* Posts by Peter H. Coffin

231 publicly visible posts • joined 7 Aug 2007

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Apple asks US gov to hide iPhone details

Peter H. Coffin

Oh hell no...

"Secret" means you keep it within the company. Once you're dealing with the government, you're talking to the COUNTRY, be it The People, The Crown, whatever. And THAT, folks, needs must be as public as possible.

Granted, it'd probably take the FCC 45 days to respond to a request for information in the first place, but....

Lightning bolt smites 60ft Jesus statue

Peter H. Coffin

Oh yes they did...

A perfectly functional lightning conductor was included in the design. They just had it labeled as "metal skeleton" on the plans, and the instant lightning hit it, it set everything ELSE on fire.

Prisoner of iTunes - the iPad file transfer horror

Peter H. Coffin
Jobs Horns

Pay for cloud storage?

Remember, earlier Apple devices had perfectly serviceable "lack of filesystem on storage cards" decades ago, so the more I learn about this thing, the more it looks like a Newton with all the nifty parts cut out and the annoyances carefully retained. Even after 35 years, John Sculley continues to influence Apple's design decisions by Steve Jobs refusing to make anything that ever even hints that there was every anything good about the Newton.

Everything should be encrypted, right?

Peter H. Coffin

Re: why encrypt selected systems and not selected data?

I was presuming that "selected systems" meant not only just all data on particular computers, but might also mean all data belonging to particular applications on many computers, or even all of particular kinds of data. That left "exceptional cases only" as being mostly a given user deciding that a particular file needs encryption; everything that's handled "case by case", basically.

Found phone leads to paedophile ring

Peter H. Coffin

Uhm, yes, actually....

It's a quite common technique among photographers to snap a picture of a business card or other printed contact information at the beginning of a roll of film or a data card. Then if the film or card ever gets lost or separated from other identifying information, then there's at least a HOPE that someone finding it would be responsible enough to use that contact info to return the item. Looking through the photos for such is a perfectly reasonable thing to do.

Google misses German regulator Street Car Wi-Fi data grab deadline

Peter H. Coffin

*Original* hard drives?

How would they be able to tell? What would they expect to gain from looking at a hard drive?

IT Crowd gets fifth series run

Peter H. Coffin

Props Dept Field Trip

Hopefully, they'll get to at least view some photographs of actual geeky offices, as most tend to have thematic elements rather more focused than just "geeky". While a Star Trek fan might let a little Star Wars crap occupy some space, it will seldom be equal, and even within the broad group of "Star Trek Fan", the vast majority will exhibit distinct preferences for TOS, TNG, or Later Series...

And then we get into the whole rant about props looking entirely too new and shiny to be the worn tools and loved detritus of a life lived...

Oz government in filter paranoia meltdown

Peter H. Coffin

Potentially silly!

I can think up legitimate reasons for pretty much any data possible to be collected in the time the van drives past that do not involve an invasion of privacy. A-#1 on that list is getting a mass sampling of how many unsecured wireless devices are being used to access Google IP ranges at the point of monitoring, as a rough sample of how many in the entire world might be, and from that, back-figure how many internet devices are being being used worldwide by Google monitoring their own traffic. There won't be enough sampling in a drive-by to "hack" a secured connection, but you do need data from the packet to get its origin, destination and an accurate time so as to be able to cross reference with the logs back in the mothership, and (if possible) connect to the wireless network long enough to flick out a dense packet of the same information plus geo location to a specific IP to confirm. That's SCIENCE in action, there! (Probably illegal in many jurisdictions, but calling it "an invasion of privacy" rather waters down the very concept of what privacy is and what invading it means. A person walking past you and your spouse having a row is not "invading your privacy", even if they note that you're having a row, until that person tells someone else that cares. Google merely knowing what your privnet was accessing at the time isn't an invasion of privacy until they tell someone else who cares.)

Best Buy tech finds 'child abuse' wallpaper on broken PC

Peter H. Coffin

IANAL

Or, more tellingly, can the tech prove beyond all reasonable doubt that the machine could not have been accessed by anyone between the time that the man submitted it for repair and the discovery of the images? An investigation into the boot process would be able to reasonably prove that turning it on didn't alter the contents of the machines such as to load child porn. But it would be VERY reasonable to suggest that some store employee could be getting his jollies with customer machines and altering the clock (and thus timestamps on files) to hide his activity.

Canadian mobe firm sued over disappearing husband

Peter H. Coffin

Only where?

By "Only In American", you of course mean "only in Canada"....

Sir Paul McBeatle: 'Me, I'd love Beatles to be on iTunes'

Peter H. Coffin

Or (yet another alternative)

People have simply bought up CDs second-hand and ripped them into the formats of their choosing.

