Posts by DZ-Jay

Re: Err...

@AC:

>> Err.. The title says 17 to 18 months so yours will fail in 5 months or less.

Not necessarily. All we know is that some devices are failing at relatively the same time, all bought at around the same time. It may have been a manufacturing error of a particular batch, or a design error on the first generation of the device.

Also, although it may seem like a large number of complaints, keep in mind that not all devices from the same generation have failed. It is natural to only see complaints in a forum thread dedicated to support and troubleshooting.

I'll wait and see what comes out of this before I sharpen my pitchfork and light my torch.

-dZ.

Revolting? Come on!

So they may not be the fittest or the cutest, but is it really necessary to call them revolting?

Cheers!

-dZ.

Competes with Apple?

As far as I know, Apple kit users only pay using iTunes when purchasing stuff from the iTunes Music/App Store, which is integrated into the application. Why would anybody go out of their way to use a separate payment system? Or more to the point, how could the payment system be externalised from the store and application themselves?

So, no, it does not compete with Apple's iTunes. It does compete with PayPal and Google Cash for all ther e-commerce purchases done over the web, though.

-dZ.

Re: Pear Computers on iCarly

Yes, all of the above. Plus, come'on, "Pear Computers"... that's funny!

-dZ.

ONLY on Windows!

"If you use the Internet Explorer, Google Chrome or Apple Safari browsers--ON WINDOWS--during PayPal transactions, now would be a good time to switch over to the decidedly more secure Firefox alternative."

There. Fixed it for you.

-dZ.

Little Snitch

Those who are concerned about their privacy and want a bit more control over what their computers are sending to the outside world should check out Little Snitch:

http://www.obdev.at/products/littlesnitch

It's an easy to use personal firewall that can be configured to allow or block access to any address on any port, by any application.

It will also announce any attempts made by any application or system service to connect to the outside, to give you a chance to allow it or deny it; hence the name.

-dZ.

Re: WTF?

Read the story, Amazon acquiesced and *settled* with him--it was their decision, not the court's. In fact, it did not get to the courts. He sued Amazon, and given the bad publicity they have suffered so far, they decided to spare themselves more aggravation and public scorn.

So the lesson to be learned from this is not that "this idiot (Gawronski) gets a wad of cash for being a morn", is that "those idiots (at Amazon) paid a wad of cash". Given the circumstances, I'd say the guy is brilliant for getting so much money out of them.

-dZ.

Re: IETab

For all those railing about IETab on Firefox, there is a difference between it and Chrome Frame: Although the Mozilla group did not directly create the IETab, they may condone its use--ON THEIR OWN BROWSER. That is, it is their decision, and their software. They are not, however, (and they'll probably object to) offering nor promoting an IE plug-in, such as "FFTab", that turns IE into Firefox. That is the difference.

If, on the other hand, Google were adding an "IE Frame" plug-in to their own browser so that users get that crappy IE experience they are so used to, then nobody would complain; they'd probably just point and laugh, but not complain. However, they are actively promoting the bastardization of a browser that is not owned by them, in order to indude the use of their own browser.

Think about that for a second. Mozilla does not object to a plug-in on /their own browser/ that runs as someone else's browser. Google promotes a plug-in on /someone else's browser/ that runs as their own browser. Do you see it now?

-dZ.

Tricky

Perhaps those same "Orwellian" constraints on distribution, quality, functionality, and content are what has made the iPhone so attractive to the masses.

Sure, it seems safe to think that people are just buying iPhones and iPods purely as a status symbol or as an inducement into some sort of cult; but to do so ignores a fundamental fact: That many cool and expensive status symbols and cult accoutrements existed before, yet nobody was buying.

I agree that Apple's restrictions sometimes border the irrationally obsesive, and I disagree with some of their more mundane decisions; but I understand that most people don't care. I'm not making judgement on any group of people in particular, but perhaps the masses were indeed waiting for a totalitarian dictator to give them something that could only be used in certain ways to ensure that it does what it says on the tin.

You know, choice is a wonderful thing, but it is also the progenitor of crap and lawlessness. Some people like their choices limited and their decisions made for them. And apparently, there are a lot of them.

-dZ.

Re: they didn't make it by the end of the summer

What? They missed the fall equinox by about 4 days, I'd give them a break.

-dZ.

Re: I worry

No worries, it's too dorky for anybody to take seriously.

-dZ.

Re: iPod Touch also lost sync

Is it the iPhone or could it be Snow Leopard?

I was having problems with iTunes since I installed Snow Leopard a couple of weeks ago. Specifically, it kept forgetting the firewall permissions every time I ran it.

