* Posts by Grass Mud Horse

25 publicly visible posts • joined 24 Jun 2009

Tick-tick... boom: Germany gives social media giants 24 hours to tear down hate speech

Grass Mud Horse
Big Brother

Re: Ha

Insisting twice "May I ask if you read German?" as A.C is actually funny, I am sure you do (read German).

Someone who leads with "Chancellor Dr Merkel" and recommends that "well-known German news publication" spiegel.de, I call "Schmalztrompete" (pollyanna for the unprivileged).

What I think about that addressing legislator would probably fall under the hate speech clause...

Today's bonkers bug report: Microsoft Edge can't print numbers

Grass Mud Horse
Pint

Who cares?

99% of Windows users live in China.

99% of these buy their copy on the street for 10 Yuan, 15 if you add photoshop.

100% of these copies are the Ultimate versions - why waste good money on low class shite?

The PRC government has recognized this by issuing all official online documents and fill-out-forms as .doc only, so nobody even knows what .pdf is, anyway.

Note: Since Linux is free, why even use it? To save 98.87 (or whatever) USD is much more fun!

LibreOffice 5.0 debuts, complete with fewer German code comments

Grass Mud Horse

Re: Star office ?

Schurly. SJS /* So, jetzt stimmt's */

What would have stopped TV5Monde hack? Yup, MOAR LAWS

Grass Mud Horse

Re: So easy to protect, not

Günther Hermann Oettinger made his way democratically to the office of Ministerpraesident of Baden-Württemberg (second tier leader, equivalent to provincial governor). After falling out of favor golden handshake off to Brussels. See Wikipedia for interesting interpretation in a leaked US document.

Why Juncker nominated him for Digital Comissioner of all things is open to speculation. It could not have been for qualification. Probably suggested by Berlin who didn't want a loose cannon during TTIP negotiations.

EU digi-chief clashes with robo-veep over geo-blocking

Grass Mud Horse

relevant and helpful

Just add a stove pipe hat and a bulb horn cane to the picture and you'll see the reincarnate Harpo (Adolph) Marx. Another advantage: Harpo NEVER talked.

German spy agency staffer spied for NSA during gov probe into NSA spying – report

Grass Mud Horse
Coat

Gesundheit!

(body)

Pictures of elite 'Chinese military hacker' published

Grass Mud Horse
Angel

vodka

That 'vodka' is 56% (112 proof) 'ergo tou', the Beijing worker's booze, made from sorghum ('gao liang' - watch Zhang Yimou's movie for its effect :-)). Tastes like bad grappa, cost around 2EUR/L (!).

Worker's paradise...

Edward Snowden on his Putin TV appearance: 'Why all the criticism?'

Grass Mud Horse

I am SO tired of

your attacking Snowden for wearing the wrong color tie, implicitly welcoming the shameless snooping and interference of big government into our private lives. Please press the "I'm opting in for NSA monitoring" button for yourself but stop making this look like business as usual.

Thousands! of! Yahoo! Mail! users! driven! crazy! by! revamp!

Grass Mud Horse

Re: basic mail option

Thanks! Besides being noticeably less sluggish, it shows the URL again of a link when I hover it. I never click on one unless I can see the underlying string. I wonder how long they'll let us use this ...

Lip-wobbling boffins: Eating Chinese food is like kissing a vibrator

Grass Mud Horse
IT Angle

third

In 2003 I couldn't prepare ma po dofu (pockmarked grandma's tofu) in the US because SP was illegal to import. We speculated why, the two most plausible answers were

- it seriously inhibits dog's smelling ability (and you can't let those criminals get away ... barf, barf, howl)

- some people use it to lose weight

Now, finally, a third - protect the vibrator industry from cheap Chinese fakes?

Pocket Wi-Fi hotspots paralyse Chinese metro lines

Grass Mud Horse

Re: Idiots.

If you ever have the chance to use Shenzhen metro during rush hour, you'll find the Subject not so far off.

The original single line (opened 2005 from Luohu to "Window of the World") has been extended into a complex network in a gigantic effort, probably multiplying the volume of commuters by 10 or more. The former WoW endpoint platform now has 1.5 meter bottlenecks between the (thankfully glassed in) tracks and the cages around the stairwells going down to Shekou line. In a town of approx. 12 million...

The funny thing is: they'd only have to go (by metro) 1 hour South to see how one of the best systems in the world, named Hong Kong MTR, did it.

Don't get me wrong: The overall work is amazing, even the quality of the materials. Detail planning however must have been delegated to lower levels, see Subject.

Ten Linux apps you must install

Grass Mud Horse
Paris Hilton

Re: @Richard 81 (was: I've been using Linux since mid-late 1993 (Slackware).)

Read Robert Heinlein's "Stranger in a Strange Land". Then you'd grok "grok".

Paris: Heinlein would agree...

Party like it's 1999: CDE Unix desktop REBORN

Grass Mud Horse

Re: I liked CDE @PyLETS

I've been running JS Pager for more than 10 years, using the same binary today that I downloaded then. It's the first thing I install on any fresh Windows, even for friends & family. At first they don't know what it's for, later they wonder how they ever got along without it.

The desktop selector looks a little tacky but allows a number of tweaks and generally does the job well.

