Posts by DanDanDan
40 posts • joined Tuesday 17th August 2010 10:22 GMT
Re: Three wins for Debian in a week
"As soon as there's a concept of charging... the whole thing breaks" - I would have thought the opposite. As soon as there's money to be made, innovation and breakthrough should be highly stimulated. It's precisely the reason that big businesses are such massive contributors to open source projects. The Linux kernel being a prime example. The GPL protects the code base and the money motivates the innovation - it's a win-win for all involved!
Re: Linux - the engineer's server operating system
Oh god... I hate myself for saying this, but I agree with Eadon.
Since the advent of SElinux (which now I'm getting the hang of it is extremely useful/powerful/secure-in-the-right-hands) and the backing/support of the USA's NSA, I think it can easily be argued that Linux *can be* the safer option if it's managed correctly.
It *can* also be the cheaper option. But not with current governmental budgetary controls/procedures in place. Linux on the servers is pretty much a no-brainer to me though.
Re: Age restricted sales = ID card preparation
Until what age, might I ask. I'm 25 and I've been ID'd several times this year alone. I don't have a driver's license so don't tend to carry ID. A lady in Tesco almost screamed "You HAVE to have ID" at me. I politely told her that no I didn't and would just leave the alcohol, she must have misheard me cause she repeated herself. I just shrugged.
I doubt that happened in the 80s.
Re: LINUX - Server.....sure, data centre...maybe, desktop...don't hold your breath
***Yawn*** - not another "Linux on the desktop" debate.... Please go back under your bridge and wait for a Patents article - far easier to disturb the flames..
Re: to answer the headline question
The whole think 'stinks' of corruption to me!
Re: Not outsourced
Did you miss that seminar on sarcasm last month?
Re: People will pay for music if it is sanely priced
I can't agree more - the gradual collapse of HMV has been the only motivating factor for my high-street music sales. Since they dropped the prices by 25%, everything seems a little more reasonable. I'm still not going to buy the latest no.1 album, but 4 albums of John Coltrane for less than a tenner? Yes please. If only they bothered to distribute the oldies in a digital format, I'd bother to sign up..
Re: Petition, anyone?
The reason the MoD doesn't care less is *because* the media doesn't focus on anything but jobs. If the media did a proper job of saying "This is overpriced gash and we need BAE to be more competitive to stay in business", THEN maybe the MoD would start negotiating better contracts.
Posted in When open-source eats itself, we win
Unfortunately, as well as eating itself, it also splits and forks itself. Web servers has always been a FOSS stronghold. Everywhere else that counts is full of crap competition: KFE vs Gnome - developer show-offs leading to no winners. LibreOffice vs OpenOffice - no winners due to diluted development.
Yes it's one of the best things that you can fork a project if it heads in the wrong direction, but it also dilutes development effort trying to do 10 things at once.
Re: At first I thought the calendar is wrong
Keeps writing in C... or switches to a different framework - probably Qt. The fact that the Qt framework code compiles and runs fine in Windows is a double-plus. The licensing restrictions and ownership are the main barriers to entry.
Re: The future of home computing
I'm sure this is just a satirical jibe at the met office, but something sciency in me compells me to inform you that the mathematics of chaos, not the ineptitude of the met office, is the reason they can't predict the weather.
What the met office actually do is run a large number of simulations, all with perturbations from the current weather situation and determine the probability of certain events. E.g. say they run 20 simulations and it rains in 15 of them, then they say there's a 75% chance of rain. This was taken away from our TV weather reports because people are stupid and don't what that means. So they say "It will rain today". Then, when it's bright sunshine (as predicted in 25% of the simulations), people say "blah blah, crap forcasters!" and laugh.
Re: Well, while we're being pedantic...
Well, if pedantry is the game, how about the fact that this planet is 3 times larger than earth? Since when was 3 times bigger "similarly sized"? If my clone was 3 times larger than me, someone would say the cloning process had failed fundamentally.
So... who's suing Apple?
If the technology that Apple have used is covered by other patents already, doesn't that mean Apple have infringed those patents?
Re: good work
Good work? They signed onto a chat room and googled the names. It's not rocket science!
