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Comment Espionage outfits must love. (Score 1) 172

The perfect storm of apathy, lack of understating and short slightness of the masses, what I find ever funnier was that some people thought the internet was going to be different, Books, Radio,TV all get controlled in the end, well it will be a little bit different, there will be two internet’s.

One that is corporate/government approved and the crypto-anarchy overlay. They will keep pushing the line until people have had enough, but by then it will be to late for the masses to catch up.

Comment Insulting to women. (Score 1) 432

Deciphering the marketing speak: “All our game have scantly clad women, guns, and blood, we need to make games for women with puppy’s,unicorns and rainbows”.

It’s the same bullshit targeted marketing you will find in all industry’s, Most women I have known, got in to gaming because of there boyfriends/husbands, when alone form other females, and most enjoy so called boys-games.

It’s the same with men, I started watching Gilmore Girls and Army Wives because of a girlfriend , Yet I would never crack open a beer and start taking about it with my mates.

When you get down to it and have a deep look at so called male-thing and female-thing, you will find they actually have a broad appeal it is just skewed by marketing and gender role ignorance.

Comment Have you used firefox recently it's all ready a OS (Score 1, Interesting) 288

That's why its fucked in my eyes.
Mozilla or extension developers have strayed to far for the main concept of small tool that help to full blown lunacy.
The other day I came across fireSSH that's right a an SSH client inside a browser!
As a network security guy I felt like going to a field where there is no technology or civilization for hundreds of miles, taking a deep breath and scream every obscenity under the sun. There is just no hope for some people.

Comment Re:Not Hard to Challenge iTunes (Score 1) 95

In fact both your points are right.
The fail is with filesystems, I know I will get a lot of flack form the filesystem guy's but it's their fault for not developing a way to maintain metadata in a ubiquitous way, a media player should just be a overlay on top of the filesystem used to view and the OS should manage the metadata not individual applications.

How it work with iTunes,WMP,Amarok, etc. it's kludgy at best, having to keep the data and metadata in separate databases.

I keep my music is top notch order with album art embedded in the ID3 tag. So it's portable and because I hate having lose pictures in my dirs. But if I load my music with different player there's always a bit of metadata missing.

The beast manager I found before I got an iPhone was Jajuk but it was written in Java so I despise it more that iTunes.

I propose a new file format, like the bundles concept in OS X, just plonk all the data raw in a dirs, give it an extension, like .album, show me the album art as a thumbnail and have the info in an XML file. we could use compressed achieves like rar or zip to be cross-platfrom. They did the same with comic books, the CBR/CBZ are just rar and zip files treated differently, it keeps the raw file for easy editing, a lot more elegant then PDFs.

Comment Economics (Score 1) 59

I use to think that the economics for open source hardware cloud not work, but a while back I thought about it.

One way would be for the R&D to be done by a community. Licensed to manufactures at fixed rates to recoup cost, kinda like a non-profit, any surplus could go to new or related projects.

Manufactures could build the designs. The market would be leveled because it's not who has the biggest patients or latest tech anymore, But who can make the most cost effective/efficient component.

Efficiency is the new selling point for hardware, So the marketing would not be that difficult for the masses to understand.

Obversely there world be resistant from the old guard but what's new there.

I know the situation is a lot more complex than I just stated, But you know the old Einstein quote about simplicity/complexity.

Comment Amen Brother. (Score 1) 383

This is so true, The UK’s computer education courses are a joke. I spent three years at college and I learned more about computers form pissing about with Linux, Networking at home, Playing with Windows server and messing about with active directory, Working in a production environment.

When I was working in a repair shop there was a lad who worked there part time while at university. One day he came in and asked me to help him with his project, It was on studying viruses. His first question was how to get them, I said just go to any shady porn site and you bound to pick up a few. At this point I though wow! this guy gets straight A’s and is at Uni, and he doesn’t even know where to find viruses. He did have a descent excuse as he was Muslim, So at the mention of porn sites, He went bright red and really quiet. I was laughing until he asked me the second question, which was how to study them without trashing his system.

That’s when I stop laughing and said to myself, The UK is so screwed if this is the level of talent that's going to university.

At the moment I am jobless so I thorough I might as-well get a degree while there is a recession. Beats doing nothing on the dole and why not, If it get’s boring I can just dropout and get a job. I went to an open day and it did look quite interesting, But at the end of the day I thought, The degree is not worth the paper it is printed on. An MCSE or LPI certificate will give you a better chance at getting a job than a degree.

The amount of times I have seen students come out uni with all the knowledge pack in there heads but no practical skills what so ever. As soon as you put them in a production environment they fall to bits, With the stress of keeping things running. It’s not like I gave them important tasks like maintaining servers, I learned that the hard way, When I first started I was a lot less hands on with the junior techs, But after all the stupid things I have seen them do, Back-end server rooms are now guarded like a prison, YOU HAVE TO SIGN IN AND OUT. My boss thought the cavity search where a bit too much (joking).

