phongn

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• Commented on Service announcement: upcoming outage(s)
  Or we could all use OpenID, but then we get URLs instead of user names.. Er, I get a username, not a URL, with my Google-provided OpenID account here....
• Commented on Service announcement: upcoming outage(s)
  The other way of saying that is that crypto algorithms optimised for modern chipsets are very efficient. Google folks would know best, of course, since power is maybe their most significant operating cost. Maybe "encrypt everything" is okay these days......
• Commented on Heartbleed note
  Except this rather depends on how exactly your OS performs memory management. They haven't naively passed about unintialised memory like this for years - linux always reuses the same memory, macs always zero-out, so neither is actually vulnerable by default....
• Commented on Heartbleed note
  It's actually not trivial, because you need to have a single certificate that is valid for all of the hosts running on it. You don't have to do that if you use SNI and most browsers support it (IE on...
• Commented on Over-Extended Metaphor for the day
  Why do people think Mac OSX is Unix? I don't even know why Apple insists on pushing that flavor of Kool-Aid. Because it is. It conforms to the UNIX 03 specification. It's a bit unusual (BSD userland running on top...
• Commented on The regular holy war ...
  a single-button mouse? :-| Er, yes? That's been a hallmark of Macintosh design for decades. Apple wanted to avoid confusion for novice users using a new input device and also to prevent developers from hiding functionality in the context menu....
• Commented on Why Microsoft Word must Die
  However, speaking of Off-Ice 2007 and later interface, did you know that ctrl+$key still does whatever it used to in earlier versions? It's just that Mickeysha@ft have removed all the hints! Office 2010 on Windows shows keyboard shortcuts on button...
• Commented on Why Microsoft Word must Die
  And from Word for Windows 2.0 onwards, circa 1990, the bloat began to creep in, culminating in Word 6.0, which was a rebranding release that brought Word for Mac and Word for Windows into step version-wise and feature-wise (circa 1991/92,...
• Commented on Why Microsoft Word must Die
  My biggest problem is with the ribbon interface. I understand that it's designed for a touch device, but for all other users it's a major step backwards. The average formatting task now takes two or three extra mouse clicks, provided...
• Commented on Crib Sheet: The Apocalypse Codex
  The impact of this is being tested in fisheries protection where smaller vessels are deliberately avoiding naval and coastguard surveillance. Missing a complete carrier fleet sounds increasingly implausible. Part of what Ark Royal did was hide in plain sight: apparently...
• Commented on Crib Sheet: The Apocalypse Codex
  It's actually pretty easy to hide in the ocean. The USN is not the only navy to do so; in the late 1970s, HMS Ark Royal steamed to within 20 miles of the US coast in wargame exercises and proceeded...