Posts by Steven Raith

Russell T Davies bows out of Doctor Who

Re: As A Long Time Fan

"Sure, not every episode has been "the best ever!!!", but name one TV show that has lived up to that - there aren't any."

Firefly.

:-)

Steven R

@Sam

Clearly you and Our Dear Leader, the Moderatrix, are both scary Dr Who geeks.

You should get married.

Hope that helps,

Steven "liked Blink too - and that other one, 42, with the videos/dvds - more of that please" Raith

EMC: The age of high-end flash has begun

Flash to be better than spindle non-shocker

Gee, SSDs will be more popular than rotating drives when the price/capacity difference levels out in [insert spurious year here] because they use less power and are faster.

Wow, who'd have thunk it? No, really, I *never* saw that one coming.

In other shocking news, when water gives the same effects as beer with no side-effects and the same low, low prices, beer sales will drop off.

In other news, the sun comes up every morning, and British Summers are ridiculed around the work for being the sweaty tuft of rectal pubic hair they are....

Steven R

A videogame that truly takes the p*ss

This is just an electronic version of...

...entertaining yourself by aiming for the soap block in the urinal.

I for one welcome our electronic urinal based overloads - especially if it means that more blokes use the urinals, rather than blocking the one cubicle, *blatantly* standing there pissing into it, and taking their time over it too, when I need a good dump.

If you are too much of a pussy/so insecure of your sexuality to use the urinal, then go put a skirt on along with some mascara and use the lasses bathroom, you big girls.

And if you are insecure, and you must use the bog to have a piss, at least lift the frigging seat first you fucking pikey.

Steven "Bored of spending two minutes wiping piss off the bog seat before dropping the kids off at the pool" Raith.

PS: I most often see this in the 'trendier' bars of Islington - nuff said?

Open source zealots fill with venom

Paul

You have managed to hit the nail on the head and miss the point entirely in one fell swoop.

Ru speaketh the truth.

Steven R

Mines the one with 'Ha-Do-Ken' scrawled on the back in Blankas blood.

Games consoles not green enough, claims Greenpeace

interfering with sexual development?

"Worryingly, Greenpeace found pthalates in both the Xbox 360 and PS3. Phthalates are believed to interfere with sexual development in male mammals."

Well, from the crap I see spouted by various console fanbois, I'd suggest there isn't a problem - they are obviously well sexually developed, as otherwise, how could be possibly be such total wankers.

<insert generic "greenpiece - arsepiece more like it" vaguely right-of-centre commment here>

Steven R

Ballmer eggs on Hungarian student

@Mark - Is Balmer a Led Zep fan?

If so, some potential dodginess there.

From "Custard Pie":

"Chewin' a piece of your cuss-tard pie.

Drop down"

I'll leave that to the fine Reg readers and commentators to twist in dark ways, and make insuations that would send Ballmers lawyers into a feeding frenzy - I haven't had enough coffee yet.

Steven R

PS: The song isn't about bakery products, I reckon. Just FYI of anyone who is confused.

Boeing raygunship fires first blasts in ground testing

LASER

For the benefit of the pedants, and those who cannot spell.

Light

Amplification through the

Stimulated

Emission of

Radiation.

LASER.

With an S.

*Never* with a Z. Ever. Or I'll send over the C-130 with the pretty lights on it and tattoo it on your motherfucking head from thirty miles away.

Hope that helps :-)

Steven R

Google under fire again for handing user info to police

@AC - NFI?

AC, if I have no fucking idea, then please, enlighten me?

What are Google supposed to have done? Stalled for time? And be realistic, pulling out of India isn't exactly an option given the burgeoning online community and tech centres there.

Come on, lets hear your words of wisdom. I'm intrigued.

Steven R

"People should not have any expectations of privacy when using their services...."

"...as they sure as hell wont protect you if someone comes asking questions."

...within the constraints of local law?

