Posts by Blain Hamon

Re: Civil War

"After that we can get the Windows / Linux / Mac users up against the wall"

Meanwhile, the Amiga users would be rubbing their hands together, saying, "Soon, revenge shall be ours!"

AManFromMars is back?

Oh man. Either I've been reading the wrong articles, or it's been a while! How's everyone's favorite artificially intelligent commentbot doing? I've missed you!

Edit: Huh. Looks like I *have* been reading the wrong articles.

You know, I've joked about security through inability before...

Although this is probably intentional, Siri doesn't always listen like GVS; instead, you must press and hold the home button (or, if you have it enabled (it's disabled by default), hold the phone up to your ear) before it even starts listening. Access to the home button state (Both to read and to write) are not exposed to the app, so it's not currently possible to for the app to trigger this.

Mind you, what I just said was on a bog-standard iPhone. On a jailbroken iPhone, all bets are off.

Re: Bang bang!

"Europeans have no guns"

Wait, what has James Bond been waving about all this time?

Ever seen the scene in Mars Attacks?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VepS-IyKOLE

"They blew up congress! Ha ha ha!"

Smoke me a kipper, I'll be back for breakfast.

Dim ones? On the contrary, I found the humor in Red Dwarf to be quite brilliant.

Mine's the one with the Better Than Life total immersion video game in the pocket.

Re: Security guards suffer this all the time

Hobo dollars = Something not "real money"

SWITD = "See What I Did There?" misspelled

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligence_in_the_American_Revolutionary_War#Intercepting_communications

Nov 20th, 1775 was the first case of the Continental Congress received intercepted letters. By 1776 it was already noted that there was abuses of this practice. So I'd put the number of months spent by the US Gov't to find the proper balance at about 2,845 and counting.

Impressive considering that the US Constitution was ratified only 2,706 months ago.

Re: B3

"Of course - Hughes may actually be telling the truth, as in: all the major UK telcos now have the same relationships with government security services."

The best way to lie is to hide it in the truth.

We tried that already!

But no, the US Government is still malfunctioning after being shut down and restarted.

Edit: D'oh. OP added that bit and beat me to the punch.

Re: Chavistically

"all my wife talks about is the green 5c."

Your wife's a Chav? My condolences.

Re: They do it on purpose

Seconding reading the article. It's informative, interesting, and if you've studied psychology, makes a lot of sense in that you can see that happening. But I do have to add this warning: If you're in mobile development, even if it's not games, you'll want to take a shower after reading it. The tactics are depressingly sleazy.

> would you like to see a 451 message there too?

Certainly! Then there'd be instructions for the bloke to contact his government about reaching the page! It actually sorts itself out from there, really.

Also, there's already an icon for jumping to "Think of the children!"

Re: The new battlefield...

> limits the speed to 25mph when there's no valid GPS signal being received

I hope not, especially considering what would happen if a truck with one of these that goes into a highway tunnel, enclosed bridge, or other unintentional faraday cage around a fast thoroughfare.

Full disclosure: I work for Appcelerator.

The original post Jeff did had "Objective-C for iOS, C# for Windows and so forth." but line wrapping happened after 'Objective-', so it might by why the article author misread it as 'C for iOS'. Ironically enough, however, a lot of the low-level Objective-C runtime calls are pure C functions like objc_msgSend, objc_allocateClassPair, or NSSelectorFromString.

Fun fact: Because of all those @ signs in the keywords, Obj-C is a pure superset of C, unlike C# or even C++. For example, "int class = 5;" is valid C code, and will compile fine within an Obj-C file, where the C++ compiler would balk.

Re: They were SO close!

Depends. Would the newer models be able to handle stairs?

We need a blue phonebooth icon.

Re: OralFarce?

Fortunately, I can be arsed! Given Oracle Salesforce

A Faceless Recolor

Core Faecal Losers

Eel Coolers Fracas

Cooler Fee Rascals

Sell Seafarer Coco

Alas Feces Recolor

Coalesce Or Falser

Colorless Ace Fear

Scarce Resale Fool

Re: Quiet news day? El Reg?

> You have just regurgitated it, again, for the titillation of readers here.

Yes, and it worked wonderfully, causing both of us to read the article and then go to the comments section. We went for it hook, line, and sinker. You get titillated, I get titillated, El Reg gets advertising money. It's a win-win situation!

So what you're saying is

They should use a bit of water? Make the sand wet and you can grip it really easily and make sand castles.

I have no idea where the metaphor goes from here.

Re: Desktop 'dumped'?

So it's more that Microsoft said that they see the desktop as a friend, really, and wanted to see other interfaces?

I'd buy that for a dollar!

Lies, damn lies, and linkbait

Agreed. Or, if you want to consider that I hardly ever boot my MacBook into Windows (I have it mostly for games) but do a lot of heavy lifting on the MacOS side. Even if you divide crashes by time used, the Windows comes out on top because I tend to avoid stressing it as much on the windows side of things and rarely leave it running unattended enough to sleep (And thus have never had it crash), and I have had some failures to wake from sleep on the Mac side.

There's so many other variables that well, in conclusion, it's time for a beer.

Re: Hey, this is the actual business model!

Years ago, I actually interviewed with a company where that was their explicit business model. That is, their end goal was to build a product that looked interesting enough to get acquired, founders cash in, bail from large company, lather rinse repeat.

Re: Timeline is a generic term

One interesting thing is if you talk with a Microsoft employee, they don't refer to it as Word, but as Microsoft Word™. That is, the name includes Microsoft in it in order to make it unique enough to be a trademark. Same for Microsoft Windows™, Microsoft Office™, etc. How they pronounce out loud the little ™, however, I'll never know.

Re: Seems that digital copies...

Comparing beer to digital copies? That we're only renting them because they eventually exit? Isn't that rather taking the piss?