I'm a fogey...

... at the grand old age of 30.

I last used it because my mp3 player was in the other room, under soemthing, and I couldn't be bothered to find it.

If they start playing more ads or trying to charge me, or even just make the product more awkward to use, then I'll give it up. I like to buy music on CD, rip it and file it away, then I can listen to it anywhere in the world on a variety of devices.

Spotify will only appeal as long as it's convenient and free.

(That said, I have some friends who love it and pay for it, but they're not as acquisitive as I am)

Can't get the bugger to draw me a fractal

It doesn't seem to like whatever notation I throw at it, I can't get a mandelbrot or julia set, it just reformats the function.

I suppose it's a touch processor intensive, but still...

@Chris (and other codec misunderstanders)

Chris, you make the device sound good. Am looking for something at the moment and this is on the list now.

As for OGG, well OGG is not a lossless format, it's a lossy format much like mp3. The difference is that you don't need to break the law to get free OGG creating software.

In various countries the MP3 algorithm is owned (By Thompson was it) and charged for and you could be sued for giving it away and not paying royalties. This is why mp3 support is often not enabled by default in linux.

That said, I use MP3, sod the legal side, because it's the defacto lingua-franca of music playing. Also I can't be arsed to re-rip my cd collection.

What?

But the 901 was surely the best EEE ever?

OK, so perhaps that a bit much of a claim, but I felt the 9inch was perfect - big enough to use but not approaching normal laptop size. 10 seemed just a step too far.

But I'm sure the sales figures prove me wrong.

Also, no linux?

So you're saying...

... we could afford a world class defence force AND a nucleur deterrant if we canned the olympics and ID cards and a few other domestic funding black holes?

Because frankly I find the 20-odd billion spent on those two things to be far more offensive.

Leave my C alone!

C is a beautiful, wonderful language that sorts the men from the boys and no mistaking.

Sure, there are other ways to get things done quicker, but when you absolutely, positively have to squeeze every last ounce of performance out of something, well, there's no other way to go (except assembly and maybe C++).

Yes, you can shoot yourself in the foot, or the head, with ease. But that's what makes the language so flexible. Take away my ability to treat everything as a piece of memory filled that I can stomp all over as I like and you take away some of my power to make things go fast.

I'll be watching this carefully...

...having written some of their POS stuff a few years back. I wonder if it's my old product that's gone bang?

Am available for (very) expensive consultancy :)

Scary stuff

Genuinely scary stuff, that there's a semi autonomous secret military in the US that's about as big as any other world power's. Who know what they could get up to?

Well, ok, we know they like torturing "terrorists" in other countries whilst staying outside the reach of their own or foreign law. The only shock here is the size of it.

A free country with a new president that promised a transparent government.... of course they need the biggest clandestine military organisation the world has ever seen. Of course....

Sorry, what?

A mobile phone is just another, smaller, computer.

Programming one machine whilst sitting at another has been a computing stable since the serial interface was invented.

This is nonsense.

What does that even mean?

We don't have time to look at it properly now, so we'll give it back to the suspect with a trojan on it and trust them not to delete stuff until we get around to looking?

Or is it the more sinister option of not bothering to collect hard drives in the first place, just hacking the machine and grabbing the info?

The former case is just damned stupid.

In the latter case I fail to see how that would affect the backlog in any way, just give police an even easier time spying on us.

FAIL.

(on my part if I've missed an option, on theirs if it's either of these)

Audits, whatever

It's the positive discrimination aspects that scare me. She's quoted as saying a business should be able to hire a woman over a man because they want more women in the workforce and avoid being sued under gender discrimination laws.

Sorry but WTF happened to the best person for the job?

I bet this %&*£$*& of a woman would have some way of weaseling out of it in cases (like teaching and nursing) where men are under-represen

SQL, C, C++ and UNIX

I always knew there was a benefit to being "old skool".

Vive la UNIX! Vive le C!

We're not going anywhere...

the decision adds to Home Secretary Jacqui Smith's embarrassment

Yeah.

She's already shown that she doesn't care and she won't either resign or take the blame for anything.

On a similar topic, anyone catch this Brown quote (on the slur thing) earlier -

"I take full responsibility for what happened. That's why the person who was responsible went immediately."

