Posts by asdf

NASA deep space probe sends back video of 'Comet of the Century'

Re: poor FX

>Instead they did the fiscally responsible thing;

Only because they are forced too after blowing $100 billion on a space station they can't even get to on their own. A fool tends to be thrifty after he is parted from his money.

A new Mac Pro coming this spring? 'Mais oui!'

Re: Whatever the change will be,

Had to chuckle at that. Apple makes some great stuff especially in the past but more than a ring of truth to the comment.

hmm

Great a whole new Mac Pro Apple wants me to buy to replace my perfectly serviceable first generation Intel Mac Pro. I guess that is why they went out of their way to be sure I couldn't upgrade it to the latest Mac OS X. Obsolesce by design is their business model. I mean you can't be in the cool kids club unless you drop fat dimes to Tim every few years.

Microsoft to open 11 new retail stores by summer

me too me too

Is Ballmer the king of mediocre me too years after the fact or what? Generally you only want brick and mortar retail stores if you have something consumers (as opposed to Enterprise) want. In fact in the electronics sphere the move is to less stores not more for most chains.

2e2 for you: Should zombies be allowed to run NHS IT?

Re: "The failure of 2e2 may be seen as positive by its competitors ..."

>It's queered the pitch for everybody else too.

Wow new term to this yank and quite amusing even if the topic isn't in any way. Behind the suffering of almost all salaried or prior salaried grunts is a rich country club ahole executive(s).

US diplomat: If EU allows 'right to be forgotten' ... it might spark TRADE WAR

sigh

Instead of race baiting El Reg likes to engage in flag baiting. This is some peon diplomat that spouted off and can be safely ignored. We just had a change at the top of our State Department so I find it hard to believe they are looking for trade war fight right now. Yes our government sucks but so does yours (doesn't matter the country virtually). The whole idea of a former colony dictating to its former master really strikes a nerve I guess (plus that jackass W Bush didn't help anything except making the USA irrelevant quicker).

Re: Hmm.

Still it sucks when you know your country's government is completely wrong on something and you can't change it. When both of your choices for leader of a nation are both total corporate whores there is no choice.

Re: Hmm.

>The EU has a ~ €2 Trillion larger economy than the USA. Dream on yanks....

Yeah and we have seen how coordinated and tightly integrated the EU is economically. North America will stay a very important market and considering the US is built around consumption and most of the EU is built on exports, a trade war could still be very bad for both parties. Still this dude is just talking trash. Obama is already paranoid about having a Jimmy Carter type legacy and a trade war of any type would ensure that.

GNOME project picks JavaScript as sole app dev language

Re: M$ Titanic?

>Yeah I've probably only got 20 more years of milking that cow. At which point, I can simply switch to whatever has replaced it. Or retire on the $$$ I've made from M$.

Wow thoughts of a 55 year old sad old parochial bastard Wally type praying to make it retirement before being replaced come to mind. In general if your skills only cover development on one platform no matter how big and dominant that platform is today (see Mainframe devs in mid 80s) you have f__ked up along the way.

Re: What a dreadful decision

Upvote for simply mentioning Perl. Perl's obviously bolted on OO functionality is about as ugly as any common modern language gets. I swear Python prospers simply due to the numerous short comings in Perl.

Fanbois rejoice: iPhone 5, iPad Mini finally jailbroken

Re: San Fransico's Finest.

Also in general if you are going to insult a place you might want to spell the name correctly, or else you end up looking like another product of the 3rd world quality education system in Mississippi and Alabama.

Re: San Fransico's Finest.

The Bay area has sure given the world a hell of lot more in the last 50 years than Mississippi and Alabama combined. It probably has a higher GDP as well.

'Broke' Estonian suspect pleads guilty to DNSChanger click fraud scam

Re: Took me a while to read that right

I read it as Elbonia (the 3rd world country of waist deep mudd) from Dilbert fame.

Oracle blocks security hole with quick, hot 'n' premature Java update

Re: I think the damage has already been done

>which can do the same by using far less code. Less code by definition also means quicker results, whether for good or worse.

Without getting into the fallacy of less code means quicker results as a C++ developer I have seen plenty of quicker results end up costing a few orders of magnitude more in maintenance than development. I have also seen plenty of quicker results that were impossible to scale including even the en vogue at the time technology the solution was written on. Last of all, managed code has its place but its telling that Microsoft is moving away from managed code in their commercial products including Metro.

java rules

Write once infect everywhere. Even on OS's that usually don't get targeted as heavily. Platform independence rules (even if with Java the only way to do so is without GUI elements)!

