Posts by Mark 65

Aussies face 10 year browsing lock-up

The stupid thing is

They want ISPs to keep a track of emails yet a large portion of users will have a Google/Yahoo/MSN address rather than a change it every time my ISP changes one. Ho hum.

Samsung NB30 touchscreen durable netbook

@frank ly

Although I agree with you that it is Ubuntu sometimes making decisions not to do things quite right with regards wireless installs - works under live CD, doesn't work when installed etc. - I find it very hard to believe that after being told to use one disk explicitly by the user it iced both of them then refused to install. I've done a lot of installs of Ubuntu since way back at 6.04 and I've never witnessed it doing anything like that.

One thing I'd add is that windows 7 does not run without issue, especially on a 6 year old machine, as it requires many drivers which have not been updated by the manufacturer for older hardware and so that could equally well be labelled a pile of rubbish. Also does not allow for a minimalist install that will run on as under-powered hardware as Ubuntu. Try 10.04LTS, it's well worth the effort - had to download a wireless firmware file (which was easy) for my machine and it works like a dream.

Tories declare students a burden on us all

Re:Education is as important as national security

With regards to the English speaking World, education importance and the nearly retired dude the point is this...

Emerging countries place importance on their education systems, but it's directed at the sciences and medicine etc not sit-on-your-arse-pontificating-for-3-years bullshit degrees. Pay for those out of your own pocket or get industry sponsorship etc if it's that important.

In line with your point directing funding, directing it towards the areas we are lacking in and away from the nice-to-haves and superfluous would be a better way of doing things. Want more scientists? Entrance exams (to double-check candidates) and free funding would do the job if you make a condition of funding that they must work for 5 years or so in the industry etc.

I believe that in Australia lower degrees are self funded (HECS debt) whereas they will pay for a PhD - another possible addition?

With regards the flippant comment towards the 60 year old regarding everyone paying for his retirement you are assuming that he has no private pension when he specifically mentions entitlements and that he would want to live in abject poverty off of the state pension. He has probably paid into the system for his working life so he is entitled to it unlike a free-loader doing a half-baked degree which is part sponsored by the tax payer. Whether the money he contributed was wasted rather than ring-fenced or whether the system itself is unsustainable really isn't his fault.

Microsoft bares Steve Jobs' Flash rant claptrap

The title is required, and must contain letters and/or digits.

"On a vaguely related note: why the hell does an office suite need so much memory it can't be 32bit anyway?"

Why that'll be so you can memory cache more data from your uber-shitty user created Access database. Not on Office for Mac though.

Prisoner of iTunes - the iPad file transfer horror

IIRC

I believe there's a setting in iPhoto to stop it from taking the photos into the package library and just leave them where they are on the hard disk - which assumes they've been imported there to start off with. Believe there is an app for that (the import). Only edits are then taken into the package library so they are non-destructive.

iTunes as well can leave your collection where it is and... have manual imports, manage it where it is, or manage it in the default location.

The "don't worry your pretty little head" default settings do work pretty damned well for the novice with all iLife apps pretty nicely integrated so the user can access movies, music, and pictures from other apps such as iDVD, mail etc. Timemachine will then take care of backups. Whilst it's not infallible and may not suit everyone it's good for the novice.

Aussie police probe Google

SSL email

Using SSL to login to email doesn't matter much if, like a lot of services it automatically falls back once you've logged in (Yahoo as an example) and hence everything is sent in the clear.

Don't blame all users when the manufacturers used to and some still do send out the devices with no security on (or crappy WEP enabled) and more recently found that a simple sticker on the underside with SSID and password in conjunction with WPA/WPA2 works wonders.

Interception of communications without authorisation is still illegal in most jurisdictions so stop making excuses and shifting the blame. All evidence would seem to indicate it was deliberate, they got caught, and they are arseholes for doing it. End of.

Twitter airport bomb spoof joker launches appeal

Same old story though

He'll probably get off with on appeal with his shiny new barrister and would probably have got off at the start from this ridiculous prosecution if he could have afforded one at the start - legal representation is like everything else, you get what you pay for. This is why drunken footballers get off of drink-driving charges lightly and this fella got a slap. Got to love modern society.

