Posts by AlbertH 588 publicly visible posts • joined 18 Jul 2012
The Linux kernel is provided as a boon for the whole world. That a commercial corporation suborns parts of the Linux kernel for pecuniary gain - without crediting the originator of the code - is a breach of the fundamental trust enshrined in the principles of the GPL.
VM Ware should be suitably ashamed. They should be ashamed to the tune of several million dollars, which could be donated to genuine Open Source projects
A free subscription to identity theft protection by one of the credit reference agencies.
Bwahahahahaha!
These cretins should be paying significant (ie: £ks) to every customer and their senior management should be in Court.
Has anyone calculated the time required to change all ones Banking details, passwords and Credit / Debit cards? Has anyone actually put a figure on what this will cost each customer? TT shouldn't just offer a worthless "subscription" to Experian (who are entirely useless anyway) - they should be paying serious amounts of compensation to EVERY one of their customers.
Yes. That's certainly one approach.
Legal remedy? Trying to unscrew screwed computers that were wrecked by this "upgrade " has cost me about 30 hours. My time is charged at £850 / hour. MS can pay my standard rate. They can then pay a further £1700 / machine for my upgrade fee (usually to SuSe). That will come close to what this debacle has cost me. They should also make reparation for the distress they've caused and the training of the staff to use the new OS.
These clowns owe me the larger part of £85k.
If everyone else who was affected by this put in a nice bill to MS - and then backed them up with Court action through Trading Standards, MS would probably fold in weeks.
Their EULA is (as usual ) unenforceable outside the USA so they're stuffed!
Sadly, there's a lot of concealed "telemetry" that you'll never find and can't disable since it's baked right into the kernel. The only way to stop MS and the NSA abusing your computer is to flush Windows. You've already spent a fortune on brokenware - don't give these illegitimate offspring any more of your hard-earned. Apple are almost as bad, incidentally.
LINUX or BSD is the answer!
Every competent IP network has redundant connectivity. That's one of the fundamental definitions of IP. The only time that there isn't redundant connectivity is to individual terminating pieces of hardware hung from the network - unless the network is done on the cheap, and the redundant loops aren't closed (as appears to be the case with Sky, Virgin, Talk Talk etc....).
The "ping of death" was always fun!
Two smart-suited salesmen were completely freaked out when they tried to demonstrate some grossly over-priced database where I used to work. Every time they started the programme up, their machines would crash after a few minutes. This persuaded our bosses that it would be much more sensible for us to write our own software!
I wrote a little programme back in the late 70s that emulated the system commands and the prompts on a GE 635 Basic Plus machine. When you asked it to get a library file, it would demand that you appended the command with "please", when you wanted to "run" a programme, it would give you one of several randomly-selected messages: "no running in the computer lab" or "a walking pace is quite sufficient" and so on. It would actually pass your command to the interpreter, and it would be executed, but the prompts and warning messages were pretty silly.
The programme grew and grew over some months as the other students added their little bits to it, and we ended up with a completely wacky machine whenever this programme was running!
The expensive "experimenters" version of the Tandy TRS80 had a built-in EPROM blower. A few Basic POKE commands could re-direct the higher programming voltage to other hardware in the machine's memory map - cue smoke and flames!
We installed and ran a little Basic program that did just that in many Tandy Stores! They withdrew the model variant after a while, because they were "always burning out when on demonstration"!
Well you can be sure that they won't be getting any proper education! The last thing a socialist ever wants is an educated populace - it's too easy to see through their lies, obfuscations, and evasions if the voters are educated.
If you want proof of this, compare the literacy and numeracy standards of school pupils across the world. There is a precise correlation between socialism and poor educational standards.
Mr Marsden:
In just the same way that the horde trying to cross the Channel from Calais are not refugees, the vast majority of the claimants for Social Security payments don't deserve them. It's just that claiming is easier than working. The British "Welfare State" was a Soviet-backed scam to bankrupt us.
"Socialist" governments have always been bad for Britain: The Welfare State, endless strikes, comprehensive "education", rampant inflation and the highest taxes in the world.
When Blair got into power, it was funny to see a neo-conservative trying to herd the socialist cats! Blair's "answer" was to generate over a million non-jobs in the NHS, DHSS and other state-run organisations, and to print money to pay them. We're still suffering the results of his and Gordon McMental's mismanagement and abuse of the economy.
The election of a hard-left nutter like Corbyn will finally show Britons that the lefties are finished - particularly now that they won't get support from Russia any more - and that we need to sort out the Welfare State, the remnants of the Unions (we don't send children up chimneys any more), and stop the PC brigade in their tracks.......
