Posts by Peter Methven

I have your missing bits...

That's strange... I always seem to have bits left over when ever I build anything from IKEA :-)

Epic Fail

Bazza, your statement unfortunately reflects why Blackberry is struggling. The consumer market is bigger than the business market and whether it is right or not consumerisation of IT is resulting in consumer products being adopted in the workplace. Blackberry could be the most secure product in the world, but a lot of business functions don't require "military approved" security nor care and will not pay a premium for it. BB have also messed up their pricing in my opinion. Windows Phone 8 on Nokia devices is cheaper, iOS and Samsung Android are considered more desirable and in some cases are also cheaper.

BB have been squeezed from every side and have been too slow in reacting and are suffering for it. Announcements like this one also stop risk adverse companies from adopting the Q10 and Z10 and make them seriously evaluate whether BB is for them.

135,000 were given away though...

I seem to recall that MS gave a WinMo7 phone to every employee, they have around 135,000 staff worldwide...

Also when you consider all the IT departments in the world who have got one, to evaluate whether to upgrade to WinMo7 and all the developers who have bought one to test with the 1.5 million manufactured number may not really mean a lot.

I'd be interested in the number SOLD to end users in a given month for each of the major mobile phone operating systems to see whether WinMo7 is really of interest to mobile phone users.

WiFiFoFum is cheaper than Fluke devices for Wifi Scanning!

I frequently use WiFiFoFum in my day job, in a multiple wireless access point environment where the frequency (channels) and strengths of individual access points are incredibly important to ensure correct working of the overall system.

Students and academics expect their iPhones and Android phones to seamlessly roam from access point to access point without any drop out so overlapping cells have to be carefully setup for which WiFiFoFum is a cheap manner of sampling signal strengths and checking everything is working as planned. WiFiFoFum is a lot cheaper than buying a proper device from Fluke!

(Although there is a centralised management tool for managing thin access points every now and then things go slightly wrong and there is no subsititute for actually knowing what thin access points are doing.)

All encryption is breakable with enough CPU cycles...

All encryption is ultimately breakable with enough CPU cycles, that was the first thing I was taught in a University module on cryptography 8 years ago several times.

Anyone who honestly thinks any key will encrypt your data forever is fooling themselves and you have to ask yourself whether what you are encrypting is ever going to be the target of 150,000 years of cpu cycles and whether at that point it will have been worth the effort to break the encryption!

Steve ...

Steve, just for your info the issue isn't with "linux" itself, its with the interaction between windows and linux. Samba allows a linux machine to talk a "filesystem" which isn't native to the "operating system" and to share a linux native filesystem in a manner that windows can understand. I think thats actually pretty impressive!

Simply put windows uses SMB/CIFS and most unix systems use NFS, unfortunately no windows user ever sees the need to setup windows to talk NFS, but linux users often have a need to talk SMB/CIFS.

If you have all linux machines then the network file system (NFS) which can be native to most operating systems (including windows if people configure it) is one of the most straight forward networked file systems you can use. (in my opinion).

There are also gui file systems which will happily go off and see windows file shares, however for what ever reason the notebooks such as the acer one and asus eeepc have gone with other applications.

But I agree with your point about too many applications to do the same thing, its both a credit and a curse to GNU/LINUX.

Peer-to-Peer

Anonymous Coward, there are lots of legitmate uses for Peer-to-peer, just go and download a linux distribution for example, most major distributions prefer you to download via torrent, to save them money... I've downloaded more legal content via peer-to-peer in the last two years than illegal!

Once again the music industry shoot themselves in both feet.. they've missed the boat on peer-to-peer and are now trying to make someone else pay to build a speed boat to catch up!

Maybe if they pulled their fingers out as an industry and produced a peer-to-peer based universal download system that would allow me to download what I wanted in a format of my choice with a preview option then I would:

a) Stop buying CDs

b) Stop ever downloading illegally an album before buying it.

c) Buy my music online to use across a range of my personal devices.

Or they can continue on current basis and:

a) I stop downloading albums illegally to see if I like them before I buy them.

b) I stop buying any albums after getting stung buying 2 or 3 rubish ones in a row!

c) They loose even more sales!

Make BT Infrastructure Not for Profit.

Of course if anyone had had any sens BT wholesale should have been set up as a NOT-FOR-Profit company in its own right responsible for the infrastructure. Then LLU might have had a chance of working. At the moment BT have no incentive to improve the infrastructure... it would just reduce profits, with little chance of return on investment. At the end of the day BT are a commercial company, not a state owned monopoly and have to act as such.

Maybe of BT could find tell their asses from their glasses...

I'm another one who tried to sign up, for BT Broadband and Vision after moving house and after a month and a half of not having my broadband line "enabled" (the phone line was within 24 hours) I gave up and signed up with sky. 3 days later and my broadband was active.

I chased BT 4 times in the month and a half, each time being bounced around 5 departments before being cut off being transfered to a 6th department average call time per call was 2 hours! Email's I sent to their customer services remain unanswered 4 months later.

The RIAA have achieved more than they were hoping to achieve!

There is one thing I think everyone is forgetting here... This is not a victory to TorrentSpy it's a victory for the RIAA.

The RIAA have achieved more than they were hoping to achieve! Rather than having to chase individual’s who were using TorrentSpy with all the associated time and expense, the RIAA have just functionally managed to close the TorrentSpy down for the majority of American's who were using it.

A victory for TorrentSpy would have been to have told the RIAA to go and fly as they had no jurisdiction (forcing the RIAA to go after ISPs in the USA), or bring a case against them under European/ Dutch law - which the RIAA would struggled to win.

Those with get up and go have already got up and gone!

My partner left CSC in the first round of "Voluntary Reduncancies" a year and a bit ago, at the time most people who were good at their job and could get a job elsewhere took voluntary redunancy and ran. Everyone suspected it was the first round of many redundancies that were going to happen.

If its cheaper in the USA - Buy it from the USA

We live in a global economy... if something is cheaper in America then buy it directly from America!

I bought Windows Vista from an American website, and paid a significant amount less than the UK retail or OEM price.

People who walk into PC "Planet" or similar and happily hand over full UK retail price are being foolish and lazy as they've not shopped around at all. Business is business and any company will charge what they can get away with charging for a product.

Also to say if you don't like Windows don't buy it isn't always realistic, I have to do testing on a range of platforms including Windows 98, XP, Vista MAC OS X and Linux. The reality is a lot of people have Windows XP/ 98/95 and will be looking for an easy and safe upgrade path with a name they recognise, Microsoft offers that. SUSE, Fedora, Ubuntu etc. are all superb OS' but are not household brands and are unlikely to become so, they can't afford to advertise!