* Posts by David Hicks

1235 publicly visible posts • joined 22 Apr 2008

Survey: Bosses are DESPERATE and GAGGING for Linux skills

David Hicks
Linux

Re: German Employment Agency

I have had load of agents get in touch re: Germany recently. There does seem to be a big demand for it over there. One or two from Poland too.

But I've only just moved back to the UK so I have no intention of going anywhere for the forseeable.

David Hicks
Pint

Re: Fiction

Places that are not London, or the UK (or maybe Europe?)

IT/Software Salaries here are very deflated compared to other places. In the US and Australia they wouldn't stand for the sort of money employers get away with paying in the UK. The only way I've found to match it is to go contracting.

David Hicks
Linux

But but but but but....

... linux is just some niche OS only neckbeards and basement dwellers would ever use!

LOL. The March of the Penguins continues, and we are all richer for it. Especially those of us who work with/on it :)

Tizen mobile OS releases v2.0 code

David Hicks
Linux

Re: Yes but,...

Surely the reason these things are barely mentioned is because there are no devices? They may as well be vapourware until something appears, so who's going to bother developing apps for them?

That doesn't mean much in terms of potential. Also it may be better to eat each other's sales in the bottom five percent than bother with WP8 which makes up far less...

David Hicks
Linux

Awesome

Hope it kicks off in at least a minor way, more operating systems in the mobile space are a positive thing.

What would be really great would be if Samsung provided a semi-official way to hack it on to their Galaxy handsets. Can't really see that happening though.

Tux because it's time 'proper' linux made a comeback into the mobile space.

Review: The ultimate Chromebook challenge

David Hicks
Linux

Re: People who buy Chromebooks for Linux are doing it wrong

I wanted it.to hack. I have something of an ARM fetish going on at the moment, so a chromebook with an exynoz SoC was exactly right.

AFAICT there is no equivalent to that. It runs ubuntu at the moment but I'm sure I'll be able to debootstrap wheezy onto it sooner or later.

David Hicks
Linux

Re: A couple of things

Reading that back, I'm not sure how the fella had such a tough time installing an alternate OS on the Samsung. There's a guide here - http://chromeos-cr48.blogspot.co.uk/2012/12/so-you-want-chrubuntu-on-external-drive.html

It's got some, err, hiccups at the moment (battery indicator in Xfce is a bit unpredictable in terms of whether it even runs or not) but combined with a half-length microsd adaptor it really is good. Beats the pants off my old eee901 with debian.

David Hicks
Coat

Re: A couple of things

Weird, coulda sworn that was the case, the 3 series was a precursor to the 5s.... Oh well, been wrong before, I'll be wrong again!

David Hicks
Linux

A couple of things

Pretty sure it's not a series 3 Chromebook, the Samsung Series 3 was an older x86 line. It is an xe303 though.

Also on the SD slot, if you get one of these -

http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/New-3-1-USB-Multi-functional-Adapter-Card-Micro-SD-Card-SDHC-USB-UK-/181076395412

And stick in a microsd card, then cut the USB side off the adaptor with nail scissors (it still works fine) you have a flush-fitting SD slot. I agree it's a bad design. Also you can then install Chrubuntu on the SD and you have a fully-featured little laptop with awesome battery life :)

Wind-up bloke Baylis winds up broke, turns to UK gov for help

David Hicks

Re: Criminal Act?

"Yet without patents why invent anything if someone else can just rip it off immediately."

Most patents are not given to inventors. They're made by employees of megacorps patenting any damn thing that pops into their heads that the lawyers think they can slip past the system. I'm not arguing for no patents at all, I think they serve as a useful incentive. BUT what we as a society need to do is up the standards. They need to be specific, highly specific, so that abuse isn't so easy.

They need to be non-obvious to someone skilled in the art, so patent review needs to involve people who *are* skilled in the art and experienced, not just patent clerks. If two 'inventors' are racing to patent the same thing at the same time then it's probably actually an obvious development and neither should get it.

Patents on rounded corners or the location of a thumbstick on a game controller or an animation technique for scrolling a page on a phone screen or a million and one other things... these are incremental developments, and not innovation.

David Hicks
Flame

Criminal Act?

Dear god no!

There are so many frickin' patents these days that everyone that creates anything, no matter how obvious, small or simple, (or conversely how unique and high-tech) infringes on any number of poorly worded, awful patents.

I bet Mr Baylis, should he have been anywhere close to as successful as he thinks he should be, would have found himself on the receiving end of more than a few lawsuits. Under his proposal he'd probably be in jail.

The wind up radio is a cool thing, and it's a shame people have ripped him off. Criminalising patent infringement is not the answer.

