Posts by Tom Chiverton

Silverlight 2.0: killer features, no Flash killer

RyanAir

I booked a RyanAir flight from Linux just last week, didn't notice any Silverlight shite...

flex ?

a lot of your IDE comments are already addressed if you look at Adobe's Flex Builder IDE, rather than their CS tools.

What is a Linux distro worth?

invalid

But it always assumes 'starting from scratch' which isn't the case - FAIL.

London could get HD Freeview next year

New box ?!?

Havin' a laugh, people are barely up to spending twenty quid on a normal freeview box !

Apricot drops 'too complicated' Linux from netbook line

"made this decision to ensure customers have a smooth installation of their operating system"

Way to focus on the thing people hardly ever do.

Sun claims super-skinny JavaFX milestone

"do not yet extend to mobile"

All the people with Flash on their mobile phones must be miffed then...

HP pops out iPaq pair

Quick !

Quick ! Shift the Windows drivel out the door before something with Android on ships !

Motorola's navel gazing Android delayed

Late to the US ?

Who cares if it's late to the US ? When will it be in the UK ?

The US is so backwards people are surprised by washer dryers, mobile phone number porting and Windows smart phones (I'm looking at you, Sony Ericcson).

Das überdatabase: Inside Wacky Jacqui's motherbrain

@Xander

"No2ID"

As No2ID are against 'the database state' as well as the more specific ID card system, I imagine so. Pop on down to your local group and get this stupid system stopped before any money is wasted on it.

Times: US about to deploy Space Marines

Music

/Nothings Gonna Stand In Our Way/ by Spectre General, as used in the first (i.e. animated) Transformers: The Movie. 'Young persons' indeed !

CPS to consider private prosecution over stealth Phorm trials

Bang to rights

Yup, I've just read the sections too. Clear-cut, given the EU findings, one would think.

Microsoft's second Silverlight courts open-source coders

supports ?

"availability tomorrow (Tuesday) of Silverlight 2.0, which supports Mac, Linux , Firefox and Safari "

This is going to be one of those funny 'supports' which translates as either 'doesn't' or 'just until you rely on it, then doesn't'

BT's 21st Century network, er... isn't

!Panic

"Recent estimates say IPv4 could be exhausted in 2011"

NAT works perfectly well, and there is also plenty of allocated-but-unused space that could be reclaimed, i.e. General Electric, Ford etc - http://xkcd.com/195/

Mandriva Linux 2009 threesome outed

Caution: may wipe all your KDE3 settings in the process

http://wiki.mandriva.com/en/2009.0_Notes#Upgrading_from_previous_releases

Toshiba re-states commercial fuel-cell deadline

6 months ?

Where's the fuel supply chain then ? Or is this going to be a special sort of overly complicated proprietary battery line ?

Spy chiefs plot £12bn IT spree for comms überdatabase

"Trust trumps everything in this field"

And *anyone* trusts a government with this soft of thing ? Geez.

Never mind what the UN convention on human rights (such as privacy) will have to say about it.

If any company wires this into their services, I'll just do with out them. I can always send all my IP traffic via SSH to another country, and get a nice IP phone to boot.

Incidentally, the ID card project is at least 10 billion quid, so could well go past the NHS and IMP once the overspend occurs.

Microsoft taints open source CodePlex well

Surprised ?

This is the 'embrace' stage, right ?

Skype admits Chinese privacy breach

it is end-to-end encrypted, and ?

According to TFA, the client is sending an (extra) message to the logging server, so the conversation can still be end-to-end secure.

Trouble is, not even an open sourced alternative would help, if the provider of that binary has meddled with it, as appears to be the case here (Skype asked Tom to add filtering, Tom added logging while they were there).

UK banking fraud losses rise to £301.7m

Errr.... no ?

"Once the European banking industry meets its target on the roll-out of plastic cards and readers that rely on chip-based technology - due to be completed by 2010 - this type of fast-growing scam will be contained, APACS predicts."

Africa rolling out many CnP terminals, is it ?

Adobe cache snafu delivers free movie downloads

! Adobe's fault

How is it Adobe's fault that Amazon stream the whole movie to everyone, weather you pay or not, rather than just streaming a separate 2 minute summary ?

Tories promise to kill off kids database

Hurrah !

No doubt Labour will try and spin this as the Cons 'harming children' and try to make us forget they've already lost every family's details.

Hopefully one day we'll not need campaigns like http://no2id.net at all...

Phorm mulls incentives for ad targeting wiretaps

I'll take cash

I'll take the profit share, a 2nd non-phorm line, and a wget script that runs their business model into the ground.

kthxby

Airline industry refuses to be ID card guinea pig

TUC not just against

The TUC didn't just vote against, they voted to 'resist with all means at [their] disposal'.

Google spills Satan Phone dev kit

Pay Sun for Java ?

"people who want a Java machine but don't want to pay Sun will use Dalvik"

Err, or use the OpenJDK...

BitTorrent crackdown cops fail to pay music copyright fees

Fraud ?

"charge of conspiracy to defraud."

Who, of what ? He told people he ran a BT tracker, and he did. Umm ?

Will Microsoft ever get the web?

And people develop with this

""LINQ to SQL is still being developed, but Entity Framework is the big bet,"

i.e. "that new thing last year, that we told you all to use ? Dead, use this instead."

It's a wonder developers put up with that sort of practice...

