Posts by Paul Crawford
998 posts • joined Thursday 15th March 2007 16:58 GMT
Diskworld quote
I like the one about the Unseen University's research pushing back the boundaries of ignorance...
The new MS
Sounds a lot like Microsoft's anti-competitive actions that significantly contributed to the killing of DR-DOS, Netscape and others by rigging the playing field of the desktop PC. Funny how any dominant business eventually turns to dirty tricks to keep itself up there...
But I also agree with Anton Ivanov, I don't want my search results polluted with comparison sites so they should be a separate area of the returned results.
True, unless...
Unless the Swedes, for whatever reason, find they must deport him back to Australia for trial there.
And that flight somehow ends up passing through the USA...
@Lottie
"creating invisible lead soup"
I though the Chinese already managed that, otherwise what is one-ton soup made of?
@LPF
"you will have no problem if the US starts intercepting all your comunications"
I guess you have not heard about the warrentless wiretaps the USA has been using on its own citizens then?
Or indeed that it has done so on "foreign" citizens who, of course, do not get the protection (for what is left of it) that the US constitution is supposed to provide?
While I can see that diplomacy needs a large degree of privacy to be conducted effectively, I must say the actions of the US in recent years, both militarily (e.g. the invasion of Iraq on doubtful grounds) and legally, such as the odious and ill-named PATRIOT act, and their actions in pushing a US-centric bullying approach to copyright (e.g. the ACTA negotiations being held in secret, even from our elected representatives) result in little sympathy from me when this happens.
@We are not typical
And thank $DEITY for that!
I don't think most of us believe that it is possible to block pr0n effectively, and most of us do not want to. The issue here is what represents the best overall solution for children and free society as a whole.
My view is it comes down to education and supervision at the early (i.e. most vulnerable stage) so as children naturally develop an interest in things sexual through puberty, they have the sense to know good from bad, and the restraint from accessing that inappropriately. Thinking for themselves, in other words.
I don't want a knee-jerk government or lobby group telling me what to think, or what I can access where the subject is in fact perfectly legal to do. I believe that is my own decision to take, and parents should those decisions to a point, then allow their children to do so as they mature.
@15 years ago
When I was young, we had this thing called "the world" that existed outside of our homes. When we were little our parents would take us out there, holding our hands, and warning us of the dangers such as cars and the odd dirty bloke that hung around the parks.
When we were older, we got to go out on our own, based on the agreement that we were going where we said (e.g. friend's house) and would be back within a reasonable period of time.
On the basis of mutual trust, that we would act sensibly and they would allow us some freedom if we kept that bargain, we grew up with relatively few incidents.
The internet bring the world inside, and I don't really see how it differs.
p.s. You can get cheap protection of sorts by singing up to OpenDNS if you really can't trust your kids judgement. And I do hope, as a reader of El Reg, that your kids don't have admin rights on the PC?
@GrahamS
Which is my point - trying to block it is going to fail, and you should be educating kids to behave 'reasonably'.
You won't stop pr0n access by a dedicated teenager, so the best you can do is make them understand what it is/means beyond the obvious titillation aspect.
It is like the whole sex education debate again: telling kids "just say no" or banning contraception is not a successful approach. Educating kids to stand up and either refuse peer pressure, or at least to use a condom for their own (and partner's) protections, is far better.
Yes it is embarrassing (probably for both), and yes it is not an easy subject to explain, but it beats ignorance by a big margin.
@Either of you got any kids
So my anonymous friend, what exactly is wrong with the suggestion that some education and supervision of children would work?
Or are you a parent who is unable to reason with, or control, you kid(s)?
@Simplistic
Really, it is sad to think that parents some how can't find the time and inclination to care about their kids.
You don't have to sit there watching their every move (bad idea, I think, as it pushes them to get out of doing thing), just put the PC in a corner of the living room and the prospect of being observed occasionally will moderate all but the most accidental pr0n searching. After all, you have found space for the TV, haven't you?
