Posts by Aaron

What Ray Ozzie didn't tell you about Microsoft Azure

Re: "And in English..."

So this redneck from Alabama gets a scholarship into Harvard University. On his first day there, he's trying to figure out the place and gets completely lost; clueless, he hails an upperclassman and says, "'Scuse me, can yew tell me where the li-bary's at?"

Upperclassman doesn't like this, go figure. Aims his best gimlet stare across the bridge of his nose at the hapless tyro and replies, in his frostiest, fruitiest Cambridge tones, "Here at Hah-vahd University, we do not end our sentences with prepositions."

Redneck takes this in, says: "All right, then, can yew tell me where the li-bary's at, asshole?"

Nokia's Trolltech Qt Software previews cross-platform IDE

"Oh Ess Ex"

Well, you know. When in Rome, do as the Romans do.

And when we're talking about a counting system which hasn't been in live use in over a millennium and which doesn't even have a zero, and which is only used today by bloody smug showoffs and people rich enough to afford dynastic numbers, then I think it doesn't bloody matter whether people say 'Ex' or 'Ten', save possibly to identify the kind of self-satisfied twat who goes around with an apple stuck to the back of their Prius -- though why you'd want to pick out those sort, I don't know.

Rigged e-voting machine snacks on Homer Simpson

What an idiot.

"Even the smallest application of Occam's razor would lead to the conclusion that voters are the main cause of errors in electronic voting, no matter how simple you try to make it, or how strenuously they deny screwing it up."

I see you've never used a touchscreen voting machine. It is essentially impossible for a person, at least one who is competent to get themselves to their polling place, to fuck up using the device; I believe this actually qualifies them, from at least this IT professional's perspective, for consideration as the ideal end-user interface.

And that is the one kind thing I will ever have to say about touchscreen voting machines. I hope you enjoyed it.

Manuelgate's goth vampire stripper fades from MySpace

Hey Dave --

"if my friend's anything to go by then it's likely an (un)happy coincidence that the Sluts initials are SS"

...go check out their website. Their logo, a take on the SS 'lightning-bolt' symbol, quickly puts paid to this 'unhappy coincidence' notion.

Oh, and Dave?

"I'm about as liberal minded as you can get but even I think videos portraying medical experiments and nun abuse are sick and wrong."

Well, then, you're not "about as liberal minded as you can get".

US uni hacker skirts child abuse charges

"Very against views to it"

Well, he would say that, wouldn't he?

Student charged after alerting principal to server hack

Yep, that sounds about right

Just as with most the rest of the people on this thread, painful experience with this kind of thing is why I don't tell people about their security failures any more.

Oh, also:

"Getting punished for doing the right thing should not deter people."

Maybe it shouldn't, but, strangely enough, it does. That's one feature of what we who live in it like to call "reality". You might want to give it a try; it's an interesting perspective to have.

BOFH: Fine detective work

"He's a bit tied up at the moment."

Lucky sod.

Also: "No one's even commented about the subtlety that the PFY is out with the boss's wife."

He's not. 'It's a joke - the page is blank!'

And: "...why the bloody hell would the PFY keep a paper diary lying about?"

He didn't -- the Bastard did, having made it up specially for the purpose. Seriously, go back and read it again, you can't have been paying attention the first time.

Google says sorry as Gmail plummets out of the cloud

Google Apps Premier Edition...

...GAPE?

Mine's the one hanging on the unnecessarily large hammer-action masonry drill.

DarkMarket carder forum revealed as FBI sting

Re: stings &c.

At least here in the good ol' U. S. of A., it only counts as entrapment if the criminal behavior happens at an officer's instigation; the reasoning seems to be that, if you were going to commit the crime anyway, you don't get to complain if your intended accomplice or victim turns out to be a cop instead -- which seems reasonable to me, and I'd be very interested to hear arguments to the contrary.

