Posts by Dodgy Dave

I think I found the problem...

The code 'if dev == woman ...' only works if there's a single woman in development, and you're testing to see if this is her.

Better would be 'if isWoman(dev) ...' to allow _any_ developer to, er, identify as a woman.

I would have suggested 'if isinstance(dev, Woman) ...' but that would be objectifying women...

Was Steve Jobs' "Thoughts on Flash" only five short years ago?

Oh, the irony

Anyone remember those "Nuclear power - no thanks" bumper stickers beloved of 70's hippies, the words being written around the edge of a smiling picture of, er, the sun.

Prizes awarded ...

...for best "Malware disguised as an Adobe Flash installer" punchline. Let 'em roll.

So, Google...

...I've got upwards of 20G of MP3s, 60G of digital photos, 100G of VMware images, and a terabyte or so of video sitting in front of me, not to mention 50,000-odd source files and assorted documents.

If they were already 'on the cloud' I might be able to start using them on Chrome OS. But they're not, and given that I have no more than 448kbps uplink rate it will take _nearly a year of continuous uploading_ to get them there.

It's a joke, less of a proper computer than an iPod touch.

Missed a trick with Vista.

Sounds to me like they've found a bug where, when you play the media file or whatever, the app changes the current directory to point at a network share before executing the media player .exe.

If so, it truly is an ancient vulnerability in the design of Windows, namely that the current directory is searched for named DLLs before fixed paths. This being a design flaw, it's hard to fix in the OS without breaking compatibility with lots of programs which rely on.

Which is why it should have been fixed in Vista, where nobody would notice...

Sticking it to The Man

I'm in awe of what Apple do technically, but reading this makes me want to punch the air and say "WOOHOO! Suck on THIS!" to all the DMCAtards in corporate America.

Am I the only one...

...who finds the Reg's scorn for user-generated content ironic given their penchant for pure trollbait 'news' ? They're like the Daily Mail, scandalised by paparazzi photos which they then just /have/ to publish.

DAB is the only way forward

So, what are the alternatives:

AM/FM: Yes, it's cheap, works perfectly well in most places, low-power, has no IP issues, and so forth. But it's Old, and that's bad 'cos manufacturers don't like Old, as they want to sell you New.

Internet: Technical issues aside, internet radio isn't owned by anybody, especially not those who currently own broadcasting. The BBC become just one more choice amongst thousands. The Government have nothing they can cash in on by 'licensing' (bear in mind that 3G operators have already paid a bucketful for the spectrum which would be used here).

DAB serves the future interests of the existing broadcasters and manufacturers perfectly well, so that's what you'll get. And you'll like it, because Stephen Fry will tell you it's OK to like it.

Google are not that incompetent

The 'four core stages' comment is so last century - Google are almost certainly an Agile shop and I imagine their code development could be quite chaotic.

However, what I can't believe is that they didn't - very early in the testing process - drive their car round a few blocks, then look and see exactly what they'd ended up with on the disk. They might just possibly be poor software developers, but they are certainly experts at data analysis, and I just don't accept this would have got through initial testing.

Here's another scary thing - even if they only collected 192.168.x.x addresses, a lot of the traffic collected might be between the user and a Google service; looking at a few headers will link it to the existing Google record on you, which is what they wanted anyway.

FSF can boil their heads

The GPL serves to promote closed-source development, by keeping its code base so far apart from the world of commercial software.

There are many developers who would be happy to contribute patches and improvements to a bit of open-source code if they could use it in their employer's products. With the GPL they can't (the Linux kernel being the exception that proves the rule).

So there is an entirely unnecessary set of paid-for toolkits and libraries out there whose existence is entirely due to fear generated by the FSF. Fortunately the world is waking up to this, and a lot of useful code is now coming out under Mozilla- or BSD- type licences.

Spot on, my friend

Here we have proof positive that Jobs is scaring developers away from the iPhone/iPad. How can software companies go to their investors and ask for $1m to write a major app, when once the project is finished and the money spent, there's a massive roadblock entitled "get approved by the App store".

It's crazy, crazy, crazy. Devs may be very happy to use Objective-C and follow "the rules" now but how can they know what the rules will be 12 months on? They change so unpredictably.

All we'll be left with is boob-wobbling apps written by students, who make a few hundred quid before they're "policed".

Think about it, Steve: why was MS-DOS, bane of the 80's, so incredibly successful?

'All video codecs are covered by patents'

Yes, including MPEG-2, which has been around since DVD was introduced in 1995, and those patents will expire soon. That's great, because the H.264 crew have to prove that any techniques used in Theora were /not/ anticipated by MPEG-2.

And there's no credible FUD about submarine patents on MPEG-2 either: if you had such a thing, you'd have held the DVD market to ransom by now.

