* Posts by M Gale

3500 publicly visible posts • joined 22 Apr 2007

Coming soon to a theme park near you: Shocking ANTI-PIRACY NAG ADS

M Gale

We already have quite hefty penalties for copyright infringement

As title.

Wanting any more is simply a US-justice-style wishing for a pound of flesh.

Hackers warn: We'll hit US banks... again

M Gale

The more religionists of any flavour threaten and coerce...

The worse it is going to get.

Looking forward to the next Draw Mohammed Day.

John Lewis agrees to flog Microsoft's Surface RT tablets

M Gale

I think you'll find most people are buying "a computer", and it happens to come with TIFKAM.

The difference is, I reckon most people get hold of it, think it's utter shit, but can't be arsed to kick up a stink about it and just accept whatever crud Microsoft fling their way. You know, like Windows ME?

I haven't met a single person out of Internet commentards that actually likes Microsoft Window. Even a professor who is trying hard to like it (it's faster and smoother and, and, and... and you might as well get used to it!) readily admits that TIFKAM, the whole damned point of the new OS, is bilge.

M Gale

"I haven't seen people think a Surface is a PC without a keyboard. They think it's a tablet. Windows Phone hasn't led to people thinking their phone is a phone-sized PC."

"It is Windows. It's nothing like the Windows XP most are used to, so what, it's a tablet and you expect a difference."

Now, what's that advertising jingle again?

Oh yes.. it's everything at once.

Except it isn't.

M Gale

Re: This can only be a good thing

Only problem with Android's way of doing this is it seems to partition your space between users. A 16GB tablet becomes a 2x8GB tablet, and no way of installing apps once for all users.

Londoners can bonk their way to work without Oyster cards TODAY

M Gale

Re: I want to remain anonymous when I travel

"Do you think that they can't trace your paper tickets?"

Whoever "they" are, no. They can't.

M Gale

Re: Caution!

Perhaps. However if the only "tampering" you've done is to remove an antenna so your card can't be scanned straight out of your pocket, and if you're at least a little bit skilled in the art of public relations.. that could look very bad for them.

M Gale

Re: What about non-repudiation?

£10 is a fairly cheap price to see the scrote who nicked your card and get him hauled before the beak.

Though granted, the police should be doing all of this anyway, minus the £10.

M Gale

Re: As a Londoner

...and let's not forget the very real chance of being arrested for wearing the wrong type of T shirt.

M Gale

Re: As a Londoner

As someone who was born in London and still has most of my relatives dahn sarf, I do like being able to go on a five minute walk and be in the middle of a load of green. The only disadvantage is that people up here think I "talk posh" and don't seem to know the difference between "born in London" and "born within sound of Bow bells", and people down there hear me speak and think I eat babies or store ferrets in my pants.

As for trying to use the Underground during rush hour, being charged increasingly extortionate rates according to which concentric circle you want to get off within, or being taxed for daring to cross an imaginary line on the ground while in a vehicle.. you can keep it.

M Gale

Re: Doink

Just because: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ckMvj1piK58

M Gale

Re: @M Gale

"Are those the weekly tickets and daysavers you have to queue on a weekly/daily basis to purchase?"

That would be the weekly tickets I buy direct from the driver at about 6am when there's no queues to speak of, yes. I suppose I could buy a season ticket direct from the bus company and avoid the 5-10 seconds of inconvenience. Either way, it works quite well and means that when the bus station/stop is busy, I can squeeze past the bonkers and cash-payers with a cursory wave of a pass, while they're reaching to place the card on the bonk-pad, waiting for it to register, then retrieving the card.

M Gale

Re: What about non-repudiation?

"How can I prove that it wasn't me who used the 7.15 to Peckham on the 12th December?"

CCTV on the buses. FOI request.

Windows 8: At least it's better than ‘not very good’

M Gale

Re: I like it!

I still don't get the "this operating system is fantastically, orgasmically wonderful... once you gut the whole point of the operating system and replace it with something that looks like the previous version" attitude.

As for Vista, well that was pretty universally panned as being shit. UAC was about the only semi-useful thing it brought over XP, and even that was soured by Microsoft's attempt to pretend they invented it and didn't just rip sudo/kdesu/gksu off wholesale.

Of course, imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, but then getting a patent on it and beating other companies around the head with it.. well that just stinks.

M Gale

Re: @M Gale

"of course running Win 8 in a VM immediately makes any and all issues a Windows problem and nothing what so ever to do with your VM server..."

