* Posts by Adam Williamson

242 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Oct 2007

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Rock-solid Fedora 10 brings salvation to Ubuntu weary

Adam Williamson

Duncan

"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."

If you ask anyone who knows me they'll tell you I'm very responsive to genuine issues. (I've closed three bugs today). The thing is, no-one in these comments reported any actual issue. They just ranted on about 'RPM hell' without giving any specifics. You, also, don't give any specifics - you say you "find apt a superior dependency manager to urpmi" but you don't say *why*. You say you "experienced more problems with urpmi/yum and rpm than we have with apt and dpkg", but you don't say *what problems*. You mention an "occasional contemporary reminder of underlying issues.", but you don't say *what issues*.

How am I meant to listen to your issues, then?

Adam Williamson
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Replies

AC 17:13 GMT - that chart is out-of-date in one respect - current RPM supports suggested (soft) dependencies, and at least urpmi and Mandriva packages implement this (I don't know if Fedora or SUSE use this capability yet). In other ways I'd say it's a bit biased towards apt, some of the criteria seem to have been chosen purely to make apt look good. What does it really matter whether 'standard tools' can be used to access the packages or the metadata?

AC 18:39 GMT - sorry about that. It would be important to know when you tried the upgrade: it's a brand new feature for 2009, and honestly, when it was first rolled out, it wasn't as robust as it needed to be against possible failure cases. It worked fine in internal tests, but these didn't sufficiently reproduce real-world cases like heavily overloaded mirrors and very slow connections. We pulled the feature for a couple of weeks, made a lot of improvements to make it much more resistant to problems, and re-enabled it again. Since then, there've been a lot fewer reports of problems with it. Anyway, this is a bit off-topic, so if you'd like to follow up further, do please post to the forums, or mail me directly.

Mike: I'm not sure if you misread my post, but I certainly didn't intend to suggest you have to use rpm on Fedora. I was defending Fedora (and other RPM-based distros) against the silly 'RPM hell' crap. I specifically mentioned yum in my post.

mario: well, yeah, I did specifically say that back when there were distros around where you had to use the rpm command directly, it was a pain. But no distro makes you do that any more. Things change, believe it or not. I don't see the relevance in bringing up problems from years and years ago.

In general, statements like "Then again, I still prefer the emerge/apt-get style method of package management since RPM tries to be all things to all men and ends up being merely adequate." and "No, they can't fix RPM Hell because it is designed that way." just confuse me. I have no idea what they're talking about. Both binary .deb packages and binary .rpm packages contain a bunch of files, and some metainformation (the package name, version, changelog, file list, list of dependencies, and a description). That's it. There's nothing massively complex about a binary package format that you can get 'wrong'. I don't know what you think it is that RPM gets wrong.

David Viner: either you did something wrong with your repositories, or that was simply an error on Fedora's part in not rebuilding the packages with the updated libraries. Given the packages in question are very important, I would suspect the former, because if an official update actually prevented the official Apache package from installing, there'd be a giant shitstorm, and I don't remember ever reading about anything like that.

Either way, it's not 'RPM hell'. It's either a user error or a packager error.

Adam Williamson
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Quit whining about RPM.

Nice to see a positive review of something - anything - other than Ubuntu. Good going, Reg.

Commentards, please stop whining about 'RPM hell', which has not been anything other than a misunderstanding or PEBKAC for at least five years.

RPM is a package format and a very basic, non-dependency-resolving package manager - in the same mode as dpkg, not apt-get or aptitude. So if you try and use the 'rpm' command as you would use the apt tools, congratulations, you just failed.

There are several dependency resolving package managers for RPM packages, all of which do the basic job perfectly well. The oldest is urpmi, which is part of Mandriva (for those who don't know, I work for Mandriva). Fedora uses one called yum. SUSE has its own too. There's a popular third party one named smart. It doesn't really matter which you use, for most purposes: they're all perfectly capable of properly tracking, managing and resolving dependency issues.

Back when some distros didn't have a dependency-resolving package manager at all and made you handle everything with 'rpm', you could legitimately talk about RPM hell. But now, you can't. All major RPM-based distros now have a perfectly competent dependency-resolving packager manager. If you have problems then 99.9% of the time it's because:

a) you hit a bug in the *package*, not the package manager (which can and does also happen in apt-style packages)

b) you're trying to install a package you shouldn't be installing: it's from another distribution, or the wrong version of the right distribution, or - please, no - you found it on some random "RPM search engine".

