Posts by Tim 11

Who needs hackers? 'Password1' opens a third of all biz doors

Re: Password fields need to be bigger.

one nice trick is to have a space at the end of the password - even if someone finds it written down or sees the plain text on your screen they're unlikely to be able to use it :-D

Re: @ J.G.Harston Resets?

the worst offender I've found here is fasthosts (this was a few years ago and I wouldn't be surprised if they've fixed it now). The "change password" form allowed me to set a password with punctuation characters, but the login form did not allow me to log in using such a password - D'oh!

Password manager LastPass goes titsup: Users locked out

Re: Who trusts a third party with their authentication?

so I presume you either just write all your passwords down on sticky notes, or you've written your own encryption software? compared to those alternatives, I'd take a third party solution any time

Keep Calm - you don't need network access to use lastpass

if the lastpass server is down, the client just opens the local copy of the data - network connection is only needed to sync.

this isn't really that big a deal

Pleased to meet you. I'm Joe Bloggs, MVP, vExpert, Cisco Champ

In general, I'd agree about letters after your name but I must admit, seeing MVP does make me sit up and listen

Too many IT conferences to cover? MICROSOFT to the RESCUE!

Re: I can see how that would work...

Agreed - the point of contract staff is that you use them for as long as you need them - not a day more and not a day less. An arbitrary limit makes no sense whatsoever and will just encourage departments to game the system, generating waste.

NO TIME to read Facebook? Delegate the task to your FUTURE SELF

What I really want...

Is some kind of bot that just reads all those thousands of "unmissable" FaceBook posts for me and likes them on my behalf, then I don't need to log on at all

Military-grade bruiser: Getac F110 rugged tablet... is no iPad

Re: Hmm Hang on.

You can get windows in <20GB but only if you don't run any updates. It's only 9 months since I reinstalled windows from scratch and my windows directory is up at 35GB. And unlike XP there's no way to trim out the junk.

That AMAZING Windows comeback: Wow – 0.5% growth in 2015

There's not much wrong with windows

If you exclude the Windows 8 UI for obvious reasons, the Windows (desktop + server) platform is really not at all bad for people who are sat at a desk while they work - and that is a hell of a lot of people. The reason people aren't buying laptops any more is simply because there is no compelling reason to change them, not because they're using them less. This might be a problem for MS shareholders, but it's not per se a problem for the users, or even the software vendors.

What is a problem for the users is the fact that MS are getting ever more desperate in chasing the mobile market, leading to stupid design decisions, which is having the side effect of making the windows desktop less usable and cannibalising what would otherwise be a pretty stable market.

Panasonic's seven-inch Windows slab has tough exterior, confused mind

Windows 8 *PRO*

When even a 7 inch tablet runs pro, surely windows RT is dead now?

Top 10 tech essentials for the festival season

my own festival survival kit

- 24 pack of stella

- wad of cash (a lot less than most of these gadgets cost)

- Nokia 6100 (10 day battery life)

sorted :-)

Facebook goes TITSUP across WORLD! Who will look at your cousin's baby NOW?

What about people using FB to log into other apps?

The more serious point here is that people often use FB to log into other applications which are actually useful (maybe even apps they use for work). Ironically, FB being down could actually have a negative impact on some people's productivity.

Google: OK world, make our 'End-to-End' crypto tool SPOOK PROOF

solving the wrong problem

transport security isn't the big problem with email - it's identity.

when every email has to be "signed" with the sender's credit card, and the recipient gets a "this is spam" button which donates $1 from the sender to charity, then we might have the makings of a sensible email mechanism.

Failover in FOUR SECONDS? HP's SAP-specific iron hits the streets

how on earth did it come to this?

needing all this state-of-the-art computing resource just to figure out a few people's time-sheets and expenses forms

<insert obligatory comparison with the amount of processing power required to execute a moon landing>

The British are coming! The British are coming! And they're buying Surface fondleslabs

blackberry playbook anyone?

MS are discounting the hell out of the surface RT to get rid of them because the OS is dead in the water. The surface pro is just another touch-screen wintel box.

Facebook wants MORE EXPLICIT SHARING

haha - facebook

hmm I remember facebook ... from 2010. is it still going?

Virgin Media so, so sorry for turning spam fire-hose on its punters

Twitter

"users took to Twitter to complain"

Aah the irony of it. Use the one service that is designed to splatter out every message to everyone

Microsoft Research adds interactivity to Windows 8 Live Tiles

Re: Amazing!

Pah - stop being so negative. If something _can_ be changed, it _should_ be changed - that's the new Microsoft paradigm

Anatomy of OpenSSL's Heartbleed: Just four bytes trigger horror bug

Re: Rust would help, but there's a reason it's not used there

according to wikipedia "Performance of safe code is expected to be ... comparable to C++ code that manually takes precautions comparable to what the Rust language mandates"

If it has met those objectives, then it seems to me you'd have to have a pretty compelling reason not to use Rust

Amazon carefully stitches up Heartbleed OpenSSL hole

Re: This didn't occur to me immediately

True, but it only affects the client if you connect to a compromised server. So any attacker would have to have either compromised the server or lure you to a fake server, in which case this vulnerability is probably the least of your problems.

