Posts by Joe Montana

Open source - the once and future dream

More realistic market...

In reply to the comment about 11,000 lines of code... Sure, kernels years ago were smaller, but a LOT of that code in linux is driver code required to support all kinds of different hardware and several entirely different architectures...

As for aiming towards $1 billion companies, is that really a good thing?

For one thing the current software market is unrealistic, economies of scale mean that by the time you've sold a few thousand copies all of your investment has long since been recovered and you could churn out additional copies for $0.01 and still make a profit. Sooner or later the masses will wake up to this and demand lower prices.

Also consider, when you have huge companies they become too powerful, and use their power to distort the market - ultimately to the detriment of customers. You also get situations where companies are "too big to fail" and end up receiving bailouts from the government... Companies like this make massive profits one year, which go into the back pockets of those high in the company who jump through whatever hoops necessary to avoid paying tax on it, and the following year they don't do so well and take money from the taxpayers... Privatised profits, nationalised losses...

So companies staying small, and having to compete on an open market against other small companies is a good thing.

H.264 video codec stays royalty-free for HTML5 testers

Bait & Switch

This is a classic bait & switch approach...

The MPEG-LA were hoping people would be suitably locked in by now, but with html5 they have the opportunity to lock in many more people. If they start demanding money now then it will drive the move to theora or other open codecs... If they delay until 2016 a lot of people won't even think about the potential problems, and get themselves locked in.

Google (finally) pays bounties for Chrome bug reports

Why open source?

What i don't get, is why it is almost exclusively open source software that offers these payments...

Open source is already giving you something for free, and i would have no qualms about helping an open source project find and fix bugs for free - it's a give and take relationship and i believe a lot of other people feel the same.

The problem is with commercial vendors, where they expect you to pay for their product while also expecting to benefit from the work of independent security researchers for free. That is an exceptionally arrogant and selfish attitude and will only encourage researchers to sell their exploits to blackhats instead.

Verified by Visa bitchslapped by Cambridge researchers

Inside an iframe..

This 3d secure crap typically comes up in a small frame inside of whatever site your using, with no way to easily verify you're really talking to mastercard/visa...

I find the whole system just incredibly irritating, and i will always seek to use my american express card online whenever i can simply because it doesn't have anything like this...

Ofcom opens debate on Freeview HD DRM to punters

Missing the point entirely...

Why is the HD/Bluray copy of this movie not available here? The only thing stopping people from playing copies imported from other countries is another draconian DRM scheme. Why should someone who purchased a legal copy of this movie in the US not be allowed to watch it here?

And why should you not be able to move this recording around your network or watch it on your phone? Because of DRM you are now restricted to watching it on that one DVR, what if that DVR or its disk fails? What if you want to watch in another room? What if you want to use it to entertain your kids on a long car journey?

These are all perfectly legitimate and legal uses of the content, it's sad that in order to do these things i would need to acquire a superior non legitimate copy in the first place.

The entire UK would not be swamped by copies from the BBC, anyone who wants a dodgy copy of this movie already has one.

Why should people who are willing to pay for legitimate content be worse off than those willing to pirate it?

ARM wrestling: Apple iPad chip to overpower rivals?

Why not PPC?

There really is no reason Apple would choose ARM over PPC if designing their own chip in-house...

OSX can already run and is well tested on both architectures, and Apple would not need to pay any licensing fees if using a PPC derived core.

IE6 exposed as Google China malware unpicked

Proprietary third party apps

They were most likely running it because they have got locked in to one or more third party applications which don't work with any other browser...

IE6 is all over the place in corporate networks, and it's all down to microsoft encouraging third party developers to target non standard features of IE6 years ago.

US makes travellers go online, before getting onboard

Travel agent

IF you book at a travel agent and don't have internet access yourself, i'm sure the travel agent will be happy to provide the service of filling out the form for you, for a fee.

British government ignores MS browser fears

Locked in...

The UK government is horrendously locked in to IE6, they have all kinds of crufty apps that won't work in other browsers and some won't work in newer versions of IE either.

The government is *supposed* to demand open standards when procuring new technology, but so far this legislation is rather toothless and more IE specific apps are being deployed all the time, further locking them in.

Had they actually demanded from the get-go, they wouldn't be locked in to IE now and would be in a much better situation. They would be free to ditch IE and use other browsers, and would be free to ditch windows (and save the taxpayers a huge amount of money).

