Posts by Richard 33

Distance Selling Regulations

I purchased a copy of GTA for Android. After a lot of trying to get it to work at all, it couldn't download its data files, so it was useless. I couldn't even start the game. I asked for a refund, and was refused. Reopened the case, mentioning the Distance Selling Regulations, and was given an immediate refund.

Know your rights.

Proprietary?

I wonder if like everything else coming from Imagination, you'll have to offer your first born children as sacrifices even to get access to basic programming details?

The rest of the world was heavily forested

The rest of the world was heavily forested, so the Amazon didn't matter that much. Now it does.

virt-sysprep

http://libguestfs.org/virt-sysprep.1.html

virt-sysprep (included in RHEL 6.3 and later) can reset network configuration in cloned VMs (and much much more).

Let me guess

It may make no money in the whole of the UK, but on the bright side it's Bermuda operations are making money hand over fist.

Patents?

Why don't they just download them from google.com/patents? Given that patents are usually written in deliberately obscure language, I think trying to read patents is more likely to set them back than be of any help.

HP LaserJet 5M

I got a refurb HP LaserJet 5M for £80 including next day delivery. There are places you can get it cheaper.

This is an HP printer built to last. It has an ethernet port, native PostScript, and you cram in up to 66MB (sic) of RAM for almost nothing assuming you can find old 72 pin DIMMs at a boot sale.

Refurb toner cartridges are also cheap as chips, giving it an unbeatable price per page.

Very simple to configure with a static IPv4 address, and the output (though obviously only mono) looks brilliant.

Oh wikileaks, where art thou now

Someone really needs to leak the terms of one of these contracts.

Drivel

What an utter load of drivel. I suggest Matt Asay buys a book about valuing companies, available at just about any high street bookshop.

I don't understand it

How many bitcoins is £40?

Don't give it to them

It's highly likely they're keeping it for as long as they like anyway. What are we going to do? Send in the EU swat team to check? Of course not.

So the only solution is don't give it to them in the first place. If they don't want anyone going there, let's see how long that lasts before their tourist industries lobby Congress to change the rules.

Amazon can fix this

Just hold on to the customer's money for a week or two (Amazon will love that), and if too many customers complain about a seller, boot the seller off and return the money to the customers.

Even better, require the seller to escrow some modest amount of money (eg. £5), and keep that money if they turn out to be a spammer.

libvirt

And you can use libvirt to do lifecycle management for most hypervisors too.

For instance if you've got a Linux machine, you can try managing a local ESX server by yum/apt-get installing libvirt and doing:

virsh -c esx://esxserver/ list --all

Firefox?

Don't forget Firefox's counterproductive handling of self-signed certificates. Why have a ridiculous multi-step process for those when unsigned/unencrypted connections don't deserve any warning at all?

"Worst"?

You might want to save up adjectives like "worst" until you've had a chance to review the GNOME 3 distros coming out soon ...

The only "Olympic tickets" I'm buying ...

... will be a 2 week holiday plus a few days either side, somewhere a very long way away from London.

Please no more

I really hoped after the last election that we'd never have to hear from "wacky" Jacqui Smith and her half-baked primary-school teacher theories again. If we just stop talking about her, hopefully she'll go away.

Not more spam txts please

Their current focus seems to be on sending irrelevant txt messages and absolutely refusing to obey the "STOP" order.

I guess the new "customer" focus will be more of the same.

Luckily my contract runs out in a month.

1100 workers doing what exactly?

Maybe to write creative error messages when the web servers break (seemingly all the time)? To recommend the really terrible colour combinations to users? Inquiring minds want to know ...

What do Unix copyrights have to do with Linux?

If something had been copied, I'm sure the SCO farce would have uncovered it by now.

Unix is of historical interest for some Linux users, but the Unix copyrights have nothing whatsoever to do with Linux.

And that is why ...

You don't put it all on one big database.

OCaml has always been open source

That's where the best F# ideas came from. OCaml has been open source and around in one form since 1985. Still welcome to the party Microsoft, glad you could join us after 25 years.

Ha ha ha ha

Let me give them this tiny violin. With a little camera inside it to track them.