Posts by Daniel 1

To paraphrase

"If the cognitive and emotional impact of online content is greatest when acquired by searching, then Web site sponsors might consider pushing this content out of the visible area of the view pane and filling it up with advertisements, instead.

After all, if you make them search just that little bit harder - even after they thought they'd actually found your content - then their cognitive and emotional response must surely be heightened even further!"

Do you want chips with that cod psychology?

When was the last time a fluid slowed down and turned into a side-pipe?

Mind you, DARPA doesn't employ the crankiest cranks in the US Secret Service. That honour lies with the Directorate of Science and Technology - who gave us remote viewing, goat staring, MKULTRA and the not-as-famous-as-it-ought-to-be "Acoustic Kitty".

Nah

If I knew someone that wanted a phone, just to make phonecalls on, I'd still point them at a Nokia 1100: an immortal, and indestructible device. If the 1100 is the Honda Cub of mobile phones, then this is more of a Honda Superdream, of a thing, and just a nasty.

We use whole disc encryption, here at work

If the laptop gets stolen it still counts as 'data loss', but at least everything on it is AES 256-bit encrypted. It puts a small extra load on the read-write operations of the laptops, but since most of my files are actually read from, and written to, mountpoints that are often physically located in other countries, the actual overhead of encrypting local disc-writing is fairly small, compared to the cost of sending data over ssh pipes to Paris, or Bantry Bay, or wherever.

However, since most of our desktops are XP pro, we still have to buy this as a third party (PGP) add on. It would not suffice for our own needs, but I cannot understand why Bitlocker is still only offered as an 'Enterprise' solution for the top end licenses of the more modern versions of Windows: they are only using a proprietary implementation of 128 bit AES, after all (which is pretty damn weak). It looks, to me like they are charging the premium price because they can, and not because it costs that much to maintain the code-base being used.

It is regrettable, but true, that while enforcing basic levels of encryption requires the addition of free or paid for third party tools, many companies will just continue to not-bother doing so. Even a free implementation of 128 encryption, shipped as standard, would be better than nothing. Filevault ships for free on all versions of OS X - even if it will only encrypt the user's home folder.

1346 - that was the real deal

The whole Agincourt myth is down to Shakespear - who used Agincourt because he was writing about Henry the fifth. Henry V was the fourth in a series of plays about the English monarchy, and so he was rather obliged to use Agincourt as his battle in the play.

However, the story, itself, is a conflation of what happened at the Battle of Crécy, 69 years previously, to the English under Edward III. That victory very much resembles the popular myth about Agincourt, and was decisive because at the time, the English tactics were largely unknown in Europe.

By Agincourt, this type of fight had become well established. A succession of textbook victories against both the French and the Scots had been recorded by Froissart and his like, over the previous 7 decades. Henry V would be employing third or fourth generation professional longbow soldiers - many of them probably from the northern French territories, Belgium and the Netherlands.

The French had even given up trying to carry out these massed assaults on horseback, by this point, so even the famous cavalry charge, from Lawrence Olivier's portrayal of Shakespeare's play, bears more resemblance to Crécy than Agincourt.

The bit that came as news, to me...

... was that, apparently, it's tired school children that cause road traffic accidents.

As I understand it, the core of the argument, is that drivers have a God-given right to drive home in the daylight, since it is so much easier for them to see what they are texting on their mobile phones.

Or something like that.

We want a 'Chocolate Factory'!

Alert! One of the Oompa-Loompas at The Register has managed to write more than two paragraphs about Google without including the cumbersome and worn out phrase "Mountain View Chocolate Factory"! This is wrong. "Mountain View Chocolate Factory" is, to The Register, what "Vole" is, to The Inquirer (an inexplicable and unfunny 'joke' that hopes to become amusing and popular simply through repetition).