There was a brilliant scratchcard scam that involved x-raying cards to find winning ones! A newsagent in London and his radiographer brother were convicted of this particular one.
This led to the scratchcards being "metallised" to prevent them being x-rayed. It didn't work - you just need a slightly more precise x-ray unit!
But someone has to talk sense.
You're right - someone does have to. Unfortunately, it's not you.
You conveniently overlook the small print in the Windoze 10 paperwork - they (as usual) reserve the right to change the charging model at any time. As usual, the large print advertising blather gives, and the small print takes away.....
Win 10 isn't quite as bad as Win 8.X, but it's even less backwardly compatible. Corporates won't be happy with having to purchase all their applications again.
10 is bloated, unstable, insecure and certainly not ready for the mass market. It's just as virus-prone as its predecessors, still vulnerable to the same old exploits, still uses the broken BSD IP code that was "borrowed" for NT back in 1990, still has the mish-mash of bits that have always been the cobbled-together kernel of all the NT-series of OSs since Cutler threw together the demonstration version that Gates shipped......
Win 10 is also designed to be an advertising medium. You'll certainly have to pay a subscription to some other M$ service to cripple the irritations!
Sadly, the fragmented Linux culture isn't ready for prime-time either. "Mint" and "Ubuntu come close and "Fedora" is a pleasing display of what's possible, but as long as you have to go to the hassle of "Arch" to get truly stellar performance, it's not ready.... Guys - get yourselves together!
They seem optomised for Bass and loudness
They are horribly distorted at any level. It's as if they've been manufactured to impart 30% thd to anything you feed them. All you need to know is that they're manufactured by "Monster" - the very over-priced cable manufacturers.....
Strange that this bloated rubbish-ware even still exists. It's never worked - it's trivially easy to write "virus" code that does malicious things but isn't detected by this snake-oil (or any other "anti-malware" junkware). Infection methods are many and various, and -short of simply disconnecting your machine from the outside world - there's no way to secure it.
The ONLY option is to use a less-vulnerable OS. The solution is obvious....
You can be absolutely certain that the tabloids will promulgate some bizarre sensationalist blather - and the company will collapse within a week or two.....only to rise - phoenix-like - with a different name, re-selling the same old crap-ware to schools under a new product name from a "new" company.
I know foxes. I have a family of them living in my garden. I've seen five generations of them. They're no problem at all (they're city foxes incidentally) and enjoy the scraps that the neighbourhood willingly provides for them.
They're very timid - they shy away from humans. The last thing any of them would do - even if cornered - is attack. That's why I call "BS" on the story. The old soaks in the club probably wanted a few extra snorts and didn't want an earbashing from their "better" halves, so claimed to be cornered in their drinking den by a fox......
Our foxes are not "tame" - they visit gardens and forage for scraps. They dig earths (I have two beneath my shed) and are good parents to their next generation. They tend to have cubs at the end of February, but you don't see them about until June or July.
City foxes suffer a high rate of attrition (mostly by meeting vehicles the hard way) and seldom live beyond two or three years. They're beautiful animals, cause no nuisance, and should be allowed to get on with their lives. They are certainly NOT vermin!
I've just downloaded and installed Mint 17.2. I've resisted the move from Ubuntu (usually Kubuntu) for too long!
This is the first distro version that really feels "easy to use". The installer is simple to operate, the selection of provided software is sensible (and there's plenty more available from the repos), and the installed system is quick and responsive, and everything Just Works™.
MAC filtering by default is just painful especially with family visiting. Looks like it might be time to look at DD-WRT and sin bin all Microsoft OSes into a guest network.
That's exactly what I do. The guest network is deliberately throttled (after an incident with a relation's laptop that was spamming the world). It's trivially easy to do, and keeps the network usage sane
I would have thought that the low cost of the equipment would make it of more interest to hobbyists
Not at all. We demonstrated the "TEMPEST" type of attacks nearly 20 years ago using a cheap(ish) Sony 7600 portable radio and a laptop. If you built a small resonant loop aerial (like often used for long distance Medium Wave reception) you could get it to work over some tens of metres. However, if there was more than one computer in the target area, decryption became almost impossible because of the interference from the adjacent machine. If you want to secure yourself from this type of exploit, just run a few machines in the same room!
Everyone I know that was using an XP laptop has upgraded now to Linux Mint. It Just Works™ and has all the application goodness that today's users want. Most people are very happy to discover the massive performance increase that comes with getting rid of useless anti-this and anti-that snake-oil that encumbered their Windoze installations, and the performance boost means that they can hold off a hardware update until their present gear actually dies! Domestic users don't want to have to buy new hardware in these financially difficult times.
