Posts by Daniel 126 publicly visible posts • joined 5 Mar 2007
Virtual Mare, mate!
Takes a perfectly simple, and straight forward situation, turns it into a right mare, then puts it in a cloud, where you'll never track it down!
Personally, I prefer Cory Doctorow's 'Virtual Uniorn' solution, myself: much more likely to see the light of day, than all this 'cloud' nonsense!
Yes, you can point to 5000 workers made redundant, in the recent layoffs, but you can bet your bottom dollar that Balmer and co will continue to allow the headcount at Redmond to bloat and bloat, in years to come - simply because that's the only way they know, how to run their business. Microsoft employees already spend much of their lives looking at the backend of a babyshit brown Chevy, while waiting to get into cramped, shared offices, to look at circular dependancies, all day. The problem, for Redmond as a town, is that they don't simply hold each other up, with their numbers, while they do this. The whole of that dreary, rainy settlement grinds to a halt, while Microsoft heads to work. Freeing up at least some of the excess traffic that this employee bloat has caused would benefit the wider community.
"I wont even bother with safari lol"
You should: it gets 100/100 on Acid 3 and has since the last major patch.
Acid 3 is a pretty tough test, however. Acid 2 is more than sufficient for rendering traditional web pages (which is what it tests for). Acid 3 is designed with highly dynamic content in mind, and tests howa browser responds to lots of scripted and AJAX-like events. Many quite basic asumptions about how a browser behaves will need to be reevaluated to cope with that sort of content. Passing the test is only a first step.
All of the ACID tests are based on adherence to a well-established set of design principlas, however, so please, don't question its bias. WaSP assembled these test to assess compliance with a very well documnented set of engineering specs; not some political agenda. In software, as in metal: good engineering is not a matter of personal opinion.
Or maybe not.
Looks a classy district, actually.
The girl on the other side of the street smoking a fag and texting her mate is doubtless writing something along the lines of "LOLZ THERES THIS AWESUM CAR JUST CUM DOUN THA STREET MAN. ITS GOT LIKE DIS TOWAH TING STUK ONTOP"
I can also spot four separate CCTV cameras on the nearby walls in this iittle tableau, but no doubt the tin-foilers will still call this an example of Google's invasion of this young lad's right to privatly vomit on the Queens Highway.
We're looking back at the wild freaky things that went on during the Universe's misspent youth, but surely, the implication is that these shenanigans went on around these parts, too. So, local space should be littered with the debris, from all this high living. Where are the super-massive black holes, in our own vicinity?
Even if they were lurking in super stealthy mode, out in intergalatic space, going "you can't see me, because I'm not logically part of your universe, anymore... and anyway, I've run out of stuff to eat", wouldn't we still be able to detect their gravity?
I'm pretty sure, my inability to grasp quite why this is a layman's question, is one of the reasons why I am a layman.
IBM regularly tops the world's companies in number of patents filed, per year. That's what makes it so hard to genuinely compete against them: you drive money into IBM, even when you sell against them, because you have to use IBM-patented technolgies in order to produce competetive products.
I suspect the one asset, in Sun's portfolio, that IBM really covets, is ZFS. Because ZFS is open sourced, IBM could never 'own' it, but by pushing ZFS as a defacto standard on their own hardware range, IBM could radiaclly alter the storage market (for the better, in many ways, it must be said).
Indeed, I think ZFS, alone, could explain a lot of IBM's interest in Sun: it's a very IBM-like invention, and one which they would be very keen to extend, since Sun hasn't capitalised on it. Surely, the fact that the current build of Mas OS server (a niche market so small, that it feels cramped, even with only one occupant), is about the most advanced non-Sun example of a fully supported read/write ZFS, is evidence enough of the way that Sun's management haven't properly utilised the tools their own resarchers have given them?
Oh yes, it suggests great raging barriers of incandesant plasma: impervious ramparts that will incinerate any 'hacker' with the temerity to approach them.
IT managers(who usually know little about these things) like to be able to say they have 'strong firewalls' in place - perhaps imagining that this gives them the ability to send blazing pulses of righteous energy, up the wires, to fry the routers of miscreants trying to enter their systems.
