threegee

It HAS taken off! http://www.scaled.com/ There are a thousand young British engineers waiting to prove that they can launch a commercial satellite with it. All that stands in their way is a government bankrupt of ideas (and in this particular case money too), and clinging on to power for their own sad ends. "It's the right thing to do" Gordon!

Drivers aren't really a problem. If you've got fairly modern hardware the Linux kernel can generally handle it. I've only had one problem and that was with a wireless LAN card where the manufacturer wasn't particularly Linux supportive (note to self to avoid that manufacturer in future). The solution was to use the ndiswrapper around the windows driver. Easy to get it working but took me a few days to work out how to make the thing permanent - so I didn't have to keep reactivating the driver after every boot - but now it is and the hardware works just as well as under windows. Data compatibility is really a Microsoft thing. Once you break free from the MS stranglehold of only supporting exports in their own proprietary formats you can more or less say goodbye to any hassle. You'll note that it's always a lot easier to import data to MS software than export it in an truly open and properly documented format.

Anti-Social Behaviour Order The whole point of which is to name and shame. Rolling back the decades of namby-pamby treatment which encourages such brattish behaviour. Email the chief constable then. There's a high res version of the photo on his website - good re-publication quality for the media. The papers have used this; we haven't, but maybe we should? My personal opinion: This is a not unattractive young girl who is trashing her own life. Social pressure is probably the only thing left outside of constant detention. She needs a boot up the backside to snap out of it and realise her potential. Feather-bedding her isn't going to do this!

It's a proper OS. In fact it's much more powerful than the likes of MSDOS or AmigaDOS of old. When the source code is available you'll find folks porting it to just about anything. Don't be fooled by the tiny screen, these are just presentation issues.

They already have. It's called Android. And lucky T Mobile users can get it right now. http://reviews.cnet.com/smartphones/t-mobi...7-33283585.html More phone manufacturers likely to take it up soon. Also Nokia are throwing [totally] open the Maemo platform from the next device (I use Maemo every day on my N800 - which is now thoroughly hacked ). In addition to that Nokia are pledged to throw open the Symbian platform too. All of which is great news for users and bad news for M$.

It's free - even the Windys edition! Just make sure you get it directly and not by a middleman. http://download.openoffice.org/other.html#en-US

How can you hate free software when you never pay for any yourself? You use Sun's java on your computer for free but you won't use their open source office suite - because err.. Bill Gates is so kind and needs the money. All sounds like double standards to me. So Sun should be punished because someone is trying to rip people off selling their free software, but Microsoft should be rewarded because they haven't got around to raiding you for pirating their products - yet!? Strange world you inhabit! :D

The same. This is exactly what the previous landlady of The Dun Cow - who is still a member here - tells us. If it's the same company as you say then she deserves every bit of support she can get.

Woah - that isn't a Sun site! Read the small print at the bottom. Some kind of con I think. As always on the Internet - beware!!

What 3.0.1 isn't the new version? I'm still using 2.4 and its fine. Just tried to download the .deb of 3.0.1 from the last link I gave, and it comes in no hassle. I can live with them charging windoze users - IF that's what they are really doing. But I suspect that's a free download from that page too. Pity!

That wasn't me. But he's doing a grand job. "It was the right thing to do!"

Are you sure that's not a Star Office page? Here is the download page for OO (and it says it's still free though they do tout for donations) http://download.openoffice.org/ Whoops that was Linux specific! The general download page is here: http://download.openoffice.org/other.html#en-US

One thread got moved because it applied to Northumberland and not Bedlington. The link to it was left to avoid complaints. One click - big deal!

Of course it's free! Best thing since sliced bread and open source. If you feel a pressing need to pay for support ($35) there's Star Office, which is a supported version of the same basic code. OO comes bundled with Ubuntu so you don't even have to install it. http://www.sun.com/software/staroffice/ Several (otherwise deluded) Windoze users I know use OO instead of shelling out a small fortune for MSO. Nor is it a second best! Can't understand why people continue to pay good money for MSO (or put themselves on the wrong side of the law by pirating it).

It was his decision to make a dumb political gesture to holiday there. The police want their expenditure back so why should the taxpayer pay instead? http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/england...olk/7866646.stm Really illustrates the futility of all this political posturing (they're all at it!). Oh for an honest politician who tells it as it is whatever the consequences! Doubtless it will be brushed off as another "it was the right thing to do!" Spin-doctorese for I can't be arsed to explain; your tiny mind wouldn't understand anyway; I can't make a proper explanation into a useful sound-bite; and if I did you'd likely see right through the con!

