Posts by Stan

@Andrew Moore

Sir, I protest, I most strongly object to your implication that I am an American ;) Co. Wicklow bog trotter through and through. Maybe my post (or rant) wasn't clear, I was talking about the re-vote on the Nice treaty, there where 2 different issues being voted for with the same vote. Cant remember what the second issue was but it more or less gave no other option but to vote yes, and in doing so also vote yes to the Nice treaty.

Wont be surprised if the same thing happens with the Lisbon treaty which is coming up for a re-vote in October, which we where promised was never going to happen. Well Sarkozy can just bugger off back to France and take his advice with him, he knows damn well that if he tried the same kind of crap in France as we get bent over and shafted with in Ireland he would be strung up. Why the hell do we stand for it?

Anyway, good points from both yourself and Ponder Stebbins on the state of Irish politics.

Bit out with the speeds

Thats may well be what the official record stands at but Stanley did a successful run of over 160mph and had a little accident at 190mph which the driver survived but suffered from the injuries for the rest of his life.

127mph for steam is not a big deal, it's recovering the water that causes problems. A friend used to have a 1940's foden steam truck and was once pulled up for speeding on a motorway while doing over 80mph, a brave man. The summons was proudly displayed on the drivers door after that.

Good luck to them anyway, its nice to see steam power getting some attention again as it is still a viable option and in many ways superior to the infernal combustion engine.

cheers.

@Toastan Buttar

Are you sure windows has better driver support than linux? Across all versions of windows perhaps, if your willing to hunt down out of business and merged companies for drivers that will only work with 3.1 and 95 but if your swallowing MS's load and running vista then that statement is so far from the truth it cant be seen from the top of a big hill on a clear day. Meanwhile I can link up some 1/2 inch reel to reel storage and a suction cup modem to anything modern with a serial port, stick the latest version of any of the major distros in the drive and have it all working as all the drivers are already in there.

Just to hammer my point home, recently picked up a vodafone 3g modem (Huawei e220). Plugged it into a p3 laptop running ubuntu, fired up kppp and connected to the net. Plugged it into a more recent desktop running sabayon (a derivative of gentoo), same thing. Had a few live cd's around so stuck them in the same box and all worked with all hardware without exception. Then plugged it into a relatives beige box running vista so he could give it a try....and, after much hunting through the net, was told it needed a firmware update. An 87MB firmware update. Over dialup. For a, what is it now, 2 year old OS? Form a company the size of vodafone? What was it you said about driver support again?

It should have been put down at birth

God only knows who the vista lovers are, I'm yet to meet anyone in the real world that has a single good thing to say about fista. I'm still using a PIII laptop with ubuntu and KDE4 for most things, laugh away, its quicker than the dual core box loaded up with ram thats running vista here. How the hell does it take 30 secs to open a shortcut?? Why does it mysteriously freeze for no apparent reason? Why where the early KDE4 beta releases smoother than MS's attempt at ripping off the mac look? And 7 is being built on the same foundations?? Not heard to many bad things about it yet but that doesn't sound good.

Folks are taking this seriously?

Where the hell is this linux uber geek stuff coming from? And companies needing an in-house team with better HPC skills than redhat and novell? Utter bollox. Take a look through the debian, redhat etc. repositories, half the stuff in there is scientific. Why? Because the 'ubergeeks' doing this stuff know it makes sense to keep it in the open so they don't all have to re-invent the bloody wheel every time they need to get something done.

So maybe the beancounters get there way and put this overpriced bittybox system on $250000 worth of hardware, what then? A piece of software rarely contains everything it needs to run, there is usually a chain of drivers, libraries, external programs etc. For that kind of money your going to expect every one of these components to do their job in the minimum number of cycles, how are you going to do that with closed source software thats intended to operate on any kind of x86 hardware? It's not going to work. Do the sums, that $250000 system is going to be wasting at least 25% of it's cycles whereas optimised software can run with the same performance on a system costing less than half the price. Add to that the money saved by using a free OS (BTW the price mentioned for windows HPC is for a limited number of processors) and pretty soon you are looking at a situation where the cheaper system plus the developers to get the most out of it costs a fraction of the price of the heavy duty system, the inefficient propriotory software and a few clueless administrators giving the same performance (when it's running).

