Re: Windows 8 Consumer Preview is great!
LOL Indeed! Here's to the last version of Windows!
Posts by Roger Heathcote 1
54 publicly visible posts • joined 30 Jun 2009
Metro breakdown! Windows 8 UI is little gain for lots of pain
Apple MacBook Air 11in Core i5 notebook
Wednesday 21st September 2011 05:43 GMT 
2GB !!!
Regardless of the other pros and cons only including 2GB of RAM is unforgiveable in the modern world. Every other high end machine has at least 4 if not 6 or 8. No Ethernet is a big omission too, especially when Mac are so big in the AV world, I wouldn't fancy moving multiple gigabytes of audio and video files around over WiFi on a regular basis.
Microsoft fingered for Nokia's bleak future
Wednesday 8th June 2011 08:30 GMT
Well...
I think you'd be LUCKY to get ONE of those qualities from a Windows phone. I have never seen one that works well and the only people who buy them are the (bless 'em) older folks who don't know any better and get pwned by the phone shop salesmen. Nobody I know who has had one is even remotely happy with it and, having had a go on several, I can quite see why!
It's hard to know who has made the bigger mistake here, M$ or Nokia.
Intel shakes off $1bn chipset flaw
SGI plunks Windows on big Altix UV supers
Friday 4th February 2011 14:03 GMT
Bollocks
You are talking out of your arse Kebabbert.
It was SGI who had to persuade Linus and the LKML to increase the value of maxsmp (maximum number of cores) in the linux kernel to 4096 precisely so they can make machines with 256 processors. SGI make machines that can run a huge number of cores in a single system image - I have seen it with my own eyes. Owing to the changes above they can even run off the shelf linuxes with stock kernels with a single massive block of memory so you're talking utter rubbish.
That there exist some workloads in which this architecture performs no better than a clustered solution is nether here nor there. Clustering is a fundamentally different paradigm to this - you try initializing an array of a 1000 x 1000 x 1000 bytes on your cluster and see how far you get!
What we are talking about here is supercomputing and you, sir, are a numpty who needs to shut up more often in public.
Mexican woman gets litigious on Top Gear's ass
Friday 4th February 2011 13:48 GMT
Good on her...
I don't much care if she's right or not, if it increases the chances of these embarrassing middle aged babies being removed from my telly then I'm behind her 100%. Litigiousness is no worse a quality in a human being than smug chauvinism and the world would be a far better place without their painfully stilted 'ad-libs'.
Personally I'd quite like to seal Clarkeson in a lead box and shoot him into the sun but I fear that might create some sort of hideous mutant clarkeson with superpowers, a bit like in Superman 4 so I'd settle for just having him torn to pieces by wild dogs. But I digress...
The irony, Michael, is that you clearly don't understand irony yourself if you think Hammond's comments were meant in an ironic sense - funniness and acceptability aside they clearly were not.
Gates: Killing the internet is easy
Friday 4th February 2011 12:37 GMT
Naive
You think Verizon or AT&T would defy the government and take an armed stand to keep you online?
That's so far from what would actually happen it's laughable. In the real world they'd get the phone call and everyone involved would do exactly what they're told and you'd be offline in minutes.
Ubuntu Wayland: Shuttleworth's post-Mac makeover
Thursday 23rd December 2010 10:52 GMT
It isn't good...
It isn't good at all dude, I'm so with you on that one. OSX has some terrible design flaws (window resizing from bottom right hand corner anyone?) but this has to be the single most annoying one. I hope it's optional because if not It would be enough to make me switch OS again and I quite like Ubuntu.
IMHO all of them have got it wrong when it comes to GUI's anyway - they're all pretty terrible and I don't mean that from a CLI fans perspective either, the CLI is worse if anything. No, I mean modern GUI's are awful - they all presume there's one best way of doing something and then bully developers into accepting that decision. There's something deeply wrong when developers end up in charge of GUI design in their apps anyway, being a good programmer doesn't mean you're a good graphic designer.
Really the move that needs to be made is to meaningfully decouple the graphics and layout from the logic in apps so graphics and UI people can actually do the graphics and UI without having to become C coders and, gasp, maybe even the end users can customize applications layouts themselves. Of course none of the head honcho's of the desktop OSes are brave enough to spearhead such a shift and they are constantly losing ground to web apps which do follow the MVC pattern (and thus can easily adapt their interface for multiple situations and support multiple clients).
