Posts by Duncan Hothersall 329 publicly visible posts • joined 25 Jul 2007
For fuck's sake El Reg, next time you get some shitty, pseudo-scientific, headline-grabbing, gimmicky piece of shit "research" like this sent to you from the desperate PR department of a University, the only purpose of which is to stir up some false controversy, do the decent thing and tell them to stick it up their arses.
I was stopped and searched twice around railway stations in Scotland; that's because the only police force up here who use these powers is the BTP.
On both occasions I was told that if I was rushing for a train I could just go, but if I had 5 minutes to spare could I answer some questions...
I'm *reasonably* sure that no terrorists or terror-related items were found.
I realise I'm flogging a dead horse, but the explicit policy of the entire NHS Connecting for Health or whatever that gargantuan, ineffective body is called now, is to limit support for the vast majority of its desktop functionality to Windows-based PCs. You are simply wrong about there being a level playing field in the desktop space - wrong about the NHS, and wrong about the vast majority of corporates.
Do you work for Sheffield Teaching Hospitals Trust? If not (and I am pretty sure the answer is no) then whatever procurement procedures your company uses is neither here nor there.
Let me come back to the deeply mistaken point you made: "if there was a Linux version of it that was capable of doing a better job than the one Windows one that was there, then they would be using the Linux one"
This simply isn't true, and none of your bleating has made it any more true. STHT almost certainly has a policy which says that desktop PCs run Windows, full stop. Most places do, because they are scared of the support costs in having more than one platform. They will therefore only look for desktop applications in the Windows realm. The existence of a perfect, productivity-enhancing, life-enhancing application which does not run on the already chosen OS will be of no consequence.
You were wrong, I'm afraid, and your self-important wittering does nothing to change this. The reasons for Linux's inability to even be considered in the desktop arena are structural, not qualitative, and Microsoft's monopoly is the key structural barrier.
Sounds like you have been fortunate enough never to have been bitten by that unpleasant "feature" of Windows Update that means running an update can sometimes magically change your settings back to the default "reboot whenever you want" ones. And you don't find out until that PC reboots itself at a most unfortunate moment.
That said, if you have a large network with Group Policy and WSUS you can control this behaviour more, so it really shouldn't have happened in the hospital instance - but for home and small network users, setting your PC to ask before it does everything isn't actually the panacea you might think it is.
Oh dear, you haven't even got the beginning of a clue, have you.
"if there was a Linux version of it that was capable of doing a better job than the one Windows one that was there, then they would be using the Linux one"
No, they wouldn't. Choice of application, like choice of operating system, is rarely if ever decided by how good it is at its job. That is almost the whole reason people get irate with Windows being adopted in this sort of scenario, and it has completely passed you by.
I can show you an operating system which outperforms Windows in just about any technical sphere you care to mention, and it won't give it an inch of market traction in the NHS or elsewhere, because performance, quality and fitness for purpose are simply not the criteria on which such decisions are made.
That was the entire point of my first response to your silliness - name the app that was deemed so critical and I'm sure I could point to 5 alternatives that could be run without Windows; but they won't be because MS has a monopoly and is very accomplished at using it.
Your gratuitous insults make your argument even less convincing, by the way. You silly little twat.
is always demoed attached to its controlled opening/closing machinery. Presumably they haven't found a way yet to make the hinge strong enough to deal with even gentle demo by hand. That has to be one of the bigger challenges of that tech, so it will be interesting to see the form factor of the first products using it - could be more chunky than you would want.
Cool though - and so is the see-through screen not requiring a backlight - neat.
A truly bizarre position you have adopted there. Essentially "Apple is just as bad as Microsoft, therefore you should just live with it." It's perfectly possible to think that Apple's fleecing of its customers is just as bad, if not worse, than MS's fleecing of its customers. I do. Having another company doing the same thing is not a justification.
Are you an American by any chance? The two-party system has a lot to answer for. :-)
this is a Vista Service Pack, and should be given free to those poor suckers who have shelled out for Vista already.
What a tawdry history the Vista releases have. First they traded out all of the significant new features from Longhorn; then they completely fucked up the rollout of Vista with far too many drivers unavailable, far too many bugs, and a dodgy "Vista capable" PR campaign which resulted in millions of machines running an OS that they couldn't cope with; now they are adding a few bits of fluff and eye candy and having the gall to call it a new version.
And the IT market responds by rolling over and taking what it is given, because MS has a monopoly grip and even when they are peddling utter shit, it's the only shit that's certified and supported by the MS-dependent ecosystem, so it's the shit they have to use.
Of course Firefox is more secure than IE, just like Macs are more secure than Windows based PCs, for the simple reason that the large install base of IE (and the same for Windows) is a far more attractive target for malware.
Given that we cannot inspect the source of IE, it is impossible to know which browser is inherently more secure by design, but I'd be willing to hazard a guess.
