* Posts by Tom

279 publicly visible posts • joined 19 Apr 2007

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Inside USB 3.0

Tom

By the time USB 3.0 ports are to be found in netbooks, they'll be running Windows 7 anyway -NOT!

Windows 7 will not run on Netbooks - MS say Netbooks dont exist - especially the really fast ones running arm chips!

Whatever it is trying to be I'm fairly sure wireless is a much more sensible way to go - nothing new to do there - I don't want cables FULL STOP.

Hulu headed for subscription service scheme?

Tom

@REH

Micropayments? But if you had the relatively free movement of money that the internet could easily achieve -I'd gladly provide a 0.1%/1p per transaction money transfer service if the powers that currently own the money system would allow it - you'd put all those poor parasitic bankers out of business!

Like Richard Kay says people will pay for quality content. So that's my money safe in my pocket - if its anything like the music industry where you have to pay for absolute rubbish with no recourse to a refund.

Google eyeballs planted on 92% of top websites

Tom

You cant count the noscripts....

I'd say 30% of the users I know use noscript - once people realise that pages are loaded slowly because of the off site garbage that poor inept marketing people are encouraged to add to their site then they seen to take to NoScript like ducks to water.

Xandros - the Linux company that isn't

Tom

If I was microsoft

I would pay Xandros to put Linux on netbooks. When I first played with it I thought they had!

4K by 2K resolution, Ethernet-equipped HDMI 1.4 announced

Tom

30Hz

Thats not enough for a lot of people - my peripheral vision needs 70Hz+ so not there yet.

What Exchange 2007 can't do

Tom

Upgrading to 2007?

'Also upgrading to Exchange 2007 can be very expensive, requiring upgrades to server hardware and software and increased licensing costs.'

A small increase in functionality (often to be done with a couple of lines of code on an external dll) and a vast increase in cost.

MS have upgraded a small icon on your desktop, please consult MS sales about redecorating your whole house and that of any poor bugger that looks through the window...

Microsoft arms half-wit developers with PHP handgun

Tom

A bad developer always

blames his tools.

PHP has its quirks but ignorance and stupidity are not built in - as in most languages that has to be supplied by the developer.

"The great draw of PHP is that it allows less experienced programmers to solve small problems quickly, which is great for people who aren't in the business of making web applications."

Replace PHP with MS and I wouldnt argue with you.

Chrome feels the need - the need for speed

Tom

@AC -where are the complaining linux fans?

No complaints - FF3.5b2 no need for chrome or anything else that makes rusty iron look like silver.

NZ couple do bunk with £3.9m bank error

Tom

@floweracre

thanks for the tip......

Worldwide GPS may die in 2010, say US gov

Tom

The lengths Micsorsoft will go

to put TomTom out of business.....

Microsoft IIS hole fells university server

Tom

@re: I think the question

Its not 'legacy software' that wont work - just about everything that talks to it would have to be upgraded. You cant just upgrade to II7, the security wont work properly (?) without updating the domain controllers and then you'll have to upgrade the databases and ...

The cost in software licences alone would be worse than investing all the staff pensions in an Icelandic bank. Then youll have to upgrade the hardware to actually run the new versions and this would have be done in term time as paying punters will be having conferences out of term...

"Microsoft said at the time it was unaware of any in-the-wild exploits of the vulnerability."

that they havent categorically 'lah lah lah I cant hear you'-ed.

Six months on, Macs still plagued by critical Java vuln

Tom

Java is a Sun thing?

OK so you get the JRE from Apples sources but if its created by or in collaboration with Sun then perhaps the reason behind the lack of update lies outside apple. Its quite possible apple have got into MS's 'its our operating system but we dont have a clue how it works' mode (Samba had to tell them how their SMB worked) and Java is not simple so they cant work out how to mend it.

Please kill this cookie monster to save Europe's websites

Tom

@mike2R

I'm perfectly happy with some cookie stuff - it can be of use to me too you know.

