* Posts by The Other Steve

1184 publicly visible posts • joined 7 Oct 2007

Pirate Party UK launches manifesto

The Other Steve
FAIL

Ah diddums

"though the whole freedom of speech opens the door to even more abusive posts on websites which then hide behind free speech."

Did some nasty man call you a fucktard in the internets ? Bless.

Loud sex ASBO woman back on the job

The Other Steve
Linux

Ah well, never mind.

"(Not to be construed as casting aspersion on the performance of Tux, which as we all know, simply gets better and better)."

Yeah, another few iterations and he will be the perfect model of a 1970s penguin, just a shame it's 2010 really.

The Other Steve
Alien

In this case ...

Thank you for not posting pictures, but those suggesting that she she should get a job in the sex industry might want to go and google some, although I warn you, you will wish you hadn't.

I suspect that the noise the neighbours can mostly hear is her hubby screaming "NO! OH GOD PLEASE NO! NOT AGAIN! NO!" not that he's exactly a looker himself.

Oh hell, go on, here http://www.sunderlandecho.com/news/Asbo-sex-romp-woman-loses.5810753.jp

don't say you weren't warned.

Germany warns surfers against Firefox

The Other Steve

UAC is per process

and indeed, for the life of a process, so it's less helpful than you might think. Plus you can turn it off, which means that relying on it for security is broken. And as you say, the 'ask the user' model is definitely broken.

But there isn't really anything a browser needs to do that requires elevated permissions anyway. FF will run quite happily from a normal user account on Windows as well as unix type systems.

The Other Steve
Flame

Yeah !

Yeah, that's right, anyone who disagrees with a fanboi must an MS shill. And what time *did* you get in from school ?

The Other Steve

Yes

And indeed, your point is rather neatly proved by the fact that said fanbois can't even muster up a response other a downvote.

Still, it's early, they probably aren't home from school yet.

Amazon brews Kindleware for Apple's iPad

The Other Steve

"Amazon did not say when its iPad app will be available"

Which means it hasn't been approved yet, just like everyone else's, assuming even that it is ready or has been submitted.

And there is plenty of wiggle room in the dev agreement for Apple to reject it quite legitimately. Devs are encouraged not to duplicate existing functionality. (e.g. to compete with Apple)

Really all Amazon can say is "we plan to make kindle available and we hope that crazy sociopath Jobs is willing to compete with us."

How likely is that really though ?

Tory 'Cash Gordon' campaign suffers Web2.0rhea bum rush

The Other Steve

IHBT ...

... I know, but 'uber twitter' is the leading twitter client for their favoured moby, the Blackberry.

The Other Steve
FAIL

Going to be a nasty wake up call for all of them soon

For the last couple of years parties of all stripes have become obsessed with blogs, facebook and twitter. I suspect it's because they get instant feedback, which is obviously gratifying their desperate need for attention.

Unfortunately, when it comes time to put our X in the box to decided which group of liars and thieves have the best posters, the fact that 90% of the electorate couldn't give a blue fuck about tweets, blogs, and facebook is going to bite them all in the arse because the only people they've been up close with are their grassroots activists who will see them to do no wrong and worship at their altar, and those of their opposition who honestly believe that they eat babies. And aren't they going to get a nasty surprise then.

And I shall laugh. Even harder than when the apparently very thin skinned 'Twitter Tsar' blocked me on twitter, even harder than we she was questioned about it in an interview. Even harder than at the comments on government shill site labourlist. Probably even harder then when Tom Harris chucked his toys out of his twitter pram after being called a fucktard.

Their whole on line presence of the political parties has been a complete disaster, it is an echo chamber filled with morons and trolls. And it is hilarious. until you realise whose money they're spending on it. After that, not so much. They haven't understood this yet.

The Other Steve
Flame

Ho ho, very funny.

"a party funded by millions of people living in the UK"

Two million (# of Unite members) is not a big number set against total populace, and let's take into account that those two million are either dribbling trot mentalists or are retards who are easily led by such. This makes it easy to question whether their 'opinions' count for more than a fart in a bucket. (A clue : No)

You also seem to have failed to understand that there are more than two choices.

Outlook bleak for NHS IT

The Other Steve
FAIL

Green eyed monster

" 1) Trough snouting IT "consultants" "

Your day rate not as impressive, eh ? 'Course you'd totally turn it down on principle if you had the opportunity.

