Posts by phoenix

Amstrad founder Lord Sugar quits 'anti-enterprise' Labour party

Beam me up Scottie

The headline sounds like something that might be written about a tiff at a Star Trek convention rather a than a filler in a slow news day. On a lighter note "joke" Mr Farage has decided to stay on the bridge of the good ship UKip.

It's time to end the Windows Wait

Windows Shindoze

I can boot my dual-core, SATA 150, DDR machines in 20 secs now, tomorrow and in 6 month's time. How? GNU/Linux. No registry, no lousy file system, few crap drivers. Want speed without the shelling out go GNU/Linux you will not look back.

Solar power boom 'unsustainable', says Gov

Expense

It is a way and a very expensive one at that. I believe not one nuclear station (in this country at least) has generated enough profit over its lifetime to pay for its decommissioning costs. Low / no C02 (ignoring manufacturing and building) is in its favour with the global warming issues (though I believe electricity generation was never very high on that list anyway). There are questions over stability of uranium supply and the amount the world has left in the ground to factor in as well.

No issues here

Totally agree. This is the problem with the green movement sometimes the wood cannot be seen for the trees. Some 60% energy use in a house is heating. Better to spend the money on insulation and other energy use reduction techniques. Too much weight is given to alternative generating systems when more should be given to energy efficiency measures. Two ways to deal with the issue; produce more by no non-polluting methods or use less.

Major BT exchange titsup in power outage

Triple Redundancy Anyone?

Maybe three feeds from different suppliers would have helped and running up the generator from time to time on-load helps to test out any issues as would maybe at least a second backup generator? I might be being a bit harsh but these things do happen.

Apple MacBook Airs to get new, superfast 19nm Flash

@Zef et al

USB 3, 2. Gb ethernet. Try looking up the specifications on the Thunderbolt interface (Intel Light Peak) http://www.intel.com/technology/io/thunderbolt/index.htm?wapkw=%28thunderbolt%29 and then argue about peripherals as this will do all that and run and external, beyond HD monitor.

BT vs Sky vs Virgin

Humax HDR Fox t2

Freeview; free, reasonable quality on a box with a 500Gb HDD. £289 quid with a portal launching soon to access iplayer et al. Get one

Feeling heat from Macs, Microsoft sells PCs sans crapware

Worked famously up till now

so why change a habit of a lifetime.

You shouldn't be

as GNU/Linux on the same set up will do that and more. Enough said

Shuttleworth sees fewer clouds in Ubuntu's future

I agree

only VMS gone Unix is still with us. There are other reasons to keep one OS over another other than ease of CLI commands.

Anyway some of that lot were responsible for Windows NT and the subsequent hell that has unleashed in the world.

Ex-MySQL boss plots Second Cloud Coming

ECALYPTUS

Ah yes shows I didn't bother to remember the meaning behind the acronym. Which must rate as one of the best attempts of creating one by bending words to match a real name.

Clouds

Thunder and lightning on its way? Still can't figure out how an Australian evergreen has any connection with virtual-ness. It's pretty reasonable tat from my exposure to it though.

OED goes the way of all flesh paper

Damn Merkins will invent more unecessary words

without access to this all incompassing tomb. Read contining for "on-going", uninstall for "distinstall" (wonderful MS for that one) never mind the chronic abuse of grammer such as sat when it should be sitting for example.

You will all say it is a living language and all that. But we do not have to invent words where there are perfect valid ones in existence?

rant over

Intel chief: Obama (still) driving US off cliff

@StrongType

Good point but if we had pulled it off it would have a classic move. Markets are a risk and poeple only yelp and cry when it goes wrong and forget the massive amount of tax the city pays when it goes right. It isn't great but thats at Tertiary economy for you. Congratulate yourself that you still have manufacturing base that we dumped years ago.

Iran unveils 'robot bomber'

@ TimeMaster T

You mean as well as the Balkans as I don't think they will be quiet forever.

@Avatar of They

How fast that boat goes is irrelevant. Fast boats still can't outrun missiles. And the Americans have lots of missiles, far more than the "Fast boats".

Stuff using expensive missiles to hit a attack boat just point your Goalkeeper GAU-8 30mm canon (yes that is the very same fitted to the A-10 Thunderbolt) at them if you can get it to tilt low enough (-25 degrees below horz.). Auto radar tracking 18 targets at once firing at up to 4,200 rounds per minute. It is normally employed as a anti missile defence but I bet it can be taught to select little boats.