As for control over user settings - you have really missed the point here haven't you. Firefox is open source - you can compile it with whatever features, or lack of them, you want. And with options preinstalled. Even rename it as "My Company's browser".
And if that's too hard, there are a bunch of builds with typical options locked down already out there under maintenance from very reputable sources.
Honestly, Firefox can be whatever you want it to be, including hobbled. Your objections are purely based on ignorance.
Personally I have very little interest in what the IWF thinks might be illegal, because it is not a body competent to judge such things under UK law. That said, I am sure there is a benefit to them making their best estimate and making available a list of URLs which it thinks might house potentially illegal content. That way, those who are concerned can consult such a list and take action accordingly. Some might even choose to empower a third party to monitor such a list and take pre-emptive action on their behalf. I wouldn't, but I can imagine that some might.
It is a huge leap from that to a situation in which an ISP takes this non-legal opinion, and implements a transparent proxy of the "offending" site which alters their users' interaction with that site making pages appear missing, AND FAILS TO INFORM THEIR USERS THEY ARE DOING SO.
It is a direct analogue of the Phorm situation - users pay for connection to the internet, not a connection to a version of the internet amended for the benefit of a third party. Users have every right to be angry and feel let down about this. ISPs simply should not be transforming content.
As for the other mealy mouthed points in this opinion piece, they are dubious at best. The Wikipedia page in question housed a thoughtful and rounded discussion of the album art, putting it into context and exploring the criticism it had received. It is simply not good enough to say that this textual content was censored for simplicity's sake. It is no harder to add a .jpg URL to a watchlist as it is to add a .html URL.
Witness the difference between Demon Internet's action, which was the show the page in its entirety and then simply *warn* users that clicking through to the full size image might be illegal, and Virgin Media's, which was to transparently proxy the page in question and pretend it simply didn't exist.
The bottom line is this: I didn't sign up for a censorship service. I don't want a censorship service. If I want to read stuff that someone else thinks I shouldn't it's down to me to decide. And if I want to view an image that someone else thinks I shouldn't, even if they think I'd be committing an offence if I did, it is still MY DECISION to commit that offence if I want to.
I don't care how righteous the IWF thinks it's being, nor how indignant Wikipedia is. I care that my internet connection delivers me what is actually on the internet, not some nannied version of it.
That's why there was and continues to be an outcry over this.
Bravo, bravo. Well said throughout.
I rang my ISP (Virgin) yesterday to register a complaint that they are censoring my internet connection transparently and without notification. I am absolutely horrified by this, because it means that even with all the anti-phishing features in my browser, all the domain-ownership checking that can be done to be sure of the site one is on, any given page I look at could be the invention of Virgin and I would be none the wiser.
If I want to censor the content coming into my house I will do so. If I want an internet connection censored by someone else (and I can't imagine a situation where I would) I will buy that service. And most importantly of all, if Virgin feels that it must block access to a particular site or image under its legal obligations it MUST TELL ME IT IS DOING SO rather than present a false version of the internet to me without ant notice.
Demon appears to have it right here - explicit notification that the jackboot of government has prevented an image being shown. Virgin has it totally wrong, with their transparent proxying.
I'm really fucked off.
Since the BBC web site works fine in Gecko-based browsers, Webkit-based browsers and Opera, it must be relatively web-standards compliant. So presumably garbling in IE8 is due to IE-specific pages being served. Does this mean that Microsoft is now naming and shaming sites which have actually gone to the trouble of developing IE workaround styles for their crappy browser? Are they seriously that fucking arrogant, to have required people to bend over backwards in the past, and now to browbeat them to lurch in another direction now? Why conduct this discussion in the media, for goodness' sake! What a bunch of tossers.
and I now believe that toasters are harmful to health. I will be blogging about this shortly, and probably creating a Facebook group, and when I do some web searches to find out more I will ignore any results which do not correspond with my new beliefs, and focus only on those which support the view that toasters are carcinogenic.
I prefer to read articles from people who approach a subject with an open mind and use the evidence they find to inform their conclusions.
In this article the conclusion that, to paraphrase, freetards are ruining everything, was quite clearly in place before any of the "evidence" was found to fit it. The canard of VOIP under threat is a good example - a little research could have told the author that both his statement and his inference from it were incorrect, but because it suited where he knew he was heading anyway he threw it in there.
However, I take back my accusation that Bennett is a psuedonym of Orlowski's, since had it been so, we wouldn't have been given the right to post our puny comments on it.
Is Richard Bennett a pseudonym for our own favourite FUDmeister Orlowski? Another article demonstrating that a little knowledge is a dangerous thing (as others have noted, to say that UDP was designed for applications like VOIP is more or less utter bollocks and betrays a complete lack of understanding of the TCP/IP network stack), and another article whose conclusion was determined long before copy was written.
