Posts by Gerhard den Hollander

Lumia 2520: Our Vulture gets his claws on Nokia's first Windows RT slab

Lync

No lync integration ... that was about the only reason (for me) to consider this ....

Double-click? Oh how conventional of you, darling!

Re: Fooling with conventions

in which case your SoL on the citroen, as it does not have a cigarette lighter,

in stead it comes with a cigar lighter .

Yes, the mind baffles .....

Britney-obsessed Ubuntu 13.10 DUMPS X Windows-killer Mir in desktop U-turn

Re: The Britney Link

from http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/10/01/ubuntu_second_beta_review/

Smart Scopes also seem to have become a little smarter. Search results were a bit more relevant than when I have tested this feature in the past, though there is still plenty of junk. Why Britney Spears albums come up on a search for "Thailand" is something only Canonical knows. Maybe.

Congrats on MP3ing your music... but WHY bother? Time for my ripping yarn

Re: grip on Linux does a nice job

If you have a laptop, this becomes less of an issue, just leave the laptop soemwhere near, and just occasionally pplug in the next CD when the drive door opens. If your work involves working with/near/at a computer, again it becomes less of an issue

Samsung's new image sensor promises better snaps in smaller devices

you will also need a bigger lens, and therefore a large focal range, meaning increased Z-height

WHY do phone cams turn me into a clumsy twat with dexterity of an elephant?

Re: Well, if you're taking photos at a concert...

hear .. hear ..

people taking pictures at any event , using a tablet/iPad should simply be taken out and shot.

I mean, wtf would youo take an ipad in the first place to a concert ?

It's not like a spur of the moment, ohh I only have an ipad thing.

You deliberately thought about it, and decided to take an iPad / tablet to take pictures, in stead of a (much smaller) camera or your iPhone. [no iPad wihout an iPhone in like 99% of the cases]

Penguins, prepare to get SPACED OUT: Ubuntu 13.10's Mir has docked

No 3rdparty driver support for Mir ?

So your nvidia card (or your AMD card) will not work with Mir ?

(or at least not work accelerated)

That's a minor disappointment.

And what about things like mplayer (and friends) who use the acceleration in those proprietary X drivers for nice smooth video playback ?

Also, editing xorg.conf ?

Havent needed to do so by hand in years ... nvidia-settings does it all (including hot plugging monitors, triple monitor support , laptop support ).

The only time I needed to manually ahck the xorg.conf tree was when I wanted to have one of my monitors in portrait mode (though even that can now easily be done through the nvidia-settings dialog)

Do not adjust your eyes: This Kobo ten-incher has a 2560 x 1600 resolution

Re: if it works as just a tablet....

It would be running ARM, which is (one of the) reasons windows RT fails.

If you want a laptop, you want to do windowsy stuff on it (for work purposes outlook 2010 connecting to exchange plus some vpn stuff that's real windows only).

For hobby purposes, you pretty soon end up needing some stuff that's windows only (roxio dvd creator, or some silly games or ....)

Linux 3.11 to be known as 'Linux for Workgroups'

Re: So I suppose...

Dali clock still lives, along with xscreensaver (which I still run), both from the same guy, who used to code for netscape (remember the days ) .

xv wasnt really an editor, and other than viewnior, not many image programs come close to it's ease of use when it come to putting an image on the screen as fast as possible, with as little unnecesary junk as possible.

Microsoft offers free keyboard covers for Surface RT

Re: The better solution would have been

Maybe they should just include a z80 emulator, a shitload of z80 games, and sell it to the retro audience

Hubble boffins: Incredibly old supernova could explain EVERYTHING

Re: superbovae ?

Is that the plural of a spherical cow in a vacuum ?

Firefox: Use new stealth window to satisfy your wife, suggests Mozilla

Re: Really?

Same here. Working mainly on Linux, I usually have 3 different browsers open (Opera, Firefox and chrome) sometimes including konqueror/rekonq/whatever.

Of those 3/4 I find that I tend to use opera least, simply because it doesnt fo what I want it to, or at least not in the way I expect it to.

Nothing serious, but sometimes it's just slower, sometimes it's just annoying and sometimes it's just crap.

And sometimes it does things to a webpage that none of the other browsers do

Still it has it's uses, so i keep using it, but if I had to stop using any one of those 3, the obvious choice would be opera.

Forget the invisibility cloak: Boffins invent INVISIBILITY FISHNETS

Re: I hate Boffins

He might have been talking about that Cricket match near the chinese border , though I think that was pre-Pearl Harbour .....

