Posts by Andrew 5 publicly visible posts • joined 7 Jun 2007
I'm fairly sure my bank has a similar point in it's contract, would be interesting to see how this play's out.
Annoyingly this will only apply to the us, so us poor sods in the UK will still get shafted when we failed to notice a change we had violated as we hadn't visited their site for a couple of weeks.
OK, on one hand we have the conspiracy theorists that believe the yanks cleared a rather large area so that they could land the alien mothership (satelite shooting gallery is almost as far fetched). Then Microsoft makes an announcement like this that lets face it, is completely against what they have ever done or believed in. Anyone else think that our lizard overlords have arrived and setup camp in seattle?
Mines the foil one please ...
"if operating systems were compared to, say, a mosquito net, Linux would be a mosquito net with a few small holes in it, while Windows would be a mosquito net made from chicken wire."
"whilst MS will develop and thoroughly test the patch behind closed doors"
Managed to spray coffee over the monitor on two occasions. Funniest comparison of windows to linux I've heard in a long time. While I'm not sure what planet Tim was on when writing the second comment. I've lost track of the times I've had roll back patches after MS Auto update ignored the settings and installed a patch onto a production server that promptly broke half the other software running on it or restarted the server in the middle of a backup run (Auto updates were set to ask before downloading or installing). While the recent debacle with Office, where a service pack stopped it from opening its own files, had the technical team dreading the phone ringing with another client moaning as they could no longer open their word documents. How the hell did that make it through "thorough testing".
I use both Windows and Linux for work and home. I use the one thats best for what I need, however I find myself cursing MS stupidity more and more lately while having less and less support calls from the clients using linux (desktop and server roles).
Nice one to the developers for getting the fix out so soon after the disclosure of the vunerability, rather than trying to bury the existence of it while taking months to develop the necessary patch.
"if a lasers just light, wouldn't all you need to defend your missiles/planes etc be just a mirror? or some other light scattering device a prism maybe?"
The problem is that mirror's only reflect a percentage of the light that hits them, some of it is still absorbed. That bit that is absorbed heats it up and eventually the mirror gets vapourised (by eventually we're talking fractions of a second at the power levels that would be needed to destroy the incoming object behind the mirror).
I'm not entirely sure with lasers, but as I understand it, they belt out light at a single frequency. Prism's split light into different frequencies so it would only change the laser beams direction, rather than split it in different directions (and thus dissipate its power). I think however that the prism would also suffer the same problem as the mirror and be destroyed in fractions of a second.
Still, there are several other problems that need to be overcome yet, such as generating the power levels required to destroy a shell, or being able to fire at a shell and not having to wait 10 minutes or so for the laser to recharge.
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