Posts by elreg subscriber

Junk your IT. Now. Before it drags you under

Is author using "anti-virus" per chance?

"Sure, it takes a few less seconds than it may have back in 1986, using Microsoft Word on the first Macintosh Plus, but where’s that thousand-fold improvement from Moore’s Law?"

Not for me.

When I upgrade my Linux system I can often feel clear speed-ups in many applications.

I've found that by far the number one cause of slowness on Windows systems is the ever growing black-list of signatures and the interception of system calls by anti-virus software to compare file contents with said signatures.

Does the author use Windows? Is he running an anti-virus too?

Shuttleworth delivers death blow in Umbongoland dispute

Re: It's a shame you two don't get along...

"Tried New Ubuntu, can't stand Unity"

Do you realize you are not *forced* to use Unity with Ubuntu?

Your choice of GUI is totally in your control.

Just 'apt-get install kde-window-manager' (or whatever window manager you prefer) on top of Ubuntu.

NetApp layoffs loom as biz 'operationalizes strategy', 'prioritizes investments'

Let's play "Buzzword Bingo"

Look it up:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buzzword_bingo

FCC bigwig grills Netflix: If internet fast lanes are so bad, why did YOU build them?

What a farce

The FCC (puppet of the Telcos) is lying.

First the telcos invent a misleading term "fast lanes" when what they impose are *slow* lanes, by throttling/QoS. Then their bought-and-paid-for FCC lobbyists, attack Netflix for paying the ISPs ransom money to ensure their users are not choked.

Netflix was *forced* to pay Chokefast to ensure its streams are not throttled *down*, not in order to provide it with "faster lanes."

I have been paying Chokefast for over 25 megabit down. Yet, before Netflix paid them the extortion money (pay us or else...) my movies were frozen multiple times during view.

With the bandwidth I pay for, I should have been able to comfortably watch about 10 movies in parallel without Netflix having to add a dime to help my poor single stream play.

Does the FCC really believe the public is going to fall for these obvious lies?

Redmond aims to outshine Eclipse with FREE Visual Studio

I'll stick with what's really free

Free as in freedom.

- Freedom to run on any platform

- Freedom to look at source code

- The FSF "4 freedoms"

etc.

C# ? because Visual Studio is now "free"?

Small print in the EULA?

Thanks, but I'll pass.

How much is Microsoft earning from its Android taxes again?

Old news, really

This is pretty old (3-4 month ago) news , including the full list of 310 asserted patents by Microsoft which many commenters seem to be oblivious of:

See:

http://www.zdnet.com/310-microsoft-patents-used-in-android-licensing-agreements-revealed-by-chinese-gov-7000030564/

and

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2014/06/chinese-govt-reveals-microsofts-secret-list-of-android-killer-patents/

As you can see from the list, almost all the patents are very generic ideas covering so much ground it is practically impossible to make a smart phone without "infringing" on some of them.

Cheers

Cash slump a Seagate problem, or a hard disk industry problem?

Desktop sales up surprisingly + possible reason

Surprisingly, desktop sales are actually UP from last year, countering the general down-trend.

I think it may have something to do with their new SSHD line ($2GB medium/fast model, $125)

I happen to be one happy customer of this particular new model. I couldn't switch to pure SSD yet because I need the much larger space at a reasonable price. Also, I used to buy from WD (longer half-life and reliability), but in the last upgrade I switched because the new SSHD was exactly what I was looking for, and no other company had anything similar (hybrid) with similar storage capacity.

Microsoft beats cloud drum as revenues remain solid but flat

milking the enterprise

Microsoft still has many years until its big cash cows are gone.

It will be a slow and dragged-out process whle the enterprise realizes that it can switch from Windows desktops to other cheaper and better alternatives. On the server side: SQL Server can be replaced by MySQL, MariaDB or Postgres; Microsoft IIS can be replaced by Apache or nginx, and so on.

The writing is on the wall. There's really no compelling reason to use most of Microsoft products save for pure inertia of the massive installed base. Indeed, almost no new, up-and-coming startup has been using Microsoft technologies. Google, Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, Github, etc. are all firmly built on free-software infrastructure which gives them a huge head-start over more traditional Fortune 500 companies.

