Different animal

Combination of Crossrail (East West) and Thameslink (North South) is designed to do what you suggest.

No, because they go through London. What was being suggested by "Dave, Portsmouth" was a line that went around London and provided interchanges with all the main in/out routes (including the Crossrail and Thameslink lines). Such a line would ease congestion on lines into the capital, and would be built on relatively inexpensive land.

A railway is properly a network, not a tree.

Re: Different strokes

Give me a plastic shell that comes apart to allow swapping out a battery and a microSD slot over a shiny metal unibody ANY DAY.

Agreed ... but those don't have to be alternatives. My old HTC Legend has a one-piece metal body and still manages to offer a removable battery and SD card. It's a great pity that HTC seem to have abandoned user-accessible batteries and user-expandable memory.

Mine's the one with the Samsung in the pocket -- one of the many, I should say.

Re: “advance the bold vision”

Good point, except the ribbon takes up a few pixels less height than the previous menu bar + two toolbar set up.

The toolbars are optional, you know. If you're short of screen space you can turn them off -- or dock them to the side of the window -- and the menu alone takes less space than the ribbon.

Re: "[a] device that connects to a website"

Great idea, Paypal. That way, the miscreants will have just one site to hack to steal personal data on everyone and gain access to absolutely all banking data there is.

Much as I dislike and distrust PayPal, I don't think the scheme they are suggesting is quite as bonkers as that!

What they seem to be proposing is a system in which every user would carry some kind of device that would enable them to authenticate to a system. The user would activate the gadget by some biometric pathway (such as a fingerprint reader on the gadget itself) and that would enable the gadget to authenticate the user to a computer system through some sort of secure protocol -- a cryptographic challenge/response exchange, perhaps. I guess the gadget would contain the user's ID as a digital certificate and would also have the ability to use the corresponding private key to effect the challenge/response calculation.

Users would register with services using the certificates from their devices as ID, and would authenticate by enabling the device to complete the cryptographic exchange that demonstrates knowledge of the private key. If a user registered with more than one bank using the same device neither bank would know the private key, so either could impersonate the user to the other.

Note that it is important that the biometric measurement and verification are performed by the device itself, and don't rely on (say) a fingerprint reader attached to the computer. If the device were to rely on the external hardware then an attacker could record capture the biometric data and activate the device automatically without the user's knowledge (possibly after it had been stolen).

The important points here are:

1. The device would be useless if stolen because it won't function without performing a biometric identification of the user.

2. The certificate on the device could be revoked if the device were lost or stolen, making it useless.

3. The private key would only be used on-board, and would never leave the device. That means that the device could never be spoofed or copied.

4. A user could have multiple devices, so wouldn't have to present the same identity for all services. All the devices could be activated by the same biometric mechanism, but the biometric data would be checked by the device, on the device, and would never need to be transmitted to the computer system asking for authentication. When you lose a device you only need to get a new device (with a new keyset and certificate) -- you don't need new fingerprints!

5. If the same device is used to access multiple service accounts, and one is closed, it is not a problem that the device can still be used to identify the user. If the user (or an attacker) attempts to access the service on which the account has been closed the system will be able to verify the user's identity, but not associate that identity with a live account.

Of course, to implement a system that did all this would be to place a lot of faith in the technology. If an attacker could obtain a user's device and spoof their fingerprints (before the device was reported missing and the certificate revoked) he could gain access. An attacker who could devise a way to extract the key data from the device would be able to spoof the device. An attacker who could break the cryptosystem used by the device would laugh all the way to ... wherever you go when there aren't any banks any more.

Mine's the one with cash in the pocket.

Re: the PR people need to go to the same place as all the lawyers.

Wasn't that just phone sanitizers, social documentary film makers and hair dressers?

I think you'll find that "advertising account executives" were explicitly mentioned -- that's PR people in some shape or form -- not sure about lawyers, though.

Beer ... because I've never been through a transmat beam before.

Re: Unfortunately...

No - if I was still developing commercial software for a living (and NZ made proper warm beer) I'd be seriously be considering getting on the next plane.

I had a lovely pint of Speights Old Dark last time I was in Dunedin -- not chilled to tastelessness at all -- it did cross my mind that all would not be lost if I tore up my ticket home ...

<-- This icon is the wrong colour.

Re: WE knew this 30 years ago

Mostly agreed, but ...

Desktop/Laptop minimum either 15" 4:3 or 17" Widescreen, minimum 1200 pixels high, ideally more.

