Posts by batfastad 894 publicly visible posts • joined 1 Aug 2009
Do computers rather than sportings because, well, we privatised all the sports facilities so they're too damn expensive to use. We'll call it "Code-As-A-Sport". There, you can now teach it in PE.
Skip teaching fundamental maths, algebra and science, just do some generic coding will you? We really need an army of smug hipster web developers brandishing Macs and Adobe DreamWetter.
Are Baron(s|esses) qualified to make these decisions?
"I am determined to bring the benefits of smart meters to GB consumers"
Well Baroness Vermin can pay for them herself then, if she's determined to ignore the cost-benefit analysis which claims only a 2% saving.
A 2% saving on bills that will keep increasing by >10% because of successive governments' obsession with windy energy and refusal to build any nuclear in the last 20 years.
I can never understand how we have money for this nonsense, yet there are people who sleep in cardboard boxes.
"A PayPal spokesperson confirmed the flaw to Vulture South adding it had no evidence accounts had been compromised."
No evidence because the way PayPal withdraws money and freezes accounts with no justification looks exactly like criminal activity, so there's no way to differentiate.
On another note, one thing that's always concerned me about PayPal is that they store your login e-mail in a cookie even when you've signed out. Fair enough have a mechanism of remembering a session to auto login. Also then pre-populating the e-mail address from the database using the session ID even when the user's logged out. But I've always worked on the basis that you should never store any part of user's credentials anywhere outside of your own database. Certainly not on a cookie on a user's machine. And certainly not for the secure login of a financial institution. But that's none of my business.
I don't know anything about security for the financial services sector so I can only assume the security requirements are more lenient than I'm used to.
Normally internal restructuring costs £$€ in consultants and redundencies. This hack might do the job for alot less. Which surely Sony will be happy about as aren't they basically going broke in an agonisingly slow manner?
A mid-manager pipes up, I know what will save us, a new proprietary memory card format! Also that useful functionality in product X? Lets kill it off in the next firmware.
MPC-HC is great as well. I ran that on my HTPC, until that became OpenELEC. And ran it on my laptop, until that became Linux.
But the fact you don't have to dig out some codec pack always makes VLC a good bet for computers that come under the "family tech support" contract I seem to have signed up to.
1366x768 was truly horrible. Over 10 years ago I had an old Asus which had 1680x1050 and it was awesome. Ever since then trying to find something that wasn't 1366x768 at my "disposable" price point of £500-£700 has been basically impossible. I tend not to spend much more than that on a laptop since they get well-travelled and tend to die after a couple of years of airports and events.
Recently bought a unit from PCspecialist.co.uk for £550 and it's been doing the job nicely for a few months now. Didn't have to fork out for a Windows that I'm never going to use either.
I'll say thank you to Apple for giving other manufacturers a kick up the a*se with regards to building laptops with higher resolution screens.
I love being able to cram more windows, text, web pages etc onto a single screen view. I don't want higher resolution bouncy icons that end up being the same physical size on the 15" panel though, I think the marketing term for that is HIDPIDIIPIDDIIDPPI or something.
I really like BT Sync. It works really well for syncing 50GB design files around a team of 10 remote workers, with a backup server also receiving all the data. I also use it for syncing personal stuff between a few different devices.
But I am also wary of the fact that it's not open source. I'd chip in to a kickstarter for a completely open source equivalent. Don't have the time to do anything about it myself though.
EVERYONE BE AFRAID... WE WILL PROTECT YOU!
Oh actually, no we won't. We can't really. Sort yourselves out, especially you city bankers, you're very important to us. Peons and the hoi polloi, not so much. We don't need to spend all that tax dosh on offence/defence and anti-terror after all! But we'll keep the budget thx.
Have an upvote for name-checking Xilo.
Moved to them just after Be started pushing people to Sky, and couldn't be happier. Was using O2 Wholesale through Xilo so basically the same connection as I had on Be. Then O2 Wholesale was sold off so migrates to TalkTalk Wholesale and still happy. Central London and no FTTC when all that happened, so sticking with FTTE (fibre to the exchange (ADSL)).
Xilo are just resellers but their customer service is outstanding... Just like Be.