While that may be a challenging proposition for someone devoted to an obscure jazz artist who's popularity peaked in the years either side of 1958, and who had a grand total of 10,000 albums sold world-wide, forever, it's not particularly difficult to pick up the entire Beatles collection over time out of jumble sales and from fellows standing near open car boots, for astoundingly little money. Quite probably less money *per CD* than iTMS charges per track.

Foreign IT pros in USA get paid more than Americans - study

Peter H. Coffin

Contractors with high-end cars

Mostly that's because there's very little for them otherwise to spend US wages on. There's no point in spending money on real estate, no point in buying lots of furniture or renting a large flat to keep it all in, saving for retirement to Bangalore requires very different levels of cash than saving to retire to St. Augustine, many H1-B contractors have no spouse, no dependents, and if they're sending money "back home" to anyone, it's supplemental support (not primary) of parents or siblings' families. A flashy car can easily be sold when it's time to move on. It is, after all, only one thing, and if it's particularly loved, shipping it to India is legal and not horribly expensive.

One sees the same buying habits in military personnel. And you can't tell me that PFC Smith is overpaid. She just doesn't have much else to spend money on.

Biometric cash machine lands in Europe

Peter H. Coffin

How reliable is this reader?

And we're right back to MythBusters episode 59. Where a moistened photocopy of a fingerprint was sufficient to beat a top-end biometric lock. Fingerprints are good and useful to ELIMINATE "false positives" like someone skimming your PIN, but I wouldn't consider them sufficient to authenticate all by themselves.

High Court rules software liability clause not 'reasonable'

Peter H. Coffin

Re: affect on EULAs

It'll have no particular effect on EULAs in general. The validity of the EULA concept isn't at issue. Essentially, the hotel was told that they were buying chocolate and that it was delicious. They were not allowed to read the ingredients ("Contents: rocks"), and told that they were not entitled to a refund when they opened the wrapper and discovered that they'd bought rocks.

Lost iPhone 4G vendor loaner outed

Peter H. Coffin

couldn't get a response?

... 'cause Redwood City is so far from Cupertino that it might have taken him all of 20 minutes to run over there and ask a receptionist to help track down the owner...

Supporting the teleworkers: Redux

Peter H. Coffin

Time spent working?

I still fail to see why the emphasis on "time spent working from home must be spent working" when so little time spent at work in an office is actually spent working. Between commute time, time spent fussing around before and after meetings, the 15-minutes periods in the loo with the morning newspaper, lunch out with coworkers taking 45-90 minutes instead of two minutes in the kitchen assembling a sandwich. In-office workers actually manage something approximating five or six hours of productive work in an eight hour day. Factor in the lack of commute time, and the perception of "work-day" means that if the home-worker spends even as little as *half* the day productively working, she's getting as much done as the typical office-bound employee.

C language inventor spurns Google's language exam

Peter H. Coffin

employed robo-Loompas

Perfectly reasonable, since at the time, they seemed to be employing robo-Loompas to send solicitations for CVs to pretty much everyone that posted a coherent answer to any question on any newsgroup or mailing list with a technical focus and used a real name to do so. I got three before they quit bothering.

Intel: Killer cables may leapfrog USB 3.0

Peter H. Coffin

light cables?

So how is this different at a hardware layer than the MiniTOSser-Link that already exist in a fair number of Sony and Apple laptops? And, well, my ten year old minidisc player.

The IT management impact of home working

Peter H. Coffin
Thumb Up

OBTitle

$FormerEmployer had this entirely sorted. Second phone line for work purposes (calls all paid for) backing up VoIP service with smart call-routing software, VPNs from company-provided workstations (they'd have to provide workstations anyway, right?) with high-capacity external hard drives for backups, and overnight courier service for handling hardware failures or software problems that couldn't be handled with support IT staff VNCing into workstations over the VPN. They even shipped Steelcase chairs to home offices. And it was STILL cheaper than paying for leased office space. Productivity skyrocked as employees tended to start work within an hour of waking up, worked straight through until evening with no time wasted in office gossip or milling around outside meeting rooms waiting to scrounge pastries, took actually LESS personal time for things because it largely didn't matter when that happened so people picked times when whatever they were out doing would take as little time as possible, and there was no time wasted with commuting. Even the *marketers* cheerfully put in 50-60 hours a week.

Peter H. Coffin

Printing

A virtual network adapter for the VPN can solve the printing issue; Just need the VPN system to hand out REAL IP addresses for he corporate network and properly handle the packet route advertising... Then VPNd machine ends up having a "work network", a "local network" that includes the printer, and "everything else" all running over one NIC.