Ubuntu? Fedora? Mint? Debian? We'll find you the right Linux to swallow

David Hicks
Linux

Re: Sneaking in with the Raspberry Pi

You can tell they had no idea linux existed before because of the proliferation of 'How to do <really obvious linux thing> on Raspberry Pi' blog posts.

It's most entertaining, like a bunch of teenagers who think they invented music, or kissing or something. Still, good that they're learning about it one way or another.

David Hicks
Linux

Re: I'll jump to Linux when...

Did you miss the title, that he said that he'll jump to linux WHEN... 100% compatible?

Because it seems like you missed it and in fact the whole point of the post, in your eagerness to find something to argue against in a post that actually entirely agrees with you. Muppet!

(BTW, OO/LO compat is as good as word's own compatr between versions IMHO)

David Hicks

Re: The Half-Truth

"For casual users that never used the few features of..."

Many fo those casual users have been trained over the last 15 years to click start so they can find the thing they want to run. Many of them will be thoroughly confused.

Not because the UI is confusing, and not because the UI is worse, but simply because 'Whar my start buttun?'

I don't know if they'll adapt very well. I anticipate many more confused parental phone calls after the next round of computer updates, whenever that may be.

David Hicks

Re: I love these posts about how it will never take off.

"Linux the kernel has certainly taken off. GNU/Linux the operating system is not so widespread."

You'll find it's probably in many (most?) houses with any up to date tech in them somewhere as it runs NAS boxes, routers and TVs these days, along with various other types of consumer electronics. And yes, GNU/Linux rather than Android or other userspace on top of the kernel.

David Hicks
Linux

Re: I love these posts about how it will never take off.

"Really????? This is about the DESKTOP environment for mr & mrs joe public."

Not really, when people (probably people like you) keep muttering this misguided nonsense about it being a niche OS that only crazy hobbyists contribute to or would ever run. That's demonstrably false, it's ubiquitous.

Android is not the same thing as GNU/Linux, no, but it is yet another example of the linux kernel (and a few other parts of the system) getting out there and getting things done. It's in cars, it's in network equipment, it's in tvs, it's in everything.

"Equating embedded versions of an OS with desktop versions does you no favours in the credibility stakes."

It's not a version, it's the same OS, which is why I can install firefox on my NAS and run it via remote desktop if I want to (not that that would be useful). I'm not sure how this affects anything in 'the credibility stakes', but it certainly doesn't do the assertion that it's never going to take off any favours either.

If there isn't a consumer UI that struck it big in the desktop space, so what? That's not even the growth market any more.

David Hicks
Linux

I love these posts about how it will never take off.

Linux owns the mobile space, the embedded space and the server space. Hell, it's probably even in your tv.

Just because you don't see it on the desktop everywhere.. well it doesn't mean squat.

David Hicks
FAIL

Re: The Truth

" I don't want to spend time outside of work fiddling on my computer just for the fun of it."

Then you are not the employee I am looking for! Why are you even reading a tech site?

Also the circular trap (no games->no users->no audience->no games) is slowly coming to an end with the advent of linux Steam.

David Hicks
FAIL

Re: Another example of why Linux fails to gain market share

"The app stores of Android and iPhone (does Win8 have one too?) are showing it's all about the user experience of getting apps installed and working so people can get on with real-world tasks. Linux needs an equivalent but developers can't even agree between .deb or .rpm! Perhaps Steam can sort it out - at least they have a financial incentive to make it work."

This is about the most ignorant thing I've ever read.

Linux has had app stores (repos) for years, way ahead of the likes of Android or iOS.

The distro devs can't *and don't need to* decide between deb and rpm because it's irrelevant. Users should never, ever have to deal with a deb or an rpm. They just install software by name straight from the repo. Years ahead of the competition. Installing new stores is trivial too.

Wikipedia's Gibraltar 'moratorium' - how's it going?

David Hicks
FAIL

Re: Not actually fussed about Gib either way but...

"If you or anyone objects so strongly then you could ask for a refund?"

Right, because when Jimmy Wales says some part of wikipedia is going a bit wrong, he should just shut up and/or ask for his money back then?

*ultra facepalm*

WTF is... IEEE 1905.1?

David Hicks

Re: Reminds me of the failure that is DNLA

How did I solve it? It being the 'only plays one song at a time' problem? I haven't yet. AFAICT (and this is all AFAICT, most of the controller software is closed-source and the renderer firmware is not something I've looked into) it comes down to that consistent DLNA bug-bear, which is that not everything implements the same subset. In particular it seems that the DLNA controller (phone) sends the renderer (tv, squeezebox etc) some sort of URL type thing (address of the media file@the chosen server), so the controller is not feeding the data to the renderer directly. It then expects the renderer to send a message back to the controller when it's finished playing the song/video/whatever so the controller can send the next URL in the playlist.