Six things a text editor must do - or it's a one-way trip to the trash

Re: A nitpick

Zawinski's observation is in all good books on regexps

'Some people, when confronted with a problem, think "I know, I'll use regular expressions." Now they have two problems.'

First C compiler pops up on Github

Re: Stupid Question

back in the early 90s this was more or less how you had to compile gcc on machines that did not come with a compiler

You downloaded a bit of binary code that would compiler some source code into a proto compiler

(or if you had access to a Convex, you could use the Convex C compiler to build the proto compiler)

the proto compiler would then compile a second set of source code into a simple compiler (Im tempted to write a basic compiler, but that would confuse matters).

the simple compiler would then use the gcc source code to compile gcc

[but this was not the end of the build cycle, there was more ...]

the gcc-you-had-just-build would then recompile the gcc source code to create a proper gcc compiler

Note that the downloading process could involve having to uudecode some uuencoded files to get the proto-compiler, and there may not be a uudecode program for your OS.. Fear not .. as long as your OS had a hex editor, you could usualy find a printed copy of the hex code to do basic uudecode on your system.

All you had to do is retype the printout exactly as it was in the printout.

Though I think most of the ftp sites (like the wsmr one) had binaries of uudecode for pretty much any conceivable platform) ...

US lawmaker blames bicycle breath for global warming gas

Re: Facepalm...

@I like noodles .... so you would be driving with nothing, even without a thong .. and you thin k that's lucky ?

Oklahoma cops rake ashes of 'spontaneous combustion' victim

Did he used to be a drummer ?

Dozens of people spontaneously combust each year, it's not just widely reported

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tZrqC5LL_oo

Any storm in a port

Re: I used to have the same problem

Ah, but those were the days when USB pens and other USB devices were thicker then they are now, and the USBplug part would be at the bottom of the USB device,

so having 2 in reverse polarity mounted atop of each other meant that you could use the double height USB devices without blocking the other port.

Crappy ascii art

+=========+

==|_U_S_B___|

__________

==| n S B |

+=========+

Boffins FREEZE PHONES to crack Android on-device crypto

Re: if the phone is on and the ecryption key in ram

... or the phone could be locked or ....

I watched Excel meet 1-2-3, and beat it fair and square

Re: "The only issue..."

Last time I had to do this, I used a perl script to manage the .csv's into whatever the right way to format a date value was so that excel could recognize it.

Not sure if that would work for you though.

This was 5 orso years ago, output to .csv -> perl script -> email -> excel 2003.

Took some fiddling, but after that the script worked fine.

Not sure what became of that script though. Couldnt find it , and cannot remember what the exact magic format was that made ezxcel get it right. Maybe just simply yyyy-mm-dd hh:mm:ss

Remember that Xeon E7-Itanium convergence? FUHGEDDABOUDIT

Re: There Is Still Hope

Why not go one step further, and did what AMD did with their 64bit chips.

Make 1 chip, that can run x86, x64 and itanic code all at the same time ?

Or are their technical reasons for disallowing that to happen ?

LibreOffice 4.0 ships with new features, better looks

Re: @Eenymeeny

which is why you keep a laptop with office 2003, office 2007 and office 2010 on it (plus the upcoming 2013 version, which is sooo ugly).

'Better than Adobe' Foxit PDF plugin hit by worse-than-Adobe 0-day

Re: Significance

Google for ``smashing the stack for fun and profit''.

PDF link here http://www-inst.eecs.berkeley.edu/~cs161/fa08/papers/stack_smashing.pdf

Nokia decrypts browser traffic, assures public not to worry

Re: "Sales of 4.4 Lumia units"

maybe the .4 was a rental that got returned after a bit under 5 months ?

Hey Lenovo, want to kill Apple? Look to Samsung hitman for tips

Ob: Userfriendly reference

http://ars.userfriendly.org/cartoons/?id=19991013

'SHUT THE F**K UP!' The moment Linus Torvalds ruined a dev's year

Re: ioctl

EBADF, as explained in the post you replied to .

The file descriptor is no longer available, so it's no longer a valid descriptor.

EBADF is the error code to indicate that.

Windows Vista woes killed MS Pinball

Re: Good job no-ones using Win 8 then!

I still sadly miss a good pinball game for Linux ... any pointers ?

Google Maps becomes Apple's most popular app

Re: what about traffic data

Not sure how it works, but here is how I understand it.

Google maps get part of their traffic data from 3rdparties, and part of it from phones using googlemaps.

This means that google maps works (at least over here) on my blackberry just as accurate as google maps using chrome on my desktop computer.

