* Posts by h4rm0ny

4560 publicly visible posts • joined 26 Jul 2008

Microsoft dragging its feet on Linux Secure Boot fix

h4rm0ny

Re: Different UEFI firmware

Microsoft forbids you from having those open bootloaders on ARM-devices. Thus Windows 8 capable ARM devices are essentially useless.

You haven't answered Harry Shepherd's question and in fact have actually given him a pretty misleading answer. He asked about UEFI harware manufacturers generally and only used Android to help explain his question. The actual answer is yes - you can have UEFI hardware not locked to a particular set of signatures. You simply have Secure Boot turned off. The side of the coin that Christian Berger somehow managed to omit is that MS have mandated that a user be able to turn off Secure Boot on x86 devices. This isn't the case on ARM devices which are locked, unfortunately. However, Christian Berger is incorrect to say that such devices are therefore "essentially useless". They're actually very good for running Windows on. ;)

h4rm0ny

Re: Hubris?

"What about other open source software such as Truecrypt, who aren't a competing operating system, but are going to have problems with full disc encryption."

Shouldn't be a problem, I think. Anything you want to run from the encrypted disk, you will need to decrypt first, in which case the encryption is irrelevant. TrueCrypt creates its own virtual disk driver. Whether you are loading a module from that or from a USB drive or from a real disk, shouldn't matter. It's only when the module is retrieved from the storage "device" and its signature checked, that Secure Boot steps into the process.

h4rm0ny

"How about the possibility of some less than scrupulous open-source developer, fed up with the apparent obstruction from Microsoft, discovering the loophole in the system?"

Then they would be highly unethical because they would be reducing the security of millions of people.

h4rm0ny

"I'm sorry, but have you even looked into the concept of "Secure Boot"? It only signs the bootloader"

Not you again, lecturing people on not understanding things when you actually have it wrong yourself. It only signs the bootloader for GNU/Linux because no Linux distribution has fully engaged with Secure Boot, yet. They are using a signed boot loader as a work around to make Linux run on a system that has Secure Boot on it without actually taking advantage of its intended purpose. On Windows, Secure Boot is capable of checking that all sorts of things (i.e. drivers and other modules) are signed before loading.

"If you previously got drivers into the kernel, it will still work."

Only on Linux. On Windows it offers an extra layer of protection.

"Nobody exploits the boot-process"

Lots of malware exploits the boot process. There are whole families of malware that infect the boot process. You plainly have never bothered to actually read up much on this, instead just deciding to talk confidently without actual fact checking.

h4rm0ny

"Why does RedHat not engage with the OEMs and provide it's key so that Red Hat variants are supported out-of-the-box on certain equipment?"

Nothing in principle. According to RedHat's statement, they investigated doing this and found that setting up the infrastructure to do all this themselves was too costly and it was cheaper for them to simply licence MS's signing capability.

Incidentally, Secure Boot can be turned off. It's not complicated.

Microsoft-Motorola patent row: Google wants $4 BEELLION a year

h4rm0ny

Re: @h4rm0ny

"You pretend not getting, do you. The whole idea of Google using Moto's patents is to MAKE MS and Apple stop their aggression. "

I'm not pretending anything. I simply believe that if Google saw the opportunity to sting MS for $4bn they'd try to get that money regardless of any good faith action on MS's part. That's just business. Can you honestly see the board of Google saying to their shareholders: "we passed over this $4bn opportunity because we think MS are okay." They are rivals. They fight. You suggest that Google would be happy to accept free use of MS's patents in exchange for free use of their patents and think that it's wrong of MS to not agree to this. But do you know what MS patents are worth and what they are? No you do not. So how can you say that it is fair to do a straight swap? Do you think sueing someone for patent infringement is intrinsically wrong? If so, then Google are doing something wrong by you. If not, then what are your reasons for condemning MS for charging Google for use of theirs in the first place?

