Posts by James Smith

Germany announces ITER fusion-reactor supercomputer

24GB?

Hmmmm. 24GB per CPU or 24GB for the entire system? Doesn't sound right if its the entire system.

Our bog standard web hosting nodes have 16GB RAM each.

Global Wii sales nearing 30m

Oi!

Where's the conversion to £ for the lazy?

Lovefilm 1, BitTorrent/iTunes/retail 0

Too many scratched disks

I've used this service for a while and I can see the benefit - But, we had too many scratched disks causing films to freeze or not play at all.

People need to learn to look after things, it was immensely annoying, cancelled it in the end.

Chinese cops opt for Segways

Height Booster

We all know Chinese people are short, so the real reason for using Segways is to increase their height.

Metadata ruins Google's anonymous eBay Australia protest

PayPal is expensive and cumbersome

For merchants, PayPal is very expensive when compared to alternatives. Its also very cumbersome to use, IMO.

UK Office of Government Commerce cracks one off

I don't see it ...

Someone at El Reg must be desperate, because I can't see it.

Rock rolls out 12in, 1kg sub-notebook

Yesterday's parts with today's miniaturisation

*yawn*.

It has a parallel HDD? I've pretty much forgotten those things existed!

Comcast acquires BitTorrent for $53bn

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAAHAHAHAHA

Chuckle Chuckle.

Parallels pads hosting play with ModernGigabyte buy

Pity, because its rubbish

I do hope the people over at Parallels sack the current developers working at ModernGigabyte. ModernBill was good about three years ago. Now though, its full of bugs and half baked ideas.

Also, I smell an IPO. Parallels has been on a buying spree of late, boasting its product offerings.

Intel slims low-power Xeon chips to 45nm

Re: what about AMD?

Gone with the wind they be.

Intel have well and truly outpaced AMD in recent years, certainly in the low to mid end server business.

Although I would like to see direct comparisons.

Dell quads up single-socket rockets

Yummy

Lots `o` memory.

However, the problem these days is not CPU power or memory capacity, its disk I/O.

Telehouse plans £80m London data centre expansion

@ By P Henry

I had two racks worth of kit in Telehouse East in Docklands for over two years with no loss of power.

@ Anonymous Coward: Out of the DC's my company has equipment in, Telehouse is by far the best on security.

The Spooks style tubes alone make it uber.

RIM out to patent BlackBerry slider

They won't get it ...

As has been mentioned above, HTC devices use this very concept, to great affect.

My branded Orange SPV M3100 (HTC TyTn I believe) uses this very system.

Pakistan blocks YouTube

Urm ...

Something else must have happened to cause the Worldwide outage. Maybe Pakistan asked YouTube to implement some kind of blocking their end but accidentally setup a wildcard *.*.*.* :p

Pakistan's ISPs blocking access would have had no affect on routing of, say, UK Internet users to America.

I did wonder though why YouTube wasn't working, when on Sunday I was trying to find a clip of the tackle on Arsenal's striker Eduardo.

Major Linux security glitch lets hackers in at Claranet

FreeBSD

FreeBSD for the win.

Linux is the ghey.

Pave your patio with... er, Game Boys

@ Anonymous Coward

Sounds like a good idea.

WOW!

I shall be buying some of these when I purchase my house later in the year, they will go nicely in the garden. I spent many hours of my childhood on a Game Boy and this is a marvelous idea.

Reg readers bring down HMRC website

Don't leave it until the last minute!

Its simple, don't leave it until the last minute - It only takes 15 minutes and then its done.

Germany flicks off-switch on DAB

Bunny hopped by the net

I listen to the radio in the car or in the office.

In the office, I'll stream the station over the net ...

In the car, standard FM is good enough.

Dell XPS M1330 laptop

Looks good

It looks like a pretty good laptop. I may consider buying one to replace my aging Fujitsu Siemens laptop.

If like me, you want something mobile when working away from home, but at the same time play the odd hour on a few games, then it seems like a good compromise.

But if they're bringing a model out with a high def drive, I may just wait for that.

Star Trek XI teaser trailer beams onto web

Oh Goody

Nothing quite like a good star trek movie :)

I shall be dragging the missus along to watch this one. Revenge time, I was forced to endure Pride and Prejudice.

Rackable kicks Xeon 7000 chips into fresh, beefy server

Storage is a bit weak

With 1TB SATA disks on the market, surely the unit can support those?

USB 'compact cassette' promises 1980s nostalgia, home taping

Riiiiiiiight

64MB?

Piss off.

