* Posts by 4.1.3_U1

128 publicly visible posts • joined 13 Apr 2007

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Naomi Campbell piles into Vogue

4.1.3_U1

@amanfromMars

Just watched the video again (excellent, by the way, one of the first mainstream examples of rapping involving a non-black)

"And out comes a man from Mars

And you try to run but he's got a gun

And he shoots you dead and he eats your head

And then you're in the man from Mars

You go out at night, eatin' cars

You eat Cadillacs, Lincolns too

Mercurys and Subarus

And you don't stop, you keep on eatin' cars

Then, when there's no more cars

You go out at night and eat up bars where the people meet

Face to face, dance cheek to cheek

One to one, man to man

Dance toe to toe

Don't move to slow, 'cause the man from Mars

Is through with cars, he's eatin' bars

Yeah, wall to wall, door to door, hall to hall

He's gonna eat 'em all

Rapture, be pure

Take a tour, through the sewer

Don't strain your brain, paint a train

You'll be singin' in the rain

I said don't stop, do punk rock

Well now you see what you wanna be

Just have your party on TV

'Cause the man from Mars won't eat up bars when the TV's on

And now he's gone back up to space

Where he won't have a hassle with the human race

And you hip-hop, and you don't stop

Just blast off, sure shot

'Cause the man from Mars stopped eatin' cars and eatin' bars

And now he only eats guitars, get up!"

Soooo ... is the problem that now he only eats guitars, or what?

and, of course, for those who have questioned the 'it' relevance of the article, our Naomi is a significant proponent of "mobile" gadgets like BlackBerries by making them even more mobile than the designers intended!

4.1.3_U1

@frank denton

Frank,

You obviously haven't pumped the lyrics to Rapture into your model yet.

El Reg protests North Korean internet domain

4.1.3_U1

re: Evil

and wa.nk, natch.

Fujitsu spins out two convertible PCs

4.1.3_U1

Resolution / Keyboard / Ports

Sounds interesting: what is the resolution of the display, and how usable is the keyboard on the U810? And what about ports - USB? Firewire? etc. etc. etc.

C'mon, this sounds like an interesting bit of kit for $1000, but you just haven't given any of the interesting details!!!

While we're at it, how about some performance figures?

This seems like a press release, not very well disguised ...

God appears in eggplant slice

4.1.3_U1

@Finnbar

Shouldn't it be incontinent?

:(-~

AT&T censors Pearl Jam's anti-Bush sing-along

4.1.3_U1

@Stu Reeves

Is that a subtle link back to the aforementioned Simpsons?

Coat, door etc.

Microsoft plans six critical patches

4.1.3_U1

@scotty1980

Of course Firefox gets a good lashing here, most recently:

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/07/31/firefox_update/

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/07/25/critical_firefox_vuln/

"how many security patches have been applied to the current Linux kernel?" ... hmmm, how long is a piece of string? I wouldn' like to try to count the number of individual security bug fixes since kernel 2.6 came out.

However, my Fedora 7 update repo only contains 4 (i686) rpms:

kernel-2.6.21-1.3228.fc7.i686.rpm kernel-2.6.22.1-33.fc7.i686.rpm

kernel-2.6.22.1-27.fc7.i686.rpm kernel-2.6.22.1-41.fc7.i686.rpm

whereas for FC6 I've got 13.

Thai police strapped with Hello Kitty armbands

4.1.3_U1

@Why are all the related stories about Paris Hilton?

Click on any of the related stories links - they're all related to this one too.

ISTR an article a few weeks ago which had _no_ related stories, and the error message below gave something away about the underlying code ... can't remember what now. If someone could find something similar and decipher that we may get there.

More important than where's the IT angle (which the link to AP fits, as this looks like it was lifted by a bot), is "where's the iPhone angle", shurely.

Fake e-cards signal massive DDoS attack

4.1.3_U1

@Morely Dotes

I think you'll find that a lot of the tasks which malware writers want to achieve do not require root access: fire off a spam email; ddos; p2p or im client for command and control.

Many distros even enable cron for normal users by default.

Maybe the whole machine wouldn't be owned, but does that matter if it performed its tasks?

