Posts by Dazed and Confused

Microsoft's fear of an OpenOffice

Its all about money

If there is zero competition to Office, MS can sell it for what ever they like.

If there is an alternative to MS Office then purchasing managers have a stick to beat the MS salesman with and demand a discount.

Salesman, "Your new license will be $10zillion"

Purchasing manager to ITO "So hows the OO evaluation project going?"

ITO (crosses fingers behind back or not - who cares), "Oh fine, we've now got 3 field offices over to OO and are seeing very few problems"

PO turns back to MS Salesman, "Nope, I don't think so, for a $1zillion we can cope with our problems in OO, you're going to have to do better than that".

Ask BOFH he knows how these things work :-)

Larry Ellison to buy EMC?

@AC and EMC=

Now buying HDS really would piss off HP.

I've not checked, but I'd guess Hitachi was a rather big fish to try and swallow.

Opera: Can someone free Korea from IE?

IE is required for life in Korea

I had a discussion about this with a number of Korean guys earlier this year. They are all Unix people, many of them have Linux boxes at home but they all also need to run Windows and IE. Why? because none of the websites they need to access will work on anything else. You can't bank in South Korea except by using IE.

A browser selection screen like the one in Europe simply wouldn't be enough. You got to shift the content first. When Koreans are able to use other browsers to do the sorts of things people expect to be able to do on the web then you might get some competition for browsers.

Spycam school to pay damages for kiddie snaps

"Lawyers rake in most of the cash"

and this is news?

Ballerina canned for flashing her assets

Re: No it isn't

While many contracts have clauses that limit what people do for their own personal gain, many people in the public eye make large quantities of money by engaging in other activities such as advertising, personal appearances, sponsorship etc...

Why is it OK for a well know (or perhaps not, I do not know) ballerina to advertise antiperspirant but not to choose to appear in nude photos?

The answer is that the business is afraid that one will be perceived by the business as not being good for them while the other is neutral or positive.

It was that perception that I was railing at. Surely she should be allowed to make the decision for herself and people (her employers their business partners and customers) shouldn't be so immature as to view it negatively.

What she chooses to do in her own time

She's not your slave, you don't own her body.

Grow up and stop being so puerile.

Ruskie gang hijacks Microsoft network to push penis pills

another possible cause?

Have they found a way to re-route this block of IP addresses to another site?

Hefty physicist: Global warming is 'pseudoscientific fraud'

You mean other than...

That the society broke their own rules by not allowing a debate despite there be sufficient members to call for one.

Hitachi shows 1600 x 1200 panel for 7in tablets

303

303 and inches usually has a different meaning

Motorola sues Apple over - what else? - patents

staffing numbers

The problem is that any R&D company needs to employ 3 times as many patent lawyers as they do research staff.

I bet patent lawyers are paid more than engineers, who historically aren't good as asking for pay rises.

So given a set staffing budget, the more this legal slug fest goes on the fewer R&D staff will be employed.

biggest pile of patents

I can't help feeling that Motorola are going to have a far large pile of "essential" patents than Apple. As they Apple are the new boys on the phone block, Motorola have been in the telecom's market for a little bit longer.

All this patent slapping does make for an interesting spectator sport. Perhaps if they keep it up for long enough they'll finally piss the politicos off more than the value of their "donations" and they might decide to do something about it....but only after someone has patented a flying pig.

Youth jailed for not handing over encryption password

Re hidden containers

I've not bothered to read through the TruCrypt docs about this, but I'm intrigued about how this works. I've always wondered about the free map in the main encrypted volume. If the hidden volume blocks are not to be over written then they can not appear on the free map of the main file system. So the prosecution could no doubt argue that the size of the volume you have opened doesn't match the size of the disk. So anything missing must also be encrypted.

I'm sure there is an answer to this as the blokes who write TruCrypt are brighter than me.

Just intrigued.

Apple wants halt to $600m patent case

When?

are these guys going to understand that the legal system exists so that Apple can sue everyone else damn it, it's not there so people can sue Apple.

Perhaps they'll grow up and join the opposition to stupid patents, but personally I doubt it.