It's not Googles job to step in and say "we don't believe that we can ethically give you this information" - otherwise they'd be the ones up in court for blocking the judicial process.

You idiot.

*belms*

Steven R

Dixons admits 'it's even worse than you thought'

@Mighty Quin

When they really screw up on the price, it doesn't get beyond the stock room.

Exaxmple: 15 Geforce 5900s come in - RRP £139.99

Price on stock system: £13.99

Suffice to say Ebay was well stocked on 5900s that day, and some of us had nice new trainers/jackets the next week.

Glorious!

Steven R

Life a mess? The Moderatrix can help

Another question for the inimitable Ms Bee

I have a very good lady friend in the US who is very much into me. I have lady friends who are very into me on this side of the Atlantic, but they are all quite unavailable.

Should I blow my VAT money on a ticket to the US, and shag her in ways which, should they be recorded, would now probably get a UK based viewer arrested?

Or should I continue on with the UK slog and carry on having half a dozen married women swear that they haven't got a clue as to why I am single?

Go on, lets hear your opinion on that one, m'dear!

Paris - because her video antics should be illegal too.

Steven R

Question

If I have sex with my hoover, will it give birth to a cleaner?

If not, do you want to come round and tidy my flat instead?

Hope you can help,

Regards,

Steven "What is this shower you speak of? Surely, tis as if man has become god" Raith

PS: I'm so badly tempted to make some kind of smutty comment about staring into the void, but I do worry that Ms Bees pseudo-S+M connotations would be replaced by plain violence if I did that.

PPS: I make them ask nicely before I stare into the void. My that's a well aimed hammer Ms Bee *splunch*

Brown goes YouTube

I have a question for Gordon

When are you getting the fuck out and letting someone capable of making a decision without dithering over it for six weeks step up to the post?

Oh, sorry - just to remain on topic - yeah, it's crap. Any questions that do make it to this video thingy will end up having all the political gravitas of the odd occasions when MPs go on Blue Peter/Newsround.

Steven Raith

First public Firefox 3 candidate shoots out the door

Hidden usage tracking?

Depends on just how 'hidden' it is.

If there is an option in the 'custom' install asking if you would like to participate etc, then that would be moderately OK.

If there is an option in the Standard/express install asking if you would like to participate, which is unticked by default, then that would be better.

I don't care about data pharming [arf], provided I have the option to, quite clearly and expressly, opt out of it.

Your argument is a bit moot however, seeing as it hasn't even been implemented yet as far as I know, and is still in the early consultation stages - the negative press attached to it may well either kill off the data harvesting idea in it's infancy.

Anyway, it installed on my machine this morning with an update, and it seems to be happy enough, fairly zippy and generally running without any issues.

Steven R

PS3 update fails to fix Grand Theft Auto IV woes

Consoles that worked..

I can remember playing Super Metroid on the SNES for about 30 hours straight once. No lockups, despite it being one of the most technically advanced games of it's time. Although the nasuea and foggy head after that meant I never played a game that long without sleeping again. Ugh. Was farking great tho.

And Goldeneye and Perfect Dark on the N64 - several hours of play, lugging the N64 and four controllers round to a mates house with a 40" TV to play marathon deathmatches [one hit kills, Complex, fifteen minutes, loser gets the beer] - all that abuse, all that playing time, not one lockup that I remember.

Arr, those were the days.

*fires up ZSNES and Project 64*

Steven "mine is the one with the K7 Avenger slung over the top of it" Raith

The Moderatrix: Exclusive boudoir snap

Re: Oh dear

If you are going to breach Clause 63 [I think] of the Criminal Justice Act by producing Extreme Pr0n [the poor sod on teh bed looks like he is under duress and may be in pain, for the sexual gratification of the viewer - we're all nicked] then you might as well go the whole hog, eh?

Mines the one with 'Made in Denmark' written on the label...

