Dual boot == information leakage
So they can only make super secure, un-trackable calls on the secure OS. Fine. They get some down time, so re-boot to look at some cat videos on the unsecure OS. Oopsie. Now they can be tracked..
Posts by Tom 38
4344 publicly visible posts • joined 21 Jul 2009
Page:
Air-to-ground rocket men flog top-secret mobe-crypto to Brad in accounts
Strategic SIEGE ROBOTS defeated by 'heavily intoxicated' man, 62
Larry Ellison buys airline
Razzie voters drive stake through Twilight
Wednesday 27th February 2013 19:20 GMT
Re: Adam Sandler was robbed
Well Vic, you could have read my post, which should indicate to you that they don't make a loss, they make, as I said, a fuckload of money. At least $150m in the case of "Jack & Jill". Also:
He is one of Hollywood's most bankable stars which allows him to command $20 million per movie along with very impressive percentages of a films GROSS profits. That's gross profits not net profits. FYI that is a gross amount of money when you consider some of those films earned over $150 million at the US box office alone. For the movie Anger Management Sandler earned $25 million plus 25% of the gross which was roughly $150 million.
(source)
So take that into account when checking the budget of a film. "Jack & Jill" had a budget of ~$80m, at least $20m of that was for Sandler himself, who also took 25% of gross - another $15m or so.
You don't keep on making shit film after shit film with you as the lead if they don't make any money. Just ask Eddie MurphyDonkey.
Monday 25th February 2013 18:24 GMT
Re: Adam Sandler was robbed
Adam Sandler films make a fuckload of money though. "Jack and Jill" made $150m at the Box Office (budget of $65m). That's $15m per Razzie.
I expect "That's My Boy" to do similar business once the worldwide figures are in.
It's (sort of) like Tyler Perry, who makes astonishingly successful film projects again and again and again without any real recognition. I say 'sort of', because they make wildly different kinds of films - almost diametric opposites! - but they are both highly targeted at a particular segment of society, and are commercially successful and produced for (reasonably) small budgets.
Ubuntu? Fedora? Mint? Debian? We'll find you the right Linux to swallow
Monday 18th February 2013 12:53 GMT 
If you just want a replacement for Windows
If you just want a replacement for Windows then all of these are fine choices.
However, if you really want to get to grips with the why and how of things, I'd recommend something with a little less hand-holding. Gentoo is both less and more hand holding simultaneously, which is a little clever, Slackware has less hand holding, but both offer the sort of minimal structure that requires you to work out what it is that you want and then go and do it.
You could do worse than using my favourite OS, FreeBSD. FreeBSD has some nifty features you just can't find on Linux, like ZFS, but it's not designed for someone who just wants to sit back and have everything done for them.
It's also a real OS, which means that that there is a core of software (the 'world') that *is* FreeBSD, it's not a collection of glorified packages that you install that hopefully makes the kernel 'go' - plus you get an awesome Beasty logo!
The benefit of all of these options is that there will be things that go wrong over time, and you (yes you!) can go and fix them. This will (hopefully) teach you why they went wrong and stop you doing the same thing in future, or at least going "aha, I know what this one is...".
Climate scientists link global warming to extreme weather
Wednesday 27th February 2013 18:28 GMT
Re: A fair analysis - @tom 38
Blargh, so I get the mechanism wrong. It's irrelevant to the point at hand.
One of the two entities in question warms and cools at a different rate to the other. This is because of it's physical properties. It is not because one is inhabited by Man, and the other is not - you get an onshore breeze, even if there is no-one on shore.
Tuesday 26th February 2013 10:29 GMT
Re: A fair analysis
The article is saying when the world warms due to some cause X, the land warms faster than the ocean. The X can be man.
Don't be a bell-end. The land warms faster - and retains heat longer - than the ocean because it is land and not water.
This is the basis of onshore breezes in the afternoon of hot days. The sea has cooled slightly, whilst the land is still warm. The warmth of the land causes air to rise, reducing air pressure, which induces a cooling onshore breeze.
Colombian boffins reconstruct flight path of Russian meteor
Look out! Peak wind is coming, warns top Harvard physicist
Wednesday 27th February 2013 11:15 GMT
Re: Why not just build a solar panel that covers half the world....
Once on a holiday to the Cotentin (Normandy), we found this lovely beach, lovely sands, perfect surf, completely deserted, and spent an enjoyable couple of hours body boarding. When we got out, an old local boy, resplendent in his beret, wandered up to us and said Êtes-vous fou? Le site nucléaire est à 5 km là!
I did wonder why the water was so warm.
