* Posts by Gary Turner

51 publicly visible posts • joined 9 Oct 2007

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BOFH: But soft, what light through yonder window breaks?

Gary Turner

Re: Draw full of random keys

Actually not. A draw is the movable part, the part that is drawn. The word drawer is more common today, but woodworking books from pre WWII generally call them desk draws or a chest of draws, etc..

g.

BOFH: I found a flying Dragonite on a Windows 2003 domain

Gary Turner

Re: Erm...

Actually, no. It' duck tape from the Dutch duik for linen. In other words an adhesive on a strong cloth backing. A heavy linen cloth is called duck, just as a heavy hemp cloth is called canvas (derived from cannabis).

You're welcome. :-)

BOFH: Don't go changing on Friday evenings, I don't wanna work that hard

Gary Turner

Re: Its a small change!

"It's Marvin the Martian, not Martin...." Actually, Martin the Martian is from a sitcom of the early sixties. See My Favorite Martian, a classic starring Ray Walston and Bill Bixby.

Legal goons threaten researcher for reporting security bug

Gary Turner

In the cool light of day

Since you're a customer, why not ask Magix's sales people and even the CEO (or is it the Managing Director in Germany?) for their responses to the allegations and comments raised in this article? How they respond should be educational, and deserving of being a part of future buying decisions.

Firefox 4 gets yet another final test build release

Gary Turner

Sniffing? How last centery is that?

"Dev channel was bitching about useragent, apparently some sites were sniffing for beta and are broken with RC."

That there was UA sniffing indicates the site developers were other than the best and brightest of breed. That users blamed the UA indicates they are no brighter than the site developers.

cheers,

gary

Frenchman cuffed for naughty lip-slip email to MEP

Gary Turner

Huh?

"he faces a prison sentence of up to a month and a fine of up to €10,000 on charges of 'displaying contempt towards a public servant'."

There's a law against that? I'd consider that a gods-given right. No, not a right, an obligation.

Microsoft's fear of an OpenOffice

Gary Turner

OO.o does MSO better than MSO?

"Not that OO is perfect, but it's come to the rescue on many occasions to recover a document that office has mangled beyond all recognition and is a less trying recovery tool for documents that [sic] wordpad (for .doc files)"

Funny you should mention that. A local business has sent me Excel files that they are unable to open using, um, Excel. OO.o Calc (on a Debian box) opens them just fine, so I save-as a renamed .xls file and send them back. They can then open them, at least, and fix any corruptions. Usually, OO.o has opened and saved the spreadsheets perfectly.

Oddly, I can't talk them into simply installing OO.o for themselves. :shrug:

Hefty physicist: Global warming is 'pseudoscientific fraud'

Gary Turner

Target shift, eh?

The hidden data in question are (esp.) Mann's and Bifra's paleo-proxies, not NOAA's weather station data. You might want to turn a jaundiced eye in that direction, too. An ongoing survey of station siting issues shows very few that are sited properly according to NOAA's own specifications. (http://www.surfacestations.org/)

In the area of surface temps, read the CRU letters. There, so-called scientists discuss how to hide temperature records form all who are not a part of their own little circle jerk. These same people admit or claim to having lost he raw data and now have only their own versions that have been pasteurized, homogenized, bent, stapled, folded, and otherwise mutilated.

Don't take my word for it. Read the emails. It's all there. In their own words.

Gary Turner

Huh?

Did you not read his letter? The issue at hand is not about the details of catastrophic man-made global warming, or even whether it exists. It is about the suppression of open data, testing and debate, all of which are part of real science. Dr Lewis resigned because data were hidden, testing of methodology was impossible because methods were kept secret, and debate was quashed; all of which are antithetical to scientific inquiry

If you don't think that's possible, read the climategate emails for yourself.

IE9 strips to win Chrome fans

Gary Turner

Firefox options, maybe?

In the tools dropdown, options > privacy. Select remember history, forget history, or customize history.

There are lots of other things you can set to your liking, rather than go on meaningless rant.

Colonel who slammed Afghan HQ PowerPoint culture is fired

Gary Turner

PONTI?

Line grunts in Korea and Viet Nam had a much better acronym, REMF; Rear Echelon Mother eFfer.

The good colonel seems to have the truth of it.

Linux kernel purged of five-year-old root access bug

Gary Turner

single user

>> ...you can lean over and hit the power button on the front, reboot with only a bash shell as you kernel, remount the filesystem input/output, and reset the root password.

>Ummm... Not quite. The "bash shell" is not a kernel; it does not provide access to any core, system-level functionality on its own. It requires at least a very minimal kernel to be loaded and running first, before it can do its thing.

