Posts by Magnus_Pym 1112 publicly visible posts • joined 14 Jan 2010
Large hard drive? Fast wireless? Why? so you can use it as a small laptop? So you can install some redmondware on it? For me price/value for money and weight are far more important.
And while we are at it why choose the ASUS that has a fancy touchscreen to compare to all the others that don't? Was it so you didn't have to choose it as the best?
... did what the population think mean anything in the Commons? I don't see them shooing BAe out the door on behalf of the pacifists or Grampian Foods for the vegetarians. The cellars of the commons itself would be anathema to the teetotallers among us. I personally don't like politicians but I don't see my views being represented.
Anti virus degrades performance. This makes a new (read profitable) chip in a Windows machine look about the same as last year's (or the year before) cheap old chip in a Mac/Linux/anything but Windows machine.
They can't improve on Windows apparent insecurity so they have to improve on the stuff people load up to deal with it. The only way they can do that is throw hardware at it. They haven't got any security themselves so they have to buy it.
ergo - Intel buys McAfee.
If I borrowed a laptop for an adult education course and found that the admins of the course took web cam pictures of my sweaty, bloated and saggy self using said laptop in my own home I think I would be a trifle annoyed.
Sod the kids. They shouldn't do this to anyone without express permission. Can't see that any law would have been broken though. However for the school admins (surely a responsible position) to not be aware that young people might choose to do their homework with their vestments askew and that if this where to happen they would definitely be breaking the law and risking moral outrage is criminal stupid. How did they get the job in the first place.
1. Why did you turn on the garden lights for a few hours every day? I would have thought that was obvious that this was a waste of power with needing to resort to a power meter.
2. PC used 400W shut down! Presumably shut down but not switch off at the supply didn't it get a bit hot without any fans turning?
3. Scape-cat perhaps?
1. turning lights off when you are not using them doesn't save much power (start up costs of fluorescents not withstanding) but turning the heating down does.
2. Line drying rather than tumble drying saves some power but not as much as cool washing compared to hot wash. (I'm not even convinced that is true).
Is this article suggesting that there is some kind of weird physics going on where small amounts of energy become zero when talked about in the same sentence as larger amounts? has it suddenly become true that not doing everything eco, green, carbon neutral and landfill friendly is the same as doing nothing?
All I can think is that this by the same 'scientists' who used to say 'actually all these "smoking is bad for you" campaigners HAVE NO BLOODY IDEA'?
I use N-Drive on a Satio and, apart from the roundabout voice over oddness, have been impressed.
As with most people, I guess, I only really need it for the last few miles of the journey. I know where Birmingham is thank you. It just when I get there the trouble begins. So if I don't like the route N-drive has chosen I go my own way and it will virtually instantly re-calc until I zero in on the destination point. If I miss a turning or choose not go through an industrial estate between two a roads, again instant route re alignment
On my dad's Navman you get two or three minutes of 'make a u-turn' before it realises you were right all along.
I'm thinking that a smart phone based app is going to have more computing horse power to throw at this than a stand alone sat nav and a definte advantage to this option.
"Anyone considering using virgins offering should just use nothing, you'll get the same peace of mind"
Is that just some general advise from a right wing Christian fundamentalist group to which you belong or perhaps some kind of ancient druidic ritual for the scurging of the unclean?
I think we can all see that old style big software is dead. It just doesn't know it yet. It is becoming more and more difficult to create the lock-in it requires. Ballmer and Ellison represent all that was wrong with the old empire. They may not be the last emperors but they will be the last with any power. Jobs and Brin represent what could go wrong with the new foundation. A single party state.
What we need is a new business leader to speed up the transition. I wonder if we should be working on a new class of robots...
If you make an amendment to an open source project and it is not included into the source (and not contributing is a sure way to make that happen) then you are tied to the version you originally amended. You cannot guarantee that future version will be compatible with your changes. Indeed if your changes are worthwhile you can be pretty sure someone else's code will go in to do the same thing ensuring incompatibly. Any significant changes in the main project made after that point will have to be either ignored or re-written by you. The support burden gets ever larger as time goes on.
