Posts by Danny 14

HARD ONES: Three new PC games that are BLOODY DIFFICULT

Re: Less than generous respawn points ... rehashing whole swathes of levels again and again

run it in a VM and snapshot it.

Blocking BitTorrent search sites 'ineffective': Pirate Bay ban lifted for Dutch ISPs

Re: Still no legal TPB alternative

apart from the kids stuff we rarely re-watch things in our house. Typically it is the £1.50 peppa pig DVDs that get the most action.

Re: "the legal online market needs protection against illegal competition,"

I know people who see something that is coming on sky, download the thing about to start and then watch it without adverts. They dont see this as stealing or infringement as they pay for sky and hate the adverts.

Fast internet means the same quality 1 hour "whatever" comes down in a minute or so.

Three-yaarrgh! Major UK mobile network's data goes down

Re: Worth looking at SIM-free if you're happy with what you've got.

I used to be on that deal but am going to switch to PAYG on orange. I found I am rarely using over 1gb a month so the £10 a month pays nicely for 1gb - you still get minutes per month and the £10 is also credit for other stuff.

Not sure what orange signal is like yet though.

Re: it got me, but it's back now

Heh. I thought it was me. I flashed my phone this morning with a new firmware. I didnt wipe the phone though just the caches. I wondered why I had no mobile internet and spent an hour faffing with APNs. A few reboots later and it started working.

Seems it wasnt me afterall!

NatWest 'spam' email cockup got me slapped with late payment fee, says angry Reg reader

Re: Lessons learned

Dont you get a mark on your credit file for missing payments? Its all automated too.

Yes, HP will still sue you if you make cartridges for its inkjet printers

I think he means bulk ink printing etc. We have an epson 2400, epson 1900 and epson 360 all on bulk ink tanks. We use a flash program to reset the counters on the printers so that you can keep printing when the printer thinks it is supposed to be dead (we have external waste bottles too so the pad doesnt get used).

I never could find a reliable HP method that would work as well as the bulk ink tanks.

We have an old canon IP4000 that has easily refillable cartridges (it has an optical sensor shining into each cartridge, not a chip) and the head carriage can be replaced.

Microsoft buries Sinofsky Era... then jumps on the coffin lid

Re: You mean ex-girlfriend?

We have a couple of dell venue pro 11s here at work for evaluation. They sit in their docking cradles most of the time (plugged into a normal keyboard, mouse and LAN). People do "hybrid" with mouse, keyboard and touchscreen but then again I think that is because W8 is infuriating at the best of times to do certain things. Not a single person has come to me asking if they can have a touch screen for their desktop (or laptop).

Re: defunct PlayBook

It said it all when a colleague brought an RT tablet in because they couldnt install "microsoft silverlight" on it for their sky TV viewer. Funnily enough there wasnt an RT silverlight app. Says something when your supposedly flagship new tablet range cannot even install something as simple as a viewer.

RT was a disaster. 8.1 was a disaster - they had a chance to fix the ill's of 8 metro force fed to people.

I've seen the future of car radio - and DAB isn't in it

Re: Caching will only get you so far

Cumbria has decent mobile coverage short of a small gap between J37 and J38. We even have 4G up in the fells too.

Guess what happened when T-Mobile US's boss trolled AT&T's CES party

Re: As The World Turns

May be rich but quite a face for radio.

TomTom GO 6000 satnav chews on smarties and tablets

Re: Waze anyone|?

http://postimg.org/image/pruxupirb/

Runcorn bridge appears on my CoPilot. Cant say ive ever had an issue with co-pilot.

Re: a considerable chunk of motorists don’t bother with satnavs - 39 per cent, in fact

Agreed. Where they help out is plotting on-the-fly alternative routes without pulling glovebox maps out. Or telling you about traffic issues. I used to be a service technician where time was money, a satnav certainly helped me. that being said they are tools and I would never rely totally on what the satnav told me.

Re: Smartphone NAV is all well & good...but...

most smartphones have GPS built in (slower than aGPS granted) but an external "proper" Bluetooth GPS module is peanuts. Copilot and tomtom are both "offline" capable too.

I use co-pilot on a galaxy S2 quite successfully in Belgium and France where I operated in "radio off" mode for my holiday so you can get away without the cell "assist".

Re: Wants: Forward planning using a stored route

Beauty of a smartphone means you can afford a cheap smartphone and BOTH apps for less than this tomtom so you can choose which one you prefer...

