* Posts by Pandy06269

149 publicly visible posts • joined 24 Jun 2009

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Apple (finally) boot camps Windows 7

Pandy06269

Keyword: Vista

"Looks like my almost brand new 15" MacBook Pro won't be getting the 7 treatment any time soon."

Windows 7 is so much better than Vista - I believe this "Vista update to unmount read-only Mac partition" isn't required in Windows 7.

I've been running 7 in both dual-boot and with Fusion since 7 was released, it's much more stable than Vista ever was on a dedicated laptop.

Kodak strikes at Apple in iPhone, Mac patent dispute

Pandy06269
Paris Hilton

Doh!

You've missed the obvious sarcastic comment - that comment was exactly what Steve Jobs told someone who infringed an Apple patent and Apple sued (can't remember who now, there seems to have been so many lol.)

Now the shoe's on the other foot.

GoToMyPC (finally) goes to your Mac

Pandy06269
IT Angle

Too right!

All you need is to install VNC, know how to open a port on your router, and get a dynamic DNS service such as NoIP (which costs less than a month of GotoMyPC for a year) or a free one like DynDNS.

I've always wondered actually how the server talks to the agent - surely the user would have to open a port on their router/firewall anyway, which if they can do that they're a third of the way there to doing it themselves. Or does the agent poll the server, and open a connection when it detects a session's waiting - which is pretty inefficient.

Android and WinMo updates going head-to-head

Pandy06269
FAIL

When...

... will this be available on the G2 - what was marketed as "the Google phone"? I've been stuck on 1.6 since it was pushed out in September.

Please Google, if you're going to release an update to an OS, allow people already using an earlier version to upgrade! Don't leave it to the operator as they know jack-all - only how to sell the things and keep the voice and texts flowing.

I wouldn't want to buy a brand new PC to upgrade from Vista to Windows 7, so why should I with a phone?

Apple sits on critical Mac bug for 7 months (and counting)

Pandy06269

Websites on OSX?

"the vulnerability could be remotely exploited using booby-trapped PHP code on a website"

I'm all in agreement with people saying Apple should have fixed it by now, but the comparison against Unix is not an argument to bash Apple.

For every 1 OSX server running a public-facing website, there's probably 100,000 Unix servers. This was disclosed in June, yet it's the first I've heard of it, so I wonder if it's actually been exploited in the wild?

False Facebook charge group used to spread malware

Pandy06269
Joke

MSN?

The old classic was on MSN - "add this user to your profile and MSN will remain free for you, if you don't you'll have to pay £10 a month." The "user" was obviously a scam account.

Or the one I liked best, "send this e-mail to 10 friends, your MSN icon will turn blue and will remain free for you" - yeah, because MSN is just powerful it can read every e-mail traversing the net and knows that you've sent 10...

Even funnier was the amount of people who actually believed it and kept asking when their man would turn blue.

TalkTalk kills Tiscali

Pandy06269
Go

Does this help?

Browsing to www.tiscali.co.uk takes you to a migration page on TalkTalk's website which says:

"What about my email?

Your email address will stay exactly the same and you can log on at www.talktalk.co.uk/mail or click on the My Mail icon at the top right hand corner of the homepage."

Is this not what you're looking for?

Pandy06269

Glad I left Pipex

I left Pipex about 3 years ago cause of their high prices - never knew they'd been taken over - I chose Pipex 'cause I didn't want to go with Tiscali!

Glad I moved...!

Firefox 3.7 to feel need for speed with multicore boost

Pandy06269
WTF?

Since when...

... did you have to pay for Opera? I think you have to shell out a little for their Mini version for your phone (which is the same with any half-decent app on the likes of the iPhone or Android stores) but their desktop version is free the last time I looked (30 seconds ago.)

I don't personally use Opera for a very different reason.

Apple misses self-imposed Windows 7 boot camp deadline

Pandy06269
WTF?

Same here

I was just about to type exactly the same thing - I've had it running since the day it came out. Even the Bootcamp driver software works a treat.

Pandy06269

Thankfully those days are over.

