Posts by Aditya Krishnan

Is it just me...?

I seriously don't get it. I got a Dell with Vista Home Basic pre-installed in September 2007 and I can honestly say I haven't had ANY problems with it so far... the only program that didn't work was DaemonTools and PowerISO replaced that... and a slight issue with my Epson MFD and a driver upgrade fixed it. Smooth sailing ever since, on a Core Duo 1.8 GHz with 1 GB RAM.

I do take security very seriously though... haven't had a virus since I got this laptop, and have never had to reformat the drive and reinstall the OS.

But...

Can it run Crysis?!

Mutilated Register

Why does El Reg appear mangled on the IE8 beta? All the text is tiny and the Google Ads are overlaid on the comment entry box as I type.

Listings?

Why can't the people at AVG just maintain some sort of list of malware infected sites and push it out to customers along with the daily updates? FireFox often informs me of such sites long before my AV scanner notices. And is this built into AVG's free version?

huh?

there are probably more people who can write in Aurebesh out there. And I'm pretty sure at least a few hundred people are comfortable in limited Mando'a.. can I get a grant to 'develop' the language...

Untrue

There was no warrant issued by a judge. Google had no compulsion to release this information. They're simply lying again.

Not that bad

It did "My name is Aditya Krishnan. I live in India" in Hindi pretty ok. Butchered the gender though (in Hindi verbs change according to the gender and number of the object). With the number of my compatriots working in Google, though, it should improve double-quick. Pretty good at French and German though. and when I tried to translate "genetic mutation" into Russian, it gave me something that turned out to be "Marathon, whence".

Why

does El Reg not have a Moderatrix Icon?

Gun

"Mach 10"? I believe you mean MAC-10, better known as the Uzi. Wouldn't that be a machine-pistol, by the way? SMGs are generally bigger.. e.g. the iconic MP5

@JonB

I totally agree... I don't live in the UK, but I watched a couple episodes of the Doctor last time i was over..

ISPs as I understand it have their own networks which converge into one big connection to the rest of the Net? So wouldn't it be easy enough to install a file server on the ISP's own local network with cached copies of all iPlayer content? Would work out a damn sight cheaper.

Huh?

I don't get it... I've installed XP on any number of machines in the past and have never faced any probs... insert media, reboot, format, install, insert driver CD, autoinstall go, done. Never took me more than 90 minutes. And I've been using Vista on my XPS 1530 laptop for 3 months with nary a problem.

Why would I want to emulate my games under Wine anyway? There's definitely going to be some amount of performance degradation.

@ Ian

Which plantation in Kerala exactly? My family owns a couple and if people are actually willing to pay that much, I'll have to look at buying cats (importing these not-cats even) in bulk. Should pay for at least a new GSX...

Brilliant

It's my kid sister's birthday next month.. she's been wanting a phone that "looks really cool, plays music and takes photos and all.. you know".. i'd been facing a problem fulfilling the first bit.. this phone seems to fit the bill. Purple for me, I think. And it should be in India in a month or so... just in time.

@ Ian

Wasn't that line from Niven's "Oath of Fealty"?

Outraged

This is bloody ridiculous. Not even Microshaft pull this kind of stuff. At least they try; and their tech support (here in India, at least) is absolutely stellar. To Creative Labs: My first soundcard was an SB Live Platinum. My first MP3 player was a Muvo. Till date every piece of audio hardware I have bought has been a Creative product. Me and my sister own Zen Visions and nearly 800 people in my college have purchased other Creative media players based on my recommendations (I am the President of the IT club in my college and the secretary of the Hyderabad chapter of the IEEE students branch). Nearly 2000 SBS speaker setups reside on our campus as nothing comes close to them for quality and value-for-money. Till date I have unhesitatingly recommended Creative to anybody who asked my advice regarding audio/video equipment. I believed you were different. Now you go and do something like this? I don't even use Vista (can't afford it) and I feel outraged. You should have given this guy a job, for heaven's sake! Needless to say, I will not consider your products whenever I go shopping in the future nor will I be recommending you to anyone. You've just lost a lot of customers.

P.S. Perhaps MS should consider offering Dan a job. He seems to have accomplished the impossible: getting something to actually work on Vista.

@Turbojerry

Since when did Pakistan have a population of 1.5 billion? Have you looked at a map recently? 1.5 billion in that amount of space? Perhaps you've confused it with India. In which case there's not much chance of us going to war innit?

Thank you and Godspeed

I can't begin to express how Rendezvous with Rama influenced and inspired me. It made me think beyond what I knew to what might be. It played a major part in making me who I am today. Thank you for sharing your visions with all of us.

Godspeed, and may there be stars.

True

I can agree with this... Back in college, I used to assemble and sell systems for extra cash. I supplied about ten PCs, low-spec P4 systems, to some new office...they didn't even have a nameplate anywhere. A few days later, one of the hard drives gave up the ghost and I had to go pick it up to get it replaced. When I walked in, it was full of people (they had about 40 machines in there by then) manually putting spam on people's Orkut profiles and on community discussion forums, 24/7. They were paid something like 7000 bucks (£90) to do this, 8 hrs a day, 6 days a week. From that to what is described here isn't much of a leap.

Explanation required

@Dan:

I live in India (Hyderabad) and have worked in a call centre during a few summers and I spent my final semester interning at the Dell call centre here (systems admin/maintenance).

The HP people did NOT "call" for a cab. Call centres here maintain huge fleets of vehicles (mostly white Tata Indicas and Tata Sumos) for the express purpose of transporting their employees. These days, it's assumed that any call centre will provide pick-up and drop facilities to their employees. So the car makes a round, picking up/dropping about four people at a time and each cab+driver has a predetermined route (they used to text me when the cab was about to reach my place). Dell alone has over 400 dedicated cars. It's not like they just whistle for any old passing cab.

In this scenario, it is obviously possible for the company to vet the antecedents of their drivers. And NASSCOM guidelines here do explicitly specify that a female employee must never be the last/first person to be picked up, which may not prevent such incidents, but just the presence of someone else will most likely prevent such mishaps.