Posts by Tim Ryan

Canada says yes to net neutrality – and no to Trump advisor, eh?

Ajit Pai!

Just where did Trump find this bozo. Or more to the point who paid him to appoint this slimy excuse for a human being.

Online criminals iced as cops bury malware-spewing Avalanche

Yeah just who is your daddy?

Brace yourself, network admins, Amazon Video just hit 200 nations

Hey where's the ChromeCast support

They launched in Canada on Wednesday, I thought it had to be better than the defunct SHOMI service, but no ChromeCast support, Just a rambling bullshit description on how to use a browser to cast.

They have some work to do....

Keep up the pressure on the telcos, Canada

The reality of rural fiber access!

Ahh Trevor

I think you have gone a little bolshie on us. There is little doubt that the telco monopolies will take advantage of any and all opportunities they can find to profit, and will actively obstruct any other operator intruding on what they consider their rightful turf to be shared with nobody. The earlier comment about the only color they respect is green is right on the button. This is capitalism.

Having said that the underlying technology is accessible and easy for anyone with a little skill to deploy. There are only two significant impediments that the telcos use to screw us all.

1) Right of way access. Getting access to the roads or to pole infrastructure is difficult and is deliberately made as inaccessible as possible.

2) Backbone Peering access. This is the last piece of the monopoly, and the one issue that should be approached as it is one that could be legislated and made mandatory. If ALL holders of an AS or Autonomous System number were forced to peer at all switch closets the whole monopoly structure would cease to exist.

For a rural fiber project I purchased 12 fiber single mode drop line for fifty cents a meter in 4 Km spools. This cable can be ploughed in to a right of way or ditch buried, and for runs of 40 Km can be carried without powered repeaters at speeds up to 100 Gbit per fiber. The largest single cost is the cost of ditching. This is not rocket science, communities and small ISP's can do this and eliminate the telcos, so long as network access is available.

Stop bitching, and get organized, and build it out yourself. You can assume that the telcos will fight you, but if your community is organized you can win. We have in Kaslo BC population 1000 getting 30 megabit symmetric FTTH at $60 a month. You can too. Community based not for profit ISP's are the answer for rural communities. The bigger the center the more politics you have to wade thru, and that is a shame, but the the days of fiber for rural areas is possible.

Windows 10 pain: Reg man has 75 per cent upgrade failure rate

I have had only one issue

My 2012 vintage Asus Zenbook had a touchpad driver issue that was quickly solved with an update. I have been running W10 since the CTP's in late 2014. It is definitively the best windows release ever, and the only release that has a reliable upgrade in place percentage. No guarantee, but the vast majority will fully update with all your apps ready to use. My 2008 vintage I7 Quad desktop with an ancient bios was cheerfully upgraded and has been running thru probably 50 update builds in the Insider fast loop.

What kind of geek would leave all this to the day before the gimme license expired....

Free Windows 10 upgrade: Time is running out – should you do it?

Go For It!

I have been running 10 since Q4 2014 when it was a pretty crude insider beta. Its been pretty much ready for prime time since the end of Q1 2015, and as it stands I am sending this from the Edge browser on Version 1607 (Build 14393.3) and this is the release code you will get for the full rollout on July 29. This product is good to go and a dream to maintain compared to 7, and is everything that 8.1 was supposed to be (but wasn't).

One in five consumers upgraded to Win10 for free instead of buying a PC

Reality Check Folks....

The fact that maybe a fifth of Windows users ran the upgrade (or worked with Insider Builds) and discovered that Win 10 gave capable hardware a new lease on life.... BONUS! Unless you are a PC manufacturer.

My 2009 vintage desktop got a new 1TB SSD, and a new 21:9 monitor, and I'm thinking its good for a few more years. It helps if you buy top of the line to start with, I7 Quad, 16GB of DDR3, and a top flight vid card.

My 2012 vintage ZenBook UX51VZA went Windows 10 without a whimper but for a touchpad driver that needed replacing.

That's two machines that will give me at least three more years without issue, and thank you very much to Satya Nadella and kudos to Microsoft.

For the poor schmuck who bought barely capable junk that was just good enough to boot a new OS at launch time, (think early win 8 release hardware) the upgrade sent them running for a new machine!

Such is life. I think Win 10 is a winner big time. The whiners are the PC builders whose products are barely capable of booting the OS in the first place. They deserve to whine and be ignored. Their consumer market garbage is what brings Windows into disrepute.

Color me all in on Win 10!

TeamViewer beefs up account security after rash of PC, Mac hijacks

Since when is user stupidity TeamViewer's Problem?

Oh Please,

I am astounded at the level of accusation leveled at TeamViewer. From where I sit, and I have corporately licensed this product since version 4 and will continue to do so going forward, the only error that TV GmbH has made was to provide free versions that allowed idiots with pathetic password security to commit gross stupidity. After having done so the same fools who used common creds everywhere including in their Browser cached creds to access PayPal and Amazon, used those same creds to access TV configured to start on boot with those creds for remote access.

