Posts by Karl Lattimer

"religion"

Hang on a minute. I don't think the galactic lord Xenu and his thetans have anything to do with religion, which of course is the conformance to dogma and ritual.

As a "belief system" which of course is different to a religion scientology is for the plain crazy nutters out there like Tom "sacked from paramount for trying to cancel south park which is more profitable than him" Cruise, the biggest problem with scientology is that they don't actually tell the story, as stated on wikipedia faithfully posted by an anonymous coward.

For anyone who is a scientologist and believes that their methods work for improving your life I suggest you take a look at the book and film "The Secret" which describes a belief system which Buddhism originates from loosely. Essentially "The Secret" as it is referred, enables us to change our lives by focusing our attention on the things that are positive in our lives, rather than the negative. e.g. People who are always talking about being ill, generally are.

The key points to remember, for people so desperate they turn to scientology;

* Have the attitude of gratitude

* Action your reaction

* Do good things and good things happen

Penguin?

Can we have something slightly representative of Linux please. Miguel, Linus, Nat etc... They could all be the Linux halo/horn

And the target market is?

Men with little willies and tarts with too many shoes.

This is the worst display of opulent narcissism I've ever seen

Stopping school shootings

I've got it... Its brilliant.... Its overwhelmingly the right thing to do...

Lets have EVERYONE carry a gun!

I'm somewhat reminded of the plight of Alfred Nobel, who after inventing Nitro Glycerine and Dynamite believed with a weapon that powerful there would be no more war. The 'poster boy' of MAD (Mutually Assured Destruction), how wrong he was, thankfully he realised the error of his ways before his death.

0day turnover

The trend of exploiting an issue within days of the fix coming out is not a microsoft thing. Exploit developers regularly keep the 0day exploits within their 'crew' until the day a fix is released, then they release the exploit for 'props'.

The thing to remember is that exploits are rarely ever released while they're still big enough to cause serious damage. They're only ever released when they can be used in a limited capacity against those who don't stay up to date.

re: yet again

"unskippable intros on DVDs man I hate waiting a few minutes to watch the film I paid for, I want to put it in and immediately start watchnig the film"

I have Freevo (www.freevo.org) with a magic button called the "REAL ROOT MENU" button, which skips those crappy ads... After all I'm not the kind of person to kill a police officer, steal his helmet, go to the toilet in his helmet and mail it to his grieving widow, so I don't need to see those ads.

RE: all of you

RE: hmm

The .net mobile stack is complete crippleware that's why, 90% of devs who want missing functionality in .net mobile cut'n'paste code from mono anyway

RE: Moonlight != Mono

http://www.mono-project.com/Moonlight

It is written in C# and uses the mono framework, check out what you need to do to build it, hmm, install mono...

RE: Windows Mobile vs others

"the windows mobile source code is mostly open" In what sense open? Erm in the sense that you can look at the code, but if you do you can't use what you've seen while implementing a workalike... You also can't modify it... Hmm, this doesn't sound open to me. It sounds like a shop which has a great window dressing and a bouncer on the door that doesn't let anyone in.

PS. Reg. can we have a Miguel hackergotchi with only a halo added please :)

Erm, didn't a teacher get sacked for this?

Another accidental incident caused a female teacher to get sacked IIRC, this was a reg article.

So it seems there is one law for the guv and one for the rest of the plebs.

girls ace boys at school?

I agree with the statement, however any reasoning is flawed. I've seen girls at school get high grades on course work papers because they had good hand writing, rather than their ability to actually write anything worth reading, or understand the points they are supposed to convey, yet they get high grades... The school system is deeply flawed, the grading systems used by teachers even more so. Remember that boys outperform girls dramatically in exam situations and girls have only gained a lead because of the higher reliance on course work. Course work = presentation not content, form without function.

15 minutes to break wep

are you on crack?

aircrack-ng can do it in under a minute usually :)

Fuel cells are quite heavy

Generally a fuel cell is heavier than an ordinary engine block, what with all those heavy metals and wot not. A hydrogen -> electricity scenario is light weight and durable enough, also it can be built with fairly conventional existing manufacturing processes, which is where the fuel cell falls down.

@Linux - here I come & @Aero UI

For Linux - here I come, try Dia, it can read/write visio files now. Also you may want to keep an eye on http://www.wine-doors.org (not that I'm plugging crapware or anything but I hope to have visio in the repos soon).

For Aero UI - try compiz fusion, runs on an old i810 graphics chip, and even does cover flow for your windows :) Oh did I mention, compositing by default in the upcoming gutsy gibbon.

sister site

wheelofdeath.com

So here's what needs to be done. You set up another website which aggregates the results from dogsindanger.com and then lets the users bet on it!!!!! The perfect accompaniment to this kind of site is a gambling site.

