Posts by Infidellic_

IBM UK: Oh, remote workers. We want to be colocated with you again

"Samsung House"

Should this be "Sampson House"? http://www-05.ibm.com/uk/locations/sampson_house.html

Bloaty banking app? There's a good chance it was written in Britain

Beyond charities and student clubs etc, I actually don't know anyone using cheques. Most (all?) banks have stopped issuing cheque books unless requested by the customer. IBAN and international payments comments are true enough though

EDIT: And on cheques let's not even start to talk about the US system and their literal paychecks!

Institute of Directors: Make broadband speeds 1000x faster than today's puny 2020 target

So they dug up our (private) road to dig a trench to put in empty pipes to lay fibre as and when later? Why wouldn't they gauge interest before incurring that cost?

Virgin aren't that much better - they dug a trench past my flat, put in a cabinet literally backing onto my apartment building and I'm told I'm not in a cabled area. Go figure.

I haven't looked it up to answer your question - but even if it does there may (will?) be multiple machines sharing a connection, even if it's a PC, tablet and phone. That pushes your hypothetical issue to the modem and networking gear which have been handling these speeds for a while in industry. By 2030 RAM will have moved on anyway, it already has!

Thinking of buying a Surface? Try a modular OLED Thinkpad first

Pico-projector in ThinkPad

I always though that a pico-projector for the Ultrabay would make sense rather than all the usual fiddling around with full sized projector where the bulb's gone, it doesn't support your resolution, only one person can present at a time etc. Wondered about bodging one myself and seeing what the internet thought but the (recent) ultrabays (I know of) only have SATA interfaces and I wasn't about to try to write some crazy hacky driver to get GFX over SATA given that I doubt it's even possible and even if it were I'd not even be close to those skills - they wouldn't be even a spec in the horizion of my abilities.

So yeah, Lenovo I thought of your pico-projector idea first - honest!

Teenage backup biz Code42 gets cash bonanza

Re: A bit of a worry

There are Mac clients (https://www.code42.com/crashplan/thankyou/?os=mac) but I guess it's Java based like the Linux PROe client? What's wrong with that?

Pioneer slaps 80s LASERS on cars for driverless push

Re: Signal to noise and interference

Question to all: Is LiDAR affected by rain? If the range is reduced what kind of impact will that have on autonomous high speed (i.e. motorway) driving? What about autonomous LiDar/RADAR based cars in (heavy) snowing conditions?

Bug hunter reveals Apple iTunes, Mac app store receipt deceit

Re: Huh?

The article says Apple staff and sellers might view the invoice, so I'd change my device name to compromise *them* not myself

Will a data centre be driving your car in 12 years' time?

Re: The first thing that sprang to my mind was

[Edited] Kind of Turkish Flight 1951? Instrument failure caused autothrottle issues, although FBW would still have allowed for "manual" (used loosely) override. I guess it's more of an FMS failure than FBW failure. I actually agree with your point and think this tweet sums it up nicely: https://twitter.com/cat_beltane/status/588359354136403969

For those unwilling to go to Twitter:

"so what did you do before self-driving cars?"

"we just drove 'em ourselves!"

"wow, no one died that way?"

"oh no, millions of people died"

High-flying LOHAN fan raises ale-filled tankard

Re: Vapourware

Fair rebuttals on the whole, particularly regarding my "vapourware" flippancy and I'll always take an accusation of being young! Judging by the up/down votes at the moment (6 up, 7 down) I think it is more split on supporters vs those of us a little bored by it, than the comments suggest. Perhaps just feed this back into any future SPB endeavours :)

Call me a cyncic but....

LOHAN, like PARIS, is a bit of fun - that I fully get and endorse. But LOHAN has been bumbling on for 4 years now: http://www.theregister.co.uk/science/lohan/earlier/4/ Any interest is well past it and these "articles" clog up El Reg with a topic that I and others lost interest on years ago after a lack of progress. Time to put it to bed as a well intentioned, but vapourware reminiscent, project and either start something new (with shorter timescales!) to get excited about or abandon these "projects" altogether IMO.

