* Posts by Nigel 11

3191 publicly visible posts • joined 10 Jun 2009

MS advises drastic measures to fight hellish Trojan

Nigel 11
Boffin

LInux to the rescue

If the user's data wasn't properly backed up in such a situation I'd reach for a Linux rescue CD such as RIP (Recovery Is Possible) Linux.

Boot. Mount the NTFS partitions readonly. Connect to a network share or plug in a USB drive. Copy the user's files. Finally nuke the disk by writing /dev/zero to the whole shebang, MBR and all before doing a Windows reinstall or restoring a disk image.

However devious a root kit, it can pose absolutely no threat to a Linux-based rescue system resident in RAM, because nothing on the compromised disk ever gets executed by the rescue system.

Hackers pierce network with jerry-rigged mouse

Nigel 11
Thumb Down

No BOOM!

Something pretending to be a USB mouse won't be able to intercept the keystrokes on the keyboard that your BOFH is using to su root. So it won't know when to launch its attack code.

Of course, a similar attack with a "promotional" Logitech keyboard is trivial.

Perhaps all BOFH's should restrict themselves to remote system administration in fuure, ie never su on the local keyboard, and instead from their administrator ultra-secure PC do

# ssh root@targetpc

where targetpc has appropriate firewall rules and sshd_config entries to make this possible only from the authentic BOFH mission control console. Then we're OK provided the BOFH knows better than to use promotional items for mission control....

Until the attacker bribes a cleaner to put a hardware keylogger in the rats-nest behind the BOFH's mission control station, that is.

Microsoft pounces as Mozilla shuns enterprise

Nigel 11
Thumb Down

Easier to reinstall that repair?!

What sort of company systems are you running? Ones where the lusers log in with administrator privilege? Ones infested with malware?

Firefox has a (near?) perfect division between user-read-only system files and read-write user profile files, and it pretty much avoids the chamber of horrors (Windows registry) altogether. Reinstalling Firefox doesn't actually clean up the user's profile, which is the only part of the installation that a non-privileged user ought to be able to mangle. Re-setting the user profile is just a matter of creating a new one and deleting the old one, and you don't need to reinstall Firefox to do it. A few extra keyclicks will copy his bookmarks from the old profile to the new, if you are feeling kind.

As for IE ... let's just say that the "Internet Exploiter" tag is so accurate it's not funny, and the only reliable clean-up I've ever found is to create a whole new user account.

Solar panel selling scam shown up by sting

Nigel 11
Meh

Fraud unlikely

Provided (a big provided) the system is set up for someone to check, it would be easy to police. They just need to know the kWp (peak) of your array. The average annual generation for the locality will allow them to normalize out the effects of weather variation. Any household generating significantly more units per kWp than its neighbours should be selected for further investigation as a potential fraud. An array might under-perform, but no manufacturer is going to understate their kWp, nor be allowed to get away with overstating it. The best a fraud could get away with is "making up" the effects of local shading, and he'd have to be quite technically competent to get it "right".

The only criminal exception I can think of is pot-growing. They could run their internal lighting off PV solar (*not* grid-connected) and thereby avoid having the electricity utility detect their illegal activities. Oh well, at least it'll be greener pot.

Name and shame fat cat bureaucrats, Number 10 told

Nigel 11
Mushroom

The right answer

Tell these fat cats that there is one way and only one way to keep their pay secret. It's accepting a pay cut to £149,999.

Sign here.

Still too fecking much in my book, but at least it would be a start!

The KILLER MUTANT FUNGUS in YOUR DISHWASHER

Nigel 11
Boffin

That which does not kill us ....

99% ... is a good driver for microbial evolution. The 1% that survives, will become 2% two hours later, and re-fill the ecosystem after another 12 hours or thereabouts. And they'll be resistant to whatever you did to their grand^6 parents.

You can breed bugs to eat almost anything this way. Culture some soil bacteria. Add enough dioxin (or other environmental contaminant) to kill most of them. Culture the survivors. Add a bigger dose of dioxin. Repeat until they pretty much thrive on neat dioxin (and possibly can't survive without it). Culture a large batch, and spray it onto your contaminated site. Leave for a year. Contamination gone.

The Gulf of Mexico long ago bred crude-oil-eating microbes, because of the high level of natural oil seepage there. Lucky for BP.

Bacteria are nature's clean-up crews. Without them, higher-level life would have choked itself to extinction with its own by-products, many times over.

