Posts by Joe Zeff

When the IT department speaks, users listen. Or face the consequences

Re: Beautiful

Even better, create a ramdrive and map the folder to it. Every time they reboot, it gets wiped. And, you know how often Windows has to reboot!

BOFH: Putting the commitment into committee

A new way to keep the number of committees down.

I belong to a social club that has an interesting way to keep the number of committees at a reasonable level: whoever proposes that a committee be formed automatically becomes the chair. You'd be surprised how good a job this does of keeping things under control.

CAUGHT: Lenovo crams unremovable crapware into Windows laptops – by hiding it in the BIOS

Re: Windows only though

You do understand, don't you, that Ubuntu != Linux? In fact, if I were responsible for setting up a corporate system and was told to use Linux, Ubuntu would be one of my last choices, because of the need for regular updates. (Fedora, which I use at home, would be the very last choice because of its rapid-release cycle.) No, I'd take something like CentOS, so that I wouldn't have to worry about updates breaking things. Businesses need stability much, much more than they need to be running bleeding edge software.

Post-pub nosh neckfiller: Bog-standard boxty

More than just burgers.

You can get far, far more than burgers and fires over here if you stay away from the Big Name Fast Food Chains, including lots of different regional specialities, such as chili, two different styles of clam chowder and the many different kinds of barbecue. All you have to do is have an open mind (and empty stomach) and ask the locals where they like to eat. Or, you can allow yourself to be blinkered by your prejudices if that's what you prefer.

BOFH: Santa, bloody Santa

Re: Wonderful, just great

I've never been a fan of Chri$tma$ and I hate the fact that we're now getting bombarded by commercials for it in mid-November. Happy Hanukkah!

Antarctic ice THICKER than first feared – penguin-bot boffins

Re: Thicker ice is a sign of increased temps

By now, any change like this is regarded as proof of AGW, or whatever they're calling it today. (Note that for all practical purposes, the theory never changes, just the name.) There's no possible way to falsify the theory because all data are interpreted as proof. As Popper would put it, the theory is no longer anything but a meaningless noise.

BOFH: SOOO... You want to sell us some antivirus software?

Re: Simple comment...

Back when the first email virus infections came out, I was doing tech support for a major ISP. Both Melissa and the Love Bug went through the company like a dose of salts. I, of course, was immune because I was almost the only person in the company who hadn't switched over to Outlook, and was still using a non-Microsoft email client that wasn't vulnerable to that kind of thing. I must admit, though, it was very entertaining watching everybody else sending out (infected) emails warning people about the virus, not realizing what they were doing. Now, of course, I have no idea what AV software works, what brands don't and which are actually malware because I only run Linux.

Watch out, Yahoo! EFF looses BADGER on sites that ignore Do Not Track

Re: Armor up

If you want to get rid of some of the stuff you're using to get rid of tracking cookies, malware and so on, switch to Linux and get rid of all of your AV software. And, if it matters, you can stop paying for your OS, your applications and your upgrades because Linux is free. Or, you can keep on throwing money into Microsoft's money pit if you prefer.

This city's smog is so TERRIBLE, people are told to stay indoors. Beijing? No – PARIS

The people in Paris are suffering from smog, and here in Los Angeles, famous for its air pollution, the air is clean and fresh. Of course, that's because we have very strict emission controls and "boutique gasoline" formulas that make the price at the pump one of the highest in the US, but speaking as somebody who lived here before the controls went into effect, the price is well worth it.

Newt Gingrich wants Moon to be 51st US state

How does Gingrich expect to pay for this?

If you'd read the article, you'd have seen that he plans to offer prizes. The neat thing about a prize is that it doesn't cost the government one red cent unless somebody wins it. And, if you'll look at history, you'll see that offering prizes has a long, successful history. Charles II offered a prize of ten pounds of gold to the first person to work out a practical way to deturmine the longitude of a ship at set, and paid it to the inventor of the first chronometer. Charles Lindburg made his flight to win a prize, and there have been many other examples.

HELL ON EARTH: The Great Dying

Volcanos?

