Posts by Daniel 1

Which dollar is that, then?

Surely the only dollar whose value is important in determining PC prices, these days, is the New Taiwan Dollar?

Acer can say what they like, as far as I see it. If you buy an Acer laptop, you're just buying a Quanta Computer laptop, with an Acer badge stuck on it, anyway - and since that's true of a third of all the laptops in the global market (including all the Apple ones), and a great many desktops, it's surely Quanta, that will determine how much component prices influence the market? This story is about what the monkey has to say - but I see Barry Lam, winding the handle on the organ: why not ask him what's going to happen?

Fermi Paradox?

There is nothing terribly paradoxical about the 'Fermi Paradox', since it starts from the assumption that interstellar travel is feasible enough to be worth doing in the first place.

Most people who discuss traveling between stars have underestimated the scale of the problem, by mere dint of the fact that they actually discuss it. It is quite possible that a civilisation can become as advanced, as it is possible for a civilisation to have become, and still be totally incapable of interstellar travel.

Einstein wasn't joking about that 'going faster than light' stuff, you know? All the evidence suggests that, it is not only impossible to move faster than light, but that it is impossible to *have* moved faster than light: i.e., that you cannot occupy a point, in space, more remote than your starting point, at any time sooner than it would take, for light to undertake the journey between those two points in space. Not if you still be made out of matter, at least.

'Hyperspace', 'space-folding', 'wormholes'... These are words, written in books and spoken in movies. You may as well debate the physics of Tolkien.

It's not what Microsoft describe as "Quirks" mode

It's quirks mode: that's what it's called.

When a proper DOCTYPE hasn't been assigned for a page, or when elements of that page do not comply with the DOCTYPE specified for it, the browser can no longer trust that the page owner's assertion of the DOCTYPE is correct, and has to fall back to programmed-n assumptions about what they actually meant.

Mozilla has a quirks mode, Opera has a quirks mode - every decent browser has a quirks mode - because many 'web developers' are so shit at their jobs.

"I was in Europe someplace"

The arrogance implicit in this statement rather sums up why Steve Balmer should not be allowed to represent anything about his company. "I was in Europe, someplace - one of those places where we sell stuff - who cares? I was trying to convince the little commie bastards to buy even more of our stuff."

Didn't Steve Balmer's own father come from "Europe, someplace"? His mother, too, since Belarus is nowadays considered as part of Eastern Europe!

ORLY?

"Shareholders usually get antsy when companies cash piles grow too large, and start demanding execs do something to return the value to... them."

Oh really? Read about Microsoft, much?

My dad used to fly these

The ministry issued all the aircrews with silk scarves, that had maps of the parts of Russia they were likely to bomb, printed on them (presumably so that they could walk back to Britain, and have another go, if they got shot down). The only problem was, that all the names, of all the towns, rivers and cities, were printed in Western Script!

I don't really know which is the more alarming

A) The fact that it (apparently) takes 26 people, to electrocute, and then suffocate, a man to death

or

B) How ordinary they all look

http://www.thenational.ae/assets/pdf/AD53408224.PDF

Sure, some of them look a bit... well... cranky (is that the smile that "Elvinger" uses as he attaches the electrodes, I wonder... and "Mildner" definitely looks like he get a big kick out of something or other ... while "Graham" looks like he was only there because he got turned down for a job as a Shoe-bomber.) None of them look especially like they just stepped out of some XBox game, though, do they?

I suppose this is what real life (or, at least, real death) looks like: you get executed by a crack team of geography teachers. (Not Maths teachers, obviously: Maths teachers are hard)

Eastwood? Really?

"I know what you're thinking, punk. Did I use both fists, or only one...?"

Re:Scalable or reneable?

Everything you say about biomass fuel is true, but we should, perhaps bear in mind, that all we are currently burning, is biomass fuel. The only thing that makes it "efficient" is that we have spent a couple of hundred years burning off a couple of hundred million years-worth of accumulated biomass.

But what's the ampage?

