Posts by M Gale

Err...

...you can add a NAS box to any network. Doesn't cost much, almost certainly less than a Time Capsule, and you can use it on any computer INCLUDING Macs! (Well, for now anyway)

However, a gigabit network link still has nowhere near the throughput of a SATA cable, and Apple are still being shitty by making you buy a speshul Apple hard drive for WTF prices.

Get a couple of multimeters.

Wire them up to measure volts/current so you get an accurate reading, Do it carefully because the mains supply in any country is rather nasty. Then try shoving an Ubuntu Live CD in them Windows PCs. It's bloody amazing how much difference using a half-decent OS without a shedload of bloatware bolted on can make to your power consumption figures.

Really, try it some time. The fans on my PC and laptop both thank me with joyously low revolutions whenever I switch that damned Microsoft monstrosity off in favour of Canonical's distinctly more svelt baby.. and Ubuntu is supposed to be a kitchen-sink distribution too!

SSDs? No heat?

You ever held a thumb drive while it's being written to? There's a little thing called a Charge Pump - I think some newer flashes have a similar but more efficient device called a Boost Converter. The primary purpose for either is the same: The input power isn't high enough to write to or erase information on a flash chip, so a charge pump is used to step things up a little. This generates heat. The high voltages required I think are the reason that Flash memory has a limited write cycle, and why reads are a lot faster than writes.

Stick a crapload of those chips together in a little 3.5" enclosure and I can almost guarantee that heat levels will rise.

<crickets />

What's that? Nonstandard HTML tags?

Oh I see what you did there.

"When will you need to replace your latest pee-cee because it's knackered or dead?"

I still have an old PPC640 that works. 286 processor, two 720kb DD 3.5" drives and a copy of DOS 3.3.

Also my old peecee got replaced due to being old, not being broken.

The G3 Power Mac on the other hand, sits there being dead through lack of a power supply. New power supplies (no, not second hand eBay ones) cost an absolute boatload, because Apple are "special". So.. what was that you said about an investment? Only I have a Spectrum +2 in the shed that would probably be more use than my Mac, currently.

Hang on, what?

"Your adversaries are using iPads/iPhones right now to gain real competitive advantage."

They are toys. Tell me what is the difference between browsing the web on an iPad and browsing the web on some Archos thing, asides the Archos thing maybe letting you view Flash content?

And how in hell does the iPhone give anybody a competitive advantage over anything? You can't even make calls on the thing without the Special Jobsian Hold being applied! My Nokia 6288 has a real competitive advantage over the iPhone 4 in that regard!

Serioously. There's marketing fluff, there's slavish adoration, and then there's that post right above.

Real competitive advantage? Thanks, you've given me the first laugh of today.

10 people don't like it when their version of the truth doesn't match reality

"And yet, for every one of you, there are hundreds - if not thousands - of perfectly working machines/phones. Who'd-a-thunk-it?"

Asides the iPhone 4, which has a very well-deserved "iFlaw" nickname. Seriously, that antenna? Fix the thing, Steve. You may be happy for the call to go to nothing if you hold the phone like a phone, but I'm bloody well not.

And it's amusing. Most of my downvotes come from telling Apple fans what they don't want to hear. Oh well, when I can truthfully say that I'd sell that MacBook in a heartbeat and get something with twice the spec that'll still be around next week despite getting accidentally sneezed on, how many downvotes would that be worth?

Moaning?

No, just telling you what you don't want to hear. Probably means more downvotes for me, but given the nature of the downvotes I'm happy to soak them up. Or as some people on Slashdot might say, "go ahead, I have karma to burn."

Might grab one of those PSUs though, depending on whether they are still working. At least that's how much an ATX supply SHOULD cost.

Heh

This would be like the Apple craptop a friend of mine has that continues to exhibit problems despite this being the third model? First a case with spontaneously-appearing cracks, then the hard drive fails, then the power supply goes kaput. Magnetic power clips are a good thing but not when it doesn't sodding work!

