* Posts by Luther Blissett

1124 publicly visible posts • joined 6 Jul 2007

US Air Force: Looking for a few good cyber warriors

Luther Blissett

Re: I wonder what basic training will be

Very good Sir, especially the Snakes on a Plane allusion. Perhaps amanfromMars should pay more attention to the causes and effects of Hollywood.

It is most important that IT does NOT work.This is megagalactic stuff, and consumer protection laws do not apply, never mind the laws of supply and demand. (What demand? What supply?). Only presidential decree operates. But it cannot be allowed to work because that would be (a) the start of the Golden Age, (b) the end of the gravy train. Neither of these things will be allowed out of the engine shed by the Nu Insect Overlards who are stripping the fat off the Land like a plague of locusts.

Road charging, the sequel - Kelly unveils 'wired m-way' plans

Luther Blissett

Opus Dei (aka Intelligent Design) at play?

Is the British public stupid for being thought unable to adapt to any-lane motorway driving? Or is the keep-left rule retained as a standing invitation to exceed the limit in the outside lane and be robbed and/or criminalized?

Malaysian woman jailed for worshipping teapot

Luther Blissett

No links?

> "Apostasy ...it's the only really justifiable capital crime left."

Do you know the word treason? Are you simple, treacherous, or do you just feel lucky today kid?

Flores Hobbits were stunted humans

Luther Blissett

Wonderful Wizards of Oz

Mr Coward deconstructs their logic forensically, succinctly, and humorously (as in funny, but not as in bone). Maybe the Wizards should practise their act on dinosaurs first?

El Reg decimates English language

Luther Blissett

Too good not to share

BBC R4 News at 6 pm reported an official denial that the nu labour 24hr licensing laws were causing "mayhem". Probably most listeners would put the effect in the criminal category of "disorderly behaviour" (figurative meaning). It was not at all obvious if the original speaker or the reporter intended the quite different criminal category of ABH or GBH (literal meaning).

Well done British Propaganda Corporation. Especially after treating us this morning to an "economics correspondent" giving an utterly fatuous explanation of the recent doubling of wheat prices to record levels as due to future events - like world population growth, increased appetite (caused, oddly enough, by increasing wealth), etc. (And yes, I am aware of options and futures). But, Lord, spare us the Berks.

You were informed. It was called 1984.

Luther Blissett

What's the deal (fig.)?

That a word has a literal meaning does not preclude it having one or more figurative meanings. End of matter. <yawn/>

Does anyone have a problem with that? "The kettle boiled... " (not). The "head of the organization... " (uh, so where's its tail?). Of course not. It's one of the joys of language - until school kills it for you. Scholars and pedants could never have written Roger's Profanosaurus for example (tho monkeys with typewriters in theory could).

For journalism as reporting, rather than journalism as propaganda, it matters only whether 10% of the object was destroyed, or more. If the item doesn't tell me, I assume someone is making a propaganda point. Then the interest is in who, and why.

But Tony (Class of 70) is right to point out unintentionally the widespread ignorance of the distinction between plain and figurative meanings. It's been a disaster for science and a disaster for poetics, with many scientists (the "consensus"?) now pursuing the blatantly unknowable [because it just don't exist, right], and lit. critters imagining they are contributing to human knowledge with their "deep [but surprisingly occult] truths" about "human nature". Wot a shambles.

If it weren't for the fact that education is so generally useless that it can only decimate 10% of free-thinking Britons into supporting the Lisbon Treaty, there would be reason for concern. Any bets that that 10% is the scholarly 10% of the population?

NASA captures Martian avalanche

Luther Blissett

Nessun dorma

This is in fact a smoke bomb being set off by a brave hunting party of natives (menfromMars?) as they search and destroy the Nu Insect Overlards who are trying to colonize their red and pleasant* land. Vinceranno.

* It might just look like a lot of dry sand to Reg readers, but surely we can take it as read that every creature views where they live as home, and wishes to repel repellent invaders?

Nine Inch Nails cracks net distribution (maybe)

Luther Blissett

@ "Britain's favorite navel gazers"

I think you just killed a lot of peoples' cats, Dan, and they are so pissed. Personally, I think you were generous ascribing to them the minimal but necessary intentionality and reflexivity to pursue that activity. Deterministically or non-deterministically, whatever.

