Posts by Linker3000

Cawing retail vultures circle dying Comet, might rip some chunks off

Re: Maplin

Maplin (singular) have turned into the Tandy/Radio Shack of the generation - all RC vehicles and disco kit at indifferent prices, with a nod towards trying to compete for computing parts.

The company has long lost its reputation as 'the' supplier for hobby electronics. I first bought stuff from Mapin in the early 1980s when I wasall of 12-years old, but when I popped in to a store a while back ('just passing') for a needed CMOS logic chip (12p elsewhere), it was sad to find the pre-packed chip on sale for *ONLY* 99p.

Maplin may be better off remaining 'what they are' but they sure as heck aint 'what they were'.

/get off my lawn etc..

Wikipedia boss Jimmy Wales marries Kate Garvey

Where am I?

"Tony Blair tips up at wedding in London"

Was he drunk?

Please dont' start using that damn stupid phrase so beloved of the hacks at The Inq (and pretty much nowhere else).

UK.gov blacklists Fujitsu from future contracts - report

In other news...

The Public Accounts Committee has announced an investigation into the overspend and ultimate failure and cancellation of the late-running government contract awarded to a 'major information technology company' to develop a database system to maintain and track details of those IT companies blacklisted from future government IT contracts.

An unnamed spokesperson said that the project suffered from numerous flaws and bugs - most notably a mysterious design fault that shut down a user's data entry terminal if they entered the letters c-a-p-i into any field.

Vodafone UK web titsup blamed on 'holiday maintenance'

Be fair

Let's be fair; server maintenance can often result in downtime - for example, I recently had to migrate our customer-facing, linux-based FTP server, with its full Extranet, mail server and Large File Transfer app (ZendTo) to a new disk set and then migrate the user database and their passwords and finally upgrade some of the app software. Once this was all done and tested, I had to re-sync the file storage areas, shut down the live site's server, swap out the disk caddys and fire the thing up again. We had an agonising 4 and a half minutes outage for this one. I'll do better next time.

Ten... celeb headphones

Re: FFS

And by 'one set' I mean one of the ten pairs.

FFS

Sennheiser HD485s for listening at home. Must be at least 7 years old and sound great.

Sennheiser PX100s when I'm at work or out and about. About £39.

Pack of 10 in-ear phones off Ebay for listening to the radio in bed at night - works out at 37.5p/pair so it doesn't matter if I fall asleep with them on and trash them. One set lasts about 3 months.

Microsoft ejects DVD playback from Windows 8

Re: Really??

Then there's XBMC on my £26 Raspberry Pi!

HTC peeves punters with One X woes

Re: Just get an iPhone

I received 14 iPhone 4s' for teams at work about 2 months ago. 4 faulty ones replaced so far.

-- posted from my rooted HTC Desire

Xmas actually accelerates Dixons sales drop

You mean, never, ever Bullshit like this (overheard in PC World, Chichester several years ago)...

"Yes, it has a dual core processor, which means the Internet is twice as fast..."

Satnav mishap misery cure promised at confab

"maybe its time or a satnav system to go on the market that has a user editable map online? When the alterations are confirmed then it will go live on the maps for all users to download...

"It's called Waze and it's free.

http://world.waze.com/

Help out with crowdsourced SatNav - Waze

See if you can grab a copy of Waze for your phone from your app store or marketplace - it's a free, crowd-sourced Satnav app with user-generated/updated mapping and real-time traffic info. It's not perfect but it's getting better all the time. I'm helping to map parts of West Sussex.

The more people start using the app the more accurate the maps will get as Waze also auto-corrects and adjusts the mapping database based on the routes being driven with the app running.

Users decide Fedora 17 will be 'Beefy Miracle'

Oh, please stay

Do as I do when I could stand Gnome no longer on Fedora 15 and install the KDE interface (took all of 5 mins) and go for the next release with KDE as the standard desktop

BlackBerry services splutter back into action, again

Optional

" "

---

Posted from my Blackberry

1-in-3,200 chance* that a fiery satellite chunk will hit someone on Friday

NASA UARS updates via RSS

Be prepared - follow the NASA UARS bulletins via RSS here:

http://www.nasa.gov/rss/uars_update.xml

Scotland Yard still have no idea why their network fell over

Canon

Well, if their Canon printers behave anything like our LBP5050N they have a strong suspect.

We bought our printer in November and it hasn't worked reliably for a day since. We've had three engineering call outs, they have replaced the comms board and have just foisted some new drivers on us that make sod all difference.

Only one person in an office of 50 has managed to print to it (from XP) and to make that happen the printer has to be switched off/on as it doesn't come out of sleep mode properly.

In deperation we bought a Brother printer that sits beside the Canon and 'just works'.

Draw and fold working circuitry with the silver-ink pen

Been done before

I guess they don't read the "Evil Mad Scientist" web site:

http://www.evilmadscientist.com/article.php/mobiuscircuit

Dated 2009

A sysadmin's top ten tales of woe

HOW DEEP??

Oh - I have sooo many!

Best one was a firm that had a new business centre built and somehow between the architects and the builders, the computer room floor void jumped from its 4 inch deep spec to 4 FEET. How this was not spotted during construction I will never know. Special pedestals were built for the floor tiles and you really really didn't leave a tile up lest someone disappeared into the void, which - as it happened - was put into use to house a second level of servers; albeit they were pigs to work on.

