Posts by Steven Raith

Sammy had Sweet Fanny Adams to do with Swiss Fanny madam's blast

Yes yes, come back when you have something constructive to say.

Ironically, I use ebay specials in my Canon 40D with £800 of glass on it.

I should probably do something about that...

This. I had the option of getting a 'pattern' replacement battery for my Macbook, but as the official Apple unit was only some £30 more I went with it. I'd rather spend £30 extra now than spend £500 replacing the fecking laptop.

Steven R

WAR ON PORN: UK flicks switch on 'I am a pervert' web filters

Re: What a load of...

I approve of your shenanigans.

Don't google any of the above at work kids, it's not worth it for a variety of reasons....

What a load of...

...rancid shit.

(possibly with two girls and one cup)

That is all.

Steven R

French boffins: Regard, our record-breaking long, fat, wet pipe

Re: Limber up first...

I'm trying to work out if that's a good thing or a bad thing.

What am I talking about, it involves having a hand shandy, is that ever a bad thing?

Steven R

Re: Limber up first...

Phil, to hers?

Sorry, was that a bit too much for this time in the morning?

(silently chuckles to self, nefariously)

Steven 'grumpy bast this morning' R

Limber up first...

"If we assume the average 15 minute, low-res blue movie is about 100 megabytes in size, this would mean the new cable could speed 40,632 naughty flicks across the Atlantic every second, enough for 423 days and nights of non-stop porn viewing - in just one second."

...or you'll get one hell of a cramp.

Steven R

Windows desktop VDI

Re: 0Virt, KVM & Spice

No help to the O.P. (my comment here, that is) but I think I've found my replacement for my 180 day Server 2012 Hyper-V test lab platform.

Nice one, Mr Anonymous.

Steven R

Badges for Commentards

Well...

Someone gave me a badge.

I'm off on a power trip now.

Cheers

Steven R

Heavenly SPEARS gives LOHAN a hot satisfying BANG

Re: Stratodangle

No, no, no - that's a twatdangle.

Do pay attention.

Dear Linus, STOP SHOUTING and play nice - says Linux kernel dev

Re: Did anyone here actually read....

Didn't seem overly arsey to me, but then maybe I've been dealing with abrasive types too much in my life? :D

Steven R

Did anyone here actually read....

The whole email thread?

https://lkml.org/lkml/2013/7/15/374

It's very good natured and various other people interject with their own opinions on the whole situation and agree to discuss it at the next 'local' face to face - Kernel Summit.

Especially if Sarah brings cookies, as she said she would. Although whether she'd include the pot was debated a lot due to legality.

It's not like he's kicking her (or her managers) door in demanding the blood of his first born; he let a bad bit of code slip through when he's supposed to keep his devs in line to the degree where they don't push sloppy code in; he finds sloppy code which should have been dealt with well before it reaches him, he goes on a rant.

Hardly the crime of the century, and from the look of that mail list, it hardly looks like bullying at all, unless you wish to interpret that way, in which case that's your own lookout.

I've worked with abrasive personalities before - I love it, it means I *really* have to be on my toes and defend my ideas. Keeps me sharp.

Steven R

PM writes ISPs' web filter ads for them - and it must say 'default on'

Re: "nobbles DNS lookups"

This.

It's like putting a chocolate padlock on a two foot high fence. to stop the kids getting out of the garden.

Getting past it is such an offensively simple task that it's just not worth wasting time on - might as well just leave it open and stop inconveniencing people.

If they don't want people getting out of their garden, parents (or ISPs selling a soltution) will have to do it properly - install a five foot high fence with steel padlocks (or locked down routers, dropping any DNS requests that aren't their own, etc) for those who *want* it.

Anything else is an utter waste of time.

Steven R

Google and fellow ad-slingers PROMISE to starve pirates of oxygen

Re: "Starve pirates of oxygen"?

Upvote for excellent Red Dwarf reference.

Man sues Apple for allowing him to become addicted to porn

Re: Epiphany

My first thought on reading that was blimey, has News 24 been around that long?

My second thought was "I wonder if I google Joanna Gosling Redhead', will I get good results?".

Add me to the lawsuit.

Steven R

Google study finds users ignore Chrome security warnings

Re: No, your certificate master is an idiot

Theodore - I set up a lot of test environments and these warnings tick me off.

