Posts by Steve McIntyre
41 posts • joined Tuesday 6th November 2007 13:58 GMT
Posted in Apple Mac Mini 2011
Typical Mac
Pointless, over-expensive hardware designed to appeal on looks alone.
If you want something better...
then just go and buy a netbook/laptop already.
-1 for the link to Mueller
He's consistently waging a negative campaign against Google and Android, and writers at the Reg and elsewhere are continuing to lap it up.
Posted in Apple sued over Mac OS X 'quick boot'
A patent system *cannot* work...
once the lawyers get involved. The initial idea for patents was great and worthy, but doomed to failure once the field was taken over by the IP lawyers. The only way forward is to remove the system altogether. Or shoot all the lawyers.
Posted in HP Envy 17 3D Core i7 laptop
Ugly
Big, heavy machine. Use it as a "laptop" and you'll burn yourself or cut off circulation. Go buy a desktop if you want something this big...
All Adobe's fault
PDF used to be a nice, simple format that you could trust. But that wasn't enough for Adobe to continue to sell new versions, so they started adding extra crap like Javascript. Guys, we DO NOT NEED scripting in documents we're sharing.
Now your options are to continue on the Adobe treadmill (spending more time downloading and installing updates than actually using the software), or to switch to something more secure instead.
User limited?
For a storage appliance? That's the Windows effect for you *giggle*
Posted in Amazon swallows UK online bookseller
Time to find another bookseller then
I refuse to give money to Amazon.
abebooks.co.uk are being reasonable at the moment for me.
Posted in Samsung NS310 netbook
Crippled with Windows 7
And expensive too because of it. With 2GB or more of memory and a bigger resolution screen instead this would look more like a sane system.
Posted in Lenovo Thinkpad X220T 12.5in tablet PC
Exactly
I'm on my 4th Thinkpad X series laptop at the moment: all bought second-hand with my own money, run for a few years with Debian and then sold on still with more life left in them. I won't buy anything else.
Aside: nice to see Orlowski not trolling!
Same here
I've specifically mentioned "failures in data protection" etc. when talking to them, but they're still sticking to the "contact the sender to unsubscribe from the mailing list" line. Numpties.
I'm about to contact the ICO to see what they can/will do.
Me too
I had exactly the same spam, again to a specific address given only to Pixmania. I've been pestering their "customer care" people about it, but no useful answers yet.
Pointless
The ICO will continue to do f*ck all regardless of what's in the regulations.
Yawn - more crap from Mueller
Don't post quotes from him - he's utterly discredited...
Posted in UK is a closed source 'stronghold'
Naive, or deliberately trolling
"If you've paid for software and it doesn't work, then you shout down the phone till someone fixes it."
Or until you shout yourself hoarse, maybe. The vast majority of *all* software sucks. Whether open source or proprietary. There are big wins with the open stuff, though, including:
1. typically you've not just paid a fortune and locked yourself in to it;
2. even if *you* can't fix the code yourself, it's possible to find somebody else who *can* if the original vendor can't / won't / goes bust
But as you're yet another person who seems to claim / believe that open source == free in cost and therefore worthless, I doubt you'll even understand the argument here.
Nothing to do with IR35
Fix the problem, rather than finding a "way around it". IR35 just closed loopholes for lots of people who were taking the piss on the taxation front.
Posted in Spanish whispers on Microsoft and Nokia
Too late...
"some sort of MeeGo device that the company is obliged to launch as a toy to mollify the hackers and geeks"
It's already too late - the hackers and geeks have already written off Nokia. The N900 is a lovely phone (if just ~3 years too late), now Nokia are dead to us.
Spoken like someone with a vested interest...
Of course you're going to support them.
It's clear to the majority of the people actually working in technology industries that the patent system is broken. That's intentional, and down to the lawyers. Who benefits from it? Oh, the lawyers...
Some minor technical mistakes here...
I know it's not the main part of what you're saying here, but please try to be correct in what you're writing as background material too...
"NAND flash cells have a finite life, in that they only support a specific number of writes": Surely you mean "limited" here rather than "specific"?
"Flash is not byte-addressable, unlike disk drives and DRAM." Last time I checked, disks need to be read/written in (typically 512-byte or more recently 4096-byte) sectors.
Posted in Ten... sub-£50 budget MP3 players
Excellent timing
Was just looking at music players over the weekend for a Xmas present.
Fedora fanboy?
