Posts by Adam Williamson

Junkie sues pusher over heart attack

Michael

yes, because crystal meth has so many legitimate, non-health damaging uses, your analogy is perfect.

no, wait...

Dan

That's ironic, because a pub can in fact (at least theoretically) get in rather a lot of trouble for continuing to sell alcohol to someone who is already clearly drunk. They're not supposed to do it, and if they do it repeatedly they can lose their licence.

Facebook checks for Cambridge applicants

The glorious confluence of Oxbridge and the Reg

One of the lesser known perks of going to Oxbridge (Cambridge, at least, I don't know if Oxford does the same thing) is that if you manage to a) survive and b) not get convicted of anything for three years after you graduate with a bachelor's degree, you get to go back, have a rather nice dinner, and get a free master's degree.

Part of the (of course, highly traditional and full of bits of Latin no-one understands any more) ceremony surrounding this involves the group of people getting the degree affirming (as a group) that they are of good standing in their respective communities. If you can't, theoretically, you don't get the degree.

At this point in proceedings I remarked loudly to the room in general "I'll get my coat, then"...

to anonymous coward (16:32 GMT), the problem is this. For most courses, Oxford and Cambridge (and other leading universities) get far more applications than there are places. They also get more applications than there are places from applicants who are, by any rational measurement, of equal capacity. Over three years of tuition they'll find out which ones are marginally smarter / more motivated than the others, but over a few written tests and applications and a few half hour interviews, they really can't. For most given courses they'll have, say, 100 places and 200 applicants who they really just could not rationally speaking tell apart. They don't *know* which 100 are actually likely to do better than the other 100.

So it comes down to caprice, hunches, irrational factors and - probably a bit more than is admitted - prejudice and the old boy network. I happened to get a place at Cambridge; I'm sure there were at least two or three other people to whom my place could have gone who would have filled it equally well. In the end, they have to pick *someone*.

GM sees future: Cars and drivers full of booze

Richard

simple enough that it's already been proposed. several times. problem is that then you move from 'let's build an electric car!' to 'let's build at least a county's worth of infrastructure!', which doesn't make your bankers happy...

hand-waving

sorry, but it's all ultimately handwaving. you can shift the fuel source around as much as you like, the underlying fact is we don't currently have the technology and resources to allow everyone in the world to zoom around everywhere in their own little personal, individually powered transporter. fundamental imbalance in the energy budget, no matter how you produce, store or transport it.

if someone manages to crack cold fusion soon, good-o! otherwise, someone's going to have to start writing stories about hydrogen powered *buses* instead. how come we never see any of those?

Google to reinvent UK newspaper biz

It's not The Times of London

It's just The Times. There is one Times, and it's the one printed in London. Anything else is the (something) Times.

Honestly, I can just about stomach U.S. sites writing about 'The London Times', but The Reg is - yes, even though it has a U.S. branch and some U.S. writers - a *British* site. It is The Times. Please refer to it as such.

How to be a failure at Guitar Hero III

Simulation

"Guitar Hero isn't a simulation. At all, it's as far from real guitar as GTA is from driving a car. And that's the point in review, as there are games that are simulators (for car). GH could have been like that, too."

But that would be fairly silly.

Accurate driving simulators make sense. This is because racing real cars is insanely expensive and inconvenient. It's bad enough doing amateur weekend track days in your riced-up import Skyline, never mind anything more exotic than that.

However, with something like Gran Turismo or (better) Live For Speed you can get a fairly decent recreation of racing a car you would likely never get a chance to even sit in in real life (if you think F1 drivers are just useless cargo, try driving the BMW F1 car in Live For Speed - it's hard enough to change the flipping gears fast enough, never mind worrying about pointing the thing in the right direction).

Playing a real guitar is not expensive or inconvenient. You can buy one of the things and a practice amp for a hundred quid or less, and play it just about any time you want. Therefore, a really accurate guitar simulator would be more or less entirely pointless. No one would buy or enjoy the thing. Anyone likely to would be better off buying, well, a guitar.

