* Posts by Paul 139

25 publicly visible posts • joined 9 Oct 2009

Netbooks were a GOOD thing and we threw them under a bus

Paul 139
Thumb Up

Quite right.

Another person in strong agreement here.

My old battery Acer Aspire One is still after 5 years my primary choice for travel. Although only £210 new, it's been treated to a few upgrades over the years; a new 1366x768 screen to bump up the resolution (£75) an SSD when the rotary rust failed (£80), an extra gig of RAM (£10),Windows 7 (£50) and a bigger battery (£20).

Adding this up, I see I've got a £500 device now rather than a £200 one - not too far off the cost of a similarly specced new device.

BBC places news chief and her deputy beyond use in Savile row

Paul 139
Coat

Well tailored headline.

Not for the first time, a recent headline has had me wondering what sort of wardrobe malfunction has afflicted the BBC.

Classic game 'Elite' returns … on Kickstarter

Paul 139

Right on, Commander!

Big Blue beats off rivals to push out first LTO-6 tape drive

Paul 139

/s/80GB/80MB

Typo, per title

HP Z1 quad-core Xeon 27in PC

Paul 139
Holmes

Noisy?

I count .. 6 fans in that screenshot of the things guts (2 screws in the PSU + 4 centrifugal) . Is it noisy ?

Hong Kong scientists claim 'self-charging' graphene battery

Paul 139

How much current? Ohm's law says 0.35v / 220kΩ = 0.0016mA

Rub Facebook pals in your wealth with 'social' credit card

Paul 139
Facepalm

Advert style seems to indicate the product(?) is aimed at younger teenagers. I'm pretty sure the A.S.A. slapped the wrist (lightly of course, being the A.S.A.) of a several banks a few years ago for pushing 'easy credit' at this demographic. Morality aside, facebook-style data exposure and banking is a combination to make most wince. Prime source of targets for the fraudsters if nothing else.

2011's Best... Games

Paul 139
FAIL

Every single one of the games on this list is a sequel, follow-up or remake of an earlier game, I refuse to believe nothing both new *and* good was released this year. Time to seek out Andrew Bailey 2, methinks.

Three questions that could put out Amazon's Fire

Paul 139

I must be confused .. Silk's a web-proxy, enabled by default but can be turned off by users, not unlike the setup of most corporate and academic networks and some ISPs. Did I miss something?

DIY aerial drone monitors Wi-Fi, GSM networks

Paul 139
Mushroom

Not happened yet?

I suspect the inhabitants of a couple of Japanese cities might disagree,,,,

Solar panel selling scam shown up by sting

Paul 139
Thumb Up

Not all bad...

At least the FIT is tied to power production (rather than just a plain old grant to install) - inappropriate installations will take decades to pay back, whereas genuinely useful ones will recoup costs in perhaps 10 years.

Credit processors targeted in fight against spam

Paul 139

Gadzooks!

90% of email messages were spam last year and only 75% this year - that's a huge improvement. Stating the figures that way does a disservice really; 90% means that for every useful message sent there were 9 spams. If just 75% of email sent is spam now, that equates to only 3 spams per useful message. Are we really only getting a third of the spam we did last year ?

Robotic waiter service uses Kinect to see

Paul 139

Roomba?

Is that a white Roomba at the bottom of it ?

Japanese nuke meltdown may be underway

Paul 139
Unhappy

I told you so?

This might be the most depressing thing I'll read today. Thousands (or tens of) dead and a truly awful disaster unfolding before our eyes. And what does someone post .. "this just shows that technology X sucks, I told you so!".

Go collect some canned food, or done some money or pray or do whatever the hell else might just help your fellow human beings Mr Phud. I know I will be.

Internet Explorer 9 pulls on best pants for 14 March release

Paul 139
Coffee/keyboard

New faster Javascript engine!

Why are all the latest releases accompanied by claims of new and faster Javascript engines? Is this really the performance bottleneck during the average persons web-surfing experience? Pretty much all of the websites I visit work well with NoScript active. Perhaps Javascript speed is simply an area in which marketing-friendly percentages are easy to generate whereas rendering speed/correctness, stability and security are too intangible to rave on about.

Sony wins subpoenas revealing visitors to PS3 jailbreaker site

Paul 139
Thumb Up

Darnit!

Read article. Visited site. Read comments. Felt depressingly un-unique (= ique?). Posted comment stating so. Now feel heartened that all reg readers are obstreperous gits also, Ho hum ;)

Ford Focus 2011

Paul 139

Not UK piccies...

Steering wheel on wrong side, German reg plates, car on wrong side of the road.

Facebook causes eating disorders in teenage girls

Paul 139
Stop

Causation or correlation

The original report declines to discuss. Does anorexia cause facebook-use ? We should be told....

Smart meters pose hacker kill-switch risk, warn boffins

Paul 139
Thumb Up

One step closer ...

.. to being able to send a surge of power through the keyboard of that 'tard who truly deserves it.

Asus Home Server TS Mini

Paul 139

Expensive.

Old PC (£10), basic PCI RAID card (£15), couple of modern 500GB hard drives (£35 each), and FreeNAS (£0). It's cheaper and when it goes wrong can be fixed.

Opera alerts EU to hidden Windows browser-ballot

Paul 139

Not that unusual

To replicate: Install vista from a pre-SP1 source - for example a factory restore DVD supplied with a 3-year old PC. Patch using windows update until no more updates are available. On the final reboot, the scenario depicted occurs.

Dell intros 'smallest' desktop PC made with desktop parts

Paul 139
Thumb Down

Optical drive ?

There's no way that's a desktop optical drive with a motorised tray, surely? Looks like a horrible little laptop "popout" to me.

Anti-filesharing laws are go

Paul 139
Stop

Legal firesharing

Oh no, no again. My firm uses a gnutella-derived p2p app for propagating a large decentralized store of lefgal documents from and to its hundred or so field agents. Around a third have had warning letters from their home (and in a few cases mobile) ISPs regarding their use of 'illegal file sharing software', along with threats of disconnection and legal sanctions.

If ISPs can't differentiate between 'illegal file sharing' and just 'encrypted stuff on port 6346', is plod really going to do any better ?

Iomega StorCenter ix4-200d

Paul 139
Linux

Too risky to use.

Old PII tower, RAID/network cards as needed, a handful of HDDs and FreeNAS. Although a few pounds less to buy and more hours work to set up initially, being able to fix the damned thing when it breaks is worth (often literally) thousands.

Toyota Prius fourth-generation e-car

Paul 139
Boffin

Diesel Hybrid

greeno99; Diesel engines are 'expensive' to start and stop in terms of fuel and wear and tear compared to petrol/LPG/gas burners. Hybrids tend to start and stop their dead-dinosaur-to-kinetic energy converters quite often in response to varying power requirements - foot down, engine on, steady speed, off again.