/* I'm sooo pretty/vacant I can't remember which is my coat, or if I brought one. OK I remember now. It's the one with the really fat wallet. No, don't look inside - it IS mine. I swear. */

Jimbo Wales dumps lover on Wikipedia

Luther Blissett

Is Rachel Marsden anybody?

Or just some body? I don't want to wiki (obviously) neither can I be arsed to google.

Microsoft cuts Vista price

Luther Blissett

Hasta la Vista baby

History suggests that to establish an OS against a monopoly incumbent you have to give it away. Are M$ about to discover this cold truth? Pigs take off tomorrow at 0900 sharp.

How Phorm plans to tap your internet connection

Luther Blissett

@ Commercial suicide

Chris's earlier item mentioned BT might get +£85M in 2010. That's very roughly annual subscriptions from about a third of million broadband customers. If Big Media run the story and/or there is litigation or regulation, I can easily see that number leaving BT.

How can customers be sure they have been "opted out" if they request it?

Ofcom to clamp down on 'unfair' charges

Luther Blissett
Gates Horns

@fuckingwankBT

Apparenty my credit card company and my bank also have a lot of customers with very rude online names not dissimilar to theirs, I discovered. In fact they seemed to have customers with similar names for every rude word I could think of, no matter how it was composed.

Perhaps El Reg might offer a little prize for copies of the look-up dictionary that these cloven-hoofed racketeers are using to spare their management blushes? And a special award to the racketeer with the biggest blush.

Were it that they took such care over their customers interests.

Asus Eee PC gives Sony the willies

Luther Blissett

"We are all in trouble"

A most revealing comment. Clearly shows that Sony is unable to compete with Asus. Also shows that Sony sees itself unable to compete with Lenovo, even tho both like premium price machines. I think Sony getting involved with Hollywood has turned them into wussies.

German high court throttles government net snooping

Luther Blissett

@ kevin

What makes a "proper" school?

A building? A regime which covertly propagandizes while it teaches? One that teaches metaphysics as theories, theories as facts, and only half the facts and conceals the other side? One that doesn't teach useful things like how compound interest works?

EC jacks up Microsoft fine by €899m

Luther Blissett

Collecting on M$

It would be in M$ and US interests to cough up the full amount immediately. If they want to chance leaving it, then when the dollar crashes, euros will be so expensive that it will cost them NH, VT, MA, and several other states on the eastern seaboard.The EC does not of course want them - but it will make a tidy profit selling them on to the PRC, who would benefit immediately in greatly reduced shipping costs. As the Chinese discovered the eastern seaboard a few years before 1492, the scope for the rewriting of myths will be truly tectonic.

Sun will swallow Earth: Official

Luther Blissett

Gaia hypothesis proven correct

because Mother Earth is indeed slowly suiciding itself in the simplest way it can, by doing the Death Spiral dance into the Sun, having finally got well and truly fed up with the inability of its most evolved species to distingish fantasy from "information".

The rest of the article is about how to be a jobsworth.

Odeon kicks Rambo in the 'nads

Luther Blissett

You'll just have to go see Brokeback Mountain now after all

Who cares? writes Dimitrov. Guys like big boom, writes Jason Harvey. Precisely.

Apart from the rearranging of the hyperreal that is likely to be the result, the prospective rearrangement of reality that is definitely on the agenda of many is the abolision of the right to bear arms in the USA.

Just remember the carapaces of the Nu Insect Overlards are not impervious to bullets. And they know it.

Blunkett gets another job

Luther Blissett

Tragic indictment of education

The educational system is supposed to nurture talents and abilities that will make a contribution to the sum total of happiness. Clearly the man missed his true vocation and ended up in the wrong job. Unfortunately that job was politics. He only wanted to be loved, but his heart was and is not fit to receive the respect of the British people as a whole. He now has an opportunity more appropriate to his talents and abilities, and good luck to him.

An education system whose aim is the welfare of a small and unrepresentative segment of society clearly needs to be changed. Only then is it fit for purpose - education, education, and more education.

Florida cops taser naked old timer

Luther Blissett

Home of the brave? Land of the free?

A better story could not be invented to epitomize the State of the Onion in 2008 methinks.

