Posts by Steven Raith

RE "not hearing people shooting at you" commenters

Hmm. well, if they are shooting close enough for the headphones to mask the sound, then chances are you can either see them, or you are full of holes already - either way, you're going to know about it.

If they are far away, then the phones wouldn't mask it anyway. Besides, bullets are faster than sound in any case - you'd see rounds smacking the scenery/your mates before you hear any noise, such as the muzzle flash/bang with subsonic ammo, or the crack as the round goes supersonic upon leaving the barrel with regular rounds - by the time you can hear it, the slug has already reached you.

Physics 101, anyone?

Steven R

Cake.dll

It was DLLicious cake, and it had a CPU timeslice.

(Sorry.)

IGMC - it's the one with the copy of Portal in the pocket.

Steven R

Feature lockout - why?

Why is this lockout even required? I can understand things like bitlocker and Aero Glass not being on by default for less grunty systems, but who knows any home user with, say, XP Pro, who has been trying to twiddle with Domain setup etc?

Utterly, utterly pointless segregation clearly only there to up the margin on the top versions, and yet again small businesses who buy from domestic retailers will be screwed over when they buy five machines from PC World, install Windows Small Business Server on one of them, and realise that they need to spend another £1000 just to connect to a domain because Windows Home Edition won't let you even contemplate talking to one.

Money grabbing, arrogant bastards MS are, but I guess those of us in the support world are going to have to deal with this [and charge, natch, so shouldn't complain...] for another five years. Like we have the last five with XP.

Steven 'Yes, I know you only bought the machine three months ago, but you need to spend another £100 on a proper Windows license for this to work' R

It's been a classy day so far

Took a slooow train into London - anyone coming in on the Hertford Loop about 11ish would have been treated to an hour of truly staggering, Christmas card landscapes. I rarely pay attention to that sort of thing, but it was proper good today. Between Hertford North and Cuffley was especially pretty.

Then, coming back from getting lunch, someone called me a 'mug' for taking my time on the [frankly lethal, unlcleared and ungritted] pavements around Lambeth and making space for one of the local shop owners who was carrying some boxes, before flouncing past us in a huff.

This was about five steps before he himself fell flat on his backside. Who's the mug with the wet arse then? Ha! Tosspot.

I'm going to scrawl up a report, have another coffee and some chocolate biccies, and sod off home methinks. I have no idea how you southerners [anyone south of Inverness, for the record....] manage to cock winter up so badly, but it never ceases to entertain me when you do :-)

Steven R

Silverlight?

Que?

having been on Linux primarily for about three years now, this whole silverlight thing has passed my by. I'm assuming it's Flash, but without any of the useful stuff Flash does [which isn't much, natch]?

Steven R

Hot to avoid this sort of thing

Buy a Murcialago. Low enough front end with a low enough angle of attack to simply sweep bambi off it's feet and over the roof.

Going faster helps...

Steven R

PS: in the scale of roadkill, you forgot Blind Pedestrian: 10 points.

@Rik

I didn't get it at first, but the linky reminded me. The Rhino cracks me up every fucking time.

I do like the idea that by prohibiting pr0n you improve the moral fibre of society. because obviously running tanks at students worked, didn't it?

Face it china, people have opinions on a multitude of things including sex, and banning talking dirty on the net and on the phone ain't gonna stop kids meeting up behind quiet bus stops and doing biologically interesting things to each other...

Steven R

Well...

Much as though I am a bit of an open sauce zealot, of late my Gnome login is shafted [wants to launch KDM - WTF?] and last night a DJ saved my li..., no, sorry, last night an ACPI module update fucked my youtube/flash sound on video playback - video runs fine, but no audio, and *only* on flash video websites. Regular videos [AVIs, Flashgot-ted FLV files, anything played back locally basically] are OK - basically anything I can set to OSS, not PulseAudio or ALSA.

Gah. Youtube-et-al sound works OK with a new profile or in KDE, but not in Gnome, so it must a .whatever confligration problem [probably in .macromedia, .pulseaudio etc], but that doesn't sort the inability to log in with anything other than failsafe Gnome.

And the CDROM on my laptop doesn't boot-from any more, nor is it new enough to support USB boot, and I'm not brave enough to try setting an install partition on the local drive and rebuilding from that, so any reinstallation requires a DHCP-PXE-boot solution from the other machine, which I am just far, far too lazy to do until a new release comes alone.

Hurry up Junkyard Jalopy, I need an excuse to back up my grot, er, essential business data, and do a nuke and pave!

[still, this is *far* less than the problems XP ever gave me on this machine, it looks nicer visually [subjective, natch] and sucks less resources and grinds the HD less, so credit where credit's due]

Steven R

Back to being OS Agnostic...

