* Posts by frymaster

385 publicly visible posts • joined 18 Feb 2008

Page:

Microsoft claims Firefox- and Chrome-whopping IE8 speeds

frymaster

@neoc

And you don't think the large crowds of online-game-playing compulsively-tweaking-their-OS folk would mind when, upon uninstalling IE8 "to speed up boot times" or similar, Steam stopped working? or anything else that uses embedded IE?

BBC botnet investigation turns hacks into hackers

frymaster

@AC, Chris

"What's even more offensive is not prosecuting the company that supplied the OS that was so easily compromised in the botnet attack. Now what was the name again, I notice how it was never mentioned in the original article."

If you think non-windows OSs can't be compromised by stupid users running dodgy programs, you're asleep, and aren't paying attention to your secuirty mailing lists, and I hope to God you aren't responsible for computer security in your job.

"The BBC contravene the computer misuse law in the name of education and seemingly walk away scott free."

I'm not trying to say they _won't_ get away with it, but that news story was posted at 5am, 9 hours ago. It's hardly a huge miscarriage of justice that there hasn't been evidence collected and a decision to prosecute made at this stage, is it?

Failed probation system 'masterclass in sloppy management'

frymaster
Heart

<3 NAO

That is all.

MS coughs to hokey-cokey IE8 option in Windows 7

frymaster

Alternative reason

While I it probably _is_ to do with EU problems, it could aso be to silence the computing equivalent of the 500-quid-for-a-hi-fi-power-cable crowd that like to tweak windows by turning lots of services off. And if I was ultra-anal about what browser I used, maybe I'd want badly behaving programs to error rather than bring up IE when they fail to respect my browser choice (but I doubt it)

MPs told PGP 'incompatible' with Parliament network

frymaster

@william henderson

"if they've nothing to hide, they've nothing to worry about"

Of course they've got things to hide. Cynicism aside, emails from constituents to MPs should be considered confidential.

Polish Spitfire shoots down BNP

frymaster

@AC 12:56

"current immigration levels are far too high"

which has sod all to do with most of the Polish in this country. Migrant workers =/= immigrants. And where I live, recession or no, most of the local chavs turn their noses up at the jobs the Polish end up getting. All other things being equal, a local applicant has a better chance than a Polish applicant, simply because you don't have to hone up their language skills. Yet many jobs are taken by Polish. What does that tell you? That no quality local applicants exist.

The Polish come over here when they're young, pay taxes, rent houses, spend money in our shops and bars, and bugger off home when they get older, meaning they don't cost the NHS much, if any, money. Seems like a good deal to me

LG 830 "Spyder" phones recalled for dropping 911 calls

frymaster

@AC

"All cell phones sold in the US in the last 5 years or so have GPS. In the US I believe it's a federal requirement. You can disable it for all but 911 calls if you wish."

Sorry but this is mince. The original iPhone, for example, doesn't have GPS. I think you're getting confused with the triangulation system that tries to pinpoint your location by what mobile cell you are in. A lot better than a country-wide guess, but not GPS by a long shot.

Microsoft talks open-source love amid TomTom Linux 'war'

frymaster

Responding to many

"As a part time GPL software developer I don't want them to use anything of mine" - That's another way of saying you don't want software to be open source any more. That's what "open" means, y'know

"Linux is worth billions" - yes, but there's nothing with money that's easy to sue

"If modern, newbie targeted Linux distros (e.g. Ubuntu) were any easier to install, they would be offering you sexual favours at the end. " - very true. But Windows still deals with post-install hardware changes better, at the user level

Microsoft woos open sourcers with Visual Studio 2010

frymaster

As the man says...

Developers developers developers developers...

Microsoft need to remember their business is driven by Active Directory networks and the developer ecosystem, with MS Office a close third. The more they remember that and the less they try to pander to the home market / lock down windows to prevent home pirates but end up breaking the thing, the better it'll be.

Google backs EU's Microsoft antitrust battle

frymaster

So what do they suggest?

People buying browsers in the shops? ahaha....

Microsoft bundling other browsers? MS are paranoid about that sort of thing... they've licenced code in the past but I don't think they'd be willing at all to just randomly stick another company's app in the base install without changes.

