* Posts by dogged

4790 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Nov 2009

Reports pump fuel into iCar gossip: Apple in 'talks' with Tesla

dogged

Oh great.

A highly-polished G-Whizz in aluminium and chrome with rounded corners.

Capita and Updata ink £325m Scottish PSN deal

dogged

Crapita, government money...

This can only end well, right?

Google's SECRET contracts: Android lock-in REVEALED!

dogged

@eulampios

> Meaning of this and/or any links by any chance.

Link as requested.

Of course, if Nokia do out an Android phone with HERE services that's going to stir things up a little but I have my doubts about the feasibility of that. The pundits tout this bit of hypeware as Nokia's means to run an OS on cheap hardware but you'd have real trouble finding much Android hardware with cheaper internals than the Lumia 520, and certainly none that runs as well.

Then, given the absence of Play (and its associated APIs), they'd need their own app store and apps which have been compiled without reference to Play. These days, even the games tend to reference Play - feedback, maintenance of scores, high-score table, in-app purchases, achievements etc) so I doubt if that's any kind of trivial task.

dogged

Except that Android, the base Android is now crippled and crappy. It used to be workable around Froyo but since then more and more of the core functionality of Android has been replicated (and supported) in the proprietary Google suite and ignored and left to fester in the base OS.

THAT's what android-evangelists don't seem to realize. Google Android is great. Take away the Google bit and what you've got is an outdated, bugridden, insecure nightmare.

dogged

Amazon are kind of a special case. What they want to do is sell online content and they created their own app store for that very purpose.

Amazon are also one of the world's biggest software houses. I know you never expect that to be true but it is; they pretty much invented IaaS which is how come they decided to sell spare server cycles and their cloud business was born.

Amazon are easily in a position to ignore the buggy and deprecated APIs in Android (that Google also ignore because they superseded them with proprietary functionality distributed as a part of Google Play) where somebody like, for the sake of example, HTC would not be.

The truth is, Amazon could have taken pretty much any linux-based OS compiled for ARM and made it into the Kindle Fire OS. Android just happened to be available.

PSST! New PCs with Windows 7 preinstalled are out there – and will be into 2015, at least

dogged

Re: Salvaging/rescuing Windows will be the real litmus test of Nadella...

It's starting to look like Windows 9 "Threshold" will sort out your first paragraph.

I quite like the rest of your post, except for the data mining.

If you could buy a $50/year "Windows 365" and pay extra for added value stuff like, oh, I dunno, SQL Server Management Studio or whatever, plus a reduction on Office 365 prices, that would probably fly pretty well and leave MS in the business of selling software rather than selling you to advertisers. Some form of USP and differentiation from Google is required, I think.

dogged
WTF?

Re: The Nokia Android phone will be the same story

> low-end handset running Android

Yeah, those are always so well-received.

EC officials voice doubts about Almunia's planned Google settlement deal

dogged

Re: The Big Elephant in the room

I'm not anti-FOSS - I'm a debian user (and occasional contributor) and have been for nearly fifteen years as you'd know if you'd read my posting history instead of just shitting out accusations.

I am anti-fucktard and anyone who will promote unsuitable tools is a fucktard. Following that up with "M$" merely confirms it.

dogged

Re: Optional

I'm consistently in favour of people using what suits them best. I don't pretend to know what that is in every case but then, the mad evangelists don't know either. They just claim to.

I'm also consistently over the "ZOMG M$ ARE EEEEBILS" that appears to afflict the idiocracy of commentards.

My consistent line is

- Google are bad news pretending to be fwuffy bunnies.

- Apple aren't as bad. They do tend to lie about what they've invented and work along a scientology basis, but still not as bad. You can always not buy an iPhone.

- Microsoft's main evil these days is that of incompetent marketing and a nightmarishly complicated corporate licensing program. Mostly harmless, if often mindboggling.

- linux is great if it's for you. It's not for most people. Especially when Google are making it into spyware.

- as dev/architect who has worked with Oracle products for many years, my considered view is that Larry Ellison hates us all. Fuck him right back.

I think that covers it.

What's yours?

dogged

Re: The Big Elephant in the room

I just spent 5 seconds looking at your posting history.

And then I compared and contrasted with your pro-Google anti-Microsoft stance regardless of the matter under discussion. You're certainly consistent, aren't you?

Play.com tech titan snaps up 'VoIP-tastic WhatsApp' firm Viber

dogged

Re: Cyprus based?

They already are.

Object to #YearOfCode? You're a misogynist and a snob, says the BBC

dogged
Facepalm

Re: Project Management

Alright, 95% + 10%....