This message never arrives, or it gets sent but the controller drops it, or something, and then what happens depends on the renderer. Most of them just go quiet, some of them repeat the same track forever until stopped. One of the potential solutions is to ditch DLNA entirely and use logitechs squeezebox software and solution, which works very nicely, but they've just discontinued all the hardware, so the only thing you can do now is run softsqueeze.

David Hicks

Re: Errr.... DLNA?

I think that would be difficult. The nearest you're really going to get is using a small thin-client box attached to the telly that can run something like rdesktop/vnc client. Doing it this way you get a local keyboard and mouse too. I don't think you'll be getting 3D acceleration going very easily that way though.

David Hicks
Linux

When did you try the DLNA stuff?

Because I agree it was a failure for quite some years, but recently I've been quite impressed.

Only quite impressed, not fully. There's some bug (protocol related AFAICT) that means my phone will only play one song at a time on the various audio renderers we have in the house, but it does mostly work now.

David Hicks
Pint

Errr.... DLNA?

Depending on your tv etc etc. What exactly do you want to do?

If you have a relatively recent smart tv then it probably has some sort of network awareness and some sort of DLNA mode. You then set up your pc upstairs as a DLNA server (minidlna, mediatomb, ps3mediaserver, windows media player?) and your tv should be able to see it and play media from it.

If your TV has a 'dumb renderer' capability you can control this all from your mobile phone, there are various apps like 'skifta' and 'allshare' that allow you to browse your server's media selection and push it to the telly. How well integrated it is depends on the specific tv. My 2010 plasma has a sort of receiver-mode you have to put it into first, whereas a friend's newer (2012) model is in receiver mode constantly and anything you send will interrupt what's on now. You can even (with quite some difficulty and a package called python-coherence) set up a linux box as a dumb audio or video renderer in this way.

Of course this only works for media files, if that's not what you meant and you need a more generic streaming mechanism you might need another solution.

The universe speaks: 'It's time to get off your rock!'

David Hicks
Stop

Re: Space Monkeys

In the deep long-term we do absolutely have to get off this rock.

The Sun will continue to (ever-so-slowly) output energy at higher and higher rates, burning up its fuel faster and faster. 5.4 billion years down the line and the Sun will expand and engulf the earth. But well before that, 800 million years in fact, the increased output will mean the earth is too hot for liquid water to exist and life as we know it will have to come to an end at that point.

So.... 800 million years to come up with a decent spaceship design... best get started!

Any storm in a port

David Hicks
Flame

Re: Optional

SCART was f*$%^*"%^ evil.

You could get the orientation right easily enough, but then you'd reach behind the tv and start sliding the damn cable around and about all over the place trying to get the thing in. All you needed was to be a fraction of a millimeter out and you may as well have been next door.

Inevitably, five minutes later, you'd have to pull the tv out and plug the damn thing in by sight. Worst Cable Evar.

Microsoft exec: No 'Plan B' despite mobile stumbles

David Hicks

Re: There's the Kool-aid...

"There's also Linux-lite, aka OpenOffice / LibreOffice running on a Windows PC..."

You think my mother knows how to operate a spreadsheet!?!

We have a hard enough time with the concept "I'm only available on skype when the computer's on" and the resulting expectation that my computer be left on all the time. Though for some reason the converse doesn't apply (things must be switched OFF! when not in active use).

She's figured out how to browse and book holidays online well enough though...

David Hicks
Linux

Re: There's the Kool-aid...

"I might suggest the Linux crowd's focus on the technical side being the more important is one reason WHY they still have no market share, despite their product being very good."

You'll find a lot of people in the linux crowd who aren't really interested in market share unless it brings more developers in to develop the system. Not the cheerleaders of course, but the 'it's awesome for me' crowd. And it is awesome for me, I can make computers running linux dance for me in exactly the way I want. That said I wouldn't wish to confuse someone like my mother by changing the way she does things, she has a hard enough time telling apart the AOL client ("the internet" which I'm trying to ween her off) and Firefox ("the Google", because that's the homepage).

People like her are why MS has a *very* fine line to walk with its interfaces, because if they change things around too much then people like me will get sick of trying to retrain them and just go with linux instead.

Nokia's Elopocalypse two years on: Has Microsoft kept its side of the bargain?

David Hicks
Pint

Re: 'Nokia has started to deliver very attractive products again'

@ dogged - "How many Androids were sold in the first two years of the OS's life?"

