* Posts by John Tserkezis

2242 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Jun 2007

Home Office planning to brick version 1 ID cards in 2012?

John Tserkezis
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Added functionality

"the more popular the Home Office makes ID cards"

Popular? Who's kidding who? The only way they're going to make them popular is to get Apple to do their marketing for them. I mean, they're good at taking a fairly ordinary product and dressing it up to the point that the users get rabid about them.

That should work for the ID card shouldn't it?

Y2.01K hits Garmin satnav

John Tserkezis

Updates are a good thing.

"Not only do you have to own a computer, but Garmin expect you to be running a supported OS and browser"

Agreed, but to be fair, the fact you DO get some update is worthy of a smiley stamp. Some vendors only care you've bought it, after that, who cares? They certainly don't.

It's official: Adobe Reader is world's most-exploited app

John Tserkezis

That's why.

"I honestly can't see why anybody would touch computer software with a barge pole, if they were not allowed to inspect the Source Code"

If you work within an industry that is so limited in scope you can afford to choose from the pool of free or open source code resources, then good for you. And have you considered wandering past your own cubical at any time?

I'm in a environment where we have no choice other than rather expensive software to assist us with our job. The bottom line is, we *could* go back to the old days, do things by hand, and do away with computers altogether. Perhaps keeping the pocket calculators...

However, this industry is highly competitive, one job numbers in the hundreds of millions of dollars, and when your client says they can get the same next door, with many more features, a fraction of the price and in the fraction of the time...

Fraud-prevention service ponies up $12m for 'false' ads

John Tserkezis

If it looks like a duck...

One clear sign of a fraudster, is they say they'll protect you against fraudsters.

For a "small" fee of course.

Microsoft sends flowers to IE6 funeral

John Tserkezis
Grenade

It's not dead yet.

Not when fucktard lazy stupid developers tie their applications to IE6 it's not.

We will continue to run XP (because it comes with IE6) because we have a number of proprietary softwares that NEED IE6. There are no options without major infrastructure changes, to use anything else. Don't blame me (or should I say, the current crop of "us") it was our predicessors who were equally brain-dead who made the decisions to lock us in like that.

Several years later, we don't have the budget nor the upper management justification to replace something put into place just before that.

We *are* slowly migrating data from these apps to newer apps, but this takes time and money. It will be some time before we see IE6 out.

But when that time comes, we'll be having a party.

Partly to make sure the door hits IE6's arse on its way out, and more to goodbye the applications that "need" IE6, which are also examples of schlock programming. (does it show?).

Mystic Met Office abandons long range forecasts

John Tserkezis

Sigh, let's face it.

Anything more than three days' forecast is a guess.

I've heard of a much more reliable "stick and string" method. (forgiveness if you've heard it before).

Jam a stick in the ground, tie a string at the top.

If the stick and string is wet, it's raining.

If the string is flapping, there's wind.

If the string is stuck out horizontal, it's a strong wind.

If the stick and string is missing, it's a hurricane.

Google says desktop PC is three years from 'irrelevance'

John Tserkezis

Gee, that's a surprise.

And purely by coincedence, it directly benfits Google's "cloud".

Wow, who would have thought?

Apple yanks Wi-Fi detectors from iTunes

John Tserkezis

Muh

I didn't even wait for my 160G iPod classic to fail before switching over to my properly obsolete Palm Treo. And I'm happy with it. Does that tell you how crappy Apple is?

I'm giving away the classic, and good luck to the new sucker who wants it. Not my problem anymore.

Mad Aus gov accuses Sydney hacks of hacking

John Tserkezis
FAIL

Sorry, it's worse than that, it's just plain incompetence

Worth googling on this matter.

-A company called Bang The Table was commissioned to build a super-secret transport website.

Or at least, it was supposed to be obscured till it's release later on.

-On a tipoff, a reporter casually peruses the website, and prints off pages.

-Long story short, transport minister David Campbell screwed up royally, accused the reporter of hacking the site, and claimed it was in fact a sustained two-day firewall attack on the server, and also claims he was told by BTT that "at no time was the website available to casual viewers".

-Turns out NSW Transport minister David Campbell was just littel bit wrong, and then made to eat his words:

<http://www.smh.com.au/national/im-sorry-ministers-mea-culpa-20100224-p3ls.html>

-Turns out BTT screwed up, and did _exactly_ what their website claims to do:

<http://corporate.bangthetable.com/>

Part of their business statement is: "Bang the table was established because no matter how well designed, current consultation processes inevitably only reach part of a community or stakeholder group. The internet provides an opportunity to give vastly more people access to information and to have their say"

Indeed. They *did* let vastly more people access to that information...

