* Posts by Iain Malcolm

4 publicly visible posts • joined 20 Mar 2009

Government rubbishes ID card hack report

Iain Malcolm
Troll

if in doubt, stick your head up your bum

Apparently the spokesperson is A.N. Ostrich - strange name, but there you go!

Microsoft, Asus launch anti-Linuxbook campaign

Iain Malcolm
Linux

Just recently I plunged into Ubuntu

on a new laptop - Acer Aspire 6930G, having immediately ditched Windows and installed Ubuntu 9.04. No it wasn't perfect - I've had to mess about with nvidia drivers, sound card drivers and a few other bits to get it going, I still haven't got sound coming out of the hdmi port...., but I've only been messing around part time for a week or so.

But compared to the months and months of hassle I had when I first tried setting up Windows XP as a media machine - weeks and weeks of waiting and hoping ATI would finally deliver a working driver with the combination of features I wanted all working at once, endless faffing around with sound cards, drivers and DVD players to get decent quality 5.1 sound from DVDs.

It seems to me that Linux (in its Ubuntu guise at least) is now way better than Windows XP was when it first came out (and that means the whole ecosphere around them as well). I expect it won't take too long for the gap to close further.

The main problem as I see it at the moment is that many hardware vendors insist on doing their own drivers, but the linux ones lag behind the windows ones, and don't necessarily work that well when they arrive. Those vendors that publish their interface specs and let the open source community join in are seeing much faster and more responsive development cycles.

I'm certainly looking forward to a Windoze free retirement in a few weeks time when I've handed back my company laptop.

BT does Italian Job on London traffic lights

Iain Malcolm

Single point of failure?

No we don't have any of them - oh well just a few in places that could never get damaged.......

looks like we need a proper 20CN before a 21CN.

Shades of the manchester tunnel fire again from our wonderful net(un)work provider.

eSATA: A doomed stopgap?

Iain Malcolm

raw speed versus real performance - long live esata

Raw speed is not what most people really want to know, just the only info easily available info

My experience with USB disc conenction is the performance is usually way below what you would expect, and is also very eratic - just watch the time remaining when copying large files on windows.

Also USB often puts a fairly heavy load on the CPU which slows down everything.

I've found that on many machines, trying to run a Virtual Machine from a USB disc is a non-starter - it will often crash within 5 - 30 minutes

No such problems with eSata connected discs - fast, reliable consistent, and well worth the small inconvenience of the PC card and cable. Oh yes - and for real speed I've found that an express esata card normally knocks spots off a cardbus card