* Posts by John Tserkezis

2242 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Jun 2007

Has anyone lost 37 dope plants, Bolton cops nonchalantly ask on Facebook

John Tserkezis

Re: They do look like males

"Anon.. as in the UK it is illegal (stupid), unless you grow tomatos instead..."

Heard from a guy I used to work with, his cousin was a heavy pot smoker, and curious, tried smoking tomato leaves. Said he "wasn't the same" after that. Probably forgot to wash off the bug poison.

See? Pot really is a gateway drug, leading to the real heavy stuff like tomatoes.

John Tserkezis

Re: Well who knows ?

"After all, stupider things have happened."

Heard about a traffic accident where police attended and were taking notes. One officer lifts his nose, takes a sniff and says "what's that smell?". His partner agreed.

Cue a local who had come out of his house to witness said traffic accident, and alerts the officers to the fact that it was his pot plantation that was doing it, the ventelation fans push the inside air outside where it smells. With the officers looking curious (no-one could be THAT stupid), he offers them a tour of his setup. Being the courtious types, both do the "tour", then promptly thank the guy by asking him to accompany them to their vehicle. He eagerly obliged. (second hand story from a close friend who had seen it unfold).

There ARE stupid criminals out there, they've even made compilation shows about them.

NSA-resistant email service Lavaboom goes BOOM! (we think)

John Tserkezis

Re: special service not needed

"2. with LINUX you get the Thunderbird e/mail client, ENIGMAIL and the Gnu Privacy Guard -- GmuPG -- all included. and all this stuff is free."

There is a windows version too. Install and use procedures are basically the same, except for some of the code of course.

One in eight mobile calls in India drops out __ ___ middle of your chat

John Tserkezis

"I've suffered much worse 2G performance than this in Brasil."

Think of us poor Australians. In the next couple of years, 2G is going to be wiped out entirely (lack of use or so they claim).

Problem is, we have many trackers and alarm systems that are built around 2G modules that come from Europe where 2G is still plentiful. Well, they're going to wipe out that industry in one swoop.

Upgrading to 3G isn't feasable, as the GSM module isn't a module, it's integrated into the rest of the device - we expect customers are going to forking over bucketloads of money to get it working again...

</rant>

OpenOffice project 'all but dead upstream' argues prominent user

John Tserkezis

"A member of the Apache OpenOffice team was quick to respond: “We think Apache OpenOffice as released has been a huge success,” he said. “Most of us don’t really like the direction LibreOffice is heading to."

Oh the irony. They've forgotten that LibreOffice was forked from OpenOffice for exactly that reason...

Boffins raise five-week-old fetal human brain in the lab for experimentation

John Tserkezis

Henry Frankenstein: Look! It's moving. It's alive. It's alive... It's alive, it's moving, it's alive, it's alive, it's alive, it's alive, IT'S ALIVE!

Victor Moritz: Henry - In the name of God!

Henry Frankenstein: Oh, in the name of God! Now I know what it feels like to be God!

.

Says it all really.

Adulterers antsy as 'entire' Ashley Madison databases leak online

John Tserkezis

"This event is not an act of hacktivism, it is an act of criminality. It is an illegal action against the individual members of AshleyMadison.com, as well as any freethinking people who choose to engage in fully lawful online activities"

Sure, the same "freethinking people who choose to engage in fully lawful online activities" are there for the single reason to cheat on their other halves... It is "lawful" after all.

Australia to capture biometrics at the border under new law

John Tserkezis

"The law's being sold as a security measure and, as such, will go down well with much of the Australian community"

It'll go down well with much of the community, but not because of that reason. The real reason is that much of the Australian community are brain dead morons, and believe anything as long as who's talking manages to keep a straight face.

But don't worry, the sheep will change their minds as soon as they realise that some of the biometric data involves anal probes.

Mozilla testing very private browsing mode

John Tserkezis

My take on advertising.

I intentionally block every from of ad anywhere. Even on stuff I obtain from TV gets post processed with commercial breaks removed.

However, we need ads. We wouldn't be able to buy crap without them.

