* Posts by dogged

4790 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Nov 2009

Google can't hide behind Alphabet, EU competition commish warns

dogged

That comment may be obvious to EU antitrust nerds, but try explaining why this investigation is taking place to people who use Google's myriad of services and find them very useful. They often fail to see why the allegations against Google should stick at all

As proof of this, we can expect a small legion of Google fanbois to come along and say this isn't fair because the EU doesn't make Burger King sell Big Macs. They are utterly missing the point, of course, but I've come to suspect that's because they're not actually bright enough to understand the point.

SatNad failure as Lumia income drops over 50% at Microsoft

dogged

Yeah he overlooked "but it does appeal to executive types because shiny > all regardless of how it actually performs." And the early iPhones were not exactly productivity monsters.

dogged

Re: waiting for win10 to be good enough?

I think MS have something up their sleeve in that regard. For a start, I think putting Panos Panay in charge of phones (and this is relatively recent, too recent to have made much of an impact on the 950/XL, those being pretty much the last gasp of Elop's Nokia) is going to change them from a design point of view.

Secondly, I think they're, well, don't take this the wrong way but I think they're giving up on the idea of the smartphone as a thing, not just their own but also Apple's and Google's visions of the product.

Surface seems to be almost all about hybridization. It's not one device, it's two (or more, if you count sketchpad) devices in one. I think this is where Windows 10 Mobile is going and Continuum is a good clue as to that.

I think the Lumia brand is probably dead, but we should expect Surface phone devices. The fun bit is guessing what else they'll be.

dogged
WTF?

Re: Windows 10

Yeah, you should totally get Android instead, right AC?

El Reg revisits Battle of Agincourt on 600th anniversary

dogged

Re: Part of the issue here is that the French underestimated the tactical effect of combining.....

> Penetrate, but not injure at 20 metres:

Yeah, I dunno what was going on in that film but I've personally (from a 220lb longbow) put an arrow with a ballista bodkin head through a dummy wearing plate. It went through breastplate (16 gauge steel), chain worn beneath, padding, the dummy itself, the rear padding, the rear chain, the backplate (also 16g) and was hanging out by the fletchings.

Admittedly, it's a big bow and I almost certainly couldn't do it at 200 yards (this was a demonstration at about 30 yards, any further would compromise crowd safety because I might miss) but your film there is bollocks.

For what it's worth, I wear plate at re-enactments and it made me feel a bit twitchy about the whole thing, rubber blunts on arrows or not.

dogged

Re: "We won the battle, but who won the war (not us)"

> As I note above, neither of the sides in the Hundred Years War were "us". Unless you are a member of the very old (and very inbred) upper classes.

And that's also not true because the odds are very high that you are, as I am*. Yes, from a bastard line but there have been a great many of those. These days, an English citizen pretty much needs to be descended from 20th century immigrant stock not to be related to Her Maj. And given the melting-pot nature of the UK (especially England) a great many of those are rapidly collecting the relevant ancestors.

* Actually, in my case, a bastard line of the Beauforts who are themselves a bastard line of John of Gaunt who, as you know, was Edward III's son and as such descended by circuitous route from a certain William the Bastard. There's a lot of it about.

dogged

Re: Part of the issue here is that the French underestimated the tactical effect of combining.....

> It is said that the "V" sign originated in English/Welsh long bow archers showing their "draw string" fingers to the enemy. The French cut off those two fingers of captured archers.

This is true but nobody's quite certain why since they went on to hang them anyway.

Archers didn't get ransomed.

dogged

Re: Slight historical inaccuracy

> It was actually the French-speaking Anglo-French

No, it wasn't. English had been growing in popularity in court circles through the 14th century and was made officially the language of court by Edward III in the 1360s. It remained so under Richard II and Henry IV and by Henry V's time, most court officials could no longer even speak French.

English or Latin was the choice of documents, because people could read them. Take your revisionist twaddle and shove it.

Android Security: How's BlackBerry going to fix it?

dogged

Why Blackberry haven't done a deal with Silent Circle for the Blackphone's OS is beyond me.