JUST BECAUSE IT SAYS .RPM IN THE FILE NAME, DOESN'T MEAN YOU CAN EXPECT IT TO WORK ON ANY RPM-BASED DISTRIBUTION.

This, again, is in no way specific to RPM packages. If you try and install a package built for one apt-based distribution on another, it certainly could cause dependency or functional problems. Fr'instance, I don't think the Debian folks would advise you to install Ubuntu 5.04 packages on Debian sid. But people seem to think it's perfectly fine to try this with RPM packages, and whine when it doesn't work. Sorry, no. It's not.

There is no 'RPM hell' any more. Every RPM-based distro is perfectly capable of dependency management within the range of packages actually meant to be installed as part of that distribution, which is exactly the same thing APT-based distros are capable of. If you have trouble with RPMs, either the packager made a boo boo, or you're doing it wrong.

Oh, on the NVIDIA thing - I think there's patches for the NVIDIA drivers to work with the new version of X floating around. IMBW, though.

Beatles stay off iTunes cos of 'heavy negotiations', man

Adam Williamson
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Apple

"Maybe if the Beatles record company hadn't called themselves Apple, then Apple wouldn't be so confused about letting Apple licence Apples tunes."

Yeah, those bastard Beatles should have seen the technology company arriving 15 years down the road.

Anyhow - "Beatles stays"? Come on, Reg.

OpenOffice 3.0 - the only option for masochistic Linux users

Adam Williamson
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Patience

Or you could, you know, just wait till packages come out for your distribution.

Why do you have a sudden burning need to get 3.0 the day it comes out? Did 2.4 suddenly turn to poison, vile poison, or something?

Top aero boffin: Green planes will be noisy planes

Adam Williamson

@Mick

"Oh and who made you the judge of whether a particular flight was, or wasn't, necessary."

No-one did, I took it upon myself. ;) But, seriously, I don't need to be, as you already did it for me. After all, your post makes it perfectly clear that you could certainly do the journey by train. You just *prefer* to do it by plane. In other words - the flight isn't necessary. Simple.

As I said above, nowhere am I suggesting that everyone learn to love the current rail system. I said we should get a better one.

Personally I'd nationalize the bloody thing again, only make sure to have a law mandating decent food. You didn't get such crowded trains under BR, generally, because there wasn't a profit motive: train companies make bigger profits by cramming people into the existing trains than they would by running more trains where everyone gets a seat. But you could do it in a private system, if you really wanted to.

(I've always loved the Douglas Adams line about British Rail sandwiches - they keep 'em fresh by taking them out of the plastic wrapping and washing them once a week...)

Adam Williamson

Objections

Lots of people seem to be objecting to my argument based on the *existing* rail system. Which is a bit silly, since that's not what I was talking about.

This applies to:

Matthew Terrell. Your argument is extremely confused: you don't give any justification for why flying is quicker and cheaper, you just say it is and that this must therefore always be the case forever and ever amen. In fact, flying is only quicker because we haven't built a decent train network yet, and only cheaper because we don't tax it properly, and the airlines don't charge for it properly (seen how many of the cheap ones have gone bust lately?), and we don't fund trains properly. It also doesn't consider likely future issues like the price of fuel (it's not going down...)

The distance from Edinburgh to Bristol is 600km. That'd only be 3 hours or so, on a decent high-speed train network. Which would likely work out faster than a plane once all the getting to the airport, getting from the airport, and dealing with security, checkin and boarding palaver had been factored in. The fact that it *currently* takes 7 hours just tells you how crap our current train network is, which isn't news to anyone who pays attention.

Same objection applies to N1AK. When did I say anything about the current rail network?

Actually I'd *personally* still rather use the current U.K. rail network than internal flights, but I recognize that a lot of people have genuine time pressures which make that impractical. Heck, I prefer taking a train down the U.S. west coast to flying, and that's 28 hours at a maximum speed of 60mph (the U.S. being the only place in the world with an even more woeful record of screwing up a world class railway system than the U.K.) So I recognize I'm a corner case there (though, the train in question almost always runs full...) Point is, I was not talking about the existing rail network, but a proper high-speed network, using dedicated expresses for long haul trips. Like the TGV, Eurostar, or Shinkansen. Which are what I was referring to when I mentioned "modern high speed trains".