Ah, but you select to boot into single user mode, in which you are in a terminal and Bash as root. From there, do as you wish; the machine is yours. The poster you quote may not have worded it well, myself either for that matter, but the effect is the same.

Air steward resigns via emergency chute

Gary Turner

Credentials?

A flight steward would likely have had the proper credentials to move through restricted areas. Were a terrorist to try the same stunt, he'd likely also have the proper credentials, don't you think?

Then, there's always the tendency to assume a person in uniform, and already in the area, belongs there. After all, he came from the tarmac, also a restricted area.

Professor warns Aus firewall is undemocratic

Gary Turner

Effing politicians and bureaucrats

"The authors argue that it is time to review Australia’s complex and inconsistent media content regulation system to take account of the online era."

I wonder how a democratic nation could even consider regulating media content. Obviously, hanging upside down in the land down under has caused a bureaucratic red-out.

Yes, I am aware of our own (U.S.) gummit asshats who's only concern is expanding their own power over the lowly unwashed masses, and controlling media content means their power affects everyone.

Biz Linux needs Office license to run MS web apps

Gary Turner

Picking nits wiith j3

I'm sure his spell checker didn't catch "bain", because it's an actual word—at least my dictionary and spell checkers say it is. I am sure, though, that he meant "bane", a scourge, curse, nemesis, poison, etc., rather than bath. ;)

For the rest, a big thumbs up for the clarity and for the major put-down.

Sony sued for dropping Linux from PS3

Gary Turner

Wow!

Pretty good for a twenty year old kid: lead hacker for Sony.

The fact is, a large number of these exploits are developed by individuals, usually with a small network of like minded friends to bounce ideas off. These are guys who can read machine code like you or I read a Dick and Jane primer.

Gary Turner

Military purchases 2200 PS3s

I didn't find it on ElReg either, but CNN reported it.

http://scitech.blogs.cnn.com/2009/12/09/military-purchases-2200-ps3s/

"The justification review states the systems will run a proprietary Linux-based operating system," (in a supercomputer cluster)

Gary Turner

It doesn't need to be valid

Neither the company nor its lawyers expect EULAs to be enforceable. Companies write EULAs to intimidate consumers by using lots of legalisms that cause confusion, and by making it more difficult and expensive to challenge them.

Sony has long since (the root kit fiasco) proven itself to me to be an unethical company. Now it has taken it upon themselves to remove an existing feature from a product already sold to its customers. It doesn't matter whether the customer knew about, cared about, or used the feature; it was a part of the product he bought. Sony is stealing, and I believe it will defend itself with its EULA.

Were Sony an ethical company, it would restore the feature on existing machines, and if it wishes, sell future degraded versions without that feature.

Ubuntu's Lucid Lynx stalks PC and Mac converts

Gary Turner

What?

And, that's a good thing, right? :D

Google tweaks search results with mystery site speedometer

Gary Turner

Er, um

"Many sites have different pages for IE and FF."

That would indicate less than competent developers. Hacks and work-arounds for IE<8 are simple and unobtrusive. There is no need, whatsoever, for having a separate page for each browser.

BT hijacks business browsers

Gary Turner

Castrati?

"Also very pissed off customer debating on [a castrated ram] to start suggesting other providers"

Couldn't help it :)

Archaeologists nail Bosworth Field

Gary Turner

Again?

The French pulled the same stupid maneuver just 70 years earlier at Agincourt.. You'd think that folks who spend their lives beating up on each other would at least study a bit of military history. Well, them what ignore it are bound to repeat it.

cheers

Google may exit China after 'highly targeted' attack

Gary Turner

Houlihan?

"Adobe spokeswoman Wiebke Lips …"

Do they call her Hot behind her back?

FCC rescues American football fans

Gary Turner

Sorry, no comparison

Look at a compilation of Rugby "big hits". You will see those hits on a hundred plays per game in American football, and that's just the tackles. Add in the hits laid on by blockers whose job it is to clear a path for the man with the ball.

Look at the action in the scrimmage line, where each 300 lb. behemoth's job is to knock another giant on his ass. Then, there's the Rugby scrum in which everyone holds hands and has a pushing and shoving match.

I'd rather watch either, though, than watch soccer, where the most exciting thing to see is the grass growing.

Homemade airship prang closes highway in Oklahoma

Gary Turner

Raspberry to you

>Notice that the Wright brothers, the quintessential men in sheds, had the brains to do their test flights at Kitty Hawk where no one would be endangered by crashes.

They chose Kitty Hawk for its consistent winds, not out of concern for safety. At that stage of development, any farmer's field would have been equally safe for bystanders.

