Re: improving javascript performance?

"why so many sites feel the need to use javascript for the simplest of html functionality i'll never know."

Often it's because the developers are brain-dead morons and don't know how to use CSS and instead insist on using javascript to swap images. Alternatively it's the morons that seem to think that the normal, controllable <A> element is far, far too useful and intuitive and they javascript "postbacks" are the only way to go forward (just not back, of course!). See the previous note about these developers being brain-dead morons.

Compatibility pack? Why?

Compatibility pack? Why? Couple of alternatives...

Just use group policy - that's what its there for forbid the creation of documents in the fecking useless docx, xlsx, and other "x" formats. There is NOTHING new in Office 2007 that any normal user will appreciate or use, instead they'll just hate the inane pizza icon, the huge user interface (1024x768 is still the most common screen size), the dumb-arse hiding of commonly required functions and the utter uselessness of the "help". Still, at least there's no "paperclip" to patronise you this time. This way you'll at least remain compatible with anybody else in the world who has yet to be force-upgraded to the latest bloated version.

The downside of this is because the utter fucktard cretins at MS have decided the MS Office (just an application) is more important than and embeds itself into, the operating system, suspend functions on a laptop will be broken unless you close every fecking Office 2007 application prior to close the lid of the laptop. The reason behind this? A pathetic nag message to tell you that it couldn't auto-save in the docx format as it was forbidden... and where's the option to tell auto-save to save in a useful format? There is none of course.

If you must use MS Office "because nothing else works", just install Office 2000 as it doesn't have compatibity problems with everybody else and doesn't suffer from a product activation scheme. Just make sure that you have licences for OfficeBloat 2007 and should MS complain just ask them nicely to swivel.

Alternatively, just as other posters have suggested - use OpenOffice. Compared to the shite that is Office 2007, most users love it in comparison.

Alternatively...

Alternatively, here's the easy way without messing around with this making wells in centre of bowls of flour nonsense..

Measure the milk and water into a blender (no need for a separate measuring container as the blender will have a scale on it). Dump all the other ingredients in afterwards. Blend until until it's all mixed smoothly. Leave for few minutes and pour into the hot dish as normal.

For the final act of laziness, rinse the blender and half fill with water with a little washing up liquid. Run the blender and it'll clean itself.

Done.

And the tech angle? using tech to make life easier - as it should be.

Arg!

"Up to now the Thunderbird client has lived in Firefox's shadow, but Mozilla hopes to change that by energising developers and end users"

Energising? Is El Reg going all Web 2.0 and marketing speak on us?

@ Gordon Fecyk

You've missed the point entirely and with this stance are not really much more secure than before.

Why? Because windows is not secure. At all. Once any kind of software is on your system it's a fairly trivial matter for it to elevate security to a higher level, even if this is only at the next boot of the system. While it is possible to lock down a windows PC, you're always fighting against the inherent problems with the fundamental "design" of a system that splatters an insane mix of data and executables throughout the entire system (quite apart from applications that require OS changes as part of the install). Combine this with the need to keep a system flexible (one of the main advantages of PCs) and you have a system that is impossible to secure without crippling it into uselessness.

Xenophobia???

More like distant memories of Private Helga Geerhart from Allo Allo... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_Helga_Geerhart

If you've seen this series you'll be unable to stop thinking about underwear and Germans in the same way...

Digital = Crap

Look at digital TV image quality (satellite / cable) for the evidence of this.

Of course, you could almost think that there is a conspiracy in siphoning off what little bandwidth they have to give the allocation to HD services and thereby "accidently" making them older digital services seem worse quality in comparison...

As for DAB in a car - it's a total non-starter. When an analogue signal is briefly interrupted or interferred with, you just get brief patchs of silence or crackling. When a digital signal goes you get nothing, often for much longer than the break in signal. We'd need to remove all high obstacles, bridges, tunnels and underpasses to get anything like the perceived coverage that FM radio gives.

Translation

"He said that because of Vista’s incompatibility blunders, company execs, having undergone some deep and meaningfuls, decided with Windows 7 “to build off the same core architecture as Windows Vista so the investments you and our partners have made in Windows Vista will continue to pay off with Windows 7. Our goal is to ensure the migration process from Windows Vista to Windows 7 is straightforward.” "

Translation:

"Our customers realised that Vista is a pile of bloated, over priced crap that extraordinarily requires more system resources to do less than ever before and therefore refused or dragged their heels in a very unsheep-like manner.

