Posts by Dazed and Confused

Galaxy S4 way faster than iPhone 5: Which?

Re: @ dazed&confused

> My 2009 yes thats right 4 years old gateway has a 1920x1200

This is precisely my point. Your 2009 Gateway has a reasonable screen res. Does Gateway make a 2013 laptop with anything other than crap res screens?

My 2003 Dull has a 1920x1200 screen.

My 2009 HP has a 1920x1200 screen, and drives a second external one at the same time.

Last year when I need a replacement is a hurry I couldn't find one and had to go out and buy 2nd hand as being the only way to get the spec I needed.

This new Samsung looks interesting. The pair of HP mobile workstations are damn heavy to lug around when I occasionally need to do so. So thank you for answering my question. I just hope you don't have to suffer W8 on it and it'll run something useful too.

@ AceRimmer

> That's because you bought a top end phone and a low end laptop

Perhaps, but how many laptops on the market have a better screen resolution than a current generation of mobe screen?

Looking at Insight's website (coz you can search on screen res) it shows only 6 and that includes tablets, so

1920x1200 (cica 2003 spec laptop) 1, a Tosh Tough book

2560x1600 a pair of Apples.

2880x1800 oh look another pair of Apples.

(I might hate their business practices but they seems to be the only people trying to make a 21st century laptop at the moment)

Anyone know of any others?

I'm doing loads of work with a major corp at the moment and all the new laptops screen res is too low to show the windows they need to run the SW they've written themselves. Left Hand, meet Right Hand, you know, you guys should talk sometime.

Throwing arms let humans rise above poo-flinging apes to play cricket

Throwing actions

OK, I know I'm going to get accused of sexism here, but if you watch boys and girls throwing you'll tend to see that in the large majority of cases they have a very different action. Boys from a very young age tend to use their wrists in a whipping action where as this, in my experience, seems to be comparatively rarer in girls.

It would be interesting to know whether there is reason why this is the case.

Boffins create tabletop ANTIMATTER GUN

Re: Ré Not really “tabletop” size.

So how big does the table need to be to hold the "petawatt laser"?

Leaked docs: GCHQ spooks secretly haul in more data than NSA

Enviable position

Of course they made a lot of effort to ensure they were in this enviable position way back at the start of the communications revolution. Its quite amusing how little that map has changed since the 1901 version.

All that's happened is the line have gotten faster.

EU Justice Department stalls India's security clearance

Re: Out of pure curiosity...

> Is the USA included in this list of 'data secure destinations'? Inquiring minds want to know...

Even more to the point, is Whitehall included in the list of secure destinations, or perhaps should that be the average commuter train out of Waterloo?

Nuke plants to rely on PDP-11 code UNTIL 2050!

It just costs money

These types of deal aren't that unusual. If it ain't broken you don't fix it.

Come 2020 I'll bet there will still be sites getting VMS support.

Just reach for your cheque book.

Government contracts often have very long support plans built into them.

I remember being asked to provide HP-UX internals training in the run up to Y2K for a release than had been phased out in the 80s, because there was still a customer who was on contract.

He who pays the piper calls the tune.

Apple's screw-up leaves tethered iPhones easily crackable

Re: You'd think after maybe the 10,000th incorrect password attempt...

> or like VMS used to do (or still does), after n-attempts, it just ignores them for some

Ultrix was doing this before VMS, I remember thinking that was a neat feature when we installed our 11/780 with Ultrix 1.0.

BBC-featured call centre slapped with hefty fine for unwanted calls

Appropriate

According to the Beeb's story

Both companies said they intended to appeal, saying the fines were not the "appropriate course of action".

No, but we'd abolished the death penalty so fines is all we are left with.

Of course life in prison for all the directors would be a more appropriate course of action. Sadly the human rights court would probably bar the idea of subjecting the inmates to constant cold calls.

SCO vs. IBM battle resumes over ownership of Unix

Re: Oh you gotta be kidding....

