Like yourself, I use Kontact and I'm frustrated with losing certain features (drag'n'drop calendar items and notifcations being the biggest priorities).
However, the thing that pisses me off most about GMail is that it seems designed around the assumption that you should never have more than one email open - I'm used to refering to three or more mails at once when creating reports or making systems decisions, coupled with dual monitors it's a dream. In GMail however I find myself having to go into an email, take notes, refer back to another email, back to the first, refer to a third, back to the second... all of the links are javascript so it's practically impossible to open more than one tab, so you have to log in multiple times for each seperate view you want and then remember which tab is which because you can rarely see anything past "Google Mail -...".
GMail certainly has its uses, but I think it's overly restrictive to enforce it on students (presuming they no longer wish to support POP3/IMAP clients on university computers any more).
vista will replace XP just as XP replaced 2K, it will just take a bit of time.
If it was anything like my remembrance of the 2k > XP migration, at the non-corporate level at least, it'll be enforced by manufacturers refusing to supply drivers and application developers refusing to support anything without the "vista" version string.
Not that I'm bitter about most DirectX games refusing to install on a 2k machine any more, despite there being almost no functional difference between it an XP as far as I can tell...
IIRC WD have brought out an "RE2" edition targeted at the enterprise market, as they do with mose of their range. Just been poking around WD's site and, as you point out, couldn't find a spec sheet listing the read error rate for any of the drives I looked at, which is a bit annoying.
Pretty sure there is a variable spindle speed though; is it possible they alter the height of the head during travel, depending on spindle speed...? Sounds quite tricky but surely some clever electricla engineering could solve that...? Curse WD for not going into more details about it...
Show me somewhere I can pay the movie people £4 (about the price of a bargain basement DVD, but remember I'm not using any of their resources) per "pirate" download, as all I ever do with my copious DVD collection is rip, transcode and chuck on my HTPC system. Just utilise the high quality volunteer distribution system already in place, people! Problem solved, surely?
Ha, of course not. As we've all been saying for years, this isn't, never has been and never will be about money. It's all about control.
From what I remember from the reviews, the disc spins between 5400 and 7200rpm depending on load. Benchmarks showed it's not as fast as equivalent 7200rpm drives of the same capacity, but the performance disparity is in the region on 5-10% at worst. For people worried about power usage and/or noise though, it looks like a superb drive - perfect for an HTPC.
Technically, yes, but since the various AA's decided that Shakespeare et al live on through their work, they granted a de facto copyright for 75 years since one of his plays was last read or performed (effectively a derivative work). They're also campaigning to get RIAA maths adopted across the scientific community, to the extent that one copyright year is equivalent to 830 terran years.
...whether they're talking about brick and mortar stores, digital stores, or both.
I live in the UK, get through a fair amount of music and gave up on brick'n'mortars years ago - buying online is more conveneient in every conceivable way for me (no crowds, no cramped and sweaty ride on the tube, no having to hunt down a member of staff to find out where they keep their Classical Nu-Bhangra Trance, no queues to pay, no queues to listen to a possible impulse buy, reviews a few clicks away, no bein gharassed by the security guards when I set off one of the bleepers from my supposedly deactivated security tags) and if the need arose I can easily circumvent any "copy protection" on the not-CD. As it is, I spend my money on MP3's, FLAC's and AAC's from Bleep, Tunetribe, 7Digital and 4AD, or buy a boatload of DVD's from Play or Amazon to have them arrive three days later.
If there's e-tailers as part of TFA, I'm glad - I've sent several letters to the Tunetribe and 7Digital asking what the likelihood of artists XYZ being available in MP3 and have always been given a "when the labels let us" response; the digital sellers are aware that many people who shop for choons online are aware that WMA support is far from universal but that MP3 works with everything with no restrictions.
Heck, I had my dad call me the other day asking me what the hell "failed to individualise" meant in relation to some tracks he'd bought from Napster (digital versions of all his old 7" singles from the 60's which he still owns) - he'd been speaking to Napster tech support and they'd eventually given up and told him to call Microsoft, which has pissed him off something pretty rotten. I said I hadn't a clue, and if Napster wasn't working he should just look elsewhere for MP3 versions, or just try and remove the DRM via that FairUse4WM tool. Napster are even reticient about refunding the money, saying there's no problem at their end (although I sense this'll fall foul of the Sales of Goods Act as "not fit for purpose" if they want to argue about it).
Moral of the tale? DRM is mucking up all of the users now, not just the techie ones. Drop it from digital downloads for your own sake.
If this is an RC, surely those screenshots are a fair approximation of what they intend it to look like in the final version, at least for now?
I wouldn't exactly call my post an "insight" because I've not used KDE4 yet, just googled for lots of screenshots of the betas and this RC. Granted, alot of them are there to show off the new features and thus there's an onus on making the changes "obvious", as per the battery applets. But I haven't seen any that integrate the usual applets I use (CPU and network monitor, pager and media control) in anything approaching a "minimalist", discreet fashion, and I get worried when I see a project that's supposedly close to a final release that seems to being going in the wrong graphical direction for my tastes.
