Posts by Charlie Clark

Satisfy my scroll: El Reg gets claws on Windows 8.1 spring update

Re: I'll wait until Windows 9 before considering an up/down grade from win7

Vista didn't really hurt MS - they carried on selling XP and then they had massive uptake on W7 afterwards

Complete bollocks. Vista really and persistently damaged the image that Microsoft had carefully cultivated with XP (the merger of the DOS bastards and NT). It had huge hardware demands and, although intrinsically more secure, it managed to have application permissions so confusing that most people looked for the "Michael Rimmer" switch to disable it!

Vista was supposed to completely replace XP but, once PC makers found that they couldn't sell it, Microsoft extended XP's lifetime so that they could at least sell that. It put corporate customers off upgrades they might otherwise well have done and entrenched Microsoft's reputation as a purveyor of shoddy browsers with a synthetic restriction on which OSes get which browser.

Because they make so much money from Office and the volume licensing that they have the damage to the bottom line didn't show up immediately. But Vista killed Silverlight and a host of other technologies that Microsoft was hoping to force down the world's throat.

Windows 7 is a fine OS in the XP tradition - I primarily use MacOS and am not a huge fan of Windows - but everyone I know is reasonably happy with 7: it's stable, has all the apps and drivers you could ever want and you know where things are.

Windows 8 was a clownish attempt to tell the market what it wanted. It proved to be both Sinofsky's and Ballmer's (and who knows who else's?) exit pass. And it still doesn't work. Now that the PC/tablet inflexion point has been passed, Microsoft's bottom line is much more susceptible. It's managed to come up with a strategy that satisfies neither touch nor desktop users. Microsoft has massive traction in the installed base and is still managing to lose market share.

Twittapocalypse! Twitter implodes, locked out tweeps around the world

Pity it's not permanent

NFT

Blurred lines: Android e-ink mobe claims TWO-WEEK battery life

Page turning to save power

Well, maybe but primarily because it's because the media is paged anyway and useful for the TOC and index and also because the eye copes much better with page turning than it does with scrolling. We only suffer with on web browsers because too few manufacturers have got round to implementing paged media extensions and have been pissing around with things like CSS regions instead!

Re: Look to wifi and mobile data for power saving

Disabling GPS when you're not using it is another good way to save power.

Does Apple's iOS 7 make you physically SICK? Try swallowing version 7.1

CL Tools update as well

Looks like some of the "goodness" requires an update of the toolchain. Version 5.1 of "Command Line Developer Tools" has also been released.

PM Cameron leaps aboard Internet of Thingies

Re: A fridge that can order you milk when it notices you are getting low

As for asking the Germans to do the engineering, well with all the IT successes…

I dunno, we've had our fair share of expensive IT balls up here as well, you know. The motorway toll collection system has to go down as one of the most expensive failures. Course, they kept throwing money at it till it worked and then renewed the contract without putting it out to tender.

Re: Roll those eyes

Yep, just as Mr O. points out: local services stand to benefit from improvements in yields and productivity. 'bout time to when consider how extraordinarily inefficient the current internet-based purchasing model is.

New design flaw found in crypto's TLS: Pretend to be a victim online

This is why

it's good to pay for research out of the public purse.

Windows XP market share GROWS AGAIN, outstrips Win 8.1 surge

Re: Piss poor data?

Yep, but when has a Reg journo let something like facts get in the way of an eyeball-grabbing headline?

I mean, El Reg could actually run a comparison of different aggregators (Net Applications, StatCounter, Akamai, et al.) But that would be work and require thinking.

GNU security library GnuTLS fails on cert checks: Patch now

As is noted on this Hacker News thread, alternative security libraries such as OpenSSL are available and packages can be compiled against OpenSSL rather than GnuTLS. However, as a result of license incompatibilities, plenty of packages default to GnuTLS.

Of course, if the FSF could get of its high horse then we could all work together to avoid bugs like this being around for so long.

As it stands I've just updated my ports and got the new version of the library. Thanks to those who spotted, fixed it and pushed the changes to the various repositories.

