* Posts by Connor

135 publicly visible posts • joined 11 Jul 2009

Page:

Brit semiconductor tech ended up in Chinese naval railgun – report

Connor

Return of the Battleships?

Radar and AI controlled railguns could surely see the return of more guns on ships and perhaps bigger ships with lots more guns? As noted shells are cheap, quick to fire and easy to store compared to missiles. With improved software controlling the guns and the radar they would surely and perhaps ironically make aircraft and missiles obsolete, after all it is a lot easier to shoot an aircraft or a missile out of the sky compared to a shell. Maybe Britain picked precisely the wrong time to start building those huge and really expensive aircraft carriers and should instead of chosen to build a couple of battleships instead?

Ubuntu reverting to Xorg in Bionic Beaver

Connor
Linux

Waylaid

Wayland also doesn't work with propriety drivers, which you have to use on Ubuntu now if you have an Nvidia Optimus card or just want decent performance. I thought I'd give Wayland a try in Ubuntu 17.10, big mistake. No matter what drivers I use, Wayland just refuses to work anyway. So I'll be sticking with Xorg for the foreseeable future which in Linux terms is probably a decade or more.

EU law bods closer to baking new 'cookie law' after battle

Connor

In many cases? But not France, Germany Italy, UK and Spain - the big members. The ones who have actual power.

Requesting the EU Commission to pass a law isn't the same as having the power to do it themselves. They have no power, which is why they have no say on Brexit or any deal. As for European politics I understand it perfectly it all starts and ends with Angela Merkel.

Connor

The EU Parliament has no powers whatsoever to pass laws. Sure they vote on things, but neither the vote or anything they say and do is binding on anyone, anywhere. They can't edit, pass, reject or repeal laws. The EU can just ignore (and has frequently) what the parliament suggests by their pointless votes. Ministers appointed by elected officials isn't anywhere near the same as them being elected themselves. Our elected officials have every law and decision scrutinised by the press and public - their position and career hang on every decision they make. EU Council members get to make decisions behind closed doors away from scrutiny and repercussions, you can't even compare the two.

Lenovo denies claims it plotted with Microsoft to block Linux installs

Connor

Re: Microsoft will be paying vendors to deploy their malware os Windows 10....

Of course, should anything go wrong you warranty isn't worth the paper it was printed on and your consumer rights are non-existent. You can of course write them a stern letter or write out an angry forum post. But that's about it. Even if they are willing to fix it, you'd have to send it back to China, and pay for that, and take the chance of something happening along the way, during which you won't have any legal cover whatsoever.

No, the risks outweigh any benefit of buying direct from China.

Idris Elba thrashes Night Manager Hiddleston for James Bond job vacancy

Connor

What the?

Why no Warwick Davies? What kind of example does that set for those with Dwarfism or other disabilities?

Hollywood offers Daniel Craig $150m to (slash wrists) play James Bond

Connor

Re: Other colours are available.

Forgot to mention my choice, none of the above. It is ridiculous that in 50 years we haven't had a single working class Bond, considering they make up 30% of the population. Sean Bean would have been excellent, too old now though.

Connor

Other colours are available.

It is interesting to see the pre-programmed responses - all black, because that is what the lefties love and is in vogue at the moment. Ignoring the fact that twice as many people in the UK are Asian, and three times more Asians go to Oxbridge than blacks, yet no-one ever mentions an Indian, Chinese or Middle Eastern bond? I wonder why? Bond is huge in Asia and Africa (Bigger than in the US and UK) but whether that would be the case with an Asian protagonist would be interesting.

It is also worth noting that once a character changes sex or race, they never change back.

Softbank promises stronger ARM: Greater overseas reach and double the UK jobs

Connor

Seen it all before.

Every time this happens the same noises are made, the same assurances given to the Government by the buyer, and then a few years later come the job losses, the moving of operations overseas and the loss of yet another great British business.

Women account for just one fifth of the EU’s 8m IT jobs

Connor

Re: none issue

Agreed.

"How many male nurses are there in hospitals?"

Just 10% of nurses in the UK are men, and most of those are foreign (Filipinos usually where they have a much higher percentage of male nurses). So that is half the percentage of women in IT, yet precisely no-one is banging a drum about it or setting up initiatives to combat why men feel nursing is not a career for them.

