSD in about 3 days, I've managed to nuke hard drives in under a day with one Samsung making its heads cease to exist and a Hitachi shattering a platter.

Cloud storage is great, until you need it. So your server is backed up to the cloud ok, cool. So your office burns down, how long is that rebuild going to take in real terms? Assuming you cant get help and have to wait for a new broadband connection thats a long wait, if you can get help a few 100Gb is going to take forever. A real backup? I'll have your server back in an hour or two at most. The cloud is still an answer looking for a question and a good place to store all your cat pics. Its not a business grade backup solution and wont be while most users connect to it by 'broadband over damp string' (tm)

Our standard setup in the editing systems is a properly sized SSD with NTFS junctions used to bring all the data to where Windows expects this. On top of this the SSD is imaged to a seperate partition on the hard drive every few days meaning that in the even of an SSD failure, the user gets told 'use F10, boot from the hard disk and we'll have another SSD out in a day' We knoe this system works, its just never been tested as one has never copped out. The Team unit was an Asterisk box that freaked.

AMD launches Android app store for Windows PCs

richard 7

Spamware

El reg need to test this stuff if they are going to link to it.

Nice app I can see uses. However I dont need the portion that sits in the tray and shows popups, for that sole reason its gone. When will the Ad agencies realise that all these peices of cretin ware do is make people remove the program and eventually the 'carrier' application gets shitlisted and removed on sight.

Space shuttle to slip surly bonds of Earth one last time over California

richard 7

Reminds me..

Of all the people that turned out for the last flights of the Concordes

Health minister warns ISPs: Block suicide websites or face regulation

richard 7

Re: "... or in front of a bridge ..."

I was thinking more on the line of 'They move?!' Come on, hard stats, how many people are mowed down by bridges each year and why isnt anything being done to stop this outrage!?

Boffins computerize giant cyborg cockroaches

richard 7
Mushroom

Venus The Flytrap

That is all

Now Apple wants Samsung S III, Galaxy Notes off the shelves too

richard 7

erm...

"Rather than innovate and develop its own technology and a unique Samsung style for its smart phone and tablet computer products"

Like Apple Invented (or claimes to)

Li-On battery Technology

Video Conferencing on Mobiles

Internet Browsing on Mobiles

Listening to Music on Mobiles

No one EVER did any of that before Apple said they did. The companies that Apple is picking on are generally innovators and have given us some major new technology. Apple have just subtley copied and reengineered existing technologies and then patented them, actual innovation there stopped years ago when they decided it was just easier to ride the PC wave than innovate. Lets not forget that the whole business is built on what came out of PARC and even then there were beaten to the market.

Apple make things pretty, thats about it. Samsung could have tried harder but Apple are aiming for 'if its a smartphone its our patent' which I think is unfair. You shouldnt be able to file patents as a weapon even ignoring software, process, biological and look and feel.

Ten 15in notebooks for under 400 quid

richard 7

Re: Higher Quality Kit For Cheap

Had the Acer through the shop along with PB, The acer wasnt a bad machine, the PB, DEAR GOD!

Remeber buying any of the DSGi/Aldi specials you are asking for a world of hurt, thats PB, Medion, Advent or Zoostorm. Sure its cheap, it'll also be shagged *if* it makes it to the end of the warranty. Parts for these machines are almost non existant so if something goes wrong you are on your own

Someone mentioned the awful Keyboard on the Pavillion, not seen that machine but I have noticed this on a lot of the newer HPAQ machines, not overly sure why this is.

As always, boot it up start in oem mode (CTRL+SHIFT+F3) and nuke all the rubbish from orbit before you ever boot it properly.

Euro NCAP to mandate auto-braking in new-car test

richard 7

Re: ABS as well?

ABS is designed to help you retain control NOT stop you faster. Common misconception. Its a PITA on snow though as it destroys the snow wedge that forms and helps you stay in control/stop

Microsoft tightens grip on OEM Windows 8 licensing

richard 7
Unhappy

Why cant they be honest?

'We hate Indies'

'You build shit pcs'

'You can't come to our party'

<Toys Ejected>

I'll reserve further ranting till we find out what this will do for us but I have a bad, bad feeling about this if you arent Tier 1

UK judges quietly declare text chat can be obscene

richard 7

Re: Oh won't someone etc...

Yeah cause they worked so well didnt they

O2 dropped the ball in Olympic cycle race Twitter fiasco

richard 7

Re: Unfair criticism

Just as well you got out then.

Microsoft picks October 26 for Windows 8 launch

richard 7

Re: I'm thinking of buying a new PC

Or you could stop lining the pockets of these companies whi will inevitably sell you crap that wont outlast its warranty and get a decent PC from an Indie that will last. Just a thought.

For my ten penneth worth. My monitors are on a vesa bracket about 2' from me, so yeah, really suited to using metro and touch. Thats not a disconnect with reality thats just a fact.

Ten budget inkjet printers

richard 7

You arent mentioning...

The software for ANY HP product and especially inkjet printers is complete total and utter crap. Common cause of horrific boot times, takes forever to install, puts a ton of un-needed services etc

Kodak isnt much better

Oh and Hp, Kodak and especially Lexmark, get used to being shafted for inak as there are no good alternatives.

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