Posts by Renato

NO MORE ALL CAPS and other pleasures of Visual Studio 14

Re: D(HE)LL?

You can run your web service with an embedded webserver (the console window you were seeing) for development and running on Mono or as an IIS application like it was done since ever.

Microsoft's new CEO: The technology isn't his problem

Re: Consumer Company?

> I know a few which are much better.

For instance...?

Having worked on projects ranging from embedded to web, in different languages (C, C++, C#, Python, Lua, Bash shell scripts, a bit of Java, etc), I find Visual Studio better than the competitors.

If you are talking about editors, yes, VS is not a general purpose editor, there are betters out there, but IDEs?

Why Microsoft absolutely DOESN'T need its own Steve Jobs

Re: A fine line between Vision and Arrogance

Alt-F4 always closed programs. Ctrl-F4 closes windows.

Microsoft watches iPads flood into world's offices: Right, remote desktop clients. It's time

Terminal Services still run in Windows Server, so using the Metro interface makes some sense. It would be better if it was an optional feature installed only with TS, though.

Microsoft buys Nokia's mobile business

Re: Commitment. NOT.

Except that Microsoft didn't buy the patents. They're still Nokia's. MS just licenced them for 10 years.

Microsoft unveils Windows 8 'release preview' for June

Re: It's so clearly a turd - Windows for control freaks?

> The "desktop" is dying, your job is changing. Learn how or move back to marketing.

The cloud is very beautiful, is changing the game, etc. But they forgot the people who will make the actual software.

I don't care if users can only use one 'app' a time, or the tablet interface. But I do care if I can't use a dual headed setup, overlapped windows, etc.

Users might like it, but developers don't seem to like Windows 8's interface. See Visual Studio: still using toolbars, while all other MS software uses the ribbon.

Chrome beats IE market share for one day

Re: No no no!!!

I did open that link you posted, and I agree with you that only one stats service saying something is not statistically relevant, but you asked for the argument and I took the bait :)

So, let's the debate continue.

> If you're using Tor and have not configured your browser to not give away any personal information it's kind of silly no?

Yes, very silly indeed.

> So now with India employing a national firewall do you not suspect, almost beyond a doubt, a large chunk of India and China, two of the largest countries in the world by population are using Tor or some form of anonymity services so the can even access any website on that top list let alone anonymously?

I doubt the fact that the general population know about Tor and other services, and they know the risks if caught using those services. People in IT? Maybe.

> Heard of taringa.net?

Nope, and I'm a South American. Maybe that's because I speak Portuguese, not Spanish. People here use Facebook to waste their time.

> 4Shared et al do not feature on the radar down here.

That's interesting. On this side of the Tordesillas line it's very popular for downloading MP3 files, allegedly.

> Now, can you tell me you don't work for StatsCounter to alleviate my fears? I find it strange one would jump to the defence on a solitary stats result, especially if one was from an IT background.

No, I don't work for them, and today was a slow day at the lab I work.

Re: No no no!!!

> Tor not revealing browsers

Yes, it does. Unless you use a privacy-conscious proxy such as Privoxy and configure it to do this.

> most of Asia using Tor

Doubt it. Show some proof, please. Some behind the Great Firewall of China, yes, but hardly "most of Asia".

> don't even get me started on South America

What about South America?

> So how many South Americans and Asians do you think use StatCounter clients websites?

According to this list, 4shared.com is the most visited website which is a StatCounter customer. And I believe many South Americans and Asians use 4shared in a regular basis.

> Can you counter-argue one point I've made?

Yes. Done.

Nokia readying Win8 tablet for 2012 release?

Re: Not so daft

> Due to WOA restrictions it will only use those ARM SOCs which have been identified as supported by MS (I think only 3 such)

I believe MS only supports those SoCs yet because they made the drivers for them, maybe in partnership with the SoC manufacturer. A bit like how Windows 2000/XP supported Intel's chipsets out of box.

It might work like that:

Chinese OEM wants to build cheap tablet, gets off-the-shelf hardware with builtin drivers for its SoC.

Finnish OEM wants to build expensive tablet, develops custom hardware and drivers for its board.