That'd be just the sort of responsibility Jaqui and Gordo know all about, the type where you claim to take it and then fire someone else. Doublespeak at its finest.

The labour creed - never admit fault

Of course we wrote this stuff, but it was a joke, right? We were just going to chuck it out, really.

Of course it was wrong to do that, clearly it's the code of conduct rules that need changing! Nothing to do with us!

Of course it was undertaken by my close friend, confidant and advisor without my knowledge! Entirely his fault and nothing to do with me!

Never, not even once is there a hint of real apology. Every time it's an exercise in passing the buck, expressing regret that they got caught and explaining to us poor proles how we've got it wrong and it wasn't really their fault.

How long do we have to wait for the next election cycle?

Right, so....

Before the 70's we were dumping (at least) two sets of nasties into the atmosphere, that cancelled each other out in terms of warming effects.

Now because we've stopped doing one, the damping effect it was having on the other is gone.

Surely the best answer is to try to stop pumping shit into the atmosphere, not ramping back up on the acid rain?

Surely that's the point

Big Blue have interests. They pushed their stuff into Linux to help themselves.

In the typical FOSS scenario we refer to a developer scratching their itch, and by doing so in an open way we all benefit.

How is this any different?

(I also agree with the above comments, Big Blue are a profit driven corporation, of course they'll only contribute to Linux when it is to their advantage to do so. Duh!)

@Paul Rogers

You entirely missed the point didn't you?

That these things are NOT as harmful as the propaganda has been saying. That your children can actually do some of these things WITHOUT screwing up their lives and more than they're headed straight for the gutter when they have that first sip of beer.

That thing your feeling right now, some sort of mixture of horror and indignation is there because you'll never believe me. It's there because you have bought, hook line and sinker, the idea that all "drugs" are necessarily harmful and their use is a moral failure.

Enjoy your glass of wine/beer/whisky "to relax after work" later on. I know it'll never sink in that cannabis and some of the other soft drugs have been rated in government reports as even less harmful to the health than your little glass of stress-reliever there.

But go on, keep justifying yourself. It must be kept illegal for the sake of the children!

Your kids would be better off having the odd "magic" brownie than going off to uni and binge drinking until they vomit, as is the current mainstream fashion.

Delicious, delicious irony

This could only have been better if it was "Extreme".

I hate that woman.

Usual Alexandr

Making a judgement before any of the evidence is in.

We know you don't like linux (either it's not enough like windows or it's just trying to copy windows, which is it today?) but some companies are pushing it internally now. Government organisaations too.

Sorry if that rubs you up the wrong way.

I use Linux, windows and solaris on the desktop, just to set things straight before I get called a fanboy.

Anyone surprised?

Give them these powers and suddenly, look, every tom, dick and harry down at the council is suddenly able to order surveillance on anyone they suspect of looking at them funny.

I hate this place.

@Anonymous Coward

"How? The only "laws of physics" that are relevant is the speed of light. The same that apply now, same distances, just more data."

Well, Laws of physics could be a bit strong, but the internet being what it is I find it hard to believe that they could do anything useful without installing rendering farms in every ISP's network. Big, expensive, supercomputing rendering farms.

"Actually, as the "server" will be "centralised", averaging out pings from individual players (due to its location), the lag would be less if anything."

Dear god no!

All that is communicated to the server usually is your position, velocity etc. Your local machine has control over what is displayed to you, so when you move it does not wait for the server to tell it "go ahead, you can turn now", it just draws the scene. If the server disagree with what it sees (you can't run that fast!) it'll reset your position to stop cheating.

This way the game continues to be responsive whilst also working over less than brilliant connections.

If you had to wait until a message had gone to the server and come back again before the screen started moving, you'd feel like you were trying to play in a world filled with treacle.

I don't have to renew until 2016

And I'm hoping to be out of the country by the end of this year anyway.

Up yours labour, and goodbye rainy old England.

Give it a rest

I've been playing "killer" video games since I was five. That's (sadly) 25 years.

Apart from the odd scuffle when I was at school I have yet to get into a single fight, let alone murder anyone.

Video games are now so ubiquitous that it's very likely that nearly every computer-owning male has at least one FPS that the police and media can use to hype their agenda.

