Posts by Rich

No

Re: Roly Gross'

"Then there's no pretence, you can jump on that plane but you'll have to sell your car when you got back"

No no no no no!!!!!

That's EXACTLY the thinking that I was attacking. If you really want to make a difference, then sell your car anyway, regardless of whether you take that flight or not.

Anything else is simply doing the absolute minimum you can get away with (in fact, it's LESS than the minimum) in order to keep within your eco-budget.

It's no better than directly killing an endangered species and selling off its furs (or whatever) and saying "it's ok, because there are still some left". That's not the point. You shouldn't be killing them in the first place.

Actually....

My girlfriend is Welsh (when she wants to be!) and she thought it was funny.

Actually, she's from Cardiff, which I gather is not "real Welsh" - apparently the "real Welsh" discriminate against and generally dislike people from Cardiff more so than they do the English; you know the tricks - talking perfectly good English until an Englishman walks in and then suddenly deciding that Welsh is the language of the moment and refusing to speak anything else!

...or is that just my imagination and racial prejudice coming through? :-)

Anti-Virus is dead

While I agree completely that the concept of "anti-virus" signature-based protection is seriously flawed, you have to ask yourself who uses this anyway?

I know of only one OS that makes use of AV software, and we all know which one that is. The only reason anyone runs AV software on any other OS is to protect Windows machines that are sitting behind it on the network, or to stop annoying (but otherwise harmless) traffic from compromised Windows machines outside of the network!

For example, I have run a small server that has sat on the internet 24 hours a day, for the last 2 or 3 years. It doesn't need AV software chewing up processor time. It doesn't need anti-root kit software running. It doesn't need anti-anything_else software running. All it needs is some decent packet filter rules and a sensible approach to running the services that it does (web, email etc). It has never been successfully attacked. Ever. It runs OpenBSD. Could I make this claim if it ran (say) Windows? I somehow doubt it.

So yes, sig-based AV is indeed "dead" (was it ever "alive"?), and it is indeed akin to plastering over an open wound, The obvious answer is not to use different tools though. The obvious answer is to remove the systems that are vulnerable and which need this huge effort to keep them from being attacked in the first place! The problem is not the tools. The problem is the OS.

What a nonesense!

So, if you are a trademark holder, you're now supposed to spend all your time looking at new applications (of which there are thousands every day) just in case someone infringes your mark.

And if you are applying for a new trademark, you'll probably get it regardless, with the possibility that it actually infringes someone else's trademark, which means that you're at risk of having it challenged at some time in the future.

And for this, the "IP" office will charge you the same (or probably more!) for their "service".

So not only are businesses expected to work as unpaid tax collectors, they are now also expected to work as unpaid trademark officials too!

What a shower this country is!

Choosing your annoyances ...errr ....I mean ads

"We want our users to be able to accept and choose what type of advertising they engage in."

In that case, I'll go for the "none" option, thanks.

Correct approach?

Why not apply the classic security solution? That is, the "key" should be based on :

- Something you have (a physical thing)

- Something you know (typically a password)

The "something you have" has been very much undersold. I understand one of the major banks (Barclays?) is starting to issue hardware keys (I'm guessing they are on the lines of a standard VPN random number thing) to customers for use on the web. These things are cheap, and though I am in no way a security expert, I'm guessing they are pretty secure and very very difficult to crack.

I've never quite understood why more use isn't made of the classic hardware dongle; the sort you stick in the parallel port (remember those?) or USB port. The security of these things has increased greatly over the years, and if more use was made of them, I'm sure their security would increase even further through investment by those with a vested interest in keeping their software (or whatever) out of the hands of those that shouldn't have it. If (say) Microsoft had issued dongles with each version of Windows they have sold/pushed, I wonder what the piracy rates would be? Nothing like what they are at the moment, I would guess. Ok, dongles cost a bit of money, but economies of scale would make the additional cost negligible.

Instead, they mess about with trying to identify your PC by pulling in serial numbers and other such nonsense, with all the problems that incurs when someone replaces a hard drive or a graphics card. A separate hardware dongle would cleanly eliminate these problems.

And, of course, you can store stuff on a dongle, like security keys and passwords and code (!) etc etc. Indeed there's nothing to stop you including a level of computing power into them (incredibly useful); they are much more than the simple "yes/no" devices they were years ago.

Dongles - you know it makes sense! :-)

What about the rest?

