* Posts by ColonelClaw

435 publicly visible posts • joined 30 Apr 2010

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Why British TV drama is crap – and why this matters to tech firms

ColonelClaw

Re: Looking in the wrong places

I though last year's The Shadow Line was bloody good. (Right up until the end of the last episode when it suddenly put in a cretinous twist in the tale)

Anyway, Rafe Spall was utterly brilliant

Behold: First look at Office 2013, with screenshots

ColonelClaw
Meh

Hmmm

There's an awful lot of white, little demarcation and not a great deal of contrast. I'm not sure that's such a good thing for two reasons - eye fatigue and having to hunt around areas of the interface that look the same to find your command.

Tech biz today is WORSE than dot-com bubble days

ColonelClaw
Coat

In the interests of IT...

...I'd just like to point out that one of the companies on that graph is practically called 'Spunk'

Super Micro fattens up Xeon E5 nodes with FatTwins

ColonelClaw

Re: Ooooooh

I can't speak for these new machines, but the previous generation of Supermicro twin servers are much much quieter than the first few generations. We first bought a bunch when they originally came out (was around the Intel 5000 chipset time I think), and have bought a few more as time has gone by. All of these machines were insanely loud. Our most recent purchase was a 2u twin squared of the outgoing Xeon architecture, so that made for 48/96 cpu cores/hyperthreaded cores for the unit. It is a hell of a lot quieter. In fact you almost work with it sitting next to you.

Mensch pal Bozier defends Menshn security, dubs critics 'snippy geeks'

ColonelClaw
Paris Hilton

Such modesty

So modest of La Mensch to name an entire social network after hetself.

I was wondering if she would put her money where her mouth is, and take Menshn offline if there was a riot? If so I may go out and start one

Paris, becuase she aint the only fame whore in town

Vatican subtly shifts its position on The Blues Brothers

ColonelClaw

What kind of music do you usually have here?

Oh, we got both kinds. We got country *and* western.

Nvidia shows off Tesla K10 performance

ColonelClaw

So,

Anybody heard any news about when the corresponding new Quadro cards will be available? It should be pretty soon now, I would have thought.

Apple's Retina Macs: A little too elite?

ColonelClaw
Holmes

Serious Video Editor?

As someone who works in the industry, I don't know anyone who does 'serious video editing' on an internal hard drive. In my office we have a 12TB Raid-6 disk system connected to our edit station by mini SAS. From what I've seen of other video editor's computers, they also put everything on an external disk, and a large number of them use 15 inch Macbook Pros (connected to big screens when possible, but not always)

Microsoft 'mulled Nokia buyout, ran away screaming'

ColonelClaw
Black Helicopters

Would this be an accurate summary of events?

So, as I see it, this is the story so far...

Microsoft wants into the lucrative smartphone business.

Microsoft places one of their executives at Nokia.

Said executive fucks Nokia in the butt repeatedly until it becomes worthless.

Microsoft buys Nokia for peanuts (and possibly discards everything it doesn't want) giving it a lucrative smartphone business.

Ten... Sata 3 SSDs

ColonelClaw
Thumb Up

Scan are selling the 360GB OCZ Agility 3 for £302 at the moment. Definitely worth considering at that price.

Oz sysadmin says Windows 8 not ready for business

ColonelClaw
Unhappy

It's the future

This article reminds me of my attempts to play Diablo 3 recently. I'm only playing the single player game, yet on 3 days over the last 10 or so I haven't been able to play because of various server-side problems. It's just crazy, and I won't be buying Blizzard's next game.

It looks like this way of thinking is coming to us at the operating system level too. God help us all.

Windows 8 Release Preview open for download

ColonelClaw
Mushroom

It's the standard Windows cycle

98: good

ME: crap

XP: good

Vista: crap

Win7: good

Win8: what were you expecting?

Diablo III dev rolls 12d6, scores PC sales record

ColonelClaw
Thumb Down

Eh?

"a few niggling problems"

Oh really? I haven't been able to play twice so far in the last week. First time was the whole of Sunday afternoon, and then the whole of Wednesday evening after getting home from work. And that's the single player game only. God knows what's going to happen when I catch up with my friends who are currently playing on 'Hell' difficulty online.

Virgin Media cuts Pirate Bay access for millions of punters

ColonelClaw
Facepalm

Thank the Lord

"Why are some websites not available through Virgin Media?"

"Working with the IWF helps protect children around the world"

As long as it's done in the name of THE CHILDREN then it must be ok. I will sleep just that little bit better tonight.

Super Micro grows despite Xeon E5 delay, disk shortages

ColonelClaw
Thumb Up

Good stuff

I've only got good things to say about the Super Micro kit we've bought - and we've bought a lot of it. Our entire render farm consists of 1 and 2U twin nodes (an invention of theirs), and it's reliable, fast and was cheaper than anything of comparible quality. It goes without saying that all our workstation motherboards are Super Micro too. Well, except for our edit suite, which is powered by an HP workstation that's (to my surprise) proved to be very flakey indeed - every time you restart it it's a lottery how much RAM the board will see.