If they cared, it is easy enough to get protection for most of it - but it is never going to be 100% covered, and eventually they WILL find it. So it is better to bring them up using their own brains and judgement - they will need it one day.
That is what the lobbyists overlook, kids need to learn judgement of their own. Just look how well our drink-related age limits serve us as a nation.
It is called 'parenting'
Some might have heard of it.
We have some moral lobbyists who will play in to the hands of all sorts of other censorship issues. If parents were concerned, would they not take steps to stop it? You know, maybe like talking to their children about the issue? Or keeping the PC in the living room?
Yup, mom was good
Say 'thanks' from all of us.
Posted in Facebook royal rant bishop suspended
Basing the Bishop
"The hereditary principle is corrupt and sexist."
Great words from someone in a church that would not allow female bishops until very recently, and even then, a number left the church in disgust.
Interesting point though: Which has been worse for the UK and its people, the Queen who has her position without direct choice or consent from the people, or Tony Blair who was chosen by the people and proceeded to lie and lead us in to stupid war while enriching himself?
Posted in The alternatives to password protection
And another thing in favour of the key-fob
It the key-fob can be taken by threat without the removal of your finger. Do we really want serious criminals using* our severed fingers, eye balls, etc?
[*] Yes, I know a lot of biometric readers will fail on plastic copies or dead tissue by design, but do they?
Posted in The alternatives to password protection
Key fob advantage
The key advantages of the key-fob system come when you are operating on an untrusted computer, as you can still intercept and duplicate a fingerprint hash (even assuming the reader hardware becomes ubiquitous) but the changing code sequence closes the window of opportunity for malware users to do bad stuff.
What hacks me off is the problem of needing more than one such key as most systems have not got the concept of registering the key's private part with more than one organisation. Yes, that weakens the security as then a compromise of one 'trusted' group brings them all down, but it would be nice if banks could agree on having one or two systems that they could share.
Most users don't need "top secret" authentication, just the ability not to be shafted wide open by one compromised PC they happen to make unfortunate (or foolish) use of. A changing hardware key offer that for most users and has no special interface needs.
Fingerprints, and other biometrics, have much larger margins of error and of course have issues if you need to use them after an accident, following rough manual work, etc, that might have changed your biometric profile.
Quick turnaround
No, he just had a late night visit from the baby eating Bishop of Bath & Wells, who had some intimate theological advice for him.
Posted in Windows hits 25
IE & system level code
OK, maybe IE was never a true kernel mode component, but why could it not be updated without a reboot? And why when compromised (a sadly common event) was it so capable of privilege escalation?
Given how much business & gov are stupidly tied in to IE6-only intranet (due to MS' non-standard design and piss-poor coding/contracts, etc), one reason for the sluggish move from XP to Vista/7 is this single issue. So why could they never make IE6 a stand-along product to plug that gap?
Indeed, why did MS struggle so badly to make IE7/8 correctly render IE6-based sites? And why was IE7/8 never possible for w2k even when it was still a supported OS?
I smell deep & murkey coding practices.
Posted in Windows hits 25
@Darryl
Yes, just like we hope to see the end of war, famine, and discrimination, sadly it never quite happens.
Still, good to see MS are still making lots of money out of such an excellent product that you enjoy buying with every PC.
Posted in Windows hits 25
w2k still used by me
w2k was the last MS OS I paid for, though I have XP at work as well. To me, w2k really was NT4 but with USB working.
ME was a botch, a complete waste, and XP really was just w2k with more GUI features.
w95/98 are really different to NT4/w2k/XP as they are a mix of 16 & 32 bit subsystems with piss-poor protection along the lines of Windows 3.11
To be honest, there is little real OS progress from NT4 to w7, a bit of protection added, some polish, but nothing really exciting. These days I use Windows in a VM under Linux, gives me software compatibility for odd CAD stuff but with much better security.
Posted in Windows hits 25
Kind of summerises it.
