Posts by BillPhollins

Sun and Oracle: End of a beautiful dream

Netbeans

Not Netbeans! Bloody eclipse then...pah. At least they'll look after Java (I hope). Then again so would IBM, and I gues they'd also kill Netbeans.

Israelis' invulnerable, 60-tonne robot bulldozer force to double

@Matt Bryant

Yes, that's right, Rachael Corrie was the only person to die at the hands of the IDF. I bet she was hard to see in her flourescent jacket by those IDF observers sitting in full view of her and the bulldozer. Maybe one day you'll get off your fat 'ass' and protest about something. Preferably something you understand in a country you can find on a map. Ah, I see your problem there...

Not to mention the amazing revelation that the US supply Israel with stuff to commit warcrimes with. Well, you are well informed. Thanks for reinforcing stereotypes about American Idiots though. Just when you'd gained some respect for electing a non-retarded President as well.

Vista SP2 release candidate gets public airing

Suck it and see

I use Vista x64 and x32 at home. Have done since pre-SP1. I have issues with media player 11 sometimes on the x32 but the laptop is old and underpowered, so not that surprising. x64 runs solid on my desktop, the only problem I've had are software related (i.e. not the OS), no different from XP.

It's fast, stable, better than XP. I know quite a lot of people who were loath to try it, but after a while with Vista they wouldn't go back to XP. I agree that MS have been weak about it and should've stuck it out, but some of the press through enough mud and MS obviously decided that the Vista brand was tarnished, despite the fact it went through the same troubles with 98 and XP.

Time to axe Microsoft's Zune

Blimmin' priorities!

Yeah, they could'e dumped the Zune and kept ACES studio. Surely Flight Sim is more of a flagship than a rubbish version of the Ipod noone wants.

Could the Airbus A380 be the new Air Force One?

Pigs Can Fly

Yeah my uncle built stuff (by which I mean avionic pods etc) for these copters in Denmark. There's 30 of em if I remember correctly.

Yes the title was supposed to be a bacon pun, I think that was a fail.

Is Google's culture grab unstoppable?

@Timothy Bogart

"Come on folks, being successful is not the same as being a monopoly."

Did you actually read the article? Using funds and tactics to prevent competition is behaving as a monopoly, that is what Google are doing in a number of avenues. MS look pretty open these days compared to Google.

Paris, because even she can tell the difference between monopoly and success.

NASA: Google Gulfstreams not science experiments

The GAF and the Battle of Backbone

Not content with reading our emails and photographing our houses, now they're developing their own air force to control our air space. They could launch modified Navy Dorniers off their aircraft carriers, I mean "floating data centres".

Merchants and punters cry foul over Verified by Visa

Foreign cards and confused punters

Another issue with 3D secure is that not everybody uses the same version - we have (or I should say the merchant banks) issues with foreign cards when 3D secure is enabled. They might actually be enrolled, but with a newer or older version of 3D secure from the merchant bank.

The main problem is the banks themselves are clueless about it, so what chance do the customers have? They're not even told their cards are enrolled half the time. Add to that the crapness of some of the card issuers 3d secure pages, I'm not surprised people don't complete transactions. You can tell it's not a phishing site if it looks crap...

As for Amex, other than the problem that nobody has them, they are a pain for merchants who want to use multicurrency because Amex force them to open merchant accounts in each country, which is obviously very expensive (probably the idea...)

Das überdatabase: Inside Wacky Jacqui's motherbrain

@Xander

By Xander Posted Thursday 16th October 2008 14:56 GMT

Unhappy

I remember when this was *the* conspiracy theory. Echelon I believe was the common parlance. A massive system, built under Area 51 which harvested all communication within the US and looked for keywords.

This is no conspiracy theory - it has existed for decades. And it's global, mostly funded by the US NSA, but participants include the usual suspects - USA, UK, Canada, OZ, NZ. Some other European countries joined in too, although, typically, France have their own system.

They cover most transmission types, like fibre optics, satellite, phone etc. It's well documented, read anything by James Bamford and you'll get the (disturbing) picture.

Applet accelerating Java update M.I.A.

Nice

These are updates that have been needed for some time. Nice that they are paying attention to the desktop and applet stuff now, rather than focusing on mobile and enterprise stuff (which is understandable).

Sun opens Java tools in mobile fight back

True, but...

It's not Sun's fault the various Phone manufactureres don't implement Java (or MIDP etc.) properly. Having said that, I'd trust Sun over the increasingly autocratic Google and Apple any day.

Hull falls off the internet

@Michael

"A spokeswoman said: "We had a significant network failure on Saturday starting at about 3pm with service being restored at almost 11pm."