I switched to Mac from Windows but still use the odd piece of software that runs under Windows and doesn't have a Mac equivalent.

All my documents are now in Pages, Keynote and Numbers (all Apple) my preferred browser is Safari (also Apple.) I've been using these since I bought my Macbook in September - Pages hasn't crashed on me yet. Word 2007 on my work PC crashed twice on me just yesterday.

Things have come a long way. The difference in your argument, however, is that Apple have historically been a hardware company, Microsoft always software.

Vodafone gives away internet over Christmas

Pandy06269

APNs?

I have a HTC Magic on Vodafone UK and unlimited free Internet is part of my contract.

However it's pre-configured with (and only with) the WAP APN.

Is there any difference between the WAP and Contract Internet APNs aside from the name, i.e. speed?

Can anyone explain the chunnel fiasco?

Pandy06269

They didn't know what was wrong

The reports as I understood them was that to begin with they weren't sure what was wrong. 5 trains had stalled in the tunnel but no-one knew why - had they sent more trains into the tunnel, they could also have been affected if the problem had been with the overhead electrics or the signalling systems; thus causing more of a chaos - at worst a major accident.

The problem wasn't the snow itself, it was the shields preventing snow getting into the electric systems that had failed, even if they'd cleared the snow away there could still have been some underneath the shields which would have melted in the same way. Plus how exactly would you do it? You couldn't get people to do it - they'd have to get too close to the overhead mains lines - a recipe for disaster. If you melted the snow and ice away, well that's what happened anyway.

IMHO they did the right thing - I'd rather not travel at all or travel 2 days late, than travel on a service where my safety couldn't be guaranteed. Better to have 100,000 people delayed than 2,000 dead.

There's a lot we don't know about, that we can only read from the news. Only those working for Eurostar and Eurotunnel that day can tell us the truth. Having said that Eurostar do have a lot to learn - particularly as a remarkably similar incident happened in 2003.

Microsoft delays Visual Studio 2010 launch

Pandy06269
Go

Re: The best X in the world ever

Sorry to tell you but you're quite inaccurate in your statements.

I've run .NET apps on Windows 2000, XP and Vista (haven't got around to trying 7 yet) without any changes - they do look slightly different on different platforms - such as the annoying progress bar differences between 2000 and XP, but .NET handles all that.

I developed an application about 4 years ago that ran on .NET 1.1 on Windows 2000 PCs. When 2.0 came out and I switched to VS 2005, I upgraded the application and people then started running it on XP. Then when 3.5 came out and I switched to VS 2008, I upgraded it again.

Those two upgrades took me from 1.1 to 3.5 without *any* code changes, therefore I hardly think you can call them backwards-incompatible. Of course you cannot develop an application on 3.5 and expect it to run on 1.1, that's the same with any language - PHP 4 and 5 for instance.

It just shows how little you actually know about .NET. 3.5 actually runs the same core engine as 2.0. Microsoft purposely developed 3.5 so that the core was untouched, meaning 2.0 apps could happily be upgraded to 3.5 with no changes.

All the extra bits that qualified 3.5 for a major release cycle (LINQ, Entity Framework, lambda functions etc) are part of newer versioned assemblies that run side-by-side with the 2.0 versions. You tell your apps which version you want them to run under and Visual Studio will see to it that they will.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not a massive M$ fan, it just so happens I'm better trained with .NET than I am with FOSS stuff because more businesses prefer the "support" of M$. For instance I much prefer PHP over ASP.NET - that I will agree with you is hugely overcomplicated, but the MVC stuff in 3.5 looks like it may be a lot simpler, I haven't (and probably won't) develop any web stuff on Windows however.

Now if M$ would put as much effort into making their MFC/C++ classes much easier to use I'd gladly switch - native apps provide so much better performance but take longer to develop. If I'm running code that depends on highly-customised memory management or need to run server-side, I'll go with C++ on *nix.

As for Windows development with a focus on speed-to-market, you can't beat .NET.

BlackBerry outage blankets North America

Pandy06269
WTF?

Why does this affect all carriers?