Also applies to Dr. Chris Thomson. For the record, I don't live anywhere near any of the areas in question; I live in Vancouver. But I'm *from* Manchester, and am still around there often enough. Fortunately we have a couple of well-run express services to London, which makes Manchester to France via train entirely feasible (and, indeed, enjoyable). I've done it. Anyway, yes: point is, don't judge the proposal on journey times using the current network.

Adam Williamson
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@AC 03:04

So, let me get this straight - you wish to argue that trains cause more noise problems than planes?

How many action groups have formed demanding King's Cross be shut down on noise grounds, then?

Yes, trains are fairly noisy on a scale of "absolute silence" to...well..."planes" (you know, the archetypal thing you put on the loudest end of any arbitrary noisiness scale). But they're a lot less noisy than planes.

Fuel? Er, I mentioned that directly. They're massively more energy-efficient - that means, fuel efficient - than planes. "Only really efficient if fully loaded" applies to any form of transportation, I don't quite see how it's relevant here. Are unloaded aeroplanes terribly fuel efficient, then?

Land, well, yes, they use a bit of land. More than planes for a comprehensive network, admittedly. But most of it is in less important locations - you need a lot more land in prime areas for airports than you do for train stations. And use of land doesn't seem to be stopping us building roads all over the damn place; the land use by a continental rail network would be far, far less than that used by roads.

Danger? Since the TGV started running in 1981, exactly two people have been killed in TGV-related incidents (both truck drivers who managed to get hit at level crossings). Since the Shinkansen services started in 1964, there has been a single fatality (apart from suicides), caused by a closing door on the train.

I'll take those odds over any other form of transportation except the elevator, thanks.

New construction? Yup. That's not always a bad thing, though. Capital investment in a beneficial cause is a great way to stimulate economies, after all. And the benefits are hard to argue. And, as I said, we seem to be happy to keep coming up with billions to build roads all over the bloody place.

Adam Williamson
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Planes aren't essential.

"In other words, being against airport noise is not the same as being green - quite the reverse - unless you also believe/accept that air travel should largely stop. (That means a return to the days when travel, other than to go to war or to migrate, was strictly for the rich.)"

It most certainly does not. "We can't get anywhere without aeroplanes!" is a huge fallacy.

There are certain types of trip for which air travel makes sense at present: the really long haul - anything that takes, say, four hours or more in a plane. Transatlantic or trans-Pacific, east coast to west coast in the States, stuff like that.

These, however, do not make up the majority of air travel.

I decided to apply myself and actually do some research for this post, instead of just pulling the numbers out of thin air in true journalistic fashion. According to the Department of Transport's helpfully detailed and freely available statistics (nice job, DoT), in 2006, total air passengers between the U.K. and the EU-15 - the long-standing group of E.U. states - were 108,534. More specifically, the most popular destinations were, in order of popularity: Spain, the Republic of Ireland, France, Germany, and Italy.

Total flights to the entire rest of the world - destinations which could reasonably be considered long haul, including the United States - were 49,938: less than half the number of flights to short haul destinations within Europe.

And that's just international flights. If we added domestic flights, the numbers would look even worse. Unfortunately I can't find the equivalent figures for domestic flights.

Still, even disregarding domestic flights, at least two thirds of air travel to or from the U.K. is unnecessary. It is simply not true to say that air travel is the only affordable method of transportation within Europe. It is entirely within the capabilities of the E.U. to build a comprehensive, continent-wide high speed rail transport network. Even with current technology, you could do it so that most journeys would be possible within eight hours or so; with perfectly feasible upgrades to existing trains, this could be cut to five. This would bring a huge amount of benefits over air travel.

It is vastly more energy efficient (and hence environmentally friendly). According to Climate Action Network (not an entirely unbiased source, I admit, but they're not inherently biased in favour of any particular mode of transportation, just in favour of *energy efficient* transportation...), trains are around two to three times as energy efficient as planes. That's not some piddling little 20% improvement, as is always touted by 'environmentally friendly' planes: it's massively higher. We could save far, far more energy by simply using trains for travel within Europe than we could possibly save by trying to make planes more efficient.