@AC1651 @gigabit ethernet

No, you dolt, it's USB2, 'capable' of 480Mb/sec [60megaBYTEs a second] of raw throughput - although you'd never see that realistically from any device.

100Mb/sec does seem to be the limitation - they could only pull about 7.9MB/sec from a single, large, contigious file according to the FAQ - about 64Mb/sec, which sounds about right for a combined standalone 100mbNIC/USB running server software in my eyes once you take into account the FTP/SMB serving that will no doubt be sharing the same resources.

Still, bit pointless for me, fucked if I'm formatting my porn drive, er, I mean ESSENTIAL BUSINESS DATA BACKUP just for the privelidge of wanging it on the LAN - I'll just leave the Acer Aspire One plugged into the wall, whack the drive onto it and CIFS/FTP it for now.

Steven R

@Brandon

What evidence is there that the person involved should have been on the watchlist in the first place, given that in this country you can have your DNA and details put on a database for being just *accused* of a crime, even if it's thrown out of court with prejudice - and until recently it was damned near impossible to have those details removed from the database.

A woman accuses you of rape, you can prove that you were in different county at the time, but your DNA has been taken and put on the database already by the time you get to make a statement...

The issue here is that data that should not have been available to the persons involved was made available through illegal means - the fact that it is classified as a 'misdemeanour' horrifies me, frankly.

I can remember being in training at BT, and being told that if you went around the systems in a manner in which you were not authorised to [say, doing a number-->address lookup without authorisation] you were sacked and up for criminal charges without any questions being asked and no quarter being given - escorted off site into a police car, along with a couple of press clippings backing this up. And that's for doing a reverse directory enquiry and just getting an address, never mind making potentially false [or at least dubious] statements about someone's character *in fucking court*.

Disgusting state of affairs IMHO.

Flames - because I'm fuming.

Steven R

RE Linux and education

This idea that Linux is useless for IT education is a load of toss.

When I went through school, we had a Mac network. I'm currently a Windows and *nix sysadmin [of sorts, arf]. I didn't learn 'how to use office' in school though - we were taught memory addressing, hardware abstraction theory and general IT background and knowledge along with generalised Office-esque packages [Clarisworks as it happens] - we could have been taught that on a BBC Micro [Folio, anyone - same theory in terms of layout and functionality, just a slightly different way of changing the font/layout - shortcuts rather than mouse actions] and still got the same standard of knowledge out of it with regards as to how to use a word processor and how to tell whether a problem was hardware or software based.

So would all the anti-NonMS-zealots please shuddup-aya-face - you can learn how to use a computer on *any* platform as the fundamentals of WIMP interface [bet you don't know what that is either] are the same across any GUI based platform.

The issue isn't the platform, it's the coursework itself, which these days isn't computing - it's little more than secretarial studies with a bit of basic DB, music and video editing work thrown in.

Steven R

Concurrance

Complications aren't generally a good thing when it comes to health, so I hope Mr Jobs isn't suffering from anything too nasty.

I'm no Mac apologist, zealot or hater, but Jobs has a knack for getting stuff done as far as Apple are concerned, and the company will be worse off without him, so here's hoping for a recovery, a return, and fair justification to use the Evil Jobs icon once again.

Steven R

PS: Have they fixed that DNS issue yet? ;-)

Not an Ubuntu problem..

...it's a Dell Support problem. If her ISP required windows for her modem, then they should have replaced the machine, helped her fix it, or rebuilt it with Windows as required.

But then, anyone who has dealt with Dell Consumer Support will know that the chances of getting anything useful out of their script monkeys on First Line will know that would never happen.

*shudders at the thought of calling Dell without a corporate account*

Steven R

Looks tasty

I know the phrase 'iphone beater' is overused, but that UI does look very clean, smooth and fast. If you Youtube search there is a five-part video from the CES as well which is about 30mins long in total going through the kit in detail.

Finally, a smartphone rival to the iPhone that, while perhaps not knocking it's socks off, might give it one motherfucker of a kick in the teeth?

Steven R

@Global warming ?

Dennis, wrapping the antartic in clingfilm to stop it melting is only the first step - they'd need to find a pretty big freezer to put it in to finish the job.

Steven "I'll reheat the remains of that chow mein for breakfast tomorrow" R

Where's my classic start menu damn it? :-(

Well, aside from that, an afternoon of tossing about with Win7 shows it to be....actually, allright really.

A lot of the utterly utterly annoying parts of the Fista interface seem to have been cleaned up and straightened out a bit, making it more intuitive that Vista was [first impressions *do* count...] and it seems to be sucking a hell of a lot less resources.

I'm currently throwing it on a DX9 capable workstation [as opposed to a VM, as I have been doing so far - it runs well in Virtualbox 2.1 with VT turned on] to see how resource hungry it is with all the bells and whistles on....

