Posts by MrWeeble

CpW unveils new identity excitingness

Virgin Mobile France

If the idea is to split CpW into an entity selling electrical goods and an entity selling communications services, why is Virgin Mobile France (a communications service) ending up in the electrical goods one?

Multiple travel firms refuse ID cards as passport alternative

1,736 - pathetic

There are 645 local government seats and 26 parliamentary constituencies in Greater Manchester. Each one of those will have a labour representative and/or candidate. Total - at least 671 people who stood for or are standing for election on a manifesto to have this scheme.

Logically if they truly believe this (and if they don't they should stand down), they must have all signed up to the scheme and tried to persuade their spouses, relations and friends to so similarly

So by my maths, those 671 people persuaded 1065 additional people to sign up. Less than two per person.

Fucking pathetic.

EU finally ratifies copyright treaty

Legal Personality

Before the Treaty of Lisbon came into force the other month, the EU lacked a Legal Personality meaning it was unable to sign or ratify treaties as itself. Now it can, meaning really this is just a bit of administrative tidying up and hardly big news

Googleplex menaced by giant cream cake

The Donut is on the other side of of the Android

"Although the cupcake was never paired with a giant donut - to signify September’s release of Android’s Donut update, aka version 1.6"

See this page for a pic of the giant donut: http://phandroid.com/2009/09/10/donut-has-arrived/

PerlMonks suffers unholy hack

Re: One thing....

Not really.

Given the webserver needs to access that data to perform its actions, then the decryption key would have to be on the server itself, and then once the server is compromised it is only a slight annoyance to the hacker. It would only be beneficial had the database been compromised without the rest of the server, but this would add a performance hit to remedy a marginal case (if your DB engine has a vulnerability severe enough to serve up the entire contents of your database, then full system access is probably not very far behind).

The point of hashing passwords in the way suggested, is that it the hash function is one way, so even the legitimate administrator of the site has no access to the original password, all they have is the result of a hash of the password (and usually some kind of seed text to make dictionary lookups more complicated).

This is because the site never needs to know the cleartext password; all the site need to know is if performing the hash function on the password entered produces the result stored in the database, if it matches, then it grants access.

WD unfurls 1TB Scorpio

750GB drive using 333GB/platter

requires it to have 2¼ platters. Unless by comprehension of how hard-drives work is completely borked (perfectly possible - I am not a hardware whizz), fractional platters seems unlikely to me.

Could it perhaps be a 2-platter 666GB drive or using three platters of 250GB each?

MoD sticks with 'most decrepit browser in the world'

Oxymoron?

"a secure desktop computing service ... currently uses Internet Explorer 6"

Riiiiiiiiiiiiiiiight

Vodafone offers customers chance to pay for own infrastructure

International

If you went abroad for a long trip, could you take it with you, plug it into a live internet port and then connect to it with no roaming charges and showing up to vodafone's network as in the UK?

I am assuming that would work as one IP must be much the same to another as far as vodafone is concerned. Anyone knowledgeable on whether that scenario would work or not?

Please don't eat your horse, EU asks owners

What is the problem

this seems like the Sun whipping up a fuss over nothing. It is clear to me, that horses can be raised for two reasons. Work animals and food animals. Why is it wrong to ask owners, which sort their animals are?

It seems pretty sensible to me that there should be someone out there making sure that unscrupulous people don't use a horse for work (and consequently allow it to be filled with veterinary drugs and stuff to make it more productive) and then sell it on as food (with all the drugs still lingering)

Is The Sun's problem that the EU allows for some horses to be eaten, or that other horses are not permitted to be eaten?, It doesn't seem clear what they are angry at, only that they are angry.

Wait a sec, I used the phrase "The Sun" and the word "sensible" in the same post, I apologise. Let me add some bigoted bullshit to counter balance it:

Bloody Johhny Foreigner coming over here eating our good British horses and forcing us to feed French sausages to our children and making us elect Curvy Bananas as MEPs. Paedophiles the lot of them. Probably Illegal Muslim too. And they are all on the fiddle.

Reg reader turns 'homo devil machine' on eBayer

Interesting pic he redirected to, but

isn't that what goatse is for?

T-Mobile getting out of blighty?

Bugger!

Nooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo!

I like T-mobile, and found them always quick to respond with good and helpful customer services . Their tariffs suit them, and in the greatest difference from 3, they have never been evil cunts to someone I love.

I guess I may have to start looking for another mobile provider

NASA releases moon return globo-projection movie

Re: Does this mean

Yes, for quite a while now: http://www.google.com/moon/

You may also be interested in http://www.google.com/mars/

Daft list names Firefox, Adobe and VMWare as top threats

Not only are the conclusions faulty, but the "facts" are innacurate

I administer my corporate network and we use a number of these apps on our computers. I roll out these products and updates to the client PCs using Active Directory managed software installations (we are a fairly small company so don't bother with SMS, but if it can be done in AD, then I am led to believe that it can be done in SMS).