It's a shame MS's plan to dumb down computers and spread bloat is coming to the world of supercomputers.

ps3

As pointed out earlier, this is a load of bollocks aimed at gobshites who want a supercomputer so they can namedrop 'cray' while talking shite. Windows for supercomputers is a joke, it isn't worthy to sniff the steam of the penguin's piss as (again, as pointed out earlier) the apps have to be optimised for the hardware to get real performance, one of these and a copy of 'stargazer extreme professional edition' isn't going to do much in the way of plotting the expansion of the solar system.

As to sheer number crunching, I very much doubt this thing could match a cluster of $25000 worth of ps3's, so whats the point of it? Lots and lots of off-the-shelf single threaded apps. The vista comments weren't to far off, its probably the only off the shelf system that can serve vista to all the desktops in a small to medium business.

This is plain crazy

The TV is full of murder and violence but if we talk of such things we can be prosecuted ?? I agree with the post further up, I want my world back.

Dissolve polystyrene in petrol, keep adding polystyrene while stirring until you have a sticky syrup. There you go, DIY napalm. I wrote it, you read it, we are now all terrorists.

all valid points

I'd like to add one other thing. OOXML is, I'm assured, impossible to implement to the letter. If MS use OOXML and claim to be using an ISO standard format then they have to stick rigidly to that standard, if they don't (and to all intents and purposes they can't) then they are breaking the law.

Their only legal option is to use a format with a different name that is more or less compatible with OOXML and make no claim of ISO compatibility. Very unlikely this will happen unless a competing office app does a better job of implementing OOXML and MS office shits its self trying to open a doc from it.

Frankly I don't care if something is ISO certified any more, they have shown their colors over OOXML and their standards don't mean shit when they are for sale to the highest bidder. It may take a bit of shine off ODF's image but ODF does exactly what it says on the tin which counts for a whole lot more that the right to add 3 little letters to the format details.

cheers

Unfortunate choice of words

To right, claiming obesity is equal to the current security issues is pure bollocks, obesity is a serious threat that will cost billions in health care. And security? blah....conspiracy theories....blah...all out to get you....blah...etc...etc, I'm not even going to bother except for this. We are under this huge threat that could bring the nation to its knees, right? So how come all the power lines and sub-stations aren't surrounded by security?

lost sales

Ryanair's website used to be great, it would work with any browser, didn't expect any godawfull plugins, was easy to navigate and the info was useful. They have been making major changes to it for about a year as far as I can tell and have been making it worse and worse with every step. Listen up ryanair:

You have lost 6 flights from me due to the changes you have made on your site.

Thats around half my flights in the past year. Look up and memorise this phrase:

K.I.S.S.

and bear it in mind every time the MS rep's and site developers are pouring sugar in your about 'great new features', because that easy to remember phrase is one of the biggest reasons for google's success.

It's the calender...

...it's the y2k bug, it's arrived at last. The calender got all screwed up with religious doings years ago. Know what this means?...Happy new millennium!!! Time to go on the piss before apocalypse gets here!

Depends on the point of view

He is right, things are moving very quickly at the mo and open source has to do it's best to keep up but there are a few other points that have a big influence on the issue.

Windows Calculator Edition (or whatever it's called now) is the best thing they have for small devices and it just doesn't cut it. MS will already have a system in development for lower powered devices but even if they rush it out of the door its not going to be here any time this year and it will be a beta at best judging by any of their other recent releases.

Big names are involved now. Steve harping on about the 300 unidentified patents means sweet FA when it's the responsibility of the supplier and the supplier is dell, HP, IBM etc. Now these folks are involved hardware manufacturers can no longer ignore linux as it is most definitely mainstream now and has a clear and well defined set of sales figures to state just how much business they are loosing by ignoring it. ATI and nvidia are already getting into a pissing contest over who loves linux more and this is only the start of it.

Software companies are under no illusions that MS will be king until hell freezes over and most major names have made it clear they are getting ready for an emerging market. Even games companies are paying attention, notice how many new titles "just work (tm)" with wine? Almost as though they have included it in their test process.

The biggest potential threat isn't MS, it's apple. The devices are changing and so is the way we use them and apple does know a thing or two about making nice interfaces. If apple where to widen it's target market a few notches lower then they could really clean up and leave open source more or less dead in the water, plus they have already been saber rattling about their new ultra-portable so there is a good chance system is more or less ready.