Of course, that's all based on the idea that the US has a trustworthy judicial and law-enforcement system, which is absolutely true as long as you're rich enough to thoroughly hide your crimes. Ignoring, then, for the moment, the fact that this is also a law-enforcement system whose members are fast becoming notorious for extrajudicial torture and murder via "less-lethal" devices intended to produce "pain compliance", I have no sympathy at all for petty thieves who've just found out that they're not as smart or as careful or as lucky as they think they are. Getting busted is kind of an occupational hazard when you're a criminal, and if the people doing the busting aren't much higher in my estimation, then at least they've managed not to fuck up and be evil *this* time, and that's probably the best we'll ever reasonably be able to expect.

Sergey Brin descends from Mount Sinai with Android API

@Neil

"Really, what do you expect of an API - for it to be so trivial that Windows developers can pick it up in 5 minutes?"

Spoken like an open-source jerkoff who's never spent more than five minutes in his life trying to write code to the Windows APIs. About which -- even if it is like bashing your own testicles repeatedly with a hammer, you at least have to respect the stubbornness and pain tolerance of somebody who can *do* that.

Crashed aircraft is Fossett's, authorities confirm

DECATHLON!

It'd be one thing if you hadn't spelled it wrong four or five times and then spelled it right. Seriously, can the Reg not afford spell check? D-E-C-A-T-H-L-O-N. How bloody difficult is that?

Meat Loaf gets Q gong

Rather Meat Loaf than Staind

Or whatever the kids are listening to these days. Lot of jangling, dissonant garbage, if you ask me, you could listen to it for a week straight and never hear a single melody. Or harmony. Or a single thing ever again, if you're really that foolish, and if you're going to destroy your hearing then why not just borrow Granny's ice pick and do it the old fashioned way? It's over a lot faster and with less pain, and there's the added bonus that people are less likely to question your sanity and good taste.

Mind you, new music's been going downhill since about 1825, 1830, in my judgment. There's not been a single thing worth listening to released since well before I was born, so I suppose it's to be expected that what's being released now doesn't even count as *music*.

Kings of Leon to freetards: Y'all are trash

Huh.

So what do they do about people who don't even care enough about their music to download it? Cry? I mean, I don't want tOH MY GOD HAVE YOU SEEN WHAT THEY LOOK LIKE

OMFG, what have you done?

Thank you ever so much!

Now I have to rewrite my "make the Reg site style not suck" Greasemonkey script.

"What sucks about it?", you ask -- there's all this ugly distracting crap in the way of my reading, that's what sucks about it. I'd written a nice long detailed script to make all the dribbling side panels and interstitial garbage and this and that and the other bloody syphilitic thing go away, so that I'd have this nice clean page with a bright red masthead at the top and a news story below that -- and now I'm going to have to redo the whole thing, like as not, just to make the Reg once again a site that I can read without my eyeballs trying to run away and hide.

Ah, well. Out with the old suckage, in with the new.

(Think I might have the new version put the "Special Report" sidebar panels up at the top between masthead and story, tho. Those are potentially kinda neat, which is a new thing for the contents of the Reg sidebars; and if I can scroll them out of my field of view, then they magically cease to annoy me.)

Tiny tots trial touchscreen tech

Spare me

Another bunch of loonballs with a good idea who want to use school kids as guinea pigs. How are they going to doodle in the margins during a boring lecture, that's what I want to know.

Chrome-fed Googasm bares tech pundit futility

@David Webb

I think it's fucking moronic that a college would install a profanity filter. What, do people these days spend thirty years being ten years old, and then magically and all-at-once turn forty? That's the only reason I can think of how anyone at a university, faculty, staff, or student, could possibly not be enough of a grown-up to handle seeing the word 'fuck' once in a while. Christ almighty, where do you people go to school that you don't hear worse than 'fuck' every damn day?

Fucking hell. You know, I really used to regret not finishing my degree, but at this point I'm pretty much thinking that I did myself more of a favor by dropping out and going to work instead. I'm never going to have a $120k/year job, maybe, but at least I've spent the last decade living like a full-grown adult human being, which apparently among the better-educated set is quite rare.

