Re: Fscking ridiculous

re:parody defence

parody is a defence against trademark claims IE your parody is allowed to be recognisable as the company it's parodying (otherwise there's no point).

It isn't a defence against copyright infringement (though for novels this is no hardship)

Re: Quite right, too

"Well, suitably backed up to a different location that'll be fine, otherwise you're unprotected against 50% of data risks."

...and 100% of "accidentally hitting the delete key" risks

RAID is nice; backups are vital

It's not perfect

I've had MSE miss a virus on a friend's PC before - thankfully a "let this program have firewall access?" prompt came up, alerting him.

We submitted the file to one of these online sites, and only 2 of the virus scanners caught it, so I'm not claiming MSE to be amazingly shit either, but that it can miss things is undeniable

Re: Can't remember the last time VoD worked properly on Virgin Mediocre

No conspiracy I'm afraid.

This issue is affecting LINX only. Speedtest decides what server to use by checking the pings. Thus, when this issue is happening, speedtest will test against servers VM doesn't go over LINX to, because the pings are lower.

Some more information:

http://community.virginmedia.com/t5/Up-to-100Mb-Speed/Very-poor-performance-between-7pm-and-12am/m-p/1505368/highlight/true#M4909

http://community.virginmedia.com/t5/Up-to-100Mb-Speed/Very-poor-performance-between-7pm-and-12am/m-p/1554170/highlight/true#M7223

(not sure if the two issues are related or not)

Re: Microsoft understands...

"forced obsolescence through incompatibility"

rerversi from windows 1.0 still works on win7 32-bit (64-bit windows can emulate only 32-bit apps)

Re: freetards?

to be fair to orlowski, he wants to re-purpose the word to mean "those who demand things for nothing" rather than "open-source enthusiast"

Seriously?

Are you honestly saying that the FIRST THING someone should do if they find factual errors in a wikipedia article criticizing them is to sue?

Re: Quite agree...

I love Edinburgh council's site

On the main page, on the "popular pages" links, it has council tax, school openings, swimming pools, bin collection, road gritting, libraries etc. etc. Never had a problem using it, which still comes as a mild surprise each time...

win7 crashyness

by contrast, I can make windows 7 bluescreen really easily.

All I have to do is push the overclock past sensible levels... :P

VM also having LINX congestion issues unrelated

the LINX packetloss issues are/were because an undersea cable had been cut. This meant traffic that otherwise would have been using it was shoved onto LINX, causing congestion.

Um, have you actually read this?

I can't help feeling you haven't actually read the article.

Microsoft are explicitly saying that OEMs won't get the shiny sticker unless both the orthodox way (no bootloader signing) and the new way (add your bootloader's keys to the firmware) of installing other operating systems are supported. What they are insisting on is that machines shipping win8 do things the new way by default.

If it's the whole idea of signed bootloaders you're objecting to, the UEFI forum published that spec in April 2011, and no one complained either before or after.

In terms of lockdown, the ARM stuff is much more restrictive (apart from the fact that MS only has a couple of percent market share so isn't a monopoly in any way)

Linux will work just fine on new stuff as well

...just that, IF YOU BUY A COMPUTER WITH WIN8 ON IT, you'll have to turn off the signed bootloader thingy.

Talking about messing with the keys is a red herring; if you want to do signed linux, you were always going to have to install your own keys, and even if the UEFI spec doesn't specify how this is to be done, it ain't Microsoft's job.

They key points is that MS have said that to get their shiny sticker on OEM PCs, they not only have to ship with a way to turn off these security features, but they have to be customisable. This will, in fact, make key-signed linux MORE likely than it would have been last week.

As to the ARM stuff, in the abstract this is annoying. But in reality, I can't see the presence or absence of the ability to load linux onto win8 phones and tablets affecting me one way or the other.

depends on the license

Not sure what the relevant bits are licensed under, but it's possible you can only use the source if you release any derivative works (like a compat layer) under the same license, And if you do _THAT_, then, assuming tight integration, you'd have to release iOS under that license as well.

MS isn't stupid

"MS will pressurise manufacturers NOT to allow the feature to be turned off"

That would leak in about half a second, and trigger a new round of EU _AND_ US antitrust penalties. They don't want that.

Disagree

All this means is that CORPORATE MANUFACTURERS will include such the "disable secure boot" toggle - they'd be stupid not to. That says nothing about the rest of the market, especially the pre-assembled end of it (I suspect consumer retail motherboards to be likely to support disabling it; OEM ones, _maybe_ not)

missing the point somewhat

for new metro-style C++ apps, it seems like compiling for ARM will be as easy as clicking a checkbox (though I'll believe that when I see it, and of course deliberately writing things that are limited to one processor is trivial)

so if you're still at the "choosing what to develop for" stage, you should be able to target both

we have a winner...