Here we have Bang The Table who can't build websites, and a Transport minister who either lied or believed BTT, instead blaming a reporter for "hacking" a website that was going to be released soon anyway.

Google buys app, removes from app store

John Tserkezis

This smells of Microsoft

You know, there is tech out there that competes with what we do, can't have that, so buy them out saying we want to incorporate the technology into our own.

Then can the idea.

Katching, said idea no longer a threat to our bottom line.

We really need a katching button.

Firefox update takes down three critical flaws

John Tserkezis
Paris Hilton

It gets better.

From the Firefox 3.5 release notes link on this report, you see:

"Get Firefox 3.6, English"

Nope, she doesn't get it either.

Windows Phone 7 will not translate to Win Mobile after all

John Tserkezis
Stop

Not so nice?

"Now they ditch legacy and start from scratch and its oh noes my old apps wont work, this sucks!! Make up your minds folks"

To use .NET and Silverlight?

More bloatware and re-invented wheels "because we're not making anough money out of the old wheel".

Apple opens the iPhone to lotteries

John Tserkezis

It does work.

"Not sure how this company is going to make money, unless it's a scam. Either they need to ensure that 1000/x people buy the application every day of they need to expire the application and force people to rebuy it often enough that sales each day are above 1000/x"

Believe it. Nothing sells better than advertising you're giving way free money. The fact you have to pay a mere $1 for the chance to enter into this wonderful game is immaterial to the end users who have become so gamble crazy they just don't care anymore.

Where's the dollar sign and Katching! noise?

Intel joins troll-blocking club

John Tserkezis
Unhappy

Great..

So either get screwed by a Troll, or get screwed by a different Troll.

(Shrug) At least we have a choice now.

Ex-Army man cracks popular security chip

John Tserkezis

It's all about the bottom line.

They're protecting their bottom line. They have the right to do that.

If you're fed up with high prices on a monopolised ink market, change. You have the right to do that.

Opera beta bear hugs plug-in-free video

John Tserkezis
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I make it easy for others.

If your site is tied to IE and only IE. I won't ever see it.

If your site is laced with lots of flash content. I won't ever see it.

If your site requires me to divulge personal information to get something "free". I won't ever see it.

If your site requires me to pay royalties to view your "special" content. I won't ever see it.

If your site requires my browser maker to pay royalties (resulting in more ads). I won't ever see it.

This is The Internet we're talking about. There are many ways to get content. And the "only" way, is not YOUR way, Google and Apple.

Chilean mint misspells Chile

John Tserkezis

Not surprised.

"Jimi Hendrix spelt child wrong on the song Voodoo Chile and nobody seemed to notice"

You neglect to say that Jimi Hendrix's fans were probably whacked out on mind-altering subsance(s) at the time. And when they finally sobered up years later, they probably didn't care anymore anyway.

Frosty fanbois navigate iPhone with sausage

John Tserkezis

But..

How do you do that two fingered iPhone salute? Two sausages?

Would you be arrested for performing indecent acts on your iPhone in a public place?

World of Google zombies mistake news story for Facebook

John Tserkezis
Unhappy

Hmm

Oh goodie. Google discovered a new "lowest common denominator" when it comes to net users.

And soon it'll start tayloring news stories to cater for this new class of moron.

Google coughs to PR gaffe with privacy-lite Buzz

John Tserkezis

It was just an oversight, really.

“We heard from people that the checkbox for choosing not to display this information was too hard to find..."

Aussie anti-censor attacks strafe gov websites

John Tserkezis
Big Brother

Conroy is convincing no-one.

See <http://hungrybeast.abc.net.au/stories/stephen-conroy-extended-interview> for an ABC interview with Stephen Conroy about this matter. His primary interest is to remove all "Refused Classification (RC)" material from the web. His stance being that since you can't actually buy it legally in Australia, neither should you able to download it from the 'net. Even if you are legally allowed to watch it in the privacy of your own home.

He goes to great pains to explain that the RC rating is NOT applied by the government, but an entirely separate entity (in other words - don't blame us).

