Posts by Peter Mc Aulay

Hmm

So if I move from ISP X to ISP Y I might get a 125 quid bill from BT? What's preventing me from binning the bill, given that I have no contract with BT nor did I sollicit any sort of service from them? Oh, ISP Y may not connect me? Well, cable it is, then.

"Leveraging assets" indeed

"...contact their IBM representative to discuss how these assets and services could be leveraged.”

That always sounds to me like something to do with a server, a lever, and an office rooftop...

Ah well, OS/2 is burdened with too many patents and proprietary code owned by other companies for it to ever become open source (at least before, say, the 22nd century). Too bad, it was pretty good at the time.

Re: OMG!!!!

You only get pictures of pock-marked balls of rock in the media because pictures is about the only thing Joe Public understands about space science! Most of the really interesting stuff is incomprehensible to non-scientists. But oh no, there can't possibly be more to space exploration than taking a few pictures of old rocks, you know, that's so like, archeology and stuff innit, which you no doubt think is just as pointless?

Poor, blind fool.

Re: Wait for the idiots...

True, but the reaction would still be understandable. That Sony choose to sell the earlier ones at a loss is their problem, not ours.

Heh

The only times I ever hear about UPNP it's in connection with a security vulnerability. I don't think I've ever had cause to use it, and I probably never will.

So what?

First of all, who cares about WebSphere?

Secondly, if its development is going to be "community driven": if you don't like the licence, don't contribute to it. It's not like IBM is /forcing/ anyone to work for them for free or anything.

It's a valid concern

Most people think that once something is on the internet, it's there forever. As the recent cencorship and history-rewriting stories have confirmed, this is false. Future historians will curse us for this delusion.

So bloggers are now press...

Does this mean they'll also get a press card, and can call upon freedom of the press in court?

Gods help us.

This is news?

I remember attending a seminar about DNS back in 2001 where I was told that internationalisation, iirc Unicode characters, was just around the corner. BIND9 has supported it for some time.

Ahem... please remember that evolution is *slow*

There is a rather fundamental difference between a) tiny variations between human populations like the colour of their skin or the ability to produce a certain enzyme and b) something as complex as the evolution of intelligence. It's not impossible - maybe in a million years such differences may become significant, if there is sufficient and constant selective pressure (unlikely in the absense of deliberate selective breeding), but H. Sapiens is a young species. I'm sure the difference between the average intelligence of a random group of white Europeans and that of a random group of black Africans is not larger than the statistical error. IQ tests are notoriously bogus anyway, so how do they test for this? It hasn't been done, and Watson was merely idly speculating (a scientific way to describe "talking out of his arse"). He was probably being naive rather than intentionally racist, though.

Going after Usenet was only a matter of time

Maybe someone should whisper into the RIAA's ear that all IP communications are inherently P2P, maybe then when they try to have the whole internet taken down they'll get shot down like they so richly deserve.

That said, Usenet.com are idiots for having advertised the way they did, it was a incredible faux-pas which deserves to be punished.

MHD?

Sounds fusion-powered. Then again, this is Sun...

Speaking out of both sides of their mouths

I disagree. Microsoft violates the principle of least surprise. Yet again. The complaint is perfectly legitimate.

Re: The moon as a staging point

Agreed, Luna is not all that useful at the moment. The most expensive part of any space fight is the first 100km or so: up to low Earth orbit. Having something up there that you can use as a staging point for interplanetary craft/fuel dump/industrial presence would be immensely useful. However, ISS is just a research station. It's the Space Shuttle programme all over again, really: over budget, over time, designed by committee, redesigned a few times halfway through, not properly thought out, not as useful as we thought after all.

Which is a pity.

Towing an asteroid or two to L5 to develop some serious space-based industry, now that would be worthwhile.

Et alors?

Turkey isn't on the current euro coins either. So?

So what if they try to "secure" the firmware.

It's software. All software can be cracked. Always.

@Jeff Standen

Admirable response. And for once not a word slandering the security researchers :) Good show.

Title

My XT built in 1987 has a 20 MB hard drive, which was considered pretty good at the time, as there were still plenty of PCs with no hard drive at all. To the average user, gigabytes were theoretical quantities, much like petabytes today.

"Never heard of a virus that lives in the master boot record" indeed. N00b.

Still...

700 extra Mhz (an increase of 28% over the 2.5Ghz chip) translates into only 4% extra performance. That's not so great no matter which sector it is.

In any case, my next CPU will be chosen on the basis of energy consumption / performance, not raw benchmarks. Electricity is expensive enough as it is.