Maybe it's just me, but it looks like they've tried to emulate Vista and ended up making it look even more childish. Why are the icons all ridiculously huge and ridiculously tiny? Why are the sides of the taskbar chopped off? What's the point in rounding off the corners? I was going to say I'm not usually the sort of person who runs lots of eye-candy applets but it seems under KDE4 users aren't given much choice:/
I just hope to hell that the final release comes with a plasma theme the restores some semblance of sanity to the frankly (IMHO, natch) ridiculous looking taskbars in those screenshots.
Can anyone show me any tasteful and useful implementations of Plasma? Or is it just being bandied about as bling-tastic fluff at the moment?
Re:How does a SSL MITM attack work?
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Spying On Tor
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· Score: 1
Granted, this'd work for most "average" computer users accustomed to clicking "OK" every few minutes. But if you're the sort of person who uses TOR, surely a bogus SSL cert would be enough to set of plenty of alarm bells. heck, I remember logging into my newly built file server at home an noticing that the SSH key had changed - cue immediate power down, reformat and analysis of all other boxes I had access to before I realised that the account I was using at the time was using ~/.ssh that hadn't been touched for at least a year (with the previous incarnation of that server still in known_hosts). D'oh!
Anyway, in answer to the GP, a bit of googling found (amongst other things) this: http://www.monkey.org/~dugsong/dsniff/ which I shall give a whirl tonight...
Password protected? I think that's soon to become NewSpeak for "we didn't use proper encryption". Knowing what I know of some of the incredibly ridiculous levels of beauracracy inside the UK public sector (although I've never been invloved with anything outside of legal) I wouldn't be surprised if this amounted to anything as secure as a password protected zip file, with a short password at that.
But the fact that the whole fecking database went out in the mail is utterly inexcusable. This is akin to me emailing a dump from the financials systems via my hotmail account.
And, just to re-confirm my stance on the UK national ID card along with everyone else, how they expect the public to believe that they can keep a database as huge and sprawling as everyones fingerprints, retinas, tax records, benefits, medical history, travel history and criminal record secure I don't know. I'm not even sure that some of them know the meaning of "secure".
The UK government is many things, but they've proved time and time and time again that, collectively*, they know absolutely fuck all about designing (or rather, outsourcing the design to the lowest bidder), maintaining and running any sort of large scale computing project. All of the ones I can remember throughout my lifetime have been late, massively over-budget and unreliable, and some have even been scrapped way before their EOL due to just plain not working.
On a related note, it's at times like this I wish Google did government consultancy. If anyone can keep a colossal distributed database on track, it's them. And as evil as they might be, I trust them more than I trust Capita or EDS**
*I've met some very smart people working for the government but they're bogged down in a stultifyingly inert beauracracy, worse than anything I've experienced in the private sector. Wouldn't be surprised if Gilliam saw Brazil as a documentary
**Governmental favourites for LCD IT outsourcing with a similar illustrious track record for incompetence
Sorry to interject with semi-seriousness, but you can (eventually) destroy your fingerprints if you stick your fingers in pineapples all the time. Pineapples are high in bromelain which has the side effect of erasing your fingerprints over prolonged exposure.
Well yes, it basically boils down to principles - I'm willing to accept some DRM, such as CSS'd DVD's as long as a) they're trivially crackable b) compatible with my kit and c) priced low enough so that my time involved in routing around onerous "protection" is outweighed. Yes, I realise I'm a fringe case/nutjob;)
I'm not keen on buying electronic equipment from the US due to the annoyance of having to have a mains adaptor anywhere (although I don't have a problem with computer equipment since it's universal, and most ATX power supplies I get in the EU are dual voltage anyway). Granted, the exchange rate makes consumer electronics ridiculously cheap at the moment.
I do have a windows installation that I keep around for games. Everything else has been Linux-only for about three years now.
I don't disagree with binary kernel drivers, no (at least not from a philosophical standpoint - their technical merits are certainly murky), I'm not one of those people who refuse to use closed source software, I'm very much a best-tool-for-the-job sort of chap. I went with nVidia because the "best" graphical adapter from a Linux standpoint is probably the Intel X3000 series. I have one of these set up, and I can't seem to get it to show video without tearing; the nVidia drivers make it trivially easy for me to rememdy this, and they're mature enough that I've not had a significant problem with them in years (YMMV, natch;)). My playback hardware (Asus A8N-VM CSM with a 6150 embedded IGP) doesn't support HDCP though and I doubt I'll be upgrading it until there's a graphics chip that'll do H.264 acceleration in Linux. Trust me, as soon as a capable OSS 2D driver comes out, my media machines'll be the first in line to get a new graphics chip - I'm hoping AMD will manage to do something useful with the still utterly dreadful ATI Xorg drivers.
