Posts by P. Lee

Pirate Bay prosecutor argues for one year prison terms

Ooh look, analysis!

http://torrentfreak.com/how-to-kill-the-music-industry-090227/

The real issue is whether it is reasonable to conclude that TBP can be held responsible for what the RIAA is accusing them of, whether it is actually prosecutable under Swedish law and whether the penalties are reasonable. If any of these are false, a jury would be quite right to let them walk.

Seriously, whatever your thoughts on snagging the latest game from sharers, if you are following "24" and you miss an episode, do you stop watching, accept you lost the plot or ask around at school/work to see if someone taped it? In many places, options 1 and 2 are legal, the third is "piracy". The problem for the RIAA/MPAA is that option 3 isn't unreasonable.

Bill Gates bans progeny from iPhone Nation

His Billiness' worst nightmare!

Their software and interface is so good, people are willing to pay over the odds for mediocre hardware just to get it.

It appears that no amount of money can make windows-based gadgets desirable.

Forget the gadgets, just wait until a rebellious teenager walks into school with a Macbook Air...

World of Warcraft: 'The crack cocaine of the computer world'

@mycho

Wuss!

In my day we didn't have t'new fangled angband with its fancy colours an' fancy screen layouts.

In my day we 'ad "Moria" on a green screen and proper player permadeath, and we were grateful forrit an'all!

I think I may know what went wrong with my A-Levels...

Icon: what icon? graphics are for wimps!

G.hn-ing for gigabit

Different cabling, one network

That would be a bridge, right?

Seriously, put your CAT5e cabling above the ceiling and drop it down into cupboards.

Then let me know when the ADSL router manufacturers start putting 8 or 12 port gig-ethernet switches into their devices.

Icon: Ethernet: physical star, logical bus

Samsung notebook-not-netbook gets VIA Nano CPU

the problem with netbooks

is that they look like small notebooks.

I suspect most people would be happier with a 13" notebook.

Maybe we just need a physical switch to turn off power-hungry devices - 3d graphics, higher-res screens (go from 1280x1024 to 1024x768 or 640x480), slow the disks down, in order to get netbook battery-life from better devices.

I know it isn't a small, cheap computer anymore. I haven't missed the point, I just suspect the real market for netbooks is smaller than people think. A higher price is better than a disappointed customer.

Microsoft: Vista desktop key to life fulfillment

What if...

I don't have a PC, I have a Mac?

BlackBerry advert sticks it to Apple

A great concept

and it was also going so well until they said nothing could touch their touchscreen.

Then I was laughing at them instead of with them.

All publicity is not good publicity, as Paris could tell you.

Microsoft trades goodwill for TomTom Linux satisfaction

It isn't whether you win or lose...

... its how expensive it is to play the game.

Large companies have so many patents on trivial things that they can afford to throw them away. It isn't about winning, its about MS sending a message to other companies out there who might use linux, telling them that they should license windows instead because they wouldn't survive a fight with MS.

Sure, MS may lose this fight and a couple of worthless patents, but if you're thinking about building a business around embedded devices, you now have to consider the possibility of a hostile MS showing up at your door in a few years. Or would you rather pay a small and predictable license fee?

Spooks told to get used to encrypted VoIP

Encrypted VoIP?

If you're doing things sensibly you've got VPNs encrypting all traffic. Is encrypted windows file-sharing and print-serving worrying anyone? SSH got the CIA in a twist? Is postfix sending traffic over a vpn?

Its just daft publicity-seeking by a corporate flogging stuff.

Teen sacked for 'boring' job Facebook comment

Shock story: Admin job is "boring."

And in other news, Pope is Catholic...

She may not be the brightest button, but if I were upper management I'd be concerned that:

1) lower management was spending time on facebook looking at her profile

2) lower management actually thinks that tea-making and filing are interesting

3) lower management is firing anyone with ambitions above tea-making and filing

I smell an easy cutback in expenditure.

Microsoft sues GPS maker TomTom

What?

They aren't using Windows? No matter, invoice them anyway! That's what we do with HP and Dell.

I'm not sure how adding an index (~1, ~2) to allow the lookup of longer names can be anything other than obvious.

Go TomTom!