It's a much less intrusive method of transportation. As the article discusses, plane noise is a huge problem for people unfortunate enough to live near airports. Airports themselves are awkward beasts which need to be sited close to major destinations but are too big to fit within them, forcing the development of ancillary transport networks (usually clogged-up roads) between the actual destination and the airport. By contrast, trains make very little noise, and stations can comfortably be sited at the actual destination, as with the existing Eurostar and TGV networks, saving time and effort on the part of the traveller.

Finally, it's a much more pleasant method of transportation. I hardly know anyone who enjoys flying. The ratio of plane size/weight to passengers carried being absolutely critical to the bottom line, you get crammed in like sardines. It's noisy. For most of the time on most flights, there's nothing to look at. There's no form of amusement or amenity on board. It's just an unpleasant experience all round.

Compare train travel. Size and weight aren't so important for trains, so operators can afford to give everyone a lot more leg room. The environment inside a modern high-speed train is quiet and relaxing. You get fresh air. You can look out the window and actually *see* stuff. You can go buy something to eat from the buffet car. Train travel can be a rewarding experience in itself; it's certainly not unpleasant, in the majority of cases.

It's time for the "we need planes to get anywhere!" fallacy to end. It is perfectly feasible with modern technology for the vast majority of medium-distance - up to 1000km - travel over land to be done by rail. This would be better for the economy, the environment, the general population, and the travellers. There's absolutely no excuse not to do it. Fortunately, anyone who's seen the terminal at St. Pancras - it's about ten times bigger than it needs to be to cope with the current volume of traffic - can see that at least some people are planning along these lines.

Ubuntu 8.10 - All Hail new Network Manager

Adam Williamson

Version 0.7?

Er...where are you getting 0.7 as a version number? They ship with X.org 7.4, x11-server version 1.5. There's not a 0.7 in there anywhere.

And, for the record, Mandriva's network tools have supported 3G devices since around 2004 (I forget exactly when...it's been a while). And...seriously...NetworkManager is only starting the connection during startup in *this release*? How the heck did it used to work? How could you use ntpd...or, well, any other kind of server, more or less...if the network connection wasn't up until you got to a desktop? That sounds kind of baffling. I dunno. Maybe I'm not reading your description right.

Oxford don offered $10,000 for proof terrorist penned Obama memoir

Adam Williamson
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Matt

Erm. You obviously didn't read Dr. Millican's article very closely, did you? Or, well, you probably didn't read it at all.

It consists in its entirety of a detailed refutation of all the analyses made by...um...Jake Cashill.

Your suggestion that Dr. Millican was unaware of Mr. Cashill's analysis is, therefore, likely to prove a bit tough to support. =)

Drunken paedo commie exposed on internet

Adam Williamson
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Pete James

"My brother used to work very extensively in China. I won't begin to repeat his pointed description of them here but let's say the words intelligent, honest and considerate would be somewhere near the bottom. Although I think the reason why he spent so much time out there was down to him being far more devious!"

...so what you're telling us is that your brother's an exceedingly idiotic racist?

Hint: it's impossible to apply any single set of adjectives to a population in the billions. But thanks for making it easy to treat your comment with the contempt it deserves.

Shuttleworth on Ubuntu: It ain't about the money

Adam Williamson
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Ah, I found my people!

http://www.happyassassin.net/2008/10/28/why-i-dont-like-canonical/

Book about D-Notices gets D-Notice slapped on it

Adam Williamson
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O rly?

"Cambridge historian Christopher Andrew, who is currently writing a history of MI5, was called in to referee the scuffling retired officers. He begged to differ with Vallance, saying the book was perfectly OK for style, structure and content."

I had him for supervisions. Nice bloke. The history of intelligence is great for a laugh.

Standards are dropping somewhere if they expect anyone to swallow "We want to pull it because it's badly written!" Since when did government ministries get to act as editorial staff anyway?

With this precedent having been set, I look forward to seeing the MoD working hard to keep all other poorly written books, ever, off our shelves. I see trouble in Jeffrey Archer's future.

Speaking clock gets Disneyfied

Adam Williamson
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George Speller

I suspect your new colleagues got you good and proper on that one.

Scene: The Pub, somewhere close to Broadcasting House

Two experienced techies are on their third pints

Bob: Ere, you'll never guess what I've got that new kid doing.

Terry: What's that, then?

Bob: I've only got him listening to the speaking clock all night long.