Ten Essential... BlackBerry Apps

Had the same thought

Then realised that most apps would probably get expensed - hence pricing.

Intel answers Microsoft's Linux 'noise' with MeeGo show

Same old story

I don't know for definite, but with that being a reasonably recent Netbook I'd guess that windows would need a driver disk for the wi-fi. It's the same old story of linux getting the blame because the manufacturers don't release the drivers so some poor sod has to reverse engineer them etc. Not sure on the recompile but I've certainly had to download a .fw file to fix wi-fi on a PC. Windows 7 wouldn't work with it and the manufacturer wouldn't update the driver.

Most things don't work in their entirety out of the box, but of all the (multi hardware) OSes linux comes closest.

What's my point? It is that most people never witness the problems with PCs because the OS is pre-installed. Get your average user to have to install windows on their hardware and they might be similarly peeved that they need to work through a pile of driver disks because things don't "just work". The only one immune to this is Apple because they control the permutations and you and I pay the premium for that.

Steve Jobs fears Nation of Bloggers

Easier sell

He'd have an easier sell if there was some genuine quality journalism going on rather than the cut/paste pass it around crap that is all too common these days.

WSJ and FT will no doubt work as they are specialised but the mainstream press will have a harder time with the tat that they peddle.

Microsoft picks over Google's Windows exit strategy

Same switching issue here

I had the same issue with trying to switch from Windows to Linux - some of the apps I need weren't there and/or I couldn't convert due to invested time/data creation or usability issues - gui design is seldom best done by devs.

So I just switched to a Mac instead as it got me closer to Linux and still had the apps I needed. Never been happier with my machine. I'd have preferred to use Linux as I like it, but you go with what fits the bill.

Regent Street blocked by iPad fanboi swarm

Nice photo

There's truly some special looking customers in that queue, were the police officers mentioned taking photos?

Fanboi's lament – falling out of love with the iPad

Re:No Computer Needed

Well the average user does indeed mainly use email and web browsing/online shopping. Backup is never a total waste - those same users that don't do it whinge their arses off when it all goes tits up.

Ah yes, the marvel of a camera connection kit. Users do indeed like to take photos, lots of them, and videos too with these little marvels. The average compact camera these days has around 8 megapixels. That translates to at least 5 or 6MB per photo. Won't be long until that poxy little bit of storage is filled up will it.

This *is* a device that definitely needs a computer to make it functional and to state that it isn't is utterly disingenuous.

Maybe

The front facing video camera for skype type calls?

UK.gov issues death warrant for ID cards

You do have one

It's slightly bigger than credit card size but still fits in a pocket. Visas can be held against it electronically or stuck into it with glue. It's called a passport. There really isn't that much difference.

Oz government in filter paranoia meltdown

If at first you don't succeed...

First post rejected but I know not why.

The problem with Oz these days is that they are only just embarking upon the nanny state Labour-led journey that other democracies are just finishing up with. To give you a brief overview, I'll restate my previous comment's simple equation...

Tony Blair was a poor-man's Bill Clinton and Kevin Rudd is a poor-man's Tony Blair. You can tell it by the way he acts and the way he Governs. Kev knows best and watch out for the tantrums (well documented) when you don't do as he says. That's what is wrong with the place these days.

I believe Mark Webber also commented on how things had gone downhill in regards to nanny state when he came back for this season's Aussie GP.

BT quotes pensioner £150,000 to get broadband

F*ck Me Dead

Given that other people in the town have broadband, why the high price? I'd want them to be running backbone grade fibre to the home for that. Wankers. You'd have thought they could come up with something cheaper.

German bank robbers in Italian Job moment

Perhaps

Next time the "highly-skilled explosives experts" might want to use a slightly smaller shaped charge. A det-cord type arrangement maybe?

EU says Google and Microhoo still violate data protection law

Funding source

I believe the EU could fund a tiny portion of that Greek debt from these idiots unwillingness to comply with the law.