I must agree with the author in this, but there are more details that should be included, such as:
The dumb-fu*k move to make the web browser an "OS component" (Win95) and the years of problems that caused.
The move in NT away from good design to put the graphics system in to the kernel space for better performance (NT 3.51 to 4.0 was it?), and the loss of stability it caused (BSOD on lots of things that would otherwise been trapped/recoverable).
And of course the nauseating business of DRM that began with XP and hogged Vista's performance:
http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~pgut001/pubs/vista_cost.html
Yes, they may have polished the turd quite well with Windows 7, but as the author pointed out, the times are a-changing for OS, and the malware situation makes Windows so much less attractive these days.
Tux! At least the sucky-ness of Linux going wrong is at least under MY control, and it lets me do as I please.
But it is not open source
True, there is little to complain about getting free software as a good deal, but remember this is the 'free' option beloved of crack dealers: "go on, try it, first hit is free..." Later you pay dearly.
Were it not for MS' track record in not being interoperate, in making some systems deliberately incompatible, and of course the fiasco over railroading MS Office as an 'open' ISO standard (which you might want to note, that Office still is not fully compliant with!) I might be pleased.
But as it stands, I see this as nothing short of an attempt to make sure the students don't see the alternatives, don't get used to the idea that *you* own your PC and can should be free to use it as you please, and don't learn to deal with computer diversity. So fail a year or two later when things change.
What ever happened to MBR write protection?
Once upon a time, boys and girls, virus writers used to use the Master Boot Record as a common way of infecting systems. In my day, often as a bootable floppy that might be accidentally left in the A: drive. What you run at start-up can trounce almost any protection the OS has (as demonstrated here).
So the motherboards started to have MBR write-protection that you needed to disable if you are updating the OS or partition tables, and that made it a whole lot harder to do.
Then it vanished. Why?
This rootkit is an example of just how hard, if not impossible, it is to have a useful general-purpose computer that can't be hacked by a malicious boot loader. MS' Windows 7 may be the choice target today, but the underlying techniques apply to all OS, even my beloved penguin.
I really wish there was a physical switch to enable/disable such access, then only when it *really* needed to be modified would your 1st stage boot loader be so vulnerable.
@She asked
"The difference is a peado is a peado"
Only if you use the biological definition, i.e. attracted to pre-pubescent children . Otherwise it comes down to the legal definition of the age of consent, which can vary from country to country.
And that is when it becomes murkey. Consider the UK's current position where 16-17 year olds can have sex, but should they dare take a photo of each other, they are now guilty of the possession of child porn. Or a 15 year old being sexually attracted to another 15 year old, is that naturally wrong, and thus a serious crime?
Oh, and if you have any of the old Sun newspapers lying around (God knows why...) that featured Samantha Fox when she first appeared on page 3, well, you are also peado in the law's eyes!
So even on the subject of child porn that most agree is a BAD THING, the issue of censorship and definitions is not quite so clear. What is acceptable in one country (e.g. nude bathing) may be serious crime in another (e.g. Saudi Arabia). Should we support such censorship?
Overall, I support the Internet Watch Foundation's aims, but I do worry about it being subverted for political or religious ends. Who guards the guards?
Posted in PARIS joins the 17-mile-high club
LOHAN
Low Orbit High Altitude Necklace?
Pearl, of course...
@perfect
I second you. Sure kids can be dumb, but it is OUR JOB as adults to help educate them. Sadly, a lot of people who should be doing this (i.e. the parents) are not knowledgeable enough to do so, and are also more likely to be ignored by the kids.
Nude pictures are really nothing in the grand scheme of things (save for the current paedo-finder general approach to making it a crime to posses by the teens who created them), but the difference now is it won't be erased from t'Internet once its out there.
It is the ease of being dumb, and eternally damned for it, that is the new problem. Education is the answer, but I don't see much happening.
Browse from the PC of someone competant
Really, this comes down to a number of issues, and by far the largest here is don't use an outdated version of IE, and preferably not IE at all (as much due to time-to-patch).
