For now, just stick with the versions you already have...
And plan a slow transition to open source, don't throw everything out over night but ensure any new systems you implement are cross platform (eg web based and work on any browser).
If you plan it well, a slow gradual transition away from ms needn't be too painful or expensive... There's no point ditching what you've already bought and paid for, but similarly no point in getting yourself more locked in...
Most systems get refreshed after a few years anyway, so if you require that any new systems you deploy must be cross platform compatible then it won't be too long before the windows-specific business apps are rotated out anyway.
I have never understood why anyone would saddle themselves with skype...
Think back a few years, when BT was the only game in town and you couldn't just buy a phone or modem, you had to get one that was BT approved or rent the phone from BT themselves.
Now look at skype, you can't just use any client with it, you have to use a skype approved client (and as someone else has noted, asterisk was recently taken off that list)... They also work very hard to clamp down on anyone trying to reverse engineer the protocol.
You have a lot of users, locked in to a wannabe monopoly telco, sure it might be free to make calls to other skype users now but how long will that last? The more people who depend on it for day to day communication, the more pain those users will feel moving to something else so a lot wouldn't move and just pay up.
The quality is highly variable, and often extremely bad... I have had people call me from skype before and could barely hear what they were saying.
Similarly the costs to make calls outside of the skype network is very high, and you only have one provider to choose from. Welcome back to the days of monopoly telcos.
There are many SIP providers out there who provide cheaper calls and far superior service, which can be used from any device that supports the SIP standard.
People have fought for years to not be locked in to a single provider, we now have 4 mobile operators to choose from, many areas have both virgin and bt, and bt are forced to offer their lines on a wholesale basis so third parties can resell them. Skype is a huge step back, and yet people don't seem to realise this and are fooled by the bait.
I never saw why a mail client should integrate tasks and calendars, or for that matter contacts...
Contacts at the very least should be in their own program, with an easily called API that allows other programs to make use of them. The idea of having an integrated contact list in the email client dates from the days when email was pretty much the only communication medium used on computers... These days we have IM, VoIP and various other services so it makes a lot of sense to have a centralised contact list.
A calendar is also not related to email, and should not be in the mail client... I prefer the Apple approach where separate applications are provided and you can use whichever you want.
As for your statement "in an office/exchange way", this is down to exchange using proprietary protocols to make it difficult for third party clients to communicate with them. Outlook also doesn't support any standard calendaring protocol, and only has very crude support for IMAP mail.
If you have a standard (CalDAV) calendar server, combined with a standard (CardDAV) contacts server and LDAP for directory lookups, plus standard IMAP mail there is a lot more you can do...
You could use the Mozilla suite (thunderbird, lightning), the Apple suite (iCal, Mail.app, Addressbook) etc.. You can even use Outlook, but you'd need a third party plugin.
Because the protocols are standard, writing your own tools to interface with the system is much easier, for instance you might have a job or bug tracking system that automatically populates your calendar with time allocated to work on particular tasks, and you can use other metadata (eg presence of your user on the vpn, presence of your assigned laptop/phone in the office network) to work out where you are.
Also because the interfaces are standard, you can switch implementation of the backend server as it suits you without breaking your custom apps.
"Our next OS will contain some of the features Android has had for months or even years!"...
I don't like the idea of integrated skype one bit, the idea of being locked in to a single supplier is even worse than a telco, at least we have a choice of mobile operators these days.
By supporting skype, you are pushing people backwards towards the days of the monopoly telco. A single supplier, can only use approved clients with the service... Just like BT 40 years ago.
Android includes a standard SIP client for Voip, allowing you to choose from hundreds of providers or run your own PBX.
Is the fact that they're less intelligent what makes them more likely to be racist, or...
How about the fact that less intelligent people are likely to be less affluent, and therefore living in poorer areas of town with higher crime and higher levels of immigrant population, as well as doing less skilled jobs that are more easily replaced by cheap immigrant labour?
As someone else pointed out, service providers source the absolute cheapest equipment they can find.
I was stuck with one of those horrendous alcatel frog modems back when DSL was first rolled out in the UK, i replaced it with my own router just as soon as such devices came on the market and never even considered using isp-supplied garbage after that...
Unfortunately the trend with FTTC and Cable is to move back towards forcing you to use the provider supplied garbage.
I have the same issue with sky, their sky+hd box is huge and power hungry compared to comparable receivers available on the market and yet they insist on locking you in to their device.
It's as bad as the old days when you had to rent a phone handset from BT... Ofcom needs to force these providers to open up and allow customers to choose their own equipment.
I am extremely dissatisfied with all the streaming services currently on the market, for a number of reasons:
I, like many people in the UK live in an area where the only available broadband provider is BT and their various resellers, no LLU and no cable here.
Because of my distance from the exchange, i can manage about 3mbit (but the performance is not consistent) and I also have a plan which imposes a monthly download cap during the day, with unlimited downloads from midnight to 8am. A streaming only service is therefore useless, i don't want to watch movies from midnight - 8am, and the fluctuating connection speed makes streaming quite a poor experience anyway.
Being forced to use specific devices irks me, I have a linux based set top box which is more than capable of playing HD video, and yet these streaming services require their own proprietary clients which aren't available for these devices. Similarly, i am artificially prevented from using my linux based laptop to access the services.
I also detest the fact that only limited content is made available to users in the UK... This is basically a form of racial discrimination and should be illegal. There is absolutely no valid reason to provide an inferior service to people based on where they live. The world has moved on, people now regularly communicate worldwide and by the time a movie is finally released in the uk, people will have encountered so many spoilers online as to make viewing it pointless.
So instead of settling for these inferior services that discriminate against me based on what software i use, what devices i use and where i live... I simply acquire movies via torrents and usenet.
I can download at night (outside of capped hours), and store on disk to watch whenever i feel like it.
I can watch the downloaded movies on any device i choose.
I can convert the downloaded movies to view on other devices as necessary (eg you wouldn't want to store 1080p video on a phone that only has a small screen)...
I can download at whatever quality level suits me (even if doing so takes hours), rather than what my connection is capable of streaming in realtime.
I can watch movies or tv shows at the same time as my friends in other countries, and then join in the conversations about them afterwards.
I would quite happily pay for a service that provided me the same level of convenience and service, but it appears that if i pay i just end up with a vastly inferior service.
I have already stopped downloading mp3 files from torrents since being able to purchase standard mp3 files that are playable on any device.
I would have expected sales of higher end machines with discrete GPUs to not be hugely affected by the HDD shortage... It's not that drives weren't available, they were just in shorter supply and thus cost more, but when your buying a full highend computer the drive is only a small factor in the overall price...
Similarly, i'd expect people who are buying higher end GPUs to be more likely to opt for an SSD instead of a traditional HDD.
"This nonsense about fair pricing and a decent online experience CRAP is well CRAP.
This is reality: No one is entitled to a damn thing they don't pay for. If you want access to copyright protected works then pay for it or be punished."
While this may be true, it is far from fair... Many countries have unfair laws, but that doesn't mean anyone likes or supports them. For instance in Iran you can face the death penalty for assisting in the distribution of pornography.
Why should a company be entitled to money for a work someone in their employment performed upwards of 80 years ago?
The original idea of copyright was to provide artists a means to make money from their performance, in exchange for that work falling into the public domain after a set time, so that yes people would be entitled after that time to make or receive copies wether they paid for them or not. Now the balance has been tipped way too far in one direction.
As a result of these unfair laws, copyright holders ruthlessly attempt to wring every last penny out of their customers while giving them the bare minimum in return...
