Posts by Morely Dotes

Innovattion: Verboten at Redmond

@ Dan: "Instead, MS talk about it, and you assume they ripped it off and that it couldn't possibly be half-decent."

Uhm... Dan? We have seen *proof* that they ripped it off.

April 2006: http://gizmodo.com/gadgets/pcs/stealth-tabletop-from-design-concepts-168792.php

June 2006, Mitsubishi: http://www.techliving.com/archives/2006/06/mitsubishi_unveils_pc_tabletop.shtml

And there are hundreds of others, *all* of which predate Microsoft's derivative (and notoriously-buggy, since it's from MS) project.

Why is it...

That we never hear of the free antivirus packages doing this? ClamWIN, AVG, Avast Personal... I'm sure there are several others.

Instead, I am constantly seeing that Symantec and Norton products for Windows (do they have any other products?) cause excessive CPU usage, or bog down the system (British pun intended there), or cause system failure. Why would anyone *pay* for software that is so notoriously dangerous?

El Reg editors on vacation? Or made redundant?

"America is, after all, the home of the inappropriate emotional display."

Right. And who was blubbing about some poor sod who was shot dead in the Tube by British cops?

Oh, and do go get some linguistic help. "Mana-a-mano" means hand-to-hand, you illiterate boob.

Nicely done

"We'll refrain from any jokes about diaries and maps"

Although I can't think of any such jokes, it was well done to avoid them.

This is clearly a matter of literacy.

The marketers at Orange obviously don't understand the difference between "fair ue" and "fare use."

Be careful what you ask for.

You mignt get it.

@ Chad H.: "Fibre to the Premisis? Yes please! Isnt that what we've all been wanting anyway?"

Verizon brought fibre to my house. The yahoos also managed to run it directly through the center of my sewer line (at 90 degrees, of course - punched right through both sides) and also caused my fresh water feed line to freeze and break.

US$3600 in repairs later (including the excavation), and my yard looks like the aftermath of the Blitz. Sure, Verizon reimbursed me for the work, and promised to re-level and resod my lawn (which has not yet been done), but imagine the nightmare of not being able to flush a toilet more than once a day until the repairs are made - and that means no showers, no laundry, no dishwashing.

One might hope BT's contractors are more careful. Good luck.

Oh, and my speed is a nominal 15Mbps down, 3 Mbps up (a vast improvement over the 384k SDSL I had previously, but not a patch on the 100 Mbps Europe is seeing).

Digital Darwinism?

'According to The Independent, London-based Scooter Computer's call-out service has recently received "hundreds" of calls from concerned users in the wake of a chilling Panorama special last month which highlighted the possible risks of going wires-free'

Mind you, that's out of millions of terrified Londoners; the rest were too dim to be able to dial a phone. Clearly, the "hundreds" were at the top end of the bell curve, in the sample of "Londoners with intelligence rated equal to or below a chimp with a brain injury."

Bloody shame that *lack* of wi-fi doesn't cause retroactive sterility.

If you're lucky...

M$ will delay the Zune in Europe until they finally write and release a secure and mostly-bug-free operating system.

Sometime in the 35th Century, perhaps.

Caveat: Anyone who does get a Zune needs to know that, when you tell it to remove items from the library, *by default* it removes them from your computer's hard disk, too. Watch it!

Not impossible!

Hugely expensive, yes. But so was Apollo, and what did we get out of that? A few kilos of rock.

For the space elevator, you don't use *one* cable. Not unless you're suicidal, anyway.

For terraforming Mars (the payoff from which is an entire planet to colonise - with more total space than all of North and South America combined, and Europe seems to have managed that nicely, even with the active opposition of the natives).

To create the atmosphere, we bombard Mars with icey material from Saturn's rings - expensive to get started, and a long-term (probably a century at least) project, but it *can* be done. This also provides some heat input (friction heating of the incoming "ice bombs") and more water. The water is likely enough to put paid to the sandstorms. If it's not, then plant beach grass.

To protect the atmosphere, and any future inhabitants, from Solar radiation, a Mylar balloon is constructed at roughly 15km altitude, enclosing the entire planet, with a few strategically-placed openings for space traffic.

And there's more than enough sunlight to grow crops. We do it just fine in high latitudes on Earth.

Expensive? Sure. Payoff? An entire *planet*. How much is that worth?

Religion:

It's what people fall back on when thinking is just too hard.

Personally, I like the Flying Spaghetti Monster theory because spaghetti goes with red wine.

Bush hugging trees?

He must have found a knife that cuts through tree bark like butter, then. Anyone being hugged by Bush needs to watch his (or its) back.