BTW, in Britain a merkin is a pubic wig. And no, we don't have policemen with hairy balls here any more either.

// Mine's the Afghan coat

Pakistan blocks YouTube

Luther Blissett

Truth hurt does it?

Always be wary of those who cannot take criticism. Strangely this is a list that includes all Anonymous Cowards.

Points mean passports: Citizenship Smith unveils 'like us' plan

Luther Blissett

The Rt. Hon. Subject Smith

Were it not that government bumbling affects real people in unpleasant ways, and that the effects of EU expansion swamp the "problems" being addressed by this "initiative", this latest mise-en-scene from Citizenship Smith would be surely be seen in the ludicrous terms it deserves. But there is more here than meets the eye.

Global Citizen 2000 is the keynote initiatve - a (developed) world standard for "citizenship" - norms, attitudes, and values. A kind of homogenised human, that fits in everywhere - and belongs nowhere. GC2000 has been adopted in the UK, and many other countries (the usual suspects, in fact), and the only problem is implementing it. That is necessary for the Nu Insect Overlards' NWO, but it is not a trivial matter in the UK, due to the real cultural diversity of people. It doesn't help either when the administration has reached its fag end and is filled with appartchiks barely able to hold onto the wagon.

The ongoing deprecation and destruction of a broad range of cultural, ethical and religious values is not a by-product of historical "progress" but an intended strategic objective. The postmodern does not supplant the modern - it is just the latest guise of the modern. If for UK nationals, such destruction appears to correlate with increasing levels of what sociologists call "anomie", that is accepted by the designers as a temporary cost of the transition to the new model citizen, who will be part of the new model "community". For the government to actually "do something" to fix anything right now would be premature - besides, it is also trying to put into place the future technical levers of power (also could be going better). Immigrants it appears cannot be left to experience the necessary cultural reorientation naturally any more - for them a forced focussed re"education" progam is now considered necessary, just in case they happen to be inspired by the better values of Britishness, which are now mostly redundant and well on their way to being a myth. Whether the urgency is required by the master timetable, or is due to the incompetence of the present incumbents in power is an interesting question, but not one the Nu Insect Overlards would answer (all your humans are belong to us, etc).

In summary, how paradoxical can the social policy of "diversity" get? Avoiding answering - this paradoxical: that Subject Smith can pass off as Citizenship Smith with next to no comment at all.

US cruiser nails crippled spy-sat on first shot

Luther Blissett

Procession of the symbolic orders

When the official story bears no scrutiny whatever on a purely material level, one has to look at the symbolic angle. Especially as we find the BBC and Reg giving it such undue prominence.

Now, the US Navy already established its preeminence among the military services of the USA for hosting future military technologies a while back, so this little exercise could not have furthered that purpose. We can also dismiss the notion of a symbolic me-too - after all, if you are the USA you don't exactly need to ape China (you just inflate the $ a bit more).

This morning there was a total eclipse of the Moon. In fact 0326 was the moment of greatest eclipse, to within 1 minute. Coincidence? Hardly. When the Capi di Tutti want advice, in the absence of a convenient Alien Grey, they will ask an astrologer. And for an astrologer, there is no more significant moment than an eclipse. It does not matter a jot that astrology is mumbo-jumbo, as we are confident the USN's missiles are not powered or guided by voodoo. We decode the moment to understand its relevance - its meaning to the players.

I am advised there was a configuration called "mystic rectangle", involving the robust significators, organised auspiciously, focussed on resilience, but without the implied malevolence of for example 911. (As well, as I don't want the black helicopters crawling all over my roof). Overall connotations are of a military in control, rather than a social governance out of control. So, the possibility exists that this was a very special type of psy-op - one for the initiated, where the message is hidden in plain view.

A counter-psy-op, with the CIA as the target, seems plausible (if you've followed so far). But if the CIA exists as a physical entity, again we need to ask - who (or what) was the symbolic target?

I could of course be completely barking, and the invasion started 23 hrs 40 mins ago...

Die for Gaia, save the planet?

