Posts by Davegoody 49 posts • joined 8 Oct 2010
Their cheaper options perhaps, but their high-end stuff is amazing, typing this on a Logi Craft keyboard and it's just the best membrane-based keyboard I have ever owned (perhaps the best keyboard overall I have ever used)..... sometimes it's a chase to the bottom...... Have to agree with other people though that the keyboard software is pretty rubbish though.
When I left an ex-employer a good few years ago, it was 18 months later that I realised I still had cached credentials to the email and hosting setup that I implemented during my time as their IT manager. They were a HORRIBLE employer, and anyone who knows me knows who they are, so I won't mention them here. I could have wreaked similar levels of havoc on their systems very easily, but didn't for a number of reasons:
1) They would know that it was me
2) I would end-up in prison
3) I am a reasonable human-being who bears no ill-will to the other employees at the business
4) Life is too short to bear these sorts of grudges.
5) I quite like the fact that I have moved-on to MUCH better and bigger things since leaving their employment, which would have been impossible to do with a criminal record.
As much as it's tempting (too tempting in the case of this guy) it's just not worth it. As anyone who works in IT knows, we hold the keys to the business, and if we screw-up, accidentally, or like with the above story, on purpose) there is often a lot at stake.
What a moronic response ! Don’t use an Apple device as a Lenovo is less likely to get stolen ?????? Don’t drive a Mercedes or BMW because a Lada is cheaper to replace than those, or don’t eat that steak tonight, have a cheese sandwich on supermarket bread as you may die overnight and it would be a waste of money.....
Happened to me years ago, with my old MacBook Pro, contacted Apple support and they basically blamed me for mistreating it, saying that nobody else had complained about a similar issue...…. Glad it was not only me, but feel bad at how I was treated by Apple.
Nah - your claim that MacOS / OSX is "Snake Oil" to run on poor hardware is nonsense. Whilst I totally agree that a typical Mac, on the face of it, costs a bit more than typical PC hardware, in my experience the build quality (thus also the resale value) is sky-high. Take your 8-year old PC laptop, sell it online and get £50 -£100 for it, a similar mac, 3-4 times that value. And the claim that a seven-year-old PC laptop with no SSD runs MacOS faster than a current "Real" Mac is nonsense. It's just not actually possible. My Mac VMs do run fast, granted, but nothing as fast as a real machine to run them on. It's like claiming that you 10-year-old Ford Mondeo drives faster because you nailed a Lamborghini badge on the bonnet !
A good few years ago, I was working at integrating an SMS gateway into our intranet (forget why this was a good idea)...... To test it, you just had to enter a string of the text you wanted to send "MATT - PLEASE COME TO MY OFFICE IMMEDIATELY - YOU HAVE SOME QUESTIONS TO ANSWER" - the RECIEVING number - whatever that had to be - and most importantly, you could specify the SENDING number - which (inevitably) was my bosses number. The S**T really hit the fan when "MATT" ran into our bosses office with his tail between his legs, wondering what the hell he had done wrong. I admitted to it immediately, rather than anybody else get blamed, and the mitigating circumstances was that I was showing a mutual colleague how insecure the system was. I got a (verbal) slap from my boss, and a pint (thus the icon) from "MATT" for owning-up. Be careful out there folks, larking around has consequences. I did feel a bit silly, but the whole project was scrapped as a result, due to the inherent insecurity and risk that I uncovered. To be fair, the "FROM" field would not have likely been exposed by the webform, but not worth the risk.
So Gareth, giving this 4 out of 10 was not the only surprise, being told by you that it's FUSE based was the biggest surprise, not that we didn't know, but for somebody who has so doggedly followed the trials and tribulations of this project I am somewhat perplexed to find you didn't know this nugget. My 12-year old knows this.
It's a shambles no doubt, but the horrible buttons can be fixed easily (as my pal who has one can testify) - with a couple of quids worth of bits - of course it should never have been released like this in the first place !
That's a terrible pun...... but I like it.
As one of the previous commentards have said, you would probably get more radiation exposure from an old watch than these samples. Everything always get's blown up (sorry about that) by media hype with these things.
