* Posts by Sel

19 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Jun 2012

Has Windows 11 really lost marketshare to Windows 10?

Sel

Re: I took the plunge into Win 11

It’s time for you to try Linux

Meta proposes doing away with leap seconds

Sel
Stop

Whack a mole

Just let UTC tick without the leap seconds, apply them to GMT instead. Then offset local time zones from GMT instead of UTC.

Software can catch up slowly with the new plan or not at all.

Smearing is ok but not great. For those who are against it, have you considered what your computer does when the NTP servers tell it it’s fast or slow?

Cooler heads needed in heated E2EE debate, says think tank

Sel

2+2=5 is a no compromise issue

All these computer literate people are so binary in their thinking it’s 2022 already! They all think a compromise on security means that the security is compromised. Nothing could be further from our hearts when we think of the children. We only want security for them especially from the nasty people who want to indoctrinate them into believing 2+2=4.

Conflicting messaging overshadows NHS Digital's attempts to inform public about patient data slurp

Sel

Re: Almost impossible to opt out

How did you do it?

'WHAT THE F*CK IS GOING ON?' Linus Torvalds explodes at Intel spinning Spectre fix as a security feature

Sel

Re: Why we need faster MEMORY!

My time addled brain assures me that Sum Microsystems already did this back in the day on some graphics oriented dram. I can’t find any reference to it today however I did find this:

http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/7850975/?reload=true

COP BLOCKED: Uber app thwarted arrests of its drivers by fooling police with 'ghost cars'

Sel

Re: tbh, Uber has a point

"Furthermore, in every country in the world, it is a crime to knowingly act to hamper the police in their attempts to arrest a suspect in a crime."

Except in this case the police are requesting a crime happens by attempting to get uber to direct a car to them in an area where it is illegal. Uber are failing to commit the crime on demand. This is not hampering police as the crime didn't happen so the police have no suspect. The shady bit is that they only fail to commit the crime when law enforcement ask, any other time they're perfectly happy to break the law.

The police will have to do it the old fashioned way and follow drivers they think are suspects and establish that they are breaking the law by gathering evidence.

Faux Disk Encryption: Mobile phone crypto not a magic bullet

Sel

Re: Another Apple issue

Settings -> General -> Profiles

Select the 'bad' Profile (certificate)

Click 'Delete Profile'

This is also where your VPN certificate will appear once served to the device.

If you don't own the IOS device then there is not much you can do to stop users doing insecure things.

If your company owns the IOS device and a Mac (with restricted access) then there is OSX Server Profile Manager.

http://www.apple.com/uk/osx/server/features/#profile-manager

There are other BYOD provisioning systems that can speak to IOS too if you don't have a Mac.

Knives out for new EU rules forcing govts to reveal hacker attacks

Sel

reporting cyber incidents would not incur any additional costs

They obviously have no idea what reporting to government agencies is really like. Reporting an incident will merely be a trojan horse to auditing your entire infrastructure and then being forced to upload it to an insecure government database.

Boffins build CYBORG-MOTHRA but not for evil: For search & rescue

Sel

Immoral research avenue

I am very much pro science, however this is very creepy.

Researching ways and means of remote controlling a brain with the explicit aim of overriding it's freedom of choice is clearly one of those areas of science that we will come to wish we could un-invent. As we can all see the end of this road leads directly to mind controlling humans.

Google WILL wriggle away from Euro probe... but THEN what?

Sel

Don't be evil

Is being monopolistic b@st@rds to sales and marketing guys evil? Surely that is the way the S&M crowd want the world to be? (At least if their actions are to speak louder than their words)

The EU should order Google not to include that annoying shopping box at the top at all. There is a link for google's shopping 'product' that people can click on if they are into that sort of thing. All other google services should be included in the yellow stained 'had to pay to be here, not here on merit' area at the top.

Suspected Chinese NASA spy smuggled smut not state secrets

Sel
WTF?

Steno-pornography?

Large quantities of images are perfect for hiding source code in the low bits.

Porn gives a plausible excuse for concealing the media.

