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User: DavidRawling

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  1. Re:I call bullshit on "unaware" claims on "Jekyll" Test Attack Sneaks Through Apple App Store, Wreaks Havoc · · Score: 1

    I don't see them actually claim that anywhere and their paper is not out yet.

    The GP included a direct link to the paper, and you blindly state that it's not out!? I know it's fashionable to comment fast and defend the almighty Apple, but you might try more reading comprehension first.

    The quote from the paper is on page 566 (remember this paper forms part of a greater work, and therefore the page numbers are a little strange) just above Figure 9. (I do note that the quote above is missing a space between "our" and "app", but that's no excuse for not finding it).

  2. Re:A build without google communication on Google Chrome 28 Is Out: Rich Notifications For Apps, Extensions · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Oh sure, that'll be the same build that finally figures out that some organisations have web servers with names that don't end in .com.

    It's woefully consistent - type a server name that is a "recognised external" URL (so something ending in .com, .co.uk, .fr, etc) and it'll go straight to the site. Type an internal server name (either a plain server name or an internal DNS name) and it will insist on searching Google, because quite obviously the user DIDN'T want localsite or site.network.internal after all. No if you want an internal server, you'll need to get the users to type in the full URL including protocol (because then the same keystrokes that were obviously wrong are suddenly obviously right).

    Couple that with the new "requirement" for Chrome if you want to download the Google Talk [wait no it's Hangouts now] on the desktop (they can pry the desktop Talk client from my cold dead fingers) and the continual forcing of Google+ to view an image in a chat, it's clear Google has already turned into Microsoft V2 and is working on digging in deeper. (Hangouts? Seriously? No, it's not a "hangout" when I send an IM to my son to put the damn garbage out!)

  3. Re:Who is supporting these bozos. on PETA Wants To Sue Anonymous HuffPo Commenters · · Score: 1

    Not sure about your local sort of "overly flexible mental gymnasts" but around here, you won't NEED to have that green power because everyone else will give up something and we'll all use less power overall. You know, greenhouse effect and global warming and save the planet. That kind of thing. Because we'll totally reverse the last two hundred year trend of increasing electricity consumption the moment the power isn't available any more. Note that the bozos won't have to give up anything because they're already using less power, so it's only everyone else who should (has to?) change in order to comply with their world view.

  4. Re:Journalists on CERN Celebrates 20 Years of an Open Web (and Rebuilds 1st Web Page) · · Score: 1

    As I post this, minus 4.5 hours. The local (AEST) 6am broadcast was heralding 20 years of the Internet (then clarifying to be the Web, which everyone knows is the same thing ). But I was thinking - I'm sure I was seeing http URLs (not that we as students necessarily recognised them as much as we do now) in early 1993, and they weren't for CERN but for an early online, full-colour comic whose name escapes me.

  5. Re:The only winning move.... on New Console Always-Online Requirements and You · · Score: 2

    Yeah yeah I know, feed the troll.

    Even when you do - the available information is out of date or just plain wrong. For example - the day I made an offer on a place I knew the current resident had a stable ADSL2 connection, and that the RIM at the end of the street had spare ports. The day the contracts were exchanged there were no ports and a waiting list for Internet access.

    Fact is the telcos have an active disincentive to invest in Australian broadband (with the NBN coming, or not, or maybe, or halfway, or God only knows what - frankly I suspect even (s)he has given up trying to work it out). My new place might get it within 3 years if the plan doesn't change. Or I might never get it. When I apply for a connection, I get to join a hidden waiting list with no ETA for service. Oh, and I WORK for the telco who would have to do something about the problem and I still can't get information.

  6. Re:Tip of the iceberg on FCC Issues Forfeiture Notices to Two Business for Jamming Cellular Frequencies · · Score: 4, Funny

    Many commercial buildings have a lot of steal in the structure / roof ...

    Ah, so that's why I can never figure out where all my money goes!

  7. Re:Not true. on Ohio Judge Rules Speed Cameras Are a Scam · · Score: 1

    With 1.5T of horses, .8T of trailer and 2T of tow vehicle, you're talking about making that vehicle a rolling roadblock at ~10mph in a 30 zone or 15mph in a 50 zone. That's possibly one of the stupidest things I've heard. Not that I should expect any less from an AC.

  8. Re:bullshit - gmail does NOT recognize dots on Ask Slashdot: Identity Theft Attempt In Progress; How To Respond? · · Score: 2

    Probably because it really does happen to some people - my own gmail address is signed up with a period, and someone else, presumably in the UK, signed up without. I still get Dell UK newsletters for him (and I'm in AU, so if I used my gmail address with Dell, I expect he would receive some Dell AU newsletters). Just because it's publicly stated that dots are dropped does not mean there wasn't a period where either the rule did not exist, or the code to enforce the rule was broken.