Just don't teach them to eat plastic, or rubber, or petrol. Or to think.

Nigel 11
Boffin

Back in the real world

I'm guessing here, but ...

The obvious question is whether the spores of the non-extremophile versions of these yeasts are omnipresent in everyday environments, in the same way that everyday green mould spores are? If so it suggests that our immune systems are protecting us against them on an everyday basis, and there's little cause for concern (unless you suffer from CF).

I'd also expect the varieties which mutate to enjoy the innards of a dishwasher, have traded tolerance of that environment for optimisation for non-extreme conditions (such as the insides of a human being). In that case we have less to fear from the ones living in dishwashers than their parent strains. Even if not so, tolerance of extreme heat, alkalinity, etc. won't create tolerance of antibiotic medicines. Be extremely wary of the dishwasher used on petri dishes in a path lab, though!

Creationists are infiltrating US geology circles

Nigel 11

65 meters

Melting Antarctica and all other ice would raise sea level by more like 65m than 12m. The point that thaere would still be a lot of dry land remains completely valid.

Nigel 11
Thumb Up

Oh yes, regional inundations no problem

I'm fully aware that flood legends are common in many cultures. It's not provable, but not unreasonable to hypothesize, that these date back to the rise in sea-level at the end of the last ice-age. In particular, there would have been people living on the floor of what is now the Black sea, around 8000BC when the Mediterranean broke through the Bosphorus.

Fundamentalists aren't willing to accept that anything in the bible may be allegory, or myth, or legend distantly echoing some real event. They think every word is literally true. If so, it would be impossible to find a 10,000 year sequence of annual mud deposition layers anywhere, and there would be a massive disruption at the time of Noah showing in all of them.

And their minds are welded shut.

Nigel 11
Boffin

Hardly worth any effort

It's hardly worth any effort arguing against these people (unlike the Intelligent Design anti-evolution mob)

Anyone with a mind not irreversibly welded shut can look at a core drilled down through the mud at the bottom of a lake, and count the annual deposition layers. If they're a millimeter thick per year (which is quite fast deposition) then one meter is a thousand years, ten meters is disproof of the whole fundamentalist bible chronology in a way that even a ten-year-old can understand, and which anyone with trust issues can repeat for himself using apparatus that any decent mechanical workshop can manufacture.

There's no record of that biblical flood, either.

AMD promises 10 teraflop notebooks by 2020

Nigel 11
Go

Play games?

The obvious immediate use is playing games. Generating 60+ frames/second of high-res virtual reality can absorb almost limitless quantities of CPU power.

Build it and they'll come? I don't know if there are any mainstream business uses that require moving 3D synthetic imagery, but if there are and the hardware is out there, someone will write the software. I do know that there are many mainstream science and engineering applications.

States consider saner 'sexting' penalties for teens

Nigel 11
Alien

Wrong planet?

Sometimes I wonder whether the USA is on the same planet as Europe. Certainly their system of "justice" seems to be operated by Vogons, not humans.

Taxman recruits fricking tax-collecting robots

Nigel 11
Big Brother

E-bay and bank accounts

In the case of E-bay, they have your bank account details or your credit-card details. Welcome to the panopticon, Mr 10-24-57 29645074.

Nigel 11
WTF?

On the other hand ...

At least on this side of the pond, tax evasion rarely leads to anything worse than a fine if/when someone is caught. For small, somewhat unintentional non-payment, quite a small fine. Jail is reserved for someone who is caught managing his affairs in such a way as to prove beyond reasonable doubt that he set out to avoid paying tax on a large scale in the first place

I've heard that in the USA, people are so scared of the IRS that some deliberately overpay their taxes as a safeguard in case they've accidentally under-declared something elsewhere on the monstrously complex tax form.

And I can't forget queueing up at city hall to pay taxes on the private purchase of an eight-year-old second-hand car! Why on earth couldn't this be done by post? (My USA friends told me everyone dodges this tax ... but as a foreigner, I didn't want to risk deportation and/or arrest next time I presented my passport). There's no sales tax on private sales of secondhand chattels over here.

I'll champion HMRC over the IRS any day.

Acer to dump 3 million laptops onto European market

Nigel 11
Thumb Down

After-sales service is what matters most

"I know there's as much chance of getting a duffer as of getting a perfect one"

Even I wouldn't rate Acer that low! But I'd far rather pay 10% more and get a product made by a company that sorts out its after-sales issues successfully, and without causing me unnecessary inconvenience.

