Posts by Russell Howe

Poor selection

Nothing cheap, nothing portable (as in MP3 player portable, not 1970's luggable).

This article was of no use to me.

Domaination and Freeciv

Both open source, both hardly modern in terms of graphics, but quite enjoy both.

Domination is a Risk clone and rather difficult

Freeciv is a Civilisation clone

And, hot on the heels of HSBC's outage, along comes Natwest. Accessing http://www.nwolb.com at 1017 BST 5/11/2011 gives:

IMPORTANT INFORMATION

We're sorry our Digital, Mobile and Telephone Banking services are currently unavailable. We're working hard to get them back up and running as soon as possible.

We would like to apologise for any inconvenience caused.

Come on, El Reg. How hard is to to put a link on a webpage?

Corning's announcement:

http://www.corning.com/news_center/news_releases/2011/2011102501.aspx

How about a link to the release notes?

http://library.gnome.org/misc/release-notes/3.2/

Power problem

"We want bigger batteries so we can burn more power"

Power => heat. How hot do you want your phone to be? I wouldn't fancy holding a running POWER7 CPU in my hand, even if it had a dirty great heatsink and fan.

Dedicated hardware (yes, this is quite expensive) and highly optimised, clever software (yes, this is also expensive and difficult to get right). Good luck with that.

Can't run programs?

Er, postscript is a programming language...

Of course, I'm sure it's totally isolated from the parts with a network connection.. right?

The real crime here

is Cisco's prices.

It seems that instead of talking averages or peak or whatever

They should be talking about percentiles.

Averages are near-enough meaningless without the standard deviation anyway.

ATA secure erase?

https://ata.wiki.kernel.org/index.php/ATA_Secure_Erase

depends on the drive being sensible, but it might do something useful...

Above sea level?

But surely if you ignore all that water which is sitting in holes on the Earth's surface things become more comparable - the ocean is more than 2km deep in general.

At this rate

It'll be done before it starts in another 3 months' time

Threats to the UK

Where exactly on that list is "the government making poor decisions"?

I think I'm the only one who likes the ribbon

I think it's much more intuitive than a toolbar.

Sure, the people who are set in their ways and incapable of handling change moan until they're blue in the face but it's a pretty flexible interface and the keyboard accelerators are decent.

The fact that half the buttons just take you to the age-old Office '4.3 (or '95 at best) windows (c.f. Fonts, Paragraphs, etc in Word, cell formatting in Excel) is a bit shit - they could do with a redesign in many ways.

Still, the ribbon's a step in the right direction IMHO. It just makes toolbars look so clunky.

I believe MS have a patent or copyright or something on the ribbon, so of course it's in their interest to push it as much as possible.

Still, as a piece of UI design I thought it was pretty good.

FTTC

Surely rural locations far from the exchange benefit the most from FTTC.

The difference between 15Mbit ADSL2+ and 40Mbit/s FTTC for someone in a city is what, 3a 300% boost? Nothing like the 8,000% difference between 500kbit rate-adaptive ADSL and 40Mbit/s FTTC for someone out in the sticks.

You never know, it might even let BT close or downsize a few exchanges, since the fibre runs to the cabs are probably able to reach much further than the copper services traditionally provided by telephone exchanges.

It's up to them how they spend their money, but it's a shame that they are sitting on all this infrastructure which was paid for by the taxpayer (I assume they bought this when they were privatised, but don't know and don't know if they paid a fair price) and to the layman it seems like they're doing what any sensible company would do - squeeze their existing cable plant for all it's worth.

The telecoms industry is f'ed up man.

DEP

DEP has nothing to do with digital signing.

All DEP does is turn off the "this memory contains executable code" flag in the page table (or equivalent) on the basis that program data and the stack does not typically contain CPU instructions.

Basically, it's a feature that should have been there since day 1 because the only reason you would want to execute program data is for things like self-modifying code and other hacks which aren't worth it in 99.999% of cases.

From what I understand, DEP has to be explicitly enabled in:

* The BIOS

* The OS

* The compiler when building your program

i.e. it's not on by default in many cases, presumably because there is so much utterly shite code out there (both closed and open source) which would break if it suddenly couldn't execute its own data.

Basically, it should be on by default with a clear warning when it is triggered by a crap program, explaining that the cause is either a vulnerability or shite programming (the latter has a good chance of creating many of the former anyway) and therefore the program should be fixed. If that's not possible, then the feature can of course be turned off.

Is it just me...

... or is the real story that browsers are bloated, slow, poorly coded and inefficient, not taking advantage of modern hardware (OK, IE9 apparently uses DirectX for some things - way to lead the curve MS.. DX has been out since W95!) blah blah blah.

Oh, it's also more than a bit to do with the fact that web pages^Wapplications contain embedded programming in the form of Javascript which is making people jump through crazy hoops to produce optimising JIT JS engines in their browsers.

