Anthrax fans at work obviously

Remember kids, Fight 'Em 'Til you Can't :)

Another person who owes him my childhood

Vic20, C64 and Atari ST - three things my childhood would have been less without and almost certainly what lead me to my career in IT.

These are the "toys" that today's children are missing out on - science thats fun.

Jack T, thank you so much.

PS I never knew you were a holocaust survivor...

Isn't it obvious?

What they are talking about is a combination of:

1) Steam type pay and download - XBL already has this.

2) A memory transfer card type thing, the blank device will be signed by your XBL account by inserting it in your machine and "formatting it" (which will apply your PKI key to it) and then a retail outlet will copy your purchased game onto it. The device is then connected back to your xbox when you get home and uploaded/decrypted to your hard disk. Maybe the device can even be signed in shop by you logging into a terminal with your XBL account userid and pw?

#2 being the alternative for people with no decent internet connection.

There won't be packagin, boxes, expensive duplication distribution etc etc

Just like iTunes or Kindle... its really nothing new and not a great leap forward for MS.

The only question mark is how big the transfer device will be - its not going to be a "memory card" its going to be a SSD I'd have thought.

The issue will come when you are a non-internet user and you own 100 odd games - clearly the hard disk won't hold that many, so you need to swap them around, which means you always have to have the storage device - which probably means buying more than one.

The storage device won't be for 90% of the user base, just the non-wired.

Retail sales will bomb...

In answer to the question how do you give a game to someone for a present - you buy them MS points cards... just like now or with Itunes or Kindle...

For a tech savy crowd you really are a bit slow with this one.

PS the 2nd hand market will of course die, but you knew that was coming one way or another didn't you?

No Tom Baker fans out there?

Seeds of Doom anyone?

These are obviously from the Krynoid!

What about backups?

So I back my customer database up and after 3 years of Fred Bloggs being a customer I am forced to forget him.... from all of my backup tapes? Really?

What about from my accounts system? Suddenly I've got loads of invoices with no customer details - HMRC are going to be cool with that? Really?

I understand the principle and in theory its good news for users - I mean every damned website I buy stuff from wants waaay too much "account information" for a simple financial transaction, I'd dearly love to go clean up and prevent their next website breach taking my details, but...

This stuff obvioiusly comes (being EU) from the lunatics on the continent who are paranoid to the extreme about "privacy" but this isn't realistic to implement is it?

I see we've gone from this story to the actual release of the draft law on El Reg now... so guess all the complaints in this story here will be ignored.

Meh

Looks about as useful as the dreadful Scalextric MotoGP that they tried a while back...

Instability just ruins it.

To be honest, of all the "big business" Apple should be most able to fix this problem.

Their product is marketed as a premium product, so increasing their prices to ensure ethical production won't damage their market, it probably will increase it.

The market space they pitch in doesn't care about penny pinching... unlike some of the others people are saying also have dodgy manufacturing workplaces. A strategy of "fair trade" would be a tag that would boost their credibility to the middle class - the same people who pay twice as much for coffee.

Unless of course I've completely misunderstood their marketing for the latest iteration of Apple as a company....

Equally of course, exposure of dodgy labour practices will have a negative effect for exactly the same reasons..

Bit hard to get their heads around I suppose...

The idea that "the people" should be allowed to steer the country in other way than putting an X on a piece of paper once every four years (and probably not even bothering to read what that X might mean).

Powerful paid for lobbyists and newspaper editors can choose the agenda, why shouldn't we?

Oh hang on, that might lead to a wholly different world for MP's... not sure that should be allowed.

Maybe it could be modified to allow people to pay a bung via paypal when you upvote an idea, perhaps that would help filll the trough for the pigs to feed on.... rekon they'd be happy if that could be made to be.

Only 43%?

"Forty-three percent of companies had actually experienced a security incident resulting from internet use"

And presumably the other 57% were either lying or weren't connected to the internet or not actually capable of detecting issues....

This of course is not the same question as "Have you ever had a computer security problem caused by using Social Networking?"

Of course the damned connection is a problem, but short of no connection (if your business can afford to operate like that across its entirity ) you just have to develop polices and deploy technology to limit the impact.

URL filtering is one aspect that can help, blocking social networking is unlikely to yield genuine network security technical advantages (short of people talking about stuff they shouldn't, but hey, they can do that outside of work too!) but I can see how some would say it has little business value - not the same as being able to google for work stuff for example. Knowing that your friends (as opposed to colleagues or business contacts) have just written some trivial crap or that Arsenal have signed a new player is pretty worthless work wise....

