* Posts by Steve

102 publicly visible posts • joined 9 Jun 2008

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Google Wave - interwebs idealism in real-time

Steve

Meh

Looks good, very Google like - but for reasons mentioned above it doesn't seem very "new".

It's email, IM and document sharing. So if your a company with Exchange and Office (who doesn't) and slap in SharePoint Services (free) then your pretty much there. Although you do need Office Comms server for enterprise IM...

Meh - collaboration like this can be done on various products. SharePoint, Zimba, couple of workspace ones hosted by 3rd parties etc. Everyone has email, and IM can be done to.

Doubt cast over ContactPoint security assurances

Steve

Can it really be that hard?

Juniper SA device

Setup to scan for keyloggers and remote control apps before logon prompt

All traffic over SSL

SA device sets up a secure workstation session which prevents print screens

Client application runs in Citrix accessed via Juniper SA device

users logon using RSA Smart Card and 8 char PIN that changes monthly

Ta da!

Obviously someone malicious could just take a picture with a camera phone, but that's not the point. Scaliable, highly avaliable infrastructure to run it all on. Nothing stored locally at all, no way to bulk exports, all encrypted.

Fourth antivirus firm buys into behavioural blocking

Steve

re 8e6

Please tell me you just forgot to use the joke alert icon...?

Marshal products are very, very good as much as I've used them. Now in the process of deploying new versions of their Mail and Web products and the improvements they keep making as well as honest development roadmaps (gave me a date for x86 and Win2k8 support last year that was met) makes me a very happy customer.

You keep on with Windows or Linux or Apple software instead....

MPs battle to save great British pub

Steve

Too right

Higher prices and the smoking ban have put me off. I can put my feet up at home, get hammered on a tenner and smoke myself to death with the music of my choice on. Why on earth would I want to go to a pub anymore?

There's a local round my corner that has a little late night lock-in where the odd ashtray seems to magically appear but generally the pub is no longer a pleasure.

Oh and Sarah - the other solution would be to allow a public house to apply for a smoking licence where up to 50% of the indoors may be a designated smoking area. Everyone is happy and the large portion of punters that smoke can continue supporting the local pub.

ClaraNet email falls over

Steve

How Long?!

Christ - even if it's not a VM (which takes 20 minutes to restore back exactly as it was before without configuration) you can get an Exchange box up in well under an hour if using a deployment system - which one would hope as an ISP.

Even manually creating a server it shouldn't take more than a few hours....

Kaminsky: MS security assessment tool is a 'game changer'

Steve

@ida

Microsoft's track record in the past few years or so can put many open source products to shame. Or are you one of the few Tux-heads that doesn't apply the hundreds of patches to you disty of choice as it's 100% secure out the box?

O2 to axe iPhone prices?

Steve

Feature Requirements

Turn-by-turn Sat Nav

Better Camera with propper "Xeon" flash

Forward SMS

Send video / propper MMS

Cut & Paste

Multiple apps running at the same time

Got that then I'm in. Till then I still contest that it's a half baked phone and I'll stay with the Nokia N series.

DellHPSunIBM unmoved by Cisco blades

Steve

Hmmm

Cisco undoubtably make great network kit. However from what I gather mixing their kit with other vendor is a nightmare, and it's bloody expensive too.

We've just deployed a new VMWare farm (were running ESX 3.0.1) and as part of it we've replaced our switches with HP ProCurve, routers with Juniper and storage with EMC. FC Switches were from Brocade.

All support true industry standards and getting the lot to work together was suprising easy.

Every company need some sort of edge, and from my understanding of Cisco it's high quality kit with a high price tag, but they also innovate their own technology on top of standards which gives them the edge. Juniper and HP don't seem to play the proprietary technology card but otherwise seem to make equally high-quality kit at a slightly lower cost than Cisco.

Same goes for the server market. Dell have upped their game in quality and support stakes, and HP have always been up there with the best when it comes to x86/x64 iron. What's going to make Cisco any better/worse? As far as I can tell it's probably going to be the same as it's networking kit which is if you buy all Cisco (servers and switches) then you'll get an awesome network though probably using proprietary tech. And it'll cost a little more.