Almost 11pm? Is that in between half past and quarter to?

Ex-Googlers reinvent web search

It's not hot

I tried searching for this in google, it returned lots of articles about it, but not the actual URL. How suspicious...

Also I tried cuil itself yesterday, typed in tcp ip and it found a whopping 0 results. I think I'll stick to google...

Exploit code for Kaminsky DNS bug goes wild

Wooshed woosh

Woosh are open, what a surprise. 202.74.207.10. This is an NZ ISP, so I'll expect a patch in 5 years...

AMD thanks Ruiz for courageous ability to lose money

Hector Principle

Maybe the US version of The Peter Principle should be the Hector Principle

Ubisoft pirates game fix from pirates

Brings a whole new meaning to copy protection

Yep, agreed. There are freetards, there always will be. But if I wanted to swap out disks all day to play games when I have a huge hard drive which exists so I don't have to, then they might as well deliver us a 1980s Amiga and let us swap floppies all day. Very annoying when you've paid 50 quid for the privelege. Problems start when your CD starts to die as well, this happened to me with BF1942.

The DRM is mostly 3rd party apps that have been cracked, so they can easily apply them across all games that use it. And from a technical point of view, I don't really understand why they insist on CD's being present when the .exe that calls it is installed on the HDD. Why is this less secure than storing it (be it a key or dll or whatever) on the HDD when the .exe that the pirates patch is also there? Bizarre.

New York pressures more ISPs into child pornography crackdown

Coumo

This Coumo (pron. coma) guy is like the Jack Thompson of child porn. Of course Time/Warner have no other interest in shutting down usenet binaries that shovel loads of illegal warez and mp3s about. Giganews will be rubbing their mits, though.

Shrinking Sun under the gun

Don't go!

It would be a real pity. The H/W is hot stuff. Those things get punished during testing, I'm not surprised they last so long. I might buy a Sun desktop next, and OpenSolaris looks interesting. Solaris has some clever stuff under the hood.

They are clever people, though I had qualms about McNealy's legal wranglings with MS, that hurt Java more than it hurt MS.

The worst thing about Sun dying would be that they're nice. They bent over backwards to keep employees. They give the prongs to Wall Street. How many companies do that?

It would prove Trump, Ballmer's, Gates mantra that only bastards succeed by bullying their way around, regardless of employees and, you know, R&D and the desire to make better products than the competition, rather than throwing their weight around. Sun are like the reverse of most companies - good products, bad sales and PR. The others are shovelling shit that's dressed up as The Next Big Thing, while Sun have got the crown jewels. It's just that nobody's heard of them.

Please stay alive Sun, my faith in humanity is at stake!

NY street-cleaning truck swallows dog

Only because it wasn't a real dog...

My dog would've kicked it's arse. And then bitten the driver.

NZ hydropower drought could see leccy rationing

Drama

The problem is lack of water in the lakes in the South Island - that'd be the one furthest from the equator- the weather there is like blighty - cold and wet mostly (and snowy in bits). And most people live in the North Island anyway.

Biofuel 2.0 gets off ground in Kiwi airliner trial

Airships

I've seen the future, and it's blimp shaped.

Eclipse slams Sun for 'mockery' of a Java process

Pffft

Good job IBM and Oracle don't indulge in backroom politics. Eclipse is looking old these days anyway. I'm switching to Netbeans soon.

Peter Gabriel cranks his f*ck machine

Yes, I hate Phil Collins too

Actually, Peter and Phil are best friends.

...Live and Loose in Paris

Download al Qaeda manuals from the DoJ, go to prison?

@Aply

"yep if the authorities know which people are in posession of this type of material then that makes me feel a lot safer as I sleep at night.

I think I'd rather have a Goverment that knows everything about everyone rather than a Government knowing nothing and my friends and family not returning home one day."

But the reality of a fascist state (which is what you have described) is that the government knows everything and your friends and family still won't return home. Try googling 'Stasi" ,"Baath party" etc.

Because one day it will be you and your family who own the "wrong" material.

Bletchley Park rattles tin for urgent repairs

Turing Test

I look forward to the day when amanfromMars passes the Turing Test.

TJX employee fired for exposing shoddy security practices

PCI Compliace

I work for a PCI DSS compliant company too. They should be required to change passwords every two months. But what I don't get is how did the hackers obtain unencrypted credit card details? Very few peope (i.e. security officer(s)) should be able to access the credit card details, and even then they will require dual authorisation.

I can only speculate that they were being duplicated in a non-PCI system for some shambolic reason.

Paris, as she knows all about penetration testing.