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.
Posts by Anonymous Cowherd
22 publicly visible posts • joined 10 Nov 2007
Patches bring zero-day relief from PDF and PowerPoint flaws
Thursday 14th May 2009 00:56 GMT 
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
Tuesday 12th May 2009 21:45 GMT 
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
Boffin dubs global warming 'irreversible'
How should software developers be paid?
OMFG, what have you done?
Monday 15th September 2008 09:12 GMT
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
Friday 11th July 2008 11:48 GMT 
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
CERN completes 'world’s largest jigsaw puzzle'
Quake rocks Britain
Wednesday 27th February 2008 12:43 GMT
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
EU commissioner backs record biz on copyright extensions
Monday 18th February 2008 09:00 GMT
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
Technical problems mar Barclays' PINSentry roll-out
Monday 17th December 2007 21:29 GMT 
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.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
