Posts by Fred Flintstone

I can beat that one, I think..

Still have a couple of Psion Organiser II's around, complete with peripherals and software libraries. Must dig up a few 9v batteries..

As for hardcore, Im saddened to see that in Windows 7 EDLIN has finally been left out from command line, but that's for pussies anyway. Real men use "copy con someprogram.exe" :-).

Joking aside, I'm not stating that I have anything against new stuff (hardware or software), I just seem to have more and more problems with the seeming waste of resources we're required to accept. I'm not a fan of anything other than usefulness. I have an iPhone because I have use for it, and I bought a MacBook for research, and it proved to be so much better that I ditched everything I had on Windows, leaving a WinXP and an OpenSUSE partition in Parallels.

The promise is always faster and more efficient, yet I see that never delivered. Well, switching to Mac made that come closer, but there too waiting is required - hence my desire to rebuild from scratch when OSX 10.7 is here. I want SPEED, and not the snorty stuff. Hence my aim to slap an SSD into the Mac in a few months (first need to do some Filevault testing).

So there. Old is good, and new isn't always automatically better :-).

You might need a finer tip then

Given the pin spacing of your average SMD packaged processor you won't get far with a 2 mm thick tip..

Actually..

.. you could kick off terminal from a USB keyboard (cmd+space "terminal" Enter) and type in enough data to load whatever is on the stick - just give it a usable drive name. From there you can launch the classic popup "The adobe reader needs updating" which the user is used to anyway (good argument to avoid it like the plague).

In other words, there is enough grip on the system to lure the average end user into entering their password, at which point all bets are off.

That is, if I considered this attack likely. I may be wrong, but I can't see that being used much. The risk of discovery is too great (IMHO, of course).

Actually, the Motorola RAZR has the same "feature"

Yup - more phones out there. Switching it "off" is simply not as good as not having the phone in the room at all.

This find is special..

The interesting thing about this find is that it is actually on a site near a location where originally iron ore was mined. This means that infrastructure is there already, and it's anyway in a very accessible place which drives down mining costs (you still have to do chemical extraction). It's not in some remote, lawless place without any infrastructure..

I find it fascinating to watch this work out..

Thank you for the first *useful* comment..

My problem with Lion-via-AppStore was exactly that: recovery. If you have a downed hard disk you otherwise end up with a chicken and egg problem of needing a system to install a system, and I had not seen any message how that was addressed. I thus hope you're right - how did you know?

I rather liked the Clie FX..

I've had every Psion device going including the 5MX, but the whole stylus thing didn't work for me - the 3 was IMHO more fun (also because you could actually replace the batteries).

However, from a PDA perspective I personally think the Sony Clie NX70 was the best PDA I ever had, other than that it didn't have the flatfile database ability of the Psion kit. Oh, and a programming language you could entertain yourself with whilst on a train or something.. There the stylus did work - I hardly ever used the keyboard.. I think that's a personal preference thing, though. The Organiser was actually quite good as a PDA, I know someone who has been using one until about 2002 when the poor thing eventually died..

BTW, anyone who has coded 16k programs on a device with a 4x20 character display has had sufficient training to follow the film "Inception" without any problems whatsoever :-)

In that context, the Leopard server is interesting

I find it interesting that really NOBODY has spotted the threat to Microsoft from the new Leopard server.. The principal problem for Microsoft sufferers has been the integrated service offered by Exchange of mail, contacts and calendaring with the only alternatives small setups under Linux (OpenExchange - which is only "open" until you need it to do serious work, Kerio and others) which mainly pretended to be Exchange.

Apple's forthcoming offer seems to be focused on using Open Standards but is presently seriously let down by the lack of any server platform - you'd have to VM this (in principle create a Hackingtosh) to invest any confidence in it. But give it time - it's IMHO not a bad idea to let the code loose on small shops which just use one Mac to run this on the side before they work out a way to mount this on a big iron.

The whole groupware arena is ready for a new player, MS has milked that cow long enough..

