Posts by DZ-Jay

Prior art?

So DARPA is creating a machine that will hang around stealthily, and potentially eat or burn anything in sight, and also steal the gas from your car?

Any parent of a teenager can claim prior art, then.

-dZ.

Bravo!

Thank you, Mr. Orlowski, for bringing a bit of common sense and rationality to El Reg. Seems like the hype of Web 3.0 is really exciting your brethren there.

Plus ça change..., as they say.

-dZ.

It's stupid

It won't work, and it will further alienate new users, especially in support and help fora. This is by nature, for if it didn't, the trolls can just log in with brand-spanking-new e-mail addresses.

I know that Ms. Bee's job is tedious and *mostly thankless, but effective. If an automated system is ever needed due to the large amount of traffic, then something like Slashdot's karma/moderation system could be used.

* Er, thanks Ms. Bee!

-dZ.

A big man?

>> "So was I wrong?" wrote Schneier. "Maybe. Okay, probably."

That sounds more like weaseling out of fault. He has not really accepted to being wrong; in fact, he continued arguing that shoulder surfing was "overrated", even though in the same sentence he seems to agree with his commenters that shoulder surfing is not a large problem anymore because of such masking.

If saying something like "Well, I'm still right, even though you have a point, and my new argument is orthogonal to my previous one. Oh, and by the way, I *may* be wrong. Probably." is accepting fault, then I guess Schneier is a "Big Man" indeed!

-dZ.

Reached... a crescendo?

>> "The very presence of Mono in applications used by Debian and Ubuntu reached a crescendo last week"

A "crescendo" marks a transition from lower to higher states, so essentially the crescendo is the rise to the peak, not the actual peak itself. Saying that something "reached a crescendo" is nonsense, since the crescendo is not the final destination to reach, but the way there.

-dZ.

Yeah, but...

What happens when your attention shifts towards, say, a scantily clad woman holding up a sign by the side of the road?

-dZ.

Re: "Titsup"?

@Richard_L._Kent_Esq:

You must be new here. Welcome!

-dZ.

Native code or Native-ish?

If I understand correctly, this is a novel definition of native code. By definition, native code is executed by the processor. However, it seems that this native-ish code is still going to be executed by the virtual machine, or will the virtual machine, upon encountering it, pass it verbatim to the processor for execution?

-dZ.

No problems here either...

In Windows XP and OS X 10.5.7 -- Just works, as it's supposed to.

-dZ.

Life expectancy

>> "Our one-year patient and graft survival rates are among the best in the nation and were a dominant reason in Mr. Jobs’s choice of transplant centers."

Does that mean that his life expectancy is about one more year?

@Ken 19:

Suffice it to say that he is now just properly "livered".

-dZ.

Re: Get well soon

Of course, the new liver already looks more slick and cooler than the old one.

-dZ.

Re: Charge for MySpace?

That's precisely the point, that it is not a viable business plan. Facebook will encounter the same reality, as soon as its popularity reaches critical mass and its expenses fly higher than the minuscule income from advertisers.

-dZ.

Re: What about programmable calculator emulators then?

@Vladan,

I understand if you did not bother to read the terms of the iPhone's SDK, but did you even read this article? Quoted within it was the relevant bit:

"An Application may not itself install or launch other executable code by any means, including without limitation through the use of a plug-in architecture, calling other frameworks, other APIs or otherwise. No interpreted code may be downloaded and used in an Application except for code that is interpreted and run by Apple's Published APIs and built-in interpreter(s)."

What this means is that emulation per se is not forbidden, but the allowance of arbitrary external context and code to be executed by the emulator is. It bypasses completely Apple's App Store and its validation process.

If the C=64 emulator came with a "game pack" of sorts, allowing only the execution of that set, I see no reason why they would reject it, just like they allow for similar packages from Namco and Sega.

However, the developer decided to include an open-ended platform which allows the download and execution of external content, and even ad-hoc BASIC programs. This is clearly a violation of the terms.