Re: Regardless of some comments

The "if more people used Linux/Unix there would be more exploits for it" argument is bogus. It's a variant of the "security through obscurity" argument, and is possibly a result of a too narrow-sighted view of IT as a whole.

The vast majority of Internet servers run Unix, yet Windows boxes remain the softest targets. Not because Unix machines can't be cracked (historically, most famous cracks were against Unix, which used to be perceived as having weak security compared to the competition!) or aren't attractive targets - in fact, cracked Unix hosts are highly prized among black hats because one can do more with them than with the average Windows PC.

The fact that vast hordes of Windows desktops can be trivially taken over by random script kiddies has litle to do with their market dominance, and the fact that this is harder to do with the various *nix flavours has little to do with their lack of presense in the desktop field.

Thin clients are ace

When you're a corporate IT department. Fixing a terminal server is rather less work (and much less frustrating) than fixing a maze of 300 Windows PCs, all different. Software breaks several orders of magnitude more often than thin client hardware does, anyway.

For home users, less so. Still, I'd consider one if they were cheaper and not locked into an expensive proprietary back-end technology. (But I'm a geek, so my house has IT infrastructure.)

Oh please

It matters not a whit why Apple charges twice for the same song, only that they do. I'm astonished that so many people find it necessary to conjure up excuses for a corporation's behaviour.

Then again there are plenty of jurisdictions where, if it looks like a sale, walks like a sale and quacks like a sale, it's a sale and not "licencing" - so Apple can't actually enforce this very often.

Re: @To all My Detractors

You are bored with the inanity of comments so you post an equally inane flame to get tempers raised. Suuuuure. We believe you.

Let's not feed the trolls, people.

Pshaw

I live on the Continent and was educated in metric, but I also learned the various Imperial and derivative measurements in order to understand people in the UK and USA (who grok even less metric than the British). It's not rocket science people, get over it. Time is not metric either and nobody complains about that, do they!

Yawn

Haven't we already seen this exact same charade played out back in 2001? They'll pull the plug on it due to "lack of consumer demand" before 2010, mark my words. Just like they did last time.

Bah indeed

Also known as the "argument from ignorance". Determining the common origin of a group of asteroid fragments isn't actually *that* hard.

Ye ghods

Net filters to combat street violence. What has the UK come to!

It's unfair to blame the developers for the mistakes of sales/management...

...so buy the game, then crack it. Problem solved. (OK, in the US that's still illegal, but for lots of people it'll work.)

Misconfigured server indeed

Facebook also appear to lack proper separation between their production and testing/development servers. Bad code will be the least of their worries.

DRM is not the problem as such...

The problem is that iPlayer requires Windows and Internet Explorer. Let me repeat that. *Internet Explorer*. The very same security nightmare everyone knowledgeable has been warning everyone off, and a primary infection vector for all kinds of nastiness. At the very least this sends mixed signals, at the worst this makes the BBC look like idiots when the first exploit targets iPlayer and then takes ages to fix.

Save us from such vapid nonsense

He wants us to "buy forms of self-expression"; if that doesn't defeat the point of self-expression then I don't know what does. Don't need imagination to have personality indeed. At least his underlying aim is clear. All hail Mammon!

WTF

Suspension and a court drama over an IM avatar? Am I the only one to think that's so incredibly ridiculously over the top it's not even funny anymore? Land of the free unless you don't march in line, what.

Death first

I wouldn't install Windows "Fisher Price" XP way back when and I certainly won't install Vista now. My desktop runs Win2K. I might install XP when games no longer support 2K (which will be a while yet, I think). I dread the day an employer forces me to use Vista; *that* day will surely come even though I'm a Unix admin by trade...

Tsk

Indeed, if you boot a Solaris install disk in single-user mode it'll also give you root access without a password. In fact this is the official way to recover lost root passwords. Likewise, Linux too can be booted with a kernel parameter that gives you a root shell with no password required. You don't even need a CD on many boxes, I don't recall anyone making a big fuss over that.

Besides, if an attacker has physical access to the machine, all bets are off anyway. That's not really Microsoft's fault.

Shame on you for falling for this one, John.

But who owns .com?

I'm sure VeriSign would never be so crass as to accidentally or "accidentally" lose the theregister.com domain records, but why tempt fate?

What makes it libel?

It's not libel if it's true.

Sizewell?

That's the one that's going to fall off the cliff into the sea in x years, isn't it? Great forward planning, that.