Posts by Jon Massey

The internet IS a series of tubes. Kinda: A Reg 101 guide to cabling

A bit embarrassing on the whole...

Another one for your corrections list: Ethernet <> Infiniband 10GBase-CX4 uses the same connector commonly used for Infiniband but they are totally different both electrically and protocol-wise.

That's a big 4Ker of a cosmos: 3D planetarium to open in Bristol

Gorgeous George?

Lenovo shipped lappies with man-in-the-middle ad/mal/bloatware

Re: I Wonder

You've gone down a couple of ranges there, alas. Unfortunately they're now releasing less-than-tanklike laptops under the ThinkPad brand (such as your Edge). The modern T and W series are still bomber

This optical disc will keep your gumble safe for 2,000 YEARS

That graph...

What a load of guff! No units on the y-axis, arbitrary threshold - FAIL indeed!

APT devs are LOUSY coders, says Sophos

Not about packaging formats

Disappointed...

Phones 4u website DIES as wounded mobe retailer struggles to stay above water

...and not a single tear was shed. The slimiest scumbags in the business engaging in the worst of pressure sales tactics. Good riddance!

Batten down the hatches, Ubuntu 14.04 LTS due in TWO DAYS

Choice?

"Database admins may be relieved to hear that Ubuntu is offering choice here..." all three variants of MySQL. Ah yes, it's so nice to have a choice of three flavours of sh*t!

Pwn all the Androids, part II: Flaw in Java, hidden Trojan

Re: how much code is needed to write something nasty?

Msg 102, Level 15, State 1, Line 1

Incorrect syntax near '*'.

Review: Sony Xperia SP

Nexus 4

Why bother when an N4 is twenty quid cheaper?

Prankster 'Superhero' takes on robot traffic warden AND WINS

I think you'll find...

That Yate is in South Gloucestershire, not Bristol. Hpmph

Think enterprise software is complex? Check out the licences

Re: Forgot Microsoft?

Sorry, but that's a flat-out lie that you have to get DCE to use Hyper-V. Enterprise and Standard come with fully-functional Hyper-V (albeit with different number of guest OS licenses included depending on the version).

Brit adventurer all set to assault ex-Reg haunt Rockall

Cheating

It looks like that route's been bolted - that's cheating in my book!

Micron brandishes sharp new flash blade, lunges at Fusion-io

OLTP?

People run OLTP workloads on MySQL?! *shudders*

TREELLION DOLLAR mobe bonk-bank alliance goes for barcodes

Hmm..

Not so much pay-by-bonk as pay-by-boop

Ofcom fines TalkTalk AGAIN - a whopping £750k over 'abandoned calls' gaffe

Well

They should've used Intel!

Apple alert as half China's fanbois consider switch to Galaxy S4

Re: so expect

Since when is 1280x1920 a 16:9 ratio? Learn to maths

Egyptian navy captures divers trying to cut undersea internet cables

Those cylinders don't look like they're in test...

Buying a petabyte of storage for YOURSELF? First, you'll need a fridge

Assuming you don't need redundancy...

You could fit 1PB in a shorty rack, assuming four 4U, 60-bay boxes and 4TB 3.5" drives, plus a switch to last them together. That probably wouldn't fall through most people's floors; but powering and cooling it might be a different matter!

HP ProLiant SL270s Gen8 beast masters eight coprocessors

Active cooling

On the GPU/coprocessor boards would probably mess with the front-to-back airflow.

Why do Smart TV UIs suck?

WDTV live has a nice UI, regular updates

My advice to anyone buying a TV is get one based on the quality of the panel, the "smart" features don't count for sh!t and will never be updated; leave that to a third-party box which you can upgrade more cheaply if needs be and still keep your TV.

Virgin launches TV Anywhere streaming

Re: All your eggs in one basket

My switches, APs, router, modem are all on some fairly meaty UPSen; the laptop has an extended battery pack - still maintaining internets during a powercut is simple!

Ten backpacks for tech-heads

Wot no...

Deuter GigaOffice? Roomy, comfy (really nice back system) and you can pick it up for about £55

Virgin Media SuperHub 'upgrade' hangs up on IP phone punters

Mine seems better since the upgrade but...

When they pushed out the upgrade it reverted all of my settings to factory! SSID, keys, channel assignment, forwarded ports, all lost. Grrrr..

Move over Raspberry Pi, give kids a Radio Ham Pi - minister

Pieminister?

Yum!

VeloBit beats big boys with SSD caching software – indie benchmarker

Nice results, amateur presentation

Seriously, leaving the red dotted spellchecker lines on your presentation/promo materials?