If your work has some dumb system that can't work without IE6/7 then those machines should be firewalled off, and a couple of hardened machines kept for web access e.g Linux + Firefox + adblock & flashblock
Also noscript perhaps, but noscript is a PITA to use for most folk, negating its value, as it violates Rule #1 of security: if you have to ask the user for permission on an unknown risk, then you have already failed.
Posted in The terabyte iPad is coming
Home/family back-up
Well, my two solutions, which are not perfect but better than nothing are:
(1) for most friends & family I have set up Linux boxes and use a small script that runs a back-up at shutdown on to a named location which is typically an external USB-powered HDD drive. This provides something they don't need to even think about, and provides salvation in the event of them accidentally deleting a key file, or the internal HDD failing. Cost about £60 for the 250GB HDD.
Downside is it is not encrypted (could be fixed with trucrypt, etc, but never pursued that) and physically attached to their desktop PC, so you can see the flaws for the highest of security. The web page needs some updating, but here it is:
http://www.sat.dundee.ac.uk/~psc/Ubuntu/ubuntu-stuff.html#Automated_Backup
There may be much better Linux backup/restore software out there, but when I looked and tried out some things around 2 years ago nothing matched what I wanted, hence yet another script option. But I really should look again at rdiff-backup.
(2) For more space and multiple user connections, I got myself a Thecus N5200pro NAS box, though it may be a bit of overkill for most, and filled it with 5*1TB disks so I have 3.6TB usable space in RAID-5. It provides CIFS (Windows), NFS (Linux), ftp and some Apple/media options I have not used. It has a decent web interface for managing it.
I see read speeds of around 40MB/sec and write around 20MB/sec over a single gigabit link (it also supports link aggregation but don't see that making a big difference). Also you can install modules like ssh and bittorrent, etc, I believe.
Posted in Dell skunkworks brews ARM server future
@Here is your ARM notebook
Thanks - when I looked at Toshiba I tried 'netbooks' and there was nothing like this, seems they don't classify it as such.
Still, it looks very promising. Wonder if El Reg will review it at some point?
Posted in Dell skunkworks brews ARM server future
Jolly good - but where is my netbook?
Great news, more competition in the server market is a good thing. It would be ironic if ARM takes the same proportion of servers that Itanium was supposed to...
But for me, where is an ARM-based notebook? I want something with the iPad's battery life but the freedom (and cost benefit) of letting me put Linux, etc, on it.
Corruption most likely.
Given Russia's communist past, and its deep suspicion of the USA, it always amazed me that they even allowed MS operating systems to become so common (OK, pirated in the past) rather than insisting on something they have control over. Remember this?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NSAKEY
So most likely there are officials in a position of power who stand to lose over the choice here, and they are pissed that he has spoken out over this matter.
Get them while they are young - MS and the church both know that.
Posted in The terabyte iPad is coming
Yes, you are talking tosh!
Firstly flash has a wear-out mechanism, and while most uses won't see this, that is not to say it will not bite you due to the file system journalling, etc, working things through.
Secondly all electronics can fail! I have had a couple of USB flash drives die for no obvious reason.
Thirdly, all your stuff on one ipad - and some thief swipes it, or you lose it - what then?
Of course most folk don't think through the consequences of their PC/phone/ipad being lost or damaged, and so they don't have a (usable) backup to recover from. It end in tears, I can tell you...
So yes we will see flash taking over more and more, and for read-access it is amazingly fast, but not so great for random write access. And yes it is more robust than a lot of HDD, particularly in high shock/vibration environments, but it is not perfect.
So what for home back-up (and restore)? A lot might trust their data to "the cloud" but I would not, as you get no guarantee/indemnity if if fails. For example. we use Googl's 'professional' email service and their support is crap. What is your data gets hosed? Too bad sonny...
