Posts by David Hicks

@Simon

"I could be wrong but....

Calling people stupid just because they want XP instead of Linux on a computer is not the best way of winning converts."

Who's trying to win converts on this board?

People ARE stupid and lazy, and it seems the new trend for linux haters to jump on is "it doesn't work *exactly* like windows and therefore nobody will use it because they are stupid and lazy. Therefore linux sucks". What actually sucks is that people are stupid and lazy.

@aL

"didnt asus do this already? everyone just installed xp on 'em and where on their merry way.."

Quirte the opposite actually, the Linux eee901s had better specs but Asus seemed determined not to meet demand, so lots of people bought the XP version and put linux on it. Check out the eeeuser forums.

Personally I reflashed my linux one anyway because Xandros was ****

That's the main problem with linux netbooks if you ask me, the fact that people like Asus ship with their linux distro broken.

Xandros on the 901 would bleat about software updates and then fail or flat-out refuse to installl them. It had a weird GUI that I could not for the life of me figure out how to add a new shortcut to, and for the 901 Asus removed the "advanced" (KDE) mode.

Ubuntu and dell might actually produce something good together...

They still think they can control the internet

The more they tighten their grip, the more people will move to darknets, where stopping the flow of ideas is impossible.

Not that I'm saying it's great that "radicalisation" or other such material is available, I'm just saying that the cat is out of the bag now, and you can't put it back in.

4.6 million quid

Right. 4.6 milsion.

Jesus jumped up christ, this is where our taxes go.

And people moan that cutting taxes would mean having to cut essential services.... Can someone GUT the goddamned government please? This is our money going on this crap.

I thought there were very strong protections

Specifically enumerated in the US constitution and its amendments, that the US armed forces are NOT to be used on home soil?

Either way, that's really slippery. Given the way that the definition of "terrorist" seems to get wider every day and legislation aimed at "terrorists" is abused, the thought of allowing use of the army to tackle them is scary.

Glad they're gone, I hope the US can successfully remount its moral, freedom-loving high-ground over the next few years. God knows we need at least one government that's interested in it. I'm not holding my breath though.

Won't stop them for a second

They'll write this down as an isolated incident and carry on regardless.

The morons in power here do not understand that if you create the database it *will* be hacked. Someone will be bought, or someone will give up a password by accident, or the technology will be inadequate.

But that's no concern, lets move on and put all of everyone's details in a single place and hope that it all goes well. Fingers crossed the software guys are the world's best, the public employees with access are all incorruptible and security minded.

Yeah right.

(All of the above is an aside to how the horrible idea this is in the first place)

Oh for god's sake

Yes, that's right, Terrorists and paedophiles are waiting around every corner to use any available, paid Wi-FI service!

For god's sake people, have you really bought into that level of hysteria?

This is a bad move for BT, but please, lets have some perspective, it's not a war zone outside your front door, neither is everyone on the street a predatory pervert. YOU are what's causing the breakdown of society.

So they murdered I am Legend

And now they want to re-abuse one of Dick's stories?

I have come to dread sci-fi movies these days. I *love* sci-fi books. But so many times they take the book, borrow a theme and then totally miss the point of the story to the extent that they're effectively pissing on the authors ideas.

Take "I Robot" for instance. Fscking travesty. They took a cerebral exploration of the ramifications of seemingly simple laws for robotic behaviour and turned it into a noisy, Will Smith laden advertisement for Pepsi, Converse trainers and Audi. Asimov must have spun in his grave.

TR was a cheap enough rip-off of the book, lets not cheapen it further, please.

@alddude

Linux is worth billions.

Whatever your thoughts on Gnome/KDE desktops, you can't argue that the Linux operating system is small-fry. It's huge in the server room (even on mainframes) and in the embedded arena.

Anyway, yeah, keep hiding in your retarded suit.

@Anonymous Comparability Coward

Umm, bluetooth? You use Bluetooth as an example of something apple has and others don't?

Even my eee 901 has Bluetooth!

On the general stuff, well, I only use Lenovo or Sony kit, other than the netbook (lenovo have got one now though). Build quality on both is excellent. VFM I feel is excellent as well. But then, in the case of Sony, I'm willing to pay for equipment that is not only cutting edge but pretty looking, compact and ultra-light.

(Why yes, I did re-image my vaio as soon as I got it, boy do PC manufacturers love to pile on the trial offers and other crapware these days!)