In order to redress this imbalance I feel I must insert the words "Mountain View Chocolate Factory", few times, here in the comments. It's such a smart thing to do, after all (like spelling MS with a dollar sign, or knowing who Leeroy Jenkins is). Look at me, I can find Santa Clara on Google Maps, too.

It's dual licensed

There are very few precedents for projects whose code has been GPLed, but where the copyrights to the codebase have always been wholely owned by one commercial entity (this will, in fact, be one of those precedents - so the outcome could have far wider repercussions than just this).

MySQL was licensed to commercial software developers for integration with proprietary software products. This licensing right is what Oracle will, essentially, be acquiring. These protective agreements avoided the need for proprietary projects to assume any sort of GPL status, themselves, simply because they used a GPLed product.

A fork project would not have the commercial rights to do that sort of licensing. Only Oracle would.

Personally, I think Oracle will behave, since - in a world where every electronic device is gradually turning into a computer - a growing number of devices will need fast, light weight databases. The licensing opportunities could be gigantic, once you stop thinking about a 'database' as being something that runs the company payroll. The problem, really, is that that's exactly what Oracle have traditionally regarded a 'database' as being.

Defenders of our freedom

Whenever I read about the fine and upstanding behaviour of these Defenders of the Free World... well, you know? I feel compelled to give them a great big database, full of everyone's DNA, to play with, or something...

(I'm now left wondering what the 'other matter', that the US government might have charged him with, was, that it merited selling atom bomb secrets to a middle eastern power. Child porn? Tax evasion? Trawling through government computers looking for Flying Saucer material, perhaps?)

Self -Cert was being used as an excuse for not checking

Self-cert loans were being made to people who weren't self-employed. Half of all mortgages at the peak of the housing boom where to these sorts of borrowers, and it was widely perceived as a problem, even then - especially when the main aim was to inflate the supposed borrower's earnings and boost the broker's commission.

There's no prohibition being proposed on loaning to the self-employed, only a requirement for proof of earnings to be made. This is how it has been done in Continental Europe for years. What is there, in your Tax returns and accounts, that you wouldn't want your lender seeing: worried they might think you're a crank, if they see how much you spend on tin foil hats, each year?

One thing's for sure: we cannot go on with the present bubble-bursting approach. House prices are going to take a long time to recover from this latest collapse, simply because of the sheer number of repossessions on the market, at the moment.

"Sony's 360° 3D display could be used for videocalls"

I really cannot remember the last time I took a video call from an animated yellow cartoon dog. (are Sony saying that they've managed to get Microsoft Bob running on the thing).

Comms Chatter in the future...

"Hello, Software. You're speaking to John. Calls may be monitored to help with future Body Counts. How can I help?"

"Hello? This is Brigadier Colins, on the left flank. We're coming under small arms and mortar attack and are able to return fire. Our rifles are saying 'Permission Denied'."

"Oh, give it a few minutes, Sir. You're Active Directory privileges are probably just waiting to propagate."

False memories

I'd use it on all the people, currently running around telling people they were Cleopatra, or Napoleon, in a former life, with false memories of having spent the last 200 million years being reincarnated as fruit flies.

Oy! Troll-bait!

All I'll add to the hopeless hubbub, the this story will attract, is that if you think "there's no way to know your Linux machine isn't compromised, either", then its because you can't be arsed looking. Describe to me the circumstances, under which a Linux owner would be unable to find out if there was something nasty lurking on their machine? You may think it bad, you may think it good, but the one thing you cannot argue about with Linux is that it gives you total control, if you can be bothered taking it.

Google it with a site: filter?

Mate, I just look at Google's cached version: those lunatics that run Microsoft Technet seem to be employed to move their contents around from one URL to another, using some peculiar hazing algorithm that makes sure that any content never stays in the same place for more than six hours.

Dog-gone?

Dog lost its true home when the Corporation Street brewery was closed and demolished. What is closing, is the old Federation brewery.

