Posts by AJ MacLeod

Re: @James 51

My own trackpad (BB9105) has been very reliable even in situations where it couldn't really be expected to be and as for the physical disconnect button I won't buy a phone without one. I only hope they don't make it completely flat and indistinguishable by feel...

Re: faulty premise no.1

Precisely why I'm still using my BB 9105 three years on... one day in the future I hope that somebody, somewhere, will realise that a phone is best supplied with a phone keypad on the front (and should last the best part of a working week without being recharged)

Until then, I'll be deleting the "upgrade" offers Vodafone plague me with...

Re: AJ McMakeStuffUp Shove off, HP

Newsflash for those living in cloud cuckoo land - most companies are NOT managing large server estates. Those that are are no doubt well placed to fork out limitless money on shiny manufacturer's support contracts (which actually aren't all that brilliant once you move away from the larger population centres.) HP then appear to be saying that all they care about is big business - that's fine, smaller businesses have other options and will use them.

Why _shouldn't_ customers who have spent plenty of money on a product get fixes for the flaws built into that product once HP eventually admits to them and produces a workaround? That kind of behaviour is pretty close to extortion...

Re: They had an extra service? (@ecofeco)

Nor had I heard of it, and I'm an AVG reseller. Having said that, they probably stuck some stupid "cloudy" name onto it, making me automatically ignore it... If only AVG could stick to making a decent, lightweight AV product and steered clear of all these other pointless gimmicks!

Re: Important change @El_Andy

That's exactly the case now (for various values of reliably.) Nobody has said ODF is already perfect (indeed the quotes in the article show that the expectation is that later versions can be used as the spec develops) but at least it's not 100% controlled by a single US corporation with a staggeringly bad track record.

Re: Huh?

Actually it's most likely because these CentOS updates are not primarily security updates, but an "point" upgrade to a new version. Similar to the Windows 8 to 8.1 "upgrade" only with a much smaller download size and the choice of virtually any UI you like either before or after.

Re: Unnecessary Windows 8.1 Hate

We all know this - don't you see that what you've actually done is wasted useful time in fiddling with fairly obscure settings in order to get a semi-usable experience? This is the whole issue that has annoyed so many people - Windows 8 can be made to work reasonably well but only after tweaking; a desktop OS should come ready-configured as a desktop OS, not some kind of dumbed down phone.

Re: Software Clients - pass the blame

FTPS != SFTP (which is far more widely used IME)

PPC640 could be bought with an internal hard disk - my brother has one which I fired up about a year ago out of curiosity and it all still worked perfectly (well, I didn't test the built in modem but I'm sure it'd be fine!) Funny, when I regularly have to bin failed hard disks that are less than a year old - outrageously expensive "enterprise" grade SAS or dirt cheap SATA, they're all short-lived rubbish these days.

Annoyingly they (stupidly offset touchpads) are not just common but almost universal. Which is especially annoying on machines that don't even have a numeric keypad!

One big thing in Dell's favour is that though they may not supply manuals with the machine, they usually have a good manual available online which actually covers disassembly and repair... I'm quite used to doing without, but it's definitely nice to know exactly what your best plan of attack is rather than going by guesswork and feel.

You've either got your dates or your Redhat version wrong there... I suspect both, actually! In those ancient days the only practical way for me to get as huge a set of software as a distro was on CD and I remember being delighted when SuSE made it onto the cover of a UK magazine. Possibly the same one you're on about, though this was 1998.

I still occasionally use OpenSuSE when I want a generic "kitchen sink" distro with plenty of quick access to a wide range of packages and it even came on a netbook I bought a few years ago - I ditched the dreadful install almost right away but it makes a nice change having a SuSE sticker in place of the usual MS one!

Re: I may have a fake copy

I've seen loads of these - lots of them were really obvious fakes because they didn't have a proper COA with the product key on them...

Yeah, what an idiot. He should have trusted all his personal information to Google, they never pry...

Brother's website is far from the worst of them IMO... which only says how bad some of the others are!

Personally I'd have tried a standard PCL or PS driver if in a rush - most reasonable network capable printers deal with that fine.

Re: and all people wanted was a movie player...

If by "X-Windows" you mean the network-aware nature of X11 then you're completely wrong. It provides capabilities that have been relied upon by thousands of people every day for years and does so with little fuss - nobody claimed it was perfect, but it definitely fulfils a genuine need. For that matter I have no idea why you've put CUPS in there, never mind "lp"... do you think that people aren't likely to need to print? Print spoolers and print servers are solutions to a problem people don't have?

In any case your argument against PDF is fallacious; if all you need is basically unformatted plain text then use plain text - PDF exists because of the difficulties in maintaining formatting appearance across devices whilst retaining the ability to preserve the textual content as such.