All just IMHO, of course. I use a Linux based groupware solution for this, but I'm always interested in something new to test..

I'm so glad..

.. that there are many dictionaries and websites have explanations about what human rights are - go read them.

Don't open that can of worms..

You have to scrape off a rather thick layer of muck if you want to go there.

First off, the Gov doesn't pay so well, so peanuts only get you monkeys. Said monkeys then happily pay consultancies to bring in the knowledge. As soon as anyone inside gets too smart, they are bought out by - yes - the consultancy because internal knowledge is dangerous to the money milking scoundrels. And so the cycle is kept intact of paying roughly 2x as much for staff as what it would cost if they just paid people properly. But hey, that would actually make sense - can't have that..

Causality is something politicians don't really understand.. Press coverage, yes, but causality ... hmmm ... no.

No, you need to be aware of your responsibilities..

I worked at MoD sites, and the kind of chatter you can pick up by having breakfast in the nearby hotels is scandalous. All the external consultants talk about their work like the Official Secrets Act doesn't exist - which shows they aren't worth their clearance.

If you work with any kind of protected information, health records, personal information bank records, government information, whatever, you MUST be aware of the appropriate discretion or you should not be doing the work. Even if your personal life is itemised by the minute on twitter, the information you are handling at work isn't yours, and you should pay that information the trust it requires and deserves.

On the flip side, this also means you can DEMAND that care with your information when you hand it off. The moment you accept lower standards, those will become the new standards..

You may be right - and it may have started already

The Huffington Post reported (well, proxied as usual) a report about American Rag who now have ass-cams in their dressing room (no, honestly, I think they even trademarked this). The idea is that customers can check out their rear ends when they buy jeans so they can check if it looks reasonable (I hesitate to use the term "good" in this context).

Add that shape recognition to facial recognition, and you will get auto-twitters which report which stuff you're buying - with pics from the dress room.

And no, I'm not buying the "closed circuit" claim. Not if it's been built by anyone male 8)

Correction..

I think what's worse is that their MANAGEMENT is so windows centric they thought that the recall button would work.

There, fixed that for you..

Not a chance..

Not a chance that it gets canned this time IMHO - too much money involved.

Probably NTP driven..

.. and it ended up syncing to a Linux laptop with its timezones messed up :-).

Joking apart - if that clock HAD been running NTP, synced with GPS, there is no way it would have run off to any noticable degree unless it was set up wrong. A properly configured NTP resource that had a chance to collect stats for a week from a GPS source is nigh impossible to mess up.

Anyway, I digress. I'm not buying that clock story unless it's confirmed by someone qualified.

Try Collanos

I like the Collanos setup because it keeps all partners in a group in sync (although I haven't tested concurrency yet - what happens if two work on the same doc). An easy way to back up is to set up an office computer as a group member - it just sync along with everyone else..

They cannot eliminate jailbreaking..

Apple is about making money. What they do is make it hard enough that the majority (read the volume) doesn't bother, which works for them. Aside from that they set some budget aside to feed some lawyers, and that's as far as they will go. It is not profitable for Apple to get too agressive - also because iOS5 proves that the unlocked community comes up with good ideas too.

So no, I'm not masochistic. I know what I want from what I buy, and I research what I buy. That's also why I don't use a Droid - I know it gathers far more data off me than Apple, I don't like the UI and I don't like it forcing me to log into a Google account before apps work, especially the location features.

The "like" button does actually more..

I have a sneaky feeling that the "like" button is a bit like Google's Adscan in that its presence means that Farcebook is probably seeing your presence.

Would love it if anyone could verify this..

/// P ///

However ..

.. they are the reason you have sunshine in the week. As soon as they go for the weekend you end up with a low pressure zone and the rain moves in. Just check the statistics - works for the city too..

Actually, I wonder..

.. what would happen if you started tagging politicians as people that are on the TSA "must get cavity searched" list, like some security researchers.

Oh, so much fun to be had..