Posts by Ken Hagan

Re: parental controls

Actually, I think this is a red herring. If the parent doesn't know about the parental controls but does know that they've given their CC details to the device, the parent should not give the device to a child without constant supervision.

It's like your wallet, except that it doesn't run out so quickly. Why in the name of fsck would you give such a thing to a child and then look the other way? I just don't understand.

Oh, and in case anyone is curious, it turns out I do have children and about ten minutes ago I just explained to my 11-year-old why I won't sign him up for websites whose T&Cs require you to be over 12. This task really isn't as difficult as some of the child-free population seem to think. It results in about two minutes of disappointment, after which time the attention span runs out and he finds himself wasting his life away in some other non-improving fashion. I think that's what being 11 is for.

Re: Broadcast TV?

Way off topic, but I have to suggest you google for "megalithic yard".

Re: screening

You can use optical fibre for data cables.

Re: About Time

"What do enterprise customers get that you can't find in Win8 Pro?"

Maybe downgrade rights to Windows 7? Remember, by this time next year you probably won't be able to buy a legit retail licence for Win7 for love nor money.

Re: Laugh? I nearly cried.

"It's all in the negawatts: the cheapest power plants are ones you don't build."

Er, no. It's all in the cooked books. Deprive an economy of cheap energy and watch that GDP nose-dive. Of course, if you are willing to ignore the GDP loss, not doing anything at all, let alone getting out of bed and building a reactor, starts to look like a smart plan.

Re: chirality

"Interestingly" is an understatement.

Finding life on Mars that isn't terribly dissimilar to life on Earth (extremophiles) wouldn't really be a biggee. We nearly had that with the Mars meteorite a decade or so ago, but it didn't make much of a splash, largely because various people stepped up to explain how plausible it was that life might hitch a lift on a meteorite and travels to a nearby planet.

Finding life with the other chirality would be a massive biggee, since it would imply that life emerged twice. That would be the biggest blow since Darwin for a certain strain of "special status" God botherer.

(I hasten to add that most God botherers don't seem to have a problem with Darwin, or science in general. However, the ones that do are particularly annoying, even (perhaps especially) for the ones that don't. Therefore, all reasonable people should welcome anything that results in them getting a good kicking.)

Re: Embarrassing really...

Yes, embarrassing, but not surprising. The bar is actually quite low.

Whilst most government sites are probably no less secure than the average, there are a lot of them. (Governments are fairly large sprawling entities and every country has one.) It is inevitable that some will be wide open. If you go to a large multi-storey carpark on a Saturday morning and systematically try *every* car, I'm sure you will find that some of them are unlocked. (*) The only difference with web-sites is that the web-site search can be automated and probably isn't covered by the cyber equivalent of CCTV.

(* At least, you would have done in years gone by. I think at least some modern cars have a preference for automatically locking themselves if the key(s) drift too far away. Human nature remains as fallible as ever, but the common failure mode has been identified and engineered away. If only there was such a thing for SQL injections.)

Re: going through back comments

Yes, they clearly are, but look on the bright side; they are now one hour closer to death with nothing to show for it. People like that *could* have been interacting with the rest of us.

Re: Big jump

I'm still waiting for milliservers. The article even suggests a reasonable criterion for such a beast: TDP/core < 1W. But then, this would be an objective definition and we know how much the marketing types like *those*.

Re: you'd have to be terminally thick to fall for them

Perhaps this piece of malware was written by a bank, trying to flush out customers who are "too stupid to be creditworthy". Perhaps when victims try to get the credit card payments reversed, they'll find that the bank will oblige on this occasion but wants the card back.

Re: XP to Win7 upgrades

Your experience probably doesn't apply to an organisation like HMRC.

It probably has a volume licence for XP, so it could roll out the shiny new hardware and put XP instances in VMs. Or it could set up a vast array of Terminal Server machines and use all the old hardware as RDP clients and never upgrade them at all.