Attack of the clones: Oracle's latest Red Hat Linux lookalike arrives

Go for CentOS instead, it's almost exactly RHEL (there's a big tie up between Red Hat (company) and the CentOS developers that was announced a few months back) but with branding removed. You can see a list of what they remove/modify here: http://wiki.centos.org/Manuals/ReleaseNotes/CentOS7#head-d58ad86f1b5399bb36755532321b1df4f242a88c

Oracle Linux do things like tweak the Kernel etc.

New MH370 search zone picked using just seven satellite 'handshakes'

Re: Doppler Shift and Timing of Satellite Signals

I watched the Panorama about MH370 - the main chap from Inmarsat did say they tested their calculations etc on data from something like 8 other 777-200's with known tracks on that day, in that region using the same satellite and found good correlation.

London commuter hell will soon include 'one card to rule them all'

But...but

So like others have said it's Oyster but *also* in taxi's. That's hardly a revolution. The train companies nationwide are already, glacially, working towards smart cards there's even a chap in charge of converging this with Oyster ( http://www.atoc.org/about-atoc/about-us/the-atoc-directors/steve-howes/ ) and a standard written (PDF: http://www.atoc.org/download/clientfiles/files/RSPDocuments/RSPS3002%2002-00%20ITSO%20in%20National%20Rail%20-%20Specification(1).pdf ). Introduce ITSO requirements into all franchise renewals and force TfL to integrate with ATOC standard. Job done for all rail travel + London public transport.

Shazam! Record labels shovel $9m into name-that-song app

Re: Building music recognition into a mobile OS

Google has a "sound search" widget for Android (not sure about < v4 but certainly for KitKat). It's fairly good but I use it and Shazam in tandem - neither gets everything

Re: Wake Me up...

...when September ends?

Sony nanotechnicians invent magnetic tape that stores 148 Gb per square inch

Time to fill

Can someone enlighten me as to how long it would take to stream data onto or off that though?

Commonwealth Bank in comedy Heartbleed blog FAIL

Re: one good thing about Heartbleed ...

Press releases are not made by the IT folks.....they probably had to simplify their responses for the marketing team and rightly so, it's not their sphere of expertise - I'm not having a go at the marketing folks. As a result I wouldn't expect the marketing team to know the answer without referring back to IT

Gnome Foundation runs out of cash

GNOME == Red Hat?

The unpopular voice here I know, I actually like GNOME 3. That aside though I thought the GNOME devs were near enough synonymous with Red Hat nowadays? Ok the foundation is more than overviewing development activities but nonetheless if that's the case then surely the biggest sponsor is Red Hat and it's like chasing themselves!?

AMD unveils Godzilla's graphics card – 'the world's fastest, period'

Re: Diminshing returns

I have an x1950 Pro. It's done me well but it's starting to show it's age in the latest (and not so latest) stuff. But I rarely game any longer not entirely sure I will upgrade with anything > £60 when I get around to it as it's simply not worth it for my habit any more. $1500 is simply insane, that's more than my entire system cost when assembled back in 2007

Lycamobile launches 'unlimited' 4G for £12 a month. Great. Now where can I get a signal?

Re: 25GB is not bad, IMO

I am a fairly heavy user - typically downloading 30GB and occasionally peaking at 75GB per month. My contract is unchanged from Three's actual unlimited tethered deal (I triple check every month as it's a rolling 30 day contract) and being able to download this much is a godsend as I'm a consultant on customer sites with varying levels of internet access (typically either slow visitor wifi or I'm denied access with my laptop).

My major problem is that inner London (the city, Tottenham Ct Road/Oxford St, South Bank etc) has HSDPA and 4G but the backhaul isn't up to scratch. For instance (it has improved) I have regularly struggled with 0.2 Mbps HSDPA connections along South Bank.

BT snatches crown: Soars to top of complaints list

I haven't had problems...