What GH and Rock Band do really well is being "playing in a band" simulators. Not very accurate simulators, but the reason they're so fun is that if you scrunch your brain up a bit and don't think too hard you can pretend you're on stage in front of 30,000 screaming fans, which let's face it, is not going to happen to 99.9% of people never mind how good they get on their imitation Les Paul. They're not trying to simulate the mechanics of producing sound from a lump of metal and wood, they're trying to simulate the...physiological, as much as anything else...experience of playing a kickass song in front of thousands of people. Which is exactly what a lot of people dream of doing, hence their success.

Ros

Konami (with their Bemani branch) was in the rhythm game business a long time before Harmonix / Red Octane. They've had their own guitar / drums games - GuitarFreaks and DrumMania - for many years in Japan (and a few other places which import the arcade machines). They did make a keyboard game, called KeyboardMania. It went through two arcade revisions and had one console version, then it died. It simply wasn't very popular.

GF and DM are incredibly popular and have been through about 15 revisions each by now. Harmonix and Red Octane are very aware of Bemani stuff, so I'm sure they're aware of the relative success of GF/DM and KeyboardMania. Which is why they didn't make a keyboard game.

On girls and boys, I'm with Tony. Had a dinner party on Christmas Eve, with mostly women in attendance. Party broke up at 6 a.m. after ten solid hours of Rock Band.

Nokia wins hearts, minds with breakthrough mobile

Nearly

I would agree, except for one thing - there's one area of convergence that *does* make sense, to me, and that's music playing.

Yes, cell phones make mediocre music players. But this is outweighed, for me, by the convenience factor.

The major problem with carrying a cellphone and a separate music player is phone calls. When I'm using my music player (a super-old school Neuros) and carrying my cell and someone calls me, I have to dig out the Neuros, hit pause, take out my earphones, get out the phone, hit the answer button, have my conversation, end the call, put the phone away, put my earphones back in, and un-pause the Neuros.

Ew.

Using my cellphone (a recently acquired Nokia 6300) as a music player, yes it carries a lot fewer songs and the interface is not as good, but when someone calls me, my music pauses, I talk, conversation ends, music resumes. Without me having to lift a finger. (Using a 2.5-3.5mm adapter with mic and my earphones plugged into that).

Win!

Of course, if someone would actually finally *implement* a Bluetooth headset, dedicated phone, and music player that all worked together nicely so I could do the same thing with separate boxes, fine. But then you have to deal with all the finicky stuff associated with Bluetooth headsets, and the crappy audio quality they generally have (compared to my Etymotics canalphones).

So, yeah, I'll suffer the crappy battery life of the 6300 for this convenience. To me it's definitely worth it.

New Jersey scraps death penalty

Life-for-a-Life

Oh, dear. And you were doing so well (well, you weren't really, but never mind) until you suggested CSI as a model for real-life police work.

I hope there's some real police officers reading this, they'll be snorting donut chunks out of their noses after seeing that one.

Facebook takes the Captcha rap

Craig

Er, what?

I posted a response based on the content of the post, as is conventional around these here parts. (Well, either that, or a response based on Paris Hilton). Do let me know if you were expecting something else.

If you're suggesting the post was 'humorous' (in that special way Reg posts are allowed to be without actually making you laugh...), it clearly wasn't, as the opening paragraph explicitly states:

"It's been a while, but we've got another for you, this time from Facebook - and this time it ain't so silly."

So?

Why is this a big deal?

Okay, it's an unfortunate conjunction of words.

Big deal.

I presume your correspondent was not seized with a sudden desire to rape his friend. I further suggest that anyone, faced with this situation, who *was* seized with such a desire clearly has some serious problems in the first place. It would probably be doing a greater service to humanity to do something about that, rather than complaining about the ridiculously rare slightly unfortunate consequences of a wonderful idea (the recaptcha system) which is providing clear and concrete benefits to the world.