Regardless of all this, leaving anything of value (especially radioactive sources perhaps) in a car in a hotel car-park is perhaps a bit foolhardy.
I have to agree....... did not particularly enjoy his writing style, it's 100% about the ideas and plots.
In a similar vein, the writing style of Philip K Dick is (in my opinion) hard to follow, not particular well written, but the ideas and plots are peerless - Man in the High Castle is a perfect example of this, as is Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep.
I think my point here is that there is more to writing than the actual writing........
You are presuming a lot there Lee D - My DashCam is on 24/7 (monitoring Parking etc). I have had to replace SD cards on numerous occasions over the last year or two - as for junk - a great-big nope there They have been typically SanDisk ULTRA, Class 10 Cards. SanDisk have been great and replaced the cards with no fuss, which for a DashCam is no great loss. For "Traditional" data, such as document, music, photos etc, it's cold-comfort getting a new card when you have lost the data. As a Mac user everything I do is backed-up using Time Machine, but not everybody is quite so proactive..... On the flip-side of this, as a photographer (sometimes) I also only ever buy top-of-the range media, and have still been let-down a few times by faulty cards - and these are not cheap copies of SanDisk / Lexar media purchased from eBay (or other Tat-Bazaar), but through proper channels. I maintain that SD or other Flash media are not up to enterprise level storage (yet).......
Bearing in mind that I typically replace my MicroSD cards in my DashCam around every 6-8 months, as they literally wear out, I don't see that these deserve in any way an enterprise moniker...... GREAT in principle as a write occasionally / read often media, but without wear levelling, they will wear out very quickly....... and 128TB on a single SD card is a lot of eggs in one (not very reliable) basket....
Yes, but don't forget the abomination that was WindowsME. It was basically Windows 98, but with GUI access prioritised in the boot-up sequence. It gave the impression of having a UI far quicker than it actually was, as thought the UI was present, it was completely unusable until the rest of the subsystems had loaded. Even when the UI was present it was so flaky that it often took multiple reboots before it was actually possible to do any work (or play games).....
Ohhhhhh..... trying to get an Adaptec SCSI controller working with a Soundblaster, and two Parallel ports on the same machine was a source of much hair-pulling, and juggling of IRQs. I still have nightmares of losing the little black jumpers to change IRQ just as I needed them. How things have changed - Mostly for the better, and though I am mainly a Mac user these days, I still sort of miss those days, and if you could troubleshoot (successfully) back then, then not much phases your since.....
As somebody that built their first ZX80 in kit form, then the same with the ZX81, when the Spectrum came out with the dead-flesh keyboard, it was remarkable that a "Real" keyboard could be included in a machine of the era for anything like the price..... When the Scrabble-key keyboard came out on the QL, which Rick also performed the industrial design for, it was amazing (and a huge upgrade from flat or rubber keys), and was eventually destined for the upgraded Speccy too......
His legacy lives-on, not just on the Spectrum NEXT which he has been heavily involved-in, but the keyboard I am typing-on now, on my MacBook Pro, is truly an evolution of Rick's designs.... Everything goes full-circle with design, and I do hope that Rick's Legacy is remembered not just for cheap-and-cheerful, but true innovation, he was yet another British Genius that perhaps has not received the recognition that he deserved. RIP Rick, you may have passed-on to a better-place, but I can't wait to receive my cased NEXT, and I will have a beer when setting it up in your honour.
After a MAHOOSIVE 1hr11minutes, I told my (Indian) "Tech Support Man" - their description - that my computer had crashed as my 16K RAM pack had wobbled......... He sounded really Pissed-Off when he put the phone down on me.
I had an identical one, not Amazon badged, that spontaneously combusted, when left (undisturbed) in my car.
Locked my car, walked away, walked back 20 minutes later to a totally burned-out wreck. Amazingly my insurance paid-out, with no hassles, but it could have been SO much worse. Mine was of identical design to the Amazon ones, purchased from a tatty phone shop between St Pancras and St Pauls on (what was) my daily commute. £20 or so, and caused £8000 worth of damage, writing-off my car. No way of chasing the store, the manufacturer in my case, at least if it was an Amazon product they would do whatever they could (I would hope) to assist with the damage and terrible inconvenience !