They can even be persuaded to part with substantial quantities of money, for a 'firewall' if you give it an exciting sounding name and fill, said manager's heads, with visions of teenagers in Virtual Reality headsets and waldo gloves 'hacking into' their systems.
They'd get much less exited if you went up to them asking for a huge cheque, for a flat text file, containing a list of incoming and outgoing port-numbers, running on some crappy FreeBSD box, built from five year old components.
My dad used to fly these things, carrying Red Snow bombs. He says they were about as exciting, to fly, as driving a bus, only more cramped and with poorer visibility (which is a bit of an indictment for a machine designed to assist in the mass extermination of mankind, really). They were cold, uncomfortable, noisy and the air conditioning used to fill the cabin with a fog, so thick, that the navigators often resorted to chalk and slate, because their papers were all sopping wet. Air frame failures, at the time, meant that it was hard enough to keep the things flying when they were operational. They were actually designed to fly at an altitude where they were beyond visible range, and while they may look nice and impressive buzzing around airshows, the sustained use of these aircraft, at such low altitudes, cause acute stresses.
The V-bombers are a family of aircraft that are most famous for never actually ever being called upon to do the job they were designed for. Is an aircraft 'historic' simply because it didn't actually bring about the End of History? Let the thing sit on the ground and be decorative, alongside the Starfighters, and all the other pretty jets, from that era, that look like they should be a really good idea.
It more likely points to short comings in 5% of conventional IT departments. Short comings that shoving yet another chunk of junk into the network - to lie neglected and unpatched, for years to come, no doubt - will not address.
I grow tired to companies whose sales pitch consists of 'buy our one-stop solution, and you can continue to employ lazy, talentless liars.' There are good people, in IT, who are losing their jobs rght now, because of lazy talentless liars. It's hard work, being any good at this crap. That's why the wages are quite good.
You close a tab, in Opera, these days, and then go to Edit > Undo (or ctrl-z / command-z, if you're a shortcut freak), and it reopens the tab you just closed... on the page it was on previousl..., with it's entire brower history intact... even if you happen to be navigating halfway through that browser history.
In fact, you can shut the browser down and reopen it (hell, you can shut the entire -computer- down, and restart it) and it -still- works.
Very cool feature, for sure - how many times have any of us closed the wrong tab down accidentally? - but I wonder at the security implications... All this data is presumably written, somewhere. Let's hope it's written somewhere Fort-Knox-secure.
How long before the other browsers get this feature - and what bets they'll be able to reimplement it, without ballsing-up the security?
One of the problems with the rebranding of everything '.NET' is that '.NET' is actually a pretty piss-poor brand. .NET was launced at around the time when Sun Microsystems were busy trying to get everyone to forget that they'd every claimed to be the 'dot in .com', and '.NET' just came across as a bit of me-too marketing (of what was actually a rather cool set of ideas) under a rather crappy umbrella title - one which employed a punctuation mark as it's first character.
The fact that everyone involved in cmmentating on it, at the time, received a ten page document from Microsoft marketing, outlining exactly when (and under what circustances) there should be a space in front of the dot in '.NET' (when it's a 'product' as opposed to a 'technology', if I recall correctly, whatever that means) also detered people from taking it all too seriously, too. When it's more important to know how to write something's name, than to know what to do with it, most technologists tend to be wary of it.
Some of this wariness was justified, too. Many mediocre managers, from failing departments in Redmond, jockeyed to get their marginal (and often failing,) products rebranded as a '.NET'product - dluting what could have been a strong set of offerings with 'lots of "Wireless Server .NET" duds. This has been the continuing trend with all of Microsoft's 'Live' branding efforts. Live has been regarded as a rather-less-sinking ship, in a whole floatilla of leaky tubs, around the edges of Microsoft's core businss... and every rat with a half-baked product, who is seeking to justify his or her budget for the next six months has tended to leap aboard it.
What they should really do, is announce some dorky new product range, let the fail-specialists jump aboard, and then cut the boat loose and watch it sink, taking a good quarter of the deadwood in the company, with it. That'll never happen, however, because fartoo many of those specialists are among the Senior Partners, who are lining hemselves up for this years Executive Officer Incentives Plan bonanza.