AMD lifts veil on six-core Constantinople Istanbul

re: Core race

I think its aimed at server apps. Apache or java app servers start more threads to cope with new connections. More cores mean more threads.

I do have to wonder if the engineering required and compromises made to get more cores into a cpu makes it more worthwhile to add another dual/quad core blade.

Small ISPs reject call to filter out child abuse sites

re: biblethumping net-nannies

Ah, so only Christians want to stop KP, is that it?

Pesky Christians! Getting in the way of your freedom!

Has no-one noticed that organisations tend to take on a life of their own? The IWF started as a focus for flagging up KP but the more its objectives are met, the more it has to find additional areas to justify its existence and increase its importance.

This behaviour has nothing to do with the IWF's goals, its something all organisations tend to do.

If the government *really* thought this was important and the ISP's can't afford it, the government would stump up the cash. That is what government is for - to organise things which aren't provided by the market. Since that hasn't happened, it obviously isn't deemed that important.

Indeed, its isn't that important. If the paedophile isn't bright enough to circumvent what the IWF is proposing, he probably isn't bright enough to pick a small isp to avoid the system and he'll probably get caught when he takes his pc back to the shop for a Windows tune-up.

And yes, ISPs should keep to their "common-carrier" function and status. If law-enforcement wants to get a warrant and tap the comms it can go through the due process. Use the laws we have, they are sufficient.

I'm much more worried about governments introducing legislation every time there is a newspaper story about something. Less activity, less PR and more thought please!

Icon, he stumbled across Paris...

Pirate Bay prosecutors get jiggy with charge sheet - again

@mittfh

"... I can't imagine them getting very far if they took sound card manufacturers to court for providing "What I hear" functionality or line in jacks (the manual equivalent - sling a cable between Line Out and Line In)."

That's precisely what the new digital media interfaces (hdmi type things) are for. You can't license the tech unless you agree to implement DRM which switches off the line-out socket when the a flag is set in the content.

Just like DVD regions, it will all work until someone twigs that their hardware will become really popular if an unofficial but easy modification is made. I see an unexplained jumper or sloppily written driver being rather popular.

As to the article - yes, dropping charges is one thing, but widening the scope part-way through should cause it to be thrown out. However, perhaps the PB team want it to continue to get a decisive win. Perhaps the IFPI team thought a PR victory could be gained by prosecuting for infringement and ending up with a win, even if it was just for something minor.

Let's hope the Swedes show a bit of backbone and stick to their consumer-friendly ways. It isn't just about TBP, its about corporate control over the law.

Google's email service goes down

"Mission critical use of a free service," you say?

Didn't mirror to a local imap server you say?

Idiot I say

Actually I suspect if you look at down-time per user and compare it to most in-house solutions its probably doing pretty well.

Has no-one noticed that if you install the imap package on linux or solaris it works for all local users without any further configuration at all? I'm not sure about the rest but suse will pull email off a remote imap/pop3 server for local users with a couple of tick-boxes and the account details, so no inbound smtp to worry about.

Even if you do rely on gmail and must have the web interface, is two hours without email really a huge problem? I certainly wouldn't be looking at Exchange as an alternative.

Blunkett and ex-CPS chief turn on Home Office

@Ted

Agree. A passport should only be needed to request passage in foreign countries, not your own. Why would it suddenly become "required"?

NASA talks little green men with Vatican

Materialist-scientist people are funny

They take it on blind faith, despite there being no evidence at all, that life sprang from inorganic matter.

Most scientists would base their "faith" on "evidence", but they seem to base it all on a 200 year old document which doesn't even attempt to explain how to obtain life from non-living matter. Of course, having taken the position that human life (and therefore, thought) is just a biochemical accident, any ethical position is logically just a random attempt at propagation of our own personal genes and may be discarded when inconvenient, or when we wish to obtain resources someone else happens to have, or we just feel like indulging in a bit of rape. As long as we think we can get away with it, its just the selfish gene, right?

