Posts by JLV

Re: Best of British

Then again, adding things that aren't there can be problematic as well. I seem to recall* someone driving their car into a lake because their GPS insisted there was turn to be made, presumably on a nonexistent bridge or road.

Good of the Ordnance Survey (lovely Mars map too).

To my fellow map geeks: if you are cheap and/or not living in the US and also using Apple gear, might I cite PocketEarth as an extremely capable offline GPS app that runs off OpenStreetMap? Not affiliated in any way, just a very happy customer. An extra $5 or so unlocks topo map mode.

* Yes, it was in an episode of The Office (US version) as well, but I suspect they wouldn't have dared to come up with such a ludicrous plot idea if someone hadn't been stupid enough to do it in real life.

Re: open and shut

Hey, isn't that thing due for expiry yet? 17 years in the US, IIRC and it seems like this abuse of a patent has been around forever.

Re: Now: Slower, less maneuverable and with an all new blue screen heads up display

Careful there. We haven't had a real air war between 2 same-class, gen 3+ jet-capable, nations in over 30 years. What you say sounds credible (and more so than the reverse which is used to justify this sorry excuse for a flying $ shredder).

But... still a conjecture. Wars have a way of shooting down some of those.

>QuickTime on Windows isn't really QuickTime

This makes no sense. As a company, you are not obligated to release code. To be more specific, you are not obligated to release media-playing code. You can always rely on other companies' media formats.

If you do make a decision to develop your own media formats, with corresponding players and codecs, you are still not obligated to release them on competing platforms. Apple could have chosen not to release QuickTime on Windows at all. I suspect that, at the time, it did so because of its rather tiny mind and market share. i.e. QuickTime for Mac only would have had no users.

If they killed QuickTime overall (on Mac OSX too), no problem. If they had never published QuickTime on Windows, no problem either. Either way, I really won't miss it much.

What is truly unpleasant from Apple in this case is that they took the step to publish QuickTime on Windows, but they are quietly walking away from it with big fat holes in it. And they know full well that if they don't kill QuickTime everywhere then users will try to view their contents on Windows, at least some of the time.

Shady "install needed new codecs" tricks used to be a fairly common infection vectors for booby-trapped (pun intended) media files on porn sites. Which do include QuickTime files. Now, you don't even have to play the new codecs needed trick, you can just rely on some idiot running your honeypot with what he assumes to be a fit-for-purpose, issued-by-Apple, QuickTime player.

Once you do publish code, you assume reasonable responsibility for it, within your means. If you stop supporting it, you announce that loud and clear. And you take your users' safety seriously.

I think we all agree Apple's financial means aren't an excuse here.

It's like "trust us (just kidding)".

Apple needs to make a clean transition to either have QuickTime nowhere or safe QuickTime everywhere.

p.s. don't read any of this as any sign of sympathy towards Adobe. It isn't.

Re: Isolating each tab

>what Chrome is loading into those tabs

dumb question, but what is eating so much RAM on browsers?

If I quit Firefox and just reopen this article's main page, I am @ 450MB on a Mac already. Sure, you can blame FF for being a hog (I do), but start tallying up Chrome processes and...*

10-15 years ago, we had javascript and css and machines did not have 8GB RAM to play with. Is this the ultimate case of software siphoning off hardware gains as they come?

The text representation of an html page, including all its css and js can't account for much. You need to add the DOM tree, which I assume is a complex linked tree of some sorts. You add actual video mapping data for the display. CSS-to-dom-to-video tracking memory constructs. But still, many other apps are complex and not such huge hogs as browsers. Is this cached stuff, just in case you need to go back to a tab?

*Btw, being cynical, for Chrome this is probably a not-insignificant benefit of splitting into processes - hides RAM use somewhat.

Re: A sad time for Microsoft diehards

>"Chromebricks", which can only be deciphered as his objection and hatred for any non-Windows computing device

Could also be deciphered as her/his dislike for Google the company, or at least this particular hardware endeavor of theirs... No need to wheel out the Trumpisms.

Having a hard day? (El Reg, we need a "Chill Pill" icon).

Re: Perhaps they'll fix all their damn crashing on iOS then?

Hum, you know how iOS works? Per the developer doc, when the system is low on memory, apps using a lot of it get a notice to slim down and release some. If they don't, a hard termination soon follows. That's not exactly a crash, though it looks very much like it from a user POV.

The one difference is that when you know the reason you can anticipate on it by closing other apps before running a hog.

For me (iPad 4 on 9.3.0) Chrome is now relatively stable, but it was very glitchy in the first months after iOS 9 came out.

Re: "Sustainable Energy mostly covers the UK"

I think you've misunderstood my comment about UK-specificity.