State bill would turn RFID researchers into felons

frymaster

I honestly don't see what the fuss is about

Researchers in other fields have to gain consent before proceeding. This law doesn't stop them looking at their own passports, it doesn't stop them buying an RFID underground card and researching it, it doesn't even stop them standing on a street corner and extracting personal-identity-free aggragate statistics (for testing the scale/scope of vulnerabilities)

Philips prices up 21:9 ratio 'cinema' TV

frymaster

Fantastic!

Now all we need is some media...

oops

Behind IE 8's big incompatibility list

frymaster

@Dan Moore / Stuart Duel

"How come all of those sites work in Firefox, Crome, Opera etc? All of those largely follow web standards much more than IE, so why is it a problem when IE starts?"

Older (ie all current) versions of IE have pretty Epic Fails when rendering standards-compliant websites. So those websites, not wanting to scare away Joe Default Browser, have special-case code so that on IE, and IE only, the site renders "differently" (ie renders the same as the other browsers). So when ie8 comes along, it hits the ie-only code, and looks like ass as a result.

The problem is, for reasons that mystify me, the most popular methods for special-casing IE seem to be the most hackiest, and the least flexible. (using CSS hacks, for instance, or using conditional comments - the proper way - but specifying "IE" rather than specifying specific versions)

Also note that "standards compliant browser" is a loaded tern. Even CSS2 isn't a "standard" yet, and _no_ browser is totally CSS3 compliant (and CSS3 has a decent chance of changing, at least in subtle ways, before becoming fixed)

The root cause of the problem? Older versions of IE for causing the whole mess in the first place. But that doesn't mean the hordes of webdevs who hacked around the issues but can't be bothered to either globally add one header to the web config, or add one meta tag to their pages* (or even, oh my gosh, actually fix their sites), aren't stupid too.

*To make IE8 behave as IE7, which they've made their pages hacky to support

Abba star slates 'lazy, stingy' Pirate Bay fans

frymaster

Hypocrisy

Record companies are greedy and their products overpriced, fair enough.

Copyright terms are too long, fair enough.

The Pirate Bay isn't technically illegal, fair enough.

Piracy isn't stealing, it's technically "copyright infrigement" or whatever, fair enough.

All irrelevant.

Whether or not it fits the legal definition of stealing, it's still ripping off someone's hard work. Whether or not there is a law to cover what the pirate bay does, by no stretch of the imagination can anyone look at it and say that it _shouldn't_ be illegal.

If you think the product of record or movie companies is overpriced, you have the right _not to buy their product_. You don't have the right to moan about their greed and then rip them off, and then say it's the record companies fault "for not changing their business model"

Apart from anything else, you are _never_ going to convince companies to change when they can go to any torrent site and see how popular their stuff is. They will always look at the downloads and think how much money they could be making if they could eliminate the piracy and get just a fraction of the lost sales back. If you genuinely think the model is broken, break it honestly, by not buying or stealing the product. Companies will soon learn.

Win 7 and smartphones targeted in Pwn2own challenge

frymaster

@aL

iirc it starts off as bare-OS, and as time passes they relax the criteria (like saying "there's a browser with xyz plugins, and we'll be visiting website abc which you control" which was quite far down the list, iirc)

Phorm: BT system 'most definitely' online by end of 2009

frymaster

re:lawyers

"i.e. can I terminate the contract with BT because they are doing this without my permission?"

Definately, but remember they haven't done it yet. You can't terminate because you believe a change in the service to be coming, you have to wait for something more concrete than that. If and when they finally do get around to implementing it your lock-in period might have expired anyway.

Just because you don't have the legal _right_ to cancel without penalty doesn't mean you can't do it anyway, though. If you phone up and say you're cancelling because of Phorm, chances are the support staff will be so sick of having to pretend they like the idea that they'll let you cancel without making you pay for the priviledge

Geeks.com settles charges claiming its security was crap

frymaster

Hang on...

" Payment card industry regulations require merchants to follow a maze of procedures designed to protect card data as it's stored on servers and zapped to authorization services"

Then why do the authorisation services _let_ you connect to them without using SSL or similar?

Doesn't excuse these people in any way, shape or form, but still...

Gears of War grind to halt

frymaster

@seriously, paul

"date expiration DRM that can be circumvented by putting your hardware clock back? No really, seriously? LMAO"

no, because it wasn't the date part of the DRM that was circumvented. It was the date part of the in-built MS crypto, which is meant to protect the user from external threats, not stop the user accessing their own data.