For laptops -- laptops that are actually going to be carried around, rather than simply desktop machines that look like laptops -- if the screen is as big as 15" the weight of the device becomes a problem. Lighter components, stronger chassis materials, and better battery technologies are helping ... but I'd say that the ideal laptop is in the 13.3" to 14" and weighs less than 2kg.

Even so, the screen needs to have at least 1200+ pixels vertically. No question.

Re: Very useful review,

Is it?

I'm glad you found it useful ... but that's not the same thing as the review being "a useful review" per se.

If a review is to be useful I'd expect it to at least contain the full spec. of the device in question -- preferably in a table, so one doesn't have to sift through all the text to find every detail -- as well some comment as to how the device in question actually performs. Such a review would be considerably longer than the four screenfuls or so that this one takes.

It might also help if the reviewer eschewed the opportunity to ride his own hobby-horse by slagging off other devices before he got started.

Re: Gates vs Politician

But on the other hand, he can program a computer - so therefore he IS superior, any engineer is superior to any politician is a good rule of thumb methinks.

Calling Gates an "engineer" is perhaps an unnecessary kindness to him -- he dropped out of college, after all -- and he must take some responsibility for the poor engineering standards that are obvious in so many of Microsoft's products.

President Geun Hye Park (or Park Geun-hye, as Wijipedia would have it) on the other hand, has a bachelor's degree in electronic engineering from Sogang University, which trumps Mr.Gates any day of the week in my book!

Re: Almost perfect

... it is a consumer device. Do you know any teenage kids that give a damn about the OS rather than the 'coolness' of the device?

That's absolutely true, but SO not the point.

This phone could have been attractive to ME had it run Meego or perhaps Symbian skinned with Qt, or maybe Android, but I'm not interested in a Windows device. So, I agree with the OP -- shame about the OS.

That's a personal opinion, of course, but a perfectly valid comment.

Re: Simple Explanation - MS MURDERED THE NETBOOK

Then MS told the OEMs not to run Linux on them. Or else have their air supply cut off.

And the 2nd half of the graph tells the ugly story. Demand plummetted!

No, you're missing the point.

If MS killed the netbook it was not by persuading OEMs not to sell with Linux. Whatever you or I may feel about the relative merits of different OSes the general public doesn't care (this is more true on netbooks than on desktop PCs because netbooks are only expected to be able to cope with general computing tasks (browsing, mail, social crap) and few people choose them for specific applications (games, photoshop, etc)).

What MS did to kill the netbook was to restrict the spec of PC that would qualify as a netbook for Window licensing. That's why we see all these shitty 10" 1024x600 screens, 2GB RAM limits, and so on. I'm sure Microsoft did that to stop the sale of cheap Windows licences for netbooks harming their sales of full-price Windows licences for laptops, but the effect was to damage the viability of the netbook as a hardware platform.

Linux may cope better with constrained hardware than Windows ... but not by enough to make netbook hardware attractive to the purchaser (and even Linux can't do much about the screen size).

Re: I think we should be talking about the death of Ultrabooks...

People will not engage in mass no-purchase ....

Why? gosh, I guess that's because they are already buying alternatives!

People will buy a piece of kit if they feel a need for a piece of kit. If my 4-year-old netbook broke today (and couldn't be fixed) I would try to get a replacement ... but I don't have much hope that I'd find anything on the market today that I'd consider worth spending money on: The screens are too low-resolution and it's hard to find one with 3g fitted.

If I ever do find a more modern netbook with a decent screen and connectivity I'll probably go out and buy it as an upgrade even though my current one may still work. Until then I'll engage in (solitary) no-purchase ... but I doubt I'm the only one who feels this way about the current market.

The problem seems to me to be that the manufacturers want us to buy expensive ultrabooks but we spitefully choose to buy cheap low-margin netbooks instead. Their response is to make netbooks less and less desirable in the hope that that will drive us to buy ultrabooks, but we just sit on the fence and say "Meh!"

Make me a netbook using the screen of the Nexus 10 tablet, put 500GB of inexpensive hard drive it in rather than an SSD (though SSDs are now half-way to being affordable), and put Linux on it and I'll bit your hand off. Until then I'll carry on using my old £300 Acer.

Re: What’s the point?

@Mark Simon

Or should digital music also develop scratches after playing a few times, or digital video start to stretch?

I think you misunderstand what is meant by "deteriorate" here. What is being suggested is that -- just as a paper book can only be lent a certain number of times by a library before it falls apart -- a digital "book" should only be lendable by a library a certain number of times before its licence expires. I don't think anyone is seriously suggesting that the pages should be shown as dog-eared onscreen, or that the fonts should become fuzzier the more times the book is lent!

