Posts by Nick Kew
312 posts • joined Tuesday 16th January 2007 15:22 GMT
Re: NomNomNom
The Mail Online?
How about that most bloodthirsty work of all, the Bible?
Re: Paul Crawford
That would be for a court to decide. They're the only people empowered to make decisions on what is or isn't legal.
Erm ... wouldn't it?
Re: Will somone think of the children!!
"... inadvertantly straying into dodgy areas ..."
I've been online for a lot longer than your kids have been alive[1], and I've never once strayed into anything more dodgy than the occasional link to a Daily Mail story.
Nothing really changes. But we come to ridicule last generation's censors. How long before comedians only have to say "IWF" to get a reaction like "mother-in-law" - the joke that evolved from the dampener on post-war sex lives in an era when you lived under her roof 'cos there was nowhere else to go, and were lucky to get a bedroom?
[1] Assuming your kids are of an age where they're in any legal sense your responsibility.
Re: Wasn't it DECtalk?
My first reaction on seeing the headline: WTF have Hawking and Intel got to do with each other?
D***. Used them both in the same sentence. Intel have won.
Whose identity?
I wonder what the real Maye and Thomason think of this?
There's a cultural issue in the UK: companies see you as a loser if you still have your hands on code past your mid-20s. Not only do older hacks have to look elsewhere (e.g myself to open source work and a US employer), it means the youngsters are doing a low-status job that they know they have to grow out of to progress in their career.
This is not universal: Silicon Valley has a much healthier blend of ages, as do online communities.
Re: Uhhhhh, no
Blackberry got dragged down by the pirates NTP. Whether they might otherwise have continued as a successful innovator is now one of those might-have-beens. But a non-US company that is a market leader is always going to be particularly vulnerable to piracy in the US courts: that's why so many companies originating in Europe (including not least my employer) move their registration and head offices to the US.
£1? Luxury!
When I was proprietor of a failing business, I got by on £2 per week (at today's prices). For two years, between running out of savings and starting to make an income.
If the core nutrition is pulses and value-line pasta (and similar), then extra ingredients that add flavour and goodness - like onions, mushrooms, chillies, green veg - turn it into a tasty meal. And if you use lentils in place of chickpeas, you escape the need for long preparation.
And I'm not even a Yorkshireman.
Re: Sticky Wicket
searching "maps"?
What would you expect to come top in such a search?
(a) A service such as google or nokia, offering worldwide maps with lots of goodies?
(b) A service that's limited to one small island?
Hmmm ...
I wonder about "maps uk"?
(occasionally use streetmap, but find google online or nokia offline a whole lot better for everyday. Seems that websites that use maps, like for example zoopla and rightmove, do too.
Police Yoof commissioner?
Could it save anyone getting egg on her face?
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-kent-22057246
Re: Once again...
2012/11 smells of hindsight. An earlier reference might have more credibility.
HP has a track record of inexplicable acquisitions. At least Autonomy did something interesting, rather than being pure Hot Air and fleece-the-taxpayer like EDS.
Choice comments at http://forums.theregister.co.uk/forum/1/2011/08/18/hp_spinoff_of_pc_business/
(I googled "two plus metoo", being my phrase for HP trying to ape IBM and Oracle).
Posted in Reg readers brew up the ultimate cuppa
Tea bags forsooth!
Do you prefer tinned fruit to fresh, too? Instant coffee? And how do you like your spam?
Barbarians all!
It's the brain drain
Pay peanuts, get .... well, UK industry doesn't even seem to want anything more than twentysomething grads. Where's the career path? Oh, right, it's into a Suit, selling Hot Air to the Public Sector. Or else it's to Silicon Valley. Or variants on a theme.
Faced with no opportunities beyond the early career, is it any wonder folks go elsewhere?
Re: In the real world ..
Bah, typo alert. That last clause should of course read "and a really refreshing *absence* of any kind of drunken yob culture."
In the real world ..
BTDT
I've lived in Sweden and traveled extensively in Scandinavia. Alcohol prices much higher than the UK, and availability altogether more restricted. And a far worse drink problem than the UK.
I've also lived in Italy. Some (not all) forms of booze much cheaper than the UK, and few restrictions. Healthy culture of drinking in moderation (with your food), and a really refreshing of any kind of drunken yob culture.
Hmmm ....
Your chance to invest in touchtype
Touchtype is backed by venture capital: specifically Octopus Investments' "Titan" funds (who are paying me a chunky tax-free dividend next month from another successful investment).
They have an offer for subscription open right now: an opportunity to buy in to a share in Touchtype, along with about 50 other early-stage companies hoping for growth.
Re: Perverse incentives
"It's not their own money, it funds under management."
Um, it is their own money. Hence, private equity. Sure, you and I can buy and sell their shares[1]: that doesn't mean they're managing our funds, it means we own a share in them. Subtle difference. The same applies to an investment trust investing in quoted assets. Yes, they're being run by fund managers, but it's the company's own money being invested.
[1] People who expect them to make fat profits should perhaps consider buying in to those profits.