Plus all the net nanny stuff like Camron's national censorship filter and blocking of the obvious t*rrent trackers is disabled.
"Rare things are valuable. Valuable things should be paid for. It’s my opinion that music should not be free."
I agree with Taylor Swift (whatever one of those is). I would like to see her music be infinitely valuable, by being so rare that it doesn't actually exist outside of her tiny little mind.
Yeah because the regulation of traditional "physical" currencies is ever so effective in stopping organised crimnals, terrierits and pedifiles. Noone has ever committed massive scale fraud or other financial crimes since regulation of the financial services industry has been around either.
I presume I can claim a refund for someone deciding to waste my tax money on this inquest/consultation/quango or whatever these gatherings of chubby UKgov blazer-wearing eunuchs are called these days?
I despair at the people who make these decisions. I despair even more at the people who just nod their heads in total gormless agreement.
Yes it did take that long.
The original security advisory was posted on the 15th Oct. The next followup announcement informing you that you need to patch within 7 hours or restore from backup, came on the 29th Oct... https://www.drupal.org/PSA-2014-003
Is it just me that finds it insane that it takes 2 weeks to provide that followup advice through the official channels?
I don't really understand why it took until the 29th to advise users that they should probably restore from backups. We have backups of course but each day that goes by makes restoring from a backup almost exponentially less feasable.
People who are active in the community and spend all day in #drupal on IRC might stay on top of the aftermath of something like this. But I don't think most users of Drupal employ full-time babysitters for their CMS. Many Drupal site administrators are probably not the most technical either, it's a point-n-click application, so why bother employing a sysadmin when we can pay for Jonny Wordpress to have a morning of Drupal training and a book to not read.
At best Jonny Wordpress might subscribe to the security announcement feeds or mailing lists. Perhaps even these... https://www.drupal.org/security/rss.xml and https://www.drupal.org/security/psa/rss.xml
In which case he would have no idea of the total sh*tstorm that's rained down in the intervening 2 weeks.
SQL injection is horrendous and especially bad news where so much of a site's structure and config is stored in the database. And even worse when the bug has been present for the 3+ years since the release of Drupal 7.
I've always thought Drupal was a total dog of a CMS. Unfortunately though it's the easiest dog there is for fudging custom applications without too much actual development experience required.
Typically I see 200+ DB queries to load a page, 4k+ in some cases with a totally cold cache. And people wonder why their Drupal sites have such poor performance! The best way to use Drupal is to not use Drupal at all, and I'm not just being an arse by saying that, i mean just use it as a glorified static HTML generator and cache the result in Varnish/nginx.
IMO if you need 300 modules and blobs of code to get a thing to do what you want, you should probably be doing it yourself anyway.
Lol, I suppose the old witty IRC reply to questions/requests for help does apply in this case... Not happy? Ask for a refund*
* I'm not slating open source in the slightest so pls don't downvote. Anyone who works with open source projects will have seen someone reply with that at some stage.
I assume this bug has been hanging around since Drupal 7 release in 2011? In that case it would be safer to assume that every Drupal site has been hacked well before this patch was released.
Surprising there's an SQL injection vuln since the database is so central to Drupal operation. You would think they would be far more aware, especially given the way they make so many APIs and hooks available to module developers. I've seen Drupal sites doing 300+ DB queries to load a single page (4k+ in one case with a completely cold Drupal cache)! And people wonder why their Drupal sites are so slow!
Drupal's a total dog of a CMS, but it's the best dog there is for customisation. Although if you need to bolt on 200+ modules to achieve your basic requirements, I would say you're better off doing it from the ground up anyway.
I've seen this film before and it's rubbish. Take an open source project, wrap it in proprietary gubbins, sell it to clueless C*Os, then it falls behind the upstream project after 6 months, vendor updates dry up as the departments get "re-focused", then in 18 months' time community support and documentation no longer applies to you and you can't upgrade to the upstream community project.
Switch SD cards? Noobs multi-boot will fix that, though still need to reboot.
Or just buy a Pi to dedicate to OpenELEC
For a small, low-power desktop take a look at the new Zotac Pico wotsit. Seems quite good, though Win8+Bing and about 5x the cost of a Pi. But definitely more usable as a full desktop.
I really like the idea of being able to deploy the Pi (or an HDMI TV stick) as a thin client which could fire up a VPN connection automatically and launch a remote desktop session.
In the 80s I was promised maglev trains. When will we get some?
Since our gov wants to spend £40bn of our money to buy us all a new high speed train set (that noone has actually asked for (democracy dear boy)) to drain the North 15-20% faster, then I at least want it to be interesting and not some Victorian throwback by the time it's completed in 2040.
"Amazon outbid Google and gTLD powerhouse Donuts to pay $2.2m for the rights to sell dot-spot addresses"
Rights to sell? Or rights to stop anyone else selling?
Why? No idea. Maybe just to annoy Google by setting up .blog.spot
But I wonder what proportion of these extra TLDs will ever be publicly available. Donuts seem to sell alot of theirs but as a private company setup solely to do this, it makes sense. In order to apply for one of these you should have to make registrations publicly available within a year, that would stop big corporates from polluting the internet with .canon .google .sony etc.
So what happens to all the money ICANN are presumably grabbing from this? Filling a US.gov budget defecit no doubt, before ICANN is spun off to "neutral" ownership.
No propulsion? Surely there would need to be some sort of thrusters to correct its trajectory within space?
Otherwise once it picks up some decent speed it's going to be slingshotting unpredictably around the galaxy using gravity of the nearest stars/planets. Sounds like a prototype for an Infinite Improbability Drive to me!
Internet != www
I would have thought the stats they get from all the f*ckzillions of DNS lookups they handle would actually be pretty valuable. Not all wgets/mail clients/daemons and whatever other internet-aware processes (lots and lots and lots!) that do DNS lookups have JS enabled. GA just gets you data from web browsers.
This is exactly the reason the first thing I do is dump the manufacturer's Android and stick on CyanogenMod. It means I get total consistency across devices, rather than some options on one and other options on another.
Hopefully manufacturers (+ operators) are starting to realise that their "value added" sh*t is actually costing them a huge amount of good favour and potentially money.
This looks great... a worthy replacement for my 7" Ainol Fire (snigger)
I agree. The Wilson Doctrine needs to be repealed. It's not really appropriate for MPs to enjoy the presumption of innocence when I, as their employer, do not.
What is this National Crime Agency anyway? A UK equivalent of the FBI? Either way it's an incredible statement by a government to admit that the police is no longer fit for the purpose of solving crimes. I guess the role of the police is now officially restricted to just beating up students and ethnic minorities.
Anyway. I'll leave my front door open, take all my money in a bag to the treasury and collect my new national workslave number and uniform.
"If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face - forever."
Give people an inch and they'll take a mile.
Want to search my house? Warrant. Want my voicemail? Warrant. Want my e-mail/browser history? Warrant. The process is supposed to be awkward, expensive, time-consuming to cut out trivial use and ensure it's only used when necessary.
A rubber stamp that any old jobsworth civil servant peon can obtain is not fair. Yet MPs are covered by the Wilson doctrine, so we have no way of knowing what they're up to on our time. Frightening.
I bought a 240GB Samsung 840 Pro about 18 months ago and the thing made such a difference to my old laptop. Saw a deal on an OCZ 100GB drive for £40 and went for it, sold the Samsung for close to the £160 I paid for it. Laptop was pretty old and just couldn't hit the throughput that the Samsung needed. I hardly ever keep any data on my laptop and still manage to dual-boot Win7 and Xubuntu in the 100GB.
An SSD has been the best computing upgrade purchase I have ever made by a big distance.
^ This!
Or high speed train sets. Or underwater nuclear death cocks. Or sports days regenerating depressing areas of London into depressing gigantic retail opportunities, encompassing modern lifestyles in the heart of one of London's most vibrant... F*ck off!
Something's wrong with democracy when so much money appears to be spent at the whim of a select group of blazer tossers.
Basically more money for London, lucky lucky London. And I live in it. Honestly the investment gap between London and everywhere else seems embarassing.
£3bn could have made a decent dent on a nationwide FTTB/P roll-out. InnovateUK my arse.
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