* Posts by Paul

691 publicly visible posts • joined 23 Oct 2006

Page:

Microsoft walks away from Yahoo!

Paul
Gates Horns

MS's strategy - to break Yahoo?

@stuart - good point... Microsoft can buy up the pieces that will be result of the collapse of Y! when the shareholders blow the board away having lost their chance at selling their stock at an overvalued price.

Since M would have massively changed Yahoo anyway, breaking it up, it's financially better for them to buy it already broken!

Whether Microsoft actually wanted to buy Y! at all is an interesting question - merely by offering to buy them and then walking away will hit confidence in Y! so badly that it gives MS a chance to overtake them.

From a personal perspective, I only care about the fortunes of Y! because I like the Zimbra mail system and MicroHoo would certainly have killed that dead.

DoJ beats up tech firm for H-1B only job ads

Paul
Flame

bad economics

So, you can't find a highly trained worker and bring in a skilled immigrant. You're not doing any harm to the economy are you as no local resident was suitable? Well, yes, the problem here is that it means the company is avoiding investing in skills in the native work-force. Mostly, this is a way to avoid paying for training or paying the going rate for someone of that skill.

The more complex problem is when you have a job going but the skill set is so low or the job too menial that none of the locals are willing to do it? There's no shortage of under-qualified people who are only capable of the most menial work. Perhaps the problem is that the cost of living is too high and state aid so generous that no residents can afford to do the job?

VXers slap copyright notices on malware

Paul
Gates Horns

GPL? Nah, freebsd botnet

the GPL is too restrictive for me, that's why I use only botnets with FreeBSD licenses!

coat? yes, I'm taking yours, the one with the wallet in it!!!

Only insanity would lead Apple to make a mobile chip play

Paul
Flame

arm variant

whilst I think "sleepy's" comments are good, that Apple could license a variant of PPC to Intel, I think it's more likely that Apple want to own their own Arm variant processor instead of buying 3rd part versions, and who better to craft one that a low-power specialist?

now, if I was being really cynical, I could suggest that Apple were going to roll a custom processor into iPhone so that noone outside Apple would have a working development platform, and therefore make the thing relatively unhackable; as it is, anyone with Arm SDK can have a go!

BOFH: Licensing model

Paul
Black Helicopters

sadly not as made up as you'd think

ok, so who here has bought or sold (or considered) cisco kit on ebay? the IOS licenses are not transferrable, so when you sell you should wipe it clean, and buy you should buy your own IOS (which would cost more than the kit)!

if your company is bought or goes bust, any cisco kit is devalued because the licenses cannot be transferred either!

so, in essence, cisco kit second hand is basically a brick.

this also used to be the case with EMC, but you'd have to check that.

This DVD will self-destruct in 48 hours

Paul

ideal for astronauts

@solomon grundy

this will be ideal for astronauts as they can simply put their dvd player outside in the vacuum along with the DVD player and the disks will last forever.!

AMD launches Dell's four-core Opteron boxes

Paul

opteron outperforms core and xeon sometimes

*** networking ***

in network performance tests, opterons have been shown to outperform core and xeon systems by a large margin.

http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.security.firewalls.pfsense.user/2738/match=opteron+xeon

*** power ***

although at peak, opterons use more power than intel's, at idle they are more efficient, and a single-core opteron *might* be better for your application.

** performance ***

it's also been found that a core2quad can sometimes be slower than a core2duo because of the contention on the front-side bus, so again, if your application is CPU bound with a single thread, you need to consider that an intel might not be ideal!

Toshiba reveals R500 sub-notebook with 128GB SSD

Paul
Paris Hilton

size and weight

the r500 initially feels like a toy because of its weight, but when examined more closely seems pretty solid. we have a few of them at work and they are very very nice. expensive though. like the Sony TX and TZ, the great thing is that apart from the power adaptor, everything is built in - usb, wifi, bluetooth, DVD-RW, proper VGA connector, PCMCIA etc. very sexy, buy me one and I'll let you come and drool over it!

Paris? I'll let her be photographed on the beach with it!

Sharp unwraps 'world first' Intel Atom phone

Paul

nokia tablets and zaurus have nothing to fear

this isn't a handheld computer like the nokia tablets or the zaurus or even windowsMobiles like the HTC universal.

no, this is a new breed of device, the portable slab, or sub-MID.

nice spec, shame about the weight, size, and the OS!