'Cancer-causing bacon would put a real dampner on processed pig sales'

dogged

Re: Am I psychic ?

> It's processed reformed pig meat

No it isn't. It's cured slices of pig meat. No processing or reforming required.

What the hell are you eating?

Sales down, profit up, 1,000 bods chopped: Your one-minute guide to Planet Microsoft

dogged

Re: The tanking Xbox One problem

XBone is apparently selling more on every quarter than the 360 did in equivalent quarters.

Nintendo would love to tank that hard.

Microsoft flashes cash for security bugs in ASP.NET and .NET Core

dogged

Re: Good move

Understandable. I'd rather use Malbolge than bloody PHP.

Support scammers target Mac fanbois

dogged

Re: Editorial Bias

The problem is your search for "fanboi", the iSpelling being relevant to Apple Cultists.

"Linux fanboys" might return more results and Windows doesn't really have any fanboys in the same way that toothbrushes don't. You use it to do a job, you move on. No emotional attachment required.

Pebble smartwatch finds its voice

dogged

I recently acquired a Vector Watch (I don't work for them and am not affiliated etc etc).

Basically it's a nice round watch with selectable faces that does notifications from your phone, is waterproof and has a 30 day battery life. That last bit seems legit, I'm on Day 22 with no charging and it says it's nearly 3/4 depleted.

There is an api forthcoming which or may not suck. So far I'm quite happy with it.

Microsoft's top lawyer: I have a cunning plan ... to rescue sunk safe harbor agreement

dogged

Re: The nerve of a Microsoftie to preach against digital dark ages

Wait, Netscape was way worse than IE.

That's why people stopped using it.

dogged

Re: Erm....

>Bell End

It's quite unusual to sign forum comments. And take a look at the actual data W10 sends home. I have. I think you'd be surprised ( or from your post and signature, perhaps disappointed) how little there is. In tests, I found the OS sent fewer packets to Redmond than Chrome sends to Google.

FBI, US g-men tried to snatch DNA results from blood-testing biz. What a time to be alive

dogged

I think it's appropriate. They take DNA samples by force, without consent. They tried to do this to entire schools full of kids.

They take samples from bystanders and witnesses, by force and without consent. And they keep them forever and refuse to destroy samples taken from innocent parties and children.

It's a fair description.

Nippy, palaver and cockwomble: Greatest words in English?

dogged

Re: Spanish...

So it's crusty as in "trustafarian" or "chugger", not crusty as in "bread", then.

dogged

Surely "rumpus" is - like "tot" - only used by provincial newspaper headline writers?

Amazon Echo: We put Jeff Bezos' always-on microphone-speaker in a Reg family home

dogged

Re: Four out of five stars.

As good as an Apple Keyboard!

says it all, really.

Fixing Windows 10: New build tweaks Edge, sucks in Skype

dogged

Re: Sorry, I've forgotten, why do I want this again?

I really don't get the rhapsodizing about Windows 7.

I'm using it at work now. Admittedly because of corporate dumbfuckery it's Win7 32bit but even so, it runs like a three legged dog with a weight tied to one paw.

Once you get past the interface 8.n and 10 are so much quicker and less frustrating to use (seriously, killing a process in Task Manager on those actually kills the fucking task to name just one small example) that I've come to the conclusion that anyone who rejects them in favour of 7 just doesn't like doing their job and would rather dick around with pointless annoyances all day.

Devs ask Microsoft for real .NET universal apps: Windows, Mac, iOS, Android

dogged

Re: Hmmmm.... Interesting

Really. Usually via Unity.

dogged
Meh

@elDog

And you presumably see no hypocrisy in calling other people fanboys.

dogged

> Java is the antithesis of portability since it runs on only ONE architecture, namely the Java Virtual Machine.

It's also ugly, about 8 years behind the state of the art, has shitty memory management (oh hi Android) and apparently the copyright belongs to Larry Ellison.