Doctor Who's good/bad duality, war futility tale in The Zygon Inversion fails to fizz

Connor

Re: Blood and death??

Is that what happened after WWII? I am not sure it is or indeed after any war. I thought the moral was that after some 'splinter group' not supported by the majority, yet were apparently everywhere, had slaughtered hundreds if not thousands of innocent humans - as well as your UNIT colleagues and friends - you were meant to work harder to understand them, and most importantly forgive them. After all they were doing what they believed in and were forced into that position as humans are so awful wouldn't accept who they really were. So you forgive them and let them get off scot-free for all the murder and mayhem because they are all nice people really and it is all your fault for not understanding them.

Grinning BBC boss blows raspberry at UK.gov, eyes up buffet

Connor

White Man's Burden 2.0

We already pay for BBC Persia and BBC Arabic Television, now we're going to pay to broadcast programmes we pay for to lots of other people for free? All to promote British values? I thought we were past this kind of thing?

Computer Science GCSE male dominated, but geekettes are ready to rise

Connor

Re: Gender question

Agreed. Just 10% of nurses are men, yet no-one ever seems to be beating a drum about that - a percentage that would be deemed as unacceptable if it were women. At the end of the day I think the whole thing is silly, people are drawn to whatever they want to and anyone who is put off so easily never had any real passion for it. Besides you can entice people however you wish, when the reality differs from the perception you have problems. Just look at nursing where they are now having problems, the carrot of increased pay and responsibility attracted those who thought themselves above things like washing patients ('Too posh to wash' as they say) and now nursing struggles with the basics. The same will happen with STEM as they get ever more desperate to attract a specific quota of women or be labelled as sexist.

Sony to PlayStation 4 gamer: 'You got hacked, not our fault. Now give us £50'

Connor

Legality?

I am not a legal expert, but unless the guy lost his credit card along with his account access, i.e. if the card details are stored on Sony Servers - then Sony are completely responsible for any fraudulent use. Sony are responsible for all the information on their servers and have a duty of care to ensure that they are stored securely. They could have iris recognition, fingerprint authentication and DNA testing to authorise purchases using the stored information, but they don't. That is their choice, not his. It doesn't matter that the hackers used his account, it is Sony that is sacrificing security for convenience not him, he already had his card details. They are completely and utterly responsible for not checking that it was him that was purchasing the game, and I am sure that they know it. He should sue them for everything he's spent on Sony products and that they have just taken away, and buy a PC.

Also I thought that the PS4 was not going to need to be online in order to play games?

Ubuntu smartphone to go on sale: It'll be harder to get than a new iPhone

Connor

"This Ubuntu phone doesn't look like it'll be as cheap...."

From what I understand the Bq Ubuntu phone will be about £150.

ASA slaps Ebuyer AGAIN - this time for ignoring regulator

Connor

Woeful customer service

Ebuyer is a nightmare to deal with, they don't bother getting back to you and when they do they invariably tell you porkie pies (e.g. refunds cannot be given until an item lost by the courier is returned to them) or just fob you off. I try to avoid dealing with them wherever possible and when I have to (sometimes they are the only place that still has an item in stock), I make sure that I have brushed up on consumer law. Novatech on the other hand have excellent customer service and have therefore become my first port of call.

The gender imbalance in IT is real, ongoing and ridiculous

Connor

Re: @Connor

@Foxyshadis I am familiar with both studies, perhaps you are not, but either way please don't presume to tell me what my interpretation of the study should be just because you've been told what you should think it demonstrated. The babies (who were too young to go off and pick their own toys) didn't prefer any toys, they played with the toys they were given by the adult, sometimes given quite persistently and then the adult was asked which toy the child preferred and they invariably said it was the one they had given them (a doll for what they perceived to be a girl etc). But as I said the study is irrelevant, it was claimed that it showed that adults give certain toys to certain genders because of biased gender stereotypes not because the children like them (the study was in fact set up to prove this), but the monkey study totally disproves this as they do not exist in macaque society yet they apparently all fell into the same gender bias trap, that isn't rationalization, it isn't even nurture, it is nature. They gave the toys the way they did because biologically that is what the children would have preferred to play with. The reason we have different toys isn't because society has thrust them upon us, but because boys and girls genuinely like different toys, just like in monkeys.

