Posts by P. Lee

Microsoft: It was never 'Metro,' it was always 'Modern UI'

Re: @Phil

> no-one would want a post-modernist computer.

We're already there. It puts random gunk on your screen and its up to you to find your own meaning in it.

Microsoft: It's not Metro, it's Windows 8

Re: Making a version number part of the name...

Wasn't the maestro well known for its digital dashboard?

Australia on path to social media regulation

Shock news!

Australians like to drink.

Also, Brits, Germans, the Dutch

Ok, I didn't see the facebook page in question, except a blurry version from SBS, but I can't help thinking that it is a bit of a storm in a teacup.

If the background images had been Charlie Harper from 2 1/2 Men or one of the cast from AbFab, would it still have been racist? Or if it is racist, is it racist is in a way which is any more harmful than the term, "whinging pom"?

Yes its a bit offensive and not very funny, but trying to stamp out everything that is bad is a very dangerous road to go down. Of course, Australians seem to love regulation and bureaucracy so perhaps its just an excuse. I'm sure there are many governments around the world which are grateful to hear the cry of, "we need to regulate the internet!"

Nokia straps Qt into ejector seat and hits the shiny red button

Re: Good

Troll, not propagandist. A propagandist wouldn't include reference to docs which make him look irrelevant.

He's right for 2006/7 but has glossed over the epic decline since then.

The joy of selective quoting! :D

Valve opens Steam store to non-gaming software

Re: Connected to the possible movement to Linux?

> I can't think of a single thing I have/need in Windows that isn't replicated in Linux

Visio and more complicated Excel bits.

Which is why MS haven't ported it.

Please slap the person at the back who said "Sharepoint."

Snap suggests Apple out to 'screw' hardware hackers

Re: Does it matter?

> You don't buy premium and then expect the premium to fix it for nothing?

No, you buy premium and expect it to last longer without repair than non-premium.

You don't expect Ferrari to weld the bonnet shut so that you can't take it to your local mechanic. You don't expect them to make a proprietary lock for the oil and radiator caps so you can't change the oil or top it up yourself.

I'm sure the new iphone and imacs are great, but Apple are making it all too hard. I loved Apple ][, Mackintosh, OSX and Mac. They've done a good job of bringing "pretty" and "useful" to the consumer, but the rest of the world has caught up and they are resorting to making life difficult rather than making life better, to keep their income up.

Deadly pussies kill more often than owners think

Re: Makes no difference,

> Every cat owner

... is under a delusion.

Dogs have owners. Cats have staff.

2.1 kills a week doesn't sound like enough to live on unless its rabbit.

Party like it's 1999: CDE Unix desktop REBORN

You can probably use twm if you like that sort of environment.

Personally I quite like XFCE4 for its quick-load. I can netboot mythbuntu over 100mb ethernet in normal OS load times. But if I'm working all day, KDE would probably be my choice.

Note that most apps will require KDE or Gnome installed as they use the shared libraries - kmail can't draw a text window without KDE installed and the libraries loaded.

It will be interesting to see how the VDI space plays out. WinXP is rather efficient compared to W7 in terms of desktop resources, so I suspect there will be a lot of RAM pain when those upgrades go through.

NASA's $2.5bn Curiosity rover: An Apple PowerBook on wheels

Re: The key question here is...

It goes round corners, it'll fall foul of some patent.

"Method for moving low power cpu in over rocky ground without life."

Oops, I think I spoilt the surprise.

Amazon exploited by hacker in scribe's epic Apple iCloud pwn

My understanding is that iCloud is for sync, not backup.

You should sync mobile to your PC and back that up - time-machine for a mac.

As for gmail, IMAP is easy to backup and probably happens automatically if you use mac mail and timemachine.

Having said that, time machine can be really slow.

Office for ARM will lack features, report claims

Re: So...

> What was the point of Windows RT again??

To stop you buying a *nix pad and maybe using Open/LibreOffice. Once your organisation has a stack of windows tablets, they are probably not going to want to buy/support android/ios as well. It also gives devs another platform to use which might unfocus devs from the other two platforms.

