Posts by Stuart 22

A really great upgrade

Updated 5 desktops so far with the 'K' variant. Nothing broke. This is as good as an upgrade can get. Maybe doing nothing is a good idea.

Except that us non-unity folks did get an extra wallpaper - weehee!!!!!

NB if you are not getting the 14.10 upgrade option - its probably 14.04 setting the updates to LTS only. Change it to Normal Release and try again.

Just Sayin'

About 13 minutes remaining on my Kubuntu desktop upgrade to 14:10.

Which puts me ahead of kibuntu.org and unbuntu.com that are both trying to 'sell' you 14.04. I guess someone slept through the alarm. Or was it set to silent?

BTW Kubuntu works nicely with openCloud if I have to go back on topic. Why should I consider changing?

Complacency

Father/Grandfather backups give more protection against this malware than any virus checker can hope. And is pretty useful when baby pours milk all over your motherboard and bounces the drive on the err driveway - probably a more likely demise for your truly beloved data.

At the cost of a few downvotes - I dare to say that so many Windows users think safety is and only is paying out to Norton & co. Few have any backup strategy that will survive this type of attack. Yet it isn't difficult.

Samsung

Are they not exiting this market in Europe? Hmmm an HP/Acer duopoly is not good.

I also wonder whether the Chromebook boom is in no small part many of us realising that we can do almost all our mobile work on tablets or smartphones. Great for reading stuff, just crap at creating or controlling it. So a tablet like environment with a real keyboard is great and we live in times when boot up times of more than 5 seconds are no longer acceptable. That's Chromebook-land.

Many of us can now live without a laptop, pocket the savings and carry less weight.

I have a Kubuntu crouton on mine - just in case I need it to be a 'real' PC. But that doesn't get used that much. We are much cloudier than we think we are and Chromebooks encourage it. Unless you are locked in the past.

Not Nominet

You realise how benign even the US government can be when you see what's happened to Nominet.

Originally a quiet 'naming committee' did the work. When demand got too big it had to be formalised into a proper organisation and Nominet was born. The early years were mostly good. There was a clear policy to service what are now called registrars and also to defend the domain holder against the worst of our breed and even their own incompetence. Nothing was a problem that a well intentioned and informed phone call to Abingdon would sort.

The bells starting ringing when they made a land grab for the old naming committee domains. And then certain decisions which can only be seen as money grabbing exercises. Then came policies (one a week it would seem). It relied on most of us not having the time to read through, understand and then lobby. So stupid things happened. HMG seeing this wild child out of control pulled the paedophile card to start having its own control.

Suddenly instead of Nominet serving registrars and the public - it is us that are serving them. There are policies which we have to adhere to whether relevant or not. Don't get me started on the data verification exercise - which has caused real problems for good genuine organisations that expect us to sort out Nominet's insistence they don't exist even when they are registered, have bank accounts etc.

No longer, when you do phone, do you get a helpful person who solves the problem but a recitation of policy. Applying a policy where it ain't meant to go is what they are now supposed to do.

I've sorted a few issues by just keeping on at them and raising my voice just the right amount and they still have the autonomy to give way. But for how long?

Sorry about the rant. But oversight by anybody other than those they are supposed to be serving is not a good idea. That's the end user, not the interested parties in between. Those parties can inform and give technical oversight but keep governments and big business out of it. And split them up into units too small to afford a big glitzy HQ.

Am I a criminal?

If I hacked the website of a certain North Korean leader to give him a different haircut?

I promise to bare all to the holder of my ...

Remind me of the average time spent in jail by the thieves who defrauded us of billions in the Libor scandal (to name but one)?

Seems the only way to get 'em behind bars in plant some dirty pictures of their beloved. But that's difficult because it will have all been nicely laundered.

Hoorah!

I can almost hear Barbara Streisand singing .... well done the BBC!

And a good weekend to all. Well except those that feel so precious.

Almost a good idea

Software SIMs would be great. I currently have an issue with my Tesco micro-SIM in a Moto G. The G keeps losing it - but not other SIMs. And the Tesco SIM works OK is my Nexus 4. And who hasn't had to indulge in an orgy of gold contact cleaning - if only to please the call centre droid?

This is a bit of unreliable hardware we don't need. The problems when we lose a phone and want to use another - the problem, cost and time of carriers despatching a new SIM.

So be able to configure WITH YOUR FAVOURED CARRIER what IMEI to attach to your number (with a personal PIN in case anyone clones your IMEI) would be great. Online and independent of the device.

So yes software SIMs please. But they belong to either the carrier or me. Not the device. And certainly not Apple or Google.

Dumbass Me

I have no computer related qualification. Here's why:

1) There was none for machine programming a Deuce computer in 1964

2) There was no or very few computing degrees in 1967. People who liked computing would probably do Maths instead (as the Maths department traditionally ran the card punch room - and all that was hidden behind it).

