Posts by regadpellagru

not watching

"[...] and the administration will be watching to see if Cuba allows the cell phones to enter the country. ®"

Probably listening, rather than watching :-)

White noise is the key to counter intelligence

Has always been. I believe any people worried by facebook should take some of their time to create fake profiles also.

As for the "change ISP" brigade, yeah, easy when in Central London, not when you're in a less populated place with only 2 ISPs available on your POP.

If/when they agree on Phorm, you're screwed and only can counter by white noise, until they realise how much it costs them and stop logging.

Sad but unavoidable to counter Phorm's business case.

@Peter Gathercole

Ah mate, you couldn't write my feelings about that any better !

Been sick of FC for years, no way to update a single pkg without triggering tons of pointless updates. I mean, supposing the updater wouldn't stall. Also, you couldn't (back with FC7) install with a single CD, thus not practical on medium networks of old PCs, even internet connected ... The worst was in fact the pkg system and categorisation of installed components. Has probably not evolved since RH 5 or 6, with still the only PDF reader unticked by default. Who would use a PC with no pdf reader ?

When is it gonna reach the level where SUN/HP/IBM were, 10 years ago in terms of pkg maturity ?

And how would you install your Nvidia driver on FC eh ? Even myself, I've become tired of recompiling the kernel (because the default one was compiled with a different version of gcc, from the one installed, which would sanely prevent the NV driver from compiling) just to get some openGL working.

Geez, we're back to Linux kernel 1.2.X with X an optional pkg to be compiled ! Was in 1994, if I recall.

Since the SW is exactly the same on all distros, I hope one day, they all agree on a common set of pkgs (and format !). Then, they could just put in their fav method of installing the common pkgs.

Would save shitloads of storage on internet FTP servers and a lot of CPU power to recompile the same sources into the same execs, to make different pkgs ! Make it green, unify the Linux pkgs !

bring it on !

As a number of people here, I've been really disappointed by Doom 3. Yeah, "quest for the light switch" LOL. Didn't buy it, after seeing critics and the demo, and went for the largely superior Quake 4, which had relinked to the Quake 2 storyline, after Q3 which was an arena game.

I also love the doom series, 1 and 2 were superb and I'm really looking forward to see Doom 4, hopefully on the tracks of the first 2 in terms of atmosphere. And light :-)

Also, if it's a good title and is avail on the Wii, it might very well put an end to my anti-console religion.

Good business case

"DVD-D Germany Ltd has high hopes for its home country market. Disposable DVDs have already been successfully introduced in France, Italy and Scandinavia, it says. Others believe the concept is dead in the water, as on-demand online rentals will kill movie DVDs, of whatever hue, soon enough."

France ? Never seen any. Scandinavia ? I don't see any of those folks buying wastes just to polute the planet and their country some more. Germany ? With so many of them voting green, yeah of course, a new business is born </sarcasm>.

Those guys are under drugs to be so optimistic, let's watch them fail !

The only valid use would be (as others have pointed out) to perform large data transfers operated by hopeless morons, but they would need to make it a writeable solution, which is not easy in the aforementioned environment.

Mine is the one with the pockets full of self-burning DVDs.

So, always in pubs ?

"The London Borough of Kensington and Chelsea has revealed that staff have had data on children stolen on three occasions, including twice in pubs."

If I lived there, I'd be mostly worried than it occured to the Borough staff twice as often in pubs than anywhere else.

Not jumping to conclusions, but why never in the supermarket, or in their car, eh ?

For real ? Really ?

"Microsoft tries to talk its way into VoIP"

Good luck, Kro ! Probably will end up the same as last time you entered a market with working products on it. Oh, wait a minute, never happened, did it ?

not the same league with Prescott

"While Sarko does indeed show promise as a very unexemplary politico, Monsieur Hollande is evidently not au fait with the public relations skills of our very own John "Slugger" Prescott, who in 2001 responded to an egg-chucking farmer by punching him in the face:"

True, true, but Prescott punched someone who agressed him, while Sarko insulted someone only because he refused to shake his hand (and after Sarko's insistance, told him that it would make him dirty).

Not the same league and I would rather have Prescott have the nuke button than the wee man we have in l'Elysee those days ...

PS: good memories, the Prescott vid !

PPS: kudos to the raising skills of El Reg, in the Voltaire's language !

At last !

"Investors approve Toshiba plan to drop HD DVD"

Ah, is not yet confirmed, but time to spare money, at last, for a new gen DVD player !

By the way, am I the only one to to find weird that Toshiba's share price is raising by 6.7 % while Sony's is raising by 1 % only ? Or investors are starting to have faith in reasonable mgmt planning for the long term rather than anal retentive mgmt ?

