Re: Is BBM really that important?
There is plenty of twitter/facebook clones too - yet you don't see them doing the massive numbers either;
Same with BBM - its not that its the _only_ one; its the most popular one.
Posts by DJ Smiley
449 publicly visible posts • joined 14 Sep 2011
The 'experts' who never see BBM will never understand RIM
Lone config file in Mac OS X SIGNALS DEATH OF THE DVD
New Intel Ultrabooks to spray HOT JUICE into mobes
Monday 13th August 2012 09:32 GMT
Re: You do know...
Why?
x86 is notoriously hungry for power compared to other arches such as arm or MIPS
Intel isn't part of either group which indicates they either think its worthless; They have their own plans (involving apple for the conspiracy theorists) or are just waiting to see which wins and run with that.
Deadly pussies kill more often than owners think
Thursday 9th August 2012 14:29 GMT 
Vast numbers of them committing genocide the world over while
So..... a creature massively expanding its explosive growth; committing genocide the world over and nothing keeping it in check. All of its predators are either gone or secured. Nothing to hold it back.
Humans, a wonderful example of what happens when you have no predators.
Amazon exploited by hacker in scribe's epic Apple iCloud pwn
WD's 2TB Green giant can't jam hardness into standard slot
Wikipedia collapses threatening the very fabric of civilisation
Daily Mail group in screeching U-turn on parody tweet persecution
Scrunched Street View spymobile spied in India
Valve: Games run FASTER on Linux than Windows
Friday 3rd August 2012 10:02 GMT
Re: Nah, it'll be simpler than that.
I wish that was true - I don't mind the CLI but run xfce on all of my desktops as a gentoo user; but ubuntu users who have come directly from windows are generally not sure about the commandline and generally don't even know how to open a terminal without clicking through the menu to access one (ctrl alt t last time I checked in ubuntu).
Hundreds of websites go titsup in Prime Hosting disk meltdown
Thursday 2nd August 2012 12:47 GMT
Re: More fun if the card goes
We had a raid controller from Dhell do this - it went to write through mode as it should if it encounters errors; except instead of actually writing the data though (abet slowly) it decided any writes could be silently ignored and dropped.
People saying H/W raid is better than software raid are either never dealt with dodgy raid controllers; or are thinking of that joke of raid that comes built into motherboards and not mdadm.
India: We DO have the BlackBerry encryption keys
Microsoft: MED-V won't help you escape WinXP end-of-life
Dropbox blames staffer's password reuse for spam flood breach
Anonymous declares war after French firm trademarks its logo
Boy cuffed after Twitter troll's drown threat to Olympic diver Tom Daley
Sellers flogging vid games to underage kids face jail, unlimited fine
Tuesday 31st July 2012 07:56 GMT 
No it wont...
1. Parents ignore age ratings
2. No game has a difficulty rating; so parents end up wasing money on games which are way too hard because they look easy (i.e. they have a cartoon or some childs toy as the picture on the front
3. Because of 2. Parents end up listening to what their kids played at someone elses house and enjoyed and so buy that.
4. Obviously not all parents; some are highly clued up or at least ask the staff in the store
5. Sadly the reality is most of the time the staff in the store don't have any more time than the parents to play games.
All the above is true. I used to work in game retail and saw everything from a dad buying GTA IV for his 4 year old son, to 16 year olds telling me they were going to knife me if I didn't sell them GTA (hahahah then the two VERY large store security guards turned up); Kids with fake driving licenses; kids with OTHER peoples driving licenses; and then parents who would ask questions and actually listen to the advice we'd attempt to give.
Sadly though my employer could not see the point in actually having the staff play games at any point, nor did they see the point in having managers who actually cared about anything other than sales.
---------------
Also, the chain that I worked at would enforce the pegi rating as if it was a legal rating (basically it was a simple get out cause to not sell a pegi rated 12 to a 5 year old without just saying "we don't want to") but parents would always say "Well thats not a legal rating is it" pointing to the pegi rating because it looked nothing like the BBFC which they were used to...
Sysadmins! There's no shame in using a mouse to delete files
Apple disappoints at first Black Hat briefing
Natwest freezes debit cards, online banking in fresh cock-up
IT departments are BRATTY TEENAGERS
Friday 27th July 2012 09:54 GMT
Re: I smell BS
I work in IT here for a very small firm. We have about 50 staff; and all seem to find me very approachable most of the time with issues from the very simple to the large and complex.
This doesn't just mean I get the annoying "my phone won't work" and "Why haven't my emails arrived" but I get questions from the devs for my advice on various systems which I may know more about than they do, and together we work through the issues.
But at the same time, if I'm doing to be looking or even thinking about doing some work on a system which someone else considers "theirs" as many do about the systems they work on every day; I'll make sure I'll ask them the best way of getting things done with the least impact. Its all about give and take.
UK ISPs promise punters 'full' and 'open' internet 'access'
Why one storage admin fears Justin Bieber
Friday 27th July 2012 07:56 GMT
Re: School I work at took another approach.
Oh how at school I loved to screw with people like you.
Well done, you trained a school of kids now trained in the art of moving pornography without being noticed.
Whats that, you hash the file when its a jpeg? Shame I inserted the image into a .doc. Why would anyone check a .doc called "version12345.doc".
How about instead of messing around with silly tools like this; you give the students X space, and limit them to that. Anyone needing more than X space has to apply to the sysadmin to explain why they need the extra space. In return they can be educated on what costs that space incurs and so they learn to treat it respectfully.