I find it interesting that the researchers say that it was all caused by volcanic eruptions poisoning the air. Don't the AGW people say that volcanoes don't put enough stuff into the atmosphere to have any effect?

Enormous orbiting solar raygun power plants touted

You can put the downlinks almost anywhere you want

"Presumably as well, the downlink stations would need to be in the equatorial region which doesn't leave too many bits of land in stable countries to choose from."

No, you don't have to put them near the equator, it's just that you get the most concentrated beam that way because the farther away from the equator you get, the more the beam spreads, just like sunlight.

And, there's a real nice advantage to this that nobody's mentioned: once you get a country dependant on your beamed electricity, all you have to do is shut it off if they do anything you don't like, and there's not one damned thing they can do about it. Kind of like OPEC, only more so.

'Boss from hell' knuckle-rapped for 'firing contests'

Why not hats?

I think I know why that guy outlawed hats on the job: he couldn't find one that fit properly over his pointy hair.

Al Gore wants to borrow your Facebook and Twitter accounts

Who cares?

The title says it all. Who cares what Al Gore does anymore? He's a washed up old has-been who should have been a never-was and everybody except the media knows it. He's a phony and a hypocrite who's trying to wring a last bit of attention out of the "crisis" he invented out of nothing just to get attention. If there's anybody out there who still thinks AlGore really believes in Global Warming, just look at the way the man acts. He's wasting power and throwing CO2 into the air like there's no tomorrow, and he wants us to cut back?

IMAO, anybody who's stupid enough to go along with him on this twit project deserves all the derision they're going to get from their ex-friends.

Me? Well, it's kind of hard to give him access to my Facebook and Twitter accounts when I don't have any, isn't it?

What vegetables are best for growing in Spaaace?

You need some grain or other starrches too.

You need to include some wheat, oats, corn or other grain to give them the calories they need. And, I'd suggest chickens as part of the livestock. That way you can have bacon and eggs in the morning. Still, what they're suggesting now is a lot better than the tanks of algae you used to find in SF books.

Spamford Wallace charged for hacking 500,000 Facebookers

What I'd sentence him to for contempt

If I were the judge, my sentence on the contempt charge would be simple: the sentences for the fraud charges would be served consecutively, not concurrent. And, he would not be allowed access to any computer for any reason until he left prison. That would get him out of our hair for a few decades.

Go Daddy 'negligent' in handing over ownership of accounts

How could they not know?

How could GoDaddy not have known that what they were doing was wrong when they did it? if not malice, they were clearly guilty of reckless indifference to the interests of their customer when they transferred all of their domains to somebody else without bothering to see if the current owner wanted this done or if the person requesting the change had any right to the domains. IMO the punitive damages should have stood to remind GoDaddy, painfully, that what they did was wrong, wrong, wrong, and that it's not a good idea to do it again. I own one, small vanity domain. It's not with GoDaddy and at this point, I'm glad of it.

Fedora 15: More than just a pretty interface

XFCE!

I've been using Fedora as my only OS since Fedora 9. Until recently, for various reasons, I've been using Gnome. Then I read a description of what the Gnome Shell would be like and I was appalled. Not only does it do a number of things I don't like (I like having one panel, at the bottom, not the top, TYVM and I want to decide for myself which desktop each window goes on.) most of them can't be turned off. Not only that, every time there's a Gnome "upgrade," it's less and less customizable. You're stuck doing things the way the Gnome devs like to do things whether you like it or not. And, if you dare complain, you get a combination of flames and snotty-grams telling you to write an extension of your own from people who probably weren't born yet the last time I did any serious programming.

As soon as I saw the shape of things to come, I started looking around. I'm now using XFCE on both my desktop and my laptop, and I'm very happy with it. I haven't upgraded to F 15, yet, but I've learned better than to jump in the first day or two. Not only are the servers slammed, there's always a few last-second gotchas to be cleaned up. Once things settle down, though, I'll be using F 15 with XFCE and Gnome can go in whatever direction the devs in their ivory tower think it should.

