Posts by David

Ballmer clashes with Obama over US tax rules

History always repeats

If US companies didn't move offshore to take advantage of lower wages and taxes, new foreign companies would be set up. These companies would soon undercut the US companies and drive them out of business.

It's happened with steel, with cars, with consumer electronics, it will happen with software.

The US might try and revert to protectionist policies (lining the pockets of the corporate shareholders, at the expense of the consumer), but tarrifs haven't saved the industries above, and they wont save software.

I can't imagine why the US thinks they can pay higher wages and taxes simply because of their geographical coordinates.

Google Oz coders crossbreed email with IM

Spec seems to be a bit of a mess

It doesn't help that its an extension to XMPP, which is not the internet's simplest protocol.

The authors assert the success of email was due to open protocols. I'd argue that the success of email was largely down to being a very very very simple and easy to implement protocol. SMTP sits directly on top of TCP. It uses ASCII. It uses half a dozen commands. That's it, it's simple enough to "implement" by hand, using telnet. No need for fancy API's. You could teach a ten year old to do it.

Wave uses XMPP, and this sits on top of TCP, TLS, and SASL, using XML, UTF-8, X509, MD5, base-64, URNs etc, which is great - much better than email - but has a lot bigger learning curve. You need libraries and APIs, frameworks, public key infrastructures, XML parsers, and so on. On the server side, I wonder if we will ever see the situation where practically every organisation on the net has an XMPP server and they communicate seemlessly (as we see now, more or less with SMTP).

Or will the complexity lead to a few big walled gardens like Facebook and Twitter?

Microsoft’s Silverlight 3 delivers decent alternative to Adobe

Compatibility

Seems like the average web developer doesn't care about compatibility; if it runs on their desktop it's ready to ship.

Cache-poisoning attack snares top Brazilian bank

SSL?

"went on to suggest that customers who were paying attention would have noticed Bandesco's secure sockets layer certificate generated an error when they were redirected to the fraudulent login page."

I doubt that. If the domain name matched the certificate (which it would have, since it is the IP address that gets changed), there would have been no error.

Newfangled rootkits survive hard disk wiping

Another reason to get a VM

Virtualise the BIOS, then you can just can the infected machine image.

Court rules airline secret security list is stupid

Now they'll have to make up a list

I bet the old "classified" list was something like "anything we decide on the spot". Now they'll have to make up a "list" and come up with other ways to get around the court ruling.

Illinois restores Pluto's planetary status

Secondary disk accreation.

A theory of planetary formation, such as the current theory of secondary disk accreation, will make certain predictions about how a planet should look and behave. Pluto does not look or behave like a planet formed by this process. Draw your own conclusions.

Music industry's Irish ISP shakedown letter leaked

Irish laws and extortion

I don't know how Irish laws work, but when do threats of legal action cross the line into becoming extortion, racketeering, and tortious interferance?

Kiwis go all black over copyright enforcement laws

Any P2P?

If they cut off any and all P2P users there'll be a lot of very unhappy World of Warcraft players.

Nine in ten emails now spam

Block outgoing SMTP

ISPs should block outgoing connections to SMTP servers (except their own) by default. That'd make it much harder to hide the source of the spam, and they could configure their own SMTP servers to block too much mail from a single client.

Native Client d**k-swinging met with fake Googasm

Flash install stats

The 99% figure quoted by Adobe is mainly home users. And I suspect a large number of surfers are sitting behind work machines. In my experience corporate machines often don't have flash, or an outdated version. Even an up to date version of adobe reader is a luxury.

Apologies after teacher's 'Linux holding back kids' claim

Drink the Kool aid

Linux is different, and normal people don't use it. That makes it wrong and scarey. New ideas are bad. Normal people don't have new alternative ideas. They should be stopped from being different and scarey. Just like Muslims, I mean terrorists are different and scarey. Terrorists probably use Linux too. Linux users need to be stopped before they all become terrorists too.

Apple's Snow Leopard set to exploit GPU power

No compiler?

Without a compiler this seems like vapourware.

Microsoft preps IE 8 for the web-challenged

Web developers

There's more crap code in the average organizations web front page than in all the other systems in the rest of that organisation put together. Most web coders (not all, but most) seem to be the D- students.

Grand Theft Auto IV PC debut gets SecuROM sideshow

Not buying it

Just say no. Not that I like GTA, but I would have bought Spore. But I don't want a game screwing with my rig. I could have installed a VM to put the game in, but it's not worth the effort.