* Posts by shaolin cookie

56 publicly visible posts • joined 23 Dec 2009

Page:

GDP-arrrrrrgggghhh! A no-deal Brexit: So what are you going to do with all that lovely data?

shaolin cookie

Re: Unlikely now anyway

> Now, we have parties (including Northern Ireland ones (DUP and SF)) who have forced impossible constraints upon the process - for politicking - rather than the best interests of the country. How could there be a negotiation - if the possibility of no deal is not permitted. I mean - why would the EU even consider negotiation in that case?

This, as strange as it seems, appears to be a fairly common view by Brexiteers. Why would you think the EU would want these endless delays to continue? Trust me, they don't. From the EU side also, it's far better to get this thing over with than to drag on forever. Sure, it would be great if Brexit was cancelled, or if there was a good deal. But Brexit being outright cancelled is highly unlikely, so the uncertainty can only end by negotiating a deal or cutting the cord. Both are better than dragging on endlessly. So whether or not the UK would ask for an extension (which wouldn't get granted anyway if there's no clear path forward), they'll certainly negotiate if there's anything to negotiate. Hopefully there's something going on behind the scenes, but judging from what's in the news that is what the Johnson government is lacking. Proposals on what they'd want.

Enjoying that 25Mbps internet speed, America? Oh, it's just 6Mbps? And you're unhappy? Can't imagine why

shaolin cookie

Which just goes to show we shouldn't have huge nations. Split the countries much smaller (like the size of Estonia) and get better service and more democracy with leaders people might actually know. The bigger cities would make nation states too large to know the leaders, but then the likes of Singapore do have great internet speeds so at least in this respect it may not be a problem.

Baffling tale of Apple shops' 'non-facial' 'facial recognition', a stolen ID, and a $1bn lawsuit after a wrongful arrest

shaolin cookie

One BEEELLION dollars!!

Where do they come up with these amounts?! Sure, a dawn raid will be distressing and all that, but a billion? Sheesh. Especially if all Apple did was reporting to the police that this person stole stuff, so it's really the decision of the law enforcement on how they deal with it. Notwithstanding whether or not this facial recognition even exists...

VP Mike Pence: I want Americans back on the Moon by 2024 (or before the Chinese get there)

shaolin cookie

Lead the way

I think Pence should lead the way and head to the Moon himself, and take Trump along with him. One way. With that pair inhabiting the Moon, it may well be that no-one else, including the Chinese, wants to go there anymore.

iPhone price cuts are coming, teases Apple CEO. *Bring-bring* Hello, Apple UK? It's El Reg. You free to chat?

shaolin cookie

> Why can't the iPhone have seperate volume controls for ringer and media?

It does, you just have to flick the switch in Settings->Sounds and Vibration->Change with buttons (the wording might be slightly different, I'm using a different localisation).

Can't unlock an Android phone? No problem, just take a Skype call: App allows passcode bypass

shaolin cookie

Re: How is alphagoog off the hook here?

Sure, which is why that OS design isn't super simple. But they still should only allow the answering of that call, thereby allow access to microphone and camera for these apps in said circumstances. The app shouldn't have access to photos etc unless the user unlocks the device first. This is basic functionality of a phone OS, shouldn't be delegated to random third-party apps.

Your RSS is grass: Mozilla euthanizes feed reader, Atom code in Firefox browser, claims it's old and unloved

shaolin cookie

Re: Goodnight, Firefox

Waterfox, assuming that they'll retain RSS feeds (which I sorely hope they will!). I already switched thanks to the removal of legacy add-on support from Firefox.

Decoding the Chinese Super Micro super spy-chip super-scandal: What do we know – and who is telling the truth?

shaolin cookie

When the two sides stories sound credible...

... they are likely to be misled by a third party. So who stands to gain from making such noise? About how the US shouldn't be buying Chinese stuff but make their own, and if things happened to go wrong, the media is dishonest?

Especially given the timing just before the midterms, would be highly surprising if some at the GOP were not behind this story. I mean if the story was real, what are the odds of the loudmouth administration actually keeping quiet about something that would drive their agenda perfectly?