"Figures from IDC, in May 2007, show Linux accounting for 12.7 per cent of the server market by revenue compared to Windows with 38.8 per cent of the market. Most of the remainder is Unix, although IBM mainframe still has a share."

"Unix" is a pretty vague term. If you divide down that remaining 48.5%, you will find a good number of BSD installations. For the rest of the world out there that seem to constantly forget about the freely available BSDs, they are a significant force in the server market. They are also technically superior and more robust than both Linux and (obviously) Windows!

...and in the open source corner...

MythTV anyone?

Mmmmm.......

This assumes that the iPlayer is going to be so massively successful that the whole internet infrastructure will collapse under the volume of traffic that it will generate.

If this is not the case, (and I rather suspect it won't come close), then I fail to see what the ISPs' arguments are for trying to screw cash out of the BBC. They don't get anything from YouTube for streaming their content. They don't get get cash from BitTorrent sites. They don't get anything from Google, or Yahoo, or (indeed) the "normal" BBC web site. Why? Well, despite these services / sites generating huge amounts of traffic, the ISPs know they wouldn't get anywhere!

The ISPs clearly see the iPlayer as an easy target (it's publicly funded and it's on their home turf) and so are wanting to hold the BBC to ransom over it. This all sounds entirely without justification.

Excellent!

That only leaves about 9 million other H264 patents to negotiate then :-)

Patent?

How can anyone have a patent on an interactive touch screen keyboard?

This sort of thing has been the stuff of novels and films since the dawn of sci-fi. Watch any Star Trek episode - it's all there.

Non-Windows

It will be interesting to see how the Beeb are going to swing this. I don't use Windows. I don't use Linux (and if I DID, which version would I need?). I use OpenBSD.

As a licence payer, should I be entitled to a service on my OpenBSD-running laptop? Unless the final iPlayer is open source, it's going to be impossible to even start to make this feasible.

And how are you going to open source MS's DRM? Indeed, does it make sense to open source ANY DRM?

Mmmm... a knotty one, that.

A couple of points

1/

"[...description of fruiteful complaint / resolution scenario...]

That's what you'd get with most IT companies."

Is it??? Not in my experience!!! You must have been very very lucky in the past. I EXPECT IT companies (and esp. telecoms companies) to be expensive, unhelpful, unreliable, useless, and lots of other words starting in "un"...

2/

I gave up using other people's email systems a LONG time ago. I have never found one yet that actually works reliably over an extended period of time. As for "free" email - well, you get what you pay for. If you want reliable email, run your own server. It's the only way forward

3/

If you are using POP to download your email, why don't you set it up to automatically delete the email from the server? That's normal POP usage procedure. Or doesn't Google let you do this?

Cookies

I stopped using Ask years ago when I realised how many cookies the damn thing tried to install on my PC. MUCH more than from Google, from what I remember.

I don't allow any cookies from Google anyway, so if they do collect any stats from me, it is only for single, unconnected, searches which I'm not concerned about.

I think it's changed now, but all the links Ask showed used to be redirected from their servers, rather than being direct, so they could track which of the results you actually followed-up. As far as I know, Google have never done this (except for the adword links, but that's to be expected)

I'm not saying Google are the nice fluffy consumer-friendly bunch they would like us all to believe, but pot, meet kettle.

Still Buggy?

So, have Intel sorted out any of the bugs in the Core Duo, some of which are "interesting" (for "interesting", read "errr ....I'll try something else, thanks")

http://www.geek.com/images/geeknews/2006Jan/core_duo_errata__2006_01_21__full.gif

...of course...

...you could also look into using a cheap off-the-shelf platform and use some of the plethora of free open source stuff that will sort out your traffic shaping, QOS handling, caching servers, access policy / restriction handling etc etc.

Especially for a smaller business, it could save a bundle compared to buying from the likes of Cisco / MS / Clearswift....

Extortion

...and a $250,000 fine on a charge of "mailing threatening communications with the intent to extort"

Are you sure they don't work for the RIAA?

What the?.....

In a statement, Google told The Reg: "While we regret the German court's decision, it will in no way affect our ability to continue to provide web email to our users in Germany. Our German users will continue to use 'Google Mail' and enjoy the same experience as users of Gmail worldwide."

So, what the F**** are google making all this fuss for then if the decision doesn't actually make a blind bit of difference???

W******!!!

Not so obvious

I have to disagree with the earlier post. Why should the rest of the world change their plans and adjust their lifestyle (eg - avoid that trip into town on Tuesday because you don't want to be photographed) to suite a single commercial company?