Posted in When open-source eats itself, we win
Common roots
In the beginning were homebrew hacks. Then two webservers emerged as leaders: things you could download and could run more-or-less out-of-the-box. Both NCSA and CERN servers were open source.
NCSA begat early Apache, which ruled the world in the second half of the '90s. But by the turn of the century, people were doing better. Apache 1 begat three new servers: Apache 2 from the same development team (modulo its evolution over time), and lighttpd and nginx as independent efforts, all drew on parts of the architecture and codebase. But their focus was different: Apache 2 with a lot of powerful APIS became a highly flexible and extensible applications platform, while nginx and lighttpd focused on raw performance in a more limited task. nginx has for some time looked like the winner in the "lean and mean" space, but is not designed with extensibility in mind!
And so we have horses for courses. The open source of NCSA and Apache 1 served its purpose, as different developers incorporated bits of them into new and improved products, serving different needs. Though of course there's still plenty of common ground: the regular web server or proxy, where any of them meets the needs of the vast majority of users without sweat.
Re: Luxury!
Pfft. I first had 1200/75 baud back in '87.
They didn't call it t'internet back then, nor was it based on t'protocols we use today. When I got onto t'modern internet in the '90s I considered 100bps a rare luxury!
Posted in Apache plug-in doles out Zeus attack
And the good news
The good news is that Google has recently been spotted detecting this and marking infected pages as such:
https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!category-topic/webmasters/malware--hacked-sites/szxNTFptv1k
Posted in Apache plug-in doles out Zeus attack
A much better account
There's a much more detailed and informative account of what looks like the same underlying malware at
http://blog.unmaskparasites.com/2012/09/10/malicious-apache-module-injects-iframes/
An open invitation ...
.... to London's dogs, to join him?
Re: fanbois
What did they use for phone sex before the iphone?
Having been infected with the anti-chinese propaganda, I wondered about this when I first heard of a chinese translation of my book.
Turned out the publisher was legitimate, and working with my publisher. The translator was very polite. The royalties arrived a few months later. A good experience.
Re: It's a start
There are sectors we're good at (and I don't just mean being the world capital of dodgy finance). Did government back ARM, Imagination, CSR, etc? Or did those companies rise on their own merits?
In terms of space, ESA may have its issues with bureaucracy (who doesn't?) but it does good work. It is one of woefully few institutions to employ scientists on decent pay, which'll be good for someone and might even help nudge one or two bright youngsters to go into science in preference to law or finance. When I worked at ESA (in a contract role, not an employee) in the 1990s, it was common knowledge that the number of Good Jobs going to Brits would be vanishingly small, and we'd be the dogsbodies.
Internet Watch Foundation?
So what action has the US taken against the "Internet Watch Foundation" censoring the web here in the UK? Do tell us if it looks similar, or tells of double-standards?
Who in Europe?
So who's been subsidising PV in Europe?
The industry is subsidised by virtue of there being FITs for consumers. But that's industry-wide, and applies equally to imported vs EU-made polysilicon.
We know Obama poured money into some lame duck (I forget the name) in the US, thus damaging its competitors both in the US and around the world. But who in the EU?
Does it not strike anyone else that, to be in a Debenhams in the first place, you've already run the gauntlet of their smells and cosmetics area on the ground floor and stink so much you can't taste whether the coffee is good or bad?
Re: Sounds fair enough to me.
So why not simplify it and just ask for a drink? All this faffing about with "coffee" vs "water" vs "beer" vs "tea" vs "juice" and all that just confuses the matter!
That would be true to one of those Italian labels.
Ask a Roman for an "Americano" and you've asked for an instant coffee - something foreign. The English use of the word apparently refers to something else, to which no self-respecting Italian would stoop.
Re: Oh Dear
I have no intention of ever finding out!
A great British company ...
Speaking as a shareholder, my vote says don't let anyone take it over.
The more shares you own, the more say you get over its future if there should ever be a bid. I consider a bid unlikely unless it stumbles really badly and starts to look vulnerable. But then, big companies with huge cash piles can get irrational, and look what happened to Autonomy!
Re: Oh Dear
"... old beardy COBOL dudes know what the f**k they are doing ..."
Erm, yeah, right, pull the other one.
My one and only exposure to COBOL: in 1986 my then-employer sent me on a one-week course to learn about ICL (now Fujitsu) mainframes, to be "qualified" for a job with a particular client. All the course examples happened to be COBOL. I was the only member of the class who wasn't a COBOL person in my day job, yet I was top of that class. How does a person who's never seen the language before beat 15 people who "know what the f**k they are doing"?
Choice?
So YOU made the choice. You who are techie enough to be reading articles like this, signing up to be tracked by ElReg, making comments here ...
But what about the average MS user?
"Huh? What's that about then? OK, better go with the default, or I'll be in no end of trouble when it Doesn't Work".
Oh hang on, no, the average MS user never installs it, they buy it pre-installed, and take it back to PCWorld (or call the support line) when they have trouble. Would they ever learn of the choice you made?
E-series
I bought a new E6. Needed a successor to my E71 (which sadly drowned). E6 is the latest and greatest in the E-series, but Nokia seems very half-hearted about selling it, to the point where I had to hunt for it! Why limit such a great product line to the low-end Asha?