To the person above who says Acer's improved, my comment is ... too late. It takes years to build a reputation, and minutes to destroy one. Plenty of other makes to choose from, why give the ones that screwed you a second chance? Perhaps I'll give Acer another try once all the others have also let me down ... but if they know what's good for business, they won't do that.

Nigel 11
Unhappy

Will include UK

Oh, it will include the UK. It's just that they'll make the same sort of UK mark-up on their discounted prices, that everyone else is making on their non-discounted UK prices.

Nigel 11

Snap

Having had repeated dealings with Acer's warranty department some years ago, I won't be tempted either. Cheap, but not at all cheerful.

The New C++: Lay down your guns, knives, and clubs

Nigel 11

Google's GO language?

Take a look at Golang. Looks like the right idea set for multicore, albeit immature.

Has Steve Jobs killed the consumer hard disk industry?

Nigel 11
Thumb Down

Spinning rust?

Must have been two decades ago that ferric oxide was obsoleted.

Even in 2001 they were using a high-tech coating of rare magnetic alloys sprinkled with three atomic thicknesses of pixie dust. (Google IBM "pixie dust" if you don't believe me)

Nigel 11
Thumb Up

And ...

I can't resist adding, Cat-5e clipped to the skirting boards like phone cable works just fine at gigabit speed. Maybe the tight bends around corners are out of spec, but the cable runs are unlikely to be more than 20m in a house, and the standard allows for ninety-plus.

Nigel 11
Facepalm

Underground datacentre?

Underground datacentres aren't a very smart idea. They can fill up with wet brown stuff when something goes wrong with the pipework or the weather.

But yes, real tape facilities are normally well-hidden from ordinary users.

Nigel 11
Thumb Down

De-duplication

For music, movies etc. The hard disk model is one copy per consumer stored on the consumer's HD. The cloud model is a few copies stored on cloud servers and transmitted to the consumer on demand.

Cloud makes sense (a) for commercially sold read-only media, (b) if there's sufficient cheap network bandwidth, and (c) if the consumer trusts that the cloud entities won't ever revoke or lose their rights to view or listen to their purchases (i.e. how much do you trust Sony?). From a HD manufacturer's perspective it may well take a big bite out of their market.

I don't think it'll be very long before a typical PC or equivalent has an SSD (probably built onto the mainboard) and no HD. Storage options beyond a few GB on the SSD will be burn to DVD, copy to own USB HD or USB memory-stick, backup or copy to cloud.

the market for HDs is going to mature and go into long-term decline. They won't disappear in the next few decades, but HD manufacture is not going to remain a growth industry. Not unlike tape, really. Sure that the HD manufacturers have worked this out. IBM did so ahead of the pack, and sold to HGST, in what was regarded as a strange move at the time. Now HGST wants out.

'Great Reversal' as world's forests stage a comeback

Nigel 11
Boffin

Global Feedback loop

Plants grow faster in CO2-enriched atmosphere. Plants grow proportionally more and deeper roots in CO2-enriched atmosphere (easier to come by CO2 so less need for leaves compared to roots).

This may be a long-term feedback loop that keeps the planet at a temperature suitable for life.

It's not necessarily able to stop anthropogenic global warming and sea-level rises, though. The average, over hundreds of millions of years, was a lot hotter than today, with no icecaps at all most of the time. Better for large reptiles than for large mammals.

Two fat atoms get the nod

Nigel 11
Mushroom

Radioactives included!

They give you Thorium and Uranium (and Bismuth). All the other naturally-occurring radioactives will be present within one or other or those samples, via radioactive decay.

Nigel 11
Boffin

Supernovae

Maybe not in the big bang.

Almost certainly created in supernova explosions (which is where all the elements on Earth heavier than Iron were created, by bashing lighter nuclei together. (That's much the same way as scientists have created these short-lived superheavy nuclei, but on a much bigger scale ;-)

Any dividing line between an element and some more transient entity has to be completely arbitrary. One can separate stable nuclei from unstable ones, but that would exclude the fairly common naturally-occuring elements Uranium, Thorium and (maybe) Bismuth as well as their shorter-lived decay products. (Bismuth is a "maybe" challenging even that division. Theory suggests it's unstable with a VERY long half-life around 2*10^19 years, but the decay hasn't been observed because it's so rare).