I can see a problem in a few years time where free loading companies will be stuck in a kind of 'IE6 lock-in' of their own making: New technology is changing the market but they can't implement it because of a 'special sauce' hack they did years ago to differentiate them in the market.
"Students are lazy bastards" - Well reasoned and convincing. You certainly put that argument beyond further discussion.
"and why would a company offer Macs? Macs are about as good in a working enviroment [sic] as a kick in the balls every morning" - Yes it's hilarious to expect Macs to break out of their tradition niche market of specialist work computers...
...No. Wait that doesn't sound right.
No. Wait, listen. Don't turn your backs on us.Your investments are safe in News International, You can trust me, I'm honest rupe, I wouldn't lie to you.
Now it might look, to the casual observer, like NI is a hopelessly beached whale. The untrained observer may think that the market for gossip dressed as news is being squeezed by dedicated pictorial gossip mags on one side and almost instant internet news/opinion sources on the other both of which have more integrity in their smallest bullet point than the whole of News International put together. But listen, they are wrong the future is golden. Its all going to change and I can once again go back to telling people how to think. Its all going to change because of... err...
...err...
...ooh. I know Its because of the iPad. The iPad will surely save use, iPads can do anything. Hooray for the iPad. Where are you all going...
... since I was a kid.
In the 1900 if you knew about cars you new everything: Design considerations; how to build them; how to make them; how to fix them; how to drive them. Since the twenties these were all different subjects. You would not employ a chauffeur to design a car and neither would you the visa versa. There are driving schools, mechanic courses and Automobile Design Degrees.
Schools teach 'computers' as if it is still all one subject. There should be at least:
1.Office IT skills (for Word,Excel etc.)
2. Software and IT (for the script kiddies)
2.Computers and IT (hardcore hardware)
You don't need to inoculate everybody against a disease to prevent it's spread.
Not all infections come directly from the source and not all workstations have access to all other workstations. Each infection must have followed a path from the initial source through other infected machines which act as gateways. If only small percentage of the these gateways are closed then the damage is limited by a far greater degree. Conversely one infection on a PC on a business with a network of a thousand identical ghosted drive machines will be a thousand botnet network within minutes.
The botnet will only be useful if it can reach a critical mass, You can't run a successful DDOS attack through 5 pc's and a few dozen compromised passwords will not make you a criminal millionaire. If you limit the spread you kill the disease.
No. they got criticised.
They wanted at least another decade tie-in to MS office. They paid their money and they got it. People hated them before they did and they still hate them. No fines, No trade controls, No threats from the Courts. What makes people think there was some kind of downside for MS?
If they learned anything it was that they can still get away with it.
Win 7 could have been released in place of Vista. There isn't much that Win7 does that couldn't have been done at the time. Even so it would still be less that Microsoft said Vista would have when it was announced.
That is what pisses a lot of people off. They bought Vista thinking it was going to be Win 7. In order to finally get what they thought they paid for they must pay again.
A lot of people have said this already but as the article clearly say 'Licensing will get a lot more expensive' I think we should be told how.
£65m x 12 years = £780m
£225m x 1 off cost = £225m
I presume they could get 'upgrades' for free but it looks to like you could have bought the whole lot outright 3 times (Win XP + oOfice XP, Vista + Office 2007 and , Win7 + Office 2010) for the same price. As far as I know they still use 2000 and XP.
Where is the 'more expensive' bit?
Privatisation by the back door, Yet another IT screw over, job cuts, pay freezes and unspecified 'efficiency' savings (probably unattainable). I wonder what Cameron meant by 'The NHS will be safe in our hands'.
As the Senator says in Josey Wales after promising to treat the prisoners decently:
"They were decently treated. They were decently fed and then they were decently shot. "
So. Some Windows 7 licences claimed as sold are actually Win 7 equipped PC's downgraded to XP, some are actually Win 7 equipped PC's wiped and Linuxed. Some are actually options purchased by PC manufacturers and not yet built or sold.
I wonder how much of 'Microsoft's most successful OS ever' is actually used.
I was thinking that buying a CD was like buying a print of a painting. i.e. you buy the art and some media to hold it but not the actual physical work of the artist. You have paid some money to the artist as well as some to a print maker and some to a paper merchant. You don't own the picture but you must have some rights to use the piece of decorated paper that you now hold. You can look at it sure, but can you show it to someone else? Can you sell it? Can you give it away?