OTA HDTV is different in the UK, there's only one channel at the moment (a BBC test signal broadcast in H.264, as opposed to standard DVB-T which is usually ~DVD quality MPEG2) and since I don't use Sky or cable, I don't have to contend with any encryption or set top boxes (incidentally, there's no provision in the UK for having to provide an unencrypted port on your cable STB so that you can pipe it into your PVR). HD penetration is still pretty low in the UK compared to the US - lots of people have HD sets, but there are very few HD sources and from what I've seen of them they still suffer terribly from compression artifacts (i.e. not enough bandwidth to go around), making them a bit pointless IMHO.
HD-DVD is certainly much less customer-hostile than Blu-Ray, the quality difference between the two (in terms of the amount of high-bitrate stuff they can support) is so little as to make virtually no difference, and I gave up on optical backups years ago (rendering data density a moor point for me), so there's little else to discern the formats other than ease of use.
I'll probably swap the DVD for an HD-DVD in my media player once the standards have become more established (i.e. when I can play back an HD-DVD in xine) but I have a dislike for jumping on a tech whose future is very much up in the air (my disdain of Sony first came from being fscked over in the minidisc debacle and I'm highly wary of adopting non-established formats as a result). If this doesn't come about, I imagine I'll be happy with my DVD buy'n'rip process for the next few years at least.
Nope, no PS3 - won't have a Sony product in the house.
Cheapest player I can find in the UK costs £180 (~$380) which, to my mind, provides so little utility over a £30 DVD player that it's a pointless waste of money to me.
HDCP/HDMI? I purposely bought my TV early so it wouldn't come with one (although the DVI port is HDCP compatible) because I object to the idea, so I'd be relegated to component output anyway (unless there's an HD-DVD player that outputs to VGA D-Sub?). If not, I'd rather wait for the tech to filter down until my media box is capable of easily playing it.
I rip because that's what I like to do. I never used to watch movies repeatedly either, but when you have friends over we find ourselves making cultural references and someone wants to see clip XYZ, or we sometimes leave one on in the background as eye candy. I'm one of those people who likes to continually go over things (I blame an old english lit teacher who taught me to read into things far too much).
The problem with Linux at the moment is that there's precious little support for hardware acceleration of video decoding - any modern box can decode hi-def MPEG2, but hi-def H.264 is enough to bring any CPU to its knees (my Athlon X2 4200 box plays it back at about 20fps), so hardware acceleration is required, and it doesn't exist yet for any of my graphics chipsets (either nVidia or Intel). Not that it's a problem though, since I'll transcode a 1080p movie down to 720p for storage (and my media boxes can just about manage decoding at that res).
I can understand why this all might come off as luddite-ism, but I really can't see any benefit in jumping to HD-DVD at the moment. At the moment I've mentally tagged HD as a corporate fuster cluck and I'll wait for the behemoths to stop trying pin the user between a rock and a hard place.
Cheapest I could find at amazon.co.uk was the Toshiba HD-E1 at £180 (~$380 at todays exchange rate). Considering this is a bare player that essentially does a slightly better quality version of what a £30 DVD player does, I do consider this expensize, yes. I don't mind dropping £200 on a piece of kit that serves a useful utility, but I can't see the justification in doing so in this instance. What do I get out of it other than a slightly better quality image and the privilege of paying extra money for the same movie? And I'm one of those people who would prefer HD-DVD to *win*!
Maybe when I can get a £50 HD-DVD reader drive to chuck in my MythTV box I'll think about it.
Well, I know that anecdote != data and all that lot, but HD adoption in my circle of friends and colleagues is approximately nil.
I've had an HDTV for ages - it came with a DVI port that made hooking up my MythTV box a cinch, so I've had half-HD available to me for a while. The BBC's test HD channel (H.264 at some weird resolution approaching 1080p quality) looks gorgeous, even if there isn't a Linux box capable of playing it at more than 20fps (where's PureVideo/XvMC for H.264?!) but no way in hell am I going to either a) spend a small fortune on BD and HD-DVD players just in case one wins b) back a single format which might sink without trace - and I'm one of those supposed early adopters.
Same is true for cow-orkers, generally not a conservative bunch and keen to keep up with the Jones' WRT to their 42" plasma screens and so on. None of them has bought an HD-DVD or BD movie that wasn't bundled with a console add-on because, and I quote, "they're a compatability nightmare" (highly amusing considering we're almost entirely an MS shop). There's practically no benefit for people with a standard CRT screen, marginal benefit for people like me with a ~32" 720p set and substantial benefit for those with a 1080p 42"+ job over standard DVD's, and even those with the most enviable home cinema setups haven't bothered other than testing it with their 360 or PS3 for novelty value. Universal consensus? Yup, it certainly looks nicer, but nowhere near as much as it looks in those freeze-frame comparisons, and certainly not worth paying twice the price of a DVD for.
