Posts by Bruno Girin

Imagery

I'm probably not the first to comment along those lines but does it mean that possession of a copy of the London 2012 logo is now illegal?

It also probably means that possession of French comic magazines like Fluide Glacial is now illegal in the UK, as they could be seen as being border line, even if obviously fictionnal.

And what will be the impact of this law on child abuse? Nobody knows! So it's just passed in the off chance that it may potentially have a positive impact... maybe. At the end of the day, child abusers are already breaking the law for something far more serious so I don't think they'll have any issue with breaking that one too.

@J

<pedant>

You're right, to have 100% increase (or doubling) every 2 years, you need to multiply by 1.414 (square root of 2) every year so that's a 41.4% yearly increase. Don't they teach geometric progression at Vulture Central?

</pedant>

"Pretty crap machines"

I have a 4 year old ThinkPad T42 with a 40GB HDD in it that's working beatifully well under Ubuntu. Its only downside really is that the HDD is quite slow: as a result, a lot of applications are limited by the disk, not by the processor (it rarely leaves its lowest P-state @ 800MHz when it could run @ 1.7GHz). So a shiny new SSD like this could significantly improve the performance of the machine while still being cheaper than buying a new laptop. I want one! (this is the second time today I say this on a Reg comment, it's going to cost me...)

I want one!

But more importantly, what OS will it ship with and what type of mass storage will it have? If it ships with Linux and a 10Gb or bigger SSD, I definitely want one!

@Conor

Presumably for that reason taken from the NBR page: "now we recommend it only for experienced Linux users or commercial OEMs and ODMs engage with Canonical for support and service offerings."

And AFAIK, EasyPeasy uses NBR under the covers put packages it in a way that runs well on the Eee and is easy to install. I'll have to try it out on my Eee 701.

Vote for it to be addressed in your favourite browser

Here: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=471539

Drives like a Panda?

If it's as fun to drive on Sicilian mountain roads as a Panda is, I want one!

Thanks!

I was considering getting one of those but I think I won't bother now.

Car sales all round

What about the fact that car sales ('leccy or not) have been in free fall recently? It's not just leccy tech that's feeling the pinch. People will do everything they can to keep their old car going rather than buy a new one in the current climate.

Bugs

@AC: how many security bugs they solve is no indication of how secure or insecure the software is. All software more complicated than "hello, world" has bugs. The important metric is whether they actually resolve the bugs and how long it takes them to do so. I'd rather have software with 100 defects resolved within a few weeks of being reported than software with 10 defects resolved within 6 months of being reported.

@Florence: have you actually files a bug or request for improvement on bugzilla for this? One reason I use Firefox is that they are usually very responsive in addressing defects and the bugzilla system keeps you updated of the progress. Some people (like me) actually like the new address bar but I can understand why some people wouldn't. An option to chose what behaviour you want to use would be great.

Oh dear!

Their web site currently says:

Server Error in '/' Application.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Compilation Error

Description: An error occurred during the compilation of a resource required to service this request. Please review the following specific error details and modify your source code appropriately.

Compiler Error Message: CS1002: ; expected

Source Error:

Line 28: if (Request.ServerVariables["SERVER_NAME"].ToLower().Contains("valueyournumber"))

Line 29: {

Line 30: string url = "http://www.numbuz.co.uk/index.aspx?vyn=1"

Line 31: Response.Redirect(url, true);

Line 32: }

Source File: e:\web\numbuzcom00\htdocs\Main.master.cs Line: 30

Cowboy programming on .NET? Surely not!

PS: screenshot of the error in full technicolor available on request.

Translation

of MS's statement: "la, la, la, la, la!!!! I can't hear you!"

@AC Hotmail on Linux

I don't know about mobiles but on a Linux laptop, hotmail will open in Firefox. However, it complains that FF is not the latest version, even though it is (which means they are sniffing the use agent string and getting it wrong). There have been reports that it's broken with Opera though. Nothing new there: as usual MS have completely ignored any web standard in designing their new interface and have been using their own standards instead. If they can't build a browser that follows web standards, what are the chances they can build a web site that does?

That said, I don't particularly care, I moved my main web email away from HM a long time ago due to their pathetic spam filter. I only use it as a spam honey pot now.

And as for people who say that because it's free, MS doesn't have to care, think again. The basic service is free but they have extended features that you pay for. Also, if they start losing users (note, I didn't say customers) through something stupid like this, that's one less avenue they can use to lock people in and cross sell other products so they'll want to make sure they limit discontent.