Lyon for speed, San Francisco for money, Amsterdam for fun: the best cities to be a techie

shaolin cookie

Re: I've been all over this muddy rock ...

I've also lived in quite a number of places on this rock, and while I agree with your sentiment on happiness starting from within, there certainly can be a connection to both the place and the job. It's just a lot easier to find that happiness when these externals are to your liking.

My advise would be that if you're not happy with where you are, travel enough to compare and find a place that would be to your liking, and go for it. These sort of rankings take averages of random quality inputs and many of my experiences in the cities listed are certainly counter to the numbers given. But everyone's situation is different, so just find what you're looking for, and be happy with it. I found my way to the place that tops my list, and where exactly it falls on someone else's doesn't make a bit of difference.

Dropbox plans to drop encrypted Linux filesystems in November

shaolin cookie

Re: Er wait...

Eh, not really. They're encrypting the whole filesystem and handing one directory of it over. Presumably consciously about it being handed over and thereby having nothing non-public in it.

Welcome to Ubuntu 18.04: Make yourself at GNOME. Cup of data-slurping dispute, anyone?

shaolin cookie

3rd choice

Opt-in vs opt-out -- they could just have no default but disable the Next button until the user has chosen either one. That'd probably get a bit more participation than a basic opt-in, while less than a simple opt-out.

WhatsApp agrees not to share user info with the Zuckerborg… for now

shaolin cookie

About that opt-out

Yes, the terms and conditions for existing users did have the possibility to opt-out of advertising. However, when you change phones (keeping the same number), you're forced to accept the terms without any opt out, even if you had opted out on the old phone. Bastards.

Democralypse Now? US election first battle in new age of cyberwarfare

shaolin cookie

Re: Democracy...?

Why would Putin want Trump as president? It's so simple that it doesn't really deserve writing up, but I have time to spare just now.

1. The proposed policies by Trump are very favourable to Russian interests. Reducing US NATO presence in both Europe and Asia in particular, as well as him suggesting he may lift the sanctions against Russia and acknowledge Crimea as part of Russia.

2. A Trump win would certainly weaken both the credibility of the US government and their relations to their allies in Europe and Asia, leaving space for Russia.

3. A Trump win would also be likely to break havoc in the US economy, again helping to increase Russian influence around the world.

4. American internal conflicts (some of which may take place now regardless of who wins), would also be an opportunity for increased Russian influence.

5. Putin may believe he'd be able to direct the overconfident fool in whatever direction he wants. That may or may not work, but even if it doesn't, the rest is still reason enough for Putin to cheer for Trump.

Alphabet spells 'Loon' for Indonesia

shaolin cookie

Haze

They need to make those balloons fire resistant, and the signals to go through thick haze.

Give us a week to gut Superfish, begs Lenovo CTO

shaolin cookie

Re: Exploring a wide range of options..

Yeah, but give the owner also a choice to have *none* of the bloat, ie. no OS either. Still hate paying for Windows whenever I buy a new computer when the first thing I do is to delete it.

So long, Lenovo, and no thanks for all the super-creepy Superfish

shaolin cookie

So which laptop then?

I was about to order an X1 Carbon before this debacle, and still need a new laptop. I like the trackpoint, but might learn to live without one. Any recommendations for a high end ultrabook for Linux use? Light weight and good battery life matter.

Lenovo shipped lappies with man-in-the-middle ad/mal/bloatware

shaolin cookie

Re: Very effective program

Hear hear. I actually even received the new X1 Carbon but just returned it due to a build quality issue without ever having turned it on. Was going to get another in its place but after reading this I'm strongly inclined not to. Despite the fact I never use Windows so it wouldn't touch me anyway.

