Posts by Quxy
352 posts • joined Thursday 22nd October 2009 13:26 GMT
I thought that the Vetinari Solution was...
...Tax the rat farms.
Re: Bruce Schneier is a twit
I'd be interesting in hearing the context for that quotation. If it's what I think it was, Bruce continued by saying,“building tanks does not mean you fear you could be overrun by a military force right now. It pays to build tanks and it pays to prepare for cyberwar, but I don’t believe that’s a fear we should worry about right now...It’s very easy to invent scare scenarios but this does not mean we should actually be scared by them.”
Posted in Microsoft Tangos into cheap smartphones
Re: Interesting Direction from Microsoft
Eh? Apple is a hardware company, while Android is a cheap-to-free OS platform used by a very wide range of hardware manufacturers. And while Apple isn't downscaling, have you actually _seen_ the low-cost devices running Android here in China and Southeast Asia? Microsoft is following this strategy precisely _because_ of the success of Android in dirt-cheap devices!
Posted in Microsoft Tangos into cheap smartphones
Yes, but...
...Even in China, Microsoft isn't perceived as a prestige brand. I would suggest that their best strategy is to emphasise Nokia (which is) and downplay WP.
Unfortunately, Microkia is also late to the party for integration with both QQ and Weibo, who have long since rolled out immensely popular apps for both Android and iPhone (not that I trust either of them in my mobile devices!).
Gnumeric?
Surely you mean sc or (gasp) Oleo!
Re: I nominate...
Erm, wouldn't that be 卫生垫 in China?
Re: I've seen that before...
Yep, that's what the ProView IPAD was. I ran into a few of them in China, and they were just as useless as the iPaq.
Not hard to beat Apotheker...
But Whitman has zero experience in the enterprise software, hardware, and services which are HP's core, which arguably puts her at more of a disadvantage than Leo had.
Her track record at eBay isn't exactly stellar, either, with its stock value sliding from a high of $58 to $10 by the time she left. Her decision to buy PayPal was probably the smartest thing she did. On the other hand, acquiring Skype for such a colossal sum saddled eBay with a white elephant, and a bullet that she dodged only by finally managing to flog it to Microsoft for what she paid for it. Worse, she missed shifts in the market that let Amazon take over much of what could have been eBay's.
Posted in LibreOffice debugs and buffs up to v.3.5
God love 'em...
My fellow FOSS developers, that is. But the fact is that whether you call it StarOffice, OpenOffice, or LibreOffice, it's still a functional copy of one of the most ill-conceived pieces of crap ever to be inflicted on a naive business community -- it's generally agreed that you couldn't make many worse usability choices than MS Word if you set out to do so.
Complain all you like about the Cupertino Gestapo...
...but 360.cn is pretty obviously spyware. Just turn on Wireshark and start watching the high volume of HTTP POST beacon requests to 360.cn and gov.cn addresses.
If this was all it did, you might be able to simply block traffic to certain domains. But the fact that it's impossible to remove without reformatting the drive containing the OS -- worse than QQ and PPstream, in fact -- moves it from simply annoying to positively evil.
Posted in Dutch retailer spills Nokia 910 beans
True...
But it'll be much cheaper than Android phones with comparable hardware, right?
Clueless, and proud of it!
Yep. This is the same candidate who announced, in all seriousness, “If the Soviet empire still existed, I'd be terrified. The fact is, we can afford a fairly ignorant presidency now.”
Moreover...
I've played with nearly every one of the Ultrabooks listed on Intel's site, and (to my disappointment) none of them comes close to matching the build quality or solid feel of the MacBook Air. I don't think that Apple's industrial design team is worried.
Formerly reasonable?
Whilst a Senator, Dodd received more campaign money from Wall Street than any other politician. And the bulk of the $47M he received in donations during his 20 years in office came from individuals and PACs affiliated with the major investment banks. So he understands very, very well the way that money buys political influence.
Global warming?
Yes, the belief that the theory of global warming is a deliberate fraud can accurately be described as a conspiracy theory. (But as Sunstein points out, this is a very different issue than skepticism or even a firm ideological belief that climate change is neither occurring nor likely to occur.)
That said, the use of copyright law to effect political or ideological change (however desirable the end might seem) is a frightening course to take, and is a sobering reminder of the sort of far-reaching misuse we will inevitably see if bills like PIPA and SOPA are passed.
Kodak ISS is now Truesense Imaging
Kodak sold ISS to Platinum Equity (a mergers & acquisition firm) last November.
Kodak no longer makes sensors
They already sold off all the viable businesses.
fscking weasels, the lot of 'em
That is all.
I don’t wanna talk to a scientist
Magic everywhere in this bitch!
Posted in Android devs get schooled on style
No black turtlenecks here
If the photo in Wired is any indication, I just hope Duarte's UI design skills are better than his fashion sense!
Depends upon your show
If you're an average consumer, sure, WiFi is usually fine. But if you're doing system administration or network troubleshooting (as I imagine a large portion of El Reg readers do), the size and portability of the MacBook Air is wonderful, but the lack of a true low-latency Ethernet interface makes it unusable.
Still not up to MacBook Air build quality...
...but at least Toshiba and Lenovo include an Ethernet port. The MacBook Air runs Linux wonderfully, but Apple's stubborn refusal to include a wired network port has always been a complete show-stopper.
