Posts by Infernoz

MS have lost the plot and are obviously deeper in corporate stagnation phase

I'm hardly surprised, anything Windows 8 related is a complete mess:

* The new GUI is nonsense for a non-tablet

* The application restrictions are absurd and probably violate anti-trust legislation

* The new version of the free development tools have been crippled, so even old OS's are not adequately supported; so the free software eco-system will ebb away and Computer students can no longer be tempted into proper Windows application development, so the MS ecosystem slowly dies.

I have progressively less reason to support these morons, and the BSD/Linux could actually become more attractive than Windows despite it's flaws, even for current Windows power users!

Ballmer should be kicked out and the board revamped, otherwise Microsoft will gradually die.

Expect Windows 8 to be rooted by users rather than crackers!

MS shot their own foot by this forced disconnect to 'support' mobile devices, so I certainly won't even consider migration until they get rid of this joke of a UI 'upgrade'.

If they continue with this nonsense I'll eventually be forced to Linux or FreeBSD, with W7 in a VM or Wine, if W8 can't be rooted by users.

Massive Prior Art, so serious FUBAR by US Patent drones if accepted!

Apple are being F'ing cheeky patenting this, they must know about the numerous prior art for this e.g.

the excellent "Thumb Keyboard" App I bought on the Google Market, does this adaptive keyboard stuff already!

Mouse keyboards and most touch interfaces also change the keys/buttons displayed based on control keys, including years old Retail POS and Windows programs; so Apple are sooooo taking the piss!

Software Patents MUST end, they are routinely abused and too often based on Prior Art of some sort!

DRAM, I think not.

I think you'll find that such small capacity memory chips were actually SRAM; Static RAM did not need refresh circuitry so was much easier to interface too. It was only later that DRAM started to appear in computers.

Hopefully Woz is correct and Apple stops being a corporate pest.

These are just for the lazy and technical illiterates.

All factory built ARM and Atom based NAS hardware have inadequate CPU, RAM and OS, and insecure RAID models, it's way overpriced and only for technical illiterates; this is just as bad for 4+ bay models.

I really don't see the point of 2 bay NAS, given RAID 0 is pointless on a NAS, and RAID 1 is an expensive use of drives and not adequate protection. You need to go for at least 4 drives and ZFS RAID models to get decent data security. If you really need speed, buy PCIe Flash cards, given they will thrash RAID 0 easily.

A much better value and more powerful approach is to built your own FreeNAS box using ZFS RAID models and either low power (e.g. 50W) or high performance 64-bit hardware; it can be a substantially cheaper approach if a 64-bit AMD Fusion based motherboards is used.

It's about mindset, not Prussian state rote or PC we are all equal at everything BS

If schools are going to teach coding, they need to select only the kids who are likely to succeed at coding e.g. a proven ability in Mathematics up to at least Algebra, the proven ability to think logically and rationally, technical curiosity, and persistence.

Oracle are stubborn fools

Google have offered Oracle a back out of this farce of a law suit and save face, but Oracles' lawyers want to fight on to 'protect' the increasingly irrelevant J2ME with dubious patents, the f'wits!

Oracle should just sack their incompetent lawyers and end the lawsuit amicably.

Tape still looks obsolete and too expensive, even with the hard disk price blip.

ZFS RAID5+N makes the 'better error rate' on tape irrelevant, given ZFS protects from and detects full end-to-end hardware and media data corruption, something which tape can't do. ZFS supports multiple live Dataset snapshots which don't waste time, storage space or requiring incremental backup software like tape does, and possibly no down-time for backups, so beats Tape for timeliness too.

If you have at least two ZFS RAID5+N NAS boxes, for replication, Tape becomes a completely pointless waste of money unless you genuinely have space issues for powered-off RAID array storage and can afford the higher costs of tape backup.

.music is nonsense, it should something like .zombiemusic

Those monopolists at the RIAA are back by an idiotic anti-capitalists state issued privilege which is complete anti-capitalist nonsense, especially now, thus are zombies (based on a dead-end business model) propped up by the state, so any name they use or sponsor should rightly include the word zombie.

So called pirates are not thieves, but rather _living_ people who recognise the absurdity of this state interference so treat it with due disrespect, just as more sensible authors, artists and businesses are now!

The Kobo Touch is in, the Kindle is out.

WHSmiths have Kobo Touch at £99.99 now (in stock), it can support up to 32GB microSD (£28 on Amazon) and has good build quality unlike many cheap plastic readers, Kobo also supply syncing reader apps for many other platforms and sell books too, so it blows away all the other readers.