The perceived "problem" that the publishers of digital books are trying to address is that once a library purchases a digital copy of a book for a one-off payment that copy will last forever, and no further fees will become due. There are two possible solutions: One is to not to charge a one-off fee but to charge a royalty payment each time the book is "borrowed", the other is to charge a one-off fee that covers a fixed number of borrowings (or a set period of time, or some combination of the two) after which the book is somehow made unavailable until it is re-licensed by the library. It is this second mechanism that is referred to as "deterioration".

Re: RE: Atheism isn't a faith

I hate to disappoint you but it is.

No, it really really isn't.

Faith is a belief in something that you can't rationally prove, but that you want to be true. For example: most Christians believe both in God and the Devil, but they wouldn't claim to have "faith" in the Devil. For a belief to be a faith you have to have some emotional investment in it.

Atheists don't have that emotional involvement with their beliefs. They don't go around saying "Oh, I really hope there isn't a god", they say something like "There is no evidence for the existence of a god in the universe as we currently understand it, and our understanding seems to be getting better all the time" -- so, yes, it's a belief but it isn't a faith.

Actually, Christianity sounds pretty neat in some ways ... if you spend your life being reasonably decent to other people, go to church on Sundays, and remember to say "sorry" before you die for any times when you didn't quite make the required standard then you're guaranteed to spend the rest of eternity (after a possible spell on the naughty step of purgatory, depending on whom you listen to) in perpetual bliss. Wouldn't that be cool? What's not to like?

Sadly, there is no evidence that any of this is true, or even possible, but I can see why some people clutch at the straw of hope that it offers.

Re: ?

Coca-Cola might call themselves the Real Thing but they weren't the inventors of cola beverages.

No, indeed, they weren't ... and as the point of the original Coca -Cola was that it also contained coca(ine) as a stimulant the stuff they sell nowadays certainly isn't "The Real Thing" (though that may be just as well).

Re: Aaand we have the obligatory idiot

... petrol is a much less polluting fuel than coal ...

True ... but most recent fixed power stations burn natural gas, which is less polluting still (more hydrogen turning to water and less carbon turning to dioxide per unit energy produced) than petrol.

Re: Fire drill

When Terry Pratchett said that he's considered writing up his time working as a press officer for these power stations, but hasn't on the grounds he doesn't think anyone would believe him - he isn't, for once, joking.

I would refer you to David Langford's novel The Leaky Establishment which -- apart from being a damn good read -- is said to be a truer depiction of life in places like (to pick one at random, and not because Langford used to work there) AWE Aldermaston than most people can comfortably credit.

Icon ... well, obviously!

Re: Class 10 32GB

I suspect SanDisk we're pushing the hardware to it's limits ...

I suspect SanDisk were pushing the hardware to its limits ...

There: fixed it for you.

Re: you can keep the 'Have a Nice Day' meaningless words

'Your pint isn't a Pint'

Or, as an American person once said to me: "You Brits have a five-quart gallon"!

... the Churchill statement, 'Two Nations divided by a common language'.

I think you'll find that was Shaw (possibly harking back to something Wilde wrote).

Re: oh joy, more bloat

There's a reason why organised menus for applications have stuck around for so long, they work really, really well.

Yes, they do. No argument there.

On the other hand, I've been using Unity on my netbook recently, and it's not really such a hardship. After all, I spend most of my time either running the GUI of an application or typing in a terminal window -- not interacting with the desktop.

Mind you, the netbook has a stupid squitty little 1366x768 screen and I think I'd find Unity's global menu infuriating on anything larger.

With Unity you have to hit super and wait a couple of minutes for the thing to load every single fucking icon for every single application you have installed all in a jumbled mess on one page that monopolises your entire screen.

No, you don't have to wait. You can preempt that process by carrying on typing. I don't particularly like the way the dash works, but it's not as bad as you suggest.

XFCE is better

Perhaps ... but I've been using XFCE again recently (it's the default desktop in Mythbuntu) and realizing just how much I dislike it. It doesn't seem to be any more lightweight than Gnome, but is much lighter on features. If I wanted an ascetic desktop I'd go for LXDE, if I want to get stuff done I'll eschew lightweight for functional.

Re: To keep in the spirit of things...

Avpr gb frr gur obzor jbexvat ntnva, naq nyfb ratntvat jvgu fghqragf naq gur lbhatre trarengvba

Indeed.

P.S. One of the problems with rot13 is that it looks like rot13 even when you're not trying to decipher it ... mind you, so do quite a lot of other things.

Re: Is CBC-mode really an "algorithm"?

