Posts by Goat Jam 2482 publicly visible posts • joined 19 Mar 2008
At least I put my name (so to speak) to my opinions Mr AC.
The fact that I clearly dislike Microsoft does not negate my points in any way.
Dave Cutlers VMS concept was utterly destroyed by Bill Gates insistence that NT be compatible with MS-DOS. Dave Cutler is known to have been upset by this.
The fact that there is little to no separation between user space and system space in Windows is the problem, not the simple misconfiguration of ACL's.
This post;
http://forums.theregister.co.uk/post/1184513
is not anti Microsoft per se.
The registry is an abomination and the way they handle user permissions is straight out of the "Idiots Guide to OS Design", then there is the absolutely astounding way that the application of even the most seemingly insignificant patch suddenly requires a full system reboot , not to mention their propensity to virus attack (see afore mentioned user permissions idiocy) and last but not least is their insane insistence of welding an internet browser into the core OS but other than that they are way up there with the best for sure.
Or not, as the case may be.
Yes, that would be the same DoJ who suddenly decided after years of litigation that MS were not so bad after all and could be let off with a slap on the wrist.
aka "a few years of DoJ oversight"
This happened about a week after George W Bush moved in to the Oval Office, although that was entirely coincidental I'm sure.
Leaving aside the positioning of the "Eye", I have to say that this eye looks more like the sort of thing you would see in a human, and not the cold, bottomless looking black-as-night eyes I normally associate with sharks.
That one looks more like it came out of an over sized Tickle Me Elmo or something.
So, let me get this straight.
In the context of M Dell being a non-descript beige box shifter with little imagination and assuming that S Jobs had the same limited imagination as M Dell then in that scenario it would have been the right move to make.
OK, got it.
Except for the small fact that S Jobs apparently did have an imagination which then makes it a wrong move again.
"Why are Microsoft always saying "This new thing we've got coming out sometime in the future? It's really great ."
Well, that strategy worked well for them in the '80's and right through the '90's.
More recently people seem to have glommed on to the fact that the rhetoric coming out of Redmond does not often match up to the reality, so it works less and less now.
Ballmer has always been a bit behind the curve so he has yet to realise this.
P.S. What does the "windows user" icon represent?
Updates go through to 13.04 (for desktop)
That is my plan. I figure I get to keep Gnome2 for two more years which is two years for them to fix Gnome 3 and maybe make it usable.
In the meantime I will sit out all the turbulence and consider changing distro's at my leisure.
First off though, I'm considering moving my NAS/Server to FreeBSD 9 to get access to all that ZFS dedup goodness.
"Romney made a campaign stop on Thursday in Redmond to speak to Microsoft’s Political Action Committee about his plans for the government, should he make it to the White House."
Romney made a campaign stop on Thursday in Redmond to speak to Microsoft’s Political Action Committee about a campaign donation and what one would buy for them should he make it to the White House.
That is a double edged sword.
Because users fail to grasp the concept of linking they often get tripped up by send other people copies of their documents that are full of broken links.
For christ sake, users have still not come to terms with the whole ridiculous "drive letter" bullshit that MS are YET to divest themselves off.
I cannot tell you the number of times I have seen idiot users send out emails with "links" to h:\My Documents\some_file_in_comic_sans_font.docx and then wonder why nobody else can read it.
Here's a question. Does anyone here think that Microsoft will *ever* get past that drive letter idiocy?
"I honestly expected Oracle to lock it up and try to charge for it or dump it into the community's hands within a couple months of their aquisition of Sun"
If they had tried the first option it would have been a fail. If they went for the second option then they would have come out smelling of roses.
But they didn't did they?
They went for option three, act like a bunch of control freak arsewipes and try and browbeat the community into line.
Of course that strategy blew right up Larry's face which is what makes it a massive fail.
Free trade agreements are about governments not imposing tarriffs on imported goods as a method of protecting the local industry.
If you add 25% to the price of imported cars then the locally made ones will be cheaper and therefore sell more.
In theory, anyway.
What we are talking about here is international corporations hiking up their prices when selling to Australians *because*they*can*.
Then you have middleman importers who have the sole importation rights to a product range. They buy from the overseas manufacturer at already inflated prices, add a 30-40% markup of their own and then on-sell to retailers.
The retailers add their own markup and voila, your TV now costs double what they are sold for overseas.
