I thought the communications network was privatised already
Does this mean my hard earned cash is being handed over to BT? Why are we subsidising private businesses like this?
189 publicly visible posts • joined 29 Aug 2008
If it is anything like the things to 'fix' the ribbon bar back to a normal menu, it won't be free. So I can pay $$$$ for Windows $ for a thing to fix the ribbon bar, $ to fix the start menu, $ to fix whatever else is broken/weird/shit ...and then the whole thing will be wobbly as fuck 'cos of the all the low level hacks.
Or I could just not bother.
Christian, I think you are kidding yourself. If you are a programmer capable of shooting yourself in the foot with C++ you will quite likely achieve the same in other, higher level languages. Maybe not buffer over/under runs but there are a myriad other ways to write crap, insecure software - SQL Injections, lack of input validation, XSS, ... the list is endless. A crap programmer will shoot themselves in the foot regardless.
With all this shooting at feet, its a miracle there isn't some kind of explosion...
I could *just* about believe alexh20 when he claimed he bought five phones in four years, but £1,500/year on phones plus an unspecified amount on a 'gaming rig' and car... AND he has a 'misses'? Pull the other one, Alex.
Joke alert because this guy clearly is yanking our collective chains.
"from someone who has owned an HTC Hero, iPhone 3G, iPhone 3GS and a Samsung GS2 over many years."
As far as I can tell, the iPhone 3G was the earliest of those. Assuming you got the 3G the day it came out in 2008, you have had *five* phones - if we include your current Lumia too - in four years!? Maybe I'm a cheapskate, but I try to keep my phone for at least a year! Are there even any contracts for such high end phones that run < 12 months?
I keep seeing adverts for various smart phone applications on the tube - Kabbee, Hail-o, various dating sites, you know the usual nonsense. They all have iOS and Android logos. None have a Windows logo. I'm sure that Microsoft is pushing these businesses to make a WinPho version, but the attempts seem half hearted. Even when there are WinPho versions, they are not promoted in any way - after all, what's the point when no one has a WinPhone?
This alone would be enough to make me discard it as a 'burning platform'. Or maybe two burning platforms colliding in the middle of the night, long after the proverbial boat has sailed.
I'm as much a fan of linux as the next guy, but X still runs as root. They are edging towards fixing this, but there is still some way to go. And even then, the DRM (no, not that sort!) components will be running in kernel space. Oh, and for legacy cards you will probably always have to run X as root.
The thing is, modern graphics cards need some fancy memory management to work well, and that sort of management can only be done efficiently (or at all) when the code is running with kernel level privileges.
I mean, not only have they written shite ASP.Net code, they've not even configured IIS to hide the errors from users. No way are *they* getting my credit card details, even if I had £550 to blow on a fondleslab!
"[ArgumentNullException: Value cannot be null.
Parameter name: input]
System.Text.RegularExpressions.Regex.IsMatch(String input) +7043206
touch.touchAPI.mobileRedirect() in C:\inetpub\wwwroot\www.clove.co.uk\touchAPI.aspx.vb:86
ASP.viewproduct_aspx.Page_Load(Object sender, EventArgs e) in C:\inetpub\wwwroot\www.clove.co.uk\viewproduct.aspx:23
System.Web.Util.CalliHelper.EventArgFunctionCaller(IntPtr fp, Object o, Object t, EventArgs e) +25
System.Web.Util.CalliEventHandlerDelegateProxy.Callback(Object sender, EventArgs e) +42
System.Web.UI.Control.OnLoad(EventArgs e) +132
System.Web.UI.Control.LoadRecursive() +66
System.Web.UI.Page.ProcessRequestMain(Boolean includeStagesBeforeAsyncPoint, Boolean includeStagesAfterAsyncPoint) +2428"
On the contrary, it makes the point that developers are pretty pissed that their investments in .NET and Silverlight are looking bad right now because everything is moving to WinRT and an updated COM. Speaking as one such, why should I trust that WinRT will survive as a long term platform?
If you have a beta version, you are probably subscribed to the beta channel. You can check in Help | About. If you are, then you will always have the current beta version. You used to be able to switch channels, but in version 7 (or was it 6? They fly by so fast these days!) they disabled that option. Instead, you have to download the release package. The nice thing is, you can install release and beta in different directories so you always have the current release and beta versions available for testing.
> my (great-)grandparents generation had nothing, were given nothing, fought a war for little gratitude and still didn't go rioting through the streets about it.
What, apart from the Tonypandy Riots, the Battle of Bow Street, the Battle of Cable Street and Notting Hill Race Riots to name a few? I'll stop in the 50's given your (great-)grandparents modifier, but there certainly were riots in the early 20th century. None in the 40s... we must have been busy with something else...
> If that includes icons then why should they be denied them?