Electricity is two things: quantity of electrons and flow of electrons. Generating quantity has traditionally been fairly easy, with fuel cells, but generating flow has traditionally been a problem. You can convert large amounts of fairly slow electrons into a thin flow of very fast ones, but simply saying you can generates lots of volts does not amount to useful work, unless that translates into a real torrent of amperage.

Herein lies the problem

Ripped off content is often more usable, better quality, and more enjoyable to consume, than the legitimate, paid-for content.

The reason we all know the "You wouldn't steal a car... You wouldn't steal a bicycle... You wouldn't steal a half-eaten doughnut..." advert, is that we've all been forced to sit through it, at some point in our lives (usually a short time, prior, to switching the damn thing off and saying "Fuck this. Where can I download a proper copy of this movie?")

For every aggrieved artist, complaining about freeloaders stealing their stuffz, there are cohorts of pointy-haired executives, who want to take control of our personal electronics, and turn home entertainment into some bizarre variant of the Ludovico Technique.

Protective patents are like this

You patent how YOU use an idea: not assert any rights to how other people might use the idea. It's designed to stop some Johnny-come-lately, building something a bit like yours... patenting it, and then asserting that YOU are in breech of THEIR patent.

Protect and survive. Mad world, isn't it?

They'll open it

Google's not in the business of owning codecs: it's in the business of getting every producer of video content on the Internet to use a format Google can index. This means metadata, and at the moment there are too many de facto, standards creeping into how meta data gets its way into video files. Ogg is a fairly typical example of this.

Google isn't against de facto standards, it just like them to be THEIR de facto standards. Opening up On2 would allow it to steer the addition of meta data in ways that suit the Googlebot, and people would go along with that, if they knew that that's how to give a video a good page rank.

Books, video, XML feeds - it doesn't matter: Google doesn't want to own the content, and it most certainly doesn't want to control the content. it wants to own the fact that you or I are interested in the content.

"Third-largest computer seller by shipments"?

What does that actually mean? Virtually every computer manufacturer on the planet has their computers made for them by Quanta Computer Incorporated, anyway (and that includes Dell's own Latitude range, and the Alienware brand). A third of all golbal notebooks sales, are rebranded Quanta machines (including all the Apple range and every XO-1). In fact, Dell is unusual in still maintaining large scale assembly plants of its own.

Maybe we should say that Dell has slipped to number two spot, and will probably remain there until a third major assembler joins in (Flexronics get my bet)?

EDF figures

EDF freely admit that they will achieve a projected quarter of that 1000 megawatt figure by buying renewable electricity generation from other firms already in the business. The purchased offset will allow them to continue generation in other areas, while still achieving their targets. That will probably include buying from Ecotricity, who currently have no need for purchased offset.

Dale Vince isn't someone I could trust, too far, but if you must issue Parthian shots, ensure that they hit a mark.

So...?

The conclusion from Johns Hopkins, is that trying to travel faster than light is a bad idea because "it is unhealthy"?

How about the near-century-old conclusion, that trying to travel faster than light is a bad idea because it is just plain impossible?

Well, I suppose this answers the question...

"What would a Jesus Phone user do?"

indeed, you haz bin trolled

Did someone REALLY go to the ReadWriteWeb website, mistake it for the Facebook login, and leave a snotty comment?

Well, maybe - but just 12 comments in, we have (as you quote):

"I just want to log in to Facebook - what with the red color and all? LOLLLOLOL!!!!!111"

That's from 'Frederic Lardinois' (who has the good grace to include his picture)... But Frederic Lardinois is "a Writer for ReadWriteWeb, joining the team in June 2008."

http://www.readwriteweb.com/about_Frederic.php

So, after a goodly bit of extra fun, fueling any apparent sense of confusion, we have John Gruber, Digg, and probably the whole of 4chan on the case....

"ZMFG!!1! Look at al thes st00pid Facebook usres cmmnetnig on this news story!!1!!!"

By about the 20th comment, it has become clear that the mischief-makers are in full swing, adding ever more dorky-looking 'comments' of their own. Eventually, the Readwriteweb article is, indeed, top of the Google page rank for 'Facebook login' and we have a 'story' about bewildered Facebook users hammering the comments section of some little-known on-line news website. Great. We all like a good story about how utterly stupid the rest of the human race is, because it reinforces our belief in the fact that We Really Aren't Suckers, Ourselves, doesn't it?

