Posts by Annihilator 3781 publicly visible posts • joined 10 Jun 2009
I could easily interpret from that limited set of data, that Mac use takes a jump at the end of each year, and then varies with statistical insignificance through the year.
The only thing that you can reasonably infer from that graph, is that Windows 7 is selling. Brilliant. I would never have guessed.
Something tells me this wouldn't be the worst thing to happen to us, and might benefit us...
Anyway, why are ex-NASA chiefs getting hot and bothered? Didn't they pretty much bolt "hello, if found please return to..." on the Voyager probes, with a drawing of what we looked like, what we liked to listen to and a scan of someone's brainwaves - perfect for when our overlords-to-be want to calibrate their mind-control-a-tron.
Fortunately, this will only be figured out if our new overlords are into vinyl.
Everything has a MTBF by definition. Either a) they can't be @rsed to measure it or b) they measured it and they're hiding the results because it's "2" or something.
I really really want one, I do, but looks like I'll just have to extend my array with 1TB drives for the moment...
@DS1 - "People should offset tmp and other system written files where possible to HDD drives if they use an SSD"
Sorry I just couldn't let this one pass without comment. Don't you think that would rather defeat the point of using an SSD in the first place?
!!It's not a bug!! When you "print" ANYTHING from IE, it titles the job with the URL (so you can identify it on a print queue) and also dumps it into the footer. If it's a "local" file, the URL is naturally the file path. A PDF printer is still a printer, but will take all this information and use it to create the PDF - it'll appear as both metadata (as document title) and also within the doc itself as a footer, just like real paper.
Firefox "just" uses the <TITLE> tag where available for print queue identification. It still dumps the full URL in the header (instead of footer). If there isn't a <TITLE> tag, it will use the URL/path for the document title. Or it does in my PDF printer, just tried it.
This is known behaviour and always has been in IE. I assume Outlook would give too much information also (outbind:// etc). Not to mention, a PDF printer BY DEFAULT will use the local username as the document author.
If anything, this is a fault of PDF printers pretending to be hardware printers in order to work. Anything that's "not printed" should not form part of the document.
One final point, why would I ever want to turn some html doc that I have stored locally into a PDF?
I'm not looking forward to explaining this one to Dad. He's already bought a TV that's "got HD" and assumes all his digi-box transmissions are in HD. And given the range of confusion on these here comment boards (ranging from RotaCyclic's "I watched the HD trials 2 years ago", to Red Bren's "everyone has an HD TV, why force them to upgrade?" - all seemingly valid points but ultimately flawed) even people who care enough to read articles about it are confused.
Can't wait for the govt's FAQ to drop through my letterbox...
G/F is going to kill me though - we bought a fairly expensive PVR last Christmas. I have zero chance of replacing it without a fight!
Utter, utter, crap.
Cigarette smoke is dangerous, yes. 2nd hand smoke, dubiously so, but I'll give them that regardless.
The crap that ends up in a computer, is no longer smoke. Can Apple not just advise their technical staff to not lick the motherboards? I reckon they'll be safe enough then.
This is like claiming that a cleaner doesn't have to empty ashtrays, due to 'elf and safety
"The agency was the chief backer of the discredited Clipper chip plan back in the '90s, so it's not altogether surprising that sections of the information security community view any of its actions with suspicion."
I read that "Clipper" as "Clippy" aka the Office Assistant. Funnily enough the sentence still made sense in my mind...
Steven, spot on, but you missed a couple of the other fails. Namely that most broadband providers assumes "always on" and so have very sticky IP assignments. Try it, unplug your modem for a day or so, and see if you get the same IP address. Fair chance you will, as there's very little need for a rotating pool anymore. This only happened back in the days of modem banks where they could assume only a percentage of subscribers were connected at one time. Nowadays, they assume that the majority of connections are live.
Not to mention this mystical science of getting a "better line speed from the exchange" by getting a new IP address. Eh? What? How?
I'd suggest you go to http://www.hummy.org.uk/forums/ - Humax are actually very good at listening to customer concerns and have possibly addressed this already (not sure what model, my Humax is perfect).
I'm glad it's them that are first to market. Just a shame there's no magical firmware fix that could turn my PVR into HD ready :-)
"75% (taking grandparents into account, who inevitably have to play along and do this) chance of a child living in the house. the more effort put into the display the younger the child."
That's a pretty sick inverse proportion you've just suggested, but I applaud the mathematics. It's y=10/x where x is the effort from 1-10 giving y the age of the child.
See the big furry things? They're called blimps. Actually it's just the secondary shell, theres another one inside. Both are acoustically transparent but block wind from travelling through it, effectively creating still air around the microphone. Amazingly, sound engineers know what they're doing :-)
Hooray for that. Something I've never quite understood - energy is never created or destroyed, merely transformed. Potential energy in petrol for example almost always ends up as heat in the brake discs, or noise from the engine.
So... why is global warming bad? Use the warmed up air, turn it into whatever form you want. We just need to get better at the exchange process.
"Rewriting Windows is possible ...because it's been done before. The MS-DOS-derived Windows 9x/ME series was a very different beast to Windows NT and 2000 under the hood"
Indeed, they were very different. Which is why they ditched one and extended the other. They didn't drop everything and start again. They extended the NT/2K codebase. Hence the versions - Win 2K built on kernel 5. XP was 5.1.
To throw everything out and start from scratch would take YEARS, and they'd run out of money before it finished. What they've done over the releases to date is tightened up the core - aka the kernel. Get that stable and it shouldn't matter what fails on top of it. They're now extending that to tighten up "the experience". They could have done it the Apple way - the iPhone's version of FTH is "don't let shoddy stuff run at all" aka, the App Store.
"User mode crashes? How the hell do you crash an OS from user mode?"