Basically: oh, grow up, view this as the tiny triviality it is, shrug, get on with life, and don't turn it into a news story.

Eee PC: better with Windows?

Turnabout...

I just can't wait to read the first comment from an eee purchaser saying "well why would I go to all that trouble to install Windows when the OS that came with the computer is fine in the first place?"

:D

Asus dropped hard disk from Eee PC at eleventh hour

Third...

...the manual (especially the boring, standard warning sections) was created largely by cut and pasting bits together from the manuals for other products, and no-one caught that including this one didn't make a lot of sense on a system with no hard disk.

I'm fairly sure most of the pre-release discussion of the eee - even months back when it was initially going to be released - talked about solid state storage.

Dell moves 40,000 Ubuntu PCs

fraction?

well, yes, a third is indeed 'a fraction'. it's quite a *large* one, though. I'd say that's a rather good ratio of voters to purchasers.

Greenpeace slams Apple Nintendo over eco-credentials

iglethal

Greenpeace has always maintained that the whaling ship in question rammed them. Don't think it was ever argued in court or anything, though.

@Block

they could've just done a 'no information provided', yes. personally I'd use 'no information provided' for use of hazardous materials in manufacturing, but a 0 score for takeback programs (because a takeback program effectively doesn't exist if you don't tell anyone about it; a statement about its existence is more or less a necessary prerequisite for having one in any meaningful sense).

Try reading the page in context, you bunch of idiots.

If you actually tried reading the page in context, it might help. Yes, they didn't measure power consumption. But no, that's not what the whole thing is *about*. The context is:

http://www.greenpeace.org/international/campaigns/toxics/electronics

"This has caused a dangerous explosion in electronic scrap (e-waste) containing toxic chemicals and heavy metals that cannot be disposed of or recycled safely. But this problem can be avoided. We are pressing leading electronic companies to change; to turn back the toxic tide of e-waste."

This is a campaign *specifically about the handling of dangerous waste from electronic products*. That is the only context the chart is presented in. It's not Greenpeace's fault if a bunch of lazy journalists grab the chart, free of any context, and present it as "A Complete Environmental Evaluation Of Everything Ever", which it clearly is not supposed to be.

And yes, Nintendo score zero because they provide no information. Of course they do. What else could you possibly score them? The table is based on the company's policies on eliminating the use of dangerous chemicals in the manufacture of their products, and on their policies for taking back and recycling or correctly disposing of their products at end of life. If Nintendo provides absolutely no information about their manufacturing policies or any takeback programs they provide, what can you possibly score them except 0?

Sheesh, try some critical thinking once in a while, it won't hurt.

Spleen, if all companies do nothing but look after their customers, everyone gets screwed. Would you happy with a nuclear power plant that was run with wonderful efficiency and provided its customers with cheap, reliable power - but dumped all its nuclear waste, untreated, into the river nearest to your house? Of course not. But it'd be serving *its customers* just fine. This is an analogous situation: manufacturers have a degree of responsibility with regards to the safety of the material their products are made with, and ensuring that the eventual disposal of said products is done in a manner which is not harmful to anyone's health. If you're going to dispute this, by all means feel free to start a campaign against all public health and safety laws.

Iain, sadly it's rather hard to turn things off at the mains in many places (including here in Canada), as wall sockets do not have switches. Unplugging and replugging things all the time gets annoying and not many people have the patience for it (I try to as much as possible). Happily, all current generation consoles actually have extremely low power drain at standby (1-3W, except the Wii, which is 10W if you leave Connect24 enabled, but 1W if you disable it).

Top US engineer in piss-off-everybody car fuel solution

The solution...

quit driving, quit eating meat and quit making more than one baby each.

thank you and good night.

Wii grasses up cheating wife

sign the guys up for an endorsement deal

I'd say there's two endorsement deals going here - the husband for the tracking, and the lover for Wii Sports. I mean, he's a professional bowler, and he liked Wii Sports bowling enough to play it regularly for long periods - sounds like a winner to me!

ross and anonymous coward - yes, you are missing something. You can't play Wii Sports online. Physical presence is required.

earlier anonymous coward - if cheating on your partner is "sick" and "unjustifiable", "get[ting] medievil (sic) on her ass" is at least doubly so. You're a pathetic specimen of humanity.