You people are all SO right!

After all, how can the opinion of a happily-married man, with children, and a highly paid job, count more, than the snap judgments of an unhygienic mob of passive agressives on Teh Intahnet? After all, some guy thinks he's clever for overseeing the development of an operating system - when some of you have even done "Hello World" in assembler!

(You can make things true, just by writing them on the Internet, you know? Just find some random forum, and start typing: I read it on Wikipedia!)

Competition for intel?

Are ye missing something? They'll patent this, and lease the rights to use it, to everyone else, including Intel - same as they have been doing with all their inventions for 3 decades. Around 60-80% of the profits on a current Intel chip go straight Armonk, anyway, with none of the production overhead to worry about.

It's the same with high density disc drives, laser optics, RAM - a whole raft of the hard stuff that goes into anything, these days - from a mainframe to a E-book. There's not been a lot of computer, you could build, since the late 80s, that would even function without making use of some patented IBM technologies. Sooner or later, the money gets back to Armonk. Thats how you get to 'lose' control of a PC industry, and yet still somehow manage to remain the biggest IT company in the world.

We see a tentacle here, we see a tentacle over there - but somehow, no one ever seems to wonder if all the tentacles might actually joint together into something really big, that's right underneath them.

The tragedy of all this...

Is that, there's probably something going on, here. There probably IS a story to be told.

The scientific consensus remains what it always was, after all: pollution is bad.

But with the people who claim to be researching what is happening, openly lying about their findings, and the nay-sayer so busy saying 'nay' to them, we really don't know quite what the effects of releasing a load of carbon (carbon that it took the planet 50+ million years to lock up), into the atmosphere over the space of a century, might be. Common sense tells you that something's going to give, when you do that sort of thing, but common sense seems to have departed this argument altogether.

It infuriates me that interesting things have happened to our climate in the past - that we are very likely to be in the process of making further 'interesting' things happen through our actions - but no one seems to researching what is actually happening, because they each have a vested interest in skewing the figures one way or the other. Disproving a falsehood is all very valuable, when that falsehood has eaten its way into international policy, but ultimately it is about as useful as disproving a negative, if what we really need is the truth.

"You could spend your whole life trying to change the world"

That was the slogan on Microsoft's recruitment adverts, back in the late 1990s...

Trouble is, what if you've already succeeded? What if you originally set out with a bold vision to put a computer into every home, and get software to be something people bought, the way they bought home appliances... and then, 15 years later, you've done it: there actually IS a computer in every home, and every high street has a dozen stores, selling computers with your software on them?

At the end of the 90s, that's very much where Microsoft was sitting. They'd changed the world, and they'd done it in exactly they way they'd planned.

So what do you do? Well, sadly, if the new world you have made for your self, is actually extraordinarily kind to you, then there's a strong incentive (however much your rational mind might fight against it) to spend your remaining energies trying to stop the world from changing any further. If the only thing you have to bank on, is that computers will continue getting faster and faster, so that people will want to do more and more with them, then your assumption is going to be that only way they can achieve that, is to keep buying more and more software for them. Great. You're a software company.

In fact, the business model was sound, if you followed its assumptions. The computer would occupy the centre of the home, like a pet mainframe. People would buy lots and lots of software for it, that they consumed on lightweight client devices around the house (it's classic client-server stuff that anyone at Honeywell or DEC would have recognised). This was the original role of the Microsoft slate form factor.

In this view of things, then the next big war would be fought between the sellers of encyclopedias, electronic reference works, and home media - and Microsoft was all geared up for that fight. They had sunk tens of billions into Encarta - and it's successor, Sendak - in readiness. They were going to do to Encyclopedia Britannica - and all the rest - what they had done to all their other competitors before them.

And that was the problem: the assumption. The network was supposed to go in that direction - outwards from the Home Computer - which acted as a library of all the information you could want - into the Home Appliances, which acted as its clients, and where the tight integration of Microsoft's office suite, with Microsoft's reference libraries and media, would make the combination of the one, with the other, a no-brainer.