Steven "Very Naughty Boy Indeed" Raith

Apple okay with Safari 'carpet bombing' vuln for now

Holy shit

"Please note that we are not treating this as a security issue, but a further measure to raise the bar against unwanted downloads," someone from Apple's security team told Dhanjani. "We want to set your expectations that this could take quite a while, if it ever gets incorporated."

I have no idea what this person has been smoking, but if it can make me that laid back about a pretty fundamental security risk [to the average user who isn't interested in the gubbins - arguably Apples main user base] then I'll have some of that for work, so that I don't have to give two hoots about my AV, firewall and general systems security solutions.

I've said on here before that I'm not a particular OS fanboy of any ilk, but that really does just smack of utter idiocy.

Steven "isn't a security consultant but knows a major vuln when he sees one" Raith

Billg bigs up SharePoint and Touch Wall

@smartboard

Yup AC, that's exactly what I thought when i saw it - a rear projection SmartBoard/Promethean with a multi-touch input system.

I also noticed that he seemed to be having problems with it, but lets face it, snags, lockups and missing inputs is something we have been used to seeing on MS software that doesn't have the hardware to run it at full whack for *years* now.

Anyone who doesn't understand this - try running Vista on a P4D 2.8Ghz with 768Mb Ram ;-)

I really, really don't see the use for this outside department stores who want something shiny to tempt customers...

Steven R

Microsoft slams OEMs over XP SP3 install cock-up

@Kerry Hoskin

"All this "it's an AMD issue" is passing the buck a bit. I've tested SP3 on 4 DELLGX620's so NOT AMD chipsets and 2 of them failed, one with a 0x0000007 and the other with a constant reboot issue, grrrrrrrr"

Oddly, I've got 16 GX620s [3ghz P4D] and they're quite happy with SP3 - but I *did* start from a clean image using the Dell OEM Windows Setup CD and installed SP3 using the network redist package, as opposed to Autotragic Updates or the ISO file.

If you haven't tried that, it might be worth checking it with a bare, clean install - and obviously checking the really simple stuff; what sort of state are the caps around the voltage regulator in, how hot is the machine running, etc.

HTH :-)

Steven R

UK's tallest bovine soars to 6ft 6in

Sarah Bee

After that atrocious pun, I retract my previous statement.

Shocking.

Steven R

Re: Re: Deserve It

Hi Sarah.

I need a cuddle. You free tonight?

Mines the one with the knife holes in the back, which is the result of Ms Bees reaction to this post.

Steven R

Vendor touts notebook as desktop server replacement

RE: 1 hour battery life...

Or you could spend that £3000 on a pair of DL380s and a UPS and have proper servers.

DL360x2:

http://www.dabs.com/productview.aspx?quicklinx=4PS0&tduid=a1ce54355b33411380dfef1de0a0b334

UPS:

http://www.stuff-uk.net/?s=ST-AF414A

Still, nice bit of kit - keep it linked as a backup DC/file server with a mirror of some users storage space on a USB drive, and i guess you could get some use out of it in a power cut.

An answer to a question very, very few people have asked methinks?

Steven R

Brits favour ASBOs for unruly mobile users

How to stop people playing music through their phone

Take phone from hand, bend offender over, insert into anal cavity.

The above survey should be taken about as seriously as this survey.

Steven R

LapDome Planet Business laptop bag and shade

Sheer genius

I know what to get my friend for her birthday now - That cat tent is brilliant. No wonder shall her pussy [oo-er Mrs Slocum etc] have to make do with cardboard boxes for cover when it tries to ambush me as I walk past.

Laptop shade? What?

Steven R

Fedora 9 - an OS that even the Linux challenged can love

re:knoppix

You can get XP on a USB stick [I have the tools for it at home somewhere] already. I saw it. It was hideously, hideously slow on a machine with 768Mb RAM and a northwood P4 2.8.

I guess that could be down to it being an oldish USB stick [lower transfer speeds] but still, the concept of XP, god forbid Vista, on a USB pen, is shocking.