Frustrated bug hunters to expose a flaw a day for a month

Stance...

I happen to agree with them, software vendors treat bug hunters with disdain... They often react with hostility when confronted with bug reports, sometimes even threatening the bug hunter. They expect people to spend their own time finding bugs, and then let them fix it quietly without telling anyone. This is much cheaper than actually hiring people to test their code before it ships.

Very rarely do you get thanked, let alone any kind of payment.

Most bug hunters are expected to pay full price for these products.

It should be share and share alike, you help me i help you... I'm quite happy to work with open source developers because they gave me the something for free, and it's easier because i can actually write a patch myself. But i very much resent the behaviour of most commercial vendors...

Recession forces software escrow releases to jump by 150%

Cost/Hassle of Escrow...

If companies are (rightfully) bothered about retaining access to sourcecode if the original supplier goes bust, why don't they put more pressure on closed source vendors or move more towards open source software?

The vast majority of closed source software bought by businesses has no comeback whatsoever if the original supplier goes bust, and with large companies like banks going bankrupt, and the history of big bankruptcies in the tech industry, you'd be foolish to blindly trust closed source software even from big vendors like MS, Oracle or IBM etc.

Inmate gets 18 months for thin client prison hack

Locking down...

You see a lot of dumb terminal or remote access setups where you just access a windows machine through rdp or citrix, and are only supposed to gain access to certain applications. I have never encountered a situation where it wasn't possible to easily run other programs... the windows interface and userland apps were never designed with any sort of security in mind, they were mostly inherited from the 9x series of windows and bolted on top of the nt kernel (which by itself had a pretty decent security model).

Microsoft IIS vuln leaves users open to remote attack

File extensions? wtf?

Who ever thought relying on something so arbitrary as the filename was a good idea to identify the file type?

Surely it is massively more sensible to parse the contents of the file to determine what it is?

Google Chrome OS goes native (code)

Arm? Mips? IA64? amd64?

The problem with native client is that although google plan to support x86 and arm, what about other architectures? Will we be forever tied to x86 and arm? The chinese make a good line of cheap low power mips based processors...

Also, even tho the platform may *support* 2 architectures, it will be up to individual developers to compile their code for both... How many sites using this will actually bother to support more than just x86?

One of the best points of web based applications is that they free you from being tied to one platform, and while google's plans may free you from software lock-in, they will create a new form of hardware lock-in.

As for performance of native code, i doubt it will be able to take advantage of special features present in modern cpus, for instance *some* arm processors have video decoding or encryption processing hardware but precompiled binaries will have to be lowest common denominator to support the widest range of target systems. A JIT compiler like java can theoretically take advantage of such features.

Also, google have tied android to a java based system...

Wouldn't it make more sense for google to work with the openjdk folks to improve java?

MS kills 'Bing buys the news' furore, but Google could still lose it

Value...

First...

"A couple of meta tags on a web page will stop Google from indexing a site. So why don't newspapers do so?"

Why? because that would hurt the site owner far more than it hurts google, they may threaten to do it but they won't carry it out for that reason.

As for making bing traffic more valuable than that from google, they're going the wrong way about it... currently bing runs promotions that effectively pay you for using it if you follow a bing result/ad and then purchase particular items... Everyone i know who uses this feature, uses google as their primary search engine and only ever touch bing to get a discount like this.

Bumbling NJ firemen, cops blown up in 'huge fireball'

Stupidity...

Perhaps they will use "water" from those little red cans to put out fires...

Or perhaps the "black sand"...

Should you lose your religion on your CV?

Religion can be relevant...

Religion is in some cases relevant to people's ability to perform a particular job...

Consider the recent case where a muslim worker working at a supermarket refused to have anything to do with products containing pork , which the supermarket clearly sells.

In that situation, a muslim employee is less useful than someone non religious. If all employees at that supermarket were muslim, then they would be unable to sell any pork products, and customers who wanted to buy such products would simply go elsewhere.

If religion is going to make you unwilling to do certain tasks, then the employer needs to know this up front so they can hire someone who will actually be willing to do the job they're being hired for.

Religion is a choice, it's not like race or gender that people have no control over, you choose to follow a religion and also choose how strictly you are going to follow it. Religion deserves no special legal protection.

