Posts by Ant Evans

Top spook: ISP black boxes NOT key to UK's web-snoop plan

Non-event

This is no more feasible than it was three years ago. Who's been pocketing the consulting fees all this time?

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/04/27/imp_consultation/

Natwest, RBS: When will bank glitch be fixed? Probably not today

Cloud

Maybe RBS should move their back office to the Cloud..?

Miniature woolly mammoths once roamed Crete

Shetland mammoths

Did they pay any tax?

WTF is... scale-in?

Lock-in

It's like lock-in, but you feel cleverer.

'Intelligent systems' poised to outsell PCs, smartphones

What's wrong with this picture

Predicting an x86 revolution in embedded systems may be funny, but that don't make it right.

Windows 8: Thrown into a multi-tasking mosh pit

Gnome Unity

Actually, now that I've tried Metro, Unity doesn't look so bad.

IDC Storage Tracker: NetApp is losing market share

OEM?

IDC says it does not include OEM sales, by which it presumably means it does not try to unravel them.

Warning: competitors with significant OEM businesses will appear smaller in your rear view mirror than they really are.

Whistleblower: Decade-long Nortel hack 'traced to China'

Question

Why would anyone spy on *Canadians*?

Windows Phone to overtake iOS in 2015

Numiricy & punditry

The minimum *uncompounded* margin of error of this prediction exceeds the projected difference by an order of magnitude. However even I can see that 'Windows phone may or may not overtake iOS in a few years' doesn't make such a good headline.

Now if someone were ever to put these pundits and their pundit-wallahs to the test, that would make for interesting numbers. We need the IT equivalent of politifact.com. Come on, let's burn some bridges.

Jonathan Ive is knighted in New Year Honours list

Go on, son

You can take your iPod out of Essex, but you can't take the Essex out of your iPod.

Word and Excel creator: How Gates, Jobs and HAL shaped Office

Office

2002 was a good time to leave. By then Office had achieved dominance by being easy for beginners to use, largely reliable, and free of annoying tics.

That it is still not consistent (e.g. Ctrl-; or Ctrl-' do nothing outside Excel) is pretty damned annoying. But it never evolved beyond this base predictability. It really has had no new feature since 1997.

The poverty of Microsoft's ambition is the most staggering thing about Office today. Office is dumb. It understands exactly nothing about what I am doing. If it were an employee it would be fired immediately. But why put lipstick on a cash cow? No wonder Simonyi chose to spend more time with his money.

If anyone knows any productivity software that raises productivity, I'd love to hear about it.

Global warming much less serious than thought - new science

Fucked

It's not all probabilities, because the climate is a sample of one.

We get to run the models as often as we like. History runs once.

That's why the precautionary principle is the right way to deal with climate, and most of ecology.

To paraphrase: Don't fuck with fucking up what you can't unfuck.

As iPhone 4S battery suckage spreads, fixes appear

Fix available from Nokia...

who make a grown-up smartphone. My battery lasts a week.

Hmm, that may be because I have no friends. You can't have everything.

Ten reasons why you shouldn't buy an iPhone 5

Smug

I feel almost as smug for not having bought an iPhone as the people who have. Everyone's a winner!

Apple is the Mercedes of computing - a car for people who don't really like driving.

Quattrone blasts Ellison, says Autonomy is right

Tired & emotional

On reading your admirable article at http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/09/29/autonomy_oracle/ I was saddened to see Oracle's senior officers momentarily abandon their usual mature, principled attitude to their worthy competitors and peers. I remain convinced that this unfortunate lapse will be followed by the swift, sincere apology worthy of a technology and business leader.

Truly, Oracle is an example to all of us.

Microsoft: No Windows 8 ARM support for x86 apps

Track record question

What is Microsoft's track record on non x86 'Windows' platforms? Is it NT on Alpha & PPC, Windows CE, and Windows Mobile?

Some may call this a port; to those once bitten, it looks more like recidivism.

Hands on with Acer's Aspire S3 Ultrabook

Incredible

That even after public hangings, keyboard designers persist with Fn combinations for Home/End. Do keyboard designers have a super power that exempts them from Darwinian selection?

AMD gooses low-power Fusion chips

AMD E series - what the atom should have been

Finally you can buy a cheap second or third machine that runs cool and has a big screen. The AMD E is not quick by modern standards, but unlike the Atom, it is not a complete dog. And unlike Atom it comes with no mafia-imposed form factor restrictions.

Rebekah Brooks quits - Murdoch accepts this time

Pwned

You do not get to buy your soul back from the Man.