Opera tunes itself for Android

Paul
Linux

android hardware?

android hardware doesn't exist? 'scuse me, but I've been happily running android on my zaurus for well over a month, and ok, so you can't buy a zaurus from your local dixons, there's half a dozen reputable places you can buy them (trisoft, conics, dynamism to name just the three best known). You can even dual boot a zaurus to have the boring stability of the old sharp (and its derivative Cacko) distro alongside the bleeding edge of Android.

BOFH: Impatience

Paul
Alert

binding energy

very very briefly. atomic bombs, fusion or fission, work on the change in binding energy which holds the nucleus together. Light nuclei (H, He, Li etc) when combined release energy, the heaviest (U, Pu) release energy when broken up. IIRC, Iron is the most "efficient" nucleus in terms of mass vs binding energy.

but all this is from 20 year old memories of physics.

Ofcom says yes on more TV ads

Paul
Coat

the customer

remember, the customer is always right! However, the customer of the TV stations is NOT you the viewer. The advertiser is the customer, and we viewers* are just bait to get the advertisers to give the TV stations money.

* when I say we, I actually don't include myself, as I don't pay the TV tax and I don't watch broadcast TV. the odd accident with azureus and a torrent file occurs and I do watch the resultant AVI file :-)

Nokia N810 internet tablet

Paul
Paris Hilton

I have a nokia 800

How many people reading the article didn't pick up on the fact that Nokia didn't intend this to be a phone? Why? Maybe it's because S60 (uck!) is too entrenched? Maybe because it avoids having to do many regional variants? Maybe because they want you to buy a phone with bluetooth to act as mobile data gateway?

I've never found a smartphone to be any good, TBH, either too big and bulky, or if usefully compact then is too small to have an adequate display - the N800's 800x480 display makes my Zaurus's 3.5" vga display seem a bit, well, stingy!

I also have zaurus 3100, & palm t3. I use the Zaurus for experimenting with Android and hacking TomTom to run on it!

The Palm is still in use as a PIM - *nothing* beats datebook5 (well, datebook6 does).

The N800 gets the most use

- the bright clear hi-res screen makes it fabulous for mobile web surfing, reading eBooks etc.

- the built in webcam works nicely with googletalk, I can video chat (when I want to be a sad geek) with my brother in california

- with USB host or bluetooth I can connect a nano keyboard if I wanted to enter lots of text

- with bluetooth (PAN) or wifi I can connect via any phone or any hotspot

- stereo speakers make it useful as a media player, built-in radio is a bonus; SDHC card can carry a hell of a lot of files!

- can play radio and TV streams - BBC News 24 live works well (but don't tell TV Licensing!)

paris - because she needs people to RTFA for her too.

Nokia starts tagging photos

Paul
Black Helicopters

battery hogging gps?

GPS is becoming ubuiquitous (sp?), and mainly I'm pleased, but it still tends to sap battery power. I read about a new product which claims to be able offer always-on GPS service without being a power hog.

FX:google google.

oh yes, here it is

http://www.cieonline.co.uk/cie2/articlen.asp?pid=1778&id=19001

Microsoft cuts Vista price

Paul
Flame

if you can't polish a turd, make it cheaper!

I remember, long ago, when IBM were arrogant, despised, unloved and people flocked to MS because they gave people back control of their computers, provided an OS you could play with, development tools that worked (I cut my PC programming teeth on MS C 5.x on DOS). Everyone wanted, but nobody believed, that IBM would fall from leadership. MS seem to think they too are unassailable... hopefully Vista will cause their pedestal to sway.

Anyway, back to the subject.

http://www.polishedturd.com/

HMRC pays criminal for 'tax dodger' discs

Paul
Flame

dear register reader

Dear El Register Reader.

I am the solicitor for some very wealthy people who wish to move their money to a safe bank account and need your help with this £100M. All I require from you is to pay some fees into....

Ofcom cracks down on London pirates

Paul
Flame

abandon FM for DAB, DVB-H or DVB-T

I think the time has come to move all national stations to DAB, DVB-H or DVB-T and keep FM behind for local radio stations with very low power for their communities.

HP's Linux sub-notebook spied on web

Paul
Paris Hilton

toshiba r500 FTW

I have a sony tx2, a colleagues has a Sony TZ, and two others have Toshiba R500s which has become our ultraportable of choice. the R500 is definitely the best - the Sonys are light but feel fragile, and the R500 also wins because there's a docking station for it!

paris? because we're talking about skinny lighweights!

