Posts by dshan 57 publicly visible posts • joined 3 Nov 2009
Bring the Daleks back pronto, this season has been very poor so far and a return of the old pepper pots might be the only way to save the show. Even the Neil Gaiman episode was fairly unimpressive, but at least it was better than the rest of the season. The other episodes have ranged from poor to simply awful.
If not the Daleks, then please let at least the Cybermen put in an appearance!
Every time I read about the low behaviour of American telcos I shake my head in disbelief, and decide that maybe ours aren't so bad after all (same with banks actually). At least our telcos are mostly content to eat you one digit at a time instead of tearing you limb from limb! Thank God for GSM and MVNOs.
It really is a case of (deliberately engineered) market failure, thanks to mess of incompatible mobile standards and the almost universal use of obscene lock-in contracts and ridiculous "exclusivity" deals with hardware companies in the Home of Free Enterprise it's difficult for consumers to vote with their feet and go elsewhere. The market is broken, gummed up with sand and monopoly pieces. Time the government stepped in and unleashed the anti-trust dogs, but as the US government is now a wholly owned subsidiary of corporate interests I can't see that happening.
It will only reappear after the election *if* the independent, creationist senator Steven Fielding gets reelected. This filter was never a government idea, it was always driven by Fielding who holds one of the two deciding votes in the Senate. Without his vote the government can get no legislation through, they are government in name only. Is anyone surprised that Labor have therefore done as much as they can to please the religious nutter from Victoria? Is anyone silly enough to believe the opposition would have acted any differently in the same position?
The key point is that although they've talked the talk on the filter the government have taken every opportunity to delay it as long as possible - first endless tests and trials, now a review of classification standards just before the next election. An election at which Fielding has to face the people again. Clearly the government is hoping (with good reason) he will lose his seat and they can then drop the whole mess.
10.04 is the first version of Ubuntu I've installed that could successfully upgrade my Dell laptops from the immediately prior version and remain useable when finished. Hooray! It even found my Inspiron 1545's Broadcom WiFi and successfully upgraded the driver for the first time ever. Nothing crashes so far, all apps seem operational and all data is intact.
It took them long enough, but now Ubuntu is almost as easy to upgrade as my Macs. Better ten years late than never I suppose.
Of course the key problem with Ubuntu remains, despite window controls on the left and much nicer default colour schemes and icons, etc., it isn't significantly *better* than the competition in any respect, it's just not much worse anymore. It used to be very Windows-like, now it's more Mac-like, but it isn't better than a Mac so why should anyone using a Mac (or Windows) switch?
It needs a quantum advance over the other systems, some totally new and revolutionary features that make using Ubuntu more fun and more pleasant, easier and more reliable, than other computers. That's the only way to get people to switch systems. It needs something revolutionary like multi-touch, iPhone OS and the Apple app store. But simply aping that would be too late now, they'd only be chasing Apple again instead of leading. That's open source's Achille's heel - design by committee doesn't produce innovation, only emulation of what's already been tried. Like MS they're too scared to knock over the table and switch to Boggle in the middle of a Monopoly game.
I did a fresh install of Ubuntu 9.10 on a Dell Inspiron 1300 over the weekend, straight after a fresh install of Win 7 on the same machine. Ubuntu install was *much* more straightforward than Win 7, I spent hours searching the Dell and Intel sites looking for and downloading the latest Windows video, WiFi and touchpad drivers for the Dell as out of the box they weren't supported by the Borg's latest bastard child. Eventually got it working using old XP/2000 drivers as there are no Vista/Win 7 drivers available for this hardware. It doesn't support Aero of course but it runs, albeit slowly.
Ubuntu 9.10 on same the hardware installed smoothly and it recognized all hardware out of the box. The only issue was some initial issues getting it to connect to my WPA2 WiFi network, aside from that it was probably the smoothest Ubuntu install I've ever done (WiFi drivers used to be a big problem with Ubuntu, but not any more).
As a rule I don't do upgrades of either Windows or Linux installs, they are often more trouble than they're worth. Only Apple seems to be able to write proper reliable OS upgrades, the others really need a fresh install each time (and sometimes even then you still have problems).
MS of course deliberately makes upgrades unattractive both economically and technically because they need to drive new hardware sales to satisfy their partners, who are their real customers. Ubuntu is getting better but their upgrades are still not up to snuff, usually they sort of work but leave certain apps not loading or crashing on startup or something like that.
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