Posts by stizzleswick

Happy 20th birthday, Windows NT 3.1: Microsoft's server outrider

Multi-platform misunderstanding

"NT 4.0 ran on Alpha, PPC, MIPS and 64bit Alpha as well as x86. [...]."

The problem that I experienced with one company was that they actually were trying to unify their x86, PPC and Alpha machines under NT. Which did not work, because the various compiles of Windows would simply not run much software compiled for one of the other hardware platforms--I remember the simple un-zipping of a ZIP file created with FreeZIP on an x86 became an unsurmountable challenge on an Alpha--so we ultimately decided to split between Solaris for the servers and MacOS on the workstations at the time... with a few, rare x86/NT machines for the bookkeeping crew.

I guess the main problem was that most software distributors simply did not go along with the idea of supporting multiple hardware platforms and so, for the most part, only offered compiles for NT on x86 and/or MacOS on PPC, and if lucky, HP/UX on Alpha.

You MERCILESS FIEND... you put that audio file on AUTOPLAY

Autoplay audio is impolite

The thing is this: many a web surfer is listening to something else, be it music or the guy who just called about the problem with getting this intrusive noise from this website turned off. Autoplay video _without audio_ would be less than half as intrusive, but still be a never-return criterium for me.

I just don't understand why so many web designers think their page holds the complete and undivided attention of the viewer, or that the viewer has nothing better to do than listening to tasteless jingles or bungled talks.

You throw noise at me without asking, you get adblocked, it's that simple.

New moon discovered around Neptune brings total to 14

Re: Black coal

I thought this was about the 14th moon, not the 5th element?

Dell & Friends get the green light on take-private deal

The comparison with IBM...

is limping a little; even at its worst, IBM was still offering stuff that actually worked. My experience with Dell hardware for businesses is mixed, to put it very gently. Two companies I was working for swore never to buy anything by Dell again after having received pretty much what was ordered, but with several debilitating flaws, like the one server that was for some reason delivered with an optical drive that wouldn't work while the hard disk was on the same or the other IDE bus (OK, ancient history...), or the more recent server with space for 8 hard disks and dual RAID controllers, but for some reason equipped with only four power connectors for HDDs. And no, Dell could not deliver the required Y cables and told us that if we used 3rd party parts, all warranty was off.

Never had that sort of problem with IBM; they always found a way to solve such problems. Once, IBM service actually copied a PC I was having problems with component by component overnight to see whether they could replicate the trouble. They could. I had called them on a Saturday. Monday morning, I had a disc in the mail with the bugfix on it. And no, I was not at the time working for a big corporation. Imagine that happening with Dell? No bloody way.

Anyway, all that said, my point is that Dell have managed to pretty much burn themselves with a lot of potential customers. I doubt those will come back. IBM, 20 years ago, at least still had their old reputation for reliability and service. That's what saved their necks IMHO.

Nine-year-old Opportunity Mars rover sets NASA distance record

@The lone lurker

You are, of course, correct!

Now for Opportunity to...

...outlast Pioneer I and II, both of which are still active after over 35 years ... hey, one may always hope!

Ahoy! Google asks US gov't to help sink patent 'privateers'

Re: Is there another side?

I would like to apologise for the unusually large number of typos in my previous post. I hope it won't happen again; I guess my irritation with the entire subject at large got the better of me.

Again, my apologies.

Re: Is there another side?

The trolls are only half the problem, really. The other half are the various patent offices waving through patents despite very clear prior art, and allow patents for minor design points. Case in point was the awarding of a number of patants a few years ago by the USPO for networking technologies that had clear prior art back to the early 1970s. The company which gained the patents is a known patent troll.

And of course, Apple's filing for a pantent on, basically, a rounded corner should simply be laughed away. Rounded corners have been known since the stone age. Certainly not a new technology worth protecting under patent law.

Unfortunately, such cases seem to be the norm these days. Were the patent offices not trying to catch up with the sheer amount of ludicrous filings, I guess they could also afford to be more judicious in awarding patents. Which brings us full circle back to the companies complaining about the trolls: they themselves are flooding the patent offices with ludicrous filings...

