Posts by stizzleswick 429 publicly visible posts • joined 25 Oct 2007
...that this eavesdropping tool only works on parties who are in violation of their carrier contract, if I read the article correctly, and it's not specifically a failure of the Jesus Phone, but of mobile VoIP in general, regardless of the device used. Still, I can't wait to read the inevitable plethora of remarks on how the hardware is to blame instead of the brainless misuse of the software which is targeted by the sniffer.
Regulators are involved because SCO is in chapter 11 bankruptcy.
That aside, I hope the company that bought SCO and then assumed its name (it used to be Caldera Systems, a pretty decent Linux distributor until they got delusions of code ownership) will finally be laid to rest in pieces soon. They're a laughing stock, and the stockholders aren't laughing.
Me, I'm chuckling to myself as the machines I am responsible for are merrily running AIX, Solaris, FreeBSD and several flavours of Linux, all without as much as a penny down to SCO Group.
Mine's the one with the printout of the GPL sticking out of the pocket.
...most of these devices are completely useless in practice or can be replaced by far cheaper devices that had been in the market for a long time (so we know they should be reliable by now, or know for sure that they are not).
I wish the manufacturers would concentrate on making their existing products better instead of constantly re-inventing the wheel.
Mine's the one with the construction drawing of a wheel sticking out of the pocket.
...like car "designers" are trying to out-do each other these days. If this thing were the only car one could buy, I'd buy a bicycle. Cheaper, does not need electricity, and I wouldn't look like a complete idiot for having bought it. And the top speed would be somewhat comparable.
Backswept windshields and suicide doors... and the rear seats are clearly ridiculous in this thing. If I were Peugeot, I would not only not pay the designers of this... thing, I'd fire them outright and demand damages.
The entire autostart/autorun thing struck me as a huge security risk when it was first offered (officially) with Windows95. As everybody knows these days, my fears were vindicated within weeks when the first strains of malware used that "feature" (no, MS said, it's NOT a bug...) to procreate.
So 14 years after the fact, MS finally admit that there just might be a bit of a security risk in there... one that the insufferable security "warnings" of the MS "Security Center" built into some versions of XP, all of Vista and W7 never even squawked about. *sheesh!*
OK, they never told the user to get rid of ActiveX either, which is at least as dangerous. (Got mail? Click here to auto-install the latest version of our botnet client...).
All in all, I am reminded of a few of the reasons I had for choosing to stick with so-called "alternative" operating systems. I first experienced XP about five years after it came out, and even after all of my preconceptions I was shocked. The OS assumed that the user had to be reminded of the fact that he/she just put a disc in the optical drive? How pathetic is that? (and I do realize that both Ubuntu and SuSE have, unfortunately, followed suit. When will they realize that most of their customer base does not suffer from Alzheimer's and is perfectly capable of double-clicking the drive icon on their desktop to access the data? And no, I am not being unfeeling here; my own grandmother was an Alzheimer's victim but even she was mentally fit enough not to need the OS to tell her what she just did five seconds ago.
Gimme the coat with the list of pubs in its pocket. Hopefully, by the end of the evening, I won't remember I put a DVD in the drive.
So they've changed the pre-set for a radio button. SuSE has, long as I can remember, had the best KDE integration of all distributions (and definitely the slickest admin tools - I'm a huge YAST2 fan). Personally, after the stability and maybe somewhat old-fashioned functionality of KDE 3.5, I am still somewhat underwhelmed by the playground feeling of KDE 4 (and I really, really miss a whole bunch of desktop configuration options that used to be there in earlier versions...), but back to the topic at hand: this is hardly world-shaking news. One radio button preset changed, that's all. Buy the other option with one click. I think Amazon has a patent on that, though.
It's friday, I'm thirsty. Cheers!
Sure... in an economy where parents ordered the cars for their children about two months after birth so they could get them when they got the driver's licence at 18 (if you don't believe me, ask my great-aunt. She lived there for the whole stretch), cars had to be maintained. And that's what people did, because they had no choice.