Sadly in the world of 'web apps' where an OS is just a way of booting a browser all software becomes private and proprietary again because it's on somebody else's cloud and not in your computer. Seriously people... if you like free software the desktop needs saving and it needs far more visionary thinking than were getting out of Shuttleworth, Jobs and Balmer combined :/
Thursday 23rd December 2010 10:52 GMT
The balls to be...
...different - by copying Apple? Are you kidding? People rave about Apple's GUI but I have to say it gets right on my nerves. Pretty - yes, it is pretty, I can't deny that, but functionally it's no less braindead than Windows or Ubuntu, in some senses it's worse (resizing - hello!).
There's little to no innovation here and what we'll end up with is a desktop less capable than we had before, probably with a file manager that's far less capable than nautilus. I, personally, think these changes could mark the end of my tenure with Ubuntu - let it go and be the poor mans Mac!
Exam board deletes C and PHP from CompSci A-levels
Thursday 13th May 2010 08:44 GMT
excuse me...
I think you're confusing "fudge" with stroke of bloody genius! I'm not disputing it turns some crusty old stalwarts off but they people will grow old an die eventually.
Not having to terminate every bleedin' line with a semicolon
No opening a closing brackets around everything and hence...
No arguments over how to lay your code out and
No more wasted time tracing stray & missing brackets
Sematic whitespace is a quantum leap forward in common sense and usability and I feel sorry for those poor souls who can't see that. I've programmed in all sorts of languages over the years and I have to say Python is the first one that's literally beautiful...
def sqr( x ): return x * x
Go on, make that more elegant and readable with your wrinkly old curly brackets and your wizened owd semicolons.
Thursday 13th May 2010 08:44 GMT
Splitting hairs...
And you're in danger of confusing comp.sci with soft.eng. Personally I loved programming and wanted to get into games so in retrospect I should have picked comp.sci as they got to fuse their learning with the real languages while we mostly had to tit about with the conceptual ones like ML & lisp & smalltalk etc - interesting and expansive to be sure but of little practical use to any mid 90s games companies!
Thursday 13th May 2010 08:44 GMT
Too true.
Yes ubiquity != quality, look at Windows. It kills me writing stuff in PHP that I know I can write much more elegantly and concisely in another language but sadly it's what most web hosts traditionally support and consequently what most of the large open source web based codebases are written in and what I have to interact with, that and PERL which isn't much better IMHO :(
Honestly it's a pig of a language, they've struggled to bolt on namespaces and OO features over the years but its still shows it's procedural, speedily cobbled together roots all too often.
Thursday 13th May 2010 08:34 GMT
Well...
What on earth do you think is efficient about writing your own sorting algorithms!? Other people have written plenty of well honed well considered sorting algorithms for you, all you need to know is which one to use if the standard one proves too slow...
Sorting an object by typing whatever.sort() as opposed to spending a whole afternoon debugging and testing your homebrew barely remembered un-reusable quicksort, now that's efficiency right there! Supporting features like duck typing so you don't have to rewrite your quicksort function for every different type you might ever want to use, now that's efficiency.
Personally I'd advocate a Beauty and the Beast strategy - I think Python and C (proper not #, not ++) should be the only languages in use at A level. Early exposure to (the beauty of) Python should ensure they are naturally repelled by all the other awful, backwards, compiled, non-dynamic languages out there, and that if they really need recourse to some serious low level voodoo there's really no need for anything other than C. The two play together fairly well too.
Props to them for ditching PHP BTW, I've had to write far more code in that ugly terrible language than I care to recall. You know a language is a dog when programming in Adobe Actionscript feels like taking a holiday!
Thursday 13th May 2010 08:34 GMT
Erm wait!
"Schools don't have huge IT budgets—hence the continued support for VB6, or did everyone miss that?"
Hence them using some outdated proprietary shit as opposed to a real language with a free compiler/interpreter? Or did you miss that?
I think a large part of why they use VB and Delphi is because either A) The teachers know nothing else and are to scared or lazy to change environments and course materials OR B) They don't credit their students with enough intelligence to grasp a language not inherently entombed in a point and click graphical IDE. Neither of these is a very good excuse as isn't money.