I'll have a look at wildcard certs later today (I assume this isn't the same as self-signed certs, as these are what give the warnings) and see if it can help prevent my stabbing hand itch when I'm doing testing.

Ta for that :)

Steven R

Why I'm sick of the new 'digital divide' between SMEs and the big boys

Re: Money is very flexible in SMB

Semi-related, but I worked with an old boy recently who was using a version of Sage Line 50 so old, his HP drivers didn't have the 16bit code Sage needed to set up his margins. (his old Canon printer he had being using physically crapped out on him, natch)

Worked around it by setting an old (Adobe Pro 6 I think?) PDF printer as his default, previewing the reports (which use the old PDF printer to do it's page layouts), then changing the printer to the HP. It was a Photosmart C4100, for reference.

If anyone has weirdy beardy problems with printing from flaky old versions of sage, try an old PDF printer of some ilk as the default, preview in that, then change the printer in the print dialogue - worked a treat...

Steven R

(spreading the love)

Analyst: Tests showing Intel smartphones beating ARM were rigged

Re: So in short....

Cheers Wilco - pretty much what I suspected.

Real world performance is far more important, but more difficult to benchmark.

Geekbench shows my late 2008 Unibody Macbook as being marginally faster under Linux than it is under OS X or Windows, but TBH all three run stupid fast with an SSD in the mix, so I don't mind either way!

Steven R

So in short....

Don't use Antutu for any kind of cross architecture benchmarking - ever.

Snark over.

Genuine question - is this true of other benchmarks like Geekbench etc, to a greater or lesser degree?

Steven R

Is it a BIRD? Is it a plane? Right first time – and she's in SPANDEX

Re: Peter Tangen

"Purple Rain can fight MY crime any time she wants, nudge nudge, wink wi.."

Unless that crime is sexual harrassment, yes?

:-)

On topic, however, what a load of turgid pish. Huawiaeueue (I was going to misspell it anyway, lets face it) need to find a better PR company. This just makes them look stupid and childish.

Steven R

Ubuntu 13.10 to ship with Mir instead of X

Re: Ubuntu, the Maralinga of Canonical's nuclear testing

They won't be happy with the same DE, just running on a lighter backend display stack if it supports it?

Are they stupid?

Acer Iconia W3: The first 8-inch Windows 8 Pro tablet

Re: Regardless of which OS we are talking about that piece of tat is an Acer.

Re Acer build quality - I've said it before on here, but I remember when nearly a third of a batch of travelmates we had (30 of them - nine died) went back within a year with (genuine) hardware faults.

Recently their 'comfortable BOM' stuff - midrange laptops etc - have really, really improved, and I set up a V5 'ultrabooky' 15" laptop yesterday for a customer and was pleasantly surprised by the quality and finish - and the Elan touchpad (single piece, Macbook style) was on of the better trackpads I've used in a while. Keyboard was still a bit spongy, but then what can you buy for under £500 that isn't like that?

It does seem from this review, however, that they still have problems on machines with extremely tight build/retail costs...

Win 8 man Sinofsky's 'retirement' deal: $14m shares, oath of silence

Re: will probably lose all their legal music and data...

@AC1555 - I sympathise, as I've had (and I'm sure other real desktop engineers) similar 'an unfortunate series of events' happenings like this before!

FWIW, I had to reactivate Windows a few times on an Asus I had to replace the HDD on recently - it was a pig. I think I finallly managed to get it sorted, but then I went on a long weekend and spent most of it drunk. Machine was gone when I got back with notes to the effect that the machine was OK.

Not complaining.....!

Re: No more Windows - /rant

Re the users files - boot your XP machine from a Live Linux device of some kind (USB, CD, whatever) and I'll put a shiny 5p piece on that getting the files.

XP cant' take ownership of the Win7 files, I'm pretty certain the NTFS3G layer won't give a toss and will just grab 'em and let you put them on an external HDD.

It'll take ten minutes to try and might well save you a major headache when it comes to contacting the user about their files.

If not, you're back to square one, but hey, worth a shot, eh?

HTH.

Steven R

Microsoft offloads heap of critical fixes in 'ugly' Patch Tuesday

Re: Bah!

...and my Debain Samba server, also not touched for a couple of weeks as it Just Works?

one update. to the Tiff handling library.

As I say, bullshit.

Re: Bah!

I've just run an update on a light Debian install that hasn't been touched for a few weeks - 26 updates.

