Posts by b166er 1468 publicly visible posts • joined 19 Jun 2007
'NASA faked the moon landings so completely they sent men to the moon to plant evidence the missions happened!'
Not quite, but rest assured, as soon as NASA feel amateurs are within reach of sending reconnaissance vehicles of their own to investigate the moon, they will send a probe to 'plant' the evidence first.
Been with Plusnet for about 3 months now (previously with Zen and Freeola) and I'm very happy with it.
A few tips though:
Bear in mind, that unlike most other providers, Plusnet count weekend usage towards your cap, so if you're on the cheapest tariff and watch a lot of TV online, you'll go over. They warn you though and it's only a few bob to get the 60GB allowance.
They charge a one-off £5 for a static IP if you want one, rather than BT's £5pcm.
If you're a gamer, you might also want the low-latency upgrade at £5pcm, you see it's all about choice!
I introduced a friend who signed for the same deal I did (6 months free broadband and phone line at £12.99pcm) and I get £1 off my bill per month for the introduction. This offer appears to have no limit, so I believe I could reduce my bill to nothing with enough introductions.
There are short contract options, if I remember correctly, I can buy my way out for @£20 at any time.
You can manage most elements of your account online, including adding the static IP and low-latency option.
So basically, for less than £20pcm, you can have a short contract, phone line rental and diet broadband from a UK company with UK call centres.
So, Plus One, Plusnet
I don't think Microsoft has lost the plot.
I think it makes much more sense for small businesses to use cloud services than to try and administer a SBS server. Most small businesses I have dealt with using SBS have no on-site support and therefore are paying externally for support. This results in under-maintained SBS machines which also are quite often not configured to use all the advantages of SBS anyway.
Far better to pay Microsoft via O365 to maintain their SharePoint, Exchange, mail reputation, threat management etc than try to do it themselves or pay peanuts to a support company that will do a half-arsed job.
For most small businesses, the one critical service is email and if there's an internet outage it makes no difference if it's on-site or cloud Exchange.
This was a well anticipated move and I'm not in the least surprised.
There also clearly weren't enough sales of WHS, hence it landing in the bargain bin, so again, no surprise that they've canned it.
At least admins can now just train for Server itself and let a support company manage the cloud-based services which will be harder for them to fuck up.
I've used online banking for years on Windows PC's. The only time I had a problem was after using my card at a shady filling station and the bank credited me as soon as I raised the issue.
I would therefore say that internet banking is very safe if you understand what to do to make it that way and therein lies the rub. Most people are just too damn lazy and blockheaded to understand how computer operating systems and the internet works (and to check their statements).
The banks have done lots wrong, god knows, however on this occasion it's the fault of dumbass users.
I can understand celebrities having email addresses not under the auspices of their handlers for sending such images, but I don't understand how they can think it's sensible to operate an email account without fully understanding the features, such as forwarding, of that email account.
That said, bulk email address providers shouldn't allow people to have email accounts with lame passwords.
It's in the title of the article really: 'not even Microsoft thinks businesses will use it'
IE, Microsoft don't care whether or not businesses use it.
I'm glad about this because it leaves Microsoft free to concentrate on making desktops, Xboxes and mobile device work well together. I also like the Metro interface and I think the vast majority of consumers will also lap it up. It's certainly better than iOS' GUI.
It's a bonus really, that they've kept Explorer as we know it and that therefore it's still accessible for those of us who need to get in there and fix computers for people et cetera. (LOL your spelling checker doesn't like et cetera (or etcetera))
This ol' tech journal is read by geeks and therefore most people here won't like Windows 8 and it's new fan-dangled ways (I can only imagine the bashing it must get on /.), but it makes a good excuse for Andrew to gets lots of comments that agree with him for a change I suppose!
This isn't a troll by the way. No need, Microsoft have already trolled you hard :)
With TMO, moving from Desire to SGS2, I got my PAC on Friday, which surprised me as I thought they'd do more to keep me.
Early Monday morning I got a call from retention 'hoping' I hadn't used my PAC, I hadn't.
I got the SGS2 (free handset) for £1 less a month than I was paying for the Desire.
I called TMO in mid-April to say I was out of work and needed to get my bill down.
They ended up reducing my bill by £10pcm and with no penalty whatsoever.
At the time, I thought this was very helpful.
At the end of April however, I got a bill for £305 pounds (I went over my minutes trying to get work) and I will be leaving TMO forever when my contract expires in April 2013.
I still don't understand why they can't send an SMS when you go even 50% over your normal monthly spend. Customer Services said they can't treat each customer on a case by case basis, but that's bullshit. Perhaps Ofcom will regulate this one day, but I'll be using a PAYG tariff (probably GiffGaff) from now on.
Anyway, long story (and cautionary tale), short, it's definitely worth haggling at every opportunity.
I like Exchange
Moving on, thanks for the article, but does this mean SSO for small businesses using SBS 2011 for example is a no-go? I thought the whole point of SBS 2011 was that it federated with Microsoft's cloud based services.
I can't see many small businesses having an ADFS cluster so they can simplify their O365 usage.
It's great to have these articles on the Reg, but it's always aimed at enterprises. Perhaps there aren't enough of us chaps supporting small businesses to make research for small business solutions worthwhile?
I was just ruminating today on the idea that patents are essentially a way of preventing mankind from having access to mans collective intelligence and that patent lawyers are, in effect responsible for holding back the evolution of man. How dumb.