As per Kubla Cant....... where you say that MacOS has far more in common with Linux than Windows, you would be 100% right by way of technology stack but conversely 100% wrong by way of UI and usability. There is not an OS in existence that separates out the technical stuff to such an extent that MacOS does.... Yes, it's UNIX underneath the shiny exterior, but you would be hard-pressed to find it as a "normal" user......
It's actually Hotblack Desiato, but yes..... I think it is....
And as for that name, I used to drive past the estate agents that lent Douglas Adams the name, in North London years ago. They then changed their name to Hotblack Dixon, which is somewhat less exotic !
I had a (Generic) Lithium-Battery based USB PowerBank charging in my car a few weeks ago.. It went up in flames, taking my car with it. Nobody was hurt (fortunately), but it wrote-off my car, leaving me with a large gap between settlement and owing..... Could have taken me and the family with it, so grateful for small mercies....
Yorkshire pudding, if done right, goes with anything, Sweet, Savoury, with Beef (or any other roast dinner) or with Ice Cream....... As a Pizza it sounds great. What the hell this has to do with IT (except for the fact that it's what I do and I am overweight) I don't know, but as wrong as this is, its also bloody right. Morrisons do some cracking food sometimes.
Maplin (though horribly overpriced sometimes) have been a source for quick and easy electronic components since I was a kid (and I am an old-fart now). Of course, if you can afford to wait, then ordering from Tat Bazaars such as FleaBay etc is infinitely cheaper, but for convenience you can't beat Maplin on the high-street.
Over recent years the quality of their staff, and their competitiveness has improve immeasurably, and it will be a real shame for this remnant of my childhood to go the same way as Tandy / Radio Shack did, though I can't see it NOT happening now, it's almost a foregone conclusion.
It's pretty much impossible to fool these devices as a couple of attempts to log-in with a mask (or just a bad-hair day, not that I have much) forces you to log-on using the passcode (as seen on the launch of the iPhone X when it failed). It's still faster and more intuitive than a fingerprint with TouchID, and I would hazard a guess that the majority of people who are complaining about the technology don't actually own an iPhone X. I am a confessed Apple fan, have been since the days of the Mac Plus, however on the rare occasions that Apple have seriously mis-stepped (such as the first Apple Watch) I have steered clear. Could see no compelling reason to upgrade my 6s Plus, though the 7, and also the 8, the X, delivered on launch-day is a fab piece of technology. All those people who go on about it being a £1000 phone, true enough, but a Samsung S8 is not much further behind (price-wise) and as nice as this device is, it's not a patch on build-quality of the X, and is hampered with Yet another version of Android (I am not a fan of the software, but the hardware from Samsung is great)......... Nobody is forcing anybody to buy one of these in any case ! - Going back to the pertinent point of the original post, the average phone thief is not going to go to the trouble of 3d Scanning their Mark's face and 3d printing a mask that may, if they are lucky, unlock the phone.
Well.....
I got mine on launch-day and FaceID was very good from the start. It has actually got better, works when I wear glasses or sunglasses and to be honest, if somebody takes it from me, then it's lost and I will be able to remotely disable it. Three attempts to unlock it with the wrong face and it's password only anyway. Much argument about absolutely nothing.
Some people just love to spend money of utter crap..... (to steal a phrase from a certain Mr Ratner).... I spend a lot of my hard-earned on tech, but I earn money back from it, so it's (mostly) justifiable (to the better-half)..
It's like the snake-oil of hifi, gold-plated OPTICAL Cables ? Give me a break..... £1k for a "directional" Ethernet cable for high-end hifi..... Pseudo-science at best, dangerous at worst !
I literally laughed out loud and spat my tea all over my keyboard, clicking the link to the toilet roll holder, thus prompting some more Tech expenditure, when
Whilst I am NOT a backer of this project, I have friends who are, and it's obvious there are MAJOR problems with legal wrangling, which is being instigated by the former directors. The whole point of a KickStarter and allied Crowd-Funding sites, is that you are backing a concept, and there is no guarantee of getting a piece of hardware at the end. I am confident that the hardware exists, but until the legals are sorted out, this is going to run and run..... If you cant' afford the investment, don't risk it ! - Just like playing the stock-market.
