Posts by Mark 65

Re:Peerless

Just a guess, but maybe he's referring to the master not the compressed retail version

Climate change

The locals are worried about climate change because of recent drought and the fact it gets quite hot for prolonged periods. The cause of this is wholly irrelevant if you can successfully start a bandwagon rolling based on collective ignorance - especially when the country is known as the "land of drought and flood". Might just get a bit wet then a bit hot and dry, no?

If they (especially in places like Queensland) built their houses properly instead of knocking up shitty wooden uninsulated homes that get bloody hot in summer and sodding cold in winter (at least in the south-east) then things might get a little better. I've lived in several and they were all crap - the concept of a breeze flowing through the property is pointless when the breeze is 38 degrees.

As for environmental issues in general, they will never come to the fore as long as the country is utterly reliant on: mining in general; the export of coal; and the use of coal-fired power stations.

Ahhh, but

"Note, there were other FREE filtering softwares available AT THE SAME TIME.

For a modest cost, more with a greater range of features available AT THE SAME TIME."

They were probably made by foreigners. If it doesn't have "Australian Made, Australian Owned" plastered over it then you can forget it. Pricey, inept, locally made shite obviously beats out industry leader/standard every time. The joys of national insularity and blinkered xenophobic thinking.

These days

There is less reason these days to run as an admin in windows as 7 will happily pop up a prompt box for you to escalate your privileges. This means you can run as a pleb and the appearance (note I didn't say the underlying architecture) is much the same as OSX or Linux in this regard. It's more the hang-time of XP that's the issue.

@AC, regarding MS testing

The reason for so many vulnerabilities comes down to 2 words

Legacy code.

@heyrick

I think you'll be surprised at how many people will end up on Win7, or whatever the flavour of the day is, when XP support runs out (if not before) as they go out and buy a new machine. Pretty much everywhere you care to mention if you are buying a PC you get a windows pre-install. Unless you change that then that's what people will end up using.

Not entirely true

They only develop for windows eh? So the My Book I bought for my Mac didn't come preformatted for the Mac and with software to use if so wished? I can understand why they may not want to rewrite their utilities for other OSes but it's probably best not to tell porkies.

@jay pigot

"This election in 2 weeks, will see plenty of people vote for one thing they hate (great aus firewall) in order to realise a significant infrastructure investment..."

Unless of course there's a fair number of luddites in the populous who don't have a clue about any of it and will just carry on voting along the same political lines anyway.

This election in 2 weeks will see people even less interested in politics but forced to vote anyhow.

Re:Gotta have

Just don't seek directions to anywhere in Texas.

Next stage...

Now that a criminal judgement has been handed down can the family not successfully sue for invasion of privacy, harassment or some other such civil infringement that might make the pricks think twice? Knowing how local Government thinks it's above the law I know I certainly would as you can guarantee the people responsible will not be punished by internal procedures (workplace not bodily) as a result because they think they were right all along and just had a bad day in court.

@blackworx

It's because the properly nasty people all wear uniforms and badges and are these lot. Eek-gads man, investigating crimes is far too difficult so you need privacy destroying information trawling privileges and DNA databases so the culprits simply have to hand themselves in.

I often wonder whether Sherlock Holmes could ever have been dreamed up in the modern day. It'd be a bloody imaginative author to come up with the concept of serving and protecting the public, investigating crimes and hunting down criminals using intelligence (not the kind taken with a camera at a rally).

@Fred 4

But isn't this new version coming with VBA (good or bad take your pick) in it which will allow users to run more speadsheets at home that they use at work?

Not saying it's a major selling point but some people will find that sort of thing pretty handy.

@STB

I'll agree that it will definitely be more interesting to split out corporate, SMB, and home licenses for a clearer picture but I also believe that the stats will be reasonably representative of trends.

Apple (I am a user) is always hamstrung by its cost. I genuinely prefer OSX to Win7 and I want a quad core but Apple's prices are just too damn high. This was the same when considering a first computer for my elderly parents. I'd have preferred OSX because I believe they'd have found the ease of use and integration between mail, iphoto, imovie etc. to be great. I wasn't going to hamstring them with a GBP800 vs 400 cost though. Linux bit the dust as nobody would be able to give them tuition or assistance (I'm half a World away) which left Windows 7. It wasn't my first choice but I believe it's sufficiently secure and usable for them (normal AV caveats etc) and others will be able to assist them. Local library training courses will also pretty much be Windows only.

I think this sort of thing is reflective across the market - Apple is nice but expensive and Windows is now "good enough" after the Vista debacle. Linux requires you to be keen to learn it and have the available help on hand.