Is the root cause of this a fault in the DRM? No. Is this because of some "killswitch" in the DRM - No (DRM which stops you using the software before a certain date does so by going online and checking for it, it doesn't take your word for it). Do either of these "No"s matter? Also no, because it's still an example of how a DRM system can leave you high and dry. If the certificate had been for 5 years, there's a half-decent chance that no-one would have been able, or bothered, to fix this

"Whether you want to call it DRM or not, it's hostile code. If it's designed to get in my way, not help me, I don't want it on my computer"

No, it's code designed to make the game run. You can uninstall, say, starforce, quite easily. It just does you no good, because it's needed. As long as people to resort to hyperbolic statements like "DRM is malware" then the issue will be treated as seriously as "meat is murder", ie it DOESN'T HELP

Fresh privacy fears over IE 8 Suggested Sites

frymaster

@Ponder Stebbins

"Peer Guardian and block all MicroCrap sites"

Yes, because hacks based on blocking implementation details are so much better than just TURNING THE DAMN THING OFF. If you're a big company, than you mandate that by group policy. Sorted.

DEC 'hacker' questions McKinnon political bandwagon

frymaster

He's missing the point

Boris is criticising the one-way nature of uk-us extradition, and objecting to the charactarisation of the attack as a terrorist incident. Not really the same, although Daniel Cuthbert's a helluva lot more deserving of sympathy than mckinnon is.

But, essentially, what he's saying is "you can't try to solve a problem, because in the past you didn't completely solve this problem, so it would be unfair on the people that had to endure this problem if you were to remove it now" That's an argument that comes up a lot, especially around computing folk. ("I'm cloning this hard drive because I suddenly realised we don't have any backups" "But that's not a good backup procedure! Don't do it!" "Agreed, but isn't it better than what we've got, and will do until we get a proper procedure in place?" "But that's not a good backup procedure!" ad infinitum)

He got overlooked. That's a shame, but that's no reason not to try harder now.

Microsoft to act on IE8 'show stoppers'

frymaster

@AC - 8th time lucky

Any chance of find-as-you-type?

Undo close tab?

Yup

"Hands up who's had a ister.co.ukwwwthereg moment or similar."

never had that so can't comment

"We’re interested in reports of critical issues (e.g. security, backwards compatibility, completeness with respect to planned standards work, or robustness)" - from http://blogs.msdn.com/ie/archive/2009/01/26/internet-explorer-8-release-candidate-now-available.aspx - implies that if the proposed standard changes before ie8 is released, they _may_ well update ie 8.... if MS run true to form, they won't make page-display-behavior changes after release, though

I'm a sceptic now, says ex-NASA climate boss

frymaster

"The UK is warmer than it was"

The problem is that local weather does not necessarily reflect global climate

Especially with the UK being abnormally warm for its latitude, thanks to the Gulf Stream and hot air from the continent, it's possible that global cooling could cause the UK to be hotter, or global warming to cause it to be cooler, or anything at all really, because while you can guess what will happen to the weather patterns, you can't really _know_ unless it happens (prediction is only part of science, experimentation is required to verify, and you can't really do that)

My personal view is that mankind has certainly pumped out enough stuff to possibly have an effect on the climate, but I'm not sure what, and the evidence isn't conclusive, and by the nature of things nothing can be proved anyway, but not being able to predict how we might screw things up isn't an excuse for not trying to prevent it, when there's at least circumstantial evidence that said screw-up might be happening. Also, with fossil fuels being strictly limited (even if we don't know what that limit is) then we'd better work out the most efficient way of making use of them and working out where we can do without, because we're going to have to some day or other.

Oh, and people who equate "biofuel" with "green" should be whacked upside the head with a clue hammer. It still results in the burning of hydrocarbons, and it also requires lots of land to grow (which implies either deforestation and water use, or a reduction in land for food). "A possible solution to fossil fuels", yes. "Green", no.