>And besides, the era of men in sheds building useful devices seems to be nearly over. Maybe a lot of innovative software still comes out of sheds, but at least it doesn't endanger lives by crashing on a freeway. It restricts its crashes to the guts of computers.

What an odd, inane statement. Surfboards, hang gliders, the CRT, and the stepped airfoil (almost) no stall wing, air brakes, and automatic oilers were all invented by amateurs in their sheds. These examples just popped into mind. A little research would reveal a plethora of like examples. Who knows what is being worked on in some enthusiasts' garages that will end up a part of our everyday lives?

Crypto snafu grounds 3D Avatar screenings in Germany

Gary Turner

Who's there?

Yeah, but did anybody attend the screenings?

Copenhagen talks stalled by green puppeteers

Gary Turner

cheap energy?

That would be coal, oil, and gas. Scrubbing the real pollutants such as sulfur, mercury, and nitrogen compounds is fairly easy and cheap. The politically motivated, scientifically challenged idjits seem to think CO₂ is a pollutant, instead of the life giving trace gas that it is, and manage to throw every possible roadblock in the way of generating cheap electricity.

Mozilla unveils cure for Web 2.0 world run amok

Gary Turner

Didn't read the post?

By Adam Azarchs Posted Saturday 3rd October 2009 19:32 GMT

"Let's invent even more non-standard tags and fragment the browser design space further! This is exactly what the world needs now!"

It seems you missed something:

"Mozilla hopes it will become an open standard and is already shepherding it through the World Wide Web Consortium."

That doesn't look like an attempt to fragment or use non-standard tags. Just the opposite.

Microsoft tells US retailers Linux is rubbish

Gary Turner

Bringing truth and light to MSS Fanboyz

By Anonymous Coward Posted Wednesday 9th September 2009 02:24 GMT

What happens if you put a FAT32 usb drive into your ubuntu machine and try to write to it?

Um, it writes a fat32 file? Actually for as long as I've used Debian (since 1999), portable storage has been mounted as an MS file system to make cross platform transfer of files easier. You can, of course, change file systems easily enough for some particular reason.

By Anonymous Coward Posted Wednesday 9th September 2009 04:20 GMT

Stop with the wine references. Saying that something runs on Linux via wine is misleading and dishonest(IMHO).

Why is that? Is saying that you can recharge you batteries from the wall socket misleading or dishonest? You do use a wall brick to transform the 120/240V 60/50Hz to a small DC voltage, don't you? How ever can you say you're charging from the house current?

WINE is simply a wall brick that provides Windows applications with the "right voltage" from the Linux house current.

UK cops eye shotgun cartridge Taser

Gary Turner

No sh*t, Sherlock

"I'm not saying this is risk free: it will leave potential bruising and it could cause a contusion"

Does that mean the bruise will be bruised?

Microsoft's Word patent case to hit appeal court next month

Gary Turner

Siding with the devil

Gawd! It's so hard to come down on the Evil Empire's side.

I cannot imagine the thought process that allowed for the first software patent. I can support copyrighted software, in the same way that an author has copyright on his work. He still can't 'own' the words he uses, nor the plot; only the particular way he put it together in the whole.

Court filings are protected by copyright, says lawyer

Gary Turner

Another IP whore

Pleadings and rulings are a part of the public record, and available to all. I wonder where they did their research on IP rulings. Don't they read common law as defined by the court cases, their pleadings and rulings in their research? Where did they think those books in their libraries, or the online resources came from? Surprised? Are they stupid, or simply unethical, venal whores?

If they want to stay private, they should settle out of court.

Firefox 3.5 - it's not a 'web upgrade'

Gary Turner
WTF?

@Martin75:

Do you have a clue what you're talking about? Facebook renders just fine, thank you.

Two pages of javascript and css errors? What's that to do with the browser? No page can be /expected/ to render properly with invalid markup/css/scripting. There are other pages that render broken markup on FF, that fail on IE. It all depends on which screwed up code is where.

Zoom is ignored? Of course it's ignored. It's not a part of css. The specs are very clear on that. If an element, attribute or property is unknown, it is to be ignored. Developers use the proprietary zoom property to trigger hasLayout, a proprietary and very buggy implementation of the block formatting context because {zoom: 1;} has no side effects in IE<8, and is ignored by every other browser. MSFT had the good sense to kill hasLayout as of IE8.

McAfee: Save the planet - use a spam filter

Gary Turner

What a crock

The world would benefit from increased concentrations of CO₂, even if it has some small part in warming the planet, which would also be beneficial to life.