BBC HD channel gets green light

bandwidth - Andrew and anonymous

yep, you guys are quite right, sorry - I was thinking of the figure for SD digital, by mistake. Of course, that just makes the argument even stronger (ditching all the radio channels wouldn't give you anywhere near enough bandwidth for one HD channel).

Those counting lines do need to remember the issue of interlacing; yes, 625 lines sounds close to 720, but the fact that it's interlaced effectively halves that. Combined with the wider aspect ratio of HD, 720p HD has rather more than twice as much detail as PAL SD.

waste of bandwidth

Steve: you need about 2mbit/sec for okay HD quality. Radio stations are probably broadcast at 128k or lower. So removing 19 radio stations would maybe give you the bandwidth for *one* HD channel.

The point

There isn't a lot of point in the U.K., frankly. The reason HD is important at all is the U.S. and Canada (and anywhere else that uses NTSC).

The problem is that NTSC stinks. It looks horrible. The main advantage Americans and Canadians get from HD is far better colors and fewer artefacts. The resolution bump isn't the most important thing, though it *is* useful - yes, you're unlikely to get the *full* benefit of HD resolution with typical set sizes and viewing distances, but you are seeing *more* detail than 480i can give.

PAL is a far better standard than NTSC. Therefore, the difference between HD and PAL is that much smaller than the difference between HD and NTSC. It *is* there, but it's not so obvious, and that'll make HD a much harder sell in Europe than it is in NTSC markets. It'll get there eventually, but only when there's almost no price difference, and only through people replacing sets they would have been replacing anyway.

I'm in Canada, and recently moved to an HDTV set. It's interesting to watch a broadcast on one of the old analog NTSC channels, then watch a non-HD broadcast on an HD channel, then an HD broadcast. There's a far bigger difference between watching the SD broadcast via analog NTSC and watching it on an HD channel than there is between the SD-on-HD broadcast and a true HD broadcast. It can be quite difficult to tell the difference between a well-recorded SD show (or commercial) broadcast on an HD channel and a true HD broadcast, if you ignore the different aspect ratio.

US man dies in Taser incident

usage records

yes, each use of a Taser is tracked. It uses a disposable cartridge system - each cartridge can only be used once, once you've shot someone, you have to load another cartridge to shoot them again. Each cartridge has an individual serial number, and when you fire a cartridge, a large number of small tags, with the serial number of the cartridge that was fired, are spread around the area.

This was mentioned by one of the newspapers covering the Vancouver Airport taser death - http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/11/15/taser_death_video/ .

Remembering the Commodore PET 2001

still got one

My family still has one of these hanging around in the cellar, I think (unless they threw it out since I moved). Tape drive hasn't worked for a few years, though.

Oz motorist reacts rather testily to small todger slur

Title

dave: ah, and in your world, the appropriate response to meeting someone who is a 'bitch' (which, in your lexicon, appears to mean 'female person who does something with which I disagree') is to haul off and chuck a bottle at them?

Wow, remind me never to go to one of *your* parties.

Ubuntu laptop clan trapped in hard drive hell

ashlee re humor

ah, sorry about that, ashlee. you forgot your SARCASM tags. =) but seriously - it really didn't read like humor at all...to me anyway.

Duncan

The funny thing is that absolutely no-one has recorded an instance of a hard disk dying due to this problem. The whole kerfuffle was just kicked off by someone looking at smartctl output. No-one bothered to check whether this is anything that's changed recently, what it's due to, whether it happens on many systems, whether it also happens on other distributions, or whether it also happens on Windows. So it was basically one big giant ball of confusion. Now people are starting to do those checks, in a haphazard way, which is contributing to the confusion as different people have different levels of knowledge about the whole issue.

so, basically, unless you bother to go and read the useful posts by the people who actually have a clue what the hell they're talking about - the Ubuntu maintainers and other people actually involved with this stuff directly - or, even better, go and test it for yourself - it's really a bad idea to comment on it.