Molyneux: Working at Microsoft is 'like taking antidepressants'

Supertanker

I'm not sure Molyneux intended to make this point but let's not forget that supertankers go down too, and when they do it's with disastrous results partly because the impact itself is bigger and partly because people refused to believe it would ever happen. I know far more people who've been made redundant from big firms than small ones.

This doesn't seem to apply to the banking system (for reasons which are incomprehensible to me) but for other large institutions the apparent safety may be a mirage. Comparisons between MS and Titanic anyone?

EE...K: Why can't I uninstall carrier's sticky 'Free Games' app?

Re: Why is this news ?

Exactly, I don't understand why this app is different from any of the other un-removable crapware that comes with every phone.

Anyone with an S4 should think yourself lucky you don't have a Sony Xperia mini pro. Mine became unusable because the on-board storage is 100% full of manatory updates to un-removable applications.

Bono bests Bezos in Fortune's 'World's 50 Greatest Leaders' list

Where's zuckerberg?

how can zuckerberg possibly missing from this list? He's the new messiah - everyone knows it. it must be true, hollywood told me so.

Xenon: Bitmap Brothers' (mega)blast from the past

it's a megablast

First time I played this game I couldn't believe it when I heard the song - the _actual_ chart song megablast - coming out of the speakers with the game noises. I really thought games couldn't get any better

iOS 7's weak random number generator stuns kernel security – claim

Is this random number generator actually used in security applications?

There's an inference in the tone of the article that this "early_random" PRNG is used for cypto/security purposes but it isn't actually stated anywhere.

From my understanding, cryptographically secure random numbers in IOS are generated using SecRandomCopyBytes which is a different mechanism and uses entropy from the microphone, wi fi, accelerometer etc.

if all you can do by cracking early_random is cheat in some games, this isn't really all that newsworthy

Dell thuds down low-cost lap workstation for cheap frugal creatives or engineers

16GB RAM enough for s/w developers?

Software developers working on enterprise server apps often want need to run the server in a VM.

When you're trying to integrate some J2EE monstrosity with SharePoint bloatware and need to run it all on the laptop, 16GB RAM doesn't cut it.

Forget unified communications, we want universal comms, Microsoft insists

A whole conference on lync??

That must be like going to a meeting of the Robert Mugabe fan club!

I tried it a couple of weeks ago. Like SharePoint, it might be OK when it's finished but it's impossible to tell at the moment because it's not even beta-quality.

Virgin Media sales flat: Firm bags fewer winter sign-ups than last year

Everyone can't gain market share every year

Why does our economic system seem to be predicated on the impossible vision that consumers have to buy things at a constantly accelerating rate so that all suppliers can sell more and more of everything every year?

Personally I'm happy with my existing broadband, my existing telly, my existing laptop (and until I was forced to upgrade to windows 8, I was happy with my existing version of windows too)

Flappy Bird becomes massively multiplayer PHOENIX

8 !!

right back to work now

Facebook adds 50+ gender options: Stalking your 'Friends' just got more LGBT-friendly

the seem to have missed out 99% of the population

According to the list on the ABC news page, "male" and "female" seem to be missing

Or maybe I'm in a minority nowadays

Whitehall and Microsoft negotiate NHS Windows XP hacker survival plan

What will they actually get for the $200m?

If the windows team won't be releasing any updates or security patches, what do you actually get for your $200-per-pc extended support? a shoulder to cry on and some help to fix your newly infected PCs?

Baby's got the bends: LG's D958 G Flex Android smartie

pointless

"Woo Hoo" I thought - "A phone you can fold in half to make it smaller and protect the screen when it's in your pocket". But of course no, it's just a phone that is slightly curved but you can bend it flat if you want to.

I already have a flat phone - why the hell would i want to buy a curved phone just to bend it flat?

Satya Nadella is 'a sheep, a follower' says ex-Microsoft exec

Unfair criticism

There seems to be a lot of bad feeling in el reg towards Microsoft, and digging out some irrelevant ex-staffer to have a pop at Nadella before he's even started seems a bit harsh.

Good for you I say - I've had 20 years of being messed around by Microsoft and their shit software. I don't care who's in charge, I just want to beat them with a big stick!

Office 365 Microsoft's fastest growing business, ever - Microsoft

re: fuck off

The thing is, office 365 isn't just cloud. it could be simply renting your copy of MS word instead of buying it.

MS have simply done their usual clever trick of renaming all their existing offerings to the new name and claiming huge uptake of the new product, when it's mostly people just using the same technology they had before but under a new name.

