* Posts by Ru

1818 publicly visible posts • joined 20 Jun 2007

Apple changed shape of Galaxy Tab in court filing

Ru
Facepalm

I'm glad the world wasn't like this 20 years ago

A portable PC including a build in power supply, keyboard and LCD monitor, you say? Folds in half for easy transport and to protect the screen? PATENT PATENT PATENT SUE SUE SUE.

Hopefully, like the mobile phone world, this is just a phase we're going through.

Ru
WTF?

Apple can't do anything wrong for El Reg

Are we reading the same website? I don't recall an excess of brown nosed flattery here... more the opposite.

Chinese giant figures to muscle into UK mobe market

Ru
Meh

Who are we?

HTC products were quite interesting when they were still just a manufacturer and not a brand. I don't think the same is true of Huawei.

Google's Moto move spells iPhone doom

Ru

It can thrive in a minority position

No. No, it really can't, and did not. It wilted, and it took some serious management shake up to drag it kicking and screaming into relevance again.

i will say though, Google "Open" = MS "Standard" is an excellent observation. I shall steal it.

Ru

In the US? Trivially.

The requests are already pending.

Ru

Maybe no-one offered?

Maybe you should start hawking your own balancing opinions to them.

'Major' C++ revision receives standards blessing

Ru
Meh

A language with commercial supporters? Say it aint so!

A quick look at the TIOBE popular language list:

Java: Oracle. PHP: Zend. C#, VB: Microsoft. Objective-C: Apple.

That's 42% of the scores right there. Turns out that big software companies have an interest in the languages they develop in! Who'd have thought? Also, using C outside of serious stuff like OS kernels, drivers (woe betide anyone who encourages C++ drivers. Seriously, what are thinking, Apple?) and embedded systems stuff is all about pain and frustration. But you know, some people like that.

Ru
Paris Hilton

Why wasn't it C++0B?

C++ isn't old fashioned so much as complex and specialist and as a result doesn't spend a whole lot of time in the limelight. I'm writing a lot of fairly complex image processing code these days, and no other mainstream language comes close to the usefulness of C++, and I'd be doing future maintainers a grevious disservice by using some sort of crazy moon language with a similar feature set (say, D).

Thirty years from now, I expect it to have the same status that COBOL does now; widely disliked, most practitioners dead, yet still used all over the place. I look forward to some lucrative consultancy.

US breakthrough in Oz bomb hoax case

Ru
Meh

I can't believe The Register would force you to read this article

I also feel rather sad that they feel your attention is so important that they'll send the goons round to hold you down and scroll uninteresting stories past your eyes, but don't care about what I read at all. I've not had so much as a threat telling me to click more ads or face the consequences.

What's so special about you, huh?

Man reveals secret recipe behind undeletable cookies

Ru

Yay arms races

The problem is that the adverts get more and more intrusive, and more and more irritating, so people end up writing tools to get rid of them. This ends up throwing the unobtrusive ads out with the awful popunders and flash animations that trot out into the middle of the screen and strobe at you; everyone loses out in the end.

I'd like more sites to offer optional subscriptions. I'm a grown up now with a salary; I'm prepared to part with some of my hard-earned if it turns my favourite bits of the internet back into readable, useable sites.

How much do el reg expect to earn from each reader using ads?

Shuttered SETI reboots ET pursuit

Ru
Boffin

Bit Quixotic

I recall someone telling me not so long ago that the window of opportunity for detecting a civilisation is probably shorter than one might expect. Humanity seems like it will go from nice big powerful AM radio broadcasts to much smaller, lower power, more efficient devices that broadcast across a vastly wider range of frequencies.

Give it a hundred years, and you might not see anything broadcast from earth that looks like a carrier wave in the EM spectrum between DC and visible light... just wall-to-wall cunningly encoded wideband signals that are more or less indistinguishable from noise.

Me, I'd rather look for the sort of asteroids and comets that might terminate our civilisation before its time.

Google plus Google Plus: You give us info, we sell it!

Ru
Meh

Apple managed it with the iPad

Disagree. Apple managed it with the iPhone, coming from more or less out of nowhere into the mobile phone market and destroying it for most of the incumbents by selling a well engineered device to even the non-technical public.

