Posts by Alan Bourke

Dell puts Sputnik open-source laptop on launch pad

Don't you love when Linux elitists

when faced with a genuinely popular distro like Ubuntu, have to retreat further into elitism by hating Ubuntu.

Apple 'iTV' looks like Cinema Display, says Throat

Re: This will be interesting

Good luck with that.

Standing NEXT to an HTML coder is like standing NEXT TO GOD

A hit on the Bong

Steve - you work in a fictional loft office with wooden floors don't you? Of course you do.

Tim Cook rejects Apple's old business model of suing everyone

Oh the lulz ...

""I've always hated litigation and I continue to hate it - we just want people to invent their own stuff," he said."

This from a company whose entire existence is based on brilliant redesign and marketing of other people's ideas.

Getting rich off iPhone apps is b*llocks, say UK devs

Apps are the new word processing.

I know of people, recently made redundant and with no history whatsoever in IT or software development going on government courses to learn how to write apps because all they read about is 21-year olds writing some game or other and becoming millionaires. And they're little dinky things that go on phones, not big scary things that go on computers! How hard can it be!

There's an ever-increasing noise-to-signal ratio in app development for any platform. The get-rich-quick bandwagon has passed.

New tech revolution: Small biz begins to lock out industry giants

Re: SaaS just shifts the single point of failure

"To do it properly you'd need two connections from different suppliers coming into your premises using two different routes."

Exactly. As if your average SME is going to shell out for that. It's hard enough to get the buggers to do backups.

CAPITALISM without PROFITS - Welcome to the Instagram Era!

We are *so* heading for another dot com bust.

Good fucking riddance I say.

Teens break up with Facebook

Re: Not really thinking, are they?

So unfair I HATE YOU

Amplidata smashes the object pedal against the metal

I have no idea what any of this means ...

... but you write it so well, you delightful young booby.

'Super rogue wave' scuppers Lego pirate

Quicktime?

Goooooood-night.

Prehistoric monster snake crushed prey under 1.5 Brooklyn Bridges

I bet the Discovery channel

are really getting the horn over this, There's a good 2 years of programming here.

Titanoboa!

Secret Nazi Titanoboas

UFO Titanoboas - The Evidence

Thin-client giant Wyse gobbled by Dell

Ah Wyse ...

I remember wiring up their terminals with serial cables to 16-port serial boards in PCs running Concurrent DOS. Them were the days. Shudder.

Yes, Prime Minister to return after 24 years

Excellent!

Low Fat Offal Tubes for breakfast all round!

Record-breaking laser pulse boosts fusion power hopes

MOAR

LASERS

Google cools data center with bathtubs, dishwashers

Aged urine

also known as 'lant', used to be actively collected and used for many things, cleaning floors and flavouring beer being two of them.

Now you know where the term 'on the piss' comes from.

BBC Micro team to celebrate historic machine's 30th year

burrrrrrrr-beep.

BBC Computer 32K

BASIC

>

Austrian daredevil Baumgartner skydives from 71,581ft

Joe Kittinger

had to have a separate support heavy-lift aircraft just for his balls.

JavaScript shogun deflects Google's mid-air Dart attack

Re: Reinventing the wheel

Because JS requires a lot less syntactical faffing.

DLNA blesses HomePlug Ethernet-over-mains tech

Re: Powerline networking?

Not worthless to me - it let me move my router from two floors up to downstairs beside where the main phone socket is, flooding downstairs with lovely WiFi (and drowning out all the neighbours WiFi) and piping the network back upstairs via powerline. The two BT plugs I have are the best things I ever bought.

Top Brit authors turn flamethrowers on barmy IPO

I don't know if it's the same in the UK

... but here in Ireland the textbook publishers have a lovely little scam going where they change the textbooks every year, so that they can't be passed on second-hand. Also a lot are of the type where you have to write into the actual textbook, so even if you could pass them on, they'd be useless. This is the sort of thing governments should be looking at.

STUNNING NEW APPLE DEVICES that will follow the iPad 3 HD!

Oh dear lord

" Apparently, secret experiments in Cupertino's labs have looked into putting enlarged iPads up on raised stands for a better user experience, but these were a failure.

"Three things came out of those trials," says our source.

"First: you've now got to reach up to get at the touchscreen, which gives you another set of aches and pains. Second: You're getting smeary finger tracks all over the display."

In other words, in situations that demand it, USE A FUCKING LAPTOP OR DESKTOP.

Archos touts Android tablets for toddlers

The UI doesn't need to be dumbed down particularly

as anyone with a 4-year-old and an iPad will tell you, but what would be extremely welcome is robust content filtering and family safety which is woefully lacking if not absent on the iPad.

That and a jammy finger-proof screen.

Windows 8: Sugar coating on Microsoft's hard-to-swallow tablet

Great for tablets and phones

Seriously - if anyone in Redmond thinks the corporate world, which does A LOT OF TYPING, will ever embrace touchscreens for the workaday desktops, they are seriously bananas.

