Re: Quiet news day? El Reg?

> You have just regurgitated it, again, for the titillation of readers here.

Yes, and it worked wonderfully, causing both of us to read the article and then go to the comments section. We went for it hook, line, and sinker. You get titillated, I get titillated, El Reg gets advertising money. It's a win-win situation!

So what you're saying is

They should use a bit of water? Make the sand wet and you can grip it really easily and make sand castles.

I have no idea where the metaphor goes from here.

Re: Desktop 'dumped'?

So it's more that Microsoft said that they see the desktop as a friend, really, and wanted to see other interfaces?

I'd buy that for a dollar!

Lies, damn lies, and linkbait

Agreed. Or, if you want to consider that I hardly ever boot my MacBook into Windows (I have it mostly for games) but do a lot of heavy lifting on the MacOS side. Even if you divide crashes by time used, the Windows comes out on top because I tend to avoid stressing it as much on the windows side of things and rarely leave it running unattended enough to sleep (And thus have never had it crash), and I have had some failures to wake from sleep on the Mac side.

There's so many other variables that well, in conclusion, it's time for a beer.

Re: Hey, this is the actual business model!

Years ago, I actually interviewed with a company where that was their explicit business model. That is, their end goal was to build a product that looked interesting enough to get acquired, founders cash in, bail from large company, lather rinse repeat.

Re: Timeline is a generic term

One interesting thing is if you talk with a Microsoft employee, they don't refer to it as Word, but as Microsoft Word™. That is, the name includes Microsoft in it in order to make it unique enough to be a trademark. Same for Microsoft Windows™, Microsoft Office™, etc. How they pronounce out loud the little ™, however, I'll never know.

Re: Seems that digital copies...

Comparing beer to digital copies? That we're only renting them because they eventually exit? Isn't that rather taking the piss?

El Reg Tagline

I much prefer the old 2000 PR Tariff ( http://www.theregister.co.uk/2000/05/09/official_register_2000_pr_tariff/ ) tagline El Reg had:

Integrity - we've heard of it.

Re: Read novels for advertisements?

Well, the English Language works like this:

You send some prattle from your mouth. You've got to have at least three, usually four or five listeners – that receive your prattle. And the difference in time it takes to make sense from one listener to the other to the other, which is whole minutes, allows them to calculate what you were trying to say to within 10 metres.

I wish it were because of common sense. They were invalidated because other writers weren't credited. IE, it was invalidated not because it was bleeding obvious, but because of a technicality.

Re: It must be us old fogeys with no perception of speed or distance

The whole concept is a very scary thought in general, especially when you consider these things:

1) In order for car slipstreaming to work (It's easier for big rigs/lorries since they have a much larger shape), the cars have to be playing NASCAR, i.e. nearly bumper to bumper and nowhere near the good 3-4 seconds needed for a proper stopping distance.

2) There's often this fraud done of stopping immediately in front of a big rig and getting rear ended, then suing for such.

So, who's up for a doing this setup, big rig suddenly stops due to failure or (2) above, and decapitation due to the lower half of the car sliding under the trailer? We could call it heads-free driving!

Re: huh

"The reverse happening is a little bizzare at first glance. If a product is too successful it endangers it's own trademark because it becomes a common term? Of course this is US law. I'm sure it differs somewhat worldwide."

This is why Xerox insists that using their systems is to photocopy, not to xerox. It's called genericized trademark, and has happened in a number of countries. Aspirin in UK and US (although that's also due to the 1919 Treaty of Versailles), and Hoover in the UK. And yes, it does differ from country to country.

As to why the linguists are adding it, slang is a very rough draft to the next iteration of speech, and the job of a dictionary is to define a word to help people understand each other. A dictionary that doesn't include newer words to help with understanding is only useful if the language is dead.

Also, if you want to make someone from Google cringe, tell them you use Yahoo! to google things up.

a built-in radiation source and Geiger counter RNG

I tried that once, but then /bin/cat would die about half the time.

That just means your Google 200 Super-Chromatic Peril Sensitive Sunglasses are working just fine!

*Google acquired Joo Janta, apparently.

Re: Maybe it will work.

Well, if there's any mask that'd be appropriate (or is it inappropriate?) for a blast, it'd be Guy Fawkes.

Explosive icon because 5th of November.

Re: Including the first memo

Don't forget the long lost bible page, "To my darling, Candy. All characters portrayed in this book are purely ficticous, and any likeness to anyone alive or dead is purely coincidental."

Mine's the one with the Better Than Life game guide in the pocket.

Re: So how long before

Did the virus then start to bittorrent movies?

Re: Availability?

"All the 'approved' outlets of MP3 files are certainly not reasonable priced." What is reasonable pricing? Do you mean Amazon or iTunes? They both are about less than £1/song.

Thanks! I quite like fantasy world women. And real world women. So I shall enjoy them as you kindly suggested.

Back to the actual topic, despite being a Mac fanboy and developer of a competing product, I can't help but see this as a good thing. Healthy competition is good for the market and good for the soul and wotnot. Does Xamarin completely end-run around Apple's frameworks and toolkit, or is a Mac with Xcode still required for making iOS apps with them?

"then they they aren't losing anything if someone else does."

The problem comes that they ARE losing something. Even if they never enter the BB arena, if said pirate makes a crappy port, or that the app isn't designed for BB and thus has some issues that aren't otherwise on Android, it hurts the appmaker's reputation and would cause support calls (like what happened in the article) that wastes the developer's time, energy, and possibly money to even find out that it's a case where the app isn't being used in the way it's designed.

That's the danger, and that's why even a free port done with the developer's permission (or by their own hand) isn't really free.

Ohhhh, I get it!