Simpler and cheaper

DENY from [IP range of China, Japan, Spain, Tiscali, Latin America, Quebec, Korea, Thailand, and if you don't expect traffic from the USA, them too]

The result is Balkanization of the Internet, from one point of view; from my point of view, it's quarantine of the major spam sources. I have cut my networks' spam uptake by over 95% this way, without losing any legitimate email.

So the joint ventrue will have...

the combined Agency's initials painted on the rocket, then?

I should imagine "AsiBNSCCNESCNSACSACSIRODLREsaISROJAXAKARINASANSAURoscosmos " might require rather a larger rocket than originally planned. Perhaps they should aim for Jupiter instead of Mars, as, once they get to the crew capsule on top, they'll be halfway to Mars anyway.

Prove that it wasn't distributed by Appl, then.

"But proving that that person distributed the file would be hard as they could just claim that their MP3 player was lost/stolen, or a flatmate copied it without permission, or whatever."

Since there's no such thing as a hack-proof server (no, my friends, no even Linux - which I use, and love), and there's certainly no such thing as a 100% honest employee base, any such files that "escape into the wild" might as easily be taken by an Apple employee, or a system cracker (called by the illiterati "hackers"), with a perfectly-honest customer's information embedded.

Of course, removing the embedded data is literally child's play. Changing it to something totally different, such as "legal@riaa.org" is no more difficult.

Scoffing? or..?

"Still, Heinlein also predicted nuclear-powered rocket ships, household robots which could "put dishes away after the dishwasher was through", human colonies throughout the solar system and beyond, "Beanstalk" orbital elevators etc etc. Not to mention a dystopian future for America in which a crazed religious zealot would establish a theocratic dictatorship."

Nuclear-powered rockets are a reality - what do you suppose drives the ion engines on a couple of the probes currently flying around the Solar system, for example. The robot is a mere matter of economics - Honda's bot could put away dishes if it were programmed to do so, but letting the humans do it is still far cheaper. NASA is working on the human colonies, albeit under severe budgetary constraints because, presumably, Congress doesn't know about the vast supplies of sweet crude on Mars, and has offered a prize and held at least one competition (which was duly reported in _El_Reg_) for beanstalks.

And the crazed religious zealot is in the White House right now.

So obviously, SF authors not only can, but regularly do, predict the future with with fair accuracy.

What's needed is a genetically-tailored virus that cures religion; that will take care of the martyrdom problem *and* eliminate one of the wedges driving humans apart in places where they desperately need to hang together.

@ David

He said he "goggled" it. One can only conclude his goggles need cleaning.

Discovery meay lead to ID theft charges as well

Soloway has a long history of various kinds of theft and fraud; anyone stupid enough to make a purchase from a spammer (such as Soloway) would be at risk of ID theft as well, and there's every chance he took advantage of the data provided by his idiot customers.

Microsoft did it first?

"3D mapping of both Swindon and Brighton (and other places in foreign-land) was introduced last month"

Yes, but weren't they plonked into the Channel or the North Sea, as is Microsoft's wont?

Malicious? Incompetent? Tiscali!

"While it's true that tiscali is probably widely blacklisted because management doesn't see spam as a problem (see http://www.exim.org/mail-archives/exim-users/Week-of-Mon-20050404/msg00002.html), if blocklisting were really the problem, people would see evidence of tiscali's mailservers attempting to deliver mail and being told to s*d off."

Not necessarily. Tiscali may be like a number of other spam-friendly ISPs, which deliberately send non-delivery reports to Bit Heaven, rather than giving them to the users, since a fair few of the users may be able to understand that a "553 Piss Off, Tiscali spammer" might in fact indicate that Tiscali *is* the problem.

Of course, having your own server and looking at the logs to find that Tiscali hasn't even made a delivery attempt is a bit more conclusive. That wouldn't work here; I've firewalled Tiscali, rather than blocking only Port 25. Malicious attacks may come on any port, and Tiscali is an embodiment of the principal: "Sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice."

I don't care whether they are malicious or merely incompetent; my servers and my customers are protected in either event.

Perhaps Tiscali tells partial truths

As owner/operator of SpamBlocked.com, I can tell you that finding the source of any spam is in Tiscali IP space is cause for blocking that IP space. They have a long record of ignoring reports of spam coming from their systems, so the solution is simple: Block Tiscali servers upon discovery.

So, even when (if?) they get the SMTP problem fixed at their end, their customers still can't email my customers - and that's how my customers want it.

