* Posts by The Other Steve

1184 publicly visible posts • joined 7 Oct 2007

Global warming is actually good for rainforests, say boffins

The Other Steve

And not only that

It will also be warmer! Really, it's just the gift that keeps on giving!

The Other Steve
Boffin

EVERYBODY STOP DOING SCIENCE!!!

Dammit, boffins, if the plebs get wind that the sky might not falling they'll never let us opress them and we'll have to go back to being a bunch of bolshie nobodys !

Google: Oracle doctored that 'copied Java code'

The Other Steve
Badgers

Ah, but then again

"And that code Oracle doctored? There's a strong indication they removed the copyright attribution on *their* version - because leaving the GPL copyright notice on it completely invalidates their case. Yes, Sun released that version under GPL"

Were that to turn out to be the case then Google would still be fucked, because they released their version under a different licence and under the GPL that is strictly verboten, IIRC.

The Other Steve
Badgers

A big boy did it and ran away

Some really excellent arguments from Google there, I particularly like the one where they state that the code doesn't look quite as similar if you leave the copyright headers on.

But remember kids, it's OK to be an IP thief if you open source.

iPhone users are sad and mentally unfocused

The Other Steve
Boffin

These traditions suggest ?

Really ? That's the evidence for it making you sad ? Seriously ?

Nvidia poised to challenge Jobs on tablets

The Other Steve

Missing part ?

That would presumably be a UX that doesn't suck and that adheres to the principal of least astonishment ?

iPhones make calls without permission, researcher warns

The Other Steve
FAIL

ROFL

"Android folk ... more technical ... used to making decisions"

Is it possible that next time you post you could include a little more blind prejudice, just so that when you claim to be all rational and technical there's something for us to point at while we're laughing.

The Other Steve
Flame

No warning ?

I'd have thought the fact that safari disappears and skype appears in its place telling you it's currently dialling a number would probably be a pretty big clue.

Plus, hey ho boys and girls, that's not a bug, it's a feature. URL handling is working as designed, and much as you little bitches love to bash Apple, it IS the responsibility of the application to sanitise input and decide what to do with it. Always.

Another day, another example of a self aggrandising 'security researcher' misunderstanding practically everything except how to get his name in the news, and the same tired, ignorant reaction from the commentards.

Same old, same old.

Glacier boffins rubbish IPCC apocalypse claims

The Other Steve

The dozens of pages analyzing glacial melt are accurate.

According to people who lie to us. The IPCC simply has zero credibility, and this is entirely it's own doing. You can wibble on about the science all you like, it changes nothing. The IPCC is incompent, dishonest and unapologetic about either. Since 99% of the population of Earth can't interpret the thousands of pages of bum wad that the IPCC is trying to pass off as science, some of which we really do know is bullshit - like the CRU climate model in its entirety, for instance - we have a trust issue. The solution to this problem is not to run around defending the IPCC, but simply to accept that it's a bust.

It only hangs on by a slim thread because it's the darling of the green movement, to whom suppressing contradictory data in favour of propaganda and pronouncing the result to be science in order to further their agenda is in fact widely admired, rather than shunned as it rightly ought to be by people claiming to have such respect for science.

The Other Steve

I really didn't think I needed the joke alert icon on that one.

But what the heck, I shall merely criticise your rather startling conflation of climate and weather, and your confusion between a long term model of average temp vs a short term model of whether or not it's going rain and see what happens.

The Other Steve
FAIL

Quite right

The fact that the IPCC are lying bastards who will try and pass off any old bullshit propaganda as 'settled science' in order to get the population of the entire world to do as they say is absolutely no reason to criticise them or expose them to scrutiny.

When you decide to go green, where do you hand in your critical faculties ?

The Other Steve
Pirate

Just ignore the study

The science is settled, we don't need any more doing. Sure as the sun goes around the earth, there's just no need to keep on with this.

<-Skully, because we know that lack of pirates is what really causes global warming

Stormy Peters jumps GNOME ship for Mozilla

The Other Steve
Badgers

Prepare to launch the ROFLcopter

Complete solution for the desktop, ah ha ha ha ha ha ha, my work here is done oh ho ho ho ho ho. OMG WTF people are using web stuff that isn't free. STOP THEM, woo hoo hoo hoo hoo.

Bless their cotton socks.

Hacker unshackles Kinect from Xbox

The Other Steve

Drivers for deffo, but where does that get you ?

REing drivers (especially on MS platforms) is relatively straightforward because they're limited in what they can do, and have fairly predictable internal structure. As has been pointed out though, this doesn't get you much other than the raw data from the various sensors.

REing or recreating the software stack that turns that raw data into something useful is a task that is orders of magnitude harder. That's the bit that cost the money to develop, and without it all you've got is a novelty webcam on a stick.

