Posts by nick

Linux: this year's silver lining?

Windows & Linux

"it seems far more likely that Microsoft will drop the price of Windows XP and extend its support to maintain share."

I think ultimately, MS will end up giving Windows away for nearly nothing, just to maintain their lead in installed PCs. I've been saying for years that the MS Tax will end up becoming a MS rent. Free MS OS but with very limited functionality. You pay for features.. That way, even if you don't upgrade to their latest flavour of bloatware, you still pay your $5 per month for the OS, $5 for Office etc... The "Vista Ready" mess has taught them they cant drive hardware sales just by releasing a new OS with ridiculously heave hardware requirements.

Black hats attack gaping DNS hole

Whaaat

I was extecting to read a story about people in bowler/top hats & other rediculous headgear to be invading t'internet. Oh well.

Hackintosh maker gets legal greeting from Apple

OSX on generic PC hardware

Yeah in an ideal world it would be great if they would allow OSX to run on an ordinary PC but they wont for 3 reasons..

1. Apple hardware is more expensive the same way a BMW is. It doesn't make it better, its just a status thing.

2. With a limited number of motherboards, graphics cards, memory, CPUs etc its possible to test much more extensively for bugs. It would be impossible to test windows for every combination of hardware that might end up in a PC.

3. It enforces their DRM /itunes lockdown and helps them get deals with itunes. Apple is fighting MS & Sony to become the main outlet for online media. All 3 are trying to become the standard for streamed media and whoever has the most secure system will win the most licences from the RIAA/MPAA.

I do hope that Apple fails and Psystar are allowed to sell OSX on their hardware if for no other reason than EULAs are evil and illegally strip us of our rights to use what we bought in the way we want.

Virgin Media rubbishes P2P throttling rumours

Re: DPI and SSL

SSL & encrypted downloads will stop your ISP from examining the contents of packets but not your usage behaviour.

But most SSL & encrypted traffic is low bandwidth. If they see many connections to lots of different IP addresses they'll assume its p2p traffic and throttle you anyway. Unless you use a VPN tunnel like Relakks (now possibly at risk because of Sweden's new spy laws) your p2p software will still behave the same way.

Heaviest Virgin Media downloaders face new daytime go-slow

Re: Seems fair enough to me

The restricted speed on XL is 5Mbit not 16Mbit. Also, the best ADSL speeds are currently 24Mbit from Be/O2 & a few others.

I challenge you to actually break those limits. My XL line never goes above 2Mbit/sec (barely 1Mbit/Sec during the day) so even if I went at full speed all day I'd find it hard to exceed their restrictions.