Paid for content...

It was not Apple who created this environment, there is a lot of windows software not just games which depends on the presence of a server to authorise, and which will become useless if the server is ever shut off. Blame where it's due.

And for whoever said its "entirely normal" that old games lose multiplayer support... Tell that to all the people who play Doom (released in 1993) or quake etc online. There is no reason for not releasing the server counterpart with games, allowing gamers to run their own servers long after the original publisher has lost interest.

Even better if they open source the engine of older games, there are ports of doom/quake for all kinds of systems now so despite the age of the game there is no need to use an emulator to run it. Many people are much more inclined to hand over cash to companies that don't treat their paying customers with contempt.

Yes, think different...

As someone else said, think different... The traditional corporate mentality just doesn't work, you become slow and cumbersome while the hackers are not so constrained.

Also cloud isn't the problem, buying services from amazon is not what hackers do anyway because it leaves a paper trail... Instead they will hack boxes, and some of them happen to be hosted at cloud providers. Hackers have always compromised boxes and used them to launch further attacks, the only "cloud" connection is that providers like amazon are prominent and fashionable enough that lots of people with no server management experience want to try it out, so they leave insecure boxes on the internet waiting to be hacked.

Cheaper..

I can understand why 0800 calls wouldnt be free, since the recipient of the call would be expected to pick up the termination charge and that for a mobile would be considerably higher than a call from a fixed line...

On the other hand, there is absolutely no reason for 0800 calls from a mobile to cost more than landline calls. The actual cost to the operators to route the 0800 calls will be lower than a landline call.

Either way, companies should move off 084/087 numbers, i detest these kinds of numbers, they are no more than a revenue gathering exercise and encourage companies to provide slow service, and dont even get me started on the ridiculous justifications they come up with to try and fool you into thinking their use of these extortionate numbers is either reasonable or necessary and for any other reason than screwing all their customers out of a few pennies each...

And if they use an 0800, they should also offer a normal landline number for those using mobiles.

Wrong approach...

Getting people who see the pound signs, and sign up to a course not because they enjoy the subject but because they see money in it is not the answer...

Having interviewed many people over the years, i have found that:

Many people have no real interest in technology, they see the pound signs, follow a course and are willing to simply accept what they're told and repeat what they were taught rather than thinking for themselves. These people are generally mediocre at best, and soon get left behind by technology, while trying to hold everyone else back with them.

And then you have the people who have a true interest in the subject, who will go out and teach themselves, who have a natural curiosity and will not accept what they've been told without investigating it for themselves.

The latter are almost invariably better, provided they aren't stifled by being subservient to the former...

I have also found that the most capable people, are those who started their computing use at a young age, and usually using systems from the likes of Sinclair and Commodore.

Modern computers, OSX, some modern Linux and especially Windows is _VERY_ bad for teaching youngsters...

You give them a system that shows them dire warnings "don't touch these system files, you might break something!" they will become afraid to experiment... And experimentation is the best way for a youngster to learn.

This is even worse if the computer is shared, as they will be afraid of breaking it and incurring the wrath of the other users...

And this becomes very clear when speaking to people, those who's first exposure to computing was one of these more modern systems are often far less inquisitive, and are willing to simply accept what someone tells them and are usually fearful of trying to find out for themselves.

By contrast, the C64 and Sinclair series kept the core system in ROM... No matter what you did, a quick power cycle and its back to normal. Similarly the Amiga although it loaded Workbench from floppies, one of the first things the instruction manual told you to do was make a copy of your workbench disks (complete with instructions on how to do so) and then encouraged you to play with the copies, safe in the knowledge that you can just make a new copy if you break it. All of these systems also came with manuals which instructed you how to use the system, and even how to start programming it.

What's needed, is more systems which actively encourage people to experiment with them and learn, given to kids at a young age... Hopefully the Raspberry Pi will go a long way towards this goal.

Cartel

This process of requiring "approved" software is extremely damaging for a number of reasons...

1, the approval process is expensive, which means that only a small number of vendors will be on the list and it effectively locks out new entrants and small vendors creating a cartel. this allows these vendors to rip the government off (and they do, rampantly) and goes against the policies of allowing smaller vendors to take pieces of gov contracts.