So it's amazing on the one hand that private enterprise is now going to space, but on the other, just think how much sooner we could have acheived that had we not been encumbered by patents.
So please, no patent lawyers anywhere, including space.
I doubt many will agree with me considering the current situation regarding intellectual 'property'.
Ours is but a small slice of life which is over all too soon, so it seems crazy to me to be held back by any encumbrances.
Let's hope that private space enterprises can co-operate, otherwise it may take them a lot longer than it did NASA to accomplish as much as NASA did. Which is a sobering thought.
So Daily Mail columnist outraged, check
UK's most crap ISP cuddles up to cheapskate parents, check
Ad driven search engine suggests letting people find what they're looking for, check
45million british people sigh, check. (the other 20million are too young to give a monkeys)
OK, of course I have no proof of the last one, but the vast majority of people think there are more important things to be dealing with I reckon.
@cjoki, really? I smell bullshit.
Bullshit that has been going on for decades.
In the 70s people like the Rolling Stones, Pink Floyd, David Bowie went abroad as tax exiles.
Companies have had offices in Luxembourg etc for years, for the purposes of tax avoidance. (funnel billions into the Luxembourg operation which then 'loans' billions back to the US/UK organisation. Repaying the loan exempts local tax and therefore instead of 20% corporation tax in US/UK, pay often less than 1% on the repayment in Luxembourg)
F1 drivers go to Monaco I hear.
All owe a debt to the country that gave them a foot up (in my opinion), but decide to fuck off and leave the rest of us to make up the shortfall. But if you all think that's fair, maybe I'll sign on the welfare and sponge off you as well! Or take all your money and fuck off abroad depriving your economy of the millions of tax dollars I've leached. They must LOL at us proles.
Echoed above, no shot of the nearside with door shut !?
If the price drops because of the omission of the offside rear door, then I'm all for it, however, I suspect the price will drop for a while and then simply normalise to where it was providing no benefit to the customer and more profit to the manufacturer.
So I'll keep buying 4/5 door cars.
I agree with all the railing at Sony, they deserve it.
Regarding nVidia/AMD drivers for Sony, I discovered this when I upgraded a Sony PC (not mine) from Vista to 7. No nVidia driver from Sony and the stock nVidia driver wouldn't install because it said it wasn't the correct driver for the GPU.
I added the HWID and description to the inf according to a blog somewhere on the web and voila! The driver installed.
Fuck you Sony!
As far as I'm aware, every single Reg article about Sony (certainly in recent memory) has ended with comments expressing exactly the same sentiment. There seems to be a unanimous opinion that their arrogance is just unbearable from a consumer point of view.
For me it was them forcing Lik-Sang out of business that sealed their fate in my mind.
PAL-V for the win, recently certified for RPL/PPL and roadable. Auto-rotation, so engine fail not a (n insurmountable) problem, light, efficient, small and practical.
(V)STOL runway required.
Just as Google's car is now certified road legal in Nevada, I expect collision avoidance to be sorted the moment flying cars become anything more than rich people's playthings.
It's not that difficult if you think about it, to create a virtual bubble around an aircraft with proximity sensors and to not allow the bubble to enter the airspace of any other bubble. Like Honda's lane guidance utility, only stricter.
How many people were fatally injured in the early days of motoring? There will be a few casualties getting flying cars off the ground, if you'll pardon the pun, however it won't be enough to stop us reaching for the skies.
The price will always be high when launching a new technology, but provided it's viable, the price always comes down as the demand increases. Same goes for the training. Whereas it might currently cost 5000 credits to gain RPL, were it to become popular, the price would fall substantially. There would also be more demand for small airfields (close to motorways I imagine) and business complexes would have runways and taxi strips to your buildings storage area.
Vehicle parachutes should be mandatory though.
So if you're in traffic and you see a lorry come piling in from the rear (driver asleep or whatever) does the GDriver take evasive action, or does it let the lorry pile into the back of you?
This is one of the reasons why I'm always in the lane closest to the hard shoulder in traffic, because it serves as my escape lane should I need it.
I'd like to set up some simulations for the GCar and see what it does in those scenarios.
Maybe Google could put up some videos showing examples of the car taking evasive action.
AV is essentially useless, apart from the fact that if we didn't have it, viruses would return.
Spend your money (or don't if you're a home user) on MBAM and grab MSE for free. Throw a little Secunia into the mix and top it off with some SpywareBlaster and OpenDNS.
Keep 'em green across the board. Simple
McAfee SaaS is actually one of the better corporate AV IMO (purely from a management/resource perspective)
I feel after reading this article, that I'm none-the-wiser regarding Intel's purchase of McAfee.
Seems the girls favour the fruity devices more than the boys, the Xbox 360 is doing well, Google+ is more popular than I had imagined and rumours of the death of email are exaggerated.
Interestingly, whilst price is the main barrier to tablet adoption, other more practical reasons include 'prefer to use a laptop' (2nd) and 'have no use for a tablet' (4th)
Oh and 36% of persons gamble online, who knew?
This just won't work.
My mum and partner shop in John Lewis all the time, but they have their broadband with TalkTalk, certainly one of the worst. Point being, they won't buy John Lewis broadband, even though they shop regularly in John Lewis, because.....broadband isn't worth that much to them.
If you want exceptional customer service (and it's a niche market), then Zen or Freeola would welcome your call.
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