Posts by Lyndon Hills 1

Re: However you dice it....

I seem to recall a story about reindeer piss getting you high, so you it might be more fun than blowing forty quid on an iPod.

While searching for the reindeer story, I was surprised to discover how many stories El Reg seems to have run relating to urine here

bell-endulous

phrase of the week? and it's only Monday.

Re: I've always wondered...

The goal is to make the meter reading easier.

I think that's only one of the goals, some others include

allowing the energy co. to control your power supply when they need to

making consumption more apparent to the consumer, in the hope that they will moderate their use, thus assisting in meeting EU energy targets

Re: Licensing audits

Yes, your example is quite simple. Now take a look at some of the licensing terms for more complex software, like Sql Server or Oracle's DB. Should I be paying per seat, per server/ per core? How do virtual machines count? Do I pay differently for dev / uat servers than live servers?

I remember Oracle trying to suggest that every user of data that had been in a database needed an Oracle license. That meant if I export some data to csv, bring it in to Excel and send it to you, YOU need an Oracle license. I wasn't on the negotiating team, but I don't think they won that one. We were a pretty big Oracle user though, so we were already paying for buckets of licenses.

GNU Terry Pratchett

here is the Reddit campaign to keep his name 'alive' GNU Terry Pratchett

Re: Band?

A wrist worn device that incorporates a heart monitor, gps and uses blue tooth to sync with your phone. It may also have some phone functions, but I think the emphasis is on tracking you doing a daily run while measuring your heart rate. It doesn't try to look like a watch - hence the name Band, I guess.

Re: Time axis mismatch

Same here, Chrome worked for me. FF had a message that it supports webGL, but there was an error. The site is pretty cool though. Be better to run this on Friday afternoon, since the whole flight is about 2 hours.

Re: PowerShell is a step backwards

The whole point is that if you need to do the same thing repeatedly, having a script means that you won't accidently 'check the wrong box'. Nor for that matter will your PFY.

Re: What I find most worrying...

there are, let's say, untrustworthy agents/police men etc out there

Surely not

What, like those mentioned in this other story in todays El Reg?

Re: "no UK Government ever spends any money west of Bristol"

not even a mainline railway

it had a maritime railway though...

Re: I struggle to know how seriously to take this...

Sorry to see you down voted. that made me laugh, and I'm way left of New Labour.

Re: Just like the corporate world

Not sure why the down votes? Maybe saying "odds are" is too speculative, but it's certainly possible. I remember (I think a Dell) firewall appliance where the manual had a section of instructions explaining exactly how to do this.

Upvoted as funny

not because the new design upsets me particularly

Re: I wonder...maybe he should have asked one of his own supporters?

remember jeremy clarkson sounding off about the dangers of hackers?

Re: You can add your own filters....

The MVP hosts file here

Re: THIS IS MADNESS

MADNESS are/were a band.

This is a quite sane idea, to start again with a standards-compliant browser, giving the opportunity to remove all the code that does non-standard stuff.

Potentially the new browser should be fast and lightweight, and the redesign should make future development easier and quicker.

Re: I always

Sex lives of the Potato Men, I'd forgotten that one. I'm still not sure of was meant to be funny (it wasn't) or it was just crap.

It quite possibly depends on the laws of the country you're in. Supported life of the device is going to be how long the manufacturer expects it to last.

Since no-one repairs anything nowadays, it's probably about 5 minutes.

Re: In that case...

I wonder where Fox News reporting on Birmingham and Paris fits in? Fake or just satire?

Re: Get a grip...

I wonder if it's time to start sending emails containing nothing but random numbers?

For this specific case - detention on the basis of encrypted email - the answer must be for encrypted email to become the norm, and so no cause of suspicion.

For this to happen I'd think it needs to baked in to every email client, setting up the key as part of the install process. It would need to be so transparent that non-technical people wouldn't even know it was happening. I'm a bit hazy on details, but if it was public/private keys, then I guess you'd need a global key-server infrastructure, similar to dns?

WorldPay

I don't know about Sage, but that is definitely the case for WorldPay. The customer enters their card details on the WorldPay site, so should never be seen on the merchant site.

While I do agree with you, most people hearing a person referred to as a 'hacker' assume that the individual in question breaks into computers. This feels like the same argument that was raging so long ago. So basically while you're right, the majority either don't know or don't care and either way you might as well save your pixels.

Re: Ignorance, malice and boredom

Up vote for dig @ facebook

Re: El Reg Redesign - leave your comment here.

I'll echo the comment on drop down thingys. might get used to them but it took me a minute to be sure I'd opened in a new tab, not just opened in the same one. Seems to be fine in IE Win Phone 8.1.

Re: PAYG

While I have some sympathy with your point, having a contract gives you more than free bling. I buy my phones and have a contract.

What is annoying is that I actually asked if I could put a cap on the bill ( it would be exceptional for me to exceed say £150 / mo), and was told I couldn't. Your data usage is clearly monitored, so that any excess can be charged for. If you're PAYG you can't make calls when your credit runs out. I don't see why the same couldn't be applied to contract phone calls.

I guess it can, and will be once the telcos are forced to.

Re: BIG Business approach to IT.

Have a programme to insure all IT's system are brought up to the latest spec's at least every 3 years.

While I think you make a lot of valid points, have you considered what this suggestion would cost? I guess if you were doing this all the time, you'd become expert at building test environments and implementing regression tests etc, but even then it would still be a massive cost.

Re: "Popped the company"

It's also used to mean pledging some item in a pawnshop, so 'pawned the company'. make more sense?

Re: Why remove it ?

Also on the front page of the web site

Re: A single language for all platforms does exist.

Also Xamarin studio, if you're into c#.

Re: If we did not have Isis we would have had to create one

Reminds me of The man who was Thursday

Re: "the UI is too deeply embedded in the OS"

And there is also embedded. If we skip to server versions, you can install server 2012 without a gui at all. This gives you a server OS that you manage and configure, preferably using remote scripting via powershell. Just like *nix admins have been doing for what, nearly 50 years....

Re: What about apps I develope

For Windows 8.1 this is no problem. If you want to deploy to a Windows 8.1 Phone, then you have to register the phone as a developer device with MS first. I think you need a dev account to do that, but I might be mis-remembering. You can only install 10 apps at a time in this way.

I guess the story on Windows 10 might be similar to this.

Re: This law is just another overreaction like "The War on Drugs".

Compare and contrast with the damage caused by the financial meltdown, and the average sentence served by the senior bankers responsible.

Re: Backslash, Backlash!

The piece in the Guardian quoted (I think it was Vodaphone) as stating that most of the salary cost incurred handling these requests is met by government.

this being a UK law, and YouTube being an international US based web site, probably not. They'll just ignore it.