...why do you think they don't want steamworks games? because you can't re-sell them, because once it's tied into your steam account it can't be extracted (to be fair to steam, I can't think of a way to transfer games to other accounts that isn't doomed to end in squillions of stupid-phished-users' games being used to scam people)

Yes and no

In most cases, all the T&Cs do is make explicit that because you've uploaded a picture to their site, it's going to be made available on the internet to anyone with the URL. Some sites, however, opted for the cheap lawyers, and the T&Cs reflect that.

not clear

twitter do now do their own image hosting, but the chances are the images were hosted elsewhere and merely linked via twitter

or maybe not

a) throttling isn't "on a whim", but more importantly

b) on the lowest service VM offer, while being throttled, there's MORE than enough bandwidth for gaming. whatever is going on, it's not due to lack of bandwidth

fool and his money

while being throttled there's more than enough bandwidth for gaming. what's far more likely is that there was some sort of issue with your connection; going to 50 meg involves changing from DOCSIS 2 to DOCSIS 3, and an engineer visit. Chances are whatever they did resolved your issue.

and let's not have any crap about "using what you're paying for"... you're on a consumer broadband connection. You're paying for a contended service -> you are getting what you paid for, unless you're paying at least 3 figures a month

pretty much

This "native" malarky is basically MS banging the drum about the graphics acceleration - AGAIN AND AGAIN AND AGAIN which, given that HTML5 is looking to replace at least some of the kinds of thing people used to do with flash (and could have done, but didn't, with silverlight) may actually, at some point in the future, be worth mentioning.

RIght now, the only real-world difference I notice is that IE is better at displaying 30,000 by 30,000 pixel images than opera.

can't be done

the assertion of existence of a deity isn't falsifiable - it can't be tested. This is the reason why it's not a question for science

not wrong but...

you're not wrong, but the default experience is still critically important. All new users, and I suspect even a very large proportion of existing users who upgrade, will judge ubuntu on what it chooses to present to them, and why shouldn't they?

This doesn't affect me so much since my main experience of ubuntu is via ssh terminal ;)

Your history is wrong

ie6 was released in 2001. Firefox wasn't released until 2004. The issue was not the state of IE6, the issue was that a new version of IE wasn't released until 5 years later.

uh... am I missing something here?

what happens if you just turn off cleartype? does it turn it off for the OS but keep it on for IE9?

true but not the whole story

that is indeed part of why people use command-line, (a similar phenomenon on windows is "registry hacks" instead of just checking the checkbox in options), but part of it is when you are wanting to walk someone through something, it's easier to tell them to copy&paste from the command line than it is to say "bring up this menu, then that menu..." ad infinitum. Windows server MSDN articles do the same thing; to enable a lot of functionality they'll tell you to type something into an elevated command prompt rather than click on the "install server role" option or similar

Missing the point

While some probably _ARE_ selling above their capacity, home broadband is and always has been a contended service, a tradition going back to the days of dial-up where they owned less modems than they had customers, meaning it was possible for you to call the number and get an engaged tone.

As soon as even 2 people are using something, traffic management can be useful, for latency reasons even if not for bandwidth reasons. e.g. on a line that can get 100 meg throughput, someone bittorrenting at 50 meg can knacker someone's voice comms which only uses 1 meg, even though there's spare capacity, simply because the voice comms is more sensitive to late or missing packets.

no and yes

the bottlenecks with cable are a lot more local. So VM don't have an overall capacity problem - mine never dips below max - but they _DO_ have a problem in your area.

indeed

i also got the previous router (this isn't the superhub) that was a VM-braned netgear firmware. From a throughput capacity, the firmware was ok, but it was woefully under-featured (couldn't do static routing, couldn't do nat for LAN clients)

a quick dd-wrt sorted that

this new superhub seems to be causing issues. If they ever get around to implementing bridge mode, it might be ok

_decent_ software?

"Decent photo management software should be able to handle tags at the very least"

hell, even the MS live photo gallery thingamabob does this!

He's right (also, you're wrong)

"Are you claiming that www.support.me is a kosher LogMeIn site?"

Connecting to www.support.me|77.242.193.195|:80... connected.

HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 301 Moved Permanently

Location: https://secure.logmeinrescue.com/Customer/Code.aspx [following]

Yes it is.

"Then LogMeIn are complicit in these scams. Why hasn't anyone sued them?"

No they're not.

The whole point of LogMeIn is that you go to the site, enter a code, and the person the code belongs to can then remotely control your computer, for tech support purposes. If you're daft enough to let a complete stranger remotely control your computer, how is that their fault? It's just a tool - if someone tells you to throw a hammer at your computer, you can't sue the guys who sold you the hammer.

No

No, because then it could be argued that you're trying to get around the tax laws. If a company "sold" you a new car, or a new computer for that matter, for one dollar, they it's pretty obvious that it's tax evasion.

In this situation, not so much, but you still have to sell them for "fair market value", based on what similar computers are going for.