Judge: Facebook must see Timelines Inc in court over trademark

Sorry, feel I need to add this...

I am aware of the differences between patent and trademark law. And I wish I had not been forced to learn that, really. Thing is, in the U.S.A, it seems one can trademark even the most basic terms (like "WIndows," for example...) and then sue the heck out of anybody manufacturing, say, windows.

It's not quite the same in most parts of Europe, but still, silliness happens even here, e.g. one company having been sued successfully for having used the standardised ink colour HKS 27 (basically, magenta) in their logo by German Telecom. Now... I would love to drown the judge who had that particular brain-freeze in a vat of that printer's ink (which is one of the four basic inks you get to see in your daily newspaper).

So... are they going to sue...

...the estate of the late Robert Anson Heinlein for his 1948 short story "Time Line," too? Oh, wait... that should be prior art, shouldn't it? Oops...

Since this is about Spacebook (or is it MyFace?), or whatever, what is the IT angle, anyway?!?

Patent shark‘s copyright claim could bite all Unix

I would like to join in...

...with the general feeling here that even for an April Fools' bit, this is rather weak...

Hand me back my wallet, I have already paid up...

Sony lifts skirt on Firefox OS with developer ROM for Xperia E

It's experimental, fergossakes...

Even three months ago, Mozilla said it's early alpha. Don't expect miracles from something that is in the very early stages of development.

But if you're a developer, maybe you should realise the market potential: the promise of FirefoxOS is that it won't call home (as Android and Windows Phone do without you being able to curtail that, and opposed to MacOS X, where you can actually limit the OS in its sharing your every move with its manufacturer, but only if you know what you're doing).

I guess the Ubunto phone OS is at a similar stage of development right now. Don't ignore them, is my view and advice. Give 'em a year or so to become ready. Then decide.

Satanic Renault takes hapless French bloke on 200km/h joyride

Re: So whats the guys problem?

The article did mention that the clutch pedal was inoperative.

FAA grounds Boeing's 787 after battery fires on plastic planes

The problem in this case...

...would be that the contents of the Li-Ion batteries used is rather aggressive and quite capable of doing serious damage both thermal and chemical without the presence of atmospheric oxygen. A vacuum might actually be counter-productive; some of the documented failures of Li-Ion batteries that had been transported aboard airplanes had at least in part been due to reduced pressure in the cargo compartment they were in.

I sort of wish Boeing luck with this, but from the viewpoint of a chemical engineer (diploma is framed and hanging above my toilet cistern, in case I run out of paper), I guess they'll have to bite the bullet and go for different battery technology (i.e., heavier batteries, reducing the gas mileage so to speak) less prone to spontaneous combustion.

What I am really wondering about...

is why Boeing are installing a technology that has been banned from being transported on airplanes by many airlines (with certain exceptions granted, like individual batteries installed in devices), and by several countries outright: Li-Ion batteries using LiCo. Several bans on transporting such devices had been in effect long before the 787 entered service.

Adobe offers free trip to PowerPC era

Re: What about...

Er... in my experience, the Windows version of the CS2 ran noticeably faster, on the same hardware, on Linux with WINE than on XP. So if speed is the issue, maybe that would be the path to choose if you don't want to upgrade the hardware.

Of course, if you are using older versions of WINE, then the inevitable crashes would also happen faster... guess it's a matter of balancing one against the other.

Anyway, the download page at Adobe's offers both the Mac and Windows versions.

This reminds me of...

...the time just after Adobe had taken over the leftovers of Aldus (selling off Freehand to Macromedia, and trying to push PageMaker), when Adobe gave the World + Dog the chance to register any pirated copy of the previous versions of their then-current portfolio for the equivalent of $50 (well, they did put up that offer in most of Europe, anyway). Got them a lot more registered customers, got most of those customers out of the "illegal" branch of software users. Certainly worked out well for a lot of businesses which at the time were largely functioning on pirated software. I should know; I was admin at one of those places at the time. And no, I did not advocate using illegitimate software.

My point being that a huge amount of businesses are currently still using Pre-CS1 versions of Adobe's applications due to the rather steep cost for the updates. Letting those companies upgrade even to CS2 is, IMHO, a nice turn. Let's see how that holds up.

