Posts by Tom

Microsoft's R&D chief: the people problem with innovation

Cloud computing is easy in theory

its near impossible when you have a major player ignoring all common standards and the patenting everything in sight in a desperate attempt to own everything rather than actually implement.

FAST fingers another Cardiff biz over software compliance

Microsoft are promoting Linux?

“help educate ‘Corporate UK’ as part of our remit to aid businesses in getting the maximum cost effectiveness out their software.”

Linux-Lego man trumpets OSH revolution

@Allan Dyer

The one thats been overriden by the 230V one last year?

I think I'll patent that one - all in the name of progress!

FoxIT update defends against PDF peril

How about formatting for

my computer screen? Or better still a small part of it!* Then I wouldnt have to bloat my computer with Pointless Document Format and have to print all that trash** that comes in a PDF document that I cant read on screen - only to find its mostly useless anyway.

*nothing more fun than having to print out the 'how do do the paperless office' instructions cos you can use them alongside the IDE cos they are formatted for paper.

** contents and indexes that are almost never linked to the document, and talk about pages that bear no relation to the real page number

PDF - a bit like the red flag of office software to slow your computer down but a different colour to be 'innovative'.

Swedish police claim massive anti-piracy bust

@Paul

How much money do think these suits have taken from the real artists? I gave up going to the cinema, and buying records when the cost rocketed and the quality went down.

A recording artist may be lucky enough to get perhaps 7 or 8 pence from a 99p download.

Now if that artist was allowed to sell at a reasonable price (cost + a profit margin) they would sell orders of magnitude more copies. But they're not allowed to - the industries get in the way. The internet WILL be the salvation of the artists - once the parasitic suits have been left by the wayside. So the suits are, like, really really bad man.

We live in age of industrial luddites just trying to save their antiquated ways of making a living.

eBay scammers work unpatched weaknesses in Firefox, IE

So whats happening here?

Its not a problem with browsers but FF people are trying to provide a solution and MS are applying the SEP field to it?

Did TomTom test Microsoft's Linux patent lock-down?

Having read the patents

the scariest thing is that anyone would think they were technological innovations.

If they are I've three intergalactic matter transporters in my garden shed and my youngest daughter is riding round the living room on a little one with three wheels!

@bias

Then to be fair everyone anywhere who makes flash/ssd devices and sells them preintalled with FAT/LFN would have to pay MS something - or would you be happy to see every one of these devices come unformatted?

OH! And then they'd charge TomTom for some pathetic patent they have on 'how computers might possibly talk to each other for the first time in decades now that MS has patented the Bleeding Obvious again"

Israelis develop 'safe' plutonium: good for power, bad for weapons

please take one of our power stations

so when you wind us up/we need to expand we can blow it up and poison you.

The only safe nuclear power is stelar.

Three months on, you still can't get off the DNA database

its not a political decision

its technical

it will take another 20 years for the goverment IT suppliers to step from 'insert into bank_account;'

to 'delete from ... where...;

Cmon give them a break - these guys arnt programmers they're lawyers and managers. Cant expect results FFS, just invoices.

Brit nuke subs exposed on Google Earth

oooh I'm so scared

just think - someone could drop a nuclear bomb there and cause about 0.001% of the damage that one banker and a bunch of politicians could.

I'd run away but I cant afford the trainers...

Microsoft trades goodwill for TomTom Linux satisfaction

They konw they are going to loose - this must be to scare others

These are 'software patents - after Bilski they will be thrown out. The only thing they can be hoping for is that they scare enough customers to buy from them to cover the cost of the failing law suit.

Works for the mafia, but failing for the RIAA

Dominican lad suffers six-day stiffy

6 days?

My woman wouldnt get out of bed for that!

The Meta Cloud - Flying data centers enter fourth dimension

The IT revolution has ended...

The CPU is the engine of the IT revolution.

We stick it in a car when we should stick it in a plane.

Currently we pay different chaufers to drive us down different types of road to destinations decided by the chaufers cos we cant be bothered to to learn to drive or map read.

All the chaufers know where the cash machine is tho.

Now the chaufers want us to stay at home and just let us take money out of our accounts electronically while telling us we've just paid for a nice new car.

Me? I took flying lessons years ago and now happily spend my life flying around doing what pigeons do best!

I've taken a few people flying but they keep all their information in big heavy leather bound documents that they have trouble getting on the plane - their chaufers dont seem to want to help.

Hacker pokes new hole in secure sockets layer

Let me get this straight

"Sadly, the Tor users entered passwords even though the addresses in their address bars didn't display the crucial "https."

But if you were running https to Tor they'd be able to read them anyway!

US Navy orders new electric hyper-kill railgun

Mach 5!

