Posts by h4rm0ny

Re: MS going for the niche markets!

>>"1%, no, it's even lower than that. Which percentage of the that 1% of gays actually care about getting married... This probably relates to a PR project that is actually geared towards less than 0.1% of the population of Microsoft.

Even if we accepted your belief that a company shouldn't stick up for minority rights due to their being a small part of the market (something I would be very happy to take on separately), the edifice of logic you have built on this belief is flawed. Firstly, you take no account of the level of resource. I mean you compare it with the percentage of people who use Linux as if, say, spending a large amount of effort in making MS Office on GNU/Linux or providing Linux images on Azure (which they do, incidentally) would be more worthwhile than making the occasional political statement in favour of human rights or clarifying their position.

One wonders how you see things in your head: "Shall I post that blog comment saying we're in favour of marriage equality? No - they're only 1% of our target market, have a couple of dozen engineers spend a few months implementing DX12 on Ubuntu, that's 3%". You see how poor your logic is? You can't say "they're 1% of our customers, a public statement isn't worth while"

The second and even more telling way in which your logic is flawed, is to assume that only the 1% (I'm just going with your questionable figures here, btw) care about marriage equality. YOU may not have any gay friends but many of the rest of us do and even though I'm not gay myself, I still want equal rights for those who are so this "PR exercise" as you term it, doesn't just appeal to "1%". It appeals to most people who believe in equal rights and that's most of us, I would hope. I think you missed that because you don't want them to have equal rights so it didn't occur to you.

Finally, there are plenty of well-qualified people out there who happen to be gay. A company that has an explicit corporate culture of tolerance is likely to be seen as a preferable employer over one that keeps its head down from any political controversy and doesn't say a word. So a further win that you've neglected, gained by simply clarifying a position and going on record as in favour of a basic human right for all.

Microsoft is one of the largest companies in the world. Far from THE largest but pretty big and a household name. If they come out in favour of marriage equality and say they're pushing for it, that does a lot of good. Though not in your eyes, obviously.

Re: Ophidia in herba

Well now you can do both!

Re: h4rm0ny He's obviously dangerous

>>"But that is not the cost just of guarding him. The Police have to provide policing and a protection detail for the Ecuadoreans anyway, just as they do for any foreign consulate or embassy, and so the figure quoted is a massive stretching of the truth"

Is it a massive stretching of the truth? Please do tell us what the normal cost of guarding the embassy was before Assange took residence there. You presumably know seeing as you're dismissing the £10million figure as pretty much incorporated into the regular necessary operations.

>>"Personally I'm quite happy for my taxes to have paid for him to be locked up in an HMG prison or one of his own making."

Seriously? You prefer that £10m of police resources are spent on keeping this person locked up than on violent or otherwise dangerous criminals? Or even just investigating every day crime? The police are underfunded so you can't say it doesn't impact other police work. And if you genuinely despise him that much or regard punishment for embarrassing the US government by leaking true information as that much more important than normal police work, your priorities are badly messed up.

Re: Cut! or hack?

>>"Interesting that the Sony haters are still deluding themselves that it wasn't north Korea, despite everyone with knowledge saying it was."

Whether they did or they didn't, you more show your own lack of knowledge of the security world than the person you replied to with this comment. Plenty of intelligent people doubt whether it was really North Korea behind the attack and there are good arguments why it may not have been. If you're calling news outlets like Ars Technica and El Reg. "deluded" for questioning whether it actually was NK or not, then you're going to have to back that up. And it has NOTHING to do with whether or not someone is a "Sony hater". Seriously - is that a thing? I thought it had eventually died off after that rootkit fiasco finally dropped out of the news.

Re: Ads?

I'm fine with sites having ads on them (so long as they're not auto-playing video or horror of horrors include sound). In fact, I *want* El Reg to make a nice profit.

All that I object to is tracking. So where possible I block that without blocking the ads. This does devalue the ads very slightly perhaps, but it's what I'm willing to offer.

Re: hmm

>>"no one wants to adopt a new platform today that won't exist in five years time, condemning MS to continued failure away from their x86 home turf."

