Posts by Blain Hamon 336 publicly visible posts • joined 6 Apr 2007
> Request permission to use "species from the family Ursidae are likely to defecate in forested areas." as often as is possible in conversation
Granted. In fact, I may have to start using it myself.
I was going to go into detail about Apple's improvements over the Parc (overlapping windows, menu above instead of below, representing files as icons, etc) vs MSFT's offering (maximizing a window), but Sean Timarco Baggale's right. I'd rather be making obtuse geeky bear references.
Expect engineering salaries to start at 40-50K, plus stock options. Throw in some managers and some higher ups, and all the vacation time they've accrued, and it all adds up quickly.
Also, "terminated head-count item"? I feel dirty even just quoting the phrase. George Carlin was right about euphemisms...
Does that mean you can get the kit, declare you refuse the terms of the EULA and will use your own (BSD/Linux) OS, and MSFT, by being the vendor, must offer the refund?
Aha. And now they can't do the 'contact the vendor'/'contact the OS maker' BS. They probably will, but hrm...
> they appear to just be a pricing con
Got it in one. It's to allow US companies to say, 'This lot is only $99*!' with '*$199 with $100 rebate'. That way, most people will spend the $200 thinking it's only $100, and the few who remember to jump through all the hoops, will get the rebate check months later, if it wasn't 'lost' along the way.
Better yet, have a missile attack where the first missiles are duds that are covered in retroreflectors (or reflective paint).
The defense system shoots the duds, probably destroys the duds, but the duds reflect enough energy back at the defense system (Given spread and slight variations, it'll be enough to destroy the laser housing instead of going back into the chamber. And after the defense has melted itself, shoot the REAL missiles.
Frankly, this would be much better served in destroying a house using popcorn.
"This excuse has been trotted out time and time again. Are programmers that expensive or are companies that uncomfortable with making updates?"
Yes and yes. There's a lot that declare, 'If it ain't broke, don't fix it," and then will never admit to it being broken.
The next step should be for Google to post how they did the plugin so FireFox, Opera, (maybe even Safari) et al could get into the IE-inplace-replacing action.
Does this mean that the MSFT stores will be staffed with only the most cynical and mercenary ex-apple store employees whose loyalty can be bought?
Hey Reg? Considering how Bill's off saving Africa these days, maybe we can replace his icons with ones for Ballmer, who actually IS making these boneheaded moves? Maybe just a sweaty howler monkey...
Fine, fine, I'll click some ads, but could you get some advertisers who put up ads that aren't boring? That blue NetApp bit gets duller every time. I don't mean more flash that looks like the love child of a powerpoint presentation and clip art, I mean actually interesting ads. For all the wit I've come to enjoy with El Reg, the ads look even more like out-of-touch stuffed shirts.
Maybe see if you can sell thinkgeek some advertising space, especially annoy-a-trons on BOFH pages or USB-powered doomsday devices. Surely you can squeeze some affiliate money from links to reviewed stuff. Perhaps even selling some playmobil kit, "Recreate this scene at work, then use the playmobil!"
@ Oh Dear...
On the US keyboards, shift-3 is #. But over here, we call it the pound key since it derived from a shorthand for 'lb' in terms of unit of weight. Shift 4 is $ and option-4 is ¢. I don't recall if the US Keyboards offer a lb-as-in-currency easily, but shift-option-2 will give you €.
@Frothing Rabid AC at 21:47
You, er, do realize that hosts file is probably only read on boot and file change, and the IP strings are probably stored as 32-bit ints either way. That means any lost efficiency your computer suffers from this great injustice is less than the time it takes for you to press a single key on your keyboard. You might have said other stuff past that, but really, you lost your credibility so I didn't bother reading onwards.
(At first I thought his post was AManFromMars, but AManFromMars makes much better sense and conversation.)
@Adrian Esdaile
Yes, speaking as an Appletard, such things did happen, during the dark ages of System 7.5 and MacOS 8, when CompUSA didn't know how to sell Macs. (To be fair, Apple didn't know how to advertise Macs back then. See http://www.youtube.com/view_play_list?p=DFB11914224D1D9C ). All 10 of us Mac users would hang out at computer stores to act as sales people for Macs, sometimes not even getting a tee-shirt for it.
But we did it to keep Apple alive (And this was when Apple going bankrupt was a very real danger), for the very simple reason to piss Will22 off.
