Posts by alain williams 2650 publicly visible posts • joined 29 May 2007
was to cause embarassment to US military muppets who were sufficiently clueless to leave wide open holes in their computer systems - things like not changing default passwords. He did them a favour: he showed that they were deficient in a relatively benign way.
The similarity with Wikileaks is that it is another case of shoot the messenger.
By the looks of it not. It was quickly switched off, the teacher apologised for the mistake - end of story.
Have any of the kids never walked into their parents' bedroom late at night without knocking ?
I am getting increasingly annoyed at those who hold others to much higher standards than they can achieve themselves, then when something goes wrong - loudly castigate them. We all make mistakes. The correct response is to apoligise and take action to avoid a repetition. Life is too short.
I support what Wikileaks is doing, but attacking organisations that are perceived to have wronged wikileaks is the wrong way of doing things -- it reflects badly on wikileaks; yes I know that Anonymous are different group, but they will be lumped together by politicians/CIA/... and this will be believed by Daily Mail type readers (or for readers on the other side of the pond: Sarah Palin supporters).
We claim that we are better than those who are being exposed as wrong doers, so we must live up to that, even if it is harder to do so. To do otherwise will muddy our good intentions.
''Bail was refused because of fears he could be a target for unstable people.''
Then, surely, he should have been offered police protection, not locked away!
Do they really think that we are that stupid or are they only interested in convincing Daily Mail & Sun readers ? -- or even more frighteningly: convincing themselves ?
If it gives in on this then every tin top organisation is going to claim that its name is somehow sacred and needs to be given special protection.
Anyway the IOC are a bunch of parasites who seem to be more interested in money than sport. Why on earth were they were allowed to force a name change on long established East London greek restaurants who had the word 'Olympic' in their name.
Quote: ''The White House. "To be clear — such disclosures put at risk our diplomats, intelligence professionals, and people around the world who come to the United States for assistance in promoting democracy and open government."''
So open that when someone exposes their lies - they complain.
The last time that this happened, they claimed that many lives were going to be put at risk, and what happened ? What about the many thousands of people killed by the illegal activities of this government ?
If you aren't going to be proud of something that you are about to do: don't do it.
and a polite one for Myhrvold's outfit. They don't make anything, just generate outlines of ideas, patent them and then squeeze those who actually make goods into paying their protection money. It is much easier to come up with an idea than to actually make it work -- another of the world's parasites.
It would be nice to see some sort of real guesstimate this new chip will run various typical applications, eg: web server, database server, ...
Chip vendors wax lyrical about how fast the CPUs are, but forget to say that typically it will be waiting on disk or RAM to give it something to chew on.
I know far too many men who their ex had raced to a refuge claiming violence - when nothing of the sort has happened. They do it, snatch the kids and by the time it is sorted out and shown to be false the bloke has not seen his kids for months and so they stay with the woman -- which is what she wanted in the first place.
I am not saying that some women aren't in a refuge for good reason - but not all are.
Where are the refuges for men who are beaten up - just one in the country, in spite of what the headlines say, the real numbers are that each sex is about as violent as the other.
Tube tickets are not cheap and could easily cover the cost of the small amount of web/... access that most people will do. What they have done is to favour BT as an ISP.
Over 1 billion tube journeys are made every year, average cost £2-£3. Take 1p off each journey and you have £10 million pounds to play with.
Ah, but by forcing you to register with BT the government spooks can follow us a bit more ......
Google could make the results page a POST form rather than GET, and pass the extra info that it needs (search terms, how many pages displayed, ...) in a hidden field. However this would cause small problems for users such as unexpected browser popups about refreshing POST forms, etc.
I thought so -- only the over priced stuff that you bought at the air-port, they will still stop you bringing in a bottle of water that you bought elsewhere -- thereby preserving their profits by forcing you to buy from their shops.
It is largely cobblers anyway, provides jobs for the otherwise unemployable, keeps the ''security'' industries in business and keeps the population in fear. I remember the IRA campaign in the 1970's -- we just got on with it.
If I start sending out millions of rubbish messages, will they be able to pick out my true correspondence (just a few dozen emails per day) under the sea of rubbish ?
Maybe spammers are cleverer than we thought they were: all that they have ever wanted is private communications.
I am certain that you can find some users who need to use MS Office because of certain features (eg some macros). But for the vast majority of people who want to knock up simple letter, reports & the such OoO is plenty good enough.
The OoO spread sheet is plenty capable as well & can run many excel macros.
Some 3rd party apps expect MS Word - so give the guys who use that MS Office, everyone else wil be happy with OoO.
I am in the other position. I sent a .ods spreadsheet to someone; MS Office opened it, did the calculations to present the numbers but threw the formuli away - making it useless. Would you call that an MS Office compatability problem ? (Or was it MS trying to make .ods look bad/hard to use ?)
Compatability:
* With an undefined .doc format ?
* Different versions of MS word are not compatible with each other
* Or do they mean that MS Office is not compatible with ISO/IEC 26300:2006 (.odf) ?
* This will change as more people use OoO - look at the browser wars
Familiarity:
* Depends where you start from. I find MS Office hostile, but then I rarely use it.
* Retrain your staff & they will be quite happy with OoO
* Complained about the tech staff who were unfamiliar with OoO - well train them
* People complain about User Interface differences between versions of MS Office, is that not a problem ?
* Why did all the attributions (except the last) fly by too quickly to read ?
I could go on ....... you know what they say about how to tell when marketing men are lying ?
That will be interesting -- if oracle release a whole load of functionality that is available in the paid for version only -- it will prob cause many to jump ship.
Mind you: for a lot of people mysql is good enough just as it is; they don't really need new features.
