* Posts by Squirrel

96 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Feb 2010

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Gigabit-over-TV-cable spec DOCSIS 3.1 passes interop test

Squirrel
WTF?

DICSIS

erm?

Facebook, are you listening? Fusion-io chucks 6.4TB 'Atomic' flash kit at world

Squirrel

Price for the curious?

How many limbs?

World braces for domain name EXPLOSION

Squirrel

not so

Try this;

1. come up with a name for a brand or company

2. search for vacant domain name

3. ??

4. 95% chance of fail

The domain name system is a namespace with a finite set. We're already reaching the limit of that marketable usable set without spending $5k - $5m for a 'good' name and it can only get worse.

It'd be nice if they limited .co.* and .com to registered companies and registered brand names but unfortunately they don't and cyber squatters sit on everything that's a dictionary word or abbrev. and anything once owned by a legitimate user.

This extension to the naming system will significantly relieve the pressure and diversify the eco system. I can only hope it decentralises the roots out of the US too. Less there, the better. No reason not to spread them across the rest of the world.

Ten... over-ear headphones

Squirrel
Pint

Best in-ear head phones in the world <£100

Victor/JVC HP-FXC50

Only downside is, they tend to wear out pretty quickly and I got through 2-3 sets a year with daily use. £10 on ebay from china or £30 in the UK.

They've been superseded by the HA-FXC51 but I've not yet found a decent source for them (ebay £27). I hope they've improved their durability!

Oracle gives 21 (new) reasons to uninstall Java

Squirrel

upvote for icon!!

Ellison icon - subtext: Bleeding it dry

Squirrel
Flame

and just 1 irrevelant bugfix

Oracle, you expect people to use your crap but don't actually make it work. Fixing the HTMLEditorKit/HTML Delegator has been looked over again.

AdBlock Plus: Open source for fun (not funds)

Squirrel
Happy

morals

if companies had more, then they'd donate time and/or money. Most don't so they don't!

I like it when EFF catches out companies using modified GPL code without releasing source code and they get their name dragged through the mud and courts. Brings a smile to my face. OFC that's a separate issue to free commercial use of unmodified code - which is perfectly acceptable.

Squirrel
Pint

contributor here

I submit bug reports and occasionally patches to FOSS projects. The bug reports not so much as the patches give me an awesome sense of pride. Bug reports are my good deed for the day. Patches are my good deed for the month ;)

It's not my sole reason for helping but the feel good factor definitely helps!

Long live FOSS!

'Tree Octopus' proves journos no smarter than 13-year-old Americans

Squirrel
Pint

Are you calling journalists stupid?

:D

'Mark-of-the-Beast' bug topples Java apps

Squirrel
Unhappy

not to worry oracle are helping

since update 23 the html delegator freezes up on reload making anything with a html content (JTextPane, JEditorPane et al.) break with a null pointer exception. This obviously breaks a lot of web applets - I've read reports of banks applets being completely useless. Bug was in the last update (23?) from October and no fix is coming. Did Oracle fire the Java team?

Talk about a game breaker. We've had to code around it but txt vs rtf vs html... html wins, rtf is a pain and txt is just not fluffable enough for the designers. *le sigh*

Amazon buys Lovefilm

Squirrel

Thank socks

I really hate the lovefilm brand spam. I hope amazon rebrand and remove 90% of the marketing poop.

@sarah, can I say poop? O_o

VOD is where it's at!

Yorks cops bust Bradford guinea pig farm

Squirrel

drugs

You must live in a dodgy area; all the bad drivers (read: weaving/swerving/retarded) are using phones, reading or fiddling with other gadgets or controls.

You occasionally see the odd one weaving down the road without obvious cause and it turns out to be an elderly person.

"This fallacy that it's less harmful than tobacco is pathetic" - medically, it is. It doesn't have nicotine, and much less quantity of tar and carcinogenics when burnt. Most regular and intelligent folks vapourise it to get the caniboids out without the by-products.

Oracle's Sword of Damocles forces open source fork rename

Squirrel

The title is required, and must contain letters and/or digits.

mysql enterprise support contracts

java support contracts

and erm, well, a huge bunch of patents and trade marks apparently.