A huge blow to spamemrs

ReisterFly always seemed to be a have n for dodgy domain registrations, mostly used by spammers as "landing pages." GoDaddy, if they are the new registrar, will be a painful wake-up call; GoDaddy is the only registrar to have taken the "no spamming" rule seriously, and has a record of confiscating spammers' domains.

I will be watching this sequence of events unfold with glee.

Now you know what it's like for your customers, Sony

"Should be interesting to see just how aggressive Sony gets on this one. They have spent billions, with others, developing BluRay technology, and along comes Patent Troll USA to spoil the party. I think I am losing count of the number of times some US based IP monger comes out of the woodwork years *after* all the development work on a major product is done, in order to sue for supposed patent infringement. If anyone wants to know what's wrong with the US economy, this is it."

Schadenfreude; if any corporation deserves to suffer from frivolous infirngement claims, it's Sony (but I hate to see the patent system abused by anyone).

Clamping is legal?

Bugger! Why hasn't someone clamped this Neanderthal's car, then? Or better yet, his jewels.

She knew what she signed on for

The shallow bint knew when she signed up to make real-life Hentai that her old man probably wouldn't be alive when she finished. Clearly, money or the possibility of money was more important to her than family, or even of knowing that a family member had died.

Let her get on with her poor excuse for a life and, if you're really upset, boycott the crappy show. It's no business of anyone else what the producers tell or don't tell their participants.

The OEM Windows license cost

OEM Windows was US$30 for Windows 2000 when I was building PCs as an OEM, and I rather doubt that's changed for XP. The wide variety of Vista options probably means the price point varies between $30 and $50 (but anyone buying Vista deserves to be gouged considerably more than that anyway).

I'll have one, please

I'm not in the UK, but I'd much rather have a nuclear plant in my back yard than a fossil-fueled pollution machine. Yes, in the few cases where there have been accidents, they have been rather sensational;nonetheless, nuclear plants have a far better safety record than fossil plants, they're quieter, they actually emit *less* radiation than a fossil plant, they're cleaner in every way, and they won't be shut down by a sudden interruption in the flow of oil from client states such as Iraq.

It's the luddites who fear *anything* new that have kept us from getting rid of the old fossil plants altogether - and who are somewhat responsible for the war in whcih the US and UK now find themselves embroiled.

But isn't that pygmy country?

@ Dave: Pygmies have very small feet, you know...

I'll get me coat.

Why MS doesn't dare name the patents - not even one

"Microsoft only has to prove that one patent has been violated and the whole open source house of cards comes crashing down."

Bollocks!

You think IBM and some of the other 800-pound gorillas don't have software patents that Microsoft infringes? Think again.

If Microsoft is silly enough to detail even *one* patent that they claim is being infringed, then the run a number of risks, including:

A declaratory judgement that the plaintiff (whoever brings the suit against the patent) is not infringing.

A judgment invalidating the patent.

A suit by other patent holders against Microsoft for patenting or attempting to patent a process for which the other patent holder already owns the patent.

And, of course, the MS fanbois will immediately claim that *I* am spreading FUD - but look at who claims "you're infringing our patents" but won't dare detail which ones.

Perhaps the employee is too busy

"Officials at Brinkster, which claims to be a top hosting provider in the US that serves customers in 175 countries, didn't respond to requests for comment."

A top hosting provider with only a /20 IP address allocation? That's a bit like being a world military power with a troop of boy scouts and a canoe.

And how is it that their registration shows them to be in Norfolk, Va, but their ARIN contact phone number is in Arizona?

I smell a rat.

Lost your keys again, have you?

"Straight blokes are best at reading maps, but if you want to know where you left the car keys, you'd best ask a woman, a new study has revealed."

Odd. My car keys will be either in my pants pocket, or hanging on the key hook near the front door. It never takes me more than 15 seconds to find them.

My wife's will be wherever she put them down last time she came in the house. It rarely takes her more than 30 minutes to find them.

The study is spot-on regarding map-reading, however. I print the maps, commit as much as possible to memory, and pull off the road to consult them when I must. It saves hours of wandering around looking for non-existent roads in the wrong county (usually caused by holding the map upside-down or sideways, and then assuming that whichever side is at the top is the direction we are currently going).

A rare event

@ Andy: A disabled pilot in a functional combat aircraft is a pretty rare event - generally, if the pilot is disabled, it's because the bird has been shot up so badly that it can't fly any more. The exception is in helicopters, where a pilot may be hit about as easily as the mechanics - but the weight premium in adding a redundant robopilot would be prohibitive. You could have robotics, or payload, but not both.

So, there's little or no point to it in a fixed-wing aircraft, and none whatsoever in a rotary-wing.