Bogus Kama Sutra presentation opens your backdoor to hackers

Old tricks still work

As long as file extensions are hidden by default, scammers will take advantage of it. And, as long as people need to run their computer with Administrator rights just to get their programs to run, scammers will be sending out trojans like this.

Sooner or later, people will get tired of wasting disk space, CPU time and money on anti-virus, anti-malware and anti-spyware programs and switch to an OS that's secure by design and Windows will go the way of the Dodo. Think of it as the computer equivalent of evolution in action.

Body of murdered cyberwar expert found in landfill

How long?

I wonder how long it will be before this shows up as an episode of NCIS. It's exactly the type of story they specialize in.

Moses' parting of the Red Sea: New sim explains whole thing

@Jad

"In fact modern Bibles use the "reed sea" translation after it's discovery in the original untranslated scripts."

I don't think so. The "original untranslated scripts" are called the Torah, and have been copied, exactly, for hundreds of generations by scribes, who have been very careful not to change even a single character as the book itself is Holy. Here's how a Jewish Bible translates Exodus, 13:18:

But God led the people about, by the way of the wilderness by the Red Sea; and the children of Israel went up armed out of the land of Egypt.

I have no problem with a natural explanation

I'm Jewish, and I have no problem with this natural explanation for the Crossing of the Red Sea. Just because high winds could have cleared a land bridge doesn't mean that The Lord didn't raise the winds at the right time and place, or that He didn't cause them to stop at just the right time to wash away the Egyptians.

I also see nothing wrong with the possibility that it was the Sea of Reeds, not the Red Sea, because that's not the only bad translation in Exodus: the word we know as "Pharaoh" is pronounced "Paro" in Hebrew, and not because the language doesn't have an F. (It does.)

Those of us who have no problem believing in both science and religion see this as nothing more than showing how He could have done what was needed.

Harry Potter theme park magically swallows big visitors

@Andrew Moore

And what makes you think that the mobility scooters are only (or even mostly) for the overweight? I have a pair of friends who'd be unable to visit that park without them, because they're both in their 80s and couldn't walk long or far enough without one. I suppose it makes you feel good, somehow, to know that you're preventing my friends from visiting the park with their grandchildren. Personally, I'd suggest that you be a little less judgmental, lest you too be judged.

There's an old saying that you might give a little thought to: Mene mene teckel uparshin!

Unpatched kernel-level vuln affects all Windows versions

Itn's not rocket surgery!

Preventing buffer overflows isn't exactly that difficult. You know how big your buffer is, so you only accept as many bytes as will fit. If somebody throws a huge mess of bytes at you, you just take what will fit and send the rest to the bit bucket. Problem eliminated.

Of course, finding every, single, last place you've used a buffer and correcting the code in something as big as Windows is going to be a long, hard, difficult job; no question. However, there's no reason in the world to add new code with a potential overflow issue.

The Reg guide to Linux, part 2: Preparing to dual-boot

@Get Off

I don't know about Ubuntu, but I can tell you that when I installed Fedora on my laptop the built-in webcam Just Worked. There was an application called "cheese" under Graphics, and it picked everything right up and worked without the slightest bit of effort on my part. Maybe your netbook just has the wrong model built into it.

Fedora 13 – Linux for Applephobes

Fedora's not for everybody

Fedora's a great distro, if you like living on the bleeding edge. If you're a "Windows refugee" and you're looking for an OS that Just Works, use Ubuntu. One of the things I like about Linux is that it doesn't try to be a One Size Fits All OS; there's a distro for just about everybody, and every type of hardware. If you're a gamer, and you want to squeeze every, last frame out of your games, use Gentoo; if you're using an old, slow laptop, use Puppy, or DSL. Personally, I use Fedora. I haven't upgraded to F 13 yet, because I like to give the newest version a week or two to shake out the teething troubles, but I will, RSN.

And, Pengwyn, there really is an upgrade path from FC 3, but you're not going to like it: backup your data, reformat and do a clean install. FC 3 is so badly out-of-date that it's not worth trying to bring it into the Third Millennium any other way.