As for those scoffing at the GIMP: get to know it. It is a different concept from the one Adobe applies to Photoshop, but it also offers a lot of things Photoshop does not. Don't knock it until you know what it can do.

Me, I'll knock back another pint and then go home for a quick lie-down before having to use both PS *and* GIMP to make my customer's website look good.

This photo slide scanner costs €60... The bundled malware? That's free

The interesting thing, though...

...would be knowing whether the identical HAMA devices, which have been pushed during the last half year by the likes of Saturn and Media Markt, are also impacted?

Microsoft releases first Windows OS in an original American language

With all due respect...

Gnome has been available in Cherokee (as well as at least 10 other Native American tongues) since the late 1990s, KDE about the same time; there are Cherokee, Apache, and several other languages available for OpenOffice (and have been since the early 2000s), and so on -- hey, KDE and OpenOffice are available in Low German (OK, sorry for patting my own back, was involved there myself)--so what's the hullabaloo about Micro$oft finally recognising one of their home markets after not even having to invest money into it (as it seems the Cherokee did all the translation work on their own initiative)?

Second Higgs possibility pops up in CERN data

Re: Nearly there

Yes, but what was the question?

Analysts: Shamoon oil biz malware flingers were 'amateurs'

Certainly goes go show...

...how easy it is to manipulate people in certain political environments. My guess is that the burning flag display mentioned in the article did its part in the spread of this particular baddie.

And I quite agree that the IT security (if any) in those two oil companies should be fired en bloc; this is the sort of thing they are supposed to prevent. Of course, if the IT security in those companies is non-existent, the people who decided that IT Sec is superfluous should be fired instead. And their salaries invested in IT Sec.

Wish there were a "double-fail" icon...

Tracking Android phones is easy, says researcher

The point of the attack, though...

...is that the requests for assistance can be rerouted to the attacker's server and that re-routing remains in place in the future, meaning the attacker will be able to see where you are at any time in the future, not only at the time of the immediate attack on your friendly local WiFi. At least, that's the way I read the article.

Australians receive SMS death threats

This once more shows that...

...Robert A. Heinlein was correct in his estimation that Common Sense is anything but common. A hit for a measly 5000? Or rather for less than that; the hit person would want to get a higher profit than from the original contract, if he actually existed. Plus, he would be facing the threat of being the next target himself after not fulfilling a contract.

I choose death by ale. Hand me another pint, please...

BIG BOOBS banished from Linux kernel

In as few words as possible:

This is completely ridiculous.

Microsoft to lob out Windows Server 2012 by September

Re: Having had the real-world exposure...

(I would like to add, before the inevitable messages come in: my co-admin at the time was young and inexperienced. When I was his age, I would most likely have acted similarly. So don't damn him; I certainly don't.)

Re: Having had the real-world exposure...

Well, when we (my co-admin and myself) tested the backup system we had inherited from Those That Went Before, it had worked... when we needed it, it was borked. Go figure. As to the security update, if the maker of the software I'm using says the update is mission critical, I check on the forums to see whether there are known problems; if there are none, I go for it, knowing that I have a full backup... My co-, who was on duty at the time the update was posted, didn't check, which was unfortunate.

I'm glad I'm out of that particular madhouse, anyway. Cheers!

Having had the real-world exposure...

that I had to go through with Hyper-V, they can push it all they want, I'm not going to go back to a solution that destroyed several VMs due to a security update that was shoved at my co-administrator as being highly important. Back then, he still trusted MS, so he installed it. I spent the next two nights trying to restore a minimum level of service from a backup that, thanks to also having been made by a MS solution, was only partially usable. Needless to say I went without any sleep whatsoever during the emergency.

The security update as such had no direct connection with Hyper-V. The Microsoft hotline said ours was the only business suffering from the problem. The open support forums had entries complaining about the problem by over 1000 different people.

No thanks, I'll stick with Xen for the time being.

Texan team paints batteries onto beer steins

Drinking from that stein...

...will certainly give you a jolt. But I'll never think of bathroom tiles as something entirely mundane again--they can be electrifying!

