Re: We don't like them, so we'll kill them

A country the size and strength of Syria is destroyed in a few months. And we talk about it being some demonstrators who have brought this about.

Bollocks - it's a surefire military action. Whole swathes of the country are now controlled by "insurgents".

Perhaps you might want to remove that tinfoil hat for a minute. It seems to have slipped down over your eyes, and obstructed clear vision...

Read some history. Massively stronger governments (with actually effective armies) have fallen far quicker to mobs in the streets. Egypt only lasted a couple of months, and there wasn't much more than protests (the army refused to shoot). Libya would have lasted longer without Western intervention, but they'd have gone all the same. The difference was the Egyptian army refused to shoot the crowds because they were a professional force with power and training. They kicked out the leadership instead, and took over. Gadaffi didn't allow a professional command structure (as a threat to him), or much in the way of training, so his army wasn't really up to taking the country back - once the job went beyond shooting demonstrators.

Syria is halfway between. It's got a professional army of 200,000 odd. But they're a bit crap. However, they can't actually use it. If they let the ordinary soldiers out of barracks, they'll defect. Maybe not all, but enough clearly did that they only used a few trusted units. By all accounts only 2 divisions of the best trained, most loyal troops, plus smaller units, and then Alawite militias, and probably a few Hezbollah fighters.

Once they didn't even try to retake Aleppo the regime was doomed. They didn't do it because they didn't have the ground troops they dared trust. As they cleared out Damascus in quick time, they could have sent everything spare to Aleppo, and cleared it out in days. They didn't really try. They've been trying to hold the country from small forts, which the rebels simply go round. Now the rebels appear to be taking them in massed attacks. I'm sure they've got Western special forces advising them on the ground, but they've not had much in the way of help with weapons. Or all the journos, and all their Youtube videos have missed it.

By the way, the US probably doesn't want Syria to erupt into permanent civil war for the next decade or 2. It'll spill over into Iraq and Lebanon and probably Turkey due to the Kurdish separatists. That's quite a lot of pain, for the gain of making it harder for Iran to support Hezbollah...

Re: How do we know who did what?

I wouldn't give up hope on the Muslim Brotherhood yet. They're a broad group, with lots of internal opinions just inside Egypt. Goodness knows what they'll be like as a force across the whole Middle East. That's assuming that the groups that affiliate to them are even vaguely related to them in reality.

Also, if they go too far (at least in Egypt), they'll struggle to hold power. There are a lot of people there who do want a more moderate system. They've brought down a scary military dictatorship already (and also the second, politer, incarnation of the same), and they can bring this government down if they so choose. Particularly as the Muslim Brotherhood don't have the support of the Egyptian military.

Re: Possible issue with the "edit" time window

Drew,

Just tried to edit a long post, realising I'd run out of time, I made 2 changes then hit submit. No probs, then went back and did the same. OK. The third time I tried it timed out. So the limit is 5 minutes from original post. The real answer is I should have proofread it before posting, as it was a touch long.

10 minutes seems a reasonable compromise.

Although even though it's only 5 minutes (maybe 10), should there be an automatic thingy added saying edited by user?

Re: Possible issue with the "edit" time window

Vic,

There's an edit button next to the Reply button. But you apparently only get it if you're a gold-badger. I guess they hadn't rolled it out to silver-vultures yet. Ten beta testers instead of a hundred or so.

Re: How do we know who did what?

So having derided others for oversimplification, by complaining about people talking about 'good guys', you then go on to do an awful lot of it yourself. I doubt there are many people silly enough to think this is a simple battle between good and evil.

I think almost everyone would agree that the Syrian regime is a pretty nasty one, by any standards. The massacres around Homs in the 80s, their various interventions in Lebanon, and that's before we mention their unhelpful interventions in Iraq and the Palestinian question (where some people might disagree about their justifications). And the current mass killing of civilians of course. The only thing going for the regime is they've been able to keep the country together in the past, and avoid an ethnic civil war. Although that's much less of an excuse now. To say this regime are the only thing holding Syria from a bloodbath of years of ethnic conflict looks pretty damned silly when they're causing a bloodbath with a side-order of ethnic conflict.