I'd rather have a mix of HP and Juniper at a lower cost that also results in a good performing and easily managed network.

MS packs yet more tweaks into 'near-ready' Windows 7

Steve

Bitchy lot the FOSS crowd...

Read the article tux huggers...

"The RC is widely expected to land next month."

At which point feel free to test. There could very well be multiple release candidates as XP and Vista both had.

Microsoft have also listed the exact changes here: http://blogs.msdn.com/e7/archive/2009/03/13/a-few-more-changes-from-beta-to-rc.aspx

See screenshots and a summary list here: http://www.neowin.net/news/main/09/03/13/windows-7-few-more-changes-from-beta-to-rc

Tata to release UK's first 'serious' electric car

Steve

I want what I have now

before I look at the "environmental" or "green" impact.

Fraid my job won't give me an allowance for not getting in ontime cause the leccy at home was off or I forgot the charge the car overnight. Nor is the boss OK when I'm 20 minutes late due to traffic which I can make up for on dual carriageways when stuck behing a fecking tractor.

When it can do upwards of 100mph and get to 60 in under 14 seconds will talk. Oh, and it's the same cost as current cars too.

Additionally, and I may very well be wrong here - but leccy is generally supplied by burning fossil fuels at power stations. So how is it better for the environment to use a car powered by the sparky stuff compared to the see-through smelly stuff at pumps?

BT OpenZone: Is it or isn't it?

Steve

Technical Details

How does this work from a technical point of view?

Does it use a seperate vLAN or subnet on the LAN side then pump the OpenZone traffic over the same WAN connection (e.g it's like having two LAN's merged into a single WAN routing table) or is it having 2 virtual ADSL circuits plumbed into a single router and therefore the traffic is completely split?

Or more to the point, if I was to shove wireshark on the ADSL port would I see traffic from two seperate public IP's or just one? In terms of legality this is a point...

G.hn-ing for gigabit

Steve
Coat

@Tony72 / Gigabit

Anyone who really cares about speed and lag will just CAT5 or CAT6 anyway.

Wifi and mains sockets are for pussies! :-)

Mine's the one with the RJ-45 modular plugs and crimp tool hanging out....

VMware's one-trick pony: Destined to be a platform?

Steve

Stability

Been using ESX 3.0.1 (and VI3) for our core infrastructure for about 3 years now, and I'm now in the process of deploying a new cluster based on 3.5.

Problem is whilst the hypervisor is cool, and technically it's the most advanced out there - ESX / VI still seems like a solid beta.

It just doesn't seem reliable enough. HA in particular is flakey at best. Sometimes the HA agent on the host simply decides it's had enough. There's bugs galore in each release that fixes a load of other bugs.

Microsoft and Citrix are nowhere near as advanced as VMWare, and if I have to virtualise the bulk of our boxes I'd only want to do it on ESX - however in another 5 years I'll be reviewing Microsoft's offer in a lot more detail.

Remember MS have only released 1.0 of Hyper-V. Give it version 3.0 and things could be interesting....!

VMware's ESX Server 4.0 lost in the clouds?

Steve

ESX is NOT Linux

The ESX Kernel is not Linux. It's by VMWare and VMWare alone. The command line shell is based on Red Hat 6 I believe - however the Kernel is not.

Anyone have more details about this vShield thing? The write up sounds pretty much like what I'm already doing - which is having a DMZ VLAN with a firewall doing the routing between other networks and the DMZ, and any server that sits inside the VLAN is within ESX. Each ESX server has 2 LACP'd NIC's that are tied to a seperate vSwitch....

What's new about that in 4.0?

Conficker variant dispenses with need to phone home

Steve

@ Gerrit

Please - don't you have a ubuntu install to patch (again!) or a SSL cert to re-issue?

Back under your bridge.

Citrix undercuts VMware with XenServer giveaway

Steve

Huh?!

I'm very confused.

