Posts by Anonymous Hero
220 posts • joined Thursday 13th March 2008 22:08 GMT
Re: I can claim the fist phishing then?
I did more or less the same thing back in 1986 with the college VAX clone (a Systime 8750). The ops manager often used to login from one of two specific terminals in the student part of the "computer room" when the admin/ops office terminals were all taken.
At lunch-time I rustled up a script to look like a VMS login and ran it on just enough terminals so as not to look suspicious if someone did a SHOW USERS. I hit the jackpot within 30 minutes when the sys admin username and password dropped into my mailbox.
I had full access to that box for the next two years of my college life :)
Re: Apple is a flop in our house
Meh...meant to change the title to "Apple logo is optional in our house", didn't mean it as flamebait.
Apple is a flop in our house
This is based on actual observation....
Both our 12 (lass) and 14 (lad) year old's think Apple's fondle-slabs "look a bit boring". Both have had iPod Touches for ages and I thought both would want "proper iPads" and nothing else, but to my surprise this hasn't been the case.
The 14 year old has an original Motorola Xoom. He got that instead of an iPad because the price of the iPad was just a bit too rich for us; I feared (read: hoped) he might not use it after a while because it didn't have an Apple badge, and I'd get it as a hand-me-down :). But no luck, you can't prise the bloody thing out of his paws and there was definitely no look of quiet disappointment when he unwrapped it on xmas day. The most important factor to him was that it was a tablet, who made it didn't actually matter. Can he Skype? check, Can he watch Minecraft and BF3 videos on YouTube?: Check, Email: Check...
Our 12 year old actually *asked* for a Samsung Galaxy Note (the one with the stylus) over an iPad, this was with no prompting, Samsungs adverts and googling made her mind up. Quite a surprise (and a relief wallet-wise) really. As with the Xoom it's been a massive hit and you rarely see her without it.
In both cases I set up a DNLA server with a library of all their fav films and telly stuff and they're happy as larry.
@Manolo mentioned that a lot of kids that age (circa 12'ish and younger) tend to use the term iPad generically and I think that's true. The main requirement of a slab is not what logo it wears, or whether it has a "retina display", but whether does all the things a ~12-14 year old needs it to do...Skype, YouTube, Email, Facebook (yeah I know, but we have their passwords), Angry Birds or whatever the game of the week is, play movies/Big Bang Theory.
In summary, kids do want "iPads" but I think the Apple logo is optional.
How the hell does this happen?
It's not like Windows 8 has just taken the world by surprise (there's been 3 preview/beta builds since September 2011). Are the underlying AV hooks in Windows 8 really that different from Windows 7? I can't imagine they are.
Or is this a case of another company bypassing/abusing undocumented API features rather than doing the right thing?
Re: Apple has peaked
Could be right there. Our 12 year old asked for the new Galaxy Note over the "New iPad" for her birthday. She's got pals who already have iPads but she thought they were a bit "meh" compared to Samsungs new offering. This 12 year old is like most others her age where being seen in the right clothes and with the right accessories is important, so what does that tell us about Apple's "coolness". Big corporate brands like to hook their customers young, if they're not catching the eye of the current crop of style concious 11-14 year olds then they're doing something wrong or their competitors are doing it better.
Apple had their window when mobile phones needed that spark of innovation to kick the industry up the backside, but everyone else has now crawled in through the same window - despite Apple trying to close it with silly patent violation court cases. Also the kids who preferred playing with their lego and playmobile back when Apple were surprising the market with their new shineys probably weren't that concious of the cool factor and the fanboi thing was a bit over their heads.
These new "customers" have a fantastic choice of non-Apple competitors (Windows Phone 8 as well) that just wasn't there a few years back. Apple's gear and the look of IOS is looking just a bit tired/dated now to these kids and Android 4 is a tasty looking OS, and the new Windows 8 tablet stuff is tempting my own wallet.
I don't think Apple are going to crash and burn like they did under Sculley but they're going to have to compete and innovate more than they are right now to stay on top of the "cool". I think we'll see their popularity drop a bit then level out, they'll still produce high quality products but they also have to be careful. Steve may have gotten away with antenna-gate and if he was still alive today he'd probably have risen above the criticisms of the maps problem because he was "Steve" and everyone loved Steve. But today Apple has no Steve and they just have Tim, and Tim just isn't the same thing.
Re: Adult novel?
"people who are old enough to know better but don't, due to their average reading age being somewhere south of 14."
I think you're being totally unfair and a typical book snob. Anything that gets people who've never read a book since their last english lesson in school reading again is always a good thing. I wonder how many people have (re)-discovered the joy of books, and have since read other stuff, I bet it's quite a few. It doesn't have to be high brow but at least they're reading which is better than not.
Re: So the UK never got a look in ?
