Posts by Magnus_Pym

Who are the biggest electric car liars - the BBC, or Tesla Motors?

Horses for courses

To test the practicality of the new BMW M3 I drove it across my local swimming baths. The journey from one side to the other was slowed somewhat by the need to repeatedly crane the vehicle out of the water and dry it out. The crane hire and the cost of first removing then replacing the roof of the swimming baths added £250,000 to the journey costs. I could easily swim across the width of the bath in a fraction of the time it took in the BMW and for a much lower cost proving once and for all that BMW M3 is not a practical vehicle.

Just for the hard of thinking: a hell of a lot of people commute by car and have a drive/garage. A product doesn't have to fulfil all needs of all people to be useful and a niche market is still a market.

Palin's email snooper sent to prison

Eh!

I think the problem was the perceived quality of her reading from the autoque not the reading per se. Also thanks for including me in your aside but I'm not sure I do 'know what the UK is'. Can you please tell me.

Also when push comes to shove some people will use their own reading of a hypothetical situation to back up a weak argument.

I can't believe...

You are comparing the Nazi party to the Tea Party ...

... the Nazi party to the Nationalist facing Tea party ...

... The National Tea party ...

... Nats Tea Party in America.

I'm mean they are not remotely alike.

It's because of Steeleye Span

"All around my hat I will wear a green ribbon for one year and a day"

Thunderstorms found to squirt antimatter into space

Ball Lightning

I wonder if this goes some way to explaining ball light. A lot of scientist don't believe it exists and those that do come up with explanations which look a lot like:

Storm -> ? -> Ball Lightning

But, well, if there is antimatter hanging around anything is possible.

Steve Ballmer at 11: A Microsoft power play too far?

Internal vs External, People vs Products

I agree. I think this phrase sums up a lot of what is wrong at Microsoft.

"and prevent Azure from cannibalizing the licensing business of products like SQL and Windows Server."

It shows that everybody is worried about their own little bit of the kingdom. They work very hard at protecting what they see as their turf. They are so busy looking inwards at who is jostling them for position in the court of king Ballmer that they don't notice kingdom is under attack from outside and is losing territory on all fronts. The enemy at the gates. (see the accidental pun there) but no-one is looking.

Microsoft to hire 4,000 in UK

Clarify?

A Microsoft spokeswoman attempted to clarify Frazer's statement, telling ZDNet UK that "4,000 full-time jobs will be created by Microsoft through apprenticeships, which will result in full-time paid employment in a new job, and through the [Microsoft] BizSpark scheme, which helps software start-ups succeed."

So 'x' apprenticeships and 'y' people starting their own businesses where x+y = 4000. Good news but I bet x is much smaller than y.

Oracle's Sword of Damocles forces open source fork rename

Cost money though

Why should they bother to pay lawyers to fight litigious Larry when they can have a new name for free (virtually)

Top CEOs agree: US is down the crapper

Free market in education?

Any technology based country needs technologists and currently the US is not producing enough.

The free market in education leads to universities offering courses that attract high fee paying students. This skews the system towards privileged but dumb over the poor but bright. It also pushes courses for the rich and rapacious over the gifted but disaffected. In other words it pumps out sports scientists and lawyers instead of pure science graduates and engineers. If you give people free choice they will choose the glamour or the easy option especially if the doting parents are paying.

Throwing out trite 'sound bites' does not make you sound informed. Your feeble attempts at political argument only go to prove what the article is saying.

If you open source an old market, are you doomed to fail?

Eadon - I agree (in a way)

The article appears to be answering the wrong question: How can an open source operation grow to be as big as the current proprietary tech giants?

or maybe (reading between the lines) how can I become the next Bill Gates?

or perhaps more accurately: How can I work like stink on something I hate for a short time then sit back and watch my Lear Jet fund grow.

The real point is there are people with other goals.

US woman @theashes gives in to Twitter, flies to Sydney

Can't you read?

It's a combination of baseball and chess. I guess it's like these this crowd of people who try to eat and/or drink themselves to death while some guys play with a bat and ball in a field... ...only there's loads of time where nothing is happening.

Novell's Microsoft patent sale referred to regulators

I'll give you bloody title young lady!

If Microsoft went alone then Apple and Oracle may get caught in the up-coming blanket lawsuit. Apple and Oracle have the money to fight.

lawsuit != valid patent

As I understand it if you are accused of patent infringement you must defend yourself or pay up. You do not have to actually have to be found guilty you just have to be not found innocent.

A 'big guy' patent owning company can get fees by simply threatening a law suit knowing that the 'little guy' cannot afford the defence. In this case you would be going up against at very big guy indeed So big that the three lead companies could probably buy America (If China was willing to sell) if they wanted. Who could stand the kind of legal blitzkrieg that they could unleash? The cabal just need to find one trivial but wide ranging patent that will stick and use it to extort a tiny fee form all those that can pay and 'hey presto, all those that cannot pay cannot even give their products away. Death of FOSS R.I.P, job done.

