Wait... what? The Australian Museum has exhibits removed often enough that security staff need mobile alerts when it happens? Maybe they need better alarms instead of an app.
Also, I'm glad to hear it's halved in funding and is only $1m - I was all set to write a rant about the cuts in funding to other departments when they're funding app-writing, but $1m doesn't buy much anyway.
Re: If you want some sort of consistency with Windows
What hardware is hard to get going under Windows Server? I've connected all sorts of weird stuff to Windows 2003 R2 and 2008 R2 servers without issue - including some obscure USB anti-piracy dongles and at least 2 Nvidia Geforce cards.
Can't be bothered reading the fine print since it's irrelevent out here, but does it say you have to recontract to a 24 month contract, or just recontract? A 12 month BYO contract would count if they haven't been specific.... Of course they no doubt reserve the right to cancel this any time once the contract expires ;)
Well all the people involved in running them seem to live in Soviet Russia. So at best, the comrades are likely to be getting around 20kbps on their dialup. That, and the bitterly cold winters, slow down the production of OSX-compatible malware suitable for the KGB to spy on the US.
At least that's how I imagine the thinking at Apple going along.
"he was confident the president would address the needs of both Hollywood and those concerned with internet privacy."
Ummm, so that would be the "need" to buy a new yacht? Or the "need" to throw another multi-million dollar awards spectacular so that the industry can feel good about itself for another couple of months?
The problem is not piracy. The problem is greed.
I admit to downloading movies, but if it's good, I pay for it. Sadly it seems the entire entertainment industry has taken on a "quantity over quality" mentality over the last decade or so - roughly the same time period the internet has been popular, which is convenient since they can continue to blame everyone else but themselves.
Well in the case of the NBNCo tower plans, apparently many people DIDN'T want to use the service... Apparently these people who don't care for computers think the rest should suffer for their benefit - perhaps we should do the same with roads and not build them because 2 or 3 people don't want to use them.
> Apple products have a proven record of - No Need For Support - when install base is educated
Proven by who?
> A PC person needs a huge IT department whereas an Apple IT dept is a 10th the size.
Increase the Mac deployment, and I assure you IT departments will start employing complete morons to support Macs too, and support departments will become stretched. It's not the fault of Windows (or any other OS) that IT departments employ useless people.
> Savings in support more than makes up for the additional cost of well designed and user friendly interface Apple products.
User friendly my arse - I keep hearing that, but the stream of users I see wanting to do simple things on iPhones, iPads and iMacs astounds me. And when I'm asked to do something even slightly technical, I spend hours tearing my hair out (not because I'm a clueless Windows user - I use various Linuxes too, and have played with QNX and other exotic OSes - all easier!)
If you are for these sorts of judgements on the grounds that people shouldn't pirate, then you clearly have never created any content of your own.
These judgements are all leading us to the scary situation whereby creative works will only be available via the "official" channels. Websites that offer sharing of creative content will end up being very locked down, or simply closed down if draconian rules like this keep getting applied.
It's not just about freedom to pirate - it's the practical side. How can a computer tell if the video I just uploaded was made by me or by a major company somewhere?
I have been the victim of copyright infringement. But worse, I have been the victim of poorly implemented automated copyright checkers... A film I created was deleted by a large website even though 100% of the content was created by me and my family. No copyright music, no copyright video clips. Just us and content we had generated.
Ironically, the same website refused a takedown request I made when someone else created a profile using images from one of my videos (basing the profile on a character we had created for that film).
Trouble with the target market wanting Windows is that Windows 8 on ARM still won't help - the people who can't cope with finding new software for Linux/Android are generally the same people who don't want to re-buy Office - and Office 2007 ain't gonna run on ARM.
> couldn't tell the difference if they'd spent twenty quid down Tandy and stood in the corner.
I'm one of the people who CAN tell the difference... But I'm also one of the people who doesn't see the point in spending thousands of dollars on audio equipment just to reduce the entertainment value of music by making it way too serious.
Completely agree with "Unicornpiss" - when we see signs of a failing drive at work, we usually guess WD. When we see a WD drive in a misbehaving computer, we test it (and it's usually the cause). One of the shop owners always tells us off for diagnosing by brand, but 99% of the time it's right.