-dZ.

So, it's unnatural?

I'm not sure I get what their conclusion is. According to the following statement, among others:

>> "For example, male-male copulations in locusts can be costly for the mounted male, and this cost may increase selection pressure for males’ tendency to release a chemical which dissuades other males from mounting them"

it seems to be that homosexual behaviour in animals is an aberration that affects their survival, which excerts pressure to evolve mechanisms to avoid it.

Is that their point?

-dZ.

Re: So basically it does what other ...

Wrong again. Those services you mentioned exist in a *centralized* environment, where the host owns and controls the media and its access. If you want to send a message via Tweeter, or publish your pictures in MySpace, you'll have to adhere to their terms, and these include owning a large chunk of the intellectual property of the information you host on their system.

With Unite you don't upload your pictures or music files anywhere: they are hosted on your own computer. You are right, this can already be done by any user with a web server; but that misses the point: it requires experience and understanding of the technologies. The same I can say for any other "innovation" on the web such as those you mentioned: it could already have been done with other technologies, but their genius comes from a new interface or way of integrating older technologies more effectively.

Opera Unite is not revolutionary, and I never claimed it was. I said it fullfills the old promises of the WWW, perhaps because the technology and the state of the art has advanced enough for someone to put them together in a more cohesive and effective way.

-dZ.

@Rik

>> "That may seem a bit pricey, but if you're a high-achieving iPhone owner, it's pocket change."

Nicely said. However, as iPhoners, they pressumably already know they're younger, wealthier, and better educated, and so have no need to check out the report.

-dZ.

Re: Comments...

I see a lot of people deriding the Opera browser as not good enough or outclassed by others, and I wonder if they have tried it at all?

The Opera browser is a very capable and innovative browser. It is faster more stable than most others, and used to be since even before it was fashionable to be fast, snappy and stable.

In fact, many of the "innovations" included in Safari and Chrome now had their start in Opera.

The reason it is not as popular as Internet Explorer has little to do with the effectiveness of their marketting or the quality of their product, but with the barriers to entry into the desktop computer market, which is strictly controlled by Microsoft. They have been trying to rectify this and bring equality and justice to the market for almost a decade, and I commend them for doing so against popular apathy and other odds.

And before you start thinking I'm just a fanboi with an irrational fondness for crappy software, I'll have you know that I use a combination of browsers, and my browser of choice at this time is Firefox--only because of AdBlock. In my opinion Opera is far superior, faster and more stable than Firefox, and a worthy competitor in the current browser wars.

-dZ.

I don't know...

Needs more cowbell.

-dZ.

Bootnote

Did any of you commenters read the Bootnote?

"Before you lot start banging on about "what about internet at work or in a library", here's the Beeb's clarification on the group who want nothing to do with the interwebs: "This so-called self-excluded group tended to be older or retired, with 61% confessing to never having used a computer."

It continues: "For 30% of those currently offline the main reasons given for that choice was financial or lack of skills."

So, nothing to do with just not having a net connection at home."

-dZ.

Re: Intel Only

@Pete: You may want to check again. Apple has indeed said that Snow Leopard is for Intel-Only machines. They re-iterated this during the WWDC also, but it was said before. You can also find such information on their web page:

http://www.apple.com/macosx/specs.html

First item in the "General Requirements" section is:

* Mac computer with an Intel processor

Is it possible that the server version will support PowerPC processors when the desktop version will not? I guess anything is possible; though I wouldn't bet on it.

-dZ.

Some comments

Firstly, to Austin: Great article! You had me laughing out loud, while immensely enjoying the nostalgic elements of the article. Wit and humour--with a touch of relevance--is precisely the reason I read the Register daily.

@AC: "The missile knows where it is at all times"

Brilliant!

@A.A.Hamilton: "50% less mutual?"