Personally, I've been ripping my DVD's (first DivX, then XviD, now lovely x264) to a home file server for pretty much as long as I've been competently using computers because to me the convenience factor outweighs most other considerations (and yeah, I find buying the DVD, getting it delivered in the mail and ripping it to be the most convenient thing for me). On that front, BD/HD-DVD is still a big lose for me.
Nah, disk is via a screw hatch on the bottom (although it slides out sideways) as per usual; it's a standard low-end business oriented model (cheapish, functional and reasonably solid with little in the way of fripperies) and, as you surmise, things like a HDD caddy are definitely not "consumer" oriented; "what? But I'm already holding the hard drive!";)
The BIOS in this'll do USB boot, yes. Can't remember if I needed to tweak the BIOS settings or not though, I might have just used the function key option at boot for "which device shall I boot from".
It'd be great for some of the hardware manufacturers to send samples to some bods at distro X, Y and Z for rigourous testing - TBH I bought the HP because I used the previous gen model at work and found it a nice machine to use. At the time I bought it, a few ACPI bugs marred its compatability with Linux but thanks to a mostly-Intel hardware stack it's well supported throughout. Other than that, it was googling for blogs by Linux users with more free time than me who'd bought laptops from the same family.
One thing that would be nice would be if review sites that look at laptops could maybe just try the odd LiveCD (I know some do but they're in the minority) and give a quick check on things like wireless, suspend, screen res and all of the other usual gotchas in the Linux laptop world. But the majority of the enthusiast review world seems more concerned about overclocking this and SLI-ing that to get +5fps in OMGWTFBBQFPS vol. 17 than they do about actually using it for real workloads;)
Aye, that suspend-to-disk-and-RAM is a very cute idea - can't remember the number of times I've lost my system state due to the battery packing in whilst suspended, and I hope that suspend in Linux adopts it soon.
What does SuSE use as it's init system? IIRC Ubuntu uses upstart I think (not checked that out yet), which is mentioned in the SuSE blog, along with stuff like fcache (block reallocation - only works on ext3 by the sound of it so doesn't hold much attraction to me - I'm generally a JFS man as I work alot with large files and ACL's, and JFS is always faster in this than ext based on my current workloads). Must get bootchart on my laptop and see what the major bottlenecks are...
As another aside, does anyone know if Linux writes the entirity of RAM to disk when hibernating? Seems silly to save things like disk cache if you ask me, but the length of time it takes to write the memory to disk seems too long for just the 3-400MB I'm typically using.
I'm quite surprised in my new laptop, and HP nx7300 running Kubuntu - it responds spectacularly well to suspend and hibernate; suspending takes about three seconds after closing the lid, and about 2 seconds to resume (not counting the time it takes me to type in my password). Hibernating takes alot longer (compressing and writing 2GB RAM = slow) but still works flawlessly. The machine came with Vista which, surprise surprise, takes longer to do the same thing and occasionally hangs.
Still though, it'd be nice if Kubuntu booted from cold as fast as OSX or XP (yes, I know XP "cheats" but Kubuntu does the same thing, I'm looking at 20s after I login before I get a usable desktop). Is there some inherent limitation in UNIX's runlevel system that makes booting markedly slower than other systems?
Well, at least this means that consumer desktops will finally catch up with Hollywood in terms of viruses being little more than 3D eye-candy. Witness Swordfish's superb 3D IDE where you write a virus by fitting transparent lego bricks together. Heck, in Independence Day Jeff Golblum even went to the effort of figuring out how alien monitors worked just so that he could project a spinning skull and crossbones on their screens just to let them know the mothership was hosed. I hear for his next trick he tried to get an open source mail client to talk to Exchange via MAPI, but couldn't find a video card powerful enough to power the 38-monitor workstation needed to hold all the alpha-blended hexagons.
If they do, tell me where to sign up. I'm no coder, but if I can put some of my money where my mouth is and use some disposable income to purchase the specs to help make a better groupware solution for the Linux stack then count me in. Similarly for all of th eother projects that have made my life as a Linux sysadmin so much easier.
Get an AD or Exchange compatible replacement royalty free and any company worth its salt will consider implementing it as an emergency backup solution. Once it gets in, it's never going to go away. Heck, we're a dyed in the wool windows shop and out web servers, oracle servers and SAN already run 100% Linux (mostly all RHEL sadly, I'd kill for a Debian based distro but there you go), despite it having almost universal derision throughout the windows admins (almost entirely due to unfamiliarity). I was brought in because I'm reasonably proficient in both. If Linux can start fighting MS on its own ground and on its own terms, adoption will skyrocket.
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Like yourself, I use Kontact and I'm frustrated with losing certain features (drag'n'drop calendar items and notifcations being the biggest priorities).
...".