Of course, those Christians have their prophecies which managed to predict the times and dates of various events to the year and even naming a ruler who will do the work, hundreds of years in advance. None of that vague, cryptic Nostradamus stuff for them, but predicting the future isn't evidence of something beyond the natural is it? If the Supreme Being of the universe won't consent to being bottled in test-tube for us to play with, there is no logical reason for us to believe that such a Being exists. If the supernatural can't be analysed with the tools used to experiment with the natural, then He can't exist. If there is a God, we would find his particles bumping into each other in the LHC, wouldn't we? I mean, the universe may be billions of years old, but after 60 years or so of modern experimentation I think we can safely rule His existence out.

"There is no God" - an article of faith which, for a sceptic, seems rather hypocritical.

Uh-oh, I've spoken heresy. Its a good job I didn't do it in *gasp* a school, or the flames would be even higher than they are now!

@Jake - you can put your popcorn around my feet - I really don't mind :)

The IWF: Charity disparity?

re: One difference betw. RSPCA and IWF

> The IWF, in contrast, represents a very narrow view from which a good many people dissent. For all the yammer about protecting the children from porn, I have yet to see any study that persuasively makes the case that porn actually harms kids.

I think it is the *production* of child porn which is mostly at issue. Banning its consumption is mostly a way to stifle demand and thus limit production.

Its a faux argument to suggest that porn is banned due to the nudity involved. SexEd usually covers the mechanics of what happens reasonably accurately. There are many reasons to oppose the (ahem) spread of porn but here are a few:

It commercialises sex. Sex becomes something you buy and for which you have no obligations beyond providing cash. There's no commitment to another person, no bond formed between two people, its just a commercial transaction.

Porn also sets unrealistic standards for sex. This can feed feelings of inadequacy or the rejection of others if they don't match-up to expectations. In the absence of real information on what sex is really like, porn not only doesn't help, its actually a misleading.

Porn consumption is generally a solo occupation. If anything it isolates people who really need to get out more. Rather like facebook. ;)

People buy what is advertised and sold to them. If you don't believe this, talk to the cola, chewing-gum and fastfood marketers. It doesn't just satisfy demand, it actually creates it.

I could go on all night (of course)...

How far legislation goes before you admit it doesn't help is a separate issue. While those who think morality can be legislated might be an easy target, its more to do with a government who likes to be able to "tick the box" to say that they have dealt with this issue. That is much more dangerous than any individual piece of legislation.

Ruling: Gov reports into ID scheme must be disclosed

@dervheid re: Poll tax

Thatcher was a peace-loving, loony-leftist defender of the common-man compared to these people.

She also didn't make the method used to put down farm pests a "constitutional crisis."

Microsoft should get serious on Moonlight

The nub of the issue

> The focus is currently on multimedia and games, but it will also be an alternative to Java for cross-platform mobile applications.

And this is the issue: while both flash and silver/moonlight look pretty, they simply aren't needed for business applications. Business does boring things like forms and database lookups which html+backend-process handles ok. If you want, you can easily get a java terminal client as front-end to your custom back-end app.

If you want to impress the PR people and the users aren't consulted, flash and *light is the way to go. Otherwise just use html or (at worst) java. Stop trying to feed non-web blobs to browsers.

Speeding, driverless Nissan finally stopped by US bombers

re: Naval base in Nevada

That's nothing, The little town of Holbrook in Australia has its own submarine, HMAS Otway. You can see it from the road as you drive from Sydney to Melbourne.

Its also hundreds of kilometres from the sea.

Icon: battening down hatches etc.

Kaminsky calls for DNSSEC deployment

re: A fake hot potato

I think its quite different. It is one thing to adopt a standard, its quite another to put someone else in control of the your implementation.

Can you really see Iran and North Korea putting themselves in the position whereby the US can kill their DNS by revoking their certificate?

I thought not.

Certificates destroy the distributed nature of the internet. You are trading freedom for security. I'm pretty sure people have commented on that in the past.

Most firewalls and client DNS systems can do quite a bit in terms of making DNS stateful which mitigates many attacks. Calling for DNSSEC when the problem is unpatched systems is rather missing the point.

State bill would turn RFID researchers into felons

Take THAT identity theives!

Fraud is now illegal, you won't dare commit it now, will you!

All those years you've been getting away with it, but NO LONGER!

Oh wait...

--

Paris: does she make more money out of showmanship than legislators?