It was never all that pure a drink, anyway. The vats in which it was brewed at Corporation Street were so vast that mechanisms extisted to allow incorrectly-mixed batches of the smaller brews to be washed through into it, to avoid otherwise wasting the ingredients. This was always its purpose, from the earliest days of it's true popularity in the 1920s. I would expect that this will be the appeal in shifting the brewing to the Tadcaster site.

The popularity of Brown Ale was based on the fact that bottles were sealed meant that the contents could not be tampered with by the publican: the fact that the brewer might have done any amount of tinkering around with, in the making, was largely immaterial, so long as it managed to undergo the rest of the journey from the brewhouse to the drinker's hand, in an otherwise unmolested state.

@"Don't try this on Mars!"

Yeah, but we might hit that guy who keeps posting things, here, in the comments section (assuming he's not an ex-pat Martian).

Wheels look a little skinny, to me

Given that these would be round profile tyres, they look rather narrow, to my eye: barely more than 120/70s - and I doubt this car weights in a at much less than a quarter tonne.

I'm guessing all four wheels are driven, which probably rather changes the dynamics we'd expect from a standard combustion-engined vehicle, but I still wouldn't want to trust a round-profile tyre, of those dimensions, with a mass that great in anything less than a flat calm and sunny day - especially since a lot of that mass could be unsprung.

Beholders, eh?

Well, a similar sort of vein, why don't we get them to call the manned version that flies around calling down air strikes...

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/09/22/lemv_contract_by_december/

... the "Orgrim's Hammer"?

And as for this layout engines business...

Yes, IE Mobile has never used either the Tasman engine, nor the Trident engines (the ones used by IE Windows and IE Mac, respectively). Instead, it has employed that weird 'thing' they developed in-house in Windows Mobile division.

Now, the Weird Thing has never really got page rendering particularly right - and doesn't seem to be doing so, now. Compare the Trident VI engine (from recent builds of IE 8), rendering the Acid 2 test (which it passes perfectly, of course), to the odd assemblage of coloured lego bricks, delivered by IE 6 Mobile against the same test.

Are these products even being made by the same company?

And therein lies part of the problem, because, when presented with conditional comments that stipulate "If IE 6" (to include correctional styling rules for IE6/Trident desktop version), the Weird Thing on 6.5 Mobile will now attempt to import and apply those rules as well! This means that web developers are robbed of one of their main tools in correcting rendering errors in IE6/Trident, because the Weird Thing will think the developer is talking to it, too.

(Many web developers will, at this point, no doubt be hoping that Windows Mobile's market share remains at its current 'robust' levels of growth... that way, they may never have to worry about any of this crap.)

You see, the version of IE being shipped in WM 6.5 is actually a rush job, originally intended for the Chinese market. It has been included in 6.5 because a revised rendering engine is still causing handset crashes. Why can't they port Tasman or Trident to Windows Mobile, you may ask (other than selfish pride, hubris, and a desire to "get one back at The Man", over in Windows main division)? It surely can't be beyond the wit of even those guys in Mobile, to do so? After all, Operasoft have ported their 'Presto' engine to just about anything with a screen on it - and when you talk to Presto, you more or less know what to expect from it!

Vitriolic hatred?

I don't think anyone whose primary job is to shift virtual column-inches is prone to 'vitriolic hatred'. (Although, saying that, I suspect Goodin has been branded guilty of vitriolic hatred by just about anyone who doesn't like stories about Windows vulnerabilities, Linux botnets, or Mac users getting infected by viruses. In fact, I know he has, because you can Google about it. The blogosphere positively seethes with 'Online journalist called my computer a poof!' style commentary in response to such articles. You could almost say it amounted to 'vitriolic hatred', at times!)

Meanwhile, businessweek, cnet, zdnet, and probably even Fox news will love it - because they'll quote this entire article, almost verbatim (and let's face it, that was the original aim). So, what's the author been smoking? Dollar bills, perhaps. The only poor journalism, is the kind of journalism no one reads.

