Posts by ElReg!comments!Pierre

Re: wonder how long before they fix that?

My guess is, they won't. I don't have a horse in this sorry excuse for a steeple-chase, but Apple started that with their steady "the specs don't matter, we offer better user experience" stance* that they episodically spice up with "our specs are actually better than the competition's"**.

When the "leader" in the field engages in baseless banter, downright libel, and generalized bamboozlment (Apple vs Samsung anyone?***), you can't really blame the upcomers for trying a watered-down version of the same.

With the latest row of failed patent lawsuits all around the world including an upcoming major slap in the US, traditionnally its stronghold, Apple's new clothes seem more and more see-through to the rest of the industry, and I doubt that Amazon will ever back down even if the original claim proves false.

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* which may make sense, for a category of users I wish I could avoid. As for me I like to make my own "user experience", thank you very much.

** demonstrably wrong most of the time but you can't blame slimy marketting people for being slimy: that's what they are paid for. True for Apple's as for anyone else's.

*** not to mention the cherry-picked comparisons with a 5-month-old competitor product when launching a new gizmo... hello iPhone5, so you're saying you're kinda sorta better than an Galaxy S3 in some ways -most of which are design-based, some would say "slavishly" inspired by the "far more popular" S3-, and that's your main selling point, 5 month late in a year-based release market? Way to innovate.

Re: Ahhh, the French

Sorry, almost forgot "lolos", "obus" and "boules" (the latter only encountered in Quebec I think).

I'm sure I forgot a few others...

Re: Annoying brats (bis)

> A good followspot operator can do a pickup from dead straight onto a head-and-shoulder spot from several hundred meters away - one end of a stadium to the other. We use telescope sights for this as they don't affect night vision.

I'm sure it's true, but the minimum approach speed of, say a 747, seems to be 155 mph. A lot of that is going to be horizontal, but the cockpit widow is still a few square meters, and most of it at an angle that will just reflect the ray. Moving at a freaking minimum of 155 mph. I hope you're a good aim.

Re: Annoying brats

> Sighting is relatively simple.

Oh no, simple it's not. It is feasible, but not simple. Certainly too expensive for the average joker. Certainly too expensive (and too easily spotable) to justify that kind of a report.

Re: Buying Sun was...

"Trying to find an alternative to Virtualbox?"

if you are flush VMWare stuff is just much better than VirtualBox. Like, much, much, much better. They don't even compare. At the very least one order of magnitude difference in speed.

If you are short in cash but are using hardware that supports virtualisation QEMU comes reasonnably close to VirtualBox in terms of speed and ease of use. Certainly much closer than VirtualBox is to VMWare. I for one moved all my personnal VirtualBox machines over to QEMU the instant "VirtualBox" became "Oracle VirtualBox" (yes, I very much dislike Oracle and its habit to screw over customers. In that case Oracle's official roadmap including removal of a lot of base I/O features from the free version did it for me. They kept their word, too.). Not looking back so far.

Re: Does this only affect the Oracle (ex-Sun) JVM? There are others...

I remember reading somewhere that some of the previous bugs (or similar) did exist in at least one other JVM (an OSS one) but had been squashed when they were found. I cannot remember where I read it or which JVM, so you might want to do some fact-checking, but there you have it.

As this new one apparently arises from Oracle's poor patch, they should be specific to Oracle's JVM.

I did not really check seriously though, as I try to avoid using Java whenever possible -still have it installed on most of my machines, natch- and I would certainly never allow it to run within a web browser, ever.

(I know, some persons kind of have to, but in that case I made my own luck really: that was one of my criteria when choosing a bank, and I did rewrite some stuff at work -in python mostly, and I had a webmonkey bake some PHP also. He dislikes Java as much as I do so it did not take much persuasion, I just gave him an excuse in case someone higher up the food chain would throw a hissy fit over it. And yes, I know, Python and PHP are not perfect yadda yadda yadda. Watch me not giving the slightest hint of a fuck. At least they're not Oracle's, to list only the top reason)

Re: Also, no Freenet.