Linus Torvalds in NSFW Red Hat rant
Dell takes aim at iPad, uncloaks enterprise-level Win8 tablet
Best Buy takes axe to touchy Windows 8 PCs - lops $100 off price
John Sweeney: Why Church of Scientology's gravest threat is the 'net
Survey: Bosses are DESPERATE and GAGGING for Linux skills
Wednesday 20th February 2013 13:11 GMT
Re: Opportunities for All of whatever Smart Hue
Fuck going to America on a skilled worker visa, most visas don't put you on a path towards citizenship, and without citizenship, you're treated worse than Sri Lankan maids in Dubai.
Friend of mine, working in America for the same company for 5 years, the company and DoHS fuck up his visa renewal, and he gets deported back to the UK in order to renew the visa. Those 5 years, due to his visa type, don't even start him off the road to citizenship. Neither does his baby daughter, legally a US citizen.
Even with citizenship, you're treated like an American, and who wants that?
Baby-boulder bowling burglar breaks Boulder Apple Store's $100k glass door
Tuesday 19th February 2013 13:05 GMT
Re: Moron thieves
Back in the 90s, one of my mates was always "bigging up", as we called it in those days, his monstrous CD collection - over 4000 CDs, of which he would carry about 400 around in one of those massive CD folders in his car. Parked it one day in a chavvy part of town, didn't hide the CD folder under the seat, came back to find that £4k+ of CDs had just wandered off, along with his passenger window.
He still bitches about losing his rare ones...
Own a drone: Fine. But fly a drone with a cam: Year in the clink
Tuesday 19th February 2013 12:04 GMT
Re: RC hobbyists
They really are not very popular. Very popular would mean that you couldn't walk down the street without seeing 5 people with RC handsets. Tamagotchi were very popular. Burberry was very popular. RC vehicles is a very small specialist hobby.
I'm not saying that because I think that, because it is a small specialist hobby, it should have to put up with stupid laws like this, I'm saying it because of your hyperbole in insisting that this is affecting everyone and his dog, simply because it affects you and your RC mates.
John Lennon's lesson for public-domain innovation
Monday 18th February 2013 17:42 GMT
Re: No!
I'm completely fed up by people not remotely connected to BSD telling the world what the lesson of BSD is. You've entirely missed the point.
The purpose of BSD is to be re-used, by anyone, however they want to use it. This includes companies that want to take it away and don't share anything back - although, companies like this don't exist. Even the most evil of all evils, Apple, contribute back a huge amount of work they do on FreeBSD and FreeBSD related technologies.
FreeBSD is the base for many closed source OS, typically shipped on appliances like IronPort. Guess what? These guys collaborate amongst each other, contribute fixes upstream, and even suggest architectural improvements based upon their experiences.
Yes, BSD allows rampant copying of source code and relicensing, and anyone can use it for whatever purpose they want. This does indeed conflict with RMS' worldview, but its what we were aiming for in the first place.
If you don't like it, don't use it, but please, for the love of fuck, please stop telling us that we haven't learnt our 'lesson'.
PS: Agree with the article 100%. A technology is never truly free to use if there is not a free to use - for everybody - version of it. All the best, universal, technologies have liberal free licenses, eg libpng, libjpeg, openssl, openssh all have liberal licenses to encourage use of them in all scenarios, and to enhance interoperability between applications. The internet took off easily because most OS started out with a copy of BSD's TCP/IP stack.
Acer's Wang: Size of PC shipments to shrink month after month
Any storm in a port
Monday 18th February 2013 13:21 GMT
Re: Flamebait
On the 'top' of almost every connector that goes into a computer is a raised logo or marking.
On a USB cable, it is usually the USB logo.
On a PS/2 cable, it is usually a raised line.
On a SPDIF cable, it is usually a raised line.
On a RJ-45, it is the cable release lever.
On a eSATA, it is the cable release lever.
This goes in facing UP.
Pay attention now, this is where it gets crazy. Plug in the cable so that the bit that is supposed to face UP does in fact face UP.
Mental. I can see how you get it so wrong so frequently.
It does get trickier if you are plugging into an extension card or onto a motherboard attached port in a tower case (or any case where the motherboard is not orientated flat and the right way up). For the motherboard, re-orientate the case (in your mind, put the computer down) so that it is pointing UP and plug the cable in so that it is pointing UP. This is advanced stuff now, so take a break if you haven't got it yet.
For expansion cards, UP is a different direction. Expansion cards have a front and a back. The front is the side that faces away from the CPU. This is UP. Plug the cable in so that UP is UP.
