Posts by Androgynous Crackwhore
200 posts • joined Tuesday 27th November 2012 09:28 GMT
Re: Uh... No.
"so, he was an ancient Thomas Edison then..."
Uh... No.
If Archimedes was an ancient Thomas Edison, all of his accomplishments would be based on other peoples work.
"As one of the inventors of Cleartype..."
Eh? Did MS "invent" your arse too? Perhaps if their marketing department tell you they did, often enough, it'll become true?
An informed and contemporary account of this "invention" from Steve Gibson: http://www.grc.com/ctwho.htm
The only thing the Microsoft Corporation Inc "invented" about "Cleartype™" is the branding.
Re: Why would the operators back MS?
>Oddly, there is a licence fee to Microsoft for use of some unspecified patents (sound familiar?).
>Unless you ignore Microsoft's threats, that is.
Quite. MS refuses to even disclose what it is they're demanding royalties for. More protection racket than licence fee.
Re: Graph with *3* lines on it
"because the network operators fear Google so much, they’re backing every conceivable alternative, except the one that can succeed, which is Windows Phone."
'jaw dropped at that one. 'Gave up reading and came straight here.
Ditto.
Has anyone else noticed how Orlowski and TheVogon formerly known as RICHTO (TVFKR) are never seen at the same time? Hmmm...
Poor sods...
..they're probably trying to protect themselves from that ghastly "BBC English" of Americanese dialect delivered in a Geordie twang. Shirley no one can blame them for that.
It's not as if they could be objecting to factual content - everyone knows the beeb dropped all that old fashioned elitist crap years ago.
Posted in Linus Torvalds in NSFW Red Hat rant
Re: No need for foul language.
<-- No need for the fowl language. Shirly?
(Could the OCD brigade please step away from the mortarboards and allow a commentard a little poetic licence? Please?)
Re: Poor RICHTO
No! You're not suggesting he's this poor soul? Whatever could have given you that idea?
/sarc
He somewhat amusingly just followed my posts back to this discussion! I don't think I'm being conceited - look at his timestamps (above and there).
Checking me out RICHTO? Sorry dud, I've a strict policy against drug addicts and MS marketeers.
Poor RICHTO
Looks like he won't be crawling out from under his rock again this week.
<-- His favourite icon - in memory.
@ dogged
Yes, I got that. The quotation from the release said:
"...number of computers, including some in our Mac business unit, that were infected..."
Hmmmmm...
Re: Eh?
...or were they trying to discretely let slip that they use Macs all over the place - not just the "Mac business centre" where they have to? Just can't get on with that hideous TIFKAM?
...and what the hell is "Microsoft’s GM of Trustworthy Computing Security"? A joke?
Eh?
They're advertising the fact that the "Microsoft Campus" runs Apple Macs to deflect attention from their PCs being pwned?
EPIC FAIL
...as Eadon might say.
Methinks one of their propaganda droids might need rewiring.
Posted in Linus Torvalds in NSFW Red Hat rant
Re: Quite frankly.....
Absolutely. This shit is the epitome of the rot that's infected the IT industry for the last few decades. Malignant mega-corporations trying to achieve global domination by fucking up the competition with wilfully incompetent "standards". It's infected EVERYTHING... protocols, file formats, interfaces, EVERYWHERE... even supposedly "open" "standards"... OOXML anyone? The WWW? This whole ask Microsoft Inc for permission to boot your machine(s) is clearly madness. Madness by design. No one in the world is able to come up with a secure method to authenticate a boot sequence which doesn't involve begging the Microsoft Corporation for its blessing? Yeah, right... and I'm the fucking pope.
Clearly the politicians are far too stupid/corrupt to do anything about it. Fortunately Torvalds isn't a malignant mega-corporation. He seems to want to just get on with managing his kernel, rather than be diverted into playing stupid power games and subterfuge.
<-- A virtual Carlsberg for probably the best manager in the IT world.
/Homage
Posted in Microsoft brings Azure back online
Re: 20 goto 10
I thought Windows Azure is intended to be a sort of proof of concept technology advertisement. A carefully constructed and managed demonstration run by the corporation which creates and sells the underlying software - for the purpose of illustrating to the world what can be expected of it.
It would appear to be fulfilling its role rather well.
Too complicated for even its own super-mega-corp creator to operate? Splendid, I'll have some of that. Where do I sign?
Posted in Microsoft brings Azure back online
Re: Microsoft CLOUD EPIC FAIL
Putting lipstick on a pig has been Microsoft's entire philosophy since Windows 1.0. If it ain't broke...
