Posts by preppy
32 posts • joined Tuesday 8th April 2008 16:00 GMT
What about the LEGAL data aggregators?
As usual, no one is worried about the privacy threat from perfectly legal data aggregators. Look up ChoicePoint or Axciom. These people know more about you even than Google or Facebook.
.......and then there's the worry that someone has hacked THEM!
Re: Nope
Agree completely. Scenario: I war-drive and find someone's open wi-fi, and use it to set up half a dozen one-time use free email addresses. Then I go down to Starbucks for a couple of hours, and use their "free wi-fi" signed on with some of these one-time email addresses. Of course, I'm spoofing my MAC address, and I pay with cash! How in the world will "the authorities" link my transactions at Starbucks back to me, unless the content I transmit or consume identifies me directly?
Windows XP Upgrade
Of course users will get to pay for the hardware and software upgrade.
....but can anyone tell me what additional VALUE or additional FUNCTIONALITY most Windows users will get from upgrading from XP to something else?
So...the idea is that you spend $1300 of YOUR money. Then you hand over all YOUR data, plus evidence of all of YOUR processing, and evidence of ALL THE PLACES WHERE YOU use your shiny new machine.....to Google.
And apart from the money, why would Google be interested in this proposition? I'm sure I can't imagine.
Re: Mint is great but ...
Regarding XFCE......it's simpler, cleaner and faster than GNOME. If anyone plans to start out on Fedora (my distro of choice), install XFCE.
...and here's what you get when people TRY to write bad code.....
Obfuscated C Competition here....
http://www.ioccc.org/years.html#2012
Posted in Linux kernel dumps 386 chip support
Re: 6502 / Z80? Hah!
No...don't remember Turbo Pascal for CP/M.....but I do remember BDS C and dBASE II - both good tools in their day.
The bad memories are all about trying to use Prestel using my Osborne 01's 300 baud modem.
Editor: Transistor symbol is wrong....
The Register main page shows the symbol for a bipolar transistor.....should be for a field effect transistor as here >> http://www.google.com/imgres?imgurl=http://www.interfacebus.com/JFET-N-Channel-symbol.png&imgrefurl=http://www.interfacebus.com/Glossary-of-Terms_J.html&h=106&w=103&sz=2&tbnid=u4OWZwlZ2VT86M:&tbnh=84&tbnw=82&prev=/search%3Fq%3Dfet%2Btransistor%2Bsymbol%26tbm%3Disch%26tbo%3Du&zoom=1&q=fet+transistor+symbol&usg=__ayrb0Oa0WlWlp6II6Nv9pVM_lMM=&docid=7vUgV1eI3SBFCM&hl=en&sa=X&ei=2GXHUJ3ENIvC9gTCi4CIAQ&sqi=2&ved=0CE8Q9QEwBQ
EasyTag???
So John McAfee was located because of a location tag in a photo taken of him and a journalist.
Interesting......given his technology chops, why was he not INSISTENT that ALL the tags be stripped out of the photo before it was posted?
This is (yet another) warning that much of the new "user friendly" technology in place today is actually spying on its users - whether actively or (in this case) passively. BEWARE!
The other part was the hardware mistake.....
Intersting article.....but no mention of IBM making a serious mistake by trying to change to a proprietary bus on the PS/2 with their Micro Channel architecture (as compared with the open architecture of the original PC and then the AT).
Come to that, the article makes no mention of the PS/2 hardware at all. Perhaps a third part of the series could be on the relationship between OS/2 and PS/2???
"...moving to Gnome 3, KDE or Cinnamon".
No....not Gnome 3.....but what about XFCE....it's the closest you will get to Gnome 2.
Slightly OT
How did Windows 8 get to 8? Should it not be Windows 10?
1 Windows 1.0
2 Windows 2.0
3 Windows 3.0
4 Windows 95
5 Windows 98
6 Windows NT
7 Windows XP
8 Windows Vista
9 Windows 7 <<<<< ????????????
10 Windows 8
Linux?
Looking at the Spiceworks site, it seems that the only OS support is for Windows, Apple, Android. No sign of managing from a Linux client. Am I missing anything here?
Re: I get enough nagging from LinkedIn as it is
Almost all of the "LinkedIn" emails which arrive in my inbox are actually spam from elsewhere....but they look exactly like the genuine article. Beware!
Twitter on LinkedIn
One of my connections in LinkedIn posted a tweet to LinkedIn every 30 minutes or so, maybe 18 hours a day. I got so used to skimming over these tweets that I was actually shocked this morning when they disappeared.
Shocked.....and pleased too!
Flame - Why did it take so long to detect?
I'm curious about a slightly different question....."Did it take the TARGETS two to five years to detect it?"
After all, the malware is huge, and the alleged data gathering impact must have created significant network traffic.
And if the targets knew about Flame all along, how much MISINFORMATION have they passed along to the spooks who own Flame?
Preppy
What am I missing?
On my (broadband) connection, all the machines on the LAN are configured to point to the router as the DNS source. After that the broadband provider sorts out the real DNS server.
1. Sounds like I only have a problem if the broadband provider has DNS malware.
2, Also sounds like a lot of people have their machines connected directly to their cable modem with no router/firewall to protect them. How hard can this be?