Keep up the good work Super Micro.

Ten... eight-bit classic games

ColonelClaw
Thumb Up

JSW

As brilliant as Manic Miner was - and I lost many hours of my youth to it - I would have included Jet Set Willy, which for me was the first platformer of almost unfathomly massive scope, perfected gameplay, and the first game I played that made exploration a real adventure. With JSW there was no longer a single path to follow, which was pretty ground breaking.

Rapidshare tells world+dog: Stop PIRACY now!

ColonelClaw
Pirate

Say What?

Wait - you mean Rapidshare can be used for stuff other than downloading pirate software? The wonders never cease

Microsoft to bake Windows 8 in three flavours

ColonelClaw
Thumb Up

About Time

Frankly I'm amazed at this outbreak of common sense by Microsoft, I was bracing myself for at least 15 SKUs, including the Windows 8 for Poor People that comes without mouse and keyboard support (but can be purchased as DLC if you can get to the app store).

The original article also notes there will be a 4th SKU, Win8 Enterprise, but they only mention it in passing. What do enterprise customers get that you can't find in Win8 Pro?

Apple finally deploys Mac Flashback Trojan terminator

ColonelClaw

I understand Java and Javascript are totally different, but...

I don't want to beat up on Java, but I can't remember the last time I used it in OSX. Or do I actually use it a lot unknowingly?

Bacteria isolated for four million years beat newest antibiotic

ColonelClaw
WTF?

Re: Now, that's strange

How the hell did that cretin end up at the reg? I'm blaming severe typing failure

It's actually spelt d-a-i-l-y-m-a-i-l-dot-c-o-dot-u-k

Tim Cook, Chinese vice PM agree IP pact

ColonelClaw
Thumb Down

Seriously?

"the world’s richest shiny toymaker"

Please, this isn't the Inquirer

High school student expelled for dropping F-bomb in tweet

ColonelClaw
Unhappy

Good Grief

The young lad should be applauded for his demonstration on the creative use of language. To expel him is beyond insane.

I remember an English lesson at school when I was about 15, where the teacher impressed upon us the flexibility of the word 'fuck' by reminiscing of the time he overheard a frustrated motorist, whilst kicking a flat tyre, shout "the fucking fucker's fucking fucked"

How many words can you say that about?

Big Brother refunds Facebook credits after vote crash blunder

ColonelClaw
Mushroom

I must say I'm surprised that a company under the ownership of the highly repected and scrupulously moral Richard 'Dirty' Desmond should be involved in dodgy practices.

Sony PlayStation Vita

ColonelClaw
Thumb Down

I don't care how good it is (and I'm sure it's awesome), £230 is far too much money for a hand-held games console.

HP caught with SIX Windows 8 PC packages up its sleeve

ColonelClaw
Meh

A step in the right direction. There should be a desktop and server version. As for 32 v.s 64 bit it should be an option upon first installation that defaults to the capabilities of whatever architecture you are running. Being asked to buy a specific version is silly.

In other words it should be similar to how things used to be in the 1990s

Daniel Craig like Connery, Skyfall helmsman suggests

ColonelClaw
Mushroom

Opinion alert

I know this totally goes against the grain of modern thinking, but personally, my favourite Bond film is 'The Spy Who Loved Me'.

It's got the best opening stunt, an awesome title song, a brilliant soundtrack, Rodge at the peak of his powers, classic exotic locations such as Egypt, a fantastic bad guy in Jaws, some unforgettable set pieces such as a supertanker that swallows a submarine and an underwater villan's lair, and lastly but most importantly, the most unfeasably hot Bond girl of all time in Barbara Bach.

CES headman: 'Microsoft not gone, just on pause'

ColonelClaw
Gimp

Hmmm

"...have taken to the stage to tell the world about Microsoft's next great innovations."

There's something not quite right about this sentence.

Star Wars: The Old Republic

ColonelClaw
Meh

Nothing new so far

Having just started playing it here are my thoughts on the game so far:

It plays almost exactly like WoW, but in a different setting, thus anyone who has played WoW will instantly find it very familiar. This is a good or bad thing depending on your perspective.

The art direction is horrendous. The use of colour harmonies is about as far away from what the textbooks suggest as you can get. It's very distracting.

The character models are also pretty bad, which is a shame as you spend a lot of time staring at them in many, many cut scenes.

Speaking of which, cut scenes in an MMO? Personally, I'm not a fan.

So far I'm not massively impressed, but I'll give it until the end of the month.

