Posts by Steve Carr 1 30 publicly visible posts • joined 20 Sep 2009
....what happens when you travel overseas or even out of state and the clerk at the rental car agency asks for your drivers license? Or the traffic cop pulls you over and asks to see you license? All the officials will see is a fancy card which could just mean the bearer is entitled to fish for trout...
An IP address certainly is always far from enough to identify an individual. Run an open WiFi access point and the torrent sharer could be anyone within range. With a protected network, you still can't tell which computer it was behind the router. And don't get me started on the use of P2P protocols by stealth within a compromised computer, without the knowledge of the computer user.
And of course this decision will be appealed, in spite of the above.
I have a couple of large boxes of old power supplies, from discarded/broken/obsolete electronics gear. Whenever I find a need for a replacement power supply, or some potential application for a voltage adapter/power brick, I shuffle thru the boxes and see if something there will do the job. This usually entails getting out the soldering iron, and fitting a different tip. Way better to have standardized tails on the units, for sure!
What we need now is the EU to take the initiative and mandate it.
Of course there'll always be an worm in the Apple (pun intended) - where a manufacturer insists on a proprietary standard. See the new iPhone for instance......
So the Apple tax just went up, yet again.
At least with the older connector standard it was possible to pick up a generic (read realistically priced) replacement cable if your original, over priced, Apple branded cable was lost or damaged. Mine cost the equivalent of under two quid from a bargain store, vs the exorbitant priced one from an Apple store. Given the new adaptor will need to contain electronics to convert signal types, it'll be a long while before that becomes true for the new crop of Apple products.
Good thing I have a Samsung phone then!
.. and certainly the jury would appear to have rushed their decision making process. Of course they may well have felt pressure from the judge, given her very strict timekeeping for the courtroom side of the case, especially the last few days farcical gallop through the witness list.
This one is going to appeal, on so many grounds it's not even funny, the process errors alone make that obvious. And let's not get started on the 'rectangle with rounded corners' aspects!
The text says you get to escort "a slow-moving Sherman tank", but clearly the author is not well enough versed in WWII hardware, as the tank in question is actually a Panzerkamfwagen (Panzer) III. In fact the screen shot with the article says you are escorting a captured Panzer in the mission as well.
The Smart Gate technology is already in use in New Zealand, and enables Australia/New Zealand trips to be so much more seamless. Given that, I'd say New Zealand passport holders will enjoy the same benefits as our Australian cousins.
Actually, on a recent business trip to the US I was amazed at how simple and frictionless the cross border processes are now, compared to even just a few years ago.
....their claim to speed up the backup by such a margin would appear to be merely a gloss of what is actually happening here. Their approach is to do a quick, incremental, backup of what has changed and present this as a 'full backup'. Woe betide the sysadmin who tries to do a restore from this backup when the original full backup repository, or any one of the other 'full backups' has any sort of failure at all - six months or six years down the track, how can you be absolutely failsafe certain that *all* of these pieces of the puzzle will be available and error free? That's why we do full backups in the first place! Calling a series of incrementals a full backup is a fools dream
There is immense pressure being applied to introduce a "Free Trade Agreement" between the USA and New Zealand. As part of the negotiations, those who really hold the power in the US (not the politicians) are insisting that New Zealand implement just these sorts of draconian copyright protection mechanisms.
This will all end in tears, of course - and result in far from free trade!
One major lobby group on the US side is the pharma industry, who have fought for years to try and jack their prices waaaaay up here in New Zealand. On the side of the New Zealand consumer is Pharmac who has pushed the price of drugs for NZ consumers way down, mainly by sourcing, or threatening to source, generic drugs. For all their faults, Pharmac has done a good job - and here we go, further empowering the crazy over the top copyright and patent protection stance of US big business.
The current crop of NZ politicos are even worse than normal, and we the people will suffer for it.