Only since Windows? Have you forgotten the whole PC-DOS/MS-DOS fraud the outfit cut its teeth on? I've never figured why IBM brought Microsoft into OS2 after being so completely shafted in the DOS débâcle. Fool me once... Got exactly what they had coming I suppose. Poor stupid IBM.
Re: 13"?
Yes, I think the super sharpness and detail of text and images when displayed at those high densities is most of the appeal of this Chromebook - but not just for games. If you're content running it at half its native resolution then, as you say, most of Windows' potential problems will disappear and you'll still get the benefit of invisible (physical) pixels - even though you'll have blockier (display) pixels. There's probably a text anti-aliasing setting which would deliver a pleasant enough rendering.
I think I might have misread 1)...
Are you wondering if you can download ChromeOS independently... i.e. without having a Chrome device? The project lives at www.chromium.org/chromium-os but doesn't provide any binaries. You can also download a prepared image (for either VMWare, VirtualBox or a USB stick) from chromeos.hexxeh.net (posted an erroneous link earlier - sorry if I sent you on a wild goose chase!)
Re: This will become more.
I agree. These are two more areas - high density displays and ARM support (other Chromebooks) - where Linux distros offer a real advantage over Windows (apart from the rather trivial not-having-to-pay-for-them thing)
The "upgrade paths and full hardware support" are already in place! Google and its staff have a good record of actively supporting Linux.
I'm starting to feel like I'm doing Eadon's job for him! Don't you work on weekends Eadon? ;o)
Re: 13"?
Agree about VERY expensive. The beautiful panel is beautiful and 3:2 and all but not all that different from the beautiful panel in the Nexus 10 - which sells for under half the price. ~$700 does seem a high price to pay for little more than 16GB flash, a hinge and Intel.
1) Dunno. Probably... but why not just shrink the partition(s) which arrive on it or clone it/them onto an SD card or USB stick?
2) I doubt MS is competent to make W8 & their own applications work consistently nicely on high density displays (nevermind "legacy" 3rd party apps) - I suspect that's the reason we're having to suffer crap screens in the PC sector... but I don't see any reason why it wouldn't run. You'll need to have drivers for the isl29023 ambient light sensor, the Atmel mxt224s trackpad and the Atmel mxt1664s touchscreen if you want those to work.
Re: Oh FFS - It's like Google have chosen to forget the past.
I'd rather have the physical keyboard removed and have a touch-screen put in place that acts as a keyboard. Then at least you can alter the keys based on the program you're using.
What an AWESOME idea! With an efficient low-res cheap-n-nasty monochrome OLED/whatever display behind it to define the keys... Still horrid to type on compared to a real keyboard but at least you'd still be able to see what you're typing into while you're using it. Nifty solution to localisation too. You could even define your own keys. Think I'll add an additional custom top row to mine providing some extra currencies, a couple of common ligatures and diaereses and some handy unicode symbols. Add a decent stylus and the more-graphics-than-typing creative types would probably go mad for it.
Re: 3:2
~10GB for the OS and ~4 for swap leaves ~50GB for data. Not an "awful lot", certainly but I think ample for a portable device. I'm saying "ample" because I think ample is the point: A portable device of any kind isn't somewhere I'd choose to archive data... and one that's a tempting target for thieves but fitted with a temperamental shock sensitive storage medium least of all.
<-- FAIL Not for your post ("matte screen" alone got you an automatic upvote), for your spinning rust contraption and the 500GB+ of your data you had on it
;-)
Re: o rly?
h8r
Actually...
What is interesting in the little actual data they gave us is:
The youngest and the poorest Americans have been most strongly influenced by Microsoft's recent advertising blitz
Not sure if that's either news or a good thing for any of those concerned. I suppose those disposable laptop things are targeted at college-age kids so perhaps it's a partial, if inevitable (the young are the most impressionable! Shock!) win. Did make me smile though.
Lies, damned lies, statistics and... now...
A fiddle, wrapped in statistics, inside damned lies.
"Microsoft is getting hip again, according to a Reuters/Ipsos poll"
No it isn't. "Again"? Eh? Don't be stupid.
"The polling organization asked the US's finest 18 and 29-year-olds what the coolest tech brands are"
No they didn't...
The shysters pollsters asked some 'Merkin yoof (and oldies, but the yoof gave the stoopidest best answers so we'll ignore the rest) "Which of these companies is cooler than it used to be?" and reeled off a list.