Wow that means you can be on target and still have a huge amount of collateral damage.

Hang on though - isnt this comparable to the superguns that Mr Hussein was meant to be making - only they were a lot cheaper so perhaps the war wasnt about oil after all...

Boffins ponder Geordies' lack of winter clothing

Its not an immunity to the cold

its more of 'I've left me wallet at home - see'. Or not drinking sub-zero fluids to avoid tasting them.

Actually when I lived up north BCH (before central heating) only sickly people wore coats.

I was happy in a t-shirt and jeans down to -5 if it wasnt precipitating. I can even keep warm now by doing physical excersise! In a couple of years the recession will have you landanars getting warm as you'll have to let your personal trainers go and carry your own bags up stairs to the gymnasium once you've driven past your house five times looking for a parking space.

Dear Obama: Please consider open-source a waste of your time

When MS goes bust

what happens - its gradually becoming apparrent to those even not in the know that MS have been winging it for years - they have to wait for the Samba project to document their inter-machine communicatione before they can get them right. They cant even write code for a standard that they spent billions creating. It wasnt maliciousness that caused them to create OOXML over ODF - they are not up to the task of writing something more complicated than space invaders game: theyve given up on flight simulator!

Even now they're offering $1/4M to someone who wrote a virus - they're obviously desperate for someone who understands how windows programming works.

Zune, rhymes with tune and thats about all. XBox - popular if you can sell it at a huge loss.

In 10 years time when they have fizzled out who will be left holding the ordure - governments who use open standards and open source and may actually utilise their data - or those that repeatedly pay those who know better to build rubbish systems to build more rubbish systems that, as they are closed source, are 'maintainable' by nobody.

Mozilla calls for 'open web' in EU Microsoft row

It's very simple Pt II

And then reset things back to YOUR chosen browser every time you do an update, and still have to use IE for things microsoft decides is going to implement in MSHTML

Its not a choice - its a hard fought for option.

Silverlight for Linux hits with Microsoft punch

@MS & Adobe get stuffed

Ere ear

The two of them joined forces to stuff javascript - and now want us to use their replacement for something we should have had anyway.

Microsoft + Adobe - both reinventing the wheel to put under your matter transporter.

Lovely

A nice new set of disc brakes for my matter transporter!

We need cheap, abundant energy. Here's how

@abigsmurf

Throw £10 million at me and within 2 years I will have:

1) 1kW wind generators for <£400 (not windmills - something to stick on your house) and assuming your house is quite small.

2) Grid connected inverters at £100 for the controller an £60 per KVA on top of that.

Thats £1million for the technical development and £9 million fending off lawsuits from people who dont own the technology but would like to scare anyone who might stop them taking your money.

Hacking the Apple TV

@Steve + Xbox

"works with Freeview if you slap a £20 PCI card in your PC"

er so why bother with spending £150 on an Xbox - even the worst monitor you can buy these days is better than the best tv screen.

I hate sitting in a room less than 30' long looking at a 48" set of pixels. I know you have to get drunk to appreciate most TV today but to have to get blind drunk to see 'through' the appalling TV's people buy!

Brits 'a bunch of yellow bastards', says irate Yank

whats all the fuss about?

Thats only a little girly gun, now if he had one like this..

Novell cutting more heads?

And their arch enemy SCO gives up at last

http://www.sco.com/partners/news/0901/200901.html

Winter 2009

Dear SCO Customers and Partners,

Blah. Blah. Blah.

Best regards,

Jeff Hunsaker

President & Chief Operating Officer

SCO Operations

Open sourcey bulletin board offline after hack attack

@Dave Wilkinson

Stage 2 and following need correcting to

2) Company sues researcher

3) Broke researcher approached by angel who will pay legal fees for peek at problem

Microsoft SKUs Windows 7 clarity

three apps at once??

windows update, the IE8 that called it and a trojan,

Thats not an operating system - thats a boot system.

As in a boot you put on a car when you want to stop it going anywhere!

BBC pumps 60 quid a head into Gaelic

At least s4c has a bit of rugby on now and then

even though the english commentary is in welsh.

Beats watching english rugby players dance badly.

Oh hang on it starts again on Saturday!

Silverlight 3 and 4 to 'open up new areas' - Microsoft

Gosh Super

So SIlverlight is going to do what Javascript would have done long ago if MS hadnt cut its head off and poohed down its neck - sorry 'joined in with the standardisation process'.

Just what I need - another way of letting lousy marketing departments say 'Hello' in two hundred meg of download and all my CPU .....

UK.gov backs ISPs on charging content providers, throttling P2P

Innovate?

How about p2p over html - oh thats not innovation thats already been done.