While Sesame Street has Muppets (Jim Henson's creation), they're not muppets (Brit slang for idiots). That slang always bugged me, especially since those muppets are too dumb to be true Muppets.

Re: Wtf?

Ironically enough, it's not about directly driving mars cars from earth. The sluggish speed of light means ping times would measure at about half an hour. Directly controlling on the moon, maybe, where the ping would be 2 seconds and change.

The key difference is a new, flexible protocol that isn't hand-crafted to the task at hand. To analogize, this is TCP/IP whereas the current mars rover setups are doing direct dialup to a late 80s, early 90s-era BBS. (Would this make Voyager 1 morse code?)

"I think international groups should be sent to the USA to monitor elections"

Apparently, OSCE did go to monitor several swing states where there was concerns.

http://www.osce.org/odihr/95107

Re: Fukishama

There's this slight problem with putting pumps up high, called gravity. It's the same reason you can't suck water up 10m with a straw or why a barometer will have empty space up top despite the vacuum. Simply put, there's only so high atmospheric pressure will push the diesel despite how good the pump is sucking, a problem not faced by a pump that's pushing. So you have to have the pump as low as the tanks, or else they won't work beyond the third floor, if you're lucky.

Hey now, get your facts straight!

Right, I know you're trying to troll, but get it right! You claim "OSX is a bug-ridden mess and has so many bad decisions built into it that it's unrecognisable from the stable, secure BSD that it's built on." This is clearly wrong!

OSX was built atop the Mach kernel, not BSD's. It merely has a BSD-compatible POSIX layer and BSD subsytem on on top.

Now, write it out a hundred times. If it's not done by sunrise, I'll cut your balls off.

Re: just be consistent

Very yes. Cars are the worst. My favourite is car batteries, where you use a 10mm socket to hook up the battery, then secure it with a half-inch bolt.

Re: @amanfromMars 1

Given patent wars, Facebook, all of this, I... I don't think it's a case that amanfromMars is suddenly starting to make sense. I think it's more the case that the world stopped making sense, so naturally amanfromMars fits in, now.

Re: Dangerous bits?

Given the age of the shuttles, and the sort of wacky things they have to do, it's more likely that the dangerous bits are hazardous materials like mercury, asbestos, lead solder, heavy metals, coolant, and other things that, now that the shuttle's not going to be under constant maintenance and instead in an enclosed area, should probably be disposed and/or recycled properly.

Curse you! Now I hear that green muppet's voice saying, "Privileged pussy I am! Yes!"

I was about to say,

I had thought aManFromMars had broke loose and now was doing the interview. Actually, where is our favourite martian, to suss this all out?

Re: Disgusting

You could probably wager a beer or two that someone's already patented HelloWorld. Sorry, 'means to indicate successful program design, functioning, and/or invocation via display of text.'

Patience young grasshopper.

> what will they do if they found some malfunction?

They could possibly figure out a way to get the rover to fix itself, find some way to compensate for a failing, or at the very least know NOT to use that tool and risk further damage. I know we're all in a 'It's already been a month. Why is it taking so long?' mood, but slow and methodical is the way to do this.

This sort of design is why Voyager 1 is still sending back information, some of it very interesting as it approaches interstellar space (17.8 terameters away), some 35 years after its launch. Most of us, including myself, would be absolutely ecstatic if our one-off kit survived just half that without maintenance.

Re: Eat this, Apple!

Even though I'm pretty much an Apple fanboy, I completely agree. The market needs a lot more designs than things that resemble Apple products. I really hope that MSFT doesn't drop the ball on this one.

I was planning on announcing my Continuity Recovery Application Business suite for Global IT departments. After all, what GIT doesn't want CRABs?

Re: @Blain Hamon

It's a fair cop. But I wasn't trolling you, I was trolling my wife back then.

I drove to work with my car, jump into the tow truck, and wait for calls. But since I lived in the coverage area, I would wait for calls, sitting in the truck at home so that I could spend time with my wife while still in earshot of the radio. We had a Ford Explorer at the time, with both of our names on the insurance and the pink slip (vehicle ownership record), but she was the primary driver, and the keys were in her purse. Keep in mind that Fords are notorious for having weak security, especially mid-90s.

Therefore, if I was outside the house waiting for a call, and she or I needed something from the Ford, I'd grab the slimjim from the tow truck (since it was right there) and use that to open the car instead of the keys in the purse hanging up in the house. It bugged her so I was trolling her a bit when I mentioned how faster and more convenient the slimjim was.

All this to impress on how weak car door (not ignition) security is, I noted that even for a car I own WITH the keys accessible (but mildly out of reach), the break-in is trivially easy enough to be on par to using the keys.

As to why I was a tow truck driver, I'm a software engineer by training, and thankfully lucked out with learning Objective C before the iPhone came out, but back in 2003 my own car broke down while I was jobhunting and jokingly asked the truck driver if they were hiring.

Re: Cool

Yeah, Poe's law (Also known as "Any sufficiently advanced parody is indistinguishable from a genuine kook.") is alive and well.

I heard it was to upgrade the distance conversion tables. You know, so that all measurements are done in linguine and double-decker buses.

Re: OS

If you actually want to know:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VxWorks

VxWorks is a major player in embedded systems. Spirit and Opportunity also used it, Sojourner used it, SpaceX's Dragon uses it. And NASA's done OS upgrades at 250 million km before:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/5022524.stm

Angry Birds has yet to be ported to it, however.

Re: "Hmm... Another indication of which OS is preferred by The Best and the Brightest™"

Quite right. On the video feed, there were quite a few recognizable Thinkpads and other laptops than just Apple kit, even at that table. So which OS is preferred by The Best and the Brightest? Whichever one is the right tool for the job at hand, no more, no less.