Posts by Ben Rose

'BLING BLING, BLING BLING' 'Hello, yes, my iPhone is made of GOLD'

Gold iPhone ringtone...

...would have to be a certain song from Roy Chubby Brown.

Microsoft pulls faulty Exchange 2013 patch HOURS after release

MS Quality Assurance at its best

Does nobody test this stuff?

I mean, they even forgot to put the Start button in Windows 8!

Facebook keeps company with misery say boffins

But what about...

...G+ users? I psychologist could have a field day with that lot.

Magnets too slow for disk writes? Use lasers

LASER not laser

Is it just me who gets annoyed when people don't use LASER?

It's an acronym like RIM or OSX, but I don't see El Reg gettng those wrong.

Netflix dares UK freetards: Watch new Breaking Bad NOW or torrent it?

Could go either way

I'm not sure this is going to change a whole lot. My limited viewpoint sees a lot of downloaders watching their content offline on phones or tablets these days, which Netflix doesn't do much to help.

Sure if you watch your downloads on TV, your broadband is fast enough, your ISP limits allow it and you have a TV that is able to play Netflix then this might be a winner. For everybody else, the download will be a higher bitrate and have 5.1 surround.

Chrome, Firefox blab your passwords in a just few clicks: Shrug, wary or kill?

Re: Not concerned..

Mutli-user has been available since Windows 95 but not until ME did they actually have separate NT style profiles. e.g. c:\documents and settings\username\etc

This type of profile allowed different settings to be stored easily for each user and, in the case of Chrome, would mean two entirely separate password repositories in different folders.

Not concerned..

Mutiple user profiles have been in "domestic" flavours on Windows since Windows ME. During first time set-up of a new PC they have positively encouraged people to have multi-user logins, with their own wallpaper etc. It works well and your desktop etc. are stored in an area that is off-limits to other users.

I share my PC with a wife and 2 children. Can they see my saved Chrome passwords? No.

'First' 3D-printed rifle's barrel splits after single shot

Clearly Scaramanga will make one of these in the Daniel Craig remake Bond movie "The Man with the Plastic Gun".

So, who ought to be the next Doctor Who? It's up to YOU...

Re: So many choices

I think Cumberbatch should be the new Master!

Other thoughts...

Ronnie Corbett, Richard Madeley (random, but think about it), either of the guys from Pointless.

In fact, I'm happy with anybody except Miranda or James Corden.

Doesn't Harry Potter need a good job? Swap his wand for a sonic screwdriver.

Re: It'd be nice

Now you mention it, the Tardis does crash a lot lately.

Re: Watch the trend...

Benjamin Button already had that plot line.

Not Going Out

I reckon Lee Mack would be good here, or even his sit-com side kick Tim Vine. In fact, Tim Vine could be awesome.

Throw in Lee's flatmate from Not Going Out as a wild card, no idea what her real name is.

Re: It'd be nice

The third comment and already somebody is suggesting Alternative Voting? ;-)

LinkedIn snarfing contacts from Exchange

Re: @ Ben Rose

@AC 18:30

How about Lotus Notes? There is no username/password, it uses two factor authentication including a physical ID file with secure keys. LinkedIn is more than welcome to try and read our corporate Notes directories.

Re: @ Ben Rose

@ItsNotMe

I responding to "Outlook hasn't had any issues with viruses" - as far as I'm concerned, there are hundreds of nasties out there that will happily spawn themselves to anybody in your Outlook address book. Outlook seems happy to do this, it's also how stuff like LinkedIn can also query your address book without much effort. Try doing that with a secure email program.

As far as I'm concerned, 90% of reasons for having AV installed in the workplace are either IE or Outlook. The other 10% is Windows.

Re: Outlook insecure?

So Outlook users can safely uninstall their anti-virus programs now? No risk of viruses/trojans accessing their address book?

Outlook insecure?

This has been the case since the Melissa virus in the 90s and why I've never recommended anybody use Outlook. Of course most IT Consultants would rather just have an easy sale and dump M$ stuff to everybody they can.

Marks & Sparks accused of silently bonking punters over the tills

Cash Points

For decades I have been plagued by idiots in front of me at the cash machine who seem to insert the wrong card. Or insert a card, check a balance, then insert another card for their cash.

These people with two cards are a total pain in the ass.