Re: what do you expect them to do
You can't tax sales, that's ridiculous. You tax profits. Which is what we're trying to do. But the issue is people are lying about their profits with loopholes. So we need to close the loopholes.
Re: what do you expect them to do
"Compete for customers" should be done by deciding how much you're willing to pay for those customers. If they want customers in the bahamas, then they can pay 5% for them, if they want UK customers, they should pay UK taxes. They shouldn't pay Bahamas prices for UK customers, it's like paying Lada prices for a Jaguar.
We do decide what our tax rates are based on market competition, but when we're being stolen from it's not because the price is too high, it's because it's perfectly legal. We need to make it illegal to steal from us, not drop our prices.
Re: Totally agree.
Let's start an independent enquiry into.... oh wait, let's not. Let's let MPs do what we elect them for. Independent enquiries really are costing us far too much!
"Who is to say that someone won't come up with a new theory that explains the physics better and simultaneously breaks QC?"
All of modern electronics is based on the physical theories we have today. Who's to say that the new theory won't break that too? Maybe all current implementations of AES, DES, etc. will be proven breakable when implemented using our current understanding of how electrons behave?
Re: unbreakable
Haha "even the ONE-TIME-pad can be broken if it is over-used"
Not sure if a joke or a FAIL...
Posted in LOHAN poses for sexy wide-angle vid
Suction cup?
I hope I'm just stating the obvious, but just in case... suction cup at high vacuum?
Posted in Bitcoin exchange shuts after heist
Re: "The bad news is that 24,000 Bitcoins is about 248,000 real world US dollars."
I think the point being made here was: "If bitcoin is so insecure (which it obviously is), then, very shortly, it won't be worth squat!"
Posted in The cooler side of the Big Bang
Re: I'm such a klutz
>>Even if there are no particles the curvature of space-time should still influence photons
Photons are particles
Re: 100 Million @ Atom Bomb
Just to burst your bubble, based on the assumption that they're at least slightly smart, this story is not true.
Mainly because betting on whether or not you're going to be alive to collect your winnings is stupid.
Re: Horsepucky
I don't think he said "No lawyers act dishonestly"
Re: Why trends don't predict the future
What is a Watt per Year? Is it 1 Watt used constantly for a year (i.e. 8.8kWh) or is it a Watt used just once for an infinitesimal amount of time? Or do you mean 1kWh per year?
I can't wait for them to go under completely
When you go into a Currys/PCWorld and ask if they sell SATA Cables, the response should be either:
a) Yes, what sort of device are you looking for, we have a variety of models for different transfer speeds
b) No, but you might try one of our larger shops, which is located... blah blah
It shouldn't be:
"Uh whuh'z tha for?"
Re: Not quite
Huh? It would've sounded ok as a 150Bps modem though, surely?
Posted in China goes Alt with root proposal
Re: permanent marker on a whiteboard
Draw over a wall-long whiteboard with dry wipe marker? I presume you're trolling?
Surely you just get a bottle of whatever solvent (acetone?) is needed to remove the permanent marker without melting the whiteboard...
Re: Daily Mail
My ass? Why would I wipe Eeyore with a newspaper?
Posted in Reg readers love Private Cloud (true)
So this cloud thing...
Is the cloud, then, just a cluster running virtualised services? I thought it was more complex than that. There's always to much bulls**t with new technologies, such that no-one understands what's what. Cloud doesn't help out very much in describing what it does and what it doesn't do. It sounds very airy fairy to me. Is there a link that explains what "the cloud" is? Is it the same as HTML5 in that a lot of technologies have been bundled under an inappropriate name for marketing purposes? Or am I missing the point?
Paris - cause she probably likes clouds.
Huh?
"ergo is it a much more personalised intelligence head game in a field which IT makes real but which cannot be defended or employed by fools and fools' tools against significantly more intelligent virtual forces who would immediately recognise the desperation of cyber attacks against vapourware foes just to project in order to try and protect an untenable, intellectually bankrupt and artificially manufactured/media pimped and pumped lead position as one battles in vain against anonymous and invisible and therefore untouchable, ever increasingly superior odds stacked in pipelines and metadatabase centres/content management systems for the free share and use of smarter beings."