Its also a threat towards intel for its linux dalliances - it would be easy to port the rest of Office, once desktop and server ARM chips become available...

Microsoft's Office 2013 app-maker cloud drenches developers

Web apps in excel docs?

There's a TLA for that!

Microsoft opens app store for Office 2013

web applications that are hosted within Word, Excel, and the other Office component,

What could possibly go wrong?

God-botherers burst onto IPTV Freeview: The End is Nigh

The tragedy of of the advertising commons

Just like facebook, you are the product, not the customer.

The focus is on the customer. Now with our ultra-efficient capitalism, its all about the customers, who are the advertisers. Alas, the product has gone off. Nothing breaks dramatic tension and spoils the show like 5 minutes of ads.

Anyway, why lament the end of TV? For the odd good programme, there's countless hours of useless or detrimental stuff and hours of programming specifically designed to part you from your cash. Replace it with a lava lamp with a flickering bulb and people will stare at that while not talking to each other at the dinner table - you'll find its much cheaper.

Ten freeware gems for new Macs

Re: Oh, you didn't just say that...

Fool! Thou shalt incur the Wrath of Fanboi!

But, if you happen to have a powerpc, Debian is an improvement over an abandoned platform.

You'll probably need a 3v pci-x sata card as the kit moves from desktop to server roles. 2 sata ports and no additional disk cage on a G5? What was Apple thinking?

I wanted BSD, but no working mythtv port has foiled me thus far.

M-Tech Data: Grey import battle with Oracle has ruined us

> Wow, hope Oracle is proud of themselves.

They will be very proud of themselves over this.

Valve: Games run FASTER on Linux than Windows

Re: Better FPS? Why didn't you say so. Shut up and take my money....

> What is wrong with windows having an app marketplace?

Nothing - its W8 Newell was complaining about. If its bad, more people will jump to osx and there aren't anywhere near as many games (lower supply) for Newell to sell for OSX. His market shrinks.

If game producers went for OGL over windows-specific DirectX, however, they are more likely to port to OSX, which gives Newell more stuff he can sell.

However, Valve can't do much about OSX because he doesn't have the code or influence Apple that much. We've known for years that the Apple drivers are slower than windows, but it doesn't change anything. With Linux brought into the game, Newell has something to demonstrate and gains some leverage as well as tech cred.

Re: Linux on a stick

Interesting idea. Write for linux, plug it into your mac or windows box, reboot and play. Also comes with a browser, video player, music player which can read your local hdd. Buy a game without having to think about whether it works with your OS or not. OS-specific files also available. It makes a cheap "console" if you have a USB stick or esata box which uses your work laptop or home pc's hardware.

eSATA, USB, flash & thunderbolt are also possible and would work best with fast flash-booting pc's.

I think Gabe's real aim is to get more opengl games so that they are more likely to be ported to OSX, which has a far larger market than linux currently has. He doesn't want windows-only as that reduces his possible revenue as OSX becomes a larger part of the home market (with a W8 fail) and makes the windows-store more attractive.

For most games, frame rates on modern hardware isn't much of an issue (305!), but the hardcore & pro gamers who spend lots probably would be willing to reboot for a particular game to gain 16% improvement.

No doubt MS will jump on this and get the performance up a bit, but its still really good news. My steam account is the only reason I have windows installed anywhere.

Microsoft tightens grip on OEM Windows 8 licensing

Re: Go Microsoft!

The pirate versions generally aren't oem, they're the "full" enterprise versions.

I suspect this is about MS testing its DRM infrastructure, perhaps to help secure their download shop.

Will Samsung's patent court doc leak backfire spectacularly?

Re: Patent Fraud

Hear Hear!

Both sides submit all their evidence (prior art, etc) and argument in written form to each other and their own lawyers make a decision as to whether the patents are valid.

If litigation then proceeds to court (still no agreement), new evidence & argument may not be introduced and if the plaintiff loses, the plaintiff-requested damages are automatically awarded to the defendant.

Licensed to kill: Amazon revamps Cloud Player to take on iTunes

Re: Music labels, studios etc all need to and definitely will die...

