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Scootah

Member since: Aug 9th, 2006

Scootah's Latest Comments

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Download Squad15 Comments

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Holla is an open-source Campfire alternative you can run on your own server (Download Squad)

Nov 9th 2010 6:28PM We're looking to consolidate from Communicator/MSN/Skype/etc to something like camp fire - but video and voice chat (and transcript retention) is a must for us. Any pointers, even as a paid for solution - would be most appreciated.

Google faces landmark fine in Britain for 'gross invasion of privacy' (Download Squad)

Nov 8th 2010 1:22AM When you broadcast information, I think you lose the right to be outraged if someone is listening.

Because that's what happened. People were broadcasting their information and google heard it. They weren't wardriving, they weren't breaking the ludicrously insecure encryption used by so many people. They were in effect just listening to the broadcasts of people who hadn't made even the most trivial efforts to keep their information private.

I can only imagine the people who are upset about this, printing their email and banking details on a shirt, wearing that shirt in public, and demanding that anyone who's security video caught their details be charged for breaching their privacy.

Microsoft attacks OpenOffice.org and open source with a damning video (Download Squad)

Oct 17th 2010 11:31PM Reality is that Microsoft Office has a MUCH lower total support cost than open office. Anyone who's supported a reasonable sized user base using Open Office should know that it's true. Render failures for non Open Office documents, user training and new user time to adjust to the unfamiliar software adds right up. And while it's not fair - Microsoft Office is faster on Windows because of the way pre-loads and integration are done.

It depends on the size of your user pool and the nature of your business if the support cost will exceed the license costs - but for large and enterprise offices running Microsoft OS SOE's - the only reason to not use Microsoft Office is if you've got some kind of beef with Microsoft.

Escaping the corporate or educational firewall, or 'how to play FarmVille from work' (Download Squad)

Jul 7th 2010 12:22AM Assuming that your network admin actually has budget and instructions to secure the network, I'd argue that If any of these other than RDP/SSH tunnelling out work - you should be asking your network admin some hard questions.

If RDP or SSH tunneling work - I'd argue that your network admin is either lazy, insufficiently resourced or leaving that particular path out for himself - or in need of some more hard questions.

I white list all external port access, management ports out only to our external infrastructure and web access only through our virus scanner and proxy, and restrict user agents so that only the SOE approved browsers can get that far.

For the vast majority of our users the proxy blocks everything fun or dangerous and doesn't allow browsing to an IP outside of our network at all.

We're pretty responsive to business purposed requests for access to stuff we've blocked and we drop a lot of restrictions between 11 and 2 so that people on their lunch break can do some internet banking or read the news or whatever and we don't get too many complaints.

Portable Apps platform 2.0 coming soon with loads of improvements (Download Squad)

Jul 1st 2010 10:30PM Liberkey's feature set really sets it above portableapps for me. PortableApps has a very nice skin - but that's about where it stops being the winner.

Liberkey has as anthony mentioned, substantially more apps, but it also has the facillity to one click remap extension bindings to it's applications, and one click update it's entire app suite - which puts it substantially ahead for me.

Buzz was just for starters -- here comes Google Me (look out Facebook, lock up your daughters, etc.) (Download Squad)

Jun 29th 2010 9:10PM Look, I'd love a google me solution that tightly integrated with gmail, gtalk, google voice, google reader, blogger and google buzz and had a great interface. I never used Orkut much because it was clunky and not very good. But Google have the potential to do something cool in this space. Certainly better then Facebook's offerings.

But arguing that Google is in any way scared of Facebook is just naive. Google sees a revenue generation channel and they're pursuing it. That's all. Facebook doesn't threaten google's market in any significant way - they just happen to have demonstrated that there's a market niche that google can probably grab a chunk of.

The suggestions of Google being afraid of Facebook probably come from the same people who think Apple's MarCap is a more reasonable gauge of business success then Microsoft's annual profits.

BPI sends Google cease-and-desist order: 'Hey, stop indexing MP3s!' (Download Squad)

Jun 27th 2010 11:00PM I want google to comply, above and beyond. Redirect the primary search terms that would go to those results to a take down notification.

usher omg (feat. will i.am) - 0 results.

Google would like to take you to information about this artist, but the BPI, a representative group who represent the artist and their label in litigation against third party service providers has requested that we filter these searches. In the spirit of a neutral internet, we have disabled the most common searches that lead to material that BPI found contentious. We hope Usher doesn't see a sales drop now that he's invisible to our search engine.

San Francisco becomes first US city to pass radiation warning law for cell phones (Download Squad)

Jun 23rd 2010 10:52PM If I was a phone vendor in Sanfrancisco - I'd be looking into making a point of this. 'This phone has a SAR of 0.79 W/kg. That's a lifetime emission rate of almost as much radiation as you were exposed to by taking your microwave out of the box!'

What a crock of crap.

Amazon leverages low-tech FedEx to fix the high-tech problem of data transfer across the Internet (Download Squad)

Jun 17th 2010 7:34PM I spent almost 10 years from the mid/late 90's onwards working for a hosting company who is in the top 5 largest in the world. We offered this solution with Zip Drives, CD's, DVD's and tapes for all of that time and it was consistently used throughout that period.

I left the company a few years ago, but the week I left, we had to find a USB zip drive that we could get working, because some customer had been more willing to pay our hourly rate to upload content from a zip drive than to upload the data themselves, or even upgrade to less antiquated technology.

Lots of people have money and technology requirements - but neither the skills nor the motivation to upgrade their local environment.

Backing up your brain is becoming a reality (Download Squad)

Jun 8th 2010 9:05PM I love Richard Morgan - but his view of the universe is VERY dystopian. To quote him - "Society is, always has been and always will be a structure for the exploitation and oppression of the majority through systems of political force dictated by an élite, enforced by thugs, uniformed or not, and upheld by a willful ignorance and stupidity on the part of the very majority whom the system oppresses."

Morgan's view of the world and the ethical challenges with immortality can be briefly summed up as 'Ethics are for suckers, why would the super rich share immortality?' - Hamilton's writing has a very different tone but I think it's much closer to the reality of technological progression. At least in terms of how he views memory backups and continuous existance through clones or digital realities.