Posts by Paul Williams 9 publicly visible posts • joined 19 Feb 2008
I have a dell laptop and quite often go through 2-3 batteries before getting round to having to plug it in (i can charge two at a time using my docking station) this gives me pretty much a full day of power without having to plug in. If it cant do that what use is it!
My father worked in education for 20+ years with special needs kids (at the worst end of the spectrum mentally and behaviouraly disturbed kids) and during that time has been accused malitiously about 10-15 times all of which resulted in a police investigation all of which were dismissed. Most of these kids even if they cant count to 3 still know that if they shout that they were touched funny that the teacher or whoever it is will get into trouble. They tell the police to f@#k off because they know the police will not risk being put in a position where they can be accused. This is a growing problem and although you cannot ignore an accusation and I would never say you should but once it has been proven to be spurious that should be the end of it.
I have been trialing Vista for a Multinational with all of their enterprise applications and I have to say about 90% of them worked no issue. The system its self is far more stable than XP (the Dell GX620 that I am running it on came with XP and was less stable before I put vista on also not exctly massive hardware spec on a GX620) in fact the OS has not crashed in the year and a half I have been running it only applications have. The increased security that UAC and the sandboxed IE would be a good enough reason for a company to consider not downgrading to XP the only bit of FUD that I would agree with is that it is not worth either the software or hardware costs to upgrade old equipment but any new kit that comes with vista will keep it also as we move to server 2008 the other security features such as Network Access Protection and the enhanced RIS Windows Image Manager will make vista even more attractive.
I also use vista at home and that is on a three and a bit year old Acer 5020 running vista x86 at the moment but I plan to try x64 on it. The only thing I did to the three year old laptop was upgrade it to 2gb of ram but this was done before vista was released and while it is a little slower than XP it is not so much that it is noticeable when using for everyday things like playing guildwars or hellgate london (hellgate BTW recons that I need a 2.7ghz proc to play under vista but it runs quite smoothly with the 1.6ghz amd in the laptop)
Take another look at the security features of vista and also at UAC it is not something that should be turned off, if it annoys you and you have one of the none home versions of vista just set it to automatically elivate the requests that way at least you can still benefit from the sandboxed IE.
I thought that we were supposed to learn from history. Prohibition in the states pretty much created organised crime there. Also I will say from personal experience that having worked 5 years as a bouncer that I would rather deal with a room full of stoned people that 2 or 3 really drunk people any day of the week.
I think the reason they dont legalise it is because they already get a cut of the major profits from higher level drug dealers in the UK since to legitimise their cash they have to pay tax on it.
It would be safer for all if it was legalised and produced either by the pharmacuticals or tabacco industry as then people who choose to take weed by whatever method would know the strength of what they are using and could be sure it has not been tampered with.
According to the system builder licensing faq:
"The OEM versions of Windows Vista Business and Windows Vista Ultimate include downgrade rights to Microsoft Windows XP Professional, Microsoft Windows XP Professional x64 Edition, and Microsoft Windows XP Tablet PC Edition."
Now I could be losing the plot but that says to me that if you have an XP disk knocking about you can just remove vista and install XP at no extra cost the only time you might have to buy a copy is if you dont have one already.
Just because a flaw has not been disclosed does not mean that it is not being actively exploited. I would rather they disclose imediately than contiune using the software not knowing about it. I cannot mitigate or evauate how critical a problem is to me if they don't tell you about it whereas I can if they do. Keeping flaws quiet does not benefit the users of the software as if it has been found by a security researcher it may already have been found and exploited for malitious use.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2025