Right! So Ballmer is first?

"IT bods should be struck off if they create too many dodgy computer systems, according to Microsoft's national technology officer."

Who came up with the concept of changing the user interface on every release of MS Windows, or MS Office? It costs roughly US$15,000 per computer user per interface (e.g., changing from WinXP with Office 2003 to WinVista with Office 2007 is two interface changes, ergo, US$30,000) in lost productivity while the user figure out where the idiots in Redmond hid the controls *this* time (not to mention turning off all the "gee-whiz" useless crap that burns up CPU cycles without adding anything useful).

So, whoever it was that decided to Office 2007 should work differently (at the user interface level) to Office 2003 is going to cost my employer roughly US$975,000 when we're forced to switch. (We're a fairly small firm, in spite of having 85% of the market in our field.)

Seems to me it would be cheaper to switch to OpenOffice. Hmmm.

They call it a "compromise"

I call it "jack-booted thugs shaking down the old ladies."

This is why I refuse to buy a CD and why I refuse to pay for MP3s.

Diesl-electric hybrid? Missing a good bet!

According to Scientific American at http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?alias=fill-your-car-up-with-alu&chanId=sa003&modsrc=reuters_box it's possible to fill a tank with aluminum (or the Brit aluminium)/gallium pellets and use water as the "fuel" to generate hydrogen silently - and thus run a fuel cell rather than a diesel to charge the batteries and power the Aggressor.

I suppose this means that Mad King George IV will want to invade nations with large bauxite deposits next, but at least those are mostly not Muslim nations.

Possible correction

"A competing bill which recently received the endorsement of the House Energy and Commerce Committee was more stringent. It required the distributors of programs to notify users and obtain their consent before a piece of software was downloaded. The software industry opposed that element of the proposed bill."

I believe that you will find that publishers of spyware were the opponents of the more-stringent bill. the *legitimate* software industry has always required user consent before installing packages. Even Microsoft requires user consent. It is adware/spyware pushers like 180solutions who want to be able to infect your computer without your consent.

Another possible defense

I don't know the legal term, but there is a principle in law that a (possible) victim is required to take any "reasonable" measures available to him to mitigate damages. For example, posting a "reserved parking" sign in a lot which appears to be a public parking lot, or enabling WEP or other methods of limiting access to one's WiFi network.

This appears to be a clear case of a local thug^W cop trying to make some headlines at the expense of an inoffensive citizen who perhaps can't afford to fight back.

Stifling public participation is an important part of education

University is supposed to prepare students for their future career and adult life. Since the world is turning more and more into the surveillance society portrayed in dystopian novels like _1984_ and games like _Shadowrun_, teaching students that they need to take steps to protect their identities when protesting the corruption and incompetence of their Uni's administration and staff is critical.

No university which fails to teach such important life lessons should be considered as an option for a student who wants to be prepared for Real Life. A few object lessons - a student or two publicly and loudly humiliated, then expelled - will bring that important knowledge home for the rest of the students.

And, as a side benefit, it will serve to reinforce the iron-fisted power of the Uni's administration and staff - so it's a win-win situation, except for the poor sods who actually fell for the old "freedom of speech, freedom of thought, freedom of expression" gag. But someone needs to clean the bathrooms at McDonalds, so they'll have no problem finding jobs.

for once MS is superior to the third-party brand

The silly Windows XP "firewall" has far fewer vulnerabilities than the Norton brand - but then, relying on a software firewall that's installed on the same computer you want to protect is about as smart as protecting your money by keeping it in a paper sack.

For those who insist on using software that gives them a false sense of security, something from a Sourceforge developer is a better choice. And it won't cost any money.

And for those who want actual protection, get an external firewall/router device. Refurbished Netgear devices can be had for as little as US$11 if you shop around. Brand new "white box" router/firewalls are only about US$12.

Compare to Norton's vulnerable package, which is rented, not sold, at about $40 - $60 annually.

This is part of my job - computer security is NOT accomplished by slapping a band-aid on top of Windows.

Re: water reactive pellets

"gods forbid there's ever an accident involving a car rupturing a tank and hitting a river or lake, instant boom."

No, hydrogen doesn't spontaneously combust in air. Liquid hyrgoen and liquid oxygen, yes - but even Michigan in February doesn't get cold enough to liquify oxygen.

Also, regarding the need to heat the fuel tank in colder climes - most cars sold in those areas already have cooling system heaters so the radiator won't freeze and burst. The tank doesn't have to be *really* warm, it just needs to stay above freezing. That's easy.

Russia is European, isn't it?

The Russians still have the world's best operational rocket for heavy-lift. Why not use it?