Murdoch dumps Microsoft, prepares to Hangout with Google

Re: Rent a managed server ..

Inasmuch as they are effectively buying managed servers my guess is that it is not cheaper. I doubt very much whether one person can provide 24/7 support all year round. Then there are the licences and software rollout costs.

Booze and bacon sarnies: A recipe for immortality?

Re: I'm game

"Pint of stout, Sinbad, and no egg in it!"

Re: 20g of "processed meat"

Fresh meat - straight from the carcass is usually fine. And, if you can overcome your inhibitions damn tasty (the palate is hard-wired to respond positively to raw protein). There are exceptions, of course, but in general you can eat anything freshly killed.

Our propensity for cooking stuff has as much to do with using fossil fuels to do some of the work of digestion as any safety considerations. Boiling water is another matter.

Apple's Windows XP moment: OS X Snow Leopard left to DIE

Re: What are we waiting for?

It would be okay if the hardware restrictions were less draconian. I have a MacMini as a backup machine and although it's Intel (Core 2 Duo) it's not able to use anything more recent than Lion.

Snow Leopard itself was a bit of a brown bag release with the most important fixes pushed into Lion.

New radio tech could HALVE mobe operators' bandwidth needs

Re: So let me ask this then....

I too am a little sceptical of this working in the real world, or at least working well enough to be useful.

We've probably still got quite a bit more to squeeze out of compression and even finer spectrum and time slicing.

Github brews text editor for developers

Re: I'll stick with sh & vi, thank you.

The choice of editor is a very personal thing. Personally, I've never got on with vi's way of doing things but I know people who love it because of the way it works. Great if it works for you.

What this thing seems to have going for it is the ability to use the internal JS runtime for working, presumably primarily with Node.js, with Javascript. And previewing generated content. That might make debugging a little easier.

T-Mobile US: Our dump-your-network drive is doing SO WELL (PS: We lost $20m last quarter)

Numbers

Losses of less than $ 50 million a quarter? No wonder no one's really interested in buying T-Mobile. Twitter, Groupon et al are able to do much better than that!

And the ARPU is still over $ 50? I'm sure there are many telco CEOs in Europe who'd be more than happy with less than half that! Shows you just how far there is to go in the US market.

Tab for Xmas, Mr Consumer? Yes please. And Mr Busin... NOPE

It's a terrible number but, given the numbers sold in 2012, it can have some great spin put on it: something thine 1000000 % growth!

Linux-friendly Munich: Ja, we'll take open source collab cloud

Re: Lucky

There is some sweet irony in that Microsoft Germany is based closed to Munich!

Software needs meaty cores, not thin, stringy ARMs, says Intel

Re: Power law

Maybe per Watt per dollar? Intel keeps on going on about performance mainly for the reason of cost. Even Atoms and ARMs are converging around performance per Watt, you can still get an ARMful of ARMs for the price of one Atom. That means more memory, networking, etc. or even margin for the system developer.

What's up with that WhatsApp $19bn price tag? Answer: Voice calls

Re: Skype is doing thef for ages... what's new?

Technologically the WhatsApp deal is not interesting. Skype's been out there for a while, I find the voice / video in Google Hangout's very good, which has the added "bonus" of already working with WebRTC, and there are now even open source solutions out there. However, scaling VOIP up and providing a reliable service for hundreds of millions isn't for the faint-hearted. As many have pointed out: the networks can easily play nastily unless the get cut in.

The money isn't real money - it's mainly a stock deal albeit plus a handsome pay-off for the VCs. Not sure if any of them are on Facebook's board. If so there might be a conflict of interest, except you can't have one for a private company so it would be down to shareholders getting off their butts and taking action (not going to happen as presumably the big ones are in on the pay-off).

No, the deal for Facebook was always about closing down the competition: there shall be one social network and Facebook is its name. Here, money doesn't matter and costs are usually offset against tax anyway (investors will accept lower profits in exchange for higher shareprices because of the favourable treatment of capital gains) and the long term expectation that market domination will lead to monetisation. Personally, I think Rakuten's valuation of Viber was probably close to the money.