Dedicated Vi device vies for buyers

Fi on vi!

Why would anybody in the world want to use an obsolete, counter-intuitive line editor with obscure, one or two character commands and no built-in help if they didn't absolutely have to? At least install nano; it's much easier to use and most of the commands are right at the bottom of the screen, including ^G to get a listing of the less common commands. If they want to be taken seriously by anybody except pedantic old pharts, give the damned thing a screen editor!

Fedora 13 Alpha release delayed

The truth behind Fedora Linux

For any of you who aren't familiar, Fedora is a bleeding-edge testbed for RedHat. There's a new version out every six to nine months, with only the two most recent supported or updated. For those of us who like such a thing, having this release delayed is actually Good News. Not all releases have really been Ready For Prime Time, and I, for one, would not like to see F 13 be an unlucky release.

Dadaist user manuals - a call for submissions

I see it on-line, too

I use Linux and often surf the support forum for my distro. It's depressing, sometimes, to see the lack of grammar, syntax and spelling skills there especially when you realize that the posts are written using Firefox, a browser with a built in spelling checker. It's gotten to the point were, for almost half of the posters, the words "can't," "won't" and "don't" are written more often without the apostrophe than with it. Not only that, but it's getting more and more common for a request for help to start out, "So, I installed Fedora Core 12 on my laptop and..." (For those who don't know, the last version of Fedora Core was 6; starting with 7, it's just been Fedora. Where these newcomers find the older form is something I've never learned.) And, of course, on some sites (Slashdot, I'm looking at you!) it's almost considered a badge of honor to misuse the language. It's taken time, but Professor Henry Higgens' lament has come true: "Use proper English, you're regarded as a freak!"

Yorkshire lass eBays cheating boyf's Xmas prezzies

The best thing about this

To me, the best thing about this is the promise to donate the proceeds of the auction to charity. Clearly she's not trying to profit from the breakup. Paris, because she understands the right way to make this kind of gesture.

Aliens more likely to live on moons than planets, say boffins

Tidally Locked? I think NOT.

The planet Mercury is not tidally locked to the Sun and astronomers have known that for over twenty years. It rotates on its axis three times for every two orbits around the Sun. The reason it was thought to be locked is that it's only possible to see surface features from the Earth when the orbital geometry is Just Right, and because of the interaction of Mercury's orbit, Mercury's rotation and the Earth's orbit, Mercury's always got the same face pointing at us when we can get a good look. I'm not sure if this was discovered by space probes or by doppler radar, but I do know that it was learned between the time a short story by Larry Niven (The Coldest Place) was accepted for publication and the time the magazine hit the stands, making it obsolete before it was published.

Top security firm: Default Windows 7 less secure than Vista

Let me get this straight...

The article is suggesting that Microsoft include a sandboxed version of XP with every copy of Windows 7 to provide extra security. Isn't the newer version of Windows expected to be more secure than the older version, not less?

US data firm blows s**t out of server

Grump

Right up until the end I thought they were demonstrating a new way to dispose of sensitive data so that it couldn't be recovered. What a sham! What a disappointment!

Security firm chokes sprawling spam botnet

@Jeremy 3 again

Complaining to the company sending the spam was good, but not good enough. You should have told them that not only don't you ever buy anything that's spamvertized, you never patronize companies who spam you, no matter what the product. You should have told them in no uncertain terms that not only didn't they gain a customer by spamming you, they lost one. Make them understand that spamming has consequences, and ones they don't like. Maybe your telling them won't make them stop, but if enough of us do it, and stick to our guns, companies like that will start forcing themselves out of business.

Think of it as evolution in action...

Does the Help Desk have a future?

User help forums aren't the answer

If you need help, and can wait several hours, or days even, for help, a help forum is a good resource. But if your computer is down, and you need it back up RIGHT NOW, you don't have time to wait. You don't have time to hope that somebody out there knows what to do and is willing to tell you, you need to talk to somebody who can walk you through getting things straightened out, and you need it now.

