The benefits
"The benefits we believe will be enormous," Carter said. I expect to BT they will be.
What is the real difference between this and pre-privatisation BT?
186 publicly visible posts • joined 19 Nov 2007
It should only be a few days coming.
The police will then admit that they have been arresting people just to get their DNA. It was the person's fault for being arrested. The police did nothing wrong. In fact they arrested people to help them. And they'll do it again in the future.
One wonders how many of these arrests can be termed "false", in which case there should be criminal trials for the arresting officers.
I completely agree about Office and Exchange. I know that some people have spent many painful days or weeks writing macros and other yarbles for their Excel spreadsheets, and moving away from that would be very painful.
Exchange is a little bit different. At my old company we had Solaris machines as the primary MXs, forwarding on to Exchange machines for the mail boxes for most people. Some preferred to have IMAP on UNIX instead. One of the things that the Exchange users liked to use was the shared calendar. But as all the staff sat in one big open plan office it was a bit unnecessary, and I suspect for many small companies it is equally unnecessary.
Most of our platform ran on UNIX, and the people who ran the platform ran UNIX. Most of the "office staff" ran Windows. It would be almost impossible to pull them away from that. Web developers - use PS, Dreamweaver, Illustrator, whatever else. Finance - use Sage. Management - er. Trying to make the techies use Windows would have made us unhappy. It's exactly the same for trying to make Windows users use Linux.
It is a bit frustrating, but I have no axe to grind.
There are good reasons not to move to Linux on the desktop, particularly lack of certain applications. Photoshop/Illustrator/Quark/other high end graphics? Nope. (Don't say Gimp, just don't say it). For the Mac retards, there are plenty of people who use PS on Windows. That doesn't mean that PS couldn't be built for Linux, but that it is simply not.
But there's another thing which might be skewing the desktop, and that is the number of Linux distros out there. Which one could or should be chosen? One thing you can say about XP is its longevity, 8 years old now. With service packs, of course, but basically the same desktop for the last x years. "Linux" gets a new KDE or Gnome or XFCE or whatever when a new distro is released. Sometimes change is not a good thing. Sometimes people want familiarity. I got a copy of Deneba Canvas 7 from a cover CD a couple of years ago. It was released in 2000. It runs fine on my Windows XP box. And anyone anywhere can do the same. That's a good thing.
Unless Linux can run Windows programs users might as well use dumb terminals.
When SARS was in the news, we had Private Jones running about telling us not to panic. Now we have some pig flu, and Jones is at it again.
So influenza can kill. I accept that, and we all know about the 1918 pandemic (thanks to a paragraph seeming to be in every report about somebody with a runny nose). But some people appear conspicuously keen to sex up every possible outbreak into the end-of-the-world-as-we-know-it event. Typically these people are WHO staffers, and their willing servants are the mis-reporters in the mass media. Ebola? We're all going to die. Flu? We're all going to die. Runny nose? You have flu and will die. Travel to Mexico? You will die. But's it's too late, cos it's here now anyway, so you will die.
For some people at the WHO and similar organisations, it seems the news is more important than the event. Their raison d'etre is to try to scare us all. They want to be first to tell us "We told you this would happen". For them, mass deaths are topical. And topicality, to quote George Smiley, is always suspect.
An open and shut case of apples and oranges, m'lud.
Ubuntu developers did not write Linux, they wrote small parts of the Ubuntu distribution. Much, or even most, of what many people think of as Linux (e.g. ALL the GNU tools, Apache, BIND, X Windows, and so on) is separate.
I've built later versions of all-the-above on Linux (and Solaris and FreeBSD). Does that make me a Linux distro maker? No. But to varying extents that is what Linux distro makers do.
I'm not deriding Linux distro makers. But you are comparing a company, Microsoft, which builds most of its own OS, with Canonical which essentially repackages Debian into something called Ubuntu. Again, I'm not saying that is a bad thing, and Ubuntu is a very nice distribution. It's very polished. But they didn't write most of it.