Physicists fire up strontium atomic clock

Paul
Paris Hilton

@jason holloway

it's now 10:40:00.00

HTH

Paul

Toshiba's board to kybosh HD DVD this week?

Paul
Pirate

it's dead jim!

http://www.akihabaranews.com/en/news-15518-The+HD-DVD+is+Dead+%21+Officially+Official+%21+Report+the+Japanese+TV+NHK+%21.html

Google Android - a sneak preview

Paul
Boffin

I already run Android on real hardware

... on the sharp zaurus!

1/ download G's SDK with the qemu virtual machine image

2/ extract the files from that qemu image

3/ modify your kernel with the android required modules

4/ create a chroot environment under debian or angstrom and fire up angstrom

5/ profit!

Straw: Police can bug MPs without asking Cabinet

Paul
Flame

to all MPs - nothing to hide, nothing to fear

well, Mr and Mrs politicians, remember, if you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to hide.

so, you employ your kids at ludicrous salaries, got found out? so, you're under surveillance when visiting constituents in prison?

well, boo hoo, I shed tears for you. welcome to being under the gaze of the big brother you created!

BitTorrent admin's police bail extended (again)

Paul

NOT police bail - magistrates or crown courts!

will people, the BBC and The Register, please STOP calling it "police bail". the Police do not set bail conditions, the courts set bail, the police are an instrument to enforce bail conditions.

sigh.

eBay: 'We will lower listing fees'

Paul
Boffin

ebid.co.uk anyone?

ebid.co.uk - do they still allow to copy your ebay rating to your ebid rating?

Apple on the lookout for one million unlocked iPhones

Paul
Flame

why can't the operators be honest and make it a rental agreement?

to me, buying a phone locked to a network is pretty much like signing a rent contract... in which case, why don't the operators just do this? phone locking to SIM or network is bad bad BAD - it's entirely contrary to the whole spirit of GSM - why bother to have a removable SIM at all if the device which takes it is a prisoner of the network?

the honest thing to do would be to rent the handsets. this would prevent people tampering with the operator's handsets, and have the additional benefit of unused phones being returned to the operator where they will not be wasted gathering dust in a drawer, but could be refurbished and sold to 3rd world countries or recycled efficiently!

Nokia spends €105m on mobile Linux developer

Paul
Alien

QT used quite a lot.

this has set the maemo (internet tablet) forums buzzing - Ari has said relatively little on his blog, so people don't know whether there will be a new UI for the tablets in the future based on QT (or some mobile version of KDE).

QT appears in a lot of places - not just obvious linux devices such as the Sharp Zaurus, but also in Archos media players, and some Motorola phones (so Motorola will be upset!).

When Green Computing attacks - hype or heaven?

Paul
Flame

bad terminology

"environmentally friendly" is SO abused.... 99% of the time it means "less environmentally damaging that the common alternatives".

e.g. since when can the manufacture of a computer be good for the environment? since when can using detergents and flushing them down the drain be good for the environment?

things should be rated on their environmentally damaging impact, with 0 being neutral and -100 be a nuclear holocaust.

Home Sec in anti-terror plan to control entire web

Paul
Stop

Dear Uk Govt's

Dear UK Gov't,

I am a citizen, as were my ancestors. I am not afraid of terrorists, I am more afraid of dying in a car accident or violent crime which, statistically, are far more likely. I am also concerned about rising crime levels, and would therefore ask that you cease wasting time and money on pointless anti-terrorist actitivities and ID cards and instead ensure the police are adequately resourced to do their job.

Oh yes, and also stop meddling with the law producing unenforceable/unenforced laws that make people contemptuous of the law and the police.

I also insist that you stop pretending to protect my way of live and protect me from terrorists whilst all the while destroying the freedoms which are part of my way of life. Stop pretending that I and my fellow citizens are all scared!

Hasbro fires off legal letters over Scrabulous

Paul
Go

scrabble PC game

I have a copy of Hasbro; it's quite old, I picked it up cheap in Albuquerque USA probably 6+ years ago. (C) date is 1999. Although it was designed for Win95 & 98, it does play on W2k/pro, I've not tried it on XP.

The back says "scrabble is a trademark of Hasbro in the USA & Ca, rights elsewhere in world held by J.W. Spear & Sons" (my abbrev's).

The back of the disk specifically says "compete with the computer, up to 4 human players or over the internet or LAN". In fact, I think when I first played it, it did have network play and there was some sort of server, but I didn't do it much as I didn't have broadband.