Typing too fast, didn't spot it until the "Edit" time window was gone...

dogged

Re: Project Management

I find this a stretch.

How do YOU go about project managing a truly Agile project given that one of a decent implementation of Agile's effects is the increasing redundancy of project managers and their thrice-cursed Gantt charts?

Probably much the same way any other PM does. Draw up meeting schedules and claim to be a scrum master or whatever. 95% of project management is make-work that the dev team lead should be doing. The other 10% is project office stuff and that's actually useful when you need a new pen.

Project Management? Pay for professionals so that you get professional timewasting know-nothing bullshitters instead of those dreadful amateurs. Right?

dogged

Re: How to teach maths

@Trainee etc

Sorry. There was also a 1lb weight (very handy for things like green veg and fruit).

Simple now, isn't it?

dogged

Re: How to teach maths

I don't think you need to be un-academic to benefit from this kind of teaching.

I'm fairly convinced that a lot of teaching could be done this way before "A" levels, if not all.

Say we do maths my way with spuds and cattle cake, actually having the kids run a "city farm" or whatever on school grounds - yes, even the country kids. At the point where they easily pass exams on arithmetic and fractions, you start teaching them architecture in the guise of technical drawing and going out with builders. This teaches geometry, stresses, loads, Pythagoras, all the good stuff.

Then start teaching them about acoustics and you can bring in the physics and the wave-structures and the equations to deal with them.

Basically, learning should be practical.

For absolute best results, it should also be financially rewarding.

dogged

Re: Haven't these people heard of the division and specialisation of labour?

> We no more want everyone to be able to code than we do want everyone to know how to fly a plane or build a house.

I don't mean to speak for you here, but surely we don't mind if everyone wants to know how to fly a plane and build a house and are prepared to learn on their own time?

I mean, it's not a bad thing. Is it?

dogged

How to teach maths

Honestly?

The way to teach Maths is not to teach maths. I can honestly say I never learned any maths at all in school until we got to sines, cosines, tangents and quadratic equations. I was in the classes but I learned absolutely nothing.

I'd already learned it working for my father; a farmer. How many cattle do we have? How much cake does one spring heifer require per day over the winter as a grass supplement? Assume the weather doesn't break until April - how much have we got and how much do we buy in?

Mrs Gregory wants 10lb of potatoes today but we generally sell them by the half-hundredweight bag, ie, 56lb. That was a fiver so how much for the 10lb she wants? Also, weigh that out when your scales take 56, 28, 14 and 7lb weights.

Algebra is the substitution of "x" for "potato" or "hay bale". Arithmetic is the process of not starving your animals and not short-changing your customers or yourself.

Geometry was interesting though :)

Seriously, cookery works the same way and that's fashionable these days. Bring out the HomeEc teachers.

And I don't know whether it's relevant or not but everyone I know who grew up with Imperial weights is way better at arithmetic than those who had easy-mode metric.

But yeah. Don't teach maths until you get to non-physical concepts. Until then, teach life, which is maths.

Samsung Gear splurge skews smartwatch market Google’s way

dogged

Re: y'know ...

That would be the "Phatch".

Also, good article Tony.

Your personal data is worth a measly eight bucks a month

dogged

Re: Not much different

> Another VERY big advertising company has forked Linux and is paying huge salaries for keeping it entertaining enough just to offer them free to the individuals in order to collect their personal info.

I'm sorry, Google Translate isn't helping me with this one; could you repost in English?

WD My Cloud EX4 four-bay NAS

dogged

Re: HP ProLiant N54L Synology DSM for £125

Agree with other poster regarding cashback through Amazon resellers. Try ebuyer. Okay, they'll spam you forever but blocking that is a small price to pay when you actually get your discount.

Also you might not have noticed but the N54L actually also has a USB header on the inside which will happily take (and boot from!) as USB stick which leaves you operational outer ports and all drive bays free.

Enjoy.

dogged

Re: The actual novice "My Cloud" problem

Agreed.

What's actually needed is a NAS+ADSL Router unit.

And less ridiculous pricing. Honestly, the "Pro" versions that come with a version of Windows Server (and the associated cost) aren't much more expensive than this thing.

GPs slam NHS England for poor publicity of data grab plan

dogged

Re: What leaflet?

@Anon5000 - I doubt you're reading that correctly.

For a start, it's wholly illegal under the DPA and also under EU law.

Whitehall and Microsoft negotiate NHS Windows XP hacker survival plan

dogged

wat

> Microsoft sold a duff product and we should not pay for failure.

13 years is a duff product? Since when? Is OSX from 13 years ago supported? (Was it even OSX 13 years ago? I honestly can't remember but I know damn well the answer is "no").