All you need is the MSI which can often be extracted from the executable installer (Java, Adobe Reader) or is provided for download directly from the manufacturer (Flash players, Skype). And of course for the open source packages you can roll your own MSI if you so desire (a company called frontmotion does this for Firefox and has them available for download).

Mobile shields man from death bullet

Divine intervention

or maybe God just really hates Motorolas

T-Mobile kicked for 'more minutes' ad

No one believes ads anyway

I seem to recall a time when 17 out of 10 cats preferred one of two brands of cat food to any other

Google fixes world's most stupid bug

stop

while reboot would be fairly rare, I can confirm that "stop" on a line by itself will freeze your G1 requiring you to remove the battery to get it to reset.

Stoooooooooooooopid

Passport and ID card price hike laundered via private sector

[first title too long, second to short, I can't be arsed with this shit]

organisations "will need to demonstrate their capability in securing applicants' data appropriately."

Which is why the government is no longer planning on doing it themselves

Electric Mini spied in Munich

Re: No exhaust?

Looks like it to me, and it seems to me that if it has "Hybrid" written on it, then it is not an electric only car, it is a hybrid car i.e. it has a petrol/diesel engine as well.

El Reg drops in on Bletchley Park

Charity Shirt

How about "My cryptographer went to Bletchley Park and all I got was a computing industry and a Europe free of fascist tyranny."

Dell launches Inspiron 9 mini laptop

Interesting

Just checked with Dell, it will come with a UK keyboard layout but the 16GB seems a daft amount for me. If I got one I wouldn't be using it to store data on (16GB is too small to keep even all of my MP3s on), it would only be used to browse the web and maybe stream movies and music from my main PC which has big storage. I think I would be happy with 8, or probably even 4. So I am hoping when the Linux version comes out there will be an option to have it on a smaller drive and thus a cheaper price. I'm thinking £200 + delivery would be a good price.

Privacy watchdog hoists Google by its own petard

Doublethink

There is a set of people that are clamouring for the rights of photographers to take photographs in public places without harassment and another demanding that Google stop taking photographs of public streets as it is an invasion of privacy. I wonder how many are in both sets.

For the record, I am in the first set but not the second.

iPhone 3G not compatible with existing accessories

re Apple iTea

I'm gonna wait for the Bono backed Product(REDBUSH) iTea out later in the year at 20 times the price of regular tea

Site guesses your sex via age-old web flaw

Non Javascript method

It's fairly trivial to do the calculation server-side, for each site you wish to check add style rules such as this:

a.site0001:link {

background-image: url(/check.pl?userid=666&siteID=1&visited=0)

}

a.site0001:visited {

background-image: url(/check.pl?userid=666&siteID=1&visited=1)

}

then in the body of the page

<a href="http://www.theregister.co.uk/" class="site0001">x</a>

Then, upon page load, the client will request one of the two background images (without needing to run any javascript). The check.pl server side script then can store in a database whether the user given the id of 666 (some kind of session identifier) has visited the url http://www.theregister.co.uk/ or not.

Unpatched Windows PCs own3d in less than four minutes

The version they were testing needs more info

Looking at the PDF thesis, I don't speak German so I have no idea what version they were testing. However doing a find on the string Windows, suggests they were testing versions of windows as far back as Windows 3.11 and NT4.0 and the only reference to Service packs seems to be "Windows XP SP1+, 2000 SP3". If that is the newest version they are testing, quite frankly I don't care - that these OSs are not secure is 5 years out of date to be classed as "news".

Vodafone prevails in £2bn UK tax spat

I'm a Pendant

"Lots of Daily Mail readers complain about the EU but most don't know who there MEP is, even less bothered to vote."

Or even that since 1999, everyone in the UK has at least 3 MEPs due to the nature of the PR system we use.

Coat please!

Apple gets (slightly) less sneaky with Windows Safari play

I'm the other way round

I have Safari installed so web-pages I design can be tested, and I also have quicktime; but whenever there is an update I get offered bloody iTunes + Quicktime, which I just do not want ... EVER. I can ignore the update, but when they update the software again, I just get offered it again. Just updated the updater though and it has I+Q in the new software section rather than as an "update", but it is still automatically ticked :(

US dairyman inaugurates bovine biogas plant

gas transmission lines

It occurs to me that the lack of gas transmission lines would prevent them from producing gas for consumption, but could they not feed the gas into a mini gas burning power station and supply electricity to the grid instead. (of course only if they are on the grid)

Alternatively, what would the economics be in liquefying it into LNG and then transporting it by tanker?

