* Posts by Tom 38

4341 publicly visible posts • joined 21 Jul 2009

Chromecast creeps further into living room with Hulu hookup

Tom 38

So far Hulu Plus is only available to iPad users…

…in North America, FTFY

Britney-obsessed Ubuntu 13.10 DUMPS X Windows-killer Mir in desktop U-turn

Tom 38
Thumb Up

Re: Fork, fork. My kingdom for a fork

Thanks for writing all that so that I don't have to.

Seagate to storage bods: You CAN touch this (at last). Stop, HAMR time

Tom 38

If I had a HAMR

I'd be very contented indeed, morning, noon or night.

Barmy Army to get Wi-Fi to the seat for cricket's Ashes

Tom 38
Headmaster

Re: Bootnote

The Ryder Cup can be drawn but in that case the defending team keeps the cup so has sort of won anyway.

Almost all Test match series are played for a trophy ("The Ashes", "The Border-Gavaskar Trophy", "The Wisden Trophy", "The Pataudi Trophy" for Eng vs Aus, Aus vs Ind, Eng vi WI and Eng vs Ind respectively), and in all cases if the series ends in a draw, the holders retain the trophy.

If you consider a team golf tournament like the Ryder Cup, then the individual rubbers are akin to each cricket match in a series, and the tournament itself is akin to the series.

Ubuntu 13.10: Meet the Linux distro with a bizarre Britney Spears fixation

Tom 38

Re: Meh

It's only "obscure syntax" if you don't use it. If you do use it regularly, then it is just "find(1) syntax".

Anyway, who uses find(1) to search for files, find(1) is for walking directory trees, not searching. For searching I would use locate(1).

WHY didn't Microsoft buy RIM? Us business blokes would have queued for THAT phone

Tom 38

Re: "I surf the web"

You mean you LITERALLY NEVER VISIT sites USING FLASH?

Wow, just wow.

I uninstalled flash from my desktop machine a couple of years back. It was a pain at first, but almost every site with an interest in displaying multimedia these days supports HTML 5, and those that don't aren't missed.

Tom 38

Why does every MS story get so badly astroturfed? Seems like their 'marketing partner' went to the Steve Ballmer School of Subtlety.

Tom 38

Re: That last sentence says it all.

Strange, as improved security is one of the big things everyone keeps going on about, particularly using it as a major reason to upgrade from XP to Windows 7 or 8 ...

Strange, the main security issue pertaining to XP -> Windows 8 upgrades is that MS are refusing to backport further security fixes to XP. Nice computer there mate, shame if anything happened to it.

EU move to standardise phone chargers is bad news for Apple

Tom 38

Re: Standardised connector

No, we'll end up with micro-USB. As on the non-Apple brands who signed the deal to standardize connector.

Good start, however the EU is looking into standardising phone chargers. A charger is more than the connector at the far end that plugs in to the phone. Most phones these days suck more power through a micro-USB than the USB spec allows for, and different phones want different juice. Most will charge with the stock USB max power (5V@900mA), but the newer and beefier phones are looking for 5V@1.5-2A.

So what will my "EU universal phone charger" look like? What current will it push out, and what will happen when someone plugs a regular USB device in to it?

Valve aiming to take the joy(sticks) out of gaming with Steam Controller

Tom 38
Trollface

Re: Half Life? What is this?

FPS? Whazzat? Fine Piece o'sh***?

(sorry, I tend to play adventure games for the most part, like the ZORK and Myst series... but please enlighten me: what does FPS mean? Honestly!)

Troll.

Well, troll, or someone dense enough to a) post to a thread on a tech site about gaming and not know what a FPS is, and b) is incapable of googling for a definition

Tom 38

Re: Peter Gathercole Hmmmmm..... @Matt

Did you even read the article Matt? What would you need a keyboard and mouse in the lounge for? There is no PC there, just your Steam Box console. You control this with your Steam Controller to stream games from your PC to your TV. No keyboard/mouse involved. Streaming from inside your house should result in sub 1ms lag, about a quarter of the time for your monitor to transition grey-to-grey - imperceptible, in other words.