Truth is, however, three different browsers are susceptible to a vulnerability in a shared Windows library - for which the fix appears to amount to little more than a call to Regex.Replace, in the correct location.

Opera and Firefox certainly seem to think so, since they have both demonstrated that it is possible.

So, is it Microsoft's fault ("did they script the fraudulent certificate")? Clearly no.

But is the world full of people scripting fraudulent certificates, however? Clearly yes.

Are millions of out of date or invalid certificates being used - even by legitimate websites? Clearly yes.

Is this One Hell of a Mess? Clearly yes.

Would you like your browser vendor to actually do something about it, or just sit on their hands and say 'Not me gov: the Internets is broken'?

I'll leave you to answer that last one.

@jake

The man you are quoting is Will Cawthorne, of Adobe software, not Bruce Lawson. Please, try and pay attention before reaching for your "Shouty Caps Gun".

I can assure you, Bruce Lawson is not an "idiot marketer". He's the senior Web Accessibility officer at Opera software and a well-known speaker on making content on the web as widely accessible as possible. In fact, the only quote from him in the article was with reference to his words about the potential dangers of proprietary systems, as opposed to open standards, in web design (and he was speaking in general terms at a recent conference - not specifically about Flash 10, as such).

He's also a very nice bloke. I use to work with him, hence my need to defend him.

As for Google's endorsement of Flash: I suspect Google's stance is to be against anything they think the Googlebot might not be able to crawl inside and index. This makes them pro-open standards, but it also makes them pro, any other format that they can harvest and harvest and harvest.

Does the bear shit in the kitchen waste?

No, but if he's a giant panda, he might as well offset is nonexistent libido, imminent extinction, and the indifference of BBC wildlife presenters as to his fate... by being allowed to do so.

"The world does not seem to have turned on to Home Server"

Well, yeah. That's because they called it "Home Server". If they'd called it "Home Media Hub", or "Home Entertainment Store" it might have been different. The problem is that Microsoft's senior management is full of geek-wannabes, who really don't understand all that much about computers, but want to pretend that they do (so that they can bully their employees with a clear conscience). They cannot imagine anything sexier than having your own server... even though they're not too sure what you'd actually do with one.

In the real world, even system administrators (who work with servers all day long) wouldn't want to own up to having a "Home Server".

They might as well have called it "Home Mainframe" or "Home Card Indexing System" (stick a big flash on the retail box, saying "Migrate all your AS/400 code to Mircosoft(R) Home Server, using RPG.NET(TM) Runtime Limited Silver Home Starter Edition - Now with full support for Crystal Reports!").

It's a bit like 'Mad Max' meets the Telly Tubbies

It may be outright dangerous, but it least it got a little further from the 'concept' stage than a lot of those 'leccy tech vehicles. I expect you're trying to work out what to use for the beer crate in the Playmobil version, now, are you?

Time to start training those teenagers...

We're gonna need a whole lot of COBOL programmers, real soon now.

Whatever next?

A foodstuff that does not require digestion, since it already resembles the end product?

@AC 09:42AM

I love the way you spell 'MS' with dollar signs... This is presumably to make me look like the kind of person who spells it with dollar signs, is it? That's nice of you.

Fact is, Star P, the product, has been wound up (as of this announcement). Microsoft has active teams in Dev and Windows, working on the Redhawk and Minsafe farmeworks, respectively - so I don't see how the remnant of ISC fits with any of that (given that they're based about as far away from Redmond, as is possible and still be in the US).

Bear in mind also that Minsafe has grown out of one of the more R&D-ish endevours of Windows Division - and traditionally, the only 'modest' thing about those guys has been their rate of progress. (Far be it from me to suggest that it's a nest of vipers... but if you had to clean it up, Indana Jones wouldn't be you first choice, to do the job.) And as I said in my earlier post, this is a shame, because all this friction will only end up holding things up.