Rather like Iraq. The civil war after the toppling of Saddam was apparently our fault. Because it was only happening a bit, under Saddam's tyranny, when we toppled him and unleashed it somehow it became our baby. Well it was bound to happen anyway. The Iraqui Sunnis wanted to continue to rule the majority Shia. Eventually they were bound to lose their grip, and vengeance would have been had. Whatever the rights and wrongs of the invasion of Iraq - that civil war was a virtual certainty. As is one in Syria. Dictatorships are less stable than (even partially successful) democracies in the long term.

Btw spare your keystrokes, Al Queda is basically being used as "bad guerilla"

Al Qaeda are separate from the other Syrian rebels. Almost everywhere that they've operated, AQ have become a scurge eventually repudiated by their allies. Strategically Al Qaeda are a busted flush, because their ideology (what they have of one) is so horrible. The Sunnis called them in in Iraq, and had to kill hundreds of them to get rid of them, even taking alliance with the US - because they realised that Al Qaeda were killing more of them than either Americans or Shia. Mullah Omah in Afghanistan (admittedly as part of peace overtures) came out and said that supporting Al Qaeda was a mistake, and they should have driven them out of the country. The Bosniak muslims feared the few units of AQ 'allies' as much as the Serbs did - they were pretty undiscriminating when it came to a bit of mahem. There were several armed confrontations with Saudi Jihadis linked to AQ. The Libyans in Benghazi chucked a bunch of AQ guys out, after they decided to attack the US consulate. They're a weapon that turns in the hand, as the Pakistani 'intelligence' agency (an oxymoron given their horrific incompetence) discovered...

A lot of those Al Qaeda guys are there, near the Iraqi border, because the Syrian government let them in. It was convenient to have them causing trouble in Iraq ten years ago. Now they're turning on their old sponsors. Nothing new. Many of the rebels recognise this. But seeing as we won't arm them, and they're not trained, there's not a lot they could do about it, even if they were in a position not to need the help.

As for your comments on the Muslim brotherhood, I suggest - again massively simplistic. The Egyptian lot moderated themselves decades ago, and they've historically been the trend-setters. It may be they'll moderate affiliated groups like Hamas (it may not). Turkey are another possible moderating influence. Middle Eastern politics is terribly complicated. There's also been so much repression and government propaganda that it's impossible to know where most populations stand, and given how little true information they've seen - they probably don't know themselves yet. The Syrian opposition aren't a united force, and therefore it's foolish to claim to understand their motives.

Although not being murdered or tortured by your own government is one of them, and it's a just motive which we should support and understand. The West has been too willing to take the short-term easy option, and support nasty dictators for 'stability'. That is unlikely to ever be a good long-term solution, and makes us look bad. I'd argue it's also often immoral (for what that's worth in international relations). The Cold War is long over, which wasn't always a good excuse for that kind of policy anyway.

Re: No Votes?

Have an upvote. Oops! This post doesn't count now...

My impression is that the site is changing. The number of people bothering to vote is going up massively. I think I got well over 100 votes this week - out of a total of less than 2,000. Also, it used to be rare to see any post with more than 10 votes, and that's not the case any more.

Admittedly that may be partly because someone downvoted the first half page of my posts the other day. Oh dear... And also because I just commented favourably on a Windows Phone story, which is a reliable way of gaining me downvotes...

So maybe un-voted posts will be more special than voted ones soon?

I do like the idea of working with voting ratios though. If you haven't got more upvotes than downvotes, then maybe your ups shouldn't count so much. Not quite sure what the ratio should be between upvotes and no-votes though.

Re: This KFC thing in Japan is real.

Is it just me, or does anyone else find the idea of food bought by the bucket disturbing?

I am not a horse!

No indeed. Neigh, neigh and thrice neigh...

Re: Proper Rebellion

Information and propaganda are vital to any revolution. That's why the 20th Century revolutionaries always seized the Radio and TV stations. Or the regime put it's last ditch defence there.

So much of any revolution is about hearts and minds. Persuading people that you're right is important, but what gets you supporters and defectors, is persuading people that you're winning.