This is rumor control...

...here are the facts.

First, it is not accurate to say that "When switching to battery power, /etc/acpi/power.sh issues the command hdparm -B 1 to all block devices". This is not the default configuration of Ubuntu. It only happens when laptop mode is enabled, which must be done manually by the user.

In general, Ubuntu does nothing to hard drive power management settings. It leaves them exactly as it receives them, from the machine's BIOS. If your machine's BIOS sets a ridiculously aggressive power management strategy, that is the fault of its manufacturer.

This also applies to Mandriva and, I believe, to most other distros.

The suggestion that "Of course, your hard drive my eventually catch on fire, which would also lessen its lifespan." is also silly. Take a look at the specs of a typical laptop hard disk:

http://www.hitachigst.com/hdd/support/5k160/5k160.htm

*Maximum* power consumption, at power-on time, is a princely 5W. Consumption in active read / write use is 1.8W. Consumption in active idle mode is 0.8W.

An absolutely maximum consumption of 5W and a more usual consumption below 2W is not going to set anything on fire.

OQO Model e2 UMPC

Japan?

"OQO may sound like a city in Japan"

Um - since the Japanese language has no 'Q' sound...not particularly, no.

Guardian blogborg takes aim at global warming

Luther

"Apart from falsely linking two things together for which there is no scientific justification"

um, what are the two things? Population growth and environmental damage? I think you'll find there's a gigantic body of science linking those two things together. I'm not talking even about nebulous concepts like 'global warming' here, just simple common sense stuff - the more people there are, the more damage is done to natural environments, the more species are made extinct due to simple lack of sufficient habitation space, the more we need to do nasty things to the landscape in order to procure the raw materials required to produce the energy we all use.

"the question is: Well do you or dont you? Want to sustain the human race, or to do something about population increase?"

pick one or the other.

if you want to go on living the way most people in 'the developed world' currently do - figure out a way to make sure the population definitely grows no *larger* and, preferably, gets smaller. If you want the population to keep on growing - you need to cut your environmental and energy impact drastically. The stuff I mentioned in my post was not, to most people, 'moderate measures'. When I wrote 'moderate measures' I was talking about stuff like using energy saving light bulbs and buying 'green' things. The actual example actions I mentioned would be, to most people, radical (just try suggesting to most people that they should give up their car and stop flying on holiday and they look at you like you just grew an extra head...you'd never believe that only the last two generations of humanity, in a few privileged countries, have been accustomed to doing these things).

easy to mock

It's easy to mock, but the Guardian does more to cover important environmental issues in a useful way than any other paper. Yes, these campaigns are a bit pathetic, but the Guardian Weekly (international edition of the paper) ran a large section on the politics of food recently - sounds dull, but probably the single *most* important political / environmental issue of the next couple of decades. It would help if rather a lot more people understood how destructive so-called 'green' food-based fuel sources are. They also dared to raise the taboo point that no moderate measures are going to be enough to prevent a massive period of environmental disasters if the current rate of population increase continues unabated. These are not topics that you will generally find much debated in the Daily Mail, but they're rather important.

if you want to contribute significantly to the sustainability of the human race in general - use energy saving light bulbs. also don't turn the lights *on* unless absolutely necessary, unplug all electrical equipment when not in use, don't drive, walk all journeys under a mile in length, buy raw food by preference (produced locally if possible) and prepare it yourself, don't use the dishwasher, handwash clothes where possible and use the washing machine only on cold water setting if you need to use it, compost, recycle, mend old clothes rather than buy new ones where possible, and in general attempt not to buy anything you don't actually *need*. if everyone in western countries took that approach, we could go on spawning for quite a lot longer. if you want to carry on using far more power than the human race can sustainably provide with current technology and the resources available to us, producing far more waste than we ultimately have the ability to remove, and indirectly contributing to the starvation of large sections of the world population - go ahead. just don't have any kids, or at least, don't condition them to expect the same privileges you currently enjoy, because they won't.