Well it's the only operating system out of all the ones I've tried in the VM that funks itself up after doing nothing whatsoever to it.

"and then once you do get it loaded you go to great lengths at removing just about all the good bits you can find from it making your experience limited to say the least..."

Err, where? You mean I unpinned all of the animated, garish, useless unused shite that it seems to spew all over TIFKAM by default? I suppose I could pin every single app to the start screen again, but then we have the problem I've already mentioned, of TIFKAM being a ginormous flat list of tiles that turns what should be an heirarchical tree, into an exercise in information overload. Same thing applies to pinning a ton of stuff to the taskbar.

Let's get this straight, in case you haven't seen any of my other posts on the subject: Faster is good. Leaner is good (though it really isn't THAT lean). TIFKAM is utter bollocks.

Give me my desktop back, with the start menu and the automatic commonly-used-programs bit, and it'll be like WIndows 7 but better. As it is, it's a piss-poor attempt to turn a desktop computer into a phone. They've created a supermodel, then promptly taken it out back and purposefully smashed its face in with a brick.

M Gale

Re: Start 'button' on Win 8

That's the same hack you use to re-enable the Quicklaunch area.

Unfortunately it doesn't quite work to replace the Start menu in Windows 8. New program installs do not put their icons in the folder tree, instead spewing their guts all over TIFKAM. All you're left with is a virtually empty, gutted start menu with no commonly-used-programs section, and a stylish look straight out of 1991. It even looks like the awful kludge that it is.

M Gale

Re: Who *really* navigated through the start menu?

/me raises hand.

M Gale

Re: Clean environment

It doesn't matter how well-coded your OS is (and being Microsoft, it won't be THAT well coded). Keep starting programs, ending programs, saving state, reloading state, starting more programs, ending more programs, shuffling data into and out of memory, day after day after day...

It'll happen. Slowly perhaps, but out of those gazillions of operations you're asking the OS to do, SOME of them will bugger up. Sure, you might not notice it at first.. it'll just be having to click on an icon twice instead of once. However, slowly but surely, entropy will build up. Things will break. Stuff will slow down. Eventually, and I've seen it happen so many times on so many Windows machines of every version, you'll be flying along in some application or game, and *CRASH*. It's not a virus, it's not malware outside of maybe Microsoft's shitty DRM being tripped, it's just a simple consequence of thinking you can keep going forever on an OS that is not totally and utterly bug-free.

That's why it's nice to reboot every now and then. But hey, it's your machine. You do what you like with it. Go ahead and waste electricity by leaving the thing on. After all, it's your electricity bill. But don't accuse me, or anybody else, of being somehow inferior because we like to cold-reboot sometimes and make sure the OS has started up cleanly. Or perhaps we just don't want to burn through the MTBF of the various components for no good reason other than not being bothered with a power switch. Or, maybe, we don't want to die in a fire caused by an exploding power supply?

Of course, you can do all of the above if you like. I could care less.

M Gale

Upvoted for awesome.

M Gale

Re: $5.00 copy of Duke Nukem Forever?

Doesn't exist any more, unfortunately.

Glad I got my new GOG account last night, instead of today, I suppose.

M Gale

Re: Could care less

Quite.

M Gale

"Or are you another one of those people who hasn't really tried it?"

Of course I haven't. I absolutely did not just fire the VM up to prove you wrong with a screenshot, only to be told that WIndows 8 has fucked up all by itself. I am lying through my teeth when I say that it's still thrashing the shit out of the hard drive doing whatever the hell it's doing and showing me that blue windowtiles logo.

So I got the edition name wrong. It's Windows 8 64 Professional, for fuxache. Hardly a major crime when you consider how many stupid editions Windows comes in these days.. perhaps I should refer to them as crippled, half-crippled, little-bit-crippled and not-crippled-if-you-have-a-volume-license editions?

Oh by the way: FINALLY!

But hey, maybe I faked those screenshots and drew them in MS Paint, eh? Perhaps I'm a Google shill? Here, throw a few "freetard" comments around as well, if you like. It's all the same bullshit. Just like TIFKAM.

M Gale

Re: Win 8 FTW

"I could care less when I only reboot my PC once every couple of weeks how long it takes."

At the usual per-KWh electricity prices, enjoy your expenses. Also some of us like having a clean environment that hasn't been toggled between standby/smart hibernate/whatever theyr'e calling it these days, and had the chance to build up enough entropy to truly bugger things up.