PS3 telly add-on update hit by splash screen crash

Squirrel

playtv2

apparently it's in the works but I've not seen anything about it for over a year.

Jailbreak it, install unbuntu and buy a linux compatible one instead ;)

EMC employee filched $1m worth of hardware

Squirrel
Alert

"unlawfully using software updates"

that's a new one

Amazon Kindles love for Windows and Android

Squirrel
Unhappy

I find it amusing

mainly because the Kindle device runs linux but they won't provide a desktop version of the software. I also believes it runs on java just for the extra slap in the face.

Courtney Love in court over 'Boudoir Queen' Twitter bitchfight

Squirrel
Pint

and not an airport bomb joke involved.

I thought the world already took seriously what people say on twitter? or is that just the UK?

Personally I think Ms Love needs to start saving her pennies as I don't see anything but unlawful harassment and libel.

Pre-holiday chip sales go flat

Squirrel
Troll

sack of innovation

in the market at both ends of the scale... IC to device is seriously limiting consumer interest in <£300 range IMHO.

Tablets have been around forever and the iPad made them cool, 3D everything has been around since near the end of CRT monitors (2000) and now LCD et al. are only just fast enough to do it again but it's still as bad as it ever was. MPC are just old tech/bin clearers with down scaled CPUs, and there's nothing new from phones.

From a PC peripheral stand point I'd like to see better flash based products, faster and higher resolution displays and an advancement in 3D PP rendering such as raytracing in games instead of DirectX9/10/11 GPGPU nonsense. Scrap the x86 instruction set whilst you're at it and move to UEFI in the same go (Win8 motivator maybe?).

97% of INTERNET NOW FULL UP, warn IPv4 shepherd boys

Squirrel

impossible

as per title.

So instead they made a far more efficient version with a lot of address space.

Feds seize 70 'filesharing, dodgy goods' sites

Squirrel
Troll

sometimes I wonder

...how many commentards are just employees of the government or industry pretending to be the public.

The torrent guy said he got no warrant or warning, and the gov is taking down sites before the Act has actually passed through the houses.

That's not enforcing laws, that making it up as they go along... "what's a few months, it'll be passed in the new year, right? Lets just do it" said Mr Fed.

IMHO country neutral TLDs like com, net and org should be under UN control or other international committee, not the US 'land of the free', patent and copyright trolls.

Linux servers for Windows folk: go on, give it a bash

Squirrel
Troll

speaking out of where?

*sigh*

'Forget the big-name ones such as SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES) or Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL). All the big players shamefully neglect the user-interface side of their server offerings. Their "server distributions" are no more a server OS than a box of Lego is a toy car.'

You're obviously trolling. There's a reason 70%+ of the web uses linux/unix, it's because it works out of the box and is easy to setup and manage remotely.

http://news.netcraft.com/archives/2010/11/05/november-2010-web-server-survey.html

"SLES and RHEL are just bags of components for skilled sysadmins to construct a server to fulfil some task."

No they're not. Any monkey can do it, it's not brain surgery.

Your intro and first section is just pure BS that you are using to prop up the rest of the article.

If your average tech monkey couldn't configure a domain name in apache, I definitely wouldn't let them near the complicated mess that is IIS applications.

'Super-secret' debugger discovered in AMD CPUs

Squirrel
Troll

Nice FUD

You'd have to be running in kernel/driver developer/debug mode to get access to these from what I can see (MSR is protected). Go read about 'Ring Security' and CPU modes.

RHEL 6: how much for your package?

Squirrel
Unhappy

centos

"for those that look at those prices and think WTF"

I've looked at RH many times over the years. Centos, the downstream community product based on RH, is very good. I've only had minor issues well within my mighty linux skills to handle. I want to support RH for doing such a good job and putting so much into FOSS but I can't justify per year per machine subs on something I don't need support for.

What they need is an alternative model whereby you can just buy a DVD set and be done with it until the next major release.... like Windows.

