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Comment Re:"masses of bandwidth"? (Score 1) 204

It won't be anything like residential FiOS connections in the US. It's the same kind of fibre leased line service you can get from any telco if you're a business in a city, based on SDH or metro ethernet, with a price tag to match. We're still some way off residential FTTH in the UK. Some areas have it but it's still very rare and very early days.

Comment Re:Will it support multi-sessions like KDE3.5.10 d (Score 1) 122

Can you do an accelerated triple/quad head setup with 2 Nvidia cards in any Windows flavour? If so, then what's holding Linux/xorg/KDE back?

Years of neglect during the XFree86 days, basically. Xorg is still playing catch-up to Windows which had these concepts nailed years ago. It also doesn't help that Nvidia and ATI, as the two main vendors of graphics hardware, tend to ignore the Xorg architecture and implement things like multiple displays in their own way. The whole mess is an embarrassment, and one of the few major problems holding Linux back as a desktop OS :(

Comment Re:So I am of an extreme minority... (Score 1) 454

Most people really want a portable computer, even if they don't have a need for it. I'm amazed at the number of university students who more or less leave their laptop in their dorm/apartment but insist they need to have one instead of a desktop so they can "take it with them." For a lot of people, the ability to cart around their computer is something they value highly, even if they make little use of it.

I've noticed this as well, and I think that what attracts people is the size rather than portability. A laptop's footprint on your desk/office/bedroom is minimal compared to a desktop and if you have limited space as students often do then it makes sense. When I brought home my new laptop for the first time my roommate asked me "where are you going to put it?" His own computer was a laptop that never moved from his desk. The idea of actually using a laptop as a portable computer didn't occur to him.

Comment Re:Stupid idea. (Score 1) 263

SSL is designed to protect against active man-in-the-middle attacks.

If you use a self-signed certificate, they will get a big scary red warning page instead of the site (even on IE these days)...

If you have your own certificate (slightly more expensive and difficult to obtain) then you stand a better chance of fooling them, as it won't trigger the warning page, but won't stand up to close scrutiny.

Comment An enterprise-ready turd (Score 1) 282

The various coverage of the absurd longevity of IE6 recently has made me feel pretty good about my decision to move my career away from things Web-related. The pain of trying to make a modern website work with a 9 year old & buggy-as-shit browser is something I never wish to go through. IE6 is something I would maybe fire up for a bit of ironic nostalgia, typing in various URLs, giggling at how badly it renders and remembering that this is what the internet used to be like, before remembering that people are actually still using this software on a daily basis, and being very glad I'm not one of them.

Here's an idea for Mozilla and Google. Make your browsers configurable by Active Directory Group Policy Objects so that they can be locked down in "enterprise" environments like IE can be. This is surely the biggest barrier to corporate uptake of Firefox, Chrome, etc?

Comment Not a huge fan.. (Score 1) 198

I know runs contrary to some of the other posts here but I found Firefox for the N900 to be frustratingly slow. The MicroB browser feels far more responsive. I ended up uninstalling Firefox in the end because I just didn't have any reason to use it over MicroB. But even MicroB isn't as fast as it should be - this is inherent in using Gecko, which everyone knows is slower than Webkit, and the difference is especially noticable on a mobile device. It seemed like a very odd choice for Nokia to make. Tear shows promise but is not quite there yet.

Comment Re:Head researcher (Score 5, Interesting) 273

It seems that the head researcher on this project is David Nutt, who was sacked by the British government over his "controversial" views on drugs like THC and ecstasy. What a bunch of blowhards; but then I'm not one to talk, since the teabaggers here hold the same rigid views.

The guy is awesome. Having been sacked in a purely political manoeuvre by Jacqui Smith (spit) it sounds like he now leads an Alexander Shulgin-like life of synthesising new chemicals and trying them out faster than the government can ban or control them. Sadly the same reasons for him being sacked will probably mean that this project doesn't gain any traction. Politics trump science and reason...

Comment Re:ATI chipsets (Score 1) 195

2.6.32's KMS and R600/700 improvements are expected to give a huge 3D performance boost to the open source ATI drivers - can't wait to test this!

This is indeed excellent although it needs to be backed up by support from the X driver. Currently I am running Ubuntu Karmic on a Radeon HD 3600 series card (RV635, which counts as an R600 series - quite confusing) and 3D support sucks. Both the "radeon" and "radeonhd" drivers only have basic support for these chips - desktop effects don't really work.

I was using the fglrx driver on Jaunty, which worked OK, but it seems to be getting worse with every release. In Karmic it was so broken I just gave up on it. It seems to play a lot better with Compiz/GNOME than with KDE for some reason.

Comment Re:c++ is good (Score 2, Interesting) 531

it's just sometimes, it's a resource hog.

A bad workman always blames his tools

The logical fallacy in this cliche has always irritated me.

- If all bad workmen blame their tools, does it follow that all workmen that blame their tools are bad ones?
- If all dogs are animals with four legs*, does it follow that all animals with four legs are dogs?

* Excluding accidents and birth defects

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