The point is, if your problem is IE6 then the minimal answer is an IE6 replacement, not a migration to Win7. That's the difference between Browsium and the more expensive bid.

Re: It'll be on Pastebin in ten seconds flat

I think the OP was referring to the "list of known perverts" that the ISPs would have to maintain.

Re: farewell snowy pictures

You mean "consume", not "watch". Remember you are the product here, and products consume content.

Re: time to ship the lot to the counterweight continent

Smashing idea, assuming you mean the politicians. Perhaps our counterweight cronies could arrange a welcoming party consisting of the ten deadliest species of, oh I don't know, pick any animal group you like really.

Are fossil-furtling boffins scientists, or pre-historians? Who cares. This is El Reg and unless you are very new here you have got over Lewis' prose style by now.

The word you *ought* to take issue with in that quote is "irresponsibly".

Re: OS To The Rescue

On the other hand, one could point out that there's nothing new in VS2011 *except* Metro support, so you could kill two birds with one stone by sticking with VS2010.

Re: the Manager

I don't think that will change.

Re: Seems

Your monitor must be squint.

Re: Not yet worth it

I suppose I can't speak for the OP, but I'd be willing to bet he'll just buy another SSD and restore his lost data from back-up.

He gave a price of $160 for the sort of speed-up that money just can't buy outside the SSD market, and the hidden cost is that he might have to use his backups once every few years. That sounds like a pretty good deal.

Re: "hominin"?

I wondered that, too, but apparently hominins are a subset of hominids.

http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/270333/Hominidae

Re: A Damning Statement About the Windows Ecosystem

UAC was/is the wrong approach. The assumption behind UAC is that privilege elevation can be made easy so there is no need to question why end-users are asking to raise privilege every five minutes. Psychologically, this simply trains users to click-through.

Privilege escalation carries risks. Therefore, it should not be easy. Separate accounts is probably the only safe solution on Windows.

Life on planet Linux is slightly easier. The "sudo" command can be given a fine-grained list of users and applications that are permitted, so if you have some particular use-cases that cause most of the elevation requests you can allow them. This wouldn't work on Windows because lazy third-party applications would simply add themselves to the list and lazy end-users would never review the list. Sad, but true. On planet Windows, both end-users AND third-party developers are the enemy. Microsoft don't stand a chance.

Is it the government they are showing two fingers to? Or is it the people whose legal system is being ignored?

There are certainly UK laws that I think are ridiculous, but I expect companies that operate in the UK to stick to them until they are changed by the proper procedure. (Digressing only slightly, I expect my government to stick to them as well, the more so because they have to power to change the ones they don't like, but again only by the proper procedure.) It's called "rule of law" and history has very little good to say about countries where it doesn't hold.

Re: Fermi Frightens Me.

For the last 4 billion years, we haven't existed either. Give us another few thousand and we won't be detectable by someone with our current level of technology, unless we want to be. (We'll be able to see them, of course...)

So just why is it called Fermi's <it>paradox</it>?

Re: Don't forget...

Spot on about the multiplexers, the crowning irony being Andrew's point that they didn't have any content worth watching on the extra channels.

I expect most of the 1.3 million "subscribers" just used the box as a way to get the free digital channels. These are the same people who still haven't signed up with Sky because they've now got FreeView built into their telly and in their opinion there's still bog-all worth watching that isn't on the free channels.

Re: I'm OK.

So in your case, sitting down all day would be the healthier option.

Re: Authenticated spam

Divide and conquer.

If I send all my authenticated mail through a relay (to whom I and lots of others pay a small fee, so it's a viable business model) and countersign it, *recipients* only have to whitelist the relay. (Recipients can complain to the relay people in the reasonable expectation that the relay people will pursue the matter rather than see their whitelisting threatened by a rogue customer.)

For further simplication, relays can aggregate with other relays. Also, I (and they) may have deals with other relays at the same level of the hierarchy, to avoid a single point of failure.