Slashdot Mirror


User: darien

darien's activity in the archive.

Stories
0
Comments
680
First seen
Last seen
Profile
(view on slashdot.org)

Comments · 680

  1. Re:So what's the point? on British Airport Will Require Fingerprints From Domestic Passengers · · Score: 1
    Then why are you doing it?

    Dude, it's right there in the summary:

    To ensure the passenger boarding the aircraft is the same person, the fingerprinting process will be repeated just before they board the aircraft and the photograph will be compared with their face.
    It's a strong way of authenticating that the person getting on the plane is the same one who was authorised to do so back at check-in.

    Honestly, you lot can't get enough security when it comes to oh-so-precious data, but when there's actual people involved it seems suddenly everybody wants to live in the Wild West.
  2. Re:I think its great news! on Microsoft Trying To Appeal to the Unix Crowd? · · Score: 1

    work has value

    So who's going to pay me for the six hours I spent today moving rocks from one side of the beach to the other? A lot of effort went into that!

  3. Re:Will they make it? on Is AMD Dead Yet? · · Score: 3, Insightful

    their processors (both CPU and GPU) are all but impressive these days

    The Phenom's a bit of a disappointment, and will probably remain so until/unless people start writing much more parallelisable code (until then, Intel's bigger L2 cache more than makes up for Phenom's "true" quad-core design). But AMD are fighting back on the GPU side - the HD 3870 X2 has had some great reviews, and in many games it's faster than an 8800 Ultra for sixty quid less.

    Of course, since Nvidia have just launched the 9600GT, we may presume there's a 9800GT on the way soon that'll blow both of them away; but while AMD's GPUs were, frankly, laughable all through 2007, the new cards definitely put them back in the game. I think they'll be with us for a while yet.

  4. Re:Why did they buy ATI? on Is AMD Dead Yet? · · Score: 4, Insightful

    They think - or at least they claim to think - it's all about the platform. With ATi under their wing, they can now offer a complete PC ("Spider") or notebook ("Puma") without giving any sales to Intel on the CPU side or Nvidia on the chipset/graphics side. To be honest, I'm not convinced that's what they needed, but I can sort of see the appeal for them.

  5. Re:MOD DOWN the whole story, Flamebait on The Death of High Fidelity · · Score: 1

    I completely fail to see how anyone can even make an argument for lossy compression in lossless v lossy. Unless it's about disk space, but that's not really an issue anymore these days, is it?

    I fear we're not there just yet. Tell people the iPod Touch will hold either 500 FLACs or 3,000 MP3s and see which they pick...

  6. Re:The SAME formula? on Futurama Returns! · · Score: 1

    Which one?

  7. Re:I've seen it on David X. Cohen of Futurama Talks About the Movie · · Score: 1

    I thought that too, but then Billy West does lots of voices - Fry, the Professor, Zoidberg and Zapp Brannigan, TO NAME BUT FOUR... so it wasn't exactly a foregone conclusion.

  8. Re:SP or New OS? on Windows Vista SP1 Hands-On Details · · Score: 1

    I had that problem, as a side effect of extremely slow network copies in general. Never managed to really solve it, but it went away when I switched to a newer (more expensive) router...

  9. I'm a reviewer... on A Look At Free Reviewer Swag · · Score: 5, Insightful

    I'm a reviewer for a UK-based PC magazine, and I have to say, though companies do tend to give out freebies at press events, I've never been given anything remotely as interesting as an iPod. Normally it's a USB thumb-drive and a branded pen or two. For major launches you might get a rucksack.

    But be that as it may, surely giving out gifts of any size is only a problem if it actually influences reviewers. And on that count I see no grounds for concern at all. I think anyone who works in this industry quickly develops a healthily cynical regard for manufacturers, and if we feel like a company's being unusually nice to us our immediate instinct is to wonder why, and to look at their product with extra suspicion. The magazine market's just too competitive for reviewers to get away with endorsing lousy products: readers aren't stupid, and I think most of us love our jobs far too much to sell out our reputations for a few hundred pounds' worth of free stuff.

    (That's how it seems to be with print journalism, anyway. Web reviewers... well, I can't speak for them.)

  10. Re:And we think EULA's are bad on Sun Refuses LGPL for OpenOffice; Novell forks · · Score: 4, Insightful

    There is just as much or more license squabbling in the OSS world as there is the other world.

    Yeah, but in the OSS world we still have access to all the software that's in dispute...

  11. Re:So does vapor on Windows Genuine Advantage Servers Out · · Score: 1

    According to Microsoft's press office, enthusiasts will be able to buy an OEM disc (without technical support), but there may not be a boxed edition. And it'll work fine on older computers: the "getting started" guide gives explicit advice on installing it on old hardware (minimum spec includes a 1GHz Pentium III and 512MB of memory).

  12. Re:I haven't read SINGLE Harry Potter book on Deathly Hallows / OOTP Movie Discussion · · Score: 1

    I'd be very interested to know who these historians are who acknowledge that Shakespeare had "no more literary talent than one of today's dime novel authors."