It worked in the past because Australians had no choice but to pay the extra but these days the Internet has changed all that.
"How did they end up being such a massive force in the computer world"
They did it by forcing OEMs into paying them for every PC sold (as opposed to every copy of DOS or Windows sold) which meant that the manufacturers decided that they may as well give you a copy of the MS OS de jour with your PC anyway since they already paid for it.
Once every PC came bundled with MS OS the ignorant masses began to incorrectly conclude that MS OS came with their PC for "free".
This had the effect of turning the PC into a commodity item and caused profit margins for every hardware maker to be cut to the bone (apart from apple of course) leaving MS in position where they could charge what they like for the OS and the cost would be invisible to the preson paying it.
Other OS makers of course tried to compete but it is hard to compete with "free".
That along with MS changing their OEM license to forbid the bundling (or dual booting) of another OS alongside DOS/Windows* made it pretty much inevitable that MS would end up being a monopoly provider enabling them to act like the malignant tumor that they clearly are on the twitching corpse of the IT industry.
* See BeOS vs Microsoft. BeOS won their court case but were out of business by then
"Microsoft Windows, and the overwhelmingly positive influence it has had on the industry"
If turning users into mindless corporate drones and using its monopoly status to stifle any and every alternative is "overwhelmingly positive influence" then I have to ask;
Can I have some of what you are smoking Matt?
Maybe this time iTunes will be able to succeed at updating my phone OS.
For a year it has kept telling me that there is an update available, only to download all 666.66Mb of it and crash at the end, which then begins the download again.
Why is it not possible to pause/restart downloads in itunes? Despite there being a button that allegedly does that?
This happens on multiple machines, XP and Win7 and on multiple networks.
"Just Works" my sweaty arse.
More iTunes ranting here;
http://tuxnetworks.blogspot.com/2011/08/10-reasons-why-itunes-is-utterly-crap.html
The site does no "testing", it just matches your browser to whatever it has in its lookup table.
I browsed there in FF7 on Ubuntu and discovered this;
Does the browser benefit from Windows Operating System features that protect against arbitrary data execution? [TICK]
O'rly?
Just more MS dirty tricks and FUD, nothing to see here, move along citizen.
that people have the sense to ignore these moneygrubbing trolls.
This guy and his family/congregation are all lawyers. They don't believe any of the crap they spew.
All they do is get in the faces of emotional people (such as mourners) and try to bait them in to retaliating, hopefully violently.
When somebody does so, they instantly sue them for damages.
It is nothing but a profit seeking scam.
Indeed it was.
I was but a young whippersnapper when my school received its one and only Apple ][ computer way back in 1980 and what a time of wonder it was.
We used to book time on "the computer" in 10 minute lots, most of which were spent copying each others disks.
Apple Panic (aka Lode Runner) , Escape From Castle Wolfenstein (Ach Leiben, your caught!"), Wizardry and Blitzkreig! were favourites that I remember to this day.
I had a disk box that I built out of wood with my own hands that would hold the handful of 5.25 inch single sided floppies that I could afford to buy.
Joyous was the day when we discovered that the judicious application of a boxcutter knife enabled us to double our "storage capacity" x2 by cutting out the write enable notch allowing the flip side of the diskette to be used.
Learning how to write programs in BASIC and later 6502 "machine code".
PEEKS and POKES.
In those days computers were exciting. They were a new frontier. It was like riding a wave. With a computer *anything* was possible.
These days it is all about lock down and lock in.
Computer users are something to be controlled and harvested for personal information.
Gone are the exciting days of finding a new program and the wonder of what can be achieved.
Ditching Windows (which has long been a tool for corporates intent on user control) for the "wild west" of Linux (and the Internet) has bought some of that innocent wonder of old back but the truth be told we will never see those halcyon days again.
I'm just grateful that I had some small involvement in the wonder of those times
I pity the kids of today. Bought up on Windows and WGA not to mention iOS and the "walled garden".
The tech is much more impressive these days, but it is also much more cold and sterile.
God I feel old.
has had themselves a "Vista" moment.
This is 100% speculation, but I wouldn't be surprised to find that apple have been working on the iphone 5 for some time now but have had some technical hurdles that they have yet to overcome.
Sort of like when MS spent years working on "Longhorn" only to fail spectacularly, forcing them to push out a cobbled together mashup of Server2K3 and XP and call it Vista.