O2 and Be customers suffer network congestion

frymaster

skewed logic somewhere

"O2 and Be broadband subscribers are reporting severe network slowdown in the evening and that some online games are unplayable, sparking rumours the pair have deployed bandwidth-throttling equipment"

that would seem to be a sign that they aren't using any network management. If they _were_ then presumably some services would run OK at the expense of others. as everything seems to be suffering equally, that's not the case

perhaps they need to start implementing throttling then? before the predictable mass of people jump on that and say "no, their infrastructure should be able to cope with what stupid customers erroneously think they are paying for when they aren't", it's pretty much a given that demand for bandwidth will rise to fill all available supply. So, _as well as_ presumably beefing up the network hardware where it's most overused, they should start prioritising certain traffic - gaming / voip / web, say, over other kinds - ftp / newsgroups / torrents.

realistically, given the relative bandwidth usage of those, that results in about a 5% drop in your bulk download speeds in return for everything else being usable

Linux to spend eternity in shadow of 'little blue E'

frymaster

Another problem with desktop linux in the office...

...is that there's no AD. Yes, I'm well aware that by customising your linux build appropriately you could end up with a multi-user multi-computer system that enforces settings centrally - but you'd basically be doing this from scratch, it would take ages, and probably wouldn't be as good.

the centrally-controlled multiuser bit is simple enough, but it's the policy management... hell, even just the better ACL system with ntfs/ad compared to linux. Given a group of users who could adapt equally well to linux or windows, OOo or ms office, and given the ability to put any money saved straight into my back pocket, I'd still choose windows and AD for any generic office. And yes, I use linux servers (and like it) and dabble* in linux on the desktop (and am ambivalent to it)

* My routine consists of: install latest ubuntu, install 3d drivers, attempt to get working with multiple monitors, end up hacking xorg config file from the command line to get it to work, realise linux is still not ready for the desktop, wait another 6 months.

Extreme porn law goes live - are you ready?

frymaster

re: smash with a hammer

more to the point, there's probably _more_ recoverable information if you do that than if you do a simple disk wipe...

Take a hammer to your hard drive, shrieks Which?

frymaster

Which? are idiots

They obviously used some simple file deletion tool rather than actually wiping the drive.

Any complete drive wipe prevents software-only solutions, but possibly not hook-up-a-sensor-to-the-drive-circuitry-and-read-off-the-analogue-value-of-each-bit solutions

3 pass random fill will pretty much prevent that, and possibly prevent magnetic force microscopy (which may or may not be actually used by intelligence agencies, but certainly isn't used by identity thieves#

This is sufficient for drives you're passing on. For ones that are going in the bin anyway, I suppose hitting them with a hammer AS WELL can't hurt, but physical damage certainly isn't as effective as a proper wipe. (For people saying that newer drives are glass and shatter easily, people mostly throw away older drives). I only attack drives which have failed so badly I can't boot my computer up with them connected

Getting animated about a 6,000 core Soho supercomputer

frymaster

Dell for business

Totally agree for this. I'm willing to concede that their consumer tech support may suck donkey balls (I don't have, and would never personally buy, a Dell) but for business they are top rate. Typical support conversation "You say the laptop drive is broken? OK. You want to keep it so you can securely dispose of it? OK. I'll send out a replacement."

Their stuff is more expensive, but you get laptops that are easier to support from a hardware POV (a lot easier to get to the HDD, for example), and decent support. It's a more economical use of my time if I know I can get someone out to replace a laptop keyboard, for example. At home the equation is different (my time counts as "free" then) and my statutory rights are enough

EA punts SecuROM-less games on Steam

frymaster

@jamie?

So online limited activations with securom is OK in your book but Steam is just a step too far?

Personally neither especially troubles me, but I'm struggling to see how a service where you carry all your games around with you, needing only a username and password to re-download them at any time, is worse than a system that combines both physical media drawbacks (having to not lose the disk) plus online drawbacks (having to activate) plus a limited number of installs.

Microsoft gives XP another four months to live

frymaster

For all Vista's alleged faults...

...it's still a helluva lot better than XP. Does it solve world hunger? No. Does it prevent global Warming? No. Is it better than its predecessor? Yes. So what's the problem?

Why port your Firefox add-on to Internet Explorer?

frymaster

@1st AC

"So, if I read this write, the Microsoft party line"

Yes, absolutely. Anything a microsoft person says, at any time, in public, must obviously be official policy mandated at the highest level. Microsoft employees are not permitted to have indepentant thought and, therefore, can't hold opinions.