IBM: Mainframe emulator part of a conspiracy

Peter H. Coffin

Innovation? Who needs it?

Seriously, technical innovation is only an actual real selling point to marginally small numbers of hardware wonks. Businesses, like most people, really don't actually want innovation. They may like more power to make their stuff run faster, or less power needed to actually light up the hardware, but the means by which those things are accomplished may as well be JFM (Just Fucking Magic) as far as the owners, buyers, and decision-makers are concerned. It's entirely irrelevant to their actual concerns, and it's not going to sway anyone pay close attention to their actual needs.

Pirates of the Caribbean say 'narrr' to Bulgarian airbags

Peter H. Coffin

Re: Aaaaand, it's dead.

Didn't seem to kill the James Bond franchise much. And those films had about as much to do with the source material as the PotC series has to do with either Powers *or* the Disney ride did originally, though they rewrote the latter to be more in line.

Much the same can be said for the new Bond materials as well, though.

Apple yanks Wi-Fi detectors from iTunes

Peter H. Coffin

Not very similar at all.

Not parallel, just kind of broadly dealing with the same category. Were Apple selling these kind of applications using these undocumented calls competing with applications that were prohibited from using those calls, then the situation would be closer. But as far as the article is concerned and based on rumors heard elsewhere, even Apple developers are forbidden from using internal calls at the application layer, for precisely the same reasons external developers are: they may change at any time, without notice, and "This application is incompatible with X.Y release" Is Not On.

Forgot your ThinkPad password? Get new hardware

Peter H. Coffin

The title is required, and must contain letters and/or digits.

"Security" that requires replacing a motherboard but then the hard drive is accessible again is a pretty funny kind of security. Don't most corporate users consider the data on the drive (or more importantly, the lack of OTHER PEOPLE'S access to the data on the drive) to be more valuable than the machine itself? There's no mention in the article about the drive also being rendered useless. Else the problem becomes a simple one: forgetting password becomes excuse to upgrade.

So what we really have is a laptop version of the old trick by car stereo manufacturers: charge 80% of the price of a new stereo for a replacement faceplate, thereby poisoning the value of stolen goods.

EU rattles sabre at Street View

Peter H. Coffin

Not doing enough!

Perhaps they could fit the cars with sirens and flashy lights as well. I suppose if they provide precise enough notice and enough noise, the only people photographed will be the ones that WANT to be and they can stop bothering with the blurring...

Leaky antivirus defences letting malware through

Peter H. Coffin

Title

People with out of date AV software or no AV software get malware infestations? Shocker! People with malware infestations seek automated advice more than people that don't have malware infestations would be equally news, equally obvious, and equally interesting. I'm all for a tasty press release concerning a new line of product now and then, or one that comes wrapping a new technology, but the "Dog bites man!" level of material probably isn't worth your time.

eBay refiddles with auction fees

Peter H. Coffin

<title>

Of course, you're welcome to write your own auction site... Or go back to putting classified adverts in local newspapers.

IBM's monster tape will take three days to fill

Peter H. Coffin

Tapes vs 5p/GB drives

How many 35TB arrays of hard drives can you put in your backups cabinet? How many 35TB tapes? How many backup sets can you fit into a Mondeo when heading to the off-site archivist? THAT'S why tape....

2010: The year PC prices go up

Peter H. Coffin

A 2.8% increase?

Really? That's the dire end of "cheap PCs"? I think some perspective has been lost on the bottom end of things. The top end PCs hasn't really changed since ... well, in about 30 years. One gains in capacity and power until a new, complete system costs about US$2500, and then you're done. You can't reasonably buy more power that you can use by yourself. That gets you a nice display, enough processing power that you can't overtax it with off-the-shelf software, enough storage that you can't fill it without putting things into it that you don't really every use, etc. It's just that in 1979, that got you a color monitor, an Apple ][+ with 64k of RAM, and two floppy drives, and a new-fangled dot matrix printer. So does it matter THAT much if a bottom-end beige box goes from £189 to £200?

Parcelforce fails to deliver for Windows 7 lovers

Peter H. Coffin

It's all about the cerification

The developers are required to test and certify that things work. They can only test and certify a limited number of platforms and combinations of things. They are contractually obligated to not encourage the use of uncertified things. Every different certification test requires having the appropriate combination of hardware and software available and ready for testing, plus the cost of paying people to run the testing. (The going rate for testers in the US is $60-100 per hour to labor contracting firms, if you want someone that actually shows up at the door having and idea of how to test something and write up defect reports.)