I've never used a BlackBerry in my life, but I'm wondering why is it the manufacturer's responsibility for the e-mail access? I thought that would be down to the carrier.

Like my e-mail is with my e-mail provider, my website with my hosting provider and my Internet access through my ISP - I wouldn't expect any of those services to be supplied by Apple because they're on my Mac. But I could fully understand if my ISP provided them.

Google 'in talks' over Googlenetbook

Pandy06269

Agree!

Hear, hear.

I have a Google phone (actually a HTC Magic but it's branded as Google.) But I'm seriously considering changing when the contract runs out because Google are starting to own too much, like you say.

I can't even sync my contacts, calendar etc to my main PC without going through the Gmail rigmarole first. Granted, I couldn't on Windows Mobile either, but at least my data wasn't stored on Microsoft's servers, it was on *my* PC.

Senior IT workers caught in bank bonus tax crossfire

Pandy06269
Stop

What's a bonus?

I've never been given a bonus in my life - unless you can call the profit share I used to get every year working in the Co-op's IT department, which equated to an average of £100 a year.

A £25k bonus is just short of my annual salary, so forgive me if I don't cry a river over this.

Citrix adds failover to Hyper-V partitions

Pandy06269
FAIL

What's this xen then?

I seriously considered Citrix's XenServer earlier in the year for a server platform for a new start-up. I had it installed but then it told me I needed to get a license (which was free of course) but 2 hours later having searched Google and Citrix's own website, I couldn't find the page I needed to register.

I did eventually find it, then noticed the license was only for a year and I thought "what if in a year's time Citrix stop renewing free licenses" - you wouldn't be able to start (or restart) any virtual machines if the license had expired.

So I pulled the plug, downloaded Ubuntu and installed KVM - I've never looked back. The platform is still in test for storage and live migration, but the 4 machines that are running on it as test beds are perfectly stable.

I'm glad I ditched Xen - this article just shows what faith Citrix have when they build something new and exciting and don't put it into their own product first.

Parcelforce fails to deliver for Windows 7 lovers

Pandy06269
Stop

Re: it's all about the certification

"The developers are required to test and certify that things work. They can only test and certify a limited number of platforms and combinations of things. They are contractually obligated to not encourage the use of uncertified things."

Maybe for internal sites and intranets where you have full control over the software used on the entire estate, but this is a public website. Users, just like yourself, have free speech - it's like saying you're not allowed into a shop because you're wearing red, because the colour red hasn't been tested if it's visible on the CCTV cameras or something.

Also they can, like you say, discourage the use of uncertified things, but the right word there is "discourage" NOT "disallow" which is what Parcelforce are apparently doing.

"The answer's simple enough: if you want to use something else, make the browser lie and test it yourself."

It might be simple to you and me, but my dad who's just turned 66 and just bought a new PC with Windows 7 wouldn't have a clue what a user-agent string is, let alone how to change it, but he's perfectly capable of booking a parcel collection online. All he would see is "my PC isn't good enough."

It's this kind of poor understanding of the industry that gives the Internet a bad name.

OpenDNS taunts Google with real-time directory

Pandy06269
FAIL

Re: Why do opendns get all this publicity?

Totally agree with you Tony, this should not be in the hands of the resolvers. TTLs are there for a reason. If bad data has got into the DNS, it's because the provider put it there and didn't take enough steps to ensure it didn't get there in the first place.

It's like driving a car into a lake, and expecting the lake to dry up and make room for it, when in reality it was the driver's fault and the lake wasn't designed to cope with that situation.

Having the "directory" push updates out to resolvers will be nearly impossible - not everyone will use OpenDNS or Google.

The "parental control" aspect of OpenDNS should also not be handled by the DNS - it's the biggest case of using a system for something completely opposite to what it was designed that I've seen.

Attack exploits just-patched Mac security bug

Pandy06269

I got it

I got the update notification as soon as I logged on to my Mac yesterday, even though my updates are set to check weekly, and I last checked only a couple of days ago.

I have no idea why it required a restart either, but if it protects my PC then I'm not going to complain about a couple of minutes downtime.