This is somehow TV's fault? Are you fucking NUTS.

I have many hundreds of end users who have taken up TV's freebie offer and been stupid about how they did it. I don't like the freebie policy, but thats TV's business choice. You could maybe make a case of TV having a sloppy PR department, but putting this responsibility on them is close to accusing a rope manufacturer because some idiot hung himself!

Adobe scrambles to untangle itself from QuickTime after Apple throws it over a cliff

And we will now throw Apple ProRes in the bin with it!

I suppose nobody should be remotely surprised with Apple's arrogance. The only reason that QuickTime for Windows ever existed on my systems was to provide a codec for Apple PrRes encoded mov files. This simply justifies the elimination of any codec or utilities based on Apple proprietary garbage.

That's the end of the line for ProRes in my workflows and we will cease accepting this rubbish from contractors.

Eat shit Apple!

Windows 10 growth stalls during October

Re: Interested to see how this turns out...

Nonsense, while I don't agree with the upgrade method, 10 is the best Windows ever. I moved my hardware over to 10 a year ago and even the ctp versions were an improvement on 8.1

Jeep Cherokee 2.2: Capable, comfortable ... but just not very Jeep

Yes Well the TrailHawk is my third Jeep!

And for those of us who did our homework before plonking down $40K. It has been a really worthy replacement for my 4.7L '02 GC and the 4L '93 Cherokee Sport before it.

What's more it goes like a banshee on the highway at 10L per 100K handles like a Mini Cooper and crawls the back country where I live in Canada with total aplomb. This review is a prime example of technological masturbation.

How I poured a client's emails straight into the spam bin – with one Friday evening change

Re: What is this "Email Spam" of which you write?

Then again you are using the mail service that simply doesn't do NDR's so you never know what you didn't get and your senders never know that it didn't get there. FAIL bigtime

Typical Geek Whingeing...

Now aren't you all really happy that your employer doesn't read this message string? Yes Exchange because it's the most useful groupware app out there. Because the entire user base (non geeks) know how to use it, and it handles message traffic reporting and receipting back to the user. As a corporate message machine and functional and secure store of corporate message traffic and business history its unmatched. Take your google garbage and stuff it where the sun doesn't shine. Any business owner stupid enough to allow a lazy bunch of geeks to push gmail deserves what he gets.

Yes that means you Trevor. We pay you to do the job not whinge about it! and you got away with this until I bitched to you on Sunday.

Graphics pros left hanging as Adobe Creative Cloud outage nears 24 hours

Re: Why not have a short grace period for licenses?

They actually have a tone of grace all of my CC apps ran just fine thru this outage. This article is a load of crap and does not represent reality. The login servers may have been down but the apps all ran without issue!!!

ICANN boss: 'Russia and China will NOT take over interwebs'

Re: ICANN doesn't control the Internet

This is the first and only sensible statement made so far. Lets be clear, ICANN has run as an autonomous entity for close to two decades, generated its own operating funds, and the sum total of US "control" of ICANN has been a very old Commerce Department contract that has been continuously extended. In theory the US Commerce department could rescind the contract and proceed to run it themselves. The likelihood of that taking place is about zero, short of that there is no control, its all BS from politicians. What will likely take place after a lot of shouting and posturing is that ICANN will be set free to operate as it has for the last two decades. Who will be pissed off? The ITU which is an ugly UN and Telco monopoly, and that's a really good thing!!!!

How Microsoft can keep Win XP alive – and WHY: A real-world example

The facts of Life

As the owner of a couple of million dollars worth of kit running Windows 2000, even a few bits of NT4 with hardware boards and drivers that there is no way can be upgraded, the pending runout of XP was and is expected. Its a fact of life when you build industrial equipment on an IT platform. It can and will be worked around. The issue of short lifecycles on IT products and long lifecycles on industrial hardware is not going away, and Microsoft is no better or worse than the others in the IT business. Ask some scanner operators with key locked software running on Mac System 8 and praying that the hardware doesn't die. I'll bet on Microsoft any day over MacOS or perish the thought Solaris or HPUX.

Trevor is right, and a past master at patching, working around, and resolving just these sorts of issues. After all isn't this the reason we all continue to feed the geeks?

Windows 8 Surface: best tablet, best laptop OR compromised and confusing?

CTO at Technicare

Its really interesting to watch the fanboi response to the Win8 plus hardware launch. This may well be the first major OS launch from ANY vendor that doesn't break large amounts of third party application software.

Take that Apple!

There has been so much whingeing about how the user community is going to be hopelessly confused by the UI changes in Win 8. These are not UI changes as much as they are UI extensions, and the vast majority of users will have these issues dealt with in a day.

Now if they would just get rid of that blowhard CEO....