Posts by Nick Cassimatis

Toshiba unwraps Blu-ray player

Upscale vrs HD-DVD

I wonder if it will upscale regular DVD's as well as my HD-DVD player (which I got for nothing when Toshiba dumped the format - cheaper than a decent DVD player)?

EMC could refresh Symmetrix on April 14

EMC merging with VW?

Tigon? Sounds like a new VW!

"Space for 4, plus 23TB of data!"

Science-boosting thickie questionnaire backfires

To top it off...

... El Reg themselves offered me a survey when I went to this article. I declined, but if it comes up again, I may take it just to see how accurate they are!

IBM servers and storage to use Fusion-io currency

SVC pretty darn stable...

"We might conceive of a mini-QuickSilver product being built with two SVCs, to protect against a single SVC failure."

So the redundancy already built into the SVC node pair isn't enough? It's pretty tough to kill a node pair, unless you REALLY try, or let the BOFH get involved...

VMware renders multitasking OSes redundant

VMWare ESX - the new Windows???

Regarding the last comment, the ESX provides a common set of drivers so each OS/application doesn't need to worry about them. And it handles the multitasking, so the applicatoin/OS doesn't have to.

Geez - sounds like the original reason Microsoft pitched Windows to begin with. Talk about taking a page from Microsoft's playbook!

Robot airliner anti-missile escorts proposed

Air traffic gridlock

So sitting on the ground at LaGuardia for an extra 2 hours because there are too many planes around isn't enough, now I can sit there because the drones need to come in for fuel?

"Uh, we're sorry folks, but we'll be delayed another hour or so, as the runway is in use to land the drones. No, not a Northwest flight (sorry - old joke), but the ones to protect you and make sure your flight isn't interrupted."

Blind spot - the trouble with optical drives

Tape is slow???

If you can find the capacity of LTO4 tapes, why can't you find the performance spec? I often see LTO4 drives drop out of streaming mode because the disk can't feed the data fast enough. And retrieving a single object from tape is pretty fast as well - it's when you have multiple requests to the same piece of media that things get ugly. As stated, it's archive data, instant access is assumed to be unnecessary, and heavy access should also be assumed to be a non-issue. Otherwise, why are you archiving it???

I just wish the LTO specs were to read all previous generations, rather than just 2 back. No reason I can think of not to have this, and it would make the generation jump a lot easier.

Ohio table-shag man gets six months

Missing the point...

Umbrella hole... metal picnic table...

Ow.

Apple tops tech support success poll

Yikes!

I'm glad my doctor doesn't work for Apple!

BOFH: Vampires!

Would Fridays be tolerable?

Without a dose of BOFH? Seriously - how many of us out there actually look forward to Friday, not as the last day of the week (as it's therefore the day the most stuff gets dumped onto us, at the last minute, by people who for some reason waited until Friday to realize...), but because we get a dosage of BOFH. By Friday morning, I'm so ready for the weekend it's scary, but I can get up, get out of bed, get ready for work, all because of the BOFH and his PFY.

Subprime PC retailer coughs up $5m fine

What's really scary...

...is that they're selling some pretty high end kit (well, for 2005 at least). For Joe Average home user to do email/internet, have the kids do some homework, maybe play a few games, a HP xw9300 Workstation is, frankly, overkill. $94.99 for 52 weeks = $4939.38 - I bet HP would love to sell a few for that!

US man saved by bulletproof DVD

Illegal to record a TV show

Since when is it illegal to record a TV show? Would then owning a VCR be illegal? Is there a list of DVD recorder owners out there, with someone sneaking into their homes nightly to see what they recorded???

If DVR's are illegal as well, I'll take Time Warner down with me!

Official: Toshiba discontinues HD DVD

HD-DVD's on the cheap?

So now I should be able to get HD-DVD's for less than regular DVD's, see TONS of them in the used disc stores, wait for BR to come down in price to something reasonable (will it with no competition???), then get a BR player, get the High-Def stuff on it, and have the Toshiba for the regular DVD upscaling.

Oh, and the BR drive will probably be in a PS3 - I can try to use the death of HD-DVD as an excuse to "need" the PS3 to my wife!

Lenovo ThinkPad T61

LCD Viewing Angle

I can remember with laptops were first really becoming popular, and one of the biggest complaints about them was the viewing angle on the screen. So now today, you have to buy a filter from 3M to keep the guy next to you on the plane from reading your screen.

IBM snubs OS/2 open source plea

M$ code

There's a LOT of code "owned" by M$ in OS/2. I know the HPFS386 filesystem, shipped with the OS/2 Server versions, was almost exclusively theirs, so it didn't come with the "regular" versions.

I can remember running multiple Win3.1 apps, each in their own Windows shell, having one crash (as they often did), and NOT bring down the others. "A better Windows than Windows" was right on!

US Army loads up on Apples for 'better security'

Security through obscurity?

The use OS/2!!!

Now RIAA says copying your own CDs is illegal

Bad news for Apple, MS, etc...

If I can't copy my own CD's to my computer for personal use on my personal music player, then my iPod becomes pretty much useless. If this goes through, maybe everyone who bought an MP3 player should sue the RIAA for making their purchase worthless!

Do composting toilet worms get the blues?

How happy are they?

Well, they're breeding, so they must be happy!

Beer set to hit four quid a pint

Crude Oil?

"The company has fingered higher aluminium, cereal and crude oil costs as the cause, the Guardian explains"

There's crude oil in my beer???