Amazon has serious competition now.

IMHO only suckers buy other readers now!

Of course I own a Kobo Touch now, because I never trusted the Amazon lock-in and local storage restrictions.

Use a better case and mobo.

If you're looking for a silent cheap and low-power motherboard w/ CPU, which is perfect for HTPC and NAS, may I suggest an ASUS E35 M1-M PRO. I use one with FreeNAS 8.0.2, it is very reliable and much better than joke Intel Atom motherboard including ION and ION2 based boards.

If you pay a little more money, you can get very attractive and silent HTPC cases, even my Fractal Design Midi tower case looks attractive and silent using an XFX 450W PSU.

The petitions project is already a farce and backwards

The fact that a 3 line whip was used to crush free voting on a petitioned vote for a referendum on leaving the EU shows the utter contempt/idiocy of the (Socialist) Political Class, especially for the really big important stuff! The mere idea of increasing the signature threshold demonstrates just how arrogant they are.

This petition project has already been demonstrated to be yet another farce of the moribund (Socialist) Political Class, with its political parties and career politicians; the stasist Socialist parties still don't get it, without a free vote, the whole project is pointless, worse seen to be pointless too!

The existence of the Tea Party in the USA and the occupy movement around the world shows that people are waking up, abet groggy and confused from the Neo-Roman Bread (easy credit, consumerism and state bribes) and Circuses (mass corporatist media and mass sports), and have begun looking for ways to break free of the prevalent and oppressive Stasism and Corporatism.

Note: Stasists is a word coined in the book "The Future and its Enemies" by Virginia Postel (1999), for Statists and Technocrats of both the Left and Right wing (Socialist ideologies) i.e. those who resist dynamism in favour of the status quo, ever greater regulation, thus stagnation and decline. The Left and Right wing are just polarities of the bankrupt Socialism ideology, thus irrelevant; the real battle is between stasis and dynamism, hopefully this will become more widely acknowledged.

The author seems to be in a reality distortion field

Yes, flash can be faster for _offline_ storage. No, you still have to save your RAM data to Flash drive/chips, it isn't magically on Flash. Tablets are much faster to load because an App has and uses so little RAM, so saves to Flash seem much faster, however it has to keep more data on Flash, so can be slow during use! Windows and other full OSs like OS-X and Linux generally keep a much more data in RAM, so loads and saves often take longer than for a tablet, however program execution is usually less bogged down by disk access during use.

Price example:

* Flash disk 120GB for cheapest offer price for slowest model over £100

* Rotary magnetic disk 2TB (16 times the size) for pre-flood offer price £57, so over. 27 times cheaper

* Rotary magnetic disk 1TB (8 times the size!) for post-flood offer price £70, so over 11 times cheaper

Anyhow there have also been well published issues over fatal data loss of a whole Flash disk, far worse than for rotary magnetic disks, so is no way in hell that I'll buy and have a Flash disk as a boot disk until they are solid reliable and more competitive in price!

Very nice.

I always thought that the 80* and Z80 CPU families and architectures were fugly, so preferred the far more elegant 68* and 65* CPU families and architectures, especially the 680x0 CPUs. I only moved to a 80* CPU PCs because the nasty IBM PC 80x86 'architecture' became the defacto system architecture, so got the investment to become much faster; hopefully this will reverse now that the 6502 derived ARM architecture dominates low power devices and will soon have the processing power to seriously grow into desktop and server areas

I hope the kludged Atom get snuffed out ASAP; given it is a poor CPU, especially for NAS.

Hopefully ARM will take over and hobble Intel.

Mega Prior Art for this abusive IP BS

An in-your-face example of Prior Art is the film Minority Report, where loads of sliding gestures were used, doesn't matter that it was not on a portable device! Opera also provided Gesture interaction. I'm pretty sure that Apple did not invent this method of interaction and are really just another bunch of psychopathic corporate plagiarists; worse still the method of interaction called gestures is a natural human communication format and used overtly by deaf signers, so it is nonsense to allow such an obvious communications format to be patented.

Mozilla has lost the plot on releases!

Googles' 'solution' chokes big time, I hate it and their crappy service, because I keep having to find the folder to delete the previous version which it failed to delete, which makes Secunia PSI unhappy! The service and the User data approach are big fat fails of ideas!

1. Updates MUST have options like: ignore, notify, download and notify, download and install. No silent install and definitely not by their own unsafe service!

