Posts by Hayden Clark
481 posts • joined Monday 24th April 2006 21:03 GMT
What about a fixed version of 8?
Win8 plus Classic Shell plus TinyWindowsBorders gives you a very Win7-like experience.
Plainly, he has annoyed somebody in power
Otherwise he would not have been singled out.
What does LTS mean, anyway?
I don't get how they can ship unfinished features on an LTS build. Either they will remain in the unfinished state for the next 5 years, with just the occasional bug fix, or they will be finished/removed/replaced in the future, so a 13.04 install next year will be significantly different to a 13.04 build now.
How are you supposed to rely on LTS for a stable platform?
Why doesn't someone call Ms May out on her untruths?
She keeps moaning on about "national security", and "saving lives" when so many of the organisations that have requested access to the information are not security related.
Local Councils
HM Revenue and customs
Food standards Agency ??
Re: "Freakishly Something". Dunno About Awesome Though... @jonathanb
Because LibreOffice sucks very large balls interoperating with Word 2011 documents. Round tripping through LO will often damage the document in some way.
It's a pity, as I'd use LO exclusively otherwise....
Re: How is this kind of deal even legal?
Rubbish.
Remember, the business, instead of having a reserve of working capital (needed to operate) now has to rely on debt to fund operations. The underlying purchase debt is also a drain on revenue, lowering the overall profit margin. Unless the new owners (Ha!) are really very good, this means the business is now very susceptible to sudddenly going under in a downturn, as credit dries up.
So, to refute your points:
1) The employees suffer, either by the business going tits-up, or by having their pension pot raided (directly or indirectly).
2) Customers suffer. The business generally has to clamp down on cost, this means less service, less product range, less innovation.
3) You are correct. The original shareholders get paid.
4) The new owners don't necessarily get their suitcases by increasing value. They ensure, that even if they cannot offload the smoking shell to some other mug, they get paid anyway. Usually by charging high "management fees" or by awarding themselves large dividends, or by charging a "commission" on the original purchase. Remember the "Rover 4"!
In other coutries they have another name....
"Load Shedding"
In other words, just before the fuse goes in the power station, they just shut off "non-essential" power users. Just' like that.
Multi-cell battery crapness
I think that most "memory effect" moans are actually the degradation of battery capacity due to cell damage. When a series stack is deep-discharged, the lowest-capacity cell will get reverse-charged. This damages it, so that the next time the stack is discharged, the runt cell gets reversed-charged more.
How is this kind of deal even legal?
Effectively buying a company with it's own money, via a relatively short-term mega-loan from investment banks.
At least in this case, Dell actually has enough cash (as the share price is so depressed). Normally, the debt is loaded on the bought company, then the buyers run away from the smoking wreckage as fast as their money-stuffed suitcases will allow.
Re: Updates
I wonder if this is already happening. Some of my Xp installs are behaving worse and worse - particularly in the area of networking, where slow or absent servers cause the UI to freeze. I'm sure this didn't used to happen.
Windows 7/8 will be "so much faster than XP is (now)"
Posted in AdBlock Plus BLOCKED from Google Play
AdBlock-in-firefox still works
Firefox add-ons don't seem to be Android apps (.apks). Firefox on Android still uses .xpi files.
So, just move to Firefox!
Re: most of this stuff is old
... if you have any real, 720k 3,5 inch floppy drives, I could find a home! I have a load of old floppies for which a 1,440k drive just won't cut it.
Re: Seriously I have trancended time and space.....
The thing that gets people annoyed about Unity is the same kind of arrogance that annoys about TIFKAM. Not just "this is better" but "everything else is crap, even our old stuff".
Unity allegedly replaced Ubuntu Netbook Remix, which was a great way of reviving an old, small-screen netbook. It came with all of the extra toys to save power, deal with 3G modems, multiple wireless links and such, all wrapped up with a simple Launcher. It was simple enough that my daughter just sat down and used it without any instruction from me.
Now, Canonical are free to stop supporting UNR, and stop making it available in current distros. But what they have done is to go though all of the download sites for old versions of Ubuntu, and remove the UNR versions! Even though Ubuntu can be downloaded right back to 8.04, UNR has vanished, even though the last build was 10.04.
