Posts by fuzzyfelt

What does £55 get you in the noise-cancelling headphones world? Something like the Taotronics SoundSurge 85

Re: A+ would buy again

cool story. I'll put you down as a "not interested" ;)

We’ve had enough of your beach-blocking shenanigans, California tells stubborn Sun co-founder: Kiss our lawsuit

In the Land Of The Free, money buys you freedom, tresspass is a crime and you'll be locked up for daring to cross a road on a "Don't walk" sign.

Mozilla returns crypto-signed website packaging spec to sender – yes, it's Google

Re: Can we get Web caching back, please?

If only there was a network of caching proxies trusted by the page owner installed near the end user with the page owners private key and certs that would deliver content...

TalkTalk returns to the email hall of shame as Pipex accounts throw weekend-long wobbly

Venn Diagram Please

Wow, that's a very tenacious and committed group of people that must have been affected by this outage.

Something like:

People who used Pipex (usually a select bunch in the know, who rejected Demon (not me)), who continued to pay for dial-up internet during the Freeserve et al rush, who continued with Tiscali, who stuck loyally with TalkTalk during their hacking scandal AND still use their Pipex email address.

Azure, Office 365 go super-secure: Multi-factor auth borked in Europe, Asia, USA

Because on-prem stuff never breaks, floods, gets stolen, overheats or loses power?

Sysadmin cracked military PC’s security by reading the manual

Re: BS

We don't know what version of DOS it had - before MS-DOS had the F5 skip, it was available on other DOSes.

So what you're saying is this machine booted DOS from ROM (Possible but very expensive in the 286 era) and had all other boot mechanisms, such as floppy drives, floppy pin headers, SCSI headers, expansion boards, blocked so you couldn't plug something in?

I doubt it - autoexec.bat security sounds more like a hindrance rather than security.

BS

If the security was just a password prompt in the autoexec.bat file, then there were a million different ways to circumvent that. The easiest would have been to press shift or F5 when it said "Starting DOS" to skip autoexec.bat and config.sys. Or boot from floppy.

Further, I'm not sure how a ROM option could have affected the OS once the machine had booted.

Be prepared... to give heathens a badge: UK Scouts open doors to unbelievers

Re: Nice to see them catch up with the girls @heyrick

"I was raised CofE. I very much DO NOT believe, and after debacle following debacle, I don't want to know.

However, that is the box that I tick as there is nothing else that comes close to describing what I think, and the other categories apply even less.

Before you say that so many people are Christian, let's start with - how many actually go to church?"

@heyrick, if you don't believe that Jesus is the son of God and that he rose from the dead for your sins then you're not a Christian. I'm sorry to break it to you like this ;)

By ticking the Christian box in surveys and censuses, you're sustaining the debacles by giving them support and credibility. Otherwise, I'm not quite sure under what conditions you'd need to identify as Christian over admitting that you're an agnostic atheist/weak atheist/5 or 6 on the Dawkins scale. Or perhaps you're a deist or polytheist, but this still means you're not a Christian.

Censuses are often used by policy makers, both locally and nationally to justify policy or allocate resources. The tick in the Christian box, ultimately supports Christian and religious privilege, such as the unproportional representation of Bishops in the House of Lords, or the justification to close large shops on Sundays.

Sinclair BASIC comes to Raspberry Pi

Re: Pushing the proprietary button

Nah, someone wrote a program for Windows for a CPU (presumably x86) with a hardware floating point unit (>386DX) which was then ported to x86 Linux which was then ported to ARM11 Linux.

"Man ports old code to new variant architecture"

FFS - I'm gonna drive my kids around in a clapped out Austin Maxi without seat belts and ban them from shopping on Sundays because everything was better in the eighties.

Yet another ground breaking story of utter banality which could have been written as - "Man ports old code to new variant architecture"

Just this weekend I spent two hours teaching a friend's 15 year old son how to write Python. He'd never written a line of code in his life, not even an Excel macro, but by the end of it he was writing his own scripts with an understanding of types, conditions and loops. He'd already pulled in the Random module and was desperate to get his code to work with world. This was all done on his cheapo netbook using IDLE. No Pi, no BASIC required.

