Posts by Sooty

Nuisance calls DOUBLE, Ofcom vows to hunt down offenders

is it possible

to ask your phone company to simply drop any calls to you from outside the country, I can't imagine any situation where most of the people I know would legitimately need to recieve them.

then after the is it possible, is it free!

Which qualifications are worthwhile?

Re: MSCDEX

meh... Soundblasters were easy, if you really want a challenge you want a 'soundblaster compatible' card! A high end model like a BluePoint card :)

In all seriousness though, there are some other admin areas which underlay pretty much all companies out there. A passing knowledge of MQ admin wouldn't steer you wrong for a lot of places, although teh IBM courses and certifications are definitely in the "my company is paying for it" price range.

It's not sexy, but almost every company has some sort of messaging infrastructure holding everything together and it needs administration. It's also pretty platform independent too, distributed MQ skills are pretty transferable.

Ten affordable mid-sized Full HD monitors

My old monitor is ageing rather well

It's older than "HD", so it is actually a decently high res, I can't see any obvious problems with it going dim/yellow, it's ridiculously thin for an older lcd panel, pretty thin for a modern one, and most importantly it's 4:3!

So useful for working on a computer rather than just watching films. The only minor issue is that it's old enough to not be HDCP compliant so my blu-ray drive doesn't like it.

Ever had to register to buy online - and been PELTED with SPAM?

What I want to know

Is why spam still exists? Who are the morons who are actually buying things from these people that make it profitable to continue?

I accept the phishing, etc emails that mimic valid ones to some extent will trick people, but really who tries to actually buy anything from the slightly less dodgy ones? If I get an email from a company I've never had dealings with, they instantly go on my 'have nothing to do with these crooks' list! Similarly with cold callers, I don't care what you are trying to sell, what sort of idiot will give their details to a stranger phoning them. All the spam is making me less likely to have anything to do with them.

I got an old window replaced last year, and the company called me several times a week afterwards to 'follow up' ie try and get me to replace all the others (about £4k). I finally shouted at them saying that I was getting the rest of them done ( I will eventually :) ) and would have used them, but there was absolutely no way I'd ever consider using them now due to all the calls. I may have used some 'colourful' language as well. Despite all the previous requests, that time they really did appear to take me off their lists.

Re: Amazon recommendations

surely the "Why are we recommending this?" link they added answers that one quite quickly

Lenovo, EA, Intel unite to DESTROY our childhood memories

Re: +1 for analogue

Yup, Monopoly is child's play to set up compared to loads of board games. I enjoy Mansions of Madness, and that takes about an hour of careful prep, in secret, to get everything seeded and ready to play.

In Monopoly, you just hand out a bit of money and put a top hat in a corner.

Up your wormhole: Star Trek Deep Space 9 turns 20

Re: I watch it on permanent repeat - on my 25th watch

The problem is, like many American shows, it had great potential, but the network stepped in and canned it just as it was reaching that potential. I would imagine the problems in the initial series were network related as well.

And god only knows what happened with the finale, shafting the whole premiss and even royally p-ing off all the cast

Re: I liked

The number of times somebody walked in on another's holodeck program in TNG & voyager always made me wonder why they never seemed to have a decent way of locking the door!

I agree with you

Especially on the suspension of disbelief thing...

In the pilot, ds9 is a backwater posting for a burt out captain. It was a way of avoiding the embarrassment of firing him. It's overseeing the recovery of a relatively primitive ( I can't recall it ever being made clear if Bajor was actually warp capable on their own) civilisation after a brutal occupation. It wasn't exactly a military outpost to start with, it was essentially a refinery... The station was a wreck and had relatively little value, but it doesn't seem to improve very quickly once it's moved to the wormhole.

Finding the wormhole turned it into a pivotal strategic military and political asset, but it was never treated as such, it was left with the burnout captain (he gets better) and supplied very little aid and support. It should definitely have had some better defences right off the bat, at least with a couple of real starships permanently stationed there, although it did finally get properly upgraded when the dominion became a threat, able to defend itself against an entire fleet.

I liked

That it was the first Trek to openly acknowledge what holodecks would really be used for, although there were a few subtle mentions in TNG

Although the cleaning of them leads to a kind of horror if you really think it through!

Minicam movie pirate gets record-breaking five years in prison

Shirley

The best quality cinema copies are created by the cinema staff themselves, a good camera setup in the projection booth and audio captured directly from the sound system. I assumed they were done in less copyright conscious countries though.

Ofcom looks at contract opt-outs as users rage over price hikes

Re: Yuck, 2 year contracts

"While your principal is some what true, a great many of us can't afford up to £500 for a new handset."

