Posts by TheBloke

Brits stung for up to £625 when they try to cancel broadband

"Thought that Verizon phonecall was painful?" :

s/Verizon/Comcast/

s/phonecall/phone call/

Asus outs 1920 x 1280 Android ICS tablet

Can you actually read anything on it?

In 2007 I got a Dell XPS 15" laptop - I paid extra to upgrade the screen to 1920x1200 because I love high-resolution.

It was just about worth it. Text was pretty small, but it was readable and I could always zoom.

But that was 15". 1920x1080 on 10"? Do you need 20-20 vision to actually read anything on it?

I suppose the principle of zooming still applies, you can always zoom browser/ebook pages to make them more readable. But I would seriously worry about default text sizes, like icon labels, being hard to read; and if you always have to zoom, the high-res sounds like more of a gimmick than anything.

Linux 3.0 all about 'steady plodding progress'

No surprise

No magical new features? Of course not.

There haven't been any for the last 20 years, why start now?

Microsoft's Outlook gorges on Web2.0 junk food

Utterly useless

I tried the Facebook one. Unless I'm missing something huge, it's completely useless. You can';t just browse your Facebook updates or receive Facebook IMs. All that happens is that the "People Pane" (which in 2010 shows recent emails etc from the given person) will also show recent status updates from that person.

A couple of problems.. firstly the vast majority of people I have on Facebook do not email me, or vice versa. We communicate on.. well, Facebook itself! Secondly, those that do do not use the same email address on Facebook as they do to email me. E.g. company colleagues email me with their company address, but have registered on Facebook with their personal or other address.

So despite having it installed and configured, I have yet to get a single status update visible in Outlook.

Just pants.

Acer Aspire 1825PT 11.6in touchscreen notebook

Easy to replace HDD for SSD?

Is it easy to replace the HDD with an SSD?

I am quite tempted by this little device. But getting rid of that 5400 RPM rubbish and putting in a proper SSD would be an essential upgrade for me. I can't live with HDD slowness and unreliability any more. Plus an SSD would boost the battery life a bit.

'Minimalist, whimsical' Google search given Bing-like overhaul

Where?

I don't have a search sidebar on either google.co.uk or google.com. I couldn't see any settings under Search Settings or Google Account Settings that would enable it.

What needs to be done to see it?

2016 bug hits Windows phones

No issues on my HTC Touch Pro 2 run WM 6.5

All my SMS' show the correct 2010 date.

But then the HTC uses HTC's own Manilla front-end, and therefore perhaps doesn't use the Windows Mobile code for this.

What’s the point of desktop virtualization?

Essential to get the best of all worlds

I've used desktop virtualisation for years.

I have Linux as my base OS, and run Windows XP in a VMWare Workstation VM.

This gives me the power flexbility and reliability of Linux as the host OS, while allowing me to continue to use the Windows apps I want - Microsoft Office, Toad for Oracle, Photoshop and more. Plus it allows me to use all those USB peripherals I have that don't work properly under Linux. My mobile phone, for example.

I've always found it pretty fast and reliable. Having lots of RAM is important of course. I have 4GB on my host, and I allocate 1.5GB to Windows.

What I've done most recently is to install Windows on a separate partition on my hard disk. I now have it setup so that I can boot directly into either Linux or Windows; then once booted into Linux, I can also boot the same Windows install under VMWare.

This gives me maximum flexiblity - if I want to play a game, or I know I'm going to be doing Windows-only work for a while (like a long Photoshop session), I can boot into Windows and be using the same install/configuration that I normally use from Linux.

Cuba crafts extra-communist Linux distro

Need to work on their database too

This is what you currently get if you search for Nova.. what was that about open source software helping with security? Apparently you need to know how to use it first

* user warning: Duplicate entry '990854' for key 1 query: INSERT INTO accesslog (title, path, url, hostname, uid, sid, timer, timestamp) values('Buscar', 'search/node', 'http://www.uci.cu/', '10.0.0.45', 0, 'eb06b17348b1b5d057a9ec2a6ffbd5b5', 203, 1234408005) in /var/www/internet/includes/database.mysql.inc on line 172.