If you mean that his methods and way of thinking can be applied anywhere, then yes, I am 100% with you. The energy demand side is also, mostly, fungible wrt location, with the exception of heating vs AC requirements.

On the supply side however, sorry, things are very geography-bound. And so is the book's analysis. The UK is characterized by high population density, limited insolation, a fairly flat terrain, winter heating requirements and a ... coastline.

Even as he dismisses solar energy, within the UK, he notes that we could build a plant in the Sahara to supply Europe with power. And that the US could meet its energy need with a massive solar plant in the SouthWestern desert - no doubt the greenies would be against it for disrupting an endangered sea turtle's habitat, but I digress.

A policy analysis carried out in Arizona could look at Mr Mc Kay's methods and apply them. But they would come to almost opposite solutions on the supply side.

To put it another way: it is great that a country like Jordan is building up its solar electricity capacity. However, I doubt Germany's voters and consumers were aiming for an increase in national CO2 emissions when they embarked on a subsidy adventure that has seen them sink more than 100B Euros into wind and solar. Yes, they may have subsidized solar technology research for the rest of the planet, but it's still a massive policy failure that could have been adverted by reading this book and paying more attention to own their national geographical realities.

Re: Four years?!?!

Ditto. Early 2011, 17". Survived some rather nasty shocks, case still looks pretty decent. Very durable.

500SSD, HDD switched to CD caddy. Want to bump it up to 16gb ram next - VM work gobbles that.

Would trade a 1920x1080 17" over a retina 15" any day. What kind of idiot @ Apple thought up that retina is going to do much for bash terminal screens 2 feet away? Or even for surfing the web?

Sitting on the fence on a new one down the road. Yes to the OS, yes to the build quality. No to the smaller screen and to unchangeable ram. So probably will keep this one for a while. It's plenty fast enough.

Re: Excellent

I thought PKD was involved and the subject was to find a way to get rich. Hubbard's take was that a religion was the best way* to do it.

Sadly, I tend to agree that the defining bit for this ruling is that FSM is a parody. Not one of the many religions which, rightfully, the state is barred from meddling with. Scientology is about as stupid as they come, but repressing it - outside of prosecuting willful embezzlement when they do it to their converts - would put us in line with the Chinese repression of Falun Gong. Which seems every bit as hoaky as Scientology, if that seems possible.

* Having read Battlefield Earth, I would say that is was the only way - Hubbard was not going to get rich from his writings. Those who criticize Battlefield Earth, the movie, fail to give it sufficient credit for vastly improving on what is a turgid, bloated, plot-less and just plain insulting-to-intelligence waste of paper. Yeah, the movie sucked, horribly, but it wasn't near as bad as the book.

I remember a sentence where you're helpfully informed that the hero's plane is going at 341.2 mph. Not 341.1? Or 340? Right in line with the earth being 80 trillion years old, eh, LRH? And Jonnie Goodboy, as the main character's name???

Re: IT?

>It was a SCSI bus

Pronounced scuzzy? http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=scuzzy&defid=185272

Re: How not to get pwned on Windows...

Valid points between Windows and Linux, to an extent.

But OSX has pretty much the same userbase attractiveness wrt malware as Windows. And very few people bother to run AV software on it - I de-installed Sophos because it tended to hog CPU atrociously from time to time and, for the overhead, I was uncertain at its actual efficacy on Mac malware. I do have ClamAV, but only use to scan downloads. So, along with the capacity of its users to pay the Apple surtax, it would seem like a valuable enough malware target.

And, going back to Linux, there is plenty of $ to be made in server breaches.

I would also separate app & browser patches (IE, Edge) from OS level patches. After all, you can always run FF or Chrome on Windows. And browser vulns are only the OS's fault if the OS allows them to propagate - an OS should be totally paranoid about resident browsers at all times. While there is no doubt in my mind that Office macros are a cesspit of threats, that's not core Windows fault, even though MS as a whole does bear responsibility for them and patches them.

So, do we have any hard numbers besides the "yours has more bugs than mine" arguments that all sides quote with happy abandon? MS does seem to focus a lot more on security than it did 10 years ago, so are we still judging them from that time?

Re: Accelerando anyone?

>like "Forge of God"

Nah*, think Asimov and the simple, stripped-down, kind of big ideas he had for Foundation. You might or might not have agreed with Psychohistory's premises, but they make you think.

It's long, quite clever, lacks much action and is in parts utterly brilliant - like the reason for the title. Plus, it's Chinese but rags on Mao-era Communism in the first book, Three Body Problem, so that's a definite plus. Both books are also fairly self-contained.