It's also quite telling that the deals offered in places like china and russia (where copyright infringement is very high) are far better than those offered here. Surely a country with lower levels of infringement and tougher enforcement should be awarded with better deals? But it seems the content industry doesn't think so, they see us as suckers and want to keep pushing to see how far they can go.
I believe in give and take...
The content industry believes in take take take.
I simply cannot support organisations that are seeking to screw me over in whatever ways they can, and certainly not when they've proven that the more they get from you, the further they try to screw you over.
A gun shop is not a good analogy at all, since the gun shop knowingly purchases their stock and directly offers it for sale.
A closer analogy would be a shopping mall which rents out units to third parties, and those third parties then decide what to stock and sell.
With the shear volume of content available on megaupload, it was not realistic for them to analyse every file... However they did act upon complaints when such complaints were received.
Personally i have used megaupload for various legal downloads, in particular i have downloaded linux based firmware images for routers and set top boxes from there. When you are developing a project that is given away for free, you don't exactly have a large budget for hosting services so it makes sense to use a free service like this.
The content industry is corrupt through and through, I simply will not support them in any way and the numbers of people thinking like me are only going to rise.
The film industry wants to push increasingly poor quality product, in an increasingly poor delivery mechanism for ever higher costs... They are greedy, and have absolutely no respect for their potential customers.
Copyright terms are simply too long, I believe in an honest day's work for an honest day's pay... The idea that someone who produced a piece of media 50 years ago still being paid for it today is absolutely farcical.
Cinemas are unpleasant environments (noisy, smelly, dirty, over crowded, uncomfortable, you've paid but are still subjected to commercials and patronising piracy warnings) and aren't getting any better, only more expensive.
DRM schemes artificially restrict paying customers and then try to rip them off by making them pay again for what they would have had in the first place (ie ability to view the movie you purchased on other format devices)... While pirates enjoy superior drm-free media.
Many movies are simply lousy, and yet instead of trying to offer a product people actually want, the movie industry is angry that modern communication technology allows people to spread the word too quickly and they cant stage their old scam or hyping a crap movie up and making a fortune before the word spread about how awful it is.
Region restrictions on media are an insulting form of discrimination. Why should I have to wait longer and pay more to see the exact same movie my friends in the US have just seen? On the other hand, why would i bother because by the time its released here i've read all the spoilers online. Why should i not be able to purchase dvds while on holiday, and why should i have to entirely repurchase my movie collection if i go to live in another country?
Whats even worse is that in countries like china or russia where piracy is rampant, cinemas are much nicer and/or cheaper, dvds are much cheaper and often released more quickly and the other legitimate offerings are often much better than whats offered in the west. So as a reward for having a lower rate of piracy, we simply get shafted.
There's no way i would want to support an industry that treats its paying customers with such utter contempt.
If a program depends on its source code being private to be secure, then it really isn't very secure at all...
I have the sourcecode for Linux, OpenBSD, FreeBSD etc and it doesn't help me compromise all the various devices (including security oriented devices like firewalls).
If having the code disclosed results in serious security risks, then the code must have some pretty glaring security holes that will quickly be identified in the source but are much harder to detect in a binary... And if that's the case, it is absolutely unforgiveable for symantec to have known about such holes and not fixed them.
Sourcecode should always be open, not only would it prevent software from having obvious bugs that are easily found in the source but it would make stealing sourcecode an utterly pointless activity since you could just download it from the internet anyway.
While having the sourcecode doesn't make it impossible for a backdoor to be hidden, most likely in the form of a deeply buried security vulnerability making it more deniable...
Having the sourcecode is nonetheless an improvement over not having it, and therefore relying on binaries instead.
The world is full of compromises...
A car with airbags, abs, roll bars etc may be safer than one without, but its still possible to crash and die...
Having the sourcecode is better than not having it, obviously its not as safe as writing your own code from scratch on hardware you also designed and built yourself, but it's the best option that's practical and affordable.
Wireless bandwidth is finite, it would become very easy to saturate the airwaves inside the DC, and all those metal racks and cables would likely cause interference too.
Instead, the costs of simply laying more cable between racks is pretty trivial, lay another bundle of fibre and run more 10G trunks
Also no reason to run lots of computers at home, i just use a single laptop and connect remotely to servers at work...
You still have your car, but you won't need to buy as much fuel for it... I assume you still use your car for purposes other than commuting.
The costs of heating (or in the summer, cooling) and the negligible costs of powering the laptop are pretty minimal compared to the financial and time costs of commuting to work...
It takes me an average of 2 hours/day to commute, assuming theres no delays... It costs about £10 in train fares, and in exchange for that i get to sit on an uncomfortable train, followed by an office which is noisy, uncomfortable, full of distractions and forced to compromise on environmental conditions...
Here i am at 6pm commenting on this story, had i been commuting i would be sat on a train in a tunnel listening to music and staring out the window.
The main reason blackhats are targeting adobe acrobat/flash these days more than they target IE is down to market share more than anything...
While no single browser has more than 50% market share, flash and acrobat are still installed on over 90% of machines making them prime targets.
Microsoft is by no means a "security leader", they still have by far and away the most insecure os currently available (not counting intentionally insecure systems used for training like dvl)...
Windows still has some major design flaws which impact security too, the file locking design and by extension the broken patching system (patches often appear installed, even if part of the install has failed), the crude file extension determine filetype (and executability) mechanism especially combined with hiding extensions by default, the ability to authenticate using password hashes directly, the default listening services (even on a standalone workstation) plus the practice of hiding these behind a software firewall rather than turning them off..
Then you have all the bloat required to support such an ageing patchwork codebase, plus all the additional crufty ways they try to work around the old design flaws, such as the fake registry and filesystems used to trick programs that expect to be installed/used as an admin user etc..
MS are stuck with a horrendous mess of a product, and no matter how much they try to polish it it's still going to be a turd... They'll never be a security leader until they ditch all the legacy cruft and start again from scratch.
Just a few years ago, the motive was to hack unix machines and there was no reason to hack windows at all...
Unix boxes were typically on fast lines with 24/7 connectivity and were never rebooted...
Windows machines were rebooted or crashed regularly, often on dialup or other weak connectivity etc.
Among those looking to conduct DDOS attacks unix machines are still far more highly prized than windows... They are rarely found on slow home user connections, and have a more powerful and flexible tcp stack for launching attacks from.
Linux machines are also not rare at all when it comes to servers... If you compromise a desktop you might get 1 or 2 card numbers, if you compromise a server it might be storing hundreds of them.
ATM systems have frequently had security problems, you can find several cases where ATM devices have been infected with various worms...
While it's true that there's no substitute for competent administration, and that competent admins can configure windows systems to be far more secure than it is by default... The same is true of linux, competent configuration of linux will also result in a system that is more secure than it is by default.
Also a lot of those admins' time will be wasted trying to work around windows many shortcomings or disabling/removing poorly designed functionality. Also if you harden a windows box, various things no longer work and users may be used to or even require these features.
Assuming equally competent admins on both sides, the linux system will still be more secure.
Payment services over mobile are widespread in many african countries...
The reason being, credit cards are fundamentally flawed from a security perspective and therefore totally unusable in countries with very high levels of fraud.
Paying with a credit card is the equivalent of giving away the keys to your safe, and trusting the merchant to only take an agreed amount from it... Very easy for them to take as much as they want.
Mobile online payments are a much better idea since you effectively initiate a bank transfer on the fly, and only send the amount you want. I would be much happier with such a payment system, but visa/mastercard have too much influence and would never let such a system fly because it disrupts their existing business model.
Installation is trivial, pretty much choose your hdd and hit go (but do consider, its designed as a standalone install and not to dual boot, so it will remove anything else already on that drive)...
You can do full virtualised images of pretty much any os, linux, bsd, windows, solaris etc and there's also the option to do paravirtualization of linux images with considerably less overhead via openvz.