If you don;t care too much about privacy, etc, then a super-sized ipad and a cloud back-up is a great combination. But if your ipad dies, how long to sync 1TB of data back to it? And will said users have their log-in details stored on the now-dead ipad so they have to all intents and purposes lost the lot?
At least with your own backup, even on the quaint old HDD, you can get a local expert to sort things out for you.
Exactly!
When I got to the bit about "Windows XP SP2" being certified at EAL4+ (which it says includes source code auditing) I really wondered what it actually means?
I mean there has been a numerous serious flaws come out since then and this certification audit found nothing? For example, the 'shortcut' DLL initialisation fiasco that helped stuxnet, and that flaw is also present in w2k, also certified, and Vista, also certified.
So it seams EAL certification is more of a tick-box to covering your ass when procuring, and not a meaningful measure of a product being actually secure?
Do your own research!
"OS's like Apple's OS* and random *nix distro's are getting attacked more than Windows, and patched less, but they still have that reputation. Why? Because it's cool to hate MSFT."
Not true, look at the numbers of windows-only malware versus Linuix/MacOS malware in this report, page 8 of http://www.gdatasoftware.co.uk/uploads/media/GData_MalwareReport_2010_1_6_EN.pdf
win32 = 1,001,902 new in 1st half 2010
*ix = 226 new in 1st half 2010
While the increase in *ix as a percentage is much bigger compared to last year, the actual number is only 0.023% of Windows-only, so quite where do you get the "attacked more" part?
"I like Office, but only because the competitors are freaking terrible. Open Office was.. I last tried it a year ago, it took 5mn to load, the scripting kept crashing, it was.. Really terrible. Not at all polished, and I like polished. I like working. I also like it when I can hit open and 30 seconds later I'm typing."
OK, I have my reservations about OO, but are you comparing speeds on the same PC? My copy of OO under Linux on my home PC (2 years old AMD AMD Athlon 64 X2 5000+ with 2GB RAM) takes about 10-20 seconds to bring up the word processor.
And also have you allowed for MS pre-loading MSOffice in to RAM at Windows long boot time to give the *impression* it loads fast?
http://www.vistax64.com/tutorials/108833-superfetch-change-preload-data.html
You did do some research before posting, didn't you?
@GatesFanbois
"If MS patents aren't valid then the manufacturers don't have to pay if they are valid then they should pay"
Which, in principle, is correct, at least for those that MS will actually name. But we have two issues here:
Firstly are the patents indeed valid (i.e. should they have been granted in the first place). There is a *lot* of US patents, and software ones in particular, that should not have been granted as they are pretty obvious, or way too wide. Sadly, the US model seems to be "grant it at cursory glance, let lawyers fight it out later".
Secondly we have the question of the 'value' to consider. They are not worth anything like $10-20 so the real motivation of MS appears to be anti-competitive, i.e. to block competition through minor legal points by pricing them far beyond the 'value' they add to, for example, MS Windows.
"One of these days linux fanbois will actually realise that the average consumer doesn't want their product"
Fine by me, and my friends & family. We can sit smugly while you bask in the glory of your popularity with 99.4+% of malware[1] that targets for your system.
[1] See page 8 of http://www.gdatasoftware.co.uk/uploads/media/GData_MalwareReport_2010_1_6_EN.pdf for the figures. And I am being generous by counting non-native *ix malare as a threat to the penguin.
@GatesFanbois
Err, you did read the article, didn't you?
The complaint is not about MS making money, but the methods used by MS to make money. Threatening manufacturers to pay up "$10 to $15 dollars per device" for some rather unspecified patents. Where are the details of the patents that always talk FUD about Linux, why the secrecy over them?
Even assuming there are one or two patents involved, why such a big fee? After all, an OS like windows has millions of lines of code and sells for around the £100 mark (depending on version, deal etc). How much might be represented by said patents, a few hundred lines of code? By my reckoning that comes to around £0.01 for the patented portion.
Now before you jump up about 'great inventions' and superior value of patents, look closely at most of them. What do you see? In most cases, bugger all innovation, but small steps that are often needed for basic interoperability (e.g. the MS FAT patent seems to revolve around their particular work-around for their originally bad design of a file system).
