Posts by Wayland Sothcott 1

Color or colour

The home computers were all colour. The PET was monochrome. But then I seem to remember the Apple was monochrome right up to the 1990's whilst the 64 had sprites and dazziling graphics. Tramel then made the Atari ST which was actually pretty good and cheaper than the Amiga.

I suspect that it was lack of compatibility which saw the end of most of the 1980's computers.

If only the MSX, Japanese Z80 machines had come out a bit sooner, we may have seen the home computer evolve into the machines we use today.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MSX

Z80 computer manufacturers always seemed to find a way of preventing a disk from one machine being read in another.

However it was the success of Acorns BBC Micro with it's very simple 6502 CPU which sporned the Acron RISC Machine CPU or ARM processor. Varients of this are used in most Windows PDAs and loads of routers and other gadgets with embedded linux.

I think the idea of a 1980's home computer is still valid since home computers were very big as games machines. Perhaps encouraging the use of a keyboard on a PS3 might be better. Perhaps encouraging people to plug their console into a proper monitor would also help.

Need experts

On the one hand it's great to have someone who is so involved in this business be investigating it. If it was F1 racing that was being investigated then probably best done by someone who knows the game.

However this seems like having a completely biased person investgate but have them not mention the fact that they are biased.

Given the massive amount of corruption that always seems to happen in politics I think it's perfectly fair to assume that this person was chosen exactly because he is so biased.

I am becoming tired of this. I am so jaded and lazy that I can barely be bothered to think about this stuff.

An enquiry is always a whitewash, enough jucy bits to placate the people and punish a few lesser players, never enough to get to the heart of the problem.

Servers need to be reliable...

...and desktop computers need to be easy to use and compatible.

If you have to wipe your windows hard drive occasionally then no big deal. You should have everything important on the server anyway.

Pretty much anything can run on Windows, but Linux is more decerning. Developers would like to use Linux for everything but instead use it where ever they can.

I mean are you really going to mess about in Linux trying to get your Nokia to sync with your Thunderbird or just use Windows and Outlook instead?

On the other side are you really going to mess about in Windows with regular updates that could change the way your server behaves and also risk viruses or are you simply going to use LAMP?

It really is a case of the right tool for the job.

Battery sales

Windows Genuine Advantage got many people phing up Microsoft with their credit card to pay them £90.

This new microsoft feature is working correctly and will sell a great number of replacement batterys.

re: Whats the problem

"Why is it so wrong that content producers and the organisations that represent them try to restrict the illegal duplication of their work?"

Yes I agree, it's just business. Like what's so wrong with schools teaching Microsoft Office rather than Office software in general. If you're in business and you can get the government to pass laws which favour your business then jolly good for you. Who wouldn't.

However there comes a point where this is fascist. The businesses are actually given law enforcement powers which entitle them to make money from enforcing those laws. The ordinary person does not have those powers nore is he making a profet from the law.

If an ISP decides you have been sharing too many movies they can create a problem for you which requires you to prove your innocence. Now if you are guilty then no problem, you just stop after the first or second letter. If you are innocent then you are entitled to carry on sharing your Alex Jones documenties but you will have to explain yourself to their satisfaction.

There are entirelty too many of these private law enforcement people. I am against private body's being required to enforce this stuff. The government is building a self funding police state of people who can make money out of their licence as long as they also enforce government policy when requested.

@Despicable

As I understand it in the old system the CRB gave you the requester the info and it was your decision to employ or not.

In the new system the ISA make the decison for you.

Burn all who fail CRB

"It's a nightmare! - my solution would be to kill a convicted pedo (hang, draw and quarter them 'just to be safe' ), then chop the remaining bits up into small sections for dogs to eat.

Then they can be removed from the database - before someone else with the same names come along."

Paul Murphy.

No you need to burn the bodies of the zombies and the living alike if having submitted to the ISA database they fail. That would keep data searches nice and speedy and keep data entry for the staff very low. Plus it would be good for the environment to have all that CO2 returned to the atmosphere and save the planet by reducing the population.

I am sure I have the science right on this one.

I for one...

welcome our new health and safety olympic overlords...

Health and Safety googles needed.

Wake up call

These things should be tools not toys. Unfortunately they have become vital toys that own you. The fact that Apple can change your phone into something different to what you bought takes away your ownership of the phone.

We need to get control of our hardware and not let it own us.

Maybe the taliban have an X-Box

If the Taliban have stuck a WiFi antenna on their hacked X-Box they could have achived positive control of the drone.

Neighbours child with him?

In future the police would be justified to check that he had an ISA licence to be in charge of children. If not then they could fine him. He could have been a child kidnapping terrorists, you just don't know unless the person can present a valid licence to prove otherwise.