Not only that, but if your computer can't reach the Internet, how are you going to use the help forums? No, we'll always need help desks, and getting rid of them is a false economy.

Does the Linux desktop need to be popular?

@bojennett

I have no idea how you got the idea that you have to install KDE to be sure you have the libraries for some app you might want. My sister uses Ubuntu, and if she uses their package manager to install a program, and it needs some KDE libraries, well, it installs them as dependencies. The same on my computer, and it runs Fedora. The only time you have to worry about dependency hell is if you're installing SomeRandomProgram you found on the net, and if that's what you're doing, what else would you expect?

FSF launches Windows 7 anti-upgrade letter campaign

Missing the point

Several of you here are missing the point about Linux on the desktop. First, having thousands of apps available doesn't mean you're going to have J. Random Worker installing them on his work computer any more than having thousands of apps for Windows means they'll end up on your LAN because you can lock Linux down just as well as you can Windows. What it means is, you'll probably find that most of your software needs are filled without having to write custom apps.

Second, if you think there's lots of retraining needed for Linux, you've either never used it or you're on the left side of the bell curve. You run Linux from a GUI, just as you do Windows. You use a mouse, you use double-click to open files and right-click to reach a context menu, exactly the same way. And, up at the top of every program you find File, Edit, View and so on, just like you're used to.

My sister is a Windows refugee, now running Ubuntu. I do her tech support, and I can assure you that she needs no more help now, than before she came away from the dark side. Not only that, most of what she needs is OS independent: problems with a website, finding a "lost" file and so on. It's been months since I had to help her with anything Linux specific. On a day-to-day basis, It Just Works.

Last, and especially with the economy as bad as it is now, there's the argument that by switching to Linux instead of upgrading Windows, you're not only saving the cost of upgrading now, you're saving the cost of every, single, future upgrade of Windows, along with no longer needing to pay for (or use) anti-virus software.

Yes, I'm a Linux advocate, but I'm not a fanatic. If you like Windows, and it does what you want, the way you like it, go for it. I'll continue using Linux, TYVM, not only because it does what I want the way I like it, but because it's free. Free as in beer, and when you're as broke as I am, that's quite an important consideration.

Kettle car breaks speed record

Steampunk!

I read the article and couldn't help but thinking that this is a marvelous example of Steampunk in everyday life.

I'd also like to mention that I remember reading that nobody's really sure just how fast a Stanly could go. Its boiler was wrapped in two layers of piano wire for extra reinforcement and the one time they tried to burst one, the pressure valve failed before the boiler. There's also the fact that, supposedly, nobody ever had the balls to open the throttle all the way and leave it there until it stopped accelerating. Probably an urban legend, but it still gives you an idea of what it was capable of.

Did the Vatican suppress hidden 'Galileo Cryptogram'?

Extraodinary claims

Extraordinary claims need extraordinary evidence, and this claim is extraordinary indeed. Not only did Galileo observe Neptune (not unreasonable) but he saw that it moved from day to day and realized that this meant that it was a planet, not a star. And what evidence do we have that he made the connection? "Yet to be discovered." In other words, NONE. No, my friends, this is nothing but an academic looking for attention by pulling the wool over the public's eyes. Move along, move along, nothing to see.

Boffins 'cage the demon' of white phosphorus

Clathrate

Just for the record, the compound they're describing is properly called a clathrate. They've been known and studied for well over a century now, and have a number of uses. I once looked at the list of ingredients for an inhaler, and learned that the medium tended to form a clathrate with the medicine and deliver it that way, breaking down in your lungs and releasing it.

Darth Vader tops movie misquote poll

Another fine misquote

There's another fine misquote left out of the list, although it's probably not been used in years, and it's more the quote of a line that was never said than a mangling of an actual line. I don't care how many voice impersonators mimicked Cary Grant saying, "Judy, Judy, Judy," he never said it. I know, because I've seen Angles Have Wings, the movie it's attributed to, and it's not there.