Is this turd hipper now I've stuck a cocktail umbrella into it? 67% yes
Is the idea of Justin Bieber coming to your birthday party hipper this year than it was before? 14% yes
Newsflash! Young hipsters say a turd with a cocktail umbrella in it is hipper than Justin Bieber coming to their birthday party. Turds with a cocktail umbrellas in them are cool! Film at 11 (SFW)
Please stop tormenting us with this heinous agency drivel El Reg
Re: 3:2
That's exactly what I'm thinking... presumably whoever it is who's making these 3:2 2560x1700 panels didn't set up the line(s) exclusively for Google... so they're coming! ...and "wide viewing angles" - usually marketingdroidese for IPS (or PLS or one of the similar HQ designs). All very promising!
<-- PS... 64GB SSD and 4GB RAM is ample to install a proper OS ;o)
Re: Deliberately disingenuous?
What a relief!
Thanks for the clarification TPM... and glad you haven't turned to the dark side!
Do you think it might be reasonable to add "ARM Holdings" to the third paragraph? I don't think I'd have seen any snide undertones if not for that curious omission.
Oh FFS
Yey! A laptop with an adequate CPU & RAM, and beautiful display - hi-res AND 3:2 ! 2560 x 1700 no less! Yippee!!!!!!!ONE!!!! At last someone's got it!!!!!!!!ONE!!!ONE!!!!! YIPPEE!!!
Wipe off the GoogleOS stuff and whack a proper OS onto that 64GB SSD and away!! YIPPEE!!! Where do I order?
Oh... They've stuck it behind a glossy touchscreen?
Oh.
Fuck.
Re: HDR?
I think that was the point. Consumer "HDR" typically involves taking a rapid sequence of images at different exposures then crudely stacking them into one weird-looking ugly haloed JPEG for the consumer to shove onto FB or Flkr and wow their friends. The crude automated stacking step takes a bit of grunt.
Re: Shame the sun didn't come out
My initial thought was "couldn't they have waited for a sunny day" too... but thinking about it... the sun moving across the sky several times during the 4000-and-odd exposures would have created a stitching nightmare. Methinks the uniform lighting was requisite.
Could have brightened the finished montage up a bit afterwards though...
Deliberately disingenuous?
Did anyone else get the distinct impression that whole piece was something of a backhanded hatchet attack at ARM Holdings?
Began with a deeply spurious dig at the architecture:
the diversity of the ARM chip ecosystem makes creating an operating system that spans them all a big pain in the ass – much tougher than for a relatively homogeneous x86 chip racket.
Next came an "inadvertent"(?) omission:
And thus Linaro was created in June 2010 by Freescale Semiconductor, Samsung, ST-Ericsson, Texas Instruments, and believe it or not IBM
Followed by an explanation of how rudimentary, almost patent-trollish, ARM's "basic" contribution is and how dynamic and pivotal the Linaro project is:
Linaro sort of resembles ARM Holdings, the company that designs the basic ARM feature set and licenses it for modification and integration into myriad devices. ARM is the starting point of ARM processor and system-on-chip designs, and Linaro wants to be the focal point of where all of the key parts of the Linux kernel and related stack are tweaked and tuned to run across ARM architectures.
...all nicely setting us up for the punchline...
The difference is that ARM charges money to license its chip technology and Linaro just pays to have programmers work on open source code that is given back to the community.
OOHHHhhhh! Evil ARM. Sitting back and scamming all those licence fees for your "basic" IP while leaving five other companies to "pay" to do all the complicated software development... which they then donate to the public good!
...except that ARM was that "inadvertent"(?) omission from the list of founders and, of course, contributes immense amounts to Linaro and directly into Linux.
All very odd. I'd previously got the impression the author was optimistic about the ARMish uprising and the return of a bit of healthy competition to the server racket... so what's going on? An honest mistake, perhaps compounded by a touch of trying too hard not to appear screaming girlie? A change of heart? Just another hapless commentard scudding off into the vortex of conspiricy-nuttery? Anyone?
Re: Also: MS Office For Linux (kernel)
Why not? They produce office for the other single-digit desktop platform as well. So porting to Ubuntu, Suse, RedHat, Mint, RedStar... should not be a technical problem.
No, I'm sure there's no technical problem at all. It'll be what Microsoft euphemistically refer to as "a political problem" - meaning monopolist strategy. That "other single-digit desktop platform" will never offer real competition. A tightly controlled walled garden running exclusively on outdated but overpriced novelty hardware from a single vendor. Hardly a realistic alternative to the cut-throat PC channel - for the myriad corporate minions - is it? Shiny gratification for a handful of bourgeois upper management types maybe but a mass-deployed tool for the plebs to type on? Hardly!