Either ways MS has already dropped the ball with that godawfull thing called vista, by the time they come up with something usefull and modern that can run on low powered hardware they will be lucky if they can even see the ball any more. The ironic part is Bill Gates actually got this one right when he predicted a rise in tablet PC's yet MS are the ones left behind.

Sounds familiar

"they told him the redirection was a feature rather than a flaw.", I'm sure I have heard some other company making the same kind of excuse, microshaft or something like that. Used to be in 2 minds when folks where branding google "internet evil 2" but judging the way they are crapping on the heads of the open source folks who helped them get where they are it's hard to trust them with the all seeing eye they posses.

Google icon with devil horns please.

Open door

Ok, it's been said 1000 times already but if you leave your keys in your car or the front door unlocked then it's your own damn fault if someone takes advantage of it. Yes, he has broken the law but if this was a common theft the police would take down the details and do nothing but laugh at the stupidity of the victim. This should be dropped, he has done them a service by highlighting serious security failings, as to the $700000 for repairs, it proves they don't know shit and US tax payers are getting screwed for it.

Darwin award

How the hell do you comment on this? I mean there are things running around under my fridge with more brains than this guy, and then he goes on to blame the guy who wrote the app, apple, world+dog because it couldn't possibly be his fault, definitely worthy of a darwin nomination but not funny enough to deserve one. Still, it answers one nagging question, this is the guy they put "do not attempt to eat this item" notices on cars, TV's etc. for in the US

Going back to calling mine 'debian based'

Great news but 'IBM' and 'cool' should only be used when talking about indestructible keyboards or mainframes with enough power to run an average population's IT needs, other than that IBM does not do cool. More of an anti-cool really, although all the above 'cool by IBM' products qualify by being top quality, so them calling ubuntu cool has nice implications :)

Well boil my dangleberries if linux isn't kicking serious arse this year, 2.7% of new PC sales, dell, HP, all the little ultra mobile thing manufacturers and now a big thumbs up from big blue, I'll stick my neck on the line and call this the year of desktop linux.

cheers

@AC

Makes sense but there must be an incredible amount of pension funds out there to be putting this kind of dent in the market, not just with sun but with any fairly major company, I would almost go as far as saying more pension funds than pensioners, guessing there is some kind of tax benefit in them. Sounds like the criteria could do with a bit of re-thinking too, if the metric it's self is effecting the market then it's kind of becoming a self-fulfilling prophesy ;)

Agreed

...sounds just like a console to me too. If they are smart about it there is a market there, it's not a big job to build a PC that can be upgraded cheaply in the future, mostly its just a case of picking the right motherboard but it can be a confusing business for anyone who doesn't have the time to trawl through hundreds of reviews to filter out the obsolete info and all the hype and spin from some writers. If they can offer a good gaming PC for a decent price and upgrade packages for the same system for at least 2 years then they could be on to a winner. Trouble is they will have to compete with GPU, RAM, HD, etc. vendors on the upgrade package price and will still suffer if they offer the best bang for your buck hardware but 'reviewers' are discrediting brand X because brand Y is handing out the freebies for good reviews.

Still, looking forward to seeing what they come up with. If they can offer a standard unit with standard upgrades then they can also use standard setups, ie. single click braindead overclocking with all the lockups ironed out and the hardware giving all it's got. Of course, if they don't offer any kind of linux support then they suck cocks in hell ;) No games for linux you say? Then they can bloody well make some.

Been running 4 for months..

..and very happy with it. Yes there are a few config and interoperability issues but it's not classed as a 'finished' release yet, but whats there is impressive and very usable. And it's not just eye candy, the improvements underneath are more impressive than plasma, pulseaudio for instance. Select my main PC as the output with the system tray icon on my laptop, open amarok on the laptop it plays on the hifi plugged into the main PC with very low latency. It works with any number of inputs and outputs. Thats only one of the improvements, it may even have usable file indexing one day ;)

BTW, I'm running it on a 1ghz PIII with 512mb of ram and intel i810 graphics (morris minor of graphics acceleration) with all the fancy effects on and it is smooth and responsive. It could do with a bit more ram as it can get a bit too sluggish with 10 or more apps open but otherwise performance is acceptable.

Told you so...