But the truly scary thing? Not that MSFT is astroturfing. Not that Mac users would do this for Apple for free. It's that MSFT is trying to copy plays from the old Apple's 'panicked last-ditch thrashing effort' playbook.
Based on this, MSFT's next advertising scheme will be to have infomercials with fictional families.
If the Aussie ISPs want to kill this cold, have them give the Minister what he wants. That is, an entire day where any attempts to connect to the outside world is met with a redirect to a site saying, "The site you wanted may contain stuff that could go on the naughty list. If you don't want this happening for good," and then provides the necessary contact information to politicians to properly give them an earful.
It is my fondest hope, that some day, phoneset makers will realize that a good phone is defined by the craftsmanship of the design and the responsiveness of the UI, not on 'how close we can make it look like an iPhone until someone tries to use it'. Sidekick (RIP) and Android got this. Why must we have so many also-rans that don't?
If someone wants an iPhone, they'd be buying it (or waiting until the exclusivity expires). If they don't want an iPhone, they won't be buying something that looks like what they don't want.
ASEM itself takes advantage of the fact that "a core value of EFI is the preservation of intellectual property", and appears to be near-paranoid that its development effort will be stolen by others, making full use of EFI's support for cryptography to obscure its code and prevent interception of its updates.
Anyone else see the irony here?
Re: fav applications, you can take a look at MacPorts ( http://www.macports.org/ ) or indeed build from scratch, if not someone already doing a build. To give you an idea on some of what comes standard on a Mac (10.5.8, ask again on Friday and you'll get specs for 10.6)
Python 2.5.1,
Ruby 1.8.6 (2008-08-11 patchlevel 287),
GNU bash version 3.2.17(1)-release,
ksh sh (AT&T Research) 1993-12-28 s+,
tcsh 6.14.00 (Astron) 2005-03-25
GNU Emacs 22.1.1,
VIM - Vi IMproved 7.2 (2008 Aug 9, compiled Nov 12 2008 15:36:47) Included patches: 1-22,
X11 XQuartz 2.1.6 (xorg-server 1.4.2-apple33)
And when you install the (free) tools, you get GCC 4.0.1
Full-on Intel32/Intel64/PPC32/PPC64 was one of the major things of 10.5. (And, with the unix subsystem in 10.4). So yes, part of the 6GB is indeed from jettisoning an entire half of the executable code. I wager this makes the optional Rosetta support rather heavy, as it means installing both PPC sections back (Unlike the 68K->PPC transition of System 7, PPC can't call intel or vice versa, 32bit can't call 64bit or vice versa) of the OS and frameworks, but not the utilities.
> Or the fact that you have to pay for every minor incremental update to OSX?
If you have 10.4, 10.4.1 to 10.4.11 is free. If you have 10.5, 10.5.1 to 10.5.6+ is free. There's significant changes in terms of added API and functionality between 10.3 and 10.4 and between 10.4 and 10.5.
Do you really need random renaming to know the difference? Should Apple rename 10.6 as Mac OS OMGWTF the same way WinNT 5.1 was called XP, and WinNT 5.2 was called Windows Server 2003? Does the product name really determine what's a major and what's a minor upgrade?
Back to topic, the OS is beta, and bugs that are fixed by the time of GM could have caused inconsistencies in the registry. Fixing the registry isn't as easy as replacing dlls, so the advice to nuke it from orbit and start over makes sense. I think the registry itself is a hideous design flaw, but it's not some vast conspiracy here. Reinstall the OS, get a fresh registry, and move on.
All this and only 125km range. So a road trip vacation to the mountains in the US that would take a 200mi (~320km) 4 hour trip into at least two 3 hour stops to fully recharge the battery, provided you can convince someone to let you plug in your car when the gas station's down the street.
Basically, this thing's only good for going from point A to point B. Provided you own both points, the parking's protected, and they're in the same city.
"What are you talking about, exactly? Can you point me to the articles with info on the DRM added to Vista that isn't also in XP and the benchmarks which measure the performance hit from it?"
http://www.forbes.com/2007/02/10/microsoft-vista-drm-tech-security-cz_bs_0212vista.html
For a video card to play certain DVDs or other media in Vista, it must pass certification that it's secure. That means, instead of video coming from DVD, being decoded by the app, and sent to the video card, composited, and set to the output, it must be decoded by the app, re-encrypted to avoid unauthorized video card drivers from capturing the video to disk, decrypted by the video driver, composited, and re-encrypted before going out HDMI or visually degraded to avoid unauthorized capture.