Raspberry Pi signs big-name sellers

RS & Farnell

Bad news for me :(

Unfortunately Farnell has a local distributor in Brazil, so I expect no availability on a reasonable timeframe, high prices and OK shipping cost.

RS has no boards available on its Finnish/international distributor (whose website is up and running), but there is no information about shipping and probably they would ship by courier only, which means outrageous shipping cost + heavy customs duty.

iPad 3 chip leak squeaks dual-core tweaks

Re: Re: Cores

Ok, if the issue is RAM, why my ol' single core 800MHz Pentium 3 with 384MB 133MHz SDRAM could handle a similar load you are describing here without a sweat?

Remote Desktop, web browsing, playing MP3 (and even XviD) etc. worked flawlessly on a single core with a crappy onboard SiS video card (or what they thought they could sell as a video card), rendering at 1024x768, as it were the top resolution my CRT monitor could work. Nowadays we offload a smaller resolution GUI and h264 video decoding to the GPU.

The only reason you need a faster CPU, for a similar load you are describing, than the ol'P3 of the day is if your platform is very bloated.

And seriously, if each full-screen application you run on your operating system needs one core to barely run, it seems you have a performance bottleneck created by the bad design of your operating system shell, as Android is not an operating system. Just a (badly designed) shell. Remembers me of Windows ME, because back in the real Linux days which my ol' trusty P3 ran, we had real operating systems.

Cores

Interestingly enough, all the droidtards with dual core Androids that play around with my single core Lumia 800 say just one thing: "It's fast".

It seems Android is so crap that it needs hardware specs similar to the server I'm currently logged in. Next year, dual CPU quad-core smartphones with 16GB RAM and 2TB storage.

Apple (and MS) don't need hardware similar to Android phones/tablets, their software are more optimized than Google's.

Well, let the downvotes commence!

What's in the box, Windows sysadmin?

I use...

...Microsoft's own Diagnostics and Recovery Toolset (DART) live CD. Unfortunately available only on MSDN/TechNet/enterprisey contracts.

Windows Phone 8 to get NFC, HD and Skype

Windows 7's Explorer still uses the Win32 namespaces. This might be why MS is "deprecating" the Win32 API in favour of WinRT. No more backward compatibility with Ye Olde MS-DOS, and who knows, finally WinFS?

Oh the joy of mkdir \\.\c:\users\userid\desktop\nul

Facebook post-IPO: Free not fee will make Zuck a buck

Facebook Premium Membership Plus! Apply now

I don't see how Facebook wouldn't benefit from a paid membership. Make it an exclusive club so everyone would like to pay.

Ye Bug List

Mobile version

No thread status icons (such as whether the thread is sticky, locked etc) are shown on the mobile version of the user forums.

And just now I have noticed: it isn't possible to add icons to posts using the mobile interface!

Apple, Amazon and Google take lazy punters hostage

@The BigYin

s/Windows/Android/g

s/MS/Google/g

s/UEFI/Custom signed bootloader from OEM/

Same state of affairs on Androidland, where there's Freedom(TM) and nobody is evil.

At least MS/Apple are open about being greedy corporations that are evil.

Official: The smartphones that suck much more than others

Email servers are crappy too.

My father's ISP email service only recently added support for IMAP and it doesn't support syncing the inbox for just the last 3 days. You have to sync the entire inbox. Thankfully, the WinMo client has a certain limit, and it errors/timeouts before it manages to fetch some 10GBs of email. Cue him spending his 20MB allowance for 1mbps in less than a week, then downloading emails at 64kbps.

No winner in Android v iPhone 2011 marathon

Market Share

Apple doesn't care if they don't have the biggest slice of smartphone/tablet market. They prefer to charge people 2x for their products instead of selling 2x more products. It's a simple question of economics.

As a developer, I see that Apple's customers are more willing to pay for applications, as they have more disposable income than Android users.

A simple HTML tag will crash 64-bit Windows 7

Crashed and burned

It renders as it should on Firefox 9.0, IE 9 and Opera, and gives a nice BSoD on Safari. I tested this on a Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1, with nVidia GeForce 310M.

If anyone is interested in reading a stack trace, http://pastebin.com/CvtHSt6u

Microsoft bans all plugins from touchable IE10

Flash is crap.

When you have a well behaved Flash animation, -- I mean, application -- it's ok and it won't waste a lot of resources. But you have to consider badly programmed Flash stuff: it will leak memory and waste CPU cycles doing nothing like there is no tomorrow.

Even the innocent Flash-based Gmail/Gtalk sound notification sometimes leaks more memory than Firefox.

> If you care about battery so much how about banning 3D games?

Usually when you finish playing, it stops draining battery. Flash animations (ads) usually keep playing while you're browsing and not having anything to do with the content. Remember, content over presentation.

Google plan to kill Javascript with Dart, fight off Apple

Language

Why create a new language if there are many mature languages and interpreters/VMs?

Just plug Lua or Python on a web browser already.

Google flight search engine lifts off

Flight search

I don't see how Google showing flight search results from the engine they bought can be a problem, as they don't sell the tickets.

The engine is pretty good actually, you can check it out at http://matrix.itasoftware.com

Lawyer touts new legal time-bomb for Android

Re: Meh

Google saying Android is "open" does not make it exempt from the GPL. (What "open" means for Google is open for debate)

If you know more non-GPL complaint products, feel free to contact the authors and warn them about those license infringements.

Sorry, time travelers, you’re still just fiction

Faster than C

Faster than C? Only optimized hand-crafted assembly code, shurely.

Coat...

IBM gets fat on Oracle-HP Itanium spat

@Ken Hagan

I think Microsoft went to the ARM route because Windows 8 is aimed at the consumer. But still, Windows is processor independent for some time with the NT Kernel and .NET. The NT kernel has a history of running on many architectures and there are .NET CLR ports for x86, x64, Itanium, ARM (Windows Mobile/Phone) and POWER (Xbox360).

Mind you, I'm not saying it's just a matter of recompiling their software, but it seems they want some independence from Intel after all.

Is Microsoft's Javascript chief killing his .NET creation?

Article summary

Part of .NET history since its beginning in 1994 to 2000;

Paragraph commenting about Windows 8 being able to run on ARM and on x86 with one sentence bridging eleven years of history;

Three paragraphs and a quote saying Microsoft has a JavaScript engine built by the same guys who did the .NET Framework and they are promoting their product.

Where's the El Reg tombstone icon?

Windows 8: Microsoft’s high-stakes .NET tablet gamble

Active Desktop

Oh yes! And the "tiles" are rebadged "channels"!

Who knew Windows 98 was so advanced for its time?

What next? A full blue screen saying you removed your diskett-- I mean, USB drive without ejecting it?

I'm laughing so hard here...

US state bans Netflix, Napster password sharing

@Mme.Mynkoff

Probably the OP refers to an account created just for the purpose of recovering Netflix' password...

Stolen smart-meter SIM leads to outrageous 3G bill

HTTP anyone?

If the smart meter used a (probably) off-the-shelf GPRS/3G modem, (probably) the meter uses off-the-shelf hardware too. I'd bet it also uploads power usage through the old and good unencrypted HTTP.

Icon says the rest.

Tron: Legacy 3D Blu-ray disc set

The interface

For the geeks here, how the interface and some graphics were done: http://jtnimoy.net/workviewer.php?q=178

iPad maker goes Brazilian

yes, we can!

El Reg's news doesn't say, but it is on the local media down here.

"O ministro da Ciência e Tecnologia, Aloizio Mercadante, afirmou nesta terça-feira que a Apple e a Foxconn vão produzir o iPad no Brasil até o final de novembro deste ano."

http://br.reuters.com/article/topNews/idBRSPE73B0CB20110412

The Science and Technology minister, Aloizio Mercadante, said this Tuesday Apple and Foxconn will manufacture the iPad in Brazil starting the end of November this year at most.

Re: Made in Brazil

> All in the name of pushing the manufacturing cost down.

Actually, setting up and running any kind of business in Brazil is very expensive compared to China, Vietnam, etc. To compete with them, the product quality (and price) usually is higher than the cheap stuff from Asia.

Facebook HipHop serves 70% more traffic on same hardware

Re: Ok folks, once again

> A) Plain C or C++ definitely is *insecure*. More than 60% of exploits can be traced to C or C++. See StuxNet, PING of death, Morris Worm, RTF-based exploits, PDF exploits.

