* Posts by Roger Heathcote

125 publicly visible posts • joined 10 Oct 2007

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PC World pips Asus to UK Atom sub-laptop premier

Roger Heathcote
Alert

@Richard Cottrill & Frank

I couldn't agree more! I wouldn't buy an Advent while there's a hole in my arse. Their support for their own hardware is lamentable so I suppose it's a good thing it's not actually made by them. Although MSI are no IBM either :-/

Roger Heathcote

Microsoft gets hip with da yoof to flog email

Roger Heathcote
Go

Do note...

You can comment on their 'blog' ;-)

Nut launches death threats at Debian women

Roger Heathcote
Linux

Ok so you shouldn't respond to trolls and idiots but...

@Pete James

Calm down. "There's been numerous events where the open-source fraternity have behaved pretty disgracefully" Yes well the same can be said of Politicians, Clergymen, Teachers and Police Officers, you read the Mail don't you? You must have seen the stories!?

When all's said and done people are people and I don't think the opensource community has a higher proportion of disgracefully behaved weirdos than any other conglomeration of computer programmers. In fact I think it is troll-like for you to be claiming that... you seem to be implying that this whole thing was inevitable because the open source community are a bunch of degenerates, a variant of the 'she was asking for it' defense. Honestly if you want to see disgracefully behaved just check out the BBC / Daily Mail message boards or, god forbid, You Tube comments.

@phat shantz

Actually most (read ~80%) of open source linux core/kernel work is paid for and I have to say all this 'deathknell' stuff is melodramatic even for a windoze fanboi. The market chooses the value of things,not conjecture, and the market has decided (for many HUGE companies) that open source software IS BETTER VALUE than Windows in many situations. If what you say is right and commercial software is inherently superior then shurely Google would have become an M$ shop as soon as they had the money?

Money doesn't always buy you quality - look at Vista! Never mind the flaky proprietary shit that companies like CA peddle as 'enterprise software'. Honestly if open source is so bad why do so many banks and fortune 500 companies run Apache, BSD and SugarCRM?

Your near certainty argument doesn't stand up in the incremental, zero marginal cost, world of OS kernels, Web Frameworks, Programming Languages, Web Browsers etc. And you REALLY underestimate how strong a motivating force LOVE is. The best and most talented people are in it for the love first and the money second.

"When I looked around for a market to provide the greatest reward for my labor"

Well that just sums you up nicely doesn't it ;-P

Roger Heathcote.

Research: Wind power pricier, emits more CO2 than thought

Roger Heathcote
Boffin

Methanol easier than Hydrogen

Indeed, you'll find that most commercially available hydrogen generators actually catalyse methanol into hydrogen as methanol's a lot easier to deal with.

Is there an easy way to turn spare electricity into methanol though? Comparable to say electrolysis?

'Anaconda' 200m rubber snake generator scheme gets funding

Roger Heathcote

Naysayers...

@Chris - Yes, effort and ingenuity are overrated aren't they? Better not to try at all eh! Hang on while I'll give the guys who built Chernobyl a call...

You hope you have plenty of cheap energy in 50 years time, no doubt so you can still enjoy your Jerremy Clarkeson DVDs on your 10Kw plasma screen, great, well you think the Chinese, Russians, Africans and Arabs won't want the same? More nuclear power will just make Uranium the new oil and instead of a bit of soot and global warming we'll have every country on earth churning out tonnes of nuclear waste and - yes you guessed - PLUTONIUM! Hand up who thinks the world will be a better place when zimbabwe is making PLUTONIUM? Fucking brilliant. Fusion might be worth exploring but fission, as a method of generating 'cheap' or 'clean' electricity is SHIT.

@AC - I share your concern that not much attention seems to be being spent on the environmental cost of producing these technologies but solar is becoming fairly practical (at least in Cali!) Watch this - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cyiPbiPLmoM

Also, some microgeneration technologies looks like they can be made without clearing acres of rainforrest, check out - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mecU7S2xoJc

One of the biggest problems I can see right now is Britains stubborn refusal to get serious about wind power. If you look at Germany it's ubiquitous, if you look here it's embarrasing... for some reason everyone from Noel Edmonds to the RSPB is railing against them. I guess we'll see how firm their opinions are when the lights start flickering eh!

Roger Heathcote.

Silverlight 2 beta 2 - Go Live if you dare

Roger Heathcote
Jobs Horns

Good market share...

