Posts by Richard

Software pirates put sizeable dent in UK economy

Correction

The title should be "Companies with business plan which defies reality lose money".

Red Hat are doing OK, and everyone's copying their software.

Tarantino plans Faster Pussycat! Kill! Kill! remake

Not actually such a good film

Perhaps I'm one of the two people here to have actually seen FPKK, in the cinema no less. It's basically a slow black and white road movie. Arty perhaps but not particularly entertaining. If you want an entertaining (I'm slightly loathed to use the word 'good') Russ Meyer film, check out Supervixens or Beyond the Valley of the Dolls.

Personally I'm waiting for the Tarantino treatment of 'Nora-neko rokku: Sekkusu hanta'.

Exposed! Bill Gates' last day at Microsoft

Concentrate

on making an operating system which doesn't make me want to throw chairs across the room when I'm trying to write software for it.

Good luck Bill, we won't miss you much. Now if only Windows Server 2008 could retire too.

Intel saddles HP with new Itanium

The Alpha died for this?

A chip of real beauty died so that Intel could sell a few hundred Itanics a year...

Apple coughs up G4 refunds to dissatisfied Danes

Anyone in the UK

I have one of these iBook-G4-of-death machines. Anyone

want to join in a complaint to trading standards?

Rich. (www.annexia.org)

Slave kids working UK cannabis farms

More poor victims of the phony war on (some) drugs

Legalise it.

TV makers go ape for 100Hz LCDs

Energy?

I wonder how much more energy these things take? Presumably at least double the power for what sounds like a minute increase in quality.

Rich.

Merchants remain angry over Protx outage

3D "Secure" & Halifax

My bank, the Halifax, have been doing this to my online account for a few months. It's incredibly annoying because the phishing page sorry, I mean important security page, _does not_ come from halifax.co.uk or some recognisable domain It comes a site, the exact domain I forget now, but the domain contains an apparently deliberate misspelling. Double doh!

I've backed out of all such transactions so far and told the Halifax I want to opt out of this scheme until they fix the above problems.

Rich.

Virtualization software to crush server market

Processors and memory

Virtualisation in the way Xen & VMWare do it isn't magical. If you allocate 10 virtual machines (VMs) to 10 tasks, and each task requires 1 GB of memory, then your server needs > 10 GB of memory. Similarly you're best to allocate a CPU core to each VM to avoid contention. Same applies to disk space. So although you maybe only have a single case and power supply, you still need to buy all the really expensive stuff (CPUs, sticks of RAM, disk drives) in quantity.

"Containerised" approaches (OpenVZ, Solaris Zones) are a bit more efficient in that they only run one kernel, so they can share CPU, RAM and disk space. However they are never going to be as flexible as full virtualisation (Xen, VMWare) because you can't run multiple operating systems alongside each other, and the separation isn't so strong.

Rich.

BBC iPlayer launches, but with limited viewer reach

To Ally:

"The Beeb don't actually have a choice with all this DRM malarky. The outside production companies demand it, so there's no point the BBC even debating the point internally."

Huh? The license payers pay the BBC who pay the "production companies". In other words WE are the customers here and we can tell these "production companies" to let us watch the telly when & where we want. Like now when I'm sitting in bed with my (Mac) laptop which is unable to view this content, even though I'm on the first trial and I'm a license payer.

Rich.

BBC Trust backs calls for Linux iPlayer

Content providers

Fraser, the "content owners" are us. We paid for it first time around.

To the Windows trolls: Plenty of people use Linux. Apple is again a major seller of personal computers. Plenty of people want to see the content on other devices. Own a mobile phone? It certainly isn't running XP.

Rich.