With the iPad, they've created a new market, sure, but despite the hype it hasn't taken the world by storm. If there was really a market for tablets, other people might be making sales because they'd be solving a problem. But there's only an iPad market, and only because people want Shiny Apple Stuff. Until it actually solves a problem, it isn't exactly going to set the world on fire,

Google SHOCK! Snaps up Motorola phone biz for $12.5bn

Ru

Motoroogle

Rolls of the tongue a little more smoothly.

People don't want tablets, they want iPads

Ru
Trollface

Ahh, Smug Mode.

Its nice to have my angry rants validated by what appear to be actual sales figures.

Adobe automates website design for arty Luddites

Ru
Unhappy

So the only new thing is the subscription fee?

There's never been a shortage of graphical designers capable of using photoshop to churn out awful image-heavy and utterly inaccessible websites, thanks to Adobe and its past efforts in this area.

Wikipedia: It's not for girls

Ru
Paris Hilton

Lack of female engineers

is a largely english-speaking western cultural issue. Russia and China do alright, for example. There's nothing fundamentally alien about women working in highly technical fields.

I know a british female Verilog coder; she observes that the lack of female engineers in the industry means she can pretty much walk into a company, say 'gizza job' and they'll fall over themselves to provide very competetive salaries and reward packages. She's not unhappy about the lack of competition, but doesn't quite understand why some many of her peers went into mediocre jobs in law, media, journalism and the like where they don't make big bucks and don't stand out from their peers.

Ru
Meh

Hrm

So, does wikipedia's little echo chamber, deliberately or otherwise, exclude known female editors? Can it tell an editor is female just from their writing? Or are its actions fundamentally offensive to the female psyche? That would be entertaining.

Maybe the fairer [citation needed] sex is simply less interested in contributing to what is largely a collection of technical articles with a scattering of noticably poorer quality nontechnical content, given the general trend of women to study and work in non-technical fields in the english speaking west, which is where most contributors seem likely to live.

Lawyer touts new legal time-bomb for Android

Ru
WTF?

I've never really understood

Why people didn't just use something like NetBSD instead. Free and open source, but very liberally licensed indeed. Sure, it might not be quite as capable as its linux equivalents in various situations, but then neither is android.

Given the stress involved with handling the GPL in a corporate environment that has to deal with inconvenient things like closed source drivers for some system components it would seem like a bit of a no-brainer... especially given the money and talent available to google.

Samsung's lovely illegal tablet: Why no one wants to know

Ru
Angel

Durr,

Landscape is of course merely preferred. My bad.

Ru
FAIL

There is no tablet market, stupid

There is an iPad market, and a bunch of hopeful wannabes clustered around the outside. They cannot compete because they are not Apple.

The use cases for smartphones are pretty clear, but tablets in general are not a solution to a problem that everyone is desparate to solve. Not many people will find their lives noticably improving with the addition of a tablet.

I guess it doesn't help that samsung have screwed up their android implementation here. Seriously, landscape only? What were they thinking?

Curved light drives boffin one-upmanship

Ru

All that and more.

Have a read up on CSIRO. They've accomplished a fair bit.

Ru
Boffin

Why supermassive?

A black hole of any size is capable of bending light by definition. You could presumably have an optical chip that only weighed a few thousand tonnes if you used suitably lightweight singularities, with the added advantage that the event horizon would be confined to your computer.

LightSquared blasts GPS naysayers in FCC letter

Ru
Boffin

Perhaps

I'm pretty certain that both standard accuracy public channels that Galileo transmits on coincide with the GPS L1 channel and so will also be affected. I think the Chinese COMPASS system also has this issue, maybe not GLONASS though.

Basically, this will affect all free use of public sattelite location systems.

Google Chrome beta turns on native code machine

Ru
Meh

Its the 'inner platform' effect

Turns out that in order to replace a general purpose operating system, you need something that works an awful lot like a genera purpose operating system. Only with all the libraries and UI bits rewritten. And requiring your developers to jump through yet another set of hoops in order to run their applications on your platform.

Meet Boss 2.0. Same as the old boss, but shiner, slower, less accomodating and a whole lot more contrived.

Ru

"Your data is worth far more than a sweetie"

Is it?