Also it's "couldn't care less". "Could care less" means you at least care a little bit, in order that you could care less. Here, allow David Mitchell to explain in nice, simple terms that you might understand.

M Gale

Re: heres an idea

I didn't buy it. Dreamspark FTW.

Ultimate Edition of Win8, in a VM jail where it belongs. Why? So I could evaluate it and see if it was as bad as people say it is.

It is.

M Gale

Re: !!!

How many things have you installed onto Windows 8 yet?

Of course if you really enjoy a massive, flat list of ico^Wtiles, then more power to you. If you like re-arranging TIFKAM every single time you install something, that's just gravy.. so long as you don't insist I be subject to the same crap. As for pinning shit to the start bar, that's damned retarded too. Sure if you only have one or two apps you play with constantly, but after pinning 10 or 11 apps to the taskbar just to avoid TIFKAM, it stops being a taskbar and starts being a big list of shit where it's not immediately obvious what's a running app and what's an icon.

Mind you, that's pretty much the same as TIFKAM, now. I'll decide when a program needs killing, TYVFM.

M Gale

Put an heirarchical start menu back in, relegate TIFKAM to an option for running Windows Store apps, and then after a little tweaking to remove stupid pinned items and put a proper quicklaunch bar back... it might be tolerable.

Until then, Windows 8 is about as painless to use as trying to find apps in Android by wandering through the huge flat-list-of-icons App Drawer.

Of course, putting the Win8 kernel improvements into Win7 as a service pack might be nice. It's not like I've only had the damned OS for a year and it's already outdated, or anything.

Facebook ditches mobile HTML with native Android app

M Gale

Re: Facebook?

Difference is, they are both the future for very different reasons.

Garlic Bread is actually nice.

M Gale

Oh, awesome.

Another version of the shit that can't be uninstalled from various phones and sits there taking up space whether you want it or not.

How wonderful.

NASA to smash its spacecraft INTO THE MOON

M Gale

Re: Newest crater on the moon

Holey GRAIL?

GRAILy hole?

M Gale

Couldn't they delay it just a little while?

At least until the probes come around to the daylit side. Video feed. Got to be of some use, as well as being mildly interesting to watch.

M Gale

Re: Thanks for not mis-calling it the 'dark' side of the Moon...

There is no dark side of the moon. Matter of fact it's all dark.

Sorry, just had a Floyd moment there.

Police use 24/7 power grid recordings to spot doctored audio

M Gale

Re: groundhog day? 1970's all over again

Vewwy, vewwy, vewwy quiet?

Damn wabbit.

M Gale

Re: I call bollocks on this

Well, it may be difficult to prove when a recording was made. However, as the article states, it may still be useful to detect otherwise-undetectable edits. WHile the part of the audio you listen to might not reveal any obvious pops or clicks, the very faint hums of electrical interference in the background may well be jumping up and down like a yoyo.

I have to wonder if more determined fraudsters are using fourier-based noise removal to get around this?

iPad mini to outsell iPad, get Retina Display? iPad to slenderize?

M Gale
Trollface

Re: no excuse for typo's.

Or, indeed, apostrophe catastrophes.

Apostrophe catastrophe's?

M Gale

Re: Could care less, or couldn't care less?

Teehee.

Microsoft: IE mouse tracking vuln no big deal. Sort of...

M Gale

Well there's an opportunity.

Like a more-selective script blocker. "Allow this site to see your mouse movements? (Y/N)"

Combine it with things like "location", "screen orientation" and various other things that modern browsers are quite happy to blindly report to whoever asks for it.

Dutch script kiddie pwns 20,000 Twitter profiles

M Gale

Re: ...verbose, complicated terms and conditions...

I know people like to diss this "Joe Public" guy, but really, "post tweets on your behalf" is pretty damned simple to understand. If you don't know what posting a tweet is, what the hell are you doing on Twitter?

Methinks this prankster hit 20,000 people on the very low end of the bell curve.

Pentagon hacker McKinnon will NOT be prosecuted in the UK

M Gale

Re: And the moral of this story?

I'm sure 10 years of wondering whether you're going to end up spending a significant amount of your life imprisoned in a country known for its implicit, and in some cases explicit approval of prison rape, is no punishment at all.

And all for what, showing up a foreign agency as complete and utter fools?