Nah, that'd be like school or something....
What happens when Facebook follows MySpace?
Kaminsky takes on censorship with info-mapping tools
Thursday 26th July 2012 08:06 GMT
Re: Wrong analogy
Wrong again,
A SHOP may choose to not stock a certain paper.
A Deliver company may choose to not carry particular goods.
A ISP may choose to not stock a certain website?
The problem is Americans online are basically stuck in a duopoly, as we are in the UK (Virgin or BT with very few examples of others). If both choose to block something, everyone is screwed.
Mac malware Crisis as Apple lets slip its Mountain Lion
Wednesday 25th July 2012 15:03 GMT
Re: Something doesn't add up in this article
Some clever hacker writes a exploit to show what can be done.
Sophos and any good security companies are watching these underground places for this activity. The hackers mostly don't mind either; its not about being good or bad.
Then some kiddie gets the exploit and manages to package it into some form which CAN be used in the wild.
Virgin Media's 'bye-bye to buffering' beardy Bolt boast BANNED
Wednesday 25th July 2012 13:50 GMT
All of those claims you just made involve you buying something you don't already pay for.
If you were going to quit, you still can. They didn't sign you up into a new contract with a promise of faster speeds, and if you did sign a new contract because they promised you faster speeds for free, you've learnt a valuable life lesson.
Techie accused of snooping wife's email cleared of wrongdoing
Monday 23rd July 2012 10:49 GMT
I hack an ex's mind
Well, I noticed something was wrong....
Stood one night at a bus stop near her house on the way home, don't know why I stopped but I sat there for about 20 minutes.... waiting.... then I saw my mate running up the hill to her house... Confirmed my suspicisions...
Now happily married with someone else :D
Barnes & Noble: You won't need a Nook to read our ebooks
New 'Madi' cyber-espionage campaign targets Iran AND Israel
Tuesday 17th July 2012 14:06 GMT 
"Interestingly, our joint analysis uncovered a lot of Persian strings littered throughout the malware and the C&C tools, which is unusual to see in malicious code. The attackers were no doubt fluent in this language."
So they ran "strings" on it, and then ran it though google translate to find out what language? ;)
Prince Charles whips out jumbo red ball for Blighty's code-breakers
NVIDIA Developer Zone, user forums plundered in hack attack
Friday 13th July 2012 14:54 GMT 
Its nice to see...
Its nice to see a technology company being sensible, and upfront about whats happening. I mean you'd expect them to be but so many won't these days.
Salted passwords? Check
Advised users clearly about what information was possibly accessed? Check
Advised users to change passwords "Just in case" Check.
Well done nVidia, while I might hate some of your practices concerning drivers at least you seem to be sensible with your users data.
O2's titsup network struggles to find its feet
O2, GiffGaff network goes titsup for unlucky punters
Top spook: ISP black boxes NOT key to UK's web-snoop plan
ISPs step in to supply DNSChanger safety net
Tuesday 10th July 2012 11:30 GMT
My wife types urls in the google box.... she knows she shouldn't/doesn't need to but she does it because thats where the cursor is to start with...
Interestingly I found this means she hardly ever manages to typo a url as google will suggest the correct one pretty swiftly, and they do at least "try" and filter out bad pages too :)
Tuesday 10th July 2012 07:36 GMT
What doesn't appear broken never gets fixed
Sigh.... while I can understand wanting to "help" customers by making sure they have access.... these machines are likely ridden with other spy/malware and the user is likely completely unaware "because everything works as normal".
If the ISP's really wanted to help, offer tech support calls who'll come and try and fix the infection for you. Yeah right, and then get sued because someones photos no longer open or something absurd like that. I know :(
Atos IT workers threaten strike during Olympics over 'living wage'
British Gas bets you'll pay £150 for heating remote control
BA staff to google for snaps, dirt on biz-class passengers
Facebook: Our phone app DID seize your email
Thursday 5th July 2012 08:01 GMT
My default never changed...
What doesn't make sense to me is my default email address on facebook has never changed from my original gmail account.
I keep hearing stories of how people have been switched over to using the facebook one by default, I login, check mine, nope, still gmail.
Are these people doing something special to have fb screwing with their account settings? Clicking "ok change my account!" on a popup that appears or something?
Forget internet fridges and Big Data. Where's my internet fish tank?
Tuesday 3rd July 2012 10:07 GMT
Re: Redundancy
Exactly.
Any "proper" fishkeeper does this.
I know I do on my expensive tank.
Also a filter dying doesn't kill fish instantly. You have a build up of beneficial bacteria in your tank which mostly live within the materials in your filter. There's lots of science on this, but if the filter stops, your bacteria start dying. Few hours later they are all dead.
This is what kills your fish, as these bacteria break down the ammonia and nitrates in your tank. While it won't kill your fish instantly, it will slowly poison them. Slowly being a few days generally dependent upon the fish and type of tank (marine being the most effected). Water changes (50% of water a day) can keep your tank happily running without a filter, and once you have bacteria growing naturally in the tank itself (which takes time) you can run without a filter at all (as mentioned by other readers).
However if your HEATER dies, and its a very cold day..... or it decides to heat your water to 70c...... then your in real trouble and not even having internet connected appliances would allow you to fix this fast enough (Maybe if you left work right away, but for a fish tank?).
Biting the hand that feeds IT