Tux because he loves them all.

@Eden

"Bulldog DSL were sending me bills and threats of courts for 2 years for a phone line that NEVER EVEN EXISTED!!

Shame I never thought of suing the B******Ds for the stress."

Likewise, took me 20 months to get them off my back after they totally and utterly failed to install broadband at our place. 6 months of them taking the money from my account before I managed to stop them (and get it back) and then over a year of "you're not paying for your connection! You owe us money!" letters. And when I finally started sending them letters via registered post and threatening to go to OFCOM I was asked if there was a problem and would I like to cancel my account?

Could happily have gone to their headquarters with an axe and murdered the lot of them.

Can you say "anti-trust"

Or monopoly?

(v)FAT is now a standard filesystem allowing devices like digital cameras, consoles, computers, mobile phones... basically anything to use the same media, usually flash media.

Whilst a free (unencumbered by patents, copyright, trade secrets etc) FS would be better - anyone could implement for no fee - that's not where we are now. FAT is well documented and widely supported precisely because these things need to be read and written by Microsoft's operating systems. The OS monopoly once again forced vendors onto another MS system.

Given that Microsoft have been repeatedly slapped down by the EU courts, I would expect that the moment they try this on the EU will bitchslap them again. Mighty hard.

Convicted monopolists should not be able to blackmail companies into paying them because the monopoly forced them to take a particular course of action. Patent or no patent, MS is saying that they'll have their pound of flesh or nobody gets to play.

Besides which, one of the patents covers the method of linking/displaying a long filename when the FS underneath uses 8.3 format (i.e. the tech they brought in to pretend to use long filenames under Win95). They have a patent on a hackish workaround to an inadequate FS to make it more like the better ones that predate it?

They're 'avin a laugh!

What are they afraid of?

The more I read about this authoritarian stuff coming out of the Labour party, the more I wonder.

The anger I first felt years ago with the announcment of ID is still there, but with every new measure something else strengthens - pity.

Something has obviously made these people extremely scared, scared of foreigners, scared of dissidents, scared of children, scared of everyone.

They need therapy, not power.

@Wolf

Sorry mate, got to disagree there.

Other languages just cannot optimise to the bare metal the way C does. Or maybe "do not" is better than "cannot".

I know, I know, java has intelligent runtime optimisation. It still seems to take forever to start and need a larger memory footprint than a decent C app though.

Where you absolutely, positively have to have control over what memory is read when and in which order, when you want to squeeze the best you possibly can out of a system, use C. And this applies to giant database systems as much as it does tiny embedded boxes.

Oh, and don't forget systems programming, drivers, kernels etc.

Plus you have the cost of distributing and installing java VMs everywhere.

If you can code C competently then there's no need to switch. I'll agree that it seems that many people can't.

Because we can't have any sex

In a game about violent thugs murdering scores of innocents, sex would be totally unacceptable, right?

Western society is retarded.

Authoritarian arsehole

The public hate the ID cards, so lets find a way around that and do what we want anyway, regardless of democratic will. Government for the people, eh? Don't make me laugh.

Personally, I picked up a ten year passport just before the biometric ones came in and plan to be living in another country by the time I'd be forced to hand over my details to their central DB.

@Alex

So your arguments have gone from "Linux is worthless" to "some of my users are too belligerent to give up MS Office".

Way to back up your assertions there.

Nobody is forcing you to use Linux, if you and your users don't like it then don't use it. But just because your pack of morons are so invested in MS tech that they refuse anything else doesn't mean that everyone is.

Also, you know that "Linux is crap because everyone knows MS" doesn't actually make sense as an argument? If you want to argue that linux won't gain acceptance due to cultural inertia - spot on.

Your little "choice is BAD" thing up the top is very funny too. So because I could choose a few different media sharing programs, depending on my needs, linux is rubbish? But MS is great because media player 11 does it with some features missing and you have no choice?

That's just, like, your opinion maaaaan. Fighting monoculture in computers is one of the major FOSS motivations. There never will be a time when there is one true linux and one true browser/media play etc. People have different needs and preferences, and different uses for computers.

As for UI, they all borrow from each other. Linux has been ahead of MS in terms of interface for some time now, imho. It might not seem that way if you're not used to it, just like I found the jump from XP to Vista painful.

