Posts by Mark 65 3439 publicly visible posts • joined 11 Jun 2009
"Nobody wants to see a blank cheque written out for green energy," Yeo said, "but the government must provide investors with more certainty about exactly how much money will be available."
Erm, I seem to recall reading somewhere a basic tenet about risk and reward and that, as such, you shouldn't expect one without the other. If they want certainty perhaps they should invest in 30-day cash or something. All this crap about "certainty around returns" is basically just asking the taxpayer to guarantee their profits/dividends. How is that any better than the banks? Is "big business" Latin for "thieving bastards"?
It isn't when you think they've not given it the ability to have an EVF. Imagine trying to shoot at arms length with one of your EF lenses on the adaptor! Shaky as hell.
Don't know why, but Canon always seem to be able to slip an epic fail into products with great potential - 5D MKII has substandard focussing (9 points, 6 assist) that was remedied with the MKIII, the G1X is just slow, and this has no EVF.
That's the point of the whole mirrorless range though isn't it? You sell the punters a camera capable of pretty good images (not DSLR quality but close) for a reasonably high cost, not too close to an entry DSLR so as to put them off, and sell the merits of IQ and size. Then the poor bastards find out that really you do need the EVF to take pictures in a range of conditions and to prevent camera shake - IS is all well and good but holding the camera up to the eye rather than at arms' length makes for a more stable shooting platform - whereby you hit them up for 1/3-1/2 the price of the camera again.
Panasonic GX1
Body only £383.95 (£50 cashback)
With 14-42 (not powered) £419 (£50 cashback)
LVF2E (viewfinder) £219
That's one expensive add-on that any sensible photographer would consider pretty essential. Nearly half the normal price of the camera. I'll leave the car analogies to others.
As for this camera, I really cannot see the point of a jumbo sized mirrorless camera. Nice big heavy glass that you're holding outstretched to take the photo with. Why?
Transparency does matter for investors as well as results - it's handy to be able to see if you are investing in a potential Bernie Madoff before it happens. Transparency can help. I see no real reason why Buffett's group should score poorly given he is normally all over corporate good governance - not practising what he preaches perhaps?
Where their HQs are is irrelevant. If they have any kind of operating entity in the EU, for example, they have to comply with EU law. Although this case is Iceland, no doubt the EU could raise a flag or two. I've even done the leg-work for you...
"Visa Europe is a European membership organisation incorporated in the UK. We partner with Visa Inc. to enable global Visa payments, but exist and operate as an entirely separate organisation.
Visa Europe’s headquarters are in the UK. We also have offices in Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Ireland, Israel, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, and Turkey."
European base, European legal entities, can get totally fucked over by the EU if they step out of line. US head office totally irrelevant. Do you understand how jurisdictions and multinationals work yet?
@Ian: Therein lies the conundrum for Visa et al. The US has put pressure on them not to process payments for Wikileaks as they deem them persona non-grata, but do allow them to process payments for the Klan and hardcore pornographers - freedom of speech, mustn't interfere. They say Americans don't get irony! But then Visa et al also have offices and companies/legal entities in other jurisdictions. These companies can then be prosecuted in those jurisdictions for their unfair actions in failing to process these payments. Guess that's what happens when head office is based on the doorstep of the World's bully and you choose to toe the line.
That they are all based in the US will matter not a jot if the EU were to decide they are obviously acting as a cartel. It is Visa et al that could end up in a lose/lose situation.
"You can get a 13" Macbook Air with a Core i7, 8Gb RAM, up to 512Gb flash it has the 1440 x 900 screen, USB 3 and the SDXC slot - for a tiny machine it's packs a pretty decent spec."
Only thing is it costs about the same as the entry level macbook pro retina edition which has a smaller (256GB) SSD, same memory, but double the cores, way higher clock speed, discrete graphics and that screen. £50 cheaper and 650g heavier. It'd be nice if the costings didn't overlap like that as it completely detracts from the Air principally due to the extreme overcharging for the SSD. £400 for 256GB upgrade of soldered on chips?
