Posts by pompurin

Each IPv4 address takes up 32bits whereas an IPv6 address takes up 128bits. That means extra processing power and memory. People will look for shortcuts and savings where possible and since the 10.0.0.0/8 range is what the majority of enterprises use there is no real rush to IPv6.

Go and check the Chinese google Maps and you'll see they control parts of India, Kashmir, Taiwan and the South China Sea. This is not new.

I was surprised it was so high for Java. I was seriously expecting to read this:

Cracking Java on a similar system will net $3 to a nimble-fingered security specialist.

How do those pesky Scandinavian countries end up on the top of all 'good' lists!?

Lastpass and Yubikey has been working for me. Only cost about £18. Every site has a different password and I sleep much better at night. The big question is if you trust your entire online life to LastPass.

Competition, or the lack of it

There are only two companies in this market, Sony and Microsoft. They are both well known for this type of behaviour. The Cloud is a major marketing ploy. It's about losing control of your own data and putting it into the hands of major companies and having them charge you for the pleasure. All for convenience.

I'll stick my hopes on Linux and hope they develop that into a decent gaming and media system at one point in the future. It has the potential to. XBMC is a good example of what can be done when people put their mind to it. The current XBMC is already more compatible than the PS4.

Lost market share to Amazon?

Personally I've stopped shopping as much at Ebay as I used to.

I find buying through Amazon and Amazon Prime especially is a better experience at practically the same price point with more quality control.

When selling on ebay I always felt uncomfortable selling anything over £50 to anyone with less than 50 feedback. Fortunately I was never bitten but I know family members who have been bitten by Paypal fraud and others who have been bitten on ebay in general. YMMV.

"Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results." - Albert Einstein

Are these the domains that cost $185,000 to apply for?

So thats 1,930 x $185,000 =~ $357m (£230m) in the coffers for ICANN. Impressive. Even Gareth Bale would be shocked at those figures.

Android Cheapos

If you're really looking for a stonkingly good deal and don't feel brandwashed (I've coined that) try one of the Generic Android phones available from China. Anything based on the MTK6589 or MTK6589T is pretty decent and available SIM-Free for less than £200 delivered. Some smaller phones are available at around the £100 mark. Most are available with Dual-SIM as well, very handy for those with Mistresses. Rooting is trivial on all of them. The only problem I've had is some Chinese Crapware which might scare off the Tin Foil Hatteries, a simple remove sorted that out.

The usual caveats apply when buying direct from China, but I've had reasonable success.

I'm curious as to why vBulletin allows a user with to run "SELECT * FROM USERS;" via a PHP page. I would have thought by now this type of query would be questionable.

Is there a genuine need for this?

Seemingly if a user account (especially an admin/moderator account) is compromised then there is nothing much that can be done apart from limiting what those accounts can do in the first place.

Apple still make a bucketload of cash, Samsung also make a bucketload of cash.

"O2 reckons customers don't call as much as they used to"

I can't remember the last time I rang a call centre without hearing the words 'We are currently experiencing heavy call volumes'. Be that anytime between 8am and 8pm.

My Toshiba NB550D (about £215 when I bought it) is a real trooper. I upgraded it to 4GB of RAM, give it a 64GB SSD drive upgraded to Win7x64 and it is now an excellent field laptop. I take it to all the dusty LAN rooms where there is no room to move and this fits the bill. The Battery lasts over 10 hours. The only major downside is the screen vertical pixels of 600, however It does do HDMI@1080p and is a very convenient tool.

It's a shame

they don't update their website. Whatever I look for seems to be nested about 3 levels down under an ambiguous sounding title. Is it just me or is their entire website painfully non-intuitive?

In my experience WiFi Hotspots just don't work.

I work in Central Birmingham and all of your general cloud providers like 'The Cloud' and 'BT Openzone' are there but you will be lucky if you get a connection. I get free Openzone access because I have BT at home.

1) You can be 'connected' to the hotspot but subsequently get no IP address leaving you with a 169.X unroutable dud.

2) You connect and get an IP address but the re-direction to the HTTP landing page doesn't kick in.

3) If you're lucky to get this far you might actually get online. Usually you're required to click through at least two more pages, one of them being a EULA and you might have to sign up if you're a new user.

4) Now you're online! On the BT Openzone hotspot I used today my connection dropped out completely roughly once every 30 minutes (with a 4/5 bar connection) and I had to disconnect and go through the whole process again. If I moved 10m away the connection went down to 1 bar and was unusable.

The most reliable connections tend to be dedicated ones in Coffee Shops.

I've just bought a brand new £1k laptop, the most I've ever spent on a laptop. It's got 16GB RAM (perfect for Virtualisation), Core i7, 1.5TB, Dedicated Nvidia 670M, Matte Screen with 1080p and a bluray optical drive. It has 5 USB ports, 3 at USB3. Its also a beast at 17". If I were to buy a similar spec Alienware from Dell I'd be paying £1.5k and more. Which brand laptop did I buy? Medion, made famous by Aldi. It came with Windows 7 (Home Premium).

The only problem is lugging the thing around, it's not exactly small and the charger literally defines the word brick.

Some specialised Apps are worth it

An App I have found fantastic and worth every penny is called Pleco which is free as a basic app. It's for learning Mandarin Chinese. For the dictionaries and addons you can pay a fair bit. I've paid £50 for all the dictionaries, OCR, flashcards, audio etc as it's very useful but also very niche.

Chinese is one of those languages where if you don't know a character it is incredibly difficult for a westerner like myself to understand it's meaning. Now I have OCR on my phone and it's success rate is fantastic.

This is the most I've ever spent on an App in my life, the next App down would probably be less than a £1 for Tunein Radio Pro or the Bus Checker App.

Snowball and a Desert

So in the past the earth has been to the two extremes of a Snowball and a Desert.

It begs the question, is MMGW just speeding up the natural process?

I can imagine an alternative reality where the earth is cooling down and there are tax breaks on producing as much CO2 as possible to keep the planet warm.

Kindle DX

I bought a Kindle DX which is only available in the States. I can see why Amazon never bothered to market it here in the UK. I predominantly use it for sideloading PDFs which Amazon get no commission for. It's a shame because it's an excellent e-reader with a hefty 9" screen.

How long until Computer Science is a lesson taught in every school? I think as a nation we've arrived at this foregone conclusion much later than we should have.

In the next few decades I imagine Computer Science will play a far larger role in our economy than current stalwarts. Granted it's a difficult subject, but so are the big three Sciences and learning a foreign language. How much do those subjects contribute to our competitiveness?

We should be giving these away for next to nothing to encourage future generations. With the funds massively wasted with Government IT systems; we could have given one RaspPi to every person in blighty.

Of course not using a proxy or TOR when hacking is the real WTF.

Essentially a professional hacker with the right tools should never get caught.

Isn't this simply a case of eliminating the middle men and flattening out the supply chain? It has seemed inevitable for a while.