Luther Blissett

Loads of balls, and sex in full body condoms

That light-hearted remark may be nearer the mark than suspected. The role of anthropologist Margaret Mead in creating the GW/mathusian bandwagon is documented here: http://www.21stcenturysciencetech.com/Articles%202007/GWHoaxBorn.pdf. Only her ghost could now tell us if her aim was to render a hyperreal nostalgia really real (for a Chosen few).

Northern Rock FOI gag 'out of order' say Tories

Luther Blissett

Roll of the Nu Insect Overlards

I commented a few weeks ago that there was a NR story which was untold, and this FoI exclusion confirms it.

@ Jamie: "If they let Northern Rock go under then it would have had a chain reaction effect on other banks"

Now t'is the season of banks reporting, we see this excuse no longer washes (by night or any other time). Nor ever did. Barclays have just announced a stiff little profit, but they made their big bad debt provision last year. Either we have to believe the Treasury haven't been watching their flocks the past year, or that they are being truly "expertly" advised on how to "manage" the "assets" with the desired redistributive effect, i.e. from poor to rich.

It seems clear the Nu Insect Overlards have had it to their eyeballs with nu labour, who cannot even manage a press announcement properly any more. Already I see quango-filling acquaintances starting to cosy up to Stuntman Dave's boys and girls.

Students win appeal against cyberjihad convictions

Luther Blissett

Terrorism Act 2000

I await the first prosecution of a UK mercenary.

Still waiting.

Suicide bomb swoop bags Musharraf's merry men

Luther Blissett

The little grey cells are ticking

An intriguing little story. Reminiscent of the USA immediately after 9/11, when quite a few Israeli spies were rounded up and put on planes back to Israel. Is there a conspiracy between MI5 and ISI to procure some islamic terrorism for the UK, and/or is Musharraf wanting to get a message to the US along the lines of Hands-off Pakistan and its nukes, or you'll get more than what you bargained for.

UK men would stay out of bed for 50in plasma telly

Luther Blissett

@amanfromMars

No point posting anonymously - we can recognize your spelling anywhere.

Hot bloke on widescreen action? Errr no thanks. Not even if they call it The Olympics.

US spooks won't get UK census access

Luther Blissett

Angela Eagle?

> "People in the UK are suspicious of anyone that tries to make lists."

False of course (and suspiciously ageist and philistine). So ministerial understanding of IT equates databases with lists? No wonder govt IT expenditure is such a mammoth size trough and disaster area.

Seems that Buggins Turn is alive and well in Westminster.

Boffin says Astronomical Unit should be binned

Luther Blissett

Pioneer anomaly

No it's not. The Pioneers know better than the Luciferians that the Creator does not live in the Sun and are accelerating onwards and outwards to meet Him all the sooner like the pure and noble (aka innocent and naive) creations that they are.

Or to meet Her. (That would be cool - after all, the Creator is the max. So he/she/it has got to be Max cool. Not excepting that the singular could be a plural masquerading under a collective noun - like a Hive Mind. That would be even cooler). So, Hers even.

The idea that the Sun's miniscule loss of mass is causing the Pioneers not to be where boffins thought they should be is outlandish and preposterous but par for the course. So what else could make the solar wind defy gravity apart from disgust with Luciferianism?

Music industry sues Baidu

Luther Blissett

Building partnerships, he says

Would that be this type of partnership - the USA to keep importing goods from PRC and printing money to pay for them, while expecting that same money to be used to buy US bonds to keep the US ticking along (or to suffer inflation if left sitting in a bank in China). Does the PRC know about this "building partnerships"? You bet it does.

Scientists warn on climatic 'tipping points'

Luther Blissett
Paris Hilton

@ "SHARKS control the climate"

QDOS to Robinson.One of the best jokes I've read on AGW. Who would have expected the BBC to let slip the real truth, even if it happened to emerge clothed in metaphor rather than naked, plain and unvarnished.

Climate of fear - Iran, credit crisis, terrorists, fear of smoke, fear of breathing, fear of food, fear of fear... How the sharks controlling all this propaganda are laughing while they are feeding.

And still you think sociology is for people soft in the head?

Straw launches inquiry into Muslim MP bugging case

Luther Blissett

@ bringing down the country, etc

The successful parasite does not kill its host. However, it may so weaken the host as to expose it to infestation by other parasites. The smart way to combat parasites would be with phages - parasites which feed on parasites - until the whole perverted ecology simply doesn't work any more. Fortunately the technical limitations of pharmacology do not necessarily apply to sociology.

