Posts by HippyFreetard

Torvalds frustrated at missing simultaneous release

Linux for Workgroups

The numerology is correct due to MS leaving all the "alpha_rc_0.00.0.00.-4" stuff off the end and selling it anyway.

'Hand of Thief' banking Trojan reaches for Linux – for only $2K

Re: will the Linux Trojan have the same value as its Windows counterparts?

So that's fine then, because nobody will pay that much money for the totally pointless chance to get at an insignificant minority of hobbyists, then ;)

Bill Gates's barbed comments pop Google's broadband balloons

I think they go hand in hand, to be honest. Improved communication infrastructures are helpful to aid agencies.

In the end, though, it's the old give-a-man-a-fish thing. Yes, mosquito nets are good, medicines are good, but over long term, education is a powerful weapon against poverty. The OLPC and Raspberry Pi projects are laudable (even though the OLPC was mismanaged into vapourware - nice thought though) and have the potential to be incredibly effective.

Using a connected computer, you'd have access to everything from CBeebies to Youtube. Using Wikipedia, Open University, Khan Academy etc, you could learn how to use Freelancer websites, or Kickstarter to make money for clean water projects and medicine - independently of any charity except a computer and connection. But of course, you have to not die of malaria, hunger, or some horrible penis parasite or eyeball worm in the process.

So both projects should be given the thumbs up by each other.

Re: Intelligence!

"Simple home-made malaria cure, discovered by a mum, that the WHO don't want you to know!!! Click here!"

Tea, Earl Grey, hot! NASA blows $125k on Star Trek 3D FOOD PRINTER

Divide by cucumber. Out of cheese error.

It's not all that much money, and could make it cheaper to get the 'nauts fed. Every ounce flown into space has an immense price tag. By the time a freeze-dried sterilised burger makes it to the ISS, it's worth more than gold.

Some sort of green soy-lentil amalgamation perhaps? Although it would be very difficult to tell what was really in it. It could be people, or even worse - horse...

IT'S OFFICIAL: Hipster era is OVER – sorry, beanie boiz...

Hipsters

Hehe, there's always been something that's "hip", and it's about the zeitgeist, and the counterculture. Someone makes a statement, it's understood by a few, and the rest start dressing up like them.

For instance, 50's Rockers wore leather jackets because they rode motorbikes. It's a safety feature. Because rockers were "cool", leather jackets became popular, even among people with no motorbike. The rave movement of the 90's shifted a lot of counterculture thought into the mainstream anyway. Fight Club, the Matrix, were all part of the normalisation of those things. 70's show, Weeds, all show a new modern teenager, a reason-aware teenager, internet, who smokes pot AND studies hard.

Which means that nowadays, our counterculture is actually mainstream. Being "hip" can no longer be associated with a dress-code, or a genre of music, or an individual drug. It's given the hipsters - those who like to "look" cool - nothing to be.

So they revel in individuality - not their own individuality, which is that which makes a society strong, but in the originality of past heroes, seeking obscure music and being retro just for the retro's sake.

'WikiLeaks of financial data' prompts worldwide hunt for tax evaders

Grrr!

It's completely unproductive to go after tax dodgers one by one. They need to look at the culture of tax evasion, and legislate and adapt to that.

Otherwise we simply create a competitive advantage for all those that get away with it (often legally) that haven't been caught or singled out yet.

Not to mention that some companies (a minority, but I have witnessed personally in some I've worked for) actually use tax-evasion to fund charities, train and promote staff, sponsor local initiatives (of course, you can do all these things in order to pay less taxes!) Some of these schemes are taken very seriously by the companies as they're vital to marketing and shareholder confidence. Also, if a tax break is the difference between a company creating a thousand jobs in an area with high unemployment or not, then go for it, is what I say.

I'm not saying tax evasion is wrong (well, watching it line the pockets of the rich while hospitals are understaffed isn't my cup of tea, either), I'm just saying it's a complicated problem. Sort it out with a statistical report into tax evasion, and legislate in a way that makes everybody pay fairly.

Apple asked me for my BANK statements, says outraged reader

You signed in blood!

I'm not even surprised :)

Wales slams Amazon over lack of Kindle support

"Welshy!"

I was brought up in Wales. Most of the locals were first-language speakers, and Welsh was compulsory in the same league as English - Welsh grammar exams, Welsh lit. exams. Primary school was completely in Welsh, and lots of my secondary school lessons were in Welsh too. In order to learn (anything) I had to be sent away to a Welsh learning school for a few terms.

It's a bit silly, really.

OpenSUSE 12.3: Proof not all Linux PCs are Um Bongo-grade bonkers

Re: Linux as a desktop is a failure, its time to move on

Yeah, they were really estimates based on my own surfing around. w3schools has 5% Linux visitors, Valve/Steam's customers are now 2% Linux, and Statcounter has just short of 1%, so there is always guesswork. MS counts sales of PC's with Windows, and lots of Linux users don't register when they dual-boot or wipe, so any kind of crossover there won't be noticed.

It's not enough of a failure to stop big organisations like the French parliament or the US Navy adopting, it's not enough of a failure for companies like MS to see it as their biggest threat, (later contributing kernel code!), and for software companies like Valve to see potential in it's customer base.

I can't say it's been a resounding success, but the statement that Linux is a failure and it's time to move on is simply not based in the real world.