Yes, Dazed and Confused indeed. Who said the OS crashed? How often do you see a Windows box crash these days? I can't remember the last time and I run mine 24x7. He was talking about APPLICATION crashes. Poorly written apps that fall over and die because they're a stinking pile of crap.
What happens when such an App exists? User complains to software manufacturer, who says "It's Microsoft's fault". Enough bad coders out there make MS the common link. So MS have decided enough is enough, if they detect you're incapable of doing your own memory management, they'll do it for you.
Maybe if they get very good at detecting this stuff, they can just print a big error message saying "software manufacturer A is crap, we suggest you get a refund. Here is a list of their competitors" and remove FTH
Laptop maker A sells 2, 1 fails - 50% failure rate
Laptop maker B sells 100, 1 fails - 1% failure rate
Total of 102 laptops sold - 2 failures - 1.96% failure rate across the industry. But average of the failure rates is 25.5%. You can't average percentages :-)
Extreme example perhaps, but you get the point
I believe the underlying point of the article is that for a "premium" brand of machines, Apple's not the most reliable. Which flies in the face of what Apple will tell you - what's the premium price tag for again? If the story were "Dell reliability is shit", people would file it under the "Sky is blue" category of stories.
Dell are in the market of pile em high, sell em cheap - don't come crying to anyone if they break down, they're a comodity. Lenovo on the other hand, I still see as a business laptop that gets straight-line depreciated over 3 years and written off, not even the accountants care about longevity. Acer are the only surprise on there for me.
Agree with the comments above of things lasting longer that were built years ago. That's pretty much always been true tho. My 30yr old telly still works, my 1.2GB HD still spins happily (noisy as hell, but always was)
I heard this story last night on the radio and assumed it was O2. Have nearly always received a sudden influx in cold calls from non-O2 people, trying to get me to upgrade. However - it could well be that O2 outsource their (what I imagine is called) "proactive retention team" to A.N. Other company. I've never stuck with the call for long enough before yelling F.O.
A calm response I've started taking though, is declining to talk to any company other than X about my account with X and gently hanging up. I also like the new idea suggested by a commentard recently of "I'm sorry, I don't have a phone" and hanging up. My other favourite is "give me a minute while i find a pen for the details" and place them on hold until they give up and have an unnecessary phone bill.
"These include potential distortions to Earth's space-time fabric, the influence of dark matter and even the prospect of changes being required to the General theory of relativity"
Or they forgot to carry a 1 somewhere?
More probably, dealing with 3+body orbits (sun, earth and satelite) in 4 dimensions is actually rather difficult and still not perfect, plus to some degree, the moon and all the other planets play a part.
Hi Leo
As if watercooling ever had anything to do with merit over expense/complication :-) Generally speaking it's put on there for bragging rights, a strive for absolute silence, overclocking beyond sane levels and a case of more money than sense!
When you're doing it properly, there can be no fans involved at all - external radiators (Zalman Reserator series), full heatsinks for CPU & GPU, so no residual airflow from graphics cards either.
Just waiting for this nutter's idea to become standardised - watercooled PSUs:
http://www.overclock.net/other-hardware-mods/59036-water-cooled-psu.html
Insurance claim just waiting to happen!
Looks like they've twigged to how wasteful HTTP actually is. Multiple requests/streams per web page, not to mention that HTTP requests are effectively in English, and largely the same information.
The pedant in me though, says that 55% faster isn't a 2x web though - it's a 1.55x web :-)
3G cells are becoming almost unusable within metropolitan areas, and it's a pretty much accepted fact that there's a very finite bandwidth available OTA. I didn't even realise that bell-ends were actually using P2P applications.
However, given that most of my 3G traffic ends up being VPN traffic for work (when combined with a laptop), I'll be impressed if they can tell what's hidden underneath.
"Whatever your firewall is set to, you can get remotely smashed via IE or even via some broadcasting nbns tricks, [with] no user interaction," Gaffié writes.
I presume he means the software firewall within Windows. I can't see my router letting through SMB messages from outside my network. Ergo, the attacker would have to be on my local network to do anything. I think I'll be fine...
"If I had left a used nappy in my car for eighteen months, I think I would rather say that I had used it myself, that day, than admit to having such a low standard of hygiene."
Or, worn a full space suit or risked passing out in the car. God only know what it would have reeked like afterwards. 1 hour old is bad enough.
"Obviously, if you use HDCP with DisplayPort or HDMI you have to license that ($15,000 a year + between 0.5 and 10 cents per device)."
Just thinking, HDCP must be a bitch if you're a dyslexic network engineer. "how much to hand out IP addresses??". Even if you're a tired guy like me, as that's how I just read your comment...
"The manufacturers need to test the upgrade and provide a revised driver DVD. All of this can take some time. Good things come to those who wait."
That's fair enough from XP to Vista, but Vista -> 7 doesn't have the same driver problem. Vista drivers will work in Win 7 like, 99.999% of the time.
Besides, you know fine well that they've refreshed the ones on sale right now in Curries et al - the same hardware you bought a month ago is still on sale now, but mysteriously with Win7 loaded.
As for my (well, Dad's) Acer purchase - have had the "we've despatched your shipment" email (twice) saying it shipped on 23rd October. Still waiting... Maybe it was shipped in an empty glass bottle and lobbed into the Irish sea (generally that's where the disc shipment comes from)
Presumably it falls on its ass whenever run on an iPod Touch then?
Utter utter fail - there is never a need to request phone number for an application. Or at the very least, Apple firmware should ask your permission first. Christ it asks permission for an app to use location data. "Phone number" comes way higher on the list i don't want random developers to know than "where am I". My location is transient, my phone number generally isn't.
I'm directing this fail to Apple more than Storm8.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