As a result all of our departments have been instructed to leverage our monopoly to ensure that everything we produce from now on will inexplicably and improbably "require" Windows Vista. You will upgrade. You will pay more for it. You will come back for more again next time."

Finally, proof!

Finally, we have real proof that a surveilance society actually works!

We should forward this to our beloved dictators and they can suggest to their pork barrel friends^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H choice private sector corporates that cameras should be installed in all homes and, for the good of the individual, monitored by the state. Or at least monitored by a foreign company sucking the tax payer dry on behalf of the state anyway.

Skunk smoking

"The poor bastards who believe all this crap are living in a perpetual hell, expecting their homes to be overrun at any minute by hoodie wearing, skunk smoking moslem transgender asylum seekers on a Jihad. It's really not a humane way to treat the congenitally stupid. Scaring stupid people should become a criminal offence."

Ah, you've got it slightly wrong. The Daily Mail readers aren't that stupid, they're in fact sitting smug on this one.

After all, these hoodies are smoking LETHAL skunk, therefore the joke's on them all along! All the Daily Mail readers have to do is to sit around doing nothing and mutter about the yoof of today and it'll sort itself out shortly. If anything, they might need more security cameras and government nannying to get them by until the yoofs die out, but that's it. Sounds like a job from heaven for them.

Randy

A while back one UK radio station (can't remember which) took to rummaging through US phone directories for amusing names, calling them and trying to get them to say their name on air.

Still chuckle when I think of their best one - "Randy Fanny" :)

@Ian McNee

Ian McNee - you should bother to read the article and engage whatever brain cells you have before flailing about with your foot in your mouth...

It's *not* an article complaining that the EEE 900 has a different capacity/life to the earlier 701, it's that the EEE 900 sold in the UK has a different (considerably lower) battery capacity than those sold in the US.

@I can forgive every coding blunder

Then just learn to touch type - not only does it makes programming much faster in the end (including documentation, a vital part of programming), but your thumbs don't suffer as much.

There are plenty of free or cheap typing tutors in the Internet...

Good!

Good! For once a small smattering of sanity has managed to break through all the FUD and anti-terror this and creationist that...

Doubtless we'll have to wait a while for the next one to come along though :(

Keyboard

"You get all of the usual ThinkPad features so the keyboard and TrackPoint are beyond reproach..."

Really? Apart from the fact that some moron at Lenovo thinks that the Fn key is so important that it needs to be where the Ctrl key is (thus messing with all your typing, especially when moving between systems). As for the position of the Esc key... you just wind up hitting F1 all the time instead.

Could be worse...

Could be worse... could be a keyboard like those designed by the morons at IBM (now Lenovo) where they thought that the Fn Key was more important than the Ctrl key therefore should be swapped with it and the Esc key needed to be on a separate row thereby ensuring that whenever you went to press it you hit the F1 key instead...

Not that there aren't other examples of idiocy on laptop keyboard layouts out there as well... for example some acer models had Pg Up and Pg Dn instead of the cursor keys...

Re: "Microsofts DHCP or SOAP standards"

At what point in an alternative history did Microsoft invent DHCP?

As for MS SOAP - this is the company that has developers who are so incompetent/clueless that they didn't understand XML at all... as a result they kludged "array" support into CDATA elements in the underlying XML rather than just using the native format of XML - i.e. an element can contain multiple child elements. In other words, they immediately broke the standard and implemented their own "binary" additions to reduce compatibility.

Hello?

"it's hard to believe that anything but a very small minority of shops would need to support floppy discs on Proliant servers"

The author obviously isn't familiar with installing windows - the damn thing still needs a floppy drive to load the poxy additional RAID controller drivers. In theory it ought to be possible to stuff them on an additional CD (which doesn't often work) or slipstream them onto a customised copy of the windows media (thereby violating whatever terms MS write on the discs themselves).

Welcome to the 21st century - the FDD is alive and well, thank you!