This is the same entity that refused a (C) Children's classification for two episodes of "Skippy the bush kangaroo", and while in discussion of "Fat Cat and Friends" over their continued (C) classification, the producers decided to can the show rather than deal with these idiots.

On the matter of "The Blacklist", he casually states it has been around for nine years, so it's no secret (yet they forgot to actually tell anyone about it), and the leaked blacklist that contained innocent entries such as the dentist in Queensland was similar to, but not the same as the offically used blacklist. In other words, it's the fault of those who leaked it, not us.

He (or his cronies) were in talks with google to block RC content from YouTube, (which Google refused to do), and attempts to justify it, stating that it's already done with China and Thailand, so why can't it be done with Australia?

So there you have it. "Australia" is now pronounced "China" and Tianamen Square is a lovely tourist destination, containing a plaque saying "Nothing happened here in 1989".

Google's Android code deleted from Linux kernel

John Tserkezis

Open source?

If google were any more open source, they'd be microsoft.

UK government rebuffs cries for free postcode database

John Tserkezis

Say what?

I don't quite get it.

If you want to post a letter, and for the purposes of postal efficiency, you also should supply a postcode that is tied to the suburb in question, you need to pay, because now you're using Royal Mail intellectual property to look up a database of suburbs and post codes..

However, it would be still legal sendable mail, (and cheaper for the poster), and since you don't *NEED* to supply a post code anyway (because Royal Mail can work it out themselves) - then just don't.

I imagine a month, or even a week of mail with no postcodes would render the Royal Mail so far backed up, they would surely reconsider their new money-making scheme...

Windows plagued by 17-year-old privilege escalation bug

John Tserkezis

@Ignorance is bliss

Bugs and vulns are fixed on a priority basis. Once they get down to 30K bugs or so, it's done.

Highly publicised vulns (even if they're relativley minor) are fixed earlier, because public perception is more important to the bottom dollar, than actual security.

China may reverse citizen ban on domain registration

John Tserkezis

Same here in Australia.

All jokes about the Great Australian Firewall aside, domain registration is the same here.

Effectively, if you don't register the name as a business, it ain't gonna happen.

What's worse, you need to submit three names, of which *they* pick the "best".

Worse still, this entire process takes some time. Forget about getting it right now.

Or, you can submit a US entry, if it isn't already taken, you pay for it via Credit Card, and it's valid within 24 hours. Wham bam thank you ma'am, that's how it's done.

Say what you want about the yanks, they know how to run a business.

Fem-rage shocker: Woman zaps ex-boyf with pink taser

John Tserkezis

Where have I heard this before?

"There's an owner background and identity check before the weapon can be activated"

Facebook snuggles with McAfee in security spree

John Tserkezis

Oh goodie.

As useless as Symantec is, (just come out the arse end of trying to tell them about a new one I had found) they make it as difficult as possible to let them know new threats of which they don't already detect (that is, most of them).

Now, with their freebies, you really DO get what you pay for...

Motorola's latest Android 'andset demo'd

John Tserkezis
Thumb Down

I don't get it.

If it's sitting on the table, the keyboard would be face down.

And the track pad is on the rear of the screen.

How do you browse the web like this?

I care not for how HE thinks it's great (he's biased anyway), but since you can't actully DO anything, what's the point?

That only leaves it with the screen in landscape position, the keyboard just underneath it.

Purely co-incedently, exactly like many, many other smart phones out there.

So what does it bring to the table? In a different postion, the keyboard can be made inaccesable, and the trackpad even more of nusance to use than it is on bloody notebooks.

France floats Google music-and-movie tax

John Tserkezis

Ahh,

Oh, I get it now, THIS is why people make fun of the French...

US music royalties' collector sues T-Mobile over ringback tones

John Tserkezis

I love the ringtone market.

They charge a bomb for several seconds worth of relatively low quality audio from a several minutes worth of high quality music track, where the entire track can be had at about 20% of the cost.

Now they're taking offence at a company that's onselling these for nothing.

Sounds fair. They've realised that users don't want to pay for high-quality full tracks, yet are happy (or stupid enough) to open their wallets for something they could have done themselves with little effort, for a tiny fraction of the cost.

Google open-source boss comes clean on Android

John Tserkezis

I don't think they can pull it off.

Fashion labels don't sell clothes or handbags or whatnot. They sell *ideals*, they sell *culture*.

