Posts by ElNumbre 663 publicly visible posts • joined 15 Jun 2009
I always thought the ISS's height changed a fair bit, both due to orbital decay and the necessity to avoid space turds and other such debris?
Besides, its a pointless allegory - I can't picture how far away the ISS is, and am unlikely to be allowed to visit, just to go "ohh, its quite high isn't it". Lengths of Wales or football pitches would be far better.
Paris because of her experience in length, width and girth.
...but such technology already exists. Its called Computrace and was bought and is now sold by a company called umm... Absolute Software.
The last time I looked at it, you have to pay an annual subscription for the service, and IIRC it was the cost equivalent of loosing 1 laptop in 20 every year. As we only "lost" 1 in about 800 laptops, it wasn't cost effective. Far more cost effective to buy encryption software per machine (one off cost) and take the hit.
As for the BBC, 73 laptops per year, with an estate probably in the tens of thousands, doesn't seem too bad. Say 10000 laptops - that's < 1% that goes walkabout. These stats seem to assume 'stolen', but its just as easy for them to be mis-audited, kept in a drawer undeclaired for emergencies by line managers or not checked in by employee's who are 'off' the BBC grid for months or years at a time.
Bought a refurb HTC Hero from 3 last week. Id rooted and upgraded it to 2.1 within an hour. Just waiting for a stable 2.2 with all the features to arrive then I'll do the upgrade.
Like computers, once you've started it up to make sure its working and not DOA is to format/root it and start with a fresh image. At least then when you have problems later down the line, you've not got the 'freebie' extra's clogging up the system and adding to the complexity of any issue and have a reasonable idea of what is on the system to aid in problem finding.
Also tried an Orange Desire, and the complementary extra's were aweful. Two market places, a paid for traffic app, nasty branding and other such irritating features are not a great way of ensuring love of one of your flagship phones. Again, an hour's work and a newer stock image was loaded, and the phone is now brilliant where before it was average.
Do they do the same with iPhones too, or does Stevey Jobsworth block that?
More like "With the launch of the new iDF document format from Apple, we shall drop support for reading PDF documents because hardly anyone uses them, its an insecure format and isn't made in Cupertino".
Wonder what odd's Betfred would offer me for such a launch at next years Apple conference?
Unfortunately being able to separate business from personal calls via a bill is nigh-on impossible and pretty unenforceable, certainly within my company. With a 24/7 workforce who have to deal with many external suppliers, subcontractors and other 3rd parties, being able to reconcile this correlation of personal vs private usage based simply on a phone number is simply impossible. And asking staff to identify which is which themselves is OK, but needs to be incentivised to encourage its use, and I've yet to see any mobile supplier offer anything to support this.
Unfortunatly, BE isn't available everywhere (like my exchange) so I can't get service from them. AAISP at least offer service anywhere where BT IP Stream services are.
Plus, I don't care about a daytime limit - I'm generally at work during weekdays, and if I am at home and using it, their unit based charging means that (provided you don't go mad for bandwidth hungry apps) it has a negligable impact on my utilization. Just have to remember to schedule large downloads overnight, when its more or less free.
And I'm paying £24 a month - looking at the BE website, thats only about £3 more expensive than the BE Pro package which is the closest equivalent - not really double the price? I average about 86GB per month, so unless you download tones more than this, they're fairly equivalent.
When I was shopping around for a new BB supplier at the tail end of last year, O2 were very high on my list due to their reasonable pricing of an unlimited service. There was also no mention of usage caps, just a 'we will tell you if you're using too much' kind of warning which made me more than a little suspicious of its ambiguity.
In the end I've plumped for a connection from AAISP who let you purchase as much as you need for a reasonable rate, tell you whats going on when something breaks (usually BT) and are pretty open about what they do and how they do it. Perfect for an experienced tech hand, but they are more expensive than many of the equivalent rent-a-BT white-box shippers. Its worth it though because it is vary rare to see contention issues, total service failure or the other crap services that the rest supply. I suppose its like comparing Aldi with Waitrose - you get what you pay for.
Plus, if you phone them (Office hours only :( ) you don't get put through to a script machine in Bangalore.
But please don't all sign up with them, you'll knacker it up for us exisiting users!
PuTTY is by far and away MY most useful utility for any new Winblows machine, BUT 97%* of computer users have no use for connecting to SSH/Telnet or Serial Port terminals. Chances are, if they need it, they'll find it. WinSCP I would argue is more useful for many, but how many people do file transfers with SCP/SFTP services?
But it should be top of the list for any IT engineer's kit-list
*Statistic made up for artistic purposes.
I think the next logical step will be to limit & contain the processing done in data centres and 'outsource' some of the churn to 3rd parties. How better to achive this than selling Google Hardware to consumers and businesses with built in 'Google Processing'. They don't have to worry about power and cooling as this will be covered by the end user, in return for enhanced access to the G-Cloud services. All they will need to worry about is storing the data in enough locations so that information is still accessible even during multiple service outages. Think massively parallel P2P data storage, processing and serving - A hybrid PirateBay/Seti@Home.
#IFOWO Google Processing Overlords.
I once had to help cart a complete data centre from the basement to 1st floor of a London office (about 6 or 7 racks) because during an audit, they were 'reminded' that they weren't that far from a river that could be prone to flooding. So prepare for the great London flooding of 2017, they took precautions of hoping the water would only come up about 5 meters max. Seems like it may be in vain though if there will be no connectivity.
Coat because.. Well, Its a bit wet out.
