Posts by spodzone 11 publicly visible posts • joined 7 Jul 2009
You miss the big problem.
It's closed-source proprietary software. In previous releases, you were not aware of built-in keylogging ability; when Windows 10 is finally released you will only have their word for it that something *which they are capable of doing* has been disabled.
I'm not prepared to go a single step down that line.
I had an ironic state of play with Yodafone when I switched across recently: after having been on the network for 3 days, I noticed signal was poor to nonexistent in the study where I work. Recalling that the Access Gateway was free to new users with a tariff over £15/month (not just the £160 flat-rate mentioned in this article), I asked for one free; yodafone tried to tell me that it should have been specified at time of purchase (when I didn't know how bad the signal was here!) and couldn't be bolted-on afterwards - a mere 3 days, "new" enough to be well within my statutory cooling-off period on the contract and yet not "new" enough for the purpose of an Access Gateway? "You'll have to return the connection and get a new one", with implied downtime.
Yeah right.
Eventually, with some assistance from their twitter staff instilling sense in their customer services, they sent me one out. Having 3G around the house is a total bonus - both my other half and I benefit hugely from it now with blackspots eliminated.
There have been a couple of significant downtimes but nothing so huge that I couldn't use 2G instead. It's quite funny when you haven't noticed but get an SMS *after* the outage to say "sorry, something might be wrong with it".
For those questioning why: 3g uses far less battery than wifi and you can't route calls over wifi directly.
I also disagree with the idea that multiple VMs makes for hassle patching - if I'm going to break bind9 and postgresql updates on the same day then I'd far rather have them affecting one "machine" each at a time, so I have multiple VMs for my own little network here, let alone at work. (Note, as long as there's network, you can migrate a guest from one machine to another using virtualbox or vmware, as well.)
Last summer I only used to be able to get a signal on 3 in Oban. As of about October I now get it all around Argyll - A82 through Glencoe and out to Acharacle in the Ardnamurchan peninsula. Is that the result of 3 and T-mobile being friendly, or just 3 getting a grip? Either way, I'm quite pleased at the increase, since the 3 tariff is bearable.
There are webby equivalents to many of the things proposed - for "Active Directory", might not FOAF+SSL be a step in the right direction? There's nothing to stop people implementing HTTP-based printing (deploy a server within your LAN, and make it interact with CUPS while you're at it); presumably playing of DVDs in a browser is just a matter of a plugin to put the video on the screen somewhere.
I think the author fails to see how computing is turning inside-out, trasnitioning from local to cloud-based and it's not a wholly bad thing.
A few months ago I emailed Seat to ask about the prospects for an electric car - because I actually like the company's position within the VW group. The response came back that the VW group had no plans for anything electric and were going to continue banging the diesel drum for all it was worth, and so I've already given up hope of staying within the group for my next car.
Where are the electric cars that'll do 250mi on a 2hr charge at 70mph (with extra spare for overtaking, and a solar panel on the roof to boost)? Where is the publicized government investment in research, in both car and battery companies, for the good of all kinds of driver and the planet to boot?
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