In the old days it was only the capital city that really mattered. Because there was no way to get information round. France had lots of regional trouble in the 19th C, but it was only when Paris rose up that the government fell, which happened plenty of times. Then information could travel on 2 legs.

Radio is probably less secure than the internet. Although you use it if you have to. The problem with cutting everybody off now, is it looks like the act of a doomed regime. Perhaps if they'd done it before when they were obviously still militarily dominant, it might have worked to bugger up rebel communications. Now it just looks desperate.

Re: Thoughts about ignoring "anonymous"

Drew,

There is a way that you could use this to identify who the anon is - assuming they ever use their real handle on posts. You'd have to be pretty determined to do it, and not have too much of a life...

One pooter logged on as you, with your anon post on ignore. Another pooter not logged in, then you compare forums until you find a post from a user that's missing from the other PC. Aha, we've found the handle of our anon friend.

Of course you could stop this by handling the anon posts and handle posts separately for ignoring purposes. Or just decide that it's too much effort for too little risk.

But there might be a risk to regular posters who go anon to dish the dirt on their own employers, as happens occasionally. And the big ones with online reputation management bods might even be determined enough to go digging.

Am I being paranoid here? Or am I not being paranoid enough...

Re: Hmm. Nice link

The link to PCPro is to an article entitled, "Apple and Google extend mobile lead". In other words, MS is picking up waifs and strays from Symbian and RIM - but at a lesser rate that Google and Apple.

peredur,

Without more information, it's impossible to say. It may be that MS are simply stealing share from other losers - in a battle of the losers. It may be however that cheap £50-£100 Android phones are what's killing Blackberry and Symbian, and MS are stealing from Android in the mid-market.

Do Blackberry even have a phone at the £450-£500 price bracket? If not, those Win Phone sales (of the Lumia 900 and now 920 could be stealing from Apple or Android. Or, in a growing market, may all be new sales, it depends on the proportion of handsets that are selling - you can't know without a better breakdown of the figures.

I'm not saying that Win Phone is the best or that it's going to take over the market. I'm simply saying it's not dead yet. It's growing at the rate you'd expect if it was going to do really well, but equally that growth may stall at any time. I'm simply pointing out a little bit of common sense to the howling masses of the intertubes. If Win Phone goes down in flames, they can cheer happily.

Me, I like a bit of healthy competition, I don't particularly trust Google, I think £500 is a ridiculous price for a phone (why do you think Apple and Samsung make such huge profits?), and I don't like tiny plastic keyboards. So I like my Lumia 710, my next handset will be a mid-price Android or Win Phone 8, in a year's time. Unless Apple come out with something sensibly priced.

Re: Deep thought ...

DrewC said they'd only rolled it out to the 10 peeps with golden vultures so far. Along with the 'ignore user' feature seemingly. As they both seem to work without any problems, I guess they'll be spreading the love wider soon.

Bob,

How's that time machine working for you? I'm assuming that's the only explanation for your certain knowledge of the future.

Apple won't be crying into their beers any time soon. Even having dropped the ball they've still got a very comfortable market share, and the lion's share of the profits from the whole market. No-one else but Samsung makes much profit at all on phones. I suspect Apple may be on the downward curve, with recent missteps and cracks appearing in their media love-in, but that might just mean a small drop in sales, and a touch less profit.

As for Android, Google make no more money out of being market leader than Microsoft do from Win Phone. The difference is that MS might make a profit sooner than Google. Would be interesting to see what happened if Google tried to charge.

Samsung are the key. If Google fail to keep them sweet, they may abandon ship and fork Android, or go another route. Bada, write something new, make the Moblin/Meego/Maemo thing work, or even Win Phone. Can't see that happening soon, but anything can happen. Symbian collapsed incredibly quickly. This is not a stable market. Many Android users only use free Apps, so there's no penalty for moving. Apple have much better lock-in, with bigger App sales.

Interesting times ahead for many years I suspect.

Re: Deep thought ...

Damn! It's The Omni Cognate Neutron Wrangler.

Ooops. No excuse either, as I'm now allowed to edit 5 minutes after posting.