Top British boffin: Time to ditch the climate consensus

The folly of consensus

True Believers in AGW keep telling us that "there's a consensus now, the debate is over." Alas, that's not how science works because the universe doesn't care what we think is happening, it just does what it's going to do no matter what we expect. Only politics works like that, and that should tell you what AGW is all about: political power.

Not only does the self-proclaimed consensus stifle honest debate and an impartial examination of what's really happening, it's based on a flawed methodology. All of the High Priests keep pointing to computer models, but they neglect to tell you one very important fact: if you give one of those programs data showing what the climate was like twenty years ago and let it run, it won't come up with what's happening now. Not one of them. And yet, these models that demonstrably can't predict the present are expected to predict the future with 100% accuracy. More and more facts are coming out every year that contradict the Gospel of AGW, but the True Believers just change their tune to make those facts "proof." If it's hotter in the summer, that's AGW, if it's colder in the winter, well, that's AGW too. By now, in the sense of Popper, AGW is meaningless because if you listen to the fanatics, there's nothing that can happen that they can't explain as being caused by it.

Windows 7 and the Linux lesson

@Liam Thom

"...and works as efficiently as XP on any decent spec machine."

Considering that this is two versions later, shouldn't it be more efficient? What you wrote above is, at best, damning with faint praise.

Microsoft gears up for Windows 8

@Charles Manning

WinFS is currently delayed by the requirement that it support Duke Nukem Forever. Once that requirement is met, WinFS will be out RSN.

Mac and Linux Bastilles assaulted by new attacks

SELinux

The article talks about most Linux distros turning off SELinux by default. I've been running Fedora since FC 6 and it's always come with it turned on. My sister's been running Ubuntu for over a year now, and that comes with it turned on. I won't say that this disproves the article's claim, but these are two very popular distros I'm talking about, and between them they have a pretty good percentage of all the desktops running Linux. From where I sit, this sounds more like FUD than anything else to me.

'Let me use poo-flinging Roman siege engine against burglars'

An Englishman's home is his castle

From where I'm sitting on America's Left Coast, what he's been doing is taking that old saying a tad too literally. Unless, of course, he actually lives in a castle, in which case the defenses are quite appropriate.

My coat? Oh, it's the one on my tongue.

Microsoft killing free XP support next week

@Thad

Why wait until your computer dies to upgrade from Office 97 to Open Office? Why not upgrade now, and get it over with? In the long run, you'll be happy that you did.

Fedora 11 beta bares chest to all-comers

@AC

The reason the nVidia and ATI drivers aren't available from Fedora is because they're not FOSS, they're binary blobs, and Fedora is strictly OSS. A simple search of their support forum will show you all the pointers you'll ever need to get them installed and running without any real fuss, muss or bother.

And, before I forget, it's "The X Window System," not "XWindows." Please remain at your current location until the Vulture Squadron arrives to confiscate your geek card and apply an appropriate LART.

Conficker botnet remains dormant - for now

Just give them time

Sooner or later, we'll find out what the whole thing is about, and it will be nasty. Not only that, but this won't be the last time this happens, either. People will continue to write better and better worms as long as it's so easy to infect the world's most popular OS. When will people learn, and start demanding that Microsoft design security in from the beginning, like Linux does, instead of tossing it on as an afterthought?

Maybe people who's computers are trashed by things like this should sue Microsoft for creating an attractive nuisance, on the grounds that if they'd secured their software properly this type of thing wouldn't happen. Yes, I know that their EULA expressly denies any warranty, but there are some rights you can't waive, even if you try.

Navy glovepuppets minister in carrier battle against RAF

Uncle Sam's Navy did it right!

This is one thing the US Navy got right the first time: Naval Aviation is completely under their control, and the pilots are officers of the Navy, not the Air Force. This is the only way to be sure that you're not going to lose access to your aircraft because of some turf war back at headquarters or because some politician doesn't like you. The Royal Navy needs to get full, permanent control of the Fleet Air Arm, including transferring all pilots, crew and ground crew from the RAF to the Navy along with the budget to fly and maintain them. Command of the sea is too important in war time to be left to the whims of officers with no seagoing experience.