Computing smart-scope gunsight for US snipers

Slightly related question

In one of the articles about Harrison's efforts he stated they took about 9 rounds to calibrate the distance ready for the attempted (successful) shots.

Anyone know how you do this without alerting the target you're sniping at them or was this a peculiarity of this case whereby they could do it as the targets may have been under other fire or otherwise unable to detect the calibration rounds as they were firing a large calibre machine gun?

Taxpayers may ship 736 iPads to Brussels

Surprise surprise

Still, Marta Andreasen, the UKIP member who sits on the budgets and budgetary controls committees, told The Times that she finds the expenditure "completely unnecessary, especially when European taxpayers are facing such difficult times."

So it turns out that politicians everyone couldn't give a flying one about massive debts hanging around the necks of tax-payers as long as their little gravy train rolls ever onwards - who'd have thunk it?

Google open codec 'not open,' says OSI man

Title Required

Although it does create a new license I can certainly see the point of it - if you're going to be an arsehole and file for patent infringement then you're certainly not going to carry on using the code. A reasonable condition I'd have thought.

Seems to be a flaw in the Apache 2 license if you ask me. Not that anyone is mind.

Jobs drops hint on Google open video codec

Confused

"This probably can’t be improved that much," he says, referring to VP8 decoding capabilities. Google is unlikely to change the VP8 spec, but it and partners will continue to develop the software itself.

So H.264 has some implementations that are far better than the others (according to the article) yet VP8 probably can't be improved that much? Just because he cannot see how doesn't mean it cannot, especially given the variance in H.264 implementations. I'm sure when others get their hands on it improvements will come. Let's not forget that H.264 is a pig on lower spec'ed hardware and needs GPU offloading - atoms struggle/fail with 1080p and Ions don't.

I can't see Google having pissed $125m up the wall for nothing.

Oz customs search lappies and mobes for smut

Certainly

Why don't you step this way and wait in this small dark room whilst we confirm there's nothing of interest sir.

Whilst they are certainly arseholes butting heads with them will get you nowhere - it's a long flight straight back home at your expense if you're not a national.

iPads may be outselling Macs two to one

Really

So how do you move files about - backup, view photos you've taken, print, do tasks people would expect to be able to do with their new computer etc?

Wikileaks founder relieved of passport in Oz

Safety

He probably doesn't feel safe in Australia because of the rampant police corruption. It went on historically and it still goes on now, albeit not at quite the same level.

http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2010/02/09/2813849.htm as a recent example.

Another one being the "unnoticed for 10 minutes whilst it was carried out" murder of Carl Williams in a high security prison with full CCTV coverage. The guy's body was dragged from one room to another without the security personnel watching the CCTV noticing. Yeah, right!

Australia isn't the land of milk and honey it makes itself out to be. There's plenty of political corruption too. The two generally dovetail quite well.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gordon_Nuttall is an example of political corruption.

The fact that the Government also tried to prosecute him before the AFP stated the obvious that whatever he did wasn't done in Australia probably has a bit to do with it as well.

He probably wasn't referring to fears for his safety in reference to street crime unless he was thinking of going out for a drink on a Saturday night in Surfer's Paradise.

Intel lays ground for larger netbooks

Perhaps

Just maybe Intel have realised that they are in the business of making and selling processors not the business of dictating what their end-users should or should not be buying or doing with them.

Mucky private chat could be illegal soon

Re:

On the subject of item 3, the actual charge for which he was convicted, doesn't the law in question read as if it was intended to be applied to a sentient being rather than an inanimate object hence explaining most of the uproar i.e. inappropriate use of the law?

Microsoft launches patent suit at Salesforce cloud

Geez

That doesn't sound like utter desperation. Couldn't they find anything better than a load of spurious sounding tat?

FOSS vendors lick chops over ConLib IT plans

Only if...

Open standards doesn't include that unimplemented Microsoft stooge but instead for documents they specify "open standards, unencumbered by patents or licensing and actually bloody implemented". Or something along those lines.

iPad to become inflight fatcat fun-slab

So

a suitable use has finally been found for it.