> Hurdle No. 1: SCO does not own the copyright to Unix, Novell owns it.

Yes, but who owns Novell these days?

Re: Huh?

Zombies, Lawyers.

Ever read the Disk World books?

Who ever said Pratchett wrote fiction?

HP sacks English employees to bag Scots gov jobs cash

Re: English Taxpayers

There is no reason why the English should have a vote in Scottish independence. If we want to independent of Scotland there is nothing to stop us voting in some so inclined politicos to put together an English independence bill.

If and when the Scot's decide to go their own way however, we'd damn well better get a vote on whether we want to share a currency with an independent nation. As the Eurozone have proved recently, sharing a currency while having independence doesn't work.

HP adds 'Haswell' Xeon E3s to entry ProLiant servers

Re: Microserver

> the crowd likely to use a microserver is also likely to use a GUI

you need the video card at times because the management card isn't on the mainboard and the two PCI slots are full of network cards and besides the management card is a significant fraction of the price of the box. So the video card is needed for boot and to kick off the install. After which any GUI stuff can be networked.

Re: I'd be interested to see the numbers

Ebuyer are currently shifting the last of their stock of the N54L, and it can be had for £100

Ta!

2 more on order,

in office upgrades for the ML110's

upgrades because they're quieter.

CentOS again.

Re: I'd be interested to see the numbers

> Virtually all customers will want Windows Server 2008 R2 or Windows Server 2012.

Well I run two at home, they run CentOS.

All the others I know of are running CentOS, Debian or OpenNAS. For a couple of years you could get a cash back on these MicroServers which gave them an affective cost of £120+VAT, at which point they were very attractive for home usage as they're far quieter than, say, my QNAP and really cheap as fileservers in small businesses, The Windows license costs are massively to high so why bother when all the small business needs is a fileserver.

STEVE JOBS hits back at ebook ruckus FROM BEYOND THE GRAVE

Wilful

Surely this would just mean that Jobs knew full well that what he was proposing was illegal and he went forward with it anyway. In Apple's normal court room dramas they insist that behaviour like this constitutes wilful infringement and ask the good judge to triple the sum on the table.

NSA: 'Dozens of attacks' prevented by snooping

If you've nothing to hide

Remember:

If you've nothing to hide

You've nothing to fear

So install a web camera in your bedroom and let the world see everything you're doing.

Will the politicos mandate this?

Will they be the first to install a web camera in their bedrooms?

To show us that there is no need for any privacy?

All major UK ISPs prepping network-level porn 'n' violence filters

Re: @Miek

Ooops - "El'reg readers are typical." should have read "El'reg readers aren't typical."

@ Mike Richards

> Well that'll make the Daily Mail happy.

Surely their website will be for the chop.

They regularly feature photos of scantily clad ladies.

They regularly have articles talking about sex. Some of them don't even follow the line of "All sex it terrible and dirty and should be banned immediately" Won't someone think of the children.

Re: Goodbye, privacy.

Could some please explain the use of a partner who doesn't know you're a dirty perv. I thought that is precisely why my wife chose me in the first place.

@Miek

> You guys assume that the Google Public DNS and OpenDNS services are not doing the same thing ;)

you just run your own DNS server and point back up to the root servers.

So unless they're going to transparently proxy all DNS requests then it will be easy to get around. If they transparently proxy it then only be fractionally more difficult to get around.

Its just that the kids will be much better at circumventing this than most parents. El'reg readers are typical. Stroppy teenager on the porn prowl is likely to be far more clued up than your average harassed single mum.

YES, Xbox One DOES need internet, DOES restrict game trading

Re: Eadon's watch

> even a broken watch is right twice a day

I'm sure Eadon has a watch which reports seconds since epoch, so can only be right once.

Penguin chief: Apple's ebook plan 'dramatically changed' market

Re: the fact that Apple forced the price up at a competitior.

I think you're wrong here. Apple are forcing the price upwards for customers.

No one else can sell the eBook cheaper than the Apple Store.

Apple take 30%.

