Posts by tiggertaebo 87 publicly visible posts • joined 8 May 2009
I hate them too... In fact I hate them so much that a few years back when developing a desktop application that carried out some fairly extensive file and database operations I spent considerable time writing a detailed and accurate progress bar for it. Unfortunately this resulted in the operation taking an order of magnitude longer to run! So I dumped it and replaced it with a simple "working" message and went home a much more cynical coder :D
Well, he sort of said sorry and that's better than silence or blaming the user (anyone remember Antenna-gate on the iPhone 4?). Mainly though he was just slagging off the guy who did the code. Fair enough the guy made an error and he's taken that point without whinging about it. Funnily enough he's the one who comes off looking classier IMO.
The more of these rants I see from Torvalds the more surprised I am that more Kernel devs don't just tell him to shove his little hobby up his arse.
I generally think that people's private opinion's and actions shouldn't be used against them in a work context - but in this case they weren't even close to private really and when the "public face" of a company commits public acts of douchebaggery you can't expect it not to have an impact on the company. And like it or not they either need to drop him like a hot potato or accept that people will consider NOT doing so to be the company tacitly condoning his behavior and some of those people will choose not to do business with them. And really it's worth saying that IMO it's not his politics per se that are the big problem rather it's the way he went about it.
I'd already concluded that Oculus weren't likely to be getting any of my money anyway after they sold out to Facebook and while I bore no ill will towards them for that (after all $2bn is a lot of money - I'd probably have done the same and I loathe Facebook and I'm about half convinced that Zuckerberg is sustained by consuming the souls of small children and cute puppies) but this leaves a really nasty stink.
"Imagine if you had the same argument for entrances to shops. Marks and Spencers don't need a ramp because disabled people should be shopping in Primark?
Totally different point there. Your argument is a legal requirement, the other is the whim of a manufacturer in a competitive market."
And the reason why it's a legal requirement? Because leaving it up to "the whim of a retailer in a competitive market" (to paraphrase) could lead to people like the author being excluded from shops that didn't want to spend the time/money/effort to make their premises accessible to people with restricted mobility. Obviously you can't feasibly make all products and services accessible to all but IMHO all reasonable efforts should be made, and while in the majority of cases the extra custom from mobility impaired customers won't come anywhere near paying for the cost of the adaptions that doesn't make it acceptable and that's where the laws come in.
I'm not necessarily saying there should be a law in this case but leaving this, relatively simple feature out is pretty poor form for Apple and it's absolutely right for people like the author to highlight that. Saying she should "just use Android" instead is pretty weak really.
Daring to speak the slightest ill of St. Linus or the Holy Linux Way will of course earn you downvotes (or in /. -speak "how does Satya's cock taste you M$-shilling douchemonkey?!?!?"), but that doesn't make you wrong. The whole approach to driver handling in Linux has never made sense to me to be honest and while I've seen musings from people much, much smarter than me on both sides of the fence I think it's safe to say that such discussions are all academic anyway since Linus will never change his approach (which it totally his prerogative since it's his train set).
As for Linus' "communication style", and the environment of the kernel development itself it's no secret that Linus isn't a "nice" guy to work with (something he freely admits) and it's always baffled me that people don't just tell him to shove his "hobby" up his arse and walk away (I know I would) but clearly there are enough people who enjoy/tolerate that sort of working environment because the project continues to thrive, which is a good thing since the computing world is almost certainly better off with Linux in it.
Would it be better if it was a friendlier community? Personally I think it would, while I'm nowhere near good enough to be writing code for a project like the Linux kernel I'm sure there are plenty of very talented devs who are but wouldn't touch that pit of toxic waste with a ten-foot barge pole. But as I said earlier the project is by-and-large thriving and no-one has a gun to their head forcing them to keep working on it.
Woke up this morning to my phone telling me updates had been installed and a few subtle things looked different. I haven't really had time to poke around it much yet but I did notice that somewhat randomly it had unpinned my "Settings" tile from my start screen and more worryingly my alarm didn't go off this morning.
One of my laptops was running Win 8.1 which I've never really got on with so installed Win 10 the day after release, so far I'd say that it's better than 8.1 and has the potential to be rather good, feels a bit Beta-ish in many ways but I have a sneaking suspicion that if they can iron out the wrinkles it could be a very good platform.