But the traffic suddenly started coming in the other way: inwards, from this weird Wild West of a place, outside, full of RPC worms, ripped-off stuff, and free things. So unprepared for this world, were they, that they shipped a prettified version of their server operating system, with all services enabled, and no firewall, straight into a marketplace where all their customers were getting their first home broadband connection: welcome to the internet, allow me to introduce myself, my name is Blaster.

This is what Microsoft's management don't seem to grasp: they could have enabled the firewall and shipped the software with all non-essential services enabled, but they couldn't have stopped the influx:. They are never going to reverse the flow of traffic. So much innovation at Microsoft is wasted in trying to get the flow of traffic going back outwards from the PC. It is never going to happen.

The picture Fred Moody paints of what was starting to go wrong at Microsoft - even back in the early 90s, in his book about the Sendak project "I sing the Body Electronic" - still resonates with what remains wrong within the Campus, today. There are still young people who want to spend their entire lives trying to change the world - but its been more than two decades since any of them saw Microsoft as the place to do it.

So what is QZHTTP based on?

Given that the whoile of the Qzone runs on it (easily beating Google) and that it is rumoured (by those who like a good rumour), to actively filter against politically sensitive content, what is QZHTTP based on? Another hacked Apache?

It looks like something Amstrad might have once made

The problem with this sort of thing is that - like an 8512 word processor, or an E-m@iler, it just does one thing very well (for the technology available to it, at least). But - as with the word processor or the Email tool - I suspect that these will fast be supplanted by fully-fledged slate computers sold at commodity prices: not because slates are a particularly sensible form-factor for a computer (any more than someone who wants to send an email needs an entire computer to do so) but because in the near future having something in this form factor - in ANY form factor - that isn't a computer, will probably seem equally daft.

The fact that Amazon appears to have used the Microsoft approach, of "nailing-as-many-words-together-as-possible (TM)", when coming up with a product name, won't help... Marketing must have run out of space on the Powerpoint slide - otherwise I'm sure the words 'Platinum' or 'Professional' would have found their way in there!

My guess is that Kindles will come to reside in that same dusty old drawer, as the Cassio LED calculator, the spare lens for the film SLR, the inexplicable collection of microcassettes, and that digital watch you bought, shortly after seeing Star Wars, for the first time - and which you simply cannot bring yourself to chuck out.

Heidi Montag isn't going to power many batteries, then, is she?

As I read it, the body parts involved have to be capable of actually moving, in order to generate any power. If that's the case, then most existing examples wouldn't be able to generate enough power to keep their staple guns on stand-by.

Re: Vacuum

Fred Mbogo, since its lunchtime, I'll just chip in to observe that 'Project Orion' is a largely imaginary space ship of very dubious feasibility: the preservation of its memory serves to show that even smart people can be delusional. After all, most of the design principles behind these 'bomb-rockets' could be refuted using a basic application of 300 year-old physical laws, written by a man who devoted much of his own life to alchemy.

The existence of 'Project Orion's Wikipedia page (and the even more fanciful page on 'Nuclear pulse propulsion' in general) simply serves to reinforce the message that you shouldn't really believe everything you read in Wikipedia.

Either that, or we really COULD have gone to Mars and back, in under a month, in 1965, using a bill of materials to be found in Wallace and Grommet's tool shed... and JFK really DID conspire to prevent the USA from having a fleet of nuclear space battleships, because he thought that a futile and degrading war in Indochina would be a better way of projecting American military might. You take your pick, but on the whole, if deciding to believe in something, actually requires to to start not-believing, in a whole load of other things that most people take for granted, it's usually a good idea to check where your belief-system is heading you.

Does this read like hurry, to you?

I know it's so much more fun to reach for the "Chicken-Little button" - especially in comments section of The Register - but please... it's right there, in the first line, of the first paragraph - "plan to sell 5 million shares... over the *next* *five* *years*".

Five years.

Since when did rats publish their "Five Year Ship Disembarkation Strategy"?

(Personally, I see the fact that they haven't stated their intention to carry on running things beyond 2038, as clear evidence that they are worried about the 32--bit time problem - and, worse: that they haven't got a solution to it!)