So if A N Other vendor is happy to live with a 10% margin they can't drop the price.

If the author publisher needs to make $20 and the Apple markup is 30% (OK, I don't know/care whether its a 30% mark up or a 30% margin they operate on, it doesn't change the argument) then we end up with a retail price of $26.

Without the MFN clause the customer could expect the price to be $22 from A N Other, so Apple are imposing higher prices on the public.

Thirty-five years ago today: Space Invaders conquer the Earth

Doesn't time fly

I remember being intrigued by this when I saw a machine in the student common room at collage. I was too mean to spend my meagre beer tokens on playing it though. A mate's Dad bought him an Exidy Sorcerer which had the top half of its character generator in RAM so I wrote a version of Space Invaders in Forth for that. His cassette recorder was too good though so after typing it all in and testing it played OK we saved it to tape only to find it wouldn't reload and neither of us could face typing it all in again.

Curse you, old person, for inventing computers!

The editor wars

Old git 3: Emacs! we would have loved to have had emacs, we were stuck with vi, but we were happy!

You can't have been there, no vi use would have wanted EMACs, them people who used that, well they were different. I mean they must have been born with extra thumbs anyway. Like they weren't really humans. Pah Eight Megabytes And Constantly Swapping. What you want one of them for.

Apple cored: Samsung sells 10 million Galaxy S4 in a month

Re: only managed to double what Apple sold in the first two days

Don't forget that both these figure include all the pre-ordered phones. So saying they sold 5M in two days is a bit of a stretch, as is no doubt the 10M in one month.

Haven't bother to get mine yet. The S2 is still fine, but mostly because waiting a short while then threatening to leave current provider will get me a much better price than joining the crowd of "most have this weeks model" fans. Their just phones FFS.

AMD's three new low-power chips pose potent challenge to Intel

Re: If it weren't for AMD....

> If it weren't for AMD, Intel would still be selling 233mhz Pentiums for $1000 per.

If it weren't for AMD there would be no x86 market place let. The Itanium wouldn't have struck the iceberg (or rather the ClawHammer ). There were no plans to do a 64bit x86, moving to 64bit was Itanium's job.

Happy 23rd birthday, Windows 3.0

That look and feel

Which they got from HP, MS and HP agreed to pool the look and feel stuff so that you got the same appearance in both X-Windows and MS Windows. But that's where the 3D look came from, not from Apple, which still had flat looking windows till MacOS8 about 7 years later. Where as HP had had the 3D look on the Integral PC back in 1985.

I'm not Eadon, but I still think that celebrating Windows 3 is a bit like asking turkeys to celebrate Christmas.

US power grid the target of 'numerous and daily' cyber-attacks

10,000 per month?

10,000 per hour would seem closer to the normal hit rate on the Internet. Of course it depends on how you count these things and what you even bother to log. I remember a few years ago the guy heading up a project I was working on ask for the root password on the front end box.

him "can I have the root password for that box?"

me "are YOU going to fix it when YOU break it?"

him (ducking the question) "well I might need to change something when you're not here"

me "what would you want to change?"

him "well I might need to change the firewall"

(it was difficult to explain to this guy that locking your car is a good idea when you park outside a pub)

I showed him the log file, it scrolled off the screen faster than you could hope to read. I did a wc and worked out we we'd been hit by unwanted packets on average 3 times per second since the previous weekend, without even bothering to log the most common junk.

He agreed that perhaps he'd leave it alone.

Report: China IP theft now equal in value to US exports to Asia

more IP to lose

Of course if we hacked back, then they could watch, learn and "borrow" our hacking IP too.

Prenda lawyers miss sanctions deadline

We need

more judges doing things like this.

Eric Schmidt: 'Google IS a capitalist country... er, company'

Re: "Governments have a lot more power than we do ... if the law changes, we will follow it."

Governments have more power than Google.

Would be interesting to see that statement in practice at election time.

Imagine what would happen if they decided to back one party over another when it came to search results.