JulieM stated that there is no real difference between newborn boys and girls in terms of brain scans, I said this wasn't true there are clear differences. Finally she said that rich people's brains and poor people brains show up different on scans, this simply isn't true. Besides it doesn't matter about differences it only matters where those differences occur and what function that part of the brain has. You are comparing apples and oranges.

Seriously though, you need to go back to manners school with perhaps a correspondence course at logic school.

Connor

Re: We're probably not as different as you might think

Does that study prove bias or does it just show that we all know that there are differences but these days we aren't allowed to say? Take a look at the monkey study with children's toys. All the male monkeys played with the trucks, ignoring the dolls. All the female monkeys played with dolls and ignored the trucks, do the monkeys suffer from subconscious gender bias too? No of course not so this shows that there is no gender policing but merely basic biological differences.

As for the chromosomes, it leaves plenty of space. Genetically we are 99.9% identically to chimps, but you wouldn't say we are just 0.01% away from being chimps. You can't measure genetics in the same way as other stuff as frankly we are still pretty clueless about it. Incidentally we share almost all the same chromosomes with chimps too (except they have two more) so again, not a good benchmark to use.

Finally brain scans of the sexes do show differences, you just have to know where to look, something we've only recently come across.

Connor

Yawn, same old, same old.

I think people, notably feminists their rent a mob followers and well meaning men read too much into this kind of thing. The fact is it is nature not nurture that determines the differences between boys and girls - they like different things because they ARE different. The famous monkey study where male monkeys ignored the dolls and picked up the trucks and the female monkeys all picked up the dolls demonstrated this. Male and females were built different purposes, therefore have different wants and desires.

This kind of thing happens the other way too. Just 10% of nurses are men (yet more than half of doctors are women) yet you see no media lamenting the lack of male nurses, no finger point to children's toys, upbringing, society or the Government. The Government are quietly trying to attract more men but frankly, no-one else cares certainly not the feminists nor do they care that female doctors outnumber male and the gap is increasing very quickly. Nor is it even really mentioned that the NHS, the MoD and the prison service are resorting to positive discrimination and fast tracking the genders to match quotas. My local prison recently had a 22 year old female wing governor - straight from academia to being in charge of a whole prison wing with no practical experience, needless to say naivety and criminals don't mix. Likewise there has been a glut of fast tracked men into management at my local hospital, most of whom have only been qualified as nurses for a few years, have no real depth of knowledge of nursing but are pushed into management roles over women who have been there years. One has to wonder whether this is because men make crap nurses compared to women (they just don't care as much about the actual patient) and are therefore pushed into management roles away from patients. Incidentally my (male) friend who's a nurse was told recently that he had to work Christmas Eve because they needed men on that day as it is a very busy day for women and they needed it off. Apparently that kind of thing (along with the cliques) goes on a lot. So there aren't just lad cultures out there.

Finally has no-one really thought that the reason that IT and Science is 80% men is because to be attracted to either subject you have to be either on, or very close the to autism spectrum? Diagnoses of which are sky-rocketing yet the percentages are the same 80% are boys, 20% are girls. There is a reason why the exceedingly smart, obsessive, inquisitive, forward thinking scientists that we rely on are usually men, and it has nothing to do with how they were encouraged as children or what toys they played with.

Emma Watson urges UN to back feminism – trolls threaten to leak her 'nude selfies'

Connor

Men!

Why is it always men in the firing line? Of the people that I know that looked at the pictures, at least half were women. When the Tulisa sex tape came out, it was only women that had seen it from amongst my peers, they were all laughing and joking about it. I don't like this attitude; it is women taking the photos (or posing for them), storing the photos on their phones, insouciantly storing them on various online services and yet it is the purely the fault of men for viewing them. Apparently men need re-education for having the desiring to view pictures of women, however the women drooling over half naked pictures of Alexandar Skarsgaard and demanding more are merely exhibiting a natural inclination and need no re-education.

Smart meters in UK homes will only save folks a lousy £26 a year

Connor

Future Boy

I have one and they are fantastic! Eon had fitted one to a house I moved into and from that day I didn't have to give them meter readings and they don't have to send anyone out, which was handy. They also send out a bill with a nice breakdown of your usage, which is quite handy. But then a year ago I changed suppliers to someone cheaper and lo and behold, I no longer have a smart meter. It is still there, but apparently my new provider is unable to access it as it is Eon's meter. I have changed supplier again since and same story.