The only thing that buggers me ....

is how much furniture was Balmered before the press release ?

Contrary to others, I believe someone as bonkers as him, could likely close the deal, setting a high speed course to the big wall.

We'll see ...

Anti-blogosphere measure at El Reg

Oh, and I don't usually comment on readers comments, but here go ;-)

I find it appaling so many El Reg readers (well, possibly abusive term, since they're all AC) do complain (some confessing they didn't even go until the end) about the length of the article, without even refering to its content. It's worth the length since it's been a lot of reasearch and facts, to prove the indeed very polemic point. What a scoop: the uber-mod of the COI policy being a cultist ! There is an IT angle, and also a very information in IT angle.

If you guys are unable to read more than 3 quality pages due to an extremely tiny brain, your IT life is over, you're already on the offshored list, and thus, would you pls move to other readings ?

IT documentation can easily raise to 1200 pages, so is several logarithmic scales above your league, and the same and the same applies to encyclopediae. No 3 pagers in this area. Move along, nothing here for you !

To El Reg: Time to take anti-blogosphere measures, like, I don't know, a mandatory login for reading El Reg + a reading/understanding test of 10 pages at the end. Failure would deactivate the login for 1 week.

Thoughts ?

Evoting = no democracy

Reminds me of the DVD player market. Once again, how many are "secure" in the sense of respecting zones without any way to unlock this ? Who bothers with zones nowadays ? Why is that: follow the money, no manufacturer is dumb enough to not provide the unlock "feature", and customers *DO* want it.

Now, same reasoning with evoting machines. What do customers (aka elected people that pay the bill) want ? Control, to be re-elected. What manufacturer will be dumb enough to make it absolutely secure and audited ?

See ? Evoting is not democratic.

"Physical locks in Sequoia's Edge system could be bypassed by unfastening screws. "

That's a good one, really, which proves the point. I bet they even had standard screws rather than torks to make it easier ...

Synergies between both

The are synergies between yahoo mail and Exchange 2007: they share the "slow as hell" feature, thus this move probably makes sense !

After that, surely google will get closer and closer to Ubuntu, and win the remote/local desktop war. Maybe ...

"And then there's the bigger question: If Microsoft acquires Yahoo!, what happens to The Register's Yahoo! headlines? ®"

This one's easy forecast: El Reg will make yet another of those titles after the merge, get sued by Kro, after some furnitures in Redmond get Balmered, and will loose. That'll be the end of this.

root cause of the problem

"No word yet on what caused the problems. ®"

Probably a 500GB export of some UK citizens DB flying from HRMC to whatever google repository via the same internet circuit, what else ?

Bizarre El Reg missed that one ...

Happens all the time ... not only in the US.

I recall clearly watching the official ceremony for a police officer that died that stupid way, cleaning his weapon, removing the loader, forgetting it has a chamber with a bullet in it, and actionning the trigger while pointing to him. Was in France, by the way, 25 years ago.

I was 14 or something and never had put my hand on any fire weapon, but clearly thought it was a really darn good thing for everyone's security that such a moron, autorised to bear a weapon, shot himself. Never understood why on earth they did such a ceremony though with the prefet and all, speaking of "duty" and so on.

Probably here lie the roots of my passion for sarcasm :-)

And yes, unfortunately, the density of morons being the same in every country, having >2 fire weapons per inhabitant will make the US beat anyone else at that game. Pity, as someone said, from a logistics point of view, noone will ever succeed to remove all those weapons, unless they leave it rust for one century ... After forbidding by law to sell them.

The car metaphor

Speaking of the very good car metaphor, here's one that happens endlessly to me:

At a family event/in the pub/at a reception/in a train, chatting with someone I've never encountered before:

- him/her: So, you're in IT

- me: yeah (not elaborating, too risky)

- him/her: I've just recently changed my PC. It was full.

- me: What was full, hard disk or memory ?

- him/her (baffled to learn there is actually more in a PC than a box, a screen and a keyboard): Errrr, it was just saying it was full ... So I bought a new one.

- me: ...

Now, let's do the same, at the very end of a driving license test, when the examinator is asking basic questions, to be sure he's not giving it to a dangerous maniac:

- examinator: Say, let's suppose a light suddenly lit, when you're driving, saying the petrol tank is near empty. What do you do ?

- candidate: I change it.

- ex.: What, the petrol tank ?

- cand.: No, the car ! I buy a new one because it's empty.

He's not gonna have the license, is he ??? If he did, we'd have even more deaths on the road ...

So, it's a darn good idea to get some tests, really. I'm up for it.

Free Telecom

"Fixed/Mobile convergence is also suggested as a security weakness, with telecos connecting their systems to IP networks but lacking the skills to maintain the security of such connections."

Bingo on this one for french provider Free Telecom, and their unsupported SIP service (not so unsupported since it's the only way to have their Black and White phone work ! Read on here (in Voltaire language):

- http://www.freephonie.org/topic3319.html

And this was half a month ahead of 2008. Rumours have it they restricted the SIP service to non-international after they realised some smart ass in their Morocco support teams had stolen SIP credentials from Free customers, to use them as a free tunnel to backcharge calls to their "customers".

Don't look for Free Telecom words on this, as they have yet, 2 months after the incident, to say anything about it.

Above expectations ? Morons.

"The reseller said the survey, which was taken by 772 IT bosses, also revealed that confidence in Vista's capabilities had improved with nearly half scoring it "above expectations" particularly on security, performance, productivity, search, and updates."

I'm skeptical about those 772 IT bosses. Are they of the Dilbert type ? Does their brain so severly limit their expectations ?

I'm using XP on a 5 years old laptop at work, and Excel for example runs ok even with large sheets.

I was, 2 days back, physically forced to work for 2 days on a brand new laptop running Vista, with HW specs 8 times above my work laptop, and opening an XLS sheet of 300 lines was a *hell* slower than anything I've seen.

Oh, yes, and since I caught the local WIFI spot, it did install stuff and wanted furiously to reboot. And at the time I had to reboot it, it took ages.

What a pile of sh*te !

As the others have said, in 2009 maybe, and if the folks at Ubuntu have stopped the distro, maybe ...

I'm beginning to believe the slowdown in semi-conductor market is due to Vista ...

OOXML and MS credibility

Would have been interesting to question Shaffner on how cool this complete debacle could impact MS credibility on OOXML ...

It seems to me noone is too enthusiast at letting the whole thing be proprietary, and probably even less at being the property of a bunch of nutwits unable to find the sources of the parser to fix a critical bug ?

PH icon here, because of the word "nutwit" ;-)

real point of this news

There should be a "real point" comment, yes ? :-)

The really interesting things are:

- this was announced by our lovely minister of health (and sports, don't forget that, even if it seems to me a good 50 kg weight reduction is needed, to only try to qualify for any such type of activity), after it's been noticed a LOT of mobile phones were sold to kids during Christmas, some with a GPS

- this was announced one week AFTER Christmas

Source: France Info radio station

PH icon. At least, she CAN do sports and even sell movies showing night sports ;-)

it *does* happen

"Instead of the expected SECOND appearing, the characters "FUCKME" appeared. I was shocked. No, that doesn't really cover it: I was traumatised."

Poor thing .... Was it the shock of your life ? ;-)

I'd be shocked if only that caused the product to be ditched ...

Mind you, I used to embed sarcastic comments or parabols in my sources years ago, about some colleagues or other event. Not rude words of course, but kind of private jokes, in the hope it would one day make someone have a good laugh. Sort of legacy from me.

12 years after, some ex-colleagues told me they re-read the sources to update/adapt them, and got a very good moment remembering the joke.

It *does* happen even in big companies, even if the SECOND.BAR thing seems to me bad taste and 14-years oldish.

Yeah, not nice a patch

Contrary to a lot of commenters, I don't believe most gamers are able to see a failure to reboot of Win XP (or before) due to that stupid patch, and fix it OK.

At least none of the folks of the villages around me would be able to do that, even if some are players ... And only 5% of them actually have recovery CDs since most dealers don't give them at all.

Thus, is indeed a pretty crap patch. Where is the icon for QA angle ?

Proposale for Gray's new job

"Gray will report to Sir Gus O'Donnell, cabinet secretary, and run "special projects to develop civil service skills"."

Right, what about data confidentiality as far as "civil service skills" are concerned ?

"They believe the discs are still somewhere in the system."

Ah, funny, this one, isn't it the one I've heard so many times: "The System can't do it. It is somewhere in the System, etc ...". Is always better than "I don't have a clue where it's gone !".

Elaborate, Darling ?

"Chancellor Alistair Darling also said yesterday that the disaster actually strengthened arguments in favour of ID cards. "

I'd be very interested to read how he could elaborate on this one. El Reg to call him ? Worth the cost, IMHO.

Even in my banana republic, the press would collapse from laughter on this one ...

If only ...

Sun had started to sort out the tape business in their acquired storage division, they could have maybe been taken more seriously by customers, for all of the new products (VTL, etc ...).