Firefox searches

Interesting point made in that firefox comment, so I tested it out for myself.

It looks like the first 3 sponsored links for firefox are malware, they aren't affiliated with mozilla and have suspicious URLs.

After that, there's pretty much an entire page of firefox crapware downloads, and one link that can take you to a real firefox download. The register I believe reported on this one. www.ie7.com :)

Damn yankees

@Eric

Anyone who equates communism with something like this is a moron, anyone who believes blaming a political ideology as the culprit for problems should look closer to home before blaming the ideologically sound notion of communism.

Neo-conservatism mantra goes, the world would benefit from US domination, that the unbridled use of war in clearing a path for US domination is a positive thing, that military superiority is the most important aim of the government, that the government can pour tax payers money into the corporations teach member is individually affiliated with is OK.

Sounds pretty much like Stalinism to me... In fact, all but the corporate love in IS stalinism, but lets face it, if the USSR was Capitalist back then, stalin would be a neocon.

Wake the fuck up, stop blaming an ideology which is entrenched in the notion of equality for these issues, don't blame the ideology for the oppression of megalomaniac nutters in charge of the state. I'm directing this at all Americans.

Maybe if US schools actually educated about communism rather than allowing McCarthyist propaganda from 50 years ago to still run rife in a country which is essentially currently behaving the same way Stalin did we wouldn't have so many morons in the world.

Oh sweet afghan apples...

Might be a dumb question...

I remember dogs, I remember watching them move, I also vaguely remember reading something in your article about the software being a bag of shite.

One question. Why does only one leg move at a time?

From my recollection of dogs, they move two opposing legs at the same time, and get past the balance issue by allowing each leg to move at speed enough so the falling of the body in the direction of the current position of the centre of gravity is propped up by the speed at which it moves, while the centre of gravity shifts toward the end of the movement.

Call me silly, but surely if you want to mimic something, then actually think about why what you're mimicking moves in the way it does. If they up the speed of the legs, and have the async switcheroo that a dog does, then they'd get some speed out of it, up until the point where a bounding stride is required (both legs of front/back move synchronously in opposing directions, unlike a horse running). Terrain issues seem only limited by the 'dogs' reliance on ensuring each individual movement is completed before the next can begin, it seems that the dog needs too much thinking time for doing something which should be controlled quite easily.

The next question is... Why are roboticists so crap? It seems that the design decisions went something like this...

Engineer 1: Why don't we make it move two legs at once, y'know like a real dog?

Engineer 2 (senior position): Nope, we tried that back in '73 with a larger [heavier] model, the CoG kept shifting too far and made the machine unsteady, so we [still? with todays gyroscopes?] need three points of contact to make an effective 4 legged walker.

I remember one of the asimo developers saying something like, the trick with asimo that took us 5 years to learn, is that human beings are essentially propping themselves up while falling with each stride. Thats why asimo is so realistic.

Regardless of scrachy halo3 discs

Let your heart go out to me, another game released today... on the same day, will not be stocked by any major stockists until friday...

I smell the ever so familiar scent of a microsoft back hander to retailers to ensure that the game of the year "ENEMY TERRITORY: Quake Wars" will not be out until friday, or otherwise mar their tumbleweed launch with hoards of people queuing for a different game.

async

"Asynchronous interactions seem to be the way of the future"

We all know how popular the hurd microkernel is :)

http://www.gnu.org/software/hurd/hurd.html

/sarcasm

Halo brand

I honestly can't understand the exercise of pimping up the halo brand. Of all the gamers I know I don't actually know a single one who plays halo. Most people are interested in games which actually have something going for them, some innovation, outstanding online game play. and BFGs.

I played the first game on mac, and was so bored with the plot that I actually spent most of the time finding interesting ways to kill myself. As is usually the way with microsoft products.

@err

"Fuck the mice. There of course is a better alternative, that we test these things on retarded animal rights hippies instead. I quite like that idea."

I second that.

Especially retarded animal rights hippies who are so involved in preservation of the life of gerbils that they are willing to dig up corpses.

@Big Catch

It always amuses me to hear the phrase "war on drugs", because put quite simply it implies a law where the enemy are stoned, and yet still winning.

"Hey honey, pass me a reefer huh... *grumble* I gotta war to fight"

What about...

everyone that pays for Microsoft Licensing for XP professional say, then when they buy a new machine it has XP home on it. Or even worse, vista!

You end up paying MS twice for something you should only be paying once.

