Posts by MarkA

Cities are investigating, workers are on strike, but it's not all good news for Verizon

I've had FiOS in three places over seven years in Center City in Philly (what we call downtown for some reason) and the streets along which is did not pass at the start of the year are all being dug up at the moment. Obviously though they waited until all of the affected streets had been nicely resurfaced with lovely new Tarmac before coming along and carving the trenches out. That's my taxpayer dollars being hauled off in dump trucks.

US Air Force launches not-so-secret space plane. Thanks Russia

Re: AC don't listen to McCain

You were doing so well until you made a political snipe. Now you're just an idiot; historically accurate, but an idiot.

Paper driving licence death day: DVLA website is still TITSUP

Re: What do other countries do?

You get to the airport, hand over your photo driving license as ID along with your CC and you're off to the races. I wish I could say I was stunned that the DVLA have done something so dumb as a three day expiring code. You can just imagine the 20 civil servants in the room coming up with that shite. And as for the tax disk thing? Everyone else puts a sticker either on the registration plates or stuck to the inside of the windscreen.

EMC and Cloudera withdraw from Indiana big data event

Re: Well that does it. I'm not going to Indiana either.

Wearing white after Labor Day? Burn him. Burn the heretic.

Who's come to fix your broadband? It may be a Fed in disguise. Without a search warrant

Re: Still Better than Comcast

I recently had a Comcast guy call me to say he was coming to fix my internet.

I have FiOS.

Strange tale of an angry bean counter, Comcast and a shock 'firing'

Way too fishy

Comcast have way too many customers for just one dude to get axed from his job because he irked some employee. They get so many complaints because their customer service is indeed absolutely terrible that if they did this once they'd have done it to tens of thousands of other people before. I called to upgrade to the next package up because I wanted BBCW and AJA. It took 20 minutes. They managed to give me the upped package but knocked off HBO. Another call, another 20 minutes and they managed to knock off the whole HD set (channels 800 up if you're in the know here). The third call, another 15 minutes gave me final result. I only have Comcast because I have to have it to get HBO and also because the new SWMBO likes "Real housewives of who the fuck cares where." My IQ drops five points every time I hear anything on Bravo - and I don't have the IQ to spare.

London officials declare cabbie-bothering Uber is legal – for now

Section (3) ought not to apply because the whole pricing and even payment part is done between your iPhone and the Uber service. All that gets passed to the driver is where who you are, how many there are, where to pick you up and where to drop you off. You are explicitly told that the driver will not take money from you in tip and he has no means of taking any card payment from you at all anyway. Maybe some do but I've never offered and never had a nasty glance after getting out of the car so clearly it's all working tickety-boo.

Bottom line here? The market has spoken in many cities and in spite of all the union bullshit lobbying going on it's legal and people like it - A LOT.

Really? This is so new to you guys in London? I would have thought London would lap this up, given the state of the minicabs sometimes. In Philadelphia we've been using this for ages. Want to hop from one bar to another? One of us opens the app, decide on whether to get a town car or an SUV (# friends, distance, feeling flush or not etc) gets the cost from source to destination from the app (It maps your current location off the phone to the address you enter as the destination). Vehicle arrives. Go from A to B by any damn route he wants because you've paid both fare and tip by credit card so it's in his interest to get you there asap and become available for the next trip. The fact that you've paid a sum based on the most efficient route on the map, why would the driver go round the houses!

It's easy. It's safe. It's comfortable (although I'll confess that the Crown Victoria's used in Philly as taxi's would make Indian Railways look good.)

I detect the whiff of Spanish Practices. They hate Uber in New York City amongst others and I'm stunned that the union-stuffed city of Philadelphia hasn't kicked up a fuss; they seem to have just taken it in their stride and they're expanding.

Troll sues Apple for daring to plug headphones into iPhone

Re: US Patient Office

Nay nay.