I'll pass, thanks anyway.

dogged

> I think he means that UWP apps are an attempted lock-in

because those are absolutely what the article was about.... not.

dogged

> It's an attempted lock-in

Let me get this straight - you say that a feature request on UserVoice submitted by users and unacknowledged by the MS S&T team is "an attempted lock-in".

By whom? The users who submitted it?

dogged

Re: @ joeldillon

> Whoever downvoted you is

e) somebody find it unlikely that MS would ditch their longstanding investment in C# for the linguisitically inferior, clunkier and harder to learn C++/Qt mix.

Don't get me wrong, I quite like Qt but objectively, C# is better designed and better supported.

dogged

Oh just buy Xamarin, dammit

it's not like it wasn't coming for a long, long time.

Buy Xamarin, kick it until it uses Windows-compatible XAML and .NET Core (instead of the current kludge and mono) and roll it into Visual Studio.

Most developers were half-expecting this at the /build/ event and for the fairly obvious reason that it makes sense. Instead MS keep dicking around buying email apps for Orlowski to complain about. Stupid.

El Reg keeps pushing Apple's buttons – its new Magic Keyboard

dogged

Re: I was going ...

In that vein, I recommend the Das Keyboard professional model. I prefer Cherry Red switches so my co-workers don't lynch me but YMMV.

I do not work for Das Keyboard and am not affiliated with them in any way.

dogged
Facepalm

Re: Wow. Just Wow.

Even Microsoft make good keyboards.

Jesus.

Dry those eyes, ad blockers are unlikely to kill the internet

dogged

Re: If advertisers want to reach me...

IGN on mobile has an ad that takes up the whole page. When you try to close it, it offers you choices about what to do, and why you're trying to close the ad. One of these choices is "ad covers whole page". If you press it, it doesn't do anything. Neither do any of the others. You're stuck with the ad and no content.

Luckily I'm on WM10 preview so I can just press "reading mode" but otherwise, the ad has literally made the page absolutely worthless.

This is the kind of shit that goes on.

Hewlett Packard Enterprise CEO Whitman slams EMC/Dell deal

dogged

I'm starting to see a pattern in the leadership of HP.

They appoint somebody who seems to be "safe" and then they go batshit within about 8 months. Every time. Quicker if you happen to be Leo Apotheker.

I can't even blame them anymore. It looks to me like Carly Fiorina left the company as a huge poisoned chalice, a root of infection that just won't go away. All we can do is watch it eat itself away and destroy people who might have been perfectly sane and maybe even competent if only they worked somewhere else.

Netgear prodded into patching SOHOpeless broadband router

dogged
Stop

Re: July to October

Take off the tinfoil hat. One look at how the vulnerability works will tell you this in is not evil, it's just incompetence.

Top boffin Freeman Dyson on climate change, interstellar travel, fusion, and more

dogged
Joke

Re: Emeritus

> Can you cite any published research that says models are getting worse?

"As a Climate Scientist, I tried to get funding to investigate whether my work was incurably flawed by suspect and corrupt data sources, worse models and a habit of making my sources say different things whenever reality disagrees with them but my proposal was rejected on the ground that I might not produce reliable evidence".

dogged

Re: customising weather to combat sea level change?

You'd also boost the planet's albedo and therefore cool it, which would result in more ice, not less.

dogged

Re: Emeritus

> I would be extremely surprised if more than a minority of scientists in climate research would agree

Consensus doesn't mean you're right, it just means other people are potentially also wrong.

Einstein was particularly clear about the (utter lack of) value of scientific consensus, especially when the Nazis had a whole bunch of German physicists sign a paper saying he was wrong.

"Why thirty? It only takes one to be right".

How much do UK cops pay for Microsoft licences? £30 a head or £137? Both

dogged
Stop

Re: Why pay fees at all?

> The price for RedHat support looks more expensive on paper, however, you have no separate APP licenses, no Exchange server licenses, not MS SQL server licenses, no CALS.

Also no familiarity so you're looking at training (is that included in the price? No? What a surprise) and big holes in your software portfolio that you'll have to pay a developer to fill or simply go without, which I'm sure won't cost you productivity in any way at all.

It. Costs. More.