Unbundling the machines also fixes the issue of returning a machine to its factory default configuration easily. Having install images on hard drives means I can't repartition my disc, which in itself is an OEM lockin method, by destroying the "hidden" partition I end up voiding any warranty I may have had.

Its time to do away with stealth taxes in computing, especially those taxes that go to MS.

Inaccuracy

"The idea is to leave hostile code in memory following the crash, at a location where it is subsequently executed once a system is restarted."

Thats not a buffer overflow, and heres why;

Memory isn't retained in any useful way after a "system is restarted", memory is volatile and doesn't remain in use after a reboot, and of course all allocations are new and software should never point to the same exact location in the chips after being allocated a second time, that and the natural state of decay of memory during a reboot would make this idea so very flawed it shouldn't have been published.

So what is a buffer overflow? Well as you don't seem to have a grasp on this let me explain...

The trick is to overflow a buffer (obviously), typically a string without correct bounds checking, so for instance if I took;

char bleh[5]; //allocate a string of 5 bytes max length

then did;

strcpy(bleh, "THIS IS A LOT LONGER THAN THE 5 BYTES I ALLOCATED");

I would be over-writing some part of memory as strcpy doesn't check the size of the buffer its copying into. Typically the stack is modified, munging the heap is a lot harder as they heap is far bigger.

Now if I for instance copied into that string enough data to reach the eip register (extended instruction pointer) I would be able to specify an address for the function call that hasn't checked the buffer sizes to return to, which would have to be somewhere inside of my buffer because thats the part of memory I can control. So my eip overwrite needs to have a known location to return to, this is hard to get right, so i'd fill some NOP (no operation) instructions in, this is called a NOP sled, and as long as you point the execution back to somewhere in that NOP sled you should be able to execute a shell code, or egg after all of those NOP instructions have been processed, that egg can create a nice little shell prompt, or open a bind port, or any number of things which will allow more access to the system.

Maybe you need some more education on how these things work, there's a detailed article, credited as probably the most important free publication on buffer overflows ever to have been written.

You'll find this article at this address, http://www.phrack.org/archives/49/P49-14

Don't believe what you read these stocks are on fire!

+ Insider Profit Reporter: SCOX Is On Fire! +

Company - SCO group

Ticker - SCOX

Current Price - .20

52 Week High - 2.54

3-5 Day target - .50

6months-target - 1.25

WOW THESE STOCKS ARE GONNA GO, MY COLLEAGE SAW THE PAPERS, THEY'RE GONNA ROCKET!

+++

Sorry, couldn't resist the pump and dump parody :)

LMFAO

@Standing naked in the back of the wood

If these people want to cause a sensation because of the title, they should maybe have thought, that Belson wasn't a gas camp, and the terminology used even in the title is ironic, with reference to a turn of phrase which is still common in the US. "Hey that movie was a gas", or how about this "I went to germany for the summer, it was a gas". Am I pushing it yet? Its an over the pond turn of phrase.

"So now on to your "oversensitivity" point. Do you really think its OK to make humorous references (ironic or not) to one of the biggest and most unplesant genocides in history?"

I think its very funny to joke about the fact that these people are so ignorant of the actual history, that the words "Belson was a Gas" is enough to make them behave in this way. Same as it was funny in '77, same as it'll always be funny to watch the absurd behavior of people when issues like this come up.

The ignorance and oversensitivity BTW: Is with reference to the complete and utter stupidity of people with regard to things like this, they immediately assume its an insult. And without being anti-semetic in the slightest, especially the jews.

I think my point was quite well proven, that people are oversensitive to this. The worst of it is, that everyone that cries that its wrong to say a word about it, should look at their governments behavior when they found out what the nazi's were doing.

Churchill put a block on any news transmissions from the discovery in 1942, same as he blocked transmissions of the polish genocide perpetrated by the russians. I have a great deal of respect for churchill, but finding out about that, lowered that respect slightly. The fact that by 1942 hardly anyone had been worked to death, lined up and shot etc... and by 1945 over 6 million jews and 7 million, gypsys, blacks, political opponents etc... had been slaughtered. In those 3 years, the british people were pretty much 100% behind the idea of belson, even the jewish population.

As I said, ignorant (of the facts of history), and oversensitive (to the mention of any reference which hasn't been pre-ordained as safe)

Erm, for the unaware

Blackwater are an extremist fundamentalist christian organisation.

So its hardly a surprise the iraqis want rid

Similar thing happened to me

I bought a laptop from PCworld, then found out that the bios on it was so broken and the manufacturer didn't provide any updates, software or firmware. This was a phillips laptop, DO NOT BUY A PHILLIPS LAPTOP!!!!!