Oh and Runcorn bridge appears on my co-pilot. http://postimg.org/image/pruxupirb/

Re: How Much????!!!

googlemaps is terrible for navigating roads in a car though. TomTom will become niche. CoPilot is my choice of software on my phone and since I can put my phone into its grippy cradle in the car (and charge it at the same time) it is preferable to a physical "one purpose" tomtom.

Also for £300 this is horrifically expensive. Better off getting a dual core "old" smartphone and buying dedicated offline nav software. At least your smartphone can do much more. If you are that bothered about a "poor" GPS then a Bluetooth module will set you back £10 on ebay and these can sit in the car permanently.

Fees shakeup: Freephone numbers will actually BE free – Ofcom

Re: About time

well for 0800 you can use 0800 buster as I said (but you shouldn't have to). GiffGaff don't treat 0845 as bundled minutes either as far as I see. I have heard of WeQ4U but haven't used it or researched it.

I use my mobile as a primary line (no land line) and im on 3 with ample minutes. I have used giffgaff previously but found the service to be patchy. Typically if I need an 0845 I look up an alternative on saynoto0870

Re: About time

TBH I never expected them to be free (from say a PAYG mobile with no credit) but I would expect an 0800, 0808 or 116 to come from your call allowance. 0800 buster was a great workaround but one that shouldnt have been necessary.

By the same logic 0845 should come out of your call allowance too, not be the cash cow it is for operators.

Thought your Android phone was locked? THINK AGAIN

Re: Idiot AC is answering his own posts now!

all fanboys are bad fanboys; all OSs will have bugs in them somewhere. It all comes down to testing and fixing. In an open source environment such as linux there is a larger chance of bugs being squashed before release.

In closed android, apple, windows environments then the bugs have a higher chance of not being found.

Whilst it is a vulnerability, it is one with limited use.

What use would it actually be? If you knew the admin password to a PC what use would an app be to reset a users password when they were logged in?

I suppose if that app could be triggered remotely then a person with physical access to the phone could send a "signal" to an app installed on the phone to unlock on command. That needs more permissions so you might aswell simply raid the phone remotely for whatever you need. If the phone is remotely locked by the real owner AND the malware installed then it will still need to be triggered somehow. I suppose a service that "unlocks" *only* if it is "remotely locked" might be useful but highly untargetable.

Another aspect is that com.android tree can be re-written on carrier specific devices. Whilst this might be a vulnerability on a a vanilla device, some other manufacturer that has added something different (HTC one with fingerprint scanner?) may handle locks differently anyway.

Re: Raymond Chen

Indeed. And if it is already locked and the malware removes the lock then surely the exploit is running as a service anyway so can do what it likes without having to unlock.

Re: @VinceH

Linux (probably, I dont know enough about the linux underworld hacking collective) has neither many security holes nor gaping zero day issues.

What is does have is swathes of people installing linux and making changes they dont understand. This in turn will make linux insecure. It isnt linux fault that it will let you swiss cheese itself enough to let attackers in, it is the admins fault for not understanding what they are doing (or opening up).

Ghosts of Christmas Past: Ten tech treats from yesteryear

dont forget

Millenium falcon. It might not be computerised but I so wanted a millenium falcon. I wanted a big trak too but never got one.

I did get one of those sideways scrolling LED mini arcarde boxes instead (with coloured acetate along the sides to add a coloured filter). That got played with for quite some time while.

I KNOW how to SAVE Microsoft. Give Windows 8 away for FREE – analyst

Re: If not free...

there are big strings attached to the £15 offers though otherwise businesses would buy a boatload of perpetual licenses and never bother upgrading. MS would lose money hand over fist without their other business licensing models.

I bought 30 W8 "home" licenses when they were cheap simply because my MS license lets me install whatever I want onto an already licensed machine (it could be win 98 even - ever wonder why win98, ME and 2000 licenses STILL sell on ebay for silly money?).

I cant see them ever giving windows away for free without a serious license overhaul that would force many companies to consider a big linux jump.

Sky broadband goes TITSUP ALL DAY, thwarts Brits' Xmas web shopping

Re: EasyNet too

easynet are unbundled though aren't they? I thought they used their own fibre backhaul too.