Coat, hat, BZZZZZZ!!! (who spray-painted my wallet?!? Oh... wait... that was the charge card...)

Hackers publish payday loan emails after failing to levy 'idiot tax'

Not "as usual" at all.

White-hat hackers do not blackmail. E.g., the Chaos Computer Club routinely hacks into "secured" systems. Often enough, they do that because they were asked to, but that is another story.

Thing is, they do *not* blackmail; they quietly notify the company owning the compromised server of the security problems. Depending on the individual hacker, they may even offer free advice on how to plug up the security holes.

Blackmail is never an option. Yes, the loan company should be persecuted for breach of privacy of its customers; they have no right to be so lax with their potential customers' data. The blackmailers, however, should be locked up and the key very carefully melted down and consequently lost at sea, for both blackmail and aggravated breach of privacy.

iPad chargers can open beer bottles

Just for the kick of it,

I tried my old iPod Shuffle (2nd gen.) charger. Works just fine, if you don't use brute force, and so far has left my charger completely unscarred.

Have Apple taken lessons from Victorinox?

Anyway, hand me a pint of Real Ale, please.

SpaceX launch put off for a week

Better safe than sorry.

I agree with Gary Bickford; obviously, Space-X have learned from the Space Shuttle booster failure and the Apollo programme.

15in MacBook Air will go HEAD TO HEAD with MacBook Pro in April

Re: Or

Funny thing about that -- people keep telling me the Apple gear is pricey compared to "PC" gear, but whenever I research the prices, it turns out that when choosing non-Apple gear that has the same oomph, the Mac turns out to be the more affordable choice. Happened to me several times. And, of course, you can install Windows on it if you really, really want to (I prefer to run my machines on Linux).

Go figure. Maybe because Apple does not offer anything cheap people are misled to think they are overpriced. But at the same performance and equipment levels, the last notebook I bought was a MacBook Pro which cost me approx. 200 quid less than anything comparable on the market at the time. *shrug* Sure, you can get a notebook at half the price. But it won't compare favourably in performance and, more likely than not, have a battery uptime that is less than half. If you can live with that, go and buy it. I need lots of compute power and lots of uptime, so... I'm off to the pub to have a pint or two while working.

New Yorker sues Apple: 'Misleading and deceptive' Siri ads

How can anybody expect...

...something as complex as what Siri is supposedly offering to actually work? No, just let me finish, please.

I have worked with things that were amazing at the time, such as the voice command feature of OS/2 v. 4, fifteen years ago... and it worked. If you didn't expect too much of it, and had a reasonably fast computer, and a reasonably good microphone, and so on and so on and so on.

To expect such a miracle-cure service such as Siri was announced at to work out of the box is ludicrous. Yes, the end customer wants it to work. Yes, Google wants it to work (and Apple _are_ using Google searches for the results; hence the current bias on business results... especially, if you look closely, businesses that do their advertising through Google...), and so does the end user. But the end user typically expects more practical results for their real-life problems than Google can sell them -- or any other commercial search engine. The search engines make money by brokering business, whether the user likes it or not.

Of course, Apple can only tie in to the search engines (whichever they are using!) by allowing those to do advertising... so I can totally understand why Siri service quality went down the drain since its introduction.

Sueing Apple over this, I think, is the wrong approach. They are allowing this process to happen, yes. But the drivers of it are the likes of Yahoo, Google, and so on, who are not interested in your finding the next filling station, but the next [fill-in-brand-here] filling station... because that generates revenue.

Might as well sue Oracle for providing the database software the search engines are running on -- pointless. If you expect anything to work as advertised... buy products that are not advertised. Anybody disappointed in what the advertised product actually offers should sue the advertising companies (or departments), not the manufacturer. Siri's a reasonable jumble of garbage, and that's what you get. The iPhone 4s is the same price (where I am) as the previous model a year ago, so there is no price hike. So, whoever complains, get off your high horse. The phone works, the service is deteriorating. Is that any news? News at all?

*shrug* OK, I know... I'll probably get a few thousand thumbs down and a bunch of flames...

New patent will give iPhone screen interactive 3D

Seeing what has been patented...