"Eye for an eye" is translated for you into "you touch my own or any of my friend's eye, I'll poke yours and kick you in the groin and rip your ear, or punch you in the face, so you don't engage in this risky business" And this is totally justified

I'm not sure which is supposed to be which party in the above. But your confidence in knowning how much the relevant patents held by each side are worth in dollars (worth translates into how much injury is inflicted in your analogy) seems unwarranted to me - unless you happen to have a lot of knowledge that the rest of us don't? We know how much MS are charging Google so we can put a value on that. We don't know how much Google's are worth, because this hasn't been settled or gone through court. We just know how much Google claim they're worth. And Google are no less unbiased in this matter than you are.

h4rm0ny

Re: Microsoft V. Google is like

"The best possible outcome for this is to have "method patents" disallowed. Then we can all go home and worry about more pressing issues"

I agree in a lot of cases. But some method patents are valid. Or at least it's a supportable argument that they are. In this case we're talking about video encoding. A great deal or work, imagination and cleverness can go into working out a new way of compressing images into video - thinking of ways that you can record only changes between two images for example. MPEG-4 has methods by which it checks forward and backward to reference frames, adjusts for motion blur and all kinds of things. It's a lot of work. And yet when that work is done, you could independently implement it relatively easily in different languages or platforms. Should the people who worked hard on developing those solutions not be recompensed because copyright does not cover it?

h4rm0ny

Re: @h4rm0ny

"No, it's you that misunderstand it."

Let's demonstrate. You wrote that someone (patent) trolling another party that was (patent) trolling, is not trollnig them. I disagree. I say that this is now clearly two people indulding in patent trolling. I tried to convey this to you in a more colourful way, hoping to show how illogical your statement was, by likening it to one person throwing excrement at another person who is also throwing excrement. The fact that one is already doing so doesn't make the latter not doing so. It's just two people throwing excrement.

You then responded with a reply saying it was okay for the second party to indulge in this behaviour. I never said anything about justification. I just said it was ridiculous for you to say that they weren't indulging in that behaviour.

And as your second post was a longish justification for why they should indulge in that behaviour, it seems you have now conceded that they are.

"Remember MS to shamelessly approach Android manufacturers, smaller companies most of the time, and extort money from them?"

What was the money wanted in exchange for?

h4rm0ny

Re: @auburnman

"It is fun watching it, isn't it?"

Uh no, not really. Big players charging each other fortunes means more expensive products for the rest of us.

h4rm0ny

Re: Google being a troll

Wow. You've really misunderstood the point of the analogy. So you now agree that both sides are engaged in the same activity?

As to the Eye for an Eye approach you advocate of punitive charges, that just creates a barrier to entry for any new players and entrenches the existing big players, because costs rise and outside players can't break in any more. Some of us would prefer the market to stay open and competitve, rather than seeing huge fees charged for licences because big players want to punish each other, as you say they should.

h4rm0ny

Re: Google being a troll

"A troll trolling another troll is not a troll after all. Don't you get that?"

Well you can say that but what makes it true? If I say a throwing excrement at another person throwing excrement is not actually throwing excrement, would that suddenly be a true statement? It's just more excrement even if you choose to support one of the parties throwing it.

h4rm0ny

Re: Oh I see

"Correct, because it happened in that order"

Well if it's a play-ground case of "Who Started It" then presumably you have to add Google infringing on MS's patents as a prior step to MS asking them for money. Because if Google didn't, then MS wouldn't be able to do so.

But really, I don't think big business quite works on the principle of who started it. If a big business sees a rival to themselves - whether that's MS looking at Google or Google looking at MS, and they then see an opportunity to get money from that rival, then they take that opportunity.

Does anyone really think that if Google had the opportunity to sue MS for US$4bn and MS hadn't been charging them licence fees, the Google board would sit there and say "oh let's not sue MS for money for our patents, we kind of like them."

PGP Zimmermann teams with Navy SEALs, SAS techies in London

h4rm0ny

Thank you for coming here and posting that. It's very interesting and it's great to see products like yours emerging. I really hope it works well as privacy is important.