Pandy06269
FAIL

Us too

Yeah, we have that same problem.

Only thing you can do is put pressure on critical app's vendor to fix their app to work with the latest version.

I never understood that about Java - our critical app breaks even just with a minor/patch release. Our .NET critical apps still work even across a major upgrade.

Bing dies (briefly) after Microsoft hits wrong button

Pandy06269
IT Angle

Async?

"This rather suggests they're running a very small group of computers for them all to go down at the same time"

There's this great thing called asynchronous processing, you know. If it takes 2 seconds to push out an update to a server's config file, and you have 1,000 servers, you could kick off 20 threads to update all servers in a couple of minutes.

PayPal mistakes own email for phishing attack

Pandy06269
WTF?

How is this news?

"...make exactly the same security faux pas"

How is this a "security faux pas?" In fact, how is it even news?

Yes, it shows just how good the scammers are. But come on, this would have been much more news worthy if PayPal had told the customer that a scam e-mail was genuine and to go ahead and give away their bank details to a scammer's website.

Google expands plan to run own internet

Pandy06269
FAIL

You don't have to use this

See the previous reader's comments about not being able to change the Sky router's DNS servers - so you really think you don't have to use it?

Pandy06269
Stop

DDOS attack

Does anyone else see the possibility for some malicious hacker to take down the entire Internet?

Google has those 2 IPs (which are really decent by the way) and let's say in a couple of years 50% of the population are using their resolvers.

If someone DDOS's those IPs, it will kill the Internet for that 50%.

You could say "the people that use those resolvers are going to be in the minority" but 10-15 years ago did you "Google"? I certainly didn't. I do now - a large number of times a day.

You could also say "yeah but behind those 2 IPs there'll be a huge number of servers" - true, but look at Facebook/Twitter - they've probably got somewhere in the region of hundreds of servers, and they managed to get taken down by a DDOS attack not that long ago.

I can also see it being pushed on oblivious people by their ISPs who suddenly realise "hey, we don't need to run our own resolvers now." So for every new customer, they post out a router pre-configured with 8.8.4.4 and 8.8.8.8.

Microsoft acted on Opera's modified browser proposal?

Pandy06269
FAIL

RE: (untitled)

"Exactly why should MS be punished for including Internet explorer with windows?"

The only thing I feel they should be punished for is not allowing IE to be uninstalled - because it was so tied in with Windows Explorer that attempting to uninstall it manually would break the entire system. I'm not sure if this is still the case with Windows 7 - they were going to ship Windows 7E in Europe which would have come without IE so I doubt it.

Like Apple and Mac OSX - you get Safari bundled with the OS but if you don't like it you can just install Firefox (or heaven help us, Opera) and delete Safari.

I completely agree with everyone who says Opera are whiny - Firefox have done great without having this ballot screen in windows. If I didn't work in the IT industry I'd have never heard of Opera, but I would have done Firefox, so Opera need to spend a bit more on marketing in my opinion.

On a plus for Opera, I do actually like the browser - it's quick at rendering, and has a decent look and feel that was well ahead of even IE in the XP days. However I don't use it because the Javascript implementation is decidedly dodgy and using the DOM to build up HTML content results in god-awful code (things like EVERY space is converted to  )

Apple's App Store police relent on hardware images

Pandy06269
Thumb Up

Mac Engineers?

Freelance engineers? I used to work with PCs, and was forever having to look up motherboard pictures on the net to find out what make/model of board it was, or what memory or processor it would take.

"Back in the day" we didn't have internet on our phones, so if we had to do this at a customer's house, it was a quick phone call to someone at the office - even having the internet in the palm of your hand was a pipe-dream then, so having all the info you could ever want on Macs in the palm of your hand would be fantastic to anyone who has to diagnose and fix them.

O/S bloat: What's the cure?

Pandy06269
Go

Ubuntu Server or JeOS?

You obviously haven't tried the server edition, or even the "JeOS" edition of Ubuntu, have you?

I've got that up and running with a single-core 2GHz processor, 128MB RAM and less than 2GB disk space - it runs 4 server applications a treat, and pretty nifty too.