Indeed, and KDE allows them to do just that and has done since 4.1. The absence of desktop icons in 4.0 lies somewhere between bug and missing feature - it was always expected that support would be there in the form of the "folder desktop view", but for whatever reason it didn't make it in to 4.0. In hindsight maybe that should have been a priority and a blocking bug/feature.
The current releases of KDE4 can work much like KDE3. Since you like KDE 3.5, I can assume that you don't want all the animations, transparency, desktop searching, indexing and general glitz. That's fine, neither do I for the most part. And that's why there are options to disable those features.
Configurability really is KDEs strong point...
I don't know enough about Gnome to comment, but in the case of KDE it was badly needed change. Many things weren't possible with the 3.x frameworks and the whole thing was beginning to strain under the pressures of a modern, composited desktop. The first four or five iterations of KDE 4 were unquestionably painful, but the changes to the underlying frameworks are beginning to pay dividends as demonstrated by the exciting new form factors supported by KDE - all without screwing up the desktop form factor.
Maybe the Gnome people are aiming for similar flexibility with all that java (or is it java script?) on the desktop.
KDE 4.6 is a good, stable platform now despite the bumpy start and I'm looking forward to trying 4.7 sometime soon. These early releases are much like Vista - they need to happen, but are necessarily painful as the underlying technologies shift from mid 1990s to early 2010s.
That said: I don't like what I've seen of the Gnome (or Unity) desktops and doubt I would be comfortable there. I am too conservative and need my Windows style task bar, menu and window decorations. At least with KDE 4 (even the early versions) you could get something very close to that familiar environment. That doesn't seem possible the Gnome 3.
...and switched to the Exchange web interface. Quite nice if you run it in Google Chrome. I don't have much use for office apps appart from Outlook so it made life a lot easier. For a small company (and ours is a small company) it makes me wonder if the next step is to drop our internal mail server and use a hosted solution.
I have the Enterprise version of XP at work and there is no sign of multi-language. Perhaps you mean Vista/7 - I don't know, I only used it for 10 minutes. But Vista was released at the end of 2006 - hardly a decade.
I'm interested though - does this allow my French Girlfriend and Austrian mother to log in to my PC (usually English) and get a fully localized desktop and all applications in their native languages? Or do I need to do a new install as I recall doing repeatedly in my dark distant past as a localization engineer :-|
The U.S. can and will threaten all and sundry with economic sanctions unless they 'normalize' their patent law to match theirs. The UK patent law is already (more or less) back in line and I'm sure there is plenty of pressure on the other EU countries to follow suit.
>remember that most of this IP is *still* only technically valid in the US.
No, its valid here in the U.K. too.
..because the data is not relational, they will accidentally send the pensioners cheese rolling and primary school kids on a drinking binge. The morris dancers will, thankfully, turn up too late to perform and the bad poetry will be poorly attended because everyone thinks it will be morris dancing.
There is a lot of pressure on the EU to adopt US style patent laws that would allow software patents. Software patents are already granted in the UK, though there was a brief spell from 2006-208 when they were not permissible. US style patent law is in the UK already, pressure on Europe to 'normalise' is intense.
...but having seen friends fumble and struggle with both an iPhone and an HTC Android I can honestly say that these devices have a long way to go before I would want one. In that sense the market is wide open - if someone comes up with a platform that is stable, reliable, fast and intuitive (none of the current platforms achieve all of these) then the incumbents will be in for a hard time.
Whether WinPhone is that platform, I can not say - I've not had any experience of it at all. It is clear to me, though, that Google and Apple need to step up several gears if they are to stay ahead. Microsoft has some 40 billion and it is not beyond them to literally start buying customers - whether that is phone networks, manufacturers or end users - to get their product to the No.1 slot. I say this as someone who is not a great fan of MS as a warning: Do not underestimate Microsoft.
Seriously, are there any OpenSource apps built on Mono? I can't imagine what reasoning would lead someone to deploy an ASP.Net web app on Linux using Mono. I recall there used to be an app included with Gnome that was based on Mono, but it was replaced amid a chorus of disapproval. So who exactly is using Mono? And who of these would pay to keep this new company viable?
On how well written the program is. I've worked on legacy apps in the past that will never get ported to ARM simply because they make too many assumptions about byte order/size. Heck, I don't think it would be practical to port one of those apps to 64bit, yet alone an architecture that swaps the endienness!
I can remember the lyrics to many popular, and some less than popular tunes. A line or two from one of them would be sufficient. Music can be a powerful memory aid!
Plenty of people can remember the opening or closing lines to famous novels.
A more obvious (perhaps too obvious?) source would be a few lines from the Qu'ran, which presumably he would have already learnt by heart.
In short: No, its easy to remember a pass phrase long enough.