RIP Win2k...

...who will be sorely missed, having made Windows NT user-friendly and lead the crusade against that icky old Windows 9x line.

Speaking of said icky 9x line, the codename Memphis was that of Windows 98, not Windows 2000. The latter didn't really have a codename, unless you include simply "NT5" which if I recall was its prerelease name for a few betas.

Convince me...

Fair enough if you're a big business and such, maybe a couple of grand isn't terrible, but as a skint hobbyist coder I think $99 is too much for me to port the few apps a month/year I write to Linux or whatever else when I can never be quite sure it'll work.

It's a nice idea, but I'm looking for incentives to use (and in this case develop for) alternative platforms more, and paying for those incentives really doesn't encourage me. Developing for Windows (which I can do for free) allows me to distribute my apps to anyone running any semi-recent version of the OS, and that's an awful lot of people. Why would I pay extra to allow another couple of % of the computing world to run them too? What kind of package do I stuff them in? deb? rpm? What type of rpm? Will it run on Fedora or Mandriva? Regular download or repository? On Windows I just release a zip with an exe and a text file inside (or even just a single install exe), I know that exe will work on pretty much any Windows machine which has the appropriate version of .net Framework on it.

Not to mention the fact that VS05 was a notch below awful and that VS10 is already ploughing its way out of Redmond as we speak, they're only now looking to support VS08? Too little, too late, sorry Novell.

Power Rangers

"There's the sequence with the giant robot, Liberty Prime, that acts as the game's climax. The original pie-in-the-sky idea was that he was about five times the size he ended up, and you rode in his head"

That sounds like an awesome start to a Power Rangers game... You could play as a Power Ranger in a Zord, then you have to combine with the other Zords and you'd get to control Megazord and you'd have a view across the city and...

...alright, alright, I'm going! Mine's the one with the Green Ranger in the pocket.

Mobile Broadband Rules

Having bought an eee some time ago I decided it made sense to accompany such a portable device with an equally portable connection of some kind so I bought me a 3 (UK) PAYG dongle (Huawei E220) for a pretty reasonable 40 quid. I'd read reviews and I'd heard the service was abysmal but never one to take reviews as gospel truth I figured I'd give it a go. At £10/1GB, £15/3GB or £25/7GB it's pricey to say the least (not to mention the fact that topups expire after 30 days). However, the convenience of being able to connect pretty much anywhere made me overlook the costs because I knew I'd only use it occasionally and I wouldn't be doing anything particularly heavy with it, that's what ADSL is for.

Now I'm glad I did, but right out of the box I wasn't quite as pleased. Trying to make the dongle install properly was a right pain in the ass despite the dongle having a U3-style flash based optical drive simulator with the drivers on it. The drivers are awful, the connection to the laptop would often just flat out die or it would seem to be connected yet would not be recognised. Terrible, pathetic, nasty, cheap... just plain crap. When I eventually got the thing installed, the device itself seemed stable but the connection it provided wasn't so much.

Now I've taken the SIM from the dongle and put it into an HTC Tytn II and it's absolutely brilliant. I don't get 3G at home but why would I need to when I have ADSL already? In an emergency though I can get GPRS which makes it a nice backup even if it's not particularly quick. Out and about, however, I do get HSDPA, and when I have that HSDPA it really is like having broadband in your pocket, it far surpassed my expectations. As an added bonus, with every topup I get 90 days of Skype traffic for free outside of my regular usage.

So in summary, if you have a decent device to connect with and you have a half decent signal, HSDPA rocks. If you have a cheaply made dongle with drivers that could've easily been written by a 5 year old and a mediocre signal then you'll probably be less lucky. It's extremely convenient but it's also extremely expensive. On the other hand, WIFI is faster and more consistent if you're not going anywhere. Most access points these days seem to be secured (so no "borrowing" WIFI) and I'm not sure I'd want to pay for a connection I could only use at (for example) Starbucks which is insecure and only works in one location when I could drop the same cash on a top up for my HSDPA and go anywhere with it.

Oh yeah, one final point, make sure you bring a portable nuclear power station, those HSDPA radios suck juice like a class full of preschoolers at cookie time.

[spoiler]

Damnit, now I have to go and get catastrophically drunk to forget you said they're going to return to earth!

Also, old news for hardcore Dwarfers :D

Part of growing up, surely?

So how is this any different to the old way of doing things, the innocent "I'll show you mine if you show me yours"? I mean sure, go after the 40 year old bloke harvesting images and all, that's just fine (as the article mentions) but if both parties are that young, the age difference is negligible and the source of the messages sent them on purpose, what's the problem?

Paris, because if monitors worked both ways, she'd have seen almost as many as have seen her...

Giveth with one hand...