The original G1 sold pretty well, IIRC, though not barnstormingly so. However this is not the first year of Windows Phone is it?

"Coming soon, new awseome phone OS! Look, all these bloggers say its the best thing ever for users and developers even though there's no way anyone has got one yet and we just announced it yesterday! And it's got so many apps! Look! Shiny! No of course the last one didn't sell very well, it was crap. But this new one is revolutionary"

Which then turns to - "Well yes, of course all these features you like from iOS and Android are missing, it's a new OS, give it time, Windows Phone has only been out a few months hasn't it? And of course the sales are slow, duh, new platform!"

Are we going to have to watch the same pattern with Win Phone 9?

David Hicks
Pint

Re: Hmm...

Apple will only sue if it becomes a threat. To become a threat they would have to sell some!

Android? Like Marvin the robot? Samsung eclipses Google OS - Gartner

David Hicks
Linux

The General Public

Can barely tell their collective arse from their collective elbow.

This is good isn't it? Phones are supposed to be appliances, not a religion.

Vertu-alised Android revealed at an all-too-real €7,900

David Hicks

Re: $10,600 = 53 x $200

If your horse steps on your phone 53 times, maybe it's trying to tell you something.

Capita bosses defend £30m migrant-poking IT deal with Border Agency

David Hicks
Stop

Re: WTF?

Because not all migrants will be doing their best to avoid government detection?

Obviously the ones who are going to be trying to avoid detection aren't likely to say yes, but I think you're confused about the meaning of the word 'migrant'.

David Hicks
Pint

Yes! And it sounds so .... enterprisey! That means it must be good, right?

Time to rid ourselves of the tech channel zombies

David Hicks
FAIL

Missed the Clinton Cards announcement

So that's why I couldn't find one the other day, when I was trying to buy a Birthday card for the first time in ten years :)

Clash of the Titans: Which of you has the greatest home lab

David Hicks
Linux

Not that much...

We've got a couple of HP microservers running zfs for file storage, a couple of ARM boxes repurposed to DLNA rendering, two desktops, a myth box, a laptop, a netbook, an ARM chromebook, three consoles, several mobile phones, a smart tv, a smart blu-ray player and a few squeezebox devices all on a mix of wired, wireless and powerline network segments. Uh I think that's about it.

These pretty much all count as part of the lab these days. They're all running some flavour of linux apart from the consoles and one of the desktops...

Dead Steve Jobs 'made Tim Cook sue Samsung' from beyond the grave

David Hicks
Stop

Re: I suspect

I'm not sure if you think I'm on samsung's side or something, I'm just pointing out that there's more than enough material to keep this one dragging on for years.

It's true that I'd like to believe in a rational legal system. In a case in which the foreman of the jury admitted that he had ignored court advice, misinterpreted the law and instructed the other jurors to do the same, I'd like to believe that in the modern day and age we could look upon that as a miscarriage. I am aware that the world is not rational however.

I'm also aware that a multi-billion dollar international mega-corporation does not need the likes of me white-knighting for them, which I'm not.

David Hicks

I suspect

That there will be a few years of appeals on that $1bn before we see any cash change hands. It certainly seems that there were more than enough shenanigans in the Jury room to get the whole thing reconsidered, and that's before Judge Koh's weird rulings on what could and could not be entered as evidence.

Australian Parliament issues summons to Apple, Microsoft, Adobe

David Hicks
Linux

Apple were quite good on this I thought

As a previous resident of Australia, yes most of the goods and services available to you over there are hysterically marked up and overpriced, with profits disappearing into the pockets of a variety of dodgy middlement, exclusive importers and (for some reason) retail real-estate barons. Most tech seemed to be double the price it was elsewhere. Cars were ludicrous!

Apple, OTOH, seemed to sell at roughly the US price + GST, which seems fair enough.

Microsoft can't even shift Windows 8 slabs in the middle of a tablet frenzy

David Hicks
Stop

Re: "Customers played a wait-and-see game"

'xactly what I thought when I read that.

Customers (well potential customers) either didn't know or didn't care. The phrasing in the article implies a hoard of people just waiting to see if MS did good or released cheap enough. I can't imagine this was the case at all.

Out of ARM's way, Brit chip juggernaut runs over analysts again

David Hicks
Pint

Re: All true

Very, very different business model though.

If you added up the money brought in by Samsung's chip division (exynos is licensed from ARM, at the instruction set level IIRC), Qualcomm's chips (likewise snapdragon), nVidia's (tegra), Marvell, Broadcomm, Freescale, Ti etc etc you'd get a fuller picture.