Gatwick reduced to anarchy by 'computer glitch'

for Simon Reed

"My Windows 98-based server"

Grhkk!

"Then my Demon-provided Turnpike software"

double grhhkkk!

who turned the clocks back to 1999 without me noticing?

Drunken Indian elephants take on electricity pole

Language request

I think we need a new noun to describe people who like to try and appear tremendously well-informed by regurgitating stuff they heard on QI. Suggestions?

US Border Patrol laughs off spyplane prang wristslap

re canada

nah, they're just fed up of British Columbians emptying the outlet malls thanks to the Incredible Free-Falling Yankee Dollar...

2012 Olympics to be 'car-free'

transit routing

"We're guessing this will be automatically generated, in fact; and given the curious quirks that routing software can sometimes display, there could be some embarrassing hiccups ahead."

Not really. Transit routing systems are far easier to run than ones for people in cars, because buses and trains *always drive the exact same routes* between the same, relatively few, stopping points. People in cars are unpredictable buggers who live all over the place, want to get all over the place, and frequently miss exits. I've used automated transit route finding services in a bunch of cities, I use the one for Greater Vancouver just about every day, and none of them has ever been wrong or misguided. I don't expect this bit of it will be a problem.

Also, buck up you bunch of pessimistic arses. I was living in Manchester for the 2002 Commonwealth Games. Fantastically well-run, popular, and good for the city - and tons of people (organizers and competitors as well as spectators) zipping around on the Metrolink. Let's give 'em a chance to get it right before sticking the boot in, eh?

Schoolkid chipping trial 'a success'

Free bag of sweets...

Free bag of sweets for the first child to remove their blazer and carefully hide it in the most inaccessible area of the school basement during a fire drill...

RIAA aims lawyers at usenet newsgroup service

not exactly shedding a tear

can't say I'm exactly shedding a tear, since the whole concept of posting binaries on news servers in the first place was essentially an attempt to dodge bandwidth bills by making ISPs shoulder the burden. let's face it, if NNTP had been intended as a file transfer protocol, it would've handled 8-bit encodings. Given that there's no reason any sane person would *choose* to transfer files over NNTP other than in order to rip *somebody* off (whether it's the RIAA, MPAA, their ISP, or some other random acronym), I don't really see that this is a problem.

Ubuntu goes 3-D

@Andy

It's not about sour grapes. I don't mind at all a fair comparison between Mandriva and Ubuntu, and if you've made one and decided Ubuntu's better for you, good for you. What we (other distros in general) do not like is when general tech sites - whose readership often doesn't even *know* about other distros - report on Ubuntu as if it were the only game in town, and it were actually directly responsible for all the stuff it's actually just packaging from other projects (and that other distros frequently got there first). Given that my continued ability to, you know, eat depends on people knowing that Ubuntu is *not* in fact the only game in town, I make no apologies for attempting to draw attention to this fact in important venues such as The Reg :)

@wow, 2

...and Mandriva has been able to graphically configure WPA connections since, um, 2005 if I remember correctly.

Compiz

Ashlee, I don't really mind the way you wrote about Compiz. It's just worth pointing out how Mark is carefully futzing the issues in the way he presents them in order to try and make it look as much as possible like Ubuntu is doing something new and innovative - or at least is not heavily behind other distributions.

However, it is a bit annoying that you don't mention at *all* that Ubuntu is nowhere near being the first to include *any* of this stuff. I'm sure if Microsoft were trumpeting things that other people had done first in a new release, you'd add a snide side note to that effect, that's why we love the Reg. :) Why doesn't Ubuntu merit this treatment?

