Re: Tab2 @droid on droid

Amusing. Silly, but amusing.

I own, or used to own I should say, an iPod touch. I had one of the old iPod minis. They were very good devices (the touch in particular got me through many a slow day at work when wifi was available). Apple are good at design, however they are not above using conniving tricks and gotchas as part of a concerted effort to use the force of the state to crush their competition. They are using the courts to prevent a fair market. That is not justifiable in any way and I don't understand why people are continuing to claim otherwise.

Re: Tab2 @toadwarrior

Compare like with like. Opening the app drawer and comparing that with the iOS home screen is a huge con.

Also the dimensions are different, like I said, and then there's the camera, and the buttons on the side, and the status bar across the bottom, the lack of a "home" button...

The fact that it's designed to sit horizontally.

Face it, your entire premise is bunk.

Re: Tab2 @toadwarrior

Looking arond, say, Dell's website or maybe Alienware I see... nothing that looks like Apple. My little Zbox looks nothing like apple. The various cases I can buy for my home-assembled boxes look nothing like apple.

Are you trying to claim that apple invented industrial design? That's probably the statement of greatest hubris I've heard all year.

Speaking of cars, most do look very similar. The 2012 Ford Focus looks a lot like the Audi A8, which looks like the BMW 5 series, which looks more than a little bit like the Rover 75. They're all 4 door saloons, similar profiles, similar sizes, similar design features, but do you see BMW suing Ford or Audi over that? No? No. Because that would be STUPID.

Apple's entire complaint is that the Samsung Tab looks a bit like an ipad, as long as you ignore the different dimensions, the different shape and the different design features. By that merit every car manufacturer in the world should be suing every other. They don't because the functional requirements of a car force it to be within a certain range of shapes that look very similar. In the same way, a tablet has to be a certain shape to be viable. That would be a rectangle with round corners, a few buttons, a screen and a case. Apple's argument is that the samsung tab is a rectangle with round corners, a few buttons, a screen and a case.

Do you see the problem?

Possibly not, considering your entire argument seems to be that nothing good came before Apple, and everything bad is someone else's fault. That's possibly the most insane and ridiculous argument anyone can make. It's the literal definition of cultic behaviour.

If you actually place the tablets side by side (without photoshopping them) the differences are immediately obvious, not least the shape of several main features, the difference in size and the fact that it says SAMSUNG on it in bloody great letters. Only an idiot could mistake one for the other.

Re: Okay

I for one am wondering if the generic version will run on the raspberry pi. Worth checking out at least.

+ + + RECURSION DETECTED + + + REDO FROM START + + +

Re: Not calculate!!!

Tom, we can guess at its significance from surviving religious behaviours. In Europe, especially northern and western Europe, a great deal of effort (and food) was expended around the winter solstice and a great many rituals evolved around the idea of bringing back the sun and the fear that it would go away forever. It was considered to be the most dangerous and magical time of year, with the nights growing longer and the days growing shorter, darkness and death and emptiness covering the land. Winter was always thought to be the time of year when the world might end.

So fine, measurement rather than calculation but the reasons for it don't change: they wanted to know when the sun was going to come back.

Re: Reconsidering

And that changes what, precisely? He's still choosing his tastes based on whether or not somebody or some body of people to whom he is negatively predisposed are expressing a positive opinion about it. It would be like me deciding that I didn't like Star Trek because the current Russian president penned a positive review, or declaring I no longer thought positively about Blade Runner because Tony Blair liked it.

Re: Bring on the Babel fish

I'd say it was written by someone who is more used to Latin grammar than English. It's an unusual construction but it does make perfect sense.

Re: Reconsidering

So you're willing to stop liking a good film simply because someone you don't like thinks it's a good film? There's a term for that. Tip of my tongue... oh... ah yes.

"Fuckwit". Seems to cover it quite nicely really.

@sir runcible

I guess Microsoft didn't learn much from their own interview questions then, considering the hole of their own making they're rapidly falling into.

Re: Impossible to answer interview questions

The answer is actually quite simple: None.

At least there's never one around when you need one...

Re: @Anon

Maybe you've heard of these things called DVDs?