Google snips Facebook's Gmail line

The Other Steve
Flame

Well, what DO you expect ?

Really, what do you expect ? That big corps will give you shit for free just because you're so fucking awesome ?

And where's my cookie ?

Government will shred ID card data

The Other Steve

RE: Warning from Scotland

Note to the Scots, if you don't like this kind of thing, you could always try not voting for nationalists and socialists. Just a thought.

The Other Steve
Flame

How much carbon was used ?

No one counted it, because no one cares. Seriously, find something meaningful to worry about.

Laptops heat up your balls

The Other Steve
Jobs Horns

iPad users - more sex, more fertile, more better

Prepare for our genetically superior progeny to take over the planet, puny sub human laptop users.

UK.gov plans net surveillance by 2015

The Other Steve
Big Brother

Who Pays ?

You do. Pay your taxes or go to jail. We are oppressing you for your own good, after all, so it's only fair that we get you to pay for it, don't you think ? Quite, quite reasonable.

The Other Steve
Big Brother

Inaugural TV speech and in the coalition document. Bastards.

"end the storage of internet and email records without good reason".

So they've basically discovered a "good reason", because knacker et al will have told them that they can't possibly deal effectively with the four horsemen of the infopocalypse - drugs, terrorists, organised crime and paedos, without "storing internet and email records".

I think it goes a little something like this :

"It's very simple home secretary, if we don't have this, all of Britain's children will be abducted by paedos before the year is out and we won't be able to do anything about it because we'll be so busy trying to arrest gangsters on crack. Then parliament will be blown up by terrorists. And I don't think we'd wish that to happen would we?"

And the Home Sec - though likely noticing that we are in fact not currently knee deep in bombed and mongled corpses - will nod sagely and go along with it, because all politicians are nasty, brutish, statist, authoritarian douchebags who sincerely believe that citizens are the chattels of the state.

Frankly the only real surprise is that anyone believed the dog fuckers in the first place.

Clive Sinclair unveils 'X-1' battery pedalo bubble-bike

The Other Steve
Happy

Without snapping the case in half

And without causing any damage to the keyboard ribbon connectors, which were a lovely surprise once you got the case open and a complete bastard to get reconnected. Dammit Clive, if only they'd been an inch longer.

Ah, them were the days, etc.

The Other Steve
WTF?

Am I mad, in a coma ..

.. or back in time ?

Software engineer blogs own Starbucks wiretap

The Other Steve

GOTO pedantry:

When used properly GOTO can, in fact, improve code quality and readability. According to Knuth, who took a more balanced view than Djikstra.

Although you should still be shot for using it without having read both. And I don't just mean the two papers.

In fact I'd state that as a general principle, but I suspect if I were to go around putting all the codemonkeys who haven't even heard of either of them against a wall, we'd start getting low on programmers. Which might even end up being a bad thing.

Zuckerberg: the iPad 'is not mobile'

The Other Steve

What's a bus ?

I use mine on the train all the time, but then again, I tend to sit in the bit of the train where they serve wine in glasses. I've seen iPad density at >1 per table on some journeys

First data fines on the way, says ICO

The Other Steve
FAIL

Do no stupid

Fuck fines, a criminal record for the data controller would focus the mind wonderfully. No more civil service arse covering. If you're the controller and the breach happened on your watch, your ass is going to be in front of a judge. And fuck letting people off, breach should be a strict liability offence, no more of this cosy old uncle ICO having a quiet chat bullshit.

And if one of those fines isn't for ACS Law, then ICO might as well put its offices up for sale. I mean FFS, who else could have the option to fine Google 500,000 quid for criminal acts and not take it ? Surely "we're tough on data protection and will bring the full weight of the law down onto offenders, whoever they are" would have been a better message to send out than "We'll probably still let you off in any case"

'Pervy' private chat case springs back into life

The Other Steve

> Can you use it in a sentence

In the local shopping centre*, they give out wrist bands to 'safe lil shoppers' to prevent them from being peadomurdered in Argos. Apparently this works, since even our pathetic local rag would hardly fail to report such an incident unless there was some really important football.

*This is really true. Look upon it and weep.

The Other Steve
Big Brother

Brat mongling

The perp was originally pulled for having kiddy pr0n, so maybe his chat session was about brat mongling. Ergo it's perfectly OK to extend a law well beyond its original intent in a liberty crushing manner, because of the very real risk that if this isn't done all our babies will be paedomurdered in their sleep.

Remember, acting contrary to any notion of sense, logic, or justice is ALWAYS justified when it's for the children, and if you disagree, well, you're next.

DWP CTO predicts the end of Windows

The Other Steve
FAIL

Reality bites

"It's only Microsoft that hardwires the file format to the processing program to the desktop O/S, for their own commercial gain and everyone else's pain."