Most people here seem to be subscribers to a false dichotomy. There is no reason a language can't be both useful for teaching and useful in the real world. Find me a computing concept that can't be well demonstrated using either of Python or C or both - they are both useful real world languages no?
HTC slaps back at Apple patent slap
Thursday 13th May 2010 08:34 GMT
Hmmm...
... isn't the entire justification behind the state endorsing a monopoly on behalf of an "inventor" that it somehow works out better for the public in the end? If so, how does this endless acrimony over utterly obvious "inventions" help?
I propose a new way of quantifying "obvious" for patents. If, when presented with the "problem" an invention purports to solve a small group of perfectly average 10 year olds can come up with the same "solution" the patent is thrown out. e.g.
Problem: Users can only move one thing around on the screen at a time
Kids: Just make it so they can move more than one thing at a time
Result: Goodbye to Apple's ludicrous multitouch patent
Problem: All the bits of a car don't talk to each other
Kids: Can't you put them all on a network like phones and computers and stuff
Result: Goodbye Microsoft's staggeringly stupid in car networking patent
Scots killer posted Bebo updates from behind bars
Biz Linux needs Office license to run MS web apps
Thursday 13th May 2010 08:33 GMT
When was the last time you drafted a £35mil contract eh?...
I think you'll find all the serious consultants create their important outward facing documents in serious DTP packages like InDesign (which afford them some half decent formatting options) and send them as PDFs these days.
All this according to my consultant g/f who's just got back from an InDesign course as her company's tenders and reports (produced for considerably less than £35mil and until recently done in Word) had been deemed to have become an embarrassment when compared to all of their competitors documents.
Many high end PA jobs have Illustrator or InDesign experience as a prerequisite now, Word simply doesn't cut it at the high end of the corporate world these days.
Thursday 13th May 2010 08:33 GMT
Erm...
...you just told somebody to "grow up" and used the word "wazzocks" in the same paragraph. Really who says that? What are you, 8 years old and still living in 1982?
Oh and haha on the casual racism and fnarr fnarr Playboy references, that stuff really marks you out as a grown up who's opinion I should respect doesn't it?
Server patching principles
Fat cat fanbois' obscene dream bling
Fanboi's delight - the top ten free iPad apps
Saturday 10th April 2010 01:46 GMT 
Oh yeah?
"Either you just bought an iPad and you wallet is now depleted, you're thinking of buying one and you'd like to know how you can stuff it with apps for zero dollars, or you're simply curious about how free iPad apps compare with free iPhone apps."
Really I'm so none of those things - yawn!
BBC, big business leer creepily at orphan works
Monday 5th April 2010 19:44 GMT
ZOMG Since when did AO permit the plebs to comment on his stories?
I'm impressed Andrew (not with your writing or opinion naturally) but allowing the great unwashed to have their say is surely a great step forward. Well done.
On the stop 34 thing... meh. Their campaign against illegal use of images uses those self same images, I wonder if they have taken the trouble or cost to license them? Maybe they would argue "fair use" as it's political comment oh, but, those are political posters they are getting upset about so that would be hypocritical.
Collating orphan works in one place might make it easier for copyright holders to notice their imagery has been appropriated and reassert their rights anyway, esp if they implement something akin to tineye for searching.
If you are someone who cares deeply about your copyright I think it's quite reasonable that you a) Be very mindful of who you give master quality copies to b) Make sure you watermark any works you distribute c) Make sure you are easily contactable and include contact info in any digial files metadata. That way no one could accuse you of abandoning anything and your stuff won't be incorporated into any such library until well after your death.
It's also always worth bearing in mind that free imagery is very useful to a society & copyright terms have already been extended IMHO beyond what is reasonable, this might go someway to redressing that. The argument that society enforces copyright to give authors an incentive to create new work doesn't hold much water when you consider it is applied up to 9 decades after they are dead. I personally don't rate Orwells post 1950 output.
As for organizations like the beeb being in favour of this let's not forget businesses are probably the most vital component of modern society - bad things happen when things go badly for them as we have seen of late - so I'm quite happy for them to gain some advantage from otherwise dormant orphan works. I'm against much of the DE bill but this part would benefit business, enrich society and by putting their works back into circulation might even reconnect derelict rights holders with their works and thereby enable them to profit from them.