If the new tills are affecting these people by reading the wrong card, I see this as revenge for having such a stupid method of handling their personal finance. One bank account, one card, no queue at the cashpoint.

Pirates scoff at games dev sim's in-game piracy lesson

A nice bit of marketing

I, and I'm sure many others, had never heard of this game or its developer before this "story" broke. I bet many of the 214 people who bought it also hadn't heard of it before the pirate release either.

I'm not going to get into what is good or bad for any media industry but I know for sure that I have bought many games, movies and TV box sets purely on the recommendation of a load of friends who downloaded it for free. Without that, I'd often never of heard of the TV show.

Beer, because pirates drink that too.

Are biofuels Europe's sh*ttiest idea ever?

Re: Another carbon reduction failure

I have been monitoring this page on an almost daily basis for years now:

http://owningelectriccar.com/national-grid-electric.html

If you ignore the electric car and comparison nonsense around it, the grid data is actually quite useful.

I've never seen the grid electric fall below 500g CO2/kWh and it is regularly above the 600g barrier - especially in the winter months when electric lights, heating etc. are used more frequently.

Obviously there are times of day, like in the early hours, where demand may be low and this may drag overall averages down and make the numbers look good. In real terms though, a mean average doesn't tell the whole picture. A modal average would probably be more realistic - e.g. for most hours of the day, the CO2 emissions are considerably higher than average.

Essentially, for people who live normal hours (e.g. not night shift workers) there is a large CO2 footprint whenever you plug in a device - larger than the DECC figures may lead you to believe. If you used that appliance in the early hours of the morning it would help a lot, but you can't really have that post-dinner coffee at 3am.

Incidentally, I try to ignore pumped hydro storage as it requires electricity to get it there which has its own CO2 footprint.

bad batch of fuel?

Sounds more to me like the DPF regeneration cycle taking place. Do you do lots of short journeys?

@Matthew 3 - Re: Another carbon reduction failure

In reality, the main problem here is that you chose to take a job that is based where you do not live.

Working should be seen as a workaround, not a solution, for this.

Unfortunately, running a car has become so cheap that people feel inclined to commute ridiculous distances each way. People used to relocate and employers used to offer allowances for it. Prospective employers even used to refund travel expenses for interviews.

There is no need for anybody to live in a rural area and also have a long commute, alternative options are available.

Re: Another carbon reduction failure

"IIRC DECC reckon the average UK CO2 emissions per kWh are about 450g, but that aside you are right with your general assertion."

Gotta love averages, they also vary with source. The number also varies depending what you include. For example, we buy in a LOT of electricity from the French who have excess generation from their nukes. This makes our grid cleaner but isn't really our electricity. The average CO2 emissions for electricity only produced on UK soil is considerably higher.

In real terms, all of our low carbon electricity is already allocated to customers. if you then turn on a kettle, or plug-in an electric car, the only place for that extra energy to come from is coal/gas. This has a considerably higher than average CO2 footprint.

"The flaw is that even reducing power generation emissions doesn't solve the total emissions given transport accounts for a substantial portion of total CO2 emissions."

Reducing grid emissions will make alternative lower carbon methods of transport more viable and attractive. I'm rather eco-conscious but wouldn't touch an electric car with a barge pole right now.

Another carbon reduction failure

When will the powers that be realise that most of these CO2 reduction schemes are just nonsense?

There are two simple ways to reduce CO2 emissions:

1) Use less energy, like turning stuff off when we don't need it. People still don't do this enough, too much water in the kettle etc.

2) Produce electricity more cleanly - Pretty much every process uses electricity. We're looking at around 600g of CO2 for every kWh of electricity we generate right now. This electricity fuels electric cars but is also used to generate hydrogen for fuel cells and refine oil for petrol/diesel. If we reduce the carbon footprint of electricity generation, every form of transport gets cleaner - either directly, for electric cars and trains, or indirectly for petrol/diesel cars, trucks and even aeroplanes.

It's been demonstrated over again that renewables like solar PV and wind turbines help reduce this but won't make a dent on emissions from electricity generation for decades. The only realistic solution is nuclear and, with a new power station taking 15-20 years to come on-line, we need to get this done sooner rather than later.

EE extends network: Soon, 1 million users will pay us for 4G

Maybe Not..