If you use the new Windows Runtime APIs, then your software would work fine on both the x86 Windows and the ARM version. It's a simple configuration option at compile time.

Re: Indolent Wretch Not so fast

>>Similarly, when Google and co do their analytics and tell their customers "next year is not going to see a rise in lamb burger demand" they are helping make the economy more efficient"

All of your post up to this point is supportable and reasonable. And then you make this giant leap from what you're talking about to Google's profiling of people being the same thing.

Re: Lol

Oh please, forgive us for using phrases you don't approve of, grand[pa|ma]. We are young and foolish and haven't yet learnt that new phrases shouldn't enter the English language.

Re: That picture

>>"Why not? That's been tried with the white causcasian male contingent by many US corporations, and it turned out that the ugly and the handsome had equal quotients that were utterly incompetent, so we might as well settle for the less painful to look upon (let's enjoy that form of discrimination until it too is banned). "

Well seeing as you want to support discrimination (looks, racial and sex - what you don't want to throw in orientation while you're at it?) then you need to brush up on your statistics. Assume your hypotheses to be correct - that incompetence is equally distributed between looks, race, sex, etc. You conclude that it is therefore irrelevant if you appoint based on one of those things. Statistically, that's invalid. In any sample where the relevant selection criteria are equally distributed without regard to other qualities, discrimination on those other qualities will reduce the proportion of competent people. Think it through - any inclusion of irrelevant selection criteria must be at the cost of relevant selection criteria. There are few things I like less than physical discrimination, but bad statistics is one of them. Well done you on getting the double.

>>"Wouldn't you rather we had a few Chippendales in Parliament?"

No, not really. Parliament is showbusiness enough without pandering to the cameras even more. It's a very supportable position that Nixon lost to Kennedy because television had become common. Al Gore reportedly lost (if you accept that he did) to G.W. Bush in significant part due to physical image. When he fell off a stage, his rating dropped several points. Are you sure you don't think your attitude is damaging?

>>"And judging by the Labour party, they are positively discriminating against nice looking women. Is that what you're in favour of?"

Well no, rather obviously from my point that looks should be irrelevant to such careers, I'm not. I think you could have worked that out from my first post.

>>"You have a point, but equally you knew what I meant."

I'll remember that next time I review someone's code. Doesn't compile, but I knew what he meant.

What is the security message and do you get it with any other browser? Different browsers can very occasionally have differences in the certificate chain that cause security warnings on one but not the other. Alternately, if it's something like Third Party cookies or something there's probably a setting. What's the message? It's probably not a conspiracy.

Re: Sigh!

>>"Tell me, as a Google shill, how much do you get paid in goods, services and/or cash?"

Nice - you can't even keep on the morale high-ground when the article starts you off up there!

Lots of people like Google's services and are fine with Google nosing through their life for saleable bits of info. I'm not one of them but even I recognize that someone can feel like that without having to be paid to think it. Really, unless someone has a *very* good reason to suggest that someone is paid to post, "shill" is not a word that should be thrown around.

>>"1. Saying that Professor XY wants to manipulate people to think that there is a man made climate change, does not mean that man made climate change does not exist (if I read the article correctly, that is the conclusion that the author is trying to manipulate readers to understand). "

I've just re-read the article. Nowhere does it say whether AGW is or isn't real. Every statement in this article on the subject directly relates to whether or not the survey says what the professor says it does. Here's one for you - re-read the article, see if you can find any part that says or implies what you say it does above, and if not, retract your statement.

Re: more FOSS adoption by Microsoft

>>"What is so incredulous about the mindset of most Microsoft dupes is that they forever denigrate Linux, BSD, Darwin based Apple OS X and all other Free/Open Source Software (FOSS) technology with incoherent drivel criticisms"

Assuming by "Microsoft dupes" you mean posters who defend MS products against criticism on these forums (as I often find myself doing, dogged being another and so on...), I actually don't recall any of us making "incoherent drivel criticisms" of OSS. On the contrary, I think most of us respect it. Want to back that up because to me that just sounds like manufacturing enemies.