I'm being picky here, but the paragraph that begins "RC4 was invented by Ron Rivest in 1987..." seems to imply CBC is an encryption "algorithm" like RC4...

Not that picky at all. CBC is not an encryption algorithm, but a way of chaining together successive uses of a block encryption algorithm to encrypt a large body of data -- such things are usually described as "modes of operation".

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Block_cipher_modes_of_operation

Re: 3 inch disc

Of course it's "disc". The word "disk" is a contraction of "diskette" (an IBM invention).

The derivation of "disc" is from the Latin discus so a 'c' seems a natural spelling, but US English and IT usage have always preferred 'k'. The 'k' spelling is earlier than the first use of "diskette", though, so you're wrong that "disk" is a contraction of that.

I first came across the 'k' spelling in Patrick Moore's writing on astronomy -- before I ever used a computer -- in phrases such as "with even a small telescope you will be able to make out the disk of Jupiter". It struck me as strange then and I stuck resolutely to the 'c' spelling for many years.

You're right, though, that "diskette"is the problem. If you write "disc" with a 'c' switching to 'k' for "diskette" just looks silly. What option does that leave? "Discettte"? Yuk. "Disquette" is better, but barely.

No: Best to adopt the spelling "disk", which is already current in much of the world, and be consistent with "diskette".

Re: PS/2?

... NHS trusts tend to want them. Partly to reuse keyboards and mice from the older kit being replaced (a 1000 keyboards and mice are worth a few extra PCs on the order) ...

More than that if the PS/2 keyboards in question have been splatter-proofed so they can be kept sterile with a quick wipe of disinfectant ... that doesn't come cheap!

<-- Autoclave icon, because there's no biohazard symbol available!

Re: EU lost the plot

I don't see Google home page offering for me to install other browsers.

Yeh, the EU lost the plot ... but so have you.

The real issue was never one of making it easier to install other browsers, the real issue was that it was impossible to completely remove Internet Explorer from Windows. What the EU should have demanded was that all web-using Windows components -- Windows Update, for example -- be rewritten to be able to use other browsers, so that every last vestige of Microsoft's browser could be removed from the system should the user decide that that was what he wanted.

The current position is that the user has to have IE installed (though not necessarily present as an icon on the desktop) in order to make Windows work, and it was to that dependency that the EU originally objected.

Re: Yes, package up other people's efforts made for free

If they didn't want that to happen, they shouldn't have made their work free and open source.

Consider two people who each work hard and produce a useful piece of software. One sells his program for money, the other gives it away for nothing.

Why do you think it should be OK to copy the work of the latter and pass it off as your own, but (apparently) not that of the former?

If anything, the altruism of the latter programmer should be rewarded by greater protection from copying - he is not growing fat on the profits of his labours, and so can less easily afford to protect his work.

Re: 'If it ain't Stiff, it ain't worth a ...'

I think it was Monty Pythons' Paper Handerchief that had 4 groves - 2 on each side ...

ITYM Matching Tie and Handkerchief ... yes, it had two grooves on one side but only one groove on the other. Try doing that with an MP3!

Sad old git icon because ...

Re: 3:2

... 64GB SSD and 4GB RAM is ample to install a proper OS ...

Yes, but not to hold an awful lot of data.

It's probably fine if you buy into the whole cloud thing, but internet access while on the move isn't yet anything like ubiquitous (let alone fast enough or cheap enough) for that to be a sensible approach for the serious mobile user.

This machine would be a whole lot more attractive with Linux and a 500GB+ spinning drive (oh, and a matt screen).

Fail for the lack of capacity, not for your post.

Re: Ubuntu is dead

I don't think Ubuntu is dead. From where I sit it looks like one of the healthier distros.

They went off on a tangent with Unity and went totally overboard with the Amazon search debacle.

While there are many good reasons to prefer one distro over another, neither of those really counts as reasons not to choose Ubuntu, as it's easy to change the desktop environment (or to start with one of the Ubuntu versions that uses a different desktop by default) and it's easy to disable the Amazon searches (which you only get with Unity, anyway).

At the moment, if somebody asks me to install Linux for them, I use Mint ...

Mint, itself, is Ununtu-based, so you can't really say that you're choosing it instead of Ubuntu -- it's more that you're choosing Ubuntu in the form of its Mint derivative (unless you meant LMDE, that is).

I've actually recently installed Ubuntu 12.04 (with Unity) on my netbook (replacing 10.04 and Gnome 2) and I don't find it as annoying as I'd expected. I still wouldn't want to use Unity on a big monitor, though so when the time comes I'll probably upgrade my desktop 10.04 setup to either 12.04 with a different desktop or to Debian 7 when it's released.