Get over it.

dogged

Re: Why pay fees at all?

Honestly? The actual non-fanboy of any description answer? The genuine reason?

Oracle is probably peer-pressure. It's like nobody ever got fired for buying IBM. Oracle is, to an exec, "reassuringly expensive".

Microsoft? Probably because they were cheapest, and no, I'm not kidding. If an individual police force went to Red Hat and asked for everything they currently got from MS including the level of support it would a) probably not be possible and b) cost about three times as much. And that's for "free" software.

I'm going to get downvoted to oblivion for this. Still true though.

Outlook.com had classic security blunder in authentication engine

dogged

Re: Other than Devs......

> Someone who thinks only "dumb" developers produce security bugs is overconfident, and is not the right person for the job an idiot.

FTFY.

dogged

Re: Nice bug bounty

Especially since the article states he's "Synack senior security researcher Wesley Wineberg" so he presumably just got a $25K bonus as well as getting paid for doing his job.

PC shipments slump in Q3, thanks to free Windows 10

dogged

Re: That's a bit unfair

I heard Windows 10 refuses to return the Register's lawnmower.

French hacks go after new surveillance law … with the help of the ECHR

dogged

Re: @dogged

@LOW

For the record, that AC wasn't me, I work in Solihull and your other post was more tinfoil hatted craziness about how MS belong to the NSA which apparently ignores that every other major OS flavour is also based in the USA and a PRISM partner.

I know picking and choosing your crazy makes it a bit more manageable but it also dramatically harms your credibility. Especially when you're posting from Chrome.

That was a guess. I'm not wrong though, am I?

Vodafone joins calls to pry Openreach from BT's hands

dogged

>"If BT is so adamant that Openreach does not provide it with advantages over alternative providers, then why is it so opposed to structural separation?”

Having worked for BT a couple of times - as a contractor, I hasten to add - I think I can answer this one. First, of course Openreach makes ludicrous profits and yes, BT charge rivals punitive rates. But they don't do it specifically for profit. They do it because as far as BT are concerned, every other voice and data provider is an upstart newcomer whom it is their business to utterly crush.

BT regard their privatisation as a minor hitch in being the UK's only telecoms company. Minor and temporary.

Google and pals launch Accelerated Mobile Pages project

dogged

Re: Dumb, dumb, DUMB.

@LucreLout - while I have some sympathy, TDD with Javascript is more than possible. Take a look at QUnit (and the headless phantom.js browser).

Even easier and more sensible with Typescript.

dogged

Re: Janky

Janky is a pretty good word for it.

Load, for example, any article from (let's pick a serious offender) The Verge. The page loads, the text loads, there are big holes where the pictures should be but who gives a shit, you can read the text, right?

So you start reading. 6 seconds later BOOM you're at the top of the page because a graphic loaded. You swear and find the bit you'd got to and then BOOM another graphic, back to the top. Continue for probably another three pictures.

Janky.

New mystery Windows-smashing RAT found in corporate network

dogged

Coincidence?

This article appears next to a sidebar picture of Edward Snowden.

Microsoft, the VW family sedan of IT, wants to be tech's new Rolls-Royce

dogged

Re: Minor problem

> Rabid Linux fanboys that represent 1% of the worlds pc using population.

It's depressing, I personally am a linux fanboy. I totes <3 teh penguin. I run debian. I had a Sharp Zaurus. I hacked slackware (most of slackware anyway) onto the original XBox hardware. I have RasPis and enjoy folling around with them with my toddler son (who loves them). But around here, people get absolutely irrational about it to the point where I find myself continually defending Microsoft. Continually. Because the hatred that gets spewed around is unjustified and contagious and it makes you stupid.

dogged

Re: The nice thing about Microsoft's Stratergy

your timeline is fucked up. Badly.

dogged

Re: Windows phones

following the Surface Book metaphor, they could shove the extra GPU in the dock.

Windows 10 mobile upgrade coming in December

dogged

Re: Here's hoping

honestly, I doubt it'll be worse than 8.1 (assuming you run Cortana).