Terry: Heh, heh...how'd you manage that then?

Bob: Told him it was giving "periodic, untraceable problems", didn't I?

Terry: One born every minute, innit? Another round?

Bob: Don't mind if I do...

And on topic - truly, the glories of privatization are many and wondrous.

1,400 Yahooligans perish as Yang raids needle cabinet

Adam Williamson
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Jonathan

Nope, as I said, that's the good old-skool Reg style, not the dull, neutered Silicon Valley-speak it's become infested with over the last few years. You a new reader?

Adam Williamson
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Fantastic

Great article in the true old-skool Reg style, Ted.

What is a Linux distro worth?

Adam Williamson
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Largesse?

NathanMeyer: "Like DARPANet, if the development and deployment costs had not been inititially underwritten by those subsisting on government largesse, Unix and Linux would have gone nowhere."

Sounds like an excellent argument for government 'largesse', to me. Of course, a more accurate term would be 'extremely sensible investment'. To turn it around, the argument runs "if the government does not spend money on intelligent people doing interesting things which may not have immediate commercial value, no-one will". This is why we have publicly-funded research institutions in the first place, yes?

Next Windows name unveiled: Windows 7

Adam Williamson
Alert

Cunning

"Simply put, this is the seventh release of Windows, so therefore 'Windows 7' just makes sense," Nash said."

How much did they pay a strategy boutique to come up with that one, then?

Mandriva Linux 2009 threesome outed

Adam Williamson
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Few points

@AC: I think they mean Intel wireless firmware, which is part of non-free (along with lots of other wireless firmware). It's worth noting Free has Java now, thanks to OpenJDK.

Rick: The point of DKMS is it doesn't have to 'match' any kernel. A source dkms package contains the source code of the driver (or the kernel interface, in the case of NVIDIA) and automatically rebuilds it if you boot against a kernel for which it hasn't been built yet.

Dave didn't provide enough information to know what the NVIDIA bug he ran into was, but there was no known issue with NVIDIA / kernel updates throughout the 2008 Spring release. There were a few booboos with 2008, though. It's possible he was on 2008 and ran into one of these (where we updated the kernel and the updated NVIDIA *binary* driver packages weren't updated fast enough, so if you didn't have the source package and the kernel headers installed, you lost your NVIDIA driver). As I said, we got that sorted for 2008 Spring.

Using the upstream NVIDIA installer will basically work, but the problem is you have to re-run it each time there's a kernel update, and it doesn't handle switching between itself and nv very well, if you wanted to do that for any reason.

David Pottage: er, 2009 is out. Released. Now. Final version.

We're always about two-three weeks ahead of Ubuntu in the release cycle, that's just how it's happened to turn out.

US teen cuffed for sending nude phone pics

Adam Williamson
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genecash

"and tell people I'm Canadian."

It's no better up here. Entirely fictional under-age porn is illegal in Canada. You can be (and people have been) prosecuted for possessing a cartoon depicting (arguably - not the least absurd point of the legislation in question is determining the age of a completely fictional entity) under-age sex. Yep, a cartoon. No real people involved at any point.

Let's face it, most of 'the western world' is entirely insane when it comes to anything related to private parts.

Stick health warnings on gays, says Stock Exchange chaplain

Adam Williamson
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Why resign?

I'm not sure why his resignation is being demanded. Seems to me he's in exactly the right organization for his opinions. Where would be more appropriate?

Blockbuster: DVD to Blu-ray shift slower than VHS to DVD

Adam Williamson
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@AC 18:35

Grab an envelope and a pencil and do the maths on two hours of entirely uncompressed video at 1920x1080.

Can't grok it? Here's a hint, it's more than 50GB. Like, a LOT more.

Of course it's bleeding compressed.

Adam Williamson
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Price

Yep, just to add another voice to the chorus, it's simply about the price of content.

I've got a really good Blu-Ray player, with all the latest features, like millions of other people do - it's called a PS3. I've got a couple of Blu-Ray movies, and yeah, the quality is amazing.

But it's really freaking hard to pay $40 for a movie. It's just not going to happen, I'm afraid. Brand new releases here in Canada are $20 on DVD and $40 on Blu-Ray. Blu-Rays never ever seem to get discounted below $25, even the really bad ones.

