5 more sites
Since no-one in their right mind could believe that these new sites are co-incidence and not motivated by a desire to cock a snook at the judge, can we now expect those responsible to be chased down by the courts for contempt?
8135 publicly visible posts • joined 14 Jun 2007
This is true, and true again for Visual Studio and Internet Explorer, but no less of a balls-up for all that. Following the OS style is the default option. To present an alternative look and feel, someone has to go to a lot of effort to bypass the OS in order to create a jarring presentation that violates Windows Logo Program guidelines. It has always amazed me that MS are so keen to do this. To me, it is like displaying a big splash screen on startup that says THIS PROGRAM WOZ RITTEN BY A CLUELESS TURD!!!, except that the splash screen eventually goes away.
You can be sure, of course, that Office will *always* get a Windows Logo on the box. It's only little people who have to follow the rules.
"Why is the consensus that this would be difficult/impossible to filter?"
Probably because this is a tech site, populated by people who know that simply blocking as you describe would (a) fail to prevent VPNs using any other method, and (b) succeed in knocking out vast chunks of the web.
You, however, appear to be one of the few who realise that the Chinese authorities are *not* tech experts and therefore, knowing neither of these things, will quite happily do just this and not care about who is inconvenienced.
At least, until the effects on the Chinese economy become clear. Perhaps by then it will be too late. If China makes itself unsafe or unsuitable for business, there are plenty of other countries who will happily step into the gap. The world is not short of poor countries. This doesn't have to be the Chinese Century. It could instead be yet another century in which China screws over its own people and achieves bog all of historical note.
It's the cluster that gets flattened, not the gluons. However, I do have problems with the explanation offered here.
"At relativistic speeds, matter compresses along its length; [...] The effect of this could be to create a “wall” of flattened gluons, and entanglement between the gluons explains how particles created by the collision can “share” direction information."
My problem with this is that the gluons are *relative to each other* not moving at relativistic speeds at all. Therefore *they* see no flattening. Presumably the explanation offered here is a crude attempt at hand-waving for the benefit of people who want to know but lack the necessary theoretical background. The problem is that it only works for those in the target audience who don't think it through. Those that do simply hit the next conceptual problem and need the next (slightly more detailed) hand-waving explanation, and so on until you've actually explained the whole theory.
It follows that any attempt to make science accessible to the lay public only works for those members of the lay public who weren't interested in the first place.
...is because the various lawmaking institutions around Europe make this the most sensible way to do it if you don't want to be sued by your shareholders. (See today's story about HP.) If you think Amazon are actually committing fraud, tell the police. If not, don't blame them for playing by the rules.
Let's not lose sight of the fact that every *legal* tax dodge indicates that the *politicians* have screwed up.
They want choice, but the default option to be good enough that they don't feel obliged to learn about all the options before the system becomes usable.
Sticking with the defaults makes it easier to get help on forums and it makes it far more likely that you are using a configuration that plenty of other people have tested. But if the default is Unity or Metro, people want a choice.
That sounds a bit like the NTFS feature where each file in a given volume has a unique object ID. The feature obviously doesn't get any exposure in Explorer because humans don't like the idea of a completely flat and numeric namespace for their hard discs, but various link-tracking facilities in Windows have used it since the dawn of whenever.
Having only observed this from the outside, I have to say it is terrifyingly plausible and explains lots of things that are otherwise mysterious to anyone who naively assumes that *some* degree of common sense was applied on a day-to-day level.
But could it really have been *that* dysfunctional?
I doubt it. My guess is that he absolutely hates this sort of thing because it is something that really *is* capable of convincing the general public that intellectual property rights are inherently evil and must be abolished.
If you wake up in 2020 and discover that inventors and artists can no longer make a living selling their talent and that your international rivals can steal whatever they like from your employer's product line, blame the record companies.
"You mean, most non-Muslims who think they've "read the Koran" are considered to be wrong by those who believe it to be more than just a book."
Actually, I think that's exactly what he means. As far as I can tell, the believers use the term "Koran" for the word of God. If you happen to read and write Arabic, it is possible to reproduce those words in book form as a mnemonic, but that book isn't the real Koran and (quite possibly) unless you are a true believer merely reading the mnemonic won't count. I assume you have to be moved by the spirit to hear the actual words whilst reading before it actually counts.
IT angle: It's a bit like the difference between an EXE file and a running program.
If you are shipping CD-ROMs to people who might not have a network connection, .NET 2 is around 235MB, because MS don't make it available to redistribute in any form except "blob that deploys everything on anything".
Conversely, if you are targetting Windows 8, Microsoft don't make it available *at all* and you *have* to have an internet connection to pull down the special Win8 version. So that's zero bytes on your CD-ROM but you have to ship a SIM to each customer.
So I think you Linux types have it easy.
Popular? Not in either sense of the word. Why would anyone use RAR when ZIP is universally understood, already supported by your OS, free and just as good?
I've only ever had to deal with one. A quick surf of the internet suggested that there were no decoders from any source that looked *remotely* trustworthy, so I fired up a virtual machine, installed an OS, downloaded a (presumably) virus-ridden pile of poop, extracted the files and then threw the VM away.
You probably don't want to know what I thought of the person who sent me the archive.
"You do have tests for your spreadsheet? Or do you prove it works by drinking Red Bull and thinking really hard?"
I think that was covered (very briefly) in the early part of the article. Companies that insisted on properly tested anything quickly went bust, overtaken by those of their rivals who were reckless enough to just go for it and lucky enough to get away with it.