Same old but why use NDISwrapper for Wi-Fi anyway?

Buffer overflow. How old is that type of bug? Apparently there are still developers who have no idea that when you manipulate memory buffers, you need to be careful where you put your bits and bytes. With great power comes great responsibility. So when programming with a language like C that allows you to address memory directly, make sure you program responsibly. If you can't be arsed, program in a language that shields you from that type of problems, such as Java or Ruby. Note that I'm not bashing any of those language, I use all of them but with powerful toys, you have to be careful. It's a bit like rm -rf under root: you need to understand how powerful that command is before using it, otherwise it will all end up in tears.

Anyway, why would you use NDISwrapper for Wi-Fi on Linux these days? I haven't come across Wi-Fi hardware that wasn't supported natively for a long time. OK, maybe it's because I haven't bought a brand new cutting edge machine for some time :-)

We need a cowboy icon for that sort of things because that's what they are: programming cowboys. The skull and crossbones will do.

Make a note of your network's support number and your EMEI number

OK so a thief could call any number. Well, the solution to that is to make a note of your network's support number. I had my phone stolen a few weeks ago (not an iPhone, a Nokia but that's irrelevant). It took 10 minutes to call my network's support number and get them to cancel the SIM and disactivate the phone (you can do that if you know the EMEI number) so the thieves now have a nice brick. Good for them!

And while you're at it, go to your friendly police station, ask them for a UV marker pen and write your postcode on the phone. It will only show under UV light but if the ne-er-do-well who nicked your handset ever gets stopped by police with your phone in the pocket, he's in trouble.

@Frank Gerlach

It all depends what you use those processors and languages for.

Sun's T1 and T2 processors are not a good choice for raw performance but when you need high throughput (as in web servers and applications with a massive number of concurrent users) they are the best on the market today. And as one of my colleagues said yesterday, if you look at the throughput / price ratio, they are cheap as chips compared to the competition.

Same for Java and J(2)EE. C# and .NET are great if you design exclusively for the Windows platform but nothing comes close to Java/JEE when you need to build resilient server based systems that supports a massive number of concurrent users (funnily enough, exactly what Sun's CPUs are best at).

Security != encryption

Encryption is one aspect of security. Is a Wifi router with WEP that only accepts connections from know MAC addresses less secure that a router that uses WPA but accepts connections from any computer? And what about routers that don't advertise their ESSID? Where they included in the survey? And what about firewalls?

Lies, damn lies and statistics...

@Vincent

When did "need" ever come into the equation? You know you *want* one!

Seriously, this looks like exactly the sort of netbook I would buy. At the moment I have a 15" Thinkpad and an Eee 701. Neither of them is practical to take around and use as a photo editing machine on the road: the Thinkpad is too bulky and the Eee 701 doesn't have enough storage space (the CF card in the camera has more storage space that the Eee!!) That and my fat fingers don't like the Eee's keyboard. Now, a 10" netbook with a 160GB HDD would be ideal: enough storage for my needs and small enough to fit in the camera bag: result!

@Reg: what about the Eee girl?

Weekend fun

That's my weekend sorted then: upgrade my trusty ThinkPad T42 from Hardy to Intrepid! And if I can have my 3G modem work out of the box, so much the better. I might give the Eee 701 a makeover while I'm at it. And the home server. And create myself an Intrepid USB stick! So much fun, that might even last for several weekends! Unless having a life comes in the way of course.

Missing the point?

Maybe I'm missing the point here but why would you want to allow any application to "install other applications onto an Android phone without warning, or alerting, the user" in the first place, even Android Marketplace? If Google want to promote security, they should apply to themselves the same security rules they apply to everybody else: don't install anything on the phone without user consent.

Numbers

You forgot one factor in your calculations: although a large part of the content on YouTube is in English, don't forget that a lot of it is in other languages. Therefore, you need to add to the 4000 employees a large number of translators and interpreters in all languages known to man (if I was a terrorist, maybe I would send messages in an obscure or extinct language), some linguists to identify whether the content is safe or whether there is any innuendo in it, etc. Plus, most people doing that sort of job in real life such as for the film industry, usually need to play border-line movies more than once and to more than one person in order to classify it properly. All said and done, sounds more like 40,000 people needed to do the job for YouTube only. Then there are all the other web sites with subversive content, like El Reg. And hey presto, we're all employed by the government watching over each other's shoulder, no unemployment anymore: result!