John Lewis pitches 80-quid colour e-book reader

Squirrel
Troll

no e-ink

An ebook should use e-ink or it should be called a tablet. They should make it an EU law ;)

Forumware giant vBulletin sues ex-devs (again)

Squirrel
Stop

Streisand effect

If the software was written from scratch, then there's nothing in UK/EU law to stop them releasing a competing product.

It boils down to whatever was in their original employment contract. As for stealing documents, it's very difficult to prove unless you have video evidence or independent witnesses.

Maybe its just the American way, sue any body and every thing if it even dares compete with you. Fortunately the company is in the UK where you can't get away with that nonsense.

[IANAL]

RIAA and Anonymous sites both downed by DDoS assaults

Squirrel

Stay on target!!

Why do they bother with the RIAA? Why not hit itunes? Make a mark on their income instead of just knocking out a crappy site no one goes too?

<disclaimer> I'm not advocating it, just wondering.

Gov depts to cut back office, IT spending

Squirrel
Unhappy

state of depts IT

is worse than most schools. A friend has worked in 2 seperate national level depts as well as large educational establishments. The edu easily is 10x better.

In the gov depts a lot of the work load is completely paper based still and they spend a lot of time doing searches and looking for lost items... O_o

I think gov depts need more IT, not less. BUT they need to spec'd and then get it peer reviewed by the public and dept. No more under-cover BS where a multination bids on it then puts interns and outsourcers on the project whilst it's paid for and paid for some more and then 50% implemented, as with the usual contact policies.

In summary;

More IT

Less multinational companies (with their interns and foreign outsourcers)

More SME contracts

More Peer/Public review of contracts and project specs

Cap on per hour charges (people charging £250+ p/h because it's the gov need a slap)

Piracy threats lawyer mocks 4chan DDoS attack

Squirrel
Troll

sounds like he's baiting them

...foolish mortal. Never underestimate the brilliance, stupidity and arrogance of a bored teen.

BT feathers ruffled over pigeon-based file transfer caper

Squirrel
FAIL

Proportional cost

It'd be nice if they just accepted that the 30 year old cabling sucks and you only pay for the Kbps that you can actually achieve. £5 + % speed achieved (0-8Mbps = £0 to £10).

OFCOM sucks and is completely powerless. It has no interest in making ISPs deliver or enforce correct advertising.

Assange under fire from Wikileakers

Squirrel
Boffin

advice

TBC

VW to eliminate worst road hazard: drivers

Squirrel
Thumb Up

looking forward to it

Much prefer a CPU to a... mobile using/map reading/paper work doing/fapping/sleeping/dropped CD finding retard homo sapien any day.

Inmate-frying microwave pain blaster turret installed in US jail

Squirrel
WTF?

erm

What has expanding bullets got to do with anything?

Yes, they are used in hunting in ALL counties I can think of including the UK and by most police forces. If you're going to shoot something you want to kill it as quickly and cleanly as possible, that means using expanding ammo that increases hydraulic shock, and localised tissue damage, minimises pass-thru and ricochets and basically gets the job done.

Now what has that got to do with microwaving US prisoners?

Short passwords 'hopelessly inadequate', say boffins

Squirrel
Stop

It's not about websites

I've seen a few post here about websites, and it's nothing to do with remote sites at all. It's to do with local files such encrypted containers that can be pushed down the pci-e bus to a steam processors like ATI or nvidia GPUs.

So unless they can download a copy of whatever is they need decrypting... then brute forcing with a GFX card is pointless, even a CPU can out perform that fattest of network connections, and then there's other mechanisms in the way such as a GUI or x attempts blocking.

16-year-old makes £1m selling ads

Squirrel
Headmaster

made 1m != turnover 1m

If I say I made a million on that last job... I mean after tax my personal account has a one and six zeros.

Turnover is not even slightly related.

Turkish groom accidentally sprays wedding guests with bullets

Squirrel
IT Angle

not quite true

Basically if the bullet does tumble you're safe, if it keeps some ballistic profile (nose first) then you're all DOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOMED

http://mythbustersresults.com/episode50

Squirrel
Grenade

blank ammo

blank ammo will still injure at close range. There's no bullet but the wadding and packing in a blank can still cause significant damage. Then there's people thinking it's blank ammo, thus safe and it's not or is loaded with live rounds.

