* Posts by Dazed and Confused

2385 publicly visible posts • joined 12 Sep 2007

Apple Watch craze over before it started: Wrist-puter drags market screaming off a cliff

Dazed and Confused

Re: Really? I mean really?

Everyone else doing fine?

Samsung probably don't even think it's worth tooling up for a production run of 600K

Software can be considered 'goods' for purpose of commercial agent rules – High Court

Dazed and Confused

Re: comments about car parks.

Car parks typically have a sign up say they the owner of the car park is never responsible for damage to your car, even if it is their fault. Now they can say this until they are blue in the face (or blue in the metal sign usually) but it bollocks. If they drive their truck into your car they are liable. Their "license to use" the car park space with liability is not valid.

So there should be no reason why courts should accept the EULA which says "we know this SW is totally shit but that's life buddy, live with it, we'll take your money and we'll promise nothing in return"

If this court case can be made to stick then SW comes under the sale of good act and must therefore be fit for purpose. Since SW can't wear out, anything that is wrong with it must be a design fault and therefore the vendor must be liable for bugs.

VirtualBox 5.1 debuts

Dazed and Confused

Could be a first

Did I just see someone use the words "systemd" and "popular" in the same sentence without any negatives. WOW

Get ready for mandatory porn site age checks, Brits. You read that right

Dazed and Confused

> Clamping down on Internet porn is about 20 years too late.

Errrr

How old are you?

It's been around for a lot longer than 20years and certainly pre-dates what you'd recognise as the Internet these days.

I remember reading an interesting article, in the Torygraph I think, about 20 years ago talking about how every major step in communication technology seems to have been driven by "porn"

Some of the earliest know statues are of naked women or gentleman sausages

Painting nudes drove the improvement of realistic paintings

As soon as the printing press was invented they printed dirty books

As soon as they worked out how to cheaply print pictures, they printed dirty pictures.

No sooner had photography been invented, then they were taking porn pictures.

the list goes on, 8mm projectors, Polaroid cameras, VHS ...

A) sex sells (and before any comments about "Men" how many women bought Kindle's to read 50 shades)

B) like with illegal drugs, porn consumers will buy even when the quality is shit and the service is difficult or dangerous to use. So porn consumers acted as the bleeding edge of Internet as a business. just like they did for printing, video players etc....

Dazed and Confused

Re: New Puritans

> That said, UK law is always vague.

Well there is a very obvious reason for this.

The laws are drafted by lawyers.

Vague laws are open to interpretation. They don't have any meaning until their is some case law to set the meaning and this all mean legal fees. Lot and lots of lovely fees.

It's a job creation scheme.

Isis crisis: Facebook makes Bristol lass an unperson

Dazed and Confused

Re: Isis

And I can't help feeling that when a lot of people reach the afterlife instead of find a host of supplicant virgins ready to do their bidding they're going to find one seriously pissed off goddess who object's to her name being abused.

Man killed in gruesome Tesla autopilot crash was saved by his car's software weeks earlier

Dazed and Confused

Re: sun-blindness

> I don't know of too many sensors yet that can properly handle sun-blindness.

If they can't then they shouldn't be being used in this application. Sunshine (even in Blighty) isn't an unusual phenomena. This is something that should have been tested for.

Man sues YET AGAIN for chance to marry his computer

Dazed and Confused

Sod marrying my computer

Can someone tell me how I can divorce the damn things!

Facebook crushes Belgian attempt to ban tracking of non-users

Dazed and Confused

Re: re: jurisdiction

If this argument hold then the French courts can't claim jurisdiction over what google.com says.

Hmm this is going to get interesting

Where's the pop corn

You can be my wingman any time! RaspBerry Pi AI waxes Air Force top gun's tail in dogfights

Dazed and Confused
Happy

Pilots

Sod the rarity and cost of training. The big problem with pilots is that they are fragile. As soon as you want to start to maneuver they break. I mean 9g in one direction and possibly 3 in the other, what sort of mil-spec HW is that. If they can get the soft squidgy bits out of their planes they can look at designs that can handle massive G loads in combat situations.