Probable cause my heini.

Oh god no

"She called on "the harnessing" of technologies that "enable seamless communication between school and home" to make a schoolkid's day a more collaborative experience in which the parent plays a key role."

The absolute last thing I wanted when I was a teenager at school was for my parents to have any involvement at all in my day. School is where you learn to be an independent entity and should be (apart from in matter related to academic progress and problem behaviour) free of the purview of the parents.

It would be horrible to have had my parents able to see me in class, and it would probably lead to overprotective mothers getting even more obsessed and sheltering their poor little lambs (whose growth they already stunt with overprotection) even more.

Why is it always that the loudest protesters

Are the worst offenders?

Sort it out Utah. If you don't want kids seeing porn then use filters. If you don't want to see porn then don't go looking for it!

Also, I don't really get what the point would be of moving to a new port, it doesn't mean you can't point a browser at it...

@Simon

"I could be wrong but....

Calling people stupid just because they want XP instead of Linux on a computer is not the best way of winning converts."

Who's trying to win converts on this board?

People ARE stupid and lazy, and it seems the new trend for linux haters to jump on is "it doesn't work *exactly* like windows and therefore nobody will use it because they are stupid and lazy. Therefore linux sucks". What actually sucks is that people are stupid and lazy.

@aL

"didnt asus do this already? everyone just installed xp on 'em and where on their merry way.."

Quirte the opposite actually, the Linux eee901s had better specs but Asus seemed determined not to meet demand, so lots of people bought the XP version and put linux on it. Check out the eeeuser forums.

Personally I reflashed my linux one anyway because Xandros was ****

That's the main problem with linux netbooks if you ask me, the fact that people like Asus ship with their linux distro broken.

Xandros on the 901 would bleat about software updates and then fail or flat-out refuse to installl them. It had a weird GUI that I could not for the life of me figure out how to add a new shortcut to, and for the 901 Asus removed the "advanced" (KDE) mode.

Ubuntu and dell might actually produce something good together...

They still think they can control the internet

The more they tighten their grip, the more people will move to darknets, where stopping the flow of ideas is impossible.

Not that I'm saying it's great that "radicalisation" or other such material is available, I'm just saying that the cat is out of the bag now, and you can't put it back in.

4.6 million quid

Right. 4.6 milsion.

Jesus jumped up christ, this is where our taxes go.

And people moan that cutting taxes would mean having to cut essential services.... Can someone GUT the goddamned government please? This is our money going on this crap.

I thought there were very strong protections

Specifically enumerated in the US constitution and its amendments, that the US armed forces are NOT to be used on home soil?

Either way, that's really slippery. Given the way that the definition of "terrorist" seems to get wider every day and legislation aimed at "terrorists" is abused, the thought of allowing use of the army to tackle them is scary.

Glad they're gone, I hope the US can successfully remount its moral, freedom-loving high-ground over the next few years. God knows we need at least one government that's interested in it. I'm not holding my breath though.

Won't stop them for a second

They'll write this down as an isolated incident and carry on regardless.

The morons in power here do not understand that if you create the database it *will* be hacked. Someone will be bought, or someone will give up a password by accident, or the technology will be inadequate.

But that's no concern, lets move on and put all of everyone's details in a single place and hope that it all goes well. Fingers crossed the software guys are the world's best, the public employees with access are all incorruptible and security minded.

Yeah right.

(All of the above is an aside to how the horrible idea this is in the first place)

Oh for god's sake

Yes, that's right, Terrorists and paedophiles are waiting around every corner to use any available, paid Wi-FI service!

For god's sake people, have you really bought into that level of hysteria?

This is a bad move for BT, but please, lets have some perspective, it's not a war zone outside your front door, neither is everyone on the street a predatory pervert. YOU are what's causing the breakdown of society.

So they murdered I am Legend

And now they want to re-abuse one of Dick's stories?

I have come to dread sci-fi movies these days. I *love* sci-fi books. But so many times they take the book, borrow a theme and then totally miss the point of the story to the extent that they're effectively pissing on the authors ideas.

