Posts by b4k4

Debian 6: Have your Debian and eat your Ubuntu too

free as in

Let's not forget also that Debian is free as in by the people for the people. No Canonical or Red Hat steering this. Debian is the Tunisia of operating systems.

OpenOffice 3.2 - now with less Microsoft envy

docx?

I've been opening docx in OOo 3.1 for months already. Perhaps you had an earlier version?

Somehow can't see Oracle taking care of OOo the way Sun did, but let's hope so. Desktop Linux (as in for use in displacing MS from offices and schools, not as in "Abiword and K-office do everything I need") is very heavily dependent on OOo.

Microsoft genuinely chuffed as judge drops WGA case

newspeak

if the issue is whether or not it was a security update, and it turns out that it was, then the meaning of security upate has been changed.

that would be in addition to changing the meaning of genuine advantage.

HTC rises to challenge after Android struggles in Europe

nm?

I think htc androids use network manager. At least mine never connects to the bloody network until I re-enter the settings over and over, or maybe re-boot. When I sit at the kitchen table near the fridge, which has the AP on top, it tells me "out of range, remembered"

Mozilla lights fire under Thunderbird

@lift and shift

That's exactly why we use t-bird here. You can even lift and shift between platforms, I've done win-lin and win-mac, and of course win-win (of course because the OS gets so slow you have to re-do it). Just move the profile. Everything is in there.

Asustek opens curtain on desktop 'supercomputer'

errr.

You *could* get 1.1 teraflops by adding those two together and dividing by two...

by could, do you mean in another universe where 2 x 1.1 doesn't make 2.2?

Microsoft's web world shrinks

sandman: why market share counts

because they hope most users will stick with their MSN/Bing advertising home page. That's also the reason they are fighting so hard to not let users select alternative browsers during install. IE brings in the advertising dollars.

Oracle's Ellison gambles with OpenOffice's future

fork!

Time to escape from Oracle's clutches. How about an IBM sponsored fork?

Acer intros 10in Aspire One netbook

what simon said

Linpus lite is shite. It is an undercover microsoft project intended to put people off Linux.

I put debian lenny on my One, and now it works properly.

When are we getting a debian icon?

Fedora 10 debuts with nips, tucks

re: Linux VM's and Life

I have a house packed full of machines running linux. I would estimate about a dozen, mostly given to me by friends, though I have bought at least three of them new and two second hand. Plus I have a young wife and 3 kids who let me go surfing every weekend or when the waves are good. I have never used a VM and don't know how. Real computers for a real life.

Asus to phase out sub-10in Eee PCs, says CEO

good point

<quote>The default Xandros is rubbish, I wonder if ASUS do it deliberately to get people to use XP.</quote>

Good point. the linpus on the aspire one is as bad as it sounds. update broke networking, useful apps wouldn't install (dependency hell), no LAN browsing, sound not working properly. I put Lenny on mine, but I bet ordinary users take it back and get XP.

These companies are giving linux a bad name amongst the general consumer public by installing badly home-customised distros. Just what MS ordered!

Microsoft faces second 'black screen' lawsuit

advantage?

I never quite understood why they called this "Advantage". Surely its to your disadvantage if you have to shell out cash to keep using your computer?

Like the Microsoft "permissive" licence I suppose, and "open" XML.

Anyway, good on them for dis-alienating their future user base. Maybe the Chinese will turn to free software instead.

London and Wales to get fast fibre

hahahahaha

You backward limies make me laff. "Fast" you call it. I have had 100Mbps in my house in Japan for about 5 yrs now. So has everyone else I know. And it costs me less than my mum pays for 512k ntl "broadband".

But I know why Britain is no longer Great. Its because of generations of eating detergent caused by failure to rinse the dishes.

Ten tweaks for a new Acer Aspire One

re: Linux Fan succumbs to dark side

Your time is not that valuable. Time learning a unix OS is well spent, as you hone your Jedi skills. Money given to the Empire prolongs the tyranny of the Death Star.

Turn away from the dark side, before its too late.

Use the source for good.

terminal

actually if you type terminal instead of xterm, it will look nicer and have a better font.

the worst thing about the aspire one is lack of nw browser. if you work on various networks and need to mount samba shares, then you need to know them and type mount commands. Unless you install pyNeighborhood, but that only seems to work on public shares.

actually the really worst thing is the useless battery.

then there's the rpm based distro. acers repo seems to be offline sometimes also.

apart from all that, its a great little machine if you wanted a 901 but they only had windows and you didn't want to add yet another + to MS sales.

Japanese children warned off mobiles

my kids

have a children's model phone. It has a built in alarm and GPS that at the flick of the emergency switch sounds a loud alarm and simultaneously calls my wife and shows her a map of where the phone is located. Being a kids phone, it is limited in what else it will do.

Of course these features are rarely needed in japan, but it means they can go to football training and kumon by themselves, enjoying the kind of freedom that I had as a boy, but which is sadly lacking from today's world.