Student geeks build Rubik’s cube solving bot

Nigel 11
FAIL

Dismantle - Not faster

Dismantle ... reassemble is not faster if you have got a good cube-solving algorithm on board. You have to make less than twenty 90 degree twists of the appropriate face. Human cube-solving speed-freaks routinely break ten seconds. A computer can form the operation list in milliseconds or less, and the speed is determined by the robotics.

I think dismantle - reassemble will always take longer on the mechanical front for human or robot. It also requires a tool to prize out one of the side-centre pieces to start the dismantlement, especially if you don't want to add "pick it up from the floor on the other side of the room" to the algorithm!

Qualcomm confirms Windows 8 on ARM

Nigel 11

ARM PC board, when?

So when am I going to be able to buy a board to go in a PC enclosure that has an ARM CPU instead of an intel Atom CPU?. At a competitive price. [M]ATX / ITX footprint. And with standard PC interfaces (plenty of SATA and USBs).

Why? Low power consumption, for 24x7 operation. Fanless / silent. (I'd run LInux, of course).

Tesco pricing cock-up provokes beer stampede

Nigel 11
FAIL

No

Trading standards will be quite happy if it's a genuine error corrected as soon as reasonably possible. What's illegal is deliberately displaying misleading prices.

HP issues annual exploding battery recall

Nigel 11
FAIL

Spin damage

And what will managing the bad news end up costing HP (or any other large corporation) if delaying the recall results in a major disaster caused by the defective product? How much extra when the claimants prove that the corporation knew of the danger but did not immediately warn?

The scenario that scares me most is a 787 going down because of a cabin fire started by an exploding battery.

Biodegradable products are often worse for the planet

Nigel 11
Boffin

CO2 vs Methane

"Methane is, of course, a vastly more powerful greenhouse gas than CO2"

True but rather misleading. Methane is not long-term persistent in the atmosphere. It oxidizes to CO2 plus water. Half-life is about twelve years. More methane is contributed by live cows than landfill. That in turn is dwarfed by what could be released if methane hydrates in permafrost started thawing out (which has the potential for a rapid runaway one-shot global warming event, which the recent fossil record suggests has happened many times in the past).

The story for CO2 is far more complex. Plants absorb a few percent of the total atmospheric CO2 every spring, but give almost all of it back come autumn. There's an annual CO2-concentration oscillation reflecting the greater land area in the Northern hemisphere temperate zone compared to the Southern hemisphere. We don't know whether the vegetable kingdom responds to more CO2 in the atmosphere and/or higher temperatures by sinking any carbon more permanently, let alone on what timescale. We do know that the more CO2 in the atmosphere, the more a plant adjusts its growth to favour roots over leaves.

We could almost certainly selectvely breed strains of wheat that encapsulate carbon in silica nodules in their roots, thereby rot-proofing it in the soil for milennia. Wheat naturally does this, some strains much more than others. Given the scale of wheat cultivation, this could provide a significant CO2 sink. AFAIK it's not known why wheat and some other grasses evolved to do this.

Most Greens don't know any of these things. It begs too many difficult questions and offers not enough certain answers.

Don't get me started on the complexities of water vapour - another greenhouse gas nearly as potent as methane, but when it condenses it forms clouds, which reflect sunlight and cool the planet.

World Health Organization: Mobile phone cancer risk 'possible'

Nigel 11
Boffin

Can't?

The above is hugely over-simplified.

Firstly, it's demonstrably true that heating changes the behaviour of living tissues. Your phone causes a small rise in temperature of tissue in your ear and brain. One of the likely changes is the speeding-up of undesirable biochemical reactions that create oxidative stresses. Such stresses are known to be carcinogenic. And warm-blooded mammalian metabolisms are fine-tuned for a tightly controlled operating temperature.

Secondly, and even more technical, there is a possible mechanism whereby microwave EM radiation may cause free radicals to flip into a different electronic configuration. Such altered radicals might escape being mopped up at the site of a biological reaction that is known to create them, and where nature has put suppression mechanisms in place. After migrating elsewhere in the cell, they go back to theoriginal state by emitting a quantum of microwave radiation, and cause damage. The theory is good; it would be verging on impossible to actually observe it in living issue.

Much better to assume "can", and ask "but does it"? More particularly, "does it to a significantly harmful extent"? I'd say for mobiles, "can" is proven, " does it" is uncertain, "harmful" almost certainly not, with a small lingering doubt in my mind for long calls in a maximum-transmit-power weak signal area.