Big Blue boffins hatch dirt-cheap solar cells
Saturday 13th February 2010 06:38 GMT
Pure FUD
Clearly you are out of touch with this area as you are spewing FUD everywhere. Lifespan for domestic solar cells is a good 40 years. The FIT (feed in tarriff) subsidy, starting this year means every kWp you generate and use will also earn you ~35p subsidy. There has never been a better time to put solar in and on places, counting in the generous subsidies available most systems will have paid for them selves themselves in 10 years or so, leaving the owner with 30 years of free energy.
The FIT rate diminishes year on year but you keep the subsidy rate you start on so anyone thinking about it shouldn't procrastinate. Many companies offer leasing deals if you don't want to part with several grand up front.
The current nuclear station designs are a dangerous anachronism and, when factoring in decomissioning costs, very bloody expensive too. Until the nuclear industry pulls its finger out and starts proposing and building safer, cleaner, cleverer reactors (such as Liquid Fluoride Thorium reactors) they don't deserve any more investment. I mean, solar panels may contain a few heavy metals but at least they don't make frikken plutonium!
Near-ready Firefox 3.6 gets second RC sausage
Monday 18th January 2010 15:34 GMT
Well Duh...
"FFers are F'd off." - Are they? Or is it just the small handful who are bothered to write anyrthing here are the small few who have a problem? I run firefox with a couple of plugins on a single core P4 and it''s fine. It takes a few seconds to start up first time but I'm not going to switch to Chrome just to save that 10 seconds a day!
"Surprisingly also increasingly using IE8 whilst wearing a condom (sandboxie flavour). Much faster and stable than FF. Just wish there were more add-ons for it."
Your copy of firefox is slow and unstable. You have lots of add ons for it. IE is faster and more stable. You don't have many add ons for it. Do you see any pattern there? There used to be a lot more "add ons" for Internet Explorer, although microsoft prefered the term "Active X controls", you don't see them much any more coz they were a bad idea badly executed.
"I didn't imagine this happening but are we witnessing the slow death of FF because young developers want to get high on new features rather than fixing boring bugs?"
You're talking out your arse now. Did you read the article at all? Over 70 bugs fixed. 3.5 is much faster and more reliable than 3.1, I see no reason to expect 3.6 won't be an improvement too. Those of you with CPU constantly pegged at 100%, get rid of some of your shitty plugins (flash is almost always the culprit here) or buy a decent computer - your experience is not in line with the rest of the world.
Facebookers made into fans of Berlsuconi in post-attack row
Facebook chief explains bear photo bareness
ID card minister forgets ID card
Dell tech flashes woman with (her own) jubblies
Monday 14th December 2009 14:50 GMT
You would have to be MAD...
... to trust your data to any of the big companies and chain stores. I used to think my local computer shops looked a little shady but that was until I found out how the big boys work behind the scenes!
The geek squad in the states (can't speak for them here but I can't see why they would operate any differently) take boxes in over the counter and if it's anything software related they hook it up their intranet and it is "fixed" remotely by employees of these anonymous digital sweatshops. Corruption happens when there's opportunity and motive and this kind of outsourcing provides both in spades.
I mean really, people go to outfits like Dell and PC World over local shops / technicians because they feel they can trust the brand. It's a serious betrayal of trust when those self same outfits then make the entire contents of their customers hard drives (you all know how much personal stuff is on there!) available to unaccountable underpaid foreign sweatshop employees.
That this guy thought he could get away with such flagrant abuse (which he may well have done!) is a fair indicator that others blessed with a fraction more forethought and subtlety are probably siphoning off gigabytes of unsuspecting customers login credentials, credit card details, blackmail material and personal photos every day and maybe doing even worse e.g. installing cam trojans on your kids PCs.
Seriously, shop local dudes & don't let your friends/family use these services!
US and Russia begin cyberwar limitation talks
Monday 14th December 2009 14:15 GMT 
Unenforceable?
Good luck enforcing this. Surely most if not all 'cyberwar' is vigilantism carried out by private citizens who simply want an excuse to go haxxoring? As the article states, it's hard, nay impossible, to find or prove state involvement in any major 'cyberwar' incident to date.
