Posts by foo_bar_baz

@citizen

Quintet = 5

Quartet = 4

@eddie

I second that. I recall getting some troublesome apps from Adobe to work that way. A good practice, though hard work, is to repackage the software for automated deployment, correct perms guaranteed that way.

Jobs

Like the affable guy from marketing he's relaxed and trendy with all the hippy credentials and a stone cold drive for personal wealth.

@homard

MS do not want Office running nicely on a platform like Linux. It would be ... not exactly suicidal but an own goal. Office and PC gaming are the biggest obstacles to Linux adoption.

This is about antitrust, control and drawing developers away from Java et al and into the MS camp.

Priceless

MS PR lady: you cannot compare EU prices with US prices due to VAT in EU. But you cannot compare pre-VAT prices either as VAT is always paid.

Paris b/c it makes sense to her.

The registry

Is not one file.

Greetings to Detroit

Why is it that so many phone related articles on this European site seem to always be about two US phones, one of which is not even available here? It seems that US phone makers have lost the big battle to European and Asian competitors so Merkin journos are desperately trying to focus on the remaining - let's be frank - fringe products with any excuse for an article. It's almost painful to watch. Next an authoritative comparison of car and home audio systems featuring an SUV and a people carrier?

@Henry Wertz

You refer to a WAP Gateway, manufacturers of which are many.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WAP_gateway.

WAP is so Y2K, BTW. Any decent new phone has a proper HTML (and JavaScript for that matter) aware browser without the need for intermediate processing on the operator side. I installed Opera Mini instead of using the default with-kitchen-sink browser mainly because it saves bandwidth.

This may not apply on contract phones if your operator dictates what you may run on it and how you use it. This of course is related to the article's point about operators screwing the customer. Competition is clearly not working in the consumer's favour.

Jacqui. Brown. Sugar.

You couldn't make it up. What's next, mr. Pink for home secretary?

@Martin Edwards

Your assertion is demonstrably wrong - hardware can prevent running unauthorized or modified sw, see xbox 360.

@Levente Szileszky

A) Quick somebody tell Volvo, they've obviously not thought this one through. Maybe they should employ you as an expert, after all they've only got the meager experience of building cars in and for "the North" since 1927.

B) 50 km distance != 50 km/h speed.

C) Re. "AWD is rather a must": see point A.

@Alan

I thought it was praise not whining.

Where to even start ...

@phix8:

"I don't think people should have a right to kill their pets". Should I take my goldfish to a vet when it gets old and sickly? Wake up, by taking a pet you are responsible for causing the death of an animal. Since its death is inevitable, who better to do the last rites than the human that cared and provided for it?

Just because it's a pet and you project human qualities and emotions on it, does not mean it has any more intrinsic worth than the lamb or chicken you had for dinner. The farmer who reared that lamb was probably emotionally attached to it. It probably had a name, for Pete's sake.

How far removed are we from the realities of life? Our grandparents' generation slaughtered their livestock themselves, most people in the world still do. I myself had to do some soul searching when I felt upset about killing and eating a fish I caught. It got me thinking and I hope I have a better attitude towards animals and food for it.

For the record I love my cats and dog, and will be shattered when their time comes. However, making use of their fur coats once they have passed away would only be a tribute to those faithful companions.

Looks more like a skinny version of

Lemmy of Motorhead fame.

@tc

From TFA "it's not surprising". What surprised me were the ratings on switches - e.g. the power consumption of a high end 48 port Catalyst is in the same ballpark.

Separate spheres ...

I hope the mod'rix gives you a spanking for that one.

@andy

So much anger... Or is it envy? Not to worry, IE is getting plugin support.

I'm taken by your implicit trust in commercial software vendors, considering their stellar track record in violating privacy, selling snakeoil and general ineptitude.

The reality is that zero day exploits appear for all browsers and traditional AV products are useless against them and of limited use in general. Disabling scripts is the logical action.

@NogginTheNog

You can lock out accounts in *nix (using the tally2 PAM module). It can be useful, but it doesn't prevent someone trying to bruteforce different accounts, and allows you to maliciously block other people's accounts.

I won't go into the stuff my Linux boxen can do that my Windows box can't, the list is too long. :P

Yawn

Attacker with root privileges can do nasty stuff on your Linux box, news as 11. Oh, and if you use a quality distro with SELinux even the root user cannot use this exploit.

Quoted:

"Users of RHEL and other distributions have been safe for some time now ... "

"Attackers with root privileges may use this to accomplish many standard rootkit behaviors ..."

Wants

I'd buy a shelfload of those. Never mind the graphics, looks excellent for a host of firewall/server uses. Small, unintrusive, quiet and low power (i.e. wife approval guaranteed).

