Posts by Matthew Malthouse

Gabe Newell: Windows 8 is a 'catastrophe' for PC biz

Re: Windows App Store

"Even if Windows continues to be open, the very fact that a store is built in is an unfair advantage to Microsoft."

They lost the built in / default browser wrangle in court. Do they not expect this to be challenged?

Tesco offers broadband for LESS THAN THE PRICE OF A PINT

High

To a "non geographic" 0845, weekday, daytime (eg to the Jobcentre job line)

BT 2.024p/min (NB first 60 mins free at weekends).

Virgin 11.24p connection charge, 10.22p/min thereafter.

I know 'cause my last housemate was unemployed. :(

Cisco recalls suicidal UCS blade servers

Unbelievable...

Sysadmins and a *live* AppDev in the data centre?

America abandoning DSL in favour of faster cable

Not the greatest suckage

Last year I tried getting a fibre connection from Verizon on Broadway, New York. I'm tellin' ya, those Verizon guys could even give the French lessons on how not to serve the customer! (When, that is, they aren't out on strike.)

Eventually got a microwave link from Rainbow and then a bunch of fibres from TimeWarner. But at least in a business heavy area like downtown NY there are alternatives. If you're in a local monopoly area and you friendly local monopolize is bad....

BT seeks apartment dwellers to sign-up to 'superfast' FTTP trial

This needs testing?

Why? Aren't they sure it'll work?

If the need some pointers I'll show them round this building where we managed it.

Brussels: Water cannot be sold as remedy for dehydration

EU Shmee Moo

They'll be insisting that we put meat in sausages next.

Adobe releases lengthy list of Apple Lion woes

Not quite

Droplets having PPC code requiring Rosetta Stone will probably be enough to stop an upgrade in our shop in its tracks.

But Adobe have known for years that this needed fixing and they didn't do it. If fingers are pointed anywhere it will be at them, not Apple.

The irony is that if we ever migrated away from Adobe software products our reason for keeping Apple hardware would disappear with them.

Does no one remember

Adobe Photoshop 3.0 on Sun Solaris? November 1994.

We tried it. Main reason for not adopting (good move in hind-sight) was that the wide Sun keyboard made so many key commands two handed that it slowed ops down.

http://www.erimez.com/misc/Photoshop_Sun_Brochure.pdf

Apple Mac OS X 10.7 Lion Part One

A review with TOC and oomph

http://arstechnica.com/apple/reviews/2011/07/mac-os-x-10-7.ars

Granted that I only got to page 7 before nodding off.

You needed

this icon.

Apple ups Mac Mini spec, lowers price

Swap trick

Apple take Mac Mini "Server" and put it in a Mac Mini Desktop box.

News of the World TO CLOSE

Ha!

The News of the World is dead; long live the Sun on Sunday.

Seriously folks; the title may go but the people responsible stay.

Samsung NS310 netbook

For a price

When I bought my N10 there was a version with a sim slot available.. for pennies short of £100 extra. Guess there may be such a thing in the newer models unless the customer base has finally got wise to being gouged?

Anti-PowerPoint Party vows end to death by slides

When used well

How often does that happen?

The Cube: Apple's daftest, strangest romance

You've got to be

"Mac Mini. ... aimed at the budget buyer"

<- There, right icon for that line.

Um... no one mention the bottom to top passive venting so you could stack them... or was that a myth?

Future of the cloud is hybrid

yeah but yeah but...

"true hybrid cloud systems will enable applications to be launched first in the cloud and then migrated internally when the server refresh gives you more local processing power to work with."

Once working in the cloud that's where it will stay.

The only thing that would persuade PHBs to bring it back in would be real identifiable cost savings, something very difficult to arrange. Especially persuading the PHB with CapX to spend money so the PHB with OpX can save some.

The next server refresh will result in less not more processing power.

World braces for domain name EXPLOSION

It would be nice

It would be nice to have a tidy, rational name system...

But that horse bolted before the stable was built. So, dreaming aside, my only problem with this is the price tag.

Re: expensive squatting

There is, as they say, one born every minute.

You might be astonished how much some people would be willing to pay to get shafted.

Cloud: Do Reg readers care?

I wish I could

just say no.

But the PHBs have got the cloud bug.

When the bills come in exceeding the annual hardware budget I expect a Bean Counters vs PHBs spectacle to rival the best Godzilla movie.

Venice not in major peril after all - new research

Minor rises

are significant when your door step is 5cm above mean water level.

Wassup with systems and service management?

Policy and practice

Saying we have "Strictly defined policies & processes" would be true.

But for accuracy the poll needs to add "that are not evaded more often than adhered to."

VDI is not the only fruit

We tried, honest...

Spend a load of time and effort setting up application virtualisation because while dozens or even hundreds of users might need a particular app over the course of a year only one or two needed to run it at any given time.

Then the application vendor changes the licensing terms to prohibit this.

Thank you Microsoft.

Bradley Manning now in nicer Army prison

Exceptions....

"If you're in the military you don't want to break the law."

Until ordered to.

Nissan Leaf electric car

There's an App for that

but how do you install in on a leaf?

The Bayeux Tapestry archiving model

Depends...

You only get a saving on the "empty" areas if you use compression.

Ten... fantasy swords you wish you owned

Those were the ones...

That occurred to me.

Except as "must haves". :)

Easier to secure the cloud than your data center - IBMer

Where is my data?

When Aggrieved and Litigious rock up to my cloud provider's head office or data centre with a writ of seizure in their sweaty hands will the law in whatever jurisdiction it happens to be support them or me?

Or will it never be put to the test because the cloud provider caved in at the first sign of a suited shark?

Nokia DC-14 bike charger

That is...

the eighteen seventies.