It's time people sat down and worked out what HTML should and should not do. Occasionally some bright ideas come along like out of process plugins, separate processes/threads for separate tabs/windows, private modes which bypass various features, flashblock (which I believe should be on by default for every browser extension in every browser - IE can apparently do this, but it's not the default?) but these ideas are often things which really should have been there from the beginning and which seem pretty obvious now...

Not to mention the craziness that is XmlHttpRequest - if you want a bidirectional communication protocol then design and use a bidirectional data-sharing protocol. That's not really what HTTP is, now, is it?

If this animation slows the machine down then that's the OS's fault for not scheduling things well and if it drains your power then maybe we need to look at OS design and do things like a power cap per application or something?

Oh and why isn't the world on IPv6 yet? We should ditch NAT whilst we're at it as well as kill those proprietary email protocols and get IMAP or something similar up to scratch.

Any volunteers? I'd like it done by pub-o-clock please. I can pay you 20p

Breaking news: Software is shit

The post is required, and must contain letters.

One organisation I know...

.. has an arrangement where you dial a prefix for personal calls, which are then charged to you.

Anyone found making personal calls without using the prefix had better start sprucing up their CV.

The handsets I've seen staff using are not smartphones, so I assume it's done on the network end by the telco.

Blame Adobe indeed

Would this be the same Adobe which to date has still not released a 64bit version of Flash for Windows, and which only released a 64bit version for Linux at the end of 2008? I think it might...

http://kb2.adobe.com/cps/000/6b3af6c9.html

Someone can probably correct me here, but I heard the main reason they had so much trouble was because nobody understood their Javascript JIT and only after open sourcing it as part of the Mozilla project* did it get the attention of sufficiently clever people to make it compile and work under a 64bit compiler. I could be totally wrong though - I can't claim to be in the loop.

If the above is true, then I think well-performing ARM might be a tall order for 'em. Now Intel's going to be releasing low-power x86 CPUs for mobiles, I think we can forget about ARM for as long as flash is the web's killer app (yeah, it makes me sick too.).

Then again I'm still holding out for the utopian future without NAT, where everyone is authenticated using some kind of web of trust federation akin to a bastard child of kerberos and gnupg, where IPv4 is in the minority and HTTP is no longer used as a universal tunnel protocol.

Paris, 'cos she's got about as much chance as Adobe of producing a cross-platform version of flash that doesn't suck.

* http://www.mozilla.org/projects/tamarin/

"The immediate goals for Tamarin is to support a broader ranger of hardware platforms, including ARM and X64"

Term 6a

Would seem to preclude the option of holding the knife to the throat of the guy who put the file on there and demanding to know what it says...

MS response

Seems to basically say "XP Mode is a hack, we don't really advise using it unless you need to and even then you should look to stop using it as soon as is practical. Oh, and look - kittens!"

OK, so technically maybe it's not an exploit, but it sure sounds like a way of bypassing security features, which counts as an exploit against those features in my book. Whether or not it directly allows you to compromise a system, there is still functionality being bypassed that one assumes was designed to not be.

I'd be willing to bet that full on 100% of network applications which are too old and creaky to run on Windows 7 and therefore rely on XP mode are vulnerable as a very vulnerable thing, so saying "it only lets you exploit exploitable XP apps" is a bit of a null statement.

What is your favourite colour?

Well, that would be "#rW^Xy60tfA?mS?", of course.

It's just another password. Treat it as such and you effectively work around the stupidly short password length restrictions on some sites.

Even more stupid than password reminder Q&A is the "Password hint" concept which you find in various places (yes, Windows, I'm looking at you).

My favourite "Password hint" which unfortunately I can't claim credit for is "Remember the password"

Hurrah for FOSDEM

FOSDEM is well worth going to. Always extremely inspirational to see the diverse range of things which so many people are working on.

It's Friday

A slow response time across a decent time period still counts as a service outage in my books.

Of course there's a distinction if you're trying to diagnose the issue, but if it's crazy slow then it's still broken from a user's perspective.

I'd say it's borderline at the moment - certainly slow, but usable.

Not sure who said it

but another commenter on a related article put it quite well - something along the lines of that if the PAF doesn't pay for itself in terms of operational efficiencies within RM, then it's pointless. The extra income from selling access to the database should therefore in theory simply be a supplement rather than something necessary to the operation of RM.

In that sense, it's less "money for nothing" and more "money for doing what you were doing anyway".

One thing I don't really like the idea of is that if RM do actually open it up, their competitors who previously had to pay them for the postcode data get it for free. That's a double whammy for RM's competitiveness.

Limited device support, though

Compatible devices: Nokia X6, Nokia N97 mini, E72, E55, E52, Nokia 6730 classic, Nokia 6710 Navigator, Nokia 5800 Xpressmusic, Nokia 5800 Navigation Edition, Nokia 5230.

srsly

That neck looks like a prime candidate for photoshopdisasters