No, it works well as 50%. If mutual is comprised of precisely two parties, then "50% less mutual" technically means "unilateral", which is follows the intent of the author. I say "technically" because semantically "mutual" is one of those concepts which are absolute, like "perfect" or "unique", which something either is or is not, wholly.

Re: Erm...

But icanhascheezburger *deserves* a bookmark!

Oh, wait--

-dZ.

Re: I dunn get it

@AC: "doesn't google show pictures of porn if you turn off SafeSearch and look for it?"

Perhaps, but it does not play the embedded videos automagically when you put your mouse over them on a screen-full of porn search result videos. You can click on the links normally to go the external site, but--and here's the kicker--you *don't have to*!

Instant pr0n preview FTW!

P.S. And may I say that the pr0n search is actually quite accurate and relevant. Er, or so I heard.

-dZ.

Re: Errr!

FAIL!

<https://ssl.scroogle.org/cgi-bin/nbbwssl.cgi> FT-real-W.

P.S. I think Bing (or is it "Bing!") warrants a looksie. I personally think it's trying to be jack-of-all-trades, which may not work out too well, but it may prove to be a worthy adversary to the allmighty Google.

-dZ.

Re: Obvious point

It's not necessarily the area of sensitivity that's important. By displaying the keys as triangular, the user is visual guided to press the key at its widest area, effectively missing any other keys. You can then increase the sense area of the key and still unambiguously detect which key the user intended to press.

Making the sense field triangular while keeping the keys square will cause the opposite effect: users may be inclined to press any part of the key not necessarily captured by the input sensor, and get frustrated when the input is not recognized.

-dZ.

Brilliant!

>> "Lead researcher Dr Alla Vein concluded..."

Dr. Vein? Participating on a research dealing with intracranial blood pressure? Really?!

Who makes this stuff up?

-dZ.

Nice,

This on the same day that Cisco is announced as the latest addition to the Dow Jones Industrial Average Index.

Fun!

-dZ.

Mac programming tips are for Mac programmers

To all those complaining about the article: May I suggest you skip anything from the "Developer" section; and perhaps more discriminately, anything from such section with the term "Mac" in the title.

I'm sure the nuances of the Mac OSX AppKit API and its undocumented features are of no interest to Windows programmers, but it may be interesting to OSX programmers (or those of us who dabble in Objective-C).

-dZ.

It'll fail flat

>> "It occurred to us that by doing this live submission of characters – which by the way was how the original instant messaging clients worked"

Back in the early days of the mainstream Internet, when dinosaurs roam the web, we had three distinct modes of personal communication: the public and very loud IRC, the personal peer-to-peer "chat", and of course, e-mail. People used to use e-mail for asynchroneous communication, and IRC for community building. Peer-to-peer chat programs (such as Talk and Powwow, among many others) allowed for real-time communication. This meant that you had to make a date to talk to people: you had to make sure they were there, and while you were chatting, they *had* to be there and pay attention.

Each character was transmitted in real-time, and you could see every typo, backspace, re-type stutter in painful detail. You knew when the other party took a bathroom break or if their attention wandered by the mere fact that you were staring at the screen and no characters had come in during the past few minutes. You also knew when they weren't home, for your chat requests kept failing.

Then one day IM, as we know it now, arrived. I remember ICQ when it started: it wasn't so much deferred "chat" as it was instant e-mail. You type a message, you send it when you're ready, you *may* get a response. You hoped that your party was there, but they didn't have to. They could be doing something completely different while talking to you, since it wasn't obvious when they were typing.

People saw the benefits of instant messaging, kind of real-time, but not necessarily; kind of personal, but not really; kind of peer-to-peer, but mostly federated. Eventually, real-time chat--with its attention and availability demands--died a painful death (IRC remained for various historical reasons, but did not survive in the mainstream consciousness). There's a reason for this. Perhaps it's the same reason why video phones, though technologically feasible, never made it as a commercial product.