That said, every brand has it's bad days. How many people swore they'd never trust Seagate after the 1TB firmware issue? And of course there's the Deathstar thing... And then there was Maxtor (who I'm pretty sure Seagate only bought to save us all from the data carnage).
My wees grow cotton - have done for about 10 years. It doesn't "close the loop" as greenies like to say, but it does remove waste from the rivers, and reduces the required water and fertiliser at the farm.
Yeah - sampling and processing combined with an unbelievably big number of pixels makes me highly suspicious. It's almost like some of the Chinglish camera ads on eBay...
Re: 26 Letters in the alphabet so why did Proview choose the letter "i"?
Read the advertising material posted with the article... It stood for "Internet Personal Access Device" - which in China in 1998 would have been something not many people had.
Apple may have released the "iMac" in 1998, but they didn't release the "iPad" until a long time later... And simply releasing one product with the letter "I" in it's name does not give you exclusive rights to that letter... Especially since Apple's reason for using that letter was the same as Proviews - "INTERNET" was a big new thing in 1998.
Re: Re: Must absolutely everything in the world involve Apple?
McDonalds is the most common "restaurant" in the world, but you don't see reviews of classy 5 star establishments comparing the experience or quality to them, do you?
In most cases, there's no need to compare any phone to another phone. Only the size and weight can really be used for reference, and even then that's relying on the reader having access to the same product (where a ruler is even more common than an iPhone).
I'm already using a box bigger than a fridge to house my comms gear, so why not add another :P
I agree completely though - and I suspect 90% of prospective NBN customers would also agree. Box size is a non-issue when it comes to getting faster outbound than bloody Telstra offer!
As long as they are required to assign records for their members public IPs pointing back to their appropriate .music domain, not any other TLD.
Will make blocking their systems from accessing mine far easier that way. Just drop any access matching a .music address. Not because I'm into pirating stuff, but because I don't want their systems checking up on mine to see if I've been naughty (which I think we all know they already do).
I work in a computer shop that also happens to be a dealer for a large telco, so we get a lot of iPhones wander in. Usually they'd like to know how to .......
Of course with the way Apple does their "intuitive" icon listing of everything installed, but in no particular order, it can take 2 or 3 minutes to find things like "settings" or "messages" among the pages of unsorted crap.
My Android phone on the other hand has this little feature where it sorts thing in a way we technical people call "alphabetically". A bit geeky, but I think Apple could probably patent it still.
The clothes folding lady has finished and gone away.... But that's OK, there's a black and white movie about a baby that suddenly disappeared from it's cot (crib?) leaving only it's dummy (pacifier?).
I read the quotes as meaning they've taken a sampler of the data that USERS were STORING. I mean that, after all, is what they're basing this whole case on.
Logs would be hardly relevant to such a case - a filename does not have to match it's content. For example, many photos posted on the web are called "IMG_<random number>.jpg" but that are not photos of numbers. And Youtube is filled with videos with amazing and unbelievable titles which all turn out to be Rick Astley promising to not give us up.
Don't think we get any spam at work to the address we've used for multiple domains as tech contacts... Can't really tell - we get maybe 10 spam messages a week, which all get filtered into a spam box anyway.
Honestly, I don't get these people who want to hide their identity when they register a domain... If it's that worrying, don't register it! Problem solved.
"The work doesn't just start being done by magical elves."
Of course not. But "third-world-company-A" could be located a thousand kilometres from "third-world-company-B", or even in another country.
Or the new company might already have staff coming off one project that's end-of-life and doesn't need new staff for the new project.
The idea that company A would close and company B would hire them is basically the sort of crap government number crunchers pull when they want to pretend that their choices are OK.
They released a (beta?) version for Windows Mobile 6 a while back, but then dropped it when MS decided no one needed to run their old software on their shiny new phones.
Windows Phone's lack of sales is not just about lack of sales. The big part of the "joke" is that MS basically pushed away the sizable group of Windows Mobile users they already had in an effort to make their OS more iPhone style.
A common comment about WP7 was along the lines of, "If I have to ditch all my Windows Mobile software, I may aswell go to Android."
Clearly this article was written by someone who has too much money. I'd happily take some of that money since it's clearly a burden. Unfortunately I will not be using such a donation to fund a stupidly big SSD.
So far I've seen 2 uses of this in our shire.... Both epic fails.