VMWare have the free ESXi which has bugger all management tools but is a decent hypervisor

MS have Hyper-V, which is similar to above although needs another version or two before I look into it properly

Now Citrix is giving aware it's hypervisor and management tools as well.

Is that basically what's going on? Or have I missed the point?

Dear Obama: Please consider open-source a waste of your time

Steve

Good article

Nothing wrong with Open Source, but begging to the new president of the USA is pretty weak.

To be honest, from the point of view of everyone other than a geek, there's no difference if the code is open or not. It needs to be usable and reliable. That's pretty much it. Unfortunatly FOSS is only really getting started on the former point, and let's face it - a big point that Ted was making is that the FOSS crowd can't bloody market it's products.

He's got a point!

Microsoft takes scissors to Srizbi

Steve

@ Raving Angry Loony

The vast majority of viruses on Windows PC's are from users installing them. How you expect Microsoft to resolve this I have no idea.

MSRT is a useful tool that you don't have to download. It's in automatic updates, but nobody forces you to download/install them. Simply turn it off.

Hacking the Apple TV

Steve

200 quid?!

Apple can get fucked!

You can get a XBox with a 60Gb HD for £150.....! That's HD and standard def, media streaming as well as local, works with Freeview if you slap a £20 PCI card in your PC (including pausing live TV), a DVD player, can download movies and obviously play the latest and arcade games.

Whack Apple TV to under £100 and we'll talk....

Ubuntu shops believe in Ubuntu

Steve

Mission Critical?

"Interestingly, 20 per cent of those polled said they run Linux (not just Ubuntu) on homemade servers, and another 23 per cent said they run Linux on tower or desktop PCs."

Don't make me laugh!

RHEL and Windows 2008 are the only platforms, and on HP ProLiant is the only Mission Critical environment I'd look at supporting.

Ubuntu on a home made box.... give me a break.

Open sourcey bulletin board offline after hack attack

Steve

@ Daviid Wilkinson

Not really, but if it helps stop the linux mob shouting how much more secure it must be as it's open source has got to be a good thing.

Open or closed, Red Hat or Microsoft, security comes down to the administrator - not the platform.

Firewalls, patching, IDS etc. Regardless of your platform these are tools that should be used.

Microsoft SKUs Windows 7 clarity

Steve

@ El Reg = Fail

Article is wrong. There is no Home Basic.

There's Starter that's sold only in emerging markets. We won't see this.

Home Premium, Professional and Ultimate are the retail SKU's.

That's three.

Home, Pro and Ultimate. All have media center. Home is the lowest, followed by Pro (which has home stuff plus domain join, RDP etc.) Ultimate has BitLocker to go and some Enterprise features in it as well as the Pro feature set.

Three retail SKU's is pretty good and from that it's clear MS are listening to feedback.

Enterprise is only volume licencing. Not OEM, not retail. Starter is OEM only in a handful of "emerging" markets only.

So in PC World or from Dell you'll have three options only.

But your complaining again? WTF?

Windows Vista stuck on single digit enterprise adoption

Steve
Stop

Anyone suprised?

Not just because a large majority of El Reg commentators hate MS so much that they would slate them if they became a charity and gave all their money to Africa - no - I'm not suprised that Vista for ENTERPRISE use is around the 9-10% mark as business have only started to look at deploying it in the last 12 months.

I can't recall many companies deploying XP till 2003/2004 time from memory - as businesses like to wait for anything major to get discovered by someone else. Also it can take months or even years to evaluate and plan a deployment. You got 10,000 machines then you need to do a LOT of testing. So after waiting 2 years for a SP and for it to be tested too you start to look into it. Give it 6 months to a year and then you make a decision and start to deploy. This has always been the way for enterprises and probably always will be.

Late 2007 I evaluated it and March 2008 it was being rolled out at my previous company. My new place started looking the same time but as we're much larger and my predecessor has been away for the last 8 months we're only rolling it out now.

There really is nothing wrong with Vista. Hardware requirements were only just valid back in 2006/2007 when it was released - today any budget PC purchased in the last few years can power Vista for standard office tasks. Cost for most companies has little to do with the £ in front as there's Software Assurance, OEM and Open licences which make it free/cheap.