That is not to say that GDR engineering was bad; the high-end car (the Wartburg), while also based on a pre-WW2 design (the DKW F9), was ingenious; you could replace a dented fender in minutes because it was not welded, but screwed on. Great for self-service maintenance; I love that part of it.
Stilll, no reason to glorify those seemingly long-lived designs. Undersized two-stroke engines in the 1980s (while the engineers had proposed a viable VW-Golf-beater in the mid-70s, but the GDR Politburo said the Trabant was still good enough for the Great Unwashed), a carcass-on-chassis design outdated by 40 years (and I say carcass because the driver would become one in even a slow-speed collision) and a body shell that needed to be swept off the road after an accident (because it would actually shatter into shrapnel)... NO THANKS!
...to keep the Trabant's undercarriage. That was derived straight from the pre-WW2 DKW F8 and felt like it.
Personally, I don't like the design much, but then, I find many current car designs to be either horrible or overblown. Or both. *shrug* Maybe that's because I remember with fondness the 1980s mid-sized cars one could get into without using a shoehorn and know a few of their successors that have somehow managed to grow larger externally while becoming superminis inside.
Anyway, if they think they can build that thing for below 10k quid, let 'em do it. I don't normally do long distances in my car, so at that price, when I need to buy a new one, this might be interesting enough for me to whip out my wallet.
is that Microsoft's document formats are simply too complicated for even Microsoft to handle properly.
Thankfully, there is an ISO standard format for office documents available that was not pushed through the standards committee by Microsoft: ODF. Which can be used by any office product that is worth using. The fact that Microsoft Office does not directly support the format says it all.
Consulting as I am for a relatively small business consultancy firm which has embraced virtualization as a means to offer everybody an identical computing experience no matter which room they are in, here's where we stand now.
Having tried several hypervisors and several guest OSs, the firm is currently running a bunch of XP VMs under XenServer. Vista as a guest has been tried, including several service requests to the manufacturer (none of which were answered to more effect than to claim that this company were the only one to experience the problems encountered, despite the fact that their own self-help discussion forums are full of said problems....). Windows as a guest OS is a customer requirement; I would much prefer to move to something a little more responsive and less complicated (less complicated for me, that is) like e.g. Linux.
Web applications? What the $/%& could they offer for this company? We do OpenOffice, and some specialized script-gloms specific to this company. They work (except under Vista. They do work under Linux and Solaris using WINE. I've tested.).
The major point in this particular business case is, those VMs have to run, and if they fail, the user needs to have access to another one on the fly. That is not a future scenario, it is already being offered by XenServer (one of the main points in our choosing it -- and no, I am in no way affiliated with Citrix). VM fails, user gets replacement VM basically on the fly, with the possibility of some data loss if a file in use was not recently saved. There's some room for improvement there; I am not a software developer, but seeing what IBM did with the OS/2 back in 1996 (after a crash and reboot, all previously loaded apps restored their files to the state about 2 seconds before the crash), it should be a definite possibility to offer no-data-loss live switching between VMs these days. Come on, guys, it has only been 13 years !
As to server consolidation, that is not (in this business case) a valid concern. The servers running there have to have the maximum in computing power they can get; they are mission critical. The latter speaks for virtualization, the former strongly against at this point in time. We need direct access to the hardware here to get maximum performance. If there were the money for high-end servers, things might look rather different: the company could probably VM most of its infrastructure then. But that would require the power of a fully stacked blade center, at least. Financially out of the question.
In larger companies that canafford to throw away a few kilobucks, things are probably different. From experience, I suggest at least a month of practical tests before going virtual with the productive workload.
