* Posts by BristolBachelor

2200 publicly visible posts • joined 30 Jan 2009

Locked into fixed-term mobile contract with variable prices? Not on our watch – Ofcom

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Re: Landfill?

I agree with the original poster. At the moment, if you buy a subsidised handset on 1 year contract, at the end of the year, your monthly payment stays the same. So you have 2 options: Carry on paying the same with your 1 year old handset, or take out a new contract, for the same money and have a new handset.

Result --> 1 year old handset goes in landfill, or if the environment is lucky, it gets sold-on.

A far better solution is people buy their phones (sure allow them a credit agreement if you want), and then have all airtime contracts independant from phone credit agreements.

Oz Army red-faced after ready ... aim ... FIRE burns suburbs

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Re: “talking through her hat” @Mayhem

Something similar is happening in the UK, but with flooding. People are saying that the increased flooding is because of man-made climate change, but it seems that the flooding is exactly the same as it always was; it's just that there are loads of houses now built on the flood plains that flood. (It's also true that replacing grassland with ashfelt roads, houses and concrete patio tiles and doesn't help!)

A couple of years ago (or 5) there was a big flood in Gloucester, that they said was "unprecedented", however there is a childs' nursary rhyme that has been around for years exactly about a "Dr. Foster" who went to Gloucester in a shower of rain. He stood in a puddle up to his middle and was never seen again.

New MacBook Pro: What's actually new, here?

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Re: And with no fanfare... @AC good riddance

It used to be a very common mod to remove the DVD drive, put a flash disk in place of the old HD and put the HD, or even bigger one into the DVD bay. Gives you a very nice fast responsive machine, but that you can still fit Gigs of photos onto. (e.g. a days shooting with 2 photographers will get you >100GB of RAWs, so by the time you want to process them for previews, you've run out of storage)

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Anti-glare screen?

Before you say look; The Apple site decides I'm on a mobile device here so I can't see it.

Do the new retina Pro15" models have an option of anti-glare screen? It's the one feature on the old 15" that I couldn't ever do without. (It's a shame not being able to fit 2 drives in the new ones though).

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Joke

Re: And with no fanfare a Macbook Pro was removed from the line-up

"Or buy a Apple DVD drive or 3rd party USB drive for £20-30."
I'm sorry your post came in a bit garbled there. Did you say I could buy an Apple DVD drive for £2030 or a 3rd party drive for £20? I'll have the 3rd party drive, thanks :)

Lone sysadmin fingered for $462m Wall Street crash

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Re: The "One bad apple." Of course. A favorite of police forces everywhere.

Since you started talking about redundancy, we also have to carry that on to the A4 / A5 example. In this case, the legacy code caused a problem that was spotted (overflow storing an int16 in an int8 or similar), so the nominal computer was effectively sidelined, to allow the redundant to take over.

The problem was that since the failure was inherent in the design, rather than the failure of a part, the redundant computer made the same error, and was also shut-down.

Pleople often forget what redundancy protects against.

What's the first Kinetic Ethernet hard drive? Psst, it's the 4TB Terascale

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Re: Not really impressed

"Cost

Pure and simple"

I'm not sure. If you take the example of the Utah data centre, and say you want 4 of those; is there enough flash in the marketplace to be able to actually buy enough to make them?

HP to enter 3D printer market in mid-2014 says CEO Meg Whitman

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Already there?

I remember seeing an HP badged 3D printer a few years ago (I can't remember what they called it 3DJet probably). It used the Stratasys FDM system - don't know if it was just badged, semi-custom or a complete HP design.

As far a jams; no what the Stratasys FDM system does is it suddenly goes ape shit, and produces what looks like a birdsnest made out of extruded plastic goo.

One problem is that after moving on from Stratasys using extruded goo (0.3mm), to SLA using monomer resins and laser polymerisation (0.016mm), all the new desktop systems look like trying to make an Airfix kit using lego bricks.

11m Chinese engulfed by 'Airpocalypse' at 4000% of safe pollution levels

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Coat

Re: Remember folks, the atmosphere acknoledges *no* borders.

