Posts by calmeilles

Tandy 102 proto-laptop still alive and beeping after 30 years, complete with AA batteries

Tandy 100

I encountered a Tandy 100 when I went to work for a journalist in 1984. Complete with acoustic coupler to phone in pieces.

Nine years later I began working for the newspaper at the other end of the phone line, complete with rack of 300 baud modems.

In '84 it seemed a technological marvel. But as better options turned up it was strangely hard to persuade the journalists to give up their Tandy's. Robust, simple and functional they were trusted far more than the new-fangled laptop things.

The modems finally went in 2003 — with the mournful howls of the dozen news-hounds still using them — after 20 years of service.

Why Tim Cook is wrong: A privacy advocate's view

It seems that the phone in question is a 5c and doesn't have the secure enclave.

https://blog.trailofbits.com/2016/02/17/apple-can-comply-with-the-fbi-court-order/

That's cute, Germany – China shows the world how fusion is done

Re 3. Laser refers to the ignition method. The confinement in that case is inertial.

Alphabetti spaghetti: What Wall Street isn't telling you about Google

Re: There is no free lunch

But in 1995 Mapquest was doing that and a double handful of web search engines had been launched. Two years later ShareYourWorld gave us video.

Google came along with a better search engine algorithm. Arguably eventually a better everything they subsequently bought. But looking at their long list of acquisitions from Deja News in 2001 onwards Google's vision has been how to market and monetise products while fundamental innovation has been very thin on the ground. Do it better / faster / slicker / wider / higher / deeper is all good stuff for the user and has created Google's success. But every genuinely new concept has come from outside.

After all, why invent when you can buy.

Cabling horrors unplugged: Reg readers reveal worst nightmares

Re: Wrong spec co-ax

Oliver Heaviside. A self-taught physicist and mathematician

And one of two physicists who predicted the existence of the Kennelly–Heaviside layer.

That's why each cable needs to be uniquely labelled both ends. And every run have a few spares just in case.

BOFH: I want no memory of this pointless conversation. Alcohol please

We always know somewhere to stash the bodies.

Server retired after 18 years and ten months – beat that, readers!

Some hardware just lasts.

And there's little predicting which will and which won't.

I had a Sparc 20 that was in use (albeit not always for the same purpose) from 1995 until 2009. When finally closed down for decommissioning it showed 1953 days uptime.

BBC News website takes New Year's Eve break

Re: It's not just their website

Ummm.... I'm getting R4 streaming no problem.

AWS outage knocks Amazon, Netflix, Tinder and IMDb in MEGA data collapse

Re: I thought part of the point of [my butt] was FAILOVER...

"AWS services went down due to an AWS balls-up. Their customers services went down due to customers not deploying redundant solutions in the AWS cloud - or indeed a multi-vendor deployment, if you have to have your backup options in the same region."

That. Exactly that.

Cannot be repeated too often.

Why OH WHY did Blighty privatise EVERYTHING?

But public money...

The one glaring difference between public transport and the other privatisations is the need for subsidy.

Whatever else might be beneficial about the dynamics of private ownership how does it make sense to put public money into an industry that pays dividends to private investors?

It's easy to accuse SNCF and DB of not being particularly well run but there is a basic political consensus that transport is a public good provided at public expense to the benefit of all — even those who never use it benefit from the positive effect on the economy over all.

The logic of privatisation should demand that transport becomes self-supporting yet there is also a wide understanding that to be so the already expensive fare structure would have to become prohibitive for many. Beyond the direct cash it is inconceivable that an entirely unsubsidised industry could make infrastructure investment such as Crossrail.

When you look more broadly at pressures of profit, investment and the public good the example of the water companies is clearly picked to make a point. A counter-example might be the economically vital roll out of fast broadband, something that profitable VM and BT wouldn't undertake without the government providing £2bn subsidy (and still fails to mandate fibre to the premises).

Not everything is rosy in the world of privatisation.

Let's talk about the (real) price of flash and spinning disks

Power?

Real life measures for power and cooling late last year SAS cost about 100p per gig per year, SATA 50p per gig per year, Flash 12p per gig per year for a head and 7p per gig per year for a dumb-ish shelf.

There's a lot more to the TCO or cost efficiency than either capital outlay or iops.