In the art world art theft is usually used for the crime of taking away the original work. I haven't stolen 'A Bigger Splash' by taking a picture of it (although some other crime might be committed). In this analogy it would only be stealing music if you took away the master tapes from the music company vaults wouldn't it?
If you scan your own print a painting are you stealing, forging or making fair use of your purchase? Similarly what if you print out that scan on your own printer which crime are you guilty of? More to the point what kind of punishment could you expect if you you make that scan available as a digital file on line?
I would have thought the crime of copying and making available to others somebody's artistic work is more akin to forgery than stealing.
What I want to know is, what would be the penalty if I bought a licensed print of of a modern art work say 'A Bigger Splash'. Then made a scan of the print and made it available for anyone to download and print out if the wished? Surely the crime of forgery would be committed when somebody actually printed the digital file.
Any lawyers here?
who is paying the bills?
It's difficult enough to get money from the banks for a profitable business. Surely nobody is stupid enough to offer them credit. I mean I assume the CEO etc are still drawing salary. Why don't the cheques bounce? When the landlord comes round do they offer to pay him in kind (wink wink)? Why is the electricity still flowing at SCO HQ? And, most important of all, how do I get in touch with these people to pitch my new 'can't fail' business idea?
Yes the curate is being a sycophant in trying not to appear critical of the bishop. He sought to make out that the egg was some balance of good and bad when the fact is that if the egg is not all good then it is entirely inedible. The point is that the good parts could not redeem the bad egg. This may be what the writer was trying to put across; that the entire phone is bad because not all of it is good. That is surely a truism in the ultra competitive smart phone market. On the other hand it could just be lazy use of metaphor.
Oh noes. I used 'metaphor' and 'truism' in a post about pedantry. That's not going to go so well.
Employers can't be bothered to train upcoming staff as it is expensive and the trainee will probably leave to work for someone else who has deeper pockets because they don't spend money on training.
It might take two or three years before the degree level entrant is actually earning their keep for the company. That is expensive and in fairness to the employers it is very hard to judge staffing level requirements for years into the future. Especially as the government f*cks about with huge and failing IT projects constantly taking on and dropping large numbers of highly qualified staff.
The lower wages, lower costs and lower employment law barriers in some countries bring this cost down. It's therefore cheaper, easier and more manageable to take staff from abroad. simples.
Use wireless at all?
If they can use by stego'd pictures then then they can communicate easily, instantly and undetectably on forums anywhere in the world. Just fain an interest in any subject and post away. A 'my little pony' collectors forum message board becomes a... well a message board.
It doesn't make sense. All this 'wireless' and 'written down passwords' crap must be planted to try to cover up the truth. After all what evidence have they got that could not easily be fabricated after the event?
And another thing. What secrets where they trying to uncover? I can't see any hint of contact with high ranking US officials or working in secret locations? What exactly where they planning to do?
.. or does this sound like people trying to get caught. I'm guessing that if they didn't get picked up by the feds this time she would have brought a phone under the name 'Anna Spy' and an address of ' 1 Spy Street, Spy City, Russia'.
I mean, they didn't do live transfers in Smiley's day why start now. And for Christ's sake taking a laptop to Russia to get it 'seen to'. Never heard of Gotomypc?
Decoys perhaps?
Windows install process on my dads HP laptop already pre-installed with Vista.
1. Start machine
2. Make emergency DVD's as instructed.
3. Wait for Vista to complete the initialisation and install processes only half done by HP
4. Meanwhile watch a full length feature film on the TV
5. Come back to find it almost ready to use.
So just STFU about how you buy a windows machine and it's all just ready for you.
P.S. daughters Mac
1. Switch on
2. enter your name
Adobe have had years to move flash forward into the new millennium. The only version that runs at a barely acceptable rate is the 32bit Windows version, The same as it was back in the 90's. and it still thrashes the processor. Ever left a web page open with a flash add in it? I love the sound of cooling fans in the morning. I used to use SETI to torture test a PC but flash is just as good.
If they haven't got it all together by now then they probably never will. Nothing to see here people just move on.
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