You're not wrong about mandated backdoors being misused by outside parties. There was a case in Greece some years ago (you are probably aware of it, so posting more for other readers' benefit), where Vodafone's own backdoor technology was subverted by a hacker who used it to listen in on the phone calls of the Greek Prime Minister and others. All they had to do, was use the bugging that had actually been deliberately built into the system for law enforcement / intelligence agencies to use.

h4rm0ny

Re: Soldiers are geeky?

"but these *are* people who put their life on the line so people at home have the freedom to whinge about them"

Actually, in the case of the USA which is the context I was talking about, it is a small fraction of the USA's overseas operations that are about ensuring the people of the USA have the "freedom to whinge". Mostly it's about maintaining the USA's position as preminent power in a region or obtaining oil reserves. Even when the stated aim is protecting the people of the USA, such as invading Afghanistan as a supposed response to 9/11, it's reasonably clear to the rest of the world that this is not the real motivation. (And 9/11 itself was a response to the US presence in Saudi Arabia, primarily).

"Maybe it's just me, but in that context I must admit that I find the treatment of those who return from war in many cases flat out deplorable."

Anyone who signs up to the US army thinking they're primarily going to be literally protecting the people of the USA, is naive in the extreme. I hope you will agree with that. So what is left, is people who sign up knowing that they are agreeing to kill people, in return for a paycheck.

h4rm0ny

Re: Soldiers are geeky?

"Maybe it's different in the US?"

The US has a major culturally engrained level of respect for its military. Some airports in the USA have special lounges just for military people to hang out in and I've been on planes there where before take off, the pilot announces that they have several members of the military aboard and thanks them for their service. Followed by a round of applause from the passengers. If your job is blowing people up for low wages, you get treated like royalty in a lot of parts of the States. If you're Special Forces... well just having that on your project name will get you instant points with the American public.

Bloodthirsty nation, I guess.

h4rm0ny

Open Source Solution.

I wish these people luck. We should definitely encourage more encryption. Even if you don't have something to hide personally, fostering a culture where the only people who have privacy do have something to hide (and thus stand out), has bad long-term implications. We should never trust that we wont need our privacy in the future.

But what I'd really like to see is an easy (for non-technical people) Free Software approach. Publishing the source code is merely open source, not Libre software. And the latter would be better still because ultimate trust only comes when you do it yourself.

h4rm0ny

Re: Soldiers are geeky?

As far as I can tell, there are group of people who self-identify as "geeks" and anything they like they decide it is their thing. Whether the rest of us like it or not. I personally am still strugglnig to work out how having studied computer programming is supposed to give me a spiritual kinship with people who like to talk about what colour underwear batman wears. The American school system has a lot to answer for.

Evildoers can now turn all sites on a Linux server into silent hell-pits

h4rm0ny

Re: Web Applications are the vector

"On a an up-to-date system? If so, can you give us at least one such flaw we could exploit . Thanks"

You're asking me for a zero-day exploit that you can exploit? Uh, no.

What I wrote was that such flaws exist. I meant that they occur. You are the one that shifted the argument to my personally knowing of ones in advance of the people who patch and fix these things which is an unreasonable shift. I'm just pointing out that they occur. If you argue that they don't then you're ignorant and you're position is based on faith rather than study. Here is an example of one: Link It's pretty irrelevant to post it except for you to show that these can and do happen on Linux seeing as you seem so doubtful.

There was a privilege escalation in an NVIDIA driver last month as well. But I daresay you would try to shift the argument there as well, saying that it's not actually part of the Linux kernel. Despite it's presence on huge numbers of Linux PCs. The reason you would think it valid to shift it is because your motivation is to show that "Linux" (as if it were a person) is not at fault. Whereas my motivation is really just real world security and to show that a Linux system can be hacked.

h4rm0ny

What's really depressing is that someone modded you down for that. Meaning they actually think that you're wrong to criticise people for thinking Linux is magically invulnerable. The tragic thing is that back when I first started using Linux, in the days when you had to compile everything yourself, nobody had that attitude. Okay, we knew it was safer than Windows in a lot of ways both because it was more obscure and because back then you had Windows 2000 and XP that didn't have decent security models. But you didn't have this zealotry.

