Posts by ElReg!comments!Pierre 2711 publicly visible posts • joined 22 Jun 2009
"(side note I did not have any of these issues when I ran the Beta's on the same exact hardware)"
That would be 1 year-old hardware then. That's why. Of course if you're going to run modern software on antique hardware, you should expect problems. Stupid people trying to install the latest OS on obsolete hardware! Go buy another computer with Windows7 preinstalled, then you can talk.
Although little can be done to help the poor guy, "not much of a deal" tends to prove that Jobs lost contact with reality. A name change IS a huge deal even for mainstream products backed by deep-pocketed companies and top PR agencies. For a niche shareware vendor it merely means death.
But short of buying the company there's nothing Jobsie can do, presumably. He can't afford to lose the iPod trademark, which is what will happen if he doesn't defend it.
Funny that, I remember a dozen articles on this site explaining that there could and would never be a disconnection in the UK, ever, and that there will never be assumption of guilt either, ever. Hey it appears that disconnections AND assumption of guilt are the core of the new legislation finally. Who's the lying chill now?
Also, I very much like the vagueness of the terms. Encrypted layered routing will make it technically impossible to determine whether a packet infringes on someone's copyright or not. But fear not, billionaires at the BPI should still be able to buy Ferraris to their 16-yo kids as Mandy now has the right to make anyone using encryption liable to compensations under the copyright law.
China is an Evil State (TM) so I myself advocate leaving Chinese restaurants without paying. Oh, and stealing in Chinese shops. And any "made in China" item in other shops.
The US are not less Evil (TM) a State, but they have a huge advantage as far as boycott goes: There is nothing made in the US anymore, especially nothing worth stealing, so protester are stuck with burning stars 'n stripes.
Same as Murdoch bravado was just that, this tool will be no Google killer. It could be Wolfram Alpha killer though, if Alpha is still alive at that point. Can I find my aunt's blog by entering her name into Dallas? Nah, I didn't think so, either.
Oh, and btw Google sometimes outperforms some very specialized and mature "data unlocking" tools, so I really can't see how it could be killed by a system that is still mostly a flowchart on MS's higher management meeting room whiteboard. If there was a significant need for such a tool, the market might very well be locked down by the likes of Alpha and Google's own Squared before Dallas is even released.
Yup, how considerate of them. Also, MS employees tend to avoid shooting their neighbours in the face, which means they act with honesty and professionalism. Even for them, the law that forbids murder count as a valid rule.
Wait , what do you mean by "it is not optional"?
"Microsoft called the violation a mistake"
Read "we knew, but we thought we could get away with it. That was a mistake."
Maybe I'm a bit too cynical, but seriously, given how the MS lawyer crew scrutinizes every single bit of code released on our planet to see if they could slap a patent infrigement case on the developer's face, I find it hard to believe that they did not spot this stone in their own garden. That's not even MS fault actually. The US IP protection system works like that: given that you lose your rights if you fail to defend them immediately, big corps are encouraged to steal ideas right, left and center. If they don't get caught, they /de facto/ own the stolen goods, and if they get caught they just have to correct the distribution conditions with no penalty whatsoever. Meanwhile, the small guy who want to protect his work has to spend several tens time his annual income in legal fees to have his case considered -with very little chances of success because he can't bribe (sorry, lobby) the court. Rotten system.
Thumb up this time, Fail icon for the system.
To use your own style, I humbly* suggest to you that you might not know what you are talking about as much as you think you do.
Let's have a beer and forget about this publicity stunt that will unfortunately spread bad science (as publicity stunts tend to do). I'm sure that the ground boffins involved in this project will have the correct controls (including same diet, same light cycles, same breeding enclosure, and /tutti quanty/). Teaching students that they can compare this to their own shelf-bred butterflies is still a shameless pseudoscience publicity stunt though. Nevermind, they probably _had_ to include this BS in the project so as to get more funding. Just another example showing that politics-driven funding of science projects is a bad idea. Also, I'm wondering how much they got from whomever owns the Gatorade trademark.