Proxmox has considerably lower overheads than vmware or hyper-v (especially when running openvz instances), and can be managed using a standard browser, ssh or vnc client (some other systems require proprietary clients thus limiting what you can use to manage them)...
You also get advanced features like live migration, shared storage, clustering etc although i doubt these will be used much in a home environment.
Also funny you should mention remotefx, X11 has had the ability to do remote opengl for many years... Still, if you want to play games remotely you can install a windows image within proxmox and then allocate a physical videocard to it.
And proxmox is free, including things like live migration that vmware charge a fortune for.
Instead of spending all this money to increase the headline top speed, they should be trying to pay off their debts, expanding their network to areas it does not currently cover and increasing the capacity of their peers with the rest of the internet...
I have the 50mbit service from them, and i can download at around 10-20mbit max from several colocated servers i have (all on gigabit links)...
I get 50mbit from the popular speedtest sites, but i get considerably less downloading from servers hosted at the very same ISPs making it very much seems they're prioritising the common speedtest sites.
I do get 50mbit from mirrors.virginmedia.com, but thats to be expected given that its internal to the isp...
I can sometimes get 50mbit if i torrent, assuming there are sufficiently diverse peers.
BMI is not a good way to measure someone's obesity, people with large muscle mass will have a high BMI despite having very little body fat... A lot of sports players would be considered obese based on BMI despite being extremely healthy.
If disclosure of source code would harm "security" of the product, then the product was clearly poorly written in the first place and is simply relying on the design flaws and bugs being hidden...
Linux and Apache are all over the place, and their source code has always been disclosed, and yet all the millions of linux boxes out there are not left wide open.
Consider that Karma, most windows users have never used anything else either and would probably prefer something else if they took the time to properly use it.
I've seen plenty of people who, after using linux or mac for long enough to get accustomed to it, never want to touch windows again.
Charge users the cost of an equivalent contract as provided by the local operator, while providing them a partial refund on the cost of their home contract for the days they are out of their home country.
Or alternatively, since most providers in europe are part of the same parent companies simply offer contracts on a europe-wide or network-wide (ie anywhere that company operates) basis instead of locally to each country.
It's only a logical extension, mobile contracts in the US used to be state specific with roaming charges if you left your state, and even in a small country like the UK there used to be higher charges for use out of region.
Considering how easy it is to travel to another country these days, especially on much of mainland europe where the borders are almost totally open and the currency is the same.
I doubt Silverlight DRM is any harder to crack than Flash, both are a case of client side security and obfuscation and all it takes is someone sufficiently competent to sit down and take the time to crack it.
The only difference is that flash has more users, and therefore more incentive for people to crack it.
These taxes dont *DIRECTLY* effect the *VERY POOR*...
The very rich are fine, they don't care about the costs.
The reasonably rich can afford new fuel efficient cars, so aren't all that bothered.
The moderately poor are worst off because they can typically only afford older cars which are likely to be less fuel efficient...
The very poor cannot afford to operate cars at all, but the higher price of fuel only serves to increase the number of people who fall into this category.
Fuel tax is not a "luxury tax", it affects everyone, either directly or indirectly...
Goods need to be transported, higher transport costs = higher goods cost.
Public transport is not accessible to everyone, eg many disabled people cannot use it.
Public transport does not go everywhere.
Public transport is often totally impractical if you have lots of stuff to carry.
Higher fuel costs affect public transport providers too.
Windows is tollerated on desktops/laptops because people don't see any alternative, but they don't usually like it and don't want it on phones or tablets where better products are already well established.
Windows tablets have been around for a long time, and most people who use them end up hating them... They are bigger and heavier than an ipad, generally slower from a users perspective even if theoretically the hardware is more powerful, and 99% of the apps you might run on them are pretty unusable on a tablet interface...In terms of numbers of apps actually usable on the form factor, ipad is way ahead.
Theres several important factors that are missing from the printer reviews on thereg lately, and i feel they would make the reviews far more useful.
1, Standards support - does the printer require proprietary drivers (and if so for what platforms are drivers made available), or can it work with postscript or pcl? I would always prefer a postscript printer simply because it works with everything and will continue working even long after the manufacturer has given up making drivers... Some devices (eg hp touchpad) only support pcl, some things only support postscript.
2, Airprint - lots of people want to print from iOS devices, would be good to know which printers support it.. Worth noting tho that with a small linux box you can make an airprint server for any printer that linux supports (i do this with my old laserjet)..
3, Noise - for home or small office use noise is important... some printers are even noisy when idle!
4, Startup time - from cold, and from going into powersave mode (assuming it has one)
5, Available prints in the default toners - for some people not wanting to print a lot, the default toners may last a long time... Especially true with lasers which don't dry out like inkjets, it may be more economical for some people to buy cheaper printers with generally higher running costs for very occasional use.
As someone else commented, underlying storage problems will cause Linux to force remount the filesystem read only while windows will happily continue using it in read/write mode...
But this is not a case of windows being more resilient, it is of linux trying to avoid causing data corruption. Depending on the root cause of the storage issues, you may get lost/corrupted writes and the linux approach is a failsafe (dont write anything) while the windows approach can and in my experience often has resulted in severe corruption of data.
Of course it entirely depends on what exactly is causing the storage problems, but the guest os running inside of a vm has no way to know.
The word "unlimited" implies that there are no limits... Obviously there will always be limits, either arbitrary ones imposed by the provider, or ones which are inherent to the technology in use...
As such, nothing can really be described as "unlimited".
Instead, you could use words such as "unmetered" or "uncapped" when the provider is not placing arbitrary limits on the service, allowing you to make as much use of it as technology permits.
All it would do is increase profits for the software sellers, writing software is an up front cost that has already been accounted for... Additional sales would require virtually no additional resources on the part of the software companies and they certainly wouldn't go about hiring more staff.
On the other hand that extra profit has to come from somewhere, which will mean individuals and other companies having to spend more on software, leaving them less money to spend on other things such as staff.
If anything it would reduce jobs, and the impact on tax revenue is highly questionable too.
They can't compete on product quality, so have to offer bribes...
Their products are massively overpriced, or they wouldn't be able to afford to offer such large discounts...
Also the "not suitable for business use" argument applied to microsoft years ago, and arguably still does...
Wasn't all that long ago when MS were the cheap option compared to Novell, IBM or proprietary unix... Sure their products were garbage and they knew it, but they were also a lot cheaper. Many of their products are still a joke compared to the stability, security and performance of proprietary unix from 10+ years ago.
The problem with encrypted removable media is that there is no standard whatsoever... So you end up with a small unencrypted partition containing a binary windows program that users are expected to execute in order to gain access to the data.
Not only is this completely unusable for Linux/Mac users, but in many environments you would not be able to install the software anyway. Plus it adds yet another piece of software which almost certainly won't be centrally updated and will sooner or later end up full of security holes.
USB sticks are typically only used when you want to transport data to a system which is outside of the corporate network anyway, since it would be pointless to use a usb stick when its much easier to copy data over the network... USB sticks are used when users have to take data off site, or give data to third party contractors...
Also every vendor of such devices seems to implement their own software, and i doubt much of it has been thoroughly audited, and there have been several cases in the past where such software has had serious flaws in the encryption it uses.
What's needed is a standard for encryption of removable media, so that an encrypted device can be connected to any computer and without the need to install software can be mounted upon entering of the correct key.
It seems that the entire article talks about virtualization being used as a band aid to work around windows specific problems...
On Linux the licensing costs are far less, depending on what your running you *may* have to pay for applications but you can install as many instances of the OS as you want, and application licenses typically cost the same wether your cramming them all onto one box or have a dedicated box for each.