Anonymous fights Scientology in schools

Re: Seems unlikely

It makes sense if you consider that teenagers, while not generally able to offer a great deal of money or material assets, generally can offer an enormous amount of *labor*...

Winehouse jibe wins Fringe's funniest gag

hippos &c.

Should it be 'hippopotamoi', then, Mr Woods? I confess my Greek noun cases aren't what they could be.

As for the rest, who the hell is Amy Winehouse?

IT career virgins need a cherry on top

C+?

What is this language "C+" of which you speak? I've heard of C, and I've heard of C++, and I've even heard of C# -- but I've never heard of C+.

NASA: The Moon is not enough

I'm no great NASA fan, but...

"NASA is like kids who get bored with their toys and want to play with new ones."

is probably the wordiest rendering of "I have no idea what I'm talking about" I've seen all week.

Global warming to stone US kidneys

Re: They could rename this belt

Thank you for making it quite clear to everyone what I set out to satirize. I mean, for the Reg comments, I was pretty subtle, and I was worried that there'd be people missing the point and jumping on me with both feet for being so hateful of the South. Thanks to your example, though, Gordon, I don't think I need worry very much at all; only the truly stupid should be likely to miss the point now.

Oh, and Rachel: What you're forgetting is that everyone in the South lives on welfare and weighs over three hundred pounds, so it'll be your very own precious tax dollars that go to pay for their kidney-stone treatments. You should be used to this by now, since no Southern state contains anything larger than a pack of cigarettes which was actually paid for by Southerners.

Besides which, kidney stones don't always pass on their own, and there's a whole range of quite unpleasant procedures intended to help them leave more easily, or simply to remove them entirely from the bladder. Given what I've seen my mother-in-law go through in the last year in that regard, I believe that if all you needed was Vicodin and Gatorade, you were awfully damn lucky indeed.

Re: I also see a relationship, here

The cost of kidney stone treatment will increase because, since it is after all the South we're talking about, the treatment equipment will have to be hardened to withstand tobacco juice, stray shotgun fire, and NASCAR.

But then, since we're on the subject, why bother going to all that work in the first place? After all, as "cirby" so aptly points out, those kidney stones are largely the fault of the people who get 'em in the first place, and he's got a point!

I mean, it should be obvious to anyone that the absolute *worst* thing to do, in 90+°F weather and 90%+ humidity, is to stay inside, not move around too much, and keep well hydrated with lots of fluids -- anywhere but the South, you'd see yards full of families doing situps and jumping-jacks on such a day, but those lazy hicks south of the Mason-Dixon line are barely willing to shift off their porches for anything that's not a welfare check, so what do you expect? And *iced tea* for Christ's sake! You might as well cool off with a fifth of Everclear! Is there no limit to what these ignorant rednecks will do to harm themselves?

Look, we've had these problems before. Look at poverty. Look at racism. Look at child abuse. None of these problems even still *exist* in the United States outside of the South. And now it looks like kidney stones are going on the list of things that science, and good progressive liberalism, have wiped out everywhere except among those stupid gap-toothed grinning hicks. How many times are we going to have to do this before we finally see the error of the ways? How many times before it finally becomes clear to us that these people will not be helped? How many times before we finally stop saddling our economy with the Northern Hemisphere's most useless pity cases, secede from the South, and let them sink into the mire they deserve while we go on to lead the world into the third millennium?

I ask you!

Trekkies to flip lids over Star Trek bottle opener

Saving the trouble for the Trekkies who actually take themselves seriously

First -- that doesn't even look like the Enterprise! You'll note that the profile is all wrong -- the warp coil nacelles should be above the engineering hull, not below. The profile of the saucer section is wrong, too; it should be much thinner in cross-section, and the REAL Enterprise doesn't have a damn great hole all through the saucer. In addition, the font used for the registry information is *completely* wrong -- the Enterprise's markings were deliberately done in a typeface very similar to that used for marking aircraft carriers and other modern military vehicles, and this so-called "replica" has been made using the same spindly, ugly font they were using on a lot of Paramount Star Trek tie-ins in the 80s and early to mid-90s -- they're not using it any more, of course, and good riddance, so it's a great disappointment to see it revived here. All in all, I wouldn't use this thing to open a bottle of *urine*.