@easyk

Wrong era we are talking deposing a rightfully inaugurated Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh in 1953 with the help of British and US involvement replacing him with a Western puppet that was unloved - the Shah. He was subsequently removed in the Iranian revolution of 1979.

Microsoft to set record with next Patch Tuesday

Ah the voice of calm reason again

Thank you for bring this mess to order.

Airline ejects passenger for being hungry

@Robert

Do you own a car?

Do you eat any food not grown organically by you, on your own land?

Do you take any medicines?

Do you only wear natural materials grown in your local vicinity?

Do you live in a wooden, super - insulated building?

if you can answer NO to the first three and YES to the last two you have credibility, if not look at icon it speaks volumes.

Teufel System 5 home cinema speakers

Devilish

You work it out................... Answers on a postcard please.

Cable lays plan for graduate tax

@ mark65

If you're not a contractor I am well and truely in the wrong F*** company.

@Sean

Clever. Though flawed unless of course you want the whole country populated solely by the children of well-off families. Do you have any children? I only ask as this perception by non parents that somehow children get a shed load of money from the tax man and somehow this is a burden non-parents carry.

@ TheRobster

Hear Hear. A lot of the blame lies with universities who have ceased to be seats of learning and have fancied themsleves, like schools to being a private company ( I know a lot all ready are) and as such want to generate lots of cash and pay silly salaries.

This country doesn't want to end up like Japan with suicides if you don't make it on to a dregree course. We need max 20% of the pop. to go through uni. The rest we need to do more import work - training to be plumbers, builders, metal workers etc. Why you ask? Because the numbers in those trades is severly lacking and they tend to hold the infrastructure together. No disrespect to teachers but I have been there ( at Uni) got the t-shirt and learned a damn sight more in work then I ever did in school.

Gulf spill to annihilate all earthlings, says seer

dito

Though I do hope all the merkins that are up-in-arms about the spill care to remember when they next fill up their 4 litre cars at the "gas" station that if they used less oil then maybe rigs would not be needing to drill there in the first place. Just like mobile phone users who complain of the positioning of cell masts.

Russian spy ring bust uncovers tech toolkit

Can too

Though you would need to be clever as the first 3 octets in the address uniquely ID the manufacturer of the NIC (as they are issued in blocks like IPs). So to be plausible you would only want to change to trailing octets otherwise mister counterspy who can see who makes your laptop will know something fishy is up.

Tories declare students a burden on us all

Tories

are out to mash up everything their dirty little hands were unable to bash up before, using the same old hacked cock they did when Mrs T came to power. "The previous Government has squandered a load of cash and now you will have to pay for it all". Funny back then, as now, circumstances over - took the Labour Government and were beyond most of their control.

Universities have moved from seats of learning to money grabbing shits who care jack for their students and then complain there still is not enough cash coming in. I remember well under Major when all the freebies were whipped away from us, then students, and the loans came in with the attitude that you , having a degree would earn on average 20 -30 percent more in your working life than without one. Which one would assume we as degree holders wouldin fact pay 20-30 more tax than not having a degree and therefore easily cover any cash the loans were trying to replace.

This country needs a number; circa 20% of people to go on to higher learning in useful subjects and another 20 % to learn useful trades to replace all the migrant trades-people, that will inevitably go home once they have saved enough cash from working here, at our trades rates, to buy their homes outright, and go on the live a more comfortable life. While we will be left with a massive skills short fall in building and allied trades that will take years to recover from. Bring back Government funded, apprentiships that mean something and train our workers to compete at he highest level with rest of the world.

Thats my, more than, three penny worth.

Fader pushers mourn Fritz Sennheiser

Keep your Beyerdynamic

it Sennheiser all the way. Thank you for your great input into the recording and listening world. Auf Wiedersehen und Schlaft gut.

MS hopes biz punters will guzzle Office 2010

VOLP

Do you have a volume licence agreement? If so pop over to https://eopen.microsoft.com and get your media electronically. MS hasn't sent disks out to resellers for a fair while now. Or keep quite if you want rid of the MS pest and jump on open office with gay abandon - it's great.

Soot, hydrofluorocarbs 'low-hanging fruit' to fight warming

@ Funkster

Agreed diesels are nasty pieces of work. They produce particles in the PM10 and below (Particulate matter at 10 microns) these soots will go deep into the aveolea (very tiny air sacks at the farthest depths of the lungs) and can stay to have a causative carcinogenic effect. And you thought smoking was a bad idea!!

