The number of pixels would be nice but more useful, to me at least, is the 16x10 aspect ratio. The 5 year old Acer I type this on has it (1680x1050 15") and is 2 years past it's scheduled retirement date because I can't get a 16x10 screen again. Apple get it so why doesn't anyone else? 16x9 was invented for, made for and is great for watching DVDs, it sucks for real work. Only 1920x1080 or above has acceptable number of vertical pixels and they are all either too small to read if below 16" or too big to conveniently carry if above.

A 15" MBP with bootcamp would be a lovely replacement but £1799 is a smidge over double the price of this Acer. It wasn't quite as close to the bleeding edge in it's day as the MBP is now but it wasn't a long way short either. Oh and I've replaced the battery on this Acer when It got down to 45 mins run time from 5 hours when new. The duff one is still used when on mains to preserve the life of the replacement, it takes seconds to swap. Can I do that with a macbook?

Re: *still* not there

I have exactly the same problem. Best I've come up with is a Marmitek AWM2P to send a signal when the amp powers up and any one of a number of simpler X10 blocks to switch the sub. Great. That'll be £100 for the blocks and another £60 for the computer interface to use just once to program them up. Then there's the time that I simply don't have to learn to use the system and wire in the blocks.

Given the number of very effective switchers out there how can £160 and a load of grief be the best available option to simply to slave the power of device B off device A?

It's all about the V

900 is not enough vertical resolution. Run Excel with the damned ribbon at the top and the number of rows visible is distinctly limited. Why does it have to be 16x9 at all? This is supposed to be portable computer *first* and playing movies something else you might do with it. Stop giving us DVD players that as a 2nd function can run windows. And glossy screens on a laptop? Oh dear.

1680x1050 15.4" matt screen here and I'd even pay macbook money if I could get that afresh with low voltage i5 chippery and a 250ish Gb SDD.

I work in the same markets as you Harvey and have exactly the same issues with the current letterbox screen fad. I want a machine for work first and maybe it's suitable for watchin a DVD in the evening. All you can buy these days is machines built as portable DVD/Blueray players first with tweaks that nod in direction of work.

The only way to get sensible vertical resolution, by which I mean >1000, is to go for a full HD screen and they are rare in the 15.x inch sizes. Probably rare because they are unfriendly on the eyes. 17+ inch is too big for portable use.

We intend to replace our laptops on 2 years but the current crop of Acers with 1680x1050 non glossy screen are past 3 years now and getting treated extremely carefully indeed.

Re: Internment camps next?

What utter tosh. Cameron is talking about it, Blair/Brown would have just got on and done it without so much as a hint of consultation. Not only that they'd have set up a national database of those who opt in as they are obviously one step away from kiddiefiddling. The database would naturally turn up in a taxi/train/ebay/etc soonest.

Get back to your (not)working mens club and stick to whining about the pits closing down.

@Fantastic idea

If you can guarantee the toxic wench would have a *terminal* seizure then you could probably fund this project by sales of lottery tickets for the honour.

@John Smith 19

"But it's not clear to me (not read the paper) if that allows you to substitute your *own* design by replacing the configuration ROM's. if so that is the ability to add logic to act as a hardware trojan."

In a word, yes.

The long version best start with a bit of background. In a microcontroller system the cpu reads the program a bit at a time from ROM as it goes along. Similarly the program for an FPGA is held in a serial flash rom but instead of being read as the program runs the entire rom is read at system startup. So to counterfeit a system you just buy an identical FPGA and SRAM and read the stream at startup of your original to program into your SRAM on the counterfeit. This is prevented by encrypting the data in the SRAM.

The secret key the equipment manufacturer chose for the encryption is programmed into the FPGA at the equipment factory, this is tiny and the only part of the program put directly into the FPGA. If someone cloned the hardware the FPGA on the clone won't know how to decrypt the bitstream sniffed from the original. This attack recovers the secret key so straight off your counterfeiter is in business.

Knowing the secret key means you can also decrypt the bitstream meaning you can load it into clone hardware without encryption and without having to program in the recovered secret key. This means you can use JTAG etc to analyse it in real time.

There are also methods cited in the paper for recovering the netlist from the bitstream. You could then make changes to the netlist and so introduce your trojan. Believe me, working from a netlist is not easy as it is not nice graphical source material. It's like disassembling machine code back to assembler with no variable names, no procedure names etc just raw memory locations. There's still a lot more head scratching to do to get usable, readable & compilable source. Been there, reverse engineered that (on a much smaller scale) after some management prong threw out the Vax with the source code. They did keep the backup tapes though, can you guess how many data recovery firms in the UK have a Vax among their toolset?

@pcsupport

"Personally I have no problem with this data being collected as Orange are able to track me everywhere I go anyway."

This isn't about Orange tracking you. You have a contract with Orange and part of the price you pay for the service you recieve is that Orange can track you. Quid pro quo.

This is about other people being able to track you and find out historically where you have been. The article gives the example of someone getting hold of the database from a backup which seems irrelevant to me. Might matter more if I were the sort to play away, if Mrs iShit wants to know where I've been she's welcome to.

What I'd find more concerning is that this is available to any app on the phone. Pleanty of apps have been found doing questionable background activity, how long before a freebie ad sponsored game starts feeding this back to the mothership?

Surprised the file isn't called newlabour.mbdb.

Done to death laready

Agreed get rid of Gates but lets not bother with Ballmer, get shot of Jobs too. Both are very boring now. Get rid of the celebutard too, the Paris because..... 'joke' has been done to death many times over.