It's almost like someone thought about this…
Friday 15th February 2013 16:39 GMT
Flamebait
I can't believe you lot call yourself IT professionals, and haven't yet mastered the tricky art of plugging cables into computers. Nobbly bit goes up. Nobbly bit always goes up. Work out which way is up on your computer. Insert plug into socket.
I normally like Dabbs' articles, but this one is utter pish. He admits to being flummoxed by VGA D-sub 15 plugs, yet can cope just fine with the identical shape of a mini HDMI.
On the list of things to get annoyed about, "OMG, I had to rotate the plug 180°" does not merit 846 words.
HYPERSONIC METEOR smashes into Russia, injuring hundreds
Reg readers scuffle over the ultimate cuppa
Friday 15th February 2013 14:20 GMT 
Brewing time
I can't believe no-one has brought up the issue of mashing into brew time. In an ideal world, we would all patiently wait the appropriate amount of time to get the right flavour and colour of tea.
However, this is a corporate world. We have no time to do it properly, only enough time to do it until it is acceptable. Enter The Mash. My work tea is brewed in under a minute by furiously beating the teabag against the side of the mug.
It's a bit bitter, but so am I, so it's a good match.
mashmashmash
Fashionably slate
$195 BEEELLION asteroid approaching Earth
Wednesday 13th February 2013 13:59 GMT
Re: estimates are a tad pessimistic
What, like Space2O Water?
Sadly, no longer made. eNOT_ENOUGH_SUCKERS.
Paper computers: Not mere pulp fiction
Friday 8th February 2013 14:14 GMT
On the other hand
If I could turn all my ebooks into paper books, then I would need two additional London sized flats¹ to keep them in. Keeping all my data in one device, plus backups, is a hell of a lot easier to maintain than a giant library.
When we dealt with my grandfather's library after he died, no-one had room to keep it all, so a lot of it went into storage. Poorly thought out storage. The rats ate a good chunk, the mould got another chunk, and some of the pages just went completely black.
¹ That's 'a typically sized flat in London', not 'a flat the size of the greater metropolitan area of London'.
Tennessee bloke quits job over satanic wage slip
When open source eats itself, we win
Wednesday 6th February 2013 14:01 GMT
Apache is not a synchronous web server. Apache has a mode of operation that is synchronous. It also has an asynchronous mode. In it's asynchronous mode, it is just as fast as nginx, yet supports many more 3rd party modules.
Apache 2.2 ships, by default, in synchronous mode. Why? Because Apache is commonly used to make a LAMP stack. PHP in the form of mod_php historically does not play well in a threaded environment, usually due to it's extensions.
The solution is to run php-fcgi instead of mod_php when running asynchronously. This is actually better since it separates the PHP interpreter from the request handler, which increases performance. This model, php-fcgi and asynchronous workers, is exactly how nginx works, and the two are comparable in speed in this configuration.
So why isn't this the default configuration for Apache/PHP? Ease of upgrade. It is too confusing, say packagers, to ask people to change how they deploy their PHP apps on Apache, it cannot be changed. Also, the package will include almost every stock Apache module, and they will all be loaded by default.
So install LAMP on Ubuntu, and you get the slowest possible way of serving PHP, by design. Install nginx, and you get the fastest. This is where the lighty/nginx/New Cool argument comes from, people install the stock configuration and think Apache is some slow beast that takes all your RAM.
Apache, properly configured, is amazingly fast and light on memory. Plus, you get the entire ecosystem of Apache modules to use. There are many books written on Apache module development, and thousands of books on Apache configuration and howtos.
Finally, about web servers. Web servers are an amazingly popular bit of software to write. It's so simple to do, that they massively proliferate, each claiming to be the fastest most agile web server going - I'm looking at gunicorn, Tornado, et al here.
I'm not going to comment on their speed, but instead the speed of the thing you are serving. Frankly, how fast the web server does it's web server tasks is massively irrelevant in the overall scheme of things. Any request involving DB queries will swamp the amount of time the web server spends handling the request. Any request not involving DB queries is a static file, and should be served from cache or disk, which is a hard thing to do slowly.
There is nothing wrong with nginx or lighty, they are both excellent web servers. But so is Apache, and rumours of it's death are greatly exaggerated. If you already have Apache skills, changing to nginx means learning new syntax and gotchas, and losing all your experiences and custom modules, and it still won't go faster than your app.
tl;dr - use Apache 2.4, event MPM and php-fcgi.
Introducing the Open Source Rookie of the Year... Whoa, it's Microsoft
Monday 4th February 2013 11:56 GMT
Re: Obvious troll is obvious.