Well when you're Microsoft you can leverage your other assets to simply TAKE market share. I was interested to note how silverlight has been getting pushed via microsofts website. Initially it was in tiny letters on the updates page but as I'm sure many of you have noticed for some time now when you visit microsoft's website the browser window darkens and it pops up asking permission to install Silverlight.

Given that Vista users are pretty used to seeing UAC I'd expect most of them to have picked up the Screen Goes Dark / Click Yes meme so I can confidently infer many people are installing it without the faintest clue what it even is.

Yes Microsoft is getting silverlight on peoples computers and I'm sure the adoption graphs look very impressive but I'm equally sure it's not primarily because it's good. How many sites and developers run with it is will be the real guage of its success.

I can't see a pressing / functional need for it yet and I'm certainly not going to install it until there's some truly compelling apps for it but, having said that, I suppose it's good that there's someting out there to keep Adobe on their toes!

Roger Heathcote

Manchester's congestion charge: pay-to-leave

Roger Heathcote
Stop

It was working well in London...

The already good public transport here has been massively improved by the c-charge, we've got 3 new bus routes where I live. The roads seem only slightly less congested but it's more about pushing manufacturers to make low emission city vehicles and making the current worst polluters subsidise the public transport infrastructure anyway. I'm just gutted Boris has got in in time to poo pooh Ken's £25 high emissions charge - now that's would have been real progressive taxation, pity!

PS: 'Rah rah rah, I pay my road tax' people who want to motor piously through the center of every town can just bite me! I ride a bike and almost anyone else who works in a city could do too. If you live out of town, which you probably SHOULDN'T if you workin a city, you can still carshare and, in many places park and ride. You budding Clarkeson's out there should all quit whining coz motoring is going to get A HELL OF A LOT more expensive in the next 10 years baby! and people are going to get bored of hearing you bitch about it.

I'm intersted to read they are considering using radio tagging (which has some clear issues to overcome) instead of numberplate recognition. You would have thought, all the work being done (and indeed working pretty well for several years now) it would be a no brainer to go with the established (and one might think cheaper) technology but government IT procurement seems to follow it's own strange rules. Still I don't see how they can contemplate a massive new untested IT system with it's unknown timescales and unfixed budget when they have one ready made :-/ Hmm

Also, to those suggesting the money could be spent on trams, I have it on the authority of several transport planners and professionals that trams are, for the most part, shit.

Think of it this way, busses are just like trams but they can go anywhere, maybe making busses run on electric would be the way to go ;-)

Roger Heathcote

PS. Yes, with the price of fuel hitting escape velocity it might prove to be a self correcting problem anyway! And £3,000,000,000 would buy a lot of solar panels

UK is not a surveillance society, MPs claim

Roger Heathcote
Stop

@Encryption

>Anything you can actually get your hands on isn't going to work well enough to keep any Government dept interested out for longer than a few moments.

[citation needed]

Wikipedia kills Greatest Show On Earth

Roger Heathcote
Unhappy

@You selfish, reactionary, self righteous anti-wiki bastards.

>It is has nearly turned a little cringe worthy when someone posts a link to wikipedia, as some divine knowledge source, so still some more discrediting work to be done :)

Yeah that's right, fight against knowledge! Don't try and help, burn, burn them all! Who needs free information anyway!?

A century ago would we have found you protesting the Encyclopedia Brittanicas factuality? Or the OED because there were so many unpaid contibutors? Since when did the profit motive ensure total factual accuracy anyway? The commercial information markets have peddled lies and half-truths as fact as long as there's been printing presses. They still do. Every f***ing day.

If Wikipedia's not that good or factually accurate it's primarily because you (and your loathsome kind) prefer to spend your time being snarky and aloof about it as opposed to getting your hands dirty, making a real effort and improving it. Think about that. It's YOUR fault, you lazy snide c****.

Despite the odd article and topic that people may be drawn towrds 'gaming' Wikipedia is still useful to MANY people and whatever your feelings towards it it looks like it's here for a few more years yet.

Given that it is the most high profile site of it's type it's clearly a good opportunity to examine issues of governance in a massive decentralised network. Questions need asking and boundaries need testing. This is an interesting and exciting test case and as such, IS newsworthy IMHO.

I have to say I'm impressed with what has been accomplished with wikipedia so far and hope to see more collaborative efforts and initiatives like it in the future. We must however be vigilant as to who holds the keys and have mechanisms that allow for dissent and prevent 'party members' tendency towards rent seeking behavior, even if the 'land' is purely intellectual.