It's all about waiting for the bugs to be ironed out (e.g. SP1), then eval, then deploy if there's a business case for what is normally quite a large project. Generally speaking I believe there is a business case. Vista has a much improved security model compared to XP and management and deployment is vastly superior. (Group Policies and ImageX for a start!)

Is Vista great? Nah. Is it a worthwile upgrade as long as the cost per box is cheap (looking at £0-£30 a pop tops) and you've waited till SP1? Yeah, it is.

Three hospital worm infection dubbed 'substantive failure'

Steve

General and @Eirronbc

"Additional training to specific staff groups

Command and control arrangements

Administration and documentation within the control room

Categorized identification of Trust priority areas

Register of staff skills that can aid Trust response "

WTF? Surely you fire the people in charge of managing the AV and patching (unless management told them too do it!) and put safe guards in place to prevent it from happening again...?

@Eirronbc

I know from the fact that you call Ubuntu "uninfectable" that you cannot possibly work in any sort of senior or responsible IT security position, but I'll try to explain anyway:

MANAGEMENT!

Not the people, but managing 1000's of machines on a daily basis. Last time I tried Ubuntu I discovered that there were more updates pending than on my Vista boxes...!!!

Ubuntu is expensive. Look into training, testing, support, management etc.

All ports are closed by default. On Vista no malware can gain admin rights either. Updates happen in the background. You rarely need to reboot a Windows server or XP/Vista desktop.

Listen penguin fans - Linux rocks. It's a great platform and I actually enjoy playing with it more than my Windows boxes. However the reason the vast majority of enterprises run Windows as their core platform is simple.... it's easy to manage and there's a shit load of support and applications for it.

It's that simple.

Since XP SP2 it hasn't been insecure out of the box. It automatically updates, it has a firewall and you shouldn't need any vists to the desktop for support. Yeah, it costs. But it's also easy to work with and the admins are cheap. Management is a piece of cake and you KNOW there's an application - with support 24/7 - for nearly any application you need.

Now please CBNorrie@hotmail.com (using a MS account?! [gasps]), get a grip a try to live a little in the grown up business world for a few minutes.

Microsoft's IE 8 beta adds 'special' list

Steve

What's wrong with you people?

MS make a version of IE that is based on web standards..... and include a button for it to render in traditional IE ways in case a site only works for IE.

If MS only did the former it would break some sites. If MS only did the latter they'd get flamed for yet another non-standards based browsers.

What the fuck do you all want?!

Linux to spend eternity in shadow of 'little blue E'

Steve
Thumb Down

@ Psymon and Lee

Your both so on the money it scares me!

It's free but has fuck all take up. The icon is a bloody penguin, apps like GIMP (the fact that someone defended it by EXPLAINING what the name means...?!) and application management tools called "apt-get" or "yum" bring to light why it's uptake is so low on desktops.

Management is problematic for mid-sized networks, the diversity alone means it can take 3 months to pick a bloody version and the complexity for doing anything. And the penguin defenders on about not needing a terminal are talking bollocks - plug in some hardward and it's irrelevent if the apps are "in the cloud" if your fucking 3g card STILL doesn't work. (Or scanner, or USB wifi, or obsecure webcam).

Linux needs to grow up. Yeah, a few well-paid geeks can get it to run well performing very basic functions (did someone mention a SOHO router?!) in a single hardware configuration - wow. I'm so pleased for you!

Give me something like GPO's - with a single, decent "version/distro" of Linux, support for hardware like Vista has and we'll talk.

Until then it's for learning/experiments.

Disabling Windows Autorun - there's a right way and a wrong way

Steve

Or you could...

1) Read the screen in front of you which gives some pretty big fucking clues that it's dodgey (e.g. the word on a different icon saying "Browse folders"

2) Keep UAC enabled

3) Ignore the autoplay screen

This isn't an exploit or a hole - it's just not great design. However the bottom line is that this is a social engineering exploit rather than a technical one. There's little different between this and getting an email saying "click here to download the latest patches from Micr0soft" from updates.ms@microsoft.fixes.tripod.com

UAC prevents this from actually working, along side the fact that the virus doesn't self-execute.

eBay revenue shrinks for first time in history

Steve

Not suprised

£10 charge to sell a £95 PSP on eBay - what a bloody rip off!