Web marketers pledge easier targeted ads opt-out

easily identifiable cookies.

How about them just agreeing to use easily identifiable cookies so we can just block them.

I don't want to have to find the "leave me alone" button every time I go to a website, I want to be able to set my browser up in such a way that ignores these guys. If websites then choose not to offer me "free" content because I don't want to play their games, fine so be it, I'm happy with that too.

Tablets in, netbooks out, forecasts analyst

Depends on why you buy a netbook

I see tablet/iPad devices fulfilling a different role to a netbook, in my life they wouldn't compete. But I'm not a typical user.

To me they would fill a whole between my netbook and my phone.

My laptop has grown too big to want to carry around much. But it needs that because too much on my life is on there.

My netbook is a handy device to take around when I can't be bothered to lug around the full laptop. I can easily use it in the office, computer room, coffee shop, bog... etc. But unless I was doing something specific it would end up in the living room with me.

The phone goes everywhere, Oh I could wind the clock back 20 years and not need to do this, but me world doesn't work like that any more.

I can surf the web and handle emails etc from there, but it isn't ideal. The screen is a bit cramped and I'm rapidly becoming an old git and can't see it that easily for too long.

So there is room for something to fit between the two.

On evening where I'm stuck at a desk because of the back ground flow of email is too high to deal with on the phone, then a tablet might allow better monitoring from the sofa.

For those who live every minute of their lives in facespace or chat rooms, then they might find a tablet a better fit than a netbook, they don't need a full PC and so the tablet might be a superior device for them

But you can pry my net book out of my cold dead fingers when I'm gone. For me at least they aren't a competitor.

EU sues UK.gov over Phorm trials

Why the Government?

Well because they wrote the law in a way which couldn't stop the bastards!

Secondly for the police's failing to prosecute the afore said bastards!

Bit hard on us tax payers though, we get shafted from both ends.

Can't we send Tony the bill? and suggest the Police might like to re-open their enquiry.

Anti-piracy lawyers' email database leaked after hack

And even more to laugh about

Looks like a £500K fine is heading their way :-) according to the Beeb.

as you said

BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA

Car wrecks rise after texting bans imposed

if you want to reduce distractions in cars

The number 1 thing you need to do is to make it illegal to transport children in them.

Trying to sort out your kids is far more distracting than using a mobe.

US.gov set IPv6 upgrade deadlines

Been coming for a while

They've been threatening to do this for a while. Got all the vendors in a Panic about this a couple of years ago. Suddenly stuff that used to support IPv6 as an after thought could do full IPv6 only.

Unless someone that big started waving a stick the industry was never going to get off its arse.

Of course it still remains to be seen whether the rest of the world will ever bother. Its a lot of arses to get off for no visible benefit. I suspect it will take a major telco to say they'll only provide IPv6 over some new generation of broadband links and call it G6 before the world & his dog take any notice.

ACS:Law's mocking of 4chan could cost it £500k

Not only ACS can be sued

But it looks like all of the BT customers could also sue them too.

Might make for any court cases brought by ACS interest as well. The leaking of the data could well be considered to prejudice a fair trial, so the judge might well just chose to throw out all the cases.

Then there would be the reliability of the data, if the data can not even be handled in a legal way by the ISP who is to say that it was acquired is a way which includes sufficient safe guards to be used as evidence in a court case. Without strong encryption and signing there could be no proof that the data hasn't been modified. So again this would make a trial difficult.

Then of course ACS' clients might feel that that have screwed up any chance of their seeking legal redress and they might feel that they should sue ACS for professional incompetence. Hmmm the list goes on.

Maybe he should be glad of the long queues at the coffee shop. The legal profession are after him, the ICO are after him, his victims will probably be after him and now his clients. He might well need a job in a coffee shop when all this is said and done.

Only all the people I come across in coffee shops are better than that.

Feds want backdoors built into VoIP and email

Don't these half wits ever learn?

> The legislation would, among other things, require cellphone carriers, websites and other types of service providers to have a way to unscramble encrypted communications traveling over their networks

How can the ISP be responsible if their customer encrypts traffic before it hits their network?

These people clearly have not got the faintest idea how the Internet works.