This is what the government should be putting a few tens of millions into, and NOT pumping billions of our future earnings into feather-bedding the banks! http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/7862827.stm It would save the country huge launch fees for civilian and military satellite launches, provide high tech British jobs, and encourage school leavers into science. Any one of those would justify the small government grant. Huge mistake to cancel Britain's small space program back in the 1970's because some dumb civil servant decided there was no commercial purpose in it. We'd already spent the money and so been paying for that mistake ever since! Here's a chance to correct that mistake at a time when we really need those jobs. Put VAT back up to 17.5% to fund it in the short term (though Gordon seems to be able to conjure astronomic sums out of nowhere when he thinks he needs it). In the long term this investment will pay for itself many times over. Does the government have that much common sense? Of course they don't; they'd rather splurge a couple of billion (probably ten times the amount of seed capital needed here) on trying to buy a few thousand dumb votes at a local election to prop up their evaporating power base!

Not a daft question if you aren't familiar with the Internet to start with! Somebody PM'd me (a good first-stab in itself!) to ask. Here's what I replied: -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Hi ??????! Very very simple. Click on the Introduce Yourself forum. Click on the New Topic button up top left on the list of threads. Put a topic title in the Title box and type your message in the big text box. Then scroll down a way and hit the Post New Topic button right at the bottom. Ignore everything else it's just eye candy! Your new thread will appear at the top of the treads list for that particular forum. The main thing is to experiment. Don't worry about messing up, the moderators will take care of any clean-up for you. Also you can edit your own posts at any time simply by clicking on the Edit Post button underneath it, making your corrections in the message box, and then clicking on the finish edit button to upload the change. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Would that do it for you, or have I not made it clear enough somewhere?

If you knew as much about computers as you know about drinking holes you'd know just how close Mac OS X is to Linux, and how many ideas they stole! So much so that if the boot had been on the other foot the writs would be flying. At least when Microsoft sell their old wine in new bottles they try to maintain some backwards compatibility and don't regularly leave their punters high and dry with the major hardware & software changes necessary to correct *their* repeated mistakes. I suspect you've never actual tried a modern Linux distribution. Easy-to-use has a huge price tag, and appeals mainly to the easy-to-part-from-their-money.

Ubuntu is just a spruced-up Debian. Uses .deb install files in the main. Can you imagine the M$ reaction to someone taking their OS, bending it to their own preferences, and then giving it away. That's the power of open source, the GNU General Public License, and copyleft!

That was my first intro to W-I-M Linux too. But the Ubuntu CD is live too. What's more you can install it properly from the live CD without even rebooting. I have a couple of USB sticks I use to install it on other machines for people - faster than using a CD. The best way to try it out though is Wubi. This creates a virtual file system under Windows, and gives you a dual boot machine. The Linux drive is just a big NTFS file in a directory off the Windows root, and it can be un-installed from the Windows uninstaller. Wubi is on the Ubuntu CD, but if you download it then it will go on the net and download the Ubuntu image itself and install that. Obviously Wubi is a Windows program.

The problem is it's a global setting and we have a couple of open forums that don't need registration. Making this one open was pre-planned - honest it was!

Would that be the four hour faff I had re-installing a damaged copy of XP on a machine that had to be returned because of a WiFi module fault. (From the in-the-box discs and hours worth of "hotfixes", bundled applications & driver updates.) Or the twelve minute faff I had installing a bang up-to-date and fully functional copy of Ubuntu on the replacement hardware (including re-partitioning the hard drive)?

There's a far simpler reason too. That's that most Linux users are far more computer and security aware and simply don't do things that will compromise their system. You can get just about everything in source code. So it's all open to peer review - some purists still insist on compiling everything themselves. I'd also guess that may virus writers are Linux users themselves and don't have any incentive to c**p in their own back yard. Nor is there an "evil empire" attached to Linux that you'd be motivated to mount a "guerilla attack" on. And, you know that if you did, you would be much more readily traced and identified. I've been impressed recently as to just how portable binaries now are between various Linux distributions. If there is a portability issue you can be pretty confident that someone somewhere has already fixed it. I'd urge everyone to give say Ubuntu a fair try. You will probably be very pleasantly surprised at how easy it is to install and how useful the bundled software selection is. At worst you will come away with a free glimpse of what's on the other side of the fence, and at best you'll never spend another penny on legitimate software (and the constant buying of the same old rope over and over again).

The odds were very much stacked against her, but she has to be greatly admired for trying. If the clock were put back I'd guess the owners, knowing what they now do, would have given her a better hand. The town would be a much richer place with a few dozen like her. So, to rubbish her efforts is a tad disingenuous. We're all influenced by public opinion and other people's experiences, whether we admit it or not. People aren't stupid and note who reaches out to them and values their custom, and who takes their business for granted.

We've flung this forum open to guest postings for an experimental period. The reason for this is that it has many casual visitors interested in computing who may not want to become a full town website member simply to post a casual observation, but who may still have something valuable to add. The downside is that the posts now have to be pre-moderated so may take a little while to appear. We will review this in a few weeks in the light of how much value is being added against how much worthless spam has to be trashed. UPDATE (The score so far - Mr D please feel free to update my tally else it's a bit pointless) Got my first one today Guest Spam: 5 Intelligent Guest Posts: 0