Posts by Rachel Greenham

Lad passes gruelling 'getting on bus' test

Possible to fail

Surely the fact that his brother failed it proves the pointfulness of the test? :-)

Acer Aspire Revo R3600

I bought one of these...

... and I was pleasantly surprised by how well Vista ran on it, given I'm a Mac/Linux person normally and it was my first experience of Vista. Maybe my expectations for Vista were just very low. Or maybe removing the bundled McAfee antivirus made a huge difference to the performance. That's what it seemed to me anyway. :-D

However in the end I still put Ubuntu on it, and XBMC. It's now under my TV being a very nice media centre. (Only the Linux version of XBMC currently has hardware decoding for NVidia.) Not quite glitch-free yet though; needed a fair bit of settings-tweaking and I still get the odd skipped frame playing back BBC HD content. But I think it's going to get there soon.

Beeb names new Who companion

is it just my naughty mind...

... that omitted the 'them' from the last sentence when I first read it. :-D

Hippus HandshoeMouse

Too late...

Mouse-related RSI means I already switched to using my mice left-handed some years ago and won't be switching back. But this looks like being right-handed-only.

MySpace rant was not private, rules US Court of Appeal

@Colin Millar

Just skimmed it. In particular:

"6.1: MySpace does not claim any ownership rights in the text, files, images, photos, video, sounds, musical works, works of authorship, applications, or any other materials (collectively, "Content") that you post on or through the MySpace Services. After posting your Content to the MySpace Services, you continue to retain any such rights that you may have in your Content, subject to the limited license herein."

The whole of section 6 is probably relevant, but it seems to indicate that copyright is hers. They only claim sufficient rights to display the users' content that they upload.

What about copyright?

Can't she sue the paper for breach of copyright?

Subsidized netbook model could sweep away 20 years of PC history

Steve Jobs has said...

"Steve Jobs has said the iPhone does everything a netbook does anyway"

As someone with several Macs and an iPhone... a short list of some of the things I do with my netbook (linux) that I can't do with my iPhone:

1: Type

2: Do Java development (ie: work)

3: Watch Flash

4: Stay online in IRC

5: Block ads while browsing

7: Use version control for stuff I'm working on (more than just java development in 2:)

8: Work fully with office docs (with OpenOffice.org)

That's a start. There's more stuff I can just about do on the iPhone (VNC and SSH to remote hosts for instance) but it's such a painful experience (mostly because of point 1: above) that I'd rather go upstairs to get my netbook.

So the earlier poster is right: Steve Jobs is just sticking with a wilfully limited idea of what a netbook is. Let's not forget it's a real computer with all that flexibility. Yes it's slower than a lot of other modern machines, but you can still get almost anything done you can do on a more powerful machine. The machine will stretch to it. The iPhone just has hard limits - and a lot of them are actually limits that Apple have chosen to burden the iPhone with by limiting openness, not ones that are necessarily inherent to the hardware or the OS.

U2 song whacked my hard drive

Tried it on my Linux/HDD AA1...

no apparent effect. played all the way through at maximum volume (which isn't saying much) without any untoward events. Did try to force some hdd use during the playback to check it was still working too.

(Specifically Ubuntu Jaunty UNR; with the 120GB hdd Linux model.)

A grim day for browser security at hacker contest

If he was sitting on it for a year...

then perhaps the competition should be run monthly or something. I've got no objection to him getting lots more macbooks if vulnerabilities don't sit around *that* long...

Apple Mac Mini (Early 2009)

Macbooks better value

Dan, Simon, buy a MacBook. That's much better value for money right now. You can still plug in the same monitor/keyboard/mouse etc. you'd plug into a mini if you want to use it on a desk. Dan, I had the Core 2 Duo black MacBook until recently and ran VMWare Fusion and Windows on it with no trouble whatsoever. The current white MacBooks are a slightly higher spec still, so you'll be fine; though I think it's worth extending your budget to the Unibody MacBook anyway.

Safari enjoys 'unusually residential' December boost

Adblock was the *response*

"Of course, it also means that there might be more suckers using AdBlock, which might mean that some ad-supported sites might start doing nasty stuff..."

Don't you think you've put the cart somewhere before the horse there? The likes of adblock [plus] came along because they were *already* doing nasty stuff. epilepsy-inducing flashing banners, floating uncloseable popups, popunders, unwelcome sounds suddenly blaring out, browser hangs while something phones home... Adblock was what they deserved.

Linux weaktops poised for death by smartphone

difference is netbooks *can* function without the net

Example: I have my complete work java development environment set up on my Aspire One (with Ubuntu). Should I need to, and it has happened, I can push bugfix software updates out from that whereever I am. Sure it's a lot *slower* than developing on my iMac, and I can't splash source code windows all over the screen but in a pinch I *can* get the work done. The netbook *can* stretch to it (in fact it's not even hard, you just need a little patience and to remember that it's still faster than your desktop machine of a few years ago). I don't think there's a smartphone that can do that. A smartphone is what it is and you're stuck with it. The netbook can stretch.

For non-programmers, I'd hazard that the continuing popularity of OpenOffice.org over Google Office Apps probably means the same applies for them too. OOo 3.0 runs fine on these machines...

NASA chief blasts US space policy in leaked email

@Terry, you forgot...

"Never start a land war in Asia"

US judge says University can ignore Christian course credits

trying to hold my feeling in but... can't...

Aaaaaaaaahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha

-breathe-

hahahahahahahahahahaha

An iPhone with a keyboard?

um, bluetooth?

It *does* work with bluetooth keyboards? Doesn't it?

So far I've only played briefly with a Touch, but I found typing on the keyboard OK, and after a few minutes, not much worse than on my E70 (so I could imagine I'd get better in time). But I think I'd want to be able to use an external keyboard *sometimes* - for working on entering stuff a bit longer than a name or a word (say, an email of a few paragraphs length, a long note, textfiles if/when an editor comes along) - at the very least to recoup the screen real-estate of the on-screen keyboard.

An external bluetooth one would be fine. A slide-out one would be teh ugly and far too small.

Lords defy Government by proposing criminalisation of data rogues

Unelected but...

Remind me again why we wanted the Lords to be abolished?

Apple's Leopard rejects latest version of Java

No, not news...

the problem here seems to be the lack of communication from Apple about it. If they were to just say "yeah, we had a problem and couldn't go live with it, it'll be available in software update as soon as we fix it" that'll be fine.

But they're not. And pulling forum threads is crappy.

Luckily here we're still building to Java 5, so we're OK to go with the upgrade. :-D