The answer's simple enough: if you want to use something else, make the browser lie and test it yourself. If it works, use it. If it doesn't, you've at least discovered WHY that combination of OS and browser isn't supported.

FCC questions Verizon's early termination fees

Peter H. Coffin
WTF?

equipment cost vs time

If it were really about recovering equipment costs, the fees would be pro-rated for the amount of time left on the contract.. $350 might be not unreasonable on a contract that started a month ago (based on the roughly $500 these things cost unlocked and the $150-200 that consumers kick in up front), and a whittling away of about $30 a month. But $350 at the end of things is $30 of equipment and $320 of "We own you, you little worm".

iPhone anti-malware stuck in state of denial

Peter H. Coffin
Grenade

This is why "ironic"

Mostly because anti-malware software can't seem to exist without a need to *market* said anti-malware software. And tech-adverse fools are very easily security-scared. (We can't say exactly "security-conscious", though.) The number of "Click here for a free security scan!" banner ads that work is staggering. So, the people who are most likely to want anti-malware software and haphazardly follow instructions to install it are precisely the people whom probably shouldn't be breaking open their iPhones to begin with, and not even trying to get anti-malware is likely to keep them MORE secure on average than otherwise.

Basically, there's three classes of people with iPhones: those that haven't jailbroken their phones and probably don't need anti-malware software because of that fact, those that have broken their phones and done it properly with secure passwords on their ssh installations and thus probably don't need anti-malware software because of that fact, and those that have no business breaking their iPhones because they're going to foul it up and expose themselves to malware. Marketing malware *only* increases the number of people in that third group.

Microsoft Silverlight - now with hidden Windows bias

Peter H. Coffin
Welcome

No phone dialer for desktops?

Why not? I've got fax service on it already, and a reasonably functional modem that I can link to my headset via OTHER software... There, we're headed back to platform parity again...

Is there any such thing as ‘The Business’?

Peter H. Coffin

Is there any such thing as "IT"?

Especially in larger organizations, there isn't a single "IT" to orient in line "The Business" any more than there's only one "The Business" to orient with. There's the CIO office, with overarching responsibility for establishing standards and security, but doesn't actually run hardware or software. There's the networks group that runs the comms infrastructure and can theoretically shut anything off at the direction of the CIO office, but also claims that individual machines and unsactioned software pose a risk to their infrastructure. There's the mail team that want to be able to deliver everything that comes in, and the mailbox team that doesn't want them to. There's web server folks tapping their bandwidth meters, and the design team that never seem to have the same configurations as the web servers do. There's the Accounting folks that never want ANYTHING changed, and if you have to change it, only do so in February, May, August, or November, and the Marketing department that never talks to any of the above and instead hire their own programmers that set up ad hoc boxes all over the place running who knows what applications that all somehow become essential to actually selling the products. And every one of those groups has eight different "Businesses" to please, and two of the eight are other IT groups, competing with them for budget.

Fat Reg slims down for spanking new mobile phone version

Peter H. Coffin

@Drew

There's nothing in the "add your own comment" section that's really at all difficult to implement on even crappy phone browsers; just make a nice simple form, with nice simple radio buttons, and a nice simple https submission landing page, and it should be all fine. Phone users don't expect much... (Oh, and the link to comments, being much smaller than the chunk of related stories below the article main, could probably happily go right between the article and the related links. Your devoted fans already read most of the related articles and are more likely to be interested in the comments, so why make 'em scroll further than they have to?)

Looks nice on Blackberry 83xx browsers as well as the Bold. Well done.

Tesla Roadster travels 313 miles on single charge

Peter H. Coffin
Unhappy

There is no title and never will be.

Lovely. Acceptable range from an electric car *that costs more than my house*. Can we go back to reading about GPS receivers and overpriced laptops? Those are at least in the realm of "maybe I'll get to own or at least touch something that cool"....

Lily Allen exits Twitter, bins BlackBerry

Peter H. Coffin

Someone remind me...

What's the point of having a mobile phone that never leaves your house?

Auto thief foiled by guardian satellite

Peter H. Coffin
Thumb Up

Fun coincidences

Amusingly, this exact scenario, including the Tahoe model, was the subject of an On Star advertisement on US cable TV channel The History Channel as early as October 15th, at least three days before the event described in the article. Apparently, crooks don't watch edu-tainment television.

Aerial laser gunboat 'burns hole in fender' of moving car

Peter H. Coffin
WTF?

Thanks, but...

no thanks. I'll be impressed when they they're at least willing to do that kind of thing with the Boeing VP in charge of the project within six feet of the target vehicle. That low impact will be useful given serious confidence and precision, but without that or real damage.... It's just some dorks wanting to live up to his Real Genius fantasies.

