Posts by Dazed and Confused

Re: Too right too!

> ... try running a fruity batphone after 4 years (if the battery powers it up) and see how well it compares...

And the Champagne will just get better with age, developing a delightful character. Would boys of Cupertino argue that a 25year old Mac was better than a brand new one?

Re: Fascinating case, more on popehat

Hard to believe pornographers would be so sleazy.

I didn't think it was the pornographers being sleazy here, I thought it was the lawyers. And lets face it, no one is surprised when it turns out that some lawyers are more sleazy than most pornographers.

Re: Too late...

Apple's probably ordering gigatons of them to include in their products. Remember when you're not suing Samsung, shop with them.

Re: Holy undergarments

On the YouTube front, its a wonder that the total internet was only hit for 40%.

Taking my kids off YouTube cuts total domestic Internet consumption by over 90%.

Re: If you have both the unencrypted and the encrypted version of the file...

Garbo, With one of the Nazi encrypted networks they used to plant in information via a double agent. Then wait for the report to turn up in the traffic and they'd have the plain text and the ciphertext and that would give them the keys. Bingo. now you can read the rest of the traffic you didn't know already.

Re: "Punitive"

Why would the lawyers want to back down now, they're watching the meter going around so fast the whole edifice is in danger of taking off. The only reason to slow down would be it they thought it would keep the gravy train on its wheels better.

Re: Linux has bigger things to worry about

The HP drivers divide into different categories. There are the drivers for the HW based SmartArrays these are included in the main kernel tree, but the SPP includes newer versions than RH ship in 6.X.

Then there's the network drivers they ship in the SPP, these aren't from HP, they're from the chipset vendors and are newer than the ones RH ship in RHEL, they're shipped as source to avoid version issue.

Then there are the non open source drivers for the SW SmartArrays. These aren't included coz they're not GPL or even open. But then I just run md which does what I want on the baby boxes.

Re: Point missed?

> I doubt if "dumping" was illegal.

Many, if not most, major retailers sell things at a lost. Lots of the supermarket prices you see in the ads will be loss leaders, to get you through the door. No ones ever stopped people doing this.

I remember years ago doing some work with a holiday travel company and they explained that everything they sold they sold at a loss, but their customers had to pay them in advance and they paid their suppliers in arrears and so their business worked on profiting from the cash in the middle, I understood this was a common business model in lots of areas.

I guess the law only gets interested when a company sells things at a loss to put its competitors out of business and then when it feels sufficiently confident that it owns the market it hikes its price. I certainly hope this sort of behaviour get monitored.

Re: may I be so bold

Even when I had "perfectly good eye sight" I still really struggled with these damn CAPTCHA things. Since hitting the age where reading glasses are necessary I find them even worse.

I realise that something is needed to stop the SPAMmers but this isn't it.

I'm sure I remember a story here on El'Reg a while back about SPAMmers getting around CAPTCHA by using porn bate, getting left handed typists to solve the CAPTCHAs for them.

offer says it expires on August 29th

After which is will be $200 off in September

$300 off is October

Like the RT, this is the start of a fire sale.

Doesn't Apple sell more

of the legacy products than the new ones?

Re: How to survive in the countryside

> "It's the sudden deceleration..."

I'd like to know how a pedestrian walking at 3mph can die from suddenly decelerating.

Deceleration is just acceleration in the opposite direction and so the effect is the same, the problem the pedestrian dies from is parts of their anatomy suffering extreme acceleration.

Re: Blimey

> Indefinite security needs much longer keys.

Personally I think it is a mistake to ever think in terms of indefinite security. Who knows what tomorrow brings?

But at the least any encryption system should be viewed in light of Moore's law. Next years computer will be twice as fast and half the cost and the decrypt function should be assumed to get twice as good. This gives you a starting point for planned obsolescence.

The problem with increasing the key length is that it takes longer to process and probably more expensive.

If you're planning something like an automated ticket system, you need to take this into account. You need to plan to use more powerful cards as they become available, you need to upgrade the ticket machines regularly. You need to make sure that the tickets do expire and can be replaced by newer ones capable of using longer keys. In short you need to plan for the future.

You can't just view it as an install once, problem solved issue.

Re: Hang on...

The judgment recognises the parasitic nature of ...

businesses being allowed to drive a coach and horse through the whole concept of the freedom of movement of goods and services throughout the EU. This judgement says that people with the sort of money the Prem has can ignore the laws or payoff people to have them rewritten in their favour, even when doing so goes against the whole idea of the "Common Market".

When VW/Audi were found to be making it difficult for their German customers to buys their cars in Italy the EU slapped them with a bloody great fine. Yet it seems the Prem can charge different rates in different territories with impunity. Get real judge. Sure people should be able to do this for free but megadosh businesses should equally be made subject to the law which the rest of us have to live by.

Re: No sex please, we're British.

blocking lega> sites that contain porn, violence and other material that parents might deem to be inappropriate for their kids.

Err no, not actually, they have no interest in filtering out what "Parents feel is inappropriate for their kids"

What they are only interested in is censoring what they feel is appropriate for my kids.

Their views and mine are frequently not the same.

Re: And that is why closed-source is a bad idea

> One does not simply recompile an application to a new target platform.

Oh its worse than that. Without Linus Torvalds throwing non PC rants at developers you find people writing code that isn't portable. WindowsRT won't just be a case of taking the source and recompiling it. The developers will need to rewrite the stuff. Back when MS convinced the world that NT was going to be more than just an x86 thing, manufactures went off and redesigned their processors to make the NT port easier rather than just being able to easily recompile stuff.

Re: Epiphany

> In fact there was a girl on the tube this morning who was looking pretty hot and wearing quite a short skirt. She was probably hotter than my wife if I'm honest.

> Think I'll sue her as well.

I think the legal cost would outweigh your dry cleaning bill.

Re: Pseudo Holographic TV - No glasses needed

> How would that system cope with multipe viewers?

It isn't a problem, typically the sort of person who wants that sort of TV doesn't know anyone real.

Re: Why it couldn't be named IainMbanks

Thanks for the explanation and thanks for the deed too.

Seems a nice way to remember such a great author.