One was when the NSW Police violated the Spam Act by sending out a non-emergency SMS to everyone to kindly ask us to be on the look out for a missing elderly man - they gave us his name, but failed to describe him. Not sure if they wanted us to ask every older man if he was the guy or not...
And the other was when they sent out a bulk message to Wee Waa residents telling them to evacuate immediately. Because they only had 3 days before the flood waters got there. And the predicted level put it at least 1/2 way up the levy bank around the town.
They later sent out one stating the previous was a mistake and they didn't need to evacuate - but too late then. They'd already thrown any newer residents into a panic.
I'd hate to be an independent VHA dealer right now... Sounds like they're all gonna get hit with a big time wasting exercise. And who gets to pay for it? The dealers who didn't do anything wrong of course... Bloody government.
I'm a tech in a computer repair shop - I'm seriously not looking forward to Windows 8 appearing.
On the topic of this article, I'm really not looking forward to the number of "my data disappeared" type of calls... We already get enough "I used the recovery disk" calls as it is. We don't really need a button as easily accessible as it is in Win8.
I'm still using the MS Intellimouse Explorer (version 1) that I bought when I finished school in 1999. The cable has broken at the mouse end at least 3 times, but thankfully it was a ridiculous length to start with so I just chop it and resolder.
I also agree with Rolf a few posts up - the improvements in mouses over the last few years seem all to have been to make them rubbish. I have trouble finding one to fit in my hand now that they make them all to fit into laptop bags instead!
Has Bob been to a rural area? Some towns with hospitals will end up only having mobile phone coverage at the 2 ends of the highway through town if they go ahead with such a crazy scheme.
And the way things work in most places I've been, you'd get Telstra at one end and Optus at the other. Imagine having to drive to the other side of town to make a call on your bloody mobile!
There's no reason why MS would need to handle the updates. They just need to create a framework (extended onto Windows Installer for example) that allows software vendors to include their own update servers into the daily Windows Update schedule. The systems used by most Linux distros do this - the distro supplies a list they support, but users can add extra software distribution services to the list to check.
That would do away the with abominations other vendors have created to reinvent this wheel, and would mean we don't need to have 3 or 4 different software updaters running on every computer, meaning less crap running in the background, and giving us all slightly faster computers (and less annoying popups at logon).
At least most of the non-IE browsers have ways to make them more to your liking.
I personally don't understand WTF both Firefox and IE had to copy Chrome's look - surely the people who wanted Chrome would be running it already, right?
They need to stop issuing numbers to bloody mobile broadband devices - surely the networks can deal with internet only devices not using a phone number (or using a fake one).
Some people I've dealt with have up to 3 prepaid data only accounts that they don't even really use. And almost every non-IT person seems to think you need a mobile broadband stick just because you bought a new laptop!
My understanding is that the flash on these hybrid drives is only used for caching reads. The drive just copies commonly read sectors to the flash.
You will see improvements outside of booting though, such as loading commonly used programs. Particularly if you open and close the programs more than you boot up since the drive will learn that you hit those areas far more often.
Plus with 8GB of flash on these newer ones, they'd fit the files used during boot and a collection of your most used software (web browser?).
With torrents, the IPs of people transferring chunks of the file(s) are freely available from the trackers and other transfer participants. I don't think you need any court orders to log these IPs. The participation gives out the information, and the copyright holder needs to nothing more than investigate whether it is actually their own content.
Additional techniques would be to post pirated files on common piracy *linking* sites and link people to servers controlled by the copyright holder - the server logs are the property of the copyright holder then. This technique would potentially be considered illegal though since it's enticing people to commit the crime they then want to prosecute.
It's also very easy to make stupid config mistakes when in a hurry, especially where the box in question isn't planned (at the time) to be a production box.
Now who here can honestly say they've never done something stupid in a config?
>But although the Air's tough and light unibody aluminium casing is part of its appeal
Really? I always thought the Macbook Air's big appeal was it's price compared to other shiny products from the fruit company. It's been their cheapest option for some time now.
And given the number of people who switch to MacOSX because "you don't need an antivirus", I doubt the aluminium was the reason.
The reason we're not allowed to have incandescent light bulbs anymore is because they apparently produce carbon. And since carbon is such a deadly harmless substance, it makes sense to force things with mercury and other such heavy metals into our lives.
