Re: Ethernet
Have a look at the Beaglebone Black
EDIT: Actually don't... that's not what I was looking for
894 publicly visible posts • joined 1 Aug 2009
Was thinking the same. Until I got to "Non-executive directors on the firm's board include Baroness Manningham-Buller, DCB, life peer in the House of Lords and former director general of the Security Service (MI5)".
So it seems the best way of winning Gov business still is to have a "Baroness Manningham-Buller" on your board. Anyone aware of any channel suppliers for those and how are they deployed?
PowerShell is no doubt a step on from the abysmal effort at command line that MS had been peddling since the mid-90s. Admittedly I've only looked at it briefly but the implementation and syntax of commands that I've used seems so inconsistent and appears to vary massively depending on the Windows team/product (Exchange vs IIS vs SQL Server etc).
It's useful as a way of exposing a programmatic API to what is usually point-n-click Windows interfaces and wizards.
But you still need a decent wrapper language to bind it all together. And that's where cygwin comes in for me ;)
Not hatin', just sayin'.
Leatherman Micra is the boss of portable knives. I've had one (a few) for years and they are truly portable. Sometimes a little bit too portable... to the point of no return at airports where I have ended up having to bin it and buy another.
And that concludes the story of my ownership of the Leatherman Micra. You're welcome.
Is this some sort of physical media format?
Joking aside, I just don't have the space or desire to store a crate of discs for someone. If the publishers/studio wants me to store a copy of their latest "re-make of a prequel to a re-make of a book" for them then that's fine. Storage prices start at £20 per year for long-term archival. Though contracts might be terminated without notice when I decide to dump them at a charity shop.
If they want me to give up my time to actually watch their latest "re-make of a prequel to a re-make of a book" then that will cost them $£$$£. Prices on application.
Their business model is all wrong :)
I, me, you, we would all be banged up if for industrial espionage on this scale.
As ever, the rules are different for those that make the rules.
I'm not condoning terrierislamopedoismists or whoever the threat to national insecurity is this week. But there's defence and there's offence. This is most definitely offence.
Yep. You don't think they have access to anywhere near the bandwidth they actually sell to their customers do you? I'm fine with the principle of overselling, I totally get it. But there's overselling to make sure users have a fair service, then there's BT's overselling to maximise profit while being able to trumpet "X number of properties have access to super-fast broadband*"
* but only at off-peak times. In a vacuum. At close to 0K at which point the home hub is transformed into a Bose-Einstein Condensate and only then able to shift packets at the advertised speed.
You've probably guessed... I wouldn't p*ss on BT even if it was on fire.
Used it for a number of years at a few small offices and worked well. IPCop also. But as embedded router boxes increased in power and features our need for the use of commodity hardware and dedicated firewall distros has gone away.
Used a few Microtik RouterOS devices in the last 5 years which do a good job but with fewer moving parts.
Agree with this.
Worked at a small business on a business park for a number of years and being on the ar$e end of town the ADSL was terrible. All the residential cabinets along the main road had been deployed in the first wave of FTTC rollout. But absolutely no effort to provide anything more than ADSL to businesses on the business park. The only option was leased line/ethernet connections which started off at £1k+ per month, they just didn't have the budget for that.
Well that sounds like it will make fares cheaper so a +1 from me. Waiddaminute!
Since public transport is clearly aimed at the luxury travel market these days, I would expect very decent connection speeds.
When East Coast GNER National Express (or whatever they're called this week) say on-board wifi what they mean is a bunch of 3G/4G dongles bonded together across the length of the train. Not that it matters. I'd rather use my own bandwidth from my phone/whatever device, than a connection shared amongst a carriage or 12.
My DAB radio sounds like a potato. Underwater. And needs a dedicated landfill site for the batteries it eats. And has a mass of at least 500g.
Until it doesn't, DAB is dead to me.
Whereas my long wave portable Roberts radio can achieve similar potato-like sound quality for a whole winter cricket test match series, all on a single pair of AAAs.
The few times I tried #! over the years I liked it but just couldn't use it medium-term. Unfortunately openbox just didn't fit for the way I prefer to work... not being able to use the desktop annoys me and unfortunately seems to be trendy and like so hot right now. Also Debian always has Iceweasel instead of Firefox, which I realise is basically the same thing, but it's just something else I had to faff with on a re-install. For some reason my Lenovo ThinkPad (with a nasty AMD Neo X2 CPU/chipset) was pretty unstable... wifi sporadically not working, random freezes and failing to boot etc. I know I know, ask for a refund, fix it yourself etc.
I switched to Mint+XFCE a few years ago (now running Xubuntu for a couple of small reasons (Mint totally munging my Firefox profile with gubbins)) and XFCE does the job perfectly. No flair, no needless tinkering every 6 months by some UI committee, massively customisable, and the desktop and UI just stay out of your way... exactly how a desktop environment should be.
Overall it is a shame but there's no reason why the project couldn't live on as an openbox theme or something on Debian. I have massive respect for anyone willing to put so much free time into a project like that and so completely understand when they need to pay some bills or generally get on with life.
