Posts by system11

The Lord of the Rings Trilogy: Blu-ray extended edition

Excellent stuff

I picked this up on release day, and having never seen the extended versions before, I didn't feel like any of them dragged on at all, they're just good, long films. The black gate scene made sense this time around.

'3-2-1 ... Good Morning Atlantis!'

Yes you should

Yes you should, human life is cheap and over-abundant. Space exploration and the innovations developed as a result are valuable. People always forget how much technology in day to day life came about as a by product of space development. Astronauts know the risks, but reap the rewards and do work which genuinely has value. It's their decision to take, not someone worrying that 6.8 billion is about to be 6.8 billion minus 8.

We as a species spend far too much time worrying about trying to look after our rapidly increasing population, and less and less time making any kind of meaningful progress. I'm glad I was born when I was, because I'm not going to be around to see the house of cards tumble down, as the elephant in the room wakes up and goes on a rampage.

50 day lullaby of Lulzsec is over .. for now

perhaps

I feel sorry for McKinnon, he didn't hack Nasa maliciously, or to expose personal details, he just wanted to look for little green men. There's no malice there, just a sad naivety.

PSN hack triggers lawsuit

There is no 'PCI'

PCI can't act because they as an entity don't exist.

There's a regulatory body who sets the PCI DSS standard, but compliance is enforced by the acquirers (Visa and Mastercard for example). They can threaten to withdraw payment authorisations, and then you stop making money.

Any large company needs to pass a PCI DSS audit, the audit is done by a QSA, an external testing company who will audit their client, and based on their findings provide mandatory changes and recommendations that the client must follow to get their PCI DSS approval.

Now here's the kicker - when a QSA approves a client, they are taking on the liability in case of a data breach of any system they have audited and approved. The client gets to throw their hands in the air and say the QSA didn't identity whatever hole has led to the breach, and the QSA gets fined. Some clients are so large that the fines will destroy the QSA, for this reason many are sacrificial private limited companies. Some will pretty much come along and say "we'll take the risk" and give a company a tick in the PCI box without so much as a second glance.

Of course the company that lost the data then has to go to another QSA and get their box ticked again.

Virgin Media says sorry over Superhub snafu

"Their customer service and technical teams were excellent."

Can you please give us the contact details for this ISP that happens to share the same name as Virgin, as you can't possibly be talking about the same company.

Our area had a fault between August and March. It was only when I emailed the CEO and tried to cancel our contract that anything was done (in Jan), but they still failed to fix it. It's a sorry process of being sent in circles between people who just can't help even if they wanted to. We were going to switch back to 5mb DSL because it had been that bad for that long. And that's quite aside from the Superfail issue, which made a bad situation horribly worse. They flat out -refused- to give us an old modem back after the 'upgrade'.

Not the only problem

Unfortunately this is far from the only outstanding problem with 'Superhubs'. They still have problem maintaining SSH sessions without using forced keepalives, and if you turn the firewall functions off (which massively increase latency and falsely identify DOS attacks when on) any fast transfers are prone to just stalling.

Utter piece of shit.

We need a bridge mode firmware update.

It's the oldest working Seagate drive in the UK

Me too

There's one of those up in our loft too, no reason why it shouldn't still work, it did when it was put there.

Oxfordshire cops switch speed cameras back on

CASH! Om nom nom!

Oh goody - $cameras getting turned back on.

I wouldn't have an issue with them if they placed them where speeding even by a small amount is dangerous. You know, places where reasonable drivers don't even do 30, like going down residential roads and past school entrances. Accident blackspots where crashes happen at over 70mph would be excellent sites too. They might make the roads safer, along with a sensible policing of driving, like pulling over those idiots who tailgate habitually, can't find their indicators, or shoot out from traffic queues and then try to jam themselves back in where a gap doesn't exist. We've all seen them, we see them every single day getting away with dangerous driving. That's ok though as long as they're staring at their speedo.

However, that's never going to happen. It just makes too much sense, and doesn't let plod abuse the motoring public - put them in their places, get them for something and make a nice fat wadge of cash though fines and license re-applications, and a nice boost for the greedy insurance industry.

Instead, we get:

* Cameras at the bottom of a hill where limits change.