2. Stop with the brain fart major version increment chaos, it keeps breaking extensions with max versions sensibly set to the current major version number; this is a regular annoyance for the WebRunner extension and many other extensions, and is soooo... retarded! Use minor versions for feature updates, and revisons for patches, leave major version increments ONLY for really BIG stuff not the current hacking.

3. Provide MSI files with a silent install option for corporate uses, to keep them happy; this is the ONLY way! The MSI could even just be a wrapper around a suitably enhanced Mozilla installer.

This lot should be easy for a organisation like Mozilla; so get cracking!

Should have got Easeus software

Acronis disk software is pants, it crashes or has device issues on many newer motherboards; it's a joke!

When I last needed to clone a drive, Easeus was the only software developer I could find whose software fully supported this for Windows 7 64-bit on Intel RAID drive; no other software could do this period! They can even clone partitions to resized partitions on another disk on a USB attached drive, just like Partition Magic could for less challenging configs.

No Clonezilla couldn't do this, not even close!

Retarded and lazy!

My suggestions:

1. As a workaround, Firefox and other browsers should, prefer RC4 for all the retarded websites which only support SSL3.0 and/or TLS1.0, and throw up an exploitable SSL warning banner if a website can't support this workaround!

2. Java is not the problem, the browser Javascript implementation is where the exploit occurs, so fix it Firefox devs e.g. learn from the Noscript extension and provide proper layered security for Javascript!

3. Oracle or Mozilla could implement a custom Java Security Manager to block this in Java, and look at securing all the other plugin vehicles e.g. Flash!

4. We need a campaign to shame retarded SSL library devs, webserver devs and website admins into supporting secure versions of TLS; via an insecure SSL version notifications in Firefox and other browsers for inadequate SSL support e.g. only SSL3.0 and/or TLS1.0!

5. Noscript also needs to be update too, because the permissions are still too global for plugins and should support custom individual site plugin permissions too!

Flash disks are still too unstable and expensive

Some flash is as bad or even worse than the DeskStar drive family because if they fail, you lose everything, potentially even all the drives with the same firmware. I won't use any drive family which can fail this badly, even in a ZFS RAID 5 array.

Evil Corporatism and Stasism farts on us again.

This Hunt is a corporate stooge backing more gross over-extension of an anti-capitalist and destructive corporate privilege (not freedom) to lazily sabotage competition; shame on him!

There is nothing fair or helpful to the economy about patents, copyright and any other form of so-called "Intellectual Property"; it is a state subsidy which breeds complacency, laziness, stagnation and higher costs to the economy.

Adam Smith had a lot to say against the evils of government suppression of commercial competition against favoured commercial bodies, including the higher costs to society which result.

Worse security than JVM!

Google must not understand security very well; Chrome is already less secure than Mozilla Firefox because all of its extensions are in machine code, which is stupid and non-portable; worse this new project will have a joke of a sandbox which thinks you only have to protect CPU RAM using a kludge; wrong! The default security in Android is also inadequate, so you have to add extra apps to provide finer grained resource permissions control than the install/don't install with all requested permissions 'option'.

A proper sand box for this native code would need to control access to: GPU RAM (to stop image scraping or GPU malware), network resources, browser components, system components, allocated and passed RAM, and various other vulnerable system resources, otherwise your native app could turn out to be a trojan or a trojan proxy!

Java already provides an extensible security model which makes the Google sandbox sound pitiful and already has serious networking, database and media support (e.g. fast 3D Graphics (via DirectX and OpenGL) , video, sound etc.), but some people are too lazy to use these facilities so mistakenly think that Java can't do fast flashy apps!

To those who think that a Java JVM can only run Java, look here:

https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/List_of_JVM_languages

Google have already proven that a Java like VM (Davik) can run fast and powerful apps with Android, so why not roll-out Davik to laptops and desktops or provide enhanced plugin support for Java beyond mere Java Applets i.e. multi-threaded code and a better bridge to the browser APIs.

.. or are Google really evil, and want to lock suckers in!

Feel the pain Amazon, complacency is not an option!

Hopefully someone will also release an affordable 9/10" screen e-Reader, with SDHC/WiFi support, to show Amazon just how limited the DX is and how ridiculous its price is; I've warned them that this will happen, given you can already pre-order a non-e-ink Android 2.1 tablet, with SDHC/WiFi/Ethernet support, for about £200!

I also notice that eRex discovered the cost of over pricing e-readers too!

The sensible price point for e-readers is under £200, even for 10" versions, so make it happen brands, or a hungry Chinese manufacturer will get there, sell direct, and eat you alive!

WTF!