Boy, mommy got all the vinegar, when you were concieved, didn't she?

How's the cure for cancer coming along? Making much progress?

From my reading, the attack targeted developers

"It was really targeted at senior technology leaders that had access to core pieces of intellectual property, source code, et cetera."

The 'sophistication' of the attack, here, seems to be at a Social Engineering level, rather than a technical one: knowing who to hit. So, yes, the targeted individuals may well have had IE6 on their computers (or, at least, *a* computer, that they had access to, sitting fairly deep inside the corporate network) - maybe as a multiple-IE install, on a virtual box, or via their own internal version of that sort of theme (indeed, the 'undocumented vulnerability' may only exist when you run IE 6 in that context, who knows, at this stage?).

Google developers generally use (or used - back when I knew these things with more certainty than I do, now) Linux laptops - typically high spec Latitudes - and are believed to use Konqueror, quite a lot (Google employees have been known to forward Google links to external recipients, where you can see, from the URL, that Google has, itself, misidentified Konqueror as "Safari" running on 64 bit Linux), but they will have had access to some sort of machine running IE 6: it's their job to do so.

If, as a developer, you got an email that appeared to be from a legitimate source, that explicitly asked you to take a look at something *in* IE 6, you might fire up a test machine or virtual box, load up IE 6 and hit the link. You might notice something was amiss, at this stage, because of the way your hard drive began thrashing like a washing machine, or the fact that your network card lit up like Christmas, but by then the exploit is running - albeit, perhaps, in some sort of memory sandbox.

It really is starting to sound like it was a question of who was hit, and how they were hit, that led to such an unequivocal response from Google.

The developer may be their worst enemy

A problem with .NET -, as with all systems based on huge class libraries - is that there are dozens of different ways of achieving the same ends, all of which rather bury what they are doing, from view, by design. The result of this hidden execution, however, is that - far from abstracting you from the underlying mechanics of what is going on - coding properly in .NET often means you need a much deeper understanding of the underlying mechanisms, if you are to avoid a lot of the problems I am seeing with failed or failing .NET projects right now.

It's not the technology that's bad: it's just that far too many of the people working in it are woefully under-qualified to be doing what they are doing, or earning what they are being paid, to do it. All those guys who recently stopped producing the really dreadful PHP applications? Well, they're now hard at it, cranking out .NET (and with an IDE that does intellisense, by default, they can crank out bad code at a rate they could only dream about, hitherto; and since their manager measures his e-peen by how many lines of code his underlings can produce in a day, that's just fine and dandy until the entire project hits the rocks).

If your developers think 'code reuse' is something you do with the cut&paste keys, it really doesn't matter what technologies you use, but if a lot of high-profile projects - like the recent NHS ones - tend to die horribly, people will tend to attribute this to the fact that they were .NET projects, and won't stop to ask whether was just because the same bunch of overpaid drongos were being employed on each failed project.

I spent much of the decade, that is now closing, looking at really really bad PHP. I now suspect I will spend much of the coming decade, looking at really really bad .NET. But Hell, who cares? I get paid to do this, and I'm not about to advocate people start doing things properly, if it means they stop needing people like me around (the fact that I get paid around a quarter, the money, of the guys who produced these clusterfucks in the first place, is by-the-by - it take four times as many people to actually support one of these creeping horrors, as it does to write it in the first place, so I guess that's only fair).

I've got it on this laptop I'm using, now

Yeah, we could employ our own disc-encryption technicians, and use the original GPL-licensed products, and do it all ourselves - but in a way, you're just inventing your own brand of 'proprietary'. Support for disc encryption that does not seriously impact machine performance across thousands of laptops, of dozens of different models, across multiple international sites, is decidedly non-trivial.

How many of the commenters, on this story are typing on machines with full-disc encryption in place, I wonder? If you are (and you installed it all yourself from source) how long did it take? If you don't think it took you that long, then I have a proposition for you: we have 2,600+ laptop users, across nine different sites in the UK. Some of them have more than one laptop... Care to drop by and replace the PGP full-disc, on all of them, with your free alternative? We'll want at least three year's support thrown in. How about we start next Thursday at our Merseyside depot? I must tell you, if you are successful, we also have offices in Malaysia, Cyprus and California, among other places, with about another 1,500 laptops. Unfortunately, you won't get to see to much of the local nightlife, because you'll be too busy installing encryption software...

