Posts by OneTwoThreeFour

BT betters pay offer under strike threat

I think the problem is

Many people are being made redundant/having their hours cut/having their pay cut and therefore for BT employees to reject a 2% rise followed by a 3% rise + bonus payments seems a bit...

How a Tory gov will be the most tech-savvy in history

Well

I hope The Reg will publish Labour, UKIP, BNP and SNP editorials as well.

Seriously though, when did you become such an obvious outlet of political propaganda?

(There were only Tory undertones previously.....)

Microsoft undercuts planned Office 2010 retail price

After the last version

I for one won't be upgrading, the sheer illogicalness of the new UI makes the product a complete pain in the ass. I can only assume the new version will be even more counter intruitive, and another waste of money.

Firefox 4.0 developers granted year of living dangerously

Opera

Only problem is it can't recover tabs. But then again it doesn't crash like Firefox.

T-Mobile picks Orange for merger

Quite hard to put a good spin on this

I used Orange->Virgin (T-Mobile) and just moved to 3. In cities the coverage seems the same, but in rural areas I get good Orange/3/O2 and no T-Mobile.

I remember Orange's customer service being pretty awful, and they sent us several faulty phones which we spend a lot of time messing around with sending them back again, which eventually prompted me to move to Virgin Mobile.

I think Virgin have great customer service, poor network (T Mobile's network is sooo shit!) but they've pretty much lost their differentiation now their plans are so complicated. And I really hate Virgin Media, who signed us up under a special offer they then claimed didn't exist costing us an extremely large sum of money (maybe around £150?).

The biggest shocker for me was 3: really good customer service, great value pay-as-you-go and indispensable free Skype coupled with very good network coverage. Amazing.

If anyone's looking for a new network, I highly recommending having a look at Three!

Oracle should relax Sun's Java Community control grip

Their number one priority should be

To start their Developer website again from scratch (java.sun.com) so that it's actually possible find whatever you're looking for. At the moment it's a complete and illogical mess and full of broken links (rather like the Java libraries?). I hate going on there to do anything, even finding the download link for one of the many versions and flavours of Java is normally very hard!

Talking of versions, they should make the version numbers and Java versions more clear and logical.

But please, please, please kill that awful website.

Opera stretches vocal cords with v.10 release

Opera all the way

I used to use Firefox until I realised it was getting progressively worse with each new version: more bloated and useless features cluttering the interface and making it harder to use. After upgrading to Firefox 3.5, I hated basically every new thing in it (and there's not much new) and in addition it completely killed my computer - everything ran unbelievably slowly when Firefox was open.

A clean install with Windows 7 (final) gave the opportunity to use IE8 which, for some reason under Vista and Windows 7 only loads web pages about 30% of the time. A removal of IE8 from all the defaults later, and not wanting to even try and installed the evil Firefox 3.5, Opera seemed the next choice.

Opera is everything Firefox should be. Despite the amount of features, the browser is small and compact and has maintained a simple and easy interface. Webpages download reasonably quickly, and generally I do like the feel of the browser. A little problem with Java (you have to copy the DLL from the Java directory to System32) but otherwise perfect.

I highly recommend Opera if you're becoming fed up of Firefox's increasing bloat and instability. It's a really excellent browser and I haven't found anything it can't handle better than Firefox.

FSF launches Windows 7 anti-upgrade letter campaign

The problem with Linux is it's a pain in the ass

In my opinion and experience, unless Linux works first time it's a complete pain in the ass and just not worth the hastle of trying to edit hundreds of cryptic text files to get, for example, a monitor working.

Linux is also more inconsistent between different distros and even between versions of those distros than Microsoft and most Linux vendors seem to think it's a good idea to release a new version every few months which either requires a reinstall or several hundred megabyte downloads. Even Microsoft don't make you do that.

Case points. My netbook runs Fedora 8. Trying to upgrade to Fedora 10 or 11 was a complete failure as the webcam, sound, display didn't work. Case two, on my main laptop, Unbuntu installs and after a week of trying to get the wireless, graphics card and dual monitors working, the only option was to go back to Vista which worked first time on all hardware. Case three, it took me and my collegues three days to get my work computer working with dual monitors and to configure it to use the network correctly. With Windows it would have worked first time. Yesterday I installed Windows 7 on my home computer, which downloaded all the drives from the internet with the exception of the touchpad and worked, you guessed it, first time.

Like someone else said, the only option with Linux is self help and looking through forum posts ful of information as to which text files you should try and edit and which odd-sounding commands to try and HOPEFULLY you might get a working PC.

In the end it's better to pay for a quality Microsoft operating system than it is get a pile of crap for free.

Firefox users caught in crossfire of warring add-ons

Uninstalled

Enough said.

Beeb tech boss seeks to expand TV licence online

Wow

You guys are so negative! What's wrong with paying if you use iPlayer instead of free-riding?

No-one's suggesting a broadband tax here!