Re: Deep thought ...

The Omni Cognate Neutron Rambler could talk all four legs off an Arcturan mega donkey. But only I could persuade it to go for a walk afterwards.

Best told with an innocent expression

Why do women wear make up and perfume?

.

.

.

.

.

Because they're ugly, and they smell.

Usually gets a laugh. Sometimes gets stuff thrown at you...

Re: Assange feeling icky?

He can have nice, free, treatment at the nearest NHS hospital with no problem at all. Admittedly he'll then be transferred to a comfy prison hospital soon afterwards...

I'm surprised being in there's made him ill though. It's not that small a flat, and it's not hard to have a decent diet. He's got exercise machines and a sun lamp. I wonder if the pressure and stress is getting to him. Alternatively it could simply be a ploy, to pressurise the UK government into granting him permission to bugger off to Ecuador. Or at least try to make us look like the bad guys for 'persecuting' him. I don't see that working though. I don't think there's any legal mechanism that would allow the government to do that, short of Sweden dropping their European Arrest Warrant.

Re: Move the badges

Drew,

I'm glad you're moving this, I've clicked it by mistake a couple of times.

I also agree with the suggestions that other have made, to move the badge before the username, so it doesn't end up floating way out in the middle of the page for those with really long user names.

Re: Upvotes/downvotes

It's not like you can vote more than once without sockpuppetry involved.

M Gale,

I believe the votes aren't linked to your login, but a cookie. So you can vote on as many machines as you have access to. Perhaps someone should hire a botnet and see if they can give some unsuspecting commentard 100,000 upvotes. Or downvotes...

According to an article, link to PC Pro, Win Phone is up to nearly 5% of UK smartphone sales and 10% in Italy. Still nothing special, but it is growing - and percentage market share gains in a growing market are even nicer of course. Looks like poor RIM are taking the hammering from everyone.

Whether it's enough to be a significant player is another matter, and how many of those sales are at zero (or wore) margin is also not shown. But it's way too early to declare MS dead in this market. Things can easily change, I don't think the market has stabilised yet, we've had at least 5 market leading OSes in the last decade - most of which are now dead.

I really like Windows Phone 7, I assume 8 will be better. But it's no less locked down than iPhone (with fewer available apps), and it tracks you at least as much as iOS (assuming Android is the worst which may not be fair). The disconcerting thing is that it ask permission for its tracking, so you have to agree to it quite a few times, whereas Google only sometimes do, and iOS almost not at all.

I rather like it, because the people hub makes it a great phone for work, and I tend to use apps on my iPad rather than my phone anyway.

Ah yes Bob, your old favourite article of the trick where Google gamed the system to wrongly associate some terms on someone else's search engine. I presume, if Google have a feature in Chrome where it can report back your search results 'to improve your experience' then the same trick could be done the other way. Unless Chrome won't allow other search engines.

Personally I prefer Firefox, due to inertia really. Chrome, FF and IE all seem to be about equally good nowadays. Anyway, I can't be bothered to check.

Anyway, yawn. There are plenty of things MS have done to be genuinely annoyed about. Surely you must be able to think of some that are actually relevant...

How come you haven't got a badge by the way? You must have put in 100 posts in the last year, surely?

Re: Microsoft with knife in hand

Once they became nothing but low margin manufacturers who weren't allowed to innovate it isn't much surprise they lost the will to do so. Why innovate a product that will make Microsoft a lot more money than you.

Dell innovated, back in the day. Not on the software side, but on the ordering, supply chain, manufacturing and service side. There was a time when a Dell PC cost £50-£100 more, but you got rock-solid service and support. Dell made nicer margins, and with that and their easy customisation/ordering they got to be top dog for a while. Then they cut back on support, but kept the margins, then they lost sales and their reputation.