Business users are a different case, but since MS have (effectively) shot themselves in the foot by offering a mobile phone OS as their flagship product (Windows 8) and rendering their principal business product (Office) unusable, corporate users are beginning to look elsewhere. MS no longer have a viable product, and Windows 10 isn't going to fix that.....
The crazy "up to" speed ratings have to stop. Virgin (on the ridiculous) offer an "up to" 165Mb/s service around here. The reality is that it's (generally) below 45 Mb/s down (they blame "heavy local use" - I blame insane contention). They claim "unlimited": the reality is that as soon as you hit their arbitrary "fair use" cap, your already sub-standard speed is reduced further.
VM and BT have some strange DNS manipulation going on, preventing access to sites and services that they don't want you to have. These are easily circumvented, but always at the expense of reduced speed.
The prices charged in the UK are scandalous. Why can't they be directly proportional to the actual data rate that these thieves can really achieve? Why don't the toothless idiots at OFCOM ever do anything about the abysmal state of service provision in the UK? Is it just another "government" organisation collecting their brown envelopes at the expense of the rest of us?
Win 10 does some peculiar "phoning home", which is incredibly network-intensive. It certainly doesn't "play nice" if run in a virtual machine, and is more unstable than a Californian backyard in the rainy season. It's also incredibly picky about the hardware it's run on. It's dreadfully slow, when compared with "7".....
Now... back to the Real World™ of FOSS where it can be mended if it's broken!
I imagine moving to digital would allow more radios to use the same bit of spectrum, and might make them physically smaller as well.
Sadly, no. The digital radios issued to the Police are larger, less effective, and suffer from very nasty distortion. Being digital, they either work or don't work - there's no "fringe" operation. There are huge swathes of the country - including within cities - where the radios simply don't work. TETRA was a poor solution to a problem that didn't really exist!
Incidentally, the flooding of the TETRA system during the Kings Cross Tube Station fire led to many unnecessary deaths because of the complete failure of the radio system.
NBFM is a good option, but -bizarrely - AM is actually better! For the same reason that aeronautical radio is still AM - operators can hear two (or more) calling stations at the same time. This has proved to be crucial in aeronautical situations. FM prevents this - the strongest signal always wins (see "capture effect").
If they want reliable communications with efficient spectrum use, they should consider some form of SSB (single-sideband AM). The communication channel bandwidth is marginally smaller than for a Narrow Band FM signal, and intelligibility is similar. The technology is well known and has been manufactured and used since the 1950s. Modern DSP chippery makes modulation and demodulation of this mode child's play, and if privacy is wanted, there are many trivially simple scrambling schemes that can be used to deter the casual eavesdropper. Use of band I (50 - 80MHz) would assure good penetration into buildings and good range.
4G LTE is a complete and utter mess in this country. No company has anything approaching effective coverage, and the resistance of the public to the location of masts that they perceive as "dangerous to health" guarantees that coverage will continue to be sporadic - even in cities. It's NOT the solution.
You might be lucky up in Glasgow, but here in London, live music is dying. We have less than half the venues we had in 1997 (the year of the start of the demise might give a clue), and the onerous "live music laws" and stupid licensing rules have done much to kill them off.
Also the nature of the music produced today isn't conducive to live performance - kids recording digitally in their bedrooms aren't going to have any stage ability. It's just not what they do any more.
London used to have a burgeoning pub music scene, but it's pretty much died off now. So we're stuck with Ticketgougers and the other similar parasites.
Except Apple and Windows operating systems aren't bad software. So it's a win/win for them.
They are both abysmally bad. The fruity fools have gone the same way as M$ in their search for "ease of use", and have sacrificed any last vestige of security. M$ still use a broken I/P stack "borrowed" from BSD nearly 30 years ago - it's slow, error-prone and unreliable (and the reason for the complexity of Windoze networking Drivers). Both OSs are hopeless.
This Halpern character is just one of the many trolls that turns up when a good idea goes global. As the holder of a few patents myself, I've seen this sort of nonsense many times - never for this kind of insane amount, but often for a million or two. Since the most I've ever made from a patent is a few tens of thousands, my legal eagle tells me just to laugh at them and file them as spam!
These are just the modern equivalent of the "begging letters" that every football pool and lottery winner receives.
" gwangy" - you're not the sharpest tool in the box, are you? The vast majority of the developments in wireless communication that you take for granted came from the "Radio Hams" you deride.