...4 months ago. Much as I dislike MS and their evil ways this is a good thing, windows has needed to go back to zero for a while and this is there chance to build the foundations for a proper multitasking, multiuser secure OS. Trouble is MS have their head so far up their collective arses that they will shoot themselves in the foot by making this thing completely dependent on their own hypervisor. The day MS learns it has to live side by side with other systems and take part in a competitive market is a long way off.

specs

Looking through the specs on the asus link above it and judging by the difference in the specs it seems like the 1000 is the top of the line model, the 901 linux model is also higher spec than the XP model. Ok, it might cost more despite the free OS, but it also has roughly an hour extra battery life which would be worth more than the extra 20 to me.

Still, its a lot of cash for what is supposed to be an affordable device, there are plenty of full sized laptops around the same size with a lot more storage and processor power.

Thats a lot of sales..

..and the majority of them are for the Linux version. This along with Dells and business, military, government, education etc Linux adoption leads me to suspect that the 'less than one percent of the market' Linux figures are pure bollocks (and thats not counting servers BTW). When will one of these highly paid statistical analysts give up calculating likelihood of wining the lottery if you take 2 sugars in your tea (or whatever) to work out what the real figure is?

Anyway, rant over... fair play asus, good sales from a deservedly good reputation.

To any Sun staff reading the comments

Please don't get your nose out of joint over Ashlie's article, it was nothing more than a discussion piece and was treated as such by anyone who made comments. What was also obvious in the comments was the high regard in which the readership of The Register holds Sun.

The Register is one of the most respected and unbiased technical journals on the net and I for one would be disappointed if up to date news from Sun was unavailable.

Thanks.

round robin

I'm fairly sure ubuntu uses a round robin configuration with their servers, where if one server is down then the next mirror in the ring picks up that address, etc. In which case it is more or less impossible for the update service to be unavailable as it would need every mirror (several in every major country) to be down at the same time.

@Jim Halfpenny

Your kidding, right?

http://releases.ubuntu.com/8.04/

They did themselves out of a market

The damn things don't break. About half the small to medium companies I have had dealings with (in France and Ireland) have a sun server buried away somewhere, usually bought as an application server sometime in the late 90's and still dogging away as a file or database server. The last one I saw was 11 years old and, in a fit of madness, had been beeping to its self for months. A dusting off of the terminal showed log files overflowing with temperature warnings, and a quick once over turned up a seized power supply fan. I would bet my socks the damn thing will still be slogging away in another 10 years. Too good for their own damn good, it would be a real shame if sun where bought out but it does make a lot of sense and would be infinitely better than loosing them for ever.

nice one

Way to go, let MS 'embrace open source' if they want the search business so badly. A lot of negative comments on yahoo here, true they are well and truly second place to google for general search but a lot of their services are very popular, like groups and finance for instance. If they can keep up standards and stop the bloat creeping into their sites then they will be a big name on the net for a long time to come. Again, way to go Mr. Yang, sticking it to MS will only improve yahoo's reputation.

@amanfromMars

Is she on your planet? 'cos she sure as fsck isn't on this one. The guy can't be the sharpest knife in the draw for marrying that contraption, but at least he's smart enough to get rid of her and look after the daughters future before he pop's his clogs. Christ, I feel a whole lot better about life knowing I can just close the browser to not hear her any more.

Screw them

F***ing trolls, they can't make anything worth buying so they wave around a few ideas that have been around since at least the late 70's and claim everyone owes them money. Sooner they go to the wall the better, the only negative is they are going to make some lawyers fatter doing it. When are the states going to pull their head out of their arse and sort out their f***ed up patent system?

Dead donkey

Or is it? You seem to have forgoten nokia's other bit of 'freetardware', qtopia. A qt4 desktop can make a mac look like dated and there is no reason the 'freetards' at trolltech can't do the same for phone handsets. By the sound of the article you seem to have dismissed the whole idea of open source as stupid and pointless without ever considering anything other than software royalties. Mac didn't chose BSD as a base for nothing, doing all that work in house would have cost them a fortune and by the looks of it the work they have done wasn't quite up to the same standard as the base they started from. By the same token both nokia and google know that if they can attract open source developers then they can have the best platform for the least cost and clean up doing the 'polishing' work needed to turn a solid, stable 'in development' platform into a finished system suitable for the end luser to get their gruby hands on and start trying to break, and when they are in that position trolltech and the work they do are worth an awful lot of money for a group of 'freetards'

cheers

Other systems

Nice article but surprising to see something so one-sided on el-reg, the entire article was written as though the only OS in existence is windows. The point about using a separate system for important bank transactions could have done with a mention of 'knoppix, for instance' and a bit less of the 'weirdo' aspect. Many firewalls run from live CD's on systems with no hard drive to make it impossible to write to the file system so a reboot guarantees a clean system. Personally I will not even enter my email address into a windows box if I can avoid it and it will be a cold day in hell before I'll enter any bank details.

