Posts by defiler

Y'know that ridiculously expensive Oculus Rift? Yeah, it just got worse

Seems a bit greedy.

On the plus side, you can buy it piecemeal. But still, I'm coming top the conclusion that I'd rather have a Vive.

That said, my 7-year-old has probably brainwashed me on the Vive. No, it's not on Santa's list...

Stingy sapphire lens in Apple's iPhone 7 is as scratchy as glass

Put it in a case!

Okay, so they've binned the headphones socket because it's too fat. But you should put a cover on it.

Couldn't they have made it a *little* thicker, a *little* more durable, and left the bloody headphone socket.

Fucking arses. It's a tool, not a museum piece. <sigh>

Simulation shows how space junk spreads after a satellite breaks up

Should've used MOAR STRUTS!

No - that's all I have.

Firefox to doctor Pepper so it can run Chrome's PDF, Flash plugins

Re: unsafe at any sandbox

For me, minimum permissions also includes a domain-wide Software Restriction Policy which stops users being able to execute any binaries from folders they have access to. So where does Chrome put Pepper Flash? Into the user's profile.

Then the users complain that websites don't work until we set "deny" permissions on their PepperFlash folder. As if all those years of Chrome installing to the user's local profile wasn't infuriating enough.

Pepper Flash couldn't burn fast enough for me.

Redmond reveals Hyper-V 2016 beats vSphere's RAM and CPU count

But...

Can it virtualise Crysis?

Heart Internet goes TITSUP again

Re: Windows

Microsoft Exchange service provider licensing is per mailbox, so no huge penalty there for replication.

If they have any sense they'll be using Windows Datacentre which is licensed per CPU socket regardless of number of virtual machines.

If you're hosting an Exchange service you *start* with 2x CAS, 2x Edge and 2x Mailbox servers, and you run them distributed across at least two physical hosts.

It's not hard if you plan it.

BOFH: I found a flying Dragonite on a Windows 2003 domain

Re: Been there done that

Umm, you weren't supposed to use a .local domain. Bad idea. Subdomain of your Internet domain. And I know that everyone did it back in the day - I was one of them using .private everywhere.

ITU okays another TV spec

But there's a difference

Unlike cables made from unicorn-sinew, HDR signalling actually *can* offer a difference in highlights and shadows whereas the cables only really highlight the sunshine reflecting off the snake oil.

Brexit threatens Cornish pasty's racial purity

Re: I don't want to lose my Tweedys chicken pot pie

But does it have real pot?

Adpocalypse 'will wipe out display ad growth' by 2020

Re: Protection?

Yep. I totally get that. And as a rule I don't bother with blocking adverts. Except when I went to benchmark a DSL line and it hoovered up the bandwidth downloading ads instead.

I'm generally not bothered by adverts unless they pop up and down (Tom's Hardware) or start playing noises. Even been known to click on them when they've been relevant.

alt.fan.optimal.die.die.die

Am I close?

Protection?

So they want us to pay them to *not* do something?

Say, that's a nice web browser. Shame if something were to happen to it...

No, no, a thousand times no, and whomever was suckered into this business model just doesn't live in the same world as the rest of us.

Siemens Healthcare struck by rebranding madness

"Healthineer"?

That's a funny way to spell "cock"...

The case for ethical ad-blocking

Ads and speed testing

Coincidentally I was speed-testing an ADSL line for a client earlier today. It got an extra 1Mb/sec when I installed AdBlock Plus...

Is it ethical to shove adverts into your speed tester *while the test is being run*?

Hubble spots ice moon orbiting dwarf planet Makemake

They called a planet Marky Mark?

'nuff said.

Microsoft to hike certification exam prices

Re: As a holder of various MS certs, I'm inclined to agree...

+1 on VMware. Had to become VCP certified for work by a certain date. No problem - 15 years of experience with various VMware products saw me through. Then, with a week and a half to go they tell me I have to also complete *their* course at £1400 to prove that I know the stuff that they'd just tested me on.

One hour. That's hire long it took to skip through the online modules quickly and then score >95% on the test at the end of *that*. Do you think that maybe I know my stuff?