Microsoft still thinks it's going to make money from Skype/Lync in the corporate world. One of my clients is big on Microsoft but they're currently rolling out Cisco kit which links into Lync and BBM still dominates the messaging space. But, who knows? Maybe corporates will get worried about the future of BlackBerry and turn to Microsoft.

Samsung brandishes quad-core Galaxy S5, hopes nobody wants high specs

Re: Brilliant

No, Samsung is differentiating.

There is a market for whatever bling Apple produces (I don't believe anyone is buying the Iphone 5s because it's 64-bit) just as there is a market for the biggest screen around, the loudest phone or the bestest (sic) camera. The S5 is more of a gradual improvement on the S4 than anything revolutionary but comes with all kinds of goodies (waterproofing is important to a lot of people) to encourage existing S3 and S2 owners to go for it (or, presumably the mini version when it becomes available).

When it comes to 64-bit wouldn't be surprised to see Samsung and others release a phone once a 64-bit version of Android is available, but as I said above, it's hardly what the market is crying out for.

Sina rumoured to be prepping Weibo for $500m US-based IPO

$500m pah!

It ticks all the boxes: app, internet, chat, social, emerging markets, growth. Got to be valued at around $20 - $30bn and IPO accordingly!

Nokia launches Android range: X marks the growing low-cost spot

The gateway drug

And this will help them sell Windows Phone because…?

Re: Heh

I guess you must have missed that Windows Phone is at over 10% market share in a number of countries now including the UK…

No, we didn't. We called the Kantar figures bullshit at the time and IDC backed us up.

UK citizens to Microsoft: Oi. We WANT ODF as our doc standard

Re: This all boils down to:

It should actually be pretty easy for Microsoft to use ODF keep a dominant position in the market by making the best software around. OpenOffice and LibreOffice are okay for many things but I have more crashes with either of them than I ever have with MS Office.

Going ODF would mean Microsoft could drop the army of people associated with maintaining and implementing its own very unwieldy (yes, I've worked with it) standard. They've sort of shown they can do this with the more recent versions of Internet Explorer but you can just see how they still haven't understood that providing tools and services are more important than sabotaging data formats.

Collective SSL FAIL a symptom of software's cultural malaise

Re: So what's the solution?

Two wrongs don't make a right: software can always have bugs. Open source has the advantage of peer review and the chance to learn from each other's mistakes.

Apple already makes extensive use of open source software in the stack but it doesn't really embrace it. No, this doesn't mean that they should suddenly open source all their stuff immediately but that they can contribute more actively to making key libraries better for everyone. Doing this properly would mean Apple developers could spend time reinventing and retesting the wheel.

Currently, if you buy a Mac your POSIX stack will stay frozen until Apple release a new version of the OS (Apple's openssl on my machine seems to be 0.9.8y, MacPorts is on 1.0.1f). It would be a cinch for them to adopt any of the ports projects and integrate into the OS and lever their own sophisticated QA so that we all get better components.

All of this has nothing to do with a caffeine-infused development culture which I think is irrelevant here. Companies still focus on features over quality. Someone took a decision here not to implement code review, static code analysis, pen-testing, etc and all likelihood that wasn't some kid hunched over a keyboard a 3 in the morning.

Microsoft courts mobe-makers, tweaks Windows 8 for WIMPs

Race to the bottom?

Is this an admission that Microsoft has lost the high-end. high-margin game and is now preparing to slug it out with a free OS at the bottom just to get some good sales numbers? This might have been a strategy a couple of years ago before the Chinese nonames got their teeth into Android but now it feels like too little too late, especially since Google has started optimising Android for smaller machines. Though, Mr Orlowski contends that Windows Phone has always been better on shittier hardware.

Also note on the sales figures: which ones are being quoted? I thought IDC poured some pretty cold water on Windows Phones sales in 2013.

Groupon plans MORE losses next quarter: Will lob wads of cash down marketing's maw

Re: Losses why?

At first I thought you were trying to be ironic but then I realised that you really don't seems to get it. Explains some of your other posts perhaps.

