Posts by pPPPP 254 publicly visible posts • joined 3 Feb 2011
The constant advertising is so annoying. I've just got back from a couple of weeks holiday in the US and apart from the countless adverts, all that was on was college football. Yawn.
If I lived in the states I would maybe get a PVR but would probably just rely on bittorrent. Or PBS. Not that I watch a lot of TV anyway.
It's not just flash which will move closer to the server. Functionality will have to too. The only way you can guarantee security in the cloud is to encrypt data using a mechanism owned by the user, i.e. keys stored in the application or the server. Drive-based or applicance-based encryption don't work in the cloud as data is still transferred unencrypted.
This of course makes deduplication, thin-provisioning, copy services etc more difficult to host entirely within the appliance.
I got my MEng 15 years ago. I was a silicon designer for a few years and then realised that there was sod all career progression. Yes, you could become a senior engineer, "distinguished" or whatever the hell they want to call it. You won't earn much more though.
I moved into the IT side of things, and while I still earn less than half of those I know who went into the financial industry, I earn a hell of a lot more than I would have if I'd stuck with engineering. I enjoyed doing it, and still would if I was now, but I'd rather live comfortably.
Windows does deal with resuming from hibernate. It doesn't deal with the Truecrypt password though. There's a boot loader in the MBR which Truecrypt uses to prompt for the password. If the password is correct, it hands over to the boot loader on the partition (ntldr or whatever....)
This ^
If you're using whole disk encryption, then oddly enough, the whole disk is encrypted.
Of course, if you were planning to had over the password for the whole disk, and you had encrypted containers with the really secret stuff on them, then you're at risk.
Hibernate's a pain in the backside nowadays. With a few gigs of RAM hibernating takes ages and it's quicker to boot from scratch.
So can you eject those flash devices and slow spinning disk drives and take them off-site? No? Then tape's STILL not dead. Even EMC are saying so (http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/06/26/emc_tape_sucks_no_more/)
Where tape fails is when it's backing up those large files where only a few bytes or kb have changed. Much more efficient to take a thin-provisioned snapshot, and have a second copy at a remote site. It's still not a "proper" backup though. If your storage system has a bug which corrupts your data (or a human does it) then that corruption will also be replicated. Or if both your production and live copies become corrupted. Or you cannot afford a DR system and are reliant on manually getting your data off-site.
Backing up entire files is inefficient. VTLs and dedup help but they're still prone to failure. What's needed are more efficient recovery mechanisms to recover historical data.
The biggest problem with some of the older phones is they don't work in all countries. Not so great if you go abroad a lot. Fine if you don't though.
I've still got my 3210, just in case. It's in perfect nick though. Looked after that one a lot more than I look after them nowadays.
@El Andy. It's not just about open file formats. The government, and many organisations for that matter, are riddled with bespoke or customised software which they can't get rid of because it hosts critical applications. When support contracts come up for renewal, vendors know this, and charge astronomical sums for continued maintenance. They also charge similar sums for changes to the code or licensing. Those licences are often tied to a specific operating system or even specific hardware, so there are still many NT4 systems out there running on Pentium 2 hardware, for example.
Then there are those situations where the original software vendor no longer exists. Try getting support.
So while the ODT format, to use your example, may be badly implemented in certain software, the choice of software is what's key.
The one that gets me is when people say their computer "forgot" their documents.
The analogy to use with such people is that memory is the same as what's in your head. The hard drive's the same as when you have to write it down because you'd forget otherwise. And if you turn off your computer it will forget everything it hasn't written down.
I played it last week up to the end (at at least as far as it goes). I recall there being one obvious bug but a reload of a save sorted it.
Can't knock it seeing as it's free though.
I've played all of the half life series several times from start to finish over the years. Somehow it's a game you can still go back to. Unlike a lot of games where I get bored before I reach the end.
I logged into a computer in an Indian internet cafe a few years back. Skype was installed, and was logged onto some Finnish guy's account. He had plenty of money on it too. I'm too nice though, so I logged him off. I was briefly tempted to tell his mother that I was sexually attracted to her but I chickened out.
Bet that guy would fall for that scam.
I'm surprised anyone coming to the Olympics bought anything in Stratford. Apart from the M&S and WHSmiths at the tube exit which offered alternatives to the food inside, which was hit and miss. I can't imagine regular shoppers would want to be part of the crowds to go and visit the shopping centre, especially as the car park was closed.
As for Micro Anvika, and the rest of Tottenham Court Road for that matter, they've just not kept up with the age of the internet. They need to offer something better than you can get elsewhere, and ultimately the price you pay is the most important thing. That and having to lug whatever you buy home on the tube or bus because it's too expensive and difficult to park anywhere near there.