Who should have priority here?

The comparison with road works is not valid - Road works are just annoying and delay you. They don't actually invade your privacy.

Is this good?

Is ZFS case-sensitive? If so, it would be a great improvement on HFS and would mean that the standard unix tools actually work correctly instead of getting confused over whether they think a file exists or it doesn't depending on whether or not Apple have got round to hacking that particular util to make it case-insensitive aware.

Oh, and if it would not randomly change the case of a filename from lower to upper case then that would be dandy too!

God I HATE my Mac!

Dear Windows Users...

...save yourself some grief. Ignore Safari.

Some Apple people will tell you it's the best thing since ...well ...since best things were invented! But then again, these same people will tell you that the Apple UI is also the best thing bla bla bla ....and it most certainly is not; it has some glaring deficiencies and some extremely annoying "features".

I agree with an earlier post - the only time I used Safari was to download Firefox. Actually, if I'd been thinking, I'd have probably been better off using wget.I can't comment on whether Safari crashes (I've not used it enough), but it certainly lacks any features like ad blocking, script blocking, proper cookie control, etc etc.

Why would you use anything other than Firefox on the Mac? Doesn't make sense.

Republishing?

Hang on a minute....

Vodafone are downloading web pages to their servers, messing them about and then (maybe) adding advertising to them...

...and then REPUBLISHING them to the handset user.

Errr.... isn't their a copyright issue here? Most web sites (pretty much all the commercial ones, and a lot of non-commercial ones) specifically disallow republishing of their material unless you have their express permission.

Innovation?

"Our customers are very excited about the freedom and amazing sound quality of iTunes Plus."

...rather than the DRM'd crappy sound quality of standard iTunes then? :-)

So, after ....oooo ....how many years?.... we've finally come full circle back to good ol' CD ease-of-use and quality then? How "innovative" and "new".

Turning back the clock

An interesting line of attack. However....

1/ None of the code in presently question is covered by GPL3 (it's covered by GPL2 at best)

2/ Some people who presently release code covered by the GPL have said that they will not use GPL3 (Linus T has said as much regarding the Linux kernel), and so the v3 clause in question will never apply.

3/ You can't apply a licence agreement retrospectively so even if all the code in question suddenly moved over to GPL3, it would not effect any of the code presently being released by Novel. So, in order to close the loophole, all MS/Novel have to do is make another agreement (post GPL3) that DOES include an expiry date or whatever is needed to plug the hole, and issue the new agreement with subsequent Suse releases.

Some things never change

I seem to remember a survey done by Fujitsu some years (~10) ago.

They concluded that something like 75% of all stored data (in whatever form; computer, paper files, whatever) was effectively useless because it was either incomplete or wrong or the cost and difficulty of retrieving the data far outweighed the actual value of it.

Windows has always done this!

Windows has ALWAYS taken ages to copy or delete files. Goodness knows why it does, but it's certainly not a new problem.

I know of no other OS that has such problems handling files, killing processes, communicating over a network, logging off, or shutting down. All these things seem to stall it at one time or another; I mean, WHY can it take Windows ages to shut down? For goodness sake - it's easy - all it has to do is pull the bloody plug!

Basically, it's shite.

Do you think...

Do you reckon Dubya has a Tony Blair version then? :-)

Duh!

"Using BITS to download malicious files is a clever trick because it bypasses local firewalls..."

But surely, you have an EXTERNAL firewall protecting your local network from the outside world, no? Even if it's just the one in your ADSL router.

You DO have (and use) a firewall in your router, no?

What is it with computers?

What is it that makes everyone (well, big corporations with a bottom line to worry about, anyway) think that a shoving a computer into someone's hands is the answer to world poverty/hunger/education/whatever?

I vaguely remember some stupid campaign a few years ago along the same lines.

I can just imagine that if I was a sitting in the middle of Africa, naked and starving to death, I would be thinking "what I need right now is a laptop! Yep, a computer would definitely solve all my problems. I don't want a job, or land or a roof over my head. Oh no - a computer for me! Oh, and if it had some really cool software like (say) MS's latest version of its toy OS, then that would really make my day."

But we've been here before.....

Isn't this exactly what the UK choccie manufacturers fought for 27 years for?

This is why the chocolate you get here in the UK is ...well ....not at nice as the stuff you get in Euroland.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/678141.stm

Yum!

I'm lost for words

"This is a little bit silly: just name the installer something else, and Vista lets it through," Chess said.