Big Red buttons right behind the light pull switch - check

Cleaners unplugging things - check

Computer room aircon that just didn't seem to work - check (endgame: when you box in an old room with new stud walls & dry lining, TURN OFF THE RADIATORS YOU'RE BOXING IN TOO

Glass aeroplanes and iPads on the way, say boffins

Indeed

Indeed, it's clearly (heh!) a 'glassy metal'

HP ProLiant power supplies 'may die when dormant'

Sulky Proliants

I once shut down a DL110 so I could remove the heatsink from the processor to check its stepping in order to purchase an identical one for the second CPU socket. This was done under proper servicing conditions (antistatic wrist strap) and the system was down for all of about 3 minutes but when powered up again the system board 'red lighted' and that was the end of it - I couldn't get the system working again so the drives were hastily moved to a standby (non-HP) server and the Proliant scrapped.

iPAD, KINDLE, all tablets and slablets MADE OBSOLETE

Oh - great..

That's the concept of the 'paperless office' well and truly stuffed.

BT blasts hundreds of would-be customers' data into Infinity

Ah yes, BT...

...the company that still sends me unsolicited business emails even though I have unsubscribed from their drivel numerous times - and here's the kicker: now the emails start something like: We know you didn't want to hear from us again but can we have permission to resubscribe you because we really want to tell you about "X product" - which has these features.....

WTF

Windows to Linux defections to outpace Unix shifts in 2011

Don't tell me...

...tell the new owners of the company I am just about to leave, who took one look at our Linux-based infrastructure and immediately decided it had to move to Windows servers for no other reason than Linux freaked them out (and they wanted to shut down my IT department). They are spending £16K alone on Exchange licences and probably around £10K on hardware. And then there's the Intranet server, helpdesk, customer survey system, Nagios network monitoring, Asterisk VoIP platform, data collation system, distributed across-the-wire backup servers.

Sigh.

Koran-burning 'pastor' loses website

The important question

Is the book burning event taking any postiive action to be carbon neutral?

Orange mobile data chucks punters

Not surprised

Orange has data network problems...or "Thursday" as they call it at Orange.

The unreliable data service was the reason I moved our corporate phones from Orange to Vodafone about 3 years ago. Seems little has changed.

iPhone thief nabbed by GPS, cops say

Darn

The thief might have got away with it if he snatched the phone with his left hand.

He's obviously not sinister enough.

Distie thief gets 14 months despite CPS 'incompetence'

To be fair

To be fair, the grid road structure in Milton Keynes is pretty confusing.

Fanbois love sex toys: Official

Surely not

Far be it for me to suggest that the real reason is because when it comes to product purchases, Apple fanbois are far more likely to automatically bend over and take whatever's offered.

;-)

/Joke alert icon just edges Paris out of the way.

Medical diagnoses for 130,000 people vanish into thin air

AxCrypt

Yeah, it's so damn hard to download and install the free AxCrypt package innit!?

http://www.axantum.com/axcrypt/

We use it all the time to encrypt/compress databases sent via CD or FTP.

More iPhone 4 angst: fanbois howl over head sensor

Real Techies...

Real techies run the latest release of Fedora on their netbooks

/Paris, because she's always game for some thrusting technology on her laptop.

Venus home to lost cities left by long-dead aliens, says ESA

Hmmm...thinks...

..and maybe they died from a disease?

/Paris...because she's from Venus ... and not because of any crude attempt to associate her with diseases of any kind.

Dixons renames itself Dixons

Add to the pile....

Overheard at PC World Chichester a while back: "...and it has a dual core processor, madam, so it can surf the Internet twice as fast..."

I had to leave before I collapsed in fits of laughter.

Vodafone sticks universal mail in shredder

Wha?

I've been getting SMSs for a couple of days urging me to 'check your vodafone.net account for an important message'. Blimey, my vodafone.net whatsit? Never 'erd of it - but now I know I had it, and am now going to lose it, I am outraged.

I feel a twee...er..fax coming on.

/Paris - because she'd be more than distressed if someone took away her box.

The Reg guide to Linux, part 1: Picking a distro

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

Yes, and someone should tell us whether, if he needs to make an emergency call as he's lynched, he'll be using an iPhone or something with Android, WinMo or Symbian etc.

Burger van busted offering free takeaway porn

Protip

Don't ask for the special sauce

Adobe warns over unpatched PDF peril

For Flash masochists...

"The only high profile site I know of that does use flash is YouTube"

Pop along to activision.com and weep.

Captain Cyborg sidekick implants virus-infected chip

OMG!

I've just written:

MOV AH, 4FH

INT 15H

on my wrist and now every time I pass a PC it reboots.

OMG I AM INFECTED!!!!!

END OF LINE

+++ATH0

NO CARRIER

Daleks poised to invade tour UK

Came here to say this

See title.

Exam board deletes C and PHP from CompSci A-levels

Bizarre

"This selection is based on the experience of the teacher in that centre"

On that basis, I should have been taught COBOL using punch cards by Mr Crusty McOldfart at Technical College.

I suppose it's too much to ask that the teachers are actually competent in a more 'current' language rather than just the one they were taught 25 years ago?

Waterstone's whips out its pendulous dugs

Go on Waterstones..

Go on, tell us how MUCH you paid for THAT.

Why didn't the Execs just pop down to the Business & Marketing section and grab a copy of "Pointless & Expensive Rebranding for Dummies"?.

At least you didn't change your name to something like BookVendia.

Boffins snare swollen 'excited giant' in forcefield prison

Stop the World

I can't handle articles that contain the word 'electron' at the moment. I keep reading 'election'.