On the other hand, with Linux it is also typically much easier to install multiple applications on a single server, and updates which require reboots are far less common. Also an application restart is usually fairly quick and measured in seconds compared to a reboot which may take minutes. Installing multiple versions of Java is easy on Linux, and you can easily adjust the path for any application requiring a different version (some distros can do this automatically too), and there is always chroot too.
As the article points out, windows is also more vulnerable to malware, and isolating systems would make sense... What it doesn't point out however is that if there are a large number of windows images running in a vm environment chances are they will all be part of an active directory domain and have all been built from the same disk image. Once you get onto one, you can dump out password hashes (including those of logged on domain users) and use them to attack other boxes... On Linux you actually have to crack the password hashes before you can use them (which you wont be able to do if the passwords are suitably strong), and unlike windows linux typically does not allow direct remote logins to the root account.
A single application using all your system resources is also primarily a windows problem, on Linux we have ulimit...
Depending on configuration, a program which is thrashing the disk on a virtualized setup can also impair performance of the other images running off the same storage.
Virtually all of the problems noted in the article can be alleviated by using open source instead of commercial software, wether you use virtualization or not.
>> Active Directory's Group Policy Objects (GPOs) and Group Policy Preferences (GPPs) offer administrators a simple, centralised, and secure method to lock down Internet Explorer's (IE's) settings.
Take the word "secure" out of that and you'd have a point, there are many ways to bypass settings pushed down by group policy... You should only consider group policies as pushing out default settings, do not rely on them for security!
A much better solution is to force all outbound web traffic through a proxy, where it can be filtered and logged irrespective of the client configuration.
Another even more secure setup, is to only allow internal browsing direct from workstations and require users to login to another system if they want to access public websites. Even with a browser running remotely, you can make it look and behave just like a local application, only any exploit attempts hit the server and not your workstation.
One such example i've seen, used windows desktops connected to a hardened linux box running chromium, the connection was i believe done using nx and the chromium window looked like it was running on the local machine. A hardened and isolated linux box running chromium is far less risky than a windows workstation for browsing the web.
High margin, lower volume goods may well be profitable in the short term, but history shows that cheaper higher volume goods tender to win out in the end. Just look at x86 vs ppc/sparc/alpha etc.
The BSA are just thugs, making threats and seeing if anyone pays up... The real solution is to simply not use software from any company that supports the BSA. Several companies have migrated entirely to Linux and other open source software after being harassed by the BSA, if more start doing so it will effectively cut off their air supply and good riddance.
It is behaviour like this which both fuels and justifies piracy..
There is no way i would agree to paying again for a game i already bought, the mere suggestion is extremely insulting. Instead i would seek alternative methods to play the games, which nodoubt will be provided by a crack sooner or later.
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Posted Monday 20th February 2012 19:15 GMT
Joe Montana
Android version? → #
In Panasonic outs dual-core Euro-centric Android phone
A brand new phone, running Android 2.3.x ?
It's bad enough that phones aren't being updated, but to release a new one that runs an outdated software version?
Posted Thursday 16th February 2012 22:16 GMT
Joe Montana
Plan long term → #
In Microsoft licensing hike sparks UK piracy, bankruptcy fears
For now, just stick with the versions you already have...
And plan a slow transition to open source, don't throw everything out over night but ensure any new systems you implement are cross platform (eg web based and work on any browser).
If you plan it well, a slow gradual transition away from ms needn't be too painful or expensive... There's no point ditching what you've already bought and paid for, but similarly no point in getting yourself more locked in...
Most systems get refreshed after a few years anyway, so if you require that any new systems you deploy must be cross platform compatible then it won't be too long before the windows-specific business apps are rotated out anyway.
Posted Thursday 16th February 2012 10:13 GMT
Joe Montana
Why does anyone use it? → #
In Cisco complains to the EU about Microsoft/Skype deal
I have never understood why anyone would saddle themselves with skype...
Think back a few years, when BT was the only game in town and you couldn't just buy a phone or modem, you had to get one that was BT approved or rent the phone from BT themselves.
Now look at skype, you can't just use any client with it, you have to use a skype approved client (and as someone else has noted, asterisk was recently taken off that list)... They also work very hard to clamp down on anyone trying to reverse engineer the protocol.
You have a lot of users, locked in to a wannabe monopoly telco, sure it might be free to make calls to other skype users now but how long will that last? The more people who depend on it for day to day communication, the more pain those users will feel moving to something else so a lot wouldn't move and just pay up.
The quality is highly variable, and often extremely bad... I have had people call me from skype before and could barely hear what they were saying.
Similarly the costs to make calls outside of the skype network is very high, and you only have one provider to choose from. Welcome back to the days of monopoly telcos.
There are many SIP providers out there who provide cheaper calls and far superior service, which can be used from any device that supports the SIP standard.
People have fought for years to not be locked in to a single provider, we now have 4 mobile operators to choose from, many areas have both virgin and bt, and bt are forced to offer their lines on a wholesale basis so third parties can resell them. Skype is a huge step back, and yet people don't seem to realise this and are fooled by the bait.
Posted Wednesday 15th February 2012 13:16 GMT
Joe Montana
Re: Still waiting → #
In LibreOffice debugs and buffs up to v.3.5
I never saw why a mail client should integrate tasks and calendars, or for that matter contacts...
Contacts at the very least should be in their own program, with an easily called API that allows other programs to make use of them. The idea of having an integrated contact list in the email client dates from the days when email was pretty much the only communication medium used on computers... These days we have IM, VoIP and various other services so it makes a lot of sense to have a centralised contact list.
A calendar is also not related to email, and should not be in the mail client... I prefer the Apple approach where separate applications are provided and you can use whichever you want.
As for your statement "in an office/exchange way", this is down to exchange using proprietary protocols to make it difficult for third party clients to communicate with them. Outlook also doesn't support any standard calendaring protocol, and only has very crude support for IMAP mail.
If you have a standard (CalDAV) calendar server, combined with a standard (CardDAV) contacts server and LDAP for directory lookups, plus standard IMAP mail there is a lot more you can do...
You could use the Mozilla suite (thunderbird, lightning), the Apple suite (iCal, Mail.app, Addressbook) etc.. You can even use Outlook, but you'd need a third party plugin.
Because the protocols are standard, writing your own tools to interface with the system is much easier, for instance you might have a job or bug tracking system that automatically populates your calendar with time allocated to work on particular tasks, and you can use other metadata (eg presence of your user on the vpn, presence of your assigned laptop/phone in the office network) to work out where you are.
Also because the interfaces are standard, you can switch implementation of the backend server as it suits you without breaking your custom apps.
Posted Wednesday 8th February 2012 07:30 GMT
Joe Montana
Cost... → #
In VMware crafts mega-controller for public clouds
When you factor in the costs of vmware, and the nature of cloud hosting ie having a very large number of servers, the two just don't add up...
The cost of running vmware would greatly eat into and later entirely eliminate your profit margin making you completely uncompetitive.
Posted Monday 6th February 2012 14:10 GMT
Joe Montana
Playing catch up... → #
In Windows Phone 8 to get NFC, HD and Skype
"Our next OS will contain some of the features Android has had for months or even years!"...
I don't like the idea of integrated skype one bit, the idea of being locked in to a single supplier is even worse than a telco, at least we have a choice of mobile operators these days.
By supporting skype, you are pushing people backwards towards the days of the monopoly telco. A single supplier, can only use approved clients with the service... Just like BT 40 years ago.
Android includes a standard SIP client for Voip, allowing you to choose from hundreds of providers or run your own PBX.