So I had one for all of three months and they are a complete waste of time if they no longer work when you change providers. I also never had the display, that was taken by the previous owners of the house (or never existed - I am not sure- either way Eon refused to send me one). So even though I have one of the hi-tech smart meters I still have to give them my meter readings and I have no usage display just like everyone else. I assume that I also paid extra at some point for this 'privilege'.

Amazon offers Blighty's publishing industry 'assisted suicide'

Connor

Grow a pair

Maybe the publishing industry should grow a pair and just pull out from Amazon altogether, after all it is their product and Amazon will suffer if a product is not available on their site. Hachette may have to ride out a storm and take a significant hit, but I am sure that rival retailers will be more than grateful and if other publishers follow suit it will be Amazon's loss. If not, they may as well just hand over complete control of Amazon so that it can squeeze them unto death.

Amazon Prime Music opens – but where's the streaming music?

Connor

Amazon Prime Instant Video

Sounds a lot like their Amazon Prime Instant Video - where you can watch some films and tv series as part of your £5.99 a month subscription, but most of the decent films are tv series are only available if you stump up an extra £3.99+ to watch each one. Needless to say I cancelled.

French software developers are all beautiful women

Connor

Seen this kind of thing before.....

I don't think this is sexist, this is clearly a rush job. Most stock photos feature women, they clearly just chucked a load in that they thought would fit; it is like white or black accessories, beautiful women go with everything.

Top tip, power users – upgrading Ubuntu may knacker your Linux PC

Connor

No problem for me.

I upgraded, which is always a tense and nerve racking experience anyway as you never know what is going to go wrong. Thank god I didn't hear about this first. I didn't have this problem, indeed quite unusually I have had no problems at all, yet. It even left Windows alone.

Ubuntu 14.04 LTS: Great changes, but sssh don't mention the...

Connor

Re: The fixation with 'serarch' for everything

@big_D I have used Windows 7, not Vista though. On Windows 7 it was far from instant, it takes ages for the results to appear, so much so that I just tend to go through the menu as it is so much quicker. In Windows 8 and Unity it is instant (admittedly the first time in Unity is slow, but every search after that is instant). Maybe it gets faster after the first time, or maybe it depends on the machine (it is anything but fast) on Windows 7? I admit I have rarely used Windows 7.

Connor

Re: The fixation with 'serarch' for everything

"Why? Can someone please explain to a dumb ass like myself (only 42 years in IT) why you have to search for everything all the time (unless you pin the app)?"

Because it is so much faster. You don't really 'search' for it, the results are instant. Believe me, going from Ubuntu to Windows XP and Windows 7 demonstrates the benefit of this method as you realise with those OSs that there is no quick way of finding a program, and it is very frustrating (Click Start > All Programs > (wait) Scroll > (wrong folder) > Scroll > (gone past it) > Scroll > Click. Compared to typing one or two letters and clicking. It also works with system settings, rather than having to open the Control Panel (as in Windows) and hunt around for the right setting to change by finding what it appears under. I really can't believe we did it the Windows way for so many years.

There are drawbacks to this Unity method though. Firstly you have to know the name of the thing you are searching for, secondly you have to spell it correctly. Incidentally though, Unity was like this way before Windows 8, so if any copying was done it was the other way around. Besides that search is Windows 8's best feature.

Boycott Firefox, gay devs urge as Mozilla appoints JavaScript daddy as CEO

Connor

Re: right - 'what's wrong with white middle aged males?'

You're right. I knew that then but I didn't have any idea about the unwritten policy until I was at the interview. It was questions like "How would you feel working in a female only environment?" and when I pointed out that I had worked in predominantly female environments before they went to great pains to point out that it wasn't predominance, they don't have any other men working for them, at all. That was where I got the sinking feeling. It isn't illegal to employ only women (or men) it is only illegal to set out to only employ one or the other. I guess that is why I was there being interviewed, to make it seem fair. I could have complained, but I really didn't want to be 'that guy' that complained about discrimination, would you?

Connor

Re: right - 'what's wrong with white middle aged males?'

5th Century BC, Sparta. 96% of custody battles in the last century.

Connor

Re: right - 'what's wrong with white middle aged males?'