All that said, I do believe that virtualization is where we will end up. The management of virtual machines can be much easier co-ordinated and executed than that of physical machines, meaning a reduction in adminstration costs. If you're an admin and are not yet acquainted with the handling of a hypervisor, ye better learn or you'll be in trouble soon. Virtualization is coming, and it will take over quickly. Even in relatively small companies, just because a single server (hardware) is cheaper than ten clients, and for most purposes offers the same reaction time and better uptime.
Me, I'm off for a beer.
From experience currently still being made, I believe Citrix have something going that may spike both Microsoft's and VMware's wheels.
A company I am doing IT consulting for (and with) has recently dropped HyperV (after it was impossible to get it to work stably) and then decided against VMware server because Xen simply is cheaper ($ 0.00) and handles better. XenServer is a lean and mean machine that is a joy to work with -- during testing, the other two players experienced a huge variety of problems, whereas XenServer was stoically stable from installation onwards.
With their traditional close ties to MS they manage to get more varieties of Windows running stable as VMs than MS themselves do. If they can keep that up for the next few years, we may see a new market leader.
...to find the actual weak point here, yet.
The hacks are spoofing the phone's ID. That makes it not a manufacturer problem, but a network provider problem, because the network provider's servers are what pushes messages to each and any phone logged in with that ID.
Considering that spoofing a phone's ID seems to be relatively simple (looks like people have already done it...), it's up to the network providers to work out a solution that more securely identifies the phones checking in. iDon't know, maybe check against a hash made from the ID with the MAC, just to name the first thing that came to my mind.
While holding this effort and, more particularly, Tesla's, in high regard as technological masterpieces, I still have my doubts about electrical sports/luxury cars. 'leccy cars make more sense in an inner city and shopping scenario, where distances are relatively short and noxious emissions extremely high in the case of petrol-driven cars.
For the performance bracket, I suggest there are much more suitable fuels which can be had at a low environmental impact, such as hydrogen (yes, I know... currently highly polluting production methods, but the methods to fix that already exist; they're just not being implemented yet. Where is the Green Party when it can do something useful for a change?), methane or similar. As can be seen from the steeply rising number of cars actually running on natural gas (please, spare me the comments), internal combustion with alternative fuels to petrol or diesel oil is a viable option.
I don't think battery-powered cars can quite make the distance (pun intended) yet in any but an urban setting. In the long run (ditto), I'm betting on chemistry over electricity for the next three decades at least.
"If XenServer suddenly takes off, don't be surprised if Microsoft just whips out some cash and buys Citrix, despite all of its work on Hyper-V"
Seeing as Hyper-V is based on good old VirtualPC, which Microsoft bought then made over into something that is pretty much unusable (as I know only too well from painful and time-consuming admin support experience)... oh, well. I am currently working as a consultant for a company where Hyper-V is costing valuable man-hours every day because it just won't behave like a nice hypervisor; they're in the process of switching to Xen. My best guess is that if MS takes over Citrix, that will kill Xen dead in the market, with customers jumping over to VMware by the thousands.
Or to Zen, which would most likely experience a source split from Xen and remain a viable OpenSource alternative. *shrug* Any way you cut it, VMware has the most credibility behind it with Xen just catching up, so I'm hoping Citrix will not get eaten by MS and continue to offer what already is a good and stable (now there's a hint for the guys at MS...) virtualization package.
This must be due to some sort of U.S. inferiority complex, IMHO. Some ten years ago, I was working for a German company and occasionally needed IBM support. Their German support number has a Stuttgart area code... and back then got me re-routed to Ireland, where friendly and competent multilinguists (mostly Germans) were available around the clock.
I particularly remember one call at approx. 2 am on a Saturday when I had a rather pressing problem with a software installation issue, and the support chaps in Ireland actually copied the hardware I was working on (or trying to) at the time overnight and sent me a working software fix within less than 24 hours. And no, that was not a big company I was working for.
Given that kind of support, why do I need anything "local?" Most companies these days can't be buggered to offer anything more than a checklist-for-known-errors approach with a probable outcome of "sorry, can't help you there" from maybe 7 am through 6 pm.