'YOUTUBE is EVIL': Somebody had a tape running, Google...

shaolin cookie

Re: About that 'low lock-in'

@The obvious

Right you are. I was just in China recently and to my surprise they had blocked Google entirely, rather than just YouTube like earlier. I've already weaned my way out from Gmail and use StartPage for search so thought it wouldn't matter much. But the likes of StartPage and DuckDuckGo use Google results and are therefore also blocked, and no Play store on Android and no Google Maps were troublesome, and while Baidu works well in Chinese, in English it's even worse than Bing, and that's saying a lot. However, the main issue came from the many not Google-related sites including things like a small Google map to find them, as such pages then took forever and a day to open. Felt relieved returning and having Google back. Who would've thought?

Video nasty: Two big bugs in VLC media player's core library

shaolin cookie

Re: Responsible security research, he's heard of it

When closing a bug report as not being caused by your application, you should file a bug to the library where the actual cause lies. Hopefully they have done this, but I for one couldn't spot these on the ffmpeg bug system. Could of course just be a more detailed description that sounds different.

UNDER A VEST: Man cuffed for smuggling 94 iPhones strapped to his body

shaolin cookie

Re: Ultimate Fanboi

With no replaceable batteries, this is the way to have iPhones that run through the whole 3 month trip. And that explains the lack of chargers as well.

KDE releases ice-cream coloured Plasma 5 just in time for summer

shaolin cookie

Re: May I remind the couch-bound critics here...

Replying even though I'm not one of the earlier critics, but instead an avid user of KDE4.

I did give KDE5 a spin, and as can be assumed it's not really ready yet. Never mind that, but the reason I did try it was one that was referred to in the article ase well, the supposed high dpi support. I have a 2nd gen X1 Carbon which really could use that, but I also didn't see any notable improvement in that regard when comparing to KDE 4.13. If there's some magic switch somewhere to turn that on, it would be cool to try.

Euro cops on free Wi-Fi not-so-hotspots: For pity's sake, don't use them for email

shaolin cookie

Smartphones

At least for me the issue comes with the phone when travelling -- it's always checking for email when there is a network connection, so ends up doing so also on wi-fi hotspots even if the idea was only to read the news at the airport. There really ought to be a setting for the trust level to the network.

Apple loses sauce, BlackBerry squashed and Microsoft, er, WinsPhones (Nokia's)

shaolin cookie

Re: Curiosity kills the KitKat.

While not implying that they would be phone home proof, I for one would have more trust on the smaller players, especially the open source ones. So, Firefox, Sailfish or Ubuntu then.

Funny though that none are marketed with privacy. Would be quite eager for one.

Richard Stallman decides Emacs should go WYSIWYG

shaolin cookie

Re: I use VI! ;-)

> what would be the benefit to learning \ using vi?

For basic vi I guess the benefits would be that it's fast even for huge files and exists pretty much everywhere. But Vim is another matter, the fact that it supports pretty much everything makes it indispensable especially when you don't have a graphical environment, but once you learn the basics it's a lot faster also when you do have graphics. Syntax highlighting, regular expressions, block inserts, folding, etc, etc, etc.

Feds charge Vietnamese suspect with slurp'n'flog of half-a-million Americans' ID data

shaolin cookie

Double standards?

So can we expect a similar arrest of Keith Alexander et al soon?

Report: NSA spying deals billion dollar knockout to US cloud prospects

shaolin cookie
Thumb Up

@AC 6/8/2013 19:59

Can't speak for the original poster, but my company moved from Amazon to GreenQloud, which is Iceland based, and the costs are rather similar. Would depend on your usage of course. And they don't have quite all the features of Amazon yet, enough for us, but again, YMMV. At least there's the added benefit that they're green to help justify the move.

Snowden speaks from Moscow: 'Obama lies'

shaolin cookie
Unhappy

Re: I agree, the real issue is the spying

Partly that, but it also serves as a detriment for anyone else who might decide to tell the public what's happening. A show of force by the US government, no nation dares to anger them, so whistle-blowers have no future. Sad.

Gnome cofounder: Desktop Linux is a CHERNOBYL of FAIL

shaolin cookie
WTF?

Mac

I went rather the other way -- I was given a Mac at work, and tried to use that for development, somehow hoping that the Unix internals and Terminal would cut it. But for me it just doesn't. Try Python development on a Mac for example, such a pain of getting all the modules. So I promptly installed Kubuntu on it and happiness prevails. Apart from the crappy Apple mouse anyway.

