skimming the fat

Cisco have bought Linksys, rebranded the products they want as "Cisco Small Business" and are throwing away the leftovers. Cisco Small Business switches, VoIP products etc.. all came from Linksys and it's obvious from looking at the software on them.

Cisco has been trying hard to get into the SOHO market for the last few years and Cisco Small Business is doing it. They've got what they want from Linksys (which doesn't have a very good reputation in the commercial world).

fond memories

we got ondigital at the house I lived at when I was at university from 1998-2001. It was certainly a welcome addition to a house with 6 students all not doing too much for most of the day.

We had to have a big aerial put up (which last time I drove past the house in Lancaster, is still there) but there was still plenty of interference every now and then.

We moved out of the house due to finishing uni right at the time it changed to ITV Digital.

nowt wrong with a bit of constructive criticism

He has a blunt way of saying things which can also be construed as being rude sometimes but can anyone honestly say that the things he says are wrong?

Gnome3 was stupid to start with, requiring a user to enter a root password to add a printer or join a wireless network is daft.

Without his relentless fighting against poorly implemented code the Linux kernel would surely be far, far worse than it is now. If all these companies were allowed to merge code designed to suit their own needs and no one else's, Linux would probably be no more than a museum piece by now.

Anyone here saying they don't use Linux, you are using it right now by looking at this website which is hosted on a GNU/Linux system!

Security by obscurity

Presumably by that they mean they will keep it closed source.

So they're admitting they've failed their goal of producing an OS kernel with zero defects or vulnerabilities already. If it was 100% bug free then releasing the code would only be a good thing. They know as well as anyone that 100% bug free code is impossible, one of the first things I was taught in software engineering years ago was that!

chicken and egg

The post my "A Non e-mouse" goes to show why this isn't likely to take off any time soon.

The general public don't want HD phone calls, it sounds "weird". I turned G.722 on for internal calls in our office and it takes some getting used to.

There's no point in the businesses paying a load of money to BT for HD audio since it'll only work if the entire call path is in HD, including the physical hardware the person at home has.

People are too used to 64kbps G.711a for fixed lines and even lower quality on GSM.

If it was £100 then I could see why some people might want one of these. As it is, you are paying more money for a system that will only run limited software and is almost useless with no internet connection. I just don't get who these things are aimed at.

Charles Calthrop - sorry but you are going to be very disappointed. Desktop environments on the Pi are currently /very/ slow to the point of being unusable in my opinion. The device is great for command-line programming but until someone writes a GPU accelerated driver for X it's not usable as a desktop PC for things like web browsing. But then that's also not really what it's designed for. To put things in perspective, the 700MHz ARM11 CPU it uses is roughly the same real speed as a Pentium II 300MHz so no where near the performance of that 1.9GHz Celeron.

Well, the thing about space dust - its main distinguishing feature - is it's black. And the thing about space, the colour of space, your basic space colour, is black. So how are you supposed to see it?

Google should be pushing to get it's Nexus 7 tablets into these shops. Chromebooks would only work if they are significantly cheaper than a normal laptop. As it is, you can buy a normal laptop and still use google docs, gmail etc... on them but have the option of using it offline too if you want.

happy memories of being shouted at by the teacher at school for trying to sneak in a quick game of lander during a lesson.

yes, the event horizon is the very outside edge of a black hole.

A singularity is at the centre

amigaos

proper AmigaOS is still under development:

http://www.amigaos.net/

And it's owned by a company who have nothing to do with this Commodore USA outfit.

Commodore USA can't exactly be thought of as Commodore to me, it's just someone who has acquired the name and using it to sell what seem like massively overpriced x86 PCs. I have to say, their GUI does look quite funky.

ah Carmageddon. One of my favs as a kid. Memorable not only for it's shock factor and comedy but also as one of the first car games I was aware of where you could just explore the whole map. Endless fun.

I particularly enjoyed being that big heavy police car you get to be after completing the game. Any opponents car would just be wrecked as soon as you hit them.

Just looked it up, it's called the "Suppressor" :D

marketing rubbish

anyone who thinks they have "unlimited" Internet is being deluded. It's a technical impossibility, try saturating the connection 24/7 and see how long it takes for the ISP to do "something". I really wish Ofcom or someone would step in and stop this silly marketing rubbish.

unlimited

The sooner people realise that an "unlimited" Internet connection is a technical impossibility and the sooner the marketing muppets stop using the word the better if you ask me!

ROM

ROM = read only memory. I highly doubt you mean that :)

"but have companies not learned that most people don't give a crap if it's the most world-record breaking thinnist phone?"

are you serious? Say what you will about Apple's operating systems, they are very good, but you cannot deny that a significant percentage of people buying Apple kit do so based almost purely on the physical design of the hardware. People very much take this into account when buying things, especially the latest piece of pockey-shiney to show off to their friends.

not so good news really

It seems unusual to be touting this as good news. It'd be good news if SSD prices had dropped below HDD prices but HDD prices rising so much is not good news.