2, the process is expensive, so even large vendors wont certify all their products... if you look at the list of approved products for any scheme such as this, they are always several revisions out of date and in many cases are vulnerable to known issues which have been fixed in the more current (but not approved) versions.

3, the actual verification of the product is generally broken.. they verify that the features the vendor claims are present are actually there, but not wether they work properly or cant be circumvented... they basically look at the front of your house and verify you have a strong door, locked windows, an alarm etc while never venturing round the back.

4, further flaws... the products are generally only approved under a particular configuration, however in many cases this configuration is not appropriate, and so actual purchasers of the product will be using it in a configuration that was never evaluated.

5, such evaluation processes are generally set up to favour large commercial suppliers, the source code of the product is rarely if ever reviewed and the cost of entry is high... some of the products on such schemes are commercial distributions of open source software, however only the particular commercial distribution is approved and running the exact same open source code is not.

6, the process and vendors behind it are very slow, whereas hackers are not...

7, lock-in, if your stuck with approved products then your stuck with whatever platforms they run on... most of the approved disk encryption products only run on windows, and theres quite a lag between a new version of windows coming out and it being supported... Support for linux is even worse, you are generally stuck with the big commercial distros that also happen to be the least flexible/least up to date, and then you may find yourself not being able to install kernel updates and you certainly cant compile a custom kernel. want to run anything other than windows and specific commercial linux distros, well you cant at all... no macos, no bsd etc. Whats even more ridiculous, is that linux has had built in support for disk encryption for a long time, and yet your not allowed to use this because it hasnt been rubber stamped.

The entire thing is basically treated as a cover your ass exercise, by implementing something from the "approved" list then any problems encountered or any excessive costs can be blamed on someone else.

In terms of disk encryption the whole thing is completely backwards, why would you place blind trust in a commercial organisation who has a vested interest in making money from you (and wouldnt hesitate to lie if it meant profit for them), over an open source system that you can verify, and which is out there to be reviewed...

Look at the actual encryption algorithms, AES, DES etc... They are openly published so that skilled cryptographers can look at them and try to break them.

With encryption you can never be 100% sure that its strong, but you can be 100% sure that its weak (eg ROT13)... The only assurance you can have, is that people known to be skilled in the subject and completely independent from those trying to promote the system, have reviewed it and been unable to break it and the more such people you have, the greater confidence you can have in the strength of the system. The same applies to software...

Obviously you can never trust the opinion of someone who is trying to sell something to you, or in some way associated to them as they now have an incentive to lie. And there are plenty of documented cases (see google) where vendors have lied, or even explicitly written code which benefits themselves at the expense of users!

Small cheap computers

There is a demand for small cheap computers... The raspberry pi might only be a board, but adding a tiny plastic case, psu and cheap usb keyboard/mouse won't cost a huge amount... Such devices could have great mass market appeal, and could be used with your TV since they have HDMI by default.

Kind of why the first netbooks were successful, small and cheap... The netbook market got screwed however as modern netbooks generally are neither small nor cheap. They are just smaller and lower spec than regular laptops, come bundled with the same software (but run it very slowly, making them look bad in comparison) and aren't much cheaper.

Regional subdomains..

The idea of a subdomain specifically for financial institutions is a good one, as if done correctly and combined with user education it will make phishing harder...

But instead of just .bank, they should make country subdomains of .bank, for instance uk.bank and possibly regional ones such as eu.bank...

Then each country subdomain should be managed by the appropriate regulatory organisation of that country, eg the FSA.

Stupid...

DRM has nothing to do with payment, if you don't pay for the service then the service doesn't provide you video at all...

Region, although highly unethical is also not a drm issue, you check the ip accessing the content and reject it based on your arbitrary regional discrimination...

All DRM is actually designed to do, is to stop legitimate purchasers from format shifting etc, and forcing those purchasers to buy the same content multiple times.

DRM is simply not needed, all it does is harm, inconvenience and ultimately discourage paying customers. Music is now distributed drm-free, movies are already distributed in drm-free formats such as broadcast tv and drm schemes always get cracked...

