Posts by Steven Raith

Re: Low end?

I was thinking that - it's not far off Nexus 4 specs in a few important ways, and I can assure you, that's not a slow, or underwhelming phone in any respect...

Re: @OrsonX "too fast for missile"

Cloud cover, surely? Or are they powerful enough to just cut through water vapour without seriously hampering the performance at range these days (attenuation and refraction etc)?

Re: So....

"Not true. Also you can always phone them to activate - only takes a couple of minutes...."

Yeah, so if I have 30 copies of office to register (nowhere near the figure where volume licensing makes sense), that's just an hour of my time wasted.

As such, get a fucking grip - that hour could be spent doing 101 other things more productive than calling them up because they have completely lost the plot in terms of dealing with SMBs.

There is some validity to the idea of getting less reliable disks for less cost, but it really, really depends on the scale of your systems, and how much time you want to spend doing RAID rebuilds or physically going to the datacentre to replace the hot spares.

I'd rather have assurances that my disks aren't going to eat themselves within a year, or have a failure rate that means I'm going to the DC once a month (And spending money once a month..) to ensure I have enough hot spares to cover the cheaper, more failure prone disks - and that's assuming that the cheaper disks can do fast encrypted writes, if that's a requirement, etc.

I'm pretty sure there'll be a surprisingly big market for these devices - and as more reliable SSDs come on stream (in a datacentre environment, that is - most SSDs are 'good enough' for non-server roles) we'll start seeing them as primary boot drives in standard servers, and then as part of tiered storage, and eventually, they'll take over from spinning rust.

I'll put a fiver on that being within the next ten years, easily....

Michael Thibault - maybe they're just the giving type?

I think I've lost the thread of conversation and got stuck in my own twisted mind, if I'm honest. Lets leave it there.

Looking for an SD slot on a Nexus device is like looking for a fission reactor in a Ford Transit engine bay.

it just ain't gonna happen. Ever.

HTH.

Re: BOFH reprisal

Obviously El Reg Forums are suffering from an ID10T problem.

Caused by sunspots.

Steven R

Re: SOHO = Garbage

I tend to agree. I used Netgear stuff for a while but it's stupid UI (Port forwarding? Nah, Firewall, services, create service, apply to Firewall, can't modify it when it's in use etc...) and hardware failings when doing big stuff got on my tits.

Picked up a Draytek 2830, couldn't be happier with it. Might not be the fastest wireless in the world, but it can handle 100mb WAN throughput, do lots of awesume VPN stuff (proper IPSEC stuff, too) and is - if you're familiar with the terminology - very straightforward to set up and configure.

Best bit, it's been sitting on my living room floor by the phone point for over two years now, only needs resetting when I make changes to it for major stuff (PPP settings etc).

It'll be getting replaced with a 2860, which I've used for work, and I'm very, very impressed with.

Does anyone do prosumer/SMB routers/gateways better than Draytek, assuming you don't want to go firmware fiddling (DDWRT etc)? My mind is open, but I'm struggling to think of anything in the circa £200 range that does more, better...

Steven "Wants to have Drayteks babies' Raith.

"I would not call significantly better battery life and memory compression just 'willy waving' - but oh if Google / Samsung had done it - well guess in 6-12 months they probably will."

*cough*

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zram

I believe it works in the same manner - compressing swappable items in RAM, etc.

That's been in the kernel as staging (experimental) since 2.6.37.1 - AKA Feb 2011. And wiki reports Chrome OS already uses it.

So hardly revolutionary. Interesting to see it be used by default, and hopefully it might save me having to close my 400 tabs in Firefox (lazy bugger, me) as it gobbles up 3+gb of wired RAM....

On the rest of it, was surprised at the free Mavericks update (which is now installed - I'll have to suppport it to a degree), and price changes on the MBA/Retina MBP range...

Overally a more interesting announcement than I was expecting. Still a bit 'meh' about the Mac 'Pro' though. It can edit 4k in realtime - woo. In a year, most real workstations using addin cards (RED Rocket etc) that can gobble up the full PCI-E 3.0 x16 bandwidth will be doing 4k editing in multiples (or is it fractions? You know what I mean) of realtime...which you just can't do with Thunderbolt 2 to the best of my knowledge - not enough bandwidth, period.

I'll definitely have a play with one if I get the chance though - shiny stuff is shiny stuff, regardless, and I like shiny stuff.

Steven R

I've got a few other forums I can fall back to before I have to do actual work*

Redundancy and backups, dude. Redundancy and backups.

Steven R

*Obviously, I do actually work, like a fiend - I'm just so good at multitasking that I can do four jobs at once and it looks like I'm just jacking around on forums all the time....

Re: just out of curiosity...

Yes boss :-(

Re: Most Importantly

Are those devices using SnapDragon 800?

That's not a bitchy comeback, I'm curious. There will be differences in thermal configs, eMMC setups, displays, too.

Unless all parts are equal, then your argument falls apart.

Steven R

Re: 2hrs 45minutes and still not done !