Bank of America wants to shove its IT into an OpenCompute cloud. What could go wrong?

Pretty certain that you're right here if for no other reason that public cloud just won't satisfy the regulatory regime.

We all know how much more efficient commodity and VM can be in all sorts of areas (and how it can be messed up!) right? The financials for a cloud solution could look very attractive. The scale at which banks use hardware make that important to them and similarly their scale makes it practical; it's not an SME's half rack of blades but distributed data centres full.

For many it'd not be conceptually a great leap. Surely we're used to sitting at a desk in London running a "machine" in Weymouth with a hot shadow in Frankfurt and its backups in Houston and Vancouver. Financial institutions have been doing this sort of stuff since the 60s.

Top Euro court ends mega ebook VAT slash in France, Luxembourg

A book by any other name...

HMRC took the view that e-books were "services" rather than books right from the start in the belief — now shown to be justified — that EU law as written pointed that way.

Personally I'd rather consider the "value" of a book to be it's text and so a book would be a book regardless of the means of delivery and therefore rather approved the philosophical implications of the Luxembourg tax authorities initial decision even while recognising that it was a money motivated twist designed to attract Amazon and the like.

Suits vs ponytailed hipsters: What's next for enterprise IT

Ponytailed hipsters in suits.

Fill 'er up: 'Leccy car firm Tesla brings back PUMP SERVICE

Re: They still do this in Europe

Service stations on the autostrada almost invariably have self service lines and attendant served lines.

There is a 3-8 cent per litre difference in price between them. I usually choose to pay the premium to have the tank filled for me as it saves the fuss of securing the car and going to the cash desk.

Judge spanks SCO in ancient ownership of Unix lawsuit

Re: Zombix

I remember using SCO Unix: Insert disk 1 of 94.

I was much, much younger then.

Microsoft says January Windows 10 build will excite sysadmins

Re: We do not need interface changes, they already work and we know how to use them

Time was that the learning curve of a changed interface was pain accepted because there'd be benefits to be had.

Now the benefits are more questionable.

For me what has come to be terms the "classic" look (and Word pre-ribbon) remains the most productive. Of course this may just be because I'm an old fossil incapable of taking on new stuff.

Blast-off! Boat free launch at last. Orion heads for space

Re: Degrees

And re-entry speed of 53.76 megafurlongs* per fortnight.

(* Yes, I know.)

UK slaps 25 per cent 'Google Tax' on tech multinationals

Re: Apple and Amazon... intangible?

If someone wants a quarter of the apple turnover they'd better say if that's with or without custard.

Google Chrome on Windows 'completely unusable', gripe users

Too much randomness

Two identical 16GB machines with Ubuntu 14.04.1

The one that was upgraded from 12.04 is fine (it's what I'm using right now). The new install crashed with the Aww snap nonsense. Turning off hardware acceleration reduced that (and fixed a Google Maps display issue) but flash still crashes regularly. No problem when it's just an ad but a pita with some other stuff.

Similar hardware with Win7Pro doesn't exhibit any problems.

But 8GB W7p Laptop Chrome becomes slow to unresponsive usually after just a few minutes use. Finally a 1GB netbook WinXP has never been able to run Chrome although my now defunct 4GB XP and 8GB Vista desktops did without apparent problem.

I started using Chrome because the "bloated" resource hogging of Firefox was getting to be an issue. But liking to use the same bowser on all regularly used machines Chrome has become untenable might mean it's back to Firefox.

systemd row ends with Debian getting forked

End of the world

This reeks of One Ring To Rule Them All syndrome.

It was binary logging that thrust the first icy dagger of despair into my soul but the final, incontrovertible proof of ultimate and unstoppable Evil was visiting the homepage and being assailed with the incantation...

..."Follow us on Google+"

Snapper's decisions: Whatever happened to real photography?

Re: nice commentary

You last point is germane. As a one-time film user it took me years to learn that taking lots and lots of frames not only wasn't going to bankrupt me it was actually allowed, not some form of "cheating."

'National roaming' law: Stubborn UK operators to be forced to share

Re: Excellent if it happens...

There may be a mild irony in that early license conditions prohibited operators from implementing local roaming. This forced them to erect separate networks which is what government considered to be in the best interests of fostering competition.