Not in the UK. The permanantly operating air washing system will rain that stuff out of the atmosphere. Shame that it interferes with solar panels & Sunday barbeques though.

Whodathunkit? Media barons slit own throats in flawed piracy crackdowns

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Re: I purchase and pirate the same movies @Wize

It gets better. Most of my recent purchases, including eye-wateringly costly Blurays also try to get me to buy Mars bars and such :(

(That reminds me - got to buy one of those firmware hackers for my Panasonic to disable region locks and enable skipping of adverts)

Laptops Snowden took to Hong Kong and Russia 'just a decoy'

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Black Helicopters

Re: Data mules

Actuallly, in the UK, they could claim that it was some encypted information (terrorists or somesuch). If you don't hand over the "decryption key" then you're guilty. Go directly to gaol, do not collect £200.

Post-PC world? POST-MAC WORLD more like

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Re: I'm waiting for MacBook Pro updates and the new Mac Pro to come out

I've been waiting for the new Mac Pro for what seems like forever. Unfortunately, I'm still waiting. All I've seen is almost a Mac Mini shapped like a coke can :(

I already have a rather nice MBP for the machine that has to be compact and I don't mind that I can't upgrade it much. What I want now is a monster machine that can be upgraded to make it even more monstery.

Boffins spot LONE PLANET roaming interstellar void

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Joke

Re: A planet?

It wasn't a cresent moon; it was a fully moon. That's all that's left of it; the rest is shooting off through the galaxy somewhere.

Microsoft covers Brit who penetrated Windows 8.1 with GOLD

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Re: I applaud this approach @Don Paul

"BTW, Do you go out of your way to tell YOUR clients you fucked up? I thought not."
Hold on. You thought that before this nobody thought that there were bugs in MS software? You forgot the joke icon :)

However, I gave you an up vote for the rest of your post. One bugbear of mine is the people who compare the number of tablets bought vs. laptops. They might as well say that there were more skateboards bought than cars (after all, they're both used to go from one place to another)

Brit inventor Dyson challenges EU ruling on his hoover's energy efficiency ratings

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Trollface

Re: "...help customers to consider environmental concerns..."

Wouldn't it just be simpler to make the manufacturers make the things 'A' rated?
Yes, and indeed that law is coming next year:

● All TVs must consume less than 3W (The biggest screen anyone has made that complies so far is 2". Sony have plans for a jumbo sized 2.3")

● All fridges must consume less than 100Wh a year. (You will need a separate fridge per bottle of milk, any bigger and the fridges consume too much)

● All vehicles must travel 200 miles to the gallon (So far there is a choice of 2 mopeds, and yes they have pedals to go up hills again, just like in the old days)

Ah yes, one size fits all.

Down with Unicode! Why 16 bits per character is a right pain in the ASCII

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Re: Control Data had it right

I remember some very old ICL and Digital machines with 6-bit bytes (being a pedant I am using Byte as the number of bits to represent a character). One guy here still cannot type in lower-case, and I'm pretty sure he'd have a stroke if you sent him a document without a single upper-case letter in it.

But I also remember at least one of those Dec machines had a machine-code square-root instruction (although seem to remember it being split into 2 to allow time slicing).

It now makes me smile a bit that we have huge monstor machines running bare-metal hypervisors, with each user having a virtual machine running its own a virtual copy of Windows, loading its own virtual copy of Excel. In the past, a single machine loaded one copy of 2020, and all the users shared it. No need to load 150 copies of the same thing, all repeating the same houskeeping tasks.

Adobe hit by 'sophisticated' mega hack ransack

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Re: Shock @danR2

NO NO NO NO!

There are plenty of alternatives to Reader; even to the full fat Acrobat Pro. What's more, almost all of them are better! I'd be happy for Adobe to drop it like a hot potato.

