Posts by Geoff Mackenzie

Cool

I was wondering what McCain was working on these days.

Morlocks!

That is all.

Waste into the sun

From the Moon the Earth is handier, and 'downhill'. Screw those guys.

Why can't they divert the funds to a vote on this?

If the government think they need this campaign, then they absolutely must not spend the money of the people they hope to convince on it. I mean, for Christ's sake, if support is so weak you need a campaign from Saatchi to try to convince us, isn't it a bit rich forcing us, under duress, to bankroll it?

UKGov: Reach into your own private bank accounts, you arseholes.

Re: UK and Scotland, English Notes

That's funny, I was in England a few months ago and they wouldn't take my Clydesdale Bank notes. I sense a curious asymmetry.

Seriously, I don't think the large numbers of 'fake IT people' are really the problem. The UK's got an exit wound where industry used to be. All we manufacture is fresh food and bullshit. Both great industries, don't get me wrong, but they can only provide so many worthwhile jobs.

The quote from the CPS

"The prosecution is considering a request for retrial in respect of the plot to blow up airliners against all seven men upon which the jury could not agree."

If at first you don't succeed... And even the Guardian runs this story under the headline "Liquid bomb plot: three guilty of murder conspiracy" and refers to Abdulla Ahmed Ali as "the ringleader." Curious.

I also like this bit: "Disposable cameras would have been used to help set off the devices which would also contain regular batteries, hollowed out to contain chemicals." Very crafty, though you have to wonder what they'd have done with the chemicals they hollowed out of the batteries to make room for the chemicals, and what use the cameras would have been as detonators without further batteries. And indeed why we're still allowed to carry batteries and disposable cameras onto planes.

Ye gods!

I think this article has drawn as much hatred from the baying crowds as IE has had piled on it in a lifetime.

And that's saying something.

Got to say, I love the way the IE crowd get their toes stuck in. On the basis of lack of innovation no less.

In a slightly different tone of voice people, it's just a fucking web browser, calm the fuck down.

Historical loss ...

... Nobody is at risk, everyone listed here has mysteriously died over the past few months.

Fully harness the power!

I can only imagine what Vista is like in a virtual machine.

The .... wow ....... starts ........... shortly.

*All* energy demand?

We'll never make it. I don't have the numbers but I wouldn't be at all surprised if over 90% of my personal energy consumption goes on transport, and I doubt that's atypical. Making any significant proportion of that renewable is going to be a tough one.

Who names these things?

Have they forgotten what happened to the original Icarus?

Good science

A car insurance company would like me to buy a bigger, faster car.

I use vehicles for transport. For manufacturing testosterone, I prefer to use my testes. Though I can see why a fast car would make a good substitute if you were unfortunate enough not to have a pair.

@Matt Bryant

"their aim is not to prove their clients' innocence as that is largley[sic] impossible for the majority of cases"

No, the reason is that justice traditionally works the other way around.

But hey, you're right, we shouldn't let the trifling issue of torture get in the way of convicting people on the basis of their own confessions. With all this wailing about human rights it's amazing these unelected agencies have time to fill their dragnets with people based on their ticket stubs to keep us all safe.

Stupid people like assonance

Reminds me of a primary school playground.

@Anonymous Bastard

Most pedantic, I like it!

The problem with verifying using the referrer is not all browsers set it. Although it's certainly fakeable, I'm not aware of any way to fake it with JavaScript, but browsers that look after their users' privacy shouldn't be sending it anyway.

Parallel versions

Nope, different versions of MSIE don't play nice with each other. It's not so bad, though - Firefox and Opera get along fine on the same machine.

I guess the solution is virtualisation if you want more than one IE knocking around (though IMO one is 100% too many).

Tor rubbish

Tor does indeed hide your IP, using a chain of proxies that it periodically rebuilds. Try bouncing through Tor to google.com and see the fascinating array of polish, german and other nationalised googles. Quite effective.

- A proud Tor server operator

@J ("Seriously now")

The same thought has often crossed my mind, but obviously MS can't go that way. Admittedly XP to Vista seems to have been quite a jump in terms of new code, but NT4 to NT5 to NT6? Radically different chrome but essentially the same engine. Releasing the source of NT4 would probably still constitute releasing a fair chunk of XP (and indeed a reasonably large subset of Vista, I reckon).

