Posts by sack

Roughly 30 years after its birth at UK's Acorn Computers, RISC OS 5 is going open source

I loved my trusty A3010 (the exact machine that the demo in the first youtube video was captured from).

Yes there was a lot of jealousy of the Amiga because it got all of the 'good stuff' on my part, but the 'if you want it you'll just have to code it' mentality it gave me, the fact that coding was so accessible in RISC OS (the basic doubles up as a macro assembler, although I preferred !extASM) and the fact that instruction set-wise I ended up on the right side of history all led to good things.

Apple security update leaves iPhone 3G users unprotected

Some people are still locked in to contracts

I'm not sure what would be the best cutoff date for support, but I'm sure it should allow people to complete their minimum contract terms with their phone providers before their handset goes EOL.

I'm stuck with this 3G for another year now, apps are starting to not install because they're built against 4.3 (updates fail too, leaving you in limbo unable to install the update, or revert to the last good version you had) and it seems to have picked up bugs over the last upgrades and then been declared EOL without any fixes. The thing does less now than it did when I got it!

If my minimum contract with orange had passed I wouldn't be so annoyed, but now I'm stuck with this thing for another 12 months.

AVG scanner blasts internet with fake traffic

Link scanner vs acceptable use policies

I never thought of that particular angle - I just uninstalled it because it made my machine crawl to a halt and crashing firefox.

The thought which occurred to me at the time was what happens to the person who types the seemingly innocent search that a long-time internet user knows is a bad idea? It reminded me of the time I had a support caller who claimed her child was researching whitewater rafting and sailing so decided to google for 'water sports' and was clearly unamused at the result set* that came back. That's bad enough - but the link scanner is going forth and pulling these pages down, through your ISP and through a firewall, creating logs that could look like an acceptable use policy breach or maybe even a criminal act. Even if the user has already thought better of clicking on any of the results its too late.

Where do people stand with this I wonder?

*After subsequently repeating what she claimed happened me and my collegues only got pictures of aquatic-based sports persuits and no filth, so we've ruled 'husband looking at filth and blaming child' on this one.

Virgin Media and BPI join forces to attack illegal filesharing

they don't seem to have thought this through...

Virgin media can bugger off. I don't torrent (music quality seems to be its own copy protection at the moment - there's nothing I can be bothered to download, let alone pay for) but my girlfriend is abroad which racks up a lot of video calling time and this leaves me semi-permanently throttled even on the XL package.

So what have I learned from this?

well... it's taught me that their cheapest, crappiest package would suffice if it wasn't for the video calls, and she's back in the UK in a couple of weeks anyhow. I smell a massive bill reduction coming.

The New Order: When reading is a crime

It's days like this I'm glad to be a Nottingham Trent dropout

All the fun and partying and less fuss like this :)

To be fair though I don't think the uni have really done anything wrong in this case - they reported a suspicioin and there's probably something in the law someplace where they would be legally responsible if they didn't report 'reasonable suspicion'.

so the police make a ballsup of it and everyone gets their name dragged through the mud. If his visa was really that bad how come he stayed in Nottingham for 10 years and got that job?

Bloody immigrants, coming over here, contributing to society fairly and holding down a job... who do they think they are?

Paris - because she's been lawfully entered by a few good men, none of which overstayed their welcome

PC World, Currys staff to be dumped in DSGi rescue plan?

'work faster or else'

'I really like but other ideas were gems of wisdom from the stock team at head office who said the way to deal with the profit loss caused by clearance is to "sell clearance products quicker" ... the less said the better?'

I used to work for PC Servicecall and the management seemed to have been trained from the same manual.

their very limited view of the world was 'If this cell on that spreadsheet goes red then we aren't hitting targets'. problem is somewhere down the line they lost any kind of idea of what the physical events behind those numbers actually were and just resorted to 'hit the targets by working faster *or else*'.

All they care about is their bottom line - and now they don't even have that. I won't be crying for them.

Paris - because she sucks too....

School crossing guards join CCTV panlollycon

I'd be a little more sympathetic about road safety around schools

if it wasn't for the parents.

The thing that annoys me is that from my own personal observations it's the parents of the schoolkids who are a lot of the problem. Around one school in Norwich they double park, drive down the wrong side of the road whilst holding the horn down because a cyclist is already using the road, park on the pavements and school areas, do over 40 around a blind corner in a 20 zone... and you have to slow to a crawl because of the sheer amounts of oversized cheap imported Mitsibishi Pajeros on the school run (whose owners should take a look at wikipedia to discover both why this is an appropriate choice of vehicle and why the spaniards don't drive them)

...and these are the same people who would be parading outside the council house screaming 'please somebody think of the children!' if a driver came within a mile of running into one of their own kids.

if parents are going to drive like this they lose the right to complain I think.