Performance of encrypt/decrypt vs simple copy is left as an exercise of the reader.
Meh. It gets old after a decade or two. You grow up, realise that OS flame wars are a waste of your time, and nothing good ever comes from it.
More so, you begin to realize that even if you don't use windows in the slightest, it's still important that it gets fixed. Think of all the spam and botnet traffic that reduces availible bandwidth upstream. Think of all the searchable data on you, stored on unknown servers, where a security hole could lead to identity theft.
Schaudenfraude is much less sweet when it can affect you as well.
> If there is no alternative to PayPal then eBay has become its own escrow agency,
> just like an offline auctioneer, and becomes fully responsible, as it would be eBay's
> responsibility to verify buyers' legitimacy. This makes chargebacks easier.
Interesting, but how much you want to bet that the EULA will change overnight to weasel out of any sort of responsibility gained?
Apple doesn't allow Java or Flash now. SilverLight's got a snowball's chance. But even if it wasn't for the politics, it'd be unlikely. It's well known that the iPhone uses an OpenGL ES (Read: Competitor to ActiveX) chipset and an ARM chip at about 600 Mhz. Silverlight would be unusable, even if.
> ...now if it was all mobiles then that would be more of an issue...
Googling about, I find a "SilverLight for Mobile," which I am guessing is akin to Flash Lite, but they couldn't bring themselves to say "SilverLightLite." Given how slow SilverLight was on TomatoQueen's Dell, do you think they'd have a full-fledged SilverLight on a 2-300Mhz mobile device? I highly doubt it.
So that'd mean all mobiles will be unable to run SilverLight full, not just the iPhone.
Full Disclosure: I make an iPhone app, but all the information here is publicly known.
> For a while I was under the impression that stuff ripped for iPods or bought from the itunes site had a strict limit on the number of systems you could migrate it to, before it stopped working
Obligatory Apple fanboy explanation: Unlimited iPods, etc, 5 computers at a time. At any time you can de-authorize a computer to free up another slot. If you forgot and can't get to that computer to de-authorize it, you can also de-authorize all computers (once every year or so) to free up all five slots (And, of course, reauthorize the computers you do have). You can also burn the music to CDs quite easily (up to 10 per playlist, then just make a new playlist) and rerip them if it really matters. As for Macs lasting longer, I've still got a 10 year old Blue and White G3 that I fire up every so often, so yeah.
> Did Jobsy relent on that turn of the screw, or what?
Believe it or not, it's in Apple's best interest to get rid of DRM (for music*). To put it cynically, the iPod lock-in is in usability and trendiness, not DRM. And Apple can sell more tracks and make more money without DRM, as well as not have to deal with the increasing arms race of DRM enforcement.
The best chance for a DRM-free music future is that the middlemen are now panicking over Apple having the power to cut them out of the musician->consumer path. The only way to weaken that possibility is to have strong competition and commoditization at the music store level. And the only way for that to happen is that anyone can sell their music to iPods or other music players. And the only way for *that* to happen is DRM-free songs. In trying to lock in consumers, the middlemen have locked themselves out, and are scrambling to undo it. Ironic, isn't it?
(*For video or software, on the other hand, well, Jobs wears two hats.)
Paris, because she has a slot free, but there might be middlemen.
Fair enough, if MSFT didn't have the update server up 24/7, we'd be deriding its instability. But this article is quite useless. How did they measure uptime? Responds to ping? Like Mr. O'Connor pointed out, uptime doesn't mean much if the updates don't actually, er, update.
Although, really, given Vista SP1 woes and WGA... isn't there times where we just wished the update servers were down?
A large site that features space for you to post information, personal details that will come to haunt you, pictures of your cat, and annoying songs that play before the user can find the off button, littered with ugly backgrounds and flashing banner ads.
Am I describing Myspace, FaceBook, or Geocities in 1998?
Paris made me post this.
A real honeypot would hide the actual site, so that only the defacer would see the defacement. If this was at least a halfway-decent org, the hard drive would have been pulled for forensics already, with a restored site up already.
It might be as smart as vandalizing a panda car, but if days pass and the panda car's not only still gang-tagged, but being driven about like such, what does it say about the cops?
"The problem with defending the purity of the English language is that English is about as pure as a cribhouse whore. We don't just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and riffle their pockets for new vocabulary." -James D. Nicoll
PS: The latin is actually decimatus, not decimate. And Merriam-Webster includes the definitions "to reduce drastically especially in number" and "to cause great destruction or harm to" So there.