I might try it on a newer USB stick on the Twin Xeon, 4Gb RAM workstation I am sitting at just now one of these days to see if specs affect it that much.

I'll stick with Ubuntu on my home machine [I have 2Gb of RAM on my laptop now and it flys :-) ] methinks, I like being able to actually do stuff without too much fuss.

Steven R

Joke ico

Looks nice

I might throw that in a VM and have a shufty.

On the point of it being the first major distro with KDE4 bundled in it, wouldn't that be Kubuntu 8.04 remixed - or is that not counted as a distro [from what I can tell, it's Kubuntu 8.04 with KDE4 slapped on top]

Steven "feels safer with Gnome for now, thanks" Raith

Kiwi airliners converted into giant iPod docks

Bob Gender

That is EXACTLY how I read it, and nearly lost a gobful of coffee to it.

Brilliant.

Steven R

HP tipped to take over BT's datacentres in £1.5bn deal

Tony: You think that there is a link?

Yes, that both companies have serious moral problems at the top of the food chain when it comes to security policies for their users, staff and critics.

Perfect match, eh?

Steven R

Web cam images undo MacBook thieves

@DanB

I think the best answer to this is to have a remote session with full hardware access running in the background [IE not affecting their session] so you can access the hardware resources [such as a webcam for mugshots, and possibly the speakers so you can shout "I SEE YOU MOFO MUHAHAHA" etc down the wire to them] without giving them too much of a clue on their login session.

I don't suppose this would be terrifically hard to do with a *nix based system, but then, I'm not a software/OS dev and I rarely dabble in terminal services full stop, so I won't say any more ;-)

Steven "I SEE YOU MOFO" Raith.

Retailers risk libel nightmare over 'no-work' database

@Steen

In large swathes of the City/Finance world, that's called 'not being from the right background'.

That is, top flight university of course.

Mine is the one with the School Of Hard Knocks tie in the pocket.

Steven "Wrong side of the tracks" Raith :-)

Windows XP SP3 blame game begins

@John Stag

Hi John.

Those of us with an IQ that breaches figures normally associated with room temperature have this great trick.

It's called 'Testing'.

Hope that helps.

Steven R

EDF circles British nuclear powerplant sites

@Math Campbell

Meh, I'm just bitter - I never did fit in up north ;-)

Good comeback though - you don't here arguments like that down here, funnily enough. Hence the thumbs up.

*goes off to meander through Scotlands economic output*

Anyway, EDF making nuke plants in the UK [just to get back on topic] - well, someone has to, and UK.Gov is too fucking scared to be attached to it...

Steven "I'm half german anyway so I don't care" Raith ;-)

Math cambpell

As a Scot living doon sooth, I find your attitude appalingly short sighted.

tell me, other than North Sea oil [by definition a finite resource] what is the scottish economic and energy platform? Tourism and ginger "See yee Jimmy" caps?

Because no bugger up there is going to swallow their pride and build wind farms in 'unspoilt Scotland', and wave energy farms - well, what a roaring success they have been, eh?

Honestly, I'm glad I got out of Scotland when I did, it seems that everyone's IQ has dropped by a good thirty points in the last five years....

Steven R

Proud Scot.

Not proud of Scotland.

Windows XP SP3 sends PCs into endless reboot

@AC

"Over the past fortnight I've updated 30 PCs and laptops of varying power and age with SP3, and they've taken between 11 minutes and 62 minutes. No, sadly, nothing went wrong...

Mine's the anorak with "Smug Git" on the back, in Gill Sans Extra Bold..."

I've had the same situation, and I've also been using the RCs and pre-release ones too, as I expect you have.

Surely our PCs are just so well built that we have no problems because we are NINJA, and those out there having problems are just full on fucking fuckwits who couldn't maintain an MS OS if their life depended on it?

