Posts by dave 46

Chrome browser 'is becoming Number Two'

I've no sympathy for people who click okay without looking what they're clicking okay to.

Samsung shows second second-gen 7in Galaxy Tab

It's a touch screen tablet, are we saying because Apple has a successful touchscreen tablet nobody else can use the most obvious form factor?

Should Samsung have a superfluous keyboard just to be different, or make it round to clearly separate it from Apples offering?

Given the purpose of these things they have to be as thin and light as possible and the shape of a widescreen LCD of whatever size.

Should Samsung sue Apple should they ever dare release a 7" tablet? Cause you know, 7" is Samsung's thing, their copyrighted dimension.

HTC reckons 'WinPho will give Android a run for its money'

Like the x-box? Yes I guess they could base it on that, or even on the quality and marketing of existing devices.

Or they could base it on hate filled forums, because that really makes sense.

Amazon revamps E Ink Kindle line

I'd quite like to see one device with both an lcd screen and e-ink screen (either side if they can't think of a more ergonomic way of doing it).

I like e-ink for reading long passages but for quickly flipping through a book or for flipping around managing collections (or accessing other material - like a website) an lcd would be nice.

Windows 8 secure boot would 'exclude' Linux

Looking squarely at security for the common home or small business user this is a good idea - just make it so you can turn it off in the bios.

If you know how to install Linux, you'll know how to turn it off.

Making it impossible to turn off is overkill and I don't think it would happen unless there was a commercial imperative (i.e. subsidised hardware or software purchased as a bundle).

Now Windows 8 goes into the ring to face Apple's iOS

Pricing hubris?

I don't think so, it's just simply not that cheap to make these things and Apple has huge volume on it's side.

If Dell could put a tablet out there for £100 they would have, it's not impossible to do it but slow 7" tablets with poor screens aren't what people want. They want a 10" tablet that looks great and is fast - like an iPad.

Sadly they cost, well, as much as an iPad. Given the choice most people prefer the ubiquity of iTunes and Apples app store.

Intel promises '20X' power reduction with 'Haswell' chips

It will be, if it isn't already, by whatever measure you choose.

Mozilla addons site targeted in same attack that hit Google

A reply needs a title?

I imagine governments want to read the hotmail / yahoo emails of people they are interested in too, I also doubt that these other services are impossible to intercept (especially given the nature of this attack).

It seems more likely that the other services either don't wish to disclose attacks or just willingly give up information when asked.

Apple vs. Samsung: next round today

Nah, not the same

Tablets can hold more than one document at a time.

Did you never notice when they wanted to show someone was really busy they'd have a stack of these little tablet devices? Like, look at me, I've got 20 reports to read, so I've got 20 tablets!

Actually I've just thought, how are we going to look busy in the future?

Seven lessons from the HP Touchpad fire sale

Must be privately owned

It's good for the steel workers, it's good to hold a long term view about their industry and market place.

But it sounds pretty obvious that they could make more money selling the iron and coal than using it to make steel in Australia.

A public company would take the short term view, sell off the loss making steel foundries and profiteer on the coal and iron.

Agency sends contractors' day rates to 800 RBS staff

Not a lot I'd hope

Contractors are very cost efficient if used right.

Why bother training somebody up for a year, paying their wages as well as expensive training courses, when you can get somebody in for 2 weeks and have the job done?

Of course this relies on several assumptions:

1) It is indeed just 2 weeks and not an ongoing requirement

2) the contractor is competent

3) there is work for the contractor to do immediately (and then leave)

Of course if the requirement is urgent and ongoing, you do both, but I'm sure a lot of lazy managers spending other peoples money don't bother and just leave the contractor on it.

How to stay out of big trouble from little devices

Bugs?

Don't need no stinking bugs to steal somebody's data, good old human stupidity is a million times easier (and works on all platforms!).

US and Russia to give uranium to ANYONE

"so it makes perfect sense for them to not be too trusting"

It makes more sense for them to make a weapon, no nasty wars by proxy if you've got the bomb.

It's what I'd do.

HP: webOS will still run PCs and printers

Patents?

That's covered by copyright surely?

Marriage makes women get fat, divorce does same to men

Conclusions seem flimsy

You work your fingers to the bone doing the house work so don't have time to exercise - wait, house work IS exercise, do it in a spandex jump suit if it makes you feel better.

Simply fact is men and women look after themselves to get laid / married, as soon as a woman gets married she stops trying. The man still wants to get laid.

After a divorce a woman jumps straight back into 'get a man' mode (must be in their dna) while the man breaths a huge sigh of relief and falls back into a comfortable batchelor-hood for a period of time before the 'must get laid' instinct over--powers the horrors of marriage and divorce.