Essentially it seems to me that Microsoft's income depends on being able to release a product, support it for a short while, then slow down the updates for a while to build up a head of steam, respray the old crate and fire it out as a new release - basically, they support essentially the same product for 10 years and call it a different one every 2 or 3 so that they can charge for it again.

So getting them to release the source for the 'old, obsolete' version is probably a no-no, simply because it actually *is* the shiny new one. Also, if the excerpts from the Win2K code I've seen are real and are anything to go by it's a little heavy on the expletives and "We are morons" in-jokes so there'd be a bit of an embarrassment factor there.

There must be some kind of half-way house, though - they could keep supporting old versions but cease to promote them. After all marketing must be a bigger expense than R&D for a company that warms over left-overs for a living.

@Can't put the oil back in the ground

Just wait a few million years, shouldn't be a problem.

Let's see a follow up

Big magnet and a field of cows. Seriously, what they're reporting here is a hypothesis. I can give you a million of those if you don't ask me to make a prediction based on the hypothesis and test it.

@ @Actual "bug" content

Ok, how about:

if total(democrat) > total(republican) then wipe_card()

Looking for eBay alternatives ...

I've been one of their more loyal customers. Although I haven't sold much lately, I had a few items lined up and I was still planning to use eBay, but this is clearly going from bad to worse so I'm out of there. I'm sure they're going to succeed in what they're doing - I don't think they're being stupid, just realigning what their site is all about. This is a systematic attack on small sellers - they really do want rid of us. They want a few big sellers and a horde of small buyers - you can see why they think that'll work, and it probably will. I don't see why they didn't start a separate side-project for this though, there was no need to kill eBay in the process.

To avoid giving them the satisfaction I'm going to stop buying through them as well. Craigslist doesn't seem to have really taken hold around here yet but Gumtree is going strong. I'm giving that a try. It's a little bit of a shame to lose the convenience of Paypal but it's a price worth paying now that the price of Paypal itself isn't. I guess the eBay of old was too good to last.

@Liquid

"We all know how the UAC played out in Vista" - with all due respect, don't include me in your 'we all knows' like this. UAC is actually hopeless in terms of improving security; it's a buck passing tool.

Even if I'm wrong, the fact that I hold this opinion clearly shows that we don't, in fact, all know.

Loving the comedy error messages

Couldn't someone working on those have had a crack at sorting the underlying issues though? Also, I have to say:

"Microsoft Live Labs developed the technology in tandem with researchers at the University of Washington over the past two years" - i.e. MS bankrolled University of Washington research.

"The viewer uses technology from Seadragon, a company bought by Microsoft in February 2006." - i.e. The viewer *is* technology from Seadragon.

If the patents are granted?

"If the patents are granted, IE could join Safari in allowing a feature affectionately known as "porn mode"."

Er ... so they'll only do this if they can arrange that nobody else can? And what they're trying to patent is Safari's behaviour? Something very odd and Microsofty about that.

Software patents suck.

Time to revive my old steganography suite project

Also, as a PlusNet customer I get unmetered bandwidth between midnight and 8am (used to be midnight to 4pm until the sneaky scum suckered me into an 'upgrade' but that's another story) and I can spare another 10Gb peak bandwidth a month. I'll be chewing through that with a web spider from now on, polluting the database with random pap and restricting my real traffic to Tor and I2P.

They're taking this too far now. Time to push it a little further from our side methinks.

No need to wait ...

... for them to release the details of the performance of this system. Just wait for them to lose it. Shouldn't take long.

@Chris

With reference to your comment about it being like asking Intel to still supply older CPUs... the difference is that if you need a 486, you can still buy one (new), even now. They have certain advantages if you really don't need much performance. Admittedly last time I saw a new DX33 (with 8Mb of EDO and a suitable motherboard) the price wasn't particularly tempting - over £100 if I remember correctly.

But still, if you want one, you can have one. If MS don't want the support burden of their older systems, they could release them open source (or, more realistically, public domain, since a lot of the source is probably too embarrassing to release) without support, rather than cutting off supply entirely. That would still leave people with a choice. Perhaps support could be handed over to another company under license.