Analyst says vendors offer pretend reference customers

i call BS

Gartner may well have astroturfed this whole article. When do they do any real research? They just get companies to pay to talk about them and give them awards. Their value add is being able to get the direct ear of clueless sociopath CSuite idiots in other companies without the BS being filtered by lower downs with some knowledge of the subject.

Wikileaks reveals Icelandic FBI shenanigans

frowney face

>Hey. Eight years of Bush/Cheney, so what do you expect?

What occurred. The US going from the only economic/military superpower with some moral credibility to just another broke ass corrupt country that tortures people.

yep

Europe not being able to sort out its own affairs ruined that. It was looking bad again there for a bit but things have calmed down lately. Still having no money is going to keep Team America out of a lot of affairs for quite some time.

Nordic telco CEO strolls in aftermath of Uzbek spectrum doodah

No excuses

When your business practices even run afoul of the United States of Corporate Whores laws you know you have no ethic compass (foreign bribery illegal). This from a country (US) that often allows its defense companies to sell to both sides in a conflict.

First the NYT, now the Wall Street Journal: But are hacking attacks from China new?

Re: A golden opportunity

>the Chinese jumped in with over a million men.

Yep that is when the Army First Cav showed it true colors and got rolled in the process if I remember right.

Re: FALSE FLACK

false flack as opposed to friendly flack I guess (which I think of when I hear that the idea during ww2 to put up random flack to stop the V2s was a bad idea as it would ended up causing more collateral damage than the inaccurate v2s did).

China

China is a proud and noble culture and all but I still don't understand why they venerate Mao at all (yes it seems to be more than just kissing ass to the party). Their may never be another human that kills more Chinese than Mao did (could be as high as 100 million total).

Re: A golden opportunity

>China is in an excellent position to become an active aggressor

Chinese culture by default tends to think long term though so they are still far less scary than say a nuclear armed Pakistan. Big difference between aggression and suicide. Any country with anything to lose (China has a whole lot to lose now) is less scary. With some Muslim countries though I can understand why the concept of heaven is so inviting considering what their daily reality is.

Netbooks were a GOOD thing and we threw them under a bus

Re: Accounting

Yes obvious thread jacking but come on Accounting, really? My main problem with netbooks was many were built to break as soon as the warranty expired. I liked the Samsung NC10 I had but due to a so obvious it seem to be on purpose design flaw with the internal video cable being pinched by the hinge it stopped working. Pissed me off so much that I never bothered to buy another even from a different competitor.

Linux boot doesn't smash Samsung laptops any more

Re: Are you listening Eadon?

I sure can but that had more to do with overclocking programs than windows itself per se.

Re: Speedy fix!

>not that of the long suffering cheap tightwad whiny users'.

The code is right there for download. Its easy enough to hire someone to fix it. Plenty of other companies do so. Support isn't free for anything but the Linux community still gives more than most.

Windows Server 2012 kicks ass: discuss

server 2012

WS 2012 proves if you swing the club enough times on the range you are bound to catch one square eventually. The last 4+ months have been a disaster for Microsoft product wise but it does sound like they hit it out of the park with this product.

Space Shuttle Columbia disaster remembered 10 years on

hmm

NASA started out great but since they decide to piss away 100 billion dollars on ISS with little chance of manned space flight for perhaps generations I think incompetent is an appropriate word for NASA management these days (not to mention their short bus overlords Congress).

Re: Not just the foam strike

>criticised it's "broken safety culture."

Like BP and countless other organizations. Whenever you get enough people together supposedly working on one goal you are going to ultimately get a clusterf__k (yes even in WW2, read Catch 22). Even the Manhattan project and Apollo program had a lot of luck involved in their success (have to admit though project management seems to have been a hell of lot better then too). The fact is people act like a herd animal in groups (change behavior and even outlook to not stand out) and not to mention self interest often comes before group success so for example manager x does what benefits his own career and bank account the most.

NHS IT bods 'walk out' in pay row with crashed UK tech giant 2e2

Re: I'm actually quite looking forward to the fight!

Actually as shown by our last election a majority of Americans are not right wing buffoons. The ones out there are just extremely loud.

Re: I'm actually quite looking forward to the fight!

Oh yeah I forgot we are talking about the UK where employees actually do have a few rights. Being a right to work state (fancy term for can be fired at will without cause without recourse) Yank myself I have no idea what that is like. Good luck and sorry for the misfortune. Its always the little guys that get screwed and never the Porsche driving douche bag sociopath mgmt.

Re: All Back In

>I'm actually quite looking forward to the fight!

Hope you enjoy the fight itself then because as a little guy employee you will be far back in line as a creditor and what $ is left will be long gone by the time its your turn.

Microsoft: Old Internet Explorer is terrible and 'we want to help'

time to troll

Before the posts come. Yes yes Opera folks we know your browser is 1337 and best of all with its rounding error of market share it may well be the safest browser. Why target an audience smaller than the number of people who actively use Google Plus?