I was recommended to remove it and re-install it from the web site, and now it works fine. It seems apparent so far that Snow Leopard tightened up the access control permissions of the apps that come with it, so I wonder if these issues have anything to do with it?

Can anybody confirm if this is occurring with older versions of OS X?

-dZ.

Seriously

The Japanese are so wierd. And I don't mean that in a xenophobic, racist kind of way. I mean, they have some very strange customs and hang ups over there.

-dZ.

They could be telling the truth

"We researched this claim by the researcher and confirmed this vulnerability was not introduced by MS07-063,"

Perhaps they know it came from an even earlier patch.

-dZ.

Wouldn't it be...

Would it be "Puck opp?"

-dZ.

"...to understand what's a stake..."

I understand what's a stake: it's a sharp stick you put in the ground to tie down tents. Some people use it to kill vampires.

-dZ.

Could it be...

Could it be because Apple offered a $29.00 online purchase with free shipping and guaranteed delivery by Friday? I myself, along with other friends, ordered it so and received it by FedEx delivery this Friday morning.

So perhaps the fanbois didn't make the queues because there was no reason to--when you can get it delivered directly at your doorstep.

-dZ.

Porn flakes?

CLASSIC!! It must be Friday, cheers!

-dZ.

How about...

How about the following apps?

- MacMame

- Mame OS X

- WoW

- TextMate

- Q (emulator)

So wait...

It's a service for developers attempting to migrate their applications to the new platform? From the start, your article seems to imply that end users will be charged for support when encountering an application compatibility issue...

So, which is it?

-dZ.

The real problem

I don't think the problem is actually posting lyrics publicly, we can all agree that this is stupid. I believe the problem stems from creating a for-profit site that depends on publishing lyrics without license.

Had LyricWiki remained a community site, which allows users to share lyrics, without any affiliation to private organizations looking to make a buck (or a quid, as you please), it perhaps would not have gartner so much attention. As it stands, it is owned by Motive Force LLC, which is a company trying to make money off the social-networking craze. In this way, LyricWiki is used to attract traffic and extend services in order to increase profits. And of course, you know that the music industry will not stand still when encountering someone--anyone--else making money off what they think is exclusively theirs.

-dZ.

Bullsh*t!

>> ".. you can almost hear the arguments emanating from Apple('s) galactic nerve center at One Infinite Loop..."

This is pure conjecture. My take is that Apple has no reason to reject the RealNetworks app, and will accept it without a problem--without controversy, or argument, or reservation.

If you put your bias asside for a few minutes, you'll realize that there are some valid arguments to Apple's complaint regarding Google's Voice app. The bit about altering "the iPhone's distinctive user experience" had nothing to do with the GUI of Google's app not conforming to Apple's standards as you suggest. It had to do with the fact that the iPhone is, primarily, a phone, and one of its strengths is its integration between the phone functionality, the voice mail, calendar, and address book apps, and the all-encompassing experience to the user provided by this close integration. The Google Voice app bypasses all this integration by offering its own address book and voice mail applications, so a user who installs it will certainly not get the full integrated iPhone experience--at least while using Google Voice. Of course, there are other issues at stake and other claims made by Apple of variable merit.

The Rhapsody music store may compete with the iTunes store, but it has been out there for a while, and people still use the iTunes Music Store. I see little reason why Apple would be afraid of it on the iPhone.

But of course, this is a completely futile argument because your self-fullfilling prophecy has no down-side: If Apple rejects the app you'll gloat with a big "I told you so"; if Apple approves it, then you'll claim it was probably because they wanted to avoid a PR nightmare, even though there's no evidence for this. Either way you'll claim you were "right"; how very convenient.

-dZ.

YAY!!!

Coo.

-dZ.

Re: huh?

Think of it this way: Let's say you are looking to get healthy and want an appropriate diet. You have two friends which attempt to give you healthy advice. One of them tells you "try lowering your carb and fat intake, cut down on burgers, and eat lots of veggies". The other tells you "you should only eat things which are good for you."

Now, compare those two statements. One seems like a pretty specific recipe for a healthy diet; the other more like a generic contemplation of what a heatlhy diet should be.

This is pretty much the comparisson between REST and SOAP. SOAP is a web services communications protocol. It is complete with message format, interfaces, and command structures. REST, on the other hand, is--well--it is like a generic contemplation of what a client-server communication should be.

While SOAP tells you "If your message is writting in X format, and says 123, then server responds with ABC", REST tells you something like "if you send a message to the server, the server should respond appropriately." It's not even "apples vs. oranges", it's more like "apples vs. agriculture".