I don't have an iPhone, mostly because I have a phone with telnet and ssh and I don't want AT&T. Does this mean that everyone has the exact same needs as me? No. For some, it's perfect.
Before 1.1.1, Apple said, "The update might not work with mods." That was shorthand for "The update does a total wipe and reinstall because that's the best way to upgrade a known system. Don't install if you've hacked it." And the iPhone will work fine with 1.0.2 still; this wasn't a forced install at all.
Apple said that they won't support mods. If I take an iPhone and drill a hole through it, it's perfectly within my rights. But it's within Apple's rights to void the warranty because of the drilling. If I take an iPhone and put sortware or confuse the firmware so it's an unknown state that's difficult to test against and an update depends on a known state to not brick, it's perfectly within my rights. But it's within Apple's rights to void the warranty because I destabilized the firmware.
Do I want the iPhone to be hackable? Yes, heck yes. But until they do, I just don't buy one. No need to foam at the mouth at them. Dollars speak louder than words.
This might actually work if it's not touted as a flying car. It's a drivable aircraft. The difference being that not everyone and their brother will have access to one, it's just for pilots. Think of it as a Cessna that doesn't need to be on a trailer to carry about.
At $140K+ a pop, you wouldn't dare park it on the streetside anyways. And like they've said, you'd need a pilot's license, and preflight checklist, etc. etc. That weight limit is a toughie, however. It's 2.2 lbs/Kilo, so you're talking 600 Kg.
2005:
http://www.zdnet.com.au/news/soa/Torvalds-switches-to-Apple/0,139023165,139183867,00.htm
(Hardware, mind you. Running Linux on a pre-intel PowerMac G5)
2002:
http://www.apple.com/science/profiles/gosling/
(Okay, okay, Java is proprietary too)
Since the beginning:
http://developer.apple.com/tools/gcc_overview.html
G'won. Tell them about how iWork uses the proprietary formats of tarballed .tiff and .xml in directories, instead of Office's clear and free .doc, .xls, and .ppt formats.
> But it's inconsistent for critics to take Microsoft to task for pushing an update that was necessary for the continued smooth running of Windows Update and then gripe when the update gets undone by a repair disk.
What part of "I want to update only when I want to update" is inconsistent? It's not "update when I don't want to update" or "don't update when I want to update."
> At least I can go to Apple's site where they have older versions available.
Apple's good about 7.5 and the like ( http://www.info.apple.com/support/oldersoftwarelist.html ), but here's a challenge. iTunes 3.0, or any version that'll run on MacOS 9.
> Vaseline? Cooking spray? A little on the trunk and you're pretty safe.
Like Carl mentioned, the US isn't short on people without foresight. Besides, this is the stuff of people driving around in stolen cars in broad daylight (dumb) or under the influence of alcohol (dumber). They're not going to be bright enough to defend against this, and with a DUI, the cops could strap a cellular tower on the trunk and the drunk wouldn't notice.
> Windows-only for now, Mac later.
Seen this before. When it's said, it's either empty words, in which later means never, or it's a port so horrid that it might as well never been released.
> Steve Jobs couldn't care less.
Spot on. iTMS isn't competing with subscriptions/playsforsure/zune. It's not even in the same league. When he does compare with something, iTMS is completing against P2P, saying, "Ours cost $1, but the time saved versus trying to track down the song on bittorrent makes it well worth it."
Until NBC et al realize that they can never complete on price, that ease of use and quality is the ONLY way they can compete, it's going to be more of the same.
That's the sticky wicket. A company in a country has to abide by that country's rules. If a company wants to do business in a country, they pretty much need to have an office there.
So a global company has to follow all the rules of all the countries they do business in.
So boycott all vendors that do this stupid questionairre. Fine. Order the parts and build your own. Only problem is that the chips are made by Intel, AMD, etc. Who also have US offices. And we're back to square 1.
Leveno is playing to its audience. This is not a laptop I'd buy. This is not a laptop you'd buy. However, there are people out there with business degrees.
These are people that go out and buy BMWs. These are people that need to feel privileged and exclusive, despite herd mentality. Who think leather is a good idea for something that would likely slip out of your hands and break. And who knows, surely there's 5000 of these executives that actually like Vista, because it sounds enterprise-y.
And with so few laptops (But meaning $25mil in sales), it'd be easy to have a half dozen different phone numbers, one for each language.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