That's a standard listing, plus bold on it. No "featured item", no subtitle or anything. One picture, some HTML and bold. Slap on eBay's fee as well as PayPal and it was £10 bloody quid!

Plus of course I HAD to use PayPal for "security" reasons as well as waiting till I got feedback / 30 days before I could release the funds.

What a joke.

Cisco virtualization-server challenge to HP and IBM?

Steve

Rumours

Could this be a little too much?

I was aware that Cisco are doing a vSwitch within ESX 4.0 - is this what they are talking about? And possibly using the same tech in a blade?

Would this really be too much for HP/IBM to bare?

IBM reaches out to SAP, RIM with Notes

Steve

SharePoint?

Sounds an awful lot like SharePoint for the IBM equivillent of Exchange/Outlook....

US woman says Ubuntu can't access internet

Steve

People are stupid

People don't normally check what engine is running a car when buying a new one - for most people if it's the right colour and size and within budget it's a winner.

Same applies for computers. She probably picked a machine that had the spec's she wanted and was asked for either the Vista or Ubuntu model. I'm assuming the Linux box was a few £ cheaper...

Powered it on, everything looks different. Can't do a couple of things. Tries to open Device Manager and can't. Read a post about getting the 3G dongle to work on Ubuntu and realised she needs to modify 3 config files, use NDISWRAPPER and thought "balls to this".

Linux - works well for the noob when one of us pre-configures it and they only want to do emails and IM. Anything else requires a Linux admin.

2009 year of Linux on the desktop? Don't make me laugh (again)

Next-gen botnet armies fill spam void

Steve

@AC

"Mines the one with a well designed OS in the pocket"

This'll be the one that the average Joe can't actually use?

I assume your one of the people also slating Vista for introducing UAC too?

Stop it Steve, don't feel the trolls...

Apple prices MacBook Pro battery surgery

Steve

@ AC

"Much as I hate to support Apple, it's the quality of the battery that is the issue here, and the labour charges involved in getting a replacement"

No, the issue is that you can't replace it yourself. The vast, vast majority of other laptops from other vendors, including the ones you list allow you to do this yourself.

If you can do it yourself then you can get non-offical batteries, and you can also purchase a spare for when your traveling long haul.

Apple take this option away, and charge more compared to others as well.

And don't take the piss.... "labour"? It's a fucking battery dude - not a motherboard replacement.

Experts trumpet '25 most dangerous' programming errors

Steve

@ the Anti-MS brigade

Prehaps you should take a look at the number of updates released for OSX and Ubuntu before you start pointing the finger solely at Microsoft.

Over 100 updates between November and today on my Ubuntu VM. Yet programming errors only happen to closed source...?

Ballmer talks 'post-PC' Microsoft with Windows 7 beta

Steve

Coiuldn't agree more

Compred to Mac OS X and the majority of Linux disto updates, Windows 7 is a valid upgrade in that is contains lots of new stuff.

However, there is an awul lot of stuff on blogs and comments stating how much better is already is than Vista and "it's what Vista should have been"....WTF?!

It's like the transition from Windows 95 to 98, or Win2k to XP - it's the fucking same! Features like the UAC config tool aren't new, it's just that in Vista you needed to edit the registry or a group policy to do it.

Other stuff are to be honest cosmetic. It's Vista with a new SP and a few new features!!! Now I like Vista personally, always ran it on new hardware (rather than a desktop from 2004!) and I understand the point. Never had a problem with it.

Yet El Reg, most of it's commenters and a shit load of press slate Vista - but are singing the praises of Windows 7. It's madness, as very little has changed in terms of architecture, security, permissons, UAC, driver support etc.

Oracle tripped up by 'leap second'

Steve

Caused a reboot?

Probably being very naive here, but why on earth would and application crashing on a server cause the OS to shit itself and reboot?