For generic desktop usage the Mac is fine, I suppose, although that depends on what you're used to. For me not being able to middle click to paste etc is a severe slow-down factor. But at least with virtual desktops and things that tend to actually work, Mac OS X is still miles ahead of Windows on desktop, albeit that's setting the bar pretty much as low as it gets.

So much noise on WinMob, but Microsoft's silent on lovely WinPhone

shaolin cookie
Thumb Down

Perhaps they realise lots of people wouldn't want a Microsoft system on their phones, regardless of how good it was? There's just a common dislike to the brand thanks to their desktop garbage. Besides, I would be highly surprised if I was the only punter to whom WP is so ugly that there's really zero inclination to try it even far enough to see if it works well or not.

Mobes with monster 72-core GPU to debut in China

shaolin cookie
WTF?

"Improved web browsing and app download times are also promised by Nvidia."

The rendering speed would give a boost to web browsing, but how exactly do these cores speed up app downloads? Wouldn't that only depend on the network?

Top Firefox OS bloke flames Opera for WebKit surrender

shaolin cookie
WTF?

Re: bah

At one previous work place I had to disable ipv6 in Firefox, otherwise it would do these random lock-ups. Maybe your network is similar? Other than that I'd just have to assume the Windows version is a lot worse... I've been using FF in Linux far longer than I care to remember and (other than that 1 network) never felt any need to change.

Review: Living with Microsoft's new Surface Pro

shaolin cookie
Thumb Down

MacBook Air

So, for the same price as this and keyboard, and for the same weight too, you could get a MacBook Air. And therefore type properly, use on your lap, and have an OS that doesn't look like Fisher Price. And none of that touchscreen smugde either. Pretty clear which way I'd go, but to each their own of course.

Sorry, Apple - China's just not that into your iPhone 5

shaolin cookie
Stop

Re: Uh........perhaps it has something to do with average income?

I think you got the currency wrong there. An average salary for college educated people would be a lot closer to 2500 RMB than USD.

Microsoft’s so.cl network now open to all

shaolin cookie
Linux

So.cl

Am I the only one who read that as 'so called'? "Microsoft's so called network" stil sounds more reasonable.

Australia’s new AUD$5m golden visa

shaolin cookie
IT Angle

Re: Citizenship / Residency, No difference

Actually there is a big difference when people travel abroad. Those with citizenship get in to most countries without visas, while the mere residents still need visas assuming their citizenship is of a poorer country.

Windows 7 passes XP, Mac OS X passes Vista

shaolin cookie
Meh

"seven years worth of operating systems"

If you sum those up, 10.[6-8] comes up to 6.24%, which would be more than Vista. So it's really only 3 years, no?

Foundering Nokia pushes 10,000 bods, 3 veeps overboard

shaolin cookie
Stop

Re: They're making the wrong one redundant

Maemo/Meego would have been a 1-horse platform meaning it would have entirely reliant on Nokia to spend money on enticing devs to code for it. Let it die. Face it, it's not as if anyone's using it or coding for it. All it did was delay grabbing an OS not restricted to Espoo and cost a metric fuckton of money for no return on investment.

Apple seem to do rather well with a 1-horse platform. At any rate, no-one's using it or coding for it thanks to it being killed off a year back. Therefore also no return on investment. And giving up this upgrade path hastened the demise of Symbian, which would be the cause of the financial difficulties. But be that as it may, Maemo/Meego was killed off over a year ago and it's too late to lament for it now. The only relevance is that now Meltemi is also dead. Tempted to add that so is Nokia, but let's wait a couple of years for that to be official.

BlackBerry 10 developer kit aims to unleash application tsunami

shaolin cookie
Linux

Re: Tsunami of Failure, that is

Yes... but interestingly they seem to be opting for Qt / QML, so guess they're targeting the Symbian / MeeGo developers that Nokia has alienated.

Walking through MIME fields: Snubbing Steve Jobs to Star Trek tech

shaolin cookie
Stop

Re: 7 bit US-ASCII - Grrr!