Just remember - society is not WYSIWYG.

Brits can't distinguish history from the TV listings

Luther Blissett

Government has it in hand

Which is why today McBroon announced compulsory visits from UK schools to Auschwitz. I don't think it's to boost tourism. Or to instill an appreciation of art and culture.

Luddite and paranoid - why the big record labels failed at digital

Luther Blissett

Theory of Surplus Value

> If I had to pick put one dominant theme from Register emails and comments, and it's not representative of everyone I'm sure, is that the value of sound recordings is going down.

The value that people attribute to music is imbued in the object before they buy it, not after they buy it. If it has only monetary value when someone buys it, then it can only be contingent happenstance that it acquires personal value afterwards, and the pleasure derived from it is equivalent to a bet at the races. (Tho some bet from compulsion rather than pleasure). Both customers and business can disambiguate "value", as they know the interest of the other party in the transaction. The people who seem completely confused are the "artists" in the middle. The smell of desparation is because the customer is reluctant to yield economic value as long as the business is delivering product that is without personal value.

The recent egregious and obfuscatory Radiohead stance of taking the piss may be artistically valid, but sets a bad example, and is not likely to appeal for any length of time. The "long tail" demonstrates just this, as does the folk scene.

Email trail from navy man to London 'terror' site goes fuzzy

Luther Blissett

The smell of desperation

Hangs around this case. Cui bono from islamophobia? Is it the real hard and unpalatable truth that We The People everywhere are really no more islamophobic than we are antisemitic?

Sociologists: Studying engineering turns you into a terrorist

Luther Blissett

Really funny

How the Engineers in our midst are still living out the military/industrial complex paradigm.

Whereas the Sociologists have long moved into the media/information complex paradigm. Same smoke and mirrors, but different sorts of bombs, see? And I don't mean cyber-terrorism either. If you'd only look, you'd see that what the country needs is a few battalions of Royal Sociologists to repulse the demoncracy of the Nu Insect Overlards.

I blame it on Ada - that's where IT all started to go wrong for the Engineers. Truth arranged by committees - make arranged marriages look good.

As there's no AI icon I had to choose the sad penguin. Let's cheer him up.

Ryanair battles ASA over 'saucy schoolgirl' ad

Luther Blissett

Bad marketing - or good targetting?

Did the ad company forget to write LHOOQ on the picture - or were they after the oik market who have never heard of the surrealists, know no French, and think postmodern comes from Ikea? Or maybe there was no ad company.

Forget passports - teachers and kids are the new ID card targets

Luther Blissett

Sound of barrels being scraped

Round the poker table the suspense is mounting. There is £20bn+ plus in the pot. Who is going to get it? Already two big players have just dropped out. But HMG is still hanging in there. Now it is HMG to take a card. Dealer deals... and it's the pedophile card!!!

Germany flicks off-switch on DAB

Luther Blissett

All your DAB radios are belong to us

So when we decide to upgrade the codecs, you will have to all troop out and buy new DAB radios.

The idea of a backward-compatible better codec is one I have difficulty wITh.

ABC fined $1.43m for NYPD Blue a*se flash

Luther Blissett

@ Spleen

> The buttocks are indeed a 'sexual organ', in the sense that men find them attractive to look at.

If I found spleens attractive to look at, that would make them a 'sexual organ'? More specifically, do you mean "all men", "some men" or "men", or is the quantifier an irrelevant noise word?

> It's a hangover from when we as a species, like most animals, tended to have sex from behind.

This is an objective intellectual prejudice and a subjective titilation. You just like the idea.

> In that sense the FCC is right, though as has been adequately covered, their prudery is still stupid.

To get real these days you first have to get unhyperreal. The FCC is 'right' only in the sense that since the meeja circus around Clinton and Monica has defined their playtime as 'sex' (a hyperreal sex), the FCC is taking a stance consistent with that view, and prudery is irrelevant. Speaking for myself I've never seen a bull and cow get busy with a cigar, tho when I lived in the country I frequently saw them get busy - do you suppose they're missing out? Animals have rights too y'know.