Videogame piracy figures show decline

ColonelClaw
Stop

So stop making shit overpriced games

You can count me in for contributing to number one. Having had my fingers burned recently with a few terrible game purchases, I decided to download a torrent of Crysis 2 to see if it was worth buying. An hour into it I quit and uninstalled. Far from being a a purchase lost, they lost a purchase gained (if you see what I mean)

Apple shoots for Premier League soccer streaming rights

ColonelClaw
Mushroom

Please let this happen

I would pay good money to see the expression on the faces of James and Rupert Murdoch should they lose the footy rights. I don't care who buys them, anyone but Sky

Brit PhD student excels in Pentagon digi-forensics challenge

ColonelClaw

Er,

Because he's still young and hasn't yet had a job?

Fans lose grace with Star Wars MMO

ColonelClaw
Thumb Down

Yuck

The art direction in this game looks exceedingly ropey. Skyrim, it isn't.

2011: annus horribilis for Microsoft and RIM

ColonelClaw

And in the UK?

How is WP7 doing in the UK? Everybody I know or have even met in the last 12 months has either had an iPhone or Android phone. So far I am yet to see a single WP7 phone. Any figures?

Ice Cream Sandwich

ColonelClaw

Agree

I would agree that Android is just not very pretty to look at, and gives the impression many different people designed the look of many different parts without any unifying vision.

Personally the main reason I don't like the look of Android is that it's just all so black. Cheer up Google!

Chief rabbi: Steve Jobs' Apple lust spreads misery, despair

ColonelClaw
WTF?

Sigh

Religious people don't half speak some shite

Illicit Bitcoin miners steal resources from infected Macs

ColonelClaw
Stop

They deserve it

If you're too tight fisted to spend 35 Euros on this quite excellent program then you deserve everything you get.

Cops find hackers' phone in NOTW office

ColonelClaw
Headmaster

Actually...

@Dazed and Confused: There is actually one expression that's even worse than 'my bad'

Just saying

As US sinks, Apple sees a glorious future in China

ColonelClaw
Joke

It's the changing of the guard

I remember back in the good ol' days (the 80s) it was all about being big in Japan. Just ask Alphaville, Spinal Tap, Mr. Big etc. etc.

Apple slips, moneymen pounce

ColonelClaw
Facepalm

This is why the world is screwed

So your company has it's most profitable quarter ever and makes an absolutely mind-bogglingly massive amount of cash, and the market responds by knocking 5% off the value of the company? No wonder the world is so completely buggered at the moment.

FSF takes Win 8 Secure Boot fight to OEMs

ColonelClaw
Thumb Down

A leopard can never change it's spots

Just when you thought it was ok to like Microsoft again, they cannot help but remind us what absolute douche-bags they can be when the mood takes them.

Top Tory 'lost voters' personal info' days before ID fraud week

ColonelClaw
Unhappy

Depressing

The quality of politicians in this country is just so utterly, depressingly low. Just when you thought it wasn't possible to be any worse than the last shower of shit, along comes this new bunch. How the hell is this country going to get anywhere in the foreseeable future?

OMG! Berners-Lee has an iPhone

ColonelClaw
Thumb Up

But more importantly

"It's the most uninformed and unimaginative idea I've heard in a long time."

Is one of the best put-downs I've ever heard. It's the perfect combination of being short but with high impact, beautifully eloquent, and utterly correct. Berners-Lee is, once again, one of my heroes.

Apple cofounder Steve Jobs is dead at 56

ColonelClaw

RIP

A genuinely sad day for the information age

Faustian descent into backup hell: A play in two acts

ColonelClaw

My complication had a little complication

Somehow I'm reminded of Terry Gilliam's incredible nightmare 'Brazil'

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KyHilwSRo28

Java, Adobe vulns blamed for Windows malware mayhem

ColonelClaw
Facepalm

Adobe must be proud

How is it possible that one third-party vendor can be responsible for nearly half of all attacks on an entire software platform? Are they really that bloody useless at coding decent software? That really is incompetence on a staggering, global, level.

Canon perks up Powershot pair

ColonelClaw
Terminator

The bulge on the top of the SX40 looks very odd indeed, almost like an alien is about to burst out from inside, John Hurt style.

Microsoft touts Windows 8 fondleslabness

ColonelClaw
Meh

Er...

"Steven Sinofsky has touted Windows 8 as one Microsoft's most significant redesigns since the arrival of Windows 95 more than 15 years ago."

Don't they say that for every Windows release?

Game says sorry for site snafu

ColonelClaw
Facepalm

Huh?

Why does this company still exist? It's like they wrote the book on how to piss off customers.

Use Steam.

A Farewell to Oates: Adios, El Reg

ColonelClaw
Thumb Up

o/

Good luck and all the best

Videogames caused riots says plod

ColonelClaw
FAIL

What would I know

And there I was thinking it was 30 years of shitty government mismanagement, endless public sector cuts and racist police that cause riots.

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