From the point of view of an individual company, the best strategy is harder to judge. Spend too much time on testing and you will lose to *someone*. Spend too little time on testing and (eventually) you will lose everything you gained. From the point of view of the ecosystem, however, at any given time *someone* is winning so who cares how much blood is being shed in the process?
Much as I'd like to sit back with popcorn and watch some skull-duggery, I have to say there's nothing in the two letters to support the conspiracy theorists.
Sinofsky has probably gone about as far within Microsoft as he can without displacing Ballmer. He probably reckons that isn't likely. He is probably financially secure for life. If he stays at MS, he will either a sideways move or be stuck maintaining his Win8 creation. It seems perfectly possible that these two prospects have given him itchy feet. It would be odd if a man with his background *didn't* have a whole pile of ideas that have been accumulating in his head these last twenty years, always being placed on the back-burner because the day-job was taking his full attention.
Ballmer needs to establish the new management team as quickly as possible, so he is brief about Sinosky and concentrates on the merits of his successor. You could also argue that this is just basic politeness.
Nice to see the US returning to the wording of the original international treaties. Perhaps next they'll turn their attention to the original treaties on patents. I'm pretty sure there's wording in there about "prior art" and "obviousness" being disqualifiers for granting a patent.
But yeah, Cable's department needs a damn good kicking.
"We have a really mature compiler and optimiser. It's been around for a decade or two, on x86 and x64. Then we have a version 1 release of ARM. You can expect that to get better."
The Microsoft ARM compiler is not much younger than the x64 compiler. The former dates back to the early WinCE releases, and the latter post-dates the era when Intel were trying to convince everyone that there would be no 64-bit extension to x86. If Microsoft's ARM compiler is immature, it certainly isn't because it is new.
Off-topic, but since you mention "repository" and use a Penguin icon I assume you are running Linux. If that happens to be a Debian flavour, you might be interested in http://www.opera.com/support/kb/view/841/
(If not, please excuse the bandwidth, but I suppose someone else might be interested. Certainly, there are no fundamental reasons why closed source should mean it's not in a repository.)
"Linus" as a project management methodology does not *have* to scale.
The principle (and it is both ancient and not particularly related to software design) is to maintain a single coherent vision of what the project is supposed to be. You do that by having a small group who do that and then organise the rest of the work-force to be delegated to so that the architect(s) can spend time maintaining conceptual coherence. (Brooks had a whole chapter on this, IIRC.)
Of course, finding people to play the roles is tricky. The hard part is when the architect needs to say "That's shit." (or words to that effect) rather than "Are you sure about that?". At that point, the underling needs to have sufficient respect for the architect that they don't kick back. Linus seems to manage this. Bill Gates was supposed to command similar respect but I haven't heard similar remarks about his successors.
" in the long term, he said, "backwards compatibility is just not sustainable""
You what? So someone who spends thousands on apps but paid only twenty quid for an OEM licence to their OS should ditch the former investment because it just isn't "sustainable" for the vendor of the latter to avoid breaking stuff?
Jeez, I hope my pension fund doesn't have Fujitsu shares.
To anyone with a clue, the success of OS/2 and Linux-on-the-desktop proves beyond doubt that backwards compatibility (or cross-compatibility in the case of anyone wanting to break into the market) is not just sustainable, but is in fact the only game in town. It's certainly the only reason MS are still in business.
You have missed the distinction between algorithms and phenomena that was the whole point of the OP's post. If I have a PC that is running a program that implements AES, I can break it by dropping it off a really high tower, or by running a second program that reaches into the first one and writes junk into its address space, but neither of these things break the algorithm in any meaningful way.
With quantum cryptography, however, the actual "crypt" part relies on physical inaccessibilty rather than mathematical irreversibility.
That may be the lesson from this isolated example, yes. However, the lesson from reading El Reg over a decade or so is basically never, ever take any picture that you wouldn't be happy with your relatives finding on Google Images one day. That may be over-cautious, but I think it ought to be the starting position when we come to educate the next generation.
Perhaps El Reg, in the spirit of public service, could introduce a tag for "pics or it didn't happen", to link together every story that involves some hormonally over-charged teen ending up on Google and regretting the whole business. Then we could just point our sons and daughters at that and say "Read, Laugh, and then *Learn*".
I think you are right about "fun" features, but you've failed to follow the logic through.
I can't think of any case where a descendant language has successfully subtracted features from its parent. There are certainly languages with "deprecated" features, but it takes decades for those to finally be removed. You have to look at truly ancient languages like Fortran and C to find examples. Backwards compatibility appears to be an essential property that any child must have, or else it will be still born.
It follows that any "fun" features that are present in a parent language essentially doom that language and all its descendants. You may *think* you have given yourself a clean slate with a new language, but you haven't. You *would* be better off spending the same effort on improving the original language.
Wannabee language designers out there, take note. There are *very* few languages with no such features and certainly none with a sizeable userbase or collection of handy libraries. Most modern programming is done using languages that are clearly band-aids around the original Lisp, Cobol, Fortran, Pascal, Basic and C. In most cases, they haven't even got around to changing the name yet. (I could probably be persuaded to add JavaScript to that list. It is a little young but, then again, so is its target platform.)
Obviously there are a *few* exceptions but there have been thousands of attempts and you can do the maths yourself. Statistically, it is almost inevitable that your language will fail. Stop it.
This does seem rather more plausible than El Reg's (tongue-in-cheek) version. After all, the emails don't come from the scammers' machines. They come from compromised boxes owned by others. There are a lot of boxes on the East coast and they probably enjoy better bandwidth than average.