Take "I Robot" for instance. Fscking travesty. They took a cerebral exploration of the ramifications of seemingly simple laws for robotic behaviour and turned it into a noisy, Will Smith laden advertisement for Pepsi, Converse trainers and Audi. Asimov must have spun in his grave.

TR was a cheap enough rip-off of the book, lets not cheapen it further, please.

@alddude

Linux is worth billions.

Whatever your thoughts on Gnome/KDE desktops, you can't argue that the Linux operating system is small-fry. It's huge in the server room (even on mainframes) and in the embedded arena.

Anyway, yeah, keep hiding in your retarded suit.

@MarkJ and AC

I'm not so convinced the NSA can break AES.

Yes, it's approved by the US government, it was written by an academic and won the AES title in competition. It's been widely scrutinised by security experts across the world.

Does that mean that the NSA definitely can't break it? No. But I'd put money on the fact that it still holds up to them and if they can break it then they can only break it with huge amounts of computer power and intelligent brute-forcing on selected small pieces.

As mentioned before

Asterisk and OpenSSH will do the trick nicely, and noone will ever know what was said.

Or check out OneSwarm and its ilk. Friend to friend peering with longer distance comms done in multiple hops, end to end encrypted.

I'm afraid that unless the conspiracy theorists are correct and 'they' write a back door into every crypto algorithm, unless that's true, the authorities literally cannot eavesdrop on what people are doing.

Even with legislation to make people give up keys. For those wondering how that could possibly work, read up on Diffie Hellman ephemeral key exchanges, pick the pieces of your brain up off the floor and then consider the implications if you're a spook that usually only has to plug his listening device into the right wire...

@Anonymous Comparability Coward

Umm, bluetooth? You use Bluetooth as an example of something apple has and others don't?

Even my eee 901 has Bluetooth!

On the general stuff, well, I only use Lenovo or Sony kit, other than the netbook (lenovo have got one now though). Build quality on both is excellent. VFM I feel is excellent as well. But then, in the case of Sony, I'm willing to pay for equipment that is not only cutting edge but pretty looking, compact and ultra-light.

(Why yes, I did re-image my vaio as soon as I got it, boy do PC manufacturers love to pile on the trial offers and other crapware these days!)

Tux because he loves them all.

@Eden

"Bulldog DSL were sending me bills and threats of courts for 2 years for a phone line that NEVER EVEN EXISTED!!

Shame I never thought of suing the B******Ds for the stress."

Likewise, took me 20 months to get them off my back after they totally and utterly failed to install broadband at our place. 6 months of them taking the money from my account before I managed to stop them (and get it back) and then over a year of "you're not paying for your connection! You owe us money!" letters. And when I finally started sending them letters via registered post and threatening to go to OFCOM I was asked if there was a problem and would I like to cancel my account?

Could happily have gone to their headquarters with an axe and murdered the lot of them.

Can you say "anti-trust"

Or monopoly?

(v)FAT is now a standard filesystem allowing devices like digital cameras, consoles, computers, mobile phones... basically anything to use the same media, usually flash media.

Whilst a free (unencumbered by patents, copyright, trade secrets etc) FS would be better - anyone could implement for no fee - that's not where we are now. FAT is well documented and widely supported precisely because these things need to be read and written by Microsoft's operating systems. The OS monopoly once again forced vendors onto another MS system.

Given that Microsoft have been repeatedly slapped down by the EU courts, I would expect that the moment they try this on the EU will bitchslap them again. Mighty hard.

Convicted monopolists should not be able to blackmail companies into paying them because the monopoly forced them to take a particular course of action. Patent or no patent, MS is saying that they'll have their pound of flesh or nobody gets to play.

Besides which, one of the patents covers the method of linking/displaying a long filename when the FS underneath uses 8.3 format (i.e. the tech they brought in to pretend to use long filenames under Win95). They have a patent on a hackish workaround to an inadequate FS to make it more like the better ones that predate it?

They're 'avin a laugh!

What are they afraid of?

The more I read about this authoritarian stuff coming out of the Labour party, the more I wonder.

The anger I first felt years ago with the announcment of ID is still there, but with every new measure something else strengthens - pity.

Something has obviously made these people extremely scared, scared of foreigners, scared of dissidents, scared of children, scared of everyone.

They need therapy, not power.

@Wolf

Sorry mate, got to disagree there.