Barron Hilton donates fortune to charity

She'll still get plenty

Assuming the $69m is divided 8 ways to each of Barron's kids, Paris' Dad, Rick will get 8.625 million ignoring inheritance tax, which is not a huge amount. However, this will be added to the $300m Rick's apparently already worth. When this gets divvied up after death between his 4 kids, she'll be looking at at least $75m before tax, it will take her a while to spunk that up the wall, even ignoring of course her own income from whatever crap she is doing.

Campaign to name US street after Douglas Adams

Not Banknotes

but a triangular rubber coin six thousand eight hundred miles along each side

No2ID calls in pledge cash to 'probe' ID Act's enabling laws

Pedantic comment

Shirley is a Baroness, not a Dame

Marvel launches digicomics initiative

Gaps in story-lines

Looks interesting, but I think I will wait until they have fleshed out their catalogue a little bit as they are not releasing the comics in order. This means you can't read an entire story-line, eg For Astonishing X-Men they have Issue #1, then skip to Issue #4, then #7 to #12

I hope this is just because it is taking time to digitise it and not intentional to force you out to buy the collection in hard-copy

Six-month hangover for 60-pint Scotsman

Has Glasgow moved?

Last I heard it was a considerable distance east of the Mississippi.

Jobs hits London to announce O2 iPhone deal

How Much!?!?!?!

The way I see it, looking at phones on o2's other £35/month 18 month contracts, you can get a phone that would set you back for £350 as a sim-free phone for free. (Motorola RIZR Z8 is what I'm using for my example)

On the same monthly spend contract, the iPhone costs £269 more than free.

£269 more than a £350 phone give this phone a theoretical value of over SIX HUNDRED POUNDS!!!

And that's for a 2.5g, network locked phone that you can not install any applications on?

Is it April 1st already?

Britannia triumphs over Johnny Metric

The misinformation on this subject could fill the valles marineris...

"How on earth can you give a bloke a conviction for selling bananas by the pound anyhow?"

You can't, and he wasn't. What you can do (and what that bloke was) is convict someone for using scales that were not correctly calibrated to required standards (ie calibrated in kilograms) and therefore potentially inaccurate. The fact is, when I ask for a pound of bananas (which I can still do), I would be shocked to get exactly a pound, it is always a little over, or a little under (let's be honest, usually a little over), the important thing is I get charged for what I end up getting, and the law has specified that so everyone gets the same deal that amount needs to be calculated from the mass of the good in a standard unit - in this case the kilogram. This man wasn't playing by the rules; people need standard measures, it doesn't matter what it is, but society needs it to be able to compare prices fairly. Quite simply the man should have got a new set of scales in the hundred and twenty odd years since decimalisation was first recommended by parliament.

I'd also like to point out the deafening silence of these campaigners for peoples-rights-to-sell-in-whatever-measures-they-please when a bar was censured for selling beers by the half-litre.

Anyway, that's my 2p (or slightly more than 19 farthings for anyone keeping count) on the subject.

Novell won't pull a SCO

re: Does MS have Unix code?

Yes, well known fact that the MS networking stack is derived from the BSD networking stack (at least it was, they may have rewritten it at some point), however since that is licensed under a BSD license, which is regarded as being clean of IP issues following USL v. BSDi.

The Unix copyrights are very complicated with many forks and branches

The BBC iPlayer 'launch' that wasn't

Recent?

"Microsoft Vista is quite a recent development..."

The first beta of Vista was released to developers on the 27th July 2005, exactly two years before last Friday's "release". Did no-one at the BBC think that maybe, just maybe, Microsoft might actually ship the product?

Mind you Windows XP x64 has been around for even longer and they haven't bothered to support that so who know how their quaint little development process works.

How to counter premature optimisation

Optimising the right thing

In the example about the decompressor the programmer wrongly assumed that the problem was a slow-decompressor when the actual problem was that a decompressor needed to be used due to small storage space. Spending time and effort solving the wrong problem is always going to be a pointless task. If you always look at the big picture and understand where your system fits into the big scheme then you can fix the right problem first time and can weigh the benefits of scenario a to that of scenario b

Physics GCSE: 'insultingly easy, non scientific, and vague'

Not even science

According to the website of the QCA, "QCA is a non-departmental public body, sponsored by the Department for Education and Skills (DfES). It is governed by a board, whose members are appointed by the Secretary of State for Education and Skills, and managed on a day-to-day basis by an executive team". I fail to see how that tallies with "the DfES says it is not responsible for approving exam specifications"

The questions asked in the exams are ridiculous and by my standards not even science. I'm not a dad yet, but if that is the standard of public science education, I'd have to seriously consider sending my children to a private school or schooling them at home - and I'm a dyed in the wool, pinko, lefty, hippy, socialist liberal.

The Mirror website cracked

wrong url

www.themirror.co.uk maybe redirecting to internic (indeed if you look at the wayback machine it has been since 1999) but that is because The Mirror's website is at www.mirror.co.uk and not www.themirror.co.uk as the article incorrectly claims.