Mobile phone users should drive faster says prof

So you can hear

If I'm using a bluetooth headset while driving I will usually slow down, if on a motorway, to properly hear the other person.

There's an awful lot of noise while driving on the motorway and you'll struggle to hear otherwise.

Laptop power cranks up a gear

I'll have it

I sit at a desk all day and its not good on the waist line.

I'll happily use one of these a few hours a day!

DNS security improves as firms tool up to tackle spam

Without ...

Without recursion, no one would be able to resolve anything.

Dutch teen swipes furniture from virtual hotel

Coma

I laughed myself into a coma after writing this.

Barracuda skydroid to make comeback?

What do they do with it?

It does worry me somewhat the amount of money continental Europe spends on their armies. Because they dont do anything with them.

If they sent some stuff over to Afghanistan and actually did something that would be nice.

Digital Switchover: town to lose BBC 2 tomorrow

Rubbish

Whats all this rubbish about Sky and poor signals? I've had it for seven years in a built up urban area with no problems.

You don't need to change your TV

Some people are missing something here.

You don't need to change your TV, just get a set top box and connect it to your scart socket.

Re: Sweden

Population of Sweden: 9,142,817

Population of Britain: 60,587,300

Go figure.

Re: "Anaglogue TV's" - every TV I've ever bought has a scart socket. Freeview box = £30 and connects to a scart socket. I don't understand why people don't have either Sky or Virgin. Its far superior to anything Freeview can offer. You can get the whole lot (landline, mobile, broadband and TV for £40 /month. Bargain.

You bought into mobile email - what have you got to show for it?

It's Pants

Mobile e-mail is pants. I receive 300 legitimate e-mails a day, of various natures. How can a phone deal with that load? It can't, because the network speeds are still pants virtually everywhere.

If you're able to use mobile e-mail then you don't need it, because what you're receiving is frivolous tosh.

Oyster card evolves into OnePulse

Re: Great idea, but limited...

"I challenge ANYONE to find useable parking in central London for that amount or under"

OK, so I didn't park in central London yesterday, but I did park in Stratford, an equally busy, if not foreign(er) part of London and it was £5.50 for four hours.

I've applied

It's about time we had such devices introduced. The days of having to carry around cash to make small transactions should be numbered. All we need now is to convert every car park in the land to take these payments and we'll never need cash again.

Cops seek 179mph net vid biker

Whats he on about

Whats the yank on about? Here in glorious Britain we've had MPH since the dawn of time. No silly KPH here.

UK payment service outage leaves users fuming

Re: Still problems, 36 hours later...

I completely agree. There should have been no other changes, other than forcing everyone to use 3D Secure. But our existing ProtX integrations were completely broken by other changes, which were NOT communicated by ProtX, no information at all was provided about these changes. Their document states a load of stuff as "optional", but in the end it is actually required!

Also, they were not purchased by SAGA, it was Sage - Unless you're being sarcastic and I'm being pedantic by refusing to accept the sarcasm and correcting you :p

Just the half of it

Today's outage is just half of the issue with ProtX.

Over the past two months we've tried contacting ProtX to learn about how their new payment system is going to work with all the "3D Secure" stuff Maestro are rolling out along with changes ProtX themselves are making to their recurring billing system (whereby a client signs up and we bill them monthly, quarterly etc without the client re-entering card details), but no one at ProtX seems to know what actually is changing.

ProtX is cheap compared to alternatives, namely the likes of WorldPay who charge an awful lot in transaction fees, but with 10,000 businesses using their system, ProtX need to get their act together. If they need to employ more qualified staff then for god sake do so, theres nothing worst than a company sticking their head in the sand ignoring the clients and they shouldn't be afraid to increase prices if we see real results. The next cheapest payment gateway we could use would be almost five times more than we currently pay ProtX.

Time to blacklist blacklists

The spam list controllers seem to think they are above the law

RBL's can work, if the controllers are not overzealous.

Anyone involved in any small, medium or large ISP / Web Host will have had, at some point, a bad experience with one of the many RBL's. SORBS and SpamHaus in my experience are the worst offenders. SORBS even want money to be removed, how is that any different to the extortion methods a DoS gang would use?

The problem is they think they are above the law. They think the fight against spam is their god given right and who cares if legitimate mail is rejected, who cares if businesses are disrupted, loosing them money.

One of our clients has wrongly been listed as a ROSKO on SpamHaus and is in the process of seeking legal advice on taking action against SpamHaus, because SpamHaus refuse to listen to any arguments regarding the incorrect listing.

There’s a few precedents to legal action against SpamHaus, but they simply ignore the judgments and the fines imposed on them, as many of these judgements were outside of the UK.