In this story I think both sides have a point AND both sides have behaved badly. There are some interesting issues to mull over and talk about and I'm dismayed at how quickly it's degenerated into luddite Wikibashing :-/

Roger Heathcote

Download al Qaeda manuals from the DoJ, go to prison?

Roger Heathcote
Flame

@By Stewart Haywood

In-frigging-deed! I personally thing they should have given the guy a break, but say for a second that I was of an oversimplistic / kneejerk reactionary / daily mail reading persuasion and I thought they should turf him out regardless of facts and ethics... they should shurely inflict the harshest sanctions on his employers too, yes? Can some of the misanthropic boo-yah biggots here please clarify where you stand on that?

a) Yes, burn them, burn them all!

b) Mumble mumble, bloody gypsies!

b) Yes (assuming they're all foreign and/or poor!)

Roger Heathcote

Japanese woman moves into bloke's closet

Roger Heathcote
Flame

@Almost all of you...

I have to say I'm getting fed up with the low level misogyny on these threads. It seems any time there's mention of a woman some retard pipes in with some 'joke' about fucking them or them being some kind of whore, or them being to ugly to consider fucking - it's juvenile and does nothing to dispel the public perception of computer geeks as emotionally stunted oddballs.

Roger Heathcote.

Kraken stripped of World's Largest Botnet crown (maybe)

Roger Heathcote
Stop

@@ if they can find the bots...

How is that a good use of their time?? These things aren't easy to remove, they're extremely difficult to remove, they hide themselves and repair themselves and if you've got one you've probably got several. Added to that, if you remove them, you still need to patch the security hole that let them in in the first place, often the patches aren't out, and sometimes the security hole IS the user.

Disinfecting infected machines is closing the stable door after the horse has bolted and the only way to be sure you're rid of the nasties is a FRESH INSTALL. There's malware and rootkits out there that are absolutely UNDETECTABLE by any of the current anti malware programs.

It's up to YOU, as a nerd, to ensure the people you meet and talk to are made aware of general good practice, have some AV and anti-spyware. It's up to you to make sure your kids and your granny are using Ubuntu, or Windows Steadystate or some other system that isn't going to end up pwned within a week of them getting it.

Claiming that researchers are indecent for trying to quantify the scope of the problem instead of turning vigilante and trying to fix Joe Public's shit riddled PC is dumb.

I'm getting fed up of reading this childlike "well if they can detect them why don't they just fix them huh?" argument. We can detect Aids, we can detect Cancer, fixing them IS NOT SO FRICKIN EASY!

Roger Heathcote.

World wants small, cheap PCs, say makers of small, cheap PCs

Roger Heathcote
Thumb Down

@Is it just me

I don't know what's worse, the 1970s-esq 'dolly bird' marketing choice or the retard who comments "But is that bird starting to look old and getting a bit of fat around the thighs ?". You misognist shit - what do you want? Anorexic jailbait?

It's no wonder you don't see many women on these comments pages when you have retards like this demonstrating their single figured emotional ages here.

Grr,

Roger Heathcote

Microsoft to Yahoo!: Surrender or else

Roger Heathcote

@Greg - Fuck the shareholders.

You write like you think that's a beautiful thing Greg! Thus is the sorry state of the world, the worlds biggest technology companies are run by hedge funds and pension funds who's sights stretch a few years at most, ignorant of the need for long term stratergy, R&D and investment.

Brilliant isn't it? A world where the people in charge aren't legally allowed to consider anything outside of the profits of a bunch of people who don't know or care DICK about the future of the business! - It's a miracle it works at all really.

IMHO things need to be done now and if shareholders can't bring themselves to take any responsibility then fuck them, our governments should step in. I'd rather suffer the market distortions of governement intervention than the market distortions of monopoly and ultra concentrated capital. At least then we might end up with a decent IP infastructure and more than two free webmail providers in the future. At this rate we'll be lucky to have a software market at all in 20 years time.

roger@microhoogleaol.com :-/

Windows better off closed, says Microsoft

Roger Heathcote
Happy

@By boe

That kinda happened recently...

Security Now #133 talks about the new Truecrypt (v5) full disk encryption software which required the authors to create their own low level disk driver for windows so all disk activity is encrypted/decrypted on the fly.

You'd expect over the course of 20 years most companies would have honed and refined something as significant to performance as this, Moreso you'd expect adding the burden of encryption would therefore negatively impact disk io performance but in this case windows + Truecrypt's driver benches significantly faster!

Hahahaha, okay there may be some situations/tests that it is slower in but still, hahahahah!