@Anon

Or we get Stargate SG1, The Venture Brothers, Game of Thrones, Futurama, Deadwood, The Wire, Sharpe, The Sopranos, House, Farscape, Firefly... the list goes on and on and on and on. What has the BBC produced in the last decade that could match that? Dr Who. Maybe a couple of documentaries, a "world class" news service that can't even get basic facts about even close European neighbours like Norway and Sweden right and then scads of mindless shite trying to compete with ITV.

Face it, your argument is lame. Other companies produce far better television for far less cost with the added benefit that I don't have to pay for them if I don't want to watch them.

And no, people "like me" haven't been whining about the BBC doing everything in house. My argument has always been that the BBC's funding is simply immoral and has always been used to fund the lavish lifestyles of a self-selected group of wannabe-kingmakers with delusions of grandeur and a belief that they're the only ones who know how the world should be run. In-house or external production doesn't change that; the fact that it's using a government-mandated levy extracted by threat of force to fund private companies is merely the latest layer of icing on the cake.

I don't watch television. To do so would require me to pay the wages of people I am fundamentally in disagreement with and I'm not prepared to do that.

Re: Boy's Toys

I call my tf101 a toy. But then I call my main computer a box and my graphics tablet a cat bed, so... yeah.

I don't get the whole problem with grown men having "toys". To assume that adults can never have anything to enjoy is a very childish way to view the world. To be an adult means knowing when you can let go and simply enjoy life - and play with your toys.

Re: oh noooooo

It isn't their money being wasted and they get paid for the time spent. No incentive to be smart about it.

Re: Case hasn't been made

Oh yes it has. The case is simple: "Shut up or we'll raise your bills and taxes again."

And then they do it anyway.

Re: I wonder what they saw that they interpreted as a "red crucifix"

A "red crucifix" and "wonderful serpents" are both very good descriptions of highly active Aurora Borealis, which form all sorts of marvellous shapes. If they're strong enough you'll begin to see coherent plasma formations taking on the form of pillars, crosses, humanoid figures, chalices and all sorts of fancy things. Serpents, which were traditionally sinuous, flying creatures and not necessarily snakes, would be fairly run of the mill.

A large CME impacting earth would generate very strong, very southerly aurora.

Additional evidence: the magnetic north pole was much closer to Europe in the 700s and 800s AD (it's moved quite a bit since then) which means that aurora would be more southerly in Europe to begin with, which would explain the serpents - bright glowing, snaking shapes in the sky would be seen as serpents and the flying, dragon-like "worm" and might even have been related back to the norse mythology of Jormungand.

So the question becomes, was that CME powerful enough to generate more coherent shapes? If it were at the level of the Carrington Event (look it up) then it could well have been responsible for both the sky sightings and the C14 increase.

Re: It's Verity Stob

You mean placing it in Bootnotes, the way it was written, the location of his VC company and the obviously implausible content of the article itself wasn't enough for you?

Re: Large loads to GEO

A space-station or three up there would be fantastic.

Re: "Er, Microsoft? Multi = more than 2"

I thought it was one two many lots.

Re: Vandenberg?

Well, it's possible to do a 270-something degree plane change and get your satellite orbiting in the right direction before you boost it up, it just takes a lot of fuel, like I said.

Bubba is disappointed that he can't make an enormous bbq out of that rocket stage.

Re: Vandenberg?

You can launch to GEO from vandenberg, it just requires a lot more fuel for all changes you'll be making to your orbital plane before you get there. If fuel were no object then you could launch to geo from the north pole, and I'm sure they'll start doing that once they've invented a Fuel Tank of Holding.

Re: Crichton

Does it involve night arrows?

Re: I don't hate my users

Given the way you post here it wouldn't surprise me if you frog-marched them all into a small concrete room and screamed at them for an hour about your new security policy before sending them off to the daily waterboarding session.

Re: Deja vu from recent Reg headlines

Or parodying people who say Jobs was in the way.

Or both.

@Ken Hagan Re: If that's so, then why

I didn't see your post before, the righteous fury was clouding my eyes. :)

You're right, I guess I was probably overstating the password thing. Claiming X is the single biggest vector is a silly thing to do and I'll try not to do it in future. It's still an issue though, not just in office environments, but anywhere people use complex and hard to memorise passwords.

Re: If that's so, then why

If by saying I wasn't up to the job you mean I wasn't complete up my own arse then, yes, you're right. I lacked sufficient rectocranial insertion to survive the world of software development.

