Posts by Ru

"I always get into a huff when SQL is brought up"

Sounds like someone can't cope with declarative programming. Or maybe you just don't like standards. I assume you do all the hard work of query processing in your application logic, yeah?

Embrace, extend, etc

This particular delightful habit wasn't ever limited to Microsoft or Cisco. Here comes the new oppressive monopolist, same as the old oppressive monopolist...

Re: Nothing new here move along

Though I can't speak for Solaris or BSD, seems like most current and past linux filesystems can indeed become fragmented. There was a defrag tool written for ext2, though such a thing doesn't exist for ext3 but ext4 is intended to include one.

The ext* filesystems and NTFS are significantly more fragmentation resistant than, say, FAT, but hardly immune.

"And now thanks to Facebook"

Uh, what? Do you really, genuinely believe that the internet was all serious business before the current batch of social networks popped up? Like the iPhone did with smartphones, all they did was make it popular amongst non-techies. For reams of endless inane drivel, take a look at Livejournal. Even that is a relatively recent phenomenon, and it predates FB by years.

Re: You're joking, right?

The beeb don't generally interrupt a programme repeatedly in order to sell you stuff. How many ad breaks does the average US channel manage to squeeze into a nominally 30 minute programme?

Re: Why can't you upgrade yourself?

Various reasons. Important ones include device-specific drivers which may not be publically available, and locked bootloaders that prevent running OS images that have not been signed and released by Motorola themselves.

There's also the fact that google is only releasing portions of the Honeycomb source tree, unlike previous versions of the OS which were freely available in their entirety.

Honeycomb devices aren't much less of a 'closed garden' than iOS devices, at least for now. If you want open, you'll pretty much have to look at devices supported by Cyanogen. They're a small subset of the whole Android device family.

Shenanigans

I wish to learn more about your malted cats.

"Everything remotely technical is getting shipped offshore"

Wrong.

Plenty of people I talk to mention the difficulties of filling the vacancies they have for highly skilled coders, project managers and sysadmins; apparently you're doing a poor job of hunting for better employment. Or you have lousy social skills. Or you overvalue your technical abilities. In the latter case, I've no sympathy with you at all, and trivial labour is always going to get sent out to someone cheaper.

No.

Cos its solar powered, isn't it. Possibly the least effective way to extract energy from a bajillion tonne fusion reactor, but it is still powered. You muppet.

Re: How to attract attention

So, how do you tell the difference between a compressed and an encrypted datastream?

Next issue, how can you trust a snooping facility to only be used by law enforcement?

I won't bother asking about how far you might trust your government to do what's right.

If the government really wants to listen in on you, it will. This stuff like a skype backdoor is largely the state flexing its muscles to remind corporations who's in charge, or it is the echelon-style mass surveillance wet-dream back again. Neither will have an appreciable effect on anyone's safety, certainly not compared to police and intelligence agencies actually working for a living.

Congratulations

I think you win a prize for the Alarming Chemical of the Week.

RE: "Will it shatter the station and cause it to spread even more debris about?"

Centimetre sized? Not unless it was travelling at relativistic rather than orbital velocities. And even then... a station module can be envisaged as a large, expensive Whipple shield. Might end up with a hole in one side and a lot of broken equipment in the middle but nothing much else if hit by tiny bits of debris. You'd lose pressure, of course.

Not sure how big something would have to be in order to be a serious threat to the integrity of the station rather than merely an expensive hazard.

Wrong.

Downtime may still be scheduled, but now both scheduled and unscheduled downtime apply to the SLA.

Oh dear.

This is the price you have to pay to do business in the US. As pretty much everyone does business in the US, they have to abide by their awful software patent system. Furthermore, if they decided to cease trading in the US so as not to have to pay these patent royalties, they're giving up on a large and lucrative market and in dereliction of their duty to their shareholders... this is also a serious offense in numerous jurisdictions.

So, good on you for taking a stand in favour of breaking all sorts of laws in all sorts of parts of the world. I trust you will be boycotting all businesses that sell products in the US in due course, and instead deal solely with Chinese domestic manufacturers, yes?

Quite so.

and LOOK AT YOU, GIVING THEM ATTENTION!!!111

No, don't tell me. The best way to deal with this sort of hacking spree which is basically possible because atrocious security is endemic in the web world, is to just ignore them, and I'm sure they'll just stop.