That's a load of racist, sexist and ageist claptrap. So none of the above applies if they happen to be gay, or non-white or younger? The fact is birds of a feather flock together and it doesn't have to be race, sex or sexual orientation but can be anything and is common in all sorts of environments, and this has been backed up by countless, and I do mean countless psychological studies. A few years ago I applied for a tech job in a company that was 100% young, female and good looking. They even warned me during the interview that they only tend to employ women. I didn't get the job. I believe the term is 'multi-ethnic feminist matriarchy' and I was too different. I don't know when white middle aged straight men became the whipping boys for modern society but I don't think it is funny or acceptable.

Connor

Re: Shakes Head

"People aren't allowed to be prejudiced against one group of people but then expect to be able to claim prejudice when that group takes action against them."

But that is precisely what this gay couple is doing, you can be just as prejudiced against someone who has a different opinion to you as you can to those who lead a different life to you. As an impartial observer I see no difference. If it is not acceptable one way around, how can it be the other way around? I recently also read about a call to make it illegal to donate to any causes that support climate change denial, it seems that these days you either agree with what you are told to agree with or face strict censure, loss of livelihood or liberty.

Apple to grieving sons: NO, you cannot have access to your dead mum's iPad

Connor

Worse to come...

Even if they gain access to the device, just wait until they try and access her e-books and music. She's dead and the licence to access those materials was for her only and expires when she does. The whole digital world is a false economy, you don't own anything, even the tangible objects.

Microsoft asks pals to help KILL UK gov's Open Document Format dream

Connor

Re: Kettle, met pot, pot meet kettle

As vagabondo said there are several suites that support ODF: LibreOffice, OpenOffice, IBM Lotus Symphony, WordPerfect Office, Caliigra Suite, AbiWord, NeoOffice Suite, Adobe Buzzword, StarOffice and Zoho Office Suite. That is pretty much all the major office suites online and offline bar the three from the big players Microsoft (who does offer some support for ODF), Apple (TextEdit apparently allows some editing of ODF) and Google (Google Docs doesn't support ODF). There are enough implementations of ODF to ensure that everyone on almost any major OS can use ODF. The same cannot be said for Microsoft's format. I am pretty sure that when Governments start using ODF the big three will support it right away.

Snowden journo boyf grill under anti-terror law was legal, says UK court

Connor

Re: That's not actually possible...

Does any country have that? Even the US has many, many amendments to their original document and it is just 200 years old, the Magna Carta is 800 years old, the Bill of Rights 300 years old.

I'm guessing only nations recently ruled by facist dictators have such a document.

Connor

Re: Not quite the same @Richard Tyler

The Official Secrets Act is a LAW (hence the act part at the end) not a contract. It applies to everyone, just like every other law. Ignorance is no excuse, nor is being born in another country, nor being the boyfriend of a journalist.

Signing of the act is just to make people aware of what they will be dealing with and what consequences they face.

Connor

Re: Not quite the same

You don't have to sign the official secrets act to be bound by it. We all are. Besides, your justification could be equally applicable to a spy who didn't steal the information himself, is not British, and just happens to be carrying some secret files.

You knowingly bring stolen British Intelligence files into the UK, you're going to be arrested. He's lucky he wasn't charged with spying in my book.

I also don't understand Greenwalds whining about the British Empire. The British Empire is famous for many things, but holding journalists and restricting the press aren't things that spring to my mind. America on the other hand....

Staffs Police face data protection probe over 'drink drivers named' Twitter campaign

Connor

If you've been breathalysed and presumably blood tested it is open and shut anyway. They are hardly alleged. Whatever the law says, I don't believe the police are wrong. The law as it stands makes a mockery of crime and victims anyway. I am sure it won't be long before all criminals are anonymous throughout the whole court process. Save millions in new identities and reporting restrictions when scum are released.

British Second World War codebreaker Alan Turing receives Royal pardon

Connor

Re: At last

What about slavery? What about those hanged for poaching? Unable to pay debts? The serfs who abandoned their masters? Pickpockets? Those who fought for the wrong side during the civil war? Where will it end? You CANNOT go back and re-write historical wrongs, it is foolish, discriminatory and completely and utterly pointless. I cannot believe that people are so blind and so naive and easily led that they are celebrating this pointless act and allowing the politicians mileage from it.