What about the open source side of the fence - is RHEL from 2001 supported now? No, and it hasn't been for at least six years.

If supporting an OS for 13 years is a failure to you, then MS are your only choice because everyone else has way, way shorter product lifespans.

dogged

Re: Balmer for the win!

What features? Exactly what features?

Itemized list, or one might be justified in assuming that all your obections are similarly yanked out of your arse.

¡Viva la Revolution! Geeksphone's new mobe to go on sale this month

dogged

"Revolución", shirley?

Typo?

BBC, ITV gang up on YouView with 'FreeView Connect'

dogged

Re: I hate set-top boxes

@Richard81 - that's fine, I already have one of those.

dogged

Re: I hate set-top boxes

I'd rather like to get YouView on my XBox. I don't see why it's not possible - it's not like there aren't cheap USB TV tuners around. The iPlayer et al apps already exist, even for the XBone (which, incidentally, should be even better able to cope with a USB tuner because it has a "full" Win8 install as well as the gameOS and is essentially a PC under the fluff).

Okay, I haven't got an XBone yet and won't until the price drops and the game selection improves but seriously, why not?

If Satya Nadella is reading this (i expect he likes a good laugh at ignorant commentards as much as anyone else) sort it out, would you?

dogged

Oh Toxteth, you were just Kibozing for Nigel then. Admit it.

'No, I CAN'T write code myself,' admits woman in charge of teaching our kids to code

dogged

Re: Idiocracy

@ " 's water music" - nice one, loses something in the forum display, btw.

I don't think it's misogyny apart from the deliberate crudity of the phrasing. Somehow, this politics graduate has taken her worthless degree and got several highly paid and extremely visible jobs out of it without producing anything at all in under four years. Most people with a similarly useless degree would be asking whether you want fries with that.

It's either nepotism or she's fucking somebody. Or a cynical attempt to get publicity in the Daily Telegraph when it's not publishing pictures of all the fit girls who got their A level results but none of the fat ones.

dogged

Re: Idiocracy

> - the only jobs it'll create are for a few of 'call me' Dave's latest cronies.

And madam here only finished a Politics degree three and a half years ago, and her CV shows some propaganda for Irritable Duncan Syndrome and some different propaganda for another bigwig. Oh, and expensive hair and makeup.

Accurate job title? Grandee cock-holster.

Petition - Tim Cook's picture

dogged

Petition - Tim Cook's picture

Dear El Reg Eds and Subs,

Whenever you feel the need to post a picture of Tim Cook, please post a picture of a Paul O'Grady instead.

Then we check to see how many people notice.

Example - http://cheezburger.com/6699719936

RISE of the MACHINES and Bitcoin: Bill Gates' Reddit tech predictions

dogged

Re: Why?

I don't buy that for a moment. You'd just use a different and non-traceable currency if you were buying hot-button items like those.

Unless you were planning a single world currency but that would also require a single world bank and a single base taxation system.

None of those are actually terrible ideas, unless you let Americans near them.

Hackwatch

dogged

Hackwatch

Nope, not here. I mean around the web and especially the newspapers.

A thread for the staggering technical illiteracy of the non-tech press to be highlighted.

Charles Arthur thinks you can make money forking Android.

I love this one.

Charles Arthur is Grauniad's technology editor. Apparently this means he gets the first iPad every year but very little else.

Charles thinks Satya Nadella should dump WP and "just fork Android" because "it's open source" and "loads of stuff works on it". However..

I don't think Charles knows that AOSP is buggy and largely superseded. I don't think he knows that it's the only open source bit. I don't think he's imagined for a second that Google move more functionality and more APIs into Google Play with every release and that Google Play is not even the shoddy attempt at "open source" that AOSP is.

He thinks you can just drop equivalent services in. And you could. But it would, at this stage, be more work than just coding them for WP8.x. Amazon do it, after all, but they only replace a minor subset.

But apps! Charles wails.

But most games won't work without the Play APIs. Which are closed source. Which feed all data to Google. And which are an all-or-nothing proposition - you can't say "yeah, we'll take maps but not GMail". You also can't make any non-Play phones in your factory if you make Play phones.

And Play's not even free, Charles. You dickwad. It costs less than a dollar per "certification", true but add up the (frankly lunatic and utterly unfeasible) claims of how many Android handsets are activated every second and that's big, big money. Although I admit that if those were true we'd all be knee deep in Android phones by now anyway.

Go back to your iPhone, Charles. And shut up.

Mozilla takes a page from Google with sync-friendly Firefox Accounts

dogged
WTF?