I often see these references ...

... to surveys of confidence. Is this really such a good way to measure the underlying performance of a sector, or of the economy as a whole? Strikes me, if anything's going to kick off a self-perpetuating rise or fall in confidence, it's surveying peoples' confidence and publishing the results.

Misread the button

I thought the big round button in the middle under the screen was labelled 'porn'.

VB6's IDE manages this too

In SDI mode you get a flotilla of little windows and can drop them anywhere. What are they on about? At work I frequently spread my work out across four screens (dual head on main box and two test boxes).

Nice one, IBM

$30bn for a payroll system. Three years.

I mean, I know it's a little more complicated than that, but still - $30bn!?

Of course the real WTF(TM) is that adjusting salaries requires code changes. I smell a rat.

@kain preacher

I don't know if I can speak for the AC who made this suggestion, but certainly from my point of view you can apply whatever bat you prefer. And I'll let you have total freedom to choose which part of the liar's anatomy also.

Please post the results on YouTube. :)

Software patents

What a good idea.

@amanfromMars

Nice one, lucid enough to get a serious reply :)

"to download malware payloads onto vulnerable Windows PCs"

To be pedantic, technically they're uploading (which is the fundamental reason why terms like 'sideloading' annoy me ... just because an MP3 player is small doesn't mean you can't upload to it).

Also, the word 'vulnerable' is a bit redundant in the context of Windows PCs. :)

Re: RealBASIC / Gambas

I've considered both of these (I'm slightly embarassed to admit!). Gambas is clearly quite nice but not enough like VB for my VB skills to be that much use (and enough like it that I won't tolerate a learning curve - BASIC is fundamentally distasteful and I'd rather learn C# if I'm picking up something new).

RealBASIC is a commercial product - I'm still feeling my way around it a little but as soon as software costs actual money I get very reluctant to put any of my time into it. I don't like the sound of "One year of software updates" for $400 and more cash for any support thereafter. In truth the only reason I think of VB as convenient and handy is that my employer handles licensing for me (and indeed pays for it) - at home neither applies and suddenly I find myself imprisoned in closed source hell again, which serves to remind me that while some of the development tools are nice'n'shiny (sharp toothed and bright eyed?) over on the other side, life in general is far more awkward.

I was only observing that MS can put together some nice development tools - not seriously contemplating infecting my poor machines with their bloatware. :)

@Frank

Funny, that's not my experience. Also, on the occasions when my Linux boxes do update the kernel or glibc I generally wait a few days (up to a couple of weeks) for an opportune time to bounce them, which takes 22 seconds on my slowest machine.

It's nice to have the option isn't it? More than once, mid-patching, I've had Windows ripped out under me without so much as a 30s window to save my work. I've had it install patches after I asked it not to, I've had it brick itself with patches, and I've had patches chew up applications. I've never had that with Linux (not saying it's not possible, but I've not seen it).

Linux also promotes world peace and leaves a minty fresh taste in your mouth, with zero (yes ZERO) calories. Mmmmmm, Linux!

Re: Can't you just smell them?

MS are crap. If an incompetent administrator changes a server's IP address, Linux pops over to the data centre and has a quick read of the sticky label on the front of the server, updates its resolver, allows you to use your mail, and composes a polite email to the administrator advising them to update their DNS servers (enclosing a concise bash script which will handle it, for their convenience). Then it looks up El Reg, searches for a vaguely MS-related story, roots through the comments for a desperate MS fanboy and posts a clever, original rebuttal of his last assertion.

In the meantime, a daemon (fantasticd) corrects for user error, restores from backups you never made and steals from the rich to give to the poor, resolves conflicts in Georgia, Iraq, Afghanistan (amongst others) to the satisfaction of all parties and deletes the records of innocent people from the national DNA database.

After bringing down oil and gas prices, patching the ozone layer and re-freezing the poles, a small script called from cron (/usr/bin/awesome) generates blueprints for practical flying cars.

@Alan W. Rateliff, II

Clearly, AVG ought to spider entire sites automatically just before you visit them. That would be popular.