I'm on 8.0 on my Lumia 920.. sync of your data to the cloud is completely optional, random battery drainage seems to have been fixed in the "Black" update (at least for me), can't speak as to the mail situation as I've got my gmail account on there instead, my utterly ancient Skype account works fine, if you use the official "Car Mode" app it doesn't lock the phone with it active and the HERE Drive satnav kicks seven shades out of all but the most high end sat navs that I've ever used, M62 included!
Good point on the Bing button though - that is something of an annoyance!
This is pretty much bang-on IMHO, I've got two laptops at home that I use a fair bit and when the drive died in one last year I took the plunge and installed Win 8 on it rather than it's original OS of Win 7. In "under-the-hood" terms 8 is brilliant, it installed really quickly, picked up alomost all the hardware and boots and runs very quickly. TIFKAM really, really doesn't work in a traditional mouse and keyboard setup though. Give it me on something like the Surface Pro and I can imagine it being brilliant but on a laptop or desktop? No thanks.
The frustrating thing is that offering a choice of "Win 7" mode out the box would have had me giving 8 a solid thumbs up!
I use my Live Gold account far more for video/music than I do for gaming - the LoveFilm, 4oD and VIVO apps in particular. I've got a PS3 and when I've used 4oD or iPlayer on there it's been rubbish to be honest - it seems to be that they just use a lightly modified version of the web page which feels very clunky. My BD player (Sony) has Lovefilm and it's not a patch on the XBOX version - it's far,far harder to navigate. I don't have it any more but when I had a SkyPlayer subscription
The 900 looked good and I've been very impressed with the plays I've had with WP8. The only reason I didn't was because I decided to hang on a few weeks when the WP8 rumours started and then when the announcement was made and it essentially ticked all my boxes I binned the notion off. I tend to have a phone for a couple of years at a time at least so where's the sense in not waiting for WP8?
It is a little strange - not that there is anything wrong with "free software" as in Stallman's definition exactly, it's just his somewhat lunatic insistance that every developer should be FORCED to release software in this fashion that I have a problem with. To quote the man himself:
"A non-free program is a system of unjust power and shouldn't exist. The existence and use of non-free software [which] is a social problem. It's an evil. And our aim is a world without that problem.'"
If he ever achieves that aim then I'll be changing career!
I'd be suprised if there were people so desperate for the other fixes that they couldn't wait "a few days" for the next release.
the PHP guys are from from alone in making screw-ups (lets not even go there on the amount of big names who have released updates that have properly screwed things up) but let's not pretend this is anything other than a clusterfuck.
..die by the sword. Someone deleted the data that waste of oxygen Assange acquired illegally. Boo-Fucking-Hoo.
Maybe BoA did pay this guy a fee to wipe the data, maybe he just felt that he didn't want any more people becoming "collateral damage". Maybe the people who leaked the data don't fancy ending up like that idiot Manning and asked him to delete it themselves. Does it really matter?
I was pretty much intending to post almost exactly the same thing but since you covered it quite well I don't think I will - I'll just say good on that man :)
The only thing I would add is that at this stage we don't have any direct confirmation that the census hack itself has happened but the post is just as valid without it.
What suprises me about things like this is not that facebook keeps making these "mistakes" but that no-one amongst the userbase ever seems to learn the one simple rule to facebook - never give it any information or images that you wouldn't want to be made public.
Privacy settings are all well and good but they have shown time and time again that they aren't trustworthy nor constant. If people are happy to give up that information in order to get whatever percieved benefit they get from facebook then that's all well and good, if you aren't willing to make that trade then don't be on facebook. I for one have chosen not to make that particular deal and I'm not telling other people that they shouldn't - I just wish they would actually learn what it is they are doing.
"If you'd tried a "one size fits all" version of Windows you'd have had more grief than any Linux distro"
Sorry but I'm not buying that.
Over the years I've taken many different versions of Windows from 3.11 to 7 in "off the shelf" form and installed them on both generic and big-brand hardware and more often then not getting everything "just working" has been more painless then not. Conversely most of my installations of desktop flavours of Linux have been utter nightmares at getting some of the simplest things working (especially grahics and sound).