Office for Linux on the other hand... that's a totally different kettle of fish. Contemporary Linux systems run comfortably on whatever decade old commodity hardware happens to be lying around. For example, I just happen to be typing this on an old single core PentiumM laptop sporting 1.5GB RAM and the infamous Intel 855GM graphics abomination. It's running a very recently released (2013) derivative of Debian's forthcoming Wheezy (Crunchbang-Waldorf) which I've been fairly savagely torture-testing. The OS is running from an .ISO file (it's not even "installed" anywhere)!... on an 8GB USB stick!... There's no HDD fitted and no other storage.
Some handy system stats from Conky:
Uptime:______ 20d 14h 45m
Ram:________ 864MiB/1.2GB
Swap usage:__ 1.26GB/4GB
Disk usage:___ 493MiB/616MiB
CPU usage:___ 4%
The "swap" is a partition on the stick and the "disk" is the .ISO(USB)/fusion(RAM) filesystem in case you're wondering.
Clicking to close this Firefox window, I'm warned "You are about to close 174 tabs. Are you sure you want to continue?" I also have an Iceweasel window running. Only 86 open tabs in that though. I've also had three fairly large PDFs lying open for a week or two, along with a text editor with half a dozen tabs, four file browser windows, fifteen "mid res" (2288x1712) JPEGs from the missus, a handful of system tools and three terminal windows (all resting ATM) strewn across three virtual desktops. None too shabby an assortment of clutter I feel. System is as nippy and pleasant to operate as the moment I booted it. I've been expecting the kernel to run out of base RAM at some point - this is a pre-PAE pentium - but 20.5 days in I'm starting to think I'll crack before the it does. If you haven't noticed, I'm quite impressed - but not surprised. So...
Office for Linux? No. Methinks not. The moment Microsoft released it Linux would eat Microsoft's lunch. Office is the Windows lock-in - without that why wouldn't any firm immediately roll out craploads of cloned Debian, Cent OS or RedHat stations for the Office drones? The brass would have their shiny Macs, the drones would have solid, stable, almost timeless systems to work at and everyone but Microsoft would be laughing all the way to the bank. Slowly migrate those odd specialist apps for the technical types, beancounters and whatnot and what's Microsoft left? MS Office. If I was Balmer, that prospect would not be something I'd want to facilitate.
"commoditisation"?
Replacing the "z" with an "s" didn't magically make it a word. See Me.
Re: Also: MS Office For Linux (kernel)
Spread the word and it is going to be a self-fulfilling prophecy.
OMG! Someone's OD'd on the space-cakes.
There'll NEVER be Office for Linux. NEVER. How would MS fully control their painstakingly honed rolling-incompatibility-programme™ and inbuilt-obsolescence™ without maintaining full control of the platform?
A carefully hamstrung toy-Office-cum-subterfuge-tool, quite possibly... but a full "Office for Linux"?!!! NEVER.
Re: too complex for us mere mortals to understand
It would cover the City of London to about 4½ inches deep.
Now that I'd like to see. Kickstarter?
Good job on the title...
...nearly made me puke all over my keyboard.
Re: Penalties
Not sure "ICO to be able to hand down jail time" is such a great idea!.. job of judges, due process, etc... but criminal prosecution powers like those of the CPS... or at least remit to work in conjunction with the CPS just as other policing bodies do... would surely be appropriate? Isn't something like this already in place? If not, why not?.. and if so, why isn't it used?
Alternative
It's alternative.
You mean to employ an adjective there but have erroneously deployed a verb.
The source managed to get it right in the quotation... but El Reg just couldn't quite manage to transcribe a snippet into a title without completely buggering up the grammar.
Tut, tut.
Posted in Australia cuts Microsoft bill by AU$100m
Re: So how much are they paying?
>But that is part of the problem, how does someone throw 100m at the [LO] devs and ensure that results are delivered?
A "bounty"
Alternatively one might choose to develop the code in-house and then, at your discretion of course, contribute it upstream.... or... well that's the thing about OSS... anyone can do pretty much as they please with it. Cool eh?
Sadly it seems as though the Blue Peter episode will not delve into Apple politics or the extent of his growing influence.
More "dumbing down" at the beeb. There are two is in Aluminium BTW.
<-- in lieu of generic "grumpy old git" icon ;o)
Posted in Australia cuts Microsoft bill by AU$100m
Re: What savings can they expect to see...
Quite. I wonder if anything besides publicly defaming (F)OSS actually contributed at all to these savings. Hmm...
Unashamedly spewing MS marketing crap like "...replacement for Office may also hamper innovation and productivity..." endorsed with a gov. rubber stamp won't have happened by accident.