EOIP is the technology - damn - I mean product - No, I mean... 'pig trough' formerly branded as 'SPSA' (it's a new, improved SPSA, that is precompiled in advance, so that the rest of the employees cannot look at the details and work out how it works, however).
"Instruction at x09ae45f70 attempted to address memory at x7ef32a996 and will be terminated. OK"
They can dress windows 7 up in all sorts of goppy plastic graphics, but underneath it all, it's still the same drab old world, where users press grey paving slabs with "OK" written on them... even when it's really NOT okay. You can argue all you want about it being beta software, but users (even, or, perhaps especially, beta users) should never have to look at error messages that amount to little more than debug output containing hexadecimal numbers.
The thing is, we all know that this software will eventually go to market in state where it is still outputing stack dumps, at its users... and users will still be asked to send the raw output back to some bit-bucket at redmond... and the bit bucket will daily fill up, and there will never be enough engineers to look at them all, and work out what the hell went wrong. And the problem will remain what the problem always was: the error message tells you exactly what just happened, while conveying no useful informatioon whatsoever. They might as well say things like "Fandango on stack" or "Warning: mallocs. Rlwrwlrlwrlwrlw!".
Oh, it's not called a 'Shared Performance Stock Award' anymore, is it? It's an 'Executive Officer Incentive Plan'. This is important, because - like investment bankers - Executives at Microsoft need incentives, lest they suddenly decide to go off and do something less destructive with their time. Anyway, renaming something, every few years, is just like inventing something completely new, isn't it?
I'm sure those redundant staff will be more than gratified to know that Brummel, herself, will probably be among the selected 900 top executives who are rumoured to be getting a share in a collective $1.2 billion dollars feeding-frenzy, this year, as a reflection of their continued outstanding performance on Vista, Live Search, and (in the case of Brummel's department) severance pay.
They will also be glad to know that the maximum bonus, payable to any one of those 900 people, will be a meagre $20,000,000... and that the over-payment, that they recieved, while feelling the door slap them on the ass, on their way out, last month, can probably be funded out of an unforseen administrative blunder, which led to a surplus in the After-Party drinks budget.
"Sorry, Bob, you've got to go. I looked at the figures, and it was either you, or the new Camaro... and, well, you know how the American car industry is struggling, these days?"
The 'Internet Explorer 8' home page has 170 validtaion errors and 97 warnings on it:
http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.microsoft.com%2Fwindows%2FInternet-explorer%2Fbeta%2Fdefault.aspx&charset=%28detect+automatically%29&doctype=Inline&group=0
The 'download Internet Explorer 8' page has 164 validation errors and 83 warnings:
http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.microsoft.com%2Fwindows%2Finternet-explorer%2Fbeta%2Fworldwide-sites.aspx&charset=%28detect+automatically%29&doctype=Inline&group=0
...and so on, and so on. You can put every page on the dowload process through the validator. Not one of them has less than 150 markup errors.
...Being placed into a security-marked container and sent off on a dispatch rider in the direction of Hutchinson Communcitaions, with instructions that i-Mate, Nettcom and Fujitsu would like to look at it, next, and that negotiations with Apple are at 'an advanced stage'?
Oh, colour me cynical.
This seems to be the last line of defence. "People are to lazy, too stupid, too scared. They'll wonder where the 'Blue E' has gone because (hearty, commisioned-ranks-only chuckle, here) they're all IDIOTS - hohoho".
If the argument really has got to the stage where these authors are saying that users deserve Windows because they're too tallentless to be worth anything better, then where does this picture sit, in a labour market where anyone with any iota of tallent is fighting, tooth and nail, to hang onto their jobs and demonstrate that they're still worth a salary?
In a market where dozens of Windows sys admins are being pitched out of their Halo 3 - I mean SERVER - rooms, and into the dole queues... how many of those guys are going to lazily and stupidly hunt around for another company daft enough to pay them to sit in a cupboard all day playing computer games, while wondering whether they should get around to rolling out that patch, that Microsoft issued last autumn? Perhaps a few of them will realise that playing computer games all day, and acting passive-agressive towards 'stupid users' with network problems, might have been a contributory factor in why they're suddenly living on 50 quid a week?