James Bond inspires US bill to require smart guns for all

Re: Back to the Drawing Board

> The US revolution was run by a bunch of rich white slave owners

Nah, it was worse than that, some of them were lawyers.

Oh S*&t!

I think I'm in danger of agreeing with something the NRA say!

This is another case of politicians failing to understand anything at all to do with technology. Its like the UK lot wanting the magic fairies to filter out all the porn off the Interweb. Look everyone, we're politicians we cab write laws about anything, surely if we can write a law you can do the easy bit and invent the technology to make it work.

COLD FUSION is BACK with 'anomalous heat' claim

Re: No Brainer

>>If it can continue to produce 2KW of output for an input of 306W then he's proved his case.

>Even if it goes chugga-chugga-chugga and smells of diesel?

Hence the need to seal the thing off and for it to continue to produce the energy. If it manages an hour or so its probably chemical. If it manages weeks? ... WTF is the diesel coming from :-)

Re: No Brainer

> It will either work consistently and repeatedly or it won't. I'm betting on the latter.

This should be easy enough to prove without needing to open up the box of tricks.

Isolate the prototype Mk1 E-Cat, give it a measured input feed, and measure the output. How long can it keep it up? If it can continue to produce 2KW of output for an input of 306W then he's proved his case.

(And I'll go and buy a hat just so I can eat it)

Global perils of dirt, glaciers and lizardocalypse overblown, say boffins

The end is nigh

I saw a bloke walking around with it written on a board.

So it must be true.

Infosys vows to fight Indian tax claim

The Indian Government doesn't like to see money leave

I know every time I do consulting jobs out there, I need to paying a witholding tax, eventually you get a statement from them you can use with the UK taxman, so you don't have to pay tax twice. But India doesn't let the money leave the country till they've had their share.

If governments around the world are going to start complaining about companies skipping tax payments, then we can look forward to all governments around the globe doing the same thing.

Give porno danger classes to Brit kids as young as FIVE - parents

Re: Jim 48

Yes, I do know that, that is precisely what I was saying. The King could proclaim what the hell he liked, but it would have no effect on the tide at all. Which is why I was saying that the Parliament could write what ever laws they like to ban the "tide of filth" but it won't make the slightest difference.

This incident is usually misrepresented by popular commentators and politicians as an example of Cnut's arrogance.

When they can find a way to define what is "porn" and what is a work of art with a naked person. Then they might be in a position to start.

In the mean time they are just showing not only their arrogance in feeling they can force others to do that which they can not understand, but also their immense ignorance about how these things actually work.

I had chosen my analogy carefully.

Re: Please start being parents...

Have you tried talking to any teachers of reception year and infants recently? I think you'll find that they are constantly having to teach kids that "Sharp things cut?" and "Hot things burn?" usually with side lessons in things like how to hold a knife and fork.

Out lawing porn

This is back to the old ignorant politician problem again.

They really need to go and read the story of "King Canute".

There is no way to electronically sort out porn from non porn, lets face it, its unlikely that any two people can agree on what constitutes porn anyway. Successive governments have wanted to be able to say we wrote a law and so the problem has gone away. But it won't, no matter what is written on the statute books. Even if you ban access to all website with the "even bigger tits than the other sites" in their domain name, it won't get rid of the issue. Is the Whitehouse the seat of US Government or a source of depravity? Any black listing scheme will be constantly out of date as porn mongers perpetually morph to new domain names. Any white listing scheme will constantly is out of date since "legitimate" websites are created at a rate no one is ever going to be able to filter. That's before you get to the idea that sites change purpose over time and legitimate sites get powned.

The problem with legislating for the issue is that then someone has to be responsible, and that requires someone agreeing to take responsibility (note: when was the last time we saw an MP accept responsibility?).

If the government say use X as a system of ensuring that little Jonny doesn't see inappropriate adult entertainment, then the Ms Shrew will want to sue for millions because little Jonny has just discovered pictures of nuddies. While the same Ms Shrew will also want to sue the arse off the owners of X when they find that the new website they've created with little Tarquin has been put on a pending list for approval because its all about loving their new little kitty they've just bought for his birthday.