When T-Mobile merged with Orange to form EE, my mobile coverage went down the pan. I'm not exactly sure what they did but I got less signal in many places and in other, where I had full strength, I got no data throughput. It became unusable, nobody listened.

In the end, I decided to cancel and move to another provider - who shall remain nameless so I don't look like I'm representing them.

I called T-Mobile disconnections...there was a VERY long queue. The guy who dealt with me said I wasn't the first with the same complaint and wouldn't be the last.

There may be many people on 4G soon...but I doubt they'll be using EE.

IBM socialises Notes mail to stop your yammering

@Mongo - Re: Ouroboros

Most of the UI issues here are familiarity. For years, refreshing a view in Notes used F9. All other apps used the same, I remember refreshing web pages in Netscape using the F9 key.

Then Microsoft decided to use the F5 key for the same function. No idea why, everything else used F5. Of course, for people switching from Outlook to Notes, this was a Notes problem. A problem that it used F9 for fresh for years before Outlook even existed. F5 was used to lock the session in Notes, so this caused more issues.

In the end, we've now ended up with two buttons for refresh in Notes. F9 is still used, for backward compatibility, but now F5 works too - to help the moaners who aren't capable of adjusting. Now, to lock the session, I have to use Ctrl+F5.

Regarding Ctrl+N, this could never work. Many databases have multiple forms, how does it know which form you want to base the document on when you press Ctrl+N? There are also many functions you may to perform at the time a document is created, which is why forms are often hidden from the Create menu. It's fair feedback from your end but, as an application developer, I know it just couldn't work.

The main issue here is familiarity. Back when I started working with Notes in the 90s, Outlook didn't even exist. For most, Notes was the only email program they had ever used. The didn't have internet at home. They seemed to manage with Notes quite well.

Since then, IT literacy seems to have gone DOWN, not up. Everybody has smartphones and computers at home and thinks they know what they are doing. Management think the same, so they train staff less. Staff don't like to admit they're clueless, so they don't call the helpdesk much.

I've turned a lot of people around from being Notes haters, simply by sitting down with them and showing them how it works. Showing them what it is good at and how it can work for them. In the majority of cases, it's simply fear of the unknown. Of course, for the MCSEs who work in a company that runs Notes on Windows, it will always been a bone of contention.

Beer - because people stress too much over this stuff.

Re: IBM - Lotus?

My last brawl with Microsoft was to do with 640k memory limits in MS-DOS.

It's about as relevant as your antiquated story.

Re: Ouroboros

The date on your splash screen image just goes to confirm how old your joke is.

If you're still using 10 year old software, I'm not surprised it sucks a bit on the UI side. Do you run it on Windows 2000 too?

No doubt there will be loads of Lotus Notes haters who drop by this thread today but, if they aren't using a recent version, their opinion simply isn't valid.

If you're going to compare Notes to Outlook, at least make them versions from around the same era.

Model S selling better than expected, says Tesla

@Stu_The_Jock Re: @ecofeco Umm, no! Leccy? No!!

Well, you said "correct me if I am wrong" and if you look a little closer, you'll see those numbers exclude consumption by the power stations themselves. For example, hydro often involves pumping a load of water uphill first for it to fall down again. Thermal requires a lot of pumping down and back up etc.

From the site you linked, is this table:

http://www.ssb.no/en/energi-og-industri/statistikker/elektrisitetaar/aar/2013-03-20?fane=tabell&sort=nummer&tabell=104211

If clearly shows the net consumption, including this losses, is positive. e.g. it uses more than it generates. This was also 2011 - they've imported a lot of electric cars since then, so consumption will have gone up.

It's close but it should also be noted that Norway is a rare exception. In more usual countries, there is a vast divide between renewable generation and consumption. Norway are doing well, although not enough to justify an electric car, and they can also help Sweden. Going to be a long time until other states get anywhere near though.

@ecofeco Umm, no! Re: Leccy? No!!

You can twist the numbers however you like to make them sound nice, but the real picture is this.

There isn't a single country in the world in which renewable electricity generation exceeds the demand for electricity. Every kWh of renewable is consumed the moment it comes out of the solar panel, wind turbine or hydro generator.

The additional electricity that is needed above that is created by fossil fuels.

If we use electric cars, we need more electricity. To general that electricity, we need more fossil fuels.

