Posts by Ocular Sinister 189 publicly visible posts • joined 29 Aug 2008
I know its hard to believe, but bankers aren't the only people that like night life. The reason I chose Berlin post-Brexit (besides speaking passable German) was excellent night life on the same level as London. I've visited a few other cities in Germany, and while they're not exactly sleepy, they don't compare with Berlin.
(And, yes, some of those clubs are a bit 'special'...)
You almost certainly do - unless you are writing directly to low level APIs you'll be using C runtime, MFC, C#, DirectX, ADO, ... all of which are third party binaries and all of which may be updated by an OS patch. Worse still, even if you do write directly to kernel/GDI APIs the entire OS may be upgraded!
OSX and the Linux (not sure about BSD...) have ways to limit the ways that libraries can change, so this is mostly a problem on Windows, but still...
Surely it wouldn't be rocket (computer) science to make all the vehicles in the platoon communicate where they are going so a break could be opened in the middle if necessary. The vehicle approaching the platoon could also learn about the size of the platoon as it approaches. None of these things are possible with human drivers.
Umm... what the hell are you talking about? My personal files are on a separate partition, the software comes OS but I could mount /bin and /lib on a separate disk or partition if I felt like it. Even better than that, I can make /bin span several disks or partitions if use LVM.
In practical terms, this mean when I install a new OS I can be sure my personal files don't get destroyed because they are on a separate disk. My home folder is now well over a decade old despite upgrading and even switching from SuSE to Ubuntu and then back to OpenSuSE.
You can install software on Linux without the admin password, so long as you bypass the package manager and simply copy your files to ~/.mypron. Modify .bash_profile to start your software and you're golden. OK, this is not very sophisticated and its easy to spot if you know where to look, but plenty of folks won't know where to look or even bother (when was that last time you checked your .bash_profile?). I'm sure smarter folk than I can come up with ways to obfuscate all this to the extent that a casual perusal won't reveal anything amiss.
Ironically, X applications in the 90's suffered from the problem if inconsistent chrome and tool kits and everyone complained (quite rightly in my opinion) that it was hard to use. Now a days my KDE desktop is blissfully consistent - even non-KDE applications - and Windows apps are all over the place!
The only condition where glossy looks best is a room with no light at all - neither natural nor artificial. Given that most offices won't offer such a space, for office use at least matte is best. Glossy might make sense for TVs as you can close the curtains and turn the lights off to watch the box, though I'm not sure the advantage over matte is that great.
> . For example, "this application should *never* access the internet" or "this application only needs access to these libraries and this particular data directory,"
You can already using tools like hosts.{allow|deny} and chroot... oh, you mean on Windows...
> Or only an admin can flag/unflag a file as executable and executables are immutable.
Even Windows does this, so I'm not sure what you are on about.
> Would anyone else find VMS' version controlled files being on by default handy
Not really. Windows 7 & OS X does this and I've never found it useful - everything is checked into source control anyway. Similar tools exist for *nix, but I've never felt motivated enough to try them. My solution is put everything important (including /etc) into subversion which has the added advantage of supporting branching, labels and so on.
> That might be a little more interesting than a new gui.
Quite.
> SIM-less works fine if the consumer is in control
...
> Apple's idea was to let the consumer sign up for network access via iTunes
That, right there, is your problem. Can you even access iTunes on Android or Windows Phone (I honestly have no idea as I don't own a smart phone)? Even if you can, why would they allow you to transfer your virtual SIM to a non-Apple branded phone?
The boot time on my ancient Dell laptop went from > 60 seconds down to 3 seconds once I enabled Grub 2. My jaw literally dropped when I rebooted. Unlike the previous two releases, all my upgrades went smoothly so I'm pretty happy. That, and KDEPIM getting stable/useful again makes this an outstanding release. Kudos to the SuSE team.
I can only think Nokia are trying to replicate the success they had in the 90s with the swappable covers for their 6220 (I think). They don't seem to realise that the market has matured a lot since then and no-one wants those stupid garish covers any more.
So Apple will block all the Android devices they can - that is anything that isn't shit - and Microsoft will move in to the gap left.
Much as it pains me to say this, given this ruling I think there will be only two players in the mobile/tablet OS market by the end of the decade: Microsoft and Apple. Yes, you heard me right - Microsoft, not Apple are the big winner here, while Apple will be quite happy to keep the luxury end of the market, just like they always have.
> ...wanting to be a leader rather than a follower
You stopped being a leader when you got rid of the R&D people. You are now, and from hence forth always will be, a follower. Another HTC. Or LG. Or whatever knock of Chinese brand. Just with an OS that's a bit more shitty and a lot less open to Nokia customisations - even if you had the people left to do that.
Welcome to the low/no margin world of the grey box shifter, following the tune played in Redmond.
This is classic Microsoft - massively undercut the competition with a large loss leader. They could only do this if they made the hardware themselves as they have plenty of cash to burn. Plus they don't have to pay the OS licenses. They are going to piss off the OEMs, but frankly, I don't think they care - they are going for an XBox here and if they are the sole manufacturer I doubt they would loose any sleep.
The question now is - can Google and their OEMs cut the prices to compete with this? I doubt this will affect the Apple ecosystem much, so there will be little if any changes there.
They already have as they have made a lot of custom modifications. You could argue its not a Linux distribution at all.
The good news is they are heading in the correct direction - they are actively working on getting these changes approved for inclusion in Linux. This will benefit us all, especially the power management stuff they've been working on.
So, no they're not going from Linux to some other kernel. Quite the opposite.
I disagree - at least at first. I expect Microsoft to be heavily subsidizing tablets to get some presence in the market. It has lots of cash, so it can afford to do this. What it can't afford to do is let Android/iPhone take the market as their own. Microsoft has done this before, allegedly paying people substantial sums to switch from Netware to the vastly inferior (at the time) Windows Networking (aka Windows for Workgroups).
Microsoft isn't going to give up on the tablet market lying down, so Google, Apple et al had better get their hands to the pump!
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