Negroponte lost my respect four years ago
I was an active supporter of OLPC until it became clear that education wasn't Nicholas' primary objective for the project. I fear that Ivan Krstić's "Sic Transit Gloria Laptopi" blog entry is as relevant as ever.
http://radian.org/notebook/sic-transit-gloria-laptopi
Sure, MMfA has an agenda...
..but this is clearly a case of reporting the facts -- the progressive media have been as silent on SOPA as have the right wing news and talk shows. I thought that the MMfA report was remarkably restrained in avoiding any partisan commentary.
"Ballmerian uber-incompetence"
And this is a problem... why? Doesn't everyone like to watch train wrecks?
Posted in Kodak heading to Chapter 11
@Grease Monkey
Yeah, that was my point. Selling off ISS was the death knell for what remained of Kodak, since it was the only viable business they had.
Posted in Kodak heading to Chapter 11
Kodak already sold off the image sensor technology
The article failed to mention that Kodak sold off its last viable business -- Image Sensor Solutions -- two months ago. Since that was the one and only technology Kodak still had going for them, that was the point when the industry realised that Kodak was really and truly dead.
Yep
I buy plenty of ebooks and audiobooks; but before doing so, I make sure that they're either DRM-free or use a DRM format that I can remove (I suspect that if Adobe finally updates ADEPT, ebook sales are going to plummet).
Indeed... no evidence of change
This is simply damage control; there is no evidence that GD has stopped supporting SOPA.
After all, they have three years of collaboration invested in it, and they stand to benefit from its passage. Even the latest weasel words from the CEO make that clear: "Getting [SOPA] right is worth the wait. Go Daddy will support it when and if the internet community supports it." Replace the last phrase with "when the internet community forgets about it" and you've got the truth.
Not backpedalling, just waiting for things to quiet down
They've been working with Congresscritters for some three years to draft SOPA, so they're not really backpedalling. This is just a matter of waiting until the hue and cry dies down, to allow the bill to be introduced quietly: "Getting [SOPA] right is worth the wait... as a company that is all about innovation, with our own technology and in support of our customers, Go Daddy is rooted in the idea of First Amendment Rights and believes 100 percent that the Internet is a key engine for our new economy," weaseled [GoDaddy CEO].
GoDaddy's shoddy service,...
...deceptive TOS, and scummy marketing tactics were already plenty of reasons for any knowledgeable sysadmin to avoid them. Who needs another to boycott them?
No nerds required
This generation of UAVs is more T3 than Revenge of the Nerds. Didn't you read the blurb?
"The X-47B is a computer-controlled unmanned aircraft system that takes off, flies a preprogrammed mission, and then returns to base ... The operator ... does not fly it via remote control."
"Use your phone instead of the TV"
WTF? Since when did watching TV stop being an anti-social activity?
At least when you use your phone there's a good chance that you're interacting with other humans instead of mindlessly absorbing whatever sludge is being pushed at you through the boob tube.
@resorting to shell
And 'resorting to the shell' is bad because...?
@Love of Apple?
Erm... As should have been clear from the icon, I'm a *NIX user, not a Mac fanboi. The two previous comments simply confirm my hunches about Windows UI design decisions.
@Why are FOSSers inclined toward Apple?
Simple -- it's because OSX works.
I may feel guilty when I sit down in front of a Mac, but at least it's easy to make the machine do what I want -- unlike Windows, which inevitably sends me into a frustrated fit of rage after half an hour of unsuccessfully trying to get it to stably perform what should be the simplest tasks...
Downvotes?
What, pray tell is your defence of DRM? Do enlighten us.
"Authorities are primarily put in place to serve individuals"
Eh? Not in the Corporate States of America, they're not...
@Remove the fuse
Sorry, they spotted that flaw. Newer GM vehicles wire it to circuits shared by other electronics systems. Best thing to do is to locate the telematics unit (you're not going to find that without the dealer service manual) and remove it.
It's worse than you describe
OnStar has granted themselves the right to collect this information “for any purpose, at any time, provided that following collection of such location and speed information identifiable to your Vehicle, it is shared only on an anonymized basis.”
And as we've seen, there's no such thing as anonymised GPS data: if your car is consistently parked at your home, it's pretty obvious where you live; and pretty easy to figure out who who are from that. This combination of pin-point accuracy, and their prospective customers (law enforcement, marketers, etc.) makes this data collection and resale very disturbing.
http://www.zdziarski.com/blog/?p=1270
No contradiction here
Someone wants the source code for some feature of Android. When the code is not forthcoming, they allege a GPL violation. But because the code in question is actually covered by ASF, there is in fact no violation of anything.
I think that RMS explained it clearly enough (i.e. the allegations derive from a misunderstanding of the licences), and Gavin understood his explanation.
However pretty the occasional error screen...
...W8 will continue to be as annoying as ever when it forces you to reboot the tablet after every new application you install.
And sure enough...
... when I type "Anonymous Coward" into Google, there's absolutely no link to your personal website. *Censorship*, I say!
"the most ergonomic, fast, and powerful ways"
Um, since when has Microsoft ever been concerned with *those* criteria?
@ Not a Godwin issue
Only if you believe that you believe that juvenile mischief by script kiddies is in any way comparable to suicide bombers blowing up children. Personally, I find it to be an inappropriate hyperbolic comparison, an offensive disregard for the people actually being killed by real terrorists, and a dangerous boost to the ego of "hacktivists".
Godwin's law needs an update...
Perhaps something along the lines of "As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving al-Qaeda approaches 1."
Easy enough to find...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u1CKB-bSalI