There is an underlying assumption that people will buy things without them being advertised. They will to an extent, but why is it that McDonalds, Coke, Wrigglies et al advertise? Do we not know about them? Do the adverts tell us what we didn't know before?

No. People will buy things they think about and without massive promotion and constant, overall sales will fall. That is what the middle-men do. What do you think all the "idol" shows are for? It's to keep you focused on and invested in the musicians so you'll buy their stuff. If you've spent several pounds voting for someone (kerching) and invested an hour or so each week following them, you're reasonably likely to buy their CD. Kerching again.

Personally, I wouldn't be that sad to see more of the media industry die off completely, not just the middlemen. Do we really need Justin (Bieber or Timberlake)? But I'm old and grumpy and think people should spend money on food, retirement, or starving millions in Africa, or perhaps buy your own instrument and play it with your friends. You won't match the studios' production values, but it will probably be more fun than blocking out the world with a pair of headphones.

Whoohoo! All my music is available everywhere!

Oh wait, its just been matched from my portable device, which is probably a phone, which I keep with me at all times, so I don't actually need cloud access... hmmm.

Where's the benefit again? Ah yes, "washing" unlicensed content. Like itunes, the deal appears to be: you can pirate as much as you want for $25/year, because something is better than nothing for the music industry.

Desperate music industry, desperate cloud looking for a purpose. That said, we do need non-Fruity suppliers in general. I just wish they would pick something a little more useful to do, such as some really good sync software for PC-mobile device. Still, the basis of any good management system is to have good inventory data, so maybe its a start and we'll end up with accurate metadata to work with.

Raspberry Pi served with Ice Cream Sandwich

re: no touchscreen

Apple trackpad anyone?

Lords call for the end of TV transmissions

Re: I'll be damned...

> Lords... with a good idea for the future of tech? Blimey.

Usually, but not today. TV is broadcast, so why do it point-to-point?

Unless they are suggesting peer-to-peer content transmission... :p

Forget 'climate convert' Muller: Here's the real warming blockbuster

Re: True Believers

The real problem is that weather stations measure the local temperature which turns out to NOT be useful for measuring climate change. As we are constantly told, weather!=climate

The data is fine. It just appears to be inappropriate for what we want to use it for.

If you have to skew the numbers, you can, but you have then interpreted the meaning of the data rather than using the data.

Of course, you could say that if the temperature has gone up due to human activity, then we have warmed it - even if its just by putting tarmac underneath. The problem comes when you then extrapolate that data to imply that the man-made rises will be reflected all over the globe. Again, the data is fine, its the averaging and interpretation which may be suspect.

@UnSteveDorkland Twitter satirist faces 4 charges in US court

Re: That's odd

No, irony is when you wait your whole life to make that trip and the plane goes down.

oh wait, that's not it...

US flags from the 1970s SEEN ON MOON

Why are all the pictures of the Big Foot fuzzy?

/gone

Hobbyist builds working assault rifle using 3D printer

Re: Bloody wonderful, dont idiots ever think first?

> Or Disney Mickey Mouse toys.

Or Barbies, or (if the hair is too hard to attach) barbie's horse, car, happy meal toys, or Olympic rings.

Then all hell will break loose.

What links Apple, Sun's ZFS and a tiny startup? Al Gore

Re: Its all about Oracle

Any hesitation on Apple's part is probably down to, "do we want to develop zfs on our own."

I certainly wouldn't rely on Oracle letting me use anything without paying up and Apple are famous for wanting total control.

ZFS is nice but few apple products have more than one disk so I'm not sure what the driver would be, unless they just feel hfs is getting long in the tooth.

Apple serves 3m Mountain Lions in four days

Re: 14 Quid...what for?

> a new OS.

Really?

It looks like new apps rather than a new OS. Which bits of the OS have they improved? You know, the bit which insulates the apps from the hardware and provides each app with a virtual machine.

It seems that the OS is actually a downgrade in capabilities (less compatible hardware) with new apps put in to distract attention from the fact.

/fuddyduddy who just stuck a penguin in his g5 and has a nice new usable machine for mythtv and iscsi time machine.