Ironically what this means is I've stopped buying movies entirely. I don't want to buy the DVD because I want the quality of Blu-Ray, but I'm damned if I'm forking out $40 to get the Blu-Ray.

So I just go do something else instead, or watch it in a theater.

I guess I could rent them, but there are no movie rental places within 20 minutes of my apartment, thanks to the decline of the movie rental business...

MI6 agent's moustache falls off during TV interview

Adam Williamson
Happy

Cunning trick

Of course, the real trick is - he actually *does* have a mustache.

Yep, these guys are just that good. Scared yet?

Memo to US Secret Service: Net proxy may pinpoint Palin email hackers

Adam Williamson
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@AC 03:04

That would be Slashdot.

And man, how dumb do these people have to have been not to use tor? Sheesh.

Anonymous hacks Sarah Palin's Yahoo! account

Adam Williamson
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D'oh

"I too recently had my Yahoo account hacked into..."

"(even though I was emailing them from my Yahoo account which should be proof of ownership)..."

Just think about it for a bit, Steve. I'm sure you'll get it.

Netbooks and Mini-Laptops

Adam Williamson
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Psion not the original

I already sent this by email to the author, but the Psion Series 7 is not the original mini notebook. Sony's first VAIO Picturebook, the C1X, launched a year earlier, in 1999. It's also far more of a predecessor to these machines. The Series 7, however you slice it, was an overgrown PDA. It ran a PDA OS. The Picturebooks, exactly like modern netbooks, were just shrunken laptops. They ran x86 CPUs and Windows.

I bought a C1XD (P2/400 CPU) off eBay in 2001 or 2002 (I forget) and used it up till 2006. Amazing little machine. My partner just got an Aspire One and it reminds me entirely of my old Picturebook, they feel just the same to use.

One thing Sony got right and modern netbooks get wrong is the pointing device. Sony realized it was better to ship a good keyboard with a trackpoint than squish up the keyboard so you can include a tiny trackpad. But aside from that, they're extremely similar, right down to the webcam on the top of the bezel.

The real big difference? Price. As they came out, the successive Picturebooks all listed around $2000 - $2500. I paid UK£700 for mine, second hand off eBay.

I'm amazed it's taken Sony so long to get in on the netbook game, to be honest. They must have the case designs and everything for the final gen Picturebook model lying around. All they need to do is take that, stick a Core in it, drop the price, and release it.

The Picturebook series died out around 2004-2005 IIRC. It split into the slightly larger (10.6", IIRC) TR series and the ultra-tiny U series of UMPCs, including the hilarious 6" screen U101 and U3 (Google them, they're insane) and the keyboardless U line that's still going today. The TR series has since turned into the T series and gotten, I think, even bigger.

Some other manufacturers made similar machines around the same time, I can't remember which exactly (I think Fujitsu did a series under the name Lifebook). I'm fairly sure the Sony was the original, though.

Qantas phone check-in to take off next year

Adam Williamson
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Over the top indeed - why need a token at all?

As ze said, this is over the top. I don't actually see the need for any special single-use user token at all in almost all cases. For international flights you have to provide ID when booking the flight these days anyway. And most people use a credit card even for domestic flights. So just show up with your passport or credit card and they check you in. Several airlines do this already, actually.

I suppose this would be useful for people who book flights for which they don't need to provide ID, and pay with cash - that's a lot of people...

Mythbusters busted over RFID gagging

Adam Williamson
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So...

the credit card companies threatened to sue for defamation, and Discovery called Adam into a meeting and said "apologize and spin some bullshit story about how it's all your fault, or you'll never work in this town again".

Am I the only one not buying this somewhat unconvincing attempt at a whitewash?

Burned by Chrome - Fire put out

Adam Williamson
Stop

Generic license

From the wording of the license it's a very generic license that wasn't really drawn up specifically for Chrome, it's one Google probably use for a lot of other services (hence the very generic language and the description of a web browser as "the Services"). Given that Google is more in the web services market - where this kind of term is more commonplace, though I don't know why we let people get away with it... - it kinda makes sense that they have it in their generic license. They should really get it taken out for a *web browser*, though.