Land of cheese adopts internet download tax

All is vanity, a chasing after the wind...

You can either tax the purchaser or the vendor.

For the purchaser, short of taxing all credit card transactions, how do you know if its for a digital download or not? Then you have to deal with paypal etc.

For the vendor, you'll be restricted to those in the area you control. I can hardly think of any more mobile business than those selling digital downloads. Cue the mass exodus of all digital download vendors.

How is this going to work?

Paris, digital download victim...

Apple routs rivals in sat survey

"ultra-portable"?

What are you - a psion shill?

... ah forget it, I'm too busy to attempt a FoTW... ;)

I would suggest that the Mac Air is ultra-portable, but Apple doesn't play in the ultra-cheap market, be it for portables or desktops.

Mac users are generally home users, therefore they don't need compatibility with a zillion and one business apps. iLife + OpenOffice pretty much covers most home requirements and offers much more useful and easy-to-access home-user functionality than a windows pc + ms office, so yes I would expect Apple users to be happier with their systems than their windows counterparts. "It just works" applies to the software, but more importantly, it applies to the computer handling what the users want to do. For all the new features in Vista, "it just works" will never apply because MS haven't gone much beyond the basic OS. Indeed, they may not be allowed to, but they can't because they don't control the hardware.

Then you've got the self-selecting halo effect. Creative media types who buy Macs probably take good photos of their kids, edit them well and so they make good calendars which Apple print and which turns up in the post. We all like to receive packages and they come out well, so bonus satisfaction points for them and Grandma too. All this is received gratefully, with Apple branding.

Relatively cash-rich and placing a great deal of importance on their photos, they know about time-machine so backups are made and disasters are easily overcome too.

By focusing on what is profitable rather than mergers, acquisitions and being the biggest, Apple have successfully differentiated themselves using OSX. Yes Mac's are pretty and pretty expensive, but the real achievement is not fighting MS (as Novell tried to do) and keeping the discipline of maintaining focus on the market which makes you large sums of money. Their whole business model is predicated on being different.

No-one in the Windows world can differentiate their hardware with software. If anyone bundles cheap software on Windows to differentiate their hardware, there are a million other systems out there to which the software can be, er, "ported." By having its own OS which it ties to the hardware, Apple sidesteps this issue. Having moved to an Intel architecture, however, it has become more of a problem, which is why it can't allow Hackintoshes - it would end up in the same place as MS.

I'm eagerly waiting to see KDE 4.2 stabilise further. It is much improved over 4.0 but I'd like to see the gui be as stable as the OS underneath it. It certainly now compares (favourably) with Aqua for prettiness and features. I've long held that KDE has the best infrastructure but Gnome has the applications. Hopefully with 4.2 onwards, with akonadi and so on, the case for having native KDE versions of firefox, openoffice etc will become compelling.

Windows 7 fast track alarms technical testers

It isn't about the bugs

All software has bugs, its about drawing a line under vista.

The longer vista is out there, the more people buy Macs and the more KDE looks just as good...

Barcelona pickpocket swipes Microsoft secrets?

In the words of lolcat....

DID NOT WANT!

(Did you expect any other icon?)

Mozilla, Skype join iPhone jailbreak fight

No mozilla for iphone perhaps

but I wonder if Mozilla's sugardaddy Google, would like access?

Brit, French nuke subs collide - fail to 'see' each other

Everyone knows...

our nuclear deterrent is to keep the French at bay.

Them French arrrr just Pirates!

Man U fan pwned in Facebook honeypot

@kit barker

The pranksters didn't ruin his life, he did.

Do not cheat, using facebook or post-it notes.

Being able to get away with it is not a justification for cheating.

Choices, consequences and all that.

Commiserations to his (ex)wife.

The dark horse in data centre I/O simplification

re: explain

Many servers don't max out their nic or hba so pooling them would be advantageous.

VMware running on blades with a backplane can help, but PCIe is a more open standard than most blade-server backplanes.

Dual nics/adapters are often used for redundancy. By pooling the nic's/hba's you could run N+1 rather than N*2 adapters and still have a nic/hba per server and a spare available (virtualised so any host can access it). For disk access, multiple PCIe buses would be much cheaper to put into a server than multiple infiniband controllers and much more efficient than using nfs/udp/ip.