...about which browser _extension_ did what before which browser, everybody. As to MS Internet Exploder for Macintosh 4.5, yep, it did have tabs. But those didn't make it over to a Windows version until about 8 years later. Makes one wonder whether the developers at MS even talk to each other at all.
Now, back to the actual topic: how to replace tabs with something more handy. Safari 4.0 beta made an attempt with those flip-through previews. Nice try, doesn't make things easier, pure eye candy. Try again. Hierarchical (treed) tabs are more likely solution.
Though I dare to make a suggestion here: before we replace tabbed browsing, how about doing a firmware upgrade on those users who feel that they need 214,398,122,343,123 web pages open simultaneously? It's a simple matter of brain capacity management. One can only track a limited amount of lines of thought at the same time. Things differ for different people, but I would wager most are incapable of handling more than, say, 20 open tabs reasonably, without having to re-think on why they opened any particular one.
Problem solved. Keep the tabs, just reboot the brains of anybody who opens more than can be displayed on their screens.
@Quirkafleeg: you may notice (if you care to look) that MSIE opens not a new thread, but a new process for each browser "window," so is basically creating new instances of itself for every open window.
Me, I'm outta here. Coat's the one wih the lynx logo on it.
The ways of madness seem endless. As (amongst other things) a professional video editor, I can vividly imagine the faces of those trying to render their final cuts on a PDA w/phone functionality. Estimated finishing time: 2.584 hours. Estimated remaining battery life: 2 hours. For video editing to make sense, you'd need a Cell CPU, not a cell phone.
For those demanding zoom lenses on the iPhone: I don't think the people at Apple are going to make that particular mistake. One of the clear design advantages of the iPhone is that it has practically nothing mechanical in it that can turn sour on the user (like e.g. mechanical keyboards that just love the taste of coffee, battery doors that fly off when you cough, zoom lenses that love to get stuck if the phone gets bumped around a little, stuff like that). For the record, yes, the camera they build into the iPhone is not a good camera. But you know what? It's not supposed to make really good pictures. To do that, you buy a DSLR, not a PDA. I use the iPhone's camera to take pix of the whiteboards after brainstorming sessions (so I don't have to take notes), and it's more than good enough for that.
And I know there are a lot of people out there who think that more megapixels = better pictures. Wrong. If you want better pictures, you need a better CCD (not necessarily a larger one) and most and foremost and utterly totally most a better lens. As in, one that is large enough to allow some light through. To be consequent, a lens that would allow halfway good pictures to be taken with any CCD currently built-in in any cellphone it would probably be quite a bit larger than the cellphone itself. So quit jabbering about how you would like a "better" camera in a cellphone. Far better would be a phone without any camera, and just for the heck of it they could chuck in an entry-level bridge camera when you buy the phone so that you can take reasonable pix.
</flame>
Actually, BR burners are supported by MacOS X 10.5.2 and up, if I remember correctly. Chuck one in and start working.
As for the capability to equip a Mac with multiple discs, you can go back all the way to the Mac II f/fx, which could fit up to three (the third would sit in the second floppy bay), and I still remember a Quadra 950 with five HDs stuffed into it. The PowerPC desktops generally had 2 hard drive bays; some of the towers were prepared for more. The G3s and later could take on 4 hard discs.
As for those claiming that one could buy a machine specced to this level from a different manufacturer for half the price, check your data sheets. The nearest Dell (which does not quite equal the performance) is a good bit MORE expensive.
As I'm moving more and more into video and DVD editing, this one's definitely in the running.
@ Anonymous Coward from 07:56 GMT
You're missing a few points, I think. Iceweasel and so on are not "cheap knockoffs" but are the real thing, only renamed in order to avoid copyrighted trademarks (like "Firefox" and "Thunderbird" and so on...). Since the Debian distro is very straight about being 100 % "open" and GPL-compatible, that is not something that is going to be "fixed" any time soon.
