* Posts by AndrueC

5080 publicly visible posts • joined 6 Aug 2009

Boffins spot 7 ALIEN WORLDS right in our galactic backyard

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Joke

Re: Names

Jita? But don't send any probes there as they might end up stuck in slow time :)

Deputy PM: Rip up Snoop Charter, 'go back to the drawing board'

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Big Brother

>highlighting its wide-ranging scope, the £1.8bn price tag, the need for wider consultation and the apparent lack of appropriate safeguard

I wonder what bothered him most? The money or the morality?

I've got the 'fastest growing THINGY ever', boasts Google+ chief

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I ended up signed to it even though I didn't want to be. I forget what happened but I was trying to do something else and was told if I wanted to continue I'd need a Google+ account. I've never been on the site because I think it's a load of twaddle but I've now had three emails telling me about people I might know.

If that's how Google+ is growing then I don't think it counts.

Take it or break it: the return of the drop test

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Paris Hilton

Re: At least...

Probably got the qualification as well. A paid consultant perhaps :)

Microsoft Windows Server 2012: Why Bother?

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Re: Just one thing missing

The whole 'Metro' bit is stupid with WS2012. All the server applications are desktop applications so you go out to Metro, click a tile and end up back at the desktop.

On a related note I also wish they'd bring back EMC. The new web based interface is even more klunky and periodically crashes IE. I wouldn't have thought it possible to make a worse UI for Exchange than EMC but amazingly Microsoft seem to have achieved it.

Explosion of DANGEROUS IT GEAR injures and CRIPPLES MEDICS

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Stop

I've had those problems for several years now. I find that a combination of stretching, taking a proper lunch break (out for an hour's walk) and a decent chair are keeping it at bay.

BT to rent cheaper FTTP lines to ISPs - if they stump up £1k a go

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Re: as much as you need

Lol,yeah. However some parts of the world have had gigabit to the home for a while now and still no-one has come up with anything that actually needs it. The most bandwidth hungry application we have at the moment seems to be HDTV and even assuming that terrestrial and satellite convert to IPTV it's still only 10Mb/s for an HD channel.

Furthermore everything is moving toward the cloud. That means expensive resources will be kept within the walls of a data centre. All we'll have is relatively dumb terminals. Given some of the restrictions that MS are trying to impose through the Win8 'Metro' UI the bandwidth requirements are going to shrink even further there.

But you're right. We don't know really.

AndrueC Silver badge

I think my concern here is why bother? If you have an FTTC enabled cabinet you can already probably get as much as you really need. It's the people stuck on ADSL/ADSL2+ who need the help. As for cost - that's going to depend on the CPs and how they package that for the market. I can't currently see a huge take-up though. That's way more bandwidth than anyone really needs.

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> but I can't help think if Google can do it when why not BT...

Whereabouts in the UK is Google rolling out FTTP?

Different countries have different demographies, geographies, costings and regulations. What Google can do in the US has no bearing on what BT can do in the UK.

AndrueC Silver badge
Boffin

Re: I am currently pricing up for new offices

> Or have I missed something?

Yes contention. With a leased line you'll continue to miss it :)

You'll also be able to shout at someone and the problem will be fixed. In fact they might not even need to be shouted at - they'll sometimes be on the case before you even pick up the phone.

Wi-Fi routers able to manage bandwidth by app are offered

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Re: Layer 7?

..and you don't need to be a geek to set it up. You can be a normal computer user.

Well, probably. Assuming the router UI isn't totally messed up.

Adobe demands 7,000 years a day from humankind

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Joke

When asked, 9 out of 10 lawyers replied 'Yes. No. Maybe. Where's my money?'

TomTom for Android with hands-free kit review

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Re: Why Bother?@AceRimmer

> it doesn't work without a mobile network connection, and voice directions drop out if you temporarily lose the network.

Mine doesn't. Android Navigation has had cached maps for a couple of years now.

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Re: Why Bother?

> If you can, run the car stereo with the Aux input taking music off your phone

Good idea. Unfortunately I want my music to come from my iPod. Not, I hasten to add, that I wanted to own an iPod but when my old Archos packed up it was one of the few devices I could find with a big enough hard disk for my entire music collection and no video playback to push up the cost.

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Re: Why Bother?

Having an amplifier for the 'droid would be useful in its own right. I can barely hear the woman unless I turn my music right down.

Japan Airlines to serve KFC on Christmas flights

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Joke

Sounds like a fowl meal :)

Dawn of the X-Men? MUTANTS swarm AMONG US, say geneticists

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Joke

So, is being able to leap tall buildings in one bound in or out?