The best form of advertising for me, is a well structured and informative website. I want information AND A FECKING MANUAL for the crap I'm buying, because, if I don't know what I'm buying, I WON'T BUY IT. If some of the dodgy eBay sellers can get this right, SO CAN YOU. It's not hard!

I don't want popups. They went out in the 80's, and rightly deserve to stay there.

I want prices ON YOUR FUCKING WEB PAGE. I'm not always looking for the cheapest prices, there are pros and cons here people. "Please call" doesn't fly with me, I have better things to do than make phone calls just to find out there is a local agent that charges $600 to freight a USB dongle within my city.

Have a "Contact Us" link THAT RESULTS IN A HUMAN CONTACTING YOU IN A REASONABLE TIME AND ACTUALLY BE HELPFUL.

Best of all for me, I use a GreaseMonkey script called Google Hit Hider, that removes selected google finds that don't know how to advertise themselves in a useful way. I will never see you again. Good riddance. THAT'S how I do my shopping. Deal with it.

John Tserkezis

Re: Good thinking, Advertisers

"Who buys from these click-bait sites anyway? I mean, when was the last time you bought a Russian Bride?"

Steve from Family Guy clicked on one that said "Russian Binoculars" and received a mail-order bride instead.

If it can happen in fiction, it can happen in real life.

John Tserkezis

Re: Works for me, too

"give-a-shit-o-meter"

Love it!

Digital doping might make you a Tour de Virtual cycling champion

John Tserkezis

Re: How durable is your GPS?

"First, I thought GPS information included altitude"

They do, it's calculated along with the horzontal data, though, it requires four birds as a minimum rather than three just for location. Generally, you get many more than that all of which help with accuracy.

"do these generally use GPS altitude or the one out of a database?"

Always GPS. Elevation data requires a bit more number crunching, which is a challenge when they pick the smallest weakest processor to do the job. Also, good accurate elevation data is expensive, and only has limited coverage. As others have mentioned, using barometric pressure is a by far better way of doing it - if you need altitude to be close.

"With an accuracy of a few feet"

I'm nit picking here, but you only get 3 metre 95% accuracy (typically) with WAAS enabled systems. And since that only operates either on or around the US, most of the world is stuck with non-WAAS, which is about 15 meters 95%, and altitude would be around 23 metres 95%. I need to stress I'm just quoting widely available numbers, and leaving out some gotchas, but these numbers should be acceptable most of the time. From there, it gets really, really complicated really, really fast.

"GPS location does just seem to jitter around a bit"

That's normal, and some units have built-in code to prevent this, so it "looks" clean to the otherwise untrained eye, and a whole lot less annoying on maps... Some handle this gracefully, some not at all.

"Dead reckoning until the GPS gets better?"

I've only seen dead reconing being used in (some) car dash GPSs. But I don't have wide experience with that, so can't be sure.

"Can it use the accelerometer?"

On a bicycle? Don't think so. What would be the point? They're widley used elsewhere, but not on bikes.

"I'd be getting 90MPH speeds in no time hahaha."

Don't laugh, I did that once. One hell of a long and steep downhill, the whole time thinking, "If I blow a tyre now, they'll have to scoop me up with a wet&dry vacuum cleaner.". Scary.

John Tserkezis

Re: FFS

"John, apart from you missing the fact of using all of them simultaneously,"

I was aware of this, and it's still irrelevant.

You could take the same trip multiple times WITH THE SAME DEVICE, and still get that kind of variation.

You might take a different path (say, stay on one side of the path rather than the other), you don't know when the actual GPS fix will come in, meaning you may or may not "cut" corners. The only stable and repeatable distance measurement is the bike odometer. Otherwise, there's a thousand reasons you get discrepancies.

And yes, you as well as others have stated the accuracy is close, almost too close to be right. There is only so much one can do to allow corrections for GPS, but at the end of the day, comparing distances travelled and trying to make sense of that is meaningless when using GPS for this purpose.

John Tserkezis

Re: FFS

"it actually works out more environmentally friendly to drive a bin lorry everywhere."