MS can't afford to enforce their "patents"

@ Nigel Kneale: "I cannot see how any company can be party to the GPL, or can be shown to have accepted the GPL, if they're not copying GPL code and giving it out to other people."

Portions of Microsoft's kernel code for NT have leaked. Incorporated into that kernel code are some lines that are lifted verbatim from Free BSD. While BSD is not Linux, the use of BSD code obligates MS to adhere to the BSD license - which they have clearly not done.

If MS is foolish enough to force a showdown over their "software patents" they will be forced to provide source doe during a process called "discovery," and at thet point, they will be shown to have incorporated code lifted from Linux as well - you can count on it.

(I place "software patents" in scare quotes because they are like "monsters under the bed" - something which can be used to frighten children, but which, if exposed to the light of day, simply evaporate.)

"At least record companies pay their artists some money"

Since when? Other than the bland, talentless boy bands that are created by the labels, most artists get absolutely NOTHING from the CD sales - and I have been told by several that they actually got a huge bill for studio time, so they *lost* money by publishing a CD.

How amusing

Zango, nee 180solutions, a well-known adware firm which has been accused by the US Federal Government of promoting their business in an unlawful fashion, is shown by Sunbelt, whose CEO has a record (see Google Groups, news.admin.net-abuse.email) of being in favor of (or at the very least, unopposed to) spamming, to have filed a frivolous lawsuit in an attempt to exercise SLAPP (Strategic Litigation Against Public Particiaption) - an act which is itself unlawful in many US States.

The US civil Justice system is deperately in need of reform - the only practical way to stop frivolous lawsuits is to institute an *automatic* "loser pays" system (which must also mean "plaintiff pays if the suit is dropped and not settled"), so that anyone filing suit for the sole purpose of annoying people or causing them expense will be in more danger than his intended victims.

But that won't happen. The current system is too lucrative for the lawyers who make the rules.

Free Mac OS?

No, of course not. But I don't know how to buy a Mac without an OS, do you? A PC clone, on the other hand, is easy to get in bits or assembled, without any OS.

My point was that MS products are *NOT* original. They're bad copies of other people's software.

And as for forcing people to use their hardware - I can't remember ever seeing a Mac salesman with a gun pointed at my head. Perhaps you have, but if not, then there's no one *forcing* you to use a Mac, is there?

Brand loyalty: Willing slavery, or?

"The major advantage of my phone for me is that I can easily create any application I want for it."

Oh, really? I would be interested to know what language you use to write your apps for WinCE or whatever it is.

"the large expanse of freely or cheaply available software for the MS OS means that in most situations I can get what I want without having to do it myself."

Oddly enough, that's the primary attraction of Linux-for-handsets, too. Well, that and the price point. Oh, and stability; a phone that doesn't have to be rebooted in order to make a call is nice. Then there's adherence to actual standards... I'll start again.

Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition!

Sure, Bill, sure.

Wasn't it Bill Gates who said such brilliant things as "No one will ever need more than 640K RAM," (I was using 1 meg at the time and upgraded to 4 megs within a year - and not in an MS OS, either, so the entire RAM space was available to my apps), and "O@/2 is the operating system of the Nineties?"

You'll forgive me if I find his prognostications to be somewhat less trustworthy than a chocolate teapot.

USSR vs. The West

Back before the Fall of The USSR, we here in the West liked to pretend that our system was socially superior to the Soviet system, and that justice was actually meted our to rich and poor alike on our side of The Iron Curtain. Those in power in the USSR could do anything and get away with it, and those who dared protest, or who simply wouldn't go along, would be hauled up in front of a kangaroo court and shipped off to the Gulag.

Now, of course, it becomes obvious that the only real difference is how "power" is defined. In the West, power is measured in dollars.

And, of course, we're allowed to bitch about it in public without being hauled off to the Gulag (unless we choose to complain in such a way that the Department of Fatherland Security can railroad us into Guantanamo). Soviet citizens couldn't do that.

Of course he was simply being stupid

Instead of speeding in front of the cameras, he could have been doing what all the terrorists are doing - drive sedately past the camera, then, once out of view, stop the bike, take the explosive device out of the saddlebags, walk back to the camera (keeping *behind* the lens at all times, of course, and making sure there are no visible mirrors), affix the explosives to the camera and either set the timer, or slip the photosensor up in front of the flashgun, so that the camera is then permanently removed from service at a pre-determined time, or when the next poor stupid sod exceeds the limit.

It's at least the sort of misbehavior that's likely to be more popular with the general public than treating PC Plod like a Norman bastard.