Is it a NAS? Is it a SAN? No. It's Synology's Rackstation 'NASSAN'

Re: Err, No

We're running a fairly budget setup, netgear "dumb switch" for iSCSI, 748TS for core. Jumbo frames for iSCSI onto HA R610 cluster. We are using hyper-v though (vanilla 2012 not R2). SQL, exchange, DC and WSUS on VMs with a FOG, squid internet accelerator and openVPN pair of VMs too. So for less than 10k inc VAT we have a SAN and a HA pair of R610s capable of running decent amount of VMs. All with 3 year onsite. So if these new boxes are pitched at SMBs then I wouldn't bother. If they are pitched at DB monsters who want 144TB of SSDs then I'd talk to a specialist about tailoring a SAN.

I don't use the R610 LOM for anything other than DRAC. I put a quad intel card in straight away and run the iSCSI (pair on MPIO) and bonded LAN through that. I cant give you "off the top of my head" iops or throughput but I know I ATTO'd it for shit'n'giggles and got a smidge over 1GBs out of it - so MPIO works ( http://i44.tinypic.com/nqpwg2.jpg ). Never had a single issue in the 6 months ive had it running. I have no idea what controllers are in it. Drives are 600Gb 15k and ive set them up as a carved up raid 6 'cause i'm paranoid (having been burnt on a double drive failure on raid 10 rebuild once); hence the hit on the write performance as you can see.

Compared to our DA disk setup we had in our previous physical servers ive been able to switch OFF the air con in the cabinet since moving to a pair of R610s and they are much smoother (and easier to backup)

Re: Err, No

You can buy a recon MD3200 with 3 years same day onsite from the dell marketplace (thats what I did 6 months ago) for 6k stuffed with 8Tb worth of 15k drives (it was worth it for the same day onsite!). Pick your modules for iSCSI or SAS plus you can expand them and they are proper SANs.

10k here will only buy you the unit so it doesnt seem like a good deal to me. If you are talking about 144TB of SSD then surely the units are peanuts compared to the cost of the SSDs therefore there are much better SANs out there with proven records.

Accused Glasshole driver says specs weren't even turned on for traffic stop

Re: Self driving cars

Granted I passed my car test close to 30 years ago and I needed to stop and apply the handbrake at a stop sign. My class A is only 20 years old and I have to stop and foot down but not necessarily transfer to foot brake as at lights.

Sceptic-bait E-Cat COLD FUSION generator goes on sale for $US1.5m

Re: Due Diligence

Convince the mob or Yakuza to buy one. That might make them rethink their strategy.

Krakoom! OCZ flies into the ground. Time to salvage the engines and look around

Re: It's not really a surprise

Out of my 6 original OCZ agility drives I have zero functioning (they have been RMAd since). some were replaced with other agility 2's early on - both of these panic locked within 2 weeks - subsequently all were returned at agility 3s. However, of the 4 replaced to agility 3 all 4 are still running I do not know about the other 2 agility 3s(they havent come back to me at any rate). The RMA path these took were fantastic, each drive circumnavigated the globe (they track each leg of the journey which was nice).

Originally they were in a raid 10 array in an openfiler box. Spinning rust has replaced them as a high cap storage rather than an iSCSI speed experiment. For laptops that need a bit of speed I now use samsung TLC 840s. cheap for the capacity.

I might just have been unlucky but according to the forums I think not. So out of 6 drives ive had a sum total of 8 RMAs (all replacements rather than repairs to the original SSD). Not surprising they went out of business.

Microsoft wields turkey knife, slices Surface to $199 for Black Friday

Re: Yup, the UK price is a total rip-off

If you dont like it then dont buy it son. Ranting on a comment thread about something that is perfectly useable to some people is just daft.

The $199 is only on the 32gb model and sans taxes (still unbalanced vs the UK £279 but the UK shows VAT since VAT is the same across the UK unlike US taxes). Sure a deal if you want one. The 64gb one isnt discounted but is in the UK.

And what does Mickey$oft mean anyway? Sure I get the M$ moniker that is thrown about but what is the Mickey bit for?

Re: Still $100 too much

locked bootloader wouldnt matter anyway as its RT isnt it? Not like you can do much to it.

US puts Assange charge in too-hard basket - report

Re: Oh really?

The chilling fact about that is the shotgun approach. America contacted every country on the planes flightpath to refuse airspace. All the countries complied against a sovereigns plane.

ye gads the NSA must have had some serious internet browsing history for those people.