I wonder what this is really about *dons tin foil hat*
Hackers declare war on international forensics tool
Monday 14th December 2009 14:13 GMT
Live response
I see much outdated thinking and misinfo here. Clearly people here aren't listening to the Cyberspeak forensics podcast!
Since bitlocker and truecrypt became widespread and various linux distros started offering easy encryption at install time the focus of digital forensics has shifted to "Live Response" i.e. imaging memory.
If they can get to your computer while it's turned on they can image your memory. MAC, Linux, Solaris, Anything. USB ports or not. There are commercially available devices that let them power your PC while they unscrew your wall sockets, snip the power cables and then transport the whole kit and kaboodle back to HQ where they can image your memory straight from the chips.
If you're up to no good and they get to your PC with the power on it's game over.
As long as le fuzz document exactly what they do and use well documented tools they argue live response does not jeopardize the forensic soundness of the results and the courts seem to agree.
Of course there's umpteen ingenious ways you could booby trap your PC so as to cut the power if you were "raided". That in itself might look pretty suspicious but it may be worth it if you have a lot to hide, or you're just a stubborn bastard!
DVLA data powers likely to be abused by foreign officials
Microsoft urges Flash makers to pay fat dollar for exFAT format
Monday 14th December 2009 11:52 GMT
@Michelle Knight
ZFS is WAAAAAY too heavy for use in low powered consumer electronics. It would be serious overkill and given the hasty and sloppy code we have come to expect from the worlds many no-name OEMs the complexity of implementation would almost guarantee serious bugs, and you don't want serious bugs in your filesystem! A different format would be good but it shouldn't be this.
Of course MS would never permit this so we're stuck with it but, thinking more obliquely, How about a $300,000 fundraiser for kernel.org ???
Roger Heathcote.
Service cracks wireless passwords from the cloud
Spook firm readies Virgin Media filesharing probes
Tuesday 8th December 2009 10:21 GMT
@ "perhaps somone can write a quick hash equaliser"
No, they really can't, that's exactly the point of good hashing functions.
Even MD5, which is considered broken and deprecated by most, takes a hideous amount of processing power to find collisions for. If they're using exact hashing at all (which I can find no mention of) they'll be using standard issue SHA128 or SHA256 for which there are no known vulnerabilities.
Roger
Mozilla kicks rebel coders to kerb with Firefox 3.6 'lockdown'
Dirty, dirty PCs: The X-rated picture guide
Wednesday 18th November 2009 20:40 GMT
@amos
Actually it's quite plausible. It's a Dell machine GX1 ~ GX110 and the cover comes off the chassis with the press of two little plastic buttons (gotta love Dell cases!). There's a CD drive there so it's not like they had a blanking plate to prise out and shove stuff through. The only way they could have gotten anything in there is to take the whole lid off so there's no reason they couldn't have dropped a mouse in before popping it back on, would take <10 seconds.
Roger
Mandy declares 'three strikes' war on illegal file sharers
Lobbyists urge FCC to loosen up
Friday 11th September 2009 20:00 GMT
It may be...
...more competetive, but that's not to be confused with better. After living in the states for all of last year I can tell you now their telecoms providers are AWFUL. Mobile phones are more expensive, with worse range AND you even have to pay to receive INCOMING calls! Cable TV and broadband are also more expensive, the suppliers do their best to con you and avoid mentioning the real price of anything and there are dozens of regional monopolies like Time Warner's cable monopoly in New York - You think BT are bad you ought to try these muppets with their Nominal 10 meg connection that is actually about 100k most of the time! Coupled with all that, the people providing telephone support, while very personable and well spoken are thick as pig shit on the whole and you can spend even longer on the phone to them trying to sort out trivial matters than you would in Blighty on line to bangalore.
I for one don't want more competition and less regulation if that's where it ends up! No doubt Ofcom are rubbish but that is an argument to replace them with better regulators not abandon all notion of regulation. Markets require a bit of regulation to offset the information gap and fight the robber barons who naturally thrive in such situations - I've seen it in America and it's a bloody mess!
New IIS attacks (greatly) expand number of vulnerable servers
Firefox to warn users of insecure Adobe Flash
Sunday 6th September 2009 05:46 GMT
@A J Stiles
>What's *really* needed (short of a simple ban on closed-source software) is for someone to >sponsor an Open Source equivalent of the Flash player.
