Posts by R Callan

Security Utopia by AC

Enigma was not expected to be totally secure. Because it was used for tactical reasons the reasoning was that by the time it was cracked the imformation included was out of date and therefore useless. Geheimschreiber on the other hand, Colossus anyone?

Ash & Tim

Hydrogen is no problem really to life, unless oxygen concentration drops too low (disregarding the explosive potential of H2 and O2 intimately mixed).

pH actually means (deep breath) the negative logarithm of the hydrogen ion concentration.

pH changes in the blood are caused by CO2 dissolving in the plasma and forming carbonic acid. This upsets the carbonate/bicarbonate buffering system, more CO2 means more acidity. Fortunately just breathing removes the excess CO2. The human body is not very tolerant of abnormal pH, once the pH gets out of the normal range (thinks hard) 7.250-7.350 then all sorts of funny things happen, none of them good for one.

End of lecture on physiology. B-)

must blame hardware and bean counters

WE cannot blame winders this time. According to Netcraft all of the listed sites are running Solaris 9/10.

Dangerous hedgehogs.

Could you claim that the culprit was spineless, but the victim anything but?

OT don't ask how to pronounce Whakatane, this is a family website :-) (cowardly kiwi from nearby).

Duncan Robertson

If my memory serves there were a lot of Scottish regiments at Waterloo, the general was Irish along with some Irish regiments so I think it could be said that Waterloo was a British victory, not an English one. Even that is debatable as the Germans were present in large numbers as well, on the winning side.

p.s. if the French won how come Napoleon ended his days on St Helena and Wellington became British prime minister?

(A penguin because St Helena must have some penguins).

Minor nit

Umm Office 2007 doesn't use (D)IS 29500 but pre-(D)IS 29500! The format used by MS will need to be changed before MS Office conforms to the standard. There were hundreds to thousands of changes made to the original draft spec before it was (possibly) passed. Even then there is some doubt as to whether MS Office 2007 conformed to the submitted spec.

Minor nit

How far is a meter? All of my meters are significantly different in size. The only one I could use for measuring distance is my metremeter and that is just over a metre long.

Telephone ads

When will BT start inserting ads into private 'phone conversations to "improve your conversational experience?"

I love multiple standards.

When (if ever) I travel to Norway I can continue driving on the side of the road I have always driven on. All of the other cars had better get out of my way, my old Daimler Conquest weighs plenty. On the other hand, if I ever travel to the UK i can then drive on the wrong (i.e. right) side. It is surely my right to decide on the standard I wish to use, even if they are not compatible. Just gotta love the ISO.

Monocultures

Even before finishing the article I knew that the problems were going to be with MS systems. The filename.exe confirmed it.

Why do companies run a known very insecure computer setup and have it exposed to the wild and wooly internet? They are asking for trouble and complaining when they get it. Just running a mixed environment where no one platform of as many as possible predominates would result in a more secure envronment.

Hang on a moment

Cuba is just now going to allow consumer computers, but at the recent ISO shennanigans regarding MSOOXML they voted from the beginning to approve without comments.

If, at the time, consumer computers were not permitted in Cuba and MS systems are really only consumer items, then what were they doing even being members of the standards committee?

Best option?

I would have thought that the best and safest option would be to toss these known dangerous programmes and replace them with similar ones that have far fewer vulnerabilities.

I found that Mepis works very well at a very good price. :>)

Why??????

Why are the Kiwis involved? The yanks unilaterally broke all of the defense agreements when we objected to their carriage and possession of nuclear weaponry, without our knowledge, in our country.

C'mon Kiwis, join in and try to stuff up all of the Yanks servers.

Grrrrrrrrrr!!!!!!!!

MS will never take any "flack" for this. The word is FLAK! It is an abbreviation of Flug Abwehr Kanon (anti-aircraft gun). There is no "C".

@AC Windows

Don't they know that a window is merely a hole sometimes filled with fragile easily broken material? There is no wonder that the US military cannot identify their own allies. The system is run by incompetants from the CinC down.

Sun broken windows

I thought this was going to be about us having to use Solaris. Oh well, I'll stick to Linux