Don't get me started on the lies about the lifespan of the alternatives, either... OK, I'm started anyway now... I swear I change CFLs as often as we used to change the old fashioned bulbs. And that's with decent brand ones. We got boxes of free CFLs from our power company a few years ago (government funded I think) - they ran for a few weeks before failing. WEEKS! Yet for a mere 50c, an incandescent lamp in the same fitting would run for months.
Well, both my parents (who aren't computer people by any means) would. And if pressed, I could probably name another 3 or 4 non-nerd people I personally know who would prefer a Linux laptop.
The reason netbooks with Linux were a problem was because they were also extremely cheap - at half the price, every idiot and his dog bought them. The original ones would have been complained about by the complainers regardless of OS since the specs were extremely low to keep the price low.
Register
662 posts • joined Thursday 1st March 2007 06:36 GMT
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alerts for museum thefts?
Wait... what? The Australian Museum has exhibits removed often enough that security staff need mobile alerts when it happens? Maybe they need better alarms instead of an app.
Also, I'm glad to hear it's halved in funding and is only $1m - I was all set to write a rant about the cuts in funding to other departments when they're funding app-writing, but $1m doesn't buy much anyway.
Re: If you want some sort of consistency with Windows
What hardware is hard to get going under Windows Server? I've connected all sorts of weird stuff to Windows 2003 R2 and 2008 R2 servers without issue - including some obscure USB anti-piracy dongles and at least 2 Nvidia Geforce cards.
Re: Fine print - you are locked in!
Can't be bothered reading the fine print since it's irrelevent out here, but does it say you have to recontract to a 24 month contract, or just recontract? A 12 month BYO contract would count if they haven't been specific.... Of course they no doubt reserve the right to cancel this any time once the contract expires ;)
Re: Apple's security rollouts are atrocious
>At what speed do Apple think that botnets work?
Well all the people involved in running them seem to live in Soviet Russia. So at best, the comrades are likely to be getting around 20kbps on their dialup. That, and the bitterly cold winters, slow down the production of OSX-compatible malware suitable for the KGB to spy on the US.
At least that's how I imagine the thinking at Apple going along.
@ChrisInAStrangeLand
> they filed for a patent for using a bunch of decade old technologies
Ummm... Most inventions are a collection of older technologies bundled together. It's the method of bundling that is generally patented.
"The needs of Hollywood"
"he was confident the president would address the needs of both Hollywood and those concerned with internet privacy."
Ummm, so that would be the "need" to buy a new yacht? Or the "need" to throw another multi-million dollar awards spectacular so that the industry can feel good about itself for another couple of months?
The problem is not piracy. The problem is greed.
I admit to downloading movies, but if it's good, I pay for it. Sadly it seems the entire entertainment industry has taken on a "quantity over quality" mentality over the last decade or so - roughly the same time period the internet has been popular, which is convenient since they can continue to blame everyone else but themselves.
>Macs don't run Linux, customised or otherwise.
Sure they do - My mum ran Debian on an old purple PPC iMac for years.
April fool's?
Or telling the future?
Actually - I hope no Apple management types read this article... They might get ideas.
Re: catch 22
>Want a mobile signal...... Yes?
Well in the case of the NBNCo tower plans, apparently many people DIDN'T want to use the service... Apparently these people who don't care for computers think the rest should suffer for their benefit - perhaps we should do the same with roads and not build them because 2 or 3 people don't want to use them.
Re: Support
> Apple products have a proven record of - No Need For Support - when install base is educated
Proven by who?
> A PC person needs a huge IT department whereas an Apple IT dept is a 10th the size.
Increase the Mac deployment, and I assure you IT departments will start employing complete morons to support Macs too, and support departments will become stretched. It's not the fault of Windows (or any other OS) that IT departments employ useless people.
> Savings in support more than makes up for the additional cost of well designed and user friendly interface Apple products.
User friendly my arse - I keep hearing that, but the stream of users I see wanting to do simple things on iPhones, iPads and iMacs astounds me. And when I'm asked to do something even slightly technical, I spend hours tearing my hair out (not because I'm a clueless Windows user - I use various Linuxes too, and have played with QNX and other exotic OSes - all easier!)
Anyone for this...