Tux because - obvious.

Welcome to Titan.

In the interest of your own safety please refrain from smoking. And don't even think about using rocket propulsion.

I also wiped Xandros from my Eepc

Xandros has the right idea, shielding the user from the internals and providing an appliance-like feel to it. All the right apps were installed. I was impressed. However, a number of annoyances like the ancient software versions and problems getting the HSDPA USB modem to work reliably (would not work after standby) made me replace it after a few weeks.

The Easy Peasy respin of Ubuntu just works. 3G and wireless work flawlessly. I almost fell off my seat when it told me the battery on my wireless mouse was running out of juice. And all the Linux goodness is there along with a fantastic netbook-friendly UI. Love it to bits.

"wrong kind of ... on the line"

Brilliant. It's only Monday and we've already got the pun of the week.

Title

My transition from Windows to Gnome has been painless. Email, browsing, development and documentation are a breeze; I don't feel I'm missing anything. OK, Gnome's a bit pedestrian but it's pleasant enough to look at and hasn't hindered my productivity.

Perhaps I'm not aware of the context here, but against my experience this just sounds like the usual whinging - Gnome is too backward and KDE is too gimmicky. I personally do not want "innovation" standing in the way my work, i.e. I don't want to have to learn a new interface paradigm or to get distracted by useless effects. If this means stagnation to those who've come to expect major GUI upheavals every few years, so be it. Maybe Gnome is not for you.

@Andrew

The vuln is IPv4.

Whatever

@Jaowon: Linux is not a religion, there is no need to convert the whole world. Horses for courses etc. That's not to say it's not worth telling people if you feel you've found something worth trying. I'm just fucking happy to have an OS like Linux. If it didn't exist I'd surely be using a BSD.

- RHEL on my work desktop

- Ubuntu/EasyPeasy on my EeePC

- Xubuntu on my son's PC

- CentOS on my home file server

- Ubuntu on my home mail / web server (will revert to Debian soonish since it has native linux-vserver support)

- XP on my gaming PC

Before hobbyists comment on it, I use RHEL/CentOS for various reasons. It does everything I need (media playback is not among those) and it's extremely stable with excellent SELinux support.

There are probably plenty of enterprise users like myself gagging to answer the questionnaire but cannot. The Register should just look at their web server logs and draw their own conclusions.

@Alexandr & AC

The desktop PC I use daily at work must be a figment of my 'fanboi' imagination. NDAs prevent me from disclosing details, suffice to say either we have a proactive IT dept or management gets it.

Hint: things change.

@Andy Bright

JavaScript is not Java. Nothing to do with Sun. Nada. Nix. Bupkiss. Even Paris knows.

In Soviet Russia ...

Meaning of name reverses you!

Like the meaning Vladimir Zirinovski's "liberal democratic" party, the "democratic" and "anti fascist" parts in the name really mean the reverse. In Russia fascist means bad foreigner, as in Estonians must be fascist since they aren't happy that they were invaded and subdued by the Soviet Union.

"Although Kremlin officials have tried to portray the groups as independent players, Nashi and the others owe their financing and political support to their status as creations of Mr. Putin’s administration. They are allowed to hold marches, while demonstrations by the opposition are prohibited or curtailed. Their activities are covered favorably on state television, while the opposition’s are disparaged or ignored."

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/08/world/europe/08moscow.html?_r=1&pagewanted=2

More like Hitler Jugend than a pro-democracy organisation.

What I took away from this article ...

... is the message that contract phones are killing innovation and are bad for the consumer. Not only do they get shafted with high rates, they also get bad phones. Operators have no interest in providing functional phones to customers, instead they make sure all unapproved applications are removed (see Skype story here on the Reg).

FWIW in Finland bundling phones with contracts was not permitted before April 2006. The legislation only applies to 3G phones, the purpose being to promote the adoption of new tech. Small telco DNA Finland were reportedly unhappy as allowing contract phones stifles competition and raises the price of calls. Consumers take heed.

USB doesn't support SMART

In my experience you won't get any warnings about impending drive failure.

title

@Al: I'm installing Easy Peasy on my new Eepc, as Goat Jam postulates.

Re. beating Microsoft:

Obviously some companies are set to make out money from Linux adoption, but on a higher level I don't see why Linux should be pushed hard into the market place to compete with Microsoft. It doesn't matter whether netbook or navigator makers like TomTom adopt Linux or not.

If regular netbook and PC users are more comfortable with Windows than they are with Linux, fair enough. That is no threat to those of us who like to use Linux. As development continues, there will be more like myself and maybe Linux usage will some day become more mainstream. That may take time, but it doesn't matter. Microsoft is no threat to Linux - you cannot kill OSS. The whole point of OSS software is that its value is in utility. An inferior OSS product deserves to die, but if it's useful it will get adopted and improved. You cannot kill it with market place shenanigans. Commercial vendors only have a game to lose and OSS only has a game to win.