I find it very hard to take anyone pro-MS seriously these days, after the vista debacle and the fact that Win7 has already been shown to take even more control of the computer away from the user in the name of DRM.

Anyway, enjoy your monoculture, I'll be off programming on lots of different OS's for money and running linux at home because it's easy, reliable and it helps me learn about real computer systems rather than how to click a box over and over again.

@AC

"I foresee a world where the people controlling the purse strings will actually be asking for larger cuts of decreased revenues, rather than one that is fairer."

Those currently holding the purse strings are just as parasitic. We'd do better without them or the pirates.

Distribution is now a negligible cost, often footed by the consumer themselves (esp. in a P2P model).

Advertising is pretty much only spent on the plastic act of the moment.

The only thing the labels can offer is production, and they overcharge for that in terms of taking the copyrights. Time for them to die. They were valuable when recording equipment was extremely expensive, they had their uses when distribution meant mass-produced physical items. Now, not so much.

All certs should be EV

But by that I don't mean everyone should pay loads of cash for an EV cert, I mean that nobody should be issuing certs without checking.

Browsers should be installed without the cheap and dirty registrars available. Those that are know to not be trustworthy should be removed from the list in browser updates.

This is a social problem. TLS itself is rock solid.

@Charles Calthrop

"I love the guys up there who go 'it's just ideas, *I* don't get paid for them all so why should everyone else' or 'the musicians got stitched up by the record companies so its OK to steal from them again, or 'Well, *I* think copyright law is too long so I should be able to download old records."

I love the fact that you think taking the piss makes your arguments valid.

Read my post again and tell me that the combination of insane copyright length, DRM, overcharging and the record industry dragging their heels don't make this absolutely inevitable.

BTW, I have a collection of about 500 CDs, all paid for (none with DRM). I don't pirate music at all. So I'd be interested to hear any arguments about how I'm personally robbing artists of money, and how everything I've said is a weak justification for illegal/immoral activity I take part in, because I know that's the argument that usually comes next when someone gives a rational critique of the current situation.

I don't pirate (unless I have bought the media and cannot rip/transcode), and I still hold these opinions.

BTW, what do you think of the people that hold the copyright on "Happy Birthday"? And charge people for singing it to kids in restaurants?

I think it's sick. That song is part of childhood and part of life, for someone to claim ownership over it is unreasonable and disgusting.

For you penguins

Check out mediatomb and ushare as alternatives to twonky that seem to work just fine.

I've had both running on my NSLU2 and supplying music and video to PS3 (and with ushare, the xbox 360) just fine.

This and the facebook thing

Have just reinforced my traditionalist leanings.

Why trust your private communications, photographs etc to a bunch of advertising companies? Why would I use flickr to host my pictures when I can do it myself? Why allow google mail and allow big G to profile it for advertising and potentially expose/lose everything? Why store your entire personal life on a "social networking" site that offers little more than early 90s style email and a homepage, when they can turn around and give themselves the right to do what they want with it?

Yes, I'm the kind of geek that has a mail/web server under his bed, and I realise that's not for everyone, but this blind trust of your data to third parties, the increasing security risks around it and the increasing volume/value of stuff people put up...

Yes, I know, thi smakes me a curmudgeonly old sod that's too concerned about contracts, EULAs, small print and security to be cool enough to join in with all this, but that's ok.

F*ck off

No really.

F*ck off.

This is just the next wave of "you're all dangerous criminals and need to be watched constantly". Enough now. The pub is a sanctuary, we are not all violent scumbags and we're not all comfortable with being recorded wherever we go.

You can't even blame this on terrorism as the terrorist threat is (currently) linked to extremists of a non-drinking faith.

Very pretty

Much nicer than the G1 brick.

@Tom Richardson

there are a couple of on-screen keyboards for android that have been written by third party/FOSS developers. There are also rumours that google have one in the works. My guess is that the HTC phone will use the google keyboard.

@Eric

It's the state of the public and their love of gadgets.

The iFart guy made tens to hundred of thousands of dollars from this thing.

At a dollar a go there are just that many hip, fashionable, arty, well-dressed, intelligent, attractive, independent-thinking, mould-breaking iPhone owners (and we know they're all like this, right? That's what Lord Steve said in his holy advertising gospel), that want to make their beautiful. perfectly engineered, light-years ahead technological show-piece fart like an old cowboy that's been on the beans.