NASA, USAF in $30m hypersonic boffinry push

Pedant point

"Hypersonic for this purpose is defined as five times the speed of sound or faster"

The speed of sound *in what* ?

UK.gov IDs identity vendors

Pork, pork, pork, wonderful pork

Well, the ID card project is doomed to be an expensive failure then, isn't it...

You should head on over to http://no2id.net and try to make them stop before they waste any more money on it.

DfT rounds up Road-Pricing 2.0 contractors

Something

Something must be done, yes, but it's not making a criminal out of millions of innocents and then keeping their data for 5 years 'just in case'.

How much extra mass transport could be built for the cost of this scheme ?

MS confirms European Xbox 360 price cuts

Too little too late

Everyone is already getting a Wii for Xmas...

UK launches major road signage review

Very simple

Very simple - stop the overhead matrix signs saying 'NN minutes to Junction X'. This information is meaningless because X could be 1 or 15 miles away.

Just tell me the current average speed (say) 2 miles in front.

PS Stupid icons

PPS Stupid fixed width page

Net-talking toaster to burn news onto bread

connects to 'a PC' ?

Did you mistype 'to Windows' again ?

Royal Society: Schools should show creationism 'respect'

"teachers should convey a message of “respect” for those beliefs"

Respect ? Why ? The sooner the kids move out from under their parents shadow and start taking a rational view of how things work the better.

The Google-isation of all the net's access points

Windows Chrome beta today

"Windows Chrome beta today".

Uh huh. And everyone else ... ? FireFox got started on non-Windows machines, in the main, and that initial traction is what will make Chrome a success.

UK spooks forced to hand Gitmo files to suspect's lawyers

Well..

"it is inconceivable that there are no documents in the possession of the United States Government that relate to what happened"

If I was doing something illegal, I'd make damn sure there was no paper trail.

As to dirty bombs - no, there's no real danger, but if you were (say) working 5 days a week in the street where it went off, thus increasing your cancer risk a lot, would you carry on going there ?

Nice write up of events though.

FCC votes to silence 700MHz lurkers

Note to self

Don't sell things you don't own, this rule counts double if other people are using it without hurting anyone.

Judge bans European-wide online music rights

Way to go

Way to go there, screwing up something that would have been good for the customer. Nice one !

Mystery Fedora disruption prompts security fears

The truth is out there

https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-announce-list/2008-August/msg00012.html

"oops", and also

http://rhn.redhat.com/errata/RHSA-2008-0855.html

"*oops* we let a stranger sign OpenSSH packages"

@Herbert Meyer

So I should subscribe to the -announce mailing list for every single project I use ? gcc ? libc ? ... ? The volumn would be huge, which is why in the case of big/serious issues, I expect news sites to at least mention it.

I don't run 'yum update' everyday, just as the cron job emails me to say updates are due. This is probably common.

Err...

Err... as a tech. news site, why wasn't this covered at the time, eh ? It's a bit late telling people now...

Apple's MobileMe plays into hands of spammers

! crawler

Read the full article (you too, El Reg !). It's not a crawler.

What this iDisk thing gives is a way of verifying a guess about a potential user name @mac.com. So you can generate a million possible address, then weed out the ones with no associated account easily.

The only reason I'd expect this to be worth the hassle is if Apple block IPs that send too much bounced email.

BBC iPlayer upgrade prompts new ISP complaints

@Outcast

Re: H264 Flash on Linux - yes, the latest Flash 9 player on 'nix has this high-def codec support, same as the latest Flash 9 players on other platforms.

Flash 10 (on labs.adobe.com right now) of course has it too.

Intel CTO demos building blocks of shapeshifting robots

catoms

Video ?

I've only got a small pic on http://www.intel.com/research/dpr.htm to go on, which is apperently more than you guys :-)

Logic-gate 'supermolecules' play noughts & crosses

Win at tick-tack-toe ?

Surly the only winning move is not to play ?

Wouldn't you prefer a nice game of chess ?

WarGames? Never heard of it, why ?

Microsoft's Photosynth falls out of cloud

Flash, but windows only ?

What sort of half arsed Flash is this then ? Not the normal one, obviously...

JavaFX preview highlights critical weaknesses

Flash on mobile

"should, do well because it offers the chance to have applications run on the desktop and mobile, unaltered"

Adobe's OpenScreen project, which had serious packing at the launch, promises just that already. Plus it's already trivial to share code between the web and the desktop with AIR.

BSF programme boosts schools' IT spending

annual growth rate of 5.3 per cent for schools' IT expenditure

An above inflation growth ? Geez.

Couldn't they make do with last years budget and use OpenOffice etc. rather than MIcroSoft's tat ?

Palm launches £399 Treo Pro

Nice phone

Nice phone, shame about the operating system.

Do you realise there are currently *no* phone on the market with all the features of my several years old P990, that aren't a Crackberry or run Windows ? Shocking, esp. as my contract has lapsed.

October for a GPhone, eh...

Microsoft dashes hopes for 'major' Windows server upgrade

Vista pushing

"compatibility with previous versions of Windows Vista"

Not XP then... surprised ?

UK.gov to spend hundreds of millions on snooping silo

Probe ?!? Like hell...

"pilot scheme will see probes inserted in networks owned by one mobile, one internet and one landline operator"

Which ones ? I want to know so I can avoid them like the plague.

Can Gordon Clown really not come up with better way of spending a billion quid (that's the cost *before* the inevitable cost overrun I suppose).

Snoopers charter is right... gezz... I must get an off-island shell account...