I was always under the impression that google was after ad impressions. It is so far the only thing they can do well which also generates them serious amounts of revenue. Every single other thing they've ever done and tried to make money from has been a disappointment, either to consumers or google's bottom line.

They wouldn't know what to do with your data. They just want you to click the ads.

Ru

From another point of view

it sounds like a way to develop apps for the browser-only future that doesn't require you to use bloody javascript. I do not look forward to the day when it becomes a necessity to use this awful language for writing any and all applications.

Dell puts gun to Streak 5 tablet, pulls trigger

Ru
Unhappy

I'd go further than that

I wouldn't even use a smartphone as a mobile phone. Compared to my little nokia classic, they're big, slow, flakey, expensive, delicate and have a battery life so short it verges on ludicrous. Compared to my Streak 5, they've got irritatingly tiny screens and fiddly little OSKs, too.

Bigger tablets don't do it for me either. Like most netbooks, 10" tablets are just big enough to be an inconvenience. 7" is tolerable, I guess, but I rather like having something that I can stuff in a pocket and anything larger than the Streak won't even squeeze into all pockets.

Oh well. The trend towards making oversized smartphones with 4"+ screens seems like it might fill the niche in the future. Here's hoping.

Mozilla to auto-block unwanted Firefox add-ons

Ru
FAIL

big flashing lights and screaming sirens

They do *nothing*. The people who would most benefit from such things have never paid attention and never will.

University rats on Sydney suburb

Ru

Its a conspiracy

They're clearly anticipating that project will be a horrible success, and there will be thousands of the little buggers everywhere and people will gladly pay more to get rid of em.

Google+ succumbs to Facebook game envy

Ru
Facepalm

You realise

you can block notifications from people and applications who irritate you? I've made sure I blocked everything by Zynga some time ago, and my facebook feed has a significantly higher signal to noise ratio as a result.

Samsung plops out waterproof smartphone

Ru

Locked bootloaders?

I liked the idea of the Motorola Defy, but the utter lack of post-purchase upgradability discourages me from ever buying Motorola gear. Samsung seem to be a little better.

Joe Public invited to hunt God particle

Ru
Meh

No advertising of your incoherent theories this time?

Do let us know when you've got some concrete, replicable results.

Until then, hush.

Counter-Strike sequel aims for 2012 target

Ru
Trollface

Counterstrike, eh?

There's a blast from the past. Whatever next? A sequel to Half Life?

Jeff Bezos patents retro jets, and airbags, for telephones

Ru

It is the non-mobile applications which seem more useful to me.

If you can make these sorts of protective devices for a few pennies, I'd be keen to have them fitted to my big camera lenses. They're heavy, delicate and rather expensive to replace, and technology is unlikely to remove any of those issues any time soon.

Laptops would be another candidate, and tablets for that matter... anything with a big screen.

Ru
Facepalm

Wrong

The closest kind of prior art I can think of (eg, external airbags triggered by an accellerameter or similar to protect delicate stuff) would be the air-collar system in YT's RadiKS uniform from snowcrash.

The airbags used by various planetary landers are also pretty similar, but I imagine they are triggered by other means, such as timing or radar altimetry.

Perhaps you should have a think about what prior art means, otherwise you could invalidate every other (non-software) patent by say 'its a thing made of materials intended to solve a task and garner money for someone'. That's been done before, you know.

David Cameron turns water cannons on social networks

Ru
Trollface

Ahh, its an easy mistake to make

There, we're looking at brave freedom fighters are revolutionaries and democratic activists casting off the shackles of an oppressive regime. Whereas here we've just got a bunch of thieving chavs.

Its just fine to oppress that section of the populace via any means possible. Only when you see a thieving chav wielding an RPG7 will they have made the transition to freedom fighter, and DC will cease to be justified in blocking twitter.

Books promo

Ru

Not so.

Dey're well good, innit?

Lossless music goes High Street

Ru

YMMV

If you're playing the music through cheap speakers, cheap earbuds or (worst of all) your mobile phone speakers, lossless music is a waste of money, a waste of space and at least in the latter case, a waste of power as FLAC decoding is unlikely to be hardware accellerated.