There is one but it's crap. Adobe made the spec open several years back but there's been little will to make a good open source version, I'm guessing because the normal version is free (as in beer) and that's all most people care about.
Microsoft pimps bogus Windows 7 'launch parties'
Sunday 6th September 2009 05:02 GMT
@Will 22
>90% market share, bitches! You not liking it won't change it.
Err, any you are catching the shine off that how? Were you involved in the design somehow? This is just a guess, but you support Manchester United too don't you? Anyway, you're not at an American frat party here 'bitch', curb your vitriol, grow up and get over your inferiority complex, it's unbecoming.
Boffins: Give up on CO2 cuts, only geoengineering can work
Microsoft at a loss in Word patent case?
Friday 14th August 2009 00:10 GMT
OFFS!
"custom XML" covers the ability to "define your data using XML Schema syntax, and then you can use that data in your Office documents."
And they were granted a patent for that !?!?!?
Surely the whole point of XML is to enable free data interchange between vendors.
It's a good job Basic's out of copyright otherwise we'd have a rash of these parasitic trolls trying to patent FOR loops and GOTO commands...
10 PRINT "FAIL"
20 GOTO 10
Microsoft secures web Office XML patent
Monday 10th August 2009 09:56 GMT
WHAT!?!?!?!?
From the patent docs...
"The present invention is directed at providing a word-processing document in a native XML file format that may be understood by an application that understands XML, or to enable another application or service to create a rich document in XML so that the word-processing application can open it as if it was one of its own documents. "
THEN WHY ARE YOU F*****G PATENTING IT!?
Patenting a format intended to aid interoperability LMFAO! Hands up who thinks the patent world isn't wildly out of control. Oh no-one? Honestly, does anyone at the patent office even read the applications anymore?
Opera chief: history will silence Unite doubters
Monday 10th August 2009 08:30 GMT
Water water everywhere
"We're starting to see servers in various components, like routers and photo frames. But it's not co-ordinated. It's not working," von Tetzchner continued.
Erm, well in a sense he's right... http://www.blackhat.com/presentations/bh-usa-09/BOJINOV/BHUSA09-Bojinov-EmbeddedMgmt-PAPER.pdf
Sony's Windows 7 virtualization switch-off (partly) reversed
Friday 7th August 2009 09:37 GMT
How many times do I have to tell people...
...not to buy Sony products because they are overpriced and often terminally crippled. I had hoped they'd turned a corner after taking on Tim Schaaff and lightening up ove DRM in SonicStage but alas here's another return to form. Looks like I need to add another paragraph to the Sony section of my 'avoid like the plague' page! http://www.technicalbloke.com/NOTrecommended.php
Pah!
Murdoch says Page 3 won't be free from next year
Friday 7th August 2009 09:14 GMT 
State monopoly...
>I don't think it is good for the country to have just a couple of major outlets in the form of a News International/BBC duopoly. However, that is the way we are heading.
>The most likely outcome though is that professional journalism will die off along with the papers, and we will be left in a world where the only news is that produced by state organisations (e.g. BBC) or published in press releases.
I might agree this were a bad thing if the entire output of the other channels wasn't utter utter dreck AND if the BBC cost as much as SKY for worse content. It is however significantly better and far cheaper... They provide 10 ad-free TV channels, 50 ad-free radio stations and almost everything they do is available to download for free for Mac, Windows AND Linux. 50p per household per day isn't a lot of money for that quantity and quality of service, even if you rarely use it.
The papers can go screw themselves, most of them are painfully inane anyway. The days of any of newspapers paying for serious investigative journalism are pretty much over. Modern newspaper writers tend to be no better than bloggers themselves, merely commenting on whatever's on the AP wire or the Beeb without adding anything of value. The papers are growingly reliant on hiring celebrities as columnists rather than journalists because they don't want to pay real journalists to do real journalism and anyone can mouth off... hence we have papers stuffed full of banal, moronic editorial content from the likes of Boris Johnson and Jeremy Clarkeson. I can live without that.
Roger Heathcote.
P.S. Monty Python, Black Adder, Fawlty Towers, Dad's army, Only Fools and Horses, Dragons Den, The Apprentice etc etc etc...
Biting the hand that feeds IT