* my addition
** Just so that you know, Butterfly eggs have an oblong shape and are usually led on whatever surface is available, which means they end up in an infinite variation of angles relatively to gravity, but still the embryos always develop the same way. Development is therefore unlikely to majorly depend on gravity. As opposed to frog (for example) eggs which are spherical and for which the polarization towards the vegetative (vitellus stock) and animal (the future critter) poles is thought to be driven by gravity. Also this double asterisk bootnote doesn't have an origin in my post, you can stop searching.
"I suggest to you that you are focussing on differences in the setups that are not important to the experimental design and are not as different or as significant as you think, especially since you don't know that they space butterflies will be fed anything other than gatorade. You simply assume otherwise."
I assume that space butterfly will be fed standard lab butterfly diet, which is definitely NOT gatorade, especially for the larvae. You're thinking Imago, and that's actually the less relevant stage when studiyng development.
And the diet is actually probably one of the less important among the points I cited. The most important would probably be temperature, light cycles should prove crucial too, and I would expect humidity and air quality to play a significant role. Actually any of these points (including diet) would probably have more impact on development that the reduced gravity. I would expect gravity to have significant effects on frog developpment (the onset of embryo polarity is mostly gravity-driven in the frog if I remember correctly), but butterflies are not frogs (well, last time I checked they weren't).
So we encourage kids to compare how butterfly develop in space on a special diet in a million-dollar vivarium (presumably with controlled temp, humidity, atmosphere an light cycles) with how they develop on earth while fed gatorade in a cardboard box near the radiator in the back of the classroom? I'm betting they'll make a lot of interesting findings. (the last sentence being heavy sarcasm in case you didn't get it)
On my left, wearing an austere anthracite suit synonymous of efficiency (with the corresponding price tag): Paid "the Beancounter of Doom" APP-LI-CATION!
In the opposite corner, in the hawayan shirt and covered in ad stickers, synonymous of annoyance but free-as-in-beer: Sponsored "U-Kewl" SER-VICE!
And now standing in the middle and loosely disguised as a referee, please welcome the best of both worlds: Micro "I Fuck You All Sideways" SOFT!
Let the fight begin!
Charge ridiculous prices for licences for not fit-for-purpose software. And still get the advertisment revenue. That's a win-win situation. Too bad MS' definition of "win-win" doesn't take the customer in account. It's "we win, and then we win again"...
"Alan Johnson gave some figures during the Select Ctte hearing: 39 people extradited from the US to the UK with no quibble at all from the Yanks. None have been held back.
OTOH, there are 7 people the US wants the UK to handover to them who are presently being held back from the US because their case is up before the EUCHR."
So 39 people have been extradited from the US because UK presented evidence. On the other hand, among a non-specified non-evidence-backed extradition demands from the US, 7 have been held back pending local examination -presumably for being even more preposterous than the bulk of the other, granted requests. How does it make the treaty not lopsided? It doesn't change the fact that the US don't have to back their claims whereas UK has to. And it doesn't say how many brits were extradited -without evidence- to the US as a counterpoint to the 39 evidence-based yank extraditions. From the numbers you cite it could be 40 gazillions requests, of which 7 has been delayed (not even denied, just delayed).
See, I drink less than the missus: she usually has 3 half pints in a typical night out, of which zero are left unfinished. Me on the other hand, leave on average 1 non-empty glass. So I must drink 3 times less than she does, by your logic. Of course that's ignoring the fact that I drink a dozen pint before not being able to finish the last. Details, details...
Ah, good old US of A and its patent office... perfect example of a patent that should have been thoroughly laughed at, because it violates basically each and every principle of the patent system: it's been done before, it's a mere idea, and it's rather obvious. It's still been granted. Colour my ghast flabbered.
The voluntarily over-rigid terms prevent abuse by the sharks and ensure that credit goes where it's due. More permissive open licences (BSD?) ensure that no successful open project can emerge: at the first hint of success, MS and the like would jump on the code, vampirise it and use it's leverage to force-feed it to the world under a closed commercial license, smothering the original open source project.
No Gnu icon, Tux will do.
"It needs a new OS built from the ground up to be fundamentally secure. Written from scratch, without worrying about end features and groovy interfaces."
VMS?