@anon "Linux is as vulnerable as XP ... NOT!" said "stealthy 100MB viruses"

What about a small statically linked executable that searched for likely mail clients which might happen to be installed (starting with 'sendmail' perhaps?).

The hardest part would probably be writing something that the (idiot) user could just install with a few clicks (or a zero day browser exploit). Maybe that even "couldn't be done". Maybe nobody's bothered trying.

Lenovo to ship Linux laptops

4.1.3_U1

re: SuSE???

Who cares, at least one isn't being forced to pay the M$ tax.

The Scouts go grid

4.1.3_U1

Vulture Central III

Before you join the Scouts team, don't forget that you might want to join El Reg's very own team

http://www.worldcommunitygrid.org/team/viewTeamInfo.do?teamId=V821SPD4BN1

and boost the current ranking:

Total Run Time (y:d:h:m:s) (Rank) 85:090:13:09:54 (#99)

Points Generated (Rank) 25,282,476 (#102)

Results Returned (Rank) 99,235 (#91)

Vodafone pulls Facebook ads

4.1.3_U1

Ads, again

While we're at it, all those people who go off and take a (the?) piss when the ads come on on telly are depriving the broadcasters of their advertising revenue; we already have a licence fee anyway.

Wanna stick USB 2.0 to your network?

4.1.3_U1

Re. ASUS WL routers...

... and you can run openwrt on a lot them, so you can do what you like.

Laser iPhones shrink your brains

4.1.3_U1

Re. No Links

Maybe some whizzkid at El Reg can put the links in retroactively so that these comments become obsolete.

Gmail: a short, sharp rant

4.1.3_U1

@Alternative?

Rik - I use fastmail.fm, generally it's OK, but I do find the automated emails "Your FastMail.FM account 'xxxx@fastmail.fm' is 92% full" a tad annoying, particularly as they go both into the fastmail.fm inbox and the alternative email address you signed up with, and if you use imap you can see your used quota in the client anyway.

Maybe this is just what Guy is looking for ... oh wait a minute the free accounts only give you 10Mb of storage.

Doctor Who recruits new sidekick

4.1.3_U1

Kylie

It's true about Kylie for Xmas:

'Minogue, 39, will play a "major lead role"' http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2007/07/03/1968231.htm

I take this to mean she won't be the official sidekick. Hope she sings and dances a bit, though.

El Reg 'buys' acre of Brazilian rainforest

4.1.3_U1

ping

Just 'cos you can't ping it doesn't mean it's down:

$ ping www.sun.com

PING www.sun.com (72.5.124.61) 56(84) bytes of data.

--- www.sun.com ping statistics ---

13 packets transmitted, 0 received, 100% packet loss, time 11998ms

$ wget www.sun.com

--20:03:31-- http://www.sun.com/

Resolving www.sun.com... 72.5.124.61

Connecting to www.sun.com|72.5.124.61|:80... connected.

HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 200 OK

Length: unspecified [text/html]

Saving to: `index.html'

[ <=> ] 38,022 30.2K/s in 1.2s

20:03:33 (30.2 KB/s) - `index.html' saved [38022]

Lots of sites disable ping.

However, it does look to be down even now:

$ ping www.coolearth.org

PING www.coolearth.org (88.208.234.123) 56(84) bytes of data.

--- www.coolearth.org ping statistics ---

7 packets transmitted, 0 received, 100% packet loss, time 5999ms

$ wget www.coolearth.org

--20:06:04-- http://www.coolearth.org/

Resolving www.coolearth.org... 88.208.234.123

Connecting to www.coolearth.org|88.208.234.123|:80... failed: Connection refused.

Spaniard buys flat complete with mummy

4.1.3_U1

Family should petition for habeas corpus

on her behalf.

About that TV service, Mr Branson...

4.1.3_U1

ntlhell -> cablehell

Sometimes I wistfully look back to the days when I was an NTL customer. I still get letters from them (or VM, rather, now) occasionally (I mean snail mail) offering me special deals, and noting that I have a few pounds credit on my account. I did ring them up several times before they 'migrated' their 0800 customer services number to 0845 (for my convenience), and after the customary 30 minute plus wait was eventually assured that I would be getting a cheque for what they owed me in the post. Maybe that's it landing on the doormat now ... Nope.