ARM are a chip-design firm, not a full on design/manufacture/sales organisation.

What we need to make real money in the UK from ARM, is a UK-based implementor-manufacturer. Should we make 2013 the year of the British Mobile Phone?

GNOME project picks JavaScript as sole app dev language

David Hicks
Linux

Re: For goodness' sake

When I've worked in Javascript I was thrown by the sheer number of options - for example there seemed to be about 8 ways to do inheritance, all of which come with their own pitfalls and occasionally need support (context binding).

As a language it's a real mess, IMHO. That doesn't mean you can't pick a decent subset and do great things with it though.

Netbooks were a GOOD thing and we threw them under a bus

David Hicks
Linux

Re: Why not a Chromebook?

Because a lot of the stuff I want to do with a little linux box is pretty low-level. Partition editing for example. I also use my chromebook as a development laptop so python, the ability to install arbitrary libraries from the Ubuntu repositories and all that good stuff is what I want.

That said, yes, when I want (almost) instant-on browsing and mail with a nice bright screen, I use ChromeOS and it's great.

David Hicks
Linux

Re: I want a new netbook

Chromebook

I mean, if you're not wedded to windows ands prepared to do a bit of hacking. Samsung's ARM Chromebook (XE303), with ChrUbuntu hacked onto it on a MicroSD card. This is serving me very well at the moment and is so much more capable than my long-suffering eee901. And ChromeOS itself actually works really nicely for what it is.

The machine is thin, light, pretty and has decent battery life and zero moving parts. The casing is a little on the flimsy side but otherwise all is well.

If you're not up for a bit of hacking or do want windows of course, this solution is not for you.

Orange boasts: We made Google PAY US for traffic

David Hicks
Pint

Re: I see it slightly differently to that.

It's a sucky perception thing, and shame on Google for getting involved.

I pay my ISP to deliver packets to me as fast as it can, if they feel the need to demand more money for said service then they can ask me, not selectively ask people trying to get my eyeball-time to pay to get access to me. I am the customer, not the fecking product.

I'm so tired of being the product.

€1.5bn swiped from EU cards: Fraud mainly takes place in the US

David Hicks

Re: Verified by VISA is horrible

@AC - "AFAICT, the chip+PIN authentication is not exactly a PKI. There is no communication with a central authority involved for the authentication part (there is for the authorization, but that part does not have to happen in real time, it can be done after the transaction is complete, and is often done as a daily batch to minimize communication costs)."

Any amount over the card or terminal's limits must go online for authorisation. There is also a limit on the number of offline transactions a card will permit, and a random factor that chooses whether even transactions below the offline limits will go online. An online transaction absolutely is authorised in real time, including cryptographic verification, by the bank, of the transaction cryptogram provided by the card.

David Hicks

Re: Verified by VISA is horrible

The PVV is an optional component and the attack on it would (according to the linked paper) take multiple years to break and many, many more if 3DES is used over DES, which one would hope in this modern day and age. It's also a hash rather than a straight encrypt, as only a portion of the DES output is stored.

The PIN is not on the stripe.

And how else could stripe-only devices check the PIN? ISO-(can't remember the number) encoding the captured PIN with a terminal specific key and sending it to the acquiring/issuing bank for verification. There is an online PIN verification capability in EMV, I don't know if it's commonly done for stripe transactions.

David Hicks
FAIL

Re: Verified by VISA is horrible

The PIN is stored in the stripe?

What unmitigated bullshit!

It's not in the stripe at all. Anywhere, coded or otherwise. The stripe contains a very limited amount of data. If you're doing Stripe + PIN transactions the PIN is captured and encrypted then sent to the bank for verification.

Crypto boffins smuggle secret messages in silent Skype calls

David Hicks
FAIL

Re: Indistinguishable?

OK no, it's me that misunderstood, from reading the linked article.

They have managed to cram data into the silent packets, which then gets thrown away or ignored by the standard client, but which someone running their program can grab and decode.

If the skype packets are encrypted using half-decent encryption anyway, then the data they contain will already look fairly random, so substituting other encrypted data shouldn't look too suspicious to the casual packet sniffer.

Whether this is an effective method or not would seem (to me) to come down to how much validation is performed by any hypothetical skype interception program in use by the authorities that we suspect of listening, and whether they get the full stream or just recovered audio.

Actually I think I like my idea better...

David Hicks
Stop

Re: Indistinguishable?

I think you misunderstand - the messages are not put into the 70 byte packets, they are encoded using the sequence of silent and non-silent packets.

Think morse code only using silent and non-silent packages instead of dots and dashes, and then layer something like ssh/ssl over the top.