Or is Dzuiba simply saying that HE's too stupid, and we're all very mean for using a technology he doesn't understand? Is there a sense of panic, in his writiing - while we wonders what he'll do, when there's no one left, to pay him to write patronising articles about how users are idiots and deserve the crap that IT foists upon them?
Have been for a year, now. It's no big deal. Just something more for people to have to look out for, and shoot. You can buy the meat in game dealers, and yes it's okay - although there's not a lot on them. pheasant is much better value for money.
Same as they do on the 'Bullfrog' laptops that they currently use in the field. Bullfrogs are made by DG-Tadpole, and tradtionally used Sparc Ultra chipsets. This order could signal a move away from Sparc, towards cheaper intel units, but all that fire-control software, and so on, runs on Solaris. (And, yes, that's 64-bit Solaris, Tom.) Since the Bullfrog carries something like half a dozen batteries in the base of a standard unit, I would expect that this will be one of the firstt upgrades this company will have to add to their unit for Navy use. Yes, they're heavy, but suck it down, soldier: Marines usually carry 130-150lbs of gear in the field.
Lenovo may argue that their semi-functional piece of plastic crap is a 'twin-screen laptop' - as may HP, their even more dismal 'Firefly' offering - but if gScreen are saying "the first dual-screen laptop with identical displays", I think the keyword is 'identical'. The 'second screen' on the Lenovo and the HP are actually part-remaindered appologies from the bottom shelves, bolted on the side of a more modern, standard display. Saying that, the civilian version of the gScreen looks almost as rubbish as the Lenovo.
The whole argument for open source software rests on the assumption that flaws will exist, scrutiny will find them, and shared, mutual need will lead to a solution being found, propmtly. The greater the list of patches, a piece of software has, is usually a reflection of it's importance, to people, and how well its integrity is overseen and maintained, not a sign of any particular weakness.
Software, like buildings needs mainrtaining. For eaxmple, I dare say the heating bill for Scarborough Castle is rather lower than the one for Windsor Castle, but that doesn't mean I'd rather stay overnight in scarborough Castle.
There's no need for Microsoft dweebs to get all touchy about this and start pre-emptively pointing <insert random open source product, here>.: the only folks to pipe up and carp about this sort of thing as if it were a sign of weakness on Microsoft's part, are the ones who ride on the coattails of technology, while contributing little to the effort.
ECMAscript was developed by Netscape and gained the name after it was submitted to, and retified by, the European Computer Manufacturers Association. However, at the height of the browser wars, some corpoate wonk at Netscape decided to deliberately confuse matters by rebranding it 'Javascript', in an attempt to suggest a completely bogus association with the, then, much more fashionable, Java language. It would be quite good if we could all go back to calling it 'Livescript' (it's original name) since that was actually a pretty good description of wwhat most people use it for.
Yes, that's Håkon Lie, the guy who works for Tim Berners Lee. The man who proposed the Cascading Stylesheets standard. Clearly an idiot, compared to your startling genius, Mr Coward.
Now go back to your Active Directory modal dialogue and try to get your user's exchange server running properly, instead of shirking off and reading articles you're too stupid to understand.... you drooling, slack-jawed, beetle-browed, servile, little Windows system administrator! No one will sack you, if your boss happens to look at some non-Microoft software, because you're already the IT-equivalent of a burger-flipper!
You'd get websites saying things like:
"This website is best viewed in Microsoft Broken Grey Rectangle, version 4.0 or above"
(it never was too clear what this state of being 'above' was meant to actually *be* 'above'... but that's what they used to say)
Now we have Microsoft's Broken grey Rectangle telling us:
"This Broken Grey Rectangle is best used for viewing the following websites."
Next we'll be seeing Gartner reports about browser useage being refuted by Microsoft, who wish to highlight their own, contradictory, report, listing statistics from a list of their own, specially selected, websites!
Comcast is one of the best-placed cable operators in the US. It's stock hasn't 'tumbled': it HAS fallen by 15 percent, but that's far less than most of it's competitors.
