* Posts by Mark 65

3432 publicly visible posts • joined 11 Jun 2009

HP TouchPad 9.7in WebOS tablet

Mark 65

@hamoboy

No it wasn't a review. It was a preview based on a hands-on at a launch event - the clue was in the it under the title. It would be really stretching it to put a score to that.

Mark 65

Indeed

In addition, my 2c:

1. Late to market with a lacklustre (albeit anecdotal) processor is a no-no especially when the current crop such as the ipad will be moving on to the next iteration not too far from now.

2. No SD, why? It is such a simple way to make the storage more flexible at little extra cost. You only have to look at the ipad lineup to know that it's only a simpleton that pays £80 extra for more space when £40-50 would get a high-performance (sandisk extreme pro 45MB/s) SDHC card with the same space or just over £20 for a lesser model. Make the slot SDXC and it's a real winner.

Some times I wonder whether these companies really want to depose the ipad or if they think they can just saunter in, toss up any old shit, and walk away with the spoils. Apple are control-freaks but I still haven't been swayed by what the competition is offering.

Microsoft patent points to Skype snooping

Mark 65
FAIL

How many billion to zero?

Talk about way to piss a company down the drain. If the Govt can listen in then so can anyone else -> your secure call simply isn't. Can't wait to read about the Anonymous recordings of supposedly secret comms.

German chemical giant depending on biscuit-based security

Mark 65

@Heff

It's probably easier to have somewhere to leave them outside of the meeting room rather than taking them in and fucking about.

Solar panel selling scam shown up by sting

Mark 65

@Handle, @Richard 12

Bejeebus, at least where I am in Oz they only pay for the net i.e. if you use 90% of what you make then good on you but you're only getting paid for the 10% you export. Their tariff is also around 3 times the retail rate for feed in but that's only just over 50c (35p). To pay so much for gross production is truly heinous. If I lived in the UK I'd be replacing the roof tiles with panels that's such a money maker.

What's the payback period for say a 1.5 or 2kW system? Over here it is about 6-7 years on our house with our usage (11-14kWh/day depending on the time of year).

Mark 65

@handle

Townhouse, $, and Sunnyboy inverter - my guess is they're in Australia. In which case the systems are subsidised alright. $10k system for about $2.5-3k with FIT 3 x normal rate. That's a subsidy in anyone's book which is why I'm interested in what the UK payback period is for different sized systems on your average 3 bedroom house.

I'm not sure it's ever going to be environmentally worth while. I don't have any figures to hand but these things have tops 14% efficiency and probably take a fair bit of juice to created (hence the $10k normal cost). Environmental they ain't.

Mark 65

@Alfie Noakes

I would guess that the feed-in results in less being drawn from the grid locally. Seeing as pretty much every house has a fridge plus other items on standby there is always a localised need for power. Our base load is around 0.275kW, your mileage may vary, so times this by the number of premises on the local subnet.

Mac OS X 10.6.8 hails from Paleolithic era

Mark 65

Download size

I guess the main reason people use the incremental is because the combo is 1GB whereas the download is around 245MB. That's a major difference depending on what plan you are on.

Accused SOCA attacker reportedly 'keen' to help cops

Mark 65

Re:Yes - It is a crime. It causes damage.

If I were to have an argument with you in the street and beat the shit out of you (a bit of a pasting but no gbh) in front of your kids I'd probably be treated more leniently than this dude. Who would you rather was free to walk the streets? The whole response to computer crimes is OTT *when compared to* other crimes.

Mark 65

WTF?

Can you really hold someone in police custody for more than 48hrs for DDoS?

Samsung Series 470 250GB 2.5in SSD

Mark 65

Moron's law more like

128GB is less than twice the 64GB, but 256GB is more than double the 128. Why? Is it the laptop sizing sweet spot so they fuck you over?

Telstra, Optus expand filter list

Mark 65
FAIL

Oh really?

"It’s not going to be a “thin end of the wedge” in any serious fashion. "

You might not say that if you had an innocent site (and there have been some) on this shit-list that cannot be seen. It's utterly pointless, it's a shit implementation that any schoolkid could get around, and all it adds is latency.

Aussie web host sells up after devastating hack

Mark 65

Not how I would have put it

"It is important to us that all Distribute.IT customers know the extent of effort to which Distribute IT have gone to rectify the damage. Distribute.IT had a very solid reputation – that comes from doing a good job for a long time."