Probably the longest "sentence" I've ever read; ever!
Re: Whatever.
While it's true that constant patches are required everywhere, Linux updates do seem better to me - generally, it's all in one place and it all seems faster and less faff - maybe that's just my rose-eyed glasses though. Can be done from several different interfaces and if you don't like one, you can find or create another - and to bring things back to the article - without open standards, this simply isn't possible! It's not like you can create your own update interface for Windows Updates (AFAIK - unless PowerScript has done something pretty good). Microsoft seem to be playing catchup a lot recently and this "open standards FTW" approach is evidence of that.
P.S. A properly setup SELinux policy should help mitigate a lot of the problems with buggy unpatched software. I'm sure (well, I'm not, but I imagine) that a similar thing exists on Windows?
His words...
I believe that he himself said it was his biggest blunder...
Re: Cheeky
I'm quite surprised at this happening at a university level. But I'm fairly sure I was given repeated knock-backs everytime I asked "Difficult" questions at school.
Seems like anyone asking for credit/ownership of their own work is either cheeky or difficult. Makes me so angry I just give up on the state of education.
Re: This could be the tipping point...
So what you want is a netbook?
I still fail to understand why anyone would choose a fondleslab over a netbook.
You said my point for me
"I've worked for both public and private sector and I'm quite interested to see how many of the posters who always say how little work public sector workers do have actually worked within the public sector, any seeming lack of activity in public sector that I have observed is generally spent following all the lawful red tape that goes with working within the public sector. Whereas in the private sector firms I have worked for if there is a delaying issue it has money chucked at it and the issue goes away."
In other words "Private sector workers who moan about public sector workers doing nothing and getting nowhere are right: They spend all the time messing about with red tape, when any normal business would sort it out and make it more efficient"
This is why I have to wait so fecking long for anything I ask the govt to do. 2/3 months to get MY taxes back - wtf?
Posted in CERN boffins to lift LHC beam power
Well...
The increased energy is not the same as an increase in luminosity (measured in inverse femtobarns).
There's essentially two factors under control: Luminosity (or the NUMBER of particles in a beam) and Energy (or the "speed" at which they're travelling).
A la E=mc^2, only particles whose mass is lower than the Energy/c^2 can be created (mass-energy conservation). Increasing the energy opens up the mass range of the particles you can hope to observe.
Increasing the luminosity increases the number of collisions and therefore increases your hope of catching a rare event (like the Higgs Boson being generated). Now, they've already created a number of events which look like a Higgs, but they *could* be something else. I'm simplifying, but the idea is to generate more Higgs Bosons so that you're 99.9999% sure that it wasn't just something that looks like a Higgs. At the minute, they're *only* 99.95% sure that they've seen it, so they want a few more events to be sure.
Increasing the Energy gives us a higher chance of seeing something we're not expecting. We already know that the current theories will break down at a certain energy, so by upping the energy enough, *eventually* we'll make a massive breakthrough. Worth some tax pennies in my opinion.
Optional
Somebody doesn't understand apparent magnitudes...
What do you need lynx for if you don't have a working internet connection?
Paris - Because she can't understand either.
I just tried the first 8 chars...
I didn't get logged in. Trusting large companies to keep secure up-to-date database software is like asking me to keep my computer up-to-date. Sure I try my hardest, but if some security vuln is found that I can't patch in time, then it may be possible for a remote attacker to access a list of usernames and hashed passwords (hopefully Amazon don't store my card details in the same table). In that case, they're likely to crack the first several thousand (most likely in about 3 hours) and then leave it at that. My username and password (which is also 16 characters) would be one of the last to be cracked and my security might be enough.
Just because they only ask for 6 or 8 characters doesn't mean that they know best, it just means that that's sufficient for the chance of a brute force attack to be reduced. This means that banks will cough up the money that I lose if amazon's servers are compromised. It's practical security, finding the optimum solution (read: profit maximising solution) between putting customers off with forgettable and therefore awkward passwords (meaning few sales) and security. 8 characters is a compromise; they have worked out the projected cost of a break-in and weighed it against the potential costs of prohibitive security policy. This doesn't make them masters of security, just good business.
