Posts by Ian Bradshaw

Atomic Weapons Establishment ditches 2e2 in funding row

Disaster Recovery

I assume AWE are the only ones that are confident in their disaster recovery & contingency plans. I'd guess all the ones in enough of a panic to stump up £40,000 at a days notice were less confident they could continue operations.

Flashy mutant Ultrabooks to shove pure SSD chaps off cliff

BOM?

So the total £BOM decreases with hybrid, so the percentage of the overall cost of each other component increases as expected ... except atennae which decreases from 2% to 1% when using hybrid.

Why?

Chrome beats IE for a weekend

Re: Weird Stat Counting?

Ah! Didn't realise they were live.

Weird how it changes though the day. Be interesting to see them by GMT hour or something.

Weird Stat Counting?

Weird stats. Why does Opera and FF suddenly get binned this weekend in favour of Safari? Seems somewhat unlikely the world turned to Safari over the weekend ...

Google threatens Chrome address bar with death

Netbooks

Might be handy on Netbooks if anyone still uses them ... but I'd rather know what site I was on. A lot of title headings (that presumably would be in the tab) aren't great when shortened.

Surely most people aren't that short of screen space nowerdays?

New Reg comments system ready to launch

You guys after a new Ferrari each or something?

Commenter zapping: All commenter's names will come with a 'zap' button - after this is clicked by three other separate commenters, the offending account will be deleted.

So what your saying is that you pay your £5/12 ... 3 people don't like something you write and you loose your subscription ... ... ... ridiculous if that's how its going to work.

I would assume that for those that do pay there won't be any adverts?

Seems like a license to print money is being requested rather than any service benefits!

Virgin trials P2P deep packet snooping

privacy?

capture those passwords why don't you ...

* disclaims all comments on the reg since it doesnt use https for comment registration * :)

IE6 exposed as Google China malware unpicked

haha

Google doesn't even use there own browser, and uses Windows OS ... excellent.

FAIL ... as if Google can't even use there own products or go to Linux (as apparetly the geeks think its better) then why should anyone else bother

Ageing Google supersizes its search box

oh dear ...

"Although this is a very simple idea and an even simpler change, we're excited about it"

there excited about that ... surely the best advert never to work for google, ever.

Some script kiddies from uni with new and refreshing ideas are really gonna be flocking there if thats suppost to float their boat ...

64-bit Chrome takes centre stage in Linux land

RE: Is there a need for a 64 bit browser?

nope.

32 bit apps run perfectly fine on Vista x64, Win7 x64, Server 2003 x64 and Server 2008 x64.

Not unless your browser is going to need more than 4Gb RAM to run ... which I hope it doesn't.

US appeals court cans CAN-SPAM suit

get a grip

go to court or install a spam filter ... lemmie think whats easier, quicker, and going to stop more spam ...

leave it to the ISPs to sort out if its hogging there bandwidth, a few thousand emails is hardly a problem for an ISP or a spam filter.

or maybe we should clog up the courts with thousands of personal cases of spam rather than those robbing and killing people?

Twitter goes titsup

Facebook

been tits up as well this afternoon ... for a few hours by my reckoning.

Paris ... just for the tits.

Cray punts smaller baby super

help yourself?

It looks like selling baby supercomputers ... not as easy as Cray had hoped

they dont exactly help themselves since you can't even get a quote as it goes 'your not in the usa piss off'.

well, it actually says 'Pricing shown on this site is for North American customers only' but the translation is the same since were all totally unable to use xe.com.

Adobe spanked for insecure Reader app

FFS ...

Just another example of the IT world presuming it's users have a clue about what to do.

How hard can it be to replace an exe on a downloads page?

Paris ... well, she's got the braincell of 99.9% of end users.

NHS hospitals struggle to hold back the malware tide

But ...

what to do?

It's not feasible to test every AV update that is sent out and not get out of date ... and prone to infection ... or leave auto-update on and have all your pcs felled when some vendor screws up.

Damned if you do and damned if you dont.

Google strips beta wrapper from Gmail, Docs et al

well ...

“We've come to appreciate that the beta tag just doesn't fit for large enterprises that aren't keen to run their business on software that sounds like it's still in the trial phase,” said Google’s Matthew Glotzbach in a blog post.

no shit.

gotta give that a fail if its taken 5 years for them to realise the bleedin obvious ...

DARPA: Can we have a one-cabinet petaflop supercomputer?

well ...

Any decent-size data centre will in future be more intelligent than its human admin

anyone who's tried to ring a certain German hosting company beginning with a 1 and ending in a 1 will know this is already the case.