Google to anoint Android, Chrome OS love (eventually)

Pandy06269

For Now

I don't like that last "for now."

Does that mean - "Chrome OS doesn't let you install local webs - but will in the future"

or - "Android let's you install apps locally - but won't in the future"

I know which one I prefer, but it's going to take a lot to tear me away from my Mac to Chrome OS. If it goes the other way, well I guess I'll have to stick to using my phone... as a phone.

Mozilla hatches Thunderbird 3 release candidate

Pandy06269

Sunbird

Did you never see the strangely-named Sunbird? It's a local calendar/tasks application (similar to Mac's iCal) that was in early development - and also had a Thunderbird plugin called Lightning.

I've not heard anything of Sunbird for ages so it may not have got any further than an alpha.

Google Wave relies on kindness of strangers

Pandy06269
WTF?

Re: To get lots of people using google wave

"I have an google wave account, but none of my friends have, so the stupid thing is useless for me."

In my case, drop the last 2 words - sorry I just don't "get it."

London's stock exchange crashes again

Pandy06269
Thumb Up

Re: Harsh .NET

I agree - to a point.

We have about 30 .NET applications deployed but the one we have the most trouble with (and I wish I had time to rewrite it into UNIX) is an app that processes in the region of 20GB worth of data in 24 hours - about 16GB comes in between 3 and 6am each day.

It constantly falls over with out of memory errors even though the server has 3.5GB free at the time. What I read up was that .NET will try and allocate some memory that's the maximum size in a single chunk - so a 2GB file will not fit into the server's RAM if there isn't a continuous 2GB chunk of RAM free.

If MS exposed the memory-allocation functionality, you could allocate non-continuous blocks of smaller sizes to fit it in - like I can (and have done in the past) on Linux/UNIX.

But I do agree, 2.7ms to process a transaction is a pretty darned good achievement - even if it isn't good enough for the LSE.

Pandy06269
Badgers

@AC Re: Lol

"He also told me that a computer science degree was the only way to go if I wanted to get into the industry."

I see why he was smug - that statement alone is utter cr*p. I stuck at university doing a CS degree for 6 weeks before I got bored and wanted to do some real stuff - I left qualification-less and am now a developer responsible for the systems keeping 400 shops up and trading.

The only mission-critical failure we've had in 3 years was for 5 hours when a supplier's network route failed. The failure was caused by human error - some idiot decided to add an old router to their live network as a redundant gateway, but the router still had some old routes on it causing all our traffic to them to get redirected to a black-hole.

3 of the 5 hours downtime was them saying "there's no problem here; nothing's changed." As soon as we got our CEO involved, they'd accepted, identified and fixed the problem.

Badgers - because they can understand routes better than afore-mentioned supplier.

Generators and UPS fail in London datacentre outage

Pandy06269
FAIL

Re: Backup power systems

Oh yeah, we suffered a massive spike in our data-centre's main power supply at about 11am one morning - our business's busiest trading period.

Of course our system worked - for all of the 9 seconds it took for the same spike to hit the secondary power supply and destroy the 10-year old UPS.

Lucky we had a separate disaster-recovery site 50 miles away - oh wait, the replication link hadn't been working for a few days and no-one had noticed.

IT companies never learn.

Pandy06269
FAIL

Cowboys

I used to have a server hosted in this data-centre with ServerCity.

Tata are total cowboys. The data-centre is poorly laid out, everything's just been shoved in wherever it fits, and you have to tread carefully otherwise you'll break your neck by tripping over the cables sprawled across the floor.

The day after I visited the data-centre to do an OS upgrade on my server, I switched suppliers to Telecity - you could see the difference as soon as you walked through the door.

No tata for me either.

iPhone upgrades - a one-way control-freak street

Pandy06269
Black Helicopters

What about Windows?

Actually just thought of a comparison - can you downgrade Windows to the previous release?

E.g. Windows 7 to Vista? It's impossible unless a) you used an upgrade CD* or b) you wipe your entire machine.