I can only see this increasing demand in SSD hugely now which will then drive the price of that up when demand far outstrips supply.

spectrum version

I remember buying the ZX Spectum port of this game. It was really more than the graphics on a spectrum could handle, the sprites need to be too small. It also crashed....a lot! I ended up taking it back and swapping it for Bart Simpson vs The Space Mutants which was OK but not nearly as good.

Spent many an hour/day/week/month playing Lemmings when I got an A600 not too much later. I can hear the music in my head now.

not a fair comparison

comparing a single version of a product (windows xp) with all generations of a while range of products (iPods) doesn't seem to make much sense.

XP is still about because it is actually pretty good at what it does. After suffering years of woe with win98 and the monstrosity that was winME, XP was a godsend. And it still does it's job well. We still have more XP machines in our office than Win7 ones because there seems little point in upgrading other than for some eye-candy.

Plenty of win2000 installations still in use too (although not in my office I might add) but that does seem pretty silly, how can they cope being stuck on IE6?

Oh and all this is coming from a so called "...bitter linux user with ... irrational Microsoft hatred..." who hasn't used any version of windows himself at work or at home for years.

disaster

This is going to be a total disaster for F1! Who on earth wants to watch half the races?!? It's unbelievable that the BBC's announcement is trying to put a good news spin on this.

Now F1 coverage is subscription only, I'm not paying for a full sky sports subscription to get F1.

Viewing figures in the UK will plummet. ITV coverage was bad enough with adverts all the time but this just takes the biscuit.

another reason

as I've just found out from trying to update my ipad which has caused a loss of all apps on it....

If the ipad/ipod/hard drive containing downloaded music fails, you've had it. Bye bye music. Short of my house being burgled, it's highly unlikely that I'm going to suddenly lose all my music at once (and they're insured anyway...).

I know you can backup and I do have at least 3 copies of everything on my file server at home but I know from experience of working in IT that most people don't even consider backups as necessary until it's too late.

never mind CDs

I still like to buy records, never mind just CDs.

I much prefer browsing shelves in my house full of CDs and records to decide what to listen to than looking at a screen with a folder of file names in it on a computer.

Other reasons I still buy CDs are:

- album art

- the feeling of actually getting "something" tangible rather than just a load of 0s and 1s on my computer hard drive

- better quality than most download music at the moment

But as for buying on the high street, I very rarely do this any more. I buy the vast majority of my music online, it's just I order CDs and/or records online, not mp3 downloads.

It will be a very sad day for me if buying music on physical media stops. Hopefully there are enough other people in the world who agree to mean this will never really happen.

no iOS

I think lack of support for iOS also played a big part in reducing Seesaw's audience. I certainly know I'd probably use it loads if it worked on my ipad.

what's left of linksys

what I find quite interesting is that they recently re-branded a lot of the Linksys kit as "Cisco Small Business", certainly this happened to all the IP telephony stuff that came with Linksys. So it looks to me like they'll rebrand what they want to keep and then sell off the Linksys brand along with whatever products they don't want.

pointless...

if you wanted a PC that looks like a C64 you'd be better off going on ebay and buying a "spares or repairs" original C64 and putting your own micro-itx board into that. Google search for "keyrah" to see how to get the original C64 keyboard working :)

I'm actually currently part way through doing similar with an Amiga A600 case and a netbook motherboard (as micro-itx wont fit in it).

I imagine even if this thing ever does become a reality it'll be massively over priced for what you get and less well made than the plastics of the original c64.

Also, who actually wants a PC in that form-factor? What possible use would it have? People looking for a bit of nostalgia certainly aren't going to buy enough of these to make it a worthwhile product.

If this was in Dragon's Den looking for investment I'm sure the resounding answer would be "I'm out".

good for them

I'd be quite happy if Flash completely disappeared from existence tomorrow.

It's not Ubuntu's fault that Flash Player development is always a step or two behind Windows, it's Adobe's fault.

And last time I installed Windows, it didn't come with Flash installed either. It has to be installed manually. And there's no central package management that'll keep it up to date there either.

Now to wait for Google to put their money where their mouth is a drop Flash from Youtube in favour of html5 etc...

domain

I bet Oracle will keep the sun.com domain registered to them. They wouldn't want someone to buy it and use it for anything, they seem intent on completely wiping the Sun name from history.

I noticed "java.sun.com" started re-directing to an Oracle URL some time ago.

oxo-degradable

So if you pay your £33 for your collectors edition vinyl, the case it comes in is designed to degrade in possibly a few years and possibly a few months? I'm all for being environmentally sound and what-not but that just seems a bit stupid.

I will buy the album when it comes out on an actual physical media though, I much prefer to have music I can browse on my shelves at home when I'm not sure what to listen to that day. I like sleeve artwork too. Don't really like the extra charge to have it in a non-lossy format too :(

Also, yes In Rainbows was "free" but there was still something like a 42p payment handling charge if I remember correctly. So I guess even that was enough to put some people off from actually buying it.

OCP Art Studio

I remember that one! Had the Spectrum version, it used to take forever and a day to load (two tapes worth!). Was much better when I copied it onto microdrive. Probably the first time I ever used a mouse.

getting there..

just one step closer to the hover-board that will have been invented by 2015.