Mandy quango says Apple, Amazon are too obscure

The Other Steve

Root vegetables

"Shopping online isn't much fun, either - it provides instant gratification but it isn't a Saturday afternoon social activity"

I don't know where you live Andrew, but round these parts physically shopping on a Saturday afternoon is about as much fun as having someone repeatedly beat your torso with a large bag of carrots. Then again, that's what you get from a culture that is still pointlessly wedded to '9 - 5, Mon - Fri'.

Not that stops anyone except for misanthropes like me, if Mr smarty pants from Consumer Focus wants to find the other 40% of his poor missing sheep, he might like to pop out one day and have a look at the queues in HMV.

Then again, he could look a at few pop histos and perhaps notice that figure probably encompasses all those who are to old, to young, to poor - or just plain don't want - to buy music on line.

I should think that Amazon and Apple will be over the moon with a 60% brand recognition.

Greatest Living Briton gets £30m for 'web science'

The Other Steve
Big Brother

Huh ?

"moving us from a web of managing documents and files to a web of managing data and information", erm, which will be stored in files and presented as documents until we fundamentally re engineer our OS architecture and UI metaphors.

Or of course think up new and stupid names for them, but surely no government struggling with a massive debt burden would spunk 30 Mquids on such a ... oh.

Blunkett: 'The dog howls when I whip out my ID card!'

The Other Steve
FAIL

PPOSTFU

"Its beyond doubt that cannabis does physical damage to your brain"

You will now post a link to the long term peer reviewed medical study that supports this opinion. I'll be checking.

The Other Steve
Big Brother

Fucktard

"Whether anyone in this room wants it or not, we're going to have a biometric passport."

And just how, precisely, is that related to the previous statement about 'vibrant democracy' ?

Facebook stands up to UK.gov's cyberbullying

The Other Steve

Darwin

Someone who is stupid enough to go and physically hook up with someone they met over the internet, and in doing so place themselves in a situation where that person can snatch them and do them harm would have found a way to remove themselves from the gene pool sooner or later.

Sad, but true.

One in four UK schoolkids admits hacking

The Other Steve
FAIL

No,not at all

Try reading the legislation instead of just guessing

The Other Steve
FAIL

3vil

"Look, I'm not arguing law, which has no rationality behind it (only what an opportunist can convince idiot lawmakers of), I'm arguing fact. Trespass is entry where you aren't permitted to be. Guess what guessing another person's password does? :)"

Violates S1 of CMA1990. I don't need to guess because it's written down and everything.

"Anything else isn't hacking, it's either fraud or trespass"

See above. And when you use the term Trespass, you are indeed arguing law, since it has a very specific legal meaning (actually a set of them, depending on what it's being applied to, speaking of which ... )

"And given the word's origin, it means exactly what I said it means. Anything else isn't hacking, it's either fraud or trespass. A hack was originally an elegant piece of code, now it's a piece of code with evil intent."

You appear to lack a clue as the etymology of the word, which I promised myself I wouldn't get into, but never mind, in fact it originally meant a prank and still means many things other than "piece of code", with or without evil intent, but that's all you're getting.

However, let us agree to disagree since, as Caroll's Humpty Dumpty aptly quoth : "When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean -- neither more nor less"

The Other Steve

Hmm

Actually I doubt _they_ said it at all, given the consistent use of the term across the various media that are reporting this, I suspect it was the term used in the press release.

The Other Steve
FAIL

Awesome !

"It does get me down at times, looking at the contrast of the way things used to work, and the rank stupidity and fear I see now."

Yeah, you're right, prosecuting people for breaking the law is, like, really lame.

And that's two "curiosity is not a crime"s and counting. Place your bets.

The Other Steve

Like totally

See post further down w/r/t CMA Section 1 offences, but yah, 'rly, crime. True.

The Other Steve
Happy

Nooooooo!

"I was told cracking is legitimate hacking :D.."

Oh good god, it's bad enough that the seeping wound of the hacker definition argument has been opened, for the love of pete, please don't drag us down the white hat/black hat flame war route as well, the Fail Icon will never withstand the pounding :-)

The Other Steve
FAIL

The other one haf got bellf on

"This all stopped when it became a world of script kiddies intent on causing havoc - myself and my cohorts were only ever interested in seeing what we could make the internet servers do that they weren't meant to."

Oh puke. Really ? you just played the "curiosity is not a crime" card ? GTFO.

The Other Steve
Unhappy

MSN ???

"I remember back in highschool my friend was telling me about MSN messenger"

You had MSN Messenger in high school ? Fuck that makes me feel old.

The Other Steve
FAIL

Ignoramus

"It's bad enough the term "hacker" has been coopted by the bad guys,"

It wasn't, it was 'co opted' by the media. How old are you ? Twelve ?