...as maybe could be said about me writing this :D

Leave the motorsport news for a proper motorsport site...

Festival of Speed is not held on the Goodwood race circuit... the Revival is, but not FOS.

Bricks and mortar retail is more expensive then e-commerce?

Really? OMG what a relevation!

Re Currys and PC World both existing, often next to each other - they are fixing that - the stores are getting merged now. Local to me two have already gone that way, so they are fixing that.

Whilst its obvious they are more expensive compared to online, I shop there when I need something in a hurry and probably most people do exactly the same. I'd go elsewhere but DSG have annihiliated all independent opposition by under cutting them... which probably tells you that the independents, if there were any, also would be too expensive compared to Amazon etc

So in summary, big stores trump little stores and websites trump big bricks and mortar. Obvious from ten years ago really and only a matter of time before the race to the bottom is complete.

Urrah!

In a time where people call bonking overpaid footballers and talentless pub singers "heroes" it is fantastic to see a tribute to a genuine hero who's bravery almost certainly will be forever remembered.

I can't wait to go and see the statue.

Urrah!

I think I must have worked in IT too long...

...couldnt we just outsource the whole defence of the UK?

In fact an outsourced, leveraged EU defence force would prove to be excellent price-performance.

Outsourcing is always better value *ahem*

Aussies: Can't play cricket and can't stop drink driving either

Looking at those stats, if you could stop the silly bastids from being drunk, not wearing seatbelts and driving off of the road into the scenery, that would tackle 34% of their fatalities.

Seems odd to target phones when quite clearly drunk people is a far bigger target.

Its not even unpolice-able because the stats show over half the accidents occur in urban environments - not like its Bruce 2000km away from the nearest police station crashing into a kangeroo whilst drunk on moonshine.

Serendipity?

I like the way this article has a banner down the side linking to ElReg's roundup of cheapo mobile phones.

I'd like to see the review reopened with a test for vulnerability to "SMS of Death" :-)

Anyway, what are the chances of getting a firmware update on a sub £100 cheapo phone?

Hell, my Nokia E50 had a fatal bug from practically day zero that Nokia never fixed and that was a flagship business phone.

I can see SMS of Death becoming a top playground jolly jape fairly soon...

So the best DSLR of the year was...

...the most expensive one.

Well, that's incisive analysis.

So Wikileaks is partially in France?

Someone ought to point that out to Government spokesman and budget minister François Baroin who said

"If there was such a thing as a French WikiLeaks, we would have to be inflexible (in dealing with it),"

François you failtard.

How is a T45 useles??

Its got all of the capabilities of the T42 only in theory the sensor platform and air defence system is more modern. Ok, so the usual suspects have some remedial work to do, but lets face it, all modern weapon systems are the same and if you can name one that isn't then you just don't know about the subject well enough and have only read the sales and marketing blurb.

I'm not quite sure what all you armchair admirals understand about naval warfare since WW2 - its not about some stupid videogame where you have some super invulnerable mega ships costing 1000000 resource points each.

A T45 has plenty of value for the RN's normal peactime role and an important role if/when war fighting is required.

Its not going to be required to fight Jutland II.

Hmmmm

Hang on, you are saying that big customers won't buy stuff from startups...

Let me see if I can work that out... oh yes, sussed it, I'm not going to invest millions and bet my organisations security on a business with no track record of success.

You need to look like a credible supplier if you want to sell to the big boys. In the corporate/government world we want to see your customer logo slide if we are going to be convinced you have credibility.

Think that took about a nano-second for me to work out, suprised someone supposedly so deep in Checkpoint and Juniper couldnt work that out.

Oooooh another security TLA

You can't detect something that you don't know you are looking for... really. Glad this made the news, we'd have never have guessed it otherwise.

This might be useful advice if someone had the answer, but they don't... all they do is wheel out another pattern matching security system thats out of date before they've even cashed your cheque.

Still, at least they've invented a new acronym, I am sure that will play a useful part in executive briefings soon.

Forget "Lives of Others"

How about the "Baader-Meinhof Komplex" - in that you see them introduce computer database backed ID cards to help them hunt down the Marxist threat to West Germany!

Germans (normally) are kinda touchy about personal privacy and preventing the state (or even employers)being able to "spy" on them.