It seems like a good idea to me, though the thought of some techie pulling the wrong PCIe cable fills me with more fear than having them pull the wrong network cable!

Vatican endorses Darwin, slights intelligent design

What has the papacy to do with creationism?

They've got someone who stands in the place of Christ and apparently let us know that God has changed His mind. Check out their teaching on the move to worshiping on Sunday instead of Saturday.

Catholicism is a very broad church, but with all the dead people you can pray to, images, pomp, wielding of civil power and a human who sits in the place of God, it bears very little resemblance to anything described in the Bible. Well, not until you get to Revelation, but that's another story...

In fact many creationists do actually believe in evolution, but not in a single common ancestor. There can be plenty of evolution, but only within a "kind". You'll only get a cat from a cat, but it may be a lion or a household moggy.

Science does not need to be incompatible with God. There is nothing inherently anti-God in experimentation and observation of the natural order. You can even define science as the experimentation and observation of the natural rather than supernatural, and still not end up as anti-God. The conflict between "science" and God comes when you decide beforehand that God does not exist and then theorise on that basis. This is a philosophical choice above all else. It is also a financial choice because public funding for anything which might lead to the inference that there is a God, is banned well before any science has taken place. Of course, when the State takes upon itself to make education compulsory but then excludes not just the study of God, but anything which may infer God's existence, any theory which can meet that criteria will have to be accepted and is likely to become dominant.

If you want a less nutty creationist viewpoint, have a gander at http://creationontheweb.com/content/view/21

This is the internet of course so the Nazis get a mention, but hey, Creationists talking about Nazis - what more could you want for entertainment?

Silverlight for Linux hits with Microsoft punch

If you embrace it...

... they will extend it.

Probably with with wrappers around windows functions which will be hard to replicate cross-platform. You'll always lag a bit in supported functionality, always be not quite as good as the windows version.

A lesson from OS/2: if you are runtime compliant with someone-else's system, no-one will code natively for yours.

Are you indemnified by Novell if you haven't paid for Suse? I seem to think this issue has come up before, but I can't remember the outcome.

Google axed Android multitouch at Apple's request?

Multitouch

Ok, its _the_ reason to get a mac laptop and having used one, I'd love to have my own.

However, touchscreens and trackpads have been around for ages. I've seen laptops where different parts of the trackpad had different functions, so I'm not sure that being able to touch two or more places at the same time (while being an excellent development) qualifies as a significant enough innovation to warrant patent protection - it really is just more of the same, similar to putting multiple cpu cores on one chip.

Of course, I may be biased because I'd really like my linux systems to have them - even the desktops.

Hackintosh maker lands Apple punch

Oooh they're gonna lose!

There might have been a possibility of getting away with it if OSX wasn't pre-installed but I can't see Psystar winning here. They are hardware sellers - they should have installed Linux with Appletalk, samba, bonjour etc configured as a "partner to your existing Mac" and thrown in a copy of OSX to upgrade "the Mac you've already got."

Personally, I'd like to see more Mac compatible kit out there, but its probably best to not to make it quite so obvious as to what you're doing. Going for the "enthusiast" market would have been so much safer than trying for Apple's own turnkey targets.

With the collapse of the Mac desktop sales, if I were Apple I would be looking at the market segments carefully. I'd be pushing a (slightly improved) mac mini for education. I'd like to see some display & control innovations too, allowing long distances between keyboard/mouse/screen and the main unit. I'd take a long look at the Wii as a possible direction for the mini too. They've got premium prices with a pretty interface. Now they just need some control-freakery when it comes to creating/publishing decent games. That shouldn't be too difficult! ;)

The upshot is, Apple doesn't need cheap OSX computers any more than Gucci needs cheap handbags. However, if I were them, more worrying than hardware cloners would be things like KDE 4.2 (or Gnome). Apple still has the edge with iLife functionality and robustness, but the gap is closing fast. If someone goes after the top end of the market with an Apple-like strategy (limited options, low-volume, high priced, beautiful hardware, a limited selection of software, but one which covers most areas of what home users want) it won't be very long before Apple has a very serious fight on its hands which it can't litigate out of existence.