Hacker uses Kindle as Raspberry Pi screen

The Pi Bandwagon Continues To Draw A Crowd

FFS!

Like other less hysterical people have already mentioned, all this "hacker" has done is used yet another device as a term emulator. People have been doing this for decades. The only people who seem excited are the ones who have no idea how mediocre this is.

It's no surprise that The Register continues to hype and exaggerate any story no matter how small the Pi's involvement is.

What's the next headline? "30 Year Old VT100 HACKED for Pi" Or perhaps they'll combine the two main camps of fanbois?

"Mac Book Air HACKED as login screen for Pi" (aka XDM remote display)

Review: Raspberry Pi

Nothing but hype

When I see my cousin who works in recruitment say on Facebook that he wants a Raspberry Pi then I know that the bandwagon has truly pulled into town.

Most Pi fanbois I've met fall into one of two camps: "small. I want one. What's Linux?" and "I learnt to code in the 80s, so should everyone else".

The only innovative thing they've done is recognised a problem in ICT teaching and then come up with just another ARM board that's cheaper than the competition. Has anyone actually shown it to a child? Chances are they won't give a f*ck for it.

I know very little about ICT education but I'm pretty sure it's not a lack of equipment that is stunting our future ability to compete on the global IT market. How will a smallish PC help this? Once fully connected up (after DDing an SD image), all you're left with is a Bash shell? Whoopy do.

So is it that kids need something "unbrickable"? There are already many good online programming tools. Then when they out grown them, use VMWare Player to run Linux or Windows hosts, setup with Eclipse + PyDev. If they break it, get a new image.

Because it's cheap? You'll need a proper PC anyway, at least just to download and write images.

Because kids wants ownership? Then code for Android. What could be better than writing software that you upload to your phone, carry it around with you and actually show people it on the move?

Because they need to know the basics? Arduino is very mature, well documented and cheap. The old traffic light exercise with LEDs and push switches can easily be coded in less than 100 lines of straight forward code.

I can only hope that the bandwagon disappears soon before the Pi fanbois pressure schools into buying another piece of unwanted and dated IT equipment.

Crystal Acoustics PicoHD5.1

ISO Access

This device may not be able to access .iso but it's not because it would have to "extracted into their constituent parts". Most OSs (sometime's with the help of 3rd party sw) are able to read/mount ISOs without extracting them by simply accessing a file as a filesystem image. (OK, I couldn't code it but the theory is simple).

Also, there's so many of these cheapo Mass Storage reader-cum-media-player coming in on the slow boat from Asia. Is the Reg gonna review everyone of them?

In my experience they're all quirky, limited and bug ridden. D-Link had the right idea by supporting an XBMC clone which instantly bought them a mature interface and a codec/format list that can't be rivalled.

How is SSL hopelessly broken? Let us count the ways

Users are the greater risk

Have you asked a normal person (someone who doesn't know of the theory of SSL) what "the padlock" means? Chances are they won't have a clue.

In my experience SSL is just a hindrance to the average user, something that stops them from buying crap off the Internet when IE6 fails to validate a cert because of an old set of CAs.

So why are we bothering with EV Certs when the greater risk is the average user who will press anything and confirm every dialog box just so they can order their latest Dan Brown novel tomorrow morning?

I can only see that state-sponsored advertising is the solution, like Clunk-Click of yesteryear which also demonstrated the general public's ignorance to safety and desire to have their eyes poked out by an Austin Allegro cigarette lighter.

Double fail

I've never seen Firefox accept a self-signed cert unless it was previously added as an exception. I've just checked with FF 4 and its still the same. I get:

"This Connection is Untrusted" Get me out of here or add Exception?

So-called

Is it some kind of Daily Mail joke that there's four "so-called..." statements in this article?