But like I say - its my computer - ask me first!

Tom

You dont need cookies to track usage

google analytics might - but thats barred from most of our sites anyway so wont do you any good anyway.

Its my computer - you want to use cookies ASK ME!

Mozilla invites all comers on post-tab future

Tom

Tabs are not the problem

its the users - if you could get users to actually work 'logically' then the semantic web would be a breeze.But its not going to happen is it? Nowt wrong with tabs or icons or whatever -just peoples natural ability to piss in their own chips.

Microsoft's JavaScript strategy hurting IE 8?

Tom

Microsoft dont want Javascript to work well

If JavaScript works well people rapidly find out that you dont need the desktop as we know it.

You only need a browser and server loaded apps...

If you only need a browser you dont need 90% of MS revenue generating software...

Thats why MS joined in the JS standards process to stop it being developed.

Same goes for Adobe....

Unsafe at any speed: Memcpy() banished in Redmond

Tom

wrong thing to ban

#include win*

or its equivalent in any language until MS unequivocally states it will not try to own any of your code at a later date.

Next Ubuntu alpha reveals video change

Tom

Nasty Surprises?

What like DRM or having to upgrade my kitchen sink to the latest MS version and finding out that my latest version of office cant even read the old versions OOXML standards MS fought so hard for, or worse still I have the fastest computer I've ever bought and its slower than the 16Mhz W3.11 I had when I was in nappies?

Carter's right-hand man lays out spectrum plan

Tom

Wont be long

before someone invents some way of making that bandwidth useless by - oh I dont know making huge pdf's of small documents, or making 200Meg flash movies that say 'hello', or 20 meg images shrunk into thumbnails spacially.......

Adobe plagued by 16-month-old XSS bug

Tom

Thank heavens for FlashBlock

Not only does it save me from pointless virus brained advertising.....

Microsoft to EU: Cut me down, and Google will rule the world!

Tom

@Paul Murphy Pt II

More a case of jumping into a taxi and having MS shoot the engine - in case you somewhere and discover you never wanted to go where MS took you in the first place. They tried to own the internet, and when they couldnt they tried to make sure it was of as little use to anyone as possible.

There should only ever be one broswer homepage on startup - about:blank. You'd get annoyed if you started your car for the first time and it drove you to the manufacturers accessory showroom wouldnt you?

Tom

@Paul Murphy

'Where do you want to go today?" is a rhetorical question - I mean we wouldnt want anything nasty to happen to your data now would we?

Ofcom works out why Wi-Fi doesn't work

Tom

@Andus McCoatover

more yokels in Bournemouth than london?

Sorry mate we re-trained them all as financiers and IT support and sent them to London.

Only yokels down here now are london drug addicts on the dole.

Microsoft’s Silverlight 3 delivers decent alternative to Adobe

Tom

pardon?

'The biggest flaw in the Flash IDE is that it basically encourages bad code, you can bury code in a literally infinite number of places - external files, movie clips, timeline frames, frames within movie clips. It gets ugly very fast. Visual Studio 2008 integrates nicely with Subversion and other version-control systems so your code is organized in a logical way from the beginning, making it easier to update, maintain and share with other developers.'

Oh look I've got silverlight - I'll ignore everything MS has told me over the last 30 years and suddenly become an modern computer programmer.

The reason why we have billions of lines of badly organised code is BECAUSE MS told us that computing could be made easy and without any of the discipline that is so badly needed today.

Just because VS2008 can connect with a non-ms version control system that actually works doesnt mean people are going to do anything useful with it.

Microsoft and Linux trade patent words in Europe

Tom

Ah patents

can you imagine if lawyers had to pay everyone who established bits of case law a cut of their earnings, or if we had to pay for the act of walking from our work station to the printer to pick up a printout cos someone with enough money had patented that as a business innovation?

Its laughable I know but thats what software patents set out to do.

I bet the mafia wish they'd thought of software patents first.