Linux seems to have acquired religious followers. Those of us who actually were around in the early days and probably know more about managing or programming on Linux than a lot of the Linux fan-people, get modded down by those who merely identify with the OS like its some sort of sect. Take Eadon for example - on a previous story they actually tried to make the argument that good programmers are those who develop for Linux, and bad programmers are those who develop for Windows. I struggle to believe someone who would make that argument has any significant experience in the world of programming. But I bet they think their pronouncements on Linux trump any old timer's. Eulampios who is posting here previously argued with me that it was right to misrepresent facts if doing so made Microsoft look worse.

Operating Systems as religion and to Hell with any inconvenient people who remember LinuxJesus when he was just a man. How depressing.

h4rm0ny

Re: Maybe its time...

"The questions - is this enough - anyone know how effective the current AV products are ? - is this a non-issue ?"

If you do all that you say you do, then the real question would be: is there anything more you can do. To which I'd say no, not really. About the only thing you could do more than you say you're doing is to monitor all the software you have installed yourself and try to patch it faster than your distribution actually does. Which is a nonsense task in practice. You might want to look at SE Linux depending on what your boxes actually do. And you would might want to install additional security tools like Suhosin if you're running a webserver. Basically, the only thing you haven't mentioned that you are doing is proactively checking to see if you have been compromised. E.g. there are tools that will monitor your system for unexpected changes. You could look into that.

But really, if you're doing everything you say you are and you're running Linux, you're going to be pretty safe. I don't use any sort of anti-virus on my own boxes. One of my clients has some of that pro-active monitoring software I talked about but I'm not overly-familiar with it. I could look into it if you're interested, but it's way overkill for your box if you're just a human being and not a company or intelligence agency.

h4rm0ny

Re: Maybe its time...

Perhaps. But this is malware for a server. Servers are typically run by people who are more cautious, keep their systems patched and up to date, and are less likely to run the sort of risks that allow malware to be installed in the first place. (Well, except for Eadon who seems to think use of Linux immediately means you can take your brain off the hook and sit back).

So this is a lot less likely to propagate wildly than something found on, say, Windows. Not saying there's no reason for anti-malware software on Linux. It actually exists. Just pointing out that this is a different scenario to most malware.

h4rm0ny

Re: Bazinga

"Could you please put bazinga at the end in future because I couldn't tell if your a ding bat or being sarcastic"

Funny - I think the same about your post. Squeeze is the current mainline stable build. The AC seemed to think "squeezy" (sic) was some "special flavour" used by Kapersky to discredit Linux (from the context of their post). So are you saying that the AC was right in their paranoia (they weren't) or that I shouldn't have corrected them? I suppose it's possible that the AC was simply mocking the typo of "Squeezey" instead of "squeeze", but given that it was in the middle of a rant about anti-virus labs trying to set up contrived scenarios, smart money is on them just not knowing much about Debian.

Bazinga.

h4rm0ny

Re: Web Applications are the vector

True. But there would still need to be a flaw in the server OS to allow a web application to escalate privilege and install this. That said, such flaws do exist. But it's worth being clear that this would be necessary. You can't install something like this just because you have a hosting account on that box.

h4rm0ny

Re: One route would be ..

"Except it isn't ..."

Isn't what? A possible route of infection? Yes - of course that's a possible route of infection. Do you think that there have never been privilege escalation flaws on GNU/Linux? If so, I seriously hope that you aren't a Linux sysadmin. Do you just never patch your Linux boxes because you believe there are no flaws and thus nothing to fix? All modern OSs have flaws discovered and need fixing.

h4rm0ny

"that are clearly running some special flavor of Debian called "squeezy"

Are you joking? Squeezy is the mainline latest stable release of Debian. I am running it here right now. It's about as far from being a "special flavour" as you can get. Educate yourself before you dismiss other people's work.

