Posts by nematoad
255 posts • joined Thursday 17th September 2009 11:50 GMT
If you want it that way...
"so it should come as no surprise if Ubuntu bases its mobile app packaging system on homegrown code"
Ah, homegrown is one thing, proprietary quite another.
It seems to me as if Canonical is heading in the direction of "We invented it, so we control how it's used and how much it will cost you."
If that turns out to be the case, and I will wait for further developments before judgement, then how is that different from "open core" as practised by the likes of Oracle?
As a worst case scenario it looks as if Shuttleworth may be trying to recoup some of his investments by piggy-backing on Gnu/Linux and charging for pay-for extras and facilities. The next step of course would be to head down the subscription route. Not very nice, but a potential pot of gold at the end may well be too much temptation to resist.
That's not to say that this is what's going on, but from a pessimistic viewpoint it is worth watching out for.
Oh, really?
Do theses characters know something we don't?
Anyone heard rumours of a second coming for the sainted Jobs?
That could explain the hysteria.
Surely not!
"“This behaviour is not worthy of a company of this size," she raged."
No, it's not but sadly it seems to be the way things are done in Apple-land.
As AppGratis only looks for free apps then the bit about "purchase" does not apply, it's the "promotion" bit that has Apple in a knot. Don't forget Apple wants to be in the driving seat and no-one else gets a look-in. That's the way Apple works.
I have no idea why, either they are the greediest bunch of bastards ever made, or the spirit of Jobs is still running the show and needs to control everything. With a cash pile of about $35 billion or so surely it can't be the money.
Re: You don't get what you don't pay for
"According to the survey, the biggest single problem businesses are encountering with FOSS is a lack of stability"
Oh, and you get what exactly when you pay MS for their stuff?
It would be interesting to see what areas firms are complaining about. The kernel or applications?
From my experience with Linux, I'd say the kernel is pretty robust and stable but some of the apps. do leave a little to be desired, yes Mozilla, I'm looking at you.
If on the other hand it's the pace of development, causing concerns about stability, then the obvious choice is to use a long-term, conservative distro. like Slackware, Debian or even Ubuntu LTS. Or even use one of the BSDs, they are renowned for their reliability.
What is probably going on is that firms don't have enough FOSS technical support so that when things do go wrong they are left without adequate backup and thus feel vulnerable and exposed.
Re: “Every device now is 'always on'. That’s the world we live in.”
" we're a fairly well equipped nation... in many countries consistant broadband is a bit of a luxury."
It might be interesting if you could tell us to which country you referring to. It sure ain't the UK.
Here it's a post code lottery and just being in the centre of a town does not guarantee a good connection and as for us dwellers in the outer darkness, a minimum of 2Gb , as promised in this quote from the gov.uk website: https://www.gov.uk/government/news/local-authorities-meet-deadline-for-broadband-plans.
"The Government has allocated money from a £530 million fund to each local authority in England to help provide 90 per cent of homes and businesses with superfast broadband access and everyone with access to at least 2Mbps."
That's not superfast, it's not even fast, it is the bare minimum that BT and its friends in Whitehall can get away with. Perhaps they should speak with telcos in Romania, Latvia, Ireland or Hong Kong to see how it's done.
Romania? I ask you!
Re: I find it unlikely that even Apple would launch an 'iTV'
"You are right: ITV won't let Apple use their name."
Why not?
After all they did blag the name Apple from the Beatles' company of that name.
Re: Classic Shell?
"I was previously offering Windows 7 "downgrades" for a nominal fee, but that's a lot of bollocks tracking down drivers from the chipset manufacturers"
There, and I was starting to believe the FUD that Linux is "difficult". It just works straight off and what's more I don't have to hand over an arm and a leg to get the privilege of using it.
Re: Mark, you keep punching that straw man...
Shuttleworth does not want to be the next Steve Jobs, that's obvious, more like Louis XlV.
"L'etat c'est moi"
"If you think the grand vision should follow your whims..."
Or to put it bluntly.
"My way or the highway."