What it sounds like to me is that you don't want to play games on your TV in the front room, and therefore there is no console that you would be interested in, but thanks for coming on and having a good moan.

Tom 38

Re: Half Life? What is this?

Half-Life was game of the year for 5 years in a row (or should have been). If you've never played Half-Life, stop what you are doing right now, spend a few hours getting in touch with Gordon.

Google's boffins branded 'unacceptably ineffective' at tackling web piracy

Tom 38

Google co-operates with law enforcement agencies to block child pornographic content from search results and it has provided no coherent, responsible answer as to why it cannot do the same for sites which blatantly, and illegally, offer pirated content.

When law enforcement hand over a list of webpages that a court has agreed are illegally offering content, Google will already remove those pages from search results.

The problem is that these clowns want to do it without the court order.

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

Tom 38

Re: Typical waste of money

You just demonstrated why they need this information, most people think they "know" what needs to be done, but in reality you know what affects your little bubble, which seems to be Kent. The problems you describe aren't unique to Kent, but you need consistent information on a national scale in order to determine where to correctly spend the cash.

Tom 38

Re: Compliance and Annoyance in One Easy Step

I don't like the idea of mass collected data being used by any government

Hate to break it to you Don, but collecting massive data and then using it is the purpose of a government. In politics, everything from fiscal policy to defence and everything in between is decided by looking at the numbers and determining a course of action that keeps you headed towards $DESTINATION. The difference between political parties is where $DESTINATION is.

For example, its necessary to know how many people are driving on a given road and where they are flowing to so that you can build enough roads to keep people moving efficiently, which is one of the purposes of the Highways Agency.

Oracle sued over $33,000 bill for SaaS: STRIPPERS as a SERVICE

Tom 38

Re: Take a look at a rip-off bar menu

I don't think anyone is suggesting this fine theatre is a clip joint. There are very few clip joints left in London anymore, the police did a series of sting operations on the operators and explained very clearly to the guy that owns most of soho to cut it out.

I think it is far more likely he took a bunch of people to a strip bar, ran a tab and ordered the champagne, probably trying to get sales. He probably anticipated the sales and would have paid this out of his commission, but the sales never came through and Oracle refused to cover it as an expense.

F-16 fighter converted to drone

Tom 38

Re: And the first step towards Skynet has been taken..

In the event of direct command/control signal loss, degredation or deliberate interference some elements such as basic flight controls & navigation will have to be capable of autonomous operation till the human can be re-inserted back into the loop. From a military viewpoint it would also make sense that the aircraft be able to defend itself during this vulnerable period. It's not a great leap from that to letting it fly the complete mission by itself.

From a military viewpoint, sure. From a computer science viewpoint, it might as well be trying to fly to the moon in a Skoda Octavia. "Not crashing" simply means maintaining the horizon, which is a task given to 1st year computer science students studying computer vision (I still have the code if you are interested). "Autonomously identify and engage enemy combatants" is an altogether different board game.

tl;dr - Its only "not a great leap" if you are completely devoid of engineering experience and think like a an army General.

Tom 38
WTF?

Re: And the first step towards Skynet has been taken...

Hyperbole much? This is still a human driving the machine, he's just not sitting on top of it any more.

LinkedIn fires back against 'hack-and-spam' US class-action sue bomb

Tom 38

Re: morons

"gullable" - does this mean that they can easily take wing, or are prone to shit on your head from a height?

Can't fit slab AND mobe in your tight pockets? 10 tablets with built-in 3G/4G

Tom 38

Re: USB OTG on Nexus 7

So what you're saying is that it doesn't support USB OTG?

'Occupy' affiliate claims Intel bakes SECRET 3G radio into vPro CPUs

Tom 38

Re: GCHQ Turing Test to Pass for UniVirtual Machine Command to Control Global Operating Devices*

Each sentence is written in a different European language using GCSE level skills. Each sentence is then translated in to Mandarin, the whole thing is then translated to Esperanto and then back in to English.