Groupon's model is because its business model involves encouraging the customers of its customers to be disloyal. It's hardly surprising that this makes it hard to keep customers which means it needs continually new customers which is acquires not from the internet but from a good old-fashioned sales force. It's closer to Tupperware or Avon than it is to an internet-based service or even classic voucher services which seek to spread the cost of promotion between manufacturers and retailers. It doesn't scale well which is why its expansion has just led to higher costs. This might be okay if it had a business model that wasn't so parasitic. Other businesses with similar requirements (people on the ground) are doing better either because they cover new markets (AirBnB) or improve yields (Opentable). Maybe the "pull" approach as has legs.

Steelie Neelie 'shocked' that EU tourists turn mobes off when abroad

Calm down! calm down!

Some of the restrictions or charges have some justification: Skype uses more bandwidth than an equivalent voice call; roaming does incur some charges (billing mainly) and does require telcos in the land visited to invest in sufficient infrastructure to cope with visitors: think of popular holiday destinations - a surcharge of some kind might be reasonable.

Ten years ago both the EC and the European Parliament proposed abandoning roaming altogether but the the national governments wouldn't have it but did accept the phasing out over time that we're seeing. The telcos resistance to change and shows how important their massive short-term profits are too them. They could have killed OTT services by simply reducing prices but preferred to charge more and complain. If international calls only cost, say, 25 % more than national ones, Skype would never have had a chance. Ditto texts and WhatsApp - SMS used to be free because billing it was more expensive than the cost of transmission…

The big bang is yet to come when you get to choose your roaming partner. This will be too fiddly for most consumers but should revolutionise the whole market (both roaming and national) within a couple of years.

Re: Once again the EU makes a good call.

The media and the government need a whipping boy and the civil service and bureaucracy of the European Commission make excellent ones.

Anything that is unpopular is blamed on them, whereas anything that turns out to be popular is usually spun as hard-won by the government. Business always finds a way to defend gouging as necessary for investment (the Ryanair twat about compensation payments, the telcos about roaming, etc.) The Commission is always on the defensive in such situations and most of the "journalists" covering the issue spend more time drinking with Farage and his buddies than they do reading the, admittedly often tedious, documents related to the single market.

Now, if only the UK would get on with unbundling the UK's energy markets as the EU requires…

Re: It's not phone calls, it's data

There has been a cap of € 50 per month for roaming charges in the EU for some years now that you have to explicitly ask to be remove. So, if anyone is being hit wit hundreds then it's most likely their own fault.

IT'S ALIVE! China's Jade Rabbit rover RETURNS from the DEAD

Re: "mechanical control abnormality"

It may have had a dust up with the rogue cooker that patrols the moon…

Elitist approach still paying off for Apple in mobile market

So what does Kantar say now?

IDC says Windows Phone managed very small growth in 2013 to about 3 %. Kantar has for months been banging on about Windows Phone gaining 10 % and more in key markets. Hm, who to believe?

The daftness of the quote underlines the daftness of the conclusion: you can't have a sum of the parts being more than the whole.

Sure, Apple and Samsung are profiting most from the business but that does not mean everyone else is making a loss.

Steelie Neelie: ICANN think of more 'credible' rules for internet. (Cough *NSA* cough)

Re: Old Neelie is good for a laugh!

downvotes from those immune to truth and rational thought

Have we got ourselves a new Eadon?

Re: Excuse me but is this Torygraph?

electorate's reason for voting boils down to which pair of loons they prefer as PM and Chancellor.

The constituency system actually is not about that at all. Maybe if the rule suggested were brought back in it would mean MPs standing up more for their voters rather than their party.

That's a side issue. On democratic accountability the EC remains considerably more so than many of the appointed members of cabinet (is Warsi still in it?) and especially of th QUANGOs governments love to circumvent parliamentary accountability. Hand's length has its place, of course but since the 1980s the QUANGO has been the vehicle of choice for enforcing, or not as in the case of most of the regulators (OFGEN, OFCOM, OFGAS, …), the laws passed by parliament.