Amen to the internet shopping part

You can buy your books from the book depository in the UK and get them sent to Oz for half the price they cost locally. Get them billed in local currency too at a reasonable rate. Completely nuts.

@Dave Bell: Highlights etc.

"Film, generally, can record less brightness range than a digital sensor, colour prints generally the lowest of all"

Not so. From Ken Rockwell's site for reference (http://www.kenrockwell.com/tech/filmdig.htm)...

"DYNAMIC RANGE: Film has a huge advantage in recording highlights. We take for granted the fact that specular highlights and bright sunsets look the way they do in painting and on film. Digital has a huge problem with this (see disadvantages under digital below.) "

Also from wikipedia...

"The dynamic range of sensors used in digital photography is many times less than that of the human eye and generally not as wide as that of chemical photographic media."

This is a noticeable difference in output when moving from a film SLR to a digital SLR - sunset shots can be a real p.i.t.a. at times. Digital's principle advantage is instant feedback which should enable you to overcome the issue (eventually) normally through compromise of some kind - highlights vs shadows, HDR etc.

@Pete 2

My thoughts exactly. So many powers have been bestowed upon the police in recent years that undermine the burden of proof, assumption of innocence, and general freedoms of your average citizen that it was only a matter of time until the average copper thinks they're Judge Dredd.

In general they used to be, and in the main doubtless still are, pleasant to deal with provided you don't act like an utter cock - and I have witnessed a few amusing "why are you doing this to me" incidents after behaviour where I'd have happily slapped the issuer. However you do get that inkling with quite a few of them that it wouldn't take much for the line to be crossed from Dickson of Dock Green to Judge Dredd. The ones that make the headlines are obviously just total wankers to begin with that get off on the power and should have been weeded out in selection - perhaps so few want to do the job these days that only tossers apply.

Question is who starting losing respect for whom first?

Hidden volumes

"The powers, known as section 49 notices, require suspects to hand over passwords or make files intelligible to investigators on threat of a two-year jail sentence, or five years where national security is concerned."

Doesn't matter that they suspect you have a hidden volume as they can only make you "make files intelligible to investigators". Suspecting something exists just don't cut it. Given the intelligence of the average "investigator" I'm not sure what you'd have to do if you were an Assembler coder. Re-write it in VB?

I do not have a hidden volume setup. Honest.

@Steve Roper

I'd choose Canada, Spain has a bit of debt floating around. Apparently.

Fewer IT jobs?

It's a bit difficult to get any competitive advantage out of your IT if everyone is using the same shit. I'm with everyone else, this is just the same old stuff with a new dress on.

Re:Foxit

By no means as many vulnerabilities but I believe one of the more recent PDF issues affected it as well (launching executables maybe?)

IE6 -> IE8?

Does IE8 not have a mode whereby it will emulate the shite that is 6?

Agree

I agree with most of this sentiment and I'm also irritated by the fact that Firefox seems to be getting real sluggish and paunchy - middle-aged software. Can't wait until it gets the extension updates in OSX (v4?) that Windows has either as the installation seems to get totally screwed up if you have to kill the thing due to an extension pissing around. It also hangs quite a bit. I'd try Chrome if it weren't for the ET behaviour and the fact that Chromium requires a user build - thanks, but no thanks.

re:Voices

They'll be the same voices that'll soon be telling him to pick up the soap.

@AC

Absolutely agree.

"Despite what TalkTalk's Andrew Heaney says, ISPs really, really hate freetards - they run up most of the transit costs, but despite their evident appetite for media consumption, these subscribers bring home no more revenue than a granny who only uses her connection for Hotmail. "

Well if ISPs didn't oversell backhaul so much it wouldn't matter would it. If I've paid for 30GB of bandwidth I shall damned well use it - we have a contractual agreement and I paid so I shall. Dont like that or chose to sell "unlimited" bandwidth connections? Tough shit.

If they bring home no more revenue then your business model is utterly stupid and you deserve to fall by the wayside.

@Fuzz

Some companies have rules around releasing OS changes and having done full testing beforehand, especially for service packs. Large company, lots of apps/variants = lots of testing. SP3 came out in May 2008 and, given some of these companies may well have been attending to Office 2007 testing at this time, it's not really that surprising they haven't updated. It's really only getting an end-of-life because MS have released 2 OSes in 3 years and they want to cut down the support overheads and push 7.

@dylan 4

"Although USB2 still suffers a theoretical disadvantage , in practice you will notice little difference compared to running migration assistant directly from another mac via FW400 "

Really? Is that just a fact of the migration assistant? I ask because the transfer speed difference between USB2 and firewire 400 is blatantly apparent - firewire just blitzes it in sustained transfer rates so I can only assume that this is a migration assistant bottleneck.

re:oh yeah

Are you a venture capitalist then?