Want FREE BEER for the rest of your life?

Tom 38

Re: So, unsafe convictions?

The conviction isn't unsafe since (as TFA states) the law doesn't care how you got the blood alcohol level, just that you have it. At best it makes a good mitigating argument for sentencing.

Google tries putting an NFC ring on it: Bonking will keep you SAFE

Tom 38

Re: Flawed

Of course you are still vulnerable to being tapped by Man In The Middle attacks but thats not the fault of the key generator

Assuming they can perform a MITM attack on SSL, in which case it doesn't matter whether the user types in the 2nd factor, or it is read from a NFC chip or even assembled by firing photons from a massive space gun at your phone.

PEAK APP: After 2013, you'll NEVER again install as many – Gartner

Tom 38
Mushroom

When is Peak Gartner?

Boffins: Earth will be habitable for only 1.75 BEEELLION more years

Tom 38

Re: Can you be more specific as to when the end will come...

The planet will still be around for another 3 billion years afterwards, will be as dry as Venus though.

Is Venus particularly dry? I It has insanely thick clouds of carbon dioxide and nitrogen, with a tiny percentage of water vapour, but the thickness of its atmosphere is so much I wouldn't describe it as dry.

Mercury is pretty dry.

Open ZFS wielders kick off 'truly open source' dev group

Tom 38

Re: Lets see a Windows version of ZFS which you can boot off, not just as an extension.

I wish I could simply use ZFS as a standard between all my boxes instead of having to resort to FAT32 or weird VM skipping to stuff files on NTFS. Currently I can do so with ZFS with everything except Windows.

That's nuts, you still put hard disks in your windows machines? Spin up a zvol on one of your storage boxes and serve it up over iscsi, install windows on that. The FS windows sees will still be NTFS, but you can take snapshots of the underlying zvol, shrink/expand the zvol, etc.

Tom 38
Gimp

Re: CDDL and GPL not compatible

ZFS is not patent encumbered. GPL is incompatible with CDDL, not vice versa. CDDL works can be happily combined with BSD works.

It's funny when a Linux fanboy resorts to FUD about superior software.

Rotten Apple iOS 7 fury: Glitchy audio or is today's music really that bad?

Tom 38

Like finally being able to tap the wake button, then poke the screen to force the mp3 player to skip ahead / back... 'Course it only works if you sleep the machine while the player is the foreground app, but there you are

What do you mean, finally? You've been able to do this for several years now, even with replacement audio apps like spotify. Double tap home button whilst locked, audio controls appear on lock screen, it's been like that since ios 3 or 4.

Tom 38

There's a special kind of person who installs .0 software and then jumps up and down when there is a bug. If you don't want bugs, wait for .1

iPhone 5S, iOS 7 misery: Only JORDAN HATCH, 19, can SAVE APPLE NOW

Tom 38
Thumb Up

Bong just makes me sad (heh)

Bong is all about how fucked up the world is these days, where as BOFH is all about how stupid users are and how IT outsmart everyone... I think I just gave away my bias. They are both funny series, but Bong is all "haha, that's true, oh wait, this shit is real, that's not funny", where as BOFH is all "haha, that's true, stupid users/accountants/security guards/vendors/Head of IT".

OK, so we paid a bill late, but did BT have to do this?

Tom 38

Re: How to make a big company pay their debts on time

…sending a statutory demand to the likes of BT is not unreasonable. The idea is to get the attention of people who can actually make things move

If your business is about to fail due to poor cash flow due to a single large client like BT paying late, then sure, hassling them with every legal avenue at your disposal is useful. However, if you are doing 'ok', then I wouldn't bother hassling BT immediately. A company like BT will always pay a valid invoice, and having you scamper around trying all kinds of tricks to get payment is counter-productive to actually running your business.

