Posts by Mark 65

Nuke support in UK hits record high

"You either have too much fucking money or are completely deficient in sense."

A "Green" is the current abbreviation.

@The Grime

Seven minutes past four in the afternoon?

Planning consent

Two points:

1. Once the lights start to dim, consent becomes easy.

2. No doubt there is a workaround based upon security of energy supply, national security or any other story a Government can come up with.

At the end of the day even the Greens will want the lights on.

More Brits desert high streets to spend £50bn online

"town is good for some stuff"

Interacting with ratboys mainly.

SOPA is dead. Are you happy now?

Funding is simple

It has to be centrally (i.e. Government/tax-payer) supplied and regulated. That puts everyone on an even footing. Candidates must then account for all that is spent on their campaign. It's about time some semblance of honesty was brought (not bought) back into politics. Remove the lobbying and the contributions/funding which essentially amount to a legal bribe. There has to be a better way.

Photos

I've also read that one of the primary concerns with photography in museums etc is the effects of the flash degrading artefacts (colour fade I'd guess, and possibly materials degradation). However the complete banning of all photography seems to dovetail nicely with the book sales in the shop you always have to pass through in order to leave. For some places (Royal Palaces etc) I'll buy as some of the shots are outstanding and the books filled with historical information and prices are often reasonable.

Kodak's moment: Camera biz files for bankruptcy

Not convinced

"Companies can - and do emerge - from Chapter 11 in a better state than when filing."

US airlines for one seem to yo-yo in and out of this one and GM is hardly a shining virtue of a well run company. I'd say it gives most companies the chance to rearrange the deckchairs on the Titanic.

A classic tale

Many similar stories have occurred.

Company has major share of a market when a competing technology comes along often, ironically, pioneered within said company. Company either: does not wish to cannibalise current product sales with "big new thing" or, in the case of Kodak, cannot see a market whereby current product is not still the top dog. Company tries to reinvent itself half-heartedly way too far down the path to extinction. Company enters bankruptcy, coughs and splutters along for a bit, then ultimately fails or shrinks to the point it's not worth bothering with.

SOPA from a distance: multiplying the trade threats

Proof positive

All this proves is what any wise man could have told you - never register a US controlled TLD and never have it hosted in the US.

A preview of SOPA: Web shut down before my eyes

@Trevor

No, this thing is really about the "leaders" of America and their desire to destroy themselves and their country in some act of digital Darwinism. I thank them for the internet and bid them farewell as they have become a digital wart upon the foreskin of humanity.

The internet

I'm sure the US will, at some point, regret just how good that system turned out to be.

The US

I laugh at the fact that everyone claims the UK is considered a colonial power in decline as if it were the only one and heartily welcome the US to the party. We, admittedly, had our day but how does it feel to slowly turn to shit in the modern world as opposed to the start of the 20th century?

Bitter? No, just somewhat amused to see how the top dog takes its medicine.

Bounty hunters

hahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha

They may make good chav TV but they cannot operate outside of the US. To kidnap a citizen for extradition you need to extract that person from the country/continent. Best of luck with that one. Seeing as a bounty hunter cannot legally carry a concealed firearm in, for example, the UK I'd be oh so happy to see them "tough it out" against one of our trigger-happy CO19 units, let alone if the wanted person was part of, say, the Albanian mafia. Personally I'd piss myself laughing at seeing them try.

Ten... laptop accessories

I imagine your printer must run oh so fast.

Windows 8 hardware rules 'derail user-friendly Linux'

I can see yet another EU court case in the offing for Microsoft - they just do not learn. Whilst any restrictions on the unlocking of Intel boards will be on the manufacturers head the ARM statement surely amounts to some form of trade restraint or competition blocking, yet again.

Netgear ReadyNas Duo v2 network storage

I know the QNAP devices support NFS, FTP, HTTPS, user quotas etc. and I'm sure the Synology ones would too.

Five things that knocked CES 2012 for six

+1 for the drone.

Experts: We're stuck with passwords – and maybe they're best

Then you have the issue that oppressive regimes will routinely take biometrics of their citizens for ID purposes - passport anyone? Oh, we'll need your fingerprints and an iris scan. Wow, we can now access your bank details, computer etc and share these biometrics with the local council just like we allow them to use RIPA terrorism intended laws to investigate rogue dogshit. I'd rather forget a password than carry around a biometric anyone can access.