Of course, we won't go into the 4th revision of their mobile telephone that is spectacularly bad at making phone calls when you hold it like a phone. Yes, I've used it. Yes, the grip-o'-death is real. No, you don't need to go out of your way to trigger it. Just hold it like a phone and not some precious pearl, and despair as your signal goes to shit. Doesn't help that the thing keeps popping up "NETWORK ERROR [dismiss]/[cancel]" in the middle of trying to aim a bird at a particularly stubborn pig or cover up an annoyingly positioned orange either.

Well marketed, yes. Very well marketed, also yes. Pretty? Well beauty is in the eye of the beholder but plenty of people seem to think so.

Well engineered? Oh come on. Couple of nice ideas (like the magnetic power clips on the laptops), but it's the same shitty Chinese crap that goes in every beige box I've ever used.

Wardriving? Illegal?

I still see no difference between what Google are doing, and running around with a CB set to channel 19. If you don't want every Joe and Jane in the area being able to see your Facebook password, encrypt your damned connection!

Anyway, the difference between what Google and Apple are doing, is that Google at least seem to be telling you what they are doing. How many iDevices tell you how much snooping that "free" fart app is doing before you install it? What about all the wibbling that Steve did after he found out third parties had snuck out details of his precious fondle-slab, by snarfing data from the development models as part of advertising programs? Notice how even the Apple developers didn't know their apps were grassing on them.

You think he was more pissed off that someone was doing it, or more pissed off that HE wasn't? Google, Apple, Microsoft, all want your data and all for the same reason.

Right click the video.

If it comes up with the Flash context menu, it's a Flash video. If not, it's HTML5 and what with being Google, most likely WebM. They did a Charlie Chaplin thing a day or two ago on the title page.

As for FlashBlock, well HTML5 video isn't flash. You'd need something to find and either remove <video> tags or replace them with, I don't know, Parry Gripp's Om Nom Nom Song?

Could do some encoding yourself?

Take a DVD and your favourite DeCSS-equipped transcoder of choice. Do some tests at the same bitrates/quantizer/motion detect/etc levels, see how it compares?

Loads easier to code for?

So I make my site work in Firefox and Chrome. Works fine, both of them love it. I try it in IE8, and I expect it to fuck up somewhere. So I make it work in that, and it fails in IE7. Ho hum, more exception code, more fucking about.

So finally I get it working and then I think "oh crap, there might be some Opera users". Guess what? Opera doesn't like it.

At least in this case it was just Opera and Safari both thinking that "no colour specified" means "paint it white" rather than "DON'T GIVE IT A FUCKING COLOUR." Just means any and all elements that have a transparent background need to be explicitly told to be transparent. Still, easiest to code for? Hardly. Opera has its own quirks, you just need to design something more complex than "Hello, World" to find them.

Letters and/or digits.

"H.264 playback (ie the bit that browser vendors and end users care about) isn't "royalty encumbered" ... professional encoding is..."

So, royalty encumbered then. "Sure it's free unless you want to use it".

What the fuck?

Hang on, who the what which where now? "M$"? Linux and FOSS? I really don't care if the system on the other end is being run by some ideological Debian purist. If I want to put a website on a host that'll scale up to however many users decide to use it at once, I'll consider "cloud" computing. If I want somewhere to store my personal information, I'll use my personal computer!

Are you that eager to put all of your information technology back behind the glass doors?

Never supported at all?

LOL, don't be too sure of that. I can see some hacker implementing it simply to be contrary. Sure there is no such thing as a "local LAN IP" in IPv6, but that doesn't mean everything outside one single address can't just be redirected to the bit bucket at the edge router, and the rest of the "public" block you're assigned being turned into your own set of de facto unroutable addresses.

Only problem I have with NAT is it going further upstream than my router.

Assigned ports...

..and when, say, I'm playing a multiplayer game, dont' fancy paying $wtf for my own colo server, and fancy just selecting the option in the game that says "start new multiplayer game", then asking my friends to connect to me...

Oh. Oops.

Pushing NAT up any further than the router in your house is a really bad idea, if you want the Internet to remain the Internet, and not a strictly client/server model of which I'm sure various large media companies would LOVE.

Don't forget the kill switches.

Wasn't their some issue a few years back with the Indian or Pakistani airforce and the US selling them planes that could be remotely disabled?

Yeah, buy American. Smart idea, that.