If you have a choice of spending the day getting new business, or spending all day chasing a client who is very likely to pay in the next 20 days anyway, chasing new business will probably pay more.

London Underground cleaners to refuse fingerprint clock-on

Tom 38

Re: Privatisation...

Why do folk trying to improve their lot, or at least not see a decline, by collective action get dissed by so many of their fellow wage slaves.

Because their demands are nonsense, completely alien to similar jobs in the same location. They have everything that they can think of (45 days holiday, £45k starting salary, 35 hr working week), and all they've had to do to get it is to repeatedly strike at the most opportune moments in order to force TFL to back down.

When the union has all the power, and the company has none, the end result is that the company goes bust in the wake of never ending strikes and wage demands. When the union has all the power, and it's a government body that has no power, the end result is that the public service is provided at an extraordinarily disproportionate cost, paid for by the end user.

Tube tickets have gone up almost 50% in less than 10 years, partly due to Ken running it into the ground during boom years (he signed off on ridiculous PFI, he didn't raise prices - even by inflation - and did raise wages, and so TFL ran out of funds to upgrade the network), and partly due to yearly strikes and threatened strikes over pay. In 2010, when everyone in the public sector got pay freezes, and those in the private sector got pay freezes and pay cuts, RMT were offered a 2% pay raise, and went on strike, saying they were "offended" - they wanted 5%.

tl;dr: if your job that involves holding a lever and not falling asleep for 35 hours a week makes you a higher rate tax payer, stop whining.

Tom 38

Re: punch card?

…networked to a central T&A database…

Who came up with that acronym for (I assume) Ticketing and Auditing? T&A has another, quite distinct meaning… I'd STFW, but there's no way I'm sticking "t&a acronym" into Google at work.

Tom 38

Re: lolwut?

There are way more stupid people that work/contract for TFL, I guarantee you that. Thousands of em.

Bob Crow for starters.

Bob Crow works for Bob Crow, not TFL. He made it so that tube drivers (prime skill: ability to hold a deadman's switch) earn more than school teachers, and so he lives (quite well) off a little of each of their salaries.

Storage rage: Like getting a nice steak and being told to only eat 80% of it

Tom 38
Joke

Re: Storagebod working for BBC watchdog?

Do you get pissed off when you go to the cinema and see smug gits without any popcorn?. Do you run over, shake your fist and wail at them You cheapskate bastards, siting here without any popcorn whilst I subsidize your ticket with buttery goodness. I bet you do.

Tom 38

Stop raging, the choice is yours

You can use 99% of the disk, or even 100% if you don't want to write anything else to it, but performance will be degraded. Those are the choices. The advice to only use at most 80-90% is based upon the idea that you will have tested the performance of the server at 0-10% capacity, when it is easy to find continuous sectors, and so performance at the raggedy end might be so bad that your server becomes unusable due to lack of IO. If IO isn't your concern, and mainly you just need to store lots and lots of bits, have at it. If IO is your concern, buy more/bigger disks.

How to get a Raspberry Pi to take over your Robot House

Tom 38
WTF?

…all written in C, … no easy way to hitch it to a Python app

OHRLY?

iPhone 5S: Apple, you're BORING us to DEATH (And you too, Samsung)

Tom 38

Re: Should have called it iPhone5TDS

More to the point, what were these 'revolutionary' features in the previous releases?

iPhone 1 had a touch interface that didn't remind you of windows 3.1 (hi WP6!)

3G had apps, that was pretty revolutionary.

3GS had a compass. Err…

4 had a 'retina' screen. Err…

4S had Siri. Err…

5 had 'slightly higher resolution'. Err…

5C has a plastic back. Err…

5S has a fingerprint scanner for identification. Err…

Each newer model is significantly faster than its predecessor, has better network connectivity, and is usually a little thinner. I think it's pretty amazing how much computing power you can walk around with in your pocket these days to be honest, where as you think its 'meh' and tedious.

TBH the people most upset that phones are now just getting faster and smaller without anything 'magic' are the journos, who now have to make a story out of it..