* Average speed cameras on stretches of road where crashes only ever happen at rush hour, when people can't even do 60 let alone 70. Instead they only make money off people doing 75 when the road is empty.

* Plod hiding their cars and mobile vans behind trees on curved, little used A roads where speeding is perfectly safe. In fact the safer the road would be for a higher limit, the more likely they are to stick a camera there. It's not about safety, it's about money and getting to put the little people in their place.

And they wonder why so many people don't like them anymore - this is just one reason. I'm really tired of looking at the speedo more than the road, but it's extremely easy to lose your license for a string of extremely minor transgressions.

Digesting the Budget: First-belch reactions

forward thinking

Maybe they should have worked out if they could afford to have children, before doing so. Don't expect the world to fund a lifestyle choice you've made. The worst part is the way the system rewards people for having children they can't support to the point where it encourages more children.

WTF is... cloud gaming?

Doomed to failure

A constant 5mb/s with good latency?

Good luck with that.

Lets use my home connections as an example - one of them gets just over 4mb on DSL, but it has a 10gb monthly cap before you have to pay extra. I use that company because their latency is excellent, so it's fine for normal online gaming.

We also have a 50mb Virgin cable line, which has terrible latency even when it's working, but actually runs about 2mb/s every evening from 7pm-11pm due to an overloaded local UBR. Even if it was working, hitting 5mb constantly would get me hit by traffic shaping.

There's a reason video streaming of high def content is yet to really take off, the infrastructure just isn't there - we need genuine fiber to the home and massive investment at provider level before any of this becomes workable. I've always thought this OnLive thing looked like a Gizmodo style investment scam to be honest.

Government flies kite for VAT changes

Smaller items should stay VAT free

Smaller items should stay VAT free.

Even at their current level of inspection, customs leads to several days delay at busier times of the year - I doubt they can inspect every single thing.

I'm not sure why the 18 pound limit is even being discussed, that looks like a poorly justified cash grab attempt more than anything else if they really mean dropping it entirely. The correct solution to their current 'problem' is to start treating the channel islands as a non-EU place, subject to all the same rules as countries like America and Japan. CDs and so on will still sail through, which is fine given the pitiful amount of tax they'd actually retrieve - just as they do from any country, but larger orders that they still ship tax free from there would be subject to import duties.

I bet Parcelforce are hoping it gets abolished completely - they scam people for massive 'clearance fees' these days, often 5 times more than the actual VAT was on smaller items.

One-third of Aussies 'are pirates'

Entitlements

I think that's a balancing act - $30 is clearly insane of course, but there's a hard core of freetards who reject the notion that they aren't entitled to everything for free. Even at $1 they won't pay.

Virgin Media kills 20Mb broadband service

Try providing 20 before offering 30.

Every evening our 20mb service slows down to about 2.3, as it does for everyone in the area.

I think they have their priorities slightly wrong.

UK.gov braces for Anonymous hacklash

Legitimate form of protest? What?

A DDoS attack results in massive collateral damage to the targets provider and other customers of that provider. In extreme cases it can result against a denial of service against other customers of the attackers provider too, as well as those in between.

How much disruption to other people in completely unrelated places is acceptable?

PHP apps plagued by Mark of the Beast bug

Anti-PHP logic fail

Indeed.

I can drive poorly in a Mazda therefore Mazda make awful cars.

In-flight fight for stubborn iPhone-loving teen

They're punishing the wrong person

Kid got what he deserved, laws are frequently stupid.

Feds raid server farms in bid to root out PayPal DDoS perps

Oh no

"knocking its corporate blog offline"

Sounds more like a service to the community.

Labour moots using speed cameras to reward law-abiding drivers

Sigh

They still don't get it, if they want to be less hated then just LEAVE US ALONE! Enough of this bullshit, turn road policing back into an attempt to stop genuinely dangerous drivers rather than persecute anyone who drifts a couple of miles over the limit. Inappropriate speed is the danger, someone travelling at 80 on a deserted dual carriageway at 11pm isn't going to hurt anyone, most of the downright terrifying driving I see happens well within the limits, and in fact may even be made worse by artificially low ones.