Like many loyal subscribers I recently received this email from cablehell. Nice to know I'm still welcome there too.

____________________________________________

Hello *************,

As you are probably aware, ntl:, Telewest Blueyonder, Virgin.NET and Virgin Mobile have recently rebranded to Virgin Media. As such we felt our name, ntl:hell, was no longer appropriate, so we have there rebranded too! Our new name is CableHell and our new address is http://www.cablehell.co.uk/

With our rebrand we've also expanded our coverage too. While we have historically focussed on being a place for ntl: customers to vent, get help or just have a chat, our forums are now open for posts about any provider. So even if you've moved on from ntl: you're still more than welcome!

Unfortunately the old address of ntlhell.co.uk no longer works

</snip>

In principle cable TV service seemed to me like a good idea (works fine in alot of countries), but until a few things are fixed cablehell seems like the place to go. I've just given up on cable in the UK for the time being.

America haunted by ghost of ice gravity

4.1.3_U1

grey goo

Obviously the ice has been turned by grey goo into water. 60m is nothin' compared to what awaits us.

Salesforce.com embeds Skype into CRM

4.1.3_U1

sip

I must say I don't understand why skype causes so much excitement. I do have a skype account (which I haven't used for a couple of years), and as far as I'm concerned it's yet another proprietary protocol to encumber ourselves with. Do't we have enough of these already ... ?

VOIP is useful; at the moment I only use sip based services (which have obvious security implications) but I can live with this for the time being (I have the security of pstn / mobile to fall back on when needs call for...).

Oregon boy in double spider ear blockage horror

4.1.3_U1

Surely ..

Earachenophobia

Tories plan open door for open source

4.1.3_U1

Open Source <> local jobs

Surely a lot of the work created by adopting open source software in government projects would be outsourced to cheaper countries - no great increase in local jobs there I'd say.

Still, I'm all in favour of ditching proprietary software where practicable.

Attackers improve on JavaScript trickery

4.1.3_U1

NoScript

Try the NoScript extension for Firefox. The default settings disable javascript, but you can enable on a per-site basis, or just temporarily allow if you don't want to add to the whitelist yet.

http://noscript.net/

Spanish flag flies over Gibraltar

4.1.3_U1

Melilla

Melilla's the other Spanish enclave on the Southern shore of the Med.

UK's 'elitist' immigration rules billed for January 2008

4.1.3_U1

Aussie style

I went through the Aussie 'General Skilled Migration' a while back, and it was a bureacratic nightmare: getting written reference letters from places I had worked 4 years previously as a contractor for 6 months, getting detailed course description for my university degree completed 15 years previously, joining the BCS as the IT content of my degree (maths) was deemed insufficient.

This was just to get the skills assessment from the ACS. Then more mountains of paperwork for the actual application. Took about 3 years in total. During this time they'd occasionally write and ask for the next thing they required; don't answer within 60 days and your application is automatically cancelled.

Not something for the faint hearted.

How to get your Wi-Fi working again

4.1.3_U1

openwrt

If you're looking at DD-WRT in more detail in the near future, take a look also at openwrt. I've been using this for a couple of years and really like the flexibility of having a small linux server with hundreds of optional packages available.

It's also rock solid; just ssh'd in to the one I set up for my mother in law on the other side of the planet and it's behaving itself; she never complains about her internet connection.

# uptime

09:05:51 up 111 days, 18:12, load average: 0.00, 0.00, 0.00

Even the clock is right.

That said, dd-wrt means I can use a couple of the crippled wrt54g v5s (half the rom and ram of the previous models) I accidentally bought before I knew better.

Linux and Solaris face off

4.1.3_U1

Time will tell

Solaris hasn't been open that long; I think it's too early to say that opensolaris isn't a viable platform.

Personally, I'm not running Solaris on any x86 platforms at the moment, linux on the desktop mostly (windows only features on the work laptop), Solaris only on Sparc.

Let's wait and see.

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