Daylight robbery. And now I have 6 months to requalify or I lose my cert and have to do the course again. Dicks.

Woman scales Ben Nevis wielding selfie stick instead of ice axe

Re: Lucky to be alive

*Precisely* what I was thinking.

I heard that the couple had gone missing on Nevis on the radio, and immediately realised that their chances of survival were slim. This woman did something very stupid and is lucky to have got away with it. Glad she noticed this...

Computers shouldn't smoke. Cigarettes aren't healthy for anyone

In my youth...

We had a PC brought into the shop which stank of chain-smoker. I had the joy of cracking the lid off it, to be faced with a carpet within.

The insides had a mat about 0.75" thick covering the whole thing, where the cigarette tar had stuck dust to the components, and then dust to dust until it had filled out into a rug.

I think the machine was still working - he'd wanted a RAM upgrade or something. He was told that we couldn't deal with the computer because it hadn't been bought from us (PC World, for my shame), and that it had been accepted for upgrade mistakenly.

To this day the worst I've seen...

Schlock and .aw as Dutch net registry rebrands

What's the point of the .bv domain name at all? It's an uninhabited island. A "dependency of Norway"? In what way is it dependent?

I'm not convinced that this lump of rock is patiently awaiting input and assistance from Oslo.

Politics and politicians...

The paperless office? Don’t talk sheet

Ryanair Boarding Pass

Top tip (which I've seen performed).

You could have the airline print your boarding pass, and pay a fee, or you can have them receive and hold a fax for you and have someone in the office print and send it. No fee.

Facebook is no charity, and the ‘free’ in Free Basics comes at a price

What are the truly impoverished going to do with Facebook?

Got dysentery again...

#monday #fml #thirdworldproblems

Linode: Back at last after ten days of hell

It does

My wife: Facebook's slow. Oh I just switched off WiFi and it's fine again.

In the other hand I noticed something awry and chose to investigate. Most people wouldn't bother or wouldn't know where to start. Router reset only helped for 5 minutes or so. Enough to make me think my router was on the blink.

Re: How much does it cost an attacker these days to launch a large-scale attack?

Oh, the attacks came from three different IPs on three different subnets, all in China.

Re: How much does it cost an attacker these days to launch a large-scale attack?

Everyone is merrily pointing fingers at Windows. Once never had a Windows machine compromised beyond adware. On the other hand, my Centos box was broken into via SSH (non-standard port) over Christmas.

I was out. Internet was sluggish when I came home. Found the problem and fixed it within a couple of hours. My XBMC user for accessing my movies had a shitty password and shell access. It's an easy thing to overlook.

Fixed now, and fail2ban to go in. Not going anon because I'll live with my mistake and I guess I deserve some ire...

Japanese hack gets space probe back on track

Shoosht!

Just needed more struts.

If it still works six months from now, count yourself lucky

My desktop

Never had to buy a new one in 23 years.

I've had to replace the motherboard a few times, CPU now and then, VGA every few years to keep up, hard discs here and there, case and PSU when I outgrew them, and memory when I needed more. But it's the same computer for 23 years!

(You probably don't want to look at my keyboard...)

X-Gene 3 in 2016 – no, not a superhero movie. It's a 16nm FinFET 64-bit ARM chip for servers

Re: Its getting harder...

Was going to say much the same. I doubt it'll have the power density of a 2-socket x64 server (thinking likes of DL360), but for most small-business applications that's overkill.

In fact, for most companies, unless you're hitting virtualisation hard (and yes, there are still some holdouts), a single x64 server is too much for a given task.

So what's the internet community doing about the NSA cracking VPN, HTTPS encryption?

Re: A little clarification

So, to be clear (as I genuinely don't know), this means that my private key prime number can't be '3' because that's not on a proscribed list of non-shit keys? But similarly, many, many websites will use the same key as me?

Am I close, and do I win a prize?

Japan 'charges MtGox baron Mark Karpeles with BTC embezzlement'

Indeed, under UK financial regs (FCA), client funds must be ringfenced and are not to be used as operating capital. And having been in a place where there were rumours of that, it's taken very seriously. If you have knowledge (or even a strong suspicion) that it's going on and don't report it then you can be held culpable too.