I still use both Windows and Linux, and would also use OSX if I had the spare cash. I found Linux on the desktop to be lacking when I first tried about 9 years ago, but continued to use it as a server. Now it has improved to the point where I've started using it on laptops and desktops. Did Linux suffer from me biding my time? No. Whereas a commercial company cannot last 10 years without paying customers, an OSS project can slowly mature without commercial pressures. Don't push, just wait and who knows where we'll be in another 10-20 years.

@kevin

TLDs don't pretend to tell you about anything about the resources accessible via them. They tell who is responsible for maintaining the name servers for that namespace and for delegating responsibility over subdomains.

While it's a nice idea to have arbitrary TLDs, it would be a logistical and technical nightmare. One organisation would be responsible for maintaining all names and I don't even want to think about the capacity requirements for the root servers.

Regarding the meaning of domains, not all registrars are so lax. There are domains that cannot be bought by just anyone.

Lastly, the web is not the Internet. A lot more is happening with domain names than humans accessing web sites.

The real fail

Is conflating SAAS with cloud computing.

@Mad Hacker

When the power consumption is a quarter of a normal desktop you're looking at big savings. A KWh costs roughly 10-20 eurocents across the EU. Being generous and assuming everyone switches off their work PC outside working hours you get:

40 hrs / week * 45 working weeks / year = 1800 hours per year.

A 40 Watt Atom PC consumes 72 KWh/year with this usage profile, while a 200 Watt desktop consumes 360 KWh/year, so you save 288 KWh/year. In money that's roughly 30-60 euros. For a PC that's on 24/7 the saving is 140-240 euros in electricity per year depending on the country you live in.

Multiply these with the usage you get from your PC (2-5 years) and the purchase price doesn't look so significant anymore.

A title

I used to like PHP, now I see PHP how I'd imagine most people see Perl. Just a mess. Python FTW.

@Nick Ryan:

Good job you checked your facts before you called anyone clueless.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Javascript#Uses_outside_web_pages

You even mentioned ActionScript yourself. ^^ It's JavaScript with a different object model (as you'd expect outside a browser).

@jc & christian

Cloud = data center where computing power is sold by work unit. CPU and OS are abstracted away. OS licences don't come into the picture.

Let them go

All employers let go all people who consider their job boring and you'd be looking at 70% national unemployment.

@Ian

Exactly my thoughts. It's almost there, just without switch- or management modules. If the disks were on a shared bus with controllers that supported concurrent access it would make a sweet cluster in a 2U format.

Lack of imagination

If I understood AC's explanation, an applet could access arbitrary intranet sites while appearing to the browser and VM to be communicating with its host site. Routers with default configuration and web admin interface enabled are an obvious target. Trivial to script a session to add lax firewall rules. You DO read your proxy logs, right?

Kids

ZOMG! Kids see tits! At what age does a tit stop being lunch and something they should not see?

Contract phones

Like having to buy a Shell-branded car as part of your petrol subscription. How quaint.

On the news here in Finland

The radio news cited cool climate and abundant, cheap electricity as pull factors. Electricity is comparatively cheap here. They are currently building a new nuclear power station, and more are planned. The closure of the paper mills also means there is less demand on a local scale.

The area was hard hit by the closure of the mills, so I'm sure they also got a good deal with any deals involving the local authorities.

@Martin: AFAIK Google datacenters work on the principle of cheap, redundant, replaceable servers. Every once in a while they just pull out the dead ones and stick in new ones. Single server failure is irrelevant. The electricity supply would be a challenge, unless it was wave powered.

Paris, because she's all about the pull factor.

How apropos

MS releases MSRT. I could labour the point and suggest other 'MSRTs', but I'm happily using XP among other OSs. And it would make the day of some fanboy looking to rant. So I won't.

Well done Redmond, now give me MSGART.

X86 under load...

How many chickenboxes with a load balancer and fast interconnect for the price of a ripoff box? Obviously YMMV but redundancy and scalability is cheap today for many applications. No wonder blades sell.

Russians

Is it just me or do the tend Russians come across as juveniles with huge issues with self esteem? Make them lose face or even look at them the wrong way and BAM.

Paris because even she is more mature.

@ac

Sorry, troll . *nix users (let's not forget the BSD guys) have many functional desktops to choose from according to preference and scenario. Who cares about market share or what the latest ms/mac interface is like? I get the same FF, Eclipse and terminal on any *nix desktop, ms or mac. I choose Linux for other reasons.