A few of these exist. The problem is that the buyers (be it Joe Bloggs for his living room machine or James Greenbackz for his multi-billion dollar company) *demand* shiny interfaces and groovy stuff with touchy-feely user-friendliness all round (talking puppy! Yay!). And they don't give a shit about security.
The world doesn't need a new OS, the world needs new users (preferably leading-L-free).
Your headline is more than misleading: the latest -and not-so-latest- Linux is indeed fully patched, only Red Hat left a hole in there, which is actually not even there anymore in their "latest" (as you put it) release. So "Bug in latest Linux gives untrusted users root access" actually reads "Hack in old RHEL gives users root access". And even so, coming from the guy who discovered that a person running programs as root can get root access (Shock! Horror!), I have my doubts.
"for all those penguin-killing data centres popping up across the planet."
I think you'll find it's just a relocation matter: from the cold inhospitable ice deserts to the insides of comfy penguin-powered boxen with shiny lights... well of course there's this slightly stingy "grind'em to powder" step, but Apple does the same for their pixie-powered machines and no-one objects. MS is safe on the ethics front (since you were going to ask) as no-one likes maggots to begin with.
¨If you actually read the EULA, you would know that if you do not agree to the terms, you are entitled to a full refund. It is not post purchase because in any real sense, it isn't purchased until you you agree to the EULA.¨
Ok kid. As anyone over 12 years old would know, legally it is purchased as soon as the seller gets the money. Anything else is snake oil and/or utter stupidity. I read the EULAs, and I very much disagree with them, but in no way have they the power to redefine the law. And the law says that a sale occurs when money changes hands. MS and co managed to bribe themselves get-out solutions (the infamous ¨film yourself refusing the EULA and you might be entitled for a refund. Just send us 3 e-mails a day for 5 years, and we´ll give you 50 pounds¨ thing). But post-sale EULAs are still illegal in most civilized countries. That´s actually the only way you can realistically get a refund under the ¨Refuse the EULA" rule: They will just ignore your request until you threaten to challenge the post-sale EULA thing. Suddently they will give you your 50 bucks...
¨You'll be breaking the Microsoft End User License Agreement (EULA), meaning you're potentially running a pirated copy of Windows.¨
Well the post-purchase EULA system itself is illegal pretty much everywhere. So MS is force-feeding ¨kid-rape-suicide-bomber¨* version of its OS on 80% of the population... the remaining 20% being either ¨pirates¨ or NIX types. Looks like the only way to *not* break the law is to avoid Microsoft altogether...
*if people who ignore ambiguous sale/licensing arrangements are ¨pirates¨, I suppose people who willingly violate explicit legal rulings on the very same matters might as well be described as kiddie fiddlers... or terrorists... or both.
This finger is not a thumb. Well, my attorney tells me to say it is. But you know what I mean.
"Finally us basement dwelling, beard strokers might get a decent Evolution plugin for Exchange! Not having to go through that web-fronted abomination that is OWA!"
As much as I agree with you view on OWA, I must point out that I used the Exchange plugin in Evolution for quite a while (our 4th-floor-dwelling MS-worshipping gnomes recently got a clue and added a standard IMAP interface. so I obviously don't use the Exchange plugin anymore). It is far from perfect, but it kinda works already. Quite decently, I would say. Of course it depends on your definition of "decent". If "decent" means "flawless", then I guess you're right, but if "decent" means "gets the job done at the price of some fiddling", nothing new on my radar.
And who told you about my beard-stroking habit?
"Gee, back when you were supposedly opening up one member of your bloatware office suite it didn't occur to you to apply that strategy across the whole product line?"
As much as I agree with you on the principle, there's a little technicality that might have played a role here: The so-called "MSOffice suite" is actually a bundle, not a suite. Deep down, the file formats are actually not fully compatible. That's even still true with OfficeOpenXML. There are still a number of -basic- tags that are not compatible across the, erm, "suite". If you want a suite, try OpenOffice (that won't solve the bloat issue, though. Bloody bloated OpenOffice. And you will need Java. Bleuargh. But that makes it kinda cross-platform). Or you could try the Gnome Office "suite" (Abiword, Gnumeric, Evince, Evolution; but then you're stuck with PDF as an cross-platform interchange format for onscreen presentations, and that won't cut the mustard in today's world. Plus, it's not really an integrated suite either).