Something like this was talked about on BBC R4's face the facts (or similar) just last week. A house was sold from under someones feet - the courts and land registry just said that they need to tighen procedures, presumably leaving some one else to carry the can for their ineptitude.
* Pupils aged 5 to 15, that is 10 years. What happens when, in 5 years, Jobs decides that the iPad is out and that we should all buy the incompatible iFolder. 105 new machines must be bought, 1050 new apps need to be bought. Who pays for all of this ?
* Little Jimmy leaves to get a job and on his first day: is asked to sign a contract but can't use a pen; use a PC with keyboard (or whatever we have then); can't do/use ... because his employer is not an Apple shop.
* When a 5 year old looses his iPad -- who pays for a new one ?
The US patent office has gone back to granting every bit of toilet paper that passes its way, with the view ''let the courts sort it out, meanwhile I want my productivity bonus''.
This means that apple can hit small guys over the head with its parasites^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H lawyers. The small guys cave in because they cant afford the crippling costs -- another megacorp wins again and innovation is lost.
What about those folk who claim that it is their religion, as reported by el-reg, will Lucas go after them, will it infringe their religious freedom ? Oh, what fun!
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2001/10/09/jedi_knights_achieve_official_recognition/
http://www.templeofthejediorder.org/
http://templeofthejediforce.org/
If Google bought Java off Oracle it would relieve it of something that it doesn't want.
Watch Oracle next hit HP or IBM with some hardware patents law suit - and get them to buy the remains of Sun hardware to make the law suit go away.
Oracle could then slowly strangle mysql and eliminate that as a competitor.
But by arguing between themselves as to which is better (Mac or MS PC) they convince everyone that the choice is one of their two offerings. What they are both scared shitless of is something else coming in (eg Linux) and eating their market.
Far better to have pointless ads that just try to brainwash people that it is one or the other.
''If you use Apple's productivity suite, sharing files with PC users can be tricky''
So you want standard file formats. Errrm, but it is MS that works hard to keep the files that it generates in an obscure format - changed every few years just for good measure (and force people to buy the latest version of their s/ware).
''Macs don't work as well at work or at school''
Well in that case, MS: for the good of your customers you ought to work to ensure that things can integrate - by the use of published standards. You don't want to? Is this because you want to make it hard for other operating systems to work with MS ones ? Why would that be ? Preserve your market share ?
''Things just don't work the same way on Macs if you're used to a PC.''
I agree -- this is why I find MS machines hard to use, I am used to Linux. A few years ago MS was saying that use of its machines was inherently easier, now it is saying that people just find them easier because they have been taught them at school -- sounds like a good argument for schools teaching kids to use many different sorts of machine. Mind you, being asked to do this this would give most teachers a panic attack.
BTW: my PC runs Linux. A ''PC'' is not just something that runs MS s/ware.
I am no MS lover, but from what I can see the finders of this bug have gone public as soon as they found the problem. They should have reported it to MS and gone public some time later - a month would be OK. That would allow MS to fix & get the patch out. What they have done is to make it easier for crackers to attack end user systems.
Having said that: it does seem that part of the problem is that MS has too much running at kernel level, things that do not need to be there. Thus problems in code have greater consequences than they ought to. This is a big design error in MS systems.
Oh: it is NOT a remote exploitable problem as El Reg suggests.
Well: if the US Destruction Department only did stuff that it was proud of: they would not feel the need to keep their actions hidden. They are winging about the informers' who's lives are endangered, what about those who's lives they have taken by slinging missiles in the wrong places?
''At other schools, freshman are encouraged (if not required) to get Macs or PCs.At other schools, freshman are encouraged (if not required) to get Macs or PCs.''
Quite: if the school just adopted 100% standards based software it would not matter what sort of PC a student had: MS Windows, Mac, Linux ...
Oh: PC means Personal Computer, it has no implied meaning on what operating system it runs.
If SAS win (which it looks that they will not) then writing software to be a drop in replacement for something else would become illegal, eg no: OpenOffice (MS .doc); samba (file sharing); the various non Adobe PDF readers; ...
The result would be a snarl up in software development where the big players would be able to wipe out competition by throwing a lawyer at them. Innovation would slow, prices would rise - bad for everyone except the large few.
This is a superb illustration of why you adopt multi platform, well documented/specificfied solutions; use standard file formats and protocols of which there are several implementations. When your current provider hikes the price you can threaten to walk - and they know that you can do it.
What a surprise that MS wants more money; they priced low to get the NHS enmeshed and raise the price when the know that they cannot move away quickly.
This is more about Open Standards than Open Source -- although Open Source fits the bill admirably.
Facebook is just the medium, if you remove the posts then people will just go elsewhere.
It is highly dangerous that Cameron makes a complaint to Facebook just because he does not like the content, today Moat, tomorrow disagreement with his budget. All that he has achieved is to publicise the postings - the Streisland effect.
When will people learn that nakedness is not obscene? What you do with your body is much more important, a stripper can be much more erotic while keeping some clothes on than someone sunbathing on a nudist beach.
This is the sort of brain dead attitude that stops the use of camers at swimming pools and school plays.
Please can we stop calling this bunch of muderous crooks a church; they are not; they are a business that indulges in brainwashing vulnerable people so that they can extract money.
Most ''churches'' push their own brand of mythology and rely on their members, but they don't extort in the manner of the scientologists.
If you don't want to use the file sytems ... then don't; others, who have requirements that match what they are designed to address, will find them useful. Most application will not notice the difference, generally it is only the system admins who care.
Why is it that all these vitriolic flames are posted by ACs, afraid to show your name ?
BTW: el Reg, the kernel is just that a kernel. A ''distro'' will take that kernel & lots of other stuff to make something that the rest of us can use.
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