How can they know that there is no encrypted source code in those image files?

Feeling poor? WHO took all your money? NOT capitalist bastards?

Sel

Re: Just a bunch of wiggly lines?

"You're right, the roads don't work, we all drive to our jobs off road. The railroads don't work. Nobody ever takes the train. The airport doesn't work. Nobody ever takes a plane. The police doesn't work, criminals roam our street uncontested. Neither do the firemen, fires rage through our cities for weeks and are only put out when everybody starts passing buckets to their neighbor. The school system doesn't work, we all learned reading and writing from our parents. The hospitals don't work, when I was ill the other day my aunt the witch doctor cured me."

Last year I lived in south London, so for a couple of days most of what you portray was actual reality for me. Roads, schools, police the A&E department really are all in a dire state because the money is not getting to them it's being used to line the pockets of various vested interests or prop up 'political realities'.

My beef is not with the "people on the front line" as the platitude pushers like to call them. It is with the management that they have to contend with. Ask any of the people doing those jobs you point out we all depend on (I would have no direct family without the NHS) and they know exactly how to solve most of the problems we all see, they just don't have the power or resources to do so. That's because we let politicians and bureaucrats dictate to the professionals what they have to do when. Teachers, doctors, nurses, police, even local council members all know what needs to be done and even how they could do it efficiently but they have to contend with an army parasites second guessing them.

Sel
FAIL

Re: Just a bunch of wiggly lines?

"it's not as if taxes are removed from society and the money is burned"

Giving money to a bunch of politicians and civil servants is no better than burning it. If there ever is anything produced it will be utterly useless, unfit for its intended purpose or will be counterproductive in some other manner (will interfere with some otherwise productive process).

I first encountered this when the government wanted to learn about successful small technology companies. Their demands for information and the time we had to spend producing it nearly folded the company. I'm sure that the reams of paper they probably printed everything out on in triplicate, are now propping the door open in some Humphrey's office, as he shamelessly plies the minister with whatever lies the big companies have paid him to fill any open ears with.

I can see that the same is clearly true in the rail industry as could be seen in the when Virgin lost their contract for having the audacity to know what they are doing, not duke stats and to top it off, add up in the normal way when bidding for renewal.

The civil service are either as corrupt, or possibly more corrupt that their masters who are uniformly the sort of scum anyone would make sure were kept as far away from the productive areas of business as possible.

Yes, after that band of scum have had their merry dance of vanity projects and pocket lining there is some trickle down to real people in the form of benefits I pay for others to have but will never enjoy myself. Left to my own devices I still save for rainy days but even there I get 'Quantitive Easing' where the scum realised they can just print more money and so long as they don't do it too obviously the natives don't get too restless. But they are still making my pocket lighter.

Google parks panzers on Germany's lawn over 'link tax' plan

Sel
FAIL

Google Advertise the News Provider Front and Centre

Dear fossil relic type news people, sorry yes the world has indeed moved on. Just as it did when the printing press was invented. Either get behind it or get run over. Google may be an advertiser but they are putting your advert front and centre for free. The money they make out of your material is not the same money you could have made this is not a zero sum game. If you want to follow the old publishing model then you are free to do so. Stop publishing things on the web. If you want to publish on the web and control people linking to it then you have the same mentality and manners as a thug walking down the street staring down anyone looking at them.

De-linking is blackmail! Or at least that's what the French lobbyists said when Google said they would de-link in the face of a likely French pay per link IIRC. So cake and eat it eh... Are you five?

http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2012/oct/19/google-french-media-links-fees

The Times found out that they wanted to opt back in to Google after they put their paywall up, blocked Google linking and lost 30-40% of their visitors... Thus proving that you don't need legal help to stop Google doing this you need technical help (if you really actually want to stop them) and that blocking Google is also very stupid thing to do if you like visitors.

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2012/10/google-threatens-to-cut-french-media-out-of-news-search/

Privacy group damns Ubuntu's Amazon search marriage

Sel
FAIL

Re: Gnome 3 started this

I think Ubuntu follow Apple closer than Windows. E.g. disappearing scroll bars, one menu bar for the focused app (completely messing up mouseover focus) etc.