None of that is MS fault. Admittedly the anti-competitive stuff is. But I'm not sure that makes MS a bad partner. They may have made you dance to their tune, but like Intel, they paid 'marketing support' for it. I'm not making MS out to be a saint, they're not. But I don't think they've screwed Nokia yet (they may do in future, who knows?), and I don't think they're particularly screwing over the OEMs. There's margin to be made by offering extra stuff, if you have the imagination to try it. And since the anti-trust settlement vendors can ship with Linux, without Windows tax, and don't make massive cash from doing so. It's made little difference. The OEMs are probably worse off without the kickbacks from MS and Intel, with no greater margins, and no slush-money to keep the shareholders happy.

Re: No sign of an "ignore" option here.

It's a sort of grey, angry, face between their name and their badge. I guess they're going to test it slowly. As you say, I can just skip any post/user I don't want to read. I'm surprised they didn't give it to all badge-holders though. More testers that way.

The other problem with ignore lists is that you can reply to someone that can't see what you're saying. I guess that stops things getting nasty. Except the kind of people without the self-control to avoid slagging-matches won't be able to leave the users that wind them up on ignore. When I was a forum Mod on a biggish site some users you were banning would ask to have an ignore button used for them. They tended to be the after pub posters. Drunken arguers and ranters...

Re: Perception.

Sometimes the downvotes are interesting. Particularly when someone takes the trouble to waste 15 minutes of their life downvoting your posts one after the other. That's downright fascinating. One hopes, this being an IT site, that they've written a script to do it...

On the other hand votes can counteract the echo-chamber that many internet forums become. For example: It's still kool to hate Micro$oft, apparently. However even if 90% of the comments on a thread are on that theme, a comment that's a bit more balanced will often find more upvotes than downvotes - even thought the composition of the thread would indicate to the contrary. I guess that means there really is a silent majority. Many people just don't enjoy an argument, which is fair enough.

Plus, I'm always willing to upvote a good pun. Or even a bad one.

Re: Bug?

As you say, after posting this one, I had badge. Perhaps the mice inside their servers were just tired with all the lunchtime posts?

Re: Bug?

Hmmm. Interesting. Now my post shows the badge. But just after I hit post, and it went back to the forum, I could see your badge, but not mine. However when I linked back here from the list of my posts, it was there. So I guess it just doesn't update when you first hit post.

Re: Bug?

I can see badges on all posts, including my own. Except when I hit reply, at which point I've just got your post and the comment box. Now your badge has disappeared, and only the 'ignore user' button is still visible.

Re: Microsoft with knife in hand

@"I ain't Spartacus" you know nothing if you think Microsoft have not used their trojan horse, Elop, to destroy Nokia in order to pick the corpse of its patents, whilst removing a competitor.

Eadon,

I don't buy into conspiracy theories without some actual evidence. Nokia have a board of directors, who appointed Elop. Presumably they asked him what his plans were going to be? If not, he presumably asked them if they were happy before going public? HP's board sacked Apotheker for saying that he was going to destroy their PC business. That option was open to Nokia's board. They didn't take it, they aren't Microsoft appointees - so at this point your conspiracy theory falls apart. Unless you believe Microsoft have invented the mind control ray. In which case how come they've failed to use it on the people who hate Windows 8...

Symbian was thriving and growing until Elop killed it with his suicidal "Burning Platform" memo. It's a myth that Nokia were doing badly, they were doing pretty well, far better than Microsoft ever did in mobile.

Microsoft did pretty bloody well in mobile back in the day. They did the same as Apple, going from nothing to around half of smartphone sales in just a few years. If they hadn't sat on their laurels and stopped improving Windows Mobile they might have still been a main contender. Rather like Nokia with Symbian.

It's too much to go into here, but I saw a piece by an analyst who was a fan of Symbian (and not of Elop) and even his figures made Symbian look bad. Sure it was growing in sales terms, as its share of the fast growing smartphone market dropped - admittedly very slowly. But, whilst Symbian sales were growing, profits per handset were dropping. And they weren't that good to start with. They were only making a few euros profit per handset. Samsung and Apple make huge margins on their high-end phones. If you sell 50 million handsets at €10 profit each your business is much riskier than someone selling 5 million at €100 profit.

It may be that Nokia were actually selling a few, high margin, top-end phones, and then a ton of Symbian 'feature phones' at break-even.