To make a point, before going into any more detail... I said to the sales clerk "I'm going to install fedora core on this, would that be OK" The sales clerk said "sure, it should run all of the latest software..." :)

Anyway, back to the story, after trying 4 or 5 times to get Fedora 5, then 5.91 installed (this was a week before 6 was released). The machine would do some pretty weird stuff, for instance, if I loaded the driver for the wifi, it would die, or at least the graphics driver did I could still SSH to the box, even over wifi! Now this was based on intel kit, i945gm, ipw2200 wireless etc... so the hardware should work fine together.

Eventually I put it down to some quirk in the IRQ steering or something similar and had no choice but to take it back. When returning it to the store manager told me that because I'd killed off the windows install, and put linux on they wouldn't provide a refund. However, I had an ace up my sleeve.

I said to him, that when I bought the machine I had informed the sales clerk that I was going to install linux, he told me that would be fine, and under the sale of goods act 1970, if I purchase a machine after informing the sales staff of its intended purpose, if it doesn't work I can take them to court and say that the machine was "unfit for the specified purpose".

Thats the key, remember the sale of goods act, and remember that last quoted statement. According to the CAB these are key to getting what you want out of PC world.

Also, if they tell you that you can't run linux on the machine, there are a whole different set of rules which govern that! Check it out, but I'm pretty sure if you're refused sale based on the intended use of goods they're being prejudicial against your usage requirements.

One last thing, the mastercare warranty that comes with these machines is terrible, they will kill off your data without telling you to back it up first, they will replace your machine without giving you notice that they are intending to do that, leaving your hard drive in the hands of someone you can't vouch for with regard to destruction of data.

In the end I bought a macbook, works like a charm, never had any trouble with it which wasn't solvable I've had it back to apple twice for hardware issues which had come up and they didn't say anything about linux

@Bruce Schneier

Bruce Schneier knows Alice AND Bobs shared secret.

heheheh

Na Na Nah Na

Na Na Nah Na

Hey Hey Hey

GOOODBYEEEEEE

Sing it with me :)

Small correction

You say the cards aren't interchangeable, however SD/MMC card readers generally will read each others cards because the chips have support for both, I'm pretty sure that most cameras and definitely my n800 will do both.

Makes me chuckle every time

"It's also been rumoured that the top models have gold-plated HDMI connectors."

I laugh heartily at this, absolute nonsense of a feature. Audiophiles are into gold plated connectors everywhere, the point being that gold is a superior conductor and therefore the signal purity is unhindered by cheap wires.

When its digital, and nothing more than a stream of 1s and 0s, does it matter? The signal quality is irrelevant, all it needs is more than or less than the switching voltage.

Sure gold has its place in computer components, its very malleable so using it inside of ICs is a preference because its easier to wire up, and there's usually some other odds and sods here and there in order to ensure that the elements which need precise resistivity etc... aren't tainted by bad conductors.

However, the issues which create a good case for using gold inside of a computer or microprocessor should never apply to signal transmission, and if it did make a difference I'm sure HDMI took a wrong turn during development.

So, what a waste of gold eh!

Interesting state on word of mouth

If you have a good experience with a product or service on average you'd tell about 3 people.

If you have a bad experience with a product or service on average you'd tell about 14 people.

The trick is, if your software quality and support quality matched the marketing material and the sales patter, people don't say bad things. This applies across the spectrum, for instance if a sales guy says "Hey, its not the best product in the world, you get what you pay for and this is adequate for your needs", and then you purchase it, then you'll feel less ripped off when you realise its not the best product in the world.

IBM + OpenOffice = MS Office RIP

@Ian Rogers: For calendaring, email, rss, and other PIM type stuff there are competitors in the field, many of them already, including openexchange, however the feature completeness isn't quite there yet, however with the introduction of calendar server from apple, exchange's days are numbered.

The Lotus contribution isn't really worth it in the groupware field, apart from plugins a plenty.

However, in the other fields of office collaboration, and IBMs general engineering expertise IBM can bring a lot to the table. The main areas of importance in open office are performance, usability of the more intricate features, and rendering quality. Now cairo and iogrind are dealing with two out of three, I recon IBM would put some real effort into collaboration tools and usability.

All in all its great news :)

Actually...

The distance between the green grocer and the boozer is measured in perches a perch being 5.5yd which is generally half a burgage plot in width. Shops are generally aligned to burgage plots you see. Well unless the streets have been completely rebuilt, after annihilation.

Long live the imperial system!

Nothing special!

Really, that seems like a 2k markup for some leather, why not just buy a macbook :)