Accenture and BAE pull out of ID card project

Luther Blissett

Banksters to win

There is a difficulty with ID cards at present which is called Northern Rock.

Since UK PC was prevented in "investing" in Iraq after the last invasion, it has been necessary to devise schemes whereby the banks can continue to create credit in the quantities they would like, and to reap the rewards of such "risk-taking". The average Briton is about brimful on personal debt. The PPI/PFI scam has been worked. Railways have had huge "safety" investment (but trains still keep coming off the tracks). IT projects have multiplied, and cost overruns are coughed up for. The limiting factors are (a) some bankers realise you have to feed the horse or it drops dead, (b) HMG gets embarrassed if you stare at it for too long. You only need look at the LSE cost estimates to see the ID card scheme is just brilliant for extracting money from taxpayers - the Mother of All Extractors (the Father being "defence"). It doesn't really matter who has ID cards, where you have to produce them, whether they work, whether they are safe (from the banks pov, at any rate - from the cardholders pov the risks are plain scary to all but simpletons), what colour they are, etc as long as all the "stakeholders" sound serious about it. And you have to admit they hadn't been doing too bad a job. It was all still looking hunky dory, until Northern Rock.

There is a story for the future - whether NR became the secret dump for toxic financial instruments in 2007H2. (The how is hardly interesting). Right now the HMG chickens are desperately scratching in the dungheap to find their heads, having removed them in that immediate panic to end the sight of depositors queuing to withdraw their money. The nationalisation option is last and least not from preferrence but because HMG is constrained by pantomime IMF rules of accounting which would trigger massive and vote-losing public spending cutbacks (read: end of jobs for the boys and girls). It will try to avoid that because of Factor B above. It also knows no buyer for NR is going to wait 25 years before sweating the assets or simply flogging them, and the indemnities will be taken up. NR has scuppered the lovely little ID card plan for taking monies out of the pockets of the public by being the elephant in 11 Downing St. There is no way either to gerrymander out of its predicament. ID cards to solve the Northern Rock problem -anyone?

HMG to play then. Banks to win. Taxpayers to pay.

ID cards delayed until 2012

Luther Blissett

@ W

> " I can't recall whose 'baby' this is and I'm intrigued."

The BBC let drop today that Gordy wasn't really a big supporter of ID cards. So it is a most intriguing question. Especially when we notice that the concept of ID cards has been on the political agenda in Australia, the EU, and the USA at the same time.

What could the common factor be? Democracy - perhaps? White supremacism?

Microsoft prints get-out-of-jail card for Vista Home

Luther Blissett

Starting to see the plan here

Stan's the Man. The new M$ OS will be Linux + virtualisation (proprietary M$) + a window manager which just happens to look like Vista... because it is the Vista GUI. Users get a new "Windows" which is more secure and reliable than any previous version of Windows - even while we'll be stuck with NTFS, which is has so much security thru obscurity that even M$ can't get into it. And M$? It gets to rule the world (finally really), tho not overnight. It won't care that it doesn't know how parts of its OS work (or don't, as the case may be).

It's not well known that Bill and Steve really fell out after they went to Palo Alto and saw what Xerox had in the way of a user interface. Steve of course got his imitation out first, which meant Bill's me-too had to use piddling useless tiling windows. (He got around that by manoevering IBM into the legal firing line instead of M$, you will recall). Bill will also be aware of Steve's appropriation of a real kernel and OS too, rather than developing them in-house - because in the circumstance it will be an irony to savour. Because Bill in doing the same thing gets the last laugh. Even if Apple puts its OS in a box on a PC World shelf, it won't make a difference.

Blissett's Law of Bandwagons states: Never be first on - never be seen to be last on.

IBM snubs OS/2 open source plea

Luther Blissett

@Peter Kay

> " It wasn't necessary to use the raw API, if you didn't want to."

It was my job to make that so. This was at the pre-release stage of PM, when the M$ C compiler was inferior to Lattice's (another M$ fatality) and before Watcom came out. As for C++, che? it was just a preprocessor on Unix then. My Stroustrup first edition must surely be a collectors item by now - bids anyone?