People who write MS with a dollar signs are those benighted souls who think there some kind of 'evil plan': I've been watching Microsoft's behaviour for the last half decade, or so, and have come to the conclusion that there's scant evidence for there being any plan, at all!

They should do this with the National DNA Database

An animated cartoon DNA spiral... "Hello, it looks like you're trying to commit a crime. Do you want me to help?"

Regardez votre sang-froid

Why did the comments start being about Arizona? The data centres in question are in Belgium and Dublin - hardly desert conditions. The problem with any scheme that tries to sell the heat generated as a resource (in effect using the external buildings of your customers as part of your heat sink) is that the majority of your problems will arise in the summer months, when your customers may be unwilling to accept this excess heat. If your data centre is generating enough waste energy to warm several buildings in the teeth of a Dublin winter, then there is something seriously amiss inside the data centre.

As for water-cooled air, Google's Belgian data centre does use river water cooling. The difficulty here is keeping any such system clean. Most Western capitals do, indeed, have major rivers running through them, but they're badly polluted major rivers, in many cases, whose water quality is outside of the control of any one body wishing to utilise it, unless (as is the case with Google's Belgian data centre) you include a full water treatment plant on site, to treat the water before using it. This is cheaper than using mains water, but does represent an extra cost and energy overhead, in what is supposed to be an energy-saving measure. Even when the risk to human health can be eliminated (where you are simply cooling machinery, and have less to worry about, with regards Legionnaire's disease, or what have you), the tendency for algae, bacteria and even fungi to build up in these systems and eventually clog them can mean you incur not-inconsiderable costs, down the line: once established, a population can become difficult to eradicate.

Finally - Register writers, please - interesting as they are, I have real problems reading these stories past the point where I encounter the words "Mountain View Chocolate Factory". Please, enough with retelling this not-very-funny joke, over and over again. I sometimes feel I'm being hit with a hammer by a bloke who demands that I laugh. We get it, okay?

32 ounces per ton?

That's a curiously convenient yield-rate, isn't it? 1 ton is 32,000 ounces - i.e. one thousandth of the lunar surface (by mass) is water. By a more metric measure, that's a potential yield rate of 1 litre per cubic meter - which is surely rather higher than anyone would have thought likely, prior to this? I'll wait until they've shot a few probes into the surface, and analysed the dust thrown up, before reading much into that sort of off the cuff statistic, mind.

Amazing!

"This bank note has been perfectly duplicated - apart from the fact that the new bank note has a completely different (and valid) serial number on it! truly this is a wonder chemical, you have, here!"

Still with the 'fling money at it' approach?

I'm sure all those Microsoft employees, sitting in badly ventilated offices, four to a desk, in a room designed for two (at most) will be most gratified to learn that their management continue to manage problems by flinging money at them.

As of the end of June, this year, there's 92,736 employees in that company (that's even after the 5000 that got sacked). I guess none of them could have run a shop, so they need to poach someone else's employees and pay them well over the existing rate? That's good business sense! I wonder if Balmer mentioned any of this, at the Town Hall Meeting, while he was busy pretending to stomp on phones?

Woo, steady on, Ian 11!

Just because he was saying that fat, docile creatures with a poor diet and no sex life should be allowed to die out, didn't mean it was a personal attack on you, lad!

Badgers? We don't need no stinkin' badgers!

What the hec? "Musk, famously cut and pasted about in the IT press..."

Ah, the joys of cut-n-paste journalism... Elon Musk, famously, the only person ever described as a 'hecamillionaire' (in a typo, several months ago, here in the Register), is now in danger of actually getting the word 'hecamillionaire' formally recognised as a real word.

This is largely because the rest of the IT press simply copies and pastes what is written, here... with the words in a slightly different order. It becoming impossible to read anything about Musk, without also reading the word 'hecamillionaire' - or, indeed, encoutering the words: 'PayPal (and/or space rocket) kingpin', 'tech biz', 'renowned', 'famed', 'battery supercar' and 'pet project'.