Note: If they had one of these 'golden bullet patents' already they would have used it, Microsoft tried FAT but it didn't have the legs so they buy whatever they can find in search of one.

Scary. No?

Coca-Cola fizzes over pornforacoke.com

I think they've had too much...

...they seem to be splashing it everywhere. That's going be a devil of a job to get out of the upholstery.

Microsoft has shifted 1.5 million Windows phones

I heard about...

..a friend of a friend who was given an iPhone and as soon as he switched it on his head exploded. When he was buried a good witch put a Nokia N8 in the coffin and a beautiful tree grew from his grave. A single apple was borne on it's slender branches. When a beautiful maiden plucked the fruit it was magically transformed into the guy, reborn. She was princess and she immediately married him and he became the king and lived happily ever after and his Nokia always brought him and his family good luck (as well as free sat nav).

Microsoft ARMs Windows for iPad assault (allegedly)

So, a punter buys a windows tablet...

... or net book and he notices that his colleague has one the same that doesn't seem to need charging up every five minutes and starts up twice as quickly. His colleague says 'oh yes well I ditched windows and put [insert your favourite OS here] on it and it's much better. Exit one Windows licence. Next year, when tablet2 comes out and is the next 'must have' our hero doesn't even bother looking at the Windows version.

Microsoft knows that exposing users to the competition is the beginning of the end for their easy profits. That's why they where so down on the netbook manufacturers. Maybe there isn't much drawing an average laptop/desktop user to ditch Windows. After all, the hardware has been designed to fit the Software. Intel processors and current GPU's all have some kind of Windows/ActiveX optimisation. Huge batteries and massive memory/storage is considered essential.

The RISC option for NT did not sell well received because, well, if you are the type of customer to go for the alternative hardware you know about the alternative hardware. The big draw for Windows servers where that they where cheaper and/or looked familiar not that they where better.

If they do actually produce an ARM version it will surely invite users to compare the cheaper and less resource hungry alternatives. If it is true then it is a position they have been forced into. Perhaps the netbook manufactures who stayed in the Microsoft cabal are now asking why they should stick with Microsoft when the market is getting away from them. I can't see this going well for Microsoft

English Defence League membership list stolen

What ever I say I am. That is what I am not

Democratic Republic of Germany, Democratic People's Republic of Korea, National Socialists, Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, Peoples Republic of China. Need I go on.

If a leadership feels the need to state a political or cultural belief in the title of their organisation it probably means that is what they want people to think despite the glaring inconsistencies in their actions.

FBI 'planted backdoor' in OpenBSD

If this proves to be true

Yes of course, like no-one looked closely at BSD cryptography over the years. It was never peer reviewed, No university courses used it as a teaching model and no researchers are interested in crypo at all. Not really credible.

I heard that the US and USSR tried to control each others nuclear weapons with the power of 'Psychic's' trained minds. If this proves true it could radically alter the war on terror.

Problem is it isn't true. Yes they tried and yes they failed. Yes they gave up. Isn't this the same type of story.

'Blitzer' railgun already 'tactically relevant', boasts maker

Question

"but the Blitzer's projectiles are already finned - it would be comparatively easy to make them smart, "

Is the making of smart electronics with the ability to survive the inside magnetic/electric environment easy?

Windows 7 really was some girl's idea, rules ASA

But it's true...

... Windows 7 was built from other people's ideas. As are almost all Microsoft products

Article deleted

Ass felt and rub her

Are you serious?

Anyway she should be careful as high performance two strokes often fail with worn bores and burned out exhaust ports. (sorry)

Flame throwing Apache flees Oracle's Java group

Java != money

Larry, Like a lot of entrepreneurs, looks through profit tinted spectacles. When he looks at Java there is no profit so he can't see anything. To him there is no value in Java so why does it matter if it dies. It's not worth money, it's not worth anything. That's why he can't get on with the OSS community. They point at something great like Apache and he can't see it. He does know what the f*** they're talking about.

He know he might piss off everybody and loose the market altogether BUT after the carnage he might find the gold nugget at the bottom of the heap, the few uses who cannot escape and can therefore be abused for profit.

Salesforce's Benioff: 'Ellison flunks vision test'

Damn. You got their first

Nobody wants push services. It's the web equivalent of cold calling: It's intrusive, open to abuse and allows big business a degree of control over the channel.

Sales people love it because it's intrusive, open to abuse and allows big business a degree of control over the channel.

Yes! It's the Reg Top 5 FUTURISTIC GUNS Thanksgiving Roundup!