As someone said the other day

All you need to know about politicians and IT can be gleaned from the fact that they knighted Alan Sugar but not Tommy Flowers.

So how do you break the subject to a 5 year old?

"Well kids if you find pictures of Mummies and Daddies do yucky things on the Internet, go and find something else to look at coz it's just so gross. Parents are so embarrassing!"

The idea might be good, but how do you explain the idea of pornography to someone who hasn't yet been taught the basic ideas of sex and what the difference is between seeing their parents walking to the shower and being overtly sexual.

(Paris, because if you find her on the Interweb, its probably porn)

Nintendo throws flaming legal barrel at YouTubing fans

Re: Aren't these videos...

> Aren't these videos just free advertising for Nintendo games?

Err, yes... And your point is?

why would a games console company want free advertising and a fan base?

Re: "Why is Nintendo bothering to harvest pennies from YouTube?"

Nintendo and clearly seen how massively successful the RIAA and their friends have become since they've declared war on their customer base. How suing anyone who's ever remotely thought about buying a copy of a copyrighted work just in case they thought about making a copy, has massively increased their sales and hence their profits.

On the other hand, someone from Nintendo's legal suicide squad has probably noticed how the legal departments of the RIAA et al have massively increased their size and influence by replacing the marketing department as the primary way of presenting the company to its customers. So the legal's have gone on the war path knowing full well that the only winners will be the lawyers, ie themselves.

Tablet? Laptop? HP does the splits with Tegra-based SlateBook x2

Re: Nice resolution.....

If it really does come with a 1920x1200 display then it qualifies as HP's highest spec laptop, since they seem to have abandoned this resolution (AKA 2003 spec laptop screen) for the laughablely named FullHD spec. When I needed to replace my laptop last year I had to hunt down a refurbed unit because the main thing that pays my living is a pain in the a*&^ on a screen with only 1080 lines, Unix screens standardised on 1024 lines in about 1988 (eek that's 25 years ago) and so if you're going to run these things in a window you need enough space around that for the usual decorations and it just doesn't work at 1080lines. Of course by about the early 90s screens had hit 1200 lines, but expecting to be able to put these inside a window just leads to disappointment.

Apple chief Cook: You - senators. Get in here and redo this tax law

Re: How are Apple (or Amazon) acting illigally

You're right, it is either the case that the corporations are acting illegally or that the politicians who drafted the tax code are incompetent, or both.

But it is very difficult for politicians to stand up and tell the world "Hey guys, we've just worked out that we're all a useless waste of space, you'd be better off without us" so they take to blaming everyone else for playing by the rules that the politicos gave them to play by.

Acorn founder: SIXTH WAVE of tech will wash away Apple, Intel

Re: You can call me AI

> Somewhat ironically, the way to make ten-thousand-year journeys tolerable is to slow down one's clock-rate, thereby greatly reducing the subjective span of time.

Which also an idea that Banks explores, although not in his Culture universe. In the The Algebraist the Dwellers slow themselves down.

Of course the other approach to making ten-thousand-year journeys tolerable is to speed up to relativistic speeds where the you spend on a journey is considerably shortened, just don't expect to find anything still waiting for you when you get back.

Oh S*&t!

It becomes like your pal – and let’s just assume it’s a nice pal

Oh no, not "Your plastic Pal who's fun to be with"

We all know who'll be the first against the wall when the revolutions comes.

Apple: ebook price fixing? Nooo, nothing to do with us, no siree

Price fixing

I didn't think anyone cared about whether they used an agency pricing model. The problem was that the "you can't sell it cheaper else where model" If this isn't price fixing then would someone please explain what is?

Windows 8 'sales' barely half as good as Microsoft claims

Re: If Windows 8 is a spork

The people I know of who are happy with W8 have installed third party stuff on it to make it look like W7.