People too stupid to work at the DMV get jobs in McDonalds. People too stupid to work there go to BK. Too stupid for the King and they go to Wendy's. Too stupid for square burgers and they work for the TSA. Only those too stupid to fondle weary travelers get to the dizzy depths of the USPTO.

The USPS is probably in there somewhere.

Netflix scores $1bn own goal after company shoots off mouth

Nothing On

My problem with Netflix is that there is 'nothing' on. Once you've seen the things that you saw once on TV as a kid and have put a few shows (Cheers, Frasier, Stargate SG1 (sorry)) into the queue as ear-candy whilst you're reading or working (i.e substitute for the radio or whatever) that's it. You're done. I've gone back to buying DVDs on occasion, ripping them to MP4 on a big-ass disk array and playing them through Apple TV with iTunes installed on a virtualized guest on the server. If we ever find ourselves at a loose end and want to watch something recent then Apple TV also provides, but it is a tadge pricey at $5 a film for 24 hours - use sparingly.

Early 2012 date for UK Kindle Fire debut

Don't Bother

The screen sensitivity is crap. I've had to factory reset it twice and "cold" boot it twice in two weeks. You press the button to turn it on and then go put the kettle on whilst you wait for it to wake up. If you don't wait and press it again it will switch itself off because, well, you pressed twice within one minute so you must mean it.

It's just very poor in everything it does apart from displaying books. And why go from a months worth of battery to 8 hours, just to read a book.

Reluctantly, mine went back yesterday and, yes, I went to my final option; the usual fondleslab which, although costing an arm and a leg, does all the things I'd convinced myself I didn't want or need but found myself wishing I had.

Feh.

Mystery railway buys 80 terabytes of Flash

Huh?

Moving from Dell/EQ and HDS to this SSD array? That makes no sense.

You don't just suddenly decide that your departmental grade iSCSI cheap-o box isn't cutting it and buy a decent chunk of SSD. Equally you don't take a look at your rock-solid HDS frame and chuck it in favour of a relative newcomer.

What is the NEW use-case that has presented itself.

Middle England chokes on Nice Baps

Perfect Name

To appeal to the (still) significant Air Force crowd, serving and retired, that are in that village and the surrounding area.

EMC blows benchmark away - again

I call BS

Really? You're not going to call out the price of the various solutions?

How is that an actual benchmark? To be a benchmark it needs to be something that others strive for. only an idiot with more money than sense would put their file services on flash.

I pity the fool, etc.

Delete all you like, but it won't free up space

Really?

You wasted time on this?

A deduped volume is there to slow down, delay, defer, whatever, your disk purchases. If your deduped volume is getting full that's the cue to buy more disk. It's the cue that you need the disk now rather than six months or a year ago.

Jeez. What a clown.

US Eye-o-Sauron border scan tower project finally axed

@ Hollerith 1

If I was escaping Bolivia I'd be hoping the USCG would pluck me off my little raft so I could claim political asylum in the United States.

Oh, and it's the Land of the free and home of the brave. Yeah, I dunno why I pointed that out either.

Ryanair plumps for Dell EqualLogic

Figures

Mind you, I'm surprised they didn't go for the HP/LH gear. A bunch of old servers hanging around with a few disks in it here and there to be turned into a distributed SAN seems right up O'Leary's street.

I am not surprised they didn't go for the IBM N Series (inferred by the NetApp angle) since that would have been a bit pricey. The N Series is fully featured unified storage against the, err, whatever the heck that Dell claim their stuff is.

GM plumps for long-distance hybrid Cadillac

"US highway speeds"

Er, WTF? Have you been on I-95 lately? Have you driven in VA? Sit on I-76 between 6 and 10am or between 1 and 7pm and you'll think you're on the M25. Drive at a good lick on the New Jersey Turnpike and you're going to find a black Dodge Charger up your arse with a lot of natty flashing lights.

US highway speeds indeed. Dick.

Now, if you'd said that the Smartcar wouldn't stand a chance even if shunted by one of those unecessarily oversized trucks that the Goddamns drive then you'd be right. But you didn't.