You paid €20m for UN mobe-fear - and that's just the start

Surely

Potential long-term issues require long-term testing, no? 10 years exposure may not be long-term enough. What will the affect be on a 12-year old by the time they reach middle-age? Prolonged exposure is a contributing factor in a lot of things - how prolonged is no doubt what is being researched.

Euro 20m is fuck-all in the scheme of things when you're talking about cancer research. New Labour's old quangos probably tore through that amount in no time flat and I reckon Mandelson would use it as an entrée. Don't even get onto bankers - the BBC forums will be afire.

Google's WiFi snoop - who knew and who didn't?

4 hard drives = not a lot of data

Depends how big those hard drives are, could be 8TB in total. That's quite a bit of compressed text. That was also just Ireland as well was it not?

Pirate Bay resurfaces after German legal depth-charge

Targetting domain name

Wouldn't you then get thepiratecove or thenewpiratebay etc etc and just start all over again?

How easy is it to seize it in the first place?

Google: Street View spycars did slurp your Wi-Fi

Accidentally?

My arse, they just got caught out by the German audit.

Facebook founder called trusting users dumb f*cks

Jealousy?

"Random observation: There is a lot of bile directed against Mark Zuckerburg, wonder how much of it is jeaulousy."

Zero probably, he *is* a prick and in a rampant gun culture like the US it'd probably pay to have a little more respect for your users.

EU privacy watchdogs say Facebook changes 'unacceptable'

Except

I don't think you can setup a contract between service and user (you agree to T&C after all) based on one set of principles and then completely change them and totally f*ck over the user base. The most important bit being the DPA and the lack of explicit consent to reveal personal information to 3rd parties. I'm not sure a contract can be unilaterally changed, but I'm willing to be educated on this.

I'm quite looking forward to Facebook getting bitch-slapped on this one - not because I have a hatred of facebook (don't use it, don't care) but because of their outstanding arrogance and complacency towards their users deserves nothing less really. You can't blame the tech-illiterate as they didn't sign up for what they're now receiving - it's a bit like the BBC coming round your house and saying the terms of the license have been changed by them so that you now need to provide beers, popcorn and a movie every friday for a group of their staff and they'll be leaving with your diary. :-)

Was Microsoft's Office 2010 worth killing Clippy?

Re:64-bit

It means that, when coupled with the greatly increased worksheet sizes (over 2003), you can now create truly gargantuan, horrendous, CPU sapping models that can suck the life out of any resource you care to throw at them. It's like what the Daily Mail thought the LHC would do. I'd also guess the complexity can increase as there's more memory that can be handled.

On a slightly different note, the organisation I work for upgraded (in part only) to 2007 for the sharepoint integration but also because some departments needed more than 65536 rows on a sheet. I pointed out they might have more fundamental issues but just got strange looks.

Problem is

In the enterprise this stuff has it's feet so far under the table it's generally only ever a question of "which version shall we run". Don't forget that no matter what business it is, in the enterprise there's normally always a "lorry load of shit written in VBA" kicking around somewhere.

BT expands fibre rollout

Re:Waste of Time

I think you'll find that 100gig is a shit-load of data (especially if stored on disk), it's probably just that you can eat through it pretty rapidly if you want as you have found. I think you'll have to change your usage expectations.

The reason they won't give you much more in the immediate future is that it would obviously make a mockery of their miserly efforts to date.

Exam board deletes C and PHP from CompSci A-levels

Jeepers

For a techie site it's amazing just how many people here don't get that schools are there to teach the concepts not a precise implementation. You know, language constructs, what goes on under the hood and so on. They are not production lines for ready made coders for industry. As some have alluded to, if you teach someone the underlying fundamentals then they should be able to pick up the various implementations (i.e. C#, C, Java). It really is that simple. I remember having to do assembly language at school in order to demonstrate how things work under the hood. Have I used it since? No. Was it useful? At the time yes.

For all those critics of it Pascal is a pretty standard teaching language - I certainly studied it 16 years ago at Uni (along with Prolog and Miranda for the declarative and functional aspects). Fortran 77 was for those in the Physics dept.