Now I continually shadow them to make sure they fear my wrath, So they think twice before committing configurations.
                             

Comment Re:Well, good. (Score 1) 209

This is the way it's supposed to work.

But not all of us have a twin to share doubt with.
If this guy had been an only child, then they would have convicted him solely on DNA.

This is a real problem with public knowledge about DNA, The masses think it's some magic barcode that proves 100% that is belongs to the subject.

DNA like Barcode's have a margin of error.

Such as Reflection,Quality of barcode,Optical Efficacy and their is also a fair amount of error checking going on.

DNA has the same kind of problems and government's are content with this status quo.

A lot of people blame shows like CSI for making the population aware of how to avoid leaving DNA.
The worse thing that CSI has done is reinforce the fallacy that once they have DNA, The suspect is arrested and the case is over.

Comment Re:Look.... (Score 1) 522

Can we now stop with this over the top propaganda that Firefox is somehow the most bloated slowest memory hungry browser.

I admit that Firefox 2 was little bit naff, But version three pulled it together and is on par with other browsers.

Factor in the extendability of Firefox and the cost aren’t really that bad are they?

Safari.

Pros:
Good speed, Nice clean UI.

Cons:
Mostly proprietary, Little to no extendability, Over the top OpenGL effects (could be considered a pro, I’d like a web browser not a flight simulator)

Opera

Pros:
Lot of features, I mean lots.

Cons:
Crap JS engine but is been slowly fixed, Proprietary. (I like Opera and have tried to switch many times but something just rubs me the wrong way and I back to Firefox after a day, Anyone else do this form time to time?)

Chrome

Pros:Fast a hell, brillant UI,FOSS.

Cons:
Well they are been hashed out here so I am not going to repeat what’s been said many times before.

IE is well it’s IE, I am not even going to try with this one.

The main problem that Firefox has is it’s a bit of a monolithic turd at the moment.

Version four will address this problem.

The monolithic approach has been show to use less memory compared to the modular approach that other browsers use.

Comment Re:Won't work (Score 1) 443

Wouldn’t that be illegal under US law? As it uses libdvdcss.
According to Wikipedia it’s never been tested in court against the DMCA, But I think it falls under the circumventing or bypassing DRM stature.

So by using VLC, I have gone from legitimate to illegitimate. I personally think that if I am going to be labeled as a theft, then I might as well not pay for the experience.

Also to be a legitimate DVD player don’t you have to follow all the rules of the standard even the silly ones like respecting the no skip flag, Otherwise you not allowed to sell it.

Which means most standalone players can not get away with, what VLC can.

(I am not American so my understanding of US law is limited to what I read on Wikipedia and the Web)

Comment The tax dogging fuck's. (Score 2, Interesting) 102

You want to know why is not cost effective to repair old computers greed, simple. I came to the town I now live in and I had a lot of time while I was getting my company of the ground. So I got a job in one of the high street computer repair shops, not a chain like PC World. I would rather stab myself in the leg with a fork than work at one of those places.

When I started it was like doing the time warp back to 1995. Every component was the oldest cheapest crappies piece of shit on the market and have a mark up of several times the actual price.

The owner even made sure that no mater what the problem was with the computer was, to some how justify reinstalling Windows so he could charge.

Every customer who would come in, spend at lest £100, for so little work mostly not needed.

Plus the crappy components he sold them would fail and they would be back, he would give them some techno-babble bullshit and they would pay again!!!

After six months I lost my rag with the guy and left.

Comment Well here is my horror story. (Score 0, Troll) 211

I the got the iPhone 3G on 02 in the UK when it come out. I finished my contract, well it was canceled for non payment, for been three week late with a payment, which I payed off the following week, effectively early terminating, costing me £280.

So 02 offers an unlock, So I put in my IMEI number in there web system and nothing, I try again still nothing. So I ring up customer service which is awful, and ask them to unlock it, they say I have to go to the shop where I bought it. So I go and ask, they say I have to ring customer services. By now I am fuming with rage.

I ring up customer service and asked for an unlock, they say I am not in the system, I give account details and three months later still not unlock.

I believe that when my contract was closed, My IMEI number was removed from the system.
I keep ringing customer service and I have to keep explain my situation.

This is Apple’s and 02’s fault for there stupid unlock system which can not be done locally (Some would say that’s a good system)

Now I am on T-mobile and I can not use the iPhone’s, inbuilt tethering.
Because my phone is not unlocked and requires signed setting from the carrier, which i don’t think T-mobile provide.

Basically getting anything done on the iPhone has become so much trouble that I am done with it and I am getting a N900.

It is 2010 tethering should not be this much of a problem, data is data. It is simple greed.

A big shout out to all the people behind the jailbraking and unlocking tools.

With out you guys my phone would be an over priced paper weight.

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