Brit ISPs censor Wikipedia over 'child porn' album cover

frymaster

Re: Neil Gaiman article

All that article says basically is "if we have to define what we can and can't say in a legalistic way, then it is not only likely but inevitable that some of the definitions will be unfair to valuable art". This I agree with. But he then goes on the imply that means you can't therefore enforce that definition, because some people will be disadvantaged.

I disagree. That's like saying threre shouldn't be a speed limit (whatever value it might be), because it disadvantages people with the ability to drive safer at a higher speed, or there shouldn't be a minimum age of consent, because some people are well adjusted and mature enough to be able to make those decisions at a lower age.

There are already limitations in our speech - slander, verbal abuse etc.

Oh, re: lack of consistency: This appears to be a disease especially affecting people in IT. There's a notion that because we can't do _everything_, doing _something_ is therefore "unfair". I'd contend doing nothing is even worse.

Do I think there's been an almighty cock-up in this specific instance? Pretty much definitely. Do I feel that in instances like this, erring on the side of caution and sorting it out later is better than doing nothing? Definitely

US couple sue over McNudes

frymaster

Strange view of morality

A lot of people seem to be saying that because the guy was careless with his phone, this somehow justifies leaking personal intimate photos of someone else, and either a) leaking their contact details, or b) making abusive phone calls... It doesn't

Let's make an analogy here... Let's say I was to, in violation of my employer's security policy, copy company data onto my laptop, which I then left in McDonalds. Let's say I get it returned, but subsequently find the data has been leaked on the internet by the manager of the store. I would, quite rightly, be fired, for having that data on my laptop in the first place. Does that mean the manager would then be told "The guy was an idiot so you're not getting the book thrown at you" ? Hell no!

The guy probably deserves an amount of ridicule for this (his wife does not) but I fail to see why that means they don't get to sue McDonalds, although the sucess will hinge around who had access to the phone. (If it can be proved that the images were copied after the manager spoke to the guy, he deserves the book thrown at him, because that either means he did it, or he let his crew play around with someone else's property)

Congratulations, Barack — Now fix your websites

frymaster

Why the derision?

Does someone seriously think an external javascript file outside your control is a good thing to be loading on every client that visits the admin interface of you web app? Does everything believe that not only does Google corporately do no evil, but so does every single one of its employees, and this situation is never likely to change? Does someone, in fact, have a good reason for needing demographic info from your admin page anyway? (Note: "The google analystics code is in the header we include in each web page" is not a good reason)

Is this a problem? No. Is it a potential problem? Yes, but unlikely. Is it easily avoided? Yes. Are there any downsides to eliminating the potential problem? No. Seems clear-cut to me.

Employees sue for unpaid Windows Vista overtime

frymaster

15 minutes?

My 2-year-old-computer takes 2 minutes + login typing time to finish booting, and I've got 2 large apps and many smaller ones on auto-start. If the pay is tied to logging in, then only the time before logging in counts. My PC was bought before Vista was released. So you'd expect any computer with vista on it to be newer, and hence faster, than mine.

There's some serious fail going on somewhere.

NASA's curious climate capers

frymaster

When will they learn...

Do I think the figures have been adjusted either deliberately or subconciously to support the idea of climate change? No

Do I think NASA is acting in good faith? Probably yes

Does that actually matter? Hell no... whatever their _intentions_ are, you do real science by exposing the raw data and detailing what calculations you've made. Not only does doing anything else subtract from anything you use the data for, it makes it almost impossible for someone _else_ to use the data for a different purpose.

This is just not scientific :(

Linux weaktops poised for death by smartphone

frymaster

I see why people are objecting but the readership of El Reg isn't representative

Money permitting, I'd quite happily have a smartphone, a weaktop, a laptop and a desktop, because they fit different niches (very portable, quite portable, I want to do serious work elsewhere, I want to play games), but I am not typical. Joe Public isn't going to want all 4, and your average businessman will probably have 2. One has to make phone calls, and the other has to be suitable for using in his office, so that's a smartphone and a laptop then. The other niches don't have enough extra benefit, especially considering the smartphone, the weaktop and the two computers will have at least 3 different UIs.