BTW you're wrong about heating caused by sun on your head. It'll warm your scalp, but not your brain tissue (at least not up to the point you get heatstroke, which is deadly dangerous). Your blood circulation distributes heat from the sun through your entire body, like water-cooling a CPU, and your warm-blooded metabolism actively regulates your core temperature at a nominal 38.4C (+/- about one degree between individuals). Heatstroke is what happens when the regulation fails to cope. You die soon afterwards if someone can't cool you down.

Nigel 11

A constructive suggestion

Cellphones operate across several orders of magnitude of output power. In a weak-signal area (one bar) they're emitting a thousand or more times more strongly than in a good-signal area.

It would be possible to give every cellphone a user-selectable maximum output power. Setting this lower than maximum would mean there would be larger black-spots where you couldn't use them. You could choose to remove the limiter for a particularly urgent call, and allow the phone to go to maximum for a text (from next to your hand, not your ear, and brief). Trouble is, no manufacturer is going to be the first to implement this functionality, partly because of fear of lawsuits for "knowingly" selling a "dangerous" product, and partly because ones without this function might be seen as safer rather than as less safe.

Let the WHO suggest that all phones should implement a user-selectable power limit, and let all major governments introduce that requirement in law. If there's a small risk at full power, let us choose never to have long meaningless conversations at full power.

Nigel 11
Thumb Down

@Daniel4 inverse squares

Is your head normally resting on a microwave oven door while it's running? Rather you than me ....

The power law for EM radiation is inverse-square. A 1W source 3cm distant (phone on ear) equals a 100W source 30cm distant or a 10kW source 3m distant. Microwave in kitchen typically 1m or more from your head would have to be pretty darned leaky to match a phone running at full power in a one-bar signal area.

In fact were that a fair comparison, phones would be provably lethal. The frequency also makes a big difference. Oven microwaves are tuned to be strongly absorbed by water, to maximise heating efficiency. Phone microwaves are not, so most of the radiation goes through your head rather than being absorbed by it.

Nigel 11
Mushroom

Cellphones may cause cancer

Yes, cellphones may cause cancer. I'd be happy to say they can cause cancer.

Coffee *does* cause cancer

Peanuts *do* cause cancer

Petrol *does* cause cancer

All these risks are acceptably small. You don't swim in petrol, you sometimes catch a faint whiff of it while filling your car. If you drink seriously carcinogenic amounts of coffee, the stimulant effects will be by far the greater hazard (heart attack or short-term caffeine toxicity). The levels of aflatoxin in peanuts are low, provided they've been grown and stored to acceptable standards. And so on.

Life is carcinogenic, and if cancer doesn't get you, something else will, even surer than the tax-man. Eventually.

Samsung Solid Immerse rugged phone

Nigel 11
Unhappy

Washing machine

"whether it would survive a bout with washing machine is another matter"

Shame on you! You should have tried it out!

(Can't think why it wouldn't. 40C isn't too hot. G-force of spin isn't high compared to dropping it on a hard floor. Water pressure is only a few inches. Comes down to whether it can resist soapy water compared to dirty water. Would be unimpressed if it failed).

Seagate, WD should put a gun to Brussels' head

Nigel 11
Black Helicopters

Conspiracy theory

Agreed, the EU has no power to do anything about HDD manufacture.

UNLESS ... might they be setting the scene for creating an EU manufacturer of storage devices with EU or State start-up funding? They did that for Airbus, because the USA had obtained a two-company monopoly. Hope they realize that HDD manufacture will be a declining niche for decades to come, and that SSDs are the shape of the future, at least up to 250GB or so.

Just a thought.

Nigel 11

USA's been doing it for years

The USA's been claiming jurisdiction outside its borders for years. For example, it put EU online betting companies ouut of a large chunk of business, by making *them* liable if any USA citizen managed to open an account with them. Even though the company, its servers, its bankers and investors were outside the USA, even though the punter claimed not to be a USA citizen. The companies caved in mostly because their directors would be arrested and face *criminal* prosecution if they ever set foot on USA-controlled soil again.

Personal jetpacks and solar-powered ships

Nigel 11

Energy multiplier

Missed points?

You might consider the possibility of an energy multiplier, using one unit of electricity to get very many units of propulsion. It's called a rotor sail. Yes, you do need some wind, though with screw propulsion as a backup you'd never be completely becalmed. (The first use of steam on mostly-sailships was to escape from dead calm conditions).

