Friday 16 May 2008 23:16
For a while, it seemed like Linux was going to claim as its own the budget PC niche, with its adoption in products like the very successful Asus Eee PC. But newer Eee models are going to be offered with Windows as well. More worryingly, Windows is going to be used on the One Laptop Per Child, the so-called "$100 PC." Windows has apparently been demanded by some countries interested in buying the machine, on the grounds that it will enable students to learn marketable technology skills. I think it is a short-sighted move. Read more...
Computers no trackbacks § ¶
Friday 16 May 2008 15:13
Two items on yesterday's TV news both shocked me and made me ashamed to live in England. Football fans leaving an UEFA Cup match in Manchester went on the rampage and attacked police, nearly kicking one policeman to death. And an item on girl crime showed young women in states of near total inebriation fighting and kicking almost as viciously as the football hooligans. Why are the British such violent drunks and why is nothing being done to stop it? Read more...
Soapbox no trackbacks § ¶
Tuesday 13 May 2008 10:10
Last Friday morning our ADSL broadband connection stopped working with the usual authentication failure messages. Being reluctant to phone up and be referred to the Indian call center to be talked through a script checking things I had already checked, I left it for a few hours in the hope that the fault would be detected and fixed. It wasn't, so I had to call. Nothing worked, the problem was "escalated" and I faced a weekend (at least) without Internet. So I decided to get a mobile data connection to use as a backup. Read more...
Internet no trackbacks § ¶
Saturday 03 May 2008 18:12
The consensus view of the mass media today seems to be that if we don't cut our energy use now and reduce CO2 emissions, global disaster could be no more than a couple of decades off. I'm sorry but I don't believe it. And neither does former British Chancellor Nigel Lawson, whose book "An Appeal to Reason: A Cool Look at Global Warming" has recently been published. In it, he expresses skepticism at many of the claims made by global warming believers, and argues that the proposed solutions are absurd or inadequate. Read more...
Soapbox no trackbacks § ¶
Thursday 01 May 2008 17:25
We have just opened a hosting account with Hawk Host, and will be migrating the sites that we currently have hosted at iVhosting.com over to it during the couple of months that our subscription with the old host has left to run. Those sites include The PC Guru and our URL shortener site xaddr.com, as well as my personal ham radio hobby site g4ilo.com, but not tech-pro.net itself. Read more...
Web development no trackbacks § ¶
Tuesday 29 April 2008 09:45
As regular readers of this blog know, a few months ago we switched to using Linux on our office systems. We're happy with the relative immunity to viruses and malware, and with not having eventually to upgrade to the appalling Windows Vista, but almost daily I find examples of how the Linux environment is under-developed or plain amateurish compared to Windows. Geeks who trumpet that Linux is superior to Windows just don't live in the real world. It's all too easy to see how many people who are tempted into trying Linux on their desktop eventually give up in frustration and go back to Windows. Read more...
Software no trackbacks § ¶
Friday 25 April 2008 11:09
There are times when I wish I had never started Tech-Pro Downloads. It's based on a commercial script that came with a database from the RegNow software distributor and receives updates from it, as well as manual submissions. But removing the dross and the spam from Chinese software developers with their third rate clones of DVD rippers and video converters takes a lot of time and is extremely tedious and boring, and editing the descriptions of the products that remain takes even more time that sometimes seems not worth the effort. But every now and then it brings to my attention a product that is really worth promoting, such as Live File Backup. Read more...
Software no trackbacks § ¶
Sunday 06 April 2008 17:59
There is a bit of a stink being stirred up at the moment over a new online advertising service called Phorm. It's an online advertising platform that works like this: ISPs will scan the text of content downloaded by web surfers, analyze it and insert relevant ads on participating sites. Presumably ISPs will receive some of the advertising income for their participation in this scheme, which will help keep down the costs of web access. Predictably it is the ISPs with the most aggressive pricing that have signed up for this. But a lot of consumers are not happy about it, saying that it invades their privacy, and some security experts have even claimed it breaches data privacy laws. Read more...
Internet no trackbacks § ¶