Christ, always with the Office 2013 installer - you know, the one that shits itself 10% of the time and needs to be ripped out from the registry before it'll let you do a clean install. It's a piece of shit, sir, and I can quality that statement any way you want. And that's before you start talking about non Volume Licensed installations on more than three computers in a day. Because you can't. Because MS won't let you register more than three MS Office accounts per day, per machine - once again, shitting all over the SMB and VAR crowd.

Anyway, you want installation efficiency? A few weeks ago, I was RDPing a couple of Windows servers and reading Facebook while waiting for progress bars to move on them, writing up a .doc file to document the processes on the servers - dong all that on a Linux installation that was in progress on a laptop.

I finished the remote server updates, documented them, emailed them to myself through my office webmail, then rebooted the sytem into a fresh linux install.

Take your Office 2013 steaming, er, I mean, streaming install, and come back to the party when you have something worthwhile to talk about....

Re: My old nail

You're right about manufacture sponsored upgrades, but who cares about those? Screw getting£30k in debt to have something new, I'll stick to my sheds, ta.

Also, no problems with a Rover 45. Basic chassis is OK, engine might not be the most powerful thing in the world but it loves to rev. My old man had a 200 TD, which was gutless, but handled nicely at speed, even if it was a bit shoddy around town.

I'd have a (clean) ZS 180 before a lot of other cars; they are very well regarded in terms of handling, even if the interiors are a bit 'early 90s' in terms of build quality etc....

Also, that V6 makes a lovely noise!

Re: Pretty sensible

Four thumbs down, no counter argument?

Come on people, you can do better than that...

Re: French Police Had The Right Idea

".And then of course major upgrades in Linux don't normally support in place updates, but require a full rebuild..."

Examples or GTFO.

Re: Switchable

Fuck it, I'll just run an old shed (by that time, probably a £1000 Focus ST/BMW 335i, arf) on a classic policy....

And if I can't do that, I'll just, I dunno, go on a killing spree or something.

Steven likes his cars. Ideally un-aided to a greater or lesser degree*

Steven R

*ABS is good though - although you don't realise how good till you *really* need it - like 'need to steer around a deer at 50mph' need it and it stops you from locking up allowing you to keep control of the car. After which, you never grumble about it kicking in early again.

Re: dont get it

Eeeh....that's dependant on where the bottlenecks are, really. with an i5/i7 system, your bottleneck is likely going to be GPU or storage. If you can optimise those, the CPU can do more, and the games be driven to use the free CPU time more efficiently.

So an i7 is not necessarily a waste, if you know the system can utilise it through the game engine (or for increasing the quality of voice comms in game, etc).

Until we see the hardware and OS in the wild, it's hard to say just how much optimisation Valve have put into this - just using a different scheduler in the kernel can massively affect certain aspects of performance, and if you aren't stuck with having to run a desktop system in the background, why use a deskop-centric scheduler, when a far more aggressive one is available, etc?

Re: Frequency, not resolution

"So higher frequency recording can be useful in representing higher frequency sounds more accurately. but resolution doesn't matter so much. What's more important is the audio being mastered correctly in the first place to retain the dynamic range of the recording."

This, this, a thousand times this.

You don't need audiophile hifi to tell the difference between a well mastered record and one that has been dynamically compressed for 'loudness' and 'pop'.

Steven R

Re: If my car leaned out it's fuel mixture to give me 60mpg ....

Frank Ly - ta. It's a rented property but I reckon that doing a bit of DIY with me dad (Landlord knows us both and is cool with it) is one of those things worth knowing - floorboards, seals, some minor plumbing etc. So it'll be interesting, at worst.

itzman (and the rest referring to this) - yes, I know that cars are mapped to work best on the economy run tests - the first gen Porsche Cayman R (allegedly) had a flat spot in it's map where it would barely fuel at all, just at around 50mph in top....that was never proven though. But my point was about being very specific about changing the way the engine works based on parameters that the driver cannot mess with - hence the reference to it being kicked off by GPS location ;-)

You are all, of course, correct, on the MPG point. My car is rated at somewhere around 45mpg at 50mpg. I can get about 40 out of it (it's got 120k on it, natch) if I pootle at 50. But when you have 86% of torque from 1200rpm to 6500 rpm...er....you don't pootle much.

My normal average MPG is about 25-30, as I spend an inordinate amount of time at WOT* (where safe to do so, natch) because WOT is so much fun :D

Steven R

*WOT - Wide Open Throttle - AKA brrrrmmrrrRAAAAAARRR-crackle-pop-bang-bbrrrrmmmrrrRRRAAARR, repeat till fourth gear....

Re: @ Steven Raith

I think whether an electric car is better or worse than a conventional ICE car is really down to dumb luck more than anything else - every accident is different.

I think, to a degree, you could argue that a well designed battery pack (with suitable firewalls etc) could be safer than a petrol powered equivelant. Both contain large amounts of potentially flammable fuel, but with petrol (diesel is far harder to ignite generally) there is more chance of it pooling and spreading vapours - IIRC, Li based batteries tend to 'clump' their 'leavings' in one place - but they do burn rather harder.

Long and short of it, though, is don't drive over large metallic objects. Christ knows, I have enough problems with potholes in my little Puma...