Or even uninstall a service pack? *

* Both these methods are either difficult to do, take up lots of disk space to allow you to roll-back, or aren't guaranteed to leave both your PC and your applications in a usable state.

Black helicopter - because I agree with the previous comment of El Reg's conspiracy theories.

Pandy06269
Paris Hilton

Of course it's my choice

Of course it does! Both Apple and the iPhone.

The applications I have running on my Mac aren't those that Apple have forced upon me - they're ones _I've chosen_ to install.

Paris - because she thinks that Apple chooses her software, too.

Pandy06269
Thumb Up

Security, anyone?

Here's a possible (but made up) scenario:

iPhone 3.1 fixes a major security issue in the iPhone OS - so Apple "recommends" you upgrade and you do.

But you realise your phone isn't quite as fast as it was before so you roll back to 3.0.

Then your phone gets hijacked using said security flaw that 3.1 fixes - who do you blame? Apple. Not yourself for using an old version of the software.

I'm with Apple on this one - I'm a developer (MS .NET in fact) and I would NEVER recommend people run an old version of ANY software, let alone the most important bit of software on any computing device - the OS.

@adnim - you can do all that on a Mac (well, maybe not the "my chosen encryption" part - Apple has it's own mechanism called FireVault.) However, it is Unix at heart after all.

The only annoying thing is there's a really decent installer for new apps, but no uninstaller - to remove an application you have to do a search to get rid of all traces - annoying, yes. But at least you CAN. On Windows you can search for days deleting random files and still not remove all traces of an application, but you might possibly screw up your system.

Apple wants life ban for clone maker

Pandy06269

@AC RE:$400??

I'm not a Mac fanboi - yes I use a Mac at home, but I also use a VM with Windows 7.

The difference is, once you've bought a Mac which comes with OS X, you only pay for upgrades - Snow Leopard was £25.

With Windows, you buy a PC with for example Windows Vista on, then when Windows 7 comes out you have to pay around £70. Not only that, if you want more features with the OS, you then have to pay yet another £70 to get all the functionality (Home Premium to Ultimate for example.)

OS X is unrestricted.

Also iWork (the Mac office suite) costs about £60. The standard version of MS Office costs around £250. Even the Mac version of Office is £110.

T-Orange won't share the airwaves

Pandy06269
Coffee/keyboard

T-Mobile = bad signal

I was with T-Mobile on PAYG for 3 months, and I couldn't get a signal at all at home which was kind of a problem. I phoned them up and they said "yeah we know the signal's cr*p in that area; but we're not going to do anything about it because not enough people have complained."

So I switched to Vodafone - been with them for nearly 5 years, only had 2 places where I haven't had a signal - once was in the London Underground, the other was up north in the middle of nowhere for about 5 minutes until my phone found another transmitter.

My room-mate has exactly the same problem as I had on T-Mobile - and guess who she's with? Orange. Yep, if they've really got over half the available bandwidth, they're not using it very well.

Esc - because T-Orange should escape now; they're getting none of my business.

Microsoft delivers 'almost ready' Azure cloud

Pandy06269
Grenade

Seriously. Seriously. We're in a recession people.

Whatever happened to the recession?

I don't think the "cloud" is any good for "always-on" services. I run a small business and I worked out that with an Amazon instance it would cost twice as much to host a 24x7 server in the cloud than it would to rent my own dedicated server (or even VPS.)

For example - I'm currently renting a quad-core 2.4GHz processor, 2GB RAM, dual-160GB hard disk server for £69 a month. That's 9.6GHz of effective processing power. I'm upgrading it in the next month or so to have 8GB RAM which will increase that to £89 a month.

Now what if I wanted to match that with an Azure instance?

Well it would sit somewhere between the Large and X Large instances, which would give me 10.5GB RAM and the same amount of processing power. That's without knowing how much disk space I'd get.

That would set me back $0.72 per hour. There's an average of 722.4 hours in a month, which leaves me a bill of $520.13 a month! Translate that into GBP = £313!