Mobe-wielding drivers getting away with it

@ Yet Another Anon

No I would hope you would realise a by-directional track (the open road) is a damn sight more dangerous than a racing track and you would therefore drive more intelligently and not be pulling any of the moronic crap that others seem to feel is safe.

Virgin Media downed by thick Leeds 'copper' crooks

mark it

It is about time someone figured how to watermark copper and other nicked metals to allow the identification of the owner to be assesed. Then the person hold ing the material can bl**dy well explain how it came to be in their hands - you have proof of theft and a much easier case to prove in court.

NASA flying car engineer shoots down Reg coverage

Well done

That is a sane, controlled and well structured arguement unlike the Phd "dude". With that kind of language and overall english usage they must hand out Phds like smarties in the States.

I personally could not give a stuff for personal flying vehicles as I think they are unworkable tripe with respect to the complexities of flying, not banging into each other, and take-off and landing. A great deal of people (in in the States - most) cannot even drive a car sfaely so there is no way they are getting airborne.

Microsoft slams nails in Windows Vista, XP SP2, 2000

@heyrick

Nice run down of what to do with windows. The reality of windows is slightly different. Windows majorly fails in three key areas: the registry; this is a nice idea but is very badly implemented leading to bloated size and orphaned keys (mostly the fault of rubbish installers), IE; employing the same engine to browse the machine and browse the web inextricably linked ( major no, no) and the totally crap file system design that leads to chronic fragmentation within months.

Equal machines ( ie the same one) after carefully installing business software and few other apps on XP. After less than 6 months usage XP crawls and GNU/ Linux is still as if it were first installed. Sorry I have given up on MS sorting their act out and have finally returned to GNU/Linux after many years in the wilderness tempted by the solid W2K and this time I am staying put.

LTO-5 tape comes from Quantum and Overland

D2D

" The lack of a roadmap might incline customers to look more favourably upon disk-to-disk (D2D) backup, especially deduplicating disk-to-disk backup. We can expect D2D arrays to be employing 4TB drives, possibly even 8TB ones, when LTO-6 tape drives appear in roughly three years time. Unless the LTO Consortium gets its ass in gear and presses its tape pedal to the metal, it could find that its lack of urgency will help bring about its own demise."

Yeah right tell that to the likes of CERN. Tape arrays and libraries exist and will still exist because they are more reliable, use a lot less electricty and tapes have a certified offsite shelf life (archiving / manditory data retention) of many years unlike HDDs. Unless that D2D is mirrored offsite you can forget any insurance cover for fire, flood and theft.

As for deduplication I am not sold as any large organisation and some small ones already emloy SANS that do that as part of their job. There is little to no value deduping at backup as the bigger issue is why all that duplicated material sat on far more expensive first line storage in the first place. Even the dreaded windows servers in 2008 / 2003R2 versions have deduplication capability in the storage server versions.

Is it ta-ta for Flash?

Jackson

"Do yo think all gay boys want to be girls or something"

Proposes that all all boys / men who dress as girls want to be gay. Good luck with those cage fighter / rugby types.

Hippie windfarm kingpin Dale Vince slapped down by ASA

Base load Base load

With all these cool wind turbines going up just where is the base load coming from? This is a fundamental issue surrounding all of this eco tech. You can only be seen to be viable as long as there is a base load provided by fossil / nuke. I believe in reducing carbon emissions but that requires a complete re-think of how we transport (grid) and us (low enegry devices) the generated electricicity.

The trouble is no one group of people have the whole answer. The greeens moan about co2 and nuclear the nimbys moan about turbines and the electricity companies worry what The City (aka shareholders) think about lowered revenue if we the consumer utilise low energy devices and properly insulate our homes.

There is no one simple answer and banging up wind turbines is a short term sticking plaster for a much bigger issue. Bunch of arse.

Visual Studio 2010 - chunky but has a great personality

I know. The amazing Dawn French no less

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Argentinians invade Falkland Islands website

Arse

Think of the bloody exocets from our friends over la Manche that were strapped to Etendards made by the same.

Microsoft erases Windows 8 optimism

Lets start that poll

still on w2k serverwise anyway.

Big Blue boffins hatch dirt-cheap solar cells

Ah no

I think it is time to realise that AC generation was a bad idea and switch to easier to handle and store DC generation. We only have AC because we transmit power over a grid and this is more efficient. Base loads are required for this system to work but the system is not necssarily the best design now.

The majority of household power (heat, light) is used to heat the building - this is where some real power savings can be made mitigating further power production requirements. So with reduction in power requirements more can be derived from differing sources not necessarily from a grid.