I'd like to see them look at tailgating - I'd estimate I get tailgated at least once every journey I make, especially when I'm sticking to the limit for fear of points in areas that are obviously rated lower than they should be.

It's usually Audi drivers.

World+Dog says 'no thanks' to 3D TV

gaming

Why is it people think 3D will be good for gaming? I can't see how it would help in the slightest, and may even significantly hinder in any genre aside from racing games. I should add I'm an avid/addicted gamer myself.

Finally

Nice to see the 3D hypewagon is starting to run out of steam. It gives me eyestrain extremely quickly, I can't ever see this becoming the broadcast standard. It's not 3D, it's just an illusion - fix that and you fix all the other associated problems with strain, nausea, glasses, etc. That means holographic TV and I doubt we'll be seeing that anytime soon.

Of course it won't stop all the "researchers" and "specialists" which have been mentioned in a lot of the tech press from telling us how popular it will be. They're absolutely desperate for something new to shovel, which is a shame when we haven't really exploited all HD has to offer yet.

Paris, because nobody feels sorry for her either.

Ten... dirt-cheap voice phones

Looking for phones

I suppose this might be as good a place to ask as any, does anyone know of any handset of any age which does the following:

1) Loud (being on-call means the beeping needs to wake me up)

2) Possible to answer calls by voice - so I can just say 'answer' or whatever at it, and it'll answer in speakerphone mode.

3) Sends and receives calls and SMS messages

That's really all I want, can I find a phone that does it? Not so far :/

Gov pays Greens to lobby it, says report

Wasters

While not strictly tech news green policies impact what many of us do for a living in various ways.

Also lobby groups of any kind should not be funded by the government.

Blu-ray barely better than DVD

Sample size & equipment

I'd suggest their test is lacking, and the results are wide open to interpretation. It's not worth going high def unless you have the following things: good eyesight and a good sized screen which is 1080p native.

For example, they mention that Zulu is a marked improvement - this is an understatement. Zulu had a full restoration process and it shows - the BR is vastly superior to the DVD releases. Other films are just quick transfers from untouched masters - those are the ones that gain far less, unless they're 70mm films which look fantastic. In other cases the quality is variable between countries, for example the UK Flash Gordon is pretty awful compared to the US release.

I've got 260 or so original Blu-Rays, all of which I've watched. The quality difference is obvious in the majority of cases, but it won't always blow you away. Even when the master isn't hugely detailed, you're still comparing a 1080P digitisation to a 576i one - so the poorly defined bits of the picture are still more accurately represented.

Virgin demands ISPs end broadband speed 'con'

Is this a joke?

Our 20mb service has /never/ hit 20mb in the years we've been with VM. In addition the upstream is pitiful, but that doesn't matter too much since the horrendous latency to anywhere outside of the UK means that upstream is fairly useless for any kind of interactive traffic.

There's no point offering 20mb when you can't actually provide any kind of quality of service.

Conversely, my 'mis-sold' up-to-8mb DSL line with Eclipse is far more usable for gaming. I can only assume Mr Branson doesn't try to use his own service much.

US may disable all in-car mobile phones

Need more focus on phone users in cars

Stop focusing on speeding and go after people using phones - simple. I saw a woman career into the oncoming lane while trying to take a left a few days ago, phone wedged between her shoulder and ear.. I'm just happy there was a traffic island between where she was and I was, shame she managed to avoid hitting it though.

Oh - what was that, it's not lucrative enough?

Greenland ice loss rates 'one-third' of what was thought

Too many.

Too many people.

Until that great big leering elephant in the room is addressed, everything else is a futile waste of time which will only delay the inevitable. It's astonishing how many climate campaigners and scientists never, ever talk about it.

Mozilla Thunderturkey and its malcontents

Thunderbird 3.x - not an upgrade.

I agree entirely - Thunderbird 3.x is a horrible, slow, bloated mess. I downgraded after a week to 2.x again, everything was just too much effort, too many mouse clicks, too much fuss. I hate it more than Outlook.

Lloyds TSB's online banking system shows no love for Firefox

Teasted a few..

Firefox 3.5.3 on Vista 64 - works

Firefox 3.0.14 on Ubuntu - works

Firefox 3.5.3 on RedHat (work desktop) - sticks in a loop at login, used to work