"Hacking (in current usage) is creating programs tha do bad things."

In your opinion, which is probably only locally correct. See for instance the popular web site "Hack a day", which is largely focussed on hacks that don't involve "programs that do bad things". But this argument is older than the internet, and I'm bored to death of it.

"Guessing passwords is more akin to tresspass"

No, actually, it is more akin to a criminal offence under Section 1 of the Computer Misuse Act 1990, viz :

"1) A person is guilty of an offence if—

(a) he causes a computer to perform any function with intent to secure access to any program or data held in any computer;

(b) the access he intends to secure is unauthorised; and

(c) he knows at the time when he causes the computer to perform the function that that is the case."

http://www.opsi.gov.uk/acts/acts1990/ukpga_19900018_en_1#pb1-l1g1

You can see where it very specifically doesn't say anything about trespass.

Apple bins iPhone covers

The Other Steve
Jobs Horns

New theory

Maybe Apple needed the shelf space for something else ? And it's accessories ? Can't think what that might be mind you.

The Other Steve
Troll

ZOMGWTF! Steve Jobs eats FUCKING BABIES!

"Cupertino pulled listings for screen protectors, on the grounds that the availability of scratch-resistant plastic covers undermines confidence in reliability of the unprotected hardware."

No! Bad Bill Ray, Bad!

Where does it say that Bill ? Where ? Did you mean this bit ?

"One vendor speculated that the ban is an Apple marketing attempt to suggest screen durability, despite scratches that have damaged both plastic and glass displays of its products for years."

Which is quite,quite different. What the hell is it about Apple that seems to stir such hysteria in the internets.

I know, I know, "shop to stop stocking some things" isn't much of a punchy story. But really.

Hidden Windows 7 costs worry upgraders

The Other Steve
FAIL

Yeah

"I'm not interested in beta-testing Microsoft's software for them,"

By which you mean "Oh, I never thought of that". Or is it just that you weren't interested in finding out what was compatible and what wasn't before you rushed into the upgrade without a clue ?

The Other Steve

Only not

"Linux or OS/X fills the need, "

No offence to either OS, both of which I use frequently, but you seem to have left out the cost of reskilling your entire IT department and user base.

The Other Steve

Good catch

And for some reason, hardware virtualisation is usually disabled by default in the various BIOSes.

The Other Steve
FAIL

IT "Pros" ?

"Rob Meinhardt, president of Dell KACE, said in a statement announcing the survey that the lack of a direct upgrade path from Windows XP meant migrating to Windows 7 could be "challenging and costly for many organizations.""

Erm, except that there is one, Windows XP Mode*, which will even happily run your old hardware drivers. I suspect the survey results would have been different if they excluded people who hadn't bothered their sorry arses to get get hold of a preview or RC - or gosh golly, splash the cash and BUY a copy - and actually test it for compatibility issues.

Y'know, like professionals ought to.

*and that's assuming that your app base doesn't just work out of the box.

Minister: Banks should give ID cards to people with no money

The Other Steve

My bad

Jumped the gun, it is in fact not law yet, but it will be shortly due an EU consultation exercise that took place early last year. Wires crossed, sort of thing.

The Other Steve

Pretty much, yeah

"Those without ID (passport, utility bills etc) can still apply for a 'Basic' bank account, which usually just provides a debit card and online banking facilities."

Indeed, the banks are required by law to provide this facility, and Meg Hillier is full of shit. The only reason that people have difficulty opening bank accounts is if they have a dodgy credit history - in which case they can still have a basic account because there are no overdraft or credit facilities offered, or they do not wish to have their details forwarded to a credit agency because they are absconding from debt, in which case they are well and truly fucked because all of the banks will pass your details to a credit agency even if they don't do a check.

Besides which, if someone is so 'socially excluded' that they can't rustle up enough ID to open a bank account, they really won't have any actual money (or not 'legitimately'), because if they were in the system _at all_ tax, benefits, etc, etc, all provide a paper trail you can use. So basically what Hillier means when she says "socially excluded" is "dodgy fuckers", and funnily enough, banks don't like to business with dodgy fuckers.

Steve Jobs' latest honors: TV, icons, fromage

The Other Steve
WTF?

Eh ?

"..you'd probably be better off using that *other* Steve"

Are you suggesting that we feast upon the gently cooling corpse of Monkey Boy Ballmer ? Or his likeness in cheese ? In either case, what would be the advantage ?

Whoever made that cheese better be afraid, Jobs will want royalties, and will probably claim to have patented cheese based caricaturing.

