Becoming routine
These data breach stories are becoming more common these days, but I have to wonder if it's because the companies are being more honest or they are getting hacked more...
Posts by rsm1979
13 publicly visible posts • joined 18 Sep 2010
Honda security breach exposes 283,000 customers
WTF is... 4K x 2K?
Friday 15th April 2011 07:17 GMT
Chips
"Some people say that a new disc callled HVD will solve the problem, but discs are dead IMO. A tiny scratch on such a disc would obliterate minutes of content, no matter the error correction. The future is on solid state drives and harddisks, and they won't reach storage capacity capable of doing 4K for acceptable number of movies for quite a while."
I can see this happening where movies and other content are distributed on cheap SSD chips that you stick into a USB3 port.
You'd go to Blockbuster and come out with something a lot like the old PS2 memory cards.
Another benefit is easy writing (multiple times).
Friday 15th April 2011 07:15 GMT
1080p on monitors
"1080p sounded vaguely wild and tricky 7 years ago but now 1080p is holding a lot of things back (trying to buy decent computer monitors with some depth other than 1080 or the still quite pathetic 1200 for example)."
There's a good reason why you want a monitor or TV with a 1920x1080 resolution - if you use a higher resolution display such as 2560x1440 then a movie in 1080p will look blurry due to the resolution of the movie not matching the native resolution of the monitor (1920x1200 is an exception to this because you just get a letterbox effect).
Apple MacBook Pro 13in
Thursday 10th March 2011 10:11 GMT 
USB Fail
I use one of these regularly and the USB port arrangement drives me mad.
You can't use a 3G dongle and a USB headset at the same time because the ports are too close together.
Your only option is to use an extender cable which is a pain in the backside if you're on a train or something.
Apart from that, the hardware is very good.
Courtney Love coughs up $430k in Twitter rant settlement
Sinclair ZX81: 30 years old
Friday 4th March 2011 16:54 GMT 
ZX81 Mug
I marked this occasion by buying a mug from eBay which has a picture of the keyboard on it, should cause some comments in the office.
I had one of these as my second computer (first was the bat + ball console), it was fantastic but wasn't it mono? Or maybe I was using it on a B/W TV? Don't really remember.
Apparently you can still buy the kits for this - but only with the US PSU.
Would be interesting to see if you can write a networking stack for it or something...
Great article, by the way.
OFT waves through UK.gov's national addressing database
Murdoch & Co unveil iPad news rag The Daily
Lane Fox promises sub-£100 PCs
Apple signs Xserve death warrant
Friday 5th November 2010 23:31 GMT 
So glad they did this now
It was getting to the point where we have a lot of people running Apple products where I work that a manager was pushing for an XServe for them.
I've had a meeting with Apple in the past about using Mac Pros as servers and XServe, and sure it makes sense if your environment is 100% Mac, but you'd be insane to use one if you are 95% Windows Vista/7 on the desktop like we are.
There is just no viable replacement for Active Directory with Exchange. Microsoft have the best product for the job and they are looking like angels when you put them next to the practices of Apple these days.
On the server-side I only use Ubuntu 10.04 with a few Windows 2008R2 VMs for AD and other stuff and it all works like a legend.
Will I be putting 2 Mac Pros into a rack in the DC and wasting 12U of space? Hell no.
They don't even have dual PSUs.
And let's not forget what happens if your shiny Apple server breaks - you actually have to take it yourself to an Apple shop and they take 2 weeks to fix the bloody thing.
Now it becomes obvious why they made the Mac Mini thinner - they fit into a 1U.
But these will break if you do anything serious on them - crappy cooling.
I have taken a Ubuntu server up to a load of 90 before when stress testing - a Mac Mini will die a horrible death with something like this, and possibly cause a fire.
Just put your Macs onto the domain and use Exchange for all their calendar/email stuff - it's so much better that way.
3 bigs self up as biggest 3G network
Thursday 14th October 2010 19:42 GMT
My experiences
I used to use 3 for all my internet access, it used to work great and because it was an older style modem it worked fine on Linux too.
Recently though, their DNS servers have been crap and hardly ever work.
I've since switched to Vodafone which somehow always manages to keep a connection even with terrible signal (1 bar).
Vodafone have been FAR more reliable, and you can even play World of Warcraft on it too.
I'm still keeping both dongles around because mobile broadband is far too useful if your home DSL is down or when you just feel like taking the laptop down the park or something.
If you use the Pay as you Go versions (like I do), you pay something like £15 per 3GB - best part is that you can never go over your allowance so no nasty large bills.
Quick and dirty file-clustering-for-idiots
BT feathers ruffled over pigeon-based file transfer caper
Monday 20th September 2010 09:29 GMT
Pigeons per minute - the new bandwidth measurement
10 P/M - 10 pigeons per minute.
Of course, you'd need to know how much capacity the pigeons have, so I propose using a format where you multiply the capacity by number of pigeons: 10 x 512MB = 5GB/min or 85MB/sec which is faster than a lot of hard disks.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