PGP may be expensive, but at least the actual source code is available on line, unlike Bitlocker. You offload the support overheads and reduce the 'bus-factor' inherent in employing your own specialists - and most importantly, you can assure any external auditing body that a stolen machine was secured using a recognised product, from a specialist supplier, rather than just some roll-your-own solution installed at your 'say-so'.

That company you keep hearing about having it's laptops stolen? That's us. You get to hear about our laptops being stolen, partly because we have so many of the damn things, but mostly because we can dare to own up to the fact that they've been stolen. Ironically enough, we're probably one of the few commercial companies, with a UK arm, that deploys the kind of hardware that could force-decrypt one of the things. Fortunately for the spooks, all our spooky hardware is too busy paying the payrolls and pensions schemes of Police forces, the NHS, county councils, and - yes - the military.

I certainly think this is a step up, in securing military laptops, from slinging them in the sea from the decks of cross-channel ferries!

Well, as someone in the process of looking for a house at the moment

I can attest that I use Google very extensively in looking for potential properties - or checking a property out, once I do find one. You can gauge a lot about a place, just by looking at it, on Satellite view (I'm searching in a semi-rural area, so street view isn't an option - and I should probably append a 'yet' onto the end of that statement, really, since the scanner cars continue their relentless march). If I do find my way to the likes of Rightmove, it is invariably via a Google search.

Now, I cannot comment on the Orwellian implications for our imperiled freedom, that a Google property offering might have, but I can say, without doubt, that a property search system that closely integrated with Google maps would be a damn sight more useful than Rightmove's clumsy 'within 1 mile of... within 5 miles of... within 10 miles of...' search form, since 'within ten miles of' some of the properties I'm currently looking at encompasses most of the opposite bank of a major river, and large portions of the North Sea, and Rightmove's antiquated interface does not allow me to make informed searches based on those sorts criteria. Google has a definite edge in doing anything that involves service + very specific search requirements + geography.

Will it succeed? Almost certainly, since the current opposition is so weak and actually costs money. The only thing that will hold it back is the glacial speeds at which Estate Agents react to anything.

A new (old) plugin for a discontinued computer game?

Says it all, really.

Reputation points?

"Fluffyfoot has gained the achievement [Exalted with NASA]

gz

GZ!

gz!

gratz

ty!"

Backups?

"Well, sir, T-Mobile can assure you, that to the best of our knowledge, our staff sold all your data to a variety of companies in Bangalore, Bangkok, and a shadowy group of Lithuanians - so as soon as any of them answer their telephones, we should be able assemble a backup."

I'm all for scientific freedom

However, any campaign for scientific freedom should not be figureheaded by a grandstanding idiot-with-an-agenda like Nutt.

You see these sorts of people in all areas of "science" - especially in fields such as environmentalism, anti-terrorism, weapons-procurement and (as in this case) health care. Need a sound bite? Yeah, all the fish will be gone by 2048 (at about a quarter past three in the afternoon, sometime in mid-March). Need a statistic? Yeah, it's much safer to inhale the fumes of this black, slimy, coagulated crap, than it is to inhale the fumes of that slimy black crap, because the people who die of cancer, smoking the former black slimy crap, don't own up to it, because it's illegal.

They parasite off the scientific community by adopting the trappings of "science", but they just push statistics (largely because they have lost sight of the difference between statistics and data). Even when people like him are right, they are right for all the wrong reasons, and I will not care to see him to hijack the debate about scientific freedom.

He's not a scientist: he's just a very naughty boy!

@Google it !!

Let's see. Who's got major offices in Mountain view, California... Let me think...

Symantec

Verisign

AOL

Microsoft's MSN and Mac Business units

Nokia

Award Systems

Mozilla Corporation

Red Hat

... Oh. You ,mean THEM.

Surely if it had been THEM, then the story would have read "...at a chocolate factory that they declined to name."?