* Posts by Anonymous Cowherd

22 publicly visible posts • joined 10 Nov 2007

Patches bring zero-day relief from PDF and PowerPoint flaws

Anonymous Cowherd
Thumb Up

Tyred software

Exactly ! The wise course is to learn which inferior component caused the problem and then make the necessary changes to avoid a future repetition.

One would not replace ones PC, just the repeatedly faulty software.

Anonymous Cowherd
Jobs Horns

My Scoda Fabia works fine

The honourable Ash is quite correct. The days when Powerpoint and Acrobat were respectively the only game in town are long gone. There are now really good alternatives and it is worth noting that they offer the same or very similar functionality, with less bloat, and without the vulnerabilities.

Why wait in fear for, for instance, a huge Acrobat fix to be released when your can install the whole of Foxit right away, and very probably with a smaller download.

To continue the automotive metaphor of Mr FFS, when you have fixed a ridiculous number of punctures (with no external cause) on a tyre it is a sure sign that you need to give up and get a completely new tyre.

Adblock developer offers 'please unblock me' tag to sites

Anonymous Cowherd
Happy

Don't mind short text ads

I block all graphical adverts using a combination of Proxomitron and ABP. Bandwidth is extremely expensive in the African country I work in, so I will decide what I pay to download.

Textual adverts are much harder to block and yet strangely more effective.

If a web site had something like the following I might even take a look:

Advertisement: This web site is associated with XYZ company who make such-and-such a product. If you are looking for something like that, please take a look at their website http://www.example.com

Cosmonaut bemoans ISS toilet row

Anonymous Cowherd

A storm in a pee-pot?

Eh?

Boffin dubs global warming 'irreversible'

Anonymous Cowherd
Happy

Irreversible!

Hooray for us, we WIN!

The trouble with hype is that it has to escalate and once it has been escalated to "irreversible" then it does not matter any more.

How should software developers be paid?

Anonymous Cowherd
IT Angle

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will do just fine. Thanks.

OMFG, what have you done?

Anonymous Cowherd

It will be perfect when it's finished

The site is great.

Okay, so the layout is broken, the graphics are not available yet, and you are still waiting for the final style sheets, but I look forward to seeing it when it is finished.

I liked the fact that you had icons quickly redrawn from memory by an eight-year-old after the old site broke down. It is a good way to save money and it prevents us from feeling guilty that Adblock still works perfectly.

So much for articles about whale-song and joss-sticks, eh? Woooooeeeeooo...

Levi's suffers profit meltdown in midst of SAP embrace

Anonymous Cowherd
Pirate

SAP and Anderson: big, slow-moving, disastrous

Anderson "managed" an SAP project at Mobil in South Africa last century. One might have thought the Androids would have learned from that, but apparently not.

It went many times over-budget and at the end of it, what was merely a regional oil company found that they had the largest petroleum invocation of SAP in the world - higher complexity, more modules, greater transactions-per-second (and more expensive) than any other single SAP installation at the time. They had to buy a bigger mainframe at huge cost merely to be able to run the beast.

Even then, it was so unstable that technicians had to stay logged on to the system from Waldorf to prop it up internally. And initially the database kept collapsing because of the unexpectedly high levels of concurrency.

Not pretty.

Mobil solved the problem by selling off the affiliate (who eventually wobbled on to project completion) and making sure that all subsequent SAP projects were smaller and tightly scoped.

Asus 8.9in Eee PC surfaces

Anonymous Cowherd
Happy

Please put the picture of the lady at the top of the article...

... so we do not have to read all of the way down before we see her.

CERN completes 'world’s largest jigsaw puzzle'

Anonymous Cowherd
Alien

PETA protest

People for the Ethical Treatment of Atoms feel that this research could be performed perfectly well without killing innocent atoms.

Show that you care for atoms by taking off your kit now.

Quake rocks Britain

Anonymous Cowherd

My oath, how boring

It rained lightly here this morning.

Sounded like a very small truck a long, long distance away... I was so astonished.