I for one am happy to wait for them to iron out the kinks and bugs on the yanks before releasing it here, so maybe no bad thing after all.
Re: Enterprises expensive loss? Posted Thursday 30th August 2012 10:55 GMT Anonymous Coward
@hans 1 - Hello, hello? The year 2000 wants it's Windows 2000 servers back. Mate, I love my opensource tools as well, but you're spouting utter nonsense and clearly haven't been near a well managed Enterprise Windows installation for a very long time, if at all.
Re: As an Australian.......
You sure it's not left-over brussels sprouts, was certainly those in the days of my youth in Scotland.
Just wait and upgrade to OSX Mountain Lion. Not that big of a deal.
Posted in Ten... celeb headphones
Celeb cans.....meh.
Tyler Hertsens who appears now and again over on twit.tv's Home Theatre Geeks (http://twit.tv/show/home-theater-geeks) did a pretty good review last year of celeb cans:
http://www.innerfidelity.com/content/celebrity-headphone-deathmatchhttp://www.innerfidelity.com/content/celebrity-headphone-deathmatch
You can hear him talk about them on HTGs:
http://twit.tv/show/home-theater-geeks/91
Suffice to say that in many cases you're paying a serious wad just for a name.
http://www.innerfidelity.com/category/specialty-headphone-reviews
Re: Well Obviously...
Just be careful and not trip those void-warranty moisture sensors :)
@AC 12:34 - Been in 3 DCs...
Sure shit happens and that's the way of the world, but this is a yearly event at Blue Square/Pulsant. The UPS system in the BS2 and BS3 areas has been nothing but trouble for as long as I can remember. Last year they evacuated the site because one of its components went up in smoke tripping the VESDA alarms. The whole site was cleared and it was a good couple of hours before customers could regain access to start picking up the pieces.
Right now I think my garage and a two stroke generator is a safer bet for up-time than my racks in BS.
No point complaining if you don't plan for this
Shit happens, it shouldn't, but it does. If online payments are mission critical to your business then why put all your eggs in the same payment gateway's basket. At least have a fallback payment processor for the day the sky falls in.
Apple are just good at refining and packaging, a bit like the Japanese with cameras, cars and motorbikes.
Posted in Aliens Blu-ray disc set
@thomas - I agree, I got the BR Anthology for xmas and was amazed at how good Alien looks. There is still "grain" but it's that atmospheric grain that may be intentional. Also you can appreciate better the way the film is lit as well. When you see the BR version you realise how much VHS and DVD just never did the lighting and hue any justice. I found this with the BR release of 2001 as well.
Having owned Alien on VHS and DVD (a one-off and in the DVD quadrology, both of which are quite flat even with DVD upscaling to 1080p) the BR version in that Anthology box really does "pop".
I got the feeling they really did put a lot of work into making it look good and they did a top job. The Anthology BR set is also a bargain to boot as well, there's tons of stuff on there which are of reasonable substance - not those crappy 2-3 minute extras.
Posted in Game of Thrones Blu-ray disc set
I sorely dislike "fantasy"...but
GoT is bloody good. I caught the telly series last year after a couple of mates recommended it. I'm now reading the first book which is a real pleasure. When I'm finished I'm going to watch series one all over again.
It's been a long time since I felt quite so immersed in a story of this genre.
I'd probably have ignored Instagram but...
...I just had to install it on my grubby old HTC Desire, if only to annoy and enrage the elitist twats even more.
Re: Human Rights
I agree, having a "do not use internet" condition of bail is akin to being told not to use pen and paper. Idiotic.
SSL is mostly money for old rope
The non-EV/domain verified SSL business is a right old rip off and a big cartel designed to allow a few heavy weights to roll in the cash.
If I can buy a basic SSL certificate for any domain name that has a registrar published owner name, address and postcode and have it in my paws inside 10 minutes, with bugger all checks, why do we need to pay Verisign et al for the pleasure of renewing it every year. It's a joke.
If all you want is a secure channel and don't give a crap about verification then why should users have to pay for something as basic as that? Surely that should be a basic function of the web these days now without having to pay for it. I don't pay anything for SSH why should I pay for basic HTTP encryption.
I can understand paying for EV SSL's, you need to have humans (hopefully) involved in the screening process, but then how good is the screening process?
Also when average Joe happens to look up at the green EV indicator next to the address bar does he even comprehend what it means?
I think it's time to re-think the whole SSL infrastructure because it's rotten to the core.
@condiment
What part of the article did you not read:
1. "This only applies to apache servers that are being used as a reverse proxy" - yep that is explained clearly in the article.
2. Though not described in the article, there is no need to because it is adequately explained in the link to the Qualys site. Why re-hash, in fact there is nothing in the article to be "wrong" about.