Double standards

What pisses me off is the way everybody's conflating the possible theft of an object with the leaking of Apple's trade secrets. Probably Gizmodo shouldn't taken it to bits, but Apple got it back in the end. That ever happen when you lose a phone? The theft, if it ever occurred, was minor.

The big deal is that someone got one over on Apple's corporate secrecy, and THAT ISN'T A CRIME. The cops, even those bought by Silicon Valley, should know that.

(BTW - why didn't Apple put a big sticker on it saying 'if found call XXX-XXXX?' )

Shame on you, El Reg

Sorry, but the whole premise of this article is full of sh*t.

"Pretends they were never there" - uh, what? An app is no longer in the shop, like creme eggs or Word 2003, and that's somehow Oceania not being at war with Eurasia?

"Wi-Fi hotspot detecting applications are the latest on Apple's list of verboten apps" - no, it's apps which use private APIs which are verboten, and they have *always* been so.

"even developers are being left in the dark" - you have an explanation from a developer, right in front of you.

Yeah, bad on Apple for letting it in in the first place then having an arbitrary change of mind, but if you really have to froth at the mouth every time this sort of thing happens, I'm deleting you from my bookmarks.

Charge 'em under the DMCA!

Maximum fine of $1.25m, for _actually stealing money_ repeatedly from a major American business (or its customers)?

Banks - take a leaf out of the RIAA's book, and charge these nobodies with copyright infringement - say $80,000 per card inserted into the machine - it must be worth at least as much as the sort of track Jammie Thomas would listen to. Best of all - you get to keep the money at the end of it!

Cheers

DD

Can I have some of their drugs, please?

In what universe does a customer go to a vendor, and asks to buy their software, then tries to impose contractual conditions on how that software came to be written?

"I'd like a copy of Microsoft Office, written in Ada, using ClearCase for source control, developed entirely by US citizens who were wearing ties at the time."

They are still abusing a monopoly

This data, which certainly the Post Office have spent time and effort maintaining, is valuable for just one reason: everybody uses it. It's only selling point is that it's a database that the public have learnt off by heart.

Imagine the alternative: Google gives every street in the UK a Googlecode, and starts a price war with the PO over access costs. Then MS will want to give you a Bing-zip to get a piece of the action. Next, the GNU Free Street Index Database, which will fragment into rival factions. Before long, the punter will need to remember half a dozen of the blessed things, so no-one will bother and we'll be back to square one.

In other words - the PO have only come to have this valuable bit of IP in their hands because, when it was originally developed, they had monopoly power. It is not reasonable that they should tilt the playing field by charging other delivery services to use it; that's clearly not in the interests of the public.

Why are postcodes any harder to maintain and distribute than, say, DNS records?

Cheers

DD

Just STOP

What we absolutely don't need is another syntax to remember for everyday things like variable declarations, for loops, and if statements. Java, C++, C# and Objective-C all manage it, and what's the point of a fast compiler if you need three goes to get your brackets and semicolons in the right place? Python succeeds because you can get going with virtually zero knowledge of its syntax.

As a spiritual successor to Turbo Pascal, TCC (Tiny C Compiler) is worth a look, BTW.

They've created a monster...

...which they can no longer control. Even if they're not really evil. Ha ha.

"we just care what you do" is bad enough for me. They'll pass on, in all 'innocence', behavioural information to third parties who can be as evil as they like with it. Very soon, I predict, the prices you see in online stores will depend on what Google's database thinks you can afford.

Oh, and however much Google says they won't go mining its records to identify 'pre-crime' personalities, they'll happily and silently hand it over to your local law enforcers, who will.

Don't trust him!

Just because we can't find evidence of a backdoor in GCC doesn't mean there isn't one.

See http://cm.bell-labs.com/who/ken/trust.html

Cheers

DD

Intel started it

Back in the good ol' days, computers were REAL computers. If you wanted to examine the registers in your CPU, you could find the board with them on and probe around with a 'scope to your hearts content.

Then corporate megalomaniac killjoys Intel decided to target us alpha-geeks by making everything so tiny you couldn't even *see* the vacuum tubes any more, and sealing the whole processor inside an "integrated circuit". Paranoid Secrecy Capsule more like - what are they afraid we'll find out?

Then they did it with storage: they did away with magnetic core memory to stop you checking that no-one had been stealing your bits. And the other day, I took all the platters out of my hard disk just, you know, to give them a polish, and the bastards made sure it "failed" when I put it back together. I *know* they made it break on purpose, just to scam an eye-watering £30 out of me for a replacement.

No sympathy for Danjaq

So Danjaq are responsible for protecting the Bond brand, and they had something like 30 years to register 'Dr No' as a trademark themselves, before this other lot pitched up.

What exactly do they do to keep busy during the week?