And another thing: Mr. Sherwood, you should by now have no remaining excuse for failing to be aware that the United Federation of Planets, which *obviously* in no way could be called a "socialist" or "communist" government, does not make use of crude reified value signifiers in its transactions. Gold-pressed latinum is necessary at the fringes of Federation space, in order to carry on commerce with other, less enlightened regional powers which insist on retaining their outmoded forms of currency; within the Federation itself, though, the rule is not "you can have whatever you can afford", but rather "from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs."

I can only assume that your refusal to acknowledge this obvious fact, as demonstrated by your cavalier and shockingly canon-ignorant comment about "Federation Credits", stems from your inability to accept that the Federation government, as depicted in Star Trek: The Next Generation and Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, is the one true and utterly perfect form of human government, which cannot be improved upon, and whose implementation will end all human poverty, war, hatred, misery, and suffering, and bring about a new golden age the likes of which haven't been seen since the Renaissance.

Mine's the one with the Paramount official Next Generation replica communicator, in real pretend gold and silver, the Lieutenant Commander's rank pips (two full, one hollow) pinned to the lapel -- and the triple-thick asbestos inner lining.

Dell offers 'Windows Vista Bonus' to frightened customers

Damning with faint praise!

"with a certain degree of sincerity, I can say that Vista makes Win ME look good"

With a certain degree of sincerity, I can say that Ebola makes testicular cancer look good. That doesn't mean I want to *have* either of them.

Re: But how to get them?

Well, the way Dell apparently does it now is that you buy a "Vista" box, and what you get is a box with XP preinstalled and a locked-to-the-service-tag DVD of Vista Business in the carton. It seems likely they'd just do it the other way, so that you get your Vista box with Vista on it and an XP CD alongside.

Seems to make sense, anyway, and Dell appears to be on this new "doing things that make sense" kick, which I have to admit is something of a pleasant change from the days of selling refurbished hard disks as new. I wonder whether it'll last.

Taxing times for Hungary's porn inspectors

Um...

...why is the one woman's navel blacked out? Surely that's not on anyone's proscribed list.

Uncontacted rainforest tribe caught from the air

Re: I think it's offensive

Tell that to an Australian aborigine. Or an American aborigine, for that matter.

Gov. war gamers hack servers to stay ahead

Ah HA!

I've finally cracked it! John Leyden is actually a sophisticated version of MegaHAL, and the last few paragraphs of this article are the final, incontrovertible proof!

Mozilla hits back at Firefox 3 quality slur

Back atcha, Andrew

User Javascript might be natively supported in Opera, but I've yet to see a decent ad-blocking plugin for it, and I haven't the time or the interest to write my own. (On the other hand, it's been > 1 year since I investigated Opera. Maybe it's gotten much more worthwhile in that span of time.)

Some (anonymous) clever dick babbled about a way of reducing Firefox's memory usage. I hadn't seen it before, but I did find something very interesting at http://www.lifespy.com/2007/firefox-quick-tip-limit-ram-usage/: apparently, setting the about:config key "browser.cache.memory.limit" to an integer will limit Firefox's memory usage to the value you set. I've set it to 12800, which as I understand it from the blog post will limit Firefox to 128M, or one-eighth of my total RAM, or about one-third of what Firefox likes to allocate itself.

So far, I haven't had Firefox running long enough to tell whether it's working. Should be interesting to see; at any rate, I hope somebody finds it handy.

Re: Javascript and Memory leaks?

I also keep Firefox 2.0.0.x open with multiple tabs for multiple days -- and I'd keep it open longer, if it weren't for the combination of steadily, if slowly, increasing memory allocation (even with the cache disabled entirely, as is the case with the FF install that racked up that 2.35G high score) and steadily decreasing responsiveness. I surely can't be the only person who finds himself, after a couple of days with Firefox un-restarted, waiting up to thirty seconds for a "New Window" menu command to actually create a window.