...in the U.S. in the past, despite copious prior art and, often enough, no way of providing a working example at the time of application, yes, in the U.S., you can patent everything. You can even register a generic term for a hole in the wall as a trademark and sue others for using that generic term in a similar application.

Over the last decades, I have more and more gotten the impression that the U.S. patent offices exist only as a means for lawyers to generate money by filing ludicrous patents and then suing the pants off anybody producing anything even remotely similar.

</flame>

'nuff said before I go overboard. My coat is the one with the patent writ in the pocket for an on-line medium embedded in a news site, allowing readers to share their opinions.

Apple iPhones, iPad back in German online store

And I wonder why...

Motorola are not suing RIM, who IIRC were the first to offer push mail for smartphones... could that have anything to do with less money to be made that way? *tsk, tsk*

Virus-slingers abuse WordPress vulns, dose punters with exploit

htaccess vs. Wordpress

"One of the most common exploits with WordPress is .htaccess injections, [...]"

Well, that is not a Wordpress-specific vulnerability, IIRC. The .htaccess file is used by various software, so this should not be blames on Wordpress alone.

Mind you, the article did specify that an outdated version of WP is being targeted (3.2.1 -- current is 3.3.1) --so blame the admins for not doing their security updates.

$25 toy radio used to knock out feds

Why do you think...

...the system is flawed that badly? Obviously, the feds bought it from the Mafia...

AMD readies Bulldozers to ship next month

@rav

"When do consoles start using desktop cpu's to stay competitive?"

Er... consoles are right now using big iron CPUs, e.g. the PS3's Cell CPU, which has been used to build several supercomputing clusters. Granted, it seems Sony wants to get out of the supercomputing sector (as of the latest PS3 software updates).

Fact is, the CPUs used in today's gaming consoles' CPUs are often a level above what you can get off the shelf in a PC, or even in many workstations.

Concerning the graphics units, nVidia's absence from the console bids might be an indication that that particular market is not very profitable -- just a thought and I may be wrong. The dedicated graphics unit will certainly stay in existence in the professional level for quite a while. That's strictly high-end stuff, though.

In the short term, I guess the low- and mid-end graphics markets are going to be made redundant by the on-going trend of combining general processing and graphics processing units into a single chip; at the performance levels possible these days, I am seriously expecting to see entry-level gaming PCs without any separate graphics chips on the shelves this year, if they haven't already materialised while I was not looking.

Microsoft loses Supreme patent fight over Word

Hoist by their own...

petard, I guess. But come to think of it... how can there be any patents on XML (XML being an ISO approved open standard)? Or are the patents pertaining to methods of manipulating XML?

Microsoft BPOS cloud outage burns Exchange converts

Strictly correct.

As a long-time sysadmin myself, I once confronted a colleague working for an IT consultancy firm as to why he kept pushing MS products. His answer was, "that way, we get follow-up work by the boatload. If we'd push Linux or UNIX, we'd install, then never hear from the customer again."

Go figure.

Microsoft's iOS and Android love deepens

Well, now we know...

...why MS had to pay Nokia a reported $2bn to actually offer any phones running WP7. Obviously, otherwise there would not have been any takers. *shrug* Here's a wild proposition: why not base a mobile OS on FreeDOS with GEM as GUI? The battery life should be fantastic, and the graphics and operating environment could be pimped to make it contemporary without too much trouble IMHO.

Better yet, why not use a UNIX-derived/POSIX-compliant OS as a basis... -- oh, they already did that...

Microsoft sues ex-general manager over Salesforce.com exodus

From the point of view of somebody who has gone through this

"This case involves an employee with knowledge of Microsoft’s sensitive customer and competitive information going to work for Salesforce.com, a direct competitor, in a job that is focused on the same solutions and customers,"

Yep. And a huge majority of cases where somebody is laid off or simply forced out of a company due to bad engineer/management relations (i.e., decides the grass is greener on the other side of the fence), this very same argument comes up. The (former) employee put several years of creative input into the former employer's line of products, then, being an expert in that particular line of product, is hired by a competing company.