Windows 7 gets built in XP mode

Tom

So what users want

is WinFS(?) and DX10. But MS wont make these available under XP which is more than capable of 'running' them. Seems a bit like having to get a new car cos the ashtrays full.

WinFS - oh goody another DB to loose data into - less people know about inner joins now than 10 years ago!

But companies dont want you playing games so theres no need for DX10 so no company with any brains is going to pay for W7 to do nothing useful for the company.

So its the end of the line for windows upgrades in business!

Pirate Bay judge and pro-copyright lobbyist accused of bias

Tom

Now let me get this straight

the judge MUST have known that this would come to light and so a misstrial would have to be called. So that must mean he, and the pro copyright parties must have expected it to fail in the long run and were hoping to gain some time.

Or perhaps they really are stupid enough to think they have a long term future.

Start-up Bee pledges 'affordable' British e-car

Tom

wahey

so with the 5k grant for an electric car and the 2k trade in on my 1992 rocket I can get an electric car for nowt!!

Oh hang on I'm 6'5" so I guess I could carry it in my pocket.....

Harvard Prof.'s hearing against RIAA can't be streamed online

Tom

Good revenue spinner

Maybe the Law has realised that it could be a good money spinner:

Charging people a fortune for lousy media and then refusing a refund on rejection is a good money spinner.

Inventing the obvious is a good money spinner - perhaps the law has realised if they copyright every development in law then anyone who benefits from a legal precedent has to pay those that set the precedent! Even allowing people to see how the law works should be charged for. I dont see why the legal business should be free of the spanners they throw in the works of every other.

Pirate Bay loses trial: defendants face prison time, hefty fines

Tom

Ok next on the list

paper and pen manufacturers!

NASA's Kepler dazzles with first pics in new-Earth hunt

Tom
Paris Hilton

Dont forget to get a

visa you damn immigrants!

Paris - perhaps she'd let anyone in.

Microsoft's online Office variant preps for business

Tom

More data encryption methods

office software - the man with the red flag walking slowly in front of your computer.

MS - reinventing the wheel to put under my matter transporter so I can wheel it into the corner when I've finished with it for the day.

Open-source iPhone plan to control your home

Tom

typical of Iphone

and mobile phone users as well.

Always in the wrong place! Now if you organised yourselves rather than phone on a whim.....

Farmers furious at EU's sheep-chip scheme

Tom

As a farmer myself

the annoying thing is you still have to fill out the sodding paperwork by hand and post it in!

Its a rule designed by the IT industry, for the IT industry by greedy f'wits.

I've tried to suggest a few standards for information interchange - but it seems if there are standards then people will use them and they cant make enough money out of backhanders or something, or it could be their IT suppliers have allergies to standards.

JavaScript battle enters final round

Tom

It makes you wonder

how these people can be in charge of anything! They publish the proposed standard in Pointless Document Format without a single hotspot(?) to jump to even the chapters in the damn thing.

Computers are too good for these people!

Gnome answers Linux critics with 'big' vision plan

Tom

Why is always 'improve the user experience'?

I'd rather improve the 'company' experience. I dont want it to be easier for employees to write a pretty document about why they cant do something, I want the path of least resistance to be the one that encourages them to actually solve the problem and not pass the buck. Three month long discussions on what colour and font to use dont put shorting options on the table.

Organise yourselves! Oh! I dont need to organise myself I've got a mobile phone and an office suite - I'll just stop the rest of the office from writing useless documents when I need help.

I go to work for companies with 100,000,000 times the computing power around when I started off and nowhere does it do anything useful. 20 years ago I could send invoices//orders etc automatically using EDI. That was seriously primitive technology. We no longer have anything as good.

Douglas Adams had it so right in 'Life, the Universe and Everything'.

iPhone VoIP tussle heats up

Tom

All we need is a bit of tunneling

I Hear U, GNU Httptunneling and a £3 headset and they'll be able to make free calls without pety restrictions* - as could you - and you can probably bluetooth from your IPhone to your laptop if you still need to pose.