However, the thing that pisses me off most about GMail is that it seems designed around the assumption that you should never have more than one email open - I'm used to refering to three or more mails at once when creating reports or making systems decisions, coupled with dual monitors it's a dream. In GMail however I find myself having to go into an email, take notes, refer back to another email, back to the first, refer to a third, back to the second... all of the links are javascript so it's practically impossible to open more than one tab, so you have to log in multiple times for each seperate view you want and then remember which tab is which because you can rarely see anything past "Google Mail -
GMail certainly has its uses, but I think it's overly restrictive to enforce it on students (presuming they no longer wish to support POP3/IMAP clients on university computers any more).
vista will replace XP just as XP replaced 2K, it will just take a bit of time.
If it was anything like my remembrance of the 2k > XP migration, at the non-corporate level at least, it'll be enforced by manufacturers refusing to supply drivers and application developers refusing to support anything without the "vista" version string.
Not that I'm bitter about most DirectX games refusing to install on a 2k machine any more, despite there being almost no functional difference between it an XP as far as I can tell...
IIRC WD have brought out an "RE2" edition targeted at the enterprise market, as they do with mose of their range. Just been poking around WD's site and, as you point out, couldn't find a spec sheet listing the read error rate for any of the drives I looked at, which is a bit annoying.
Pretty sure there is a variable spindle speed though; is it possible they alter the height of the head during travel, depending on spindle speed...? Sounds quite tricky but surely some clever electricla engineering could solve that...? Curse WD for not going into more details about it...
Show me somewhere I can pay the movie people £4 (about the price of a bargain basement DVD, but remember I'm not using any of their resources) per "pirate" download, as all I ever do with my copious DVD collection is rip, transcode and chuck on my HTPC system. Just utilise the high quality volunteer distribution system already in place, people! Problem solved, surely?
Ha, of course not. As we've all been saying for years, this isn't, never has been and never will be about money. It's all about control.
From what I remember from the reviews, the disc spins between 5400 and 7200rpm depending on load. Benchmarks showed it's not as fast as equivalent 7200rpm drives of the same capacity, but the performance disparity is in the region on 5-10% at worst. For people worried about power usage and/or noise though, it looks like a superb drive - perfect for an HTPC.
http://techreport.com/articles.x/13379
"Don't those works predate copyright?"
Technically, yes, but since the various AA's decided that Shakespeare et al live on through their work, they granted a de facto copyright for 75 years since one of his plays was last read or performed (effectively a derivative work). They're also campaigning to get RIAA maths adopted across the scientific community, to the extent that one copyright year is equivalent to 830 terran years.
...whether they're talking about brick and mortar stores, digital stores, or both.
I live in the UK, get through a fair amount of music and gave up on brick'n'mortars years ago - buying online is more conveneient in every conceivable way for me (no crowds, no cramped and sweaty ride on the tube, no having to hunt down a member of staff to find out where they keep their Classical Nu-Bhangra Trance, no queues to pay, no queues to listen to a possible impulse buy, reviews a few clicks away, no bein gharassed by the security guards when I set off one of the bleepers from my supposedly deactivated security tags) and if the need arose I can easily circumvent any "copy protection" on the not-CD. As it is, I spend my money on MP3's, FLAC's and AAC's from Bleep, Tunetribe, 7Digital and 4AD, or buy a boatload of DVD's from Play or Amazon to have them arrive three days later.
If there's e-tailers as part of TFA, I'm glad - I've sent several letters to the Tunetribe and 7Digital asking what the likelihood of artists XYZ being available in MP3 and have always been given a "when the labels let us" response; the digital sellers are aware that many people who shop for choons online are aware that WMA support is far from universal but that MP3 works with everything with no restrictions.
Heck, I had my dad call me the other day asking me what the hell "failed to individualise" meant in relation to some tracks he'd bought from Napster (digital versions of all his old 7" singles from the 60's which he still owns) - he'd been speaking to Napster tech support and they'd eventually given up and told him to call Microsoft, which has pissed him off something pretty rotten. I said I hadn't a clue, and if Napster wasn't working he should just look elsewhere for MP3 versions, or just try and remove the DRM via that FairUse4WM tool. Napster are even reticient about refunding the money, saying there's no problem at their end (although I sense this'll fall foul of the Sales of Goods Act as "not fit for purpose" if they want to argue about it).
Moral of the tale? DRM is mucking up all of the users now, not just the techie ones. Drop it from digital downloads for your own sake.
If this is an RC, surely those screenshots are a fair approximation of what they intend it to look like in the final version, at least for now?
I wouldn't exactly call my post an "insight" because I've not used KDE4 yet, just googled for lots of screenshots of the betas and this RC. Granted, alot of them are there to show off the new features and thus there's an onus on making the changes "obvious", as per the battery applets. But I haven't seen any that integrate the usual applets I use (CPU and network monitor, pager and media control) in anything approaching a "minimalist", discreet fashion, and I get worried when I see a project that's supposedly close to a final release that seems to being going in the wrong graphical direction for my tastes.
How is this offtopic? It's an opinion on TFA.
