Posts by batfastad

Shame

It's a shame that the infrastructure that results from this won't end up being owned by the taxpayer. A government funded proper FTTP roll-out, fair enough BT doing the build, then any from a wide range of comms provider can pay to provide service to customers.

It's not like trains where privatisation just results in local monopolies rather than national monopolies. With this there would be no physical or technical barrier preventing a whole host of comms providers from running services to customers in the same town/street. Plus the taxpayer gets to make money back over the long-term and ends up owning a decent blob of national infrastructure. Plus it would give Ofcom something to do.

It seems like a bunch of public money given to a private company to build themselves a nice expensive train set that we'll only be allowed to play with at weekends. And at a price we're powerless to ever argue against.

Rubbish

Wow this tactic reminds me of the early days of domains, where nearly all registrars had fees for any single conceivably action.

These guys are complete jokers, on the same level as UKReg/Fasthosts. Most companies I've worked for have had an account and I always push for a switch.

Not to mention the control panel looks like it's not changed since 1998 and feels like a bunch of cobbled together CGI scripts and Apache Server Side Includes. Don't even think about managing more than 5 domains with it.

I actually hate the way that the contact details and owner information for UK domains has to now be managed at the registry rather than the registrar as well. Want to change the ownership information? That'll be £10+VAT to Nominet.

Turning circle of a...

Turning circle of a... gov department.

Much scale, wow, big data, so hip

Funny as you see all these startups using FlapsDB (or some other NoSQL database trending on GitHub) because traditional RDBMS just can't operate at the scale they need. Are you sure about that? Facebook, Twitter, now that's scale.

Or maybe using NoSQL just increases their chances of getting their grubby hipster hands some Silicon Valley dosh, because like Big Data Cloud Internet Of Things is like so hot right now.

LibreOffice, ImgBurn, 7-Zip, Notepad++, SumatraPDF, CutePDF writer, Pidgin, IrfanView, GIMP, Inkscape, FileZilla, WinSCP, Audacity, VLC

Cryptic

I'm assuming the phone calls coming in from the NSA/GCHQ to ask for any of their users' sh*t will be encrypted as well? Because I'm fine with that. Not.

Yes. Er no

Yes Mr NSA, they were fully aware. They were also fully aware of the court order you gave them from your secret military court telling them to keep it buttoned or else.

"If you have to go back to court every time you look at the information in your custody, you can imagine that would be quite burdensome". Yes Mr NSA, that's literally the entire point of judicial oversight.

LOL

I don't believe these stats because, well, it's rubbish. I hardly ever see IIS in the wild these days.

And personally, I wouldn't even trust it to run a domain parking page, which seems to account for most of the IIS market last time I looked.

One thing that may add an element of truth is people starting to use Azure's cloud object storage service, whatever that's called, and adding DNS records to it.

What everyone doesn't realise is that the Azure cloud is probably running haproxy, nginx, Apache just with the Server HTTP header changed to appear as IIS. I joke of course but the thought of Microsoft trusting their own software to handle the business-critical applications of paying customers has put me right off my breakfast.

cloud != cloud

Most smaller/local providers offering "cloud" are basically giving you a few Dell PowerEdge nodes, in the same country, in a single datacentre, the same datacentre as all their other stuff, the same network as all their other stuff, and in the same racks as all their other stuff.

Just because the ESX nodes have been configured as a "cluster" that doesn't make it a cloud. That's just some dedicated servers with a "mission critical" premium added to the pricing. In those cases, you're better doing it yourself and spreading the risk around multiple DCs.

Proper cloud to me is the abstraction of resources through APIs and geographic redundancy.

amaze. wow.

much fisheye!

Accessibility requirements?

Official government line: Any accessibility requirements? Then go F yourself.

I've only ever used 123reg briefly, when transferring domains out for clients, and their control panel always struck me as a horrible mish mash of technologies and frameworks. They sit in the same bracket as Fasthosts to me. I wish the best of luck to all their customers and nothing but bankruptcy to both companies.

Bye ChromeOS

For several years now I've had HTPCs of various ilks hooked up to my TV. A shuttle box for a long time and currently an ageing mini-ITX Atom (Zotac nVidia ION) which has done a sterling job. These were usually on 24-7 as an all round home server web browsing kiosk Skype music YouTube etc. Early last year I bought a RaspberryPi and stuck OpenELEC on there and that's sorted all of the media playback stuff. The problem is I still end up with the HTPC on probably most days because of two annoying proprietary MS technologies, Silverlight and Skype. I would have switched it over to Linux years ago had it not been for Eurosport Player being Silverlight only.