AIIA takes the ‘Australian’ out of price-gouge concerns

It isn't just IT

I took my kids to a roller-skating rink in Bayswater in Victoria - a fairly low-end industrial-estate area complete with sex-aid shops etc. The price was $36 for a family of four.

Compare that to the John Nike Centre in Binfield, Berkshire where ice-skating is £20 ($30) for a family of four.

Seriously? A (not very smooth) concrete oval in a warehouse with 4 staff in a working-class area of Australia (which has pretty much infinite land available) costs more than a high-end ice-rink (with all the infrastructure and power that requires) in one of the more expensive villages in grossly over-crowded south-east England?

I'm gonna quit my IT job and go sell coffee (retails at $3.50-4.50/cup) and a chips ($9/plate) for cash.

Surface slab WILL rub our PC-making pals the wrong way – Microsoft

Re: 2 Ways

Agreed. Businesses will just skip W8 as they skipped Vista and stay on W7 for the desktop. Moving from Windows would be enormously expensive for a large enterprise. License costs are quite low compared to support and migration costs.

W8 Server is a different beast and may be worthwhile and server migrations generally aren't as fast as desktops might be.

However, if Valve gets devs on board with linux/opengl (cross platform) games and W8 is a consumer failure, then OSX will pick up more consumers and MS' grip on the home market will be loosened further. That means more OSX devs around who will want to do cross-platform, rather than OSX or Windows only. An OSX-Windows cross-platform app is just a hop-skip-and-a-jump from linux. Worse than cross-platform apps are web-apps which remove investment in the windows platform and make it a non-critical bit of infrastructure.

Story gone

Re: No.

that's what Perl and catch-all email forwarding are for... :-P

Hidden Grand Canyon-sized ICE-HOLE hastens Antarctic melt

Re: Of course...

Yeah! 'Cos Jesus is well known for having said, "Screw the poor!"

Worship is about what is worthy of being served. The greedy serve themselves. How does that relate in any way to serving a god who said that every 50 years all loans are to be wiped out and land returned to its original owners?

If I am the pinnacle of life in the known universe and the is no judgement of what I do, I may as well make my own brief and ultimately pointless existence as fun as possible. Eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow we die.

Gabe Newell: Windows 8 is a 'catastrophe' for PC biz

Re: Damn Newell and his common sense...

Its more about a migration strategy than the immediate effect.

If Steam becomes the cross-platform games provider, it helps move people to opengl (from directx) even if they are looking at windows-only releases initially, since that gives more flexibility for OSX as well as linux for the future, especially as even iMacs now have reasonable graphics capabilities.

Linux might be the trendy dev-bait but I suspect that Valve would like more OSX games to sell and linux (opengl) games are going to be easier to port than directx. As MS knows, its all about the developers. If W8 is a disaster then more people will pick up Macs at home and Valve would like something to offer them rather than suffering a drop in sales due to a lack of Mac games.

Microsoft Azure goes titsup across Western Europe

Re: Another clear demostration of why we can't "go to the cloud"

A mainframe has lots of engineering in it.

"The Cloud" tends to be a bunch of pc's.

Mainframes are built for predictability and reliability over everything else.

The Cloud is about features, new, improved (& untested).

You get what you pay for.

Stuxnet: 'Moral crime' or proportionate response?

> "Ultimately the ethics of this don't really matter – the decision has been made and this kind of stuff is going to be unavoidable."

i.e. those making the decisions don't care about the ethics and are not accountable for their actions.

Hmmm. Perhaps we should hold them accountable? That's the problem - we will still vote in people who do things we despise. Just look at Tony Blair being re-elected despite setting up a war the electorate didn't want.

Valve tried tongue-tied interface controller

Re: What'll be the future?

Just get another computer to respond to the action and you don't have to even think about it!

Touch is only useful when you've got nothing else. Look at gamers - generally they'll use laser mice which require only very small, precise movements. Having "nothing else" isn't always bad, it just has a restricted field of use.

Even on a tablet, most on-screen keyboards are too large. Far better to have an almost-phone sized keyboard you can use with just your thumb (swype). It's faster and more comfortable than poking the unyielding glass screen with one finger (as the other hand has to hold the thing).