A more honest comparison might be between Microsoft and Debian, and The Register has had things to say in the past about delayed Debian releases.
After the Vista debacle I'm not surprised that MS is apparently being more cautious this time. Why wouldn't they be? Who would get the blame if MS releases Windows 7 and some widely used piece of software doesn't work exactly as expected? Or some "feature" is broken?
I have always considered Bob Crowe very eager to call a strike for the flimsiest of reasons. Indeed, whenever I have gone on holiday and taken the train/tube to the airport, I have woken on the day with some trepidation lest Bob Crowe had called a strike because a railway worker had cut his finger.
For once I am in agreement with Crowe.
as you would have them do unto you.
Well, it's a little bit rich of the USA to complain if the Russians have managed to infiltrate their electrical grid and leave a few rogue programs behind. Didn't the good old USA supply Russia with deliberately-flawed computers, technical manuals, faulty designs and so on when Reagan was in power? Is spying and sabotage only OK if it's being done by the USA to somebody else?
Of course, when things go wrong with the power grid in the USA, they can't wait to blame somebody else: "http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/3152451.stm".
"It was dem Canucks", said the Americans. "Nope, wasn't us", said the Canadians. And who was right? Next time, they'll be able to say "It was the Russians/Chinese/Canadians/other people".
Let's think for two seconds. RIPA, which was introduced for anti-terror purposes (don't try and deny it, read Hansard), but later extended, is being misused by councils to catch parents trying to get their children into good schools, and against those who drop litter.
How do we know that the government is not now misusing the Terrorism Act 2006? Why should we trust the government? Who are the faceless and nameless bureaucrats who will be deciding that certain web sites are not for our eyes? What will be the criteria for blocking such sites? This is quite a different situation from that with the IWF, which has published guidelines on its "block" list. The words "minister" or "secretary of state" on a document does not any credibility these days.
I can easily see this being misused by the government to block any site they disagree with, or that offers an alternative view or opinion on things they consider important. Would Al Jazeera be blocked? This is not a farfetched notion.
The very suggestion that is a (poorly kept) secret plan does not bode well.
What are they afraid of? The BBC love to tell us that BBC is fantastic television. In which case people will pay for it, won't they? Or is the BBC actually a load of rubbish? Does it live in cloud-cuckoo bbcland, where everything is peachy?
I watch the television about once a month now, and that's only when I really can't find anything else to do. Soon I will get rid of my TV and save myself the licence fee. No doubt some jack-booted licence enforcers will knock at my door and I will have to prove I don't have a TV.
Naturally there is not a snowball's chance in hell of this happening. The "powers that be" won't listen to either reason or scientific evidence. They have made up their minds and will not change them.
Take the recent Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs recommendation that ecstasy be downgraded to class B. Cue the ham acting of government ministers: gnashing of teeth, hands being flung into the air, shock and horror on the look on their faces. "The government firmly believes ecstasy should remain a class A drug," a Home Office spokesman said.
What is this "belief" based on? What other things does this spokesman "believe" in? Which religion has it written down in some holy book that ecstasy should be classified as a class A drug?
It's time to remove the shackles and give us back our liberty.
Go and look up the parliamentary debates in Hansard. At the time the legislation was passed, 9 organisations were allowed to use RIPA. The purpose when it introduced was to fight terrorism and serious crime. There is no mention in the original debates about it being used by local councils at all. RIPA was later extended to councils and hundreds of other organisations.
There are (supposed to be) safeguards in RIPA, and a very useful FOI request would be to see how many RIPA orders have been turned down. I suspect the number would be very low.
It seems that absolutely none of the rights that we have taken for granted are either safe nor sacred.
In the name of anti-crime or anti-terror measures, i.e. at the behest of a policeman, privileged conversations can be bugged! Whatever happened to the "fruit from the forbidden tree"? Our MPs are a very sorry lot, intent only on filling their pockets with our money, yet not protecting our rights.