Jacked being searched for anything that could help incriminate the person.

Child Exploitation and Online Protection

Are these the good guys or the paedos? It's hard to tell which from the name.

Trojan spyware

We know what this is for. We don't want it. But that's OK it's volentary until the end of 2009.

Fantacy crime

"After all what we care about is not whether people get off to weird stuff, but to keep them from harming others with that."

I think you are wrong on that. What we care about is punishing people who have sick perverted fantacies. It's not the actual harm to the children we care about, it's that people are getting away with fantasising and getting off on their sick thoughts and no one seems to be able to stop them.

Obviously if a child was harmed in the taking of the photos then having aa market for those photos could cause more photos to be taken. Also if a harmless child photo gets into the hands of a peido then it can become an object of sexual perversion, and no one wants their childs photo used that way.

However the way the law is worded it's the actual possession of the 'images' which is prosecuted provided the person gets off on them. This means they could have artistically created the images without reference to actual people and they would still be illegal.

This would be like accusing readers of crime fiction of murder. Or at least make thinking about murder a crime.

I fixed the RROD

A customer brought me his X-Box which sometimes would run for a bit before crashing out with the Ring Of Death. On examination of the heatsinks they were bonded to the chip very poorly with a pad which was not sticky but dry. I cleaned this off and used some expensive thermal paste. The X-Box now runs for much longer before crashing out with the Ring Of Death.

I suspect the damage has been done. However if Microsoft spent a little more on heatsink compound and maybe even better heatsinks then they would not have this nightmare.

I have an Atari 2600 console, the one with the wood effect plastic that was very american 1970's. That still works. From 1978.

Windows 2000 users

For those of us forced to like XP having found Windows 2000 perfectly sufficent, Windows Vista is just pointless and broken. Windows 7 has had the glazier in and everything is now mended and clean.

New users are probably better off with a Mac but if you need Windows then Windows 7 is good news. I stuck the beta on a P4 with 512 RAM and it was fine, faster than XP SP2.

So if you can switch from Windows you should, but you don't have to any more.

iPhone is not a Mac

but Windows Mobile is pretending to be a PC.

The Psion range were good PDA's but the Windows based PDA's were clueless by comparison. All that CPU power and bright screen and lot's or storage and still they were horrible to use. I could never understand how people could find them useful. I put the SD card from my camera in a top of the range HP PDA and it really struggled to display the pictures. What a useless brick. To top it all they crash and lose all your data on a regular basis.

Apple simply started from scratch with new hardware and a new aproach, not trying to make a desktop operating system fit in your pocket. What Apple have done is really not that amazing, they were just bold enough to do it and tenatious enough to get it done right.

Anyone not in awe of technology can see what's right and what's wrong with PDA's and Mobile Phones. It was obvious that a camera is a good idea and that the view phone is a bad idea.

Look at the graphics on a Windows PDA and that of an iPod Touch or iPhone. The Windows device can hardly keep up with the very basic opening of windows, where as the iPod can scroll and resize as smooth as angel delight making it far easier to get along with. Pretty obvious you should never over burden your hardware with bloated software, but Microsoft have been doing that forever.

Example, P4 with 512 RAM, it runs great with Micro2003, a cut down pirate windows 2003 distro, it's a dream to use. Similar PC with 2GB RAM and Vista, it's just horrible.

MS have choked our computers to death and are now choking themselves.

Global Warming star of it's own movie

A very witty peice. However the world is not controlled by the many, it's controlled by the few. So yes most people don't care about net neutrality and what is returned from a miss-keyed domain name, but it is still important. Their may be millions of people who know how to create a website, but their are billions who simply look at them.

When you think about all the stunts that an ISP could pull, then DNS error re-direction is pretty mild. As techies we should care and we should make a fuss, for the sake of the Internet the way we like it and for the sakes of all those billions of people who don't know why they should care. We are the few...

MinionZero "encouraged to upload a self-portrait" #

So what you are saying is little groups are fighting particular little issues rather than the root of the problem which is state control of our lives?

I think you will find that most people are aware of at least one aspect that's hitting them personally, be it Health And Safty not allowing pallbearers at a funeral or the school not allowing partents to take photos at the school play.

People are joining these dots and seeing the picture emmerge.

Central control in most of it's forms is still promoted at 'the solution' to our problems, be that ridding the NHS of the 'Post Code Lottery' in treatment availability or creating a currency which works in all countries.

We can agree to co-ordinate actions and laws or we could chose to be different. It's not nessasary for there to be a single central controling point at the top of one huge pyramid.