Even Tesla's super duper power stations are, I believe, connected to the grid. When a car ISN'T plugged in, they are reducing demand for fossil fuelled electricity and making the grid greener. The moment you plug a Model S in, that electricity is no longer going into the grid and the demand for it has to be met from elsewhere - e.g. coal and gas.

Review: Renault Zoe electric car

Re: Aaand we have the obligatory idiot

I've even seen Nissan use a portable petrol generator at press events to recharge the LEAF.

The generator was made by Honda!

Re: Renault and electronics...

at least there is no head-gasket, I guess.

Spot On!

Renault/Nissan frequently use Lisbon for EV launches due to the easy availability of charging points. That, combined with the warm temperature and relative lack of traffic/gradients make an EV seem like an exciting proposition.

This review did read a lot like a re-written press release.

Re: Aaand we have the obligatory idiot @Fishdog

"The B787 battery issue has nothing to do with vehicle batteries"

I believe it was the boss of Tesla that brought the two issues together...by saying his expert knowledge could fix the issue in no time.

Ultimately, a Li-ion battery is a Li-ion battery. Whether it's a Dell Laptop that's catching fire, a smoking iPhone that's been dropped, or a Fisker Karma that's buring to a cinder, it's still the same tech underneath.

Re: The thing that amazes me about electric cars...

"And by working in the 'City' you contribute to the pollution, so that buggers your clean air credentials."

Depends where I live, no?

Re: The thing that amazes me about electric cars...

"Sorry, what was the problem again?"

Global warming.

It will affect the South first...

Re: Renault Flatulence

Are you mistaking that for the E-Fluence?

@Chad HRe: Lies...damn lies...and statistics.

"1) this of course would need to be compared to 100% of petrol burned in a car comes from fossil fuels, making the grid about 35% better on this basis."

You're comparing 100% of the chalk with 65% of the cheese again. You can't compare one unit with another of a completely different type.

Sure, 100% of energy in a petrol car comes from petrol. This isn't necessarily a bad thing. I've yet to see a better alternative.

"3) So removign car emmisions wont help?"

There is no means of removing car emissions right now. We're simply moving it from one place (the car) to another (the power station). It would help greatly, but we can't. Unless we walk or similar.

"5) I fail to see your point here. At the moment we've got a lot of cars on the road effectively using dirty power. Hell of a lot easier to do about it when the power is centralised to a few power plants, than smaller petrol engines moving all around the place."

I'm all for fixing the power stations. When they are clean, we can start using more electricity again. All the true eco supporters are turning appliances off at the wall, to avoid standby consumption. They're replacing light bulbs with LEDs etc. Plugging in an electric car increases power usage, the exact opposite way to what we need.

"You see, there's this thing called a rechargable battery, perhaps you might have heard of it, that can effectively store electricity. I believe these cars use something a bit similar."

Whichever way you want to twist it, there isn't a single minute in the day where electricity demand does not exceed generation from renewable power. The only way to provide the extra power needed for electric cars is to burn more coal.

"Its ony a fact in the short term. In the long term, we add more power sources of a different nature to effectively replace the millions of mini plants we have running in cars today."

The thing is, UK power generation is going down not up. People keep pulling out of deals to create power stations and we're being threatened by brown outs. EVs aren't helping this.

"Methods such as carbon sequesteration are better applied to large central power plants than say a million cars on the road."

Sure, but all of the EVs currently on sale will be on the scrap heap long before we have a low carbon national grid.

Re: @thegrouch

>OK, for the EV battery the charging is not 100% efficient, but on the other hand if you charge overnight then >there tends to be a higher proportion of low-CO2 sources which should compensate somewhat.

The additional power required can ONLY come from dirty sources. There is no compensation.

>It's worth remembering that renewables such as wind and hydro power have the drawback that they still >generate power even when there is virtually no demand for it at (say) 3am. There are very few ways to store >all that potential excess electricity.. except electric car batteries are one way that it can be done.

At any time of day, day & night, weekday or weekend, power demand always exceeds the amount that comes from renewable or low carbon sources. The only way to generate extra power is from fossil fuels.

The thing that amazes me about electric cars...

...is the amount of techie geeks who believe all the marketing hype.