As for the Javascript crashes, I haven't been able to do much debugging of this, because it mostly happens on my work machine, which it's been more than a month since I've had time to fix anything on that because I've been way too busy fixing things *with* it. (Which of course begs the question of what I'm doing on the Reg's comment section at 9:30 Monday morning, instead of hard at it, but what can I say? The caffeine hasn't kicked in yet.)

And now, of course, that I've said something, I find that I can't even reproduce the Firefox bug which has been among the banes of my existence for the last month. Frightening: it's not just contrary, it's *smart*.

I agree that FIrefox is by far the best thing currently available, which is why I use it in spite of the way it often frustrates me to the point where I want to squirt blood from my tear ducts; I just think that any devteam emphasis at all, or even any devteam *interest* at all, in new features for Firefox 3 is completely and utterly misguided, when they could be spending all that time and effort on making the browser work right in the first place, and when that'd make the users so much happier than the Firefox 3 we'll be getting.

"Best by far of a bad lot" doesn't automatically equal "good", and, just like the US political system, it'd be really, really nice if there were a viable third option which could serve any higher purpose than splitting "principle" votes away from the "tactical" votes for the lesser evil, so the greater evil wins and we all get it that much harder in the end. (Yes, I *do* mean the ass end. Get your mind into the gutter. And, yes, I'm equating Opera with Nader. I hope that's as funny as it is stupid.)

The only thing I care about in Firefox 3

...would be -- well, two things, actually.

I'd care if they fixed whatever stupid bugs have lately been making their browser crash on random simple Javascript (don't believe me? Install the 2.0.0.9 update, but only if you don't need to get anything done on the web), but I know better than to think they'll bother.

What'd REALLY get my attention would be fixes to even just a few of the memory leaks we've been putting up with since back when we were calling this thing Phoenix. You know, so that if I recklessly and with malice aforethought do a stupidly careless thing like leaving a browser open overnight on my work machine, I don't have to come into work to find that Firefox has eaten up all of my physical memory *and* all of my page file, for a total of 2.35G memory allocated -- a high score, necessitating of course a restart of the whole system -- and just because I incautiously left open an MRTG window which refreshes itself every five minutes. But I know better than to think, &c.

No, they'd rather keep on fighting the browser wars, adding in a whole slew of buggy new features -- well, not counting the ones which were there already but have now had a name change and been made harder to use -- probably slopping in a half-dozen new random crash bugs and two megabytes per minute of new memory leaks, because they're too stupid to realize the browser wars are over, and also they're plenty cynical enough to realize that, for all that Firefox frankly sucks, there's really nothing very much better out there unless you're willing to go with a browser nobody uses (and, by extension, a browser which doesn't run any of the nifty Javascript stuff you like).

In short, while Phoenix and Firebird were the plucky, lovable underdogs, Firefox has become the US Democratic Party of browsers: "Yeah, we suck and we know it. We don't care, though. And, really, what are you gonna do? Are you gonna go over to the dark side and use IE? Are you gonna go Green Party and use Opera? Yeah, I didn't think so. You know we're the only ones who'll give you any pie, so shut up and eat your pie and stop whining at us about all the fingernails in it."

Oxygen pollution began earlier than we ever thought

@David

Are you too stupid to recognize the difference between theories for which there is reproducible support both empirical and experimental, and 'theories' for which the only support is you and other idiots really, really, *really* wanting them to be accurate?

@David Ralston

"Our obvservational window on these theories is way to short to extrapolate that information back gazillions of years."

That's 'observational', David. I know you have trouble with the long words, though, so don't sweat it this time. I shall have to take marks off if you do it again, though.

And it's awfully funny how the 'obvservational' window is 'way to short' to extrapolate when someone is trying to do so in support of a claim opposed to yours, while when it's in *support* of what you're saying you apparently have no difficulty in finding the creationist viewpoint more plausible.

I'm not even going to try to sort you out, because I know good and well you are not at home to it. I shall simply call you a babbling fool and move on.