Anything with running water shows this up. And oddly, so does the football. Grass is made up of individual blades, all with slightly different colour. Apart from on Freeview, or Virgin for that matter, where it becomes an indeterminate splodge apparently made up of small squares.
They need to get rid of the shopping and chat channels, whose sole purpose is to fleece the house-bound out of what money they have.
Well mine's actually been fine, until today. I got mine when the previous modem played up. It sits under the stairs on the ground floor and I can get decent wireless signal up in the loft, two floors up. The old router's up there in case I can't but it's rarely needed.
Today, things changed though. I've not been able to log onto it for a week or so so I rebooted it. And now it refuses to connect. I've tried all day. Called support and had the usual friendly Indian gentleman asking me how many flashing lights there were and what the power levels were. He explained to me that these were "technical things" and he would need to send an engineer out. I replied that I have an electrical engineering degree and am an actual engineer and understand perfectly well what these things mean (Don't have a problem with the technicians they send out by the way. Most of them are very pleasant and also very knowledgable. They don't know how to engineer things though).
Still, someone will come around (on Friday as it happens) and will probably reset whatever's failed in the box at the end of the street, like they did the last time. Maybe an attenuator's the answer. They've probably lost a few customers in my street through their shit service.
They offered me £7 compensation. That will really help me with my quest to do my job and earn my living. Glad I have 3G.
You can get Windows XP to boot from a USB stick, but it needs some hacking. You need the cfadisks.sys driver which was written by Hitachi for microdrives and makes Windows think the USB stick is a fixed disk rather than removable. This allows you to partition the disk.
You also need to edit the registry so that the USB storage drivers are loaded on boot rather than once Windows is loaded.
I've got a stick with several Linux distros on it (puppy etc.) as well as a Truecrypt encrypted Windows partition, with a bunch of work stuff on it (VPN etc.) so I can use a colleague's laptop if mine dies. Works a treat, although I'll admit it took some setting up.
It doesn't work with Windows 7 though, at least not the 64-bit version due to the lack of driver support. Not that I've tried too hard. XP does what I need.
Apparently it will do some of the older mame games, but then again, you need a lot of beef to play the latest ones. The point of the mame project is accurate emulation rather than playability after all.
I got mine a few days after ordering from Farnell. Got it last week and it's now running OpenVPN through my router, so I can get into my home network when I'm out and about. It's got a 32GB flash card in it, which is plenty, and I can also wake up my other computers using WOL. Just need to get rsync up and running.
I was hoping to connect an old web cam to it but it draws too much current. Might try a powered hub but I expect a more modern web cam would make more sense.
I've always used Slackware and it seems to work fine on the Pi.
I bought a Denon mini hifi system (currently £180) a while back purely so I can listen to 6music. It's connected to the roof aerial, but works fine with the small lead supplied with it. Sound quality is flawless, at least for Radios 4 & 6 which are all I listen to.
Then again, I do live in London. Not sure how good it would be in a deep valley somewhere remote. But then again, FM's not so good in those places either.
Why anyone would pay £250 for some of these though is beyond me. They won't sound good enough for anything other than talk radio, which for me is available on FM.
"Every time I've heard somebody complain about the lack of a driver for XP x64, a quick search turned up the required driver, so this opinion seems to be largely based on FUD rather than fact."
That's true for most things but it's more difficult for less common hardware. Things like old keyboards or other audio hardware are often troublesome. I use my PC as a DAW and tried XP64 a while back but couldn't get drivers for everything I needed. 64-bit Windows 7 drivers were available so I made the switch.
Er, no. You're wrong and you've backed this up yourself by saying "one of the meanings", not "the one and only undisputed meaning". I picked up on one of those meanings you mentioned and elaborated on it in my response. This may or may not have been how the author had intended (I suspect not). You may not have discovered this in your years of trolling, but some words have more than one meaning. They're called homonyms.
Whether you agree with my sentiment is entirely up to you. I'm not a huge fan of certain aspects of Windows 7, as I explained. Others clearly love every thing about it and I wouldn't dispute that someone has a different opinion on what personally appeals to them. That would be daft. They're welcome to downvote. That's what it's for. Disagreement is the essence of debate.
You, however, have managed to embarrass yourself by accusing others of having done so, and you have managed to back this up and make a fool of yourself with the only sentence in your anonymous comment which wasn't a personal insult for something you clearly know very little about.
Perhaps you'd like to find a dictionary definition which backs you up. I can certainly find plenty which don't. Or maybe you should just crawl back under your bridge.
Then again, I doubt anyone's still reading these comments still as the article's getting on.
You're still a knob. Downvote that :-)
Yep, I did mean popular and common aren't the same thing. It's common for people to breathe in and out, and one could describe it as a popular activity, but I expect that if we weren't compelled into doing it it wouldn't be as popular as it is.
It's about choice, in other words. Many people have no choice but to use Windows, and often particular versions of Windows.