Re: Daily Mail

If it were the Daily Mail they would have posted pictures of the unfortunate victims so that their readers could be suitably shocked at how someone could have posted them online.

The Daily Mail website is that most unusual of websites - a porn site that condemns porn.

>>"The only thing they are actually saying is that unless the artist signs up to the new service terms then they'll stop paying the artist when someone else uses their content in an upload."

Isn't that thing actually quite a big thing? The artist in this case certainly seems to think so and should Google be able to force people to accept their terms or let them do what they want anyway?

Re: Java is shit

>>The same Boeing 747 is like shit on transporting sofa inside NY Manhattan area ..

I can read about six different computer languages and three human ones, and that was none of them. I'm sorry, but... what?

Re: Just Asking...

IE being embedded in Windows isn't due to "spaghetti" code. OS's and browsers are growing ever closer and we are reaping the benefits of that. Why implement HTML rendering and vector graphics and javascript at the browser level when you can build support for this directly into the operating system and gain the benefits of direct use of graphics hardware and other performance gains. With Windows RT (the API, not the OS) you can code apps directly in HTML5, CSS and JavaScript if you want, no browser needed. Tight integration is one reason Metro IE11 is so quick.

You make it sound like careless coding when it's actually design with good reasons behind it. If you don't agree with all that and think that browsers and OS's aren't growing closer and closer, just look at ChromeOS - that's an operating system that actually IS a browser.

Re: Inconsistent stock market reactions

In short: Nobody has ever successfully convinced Wall St. that they can't have their cake and eat it.

Re: Credibility?

Well to him an Internet of Things includes people so maybe he doesn't see a difference between people and objects - they're all just an IP address to him. ;)

Talkie the Toaster counts as a new job in that case!

>>"1 vote for Battleship. the film that is the very epitome of what is wrong in Hollywood"

Battleship is surprisingly watchable satire. You realize that no-where in the film did the crashed alien vessel initiate hostilities and despite their clearly superior firepower they always hold back from pressing their advantage each time the humans are forced to back off? I'm not even convinced the alien ship was a military vessel. The entire point of the film is that the humans are the aggressors attacking a damaged alien ship whose sole aim in the movie is to "phone home". They trot out all the American Military Hero tropes and film it from the action heroes' points of view, whilst at the same time making it clear that the humans are needlessly provoking war.

It's a brilliant indictment of the American military industrial complex and Hollywood war movies. I worry when I read posts like yours that people missed that and just took it as a straight action movie.

Re: We will tell them it's free - Muuhahahha

>>"I build and support my own devices, and I suspect that MS will class this collection of bits as "the same device" only until I change the motherboard. To be fair, mobo (and thus CPU + RAM) changes I always fresh reinstall for anyway, but I'd like to be sure that Win10 will actually let me reinstall onto "this PC but with different CPU/mobo/RAM in" and not require I buy a new copy of the OS to do so. "

I'm going to make an educated guess and say you'll be out of luck. If you have the full-price version of Windows, you should be able to use that through as many rebuilds as you like. The cheaper OEM version is actually what is sold to resellers for putting on pre-built devices. It's just that many people buy those instead because they're cheaper. So if you get this upgrade and you're upgrading from a non-OEM version I expect that you'll be fine. But if, like most, you're upgrading from an OEM copy then the new version will be the same licence. Meaning you'll probably be able to get them to re-activate it by phone unless you're unlucky, but technically they might not and I wouldn't count on it.

Re: Oh, dear...

>>"I'm sure that any of these companies could do far better if they just doubled their prices. Do you seriously think that it would have customers flocking to it, even if it were proven to be better?"

I'd be willing to pay around a 15% mark-up over their competitors if I knew it was better. If Vodafone was £20 a month and Three was £25 a month but I knew that I would get solid reliable service with Three, I would choose them. There is a market for quality.

Re: Hidden costs.

>>"This tablet is basically to fool idiots into locking them into Microsoft's new pay for services platform."

And what do you think Google giving away their OS for free is about? Charity?