Back in the real world

iSCSI will probably evolve too in order to resolve the packet loss and other problems associated with it and data centres will probably use both technologies for different purposes. Even if FCoE were to completely replace iSCSI, large data centres won't migrate overnight.

You guys should know better than writing articles along the lines of 'new technology X is so much better than old technology Y that it will have completely replaced it in 2 years time'. That never happens because the only constant in technology is change and what may be old today may become new tomorrow by learning new tricks. Also, sensible geeks know that more often than not, the question is not whether technology A is better than technology B but whether A can solve the particular problem they have better than B (and is more cost effective).

@Peter

File a bug for that then. Seriously, that's one of the major benefits of open source software: you can file a bug (or request for enhancement) and have the developers take it seriously. The Firefox crew are usually very responsive on bug reports: I've filed a few and have always had a first reply within 48 hours. That's one of the main reasons I use Firefox (that and useful extensions like AdBlock, WebDeveloper, etc): if I'm not happy with some of the features, I can report it to the developers and discuss it with them.

@Mike Moyle

Thanks! I was rather disappointed to see they didn't have a PPC build on the official site. Now I'll be able to enjoy OOo3 on the home desktop: result!

Translation

"[this] is the subject of a careful internal review, in which all options are being explored". Or in other words: "we're still looking for a good excuse not to release that information".

@Chris Hamilton

Do you mean cars that look like this: http://www.lightningcarcompany.co.uk/ ?

On the other hand, as said above, the interesting aspect of this Renault concept car is that it introduces a number of interesting technologies. It will probably be different when it comes out of production but by the looks of it, it's not that removed from their recent models like the newer Clio or Modus so should do rather well.

@John Imrie

Presumably, the data on the laptops was as secure as the location the laptops were left in. Considering the crooks got in by breaking a window, I suspect the unbreakable security was a top secret password, such as 'qwerty'.

@Ken Hagan

The convincing reason I have for using a (free) gmail account is that it has a much nicer web interface, a much better spam filter and much more storage space than anything my ISP can offer (and that I have to pay for).

Also note that email spam existed before free webmail accounts so your argument seems flawed to me. What free email accounts do is provide another way to distribute spam but it is far from the only way.

I agree with your analogy about bribing the secretary though.

OS and Dev kit

Looks good! But what is the underlying OS? S60? Linux? Something else? And what about a development kit? Can I still create my own J2ME apps as I can for other Nokia phones? And if yes, does it offer an API to interact with the touch screen? And what about multi-touch and a tilt sensor? Any device that wants to be an iPhone killer needs to offer the same level of interaction AND be easy to program for.

Spam

There would be a very easy way to make hotmail relevant again: include a decent spam filter. I have a hotmail and a gmail account. Both receive a large amount of spam. With hotmail, 90% of that spam ends up in my inbox where I have to delete it. With gmail, 90% of it ends up in the 'spam' folder where it belongs.

Now what are the chances that this new flashy hotmail incarnation include a decent spam filter? More likely, it's full of unnecessary web 2.0 widgets that make it look swish and polished rather than useful.

Prior art

They've been doing that in the Middle East for hundreds of years which proves it works in very harsh climates. It's called a wind tower: http://hubpages.com/hub/Wind_Tower_-_An_Architectural_Element_of_Local_Identity_in_UAE. You can also find an example of such a wind tower a bit closer to home, at the Palazzo dei Normanni in Palermo, Sicily.

For more recent prior art, see the Swiss Re building @ 30 St Mary Axe, London, aka the Gherkin: http://www.fosterandpartners.com/Projects/1004/Default.aspx

Cabling

I've stopped counting the number of time I've seen that sort of things happen in a data centre. The best excuse I ever heard was "we didn't know what this big yellow cable was so we cut through it" after we discovered that the hapless hacks hired by one of our customers to "clean up" the spaghetti junction that was their data centre had been slightly over-zealous. For some reason, the traders who couldn't get any market info until the ethernet backbone was replaced weren't very impressed.

@first AC

Reading the article, it says that the CURRENT version of the iPhone has a Samsung ARM chip in it, as you say, but that it would make sense for Apple to work on their own variation of the chip for FUTURE versions of the device. Re-read it and you will see that it agrees with you.

Hide & seek

Same here: I've been trying to find the Linux loaded laptops on Lenovo's web site and have completely failed. So Lenovo have discovered that actively hiding products you sell from prospective customers is a good way NOT to sell them. Who would have thought?

Simplified spelling?