My favourite mix is currently Evolution [1], Gnumeric [2], OOImpress [3], and OOWriter [4].
Of course, whenever it's down to paper -or ps/pdf- output, I use good software instead... because let's get real, all WYSIWYG/point'n'click desktop apps are crap anyway.
How do yo like my purple hairdo?
[1] the Outlook that doesn't suck -matter of taste. Some might like security holes.
[2] the Excel/OOCalc that doesn't suck -well, not as much as Excel or OOCalc, at least.
[3] sometimes you just *have* to get a .ppt input/output workflow. Life sucks.
[4] sometimes you just *have* to get a .doc i/o workflow. Life sucks (bis). And OOwriter has better compat with word2007 than word2003. I kid you not. On one of my machines I am running both word2003 and OOWriter; any word2007 .doc document that features comments or tracked corrections is virtually illegible in word2003, yet displays fine in OOWriter. Docx documents cannot be opened (natively) by word2003, yet you can open them in OOWriter (the comments and modifications might be a bit messed up, but it's still good enough for emergency NIH grant submission!).
The signs are telling. Once they would just have stolen whatever idea looked good, and force-fed it to the world as if it was theirs. Now they're begging for people to provide them with ready-made code for their crappy software. Quite telling. Especially after the Vista and Vista Twodotow episodes: when a software maker with bottomless pockets, backed by the "Most Powerful Government on Earth", decides it's time for a new start with a fresh new codebase, you think "behold, it's the return of the Mean Lean Coding Machine". When they miserably fail to deliver and have to hack together a few gadgets on an old codebase in a hurry, then 4 years later *still* don't deliver a new codebase, something smells fishy. If I'm not mistaken, Windows7 is still Server2003 at heart... that wouldn't be a problem in itself -you could even say that letting the server team design something reliable, then having the desktop team sprinkle the shiny stuff on it, is far from stupid- , it's just a big miss on the "fresh new codebase" front. Especially as it means that the desktop version lags behind the server one, not a terribly good thing when you make most of your money out of the desktop market. MS has a hell of a momentum, and very deep pockets indeed, so they might get out of it with minimal damage, but they'll have to put their act together rather fast... more than two years after the release of Office2007, most major publishers and conferences in my field still don't accept their new file format, even in the US. When was the last time this happened to MS? Next thing you know everyone will accept ODF files. PDFs for presentations, even (one can dream).
Something is rotten in the state of Redmond, indeed. And the king's buffoon (or is it Buffoon King?) is not even dead yet. May that be the problem?
"Note to Palm: just write your own damn iTunes Library–accessing software. If RIM can do it with Desktop Manager's BlackBerry Media Sync utility, why can't you?"
Well, the Apple fanbuoys and Apple ongoing efforts to nullify Palm probes generate such an amount of free press.... If I was Palm or Apple, I couldn't dream of a better press-coverage stunt...
"As the owner of two female dogs who also like having their tummies rubbed (and no, I'm not rubbing anywhere else)"
I wonder how bestiality nipple-fondling is regarded in your country... If you're a Briton, you should probably hope that El Reg won't give your IP away to the plods. You dirty dog rapist, you.
... maybe you shouldn't put it on the web for the whole world to see. Or you could host it yourself and tweak your robot.txt accordingly, or put it behind some kind of autentication.
You know, ALL these online services have this things called Terms and Conditions that states that you *do* *not* *own* the content you put online through them anymore. You ticked the box, didn't you read the text?