Council clamps down on 'man on the street'

Adam Williamson
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@NT

I would agree with your criticism of my post, except that you've fallen for the Daily Mail bit. The amount of times where the sort of nutty over-enthusiasm you cite has happened are either very small or, possibly, zero - as I recall, the last time the 'nativity banned for dirty towel-heads!' meme cropped up, it turned out to be an urban myth. The Mail and other august institutions *love* to try and find isolated examples of nuttiness like that in order to tar any and all attempts to combat prejudice as "political correctness gone mad". This is what I don't like.

As I wrote, this is not the same case. The phrase "the man on the street" was expressly designed to be sexist (though of course it wouldn't have been thought of that way at the time), it's not a case where the word is being used in the sense of 'a person'. If you perpetuate the use of the phrase it - in a very small way - perpetuates the mindset of valuing male opinions over female ones. Attempting to replace it with a gender-neutral alternative is - in a very small way - a positive step to take. Not everything has to be a big deal, but that doesn't make it absurd or useless.

As I noted in the comments on that story (which seems to have now disappeared from the RSS feed...), the same Reg which posted this story poking fun at 'political correctness' over sexism on the grounds that we're all so enlightened we don't need it any more posted a story on the same day which featured this gem of an opening sentence (and no, amazingly, it wasn't intended to be sarcastic):

"If the Missus always nags you to help her with the cleaning, she’ll faint when you offer to vaccum (sic) the whole house."

Yes, sure, we don't need to fight sexism any more. Good job, Reg.

Adam Williamson
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Neil

"Those of us that bring in revenue should rise up. Rise up I tell you!"

So, not the IT department (and hence 90% of the readers of this site), then? They don't bring in any money.

Adam Williamson
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@RW

I live in British Columbia. My apartment is in fact owned by my partner's mother, who doesn't speak English. I imagine she's rather happy to have all the relevant council information translated to Chinese. I don't see how communicating with people in their first language is "paternalistic".

Adam Williamson
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It's perfectly right.

The only problem here is that it's exactly right.

"it's not as though anybody in their right mind would believe that the 'man in the street' referred solely to the male sex," fumes some (male) Tory twat. Except that it is. The phrase is sufficiently old enough that it was used to mean exactly what it said. When a newspaper discussed what "the man in the street" thought it really did mean the man in the street, because the woman in the street was supposed to be thinking about knitting.

Call it political correctness all you like, but that doesn't make it wrong.

Knee-jerk reactions to anything at all which attempts to address sexism, racism, or any other form of prejudice as "political correctness" are far more damaging in the long run.

Android's missing Bluetooth: Limitations laid out

Adam Williamson
Thumb Down

Erm...this is completely wrong

As steogede says, you've completely nerfed this up. The two features in question will be missing from the *developer API*, not the phone itself. This story has no implications for the actual functionality of the phone. Please fix it.

Portsmouth punts naval boy-on-boy to innocent kiddies

Adam Williamson
Happy

Of course...

Your average innocent kiddie (anyone seen one lately? Anyone?) wouldn't see anything odd in that picture at all. You're only going to look at it a bit sideways if that sort o' thing is on your mind already.

Which says a lot for the mentality of your average Daily Mail reader...

CERT: Linux servers under 'Phalanx' attack

Adam Williamson
Pirate

@AC 07:26

If this was exploiting the Debian SSH vuln, then no, it only affects Debian-derived Linux distros (that's Debian, all the Ubuntu variants, and a few also-rans; but *not* Red Hat, SUSE, Mandriva, Gentoo, Slackware, PCLOS, or any non-Linux system).

Adam Williamson

@E

Sorry to impugn your security practices, then. I do find an admin who considers the complete compromise of systems on his network as just a regular part of the job a bit worrying, though...

Adam Williamson
Paris Hilton

@E

...and why hadn't you updated openssl and regenerated all your keys back when this massive vulnerability became public, then?

Paris - even she would've figured that one out.

Geek tech takes hoovering to new heights

Adam Williamson
Unhappy

*koff* excuse me?

Wait - this story from the same Reg which this morning also published a story poking fun at 'political correctness' over sexism on the grounds we're all so enlightened we don't need it any more?

"If the Missus always nags you to help her with the cleaning, she’ll faint when you offer to vaccum the whole house."

This the Reg's view of today's society - Jack Geek out working in the server room while his missus waits at home with the vacuum cleaner (and, presumably, Jack's pipe and slippers)?

What's next, an article titled "Ladies! Learn to use the Personal Computer to store your knitting patterns!"? This is pathetic.