"Nuke plants deal with decommissioning, solar, wind, hydro and tidal must cope with stupendously high equipment and territory costs, and geothermal doesn’t really exist yet."

Not one nuclear plant has made enough money in its active life to even vaguely pay for its decomissioning - as always this will be born by the customer / tax payer over and above what they have already paid in bills. Nuclear has had massive monetary input from government to keep the produced electricity price cheap and inline with other forms. Nuclear never has and never will be to too cheap to tax as was once mooted.

Geothermal does exist talk to the Icelanders - been using it for years. Geothermal suffers from being too inaccessable for commercial use away from vulcanic hotspots (usual in low occupational areas).

As for grid provide power what happens when you have a ice storm!! No grid at minus 30 and now feeling like an lump of ice. If only you had a super insulated house with simpe DC power requirements that could be met be a local CHP plant burning biomas.

Aussies cane cane toads with cat food

Not again...........

Funnily enough the cane toad was tested in Hawaii and past muster so was used in Aus to control another imported pest the cane beetle - needless to say that failed. Australia was left with a bloody great monster, meat eating toad that breeds better than rabbits and the bloddy thing is poisonous to most creatures. I just hope those ants aren't affected by the poison the toad and tadpoles secrete.

Best outcome cats come to eat cat food, meet toaddie, have a bite killing toad and snuff it. Gets rid of two major pests in one go and the ants get to eat cat.

OpenOffice is the new David Hasselhoff

Nothing Wrong

with open office for the majority of business users. Yes it doesn't do things in quite the same way as MS office but if you are going to pull it upon pivot tables and VBA (utter shite) then I don't see a big enough argument. Paying £300+ a copy for MS office should be a big enough arguement not to us it

By the time you have hacked around excel with that poor excuse for code production you might as well have done the whole thing properly in a SQL database and then you would make meaningful use of the data. The number of spreadsheets we have work that are hacked together, usually by sales staff, with same data repeated many times makes a DB admin shiver. The moans as data falls out of sync and older data taken as current, I just walk away laughing.

Rubber Duck banned from txt

Harder

Lets go for a new one dangerous and negligent driving to clober this one. DWDCA is good for not looking where you are going but using a device such a mobile (unless handsfree) whilst driving should have stiffer penalty. This would also cover smoking drinking (non alcohol), eating and reading the weight of the vehicle is totally irrelivent

New inside out hover-magnet fusion reactor debuts at MIT

@Paul Shirley

I wish we hadn't spent the last 50 years producing monsterously costly nuclear power derived leccy, just to provide the material to blow each other up based on a disagrement as to politcal views - but hay whatever.

The answer is to reduce energy consumption at one end and seek non / little damaging renewable sources on the other. Fission fits neither of these criteria, even if you include fast breeder plutonium burners.

@El Richard Thomas

Nope nothing is missing it's just very difficult to create the pressures and temperatures on Earth that matcth those of a massive body (tremendous gravitation field) like our Sun. Lots of fiddling with magnetic fields to stablise a squiggly ball like a plasma field.

Twenty years is hardly a long time for what is fundamently more important physics than trying to smash your way to an answer about the begining of time itself. I wish the fusion guys had half the funding the particle physists have for colliders.

Windows plagued by 17-year-old privilege escalation bug

@20th January 2010 23:10 GMT

Where's Mr Bryant when you need him he'll learn about how great the powerpc line is now as in not great. Take it up with your Uberman Jobs he made the jump.

Fanboy

Pot calling the kettle black. I am no MS fanboy just making the point that a being a macality can cost you dearly. Anyway Apple's work was mostly done for them (as in brilliance, security and stablility) by the BSD crew so I'm not sure what mactards always crow about I guess in IT knowledge terms they are still on Peter and Jane books ;-)

@ keith Oldham @ AC20/01 12:46 @ @Fraser

@Keith - you are correct but that still means you have to reboot the OS I was not inferreing Linux required as many reboots as windows - of course not

@AC and Fraser Please re-read my post:

"Afterall you could buy OSX which regularly drops support for your APPLICATIONS, forcing you to buy a massively inflated (in cost and bloat), newer version when it changes face.

I was not refering to the OS but the applications such as Photosohop CS4 which due to the Coccoa / Carbon fiasco still doesn't work on snow leopard unless things have changed. I am no expert but taking the processor architecture aside we had to buy quite a bit of new software for the alte versions of OSX.

Personally I'm not too enamoured with any of the current OSs in desktop form. I wish Europe would get together look at the flaws in Linux / Unix and write a better OS than both of those because I think it is possible - any takers?