Sometimes regulated financial markets are a jolly good thing.

Finally! It's the year of Linux on the desktop... nope

The problem as I see it.

I do like Linux, and tend to favour Centos or Ubuntu for certain tasks, but this:

"As a barometer, DistroWatch readers rank it the 80th-most-read-about Linux distribution."

80 distributions, plus the rest. And three different ways of doing anything, depending on the distribution you choose. This is why I just can't see Linux on the (mainstream) desktop any time soon. I've used it daily as my desktop before (Ubuntu 12.04) and enjoyed it when I got used to its quirks, but when there's such a fragmented market I just can't see it gaining traction.

However, I'm also the guy who gets pissed off trying to select between 40 types of toothpaste.

Scot Nationalists' march on Westminster may be GOOD for UK IT

Re: Be Careful what you wish for.@SolidSquid

"And, in fairness, the toxic vitriol against the English during the referendum was unacceptable and has eroded the goodwill that would be required from England."

It was entirely unacceptable. And it was also by a very small minority. The rest of us got on with our days, and on referendum day turned up, voted, and went to work quietly. I didn't want to hear the big "YES" party going on in The Meadows in Edinburgh - it was distracting me whilst I was trying to get stuff done. I also didn't want high-profile campaigners on either side to be subject to some of the hatred that arose (whatever you think of JK Rowling, for example, there was no excuse for some of the crap hurled her way).

Some of us up here in Scotland were pointing out throughout that the YES campaign's plans seemed to rely a lot on the goodwill of England (in particular), which may not be forthcoming given the expense that would be incurred if we dropped out of the Union.

So I'm not surprised that many in England are bored of it, or repelled by the nastiness. Still, two points to be made here:

1) Unlike some muppet's suggestion above, there are about 5.5 million people in Scotland. Not 3 million.

2) If we did leave the Union we wouldn't be subjected to nineteen-sixty-fucking-six football pish *every* *fucking* *four* *years*. You think England's bored of Scotland going on about something?...

Streaming tears of laughter as Jay-Z (Tidal) waves goodbye to $56m

Re: Word perfect article

"What makes me wonder is how people actually arrive at that point where they become incapable of detecting a difference between their imagination and the real world out there."

Dougal. Have you been studying the diagram like I said?

Saturn's rings, radio waves ... poetry? At home with Scotland's Mr Physics

Let's not forget JCMB

The James Clerk Maxwell Building at the Kings Buildings campus of Edinburgh University. Legendary for having no Ground floor, having the front door come into the second floor and the enigmatic sign that said "level 1" and "other level 1".

Oh, and Mays cafe. But that's another tale (or ten)...

Let's talk about the (real) price of flash and spinning disks

Re: IOPS

For single-user streaming, spinning discs are an easy sell, but if you scale out to a hundred users streaming different streams at the same time then you're not far off random data again.

I know, you can have the OS pre load lots of data while the head's looking at one stream so it's not a total disaster, but then you're moving the problem to RAM. And that costs more than flash. Just a thought...

Atomic keyring's eerie blue glow lights SPB lab

Mine worked fine until about 2 years ago

Then I accidentally rolled my motorbike over it. Sad day.

ATTENTION SETI scientists! It's TOO LATE: ALIENS will ATTACK in 2049

Re: We have senses. Smell, Taste, Sight and Touch. Without any of these things, we wouldn't live.

WHAT??!

Elon Musk: Hover rocket? Check. Hover ship? Check. Let's DO THIS

Good luck!

Good luck to the engineers and scientists on this. They're breaking new ground and were achingly close last time.

If it lands cleanly them I might forego my diet for a beer!

Boffins: It's EASY to make you GRASS YOURSELF UP for crimes you never did

Step 3 - Profit

We can remember it for you wholesale. That's all.

Last year was utter rubbish. Thanks for being part of it!

Re: Come on the great South, we're rooting for you

Much of South Korea is in artillery range if you have a modern artillery. Most of North Korea's pieces are obsolete which could merrily shell Seoul if it wasn't 30 miles out of range.

