Posts by Duncan Hothersall 329 publicly visible posts • joined 25 Jul 2007
That's a bit like saying that Dell's new netbook will launch with a 30,000-volume free library. Or that the iPhone launched with a 30,000-volume free library. Or that my desktop PC launched with ... you get the idea.
The iPad my well be spangly and shiny and worthy of interest, but the fact that it is capable of accessing Project Gutenberg works is absolutely nothing to do with Apple or the iPad.
I can't help wondering what the different layers of the UK, Israeli and UAE governments/ intelligence agencies are *actually* saying to each other, outside the realm of public denials and carefully orchestrated "anger".
The UK can't risk British passports/credibility being devalued in the UAE, hence all the public anguish; the UAE can't risk Hamas thinking them an unsafe country, hence all the public anger; and of course Israel can't acknowledge executions by its intelligence agencies, though it knows there's little point in making a big fuss. But the cynic in me could see all three governments knowing in advance at some levels, plotting out the reactions and stories, and manipulating the news agenda for their own ends to get this hit done.
Petrol is roughly at the same price in real terms today as it was in the mid 80s. The craziness was the massive drop in the real terms price from the late 80s to the late 90s. Since then the price has nothing more than returned to its mid 80s level - and that includes the effect of the incremental duty hikes brought in by the Tories and embraced by Labour.
So I think we can do with less talk about "stealing from the public" or unfairness, and more acknowledgement of the reality of fuel pricing.
Even El Reg has succumbed to the torrent of press releases from the so-called "TaxPayers' Alliance" which is in fact nothing more than a Tory party campaign group which has had huge success in filling newspapers with its version of the truth over the past few years. Please don't collude in their misinformation campaign.
http://www.theonion.com/content/node/30072
"WASHINGTON, DC—In a surprise announcement with wide-ranging implications for U.S. narcotics policy, Drug Enforcement Administration director Thomas Constantine acknowledged Monday that some winners "may occasionally" use drugs."
Still loving my NC10, still haven't seen anything better come onto the market, including from Samsung. The best evidence for this is that the NC10 costs more today than it did when I bought one (presumably because it is no longer manufactured?) despite it now having hundreds more models in competition with it.
Genuinely don't understand why people are buying or selling netbooks with 3 hour battery life, or Windows 7, or priced above £250.
Understandable that you don't know how Google Docs works since you said you've never used it, but while I agree it would be completely impractical if you had to be online to edit your documents, the whole point of Gears is that you don't. Google Docs with Gears runs offline, and then automatically synchronises your work when you go online again.
Fair enough if you don't want to use Google on a point of principle - it's not like Ubuntu netbook edition will bar you from installing whatever software you want, so just install what you need. But I continue to think that Google Docs with Gears is a very good default for a netbook.
I imagine, like my last three comments on Cade's Google-bashing one track mind, this comment will be refused by the moderator. But here goes anyway:
The first paragraph uses the words "silently", "barely-disguised" and "mystery" to create a sense of wrongdoing but guess what? Google just set up a fucking web address. That's it. It's a web address.
Is Google-bashing for the sake of it going to be a regular feature of the Reg from now on? Because it really might tempt me to give up altogether.
Okay, so they must realise that this won't stop anyone with a bit of nous and/or determination from accessing any hosted code they want. At best it might be a hindrance to someone with a casual interest.
So this must be one of those "send a message" things. Who is the message for, I wonder?
I can't help thinking that this has precious little to do with Sourceforge and a lot more to do with the bully-boy diplomacy of the USA. Which means it's a bloody shame.
You are either being honest but haven't used Oo.o in a few years and even then gave up after hitting what was probably a readily fixable problem, or you're a wind-up merchant.
Like a huge number of people, I don't have MS Office and use Oo.o exclusively, and the *only* time I run into problems is when I get the odd document from Word which comes across badly. Importing CSV files into a spreadsheet happens to be something I have done on a regular basis in Oo.o for years, and I have *never* had a problem with it. Nor have I ever had a problem with any other general use of the suite.
I'm not sure why you should think you would constantly have to "port" your documents, but I think this is why you have ended up with such a distorted view of Oo.o. You're using it stupidly. It isn't a system to fit into a MS office ecosystem - it is a system to replace MS Office with.
We've had it happen on our machines, when it was set to download only but went ahead and rebooted.
See also here, especially the comments:
http://www.emailbattles.com/2006/02/08/vuln_aacfhddccc_de/
And here, noting the acknowledgement by Microsoft of reports from their users:
http://arstechnica.com/microsoft/news/2007/10/bug-in-automatic-updates-forces-install-reboot-for-windows-users.ars
So yes, I'm sure thanks.
The "open source-obsessed outfit" gobbet was aimed at Mozilla, not Google. Therefore there was nothing ironic or sympathetic in it, nor even relevant to the "spirit" of the story. It was a pathetic side-swipe at a company which wasn't part of the story.