You wouldn't have wi-fi, mobile phones, portable and mobile radio communications, and high quality TV (we'd have been stuck with the Baird mechanical system if it hadn't been for a group of keen "amateurs" at EMI)..... Try to imagine the emergency services without radio communications.
Powerline adaptors - of all sorts - cause massive interference - pretty much from DC to daylight. They even interfere with each other!
Look at maps - informed choice.
Sadly, no. The MNOs have their own bizarre interpretation of what "coverage" actually is. The stupidity of the educators doesn't help, either:
"You can't put a mobile aerial on the roof of our school / community centre / block of flats because of the damage to health / headaches / sterility / other malaise that it will cause". These clueless morons have never heard of the inverse-square law and don't realise that holding their mobes to their lobes is going to irradiate them many thousand times more strongly than the antenna some tens of metres away through a few walls.....
Our local coverage was crippled by one stupid woman in a nearby block of flats complaining of headaches "caused" by the mobe repeater on her rooftop (eight floors above, incidentally). The MNO left the base in place, and she was unable to tell that it had been switched back on for over a week - until she found that her phone actually worked again: she then mysteriously developed the "headaches" again....
Similarly, a local school refused to have wi-fi installed because of the "damage" it would do to the poor little darlings in their care!
If you watch ANY television programmes as they're being broadcast even without an aerial, if you don't pay the BBC telly tax, you're breaking the law.
If I watch either by satellite or by interweb, it is NOT "live" - there is a huge delay, so I'm (effectively) watching a recording. It's exactly the same reason that digital CCTV cannot be used for traffic enforcement actions - the "infringement" cannot be "recorded contemporaneously".
My 89-year-old Father had two thugs from "TV Licensing" force their way into his home. They went from room to room looking for the non-existent TV, then accused him of "hiding it". They made the mistake of presenting their name badge "credentials" which my Father had the presence of mind to photograph on his mobile phone. He only got them out of his place by dialling 999 and asking for the Police....
When they left, he found that his wallet (left on his bedside table) was lighter by £40.
The two clowns were arrested later the same day, and each blamed the other for the theft. They both admitted "forced entry" to the premises without Warrant. Both are serving "18 months" (they'll be out in 6, of course), but the Police made sure that others in the prison were made aware of their former "jobs"!
My Galaxy S3 and S5 phones both have fine reception - significantly better than any of the iPhones. These work well in areas where the Apple things can't detect a signal at all. The sample S6s I've seen work just the same as the S5, so perhaps you've got a damaged one!
By starting again and eschewing WebKit, going their own way AGAIN, all they are doing is adding ANOTHER variant to deal with.
Of course - and you can be certain that M$ won't get it right! They'll just introduce a whole new set of incompatibilities for web developers to have to cope with.
My websites all now warn visitors (if Internet Exploder is detected) that they are using an insecure and unreliable browser on an insecure "operating system" and that the site is unlikely to render correctly on their defective web browser. Our visitors use of Internot Exploiter has reduced to under 3%. People are beginning to realise that M$ isn't the answer (except to some really stupid questions)!
Exactly right.
Linux admins usually command higher pay because they have REAL skills! There is also the point that one Linux admin can replace dozens of Windows W*n&e@s. A global company - that I've consulted for - recently replaced 44 Windows data centres around the planet with just 4 Linux servers - and reduced their IT staff from nearly 400 to just 8 (a sysadmin and 7 PFYs).
That's the real saving - the 8 linux admins can be very highly paid (and certainly are!) and the 400 MCSEs will have to go and re-train if they want to earn in the sector in future....
There is a HUGE misunderstanding of Telco pricing....
It's trivially simple: The infrastructure costs are insignificant. If you get the customer to pay for their installation (and they all do, in one way or another) all subsequent revenue is pure profit. That's very close to 100% profit.....
Telecoms plant is pretty reliable these days, and as long as Murphy doesn't put a pickaxe through your ducts too often, there's no real maintenance involved. The only thing that costs the Telco anything at all is the hardware (incredibly cheap these days) and their "Customer Services" helldesk which they'll outhouse to the cheapest third world bidder (or even Scotland!).
All "line rental charges" are pure bunce!
Then the bastards try to monetise their error messages and run DNS servers that send you where THEY want you to go.....
Dave used to tell the story of NT - how it was never documented, how the kernel would only build on one toolset and failed on all others, how Gates insisted that the undocumented "demonstration" system was to be shipped "immediately", how there were so many patches and kludges that the code was spaghetti.....
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