Anonymous digs ahead of more assaults on Scientology

re: Religion is Evil

I suspect what was actually said was that a prevalent scientific error of the time (all races are not equal) combined with the philosophical Darwinism (we are merely animals and must struggle to survive) provided the logic for the Holocaust.

‘One of the central planks in Nazi theory and doctrine was …evolutionary theory [and] … that all biology had evolved … upward, and that … less evolved types … should be actively eradicated [and] … that natural selection could and should be actively aided, and therefore [the Nazis] instituted political measures to eradicate … Jews, and … blacks, whom they considered as “underdeveloped”.’ - Hickman

Which, having studied Nazi Germany at A-Level, I would have to agree with.

You can have a go at refuting the logic at http://creationontheweb.com/content/view/1675/

<cue David Attenborough voice>

"What we see here is the struggle between two groups of animals each doing everything they can to gain power within the pack. The Scientologists using their financial fitness to exclude their rivals from the pack; and the Anonymous sub-grouping becoming ever more confident in their challenges to the status quo."

Icon: when your dead, nothing matters and in the end, we're all dead.

One-tonne 40ft snake prowled superhot prehistoric jungles

In Titanboa, no-one can hear you scream...

@Phil Royall: Living in the Nevada desert? Why weren't they hiding with the rest of the dinosaurs behind the sofa?

Icon: Trussssst in meeeee http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s46SgIBpQ-Q

Teen accused of 'sinister' Facebook sex extortion plot

Education and Pride

Let me get this straight - kids are taught how to have sex, but no-one thinks to drill it into them that sending that sending nude pics of yourself to people you've never met might be a bad idea?

Teach SexEd in school? Sure! Teach modesty? No, no way - that would be supporting some religion, infringing on my free-speach rights blah blah blah.

So these kids were ok with sending pics, but were then too embarrassed to *not* have sex? Let's face it, they had very little to lose but their pride. Someone was trying to manipulate them using a photo and they thought having sex would fix it? No marriages were at stake, no custody battles or lawyers to pay. If you are normally too proud to admit you've made a mistake, this should surely be a wake-up call.

Ok, rant over.

Except to mention that the sentencing is typical over-the-top stupidity. No wonder the kids lack all sense of proportion!

Paris, an object lesson in making money out of cringeworthiness

Big labels or Google - who is the songwriters' worst enemy?

Before you pick a job...

you may want to consider if it will actually provide you with a living, or if its just a hobby.

Alas, not everything I do makes me fabulously wealthy. I suspect others have this problem too.

The bit about the exploitation of teen idol type tv and greedy media companies does ring true though.

Personally, I suspect Doom, WoW and Facebook are just as much to blame for dropping revenues as p2p. The industry that pushed 3.5 minutes as the maximum human attention span, has been outdone by computer games which provide even more interactive stimulation than skimpy dresses on MTV.

Switch it all off and go read a book.

MP wants Welsh text on ID cards

It obviously isn't a UK ID card

Its an EU one, otherwise they wouldn't want it in frog-speak.

If you want to go abroad TAKE YOUR PASSPORT.

A bad concept destined for a rotten implementation.

Deu Et Mon Droit is about as much french as I want to see on it.

Microsoft SKUs Windows 7 clarity

Three versions

Windows basic

Media edition (OSX)

Ultimate (Linux)

I know, I'm leaving alread...

Google on trial over Italian 'defamation' vid

Nah nah na-nah nah!

Ok, its a really mean thing to do, but some kids making fun of another and some kid hitting another with a box of tissues? This is the subject of multiple governmental legal actions?

This is a country which joined in an aggressive war on Iraq, right?

Perspective please!

European Parliament wants criminalization of online 'grooming'

chat rooms...

Huh?

Hello! These aren't real places! "Cyberspace" doesn't actually have any "space". Nothing happens "in" it. Its just fast email. This is an "after the fact" crime. If you are convicted of being a paedophile, they can go back and classify all your pre-crime communication as "grooming."

It all smacks of:

a) creating multiple offences for the same action so they can implement plea-bargaining.

b) a power grab by the EP, unnecessarily usurping national law.

Mines the one with the EFTA membership application in the pocket.