Florida man sues Apple for $10bn, claims iPod, iPhone was his idea

Dazed and Confused

Re: swearing profusely

> Rounded corners. Someone over at Samsung is swearing profusely.

Since this must be one more piece of prior art to throw onto the fire, it must be getting pretty hot there by now.

Never-never chip tech Memristor shuffles closer to death row

Dazed and Confused

Whistling

> Call HP and tell 'em they can go whistle for Itanium updates if this ain't killed now."

There ain't no new Itanium updates coming, we've had the last one already.

I think HP already paid Intel for the last couple of revs anyway.

One big issue I'd have thought was that HP doesn't have any fab capability. Didn't that sort of thing go to Agilent in the big split all those aeons ago?

Surely HPE would be better off trying to persuade someone like Samsung to turn the dream into a reality. They got the expertise on actually making bit of silicon these days.

Non-US encryption is 'theoretical,' claims CIA chief in backdoor debate

Dazed and Confused

Re: Layered Options...

> I only trust a one time pad (OTP).

But how was your OTP generated?

Unless your random OTP generator is really random then your message can still be decoded.

And that before we get into the thorny subject of exchange and security of the OTPs themselves.

Austrians are most likely to bare all on beaches

Dazed and Confused

Re: speedos as “adequate swimwear”

Only the younger "prudish" generation think that there is anything wrong with speedos. Budgie smugglers are the only way to go if you want to swim, unless you've got one of these "shark skin" full body suits the pro's use these days. The baggy flabby crap you see people wear these days have got to be the most stupid garments imaginable. What are the prudes going to demand next? full body cover with no exposed skin and just to slits for the goggles to poke through?

Q: Is it wrong to dress as a crusader for an England match?

Dazed and Confused

Re: lack of Austrian hospitality...

> Also, it's good to know that the Ottoman expedition to Vienna was actually a multicultural encounter that turned sour due to a lack of Austrian hospitality....

But it did lead to the invention of the croissant which can be considered to be a good thing.

Our CompSci exam was full of 'typos', admits Scottish exam board

Dazed and Confused

WTF?

has the weight of a fondleslab got to do with a compsci exam?

The Windows Phone story: From hope to dusty abandonware

Dazed and Confused

Re: "Universal" anything is always a disaster...

Great, now they decided to put a bullet in it, please can they also put a bullet in this stupid UI it's inflicted on Windows desktop too.

Great minimalist designs need a lot of careful though, the newer UI looks like they just shot the design team to save money.

$10bn Oracle v Google copyright jury verdict: Google wins, Java APIs in Android are Fair Use

Dazed and Confused

Re: Google must have paid big bucks...

> Is that you Larry? Go back to your Hawaiian island and leave the computer industry. You are no longer relevant.

But if Larry had won, he wouldn't own a "Hawaiian island" or even a pedallo for very long. If Oracle had proved that you can claim royalties on the usage of an API, Oracle would have to give every cent's they've ever acquired to IBM.

Dazed and Confused

Re: @tekHedd - I haven't downvoted a post in a long time...

> Meaningful error messages are the responsibility of the coder of the software, not the language used?!

But the default of dumping out all this programmer shit on poor unsuspecting customers web browsers screens is just plain dumb. Not only does it confuse the shit of them it probably gives hackers way too much information about how bad your programmers are and where holes they will be able to exploit are.

HR botches redundancy so chap scores year-long paid holiday

Dazed and Confused

Re: The rest of the story...

Or was it like the HHGttG seen where the Vogon captain orders a guard "When you’ve shot the prisoner, shoot yourself. ... Then throw yourself out of the nearest airlock!!"

On the first of January the HR team responsible were told to sack everyone and then to sack themselves. So come the 3rd of January there was no one left who knew what they were supposed to do with Anj. Anyone left in HR was probably hoping that head office in the US had forgotten them too. So the only course of action was to keep stum.