Vista DRM

There's probably a little more to this than just Creative being a greedy bunch of low-lifers with little market share left and desperate to fight their old corner of the market rather than adapt and succeed. After all, 99.9% of PC users are more than happy with the audio that they get from their on-board sound chips - it's the high level gamers and audio-philes that really care for anything else. What market?

As for what else is likely to be a problem... Creative may be (or have been) under a lot of pressure from MS to tie down their drivers into the Vista DRM system and by throwing our this garbage and allowing non-DRMed use daniel_k could have given Creative a hell of a rude awakening. As for Creative being able to provide working drivers for MS Vista - well, if the specification (loosest possible use of the term here) of OOXML is anything to go by, Creative would be screwed from the start.

@ Release time - Remy Redert

"Well, do not underestimate Microsoft and Apple. I'm fairly certain that if they REALLY want to, they could release a patch within a couple of days."

Unfortunately if they did attempt to release a patch within a couple of days, it'd almost certainly break things. The reason is simple - these operating systems are so convoluted and interlinked and the source so badly written and badly controlled that a seemingly trivial and insignificant change in one place can take down the entire system in another.

MS tried this kind of rapid release fix at one point but gave up as they don't have the resources to test even the smallest of fixes that quickly. Apple just never bothered trying to do anything fast at all - but then that's probably based on seeing MS try, fail and get away with a much longer patch cycle.

So much RFID *FUD*

For of all, ignore the moronic and utterly stupid adverts that IBM chose to foist on everybody recently where, through the "magic" of RFID, the packages knew that the truck was in the wrong place. An RFID tag itself, can track nothing, it can do squat diddley.

Broadly there are two types of RFID tags - "active" and "passive". Passive tags rely on inducing power in the circuit using an external device, when powered in this way the tag will broadcast its data. The range of passive tags is quite limited due to the obvious problems in getting power efficiently to the device, then the amount of power that can be induced into the emitter. Active tags come with some form of power source and, due to the relative power of this power supply compared to that available in passive tags, have a much longer range.

So what's the difference between RFID tags and barcodes? Both store data, an ID of some form - with barcodes we're used to seeing the code itself, however many products have multiple barcodes or 2-D barcodes that store more information. This extra information is usually a unique identifying ID for the product, batch number, expiry date or something similar.

The trouble with barcodes is that they require direct line of sight to read them. RFID scanners don't require direct line of sight, although they have their own problems (metallic objects, water, etc). Barcodes are very cheap and reliable and if the barcode itself cannot be machine read, the code can be typed in manually. RFID tags are nowhere near as cheap and aren't especially reliable and there's no manual fall back.

So where does this really leave us? Yes, if you have RFID tags on you and somebody comes by with a reader, they can read them. Given the range of passive readers it'd be a bit obvious and the perpetrator would have to wave an item like a security wand over you - not exactly subtle. Naturally, things are changing and more sensitive / higher powered / more directional devices are being manufactured all the time. Of course, standing there with an "iStore" bag does make it equally obvious where you've been shopping. Active RFID tags *should* actually be less of an issue as they should only respond and transmit when they receive defined broadcast keys - needless to say if you got hold of these keys then you could trigger the RFID broadcast anyway. These are the possible security issues with RFID tags - not any "magical" linking of purchases and real time locations.

That's the additional tracking the RFID allows - marketing profiling has been going on all the time anyway and it won't get any worse or better with RFID tags.

That would be...

That would be... the "T4 buggage system" then?

/coat /hat

@Sharedband

Next time you pay for an article on a tech site like the register... make sure you put all the relevant details in the advertorial.

For example, the fact that your service involves the routing of all traffic through your own proxy servers, which then present a single IP address to the public Internet is a pretty large omission and is pretty critical to the whole operation and is something that separates it from the hundreds of other load balancing/fail over solutions, both software and hardware, that currently exist.

Of course, operating a proxy like that adds a single point of failure to a system that other than this single proxy would provide fail over safety (as well as improving data throughput). [although you could load balance/fail over the proxy server as well]

On the other hand, as far as I can see it (and I haven't put much effort into this), a lot of readers here could easily put together something like this themselves... just by installing a proxy server in a data centre and setting it as the proxy for their local network.

Hundreds of mail hosts?