So just replace the icon and rename the app, and you're where you are with other distros. *shrug*
"Aren't all macs obsolete?"
Interesting question. I remember a time in early 2008 when Best Buy in the U.S. were getting so many premium-brand PCs marked "Vista Capable" back because they really weren't, they put up "Vista Capable" banners in their Apple corners... because ALL Intel Macs could run the full-blown Vista feature set... (sole exception being the entry-level Mac Mini of the time because of its low-power graphics chip; the current model can. I notice that I can still get plenty of "ready-to-use" machines that won't run most of Vista's eye candy more than a year after release of that POS.)
@joe, yes, they're talking about the Ti PowerBooks at this time.
As to the news value, many other manufacturers revoke any meaningful support for their products sometime between the time the warranty is up and five years. Heck, some companies don't really even offer any meaningful support at all.
Quite contrary to the experiences of PC people who try to "fix" friends' old Macs for them, I have made the experience that Apple hardware in a production environment tends to last rather longer than most other brands. Generic Dells and HPs tend to get replaced after 2 to 4 years; I have worked in outfits where 8-years-plus Macs were happily shifting bytes quite productively. Maybe that's why the gripes: with most brands, a withdrawal of support after five or more years doesn't really matter much; that piece of hardware has long been and gone to silicon Nirvana. But hey, they still have that fav old App "File Router" happily shuffling data throughout their Linux/Windows network... running on sth like a PowerMac 7500.
Note on the side, after seven years of sturdy, sterling service, with an aggregated uptime of around six and a half years, my trusty old TiBook 867 MHz finally went to hardware heaven late last year. I loved the G4 CPU. It could out-Photoshop the quickest Intels of its day and then some (Vector units, yay!), and drew about 1/10th of the power. Oh, well. It did more work during its lifetime than most immobile workstations. And these days, eight Xeon cores are nothing to sniff off, either, when you're doing video and raytracing.
Mine's the one with the PowerPC logo on the back.
...from the usual sickness. Switch OS to avoid the problems of the legacy stuff, then glue the old, flawed UI on it. They're not the first to do that; Microsoft have done it several times already, though they currently go the other way around (keep using same flawed kernel, keep gluing different UIs on top).
Frankly, given Moto's track record for UI design, I wouldn't want ANY of their phones even as a gift. Motorola Smartphones? An oxymoron, if you ask me, no matter which OS they use.
Just too bad that the German, as well as some other European and the U.S. governments have seen fit to criminalize the digital crimefighters for using the tools they need to fight digital crime, while the governments, themselves, are legalizing the same tacticts to be used on innocent citizens without the need for a warrant...
The count of maybe all statistics on browser usage is questionable. The reason for that being that many browsers (or plugins for them) offer the capability to send a "fake" browser ID to the server, i.e., to the server e.g. Opera appears to be MSIE6, or Safari may mask itself as Firefox 2.x and suchlike.
Particularly in the case of Opera, the fake MSIE guise is often used because certain websites are even in these days "optimised" for MS Internet Exploder, putting out garbage on some other browsers. Or there are forks in the site that send different, "optimized" code to the browser in question, sometimes leading to diminished functionality of the site for that particular browser. Hence the use of the "fake" ID, so the server will send the html "optimised" for Internet Exploder.
Plus, of course, those statistics are normally generated from the stats of servers run by special interest sites -- so you'd have maybe a UNIX-heavy site and you can count on there being a lot of Firefox and Webkit users in their statistics, or a general-consumer-computing oriented site, where you'll get nearly 90 % MSIE.
"Anybody care to place a wager {By Anonymous Coward Posted Tuesday 25th November 2008 21:28 GMT} as to how long it takes for someone to use this toolkit as a handy deus ex machina in a two-bit SF offering?"
You're late for that one... that entire theme has already been used by R.A. Heinlein, Norbert Dillich, Isaac Asimov, Robert Silverberg, and a whole load of others in the mid-50s, and some others since then.