A cheap, small, fanless x86 box would make an ideal replacement for the old HTPC and this looks pretty good. That's if I can kill the ChromeOS.

Get kids into computer science

Get kids into computer science?

Nope. Increased footfall in the gift shop required to fund CEO-level salaries.

google site:microsoft.com

Funny because the only way to actually find what you're looking for on the MS site is to ignore the built-in Bing and go Google.

Politicians

Yeah forget empowering people properly. Let's just do whatever we want and assume the hoi polloi are OK with it. I mean they're just like us we're all in this together man on the street private supper club what what?

"Politicians are not born, they are excreted."

- Marcus Tullius Cicero *

* note there's no actual evidence of Cicero saying this but it sounds about right to me so it must be true.

Honeypot?

That is all.

Apologies

Now apologise for being a totally horrendous company in every single other respect.

Overselling

It sounds to me like someone doesn't have enough product to go around, or can't afford to supply the product to all its customers.

Awesome

The great thing about Docker isn't the virtualisation and low overhead, it's the ease with which you can make deployments of applications. You configure your Docker from a base image, effectively recording a diff. Then all you really need to deploy is that diff from the base, the run file. And you know it's all self contained and a fresh environment with nothing screwed up during build/deployment.

Been playing around with it a bit at work and it's got some serious advantages.

Consumer vs Enterprise

I've always gone with consumer drives unless you need a small+quick array, in which case you probably go for SAS or flash these days. The I in RAID stands for inexpensive and using "enterprise" drives would double the cost.

Generally there's no difference, apart from when WD infamously changed the TLER flag on their consumer drives mid-way through a batch of drives a few years ago and people wondered why half their arrays kept spontaneously re-building.

This...

http://motherfuckingwebsite.com

Cost effective

Cost effective! Value for money! Efficient! Savings!

Won't stop them charging 500% the market rate back to the gov though will it.

1366 x 768

1366x768 should have been shot and killed 8 years ago. Yet it's impossible to find anything else at the £400-£500 price point.

In 2004 I bought an Asus Z71VP which had 1680x1050 and since then that is the minimum I expect.

Netbooks

Don't diss 'em! I still rock an Asus 1005HA-P. It's one of the 10" screen ones, not those early ones with a glorified CF card "SSD", massive black borders around the screen and a cut-down Linux OS.

Dual boot Win XP (gah) and Linux Mint, battery life still getting 9+ hours (covers a full transatlantic flight + airport faffing), 4GB RAM and only 1Kg in the bag. Replaced the HDD with a cheap SSD last year and it goes like a train. Well it struggles a bit with HD video on Youtube, or vimeo and anything to do with Silverlight. But I get infinitely more done on this than I ever could on a tablet. Being able to run real desktop applications is just ideal. At £200 for the amount of use it's had over 4 years it's been a total bargain. How much is the Nexus 7 again?

Unfortunately when it comes to replacing my netbook, I'm probably going to end up with both an Ultrabook(tm) and probably a tablet, for those times when the ultrabook is too big. This netbook though, goes in the bag and works everywhere.

If they had just dumped stock Android on these Chromebook things from the start instead of ChromeOS then that would make people seriously consider them, as the hardware generally seems decent. Internet access coverage when travelling around is nowhere near complete, reliable or cheap enough to go cloud only.

Offset touchpads and screen res

Just stop it, ok? I don't care if you think a numeric keypad gets in the way. Just stop.

Well done for the ethernet port though!

Stupid

It seems you can basically make any claims you like in an advert, generate sales/revenue immediately, then worry about a slap on the wrist or a small fine from the ASA about a year later. Surely that's completely arse about face?

Unless you're going to impose such massive fines as a deterrent for blatently flouting the rules. Oh, not that either.

No SD card slot?

Just give me an SD card slot you bozos!

Battery life

For the last 10+ years I've been using a small LW/MW radio to listen to cricket during the winter nights. I can get through 5 test matches and a few one-dayers on 4 or 6 AAA batteries, probably about 25+ days' of usage on average. Call me when there's a DAB or internet radio the size of a wallet that can get anywhere that. I suspect that will be... never.

Ffffuuuuuuuuuu

Their global infrastructure has to run (predominantly) on their software. It's a pretty big admission of defeat if it's not possible.

But take a second and imagine that scale of global DNS and anything else, all being managed by AD/group policy. The only word that springs to my mind is... fffuuuuuuuuuuurrrrrggggghhhhhhhh!

Still planning that Azure/Office365 migration?