I don't think having weak enough security for all your servers to be wiped and your online backups scrapped would count as "doing a good job for a long time". I would class it more along the lines of "pissing into the wind and eventually copping a face full". It would seem that circumstances eventually caught up with them.

Brit CompSci student faces extradition to US over link site

Mark 65
WTF?

Re:This is utter bullshit!

"He had no material"

More importantly, he is not based in the US, his site was not hosted in the US and he did not host any infringing material thus:

1. What crime did he commit?

2. Where was this crime deemed to have been committed, and why?

3. How the fuck did you come to the conclusion US law applied and extradition was the answer?

X-51A hydrocarb scramjet flames out in second test

Mark 65

Re:Unstart

"when the vehicle experienced an inlet un-start."

Sounds like something you may encounter after a night on the beer (precise interpretation left to the reader).

Facebook's mega-billion-dollar bubble ... will it float?

Mark 65

Not sure I follow

"The first social network, Friends Reunited, is said to have caused a bubble in the divorce rate) to the benefit of the next generations' genes."

How does the next generation benefit from being from a broken home because mummy or daddy decided to screw an old squeeze?

Telstra throws AU$800m at clouds

Mark 65

Purest definition of failure

Someone choosing Telstra to run/provide their IT.

Well, that about wraps it up for the NBN

Mark 65

Minor pedantic point of issue...

"(It would be both tangential and unfair to point out that first, Australians pay over-the-odds for everything under the sun except coal"

I think we even pay over the odds for that. In the good old UK the current price per kWh excl VAT is 11.37p (17.43c) and in Australia it is around 19c/kWh. The UK doesn't really produce coal, may have nuclear, but I'm pretty sure imports most of its fuel. Australia has shitloads of coal and we still pay more for power. Nice! Resource rich and retail price poor. Lucky country indeed.

Microsoft warns on support scams

Mark 65

Re:Actually

Sounds like the exact same call I received and I also thought about the international call angle and keeping them on the phone. Then I realized that scamming bastards like these would be making thousands of calls and no doubt have some way of getting them as cheap as chips.

New York Times takes on Apple-baiting troll

Mark 65
FAIL

IANAL

I cannot understand how, as the holder of a patent (shithouse one or valid one), you can go after the purchasers of an infringing item rather than the manufacturer. How is this legal? If I buy a device from company A how can I in any way be liable for any infringement it might make of company B's patents? Does the US not have any concept that the item is bought in good faith or does every consumer have to therefore check whether anything they ever buy is infringing on any patent that exists?

These sorts of legal actions should be dismissed at filing the filing stage. I can understand going after an importer to prevent the importation of an infringing device but not going after the user of said device. Utter fail.

Microsoft+HTML: The antidote to iOS and Android

Mark 65

App discovery

From the point in the article, one of the main reasons that app discovery is so poor is that when looking you can browse or search by name but aren't presented with very good filtering opportunities. Sort by using rating or number of downloads, filter by price, filter by average rating etc. It may be different in the Android marketplace but the iOS app store drives me nuts.

Stand by for more big, windfarm-driven 'leccy price rises

Mark 65

Indeed

It is a system that only a career politician or quango bureaucrat could have thought up. Utter shite.

Mark 65

Wind

"How predictable is the wind?"

Around Westminster? Very.

Mark 65

@Turtle_Fan

"Whatever their failure rates were (think early automobiles) I'm talking about turbines many generations later that have been perfected in terms or reliability"

We may all be skint well before then. You may be able to pay twice for your power but I doubt the nation can.

Jobs confirms iCloud's murder of iWeb

Mark 65

Re:So

"In your happy world of unicorn tear waterfalls and fluffy fields of marshmallow, any business that offers a service must offer it perfectly and indefinitely for free, or at least at no profit?"

No, and there's no need to be a patronising prick either. The point is you don't setup services and encourage users (or sheeplike followers with little real IT knowledge) to base their whole IT universe around them and then whip the carpet out from under their feet. It will bite you on the arse eventually and let's not forget this is a company that went tits up in the past.

"It's not as if Apple have given a years notice and given a FoC extention to current MobileMe users, or that there are similar services that are available for less, or indeed free, elsewhere is it?"

The point is that Apple make sure they tie you in to using their services and theirs alone. They know their user-base isn't the most IT literate which is why the people bought the kit in the first place as it is a damn site easier to use for the novice. Do you really think someone who uses iWeb and its hosting is going to configure a web server on a third-party host or know how to reconfigure the deployment? Is there any real reason they couldn't have kept things like the iWeb hosting part going? Really? Charge a little more maybe? No, they just couldn't give a toss.