I know many, perfectly wise, intellligent people who just soak it all up. Some have even bought the cars. These are clever people, who normally ask the right questions. They're atheists as they like a bit of evidence and often work in IT or other science linked profession. They can do the maths, yet somehow believe the numbers they are given without challenging them.

I'm a clean air campaigner. I work in the City and breathe the pollution in central London, it's horrible. I'd love to see changes that reduce carbon emissions in the UK. But I've done the maths and EVs just don't help there.

Sure, if it were practicaly for everybody in London to switch to an EV then pollution may be better in the South. But up North in towns like Sheffield and Nottingham, where a lot of power is generated. pollution would get worse.

Maybe these EVs fans & buyers are just gadget geeks and simply can't stay away as it's a new toy with a plug on it? I admit, my interest was provoked for the same reasons but fortunately I saw through the hype before wasting my money.

Lies...damn lies...and statistics.

Ah, the obligatory person who claims the other guy is an idiot. They're usually more wrong than the first guy. Time for some corrections.

1) As I type, 65.4% of electricity on the National Grid is coming from coal or gas. Rather less than the 40% you claim is coming from low carbon sources. But this number is irrelevant - I'll explain below.

2) That percentage changes all day. It often goes lower at night as we import spare electricity from nuclear power stations in France which aren't as easy to shut down for the night as our coal/gas fired ones are. But this number is irrelevant - I'll explain below.

3) Whilst some pollution is localised, CO2 is more of a global issue. Where it comes from is irrelevant. Generating electricity in the UK generates on average about 600g of CO2 per kWh. When one kWh is only good for about 3 miles in an EV, that's quite a lot. Additionally a lot of low level pollution in City Centres is, rather amazingly, caused by crappy diesel generators that kick in to provide electricity when power supplies frequently fail. WIthout them, London would be a cleaner place.

4) Efficiency is a non-argument, unless the waste is of concern. EV fans always use the efficiency argument but it simply doesn't apply, unless we're comparing two machines that use the same fuel. We aren't. One machine is 80% efficient at burning cheese and the other is 30% efficient at burning chalk . So what? It's the best use for chalk that we have.

5) Improving the power supply will indeed improve all EVs. That's why we should be investing in a cleaner power supply, not investing in more devices to use the dirty power.

The reason the numbers in 1) and 2) are irrelevant are because EVs are only charged using "marginal" electricity. This is the crap you have left after all the green power has been used up.

Wind, solar, and other sources do not have fuel you can store. You get "green" solar electricity when the sun shines. You get wind power when it's windy. You can't simply bottle it up. As a result, green suppliers sell every last drop of it at the moment it is generated. It is all pumped directly into the National Grid...and used.

We're currently generating 48,115MW of electricity to meet demand. The entire wind power output of the UK is currently 5,228MW, or just 10.9% of demand. 1.8% (860MW) comes from hydro and solar genaration is so small it doesn't even appear on the chart except as part of "Other", which provides 696MW (1.4%).

As these green sources only make up about 15% of the current demand - or around 30% if we include nuclear - they are all consumed before they even come out of the power plant. If our demand was only 15,000MW maybe that would be OK, but we need more than three times that. The only way to get extra power is to burn fossil fuels - enter coal and gas.

If you plug in an electric car, the grid needs more power. As all the power from wind, solar and hydro is already allocated, the only option is to throw a few more coals on the fire and increase pollution in the atmosphere. This isn't an opinion, it's a fact.

The only way to improve UK air quality is to either a) Use less electricity or b) Reduce the emissions footprint of generating that electricity. As a) is highly unlikely, that leaves us with b).

Once all UK electricity comes from clean or renewable sources, then, and only then, should we start wasting our money on electric cars.

4K video may wow vidiots, but content creators see pitfalls

You think that's a lot of storage?

Seriously, a few TBs is nothing. I really have no idea what they are moaning about, unless this is just an attempt at promoting 4k to those who may not have heard of it.

Superman II the Richard Donner cut was made by working through a basement that contained all of the original reels of film taken during shooting. The combined weight of these tapes was SIX TONNES!

However much storage 4k may require, it's got nothing on those old film reels.

Old reels used to have to be played through by hand and cut up using scissors and tape too. Still think you have bandwidth constraints on your pro workstation?

Wii-U boat torpedoes Nintendo's '¥20bn profit' into ¥20bn loss

I own one!