Don't take it personally, this is "free software" we're taking about and people using Linux have a choice and if someone disagrees with him that does not automatically make that person wrong.
Personally I wouldn't touch Ubuntu with a barge-pole these days although Xubuntu is still reasonably useable. It's going in the wrong direction for me and ramming Amazon down everyones throat is on a par with MS's insistance on TIFKAM. Plain arrogance.
On second thought, maybe he's not trying to be Louis XlV but Bob Geldof,
"Just give us your money!"
Re: Full marks for effort
The phrase "Jack of all trades, master of none." springs to mind here.
Yes, it's a worthy goal trying to make a diverse range of devices look and fell the same but can it be done?
I have the feeling that by trying to get a foot in all camps they may lose out and satisfy no-one. After all looking at the daily hits on Distrowatch seems to show that people are voting with their feet and moving en-masse to Linux Mint.
So it may be that Shuttleworth and Co. have bitten off more than they can chew, but if they can pull it off then I for one will be interested in seeing the results. I'm not, however, holding my breath on this.
No!
Oh dear. I think that I have just seen a way out for the likes of MS and Apple.
Do the work and then give it away to those companies that are looking for hand-outs like this. They'll say "Thanks very much" and promptly wrap it in proprietary licences so that they can gain the benefits and not the people who did the work.
Stallman may be obnoxious and rub some people up the wrong way but he's not stupid and if he had though that Public Domain would offer the sort of protection needed for people writing free software I'm sure he would have said so.
No, the likes of the GPL are there to keep the sharks at bay. It works and no special pleadings on behalf of MS and Apple will change that. The code donated by free software writers is theirs and if they want to make sure that they get the recognition and keep some control over what is done with the fruits of their labour then far as I'm concerned that is their right.
It may be that some good may come out of public domain stuff but experience has shown that if proprietary companies get the opportunity they will abuse it and behave like parasites.
Re: There's the Kool-aid...
"There was only OS/2 and that was released two years after Windows 1.0."
You may not have seen it but there was another WIMP OS.
GEM from Digital Research.
This came out in about 1985 and was most successful on the Atari ST. However it did run under DOS and I remember using Ventura Publisher on a PC at a training course I went on in about 1992.
From what I can recall the DOS version was intentionally crippled due to pressure from Apple. Some things never change.
Re: Sounds familiar
"We're very focused on continuing the success we have with PCs and taking that to tablets and phones,"
I agree.
Or, in other words "It was good enough for my father and grandfather." etc. This is not even a plan A, just hope that the money will keep rolling in as it has done for so many years.
Complacent? They probably know how to spell it, but not what it means.
Re: I'm unsurprised
"Staff purchase equipment that actually meets their needs"
In what respect?
Personal? That's fine,if you only use your own equipment for personal use, then of course you should be allowed to do and use what you want, it's no concern of your employer.
If, on the other hand, you intend to use you own kit to do work which involves your employer's data, time and other resources such as broadband charges, then you must be able to demonstrate that what you are doing is safe and under the control of your company. After all, it is their money you are spending. And if that means that the IT department sets standards that must be met, then so be it. Or would you really like to assume the entire responsibility, i.e. the cost of when something goes wrong, like data accidentally deleted or that vital piece of future planning that's stolen along with your tablet and the putting it right.
I always used to tell managers, when they complained about the cost of a visit from Desktop Support, to look on it as an insurance policy. "If you get something wrong and we have to fix it, then you'll pick up the entire bill, if we make a mistake and it has to be fixed then we pay, not you."
So decide, do you want that responsibility?
If I had to make the decision of whether to allow BYOD into a company I was running, I would first have to be assured that the costs to the company did not outweigh the increase in productivity and that includes risks to the integrity of the company's data and infrastructure, increased support costs and so on.
Posted in When open-source eats itself, we win
"LibreOffice vs OpenOffice - no winners due to diluted development."
Given that Oracle seems to have an Apple like control freak complex, I fear that there's a good chance that if the devs. had not forked OO.o we wouldn't have a choice at all.
See also: Hudson/Jenkins and also MySQL/MariaDB.