Some schools of thought would suggest that if you can't afford a £500 phone, then you shouldn't be getting one! You can get a phone for next to nothing, if you don't want the latest and greatest fashion accessory smartphone

I bought my Samsung galaxy 2s upfront and have a 1 month, very cheap, sim only contract. Overall much, much cheaper than getting one "free" on a contract. in future, when i come to upgrade my phone, I'll just buy the phone... it's one of the benefits of having a decent tech job with plenty of overtime opportunities.

Re: Ordinarily, I'd be inclined to agree

"Removing minutes and texts doesn't gain the network anything. The infrastructure is largely paid for and the data transmission isn't really costing them anything. "

Surely then they could offer more minutes/texts in compensation for the price rise, although changing the price pretty much defeats the purpose of signing a contract in the first place.

2012: The year that netbooks DIED

My netbook

Has been relegated to the position of a server, I saved a fortune in electricity from using that over having my standard desktop on 24/7. A slightly fancier NAS than i have would likely eliminate the need altogether though.

I had high hopes for it, but as stated in the article its just too small and with a rubbish screen. It's pretty much been replaced as my portable machine by a thinkpad x61 I picked up off eBay, better screen, better keyboard, better processor and about half the price.

Help-desk hell

@TeeCee

It's hard to lay that one on the user... If you have to explain to someone over the phone what to type the absolute last thing you should tell them is to log in as root and use rm -rf

its never going to end well.

We script up the noddiest of things and tell them to just run the script.

Business sues for $750,000 over bad Yelp review

This highlights a general problem with user reviews, people are pretty lazy... If they get ok, even good service they probably won't bother to go online and write about it. If something goes wrong though, they are motivated to mention it, whatever it is.

This unfortunately means you do legitimately get people mostly giving 5 star or 1 star reviews, with most of the people saying negative things.

Who's using 'password' as a password? TOO MANY OF YOU

Re: What, no "swordfish"?

Sadly too common on tv

http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ThePasswordIsAlwaysSwordfish

No more fun and games for Zynga as Facebook cuts apron strings

Re: Shame

while they may not be a particularly nice company, I have to give them credit for their poker game. Pretty much all of the real money on-line poker games aren't a patch on their client.

It'd be nice to be able to play a real money game on my ipad, and with a half decent experience.

Microsoft cues next-gen Xbox for Crimbo 2013

I'm at the stage now, where it's about the games. I don't really care about the hardware, that's what my pc is for.

If the next generation of consoles are not backwards compatible with my xbox/360/psone/ps2/ps3 games, I'm not chucking them all, and I've run out of hdmi connections on my tv, so i'll probably not bother.

There'd have to be some spectacular game to encourage me to upgrade

Prisoner found with phone + charger in anal cavity

Was it a usb charger, or the full UK 3 pin jobbie... teary eyed people would like to know

Assault on battery

Re: Back in reality

clickyness... Ahh the good old days. The first keyboard i ever got has to be by far the best I've ever come across. It costs an absolute fortune to get one like it now. If only i'd kept it and got a ps2 to usb converter...

Solid, heavy, very clicky keys, nice feel and feedback, shame they are all cheap nasty plastic nowadays.

Amazon Kindle Paperwhite review

Kindle came first, of course

Did it?

Maybe in the US they were, but certainly not in the UK.

Xbox SmartGlass comes to iOS

I tried the iPad version

My initial experiences weren't good.

On trying to sign in I was presented with an error saying that there wasn't a mobile version of the page I was trying to access.

Figuring out that I'd managed to get my password wrong, I looked it up... After entering it correctly I was then presented with an error saying the terms of service had been updated, and was thrown back to the login screen.

After logging in via the website and accepting the terms and conditions, I was finally allowed to login.

Then I just had to do all the settings on my 360 to get it to connect... It's not exactly bad, but it could do with a. Few coats of polish!

New trend: Trojan which steals your pics instead of your text

Sounds pretty stupid to me

All you need to do is accidentally infect a pc full of child porn and it will start uploading it to your servers.

Police may not really care too much about you nicking a few people's bank details, but they'll certainly come after you for a server full of kiddy porn. It also has the effect of giving whoever you get it from an 'out'... "My pc is infected with malware which is communicating with a server full of it? Well it must have been put there by the Trojan."

Brit 4G live TODAY: At last you can bust your data cap in 5 minutes

I'd much rather

they got 100% coverage, fully unlimited, practically free, data at 0.5 or even 0.25meg. Then once this is in place they could let people who need it/want to pay extra for it get higher speeds

The speed limiting technology is already in place, as my bundle drops me to a couple of k if I hit my cap rather than charge me extra of cut off, although it drops too low to be usable for much.