Re: this should be good

Next step is sweden will drop requests for him to give evidence. Once that happens he'll leave the embassy and get porridge for breaking UK bail restrictions :-)

That was of his own public choosing too. Oh the irony.

Lumia 1520: Our man screams into ENORMO new Nokia phondleslab

WTF?

"A lanyard strap would have helped."

Jebus, a lanyard on a phone?

Winamp is still a thing? NOPE: It'll be silenced forever in December

Re: Can anything else play random Albums in FLAC?

XBMC

Re: And a lovely player it was

cpu cycles are just 1's and 0's so they are little.

US senator asks: Will Bitcoin replace Swiss bank accounts?

Re: Yes

bitcoins can be tangible, if you write the numbers on a piece of paper; they are (afterall) just a string of numbers. gold can also be traded without physically posessing it.

It can also be said that art is only paint on some canvas.

Eat our dust, spinning rust: In 5 years, it'll be all flash all the time

Re: all down to $/GB

data recovery might have something to do with it too.

Recovery from HDDs is possible and relatively "easy". Recovery from SSDs is not so.

WHO ate all the PIs? Sales of Brit mini-puter pass 2 MEELLION

Re: Some context

The above made money though. Shame the PI couldn't have had £1 added for future R+D purposes.

in our school. Learning to code? Not sure. Learning to install Linux onto memory stick? Yes.

Microsoft advertises Surface, Excel with maths mistake

Re: The gift that keeps on giving

Id rather they add the fee to the device so I can have an SD port. Shame my S2 doesnt support 64gb SD cards my 32 is full :(

Re: El Reg not a travel expert

Southport has better restaurant. Ho Lee Chows is fantastic (on rotten row).

Re: Excel does try to be helpful, I just wish it wouldn't.

just change the default formatting to text for those columns. Easy (we use roll numbers padded with leading zeros - effectively text as no mathematical calulations occur on them).

It's NOT an iPad - but that's FINE: I learned to LOVE Microsoft's Surface 2

Re: @SuccessCase

companies like native apps because you can make them do plenty of things under the bonnet that you cannot inside a browser. Native apps can happily ask users to sign away their privacy rights and raid your contacts, habits, location etc. They also have habits of waking your devices when they feel like it. At least a browser app is controllable.

Take a point with a facebook app. Try that will all the notification bits turned off then try uninstalling it and using the browser version. At least with the android version my battery life SHOT up (at least 25% over a typical day).

Virgin Media only puts limited limits on its Unlimited service

Re: Alternatively...

because not only are they toothless advertising watchdogs, they arent magicians either.

Re: mangled english....

contention ratios would be relatively meaningless on cable though. It doesnt work the same way. You could be on a completely no cap 100Mb service. If the whole street is on the same and also like to download perfectly legal ISOs of windows 8.1 then you'll find you get a trickle anyway. If you live in the countryside with noone else on cable then you'll get 100Mb all day long.

FTTC may well suffer the same. That pipe back from the cabinet has a finite capacity too. If your cab is full of EVIL-DOWNLOADING-DATAHOGGERS(tm) I imagine you will suffer the same fate.

The nasty part about VM is that they will throttle you anyway - even if noone else is near you.

Blighty's laziness over IPv6 will cost us on the INTERNETS - study

Re: @Unlimited - if ipv4 addresses are so rare

Even if you dont have a fully integrated IPv6 internal network your firewall should be able to 6over4 for you anyway, then get your server to ipv6 what you need. That way you can still have an IPv6 for your web/email/whatever server and leave your internal network (mostly) alone.

Re: IPV4 best for the general public

maybe he has a shit router? Quite a few enterprise firewalls only started supporting IPv6 in the more recent times. MS couldnt be bothered to update their firewall (TMG) so canned it instead.

Perhaps if the naysayers wait long enough then someone big will release their IPv4 back to the pool and utilise IPv6 instead - then you can buy more!

Toshiba brings out terabyte laptop drive (yes), miracle enterprise-grade TLC

no TLC SSDs? yes there are...

Samsung have been running TLC drives for a while. I have one in fact. As for endurance.

http://techreport.com/review/25559/the-ssd-endurance-experiment-200tb-update

200Tb is more than i'll write onto my drive and although that particular TLC is remapping it still has a LOT of remap area to go.