If you choose to follow a religion that prohibits certain things, then you have made the choice not to take a job that would require you to do those things. It's absolutely insane to apply for such a job and then complain afterwards.

You made a choice, now you should have to live with the consequences, not enforce those consequences on others.

'World's largest' BitTorrent tracker Mininova kneecapped

And?

So mininova lose all their content, and soon all their users... The owners will just sell the name and add it to all the advertising revenue they've made while the site was up.

Someone else will create a new torrent site, and noone will remember what mininova ever was.

iPhone anti-malware stuck in state of denial

Screw personal firewalls..

Who says a "personal firewall" needs to be a userland application running in the background...

Being based on OSX, the kernel should have support for ipfilter (or apple could compile it in if not there in current versions), then the only userland application you need is one to configure the underlying kernel packet filtering.

Early adopters bloodied by Ubuntu's Karmic Koala

Less than 10%

It's not surprising less than 10% of people who posted to forums had successful installs... I had successful upgrades on 2 machines and just got on with it, didn't even think about posting anything anywhere until i read this story, and this is a news site rather than a support forum - people visiting support forums usually only do so when they need support.

Westminster readies 'wave and pay' parking meters

Parking is a joke...

The current methods of enforcing parking are a complete joke...

Where they make you pay in advance is always a scam, you don't always know how long you're likely to be there so you end up paying more than you need or getting fined if you are unexpectedly delayed. Coming back to the car to top up the ticket wastes your time, and unless you time it perfectly you pay twice for the overlap time.

Parking wardens are not there to enforce the rules, they are there to make money and they have quotas of tickets to fill. If they see you about to park, they won't jump out and tell you not to park there, they will wait until you leave the car and then ticket you. It is in their interest for people to break the rules and get fined, because if noone broke the rules the wardens would get fired for doing their supposed job too effectively.

Also, parking tickets have become a cost of doing business for countless delivery companies... There are thousands of businesses that require deliveries of various goods, and yet there is nowhere nearby for the delivery vehicle to park.

Just a few days ago i saw a pub that has stood for hundreds of years having large barrels and crates delivered... The truck parked right outside and got a ticket almost immediately - like the warden knows when the pub is scheduled to get a delivery and waits for it. There is nowhere else for the driver to park, there is a public car park nearby but it has a height restriction on the entrance and would require transporting the heavy deliveries across the road - likely to cause more obstruction than the truck.

Fanbois howl over data-munching Snow Leopard bug

Time machine...

Time machine on OSX is so trivially easy to use, and external usb disks which it would work with aren't exactly pricey, especially if your willing to fork out for an expensive machine from Apple... There really is no excuse for not having a backup, and as bad as a bug which wipes out your home directory is, recovering it from time machine is trivial.

BT to push fibre to 1.5m more homes and businesses

BT DSL Slowdown

First, there are a number of ISPs providing IPv6, tho it's usually not heavily advertised because few people have use for it yet...

Andrews & Arnold (aaisp.co.uk)

Goscomb technologies (goscomb.net)

Nitrex (nitrex.net)

Public Internet (public-internet.co.uk)

But on another note, i used to get a sync rate of around 7mb on my line, but just recently the performance has really turned to shit... According to the BT broadband checker tools my line is unsuitable for 2mb, and "might" be able to get 1mb... A few years ago, before the adsl max products were released, i had a 2mb service which worked perfectly. Now if i were to order the same service it would be refused...

And apparently i'm not the only one, some people with long lines that could barely get 512k before are now being disconnected totally, and many other people are experiencing massively slower sync rates.

My line hasn't changed, i have tried new equipment and i am connected to the master socket (incidentally i wasn't connected to the master socket before when i had 7mb).

Anyone shed some light on what BT are playing at here?

EC forces interop promise out of Microsoft

Opening vs existing standards

Rather than allowing them to continue creating proprietary protocols and only opening them up once they have a product on the market...

While having to open their protocols is an improvement, it still puts third parties a step behind, and allows MS to create protocols which are intentionally over complicated and difficult for third parties to implement.

MS should be required to develop and standardise protocols in an open forum, like how ODF was developed with participation from IBM, Sun and a bunch of others.

They should also be forced to use existing standards when such standards exist, and if those standards are inadequate they should be required to participate in the community to update the standard as appropriate...

O2 could impose out-of-contract iPhone lock-in

Customers being screwed?