"Ah well, I guess you're just screwed then if you don't have a finnish keyboard available at all times?"

Not completely screwed -- most of us change the keyboard layout and type "blindly" since we remember where those keys are in the Finnish keyboard. So you press the semicolon for ö for example, or apostrophe for ä.

But imagine what the Chinese would have to do? That is *really* hard to decipher from ASCII.

Anyway, technology is supposed to be there to make things easier for the end user, not to create all these unnecessary complications and forcing changes to writing systems that have been in use for centuries.

Microsoft blames poor Windows sales on PC slump

shaolin cookie

Apple

Macs run on Intel iron too.

Nokia loses sales lure as Maps and Music apps cracked

shaolin cookie
Linux

Not to worry

The ever-so-brilliant CEO Stephen Elop stated that the success of any WP7 OEM, be it HTC or Samsung or whatever, is good for Nokia. As it clearly doesn't matter to him if no-one buys Nokia phones, don't see why it should matter to anyone else either. Except maybe the few stockholders left, and if they care, then just get rid of Elop and WP -- problem solved.

Mozilla updates to Firefox 8, disables add-ons

shaolin cookie
Stop

Crazy version numbers

I like Firefox, and am not moving away from it, but this kind of release cycles -- when they increase the main version number that is, no problem releasing 4.3.7 or whatever -- does lessen my respect for the outfit. In 3 years we'll be at Firefox 34?!

Nokia celebrates milestone with nostalgic exhibition

shaolin cookie
FAIL

N9

The lack of buttons suggests that's the N9, not lumia.

Nokia: The first year of the Elopcalypse

shaolin cookie
Thumb Down

Operators would have wanted an alternative to Apple and Google just the same without the Elopcalypse. WP offers very little of an alternative, given that it's the same closed platform as iOS. Had MeeGo been pushed, it could be that alternative and WP marginalized.

So MeeGo doesn't have a Kindle app -- given that the platform was killed off 8 months ago and the first product is just out, that should surprise no-one. Without Feb. 11 things could've been very different.

London 2012 Olympics: 17000 athletes, 11000 computers

shaolin cookie
WTF?

My wife has Vista

Most of the time I see her at the computer she's either waiting for it to respond to commands or rebooting since the (wifi/MS Word/input systems/...) don't work anymore.

On the plus side, the athletes will get lots of exercise having to run the races many times given that the computers crashed again. :-)

Apple, HTC trim phone forecasts as markets tank

shaolin cookie
Thumb Down

N95

Well, I for one synchronized my mails to my N95 and browsed the web with it daily, plus navigation and camera usage of course -- pretty much the same usage as I put the current touch screen slab through, but 2-3 times the battery life. Very true about the screen size though.

Linus Torvalds dubs GNOME 3 'unholy mess'

shaolin cookie
Happy

KDE4

I had much the same view of KDE4 after trying the first releases, but then Unity came along with broken classic Gnome in Ubuntu 11.4 and pushed me to retry with KDE4.5. After a while of tinkering with it I actually got it to work my way, and was so pleased with the result I converted the work computer to KDE4 as well.

It's all about choice though and I'm sure we all like different desktops, but for the moment KDE4 is doing well for me.

Nokia: When pigeons fly home to roast

shaolin cookie
Thumb Down

Option 2

The same problem here as in Elop's speech on feb, ignoring the fact that option 2 wouldn't take years since it already existed. The one MeeGo device he's still agreeing to ship will go out before you see any WPs from Nokia. And with Qt it would've provided the existing Symbian users with an upgrade path, in fact the UI was to be copied to Symbian also to make it more competitive and smoothen the change.

Why Nokia failed: 'Wasted 2,000 man years' on UIs that didn't work

shaolin cookie
Linux

meegotouch

One more UI library not really talked about in the article, in the Linux team libdui was replaced by the meegotouch library (or renamed to that perhaps?) and its use was mandated by the agreement with Intel.

shaolin cookie

N97 surely

You must be talking about the N97, the N95 didn't have a touch screen and was actually a quite nice device to use.

Page: