Posts by Karl Lattimer

does this mean...

That planes will start going the wrong way down one way streets, and ending up in rivers where there used to be bridges?

The problem with palm

Is that the only part of their business that was any good, they forked off, now Access Co have bought it up and Access Linux Platform and the Hiker platform are rocking and will be making it into a whole new generation of mobile devices. Hiker has some pretty unique features which have come from palm OS and been nicely ported to the linux platform.

Now Palm are playing catch up with the arm of their business that they got rid of. Long live Hiker!

Simple statement of truth

You can't polish a turd

Easy to fix

If a 14 year old girl gets shagged because she advertised herself then she's the guilty one. Its a total no brainer.

Its called entrapment.

Didn't take everything into account I bet

How many dell sales are ubuntu? How many PC sales wind up with vista being wiped out and replaced with linux.

This is happening everywhere I look now, vista is a dead donkey of an OS and Linux is killing the market share on PC.

Mac sales on the up, and Linux usage rising are the results of microsoft releasing vista before it was anywhere near ready for market, as an example of this Robert Love of Novell and Google fame wrote this http://blog.rlove.org/2007/08/those-dang-dpcs-clogging-mmcss.html yesterday.

The driving factors behind the user adoption are system resource usage, performance and compatibility. The same driving factors behind the death of OS/2 and the rise of windows 95. Heck even wine has better ABI compatibility with windows apps than vista now!

And apparently...

They're remaking Star Wars with all the guns replaced with walkie talkies.

Why not use stellarium

Stellarium is a far more mature piece of software, has all the data there as far as I can see, but also has some pretty nifty features for hooking it up to telescopes etc...

reasons to be cheerful

The main reasons virgin are loosing the plot are in no particular order;

The TV has turned to crud, not only with the loss of Sky channels but the general programming has become thinner on TV in general, so unless you spend a fortune on your TV you get the same crap over and over again. For instance, paramount comedy insists on that program "everybody loves raymond", e4 insist on "friends" both are crap american 'comedies' whatever happened to MASH!!!. Sci-fi channel doesn't appear to show any actual sci-fi anymore (firefly, twilight zone, outer limits etc...) instead we get angel all day long, followed by other crud like medium etc... So its more of a spooky-style-prime-time-brain-dead-tv than sci-fi

The virgin central service has like 5 shows on it, non of them are up to date, and non of them are any good, and they aren't archived either, so unless you run the red button every day you miss shows.

They've started throttling people back from 4pm to midnight. Which is simply sick, my 4Mb line turns into dialup after 4pm. I recently downgraded from 20Mbit because I only ever got 20Mbit when I wasn't home.

They ring people up and tell them they can apply the savings they're offering to new customers to existing customers, then tell you that you can get a 10Mbit line for the price of your 4Mbit, and they'll upgrade that to 20Mbit, and as a result you find yourself paying an extra £12 a month for what was supposed to be a free upgrade.

Things were generally better when it was telewest, at least you knew where you stood with your bills.

The idiocy of a bunsen of boffins

Time and again revolutionising the creation of a robotic limb. Get a grip, the problem with existing limbs is not their lifting power or their activation speed, its the amount of energy exerted while holding a body of weight.

Is it really important to have a robotic/prosthetic limb which can lift 2 tonnes of weight but hold it for 0.5 seconds?

This is why we need tendons to do robots justice. Although, this may spur on the RoTM(tm). Tendons perform a balancing act that no material to date can replicate, when in compression or tension a tendon resists the force in the direction opposite to that which is exerted. It does this by having millions of those cell things which can fill with blood and other chemicals when necessary to change the properties of the material. Something like a meta material should do the job. So rather than trying to make smaller and more powerful sources of energy, do what nature did and make what you've got more efficient.

And these guys call themselves boffins.

*tsk* *tsk*

I'm not one of those but hear me out

I'm not a climate change denialist, however when you take into account the following.

http://www.thamesweb.co.uk/windsor/windsorhistory/freeze63.html

Couple that with the climate patterns of earth over the last oh I dunno, say 100 million years. It makes sense not to think that "climate change" is happening, but the climate stability is over.

Yet another example of the human idiocy to equate the micro with the macro.

@Charles Manning

Obviously you don't understand what a logical fallacy is, the quote at the beginning of my post is wrt the explanation of the post hoc ergo proctor hoc fallacy, in that the timing of events does not necessarily mean that one thing led to the other.

My following statements demonstrate how this logical fallacy is generally used to further arguments without any causal link.

In fact my reasoning is such that whatever caused chernobyl is irrelevant and the effects of the event may be felt today, however without demonstrating a direct causal link it is scare mongering to point out that there is a link.

Much in the same way as surveying 12 autistic childrens parents to see whether or not they had the MMR vaccine, then declaring because of 12 autistic kids who had it, MMR causes autism. In that example they didn't even use a control set, and didn't look at the overwhelming statistics to the contrary.

And for the record, the fall out cloud from chernobyl followed south, then west, then north IIRC. Missing sweden and pouring rain on poland, france, and yorkshire in Britain.

The radiation released was also less than that of the Hiroshima bomb, and far less than the media has reported since. I understand that the children of chernobyl itself have been harmed however them and their mothers vicinity to the event would suggest that mutation would have happened.

The radiation from the fall out cloud wasn't that great either, some effect was noticed in sheep, but not statistically significant beyond some minor issues.

People seem to forget that chernobyl wasn't anywhere near as big as the events at the bikini atol, or the nevada desert, and also seem to forget that for the last 50 years no detrimental effect has been demonstrated on those within 500 miles of those events. They even grow Marlbro on the site of the trinity test, which was a ground level detonation and even with the fall out from that (which was in the region of half a million tonnes) hasn't caused lasting damage.

Will we see it in Linux

When will these driver changes be made available in the (now open source) Linux driver for intel? If at all.

This is a far more important question than what it can do on windows. Linux needs this stuff daily in the world of compiz-fusion.

If I were a camel

I'd be so bored of counting all that sand I'd kill myself.

Could be one possible cause

Balderdash...

@Martin Benson, that is a load of hog wash! Micheal Meeks has done 99% of the work to get 99% of complex spreadsheets running WITH macros and VBA running on open office. Open office is currently undergoing a massive profiling and performance enhancing process and by the end of it (2.4/2.6) should be an easy competitor to Excel, and if not my software (Wine-Doors) will be shipping office2003 packages in the near future.

@TheReg, the adage used to be fast, cheap good pick any two, with open source you're looking at fast, good, pick any two. The whole debate over who sells the most servers is bull anyway. Most people running linux servers either purchase components and slap them together, or purchase a server with nothing on it, thats because Linux admins know how to do what they want to, and don't need the manufacturer to pre-install all the crud they want, the admin then tottles off to a distributors website and downloads the OS free.

The same truth of linux can be applied to desktop machines also, I know a boat load of people who buy windows machines then install linux on them, killing the license (some ask for refunds as allowed under the terms of the MS EULA) sales figures look skewed in comparison to reality because Linux is free as in freedom and can be downloaded from anywhere its hosted which is a lot of places. WRT sales Linux will always show poorly because people don't pay for linux on their desktop, and rarely do they buy it pre-installed on their servers.

I agree that ubuntu is the way forward, essentially a community of people who've had enough and want to make a change without buying a mac, all parts of fedora are better bar package management (try DKMS for drivers, its like heaven). Linux will eventually be dominant in all arenas simply because when the platforms (hildon, hiker, mono etc...) go live it gives companies the chance to capitolise on that code without having to own licenses and forge ahead with developing on top of something closed that they've got _some_ leighway with.

Linux isn't just for developers though, its for monkeys and humans alike!

Whiskey

If this is to become a list of favorite whiskey or recommendations there of for other bofh's out there may I recommend (ages in order of quality, best first);

Highland park, 35, 25, 15, 18, 12

Dallas Dhu, 23, 19, 15

Glenmorangie 12 golden rum cask, 10 three cask, 12, 10

The highland park 35 and 25 are generally cask strength and should be diluted to taste preferably with highland spring water for consistency.

Just a few of my favorites :)

Two words

Thought police!

About frickin' time

The beeb have been squandering my license on foreigners for too damn long! Maybe now they'll make some worth while programs

RE: Weasel words

Perjury gets you some jail time?

2010... following on from george

@George Johnson

As said in 2010, "this event has reminded us that we're merely tenants of this world, and the land lord just renewed the lease"

Bad news for

Conjoined twins

Lets be honest

No US company cares about europe at the minute, the strong pound and the reasonably strong euro have been screwing the US for 6 months now, which explains the wild difference in the price of Adobe software for example UK price £1,429.98, US price $1,719.95, now based on the exchange rate that should be more like £ 859.98.

MS of course, have a monopoly so they can do what they like with vista... Which explains the mass european migration to OSX/Ubuntu. As far as Xbox is concerned, its probably a better policy to buy one of them than a PS3. If everyone who was to buy a PS3 bought an Xbox, microsoft would be out of business pretty damn quick as they loose muchos peso's on each one sold, and as long as you don't buy any games they're not recouping the cost elsewhere.

I'm impressed!

A technology company who talks to the reg!

Go Alcatel!

Can't we take our 'mobe' language implants from nokia instead

at least nokia is a finnish company, and as such uses logical language constructs rather than arcane romantic ones.

I'm also totally with Smallbrainfield on this one, I think I might be sending a courriel to la Orange marketing droids over this

I really really love the idea of...

having yahoo/google/youtube/<insert content filtering web service here> to allow users to upload "real" questions to be used as part of a political debate.

</sarcasm>

In all honesty the questions are still cherry picked and surely its not too hard to simply use the faces of the "voters" (used very loosely) to air questions that the same in the pocket of <insert media mogol> presenter would have been asking anyway.

Pundits - filtering the truth _YOUR_ way.

Very interesting article

And if I might add, far better than the last :P

I have one complaint and that is regarding the "camps" mentality of EDBD and TDBD, sure most EDBD designers are application developers, I myself favor an EDBD design model, however I think saying that EDBD devs think of the DB as an inconvenient model of storage is wholly incorrect.

The main factors in EDBD are generally usability, functionality and agility. Usability of an application by proxy affects the design of the database and the design of highly usable applications and the methods employed in acquiring a high usability standard including things such as paper prototyping have a great influence on the design process, including getting the information out of the users heads and into some kind of logical model. In fact the kind of design methods used in usability testing often provide better requirements and models than simply discussing things with a user (mostly because users don't know what they really want), as they will see something which is similar to what they could/would be working with in the future.

It is at that point, when things are able to 'click' for the user and that turns the DB into an adaptable temple, which is less likely to come crashing down around you.

One final remark on TDBD is that a user interface as an afterthought has often led to difficult to use difficult to train database applications. Where data fields are thrown at the user sometimes in such large volumes with such bad groupings that the temple isn't going to survive for long.

In short sometimes looking at the DB from the users perspective, as in through the 'window' that they actually use has greater influence on good database design then attempting to gather logical models from individuals who are users and aren't well versed in the intricacies of database design.

This is senseless...

Why develop an operating system, trim it and slim it then offer it at a lower price targeted at developing countries.

_WHEN THEY'RE AN OPEN SOURCE COMPANY!!!_

I have great respect for redhat and especially the sterling work j5 puts into sugar and OLPC, however redhat produce free software, I really don't understand why they don't offer the exact same OS with a lower price tag attached. I am of course assuming that the RHN support is still included in the price they're selling it at.

IMHO it would be a much more appropriate gesture of redhat to simply discount the RHED product as it stands. Plus it would of course put a thorn in the side of MS by offering identical products at a lower cost to developing nations.

Oh Please god

Let it be sky, remove that satellite and suddenly rupert murdoch's balls are cut off...

Oh please let it be sky!

This must be the work of...

Megatron and the Decepticons!!

Sorry, just seen transformers... I'll get me coat.

Watch while you play...

Its a frickin' CELL BE

Watch this video: http://www.mc.com/cell/demo.aspx

Then kindly STFU about not having enough CPU time to do both.

For all the novel ideas...

The actual problem with US patent law is that patents are granted before they are deemed to be innovative, it is then up to a previous inventor to contest a patent with prior art.

In the UK the patent office will perform a reasonably exhaustive search to identify any clash with prior innovations before granting a patent.

Essentially slowing the patent process down by getting the patent clerks to actually do their job properly rather than relying on the legal system and corporations with lots of $$$ to do it for them.

Reliability and reliability

Vista performance and reliability, Vista compatibility and reliability...

Hmm, why is it that Microsoft always use improved reliability as a selling point, I'm sure they sold vista on "more reliable" too.

Microsoft should make reliable software in the first place, rather than using some orwellian style propaganda to try and convince people it _IS_ more reliable. Maybe if they tried to hit a 6 month release schedule like GNOME they'd get a more reliable desktop.

Yet another christian lobby group?

Take this guy for instance

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ted_Haggard

He told us of the evils of drugs, homosexuality and paw naw gra phee. Then he's found in bed with a 16yr old boy in possession of angel dust! There's nothing wrong with porn, well maybe some of it but looking at the state of the porn industry on the net I'd rather it stayed and drove new development as it does than be blocked by some holier than thou hypocrite like Reverend Ted Haggard!

Or is it that internet porn is killing the print/video porn industry in Oz and like las vegas and gambling they want to ban it to drive people back to spending money the way the gov wants them to.

Can I just point out

Dick Cheney (emphasis on the Dick) is the one with his hand up the arse of the puppet they call Bush.

He's got the legislative branch, the executive branch and the judicial branch of government in his hands. He's more powerful than any president has been.

And he shot someone in the face.

Someone should impeach Cheney rather than Bush, the fear doesn't originate from the texas hollow head...

Oh and when I say impeach, I really mean boil in oil.

You can't help but wonder...

Why celebs always insist on calling their kids unique names, when I say unique I mean ridiculous. I think its something to do with their desire to sound classy, but when you're in a supermarket and some gruff chavvy bird screams chardonay down the isle and 15 little girls turn around you've gotta start wondering.

I nearly spat my drink out when I heard what he had to ask

But they weren't aliens, they were Genetically Engineered Life Forms or GELFS

Funniest comment I've heard in ages!

Ooops

You forgot to capitalise and embolden the E for blimey!

Second correction in 5 mins, are you lot pissed today?

Erm .net fix?

The link for statistics is leading to the .net fix mentioned in another article.

RE: Unlikely they'd have questioned him if he was caucasian

"there haven't been that many caucasian suicide bombers either..."

That is a retarded statement, not many suicide bombers, but I seem to remember a rabble of irish gents who were into the old bang bang.

There was a time when you walked the streets as an irishman in england and they thought you were a terrorist, remember the guilford 4? Remember how the government suppressed the witness statements that were corroborated and proved they weren't in the vicinity of the blast, hadn't been in the vicinity of the blast, not to mention the character references that described them as peace loving hippies, erm, I mean pacifists.

The thing that is happening here isn't the obvious racism, its actually fascism, there's a slight difference, but basically it goes like this, to avoid any accusations of prejudice fascists generally pick on one sub section of society as the root of all evil, then ostracise and oppress those that disagree. That way nobody calls them prejudice against say Jews or Blacks or well whoever they chose to oppress and blame.

#define AMERICA 1

int location;

if (Dissent == Terrorism) {

location = AMERICA;

}

Compare this with the GNOME project

In 2002 GNOME released GNOME 2.0 since it has grown to GNOME 2.18 and soon GNOME 2.20, between the release of GNOME 1.4 and GNOME 2.0 many important changes were made that built GNOME into a brand spanking new platform. There were severe API breakages and ABI compatibility was completely out of the window.

During the changeover period for GNOME 1.4 - 2.0 applications were being ported. It took around a year _BEFORE_ the release of GNOME 2.0 to get most of the important apps running on the new platform, within the first 6 months of release of GNOME 2.0 almost everything was ported. From my reckoning we're almost 6 months into vista, and a large quantity of their partner products are still broken.

GNOME is just a desktop and developer platform though, it doesn't get heavily involved in the underlying operating system stuff that much, sure HAL and DBUS exist but they're not just GNOME things. So lets compare the open source conversion from say, the Vanilla Linux 2.2 - 2.4 which was a big change for kernel hackers. This update was done pretty much within 6 months and didn't break any interfacing with software.

Microsoft really dropped the ball, not because their new API's suck, they're actually pretty good from what I've heard (sharing many similarities with GTK and GLADE) the problem with the changes they made were that they changed kernel level, user space and developer space at the same time. The API/ABI compatibility is about as good as Wine now but there are loads of new API's to play with, and big changes to the underlying libraries on the system. When Microsoft make these kinds of sweeping changes all at once, everyone suffers, the users suffer because they can't get their sound card to work for instance, the driver developers suffer because they have to find kludges to get around Microsofts new security systems like patchguard, the application developers suffer because they have to rethink large portions of their software all at once.

Its not merely refactoring some code, essentially its rewriting everything, while your users complain your software/drivers suck.

Too many changes make developers angry, and what you don't want is a bunch of angry developers. Of course its OK for the microsoft suits, they can assure each other that things are going to get better whilst patting each other on the back for a job well done, but the developers on the floor have a different opinion. One which scarcely ever makes it into the mind of a middle management drone.

Lawn Chair Larry II

http://www.darwinawards.com/stupid/stupid1998-11.html

Now it fails to mention that larry, while atop the clouds in his helium erm powered lawn chair had actually managed to shoot his own balls off when he attempted to descend.

He killed himself a little while later, without fathering any children, thank god!

Please rephrase that

Please do not refer to Microsoft lackies as gnomes it is a detriment to the outstanding work that goes on for the gnome project.

Find out more at http://www.gnome.org and come at see all us devs and users at http://www.guadec.org next week in birmingham!

"through a middle-of-the-road approach"

Welcome to the so-so

Its amazing how Ballmer hasn't brought anything new to his continued speculations about where the industry is going and what microsofts part will be, this is wearing thinner and thinner every time he speaks.

