Posts by jrd
13 posts • joined Monday 6th December 2010 12:48 GMT
Old PCs
My 7 year old laptop still does what I need. I don't have a compelling reason to replace the hardware - Windows XP, Office 2003 and Adobe Photoshop CS2 are all "good enough". PCs have become household appliances for most people - you keep the one you have until it breaks or won't get the job done. Or (maybe) Miscrosoft stops supporting the OS.
Re: Way to miss the point...
[Quote] This is a gamechanger for two reasons. Should I want to put a bullet in David Cameron, dont tempt me, with this I can make it myself, disguise it if I want to, and all I need to do is find the guy (probably when he's daughter hunting again), walk past, jam in in his gut and pull the trigger. [End]
Bullets are not freely available in the UK. And, if you're sourcing the bullets illegally, why not buy a gun the same way? Or, why not just stab him with a knife? It will be just as lethal as a small, low-velocity bullet.
Doesn't seem like a game-changer to me.
Re: Lenovo Thinkpads are not IBM Thinkpads
Typing this on a Lenovo Thinkpad X60 Tablet, my main computer. Bought it second hand 4 years ago and still going strong! Excellent bit of kit - vendors who offer 3 year warranties build their kit to last.
gmail works
I've had 1 email address for 10 years which I use for everything, and I do a lot of shopping online, I'm on mailing lists etc and I must say almost no spam gets past gmail's excellent filters. Those that do always seem to respond to unsubscribe requests, so I would recommend this extremely simple and low-overhead combination if you have spam problems.
Hmm, government puts the interests of its' own citizens ahead of those of foreign multinational companies, who would have expected that? I wonder if that'll catch on in the West too...
Re: Even with $2.6B
No, this isn't price fixing. It's companies learning that the strategy of bidding up the value of patent portfolios on the basis they can screw their competitors later isn't a great way to run a business. Which is a step in the right direction in my book.
Re: Blimey...
Jeremy Clarkson was apparently quoted over £20,000 to insure a Ford Escort (a fast one), and that was over 20 years ago. Expensive car insurance isn't only a modern phenomenon!
(And I think that was before he was famous, so I don't think they pushed the quote up because it was him...)
Posted in Happy 20th Birthday, IBM/Lenovo ThinkPad
X60 and X30
My current computer is a Thinkpad X60 tablet running XP (6 years old). It works fine.
This replaced a Thinkpad X30, which I still use as a music/print server.
Both of these I bought second-hand (each a couple of years old at the time) and have been good, reliable machines.
Congratulations
I think I like every single thing about this story. Well done, all concerned!
Posted in Nokia Asha 201 Qwerty phone
Different opinion
C|Net don't like the phone much...
http://reviews.cnet.co.uk/mobile-phones/nokia-asha-201-review-50005823/
In particular, that reviewer hated the keyboard and the menu interface. And wasn't much impressed with the call quality either ("muffled").
Extradition to US
"If they know its a setup, then he should have no worries about going to Sweden and helping the police resolve the case".
I do not believe Assange is particularly worried about beating the Swedish accusations themselves. He fears that if he returns to Sweden then he will be extradited from there to the US.
Posted in Is cloud data secure?
Risk assessment
I suspect it's the difficulty of assessing the risks of migrating to a cloud that's holding organizations back, as much as anything else. We know how to do risk assessment of servers, data retention and archiving systems, data centres, firewalls, physical site access controls - we've done them in the past and there's plenty of advice and best practice available.
But - how do you identify and quantify the risks with the cloud model? No-one really knows.
A risk which is that difficult to assess and mitigate is by definition a high risk...
Good!
Mark McCormack, "What they don't teach you at Harvard business school":
"If your company has hired a consultant and you are not taking his advice - fire him.
This is no reflection on the consultant. He may be giving you the best advice you will ever get, but if you are not following it you are wasting his time and your money."
If we are going to have a government which thinks it knows best, and is prepared to make its own decisions, I'd rather they didn't waste our money paying consultants and then ignoring them or blaming them when the decisions don't generate the desired effects.
