Yeah, right!

<quote>The suit was settled in January, with the companies agreeing Papermaster "shall not use or disclose any IBM confidential information."</quote>

shame

fox are notoriously short sighted - just look what happened to futurama

What's new in this?

I thought as a industry we banned all unbound buffer copy (e.g. using strncpy() instead of strcpy() etc.), and the POSIX version of memcpy() has length of buffer as a third argument

http://opengroup.org/onlinepubs/007908799/xsh/memcpy.html

I guess, M$ is still behind the curve. Welcome to secure computing!

Twatter

The sooner this self obsessive pile of wank is obliterated, the better. Twatter is everything that's shit about the internet.

advantage?

Thought blades were power hungry beasts that you only installed when electricity was free and your colo charged by the U?

Oh dear God

I'm not sure I have ever seem such an embarrassingly pathetic load of illiterate drivel in my life. Did these people go to school? Were they taught even the most basic spelling or grammar? How do they get jobs when their level of literacy is somewhere below that of a brain damaged slug? Come to think of it, how do they manage to dress themselves?

Sweet suffering christ, they're thick.

ah the future

we will be back to chroots before 2010....

$1bn - seriously?

I doubt this was based on the conservative 3 x profits + 'real' assets - what is wrong with the idiots in finance these days - oh wait...

Chronology

> At the start of the twentieth century deep questions were being asked about science and the tools used to think about scientific problems. In the same way that Einstein's work had challenged orthodox views of physics, so Hilbert and others questioned mathematics.

Hilbert's list of 23 questions came in 1900, a year before Einstein's first published work.

Better than nothing?

> But sometimes a skinny bit of survey data is all you have to start with, and that data is better than no data at all

Actually, if the small sample you have misrepresents the population, it's actually WORSE than no sample at all. And of course there's no way of telling, without a bigger sample...

last mile fiber - do we need it?

24mbs on dsl (still waiting on this BT!) should be enough but really the exchanges can't cope with 100s or 1000s of customers using that level of bandwidth.

I'd rather have better capacity infrastructure within the exchange and upstream links / backbone rather than the last mile. If we really need it now fibre to cabinet level might work ok but fibre to the home can wait until we REALLY need it - allowing BT to take advantage of future advances, cost reductions etc

"GFE"- @AC

I saw Genital Frolic Experience at The Forum last april, they were playing support for Coldplay.

Well, thanks, Mark

Umbongo's nice, it works. It has knocked a few of the rougher edges off the presentation of Debian, and allowed you to sidestep some of the Debian project's spottier fanboys. The net result is that you get something approximating the best of both worlds. I have some Sun boxes, some *BSD, 'doze, Mac etc., and I have to say that the Umbongo boxes are the least hassle of all of them. Stable and usable- and free. At this point, even when someone is offering to pay for commercial OSsen, Umbongo or maybe Debian will be my first port of call for everything except odd specialist tasks like Photoshop/audio production.

It's unlikely that I'd ever need to pay for support, so I get exactly the same amount of free support I get for windows- none.. However, I wish Canonical and by extension, Mark Shuttleworth luck. I like his distro, it works. Hope he does well. Proof of the pudding's in the eating.

Paris, 'cos she doesn't give it away, give it away, give it away now.

Just BAD

So Is suing your customers also "Good Customer Service" ???? WTF !!! If you don't like negative feedback on eBay, then you shouldn't be using eBay. This could also set a dangerous precident "forcing" everyone to give good feedback, or risk being sued; even if that person's goods are damaged, or the seller is a scam artist. eBay should alter it's Terms of Agreement to basically say that if you use their service, you can't sue people for Negative Feedback, etc.

I bet this guy looks like your Evil Steve Jobs avatar.

Too bad

The gitwizard streaked with his own bodily fluids would have been fitting.

..and everything under the sun

Not new- some existing implementations are:

http://www.sandboxie.com/

http://www.trustware.com/

doesn't mean it's not a good idea, though :)

So different, so very different from the home life of our own dear queen

I've had this precise conversation with hapless users- and one in particular, who was a dead ringer for a prototype Nathan Barley. He seemed most offended when I asked what made him imagine that anything he could do, say or know would be of sufficient interest for me to spend time poking through his email, or his machine. I also pointed out that the location of his porn stash was relatively common knowledge, such that you didn't need root-level access to find it anyway.

Suffice it to say that he performed a deeply splended mime that reminded me of a goldfish, leaving me free to take advantage of the freshly-brewed coffee that someone with an above room-temperature IQ had just prepared to get us through the morning.

(Paris, because maybe her data might occasionally be interesting)

unfiltered office connections?

Most offices are filtered, if you need something basic (yeah you can work around it) opendns is a quick and easy first stage solution.

testing?

what happened to serving different themes to different users to test results - in most cases ad revenue vs theme vs length of stay.

PS the fonts are ugly

best you can do, trollboy?

"Jesus, what faggots"- classy, really classy.