If you are for these sorts of judgements on the grounds that people shouldn't pirate, then you clearly have never created any content of your own.
These judgements are all leading us to the scary situation whereby creative works will only be available via the "official" channels. Websites that offer sharing of creative content will end up being very locked down, or simply closed down if draconian rules like this keep getting applied.
It's not just about freedom to pirate - it's the practical side. How can a computer tell if the video I just uploaded was made by me or by a major company somewhere?
I have been the victim of copyright infringement. But worse, I have been the victim of poorly implemented automated copyright checkers... A film I created was deleted by a large website even though 100% of the content was created by me and my family. No copyright music, no copyright video clips. Just us and content we had generated.
Ironically, the same website refused a takedown request I made when someone else created a profile using images from one of my videos (basing the profile on a character we had created for that film).
Not old enough
Not old enough makes for an awesome excuse not to buy things though...
Re: I don't know...
It's probably wrong that my first thought when I read "Romulan" was Big Bang Theory and Tweety Bird...
:S
Re: I love the new ipad!
Trouble with the target market wanting Windows is that Windows 8 on ARM still won't help - the people who can't cope with finding new software for Linux/Android are generally the same people who don't want to re-buy Office - and Office 2007 ain't gonna run on ARM.
Audiophiles
> couldn't tell the difference if they'd spent twenty quid down Tandy and stood in the corner.
I'm one of the people who CAN tell the difference... But I'm also one of the people who doesn't see the point in spending thousands of dollars on audio equipment just to reduce the entertainment value of music by making it way too serious.
Re: I just hope...
Completely agree with "Unicornpiss" - when we see signs of a failing drive at work, we usually guess WD. When we see a WD drive in a misbehaving computer, we test it (and it's usually the cause). One of the shop owners always tells us off for diagnosing by brand, but 99% of the time it's right.
That said, every brand has it's bad days. How many people swore they'd never trust Seagate after the 1TB firmware issue? And of course there's the Deathstar thing... And then there was Maxtor (who I'm pretty sure Seagate only bought to save us all from the data carnage).
Nothing new...
My wees grow cotton - have done for about 10 years. It doesn't "close the loop" as greenies like to say, but it does remove waste from the rivers, and reduces the required water and fertiliser at the farm.
http://www.narrabri.nsw.gov.au/index.cfm?page_id=1145
Yeah - sampling and processing combined with an unbelievably big number of pixels makes me highly suspicious. It's almost like some of the Chinglish camera ads on eBay...
Here was me thinking they might have gone and added support for Google's proposed "spdy://" protocol...
Re: 26 Letters in the alphabet so why did Proview choose the letter "i"?
Read the advertising material posted with the article... It stood for "Internet Personal Access Device" - which in China in 1998 would have been something not many people had.
Apple may have released the "iMac" in 1998, but they didn't release the "iPad" until a long time later... And simply releasing one product with the letter "I" in it's name does not give you exclusive rights to that letter... Especially since Apple's reason for using that letter was the same as Proviews - "INTERNET" was a big new thing in 1998.
Re: Re: Must absolutely everything in the world involve Apple?
McDonalds is the most common "restaurant" in the world, but you don't see reviews of classy 5 star establishments comparing the experience or quality to them, do you?
In most cases, there's no need to compare any phone to another phone. Only the size and weight can really be used for reference, and even then that's relying on the reader having access to the same product (where a ruler is even more common than an iPhone).
Re: must be coming soon
I'm already using a box bigger than a fridge to house my comms gear, so why not add another :P
I agree completely though - and I suspect 90% of prospective NBN customers would also agree. Box size is a non-issue when it comes to getting faster outbound than bloody Telstra offer!
They aren't asking to have it banned outside of China. They simply want imports and exports of it to be stopped....
I suspect Apple would have asked the same thing of the Galaxy Tab if they'd managed to get it banned in it's country of manufacture.
3G dongles
"On what I use (Fedora 14, CentOS 6.2 Desktop) you just plug in the device and tell NetworkManager what country + provider you're using"
Yep - And it generally takes about 1/4 of the time it does on Windows, and usually just works. It's actually quite bizarre when you think about it.
I'm OK with it.
As long as they are required to assign records for their members public IPs pointing back to their appropriate .music domain, not any other TLD.