With moderately good speakers or a nice set of headphones through a reasonable amp, you probably can tell the difference between lossless and good quality lossy. You might not care, of course, and the difference can be quite subtle.

Shouldn't cost you the earth, either.

Q: Why do defenders keep losing to smaller cyberwarriors?

Ru
Facepalm

Coulda shoulda woulda

So the take home message is that is *is* as bad as everyone says, but shouldn't be? Well, we'll add that to the big heap of similar issues including poverty, healthcare, politics and the world economy.

iPad threatened by young pretenders

Ru
Meh

High prices?

I believe if you compare bang for buck, the ipad2 is pretty competetive with competing top-end models, only with the advantage that it is a) by apple (and therefore must be amazing) b) appears to be a premium product, because it is by apple. Competetors, like the Xoom, can't compete on price and features at the same time.

And besides, people don't want tablets. They want ipads.

SQL survives murder attempt by mutant stepchild

Ru

Hurgh

I've generally found that ASPX is an adequate development platform... the biggest issue for me was the requirement to use IIS which is a bloody awful webserver. The only nice thing I have to say about PHP is that it is quick... I'd much rather use any other language for development however, as its a horrible language with disappointing libraries. Perl and Java and Python rather put it to shame, and have a fractionally higher bar to entry.

Ru

Sorta

Very few GUI libraries are easy or fun to use... I'd go as far as saying that none are or ever have been. MS at least managed to be competetively awful, or marginally better than some atrocious alternatives.

That was good enough, back in the day.

Ru

sold as an "SQL Substitute"

Sold as an RDBMS substitute, I think. I imagine if you plotted a graph of 'number of RDB instances' vs 'number of features of an RDB used' you'd see that the vast number of deployments are very small, very simple, and only use fancy things like 'foreign keys' because they were crufted together by someone who did a compsci course once.

For the sort of people who have no idea what data integrity might mean, or use cursors instead of select, NoSQL would seem to be a perfectly adequate replacement.

Me, I've always liked lightweight transaction-capable embedded databases like BDB and ESE. But that isn't cool at all.

Sony confirms investigation into warehouse blaze is underway

Ru
Stop

Read again.

Sony will ultimately shrug this off.

It is the smaller labels who relied on the warehouse as a storage and distribution centre who are going to suffer the most here; I expect some to fold as a result whilst sony just carry on regardless with a slightly lighter wallet.

Sky wins TV riot battle

Ru
Flame

Think laterally

Fuel's expensive these days... clearly there's value in looting fast food outlets for their cooking oil!

BlackBerry blog hacked with riot-related threats

Ru
FAIL

Eh?

Different group of people, sunshine. Different approach, too.

Read first, then foam at the mouth.

India cracks down on the Blackberry

Ru
Meh

Tsk tsk.

The expenses scandal has nothing to do with bribery, only greed.

They are often closely linked, but they are distinct. Billing your second home to the taxpayers to house your secret boyfriend? Not quite the same as accepting a few hundred grand as a backhander from a large corporation who'd like preferential treatment.

Apple sued over Mac OS X 'quick boot'

Ru
Mushroom

Dear Mr. Esdale

My lawyers (Sue, Cripple and Sneer) will be contacting you shortly to discuss your recent violation of one of my patents, namely "System and Method for for using Stupid IP Laws to Extort Money using Frivolous Patents".

I'm hoping that an amicable agreement will be impossible, and that you, your businesses and legal advisors will all be reduced to a smouldering crater by the somewhat technologically inept judicial system in the fine state of Texas.

Windows Phone dev GM splits with Microsoft

Ru
Holmes

"if you have to legislate for it, it's a lost cause."

Sounds like we've got a white, western, english speaking middle class male here!

I doubt anyone who has ever been discriminated against based on their gender, ethnicity, age, language religion or indeed primary language would quite agree with you there, chief.

But that's okay, because you made a crap example. Authoritarian dads are doomed anyway, because whatever they forbid their kids will go and do immediately.

DIY aerial drone monitors Wi-Fi, GSM networks

Ru
Boffin

The word you're looking for is 'fuck'

High gain antennae and rf amplifiers can do wonders for sniffing radio traffic. Not having to establish a 2-way link means you can get away with a lot more, too.