* Posts by hstiles

9 publicly visible posts • joined 3 Aug 2009

Iranian firms told not to use foreign email providers

hstiles

Re: Let's not over-react here

It 'is' reasonable, but it should also be a choice. Forcing organisations, companies, etc.. to use a domestic domain, over which you have full control, is a simple first stage to suppress any opposition - you can refuse to issue a domain name or yank an organisation offline with very little effort.

Now you have control of the domestic DNS, so you start informing subscribers that you'll be changing their DNS and routing any mail through government servers.

More BT heads roll amid biz transformation

hstiles
Facepalm

BT reseller

BT couldn't

- sort out the endless billing issues relating to redundant services they couldn;t find

- give me a straight answer on a line move without trying to trick me into signing up for a new 3 year circuit rental

- offer me improved call rates without some convoluted dial plan designed to hammer with me expensive connection fees

So why would I want to reward them with additional business and why on earth would I move it from a competent supplier.

Flickr thinks again about 4,000 pix loss

hstiles

Yeah right.

The restore functionality was probably always there, it was just too much of an arse for the Flickr admins to carry out a restore procedure and THAT is the fundamental objective many people have to cloud services; Namely that unless you check the T&Cs like a hawk you'll find that there's a loophole that allows them to bung you some free stuff as recompense for deleting a load of your data rather than doing the right thing and restoring it. Sure, you can keep your own backups, but unless this allows you to restore all of the neccesary functionality its intended state, you won't have faith in the solution.

I appreciate you have to put things in perspective. This is flickr, not hosted corporate e-mail or a CMS, but the principle still applies, when you use hosted or cloud services, yours may be a lone angry voice amongst thousands and your service provider may simply decide that a small rebate on your monthly subscription or some other token gesture is cheaper and easier for them than providing a service over which you have total faith and until that rather significant concern is addressed, there will still be a significant proportion of peopler who will insist on running everything internally.

Photo loss blogger to Flickr: You're f*cking kidding

hstiles

the solution is simple

Flickr should provide a backup service for the end user that allows them to backup their image database and or metadata. The onus of backing up is passed onto the consumer and a small adjustment to the T&Cs absolves Flickr of any responsiblity.

The biggest problem with cloud services such as Flickr is that the scale of the operations makes inconvenience caused to single or small groups of individuals of little or no consequence and that's the bit that people often fail to appreciate.

Google battles Derby cops over access to Street View data

hstiles

Maybe

Or he could have parked car at that angle to obscure the view of the caravan from the road whilst he fetched a set of bolt cutters or similar from the boot and set to work removing the wheel clamp. Also a bit of a coincidence that the vehicle caught in the picture is a 4x4, perfect for towing a caravan. Who knows.

Axl Rose sues Activision

hstiles

r.e. no

It depends. The wording of the article doesn't help. Is there a clause in the contract that states that permission to use Welcome to the jungle was granted on the condition that Velvet Revolver or Slash were not to be included? If not, there it's an (unreasonable) request and Activision would have a case to answer.

I would also assume that Axl Rose would have to prove that this inclusion caused him personal injury, loss of earnings, loss of reputation, etc...

Anyway, we're talking about the USA, so the likely outcome is a lengthy and costly court case involving lots of expensive shit hot, sheister lawyers and a not-inconsiderable settlement amount that keeps A (triple) XL Rose happy and allows Activision to include G'N'R songs for the next 6 Guitar Hero releases.

Multi-network iPhone SIM rumours at Apple

hstiles

This could benefit more than just iPhone users

This addresses a big issue for a number of users, namely the crippling data charges when roaming. By simplifying the process of switching to a different carrier when overseas and, therefore, benefit from more favourable rates.

This in turn could put pressure on providers to reduce roaming data charges, which would be nice.

Hypervisors: grinding through to bare metal

hstiles

@Gordon Bennett

"If I want thin client computing (and trust me, I do understand the reasons why some people might), wtf do I need a virtualisation-ready desktop system with a bare metal hypervisor? What does that give me that Citrix or LTSP or whatever doesn't already give me (other than a big bill from VMware, of course)?"

Quite a lot.

Not all applications play nice. Plenty of IT Departments waste hours trying to trick badly designed software to work properly in a multi user environment such as LTSP or Citrix XenApp. Solutions like XenDesktop or streamed applications are one solution, but they are complex beasts to setup and maintain, are bandwidth intensive and costly in terms of licensing and the network infrastructure required to support them. They also don't lend themselves to distributed environments.

Hain breaks ranks with Cabinet over McKinnon extradition

hstiles

@Glynn 2

"Why has no-one offered him a job hacking computers, I thought this was standard procedure for a hacker this dangerous "

McKinnon did offr his services to the the yanks but they rejected it saying that 'any idiot was capable of doing what he did'.

So, that's the dangerous cyber criminal angle pretty much rubbished, so all that's left is the simply fact that they want to throw the book at thim for making them look like a bunch of incompetents.