Simplifying spelling is not a bad idea in itself. However, phonetic spelling won't work in English for a number of reasons that the prof has decided to ignore:

As mentioned above, English has a huge variety of accents that make phonetic spelling virtually impossible. Should you spell differently between London and Newcastle or should you devise phonetic spelling based on the South East and ask everybody else to learn a new spelling that is not phonetic for them?

English has a lot of variation in vowel pronunciations, including long and sort vowels, diphthongs, etc. By contrast, Spanish and Italian, as cited as examples, each have exactly 5 distinct vowel sounds that correspond to letters a, e, i, o and u. Few diphthongs and no difference between short and long vowels. If you were to devise phonetic spelling for English, you'd need to introduce a large number of new letters or new letter combinations, possibly some diacritics as well, just to reflect the range in pronunciation.

@AC: Listen up Frenchy: in the same vein should English speakers say Roma and Munchen rather than Rome and Munich?

No chrome then

I was going to install Chrome to see what all the fuss was about but I think I'll abstain now.

If Google was expecting Chrome to challenge IE, that's not a very good start...

OBL

“…even in today’s desert, complete privacy does not exist.”

In this case, does it mean that Google know where Osama bin Laden is hiding and that they should be brought to court for not giving him up?

Snow Leopard or Yellow Dog?

Dear Apple, if you drop PPC support in Snow Leopard, I'll either stay with Leopard or upgrade to Yellow Dog Linux. Why on earth would I ditch a good old PowerMac G5 that works well and is more than powerful enough for my needs?

Burnt dinner

I was laughing so much I nearly forgot about dinner in the oven. Thank you El Reg, this is absolute genius!

Image Stabilisation

With Canon DSLR's, image stabilisation is a feature of the lens itself so indeed with the entry level kit you won't have image stabilisation. However, you can use the 400D with any EF or EF-S lens including any IS (Image Stabilised) lens. So just change the lens and you have IS.

The 400D is a great first DSLR. As it will accept any lens in the current Canon range (as well as Sigma, Tamron and others), it is very easy to upgrade it or extend its capabilities by adding or replacing lenses. And even though it's an entry model, it may take you years before you feel the need to upgrade to a more advanced camera body.

419 on LinkedIn

I received a 419 scam message on LinkedIn a few months ago. I notified LinkedIn of it and to their credit they replied within 24 hours saying that they would investigate and delete the user account if it was found to be fraudulent.

As for the NoScript add-on, I agree it's great but that doesn't excuse shoddy coding! Perharps El Reg could point Facebook to this page: http://www.owasp.org/index.php/Top_10_2007-A1 ?

@Ben Hutchings

Yes, there are a lot of mobile platforms out there. However, most of them run a version of J2ME. So, today, if you want to build a cross-platform mobile app, you can do it with Java, as long as your app doesn't require anything that is not part of the J2ME standard API (less and less of a restriction these days as J2ME evolves regularly). Google Maps and Google Mail mobile are perfect examples of this. However, Android changes that because the platform is not compatible with J2ME: it uses a custom JVM, custom API, etc. So in practice, it does fragment the market. Guess why Nokia, who is one of the most active contributors to J2ME, is not part of the Open Handset Alliance?

@AC

One time number tokens add some level of security on top of a simple password but they are not perfect. They reduce the risks but don't eliminate them.

You are right in saying that anti-virus protection is not perfect either but I sort of agree with the banks that their users should ensure they have the latest version of such software: same as the one time tokens, having up to date anti-virus protection doesn't eliminate risks, it reduces them. And to be honest, seeing some friends' machines I've seen in the past, *any* protection would seriously reduce risks.

That's how banks work: they know they can't eliminate all risk so they try to reduce it as much as possible, to a level they can manage. In an online banking situation, there are two sides to the risk: the risk associated to their internal systems, authentication methods, internal security, etc, which is a risk they know and can manage; then there is the risk associated to the customers' PCs such as anti-virus security, recent browsers, etc. So what they're saying to their customers is "take care of your side of the security and we'll take responsibility for our side of it; don't take care of your side of the risk and we'll consider you liable". It's exactly the same as saying to customers to not write down their pin numbers.

At the end of the day, any incentive for users to make sure they have the latest anti-virus and behave sensibly online is a good thing.

Time to move?

Darn! First, Freedom 2 Surf was acquired by Pipex. Then Pipex was acquired by Tiscali. Now, we (f2s's customers) are being sold to CPW? Methinks I may ask for my MAC when this happens.

widely adopted standard?

So a standard that has 1 implementation is a "widely adopted standard"? This is a meaning for the phrase "widely adopted" I wasn't aware of.