If MS make a good product, a large number of people will gladly pay for it (I did for VisualC, for example). This is about their bullying of others who decide not to choose them, but go with other (and often better) OS choices.
Tux, as he and thousands of other penguin lovers are marching forward and not throwing thier toys out of the pram.
Ignoring the 800lb gorrilla
Funny how MS is going for "device manufacturers' use of Google's open source mobile platform, Android" rather than tackling Google head-on?
Maybe it is Google has a lot more money to throw at lawyers?
Maybe they hope the US court is going to side with MS as the "American" side, rather then against those pesky foreigners?
Sad really, if all they can do to 'compete' is attempt to use patent laws (and in particular the broken US system) to defend their old spot in a changing world. I really hope Acer and Asustek tell MS where to stuff it, and Google weighs in to force an open trial of just what is covered by which patents so they can be revoked, or worked around.
@...ubiquitous
Your theory is only partly tight - of course virus writers go for the biggest return (i.e. maximum number of users and/or biggest value targets to hack open).
But it also fails to weight up the relative underlying quality of code in different cases. If product A had hundreds of exploitable bugs, but product F only a few, even if they were of equal popularity you can work out which is going to be getting pw0ned more often.
Adobe's problem is they have so much dumb stuff in Acrobat (as already pointed out, who actually wants scripting and application running in a document reader?) and it appears to be written by incompetent monkeys, a combination guaranteed to FAIL.
@Fun
Surly you mean good for jokes such as:
Q: Why has an elephant got 4 feet?
A: Because it would look silly with 6 inches!
Thanks, its the one without the good joke book...
p.s. If a child asks, its the trunk you are referring to.
@Huh?
I understood the term to be as wikipedia has:
"An oligopoly is a market form in which a market or industry is dominated by a small number of sellers (oligopolists)"
MS dominates the market in OS to such an extent that all PC manufacturers do what MS want, and thus the market is so skewed that other OS have little chance of success* irrespective of their merits.
[*] success here is being available pre-configured by the PC manufacturer so Joe Average can buy a box from PCWorld, etc, that works when they turn it on.
@Ken Hagan
How much? Probably £50-100 for word/excel/visio as those I use. Occasionally powerpoint, but not much.
I use Linux+OpenOffice mostly now, but actually prefer my copy of word97 (bugs and proprietary formats excluded) as it did everything I wanted fairly well. Sadly later versions at work *still* had bugs that were not fixed after 5+ years, so that would temper my desire to pay for something unless it was genuinely better than OO for my use.
But really, there are a couple of MS product I would happily pay for to use under Linux, such as some of the office suite and the VisualC development environment.
@Two words
If you are asking for a custom application, one where there is no one else really interested, then it is all the more important you have access to the code!
Also why would the contractor loose out in this case, you are paying them for their work *just for you* so you should expect the code (but not necessarily all rights).
I would imagine a fair arrangement is where by my company gets code and demonstrations of building it on a clean machine, and the rights to make use of that if the contractor is unwilling/unable to support it under reasonable terms, but the contractor retains the right to re-use the code for other projects (assuming it did not incorporate any of my "trade secrets" in development).
Whether it is 'open source' to the world is less important, all that matters is that my company can make use of it as required.
Drifting away from MS
You are right that the desktop PC won't die, and for a lot of situations it is still best. Neither will MS die completely as too much is already invested in Windows-based software worldwide.
But the mere fact that people are looking away from MS Windows at the iPhone, Android and (to a lesser degree) Linux is a big problem for the traditional MS approach of "everything with Windows". Remember how anal BillyG was about not allowing non-MS branded start screens? That was one of his approaches to keeping people from looking at the competition (when not screwing them with illegal or at least immoral business moves) and 'monkey boy' Balmer is just following that.