Well, quite!

So if I want my new virus to bypass Windows' "security" (I use the term loosely to the point of ridicule), all I have to do is name it "MS Office" maybe, or "explorer"? It beggars belief (or as the spell check has just helpfully pointed out, maybe that should be spelt with a 'u'?).

This aside, it has always been a complete mystery to me WHY so many (ok, pretty much all) Windows apps NEED to write to privileged areas of the OS. I mean, why? Compared to (say) Unix, where I can pretty much take any app and install it locally in my home directory. No privileges needed beyond what I already have. As long as it doesn't contain a driver, then what's the problem?

Oh, and of course, you also have the fun of rebooting every time you stick a new app on the machine! Why? No idea. Does anybody know?

I could rant on about Mickey Mouse toy OS' and my continuing amazement that otherwise sensible and sane people still buy them, but I'm sure you'll be pleased to learn I'll resist on this occasion.

Rich.

Ah but....

Ok, someone's got to state the bleedin' obvious....

It's still not as cool and funky as a certain other (white) box, is it? Oh well, at least they tried, eh? :-)

Poor Administration

I run an on-line shop using one of the more popular open source e-commerce packages (I'll not say which one for reasons that will hopefully become clear).

Like many open source projects, it has it's support forums etc, and I read and post on these occasionally when I get bored.

Now when I started up, I spent a considerable amount of time and effort securing my website and the server it runs on, and I still address issues that come up from time to time. I'm no security expert (no such thing!), but I'd like to think I learned a good deal about the subject over the years of working on my little shop. The one thing that constantly amazes me from reading the forum for the e-commerce software that I use is the brazen disregard for security in general and in particular the cavalier attitude sys-admins (I use the term loosely) have for the security of the personal data that they are entrusted with by their customers. Basically, given a choice between "It works, and is nailed down, but it's not as pretty as I would like" and "It works and is cool and flash, but my customers' personal data is laid out for the whole world to see. Oh well, never mind, eh?", it is staggering how many of these shop owners go for the second option.

And one of the main "reasons" given for this is "it's too difficult to do", to which I have to ask, "what the f*** are you doing messing about with this stuff if you can't do it?".

I delayed opening my shop for some time (at obvious financial cost) until I was as confident as I could be that it was secure and that my customers' data was safe. Sadly, it seems that most are happy to open-up shop over the weekend with total disregard for such issues; as long as it looks cool then that's fine.

I am not in the least bit surprised that many websites get hacked and the data stolen.

Well what do you expect?

Something about the whole China situation baffles me. Or rather it baffles me that politicians and business don't seem to have grasped the blindingly obvious.

On the one hand, the USA (and no doubt Europe, even if they aren't so vocal about it) are getting increasingly concerned about China's aspirations, especially in the military direction, which seem to be galloping along quite nicely. An important property of such aspirations are that they are very very expensive and lots of money is needed to fulfil them.

On the other hand, the USA (and Europe and lots of others) are breaking their necks to pour money into China so that they can make us cheap iPods and laptops and fridges and lots of other plastic rubbish. If fact it's difficult these days to find any such product that isn't "made in china"!

Doesn't anyone else see the connection?

Gosh!

Dunno about 248 dimensions - I struggle with 3! I'm forever bumping into things and have always had a problem with the concept of 'up', especially after a pint or two.

But credit where it's due; clearly a clever bunch of chaps and chapesses - congratulations to them all.

Why can't they just accept it?...

Re "the employment of French and favour its use as an international language"

I worked in Belgium for a while and from chatting with someone who worked at the EU commission there, I learned just what a complete pain in the a*** the French are with respect to their language (as if I didn't know already). Basically, the EU throws away millions and millions of euros every year translating stuff to and from French. This is done JUST for the French. Nobody else. The Germans don't demand German translation. The Italians don't demand Italian translations. The French DO. Also, all the meeting take twice as long as they should because the French insist of speaking French and everyone else speaks English. All the French people that matter speak perfectly good English. They just choose not to out of sheer arrogance.

Another example: I read in an in-flight magazine the other week an interview with an African chappie (sorry - I don't recall who he was). He mentions going over to France once on a state visit and describing how furious the French were because he didn't speak French! They also threw him in the clink for the evening (!) and he reckons it was because they were just hacked off with him.

Why won't the French accept that nobody else in the world gives too hoots for their language. We don't care! We are not interested! It's annoying!

Phew...