Posts by Adam

Unpatched PowerPoint flaw spawns Trojan attacks

Not Surprising...

...that software that is almost 10 years old has a security hole in. People should stop expecting security patches in ancient products and upgrade. Software doesn't come with a lifetime warranty.

Recent exploits should make people realise that Vista + Office 2007 aren't just a new paint job and that you are actually paying for a car with a much stronger chassis.

OpenOffice still isn't up to the job. Microsoft Word 2007 is also hideous, but thankfully there's always plain text and/or latex.

OpenOffice

P.S. What's with the ultra crap software model of OpenOffice where if one program (such as Impress) crashes, and it takes down every instance of every other OpenOffice app with it? Surely that can't be good for security either.

P.P.S. There seems to be an abundance of "presentationism" in the corporate world, where a excessive slideshow (which can only be made using clunky Impress and PowerPoint) is used when a simple PDF would suffice.

AssLicker: Hey boss, I've made a snazzy PowerPoint presentation about our sales performance!

Translation: Hey boss, I wasted hours of work time making a crappy presentation when I could have just exported my spreadsheet as a PDF!

So, what's the f**king difference between a Netbook and an ultrathin?

What To Get Instead Of A Crapbook

Ebay: D420 look at completed listings, they go for £250-£300 tops. (OH HAI, LESS THAN £360!)

What you get:

Processor at least 2x faster than Atom

Full size screen (1280x800), not crappy 1024x600

Featherweight (~2kg)

Good build quality

Proper (40GB+) hard drive size

Other components proper spec

Almost as good battery life (~3 hours)

I'm sure there are other 12" ones around, just stay away from these crapbooks. You get what you pay for. Most of your money probably goes on the retailer, packaging, transport rather than your actual item if you buy one of the cheapos.

Firefox went ton up in bugs in 2008

JavaScript Vulnerabilities?

Anyone know how many JavaScript vulnerabilities there were for the major browsers in 2008? Would be interesting to compare the to Flash and Java.

World of Warcraft: 'The crack cocaine of the computer world'

Narrow View...

This guy seems to have a very narrow view of game addiction. I have personally been "addicted" to EVE-Online and WoW. People have KILLED in real life over items in other games like Everquest. What is addiction, is it not being able to stop? Maybe I don't want to stop? I bet people who are addicted to crack cocaine *do* want to stop being addicted, that's the difference... I recently asked myself "Do I want a very good degree mark, or do I want to play WoW?" I chose the former, and had no problems putting myself on a 4 month /afk - because that's what I WANTED to do.

Maybe WoW just scoops up all the publicity cause it has 11 million players, and is therefore statistically likely to have the vast majority of people dying from "addiction" to it.

Researcher warns of data-snooping bug in Apple's Safari

Firefox FTW!

I use Firefox on Windows (sorry but WINE is not good enough for games!), and I can't remember a time when there's been a security hole in it which wasn't plugged before I heard about it.

Nuff said.

Latest Firefox beta gets touchy on Mac

Release Date For FF 3.1b3

https://wiki.mozilla.org/Releases

"early Feb, 2009 (estimated)"

So don't expect a 3.1 release until at least March-April.

NYC invites 911 crime-busting snaps

Software For $250,000?

$250,000? Bargain - would have cost taxpayers more like $250,000,000 in the UK.

Hitachi slips past Fujitsu with speedy 320GB laptop drive

113 quid?

$220 (~£113). ®

Don't you mean $220 (~£220). ®

Stupid retail markups in this country.