If you like weird...

And you wouldn't be here if you didn't. You should look at the list of nazi secret weapons. They didn't have an overall authority for wepons development and this allowed 'inventors' to tout there ideas aound all the different departments of war until they found a symapthetic ear. This lead to some amazing war tech but also some amazing duds.

See Dr Zippermayer's sound cannon and the Dr Porsche's MAUS. Also they had a shoot-round-corners machine gun as mentioned earlier in the comments.

Microsoft and Attachmate were not Novell's destiny

OMG Microsoft are coming! Don't panic!

So much great software has been ruined by various CEO's panicking in the face of Microsoft 'coming for them'.

Netware could still have a niche market if they had just built the best products they could instead of trying to second guess, out think and out do the perceived Microsoft threat. NT was shite when it first came out but all they had to do was sell it on the 'common interface' FUD and wait for Netware to implode.

Android out-runs Windows Phone 7 on price comparison site

Microsoft the new IBM

Each product has to be hobbled to prevent it competing with that of another division. If Phone 7 was too good it would make Win7 starter look bad so it had to have some good stuff hacked out of it. This is exactly what IBM did in the 80's and it nearly killed them.

Indian village bans single girls from mobile use

Yes but...

...shouldn't that be 'I'd sooner kill you'?

'Phantom Ray' robot warjet to ride atop NASA shuttle-carrier 747

Name Suggestion

What about if the changed the company to 'Advanced Death Machines' and called the plane 'The Hammer of Thor'

Which is worse?

My guess is that you could deploy a couple of hundred of these things against a specific target knowing most will return. If you call in an airstrike you risk dead pilots on fox news and that is not polically expedient. Either that or artillery and which is better Autonomous slightly intelligent drones delivering a lethal payload or autonomous non intelligent artillery.

After all, sending in meatbags equipped with full human intelligence has been know to go wrong in the past so where is the downside?

Murdoch buys into education

Who would have thought?

Murdoch and education in the same news story.

Berners-Lee: Facebook 'threatens' web future

"Oh god you don't still facebook do you"

This is what facebook know will happen eventually. It's a fashion thing. The fashion will move on to the next big thing. Maybe not today or tomorrow but sometime.

They have to try to wall people in to fend off the inevitable for as long as possible.

Content 'made available' in jurisdiction where server is located

Sense at last?

I hate the way that some people seem to suggest that everything internet based is completely new and cannot be addressed by existing laws. It has been possible to carry out crime remotely over international borders since the invention of the post. Nothing is new. Surely this would be the same service if the bookies rang a Swiss phone number to get the results or had an employee post a book published in Switzerland.

Unlucky for some: Sex.com sold for $13m

What? Title? no way!

Isn't Clover owned by a a subset/superset of the owners of Escom anyway? No wonder it was quick sale.

Cyber cops crush plod-snapper site following Millbank riot

Apprenticeships.

Employers don't want to pay for apprenticeships.

They don't like investing in the future. Buy now pay later is the modern way.

They don't trust the government to prevent boom/bust.

They don't trust the apprentices not to jump ship at the first opportunity.

They don't know if the skills required now will still be relevant at the end of the training period.

They don't like to compete on service rather than price.

Because...

Dumb rich people run the country that's why. They choose who gets the top jobs.

Market forces being what they are we will have (as we had in the past) our lords and masters paying huge fees for an Oxbridge degree for their little darlings so they can follow mummy and daddy into Banking, Law and Politics. Those who can't muster the cash are kept down in their rightful place. Parents wealth becomes the arbiter of social position. The country moves from meritocracy to a feudalism.

It's not education that you pay for.

It's opportunity.

"US universities wouldn't think twice about charging $50000 per annum"

That's not the cost of the education it's the cost of joining the club. The right law degree gets you a chance at the right law firm. The right law firm gets you a change a the right career ladder. etc. ad nauseum.

How to make boots on Mars affordable - One way trips

Get off the earth is the expensive bit.

Now that projects have been cut NASA has loads of redundant stuff lying around. Transport it up to the ISS in batches and away you go. Just bolt on a rocket and start the journey. They could use the time it takes to arrive in Mars orbit to devise a landing module.

Job done.

Google: Oracle doctored that 'copied Java code'

Re...he....he...herlly?

"First, in the US you can't sue anyone over anything. It has to pass a sniff test otherwise the lawyer bringing the lawsuit can be disbarred."

That's the theory. I don't think it's working in practise though.

I know...

... it's not a very good argument. but I still think it could be read in that way.

"Does Oracle have to sue everyone at the same time? No. They can pick and choose who they want to sue and when. Suing Google first is the clear cut winner. If /when Oracle wins, they have case history to go after HTC and Motorola. And more than likely they will settle outside of a lawsuit."