To sort out the confusion a little...

e-mails will rarely go through more than a couple of mail hosts. For example, when you're sending e-mail from your ISP to a friend/colleague who works for a corporation, the e-mail will frequently pass through something like this:

1) Your system (of course)

2) Your ISPs internal mail system

3) Your ISPs external mail system

4) The recipients external mail system

5) The recipients internal mail system

6) The recipients system

Of course, this is just a simplistic example. An unencrypted e-mail can be examined (and a copy made without your knowledged or consent) at any of these points.

Now onto the "hundreds"...

Because of the way the Internet works, transferring data between systems can take pretty much any route. Usually these routes are fairly obvious and take the shortest/fastest route (least cost) but in theory there's nothing really stopping some of the data packets going around the world while others just take the easy hop across the street. In any case, you cannot be sure of the exact route that all of the data packets that your e-mail is made up of. If one of the routers that it passes through makes copies of the packets and re-assembles them, you'll never know. It's this enormous unknown that also makes unencrypted e-mails so insecure.

Mind you, you're more likely to "lose" your personal details by printing them out and leaving them on your desk (or by having spyware on your or the recipient's systems) than you are to have Internet routers snoop them from data packets.

Nothing new here...

There nothing new here at all... various other vendors already provide load balancing and fail-over safety (which is all this really is) between two, and sometimes more, WAN connections.

The problems start *because* you have two different WAN (ADSL) connections, and therefore two different IP addresses. For example, when a user logs onto a website and happens to be using line 1 (with one IP address), when they click a link the router may start using line 2 (with a different IP address) and as a result most websites will flag up a security issue as the second request has come from a different IP address.

And now for something complete different...

And now for something complete different... an operating system and API / set of programming libraries that doesn't take thousands of times more CPU cycles than necessary to do something that should be simple.

Software Optimisation... the purchase of faster hardware.

Not Applicable

Virgin Media = UK

Gemstar = US

Dumb-ass US patent laws patenting the obvious and/or software do not apply in the UK (or Europe). Admittedly, the large US cartels are bribing, oops, lobbying the EU MEPs to change this but currently these patents are not applicable in any way in the UK.

Huh?

"Real Linux/UNIX FS designers still dream about NT's token based security and Transactional FS that has has streams since ver 1.0. (though most apps don't use them). Try pulling out power during a write on XP and Linux EXt3 a dozen times on both and see which is most damaged (NT may be OK, Linux may be bad on 1st try)"

I think you got the wording wrong... it's not "dream", it's "nightmare".

Streams were only cobbled in to attempt to subvert Apple Macs into cooperating with an NT server. As for transactional, that's far from true - NT's monolothic file system is far from a stable journalled file system and can't be readily replaced. The OS can't access other FileSystems with any measure of integration and the entire security botch that is windows file access rights is very closely intertwined with NTFS. Compare this with your average Linux distro where you can pretty much choose the file system you want to access and it's away... want a safe, fully journalling file system? no problem, want one that's fast but less stable, likewise. Hell, at a push it can even handle NTFS (made rather more difficult given the entirely poprietry nature and closed source of NTFS).

Re: What a bunch of *** by Webcrawler2050

"There is currently no Malware, no spyware, no viruses for the MAC - where as Windows is loaded."

Oh dear, now *you're* being blinkered and stupid! I think you'll find that there are quite a few examples of these kinds of malware for Macs. Admittedly, there are nowhere near as many as for Windows where it's so easy to write such applications. However there are a LOT of critical security holes and vulnerabilities in the Mac OS and associated hardware/software items - most of the OS related ones were introduced by Apple when they thoroughly botched the base OS but also some from the base OS itself.

Symantec (Norton)

"Compared to the mess that is the majority of open source interoperability, the MS family of software is rather superior when it comes to integration. (Exchange, SharePoint, Vista, Office, ISA, AD, XBox, ForeFront etc.)"

Oh hell, not wanting to sound like a Linux fanbois (I'll use whatever solution works best at the time, thank you)... but you really have a screw lose... very, very lose indeed.

Exchange - doesn't actually integrate with very much apart from, it's partial (botched) integration with AD and IIS in order to provide a borked "web-mail" that so "integrated" it doesn't even have anti-spam. (Anti-spam is in the Outlook client, to force you to use it, not a decent e-mail client).