Posted Sunday 5th February 2012 11:39 GMT
Joe Montana
Cause and effect → #
In Study links dimwits to conservative ideology
Is the fact that they're less intelligent what makes them more likely to be racist, or...
How about the fact that less intelligent people are likely to be less affluent, and therefore living in poorer areas of town with higher crime and higher levels of immigrant population, as well as doing less skilled jobs that are more easily replaced by cheap immigrant labour?
Posted Saturday 28th January 2012 10:36 GMT
Joe Montana
ISP Supplied Equipment → #
In BT comes clean on Infinity modem 'upgrade'
As someone else pointed out, service providers source the absolute cheapest equipment they can find.
I was stuck with one of those horrendous alcatel frog modems back when DSL was first rolled out in the UK, i replaced it with my own router just as soon as such devices came on the market and never even considered using isp-supplied garbage after that...
Unfortunately the trend with FTTC and Cable is to move back towards forcing you to use the provider supplied garbage.
I have the same issue with sky, their sky+hd box is huge and power hungry compared to comparable receivers available on the market and yet they insist on locking you in to their device.
It's as bad as the old days when you had to rent a phone handset from BT... Ofcom needs to force these providers to open up and allow customers to choose their own equipment.
Posted Thursday 26th January 2012 16:16 GMT
Joe Montana
Why bother? → #
In Netflix vs Lovefilm
I am extremely dissatisfied with all the streaming services currently on the market, for a number of reasons:
I, like many people in the UK live in an area where the only available broadband provider is BT and their various resellers, no LLU and no cable here.
Because of my distance from the exchange, i can manage about 3mbit (but the performance is not consistent) and I also have a plan which imposes a monthly download cap during the day, with unlimited downloads from midnight to 8am. A streaming only service is therefore useless, i don't want to watch movies from midnight - 8am, and the fluctuating connection speed makes streaming quite a poor experience anyway.
Being forced to use specific devices irks me, I have a linux based set top box which is more than capable of playing HD video, and yet these streaming services require their own proprietary clients which aren't available for these devices. Similarly, i am artificially prevented from using my linux based laptop to access the services.
I also detest the fact that only limited content is made available to users in the UK... This is basically a form of racial discrimination and should be illegal. There is absolutely no valid reason to provide an inferior service to people based on where they live. The world has moved on, people now regularly communicate worldwide and by the time a movie is finally released in the uk, people will have encountered so many spoilers online as to make viewing it pointless.
So instead of settling for these inferior services that discriminate against me based on what software i use, what devices i use and where i live... I simply acquire movies via torrents and usenet.
I can download at night (outside of capped hours), and store on disk to watch whenever i feel like it.
I can watch the downloaded movies on any device i choose.
I can convert the downloaded movies to view on other devices as necessary (eg you wouldn't want to store 1080p video on a phone that only has a small screen)...
I can download at whatever quality level suits me (even if doing so takes hours), rather than what my connection is capable of streaming in realtime.
I can watch movies or tv shows at the same time as my friends in other countries, and then join in the conversations about them afterwards.
I would quite happily pay for a service that provided me the same level of convenience and service, but it appears that if i pay i just end up with a vastly inferior service.
I have already stopped downloading mp3 files from torrents since being able to purchase standard mp3 files that are playable on any device.
Posted Wednesday 25th January 2012 21:32 GMT
Joe Montana
Somewhat surprising... → #
In Nvidia hit by GPU slump, too
I would have expected sales of higher end machines with discrete GPUs to not be hugely affected by the HDD shortage... It's not that drives weren't available, they were just in shorter supply and thus cost more, but when your buying a full highend computer the drive is only a small factor in the overall price...
Similarly, i'd expect people who are buying higher end GPUs to be more likely to opt for an SSD instead of a traditional HDD.
Posted Monday 23rd January 2012 13:02 GMT
Joe Montana
CRAP → #
In Megaupload kingpin found in panic room when arrested, say cops
"This nonsense about fair pricing and a decent online experience CRAP is well CRAP.
This is reality: No one is entitled to a damn thing they don't pay for. If you want access to copyright protected works then pay for it or be punished."
While this may be true, it is far from fair... Many countries have unfair laws, but that doesn't mean anyone likes or supports them. For instance in Iran you can face the death penalty for assisting in the distribution of pornography.
Why should a company be entitled to money for a work someone in their employment performed upwards of 80 years ago?
The original idea of copyright was to provide artists a means to make money from their performance, in exchange for that work falling into the public domain after a set time, so that yes people would be entitled after that time to make or receive copies wether they paid for them or not. Now the balance has been tipped way too far in one direction.
As a result of these unfair laws, copyright holders ruthlessly attempt to wring every last penny out of their customers while giving them the bare minimum in return...
It's also quite telling that the deals offered in places like china and russia (where copyright infringement is very high) are far better than those offered here. Surely a country with lower levels of infringement and tougher enforcement should be awarded with better deals? But it seems the content industry doesn't think so, they see us as suckers and want to keep pushing to see how far they can go.
I believe in give and take...
The content industry believes in take take take.
I simply cannot support organisations that are seeking to screw me over in whatever ways they can, and certainly not when they've proven that the more they get from you, the further they try to screw you over.
Posted Monday 23rd January 2012 12:49 GMT
Joe Montana
Gun shop analogy → #
In Megaupload kingpin found in panic room when arrested, say cops
A gun shop is not a good analogy at all, since the gun shop knowingly purchases their stock and directly offers it for sale.
A closer analogy would be a shopping mall which rents out units to third parties, and those third parties then decide what to stock and sell.
With the shear volume of content available on megaupload, it was not realistic for them to analyse every file... However they did act upon complaints when such complaints were received.
Personally i have used megaupload for various legal downloads, in particular i have downloaded linux based firmware images for routers and set top boxes from there. When you are developing a project that is given away for free, you don't exactly have a large budget for hosting services so it makes sense to use a free service like this.
Posted Friday 20th January 2012 22:55 GMT
Joe Montana
Gartner, haha → #
In Windows Phone to overtake iOS in 2015
Gartner predicted that windows mobile would dominate the mobile space by 2010...
Instead, windows mobile failed miserably and has been deprecated entirely in favour of a new but incompatible product.
Why do people put any stock whatsoever in what gartner say?
Posted Thursday 19th January 2012 10:24 GMT
Joe Montana
Unbalance → #
In Blighty's film biz asks gov to hurry up pirate crackdown
The content industry is corrupt through and through, I simply will not support them in any way and the numbers of people thinking like me are only going to rise.
The film industry wants to push increasingly poor quality product, in an increasingly poor delivery mechanism for ever higher costs... They are greedy, and have absolutely no respect for their potential customers.
Copyright terms are simply too long, I believe in an honest day's work for an honest day's pay... The idea that someone who produced a piece of media 50 years ago still being paid for it today is absolutely farcical.
Cinemas are unpleasant environments (noisy, smelly, dirty, over crowded, uncomfortable, you've paid but are still subjected to commercials and patronising piracy warnings) and aren't getting any better, only more expensive.
DRM schemes artificially restrict paying customers and then try to rip them off by making them pay again for what they would have had in the first place (ie ability to view the movie you purchased on other format devices)... While pirates enjoy superior drm-free media.
Many movies are simply lousy, and yet instead of trying to offer a product people actually want, the movie industry is angry that modern communication technology allows people to spread the word too quickly and they cant stage their old scam or hyping a crap movie up and making a fortune before the word spread about how awful it is.
Region restrictions on media are an insulting form of discrimination. Why should I have to wait longer and pay more to see the exact same movie my friends in the US have just seen? On the other hand, why would i bother because by the time its released here i've read all the spoilers online. Why should i not be able to purchase dvds while on holiday, and why should i have to entirely repurchase my movie collection if i go to live in another country?