But a bike has a more favorable manufacturer's fuel economy figure. And EVERYONE knows that's the single only important thing the idiot plebs look for when buying a vehicle.

Unless you count the number of airbags as being important. Pussies.

John Tserkezis

There is SO much wrong with the article.

I was under the impression that a writer would understand the technology before actually writing about it.

But it appears this is not a prerequisite.

My bad.

Australian court slaps down Hollywood's speculative invoices

John Tserkezis

Re: I think a pig just flew by

"The same Australia which ruled DVD region coding as an illegal restraint of trade."

The very same Australia that STILL manufactures region 4 DVDs regardless.

It's not just antivirus downloads that have export control screening

John Tserkezis

What does it take to get ON the list?

Call George W Bush a screwball? Or the best president ever? Or both?

There we go, I've done it this time, I won't be flying to the US anytime soon.

ZUCK OFF: Facebook nixes internship after student embarrasses firm

John Tserkezis

"I am sure he'll find a proper internship somewhere more interesting."

I'm also sure he'll find PAID work somewhere more interesting.

After all, an "intern" is analogous to free slave labour. Sure, it's marketed in a different way, but whichever way, for every one of him, there are 100 waiting in line.

Mozilla-Microsoft spat latest: Firefox yanks Cortana away from Bing

John Tserkezis

"But Tuesday's blog post added that Firefox will eventually disable uncertified add-ons by default – although that won't happen until an unknown, future version."

Nice how they snuck that one in when they thought no-one was looking.

It's like Firefox and Microsoft are in bed together - even though it *appears* as if they're not fond of each other.

Aussie bloaters gorging on junk food 'each and every day'

John Tserkezis

I resent you saying Australians eat too much junk food.

(as he tries to swallow a mouthful of a Twinkie knockoff)

Return of the Jedi? StarWars.co.uk bod to fight the Empire (Disney)

John Tserkezis

Re: Feck nominet

"domains are like any ip and should be traded on the open market"

Unless your name is Disney, in which case you automatically own everything, right?

Thought so.

'WOMAN FOUND ON MARS' – now obvious men are from Venus

John Tserkezis

It's not my ex wife!

I mean, I didn't think anyone would actually look there, but...

Nothing to see here, move along....

Perhaps middle-aged blokes SHOULDN'T try 34-hour-long road trips

John Tserkezis

Re: A few things

"2. You'd have to be stupid* to drive for 34 hours to dodge tax"

"You'd have to be stupid to think this!"

Stupid people do stupid things. I heard someone say they drive to the local (to me) shops because the Milk is cheaper - did I mention it's a 45 minute drive from their place?!

Their defence was, "That's not the only stuff we get". What *I* don't get, is how they justify in their heads their time, fuel and maintenance costs to save mere bucks.

A close shave: How to destroy your hard drives without burning down the data centre

John Tserkezis

I seem to recall a device, about the size of a washing machine, that was purpose built for the job. It punched a specially designed drill bit into the drive, which not only drilled through the platters, the vibrations left ripples in the platters. It even had a conveyor belt for more than one drive.

However, it would fail the 60 second requirement, I think the order lead time on the device was a bit longer than that.

Boffins have made optical transistors that can reach 4 TERAHERTZ

John Tserkezis

"Boffins have made optical transistors that can reach 4 TERAHERTZ"

And my mother would still claim she can do maths in her head faster.

She is so anti-tech, she has a cell phone, but never takes it anywhere. In fact, every month or so when she forgets to recharge it, she gets me to turn it on again. So it can sit on the dresser for another month not being used. I'm looking forward to brain implants, maybe we can port Crysis to run on her without overclocking.

Sigh.

Safe as houses: CCTV for the masses

John Tserkezis

Re: "the use of rules which allow you to specify the action"

"A rule that releases the hungry lions. Yes, that would work."

Don't laugh, in some countries they do exactly that. Training cats has it's own issues, however, one big cat can replace several dogs, so for heavier-duty guard duties, they do well.

Feeding them can be a bit costly, they do go through a LOT of meat...