The message is clear: if one is arrested, speak quietly directly into your lawyer's ear, and ask him to do the same. It won't be long before the "serious" cases where this is used includes minor motoring or littering, if it hasn't already.
Who in this country actually wants to live like this? Who voted for it?
I really don't care tuppence what they say or think. The first duty of the police should be to protect the public, not themselves.
Let's face it, the police knew that tasers were not an issue item when they joined. Too bad if they can't do the job without them, find somebody else who will.
It's unfettered police access without a warrant to the recordings of those CCTV cameras, without a warrant and on demand. Whether or not a crime has been committed or alleged...
All licensed premises would thus become yet another part of the country where people are under surveillance.
I understand the point of this author's complaint, but I'm not sure I agree with it al all. As he has rightly pointed out, recourse to law is often extremely expensive. If I am defamed I may not have the funds to use wealthy lawyers like him, but two years later I may well do.
I think that "our" MPs are becoming very afraid of US, the electorate and tax payers. This measure is not aimed at would-be terrorists who would plant a bomb on the Tube. It is aimed solely at the electorate.
There was a headline on Sunday Express that MI5/police are becoming worried about serious disturbances in the summer, not from the usual ban-the-bomb-and-do-F-all (thanks, Quadrophenia) brigade, but from "ordinary" people who have had more than enough of this nonsense. The tax payers, who have bailed out the banks without a proper debate in the useless parliament, while losing their jobs, while seeing their assets dwindle, while seeing failed bankers getting £615k pensions, and ever encroaching surveillance under the false guise of anti-terrorism measures, are the ones who will rise up. Or that is the fear.
Yes, MPs should be afraid. Because they have let it happen. Because they are responsible. Because they will still get their perks and payoffs. They have become rubber stamps for the government, that is when things are debated and Acts passed, and legislation not just reduced to statutory instruments at the whim of a minister.
If there are serious disturbances/riots/insurrections this summer, there will be two sides: THEM and US. Indeed, not having THEIR addresses will not save them for long from US.
that Adobe Reader went back to the basics of rendering PDFs? Or at least have a click box that enables such a mode and nothing else?
It is now such a nasty piece of bloatware, performing like a snail with a fricking wheel clamp, that I only use it if Foxit doesn't work properly.
There are even tools to make Reader faster (by disabling all the very-rarely used plugins). If somebody has written a tool it is because a lot of people want it. Adobe should take note.
David Hicks, prove me wrong.
Install VPC or xVM, then try and install Debian Lenny. See what happens. I have several versions of Linux and FreeBSD installed in VPC 2007. They all work fine. The latest Debian does not.
As usual, the Linux fan boys can't stand a little criticism. I don't need to check any compatibility list for VPC. It is Debian Lenny that does not work on it.
I know Linux is not a supported guest OS. So what. That doesn't mean anything.
I haven't said that Linux is broken. I have said that Debian Lenny does not work in VPC or xVm. So instead of trying to spread some FUD, go and see for yourself.
Debian crashes during installation.
I know Virtual PC is not a real PC, stop whining at me. But it is a widely used program so I would expect it to work.
Don't bleat at me that it's Microsoft's fault either. Virtual PC existed before Debian Lenny, so a 1 minute test would have shown that it crashes. So now I'm having going out of my way to try it.
Imagine for two seconds that I haven't been using UNIX and Linux for the last 12 years, instead I've been brought up on Windows. My first impression as Bob the User is: Debian/Linux doesn't work. It doesn't matter too much why not. All the reasons and excuses in the world are meaningless. First impressions count. I would go back to my XP box and forget about Linux, refusing to believe the (not inconsiderable) hype, the year of the Linux desktop and so on. And I would probably tell my XP-using mates that Linux doesn't work. And we would make ourselves feel a little better by playing a few Windows games.
Oh boy. I went the extra mile and tried Debian in Sun's xVM. Debian installed. I rebooted. Guess what? Kernel panic. Yep, there's a lot to be said for Windows, I would be saying to myself.