An email system just carries data from one place to another. The ISP shouldn't not be looking in there at all without a court order, but once they have that all they are going to get in the raw data. Anything inside that could be encrypted in millions of different ways, something like GPG would make it difficult for them to make any sense of it. They could of course insist on adding a backdoor to GPG, but users would only rip it straight back out again. Open source, no secrets there.

As Phil Zimmermann famously said "If privacy is outlawed, only outlaws will have privacy."

If they insist that all internet encryption systems have a backdoor, Internet commerce will collapse over night since there will not longer be secure way of sending your payment details.

If they do insert a backdoor how long before it leaks?

Why don't they go and ask their paymasters in the entertainment industry about this. How long did the encoding on DVDs last before it leaked, now the backdoor on HDMI has leaked. Leaking is what data does best.

HP gooses Integrity server virt with PA-RISC emulation

wacky wizards

So long as you've plugged the cables in the right places the new set of "simple cluster" commands will set up the networking and storage for you as well as build the cluster.

# of customers running Aries emulation

Since various standard utilities in HP-UX 11.23 & 31 have been shipped in PA for on Itanium boxes over the years almost all HP-UX Itanium customers have run the Aries emulator.

Most smartphoners don't give a flip about apps

Locked phones

Is this "most users don't care about locked phones" some sort of weird US centric view point related to the staggeringly low rate of passport ownership legend?

If you travel then a locked phone is a mega mistake. I made this error once, just once and never again. Pretty much the first thing to do after touching down is to go buy a SIM card. Its either that or do what an idiot friend of mine once did and run up a £1700 phone bill in a month while travelling.

Even travelling within the UK is can be useful to be able to swap SIM to one that gives you coverage if you ever venture out of the major cities.

IPv6 uptake still slow despite looming address crunch

Horders

Mostly the large blocks of IP addresses were allocated before anyone thought there was a shortage. They were allocated before technologies like NAT existed.

HP for instance owns its original allocation of 15/8 plus several class B and lots of class C blocks

It then acquired 16/8 when it acquired DEC. (Damn clueless management, should have worked out who owned 14/8 then they could have had a whole /7)

As to third rate technician spooking clueless management. These allocations were made by lab engineers and the company management would have had little or no involvement. It was only later on that the companies found that these research IP networks were better than the previous networks built by corporate IT departments and used by management. But that was still years before the idea of having an internet connection at home or at a small company.

From 1981 till 1993 IP address allocation were made by class A,B or C. You got a /8, a /16 or a /24. That is how allocations worked. Even after the advent of home Internet connections (but still years before Al Gore invented the Internet) if you asked for routed IP addresses you were allocated a /24 block. At one time I had 193.195.11.0/24 allocated, that is just what you got. It wasn't until about 2000 that they started to get worried about the supply and asked for them back, or asked you to justify why you needed than many addresses.

Perhaps the owners of the large blocks should be asked to return them. But I don't think anyone will every manage to persuade them to do it.

Steve Jobs in iPhone bitchslap to creationists, Tea Party

literature

What ever your views on Christianity the Kings James bible is widely regarded as being a significant piece of English literature.

ID, where is the inteligence?

The ID debate always reminds me of the old joke,

How can you tell God was an architect?

Who else would put the waste disposal unit in the middle of the play ground.

Prosecutor won't resign over lewd texts to 'hot' crime victim

Sheeeeeeeeesh

It's guys like him who get us dirty old men a bad name.

Phone hacking probe cops 'got law wrong' - were too lenient

Makes you wonder

Just why NuLab didn't want this pursued at the time but why suddenly they do when they are no long in power.

Lily Allen sues Apple over hacked Macbook

Will St Jobs

tell her to piss off and leave us alone too?

Intel eats crow on software RAID

? Ehh, not necessary

If you write to a raid device you need to write to at least 2 physical drives (hdd/ssd doesn't matter). Since you won't be able to get the two devices into sync the 2 writes will occur at slightly different times. A system failure will result in inconsistent data on either the mirror or the parity device. So you need to have some mechanism to avoid this.