Posted in Twelve... classic 1980s 8-bit micros
Osborne 01
The Osborne 01 was a bit more expensive in 1982 - around 1500 pounds. But for that you got the complete Digital Research CP/M toolset (assembler, debugger, etc), CBASIC, MBASIC, plus Wordstar, Supercalc. I added dBASE II and the BDS C compiler.
For me the bottom line was that I got a machine which allowed me to hack (assembler, C) but also use the Osborne as an office machine to write documents, build spreadsheets and write database apps in a (reasonably) high level language. This flexibility may seem run-of-the-mill today, but it was amazing in the earky 1980's.
The machine was turned over to the Science Museum in Kensington in the 1990's -- still fully functional and with all the original documentation and floppy masters.
Iceland? What's happening in Munich?
Can we have an update about what's happening in Munich? I seem to recall that Munich planned to move 14,000 seats to Linux? How did that work out? Did they save money? Were there other benefits?
Here at PreppyCentral we've been a Red Hat/Fedora shop since 1999 with no problems at all. And we've cut our licence costs to close to zero.
Gartner Advice?
Gartner advice from way back when sounded like this - Get with Portfolio Management. That way:
- the user community set the agenda for the IT department
- the user community made the hard choices about what NOT to fund
- the user community got to hold IT accountable for Programs and projects which were funded
The article might read better if the advice was "Propose and fund a new Program within IT for process and productivity improvements - with some hard targets set by users".
The way it actually reads is "Gartner says IT is unproductive".....not helpful!!!
Deja Vu
This is not the first article I've read which contained similar criticisms of a new GUI. The other articles were about Gnome 3.0 and Ubuntu Unity.
Are GUI designers ALL ill with the same disease? Or is this just a symptom of the "bleeding edge" -- where we'll all just have to wait for the technology to "mature"?
What about authorized users using authorized software?
Recent news items (securities fraud, WikiLeaks) make it clear that organizations can be compromised by authorized users using authorized software. This problem is not mentioned at all.
The real issue is a much more general one of risk management......how high is the risk, and how much are you prepared to spend to minimize that risk? The highest risks cannot be lowered to zero, and no amount of technology implementation (software, hardware, network monitoring, etc etc) will make the risk zero.
Posted in Facebook rolls out Timeline to world+dog
Facebook.....
Why oh why the continuous emphasis on "keeping my own page secure"?
The real problem is that FB is a DATA AGGREGATOR, and that everything that everyone has ever uploaded is available as a whole to FB. Also to the CIA, the FBI, and all the hackers that no one (even FB!) knows about.
Happy surfing!
Posted in Sinclair ZX81: 30 years old
I waited a bit.....
I bought a Mk 14 and did some machine code programming. I even modified the thing to use a UV erasable EPROM to save my code. The whole thing was interesting, but I couldn't really say the results were useful!
So I waited a bit, and bought an early Osborne 01. This had CP/M, floppy disks, dBASE II, the BDS C compiler, Wordstar and a 300 baud (!!!) modem........almost modern really.
Microsoft lovingly open sources .NET package manager
...so why is there no mention of the EXACT OPEN SOURCE LICENCE being used. GPL....surely not!!!!
"a modern operating system is so big one single person ... cannot understand it all"
Well, that may be true. But it's beside the point. Professional shops do lots of things both before and after compiling code to make sure that the code is sound. Two examples:
- [Before] Code walkthroughs (so that bugs like SQL injection are not written into the code)
- [After] Using LARGE suites of test cases which can be run automatically....it's called .... err ... testing.
Please be careful who you call a fool....
"A demo recently showed just how perfect this system can work." So you saw the demo!
I saw a demo at Microsoft in 1994 (yup....1994) showing a really great integrated communications client on a Windows desktop. It looked like an email client, but it integrated email, voice-mail and faxes in a single tool. It looked and worked like an email client, but brought all the various media items together in one place. Fantastic demo.
......but I never saw anything else like it ever again! That's the thing with demos....sometimes you never see anything ever again.
Microsoft to banish 'responsible' from disclosure debate
"We all want to protect customers and users"
Dear Microsoft:
Well why not start by designing secure software in the first place? From the "brain" virus, through Wordbasic macro viruses to the latest USB vulnerability, Microsoft have ALWAYS put "speed to market" first and security last. This latest step in the Redmond game is more "blame the messenger" posturing, and as such clearly does not represent any change from the sloppy security practices of old.
How many more messengers will get the blame before the world wakes up and stops buying inferior products at elevated prices from the Gates/Ballmer crowd?
Re: Another answer to the question that still hasn't been asked
Well....ALMOST nobody. I care, and there are a few others out there too. But you're right - outside of the Linux Server community, there isn't much traction for Linux on the desktop. Pity really, because it's pretty good for most of the basic things that I do every day.
VOIP???
Isn't 150 milliseconds the target for latency. If these are geo-stationary satellites, then the latency just from the satellite round trip is around 250 milliseconds - and that's before any latency associated with the terrestrial network. Am I dreaming, or is the promise of a functional VOIP service just a pipe dream?
...you don't need AntiPhorm!
....all you need is an anonymizing proxy which encrypts the session. Like:
www.proxyweb.net
It's slow, but the Internet Provider will will only see the connection to the proxy, and none of the traffic piped through the proxy!
Preppy
Posted in Oracle scans BEA code for GPL and LGPL
GPL - Remember Unbreakable Linux?
ORACLE....isn't that the company which used the GPL to redistribute Red Hat Linux? Is this hypocrisy...or what?