The only reason cracking of flash/silverlight drm is not more commonplace is because the quality and selection is poor compared to bluray, so its easier to rip those instead.

Android version?

A brand new phone, running Android 2.3.x ?

It's bad enough that phones aren't being updated, but to release a new one that runs an outdated software version?

Plan long term

For now, just stick with the versions you already have...

And plan a slow transition to open source, don't throw everything out over night but ensure any new systems you implement are cross platform (eg web based and work on any browser).

If you plan it well, a slow gradual transition away from ms needn't be too painful or expensive... There's no point ditching what you've already bought and paid for, but similarly no point in getting yourself more locked in...

Most systems get refreshed after a few years anyway, so if you require that any new systems you deploy must be cross platform compatible then it won't be too long before the windows-specific business apps are rotated out anyway.

Why does anyone use it?

I have never understood why anyone would saddle themselves with skype...

Think back a few years, when BT was the only game in town and you couldn't just buy a phone or modem, you had to get one that was BT approved or rent the phone from BT themselves.

Now look at skype, you can't just use any client with it, you have to use a skype approved client (and as someone else has noted, asterisk was recently taken off that list)... They also work very hard to clamp down on anyone trying to reverse engineer the protocol.

You have a lot of users, locked in to a wannabe monopoly telco, sure it might be free to make calls to other skype users now but how long will that last? The more people who depend on it for day to day communication, the more pain those users will feel moving to something else so a lot wouldn't move and just pay up.

The quality is highly variable, and often extremely bad... I have had people call me from skype before and could barely hear what they were saying.

Similarly the costs to make calls outside of the skype network is very high, and you only have one provider to choose from. Welcome back to the days of monopoly telcos.

There are many SIP providers out there who provide cheaper calls and far superior service, which can be used from any device that supports the SIP standard.

People have fought for years to not be locked in to a single provider, we now have 4 mobile operators to choose from, many areas have both virgin and bt, and bt are forced to offer their lines on a wholesale basis so third parties can resell them. Skype is a huge step back, and yet people don't seem to realise this and are fooled by the bait.

Cost...

When you factor in the costs of vmware, and the nature of cloud hosting ie having a very large number of servers, the two just don't add up...

The cost of running vmware would greatly eat into and later entirely eliminate your profit margin making you completely uncompetitive.

Playing catch up...

"Our next OS will contain some of the features Android has had for months or even years!"...

I don't like the idea of integrated skype one bit, the idea of being locked in to a single supplier is even worse than a telco, at least we have a choice of mobile operators these days.

By supporting skype, you are pushing people backwards towards the days of the monopoly telco. A single supplier, can only use approved clients with the service... Just like BT 40 years ago.

Android includes a standard SIP client for Voip, allowing you to choose from hundreds of providers or run your own PBX.

Cause and effect

Is the fact that they're less intelligent what makes them more likely to be racist, or...

How about the fact that less intelligent people are likely to be less affluent, and therefore living in poorer areas of town with higher crime and higher levels of immigrant population, as well as doing less skilled jobs that are more easily replaced by cheap immigrant labour?

ISP Supplied Equipment

As someone else pointed out, service providers source the absolute cheapest equipment they can find.

I was stuck with one of those horrendous alcatel frog modems back when DSL was first rolled out in the UK, i replaced it with my own router just as soon as such devices came on the market and never even considered using isp-supplied garbage after that...

Unfortunately the trend with FTTC and Cable is to move back towards forcing you to use the provider supplied garbage.

I have the same issue with sky, their sky+hd box is huge and power hungry compared to comparable receivers available on the market and yet they insist on locking you in to their device.

It's as bad as the old days when you had to rent a phone handset from BT... Ofcom needs to force these providers to open up and allow customers to choose their own equipment.

Why bother?

I am extremely dissatisfied with all the streaming services currently on the market, for a number of reasons:

I, like many people in the UK live in an area where the only available broadband provider is BT and their various resellers, no LLU and no cable here.

Because of my distance from the exchange, i can manage about 3mbit (but the performance is not consistent) and I also have a plan which imposes a monthly download cap during the day, with unlimited downloads from midnight to 8am. A streaming only service is therefore useless, i don't want to watch movies from midnight - 8am, and the fluctuating connection speed makes streaming quite a poor experience anyway.