I've got an eee 701, I love it, it was cheap and the battery's fairly reasonable for its size. It'd be nice if it had integrated HSDPA though...

...which is where this LG would come in. In theory. There's always something horrendously wrong with the portability of these things when you compare features of one with another. Yes, we did want HSDPA, we really did, but what's the point if I can only use it for an hour*?

* I might be underestimating the Atom and ElReg's battery estimation could be wrong...

Another vote for Archimedes...

...because those Archimedes machines could be credited for my interest in computing as an early 90s school kid. Here's to 30 years of Acorn/ARM! Don't own any Acorn machines any more but hey, there's always emulation (though you don't get the feel of the old keyboard or the smell of the computer room after school or the big old Cub monitors or the... *sniffs and wipes a tear*)...

Now, if only kids these days had the same kit to play with... I guess they'd just laugh at you if you presented them with it. Shame.

Thieves-cum-Electrical-Engineers?

Wait, so even if this happened to be true, where are people gonna stick these chips and how? I can't imagine seeing Bob down the pub one night and him telling me he'd just modchipped his Sky box with the guts from a standard issue Focus radio...

Either there's some really slow people out there or this is a cover-up... >_>

Not real, eh?

I'm seeing people trying to describe this as something other than the article did, I can only imagine in some vain attempt to save face after years of laughing at Windows users. Let me just fix that for you...

Firstly, if this isn't a real trojan then a very large amount of the malware you constantly poke fun at on the Windows platform isn't real either. Of course, at the end of the day, malicious software really is just software that does things you'd rather it didn't while the guy who wrote it is sitting there rubbing his hands together with glee. Works the same on every platform, and if it gains root/admin/system privileges without asking you then it's a problem, regardless of what you wanna call it.

Secondly, I see people mentioning easy fixes. There are easy fixes for holes on other platforms too but that's sod all use to Joe Bloggs at No. 91 who just got his first computer 3 months ago and has abolutely no clue that computer security even exists, let alone that he has to worry about it himself. It's all very well knowing that if you turn off ARD then you're probably fine but that doesn't help all the other Apple users...

Finally, it doesn't really matter whether this is "real" or not, or whether you're in denial about using an OS that's a lot more vulnerable than you like to believe. At the end of the day, this is a security risk. It doesn't matter whether you want to believe it, which other platforms have more malware, how intelligent users supposedly are or how much you claim to know about your precious li'l Mac. If you wanna sit there cuddling your Jobs dolls that's fine by me, but when something comes along that you should be paying attention to, get your heads out of the god damn sandbox!

Yeah, I'm a Windows users. Oh, I use Linux too. OSX too, occasionally. OS8/9 once or twice, AmigaOS, RISCOS, FreeBSD... Well, you get the idea, I'm about as OS agnostic as you can possibly be, so no calling me a fanboy (that'd be somewhat hypocritical). Eep... Uberpost, I'm done here I think...

I reckon they're just not getting any...

But seriously,

"Causing a person to see or hear an indecent communication is also an offence. It can be committed by reading "a passage in a book or magazine" or by communicating the sounds of actual or simulated sexual activity or by communicating in sign language." ?!

So any book that contains sexual description, any song that contains orgasm-like noises, any innocent I'm-not-sex-deprived-honest pen flicking between thumb and forefinger can be cause for arrest? Are they trying to become the deep south of Americaland? Perhaps we should all just never learn about anything sexual?

Ok, so sexual harassment is and should be a crime, if someone's targeting someone and the feeling ain't mutual then fair enough, but under that wording, simply writing a mildly sexually suggestive book (or even your own diary, for that matter) could land you in the nick.

Oversensitive gits.

Oh, and Evil Bill, just to give you all nightmares after thinking about sex and seeing that picture in the same moment.

Re: Fonts

That's one complaint I have about most Linux distros I've tried - if only they used better fonts it'd look so much better. I dislike Ubuntu's default brown theme but if you just change the fonts it looks a million times less... err... amateurish. It's simple things like that which put me off of Linux, it could so easily be fixed... even some of the fonts provided (but not used in the UI) would be a ton better.

Come on guys, you want Linux desktops, you gotta put some effort into making them look usable.

Take a cue from Akon...

You'd have thought they'd have heard of Kensington locks by now, they're not that fecking far away from the place...

PearPC

The name reminds me of that CherryOS, the ripoff PearPC PPC emulator clone. I guess they share nothing in common other than the apparent ability to run iTunes but it just seemed interesting.

Me? I'll just keep my ol' dual-floppied Apricot with the glowing green monochrome monitor for when I'm feeling fruity.

Dead birdy 'cos it looks like he's just dribbling cherry hooch.

Y'know...

...I think I prefer the new one. She seems like quite the fun hostess, and judging by the bags under her eyes, she does it quite often.