Most cases are a big fish against small fry and settled out of court as this is becuase.

a) The defendant has been chosen because they are rich enough to pay royalties but not rich enough to pay legal fees.

b) it's secret. No one knows if any money actually changes hands of if it was all just to put the frighteners on everybody else.

c) It doesn't set a precedent (i.e. all the other potential infringers aren't automatically guilty and therefore must pay royalties too).

Oracle is a rich company but Google has almost no overheads and an enormous continuing revenue stream. No way is Google going to settle out of court because they know that, as you said, 'Oracle will then go after HTC and Motorola'. And all the others. Which means that these guys cannot afford to sit around and wait for the shit to hit the fan. They have to start acting now. Against Oracle - all of them.

If Google wins then it sets a different precedent - 'Don't try to sue Google' This weakens all the threats against Linux et al. including Microsoft's. These guys may have to line up against Google.

Google stalking horse?

I wonder if Google haven't deliberately set up the Android framework to break the software patents system. They could be setting a trap for Oracle and anyone else who is foolish enough to venture down this road. What they are saying here is:

'Our code is similar, so what?'

but more importantly:

'if you find us guilty all our partners are guilty (which includes almost everybody)'

'You must also sue all the open-sourcers who contributed (but only to those specific lines)

The litigant (or patent troll) can't pick and choose who to sue. If you don't sue all those who allegedly infringe you are not 'defending your patent' and the patent is void. This is not a smoke screen but a legal fog-bank that Oracle could wander into and be lost forever. Google can keep appealing on these sorts of grounds for ever. This would be very expensive for Oracle to keep in court and if they give up the patent is lost.

Falklands hero Marine: Save the Harrier, scrap the Tornado

Funnily enough...

... I can't remember a time when this wasn't the case.

Steve Jobs chucks Apple server biz from pram

ARM server

The fit between apples own ARM hardware and Xserver looks so good on paper that it must have been discussed. So either there is a very good reason for Apple not to go down that road perhaps the server market becomes too 'commodity' at that point or Steve has gone all cloudy. OR Someone told Steve about how good it would be in slightly the wrong way and Steve destroyed the whole division in a fit of pique.

Hacker unshackles Kinect from Xbox

"They spent years... "

...in making it unhackable apparently. So if they hadn't bothered they could have had this on sale for last Christmas? They could have beat Sony to the market and made a killing?

I would suggest that was probably time poorly spent.

P.S. I know the Playstation controllers aren't the same thing but it still competes for the same customers at the Christmas sell-athon.

Shut up, Spock! How Battlestar Galactica beat Trek babble

Sigh back at you...

The robots have to have the power to carry out the rules to their logical conclusion. The robots are numerous enough and identical in their thought process. A few specifcally autistic individuals is not going to do it. For one thing, humans die: robots don't. The future is not cast.

Perhaps you could use genetic engineering to create a race of strong yet literal thinking humanoids to use as slaves Oh no - it's science fiction again.

Autistic = no free will?

really?

Because...

... there is nothing to stop the same story lines being set in a different genre. An ethnic group running before an all-powerful merciless enemy is a story as old as time. Exodus for example. The actual plot points are based on contemporary political issues.

SF is fiction based on science: advances in science suggest alternative futures where current thinking may be challenged. Asimov was struck by the possibilities of willing of slaves with no free will and no wish rebel. Without the science of robots his robot series doesn't work and is therefore Science Fiction. You could argue that replacing science with magic would make a similar story. Magic has no boundaries except those stated by the author. It exists in world created especially for it. SF is bound by current scientific knowledge. If not it is fantasy.

Burglar cuffed after crime scene MySpace blunder

Toe Rag?

He didn't say he was hungry. He said he was cold. I don't know how cold it gets on Sugarloaf key this time of year but weed has always been cheaper that accommodation.

US smartphones – Once you’ve had Android there’s no going back

Hotbed of change?

all I ever hear from US commenter is complaints lack of infrastructure and poor service.

Ex-Sun boss gives Ellison open source wedgie

I disagree with everything you say...

... but can't be bothered to point out your glaring errors.

Volunteer biker gang foils Westminster CCTV car fleet

National Speed limit applies

I agree that driving too slow on a motorway is a menace as are lorries that attempt to overtake one another with a 0.01 mph speed difference. It's just a rolling road block. In general the speed limit is a good cruising speed to aim for on open roads. Speeding on Motorways makes very little difference to the total journey time. However if you attempted to drive at 60mph on the country roads round here you would be in the fields within half a mile unless your name is Colin Mcrae.

The biggest problem is that if you remove the restrictions you get more idiots not less. More idiots cause more bunching on the motorways as other drivers allow bigger margins for error when they notice an idiot approaching. More bunching means slower average speeds.