Swedish old timer pulls airsoft gun on broadband salesman

Dazed and Confused

Re: MS get lost too !

It needs to be something a lot more suitable than an airsoft pistol.

FrustratedVictim: Would you like a smack around the head?

MS: No

SMACK, SMACK

MS: Why did you do that, I said NO

FV: Argh but due to a change of policy, NO now means smack you around the head twice.

MS: But I clearly said I didn't want to be smack around the head

FV: Yes, but smacking you around the head is now considered "recommended" so saying NO, means two smacks.

...

EU mulls €3bn fine for Google

Dazed and Confused

Tit for Tat

So how long before some US court imposes a comparable fine on some EU based company just for balance here. Anyone want to bet on a trade war?

Where's the pop corn, I think the politics of this one could get interesting, Still might be a nice change to watch the diplomats get rich instead of the lawyers.

'Apple ate my music!' Streaming jukebox wipes 122GB – including muso's original tracks

Dazed and Confused

Re: A: he is not a real musician

> And so what if your music ends up in their cloud

I think you'll find it isn't, you know. That's what the whole story is about.

If it was still in their cloud he wouldn't have a problem.

Ex-HP boss Carly Fiorina sacked one week into new job

Dazed and Confused

Re: Good news !

Yes, it would have been preferable to have a nut-free choice, as lots of people have allergies and such, but one takes what one can get.

Does remind me of the HHGttG

"You mean they actually vote for the lizards?"

"Oh yes," said Ford with a shrug, "of course."

"But," said Arthur, going for the big one again, "why?"

"Because if they didn't vote for a lizard," said Ford, "the wrong lizard might get in. Got any gin?"

Greenpeace leaks TTIP texts, reveals strained negotiations

Dazed and Confused

Playing devil's advocate here

American telcos and Internet firms believe the EU is crimping their ability to compete on a level playing field, while on the other side, Europeans believe America wants to dismantle their privacy protections.

But

In last week's article where so EU joker was saying we should all login to the Internet with our state issued ID cards there was the comment

The European Commission has noticed that only four per cent of the most used internet platforms come from the EU. And it’s noticed some dangers to competition from dominant platforms, too:

Perhaps there is a correlation here. Perhaps very few popular Internet sites are of EU origin because the legal framework here leads people to think "We can't do that, it might be illegal somewhere" whilst the US mind set leads to an approach of "Hey, lets just try it and see what happens"

Thunderbird is GO: Mozilla prepares to jettison mail client

Dazed and Confused

Re: Er... beg to differ

> With such a loving parent, it is better for it to be taken by social services and adopted.

If the latest update to Thunderbird is anything to go by then it needs to be taken into protective custody PDQ.

It's driving me nuts!

Oh yes, and I do run a real business using Thunderbird. It happily copes with the 70K odd messages in my in-tray and instantly finds things for me so I've given up filing everything away into different folders. It runs cross platform, so I can use the same config files on my Linux and Windows PCs. The death of Thunderbird would be a huge blow.

OneDrive shrinks

Dazed and Confused

Re: opt out

Eeerrrrr any pointers to this opt out of being down graded would be gratefully received.

Ubuntu 16.04 LTS arrives today complete with forbidden ZFS

Dazed and Confused

Re: Priorities?

> Sounds to me like an argument over whether something's broken or not, with one side claiming it's not broken and the other saying it is.

No most of the complaints about systemd aren't from people saying that init can't be improved upon, it can and it needs to be. It's just that systemd has taken the wrong turn in it's attempt to fix things.

There are other attempts to produce a better init, a better init is needed sure. But an init that thinks it is also an NTPd is not what the world needs.

Dazed and Confused

Re: Priorities?

It looks to me many complains about systemd is from people who wish to manage systems as if it was still 1970 and nothing changed in the past forty years.