AT&T squeezes wannabe iPhone upgraders

You've got an un-needed W

"... the petition had over 1,700 signatures (Twitnatures?)."

it's hardly rocket science that an upgrade would be coming before your contract was up. Happens with every phone in every country.

You pays ya money you makes ya choice.

HDD data density to hit 2.4Tb/in² 'by 2014'

@ frank

"If they are using 2 SSDs striped, that would be for access speed. Striping is for speed, mirroring is for data recovery." ... yeah I know ... it was more the technology exists to hide it (which I hadn't seen in action before). Personally I suspect it was to keep the price down and use smaller SSDs for the same capacty tbh ... not seen it mentioned anywhere in their literature and not before I bought it either (not that im complaining its there tho).

not sure how there gonna backup 15TB though ... new usb speeds and the like maybe ... but even so ... a 15TB backup would make most give up I suspect.

poor home users

who will end up being sold 1 disk for the rest of their life ... which then fails loosing the world + dog.

pc makers had better be kind and develop hidden raid mirroring on standard pcs (no end user will be any use at configuring raid) ...

the tech exists to do it .. my new sony Z3 has hidden raid (it actually uses 2 SSDs striped on an intel controler to give the storage capacity, but hides the raid stuff from the OS and even the bios boot sequence unless you go tinkering).

Xandros - the Linux company that isn't

Finally ...

"Doing that general purpose operating system is a nightmare, and you lose your shirt on it,"

someone in Linux land admits why Windows sells so well apart from all the usual monopoly crap they come out with - even if they don't realise they just did.

eBay not obliged to protect trade marks, says High Court

erm ...

"I am satisfied that mere knowledge on the part of the supplier of equipment that it would probably be used to infringe someone’s copyright does not make the supply unlawful; nor does an intention to supply the market for such user."

erm ... napster ... et. al.

Getting real about Linux on the desktop

You havin' a laugh?

"consider the value of creating a mixed estate of Windows, Linux and possibly even Mac"

you havin' a laugh ... or do you just like spending all month delivering patches and updates?

Most apps don't run on linux (without some sort of emulation / wine affiar) ... so for the sake of £90 .. I'll spend the cash rather than have all the wasted man hours with hundreds of patches, user training sessions, new standard builds, admin security courses, test environments (as the mac is so good at updates not breaking things) etc. etc. ... ... ...

If they can break the law, why can't we?

Lying Cheating Bastards

"Claims that most workers would be sacked at once for bending the rules in the way that MP’s appear to have are likely misplaced, and if the public reflected more quietly on the issues, it is probable they would not wish their own employers to pursue such a draconian policy either"

If I'd just made up a claim for a new laptop (substitute for mortgage) that didn't exist and pocketed the cash thank you very much and then go, 'oh, sorry, didn't realise that laptop I made up didn't exist' ... then yes, I would expect to be instantly dismissed.

It's a matter of scale, these lying cheating bastards have been thieving more than a lot of people earn in a year. It's not as though they've just taken a few hundred by accident (when you would just expect a telling off).

Google: Let us keep search data or die

So what?

All this keeping data stuff ...

a) If you don't want them to keep it then use a different search engine or create your own. Noone forces anyone to use google.

b) It would be quite simple for all data capture people to anonymise data to e.g. city level based on geoip if they wanted to.

'b' won't happen as it hurts their business, and why should it? There a commercial company, just because there better at it than anyone else doesn't mean they should be punnished (same goes for MS, Intel, etc etc).

So, you don't like it? Go do something about it. Just tap in ask.com, yahoo.com or whatever; or go create your own search engine thats better, dont keep the data.

As for us all being dead if they don't keep the data, thats just to confuse the issue, the real issue is wether people should be punnised for creating a better service / product than anyone else.

Videogame history project successfully emulates CRT on LCD

AA x16

AntiAliasing for the 80's! :)

Will Oracle kill MySQL? Who cares?

XE ...

Why not just use XE? MySQL is pitty much legacy for existing sites ever since Oracle gave us XE for free.

All Oracle need to do is raise the XE limit from 2GB storage and job done. It's Oracle mini, which is all MySQL is. You can't store massive amounts of data in MySQL, and with decent table spec (such as using the right data types and lengths for example), its amazing how much you can actually cram into 2GB. Short of space? Just create another copy of XE in VMWare shell and get yourself some clustering experiance (the hard way as it's the only Oracle feature not in XE that I've come accross, so you need to think a bit more - no bad thing).

Give it a bit more storage in 11 XE and then we can all use that and truely kill MySQL, learn some Oracle skillz and migrate any apps we do to full scale corporate at some point with no worries about chaning quieries.