Nope... This is result of the programmer not doing things he/she should do (aka checking memory allocations, input data size etc). Which takes more time/expertise to do it right, which increase costs, which the boss won't like. There you go.

Mozilla to ship Firefox 4 on 22 March

Re: Memory footprint

> I've always wondered why memory footprint is such a big deal. If your PC has the spare memory, why wouldn't you want apps to make use of it?

Because I have other apps to share the limited quantity of memory I have.

Actually, I don't care too much if Firefox uses 1.5GB, but I do care if it doesn't use it accordingly (ie, leaks).

Not only memory, but CPU footprint is also a big deal. Remember folks, the OS multitasks on limited resources; you don't get a new CPU and 4GB* of RAM exclusively for your program, even if the OS makes you think so.

*x86, 32 bit, depends on OS. On Windows, 2GB for you, 2GB for the kernel.

Mozilla delivers first Firefox 4 release candidate

Roadmap

> According to Mozilla's public roadmap, Firefox 5 will offer a new account manager, a UI for "simple sharing", UI animation, and support for 64-bit Windows. Plans for Firefox 6 include a faster cache, support for Mac OS X 10.7, JavaScript optimizations, and a move towards "open web applications".

Instead of account manager, UI animation, and "web applications", they should focus on performance, performance and performance. Firefox 3 is bloated, 4 have lots of crap (shiny, nonetheless). Firefox 5 & 6 will be pure shiny crap.

Until there is a new browser supporting the number of extensions Firefox supports, we'll have to put up with this shit.

Facebook to share home addresses, phone numbers

Re: uh oh...

Plenty of companies have my address, phone, credit card # and other confidential data. But I expect those companies to treat my data confidentially, not happy to sell to the highest bidder. Which is not the case of Facebook et al.

And who gives away real addresses on the internet except when buying something you expect to receive by mail, anyway?

Oracle: 'Eight Android files are decompiled Oracle code'

Re: @LINE FOR LINE?

If you read the text right above the Android code, you will see it wasn't stripped of its comments.

And a non-commented piece of code with such variables as s, set, flag etc on a function declaration is a good indication of decompilated code.

FOSS maven says $29 'Freedom Box' will kill Facebook

Project Cauã

This "Freedom Box" remembers me of maddog's Project Cauã <http://www.projectcaua.org/>.

HP cans WebOS 2 updates for older Palms

Re: When open source is not really open source

Even x86 is not as open as it seems. It is "open" when you use the standard firmware called BIOS/EFI, which allows you to boot any operating system compatible with that standard.

But it is entirely possible to switch the firmware from BIOS to an in-house one. No BIOS, no "open platform".

Hack reveals passwords from locked iPhones and iPads

Re: Jailbreaking is the security flaw

> The fact that the iPhone can be jail broken is the serious security flaw, on any other device it would be called an exploit.

So if I make a malicious app to do the same thing that typing in the shell does, what would you call it?

Grief and disbelief greet Elop's Nokia revolution

Re: Differentiate?

>Am I the only one that would love to buy Android on Nokia?

No, but a lot of the linuxtards here (including me) would love to buy MeeGo on Nokia.

RIP Nokia.

Google and Facebook named as Twitter suitors

Re: It's all about $/user

I don't think people would pay for Twitter or Facebook. A great number of those users are teenagers without income (or their allowance). What teenager would spend $x in Facebook instead of buying booze? :P And that's not counting they've got infinite SMS plans.

There is also the psychological factor: something that costs $0,01 is infinitely expensive compared to a free thing. This article on Wired says it well: <http://www.wired.com/techbiz/it/magazine/16-03/ff_free?currentPage=all>. And I guess El Reg also ran some article about this too.

Let's face it, those Web 2.0 Social things are useless, it's just rebadging of the ol' internet protocols on top of HTTP with a shiny coating: BBS, IRC, e-mail, instant messaging, plain and simple webhosting.

My usage of Facebook: my profile picture, some text there and that's it. Someone posts on my "wall", I get an email, I access Facebook, reply the message and close the tab.

Twitter is like a broadcast SMS, which, oh, IRC was too, but not limited to 140 chars.

Well, maybe I'm getting old.