"It also makes a nice contrast to Canonical's Ubuntu, which has a habit of taking Fedora's upstream contributions, wrapping them in a prettier package and stealing the limelight. There's nothing wrong with that, it's the nature of open source software - you can do what you want with it. It's just that Fedora rarely ends up getting the credit it deserves for making desktop Linux as usable as it has become over the years."
All of the Linux distros tend to work with upstream, providing new features and bugfixes. Your words make it sound like only Fedora are doing that.
Posted in But it said so in the manual
Clueless alert
Go on, justify why you think ext2 is a terrible hack.
Wrong
The Cortex series are v7. We haven't got to v9 yet!
As to what the original text *should* say, no idea...
Posted in You don't have to be crazy to work here
You're just making it worse for yourself
If you insist on looking for magic bullet solutions like webmin (like the "Microsoft Management Console"), you're never going to learn how to admin systems well. You're coming from the Windows side of the fence and complaining that because Linux and Solaris are different, they're inferior (e.g. "Clustering systems has traditionally been a special magic power reserved for those who type arcane things into a command line and mutter to themselves a lot.") As an example, using a web-based log-viewing tool will *always* leave you missing the power of the unix command line. Does it give you regular expression searching so that you can work out which external mail systems connected to yours in a given hour? Can you track which systems are trying to brute-force attack your sshd? Etc...
As an aside, if you've picked Linux spam filtering services that are using Sendmail then you've just made things harder for yourself. Try learning more about the problem space and you'd do much better.
Posted in Save us from our users
"all non-administrative users were set to the same default password"
What a great idea that is. So then any user can masquerade as any other. \o/
Posted in Netbooks Best Buys
The Windows tax
That's what happens when you ship a crap and expensive OS on small hardware...
Utilikey is a good option too
I've owned a couple of these:
http://www.thinkgeek.com/gadgets/tools/6d98/
and they happily go through airport security, looking close enough to a normal key that nobody looks twice.
Posted in Ten... Premium iPod Speakers
Waste of time and money
Hundreds of quid for something to sit an ipod on? WTF? Go buy some decent hifi kit...
Posted in OpenOffice gets Ubuntu-media friendly
"ubuntu-friendly" ??
gstreamer is a distro-neutral Free Software media stack. Why are you specifically linking it to Ubuntu here?
More google bashing
I have to wonder sometimes - did somebody at Google run over the El Reg cat at some point??
Posted in Danger lurks in the clouds
Totally retarded device design
Depending on the network for everything will only work when the network is 100% available and 100% reliable. We're nowhere near that...
UDO wasn't holographic...
So it's not like holographic storage killed Plasmon. UDO was a conventional high-density blue laser optical disc, sharing some characteristics with BluRay.
More/cheaper patents != more innovation
But the commission doesn't/won't realise that...
Minor corrections
Just a couple of minor places where Gavin and I may have mis-communicated. I'll cut him some slack here - when we were on the phone last week, there was a snowball fight going on around me and therefore a lot of background noise! *grin*
The next Debian release will be Squeeze, again most likely due in another 18-24 months.
We've had DVDs for a while now, but Lenny is the first Debian release to come with official Blu-ray (BD) images. We *just* about manage to fit an architecture on one: i386 this time was just over 19GB.
Otherwise, thanks for the good reception. We're happy with the Lenny release and we're organising parties to celebrate this week. :-)
Posted in Linux distros lead jumps from Sun
Good luck to him
Barton and I spoke lots of times over the last few years - he's a nice guy and helped organise Sun sponsoring Debconf. We met up again at Debconf in Argentina this summer and had a good natter about Debian, Sun and life in general.
Good luck to him in his new job; I hope he enjoys it.
Very good philosophy
Lots of FLOSS projects see the "poisonous people" problem as they grow, and if you're not careful in controlling it then you risk your project being paralysed. Poisonous people are the ones who can suck all the life and fun out of a project, both wasting the time of useful existing developers in pointless discussions and discouraging new developers who don't know up-front which are the people they should be listening to / working with.
Posted in Concerns build over Debian delays
Response from the incoming DPL
There are some bottlenecks and problems with delays in some of the core teams in Debian; that's an acknowledged issue that I'm going to be working on very soon. As in many volunteer projects, it's not always easy to ensure that all the "boring" tasks get done as quickly as some people would like.
My term officially starts in just under an hour(!), and over the next few weeks I'll be reviewing the work of all those teams to see where more effort is needed and how we can improve performance. That's the most important of my campaign promises.
Posted in Ten tips on agile software development
Write English!
"Think you're organization is ready ..."
*sigh*
"Open standards always cause security problems"
Do you have any evidence to back this bollocks statement?