I was with you until the "Christianity and in fact most religions have this backwards.". That is not true. No religion can exist if the adepts do not believe that the deity predates the faith. It's probably because the human brein is not terribly good at dealing with abstract concepts (that can be explained by evolution -just to piss off the American christians a bit more). Abstract concepts can only be grasped at the price of a very extensive mental exercise -that's school for you-, which can take a whole life -often more-, when dealing with *very* abstract matters such as the nature of the Universe. Think Chords theory. That's why kids learn to count with small items, and believe they can hide by masking their eyes. That's why you always have to resort to the tired "fabric that bends around objects" analogy to explain gravitation. That's also why, no matter what you can say, most people won't believe that Shroedinger's cat is both alive and dead at the same time, although it quite obviously *is*, and although this paradox was actually a *simplification* to make quantum physics more understandable. And that's why religion doesn't work very well without the faith in a pre-existing deity (As far as I can tell the GSM hasn't buit anything remotely equivalent to the pyramids or Stonehenge). Actually these limitations of the human brain in terms of abstract concepts is also why many "scientists" (in the faith sense, not the education sense; "sciencetists" might be more appropriate) fail to understand that gods *are* almighty and omniscient, provided they have enough worshippers, and provided said worshippers are a majority of the general population (there are quite a few ways for worshippers to *create* this majority thing even in the absence of an "objective" statistical majority, but that's another story. Ask me about it if you dare!). That's because they crystalize the power and knowledge of their worshippers. I might sound like a nutter right now, but think about it, you'll realize it's true. It has nothing to do with handey-wavey brain power, it has to do with extreme dedication, teamwork, and distribu-centralized(1) information. Gods erected the Egyptian pyramids for dog's sake (2)! At that time our ancestors (mine, at least) were struggling with that new-fangled "wheel theory" concept! Even now we can't figure out how they did that. Same goes for Stonehenge and co.
To summarize, IMHO religions are not bad because they are irrationnal -I believe in a lot of irrationnal stuff (i²=1? seriously?)- but because if I can choose I'd rather not feel like an ant with no choice over my life whatsoever. Of course some people can feel free just because they're allowed to wear a Looney Tunes tie on Fridays. Or because they're allowed to carry a firearm in the glovebox. Lucky, lucky people. How much is it for a partial lobotomy?
(1) that would be "centrally coordinated network of priests" in Oxford-approved English
(2) the ancient Egyptians had this handy trick that made their leader a god. Any similarity with Staline, GW Bush junior, or the latest recipient of the Nobel prize for peace, would of course be purely coincidental.
Can anyone explain why, after voting left, right and center a dozen times on the Alpha website -from the very same machine, just reloading the page-, I was at some point served a "sorry, you can vote only once in this poll" message? And why after a reload was I allowed to vote once more?
I mean, WTF? Said machine is granted with fixed IP powers. It is reachable by DNS lookup from anywhere in the world, and I was not even logged in as another user. Is that a miracle?
"Paradox! You can't have a God *and* free will, the major cornerstone of the Abrahamic religions."
You're new to this controverse, ain't you? That point has been extensively discussed by theologists for the last 10 decades (at least). That includes a few conciles where old farts with nothing better to do with their life tackled that issue quite extensively. I am still not convinced, even though I have been discussing this quite a lot with some renowned theologists (two of whose happenned to be my grandparents), but , as S. Bee's fave T-shirt puts it, "I think you'll find it's more complicated than that". Never underestimate the rhetorical power of sex-deprived brilliant minds (come to think of it I wonder how often the average quantum physicist gets laid. But that's another story)
"If the majority say God exists, does that automatically create him"
Actually from a sociological point of view that's pretty much how it works, yes. Some would even argue that god's existence outside of the collective mind that "created" him makes little difference, if at all, and is pointless to discuss.
So, I guess that it will be a critical update, just as WGA... or not?
I'm guessing not many people will ever see the ballot screen at all, lost in the "non-important, don't even bother to look at it, you don't want it anyway, honest" updates. Heck, MS might even create a special category just for this one...
I'm not sure whether I must applaud or hiss. I feel like lauding you efforts to control your kids' online behavio(u)r, and your resistance against peer pressure. But on the other hand, you seem to be blaming the technological advances, and especially "open operating systems", whatever this might mean for you). The most "open" OS, when it comes to user mangement, is Windows. I suspect you were blaming *NIX-inspired OSes such as Linux or BSDs. Just so that you know, these OSes were *designed* to allow the admins to keep a firm grip on the figurative users' nuts. If you want to tightly control what users can or cannot do with a computer, at any level, these are the best solutions on the market, by a considerable margin.
Anyway, as far as controlling your kids' access to the web and when you know what you're doing, the OS is not really relevant -and if it was, Windows would be the weakest link. I went on to type a whole analysis but halfway through I figured that it was far too much work for dubious benefits, so I'll let you search the web by yourself, you'll know what I mean.
First, thanks to the many people who got my point and restored my faith in the human race (well, kinda, for now).
For the ones who didn't get my point: I don't approve of what the offender did. It is quite gruesome, especially the blackmail part. I am not a (closet or otherwise) kiddie fiddler, I have plenty of fun with women my age, thank you very much (mostly women 5-10 years older than I am even. I expect that to change in a couple years when I pass the 40 milestone, but that's an other matter entirely).
I am just tired of the overly hypocritical situation unraveled by this kind of stories. "I can't control my kids' access to the Internet because they have cameraphones with unlimited dataplans, and laptops"? Really? I'm sure you guys can make sure that your 14-yo kids don't take your car for a ride every single night, right? How is it any different? Who bought the smartphone, who bought the laptop, who's paying for the unlimited dataplan, who got -and controls- the internet connection?
To go on with the car metaphor, I was "lucky" enough to be raised in the countryside, and I can remember driving all sort of vehicles (cars, trucks, tractors, you name it) as soon as I was old enough to reach the pedals. I do also distinctly remember my father and/or mother being never far away, especially the first times. There was no need for spying, or even for close supervision (appart for the very first times). They were around, and it was enough. It does work the same way for internet browsing. Think about it.
Another comparison, just to nail it down: I'm sure every single kid knows better than to follow the strange guy with the dirty trenchcoat to his unmarked white van (although child abuse is most of the time the doing of close relatives -again, an other problem entirely). Then how come that the same kids will happily send titty pics to whomever asks for them on the intarwubs? Isn't there an education problem here?
I guess the misunderstanding is partly my fault, though. I know what confused the simplest minds: I probably shouldn't have mixed this point with the discrepancy between how our society considers fraudsters (they did it for the money, so even if they ruined a few thousand families' lives -or even the whole nation, come to think of it-, it's OK. Let's wait a couple years and give them a government job) and anything remotely related to sex (They obtained a picture for sexual gratification, let's put them behind the bars for the next 2 decades and make sure that they won't get a job or a normal life ever again). Again, I do not approve of the so-called "online predator" behavior, far from it. I just think that the lack of balance kinda ridicules the whole system. Sorry if it's just me. I'm quite sure that my first point still firmly stands, whatever you might think of the latter one.
Time for a pint now.
"dragging the poor little sods dead body up the road by a string!"
I honestly don't see the problem with that. Now the petrol-dousing and fire-setting part of the story is different. That can be seen as cruel and gruesome I guess. Unless the cat had been declawed beforehand of course. Those things are sharp.
I've been to Glasgow and Newcastle. Never had a problem. Now I couldn't say the same about Manchester. Actually the latest addition to the staff here is Mancunian. Even after a few month I'm still answering "Huh-huh" in the most neutral way possible sometimes, hoping that it'll fit (granted, I don't interact much with him anyway, which could explain the delay, but still, we could use a translator...)
"Don't predators pick on the sick and lame? If I was wondering around the Serengeti I'd like to do it with someone in worse condition than me too."
It's probably not what it's all about. The problem is, if you leave the "sick and lame" behind, it gives those pesky predators a good reason to follow you around wherever you go. A bit like it's a bad idea to let food laying around if you want to avoid ants. Or roaches. Or raccoons. Or bears (check those which apply to you geographical location).
It probably played a role in the emergence of funeral rites in humans. They are very diverse (burriyng vs anging in trees vs throwing in the river on a raft etc). The most basic common denominator is that it prevents predators from being used to getting easy food if they just hang around. Because you know that sooner or later they will want more.
(also, people might have noticed at some point that hugging rotting corpses might have adverse effect on health. But that explanation doesn't work for nomadic groups).
I'm quite flabberghasted. Not by Twitter attitude (although suspending the account and removing all posts might have been a bit extreme) but by the reaction it raises. If you want to share serious info, why don't you do it on your website, or even on your blog? You can host those yourself for peanuts, or get them on a hosting platform for barely more. Then you can post links to that on twatter if you really have to use that bog-standard platform. But complaints about random filtering on a free "microblogging" service? Seriously?
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