As far as how real time the data is, I've used it a couple of times whilst stuck in traffic (either when I was not driving, or by having handed the phone to someone who was driving with me). The traffic data (at least in the NL, germany, belgium and france) seemed to be accurate upto a few minutes, good enough to get a pretty accurate idea how far you would be stuck in barely moving traffic.

North Korean rocket works, puts something into orbit

Re: Why hasn't the US "brought democracy" to NK yet?

China, Japan and South Korea would be very, very unhappy.

Even assuming the mere threat of the US invading would let to the fall of the NK government, and total freedom for it's people, without a single shot being fired,a nd the entire NK nuklear arsenal being disposed off safely, and immediately, it will only be the start of problems in that region.

Neither China nor South Korea will be capable of handling the influx of 1m starving North Koreans if the border opens. Nor will the South Korean economy be able to cope with this.

Reuniting NK and SK will be a lot more difficult then the east/west german reunion.

Another Apple maps desert death trap down under

Re: Needs to be said again, Roadsigns?

I've seen more examples then I would like to remember of people who, when gettting conflicting information from roadsigns and their satnav, would trust their satnav.

If there are major roadworks in the Netherlands, these now include warning signs that people should switch off their satnav.

Samba 4 arrives with full Active Directory support

Re: What a waste of time

Not a waste of time for me, as other have said, it will make my home network a lot easier.

And sidestepping the whole AD stuff, sharing unix shares over samba to windows clients will (under certain circumstances) be faster then accessing a windows file share over the same network.

If samba 4 has better performance than previous incarnations, that would be good news.

Review: Apple iMac 21.5in late 2012

Re: THE POWER CABLE WILL COME OUT REGULARLY

Not sure about this apple, but I've got 2 Dell screens that have USB connectors at the bottom, and nothing has ever fallen out of them. If I connect a USB drive to those sockets, I use an extension core (or a USB drive with a long enough cable :) ) so that the disk can lie flat on the desk, with enough manouvring spce so that I can move the monitor without the cables getting unstuck.

Nokia uncloaks Lumia 620: A 'budget' $249 Windows 8 mobe

Meh ...

Unless it has some impressive camera tricks up it's sleeve, I dont see any differentiator on this that would make people go out and buy it .. esp. since it's at the high end of the budget phone range .

But I've been wrong before :)

New Tosh drive can wipe out 4TB 'near instantaneously'

5 better then 3 ?

it's been ages since I've done benchmarks on this, but arent more platter supposed to give better read performance ?

And better write performance as well, because if done properly, the r/w can be done by 5 heads at a time in stead of 3 ?

Or is there something Im not seeing ?

'Boson' Higgs: Yes, CERN has seen the coming of the God particle

Re: "Boson' Higgs: Yes, CERN has seen the coming of the God particle"!!!!

I could care less for the tiny frogs, but if the Higgs boson leads to a loot of burned pigeons, it will certainly make some big cities a lot more pleasurable to visit.

Nokia Lumia 820 WinPho 8 review

blame the network ?

I cannot vouch for the reviewer, but lack of call quality, missed calls due to too low ringer volume are (to me at least) pretty big reasons not to buy a phone.

Also a battery that doesnt even last a day ? On a new phone ? That's another reason not to buy it.

While most days I will be near a place where I can recharge my phone (read, behond a computer with a USB port), there are days (oh so joyous days) where I can (and will) be away from those places as much as possible. And while I understand that I can even make those days more enjoyable by not taking a phone, or leaving it switched off, I dont always have that luxury ...

Where were the bullet holes on OS/2's corpse? Its head ... or foot?

Re: Long story, short version

Same here .. I never managed to convince myself to shell out the money to buy OS/2.

I wanted to get Warp, becuse it could run windows better then windows itself , but I never could convince myself to spend the money on it.

As for running 32bit, back then I was doing most of my development on SunOs (4.X) or Convex (with some dabbling on IBM AIX 3 and even a Dec Alpha (cannot remember what the model was), so 32bit was so common for us, that we failed to realize why MS was making so much noise about it :)

BOFH: The Great Patch Mismatch

Re: The point of Halon

ook !

Apple, Spotify, Amazon: All your Cloud are belong to us, says firm

Re: errrrr there's more to a patent than its title.

The only novelty I see is where they claim a patent to where the data is actually written to a DVD/PMP/CD/media, everything else in their patent could be priorarted by (say) a webbrowser playing a youtube clip.

And even for that, one could probably argue that using k3b to burn Mp3s to an audio disk, where the mp3s reside on an NFS share would consist of prior art.