No, I wrote good code. It works, does its job and is secure. I was not the best but I was good. I left because a) people like you kept telling me how to do things despite their claimed solutions being obviously stupid and broken and b) I get better money making holes in peoples walls and filling them with copper, with the added bonus of setting my own hours and not having to deal with (a) at all.

My assertions are no more beardless than yours: you may believe that your complete knowledge of your own experience makes your claims superior to my own but that simply demonstrates further your apparent inability to understand that other people disagree with you for reasons other than being stupid lusers and XKCD fans. In fact you may be surprised to learn that there are people who have had far more experience of this than you. You're arguing with some of them right now and making yourself look like an arrogant cock in the process.

Re: If that's so, then why

"you mean you guys actually let random people on the Internet sit there and beat on your login prompts with brute-force attempts?"

Well if anyone had actually said that you might have a point.

Again you're assuming you know everything.

Re: If that's so, then why

So we reach the crux of it, which is that you just don't like anything that refers to XKCD and your'e so determined to hate everything related to Randall Munroe's "opus" that you reject, out of hand, eminently sensible and workable solutions to the whole password problem with the same elitist bullshitting attitude you always seem to have on these forums.

Now here's the affix: I don't work in anything directly related to IT these days. I got out of it, in part, because of people like you throwing your not inconsiderable weight around every chance you got, insulting everyone who wasn't uyou as "luser" waste of space morons who obviously have to be nannied through everything - even when it wasn't true. In fact especially when it wasn't true. You are an arrogant little blowhard who has a little bit of power over his domain (oh ho ho) and refuses to accept that maybe, just maybe you might be wrong sometimes.

What's the biggest single security hole passwords have these days? People writing them down. Why do they write them down? Because they can't remember them. What do we want people to do with their passwords? Remember them and not write them down. On that score alone the regular language phrase is superior to the cryptic nonsense string of characters. People are able to remember phrases because they are semantic. They contain meaning, and meaning is the glue that makes memory stick.

And in terms of entropy it's a winner again. An 8 character password is easier to brute-force than a 32 character one no matter what characters it's made up from. There is no difference between the strings abababab and nGl04$sh when you are brute-forcing and if you have access to hash tables there's no amount of security that can keep you out over even a short period.

So it comes back to blocking that one major hole: the user. Your solution ensures that there will always be a human-readable copy of some large portion of your userbase's passwords available on handy little pieces of paper. The regular language solution provides a way to close that hole.

So as far as I can tell the only reason you have for rejecting it is that you didn't come up with the idea and Monroe did. Which says plenty about you and little about the idea itself.

Mineral oil has a flash point of 170°C and a boiling point of, I think, 310°C. It will burn, but by the time it starts burning the rest of your data centre is already so far gone that a regular air-cooled system would have been reduced to twisted metal and ash. In fact it may well preserve your hardware against fire and subsequent water damage.

Possibly.

Re: In fact it is not

Okay, so how do they enter their strong password made up of numbers and letters and a limit set of non-alphanumeric characters in a field with masked input without typos?

Re: Desktop performance is not surprising

What tablet would this be? Sounds like an ideal candidate for a project I've been pondering.

Re: Deja Vu

You're mixing up positive and negative rights. Negative rights are rights that exist regardless of regulation (and are usually curtailed by it). They are everything that require no other person to be deprived in order to exist, such as the right to own property (the actual ownership of property is a separate issue) and the right to free speech. Nobody has to be prevented from speaking to allow me to speak, for instance. They require no action to exist and require a negative action - an action against them - to be curtailed.

Positive rights require one party to be deprived in some way in order for another party to enjoy a "right" such as the right to not be offended that is the essence of all hate speech legislation, or the right to force others to provide access to their property regardless of their opinion about what you want to do with it. Those rights must be created by regulation, otherwise they wouldn't exist - they require "positive action" to exist in the first place.

Re: Remember this is not intended for Joe Bloggs users.

@AC

I don't know about UK procedures but I'm given to understand that the US armed forces employ a three-part procedure to destroy their data. First they format the drives, then they cut the drives into pieces with an industrial cutter, then they pile them up with a few cases of thermite and throw a match. You know, just in case.