Unfortunately, as most people don't need more than this when mobile, the revenue from it would likely drop off, so I can;t see it ever happening.

Mac gamers a-gog as GOG goes Mac

Re: Ooh, syndicate

I used to have pocketUFO for my old pocket PC, but i think it was unofficial but it was pretty good. I'm amazed the original X-Com/TFTD were never released on tablet, although I suppose it could be to do with the ownership.

Resident Evil 6 game review

I've never really liked the third person camera, I think it took away from the atmosphere of the originals with the fixed point of view.

Ten backpacks for tech-heads

Re: What about us bikers?

I too was wondering how waterproof some of these were. Due to the recent fine weather we've been having a large number of people I work with have discovered that their laptop bags are about as waterproof as a sieve! Even going from the carpark to the office has been enough to kill a lot of them.

Brit turns Comp Sci coursework into $100k glad-rags search biz

When i did my degree, i was told in no uncertain terms at the start of the course that anything i created as part of the course belonged to the university. I had to sign things to that effect and was given warnings about using university resources for anything personal and commercial.

I wonder if there was anything similar there?

Ten 15in notebooks for under 400 quid

I've just picked up a thinkpad x61 from ebay for around £100 (2Ghz core duo, 3gig ram, fingerprint scanner), and it's excellent. Much better than the generic cheapy 15inchers you see in PC world. With windows 7 and an SSD (ok the ssd brings it up to £170) it flies along.

It may only be 12" but that's one of the reasons I wanted one, along with that all important 4:3 screen!

Reg readers scrap over ultimate bacon sandwich

Not toasted solidly, but lightly toasted is definitely the way to go. Thick unsmoked back bacon, and since I was introduced to the concept of half hp sauce and half ketchup (daddies obviously), I've never gone back

If an egg is required, it should be a duck egg, and the yolk should be kept runny.

Yes, yes, the Olympics are near. But what'll happen to its IT afterwards?

Re: I smell some sport!

I'm glad the damn thing is staying in London, it means I can ignore it. It was bad enough having whole towns grind to a halt so some fool can carry a torch through them.

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

Perspective

The problem is one of perspective and relative size. if you are in America, the only things from the uk that make it over are the best of the best, so all you ever see of British shows are the really great ones. You probably think British telly is much better. Nevermind the muddy waters of trying to remake anything successful and killing it in the process. Similarly with American shows over here, there are vast amounts of dross produced, but we only ever see the good stuff. Given the relative sizes and output of the two countries, it makes it appear that there is a lot more good stuff produced in America, despite the proportions of varying quality being about the same and similar quality stuff being exported.

Lowest common denominator tv is pretty much the bulk of the output on both sides, we just don't see much of it from each other. Admittedly though, some of the sky/cable channels here seem to be proud of showing nothing but America's really crap output.

Also, I'm amazed no one has mentioned Waking the Dead yet!

Devolo dLAN 500Mb/s powerline network adaptor review

The socket position ,along with the design, means that these would not fit in most of the sockets in my house. I realise newer properties may have the sockets higher up on the wall, but all of mine are on the skirting boards.

Extending upwards would be fine, as would having a socket on teh top or side, but goign downwards and having the socket on teh bottom means I'd have to ignore these as an option

Big media little iPad stories suggest Apple is cranking up the spin cycle

It could be the basis of the advertising campaign.

OK, one last time. These are small... but the ones out there are far away. Small... far away... ah forget it!

Capita publicity to show only UK staff - some of whom are being let go

I assume it's buried in the contracts somewhere

But can your employer actually use your picture in it's publicity material without your permission?

'Young people don't want to become like us', say IT pros

Re: The injuns

With all the IT jobs being farmed out to the cheapest country possible, why would anybody want to get into IT now. I certainly couldn't recommend it as a secure career path.

Where I work I, and many others, can see a problem looming on the horizon. We are constantly told that only the low level jobs are being offshored, and that they will always need experienced 'SMEs' onshore. But... How does anybody new become experienced if they aren't any low level jobs for them to start in.

Additionally, you don't get 'lifers' anymore. That guy in your office with 40 years experience of a system, knowing it inside and out. Good luck replacing them, You'll never get someone doing that now, at the very best you get people job hopping ever few years as most companies don't promote anymore, if you want to progress you have to find another job at a higher grade. On a similar note, a lot of places have no techie career progression, once you reach a certain grade it's management or stay where you are.