IBM database strategy chief on DB2: Devs are people too

Re: @IBM: Fix the Basics First

Totally agree, both the IBM-supplied one and the MS one are complete piles of dog shit

Screen idols: higher resolution means better laptops

Lenovo?

"...Lenovo and the rest slap a relatively low-resolution, 15.6in, 1366 x 768 screen on a laptop that is maxed out in every other area"

My maxed-out W520 has a 1920x1080 15.6in screen. Get your facts right.

Volvo claims V40 is first car with an airbag for pedestrians

Re: and above 31mph

Not always, I took an Audi R6 to the head at 45ish and lived to tell the tale!

Big Bang secrets hidden in hundreds of petabytes of tape

mp4 == QuickTime ?

Since when?!

New standard test of Big Data bang per system buck rolls out

Ttt = Tt1 + Tt1?

shurely shome mishtake? Where's throughput test 2?

BT invites telcos to sign up to FTTP trials

only 330/30?

If it's FTTP, then why exactly aren't they offering GigE?

Theresa May: No emails sniffed in web super-snoop law

Good to see...

Julian Huppert giving May a grilling. He's one of the (appallingly few) good ones!

Ikea to integrate TV, Blu-ray, sound system into sideboard

PAP?

yeah, that's about right...

Americans resort to padlocking their dumb meters

Dumb meters for dumb people

Electrosensitivity loons are one of my favourite types of loon

Belkin Power Pack 4000

Typical marketing fluff..

How about telling us actually how many mAh this can hold?

Rackspace snaps up SharePoint911

Not a bad bunch..

They've got me out of the sticky stuff before with that cantankerous beast that is Sharepoint!

Toshiba 14in USB LCD Mobile Monitor

PCs?

Since when did Linux not run on PCs? Just a question of drivers, it's a bit crap that Tosh haven't got broader range of OS support at launch, maybe will arrive in time or wait until some clever hackers get their hands on it!

Eight... HD camera smartphones

In the mosh pit?

Ah, so you're one of those wankers?

Orange San Francisco 2

Loose? Loose?!

"Lose", you cretinous oaf!

Nikon stretches Coolpix focal-range beyond belief

I bet...

at 1000mm it'll be about as sharp as a cotton wool bud

Surprise: Neil Young still hates digital music

digital media aren't the problem

It's the mastering engineers who compress the living daylights out of everything!

Oracle punts carrier-grade Sparc T4 servers

You can indeed get commodity 48V DC PSUs for commodity servers

For a lot less than a grand but as said above, they're not NEBS L3 certified. I've had a couple of Dell Poweredge 2950 boxes with their second PSU as hooked up to a big stack of forklift truck batteries in a particularly tricky power outage once (UPS running out, genny not behaving).

Virgin Media to push out nimble new broadband speeds

What upload speed?

Got great service in BS2 on the 50MB plan, consistently fast, no caps, no probs with the superhub (in modem-only mode anyway); but the 1MB upload is a bit pants sometimes if you're really spanking the downstream with lots of torrent peers and your ACKs don't get out fast enough and so your web browsing experience slows to a crawl. Good traffic management at the edge of my own network helps allay this somewhat, but it's still an extraordinarily asymmetric connection when compared to the FTTC offerings.

AT&T joins 'Linux for cloud', boosts HTML5 apps

No BSD?

You'd think with AT&T's heritage and all that...

Kodak heading to Chapter 11

Ektar's quite nice

Surprising that they brought out a new colour print film so recently if they were up sh1t creek, it's pretty nice stuff too - bit more restrained colour than Fuji. Guess I should buy a few bricks of it for the freezer...

2011's Best... compact cameras

Panaleicas are a waste of time

Just get the Panasonic original and save a shedload of cash

Zombie Microsoft antitrust case shuffles to retrial

wait a sec...

Isn't Novell now owned by Attachmate, which itself is partially owned by Microsoft?!

Ten... inkjet photo printers

Get a laser

As many have said here already, get a small laser for home use and find a decent local photo lab to do your C-type prints or large-format inkjet (Giclée) prints.

I've yet to see an injet print that can match a well-made c-type or silver print for quality or longevity - you can pry my ilford multigrade paper from my cold, dead hands!

2011's Best... DSLRs

Pentax range has slimmed slightly

The (belting value for money) Kx has been dropped off the bottom. There's still plenty of stock around, but whether it is to be replaced or not is an open question. The k-r used to sit above it in the range, but is now the entry model (and also a mighty fine camera).

(/ex-Kx owner now with a K5, the DA* zooms and a full set of FA Limited primes!)

SSDs choked by crummy disk interfaces

Great article

I had wondered what all this SCSI Express murmuring was all about!