* I wasn't a big fan of Forge and especially not Anvil. While not as scientific as Asimov, Liu is mostly more hard SF than Bear in the actual science, except for the occasional handwavium. And, yes, am aware Bear has some science degree or another.

Re: Sounds like a change of engine --

>flying squirrel

agree.

>renders pages impeccably

@ < 100MB RAM use / page, please, if that's not, like, asking too much.

>Open source offers some protection

Interesting point. At the developer end, open source is both a blessing and a curse. To name no names, I was looking at a Python GUI IDE some years back. One of the most promising ones was open source and it promised to do a lot of things. Looked great, lots of recommendations. This was back in the days when Python GUI tools were a dime a dozen and there was the sense that more choice was always good (thankfully the community has since realized that too much choice can be toxic to newcomers and veterans alike and the Python web app server space is way more focused these days than IDEs ever were).

Look under the covers though and you could see that a) it seemed to be a solo dev job, b) lots and lots of features and c) many features did not in fact work very well. They worked for basic use cases, but step outside and things would fall apart. Quickly.

Shiny? Yes. Robust. No.

10 years ago I decided I'd be much better off not touching that thing, free or not. But over the years, I've seen ongoing recommendations for it, even as no new release ever came out. Seems truly dead now, but still downloadable. Wonder how many people utterly wasted their time and money hitching their work onto that horse.

Another Python offering, this time an alternative to Django, also had that smell when you looked under its skirts. Whole branches of code not implemented, things that didn't work, over-promised feature set.

Open source is great, yes. But some offerings can be ephemeral in nature and it behooves you to have your eyes wide open while picking components and evaluate your exposure. Leftpad style Javascript micro-module dependency are no big deal, they can be swapped out in a jiffy. Frameworks that your code is totally coupled to? Not so much.

For example, if I needed to use one, I'd be especially leery of the coming shakedown between the various JS frameworks a la Ember/ReactJS/Angular. There's a new one every week and not all of those will retain mindset.

Re: Just can't make it work?

Well, by now you have very much a very big defensive wide moat for the incumbents (Android/iOS): the apps stores.

If they're not fully stocked at D-Day, the new OS gets reviewed as being incomplete. Now, I didn't really mind that with BB10 as I am at best a very very picky app installer, whether $ or free. There's so much junk out there and app store discoverability is poor enough that it seems easier to just stick to websites.

But I understand I am in a minority not to care overmuch about apps.

Another defensive mechanism is the collected collective wisdom (hah) of the crowd. Nearly any solvable iOS/Android configuration/usage conundrum has made its way onto the internet. Via blogs, forums and now StackExchange covers both iOS and Android. So if you don't know how to use something in your gadget, but it can be done, the answer is likely out there.

Contrasting that with CrackBerry's rather poor IMHO, S/N, is instructive.

BB10s are excellent phones. I dropped my Z10 into a pool and, after spending a month in a rice bag, it boots up again. In the meantime, I replaced it with a Classic and that is a brilliant little phone too. OS functionality is sparse, but highly discoverable and elegant. And rock solid - they stay up and usable during most of duration of a major OS update, only to reboot at the end.

Sad, but not surprised they will be the last.

It will be difficult for a challenger to knock off the Android/iOS incumbents without doing something really radically different, like what the v1 iPhone did to Nokia & BB when it came out. To forestall protests about Apple having imitated whatever the iPhone imitated, that's somewhat besides the point. Whoever Apple imitated had not pulled off selling whatever it was that was being imitated. Apple did.

(mind you, Apple also didn't pull off selling the Newton)

Copying someone else in order to leapfrog incumbents is allowed, perhaps even preferable. But the new guy will have to catch Apple and Android by surprise by using their imitation/innovation as a new angle, not just to improve on standard mobile paradigms. Augmented reality? Much better AI than Siri and the like?

Hint: solving problems for the ultra-geek won't do a breakthrough, you need mass appeal.

Look at it this way, how much $ has MS thrown at exactly this problem so far? Plus, they basically sacrificed desktop Win 7 usability to give Win 8 a leg up on mobile.

My advice? Take up the upcoming fire sale on a keyboard BB10 if you have the chance and inclination.

Re: "...video in the center of the page will be loaded as usual..."

Nah, in Charms, where no one can find them.

Re: I quite like this

(disclaimer: dev, not sysadmin, here)

I like the idea that you're paranoid everywhere and all the time. But I did not see BYOD mentioned in the article. In fact, I wonder how their BYOD posture is set up, given that their trust/distrust model is based on device + user. Would be nice if that had been explored in the article.

