Posts by Stephen

Apple tells Mac users: Get anti-virus

@Gerry Doyle

Dead right. I've never used AV either. Firewall in the router, sensible browsing on a sensible browser, always junking spam and occasionally running Spybot for good measure (which has never spotted anything) is enough.

Never had a problem and if I have to rebuild once after 15 years of using the net on Windows then I'm still way ahead of all the suckers who run the truly appalling Norton (far worse than the majority of viruses).

And yes, I would know if I had a problem I just hadn't detected, I use Wireshark, ProcessExplorer and similar tools a lot, I would spot anything untoward.

DARPA in Tom'n'Jerry robo-brain quest

Dog

They've got the dog, now they are going to put a cat's brain in it. Go go DARPA.

The Baying of the Hounds

Depressing

Between the Police State, the Health Fascists and the Puritan Moralists there is little space left for liberty in the UK. Very depressing.

As for the "War On Drugs", this must be the most catastrophic and destructive policy ever imposed on the population of the planet. I would guess it is responsible for more deaths than all the wars in the world since WW2. The only (and obvious) solution is to legalise all drugs and deal with the consequences in a legal framework.

Army says farewell to UK's 'bugger-off' airbag drone

Vested interests?

Another week, another Lewis Page article slagging off Watchkeeper. You do know that these things are designed for completely different purposes don't you? Have you got share options in GAASI you should be declaring perhaps?

UK's Reaper wardroid imports slashed in budget pinch

Why the hostility?

This is the third or fourth article attacking Watchkeeper. Why the bias? Personally I am very happy that we intend to maintain an independent capability in this volatile world. Yes, Watchkeeper cost a lot, but most of that is for a 25 year support deal which would have been necessary for any solution. I would rather our tax money stayed in the country, created British jobs and didn't bugger up our balance of trade, any more than it already is, than just fed the American military industrial complex.

Boffins demo OLED-on-a-roll production process

Get a move on

All I want to know is how long it is going to be before I can wallpaper my sitting room with this stuff

Star Trek XI teaser trailer beams onto web

@Space dock?

Don't we all want Comic Sans with drop shadows?

FBI to get UK biometric database hookup?

Bye then

The American prison population is 2.2M (0.73% of the total population), The British prison population is 80,000 (0.13%).

This means that by American standards 360,000 of us are guilty of something that we should be in prison for.

We could be seeing a rapid population fall any time now.

The art of software murder

TextPad

Can I nominate TextPad 5 for a bloatware award. Previous to this version it was the ideal light weight editor for coders. Version 5 looks like it might have been C#/.NET'ed. It now has that characteristic slow, flickery rubbish feel of all C# apps.

Amazon Prime comes to Blighty

@Seamaster

Your comment could have been written by me. After many years and many thousands of pounds of happy Amazon trading I can no longer use them because they now use HDNL.

Unlike Royal Mail, HDNL require a signature which I can never give and they have no local depot either (hate to think what their CO2 footprint might be) so I can't pickup either. Result: any package I order fails repeated delivery attempts and then gets returned.

Amazon must be losing a lot of custom over this.

Logitech plugs in 'world's smallest' cordless mouse dongle

Not sinister

Like all Logitech mice this looks like it is for the exclusive use of right handers. Don't they care about losing ten percent (and probably higher for programmers) of their potential market?

Microsoft squares up to Google with $6bn buy

I can dream.

Perhaps this means Microsoft are going to accept the fact they can't write a decent OS and are going to focus on adware/spam instead.

Far more fitting use for their talents.

And now we are 10: MS goes to work on Visual Studio

C++

No mention of C++. I take it those of us who like to program real computers rather than Microsoft's virtual mono-platform environments will still be welcomed (and supported).