YouView: 'Public service catch-up telly should belong to us alone'

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Stop

I can't see ITV being pleased. Restricting part of their service to 'freetards'(*) instead of being available to 'people with more money than sense who actually pay to watch TV'(*) doesn't sound very sensible. The BBC might not care but commercial operators live and die by 'bums on seats' and I bet one Sky subscriber is worth several non-subscribers in revenue terms.

(*)I'm in the latter camp in case you're wondering. Not that I watch adverts anyway. I PVR :)

Beware the malware-tipped SPEAR TRAP in your inbox

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Re: simple yet effective

It's also interesting how long a 'dead' address can keep going. I'm still getting spam to an address I blacklisted over a decade ago. And yes, it's noticeable from the headers last time I looked that it's been traded all over the place.

AndrueC Silver badge
Boffin

It might. My system is based on a wildcard. So to give a ficticious example:

Set an alias up on the server:

nostril.*.face@notarealdomain.local -> nostril.

In every day use you replace the '*' with the contact's name.

Seems to me that you could extend this passably well. The typical daily maintenance is zero because you don't actually have to create mailboxes. The wildcard lets you just hand out addresses as/when you want. The only maintenance is if/when you add an address to the blacklist.

I'm thinking it might scale up to a few hundred users at least.

AndrueC Silver badge
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My email anti-spam system is still going strong after fifteen years. It's a variant of disposable addressing and grey listing. Every contact gets their own email address to use for me following a basic template. My mail server throws away any incoming mail that doesn't match the template. Everything else goes into my mailbox.

There's a small list of known offenders who also get blasted. Mostly small independent retailers. Which is why I rarely use those these days. The big boys seem better able to keep my data private.

Aside from making me immune to random spam it means I know who an email is supposed to have come from - I don't have to rely on the 'from:' field in the headers which is easily forged. I don't have to use any spam cleaning software and yet I almost never get any spam. If I do get some I can stop it dead by blacklisting the address without affecting anyone else and optional have a rant/quite word with the person who was assigned that address.

The latter doesn't always work though. The publishers of Avast claimed that the unique address I gave them must have been generated in a dictionary attack - despite the fact the server logs showed an otherwise normal day of a dozen random spam mails. I stopped using their product after that.

Data cop slap for Brit text pests

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Wow - whatever next. Maybe companies reported to the TPS for cold calls on land lines will get boshed.

Oink, oink, flap, flap. Pass the bread please.

Annual reviews: It's high time we rid the world of this insanity

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We're in the middle of it at the moment. This year though our goals and aspirations are apparently not relevant. It appears that they want us to say what we did well and what we'd do better.

I'm a programmer. I wrote code. I hope to..um..write more code?

Oh and one group says it shouldn't take longer than fifteen minutes and another tells me I've not put enough detail in.

Windows 8 launch outdoes Windows 7's, says Microsoft bigwig

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Trollface

Re: vs. Desktop Linux and OSX

Within five minutes? Ten at the outside?

MIDI: 30 years old... almost

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Re: "unfriendly" European hi-fi gear?

Agreed. I always liked DIN.

Bash Street bytes: Do UK schools really need the Raspberry Pi?

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Re: Seriously!?

Not to mention the wear and tear on cables and sockets.

I do wonder if some people get too hung up on the PI. As a way to learn about hardware it's good and also as a cheap and flexible embedded controller. But for education I'm not so sure. If the objective is to train 'coders' you can do that with software as the article says. I don't really see any value in knowing that the program you wrote is sitting on a circuit board beside the monitor.

We do need people who can do the low level hardware stuff but frankly we don't need very many of them. That's primitive programming (no denigration intended). The real value to the economy is in people who can write applications and that has little to do with hardware on a day-to-day basis. Heck if 'the cloud' really takes off programming will have bugger all to with hardware. I bet in ten year's time most programmers won't even know where the code is running (I feel sad about that but progress is progress).

NB: To the purists/pedants. Yes I know that even 'the cloud' runs on hardware. It's something I've pointed out to people in the past. However a modern day 'programmer' can put in a full day's work for several years without ever having to know anything about the silicon magic.

Badges for Commentards

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Re: Well This Is Interesting

> Where can I check my upvotes?

Top right of the page, click on 'My Posts'. It says at the top. My next target is an up:down ratio of 4:1 - prolly take me another six months.

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Yay - I'm a star!

Hmm. So how exactly do I edit a posst?

OS/2 a quarter century on: Why IBM lost out and how Microsoft won

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Oh I wouldn't deny that by today's standards it was basic. But to outright claim there wasn't an API is wrong.

