Posts by Ken Hagan

"How anyone can cite Microsoft as a company to emulate where security is concerned, who isn't a Microsoft shill, is beyond me."

Perhaps they've been paying attention. Compared to Adobe, Microsoft are golden.

"Google does pretty much the same thing"

Not really. Their search engine runs an algorithm whereas our friend had compiled a list of links by hand, which is more like YouTube, except that the latter actually hosts the material.

There's an obvious similarity in both being funded by advertising, at least if you can put aside the scale of Google's operation.

Re: "can't hide" & "voting with wallets"

Really? I think you'll find if you stop random people in the street that most of them haven't a clue that MS have criminal convictions for anything. Also, I think you'll find that Windows' market share is still so large that most of those same people don't think there is an alternative. Apple? They only make phones and tablets for Stephen Fry, don't they?

clubbing together

How about *.sucks, a TLD devoted to customer complaints against big brands.

The rules of the registry are that trademark owners *cannot* buy their own brand names, which in turn means that anyone going to (for example) www.theregister.sucks can be in no doubt that it isn't affiliated in any way with the well-known brand. Thus, the usual "passing off" argument that brands use to silence their internet critics is whisked out from underneath them.

It works fine in a cupboard. VirtualBox is happy to run VMs headless and you can administer them with VBoxManage.

@AC 11:22

Actually, if I go to reasonably large shop, I *assume* that there is an employee of the shop whose job it is to track me whilst I'm in the shop and record the footage on CCTV. I think this has been standard practice in retailing for several decades and society seems to reckon it is OK.

If they follow me home, that's different. But then again, I said as much in my earlier post. Collecting data isn't an invasion of privacy. Trawling the resulting dataset and making certain kinds of connections might be. Computers don't change the principles here. I see no scenario where something that is legal on a small scale becomes illegal just because you've automated it. If it is wrong on a large scale, it was wrong in the individual case, and vice versa.

Re: Would I be alone

Not quite, to judge from the up-votes, and if you want to be a programmer I'd say these are essential skills (at least for the current generation of machines) but I'm not sure it is the best place to start with an average class of pre-teens.

Re: countersunk touchpad

What sort of typing position are we talking about here?

I've just tried to type with my palm low enough to touch a touchpad. It's bloody uncomfortable and I've no intention of keeping it up. (I'm typing this now with my hands above the keyboard like any sane person.)

I was briefly tempted to patent the pain in my joints, but then I remembered the prior art: "Doctor, it hurts when I do this..."

Re: Checking facts

I can't be bothered to check wikipedia, but I think you'll find that Italian, Spanish and French were mutually intelligible (and basically medieval Latin) until at least the tenth century, and educated folks all over Europe used Latin as a lingua franca until a handful of centuries ago.

So 1900 years is very probably off by a factor of two and arguably off by a whole order of magnitude.

Why bother with a PIC? You've been able to buy "Pretend I'm at home" light switches and timer-controlled sockets for yonks.

Of course, in these "enlightened" days, you might not be able to buy a 60W light bulb anymore.

Re: previous versions

Of course, the previous version is still there for *you* to find precisely because the end-user didn't know about the feature and therefore hadn't either switched it off or recently purged all previous versions. Making the feature *more* visible to typical end-users might actually make it *more* likely that they lose data.

VMS had a similar feature and a sub-population of end-users who relied on the fact that a document had multiple personalities and so you could store important data in different versions. It was great until they exceed their disc quotas and their sysadmins "fixed" the problem for them by purging all older versions of all their documents.

There's no substitute for a decent backup regime. I know it's boring, but if you can't calm down enough to put one in place then I'm afraid you are just too disorganised to use a computer.

Re: the registry

"The registry is the number one place MS screwed the pooch"

Crap. Certain other OSes store this information under /etc or in dotted directories under ~/ in a host of tiny files all in different formats. Windows uses several instances (hives) of a strongly typed custom file system, allowing uniform access to the same data and fine-grain security. Both design choices have plus and minus points.

Registry corruption only happens if you let crapware or clueless users run amok on the data. The same would happen under any other design and the problem is letting crapware or clueless users run amok.

I speak as someone who has made typing errors in small files in the /etc hierarchy. :)

I think "iPod" went the way of hoover and biro some time ago, particularly in playgrounds.

Kindle might follow, but only if Amazon stop diluting the brand with things like the Fire.

I don't know if "owning the brand" is commercially useful to Amazon. It makes them the first place people go if they are interested in buying an e-reader, at least for a few years. (I don't suppose anyone buys hoovers or biros from the original manufacturer anymore.) It is certainly deserved. Amazon made a product cheap enough and good enough for book lovers rather than gadget lovers.

Re: what it says on the tin

Perhaps. Of course, it isn't actually the job of a DNS server to decide whether the answer to your query is safe to use. If there is a problem with the certificates on the target site, it is the client's job to decide how to handle that. But if you've punted that responsibility to OpenDNS, then they are indeed doing what you ask.

Either way, if people are now migrating to the MS alternative, it looks like Google have paid the penalty regardless of whose fault it is.

Re: launching myths

How about leaking the idea that poachers are terrorists on training exercises?

I mean, it's not like the world is short of shockingly well-resourced search and destroy teams. All we have to do is persuade them to take an interest.

Re: that early 2000's era PC

That's "everything except display a picture more than three inches wide and/or let you type anything in". I know the CPU power and RAM are there, but *unless* you are a mindless consumer of low quality versions of someone else's content, you'll need a PC as well as a smartphone.

Furthermore, if you can only afford one, you'll go for the PC if you have anything at all between your ears.

What *ought* to happen, unless the Berne convention has been completely consigned to the history books, is that as soon as the idea is *published*, no-one (not even you) can obtain a patent. In practice, it seems to be possible to patent a version of the idea that differs in some utterly trivial idea. The USPTO will cash your cheque (or check!) and the rest of the world has to go through a US court in order to overturn your immoral, fraudulent, crooked and intellectually insulting behaviour.

And faced with such institutionalised theft, the response of the rest of the world's politicians appears to be "absolutely incomprehension and inactivity for a decade or so, followed by a dawning realisation that they could perhaps get their snouts in the trough, too, if only they were crooked enough".

Re: look at the graph closely

I went back and looked at the graph closely. The x axis is clearly labelled voltage.