Re: Google made its bed.

I still sit pondering why Google chose to use the JVM at all.

They don't. They use the Java language and the Dalvik VM.

If you were going to be running a battery powered device, would you choose Java as your primary developing language?

Probably not ... but I would choose a VM environment in which apps could be effectively and efficiently sandboxed.

They should of stuck with Linux, and used C.

They did "stick with Linux" ... but they built layer on top of it. You can program Android in C++ (which is almost a superset of C, so if you want to write in C you very nearly can).

You seem to be wrong on all three counts ... Oh, and it's "should have".

Re: Ship of Theseus for the modern age

So, if I install Office 2013 on a computer, and then, on progressive weeks, upgrade the motherboard, processor, memory, hard disk and video card, is it still the same computer five weeks later? Have I invalidated my licence?

So, the same case then? You should be OK ...

Microsoft are relying on the fact that most people don't upgrade, they go out and buy a new PC and so need a new licence. If this change in licensing terms means that more people upgrade their systems in future, and less old kit ends up in landfill, it may even be a good thing.

... up until the point at which Microsoft persuade the hardware industry to start making motherboards that won't fit in the old cases, anyway!

Re: The Half-Truth

What has been "dumbed down" on the Win8 desktop?

Start menu, gadgets, sidebar ... anything and everything that was useful on the desktop has gone.

... that has been replaced by Metro.

Exactly. Microsoft decide that Metro/TIFKAM was the One True Way and removed the functionality from the desktop. Instead getting a simple pop-up menu to start programs you now have to suffer a switch to a completely different GUI to run a program. Insanity!

TIFKAM may be an OK-ish sort of interface on a phone or a tablet, but it's a bit rubbish on a desktop without a touch screen and useds should have been given a choice.

@mmeier

... "WinTel" units ...

WinTel?

That's "Windows" + "Intel".

Small 't' please, capital 'I' at your discretion.

@Peter Gathercole

All mainstream distros on mainstream hardware will do pretty much everything a home user would want to do out of the box, with the possible exception of patent restricted file formats, and there is no way in hell that you can blame the Linux community for that problem.

Agreed ... up to a point.

Unfortunately there are some specific pieces of hardware and software that require Windows, and any user who wants or needs to use one of those has to use Windows.

In my case -- I can't update my TomTom SatNav without Windows because TomTom Home only runs on Windows (even though the TomTom device itself runs Linux), I can't use the software provided with my Canon DSLR without Windows, and I can't use my copy of the MemoryMap OS mapping software without Windows. In the latter two cases a VM is OK (but I still need a licensed copy of Windows to run in it) but the TomTom software is happier when it can connect to a real (non-virtualized) USB port. For these, I keep an old P4 box running XP.

The problem is that there is no incentive for TomTom, Canon, and MemoryMap to produce Linux versions of their tools because they can pretty-much expect that any potential customer has access to a Windows PC. As long as that remains true Windows will be the OS of choice for everyone who runs only a single PC.

On the bright side, I can use my old 16-bit Windows copy of the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary under Wine on my 64-bit Linux box, whereas 64-bit Windows won't run 16-bit software at all.

Read into that comment what you will.

Microsoft commented, 'luckily we don't suffer these kind of smash and grab raids'.

That it's much easier to break Windows, perhaps?

Re: 1080p _is_ low resolution

Well, to be fair, 1080p is middling resolution. I'd *like* more, but anything over 1000 is a big step in the right direction. My old PIII ThinkPad had 1400x1050 and that was pretty usable.

Still, if a 10" tablet can have 2560x1600 I don't see why a 13.3" laptop shouldn't have at least as much.

Re: although i'm not a microsoft fan...

Who amongst us hasn't used XP to the day they couldn't install the brand new DX11-only game?

Am I alone in finding it unutterably tragic the choice of desktop Operating System may be dictated by something as trivial as a game?

Re: But you're still missing the point

Windows COULD do this but does NOT do this because it's been tested by Samsung. I'm pretty sure they would have noticed all their notebooks bricking with Windows and would work with Microsoft to get it fixed before they shipped.

You'd hope so, yes ... but did you read what actually causes the bricking?

It apparently happens when data is written to a diagnostic log that's maintained by the UEFI Firmware. If you write too much you brick the PC. It appears that when Windows boots normally it doesn't have enough diagnostic information to write for this limitation to cause a problem ... but there may be circumstances in which there is more to report, in which case the PC will get bricked under Windows.

This could get triggered by something quite routine ... perhaps an error caused by trying to boot from a non-bootable USB Flash drive or SD card that had accidentally been left plugged in.