Magellan Explorist 710 hiking GPS

GPS accuracy

The lake district isn't remote NZ though :)

I don't use it any differently to a paper map, there's plenty of features around to work out where you are and the GPS bit just helps you if you've managed to take a wrong turn (tbh looking at the compass and a map would tell you that quickly enough but it may save you walking 10 minutes in the wrong direction).

iphone

Roadtour app with all parks at 50k and in-app purchase for lakes at 25k was £80 total.

Already have a waterproof case for it, battery is plenty for the walks I do but you could buy a booster pack that takes AA batteries.

Of course that means owning an iPhone first but the maps seem a lot cheaper.

Wikipedia: It's not for girls

Girls bullied on nerd forum?

That would run contrary to experience, perhaps wiki editors are unlike any of the nerds on every other internet forum but I doubt it.

Could be the women don't want to argue, hide the fact they are women if they have any sense and aren't used to being corrected when wrong (it is the ones without sense who own up to being a woman remember).

Then the clincher, women just don't want to edit a wiki.

Lets face it, most guys have better things to be doing than editing a wiki, what kind of swamp monster must the women on their be?

IBM PC daddy: 'The PC era is over'

the PC is at a desk

Things you don't want to sit at a desk for use other devices (phones, tablets, game consoles).

There's plenty of things you want to do at a desk though, fps gaming, strategy games, any non trivial word processing / spreadsheets / cad / graphics.

The difference is things we don't need a desk for, we no longer need to do at a desk. That doesn't stop a desk being useful, and no matter what you want to call it, that computing device you use at your desk is a PC.

It could be your tablet plugged into a dock, or it could be a great big biege box, it's still being a PC.

ISP-operated servers alter search results, researchers claim

Umm

Do you mean when you type in an invalid domain, it returns search results instead of a 'address not found' error?

Hmm, k, malicious servers indeed.

India cracks down on the Blackberry

this is a technical issue, not legal or moral

RIM are happy to provide anything they can to facilitate lawful intercept (lawful in the relevant jurisdiction).

The problem is people with their own enterprise servers who have their own encryption keys - RIM can't decrypt that.

If they could, they already would have, this has nothing to do with standing up to tyrants.

Amazon Free Apps start to rile developers

due diligience

Free app, front page of amazon, consumes server resources and has no advertising.

And the outcome was a surprise to them? Maybe they need to hire a business manager, developers aren't always suited to all roles.

Game graphics could be 100,000 times better

Patenting an idea that was in production 15 years earlier?

Yes, that does sound like how patents work actually - carry on.

Sounds familiar

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voxel ?

I think I first heard it mentioned in the first commanche game. Good for from a distance but a little blocky up close, so they've made the blocks smaller now? Is that it?

'Missing heat': Is global warmth vanishing into space?

It's such a shame

But popular science is a religion, this article, anything that gets into the popular press and especially these comments - all based on belief more than the scientific method.

Personally I like my gods to have some some theatre and a bit of hope for an afterlife, all the pop science cultists can offer me is mung beans and milk floats - no thanks, I'm out!

BBC mulls talent Twitter ban to prevent storyline spoilers

It's obvious

If they could come up with 3 laughably bad shows a day they'd be in charge of light entertainment not parading in front of the camera.

Plans to move gov online 'lack cyber-security', say MPs

More government pork?

Sounds like a good time to get that evening class in 'cyber security'.

Make sure it says 'cyber security' though else they won't know you're the man for that 6 figure government job.

Hackers pierce network with jerry-rigged mouse

exactly

This is social engineering - getting a schmuck to plug a hacked mouse in isn't too different to getting them to download and run your malware.

I'd be pointing at the 'social engineering' clause and telling them to go do what I paid them to.

Samsung NC110 matte-screen netbook

Since when

did every new product have to be revolutionary and magical?

It's a netbook, use it for sending email and browsing on the move. It doesn't need higher specs for that.

An SSD would be nice but realistically you aren't going to get anything bigger than 20GB and the big spinny HD lets you dump quite a few episodes of something on it for travelling.

Microsoft pounces as Mozilla shuns enterprise

Firefox in usermode

Can you even update firefox without admin?

Woman dies of heart attack at own funeral

You hear stories

Of people going abroad to get cheap operations - does anyone seriously think that's a good idea?

Unless abroad is America, but that isn't cheap.

You do get to see Mickey though.

Travelodge admits hack

title

No good if your PCI-DSS compliant data store gets compromised too.

Far less likely than someone getting an SQL injection past your badly coded web front end but still possible.

Feds declare victory over notorious Coreflood botnet

Too soft on the infected users

the ISPs should have pulled the plug on the zombies until the client paid for a technician to go out and clean their PC(s), they should also have to provide proof they are running up-to-date AV software for a period of 3 years after being identified as a zombie.

ISPs that have identified zombie clients and do not follow the above rules should be cut off upstream.

I don't see why we're still tip toeing around with what is a serious threat to both the commercial and free speech future of the internet.

Apple Snow Leopard update sets stage for Lion

More than one

http://support.apple.com/kb/HT3669#epson

Didn't Nvidia go through a stage of including every product in one driver? Easy for Noobs but by god the download size quickly got out of hand.