Will make blocking their systems from accessing mine far easier that way. Just drop any access matching a .music address. Not because I'm into pirating stuff, but because I don't want their systems checking up on mine to see if I've been naughty (which I think we all know they already do).
Already a box
I work in a computer shop that also happens to be a dealer for a large telco, so we get a lot of iPhones wander in. Usually they'd like to know how to .......
Of course with the way Apple does their "intuitive" icon listing of everything installed, but in no particular order, it can take 2 or 3 minutes to find things like "settings" or "messages" among the pages of unsorted crap.
My Android phone on the other hand has this little feature where it sorts thing in a way we technical people call "alphabetically". A bit geeky, but I think Apple could probably patent it still.
Awwww....
The clothes folding lady has finished and gone away.... But that's OK, there's a black and white movie about a baby that suddenly disappeared from it's cot (crib?) leaving only it's dummy (pacifier?).
Re: Why they didn't grab the servers?
I read the quotes as meaning they've taken a sampler of the data that USERS were STORING. I mean that, after all, is what they're basing this whole case on.
Logs would be hardly relevant to such a case - a filename does not have to match it's content. For example, many photos posted on the web are called "IMG_<random number>.jpg" but that are not photos of numbers. And Youtube is filled with videos with amazing and unbelievable titles which all turn out to be Rick Astley promising to not give us up.
Don't think we get any spam at work to the address we've used for multiple domains as tech contacts... Can't really tell - we get maybe 10 spam messages a week, which all get filtered into a spam box anyway.
Honestly, I don't get these people who want to hide their identity when they register a domain... If it's that worrying, don't register it! Problem solved.
"The work doesn't just start being done by magical elves."
Of course not. But "third-world-company-A" could be located a thousand kilometres from "third-world-company-B", or even in another country.
Or the new company might already have staff coming off one project that's end-of-life and doesn't need new staff for the new project.
The idea that company A would close and company B would hire them is basically the sort of crap government number crunchers pull when they want to pretend that their choices are OK.
It was on WM6
They released a (beta?) version for Windows Mobile 6 a while back, but then dropped it when MS decided no one needed to run their old software on their shiny new phones.
Re: I love these "all six" jokes
Windows Phone's lack of sales is not just about lack of sales. The big part of the "joke" is that MS basically pushed away the sizable group of Windows Mobile users they already had in an effort to make their OS more iPhone style.
A common comment about WP7 was along the lines of, "If I have to ditch all my Windows Mobile software, I may aswell go to Android."
Article author can donate money to me anytime
Clearly this article was written by someone who has too much money. I'd happily take some of that money since it's clearly a burden. Unfortunately I will not be using such a donation to fund a stupidly big SSD.
Stupid
So far I've seen 2 uses of this in our shire.... Both epic fails.
One was when the NSW Police violated the Spam Act by sending out a non-emergency SMS to everyone to kindly ask us to be on the look out for a missing elderly man - they gave us his name, but failed to describe him. Not sure if they wanted us to ask every older man if he was the guy or not...
And the other was when they sent out a bulk message to Wee Waa residents telling them to evacuate immediately. Because they only had 3 days before the flood waters got there. And the predicted level put it at least 1/2 way up the levy bank around the town.
They later sent out one stating the previous was a mistake and they didn't need to evacuate - but too late then. They'd already thrown any newer residents into a panic.
Oh dear
I'd hate to be an independent VHA dealer right now... Sounds like they're all gonna get hit with a big time wasting exercise. And who gets to pay for it? The dealers who didn't do anything wrong of course... Bloody government.
Not looking forward to Windows 8
I'm a tech in a computer repair shop - I'm seriously not looking forward to Windows 8 appearing.
On the topic of this article, I'm really not looking forward to the number of "my data disappeared" type of calls... We already get enough "I used the recovery disk" calls as it is. We don't really need a button as easily accessible as it is in Win8.
They can keep it
I'm still using the MS Intellimouse Explorer (version 1) that I bought when I finished school in 1999. The cable has broken at the mouse end at least 3 times, but thankfully it was a ridiculous length to start with so I just chop it and resolder.
I also agree with Rolf a few posts up - the improvements in mouses over the last few years seem all to have been to make them rubbish. I have trouble finding one to fit in my hand now that they make them all to fit into laptop bags instead!