Being forced to use specific devices irks me, I have a linux based set top box which is more than capable of playing HD video, and yet these streaming services require their own proprietary clients which aren't available for these devices. Similarly, i am artificially prevented from using my linux based laptop to access the services.

I also detest the fact that only limited content is made available to users in the UK... This is basically a form of racial discrimination and should be illegal. There is absolutely no valid reason to provide an inferior service to people based on where they live. The world has moved on, people now regularly communicate worldwide and by the time a movie is finally released in the uk, people will have encountered so many spoilers online as to make viewing it pointless.

So instead of settling for these inferior services that discriminate against me based on what software i use, what devices i use and where i live... I simply acquire movies via torrents and usenet.

I can download at night (outside of capped hours), and store on disk to watch whenever i feel like it.

I can watch the downloaded movies on any device i choose.

I can convert the downloaded movies to view on other devices as necessary (eg you wouldn't want to store 1080p video on a phone that only has a small screen)...

I can download at whatever quality level suits me (even if doing so takes hours), rather than what my connection is capable of streaming in realtime.

I can watch movies or tv shows at the same time as my friends in other countries, and then join in the conversations about them afterwards.

I would quite happily pay for a service that provided me the same level of convenience and service, but it appears that if i pay i just end up with a vastly inferior service.

I have already stopped downloading mp3 files from torrents since being able to purchase standard mp3 files that are playable on any device.

Somewhat surprising...

I would have expected sales of higher end machines with discrete GPUs to not be hugely affected by the HDD shortage... It's not that drives weren't available, they were just in shorter supply and thus cost more, but when your buying a full highend computer the drive is only a small factor in the overall price...

Similarly, i'd expect people who are buying higher end GPUs to be more likely to opt for an SSD instead of a traditional HDD.

Gartner, haha

Gartner predicted that windows mobile would dominate the mobile space by 2010...

Instead, windows mobile failed miserably and has been deprecated entirely in favour of a new but incompatible product.

Why do people put any stock whatsoever in what gartner say?

Unbalance

The content industry is corrupt through and through, I simply will not support them in any way and the numbers of people thinking like me are only going to rise.

The film industry wants to push increasingly poor quality product, in an increasingly poor delivery mechanism for ever higher costs... They are greedy, and have absolutely no respect for their potential customers.

Copyright terms are simply too long, I believe in an honest day's work for an honest day's pay... The idea that someone who produced a piece of media 50 years ago still being paid for it today is absolutely farcical.

Cinemas are unpleasant environments (noisy, smelly, dirty, over crowded, uncomfortable, you've paid but are still subjected to commercials and patronising piracy warnings) and aren't getting any better, only more expensive.

DRM schemes artificially restrict paying customers and then try to rip them off by making them pay again for what they would have had in the first place (ie ability to view the movie you purchased on other format devices)... While pirates enjoy superior drm-free media.

Many movies are simply lousy, and yet instead of trying to offer a product people actually want, the movie industry is angry that modern communication technology allows people to spread the word too quickly and they cant stage their old scam or hyping a crap movie up and making a fortune before the word spread about how awful it is.

Region restrictions on media are an insulting form of discrimination. Why should I have to wait longer and pay more to see the exact same movie my friends in the US have just seen? On the other hand, why would i bother because by the time its released here i've read all the spoilers online. Why should i not be able to purchase dvds while on holiday, and why should i have to entirely repurchase my movie collection if i go to live in another country?

Whats even worse is that in countries like china or russia where piracy is rampant, cinemas are much nicer and/or cheaper, dvds are much cheaper and often released more quickly and the other legitimate offerings are often much better than whats offered in the west. So as a reward for having a lower rate of piracy, we simply get shafted.

There's no way i would want to support an industry that treats its paying customers with such utter contempt.

Open Source

If a program depends on its source code being private to be secure, then it really isn't very secure at all...

I have the sourcecode for Linux, OpenBSD, FreeBSD etc and it doesn't help me compromise all the various devices (including security oriented devices like firewalls).