All-optical RAM to clear comms bottleneck

Bubble memory

FTW.

Sony PlayStation Vita

The price of the memory ...

... is gouging, plain and simple.

Death to Office or to Windows - choose wisely, Microsoft

Re: Re: Re: Re: "Windows is dead."

"It is amazing that a viable Linux desktop OS (Red Hat desktop, for instance) has not taken hold in the enterprise. How in the world do these CIOs justify paying seven figures in annual Microsoft support for software "

Very simple my friend - all the software that you actually need to use to run an enterprise (ERP, payroll, manufacturing etc) does not exist on Linux or Apple.

Hey Commentard! - or is that Commenter?

I have not voted.

There is no option there for 'commenterino'.

Cameras roll on 'blockbuster' new Who series

Re: X in SPAAAAAAAAAAAACCCCCCCEEEEEEEEE!

I care not a jot as long as it continues to feature:

Miniskirted pouting IN SPAAAACE!!!!

FCC hangs up on 4G broadband biz LightSquared

Why can nobody spell 'lose'?

Not 'loose', FFS.

HD bandwidth limits BBC Olympics 3D coverage

Ah, 3D...

... it really is deader than dead.

LibreOffice debugs and buffs up to v.3.5

Generally agreed yes

by MS haters. Everyone else seems to use it in their hundreds of millions. If only they knew!

Yeah but come on

pretty dumb if the thought he was getting full MS Office for free.

No 'Xbox 720' in 2012, says MS exec

I doubt it.

"Even in the world of corporate, next gen consoles (with an admin option to prohibit game playing) instead of desktops, that can be "repaired" by simply power cycling with cloud based / centrally held data storage would sound attractive to many a PHB interested in culling IT staff "

If you're going to go completely thin-client and cloud-based in the corporate world, why would you spend money on the audio-visual grunt of a console? All you need is a really dumb Linux terminal. And if you plug a mouse and keyboard into a console, how is it different from a PC anyway?

And the corporate desktop isn't going to forego mouse and keyboard for Kinect and touch screens - good luck typing up a 20 page letter or doing the payroll like that.

There'll be cross-over in terms of Windows 8, but the desktop version of that will just be an evolution of the traditional UI , it's the tablets and phones that will be Metro city.

With the recent Dash update

... since they let the fargin' marketing dept design it, it's clear they're going to try to thrash another couple of years out of it by trying to push Kinect and set-top-box functionality in your face, relentlessly.

It's looking decidely creaky these days - Skyrim is gorgeous but has murderous lag and pop-up.

Man recreates ZX81... in Lego

If the keyboard *was* LEGO

it would still be better than the real original keyboard.

I want a BBC B one.

To put my Raspberry Pi in.

Ex-staffer: Apple assigns new workers to made up projects

There was me forgetting

that because it WORKS that means it's RIGHT.

Sick of Ubuntu's bad breath? Suck on a Linux Mint instead

I stuck it on a laptop only last weekend ...

Went fine apart from having to manually install Wifi drivers despite the install stage finding them OK. Also, can't use any sort of suspend or hibernate as it locks the thing hard.

Linux distros really have to sort these sorts of niggles out, and in a way that doesn't involve faffing with conf files and the like.

Aside from that, I like it a lot. Certainly would use it over Unity.

Microsoft's magic bullet for Azure: Red Hat Linux

'Throes'

And you might even be right if the day ever comes to pass when all the enterprise apps (payroll, ERP) and games and the like appear on Linux.

E. coli turns seaweed into ethanol

Vibrio splendidus?

Sounds like an ancient Roman sex toy.

Raspberry Pi Linux micro machine enters mass production

Bedroom coders and assorted boffins ...

... assemble!

Microsoft de-cloaks Windows 8 push-button lifesaver

Lame troll

of the week.

It doesn't lie ...

... it takes a guess, obviously. Maybe not an accurate one, but still. How the f**k would it know how long an install is going to take?

It won't matter

as long as you bought it from Comet. Oho!

That Brit-built £22 computer: Yours for just £1,900 or more

You

will be proven so wrong.

A simple HTML tag will crash 64-bit Windows 7

A MAJOR, MAJOR ISSUE

for all three of you using Safari on 64-bit Windows 7.

Doctor Who girl Amy Pond axed in 'heartbreaking' exit

No more microskirted pouting?

Feck.

Microsoft copies Google with silent browser updates

Or maybe

he has loads of business software, or games, or other software that only run on Windows? If it were that easy the world would be using Linux.

Mythbusters cannonball ‘myth-fires’

At least Kari is unhurt.

That's the main thing.

Greatest ever first-person shooter* brought back to life

People, people, people.

So, Marathon.

Greatest ever FPS? Well, the only people that still remember it are decent-game-starved Mac users. Yes, it was a welcome departure at the time from kill-imp-get-key-open-door but it's a bit po-faced and the weapons are crap.

First ever FPS? You'll need to look back to MazeWar in the 1970s for that. Multiplayer and everything.