Megaphone: GET OFF MY LAWN YOU DAMN KIDS! <mutter>

Disabled dude demands EA improves gaming access

Re: What about the device maker?

>I'm not unsympathetic to his needs, but why is this an obligation of the individual game makers instead of a hardware issue for the console and controller makers.

Perhaps because plays on a PC, which probably is because many games allow control remapping and/or the mouse is the device he learned how to use?

Android's on top – will Nokia and RIM let it in?

Re: Thought process of a Nokia Exec...

>Dropping Symbian for Android would allow Nokia to cut 60-75% of their current developers and get the company away from soup to nuts IOS development and into the core business of selling phones. Gee, what a thought!

Yes, what a dumb thought. If Nokia drops Symbian for Android, you would have fewer choices in the market and consequently fewer differentiation between brands. The ones selling cheaper hardware wins (aka not Nokia).

On the other hand, if Nokia drops Symbian for MeeGo, you would get a better Linux platform (not the half-assed Linux/Java contraption they call Android) on more phones. There's a disadvantage using MeeGo on all Nokia phones: they would need more iron to run the OS, hence increasing the price and reducing their market. Not a good strategy in the current situation.

Keeping just Symbian and not going ahead with MeeGo without fixing the horrible (for touch phones) Symbian interface is a ridiculous idea. Symbian is like Windows Mobile 6 Smartphone Edition (the one for non-touchy phones): Symbian UI was/is great for non-touchscreen phones, but terrible on touchscreen phones, and WinMo was designed for touchscreened devices back in the ol' tymes, not for things without a point-and-click/touch device.

As it was already stated here by the sane commentards, the end-user doesn't care about the underlying OS, so Nokia can use both Symbian and MeeGo as the OS for their devices with Qt being the common API that can be relied upon. ("framework" for those who need their daily buzzword fix)

PS: Seeing a Nokia device running Windows Mobil-- I mean, Windows Phone 7 would make me laugh so hard at Nokia's management...

Microsoft reinfects Chrome with closed video codec

Re: but you still have to purchase the Windows Media Player

I don't know why the freetards here are talking about purchasing IE and/or WMP.

IE, WMP, the h264 decoder, Notepad etc, etc, comes with Windows. Microsoft makes you purchase those software the same way Apple forces you to purchase Safari, QuickTime & its codecs and TextEdit with MacOS X.

If you want to licence the Windows kernel but not IE and a h264 decoder, but want a MP3 decoder, you can go ahead and licence only those components. By the way, when Windows is licenced this way it is called Windows Embedded Standard 7.

Canada? The computer vendor says no

Canada, eh?

You complain about devices not being available in Canada. The problem actually is: only a few manufacturers readily launch their products outside the US market. And when launched six months later, they sell with absurd conversion rates and taxes.

Why? That's a question all us non-USAnians would like an answer.

Home Office crime maps go to street-level detail

Re: Servers

I use Windows 2008 R2 on my personal laptop and I can assure you it runs widely-used programs without a hitch. And rare programs too.

Even Steam and other gaming platforms.

Usually what happens is that the installer check the Windows version and refuses to install, so you have to hack the installer. No big deal. That was a bigger problem on Windows 2003 which had a different kernel version from XP, but now Windows Servers use the same kernel as the Windows "Clients".

Google algorithm change squashes code geek 'webspam'

The worst

If you use Google in a language other than English you can see many Wikipedia clones that grab the Wikipedia EN article and Babelfishes it. It is very annoying.

With net unplugged, Egypt cracks down on journos

Viva la revolución

>What happened in Egypt is a clear picture of what can happen. The government gives the order, routers get updated, and AS systems drop off.

>This is why there needs to be a open market, with lots of competition. Not the same top 3 or 4 companies running things.

Even with lots of competition, if the guv sez to null route the country, all the companies must comply. Specially if Mr. Abdul CEO of Pyramids Small ISP Inc. wants his head on its proper place.

The top tiers companies could opt to disobey the law. But I would not expect the traffic flowing for long. There are easier ways to cut off the network from the disobeying ISP, ie cut the fibre-optic line, terminate the telco's licence and seize their property, etc, etc.

There is the need of a truly independent peer-to-peer/mesh network with encryption and plausible deniability as its core values.