Posted in When open-source eats itself, we win
What a refeshing change.
"fighting for market supremacy in the only way open source really knows how: technical merit"
Makes a change from all that bloody litigation that's going on.
"Windows 8 was never going to be explosive on its first weekend"
Hah!
Explosive? More like a damp squib.
Re: Do be quiet!
"I doubt that..."
I agree, it would perhaps, have been interesting for the writer to spell out the grounds for his assertion.
What do you think?
Copyright? Patents? Not a chance, getting something to do the work of Windows, *without* using any of MS's code does not constitute infringement. See the Samba case for that.
Look and feel? Well if the OS is not actually running Windows just the application then again I can't see any way for MS to complain.
"though we'd expect Microsoft to make short work of that in a court of law if it felt inclined."
No, it's just a throw-away line and has no basis in reality.
Unlikely
"Is there a hardware maker brave enough to provide not what the tech giants envision, but what users actually need?"
Probably not, or at least not at a price point where the consumer is prepared to accept some compromises in the spec.
As I haven't been around the OEM scene for a while I'm not certain what the margins are for bare laptops, netbooks i.e. not loaded with "crapware" and so on are these days. If they are as thin as they used to be then it is probably not in the commercial interest to move against their real paymasters i.e. the likes of Microsoft or Intel, with their "marketing" slush funds and other assorted inducements to toe the line.
Mind you, if the current trend of ever increasing size in mobile 'phones is anything to go by, by the time my good old Asus 701 heads for the scrap heap there will be a phone with a large enough screen to allow me to use it as a replacement.
Remember those "portable" bricks that used to pass as mobile 'phones many years ago, we just might be moving back in that direction.
Re: The purpose?
"These new licensing changes are just begging for a legal challenge"
Why bother throwing good money after bad?
Just don't buy the bloody thing.
Use LibreOffice instead
Re: PDFs
Are you telling me that Word has not been able to handle PDFs like LibreOffice?
Sorry, this is not a wind-up, but as someone who last used Office '97, I thought that *all* WPs could do this now.
And people keep telling me that LO, OOO are not good enough, seems that they might never have used either of these programs.
If you are going to quote, then get it right.
"there is no such thing as a free lunch"
(TANSTAAFL) There ain't no such thing as a free lunch
Popularised by Robert Heinlein The Moon is a Harsh Mistress 1966
Re: It's the guardian of the security of the data held
"The reality is that many (most?) IT departments is that it's mostly driven by cost-cutting and lazyness."
I'm talking from experience of working at some of the largest companies in the world.
At one site we had over 4500 users and 2500 PCs and servers etc. And that was just one site with dozens spread all over the world.
So yes, things did take a while to go through the system but it's like a huge oil tanker, you can't just put on the brakes. In this case size does matter and although the average user only saw his or her own little piece of the picture, in reality we did the job as fast as we could coupled with all the security and safety considerations needed on a site where it could literally explode or cause serious risk to life if something went wrong.
Cost cutting may be a goal in many industries but it this particular instance the results could have been catastrophic.
Re: more proof@nematoad
"it's always the senior IT bods who volunteer to test the kit"
At the one place I worked where we had the senior managers on-site they used what everyone else used, as they needed to get stuff done and could not afford to have a new piece of kit fold up under them.
Their work was just too important.
The people who did get to play with the new stuff were generally the team leaders and senior support staff, even then it was a case of using the new kit as a secondary device or program, not the primary.
As safety was the prime consideration, you don't want dodgy kit running an oil refinery, we were VERY careful about rolling out new stuff, even if the users were screaming blue murder. It got tested and screened and then sent to another team to verify, before it was even put to the Change Committee.
So yes, in a one-man-band or very small company it might be OK to give new stuff to everybody, but having worked at very sensitive sites, i.e. places that could blow up or in the financial industry, the IT department was ultra-cautious in changing anything unless it had been thoroughly vetted. We had no choice, that was what our bosses told us to do.
Re: more proof
"So who is the real problem here? IT pros who can't keep up with the times, or Microsoft for having the temerity to try and evolve a bit?"