I don't think I'm overly sensitive to "hidden meanings". But I appear to be significantly more sensitive than you to understanding the English language and realising which entity was the subject of which phrase.
Or, to put it another way, learn to fucking read.
because I think your statement is pure bollocks. For a start you aren't referencing versions, so you are effectively claiming that IE6 is more secure that Ff 3.5, which is laughable. Even assuming you are talking about IE8, "more secure" is a completely subjective concept, given that security depends on architecture, deployed platform, scripting, usage, speed to fix problems, etc. etc.
IE is a perfectly secure browser on a machine which is not connected to a network - I'll give you that.
So define "more secure", and stop just regurgitating marketing-speak.
"Bare-bones video was essentially invented by Pure Digital Technologies"
No it wasn't. Since when does the Reg employ writers who think that the first time they hear about something must be the first time it happened?
Hitachi were doing small-form-factor straight-to-storage video cameras in the mid nineties. I bought one in the states, and still have it.
"they did redesign the mother ship from the ground up so that was excusable"
Longhorn was going to be a redesign from the ground up, but what Vista became was just a repackage of Windows Server.
If they really had redesigned you could possibly have excused some of Vista's awfulness. But they didn't. And Win 7 still isn't a ground-up redesign.
Murdoch knows fine well that removing his content from Google's index will just result in more traffic for his competitors. He may be happy with that scenario for any number of nefarious reasons, but he knows fine well that it doesn't lead to people paying for his stuff.
There was an interesting Orlowski take on this story last week but unfortunately comments were not enabled for it, presumably so as not to sully its perfection with the uncultured ideas of the masses.
Did you know that at New York's Mount Sinai hospital, the lifts are set to move constantly from floor to floor, opening the doors at each floor, so that orthodox Jews can work on a Saturday but not "operate machinery". Apparently getting into a lift is okay, but pressing a button would be unacceptable.
Wherever and whenever irrational beliefs are pandered to in this way, harm is done.
Except for the teensy problem that of course Google *would* still deliver valid search results for those searches, it just wouldn't deliver the ones who have spent all that time and money making themselves top listing.
A radical thought, but if MicroHoo want to beat Google in the search game, they should probably focus on delivering a better product than Google.
going waay off-message. Looking at the original article, the interviewer responds to the "stable Vista" statement with the question
"So you’ve taken the style of the Mac platform and built it on the more solid foundations of Vista?"
Sadly there are no emoticons or other visual clues, but surely that was asked with either a grin or an utterly disbelieving face?
At work I was able to put my PRS-600 alongside my colleague's PRS-505 and the difference in readability between the two was startling - the contrast on the 505 is far superior. So people should be aware of this tradeoff when choosing between them.
The other thing which never seems to get a mention is the screw-up with DRM - you can only use one type of DRM on the device at once, and if another book you need uses a different DRM then you have to delete all the Adobe DRM ones before you can read the other one. This is a monumentally shit "feature" which desperately needs to be fixed.
Otherwise the thing is reasonably useful, though I find myself with an aversion to spending real money on content for it, because the result is so ephemeral. I guess I must be a Freetard at heart.
Sony's reader software has the same limitation on support for different DRMs, and also comes with Adobe's as default - you cannot cohabit different DRM books on the same reader. Which is a bit shit to be honest.
@AC 15:49 You may have just been lucky with the types of PDF you've encountered. I have the same machine as you and the PDFs I've tried have been a very mixed bunch - some behave well but most look crap when zoomed, with line breaking all to pot and graphics illegible and ugly.
And they announced plans to shut their Edinburgh brewery recently too. You might well say that they should no longer call themselves S&N, and in fact this is going to be the case: as of next year they will be called Heineken to match their parent company.
Which is all a bit shit.
"But Nokia plans the Maemo's next incarnation to use Qt, due to the appeal of apps that compile easier across Windows, Linux, Mac OS, and Windows Mobile."
No, Nokia plans the Maemo's next incarnation to use Qt because they now own Qt. Maemo is actually a very healthy developer ecosystem, which is having Qt thrust upon it by Nokia's boardroom, not their engineers.
"At the end of the day they both do the job, so the only real choice is down to the UI"
Really, truly, that's not the case. The only important differences are in the rendering engine and the javascript interpreter. In both cases IE is fucking shit. IE8 is slightly less fucking shit than previous incarnations, but it is still fucking shit.
Some of these standards have been around for more than a decade and MS still can't or won't implement them. That's the problem. It makes web development much harder than it needs to be.
Why do think it childish to assume that most Register readers, who tend to be tech-savvy, would use a browser other than IE? It's not childish, it's perfect sense. IE is a shit browser. It's fucking dreadful. The only tech people I know who use it are those who have to for testing purposes because it's been pushed down the throats of non-tech users.
Tell me seriously that you think IE is a better browser than Firefox.
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