Posts by Martin Kirk

No guilt here. Now, if they gave me a cut of the revenue they get when they show me an ad, I might reconsider.

The biggest problem with alternatives is finding one that will control a Sky Digital box properly. EVerything else is fixated with DVB-T. Wile MCE was not ideal (I still miss my TiVo), it did interface very well with SKY and allowed me to have decent TV window running on one of the monitors in my home office.

I'm busy looking around for alternatives, but so far not finding anything that will do what I want.

I have a model dalek someone gave me many years ago. Press a button and it comes out with some useful phrases, such as "You will be exterminated". It can be quite interesting listening to them trying to engage it in conversation.

Gonna be a problem for website operators when they are hidden by Adblock.

The last thing we need on the internet, more advertising.

It is all very clever, but the experience is still painful to be enjoyable. I'm holding out for proper 3D as depicted in "The Flipside of Dominick Hyde" (for thos of you with long memories).

I always position the leading { on the line following the conditional. This way it is at the same indentation as the closing }, and it is much easier to spot errors.

Waiting for mine to arrive, too. It is a speculative purchase. I do not have over-high expectations of its usefulness, but it should be interesting to experiment with, at least for a awhile.

What an idiot!! I would love to see his lawyers explain away that the word means what we think it means, not what the customer understands.

Curiously, it seems that the App Store on my (US-bought) Kindle Fire will still not allow me to download apps. Eben free apps such as the BBC News app complain that my credit card does not have a US billing address.

Me too

About 8 years ago I too found a dead frog in one of the servers in my lounge. Somehow it must have got in through a missing blanking plate. I can only assume it was trying to get away from my cat!

Fallacy

Once again, a "social networking" idea based on the false premise that I will like what my friends like. Only works for lemmings.

Not quite like the Post office

I see that a former UK Information Commissioner said that the case was ridiculous because "It is like prosecuting the post office for hate mail that is sent in the post". I think this analogy is flawed. The difference is that most postal material is hidden inside an envelope, and the Post Office has no way of knowing the contents. Material posted on the Internet is visible to all, so Google (or anyone else) is able to inspect the contents. It may not be commercially viable to do it, but it is far from impossible.

Not a bug, but a frog

I wish I had taken a picture, but regrettably I didn't. The strangest thing I found in one of my servers was a dead frog. My cat tended to bring frogs into the house, and I would find their dried out bodies under the sofa months later.

Then one day, I was adding a new video card to the server, and inside I found a dessicated frog corpse. As to how it got in, I can only imagine it jumped in through the one missing card slot cover. The alternative is that the cat posted it inside, which is too weird to contemplate.

It may be the only way

This may be the only way to educate the average user about security. I have long thought that ISPs are the best placed to identify compromised PCs that are generating spam or other bot-net related output. There is little difficulty in identifying spam e-mails that are in circulation, and identifying PCs that are generating them would not be rocket science, although it would likely involve a significant investment in compute power and packet inspection.

Taking infected systems off the net is the only way to both solve the problem and educate the user community at the same time. The problem would be in finding the funding to put this in place.

Wandering wild creatures

My personal favourite, produced by a compiler for a language that allowed type definition:

"Integer expected, but rabbit found."

Absurd

"Installation programs are applications designed to deploy software, and most write to system directories and registry keys. These protected system locations are typically writable only by an administrator user, which means that standard users do not have sufficient access to install programs."

Write protection, anyone? It isn't rocket science. If a program, whatever its name is, tries to write to a protected area, that is the time to either reject the operation or prompt for the admin password to temporarily raise the privilege level. You either have a system with proper separation of user and admin roles or you don't. UAC fudges it to try and make admin painless for the non-technical user, but in reality they will almost always say yes to whatever the system asks them. It really only provides Microsoft with the ability to say "Well, we warned you", when things go horribly wrong.

Basing security on program name is frankly absurd.