'Who knew in 1984 that Steve Jobs would be Big Brother?'

Tom 38

Apple have already said that the biometric sensor is connected to a separate chip with it's own storage, and all the OS can do is read validation results from the chip, and request that new identifiers are added to the on-die storage. Your fingerprint is never in any memory addressable by the main processor.

Top UK billionaires considerably richer than Chinese ones ... for now

Tom 38

Re: British or not British

You are describing the difference between short scale and long scale. Short scale, a billion is a 1000 millions, in long scale a billion is a million millions.

Anyway, it's funny that you call it a "British billion", since historically long scale has been used by the French, the Spanish, the Dutch and the Portuguese (and hence, their colonies), who all call 10⁹ a "millard" (miljard/milhar/millardo) and 10¹² a billion. The British use the short scale.

David Attenborough warns that humans have stopped evolving

Tom 38

Re: Overpopulation

You can get a longer sentence for theft or destruction of property than for murder.

Bollocks.

Should Nominet ban .uk domains that use paedo and crim-friendly words?

Tom 38

Grubby little hands

rubbing grubby little gears, all churning away at a "non profit" to increase revenue. If only they would concentrate on doing their job, which is to not fuck up .uk

Amazon DENIES launch of iPhone-killing freebie smartphone

Tom 38

Re: OTT? WTF?

Did you also have to look up who Amazon are?

Don't tell the D-G! BBC-funded study says Beeb is 'too right wing'

Tom 38
WTF?

Re: Baffles Me

what the hell organization appoints its own outside auditor?

Who the fuck else would appoint an external auditor, their competitors? Do you think ITV might commission an audit of the BBC? Having an audit is a self examination process

Engage brain, then post.

Penguins, prepare to get SPACED OUT: Ubuntu 13.10's Mir has docked

Tom 38

Entire article is full of FUD bullshit

no more Xorg.conf to spend long hours wrestling with.

Awesome! Except, no-one has needed an xorg.conf for five years now, unless they have peculiar needs. And if they do have peculiar needs, they will still need to register those needs in some configuration file in this new world order. Except now it is not xorg.conf, the configuration will be a different file with a different syntax.

Mir is a huge change. It enables all the various flavours of Ubuntu to run unmodified on a single graphics stack. That means the same code running across phones, tablets, desktops, TVs, cars, toasters and so on.

The same code means faster development, which is a huge win on its own,

It also means that software has to be explicitly written for Mir, a stack that runs on a single distribution of Linux, and software written for Mir will not work on any other Linux distro, nor any UNIX, BSD or Mac, all of which software written for X will do so easily. Fuck Ubuntu and it's "embrace, extend, extinguish" approach to development of FOSS.

Panasonic whips out MONSTER fondleslab for serious S&M sessions

Tom 38

Re: Pros & Cons

I cant see a CAD driver wanting this, but I could see his engineer using it to check and sign off drawings.

The Solar System's second-largest volcano found hiding on Earth

Tom 38

Re: British Isles?

Last time I checked, the Republic of Ireland (Southern Ireland) was independent of Britain, and doesn't fall under the term "British Isles".

You must have checked in the Big Retard's Book of Geography then. Geography has very little to do with politics.

The British Isles are a group of islands off the north-western coast of continental Europe that include the islands of Great Britain, Ireland and over six thousand smaller isles

Forget Mars: Let's get someone on the Moon – NASA veteran

Tom 38
WTF?

Re: A leetle question

Do those who suggested cables even humorously; realise the moon orbits the Earth?

Yes Chris, yes they do.

Give us a break: Next Android version to be called 'KitKat'

Tom 38
Headmaster

Re: Hershey giveaways

How do you know?

Roman cook books, probably Apicius.

Tom 38

Re: How about

Nutella isn't chocolate, its hazelnut. Well, OK, mainly it is palm oil and sugar. In Italy, you can't even describe is a "chocolate cream" because it has so little chocolate in it.