I think it's be nice if I could create my own XP fork, I almost certainly wouldn't but it'd be nice to know I was allowed to and, as the above shows, some clever 17 year olds might make a good job of it (or get Wine working better)

Dear ISP, I am not a target market

Roger Heathcote
Alert

No problem with ads...

they're the only thing funding many of my favourite sites. The problem with phorm is more fundamental, it's to do with architecture and peoples general expectation that the only people who 'see' your surfing activity are people you ASK to, i.e. the people serving the pages you go to and, if both you and they do advertising, their advertisers.

That I DON'T have a problem with. If you don't like a sites advertisers you still have a number of choices: don't go there, disable 3rd party cookies, install ad-blockers whatever, it's YOUR choice and the market will vote with its feet.

How is a market supposed to function well when everybody is tied into 12 month contracts whos terms can change without your agreement at pretty much any point.

Your ISP will already co-operate with the police if a judge agrees there's reasonable suspicion of a crime being commited. Now in order to more effectively flog viagra and insurance we are creating a single point where dozens of ISPs send all their users surfing history in real time, creating a dangerous resource, one that only the most hopelessly naive would suggest won't be abused at some point in the future - as the police database routinely is.

"There was of course no way of knowing whether you were being watched at any given moment. How often, or on what system, the Thought Police plugged in on any individual wire was guesswork. It was even conceivable that they watched everybody all the time. But at any rate they could plug in your wire whenever they wanted to. You had to live -- did live, from habit that became instinct -- in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard, and, except in darkness, every movement scrutinized."

Christ, 1984 really ought to be part of the national curriculum!

Roger Heathcote (using https whenever possible from now onwards!)

Most spam comes from just six botnets

Roger Heathcote
Stop

To some of the less nuanced - more confused posters...

@ Where`s the list of IP addresses:

dShield.org

@Nuke Them:

It`s people like you who are responsible for the public`s impression of IT experts as calm, objective, well reasoned people - well done, I hope you have to spend the weekend reinstalling your grannys laptop again!

@Hany Mustapha:

ISPs don`t do this to help-hurt spam, it`s a useful and legitimate feature.. the fact that your spam filters use this as the test of what is a server (and therefore what is kosher or not) only means your spam filters are DEEPLY RETARDED. Start shopping around for something better.

@Lee Mulcahy and Thad

It`s not that simple, if it was they`d already be doing it wouldn`t they? I guess the way they figure it out is by crossreferencing the torrents of spam they get with what is coming out of honeypots they run. Look at some spam, they are NOT identical, they go to the trouble of salting each one with some random text to make sure they are not identical so even if you catch one, you can`t just filter out the rest.

@Sam Penny

That might have just about worked 10 years ago (see steve gibsons dos attack report at grc.com) but it`s not that simple these days.. if the bot is not run via IRC (hard to trace) then the machine or site relaying the commands is as likely owned too. These people are tricky - they have thought of this.

Roger Heathcote.

Roger Heathcote
Stop

@David W

The sites they use are legion, and change frequently.

Hundreds of people get their webspace hacked daily, a combination of laxness on the part of the owner and the administrator. When this happens you`ll end up with a dodgy subdomain hocking cheap OEM software or viagra which may go unnoticed for months, especially with the domain redirecting DNS shennanigins many of these guys employ these days.

PS, it`s not at all clear from the confused numbers in your post that there are a `relatively tiny number of enabling organisations`. Finding more webspace is NOT a problem for these people.

Hotmail dies on both sides of the Atlantic

Roger Heathcote
Stop

@ " actively investigating the cause "

Erm, if you're trying to fix the problem probably the first thing you'd do is kill the webserver (port 80) while your doing it. Much as I don't trust windoze webservers I doubt the webservers of several hundred hotmail servers all croaked simultaneously.

Roger Heathcote

ISP data deal with former 'spyware' boss triggers privacy fears

Roger Heathcote
Thumb Down

@ Not much of a problem...

You're missing the point, you can block the adverts but that isn't going to stop every URL you visit and every keyword you google from being sent to a third party, widening your exposure and IMHO contravening data protection law. Your argument is akin to saying it's okay to use a shonky net cafe to log into you online bank if you close your eyes as you type in the password!

This data is NOT anonymous, well certainly not for everyone, my URL history would identify me in a jiffy. And the idiots trotting out the unthinkably banal and cliched "if you've got nothing to hide" argument need to start thinking - there are several things YOU DO WANT hidden such as pin numbers, passwords and your email address.