Now these are just general trends - I've had configurations that have been utter pigs to get Windows just to boot on and I've had Linux installs that practically did themselves AND made me a cup of tea, and on the whole Linux has been getting alot better (and I applaud the hard work of the people that have been making that happen) but at this point in time if I wanted to take a PC (either branded or custom build) and pick the OS I thought was going to be easiest to get up and running then it would still be Windows every time. W7 in particular makes the experience very painless IME.
(Mine's the one with the Windows 7 disc on the pocket)
I've always been against the whole Guantanamo Bay thing - it never seemed like a good idea to me on either human rights or tactial grounds but such is the power of the negative connotations that the name now holds for me that the very term "WikiLeaks" in the title meant that my first thought was just "will that twat Assange just fuck off already?"
There's not really enough info to determine if the lack of supply is deliberately engineered there is no denying that it certainly doesn't hurt Apple and the extra "hype" generated actually helps with the product's image and probably their whole brand image. If you were looking at buying a gadget and there were two different products, one that was in plentiful supply and one that was generating worldwide headlines for selling out if you knew nothing else to differentiate them then you'd probably automatically think that the sold out one must be the "better" product.
So why on earth would they spend the extra time/resources to ensure a greater stock level at launch? Generally if someone has decided they want an iPad then they aren't going to change to a competitor just because they will have to wait a day or two for their desired fondleslab so they aren't going to lose any sales and the buzz might even generate them more in the long term.
It's certainly not the first Apple device to get a little too toasty but given the number of iPhone 4 handsets sold so far one bursting into flames is little more than a statistical footnote. If it starts happening more frequently then it'll be a big deal but at the moment I'd suggest it's the least of their problems!
Flames because.. what else? :)
I don't think anyone can really dispute that the iPhone platform (and there for development for it) is Apple's ball and they can damn well take it home anytime they like. Those that bang on about rights and freedoms that Apple "owes" them are generally children and the deluded.
However much like the actual balls the saying comes from - if you "take it home" too often then sooner or later you run out of people that want to play with you.
iPhone app development is a good way of making some money right now - the market is strong and barriers to entry are not insurtmountable. Anyone who relies on it totally is an idiot though, Apple can (and has shown that it will) move the goalposts at a drop of a hat so it's no good these people throwing their arms up in the air in shock and horror when they do. To paraphrase a certain popular show involving unfeasibly hot robots "All of this has happened before and all of this will happen again"
Maybe someone should remind apple that just because they design everything in california doesn't mean their products aren't going to be used by people in more rainy climates.
Also you have to love the irony of a product with LCI's that can (allegedly) be triggered by sweat given that "sweatshops" are (allegedly) where apple's products are made :)
Sounds like a serious amount of scaremongering going on here. So essentially its fumes from things like diesel engines (already fairly toxic) interacting with smoke residue left behind on fabrics to produce other toxic fumes. They talk about how it can persist in fabrics for days etc etc.. given how (in the UK at least) people are having to smoke outside anyway the only fabrics affected will be clothes, which get washed alot. Somehow I think they are somewhat overstating the risk here.
Do these experts wear tinfoil headgear? Can they occasionally be heard muttering about the sinister actions of "The Man"? Oh and I'm sure they all drive Priuses as well :D
I've gone into great detail on this on other outlets and frankly I can't be arsed to repeat myself. The upshot really is that Monty has no say in MySQL's future any more - he sold that right and was well compensated for it.
At best this is a sad little man who needs to learn to let go of what is no longer his and at worst it is someone with a vested interest trying to promote their own agenda while pretending that he's not. Either way I don't want to hear it.
And as for the dubious e-mailing tactics? I have two words for that... and the second is off!
Yes... because web is ALL people use mobile phones for. Riiiight.
I used an N95 for over two years and I can count the amount of times I needed or even wanted to use it for the web on one hand. The iPhone is easily the best mobile browsing device even when you take into account it's woeful lack of flash nothing I've used has beaten it. And if that's the functionality you are looking for then I'd generally recommend it. The N97mini I have now however is certainly more than capable for the minimal web work I need to do on it and for calling/texting people and for taking general snaps it kicks the living shit out of any iPhone I've ever used.
El Reg aren't exactly baying for Apple's blood here... they are just reporting the issue. Just because Apple don't like talking about it when they have problems doesn't mean that no-one else is allowed to!
Somehow I think that if this was Dell or HP you wouldnt have batted an eyelid at it being reported.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