The article doesn't mention the captive-audience increase in licensing fees that Microsoft started using to pad the results. I wonder how the results would have looked like without these price increases on the captive enterprise licences.

Microsoft's earnings down on slow Windows sales, Surface RT bust

Crucial missing data

How much of the revenue comes from "intellectual property" royalties like FAT paid by Google, Samsung, and many other victims of the Microsoft patent extortion?

Red Hat to ditch MySQL for MariaDB in RHEL 7

another one bites the dust

So what else is new?

- Oracle takes over some open source project by some acquisition

- Lawyers replace developers, threaten to sue for trademark violations etc.

- Developers run away

- Forks happen - in the case of MySQL: both MariaDB and PerconaDB

- Everyone notices that the forks are better

- Users switch to new forks - in this case notables are Wikipedia and now Red Hat

- The Oracle version, encumbered by legalese, restrictive licences, plagued with security issues, terrible package management etc. descends into total irrelevance

- Happiness ensues

I know identity of Bitcoin's SECRET mastermind, says Ted Nelson

Bitcoin? Definitely not Mochizuki

Nelson's spaculation seems superficial and totally wrong to me.

Mochizuki is 1st and foremost a matematician. His whole life work is about pure formalistic proofs of math theorems.

Bit coin inventor is mostly a computer scientist / programmer. Bitcoin is code.

Neither the math behnd bitcoin, not the code is difficult to understand. It is way below the complexity of what Mochizuki has been working on for years. It is not what motivates or interests him.

But Nelson's video is entertaining in a way. Perhaps Nelson should be an actor. He definitely seems to be enjoying it and I have to admit I enjoyed some of the drama.

St Zuck gives half a BEELLION DOLLARS in Facebook stock to charity

enough with the negativity

I'm with b166er.

Why all the negativity and cynicism in the original piece and the talkbacks?

You may think many not so cool things about him, but giving to Charity IS nice after all, so why not be a tad grateful for him thinking about those less fortunate than him?

Apple loses iPhone patent lawsuit

Mutually assured destruction is now assured

One day they (all of them) will all realize how badly broken the patent system is.

And then billions of dollars eaten by patent attorneys and patent trolls, will finally be free to be used on real products and innovation.

Schmidt 'very proud' of Google's tiny tax bill: 'It's called capitalism'

Re: OK, what's wrong with this?

Why tax corporations at all?

If corporations didn't pay taxes they wouldn't have to use tax havens, use loopholes, pay tax lawyers, spend energy on overhead.

If corporations didn't pay tax, there would have been more left for employees and shareholders.

Corporations aren't people.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/11/25/tax_and_tech_biz/

Re: VAT

Corporations are not people.

The less tax a corporation pays, the more it has for employees & shareholders.

Taking from employees and shareholders and giving to government makes sense according to who?

Before you respond, please read:

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/11/25/tax_and_tech_biz/

I was actually converted by the perfect logic of this piece.

Hackers get 10 MONTHS to pwn victims with 0-days before world+dog finds out

symantec self serving "information"

Here's the simple truth. Anti-Viruses and ever growing black-lists are an anathema to security.

Symantec's whole business model of selling subscriptions for black-lists to corporations is based on the ignorance of millions.

If you really want security, ditch your fundamentally unsecure infrastructure and black-lists. As a bonus, your computers will get much faster too. Indeed, "anti-virus" variants are the biggest viruses ever invented.

Story withdrawn

The nightmare becomes true - now your CPU comes with a built-in virus

7 billion dollars wasted by Intel for buying this "wrong way to do security" (ever growing black list instead of well defined white-list) mediocre company. But it gets much worse: now this mediocrity seems to have infected the CPU itself.

How can anyone trust their own computers when they are being controlled by an external entity that has repeatedly demonsrated it knows nothing about real security?

Thanks but no thanks. If I buy a CPU, I want it to run what I tell it to run, not what the distorted reality McAfee "cloud" with all its bugs and false-positives, tells it to.

The lunatic marketoids have taken over the asylum. White is black. Lie is truth. Is this a bad dream or what?