  13. At last... on Zune DRM Cracked · · Score: 5, Funny

    This is the announcement that's been so desperately needed to kickstart Zune sales...

  14. Re:It Could Be Rising Tech Really Is Malicious on Antivirus Vendors Headed for Court · · Score: 1

    There's a new version out next month...

  15. They got Al Capone for tax evasion on Apple Sued Over 'Lacking' Macbook Display · · Score: 0, Flamebait

    While this sounds like a ridiculous lawsuit, I have some hope it'll cause Apple to be generally a bit less cavalier with their advertising claims in future. It's one thing to emphasise your product's strengths, but I don't think it's on to mislead punters by going around making implications like "PCs are attacked by 114,000 viruses a year."

  16. Re:ATi ain't far behind on Affordable DX10 - GeForce 8600 GTS and 8600 GT · · Score: 2, Informative

    But Nvidia's drivers don't work, at least not on Vista. Google confirms it.

  17. Re:Yes... on EU Official Labels Microsoft's Behavior Unacceptable · · Score: 1

    Spoken like an American who hasn't studied the relative size of the western markets lately.

  18. Platform-independent, I hope on Photoshop Online Within Six Months · · Score: 4, Insightful

    So long as it's not written in ActiveX or anything dumb like that, this could be good news for Linux on the desktop. Can't install the latest version of Photoshop? Who cares, just use it online!

  19. Re:Of course they do on Sony and Universal Prohibit Sharing Via Zune · · Score: 2, Informative

    I think your brother must have had some clever software installed, because although you can simply drag files onto an iPod, they won't ordinarily be recognised as available songs and won't show up in your music library. You do need to import them with iTunes (or some third-party equivalent).

  20. Re:BFD on Sony Ships 2 Million PS3s, May Still Miss Goal · · Score: 1

    My only message to Nintendo is this: Don't get cocky!

    I have another piece of advice for them too: "crack, crack, crack the egg into the bowl."

  21. Re:No real surprise... on Wii Outselling PS3 in Japan · · Score: 1

    Can't speak for Americans, but over here in the UK the Wii is £180, whereas the PS3 is going to be £425. It'd take a lot more than "one serious price cut" for the PS3 to compete with the Wii, even assuming Nintendo never cut the price of the Wii.

  22. Re:Not many similarities at all on Is Vista the New OS/2? · · Score: 1

    are we going to talk about how much better Open Office is than Office 2007? It's like a clunky version of Office 2000.

    I was sceptical all the way through your post, as I've been trialling Vista on an Athlon XP2400+ with 1Gb and my experiences have been rather different to yours: the eye candy is admittedly a question of taste, but the UI is absolutely, definitely, noticeably slower than XP on the same hardware.

    But this last line on the subject of OpenOffice was the clincher that persuaded me that you're an MS troll (if not shill). The airy implication that Office 2000 is self-evidently obsolete isn't an argument - it's a Microsoft marketing message, appealing to the emotions of those who haven't upgraded ("I don't want to be a dinosaur!"), rather than to productivity. That Microsoft has chosen this as its approach suggests that even they tacitly recognise that, for the vast majority of users, there is no material benefit to moving from Office 2000 to Office 2007.

    Of course, if OpenOffice is clunky then that's bad. But let me stand up proudly and say that being a version of Office 2000 is absolutely fine.

  23. Re:Migration on Now Is Not the Time for Vista · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Why did MS think that businesses want to be the guinea pigs? Has the entire executive team at MS lost it?

    Perhaps they knew businesses wouldn't, so this was a way of "releasing" the software in 2006 rather than 2007 but still having an extra 10 weeks to work on patches before support became an issue.

  24. How many sales lost? on What Questions Would You Ask An RIAA 'Expert'? · · Score: 1

    I would ask this expert to put a firm figure on precisely how many extra CDs the RIAA would have sold if this individual person had never used peer to peer software. I imagine his first response would be some sort of weasel answer about how every file shared can end up going to thousands of people; but the issue here is of the damage that this specific defendant is alleged to have caused, and even allowing the existence of these thousands of imaginary copyright breaches, the distributed nature of the technology ensures that her personal involvement in this would be limited to a small number of uploads. As an "expert" he will have no option but to acknowledge this. So I'd press for a solid figure, based only on the firm evidence that they have of copyrighted data transmitted by this particular defendant - I mean, they're in court, so they must have firm evidence, right? - of precisely how many CD sales she is personally alleged to have cost the RIAA.

    I would then point out that the damages sought by the RIAA are far, far in excess of their own expert's calculation of alleged loss. I would suggest that had the RIAA sought a value proportionate to their alleged loss, plus a reasonable fee to compensate them for the expense of identifying the responsible party, the defendant might well have settled immediately; but that the RIAA's decision to seek such a flagrantly excessive sum has forced her to defend herself against a claim that is patently unjustified and should ipso facto be denied by the court.

  25. Re:Not really cracked, more like circumvented on HD-DVD and Blu-Ray AACS DRM Cracked · · Score: 1

    Surely I can just hack the player from within a virtualised Windows environment? (I mean, not me, obviously, but someone good at programming.)