What about the original iphone, which wasn't subsidised? Surely anyone who has one of these (and it would be out of contract by now too) should be able to unlock it.

And how about the prepaid phones?

As for the ridiculous excuse about having an exclusive deal in the UK, what if i want to pay up my o2 contract and leave the country?

Or how about if i travel? Roaming is expensive, and some countries don't have roaming agreements anyway...

Windows plays virtualization catch up with Linux

One server, many functions?

On a unix machine it is relatively easy (and common) to install several functions on a single system, you can even install multiple instances of the same application in many cases either by installing to different prefixes, or using chroot. And there are also the lighter weight virtualization options based on souped up chroot (eg openvz).

On windows however, it's generally recommended not to run multiple functions on a single box (and problems are likely to occur if you do), and often impossible to run multiple instances of the same application on a single box.

"Every server (virtual or otherwise) needs some systems management, O/S licensing, certificates, etc."

Licensing is a moot point with linux, you are entitled to install it on as many servers (virtual or otherwise) as you want...

Also, by having lots of small single purpose machines instead of a small number of big multi purpose machines, you can actually decrease maintenance significantly... Each server has the minimum required applications installed on it meaning you have less to update and less to test, and you can update your services one at a time with no risk of breaking other services.

Another benefit of virtualization is that each server is inside its own container, and can be shuffled around different physical servers at will, making it easier to upgrade hardware, easier to replace failed hardware, easier to make backups etc

There are also the security aspects, if you find a security hole in a single service and gain access to a server you now have the potential to take control of other services running there that individually would have been secure.

Nokia lets operators screw with customise the N900

Subsidies...

Someone commented about why would you buy a phone from an operator when you wouldn't buy a TV from BBC/C4/etc...

There's a whole bunch of reasons..

TV technology moves a lot slower than mobile phones..

Phones get far more abused, a phone will be carried around in a pocket full of scratchy coins, dropped, etc.. a TV will sit on a stand in your house and typically never be physically touched.

A TV can't typically be locked to one station, and a network operator won't want to subsidise a device you will use with someone else's service, and BBC/C4 don't offer subscription services that could subsidise the price of the TV.

That said, people often buy set top boxes from cable and satellite tv providers, where it is a subscription service that usually subsidises the box and locks you in to a single provider.

As for network customisation, i had a nokia N95 from orange which was ridiculously unstable, and functionality like the sip client could be accessed but simply didn't work... Once i reflashed it with standard nokia firmware, it was like i'd gotten a whole new phone, the sip client worked as it should, battery life improved, the interface looked better and the phone was far more stable.

Apple blogger legally unlocks iPhone

How about UK?

What about doing this in the UK?

You can buy a prepaid iphone from o2, do these come locked? or can you get them unlocked? There's no contract to "buy out"..

Also, when you do buy out a contract, they make you pay the monthly subscription cost for any months remaining on it... What happens to those months and everything included in them? Do you lose your allowances, or do you get to keep them having effectively just paid for them in advance?

Google kicks Maestro into touch

3d secure is ridiculous...

I can't stand this 3d secure / verified by visa stuff...

I have several cards, and don't buy stuff online that regularly... I tend to forget the passwords and have to reset them every time, so all it does is provide an annoyance.

It typically comes up as an iframe inside a site, ie without a url bar so you can't verify that it's really coming from visa/mastercard or that it's even using ssl... A malicious site could easily spoof it.

Many criminals acquire card details from keyloggers these days, so it just gives them something else they need to log...

For the legit user tho, it's just more hassle, more passwords to lose, more incentive to use the same password everywhere or print it on a postit note etc...

ISPs vs BBC iPlayer: Missing the point?

Hypocrite

"the [service] they want at the price they expect"

If they hadn't been advertising unrealistic levels of service at unrealistic prices and relying on customers not trying to actually use what they'd been sold, then people wouldn't be expecting it now would they. ISPs only have themselves to blame for this.

Microsofties lose their iPhones

Forcing?

Maybe forcing their staff to actually use their own products will give them an incentive to actually make them usable? Windows mobile is a joke right now.

iPhone owners are superior beings, says survey

Nokia

Nokia outsell Apple for a large number of reasons...

They've been around (in the mobile phone industry) longer..

They make a much wider range of phones.

They have deals to push their phones through a much larger range of networks.