Quad-core Xeons use small power plant to maul Opterons

Paul
Go

dual process xeon motherboards from Tyan

erm, so, according to El Reg, this motherboard can't exist?

http://www.tyan.com/product_board_detail.aspx?pid=566

dual xeon processors with DDR2 memory.

Neo1973: long-distance contender to Apple and Google?

Paul
Linux

android isn't open, and it's not vapourware

open, when it comes to smartphones can mean two things; the device itself is open and all source code to make it work can be downloaded and built, or the SDK to develop application is available for building from source.

android runtime is closed and not all the SDK is open, so it's really just a free SDK. Symbian likewise! OpenMoko and the NEO are truly open, you can get pretty much every line of source excepting where regulators control it.

people have assumed that android is largely vapourware. well, it's not, you can download the virtual machine (arm processor) and run it on a PC (linux or windows) using the QEMU virtual machine container. Even better, you can extract the files and copy them to an Arm processor handheld such as a Zaurus and run it - even now, people are working on improving the hosting of android on top of either the Debian or Angstrom distros.

Kid's 'new' MP3 player was preloaded with smut

Paul
Paris Hilton

I once bought a 2nd hand PDA

... a Sony Clie (N770C/U PalmOs4 device); the owner sold it with a memory stick. When I collected it, I asked if he'd done a hard reset, he looked blank, so I demonstrated - so that way we both new is was clean. He also sold it with a 32MB memory stick (quite big in those days).

it was only the next day at work when I discovered he had a bunch of self-made porn photos on the memory card, ewww, which I quickly wiped. My colleagues were rather more mercenary, suggesting I could have sold the memory card back to him for a lot of money!

Outsourcing overruns cost UK taxpayers £9bn

Paul
Jobs Horns

dear register reader

Dear Register Reader,

I am a humble official in the UK government and I have £9B money in a bank account and I need your help to release that money to its rightful owners; in order to do so and prove your trustworthiness, please send £1000 to bank account sort code 19-28-37 91827364, and also email me with your contact details in order to facilitate this transaction.

yours bumbingly,

Gordon Br^H^HSmith

Nokia wins hearts, minds with breakthrough mobile

Paul
Thumb Up

E65? E51? avoid S60, old 6310i was best

I still have my 6310i which I bought 2nd had at 6 months old, and the battery life is still excellent - as a light user I charge it once a week - I could leave it longer but then I'd forget, so it was better to get into the habit of charging it at the weekend.

To replace it I bought the E65 - having rejected the N95 as too big, overfeatured - which seemed to be a good idea: quad band GSM, 3G, bluetooth & wifi (for VOIP). I had to disable 3G to get the battery life up, and if I leave WiFi on for voip the battery dies within 36 hours. Suddenly I've *had* to buy a car charger and *had* to leave my spare Nokia charger at work, and even keep my 6310i around for emergencies.

I don't think S60 is all that fantastic in itself, the suite of 3rd party apps has some use, and the camera is nice for tagging contacts with a face... but as a *phone*, the 6310i wins over the E65 and (having played extensively) the N95.

I think if I hadn't bought the E65, I'd be happy with my Nokia Tablet and the 6310i. If Nokia did remake the 6310i++ and added 3G but kept the same simple system software, kept or improved on the battery life, it'd be a winner!

This is what I want, a phone and data gateway, no PIM, no games, no bling. If you want a the big screen experience with GPS, get a Palm or Zaurus or Nokia Tablet or Kohjinsha/MiniVYE or Fujitsu U810/U1010...

US surgeon snaps patient's tattooed todger

Paul
Paris Hilton

ldo/llandudno

I recall from one of those memoires of a doctor books about a doctor who observed that a man had LDO tattooed on his penis, but didn't ask or comment. The patient was then sent off to see the attractive young nurse, for some cream or something, and she later said to the doctor "did you notice how he had llandudno tattooed on his penis".

Open Office standards row heats up

Paul
Stop

ooxml is just

ooxml is just a binary dump surrounded by angled brackets

.. I forget who said that, but it's largely true

Google spanks memory, disk and networking vendors

Paul
Paris Hilton

intel are a major cause

despite the latest core2duo/quad devices, if you want to run multiple processors it means zeons with FB-DIMM - and these run very hot and eat electricity! We have a some dual-CPU/quad-core boxes (8 cores in total) with 8GB RAM and they run very hot and eat loads of power.