True, but if you have a NAS how do you do your backups? Another NAS? It's an interesting question in the home user (or small business) space as we accumulate more and more data that is not necessarily throw away like DVD rips. Photos and home videos are taking up ever increasing space as the pixel count rises. I sometimes wonder if at some point I'm going to need to buy an LTO5 drive.
What do others do? Would El Reg perhaps run a piece for those of us that have say 4+TB RAIDed NAS space but aren't sure how to back it up effectively - 2x4/5 bay NAS and disks is an expensive way to do it?
Michelle, I totally agree. My first, and only, ever purchase of a WD drive with intellipower was a disaster. Worked ok for a year or so then the intellipower circuitry shat itself. Spin up, spin down, spin up, spin down, repeat ad-nauseum. Took me days to copy the data off in order to very against backups. That's when I bought a NAS and I certainly wouldn't be sticking any of these in it. Seagates or Samsungs thanks.
"On the issue of a warrant system being used when public bodies wanted access to comms data, both McGregor and Thornton said it would prove a hindrance to their investigations both for reasons of cost and potential delay."
What the fuck do they think gives them the right to make an end-run around the judicial system? The one law that should be in place and totally enforced is that any evidence gained without a judicial warrant is utterly useless for a prosecution or further legal action. The other is that is a public body like some poxy tinpot council thinks the law has been broken then the police investigate and they can get a warrant. I'm sick of all this "if we have to abide by the law and convince a judge then it costs too much and takes too long" bullshit. Laws for pursuit of terrorists being used for dog shit - it amazes me just how far this country has fallen.
I'm sure I can remember a day in my childhood where I believe UK citizens may have actually had rights.
It's a bit like politics then. Which really brings home the point that, given they were all found out for being financial frauds fiddling their expenses, ripping the taxpayer off at every opportunity, and thus proved themselves to be utter lying bastards it now seems a bit rich that politicians think they can preach to anyone about integrity.
@Stephen: Indeed, ironically, a lot of the pressure on banks for double-digit growth, dividends etc that led to reckless behaviour comes from shareholders - the very people totally reamed but the result of their desires. In fact most people desire healthy pension returns to fuel their retirement. The companies that invest that money are under pressure to deliver it or lose FUM so these big institutions place pressure on the major listed companies, of which banks are some, to continually deliver these returns (and dividend growth) and the reckless behaviour begins.
It's easy to point the fingers at big bonus "earning" bankers but where does the greed really sit? I'd argue it is within all of us collectively as a society but it's just easier to blame the guy with the big pay packet than look in the mirror and say "I played my part".
The GFC was home loan driven yet the public weren't to blame. No, it was the bank's fault for lending me the money. They lent me too much and I could never pay it back. There is ample evidence of fraudulent applications and bad behaviour all round but it makes me sick when I hear people blame others instead of stepping up and admitting they got f*cking greedy and wanted something they couldn't afford and were willing to do whatever it took because "shit, we thought it would be worth more in a year's time".
I don't think it's even about data access control. To me it's more of "would I want to get the sack because an outsourced supplier/SaaS vendor really fu*cked up?".
To those clients bleating about it - did you really expect the uptime they told you there'd be? Did you check how they were planning to achieve that? Was that expectation realistic given the problems that even the mighty Amazon has faced? So far, to me, cloud is just a shortening of "cloud cuckoo land" as that's where a lot of the companies are living.
Well, they don't allow the early 2008 Macbook so I'm a year later and shit out of luck. I figure in my case it's because of the X3100 graphics and how they've been doing more work under the hood for offloading work onto the GPU.
I do think their cycle is getting too short now as Mountain Lion is only 1 year after Lion but before that it was a 2 year gap. Potentially I have only 12 months of support left on my laptop as I'm not terribly keen on running an unsupported OS and obviously they lock you out of their software updates (iLife, Safari etc). Bastards really as the machine is going great guns.