Microsoft sold these shares simply to cover their own losses - notably in online, Xbox and entertainment - and also in order to raise funds for the failed bid for Yahoo! Microsoft sacrificed a very valuable asset, and this decision (made at the height of the financial folly of last year) is simply another reflection of the inept management currently residing in redmond. 9 billion, they have, now - partly based on market value, which can change, of course. Remember when they had 45 billion? Around about 30-40 billion has bled out of that company, over just the last few years: now THAT's a story.
The decision is entirely commerccially driven, but the more that it starts to make commercial sense to simply design to open standards and, then make it beholden upon the device and software makers build towards those standards, the better.
What we can say, is that - since iPhone users represent a demographic, about whom, we could all probably make some fairly broad (but reasonably accurate) assumptions - it is more likely the fact that Google cannot accurately target those users, rather than the fact that they aren't worth targeting, that drives this decision.
What are you doing, that's so productive, while all these Linux types get your blood boiling?
You seem to have enough hours in your day, to not only post here once, but to repeatedly come back - like a dog to his sick - to see what replies you've had. Truth is, your type always comes acorss like Travis Bickle ranting at himself in the mirror. If you'd only realise that that shadow you were pouring your bile at was actually your own reflection, you might lead a happier and more fulfilled life.
If the viruses aren't forwarding all the email to overseas, hostile forces, it is simply because the virus writers, in this case, simply did not have the foresight to make it do so, and were not working for those overseas forces. I certainly see nothing about the configurability of the Conficker worm to stop it being modified to do so, even if a bit of port-forwarding was needed, to get around whatever meagre firewalls these MoD site do have running..
Also, if the Chinese military really DOESN'T employ teams of black hats to penetration-test MoD systems, they'd be mad not to start doing so. You don't have to be looking for UFOs, to find vested interest in subverting the computer systems of an overseas military - even one you're not overtly hostile to! The notion that any such intrusions would be detected - at least at first-point-of-attack - appears to be rufuted by this evidence.
Most of them are decent, well meaning people, pressed down upon and confined by layers and layers of insensitive burocracy and a legacy of badly-written, poorly maintained code, based on assumptions long since proven to be wrong. The spend their entire lives wrestling with stupid circular dependencies, or writing yet another document-spec, justifying the effort. Your Vista is a dog because these people find themselves overruled by stupid, lazy managers: not because of any lack of effort on their part.
None of them were especially rich, because the money does not thrickle down much beyond senior partner level.
On the basis of this, I will definitely say that AC, above there - caliming to be some fabulously rich Microsoft employee - is either a senior partner, or (much more likely) some hopeless little SQL Server jockey, who thinks that his OWN payslip lies in making sure the boss never takes a look at using something he hasn't got a MCSE in. Either way, that qualifies him for the title of Clueless Leech. Both he, and IGnatius, there, are a poison in our industry, and the sooner we loose both of them, the sooner we can stop worrying abou good, decent, hard working people getting sacked instead.
The future of Microsoft with Ballmer at the helm is about as bleak as the prospect of the future of an Apple without Jobs. The thing is, it would (theoretically) be easy to bump Ballmer out of his position, than it would be to stop jJobs from keeling over... Except. Ballmer represents exactly the kind of myopic, middle-aged, money grubbing incompetence which marks people's perception of Microsoft and constitues much of it's current upper management. The company has been hijacked by a Junta of miserable, self-serving nobodies, who each prop one another up. The notion that it should be Bach - who is widely percieved, within Microsoft, of haemorrhaging money out of the company in untold billions - who should add some sparkle to this lacklustre affair speaks much: only the blatant thieves within the upper management are capable of showmanship.
Oh, and by the way, Gavin, it's 'ought', to imply 'should', not 'aught'. 'Aught' - while a fine and handsome word, that deserves a better airing than it currently enjoys - means 'anything'.
Why the hell didn't ESP* check this guy's references? I really do think that sometimes bullshitters gravitate towards one another, and the fact that a company can emply a secondrate fraudster without spotting him, as such, tells you as much about that employer, as much as it does about the employee. A quick Google search for his name reveals a criminal record for issuing bad cheques.