Fujifilm Finepix X10 compact camera

Given Canon's recent announcement it'll be interesting to see if Panasonic provides an update to the LX5 or if they leave it as is to concentrate on the m4/3 models.

Flash stalks Seagate's hybrid drives

@Luke

More of a niche case but I run VMs on mine and they tend to suck up disk space. Once I replace my internal HD with a 256GB I should be set in speed terms too. I just don't want to have to hook up external storage as I don't have eSATA, Thunderbolt, or USB 3.0 for speed. I think SSDs suit portables and that's about my size limit else I end up carrying too much data that needs redundancy. The extra speed probably helps with whole disk encryption too - not checked up on it yet, but I'll do it out of the box rather than post install due to wear levelling.

Barclays axes 422 UK IT staff

Senior Managers

Don't forget....

Get schmoozed by salesmen

Play plenty of golf, all good networking happens on the course.

NHS fined £375k after stolen patient data flogged on eBay

At some point I'm sure these organisations will just work out that it is cheaper to run whole disk encryption.

US killer spy drone controls switch to Linux

@AC

"The only way that money is lost from ATMs is if they are physically stolen."

So the Reg didn't carry an article recently where a white hat demonstrated at a conference how to make an ATM spit out money? My eyes must have made it up.

DIY virtual machines: Rigging up at home

@Ken

My point is more, depending on the any old OS installed it may not necessary come up cleanly without prompting. I have certainly had issues with a linux variant dropping its remote login permissions after an update which meant I needed to attach it back to a screen to re-enable it. Therefore it is perhaps better to use something like ESXi (or equivalent) which expects to be remotely administered.

Never mind

I was originally looking to re-purpose an old Shuttle XPC box I have. It's a nice size for hiding somewhere, gigabit lan etc but has the unfortunate issue of being a late Pentium IV machine. This comes with multiple pain points including: too much heat created (with associated fan noise); too much power use even on standby; and lack of VT on the chip. I'm guessing this will end up as a charitable dump to a relative or actual charity as I can't replace the custom Shuttle motherboard because they won't sell them.

How does that work as a shove in a cupboard solution? Ideally you want something that you can administer remotely and know will restart without throwing a single prompt or request.

$18k for Aussie domain sets new record

Did he used to be a Real Estate agent?

He's talking up the market as if he was.

Facebook obsessives overlook enterprise riches

Parental thoughts

"if you had the choice to tell your mom that your company makes it easy for 800 million people to talk to each other, or that your business makes it easier for companies like Chevron to do business more productively, the former is going to sound a heck of a lot cooler."

Yet the latter would sound to them as if I was doing something productive and worthwhile rather than just enabling phone-obsessed street urchins to tell all of their "friends" that they are "like on the way home on the bus, and like there's so much traffic and then like she said that he said that she said" etc.

As someone once said, some of the smartest minds of our time are trying to work out the perfect advertising algorithm (or thereabouts).

Canon focuses on compact snapper spruce-up

Problems problems

Yet again we see the chief issue with this type of camera from Canon, and that is that they want to charge you £700-800 for this vs £600 for a EOS 600D + 18-55 IS II from Pixmania i.e. the street prices will likely be the same. I own a G9 and this looks bigger and heavier i.e. not pocketable, and therefore I'm wondering who'll buy it at that price? I think pro/semi-pro DSLR owners want an everywhere side-kick but I don't think this will fit the bill over the m4/3 crowd or a S100.

Virtual sanity: How to get a grip on your home PCs

Bookmarks and passwords

Xmarks in Firefox. Password protected, syncs wherever I need it. Don't care about banking passwords as I will never commit those knowingly to the storage of any browser. It's worth using even if you want to persist with VMs.

@Trevor

Any chance of you doing a brief overview of how you go about this sort of thing?

Are the personal VMs all up and running on that $750 box, or are they run up on demand like VDIs are?

What software and versions are you using etc?

I have various machines, various OSes, a SoHo NAS appliance etc and wouldn't mind being able to do the same. The thought of VMs with their snapshot/last known good configuration is a big benefit although I like the data to be kept separate from the OS (bookmarks, emails, documents etc).