3. Oh aye, big man speak. Come on then, put your money where your mouth is and show us your skillz and pwning.
Sigh,
Meanwhile the "Femail" link panel on the right salivates over Emily Scott's (whoever the hell she is) booby revealing swimsuit:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshowbiz/article-2063987/Im-A-Celebrity-2011-Mark-Dougie-make-breast-effort--eyes-Emily-jungle.html
Will fail due to pompous and high-falutin' name
Yet another open source project with identity/name fail. If you want to encourage non-techies and your mum and dad to leave Facebook then they'll need to come up with a better name.
I doubt that 70% of Facebook users even know what the word Diaspora means.
@banjomike
Did you post to the wrong article or something?
Did you even understand any of that article? Do you know what a compiler is?
O_o
Posted in Dell Vostro V131 13.3in Core i5 notebook
@Business machines? @Head
I've got three vostros, an original 1700 which was the last of the decent build-quality units. The two latter 1720's I was disappointed in, they are a bit bendy, but that said they've survived reasonable well including umpteen trips between Scotland and Ireland for business and pleasure. I have one running Citrix XenServer and the other running Windows 7 x64 Ultimate and they're good enough (for the money). The 1920x1200 glossy screens that shipped with them are fairly pleasant to work with as well.
It's a shame they're hobbled with VGA video outputs though.
There are a lot worse things you can spent your money on when looking for cheap laptops....such as the Latitude E series. I don't think there's a single one of these in our company that hasn't topped itself.
Real life use
A mate of mine who is a serious jazz aficionado and hifi bod got one of these and seems pretty happy despite it's one or two shortcomings. This was his take on it:
http://harbar.net/archive/2011/07/20/334.aspx
I agree, this is what cults do
Like Scientology, even from beyond the grave the cult's aims and ambitions still march relentlessly on to L. Ron's drum.
The BBC are crap at bug fixing generally
For a long time, when playing "Listen Again" radio programmes, the (browser based) BBC iPlayer would play fine for ~10mins, then start playing a second stream of the same programme in the background which was between 1 and 10 minutes behind.
This happened regardless of browser or Windows version. Despite many complaints about this problem on the iPlayer message board the problem just seemed to be ignored because it only affected a "small number" of users. The problem lasted for ~5 months and got to the point I gave up on the iPlayer.
The BBC iPlayer development group are utterly shite when it comes to listening to users reporting bugs. There's virtually no useful communication from their staff on the support message boards. Much as I love the BBC's content, sadly we're stuck with this crap level of support. Maybe it's time the iPlayer lot were hived off into a performance driven business environment where their jobs relied on looking into these issues and communicating with users in a timeous fashion instead of the bollocks support we get at the moment.
@gordon 10 - Peanuts
That may be so, but at the same time if they bumped the license fees then Apple et al would just go somewhere else.
I think it's an excellent example of a company making a fair profit out of licensing their IP without being too greedy.
I wonder if....
...they threw the book at him.
Why would you put sensitive stuff on a thing like dropbox anyway?
I use dropbox but would never entertain dropping anything of any importance or sensitivity in there. That just seemed like asking for trouble. I'm just waiting for the BBC report about some civil servant who's been sharing confidential excel spreadsheets with colleagues via drop box. It'll be the new "USB-stick-lost-on-a-train" story template.
However given this latest performance I'm ditching it. Who knows what other little "flaw" is awaiting users such as whole machine pwning through some undocumented backdoor they've been asked to secretly add by the security services.
That's me grabbing my tin foil hat and jacket.
@Ian Yates
re: Name the culprit: "It's our operating system, we can tell people what browser and media player we want them to use!"
But they didn't prevent anyone releasing alternative browsers and media players. Big difference.
Posted in Honey, I shrunk the micro server
re: The problem for those server consumer
Yes...but you forget that you're not just paying for the virtual or physical server....there's power, chillers, connectivity, storage, the data centre floorspace that costs money.
Add to that the costs of support staff, vendor support contracts etc etc etc.
£70 quid a month for an 8GB Quadcore box is pretty good value for money when you consider these often forgotten costs.
Lets face it.....
Yes it's shite, but it's not any worse than the other auto-tuned shite that prevails over the current popular music charts and our wireless's.
Thank god for Stuart Maconie's Freak & Freakier Zones on Radio 6.
Right I'm off to listen to some bloke breaking cups to white noise and train noises whilst screaming obscenities at his cat :)
ps: what is up with the line breaks?
That's why...
....I never go anywhere "interesting" with a mobile phone.
BBC News 24 morons
On the day of the earthquake, just before they got word that the Tsunami was going to hit, one of the simpering idiots that present News 24 referred to the recent Christchurch earthquake and asked some expert who was in the studio "why are we seeing so much seismic activity now?".
I no longer watch News 24 for the purposes of gaining facts or news.