At the end of the day, they protect that, because their marketing teams spent a lot of time and money cultivating it. They care only for their bottom line. Little to do with cheap cloned knock-offs sold dirt cheap, aside from the quality differences, their products are not THAT much better than the cheap knockoffs going on price alone.

What's the difference with tech? Little in this context. Apple has been doing for a while. Their users want whatever Apple gives them. I think the iPhone speaks for itself when compared with other phones on the market. (just in case you're slow, or a Apple lover, no, that's not a compliment).

But Apple can get away with it. They've been cultivating their market for some time.

Can Google compete without a background in screwing their users? Or should I say, screwing their users overtly, as opposed to covertly as they have been?

How are they going to create and cultivate a market that doesn't know about, or better still, care of the pitfalls of the "cloud"?

Or better still, when everyone WILL eventually know, cultivate a market that *likes* advertising? And you'd better start liking it, because you're going to get it whether you like it or not.

Taoist truck driver guilty of unlawful sex

John Tserkezis

Why no fine for her?

I'm sure there could be some type of fine for those who are a little bit challenged in the area of grey matter.

And most certainly some kind of fine for someone of her calibre of stupid.

And let the guy off. I mean, he was just trying to get his end in. Nothing wrong with that per se.

Secret code protecting cellphone calls set loose

John Tserkezis

It's all about making money. And if you can't, cheat.

"All your calls are made with 2G and not 3G. Try to turn off 3G on your handset und you will still be able to make calls"

Not sure how things work in your side of the lake, but here in Australia, some carriers (not mentioning any names) lock GSM/3G capable hardware, to 3G ONLY. So, if you're in a GSM-only covered area, you're screwed. Let's lock in our users to ourselves only shall we. That way we don't have to sub-let carrier time from someone else...

Telstra, because they have more money to throw around, have gone further by knobbling the world-wide standard issue 3G, into something they call NextG. So if you have a GSM, GPRS or 3G phone, and you're in an area that's only covered by Telstra, you can be SURE it's kobbled to accept phones that they've knobbled with their NextG badge and firmware first.

If you can't (or don't want to) compete on a world-wide standard issue network, make your own!

Tobacco biofuel to solve energy/ environment crisis?

John Tserkezis
Thumb Up

Am I the only one seeing this?

Oil companies are bastards, even to their own employees. They'll use additives to kill their users and envronment (albeit slowly) and once oil runs out, they'll have nothing left but to shift their line of work to something slightly less bastardy, like real estate, or used car sales. Or religion.

Instead, we'll hand over the reigns to the tobacco companies, who like the oil mongers, have a primary self-interest in money, but are more than happy to kill their users quickly instead of slowly, and spend a substancial amount of their profits on PR work to make their cancer-riddled users feel good instead. On the upside, they kill the environment marginally more slowly than oil.

So that makes it all right.

So, in that case, I welcome our new tabaccy overlords to the top of the energy foodchain.

Now, excuse me while I cough a lung out or something...

Lithuania hits off switch on nuclear plant

John Tserkezis

Money money money...

What? You have your own power station? Can't have that now can we?

If you want to be part of the Union, WE will supply power. We have lots of watts left spare that we're quite happy to let you use for a fee.

Apple ejects Dalai Lama from Chinese iTunes

John Tserkezis
Thumb Down

Are you serious?

"This is not kowtowing to pressure, but simply following the law. Hardly news at all, really."

So you can't just go in there and mention that Tiananmen Square in 1989 was something OTHER than just another tourist destination?

So your defence is "it's not my fault, I was just following orders".

Bite me.

California cops don defensive headcams

John Tserkezis

Too bad coppers don't want cameras.

Funny. There seems to be a bit of an issue with the camera-equipped tasers here in Australia. While the Taser part appears to work every time (even after the first, then second, then third... enough to get the perp into hospital then die of heart failure...), the camera on the other hand appears to almost invariably be either faulty, or not activated for whatever reason by the time the incident gets to the media.

It's ok for the plods to *want* the camera, but they have to actually *use* it too. Even during the bits they might not want it work. Not that there's anything wrong with the Taser camera equipment, no-one will ever admit it's "user error" though....

Top Gear tops iPlayer hit list

John Tserkezis
Thumb Down

@Much better than it was

> Why would anyone with a bit of know-how waste their time with bittorrent?