From what I understand these holes exist when running java code from a web browser. With Freenet you are essentially running a proxy, so your browser does't need to run any java code. Just disable java in the browser (or use a simple java-less browser like dillo or even w3m, linx etc). Although Freenet does suffer a lot from being written in Java (well, it's a pig to run to begin with).

Re: 2 birds with one stone

"Surely the job of a programming course is to teach the fundamentals of programming, etc. The language(s) used are likely to be choosen to make teaching those fundamentals easier.

Do you really think students will finish a programming course and never learn another language ever again ?"

While it may be true on paper, in reality every language has its quirks and oddities and the first laguage you learn does have an influence on how you think about problems, and how you solve them. Of course you can learn new languages, and perhaps shift views as a result, but it's certainly far from instant and one could argue that you will never completely lose the reflexes induced by your first language. I have this co-worker, when reading his code in any language you can just see that he is trying to emulate GOTO every couple tens of lines or so. Yes, that's a pain. But who am I to judge? My code probably has a lot of quirks that annoy him as well.

Also, when virtually everyone knows a language it tends to be used, regardless of the merits of said language. And when students have spent the past couple years programming almost exclusively in java, what language do you think they'll pick for a new project (if given the choice)?

Re: Stop slapping at symptoms!

I second that, but to be honest Java started to smell like a "resting" fish long before Oracle came in to liberally add another layer of fail to it.

(BTW the current situation is exactly why RMS and others were warning people against Java since the dawn of time, only to be seen as loonie zealots by too many people. Well, guess who was right -again!)

Re: Impossible (re:self interest)

"They rely on the open source community for their products."

Indeed, they do, heavily, both of them (and Oracle more than Google, actually). But only one of them is giving anything back, and that ain't Oracle.

@ Bruno Girin

"Saving as PDF gimmicky? I beg to differ: I use it all the time for documents for which I am the only author but that I want customers to be able to open. Invoices for instance are a typical use case: I create they invoice, they read it (and hopefully pay me), PDF is ideal for that sort of use cases and LibreOffice produces flawless output."

PDF output is not entirely without use, I agree. The example you give is a quite poor one though. PDF is widely used for quotations and invoices only because of the need to some bureaucracies to keep a paper copy of everything (which, in _some_ cases, makes sense), AND he common misconception that PDF cannot be tampered with. In hard technical facts an "informal" GPG/PGP or MIME- signed (optionally, encrypted using the same techniques, if confidentiality is an issue) pure-text email is much more secure and much, much smaller than any PDF.

Moreover, when collaboration is limited or absent and PDF output is wanted, non-WYSIWYG systems are far more reliable than so-called "office" suites. I'm thinking LaTeX of course, but also lout (which I use the most these days as it produces flawless PS, is extremely small, and extremely easy to script, extend, or otherwise customize).

Saving as PDF is useful for presentations and/or brochures that are not to be printed. But again, it is far from flawless, as the PDF format is remarquably vague, so it sometimes happen that you get PDF documents with embedded graphics that just cannot be displayed on a regular computer because of silly DPI specifications (usually more of a problem with printing than with viewing, some printers have little memory). More often even, you get PDFs writen in a combination of exotic fonts (as text, not as graphics), but DO NOT include any info about the fonts used besides the name, so every other character looks like a comic strip insult when viewed on any machine but the one it was created on. Very practical, I can tell you.

PS, yes. PDF, just asking for trouble in the hands of the clueless masses. Although LO's (and before that, OOo's) default PDF output is quite near to flawless, as noted above by someone else.

Therefore, I maintain that PDF output in an "office" WYSIWYG suite is mostly gimmicky. But still nice to have.

Re:"Microsoft Office Compatibility Pack for Word, Excel, and PowerPoint File Formats"

It came late, doesn't work for the versions of MSOffice that Fihart mentions, and does not always work properly.

But at a pinch it will do, I guess.