Also, vacuum has one c, two u's.

EC misleading EU on copyright extension, says boffin

Adam Williamson
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Bitter

I think the Prof is just bitter because he just realized he could've taken the money, written "spam spam spam spam kippers" on every page, and sodded off down the pub. Or brasserie.

No snapping: Photographers get collars felt

Adam Williamson
Stop

Fair point?

You say the - rather vague - notion of individuals at demonstrations using cameras to "wind up" individual officers is a fair point.

How's that, then? Unless they are beating said officers around the head with a chunky DSLR, I fail to see how this can possibly constitute something worthy of, in your terms, "punishment". Last time I checked, even New Labour hadn't managed to make "winding up an officer" a criminal offence yet, nor should it be.

I'm continually irritated by the notion that it is acceptable for something to be legal if done to another person, but illegal if done to a police officer. There's absolutely no reason for this. Police officers should get the exact same protection under the law that everyone else gets; no more, no less. Anything else only serves to encourage the police to turn their noses up at the rules the rest of us live by, and encourage the public to resent the police, which is not in anyone's best interest.

On unmarked police cars, I am always amused by the ones here in Vancouver. They take off the police markings, but leave on the gigantic black metal bull bars that no civilian car ever has. It's kind of hard to miss.

Unless, of course, it's a *really* cunning double blind: those are the unmarked cars they want you to see. In which case, hats off, lads. Good one.

UK spooks forced to hand Gitmo files to suspect's lawyers

Adam Williamson
Unhappy

@James

A quick Google attributes it to Dostoevsky. I was thinking Foucault but was as usual wrong. Sigh.

Adam Williamson
Thumb Up

Seems to me...

The fundamental problem here is that, on the one hand, a committed supporter of jihad willing to murder countless numbers of innocent civilians is unlikely to confess this fact to the security services of the 'enemy' nation if sat down and given tea and biscuits. On the other hand, someone who is *not* a committed supporter of jihad willing to murder countless numbers of innocent civilians is fairly likely to nonetheless 'confess' to being one if disappeared to some dodgy U.S. ally and tortured for two years.

So you can have no confessions, or you can have completely unreliable confessions. But you're extremely unlikely to get a reliable confession out of a committed terrorist against whom you have no other useful evidence, if it doesn't suit his purposes in some way.

The bootnote of this story is especially ironic given the reason the Security Service doesn't like being called MI5 is that would identify it as a branch of military intelligence (rather than the separate, civilian agency it actually is). Apparently they're very sniffy about being too closely identified with the military, except when that military is the American army...

Cops cuff anti-drug ninja vigilantes

Adam Williamson
Thumb Down

@AC

Your argument runs thus:

Hitler was a bad guy.

Hitler believed $SOMETHING.

Therefore, $SOMETHING is wrong.

Spot where it falls down.

Adam Williamson
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@AC 15:11

"Correct me if I'm wrong, but adjusting for population size difference, don't the US and UK have a fairly equal murder and violent crime rate?"

Okay. I'm correcting you, you're wrong. No, they don't. :)

Here's a handy list for murders:

http://www.nationmaster.com/graph/cri_mur_percap-crime-murders-per-capita

U.S scores 0.042802 per 1,000 people, U.K. scores 0.0140633 per 1,000 people . So that's almost exactly 3x higher in the U.S. Canada scores 0.0149063 per 1,000 people.

Violent crime is similar, IIRC.

That password-protected site of yours - it ain't

Adam Williamson

Not quite that easy

It's not quite as easy as updating Wordpress - you then have to dump the entire contents of the Wordpress database and weed out the nasty content. Which is a pain. I should know, it happened to me too. Too lazy to update from 2.5 to 2.5.1. Sigh.

Jeery Jerry loves Vista, y'know

Adam Williamson
Thumb Down

Seinfeld

"Still, he hasn't done a damn' thing since his sitcom went off the air*, so I suppose he probably could stand to pick up an extra mil or two."

Actually he's been doing stand up tours, probably for mind bending amounts of money. Not doing anything on TV is not the same as not doing anything.

El Reg salutes ultimate shed anthem

Adam Williamson
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Er...

It's really not that funny. So someone noticed their name sounded a bit like 'raining'. That's not really hilarity central.

Even the Hyundai ad which equally 'hilariously' changed the lyrics to Flash Dance was better than that.

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