Lib Dem stripogram councillor quits politics

frymaster

@AC @ 15:35

That would only work if we had whole populations worth of jobs going spare. And if we did, we'd be screaming out for migrant workers, especially from the EU, because since every EU citizen is allowed to work in this country, they're almost all on the books.

I dunno, bloody europeans, coming over here, paying our taxes.... oh, wait.

A group of people who pay tax in our country when they're at their healthiest, and who leave the country again before they become a drain on the NHS, are a good thing to have imo

Microsoft's 'M' treads on US veterans' toes

frymaster

oh for gods sake

....some of these people must really have to work hard at getting upset by this sort of thing. I really really _REALLY_ doubt microsoft's codenamed their latest research project as M as part of some kind of master marketing plan to fool users of MUMPS into accidentally buying microsoft products. Though come to think of it, from what I hear MUMPS is an absolute pig to use, so maybe they should ;)

Top aero boffin: Green planes will be noisy planes

frymaster

@Classic Lewis Page!

On the contrary... it seems to be in a lot of group's interests (espcially big business) to conflate any and all issues of pollution, carbon emissions, fossil fuel use etc. together, for the purposes of pulling the wool over people's eyes. How many people in this country, for instance, probably equate "biofuel" with "green", just because it doesn't burn fossil fuels? (It still produces carbon emissions, plus you have the land needed to grow the stuff).

A proper response to the growing effect our civilisation has on our environment globally is needed, and to do that requires joined-up-thinking and an understanding of _all_ the issues, not just those it is trendy to tubthump about.

IPS dismissed 14 over data protection

frymaster

agreed

obviously passports are necessary, and IPS must be commended for catching, doing something about, and publicising (at least some of) their bad apples, and it implies that at least have some kind of system for detecing this kind of abuse

nevertheless, this is why a joined-up identity system is a bad idea. regardless of whether or not you think it won't be open to abuse deliberately by the government, it _will_ be open to abuse by people taking backhanders to look up details on behalf on any number of shady folk

Century-old hydropower plant to run on fudge

frymaster

Good point well made

intelligent stewardship of resources requires joined-up thinking, and it's no good making a policy decision to do things a certain way ("we want to reduce carbon emissions", for example) and then ignore most of the system.

the point has nothing to do with some random heritage project, mind you :P

New Scientist goes innumerate in 'save the planet' special

frymaster

theory versus practice

@Dave re: WTF: No, he's saying they are limited but that doesn't necessarily mean you can't support some growth (and certainly not infinite growth)

However, while I agree that theoretically growth needn't result in more resources being used, in practice it pretty much does

with that out of the way, I agree with everything else in the article :)

Silverlight for mobile: what's in, what's out

frymaster

re: fragmentation

Some good points, but I disagree about needing it to be open-source. Microsoft's strengths lie in having an open _platform_ (ie making it easy for people to use and add stuff on*) which is all that's necessary.

If nokia, for example want an API for nokia-specific stuff, they should be able to do that without needing source code access.

* if you think about it, a lot of improvements MS has made recently involve it taking back control of things rather than letting third-party programs alter them if they want to.

Windows 7 early promise: Passes the Vista test

frymaster

Re: I like vista

Agreed. The "one step back" comment is presumably because it apparently needs a higher minimum amount of RAM to work well. I say apparently because my computer is almost 2 years old, and so already has 2 gigs of RAM.

I used XP(because that's what I had a licence for) until about 6 months ago. On my hardware it is a helluva lot more stable, and at leat as fast, as XP, and because of the improvements it is for all intents and purposes faster, as things are easier to do.

re: DRM. Yes, microsoft could take out DRM components. There's 2 main things - the stuff for ensuring your copy of vista is legit(which I've only had trouble with on XP, ironically, and not for about 2 and a half years) which is hardly a major problem*, and the stuff for playing protected content. So if you take it out, you can't _play_ said content. I refer moaners to Linus Torvalds' infamous comments on this subject, and what a dumb idea restricting the ability to play such content is.