If Intel adopted a better bus technology (which in theory they will do - a slight revamp of Hypertransport) they could make multi-processor multi-core systems much more efficient and get rid of FBDIMMs

The huge FSBs that Intel push for are also very inefficient - power is mainly lost in the switching of logic states.

Police launch hunt for bogus bobbies

Paul

stolen to order for off-shoring

I'm sure that much of this stuff goes off-shore and is stolen to order. Most high-end kit is put on maintenance contracts and thus serial numbers etc are audited, so companies like Sun will know if some kit reported stolen appears anywhere else.

The lesson is to have a proper asset registry, and thus be able to report accurately what is stolen, not sure whether putting up signs to that effect would prevent theft?

Although the kit I use at work is fairly ordinary (1U servers, core2duo, 8GB ram, 750G or 1TB drives * 4), we record serial numbers of chassis + motherboard + drives, the ether macs, etc etc. We do similar things for laptops too.

HMRC offers £20k reward for ID goldmine CDs

Paul
Paris Hilton

hmm

1. start shell

dd if=/dev/urandom of=/tmp/secretdatabase.db bs=2048 count=24000000

dd if=/dev/urandom of=/tmp/secretdatabase2.db bs=2048 count=24000000

2. use k3b

3. burn to CDR

4. label disk "HMRC benefits", put in envelope matching the description, write on address, wrap and send to the hotline and claim reward

5. profit!

so easy Paris could do it!

New taskforce to discuss why more people aren't turning to digital

Paul
Unhappy

I like DAB - somewhat

I agree with comments that:

* there are too many stations fighting for too little bandwidth.

* there's a price premium

I have a Pure pocketdab 2000, whose only downside is that the max SD card it can take is 2GB, so although it also makes a good mp3 player it is limited. If it were DAB only, it'd be 60% useless.

The reason why I like DAB somewhat is that I listen to ClassicFM a lot, and the sound quality is respectable; where I work computer inerference drowns out any FM, but DAB seems to cope better. I also like being able to record digitally off air - but, there are some MP3 players with built-in off-air recording?

Why are there still no decent DAB + MP3 large hard drive players? I did find one with 8GB of flash and a card slot. Perhaps because DAB has not been a big success round the world so there's quite a small market,

Asus Eee PC 4G sub-sub-notebook

Paul
Flame

minipci?

apparently no black variants have the minipci socket, and the newer white ones are also missing it - look for the B in the serial number so I'm told.

I still think the nanobook is more interesting.

Remembering the IBM PC

Paul

the PC and XT weren't IBM's first personal computers!

the PC 5100 was earlier, but failed as a product, the PC as we know it was a totally different architecture despite being the 5150.

I recall first encountering PC XTs as a undergrad in Elec/Electronic engineering at the University of Leeds, when IBM gave them enough to build a classroom full of machines, with network and a file server - the staff knew IBM was going to make the gift but didn't expect it to be so generous, especially as the machines were higher spec than normal (memory etc) nor did they expect to get a network and file server!

Many of us had Amigas or Ataris and though the specifications of the PCs to be a bit of a joke - no colour, crap graphics, no sound except a beep, and hugely expensive! Four years later I was using a 386 @ 16MHz with a whopping 4MB of ram to write C and assembler, but I still went home to an Amiga. I didn't consider owning a PC for many years still until an affordable system with accelerated graphics (matrox were king at the time) and quality sound (soundblaster) came my way in the early/mid 90s.

German amateur code breaker defeats Colossus

Paul
Flame

C shorthand for assembler?

"C shorthand for assembler".. well, great! real programmers program in machine code, not assembler, since they know all the op-codes by heart in decimal, hex and binary - the latter is essential since you toggle your code into the machine using the switches on the front panel.

However, we real programmers get lazy with age and like to use assembly language, or even C. C++ is, however, for quiche eating script kiddies!

Access Palm OS now available... for Nokia!

Paul
Boffin

palm is an appliance, not a gadget

Mike suggests that Palm platform is somehow for experts and winMobe is for windows & mac users!

what utter drivel. there are many people who can use a palm who never even sync it - just back up to a memory card (if even that!). My daughter and nephews/nieces were able to use my spare Palm from 6 years upwards, it really is so easy.

