* Posts by Andrew Duffin

24 publicly visible posts • joined 14 Sep 2007

SMARTPHONES make TEENS have SEX with STRANGERS

Andrew Duffin

No confounding factors were present in this research, no sir, none at all.

And the respondents weren't self-selected, oh no, not in any way.

What a load of bull.

Pints under attack as Lord Howe demands metric-only UK

Andrew Duffin

From the Dead Sheep Dept

Howe is a silly old ass.

Just because he finds real money confusing...

And if I were him I'd keep pretty quiet about having been a member of the traitor Heath's government.

He can hobble back down his hole, frankly.

'Catastrophic' Avira antivirus update bricks Windows PCs

Andrew Duffin

What number of patch?

"Service Pack 0"

Zero?

Well that would have made me suspicious straightaway.

I mean, it's like V1.0 of a Microsoft product; you just don't, do you?

UK.gov gives nod to .scot

Andrew Duffin

Hilarious.

Advertise yourself as a parochial provincial with a chip on your shoulder - what could possibly go wrong?

EU cloud data can be secretly accessed by US authorities

Andrew Duffin

Great!

Another fine reason to put your data on someone else's servers!

Has Steve Jobs killed the consumer hard disk industry?

Andrew Duffin
FAIL

Nonsense on stilts

Smartphones are easier to use than PC's?

Gimme a break.

And nobody needs local storage any more, because - as we all know - Internet connections everywhere are super-fast all the time and never break. Oh, and cloud suppliers are completely reliable, they never lose your data or get hacked into or cut you off for non-payment or for any other reason mistaken or otherwise. Ever.

Whatever this guy's smoking, I don't want any of it.

An Apple shill, nothing more.

Absurd.

Cops raid man whose Wi-Fi was used to download child porn

Andrew Duffin

This is news?

I knew this would happen as soon as I read about that BT thing where they "encourage" you to let random people use your WiFi connection.

No way will any law enforcement types ever understand this; anyone who allows their connection to be used is just asking for trouble.

Me? 802.1x .... forget it, bad guys!

MS home server users hit by Windows Live Custom Domains snafu

Andrew Duffin

Maybe not a crock, but...

I always assumed Windows Home Server was a solution looking for a problem - it seems that they have now found each other!

Dell chief stuffs data center into suitcase

Andrew Duffin

And?

If 4Tb of storage makes a data centre, I've got one in my study.

It's in an Antek ATX case, and it runs Windows Server Hyper-V with a couple of VM's. It has 16Gb of RAM and 6Tb of storage.

I thought it was just a server.

I think this thing is, too.

ContactPoint goes live despite security fears

Andrew Duffin
Thumb Down

Because THAT worked so well before

Health officials and schools?

Oh God, please no.

I have seen at first hand how careful they are (not) with passwords and such.

This data will leak faster than a leaking thing.

What this means basically is that anyone who wants to can find out all about your children.

Fortunately (a) I have no children under 18 any more and (b) I don't live in England.

Charges against London tube tourist snapper thrown out

Andrew Duffin

Erm?

"the police held him overnight and refused to allow him access to legal advice"

Is that now legal in the UK?

Did I miss something?

Police law-interpretation: What next?

Andrew Duffin

Guess what...

"Police will in future consider all licensing requests on their individual merits."

I bet they will. And oddly enough, they will come to the same conclusion in every case: they must ALL install CCTV.

It's a coincidence!

Software body slams uk.gov's 'special treatment' of music biz

Andrew Duffin

As expected

There was me thnking FAST were going to say something useful, but no, it's the same old refrain, "we'd like some of that, please".

The old business models are gone, people, get used to it.

Let's pay, by all means, but let's pay the creators of the content, not the parasitic suits who've grown up thinking we owe them a living.

Lucky Mancs could get ID cards first, Jacqui declares

Andrew Duffin

wtf?

"...opening their first bank account, renting their first flat, or perhaps travelling to Europe..."

Because of course, none of us was able to do that in the bad old days before ID cards.

Mendacious imbecile.

EC will force users to pick a Windows browser, says Microsoft

Andrew Duffin

Redundant?

And there was me thinking I could already choose which browser I wanted to use.