Anyone can see Apple is growing in popularity and they have ambitious plans which will grant them an important role in the future of IT. Especially with leopard server offering a better experience than 2003 with better features right out of the box. (Caldav, backup, anti-spam, anti-virus all inclusive!) Apple it seems are also breaking into the smartphone market with some success, a couple of generations time they'll have it sewn up, just like digital music players.

Linux will always remain in the server market, and will always have new deployments in every crack it'll fit into, Linux is like a fungus in the server market it grows into the smallest crevice, if you want a server now, install Linux, 20 mins you're up and running. Linux on the desktop is growing too ubuntu is massively popular and growing every day.

So whereabouts in this evolving market does microsoft sit?

Charging customers for software, and software services, while providing a middle of the road quality product which has a total cost larger than the rivals.

Not much of a change then.

And the bug belongs to ...

IE... Why?

Because within a few days firefox will be fixed, and IE will still have its half of the bug. The question that should always arise when multiple browsers are affected by the same bug: "Which one will be fixed first?"

Not a weedy geek but...

I'm a fairly burly bloke, not ashamed of it, I also have a ponch but alas non of us are perfect. Now take into consideration that most men that spend a lot of time in the gym are generally already insecure enough about their own body image to want to change it, it is more than a theory that these men would lie about the number of sexual partners they've had. The same also applies to men who dress up in adoration of the clothes worn by men in Lynx adverts (see the original pulse ad).

Insecurity is one of the largest personality disorders in men, men are generally put in competitive situations where if they aren't successful this adds to an inferiority complex, which as I have found on nights out in the town I live leads to insecurities so great they end up brawling in the streets like 5yr old boys who don't know how to fight.

Thankfully when I left my home town it wasn't like that, I hold that memory quite dear as my home town is one of the only places in england I've found where the general population of men don't want or need to try and turn themselves into a folk hero as a result of their growing complex.

Personally I think the best way to attract women is to show them you're strong in other ways, strength of character, opinion and courage of their own ambitions and convictions are far more important to women in general.

Faster and more reliable?

If you kill off 80% of your user base of course it would become faster and more reliable.

Ye gods, lets state the obvious as a selling point, we have no users, our service is fast and stable because it isn't pushed to any real degree of load.

The problem...

Google have hooks into iGoogle for desktop search, google users want google desktop search because they trust google more with their (meta)data than microsoft.

In Linux the defacto standard for desktop search is beagle (which BTW is an instant search capability with lucene metadata and indexing) however, although there is a default engine, there are lots of other tools which do exactly the same thing. Even google desktop is available for linux. Apple spotlight is a very similar implementation to beagle and can easily be replaced in the system with another product. Chances are google are already developing that.

The spat between big G and the vampires of redmond is that vista _CAN'T_ have any other search capability added. There are many reasons for this, the most obvious is, try doing lucene indexing on any file in vista and you'll find lots of clever hooks in the code which do some really bizarre things like checking the licensing of every file whether it has DRM capabilities or not, which I thought was strange and results in slow initial indexes and slow updates to what should live update and index very quickly. Google acting as a friend of the court is a better idea than to outright sue them, simply because google has the technical know how to illustrate these points in a more eloquent way than most and as part of the DoJ antitrust action will make this a far more important legal conflict than it has been for XP.

I just hope they don't simply present only the desktop search issue, rather than using it to demonstrate one or two of the many anti-competitive measures microsoft have put in place in vista.

Re: ODF et al

"Microsoft said the partnership reflects the efforts it has made to move away from a proprietary model"

that made me chuckle, I always thought the proprietary model meant that we own this and you can't have it so ner ner... I don't see the source code for office 2007 around... Just because they don't obfuscate the format in binary any more doesn't mean they're not obfuscating the format at all, in fact there are questionable parts of the open xml format, first question I have is how is it open?

WRT ECMA don't microsoft have quite a substantial presence within the ECMA allowing them to direct/define any standards they want? I'm pretty sure they do, which is one of the reasons ISO are still hmming and haring over 'open' xml.

elreg please stop these "microsoft are doing good! honest!" stories, they give me acid reflux

Re: Bills Challenge

-- Feb. 1, 2007; http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/16934083/site/newsweek/page/0/

Searching security focus for Apple -> Mac OSX -> 10.4.10 returns 0 results...

Am I missing something here? People might be finding bugs, but they're not 0day, don't affect a large homogeneous population of machines, are generally fixed quite quickly (you can get more than one update a month!!) and 90% of the existing bugs for OSX still don't give you root access.

There are lies, damn lies, and whatever microsoft says about apple :)

WRT the microsoft website;

Retarded web developers who could only get a job at M$ + IIS6 = Erm, our server just got defaced over in the UK.

This kind of thing makes me chuckle every time :)