Posts by Clod

Martian microbes may just be resting – boffins

"Just resting"

Nah they're just pinin' for the fjords, innit?

Mine's the one with the Norwegian Blue in the pocket.

Metal 3D printing at 100 times the speed and a twentieth of the cost

Re: Inject printers cheaper than Laser printers

Canon inkjet: $80 every 6 months

HP LaserJet 4Plus: $80 every 10 years = $4 every 6 months

The cost per page is left as an exercise for the reader.

What the fdisk? Storage Spaces Direct just vanished from Windows Server in version 1709

Welcome, Citizen

I've seen this coming ever since the PlayStation 3 fiasco.

Welcome to the Brave New World of Software as a...erm...Service™.

Where you pay monthly, weekly, daily, hourly, or by the minute and second.

Where features disappear, or simply move to a "higher tier".

We are happy to Serve™ you, Citizen. Your account has been automatically billed for this text.

Rejecting Sonos' private data slurp basically bricks bloke's boombox

Who wants my money?

I've got $400 to spend on smart speakers. Up till now I was waffling between Echo and nothing. HomePod sounds like what I want but I was open to options. Was studying Echo but found out they're just slurps. Google Home as well. Now it looks like Sonos is slurping even more than Echo.

Apple is literally the only one I'm willing to even consider at this point. If they dare fail me then I'm going homebrew.

Nasty firmware update butchers Samsung smart TVs so bad, they have to be repaired

The Smartest TV

...is one that works. So, our "Smart" TV is disconnected from all networks. Aside from 1 firmware update to fix a bug, that TV will stay air-gapped from all brick mongers.

Hell desk to user: 'I know you're wrong. I wrote the software. And the protocol it runs on'

The Fail Was Strong

This reminded me of my last job. I had made rather strong recommendations that we get some true power redundancy on our core switch stack, since if any single component had a power failure, our entire network (13 branches) would go down. I received enough resistance that I stopped talking about it.

About 2 weeks later, it was time for our routine generator test. Of course, the switchover to generator power caused a blip in the mains supply, and the single UPS holding everything together promptly passed out. I felt a great disturbance in the Force as dozens of employees screamed in terror and went offline.

I spent the next 15 minutes in a state of calm, and recommended the power redundancy again afterward. It was swiftly implemented.

Microsoft backports data slurp to Windows 7 and 8 via patches

Re: Excellent article in ghacks about ridding oneself of Microsoft's spyware

Linked Wordpress: https://blockwindows.wordpress.com/