Senators propose permanent ban on internet sales and access tax

Re: And nothing of value was lost

Everyone of the places you named are national chains so its hard to truly call them local businesses. Unfortunately often times they killed the true local businesses and many brick but at least many mortar chains are in the process now of being killed by the internet. Payback.

Oracle 'fesses up: Java security flaws more than storm in teacup

Re: Do you want me to post

Here ya go. Lazy way out but still. This is an incomplete list obviously as it only covers two products but its still pretty impressive.

http://www.cvedetails.com/vulnerability-list/vendor_id-53/product_id-497/Adobe-Acrobat-Reader.html

http://www.cvedetails.com/vulnerability-list/vendor_id-53/product_id-6761/Adobe-Flash-Player.html

Re: somewhere

And the joke falls flat because saying companies x security practice sucks is much different than saying all developers of a product are idiots. Do you really want me to post all the drive by critical CVEs found in Adobe's products even in the last year? Pretty significant list and these days is even longer than Microsoft's which is bad when they make the OS and the good portion of the software on most desktops.

somewhere

Adobe has to be breathing a slight sigh of relief. There for awhile it was looking like they were the undisputed pariah of basic security best practices but now they have some serious competition.

Re: Java

Don't get me wrong I am no fan of managed code (and neither is Microsoft based on their strategy going forward) but slagging off on all Java devs is bad form even for a troll.

How to destroy a brand-new Samsung laptop: Boot Linux on it

Re: @peter storm

Agree pretty much about French cars but I did rent Peugeots off and on while working in Europe and thought not impressive weren't as junky as I was expecting.

Web smut sites are SAFER than search engines, declares Cisco

wow

I must be getting old I remember when Cisco gear was peerless and when they said something it mattered. Wow that had to be during the Clinton era at least. Now when I see Cisco my mind translates it to Linksys and I laugh.

"I've been virus clean for 5 years - I recommend AdBlock to everyone"

can also be translated as I run some crap 3rd world free antivirus program that doesn't find crap and I think I'm safe.

Researchers break records with MILLION-CORE calculation

Re: The future of home computing

There is a reason why weather forecasting is one of the first practical studies that led to much of the discovery of chaos theory. You change one variable slightly in weather models and you find totally different results 5 days later. Basically the same concept behind cryptographic hash functions where changing a single input bit causes the output to totally change.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Norton_Lorenz

My top tip for Microsoft: Stop charging for Windows Phone 8

Re: How to Compete with Free

Show me any product Microsoft has been able to compete with anyone successfully besides PC software? Don't say the Xbox because the division last I saw still hasn't broken even cash wise if you count the original Xbox as well.

Re: Plus, Android phone manufacturers

Love how you immediately assume I am a freetard defending Google. Anybody with eyes and half a brain could tell the only reason the software patent system hadn't broken down long ago was due to the big boys having a cross license truce for the most part. That all changed once Apple decided it could go nuclear on everyone else and the result is that the system has started breaking down in a hurry. The last thing most judges want to do is pick winners and losers in the marketplace. Its going to become obvious that the current system is impeding innovation to even the politicians. Yes they won't do the right thing and eliminate being able to patent math (what software is) but they will change the game some. Who it is most likely to effect is companies like Intellectual Vultures who make nothing and just leech off others. Microsoft is obviously not in this camp as they still derive the majority of their income from real software. That patent cash you are talking about is still largely chump change compared to say Office revenue. I am just saying if you are counting on that patent revenue to be able to replace Microsoft's software sales long term you are making a fool's bet. Microsoft won't survive as major player long term unless people start buying their software on mobile platforms as well.

Re: Plus, Android phone manufacturers

What you seem to not realize is the whole house of cards software patent scam in the US is starting to collapse. The system is not stable, the courts realize it (clogged up having to decide life and death of companies and markets), the tech companies realize it (market share won in court not in marketplace), even the patent office realizes it (desperately hoping outsiders helps them with prior art due to terrible funding). You might be fine for several years but their is some major systemic risk to companies that rely on software patents to turn profits.

Worst broadband notspots in the UK named and shamed

Re: High Speed

Would say might be because the guberment has more buddies in the rail industry but considering BT is basically an arm of the UK government that can't be the case.

waving the US flag

For the US supposedly being a backwater country when it comes to the internet pretty happy with my 15 to 20 mbps dl and 10 to 15mbps upload on cable. Am in the middle of a major metro area but still in the middle of a western desert though. For the most part the cable companies are pure monopoly evil in the US but being the only viable option for internet you deal with the devil (luckily have directv for tv itself).