Microsoft claims IE8 is 'a leap forward in web standards'

Gary Turner

A Good First Step

It's enough for me that at this first attempt by MSFT to support web standards, IE8 passes acid2 with flying colors. I don't doubt that there are bugs that will bedevil us as we learn more about it, but for now, IE8 is a welcome addition to the list of modern browsers.

It will be a Good Thing® if MSFT will continue active development and issue timely bug fixes and improvements.

Microsoft promises 'lessons learned' on IE 8 download day

Gary Turner

It's not so much what you don't know as what you do know that ain't so

Nobody is understanding the issue

By Anonymous Coward Posted Thursday 19th March 2009 18:44 GMT

> C'mon guys, am I the only person who can see what's going on here?

> When a web site sees that it's being accessed by IE, it serves its IE6/IE7/whatever non-standards-compliant pages.

> So , even if IE8 is standards-compliant, it's still going to get all the old IE6 pages from web servers.

That is not the case. Unless the developer is an incompetent boob, the server will not care which browser made the request, and will serve the same page to all browsers. (There are some exceptions based on the browser's accept header, but that's not the issue here.) No developer with a lick of sense will implement browser sniffing.

The problem lies with MSFT's efforts to lock customers in to their products by not supporting the common standards. Combine that with lazy developers who authored pages against the buggy models provided by IE5&6, IE7 being little more than a bug-fix patch to IE6, and you have a huge inventory of poorly written pages that do not render properly in a modern browser. IE8 has managed to squeeze into that category.

Just about any page that renders well in a modern browser will do so in IE8 also.

'Sunshade' global-cooling plan would ruin solar power

Gary Turner

Raise the CO₂

@Plants...

By Craig Posted Thursday 12th March 2009 15:04 GMT

No need to worry about the plants. Raise the CO₂ levels to the 700–800PPM (presently about 380PPM) range, and plant yields would rise by 25–60%, as they can better use nutrients and sunlight.

That should please the anthropogenic global warning scare-mongers.

cheers

NASA CO2 scan satellite launch fails

Gary Turner

What would it prove?

I don't see how that would end any arguments. CO2 is not a pollutant, nor does it drive temperature. It is the other way around, temperature driving atmospheric CO2. The world is CO2 impoverished compared to historic geologic levels. The two most bio-diverse eras were the Cambrian and Permian, where CO2 levels were ten and seven and a half times current levels, respectively.

'Lenny': Debian for the masses?

Gary Turner

Elegantly argued

@ Peter Gathercole Posted Tuesday 17th February 2009 15:05 GMT

Thank you for a nicely turned argument. I have used Debian since 2000. With the exception of needing Win for IE (I'm a web developer), haven't found a thing in Win that I couldn't do in Linux—usually more easily, more configurable, and certainly more straightforward.

Gary Turner

Debian hard?

I keep hearing that Debian is difficult, but that hasn't been my experience at all. My last install was Etch, and I found it to be much faster and easier to get going than Vista, tho' YMMV. At least I didn't have to sit through a bunch of reboots for each application or update install.

It is possible to simply accept the defaults offered, or make simple choices, and have a fully functional desktop 'puter.

The odd bit is that I originally chose Debian, and I've run/administered other distros too, because it was the easiest to get going; everything was where it was supposed to be and did what it was supposed to do. Then there was apt, no doubt the best package manager of any distro.

Now it's time to upgrade my servers from Etch (stable) to Lenny, and my desktops from Lenny (testing) to Squeeze, the new testing version. it will be painless and quick; update, upgrade, point my list to the new version, and dist-upgrade. A few minutes for each machine, and not a reboot to be seen.

Harvard prof slams US nut allergy hysteria

Gary Turner

How have we survived?

I am always amazed the human race has survived, considering all those fatally toxic ingestibles dong their damnedest to do us in. People who would eat raw oysters may have a death wish, come to think of it.

--g

Microsoft preps IE 8 for the web-challenged

Gary Turner

What's wrng with IE8?

Odd. I can visit those sites with Firefox, Opera, and Safari, all highly html4 and css2.1 compliant, without running into problems. What are the issues with IE8, and why am I not facing them with present modern browsers?

I'll grant you there are poorly built sites, and idiot developers that are IE5 oriented and have no concept of the standards. Those sites fail in all modern browsers. Any sites that render well in good browsers ought not cause problems for a standards compliant IE.

