Posts by dave the rave

Teenage noughties protocol BitTorrent reinvents itself again

Re: Rsync

I've always thought there should a system where spare capacity (assignable as percentage of free space for example) on workstation / laptop hard disks could be used in some kind of network raid storage used for onsite backups - 100 office computers will nowadays have at least 300GB going spare - why not create a massive pool of storage space where the parity / redundancy exists across say 50% of the computers - 300GB * 100 / 2 = 15TB of storage which could be used for non critical storage of archive data say or previous versions of backups?

Perhaps this BitTorrent technology could be used for the above?

Italy's High Court orders HP to refund punter for putting Windows on PC

what about UEFI?

UEFI???

Many laptops shipped in the UEFI state seem not to allow switching back to standard BIOS as the options are only available (asked to be left like this by M$??) once the consumer has upgraded the UEFI firmware.

How is the consumer meant to do this without accepting the EULA first to boot the installed OS to then upgrade the firmware? Many aren't going to be prepared with a bootable USB stick (a whole nonsense in itself) with the relevant firmware updates required. I dread the day I'm asked to turn up onsite and asked to install Linux etc where they currently don't already own a Linux device and expect it to just be a 15 min install as most will have read somewhere. IMOH - If consumers don't know they can use an alternative OS then they certainly will not be able to cope or care with doing it themselves.

Don't get me started on the "Why won't my old scanner or printer work with Linux??".