Of course, this is an oversimplification, but that's basically it. You hear lots of people argue over "REST vs. AJAX vs. SOAP" or some such, but this is nonesense. It's like arguing over the South Beach Diet vs. the Atkins Diet vs. eating healthy food: it means nothing; and worse, it implies a misunderstanding or misrepresentation on the part of the speaker.

The point is that REST does not imply any specific protocol nor communications standard, it merely means stateless communication between client and server, which is purely conceptual. When people advocate REST against, say, SOAP, what they really mean is "I don't like SOAP, so let's do something else--I don't know what, but let's", which is really not a bad thing to say since SOAP is pretty much bloated and overkill for many applications; but the hidden meaning is that there is no indication as to a substitute. This ends up meaning that everybody invents their own, and ends up sometimes being worse.

-dZ.

Re: Who needs religion

@Hollerith 1:

Ok, I'll bite. Without entering into an entire metaphysical and philosophical discussion, I'll just say that religion has tried to do more than just attempt to "explain weather, luck and power". It has tried to find meaning for existence and coherence with our surroundings. Sure, science explains a lot of how the world works, and I'll guess that we have much, much more to discover as time goes by; but it still cannot answer some basic inquiries that has baffled mankind for millenia, mainly, what is all of it for, and why are we here, and so briefly.

This questions lie at the heart of what it is to be human, and may never be answered by science. Religion may not answer them either, but it at least attempts to look for an explanation beyond the mere physical qualities of the universe, and it certainly gives comfort, if not pure understanding, to entire societies regarding their place within this universe.

I'm not a religious person, but at least I can appreciate that there is more to being human than the mere curiousity of understanding the mechanical and physical properites of our universe, though that may be a big part of it. That there is a deep drive to comprehend our position within this universe, and that introspection and reflection can be as meaningful and gratifying as physical observation and rational speculation. That, to this end some seek religion, is just a personal choice they make. To each their own, I say.

-dZ.

Revolutionary?

Pressumably, other prototypes have crashed also, so how revolutionary is this one if it manages to work just as well as the others?

-dZ.

Re: @Zero-day?

I'm mr.K, if the vendor and the security community (at least the organization who reported the bug) knew about it for two years, then it is most definitely *not* a zero-day vulnerability, but more like a 730-day vulnerability (not accounting for a leap-year within those two).

@VoodooTrucker & northern monkey

Yet the App Store remains very popular and there's apps for practically everything. The complaints are coming from a very vocal yet small minority of developers and critics.

-dZ.

Re: Other ways

@A.C.:

It is a bit more subtle than that: They used that same technique, but instead of calling libc functions, they used the code within the ROM itself.

-dZ.

Not the same

"Windows malware strains dwarf Mac virus variants by several orders of magnitude, but that's not to say that Mac malware doesn't exist. VXers are taking more interest in Macs as the platform has grown in popularity."

Still, not the same threat. In Mac OS X, the trojans depend on a user downloading and installing the malicious program from a dodgy site. This involves not only a prompt to download the software, but prompts to install and enter the admin password.

If you are in the habit up updating system software with random packages offered by dubious web sites, then, well, you get what's coming to you. I'd say the same to a user of any platform.

-dZ.

Accuracy of timing? Consistency in taste?

It's ramen noodles, for crying out loud! How can anyone mess those up? you could hire chimps to boil them and still get a decent product. Any unemployed college student could do no worse, either.

-dZ.

Re: @etabeta

@Winkypop,

You mean, like a Wiki? I guess they would lock out the "history" page to avoid arguments as to the modifications.

-dZ.

Piccies, or it didn't happen!

I mean, it's Friday. I'm just saying...

-dZ.

Re: Can it now fry eggs twice as fast?

I own one and yes, I can attest that it gets very, very hot on the surface. However, almost a year in, and it hasn't missed a beat. It therefore does not bother me. Besides, my cat loves it.

-dZ.

Re: null

@Allan George Dyer,

The problem is not C, and has little to do with string terminators. It has everything to do with an application not validating its inputs properly. It seems to me that the reason he added the null terminator after the asterisk is probably because the input validator would not accept a single asterisk as input (good), but would happily hand off a truncated string that "seems" to be the correct length (bad).

The root cause here is a discrepancy between how the end application interprets valid input, and how the validator accepts it. This is called "command injection", and it's easy to avoid by, hum, validating input properly.