Re: Not sure I trust Mozilla

Hmm. Do I trust a not-for-profit organization with my data more than a rapacious monopolist who makes a living mining my data?

Tough decision...

NYPD dons Google tech specs: Part man. Part machine. All Glasshole

dogged

Re: "The old trick of yelling...."

It's a few months old. In Twitter terms, only dead people remember it.

dogged

The old trick of yelling "OK Glass, SafeSearch off, Horse Porn" could prove invaluable for getaway drivers.

Inside Microsoft's Autopilot: Nadella's secret cloud weapon

dogged

Re: LOL???

You might have "seen" but you haven't actually done it, have you? In most cases, a recompile suffices.

Also, most people don't delete an older framework when a newer one comes along. To do so would be break all the rules of APIs.

You're not telling us that you do that, are you?

dogged

ITT -

people who either

a) know nothing about massive infrastructure management

b) are genuinely stupid

c) have been to the pub

d) any combination of a), b) and/or c).

For Windows guest - KVM or XEN and which distro for host?

dogged

Re: For Windows guest - KVM or XEN and which distro for host?

> no space for two computers here, really.

I don't believe you.

http://globalscaletechnologies.com/p-57-smileplug.aspx

MEP: Google's SECRET deal will cause crisis of trust for Europe

dogged

Meanwhile, 3 months in the future

Google appoints Joachin Almunia as a non executive director on a salary of $[obscene] for two days per month.

It's the EU way.

Facebook-for-suits biz LinkedIn shares drop on weakened 2014 outlook

dogged

Re: Nothing unexpected

> Now this is nothing but another recruitment site

It's a shitty recruitment site, too. jobserve.com does it way, way better.

And they send several orders of magnitude less spam. Seriously, does anyone not block linkedin emails?

JavaScript is everywhere. So are we all OK with that?

dogged

Re: Javascript is the VB6 of the 2010's

It's better than VB6. I mean, you can actually do inheritance and even polymorphism in it if you know how prototype works. It's ugly but you can.

The lack of type-safety is what really annoys me. I keep meaning to learn TypeScript (which is a superset of JS which compiles to plain JS) as a means of overcoming this horrible flaw but... never do find the time.

'I plead guilty to DDoS conspiracy and these GCHQ b*stards were doing the SAME thing?'

dogged

Kempin

Obviously, a sales manager from Germany who quit Microsoft 12 years ago knows everything about everyone.

Or the barrel-scraping for somebody to badmouth Nadella is getting pretty desperate.

Next week on the Reg - "SHOCKER - Reg commentard Bob Vistakin says Nadella is crap, quotes discredited article about Bing toolbar plus his own extensive experience of MS Project".

Google v Intellectual Ventures patent spat jury: Soz judge, we're stumped on this

dogged
FAIL

Re: Intellectual Ventures

They were employed by MS and Intel but they were employed as lawyers.

Lawyers is lawyers is lawyers. Anyone prepared to bet real money that no patent troll firm has been started anywhere by any lawyer previously employed by Google?

Me neither.

Android console on the way? Amazon slurps gamehaus Double Helix

dogged

Re: Up against it

> Actually for that £200 you could get a Wiii-U

That'd certainly be a talking point since nobody but you would have any idea what it was.

Geek's geek Guthrie heads up Microsoft's mega-billions enterprise software biz

dogged

Silverlight?

Oh Gavin. Seriously?

All the stuff Scott Guthrie's created and all the initiatives he's led - such as completely open-sourcing ASP.NET, just to name one example - and you pick Silverlight to make him look bad.

Is this editorial policy or are you just being a massive dick?

fWHoaR! Researcher crack eternal mystery of what women want in a man

dogged

Re: George Zimmerman

I think he shoots 'em.

Google will dodge EU MONSTER FINES by 'promoting' rival search services

dogged

Re: Why?

> Monopoly: Google are not a monopoly. They are very popular - the most popular by far, but they are not a monopoly.

94%.

Google have 94% of the online search market. What are your criteria for a monopoly if 94% does not cover it?

London's King of Clamps shuts down numberplate camera site

dogged

@ Paul Hovnanian

I agree that's a workable solution but it's not really my field. I do mobile ANPR fitted to squad cars so the light you have is all you have.

To the person who states that banks of operators typing in number plates are part of the ANPR system - don't be ridiculous. The "A" stands for "automated".

It's Satya! Microsoft VP Nadella named CEO as Bill Gates steps down

dogged

Re: Bad Servers

a. Netware was shit.

b. If you're pushed into using something that's bad, make a business case for using something that isn't bad. Unless you can't because the thing that's actually bad is you.