Nokia themselves sell far more of their cheap lowend models than they do the high end devices, whereas Apple only make higher end devices. They simply have nothing to compete with the Nokia 2110 and other such phones.

It's not surprising Nokia sell many more phones, the fact that Apple sell as many as they do despite the disadvantages is actually pretty positive for Apple.

Windows 7 to push up netbook prices

Defeating the point...

All this will just defeat the point of a netbook...

For £400 you can buy a lowend regular laptop from several vendors, or a higher end one that's a couple of years old and will still be more powerful than a netbook...

Netbooks took off because they were small and cheap, so making them more expensive will just start the cycle over again when the cheap arm-based linux ones come out...

Microsoft to bomb Europe with IE-free Windows 7

Who cares?

End users will not receive a computer without a browser, no OEM will ship a computer which doesn't include one. The only people who will get a version of windows without a browser, are those who are tech savvy enough to install one themselves... Windows is hardly the easiest OS to install, and even with a browser bundled in, is still pretty useless on its own. People installing it will just add a browser to the long list of other apps they have to install before windows becomes useful for anything.

As for Apple, they don't receive the same level of scrutiny because they are smaller and cannot wield an unhealthy level of influence over the industry. You can quite safely ignore Apple, many people don't even know they exist or don't realise they make computers. MS on the other hand are impossible to ignore, even the most die hard of linux or mac users will sometimes be faced with proprietary file formats, protocols or applications that are tied to windows.

Incidentally, noone is saying MS should unbundle mobile-ie from windows mobile, for the same reason as apple, their influence over the cellphone market is small enough that it doesn't matter.

"Europeans can now look forward to the hassle of installing IE on their own. Or uninstalling redundant browsers that OEM might ship. Thanks EC!" - much like existing users are faced with uninstalling a redundant copy of ie, which is not made easy.

iPhone 3G S in the UK: what you need to know

Buy out

If you buy out your existing O2 contract, what happens to all the inclusive minutes/data which you would be paying for? Do you lose it, or does it get tacked onto the end of the new contract they make you buy?

Anyway, i think the new pricing is ridiculous, but people will line up and flood the stores in the first week anyway... When the previous 2 models came out they were out of stock for weeks and with long queues trailing out of the stores. Perhaps they are planning to handle the initial flood of demand - higher price will reduce demand and increase the margins from those who do sign up... Maybe they will drop the prices significantly after a couple of months?

I already have the iphone 3g, and won't be buying the 3gs at these prices... I might consider it when the current contract expires, if they offer a decent deal on it by then.

The tethering pricing is stupid too, you can use third party tethering apps with the current models if you jailbreak and they work fine...

Webhost hack wipes out data for 100,000 sites

Backups...

"Since last night, I've had probably 40 phone calls from clients saying 'Why is my website down,'" said Daniel Voyce, a web developer for Nu Order Webs who uses Vaserv to host customer sites. "It's making me look bad."

I have no sympathy here, if you are using low cost hosting and not backing up your customers data then it's your own fault.

They explicitly offer a cheaper service without backups, and if you made the conscious decision to use the cheaper service which doesn't offer backups then you are either not storing anything of importance on it, sorting out your own method of backups, or stupid.

I have a cheap VPS with a plan like that, it's sole purpose is as a backup DNS server, which retrieves the data directly from the main server. The main server has regular backups, the backup DNS server is never backed up. Were i to lose that server, it would be a trivial case of copying a new set of data from the master.

"Voyce said the hackers, given the high level of server access they gained, were likely able to intercept a wealth of sensitive data stored on Vaserv's servers. Voyce said his customers are safe because all sensitive information was encrypted."

It may well have been "encrypted", but where were the keys stored and what type of encryption was used? I've seen lots of deployments where data is stored on an encrypted filesystem, but the key has already been entered into the system so that the database can access it, meaning you can still access the data from the running system, the encryption would only protect against someone stealing the physical drives. Sometimes it's even worse than that, the keys are saved on the machine so that it can access the encrypted drives at boot without user intervention required.

EC asks: Been leant on by Microsoft?

Ballot screen?

Personally i think Windows should come with no browser, and just a basic core OS...

And then OEMs are free to create bundles based on the core and whatever other software they choose. Users would never see a ballot screen, they just receive whatever browser the OEM gives them.