Actually, it's probably a bit different in this case. I fully expect apple to eventually iron out the problems and launch the iphone 5, unlike MS who simply ditched almost everything about longhorn that was supposed to make it great in the first place.
TheY are nothing but parasites that feed on the rotting carcass of what could have been a great civilisation.
These people are second only to market day traders in the completely worthless money grubber stakes.
It does not take much scrutiny of their profession to come to the conclusion that they are the equivalent of the pre-Renaissance Catholic Church.
They operate in an arcane world which we are told cannot be understood by mere mortals who have not been inducted into their ranks.
They wrap themselves in ceremonial robes and wigs and confer upon themselves impressive titles that are intended to convey an image of superiority over lesser men.
They infiltrate our governments and pass countless laws that are designed to do nothing but cause conflict between groups.
They sit in judgment over the common man and use their own conflicy promoting laws to simultaneously exact tribute from and maintain control over those that otherwise would be free.
Provoking conflict is not only profitable for members of the legal class but also dissuades groups that otherwise might join forces to squabble amongst themselves insteas of joining forces in order to unburden themselves from the predations of the legal class.
They have convinced the common man that their predations are a "necessary evil" and that civilisation would indeed be reduced to a state of chaos were it not for the servitude they force upon us (backed by threat of force for those that refuse to bend).
I was reading an article on Tim Cook and it caused me to wonder about how much longer SJ would be around.
I hoped it would be quite some time so It saddens me to find out only minutes later that he had passed away.
R.I.P. Steve, I doubt I will see a visionary and businessman of your caliber within what remains of my own lifetime.
<- Divine being icon for obvious reasons
"Would you like to install Google Chrome?"
"Would you like to install the Ask toolbar?"
"Would you like to install any other crap that's got nothing to do with the software you actually downloaded?"
This must be an attitude/mindset that afflicts the Windows ecosystem because the adobe stuff I've installed on my Linux boxen never ask stuff like that.
Ever.
but flame away and downvote all you like kids, it's not like we are karma whoring on slashdot after all.
"What Apple is saying is that it has a legal right to every possible consumer"
Firstly, I was replying to the author of the article who had yet another interpretation of the "facts" involved;
ie: "Apple says: 'our products are lame' "
So what you are engaging in here is what is known as a "straw man argument".
Look it up.
Clearly, apple are not saying that. The author was simply trolling and good luck to him to, it gets the page views after all and is probably the main reason I red El Reg.
But, having said that, I will address your straw man regardless.
From the perspective of apple they are saying that the Galaxy is a copy of an apple product. (considering their legal activities I think we can assume that they believe it is quite a good copy, good enough to be a threat anyway)
I think it worth pointing out that I never said I support their perspective, so all you knee jerkin' fanboys try and exercise some kind of restraint mkay?
Anyway, I think it is reasonable to infer that apple thusly believe that ;
a) Once somebody buys the (nearly as good as? Better?) Samsung "copy" that they will see no need to pay a premium for what apple considers to be the original "innovative" product that has been "illegally/unfairly" copied.
b) The user will likely invest in the android ecosystem (apps) and therefore be less inclined to move to iOS.
This is not the same as saying "Apple says: our products are lame" and it is not the same as saying "we deserve every possible customer" (that status us reserved for Microsoft)
Considering the rabid nature of the fandroids here, I think it worth repeating that I am not saying I agree with, nor in fact support, apples viewpoint/actions here.
However, not supporting them is not the same as living in a delusional state where everything fits nicely into black and white boxes either.
Nice demonstration of rabid fanboyism though, pity there is no karma here considering all the fanboy upvotes you received.
What percentage of Finnish GDP does Nokia account for?
It is basically Germany, and the Finns who are bankrolling all the EU bailouts at the moment.
So, when Elop succeeds in imploding Nokia, moving revenue to MS along with the wholesale destruction of probably the entire tech sector in Finland, with the all the job losses that entails, I wonder what macro effects that will have on the Finland economy and their ability to hemorrhage cash to the basket case economies of southern Europe?
It's funny you should say that but the last time I went to a dentist in the early nineties it was because I chipped a tooth. Three visits and several hundred later it is still chipped and I just live with it.
If I chipped a tooth again and I could choose my country then it would be Thailand without a doubt.
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