Why patches are monthly

See the other discussion thread about testing. By releasing once a month, an IT department can sit down once a month, discuss what patches apply to them, test them, and release them. If patches are drip-fed as and when, the admin overhead involved in properly testing updates before applying is such that many companies don't apply them at all.

2-4 meg WOULD be a better thing to aim for

I know someone who gets sub-1-meg speeds he's so far from the exchange, and someone else who only gets dial-up.

while it's nice to get faster internet, imo we should concentrate on getting a decent minimum before we spend money improving the speeds of those who already have decent broadband

shouldn't need catch-up

"Okay, when it came out Security Essentials had a lot of catching up to do "

shouldn't have. Certainly when it first came out, the virus definition files were identical to those of its big-brother product Forefront. (which is the domain-controlled, central-reporting, costs-you-money version)

it's also both inconspicuous, AND doesn't have a "please ignore and run the virus anyway" option on its pop-up

for anyone saying "just don't get infected", remember you can get infected from flash. Before someone mentions noscript, remember there have been cross-side scripting exploits on youtube before. Just because you browse legit websites only doesn't mean you're safe, that's like saying uprotected sex is safe as long as you stick to "nice girls"

fining the person who lost the data...

...results in some poor schmuck who doesn't know any better getting in trouble, while the manager who didn't implement proper procedures in the first place gets off scot free.

indeed

"And further, all that chart measures is how many people have visited the distribution's page on Distrowatch"

and put it this way, I already know what ubuntu is, so I'm never likely to visit its distrowatch page

I don't know if this has occurred to you...

... but it's not the SRA's job to prosecute random people. It's not even their job to sue random lawyers on behalf of random punters. It's their job to police their profession. As such, all they can do is kick folk out of said profession. You want charges brought against them, go see the police.

even less than minor

for the chrome issue, it occurs when multiple users are simultaneously running chrome on the one machine, and at least one of them has right-clicked and selected "run as admin" instead of just double-clicking. The scope of the issue is that said users can't auto-update chrome.

The adobe issue is that certain updates would require a reboot.

It's hardly the end of the world, is it?

er... when did they register the domain?

from the sounds of it, you guys had a trademark, and decided on the basis of that, that you should be allowed to use some random domain name which had been registered for donkey's years. I'm afraid that's not how it works*. The idea is that you've been using a trademark, and then someone's gone and registered the domain in an attempt to make money off your PR. _THAT_ would be cybersquatting. Refusing to give up a domain name just because someone's come along later and quite fancies using it is not.

If I've somehow misinterpreted your remarks, please let me know; this is mainly due to the "years ago and appears to keep it around for that reason." part of your comment.

*ok, not how it's _supposed_ to work, I'm aware of the many failures of the system

are you honestly saying...

...that chief constable Plod sat in his office and said "I could detail a couple more people to this protest, or I could send them to arrest an MP over a twitter message... let's do option 2"?

It's different people on a different day from a different department. It really isn't an either/or thing.

In any case, the current thinking is the police _COULD_ have deployed more people to cover the protest, but didn't expect it to kick off, and so didn't. Whether or not that was a good idea is open to question (though from what I hear, the people who started the trouble were rent-a-mob fodder not associated with the actual protest anyway)

kinda

the MS OS evolution makes a lot more sense if you posit a "missing" OS between XP and Vista that was eventually abandoned. this explains why vista didn't do half the things they said it would - because it's technically a different OS - and also why it doesn't seem to have 5 years worth of improvements - because they weren't working on it for 5 years. The incremental improvements from XP to Vista to 7 then make sense

actually it _IS_ saying that

"Looking at wired infra that would be like saying that net neutrality forbids NOCs to counteract DDoS attacks"

the way the fanatic fringe - ie the part that gets the publicity - of the net neutrality brigade are phrasing things, that's exactly what it would mean.

I agree the circumstances in which ISPs can discriminate traffic need to be locked down, but the tubthumpers (again, only the very fringe, but the people who get quotes) are going on about total neutrality. I want ISPs to be able to:

- deal with (D)DOSs and faulty apps like in the article

- prioritise based on tcp/ip headers (icmp vs udp vs tcp, for example)

- to further be able to prioritse based on traffic type (real-time VOIP and gaming vs web pages vs bittorrent/ftp/binary newsgroups)

...all of which make sense, but we're in danger of throwing out the quality of service baby with the sneaky underhand revenue generation bathwater

easy to do in any big chain in any country

walk in wearing the right uniform, say "i'm here to upgrade your card readers mate", know exactly where to go, know the corporate lingo, and it's easy

all it needs is someone to work in an Aldi for a couple of weeks to learn the lingo, and see what company their till support contract is with

as a part-time university job I worked at mcdonalds, an engineer came to install a wifi access point for customer internet one evening when I was shift manager and I had a HELL of a time tracking down that he wasn't, in fact, some random dude trying it on (especially because I was short-staffed and had to leave him along in the back office by himself). The idea that someone would want to confirm an unannounced maintainance visit was almost unheard of