Nokia's other problem has been that Chinese dumbphone manufacturers have finally managed to to beat Nokia on price - something Nokia had managed to avoid for years by brilliant manufacturing and supply chain management - even though their labour costs were much higher. Given this, it was sensible to assume that the €100-€200 feature-phone/cheap smartphone market might be about to go the same way. At which point manufacturing 50 million loss-making handsets becomes a horrible liability.

they [Nokia] are a humiliated hardware arm of Microsoft's Win 8 division. If you do not think Microsoft did that, you are weird in what you think, like most Microsoft apologists here.

No, not weird in what I think. I've just thought about it with as little prejudice as I can manage. If new evidence turns up to show MS have executed a brilliant 'Manchurian Candidate' strategy, I'll change my mind. Given how un-brilliant their current management appear to be, I'll stick to the cock-up (rather than conspiracy) theory. Particularly given how piss-poor Nokia's management have shown themselves to be over the last decade. Yes, they've had some great technology. But they've failed to even bring most of it to market, let alone make profits from it.

Whether Elop was right is impossible to say. But the idea that he took a successful company and ruined it is ridiculous. Nokia had been under-performing for years, and the market was finally catching up on their lead in all areas. Something had to change. Given they had nothing 'market ready' to show for all their huge R&D spending, it was either Android or Win Pho. Neither very attractive choices, but that's all they had left.

As for Surface, who knows? MS OEM partners don't seem to be able to innovate their way out of a wet paper bag, so MS need to either prod them or replace them. You might even argue they've stabbed Microsoft in the back, by their continual failure. If they can't keep MS happy, they'll deserve it if MS can outcompete them. They can't say they've not been warned. If it does happen, they can't claim that MS stabbed them in the back. And a knife in the chest is perfectly fair play, this is business...

Re: Microsoft with knife in hand

Microsoft has been nasty to various competitors and 'allies' over the years. Although I find it hard to feel any sympathy at all for IBM - who managed to be a nasty monopolist for a lot longer than MS ever were...

But you're being unfair on the modern MS. I've not seen any evidence that they've done anything to knife Nokia. They may not be developing WinPhone as fast as Nokia would like, but they're not gaining from dragging their feet - and improving no slower than Android or iOS did. Nokia are in the shit because of consistent piss-poor management over the last 5-10 years. They've had some great innovation, and failed to bring most of it to market. They couldn't even organise themselves to improve the Symbian UX for years.

As for Surface, they've not really priced it to kill their OEMs. They've not gone into either phone or PC manufacturing yet, nor announced same. So it's not so much a stab-wound as a small pinprick.

They're a big corporation. They're not nice, or fluffy. Neither are Google, IBM, Apple or any of the others. It's not their job to be. The idea that you can be safer in a relationship with Google is laughable.

Re: Jumpers for Goalposts

If an infinite number of monkeys with an infinite number of typewriters can compose the works of Shakespeare - how many monkeys does it take to replace just one Register writer?

More worryingly, how many monkeys are required to replace your average commentard? This could be a new El Reg unit of measurement - for both writing and perhaps software writing quality. So we might say that Windows 7 would require several trillions of monkeys to achieve it by random chance, whereas Windows ME could have been written (probably better) by one monkey, in an afternoon. Probably when it wasn't feeling well, due to some dodgy bananas it had the night before...

Re: Great - a Bore's Charter

Isn't that what the upvote requirement is for? Admittedly you'll be able to farm more of those if you just keep on posting, assuming you can avoid being an arse and getting the opposite effect, but 2,000 upvotes is still an awful lot.

It would also be interesting to see the ten with the most downvotes. Ghoulish interest, you understand.

Re: Quite simple

It's not nepotism. I've just got the negatives of Lester, Drewc, Lewis, the ass, the whipped cream, the stepladder and the mashed potato. They claimed they were just cooking up a post pub deathmatch - but I'm still getting the regular monthly payments.

They picked them themselves. Who said this was a democracy? They just did it because they felt like it.

Still, what The Register giveth, the Register taketh away.

Re: Badges for Commentards

Patience? Pah! Want toy now!!!!!!

Surely you should keep your badge. Or just have an extra red one of these, that you only give to staff?