Posts by Nerd King

Uninstalled immediately

Needless to say I won't be spending my money with these scaremongering bastards. About 5 minutes after the box came up I uninstalled Zonealarm and decided to make use of my bank's free kaspersky for my windows box.

Twatter

I've not always been a fan, but sometimes Twitter is a truly fabulous tool, not what people claim it is (ie people saying they're having a crap). I was in Thailand for the red shirt crisis (a bunch of nutters going round bangkok throwing grenades, firing AK47s and blowing shit up basically). Twitter was amazing, as the local media was a bit restricted, but people on the ground (many of whom I ended up meeting in person) were able to keep me posted on what was going, where the latest grenades were fired, where to avoid in Bangkok, etc. Generally anything accurate got retweeted and anything bollocks got buried, and you could get info and opinions from both sides of the conflict. It was utterly invaluable at a time when the whole country was in crisis (and we all know how it ended up when the bastards set most of Bangkok on fire). Twitter's reliability is an issue, but to suggest that it is without value is bollocks.

Autorun

..is the single stupidest idea MS ever implemented. Disappointingly Ubuntu does the same, and it would be trivial to exploit in terms of automatically running something to do a job in your home directory. We do however at least have the advantage that doing anything really damaging would require the user to enter their password, and if they're that bloody daft then there's nothing you can do to protect them. Still, would be nice to default to no auto run, it's be one less job to do after install.

Freetard answer

For the less-skilled freetard the option is to use the neighbour's unsecured wifi for any porn/warez. For the more-skilled freetard, this is precisely what aircrack-ng is good for :) Penguin cos she gives me love.

HP Slate's biggest problem..

.. is that it's got Windows. That limits performance, and also leaves them stuck with an unsuitable processor. An Intel Atom will never match the wattage/performance ratio of an ARM chip, but of course an ARM chip will only give you Win Mobile or Linux, and HP probably chickened out. So 5 hour battery life it is then. Opportunity lost.

f*cking title

Get windows off people's computers, educate them, give them the penguin. Once done, no more botnets. Simple.

PHP user != open-source enthusiast

When I started developing in PHP way way way back in 2000 I did so because if I didn't, my job was going down the toilet. Basically I'd conned my way into a web design job, realised I couldn't design for shit, sussed that the company had no coders, and swiftly learned to code. Why PHP? Well, I could have had ASP, but I chose PHP and MySQL (the partnership here is important) because there were no cost/licensing issues with either, and security was rock solid. It was also much nicer than that butt-ugly mess known as Coldfusion. My assumptions about security would prove correct, with none of my stuff being hacked, but later my ASP-loving colleagues getting hacked to smithereens.

Anyway, back then, Linux on the desktop wasn't really anyone's idea of fun. I tried a few live cds from magazines god-knows-when (probably 2003-4ish but can't honestly remember) and they were terrible. Linux was for servers, windows was for desktops. It's a habit that stuck til about 2 years ago when I stumbled upon the gateway drug, Ubuntu. These days I'll happily use Arch, BSD, OpenSolaris or any other assorted weirdness for my desktop, because they all mostly let me get my work done (Ubuntu still wins here for 'Just bloody works and stays that way'). I'm now a Linux user.

The thing is, being a PHP user doesn't necessarily make you into open-source. Of course, now I'm a fan, now I know what it is, but back when I started I didn't know jack. I suspect many devs started the same way. Now I develop on Linux because a linux desktop is excellent, but I suspect many may still be in the mindset that Windows is for desktops and linux is for servers. I'm sure they'll eventually move accross, it just takes a couple in each office to stumble upon it then it'll spread like wildfire, provided corporate policy doesn't screw them. Once you have a few early movers, they can show everyone the cube and wobbly windows and all will be right with the world (hey I know they're lame, you know they're lame, but n00bs still coo over them, so there's nothing wrong with eye-candy to attract the masses).

No lan port?

Ok so it's expensive as hell, and yet they leave out the LAN port? Seriously, the LAN port is kinda important if your wifi isn't working, or if you're in an environment that just doesn't have wifi (they do exist you know). Jeez, designed by a moron.

Package Manager

Given that Android is basically linux (as is ChromeOS and also remember Google are working with Canonical of Ubuntu fame) why don't they follow the lead of most decent package managers? On my ubuntu box we have our 'marketplace' (otherwise known as Synaptic) and can download thousands of apps from it. Then, when updates are pushed to the marketplace they all come in one big pile, with dependencies checked etc. So once in a while your OS will check the 'marketplace' (repository) and see if updates are available and deliver a list, you press ok, job done. It's simple, elegant and rarely fucks up. So what do you say Google?

ChromeOS is no big deal

I can build something that'll do a very similar job with Ubuntu minimal CD, add Xorg, fluxbox and various other bits and bobs, add Firefox/Opera/Arora/Dillo/Lynx/other-browser, idesk to give me desktop icons and bob's your uncle, one super-fast lightweight browser OS. So why's everyone hung up on ChromeOS which seems to be below the level of those crappy splashtop things?