Also extend this to retail, allow third parties to sell retail distributions in the same way, as it stands a retail version of windows is rather useless since it comes with no useful software and often severely lacking in drivers and will typically be multiple patch levels out of date, making the whole install process extremely painful and time consuming. The pirate distributions are a lot better...

Had this happened a few years ago, Netscape would likely still be king, many customers wanted Netscape and most OEMs wanted to include it.

Acer: Android netbook to come with... Windows

Dual boot by default and education is the key

Years ago, MS worked very hard to prevent BeOS from being installed as dual boot alongside windows... Why? because if people were to try BeOS they are likely to find it's much better than windows and stick to it...

People may not *want* Linux, but a lot of that is down to not knowing what it is, not knowing what it's strengths are and not having used it before... Linux has a lot of advantages over windows for the average user, package management and not having to worry about viruses/spyware for instance.

If you provide a dual boot, and clear documentation/advertising which explain the advantages and differences then inevitably some people will try it out.

A lot of ordinary people will consider using linux if you take the time to explain it's advantages to them, and many of those people will stick with it once they've got used to it. I know quite a few non technical people who have given linux a try, and after a few months now hate being forced to use windows at work and would never consider using it at home.

Pirate Party wins seat in European Parliament

The AC got it right...

As someone else stated, there wasn't really much choice as to who to vote for in the UK... All of the parties are either corrupt and self serving (labour, conservatives, libdems), or too extreme in one way or another (bnp, ukip, green, christian)...

Is it any surprise that only 20% of those eligible to vote actually bothered to do so?

Those who support parties like the bnp will go out and vote at every chance, and they will also gain a lot of votes from people who are casting a protest vote due to being disgruntled with the other parties... The percentage of die hard supporters of the minority parties goes up significantly when there is such a low voter turnout.

If we had a pirate party i would have considered voting for them, copyright laws are ridiculous these days, they are constantly being extended while modern technological advancements should make them shorter (software becomes obsolete quickly for instance, by the time copyright expires it will be completely useless, and audio/video technologies are constantly improving)...

As for the UKIP MEPs being disrupting, that's exactly what they were supposed to do... They are an anti europe party sitting in the european parliament, their entire philosophy is anti europe and the people voting for them know that. Are you really surprised that an anti europe party would seek to disrupt the european parliament? If you truly believe in democracy, then you have to respect that a percentage of the population voted for this behaviour.

Russia stings Microsoft with monopoly case

Cars are different...

It would cost Ford a lot of money to continue producing last years fiesta, the market for last years fiesta is likely to be very small unless it's extremely cheap and ford don't try to stop people from selling cars on so the small market for cheap previous year fiestas is satisfied by people selling used models.

The amount people would be willing to pay for last years fiesta is less than the cost to produce one, thus its completely inviable for ford to continue producing them.

By contrast, it costs MS virtually nothing to continue distributing XP, and each copy sold, even if sold at a massively reduced rate would be profitable. They sell the netbook version far more cheaply, and it's still profitable, it's the arbitrary restrictions they place on the netbook version which are stupid and anti competitive.

Judge backs Halifax in Chip and PIN clone case

Security?

Someone commented earlier that staff never check signatures... Why should they bother? Signatures are a totally worthless method of identifying someone.. Whenever i had to sign something it looked different every time and was never checked. Plus it's prominently shown on the back of the card for anyone to copy.

Some american stores would ask for photo ID that matches the details on the card, not perfect but much better than having someone make some arbitrary pen mark.

A pin is also not perfect, but still better than a signature.

The biggest problem is the way banks have used this as an excuse to shift the blame. They took a perfectly reasonable and useful mechanism which has been used in mainland europe for years, and used it to try and weasel out of their responsibilities to customers. £2100 may not be very much for a bank, but to many people that's a lot of money and could completely screw their life up.

BNP pleads for cash after reported DDoS assault

Why bother?

Attacking the BNP only serves to get them mentioned in news outlets, like this one...

On the other hand, the BNP managed to get just over 5% of the vote in the london mayoral elections... I doubt that 5% of the people of london actually believe in their policies, most of those votes will be protest votes because all of the major parties have disenfranchised them in one way or another. Take away those, and the BNP will only have a small hard core of followers.

If the major parties would stop being so sleazy and self serving then parties like the BNP wouldn't even register in the grand scheme of things.

Try serving the people who voted for you, not your buddies at the golf club.