Other languages just cannot optimise to the bare metal the way C does. Or maybe "do not" is better than "cannot".

I know, I know, java has intelligent runtime optimisation. It still seems to take forever to start and need a larger memory footprint than a decent C app though.

Where you absolutely, positively have to have control over what memory is read when and in which order, when you want to squeeze the best you possibly can out of a system, use C. And this applies to giant database systems as much as it does tiny embedded boxes.

Oh, and don't forget systems programming, drivers, kernels etc.

Plus you have the cost of distributing and installing java VMs everywhere.

If you can code C competently then there's no need to switch. I'll agree that it seems that many people can't.

Worried that crooks are going to use skype...

Skype?

Trust your highly confidential and illegal comms to a third party with unknown, proprietary encryption and an unknown route.

Set up Asterisk at two points, tunnel it through a secure connection (OpenSSH would likely do) and voila, no eavesdropping possible without actually breaking the well-tested real crypto.

Not that I want to aid and abet criminals, but this focus on one technology, skype, is just downright stupid and easily circumvented by anyone that has half a technological brain.

Tux, because using a penguin based system will get you all this stuff for free.

Lies.

"This just emphasizes what we already knew about C," Fortify researchers wrote. Even the most careful, security conscious developer messes up memory management."

Like hell it does. Out of 45 submissions they found errors (or more likely potential errors) in about 5. Yes, C is awful and not a single living human can write C code with no security holes...

Morons.

Because we can't have any sex

In a game about violent thugs murdering scores of innocents, sex would be totally unacceptable, right?

Western society is retarded.

Authoritarian arsehole

The public hate the ID cards, so lets find a way around that and do what we want anyway, regardless of democratic will. Government for the people, eh? Don't make me laugh.

Personally, I picked up a ten year passport just before the biometric ones came in and plan to be living in another country by the time I'd be forced to hand over my details to their central DB.

@Alex

So your arguments have gone from "Linux is worthless" to "some of my users are too belligerent to give up MS Office".

Way to back up your assertions there.

Nobody is forcing you to use Linux, if you and your users don't like it then don't use it. But just because your pack of morons are so invested in MS tech that they refuse anything else doesn't mean that everyone is.

Also, you know that "Linux is crap because everyone knows MS" doesn't actually make sense as an argument? If you want to argue that linux won't gain acceptance due to cultural inertia - spot on.

Your little "choice is BAD" thing up the top is very funny too. So because I could choose a few different media sharing programs, depending on my needs, linux is rubbish? But MS is great because media player 11 does it with some features missing and you have no choice?

That's just, like, your opinion maaaaan. Fighting monoculture in computers is one of the major FOSS motivations. There never will be a time when there is one true linux and one true browser/media play etc. People have different needs and preferences, and different uses for computers.

As for UI, they all borrow from each other. Linux has been ahead of MS in terms of interface for some time now, imho. It might not seem that way if you're not used to it, just like I found the jump from XP to Vista painful.

I find it very hard to take anyone pro-MS seriously these days, after the vista debacle and the fact that Win7 has already been shown to take even more control of the computer away from the user in the name of DRM.

Anyway, enjoy your monoculture, I'll be off programming on lots of different OS's for money and running linux at home because it's easy, reliable and it helps me learn about real computer systems rather than how to click a box over and over again.

@AC

"I foresee a world where the people controlling the purse strings will actually be asking for larger cuts of decreased revenues, rather than one that is fairer."

Those currently holding the purse strings are just as parasitic. We'd do better without them or the pirates.

Distribution is now a negligible cost, often footed by the consumer themselves (esp. in a P2P model).

Advertising is pretty much only spent on the plastic act of the moment.

The only thing the labels can offer is production, and they overcharge for that in terms of taking the copyrights. Time for them to die. They were valuable when recording equipment was extremely expensive, they had their uses when distribution meant mass-produced physical items. Now, not so much.

All certs should be EV

But by that I don't mean everyone should pay loads of cash for an EV cert, I mean that nobody should be issuing certs without checking.

Browsers should be installed without the cheap and dirty registrars available. Those that are know to not be trustworthy should be removed from the list in browser updates.

This is a social problem. TLS itself is rock solid.