I don't mind the new start screen. But I have a touch screen so it makes sense. I have however also tried it with a mouse. The adjective turd comes to mind...
Posts by Adam 1
2545 publicly visible posts • joined 7 May 2012
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Windows 7, XP and even Vista GAIN market share again
Xiaomi: Hidden Android dragon is growing fast, despite being unknown in the West
Conformist Google: Android devices must LOOK, WORK ALIKE
Microsoft compliance police to NHS: We want your money
USB charger is prime suspect in death of Australian woman
Appeal to again seek code for Australia's secret election software
Tuesday 24th June 2014 13:32 GMT
It is completely unacceptable that the code that decides who sits in the house of review is not public domain. I am making the same argument that we make when we deny the legitimacy of a secret court. It is not that a specific ruling is always going to be wrong. It is that you end up with a system that is open to abuse.
AMD details aggressive power-efficiency goal: 25X boost by 2020
Vodafone AU frees data to atone for outage
How farsighted is Microsoft's Azure RemoteApp?
Tesla, Nissan, BMW mull all-for-plug, plug-for-all electrocar charger plan
IoT cup claims 'instant' identification of what's in it
Oz refugee data leak a SNAFU, says KPMG report
Greenpeace rejoices after getting huge renewable powerplant cancelled
Thursday 12th June 2014 10:03 GMT
Re: Why...
Why a down vote for a reasonable question?
Often you have A/C grids in different cities which are not synchronised. This makes interconnects complex and can allow failures in one grid to take down the connected grid.
Coupled with the "you can transport more power without building bigger pylons to hold thicker wires" (read: cheaper) and you lose less power along the trip (read: increased range) makes it a bit of a no brainer.
The following link is pretty good.
http://electrical-engineering-portal.com/advantages-of-hvdc-over-hvac-transmission
Google: Why should we pay tax when we make 'intangibles'?
Thursday 12th June 2014 08:36 GMT
Re: If I can't see it, it doesn't exist???
Notwithstanding the tangibility of said police officer and road, the tangibility or otherwise of the goods and services provided by Google have no bearing on whether they are taxable activities.
They really don't do their net neutrality arguments any favours by such asshaterie. Organisation A which throws lots of money at political parties to attempt to get a fast/slow lane made legal and organisation B who refuses to pay tax to the said governments whinges about it.*
* I get there is a difference between a party and the government, but even dumb governments recognise that a healthy tax base allows you the revenue to do your political leaning (cut taxes or increase government services) so even little government fans tend to hate tax shirkers.
SLOW DOWN: Insecure-by-design software on road
TrueCrypt hooked to life support in Switzerland: 'It must not die' say pair
Saturday 7th June 2014 07:58 GMT
Re: "What difference..." @John P
>It seems reasonable that the team should want to take a course of action based on a) not suffering slights on the software due to problems in the underlying OS, b) not feeling obliged to build more and more plugs into the software due to holes in the host OS, and/or c) not needing to keep suitable-for-testing copies of XP around for longer than necessary
Sure thing.
* Add the following text to the website. "Due to Microsoft ceasing support of windows XP, Windows XP is no longer a supported by Truecrypt. We recommend you upgrade your operating system."
* A checkbox later in installshield will prevent its install on such operating system versions (or at least those who can work around that know the risks)
UBER UBER ALLES: Investors value ride app at $17 BEEELLION
Saturday 7th June 2014 14:14 GMT
Which is the bubble?
If you look at the taxi industry here, they are basically a cartel that have organised via political favours an artificial limit in plates and therefore are creaming an absolute fortune in fares.
I feel for the drivers. They are paid utter pittance for the abuse they incur; to the point where they make more money driving for Uber than their day job. Many of the taxis are old having many hundred thousand kms.
So what do we want from a taxi industry. It really isn't hard to understand:
* Competent screened drivers who are paid a liveable wage. We get that this is not free.
* Well maintained, clean, comfortable vehicles with appropriate insurances.
* A way to book them where a driver actually turns up who drives you to your destination with courtesy. One of the last taxis I caught nearly killed us and several pedestrians going 80 through a 30 zone because we had the audacity to expect a ride to a place that was "too short"; By too short, far enough away from the airport to be impractical to walk but obviously too close for his liking.
* Reasonable fair structures, taxes and credit card surcharges.
A component of each fair must go towards each of these costs, yet the elephant in the room is the plates. Seriously it is over 10x the cost of the car itself. This means that they have to spend most of the fares they collect just to pay for the plates. Those not working for the man basically have their life savings paying off a piece of paper saying that they can carry passengers. Now I am sorry, but that is the real bubble here.
What Uber have brought to light is that the true cost of offering a taxi service is much lower than what we pay when we hop into one. I don't necessarily think Uber's cost model works out (many drivers haven't really thought through the true cost of wear and tear and depreciation on their vehicles from being involved in this), but it is definitely a step in the right direction. If the taxi industry were deliverying a service people were reasonably happy with, it would have gone nowhere.
As an occasional regular taxi customer, I expect them to realise that the fare equates to a not insignificant amount of my disposable income and well and truly covers the cost of their wage, fuel, insurances, wear and tear, car lease and a pretty handsome profit. The fact they get paid crap is because THEIR boss / industry body is screwing them, not their customers.
Icon; because bubbles can be good.