Chandra tags ancient black holes

I didn't know either

http://www.grammarist.com/usage/like-gangbusters/

Has Steve Jobs killed the consumer hard disk industry?

Cloud storage?

What are cloud drives made from - clouds?

I see it as a big plus for the fixed disk manufacturers, demand for enterprise storage is rising faster than in decades and we still need a desktop or laptop for most of what we do with computers.

It may end up being a smaller SSD, but that's got nothing to do with the cloud and everything to do with new tech. WD et al should get into making SSDs if they don't want their consumer market (and even high end enterprise market) walking away from them.

Groundhog day: more Sony breaches

straw man

"Customer details should have been no more accesible than internal corporate data."

Because requiring customers to be in your building or signed in with a securid authenticated VPN connection is a great business model.

Things that expose themselves to the world get hacked more often than things that are hidden behind firewalls. Shocker.

Apple iPhone 5 to sport CRT-style screen

I am guessing

There is limited supply of the curved screens and Apple has *big* launches (much bigger than the other phones that have used a curved screen).

Apple could risk supply problems at launch, sign big long term contracts to some firms (which would allow them to commit to the investment needed) or they could give them the machines, I expect with a proviso that Apple owns the machines and they are only to be used for Apple contracts.

It's a way of controlling the market, ensuring exclusivity and guaranteeing (their own) supply. The normal approach would be to sign commited contracts with suppliers which would ensure they could invest in the machines needed. But whats to stop them selling similar screens to someone else ocne they've satisfied Apple's order?

San Francisco BOFH must cough up $1.5m

This bit does concern me

His employers have no process in place to ensure passwords are kept in the company, and changed when a senior employee leaves.

So they sack him, then realise he was the only one who knew the passwords, that nobody thought to get them from him before he left, and (obviously) they haven't been changed.

So because of his human instinct to tell the guys who are ultimately responsible for not maintaining the passwords (his management) and who just sacked him to go do one he is jailed for 4 years and a $1.5m fine.

I surely hope there's more to this than meets the eye because in my eyes he's left, he has no further responsibility to that company. What if some server just failed without good backups, would he be expected to go in and fix it after being sacked too - whats the fine for not going in when you don't work there anymore?

Microsoft poised to make biggest ever buy – Skype

Google

Apart from selling adverts has it really made any money on anything?

TalkTalk serves up website blocking to users

DD guarantee

Good luck with that.

I've never had to use it but my brother tried once and they were told it didn't apply as the amount taken was what the business intended to take (i.e. it only protects against errors).

Un-authorised transactions on a CC however are a slam dunk.

Google sprays customers with cash in AdWords cockup

Google really do have zero customer service

As subject, if it wasn't for their dominant position in advertising nobody would use them - Google docs? You'd have to be insane.

PC rental store hid secret spy hardware in laptop, suit says

Not for tracking habits

But for identifying where your machine is when the guy renting it disappears.

It's not unreasonable but should 1) be up front about it and 2) strictly controlled and only used when the rental agreement is breached.

To be legal the agreement would need to be explicit and that might well tip off the user (i.e. if they decide to nick it, the'll wipe the HD before doing anything else - soldered to the motherboard my arse).

Janet 3G to go live in June

three by the looks of it

http://www.mobiletoday.co.uk/News/11408/Education_body_JANET_launch_mobile_broadband_MVNO.aspx

If it keeps costs down and helps them get access to journals and research 'behind the firewall' it's not a bad idea.

Sony implicates Anonymous in PlayStation Network hack

Is it just me

Or does anybody else find it surprising a company as large as Sony didn't have an information security officer before this?

Seems it isn't just small business that ignores security until it's too late.

HP engineering veep spills cloud plans onto LinkedIn

remember grasshopper

Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity.

Computer glitch opens un-staffed supermarket to happy Kiwis

couldn't tell?

The guy walking out with milk and bread probably paid, the guy with 20 bottles of whiskey perhaps needs some investigation.

Facebook forced to reinstate snogging men pic

stop oppressing me with titles!

I bet facebook has deleted pictures of heterosexual couples kissing from time to time too.

Anyone who's ever moderated any content knows the guidelines aren't always clear, there isn't time for extended debate or discussion, and if you get it wrong you're a nazi.

Sonim XP3300 Force rugged mobile phone

The question nobody ever answers

How good is the reception on poor signal areas?

The chances are people will use this somewhere outside the M25 and some of the more 'rugged' parts of the UK barely get a sniff of GSM.

Feds commandeer botnet, issue 'stop' command

It's a legal problem not a technical one - the law needs to sort it out.

Make the ISPs responsible for traffic leaving their network.

If Youtube host infringing material they are required to take it down but if an ISP is spewing malware and spam it's nothing to do with them?

The law isn't perfect but I can't imagine youtube bothering with take down requests if there wasn't a legal framework backing them up.