Carp, it is not just the damned plugins, it's the damned pages hanging too!

The pages themselves should also be running in separate processes, threads, or pooled threads, and both pages and plugins should have user accessible performance metric reports, just like Chrome; to stop the whole damned browser hanging *, and the metrics would help to identify rogue pages, plugins, and sloppy JavaScript coding in extensions!!!

* This whole damned browser hanging is all to frequent, even on a powerful 12GB i7 Win7 Ultimate 64-bit PC!

FFS, how long before Mozilla see sense and catch up with Google!

Bono is busted

Bono has some very dubious friends, and does not pay his way, so I would not trust a word he says, if you value what freedom you have left.

Anyhows, current copyright 'law' is based on statues, and as a self-declared freeman, I chose not to consent to this particular abusive corporatist mockery of fairness!

What a loser!

Trevor Baylis is a patent troll, cry-baby, he's upset because the Tiger economies are making superior, lower priced, products, to his. I have one of his old torches (a present), it's heavy duty rubbish filament bulb trash, the battery life was pathetic, the generator a pain to turn, and it broke; the far east upgrades I have are a far superior LED based, at a fraction of the price of his new LED based models.

Cheeky Corporatist

Wrong! Intrusive data Collection really does matter, if your get enough direct, or indirect, identifying, or worse mis-identifying, data, it can be misused later!

You can only misuse data you have collected, so the use argument is a red herring. It is easy to backup over-broad data before a database is 'sanitised', and new analysis can be applied to one or more databases, so making the results far more intrusive than the original intent.

The state can be both intentionally, and unintentionally, malevolent; the incompetence, and cynical erosion, of our political checks, has allowed this to occur.

I don't trust the state at all, I try to have as little to do with it as possible.

Pointless

Someone will either provide an image 'fix' program, or disable their 'security', just to spite MS.

Pettyness allowed by the stupid monolithic design of Firefox.

Extensions should not be allowed to change other extensions, period, it is Mozilla's stupid extension framework which allowed this.

IMHO NoScript seems to often require ridiculously frequent reinstalls (daily! updates), this was either lazy design (or 'greed' for ad revenue), when IMHO it should use live updates (without requiring a restart), like AdBlock Plus. I use both extensions, but the current need to reinstall most extensions seems really stupid; part of this is due to the poor implementation of JavaScript, in Firefox, and the stupid way that extensions 'live' in Firefox. WTF, I know that JavaScript can support scoping, so why not global versioning of extension instances too!

Firefox is a de-facto application host, a kind of mini OS, it is about damned time it had the basic task management tools, and task isolation, to go with it.

Roll on a version of Firefox which will allow tracking of _which_ pages, scripts, extensions, and plugins, are resource hogs in Firefox, and provides some way to pause, kill, or restart rogue instances, which make Firefox stall or use up excessive CPU percentage!

No good for a civilisation collapse or 'library burning'

IE tab uses the IE HTML engine, the same engine used by Windows Explorer, and other stupid third party software, like Anti-Virus updaters!

What a ridiculous waste of tax payers money

The Police should stop wasting their time with harmless small fry like this bloke, and go after the serious criminals, like: our government, the Political Class, our PC press, the fraudsters running our banks and all the other knaves who expect the tax payer to pay for their negligence.

Malware alert

When you have terrorists resident, funded, housed and cared for by the state and using Britain as a base, so more police looks damned futile, without first attacking the root cause. We have a damned bad root kit, viruses and trojans infecting the kernel of Britain, which are causing havoc and using up system resources at an alarming rate, we need to do a full off-line anti-malware scan and disinfect done on the whole of Britain! That solution is no socialist fake, is it real Britishness, with genuine values.

XP malware seems a stupid reason to use Vista

Praedor Atrebates:

Vista does not look much more secure than XP, I have read that it the security is a paper thin wrapper around recycled XP code, so more like smoke and mirrors than proper security.

Using Linux or OS-X is no longer a reliable protection from malware, there are now several exploits which can break security, even from non-admin user accounts, so you still need to be careful.

If you want to avoid malware, stop using Microsoft Internet software (e.g. Internet Explorer and Outlook Express) or software using Microsoft browser components. I use a NAT/firewall router (to block OS port attacks) and use Firefox with the NoScript (*1) and Adblock Plus (*2) extensions, this works well for me, in Windows XP and Linux.

* NoScript often fixes security issues before Mozilla and blocks some 'Web 2.0' exploits, which Mozilla ignores.

* Adblock Plus reduces the advert noise, but can also be used to block malware laden content or pages.