What a load of shit, quite frankly. I expect, and usually get, far better from El Reg. Is Lester away or something?
Under Ian and Tony Blair the MPS became more politicised than it has been for many years, with the Commissioner habitually commenting on political issues such as approaches to terrorism, and politicians holding up those opinions when they suited them. Ian Blair was himself hoist by this petard when he was effectively forced to resign by Boris Johnson, and act which itself ratcheted up the politicisation of the MPS.
All of which makes it very difficult to accept that any MPS actions involving politicians are not tainted in some way. This is very sad, because the law, and long-standing convention, are very clear on the separation of powers here. We should be able to implicitly trust that an action such as this is completely independent of political interference. That we cannot does great harm to British justice. More importantly, it gives the Tories justification for grandstanding, which is a bloody shame in itself.
I appreciate a good rant as much as anyone, but just occasionally you might want to listen to the issues people are having rather than simply defend your entrenched position.
Many people, me included, having tried them both, find apt a superior dependency manager to urpmi, and make their deployment decisions accordingly. Free software is about choice, after all.
Many people, me included, have experienced more problems with urpmi/yum and rpm than we have with apt and dpkg. The rpm ecosystem was late to the dependency management game, and the effect lingers, both as a memory of troubles and an occasional contemporary reminder of underlying issues.
I suspect that, while I personally find apt more reliable, urpmi and yum are probably very good tools now. The real reason there was a flurry of "commentards" on the RPM-hell case on this particular article was that the author made the ludicrous claim that the rpm system was "always excellent", and we *know*, from personal experience, that it *wasn't*. It used to be crap.
I'm glad to hear it has got better.
This is a new use of the phrase "always excellent" that I haven't come across before. RPM was the reason I moved away from RH-derivatives. It may well have got better recently, indeed I'm prepared to believe it might now be "excellent", but it definitely hasn't "always" been... I'm afraid that means I don't believe anything else said here, which is a shame, cos it might be true.
Presumably they must have been charged on the basis of a specific instance (or several specific instances) of the use of one or more of the devices, since I cannot see how simply selling a device which *could* be used to defraud could attract conspiracy charges. After all, used properly, a computer is capable to being used to defraud, yet selling them doesn't land people on conspiracy charges...
If they are promising the channel revenues from "migration, customisation, consulting, training, support and application development, and integration services" then it sounds like the poor customers are going to see much much bigger costs than $3 to £15 a month!
If only there was a widely used, well documented, standard way to implement these services using free software...
Can anyone explain to me why reporting of BT here appears always to ignore the EXISTING FIBRE NETWORK in this country, owned by Virgin Media? Whether it's reporting about exciting new high-speed broadband - which is to be slower than that already provided by cable - or this reporting about the 21CN, the elephant in the room always seems to go unmentioned. Am I missing something? Is there a fundamental difference between cable fibre and BT fibre?
Amid accusations of hypocrisy from Brits who apparently simply don't understand that the only way to stand up to government is to shoot at them, you say "Getting the guns away from the population is the first step in trampling the citizens rights."
I'm searching for a way to express my thoughts on this clearly and without unnecessary abuse. Here goes:
NO IT ISN'T YOU UTTER TWAT.
Oh dear, that didn't go well.
By this, and by the votes for anti gay marriage constitutional amendments in various states, Merkins are ensuring that the rest of the world realises that despite their voting for the groundbreaking change agenda of Obama, they are still a nation of God-fearin', gun-totin' rednecks at heart. God bless America, and God help the rest of us.
Look, 2 people complained when the show went out, and those complaints were about the use of the word "fuck". Not a dicky-bird about "abuse".
A full week later, Max Clifford sells a story to a newspaper whipping up a frenzy, and thousands of people start complaining about a programme they would never listen to.
Andrew Sachs says he hasn't been attacked and doesn't need any apologies, and wants it to just blow over.
But the attention seeking Ms Baillie milks the story for all it's worth, makes money, makes a name for herself, and somehow there are people here who think she has been cruelly wronged?
Get a fucking grip.
Or indeed in cities - 3G in Edinburgh is patchy at best. And as with all of these technologies, they are most available precisely where you don't need them - i.e. home and work where better networks are more easily available - and least available where you do need them - out in the wilds, on a train journey or in a foreign country.
How entertaining that you start your post with "we don't know the facts" and then go on to make a huge range of assumptions. Especially when I made no comment about "legitimacy", or whether lap belts might have been off for "good" or "bad" reasons, or indeed whether any of the injured were "at fault". These are all your inferences, not mine.
I repeat, it would be interesting, and potentially educational, to know how many of the injured were wearing their lap belts, because it could help to justify, reinforce or disprove the usefulness of a policy which rarely has the opportunity to be tested.
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