Russian rides Phantom to OS immortality

What is a disk file?

It is an optimisation allowing the software recognise the limitations of slow but capacious disk data storage vs fast but more limited RAM data storage.

Persistence might be applicable to small devices like a phone, but I can't see it working for general apps.

Hiding too much detail results in bloat (hello windows, acrobat reader...) If you want performance, you have to know what you're dealing with, which is why C is still used now and how computers in the 1980's managed to get a spreadsheet , word-processor or database functionality into 64k - 640k of RAM.

Windows Vista stuck on single digit enterprise adoption

Little Gain for Business

The move from ME to NT/2000/XP could be justified, better stability, 32 bit and all, but there's just no really good reason to go Vista and, to be honest, Windows 7.

I suspect Windows 7 will gain from not having the Vista name attached but it'll have to pull something more than that out of the hat. There should be some traction from the move from 32 to 64 bits (especially for servers and gamer rigs with massive video-card memory) but its nowhere near the impetus that the move from 95/ME had. Any business which reckons it generally needs more than 4gb ram on the desktop needs to have its IT policy and practises scrutinised.

With Apple doing better than it did, MS is really caught. There are a lot of people out there who aspire to have one of those low spec Macbooks rather than a "better" Dell or HP laptop. For MS, that's a big "ouch!"

Vista is pretty much dead in the water as W7 is rushed out, but in the meantime, with every "I don't care about computers I just want to do stuff" new home Macbook user, MS gains a "my pc at work sucks" user. From the other side, KDE 4.2 (just for example!) brings Mac-like eye-candy to the standard pc and provides the computer enthusiast with tinkering to their hearts content.

Of course MS will do well with Windows 7, but if they want to keep ahead of the game, they need to pay some serious attention to what customers actually need and they need their hardware providers to do something really quite special to make the Windows PC something someone, anyone, actually wants.

Gears of War grind to halt

Is it DRM?

Of course it is! The mechanism is designed to restrict code modification rights to the publisher only.

In many cases this is a bad thing, but in this case its a good thing as it helps prevent cheating which directly and negatively impacts other users, by taking away their fun, which is the product's sole purpose.

It isn't a conspiracy, its a code re-use error. There was no need to quash execution if the certificate had expired, but its a general part of PKI infrastructure which wasn't ignored.

Oh yes it is also a demonstration of why DRM in general (i.e. the offensive kind) is worse than its proponents would have you believe.

Mac flirts with 10 per cent web share

Go Go Go!

Ok I don't have a Mac and I can't see them becoming the business option of choice - I don't think Apple would even want that. Macs have a much higher upfront cost (though I suspect if you count software its evened up a lot), but more people are picking them over MS's product when they have a choice.

As far as I'm concerned, I'd like to see MS suffer on the home-user front because it introduces variety and debate into the question of choosing software. I really hate to see a product/company do well purely because it is the incumbent and I reckon more Mac's at home means more Linux at the office. And I spend a lot of time in offices.

Experian sends 'cheap' Lord a-leaping

re: It still gets me

The problem is people don't vote out politicians who are dishonest.

If you can start a war on false pretences, killing hundreds of thousands of people *and get re-elected* who's going to worry about a couple of TVs or modifying the odd law?

Birmingham drops the possessive apostrophe

re: King's Heath

If it doesn't belong to the king, surely it should just be called "Heath."

You save not only the paint for the apostrophe, but also a whole five extra letters, plus a space!

As a place name, the point that it belonged to the king at some point should be enough. After all, we have lots of "forest road" names without a forest being in sight. Given that we don't have a king, I suspect people know the place doesn't belong to him.

I have to agree, the ambulance story is one of the lamest I've ever heard. Strip trailing esses in the database if you can't code escapes. It s easier than changing place names!

It looks like change for change's sake. I suggest the good councilmen stick to improving rubbish collection and stop annoying large parts of the electorate, regardless of the merit of such a plan. More focus and less self-publicity please...

Paris, the similarities are more than skin deep...

Firefox 3.1 release date hampered by cheeky monkey

re: settings in a database

Unless it is network-accessible (to allow the same config across different hosts) this seems like a bad idea - little advantage for the cost of leaving text-file simplicity.