In their defense,

the cut-down (and blissfully silent) lego games for the prequel trilogy films were vastly better than the films themselves.

Put it this way; they managed to make Jar-Jar likeable and he made a valuable contribution to the heroes efforts. Not something Lucas managed.

"There are no secret speed cameras"

That's what they want you to think.

Until they provide exhaustive and incontrovertible proof of the non-existence of secret speed cameras, paranoia is clearly justfied!

RAN? SAE? LTE? Easy.

Really Awful Nomenclature, Still Angers Everyone, Lacks Telecoms Education?

You should know what LTE is by now. RAN got me though; wikipedia suggests 'radio access network'. Sounds as likely as anything else.

"That's Lulzsec wiped out"

Golly gee, what with their forum and IRC dude helping the police with their enquiries, I'm sure every last member of lulzsec will be hanging up their hacking hat and never being so naughty again!

Or, y'know, they'll be back under a different name next week. All the talent is still out there. The only need they have for leadership is someone to point at a target and say 'kill'.

You

can take it that such commentary is part of the reason why the DEA was passed in the first place.

65,000,000 days in jail

I see you're a big fan of the RIAA/MPAA school of justice.

Seriously, you're wishing death on someone who might have exposed a list of email addresses and passwords? Someone who might have helped impair access to a few websites for a few hours? Get a grip.

Point: Missed!

The takehome lesson here is not 'lulzsec are a bunch of little shits'. It is that net security is so woefully inadequate and the attitude of the people responsible for your information is lax to the point of irresponsibility if not dereliction of duty.

Sure, it sucks that a bunch of juvenile delinquents stole your stuff, but, get this: how on earth did a bunch of juvenile delinquents get to steal your stuff in the first place? If they can do it, so can pretty much anyone. And indeed, there's a pretty big chance that people already have, but because they are serious criminals you won't find out about it til your credit card bill comes.

Regarding bikes? Your metaphor sucks. Its a bit like giving your bike to someone else to keep safe, only to discover they left it locked up on the street with a £5 bit of wire and a 3-digit combination lock and it vanished the moment their back was turned.

You should be grateful that the people who have exposed such incompetence are not more malicious.

Oh dear.

Alternate DNS roots have been tried before. They have no market penetration, so the names registered with them have no value.

By an interesting co-incidence, this is why non-dotcom domain names are practically valueless too; everyone will either search for the company in google, or they'll try a .com/.co.uk/whatever is your local gLTD. Anything worthwhile ever popped up at .biz? Didn't think so.

The problem with the current set of TLDs is that the namespace is massively polluted with 'what you want, when you want it' ad-pushing valueless spam sites. I bet they outnumber real domains by a few orders of magnitude. If .coms were restricted to require your local jurisdiction's equivalent of a limited business or trademark the amount of domaining is going to drop just a wee bit.

Are you trying to say

that such a combination is neither popular nor desirable?

I think 'stupid, beautiful and rich' scores the hat-trick here.

Weeeell, if one were feeling reaaaaally cynical,

one might wonder if El Reg might be speculating on bitcoins too.

Possibly, but...

writing applications which actually make use of very large distributed systems is non-trivial. Having some clue about why and when you'd ever want to use something like RabbitMQ, MongoDB, Hadoop or whatever else would be an excellent start. It is also a hurdle which I expect most developers to fall at; after all it seems that the vast majority of coders can't even cope with writing a decent multithreaded app on a single uncontended machine where locking and transaction-handling are relatively straightfoward. I don't see how they would to cope in the cloud bubble.

How is it private?

"By donating to a political party, you are basically trying to help get that party into power, and impose your own preferred policies on everyone else. How is that a private act?"

By voting for a political candidate, you are basically trying to help get that politicial into power and impose your own preferred policies on everyone else. How is that a private act?

Your lousy interpretation of the issue aside, you will probably find that donations above a certain size need to be disclosed; small donations do not. That's generally how this works.

Tsk tsk.

It'll be multitouch, apparently. That implies that either no stylus is needed at all, or it will be optional. It'll be expensive because it probably isn't intended for mass-market use. It'll be heavy because it needs to not fall to bits or leak at the slightest provocation and resilience doesn't come for free. It won't be anywhere near as heavy as the mil-spec toughbooks though, this isn't a tank.

I'm slightly disappointed it comes in at 10" though. A 7" model could fit in a jacket pocket...