* user warning: Error writing file '/tmp/#sql7ba_2e8_0.frm' (Errcode: 28) query: CREATE TEMPORARY TABLE temp_search_sids SELECT i.type, i.sid, SUM(i.score * t.count) AS relevance, COUNT(*) AS matches FROM search_index i INNER JOIN search_total t ON i.word = t.word INNER JOIN node n ON n.nid = i.sid INNER JOIN users u ON n.uid = u.uid WHERE n.status = 1 AND (i.word = 'nova') AND i.type = 'node' GROUP BY i.type, i.sid HAVING COUNT(*) >= 1 in /var/www/internet/includes/database.mysql.inc on line 172.

* user warning: Table 'internet.temp_search_sids' doesn't exist query: SELECT MAX(relevance) FROM temp_search_sids in /var/www/internet/includes/database.mysql.inc on line 172.

Dogs and arson feature in top 10 data recovery disasters

This is the worst list ever

'Bottle of wine spilled over keyboard..', 'Scratched DVD ..' - wow, hold the front page, data recovery firm recovers data from a scratched DVD! Whoulda thunk it.

The first one was good. After that it's lame and seems like just an excuse to promote Datalabs.

So what will happen to Sun?

It's not obvious (@jake) - Sun's software is outstanding

Jake,

You're so dead wrong. The hardware is good, that's true, but it's in software that Sun is not only leading the way but in fact blasting away all opposition.

The Solaris 10 operating system has been a revelation - as well as the high-profile items like ZFS and dtrace, it introduced zones, easy to use, very powerful and near-zero overhead virtual machines with resource management (Containers); the Service Management Facility, a complete rewrite of and vast enhancement to the /etc/rc.d|init.d system that have bogged *nix systems with shell scripts for years; the Fault Management daemon for error reporting and fault fixing across the system; and much more. Solaris 10 has enough significant enhancements to fill two or three major releases on most other vendor's schedules.

ZFS, DTrace and Zones/Containers in particular represent an order of magnitude over what went before, and over what any rival vendor is developing. The Linux kernel team and their numerous distrib cohorts haven't introduced an innovative, concept-changing feature in years (did they ever, besides price and being open source?), AIX is rock solid and very manageable but lacking any real innovation, BSD is reliable but under-resourced, HPUX is stagnated, etc, etc.

The world needs Sun software, they are the only truly innovative operating system vendor out there. I sincerely hope that they don't sell, or that if they do they find someone willing to be hands-off on their software R&D and let them continue on their path.

Without them, we'll be back to the mindless mediocre feature tweaking of every other OS producer out there.

'Googlebomb' blows up in Daily Mail hack's face

Come on El Reg, where's your contribution?

I am very disappointed to see that you did not:

a) Put "Web says Julie Moult is an idiot" in your story URL, or its title

or

b) Link to one of the blog posts with a hyperlink containing "Julie Moult is an idiot".

With your pagerank, either would have been a powerful and lasting contribution to this monument for ill informed shock journalism. And the fact that it's the Daily Mail only makes it even more fun.

Google will eat itself in 202,345,117 years

"this is not a criminal practice"

Surely the click fraud part is, well, fraud?

Yahoo! recounts! votes!

Convenient mistake?

So they put out figures showing Yang has 85%, world+dog reads that and sees huge popularity for Yang, thinks no more about it.

Then when they correct it to a more modest 65%, far fewer people will be listening or noticing.

So as long as you don't change the actual result, it would be easy to boost your perceived popularity with little risk (unless the SEC apply some meaningful sanction/fine as a result of this.)

US nuke missile crew falls asleep on the job

What's the problem?

If all the nuclear launch crews were asleep, surely we'd all be a lot safer.

1,076 developers, 15 years, one open-source Wine

Too little, too late

I've always regarded Wine as something of a running joke - freetards like to bring it up as proof of the obsolescence of Windows, neglecting to mention that any app that is remotely complex or unusual will likely run with major glitches, or require hours of research and effort to make run at all.

It might be fun for hackers, but for anyone who wants to do real work it's simply not worth the bother.

You're much better off using VMWare Workstation or Virtualbox. VM Workstation, as of version 6.5 (now in beta) can integrate guest operating system windows directly onto the host, so in most respects it's like running them natively.

And unlike Wine, it hasn't taken them 15 years to reach stability.