Skype pulls about-face, calls for interoperability

Proprietary keeps me away from it..

Skype's lack of support for SIP means i won't even consider it...

If i use SIP, then i have the choice of many providers, some of which are cheaper than skype and don't suffer from the delays someone else posted about, and i can switch providers at the drop of a hat...

I can also setup an asterisk box that talks to the sip providers, and automatically routes to the cheapest provider... And i have a choice of literally hundreds of different sip handsets.

UK tech quango eyes 10Gbit broadband

Other uses...

If you have 10GB to every building in the UK, then all internal traffic throughout the country could travel over that network... Coupled with some intelligent caching for international traffic and people would still be much better off.

But with 10GB of bandwidth to play with, everything current could use the fibre, think HDTV over IP (streamed from locally located servers), VOIP, and whatever new technologies people might be used in the future.

Unsafe at any speed: Memcpy() banished in Redmond

WTF?

the memcpy function already has a parameter to specify how many bytes to copy:

void *

memcpy(void *dst, const void *src, size_t len);

Destination, Source, Length...

If you add a 4th parameter, people will just put the length parameter twice, so if the specified length is wrong then it's wrong.

Microsoft to EU: Cut me down, and Google will rule the world!

Hypocritical...

So basically they're saying, that were they to open up to alternative browsers then Google would have the same ability to set the default search engine as they do?

That's an extremely arrogant attitude... It would be an open market, where search engines could bid to become the default in Opera, Firefox or any other browser that comes along.

The shear arrogance of MS, claiming they have some inherent right to be the default search engine, and that google should be denied that same right.

Besides, if Google become too powerful then the EU can start their own antitrust investigation against them.

You can see where MS are coming from, their previous strategies have always been to have an inferior product, but bundle it because a large enough section of the population are too lazy to look for alternatives. If they lose this (somewhat unfair) advantage they would actually have to compete based on the value of the product itself. And it says quite a lot about their search engine that they are still failing miserably despite having the bundling advantage.

Do not have to?

"Oh and just FYI, you do not HAVE to use MS at all.Yes it comes with most machines, but you can build your own, most people who are not able to build there own are also not able to use any other OS anyway!"

This is exactly the point...

It is entirely possible to ignore Google, or Apple, or any Linux distro... It is not possible to ignore MS - sooner or later you will receive a file in a proprietary format, or try to access a website that is locked in to MS browsers or such. So even someone who wants nothing to do with MS, and who runs Linux or OSX exclusively will at some point be forced to compromise.

This is what makes a monopoly, when something is unavoidable.. Come the day when MS is one choice of many and you can make that choice based on value and not lock-in, then those who hate MS products will simply ignore them, they will no longer be forced to deal with them and thus feel no need to complain about them online.

SSL encryption and the Ghost of Windows Past

Strongest?

128-bit is _NOT_ the strongest encryption available, many sites supports 256-bit AES encryption as detailed in RFC 3962 as do modern browsers, sites such as paypal among others support it.

Microsoft conjures imaginary 'Apple Tax'

Linux?

Someone should take their comparison, and show how the same hardware when running Linux works out cheaper than windows...

But what did you expect? advertising is never honest, it is designed to show the product being advertised in a good light relative to the competition...

The comparison is invalid because the hardware being compared is not equivalent... When comparing equivalent hardware Apple tend to be fairly competitive.

The idea of Macs being expensive comes from the fact that Apple's range doesn't extend as far down market as most other vendors.. They don't have a cheap lowend netbook, they don't have a barebones desktop etc... They don't try to compete in the lowend budget market, just like Jaguar have nothing to compete with a Ford Fiesta.

Linux chief calls for FAT-free Microsoft diet

As always, MS is the problem...

It is Microsoft that try not to support any filesystem other than their own... They supported ISO9660 (used on CDs) late because they had no choice, same for UDF...

HFS, HFS+ and UFS are all supported out of the box by OSX and Linux, tho Apple could be a bit more proactive in supporting other file systems...

BSD and Solaris also support UFS natively, not sure about HFS/HFS+...

Linux will support most filesystems, either in the default kernel or shipped by default with major distributions.

FAT may be supported everywhere, but it's one of the crappiest filesystems out there and it's patented which causes problems in some countries... There are plenty of other filesystems for which drivers exist under easily reusable terms (eg BSD licensed code) that could be incorporated into virtually anything.