I'm a sucker for a new gadget so we got a Wii U for Christmas. We got the original Wii on the day it came out and played it a lot. However, since my son was born 3 or so years ago, it hasn't seen much use. Now he's hit that PEGI 3 rating age, I thought the Wii U might appeal...I wasn't wrong.

I'd not seen one before buying so when unboxing I was surprised by how big the new controller was. It's not heavy though, which is good for long gaming sessions.

Set-up was quite genius and allowed me to port everything over from the old Wii. You install the Wii U transfer app on your old Wii and the Wii U and, with the help of an SD card and your internet connection, all of your save games, store purchases etc. are transferred over.

All of our Wii games and accessories work perfectly on the Wii U, it's effectively dual boot. You tell it to go into Wii mode and it reboots to the Wii menu. Want to play Wii U games again and you click a menu item and it reboots again to the Wii U home screen. Switching to the Wii menu for the first time showed me my transferred software and inserting a game disc confirmed that all my save games, Mii characters etc. had been transferred. It worked perfectly.

As for the Wii U gaming side of things, I'm highly impressed. We got Nintendoland, Zombie U, Sonic All Star racing and the Super Mario game for the Wii U too.

Nintendoland is simply brilliant and consists of loads of mini games, many of which show off the new controller functions well. On some games, for example, it's effectively hide and seek. The player with the Wii U controller uses their "private" screen to see where they are on the map whilst up to four other players try to find them using the TV screen. We've had a lot of family fun doing this.

In other games, the controller screen is used for aiming or display of maps that would otherwise clutter the game screen. In Zombie U the Wii U controller is excellent for looking at what's in your backpack, switching weapons etc. As a gamer, I love how that works without the need for pop-up menus on the gaming screen.

Sonic All Star Racing uses the controller screen for player 2 if you're racing another local player. In fact, using this method, up to 5 people can race on the same console, with the other 4 using old skool Wii controllers.

Mario is more of the same and can be played just like the Wii version but, if you use the Wii U controller you have increased functionality. Firstly, the co-operative function allows the Wii U controller player to use the touchscreen to build extra platforms, kills monsters and other functions whilst another player controls Mario. With a 3 year old, this is really handy. When he's about to jump into a hole and die, I can put a platform right under his feet and save him.

On top of that, the apps from YouTube, LoveFilm and Netflix are a real winner if you don't already have a device connected to your TV for this. The buffering on YouTube is pretty good and I enjoy HD video from there often. The HDMI connection has also made it easier to hook up to my home cinema for audio and video.

I'm really happy with all of it, pretty much, except the DVD drive is a little bit noisy when the disc is spinning. I had a to struggle to think of that fault though as we love it and it's even got us playing our old Wii games some more..

Which qualifications are worthwhile?

MSCDEX

Do you know what MSCDEX is? Can you get a Soundblaster card working in Windows 3 without using QEMM?

If not, I wouldn't bother.

Feeling poor? WHO took all your money? NOT capitalist bastards?

Re: The Blame

The article clearly points out that inflation went through the roof in the late 70s and things went downhill from there. Who was in charge in the late 70s?

The Blame

Of course, I blame Mrs. Thatcher for all of this. Sadly, the Champagne is still on ice...for now at least.

Google stealthily coalesces UK music cloud into being

@Tim Parker Re: @Ben Rose : @Tim Parker Good idea, poorly executed

"As for FLAC and iTunes - it shouldn't be a problem"

They don't work together. FLAC is not a supported codec in iTunes...period.

"It can be exported via an iTunes server, or pulled from the NAS into iTunes in OSX via fluke."

iTunes and an "iTunes server" are two entirely different thing. Even Apple tried to kill the latter as it was implemented horribly on cheap NAS devices. The iTunes server function was built in to iTunes clients in an attempt to allow households to share their music in a read-only way. e.g. you rip your own music into your own iTunes library and, whilst your PC is on-line, other people can play music from that library. 3rd party iTunes servers will built to allow the same functionality to play music from NAS devices through the iTunes client. Last time I looked, it didn't work with lossless codecs - certainly not on my ReadyNAS.

I don't use OSX, never have. I just use iTunes, as it was the best music manager available when I was given my original iPod.

This evening I have converted my KLF and Prodigy albums to mp3 320 and uploaded them to Google music. It will have to do for now, until something better comes along.