Well I think I know who 's position I would rather be in, and it ain't Microsoft's.
Technology is all well and good but it is a means and not an end. Companies and people want to use their computers as tools to do "real" work, not live on the bleeding edge of technology, that's for the hackers of this world.
IT departments. have a poor reputation for being inflexible, resistant to change and not having the user as a priority. This may well be the perception, but don't forget the IT department has a job and a responsibility to the rest of the organisation.
It's the guardian of the security of the data held and must make sure that anything new coming along is fit for purpose and will not pose a risk to the company's most valued information. Stuff must be tested and guaranteed to be safe and if that means a delay in rolling out the latest and greatest, well sorry, but if the brown stuff goes into orbit after a security breach you can guess where the finger of blame will point.
Generally IT departments do as their management directs, this may seem to be obstructionist to someone eager to get the latest fix for their work, but again, safety first.
Don't forget also, it's the company that makes the decision on what to buy and how to deploy IT resources. After all they are picking up the bill.
As for MS it seems as if they can't find their own arse with a map, at least not Apple's recent offering, and are floundering around blaming everyone but themselves for the long predicted flop that is Windows 8. Like Ubuntu and Gnome they definitely seem to be heading down the wrong track and folks are not following.
Wonder how long before the penny drops.
True, but...
"The Mac and Linux are free of these parasites."
True they don't have the anti-virus crowd sending shivers down people's spines just to boost sales, but Dropbox has a history of security failures and yet it is still in a number of Linux distros.
I have just checked a few, it's in Mint, and Bodhi, but not as far as I can see in Mageia. These are just VMs I have on my box. If there are known problems with Dropbox what the hell are the distro developers doing putting something in there that could pose a real danger to a newbie or naive user?
Re: Upgrade to a more useful, sexier, *real* operating system. Linux
Damn, Eadon you beat me to it.
Yes Steam is the answer, and it's not vapourware it's here.
Unfortunately only on Ubuntu at the moment AFAIK.
And I'm not sure whether that includes Xubuntu, Kubuntu as well, 'cos if it doesn't then Valve might have picked the wrong distro given the momentum Mint has just now.
Do you know something?
I don't want to be always "online".
Sometimes I want to be alone, without anyone having the ability to contact me, know where I am or what I am doing.
I have a mobile phone, the cheapest, simplest one I could get, £4.99 from Carphone Warehouse. It stays at home and I never take it with me. Why did I get it? So that my sister can text me when she needs me to do something for her, she is disabled. That's all.
If someone needs to get in contact if they have my landline number they can use that, if not send me a letter.
Before being accused of being a Luddite, I was, until I retired a sys admin so I know how to use a computer. It's just in my case I prefer to keep them in their place and let me retain control .
Re: In the U.S.
"You were not allowed to support / fund / benefit from something without being responsible for what that organisation does."
Yep, just like Lloyds of London. That is until the shit hit the fan and all the names faced the horrible thought that they would actually have to pay up. So they changed the rules and managed to back away from the losses that had been built up over many years by various dubious accounting practices.
Several problems that I can see
1) You have to trust that what you give to other people to store is going to be safe. Megaupload comes to mind here. Regardless of the rights and wrongs of the case of lot of people have had their stuff taken away from them with little chance of recovery and through no fault of their own.
2) Where is the data going to be stored. Yes, in Europe there are regulations that ensure that things are protected against snooping, though that can surely be got round. Agreements with the USA are again, in place but the US government seem to have a cavalier attitude to anything that they think comes within their ambit, and finally what if the provider decides that a nice cheap server farm in say, Uzbekistan, is what they really need, what protection do you have then?
3) Cost. I don't know about you but I have to pay for the pathetic broadband service that I am forced to use, too far from the exchange, rural area with little chance of fibre connections etc. So if I decide to ditch my local storage I will in effect have to pay rent to get things done.
4) At the cost of repeating good ole Bill G's remark about 640K being enough for anyone what would you do with a PB of storage, unless of course you run something like Pixar.