Or how about people sharing over bluetooth.

Or more sensibly how about kicking the parasitic music industry into touch?

We have the internet I can buy direct from the musician go away and die.

Saving ISPs and the music biz: Is it even worth it?

What service does the music industry provide?

Service: An act or a variety of work done for others, especially for pay.

I'm sorry, getting in between me and a musician and charging an absolute fortune for so you can threaten anyone who doesnt play your game is not a service, its blackmail.

Time to axe Microsoft's Zune

The point is

not to produce useful, usable software - I'd have noticed that - but to dominate the market.

What happens when the 'music industry' finally collapses due to reality and musicians sell direct?

The only way for MS to take a share of that is to try and convince people they're providing a service - something they do brilliantly compared with their software 'development'!

Microsoft's IE 8 beta adds 'special' list

@Tom Cooke

And all of these roads lead you to a bank at the end that only takes deposits for microsoft.

Microsoft axes 5,000 staff as Q2 profit dives 11%

Research and Development department

Is that left over from an aquisition?

US Army working on 'exploding marmalade' missile tech

Brute force and pig ignorance

I was under the impression that amateur rocketry had already solved this problem with PTFE/Nitrous Oxide: All the bang of a chemical booster with the control of a liquid fueled killer of the innocent.

Oh hang on there - its a 'need a specific use for something my freind has already invented' and I'm due for a big wack if I can pull it off contract.

You dont think the UK invented 'PFI for my best mate' do you?

Ubuntu's Shuttleworth praises Windows 7, welcomes fight

@Gordon

Compiting on price is probably illegal. Competing on price isnt. Lowering your price stifle competition is!

I quite like Ubuntu - like Windows its for people who dont really want to use a computer but like something on their desk/lap to make them feel important and technologically aware.

But at least with Ubuntu you can actually get to use your computer should you want to.

Conficker Autoplay ruse gets teeth into Windows 7

@Sam York

But MS dont want you to find out how to use a computer* - if you do you might just stop using theirs

* I've been on Administrator courses and that holds true with them to!

Microsoft releases Vista virtualization

@andrew - Doomed I say Doomed!

No such luck - Fistula would have to be able to access the hardware to allow it to be passed to the VM.

I'll take all they've got.

There was me thinking that Vista ran aps about 30% slower than XP - but no, if I run my apps in Vista or the virtual XP I can see that they run slightly slower on the XP version. I'll get my chequebook...

Church of Scientology seeks 'ban' against HIV+ protesters

There is a cure for scientology

Take the money out of it - those at the top and the lawyers would soon loose interest in it.

Microsoft prods and probes Office 14

Great inventions of our time

take a computer that can do 2billion calculations a second and turn it into a filing cabinet!

Office software - the red flag walking slowly in front of your computer.

MS Office - the red flag walking slowly in front of your computer and leading you to the cash machine!

RIM squashes BlackBerry PDF peril

malformed PDF?

Is there any other type of Pointless Document Format?

Brit porn filter censors 13 years of net history

Role on Web3

Web3 will be created by using Mesh networking which will totally remove the need for ISP's and make it almost impossible to block sites. If governments and self appointed censors dont want us to find things they'll just have to stop them existing!

Experts trumpet '25 most dangerous' programming errors

They missed one

#include "win32.h"

or similar

NASA warns of 'space Katrina' radiation storm

So what theyre saying

is that centralised generation is a no-no.

We can build all the nuclear power stations that industry wants for its Keynseyan boost and it will be so much wasted effort* come a solar storm whereas the 'unreliable' local renewables and associuted power stores will still be functional?

* or liability - three mile islands shows us its especially useful to have lots of power available when your nuke fails.

Apple's latest patent brilliance: the iGlove

but surely if you've got an iPod

then gloves are not really your style.....something more showily expensive and no more functional will have to be invented.

How about gloves which flash 'I've got an iPod' as you wave them about, or perhaps ones that can spot people who arent impressed by electronic personality enhancers so they can go over to them and make sure they know who the new generation of trainspotters is?

Microsoft gives XP another four months to live

Vista is a great step forward in computing.

Its taught people to do things to computers that 3 years of university IT failed to do! Thats quite impressive as an educational achievement.

Unfortunately for MS Vista has actually encouraged people to try installing another operating system on their pc!

iPlayer finally makes friendly with Mac and Linux

ta for nowt

On two of my Ubuntu machines the flash player was updated yesterday from 9 - 10 and now all flash is black and doesnt work!

Adobe brings AIR to Linux

oh goody more things not to run

Why are adobe trying to do what MS failed to do: Own the web?

Dont let them

Adobe sales are flat in tough market

thank god for flashblock

NT