It's no wonder IT isn't attracting new people

Brits upscaling their TV buys

Re: sweet spot ... 26-32in band

That "sweet" spot does seem a little low for flat screens, certainly for a main tv but I suppose it depends on the size of your room. But generally tv size is something you get used to. Growing up I've had several tvs, starting with a 14 inch main living room tv. Each one seemed tiny after using the replacement, but fine while using it.

As someone else pointed out, the switch from 4:3 to widescreen did have an impact. Widescreen tvs need to be a lot larger to be horizontally as high. Which means if im used to a large 4:3 tv I'll end up getting an even larger widescreen one as it will feel small if I don't.

I have a 40 inch tv at the moment, and I've moved recently, in the new location the tv feels a lot smaller, so I'll probably replace it soon with a 50 inch or more, chances are that even from the same manufacturer it will be cheaper, lighter, thinner, better quality and have more features. Why wouldn't I get one as large as I can afford, that fits in the space?

Additionally, as tvs rarely die, the old one will get shifted to my bedroom/hobbyroom

Ministers consult public on 'opt in for smut' plans

Mine was unblocked so that I could buy a bottle of scotch from a distillery. If its definition of an adult site is anything like the teleco's, every connection in the country is going to end up unblocked.

WTF is... Li-Fi?

not detectable?

I'd want a lot of testing done before I'd allow all my lightbulbs to be flickering.

Even if it's too fast to consciously see I'd want to know that it wasn't going to end up causing splitting headaches before using it

Scotland considers dishing out more iPads to schoolkids

It was good enough for us

What's the obsession with mobile devices for schools. All computer use in schools should be in computer rooms that are monitored and controlled. There should be no need for kids to even own a computer themselves, nevermind requiring something like an iPad.

I know it's not "cool" but it's a he'll of a lot harder to sell them on ebay

Crooks sell skint fanbois potatoes instead of iPhones

Re: You have to wonder

As I understand this sort of scam, they actually do have the laptops and show them quite freely. They are then put in a bag or box and switched around when the cash is handed over

The 'victims' are hardly innocent in this. They are trying to buy an ipad/iphone from some random guy who approaches them in a car park. At the very least they must think they are buying stolen goods.

Ten... freeware gems for new PCs

Re: mpc-hc

I use media player classic as my main player (windows media player 6.4 was really nice, clean and easy to use) but it's still worth having VLC for those odd files. It's ability to play practically anything can come in handy.

Ten... crowd-funded games from veteran devs

crikey

A space combat sim, I haven't seen those for ages and I miss them... where's the modern version of x-wing v tie fighter, imagine what a modern pc/console could do with it"

Telly is becoming moving wallpaper for constantly online Brits

It's about time that it was recognised that tv/DVDs etc are used as 'background noise' by a lot of people while they do something else.

I, and a number of my friends, half watch, mostly listen to, things while painting, or playing games. It does tend to be things that we already know though, ie blackadder is a good one.

Star Trek's Wesley Crusher blasts Google+ landgrab

Re: Hang on....

Because, despite being an all around decent guy, he is, and always will be, Wesley crusher!

It's one of those roles the will define someone for their whole life due to how bad it was* and being in a popular series.

*the character, not the portrayal.

If you could force an honest answer from a tech company what would it be?

If you could force an honest answer from a tech company what would it be?

I'd ask Microsoft the following

You had basically cornered the market on gaming peripherals in the 90's with your sidewinder range, why on earth did you completely abandon it, dropping all support, instead of expanding it. I understand focusing on the Xbox but why completely drop a complimentary business?

Ten... two-bay Nas boxes

Re: If all you want is something basic...

I have a d-link sharecentre pulse as well, and it's passable, but not great. Although you can improve on the basic functionality by using funplug so you can install your own media server etc.

My main issue with it, is that it seems to randomly stop broadcasting it's shares on my network and needs a reboot for my AV streamer to be able to pick it up again. For the price it's great, but if I ever have to replace it I'm going for a higher end, more reliable one. probably a 4 bay synology.

One of the thinks I'd like to have seen on this is disk compatibility, a lot of NAS boxes don't like 2TB or greater disks, depending on the format. Although this may have been sorted now, it was a while ago when i was looking.

Amazon Kindle Touch touches down early

@Some beggar

I suppose it depends on the person, pretty much all the books I buy are worth reading multiple times.

I grew up reading the shelves and shelves of 60's & 70's sci-fi books that my dad had kept from when he grew up. If I had only had the choice of reading the pap supplied by schools, instead of having a wide selection years ahead of my age*, I'd probably have never read to the degree that I did and developed much poorer language skills as a result.

Because of this I want to keep all of my books as well.

*I'd have had a much easier time trying to do book reports though