3) Ditto for Z80 Assembler in 1975 or thereabouts

4) Ditto for practically any other innovation in the IT industry

5) Been using and setting up clouds for sometime. Taught by my peers online. Success at last?

I generally find people who come to me with IT qualifications are very good at what they are qualified in. The problem is that's all they know. A few selected silos without even realising the connections between them. Yet alone how to exploit them.

So I am a dumbass at computing. There is always someone better than me to help fix an issue that tests me. But very few who can see an IT project as a whole. That's helpful in spotting black holes that will screw the whole system while all the bits are claiming success.

That's also why I probably earn less than the average qualified coder/designer/analyst. Not that I would ever want to trade places. You can't price pride, enjoyment and just understanding of the subject. Oh, and sometimes making it work.

It's all over now

Anybody watching The Code (BBC4) will have spotted the leak of pre-prepared embarrassing information on a cabinet minister.

Its hard to imagine that the Director of GCHQ doesn't already have a dossier of resign quality data on every minister (or potential minister). That's leverage that's hard to put down. Even the most honest/moral of us leave trails that, as Hyppönen claims, can be construed as 'awkward'.

As Ted Heath once asked "Who Rules Britain?" It sure ain't trade unions.

Your Fridge has shut down unexpectantly, please reboot ...

The most obvious benefit to intelligent fridges is being used to smooth peak electicity demand by shutting down during TV breaks etc. Except this doesn't even need the internet, just the AC frequency signal and a bit of random number generation should do it nicely and securely. One would think it in the generator's interest to pay for the chip.

Except it hasn't happened. Why?

[SECURE DEVICE: SOLVED]

1. Get a Nokia 3210.

2. Don't use the contacts section

3. It will hold no more data than plod could have got from the network anyway.

Car Bonne Tax

I'll believe it all when Osborne starts giving tax breaks to high polluting CO2 gas guzzling flash motors. Oh, hang on hasn't he being doing just that with removing planned hikes to fuel duty?

More wheels, less bedrooms wins votes. Bit sad innit?

I can't find my Instamatic ...

Yep even my smartphone produces better picture these days even if I am not a better photographer. I do need to cover my mistakes/enhance. And I do it with my Chromebook using GIMP running in a crouton. But then its mostly cropping and adjusting for over/under exposure. Do it easier in the Chrome browser for free and I'm hooked.

As for that 50GB worth of pajamaless MPs - my nano 64GB USB stick does it a lot more unobtrusively than his $%^& - oops I don't really want to think about that.

All software engineers should be put back on dial-up ;-)

One problem is those that commission and create net services have the fastest juiciest broadband that money and location can buy. Hogs and hogs of quad core processing and fat wide pipes makes pretty pictures. The prettier the picture the more kudos.

Which means the rest of us are forced to play catch-up with power and bandwidth. If we don't we don't see stasis - we can watch our existing services get slower and slower as the poor processors try and grab more and more inefficient code to basically do the same job. Think how fast sites were when you first got 256 kb/s. are they going faster or slower with 60mb/s?

Living in an urban area and having dosh - that is do-able. In the sticks the laws of physics are harder to defeat.

Yes some stuff really needs cutting edge technology, multicore fat fibre to work. But actually most of us homeworkers are not majoring on HD Videoconferencing or trying to beat the fast computer brokers with nanosecond trades.

Nope - we just want normal websites to load as fast as they did and email to not get lost. I bet I could speed up a lot of folks net access by reminding them of adblocking software and script supression. Trouble is stopping unnecesary waits and processes creates a performance hit in its own right.

And lets not confuse reliability with speed. What use is the latter without the former if you are trying to run a continuous service.

Desmondia

if it was real why are Nvidia are keeping quiet on the WW2 bomber airbrushed out of the scene. ;-)

At last the 1936 Show, Folks!

Which decade is radio stuck in, the theatre stuck in, the book stuck in ... ???

Technology has aided them, complemented them but not yet superseded them. The only major media certain to die is the printed newspaper. Its problem is the time lag in delivery. You can't be more immediate than broadcast. I mean iPlayer is great but only if you want to revisit last week.

I won't mention its more robust, cheaper and more reliable than AppleTV or whatever wasn't working or compatible with any of my devices for a certain launch last week. Its was all a bit 1936 for students of British TV.

You get what you pay for

Which in Virgin's case is the eradication of several forests to junk mail me several times a week. If only they would spend that money in improving their service I might be interested. But my interest will come from expert people saying good things about the ISP. That's harder to buy than TV time (or buying islands in the Caribbean).

Yea I know VM have moved on from dodgy Branson but the legacy persists.