Today, they have 3 libs:

- SL500: atrocious sh**e

- L700/1400: obsolete, as per STK themselves. They removed all L models, 3 years back, except for this one to fill the gap.

- SL8500: gigantic, can't fit anywhere else than Los Alamos labs. 2.35m height, 4 m long, nearly 3 m large and oh, yes, 1 m needs be empty all around. Entry ticket at 1500 tapes ! What a footprint ! On top of that, that massive thing still runs under the ill-designed ACSLS, which is the SPOF of the architecture (except if clustered).

yeah, better bugless (mostly) than dead on crashes

My own experience of FF:

- switched to 2.X by way of 2.0.1 (after reading of it in El Reg !)

- it crashed any time I visited one web site (that happens to be the one I read most): nwvault.ign.com

- switched back to 1.X

- only was back to 2.X when it popped out in the automatic update

- is solid ever since

Lesson learnt: switch to 3.X only when it's general deployment, and pops out in automatic/manual updates.

This article confirms this even more.

De Profundis

Rest in peace Atari. The positive thing is this iminent and much awaited death, might release the D&D licence they have, which no one is too happy to see captive of the bunch of morons that lead Atari into the wall.

As others have said, loads of clueless managers and noone able to compile hello_world.c ...

I didn't know about the ET story from the link below:

http://www.snopes.com/business/market/atari.asp

Interesting, and how does it compare with some recent disappointments. NeverWinter Nights 2, for example, crippled with performance problems and neverending bugs for one year now, because rushed for christmas 2006.

Last time I checked the NWN2 forums (more in flames, by the way, than any plane in hell), there was a thread started by a dev of the title "What's the most buggy character class". Erm.

And of course, to be sure to upset people, it's been found out the performance problems were largely due to ... Securom, the famous and extremely moronic DRM, for which only the editor (Atari) can be accountable, not the developper.

See how they managed to have a one year running (and over 1600 posts) in a petition thread here, where many people claim to boycott the mark:

http://www.ataricommunity.com/forums/forumdisplay.php?f=501

PS: PH icon also for me, to illustrate the amount of stupidity of Atari mgrs.

Sperm whale from Hitch hicker's guide to the galaxy ?

And what about the last thoughts of the beast ?

Maybe, like in Douglas Addams' famous book, something like "Oh, what is this object coming at very high speed ? Big, brown. I wonder if we'll be friend." or more "hmmm, this van seems to come very fast, maybe jumping off the cliff wasn't the brighest idea ..."

Vista more secure than Linux ? Not.

"Ben Fathi, corporate vice president of development for Windows, claimed on Tuesday that Vista experienced fewer security vulnerabilities than either Mac OS X, Windows XP or Ubuntu Linux."

I won't be making comments on Vista vs. XP or MacOS X, apart from the usual "less Vista than any of the others, thus have the numbers been compared fairly ?", but the Vista vs. Linux, I'd like one day to get a demo on how you infect so many Linux boxes so as Fathi has anything close to a valid point.

I've put my Linux PC direct to the net, unfirewalled, for years before DSL routers were the norm, and never saw any malware/virus or anything like that. Anyone up for doing the same with Vista for 8 months ?

Is this Fathi guy of the same family as Ballmer ;-)

Yes !

"Dr Paabo has grown a batch of lab mice whose FOXP2 genes have been replaced with the human version, and says that although their behaviour is unchanged "there seems to be a change in vocalisation. They squeak in a different way". The mice also have extra connections in their brains."

This is terrific news ! Once this bloke has sorted out the exact genes sequence, surely, he'll be able to work out a treatment for "her" being too talkative !

Ballmer. Again.

Let's portrait Ballmer as a linear combination of:

- http://www.politicsforum.org/images/flame_warriors/flame_42.php

- http://www.politicsforum.org/images/flame_warriors/flame_45.php

- http://www.politicsforum.org/images/flame_warriors/flame_70.php

- http://www.politicsforum.org/images/flame_warriors/flame_76.php

I'm leaving for all El Reg's readers the calculation/estimation of the coefficients.

May we never loose his genes, just like Ebola's virus, so as to be sure we can still fight him in the next centuries.

Title

"People who use Red Hat, at least with respect to our intellectual property, in a sense have an obligation eventually to compensate us,"

"I would love to see all open source innovation happen on top of Windows"

"Google's had the same experience - even though they read your mail and we don't"

No doubt, someone will have to give back his pills to Balmer. It's been a while, come on, it's no longer funny, naughty boys !

@El Reg, we've seen uncoherent statements receive their fair share of sarcasm, in those columns, why not those ? Well, sure, I understand Ballmer is now a very vulnerable target, making the world collapse in laugh, but come on, someone will have to deliver !