I don't use any of their services, never have and never will, for just this reason but I at least acknowledge that there are less IT literate types that do and I don't have to belittle or patronise to get my point across.

Mark 65

Yep

It seems as if they don't even give a shit that a service they provided that users paid for is now discontinued thereby causing, in some cases, a shitload of woe. This sort of attitude to your customers may well earn short term record profits but long term will come back to bite you on the arse. The company went tits up before and may well do again.

Aussie censor bans Dead or Alive

Mark 65

Title required

This country is simply neanderthal and filled with bible-thumping prudes.

Site appeals feds' unprecedented domain seizure

Mark 65

Pricks

"ICE officials have claimed the Rojadirecta website violated US sports teams' copyrights and trademarks by offering links to sites that offered unauthorized live streaming of games."

I look forward to them seizing google.com

iCloud: Big step for content management, but not for the cloud

Mark 65

Horses for courses

As stated in the article...

""Google views the cloud as the central repository of apps, content and service intelligence into which device or browser can tap; Apple sees the cloud as more of way station between the devices it sells and the software it and its close partners have developed, to the exclusion of all others.""

Google want to search everything you have and display ads based on it and Apple wants to sell you lots of hardware and hope that by allow automatic device syncing they can sell you one of everything. Two different business models, two different approaches. Now if Google's offering was based around encrypted data whereby you hold the key then that may be something, but then they couldn't search it could they?

Time to say goodbye to Risc / Itanium Unix?

Mark 65

Re:Missed the point

"NO. You missed the point."

"1. Say the x86 system mentioned costs $500,000 while the RISC system costs $1,500,000. If you bought two x86 systems and ran them in parallel, assuming a 10% overhead for synchronization, you could have the jobs run in under 3 hours and still save $500,000."

I'd say that in responding to the previous poster's banking example it is you that has unfortunately missed the point. These people aren't numpties sat there running sequential batches. I can assure you that where tasks can be run in parallel they are. However that only gets you so far after which you need to up the hardware and it is this fixed window issue that the original poster is referring to as if they could run a job more cost effectively then believe me they would as any spare cash goes in some fat bastard's bonus pool. Ergo throughput is still king no matter (within reason) what the cost is.

Mark 65

@Steven Knox

In some applications throughput is key and should not be discounted.

Mark 65

Unwilling to move?

"Organisations that have Unix skills are similarly unwilling to move to a new server architecture and operating system at the same time (although if they are using packaged software and migrating to a new version, this kind of transition can be done less painfully than actually porting home-grown applications from a Unix box to a Windows or Linux system)."

The bank I used to work for moved their realtime risk system from Solaris/Websphere to Linux/JBoss due to the fact they could have many more machines to share the load and pay a lot less for the privilege.

El Reg guide to the Private Cloud

Mark 65

The beauty of VMs

To me the beauty of it (as well as cloning, snapshots etc), is the ability to have this hybrid hardware whereby you could be running Windows 7 desktops on a piece of server hardware by day then flicking over to Linux/Windows server by night for batch runs. The fact that some consultant monkeys are now spouting cloud this and cloud that is irrelevant. IT shops have been using this since before the snakeoil salesmen came to town and still will after all the buzz and bullshit has died down.

A cloud hangs over the sysadmin

Mark 65

@sysconfig

"Many of those who are concerned about the data security in the cloud actually I run servers in their own office, ready to be stolen physically, or be destroyed by fires or floods (you would assume that it's common sense not to put servers into the basement of building in proximity to rivers, but you're wrong there)."

They have every reason to be concerned about cloud data. It doesn't matter what certification Amazon have they've already lost user data with an outage so relying on the cloud is no different from relying on in-house hardware as you still need multiple copies of your data. At least in-house if you encrypt a backup then send it off site you know it's encrypted. Send it to Amazon and who really has it? Can a sysadmin there make a copy?

Mark 65

Couldn't agree more

At times it sickens me as what I'd term a monkey-dev (jack of all trades but certified master of none) that I know more about IT than a lot of the sysadmins and desktop architecture guys I deal with. The reason being as you state that a lot just view it as a 9-5 (6-2, whatever) whereas I like to dabble to satisfy my curiosity of desiring to know how something works or whether OS A has more to offer than OS B etc. Another thing seems to be that they are interested in getting terms on their CV whereas I'm more concerned with getting shit out the door that solves a need/problem.

Cloud iTunes DESTROYS music business FOREVER!