There is an awesome rendition of the Bayeux Tapestry in small town New Zealand.
http://www.1066.co.nz/mosaic/mosaic.htm
1.5 million "bits" of spring steel, individually coloured, so maybe say one byte per "bit". This is a scaled down rendition, not at the original physical size, but there has been no information lost, per se.
If WHS were expensive, maybe, just maybe, I could agree - but it isn't! My WHS box cost less than most RAID NAS chassis to buy, and yet does a heap more than pretty much any NAS box I've seen. It has a real server OS, and as a result is fully configurable. I run apps directly on it (my weather station software for example, a website staging host, a flash based internet music server, media server, etc etc) as well as using it for storage, backups and restores. All for under US$400 including hardware and software.
Over the years I've been a reluctant user of Microsoft software, and pointed potential users at almost anything other than the stuff from the boys at Redmond. That was until I discovered a magic wee machine from Acer loaded with Windows Home Server. Cheap as chips, it simply does the job it was designed to do. Add a drive, any size, internal or external, and add it to the storage pool - and the space appears and is usable pretty much instantly. Want to drop a drive out? Mark it as no longer in the pool, wait till the drive light changes colour, and pull it out. No disruptions, no drama, no waiting for a RAID array to rebuild in either circumstance. All while maintaining a single cohesive file system structure. What's not to like here?
And now as someone else has said, Redmond has delivered both barrels into it's feet. sigh
http://kamlau.com/software/sans-digital-towerraid-tr4m-b-and-acer-easystore-home-server/
This describes how to add a multiplexed external SATA enclosure, to give 4 more SATA drives, using the built in eSATA connector, and also two further enclusures, for a total of 16 drives, each 2TB or more, for a total of 32TB+ of storage.
My suspicion is that Acer quoted the 4TB 'limit' way back when 1TB were the top end drive. As someone else has said, these machines have been available elsewhere for at least a year.
The one limit that is there, though, is the 2GB RAM limit - this is as much as the Atom CPU installed can address, and the CPU is soldered to the board.
There are also ways to add PS/2 keyboard, mouse, VGA and a true serial port, for those moaning that it is a headless unit. See this link:-
http://www.mediasmartserver.net/forums/viewtopic.php?f=6&t=3980
I have had one of these boxes for around five months now, and love it.
RAID - it doesn't have or need it! Instead it uses controlled dataset/share level replication of files across multiple spindles. Love one drive and the software automagically detects that you only now have one copy of any file you want duplicated for safety, and makes another duplicate on another spindle. Remove the failed volume and add another one *of any size* and you can add it to the storage pool. And did I mention it also has automated data deduplication, so if your users store the same file in multiple places, even on different shares, it quietly reclaims the space?
Remote access from outside your private network via the cloud to your own home desktop box works a charm, too - and WHS controls the initial access, then steps aside so you're talking to the native CPU on your desktop machine, not the Atom.
There's a raft of great WHS plugins too.
Dump the provided MacAfee AV software - it sucks - and perhaps give try Avast for WHS a try. It works, though it ain't free.
I reckon these boxes are a steal, and worth way more than the asking price.
As others have pointed out, the inside of a smokers PC is a hideous thing to behold. My own experience of the effects of long term cigarette smoke on the inside of a PC when relatives have brought their PCs round to be diagnosed has resulted in said relatives being told their PC is unrepairable also!
Those who smoke themselves are pretty much in denial, I'd say, and are likely on the ones above braying "Bad Apple". I for one support the tech and the techs managers in refusing to suffer the effects of the f*cktards who continue to smoke, in the face of overwhelming evidence of the dangers.
I recall working on some FORTRAN code many years ago, that was designed to compute the correct/safe dose of radiation to be used when irradiating a patient tumor. For a language that is still in use, it certainly was far from ideal for use in such a critical application. These days we seem to take for granted that calculations will be 32 or 64-bit, but back in the day, different manufacturers and different memory architectures abounded, and these routines were ported from architecture to architecture with seeming gay abandon. As a result, the code I was faced with had HUGE known errors in its calculations, almost all down to precision errors caused by the changes in arithmetic precision.
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