You smell porkies, I smell utter bullshit.

Re: Surprise!

I'd love to see you put your money where your mouth is and produce some hard numbers on that for both systems....

Particularly for vulnerabilities exploited in the wild.....

Star bosses name asteroid to honor author Iain Banks

Pittance

Well, he was scottish.

(I write as someone far, far more scottish than him, coming from the area around John O Groats...;-) )

Utterly top notch way to remember Mr Banks, I can't think of any reason why he would not have approved of such shenanigans.

Steven R

Microsoft's murder most foul: TechNet is dead

Oh, and can I just add...

...some top debate/gassing in here, kids - another reason why I enjoy Mr Potts articles. The comments on El Reg are always interesting (and readable now that Eadon has be foxtrot oscar'd) and well worth a look to a greater degree than a lot of the articles on the site, but I find the level of debate in Potts articles and subsequent forum threads to be a cut above for the most part.

Keep it up, chaps and chappettes.

Steven R

Incidentally...

....this whole debacle has encouraged me to look at spending some money.

On formal linux sysadmin training. I'm fairly tasty with desktop linux and can google the crap out of most problems I find, but I can't honestly say I could run a farm of Linux boxes in a corporate environment.

Best start learning, eh?

South African kids win global cluster glory at HPC fest

Re: Background or explanation

Cheers Dan - I missed that.

Look forward to hearing more on these little HOC setups, always interesting to see who can get how much out of what, as it were.

Re: Background or explanation

If I recall, Dan did a deeper dive on the hardware last time around? There was mineral oil cooled competitor in there.

Perhaps we'll get a more in-depth round-up later in the week?

Steven R

Snowden speaks from Moscow: 'Obama lies'

Re: Justice??

What about Gangnam Style?

Sorry, sorry....

Steven R

AXE-WAVING BIKER GANG SMASHES into swanky Apple UK store

Re: couple of years late

It's his own lookout for leaving his laptop in full view in North London with nothing more than a plate of glass between it and miscreants!

Steven R

Re: couple of years late

One of the best things about Islington are it's socioeconomic dynamics.

Take a couple of wrongs turns after exiting one of the trendy bars on a friendly road, and you end up somewhere like the wrong end of North Road. Where I once watched some kids on a scooter smash the back window of an Audi A3 and whup the laptop in there while the owner was in the council office.

And then, as I walked up the road around about the parks/greenspace office, they tried to sell said laptop to me. I politely declined, they politely made their exit.

Even stranger is that 300yds down the road towards the recycling centre is a pretty well known garage that preps full on racespec porsche 911s for privateers IIRC.

Other end of that road is....shall we say, somewhat grittier. My memory might be foggy, but if you know the area, you probably know what I'm talking about.

Funny old place, Islington - but really interesting on multiple levels once you get off Upper street and start floating around the rest of it.

Steven R

Galaxy S4 way faster than iPhone 5: Which?

Re: Faster phone ?

I'll stick with my bright yellow Ford Puma, thanks.

Not quite as quick in a straight line as the Abarth, but handles better because it has something other than 'grip' in it's handling repertoire.

Also cost me under a grand.

What were we talking about again?

Steven R

Saucy selfie app Snapchat hits $800m valuation as VCs chuck cash around

"It’s no secret that Snapchat has yet to turn on its monetisation engine."

As it's snapchat we're talking about, I misread that as 'molestation engine' and it didn't seem out of place.

Steven R

Boffins build headless robo-kitties

Re: Obstacles

I can't recall the last time I saw a housecat jump more than two meters up. Most have owners to help them with that, signalled by mewling and squawks to get their attention....

Steven R

Buffalo herds DDR3 RAMs into DriveStation's spinning rust corrals

Also...

Software lets you create a RAM drive with it - handy for editing photos/videos surely?

Surprised that's not in the article TBH, an easy way to make a RAM drive is something that's interesting from a consumer product.

Steven R

A quick google suggests..

A gig of DDR3 according to Buffallos website.

To be fair, for most stuff, that's well more than enough and would probably do no harm with small file transfers (assuming the host OS can keep up) but it'd be interesting to see how it copes with a 3gb file transfer.

I tend to bang a few hundred meg of photos over to a backup drive at a time - that'd suit me fine, assuming of course the drive has a DRAM battery somewhere...