Credit cards at the turnstile across London by 2013

CC as oyster

If this were to become a reality I might reserve one credit card solely for travel. Bit of a waste.

Apple tightens screws on hardware hackers

Money spinning

Been looking at a quote this morning: memory upgrade fitted by Mac shop £350, memory from Crucial and fit myself £75.

Adequate explanation of why Apple don't want our grubby little fingers getting into their shiny kit.

And here's how a datacentre network works...

One plan

But not one I'd like. Too many layers, too many switches. And where's the structured cabling?

El Reg, either this should be done in much more depth or not at all.

This year's DSLR stars

Less noise please

I've sort of got over the megapixels excitement. (And never was about video.)

What I wish for would be much less noise at higher ISO's So far while there are improvements nothing I've seen makes me want to rush out and spend lots of money of a replacement camera.

Tumblr tumbles down, stays there for 24 hours

Surprised...

That the weight of "tubmlr dwon" tweets didn't take out that service too...

Diary of a Not-spot: One man's heroic struggle for broadband

Distance no object...

to failure.

90 ft across a road with 18 inch dishes still failed unpredictably. The weight of snow they collected could bend them out of alignment. After a while the £50,000 asked to put a conduit in the roadbed started looking attractive.

No domestic iSDN any more

although you can still get iSDN2e or (as we have) iSDN 30 for business from BT.

That's a shame because iSDN was supplied with new copper to the exchange and once you had that you could ditch the service, persuade some engineer to transfer your phone to the new copper and then get brilliant aSDL way past the published exchange distance limits.

TomTom Go Live 1005 satnav

Improved by how much

I've had a XL One Europe for some years and I'm not seeing anything here that is an incentive to "upgrade" especially at that price.

The XL has successfully navigated me to Palermo and around obscure parts of Sicily, Siena and Venice, Barcelona and various trips around France. Would this model actually do any better at its basic task?

Apple signs Xserve death warrant

Unfortunately there are

apps that only run on OS-X. Final Cut Pro being one we're stuck with and will have to find an alternative to. Other stuff is comparatively small in house development but it will be expensive in resources to re-factor for other platforms.

Datacentre problem

So from January datacentre managers will either have to permit "desktops" into their racks or find an alternative platform for their applications.

For my part any new budget request for Mac hardware will be shunted to developers to write software that will work on something else.

Amazon Kindle 3 e-book reader

think about the books

Lovely though the e-reader idea is I still want paper books on my shelves at home.

Now if Amazon were to offer a free e-book download of the text when I bought a real book then I'd get a Kindle.

Large companies ignore data centre advice - survey

safety blanket for the insecure

Advice that doesn't sit well with the company doesn't get into the plan.

Advice that does, does.

The plan goes to steering committee where people who think they understand technology try and improve it. Then finance committee which thinks its sole purpose is to knock zeros off the bottom line ("if we're not filling these racks immediately can just cable the ones we need and do the rest later?").

Once the danger of a little knowledge and the danger of no knowledge have been negotiated you end up with what you knew you were going to get before spending 000's on consultants but somehow those in control now think it's acceptable.

Consultants aren't there to give advice that will be taken seriously. They are there as a big baby-blue safety blanket for the management who don't understand what they're managing and don't trust those who do.

What a way to run a business.

Clegg's taking away Your Freedom

refinemnets for Floyd's Law

1.) Appropriate use of capitalisation.

2.) More than one successive exclamation points.

Nokia C3

What's it's market?

80 squids might have been tempting but all those interweb toys yet no 3G? No sale.

UK.gov abandons 2012 rural broadband pledge

Thinking ahead

Back in the early nineties France Telecom decided that all new phone connections would be wired with solid copper suitable for ISDN and old ones replaced - this on the back of an earlier improvement program dating from the 1981 start of Minitel. It turned out that those wires were also very good for ADSL. I a bit of serendipity.

The UK still has masses of poor exchange or street box to consumer cabling - some of it 50 year old aluminium pairs - that is the most significant limitation for ADSL.

What we should have is fibre to the box + UTP to the home (leaving scope for fibre all the way later) which should future-proof us for any reasonable speed. But of course no on wants to pay for it.

Or...

A Scottish motorway.

Hubble eyes sun-roasted exoplanet

Obviously...

The CERN matter transmitter.

Ofcom sides with mobile operators on 0845

What of other landlines?

Like Virgin Media who charge 11p connection and 10p per minute to 0845 where BT's landline rate is 4p?

Stephen Fry's truly terrible mistake

Dab on wheels... or not.

DAB's oaky...

Unless you want to go abroad - and 3K of the 4K miles I've driven in the last 8 months have been in continental Europe.

So no DAB car replacement for me.

DVLA off-road system seriously off-message

Brainless in every possible way

The SORN online facility isn't the only one that's functionally brainless.

You can declare as a disabled driver and get your tax disc discount.

But if you buy a vehicle from such a driver and want to change the status - ie pay them the full amount - you have to go to one of their so-called "local" offices.

Vodafone launches snooping service

Apple doesn't allow interception

"Vodafone tells us it's working on an iPhone version, but Apple doesn't allow interception of outgoing calls so we can't help thinking it's going to take them a while."

But Voda owns the cells. For many large corporate accounts a pico-cell in the basement. So it might not take them as long as you think

SanDisk flips out 32GB mobile phone card

Back in the day....

Does no one feel even the slightest awe at what is produced these days?

Tried a rough comparison with the first data device I ever owned, an Apple HD20SC. If you could put enough of them together (which you couldn't, but this is a game) to equal this storage you'd have to have 1,639 of them, that'd make a cube just over 2 meters on a side and if running would consume 10 KW.

Try putting that in a phone. :)

Yeah, mine's the one draped over the Zimmer frame, thanks.