Word crashed a few days ago and Windows seemed to live through it...?

Or have Oracle taken the final step to raping your budget by developing their own Linux based OS for it's DB app?

Linux: this year's silver lining?

Steve

It's the year of Linux...

.... again!

After well over 10 years of hearing it, I'll believe it when I see it. (Rather than when a marketing droid comes out and tells me it AGAIN!)

In the ditch with DAB radio

Steve

Why bother?

The signal quality in the East of England is truly awful. My other half has a DAB in the car and it's never used for digital - only FM - due to the fact that we can't get any bloody stations! The Working Group seems oblivious to the fact that people will only shell out good money to upgrade when there is something worth upgrading too. FM quality is excellent for what I need, and the only advantages appear to be more stations.

Consider that the majority of the time I listen to the radio is traveling to work, I maybe listen to radio for 2 hours a day Monday to Friday. As such I'm not willing to pay over £100 to get more stations when I already have access to at least 7 currently with great quality.

Deutsche Telekom to share fibre with Vodafone

Steve

Crazy

I just don't get it. Surely, infrastructure is key for the government, public and country as a whole. Post, data, water, electric etc... IMHO shouldn't they all be operated by a non-profit organisation, funded by the government, with an independent board to oversee them all?

Engineers should be looking after the cabling, DSLAM's, water pipes etc. Then ISP's, water companies,'leccy co's bid to the consumer allowing us choice? Universal access to the infrastructure with the providers of the data/water/electricity then pump their content over it....

Am I the only one that thinks this is a sensible way of doing things?

TVonics DTR-Z500 500GB Freeview+ DVR

Steve

And for £150

You can get a Xbox360 and a Dual Tuner Card.

Games console, DVD Player, Download films for rent in HD, Plus everything this box will do.

And your only limited for size by your PC HD

(Assuming you have Vista HP/ULT or XP MCE that is!)

Daft list names Firefox, Adobe and VMWare as top threats

Steve

Seems fair to me

In a corporate environment, Adobe, all Apple software and a crap load of other stuff are a nightmare to manage without 3rd party tools.

Windows and Office can be done using a centralised management platform that is free of charge. The day Apple do that I'll be gobsmacked.

Why port your Firefox add-on to Internet Explorer?

Steve

@Ropata

Here here!

Using for a while now and it's awesome. IE7 with Vista (e.g. Protected mode) and IEPro make it safer than FF with all the functionality plus some.

Microsoft preps IE 8 for the web-challenged

Steve

WTF?

Hang on, so MS has got IE8 setup so that it renders in a standards compliant way - similar to FF, Opera etc.

However if a website will only work in IE7 and prior then users can press a single button and it will switch to the non-standard rendering method.

And your slating MS for this?!

How is this any different than MS dropping IE and pushing FF out via Windows Update? The effect is the bloody same - people start using stanards based browsers!!!

What a bias bit of "reporting". May I ask - Linux or Mac your platform of evangalism?

Or do you really work for Opera?

Windows patching abysmal, and getting worse

Steve
Stop

@ Anon Cowards

"Roughly a third (30.27 per cent) of users of the software scanner are running between one and five insecure programs, while a quarter (25.07 per cent) were caught out with between six to 10 packages that need patching on their systems. Almost half (45.76 per cent) had more than 11 insecure software packages on their computers."

If you care to read the article rather than the headline you'll realise that nowhere does Secunia mention Windows patching, rather insecure programs.

For example, I can have a machine fully patched and up to date from MS (as it's all done automatically I wouldn't even know about it), however I may not be running the latest version of Adobe Reader or iTunes.

Prehaps I'm using Firefox which requires security updates about as often as IE.

Or maybe the version of Google Desktop I am running isn't the latest....

The point I'm making is that Secunia are talking about insecure applications. They are not talking about the number of patches missing, or just a particular application. For all you know the people doing the scans that these results come from have the latest Microsoft patches installed, but simply have a number of 3rd party apps that are not up to date - such as the ones I mentioned above.