You can journal the writes through an intent log, but this requires an addition physical write to occur before the real data write can be allowed to proceed. OK, you can have a cache of recent accessed areas and trade cache size against recovery speed, but it still doesn't help random writes and fast sequential writes will always tend to saturate this cache.

Or you can hold the un-acknowledged write in the cache pending completion. In order to be able to use this approach you need a protected cache.

The claim was that SW RAID could have a equal or better performance than HW RAID, so I would expect the logged write approach to be unrealistic.

Safe write caching

One of the traditional downsides to software raid that even effects RAID1, which doesn't suffer the CPU overhead, is the need to log writes unless there is some form of safe write caching. Are these new boxes going to provide battery backed up write cache?

Apple iPod Nano 6G

No Video, no point

My youngest bought a previous generation Nano (we found a shop selling them at a sensible price rather than the normal rip off rate). One of the major things he uses it for is to video him and his mates. Quite a few of them also have the things and like wise use them to make daft vids. The new one doesn't have a camera, so what's the point?

Software re-sale restricted by US Court of Appeals

At least one case has gone in favour of the customer

I know that way back in the 80s DEC took this issue to caught about VMS licenses. They were trying to block the sale of second hand VAXes by universities. Without a VMS license the box was basically useless (sure you could run BSD Unix but most people ran VMS).

They pointed out that the license couldn't be re-sold.

The judge didn't agree and allowed the sale.

Germany also allows the sale of second hand software. This has been covered on El Reg.

The UK case pre-dates El Reg, even as an an email circular. I read it in either Computer Weekly or Computing.

Software is not different!

If the legal system won't stop pandering to rich software companies that pay lawyers vast piles of dosh to claim that for some reason not understood by human beings that for some reason software is different and that the normal laws of the land that apply to everything else somehow just don't apply to it, then it is about time that the elected governments around the world started explicitly writing laws that include computer software.

1) You get the right of first sale. You may not do anything to impede the legitimate customers right to exercise their normal rights. What you put in the EULA isn't worth diddly squat, just like the introduction in book that says you can't sell that too, funny how there was 2nd hand book shops but no 2nd hand software shops.

2) The sale of goods act applies to you too guys, if you sell shit you are responsible for making it work and you are responsible for it not working. In much the same way that if you make a car then find that the brakes don't work you have to issue a recall and you have to fix the damn things.

And before you start whinging that writing software is difficult, it isn't - Stop whinging. Try designing a bridge or a new commercial airliner or anti-cancer drug. They cope with quality laws why are you unique?

That is will put the price of software up through the roof, It won't, it will reduce the price significantly. Almost all products are priced at "what the market will stand" pricing. Once there is a healthy market in second hand software then there will be legitimate competition and this will keep the price down since vendors will have to compete against it.

PS, I have and do still sometimes write software for a living.

Police legal advice gives spam RIPA protection

@Pete 2

What the QC is telling them is "If you go to court with this, the defence lawyer will argue..." and we won't have a leg to stand on.

How to prove it has been read?

Since most voice and email systems have a function that allows a read message to be marked as unread how could any conviction under these clauses ever be obtained? Surely it would then rely on the prosecution providing evidence that this had not in fact happened. I've no idea whether the phone companies VM systems would keep these logs. Not all email systems that I have worked on log this sort of detail. Would it be possible to prove that the initial read was part of the delivery or part of an interception?

RIPA, powers given to the state? Near total. Protection given to the electorate? bog all it seems.

Playboy centrefold freaks out at 10,000 feet

a large stiff one

Airlines normally take a dim view of young ladies trying to calm their nerves by trying a "large stiff one" on flights.

Sorry, couldn't resist it.

IP address-tracing software breached data protection law

Personal data

And this from a country that publishes a book with the names and addresses associated with all car registration numbers.

But it is good to see some country taking individuals rights on the Internet seriously.

New 'iPhoD' can 'adjust the speed of light by turning a knob'

Who wants to slow it down

We need to speed it up. That damn value of "c" is just too slow, it causes too many performance problems. Can't these guys get on with tackling the real problem, latency!

Godly Aussie MP accused of being online 'smut' junkie

@StrongType

For many of his voters his viewing of porn would be the sin that he has been telling them it was all along.