UK cops: How we sniffed out convicted AnonOps admin 'Nerdo'

M Gale

Re: IRC is not secure

Depends on the network. It's possible to use SSL, though of course you need SSL between all the nodes as well as from client to server.

I've also had fun with various encryption methods that make you and others with the key able to see the text, but everyone else in-channel sees a load of g&7b6^&f7&^fvk8.

Of couse, as the post above mentions, this isn't perfect!

M Gale

NIC?

Not "nick"?

Dexter malware targets point of sale systems worldwide

M Gale

Re: "It wasn't me. It was that POS system that swiped my card!"

This is where the other, more profane version of the POS acronym is rather accurate.

Yet another eavesdrop vulnerability in Cisco phones

M Gale

Thankfully, ReVuln didn't find this one first or we'd all be getting told something like "we can hack Cisco phones.. who wants to pay us for the details?"

Stroustrup on next-gen C++: I didn't want to let go of my baby

M Gale

Re: Missing foot.

You mean the 0.001% of developers who want something that's compute-intensive to complete on a timeline somewhat less than from now until the heat death of the universe?

Those developers?

M Gale

Re: Not understand the whole language...?

"So it's a big question whether you are a C++ programmer who thinks that out of index array accesses create exceptions, or one who knows what really will happen."

Ah, the joys of creating fencepost errors and wandering pointers, then wondering why your program is behaving "oddly", cannot be overstated.

M Gale

Re: C++ put me off programming

"I strongly feel that the best way to put someone off being a developer is to choose a language like C++ as their first exposure to programming and then get taught how to use it ..."

Oh I don't know. Back when I was doing an initial Access to IT course, the tutor split the year into two classes. We both did VB and C++, however one group did VB first, the next group did C++ first.

I was in the group that did C++ first. It was only a very basic course, didn't even go very far into things like pointers, however it did teach some of the basic principles of OOP. When it came time to switch to VB, everyone in the class had become so used to C++'s idiosyncracies that they took to VB's hand-holding-but-slow-as-treacle paradigm like a duck to water.

The group that started with VB on the other hand, took one look at C++ and collectively shat their pants.

Sometimes, just sometimes, learning by going to the deep end and throwing yourself in can be a good thing.

Google maps app is BACK on iPhones, fanbois spared death

M Gale

Re: Your move apple...

"almost all phones suffer the same type of issue"

Not to anywhere near the same degree, they don't. The iPhone 4's Grip O' Death was pretty much guaranteed to kill the signal, whereas any other phone? Not so much.

M Gale

Re: I almost died in Australia

"took me years to convince Google, TeleAtlas and Navtech to stop sending people to our house via the mudpit that masquerades as the middle portion of our road."

I still see people trying to head from here to a village due South, via an old track that is still legally a toll road. Unfortunately, the farmer who owns it can't be arsed maintaining it, so keeps the gate shut.

It proved amusing once, at some ungodly hour on a Winter morning, when I was woken by the sound of a screaming engine. Some chavs had nicked a car, presumably with some kind of satnav in it. Now, the junction off to the track I mentioned is further up the street. However, these fools were being chased by the cops and missed their turn. Not even realising this street is a dead end, they hit the very gentle curve near the bottom of the street, fast enough for me to hear the tyres begin to screech and complain about lack of traction. Wouldn't surprise me if they were doing near enough a ton at that point.

Then they saw the end of the road.

What I heard then was the longest ever skidding sound as this car proceeded to slide the last two or three hundred yards down the road sideways. There was an ominous silence for about a second as they careened off the tarmac, ploughed (literally, like digging trenches in the lawn) through someone's front garden, and then a short crunch as the car impacted the fence just before a 5 foot drop into woodland. I managed to gaze bleary-eyed out of the window to see what the fuss was about, just as the police came down at a much more leisurely, relaxed pace to arrest the joyriders.

Faulty mapping data: An awesome anti-theft device.

In a mobile data eating contest, Brits would win - Ofcom

M Gale

Re: Source?

" you could start looking at dropping the fixed-line services with that."

I'm sure many people could. However, how long could the average Reg reader stand to be stuck behind 192.168.0.0/16? I know it can be somewhat annoying for me.

Sinclair ZX Spectrum FAILS latest radio noise rules SHOCK

M Gale

Rebuilding?

Why bother? You could probably emulate a speccy with a microcontroller.

Wonder if anybody has stuck the whole thing, ULA, CPU and all, on a single chip yet?