Never mind Azure: They BROKE Twitter!

Its IRC for server & load-balancer vendors.

Galaxy S III dumps universal search, tries to dodge Apple's sueballs

Re: Thanks Apple

2. Profit!

Oracle hurls MySQL at Microsoft database wobblers

Re: I think..

> it would be much more fun for MS to release a tool to migrate Oracle users to MySQL :)

or postgres :D

Postgres-on-steroids wields bare metal in Oracle, IBM skirmish

Re: HP needs a database?

Like any cloud / outsource provider HP (ex-EDS) needs a db which can guarantee data and transactions stay in particular jurisdictions. Banking, finance, security and government all have regulations in most countries and you don't want to have to even think about applying for exceptions if you don't need to, even if exceptions are possible.

HP don't have a great acquisition history, but if I were them, I'd make sure none of the other big players can get in and mess this company up.

Pure Stream takes on AirPlay

Re: Apple Tax.. extra revenue

e.g. time machine.

You would think that saving files would be a standard part of the OS, but apparently not when its a duplicate of existing files for backup. Then apple want you to buy a grossly overpriced disk drive from them to plug into the network for that function.

Vendors responsible for ‘Aussie Tax’: Choice

Re: Rental retail costs and their use for online pricing

Vendors won't undercut the channel once they've set the price.

I don't believe property is more expensive in Melbourne than London.

Lying toads.

Re: the problem with digital online distribution

I wrote a stinking email to bethesda noting that I won't buy any of their games until they stop the practice. Even though I could get skyrim from the UK easily.

Savvy buyers going via the US/UK is a "no-lose" scenario for the vendors which encourages the gouging in Oz.

It isn't just IT. Coles sells Ambrosia Rice Pudding for £1.65 which makes their own brand look cheap at £1 for 400g of rice and milk.

Skype so sorry for sending that saucy IM to mum instead of pash

What's your name? Bruce?

Finally some QUALITY apps for Android: PalmOS emulator ported

Re: Heaven

I found graffiti to be far too slow - as is writing with a pen compared to typing.

Swype rules though! So much so, I want a phone-sized swype keyboard in one corner of my tablet instead of the monstrous on-screen keyboard where I have to stretch my hands to get to the keys.

Intel CEO Otellini promises $699 ultrabooks by fall

Re: Can I just buy a $400 laptop with a SSD in it?

While intel CPUs are more expensive than AMD, the real cost is in a decent screen and battery which you won't get at $400.

The problem has been that we weren't getting it at $900-1100 either unless you got a mac, and even then...

I don't know about editing video, but I found I frequently maxed out my CPU not by stuff that I wanted to do, but with scan-on-access AV operations. Corporate ultrabooks running windows and AV might actually have performance issues, especially if you have file preview options that read the data.

I'm surprised that we haven't seen some file multi-data-stream innovation where a scanned file on a server is tagged with a corporate cert to say that it was scanned recently and clients with the same AV don't need to check it again.

On a slightly related note, there might be some room for innovation from the floss chaps here, where editing the metadata doesn't alter the file. The same idea could be used to allow people to change mp3 tags without creating a "new" file. I'm really tired of needing databases to store podcast data, for example. Couldn't we generalise something like an mp4 container and have a file system which can see the different streams, but when you copy the main "data" part of the file it copies the meta data too? Perhaps the problem is that it becomes a db in itself with all the related complexity and lack of robustness.

Valve to raise Steam for Ubuntu

> The only problem I see are the grumbling Linux "free software ONLY" ideologists.

No, the major problem is that most of the games aren't written by Valve and will still be Windows/OSX only.

I had Steam on my hackintosh but in the end a reverted to windows for gaming because dual-booting just isn't fun. Its easier to install windows natively and do all your proper work in a *nix vm.

However, perhaps this might pave the way for a *nix console.

Its an interesting move by Valve. It isn't going to bring in lots of cash in itself (it might actually cost Valve more as already-bought games are re-downloaded for *nix) but it might encourage devs to do more multiplatform work -use opengl rather than directx.