Considering the tax-payer is giving BT a decent amount of dosh for the FTTC roll-out (apparently ASA rules they can call this "fibre") I presume the tax-payer will then own all this infrastructure and will charge BT Openreach Whoever PLC for using it in the future to recoup the investment. Wait, what?
However in this case I sort of agree with BT. Decent commercial business-grade connections are available throughout central London from many suppliers. If you're a hip startup with no cash, no product to speak of, no sales to speak of and shopping in the residential market, then you have to wait your turn like any other residents. What, hardly any residents in your area?
There are lots of other small businesses and humans you know, outside of lucky lucky London. I live in London with sh*t ADSL and sh*t ADSL is all I need.
I would make the same argument I made about the 'lympics. If anywhere needs the cash spending on infrastructure it's definitely not London. Regardless of what some oik London politician says, in London.
+1 for Xilo
Went there for their O2 Wholesale connections after my Be connection was about to be migrated to Sky. Unfortunately O2 Wholesale were sold off so had to migrate to a TT wholesale connection. Not actually noticed any difference and Xilo handled the whole thing really well.
There is some good stuff in there, just a shame so much of it is wow, so hip, much Ruby, amaze! Nothing against the language. But from an operations point of view all my experiences of Ruby have been a complete pain in the backend. Probably different if you run Ubuntu Server Tepid Teabag etc in your enterprise though.
Some more stuff here too https://github.com/alphagov but don't expect it to actually, well, work at all ever.
Well my annual report on Cisco goes something like this... Sell kit that's always full of bugs, so you keep paying for support to get software updates to fix the things that supposedly should have worked in the first place. It's the same report as last year, and the last 10 years before that.
Not that I'm bitter at having wasted most of this week dealing with an interoperability issue between minor release versions of iOS.
Unrelated but I just wish they'd stop tinkering with the UI, then trumpeting as if it's a great revolution in web browser UI, when usually it just looks like Chrome from 3 versions ago.
There's no shame in just saying, "you know what, we absolutely nailed it with Firefox 4, so we're just gonna keep that if it's ok with you?". Don't like it? Change the theme or install some addons to add/remove bits.
Also it seems loads of work goes into the integrated developer tools. I ditched Firebug after Australis arrived because it started to take about 10s to load each time. The FF developer tools are pretty good to be fair. But are they actually needed by 90% of users, probably not. In which case they should still be an addon.
And talking of bloat, a built-in PDF viewer? Written in JS? Give me a break. It's bad enough when Adobe Reader tries to pump itself into your browser. Let alone having JavaScript trying to decode a 50MB 1000+ page PDF without even asking. The answer... pdfjs.disabled;true
The next thing they're going to break in the name of becoming Chrome, is the separate search box. You might need this pref... browser.search.showOneOffButtons
I noticed that a default changed around v32/33 that stopped the DNS suffix being appended to URLs that don't have a domain extension. So if your users find that typing support or intranet into the URL bar ("awesome bar" apparently) thinking that they are going to a web address when it actually ends up googling for it, then you'll need this pref... keyword.enabled;false
I've built up quite a library of these preferences and addons since it started becoming Chrome. Still miles better than Chrome though for power users IMO.
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An SSD has got to be the single best upgrade spend I have ever made. Look out for deals though. I doubt most people need higher performance SSDs like the Samsung Pros. The biggest benefit to me is just eliminating the thrashing you invariably get under Windows and even the cheapest SSD improves that massively.
I had a OCZ refurb 100GB which I picked up for £40 a year or so ago. It was SATA II but made such a huge difference, I doubt I was ever near the max of the SATA II interface. Bought a new machine which came with a newer Kingston so the OCZ went into my lab.
Just buy one, any one.
Also I presume our employees, the chubby blazer-wearing eunuchs in parliament, will still be protected by the Wilson Doctrine? Lucky lucky them who make the rules.
It would be preferable if my communications were public to all nations, not restricted to a particular host state that has legal jurisdiction over me.
Our only hope is that the concepts of nation states, national governments and border restrictions continue to become increasingly irrelevant over the next century. Unrestricted movement of people, money and information throughout the world. Sound good?
No, we just bend over. And over time, we become them.
I'll leave my front door open, take all my money in a bag to the treasury and collect my new national workslave number and uniform.
"If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face - forever."
Most people just search for stuff on dogpile, lycos etc now anyway.
The new domains that describe the vague function/activity of the site is not a bad idea though. I've always thought that having the top-level of domains categorised by country, on an internationally connected network that spans borders and governments, was a little strange. ISO language codes may have made a bit more sense.
One thing I do think though is that anyone applying to become a registrar of a new .tld would have to make domains publicly available. Want .google, then you must offer registrations under it. That would ensure that new domains were mainly function/activity/category based rather than corporate brand holding.
I appreciate a good money-making scheme as much as anyone, so I'm not going to blame ICANN for wanting moar. But I would like to know where all the dosh from the non-refundable application fees will go/is going/has gone. I'm guessing that's a substantial windfall over their previous funding.