FWIW, the apps are a huge improvement on the E71, with just a couple of caveats mainly concerned with some controls having migrated to screen-only. The hardware, alas, isn't: the keyboard is OK but has lost its edge over a mid-range Blackberry, and the touchscreen is a pain in some apps. On the upside, the screen resolution is so good I surprised myself by finding web browsing and email easier on it than on the N900's screen.
lines to nowhere
I have a new symbian phone. Got it not for symbian, but for the seriously good hardware of Nokia's E-series. An on-screen keyboard is no substitute, the Blackberry alternative is just too bulky in the pocket.
My history with Nokia linux is a classic disappointment story. Saw the N810, it was exactly what I wanted but for the lack of phone/3G connectivity. Bought the N900, bitterly disappointed by the dreadful keyboard, excessive weight, lack of battery life, and above all Nokia abandoning the line.
After so badly burning their bridges with those of us who bought into Maemo, Windows may indeed represent their best chance of recruiting a new developer community!
Shakeout
The Giants Nokia, RIM. Now HTC. And where are the traditional second-rankers? Anyone might think there was an industry shakeout happening! Though perhaps it's also the rise of chinese competitors to the point where the 'merkins pulled the strings of naked protectionism.
Question: why do fashions have to throw out the baby with the bathwater? Why does noone produce a phone with keyboard quite as good as the Nokia E71 any more, unless you count the whopping £500 two-hander blackberry bolds?
Posted in iPad mini to go on sale in one month?
Who will be there?
Note that you can only get to the event by following your satnav using Apple maps and autohypnotic suggestion. Other maps such as Google, Nokia or Bing simply won't get you there.
Come on, let's have a real advance ...
I'd buy a machine that size and shape like a shot, if it had E-ink screen, ARM processor, and really sensible battery life.
Is there a story?
Hang on! When were TI ever more than an also-ran in sexy devices like smartphones/tablets?
If it had been Qualcomm or NVidia reporting being squeezed by Apple and Samsung, that would be a story! And it would speak of a changing field: one which a player like Intel might (try to) enter on equal terms.
But AFAICS it wasn't, and it doesn't.
If it ain't broke ...
... fix it, until it is.
Someone's got to say it
Do you really live longer, or does it just feel like it?
Did noone think to ask Methuselah?
Re: Misinformation
@Alasdair Russell - since there's no code involved, any talk of a code freeze is a red herring.
If you want to know about code freezes at apache, you can check the development mailinglist (where you'll see it doesn't work that way).
Re: Default ON
"The server doesn't know and cannot know."
The server absolutely does know. If it cares, which mine (among many) doesn't.
DNT: [anything] - someone explicitly set it
No DNT header, default behaviour, noone set it.
And of course, noone has committed a code patch to apache.
Re: Misinformation
@jimc, true but not in the least relevant. Your comment is still premised on the misinformation that he's changed the apache code.
Re: IE10 patch to follow
"Or.....why doesn't somebody, anybody, just make a browser that actually refuses to store or pass any tracking information at to a web site unless it is part of an approved cookie interchange - is that really so hard to do?"
Nope, not hard at all. In fact it's been standard since sometime last century though some implementations (e.g. early Firefox versions) have had their own problems. But it's a browser option: accept or reject third-party cookies.
It's a shame that's not all that's involved. The real crap is things like (paraphrasing HTML syntax):
<img size=0 src=tracking url>
or of course equivalent tricks with other elements like object, iframe, etc. The key point is that the tracking URL is at the site that sets cookies and supplies data to advertisers.
Re: Anyone can undo the change
You're much closer to the truth than the article's author, or most of the commentators. Indeed, if the purpose of Fielding's apache change was as everyone (including you) assumes, you'd be spot-on.
Your speculation is insightful too: a server upgrade isn't going to mess with your config (that would indeed make every upgrade a headache for every sysop).
Misinformation
Both this article and ALL the comments[1] above are based on misinformation.
>>> "Fielding has updated the code of millions of servers"
He has done no such thing! So far as we know, he hasn't updated the code of a single server in respect of DNT.
If the peanut gallery cared about it, they could raise the matter on Apache's mailinglists, where discussion of all aspects of apache are welcome.
I'm not bothered either way about "DNT" (FWIW I have no problem with harmless ads, but will automatically block anything that moves/animates - noscript is more helpful than adblock).
[1] Unless I've missed something, which is entirely possible.
@Andy ORourke
Isn't it just VAT that pushes up the price of e-books above the paper versions?
The tax on being too poor to have the physical space for a paper-book library.
Legal basis?
The legal basis is cited as a law passed in 1987.
Hmm, what might 1987 legislation have been targeting? Could it be the incident when a London policewoman (Yvonne Fletcher) was shot dead from inside the Libyan embassy? That kind of incident could indeed merit some kind of extraordinary action.
Does that mean Mr Assange is armed and so dangerous as to pose a live threat, AND has the collusion of the Embassy? Or is the government threatening blatant abuse of this extraordinary legislation?