How about an Eye of Sauron picture with the popup text: Google - <strikethrough>Don't</strikethrough> be evil. That'd get a lot of use.

Quite like the idea of a 'we need an icon for....' but I've no idea what it could look like

@jake

The target machines in this case were not and that didn't save them. And why never, ever? I've seen siemens kit bodged into service by bored techs to run christmas lights, the world is not likely to end if that got pwned.

@Stuart Longland & AC above

Have a read of the Stuxnet Dossier by Symantec. It is a quite superb piece of analytical work.

http://www.symantec.com/content/en/us/enterprise/media/security_response/whitepapers/w32_stuxnet_dossier.pdf

@Mystic

Care to cite any credible sources? Just asking, genuine interest 'n all.

@ZimboKraut

Sorry but no. davcefai had it correct with "you can type "ftp" into just about any shell on any machine" , the secure alternatives you list do not have this advantage. The others you mention may well be available across the board but available out there somewhere on the wobbly wild web is not the same as bring up a command prompt and use.

As for transfer across a public network why should I give a stuff if someone sniffs the username and password to my server if every item on it is adequately encrypted? Sure you're not going to rely on one level of protection like that for the companies crown jewels or military but for general stuff why the hell not? Often enough there's no need to encrypt anyway, what needs to be picked up has no value or would be meaningless. FTP has the lowest overhead bar none, for occasional file delivery to remote locations an anonymous FTP server still makes a marvellous drop box.

@Elmer Phud

I think you've missed the trick. With your situation the keyboard is a fixed layout, with this it is not.

Say for example my pass-shape is Green and top-left to bottom-right then up the vertical. Forget the colour for a moment, I'll come back to that. On a standard keyboard numpad that would be 75369 every time, easily shoulder surfed.

But with the example screen shot there are 4 different codes traced out by my shape. 10250, 01512, 50401 and 23420. I know the green squares are the correct ones so I enter 01512. Next time I need to authenticate there will be a different grid presented so my pass digits will be different.

Say someone did watch me type in 01512, the shape I typed on my numpad is a completely different shape to my pass-shape, if they tried that shape they'd get rejected. So say they have a video of me typing and of the screen, what now? Well they know my colour is not yellow because there's no yellow 1. They don't know the shape though because there are dozens of shapes I could be following to make that number sequence. The positions on the shape don't have to be joined up and unique like my example.

If they shoulder surfed me 2 or 3 times with a video of each they could probably work it out. No idea if this is the exact method of using the grid winsoft are promoting but hopefully it illustrates how using a shape or path over a non fixed grid makes life a bit harder for the shoulder surfer.

Shit code...

is shit code no matter how many times a day *you* happen to run it. Churnalists and web devs seem to think it's ok to crank out any old crap just so long as they crank it out fast. I prefer quality myself.

@netandsec

Well put. The general public does not understand and has no desire ever to do so. We have the same problem over here though much less with all forms of firearm tightly regulated.

Tell a town dweller that a farmer is teaching his 14 year old son to shoot or worse bought the son a shotgun of his own and the moral outrage switch is instantly flipped in 9 out of 10 cases. They do not want to hear about the foxes that will kill all the chickens in the shed but only carry one away as that is all it needs to feed it's young. They don't want to know about the fluffy spring ducklings carried off to a grizzly end by rats and crows. Tell them that father and son enjoy shooting clays on a Sunday and the assumption is both are wierdos that need locking up.

The simple fact is that humans are lazy and attempting to see an issue from the other persons perspective is an effort few are prepared to make.

Foul play!

How very dare you try to bring an unbiased viewpoint to a PS3 vs 360 thread, fanbois and trolls only don-cha-know?

@Will Godfrey

You seem to be a little behind the news. The mob obsessed with spunking billions on databases, networks, ID Cards and countless other technological white elephants mostly aimed at monitoring the electorate got shown the door last year. You are correct tho, the Can't Count Crew remain just as technology obsessed and are doing sod all to help fix the mess they created. It's just that they are the opposition now not the govenment.

poor working class Labour

No such thing in the house of commons. Almost all of our MPs come from very, very comfortable backgrounds regardless of the colour of their tie. There are roughly as many commoners in the house of commons these days as there are snowballs in hell.

Re: Printing out documents?

Fair points all IMG, I have the memory of a gold fish too. I carry buckets of pdfs and project documents on my laptops and have no problems with the screen for a days work, reference or lookup. But if a chapter or a drawing needs digesting in depth I just don't get on with an LCD. The other functions you mention I do directly on a Desire or via it tethered. That's what works for me, vive la difference.

My gripe is with TPM's comment that an iPad screen is superior to a Kindle screen for the purpose of reading ebooks. I can't accept that. Reading a book is not the same as referencing a technical manual. I spend a lot of time away from home for work and while travelling and overseas I get through a good number of books. Regularly packing and carrying sufficient dead trees to get me through a 6 to 9 week rotation is a significant motivator to put a lot of thought into getting an ebook reader. When I do make the jump it will have a screen designed to be the best paper replacement possible and not one designed for entirely different purposes.

Re Cars!

You forgot to list the fine piece of British engineering used in the early episodes. Ditched because Triumph would not provide support whereas Ford would.

It'll be modern muck for sure. This time round if they wany to use something British for the first 5 minutes it'll have to be a Morgan or a taxi.