Whats even worse is that in countries like china or russia where piracy is rampant, cinemas are much nicer and/or cheaper, dvds are much cheaper and often released more quickly and the other legitimate offerings are often much better than whats offered in the west. So as a reward for having a lower rate of piracy, we simply get shafted.
There's no way i would want to support an industry that treats its paying customers with such utter contempt.
Posted Wednesday 18th January 2012 16:17 GMT
Joe Montana
Open Source → #
In Symantec 'fesses up: 'Code theft worse than we thought'
If a program depends on its source code being private to be secure, then it really isn't very secure at all...
I have the sourcecode for Linux, OpenBSD, FreeBSD etc and it doesn't help me compromise all the various devices (including security oriented devices like firewalls).
If having the code disclosed results in serious security risks, then the code must have some pretty glaring security holes that will quickly be identified in the source but are much harder to detect in a binary... And if that's the case, it is absolutely unforgiveable for symantec to have known about such holes and not fixed them.
Sourcecode should always be open, not only would it prevent software from having obvious bugs that are easily found in the source but it would make stealing sourcecode an utterly pointless activity since you could just download it from the internet anyway.
Posted Wednesday 18th January 2012 15:59 GMT
Joe Montana
More lock-in → #
In Peeking up the skirt of Microsoft's hardy ReFS
I guess FUSE-NTFS was getting too good, so now they need to migrate to another proprietary filesystem in order to continue their lock-in scheme...
Posted Wednesday 18th January 2012 15:40 GMT
Joe Montana
Source code → #
In NSA constructs hardened Android, unleashes it on world
While having the sourcecode doesn't make it impossible for a backdoor to be hidden, most likely in the form of a deeply buried security vulnerability making it more deniable...
Having the sourcecode is nonetheless an improvement over not having it, and therefore relying on binaries instead.
The world is full of compromises...
A car with airbags, abs, roll bars etc may be safer than one without, but its still possible to crash and die...
Having the sourcecode is better than not having it, obviously its not as safe as writing your own code from scratch on hardware you also designed and built yourself, but it's the best option that's practical and affordable.
Posted Wednesday 18th January 2012 12:07 GMT
Joe Montana
Ridiculous... → #
In Data centers to cut LAN cord?
Wireless bandwidth is finite, it would become very easy to saturate the airwaves inside the DC, and all those metal racks and cables would likely cause interference too.
Instead, the costs of simply laying more cable between racks is pretty trivial, lay another bundle of fibre and run more 10G trunks
Posted Tuesday 17th January 2012 18:10 GMT
Joe Montana
WfH... → #
In Work from home, find a new hobby, buy a fountain - UK.gov
Most people already have broadband at home...
Also no reason to run lots of computers at home, i just use a single laptop and connect remotely to servers at work...
You still have your car, but you won't need to buy as much fuel for it... I assume you still use your car for purposes other than commuting.
The costs of heating (or in the summer, cooling) and the negligible costs of powering the laptop are pretty minimal compared to the financial and time costs of commuting to work...
It takes me an average of 2 hours/day to commute, assuming theres no delays... It costs about £10 in train fares, and in exchange for that i get to sit on an uncomfortable train, followed by an office which is noisy, uncomfortable, full of distractions and forced to compromise on environmental conditions...
Here i am at 6pm commenting on this story, had i been commuting i would be sat on a train in a tunnel listening to music and staring out the window.
Posted Sunday 15th January 2012 12:54 GMT
Joe Montana
Redirection of blackhat resources → #
In 10 years ago today: Bill Gates kicks arse over security
The main reason blackhats are targeting adobe acrobat/flash these days more than they target IE is down to market share more than anything...
While no single browser has more than 50% market share, flash and acrobat are still installed on over 90% of machines making them prime targets.
Microsoft is by no means a "security leader", they still have by far and away the most insecure os currently available (not counting intentionally insecure systems used for training like dvl)...
Windows still has some major design flaws which impact security too, the file locking design and by extension the broken patching system (patches often appear installed, even if part of the install has failed), the crude file extension determine filetype (and executability) mechanism especially combined with hiding extensions by default, the ability to authenticate using password hashes directly, the default listening services (even on a standalone workstation) plus the practice of hiding these behind a software firewall rather than turning them off..
Then you have all the bloat required to support such an ageing patchwork codebase, plus all the additional crufty ways they try to work around the old design flaws, such as the fake registry and filesystems used to trick programs that expect to be installed/used as an admin user etc..
MS are stuck with a horrendous mess of a product, and no matter how much they try to polish it it's still going to be a turd... They'll never be a security leader until they ditch all the legacy cruft and start again from scratch.
Posted Thursday 12th January 2012 17:16 GMT
Joe Montana
Marketing... → #
In Microsoft sharpening axe for marketing heads - report
If they cut back on marketing, MS will have nothing...
They've always had inferior products relative to the competition, which are only successful through inertia and heavy marketing.
They've even been known to pay people to use their products...
Posted Thursday 12th January 2012 16:08 GMT
Joe Montana
Profit motives... → #
In US killer spy drone controls switch to Linux
Just a few years ago, the motive was to hack unix machines and there was no reason to hack windows at all...
Unix boxes were typically on fast lines with 24/7 connectivity and were never rebooted...
Windows machines were rebooted or crashed regularly, often on dialup or other weak connectivity etc.
Among those looking to conduct DDOS attacks unix machines are still far more highly prized than windows... They are rarely found on slow home user connections, and have a more powerful and flexible tcp stack for launching attacks from.
Linux machines are also not rare at all when it comes to servers... If you compromise a desktop you might get 1 or 2 card numbers, if you compromise a server it might be storing hundreds of them.
Posted Thursday 12th January 2012 15:49 GMT
Joe Montana
Security issues → #
In US killer spy drone controls switch to Linux
ATM systems have frequently had security problems, you can find several cases where ATM devices have been infected with various worms...
While it's true that there's no substitute for competent administration, and that competent admins can configure windows systems to be far more secure than it is by default... The same is true of linux, competent configuration of linux will also result in a system that is more secure than it is by default.
Also a lot of those admins' time will be wasted trying to work around windows many shortcomings or disabling/removing poorly designed functionality. Also if you harden a windows box, various things no longer work and users may be used to or even require these features.
Assuming equally competent admins on both sides, the linux system will still be more secure.
Posted Thursday 12th January 2012 14:26 GMT
Joe Montana
Payments... → #
In French get unlimited mobile for €20
Payment services over mobile are widespread in many african countries...
The reason being, credit cards are fundamentally flawed from a security perspective and therefore totally unusable in countries with very high levels of fraud.
Paying with a credit card is the equivalent of giving away the keys to your safe, and trusting the merchant to only take an agreed amount from it... Very easy for them to take as much as they want.
Mobile online payments are a much better idea since you effectively initiate a bank transfer on the fly, and only send the amount you want. I would be much happier with such a payment system, but visa/mastercard have too much influence and would never let such a system fly because it disrupts their existing business model.
Posted Thursday 12th January 2012 12:59 GMT
Joe Montana
Proxmox... → #
In DIY virtual machines: Rigging up at home
If you want a home VM setup, try Proxmox...
Installation is trivial, pretty much choose your hdd and hit go (but do consider, its designed as a standalone install and not to dual boot, so it will remove anything else already on that drive)...
You can do full virtualised images of pretty much any os, linux, bsd, windows, solaris etc and there's also the option to do paravirtualization of linux images with considerably less overhead via openvz.
Proxmox has considerably lower overheads than vmware or hyper-v (especially when running openvz instances), and can be managed using a standard browser, ssh or vnc client (some other systems require proprietary clients thus limiting what you can use to manage them)...