No, with the advent of SSDs in ever larger capacities if I need to expand my data storage that's what I'll use and keep MY stuff firmly away from this cloud thing that everyone seems to want to push us into.
One thing for sure, they aren't doing it as an act of charity, they see a way of getting rents in perpetuity and personally I'm not buying that.
Re: How things have changed....
"Install StartIsBack (if Start8 if that's more your style"
And I still hear people banging on about how hard Linux is to get working!
For the most part Linux "does what it says on the tin" i.e just works.
Re: I'd be happy to lobby Google for a youtube app for ms phones
"It's like if Microsoft provided specs..."
Oh, you mean like they did with the SMB data?
If I recall correctly MS had to be dragged kicking and screaming to deliver the documentation needed by the Samba team as part of the settlement with the European Court of Justice. I also remember MS being fined astronomical amounts for their prevarication over the matter.
So, pot, kettle, black etc.
Personally I can't see the US authorities doing much, though I hope I am wrong. Otherwise it just might be up to the ECJ to sort things out, again.
Re: This proves what I have been saying for years..
""Keep it Simple, Stupid!""
There's simple and then there's crippled. For my money Unity, Gnome Shell and TIFKAM are crippled, not simple, hence all the anguish shown when people try to get something done that formerly took one mouse click and which now either is impossible or takes an age to do.
I do note that the Nautilus devs. have taken this trend even further and have been shunned by those Debian based distros. that use it. Including IIRC Ubuntu. There's irony for you!
Jono Bacon
"Ubuntu's Jono Bacon called Stallman's tongue-lashing "childish""
I've been following Jono Bacon since he was a columnist in Linux Format. Generally he seems to be on the right track and I agree with a lot of what he says.
However, I see that his job title is "Canonical Community Manager". As Ubuntu no longer seem to have a "community" but just "users" I wonder how he fills his days.
Posted in 2012: The year that netbooks DIED
Re: My netbook by Asus never agreed to become extinct
You know, reading through this thread a thought occurs to me.
As many have said, netbooks are ideal for use when traveling, small and light I find mine ideal to use in an aircraft. As I invariably travel cattle class I wonder how those people talking about using their 15" or 17" laptops get on. They must be traveling business or first class, 'cos when I wedge myself onto the shelf the airline laughing calls a "seat" there is not much room to exhale let alone open up a 17" laptop. Unless that is they have a high aspect ration machine with a very wide screen, but then surely that would get in the way of the person sitting next to them.
Posted in 2012: The year that netbooks DIED
Re: Ultrabooks with "premium specs"
"Oranges, apples, etc..."
Thanks to Gio Ciampa for that, it saves me the bother of replying to Gordan's ranting.
Hint to Gordan, read the post before replying.
Posted in 2012: The year that netbooks DIED
Re: Ultrabooks with "premium specs"
"I can tell you that 99% of the time I ignored a "Netbook" release it was because it didn't have a minimum vertical resolution of 768."
If the resolution was too small for your needs then you needed a laptop or equivalent not a netbook.
I got one of the first Asus 701s, It is small, limited and the resolution of 800×480 is maybe not the best one can find, but for my needs is acceptable. I use mine when I am away from home and just need to check my e-mails and so on. As it is so small it's ideal to just slip into my flight bag and lets me watch a film or read an e-book from a USB stick during the flight.
It's "horses for courses" and obviously a netbook is not what you needed.
As for the Linux versus MS Windows I think that it was a big mistake to stop loading Linux on to these little machines, but then the mighty MS dollar has a lot of power in the world of the OEM.
Mine still has Linux on it which one of the reasons I bought it in the first place. Crunchbang at the moment but I may change to something else if I find anything better.
Re: You do it, if you're so clever.
"I've never been a fan of total automation myself because of situations like this one."
Neither am I, nor will most readers of El Reg. But we are not in the majority of people using these sort of applications. We know, more or less, what's going on and are very wary of going onto the internet without having any control.
The majority of people don't think of their browser as a computing related thing, to them it's just the way they get to Facebook, read e-mails and so on. To them these things are just appliances, switch on and go. After all, you can just turn on the television or oven and it does it all for you, no dialogs asking you for permission to do something.