The author, Gareth Corfield, is SO obviously biased against RCL, that I don't really trust much of what he writes. I am a long-term Reg reader, but this sort of biased "journalism" has no place in our society (unless you count the BBC of course). Bet this comment is removed too.
I have a 2015 Spec 65" Samsung 4K telly. Picture is great (really great), Audio is handled by my Home Cinema, and input is via HDMI2 from SkyQ, and also a Mac Mini. Hardly ever use the SMART features, other than AMAZON PRIME and Plex Client, and when this is no longer supported the Mac does this anyway.
Future proofing is relatively simple, and by the time I upgrade, will be time for an 85" telly ! Just got to get that one past the wifey first....
Every time I see this stuff on here about 123-reg I shudder (and comment again). I moved from them a few disasters ago, They are just appalling, and when 123-reg read my comment on here, they kindly offered me a chunk of free web / email hosting.
WHY ? Why would ANYBODY in their right-mind sign up for what will inevitably end-up with EXTENDED misery. How these people are still in business at all is totally beyond me.
To be fair though, they DID refund the remainder of my contracted fees.
This is a professional outfit supposedly, but I am staggered that they are still in business.
I was with SKY Broadband, out in the sticks in Wiltshire a few years ago. When we moved there we checked and the estimated speed on ADSL was 5-6mbps, but we were eligible for Fibre, with an estimated speed of 20mbps.
It gets installed (two days after the agreed date), and we got a MAXIMUM of 3mbps. Most days we got less than 500k..... Upload speeds were pretty much non-existent. SKY refused to give us any discount at all, we were bound by contract, and I could not work from home with less-than-broadband speeds. Their "oh-well" attitude was what finally made us move home, as WFH is an important part of my job, Seriously crap, so it's not just BT (though they do use OpenReach infrastructure). Now with Virgin in a more urban environment and get 300mbps constantly. Two different technologies of course, but at least Cable providers pretty much nail the discrepancy between advertised speeds and REAL speeds.
I was a customer of these clowns for a good few years, and having lost my email and webserver on numerous occasions (not related to DDOS, just pure incompetence), I finally left them, When I left they contacted me and offered me a free year's service to stay. Why would I stay, when that year (though free at what real cost) would just be misery after misery. I feel sorry for the people I referred to these jokers over the years.
They can't directly be blamed for being the targets of DDOS attacks, but they don't seem to have any preparation for this, nor any remediation policy in place. Their customer service is worse than useless, and I am genuinely amazed that they still exist in any capacity in 2017.
Having spent some time at Bruntingthorpe, which was where this wonderful aircraft was housed, it is an amazing place, with some stunning aircraft, and some equally amazing people working there. So very sad to see that this majestic aircraft is no longer flight-worthy, there has been so much work, great fundraising and heart-wrenching keeping this thing flying. I have been lucky to see it in the flesh, and (forgetting about it's intended role) it is one of the most beautiful sights in the sky (or on the ground) those delta wings are just wonderful.
I do agree though that it is best remembered as a wonderful legacy than a burning wreck on the ground.
Best remembered that way than the way Concorde is remembered for it's fateful Paris flight, especially when you consider it's otherwise impeccable safety record.
I moved from Nottingham where I have over 100mb of stable service from Virgin (terrible customer service, but great broadband) - to Melksham in Wiltshire. I am a mile from the exchange and have Sky "unlimited" Fibre and have at best 3.5mb of flaky service. All this after 5 visits from a Sky "engineer" who did not seem to know his arse from his elbow. Get a faster and more reliable connection from my (definitely not unlimited) Orange 3G Hotspot from my trusty iPhone. GRRRR
We are living in a world where our leaders are given speeches to read out, and where they have no real appreciation of what they are saying. Just throwing a few "buzzwords" - that is what he was trying to do, into the conversation may well work with the general public, but doing it in front of people who know what they are talking about is asking for trouble.
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