Also the power needed to propel a ship rises as a high power of its velocity. Travel slower? Optimum velocity is an economic function of cargo and fuel costs. As for engine efficiency curve, that's an internal combustion problem. Electric motors can work efficiently over a wide range of speeds and power outputs.

Nigel 11
Meh

A totally solar boat could do a LOT better!

This is a very poor design of solar boat. A test-bed for marine deployment of solar panels at best. Be a bit more ambitious!

The right way to go would surely be a rotor-sail ship with the rotors solar-powered. You'd be propelled by the wind whenever there was any, switch to direct propellor drive if becalmed. Rotor-sails use the Bernoulli effect to generate as much a 20 times more propulsive force than a sail of the same cross-sectional area as the rotors (which are vertical spinning cylinders). The amount of energy needed to make them rotate is small. They also need little manpower to operate them compared to sails, kite-sails, etc.

Also note that in a boat, crude lead-acid batteries should suffice to store solar energy. Weight isn't much of a problem for a boat. Indeed, many designs of boat require a considerable weight of ballast to stabilize them.

Sail plus solar has another advantage. Becalmed normally implies sunny, or at worst light overcast: a high-pressure system. Heavy cloud cover normally implies wind.

Linux 3.0 all about 'steady plodding progress'

Nigel 11
Boffin

Big kernel lock has gone

This won't mean much to many, but recently the Big Kernel Lock has finally been removed. It's been a very long time going, so maybe that justifies going to 3.0

Filesharers spread Allied Telesis networking 'backdoor' info

Nigel 11
Thumb Down

The write-lock switch, yet again.

The answer for all such issues, is to make the functionality work only if something mechanical has been done to the hardware. The classic is the write-lock button on an old exchangeable-platter disk drive. These days, any hardware that is user-flashable should have a firmware write enable switch (shipped OFF), and anything with a built-in password should have a built-in-password-enable switch (ditto shipped OFF).

Best, in my view, if the switch requires taking the cover off the equipment. But even more important, that these switches exist in the first place.

Next-gen Atom CPU price halved to push netbooks

Nigel 11
FAIL

Netbook = Tablet - TouchScreen + Keyboard

Two things. Firstly, a netbook has a keyboard. For some modes of usage, prodding a tablet screen doesn't cut the mustard. For use on the move, up a ladder, etc. a separate wireless keyboard and mouse doesn't work either.

Also as far as the hardware is concerned, most of it is identical between a netbook and a tablet. The difference is keyboard vs touch screen. Is a touch screen cheaper than an ordinary screen plus a keyboard? I see no evidence of this in current prices ... rather the reverse, unless tablet manufacturers are profiteering off the hype.

The netbook format (physical, not necessarily Windows-compatible) will be around forever, or at least until there is a better way to input text than a keyboard. I'm not so sure about the tablet, once smartphones cost £100 or less.

Endeavour spacewalkers come face-to-face with VADER

Nigel 11

Name ...

Cholomondeleigh?

Slartibartfast?

Brit expats aghast as Denmark bans Marmite

Nigel 11
Boffin

Excreted?

Some vitamin excesses are excreted or metabolised, some aren't. The ones that aren't can build up to dangerously toxic levels. I think I've read of people dying of chronic massive Vitamin D overdosing. Vitamin A is supplemented as beta-carotene rather than the vitamin, because the body turns carotene into vitamin A as needed, but can't get rid of a surplus of the actual vitamin.

The B vitamins (in Marmite) are excreted. In fact your body can't maintain a stockpile, so Marmite on toast every day is likely a good thing (but watch your salt intake). Tastes nice too!

Danes should be able to buy Marmite by mail order from another EU country. It would be against EU rules to block such imports (as well as totally impractical).

The Danes are being inconsistent. Vitamin C is also known by its E-number. It's commonly added to a huge range of foods as an anti-oxidant preservative (in quite small amounts compared to eating an Orange, let alone a Kiwi fruit, but even so, it is an added vitamin suppplement! )

Steve Ballmer window-dresses Windows 8

Nigel 11
Flame

I hate all GUI redesigners.

If only the new user interface for Windows 7 *had been* just a different colour scheme!

Why can't anyone (even the Gnome folks on LInux) understand that not all users see a changed user interface as an improvement. Especially not if it is forced on us in one enormous downgrade with no route back up (XP to Vista or 7). Now Gnome have decided me-too, although at least on Linux there will be the option to keep Gnome 2 while upgrading the OS, for as long as someone deems Gnome 2 worth maintaining.