Maybe it's just me, but it looks like they've tried to emulate Vista and ended up making it look even more childish. Why are the icons all ridiculously huge and ridiculously tiny? Why are the sides of the taskbar chopped off? What's the point in rounding off the corners? I was going to say I'm not usually the sort of person who runs lots of eye-candy applets but it seems under KDE4 users aren't given much choice :/
I just hope to hell that the final release comes with a plasma theme the restores some semblance of sanity to the frankly (IMHO, natch) ridiculous looking taskbars in those screenshots.
In a word... UGH! I've been using Dolphin under KDE3 for a good six months now and have been loving it (barring apps like Ark not having any integration with it yet), but what they've done to Kicker looks absolutely hideous, in keeping with what they've done to my beloved Amarok interface in Amarok 2
http://amarok.kde.org/blog/uploads/Amarok2preview30-07-07.png
http://amarok.kde.org/blog/uploads/jamendo_ktorrent.png
Can anyone show me any tasteful and useful implementations of Plasma? Or is it just being bandied about as bling-tastic fluff at the moment?
Granted, this'd work for most "average" computer users accustomed to clicking "OK" every few minutes. But if you're the sort of person who uses TOR, surely a bogus SSL cert would be enough to set of plenty of alarm bells. heck, I remember logging into my newly built file server at home an noticing that the SSH key had changed - cue immediate power down, reformat and analysis of all other boxes I had access to before I realised that the account I was using at the time was using ~/.ssh that hadn't been touched for at least a year (with the previous incarnation of that server still in known_hosts). D'oh!
Anyway, in answer to the GP, a bit of googling found (amongst other things) this: http://www.monkey.org/~dugsong/dsniff/ which I shall give a whirl tonight...
Password protected? I think that's soon to become NewSpeak for "we didn't use proper encryption". Knowing what I know of some of the incredibly ridiculous levels of beauracracy inside the UK public sector (although I've never been invloved with anything outside of legal) I wouldn't be surprised if this amounted to anything as secure as a password protected zip file, with a short password at that.
But the fact that the whole fecking database went out in the mail is utterly inexcusable. This is akin to me emailing a dump from the financials systems via my hotmail account.
And, just to re-confirm my stance on the UK national ID card along with everyone else, how they expect the public to believe that they can keep a database as huge and sprawling as everyones fingerprints, retinas, tax records, benefits, medical history, travel history and criminal record secure I don't know. I'm not even sure that some of them know the meaning of "secure".
The UK government is many things, but they've proved time and time and time again that, collectively*, they know absolutely fuck all about designing (or rather, outsourcing the design to the lowest bidder), maintaining and running any sort of large scale computing project. All of the ones I can remember throughout my lifetime have been late, massively over-budget and unreliable, and some have even been scrapped way before their EOL due to just plain not working.
On a related note, it's at times like this I wish Google did government consultancy. If anyone can keep a colossal distributed database on track, it's them. And as evil as they might be, I trust them more than I trust Capita or EDS**
*I've met some very smart people working for the government but they're bogged down in a stultifyingly inert beauracracy, worse than anything I've experienced in the private sector. Wouldn't be surprised if Gilliam saw Brazil as a documentary
**Governmental favourites for LCD IT outsourcing with a similar illustrious track record for incompetence
Sorry to interject with semi-seriousness, but you can (eventually) destroy your fingerprints if you stick your fingers in pineapples all the time. Pineapples are high in bromelain which has the side effect of erasing your fingerprints over prolonged exposure.
What makes it even worse is that the road can't be resurfaced until 75 years after the original road was dug up :(
Well yes, it basically boils down to principles - I'm willing to accept some DRM, such as CSS'd DVD's as long as a) they're trivially crackable b) compatible with my kit and c) priced low enough so that my time involved in routing around onerous "protection" is outweighed. Yes, I realise I'm a fringe case/nutjob ;)
;)). My playback hardware (Asus A8N-VM CSM with a 6150 embedded IGP) doesn't support HDCP though and I doubt I'll be upgrading it until there's a graphics chip that'll do H.264 acceleration in Linux. Trust me, as soon as a capable OSS 2D driver comes out, my media machines'll be the first in line to get a new graphics chip - I'm hoping AMD will manage to do something useful with the still utterly dreadful ATI Xorg drivers.
I'm not keen on buying electronic equipment from the US due to the annoyance of having to have a mains adaptor anywhere (although I don't have a problem with computer equipment since it's universal, and most ATX power supplies I get in the EU are dual voltage anyway). Granted, the exchange rate makes consumer electronics ridiculously cheap at the moment.
I do have a windows installation that I keep around for games. Everything else has been Linux-only for about three years now.