Because I live in Australia, where we get things sometimes up to a decade after release in its native country - or -

To appease the masses, we used to get "Direct streamed" selected episodes a week and a half after release in its native country (though still better than the typical two years), and then not see following episodes for the next six months (or sometimes ever again) because OUR seasons don't line up with THEIR seasons, or the local marketing people don't think that it'll "sell" here.

Many get fed up, give up, and their ONLY option is to get it via bittorent or such.

Or, if you want to toss that in for real Australian local content, then you have the choice between drama, drama, drama, and just in case we were not already spoiled for choice, more F%$#ing drama. The only alternatives are localised versions of games shows.

Still wondering why many bother with bittorrent? That's why. So there.

Publisher asks Google, AT&T to unmask network intruder

John Tserkezis

Find the perps and deal with them swiftly and harshly.

Yep, highly lucrative thing that fashion industry is.

Highly sought-after material critcal to national security.

The perps should be found and dealt with by every measure the law has available to it.

Can't have those loose cannons sending out pictures a month early now can we?

Oz anti-censorship site is censored

John Tserkezis

Ahh, the Streisand Effect.

Had they taken normal channels, who knows if a mere parody site would have bothered to survive?

Now that they're selling t-shirts and mugs, there's no stopping it. :-)

US politico calls for cancer warning on cell phones

John Tserkezis

Warning: Life may cause brain cancer.

It is statisically provable that a portion of those who choose to partake in the game of life will contract brain cancer.

There is no cure.

There are however preventative measures that can be taken. Limit your use of life as soon as possible.

Those who are invovled in politics need not take any preventative measures, as they clearly are already dead. And if they're not, best to top them off first, just in case.

Design firm sues Microsoft over Bing trademark

John Tserkezis

You snooze, you lose.

If you don't want to have to change your company name after nearly a decade of use, next time, you'll actually register it, rather than just plain sit on it.

Probably cheaper to register a name right at the start, than hire lawyers to get your old name back too.

Fujitsu workers picket London HQ

John Tserkezis

(Hand on forehead slap) When will people learn?

If you want a pay rise, change jobs. I learned this from my first job, and it's held since.

Instead, you piss off your current employer by NOT working, and actively berating them at their doorstep.

And you think this will somehow get you and your mates more money.

Your (former) employer will eventually get the message when they find the only employees left are chimps that wear cloths and smoke cigars. One of two things happen, they either eventually go under, or, they actually fork out some more money.

Either way, you shouldn't care because you've moved on anyway.

It's really not worth the stress otherwise.

EDS mainframe goes titsup, crashes RBS cheque system

John Tserkezis

Pay peanuts, get monkeys.

This is what happens when you're too tight to even pay for monkeys...

Ladies put off tech careers by sci-fi posters, Coke cans

John Tserkezis
Thumb Down

Bollocks.

People not trained or interested in computing nor psychology, are surveying other people who are also not in, nor interested in computing, whether or not they might be interested in computing based on environmental changes, even though they clearly showed they weren't interested in the first place.

These trick-cyclist clowns aren't even qualified to ask "Would you like fries with that?"

Mozilla lights fire under Thunderbird

John Tserkezis

Stagnant? That's one way to call it.

Another is dead in the water and going nowhere fast.

In all honesty, talk is cheap, and this thing has been going nowhere for a LONG, LONG time.

There are fixes and features to bring it up to a vaugly competitive point that have been outright ignored by developers for many years.

Now, out of the blue they expect us to believe they want to throw money at it to actually improve it?

Where they not at one stage considering tossing Thunderbird to someone else so they can concentrate on Firefox alone?

But now they're keeping it and claiming they're going actally *improve* it?

I don't know if there's going to be any breath-holding over this, but it's not going to be me.

Channel 4 raises Bing word-extinction alarm

John Tserkezis

Let's face it.

It's just another search engine, where the vendor wants YOU to see THEIR ads instead of their competitors.

Google adds automatic captions to YouTube

John Tserkezis
Thumb Down

Oh wonderful.

Now they can automate ad generation instead of manually entering everything in.

How convenient.

California votes in HD TV power pruning law

John Tserkezis

Er,

I work for a company that makes power stations.

I can't with any good conscience encourage this newfangled trend of using less power.

Next thing you know, they'll be telling us we can't leave our lights on overnight.

Shocking I tell you, shocking...

Baying mob turns on miniskirted Brazilian uni student

John Tserkezis
Happy

Well, if *they* don't want her..

Plenty of space round this side of the pond... She's welcome here...