Mark 65

@Christopher W

I also cannot help thinking that the industry has missed the boat. Apart from artists marketing more directly to their listeners it would seem the Apple deal is all there is and the real power has irretrievably shifted.

Mark 65

@Christopher W: Variable Quality

I think you'll find that these days people are downloading very good quality pirated music. Back in the old days of eMule 128kbps CBR mp3 was commonplace. Nowadays, as a previous poster mentioned, the quality is 320kbps VBR mp3 or FLAC.

If I were you I wouldn't worry about it as the type of person who downloads a 96 ain't ever intending on buying it so you should be grateful for the pennies that Apple may be dishing out as that particular freetard otherwise wouldn't be handing over anything. If you don't like that then I'm afraid it's off to court or supply a better business model i.e. don't use apple and so get more than pennies but don't ever expect a freetard to pay as it's not in their nature.

"Even for people who download 16/44.1 FLACs, they can still get a guaranteed, 10-device-synced version of the file for their iDevices and have it legitimately tied to their Apple ID as long as they pay the almost token sum of $25 a year."

Am I reading that you'd prefer them to pay for music per copy per device? If so then you are part of the problem of the music industry if not then can you explain how you'd like multi-device syncing to work?

The New C++: Lay down your guns, knives, and clubs

Mark 65

Syntax

If you use an IDE and something like ReSharper (or equivalent for your language of choice) then you need not worry that much. I can only see it being a problem these days if you want to dick around in a text editor.

Mark 65

speed of language

I believe that's one of the reasons Python is getting so popular - the mix between capability and speed.

Nikon Coolpix P300 compact camera

Mark 65

@AC

So, what've you got and how do you rate it? I'm still looking for a carry everywhere that gives me enough IQ including DoF control.

4G auctions - illegal and immoral?

Mark 65

Competitive

"intriguingly Intel is most adamant in pointing out that one only needs two operators for a competitive market"

Bullshit. Australia has two main supermarkets controlling 80% of the grocery market. Competitive it ain't.

Cabinet Office talks to Facebook & co about new ID system

Mark 65

Re:Who am I

Indeed the concept of Facebook being able to genuinely ID anyone makes the whole story seem as if it was meant to contain enough buzzwords and phrases such that the Government's press release scores top result in Google. Has the Government started trying to collect Google ad revenues on its sites?

Is Microsoft's Javascript chief killing his .NET creation?

Mark 65

Dark days indeed

"Right now, these are dark days for .NET, because Microsoft now seems to be positioning HTML and Javascript as the new universal runtime."

I can just see the enterprise - one of, if not, the largest users of .Net - switching from the .Net framework to some bag of bollocks based on HTML5 and JS. It may well get more people writing on the platform, it may even become a universal runtime (if they don't start putting proprietary/platform dependent hooks in it for speed), but it won't kill off .Net for the people that actually use it.

iOS 5 system files finger next-gen iPad, iPhone

Mark 65

Maybe

Maybe the Reg could start a section URL'ed /MacRumours for all of these stories. Or, to save time, just point at that site.

Top telly tech fails to drive new set sales

Mark 65

LED backlighting

I'd be interested to know how many models are backlit as opposed to edge lit LED models. I'm led to believe there is a big difference in the potential picture quality (rivaling Plasma for blacks) with a much lower power consumption.

Apple pilfers rips off student's rejected iPhone app

Mark 65

IANAL

But I would have thought a clear cut case of breach of copyright has taken place. Take them to court and force them to pay or get the service blocked in the EU. Wankers like this need to learn a lesson.

RAF Eurofighter Typhoons 'beaten by Pakistani F-16s'

Mark 65

Hmmm

Wouldn't be like the other guy would be lying whether he stands to cop shit or not. I'll wait for a more verifiable source than "some bloke what was there and didn't want to be named"

Cameron calls for ISP-level parental censorship tools

Mark 65

@Ken Hagan

But that advice to parents could be along the lines of telling them how to setup OpenDNS couldn't it?

Nobody is saying you have to tell them how to maintain a blocklist. You seem to have missed the point of the original post entirely.

Sandi Toksvig puts the 'n' into cuts - on the Beeb

Mark 65
Coffee/keyboard

@Chris Collins

<-- See icon

Mark 65

Let us not forget

A certain Fawlty Towers episode where the Colonel discusses with Basil the time he took a date to the cricket. Certain terms were used in the description of the match participants that wouldn't be acceptable now but were on broadcast tv then so attitudes certainly do change. It's not as if she even used the actually word itself it is just implied. The complainant is clearly a puritanical twunt themselves.