Google may not be to everyone's liking, but they are quite clever and often have interesting ideas. Hadoop, for example, was inspired by their MapReduce publication.

Re: This mess of an article still doesn't explain WTF is going on?

Yeah, felt like a mental midget as well. What is noscript's role in all this? Someone can upload a malicious clone of it somewhere? Or someone can write a different extension that taps into legit noscript to hack you?

I agree with the poster that the less you install the better off you are and only do it for large volume use stuff. Let other kids take point in landmine country. That model is true for PCs, smartphone apps, JS n Python modules, browsers. I do tend to trust Linux and macport official repos though.

Re: They have hired top Linux people before

Speaking of free and freedom, I wonder when MS will do away with the can't run Windows on a guest VM using the host PC's current Win license...

I realize that there might be all sorts of server and revenue implications, to loosening up. But the end result is currently that you can't set up a quick VM to say surf disreputable websites using your current Win.

Of course, you could set up a Ubuntu VM in a jiffy instead, but that's hardly a desirable outcome for MS, even in a world which is now seeing Bash on Windows.

Re: Fucking moron

I specificallly have no opinion on "the dozy mare". Live and let live.

I do have a, negative, opinion of those who advocate charging for rescue ops. For the reason I mention - it doesn't work as a useful deterrent.

Now "doesn't work" is pretty high on my list of drawbacks, as I suspect it is for many IT folk ;-)

Re: If the current Republican front-runner --

You know, the really frightening bit, besides the fact that a, hopefully soon-to-be-revealed-as-small, proportion of the American voters consider Trump to be presidential material?

Trump isn't really that hardcore by Republican primary voter standards. He's mostly just populist, with their standard simple solutions to complex problems appeal.

Cruz is the real whacko.

In fact, I remember the Republican establishment mumbling a while back that they'd prefer Trump over Cruz.

- Carpet bombing ISIS. Does the man even know what carpet bombing means??? on terrorists embedded in urban areas? Recruitment poster for extremists much?

- Advocating shutting down the government during budget time a while back because some pet fantasy of his wasn't met? Then ragging on the Rep leadership for not going along?

- Abortion. Notwithstanding the Supreme Court, he opposes it even in case of rape.

And most of the rest wasn't all that much better than Cruz in their pro-Christian histrionics. I don't mind if someone is Christian or not, but what gives their 20% of really hardcore loonies, whom I do mind, the right to decide for the rest of the population?

I hope the average American Republican voters take back their primaries next election, they've already effed up this one big time. As it is, I can see a big landslide for Hillary. Not because she is so great (though she's not that bad either), but because the alternatives suck far worse. However, the US won't benefit from being stuck in Dems-as-Presidents-always mode.

p.s. in Canada, what's frightening is how many of the CBC commentards express favorable views towards Trump when he makes the news here. Makes me wonder about what years of cat videos and news-through-social-media and 30 sec soundbites have done for our collective IQ.

Re: it's so easy

As a dev, not a dba, my approach when writing manual update commands for a live database that other folks will execute, tends to something like:

The instructions ask you to first execute the whole command & check that the select returns plausible values for what will be nuked. Then you are asked to select just past the -- comment on the second line, exposing the delete proper to execution.

Slightly more complicated to do with updates.

But I've bookmarked the wrap-in-transaction suggestion. Which is not exclusive with mine.

Re: What a disaster

> oh. err...

The F18 is not flown by the USAF. There was less design-by-committee in its DNA. The Spanish, Canadian and Aussie air force just didnt have the level of input as this 3 way US service clusterf$&@.

Looking at gen 6 plans, it seems that they're specifically flagging cross-service procurement as a risk to be avoided. Commonality in components, yes. Common airframe, no.

"Scam" is perhaps too strong a word. And I did mention a possible valid reason for the functionality not being available.

But I don't have an iPad 2, I have an iPad 4. When I installed 9.0 (which I regret as it has been very slow on my machine, I installed it thinking I was getting the great new iOS 9 features). Which Apple and the reviewers were all crowing about. Chief among them was ad-blocking.

Turns out that, no, those features were locked out and ad-blocking requires an iPad Air 1 or 2.

I understand the reason why new features might not be feasible in HW. And I appreciate the fact that Apple provides updates to older devices (not to mention that certain other mobile operating systems really should be throwing stones in that regard).

But in that case:

a) make it obvious in the release notes what is supported or not.

b) reviewers - do your work, not everyone buys new bling every time Apple farts

c) architect the OS so that the new features do not hog performance on older hardware, if those features are not enabled on it. That will avoid us having to choose between vulnerabilities and unacceptable performance.

re. point c) if iOS 9 did not bring any new features to my iPad 4, why is it so much slower?