Sharepoint - erm, this doesn't integrate into ANYTHING, even itself. It certainly doesn't integrate with IIS, has little to do with AD and as for Office, well MS had to break the HTTP standard and put yest another botch in IE for Office to "integrate" with Sharepoint. And it'll integrate OK, until it randomly stops working or you recklessly want to use Windows Explorer to access it as a file store. You do realise that it's MS's intention to do away with file sharing and use Sharepoint instead?

Vista - integrates so well with MS's own products that you're going to have wait until SP2 until it can actually copy files? (the eternal file copy bug is still in SP1).

Office - doesn't even properly integrate the component parts of its own suite of products, so quite how you think that it integrates with anything else...

As for MS ISA - there's a VERY good reason why nobody with any trace of sanity left would EVER trust MS to produce an Internet facing firewall that you'd use for a corporate environment. Something to do with enormous security and resource issues perhaps?

As for what you think X-Box and Forefront integrate with... any clues please? The first is a rather nice if flawed and nastily locked down toy and the other is a tool to help reign in the mess that MS made in the first place with their total lack of integration? If by "integration" you mean - force the customer to waste more money on yet another overpowered (for the simple job) server to manage, then of course, it integrates just fine.

Not that there's much great in the way of Linux integration, but adhering to publicly standards, data and file types and their processing is a start. There's a HELL of a long way to go before there's any sensible and viaiable level of integration between systems - not just MS and Linux, but all the others as well.

Now... back to the plot - MS home server is build on small business server which is a hacked about and restricted/bundled build of MS server 2003. Quite how they managed to bork it to such an extend for such a simple set of tasks... now that's an interesting question. I'm sure anybody who has to deal with the things knows the pain and agony of random security descriptor corruptions, the sheer stupidity of the windows seurity system but how did they manage to break file storage?

@Virus creation is unethical

Huh? Your statements beggar belief!

So how, exactly, are they meant to test the detection of viruses? By writing "hello world" programs and seeing if the AV applications detect these? A virus is just a program that performs certain tasks, if the "test" program you write doesn't perform these then it isn't a virus and therefore *shouldn't* be picked up by an AV scanner.

Production Checklist

* Marketing department

* Merchandising department

* Special effects teams

* Wooden actors

* Clueless director

* Video-game tie in

I'm sure they won't forget anything important, like, for example, plot or dialogue?

@Steve Evans - OEM XP install CD

You won't find a useful OEM XP install CD anywhere - just use a normal XP install CD. It's perfectly acceptable and *legal* to borrow a copy and re-install an OEM version as long as you use the licence that's on your system. Of course, this is assuming that like many laptops, the code hasn't been rubbed/worn off.

You may have to perform the telephone activation process rather than the on-line version. This can be annoying and almost rude and entrapping when it first asks you if you have installed the software on any other system (you need to press '1' to confirm that you haven't) and then rapidly follows it up with another, almost identical, question querying whether any other systems have the same software on it and this time you have to press '2' - pressing '1' tells them that the software is installed elsewhere... A nice little gotcha there for those that are new to the joys of MS telephone activation.

The alternative is the recovery disc that your laptop supplier should have supplied, or otherwise will charge stupid amounts of money for. This will usually just reset the entire system to a state of almost complete unusability - i.e. multiple FAT32 partitions, "recovery" partitions that steal vast amounts of disk space, shovelware like Norton AV and the usual stuff that makes a grown system administrator cry.

Just point this out, because I've come across people that bought new, full versions, of MS's OSes just because their last one crashed!

Hmmm

"We wanted to build the foundation and DNA of the new site in line with the ongoing trend and evolution of the internet towards dynamically generated and syndicable content."

Ah yes, the standard web2.0 muppet-speak...

Shame about the fact that when they redesigned it they STILL failed pathetically to produce a liquid (i.e., scalable/flowable to multiple resolutions) design, instead they stuck with the standard incompetent fixed width layout...

Also, what's with this stupid love of scrolling things "smoothly" (well, slowly). If I want something to appear or disappear, I want it to do it now, not when it feels like completing the task.

Apart from the usual gripes, it does look better than the old page. Shame there seemed to be no way to remove the other extraneous junk on the page such as the big "live lounge" flash and other content that I have absolutely no interest in