Scrap PCs smuggled, dumped in Africa, China

Gary Turner

Do-gooders trying to keep the third world down

"… how in Nigeria alone more than half a million second-hand PCs arrive in Lagos every month, (all those nephews of the late, unlamented minister of whatever need those computers in order to find an honest person who will help them smuggle out their ill-gotten loot) even though only one in four works. (thank gawd for small favors)"

Granite Jesus, blessed be thy gneiss

Gary Turner

Of course it's Jesus

A lady friend of mine's first reaction on seeing the pic was, "Jesus! Now, that's a big one."

Microsoft: 'We will save America from foreign domination'

Gary Turner

Get a clue

The term American applies to citizens of the United States of America, as Mexican applies to citizens of los Estados Unidos de México, Canada has Canadians and Guatemala has Guatemalans. The continents are North America and South America, and denizens of these continents are North and South Americans. There is no land mass, "America".

Find a more meaningful nit to pick. Certainly, check your prejudices and presumptions before exhibiting your ignorances in public.

Stallman steps back from Emacs

Gary Turner
Linux

Not too old nor out of touch

Back in the day, I used Borland's IDEs for C++, Pascal (now Delphi) and Java. If I were still programming for Windows, I might still. But, as a web developer, I will swear and affirm Emacs to be the most productive editor/environment to work in. There are other editors that may seem to do some things easier, but they somehow come up short at one point or another.

Microsoft's smiley browser face turns sour

Gary Turner

MSFT lacking cojones

The weird thing is that MS want IE8 to act like IE7 unless you tell it to act like IE8.

There is a vast number of legacy pages that were written specifically for IE, and those pages are broken. It is obvious when viewed in a modern browser. The important thing to remember is that so many reside on intranets served to a captive IE audience. These business pages are what worry MS, as suddenly, "IE broke my pages" becomes the plaint heard 'round the world. Then there are all the banks and other financial institutions that have long written their customer applications to work only in (the non-compliant) IE.

To avoid appearing to break all these pages, MSFT want to have their shiny new v.8 browser default to the broken rendering mode. Those of us who actually write pages that are compliant are expected then to add a new http-equiv meta element to opt-in to standards mode in IE8. What a crock!

MSFT should have the balls to do the right thing. Make IE8 default to standards mode. Instead of putting the onus on developers to cover for their mistakes, let the user select the rendering mode. If a page breaks when viewed, let the reader click the switch.

One thing I have always admired in Netscape was their decision decision to bite the bullet when they found themselves on the losing side in the W3 standards wars. V.4 was orphaned and v.6 aimed at standards compliance. I remember running both v.4.7 and v.6 so I could view pages written against either. Netscape did the right thing. I doubt that IE will.

Opera hits Microsoft with EC complaint

Gary Turner

@Mark Rendle

"Is there a document available that catalogues the W3C standards which aren't supported in IE7?"

Yes, there is. See http://www.webdevout.net/browser-support

Unless you're a web developer, you'll be surprised at the poor level of standards compliance by IE7, never mind IE6. We work very hard so that the web site visitor is never aware of just how crappy IE is. A part of what we do is dumb the site down to IE's level. As a result, the web is being held back by that one majority browser.

Just so you realize just how far behind IE is, html4 was adopted in 1999. CSS1 (the core stuff) was adopted in 1996, and css2 (the positioning stuff) was adopted in 1998.

IE5, released in Mar., 1999 had poor/buggy support for css. IE6, Oct., 2001, was a great improvement, but certain software decisions (notably hasLayout, MSFT's block formatting context) created truly ugly rendering bugs. Mozilla's Phoenix 0.5, in late 2002, was considerably more standards aware and less buggy in its rendering. Since then, Opera, Konqueror/Safari and the Mozilla family have continued to improve, while IE was stagnant. IE7 was, in no way, any more than a bug fix, UI enhancement revision; certainly not a major version step, no matter how much the marketing department wishes it were. IE7 fixed several major bugs and added a very few css selectors. The rest was eye candy and jonesing, tabs for example.

Mozilla hits back at Firefox 3 quality slur

Gary Turner

Epiphany??

Epiphany, a descendant of the Galeon browser, is built on the Gecko rendering engine, using Gnome desktop components rather than XUL for a "native" desktop look. Think Mac.

Webkit is a fork off the KHTML engine which powers Konqueror and its KDE desktop components.

The next sub-major version of Gnome (v2.22, currently 2.20) will switch to the Webkit engine for Epiphany, but for now, it's a Gecko based browser.

The KHTML/Webkit engines are significantly less mature than the Gecko engine, but getting better.

Any browser engine, Presto (Opera), KHTML, Webkit or Gecko is better and safer than Trident (IE). So, take your pick

cheers

BOFH: How dangerous are your users?

Gary Turner

:shrug:

@Dave

The disclaimer came late, after the complaints about Simon mailing it in this week.

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