Clearly this "Firefox" thing on my PC is a mirage.

Why don't the EU grow up and learn something about computers?

There's no riddle to Dell's Limerick move

Andrew Duffin
Unhappy

Ok, but...

It's hard to argue too much with the analysis, but there is a problem.

Even supposing the jobs existed, not everyone is capable of becoming a degree-qualified brain worker. Unless we dumb degrees down even more than the UK already has, which would mean nothing changes anyway.

Or, to put it more bluntly, what are we to do with the left-hand side of the Bell curve?

There are hundreds of thousands of good, capable, hard-working citizens who need something worthwhile to do. If they don't find anything worthwhile to do, there will be trouble. Saying to them "tough, Poles are cheaper" may be true, but will not avert the trouble.

I don't pretend to know the answer, btw.

Electric car maker in 'urgent financial distress'

Andrew Duffin
Thumb Down

Solution

Jeez, if nobody want their shitty cars, they should go bust. It's that simple. Why is this hard to understand?

Terror in orbit: ISS piss recycler in fire alarm mishap

Andrew Duffin

Piss awful procurement, what?

They need a machine THAT big to do what's basically a reverse osmosis job?

Looks like another $600 hammer to me.

Why not just pop along to your local friendly yacht chandler, where watermakers that turn sea-water into drinking water are pretty much a commidity at a few $hundred.

I know it's not quite the same task, but it's not that different, is it?

Passport and ID card price hike laundered via private sector

Andrew Duffin

Aye right

organisations "will need to demonstrate their capability in securing applicants' data appropriately."

So that's the government ruled out then.

Next!

Why blade servers still don't cut it, and how they might

Andrew Duffin

Why bother?

Blade Servers?

How 20th century.

Has none of you heard of virtualisation?

Four 1TB hard drives on test

Andrew Duffin

Your mileage may vary...

Steve - horses for courses I guess. In my office we refer to WD drives as "Western Dodgital", since they fail so often. Just about every PC that comes back with a HDD problem turns out to have a Western Dodgital. We refuse to accept another WD drive as a warranty replacement because we'll only get it back in a few weeks later - Seagate or Hitachi only accepted!

Maxtor used to be good, not sure since the takeover there; Hitachi seem to me to be the most reliable drives around.

But then again, ymmv.

Scottish Government to block wind farm plan

Andrew Duffin

Beauty isn't the point

Dave, I've never seen the (allegedly) 2Mw turbine at Reading, but given how little wind blows in the South of England, I would guess it never produces 2Mw and doesn't even come near that for at least 75% of the time. In other words, amazing and majestic it may be, possibly even an engineering marvel, but considered functionally, it's an expensive and pointless piece of gesture politics.

As for the Lewis windfarm, well the wind is a little more prevalent there, but sometimes it blows not at all, and sometimes it blows too strongly (yes, that too is a problem for wind generators), and never ever does it blow predictably and manageably.

This has two consequences - first, you have to keep standby generation of equivalent capacity in an almost-ready state all the time, which pretty much negates the emissions gains, and second it destabilises the power grid, which becomes unmanageable once intermittent and unpredictable generation like wind exceeds about 10% of the installed capacity.

The Scottish Executive has done the right thing this time, though probably for all the wrong reasons.

Scotland currently gets about 40% of its power from its two operating nuclear stations (Hunterston and Torness). Once these go off-stream around 2015 our choices will be (a) build more nuclear or (b) depend on imported Russian gas (like THAT's a good idea - ask the Ukrainians) or (c) import power from our more sensible Southern neighbours in England and/or France or (d) let the lights go out.

Wind is not going to hack it, and it is not worth destroying our finest landscapes in pursuit of a chimera.

What does Microsoft's European defeat mean?

Andrew Duffin

TINA

I'm no great friend of Microsoft, but when the EU says it hopes Microsoft's market share will decrease as a result of this, whose does it hope will increase?

Apple's? Even more closed, even more expensive...

Linux? 57 varieties and unusable unless you're a major geek?

What exactly are they hoping will happen?

Root-locked Linux for the masses

Andrew Duffin

An oldie but a goodie

Sounds like a UNIX-based thin client to me.

Hasn't that been about to take over the world for, oh I don't know, about thirty years now?