Texan schoolgirl expelled for refusing to wear RFID tag

h4rm0ny

Re: OTT

All these technical solutions are starting down the wrong path. The girl has chosen the right one - take it to the people and the courts. What would be wonderful is if all the children in that school microwaved their cards as a sign of solidarity with her. If all the pupils did that, then the school could do nothing to them.

NASA admits hiding 'really good' news from Martian soil

h4rm0ny

Re: Wouldn't it be great if they've found ...

My God... It's full of patent lawyers!

h4rm0ny

Re: I wish they would stop doing this.

So a journalist calls you up and asks you to comment and you're not ready yet. Do you say: "nothing has been found". Well that's a lie. Do you tell them stuff before you've triple checked, knowing that you've been burned before by that. No. Do you say: "we will make an annoucement in due course." ? Sounds like the last is the only acceptable option. So if you don't like it, have a go at the journalists, not the scientists.*

(*note - am not saying you should have a go at the journalists.)

Thank BRIT eggheads for new iMac's sexy seamless knife-edge

h4rm0ny

Re: That thing looks very thin

"because they cost three to ten times what an equivalent PC would cost. "

Exaggeration makes your argument silly. If you had said 20% extra, you would probably have been fine. An Apple Tax is hard to dispute. An Apple tax of 200 to 900% makes you sound crazy.

(Not an Apple but their current hardware seems reasonably good. I just prefer something I can take apart if I need to).

h4rm0ny

Re: Gimme, Gimme, Gimme

I like the look of them, but would prefer more colour.

Sarcastic tweeter jailed for mocking Communist Party

h4rm0ny

When I was a little kid, I was told the magic word was "please".

Turns out it's "terrrorist".

Mozilla needs to find alternatives to the Google umbilical

h4rm0ny

Re: marketplace.firefox.com ??

How do you go about stopping piracy from a purely HTML + JS based piece of software? Curious question.

h4rm0ny

Re: The same is true of the Android or Windows stores

"Unless you of course mean the RT version."

RT unfortunately is locked down. But at least an Enterprise customer can put their own stuff on it for their employees. That puts RT somewhere between Apple products (so far as I'm aware) and actual Windows 8.

Actually, genuine question - what is Apple like for rolling out corporate software / custom installs? I've never really heard anything significant about this for Apple, but if my above statement is wrong, please correct me.

h4rm0ny

Re: Dear Matt,

"Ah, that myth. No, Babylon 5 was not rendered using Amigas and video toasters. The Babylon 5 pilot movie was, and then they went to Pentium PCs, DEC Alpha workstations, a handful of Macs and some SGI equipment."

Not a total myth. I didn't know that they later on moved away from the Amigas, but your link actually just says later on they moved to those machiens "later". According to Wikipedia, not only the pilot episode, but all of Season One and some of Season Two were produced on Amigas. Also, a quick search turned up an interview with the visual effects director here where he talks about the use of Amigas notably dated during Season Two. In any case, it more than shows that Amigas were more than "toys".

h4rm0ny

Re: Dear Matt,

"No you didn't"

Yes we did. You are simply not aware or have forgotten. For example, your comment about Amigas being something used for games or occasional techno music. There was a TV series called Babylon 5 which was pretty advanced for its day. The graphics and space scenes in it were all rendered on banks of Amigas for example. There were all those home PCs like Spectrums and Commodores. And your casual dismissal of things that sold in huge quantities because they weren't "big computer" is beside the point. They were there and in fact they were everywhere. There were multiple different types of UNIX, some quite different to each other. There was OS/2. Novell's stuff, BeOS... Most of the ones in the Eighties and Nineties were UNIX-like. But there were more active and popular than there are active and popular today.

h4rm0ny

"Really. I think its more likely Microsoft will let Mozilla die, one less competitor in the open source market, one less competitor to compete against to impose it vision on to the internet"

A browser that is making them money (i.e. Firefox working with Bing) is not a competitor in the same way. MS have actually been contributing quite a lot to open and free standards recently. Typescript is one instance (and Chrome, incidentally, has one of the most advanced ways of working with that as there is a plugin for debugging Typescript available for it). MS's contribution on handling video in HTML is far better than W3C's own that they've been tarrying over for ages, too.