If having the code disclosed results in serious security risks, then the code must have some pretty glaring security holes that will quickly be identified in the source but are much harder to detect in a binary... And if that's the case, it is absolutely unforgiveable for symantec to have known about such holes and not fixed them.

Sourcecode should always be open, not only would it prevent software from having obvious bugs that are easily found in the source but it would make stealing sourcecode an utterly pointless activity since you could just download it from the internet anyway.

More lock-in

I guess FUSE-NTFS was getting too good, so now they need to migrate to another proprietary filesystem in order to continue their lock-in scheme...

Ridiculous...

Wireless bandwidth is finite, it would become very easy to saturate the airwaves inside the DC, and all those metal racks and cables would likely cause interference too.

Instead, the costs of simply laying more cable between racks is pretty trivial, lay another bundle of fibre and run more 10G trunks

Redirection of blackhat resources

The main reason blackhats are targeting adobe acrobat/flash these days more than they target IE is down to market share more than anything...

While no single browser has more than 50% market share, flash and acrobat are still installed on over 90% of machines making them prime targets.

Microsoft is by no means a "security leader", they still have by far and away the most insecure os currently available (not counting intentionally insecure systems used for training like dvl)...

Windows still has some major design flaws which impact security too, the file locking design and by extension the broken patching system (patches often appear installed, even if part of the install has failed), the crude file extension determine filetype (and executability) mechanism especially combined with hiding extensions by default, the ability to authenticate using password hashes directly, the default listening services (even on a standalone workstation) plus the practice of hiding these behind a software firewall rather than turning them off..

Then you have all the bloat required to support such an ageing patchwork codebase, plus all the additional crufty ways they try to work around the old design flaws, such as the fake registry and filesystems used to trick programs that expect to be installed/used as an admin user etc..

MS are stuck with a horrendous mess of a product, and no matter how much they try to polish it it's still going to be a turd... They'll never be a security leader until they ditch all the legacy cruft and start again from scratch.

Marketing...

If they cut back on marketing, MS will have nothing...

They've always had inferior products relative to the competition, which are only successful through inertia and heavy marketing.

They've even been known to pay people to use their products...

Payments...

Payment services over mobile are widespread in many african countries...

The reason being, credit cards are fundamentally flawed from a security perspective and therefore totally unusable in countries with very high levels of fraud.

Paying with a credit card is the equivalent of giving away the keys to your safe, and trusting the merchant to only take an agreed amount from it... Very easy for them to take as much as they want.

Mobile online payments are a much better idea since you effectively initiate a bank transfer on the fly, and only send the amount you want. I would be much happier with such a payment system, but visa/mastercard have too much influence and would never let such a system fly because it disrupts their existing business model.

Proxmox...

If you want a home VM setup, try Proxmox...

Installation is trivial, pretty much choose your hdd and hit go (but do consider, its designed as a standalone install and not to dual boot, so it will remove anything else already on that drive)...

You can do full virtualised images of pretty much any os, linux, bsd, windows, solaris etc and there's also the option to do paravirtualization of linux images with considerably less overhead via openvz.

Proxmox has considerably lower overheads than vmware or hyper-v (especially when running openvz instances), and can be managed using a standard browser, ssh or vnc client (some other systems require proprietary clients thus limiting what you can use to manage them)...

You also get advanced features like live migration, shared storage, clustering etc although i doubt these will be used much in a home environment.

Also funny you should mention remotefx, X11 has had the ability to do remote opengl for many years... Still, if you want to play games remotely you can install a windows image within proxmox and then allocate a physical videocard to it.

And proxmox is free, including things like live migration that vmware charge a fortune for.

Service...

Instead of spending all this money to increase the headline top speed, they should be trying to pay off their debts, expanding their network to areas it does not currently cover and increasing the capacity of their peers with the rest of the internet...

I have the 50mbit service from them, and i can download at around 10-20mbit max from several colocated servers i have (all on gigabit links)...

I get 50mbit from the popular speedtest sites, but i get considerably less downloading from servers hosted at the very same ISPs making it very much seems they're prioritising the common speedtest sites.

I do get 50mbit from mirrors.virginmedia.com, but thats to be expected given that its internal to the isp...