What they should carry on with is CS which doesn't have an equivalent, but unfortanely they dropped like a hot potato :(

Scientists to IPCC: Yes, solar quiet spells like the one now looming can mean Ice Ages

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Joke

Re: Bootnote

"Science is about facts, not opinions."
And that's your opinion. Sorry couldn't resist. Couldn't help myself. Also sorry to Sheldon's mun for stealing her line.

NSA's Project Marina stores EVERYONE'S metadata for A YEAR

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Joke

Re: Apathy

"We have become East Germany, but without a West Germany to escape to."
Does Sealand still have room?

Google's robot army learns Spanish

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@Indomitable Gall

Ah the Gender axis. I remember a sketch a very long time ago (Smith & Jones era?) where someone asked if they had any kids, said "Yes, three - one of each; boy, girl & hairdresser".

However your point about axes is spot on.

Samsung Galaxy Note 3 region-locking saga CLEAR AS MUD

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Re: And people say that Samsung is a copycat

Well actually, I have to defend Apple on this one (sorry). Bought a Mac, and can swap the language and regional settings between any option my iPos Touch too (don't know about the phone version of the iPod). Bought a PC with MS windows. The language is fixed - to change it you have to buy a new copy of MS Windows.

Highways Agency tracks Brits' every move by their mobes: THE TRUTH

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Re: Typical waste of money @Alex Rose

I don't know if they have changed it recently, but last time I used the A3 to get to the M25 coming from the west, the signs seemed to suggest that the M25 only goes to Heathrow and Gatwick. There was nothing suggesting that the M25 goes anywhere else, nor anything saying North/South or Clockwise/Counterclockwise. If you didn't know where you were going relative to the airports, you were fucked.

Boffins explain bizarre here-one-month-gone-the-next 'third Van Allen belt'

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Re: High energy - no, moderate

No, not really a problem at all. I have no problem with electrons (even the younglings of Don Jefe). What I have problems with is the nasty particles with >80MeV. I am not looking forward to next year's work on new stuff for Jupiter - makes the Van Allen belts look like kindergarten.

Firms fined $350,000 after yogurt sting uncovers review rigging

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Trollface

Re: Unlike the Reg

Still got me Gold badge too, but the carriage clock stopped working ages ago.

Google smacks Surface with free Quickoffice for Android, iOS

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@Heyrick

Give me InterWord and InterSheet any day. Load much quicker than tape too :)

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Trollface

Re: Didn't Microsoft kill off a better browser by giving away an inferior one?

I'm sorry Steve. Could you put carriage returns before char 80

on all your lines please. Only you see I'm reading this on a portrait

screen, and the fixed width of the bloody website means I keep

having to scroll left and right to see.

Office 365 goes to work on an Android

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Re: Related topic...

Extra marks if the article also considers the small things that make all the difference. EG.

1. The ability for the BT to pair with more than one device and switch between them; instead of having to delete the pairing and repair to swap.

2. Shortcut buttons for your mobile OS of choice (Android / iOS / Win mob, etc.). Things like Home, Back, Menu etc.

3. How long you have to wait before you can type after switching on or it auto sleeping.

4. Range in real-word situations (baring in mind that the handset may be next to the TV it's driving through HDMI)

Brazilian TV show accuses NSA of spying on oil firm based on leaked docs

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Trollface

Re: See Forbes for an opposite opinion

Well then given how much money the US owes to China, then the Chinese should feel free to do anything they want? Oww that smarts!

WD outs 'Mini Me' Red label NAS drives

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Re: I still haven't forgotten, WD!

I should also tell you that the Reds are PAINFULLY slow. I have used them to replace some Hitachi and some Samsung (both 7k drives), and doing things like loading Adobe Lightroom or copying from memory cards to the NAS take about TWICE the time or more - not just a little slower. The NAS is only a QNAP, but that is what the drives are supposedly designed for. (Write cache can only do so much when you are copying 100GB or more)

HDMI 2.0 spec arrives ... 1.0 years late

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Re: Ethernet over HDMI

I think the original reason was just to remove an extra cable. For me, I prefer the separate ethernet cable, but I suppose for the masses it simplifies things.