Seriously - faced with a choice of A + B as their competitors vs. just A, where A is complete rival and B is a semi-rival that makes you money, they will choose A+B. Besides, it's not like Firefox is going anywhere anytime soon. This is just an opinion piece on El Reg.

h4rm0ny

Re: Gotta say

"I used to be a firefox user and proud of it. I got most of my family onto firefox, but it began to slow down, it was getting buggy, things would crash for no reason,"

This is true and it definitely got very slow and bloated at one point. It's still not the fastest, but I never stopped using it and it seems to have improved again. Anecdotal, but it gets almost daily use from me so I think there's something to my impression.

"Considering they both share the same goals, or similar goals. i'd like to see some more synergy between firefox and chrome."

I'm not sure that they do. Firefox's goal is the success of Firefox. Chrome's goal is the success of Chrome. Regarding shared APIs... I'm with others who want to see something truly cross-browser. I.e. build your app as a web-site and use the DB and advanced cache ideas in HTML5 plus a tonne of Javascript. That's as far as I want to go with apps in a browser. I dislike Browser as OS model for a long list of reasons.

h4rm0ny

Re: > Any ideas as to where it could come from?

"Google only needs Firefox as long as it's market share is significant. If Chrome becomes dominant and Firefox drops to something small (say sub-10%) then why pay them $$$. Based on the uptake of Chrome that may well not be too far off (although most Chrome growth so far has come at the expense of IE, Firefox has dropped a little)"

Broadly accurate, but Google do also make money from the advertising that Firefox sends their way. Google is the default search bar in Firefox as well as (last time I did a fresh install) being integrated into the default home page. If Chrome takes over (and I still rate Firefox as the better browser, but it is now the slowest of the big players (behind IE, Opera and Chrome), then it will still be worth some of Google's while for the ad revenues. But maybe not quite as much as before.

Firefox was backed by Google because they wanted to unseat IE and quite frankly, Firefox was much more capable than Chrome at doing that and was already in the fight at the time. The question is with so much money pouring in, could Mozilla foundation adapt to living like they used to, without the huge amount of resource and management that Google have paid for?

Firefox gained a lot of traction because it was (a) the Open Source champion and (b) had better developer tools than IE. IE9/10 has reached parity with Firefox for developer support (don't downvote me until you've actually tried them properly, thanks) and Chrome might try and usurp it's role as (a). Even though I think Mozilla has greater claim than Google in that regard.

Personally, I would choose Firefox over Chrome ten times over even though it is a bit slower, simply because I dislike the way Chrome's objective is getting advertising data on you. (Yes, there is Chromium, but that will always be second fiddle to Chrome so long as Google are at the steering wheel of development, for the same reason Mono on Linux will always be second fiddle to .NET on Windows).

LIVE NOW: Speak Your Brains on Windows chief's defenestration SHOCKER

h4rm0ny

The most accurate answer...

The most accurate answer is that nearly none of us actually know why he left, we can speculate but we really have no evidence either way and there are plenty of boring and normal explanations for why he left.

But a two line statement that we just don't know doesn't excite many people, so it will no doubt get buried beneath a wash of people who think they do know.

Survey: Win8 only HALF as popular as Win7 among IT bosses

h4rm0ny

Re: Get over it

"One word, multi-tasking. It doesn't do it well, oh it can run lots of apps at once, but accessing them once they're running is not as easy as it could, should, or used to be."