Have they not heard of party poppers? (not to be aimed at people... )

grenade... coz it's the nearest I could find.

Leicester Council's iPad can chair meetings

Squirrel
Flame

why not kindle?

£109 vs £429

I'd think they'd say anything to keep their expensive toy. I'm quite sure they can 'chair' using just about anything that can display a PDF and make notes on. It'd be interesting to see if they still used pen and paper to make notes with...

A netbook with Office and Outlook on would still cost less, be more manageable (domains/GPO etc) and more secure (the ipad has none). Their reasons for an iPad are hogs wash.

Hands on with Nintendo 3DS

Squirrel
Happy

not quite

It is susceptible to movement and the optimal horizontal viewing angle is fairly small but it's a hand held device, you won't be looking at it from the side, whether it's resting on your lap or held up level to your face shouldn't make a difference though, just don't rotate along the Y axis and expect the 3D to stay.

The average distance between adult EU eyes is 7cm, we'll say 9cm max. A young child's is probably a minimum of 5cm (guess). So it's designed to handle a eye separation distance of 5-9cm at a viewing distance of 20cm-80cm. That's a pretty narrow view angle from the users perspective but the point is; A) it's impossible with autostereoscopic approach to have wide view angles usable outside the expected ~10-15 degrees per eye, and B) it doesn't need them.

Leicester City councillors eye up iPad to save £90k a year

Squirrel

agreed

I can understand their need for such a device that can view PDFs in a meeting... commonly referred to as a laptop... but limited functionality luxury items like the ipad... why don't we just buy a couple of helicopters whilst we're at it because the mayor's car is obviously unsuitable for the task based on their tech criteria for purchasing.

Squirrel
Troll

glue and lots of it

You really have to wonder what brand of glue they are sniffing sometimes. iPads is not their first spending spree...

£500k Leicester's big screen... a big 18ft LED monitor down one of the more open streets that carries no content or usable seating, and costs £45k a year to run.

£1m chewing gun clean up for the Queen's visit.

£19m on re-paving the city centre (after cleaning the gum) then destroying all business with....

££££ on highcross/shires shopping centre, making all the traditional shop streets go bust

Really, lots of glue and a special brand at that.

Firefox 4 beta 2 preaches tabs-on-top love to fanbois

Squirrel

mem caching

My firefox is currently using 60MB with just reg open and the usual 16 extensions install/enabled. I believe what you are complaining about is the memory cache.

If that extra 60MB is such a problem (on a modern machine[4GB] it's barely a scratch, 1.46%) then look here; http://kb.mozillazine.org/Memory_Leak

Also you might want to consider upgrading if 120MB usage is seriously hindering your productivity.

Airline ejects passenger for being hungry

Squirrel

air marshal

'any meals' =/= 'air marshals'

There's been worse misunderstandings I'm sure.

Torrent sites: Here today, gone tomorrow and no one even cares

Squirrel
Thumb Up

you basically copied their article.

what you didn't get was the right level of sarcasm.

Famous 'Invisible Gorilla' trick vid gets sequel

Squirrel
Stop

tittle

same in motorcycle training, snowboarding and a whole host of situations.

But more importantly it often makes you steer towards the hazard instead of away from it subconsciously.

Ever eyed up a hot lady on the other side of the street whilst driving and afterwards realized you drifted on to the white line? That's target fixation too.

In snowboarding it can be about dodging people; if you're about to collide with someone, don't look at them look at your escape route. Near an edge? don't look down it, look at your intended path.

If you've had a good trainer whether it's car, bike, plane, skis, skates, boards... you'll have been taught about target fixation, hazards, escape routes and avoiding the avoidable. If you're good, you have high situational awareness making escapes routes quickly calculated instead of panicked or misjudged or just freezing up as many people do. For example you see blue lights in the rear view, you already know how to get out the way quickly without blocking others.

A classic example is rubber necking accidents and then hitting the car in front as it's slowed down without you noticing. Another is hitting the car in front at a roundabout which didn't leave when expected but you didn't check you because you were too focused on the roundabout traffic to make sure your lane was clear.