They should have followed Apple or Microsoft a little closer though. Apple do ask if you want to integrate with FB etc. but they don't do it on the sly. I'm pretty sure Microsoft would not try to pull a fast stunt like this either. Completely insane.

Yes people do indeed like the flashing lights and things that work as if they were real physical things. There are several million years of evolution behind our 'intuitive' understanding of physical things. A vast proportion of our brains are dedicated to visual processing. Why not use it to help the user feel comfortable that they understand what they are doing? The processing power for good graphics is there now we don't have to present people with a CLI unless they need to do something linguistic in nature.

I'm an 'RPM hater' (for over 10 years now I've avoided any system that uses them) so couldn't possibly comment on RHEL/CentOS etc. But I feel confident in saying that there are better alternatives for the Ubuntu refugee.

Ballmer claims Win 8 sales strong, WinPhone to follow

Sel

Re: Little known fact

It doesn't have to be because Windows 8 has had a rough ride in the press.

Apple sold the Mountain Lion upgrade at £13.99. The one before that was similarly pocket change.

The upgrade to 7 Pro was about £190 IIRC

I'm not a marketing guru but I'd say that if Apple are making you look expensive, you have issues. Further Apple do not have too many problems getting people to take their latest platform. This means they can feed their latest stuff to users more easily (app stores etc). Microsoft in contrast have had some fairly big problems moving their user base ever since XP making pushing other (more profitable) products that depend on new OS features harder. Remember that there are a large number of people out there who still answer 'Office 200X' when asked what OS they are using. This is not because they are idiots it is because 'the OS' is irrelevant to their lives. If you want these people to upgrade then you should remove any stumbling blocks (like large price tags).

So today Microsoft are offering a legitimate upgrade 'for a limited time only' from XP Vista or 7 to 8 Pro for £25 no petty fraud required.

I'm not sure I would want to replace my windows 7 install with 8 (giving me 'features' I'm pretty sure I don't want on my current hardware) even at pocket change. I am tempted by the stuff under the hood but from what I gather the new OS has a split UI personality disorder...

Forgetting Microsoft: How Steve Ballmer's Surface could win

Sel
Linux

Re: Apple never dominated anything.

Apple do dominate a couple of things:

1. (and I hate this word) Innovation in user interface, the iPhone was the first committed touch based device and UI. Yes others have copied that since but they didn't come up with a working product until they saw another one. I have stopped counting the amount of MacOS and OSX features Windows and Ubuntu have tried to emulate over the years. They really do make very sophisticated UI where the last word in sophistication is 'SIMPLE'. Making things simple should be the purpose of computers in most people's eyes. Nobody delivers on this like Apple do.

2. Focus on a coherent end user experience. Other organisations have a tendency to focus feature comparisons (including the price). Getting a tick in the box is often missing the point.

All that said they are or will become just as monopolistic in attitude as Microsoft.

Microsoft's 'official' Windows 8 Survival Guide leaks

Sel

ME Vista 8 My Computer

Seems like they've done it again...

Another one to skip or maybe move to another OS if not shackled to Windows.

If they don't close that gap in the UI in the next release they are in serious trouble. Even if developers all wanted to dance Microsoft's new tune (plenty don't) they still couldn't all move their apps to the new paradigm as fast as Microsoft need them to as UI is expensive to code.

Apple who are given to leaving sections of their users behind if they don't move in the right direction knew not to go this far integrating IOS features in OSX. They even stated that they knew they needed to reinvent IOS features for OSX not just plaster them over the top with out regard for the different platform.

Linux obviously allows the user to pick the UI they want, many users have moved to XFCE to get away from the new UI's and keep the OS UI where it's supposed to be (light weight and out of the way).

Retina Display detachment

Sel

Re: 50:50 for me...

"I wonder how long before we get bespoke Apple Thunderbolt-Ethernet adaptors"

Not long it is a £25 option.