About a year ago there was a case of a pervert chasing a kid in a public toilet. Her quick thinking friend snapped him on her mobile and then ran to police station. They used the photo to track down the bastard.

Mobiles are here to stay. There's no going back. Good on the Japanese for thinking about limiting the harm.

Asus Eee PC 900 Linux Edition

anyway

I was getting sick of that girl. Can we have a new one?

Delayed Debian developers get thumbs up

where is the debian icon?

debian makes the world a better place. debian volunteers are an example to us all

Microsoft soothes Vista pain with Bossploitation flick

I watched it

all. It was disturbing.

The truth is in there - the sales team rocks, not the software.

What cringe worthily rubbish lyrics.

They spent a fair bit putting that together, but if they really wanted advertising, surely they would have just bought the Rolling Stones again, like they did for win95?

The missing five-minute Linux manual for morons

There - like I said!

AC works for microsoft. An article poking fun at linux, incidently does the same to MS, and AC bites back about how bad linux is and how much better windows is.

AC works for microsoft. His job is to write `anti-everything thats not MS` and pro-MS comments on tech sites, regardless of the actual content of the article. He obviously didn't read this one, right? One of his stock phrases is "recompiling the kernel", something that most linux users have never even heard of.

Adobe launches 'free' Flash-only media player

VLC

I second the VLC comment. And its not "free" as in you pay for it by suffering ads, and having Adobe spy on your stats, it actually really is free.

Dave Cameron pledges to Open Source UK.gov

@sixth form AC

You should take a look at Debian Edu. It scales to the size of all the schools in a Norwegian city. It could easily run your college for zero licensing cost. Then you could spend your adobe license and the MS bribery money (wait a minute - you still pay them to push their products on children, right?) on a bit of training for yourself. As for your CS3 brag - congrats on helping Adobe push their stuff on tomorrow's designers. Another generation of vendor lock in can only be good for software innovation right?

Cross industry AJAX group reaches IE 8 'consensus'

trojan horse team

I couldn't agree more and I got a little insight into the way it works when I recently read the blog of the guy who let MS into the OLPC and showed them how it all works, so that they can put XP on it and extinguish Sugar.

Basically, they send really nice guys who know what they are talking about, and who probably genuinely have really good intentions. Unfortunately, those guys are the trojan horse.

Reality crashes Google hippie code fest

vincent

what's it like living in the soviet union? or do you work for microsoft?

Debian's not like that

Debian is completely open, meaning all debates and disagreements are public, has very firm moral guidelines, and a very clear understanding of the meaning of "free". This naturally causes tensions with people corrupted by society's norms.

If only countries/the world could be run like Debian.

Tux because where's the whirling spirit?

Royalties are the admission price, Microsoft tells freetards

they have patented wiping your arse

they have people who's job is dreaming up silly ideas, or re-wording the bleedingly obvious, and then getting them patented. the whole world violates such patents.

Didn't El Reg list a few of Bill's more recent patents, eg. "to do list"?

open source have to stop inviting MS to their conferences. it just gives them undeserved publicity ops so they can pretend to be playing fair with everyone.

AJAX patent threat to giants under the hammer

outrageous

Patents are supposed to protect inventors from being ripped off. How can you sell a patent to someone? (who is obviously not the inventor and therefore doesn't have anything to protect.) And they will then use this patent to blackmail random companies.

What an evil and twisted world we live in.

Why I downgraded from Vista to XP

so many comments..

..on such a worthless article, that I can't resist adding one more.

Imagine some kind of soviet world where people were unhappy that the new Lada was slower than the old one, but those were the only choices.

You use what Big Brother gives you. That's why you are posting these pathetic comments on this pathetic article. Wake up from your nightmare! Rise up and tear down the wall! Start by refusing to give them your money. You can do very well with no-name machines from Taiwan or China.

Microsoft indemnifies Novell Moonlight users

this is BS or the world is in a sad state

"Microsoft will provide codecs worth $1m to every user downloading"

What nonsense. How can codecs be worth money? Your content can't be seen if you make it in a secret codec.

Now, if they would just give me the million in cash I wouldn't complain.

Canonical fires up box Landscaping business

ubuntu and server?

is it just me, or does anyone else think that taking Debian Sid, beautifying it a bit in a hurry (those 6mnth deadlines), and then installing it on servers may not be such a good idea? Especially many servers all over your business. Why don't they install Etch on all the servers and Ubuntu on the desktops, and still use this Landscape tool?

And I second the open source question. Ubuntu doesn't play fair. They fix up Sid and keep it to themselves. When they invent something of their own, they don't even GPL it.

I'll be off then.

Microsoft immune system rejects execs

infiltrators

they are probably off to infiltrate other companies and organisations, like they did with the BBC.

Microsoft tries to CTRL-W WordPerfect lawsuit again

@imposter from mars

I don't think a man from mars wrote that, because I could understand what he was writing.

Mozilla pulls offensive viral campaign

For real amusement

they should publicize the msfirefox site, the most entertaining web site on the Internet:

http://www.msfirefox.com/

its better now.