I presume ICANN were hoping that any mega-globo-corp would panic and buy their .brand. Typically though these things work the other way, since tehre's a high barrier to entry for a .brand it's unlikely squatters will ever buy it. And if they did the mega-globo-corp could just sue the squatters into oblivion. So actually no real point in registering. You see the same with ltd.uk .plc.uk etc, noone bothers to register them because noone else can register them.
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I bet 90+% of laptops purchased with Windows run the original version they shipped with. There'll certainly be some re-formatting and re-installing the original version. But I don't know many who would bother to buy and install an upgrade to a newer version. Most would just buy a new laptop running the newer version.
With phones it's even more likely people will just buy a new one, typical contract length is what 1.5-2 years. When you've got operator's foot on the upgrade hosepipe that already has the manufacturer's foot on it further up, then it's usually easier to just wait and buy it new. Also, new version of Android with some different eye-candy, would anyone non-technical actually care enough to bother upgrading?
Lol. The NEET adaptor I bought supports APTX but my phone (Moto G original (which is excellent btw)) doesn't. Still sounds really good without IMO.
When buying new laptops I always format and re-install everything manually. The bluetooth driver package was always the biggest of the lot, often in the 150MB+ range.
Bought a bluetooth to optical dongle about a year ago to plug in to my receiver. Works great and sounds great. I'd always totally written bluetooth off as having the sound quality of an underwater potato but things have moved on.
Streaming local media, spotify, google play music etc from phones, tablets and laptop is really good. So much so, the missus actually uses it, consistently and deliberately!
Have never had to re-pair the bluetooth connections to phones/tablets either which means it's really quick to connect and go.
So what they mean is they can't track *suspected* criminals anymore. Suspected should mean nothing. Anyone could suspect anyone of anything, and say it loudly enough it can become true. I want evidence not presumption and if there's enough evidence of a crime having been committed then it should be trivial to obtain a warrant and poke that under the noses of communications providers.
They overstepped the limits of the legal framework, just like the baddies. And they know it.
Normal law-abiding peons and suspected criminals/transvestites/activists/terrorists/ghosts/aliens/jobsworth civil servants have got themselves their very own technological equivalent of the Wilson Doctrine. Seems only fair to me, even if I don't like the fact that bad people do bad things. Hurrah for normal law-abiding peons and suspected criminals/transvestites/activists/terrorists/ghosts/aliens/jobsworth civil servants everywhere!
Staples CIO: "It's dem pesky North Koreuns again. There are genwine US lives at risk if we can't sell stationary to US citizens. So Obama, can u nuke them for us plz? Thx"
Seriously though, how is the US so backward when it comes to buying things in shops?
I've never been a huge fan of chip and pin because it's easier to give someone a kicking to get their pin and withdraw a bunch cash. At least forging a signature in a shop requires a vague amount of practice. The only reason I can think of is to place the burden of security (and blame for fraud) onto the account holder. Also pin codes, only 4 digits!?
Is it just me who thinks it's insane to make a film about killing the current living premier of another country, even if you do think that country/premier is a joke?
If there was a film produced about the assassination of Obama, you would expect things to go very bomby (well, whingey) very quickly.
Err most companies need to keep ex-employee records for pension & tax purposes.
Fair enough. But why most and not all companies? What's the criteria that state whether a company does or does to keep these records on ex-employees?
I doubt that indefinite storage of ex-employee pension/tax records is a legal requirement, more of a "nice to have" from the company's perspective. And I'm not sure when "nice to have" trumps EU data protection.
"Really? And who will pay for the lines that the ADSL is carried on, then. Or will tbe bits arrive by magic through the ether?"
The same people who pay for health, education and welfare. Us, me, you. Having access to half-decent healthcare is a good thing. Having access to half-decent broadband is also a good thing IMO, a virtually unlimited source of learning and opportunities (ok so pr4wnz, t0rrentz etc come with it too, big deal).
Line rental is usually higher than the cost of ADSL broadband these days. The only reason I have a landline is to get ADSL, it hasn't had a phone plugged in for 5+ years. Am I the only one? I would be this is a significant barrier for people on low/no income that could be sorted quite easily if the regulator had the balls to put the squeeze on the incumbent national telco.
Chop a couple of nuclear subs from the offence budget or scrap the building of a 20% faster trainset to pay for it. Or flogging some unused Gov IPv4 address space, as hinted to the article.
I am assuming that you give a fsck about people who are not as fortunate as yourself. I understand that this is often a false assumption.
Nothing to do with IPv6 and for that I apologise.
OFCOM sells an unused IPv4 block. Re-invests profits into cheaper universal broadband access by mandating that BT offer ADSL without landline line rental charges (digital nation etc)!
No wait, I got that wrong... Re-invests profits into swanky Southbank office space.
Did I hear something about the Gov wanting ISPs (and all websites) to provide them with real-time logs so they can surveil by IP address? Pretty difficult to tie an end user or device to an IPv4 address. IPv6 however... oh I see!