I can sometimes get 50mbit if i torrent, assuming there are sufficiently diverse peers.

Tax...

BMI is not a good way to measure someone's obesity, people with large muscle mass will have a high BMI despite having very little body fat... A lot of sports players would be considered obese based on BMI despite being extremely healthy.

Security through obscurity...

If disclosure of source code would harm "security" of the product, then the product was clearly poorly written in the first place and is simply relying on the design flaws and bugs being hidden...

Linux and Apache are all over the place, and their source code has always been disclosed, and yet all the millions of linux boxes out there are not left wide open.

Abolish roaming charges...

Instead of roaming charges, do it another way...

Charge users the cost of an equivalent contract as provided by the local operator, while providing them a partial refund on the cost of their home contract for the days they are out of their home country.

Or alternatively, since most providers in europe are part of the same parent companies simply offer contracts on a europe-wide or network-wide (ie anywhere that company operates) basis instead of locally to each country.

It's only a logical extension, mobile contracts in the US used to be state specific with roaming charges if you left your state, and even in a small country like the UK there used to be higher charges for use out of region.

Considering how easy it is to travel to another country these days, especially on much of mainland europe where the borders are almost totally open and the currency is the same.

WTF?

A tablet OS that's 2 and a half years behind the market leader...

Which starts with no apps (this killed WebOS and is doing for Blackberry in the tablet space)...

Which is advertised as "windows", but yet doesn't run familiar windows applications - which will only serve to create disappointed users.

From a company with a history of poor tablet interfaces that were almost universally despised by their users...

You'd be a fool to buy this

Good morning Mr Ass

What a name... Bet he got bullied at school for that.

Very poor..

These taxes dont *DIRECTLY* effect the *VERY POOR*...

The very rich are fine, they don't care about the costs.

The reasonably rich can afford new fuel efficient cars, so aren't all that bothered.

The moderately poor are worst off because they can typically only afford older cars which are likely to be less fuel efficient...

The very poor cannot afford to operate cars at all, but the higher price of fuel only serves to increase the number of people who fall into this category.

Fuel tax is not a "luxury tax", it affects everyone, either directly or indirectly...

Goods need to be transported, higher transport costs = higher goods cost.

Public transport is not accessible to everyone, eg many disabled people cannot use it.

Public transport does not go everywhere.

Public transport is often totally impractical if you have lots of stuff to carry.

Higher fuel costs affect public transport providers too.

Not surprising..

Windows is tollerated on desktops/laptops because people don't see any alternative, but they don't usually like it and don't want it on phones or tablets where better products are already well established.

Windows tablets have been around for a long time, and most people who use them end up hating them... They are bigger and heavier than an ipad, generally slower from a users perspective even if theoretically the hardware is more powerful, and 99% of the apps you might run on them are pretty unusable on a tablet interface...In terms of numbers of apps actually usable on the form factor, ipad is way ahead.

Proprietary service...

This is what happens when you depend on a proprietary service supplied by a single entity...

There need to be open standards for secure communication, just like there are open standards for unencrypted communication.

Add to review..

Theres several important factors that are missing from the printer reviews on thereg lately, and i feel they would make the reviews far more useful.

1, Standards support - does the printer require proprietary drivers (and if so for what platforms are drivers made available), or can it work with postscript or pcl? I would always prefer a postscript printer simply because it works with everything and will continue working even long after the manufacturer has given up making drivers... Some devices (eg hp touchpad) only support pcl, some things only support postscript.

2, Airprint - lots of people want to print from iOS devices, would be good to know which printers support it.. Worth noting tho that with a small linux box you can make an airprint server for any printer that linux supports (i do this with my old laserjet)..

3, Noise - for home or small office use noise is important... some printers are even noisy when idle!

4, Startup time - from cold, and from going into powersave mode (assuming it has one)

5, Available prints in the default toners - for some people not wanting to print a lot, the default toners may last a long time... Especially true with lasers which don't dry out like inkjets, it may be more economical for some people to buy cheaper printers with generally higher running costs for very occasional use.

6, power consumption and heat output

Also a table at the end summing things up...