Be prepared... to give heathens a badge: UK Scouts open doors to unbelievers

Connor

Why Bother?

I was in the Scouts many, many years ago and despite not being a believer in God I took the oath, after all what did it matter? I think atheists these days have found another pseudo-religion, despising religion in all its forms with an almost fanatical hate.

So, who ought to be the next Doctor Who? It's up to YOU...

Connor

I think that the series should return more to its root personally, i.e. an older, wiser Doctor. I don't like the idea of the Doctors being so young, nor the flirting and kissing with the assistants. That wasn't what the show was about. I also don't like the idea that it should somehow be a black or female actor - just because it ticks equality boxes. Or the time is right, etc... We don't want to get into the habit of changing characters sex and ethnicity purely to reflect the vogue thinking of the time.

That said Don Warrington has more than earned the right, i.e. doesn't just happen to be black and been on TV recently, but also a great actor who has had some great roles in TV and comedy stretching back decades. He's always had Timelord written all over him anyway, at least for me. And whilst we are ticking equality boxes - Warwick Davies. He'd be awesome.

At the end of the day though, the best actor for me would be Hugh Laurie, he's really the only one on the list with the gravitas and charisma to breathe new life into this flagging series.

Reports: New Xbox could DOOM second-hand games market

Connor

Re: Luxury product

The same could be said of anything from houses, cars and jewellery right through to clothes. How can I be allowed to buy clothes from a charity shop for a nominal sum when the 10 year old 'tailor' in Bangladesh won't get his cut? The whole world is a system for purchasing products second hand and always has been, it is only in recent times that 'content creators' are claiming that their products are so wonderful and so unique that they can only be purchased once, ever.

The whole concept is ludicrous and akin to a watchmaker claiming that once he has sold a watch, it can never be used by anyone other than the person he sold it to, moreover the buyer never actually owns the watch, only a non-transferable license to view the time on said watch, a license that can be revoked at any time, for any reason, at his discretion. When the buyer expires, so does the license and the watch must be returned to the watchmaker to enable him to 're-sell' it. But then, a nice watch is a luxury item.

Connor

Am I reading this right?

So if I buy a game on the Xbox One and play it, it is locked to my account. Therefore if my girlfriend, living in the same house and playing on the same Xbox wants to play it, she can't? Or is it like now where it is the console and not the account that is registered?

It sounds to me like games are going to be per account (like Steam) rather than per console?

Connor

Whilst that's true, Steam games are a lot cheaper and sometimes a hell of a lot cheaper (many games I've bought have been £5 or less) and the restrictions are known in advance and of course you can also buy the PC DVD version of the game, without Steam, without restrictions, but for more money. There's no such option on the Xbox.

Ubuntu 13.04: No privacy controls as promised, but hey - photo search!

Connor

Amazon...

I don't understand why people complain about the Amazon lens so much. If you don't need it, just ignore it, it appears at the bottom and so is easily ignored. But when you DO want to buy something from Amazon, it is a quick and easy Amazon search, the results appear in an easily viewable and navigable form with pictures and description making it much faster than viewing the Amazon site. Of course most importantly, every time you purchase something from Amazon, which most of us were doing anyway, Canonical gets a cut from Amazon's end. If you like your free OS, surely that is an easy, free, zero-effort and non-obtrusive way of helping pay for it?

It's also useful for discovering stuff, say searching Dash for your Greenday albums and then seeing that they have a new album out! What luck!

In all honesty the only problem (aside from the occasional slight delay in results) I have with the Amazon lens, is that it is just Amazon and that I have to open a browser and multiple tabs to check out the competitions prices.

Movie, TV ads annoying? You ain't seen nothin' yet

Connor

Content for free?

Somehow I don't see them giving stuff away for free instead it will be added on top of everything else. We'll still have to pay for the content, we'll still have advert breaks, we'll still have product placements and also this new technology too. This is an additional source of revenue for the content providers and of no value to the consumer whatsoever.

Indeed as others have pointed out, why are content providers still relying on adverts when consumers WANT to pay? Take Game of Thrones for example. It cost $60 million to make the first series, yet it made $33 million back in DVD sales in the US alone in less than six months, despite the fact that barely anyone watched it on TV and it was also one of the most pirates TV shows ever. It seems that content providers have the whole dynamic wrong.