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Re: Still no 5V @1A output? @jxp

I'm not quite sure what you are trying to say there. Are you saing that MHL gives you 5V and HDMI at the same time, so is the answer to the OP?

In my case, the MHL adaptor needs a 5V supply to operate. If that 5V came from the HDMI interface, it would be quite cool.

As for the post about "well it's a video interface...." Well it also seems to have audio. Oh, and Ethernet. Oh, and remote control. Oh and device authentication.... What's your point?

Dixons in talks to offload loss-making online mart PIXmania

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Re: Negative for Dixons, negative for me

Same here with the email address, although unfortunately not the only etailer I've used to do it.

Plus they added on a "Pixmania club" card for an extra £5 or so without me asking. Plus gawd awful customer services.

Ofcom launches idiot's guide to traffic-shaping

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Re: When is Net Neutrality not Net Neutrality?

You've hit on a point there that is sort of related. Now that all networks are a series of point-to-point links with concentrators¹, it is possible that 2 packets arrive at a switch at exactly the same time. Obviously, 1 has to be forwarded before the other, and I am happy in this case for the time-sensitive packet to go first². For me that doesn't violate the rule of "net nutrality" - the 2 packets cannot be forwarded in parallel, one has to go first.

Now the difference comes when the problem is that the network is congested. In this case, what is "fair"? For me if everyone pays the same, then everyone's packets are equal, and therefore are routed/dropped equally. Obviously if someone pays more, then they receive more share. What is not "fair" is that the ISP doles out the bandwith depending on how much they like the packet.

¹In the old days of co-ax this was all sorted out by collisions and retries. Ah cutting holes in co-ax to insert taps...

²This can fall down, like when some undergrads decided to use UDP to copy files across from the US instead of TCP, and flodded the Janet link for a whole weekend. Here is an example of where sharing the congestion works better than just deciding on packet flavour.

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Re: On the other hand...@Terry Barnes

That's great, but if I've paid my 1/50th, then why shouldn't I get my 1/50th? Why should Virgin Media or whoever be allowed to drop my packets, because there are others that they like more (e.g. perhaps me using VOIP doesn't make them extra money, but offering catch-up TV does).

Anatomy of a killer bug: How just 5 characters can murder iPhone, Mac apps

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Re: Brings back memories

Talking of VMS, and VT100 terminals, reminds me of much fun in the old days. I remember a certain PAD that would drop the connection if sent something like ZZZZZ (as well as certain control sequences). People used to put them everywhere - including nicknames and in finger IDs on the unix boxes. If you hacked appropriated someone's account, you might set it as their prompt too.

Oh, it's good to see how far we have come.

Beat the UK's incoming smut filter: Pre-censor your grumble flicks

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Re: Puritanical Britain

If it really is as you say, then I hope they have removed all the ankles too. Don't want anyone to be offended.

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Re: What's the problem?

I think the problem is when it then switches the other way (to save the children). Then you won't be asked if you want to deactivate it (to save the children), but you'll have to hunt around, maybe stay on hold for 40 minutes to speak to someone.

WikiLeaks' Cablegate server touted on eBay for $3k-plus by Swedes

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Coat

NSA

"The original information cannot be recreated, not even by NSA.”
By why would they bother? They already have it on their internal wiki. I was going to use the joke icon, but it probably isn't a joke.

Punter strikes back at cold callers - by charging THEM to call HIM

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Happy

Re: Spam Spam Spam Spammity SPAAAAM

"Is there such a thing as a premium rate email address?"
I have a different email address for everybody that wants to email me. They all end up in Outlook, and I get practically zero spam (Months between SPAM and no filters at all).

Just recently I started getting some, and just junked that address and the spam stopped. Because the address was unique, I could work out who had leaked it too. In this case it was an ex-pat site who left their mailing list on a viewable "upload" directory on their site - doh!. But for example I know not to use Pixmania or Directline because they sell on the addresses.