VB though? Sketchy, real sketchy - unless they want to demonstrate how things shouldn't be done.

Adobe declares 'LOVE' for Apple

Do they also...

Love Security flaws and badly written code?

City Police still using Terror Act to bother photographers

The only problem is

If you intend using the pictures commercially I believe that you would need a release form from the owners of the building in order to use pictures you have taken of it. Getty or the like will have the relevant documentation on their site but I've saved you the bother...

http://www.alamy.com/contributor/help/image-releases.asp

It is a grey area though and the likes of Alamy tell you to err on the side of caution.

So, if the photos the pro was taking were commercial in nature and featured recognisable shots of a private building (imagine having someone next to the gherkin snapped from down low etc) then I'm afraid the security guard would have been within his rights - and no doubt told to enforce this by the property owners (I've been questioned by security at 30 St Mary Axe when I worked there but they were alright when I told them the company I worked for owned and occupied the building) - and it is possibly correct that the plod were called.

However they acted like utter arseholes, abused their position, possibly acted unlawfully and did themselves no favours. The age old disproportionate response from the plod issue.

Software piracy rates fall

Probably

Just small businesses using linux and free software instead of knock-off copies of office or the like.

Apple iPad

Wrong

Er, that's a dock connector. Not a USB socket for a printer connection, mouse, keyboard or external storage. Nor is it a connector to, say, a video display device such as a monitor or TV.

So no, they don't come FREE.

Epic fail sir.

http://store.apple.com/us/browse/home/shop_ipad/family/ipad

Read the "what's included" part.

Issues

1. Price

2. Non-standard port(s) requiring nice pricey custom cables

3. Requirement for another computer in order to use this computer - just makes so much sense Steve. Would it be better if it were a Mac?

4. Control freakery.

Outside the house a netbook would be far more practical due to ease of getting stuff on and off of the device and the fact you can do what you want with it. Inside the house what do you really need it for that a netbook can't do (and also has more outside-the-home advantages)? Watch movies or TV?

This device really does seem to be a proxy for an "Are you a wanker survey?".

Mobile Broadband Best Buys

Latency

It's not mentioned (that I noticed) in the review but what was the latency like on the networks? I ask because I have seen 1.5s+ ping response times in the past. This is the bit that screws things up.

I'm also puzzled by the massive asymmetry in the 3 results. Their download speed is good but the upload is shocking. At least Vodafone has some symmetry in it's speeds.

Secret forum reveals Oz firewall backroom dealing

You should have heard the twat

Watched the programme last night (http://www.abc.net.au/4corners/default.htm) and he and his supporters - a progressive thinking (?) Professor from some social studies department and some bible thumping God-botherer - opinions and attitudes begged belief.

The God-botherer came out with the classic "Why are people against this? If people think they have a right to download child porn then a file should be opened on them". The classic save the children angle. Never mind that there is plenty of legal material banned under this!

Conroy was his usual utterly incompetent techno-tard self. I thought he dude from iinet (or whatever ISP he works at) who originally railed against the technical aspects of the filter was going to breakdown in utter disbelief at what was being suggested and put before him.

It was typical political foolery. Conroy even stated that the blocklist couldn't be revealed because, unlike showing a list of books or films that are banned, it would give you direct access to the material. This, obviously, ignores the fact that 1) he's blocking it, and 2) if you have got around the system you are viewing what you want anything. I can understand not wanting to give an A-Z of kiddie porn but the list has to be up for independent review by someone other than the blockers.

Read the details of the show here (http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2010/05/10/2894468.htm)

Many people put forward the idea of "why not just block kiddie porn like other countries do?" but this obviously didn't fit in with the populous control that the vested interests wanted.

Funniest bit was watching a gathering of oldies being schooled in bypassing the filter so they could still get to a euthanasia site.

EU plans changes to competition rules on technical standards

I believe

Reasonable is generally defined in law as what a rational person would consider to be reasonable. The company's viewpoint, no matter large or small, matters not a toss.