Why, for example, did anyone at MS think keeping most of the same control panel applets but renaming them and moving them around so that you can't find them any more using your XP experience, would be regarded as anything other than a confounded nuisance? Ditto Ofice 2003 to 2007.

Every time someone at MS changes the GUI, a billion people have to spend time re-learning what they already knew well. Every time, because they are distracted by the unfamiliar, some of them will make mistakes with the actual work they are trying to accomplish with their computer. Multiply an hour of wasted time and a day or two of frustration (and occasional consequential heart attacks) by a billion or so Windows users, and that's what the inflated egos of graphics designers and marketeers cost us. Fuck 'em all. I hate them.

ESA: British Skylon spaceplane seems perfectly possible

Nigel 11
Happy

Cool name

the cool name predates Skynet and Cylon - it was given to a purposeless buy eye-catching structure at the festival of Britain in 1951. This beast's fuselage is much the same shape.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skylon_%28tower%29

Google slips open source JPEG killer into Gmail, Picasa

Nigel 11
Thumb Up

$$$ cost

You quite assuredly would want the best compression you could get, if you were paying the bandwidth bill for a website that transmitted billions of images per day

Like Google.

More interesting is the green angle. Are compressed images unconditionally better because they eat less electricity in all the network routers? Or are they worse because they need extra CPU cycles to create them in the first instance? How many retransmissions equals one compression in CO2 emissions? (Sorry, no answers).

Firefox add-on with 7m downloads can invade privacy

Nigel 11
Pint

Escape tracking

You can escape tracking with any browser - just run it in a virtual machine that you blow away after each session. VMware player is free (-beer) as is any Linux-based browser application (containing Firefox, Chrome, Opera, ...). If it's IE you are after, MS probably expects you to pay for a second copy of Windows even if it's running inside your first copy.

What's hard is if you want to save state between sessions, but only state you approve of, and not the state that the rest of the world inflicts on you.

RHEL 6.1 lays foundation for future servers

Nigel 11
Pint

Try Scientific Linux?

If you want free beer and don't want to wait for Centos to solve its problems, then the answer is Scientific Linux, another RHEL clone. It's maintained for use by the particle physics communities at Cern and Fermilab, so it won't be going away soon, and SL 6.0 came out about 3 months after RLEL6.0 did (the usual timescale).

It's not quite the same as Centos, in that they do not maintain total bug-for-bug compatibility with RHEL, and do make a few tweaks. It's close enough for anything I've ever heard of where free-beer is acceptable. There's nothing specifically scientific about it other than the name, and a number of extra packages (not in RHEL) that don't install by default.

It's a bit premature to write off Centos ("reports of my death are somewhat exaggerated"). Red Hat made a number of distro-build utilities closed-source with RHEL6, so Centos have to develop their own build system. Progress is reportedly being made. I'd hope that once Centos 6.0 is out, they'll be able to catch up on the minor releases.

Apple to support reps: Don't confirm Mac infections

Nigel 11
Boffin

@Bear Features - probably true

I'm no Mac fanboi, but your statement is as true for a Mac as it is true for Linux. There's a big difference between a virus, and plain ordinary malware / crapware.

A virus spreads itself without any interaction with the computer's user. On a properly-designed operating system this is impossible, modulo any bugs. Provided such bugs are fixed promptly as soon as they are discovered, viruses are rare to nonexistent on that system (Unix, Linux, OSX). Some versions of Windows are broken by design rather than by mistake, and Microsoft is renowned for doing nothing about known bugs until some months / years later when a virus starts exploiting them.

Malware is the equivalent of giving the user a bottle labelled "Drink me". An idiot or child will do just that, without asking any questions, and whatever happens next is his own fault (or the fault of whoever gave him administrator access to that computer - his parent or school, for example).

On a properly-designed operating system it is possible, indeed normal, to use the system without having the ability to install anything. On a multi-user system, only the administrators can do installs, and you are as safe as your admins are competent. On a sensibly-configured single-user linux, its sensible single user normally runs unprivileged, and nothing gets installed without the user doing rather more than just clicking "OK" by mistake. IMO, Anything that makes software installing easier than logging in as root or invoking su, is a mistake. Humans suffer from their conditioned reflexes taking over simple repeated tasks. Dangerous tasks should never be made simple enough for the conscious brain to escape from the loop.