Happy Birthday Tetris: It's flipping 30
How Bitcoin could become a super-sized Wayback Machine
Wednesday 4th June 2014 08:16 GMT
Curious
I have read the paper and I am still a little**1 confused about how it works.
First things first, I really dislike the inherent uselessness in the BTC computations. It serves no beneficial purpose other than as an overhead in ensuring scarecity. But it does this by using frightful amounts of energy and wasting computing resources that could otherwise be used in useful pursuits (Folding / Climate Modeling / etc). At best you could call it an overhead; a necessary evil but finding something useful to do with those computations should be a high priority. Otherwise, the only people who will be able to profit from it**2 are those who run massive distributed botnets or cryptolocker malware who therefore don't need to pay input costs.
So I really WANT to like this, but there is one glaring problem that I can't see addressed. Let us assume that I agree to store X Bytes of data which is valued at a given amount Y. I can prove that I have stored X by signing some random challenges with my private key. Now I can believe a few things about all this:
* That due to the random challenge I can not predict which subset of X will be challenged.
* That due to my private key being needed to sign the challenge, I would not want to pool it in the cloud.
Now after some time, I want to sell my Y currency to buy a good/service. I am assuming that the buyer has the necessary mechanisms to prove that I am indeed the owner of the coin and the transaction goes ahead.
Now that I am no longer the owner of the coin, where is my motivation to not just wipe the data I am currently holding to realise the X Bytes of storage (or to use those same X bytes to store some other coin)? If I was to do this, there would be a coin that was not backed by the promised stored data which goes counter to the purpose of this.
How does the proposed solution prevent me from doing this? Surely I don't need to upload all of the data associated with the coin to the recipient in order to transact? Otherwise, where is the benefit in trading vs just mining fresh coins.
**1 by a little, I mean a lot.
**2 talking about mining here, not speculation; I will leave that for others to "solve".
CSIRO claims milestone in solar-powered steam turbines
Apple: We'll tailor Swift to be a fast new programming language
Monday 2nd June 2014 23:00 GMT
Re: Just what the world needs
.NET is not a language, it is a runtime. There is a pretty low level language MSIL that many excellent c# programmers haven't even heard of which is what your c# or VB.net or whatever compiles into which is if you like the native tongue of the framework which JIT compiles to assembler (usually x86/x64).
But the point is that I can write some fancy component suite in c#** and you could buy it and use it within a VB.net codebase (or j sharp or whatever floats your boat)
** I probably couldn't
Snowden shoots back: 'So you DO have my emails, after all'
Rap chap tapped for $3 BEELLION: Apple buys Dr Dre's Beats
TrueCrypt considered HARMFUL – downloads, website meddled to warn: 'It's not secure'
Tesla's top secret gigafactories: Lithium to power world's vehicles? Let's do the sums
Hello Moto... It's the Nokia Lumia 630
EBay, you keep using the word 'SECURITY'. I do not think it means what you think it means
Thursday 22nd May 2014 10:45 GMT
Re: "Encrypted" passwords
Don't confuse an implementation of salt with the definition of a salt. Salt is simply a technique. If can be 2 bytes but it can just as easily be 256 randomly generated bytes (or any number). It doesn't even have to be appended to the end. You know the size of the hash output so you can interleave the salt and resulting hash in the one field if you want. That approach means that your authentication server can easily get all the information it needs and you can not tell from the table what is hash and what is salt.
So you reckon Nokia-wielding Microsoft can't beat off Apple?
Apple, Google: WE SURRENDER ... to each other in patent war truce
Urinating teen polluted 57 Olympic-sized swimming pools - cops
Boffins run iOS apps on Android hardware
Friday 16th May 2014 09:00 GMT
Officially yes, but you can still download the APK and install it directly. Not that I would recommend installing anything from Adobe that isn't frequently patched. I think their patches this month through windows update outnumbered the OS patches so abandonware from them is something I would recommend to avoid.
Microsoft blinks, extends Windows 8.1 Update deadline for consumers
Tuesday 13th May 2014 22:51 GMT
Re: Moan moan moan
If 8.1 was just a free optional update you might have a point. But Microsoft have decided to cease support for 8.0 not us. As such, in order for us to avail of the support and maintenance promised to us at time or purchase, we need to install this update. If it is a prerequisite to any other critical update available on 8.1 but not 8.0 where the issue impacts 8.0, then the 8.1 upgrade itself must be labeled a critical update and available to us via the usual channels (windows update, WSUS, etc). If they want to deploy via app store as well then that is not a problem.
The fundamental inconsistency is that their windows update will give you a green tick saying all is well on an 8.0 system even though it would be missing patches. That is rightfully criticised.
Tuesday 13th May 2014 08:15 GMT
Re: The amusing part?
Technology to do binary diff for remote patching has been around since forever. In simple terms, take xyz.DLL with hash ABC and do a binary XOR against this file (which is compressed) and the output is the new version. In reality you would do it below the file level on specific chunks but either way the total download of 8.1 should be substantially smaller than a fresh image.
LA air traffic meltdown: System simply 'RAN OUT OF MEMORY'
Tuesday 13th May 2014 04:03 GMT
Re: I think the time has come
TCAS by itself would have been enough there. One of the factors in that crash is that the air traffic controller on realising the problem sent instructions to each pilot to ascend/descend respectively but was coincidentally the opposite advice as given by TCAS. One pilot listened to the controller, the other to the computer.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