Unreliable, untrustworthy, lazy
Those are my impressions of all of the "respected" news outlets (BBC, Sky, etc). It's shame that you can no longer believe a word they say anymore just because they have to keep the critical mass of excitement going to keep viewers hooked during their ridiculously short 20-30min news (re-) cycling.
I wonder if they bothered to follow up the resultant long term health risks that were posed by the Buncefield oil fire from the toxic cocktail of chemicals that spewed into the atmosphere for days on end.
But sadly it's not nuclear so no salacious headlines to be grabbed off the back of radiation poisoning which is way more exciting apparently than a dose of lethal organic chemicals.
Security fixes, really?
And there was me under the impression that Apple products didn't have any security flaws.
@But you can download it via http....
That worked for me too.
Maybe they're beefing up their content distribution network before switching.
Posted in Christmas shoppers hit by BT fire
@ those who've never worked in telecoms
last mile redundancy: You don't unless you specifically ask to be provided with diverse feeds from two or more different exchanges which is not cheap but can be done.
Also the water damage was caused by ingress from an adjacent building. Most telecoms/data centre facilities use a high fog mist system which is not the same as a "sprinkler". This is designed to lower the air temperature and smother the flame whilst reducing water damage to electronics.
The use of inert gas suppression systems are fairly uncommon (except in very specific applications) now due to health and safety risks (e.g. suffocation).
Big deal....I'm more disgusted at....
...the fact that the teacher had to bring her own AV kit to school presumably because the school either won't spend the money or this is fallout from Camerons new age of austerity.
Meanwhile some layabout royals probably spent a teacher's annual salary on security just because they fancied a night out at the theatre.
Posted in Synology DiskStation DS411+ Nas box
Looks...
It looks quite nice to me, reminds me of Data Generals 'brown and gold' phase.
Posted in Easynet network goes titsup
Nothing in life is perfect....
You generally don't hear bad things about EasyNet so I guess like everyone else they were maybe due to take a bite from the big green banana.
But as always, if your business is heavily reliant on internet connectivity then you should be employing the services of more than one connectivity provider....I have three different services here just for working from home, two of which I pay for (ADSL, WiMAX and if the worst comes to the worst I can even use 3G).
Paris because she enjoys a nice firm banana every now and again.
Nothing to do with .NET's cryptographic strength...
"The vulnerability stems from a cryptographic weakness, specifically involving improper error handling during encryption padding verification.".
I wish the IT press would get it's facts straight instead of bandying around sensationalist crap like this .
This has nothing to do with a cryptographic weakness, this is about ASP.NET revealing too much useful information when a CryptographicException is thrown.
Posted in GoDaddy seeks $1bn buyer
@transfer any domain to us
Um....took me one click to arrive at:
http://www.godaddy.com/domains/domain-transfer.aspx?ci=8992
Which doesn't even list '.co.uk'
A couple of extra clicks if you take a wrong turn reaches this page:
http://www.godaddy.com/domains/bulk-domain-transfer.aspx?ci=14581&app_hdr=0
If you specify a .co.uk you get:
Transfer Error:
z******a.CO.UK has been removed. Only the following domain extensions are allowed for bulk transfers : .COM, .CO, .INFO, .NET, .ORG, .ME, .MOBI, .US, .BIZ, .MX, .CA, .WS, .COM.CO, .NET.CO, .NOM.CO, .ASIA, .BZ, .IN, .COM.MX, .TV
None of these pages required me to:
a) login
b) part with anything other than the domain name
Don't be such a drama queen.
ps: I work for a hoster and it isn't GoDaddy just in case you think I'm being a shill.
@daniel
Check the LA Sun Archives:
http://www.lasvegassun.com/news/2010/aug/19/2-lawsuits-over-r-j-copyrights-lift-total-100/
Posted in Death by iPod: beware the zombie trance
Darwin in action....
People just seem to get more stupid every day.
What happened to the green cross code?
@xj25vm - Promo alert
Where's the "promo" in the 2nd and 3rd last para's? Looks like criticism to me?
The article looks like a first impressions product review to me, which you know, the El Reg does as well as the usual IT muck raking we all know and love.
Posted in Windows Phone 7 SDK coming 16 Sept
@martin
Android wasn't exactly perfect on day one but in the short time it's been around they've done a damn good job.
I think MS have learned a few things watching Android and iOS mature and from the mistakes made with Kin. When you have guys like Scott Gu pimping WinMo7 dev tools then you can take it as read that they're serious and we'll see a fairly rapid release/bug fix cycle ala Android. MS can't afford not to do this, not this time around
I agree that as a Window Mobile 5/6 user I wasn't exactly enamoured. The platform was stale and had no sex appeal. WinMo7 feels different.
I have a HTC Desire and love it. I'm also about to kick of a dev project targetting Android, but I'm also gonna take a stab at WinMo 7 because it looks interesting.
I wouldn't write them off yet.