(whether the argument is valid I dont know, IANAL)

RIM good for secret jobs: BlackBerry 10 cleared for Restricted data

Re: So what?

lots of people care. Despite signifcant drops in sale, it's still a widely used phone.

Looking at the general populace around where I live, I would say about 1 in 4 smartphones is a BBrry.

BBerry may be years behind the other platforms on many things, their exchange / lotus notes/email services is still far ahead of the competition (and for me personally, physical keyboards are a prime motivator when it comes to choosing a mobile phone).

If you want a phone that can do phone stuff (calling, texting, whatsapp) and can do email better then anyone else, you have little choice.

What made us human? Being armed with lethal ranged weapons

I thought there was a recent study that showed that home sapiens and the neanderthal had interbred ?

then again, there were equally recent studies that shows they didnt. Thought the most recent one suggests that they did. (see the below 3 links, aug 24, aug 25 and oct 5).

If neanderthal was al;ready gone when men came out of africa, the did they interbreed or not studies would not have been necesary.

http://news.discovery.com/human/neanderthals-interbreeding-humans-110825.html

http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2012/aug/14/study-doubt-human-neanderthal-interbreeding

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2213219/Neanderthals-bred-modern-humans-Europe-recently-37-000-years-ago.html

Incompatible IT systems blamed for bank sale collapse

Last june ?

Am I the only one who thinks this is the aftermath of last summers IT failure at RBS ?

Santander has spendthe last few months trying to be convinced

(or RBS has spent the last few months trying to convince)

that this would never happen again, and those people responsible for firing the people responsible had also been fired.

And they just failed ...

The real problem now is that chances of anyone willing to buy the RBS bits have dropped significantly, as noone would want to touch an IT system that's so complex that it caused the previous deal to backfire.

Hands on with BB10: Strokey dokey

Re: Success

Depends on what kind of office or business you're in.

The dutch government, prime-minister and all top members are using blackberrys.

Company I work for, all higher management has a blackberry.

And all of those having a blackberry are over 21.

I've said it before, blackberry might have low market numbers in actual number of phones sold, but looking around the streets, concerts etc about 1 in 4 has a bberry.

Is lightspeed really a limit?

Re: It's my understanding.....

... and therefore it is impossible to cross the boundary.

Who knows maybe all the dark matter, and weakly interacting massive particles are just those strange beasts zapping by at speeds greater then light, having discussions on their version of the register discussing the possibility of STL travel (slower then light ), and laughing at the ridiculous idea of anything moving slower then light, which would mean you could actually see where you were going before you got there, violating all kinds of conversion rules.

Just as we found that non-euclidean geometry would make mathematical sense, someone with better math skills then me could try and come up with a physics for the FTL world.

Who knows, maybe all the spooky action at a distance and the 2-slots, multiple world interpretation can be solved by just assuming a duality where we have an STL universe (ours) and an FTl universe (theirs) and all the quantum machanic weirdness is just the folks from the other side trying to get a message across

(or maybe it's just interference caused by their version of the X-factor TV shows)

Man I need more coffee ...

From Dr No to Skyfall: The Reg's one month of Bond

bond bike

Ok, so it's not james, but mario,

but it's a nice piece of cinematic, and everyone who wants to make a bike commercial should watch this.

It's got bond, babes, a villain with an accent to match the french taunter, product placement galore, millionaires, gadgets and a bike

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5lKRxk7uq8U

Google to axe IE 8 support, cuts off Windows XP lifeline

Re: Misleading as ever

those companies usually also block the google drive , google docs and other ``lets share all our private data with the cloud'' tools.

So no big loss there.

Casio to enter tablet market with twin-cam scanner

interesting

if it works, and if it would be able to cope woith my handwriting ... this would be a nice piece of kit to have ...

Memo to openSUSE 12.2: More polish, less angst

Have been using it for the last week orso, really like it .

Got to KDE 4.9 thanks to the distros .. smooth, slick and shiny ..

Now to find a plymouth manual that allows me to put my own pictures instead of the SuSE splash screen and I will be a very happy puppy

Ding dong, the Ping is dead! Apple brings in Facebook for iTunes

Re: Can anyone....

gnupod ?

it's command line, but if all you want to do is say ``copy all these files to my ipod'' it cannot be beaten.

Windows 8 to grab iPad market share wrested back from Android

windows 7 ?

> Preventing the Google OS from grabbing a share from Apple is Windows 7, though it'll only have a share of 17 per > cent or so by 2016, the researcher believes.

Steve B will be livid ... windows 8 was supposed to be the big breakthrough on tablets ... and now those pesky resellers and tablet makers go out and put windows 7 on their tablets.

Some people have just no shame