[he says, under the false premise of 'starting healthy debate'...;-) ]

Mines the jacket with "if you can read this, F***ck you" on the back.

Steven R :-)

OEM Kit

Mike,

I'm making this image with the Dell OEM XP CD - it's working fine.

My 4gb USB pen, with all my tools on it, however, has just died a death and is now residing in the fucking bin.

[must have been SP3 that did it, cough, ahem ;-) ]

Steven R

That promised update...

Yes, I know you have all been waiting with baited breath to see if my PC is shafted.

Well, it's not. No issues at all, and an interim "SP3MitNeuProfile.gho" has been created so that I have something to fall back on if Sysprep causes the machine to shit it's biscuits.

Which it probably will.

Ah well!

Just the AXP2400Thoro@2200Mhz to put it on at home now....

Steven "can't afford an A64/Core2Duo" Raith

I'm saying nothing...

As I am about to put SP3 on a machine I have just taken a snapshot of [it's for an image I am building].

After my previous defense of SP3, who wants to bet a pint that the machine shits itself?

[Dell optiplex GX620 MicroMachine thingy, P4]

Updates on this important event later this afternoon....

Steven R

Microsoft orders 65nm Xbox 360 graphics chip

RRoD? Not an issue....

But I like the thought that pumping out less wattage, it might not require such aggressive cooling, making it more of a media box.

Not that I can afford one [and the HD ready telly to go with it] on my crappy wages.

:-(

Steven "any spare change for a cuppa tea, pal?" Raith

When flash mobs go bad

Leeds/Bradford?

My old man has lived and worked in Leeds and Bradford for over ten years?

Which is better?

Scarborough, because it's not as big a shithole as either of the above.

Steven R

Phone-theft hotspots named and shamed

Phones only go missing in pubs..

If you are stupid enough to leave them on the table, or in something else in plain site, like a handbag or backpack.

The only people I have seen lose phones are the people who constantly show off their iPhone/N95Supercomputer/D600Mediacentre etc as if it were some kind of sign of their sexual prowess.

This goes for girls who leave their mobile phones at the top of their wide open handbag at the edge of the bar/table etc too.

Simple rule - if you have something valuable, either don't take it with you or keep your eyes on it - it's not tricky, is it?

Steven "has never had anything nicked from him in a boozer, but has had to stamp on a few wandering hands to keep it that way" Raith.

Wanted: Americans to join Al Qaeda

Corrected...

"By speaking directly to potential followers in the Blair and Brown cabinet, G W Bush and others are able to control their message, suppress dissent, and offer a hateful worldview that dictates, based on a perversion of the Christian faith, that violence is the only remedy to rectify perceived wrongs," the senators wrote.

Childish, I know, but I couldn't help myself.

Mine is the overly heavy one with the wires poking out - I'll be avoiding the tube today...

Steven R

Nvidia paid the right amount for 3dfx, court affirms

Memories...

Aar, I remember a mate with a PII 200 [or something similar] playing Carmageddon without 3DFX acceleration, and with, and thinking that man had truly become god!

Looking back, I still preferred 320x200x256 Doom II though.

Sam - how much of that is poetic license and how much is real? How much did these cards suck in terms of power? I wasn't into hardware back in those days, not *seriously* anyway...

Steven R

India and Belgium decry Chinese cyber attacks

Re:At the risk of sounding xenophobic...

Name and shame, mofo.

Steven R

Chris Miller is correct

Belguim indeed.

Does make me wonder why those jolly chinamen [and women, of course] wouldbe poking around belgian interests? I mean, what important information could they gleam?

New recipes for high quality chocolate? [they are turning into a consumer based society after all]

Technical data from Fabrique Nationale so they can make cheap knockoffs of P90s? Perhaps the Type 56 [one of the most successful AK47 knockoffs in second and third world countries] will be replaced with a suspicioucly familiar 'type 90' bullpup SMG sometime in the near future? ;-)

Possibly being bundled with some tasty dark chocolate to entice overseas buyers?