John Tserkezis

" Your NAS system is fine until someone walks off with the NAS or burns the house down."

But both those options are much less unlikely than compared to someone pilfering your video (and other data) from the comfort of their own chair across the other side of the world courtesy of the interwebs.

It's incredibly easy to bump someone off online, and here's how to do it – infosec bod

John Tserkezis

On the up side...

...it explains why everyone ignores me. I was dead all along and never realised it.

Who did that by the way?

John Tserkezis

Re: Clarifications requested

"Please tell me this is a joke. Why shouldn't someone with a degree in, say, biochemistry be considered capable of handling a body?"

Easy: Only those with arts degrees are qualfied to ask "Would you like fries with that".

Another death in Apple's 'Mordor' – its Foxconn Chinese assembly plant

John Tserkezis

"employees aren't statistics"

Don't know about that, I've worked for some places where we were just stats.

Want to download free AV software? Don't have a Muslim name

John Tserkezis

We are Sophos, we are a security company, just trust us.

Just give us your date of birth, and ID number, and your passport number, and your drivers licence number, and while you're at it, your bank details would be nice too.

Don't worry, this is not a scam, we are Sophos, just trust us, we know what we're doing.

Windows 10 is FORCING ITSELF onto domain happy Windows 7 PCs

John Tserkezis

Re: That won't guarantee anything. @Hellcat

"The way this is unfolding I wonder how many small and not so small shops will begin to ask serious questions about how much they really need microsoft."

Unfortunately, the smaller the shop, the less likely they're going to be aware of *nix options, irregardless if it works out for the better.

It's happened, folks: An actual exhibition about cats and the internet

John Tserkezis

I for one welcome our feline overlords. Australian television has well and truly become entirely saturated with fucking cooking shows, and one network has replaced their competing cooking show (because it couldn't compete), with a cat program showcasing cat videos from youtube. True story.

Which is just as well, because if I hear one more retarded cooking contestant whine their overcooked meat sampling is "devastating" I'm going to puke.

Oracle waves fist, claims even new Android devices infringe its Java copyrights

John Tserkezis

"How much does a current Android device depend on this alledged Java code?"

It doesn't matter. It's all about how much cash Oracle can wrangle out of it.

Researchers look sideways to crack SIM card AES-128 encryption

John Tserkezis

"Given the speed and ease of the crack, the intelligence services will be very interested in his technique"

What are they going to do? Steal money from our accounts? Isn't it enough they're taxpayer funded...

AIDS? Ebola? Nah – ELECTRO SMOG is our 'biggest problem', says Noel Edmonds

John Tserkezis

Doesn't have all the dots on his dice.

Besides, he should have come to me for a tinfoil hat. I have a bit of spare al-foil that would have cost him nothing. But you know how it goes, an idiot and his money are soon parted....

Yep, lots more where they came from.

It's enough to get your back up: Eight dual-bay SOHO NAS boxes

John Tserkezis

Re: Updates

"Given me confidence enough that if I bought a NAS for home use, I'd look at Synology"

I'm currently looking at something to replace my 8-bay Synology NAS. Their updates have caused connection dropouts, and I'm not the one that's hurt the most. Reading the forums, some have had their boxes entirely borked.

As things stand, it's not workable at all. Not happy Jan.

Remote Queensland fibre hookup hopes dashed, for now

John Tserkezis

I live in suburban Sydney, surrounded by areas that claim to be "NBN ready, or Real Soon Now", but with OUR promises (and the many ammendments) what we're going to get instead is what we already have RIGHT NOW (fibre to the "node" which is just our local phone exchange, "soon" to become our local NBN exchange), just structured differently to suit the NBN bullshit.

NBN my arse. This is what happens when you let your government run the show.

Don't want Windows 10 FILTH on the company network? Step this way

John Tserkezis

Re: Silly admins. Power users don't bother joining domains

"Obviously never worked at a major UK government department - we detect and kill machines such as yours then revoke your security clearance..."

The UK government cares about security? Really? Are you sure?