Most of the criticism of systemd that I see are from people who would like their systems to work and not have key things broken for them by a bit of SW that has decided to shutdown some key service because it feels like it. The Unix approach of doing one thing and doing it well has proved useful for 40 something years because it appears to be the best way of doing things. It's like writing SW using functions rather than trying to put all your code in one place and using goto's. There are many good ideas incorporated into systemd, but they would still be massively better if they were separated out into a series of individual bits that did what they were supposed to do and did that job well.

Clucking hell! Farcical free-range egg standard pecked apart by app

Dazed and Confused

Re: Simple App

> only needs to detect movement of the mouth.

If their mouth isn't moving then they are probably doubly lying

a) They'll be lying under their breath

b) They'll be lying by omission

That naked picture on my PC? Not mine. The IT guy put it there

Dazed and Confused

Re: What happens in Vegas….

> Activities like searching for a new job are best done outside of ones current employer's system/hardware.

The first job I had as a Unix admin the department bought a LaserJet (original model, it was that long ago) just to make peoples CVs look better when they were printed out.

Now that's looking after your staff

Furious English villagers force council climbdown over Satan's stone booty

Dazed and Confused

Re: Move the bloody thing

Given that the rock was there first surely it is the road that should move if there is a problem.

Dazed and Confused

Re: The compensation culture at work!

Does the phase "Pissed as a fart" spring to mind?

I suppose it was either blame the rock for jumping out at them or admit to being either drunk in charge or not in charge.

BMW complies with GPL by handing over i3 car code

Dazed and Confused

ReL or are told not to escalate things

You'd have thought that people in call centres would be told to escalate things when the guy on the other end of the phone says things like "you do realise that what your company is doing here is against the law". This should ring an alarm bell which goes something like "I'm not paid enough to deal with this shit" and make it an SEP* as fast as possible.

(*) SEP, Somebody Else's Problem(TM)

(TM) the late great Douglas Adams

Tired of Windows 10 phoning home? Maybe the special Chinese govt version is for you

Dazed and Confused

Re: So....

I think my wife's already got the Chinese version.

When she shuts it down now it lists all the still running apps (which we can't find) in Chinese.

Oh, sugar! Sysadmin accidently deletes production database while fixing a fault

Dazed and Confused

Re: I was asked once to resize a virtual machine image.

I always like the way HP-UX's LVM had lvextend and lvreduce as separate commands, just to avoid this issue.

Dazed and Confused

Re: Found Out The Rule The Hard Way

> Please define "THREE SEPARATE PLACES".

There is a reason why the Veritas Volume Manager supports 32way mirroring. They had a customer ask for it. Said customer has 8 Data Center's (SIC) buried under 8 mountain ranges in 8 corners of their continent. At each data centre you need 4 copies, 2 for mirroring, a 3rd to split off for backup and the fourth so you can alternate the merge back, so there is always yesterdays data available too.

BT: We're killing the dabs brand. Oh and can customers re-register to buy on our site?

Dazed and Confused

Re: Hell No

I used to buy most of my kit from Dabs, at one point they had a branch in Bracknell and I could just pop round to pick stuff up when I needed it. Then they consolidated up't norf but continued to offer a great service. Then they started to take longer and longer to fulfil orders. Amazon, eBuyer, Misco, even buying laptops direct from HP these days and it arrives the next day. eBuyer often has things to my house first thing in the morning on free delivery. Dabs can still be claiming to be picking your order more than a week after placing it online. That wouldn't have worked in the 90s, it sure as hell won't work now.

Notice to suppliers, you've got 24hours to deliver or you're about as relevant to today's business world as a horse drawn milk cart.

How one developer just broke Node, Babel and thousands of projects in 11 lines of JavaScript

Dazed and Confused

Re: Timing

> it's more about perceived good will in the brand and whether the brands could be confused,

He could argue that there is no risk of confusion but now Kik can't their legal missive is proof that they believe that confuse arises so they've shafted themselves. They can't now argue that their is no confusion because they've legally stated that their is.

Dazed and Confused

Re: But did Kik's website go down?