EFF appeal win reopens NSA dragnet spying case

And this is exactly why, as the Americans found out when they raided OBL's Pakistani villa, terrorists to not just pick up the phone and have a chat. Well, the ones that set their shoes or underpants alight on aircraft probably do but not the proper ones.

Retroactive immunity? Gee, and I though the House of Commons contained some lying, deceitful, expense cheating, lobbied, complicit shitbags.

Solicitors from hell website unplugged by libel judge

Thanks for filling in the gaps. Seems like the accused was behaving like a cock and chose completely the wrong group of people to victimise.

David Cameron gets custom prime-ministering iPad app

Well, don't forget the mini-me sometimes seen next to him at conferences.

Didn't they "set they data free" at some point in the last couple of years in which case they can just suck in freely available ONS datasets?

CSC faces £1bn write-off over botched NHS IT project

However I hold out little hope that NHS trusts being left to their own devices to get in patient record systems will result in either: savings; or compatibility.

This went wrong because, fundamentally, the Government just simply does not know how to:

1. Spec a job and stick to that spec thereby avoiding renegotiation, and

2. Write a bloody contract such that penalties are not always and only on the tax-payer side of the equation.

If you f*ck up a contract that badly as this outfit has then you should be black-balled from bidding for a suitable period. BAe would be screwed by that one.

Merry Christmas, Stratfor

Hackers

and there was me wondering what the relevance was of them being shit at golf.

What you can do to enforce endpoint security

How do you deal with Windows 7 gadgets/widgets? I see these as a potential security issue in that anyone can install them.

Nikon Coolpix P7100 compact camera

XZ-1

I too was interested in this camera for it's wide aperture until I found the following comparison...

http://snapsort.com/compare/Canon_PowerShot_G12-vs-Olympus-XZ-1

"A camera's overall image quality score takes into account: color depth, dynamic range and low light performance.

Snapsort uses metrics from DXOMark to determine how good a camera's overall image quality is."

That kind of did it for me. Not that I'll get a G12 as I have a G9 already and know the limitations. I think my most likely pick up is from one or more of: Canon S100 for a take everywhere; Micro 4/3rds or LX5 for when I don't want to carry the big DSLR.

Mighty WAN pumper offered in the struggle to cope with Big Data

Finbar Saunders would be proud of that one.

Belkin LiveAction Camera Grip

Tripod connector?

What the fuck for? Seriously, it's a phone with a poxy little lens, sensor and, as far as I can tell, non-selectable ISO range. That kind of makes a tripod pointless as any lowlight shot will be chock full of noise if one is needed.

Ten... inkjet photo printers

Photographer needs...

"As well as photo card slots, which include CompactFlash for older, pro DSLRs"

Older, like the 7D, 5D MkII, 1D-X? Non-beginner/compact end of the market? Yes. Old? Nope. Whether any owners would use any of these is anyone's guess, but I get great results from a pixma 4000/MP610.

Samsung hauls Apple into court over emoticon patent :-(

@AC:22:53

Are you really that stupid? "Without itself intending to...". They clearly stated that they could not possibly afford to rather than couldn't be arsed to.

Nikon 1 V1 interchangeable lens compact camera

Also, 2.7 crop factor is really shit when m4/3rds is 2 and this introduces yet another lens system. Surely they'd have been better off making some quality m4/3rds kit under license. Yes it may have cost a license fee but given the quality of their lenses they'd pick up money in sales their if not also in the cameras. Here's hoping Canon see sense before embarking on a mirrorless system range.

Cops target climate-sceptic bloggers in three countries

Not sure why the router was relevant. Why not take his printer too?

WD slashes warranty periods on Blue and Green drives

Indeed. I found out the hard way that the Green part of the Green drives is prone to failure. Specifically the bit that decides when to power down the drive. Took me 2 days to get the data off due to the resultant stop/start spinup.

Learning about chip design from Silicon Roundabout

Would it be too much to describe him as a "floppy-haired, cravat wearing fuckwit"?

2011's Best... Premium Tablets

The 9"/10" netbook hasn't gone out of fashion - they've stuck a SSD back in it with a quad core processor, trebled the price and will now up-sell you an Ultrabook.

2011's Best... Cars

and, given the decrease in driving skills apparent on the roads, dead far quicker