James Woods demands $10m from Twitter troll for 'coke addict' claim

John Tserkezis

"You do realize that something called libel still exists, even in the days of the internet, and it's illegal, right? Whether this will constitute that is up to the courts."

You do realise that if you don't have an entire team of lawyers working for you, it won't mean crap.

Ask all those who have been bullied to death (literally, via suicide, ironcially on Twitter too), does libel exist?

Bull fucking shit.

Windows 10: Buy cheap, buy twice, right? Buy FREE ... buy FOREVER

John Tserkezis

Bloat? What bloat?

"Don’t blame Microsoft: WordPerfect and its ilk committed slow-motion suicide. Essentially, they turned themselves into bloatware and died as a natural consequence of morbid obesity."

Because Microsoft have NEVER EVER been accused of bloat. EVER.

Yeah right.

MORE Windows 10 bugs! Too many Start menu apps BREAK it

John Tserkezis

Re: I have 600

"What kind of idiot coded a 512 limit, and coded an ugly fail when the limit is exceeded?"

Bill Gates? He's been known for sprouting ideas like that before, maybe he has more of an influence than we thought?

Debian Project holds Sparc port's hand, switches off life support

John Tserkezis

This article prompted me to remember that mum threw out my last remaining Sun Microsystems mug during a cleanup many years ago.

I just wanted to say I'm still pissed about it.

That is all.

Hacked US Census Bureau staff to take anti-phishing classes

John Tserkezis

training and support portal? REALLY!?

That's what they're doing to "stop" phishing attacks?

Said it before, and I'll say it again: Good Luck With That.

Australia to tax ALL international online purchases

John Tserkezis

"Anyway what legal grounds does the Australian government have for forcing foreign companies to collect tax on it's behalf?"

It doesn't, it won't, and they can't. There are existing systems in place of tax collections as they arrive from outside Australia. But as you said, after a phone call, and manual handling, good luck on making any money anymore.

The fault lies entirely on Harvey-Fucking-Abnormals who have been screaming for years that they're losing business through tax-free online options, and who also claim every local business who isn't part of the Harvey-Fucking-Abnormal chain is also a grey importer who are also undercutting them.

Boo fucking hoo, cry me a river.

Sydney adopts 'world's first' e-ink parking signs

John Tserkezis

Re: Fantastic!

"So you'll need to know the APN and authentication credentials."

Security? By what is effectively just another government department? Yeah sure.

HP slaps dress code on R&D geeks: Bin that T-shirt, put on this tie

John Tserkezis

"When I see a coder wearing shirt and tie, all I think is that he's another modestly skilled type who couldn't cut it in the arena with the talented coders."

I can do one better. I worked at a place were one of our techos was pretty decent. He was promoted to <some position or other?>, and ended up in a suit and tie. From then, he forgot everything he learned and actively went backwards as far as his learning and knowledge goes.

I firmly believe that a tie cuts off oxygen to the brain, turning you into a moron. Noone has been able to convince me otherwise.

Google dumps ISP email support. Virgin Media takes ball, stomps home

John Tserkezis

Re: who cares

"I maintain my own domain name, so my email address never changes. But I don't want to set up mail servers to do the infrastructure piece, so I've got to "buy" that service from somebody. Might as well be my ISP in my monthly subscription."

My domain handler offers email as a paid option, so I don't have to use my primary ISP email at all.

Unfortunately, part of the setup requires another email address as a point of contact (not the one you just created). That might sound acceptable, especially if your domain needs to contact you when your email option has fallen over, however, this requires you to either choose an ISP who offers email, or, create your own account via a third party - which is just stupid, because you just did that.

Ashley Madison hack: Site for people who can't be trusted can't be trusted

John Tserkezis

Re: >The leaked data could become fodder for extortion or blackmail,

"I could _not_ however be blackmailed - what would they threaten me with?"

You don't get how the internet works, do you?

Password manager Mitro will shutter itself on 31 August

John Tserkezis

THIS is why I can still use TrueCrypt - because it ISN'T tied to some cloud.

Our only option would have been (shudder) bitlocker...