    I've also sent mail to the version of my GMail account without the dot, and it neither bounced nor arrived in my inbox. I therefore deduce that it was delivered somewhere else.

  9. Yay, time for finger pointing on Japanese Probe Finds Miswiring of Boeing 787 Battery · · Score: 2

    Who will it be? Maintenance? Boeing?

  10. Re:Simple... on Adobe and Apple Didn't Unit Test For "Forward Date" Bugs. Do You? · · Score: 1

    OK, so how will you solve the GP's problem then? Or to put it another way, here are two future meeting dates. Which one has been updated to reflect the new timezone, and which one has not:

    • Jan 27, 2013 03:00:00 UTC
    • Jul 15, 2013 16:00:00 UTC

    I'm not saying that the GP's solution is perfect, but you've completely ignored the problem in making your comment. Unfortunately we live in a time where politicians and lobby groups think time is pretty flexible (sorry about the pun). So you probably need to store in UTC with an associated original timezone, original timezone offset, and a last updated time. For some apps that could be overkill. For others, it might be necessary.

    You need the timezone information so that you record the creator's intent - I set this to 10 am Thursday in my timezone because I want it to be at 10am. You need the last updated date/time so that you know what the timezone configuration was when it was updated (i.e. "it was created/changed in daylight saving time, so even though we're now NOT in DST, I need to do some extra correcting of the display").

    TL:DR; time is harder than it seems.

  11. Re:Saw what he wanted to see. on 30 Days Is Too Long: Animated Rant About Windows 8 · · Score: 1

    In this case, the tutorial appears the first time any new user logs in (be that domain or local). Need to find out how to kill it, actually, via GPO, or it'll drive me batty.

  12. Re:Banned from Google? on France Applies Tax Pressure To Google For Republishing News Snippets · · Score: 1

    In this case, would it not be that Le Monde is going to start charging the newsagent (news stand) based on the number of people who read the headlines, then either buy something different or walk away?

  13. Re:why no pics? on French Bees Produce Blue and Green Honey · · Score: 1

    My first thought when I read the article was "just sell it as a novelty product" - green and yellow honey in some sort of twin pack might go down well in sports-mad Australia, for example. But those pictures are much, much more disturbing than I expected, and I'm not sure I could get past the colour after all. Maybe kids would love the idea of funky-coloured honey though (they like tomato sauce to be green FFS - kids are weird).

  14. Re:Who cares on UK Government Owns 16.9 Million Unused IPv4 Addresses · · Score: 1

    For me it's not the "hard and catastrophic" failures that are a problem - it's the subtle ones. For example a recent customer environment - DNS lookup for a particular server returned the wrong IP. It worked perfectly, and fast, except that the data was wrong. It took nearly a week of debugging firewalls, routing tables, services and app configuration to figure it out - and the problem was actually caused by OpenDNS and its filtering.

    When you look at "64.27.80.4" and compare it to "67.215.2.41" the differences are obvious. Not so when you're trying to compare "6732:87fb:87fa:12a9::54d8" with "6732:87fb:87fa:72a9::54d8" and work out why things are failing.

  15. Re:Consider the security hole this does fill... on TSA Says Screening Drinks Purchased Inside Airport Terminal Is Nothing New · · Score: 1
    Darn, I was with you all the way until we got to your last assumption:

    Someone somewhere must have gotten some intel about this vector.

    Intel? At the TSA? Not going to happen (aka "Beam me up Scotty, there's no intelligent life down here").

  16. Re:Ugh on Gelsinger Shoots Down EMC On ARM · · Score: 1

    Absolutely - I see SlashBI and I think "great idea, let's slash our business intelligence [further] by getting the MBAs to read this site". I doubt that that's the reaction for which the MBA crowd aimed, however.

  17. Re:You set the tone on Ask Slashdot: Is There a Professional Geek Dress Code? · · Score: 1

    This is the first reply I've seen that has the right idea. I'd take it a step further though, and suggest that you should decide how you want your staff to look and use that to guide your own choice of clothes. If you're happy with them in jeans and t-shirts, go slacks or "nice" skirt and matching top, and make it clear if they ask, that you prefer (need) them to dress in jeans and t-shirt or better "just in case". Remember your customers may not be outside your organisation, and internal people will judge your staff's clothing just as much as will an outside customer.

  18. And yet in Australia on City Council Ordered To Stop CCTV In Taxi Cabs · · Score: 3, Informative

    Or at least in Sydney, pretty much every cab has recording devices "for the safety of driver and passenger". Most appeared after the well publicised bashing of taxi drivers. Thanks numpties for ruining privacy for the rest of us.