No. No it isn't. Shush.

The Other Steve

Why "suffer" from "anti-social" advertising?

Because it pays for your content, fuck head.

The Other Steve
WTF?

A who said what now ?

I had to go back and read that again, because at first I read it wrong and it looked like you were expecting me to take someone from DWP in the least seriously when talking about IT. Oh, wait ...

SkyFire flees iTunes store

The Other Steve

EULA

I can't believe anyone who reads SkyFire's EULA would actually use it, whatever small benefits it may bring. Like facebook, it isn't really free, you're just giving them something that isn't money.

BT network goes titsup up north

The Other Steve
FAIL

Thought ?

"I thought the internet was conceived to deal with exactly this kind of problem."

No you didn't. You didn't think this, you were spoon fed it by some idiot* and decided it sounded good. I bet you tell it to other people all the time without any actual understanding of what it means in real life. Hint : "the internet" didn't break.

*screw you, slashdot, seriously.

Twitter slips ads into user tweet streams

The Other Steve

I'd say it was a generational thing

All the still not getting twitter amongst the commentards, but I'm old, so I guess it really is just a not getting it thing. If your twitter stream consists of 140 character ego turds, you're doing it wrong.

Info Commissioner admits 'It's going to be tough'

The Other Steve
WTF?

From his Wilmslow office

Said it before, will no doubt be saying it again, I do not understand why it is there at all. Move the lot of the buggers to Whitehall where they belong and where the people who need to kicked are largely based.

Wilmslow is an arsehole of a town almost entirely populated by twats, so it's not like they'll be suffering any culture shock if they move to the smoke.

No wonder CompSci grads are unemployed

The Other Steve
Stop

So you have an IQ high enough to get into mensa ? So what ?

Many moons ago I was senior dev at an ISV and I needed to recruit a new codemonkey. Fairly standard process, get the candidates in for an interview then sit them down with the team for a tailored aptitude test.

One candidate sat down with the aptitude test and ignored it. He proceeded to program something else entirely because he didn't think that the aptitude test we'd given him would be enough to show off how smart he was. And boy was he smart, according to him.

Funnily enough I didn't hire him, because while smarts are good, so are not being a dick and doing what I fucking tell you.

The Other Steve

Perhaps the pimp will beg to differ, but ...

"Experience is what employers look for."

Yes, commercial experience. My experience over the years has been that recruiters don't give a fuck what you've done unless it's on your CV under a job title and a set of dates.

YMMV

The Other Steve
Joke

Yeah but ...

"And once you understand pointer arithmetic you can conquer anything computing."

Yeah, but try doing triple indirection*** after half a bottle of cheap Portuguese pish from the corner shop and you'll see why PHP was invented (and coincidentally, how it was coded).

*** fuck you, COM, seriously.

The Other Steve
WTF?

CompSci != IT

So many points to pick at, so little time today. Lets start with "OMG THEY TEACH SHIT IN JAVA!".

Good. I'm glad. Language is an implementation detail, when you need to learn the fundamentals of something, you don't need implementation details biting you in the ass. Want to learn the fundamentals of OO ? C++ is not for you. you'll hurt yourself. Learning it is hard(er) and most of the language has fuck all to do with the OO paradigm. Ditto OS internals.

I certainly think that CompScis should have at least a passing familiarity with assembly and C, but these are suited to modules covering machine architecture.

Which brings me to my next point. CompSci is not, ought not to be, ought not be expected to be and ought not to be taught or promoted as though it were, a good choice of degree for people who want a career in IT or who want to be programmers. 90% of typical workaday IT stuff is tedious drudge work, 90% of programmers will never be asked to implement (say) a soundex alogrithm or a quicksort algorithm, never mind mind analyse one. And the proportion of codemonkeys who will ever need to implement an OS, a compiler, a VM as part of their day job is vanishingly small.

The clue is in the name, Computer _Science_, is a good choice for people who want to be computer scientists. Or it ought to be. That dead eyed look, mopeyness, lack of interest and social awkwardness the author sees in CS grads is most likely because they thought they were training for a career doing all those neat things but once they hit the recruitment stage find out out that they've actually qualified themselves for just another boring IT job. They may be sitting in a cubicle in a merchant bank earning 100K (before tax, don't even get me started), but their day to day existence will be no different from the VB monkeys in the insurance brokers down the street or the VBA jockeys in the small office round the corner.

What a fucking waste, right ? So yeah, it probably should be harder. But on the other hand, neither should the author be trying to hire CS grads to IT positions. If you want to work in IT, go do an IT degree - of which there are many - or even better do a Business and Computing degree. It will be more use to know about profit margins, accounting practices and management techniques than compiler backends.

Canadian teen charged with school board hack

The Other Steve

Harsh, but ...