The irony of the whole situation is despite all of this the aggression, speeding and bad driving all seems to come to an immediate halt the moment the lollypop lady pokes her stick out onto the road. The police don't even get that kind of respect around here.

Capita buys way into ComputerLand

My sympathies...

To everyone who fled across the road to computerland Nottingham to escape the clutches of Crapita when they took over PC Servicecall.

may your next move be more successful....

Bolluxed router configuration? Click here for help

Okay... own up

who is waiting in the wings with the patent for 'a method or apparatus for reverting software or related equipment from a bolluxed state?' to troll this one?

Jane Fonda c-word slip shocks US

Cockney rhyming slang, anyone?

Can't we simply replace the offending word on TV with rhyming slang.

I think 'James Blunt' would be a suitable alternative

MySpace wins UK domain name that pre-dated its service

I don't see the problem here

I really don't see what the anger is about here.

It was just a holding page on a now unused domain. If it was the original users site doing whatever the original user chose to do within reason then there would be plenty of room for outrage but that isn't the case.

It's just some registry company holding on to a now unused domain in order to make some easy money and it just makes a mockery of the registration system and hinders peoples ability to simply go forth and register an unused domain. It annoys the hell out of me the way these generic links pages are supposed to demonstrate use of a domain and 'I'm not squatting, honest guv!'.

I get the feeling that an unpopular target won this round and that's all most of this argument is really.

Winamp blighted by bug brace

Whats-amatta-you, eh?

It's-a-not so bad

shuduppayaface.

(now just to make the people cracking the ultravox fans cracking jokes feel bad the day you sat at home lamenting the fact joe dolce beat vienna to number 1 was the day I was born :)

PC superstore suffers breakdown over Linux notebook

Carlos might actually have a point

It all depends on what 'non booting' means. There's not enough information in the question.

My first question would be 'what is the last thing you see before it stops'

BIOS screens I go with carlos, anything windows related I try safemode - and multiple AV installations were quite common machine killers.

Music industry cripples eDonkey network

The music industry has almost completely removed any incentive for me to pirate anything

mostly because they don't seem to be releasing anything worth having. At least it means I only buy a decent album once in a blue moon and everything is legal...

PC superstore refuses to take sack in hand

PC superstore refuses to take sack in hand?

That's why I quit working for PC Servicecall :)

Please forgive me my sins... a confession

I did work for PC Servicecall on their helplines.

I'm not exactly an idiot (although the odd lapse in common sense isn't unheard of) and I did go in with the best of intentions and to 'tide me over until I decided what I wanted to do with my life' after failing my degree (again - not a lack of knowledge really, more to do with lectures being next to a large selection of pubs).

Eventually I worked my way up to the glorious position of 'Technical Advisor' where one of my duties was covering the branch action line and dealing with queries from store staff in addition to the confused customers who in many cases did seem to have been spoonfed some utter crap to get them out of door a couple of grand lighter and weighed down by a PC that would do anything except what they wanted to do in the first place (usually selling fast PCs with almost no graphics features as a 'gaming machine').

You could sit there, cover the phone display and I swear half the time if it wasn't for the fact that store staff anounce themselves you'd be hard pressed to tell the difference between the staff and customers!

For what it is worth though when I was there I was around a group of people who did genuinely know what they were doing and care. They were only too happy to pull out all the stops and get the customer back on track doing exactly what they wanted to be doing. Sadly this did often mean reversing something one of the muppet callcentre or store staff had done that had only made things worse and I felt a customer had been royally shafted I would actually brief them on the sales of goods act, coaching them with the required wording to get the store manager to take note. Probably made me unpopular a few times but I value my self respect more than my managers opinion any day of the week.

But alas the targets went up and up, catheta* (sorry - capita) took over and customers were getting a rougher ride as time went by due to some decsions which could only be described as 'really bloody stupid' by people on the shop floor, managers only knew how to scream variations of 'work faster or else!' in order to meet targets and apathy ran rampant everywhere.

Apart from the people who saw the writing on the wall who promptly buggered off in the summer exodus of 2006. And by christ I'm glad to say I'm one of them!

I'm finishing up a software engineering degree now and there's no way in hell I'm going to give up or be tempted into slacking off this time because I know where I'm going to end up if I don't succeed. I'm going to end up a tech guy.

If that doesn't motivate me nothing will.

*Always thought this was a more appropriate name for the company seeing as they seem to excel at taking the piss.

Get a passport, enjoy casual sex with foreigners

I don't see what's wrong here

This kind of behaviour will benefit the UK teen pregnancy figures....

.. Might screw the figures up for spain, france and germany as the lads abroad work their way methodically around 'Shagalluf' but on the home front we should be quite safe.

And maybe we'll rule the world again, in a more nefarious and sneaky way this time by spreading our seed over europe.