  19. Re:Wasn't there... on San Diego's Fireworks Show Over In 15 Seconds · · Score: 1

    I'm onboard with the quote, but let's make Marvin's quote accurate: "Where's the kaboom? There was supposed to be an earth -shattering kaboom!"

  20. Re:hot-swap RAID-5 on Ask Slashdot: Low Cost Way To Maximize SQL Server Uptime? · · Score: 2

    I recommended RAID 5 because it can tolerate two drive failures if you give it all five, and I have seen two drives fail at once. It also performs better for SQL, not that it really matters in this case.

    Uh, no, no it can't, not no way no how. And it doesn't necessarily perform better for SQL either. A 2 disk RAID 1 can handle one of the two disks dying. A RAID 5 of ANY size can handle one of the n disks dying. If you're thinking of RAID 6 (HP called it RAID ADG for ages) then yes that can handle 2 disk failures. So can RAID 10 for a subset of cases.

    And in either case I doubt POS for a restaurant is taxing the server - I recall Dominos stores in Australia running a simple SATA mirror set on their in-store servers for hundreds of orders each night. The biggest load it ever had was reporting (end of day etc).

    As for my recommendation - two desktops (relatively new) with SQL Server mirroring and backup to disk (replicate the backups). Having the data and logs backed up gives you protection against "delete database" and Bobby Tables, among other things, which you will not get with a straight replica. Failover should be as simple as an icon on the desktop (that runs the appropriate script). Not automatic, but cheaper than having a third PC with SQL Express (or Workgroup, or whatever they're calling it nowadays) for a witness server. Less to go wrong too.

  21. Re:Good riddance on IT Desktop Support To Be Wiped Out Thanks To Cloud Computing · · Score: 2

    Desktop support isn't just about the hardware and OS. It is also about "how do I do X" and "I can't access the Internet". Both of which require hands on help, if not always, certainly often. Plus as others have said, it is a poorly disguised marketing effort by Gartner, so ignore it .. SITREP normal for now.

  22. Re:Clueless court on SCOTUS Refuses To Hear Tenenbaum Appeal · · Score: 1

    Well by that argument, I think you're saying the music Tenenbaum distributed is worth approximately double that of Beatles music. If MJ paid $47.5M for 4000 tracks, or 11,875 each on average, then that's darn near half of the per-track infringement damages - and it's not like he suddenly owns the right to distribute either. So I'm not convinced that saying "the tracks Mr Tenenbaum distributed are valued at approximately double a comparable Beatles track" is necessarily reasonable.

  23. Re:Android on Android Ported To C# · · Score: 2

    1. Agreed

    2 - not sure it is that big an issue, but I don't believe you're wrong.

    3 - not sure what you're saying here, this is about teaching people to use the code management tools available to them, not the IDE.

    4 - are you contradicting yourself - you say VS coders break things up and Coders don't?

    5 - isn't just VS coders.

    I'd specifically like to call out statement 6 though:

    Exceptions! Catch them please! No one is immune to this, granted. However the forgot to catch an exception for Visual Studio coders is quite higher than say the guys that write C++ or Java and use Eclipse.

    I think you're conflating two different approaches here. On the class library side of things, I'm strongly against catching all exceptions. The only exceptions a library should catch - and this is one of many opinions I freely admit - are those where the cause of the exception is totally and completely within the method call. That means any method using external data, externally configured data sources, parameters etc should not hide the exception but allow it to bubble back to the calling app. The app can then decide what to do (example - a misconfigured database connection string).

    A program/application, on the other hand, should almost never show a user an unhandled exception. Not that I'm great at that either but still, that's my viewpoint. Again an exception - things like exceptions in an exception handler might be good exceptions to the "don't show exceptions" mantra.

  24. Re:ISP Followup Story on UK ISPs Ordered To Block Pirate Bay · · Score: 1

    Australian ISP BigPond changes name to SmallPuddle ...

  25. Re:You have to be kidding on Accountability, Not Code Quality, Makes iOS Safer Than Android · · Score: 5, Interesting

    On the contrary, the user has NO control over app permissions, by default. The app author sets what he/she wants, and the user has the choice of accepting it or finding an alternative. No justification, no ability to say "well I want this useful SSH app but I don't want it reading my contacts, so I'll deny that permission". Yes, there are firewall apps (the permissions are in the OS, why do I need an APP to enforce OS permissions?) and for rooted devices, apps that can tweak permissions. But the default is horribly, terribly broken because most of the power is in the hands of the developers, NOT the users.