I think prosecution is harsh, but I'm afraid that the "exposure of 27k student ID/Passwords", means that it is also fair. Lets hope the judge doesn't come down on him to heavily.

Google's 'copied Java code' disowned by Apache

The Other Steve
Welcome

I, for one, welcome our sub-bridge dwelling overlords

I reject your reality and substitute it with my own.

The Other Steve
FAIL

Yawn.

"Well, I glad that when they copied the code they added the curly-brackets in that any sensible programmer would have put there in the first place."

There is no OTBS. This argument got old in the 1970s. Troll something modern.

The Other Steve
Boffin

+1 That's clearly decompiled code

What he said.

"PolicyNodeImpl policynodeimpl, Boolean flag, Boolean flag1, Set set, Set set1, String s ..."

That's automated variable naming based on type, output from a decompiler filling in information lost during the compilation to bytecode. And they didn't even bother to clean it up.

You can also see where the decompiler has added curlies around some conditionals because it doesn't (and almost certainly can't*) know that they're one liners.

On the extremely slim chance that the Android code was generated by a human being, they should be beaten with a cluestick until the fail comes out for using variable names like flag1.

Sorry fandroids, but given that code sample, Oracle has a case. It's got big greasy decompiler fingerprints all over it. It's about as far from a clean room implementation as you're going to get.

*because when it sees bytecode if_* ops, it only knows that the code is going to branch, it doesn't know how many instructions it will find when it reads the bytecode at the branch offsets. I say "almost" certainly, because you could probably avoid this by doing a bit of read-ahead in your bytecode decompiler and counting the output instructions for each branch, but why bother ?

Android kernel leaks like a colander

The Other Steve
Stop

Again with SLOC metrics

Meaningless. Bugs is bugs. Code analysis is great, but SLOC metrics suck ass.

The Other Steve

Only not

"Coverity has been testing code in open source projects since 2006. In fact, in 2010 we’ve analyzed over 291 projects and 61 million lines of code"

Coverity don't explain in their post where they got that 'industry average' figure from, but the above suggests it is only for FOSS. Which would make sense, really, since they need the source code.

Child porn victims seek multimillion-dollar payouts

The Other Steve

On a practical note

Where is a man serving a 17 year jail sentence going to get $3.68m ?

Seagate squirts out rectal cleaning spray

The Other Steve
WTF?

Borax ???

For treating homoeopathic ass fleas ?

The Other Steve
Thumb Up

I could squirt cold water up my ass

Or I could just continue with my wildly successful and long running strategy of taking regular* showers.

Tough choice.

*Sometimes as often as once a day.

<- Thumb. Work it out :0

Fans roast Microsoft for Silverlight demotion

The Other Steve
WTF?

It seems like you lose when you win

Ah I see, so MS decide to do things in a 'non standard' way, and loads of people hate on them. Then they decide to things in a standards based way, and loads of people hate on them. Brilliant.

As for this :

"Your comments (or at least the snippets that appeared in print) may have done irreparable damage to my career, and many others like myself that threw all of their eggs into the Silverlight basket."

Well, firstly, isn't there a saying along the lines that you shouldn't ? Something pithy like "Don't put all your eggs in one basket", in fact.

Secondly, as anyone who has been an MS dev for more than about five minutes knows, the retool/reskill cycle on MS platforms is about two years. Get used to it. If you or your boss haven't taken this into account, you're doing it wrong.

Thirdly, stop whining. Did you really expect that a single skill set would last you entire career ? Go learn something new, pussies.

And fourthly and lastly, Silverlight doesn't get switched off tomorrow. The sky is not falling. Go back to your cubicles and prepare for roadmaps.

Dolphin speaks: Ditch the iPad, give me the Toughbook!

The Other Steve
WTF?

Originally purchased an Apple iPad ?

What the hell for ? I mean FFS, I'm a big fan of the fondle slab, but I am not filled with confidence in the ability of these people to communicate with dolphins if their first choice of platform for this task was an iPad.

Time will tell, I suppose, and we'll know if they've cracked it if the first translated sentence goes something like : "[untranslated sound : laughter ?] look, that monkey dropped his shiny thing in the tank, what a [untranslated phrase : relating to genitals ?] dumb ass "

HP whips out iPad challenger Windows 7 fondle-slab

The Other Steve
FAIL

Blinded by Hatred

"No expansion, HDMI ports, USB ports, Flash, or business apps, make it a toy for people with more money than sense. Apple sells hobbled toys to mass numbers of blind, coolaid drinking idiots who defend their fearless leader while bent over with pants around ankles. No thanks."

I think you forgot to read the OP, because the mere mention of tablets sent you off into your hate place. Still, look at it this way, you read 'tablet', your brain thinks 'iPad'. Steve Jobs has pwned your brain.

Neat trick.