"Slower? Hardly. DVD 16x is 22 Mbytes/second. Most USB thumb-drives are slower, at least when writing."
Nigel, Nigel, Nigel. Please navigate to the following link before issuing such statements...
http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/charts/usb-thumb-drive-charts/Copy-Benchmark-Images-Write,2301.html
The top drive on there has a 139MB/s write speed. Although that requires USB 3.0 you can be sure that it is capable of saturating a USB 2.0 port. In short, modern USB sticks shit all over optical media. Installing an OS from one is so much quicker. I don't even agree that cheap sticks are poor - you can easily get some that outperform the named brands. What is certain is that it can be a minefield if you don't research it first.
@geekclick: Installing an OS from a USB stick is an absolute dream. Way quicker than spinning media. So much so that I have several sticks that I have bought for the sole purpose of hosting various OS installation media - buy it, load it on, label it, then just keep it for whenever it's needed. Even create your own slipstream install on one.
My carry everywhere USB drive on my keyring contains various bootable OSes for system recovery etc created with MultiSystem on Linux. That is something I'd recommend for IT people for the inevitable "can you take a look at our PC" moment when you're round someone's house for a social call. At the moment I have (from memory) Puppy Linux, RIP Linux, Darik's Boot and Nuke, Ubuntu and a persistent store area on the one stick.
I accept the point about optical drives being necessary - clients prefer media on them to USB sticks due to the nature of the medium being finalised - but I wouldn't go back to installing an OS off of them unless I really had to.
"I don't know if there's a real shift in how the tech world treats its customers"
No different from the rest of the commercial world. Whereas in days of old the business model was to serve the customer and serve them well for repeat business and recommendations, the current model is to rip the bastard off for as much as you can get because, just like a bus, another one will be along in a minute.
Probably one of the most important things about iGoogle vs Chrome is that iGoogle can be used in the workplace. I have tabs for news feeds, financial data, tech blogs, tech news etc. No way Chrome is ever going to be allowed in the enterprise.
On the money AC. With outsourcing and offshoring only really happening to IT workers - the business can contain complete muppets that will never be replaced or moved - I'll make sure my kids are IT literate but I'll do my damnedest to steer them into something more lasting than the pigeon-holing of a career that IT is.
The whole point of copyright is that you don't have to register it - as I understand it is yours upon creation of the work. The problem is often that whilst a photographer may embed the copyright details in the metadata of their work often sites will strip out this data upon upload. I believe Facebook is but one example. This then gives the industry a "we can't trace the owner" excuse (not necessarily in the case of Facebook) and things have rolled merrily along from there with a complaint of "it's all too difficult" to the current bunch of arseholes in power.
Regarding your destruction of property comment - does it breach any computer misuse acts? Or is this going to be yet another case of "individual hacks company and goes to jail, company hacks individuals' data by the thousands and gets off with it"? Can they be sued for the cost of replacing the data/fixing the problem just like an individual would? Thought not.
Patriot Supersonic USB 3.0, Kingston DataTraveller Ultimate 3.0, Kingston HyperMax etc
Cnet has them benchmarked at 129MB/s read speed
http://www.cnet.com.au/patriot-supersonic-usb-3-0-32gb-339322609.htm
Toms Hardware shows high benchmarks of up to 193MB/s for some of these...
http://www.tomshardware.com/charts/usb-thumb-drive-charts/Read-Throughput-h2benchw-3.13-average,2292.html
"The Thunderbolt Duo comes with two Caviar Green 2GB drives"
That there is a bit of a problem. I've had the "green" part go in a couple of these. Spin up, spin down, spin up, spin down. Turn off to reset. Spin up, spin down etc etc. Took me 4 nights after work to copy the data off to reconcile it with the last backup. Poxy things. It was at that point I moved to OWC or Akitio enclosures and my choice of internal hard drive. I believe all WD externals use these things nowadays.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