Of course, the browser expects that certificates from an issuing authority are already valid, such is the nature of the system (being an "authority" and all). Therefore, putting the browsers at fault is also disingenious. Sure, clients can double-check just in case (as apparently Firefox does), and so they should; but at the end of the day, if you can't trust a Certificate Authority, how much of an "authority" is it?

-dZ.

@Tom 101

Sure, tell that to the NASA historians trying to recover potentially lost telemetry data from ancient tapes, stored in a format no longer supported by any reader--while the obsolete readers have been either dumped long ago, or no longer function.

-dZ.

Screenshots?

Can anybody provide screen captures? The site is currently down and I would like to experience its mind-melting uglyness first hand.

-dZ.

@Joe 3

I live in the real world. I've worked for over 15 years in low-level systems programming, at least 10 of which include "web development". Yes, that means JavaScript and ActionScript too. I can tell you the technology for web applications sucks, and most "web developers" are oblivious in ignoring the lessons of the past in other platforms, such as security, stability and scalability.

When I go home and browse the web, which I do quite often, I disable JavaScript and Flash on my web browser, and enable them only on the seldom chance that it is required for a resource I /want/ to access. This is very rare.

Not everything requires "rich media", and as a matter of fact, most resources on the web would do good to avoid them.

-dZ.

@Simon Newton

You may be right, but the fact that you are missing (or knowingly ignoring) is that the threat is highly mitigated by the fact that the phone--stock, as per manufacturer's specs--won't allow the spoofing to take place.

Perhaps this is why Apple is not contacting this "hacker" in a hurry; at the moment, only those who hack their iPhones are at risk, and so it is not Apple's problem.

I will hazzard a guess that Apple will in time lock down their infrastructure to eliminate this potential risk, but aren't in a rush to do so; nor to acknowledge a theoretical flaw in their system which can only be manifested by those who already circumvented the licensing rules and security mechanisms of the device.

-dZ.

Good for Apple

This, at a time when Google and Microsoft are effecting or planning lay-offs (or is it lays-off?) and looking to cut as many operational costs as possible, in order to stop the red-ink haemorrhage.

I say, more power to them.

-dZ.

@Gary F

"Never attribute to malice that which can adequately be explained by stupidity." Or, in this case, incompetence.

You have to put everything in proper context. NASA did not erase the Apollo 11 landing tapes, at least not knowingly. It wasn't like someone, when asked for a blank tape, went to the special Apollo 11 vault, picked up the one labeled "Apollo 11 Moon Landing - 07/20/1969 DO NOT ERASE, EVAH!!!" and wiped it clean.

Keep in mind that at that time there were no personal computers; no electronic record keeping; no SAN back-up storage. Inventories were kept by hand, and tapes were manually labeled and stacked on piles in large rooms somewhere. All done by a sprawling government bureaucratic machine. And you know what? Mistakes happened; quite oftenly, too.

It stands to reason that the tapes were originally mislabeled or misplaced--or both--and then recycled inadvertently. It's also not as if these were the only important tapes missing. These are the ones making the headlines today because the 40th anniversary of the Apollo 11 mission shines the spotlight on them; but I'm sure the are plenty other tapes and artifacts that have gone inconspicuously missing over the years.

-dZ.

Ok, I'll bite

I'm a computer programmer by trade (software developer I think they call me these days), male, and at my age I'm getting pretty sick of it (darn kids and their tweeties and web-two-point-ohs!). I make quite a bit of money, but wouldn't mind finding a more rewarding career.

So, what I'd like to know is, where are the insentive programs for me to consider a career in a field in which my gender is under-represented?

-dZ.

Apollo - Special Edition

These are just the "Special Edition" of the originals prepared by Lucas Films with additional footage and CGI-enhanced imagery.

Can't these people just leave these things alone?

-dZ.

Re: All farting aside

@Joe K, David Edwards:

You are right. El Reg likes to ridicule the App Store for all the useless crap, but tends to skip reporting on the (admittedly few) very useful and innovative apps. For every few hundred fart apps there's one really good game or such.

It's like critisizing the Internet as useless just because it's the biggest repository of pr0n and apocryphal trivia in human history. Sure, the crap's out there and it is very easy to stumble upon; but it's not like there is absolutely no useful content, which is equally as easy to find.

-dZ.

As you said...

>> "In real life, you sometimes get penicillin or radar or integrated circuits. But shh! Don't tell anyone."

However, as you said, we only have to be unlucky once.

-dZ.

Oh noooes!

Not Aaron Kempf! I'm scared! Is he going to throw databases at us?

-dZ.

I'm not scared of databases...

Unless it's used to keep in velociraptors.

-dZ.