XE is the Oracle version of a community server (i.e. free for whatever), and has a lot more features.

Just because it's not open source, doesn't mean it's not better and provides an easier expansion to corporate land as well as giving the new developers some good Oracle experiance.

Oracle killed MySQL long before they bought it, they killed it as soon as they released XE.

City IT workers brace for anarchist attack

Its 2009 ...

ever heard of remote desktop?

I'm sure they could setup a remote desktop that would give them access to whatever terminals they need from a couple of servers ...

Privacy watchdog barks for federal Gmail probe

The cloud ... safe ... you having a laugh?

The Google Cloud - Is it safe?

Nothing is secure ... security is merely the fact that a bug hasn't been found yet in the wekest link in the chain.

The complexities of anything useful mean that everything will be vulnerable ... there just not all found ... Google docs ... Adobe Flash as recent examples.

Sticking stuff into a cloud can never be secure.

Is it more secure than storing it at home? Possibly.

Security should be defined along the lines of ... 'data is unavailable to unauthorised users based upon the highest technically abilities of the best technical user with access to that system or any link in getting to the end system'.

This obviously dictates that the bar for online data being secure is greater than one at home or in a general office / corporation.

It's worth remembering that, for example, with the DNS hijacking of recent times, it's not necessarily the respective cloud that may be the problem; it could equally be the router you go though to get there, over which 99% of users have no control.

How long before someone presses the wrong button or a disgrunteled employee presses the 'sitck into search engine results' button?

The cloud ... safe ... you having a laugh?

Mozilla hangs fire on Firefox 3.5 till June

Who cares?

In the grand scheme of things, who cars about a browser?

Some are marginally faster at a/b/c, but the same one slower at x/y/z. They'll all have some security bugs, so you're going to have to keep checking for updates to them all (and frankly, who cares if it gets upgraded once, twice or 50 times a year - they all do it automatically).

The only people this matters too are the ones making the browsers, the rest of us install whatever pedastole we want to stand on (wether its an Opera one, a Mozilla one or a MS one) but at the end of the day; we all have to update, patch and upgrade regardless of whatever path we pick.

As for speed ... it makes no difference. In the real world, websites dont use 9000 JScripts or whatever, so a marginal saving (in time terms) is meaningless anyway.

You get a site that loads in 10 sec on one browser and 5 on another, its doomed anyway; as there will always be a split between browsers - so you immediately alinate whatever % are using that browser. By the time sites are upgraded to what is the latest and greatest website toy, the browsers will be capable anyway.

The web runs on the lowest common denominator of the major browsers, not whichever is the fastest. So if your interested in saving 0.25sec of your life, the browser speed choice is relevent. For the rest of the human race its about wether you want to customise it, disable scripts or whatever your personal quirk is.

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

Why can't I get a date?

This is just the sort of shit we need on beer night.

/me goes to print out diagram for all the birds in the local.

doh.

Think that answers the "Why can't I get a date?" part of the useful stuff to know on a Friday night article.

:)

I.

Cocaine now cheaper than lager

Taxman

Can't imagine which of the two the government can't tax.

Did Parallels ship pre-release version 4 code?

Not surprising?

It's hardly surprising that a boxed version is older than a web delivery version ... burn the CD, make the box, ship it somewhere, ship it somewhere else ... or just upload a new exe to a website for instant delivery ... and in any case ... who buys anything in a box in 2008? and who's not connected to the internet for an auto-update thats going to be using this?

If your daft enough to buy a boxed version of something, you're going to have to update it ... when was the last time you got a copy of XP / Vista or Office with all the latest patches on it? erm ... sometime never I guess ...

As long as there not charging for updates / patches ... who cares.

Google Analytics — Yes, it is a security risk

Offsite scripts in general

Whilst this isn't a security forum ... now the topic is aired ... it would be good (and benificial to noobs like me) ... to perhaps run a story on offsite scripts in general?

From my perspective ... maybe a little defensive ... any script called from a domain you don't control seems careless at the least ... never mind on an admin page ... but what is the risk?

Millions use analytics ... so is everyone at risk from a roge JS at the Googleplex? ... or just those running that script on admin pages? ... presumably everyone, and a malicious script could do what it likes with your server ... at least as far as whatever process the webserver runs in is allowed (e.g. IUSR on Windows world) ... is that true? ... for example replacing urchin.js with one to load content from a rogue server thats neither Googleplex or yours to infect pcs? ... or is it limited to (for example) session data?

This raises more questions about the use of any external scripts / content you don't host than the fact it's some specific website.

A followup noobs guide to the risks ... now the topic is aired ... would be welcome.

Keep up the good work fokes! :)

Ian.