Funny - we had about 6 of our sites out today (out of 300 or so), but we heard about the MSO via the Register, not via our account mangler, or the service announcments.
And by 3pm, our BT contact centre had stopped accepting new calls because they were too busy. Given its location in the North of Scotland, I guess they had a fair number of staff away because of the snow. Its a good job the snow didn't fall in the South East, as all the home-workers wouldn't have been able too.. :)
I am fed up of being pestered by BT's unstoppable tide of spam which I get in the post every week or so and email practically daily. Moving to mailbox messages doesn't surprise me.
In Summary:-
BT Creditcard with horrendous APR
BT Total (Crap) Broadband
BT (Lack of) Vision
BT Wholesale to my work account - look how good we're doing (at screwing things up?).
Whilst i've managed to stop the BT Sales calls, I'm told that apparently the flyers inserted in the bills cannot be opted out of.
Still, they're not quite as bad as Virgin who post a weekly flyer about how great their services are, but refuse to install a 100meter cable to enable our street from the feed on the main road.
...that when an encryption mechanism isn't open to peer-review, your peer's cannot point out your mistakes. Given how complicated encryption is, its easy to make mistakes. Security by obscurity is never a sensible defence, because if your product/service becomes popular, so will the attacks against it, and if you have screwed up (which humans have a tendency to do), you will be found out.
"Open source" cryptography doesn't necessarily negate the possibility for mistakes, but it increases the likelihood that those mistakes will be identified and corrected quickly, rather than those attack vectors persisting long term because the source-code is held by a vendor and requires them to implement fixes. You only have to compare Microsoft with the Linux community - Critical MS Bugs can take many months to fix and for a patch to be released, Critical Linux bug fixes tend to be turned around in days or weeks.
They'll be after me for my comments on the 2012 Summer Olympics Logo and how it looks like a cartoon of something else (not that it does now of course - its an excellent logo which represents London, the Olympics, the IOC, Steve Jobs, Kim Jong Ill and everyone else (ever) in a favourable light).
Wait, is that some black helicopters I hear???
Eigh?
If you're having troubles with WPA2, have you tried an alternative firmware, particularly Tomato, OpenWRT or DD-WRT? I've had a variety of WRT54G's and they all support WPA2-PSK. Haven't got a certificate infrastructure for the Enterprise level version, but certainly the menu's are there in DD-WRT for that. Plus, if your router is out of warranty and you're considering buying another one, might be worth an experiment.
In other news, is it really worth panicing about this unless you're an Enterprise? So many home users are still running WEP which doesn't require a $34 investment, that unless you're after company secrets rather than "free" internet access, you're better off driving down the road a bit.
In order to comply with our ruling overlords, I've already been practicing my thrusting right armed salute, and the cry "Heil Home Office".
In other news, these are cunning civil servants not defining the position of the goalposts, so no-one can be blamed (and therefore sacked) when they fail to score any goals, ever.
Stewie: You said I didn't have it in me to kill Lois, so I was just running a simulation to find out exactly how killing her and taking over the world would play out for me.
Brian: Yeah? How'd that go?
Stewie: Not well, Brian. Not well. I suppose I'm not ready to kill Lois or take over the world… yet.
Brian: So, what you're saying is that what you experienced in the simulation didn't really happen, or even matter?
Stewie: Yes, that's correct.
Brian: So, it was sort of like a dream?
Stewie: No, it was a simulation.
Brian: Yes, but, theoretically, if someone watched the events of that simulation from start to finish, only to find out that none of it really happened, I mean… you don't think, that would, j-- be just like a giant middle finger to them?
Stewie: Well, hopefully, they would have enjoyed the ride.
Brian: I don't know, man. I think you'd piss a lot of people off that way.
(Brian leaves)
Stewie: Well, at least it didn't end like The Sopranos, where it just cut to black in mid-sen--
"...wondering why we can't do something savvy like that here, instead of flapping around in the embarrassing death spasms of the UK's national ID card fiasco."
Don't count your chickens just yet. We still need another political party to take over AND actually implement the takedown notice. Until then, I shall continue looking over my shoulder for the dark sith lords...
The previous commentards here are right - Most Wii games suck monkey balls and any decent game they release requires the purchase of expensive additions. Plus, when I bought the thing, I stupidly forgot that after a day's hard work, the last thing I wanted to do was get my arse up off the sofa to play games.
Its probably the best thing since sliced animal if you're 7 or 70, but the rest of us in the 'middle ground' are less easy to fool.
My smart meter provider, eOn are kind enough to provide my smart meter information on a monthly basis as a usage summary. Plus, they still 'estimate' what my bill will likely be over the coming months to charge a fixed rate in advance, rather than what I've actually used. So I have to glance at the LCD displayed on a regular basis, which ends up not being that interesting after 12 months of similar graphs. Plus, there's no built-in way of exporting the data for online analysis, making it all a bit pointless. Not even a CSV export :(
I supposed I could take a screwdriver to it though! :)
I wonder if I can print that off, walk into burger king and ask them to make it 'my way'. (Id 'install' some bacon 1.0 too).
Reminds me of the buddist who walks into Burger king and asks "Make me one with everything".
Can't see anything about a meal deal though - surely you must want fries and a drink with that?
Delete * from doogle.datacentres where countryfield=Switzerland
Just eliminate the country from Google in its entirety. No Search results, No Gmail for the country, maybe just a green/white splodge on the satellite maps where the country used to be. They'll soon come crawling back!
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