Re: Linux as a desktop is a failure, its time to move on

It's not a complete failure, figurewise. Compare desktop market share percentages to time of company or project existing. Apple started shortly before MS in the late 70's, Linux has been going since the early 90's. Even with no marketing per se, Linux has gained between 1 and 5%, and that's just the ones we know about. Compared with Apple's 10-15% in longer time than MS, which is frankly pathetic in comparison, considering their superbowl ads and trendiness...

Of course, we all know MS got their huge market share from being the best, and not because of monopolistic antitrust fuelled FUD and E&E tactics. That would be tin-foil-hat crazy talk!

For most people, the main reason they use Windows is game and work compatibility, which are all being addressed (slowly), and there's always more companies and organisations switching all the time.

Build a BONKERS gaming PC

Where's the ergonomic Alienware keyboard with built-in screen, the joymousestick with many protruberences, or the triple-screen configuration?

Hehe, I remember when a "gaming case" was one with handles so you could carry it to LAN parties...

Top tools for junior Linux admins

I'm learning all this stuff for fun in my spare time.

I've found TLDP really helpful. I'm going to try a LFS build as soon as I'm happier with vi - I actually learned to ed (for fun), which came in really handy for learning to grep. I'm working my way through distros that force me to learn before I'm happy (then I move on) - started with Linux Mint, moved onto a Debian minimal install, now I'm making Gentoo my personal distro.

As a complete beginner, man pages would just blur in front of my eyes. Now I read them like novels, gasping with delight when I find a useful new switch!

grep, regex, TLDP "guide"books, wikibooks, LPI Essentials Guide (from linupfront) and generally googling for "advanced [keyword] tutorial" like bash, zsh, grep, regex, globbing were all helpful. I tried getting books out of the library, but they were all stuff I knew, except for Networking for Dummies, which was a big help for a complete noob like me learning TCP/IP principles (even though it's Windows based, the standards are all the same) and it's good for when things with ipconfig comes up.

That's me, anyway...

We shall CRUSH you, puny ROBOT... with CHESS

Clever stuff!

That's clever. No machine could ever crack a chess puzzle better than a human. Sarah Connor 1, Skynet 0...

I think all chatrooms should have an KOL Altar of Literacy style captchas:-

When they get [there|their|they're], [there|their|they're] going to put on [there|their|they're] mittens.

[Your|You're] nuts if you think I'm going to polish [your|you're] armor for free.

Heavily armed dolphins on rampage in Black Sea

Reg Headlines

You never know with Register headlines. I thought some MySQL deal had gone through or something, turns out it's actual frikkin' armed dolphins. Wow.

A history of personal computing in 20 objects part 2

They Live!

I had an Acorn Electron, and used BBC's in school, then Archimedes' in high school. I remember seeing my first PC and wondering where the mouse was! I think the Raspberry Pi is a direct descendent of the BBC - didn't Acorn sort of become ARM, which is what the Pi is based on? And the Pi's creator cited inspiration from the BBC machines he used as a kid. Superior Software (who made Repton) still lives - you can buy Repton games for iPad now...

Also, really nice to see the C64 has been reborn as C64x - a 64-bit Linux (Mint?) PC in the shape of a keyboard, just like the original C64. Even has the option to boot to a classic C64.

AmigaOS last updated? Two months ago.

I think I was really lucky to have been growing up at a time when computers were just simple enough that a 10-year-old could write machine code, while being just complex enough for that to be a worthwhile endeavour :)

Reg readers serve up bacon sarnie amuse-bouche

The best

is the one you have when you're hungry.

Then it doesn't matter if it's cheap bacon, soggy-rinded, and dripping grease all over your fingers, it's the best damn bacon sandwich.

New vicious UEFI bootkit vuln found for Windows 8

Could this root a tablet?

I'm interested - not exactly sure how UEFI works yet, but does this mean:-

a. An UEFI enabled Windows PC could be "rooted" legitimately to enable a dual-boot?

b. A MS tablet with enforced UEFI could be legitimately rooted to enable an Android or Ubuntu install?

Also, is this exploit open source?

And before I forget, "Yaarr!"

A load of Tosh: External hard drives the new 'personal clouds'

Cloud is one of those weasly umbrella terms, like Web 2.0, Intellectual Property, or "because God." I have a Hotmail account from before the MS buyout. I used it to store my WAV files. When I was a kid, I had mates who stored their bleeping MOD files in each other's houses over phone lines.

I can have a personal home server these days with a messenger-style protocol I can access from anywhere, but that's what it is. A server. Software as a service, is just a program running online, like Prestel. Virtualising the server OS to make it stretchable across hardware is tautologically that.

But if somebody sells me a "Personal Cloud", I expect to ride around on it shooting lightning at people...

Lumping unrelated things together under a single term is the opposite of science!

Here we go again: Critical flaw found in just-patched Java

I'd like something new

I'm kind of sick of half-open things becoming de facto standard. In a way, it's worse than having fully closed things like Windows, because Oracle pretends it to be open. I'd really like a nice W3C approved binary/VM web standard.

On the Web-Java side we have IcedTea which doesn't work much. On Flash, we have Flashdevelop, Haxe, and Gnash, which doesn't work much. Oracle has Java sewn up, like Adobe has with Flash. HTML 5 is very limited as to the binary you can stream at the moment. Something completely different might be called for. These latest security blips are just convincing me more.

Anyone know of anything like that? I wouldn't mind forcing my users to download a "plugin" if I knew it was GPL'd, and cross-platform W3C standard (and it worked!)