But more importantly, all throughout, e-mail remained king. Some would do chat; some others would do instant messaging; there were even those who would do IRC. But *everyone* did e-mail. There was--and still is--an appealing quality to e-mail's apparent deference to time and immediacy. The recipient has the choice--and this is well understood and expected by all users--of responding at his or her leisure, or urgency, as the case may be. There's no obligation; though a response is expected, the sender knows not to hold his or her breath waiting for one. And that is good.

Now Google wants to go back to real-time, character-by-character chat--not as an improvement of instant messaging, but as a replacement of e-mail? Good luck with that!

-dZ.

Re: It is cowardly and something something else...

My impression is that their original intention was to be extra "cool" by showing off that their products are constantly being tinkered with, and therefore are forever improving. Hence, re-defining the term "beta" as A Good Thing (tm).

After the first year or so of some of their beta labels failing to show any sign of disappearance, a few bloggers and news analysts made a point of this: of course the beta label remains indefinitely, said they; Google is constantly changing the applications, so it's a new kind of software development cycle. The Google Kind of Beta (tm).

Apparently, this didn't catch on as well as Google wanted to. Well, it may have among the blogging, mytubeing, facetweeting, youspacing geeks, but not amongst the enterprisey suits and the serious technologists, who are the ones with the big cheque-books and the industry clout.

A "new kind of beta", indeed.

-dZ.

The real danger

Wow, I see lots of comments deriding Google's plans and their same-ol'-same-ol' view of the centralized vs. point-to-point paradigm. That's great! I guess I'm not the only one who distrusts Google.

However, they only seem to see part of the picture. This is just Google putting up a puppet show to distract everyone from their real plans. While everybody's enthralled with the puppets and their shiny toys, they hope not many are paying attention to their data retention policies, their government lobbying for a sanction monopoly on web data access, their land-grab of available information, and more importantly, their consolidation and centralised control of advertising technologies.

This is Microsoft's Hailstorm all over again; even Overture's data-collection dream! Google wants to control access to information--all information: health care records, books, tv, music, historical and geographical data, consumer purchases and browsing habits, etc.--and put ads in them. That's where the real money is at! They don't want to *own* the data; they want to *control* access to it, and own the right to sell advertising for this.

Where those other companies failed was in grabbing everything too fast, attracting public and government attention, and ultimately scorn. They did not have a puppet show to distract the masses. They were powerful corporations attempting to gain ultimate control on data access and sharing, plainly as day. We all saw it, and the governments of the world saw the money train and wanted their piece of the pie as well.

The real danger here is to keep viewing Google as the underdog, the innocent new comer, the small and agile software innovator. It is none of these. They are giving away access to their web applications because the real money is in the advertising business, and as long as they keep pumping out free software people will keep thinking they are just a software company. An innocent software company who can Do No Evil (tm).

But don't you pay attention to that, here's a little puppet with a shiny toy... for free! Look at the puppet...

-dZ.

Yawn...

Wake me up when DARPA takes on the personal Jet-Pack.

-dZ.

Re: Euro sterling exchange

It seems interpret the amount of currency exchanged by the U.S., i.e. the total amount of euros exchanged to Sterling in a given year.

Try the following, which gives the the conversion rate you are looking for, and compares it to other currencies too:

http://www65.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=euro+to+sterling

-dZ.

Re: @ Keith T

@Greg Fleming:

The difference is that Google is an index of web pages; it does not provide knowledge nor gauges the accuracy of it's results--and as a matter of fact, contains no content at all, just links to other resources. You ask it a question, and it will retrieve a list of resources that it thinks are relevant, based on various factors which may even include popularity. However, it only knows what's on the Internet, which as has been pointed out before, even by El Reg's Mr. Orlowski, the Internet is far from representative of the collection of human culture and knowledge.

Wolfram|Alpha is a collection of facts compiled from various resources (available to you for reference), most definitely *not* web pages. It is not an index of, nor it represents a "new way to interact with the Internet"; it is a searchable database with a computational engine and expert system that allows you to combine and correlate any of its myriad data points.