AOL tosses Netscape into the dustbin of history

I remember when

downloading the 11MB Navigator 4.something was an overnight, fingers-crossed download. Expensive also, when I only got 40 hrs a month with my dial up. Computer magazine CDs were actually useful in those days.

I liked the way the status bar told you how many images were left and how big they were, so you could see whether to continue waiting for a page to come in or not.

Netscape was the foundation on which Mozilla built. Respect is due - they did the right thing and open sourced it. Thanks Netscape.

Vista sets 2007 land-speed record for copying and deleting

re:So does this bug just involve the estimate being ..

..woefully wrong or does it actually take a RIDICULOUS amount of time to complete the transfer?

Real life operation:

Win XP, sempron, 512MB. Zip up my documents and transfer to USB key took a couple of minutes.

Brand new Vista dual core 2GB. Copy from USB key onto Vista took about half an hour. THEN unzipping on Vista took 2 HOURS!

Why does unzipping take so long?

BusinessWeek novel turns Google's cloud into epic hero

all martian to me

Does anyone else glaze over and scroll on while still less than half way through amanfrommars' comments?

Asus Eee PC as 'hard to get your hands on as a Wii'

re:Japan doesn't like Windows

<quote>Japanese don't much like windows - it's Mac terretory.</quote>

I disagree. Windows is everywhere. Many Japanese web sites are IE only. Sure, Macs are on the up, but that's just an iFashion thing. Japan loves windows much more than the begrudging west does.

<quote>Also they are rather use to small high quality laptops </quote>

True. Walk into any high street electronics store and you will find a dinky little sub notebook by Sony, Toshiba or Panasonic. The price is double (or more) the eee, but they are fully featured.

BBC redesigns and 'widgetizes' homepage

where are the bookmarks?

Why would I want to customise the BBC home page, when it will be reset every time I use a different computer?

Its not like they are making it useful, with bookmarks and e-mail (a la my.yahoo) that you sign in to access. Its an index to their content. Just display it simply and efficiently, and forget this nonsense.

Gates' spontaneity highlights IE data gap

re: MSFirefox

<quote>

you mean like this:

http://www.msfirefox.com/

</quote>

This is fantastic! Who the hell had the time to craft such a masterpiece? And why haven't MS had it taken down? This is more than a thought crime, you know.

"Where am I today?"

"Microsoft offers the best implementation of its web standards. Period."

"We continue to be a leader and partner in slightly open source development,"

This has enough to keep me laughing for weeks.

Eee PC: better with Windows?

@Dave Bell

<quote>..and schools will want their pupils to know how to use Microsoft Office.</quote>

Wrong. If schools can't teach ideals and higher morals, eg. using open standards and ethical software, then there is no no hope of ever making the world a better place. Schools are where we start to chisel away at the monopoly.

Didn't you watch Chitty Chitty Bang Bang?

Drive for superfast broadband switches up a gear

this looks like a good place

to brag about my 100Mbps (yes that's 100 base T ) fibre connection here in Japan. I've had it for about 3 yrs already, and it costs about 20 of your british quid a month, including phone and cable TV.

hahahahahah

you are stuck in that cold and rainy techno backwater, and I'm not.

Reg Dev wants your Big Three for 07 and 08

You're supposed to send e-mail

not write it all in the comments

Six-month hangover for 60-pint Scotsman

re: You don't comment much.

<quote>the moderator tends to wait on them, so you can't see what others have written</quote>

Are you defending the moderator? I thought he was too busy having a cuppa and looking at pr0n.

Mandriva bigwig (nearly) accuses Ballmer of b-word

@Billy Goat Gruff

<quote>As long as we insist young employees understand how to use Windows-based software then educating them in something else is wrong. </quote>

What are you talking about? What does windows do? Runs programs and manages files, thats all, exactly like Linux does. Point click drag drop. That's all.

At my school we are 100% linux. Naturally we use OOo. Do I think kids can manage on Windows and MS Office? Of course they can, its the same, only simpler and easier (only 1 choice of everything, designed for your grandma to be able to understand)

Dutch Consumer Association declares war on Vista

zip is not zippy

How about this?

Zip up my documents on Sempron WinXP = 1 or 2 minutes

Transfer to stick drive

Transfer from stick to new Core Duo Vista computer

Unzip on Vista = over an HOUR.

I'm talking about a lightweight my documents, as you can see from the XP time. I think it was something like a dozen Mb.

I'm sure the poster above is right. Each file was transmitted to the RIAA and/or others for checking before being allowed to be written onto the HD.

Curl mounts Silverlight and AIR challenge

@ b shubin

Well said sir!

Lenovo unwraps Reserve Edition ThinkPad

Are support contracts good then? For what?

A few of you are saying its worth it for the support. Why is that? Are you saying you can't fix your own computer problems? Are you sure you are on the right web site?

Blades carve up Top 500 supercomputers list

interesting read

Francis should write the next top 500 article.