Steven R

Google accused of hypocrisy over Glass ban at shareholder shindig

Re: The reality

...and even if you could circumvent the activation prompts (remote bluetooth trigger in the pocket, kill the 'camera active' light etc) you'd still have to be staring right at them.

Sure to be interesting when said kiddy-filmer comes out of the restroom to find Little Jonny pointing at him saying 'Daddy, it was him, he was the funny man looking RIGHT AT HIM while I was having a wizz'.

Closely followed by a loss of teeth police interaction.

It's not hard to envisage. Think of the children? Try just thinking, for a start.

Steven R

Microsoft video preview shows Windows 8.1 tablet UI options

Re: Dragon Animation

Three browsers, mail app, remote desktop app, database client, music, text editor for note taking.

OS X and Linux and older versions of Windows can handle this fine (well, Windows has a problem with lacking multiple workspaces, but it's doable)

To do it in Windows 8 I have to ensure that the TIFKAM apps are explicitly exluded from default launching anything - otherwise the whole thing becomes schizophrenic as fuck.

Not the end of the world, and TIFKAM is fine for content consumption, but it's a proper PITA if you actually want to *do* stuff.

I don't see why Microsoft have taken so long to work this out, and have only partially resolved it by all accounts despite extremely heavy criticism and insinuations that they may actually be a causative part of the recent slump in desktop and laptop sales.

Steven R

Who should play the next Doctor? Nominations needed!

Guy Martin

He'd constantly be disappearing off the set only to be found two hours later under one of the on-location vans, stripping the gearbox, having overheard the driver moaning that the syncro on fourth was a bit flaky. Or drinking tea. And he'd insist on flying the tardis at a mental lean, scuffing his knees out the front door.

I really rather like the idea of Sean Pertwee - preferably in Sergeant Wells guise from Dog Soldiers.

"The only people who go looking for Daleks are Kamikazes, glory boys and full-on f*cking f*ckwits."

"Sausages!"

Etc.

Steven R

Elon Musk pledges transcontinental car juicers by end of year

Punative carbon taxing - slight problem

The working class.

Taxing carbon-spitting cars is all very well, but most people can't afford to buy a new car, nor a new electric car, and the second hand market of sub-£3k cars that most real, non-highly paid, financed-up-to-the-hilt people in the first world survive on won't have electric cars in it (that are a realistic proposal - IE aren't public beta tests with unsupported tech in them, due to the change in pace of technology) for another twenty years.

Otherwise, much as though I love my popping and farting little shed of doom, I tend to agree - once the economics of scale and tech viability come into line, even as a 'petrol'head, I'd have no issue with 'leccy cars, as long as they drive as nicely as their equivelant petrol-fuelled brethren.

All that torque from idle - yum.

Steven R

First 'adult' app for Google Glass planned 'within days'

Re: Peril Sensitive Sunglasses? ala HHGTTG

Dude, I think you just created the template for the Daily Mail Glasses app!

Steven R

The iWatch is coming! The iWatch is coming!

Someone doesn't care about network infrastructure?

You liar, everyone loves network infrastructure!

Steven R

PS: Can't see a usage model for a watch-phone combo if I'm honest, but then I didn't see a model for a tablet.

After buying a (halfway decent one) I still can't, but plenty of other people seem to like 'em....if it filters down some shiny new tech, then I won't grumble.

YouTube channels at $1.99 per month could launch this week

Re: I'm not sure that this statement is correct

I don't mind Top Gear as entertainment, but as we both say, it's not really a car program any more, except by loose association.

Fun, but I don't take anything on there seriously. As a result of that, I don't bother with TG mag either. Tend to stick to Evo.

Currant Bun erects £2 paywall: Wraps digi-paper around free footie

Mail online

As Rupert Murdoch told the Leveson inquiry (PDF), the Mail Online is "unrecognisable as part of the Daily Mail"

I dunno, they're both pathetic excuses for actual journalism, so there's definitely a resemblance.

Rolls-Royce climbs aboard Bloodhound SUPERSONIC car

Re: Lucky

Who did he alienate, and how?

I'd google it, but about to go to work, natch. El Reg Forums, edumacate me while I toddle off to install a server....

Steven R

Google adds Atari Easter Egg for Breakout's birthday

Re: Addiction broken

We had LCIIIs and Performas in our high school computing labs.

Suffice to say a lot of time was spent playing this when we should have been working.

Still got an A though, arf.

Steven R