(Engineer at a globally-known outfit, doing envelope-pushing research, using linux as a platform.. We have the choice of whatever tools we want- this one just happens to be the one that works best. Must be our latent homosexuality)

@paul

It's easy enough to come up with a reason to not use chrome- having been horribly spoiled by Flashblock/Filterset.g and Noscript on Firefox, a browser feels incomplete without them. It's shocking what a twitching, flashing gyrating morass of crapola the web is- without the ads removed, it's pretty much intolerable. Sure, you can run a local filtering proxy, but that's a faff, especially on Windows.

Anyway, only my gaming machine runs windows, and most of my browsing is one on one of the linux boxes (at home or work), there isn't a native chrome build for penguinistas yet :-)

Otherwise, chrome looks nice, some good interface decisions. However, not for me, yet- until all the headache juice can be stripped out of pages on the fly.

Love and fear

Sigh, I hear kittens dying.

About the only person I could take semi-seriously as Bill is.. No, wait, there no-one. Maybe Chris Morris with a strap-on merkin accent, but even that's a stretch.

Sarah Bee:

I'll start the pump up, you drive your truck on around back..

(RIP Bill, you irreplaceable fucker)

Doesn't need to work

Most weapons of this sort don't need to actually be effective, except in the official propoganda- they're an exercise in willy-waving. Remember the patriot system? Come on, they want to have planes with enormous fricken laser weapons- the psychological impact (even before some ill-advised use on some poor country that happens to be sat on top of oil) is the main thing.

Paris, because, well, she understands willy-waving.

Cancel your Direct Debit with PayPal.

This is why I never leave an active DD with PayPal. I set it up if PayPal requires it for some step but promptly cancel shortly thereafter.

Allowing a shambolic company like PayPal to have full access (direct debit) to my bank account is very scary indeed.

At least with Credit Card I have some protection against dodgy transactions. Amex has been very good in 2 instances I have had with PayPal and put some pressure on them to resolve it.

Reg getting hold of a person: choose the option to report credit card fraud. this will get you to a person.

Rant inc!

To the "I buy nothing" AC..

Yep, with you there.. I will (and indeed prefer) to pay a fair price for decent-quality media as long as it's not DRM-encrusted. I suspect that getting hold of a few mp3s works as a word of mouth sales tool for a lot of people, I know I have discovered interesting stuff from being pointed at an mp3- if I like it, it's probably enough to make me buy it, if I don't, I generally don't like it enough to keep it..

That said (beware, whinge incoming), I recently decided to be all numeejafuturetechnology/digital wotnots, and had a horrible experience. I wanted a particular game for the PC, went to the official site and snagged. a demo. All good, fantastic fun- so I decided that I wanted the whole thing. Remembering that the official site made much of the fact that I could buy it at direct2drive.co.uk, I decided to go for some near-immediate gratification. I bought a copy there, at nearly twice the price of the physical media, on the basis that I could probably have it downloaded by the next morning- much quicker than waiting for a delivery via Royal Phail (tm).

All I can say is ouch. Direct2drive don't "allow" refunds after more than 48 hours. The title was a 6 gig download. The fastest their site was managing was 100k/sec. The "support" site was insistent that people should get at least twice that. Checked out my connection in case of contention- 500+k/sec from various US, UK and euro sites. Tried d2d again, 69k/sec was the fastest this time. Urgh. downloads terminated early, stalled, you name it. Total crapola. The ticket that I submitted to "support" was answered with a single line which could have come from a badly-adjust Markov chain parser, four days later.

I could have ordered it from play.com, had it in two days for half the price. I could have grabbed a torrent and had it in a few hours for free. If this is the future, then I am adapting all my hardware to run on coal. Digital fulfilment must not be shoddy, to gain consumer trust- especially in these years after the deCSS/Sony Rootkit/DRM/random litigation and other loathesome media pimping company adventures. People are increasingly tiring of vat-grown product and soaring prices. Restrictions on fair use (remember the recent speculative attempts to brand ripping CDs onto your iPods as criminal, folks?) and insulting consumers with the taint of criminality might just be the final nail in the coffin for some folks. Treat me like crap, brand me a criminal and accuse me of stealing your stuff, and I just might do that.

Oh, gotta go, Soulless Hollywood Remake II opens tonight, and I have tickets!

People do pay for pretty

Funny how people criticise the Macbook Air for being (in their opinion) priced high due to style over features.

Take a look the mobile phone market - 95%+ of it is style over substance. $500+ for a device used 99% of the time still to just make calls and send text messages. Yeah right. Peer pressure? Vanity anyone?

There's a place for for style and substance. If manufacturers can design with both in mind both and charge a reasonable price they will always hit the mark.

no wonder

Running a business in the UK and having lived in Switzerland beforehand - I can totally see why they are doing it.

Based on corporation tax ireland seems to be the popular tech head office for europe destination.

Blame the government please.

sport fanatic nation

Duh! Where and when are we going to cultivate the needed engineers/scientist from the dysfunctional US pre-collage school system?

The emphasize on sport is troubling, schools spend more time and resource on sports program then the math/science.

Paris, because even she can figure this one out by herself.