Sorry... not really an original theme. Try Kurt Vonnegut for a pretty unique take on the general idea.
"[…] make sure everything is tried down on their remaining spacewalks."
I'd say they're trying them _up_ there in orbit...
But honestly, I'd completely hate to know how much junk we currently have drifting in orbit endangering both current and future space missions.
Mine's the one with "My buddy went to the ISS and all I got was this lousy grease-stained jacket" across the back.
I agree (as per my earlier post) with your gist, though I disagree with your statement that the judgment would be in favour of the _plaintiff_; quite the contrary!
@James: As I said... nobody knows how long that phone was lying around unattended. That alone should make any case against McBarf's the company, the particular franchise involved and any of its employees and management truly null and void. But I have full confidence in the U.S. justice system yet again perverting itself.
…for the sheer amount of stupidity involved. It's not the non-food place's staff's fault that a. the phone was left lying there unguarded for who knows how long until somebody working at the place noticed it, b. that the thing was not protected against unauthorized use in any way, and most of all c. that the missus chose to practically self-publish the pictures. Classic FAIL. Basically, I'd say the couple are trying to cash in on their own ineptitude and stupidity.
...that the SCO that did the sueing was actually Caldera Systems, which had bought up the UNIX business bits from the Santa Cruz Operation and then renamed itself SCO Group while the original SCO changed names to Tarantella, Inc. IMO, it was only after Darl McBride took the reins of SCO Group that the fan began being hit.
I agree that patenting business methods and algorithms is a bit on the silly side. However I would like to point out that in the real world, relatively few patents are filed by the inventors. If you're in R&D the contract usually includes a clause which makes all inventions you make while working for the company the company's property. Also, a considerable amount of patents are filed by and granted to parties that had nothing at all to do with the invention (if you want a classic case, you might want to look up the filings for the U.S. patent on barbed wire…).
Mine's the one with "IANAL" on the back…
"Look at proper cities - New York, LA, Houston. They've got massive 8 lane freeways and roads coming out of their ears."
Yep. Thing is, those cities were PLANNED in a straight-lines grid and then constructed according to those plans. Manchester was built a little earlier in history, so if you want to turn it into a grid with some 8-laners, you'll first have to tear down the entire city, because most streets currently follow the paths of the sheep that were herded there around 1.000 BCE.
I think you're overlooking something here. If they don't introduce the fees, the city will end up in a terminal permanent gridlock. London used to have that problem, too, if memory serves.
And if you want to escape the fees, get yourself a scooter; anything with less than four wheels is exempt. Saves a lot of petrol, too, and you don't have to worry about a parking space either. Put a topcase on it, add a trailer and take along a backpack and you're all set for a shopping spree. Never mind the cars standing around waiting for each other to get out of the way, there's always space enough for a scooter to come through.
Mine's the one with the Aprilia logo.
...Adabas D as a commercial database app. Anybody remember when they dropped the image editor component (was still there in 5.1—pretty good one, actually, could use Photoshop plug-ins and everything; back then it was the clincher for me to buy SO because the GIMP was still a little rudimentary at that time)?
Join the fleet of planets of the Pierson's Puppeteers, they're headed in that general direction. On the other hand, you could also let yourself be dropped off at the Ringworld; should be safe now that the stabilizers have been mostly re-installed and a bunch of Protectors are running things there...
"We need to separate what the "Vista Capable" logo requirements are from the concept of being able to run Vista..."
Now THAT is a quote so totally worthy of Microsoft... why don't they go a step further and separate the "Microsoft" logo from the capability of any CPU to run the software... oops, they already did...
Mine's the tux...
If I understood it correctly, the dual GPU was a bit of an accident which happened because the chipset they used already includes the 9400 GPU They wanted something a little more professional for the MacBook Pro however, so they added the other. Since they now had both GPUs in the machine anyway, the design team figured they could just as well find a use for both and decided to put in the power-saving option.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2025