You also get advanced features like live migration, shared storage, clustering etc although i doubt these will be used much in a home environment.
Also funny you should mention remotefx, X11 has had the ability to do remote opengl for many years... Still, if you want to play games remotely you can install a windows image within proxmox and then allocate a physical videocard to it.
And proxmox is free, including things like live migration that vmware charge a fortune for.
Posted Wednesday 11th January 2012 18:40 GMT
Joe Montana
Service... → #
In Virgin Media to push out nimble new broadband speeds
Instead of spending all this money to increase the headline top speed, they should be trying to pay off their debts, expanding their network to areas it does not currently cover and increasing the capacity of their peers with the rest of the internet...
I have the 50mbit service from them, and i can download at around 10-20mbit max from several colocated servers i have (all on gigabit links)...
I get 50mbit from the popular speedtest sites, but i get considerably less downloading from servers hosted at the very same ISPs making it very much seems they're prioritising the common speedtest sites.
I do get 50mbit from mirrors.virginmedia.com, but thats to be expected given that its internal to the isp...
I can sometimes get 50mbit if i torrent, assuming there are sufficiently diverse peers.
Posted Wednesday 11th January 2012 07:05 GMT
Joe Montana
Tax... → #
In Profs call for harsh taxes on sweet carbonated beverages
BMI is not a good way to measure someone's obesity, people with large muscle mass will have a high BMI despite having very little body fat... A lot of sports players would be considered obese based on BMI despite being extremely healthy.
Posted Friday 6th January 2012 19:35 GMT
Joe Montana
Security through obscurity... → #
In Symantec downplays source-code trophy theft
If disclosure of source code would harm "security" of the product, then the product was clearly poorly written in the first place and is simply relying on the design flaws and bugs being hidden...
Linux and Apache are all over the place, and their source code has always been disclosed, and yet all the millions of linux boxes out there are not left wide open.
Posted Thursday 22nd December 2011 19:36 GMT
Joe Montana
Time to properly use it... → #
In Lumia sales fail to set world alight
Consider that Karma, most windows users have never used anything else either and would probably prefer something else if they took the time to properly use it.
I've seen plenty of people who, after using linux or mac for long enough to get accustomed to it, never want to touch windows again.
Posted Thursday 22nd December 2011 12:07 GMT
Joe Montana
Abolish roaming charges... → #
In EU to push through more roaming caps in 2012
Instead of roaming charges, do it another way...
Charge users the cost of an equivalent contract as provided by the local operator, while providing them a partial refund on the cost of their home contract for the days they are out of their home country.
Or alternatively, since most providers in europe are part of the same parent companies simply offer contracts on a europe-wide or network-wide (ie anywhere that company operates) basis instead of locally to each country.
It's only a logical extension, mobile contracts in the US used to be state specific with roaming charges if you left your state, and even in a small country like the UK there used to be higher charges for use out of region.
Considering how easy it is to travel to another country these days, especially on much of mainland europe where the borders are almost totally open and the currency is the same.
Posted Saturday 10th December 2011 00:05 GMT
Joe Montana
WTF? → #
In Win8 beta to surface in Feb 2012 - Microsoft exec
A tablet OS that's 2 and a half years behind the market leader...
Which starts with no apps (this killed WebOS and is doing for Blackberry in the tablet space)...
Which is advertised as "windows", but yet doesn't run familiar windows applications - which will only serve to create disappointed users.
From a company with a history of poor tablet interfaces that were almost universally despised by their users...
You'd be a fool to buy this
Posted Wednesday 7th December 2011 09:53 GMT
Joe Montana
Begs the question... → #
In Lovefilm dumps Flash, BLINDS Linux fans with Silverlight
I doubt Silverlight DRM is any harder to crack than Flash, both are a case of client side security and obfuscation and all it takes is someone sufficiently competent to sit down and take the time to crack it.
The only difference is that flash has more users, and therefore more incentive for people to crack it.
Posted Monday 5th December 2011 11:27 GMT
Joe Montana
Good morning Mr Ass → #
In Mozilla denies OS X Leopard 2012 kill
What a name... Bet he got bullied at school for that.
Posted Thursday 1st December 2011 13:36 GMT
Joe Montana
Very poor.. → #
In Fuel taxes don't hurt the world's poor - they don't have cars
These taxes dont *DIRECTLY* effect the *VERY POOR*...
The very rich are fine, they don't care about the costs.
The reasonably rich can afford new fuel efficient cars, so aren't all that bothered.
The moderately poor are worst off because they can typically only afford older cars which are likely to be less fuel efficient...
The very poor cannot afford to operate cars at all, but the higher price of fuel only serves to increase the number of people who fall into this category.
Fuel tax is not a "luxury tax", it affects everyone, either directly or indirectly...
Goods need to be transported, higher transport costs = higher goods cost.
Public transport is not accessible to everyone, eg many disabled people cannot use it.
Public transport does not go everywhere.
Public transport is often totally impractical if you have lots of stuff to carry.
Higher fuel costs affect public transport providers too.
Posted Wednesday 30th November 2011 00:23 GMT
Joe Montana
Not surprising.. → #
In Consumer interest in Windows 8 tablets slumps
Windows is tollerated on desktops/laptops because people don't see any alternative, but they don't usually like it and don't want it on phones or tablets where better products are already well established.
Windows tablets have been around for a long time, and most people who use them end up hating them... They are bigger and heavier than an ipad, generally slower from a users perspective even if theoretically the hardware is more powerful, and 99% of the apps you might run on them are pretty unusable on a tablet interface...In terms of numbers of apps actually usable on the form factor, ipad is way ahead.
Posted Monday 28th November 2011 23:57 GMT
Joe Montana
Proprietary service... → #
In Twitter crypto purchase leaves Egypt dissidents in lurch
This is what happens when you depend on a proprietary service supplied by a single entity...
There need to be open standards for secure communication, just like there are open standards for unencrypted communication.
Posted Sunday 27th November 2011 19:03 GMT
Joe Montana
Add to review.. → #
In Ten... colour laser printers
Theres several important factors that are missing from the printer reviews on thereg lately, and i feel they would make the reviews far more useful.
1, Standards support - does the printer require proprietary drivers (and if so for what platforms are drivers made available), or can it work with postscript or pcl? I would always prefer a postscript printer simply because it works with everything and will continue working even long after the manufacturer has given up making drivers... Some devices (eg hp touchpad) only support pcl, some things only support postscript.
2, Airprint - lots of people want to print from iOS devices, would be good to know which printers support it.. Worth noting tho that with a small linux box you can make an airprint server for any printer that linux supports (i do this with my old laserjet)..
3, Noise - for home or small office use noise is important... some printers are even noisy when idle!
4, Startup time - from cold, and from going into powersave mode (assuming it has one)
5, Available prints in the default toners - for some people not wanting to print a lot, the default toners may last a long time... Especially true with lasers which don't dry out like inkjets, it may be more economical for some people to buy cheaper printers with generally higher running costs for very occasional use.
6, power consumption and heat output
Also a table at the end summing things up...
Posted Tuesday 22nd November 2011 10:28 GMT
Joe Montana
Linux read only → #
In Virtual server farm goes titsup TWICE in a month
As someone else commented, underlying storage problems will cause Linux to force remount the filesystem read only while windows will happily continue using it in read/write mode...
But this is not a case of windows being more resilient, it is of linux trying to avoid causing data corruption. Depending on the root cause of the storage issues, you may get lost/corrupted writes and the linux approach is a failsafe (dont write anything) while the windows approach can and in my experience often has resulted in severe corruption of data.
Of course it entirely depends on what exactly is causing the storage problems, but the guest os running inside of a vm has no way to know.