If you had ever tried to run IT environments in Germany from outside of Germany, you'll know exactly what I mean...

I'm going to agree with the article.

Its all perfectly true. Two weeks of unadualterated hell and rubbish advice all trying to get my wife's HTC Desire working.

If it was just her, she'd have sent it back to the shop and at one point, I was almost at the same place too.

The damned thing is just like trying to run homebrew Linux and there's a reason why the peguin shaggers haven't taken over the world... this stuff is just not slick enough to be mass marketable to non-techies, but thats not how they sell it.

Sure I'd not buy an i-anything just on principle, but equally, I'd not buy another one of these either. Maybe unlike Nokia they will get their shit together in a few years, but i doubt it somehow.

I get it!

I was going to type "so go on then oh cyber-security god, tell us how we do it cos nobody else has remotely a clue" then i re-read his comment:

"the internet has made the threat of espionage by foreign countries higher than ever before, but insisted it is "relatively straightforward" to block attempts to steal data."

The answer - disconnect your sh1t from the internet!

Why didn't we think of that before.... doh

Why not...

...buy some Russian helicopters... rugged, cheap, modified for and proven in Afganistan.

The enemy this time around don't have British/American surface to air missiles and consequently would get proper chewed up just like the Muj did before the West bailed them out (much ultimately to their own undoing of course!)

Then again, if we won't even buy US equipment because some politician's mates at the Garrick club have directorships of UK defence contractors, then certainly they wouldn't do some as radical as buying Russian kit!

Your flexible fiend

The rest of the money probably went to the credit card companies.... who almost certainly will be the ones loosing out on this.

I know its hard to find sympathy for them but...

Handguns?

What kind of a moron is shooting at proper soldiers with a handgun?

"On the battlefield a pistol only needs one bullet" as the Russians say...

Even Paris aint that stoopid

Lag Schmag

I'll bet the "test" was done over 100mb ethernet, or maybe even faster.

This is insane, assuming that the internet will be able to deliver the bandwidth? Good business model there then... "yeah our bit works but the vast chunk of it we don't control lets us down"

This is no different to streaming video and we all know how poor that is day to day, but at least we aren't trying to control the action in streamed video. This will make traditional gaming lag seem like something we're perfectly happy with!

What the poster forgot to mention...

...was that funnily enough cross platform code execution isn't actually possible.

Like duh

Always a tricky one...

...trying to find something suitable to do with people who you arrest not actually engaged in a terrorist act. Stopping them in a taxi to the airport would have given a rather more convincing version of the story, as it stands a lot of what went on was speculation in the eyes of the court.

As mooted, a fair version of British Justice has been seen to be done and maybe that in itself is a bigger victory than convictions themselves. A Daily Mail style field troika and firing squad would have only served to harden opinion that we just want to persecute Muslims...

Over price Amerikan junk

Should have bought some Su-33 instead really.... the Russians fly these without giant aircraft carriers and catapults and they are pretty capable... well, capable of bombing 3rd world countries with little in the way of air defence which lets face it is all we are ever going to do with these anyway.

Oh hang on we can't buy them because our government is having a stupid pissing contest with Moscow.

Perhaps the Chinese will sell them to us instead.

Paris, cos she has see many an Amerikan cock up before

@my mate dave

You are 100% correct in your writing there.

Whilst most in this discussion thread work in IT, some of us only have a server and four users to look after and others have just a little more complex environment, demanding customers, complex projects and even more complex contracts.

Paris because she has just one server and four users to look after too and also could probably "knock up a system for the NHS in five minutes"

Hmmm

Dunno why you lot are struggling to work this one out... SSL offload network appliances have been around for donkey's years. Funnily enough anyone running large load balanced server farms uses this and doesn't just kick the arse out of their servers.

Oh and you also probably need to use the SSL offload devices in order to load balance any kind of application that requires session persistence anyway...

Anyway, surely the Gmail problem is resolved by having the user select in their profile if they want to use SSL or not. If they select this option then the system will never allow them to drop into unencrypted mode mid session- which is actually the problem here... hmmm that sounds quite simple...

Peace

Hmmm funny you should say that AC, I too have thought the best hope for peace in this world is to divide up the military firepower equally amongst nations.

My own personal idea was to do this at an individual level.... I have always fancied my very own SS-18 as the ultimate deterrent to the local kids who like to throw stones at my car....