That's not "leadership". That's just gittish.
Nationwide are ok now, but....
Nationwide's systems are a home-grown bunch of mainframe cruft. .. so it stays working all the time. They are about to do a big-bang switchover to an outsourced SAP solution. That has such a high probability of failure it's not funny. I don't know what I will do for a bank then.
Earth-Neutral bonded
Some installations in the UK have the earth wire bonded to neutral at the point of entry to the premises. So to get any signal down the earth wire is going to need an appreciable amount of power. So these things will be hotter (more wasted energy) and more noisy.
Re: I'm still using Office 2000
@Ian Johnston
Because you didn't, Wedgwood is no more.
Re: "the writing is on the wall for desktop computing."
@eadon.
No, retailers demanded Windows on Netbooks because of the high rates of customer returns on Linux netbooks. It's a great shame - I have a few eeePC701's, and the default Xandros build is really nicely done (my kids love them). But most people didn't like the inability to install stuff from the internet, and to play silly web games, print to their printer, use their scanner. So they took it back, as it was "broken".
Emergency buttons
Will work just as you expect, in that the chances of the signal getting through is improved by pounding the button harder!
Phew!
Curly-braces!
syntax-significant whitespace always gives me the heebees......
VPN and VOIP
Both VPN and voip sessions require that a NAT router do some fairly sophisticated connection tracking on connectionless protocols. Voip is easier, as at least it uses UDP, which has port numbers as part of the protocol header, which means that the NAT process is free to tweak the source and destination addresses and port numbers to achieve a reasonably reliable pseudo-connection.
VPN, particularly IPSEC and PPTP are very hard to run over NAT, particularly if there are multiple VPN clients in the local LAN. The protocol (GRE) does not have port numbers, and the payload data is opaque. This means that the NAT router needs to make some guesses to route the packets correctly, and so bad NAT algorithms are bound in a CDNAT situation to cause VPN connection issues.
Might just be plain incompetence
I bet they bought the company, got rid of the board and senior execs, and just manage it as a subsidiary. They probably don't realise that they need to keep filing in the UK.
Re: Hmmm
Adding EXIF data to your jpegs won't help, when most media organisations have a policy of stripping all metadata on publication.
Plus - you can't read the EXIF data from a paper magazine!
Re: Duck tape
Sigh, here we go again. Even the Wikipedia article gets all out-of-shape over "Duck" and "duct" tape, while correctly describing the function of each.
The sticky, hand tearable stuff that you repair the world with is Duck tape. This follows on from the military stuff used to hold ammo boxes shut and keep the wet out.
If you used Duck tape on a duct, it would quickly dry and crack, especially if the duct carries warm air. Duct tape does not have the awesome properties demonstrated on Mythbusters. It does, however, have adhesive that continues to work at higher temperatures, and is resistant to cracking. Some varieties incorporate a foil layer to improve airtightness.
Typical
The one time you really need a "Buy from Amazon" link, it's not there!
How about actually making Ubuntu work?
Get rid of that Unity bollocks, for starters. I actually installed it on a netbook. With no "netbook remix" available, you're forced to use Unity on an 800x480 screen. And guess what? It's complete pants. With the old app classifications gone, unless you know what, say, the image editor is called, you can't find it unless you scroll through a list of every single installed application.
Oh, and re-instate support of the kind of elderly hardware that folks can recycle with Linux!
.. or maybe the customers won't play?
I'm guessing that quite a few big consumers of drives are just waiting for prices to descend to pre-flood levels.
Re: @AC 13:56
No, VM paid for none of it. The bankers (and therefore, indirectly, us) who originally securitised their debt when Cable and Wireless, and later Nynex, then NTL went nearly bust paid for it. Like any other big infrastructure project, it only succeeds when the original financiers have been wiped out, and the debt reset to zero.
Anybody who bought shares in Nynex lost all their money.
Re: I quite literally now have something (to do) for the weekend...
Stick the USB keys and the ethernet hubs on fleabay.
The USB keys would be great (bundled in packs of 5) as semi-throwaway School ones.
An ethernet hub is just occasionally handy for sniffing ethernet traffic.
Yell when you do - me and 50 other people will be along shortly! :-)
I used to have a cable box like that...