Given the power and threat of the internet; after all using a washing machine will probably not mean that you have money taken from your bank account, Google should be held to account for such goofs as silent auto-install. But looking at reports Chrome is very popular, I just wonder, given Google's propensity for data skimming, whether it is as popular with the readers of El Reg, for the reason set out above.
Why do all the dirty work...
... when you can leave it to someone else.
That seems to be the attitude of the authorities in the US regarding bringing the likes of Google and Microsoft to heel.
In the present case it seems that the FTC has decided to go easy on Google, perhaps because of vested interests by the White House, and is relying on the EU to hit Google where it hurts i.e. in the wallet.
It was the same with MS, it took the Samba team and FSFE aided by lawyer Carlo Piana to go to the European Court of Justice and get MS to release the documentation for SMB/CIFS. The US authorities did nothing and yet they too have benefited from SAMBA, all without lifting a finger.
Nice way to get things you want, without paying for it.
Grammar
"the Redmond giant is still a personae non gratae."
Should be "persona non grata" Singular.
Your Latin is in the plural and the sentence would then be "the Redmond giants are still personae non gratae."
As there is fortunately only one Microsoft this is incorrect.
Spelling
"slipped the surly bounds of Earth"
Should be "slipped the surly bonds of Earth"
From High Flight by
Pilot Officer Gillespie Magee
No 412 squadron, RCAF
Killed 11 December 1941
A fine poem that was quoted by Ronald Reagan after the Challenger disaster.
Re: Kutcher haters can start getting their rotten tomatoes ready now
Jobs I know about, but Ashton Kutcher, who he?
Posted in A valid use for Windows 8?
You might have hit the nail on the head here.
Your experience seems to suggest that Windows 8 might have a place running appliances, like your media centre.
As such those big tiles may well stand in for the hardware knobs and switches that used to festoon radios and so on. Just push to switch something on.
As a UI for computing, it's not so good as switching from desktop to TIFKAM just gets in the way.
So a use at last for Win8.
Anyone seen it on a toaster yet?
Re: Indeed.
"Microsoft everywhere"
Shudder.
Re: But what about muh socialism?
"I didn't pay any income tax, but I contribute to the economy by paying VAT your honour."
Indeed you do unless you are a company or registered for VAT.
Unfortunately there seems to be a mind-set that the only "tax" that counts is income tax. Just listen to the politicians spout off about "tax payers" being the only ones contributing to the national coffers, and that those in receipt of benefits are "scroungers, cheats and thieves" as they do not pay any "tax".
Of course they do unless they have devised a way of operating in a totally non-monetery system and never, ever buy anything from anyone. The only group of people that comes to mind who get near this are members of a religious order such as monks or nuns and I bet you that the monastery, convent or religious organisation does pay tax.
What the politicians and right wing papers conveniently forget is that VAT, road tax, excise duty, petrol duty and so on ARE taxes and that everyone pays one or more of these.
So, pay no "tax" if you are unemployed and you are a drag on society and should be pursued relentlessly, but if you are a big corporation and avoid or evade tax you are just fulfilling your duty to your shareholders and that's OK.
Talk about double standards!
Re: Eve Online but not Elite
"To wit, if you don't understand something, better to keep your mouth closed, rather than open it and remove all doubt."
Do you mean "Better to be thought an fool and remain silent than to speak out and remove all doubt."?
A Lincoln
But it's like selling your children
I do remember selling a computer once.
An Amstrad 6128.
Other than that I still have all the computers I have bought or built starting from a Sinclair Spectrum from 1984.
As I live on my own there is no-one to nag me about clearing them out and as I haven't moved house in over 30 years that spur to disposal is missing as well.
I do actually use some of the older stuff from time to time. Getting some software to run is a lot easier when everything is of the same vintage i.e. getting stuff from the 1990s going is easier on an AMD K6 with a 3dfx Voodoo 2 card and so on.
So keep hold of that stash, it MAY well come in handy one day.