...with TalkTalk despite them always being near the bottom of the table. But then again I haven't had to call them to assess their customer service, my connection has just worked fine for the last 3 years. Back in the past the worst customer service I had was explaining to Virgin Media's Indian CS team that a gardener had cut the cable entering our house, they were determined to go through their script asking about lights on the router, switching it off and on etc - incapable of grasping that yes I definitely did need an engineer. That took hours (literally) to arrange and tens of minutes at most for the engineer to fix.

When was the last time you filled up your petrol tank in gallons!?!?!

IBM to shutter Greenock x86 line after sale to Lenovo - reports

Fact of the day

There is a public train station on that estate called "IBM Halt" with a code of IBM and supposedly Operated by IBM: http://www.nationalrail.co.uk/stations/IBM/details.aspx

Google gives Maps a lick of paint, smears it over screens worldwide

Memory hog

At home I have a system that's light on RAM and boy does the new Maps try to use all of it! But that seems to be relentless with the web in general nowadays :(

IT'S ALIVE! China's Jade Rabbit rover RETURNS from the DEAD

Re: Good news

Well I think it's clear that it was a hare's breadth from being done for, I mean you can't just hop over to it to fix it. I bet the engineers found themselves in a right stew

Opera founder von Tetzchner: It's all gone to crap since I quit

Re: Sad panda.

I too am a sad panda. Still on Opera 12 at home, I'm using it less and less I get concerned about the lack of updates and potential vulns that won't be patched and the fact that it's also the last version with the mail client integrated. There was a big cry to ask Opera to open source Presto which would have been nice but it was never going to happen whilst customers were still licencing it for embedded products. Another one bites the dust :(

Three-yaarrgh! Major UK mobile network's data goes down

Not far from business as usual

At home in Hampshire (and more generally in populous areas outside of London) I typically get >= 12 Mbps from Three regularly. In the square mile, South Bank, Oxford St etc this often drops to < 0.75 Mbps and is barely useable (lots of timeouts etc). So as far as I'm concerned the lack of t'interwebs in London is business as usual

Just when you were considering Red Hat Linux 6.5, here comes 7

Re: I wonder if they've hired any tech writers in the last 2 years

If the sheer amount of TODO statments in their RHEL 6 -> 7 migration document is anything to go by I'd say not:

https://access.redhat.com/site/documentation/en-US/Red_Hat_Enterprise_Linux/7-Beta/html-single/Migration_Planning_Guide/index.html#_file_system_formats

Little devil: Electric Imp is an Internet of Things Wi-Fi PC-ON-AN-SD-CARD

Re: A big but

Exactly, when these came up on Hackaday exactly your thoughts came out against it, and that *is* part of the hacker community el reg is talking about. Hackers don't want to be tied down to a specific company's whim, it's one of the reasons they're hacking in the first place rather than doing off the shelf.

XBOX ONE and PS4, you'll make us RUN OUT of INTERNET

Re: Enough with the capitalization

You're fine with -ize as the Oxford English Dictionary actually uses z's instead of s and either form is considered correct: http://blog.oxforddictionaries.com/2011/03/ize-or-ise/

Whilst -ise may be more common it's a commonly mistaken belief over here that -ize is an Americanism

Forget ANGELINA JOLIE, Xbox One struts red carpet in London's Leicester Square

Ebay pass

Anyone else notice the linked eBay'd queue pass has an Xbox 360 logo? Smells of scam to me or very poor work from Game (who incidentally I thought had gone bankrupt but I'm clearly wrong)

PlayStation 4 BLUE LIGHT OF DEATH blamed on power cords, TV sets, butterflies in China

Re: Seriously...

However for some serious HA stuff that's something of last resort. Turning it off and on again isn't always best for every situation......just most situations!

Look! GNOME 3.10 (with Fedora 20). Did we mention GNOME 3.10?

So I actually agree that getting rid of the minimize button isn't an issue. In GNOME 3 I never did that as I used the virtual desktops like yourself. But maximise is going to be something I'll miss I expect. Still time will tell.