Are you talking about WIndows 8? Because it still has the Desktop usable in the same way as before. It just has a Start Screen instead of a Start Menu. Which isn't really a factor in how many programs you can juggle. Nothing obliges you to use the MUI apps as you can still run the same software you ran on Windows 7. So the rest of your argument that follows from this misconception immediately doesn't apply.

h4rm0ny

Re: I for one

"I suggest you read Trevor's rant and see how many upvotes he has and indeed reflect on your dismal balance of down/upvotes"

I can provide you numerous examples where factually correct posts has been repeatedly downvoted and where factually incorrect or plain ignorant posts have been massively upvoted. The criteria for the voting? Whether it makes Microsoft sound good or not. Seriously - I have seen someone post basic and wrong information about Windows, things that can easily be checked, and get lots of upvotes. I've replied with posts that are sometimes nothing more than a factual correction, and the downvotes come flooding in.

Logically, does that suggest that the upvoting and downvoting here reflect accuracy or that it actually reflects allegiance to an OS? Your appeal to Group Think argument is not supportable and by numerous examples, can be shown to be not supportable.

h4rm0ny

Re: Ignorant users

"I think what you are saying is:- Win 8. Windows for Monkeys."

No, I think their original typo of "moneys" was more accurate. Windows for moneys. (And lots of them with the recent price hikes).

h4rm0ny

Re: childish tiles on Windows Server 2012

@Joerg.

You're not quite understanding the GUI-less recommendation on Server 2012. From your post, you are obviously under the impression that the alternative is a big shell interface in which you type scripts or commands and hit return. What you'd actually more likely do, were you an enterprise customer that was managing many Server 2012 instances, is turn off the GUI on all of them so that they used less resources, and manage them using the remote server administration tools which you'd run as a management tool covering some or all of those instances on your own PC, not running on the server instances. Of course you can open a shell on those servers as well, but your impression that a GUI-less server is a screen full of text, is wrong.

As to "pathetic childish unusable UI", what is it you've been unable to do on Server 2012's GUI that were able to do on previous versions of the Server?

Reefer madness blasts pot machine maker's stock sky high

h4rm0ny

Re: ... there is no Madness in Reefer, only in Politics ...

I love how you came into a thread with what you wanted to post, realized you were a bit late to it and that your post might languish on page 2 with not all the readers you deserve, so decided to post your unrelated comments as a reply to the first and highest comment you could find. No wait, I don't love that at all. It's irritating. Sometimes you just have to accept that you don't have more right to be heard than anyone else.

Lawyer sues Microsoft rather than slot an SD card into his Surface

h4rm0ny
Unhappy

Re: MS should just post him a free sdcard

"Now, everyone shut and put Linux on your Surface. You'll get more free usable storage space that way and those pesky tiles will be gone."

Sadly only possible with the Pro version of the Surface (presumably), as the RT version is locked to pre-installed OS.

Microsoft offers 60-day free trial of Office 2013

h4rm0ny
Joke

Re: @h4rm0ny

"or click Start Screen (or the Windows key) and type "update". Then select "settings" from the right-hand menu and then select "Windows Update" or "Check for updates" (depending on which is applicable) and there it is."

Very true. But the poster I was replying to was having trouble moving the mouse to the right of the screen. I was planning to work my way up to introducing them to the keyboard. ;)

h4rm0ny

Re: What a crock of shit office 2013 is

"You mean hover over the invisible spot (but don't click!) then move over the sort of gear thing (now you have to click), now click on the power thing, then click shut down."

Despite your attempt above to make it sound complicated and obscure, what it boils down to is move the mouse to the right-hand side, something that most of us would only have to learn once so is irrelvant after that, then click on the "sort of gear thing" that actually has what it is written underneath it, and then click on the power icon which is the same as it has always been and also has the word "Power" written underneath it.

So basically, mouse move and two clicks. Doesn't sound so bad now, does it?

"See? Dead easy, why would anyone have trouble finding that?"

I don't know. Perhaps they should spend quarter of an hour sitting next to a bunch of ten year olds who are able to manage to shut it down and do other things on the PC too, and then question whether their inability to remember which side of the screen brings up the menu is actually proving Windows 8 is complicated, or if it's possibly proving something else.