Symantec trims targets as subscriptions put off payday

"Anti virus" is an oximoron

AV has all the hallmarks of a virus except one: it is installed on purpose by the (misguided) user.

AV is software that:

- Comandeers full control of your computer

- Keeps updating ever-growing black-lists (the opposite of a sane "allow only what's known and kosher" security policy)

- Keeps increasing CPU usage

- Keeps taking more and more memory

- Inerjects itself into the system call path, making your programs slower, and sometimes breaks them completely (e.g. cygwin)

- phones home for regular updates

Why are people still falling for this scam?

Stats king SAS surfs the analytics wave

Just a matter of time till SAS crashes and burns.

Penguin herder got it right.

There are FOSS alternatives that are greatly superior: R and Octave (matlab clone) to name two.

Those enterprises who keep paying for the expensive annual support contracts and getting inferior software for it, are cases of plain inertia not much different than paying millions per year for Oracle databases.

The up and comers; the younger companies like Google, Facebook, Twitter, etc. don't use this expensive, proprietary and restricting stuff. They started from scratch, with the much better free options, which is part of why they are more successful.

This 2.5B behemoth is near its peak. IMHO.

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

No hope for Microsoft and it is not Ballmer's fault

The internal structure of the company is ossified. Too many layers of management, too much politics and back-stabbing.

The developers! developers! developers! developers! have gone elsewhere. They prefer more exciting platforms and frameworks to work on (mobile apps on android and iphone, open-source frameworks like Ruby-on-Rails, etc.)

The software is too bloated and complex from years of legacy-preservation and patching upon patching. At this stage the only real hope is to rewrite it from scratch.

Some of the biggest cash cows like MS-Office are being cannibalized by free alternatives (Open Office) and web apps like google docs.

The core cash cow (Windows) is being marginalized, because, let's face it, today the more relevant "OS" on the desktop or smart-phone, is made up of the network and the browser. Nobody cares what the underlying OS is. Plus, the underlying OS on the other side (the server) is mostly Linux (Google, Facebook, The Reg, etc.)

The best technical employees have long moved on. When you have 98% of the market and inferior offerings, it is very hard to grow, and when there's no growth, there's no hope for the pawns via stock options.

It is not Balmer's fault really. There's no one, not even Harry Potter who can bring about the transformation miracle after being dealt such cards. It is going to be a slow and very long decline to complete irrelevancy.

Tux because I haven't felt the need to use any of their products for 16 years now.

Fear as motivator: why Intel acquired McAfee

This has to take the second prize

Second dumbest acquisition ever (AOL Time Warner @ 164B still takes 1st prize)

Security in hardware is actually a terriffic idea:

* Add some barrier registers to allow compilers and Operating systems to protect regions by comparing address bus in real time to preset locations.

* Add two more 'privilege' levels so there's some middle-ground between kernel/root and user-space (e.g. for compilers to be able to protect writing past the end of arrays)

* Add read-only, write-only, execute-only and any combinations thereof to prevent executing in stack/heap space and the like

* generate a hardware exception when any violation of barrier/rules occurs

This all can be done in hardware, in real time, and for very little cost: all it takes is:

- Some minor architecture extensions to x86

- A few more registers, a few more comparators and some multiplexers on the core

Implementing this right should render any malware which tries to write code into data-space and then execute it - useless. There's no need to engage in the futility of updating huge signature files on a daily basis and still miss all the zero-day exploits.

But buying a mediocre Windows anti-virus company for 7.7B ?!

WTF indeed.

Microsoft clutches open source to its corporate heart

Enough talk, start the walk

Agree with @Randall.

I've lost count of Microsoft friendly declarations towards open source.

Unfortunately, Microsoft credibility in this area is well below zero.

Instead of bombastic declarations about becoming open-source friendly and "this time is different", start gaining credibility by walking the walk. Declare the FAT patents public, give MS fonts to public domain. Stop funding anti-linux proxy IP-trolls (SCO) etc. etc.

Do it for a few years, and remain consistent. Only then, the public sentiment and trust will come around, otherwise, it is a total waste of air.