Posts by Anthony Youngman

Attachmate's Brauckmann takes control of SUSE Linux

Very much agree

Dunno why, I don't seem to get on with Debian-based distros.

And I don't particularly like Red Hat - they're the biggest boy on the block so I avoid them on principle (I like to support the smaller guys :-) Plus when I tried them in the v5 days, SuSE just seemed so much - easier ... - to use - it just felt more comfortable.

Lose SuSE, and where would I go? I use gentoo for me, but I support various other sites so it has to be something I'm comfortable with.

Losing SuSE would reduce the diversity - it's one of the oldest surviving distros, being a slack derivative. The majority of distros out there are now either Debian or Red Hat derivatives and I'd hate to see an unrelated old-timer disappear :-(

Cheers,

Wol

German Wi-Fi networks liable for 3rd party piracy

Wireless routers

Like someone else, I disable wireless as a matter of course if the user doesn't need it.

I also have the other problem that wireless "just doesn't work" a lot of the time. My router is in the living room, and that's the only place I can get a signal - the kitchen is unusable, upstairs is unusable ... a friend over the road finds that his laptop prefers to connect to the router next door rather than the router in the next room ...

My current router at least is sort of secured by default - its admin passwords are still the default settings, but admin only works on the wired connections unless it's specifically enabled for wireless. The annoying thing, though, is I use MAC filtering which applies to *everything* including the wired ports :-( no option to secure only wireless.

My old D-link was totally unsecured, but that was because I (a computer professional!) couldn't get security to work! If I couldn't do it, what hope would a normal person have?

Cheers,

Wol

Beeb confirms iPlayer streaming dominance

Connecting computers and TVs

"Connecting a computer to a TV is hard work unless you happen to have a VGA input on the telly --- extremely unusual --- or want to mess about with weird graphics cards and cables. Which is why no-one does it."

Have you looked at NEW TVs lately? Okay, there's still a lot of old ones floating about, but I recently bought a new TV and it's actually quite hard to find a flat-panel TV that *doesn't* have a VGA port these days.

Oh - and I thought many video cards today had HDMI ports (don't know - mines a Matrox G550 and I have no plans to upgrade... :-)