* Posts by John Ridley

9 publicly visible posts • joined 2 Dec 2006

Canada prostitution laws pulverised: politicians apoplectic

John Ridley

"It's for the government to decide..."

"It's for the government to decide how best to protect prostitutes..."

So I suppose the government feels that way about all citizens; it knows better than they do what's good for them?

Energy-saving LEDs 'will not save energy', say boffins

John Ridley

I don't buy it

We've been running CF bulbs in our house for many years now, and we don't leave our 16 watt CFs on any longer than we left the 100 watt incandescents that they replaced. If those got replaced with 4 watt LEDs, I still wouldn't leave them on any longer.

Ballmer's 'lost generation' note finds resonance

John Ridley

College student choice

Choice of OS by college freshmen is highly dependent on the school, what type of curriculum, and the recommendations from the school to incoming students.

I had a kid start college last year, and she said laptops in classes that allowed them were overwhelmingly PCs - with only perhaps 2 or 3 Macs in a lecture hall with 100 laptops. Her school said either one was acceptable, though individual departments within the school may prefer one or the other.

At other schools, freshman are encouraged (if not required) to get Macs or PCs.

Murdoch predicts iPads all round

John Ridley

Well, tablets maybe

No iPad for me, but I'm sitting here with my credit card in hand waiting for a really nice Android tablet to hit the market. Any minute now...

Facebook bars crawls from all but select few

John Ridley

It's a start

Now, can I specify a custom robots.txt so that NO search engines can crawl my Facebook stuff?

I suspect I'm OK already since I go in every few weeks and make sure that nobody I haven't accepted as a friend can even tell that I exist on FB, let alone see any of my stuff.

Adobe pushes out emergency patch for Reader apps

John Ridley

too late

I've installed FoxIt on all my machines. I've found it to be about the best alternate. There are smaller ones that don't have quite the features I'd like, and ones with far more features than Adobe does, but FoxIt seems the best simple replacement.

It does what a PDF reader SHOULD do - allow you to READ PDFs. it's not a launchpad for every bit of malware out there (all the dangerous stuff is disabled by default, though the features are there if you feel the need to drop your pants).

Windows 7 Backup gets users' backs up

John Ridley
Thumb Down

It's always been rubbish

I never tried Vista backup, but I gave up on Windows backup many many years ago, when they changed the format of the backup completely on every new version of windows, so that you couldn't back up your system, install the new OS, and restore your data. I think this is because they never actually wrote their own, they just bought a license to a crappy cut down version of some other backup program, and switched vendors with every new release.

Windows backup is for people who...Oh, heck, I don't even know. It's for nobody. Anyone who has data worth backing up should use something else.

Beeb reporter breaks Sonim's 'unbreakable' phone with fishtank

John Ridley

did he get his free phone?

just wondering.

SanDisk 4GB SDHC memory card

John Ridley

First?

Odd, I've had a 4GB card in my Canon camera since September. They've been available and in stock from online retailers since early summer, I first started following the prices in June.

Not from major suppliers like Sandisk, but they've been around and are getting good reviews. The only bad reviews I've seen were by people who didn't make sure their devices would actually work with 4G cards before buying a card.