Eugh I always liked the fact that package kit *wasn't* a Software Centre clone. In fairness I rarely use the UI's but even when I do I'm going there for something specific and don't need the added bloatish advert style. I'm one of the few people on t'interwebs who actually quite liked GNOME 3 after using for a bit but there are some odd design decisions coming out every release, the lack of a maximise/restore button being one of them IMHO

Reply-all email lightning storm STRIKES TWICE at Cisco

Troll nostalgia

Reminds me of something classic I did at school:

In outlook web access three friends and I set up an e-mail rule each,

If a received e-mail had "SPAM" in the subject then forward it to the other three and then delete it

one person then sends one e-mail and sits back. The admin realised after a few 10's of minutes why the servers were bogged down and tried to *e-mail* us to ask us to stop. Naturally given the rules we didn't even get that e-mail for 5 hours.

Not sure how I didn't receive any punishment. Nor when we used a similar technique to bombard a different friend with 15,000 e-mails in 10 minutes

Snowden's email provider gave crypto keys to FBI – on paper printouts

Re: Thanks Mr. Levison

Wouldn't that be revealing a secret court order hence still be violating it?

Google cursed its own phones with wacked Wi-Fi, say Nexus users

Issues disappeared here

When I upgraded to 4.3 for the first few days I'd take my Nexus 4 out of my pocket to discover it was asking for SIM pin (so probably a restart). This seemed to stop after about a week, since then I haven't had any problems fortunately :)

Taiwanese spill on Zuck's racks: Servers powering Facebook REVEALED

Let's speculate

I'm guessing:

1) I/O work

2) CPU work

3) Lightweight proxies

4) ?

Google to snub Samsung, hand Nexus 10 to Asus – report

Ugh

I hate that phrase "holiday season" despite being non-religious. Must we bear this contrived description for what most in the west refer to as Christmas?

Penguins, only YOU can turn desktop disk IO into legacy tech

No one else?

Ok I'll be the first to suggest it (and possibly be shot for it)....

why not simply mount a ramfs/tmpfs "drive" and on system startup copy necessary apps into it?

Slower startup time but if you're an avid suspend/hibernate users then what do you care about that for

Can I have my £1tn now? :p

Filter Great Firewall of China's architects at US borders - petition

"arguably the world’s most successful and comprehensive web filtering system"?

"arguably the world’s most successful and comprehensive web filtering system"

*Cough, cough* North Korean *Cough, cough*

Big Bruv - obviously

Schmidt 'very proud' of Google's tiny tax bill: 'It's called capitalism'

Re: Let me fix part of that for you

Hold on it gets better - he used to be a corporate tax adviser!

Re: Alternatives

I in no way vouch for their effectiveness or Britishness but you made me look up an confirm that both Lycos and HotBot are still up and running!

Let me fix part of that for you

MP Stephen Williams, co-chairman of the Liberal Democrat Treasury Parliamentary Policy Committee, described that offer as a "joke".

should be:

MP Stephen Williams, co-chairman of the Liberal Democrat Treasury Parliamentary Policy Committee, described as a "joke".

having met the man on many occaisions

Windows Phone 8 reboot woe causes outpouring of forum misery

"....and (in the case of Nokia) booting the phone without a SIM for ten minutes, then booting with the SIM back in again, which apparently worked for one user"

I can't help but read these anecdotal "solutions" and wonder if I put "Sacrificing my first born to our Lord and Saviour the almight Satan worked for me" whether people would believe it could be an actual solution as much as the faith they put in these generally baseless techniques.

Galapagos islands bombed with 22 tonnes of Blue Death Cornflakes

Skyfall SPOILER ALERT

Wasn't getting rid of rats from an island the main monologue from the antagonist in the recently released Bond film Skyfall?

IIRC big hole with coconut (replace here with tortoise egg), rat falls in. All rats eat each other then get a taste for rat flesh, realease to wild until they eat every other rat.

Wonder how viable that is?

Mine's the one with the Walther PPK

Hold it! Don't back up to a cloud until you've eyed up these figures

I agree, particularly given that any decent backup solution will merely be doing differentials

Word wonks insist GIFs are really JIFs

Verb?

"...it should of course be the same for both the noun and the verb.”

Verb!?!?! To GIF? Am I the only one never to have heard of this magical verb?