... which turned to a single block of tangled cable if it was left for a few weeks. Then I discovered Nylon releasable cable tie,250x7.6mm (RS). Buy loads, then you always have one handy. You can now bundle up the cables, power adaptors and such into neat parcels.
They're also great for taming the cable hydra that lives in the foot zone of any geek desk.
Re: Linux laptops
Eee PC? You can still get nice ones on eBay for £40-£60. Just got a trio of them for kids and myself, for less than a "netbook" or a fondleslab.
Both are now big fans of TuxPaint! :-)
"Android tablets catching up"?
I don't think so.
2 reasons:
1) The desktop integration is pants. Apple - iTunes, Microsoft - ActiveSync/son-of-ActiveSync. Android?
2) Price. As the current crop of patent cases come to fruition, the cost of buying off the trolls to make an Android tablet will exceed the cost of a Win8RT licence.
Ticket fiasco, perhaps?
@Boldman
What about all those empty seats, caused by the pigsnouters reserving so many good seats for corporate boondoggles and VIP packages that there were not enough for ordinary punters. The VIPs and boondogglers could not be bothered to show up, so the stadiums were half-empty.
And don't forget the hotel chains that donated cheap hotel nights to Locog, only to find them re-sold to the VIP package sellers.
Modern SIMS communicate faster than 9600 baud
The initial conversation (the ATR) is at 9600 baud. The ATR packet allows the host and card to select a much higher rate. Generally this is 56kBaud or more.
Best use of the money
It says something about the grossly wasteful and grasping "big" IT suppliers that it is actually cheaper in the long run for a hospital to write it's own system.
The DTR must be a marvel.
The idea of a electro mechanical thing like a tape drive, still working after many, many hours of record, rewind, play, seek, play, rewind etc., is just amazing. And the tape still has some oxide left on it!
Imagine putting your ear to the spacecraft (space being a vacuum an' all) and still hearing the "clunk.. whirr...clunk.... squee-squee-squeee..." noises after all this time.
What maple syrup
We are of course assuming that the "maple syrup" in the barrels was actually there in the first place.......
Re: your role as IT support
VPNs
I insisted the family members that want help from me have a customised router from me that runs a VPN. This means that I can fix most problems with their PCs from the comfort of my lair at home!
... and so it begins.
First they blocked the evil paedophilia sites.
The they blocked the pirates.
Now they block commerce sites that may or may not be contravening the Ts&C's on event tickets.
... what next?
How much do they pay Twitter for the feed?
... thought so.
"API" is being used in two senses here
Which makes the argument a bit meaningless. What can be open-sourced is the API definition. That is probably uncontroversial, and probably of little value, as each service has its own API requirements.
However, what cannot be "open-sourced" is the actual data the API provides access to. Fundamentally, the data has only been provided for free in order to create interest in the underlying service - business as usual in the Web2.0 world. There is no need or obligation on the hosting sites to hand out their product for free.
There is this curious tendency for web developers to treat privately-run services as generic public-service utilities. Heck - the internet only looks like a utility if you don't ask who pays for it.
Re: OMG they gave people DISCOUNTS!!!!
Discounting is fine. Making the discount conditional on not buying the competitor's product is not.
1200 pixels!
I want my 1200 vertical pixels back!
Even for desktop monitors, getting more than 1080 pixels is seriously difficult - not just expensive, but hard to find.
Re: Any recommendation as to the best way of buying mobile data in France?
Just found LeFrenchMobile. If you buy a 30EUR bundle, you get 300MB of data.
Windows 7/Vista? XP FTW!
See? Told you!
Re: The Internet still works!
Take a look at the pictures she took. The first few showed some pretty woeful meals, the later ones looked pretty OK. Also - note the "special lady in the white coat and hairnet" who was inspecting the food for several days later on.
I'd guess they upped their game somewhat in the face of the exposure!
Re: M$'s programming products?
Or even NetBeans. That will do an assortment of useful languages - Java, C, C++, PHP, Perl (via plugin).
Any recommendation as to the best way of buying mobile data in France?
Going on holiday soon......
It's fake
Look at the image at 2:30. The while silkscreen looks blurred, like someone did a bad smudge with photoshop.