The Other Steve
Jobs Horns

TV series sounded good until

"director of Borat and producer of the hit TV shows Seinfeld and Curb Your Enthusiasm. "

None of which were even remotely amusing. But then again, neither is Steve Jobs.

Microsoft cuts out paste

The Other Steve
Jobs Horns

True, True

"That's problematic for Microsoft phones for a start - they aren't actually Microsoft's phones are they?"

Well, no, quite. It's partly an OEM problem, and partly a carrier problem, and partly because the WInMo OEM licensing model is, well, interesting. Each OEM has to create their own special version of WinMo, complete with the requisite drivers for their specific hardware, chosen bluetooth stack and profile implementations, etc, and bundle it into into a ROM image. Then they have to license it some more every time they want to update it. Then they have to find some way to distribute it. And then you have all the carrier 'enhancements' to throw into the mix.

The whole process is a complete pain in the arse, both technically and administratively. If MS have locked down their hardware spec though and only offer one version of the OS, this should stop being such a problem.

It depends if Ballmer can get his head around the notion of giving an OS away for nothing as a loss leader for some other revenue stream. What other revenue stream I have no idea. Apple take a cut of everything from the handset to the apps to the accessories (every 'made for iPhone/iPod' logo product kicks back a chunk of sales revenue to Cupertino, plus you have to buy their auth chip now) and supposedly gets kickback from some carriers, although I don;t know the details of that.

So it will be interesting to see what MS does in this regard. Obviously they're taking a cut of the App revenue, but will that be enough to subsidise new OS versions I wonder ?

The Other Steve
Gates Horns

Thats's the MS Way

Buy it now, because in the future we will fix these things that suck! What ? Oh yes we'll charge you for the upgrade.

They generally take (at least) three releases of something to get anywhere near a decent level of functionality because they're usually rushing to market to keep up with some competitor or other. Their first release is often just a place-holder to let people know that they are in a particular market. Windows itself is a perfect example of this. Windows Phone 9 Series will probably be reasonably featureful but if they leave it until then, they won't have any presence in a market that they're already playing serious catch up in.

One of the things that Apple have got bang on right with the iPhone is that you get OS updates for free. MS have never, ever, done this before with their OSes, but then until the iPhone, neither had Apple. If MS are just directly ripping off Apple's business model, it is to be hoped that they incorporate this part of it, because one of the most annoying things about WinMo was never being able to get upgrades without using a pirate ROM.

The Other Steve
FAIL

Only not

"it is an MS product, so it will need an anti virus to run all the time just to be reasonably safe."

Not if apps have to be signed in the same way as as the iPhone's. And if all code is managed rather than native, the likelihood of successful exploitation of existing apps is lowered significantly.

Not gone altogether, but the iPhone, which does allow native code (and ObjC allows you to do all the stupid things you can do in C by virtue of being a strict superset) seems to have been (so far) remarkably resilient to that type of pwnage considering the number of units deployed and the likely demographic of the user base.

The Other Steve
FAIL

actually

It isn't, it's a complete pain in the arse, thanks.

"on the other hand, the only thing microsoft will ever release that doesn't suck will be a vacuum cleaner."

Oh I see, a blinkered fanboi, oh well.

The Other Steve
FAIL

OK, that really is stupid

Is there one of those "in this release" caveats on that ?

Hell, maybe MS just realised that Copy/Paste on the iPhone sucks like a vaccum and decided they couldn't do any better

Or maybe, just maybe, MS are genuinely going to replay every single step out of Apples iPhone design and marketing strategies over the lifetime of the product. If nothing else that will certainly be amusing to watch.

El Reg insults 'millions of Irish Catholics'

The Other Steve
Flame

Is it St Patricks day already ?

That explains the large number of wankers puking in gutters and wearing stupid hats at four in the afternoon then. Retards.

As for the complainers I have only this to say : Grow The Fuck Up, seriously, Grow The Fuck Up.

Windows Phone 7 - what's in and what's out

The Other Steve
Thumb Up

Silverlight at the end of the tunnel ?

I don't wish to impugn your personal abilities, but I can't help pointing out that the sentence "I can put together a quality silverlight app very quickly and make it look good, as can a lot of developers" would be more honestly written as simply "a lot of developers put together a silverlight app very quickly."

Slverlight is good, since its nature is not to be fugly, but hopefully that means that people who grok silverlight will move to WinMo, not the other way around. I for one would happily see most of the crop of current winmo develepors left behind. In a ditch.

The Other Steve

Huwah, WInMo Dev Team, What are they good for ?

"What was Microsoft doing to address the known problems of its mobile platform before then?"