Don't buy a Google car: They might stop it while you're driving

Connor

Google.

It isn't the first time that Google has shut down a 'free' service, and it won't be the last. I used to use Google Notebook, but when they announced they were closing that, I decided never to use Google's services again. After all these free services are really just a funnel to get you to use their core services and give away much, much more information about yourself than you'd really like. It is getting ridiculous, having to have an online account in order to use my computer and an online account in order to use my phone. What's next?

UK Serious Fraud Office queues up to probe HP's Autonomy allegations

Connor

Autonomy and the BBC

This is the same company that spent six years and £8 million of license fee payers money to create software for the BBC Monitoring Service, which never actually materialised. They sound like a totally honest and top notch company.

On International Woman's Day we remember Grace Hopper

Connor
WTF?

Revisionist B*llocks

"....and grew up in an age where women were supposed to be seen and not heard."

She grew up on the Mongolian Plains circa 1250AD? Otherwise I am struggling to find a time period where women were meant to be seen and not heard. The phrase you erroneously apply to women was in fact an expression aimed at Victorian era children, not women. Women in Victorian times were able marry, divorce and work, all at their own discretion. They could get served in bars, have an education, inherit, and all the things that men could do. Indeed as anyone who has ever read any 19th century literature can see, women were an important and functioning part of society and not the pseudo slaves that they are made out to be today. The only thing women couldn't do was vote in the UK until 1928, but then ALL men couldn't vote either until 1918, only the rich ones were able to vote prior to that.

All this discrimination, adversity rubbish is retrospectively applied to women. If you ask women from the era if they felt they were discriminated against back then, they invariably will say no and men and women were just different in those days and at no point did they feel objectified, controlled, discriminated against or held back. Such terms and thinking are all part of modern day brain washing and revisionism.

Grace Hopper was a computing great, but the article is somewhat ruined by your whole 'women were so mistreated, its a wonder any of them were able to accomplish anything..' rhetoric.

Mark Shuttleworth: Canonical leads Ubuntu, not 'your whims'

Connor

Re: Re:a patch that annihilated Unity

For every open source fork there is great fanfare and multiple pointing out this being one of the great things about FOSS, followed two years later by an appeal for someone else to take over. Mate and cinnamon et al are likely to be dead ends in a few years, do you really want to be using software that is no longer maintained? Unity and Gnome3 clearly aren't going anywhere, there will be no re-merging, no superseding Unity/Gnome3 so that means someone has to carry on these forks on permanently. I've seen enough open source projects to know that 'No longer maintained' is an inevitability for most projects.

The reality is, you either have to give in sooner (as I did) or later, and these forks are just delaying the inevitable.

Connor

Re: I still don't like it, but I can see where it is going @fatman

I used to feel the same. But you can make Unity auto hide and 32px too and believe me if you do that you can almost forget that it is there. Prior to Unity I used to use Docky and Synapse (and before that Gnome-Do) and so seldom used menus anyway, I just typed the name of a file and program and hit enter. Using Unity is pretty much the same, indeed it really is just a Dock with a text search box like Synapse with a few added extras. It is made for the desktop and when used with a keyboard it is super fast.

I found Unity on 12.04 so crash happy that I installed Synapse and used that most of the time anyway, just as I had before so the change wasn’t so pronounced as it could have been. 12.10 is much more stable and I use Unity now most of the time as I find it more useful, especially for things like iPlayer, (e.g. hitting Super + V and typing the name of the program to download a program is just much faster than browsing there). I also like HUD for the same reasons. There are problems however and it still does feel like beta software, forced on us with little or no configuration options. However such quick and fluid access to things is the future, regardless of platform.

As for Windows 8, I just use that in a similar way to Unity. If I want to open an app I hit the Super Key + Q and type the name, the same as Unity and again it is very fast, much, much faster than the old menu system, and that is pretty much all I use Metro for. The rest of the time I use the Desktop (just as in Windows 7). The tiles etc aren’t so bad although I don’t really see any reason to use them; Microsoft’s biggest mistake was making them the default, and forcing users to guess the shortcut keys (e.g. Super + Q). Metro should have been hidden by default and called as needed with the Windows key, with clear and accessible shortcuts. At least Canonical got that right.

Page: