Posts by JimmyPage
852 posts • joined Friday 5th March 2010 16:20 GMT
re: Cake or death
A downvote ? Seriously ? Can someone explain why this delicious echo of Lord Izzard of Cheam is downvoted ?
Hang on ...
Surely the hardware doing all of this is going to have a thread-per-call scheduling ? So crashing one call wouldn't bring the whole system down ?
Well, if the thing was written properly to start with.
VM - experts at crippling kit
They have done the same to the TiVo. Probably because of copyright issues etc. And with the hubs, they are terrified that people will clone them and get free cable ....
I had the other new hub from VM end of last year, and sent it back after 10 minutes, when I discovered I couldn't set the IP address to be what *I* wanted. Had a right old ding-dong on the phone when customer services told me it was illegal to change an IP address. In the end they sent me the superhub so I could put it into modem-only mode, and carry on with my old router. The non-superhub didn't have a modem-only mode, just a DMZ mode, which wouldn't allow you to change the IP address.
That said, with my setup, I am blazing. Can download 1gb in 2 minutes.
Nice to end Friday with a smile
When I had to google Amanda Palmer, and discover (according to Wiki) she is also known as "Amanda Fucking Palmer".
Life ain't so bad after all.
Not even a hard-hat ?
Sorry, massive fail for *basic* safety.
Instead of reacting to hand gestures ...
why not get it to lip-read ?
"Open the pod bay doors, HAL"
Didn't there used to be a Rise Of The Machines icon ?
Re: Reason for Apples success....
Indeed ... I consider it a duty to quote Mencken as often as possible ...
"The only good bureaucrat is one with a pistol at his head. Put it in his hand and it's good-bye to the Bill of Rights."
"Puritanism: The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy"
"Laws are no longer made by a rational process of public discussion; they are made by a process of blackmail and intimidation, and they are executed in the same manner."
Options for the boss
1) Works
2) On time
3) On budget
pick any two.
Re: Bah
I think it's pretty obvious the LibDems left their principles by the door in 2010. I honestly can't seen any sign that they have in anyway managed to dent the increasingly loopy direction the Tories are lurching in.
Leaving us with no credible choice at all.
Note to USians .... seems like you're catching up with the UK .... having absolutely no one worth voting for,.
NASA - missing a trick here !
How much do you think they could charge, to write a company logo, name, or marketing slogan on Mars ?
Enough to fund the manned mission ?
@Spearchucker Jones
Ah, evidence-based policy making. Not the way we do things in the UK, old bean.
Re: Not hard to get around...
ISTR there is a defence to a password request, if you can demonstrate good reason why you can't provide the key - after all, your emails are probably encrypted by your employer in their exchange database. *You* wouldn't be expected to know they key. This is why the smart alecs who send "Oh, send Jack Straw an encrypted email and get him locked up for not knowing the password" were wrong.
Regarding repeated jailing for the "same" offence ... well Scotland managed to keep the naked rambler locked up for over a year, on repeated "contempt of court" charges. So I imagine, yes, if you get 2 years, and then come out of jail and refuse to hand the password over, it'll be 2 more years for you. Pour encourage les autres and all that.
The REAL scandal about RIPA (as previously highlighted) is that it gives the authorities access to EVERYTHING, including what used to be privileged. Under RIPA, any correspondence between you, your lawyer, your MP, your doctor, is completely fair game.
Harsh sentences
The problem is you can only go so far before juries start getting nervous about convicting. Which is why, despite apparent public approval, we don't get the draconian punishments for death by dangerous driving we could have - juries simply stop convicting.
It's one of the reasons the death penalty got abolished.
Not that I don't agree with the sentiment (yours that is, not about the DP which I am opposed to).
Re: Not hard to get around...
They are. The Law Lords (as were) ruled that privileged communication does fall under RIPA. There was a court case in Northern Ireland a few years back.
I've won a few pints on that one.
Re: Not hard to get around...
If they ask you for a password to your storage say "no its got all my personal information in their, like homemade porno's, some sexy pics of my wife and a load of my passwords in files. im not letting you see that.." or "shit i forgot it..."
One word: RIPA. Two years in chokey for you.
Re: Strange, the article
What do you think a WP7 owner is going to do, if he discovers that WP7 is obsolete ?
I would humbly suggest they would not consider WP8, making it a moot point.
So the UK never got a look in ?
Bit of a rum do, eh ?
Re: Times are changing
You should have stopped writing *before*
"in their day -to-day work in pursuing criminals"
And another problem ...
all of this technology (with it's associated eye-watering price tag) is only as effective as the database it sits on. I challenge anyone here, to tell me they can believe a non-trivial database can be anything more than 95% accurate at any given time. And that's before you start to look at people who *deliberately* salt it with duff data.
An ex copper I knew explained some of the tricks the more pikey among us use to evade the law using a round-robin of address changes mainly. End result - the car looks legal, but you would never find the owner.
On a related note, I wonder if they have done any sanity analysis on the data ? I would be curious to know what (if anything) would happen if the same vehicle was clocked in Glasgow and Penzance in the same hour ? Also, in arrangements, where all traffic has to pass in and out of an area via ANPR, do they have any orphaned records, where a car went in, but never came out ?
I have always wanted to have a number plate changer, and drive past the first SPECS camera with one, and the second with another ...
I know it seems incredible to us now
but Britain in the early 1980s was a world leader in IT teaching.
RIP
Re: or ...
Maybe it's an anagram ? No reason to believe Microsoft are any good at them either ?
Re: How to solve the Assange problem
Given the public assurance given by the Ecuadoran ambassador that they will not smuggle him out of the UK, why bother with *any* police presence ? Save the money. I suspect that the second he leaves the embassy, Ecuador will suddenly not want him back again.
I read on another forum an interesting observation that given the Ecuadoran ambassador is quite foxy, and Assange is notoriously permanently on heat, and the embassy is a small flat, the situation might be resolved quicker than we think ....
Re: Straw man
IANAL but I believe you can extradite for capital offences, as long as the prosecuting authority (State or Federal) give undertakings not to seek the death penalty. Understandably, prosecutors intensely dislike this (as do the US public) as it highlights the fact that the US is one of the few "civilised" countries in the world that executes people.
I believe there have been a few cases where suspects have fled to Canada, who also will not extradite if the death penalty is a possibility.
There was a guy wanted in the US for child porn offences that the UK refused to extradite recently, as the state prosecutor refused to give assurances he wouldn't be put on some sort of "program" which the ECHR had determined was a cruel and unusual punishment.
as if by magic ...
Re: Thorium rocks
To be more specific, the biggest roadblock to nuclear is the oil industry.
Re: Won't anyone think of the Police ?
But the police don't seem to know.
On a wider note
this is what happens when governments start to meddle in "social policy". It will invariably end up with people with influence regulating other peoples behaviour. Unfortunately, in the UK "people with influence" tends to be a small minority of a small minority.
If you stopped and realised how many laws there are that criminalise harmless behaviour, in the name of morality, you would question the statement the UK is a free country.
Re: Vehicle Security
You'll need an environmental impact assessment. And an equal opportunities policy.
Re: IBM
Thank you sir! (Or madam) - Clearly I am in the upper bracket of El Reg commentards, as I remember when IBM held this crown, and various articles pointing out that they were in effect richer than several countries by miles ... this was in the 70s. I was surprised I had to read so many comments before it was mentioned.
Contemporary fanbois might do well to ponder this, and look where IBM is today.
Posted in Assange calls for help from … Quakers?
Re: I don't understand
Question: Why haven't the US authorities tried to pick him up in the UK? Our government is even more likely than the Swedes to bend over for the Americans.
I really wish people would stop pointing this out, since it brings the entire Assange circus crashing to the ground. Can't somebody at least try to pretend the US have asked ?
Hmmm wasn't this announced recently?
anyway, my prediction:
1) Amazon will tie up with one, or more major supermarket to piggyback onto their online shopping deliveries
2) As above, but to offer some sort of locker facility at the mega-stores.
Tesco have already subbed their cafe service to Costa, so I would suggest they are the more adventurous of the retailers.
As far as I can see it's a win-win for the retailers. Maybe I should patent the system ?
The elephant in the room ?
Surely the bottom line is the market is just completely saturated ? Apart from the dearth of apps, my Windows Phone (January 2011) isn't missing anything that would make me go out and get a new phone.
Ditto the Mrs HTC Wildfire (bought Dec 2011).
Ditto the lads Nokia 5800 (bought March 2009).
Therefore, for this household, it's completely irrelevant what the price of handsets is. We can't be the only one.
Posted in Not a Cloud in my holiday sky
It gets better
Obviously, if your house is burglarized, it was done by a burglarizer. And obviously, a burglarizer burglarizes.
Would *anybody* trust their business to the cloud ?
given the Patriot act, and the willingness of US judges to slap takedowns left right and centre.
Tin foil hat time ?
you have just neatly encapsulated all the reasons why governments around the world would rather radio hams weren't allowed.
Re: Passwords, hashing,salting...
It depends ...
done *properly*, when the password is created, the app also creates a hashed code for each letter in the password. When you are prompted - it compares your input with the hash. Systems like this should be more secure, because even if you speak to an agent - you never give them your whole password (so they can't hightail it out back and hijack your account).
However, you highlight one thing: once you have entered your password, and pressed "return" you have absolutely no idea what happens to it. Which is why you should NEVER reuse passwords.
LinkedIn losing the edge ?
funny, coz I care much less about my LinkedIn profile, since I started getting loads of agencies trying to connect.
And so we have another law
where no one needs to complain, for someone to get banged up.
I for one, am heartily sick, of seeing the criminal justice system being used to dictate some arbitrary morality upon society. I really have no interest in what people watch, or do amongst consenting adults, as long as no one else gets hurt. Endof.
Remember the extreme porn law ? Just taking a screencap of certain films, despite being BBFC approved will get you banged up. And you're forbidden to mention the clip came from a BBFC approved film in court.
Posted in Microsoft dumps Metro from Windows 8
I would have thought the solution was obvious
throw open a competition to crowdsource a name via the new Outlook.com userbase.
Both of them.
Back to school for you
you misunderstand what "profit" means.
To most people, profit is what you have, AFTER you have spent money on running your business - including things like R&D, and investing in infrastructure. In this meaning companies cannot whine that making less profit means less investment, because the investment is what you put in before profit.
However, on the basis, I have never heard a journalist bitchslap a pasty-faced spokesperson who dares to wibble on that without massive profits, you won't get investment, it must mean something different on planet corporate.
more about knowing *what* you watch
When I posted that comment, I was thinking more of a slightly creepy marketing dimension.
VM customers with TiVo are already in the vanguard of this. VM knows not only what you watch, and when, it also knows how you skip the ads, and how you channel surf. Put all that data together, and you have enough for some pretty smart targeted marketing.
Now, who do you think are behind the Lords ?
One thing that I don't understand
are MS going to simply stop @hotmail.xxx emails working - just like that ? Surely not ?
Anyway, have grabbed new @outlook.com accounts to match mine & Mrs Pages @hotmail.com accounts, so we're happy.
80 posts, and no one mentions ...
(OK I skimmed them)
the fact that the proposed system means that someone, somewhere, will know *exactly* what you watch. Which is of course impossible under the present system.
Is anyone
writing this as a screenplay ?
Re: Epic fail
If you know what his 1969 Christmas present to the entire Zeppelin road crew was, you'd know why you haven't got it
(It was a bottle - singular - of scotch).
Re: Am I the only
you're not. But do you swap buttons too ?
I went for a job interview recently, where they wanted you to sit a technical test. The PC was locked down, and the poor interviewer had to dig someone out of IT support to log in to change mouse settings.
One massive FAIL with Windows, is when you RDP into a box, it uses the boxes settiings, not the terminals - so you have to change settings on the box. Which is a real nuisance, if you are sharing a server, as I used to in a team. Every time I logged in, I had to swap buttons.
Also the Windows login screen defaults to right-handed.
Now Linux - or at least the NX protocol is much more sensible, and inherits mouse settings from the client.
Epic fail
passwords should be stored via a one-way hash. Forgotten passwords need to be reset.
Virgin seem to cripple their kit before letting it out the door
Start of the year they upgraded me, and send me a new modem/router (not the superhub, the one down from that).
I have set my network up to be 192.168.1.x . Their poxy router simply couldn't be configured to take that - and it couldn't be put into modem mode to allow me to use my existing router. Repeated calls to overseas just put me through the same steps again and again, with the "technician" expressing surprised when I got the error message about not being able to use that address.
In the end I had to reconfigure my network.