In fact, I suggest that in future when writing about Musk, the Register find an excuse to drop the word 'boffin' into the article... That way, the next time businessweek, or zimbio, pass by with their article-hashing bot (or whatever it is they use to actually produce their copy) the origin of the story will be evident for all to see.

History of Windows Mobile: It's a Mahatma Ghandi quotation in reverse

First you win

Then they fight you

Then they laugh at you

Then they ignore you.

Some excellent names, there

First guy on the list is called "Mr Lonely". I bet he's a bundle of laughs to hang out with. Somehow I suspect decent_cute_sameer is neither decent, nor cute, either!

They'll both need to find a different means of paying their Halo3 subscriptions, now.

How hard can it be? They only pluck their figures out of the air, anyway.

In 2006 the Student Loans company wrote, to refund me one hundred and fifty pounds worth of over payment, that they had made against me previously. This was for a student loan that dated from my BSc degree, which I began back in Summer 1991. Furthermore, it was on a debt that I had voluntarily repaid the bulk of, during my industrially-funded PhD, between the years 1994-1997. The most striking thing, however, is that I still have the letter I suddenly got from them in April 1999, threatening legal action if I did not repay the remaining balance of the loan - something around three hundred quid, as I recall - which I grudgingly did and thought no more of it... until this refund suddenly arrived (as unannounced and unexpected as the legal demand that came before it).

So it only took them seven years for them to work out that I'd been over charged £150, on a loan that was, by that time, a decade and a half old.

Now, in 2006, I happened working as an IT contractor at £32 an hour: a precarious but wealthy existence. £150, was a short-day's work, to me, by then. However, I reckon that at any time in between the Summer of 1991 and the Autumn of 1999, £150 would have been pretty damn useful to me (albeit in a rather boring, "paying-the-gas-bill" sort of way).

Dari Alexander

Yes, she looks both horrified and baffled in ways that words cannot convey.

@AC: "What energy source will be used to generate the electricity?"

Why, Smithers... haven't you realised by now? We'll use the decomposing bodies of our enemies, of course - just like those pesky robots!

Mwahahahaha.

Yeah, I'm wondering about 17 and 1.8, too

It's a no, for both, anyway.

@Joke

"Now I know why I can spend silly money and by a remote control for my shower"

Oh noes! Robot showers wage germ warfare on humanity! Don't do it, I say, or we're all doomed!

"most secure operating system"

To be fair, this extravagant claim is only made by OpenBSD - not FreeBSD - and it is FreeBSD that is being described, here. However, kqueue (an event notifier, similar to the Linux epoll process, that was introduced in FreeBSD 4.1) has been causing a variety of kernel panics and escalation problems for more than half a decade. An OS X patch, back in January, actually disabled kqueue (for those that had installed the optional xtools set, on OS X) for this very reason, I believe.

'legitimate' websites? Well, it depends how you read it.

The sites in question are Chinese-hosted sites aimed at online gambling, porn and World of Warcraft gold-selling.

The choice of nginx is interesting, too. There is a relative scarcity of documentation for this server in anything than the creator, Igor Sysoev's, native Russian. It is widely used by Wordpress and Rambler, but outside of the Russian-speaking world, it is still quite unknown - desspite being an excellent piece oif software.

So, we're probably looking at an organised gang of Russian mafia, targeting poorly secured web servers, offering semi-legitimate content, from China. My guess is that the servers weren't even compromised, in the conventional sense of the word. I'd say there was a good chance they were simply sold. There's a global recession on: you can buy anything, these days, if you find the right market.

"Whether they are using a PC or a Mac?"

You mean Mac users can view web pages just as well as PC users? You'd think the scammers would have the good grace to code crappy IE-only web pages, wouldn't you? What's the world coming to, when even fraud websites are standards-compliant?

Did it have a Bobby accessibility logo on it, as well, prey?

Obviously on private healthcare

This is what you get when you don't have a national health service, boys and girls.