I don't disagree with binary kernel drivers, no (at least not from a philosophical standpoint - their technical merits are certainly murky), I'm not one of those people who refuse to use closed source software, I'm very much a best-tool-for-the-job sort of chap. I went with nVidia because the "best" graphical adapter from a Linux standpoint is probably the Intel X3000 series. I have one of these set up, and I can't seem to get it to show video without tearing; the nVidia drivers make it trivially easy for me to rememdy this, and they're mature enough that I've not had a significant problem with them in years (YMMV, natch
OTA HDTV is different in the UK, there's only one channel at the moment (a BBC test signal broadcast in H.264, as opposed to standard DVB-T which is usually ~DVD quality MPEG2) and since I don't use Sky or cable, I don't have to contend with any encryption or set top boxes (incidentally, there's no provision in the UK for having to provide an unencrypted port on your cable STB so that you can pipe it into your PVR). HD penetration is still pretty low in the UK compared to the US - lots of people have HD sets, but there are very few HD sources and from what I've seen of them they still suffer terribly from compression artifacts (i.e. not enough bandwidth to go around), making them a bit pointless IMHO.
HD-DVD is certainly much less customer-hostile than Blu-Ray, the quality difference between the two (in terms of the amount of high-bitrate stuff they can support) is so little as to make virtually no difference, and I gave up on optical backups years ago (rendering data density a moor point for me), so there's little else to discern the formats other than ease of use.
I'll probably swap the DVD for an HD-DVD in my media player once the standards have become more established (i.e. when I can play back an HD-DVD in xine) but I have a dislike for jumping on a tech whose future is very much up in the air (my disdain of Sony first came from being fscked over in the minidisc debacle and I'm highly wary of adopting non-established formats as a result). If this doesn't come about, I imagine I'll be happy with my DVD buy'n'rip process for the next few years at least.
Nope, no PS3 - won't have a Sony product in the house.
Cheapest player I can find in the UK costs £180 (~$380) which, to my mind, provides so little utility over a £30 DVD player that it's a pointless waste of money to me.
HDCP/HDMI? I purposely bought my TV early so it wouldn't come with one (although the DVI port is HDCP compatible) because I object to the idea, so I'd be relegated to component output anyway (unless there's an HD-DVD player that outputs to VGA D-Sub?). If not, I'd rather wait for the tech to filter down until my media box is capable of easily playing it.
I rip because that's what I like to do. I never used to watch movies repeatedly either, but when you have friends over we find ourselves making cultural references and someone wants to see clip XYZ, or we sometimes leave one on in the background as eye candy. I'm one of those people who likes to continually go over things (I blame an old english lit teacher who taught me to read into things far too much).
The problem with Linux at the moment is that there's precious little support for hardware acceleration of video decoding - any modern box can decode hi-def MPEG2, but hi-def H.264 is enough to bring any CPU to its knees (my Athlon X2 4200 box plays it back at about 20fps), so hardware acceleration is required, and it doesn't exist yet for any of my graphics chipsets (either nVidia or Intel). Not that it's a problem though, since I'll transcode a 1080p movie down to 720p for storage (and my media boxes can just about manage decoding at that res).
I can understand why this all might come off as luddite-ism, but I really can't see any benefit in jumping to HD-DVD at the moment. At the moment I've mentally tagged HD as a corporate fuster cluck and I'll wait for the behemoths to stop trying pin the user between a rock and a hard place.
Cheapest I could find at amazon.co.uk was the Toshiba HD-E1 at £180 (~$380 at todays exchange rate). Considering this is a bare player that essentially does a slightly better quality version of what a £30 DVD player does, I do consider this expensize, yes. I don't mind dropping £200 on a piece of kit that serves a useful utility, but I can't see the justification in doing so in this instance. What do I get out of it other than a slightly better quality image and the privilege of paying extra money for the same movie? And I'm one of those people who would prefer HD-DVD to *win*!
Maybe when I can get a £50 HD-DVD reader drive to chuck in my MythTV box I'll think about it.
Well, I know that anecdote != data and all that lot, but HD adoption in my circle of friends and colleagues is approximately nil.
I've had an HDTV for ages - it came with a DVI port that made hooking up my MythTV box a cinch, so I've had half-HD available to me for a while. The BBC's test HD channel (H.264 at some weird resolution approaching 1080p quality) looks gorgeous, even if there isn't a Linux box capable of playing it at more than 20fps (where's PureVideo/XvMC for H.264?!) but no way in hell am I going to either a) spend a small fortune on BD and HD-DVD players just in case one wins b) back a single format which might sink without trace - and I'm one of those supposed early adopters.
Same is true for cow-orkers, generally not a conservative bunch and keen to keep up with the Jones' WRT to their 42" plasma screens and so on. None of them has bought an HD-DVD or BD movie that wasn't bundled with a console add-on because, and I quote, "they're a compatability nightmare" (highly amusing considering we're almost entirely an MS shop). There's practically no benefit for people with a standard CRT screen, marginal benefit for people like me with a ~32" 720p set and substantial benefit for those with a 1080p 42"+ job over standard DVD's, and even those with the most enviable home cinema setups haven't bothered other than testing it with their 360 or PS3 for novelty value. Universal consensus? Yup, it certainly looks nicer, but nowhere near as much as it looks in those freeze-frame comparisons, and certainly not worth paying twice the price of a DVD for.