Behind the candelabra: Power cut sends Britain’s boxes back to the '70s

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More organised in the 70's

I remember going to the Seeboard shop to pick up a timetable saying when the power cuts were going to be. It was a lot better when you could organise everything around them.

I'm not sure if civilisation really has failed, or I've just reached the point where I should buy a weather station.

Moto X teardown shows US manufacturing adds mere $4 to handset costs

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Stop

Re: Why not use slave labor?

"The US prison system is full of workers who work for free..."
That's a good looking chip you have on your shoulder there. You forgot to mention the free rent. Oh, and free food. Don't suppose they pay much in the way for lighting, heating, water, sewerage or other utilities either. Oh and the security probably doesn't come cheap. Let's also not forget that they are "paying their debt to society" either.

I'm sorry, but exactly what is it you want? Ciminals can do whatever they want, at whatever cost to others or society, and then IF caught and IF eventually found guilty after a costly investigation and trial - they get free bed and breakfast for a while and put their feet up watching daytime TV? And all this is paid for by the tax payers, who also happen to be the victims? Cry me a river.

If there are jobs that no-one else will do, and are a benefit to society, then put them to work.

*Obviously this is over-generalising and their are people who should never be anywhere near a prison because they really have done nothing wrong, but I was generalising about the others.

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Re: how accurate are these tear downs?

I remember reading the tear-down for the original iPhone. I had just worked on a commercial project at the time with significant numbers of processors, flash, etc. The prices that were quoted for exactly the same flash chips were way above what we were paying for them, and Apples quantities would've been MUCH higher.

So when I read the tear-downs, especially the ones saying that the devices are sold at a loss, I don't believe them in the slightest.

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Coat

Re: WTF?

"Imagine it catches on and you and six friends have phones out on the table. Oops."
It doesn't even have to catch on. Imagine some poor sod is just walking down the street with one, and someone shouts out "Google sex with goats".

Snowden's email provider may face court rap after closing service

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Re: That's a good way to get charged with obstruction of justice

Well I read that the original system was designed to make it hard to do what they wanted. So, they do a manual modification of the database code and all of a sudden, it's all gone.

Hey, if banks can do it, and cloud providers can do it, then surely a small outfit stands no chance at all.

Russia's post-Snowden spooks have not reverted to type

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Re: Perhaps it's just me

"(though inserting a steganographic serial number is certainly possible)."
There are certain HP colour laserjets that print a practically hidden yellow graphic on the page to track the printer. Obviously when viewed under only blue light, they become instantly visible as black though. Now, where did I put my tin foil hat...

Seagate drops new summer spinners, bares 'quiet', 'fast' models

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Re: WD 5900rpm

A WD "expert" on the Red desk told me that "intellipower" means that the speed of the drives is "between 5k and 7k", however, the ones I've got are always at the same speed - you can tell by the pitch that they sing as. They never seem to speed up or slow down. The expert also linked a page saying that intellipower drives were very fast because they had cache memory. Who knows what we would do without all these innovations from WD :-/

I suspect that the speed range just allows them to ship a whole load of different drives without having to update the specs. Also bare in mind that the Reds are basically Greens but with firmware that supports the drive not dripping it's SATA connection when it reads a bad sector. I'm just a bit pissed that at the time I couldn't buy any of the Hitatchi or Samsung 7k drives, and the only proper 7k NAS drives I could get from WD were SAS only and cost almost the same per disk as the NAS chassis.

Acer silences Thunderbolt

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Re: Intel have crippled themselves!

I wasn't aware of this. Does that mean that the new MacBasic with it's 12 TB ports will actually support 12 monitors out of the box? (note that I am not being sarcastic - it is a serious question)

Planet-busting British space bullet ready to bomb ice moon Europa

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Re: So ...

"They've already got working devices with slightly more substantial penetration..."
Well, that may be true, but most of them don't have to do anything useful after arriving, apart from blow-up. Another point is that the tech you speak of will not be available to us, or it will only be available with our eyes shut and no info. Isn't that what happened with the air-bag system that we received for Beagle? It's hard to design for something that you are not allowed to know anything about.