Posted Friday 18th November 2011 17:21 GMT
Joe Montana
Misuse of the word → #
In Mobile operators warned on 'unlimited' data gouging
The word "unlimited" implies that there are no limits... Obviously there will always be limits, either arbitrary ones imposed by the provider, or ones which are inherent to the technology in use...
As such, nothing can really be described as "unlimited".
Instead, you could use words such as "unmetered" or "uncapped" when the provider is not placing arbitrary limits on the service, allowing you to make as much use of it as technology permits.
Posted Friday 18th November 2011 13:00 GMT
Joe Montana
WTF? → #
In Microsoft names and shames pirate software traders
How would a reduction in piracy "create jobs"?
All it would do is increase profits for the software sellers, writing software is an up front cost that has already been accounted for... Additional sales would require virtually no additional resources on the part of the software companies and they certainly wouldn't go about hiring more staff.
On the other hand that extra profit has to come from somewhere, which will mean individuals and other companies having to spend more on software, leaving them less money to spend on other things such as staff.
If anything it would reduce jobs, and the impact on tax revenue is highly questionable too.
Posted Thursday 17th November 2011 12:46 GMT
Joe Montana
Desperation... → #
In Microsoft takes fight to Google over cloud apps defections
What this says to me is...
They can't compete on product quality, so have to offer bribes...
Their products are massively overpriced, or they wouldn't be able to afford to offer such large discounts...
Also the "not suitable for business use" argument applied to microsoft years ago, and arguably still does...
Wasn't all that long ago when MS were the cheap option compared to Novell, IBM or proprietary unix... Sure their products were garbage and they knew it, but they were also a lot cheaper. Many of their products are still a joke compared to the stability, security and performance of proprietary unix from 10+ years ago.
Posted Thursday 17th November 2011 12:45 GMT
Joe Montana
No standards → #
In Survey: UK biz is using more encryption
The problem with encrypted removable media is that there is no standard whatsoever... So you end up with a small unencrypted partition containing a binary windows program that users are expected to execute in order to gain access to the data.
Not only is this completely unusable for Linux/Mac users, but in many environments you would not be able to install the software anyway. Plus it adds yet another piece of software which almost certainly won't be centrally updated and will sooner or later end up full of security holes.
USB sticks are typically only used when you want to transport data to a system which is outside of the corporate network anyway, since it would be pointless to use a usb stick when its much easier to copy data over the network... USB sticks are used when users have to take data off site, or give data to third party contractors...
Also every vendor of such devices seems to implement their own software, and i doubt much of it has been thoroughly audited, and there have been several cases in the past where such software has had serious flaws in the encryption it uses.
What's needed is a standard for encryption of removable media, so that an encrypted device can be connected to any computer and without the need to install software can be mounted upon entering of the correct key.
Posted Thursday 17th November 2011 12:44 GMT
Joe Montana
List of Windows specific problems → #
In Virtualisation: just a lot of extra software licences?
It seems that the entire article talks about virtualization being used as a band aid to work around windows specific problems...
On Linux the licensing costs are far less, depending on what your running you *may* have to pay for applications but you can install as many instances of the OS as you want, and application licenses typically cost the same wether your cramming them all onto one box or have a dedicated box for each.
On the other hand, with Linux it is also typically much easier to install multiple applications on a single server, and updates which require reboots are far less common. Also an application restart is usually fairly quick and measured in seconds compared to a reboot which may take minutes. Installing multiple versions of Java is easy on Linux, and you can easily adjust the path for any application requiring a different version (some distros can do this automatically too), and there is always chroot too.
As the article points out, windows is also more vulnerable to malware, and isolating systems would make sense... What it doesn't point out however is that if there are a large number of windows images running in a vm environment chances are they will all be part of an active directory domain and have all been built from the same disk image. Once you get onto one, you can dump out password hashes (including those of logged on domain users) and use them to attack other boxes... On Linux you actually have to crack the password hashes before you can use them (which you wont be able to do if the passwords are suitably strong), and unlike windows linux typically does not allow direct remote logins to the root account.
A single application using all your system resources is also primarily a windows problem, on Linux we have ulimit...
Depending on configuration, a program which is thrashing the disk on a virtualized setup can also impair performance of the other images running off the same storage.
Virtually all of the problems noted in the article can be alleviated by using open source instead of commercial software, wether you use virtualization or not.
Posted Wednesday 16th November 2011 16:55 GMT
Joe Montana
Take out "secure" → #
In Browser privacy at work: The BOFHs' guide
>> Active Directory's Group Policy Objects (GPOs) and Group Policy Preferences (GPPs) offer administrators a simple, centralised, and secure method to lock down Internet Explorer's (IE's) settings.
Take the word "secure" out of that and you'd have a point, there are many ways to bypass settings pushed down by group policy... You should only consider group policies as pushing out default settings, do not rely on them for security!
A much better solution is to force all outbound web traffic through a proxy, where it can be filtered and logged irrespective of the client configuration.
Another even more secure setup, is to only allow internal browsing direct from workstations and require users to login to another system if they want to access public websites. Even with a browser running remotely, you can make it look and behave just like a local application, only any exploit attempts hit the server and not your workstation.
One such example i've seen, used windows desktops connected to a hardened linux box running chromium, the connection was i believe done using nx and the chromium window looked like it was running on the local machine. A hardened and isolated linux box running chromium is far less risky than a windows workstation for browsing the web.
Posted Wednesday 16th November 2011 15:21 GMT
Joe Montana
Crime → #
In Equipping pre-teens with web mobes spreads beyond West
And they wonder why crime against kids is on the rise...
When i was a kid, i was lucky to be carrying round under £1 in cash, a few cheap pens/pencils and maybe a few sweets...
Now kids are running around with hundreds of pounds worth of electronics in their pockets. They represent very easy targets for opportunistic thieves.
Posted Tuesday 15th November 2011 18:22 GMT
Joe Montana
Larger margins → #
In Samsung's Bada outshipped WinPho 7 in Q3
High margin, lower volume goods may well be profitable in the short term, but history shows that cheaper higher volume goods tender to win out in the end. Just look at x86 vs ppc/sparc/alpha etc.
Posted Monday 14th November 2011 11:11 GMT
Joe Montana
Extortion racket → #
In BSA name-and-shame tactic may have backfired
The BSA are just thugs, making threats and seeing if anyone pays up... The real solution is to simply not use software from any company that supports the BSA. Several companies have migrated entirely to Linux and other open source software after being harassed by the BSA, if more start doing so it will effectively cut off their air supply and good riddance.
Posted Monday 14th November 2011 11:04 GMT
Joe Montana
Screw the customers... → #
In PSP owners must pay to port games to PS Vita
It is behaviour like this which both fuels and justifies piracy..
There is no way i would agree to paying again for a game i already bought, the mere suggestion is extremely insulting. Instead i would seek alternative methods to play the games, which nodoubt will be provided by a crack sooner or later.
Posted Thursday 10th November 2011 20:15 GMT
Joe Montana
WTF? → #
In Nokia Lumia 800
Weak hardware specs, coupled to a price only £30 less (less than 10% of the total price) than an iphone 4S?
The review also seemed like he was trying very hard to praise the phone, but was having trouble doing so...
Not to mention the lack of apps compared to an Apple or Android based handset...
Why would anyone want one of these?
Posted Thursday 10th November 2011 17:29 GMT
Joe Montana
Facebook/Twitter integration? → #
In Nokia's Windows comeback: Great but what's next?
Does noone else see a problem with integrating phones to specific services?
A few years ago it would have been myspace or bebo integration, now facebook and twitter but what about a few years from now?
Someone needs to develop open APIs for such services to use, so that its possible to integrate new services without a huge amount of work.
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