Blasphemy! Finns trample over Windows Phone home screen

that screenshot - are you serious???

An interface that looks like Windows 3.1 would have if it only supported 2 colours and 256x512 resolution!

It's not surprising nobody wants it!

Sony seeks mojo reboot with 147-inch 'honey-you-can't-afford-me' 4K home projector

dark colours anyone?

the basic problem with any wall projection is that the darkest colour it can project is, well, white

Snapchat: In 'theory' you could hack... Oh CRAP is that 4.6 MILLION users' details?

useful stuff

What would I give to have the email address and phone number of everyone who uses shapchat? Hmm, about £0.00

Resellers, distributors - your countdown to oblivion starts NOW

as Basil Fawlty would say...

quote unquote

Can't we get you on Mastermind? Next contestant: Mr. Tim Worstall. Specialist subject - the bleeding obvious.

Microsoft's cloudy chief: Azure reliability knocks your own kit for six

...not just a service for customers, but used extensively by Microsoft itself

Isn't that a bit ironic. People are scared of cloud specifically because it's NOT IN HOUSE - they lose control of the servers, data etc.

Of course MS would use azure because it IS IN HOUSE for them. Would they run their infrastructure on google or amazon? no. then why would they expect anyone who's not Microsoft to run their infrastructure on Azure.

You gotta fight for your copyright ... Beastie Boys sue toymaker over TV ad

I'm with the beasties on this one

If GoldieBlox had behaved in any reasonable manner, I'm sure the BBs would have been much more receptive to an amiable solution, but for them to file a pre-emptive lawsuit was cynical and appalling. Take 'em for every penny you can boys.

Unstoppable data growth in storage has ... er, stopped

growth in sales is not the same a growth in storage

as a very rough approximation, storage is the integral of disk sales over time, so if sales go down it doesn't mean storage is going down, it just means it's decelerating (not going up as fast as it was).

Moreover as the article pointed out, there are other significant factors like reducing cost of storage and improved efficiency which would allow total storage use to accelerate even if disk sales go down (and yes I know old disks get thrown away but I suspect even that isn't enough to counteract the other factors)

If you want an IT job you'll need more than a degree, say top techies

Experience is overrated

what counts mostly in computing is ability, not experience. I will agree that all other things being equal a wide range of experience is a plus, but counting the number of years' experience in a particular subject area is very overrated.

I'm sure we've all met with people who've been doing the same job for 20 years but still don't really have a clue, whereas a keen newbie with talent can pick things up quickly and learn on the job and overtake their "superiors" within a few months. I'd choose a fresh grad who knew how to program over a "lifer" who'd lost all drive any day.

Inside Steve Ballmer’s fondleslab rear-guard action

This could actually be a good thing

computers have suffered for so long from the problem that any old idiot with a laptop had the tools to create content, hence most software and most web sites are crap - the software equivalent of a movie filmed on a mobile phone.

by finally giving dumb users a content consumption device instead of a content creation device, we might finally get to have the people who know what they're doing creating the real content and software, while slab-fondlers can concentrate on tweets and facebook posts that nobody reads.

The only way is Office: UK Parliament to migrate to Microsoft cloud

payback time

Governments have been spying on us poor citizens for years. Now finally it will be easy for the common man to snoop on the private lives of MPs

What lies beneath Microsoft's Cloud OS?

all well and good in theory

but it's exactly the fragility you experienced that is the problem with Microsoft - "black box" installers that sometimes work but often don't; incomprehensible error messages; the fact that things often inexplicably work the second or third time. They failed to make SharePoint reliable in the enterprise so they've abandoned it, and it took them 20 years to get windows right. How long (if ever) it will take to get WASWS right is still very much open to question.

Mass Effect: Ten lightweight laptops that won’t bust your back

these look somehow familiar...

ah yes, they all look exactly the same as my 4 year old MacBook air :-)

We flew our man Jack Clark into Facebook's desert data tomb. This is what he saw

"a digital archive of rarely accessed but useful, static information."

2 out of 3 ain't bad :-P

Julie Larson-Green: Yes, MICROSOFT is going to KILL WINDOWS

the crazy thing is

it's only about 2 years ago they decided to dedicate a vast amount of resources to invent the third platform. I wish I could afford to waste $10Bn (or whatever it cost) doing something utterly stupid and then still get a massive payout when I finally got kicked out of the company

BOFH: One flew over the PFY's nest

are "me too" posts allowed in this particular instance?

best one for years :-)

Microsoft bags another glamorous Office 365 customer

but which parts are they actually using?

One of the nice things (for the supplier) about bundling all your apps up into one umbrella brand is that you can announce that customer is has signed up for your latest all-singing all-dancing cloud offering when all they're actually going to use is office on the desktop (which they were already paying for) and a bit of webmail.

All conjecture of course!