I wasn't talking about the laptop manufacturers' crapware (first thing I ever do to a new computer is trash it and install from scratch). More about Windows itself, although to its credit Windows 7 does let you uninstall things like Media Player and IE. I don't have the slightest problem with these programs, other than the fact that they're installed by default, and you get no choice. If you could select the packages you want to install, or choose which window manager you want, without having to install those you don't, then that would be fine. It's all those extra files you neither want nor need. When I installed XP it was a few hundred MB. 7 is tens of gigabytes. Why can't they give you a basic install and let you add things as you need them?
MS can do it when they want to. Security Essentials is an excellent piece of software which isn't forced on you, and does what it's supposed to in a pretty efficient manner.
" world's most popular desktop operating system"
Not sure I'd use the term "popular". Most common, perhaps. I have it on my laptop because I need it for work applications. I have it on my home PC (or one of them at least) because I need it to play games. It's far from popular with me. XP wasn't great but at least you could strip out the bloatware. With Windows 7 you get a ton of shit you don't want or need.
If they'd just fixed XP then it would have been fine. Not great, but fine.
And why the hell does backspace do what the same as alt-left in explorer windows, yet do the same as every other version of Windows in file dialogues? (apart from Vista, which doesn't count). That and all the other stupid bugs and annoyances.
At least I'm pretty confident I'll never have to use Windows 8. I only went to Windows 7 to get a 64-bit Windows OS with decent driver support.
Most people who need a PC already have one. Most people who need a laptop already have one.
People only buy new if they believe theirs has slowed down due to it getting old (in reality installing too much crap), if they're convinced that the latest, shiniest, most expensive laptop is a must have item, or they're suckered in by bloated new operating systems. And a lot of those people are the same folk who would buy a tablet because they think it'll solve all their problems.
My mother was recently convinced that she needed a new laptop, and as a pensioner she was becoming increasingly worried about it. The laptop in question had Vista, Norton bloatware (for which they'd frightened her into paying a subscription - I got that back) and surprisingly few toolbars and was running on 512 MB of RAM.
You're all techies. You don't need me to tell you the rest.
I own many PCs. Most of them sit in the loft doing not a lot. They're not worth much but I refuse to throw them out. Along with an ST and Amiga and a Spectrum.
It would be OK if you could just pay for the TV that you want for a nominal charge. But here in the UK, to get the one or two programmes you actually want to watch, you have to pay for the rest of the channel, and on top of that countless of shitty shopping channels and other crap that you couldn't care less about.
And to add to that, Virgin Media increased the amount they were charging recently, presumably so they could afford to send me junk mail telling me to buy a mobile from them every TWO F**KING WEEKS.
Very few people would have an issue with paying a few quid for a legitimate version of UKNova. I'd sign up, and ditch the crappy V+ box while I was at it.
I haven't used UKNova for ages, mainly because most stuff worth watching is on iplayer and I'm in the UK. But I bet those living abroad will be annoyed. Or get their torrents elsewhere.
Hybrid technology is still in its infancy, and there's the argument that as flash prices come down the difference between them and spinning disk will lessen. However, spinning disk capacities continue to grow, as does demand for capacity.
It's all about the way its implemented, in particular granularity. Some systems only offer automated tiering on a per-volume basis. Others offer sub-volume tiering but the entire volume tends to have to be in the automated tiering pool. And the level of granularity tends to be large extents, rather than the small chunks of data you actually want on SSD. So you're always going to get a degree of inefficiency (although this will no doubt improve).
Also currently, the admin has no control over what data goes where. The small chunks of data you want to run quickly aren't necessarily the same as those which are accessed the most frequently.
It's this kind of stuff that's being focused on and will ultimately differentiate manufacturers' offerings. In fact, it already does to an extent (pun not intended, because it would be a really bad one).
I listen to 6 music and it's fucking brilliant. Always hearing new stuff on there, including genres I'd normally not look for. Loads of old stuff I've never heard before. And virtually no manufactured crap.
On the subject, I can't believe they dredged up the bloody Spice Girls for the Olympic closing ceremony. Inspire a generation? Fuck off. Ironically it emphasised how good the actual sport was in comparison to that crap.
Mind you, I was in Hyde park watching Blur.
That's the bigget problem. There is no competition. There is only one cable provider for the majority of people. The only alternative is ADSL or 3G, both of which are inevitably slower. Hence there is no competition and VM can charge what they like because we don't have anyone properly regulating the industry.
The 1200, like all DJ turntables (it has plenty of competition) is only a good turntable for DJing. You get a lot of rumble through the direct drive motor which you don't get with a decent belt drive turntable.
I've been tempted to buy a belt drive turntable for ripping records to mp3 but never got round to it. Then again, I rarely play my records one at a time.
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