Apple fund a lot of FreeBSD developers and projects, so I don't see where this assertion comes from. The security and auditing portions of OS X and iOS directly come from TrustedBSD/OpenBSM, which are projects majorly sponsored by Apple - just look at the commit logs.
clang is now the default system compiler on FreeBSD current, and produces correct code that runs as fast as gcc. It's not as fast at compiling as gcc currently is though.
It's all very well bitching about how evil Apple are, or how XYZ is better, but I don't see them contributing. The point of BSD is that we don't mind people reusing things, it is better when they contribute back. Successful users of BSD, like Apple, Citrix, IronPort and Netflix all contribute back.
You thought watching cat videos was harmless fun? Think AGAIN
Wednesday 30th January 2013 15:08 GMT 
Film at 11
The entire purpose of cats is to kill small animals - it's why we domesticated them in the first place. They should be killing anything they can get to, so that it stays out of the way of humans.
Hardly fair to suddenly turn around and say "OK, mice and rats, but not the cute ittle birdies or water voles".
Fujitsu reveals data transfer protocol 30 times faster than TCP
Worst broadband notspots in the UK named and shamed
Revealing new pics of galactic princess Andromeda
Wednesday 30th January 2013 13:27 GMT 
Andromeda, named after the mythical Greek princess known for her beauty
1) Andromeda is the daughter of Cephus and Cassiopeia, who are Ethiopian, not Greek.
2) Andromeda is "known for her beauty" because of her mother's hubris in declaring she was more beautiful than the Nereids, and was punished by Poseidon.
BoJo was right, a classical education does eventually come in handy.
UK.gov told to get a brain in wake of £1bn IT deals collapse
Friday 18th January 2013 14:09 GMT 
Sour grapes?
Sounds more like certain people were miffed that they had to do work in order to tender a bid, and are upset that, because their tender was not accepted, that that work no has no reward.
Suck it up. When you ask an engineer to tender a bid, they do a lot of work in order to be able to tender. Factored in to the bid is the cost of producing tenders, so if only if they consistently do not win bids does this become a problem, in which case they should look at why they are not winning bids, rather than bitching about the cost of working to submit tenders.
US taxman joins UK politicoes on hunt for Amazon cash
Thursday 17th January 2013 12:10 GMT
dogged: VAT is only zero sum if you receive the same or less in VAT on sales than you expend on VAT in purchasers. Companies that spend more than they sell don't tend to last that long. Therefore, successful companies do pay VAT.
VAT is a tax on consumption. Someone on £5k only pays the 'same tax' as someone on £500k if they consume the same amount. People on £500k do tend to consume more - the Jag uses more petrol than the Mini, but it is still a regressive tax, because even though the wealthy consume more, their proportion of the overall consumption is dwarfed by the (meagre) consumption of everyone else.
The main issue is the tax code, which has grown massively since the mid 90s. There are far too many loopholes and special conditions that the top few percent no longer pay their fair way, and companies (legally) avoid the majority of their taxes. Raising VAT would not help, simplifying and rewriting the tax code would.
China visa changes could attract job-hunting IT pros
Look out, fanbois: One in two nicked mobes is an iPhone - cops
Fusion-io touts cheap-as-chips flash to Apple, Facebook and chums
DoJ to Kim Dotcom: We never asked you to retain files
Amazon-bashed HMV calls in administrators, seeks buyer
Tuesday 15th January 2013 17:36 GMT
Another place where you could actually browse effectively lost.
I vehemently disagree. My (past and recent) memories of HMV are disorganized tat warehouses, where you can browse all you like, it's just they've sold out of the thing you wanted to buy. Looking for someone in particular from a back catalogue? Good luck even finding the artist.
We put up with this in the 90s, we'd pop along the high street, wandering between Woolworths, HMV and Virgin comparing prices, since usually at least two would be massively overpriced, and you'd hope that one of them was not.
Most recently, I wanted some DVD box sets for Christmas presents - nothing rare, new releases like The Wire, The Killing, Breaking Bad etc. I popped into the HMV at Westfield Stratford - presumably their most recent store. It was tiny, so crammed with people that you couldn't effectively move around, and none of the DVDs I wanted. I spent 30 minutes trying to look for them, and 10 minutes waiting to talk to someone only to be told "If you can't find it, we probably don't have it".
After that, I went home and did what I should have done in the first place - order it from Amazon. Services like Spotify mean I can browse and discover music on my phone whenever I choose, Amazon nearly always has the best price and everything in stock. Shops like HMV are an irrelevance that will disappear along with the box shifters like Currys and Best Buy.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