Remember, this is a nation which is still flying MiG-17s...

Hairy situation? Blade servers can reach where others can't

I don't get it

I've been curious about blades for a long time, but I've been running my entire server infrastructure as virtual machines for over 10 years now. Density of nodes is irrelevant to me. Density of resource is a different issue, but it seems to me that I can cram more horsepower per U into a rack with 1U servers than with blades because the blades have lower individual performance (presumably due to cooling limitations).

I like the concept, but it just doesn't seem to add up. Maybe if you're running physical loads rather than virtual it's a clear winner. Otherwise I'll be keeping an eye on the DL360 quickspecs.

Splashdown! Orion lands safely in the Pacific Ocean

Re: @ Mainlanders @Uffish - Oops

I was only joking about the mile and a half. When it comes to travelling to Mars you start from orbit. You can calculate your trajectory very accurately when you don't have air in the way.

Once you're moving, you can also verify just how close you are going to be and tweak your trajectory en route. Is not like firing a gun at a target millions of miles away.

A mile and a half

Don't get me wrong, a mile and a half out is pretty good. But Buran landed within 5 feet of its target on its one and only flight.

Also, keen to see how they plan to put together a Mars lander. That thing has to touch down with a hell of a lot of delta-v in the tanks.

Anyway. Well done to all. A safe flight is a successful flight.

It was space vs boat at Orion launch. The boat won

Re: You will not go to space today

Thank you, Nick. Saved me the bother :)

You will not go to space today

I'm sure someone will find the XKCD - I'm trying to work here!

Munich considers dumping Linux for ... GULP ... Windows!

Re: Lack of integrated email/contacts/calendar?

"Just to note that Windows 8.1 outperformed the latest Ubuntu in benchmark tests such as boot time, 3D graphics and copying large files..."

That's great, and I tried Windows 8.1 - yes it's very quick to boot. So that's saved me about 12 seconds a day.

3D graphics? Wonderful but I don't care in an office environment.

Copying large files? Again (almost entirely) unnecessary in an office.

Having used Ubuntu for 2+ years for work and dual booting to Windows 7 on the same machine, I found little difference in program performance, but Ubuntu was generally quicker at drive access and more stable (particularly Firefox).

And I wish I'd had an Outlook equivalent. Though Thunderbird was good for most jobs.

Stephen Elop: 'Hello there' (and goodbye to 12,500 of you)

Smug wee Alex Salmond?

Nothing quite like taking sides, I suppose.

I'll be honest, I have no love for the man or his campaign, and I'm certain of which way I'll be voting, but I'm not sure whether it's appropriate in an article on a news site.

Also, .scot domains? What the fuck? I'm going to propose .ass for "associations" and then register bitemyshineymetal.ass...

(Yeah, I'm bored. Waiting for a backup to finish...)

Surprise! NSA's first ever 'transparency' 'report' is anything but

How big of a target?

Apparently a target is one or more people, up to, including, or beyond 7 billion.

Phew. Glad there aren't many targets then!

What a whopper, LG: Feast your eyes on this 77-inch bendy TV

Curved telly?

Not really feeling it. Recently bought a 65" LED-backlit Samsung. 1080p looks fantastic on it, since not only do I not have any 4k content, but I don't even have a device that could produce it right now. The backlight spread is not perfect (though it's damn close), and the image processing (frame interpolation) occasionally screws up a frame (maybe 2 or 3 over the course of a movie), but I'm delighted with it.

You know what the best thing is? I can stick it up on the wall. Great, eh? Of course, I look forward to buying a lighthouse so that I can stick a curved OLED up on the wall...

Traffic lights, fridges and how they've all got it in for us

Re: Need a "home controller"

Given that we're talking about billions upon billions of devices (in the article), and you don't want them to be visible outside the local network, shouldn't you be just using IPv6 local link addressing?

Anyone trying to use internal routing in their house should have the savvy to be able to effectively firewall, and the responsibility to accept when they've screwed up. They can then enable routable addressing on these devices if they like.

Just a thought.