Posts by Dale Richards

The art of software murder

PSP7 vs. PS CS3

Paint Shop Pro 7 was a legendary piece of software, and in my honest opinion it still pisses all over Photoshop CS3 for speed, ease of use and plain usefulness.

Foxit Reader is an excellent find, too. I first installed it a little over 6 months ago, but even now I still find myself letting out a little smug chuckle every time I click on a PDF and it opens immediately. I remember being a little concerned about potential advertising in the latest version, although I tend to get very twitchy whenever I see anything that even remotely resembles an ad...

UK.gov loses driver ID data

@Red Bren

I would imagine Paris knows a thing or two about the consequences of data leakage already...

Random number bug blights FreeBSD

Hardware RNG

Isn't there a device out there that samples atmospheric background radiation and uses that as a random number seed? Or something?

I probably could have Googled it in the time it took to write this comment, you know.

Rove investigator erases his PCs - to kill computer virus

Re: He PAID for that?

That was my first thought, also. By hiring someone in to do this job, he's left a paper trail and made himself look incredibly suspicious.

There is plenty of software available freely on the Internet that can perform this 7-pass DoD wipe (and even the also-mentioned 35-pass Gutmann wipe) without cost and without arousing suspicion.

BitTorrent site Demonoid.com downed by Canadian record industry

Canadian Music

I'd say Canada's current musical output is among the best, if not the best in the World (and I've never even been to Canada).

Alexisonfire, Arcade Fire, Bedouin Soundclash, Bell Orchestre, The Besnard Lakes, Broken Social Scene, Death From Above 1979, Feist, Final Fantasy, Godspeed You! Black Emperor, Emily Haines, Holy Fuck, Metric, Most Serene Republic, The New Pornographers, Our Lady Peace, Stars, Tegan and Sara, Venetian Snares, Martha Wainwright.... These are just the ones I listen to. There are still plenty of others. Obviously, most of these have little, if anything to do with the CRIA, but the point is there is a lot of good music coming from Canada.

It's a bit stupid to judge the whole of the Canadian entertainment industry just on Bryan Adams, Shania Twain and Police Academy. It's like judging the whole of the British entertainment industry based on Chas and Dave, Cliff Richard and Little Britain.

Gatwick reduced to anarchy by 'computer glitch'

UTC?

Shouldn't this kind of system be using UTC to store the current time and the time of all departures and arrivals? The time should only be converted to local time for display. If this were the case, then even if there was a "glitch" and the time wasn't being displayed correctly, all of the ETA times would still be accurate.

Dot, squiggle, plop

Nice idea

But it would make phishing so much easier. It wouldn't exactly be difficult to trick people into entering their login credentials to the domain "еЬаy.com" thinking they were getting "ebay.com"

Digital downloads get pop-tastic applause

Harvey Danger

If my memory serves me correctly, Harvey Danger are "that band who did that song that was in American Pie that ended up being the theme tune to Peep Show".

Macs are more secure: official

I call BS

"Apple identified 114,000 viruses that target PCs and that it did not claim Macs were entirely immune to viruses."

The 114,000 viruses Apple have identified are not targeting PCs - they are targeting Windows. Since you can quite happily run Windows on an Intel Mac (and most of the Mac users I know are doing this in a dual-boot configuration), these viruses are a threat to any computer running Windows, including PCs and Macs alike.

Of course, Macs are also susceptible to the handful of Mac OS X viruses out there. Although these don't actually account for any real risk in the real world, it's fair to say that PCs are "immune" to these viruses since Mac OS X refuses to run on them, Therefore, if you wanted to be really picky, you'd have to say there are about 114,000 viruses for PCs and about 114,010 viruses for Macs (this doesn't include viruses for Linux, which can run on either platform).

In conclusion, Apple's adverts are misleading. This is not a "Mac vs. PC" issue, but rather "Mac OS vs. Windows". Apple should have been forced to make this clear in their ads.

Student expelled for high school Counter-Strike map

My University

At the university at which I study, one of the more popular courses is Computer Games Design, and for the first year one of the assignments is to create a Counter-Strike map based on the university campus.

As Chris said, when you're setting out to create maps (and especially if you're a little inexperienced) it's far easier to base them on locations with which you are familiar, and for students the most likely candidate by far is your school/college/uni.

This story is outrageous and I really hope it doesn't traumatise the boy too much.

Dell's dance with Ubuntu: True love or farce?

Windows Tax

Kevin Hall,

I think the primary reason people want to buy computers with Linux pre-installed is to avoid paying the "Windows Tax". Sure, you could get a computer with Windows, wipe it and install Linux, but you've already paid for a Windows license.

Technically, a computer with Linux pre-installed should be cheaper than one with Windows, but that decision rests with Dell. Even if they charge the same price though, many people will still be happier that they're no longer artificially inflating Windows sales figures.

'IE8 compatible' - the cure for web standards headache?

The Firefox method?

Would it be so difficult for IE8 to do what Firefox does (and other browsers, I'm sure)? That is, to render pages in "quirks mode" for backwards compatibility (i.e. compatibility with backwards browsers like IE) but switch to standards compliance mode when rendering a document with a valid DOCTYPE declaration?

While I'm sure that will messy up the Trident code a little, maybe even requiring two almost completely separate layout engines in IE, but Microsoft have made their own standards-ignorant bed and now they have to lie in it, so to speak.

Program Names govern admin rights in Vista

Wow

I find it disconcerting that this non-issue has sparked a) a "news" item on El Reg; and b) so many mindless comments.

Firstly, this feature is NOT a security feature, nor is it documented as such. It is purely for compatibility with non-Vista-aware applications. The decision to run something with or without admin rights is still left up to the user, regardless of the name of the executable.

Secondly, this is NOT a security hole, as was suggested here:

"Trojan authors will not "work around" the "problems" by renaming their installers _away_ from "install". Far from it. They will rename their Trojans _to_ "install", because now Vista will helpfully ask the user to run their code as an administrator"

Vista-aware trojan authors can do this anyway by the manifest method, so it makes no difference what the executable is called.

So this whole "problem" is nonsense. I'd expect this kind of reporting from the Queen of Non-Issues, Steve Gibson, but I expected better from The Register.