.XXX to get ICANN nod

Squirrel
WTF?

actually

if you read my post you would have seen that I only mentioned .xxx and not all porn in general. For blocking all porn you're better off with 'block all sites by default' and then import a list of allowed sites and then have that also run through a filtering proxy.

That's because it's almost impossible to block all porn; you even have to get rid of all popular search engines or use their APIs/appliances for word searches only.

To block ALL porn, you need a walled garden or a deny/block all plus whitelist. Still, I wouldn't want to be that admin. It's a classic benefit vs cost problem - there's no 100% perfect solution from third party vendors and white lists need a lot of tending.

What .xxx does is just make it a little bit easier for vendors and admins because they know they are safe to block that TLD without disrupting business operations. No business in their right mind will use it unless they're into porn.

AC L2R.

Squirrel
Happy

yay

can't wait to get a new email address ;)

"Will it make porn easier to police? No."

So filtering all .xxx is hard is it? wow. Wouldn't want to be you. xxx has a designated use and it's pretty fair if an admin filters the lot for work/school/nursery/hospitals/etc/etc/etc

Windows 7 Backup gets users' backs up

Squirrel

cobian

Free VSS compatible x86/x64 backup. google it. :)

Mozilla's next Thunderbird gives Gmailers hope

Squirrel
Paris Hilton

Speed vs RAM

It's a simple trade off.

HDD are the slowest component in modern hardware. You complained that it's slow? so they move it to RAM based indices.

You're probably comparing it to Outlook hooked up to exchange... which happy will use many GB of RAM to do it's job even for 1 mailbox.

If you really want to compare with Outlook then run it in local mode/offline.

PS. to all the idiots. It doesn't use 1GB, it's the recommended minimum spec so that you can still multi-task and get on with work without paging constantly. Seeing as it's the same for vista/win7, I'm not sure why anyone is complaining at all. OFC if you were running super light embedded linux then it's something to QQ about. (ie. on a hacked xbox or portable device)

svchost (single prcs), skype and MS security essentials all use more or same memory as thunderbird does on my machine and I can guarantee they don't offer as much functionality.

Paris because sometimes I think the average commentards and journalistards have the same IQ.

------

You can't win an argument on the Internet. State facts, list citations, walk away.

Renew your firearms licence via your iPhone

Squirrel
Badgers

FYI

Anyone can own a shotgun. There's no land requirements, only a short criminal check.

Only people with good cause and access to suitable land or range can get a full firearms licence. And then only single action (ie. bolt action) centrefire rifles or single/semi-auto rimfire rifles. Ammo type and suppressors are limited to what's on your licence and you have to show significant reason for requesting expanding ammo or suppressors. (I'm ignoring FAC air rifles, they're a special case)

So to answer your question... yes. There are ~140,000 licensed owners in the UK with an average of 3.8 guns each. In 2008-09 firearms were involved in 0.3% crimes. Most illegal weapons are imported from the EU, notably eastern Europe.

In reference to shotguns and to quote Hot Fuzz; "everyone and their mums packing around here." There are a LOT of shotguns.

In the UK there is no significant anti-gun lobby because we don't need one. They do actually need to tighten it a little further tho' and require training before you get a licence. At the moment training is optional (via a third party) and down to the owner.

And no, you can't shoot badgers ;)

Sex offender downloads child pr0n to get back into prison

Squirrel
Grenade

Prison, it could be worse

it'll be even worse when they get put on registers that are distributed to the public. Whether they did it or not, who wants to get hounded for the rest of their lives. 'Reformed' sex offenders are better off leaving the country ATM... just not to USA, I hear they still have lynchings.

The simplest way to stay in prison is to kill someone and deny doing it, get convicted for it but always deny doing it (hell even video record it, just verbally deny it). As long as you deny doing it against all evidence, they will never let you out.

The sticking point is people that actually didn't do it and have to much pride to lie and tarnish what's left of their life... they also never get out. Wrongful conviction + pride = dying in prison.

BOT; I hear they get it rather cushy too. PS2/xbox, TV, education, any books and videos they want as long as they behave... TBH rather tempted myself. Free food and clothes for life.

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