I agree with previous post about variations in hardware design & poor quality. However, one thing I'd like to point out: because the palm os is, ahem, timeless (or stagnant), it means you tend to keep your palm device forever, and because you become dependent on it, are unforgiving when it finally packs up. That said, there have been a few lemons in the products... but then, pocketPC/winMobe have also had some truly sucky products!!!

Microsoft vows cluster OS upgrade will include Linux nod

Paul
Coat

windows supercomputers have been biggest for long time

the worlds largest supercomputers run windows in a distributed network - they're called botnets!

so, nothing new to see here.

Animal rights activist hit with RIPA key decrypt demand

Paul
Flame

TOP SECRET FILE

here's a top secret list of Al Queda operative, encrypted using GPG with a symmetric key and uuencoded to make it text form.

begin 644 al-queda-list.gpg

MC`T$`P,"(3(;RY9QB4)@R<#DGI;+VS?'`0QI\T$;2=>'8L0X!W#@+/+?M2F0

MY'*`WRZ;V-V?TC`?=J4N&Q>DQ6#:7;]/]%O[.>WYX@6]Y#A#)O?`BF73`A%F

M<Y.U@-)!"('SQZ6R[^SNA91_L2,N*I3]HW?_E.-QQ5NNG;%":S26D@6@)FT1

M$=%PIXF&WE^6/+NZE'_EN@J#?#&@T-#S,TYZ5.ER6(6C`,G^A]Q0F8#RN96>

MS46IL+F2?("_9&-D\DE.XLG0J%,EYO9]._LU..27&I-".ZO?E'U-+:)..^'J

M2N''>>5DT`B9:8QT'+5ME84VZN*X6S\4;E&,.$G:41T=\O-6WKR+Z_U:0D2Z

M1M92]5Y_ME_IV3T'\;VYB2+,]+TW?I<M8*'4:&Z]H-U,]C'$;LC!;J2U?P.+

M[^LH*`M7])C`JS$*&=@=Q(/5,ZQN.A12I%#3(B;HJB\BTQ'EE?$8UR]:8XO"

MP03GF7G#$E!;]I\Q')1Q[QL=<D6#"^1R/03T)M@X&T<LXPU^:T]#GIM!T<YS

AQOGL$TI,3,VLQ.Y?>86Y8WC$?_\HGE:E!P*/(\X27(G)

`

end

so, what will happen if this list is published?

eBay glitch wipes out 11 year-old account without a trace

Paul
Unhappy

rivals to ebay in the UK

there is a UK auction house - ebid.

I did long ago sign up with QXL, but gave up on them because there were so many dodgy items and sellers. they would also spam me. not sure if its improved, but I don't get the spam any more!

Cambridge computing profs 'desperate' for applicants

Paul
Unhappy

keeping it exclusive?

My mother was a nurse, she loved being a nurse and helping people - she gave up being a senior relatively well paid teacher (about 30 years ago), and only retired when health and poor hearing meant she couldn't continue. Many of her colleagues were also nurses because they enjoyed the job, despite the long hours and poor pay; many of the skills were learned doing the job back then, with a slow/steady rise from menial to senior to staff to matron or whatever it became.

Nurses are now much better paid in comparison, and it's much more of a "career" than a vocation.

When I first started in embedded s/w about 20 years ago (ouch! I'm getting old), most people were self-taught and did it because they enjoyed it. Pay was fair for an engineer, some contractors got rich often by being either specialist or working longer hours or being willing to do the jobs noone else wanted.

When pay began to rise during the boom, especially during the dotcom rise, all manner of idiots jumped onboard, many were crap, they could barely write working HTML (no wonder Microsoft didn't care that IE was broken, so many web sites were too) let alone actually understand machine architecture.

Maybe the good thing about the dotcom bust is that now only those who actually enjoy computers, programming and diving under the hood will make the effort to get some qualification? Not sure. I still have to set some stiff interview questions and a practical to sort out those who have good CVs from those who can actually do the job!

McAfee pays $51m for Hacker Safe

Paul
Jobs Halo

security theatre

you can't verify a site is secure by only using standard automated test tools - sure, they're great for capturing obvious stuff, but to really prove a web service is secure requires a willingness to actually break the service, and a proper audit of the source code by experienced security-aware *independent* programmers.

if these people have, or ever will, issue a kitemark to a service running on any form of windows, then they're charlatans!

Cops coax half-naked Czech wolfman from Cardiff tree

Paul
Coat

best headline ever from the reg?

"My Internet love is a corpse-hoarding granny"

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2001/02/22/my_internet_love/

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