A far off place
In a book review of three books (The Economist) each attempting to explore the cause of 2008’s global “credit crunch” we are told that it’s simply not fair to lay the blame at the door banks. In a telling section we are sternly lectured that “It was the Basel accords on bank capital ratios………that helped push the banks into securitising sub-prime mortgages.”
This is an outrageous statement.
Back in January I wrote about the newly-released KDE 4.0, and what a disappointment it was.
Since then, and particularly in recent weeks, the FOSS community has been raging with discussions about the perceived issues with KDE4.
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Despite being something of a Linux enthusiast (Linux boxes at home outnumber Windows boxes) I’m also realistic. My main workstation at home runs Windows, due to the simple reason that the applications I need only run on Windows. Yes, I know all about WINE, and use it very successfully on some Linux systems at work, but some stuff just won’t, at least yet, run on WINE. Two significant problem areas for WINE are games and…. Adobe applications. And when I ain’t Photoshopping, I’m gaming. So Windows required.
Anyway, to get back to the point: having built a reasonably muscular new PC last year I decided to drop Vista on to it as my choice of Windows. Last weekend it had a catastrophic file-system error. To be fair, that’s probably not Vista-specific: Windows has a long and ignoble history of buggering up its file-system and requiring reformat, reinstall, recriminations, etc. So this was just a normal day-in-the-life of a Windows user.
The interesting part is it at last gave me the excuse I needed to ditch Vista and put Windows XP on the PC. So after several months of Vista use, why did I hate it so? Let’s list some Pros and Cons of Vista versus XP.
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Ubuntu’s generally splendid Linux distribution came up to version 8.04 a few days ago.
The three Ubuntu systems in my life were headed for an upgrade! First off a Kubuntu laptop I use for work. Fairly vanilla configuration. Upgrade took a while due to a *lot* of downloads, but it went well and the upgraded system worked fine. [EDIT: See below - Later saw this upgrade was bad too...]
Unfortunately this encouraged me to try two others, which both went very badly…
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It’s an honour and a privilege to elevate two-fingers at the people trying to censor Dan - he of Dan’s Data, one of the better (and more idiosyncratic) technology sites on the Internet. Go to his site and see the story posted today, 19th February 2008, about how Firepower are being a pain and coming on all heavy. Go here for a fuller discussion.
And the item they wish to censor? GET IT HERE!!!!!!
EDIT: And here is Dan’s analysis of the document.
This is going to be just about the briefest review of KDE 4 you’ll read anywhere.
First things first: I LIKE KDE. I like it a lot, and have done for years. I use it every day (literally) and always look forward to new versions. They just get better and better.
KDE 4 was finally released a few days ago, and I installed the Kubuntu version of it to take it for a spin.
Here we look at building a cheap, quiet and compact home media server.So what is a “home-media server”? Different things to different folks, but the box I’m going to build is actually to replace an existing unit which works fine but is too large and much too noisy.
Like many homes these days we have various PCs and client devices scattered around the house, all networked back to a central point and, if required, via that central point to each other. What sits at the centre? Internet access, a fat hard disk for backup of workstations’ data and a couple of server-related functions. The server-side of things has several requirements: Read the rest of this entry »
A story tucked away on the BBC new website a couple of days ago is entitled “Medway luckiest for lotto wins.”The story is about the “luckiest” place to buy a lotto ticket in the UK.
And how do they measure the value of “luck”?
Apparently the technique is, for a given town:
“based on the number of top prize-winning entries as a proportion of its adult population.”
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HotRecorder is a neat product. Unfortunately the people who run it are a bunch of crooks.I bought HotRecorder in April 2006, being a soul who purchased music (legally!) off the iTunes store but who wished to play it on MP3 devices.
One day I was stupid enough to want to move HotRecorder from one old, unused PC to a new one. HotRecorder’s online activation said “No!”. OK, so I email the support people FOUR TIMES asking them to permit the activation of the software I had paid them for. Four times they do not even reply.
HotRecorder do not deserve your money. They are dishonest and fraudulent.
Avoid.
Media servers for Pinnacle Showcenter 1000
I’ve had a Pinnacle Showcenter 1000 for a while now. It was one of the first “simple client - smart server” devices around, and is still a great device for getting music, photos and video from a PC to a hi-fi stack and TV.
The Showcenter itself is physically located with the TV / HiFi, with a network connection back to the media server. The Showcenter has various video and audio outputs and, for the network connection back to the server, supports wired or wireless Ethernet.