Woz: Microsoft's innovation lead 'worries me greatly'

h4rm0ny

Re: @h4rm0ny - @toadwarrior

"Wow, careful h4rm0ny, you are attacking toadwarrior - but how do you know he is not more successful than you?"

Your ability to parse logic is weak. My statement assumes not that toadwarrior is more successful than me, but whether they are more successful than Woz. As Woz has founded companies, can buy his own aeroplane, contributed enormously to the development of the modern PC, gets interviewed frequently by the technical media, statistically it is extremely likely that Woz is more successful than toadwarrior.

My own criticism of toadwarrior is not based on a need to attack those more successful than me (which you correctly point out, I don't is the case or not), but a dislike of both talking with authority about something they exhibit ignorance on and a spiteful dislike of someone who is successful.

"So we are not allowed to criticise Obama, Cameron, Gates, Torvalds, Jimmy Saville, Hugh Heffner, Ghenghis Khan, Stalin .....?"

Go ahead - the question is whether you are criticizing them because of your need to attack and whether you show ignorance about them at the time.

"I think toadwarrier has a point. There are many people who succeed in doing great things but who never generate any interest, and there are others (like Woz) who become media heros and who's every utterance is made into headlines."

toadwarrior said that "the guy who build their house" not only built one house, but then went on to build other houses. That's a rather flawed analogy for someone who, in these terms, would be rather someone who significantly developed the concept of houses and influenced how everyone else built houses. It also presumes that after "building the house", Woz then stopped work and did nothing. Rather than starting companies, doing other consulting work and teaching.

You seem to be lambasting Woz for being the headlines and yet you think toadwarrior "has a point" when they damn him for not being in the headlines. When people created damned if you do, damned if you don't criteria for judging someone, I usually smell a need to damn that person that exists prior to actually weighing evidence.

"and who's every utterance is made into headlines."

That's rubbish. How many times a day do you read an interview with Woz? Or how many times a week, or month or year? I'd be surprised if you personally read more than one interview with him a year. How is that "every utterance made into headlines".

If you personally are not interested in his opinion, that's no big deal. Plainly journalists run interviews with him because other people are. That's no cause for personal attacks by you and toadwarrior that damn him for not being Jesus. It's just the usual double-standard for when someone becomes successful. What would be a cool achievement for anyone you knew or worked with that you praised them for, becomes a damning failure for not being revolutionary in someone successful.

Woz is just a smart and generally honest person with a lot of specialist knowledge built up over decades of experience in our field. If you resent that he gets called up and asked for opinions by younger journalists, just don't read them. Don't make really, really stupid personal attacks on them for "doing nothing with their life." If you do that to Woz, then I can only imagine you spend your entire day going out and shouting at every colleague and person on the street for "doing nothing with their life" as well.

h4rm0ny

Re: Microsoft doesn't have a history of great innovation...

I notice that the first link has 17th March on the Lock Screen. That means she is using the Developer Preview. That Lock Screen that she was having trouble with at the start is different now. The moment she had clicked on it, it would have rolled up to show the option for entering your password the moment she clicked anywhere, which is what she did right away.

She is also able to get into email immediately on being asked. She's only flummoxed in two places that I can see - it takes her a minute to work out how to close the email program and it takes her a while to work out how to get onto the Internet because - and I quote from the video poster's comment, she didn't recognize the Internet Explorer icon because she has never used Internet Explorer before, only Firefox and Chrome.

Actually, she seemed pretty intelligent to me. I also quote that her first comment on reaching the Start Screen is "I like how they done all this." And the other link is that same old one of someone's father that's been doing the rounds. In both cases, the user would have been able to manage fine if someone had just told them about clicking on corners and the sides of the screen. Something that is pretty easy to communicate.

Maybe you also shouldn't be assessing usability based on people trying out the early developer preview where things that were giving them problems no longer apply.