Rural areas
Oh great... He's got one crackpot law enacted, one basically accepted by the party he's in bed with, and now comes up with a 3rd.
Is he trying to prove the carbon tax is sane by suggesting even crazier ideas he could have had instead?
Rural areas
Has Bob been to a rural area? Some towns with hospitals will end up only having mobile phone coverage at the 2 ends of the highway through town if they go ahead with such a crazy scheme.
And the way things work in most places I've been, you'd get Telstra at one end and Optus at the other. Imagine having to drive to the other side of town to make a call on your bloody mobile!
MS only needs to create a framework
There's no reason why MS would need to handle the updates. They just need to create a framework (extended onto Windows Installer for example) that allows software vendors to include their own update servers into the daily Windows Update schedule. The systems used by most Linux distros do this - the distro supplies a list they support, but users can add extra software distribution services to the list to check.
That would do away the with abominations other vendors have created to reinvent this wheel, and would mean we don't need to have 3 or 4 different software updaters running on every computer, meaning less crap running in the background, and giving us all slightly faster computers (and less annoying popups at logon).
Don't worry
Google's currently trying their hardest to make their search results as crap and irrelevant as Bing, so it won't be too hard to switch over soon.
Why can't Google just go back to being good at searches?
At least most of the non-IE browsers have ways to make them more to your liking.
I personally don't understand WTF both Firefox and IE had to copy Chrome's look - surely the people who wanted Chrome would be running it already, right?
Mobile Broadband
They need to stop issuing numbers to bloody mobile broadband devices - surely the networks can deal with internet only devices not using a phone number (or using a fake one).
Some people I've dealt with have up to 3 prepaid data only accounts that they don't even really use. And almost every non-IT person seems to think you need a mobile broadband stick just because you bought a new laptop!
No.
My understanding is that the flash on these hybrid drives is only used for caching reads. The drive just copies commonly read sectors to the flash.
You will see improvements outside of booting though, such as loading commonly used programs. Particularly if you open and close the programs more than you boot up since the drive will learn that you hit those areas far more often.
Plus with 8GB of flash on these newer ones, they'd fit the files used during boot and a collection of your most used software (web browser?).
I'm not a lawyer, but...
With torrents, the IPs of people transferring chunks of the file(s) are freely available from the trackers and other transfer participants. I don't think you need any court orders to log these IPs. The participation gives out the information, and the copyright holder needs to nothing more than investigate whether it is actually their own content.
Additional techniques would be to post pirated files on common piracy *linking* sites and link people to servers controlled by the copyright holder - the server logs are the property of the copyright holder then. This technique would potentially be considered illegal though since it's enticing people to commit the crime they then want to prosecute.
Stupid in a hurry...
It's also very easy to make stupid config mistakes when in a hurry, especially where the box in question isn't planned (at the time) to be a production box.
Now who here can honestly say they've never done something stupid in a config?
Privileged ports
WTF would it achieve to run it on a non-standard port and then remap it at a NAT level?
>But although the Air's tough and light unibody aluminium casing is part of its appeal
Really? I always thought the Macbook Air's big appeal was it's price compared to other shiny products from the fruit company. It's been their cheapest option for some time now.
And given the number of people who switch to MacOSX because "you don't need an antivirus", I doubt the aluminium was the reason.
Mercury isn't carbon.
The reason we're not allowed to have incandescent light bulbs anymore is because they apparently produce carbon. And since carbon is such a deadly harmless substance, it makes sense to force things with mercury and other such heavy metals into our lives.
Don't get me started on the lies about the lifespan of the alternatives, either... OK, I'm started anyway now... I swear I change CFLs as often as we used to change the old fashioned bulbs. And that's with decent brand ones. We got boxes of free CFLs from our power company a few years ago (government funded I think) - they ran for a few weeks before failing. WEEKS! Yet for a mere 50c, an incandescent lamp in the same fitting would run for months.
Who'd want Linux?
Well, both my parents (who aren't computer people by any means) would. And if pressed, I could probably name another 3 or 4 non-nerd people I personally know who would prefer a Linux laptop.
The reason netbooks with Linux were a problem was because they were also extremely cheap - at half the price, every idiot and his dog bought them. The original ones would have been complained about by the complainers regardless of OS since the specs were extremely low to keep the price low.
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