* just the usual Fair Use bollix (like not actually flying the lear jet you thought you'd payed for)

Google force feeds Web 2.0 to US gov

Tom

Give them their due

Most stuff on the internet is in things like Pointless Document Format and has such a built in 'paper mentality' that its pretty unreadable on the screen.

And its only luck that means most Flash offerings contain such little data that people dont wipe out rainforests trying to print these too.

Office Software: the red flag walking slowly in front of your computer.

Shuttleworth: standards and open source against 'gross' cloud lock-in

Tom

And of course the advantage of a Cloud

is you can have an inhouse cloud, do your backups to part of a 'freinds' cloud and vice versa and have all your internal machines as part of your cloud, all users do their work in the cloud and 95% of your system admin goes out the window and no other parasite owns your data.

Has Microsoft matched Flash with Silverlight 3?

Tom

@anonymous cowards re flash versus javascript

You are aware that flash is a proprietary extension of Javascript and Adobe have kindly handed over the code to Mozilla so very soon Firefox will have the ability to run javascrript and open vector graphics etc as well as flash? go look up tamarin and tracemonkey.

And as for Flash being awsome - you may think so - I use flashblock.

Tom

Well how nice of them

Adobe and Microsoft join in with the standardisation of Javcascript and stop its development in its tracks.

Now they are both fighting over who has rights to your browser to do what Javascript would have been able to do with its eyes shut if they hadnt got 'involved'. Quell surprise!

Next time I want to turn my computer into a heap of useless junk remind me to install MS and Adobe on it.

Which desktop Linux distribution?

Tom

Just one icon

I dont want desktop anything. Just give me a browser and the tools on it to do anything from anywhere.

Microsoft kills MSN Encarta

Tom

Is this one up for Open Source

or is it a serious change of tack by MS from

developing 'future locked in revenue streams' to developing "future technology solutions."

Which would be nice!

IBM-led Open Cloud Manifesto: Who's in, who's out?

Tom

hows a company to make a living

if you use open standards - I mean the customer might go to the cheapest provider if we dont lock their data into our system. Or worse still they might read the open standards and use them themselves - then where would we be?

Madoff data can be extradited back to US

Tom

Thats nice

we send them private personal information and they send money to shoot people in NI.

Novell boss in semi-apology over Microsoft pact

Tom

All the best accessories

I've just bought the new carrera turbo with MS installed. Its got the best maintanance I can pay for. Its got the best garage I can keep it in. Its got the best interface for new fittings like expensive DRM radios and CD and video players. The windscreen wipers are the best. Its got the best filing cabinets to keep my documents in and the leather upholstry....

When it needs updating it can drive me to the bank to get a new two turbo version. Its brilliant!

So where do you want to got to today? I'll ask the computer - I cant drive, it doesnt want me to learn.

BT names first 29 exchanges for fibre rollout

Tom

I cant find in the RFC's

where it says the internet in one country should be screwed up by one monopoly supplier.

Time we all looked at getting wireless mesh working in our areas.

Then we can all get 100MB connections so pointless media companies can send us ever more impressive and contentless flash presentations!

Microsoft dumped after India PM's emails go AWOL

Tom

People are still using Outlook express?

Some of you sound shocked. Why mock those using it when MS are still pushing it?

You say Vista has fixed all the problems - India cant afford a supercomputer to run it, let alone the retraining costs and the downtime for the downgrade.

And as for the 3 months to notice something was amis I'm sure the post office infroms you when letters arnt delivered to, and G Brown must respond to you instantly.

The only mistake India made was to follow the herd and buy 'We're do you want to got today?' 'No,no not there...' MS.

Microsoft's Azure cloud suffers first crash

Tom

Find out exactly what went wrong?

You offer something this big and then you dont know why its gone tits-up?

Clueless system programming - you should patent that.

3D laser maths models of women's bodies produced

Tom

Gussetless article

I seem to remember seeing something like this on Tomorrows World.

El Reg is so last century.

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