Excuse me but is this Torygraph?

unelected digital czar

What's with the sensationalism? All the members of the European Commission are bureaucrats, though they're technically more accountable than say members of the British civil service and are as elected as say the Chancellor of the Exchequer is to his position. They are chosen, albeit in a bout of severe horse-trading by the elected heads of government of the member states and approved by the elected members of the European parliament. The process is due to change for the next commission with the parliament getting more power over individual members.

Not that I'm holding out my breath for a significantly better commission. Only if we can reduce the horse-trading by having fewer ex-politicians and more proper technocrats will we really get anywhere.

But, hey, facts are boring, right?

Microsoft, Oracle name the date to consummate Azure deal

Re: "Please use us!"

Microsoft already ported their latest kernel - it runs under ARM on Windows Phone 8 and Windows RT. Simply a matter of there being market demand and Microsoft can click the compile button on the rest of the toolset for a server edition....

ROTFL If it was anything like that easy then Windows RT might have had a chance. How many apps have been ported to RT? Oh, and have they ported VBA to RT as well? What, you mean that managed code can't simply be ported to a new hardware architecture because it actually depends on machine instructions?

"Please use us!"

So, while the rest of the world is getting on discovering that they can very well do without Oracle databases, Java application servers and Microsoft operating systems, these two companies have started to notice the lack of new business. Putting stuff on a cloud isn't going to be enough: they are going to have to change their business models and lower their prices. Oh, and port their crown jewels to ARM.

Bad luck, n00bs: Mozilla to splurge ADS inside empty Firefox tiles

Copying Opera Discover?

Opera 15 (the Chrome based version) added something similar called "Discover". First thing I did was find out how to disable this "feature" which includes prefetching content which someone thinks I may be interested in.

Virgin Media's flaky broadband network turns Bolton off

The road to hell…

If you live at the end of the A666, what do you expect? ;-)

Twitter shares plummet as first-ever earnings show weak growth

Are you sure your bank or pension fund didn't lose money for you?

Asus unveils dirt-cheap Chromebox desktops with Haswell chips

XBMC runs fine on a Pi. No need for hot and hungry Intel hardware.

Indian press focuses on Satya Nadella's love of cricket

Windows 9 as the doosra release?

Mine's the one with the copy of The Cricketer in the pocket.

Life support's ABOUT to be switched off, but XP's suddenly COOL again

A simpler explanation

Net Applications numbers are based on browsers so pretty suspect in any case. However, you always see a surge in IE in January as people return to corporate environments after the holidays. I'd hazard a guess that the majority of household computers have already moved to Windows 7 not least because they don't have access to enterprise install disks.

ARM posts sterling revenue growth, but moneymen spank it anyway

Re: Laser-focused money men

The margins have always been like that, It may even be the reason so many companies do business with them. Unlike Intel who still demand absurdly large margins.

Yet another Brit mobe tower borg: Three and EE ink network-sharing deal

Not necessarily. This is simply a logical progression of consolidation of inefficient assets: vying for mast space usually serves to drive up costs. In any one notional cell there will be only one or two optimum places for towers. Cabinets, power supplies and backhaul will have to be duplicated where shared resources would technically suffice.

The next step, and in reality, this is already happening is to have the equipment manufacturers actually own and operate the sites and rent them out to operators. This is much the same model as is supposed to happen with other utilities: electricity, power, water. The key to preventing cartels is making sure that the operators of the infrastructure do not favour one party. The key to ensuring good coverage is in the terms under which the spectrum is awarded.

Anonymous means NO identifying element left behind – EU handbook

Re: "Data are anonymised ..."

Data is / data are - both are in common use and, therefore, okay and in the dictionary. Personally, I much prefer "data is" with a partial noun "bits of data" when I want to be specific as this fits the pattern of other "uncountables": milk, spaghetti.

HELLO LENOVO. Do you really, really want to make smartphones?

Re: Stock Android

Having used both I actually prefer the Samsung UI to stock Android

With you on that. The Samsung camera app is pretty impressive. Been running CyanogenMod for a couple of weeks on one my phones but will go back to a Samsung build, not least because of better battery life. But the device will stay rooted so I can get rid of the bundled stuff I don't want and that normal users are not allowed to remove.