Re: What's the downside of the "upgrade?" vs Snow Leopard?

Thanks, will maybe image the drive and update sometime soon then. I wouldn't ever have paid real money for an OSX update but my wife (it's her laptop) was finding that ordering prints through iPhoto had stopped working properly and the new version wouldn't run on SL so maybe now's the time to update.

Sadly it won't cure the "won't stay turned off" problem the thing has had since before 1 year old as it seems to be hardware / firmware related (does the same thing even when running Linux off a DVD)... so long as it doesn't break anything more she'll be happy.

Re: Right click admin options

I'm still completely unable to find any kind of justification for the huge download - it still needs classic start etc to produce a half reasonable user experience. Advice to those who haven't tried the upgrade yet - don't bother.

Re: What are the alternatives?

LyX is very good indeed for writing technical documentation IME. I ditched Word in 1997 and have spent a good part of my time since then helping people to work around disasters caused by that abomination.

Note that most of these disasters are not merely a result of user inexperience but rather Word's infamous "random disaster generator" behaviour.

Re: Like BT and British Gas

"The workers get shares and sell them quickly when they realise that to go up in value, they have to do their jobs properly"

Except that they can't sell them for years yet (not their freely allocated ones, anyway.) Still, facts etc...

Re: Phone cams hard to use

"Smartphones on the other hand are frictionless slabs with nowhere to put your fingers, without touching the screen and thus firing-off some function."

Another reason why I like my BB 9105 (which works amazingly well as a camera despite the specs not looking too promising); the "shutter" release is the touchpad click, which is a physical switch. Impossible to press by accident and couldn't be easier to find by feel.

Re: Why? (@Pen-y-gors)

Actually yes, I know that TalkTalk give a better service than BT IF AND ONLY IF it's TalkTalk Business (which it would only seem fair to assume for this particular comparison)

Having suffered many times on other people's behalf at the hands of TT's various consumer arms, I would never have considered their business offering but ended up with them through the takeover and re-takeover of Freedom2surf.

On the couple of occasions I've had to call them I've had better service than I've found anywhere else, ever (and I spend time on the phone to the whole range ISPs on a weekly basis through work.)

You know you're going to get somewhere when you start the conversation by giving your diagnosis of the fault and a brief outline of the steps you've taken to deduce it and the person on the other end listens, actually understands and takes the issue from there. It's been my experience every time with TT Business... can't say the same for BT business (though they do usually get there in the end.)

Re: If it's too hard for the experts...

I admire your faith in Time Machine, but experience would suggest it's badly misplaced...

Re: Of course we are evolving

@Thorne; Your comment shows that at best you are extremely ignorant - not least because if you were to actually study the list of the very greatest scientists and engineers of the past few hundred years you would find that many or most of the very best of them are/were very religious, even to the point of religion being their main inspiration.

This, despite religion having been generally held in disdain amongst the majority in the "educated" circles during the same period.

Re: Even better

Whilst I agree with the sentiment in this particular case, it's definitely not true that what's known can never become unknown.

Re: I' not buying the Groklaw arguments - see the evidence..

Not necessarily dumb, but this is an IT site... the post is indicating that Groklaw has been using Google to supply their email services.

Since Google has always made it plain that there is no expectation of privacy for GMail / Google Apps users, it is slightly odd that Groklaw is now shutting down because their emails are being read by third parties...

Fully agree... in fact I'm right now sorting a machine which Rapport has wrecked (it's somehow mangled a pile of pretty vital drivers in this case.)

I have always advised people not to install it; at best it is guaranteed to slow down your PC and I've not seen any evidence of it actually doing anything genuinely useful.

My 9105 has a battery life that rivals the Nokia brick that it replaced - even now, three years on, it'll stretch to about a week of normal usage (i.e. mainly calls and the odd email/BBM) or a few days of heavier usage (lots of photography / GPS / browsing )

It's easily the most practical smartphone I've ever used, not lacking any feature I'd even "kind of like"; sadly most of the market apparently doesn't actually want a reasonably priced practical smartphone, they want flashy fashionable gimmicky toys.

Re: Your demands are getting ridiculous!

The funny thing is, I'm pretty sure that if Microsoft had done nothing at all other than maintain Windows 7, the PC market wouldn't be quite so poorly as it now is.

Compare the going price for Windows 7 Pro vs Windows 8 Pro... nobody in their right mind wants the new rubbish.

Re: Giant?

Funnily enough, one of the two routers exhibiting exactly the same symptoms (naturally, as the problem is at the other end) was a usually trusty DG834G.

The most annoying thing is that for the ridiculous price they are paying every month they could have a decent business broadband package with faults lines staffed by people who have at least a vague idea of what they're talking about...