Dumping gear in the public cloud: It's about ease of use, stupid

We're doomed I tell you....

Having looked at alternative hardware for exactly this purpose I'd suggest that the less expensive options have compromises not mentioned here. Sometimes acceptable, sometime not. often not, actually.

An aspect not mentioned is all those expensive sysadmins and hardware engineers you no longer have to employ when someone else is doing "that stuff" for you and the in-house "expertise" consists of point and click in a web interface.

VMware builds product executables on 50 Mac Minis

"It looks a little odd that a $6bn concern like VMware is using consumer-grade kit for important chores."

First Apple stopped making enterprise quality kit. It wasn't wonderful stuff but at least it had a few basics like dual power supplies, multiple NICs and remote management.

Then after long prevarication if finally licensed MacOS on VMWare... But only if your VMWare was on Apple hardware. Which would have been fine if they made anything fit to go into a data centre.

I suppose that a 50-node ESX cluster addresses the lack of in-built redundancy, now you can even get cute little trays to mount Mac Minis in racks too. But still I'd tell people dazzled by the shiny that if they insist on Macs in my data centre their uptime SLA is 0.

This article has been deleted

Is this supposed to be a tech site?

"Except it would only be fair to note that the Labour Party has "erased the internet" too. Labour’s housecleaning has removed almost everything prior to the start of the current leadership, and the Wayback Machine (sorry, "the internet") is pretty empty of Labour's past as well as that of the Tories."

Only because your search is based on their new structure, using the search term http://www.labour.org.uk/news-archive

If you were to search on http://www.labour.org.uk/ lo, history re-appears. Here's 6 May 2010, http://web.archive.org/web/20100506034527/http://www2.labour.org.uk/vote-labour ah! heady days.

Adobe exec puffs cloud shop: Online features are so 'compelling'... What are they again?

It's the end

For me at least. As a hobbyist user of Photoshop I've been an Adobe customer since for ever and, to save money, bought only every other release these last few.

Doubtless this behaviour is what riles Adobe. But the subscription model is far more expensive than I can justify for a hobby. My guess is that the same is going to be true for many, perhaps the majority, of private users. So Adobe rather than make more money out of me you've lost a little.

However what will make the difference will be the take-up by corporate customers. That I cannot guess about. So far it doesn't look good but corps. are notoriously slow so maybe Adobe will keep them as CS6 becomes too old to use.

Blighty's great digital radio switchover targets missed AGAIN

Re: DAB in cars

Is there an in-car receiver that will do DAB here, T-DBM in France and DAB+ in Italy?

(And cost less than the car it's fitted to of course.)

Bin half-baked Raspberry Pi hubs, says Pimoroni: Try our upper-crust kit

Re: You can get the AC adaptor with either UK or European power pins

"CEE 7/16 ... doesn't work in Italy."

It'll fit the CEI 23-16/VII 10A variant, the multi-standard bipasso 10A or 16A Schuko and the VIMAR universale.

In practice it's rare to find a room where you can't use one.

Re: The least of its problems

Indeed. And more so if they ever put PoE in them. (Yes, i know you can achieve this with some stuff, but still...)

Samsung Galaxy S4 Active: The mobe for CHUCK NORRIS TYPES

Re: About bloody time!

Going up it should be fine, air in the phone should be expelled.

But coming down air will be sucked in. If the phone is more than just damp then so will water.

Full metal jacket: Nokia launches new Lumia 925

Re: I don't think you will find anyone that disagree's about Nokia's ability to make nice hardware

I'm afraid that I have to agree.

All my phones except the very first have been Nokias and on the basis of long-standing satisfaction I took another at latest upgrade not paying attention to the fact that it was a Windows phone. Alas the suckage is huge starting with the inability to take a verifiable, readable back-up, going on the the inability to manipulate SMSs via a computer and descending from there to the pits.

I'm cheap, so I won't be replacing it until the next freebie but that will not be a Windows phone and if they offer nothing else it will not be a Nokia however shiny the hardware may seem.

Copper load of that: Ofcom claims HUGE jump in 'average' broadband speed

The answer is amphibians

Had one where the cable came down the pole into a culvert that was usually flooded and inhabited by toads. BB stopped working when it dried out. It also stopped working if still wet but toads removed. Doubtless there's an RFC for this somewhere...