The great productivity myth: Are we slaves to the machine?

Peter H. Coffin

Keeping up with the curve

The thing I've found is most essential to minimizing this kind of crap is actually something management can do something about, at the "expense" of productivity. Active participation in subject-specific mailing lists, forums, newsgroups, etc is the single best way to have staff prepared to anticipate problems, avoid outages, and minimize downtime when they do happen. The challenge is that the time spent on the mailing list *looks like* time wasted when the outages simply don't happen, and better capacity management means upgrades can be put off for months or years longer than otherwise. It's all invisible money saved, and difficult to account for.

US court says software is owned, not licensed

Peter H. Coffin

Complaining about metaphors used invalidates discussion.

@MichaelC FWIW, Diablo II does NOT lock a key to an online account for any appreciable period of time. Characters on Diablo BattleNet expire after a month of inactivity, and the whole account goes away after three months of no logins.

Sony reveals slim PS3, drops price

Peter H. Coffin
Stop

Why Linux anyway?

I'm puzzled: what do people DO with linux on a single PS3 in their lounge? Seriously. Run VLC so they can watch AVIs or listen to MP3s off a media server? Oh wait...

The loss of back-compatibility with PS2 and PS games is, to be honest, a loss. It means more plugs, more A/V switches, and more hassles than just sliding a disc in and having it Just Work. I mourn the loss of that bit of elegance.

But I don't really care. I've already got mine.

Japan fine with cheap old mobile phones, ta very much

Peter H. Coffin
IT Angle

Strangeness

The whole point of carrying a smartphone, for me at least, is to as completely as possible avoid having to make and receive calls. I much prefer the self-documenting nature of email and use the ssh client with the tiny-tiny screen to fix problems myself instead of trying to talk some idiot through the steps of killing the last shards of the samba server and restarting it. Dont' call and invite me for a pint. Send me a meeting notice instead, along with everyone else, so I can see who's going, where and when it will be and propose changes back to the whole group.

US carriers are taking the beep

Peter H. Coffin
Grenade

Seems only an irritant

Who leaves voicemail messages anyway? I can't remember the last time I got any content in a voice mail other than "Call me" and a missed call in the phone's Caller ID log is enough to convey that.. For any information that's appropriate to leaving in a voice mail box, SMS is clearer and requires no transcription anyway.

World's first electric Chopper parks up

Peter H. Coffin
Pint

Predicting winners

I'm buying the next round if Jay Leno doesn't end up with this machine. He's already got a jet-powered one: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4uoATZMJrao

Twitter sued for patent infringement

Peter H. Coffin

Twitter for Emergency Response?

Maybe if they can schedule emergencies around the multiple-times-weekly fail-whale periods, DoS attempts, and other joys. I wouldn't recommend Twitter for anything more vital than which pub one's heading for, and would expect IRIS to be MUCH MORE RELIABLE, commensuate with the money paid for the service.

Landlord sues tenant over moldy Tweet

Peter H. Coffin

@Lost

Not in Chicago, they don't.

Most IT pros not planning on Windows 7 rollout

Peter H. Coffin
Thumb Down

One missing thing...

Ugh. The part that they don't mention is that there's more than a few Giant Applications, which require large amounts of setup and testing (like, years...) to implement, even after their years of development in the first place, which are even today still wedded to IE 6. Which means even upgrading to Window 7 isn't a simple matter of getting the latest versions of desktop applications, it's also running a VM with XP installed on it ANYWAY, in order to have IE 6 available. Which means double the support headaches, twice as many places for things got get broken, and (unless I'm pessmisitcally wrong -- I hope I'm wrong) most of the improvements that Windows 7 might have get burned up because a large chunk of work is being taken up running that VM in the first place... My Fine Employer has been backleveling desktop machines to XP since Vista comes out, and will still need IE 6 available until at least 2011, probably 2012... It's not just the rollout that's expensive, the upkeep and ongoing support is a killer as well.

Net sleuth calls eBay on carpet over shill bidding

Peter H. Coffin

simple answer

As a buyer, bid what you'd be happy paying, then ignore it. You'll either win and get something at your price, or you won't. Either way, you get an outcome that make you happy. Making a game of it only helps ebay.

Lawyers claim ringtones are public performance

Peter H. Coffin

I can almost kind of sort of see this...

Depending on, of course, that the targets of the suits are in fact the mobile operators that have been selling the ringtones, and that those operators have not been paying royalties for selling those ring tones to fools that don't know how to clip their own audio and tuck the results into their own phones. Given those things, then the downloading could well be seen as a public performance, simply to a device instead of a person.

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