Huwah, good god, absolutely NOTHIN'! Say it again.

And that despite the massively negative feedback they were getting from both customers and (especially) developers. Feedback they simply dismissed out of hand, even as it was obvious that they were years behind the state of the art and making themselves look stupid (Pocket IE anyone ?)

As for the whole "Boo Hoo it's managed only" whine, who cares ? As long as the hardware platform is specced to support it, it really doesn't matter. MS have been taking shit for crashy WinMo platforms for a long time when most of the abhorrent behaviour was caused by the almost uniformly pathetic skill levels of WinMo developers working in native code.

I mean, I like C as much as the next person, but unfortunately the next person is a muppet who should never have been let near a computer, never mind a C++ compiler. As someone who has occasion to develop WinMo software from time to time, I'd like to thank MS for making sure that all those tossers have the GC to clean up after them.

The Other Steve
Paris Hilton

Yes but really

OTOH MS (or indeed Apple) are providing the developer with a channel to market. I think people who are not themselves developers underestimate the utility of this. As an ISV, getting your shit out to people who will buy it is by far your biggest business challenge.

With an App store, much of that overhead is gone. Sure, you still need marketing strategies, because in the gazilions of tit wobbling apps, you need word of mouth or good PR to make your app visible, but a good chunk of your sales, billing and distribution bureaucracy is gone.

People who never worked for or been ISVs might find it hard to get their heads round, but a 30% cut and sticking to some rules are more than a fair swap for that.

Consumers want a phone that doesn't crash every five minutes, so having MS check that some fucktard isn't hacking at the native API with an axe is a good thing for them.

90,000 people a day think this is a great business model when Apple does it, so it's hard to see who loses out, other a couple of thousand whiny freetards who wouldn't buy an MS product even it was encased in skin vat grown from a clone of Natalie Portman's nipples.

And, and this is important, no one gives a fuck about them anyway.

The Other Steve
FAIL

The market has a solution for that

Do Not Buy.

Simples

The Other Steve
Gates Horns

Money well spent

"Now we will have to wait a while till the Geeks and XDA come up with a a way to "jailbreak" Winmo 7"

No need, just like the iPhone. Buy a dev subscription and open source everything. Course, this doesn't work if people want to make cash from things sold outside the channel, but those people have chosen the wrong platform to play on, so fuck 'em.

Course, this is only 'free as in speech' ...

The Other Steve
FAIL

Oooh, I'm so frightened

"but you should be extremely cautious of "alienating the geek""

Why ? What are they are going to do ? Unfollow me on twitter ? Boo fuckin' hoo.

I think we need to be clear that when we're bandying the word 'geek' around in this context what we're really talking about is "the tiny but horribly voluble percentage of technically literate people who regard any interference with their perceived 'right' (note that this is different from 'ability') to have total access to every single piece of silicon on the planet as a form of oppression.

Put another way, if you're a 'geek', and you refuse to recommend something to a 'non geek' because although it has all the features a 'non geek' will probably ever want, but fails to conform with your borg like political agenda, you are, in fact, a twat.

Fortunately, consumers are becoming sufficiently savvy to realise this, and they look instead at the tech and their personal requirements to see if the two match up while disregarding the awful self righteous web monkeys' high pitched whining about 'freedom'.

And about time to.

The Other Steve
FAIL

Uh huh, yeah

"Having everything MS controlled I think is a major mistake and will kill it off completely"

Yeah, that's right, just look at what it did to iPhone sales. Erm, oh, hang on ...

GCHQ loses Top Secret laptops

The Other Steve
Big Brother

Murky past

AIUI, it's not so much whether the vetters know your murky secrets, but whether you are prepared to cough to them, which means that if you forget to mention one that they do know about, they'll bounce you.

Plus see ACs comment below about pernickety verifiable history. But then again, it's GCHQ, and they take their vetting process extremely seriously, so much so that if you have already been positively vetted, they'll do a refresh before you even get through the door.

Makes it a pisser for them to get contractors in, or so I hear.

Info Commissioner pleads with Tories to jail data thieves

The Other Steve
Thumb Up

Chokey for receivers also

As it stands, the only people who can expect to attract the marshmallow like wrath of ICO are the data controller and the tea leaves. People who subsequently obtain data that has been leaked or stolen and then make use of it - the Graun publishing the BNP membership list, HMRC rifling through stolen bank records, etc - get away scot free.

Receiving personal data that aint yours should also be an offence, and one of strict liability, IMHO. Public interest exemptions for scumbag expense fiddlers, obviously, as there are in the current legislation.