I really hope their oligopoly on the desktop is broken, and we see a fairer split and a *choice* of pre-installed OS, that would be good for competition, hardware support and document longevity.
Open source but not free?
If your business depends on something, so much so you would have serious problems without it, you need to have that under your control for the worst case situation.
Being open from the start for any custom code or special system should be prerequisite if you build a major business on it. That is not the same as being free - you can impose license terms and support costs, but still making the system supportable no matter what.
" software programming is not necessarily clear, consistent and reliable."
And when it is not you have big problems even if the supplier is still around. Problems of numerous bugs and difficult (i.e. costly) effort to implement any changes and improvements.
This is not to say open is automatically good, but you can at least gauge the quality of your supplier from having some of your own folk try to understand & build the system from scratch. Otherwise you have to believe the sales folk...
If only!
The folk I am thinking of would not have/use/keep updated AV in the first place :(
Also my experience of AV is it is as good a water carrier as a fine sieve. Even on Windows PCs where I installed it for them, they got shafted. I don't know if this was due to 0-day exploits that the AV missed, or some dumb person clicking 'yes' to the AV asking them if shaftmesideways.exe should be allowed to run, but the end result was the same.
Now I set up Linux boxes for friends & family. I get the odd bitching about games not working, but a happy silence about slowness and other infection issues. It helps that some folk don't have sudo rights either...
Posted in Microsoft's Office ribbon hits Mac fans
Objectivly better?
No, you mistake the idea that somehow a 'new' approach will be better for those who already can use the menus perfectly well. For those folk, who make up the *majority* of users who would be 'upgraded' the ribbon brings little but pain.
Where MS screwed up was to not give users a *choice*, I mean just how hard would it have been to have menus or ribbon with a simple tick box to select them?
Also why pay MS for a newer version? It was reported:
"Office 2010's inability to work with existing Office add-in applications and macros, and non-XML file formats in older versions of Office documents, concerned 33 per cent"
This is just the sort of criticism levelled at Open Office! While OO is not perfect (and neither are any versions of MS Office), it is free and multi-platform, and if you use the PDF export feature the documents are perfectly readable by more or less everyone.
Transfering sir?
"You can buy liquids in the duty free shops now, they are AFTER security."
Which is all very well on a single flight, but then the idiots will take it off you at your next transfer point as you have to go through security *again* for no obvious reason!
This often wastes more time as you have to queue with everyone starting there as well, and makes the whole flying experience even more shitty. 10-20 years ago I actually looked forward to flying somewhere, now I really don't.
Malware vector...
Having had to clean up some computationally-challenged folk's PCs I can't say I am sorry to see it go.
But to say it is a major defeat for P2P is a joke as BitTorrent is alive and well and has a lot of good clients, not all java based, so Mac-tards can sleep in peace.
Posted in Opera: Can someone free Korea from IE?
Oh really?
You really think that IE + ActiveX, that fabulous method of virus propagation and OS tie-in, has helped in some way?
You don't think it has anything more to do with the nation actually making a lot of successful products and building national infrastructure to suit? And do said plug-ins work with a sensibly secured Win7 box as well, or do you have to weaken you security settings (and allowing users to say 'yes' to any web-initiated plugin counts here) to allow them to run?
Web standards should be the norm, and OS-specific or browser-specific web sites forced out of use.
Indeed he would.
He mistakes success with quality, "the best compute architecture" is not true, but the legacy of Windows and its applications being x86-only (to all intents and purposes) pushed the x86 to be the dominant architecture with economies of scale following its mind-boggling investment over the past couple of decades.
But what Apple have shown with the iPad (for all its non-tech features) is you can achieve a great deal with ARM in terms of a usable product with very good battery life, much more than any current x86 model could, and people like it.
Most importantly is the fact it is not Windows but still accepted, showing that most folk don't actually care what OS it uses. The lack of a real need for AV that Windows suffers from avoids that power/resource hog as well.
Will the tablet be the item that finally puts serious cracks in the 'wintel' model, at least in consumer product space?