....so we'll see.

I certainly don't hate it like a passion as I did with my first few hours with Vista, that's an improvement.

But I do want my classic start menu back. Maybe it's down the back of the sofa...

Steven R [sitting in front of an XP tower, an Ubuntu tower and a 24" iMac...no bias here...]

PS: I concur with a few of the opinions above - if you haven't tried it, how about you stop spewing the verbal diarrhoea and have a poke about with it in VMware/Virtualbox.

What, have they spunked all their money away?

Sorry, couldn't help myself.

I'll get me coat - the dodgy mac with the stains, obviously.

Just kiss?

"I've only done it with a couple of people. People make up stories, but mostly I just kiss."

Yeah, I have known a few lasses use that line, but it all depends on what and where they are kissing, doesn't it!

Steven R

Send 'em to Phobos

And start experimental research into teleporting.

:-)

Mines the one with the double barrelled shotgun down the inside....

Steven R

"HELLO? WHAT?"

"YES, I'M IN THE HOSPITAL. CYSTOSCOPY, I HAVE A SUSPECTED KIDNEY INFECTION AS WELL. YES, THEY'RE GOING TO PUT A CAMERA UP MY COCK. NO, IT'S REALLY-"

*sounds of a scuffle*

*Several thwacks*

*strange sink-plunging noise*

*blissful silence*

*alarm cord rings to remove mobile from somewhere it was never designed to be stored and to bring round an unconcious patient*

Steven R

Photocopiers in a leafy glade

"Having grown up in Wales, for me Xerox PARC always conjours up a delightful mental image of a load of photocopiers in a leafy park."

Could be worse Robin, I helped test the Docucentre range [known at the time as Leander for the black and white ones, and a couple of other names for the colour and back-to-back 120ppm variants] at the R+D centre in Welwyn Garden City and so I had to walk through a leafy glade to enter a test chamber filled with the things, run several thousand copies a day, and look for skew, degredation and mutlifeeds.

Still, I have no problems clearing jams in the office these days - guess what machines we use? Yup, docucentres, the exact same ones I used to pull apart...

My, that was off topic. For the record, I learned Clarisworks on OS8 and 9 at school. It didn't seem to shit itself too often....

Steven R

Getting back to the Nikon...

I'm quite surprised at the lack of exposure-adjustment-while-shooting-video on this camera - I'm not sure if 5Dii supports it either - as with a couple of fast lenses, you could make a pretty good job of shooting an HD movie with these things, provided you had enough SD/CF cards.

I like the idea of slotting my 28-70 F2.8 onto a 5Dii and taking some arty farty shots of crows and stuff. Shame I don't have £1000 to burn :-(

Steven R

PS: Yes, we know the Casio isn't an SLR everyone - can we let that drop now please?

@the Mr Flibble referring AC

By god, that's exactly what I thought too - astoundingly bad voiceover!

Rimmer: "They've been naughty boys, haven't they, Mr. Flibble?"

Mr. Flibble: "Yes!"

Rimmer: "What happens to naughty boys who've been naughty, Mr. Flibble?"

Mr. Fibble: "Uncle Arnie fries them alive with his OLPC power supply, because the solar panel is knackered..."

RAID5?

What with Snow Leapord apparently having ZFS as the default file system, is it not more likely to be a ZFS RAID-Z/RAID-Z2 array? That would allow a non-hardware RAID card to be used, and as such be cheaper, no?

Or have I completely misunderstood how ZFS works?

Steven R

@AC - Integrated RAID

My dodgy old Asus A7N8X Deluxe* had 'integrated RAID' - that is, a Silicon Image 3112 processor on teh southbridge with it's own BIOS setup, much like an add in card - hardware RAID 0 and 1 can be set up from that, outside the OS, much like an add-in card.

Are you thinking of the Intel software raid in ICH chipsets or something?

I was thinking, for a while reading that article, that one of those with OpenFiler [google it...] or OpenSolaris set up as an NFS share would make a nice wee NAS with RAID5 set up - even if it was software, or ZFS.....but then again, an Atom chipset with a PCI four port SATA card would probably end up cheaper and for a NAS, I can't see the performance being massively slower with the same amount of RAM.

Oh well, back to the drawing board I suppose.

Steven R

*For the record, that board is now about six years old, and is still hapily running a Thoroughbred XP2400 at 210Mhz with a 12x multiplier, RAID0 over two SATA drives, three IDE hard drives, a DVD burner, and an AGPx8 Radeon X1650. Fucking brilliant motherboard, never a problem with it!

Radioactivity from coal? Pff...