Porn breath tests for PCs heralds 'stop and scan'

Steve

Can you spell T R U E C R Y P T ?

FFS - why not just use TrueCrypt to create an invisible, encrypted folder? Or Just Vista BitLocker? Or keep the naughty stuff on a USB stick in your hand luggage?

I'm really getting pissed off with this sort of thing...

IT WON'T FUCKING WORK!

Windows 7 early promise: Passes the Vista test

Steve

@AC / "How Fast?"

Um, the the first P4 3Ghz chips with HT (the one I have in my "old" box) were launched by Intel in the summer of 2002....

So your telling me that you expect an Operating System launched in 2007 to run fine on chips older than 6 years prior to it's release...?

Earth to Coward, come in Coward...

Welcome to the 21st Century - a 6 year old CPU with a gig or RAM runs Vista fine, and on a £500 box today it flies like you wouldn't believe.

Steve

WTF is this bashing about?

I've never got why there is so much hate for Vista. The only real issues have been OEM's throwing bloat on it, 3 year old PC's didn't have the guts to run it at launch and driver issues.

I just purchased a £500 machine from Dell - quad core with 3Gig of RAM. Runs like lightning. Before that machine I ended up using a P4 3Ghz (NOT dual or quad core!) with 1.5 gig of RAM. It's now hitting it's 5th birthday and it's getting a bit flakey on the hardware, hence the new machine.

A single core P4 3Ghz with a gig of RAM is fine for office users. Letters, web browsing, listening to music etc. That's a 5 year old machine guys.... and it cost £600 when brought.

Vista doesn't need some quad core behemoth with 32Gig of RAM. It runs fine on any mid-range machine built in the last 4 years or so if your a standard home user. Just don't install OEM guff...

And the driver problems were gone mid-2007.

I honestly can't see what other issues people are going on about - it works fine on mid-range hardware that's under 5 years old as long as there's no OEM guff pre-installed and the drivers have been about for a good year or so too....

Steve

Interesting....

Agree with Neil in that there's not actual anything wrong with Vista.

The problems that "plaged" it at launch were drivers and application compatibiltiy. I hasten to add that the apps that didn't work on Vista were normally internally developed apps that don't adhere to any type of development standard - or more commonly the apps that "had" to run with administrator rights as they wrote to the root of C: or something equally retarded.

Mid to late 2007 the driver problems were generally resolved with 3rd parties and manufactures finally pulling their fingers out.

Windows 7 will be Vista R2. Same security, same permissions, very similar GUI, same development guidelines.

The difference will be that new drivers won't be required and people are used to UAC!

Sony and the terrible, horrible, no good, very bad quarter

Steve

How times have changed...

I used to like Sony. 15 years ago I would think high end, reliable and good quality products with great customer support means Sony.

But in the last 10 years they've become arogant, lowering the quality whilst upping the price, lacked innovation and threw in some lovely DRM to piss off the geeks. Oh, and also managed to completely cock up customer support - as in they don't really have any.

Any attempt any innovation is some pointless proprietary "standard" which is replaced by a chepear more open choice within a year. Quality has gone and has been replaced with marketing.

Seriously - they're blaming the strength of the Yen?!

Windows 7 borrows from OS X, avoids Vista

Steve
Stop

You must be kidding!

So MS make some changes to the task bar and therefore it's OS X like?! WTF!?

This is Vista, with more refinements. Think of it as the Win98 to the Win95. Same underneath but with some tweaks and improved eye-candy. The fact that the anti-Vista folks - including the media - are falling for this is quite simply unbelievable.

Windows 7 has the same architecture, security changes and system requirements as Vista. With that basis, it implies that the only issues with Vista were drivers and hardware requirements..... which pretty much left us mid-way through 2007.

I'll probably be in the vast minority, but as much as I rushed out to get Vista - which I'm glad I did (no problems at all and a BIG improvement on XP) - I won't be running out to get Win7 unless some other big changes are promised.

Win7 is Vista re-dressed so media and critics go "oh, it runs well on hardware at the moment, and there's lots of driver support... it's so much better than Vista".

Marketing delivered...

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