Jail for Hong Kong techie who exposed stars' sex snaps

@AC

Section 161 of the HK Crimes Ordinance (based on UK law!) is "access to a computer with dishonest intent". The access doesn't need to be unauthorised, you don't need to actually gain anything, it can even be your own computer - you just have to access the computer with some kind of dishonest intent that fits in the very wide-ranging categories. So they could even argue him accessing a suspicious folder labelled "Pictures" was with dishonest intent, and as soon as he made a copy he had "view to dishonest gain for himself or another" which ensures he was ready to be banged into prison.

(You can find it online here http://www.legislation.gov.hk/ Chapter 200, section 161).

Plod called in on MPs' expenses leak

Disgrace

I am fuming with anger at the MPs - I can almost understand that they're milking their self-created system for all its worth but still staying "within the rules" and blaming the "system" but what is completely inexcusable is trying to find someone to prosecute for telling taxpayers how taxpayers' money was spent! This is absolutely crazy, how can any semi-intelligent being think this isn't in the public interest?

For me, Hazel Blears come amongst the worst of the bunch award. There's a clip of her on BBC of her, in an extremely condescending voice, saying how the system is wrong but she claimed within the rules. Right, so you completely milked the system, you knew you were immorally completely milking the system, yet you have no remorse and believe it was within your rights. Then you talk to the people who pay your wages like they're dirt. Awful.

While I'm looking forward to hearing what the Toff Party have been claiming on expenses, with Brown as a "leader", corrupt MPs and Wacky Jacqui imposing un-needed IDs cards and all the other rubbish, it's hard to see how anyone would vote Labour back in. Having said that the Tories was to reintroduce hunting and all three want to sell of part of Royal Mail to a foreign-owned company which has a reputation in their own country for being rubbish, somehow thinking they won't be rubbish here. This is the same foreign-owned bomb-named company that is resisting competition in its home country but routinely complains they don't have enough competition in the UK.

Fantastic, all our politicians are corrupt and have completely lost the plot.

Cameron: Give the UK's health records to Google

@ MnM

The BCS did a presentation at my University, and afterwards the lecturer told us his take on BCS was not to bother. I had free membership for a year and cancelled afterwards; in other words I agree.

No point in BCS other than some people want it on their CVs: people who aren't in the know might think it's a good thing.

Mozilla releases final Firefox 3.5 beta

Good point

Thanks for the helpful comments - I do have AdBlock installed (which also merrily updates itself frequently) and NoScript and I think some crashes are from Adobe Acrobat, but also some are from Firefox itself. I think I'll uninstall the addons and see if it helps. The thing is I didn't have many crashes until 3; 2 rarely crashed, but point taken that maybe it's not all FF's fault.

But still a new FF3 installation is unusable on my Aspire netbook (Linux) as it's slllloooow.

I would also like the option to revert Firefox's tab bar back to FF1 style (to get rid of the scrolling buttons and have tabs shrink infinitely small), you can hack it but the behaviour is not quite as nice. (But I wouldn't want to stand in the way of progress ;) ).

I might try Opera also, I did download it after a few crashes but didn't get around to trying it.

If Firefox keeps getting more bloated, I'm sure someone will make a Firefox Lite, otherwise in true open-source way we could try and make it ourselves!

Anyway thanks guys!

Firefox needs improvement

I hope they manage to improve reliability and speed as Firefox 3 crashes consistently for me and is extremely slow compared to earlier versions. I can't use it on my netbook as it's too slow.It also seems to update continually and find addon updates every few days which is extremely irritating - open source software seems to have far more updates than Microsoft, not to mention Linux versions change completely every few months! (I'll leave the rant about how useless Linux is on the desktop unless it's provided pre-installed to another day.)

Firefox is also getting too complicated IMO - part of its charm at first was being simple, quick and reliable. Maybe they should make a "lite" version with all the new things stripped out.

Dell moves 40,000 Ubuntu PCs

Hummm

They might actually want to make Ubuntu run on Dell hardware first - it hates everything about my Inspiron notebook. No wireless, power features...

The problem with Linux is that when it works it's good and when it doesn't it's impossible to get it work without spending hours and hours googling and typing commands at the terminal. It's a complete gamble as to if it works with anything and is a complete pain in the ass - the fact Linux is an exceptionally flaky OS is the reason it hasn't gone onto the desktop. Generally, it is a pain in the ass to use unless everything you want happens, by some miracle, to work out-of-the-box.

Example: at the start of the year all of my flatmates (including me) converted to Ubuntu full time. That's 4 of us. Of those, only three had a working system (mine was basically unusable with Ubuntu). After two months, only 1 was still using Ubuntu (and that was only because he'd been using it before we started). One guys' new monitor refused to work with Linux regardless of what he done so back to Windows it was, and after a month of battling the other guy just decided it was too much effort to get anything whatsoever working on it. Oh, and by the way we're studying computing at Uni....

When they make an OS that has standard applications that are easy to install, an intuitive GUI for doing configuration, better hardware support, more common-sense everything it might be desktop-friendly.

As it is desktop Linux will never work - they should go back to the drawing board and write a desktop OS from scratch.