Honestly, it's not just giving one more company access to your data, it's giving anyone who advertises through them access to your browser, and in a world where you can get owned by a malformed JPG or Flash file I don't want these people being able to target my computer by keyword, what if the keywords they use are crafted to find vulnerability.

Sadly I live in a shared house and the BT broadband isn't in my name, and even if it was I strongly suspect they won't let you cancel your contract over this. I feel like I'm getting F'd in the A here :-[

Roger Heathcote

Security boffins unveil BitUnlocker

Roger Heathcote
Thumb Up

1 minute

Erm, 1 minute is plenty to power off a machine and power it on again? As soon as the powers back on the memory is refereshed again yes?

I have for some time longed for a tool that could pull dump data from the memory of a freshly rebooted PC. Would be very handy for rescuing work from a crashed/locked up machine. Even a simple prog that dumps it to a file/lan. Anyone know of such a boot disk? Or a way of forcing a locked up windows machine to write a full memory dump to disk?

Roger Heathcote

Why there will never be another GSM

Roger Heathcote
Happy

@mr.K

It IS outdated thinking in MOST cases. Come up with some killer apps we don't already have some spectrum for and I'd consider ringfencing some spectrum for them, but unless you've got something more useful than what we've now got i.e. DAB, DTV, voice & general purpose wireless ip networking) then I see no point restricting what spectrum can be used for.

MrK - "The worst part however is that a company may at any given time render your gadget useless since they can decide independently that will change the use of their spectrum to some new gadget."

Yes that would suck, like the government deciding to turn off FM, which is why we would do well to allocate a good chunk of this spectrum to the aforementioned general purpose IP networking and maybe the government should maintain a bit for a state backed ip multicating system.

Don't think I'm not pro regulation BTW, there's many industries that need regulating inside out. Applying regulations evenly accross a healthy market doesn't stop it being meaningfully 'free', allowing monopolies and oligopolies and enormous inbalances of power does that. The so called 'free marketeers' you read about are nothing of the sort - Adam Smith would puke if he met the 'Adam Smith Institute' or 'The Competition Commission'

Roger Heathcote
Flame

Flexibility yes...

Perpetuity no. Tying frequency to purpose is in most cases outdated thinking* IMHO. Leasing spectrum would retain public ownership (as it should be) and still create a market tradable commodity (like physical property leases).

*Having said that I think we should leave FM radio well alone, tellys can be converted to digital but radios can't. Think of the mountain of landfill we're going to create overnight. Plus, I love London's pirate radio scene ;-)

Roger Heathcote

Facebook mounts Tupperware-style ads push

Roger Heathcote
Flame

No ads = no free stuff.

A few ads is a fair price to pay for things like unlimited free photo storage surely?

I have to say I have never been disturbed by the ocasional ads dropped into my newsfeeds, nor the 'flyers' you get down the side, infact I've just purchased some for my website & was glad of the (rudimentary but useful) ability to target them on age/sex/location. I look forward to the newer metrics coming onstream, if anything these are more useful to a small business person like me than to international brands like coke :-)

Maybe those who object to facebook adverts full stop should have the option of PAYING SOME CASH for an ad free version? Me, I'd rather have companies I hate (like mcdonalds and cocacola) pay for it ;-) These companies, whilst excited by buzzwords like 'viral' really don't understand this stuff yet (as the coke quote above shows) so we get to happily sit here playing pirates and poke'ing our friends while they take years to figure out they're pissing their money down the drain. I ask you who's really losing out here?

As goes the information sharing I really don't care if advertisers know that I regularly cycle & my favourite food is trifle, over a million people in the London network can find this out easily, if I didn't want people to know this I wouldn't put it in my profile would I?

BT home router wide open to hijackers

Roger Heathcote
Jobs Horns

Erm,

If someone has the skills to try and crack your WEP/WPA keys then no amount of SSID hiding & MAC binding will help you. WPA needs a LONG key (think 20+ digits) to be safe against dictionary/brute force attacks. The home hub gives 10 hex digits of WEP by default! :-0

Also, the home hub IS a thompson speedtouch in a snazzy new box. It is, as its predecessors were, a crock of shit. Mine has dropped its connection about ten times in the last couple of days. I don't know if this is down to BT's frantic firmware upgrading or haxorz attempting (and maybe succeeding) in pwning me or just it's general shitness. Whatever the cause I'm not terribly bothered as I'm using another (better) router upstream of it.

Roger Heathcote.

PS: It's just crapped out again when I tried to post this LOL!

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