"Why don't you write about the massive radioactive emissions from conventional coal stations? Yes easily more radioactive material leaves coal power stations compared with nuclear ones. Uranium is a trace element - a few ppm - in most coals and the ash is 'hot' in more ways than one. Good job we make sure its safely contained in a powder from which we make construction materials!"

Hey, I can google too - pretty much every source I have found suggests that the radiation released by coal burning is pretty much inignificant compared to background radiation - uSv for industrial release through burning fossil fuels, as opposed to mSv from background radiation. I believe that the phrase 'an order of magnitude' fits that.

As Wikipedia [*spit*] quite aptly puts it...

"The amount of radioactive contamination released by human activity is rather small, in global terms, but the radiation background is also rather low. In fact, the total amount of radioactivity released by humans is negligible in comparison natural background radiation"

So stick that in your coal fired power station and smoke it you scaremongering twat. People should be far more concerned by the fact that fossil fuels are a finite supply, and wind farms are a waste of time.

Bring on the nuclear fusion [which has made progress recently..]

Steven R

Fee-Fi-Fo-Fun

"So if you happen to be one of the many who are either fearing or recovering from a layoff from HP, Yahoo!, Nvidia, or some other struggling tech firm, you might want to point Google Maps towards Kings Langley, Hertfordshire UK, Imagination's home. We hear that there are still tickets available for Jack and the Beanstalk in nearby Stevenage - it's "Fee-Fi-Fo-Fun!""

You'd be better off checking out the Red Lion in the Old Town - it's about the only place worth going to in Stevenage.

Alternatively, just jump on a train into London and go somewhere that isn't utterly shit - I've lived in Hertfordshire for five years and have yet to find anywhere worthwhile to hang out that, er, isn't in the Big Smoke.

Hope that helps any budding API engineers and graphics programmers looking at relocating!

Steven R

The Linky Bar

That is, the one on the top right that I missed, then noticed - what are the chances of it getting attached to the main Reg and Channel Reg sites as well for making navimigation a bit easier?

Or is just me who likes it?

Steven R

Audio pops?

Ah, so *that's* the cause! I took the combo update down to the iMac in the office, and it's been making wee clicks, cracks and pops on reboot ever since.

Ah well, good job I only use it to run a full screen virtualbox session of XP to run my VMware Infrastructure client, eh?

Fullscreen XP on a big shiny iMac seems to wind up the Mac fans a bit :-P

Steven R

Matthew is correct

Horrible, plastic, rattly quadricycles with all the structural integrity of a Blue Peter model that they made earlier, and the fine chassis finesse of a blancmange.

I have spent enough time in one [not much, but by god it was enough] to feel those things are fucking deathtraps in every sense of the word.

I feel sorry for the engineers who build it, but I don't feel sorry for the designers who decided to class it as a lower form of vehicle to escape crash regulations so they could save money on development - they're the ones who made it feel so fucking horrible, and they deserve everything they get IMHO.

Steven R

Skull and Crossbones, because that's all that would left of you if you had a head on with a real car at 30mph closing speed.

Where is the love?

Honestly children, what's going wrong, it's Christmas!

I have a 24" iMac, a quad core Linux box and a quad core Windows box on and under my desk. And a couple of Solaris machines kicking about too for good measure. And a BSD mailserver.

They all have their uses, pros and cons - I love them all, with all the fluffyness my dark little heart can muster up.

How about a group hug people? No Webster, not with the knife in your hand....aaargh!

Steven R

That is the coolest thing I have ever seen

Especially if that really is 7m in the air, and not 70cm as it looks like....

Mind you, stick some .50cal machine guns with a targetting servo on it and you have a proper meatbag-chasing killbot of death.

Terminator-esque HKs are on the way!

Steven R

@DT

"Although the passengers at the lego airport are gonna be pissed at any resultant delays."

Well, as long as it's not the train station.

*tumbleweed*

Too soon?

Steven R

Office 2007 on 2003

I'm not sure what the problem is - all you need to do is GPO or SMS the Office 2007 compatibility pack for Office 2003 out to all machines in the relevant OU.

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=941B3470-3AE9-4AEE-8F43-C6BB74CD1466&displaylang=en

I was planning to do this to about 1000PCs some months ago before changing jobs and not having to worry about it - so I admit I haven't done it.

But unless I have missed something here, it doesn't look like that much work - why the fuss?

Steven R

@Nick Palmer

I was thinking exactly the same thing, especially with regard to *nix compatibilty...but then I saw how the Advent 4213 stacks up compared to it, and I had another think.

Tricky choice methinks.

Steven R

So what makes it better than the iPhone?

Not having to use fucking iTunes for a start, arf!

Steven R

8500rpm?

Pff, you girl. I want it to soft cut at 9500rpm and hard cut at 10,000rpm.

With all the power coming after 6000rpm.

Yum.

Steven R