For many others it will be a question of hypocrisy.

That some person likes to look at pron should indeed be their own private business, but this guy has been going around saying that no one else should be allowed to look at it. At that point it does become a point of public interest. He is alleged to have been using tax payer funded equipment to do something he, as an MP, says should be illegal. He was also risking further public expense when the Government gets sued by some employee who claims to have been sexually harassed by coming across material they find offensive, or at least claims to find offensive when they realise that there is a big payout coming their way.

Ideally the good people of Oz should just vote the sex party in and then all this could be legalised and no one would have to worry about it.

In the mean time, people in glass houses shouldn't throw stones.

UN steps into Blackberry debate

who blinks first

They don't have to let the Governments have "lawful" intercept.

They could exercise the right to cease to trade there.

I wonder what the reaction of the Indian business community would be to loosing all their Blackberries. Would the users in India accept this? or would the Government suddenly find themselves out on their ears?

It's a big game of bluff.

New iPod crew: 'Phoney, futuristic, retro, doomed'

@ShaggyDoggy

Yes you would thing that sound quality would be the major consideration. Sadly with most of the target audience it isn't. Most of the MP3 player vendors must know this or they wouldn't ship the players with such totally shit headphones.

.XXX domain deal stripped bare

@why

Because putting all the pr0n sites in one place would just make it easier for their precious kids to find what they are looking for, not that they normally need any help.

Dell Streak GPL snub enrages Android fans

FAST are a handful of Closed Source Nutters

BTW, do you think you'd get away with telling M$ that "It's OK I'll pay for this software eventually, but you'll just have to wait"

The Linux kernel is not "completely free" it comes with obligations attached. You get make use of millions of hours of development and testing time without having to get your cheque book out. But in order to gain this colossal benefit you have to play by the rules and contribute your code back to all the people who's hard work you are benefiting from.

Half of UK road users support usage-based road charging

There are lies, damn lies and...

Can't say I've ever found a motorist that agrees with any road pricing scheme. I've not looked at the actual report, I wonder how they worded the question to get that sort of response.

We have a very efficient road pricing scheme in operation already. One that requires no spy technology to work. One which is very hard to evade, even by people with no tax, no MOT, no insurance and no registered keeper of the vehicle. It also accurately tracks their emissions. It works by the simple method of mugging motorists at the pumps. The fuel companies pay almost all the costs of recovering this massive revenue stream for the government.

The only major loop whole is imported fuel with HGVs with large fuel tanks filling up in lower taxation countries and avoiding buying UK taxed fuel. Perhaps they could be charged fuel duty at the entry ports.

Energy-saving LEDs 'will not save energy', say boffins

@dave wilson

fashion, usually the major driving force in these things

Spot light replacements

I've recently swapped the 50W halogen spot light in my study for 7W LED equivalents, The illuminated area is very similar, but you can choose different "angles" when ordering both. I'd say the LEDs are noticeably brighter, but the colour temperature is no where near what Philips claim, they are supposed to be 2700K tungsten equivalent but they seem much closer to sun light. My wife kept thinking I'd left the blinds open.

They also save in cooling costs.

The guys in this report are probably right that in many case people will just use more and more lighting, but this is a trend that has been going on for ever. In the past, as people got richer they used more candles, then more oil lamps. The fashion for using GU10 and their low voltage equivalent bulbs tended to see a massive increase in the number and strength of lighting. It wasn't uncommon to see single 100W traditional bulbs being replaced with a dozen ceiling mounted 50W spots.

Royal Society opens inquiry into why kids hate tech

Make it fun

If you want kids to learn, make it fun. Get their enthusiasm. If you can get them enthused you'll find there is very little they can't learn to do.

Teaching them how to change font in Word isn't "computing", even it is might prove to be a necessary skill.

I suspect that one major problem is that half the kids will rapidly get to know more than more of the teachers.

In terms of primary schools, they appear to have given up teaching maths and just concentrate on basic arithmetic so what chance do they have of teaching programming.

Stockholm schoolgirls fined for bugging staff room

10 out of 10 for their use of ICT skills

-10M for good thinking.