Nokia E6 smartphone

Deja vu all over again

Good to see Nokia trying to develop a natural successor to the E71: a smartphone designed as if battery life mattered.

Bad to see that Nokia still can't design smartphones as if software mattered.

Since I am not interested in an MS phone, I guess my E71 will have to live forever.

(My 6310 tried, but, through no fault of its own, it ended up at the bottom of the river Wey. To avoid a recurrence of this unfortunate outcome, I moved to Germany. So far, so good.)

App Store not invited to web's date with destiny

Functionality venn

Apps and web pages can do different things. There is no way to get a web page to show local asbo rates, or react to you shaking your phone, or recognize the user, or stroke the onscreen fish, or whatever the West Coast Beautiful People are doing this week, because a browser has no hook into the GPS subsystem, or the accelerometer, or the camera, or the touch screen.

The coolest mobile apps are, in other words, security compromises that tend toward the extremelyfunbutspectacularlydangerous end of the scale. A lot of smack users consider hepatitis a worthwhile price for the high, and app users apparently have the same attitude to online privacy. That gives app stores a lot of traction.

Please, no 'killer' app jokes here. And you may counter that stroking onscreen fish is safe, but that don't make it right.

There is room on this scale for safebutboring, and it is nicely addressed by the web browser.

Indian courts 'rule astrology is a science'

That sounds about right since

Indian justice is largely hypothetical.

Storage array vendors vs. the cloud

Where is your storage value, Mr. storage array supplier?

It is at the storage customer - the cloud service provider.

iPhone 4 burns, hurts owner

A miracle!

And it was said in those times that there would come a prophet, and that the people should not know him, but that his Jesus phone burn with a holy light.

A multitasking iPad? Let's bin the netbook

heart breaker

The deal breaker is I want to manage the computer, not be managed by the computer.

The same goes for the IS department. Although the iPad should do okay in media, where the service acceptance criteria have more to do with the subtle interplay of shininess and exec ego.

,Can we have a 'dig' icon?

Computer boffin on NHS Spine: Get out while you can

Information orthopaedics

I don't want evil doctors knowing private stuff about me. I'd rather they just took a punt on the basis of a 6 minute consultation. If they really want the info, make them work for it, and then send them a random pile of old photocopies. Ha ha ha!

India eyes man in space by 2016

What's space offshoring called?

Maybe the UK could outsource its space programme to ISRO? Win-win.

Brits left cold by mobile internet

Paper serviettes

Mobile internet access is like the plasticky serviettes you get at fast food places - better than a mayonnaise beard.

Those moaning about prices are behind the curve. Like paper serviettes, internet access is effectively 'free' on 3 payg for one. European roaming rates have been capped and are now almost reasonable.

If your browser is crashing, that may be because your browser is no good. If your battery dies every day, you may find you have chosen your phone on fashion principles - an easy mistake to make. Have a look at a Nokia E7x.

The backhaul IP networks are still awful and 3G can't really cope with buildings, distance, rain, metal, or meat, but if you need to know urgently when the last train is, or where the Austro-Hungarian empire was, with a little bit of faffing, you can make it so.

UK.gov to spend £2bn on ISP tracking

I'm in favour

I've read the consultation document and I'm in favour of this scheme. It is obvious to anyone involved projects, private or public, that it will fail at every level - and there are a lot of levels for it to fail at:

Technical. Packet snooping is easily defeated, storage will be insufficient, snooping algorithms and or signatures will need to be updated remotely and securely with random Skype / MSN / Twitter versions, data has to be returned to HQ securely, appliances will be susceptible to hacks, and queries will take days to run and return millions, possibly trillions, of false positives.

Financial: running costs are impossible to predict. Is this included in the £2bn? What's the annual cost and why wouldn't it rise proportionately with app versions, traffic volumes, flash-in-the-pan ISPs, new P2P protocols, and new social networking fads?

Organisational. ISPs run lean and couldn't organise a party in a LAN room. There is no test as to whether they are routing all packets to the snooping appliance. So at 8pm on Sunday when their networks choke, they'll just route around it and cite unavoidable and unprecedented operational issues - if anyone even asks.

So in the unlikely event that this ever gets beyond a pilot, it WILL grind to a halt and be ignored by everyone.

The one advantage, which is why I'm in favour, is that it represents a subsidy for ISPs to fix their underpowered networks. So we're all likely to get slightly less bad availability and performance as a result.

Nokia slides latest Linux tablet onto market

It's the channel, stupid

Nokia could put a SIM in it, but as soon as they do that, uppity GSM service providers control the sales channel. Nokia is hedging its exposure to GSM, albeit in a very small way.