I'm planning on getting another server of the same spec, sync'ing the systems data storage, which means I will be able to run 8 VMs of the same spec as the Small Azure instance for less than £200. Which will include live migration of the VMs across physical nodes, about 260GB storage for all 8 VMs and the option of load balancing them.

A Small Azure instance, running 24x7, will cost approx £52 a month, if I had 8 of them that'd be £416. DOUBLE THE PRICE.

Now, if I wanted one or 2 Azure instances to do some heavy processing for a couple of hours a day (which would be useful for exactly 1 scenario if I didn't need my own servers for anything else) then I'd get my head straight in the cloud but for anything else, it only deserves a grenade.

Google Chrome OS due next week, says someone

Pandy06269
FAIL

Is it really an OS

Am I missing something? It's a browser with a clock, battery and network thingy in the title bar, which probably reads from the underlying kernel.

I developed a selling system at work which reduces the need for users to have to touch their Windows desktop - built-in web browser with favourites, clock, news ticker, terminal, etc - does that mean it's an OS? No.

An OS interacts directly with the underlying hardware - this is an application running atop an OS (Ubuntu to be specific.) It won't boot up any quicker than Ubuntu will, so why not just use Ubuntu with Firefox?

Sorry Google, you've not impressed me yet, FAIL.

Revolting postmen force early Windows 7 launch

Pandy06269
Paris Hilton

Amazon @Neil Williams 1

Got mine yesterday (21st) from Amazon, had it installed within an hour.

@nobby - Yes Amazon have a price guarantee, the 50% offer was valid if you pre-ordered before the end of August, so I got mine for about £60.

Paris - because she'd probably cancel her Windows 7 pre-order without reading the price guarantee too.

Poor porn protection hurt Firefox 3 uptake

Pandy06269

@Paul Ryan - DNS cache is not FF's fault

"The Firefox people seem to have forgotten that. I don't particularly mind their new location bar behaviour, but the DNS cache has had me seriously considering alternatives that don't lock in an error received from my ISP's DNS lookup for a minute or more while I repeatedly try to reload the page from a domain which worked a few minutes ago. That's despite going into the Firefox hidden config stuff to manually set the DNS Cache storage time to 0."

This is not FF's fault - it's down to the owner of each domain - or the company running their DNS records. There's a field called "negative cache TTL" in the DNS system that tells clients how long to cache a "failed" result for. All my negative TTLs are set for 5 minutes.

Of course clients can choose to ignore this negative cache but it depends on your upstream DNS resolver, and of course that's against the whole point of this record being there.

Smoking iMac caught on camera

Pandy06269
Grenade

@FAKE

"... all those who claim their Apple device(s) catch fire or explode are lying. If it did, it was not Apple's fault. The user is at fault and must have been using illegal software ..."

Yes because everyone knows that illegal software can cause your PC (or Mac) to set on fire... obviously. I used to have a cracked copy of XP - it must have been a ticking timebomb!

Microsoft's Windows 7 pretzel takes fresh twist

Pandy06269
Go

@censored

"At £80 I'd probably have bought it. At £150 there's no chance, so if I need it I'll get a cracked copy."

It's £64.99 on Amazon until the end of the month - link on the homepage of Amazon.co.uk. According to Amazon: "This version of Windows 7 ships as a full edition, suitable for both new Windows users and Windows Vista users looking to upgrade."

There you go - a full copy for £15 cheaper than you would "probably have bought it" - go get it! I have; it's a lot less hassle than trying to find every way round the inevitable "you're using an illegal copy of windows" annoyances.

Microsoft's Bing in travel trouble

Pandy06269
WTF?

No similarity

We wrote a piece of software in-house to display availability prices to our travel agents. It looked similar to the software they used previously that was provided by an external company.

Why was this?

Because there are only so many way you can display: East Midlands to Kefalonia on the 20th August will cost you £499.

The way Bing searches is completely different to Kayak, who load the results as they're returned from each supplier; Bing waits for all results to return then shows them.

Thomson's website allows you to filter the results using a sidebar on the left, and Thomas Cook's website saves previous searches - perhaps Kayak should sue them too?

This is a non-story.

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