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I liked HPFS. I was a data recovery engineer at the time and HPFS was one of the most damage tolerant file systems around. It was also fast without the need for a huge cache. Surprisingly it was written by Microsoft which gave rise to the joke:

OS/2 was a gold mine. When IBM and Microsoft split MS got the gold and IBM got the shaft :)

AndrueC Silver badge
Meh

Re: Awesome article

I'm not totally convinced by that. There are some pretty fugly and dark corners to the Win32 API. Then there's the backends of SharePoint and Exchange both of which have had to undergo significant changes with new versions suggesting that the Office guys at least aren't much good at forward thinking. And the probable icing on the cake from those guys has to MAPI and friends. Or the whole Exchange communication bit - one release introduces CAS arrays to solve a problem and the next release gets rid of them again.

My thoughts on MS are that they are generally quite poor at design. They really don't seem to be much good at orthogonality.

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> There was no API to speak of

What? I dispute that. An API is just a documented collection of calls that Application Programmers can use to Interface with something - in this case the OS. Even CP/M had an API. It wasn't a protected mode OS, true, but it certainly had an API.

Elon Musk envisions small town of vegetarians on Mars

AndrueC Silver badge
Trollface

Re: Then there's the Daily Mail perspective...

$500,000 if the prison is Mars :)

AndrueC Silver badge
Joke

I want to open the first pub. It'll be called 'Mars bar'.

AndrueC Silver badge
Pirate

Re: "ship off thousands of vegetarians to Mars"

Oh I don't know. Cannibalism is always an option for struggling colonists.

Harley allows Apple to use 'Lightning' brand on 'playthings'

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Joke

Re: Crazy

Dear Sir,

I have the trademark on the word 'it'. You now owe me £300 for use in a public environment.

Yours,

A L Awyer.

P.S. Nyah, nyah.

Girlfriend 'tried to MURDER ME with her AMPLE BREASTS'

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Joke

'Up in court'. I bet all the blokes were :)

Where were the bullet holes on OS/2's corpse? Its head ... or foot?

AndrueC Silver badge
WTF?

Re: Long story, short version

Wasn't there also some rule that prevented IBM from advertising it's own products? I have some vague recollection that it was part of a deal with US regulators that stopped them being broken up.

AndrueC Silver badge
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Re: Long story, short version

> every process had its own windows message queue.

We used ccMail for a time back then. It was actually quite a nice idea to have it integrated into the WPS (using the OOP features I mentioned in a previous reply) but when it locked it would lock everything as you say. But I thought the separate message queues was actually introduced by Warp. I know that one of the last version I used had the separate queues and I didn't think I used anything after Warp. Hmmm. Wikipedia says there were different versions of Warp. Warp 3 rings a bell.

Meh. Fading away into foggy recollection as I age. Probably all for the best :)

AndrueC Silver badge
Happy

Re: Tales of Woe

I remember the 'No more hourglass' adverts. They were right. OS/2 used the picture of a clock :)

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Re: Long story, short version

> So what it boils down to is that OS/2 was more advanced than the competition but too expensive

Pretty much. I remember when Win XP came out everyone crowing about it being a truly 32-bit OS. Yet I'd been using a truly 32-bit OS before even Win 95.

It's something that happens over and over again. I've heard people crowing about C# and Winforms and saying how much better it is than C++ and MFC because it was RAD. Some of us were doing C++/RAD development with Borland builder in the late 90s. Then there's the Betamax/VHS/v2000 sequence.

What it comes down to is that in most cases marketing trumps engineering. This is a lesson everyone reading El Reg should keep in mind. It can grow or wreck your career :)

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There used to be quite a bit of support via Compuserve. I remember several discussions with a chap who worked on HPFS. Doug Azarito I think his name was.

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Facepalm

> I was one of the fools who didn’t realise that English is the most terse of all major languages.

Been there got the T-shirt :-/

Acid oceans DISSOLVING sea life

AndrueC Silver badge
WTF?

Re: They'll evolve?

>None of their descendants are living today (Archaeopteryx and other ancestors of birds excepted)

So none of their descendants are living today other than tens of thousands of species and billions of animals?

Heroic Register reader battles EXPLODING COMPUTER

AndrueC Silver badge
Mushroom

Ha ha. Almost happened to a colleague of mine once. I heard a loud pop and when I looked at his desk there was a mushroom cloud above his computer. He was a hardware engineer though so it didn't bother him much beyond losing half an hour's work.

Asteroid miners hunt for platinum, leave all common sense in glovebox

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Re: They need to be careful out there

Punishment for mining into a jettisoned can?

:)

AndrueC Silver badge
Go

Solution: Keep them in space. Use them to build communities in space.

That should keep prices on Earth stable and creates a new market.

Jubcropgate: El Reg in snake-fondling nude nipslip outrage

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Joke

Re: WTF

It's called progress?