It really makes me think that Googling an potential IT supplier's own employee names is a good way of winnowing out second rate IT suppliers. If you can spot how crappy their employees are, when they can't, you're a long way towards avoiding being sold a polished turd - by yet another second rate IT supplier.
It really does look like the possibility of buying a PC with a decent operating system that isn't bundled with a tonne of rubbish you don't want seems to be fleeting away. I checked out the bankrupcy sales for some new base units, the other day, but it was just full of Vista machines.
Is it really? Let's think about that word 'Workstation', then, shall we?
A 'station' is something that is meant to be 'stationary': Stations are things you travel between, not things you carry with you. This is a machine that is trying to invent a new way of working around itself. It's like making a portable flat-bed lathe, for the machining industry, and saying that it would allow latheworkers to opperate out in the field. If the job cannot be done without something like this, then it's the job that is wrong, not the machine, that is right.
This thing represents an eighty-column mindset for the 21st century, and will end up burried nine-edge first - alonside all the other things that we'll look back on, in a few years time, and think 'Oh yeah. i remember a guy who had one of those. he was a dork. I wonder what became of him?'.
1. It's not a portable, because it almost certainly uses too much power for sustained battery use.
2. You cannot use it with both screens while on the train, flying, or duiring any other form of travel, because of the space it takes up.
3. You get stuck with two screens, both of whose specs will look really crap in under a year's time.
4. Could just buy one nice laptop, and two nice screens, instead, and just carry the laptop between the two screens, making do with just the built in screen, while genuinely on the go.
You do, however, get to own something that looks like it was built for the Chinese Military, to control artillery units with.
For instance, they could show us Clarkson being bludgeoned to death in his bed... in order to show us what it would look like if someone was to bludgeon Clarkson to death in his bed.
They could even show someone from the BBC coming around to my house to refund my license fee, in order to show what that would look like, too! I think we should be shown! After all, I don't want to think my good money is being spent to fund the coke-snorting lifestyles of a bunch of toffy-nosed gits with names like 'Jeremy', 'Tiff' and 'Quentin'.
On the whole, mars is (and always has been) an acidic wasteland that would have destroyed anything even approaching cellular. However, now NASA have discovered an area that might not have been so unspeakably hostile to complex molecules, for all eternity, after all... and where some of the most boring and unispiring life forms, that can even be considered 'alive', may have, briefly, evolved before being doused, desicated and then frozen out of existence.
Someone give them a gazillion dollars: we need to squander the rest of our own planet's resources, sending some people out there and dig up these dead, boring, dried up germs (it there ever were any, that is).
...but continuing existence of 'Magic Alex' does go a long way to explaining why the Beatles estate will always have something of a bee in their bonnet about anything where with the words 'Apple' and 'electronics' and 'innovation' are linked together in people's heads.
By the time they're done, they'll have realised they need to stick all their number-crunching processors and drives in one big box, and they'll have found out they need a special operating system to run the processing. They'll find they need special boxes to house the databases on, and special databases that use the file system to partition the data, with a special odatabase operating system to manage all that.
They'll work out that they need to put as much processing as possible into batch processes, to maximise processor useage. Then they'll start sending the jobs from datacentre to datacentre, around the globe, over a twenty four hour cycle, to make use of cheap, overnight electrricity.
And by the time they've finished, they'll have reinvented the mainframe and the AS400. These people are geniuses.
These people must have biceps like elephant's legs. The idea that the dsic scratching was in any way caused by people picking the unti up and tilting it around is nonsense.
There's a well documented flaw with these units, that is damaging game discs - and it sure as hell caused by you average lardy Xbox player, suddenly developing a strong urge for physical exercise!
One of the most pesimistic and depressing elements of the way that the attacks of 2001 were dealt with by the US government, was the scrambling of the Air Force with orders to shoot down any other airliners that might show signs of having been hijacked. On this assumption - that the only way of deflecting a rogue airliner would be to destroy that airliner - are the Air Force to have some means of circumventing these defensive features? After all, when you've declared war on 'being afraid', even your own people become legitimate targets.
What if an Air Force jet gets hijacked?
Surely there comes a point where putting in counter-counter-counter measures no longer make sense, and a better option might be to stop making enemies?
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