Personally, I've been ripping my DVD's (first DivX, then XviD, now lovely x264) to a home file server for pretty much as long as I've been competently using computers because to me the convenience factor outweighs most other considerations (and yeah, I find buying the DVD, getting it delivered in the mail and ripping it to be the most convenient thing for me). On that front, BD/HD-DVD is still a big lose for me.
Nah, disk is via a screw hatch on the bottom (although it slides out sideways) as per usual; it's a standard low-end business oriented model (cheapish, functional and reasonably solid with little in the way of fripperies) and, as you surmise, things like a HDD caddy are definitely not "consumer" oriented; "what? But I'm already holding the hard drive!" ;)
;)
The BIOS in this'll do USB boot, yes. Can't remember if I needed to tweak the BIOS settings or not though, I might have just used the function key option at boot for "which device shall I boot from".
It'd be great for some of the hardware manufacturers to send samples to some bods at distro X, Y and Z for rigourous testing - TBH I bought the HP because I used the previous gen model at work and found it a nice machine to use. At the time I bought it, a few ACPI bugs marred its compatability with Linux but thanks to a mostly-Intel hardware stack it's well supported throughout. Other than that, it was googling for blogs by Linux users with more free time than me who'd bought laptops from the same family.
One thing that would be nice would be if review sites that look at laptops could maybe just try the odd LiveCD (I know some do but they're in the minority) and give a quick check on things like wireless, suspend, screen res and all of the other usual gotchas in the Linux laptop world. But the majority of the enthusiast review world seems more concerned about overclocking this and SLI-ing that to get +5fps in OMGWTFBBQFPS vol. 17 than they do about actually using it for real workloads
Aye, that suspend-to-disk-and-RAM is a very cute idea - can't remember the number of times I've lost my system state due to the battery packing in whilst suspended, and I hope that suspend in Linux adopts it soon.
What does SuSE use as it's init system? IIRC Ubuntu uses upstart I think (not checked that out yet), which is mentioned in the SuSE blog, along with stuff like fcache (block reallocation - only works on ext3 by the sound of it so doesn't hold much attraction to me - I'm generally a JFS man as I work alot with large files and ACL's, and JFS is always faster in this than ext based on my current workloads). Must get bootchart on my laptop and see what the major bottlenecks are...
As another aside, does anyone know if Linux writes the entirity of RAM to disk when hibernating? Seems silly to save things like disk cache if you ask me, but the length of time it takes to write the memory to disk seems too long for just the 3-400MB I'm typically using.
I'm quite surprised in my new laptop, and HP nx7300 running Kubuntu - it responds spectacularly well to suspend and hibernate; suspending takes about three seconds after closing the lid, and about 2 seconds to resume (not counting the time it takes me to type in my password). Hibernating takes alot longer (compressing and writing 2GB RAM = slow) but still works flawlessly. The machine came with Vista which, surprise surprise, takes longer to do the same thing and occasionally hangs.
Still though, it'd be nice if Kubuntu booted from cold as fast as OSX or XP (yes, I know XP "cheats" but Kubuntu does the same thing, I'm looking at 20s after I login before I get a usable desktop). Is there some inherent limitation in UNIX's runlevel system that makes booting markedly slower than other systems?
Well, at least this means that consumer desktops will finally catch up with Hollywood in terms of viruses being little more than 3D eye-candy. Witness Swordfish's superb 3D IDE where you write a virus by fitting transparent lego bricks together. Heck, in Independence Day Jeff Golblum even went to the effort of figuring out how alien monitors worked just so that he could project a spinning skull and crossbones on their screens just to let them know the mothership was hosed. I hear for his next trick he tried to get an open source mail client to talk to Exchange via MAPI, but couldn't find a video card powerful enough to power the 38-monitor workstation needed to hold all the alpha-blended hexagons.
If they do, tell me where to sign up. I'm no coder, but if I can put some of my money where my mouth is and use some disposable income to purchase the specs to help make a better groupware solution for the Linux stack then count me in. Similarly for all of th eother projects that have made my life as a Linux sysadmin so much easier.
Get an AD or Exchange compatible replacement royalty free and any company worth its salt will consider implementing it as an emergency backup solution. Once it gets in, it's never going to go away. Heck, we're a dyed in the wool windows shop and out web servers, oracle servers and SAN already run 100% Linux (mostly all RHEL sadly, I'd kill for a Debian based distro but there you go), despite it having almost universal derision throughout the windows admins (almost entirely due to unfamiliarity). I was brought in because I'm reasonably proficient in both. If Linux can start fighting MS on its own ground and on its own terms, adoption will skyrocket.
Whatever you do, don't wave it about or a certain rabid, hairless baboon will sue you for copyright infringement.