cheers

bollox

This sounds more like the real reason cannabis has been re-classified, the cops are getting too far out of their bin on commandeered super skunk. Could be Amanfrommars's satellite link is playing up either :)

cheers

@Ian Michael Gumby

Ubuntu-on-a-stick wasn't much for IBM, there Linux-in-a-watch was impressive though, an x-server on your wrist would really pull the chicks...

Hope Mandriva-on-a-stick sells well, USB key distros are a great idea but they tend to be too slow for normal use, the read-write speeds for this one are more than fast enough though. Stupid question; can a PS3 boot from a USB key?

cheers

Classic :)

I was expecting a sequel to the 'boss with an antenna stuck down his back looking for his laptop in the basement' robotwars episode but this artificial intelligence meets BOFH intelligence is even better :) Could it be a prequel to BOFH, next generation? Spawn of BOFH perhaps?

Nice one, keep up the good work.

Zaurus replacement

Looks like they have come up with the zaurus replacement. Sure, it's a communications brick and its running ME2 but that's all going to make it cheaper for me when I replace my SL1000 in a year or two :) Phone, bluetooth, a bigger screen and a lot more powerfull, good stuff. No-one has mentioned battery life though, could be half that bulky brick of a phone is li-ion cells. and it still needs plugged in twice a day if you actually use it as a PDA/PC/mini laptop thing.

cheers

ARM

Have one in a zaurus, it's not great when it comes to floating points but works very well otherwise. It will sit in suspend for a couple of months on a single charge and be ready to use in a couple of seconds if needed, run for over 8 hours with the backlight one step down from full and play mp3's for a solid 24hours with the lid closed. And it runs linux :) There was a craze for the things in Japan for a while (bigest selling PDA for a few years) but they where never really imported to the west in any great numbers.

The thing runs an Xserver and will run KDE (full, not a cut down set of libs) at an acceptable speed. Nokia's net tablet is along similar lines and there are dozens of other similar devices from various manufacturers but they always get labled 'not a computer' because none of them run windows. No fault of the hardware, this thing isn't fast for a recent ARM and would handle XP easily, but MS aren't capable of getting their system to run on anything other than X86.

The eee has been a very successfull experiment for asus and judging from the customer responce it has proved that for the eee's class of device windows is not essential, folks aren't buying the things for constructing 3d animations but for portable documents and internet in a cheap package with an easy to use interface.

A lot of the joe public response is surprise at the capabilities of units they bought knowing they where cheap and expecting cut-down usability. Going down the X86 road is going to be a serious limitation further down the road as the same customers look for an upgrade and find performance is still no better than a 4 year old desktop despite a couple of years of development in a competitive market. If MS can't get off their arse and port to a more suitable processor for small devices then the market will fork as manufacturers give customers the cake they expect but without windows to eat it with. ARM is only on side of the coin, IBM are happy enough with the core judging by their server range and will start looking for other markets, and no one ever got fired for buying IBM.

cheers

The plan is working

Looks like the UK government's secret plan of flooding the personal data black market is doing a good job, the prices are dropping like stones. Their taking the open source initiative a bit far in applying it to personal data though.

Have they actualy got something right?

What? A 40mb system proposed by MS? Not another 'new, improved windows with extra bloat and added pretty colors'? A system stripped to the point that they can re-build it from the with ground up as a multiuser system with rights and privileges as per the industry standard for a secure OS? Well if they do I for one will be a little shocked. Sure, they would be copying a model that was in use long before windows was a wiggly thing but its a model that works. Maybe next time I hear 'The most secure windows ever' I might not piss myself laughing. 'Corse, 'microsoft makes every effort to insure interoperability between systems' will still bring on the painfull sides and damp trousers.