Mine is the long overcoat with the large amounts of firearms underneath...and the 70% cocoa chocolate bar in the breast pocket.

Steven R

Windows XP SP3 leaps into the tubes

@BlueRanger

If you like fast bootups, get a hold of MS Bootvis.

It's no longer supported by MS, but I've been using it on machines I have been building to near as dammit half the bootup time [from 30-ish secs to more like 16-18 in most cases].

Interesting to note the massive memory use dropoff on boot - will have to check that on the SP2 machines I have that still need updating.

Steven R

Just a note...

Anyone who downloaded this last night, like me, the link on the page originally pointed to the Debug/checked package which I'm told isn't the best one to install on a real machine outwith development/debug environments - but the network install [IE the public redistributable that you can slipstream into an XP CD/install on an offline machine etc] is linked there now :-)

As for all those people going "Dur, why would you bother, SP2 ain't broke" ; format your hard drive, install XP SP2, and don't update it - until XP SP3 install discs are available, any clean install machine is two years out of date patchwise. SP3 redistributable lets you patch those up to April 08 levels in the space of an hour or so [excluding download, obviously].

Useful for those of us who work in IT for imaging, and to guarentee that a machine is patched to a certain level without worrying about Windows Update

A: taking hours and hours to download and install

B: Breaking halfway through and missing patches inbetween.

HTH :-)

Steven R

@Chris C

I've had SP3 RCs and 'buggy' versions one the machines I need to put on for a while now as I have been testing them and it's caused no problems thus far.

Although I'm still 'testing' as far as I'm concerned, I don't expect to find anything scary in there; it's effectivly just an accumulation of patches, and these are clean install machines, so it's about the safest environment for an SP3 install - AFAIK problems that have been found have been related to strange, rare tools and dodgy third party components. Not virgin installations on widespread, mass manufactured [Dell] hardware. I'm not so niave as to just blindly accept that all will be bliss however, of course - but then my machines are not 'production' yet so I'm prepared to take a step into the dark on this.

In any case Automagic Updates have caused me *far* more problems than redistributable service packs over the years - and I'd rather have machines that are secure than machines that are only patched up to a level from three years ago.

Simple as. Contrary to popular belief, I *do* have a vague, wishy washy, rough idea what I am doing ;-)

Steven "fucked if he is spending 200 hours updating 50PCs over a 2meg DSL lin" Raith

NB: I'm not running a domain, I don't have WSUS and I don't have the option of slipstreaming the current 'up to SP3 level' patches into an image [neither of which I am happy about but my hands are tied], so I hope you can see why SP3 is of use to me!

Finally...

An official release.

I have about fifty PCs that require updating from SP2 [I didn't/wasn't allowed to make the image, unfornately or I woudn't have the problem...] and at least now it will only take an hour per PC to patch them up to a decent standard, not half a day with a dozen restarts.

Given that five of the machines have the previous 'buggy' release on them and are fine, who wants to make a small wager that the 'fixed' release completely fucks the other machines?

Steven "no faith" Raith

Defra steps up probe into honeybee wipeout

Insectiod Spots this year:

One bee looking a bit sorry for itself early Feb in the warm spot we had - I guess it didn't last long either. Fat bastard of a thing, maybe a queen?

Not seen many bees since, but a FUCKING HUGE wasp decided to spend a good five minutes checking out my fucking window yesterday as I was trying to tidy up my flat - proper big sod, a good two inches long.

Proper shook me up when it whacked into my face as I was cleaning the blinds. Laugh? I nearly shat!

As for Sarah Bee, surely the question we need to ask, is is she fluffy and fuzzy and strokeable like a bumblebee, or is she slim hipped and waspish like a...er...wasp?

These questions must be asked!

[unless the editor mods them out, of course]

Steven "has had too much sugary drinks and coffee today" Raith.