Luther Blissett

NOOP of a programmatic kind

For 18 years I have had a continuation to smack someone who wrote OS/2 due to difficulties of getting decent API docs for it, an experience not unlike getting blood out of a stone - and my company was supposed to be friends with IBM. I now realize how absurd, because PM was really the scheme of the Beast - which then ran away, cackling horribly, and proceeded to grow and feed, feed and grow. Now finally closure. And return.

May all your gotos have a safe target. Unless you work for the Beast, in which case a pox on all your houses.

Spirit discovers life on Mars

Luther Blissett

Hallelujah! And now...

perhaps NASA boffins can get down to some serious science without having their press officers continually e-mailing them demanding to know "Have we found it yet? When are we going to find it? Are we going to find it? Is that IT? Yuk - you mean to say THAT is intelligent?"

Just don't tell them about life on Jupiter.

Microsoft tries to CTRL-W WordPerfect lawsuit again

Luther Blissett

@ Novell haters

I wonder how many of you were there?

At the time of WP 5.1, the first Windows port, there were also other GUI ports of WP ongoing. I saw 3 of these run side by side, performing the same operations on the same document. There was a visible difference in the display update speed. The Display Postscript version on Next was far and away the fastest. The Windows version was the dog which wouldn't hunt. It was also clearly (and painfully so) slower than Word on comparable operations. There can only be two explanations. Either the Windows porting team was totally incompetent, or they did not have access to fast display routines - routines that Word on Windows appeared to be using. Since the management could see their 3 ports of WP, the incompetence charge can't stick - if something could have been done, it would have been. Windows APIs change - frequently - precisely to screw the competition by making them play catch-up. Once the M$ product is in the market, the APIs get published, as the game no longer depends on technical advantage but on marketing clout. This is precisely what happened - eventually the display APIs got published, the playing field was put back to level, and WP in Windows became usable, but M$ had already made their end run around it. Anyone need a lesson in M$ marketing?

Ok, a quick one. WP Corp had seen the way the wind was blowing out of Seattle. How M$ had put code in DOS to catch and slug Lotus. How M$ had killed Aldus' word processor, which had at least a 6 months lead on Word, by announcing Word would come out next month - it didn't, and couldn't, because it didn't even exist as a Win 3 product. I guess that is why WP Corp sold up to Novell. Again you may remember Novell were the leaders in networking at the time, and I guess they thought they had the clout to take on M$ even knowing full well how the Beast operated.

I maintain WP was always superior to Word from the engineering pov. The decision by Word's designers (not M$ BTW - they bought it in if you remember, like so many other things) to put formatting information in effectively a separate fork in the file, and run it in and out of memory produced quicker file read and write times, but is only any use for a kiddies' word processor that never has to format more than a couple of pages, and a poor one for anything with long document and/or DTP pretensions. (Your code ends up spending most of its time in malloc() and who said something about garbage collection? Don't you know how that's going to impact the user experience?). And as Mr Coward pointed out above, WP's file format needed only a trivial (5 minute) change to accommodate SGML and XML markup. Contrast that, if you will, with M$'s shenanigans over XML - new file format, OOXML, etc.

On days when not just the sky is grey, but the trees, fields and houses also, I think the quality metrics for software are inverted in proportion to the perceived market for it.

Do we need computer competence tests?

Luther Blissett

Government must save us! The War on IT

On the basis of a feeble analogy is Guy insinuating that computers are now such a threat to our "security" that a Government must step in with drastic controlling measures? That 2nd (or 4th) core is just dying for a background process which continuously reports to Central Server the URLs, files, data we are looking at so it can proactively shut down the process and save us from IT, isn't that right Guy? And after all, the letters t e r o i and s are in cyber-terrorist, so let's have a War on IT.

When you get off the boolean and onto the metaphorical logic, all sorts of non sequiturs become possible. Whether Guy has turned into an old lady, or is simply nostalgic, some things will never change. One of those is finding him barking vociferously up yet another wrong tree.

Got an amicable a*se? We have the job for you

Luther Blissett

i.e. must be chair friendly

So no Ballmer types wanted. Perhaps the previous incumbent was too hard with them.

ObjectOrientedProgrammingSystems

DVLA's 5m driver details giveaway

Luther Blissett

SNP?

SNP is in Scotland, right? DVLC is in Wales, right? Both devolved. Seems like an accommodation could be on the cards.