China wants to be techno SUPERPOWER

Grass Mud Horse
Big Brother

Re: Racist my arse!

Of course a bigger base (1.4 billion) produces an appropriate number of geniusses, but they can apply their gift to anything, not only innovation. If the surrounding culture is generally risk-averse, the envy factor is high. I'm European, lived in both the US and China for years, and only in the US I had the feeling that failure was not punished by schadenfreude. I am not surprised that (software) innovation correlates highly with a generous environment.

In addition, the Culture Revolution is still very present in the minds of the parent generation, although the government supresses any mention of the terrible ten years, when being a scientist was a sure ticket to re-education in a farming commune.

Former UK.gov CIO takes top security job at Huawei

Grass Mud Horse
Trollface

me tooo ...

I had the pleasure of working inside Huawei for a while. Very paranoid^h^h^h^h security conscious, in a clumsy way. But he'll get after lunch naps. And they need someone to check their Chinglish.

Don't let China hold rare-earths to ransom again

Grass Mud Horse

another article from the east

without the proper use of plural 's' and other telltale signs of the wu mao writers brigade. Why the penguin?

Chinese regime opens Google Earth rival

Grass Mud Horse
Gates Halo

bu yao, xie xie

Firefox or Linux are not supported. An initial popup appears that reminds you to use IE7, it even gives you links to get some tools in case you have only IE6 or IE8.

Finally M$ will be able to cash in on all those hundreds of millions pirated XPs out there, since now the government officially (besides providing form downloads in .DOC format only) requires everyone to use Windows.

Thanks, but no.

Bill Gates because, well, no Ballmer icon.

Steelie Neelie batters at China's Great Firewall

Grass Mud Horse
Coat

Hanlon

Yeah, you' right. And I could have looked, Wiki is open for over a year (but not Wikileaks, Yikes!). But Logan is much better to memorize at my age ...

Mine is the one with the Gingko pills.

Grass Mud Horse
Paris Hilton

boobs

Looking at the world from China, I often crash into the Wall while trying research something. The most aggravating block used to be Wikipedia, now not getting to blogspot and various picture services up my blood pressure almost daily. YouTube I don't miss that much.

But to be fair, keeping me from someone's opinion about a processor is a side effect. It's the opinions about Hu and Wen (and some other boobs) they want to protect me from. A lot like a child that hopes things will go away by closing its eyes. So all things being equal, Logan's razor applies again: stupidity tops malice. And hey, censorship feeds several 10 thousands of families.

Second thought: what equipment may they be using ... could it be ... Cisco?

Microsoft wins big in Chinese piracy lawsuit

Grass Mud Horse
WTF?

where to buy

genuine M$ software here in China is widely unknown. But I have only to walk 500m (6 football fields) to find a copy XP SP3 for 4 RMB.

The whole system here is solidly based on M$. Everything would come to a screeching halt if Ballmer ever could (or wanted to) switch off illegal copies. Downloadable government forms and documents are .doc only. Naturally. To a Chinese mind only things that cost a lot of money (and then are copied or faked) can be good. So pdf must be crap. Linux must be crap. China Merchant Bank and Bank of China require IE to access your account online (the others probably too), not even firefox for windows works. Linux fanbois would run out of money faster than Greece ...

China hits back at Google's uncensored Hong Kong servers

Grass Mud Horse
Go

Promises, promises

"Google has violated its written promise it made when entering the Chinese market by stopping filtering its searching service and blaming China in insinuation for alleged hacker attacks"

So, Google has promised in writing not to say anything, if PRC hackers attack? I'd like to see that ...

Having done IT work in China, I can say from experience, that written contracts are usually not worth the paper, unless ... you violate *their* side of it. In any other dispute they suddenly mince words, fall back on "language diffulties", etc. Pure Sun Zi.

"Lao wai hen sha, hen hao pian" (foreigners are stupid, easy to cheat). My handle is my reply.

Google, I don't like you, but you have my full support on this one.

IE6 exposed as Google China malware unpicked

Grass Mud Horse

they are the experts

Bank of China and China Merchants Bank both allow only IE to access their internet banking services...

quote from cmbchina.com:

"Requirements before Application [of a personal internet account]

* Target Clients: holders of bankcard issued by China Merchants Bank

* Requirements for PC: personal computers pre-installed with Windows 98 or more updated editions of operational system plus Internet Explorer version 5.0 or higher; with Internet accessing devices."

A clear sign of their expertise and their security-mindedness. Who would want those pesky Linux using customers anyway?

Google may exit China after 'highly targeted' attack

Grass Mud Horse
Big Brother

who else?

For the last few days IMDb has been unavailable from Shenzhen - connection requests timing out from various IPs, usually the milder form of censorship - one of the attacked? It would really suck if googlemail is blocked in the process, though. I don't want to use Hu's friends yahoo! or hotmail, dammit!

My handle says it all ... life is strange in the PRC.

Beijing snuffs Google.com

Grass Mud Horse
Troll

The mother of idiots is always pregnant

Shenzhen is still google-free zone. The censors are probably watching pr0n and missed the all-clear signal.

Yeah, a real creative block. They direct *.google.com at their gateway! That's why god created /etc/hosts.