Even better if the Kik's shitesters website had imploded too. Would be great if they got a sudden lesson in intellectual property rights "Know that stuff you're using? Well it's mine and you can F*&k right off"

True believers mind-meld FreeBSD with Ubuntu to burn systemd

Dazed and Confused

Re: Well systemd is what you get

And systemd is so good at coping with weird corner cases isn't it. Such a lock solid reputation for always doing the right thing. Especially when the poor box is also infested with NetworkManager to stir things up till systemd decides to just kill them.

Data-thirsty mobile owners burn through 5GB a month

Dazed and Confused

Re: Same here

"They still seem to have parent friendly tariffs (ie you know what it's going to cost you - no shocks!)"

Agree - up to a point!

...

What I couldn't find was any easy way to configure a cap on data

Since it is an all you can eat service why would you want to put a cap on the data usage?

Except to limit the amount of time the little perisher spends gawping at YouTube

Dazed and Confused

Re: Same here

We've got 3 of the Three SIM only deals, the first was only £12->13/m the other 2 were a couple of quid more. When we took them out we were warned that tethering was limited but they haven't complained about the usage. Number2 son burns through well over 100G each and every month these days,I think he took it as a great insult when I pointed out in the first month he'd missed the 100GB by a a couple of MB and has promised to use it more ever since. Compared with him my usage is trivial, but they've just texted me to say my recent trip to the US would have been £1500 more expensive if they charged for roaming (it wouldn't have been, I'd have turned off roaming and bought a local SIM).

They still seem to have parent friendly tariffs (ie you know what it's going to cost you - no shocks!)

Linus Torvalds wavers, pauses … then gives the world Linux 4.5

Dazed and Confused

Re: PS/2 Mice

Hey, I've got some not that ancient servers that have PS2 for keyboard and mouse.

Errr not that I'd ever use a mouse on them, mice should be connected to servers via the LAN cable :-)

US chap sharpens paradigm-busting scissors

Dazed and Confused

Re: >I'm sure they predate the invention of the idea of discrimination.

> Or do you mean the idea of trying not to discriminate? : )

No I meant before the days when people expected not to be discriminated against.

Though I'm not quite old enough to remember when "cack handers" expected to be beaten at school till they learned to write neatly with their right hand. I can remember teachers talking about it.

Dazed and Confused

Re: History repeats

> Got some in my garage right now :)

Well they're in the old man's garage, but...

We had then in the metalwork room at school too, plus a larger version (guillotine) where the top arm started off a right angles to the work.

Sorry neither the ones at my parent's or the ones at school would work for the left handers. I'm sure they predate the invention of the idea of discrimination.

Samsung off the hook as $120m Apple patent verdict tossed

Dazed and Confused

Re: hold on..

What!

The cavemen did it counts as prior art

Since when did that happen?

German mayor's browser tabs catch him with trousers down

Dazed and Confused

Re: So fucking what?

> Shock horror - man watches porn in hotel room.

He's a politician, he should have blamed it on his wife and quickly claimed for it on expenses.

Indonesian comms ministry orders 'gay emoji' block

Dazed and Confused

holding hands

I don't think I've ever seen any of my male gay friends holding hands, on the other hand it is very common to see men holding hands in the Middle East, and I'm presuming that they aren't all gay.

This is why copy'n'paste should be banned from developers' IDEs

Dazed and Confused

Re: Tailes from the support desk

OH but sendmail.cf is a truly beautiful thing. You just need to remember that Eric was a poor student and therefore obsessed with dollar signs.

Configuring was lovely to people started messing it up with bloody macro languages, I could never get my head around why anyone would want to use M4 let alone worry about how it worked.

I remember teaching one OpenMail class where a student's company had paid serious bucks for a couple of different consulting companies to get something done differently in their sendmail config only for them to eventually say it was impossible and send in a big bill. He was late in the morning when we covered sendmail.cf and arrived while I had everyone doing labs. I sat him down and walked him through it, then added 1 line to the file and got it doing just what they'd been asking for.

Then again I was always being told my head was screwed on wrongly.