Why should that person (who most likely has suffered severe mobbing, the wrath of managers who have no idea about what the person is actually doing besides the straight numbers and is not even interested in knowing) be kept from doing the same thing for the next company? It is not, usually, that the workslave shifting workplaces takes along intellectual property not thought up by him- or herself, but rather that the former employer would like to keep using those ideas, methods, in some cases patents (in which latter case there would not even be a problem at all!) exclusively. Which usually is ruled out in the employment contract. You can't buy a person's brain with a contract (well, not in Europe, the Commonwealth, the Francophonie or the US, far as I know.)

Back to the topic.

Any company that loses an employee who has such intimate knowledge of the business it is interested in that they would like to prevent this from happening, should do so by keeping on said employee at whatever cost it takes to do so.

If they can't be bothered to keep their cash cow happy, they at least should have the decency to let them go with dignity. Suing for IP after the fact is, in one word, ridiculous, and should be laughed out of court.

I, myself, at one point was put in a position where I had to negotiate with a former employer that had laid me off with extreme discourtesy. My new employer was in the same line of business. In the end, I won a settlement in my favour... though calculating the time and effort spent in getting there, I was pretty much shafted (had I been allowed to spend the time involved with gainful work instead of the ludicrous lawsuit, I would have made a few ten thousand quid more).

I need a crate of beer now.

Rescue mission begins for Hitchhiker's Real Guide

PANIC!

(can't believe nobody here has seen that one before...)

Intel pumps $100m into university research

They won't give to those at the bottom...

...they'll funnel the money they hope to save on in-house research (which is expensive!!!!!) into the best research-oriented universities (Harvard, Standford, MIT, Erlangen-Nuernberg, Bangalore, the lot)... because that way they'll get the patents (as per donation contract) stemming from the research, the research results, and so on, for practically free (since money donated can be deducted from taxes). Beautiful setup, really.

On the plus side, I see a bundle of research topics in there to allow university students to qualify for high-paying jobs in the future. Which will then be voided by another donation which will dump their line of research on a bunch of universities... etc...

Apple $10k winner hangs up on 'prank caller'

@AC from Tuesday 25th January 2011 00:07 GMT

IIRC, one can re-download everything one has bought, unlike with certain other services.

@everybody talking about apps

From what I gather from the article, it's a freebie for the iTunes store (not the AppStore), which offers apps, videos, music, the lot. Honestly? For 10k bits of pressed metal, I'd vastly extend my music library, with the odd movie thrown in.

As for the tax situation, I have no idea how it is in the UK at this time; in the US it seems to depend on which state you are in and sometimes the phase of the moon and time of day. Where I live, all winnings from publicly-available lotteries and suchlike (which this falls under) are tax-free for the first year. So here, the winner would have one year to get rid of the gift value. OK... the complete works of the Beatles, to start with... then Led Zeppelin, Steeleye Span, Rush,... I don't think I'd have much of a problem getting rid of that money within one year, particularly if I also buy movies.

Mozilla plans 'Do Not Track' bottle-stopper for private surfers

The title is required, and must contain letters and/or digits.

<cynicism> "Meanwhile, the world's largest ad broker Google is reportedly set to announce a "keep my opt-outs" privacy tool later today, that will allow its Chrome browser users to scream "in your face, OBA!" - or something. ®"

Of course, knowing Google, they're going to allow themselves a back door or other workaround so they can still collect the data. As for Microsoft claiming to wanting to respect the user's sphere of privacy: huge, rolling laugh!</cynicism>

That aside, I find this sort of thing to be a little overdue, though the header approach suggested by the Mozilla Foundation will of course only work so long as the operators of the web sites actually respect those headers. Which I doubt the more commercially-oriented ones will do.

Matrix 4 and 5 in works, threatens Keanu

Ohdearohdearohdear

The first one was... interesting. Worth the admittance, anyway.

<rant> The first "sequel" was superfluous. The second "sequel" should have been banned outright because it contravenes the Geneva convention, particularly the articles about unwarranted cruel treatment of non-combatants. Any further sequels should be investigated by the responsible district attourneys and the people responsible brought before a court of law and sentenced to death by Matrix 3D viewing. </rant>