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I too enjoy the articles by Messrs Orlowski and Page. Much better than certain other articles that suffer from irreleVance.

Since global warming is responsible for everything it is pretty obvious that it caused the quake too. There is doubtless already a graph somewhere, based on 14 different models built around two data points, that shows how breathing out increases the earthquake rate.

Malware writers think global, act local

Anonymous Cowherd
Thumb Up

Nipponese Blueteeth

The number of phone MODELS available with Bluetooth gives no indication of the number of Bluetooth PHONES in circulation.

Customers could be buying only the blueteeth phones and none of the others...

EU commissioner backs record biz on copyright extensions

Anonymous Cowherd

The 50 year period also gave the purchasers certain rights

People who bought a copy of a recording 50 years ago had the implied future right to do whatever they wished with it when that period expired. This right would pass to their heirs and successors, so that, when the period expired, anyone that had physical possession of the copy could use it to make derivative works, or to re-issue it unchanged it they wished.

By extending the copyright period now, the law will diminish the value of possession. Without the change in the law the value of possession would increase as the lapse in copyright loomed.

Since the right to do whatever you wished with a recording when copyright expired was costed into the original purchase price, it also means that the recordings will retrospectively become over-priced. This suggests that some sort of refund, with inflation for 50 years added in, should be payable to the current owners of any such copies.

Anyone that could prove that they were intending to re-issue the recordings should also logically be able to sue for damages (loss of anticipated income) suffered as a result of the change. Though who they would sue is a difficult one.

Government rejects elephants for pets e-petition

Anonymous Cowherd

The Chinese have been breeding

There are billions of them already.

Technical problems mar Barclays' PINSentry roll-out

Anonymous Cowherd
Thumb Down

For Harry Stottle

In South Africa the First National Bank uses a SMS code to authenticate online transactions, for each transaction.

As a result, clients are now being targeted for theft of their mobiles. Or, if the criminals can't grab the phone, they steal the number: once the nasties know a bank client's mobile number, they (the crooks) report the phone lost or stolen, and obtain a "replacement" SIM card from the cellular service provider by submitting bogus documentation.

When the thieves have the new SIM card, now programmed with the bank client's phone number, they set about draining the account. Which they can do, because they now get all the one-time transaction codes.

By the time the bank client complains about not being able to make or receive calls, the account is empty.

So in practice it is not proving as successful as the bank had anticipated.

It should also be noted that a standard SMS is not encrypted and could be grabbed by a scanner within the footprint of the cell that the mobile user is in.

Boffins slashed in big-science budget blunder bloodbath

Anonymous Cowherd
Happy

Yes, Minister

o

Boeing announces 'Laser Gunship' completion

Anonymous Cowherd
Alien

Talcum powder

Presumably people in target lands could just shoot clouds of talcum powder into the air when they come under attack.

Or is talc now banned as war materiel?

UK firm 'recalls' 575 knee implants

Anonymous Cowherd
Pirate

Whipping out? Whipping?

I should think not. Whipping is bound to damage surrounding tissue.

Windows random number generator is so not random

Anonymous Cowherd
Coat

@ Chris Morrison

The full details need some work, but clearly somewhere in the answer one needs to use Random Access Memory...

Yahoo! Settles! With! Jailed! Chinese! Journos!

Anonymous Cowherd
Alert

Exclamations warn us!

Hazardous people, the Yahoos.

Though ever since they painted over "First do no evil" one can no longer be at all certain about Google! either.

Microsoft sells Windows twice

Anonymous Cowherd
Stop

Why bother?

If it is old equipment, why bother trying to run Windows on it?

Both technical and financial factors argue in favour of Linux in such a case. Something like Puppy will run on a really low spec machine, and make it perform rather better than the same machine trying to run Windows.

Ballmerized Nigerian PCs might run Mandriva after all

Anonymous Cowherd
Dead Vulture

Same ethics

Microsoft might want consider moving their headquarters to Lagos. They would evidently fit right in.

"The estate of the late General Ono Morbaddata has three million copies of Vista and I am needing of some help with getting them out of the country..."