As the article said, the the data sets are currently few, so it is understandable that it cannot respond to every query. However, it should be understood that even this is no small feat, as the data sets contained are vast themselves. Don't think works of Shakespear, think the English language; don't think recent hurricane patterns, think historical weather data for the last century. Surely you can see the potential of such a system if its database continues to grow.

In more popular term, I would say that Google is closer to The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, while Wolfram|Alpha represents The Encyclopaedia Galactica.

I suggest you and others watch the demo presentation, where Mr. Wolfram explains and shows the capabilities of the system.

-dZ

Re: Didn't quite follow...

Simple: the Microsoft yanks preferred the status, as opposed to, say, the name or the quality, of the firm.

-dZ.

You forgot...

Bowman_2010: OMG! It's fullof starz!!!1

CmdConnor@SkyNet: Todays the day! everyones excited! In 5mins I push the big red button. I rly hope it works.

PiedmontMD: Townsfolks just brought this thing in that fell from the sky. they've asked me to open it. I wonder what's inside. stay tuned...

No problems here...

I just upgraded my Mac Pro and my wife's iMac without a hint of trouble.

Moreover, I read through some of those posts in the article and some of them seem to be due to user error. For example, at the bottom of the "Time Machine" issue thread, the user acknowledge that he just wasn't giving the program enough time to re-scan the file tree, and that everything went fine after he just left it run overnight.

Some other issues seem to pertain to specific models having incompatibilities with specific 3rd party extensions; no surprise there.

I think the problems with this patch have been overstated, as with many others in the past.

-dZ.

Re: The Asylum is awesome

And lets not forget the recent classics:

I Am Omega - (to coincide with "I Am Legend", which remakes the sci-fi classic "The Omega Man")

Alien vs. Hunter - (for "Alien vs. Predator")

Transmorphers - (for "Transformers")

On titles alone, they have my vote!

-dZ.

It won't work...

If you read the article from Wladimir Palant, his intention is to "aid" those users who would gladly accept ads from their favorite sites, but who are too stupid or lazy to add the sites to their whitelist, or modify their EasyList filters. He claims that these users account for the majority of AdBlock users, though he later on admits he has no way to quantify this, and that even those who comment on his blog are not necessarily representative of the full set.

I personally think that Mr. Palant is succumbing to the pressure put on him by the Internet community and the IT media. He thought he scored big when Mozilla took his side of the argument between him and Mr. Maone; however, some well read publications, including El Reg, have shone some not-so-positive light on his behaviour, in essence calling him a mere facilitator of freetards.

His proposal, though well intended, is thus reactionary and has been prepared in blind haste and is, frankly, naive and prone to abuse and ultimately, failure.

-dZ.

Re: @Andy Bright

Still... ewwwwwwwwww!!!

Double plus ungood.

-dZ.

Re: Google might be evil...

The article was just pointing out that Google is currently under inverstigation for other concerns, implying that the FTC investigation is not the first time Google is under the microscope of the government.

-dZ.

Re: Or..

I agree. Had the researchers considered how difficult it is to find rope and other small, sharp objects in the dark during winter?

-dZ.

Yay, it's Friday!!!

Thanks for the piccies. Now I know it all really happened.

-dZ.

Web applications?

Echoing the sentiments of Jake and others, I wonder why they are using web applications for ATC systems at all? You would imagine that such a critical system would require a better infrastructure than a stateless transport protocol and an immature scripting language, transacting over a public and hostile network.

-dZ.

What is this Page 3 of which you speak?

I'm a Yank (sorry, it's not my fault, I swear!), so I am not familiar with this Page 3 on The Sun.

Can someone explain what's on it? Is it really 16 year old girls showing their bare breasts in provocative poses?

If such is the case, I cannot imagine how the editors categorize that as "family content". Surely the descriptions above by other commentators are overstated.

Or else I am really oblivious to our cultural differences and I should get out more.

-dZ.