On Tracker, it's impossible to tell from the way the article is written whether Mark claimed that Ubuntu was the first to deliver *desktop search*, or whether it was the first to deliver *Tracker*. As he is a smart bloke, I'll assume he does at least know that SUSE has been including Beagle for ages, even if he didn't know Mandriva's done it before, so I will assume he didn't actually claim that Ubuntu was the first to deliver desktop search. However, as he is also a consummate publicist, I wouldn't be at all surprised if he was careful to arrange his quote so that - when soundbitten - it could give that *impression*. Which is the case here. From the way this article is written, the interpretations "Ubuntu is the first to deliver desktop search out of the box" and "Ubuntu is the first to deliver Tracker out of the box" are equally valid and it is impossible to know which of the two Mark was claiming. I'm sure he's not displeased that it reads this way. :)

Shad, you look a bit silly telling Colin to 'look things up'. His was instrumental in getting Compiz included in Mandriva Linux 2007, and he is still one of the main contributors working on 3D desktop packaging in Mandriva.

Ahh, Ubuntu.

"Most notably for the client crowd is the production version of Compiz. This software gives Ubuntu some 3-D graphics that by our account surpass anything seen on Windows or Mac OS X. We've run Compiz in beta for several weeks now with no problems and expect users will enjoy the production version."

Mandriva Linux 2008, already released earlier this month (thanks at least for running a story about that, this time) already has Compiz Fusion (0.5.2). Mandriva Linux 2007 Spring, released in April 2007, had Compiz 0.3.6 and Beryl (the latest available 3D desktop stuff at that time). Mandriva Linux 2007, released in October 2006, had Compiz 0.0.13. All three include drak3d, our simple little wizard for enabling and disabling 3D desktop effects.

"On the more practical front, users will find the Tracker tool for indexing files on your system. This software mimics the Spotlight tool available for many moons with Mac OS X and Vista's desktop search. Basically, you're able to find any file on a system with relative ease.

"I believe we're the first (Linux) distribution to deliver that out of the box," Shuttleworth said, during a conference call with reporters."

Mandriva Linux 2008 includes desktop search out of the box via Beagle (using the Kerry KDE frontend). It also includes Tracker - I'm the packager for Tracker - but we don't use that out of the box as it doesn't have much in the way of KDE integration, and it has some technical issues some of our developers aren't happy with. All you need to do to install Tracker is set up repositories and install the package named 'tracker', though.

"The Ubuntu update system has been tweaked to permit more hardware updates over the coming weeks, meaning that it should be just about the most up-to-date Linux OS available."

Oh, yes? We just released the latest versions of the NVIDIA and ATI proprietary drivers (100.14.19 and 8.40.4 - 8.41.7 is a special case, ATI recommends its use only on HD 2xxx cards) for Mandriva Linux 2007 Spring, the release prior to 2008, via the official /non-free/backports repository, and an updated version of our hardware detection engine (ldetect-lst) which will ensure that the latest NVIDIA and ATI cards (except HD 2xxx cards, it'd be too invasive to backport 8.41.7), which didn't even exist when 2007 Spring came out, can be detected and automatically configured to use 'em. See my blog post:

http://www.happyassassin.net/2007/10/15/new-nvidia-ati-driver-backports-for-2007-spring/

By comparison, Ubuntu appears to be still on ATI 8.37.6 even in the latest RC of Gutsy. (At least they got NVIDIA up to date). So...we *already have* a working backports system which we've *already used* to update the hardware support of our *previous* release. They're *promising* some kind of system for their *upcoming* release which already appears to be shipping with outdated drivers.

And, yeah, we've got easy printer support, RandR 1.2 with a patched KrandR to provide graphical configuration (that's what he's banging on about projectors, and what I guess he didn't mention is it's only any use on Intel graphics cards), NTFS write support, AppArmor, a tickless kernel, Python 2.5 and GCC 4.2 (and a pre-release of 4.3 as an optional extra).

I think OpenSUSE 10.3, also released earlier this month, has a bunch of the same features, though I wouldn't know which in detail.

Once again, Ubuntu is showing up to the party late and trying to make up for it by being the loudest person in the room...