Sums things up nicely for me.

@ Mythical AC

"Open source software has its place, just not in the mission-critical data center. I've never met an open source solution that wasn't buggy and significanlty less reliable than one of the leading proprietary equivalents"

Linux is already in the mission critical data centre.

Or have you never heard of google? That critical enough for you? Or were you talking about governmental, really critical stuff? Like the NSA and their custom versions with the SELinux extension?

Your view is waaaaaaaay out of date.

As for reliability, I've had many more problems with HPUX than I've had with Linux. Solaris and AIX tend to be as reliable as Linux in my experience, but are much less pleasant to use for the average sysadmin/developer.

Keep on shilling away, but I'm afraid your side lost the server room game some time ago. Even mainframes are now running a flavour of linux as often as not.

Benefits?

"Identity cards will be mandatory for all airside workers, just as other pre-employment checks are today, so that the benefits from the Scheme can be realised across the aviation sector."

When a single benefit of this scheme that stands up to even the slightest scrutiny can be identified, would someone let me know?

So far all I've seen is "we're spending billions so we can store all your data in one place (and track where you go), for all these spurious and easily knocked down reasons^H^H^H^H^H^H excuses"

@Difficult AC

Iceweasel *is* firefox with different branding, because the mozilla team don't allow custom builds of the source to use the FF branding, and debian make custom builds. What's the problem?

And Icedove *is* thunderbird.

Debian isn't that difficult, but if you're not geeky enough to know about these or even look them up on google then, well, sorry but I have to say it - STFU and GBT windose, n00b.

Silly user, Debian's for geeks.

And hooray for the Debian foundation, lenny is a great OS but this also means I get to move my machines to squeeze now :)

Kinda cool

I played with it for a while. It has a good selection of stuff I was interested in, a few albums I haven't got by some fairly obscure artists, other bits and pieces.

I was also pleased that, even though there's no linux version, the page allowed me to download the windows version and suggested I try wine.

I hadn't realised it had audio ads though. That's a deal breaker for me. I know, I know, how else were they going to support themselves? But still, guess I won't be using it much because of this.

RE: Anonymous Quixote Style

There's more to it than that. The lawsuits and harassment, the censorship, separation of people from their families, bankrupting effectively enslaving adherents...

It's a crazy, crazy cult.

That good old time internet really is gone, isn't it?

The one that I first got to know, the one full of programming and scientific information, the one where leaving services open was a courtesy and not a security hole... When did that internet die?

Was it when we let the great unwashed in and then commercial entities decided to cash in?

Screw it, I'm off to make own internet, with blackjack. And hookers. In fact forget the internet....

@Simon

"actually, no. windows has drivers for most things, and if not, you just have to pop the CD in the drive or run windows update."

I just told you of at least on e situation where the opposite is true. Keep spouting your bullshit though.

"oh and anyone in charge of purchasing IT equipment for employees who chooses linux over windows is an idiot and should be fired."

Right, because we all know that change is bad and companies should never try changing business practices to save money on software, increase productivity or increase the lifetime of their hardware acquisitions?

All because that initial 10 minutes of "here is your office program, it works pretty much the same, here is how you log off" is just too costly.

Twat.

Good luck with that.

What, you think the government are just going to roll over and dismantle the surveillance apparatus they've dedicated the last decade to building up?

Remember citizen, if you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear. Only terrorists, criminals, malcontents and other asocial types could possibly object to your friendly government watching over and protecting them!

You're not an asocial are you?

Groan

So we're going to have another badly worded, totally nebulous and unspecific law that's being forced onto us "for the children".

F*ck the children (not literally).

Get them off my internets. Why should an operator of a free forum site, that he's probably put up for next to nothing (and makes no money from) have to pay money for the privilege of a police check because children or vulnerable adults might just use it? This raises the barrier for entry to the 'net. The very thing that makes it vibrant and alive.

I'm sorry, but I'm SICK of the nannying.

So all those old assumptions could be wrong...

Like when you can have an address for every atom in the universe, then you've got enough IP/RAM/HDD addressing space".

Now it seems we may need more...

Wow.

Sick

Restrictions on parallel import are a n abuse of globalisation.

Big companies can but materials and personnel from wherever in the world they like. But when small businesses or individuals try to buy products from other markets we're told it's somehow wrong. Due to "licensing".

Reform of IP laws is needed NOW.