*assuming your copy is, of course, legit. Anyone with a cracked copy who moans about anti-cracking measures warrants nothing but derision

Police poison speed debate with fuzzy figures

frymaster

The consequences of our actions

you break the law (by speeding) I don't see why you should complain about attempts to catch you

speed cameras are used _because_ they don't require highly trained (and therefore expensive# people to stand there, because those people might be needed elsewhere, and because, by members of the public continually getting caught by them, there's a demostrable need for them.

if noone speeded there'd be no point in speed cameras. If you think the speed limits are wrong, then vote in someone that'll change them. No politician wants to change them? Probably because most people disagree with you. Them's the breaks.

note: 320,000 a year does not equal 10 people at 32,000 a year each. Admin overheads (like, say, a building for them to leave their paperwork and change, never mind administrating PAYE and national insurance) add more than you'd think

Microsoft sued in China for black screen of death

frymaster

Not got a lot of sympathy

Presumably his copy of windows is, in fact, fake, which in my mind makes any outrage he might be feeling a bit laughable.

"How dare I be faced to live up to the consequences of my actions" is not a slogan I can get behind.

There's other reasons to not like WGA - it's false-positived legit installs in the past, for instance, but this isn't one of them.

Oh, and if you don't like WGA? Don't install it. Automatic updates are off by default for a reason. Set it to download but not install, de-select WGA, and tell it not to notify you again. Not difficult. Sueing microsoft for auto-installing software after ticking a box allowing microsoft to auto-install software is rather stupid.

My personal view on piracy itself is a big fat "meh" - I'm not 14 any more and so I try to buy things myself, but I don't go on a vendetta or stop speaking to those who do. Those who pirate and then whine about anti-piracy measures, however, deserve nothing but scorn.

The netbook newbie's guide to Linux

frymaster

Very clear :)

It's pitched just a leetle bit below my level but this is very well put together :) There's nothing I hate more than guides that basically say "to do x, perform magical incantation y" and don't explain what's going on

more of this sort of stuff, please (even if this specific series is unlikely to tell me, personally, anything)

Hubble's 486 back-up springs into life

frymaster

Re: It wasnt me

"Thats not the sort of development cycle or part heritage that NASA (or any other space agency) would normally fly with"

I seem to recall they upgraded the computer at the same time as they were giving the hubble its spectacles, so it didn't have the 486 in it from launch

Woman sues EA over 'secret' Spore DRM

frymaster

A bit of perspective here...

...many games install system software (mostly things like codecs) that aren't removed when the game is uninstalled, because the uninstaller _can't_ know if any other game is using them (just like the Spore uninstaller can't know if you need the Securom drivers for Bioshock). Obnoxious copy protection is over 20 years old now (who remembers lenslock?) so let's stop pretending it's new and/or a temporary aberration that will go away if we all hold hands and sing Kum Ba Yah at the publishers.

Is Securom evil? No, no more than Starforce. (Well, _slightly_ evil because if I've used Process Explorer at all I have to reboot before playing securom games). Does it clog up your PC? Nope.

Is this treating customers like criminals? No more than being asked for ID on the way into a club. Is the way EA are using the DRM over-the-top and paranoid? Oh yes. Are most publishers of mainstream games (gotta love my bet-hedging there :D) likely to move away from at least one form of DRM? Oh no...

About all we can do is find a _mutually_ acceptable solution. There is _ZERO_ chance of everyone suddenly coming round to the no-DRM point of view, especially when they see all the piracy. (And yes we all know only a tiny fraction of pirated copies would otherwise translate into sales, but how would _you_ feel about getting ripped off in that situation?)

I think I may have said this before, but I think Steam may be the way forward. The actual copy protection on Steam is laughably bad, but what it _can_ do is pre-launch-day control, where the physical data on the disk (or on the drive via direct download) is encrypted, and the decryption keys only released at launch day. I have a theory that set of people keen enough to download the game before it's released have a higher proportion of people who would buy the game instead.

VMware renders multitasking OSes redundant

frymaster

single-app per VM

"So, in this modern day and age, is it still not possible to configure a Windows server to reliably fulfil more than one task? I ask this because we are happily running a linux box as a combined file/email/intranet server and we all know that proprietary software is supposed to be better."

Perfectly possible; I've got several. It's only vitualisation which leads one to consider one app per machine.

The theory is, you can separate each kind of service so that one getting clobbered won't take down everything, you can use VM backups to roll back, and if the app needs more resources it's easy to migrate it to a different VM host.

Basically virtualisation reduces maximum capacity of your servers ( a lot more overhead per app) but more importantly reduces overcapacity as well. You need to have the right kind of requirements for it to be worthwhile

Page: