Posts by Kubla Cant

Big biz 'struggling' to dump Windows XP

Re: Delaying the Inevitable

It may not be the inevitable that they are delaying.

If current applications continue to meet requirements, it would be bad business sense to rewrite them simply to allow an operating system upgrade. It will incur cost and risk for no other reason than to move to a Windows version that is to be imminently superseded (aka "dated and cheesy").

If business requirements have changed to the extent that applications need to be rewritten, then the cost of moving to the dated and cheesy system should be factored in as part of the cost/benefit analysis.

Good luck to Browsium. The sad thing is that Microsoft still seem to base their upward-compatibility strategy around home users who buy a new version of Windows when they buy a new box.

Twitter airport bomb joke conviction binned in common-sense WIN

Hyperactive officials and low-hanging fruit

My impression is that the threat of public sector cuts has woken many dozy bureaucrats into a frenzy of hyperactivity. They hope thereby to prove how essential they are and avoid the axe. This would be a good thing if it resulted in an increase in worthwhile activity.

Unfortunately what they do is to look for tasks that they expect to be quick and easy, without much regard for the value. What is known in mgmtspeak as "low-hanging fruit".

The Paul Chambers prosecution is an example. Expect to see many more.

Re: Frankie Boyle...

It's great that they appointed him to plan the Olympic opening ceremony. I'll be sure to watch - it should be hilarious.

Well-funded Meteor poised to impact web development

Idiot

"The challenge of writing applications that run mostly in the browser, DeBergalis says, is that the application code is running on a system that is far away from the data it needs."

No it isn't. Transport to and from from a server and processing and persisting data on the server are the easy part, relatively speaking. They're both problems for which a wide variety of solutions has been offered.

In most of the applications I've been concerned with in {mumble} years of development, the UI has consumed well over half the resources. Rich browser applications are the worst. The browser offers a rather meagre API. Javascript is a language that has just managed to get itself taken seriously by exploiting a few bizarre features, but it still isn't what you'd call industrial strength. The main selling point is that HTML+Javascript applications can be easily distributed.

Oh, and when did anyone but a rank amateur last send HTML with data?

UK Border Agency to create 'national allegations database'

Re: Really Dave

They keep trying to roll back the database state, but it's running with auto-commit on.

Windows 8 'bad' for desktop users - Gartner's one-word review

All-in-ones

I don't think all-in-ones are likely to be the rage in office environments. A few years ago I spent too much money on a big monitor for my home PC. More recently I've been working in offices where I have two, three or four small screens - the very opposite of the all-in-one. I sit here wishing I hadn't wasted money on that big screen.

You're right about laptops, though.

Google ordered to censor 'torrent', 'megaupload' and more words

Re: Obvious solution.

@Chalky White of The Mirror "a bit of a non-event if you don't like dipping bread in stinky, melted cheese"

This is a gross slur on Swiss cuisine. There is also a dish called Raclette, where you dip boiled potatoes in stinky, melted cheese.

I remember my first Raclette meal. When we finished the first plateful of melted cheese, we asked each other what the next course might be. More melted cheese. And then more.

BIG BOOBS banished from Linux kernel

Re: Doesn't this happen everywhere!?

Hungarian naming! The only one that ought to be allowed is intThisAnnoying.

If it weren't for the severity of their other crimes, Hungarian naming alone would be enough to condemn Microsoft. Especially when a lazy developer changes a parameter type without bothering to rename it.

Austrians drool over 15th-century jub buckets

Re: ... underpants "were considered a symbol of male dominance and power"

"The purpose of underpants is to support the male genitalia" - maybe, but boxer shorts are popular though they signally fail in that respect.

I have read elsewhere that underpants were almost unknown until the 18th century. The usual procedure was to tuck your shirt-tails between your legs. I assume that accounts for the old-fashioned tunic-style shirts that had a long tail at the back and front and buttons that barely reached the waist. It still sounds like a rather precarious solution.

Where there's brass, silver and gold ... there's also muck

Re: cubic litres?

How do they make the horses shit cubes?

McDonalds staff 'rough up' prof with home-made techno-spectacles

No cameras?

This is McDonalds?

On the Champs-Elysées?

And it doesn't allow customers with cameras? I should have thought nobody but tourists ever goes in there. And 90% of tourists have cameras. Come to that, 99% of mobile-phone users have cameras.

This guy must have been their first customer in months.

Re: Tourist Food

@Nev tourists turn up asking for a "Steak 'n' Chips...

It's "Steack-frites" [sic], and it's the French people's favourite meal. Nothing to do with tourists.

Parisian cuisine

I'm sure I read somewhere that France has one of the highest per-capita consumptions of McDonalds in the world. I think it's to do with the fact that a large number of French office workers have their lunches paid for, but they can't afford real food.

My experience is that as time goes by it gets harder and harder to find a decent meal in France anyway. I don't know if my standards have gone up or theirs down.

PayPal is bleeding market share and it's all eBay's fault

A couple of years ago I had occasion to buy a lot of stuff on EBay.

Once I'd spent several thousand pounds, I got a message from PayPal, not saying "You're a great customer, keep it up" or anything, but "You can't settle by credit card any more. You must give us your bank details so we can just siphon money out whenever we feel like it."

Needless to say, PayPal and EBay have seen zero business from me since then.

Cockfighting Reg hack cursed with cancer

Re: Oh, the sophistication of your whit! You have truly attained new heights of humour!

@Ben 50

The exclamation marks in your headline, and its inconsistency with the body of your comment, suggest that it is intended to be ironic.

Have you considered the possibility that there was an element of irony in the article and posts you're commenting on, or do you think you are the only person capable of irony?

Halfwit.

Web crams down 7 MEEELLION more domain names

Re: Percentages

Strictly speaking, any web site that delivers active content presumably has an indeterminate number of pages. If a site consists of one page that shows the current date and time, is that one page, or infinite pages? If that's one page, how about a page that shows a random number of "Hello world"s?

Prince Charles whips out jumbo red ball for Blighty's code-breakers

Re: Public Recognition

My impression has always been that keeping Bletchley Park secret was nothing to do with recognition for eggheads or honour for soldiers.

The ability to read your enemies' (and your friends') secret messages was a war-winning weapon in 1945 and probably still is. It doesn't diminish the Bletchley Park achievement to say that the weapon was more effective when the enemy thought it was impossible. So national security alone would have been sufficient excuse to keep the secret.

Build a bonkers hi-fi

Re: What was the point of that?

The point was that it generated 200 comments. Lots of enjoyment and/or annoyance for lots of Reg readers.

To misquote an unusually percipient comment by Bill Gates: "Measuring a Reg article by the amount of research it took is like measuring aircraft building progress by weight."

Separate power supplies - pah!

The amplifiers with separate power supplies remind me of something. In my teens I built a 60W power amplifier from a circuit in a booklet published by Ferranti. (I know, I know, but they were RMS watts, and 60W was a lot in those days.)

I was tempted by the 100W amplifier on the next page, but for some reason it incorporated a 3-phase power supply, and I was persuaded that might pose a problem, especially as I was planning to use it in a mobile disco.

I wonder if anybody ever built the 100W amplifier. If they did, it would overshadow the separate power supplies mentioned in the article, even if the reproduction was crap.

Re: Bonkers? oh yes.

Of course the quality of your CD drive is important. The other day I installed Windows from a cheap CD drive and I ended up with MS-DOS 2.2!

Phishers use less strident subject lines to deliver new cunning attacks

Re: same ol

"dont follow links from spam in your mailb"

The problem is that it's getting more and more difficult to identify the spam. It used to be identifiable by its bad spelling and punctuation, but what with the phishers becoming more literate and the banks more illiterate, that's no longer a reliable test.

Yahoo! hack! leaks! 453,000! unencrypted passwords!

You don't know where it's been

Prepared statements are easier to code, easier to understand, probably faster, and above all safer. But the world is still full of so-called developers who concatenate their SQL with whatever crap they just got from a web form. And they do it when authenticating passwords, FFS.

These are presumably people who'd pick a sandwich out of a urinal and have it for lunch. The surprising thing is that with this level of stupidity they can put together a piece of code that compiles and runs.

Can neighbours grab your sensitive package, asks Post Office

Look at it from the other angle

If I accept an delivery for my neighbour, I presumably accept responsibility for taking care of it and making sure my neighbour gets it. Will the Post Office pay my usual hourly rate for doing their job for them?

And how close does a neighbour have to be?

Museum of Computing recognised as PROPER MUSEUM

Re: The history of computing

@Alan Brown: you seem to be confusing the history of computing with the history of home computing.

The late 70s that you refer to was preceded by about 40 years of computing history, during which most of the important developments were made. The 30-odd years since then have seen immense refinement, but with the possible exception of networking, little fundamental change.

50 years in SPAAAAACE: Telstar celebrates half-century since launch

Re: Echo and SCORE

"SCORE was the first satellite to broadcast from space"

I should have thought the first satellite to broadcast from space was Sputnik 1. Not a very interesting broadcast (beep, beep, burble), though it sounds like it was the inspiration for Joe Meek's record.

The Grundy NewBrain is 30

Sinclair

My recollection of Sinclair in the pre-micro era is that it supplied matchbox radios and cheap but unreliable amplifiers through small ads in Practical Wireless. How odd to learn that the Labour government of the time regarded this as a key industry and therefore a target for nationalisation.

Imagine if it had all worked out as planned, and Britain had a nationalised microcomputer industry! We'd probably still be using hex keypads like the one shown in the article.

Reg hack attempts gutsiest expenses claim EVER

Re: Only 98 euros?

"laughing all the way to the bank" - this is the usual response to Spanish banks at the moment, isn't it?

Re: Escort - service

Worse - the details showed that a gallon of oil was used.

Dimming the lights on smart(arse) TV

Remote controls

Have the people who design remote controls ever used them? Ever watched anybody else use them?

I'm sure my usage pattern for the TV remote is not untypical. At least 90% of keypresses are EPG, Up, Down and Select. (My latest control uses the next/previous channel control to page the EPG, so that gets a fair bit of use for skipping past channels that do nothing but sell tawdry jewellery and weird ones like the channel that's apparently targeted at homosexual rabbits.) The other 30 or so buttons are never used.

So why is the EPG button almost always hard to find? Why is it so often indistinguishable from numerous buttons whose function is incomprehensible and others that seem to do nothing at all? Why does the down-arrow on the next/previous channel control move through the channel list in the opposite direction to the down-arrow used in the EPG?

And another thing, while I'm ranting. When you select a programme from the EPG, if it's microseconds before the TV thinks it's due to start, it asks if you want to set a reminder. My previous TV was worse, it not only did this, but if you pressed the button when the selected programme had already finished, it didn't even switch to that channel, just ignored you because you're plainly not as clever as a smart TV.

Ford touts tech to bottle up traffic jams

Re: LOL Ford

Not just Ford. I get the impression that most TV ads for cars show left-hand drive models, even, oddly, in an ad featuring people who talk in English.

Mind you, there's an ad at the moment for a car that you can drive under water. Can this be true?

The Beatles Yellow Submarine restored

Re: Sir

If I were you I'd take the mushrooms back to the supermarket and complain that they don't work.

Re: @ravenviz The Sixties

Er, me too.

No sign of the alleged final salary pension yet, and I've missed the boat for early retirement.

Boffins program peripheral visions for ultra TV immersion

Another day, another way to enhance TV video. Could they perhaps do with a sign in the office that says "It's the content, stupid"?

Kensington Virtuoso Mini collapsible stylus

"slightly longer than a bookie’s pencil"

I know El Reg loves unconventional units, but what on earth does this mean?

I've hardly ever been into a betting shop, so I have no knowledge of their pencils. Do bookies have special pencils? Why? Are they longer or shorter than normal pencils? Is that the length of the pencil when it's new, or when the bookie has sharpened it down to a stub?

And, FFS, what is "stylii" supposed to mean? If it were a Latin second-declension plural, it would be the plural of the non-existent word "stylius". The rule is "-us" becomes "-i" in the plural, not "just keep adding 'i' until it looks like a lot". If you can't grasp this, I suggest you stick to the English plural, which is "styluses".

Alan Turing 100: Visionary, war winner ... game maker?

"until the 1950s, computers were non-electrical calculating machines"

Wrong on two counts.

From at least the 18th century until the 1940s, computers were people who did calculations for a living. I believe the first electronic computers were so called because they were designed to calculate ballistics tables, a job that was previously done by human computers.

"Calculating machines" were called, er, "calculators". Before the 1950s they would mostly have been manually-powered, but I'm pretty sure electro-mechanical ones existed.

Ex-Soviet space gunboats to be FOUND ON MOON

Isle of Man

As far as I know, the most famous explorer in history to have originated in the Isle of Man was Fletcher Christian.

So make sure you take a lifeboat on the trip.

Google in dock again over defamatory auto-complete

For some reason my colleague Mr Paedo Burgles keeps having similar problems.

So you wanna be a Wall Street techie? Or anyway, get paid a lot

Oxbridge colleges and Zen-like questions

At my Oxford college interview, I was asked "Did Modigliani paint long thin people because he suffered from distorted vision?". I provided a logical answer: "No, because the visual distortion would make normal pictures look long and thin to him" and got the place.

Some years later, the Philosophy tutor who had interviewed me said, by way of a put-down, "We agreed to award the scholarship to the first person to get the Modigliani question right". I was delighted to tell him that although it might have seemed right to a philosopher, my answer was actually wrong. Perception of objects and perception of paintings are not the same thing, and people with severe astigmatism actually produce distorted drawings.

So much for Zen-like puzzles.

Steely Neelie: EU is crippled by its clueless tech-ignorant workforce

"...43 per cent of the population have medium or high internet skills – meaning they can make a phone call online or create a web page..."

This is a weird statistic because the range is ridiculously wide. A bit like saying "43 per cent of the population have medium or high navigation skills – meaning they can find their way to the shops or sail across the Atlantic".

Is it just me, or is the chart in this article distinctly baffling?

The left-hand is a set of targets, but the on right-hand side there is a time-series. Each bar seems to be intended to look like some kind of network patch cable. Some, but not all, have a percentage on the connector, and most, but not all, have a coloured L-shaped stripe coming out of the right-hand end, followed by another percentage on a black rectangle.

The legend seems to imply that the connector shows a percentage for 2009, and the L-shape shows a 2011 figure. If so, is it really claiming that 50% of households had Broadband better than 30Mb/s by 2011?

Windows Metro Maoist cadres reach desktop, pound it flat

Have you seen Windows 9?

The window is almost black and it fills the whole screen. All the text is greyish-white. The cursor is a big flashing square thing. When you press a key it makes a loud click noise. When you move the mouse nothing happens.

For Windows 9 Home, the interface is called VT52. If you're prepared to spend the extra money you can have the Professional interface, called VT100.

Clouds gathering on horizon for software devs, say wise men

Re: "The Last One"

Exactly what I thought when I read the article. Every decade produces a magic solution that's going to put an end to software engineering. TLO, 4GL, RAD. The cloud is mainly different because it has a name instead of a TLA. It's still the same old snake oil.

I'm sure a large part of the problem is that "consultants" like this don't have proper jobs, so they're unaware of the thousands of vital business applications that companies rely on. They think "software" means Facebook.

Must try harder: Cumbria tells BT and Fujitsu to resubmit fibre plans

@AndrueC "So they want next generation broadband...on the cheap."

The article actually seems to say that the suppliers have been asked to re-submit because they haven't tendered for what was specified, not because they were too expensive.

Kogan 'taxes' IE7 users

Re: W3 Validator

@Andrew 63: If you think you need HTML5 for web sites that aren't "minimalistic, plain, uninteractive", then you need to upgrade your skills. Competent developers have been building such sites for years, even in IE7 and, dare I say it, IE6.

All of Europe's data in US servers? We're OK with that - EC bod

Sovereignty

It doesn't really matter what US laws say now. The main issue is that the US government (or any other government, for that matter) can do anything it wants to in the future. It's an act of state. For US citizens' data, this is OK because they elected that government and they have the theoretical ability to throw them out.

European citizens whose data is stored in the US would have no sanction beyond saying "I'd rather you didn't", because we didn't elect them. Whereas we have control over data stored in Europe because we elected the people who run Europe and we can throw... Hang on... no we didn't, and no we can't.

For FORK'S sake: GitHub checks out Windows client

Re: Feeling a little jaded

"I've never seen serious problems in a project due to the source control tool"

Try working with Visual SourceSafe. Your experience will be widened, not in a good way.

Fate of dot-word bids decided by ICANN archery shoot-out

Digital Archery?

Left a bit...down a bit... Bernie - the bolt!

(Actually, "international law expert Alain Pellet" sounds more like digital air-gun shooting.)

New UK curriculum ramps up lessons in SPAAAACE

Re: Too much added, not enough removed

"The amount of times I've had to correct native English speakers which there / their / they're to use it absurd."

How about "number of times"?

"... fixing english ..."

I think you mean English.

Rats with GPS backpacks prepare to sniff out landmines

Re: Is not this called Pavlovian conditioning? ??

I don't think it is Pavlovian conditioning. It's Skinnerian, or operant conditioning. Pavlovian conditioning alone would only make rats expect food when they were dumped next to mines. The conditioning that encourages them to find the mines seems to be training.

Pavlovian, or classic conditioning starts with an unconditioned stimulus-response pair, such as salivating when exposed to a meaty taste. An unrelated stimulus, such as a bell, is introduced alongside the true stimulus. When conditioning is complete the bell elicits the salivation without the meaty taste. The order of events remains stimulus-then-response.

Skinner's conditioning associates a reward or punishment (known as positive or negative reinforcement) with a pattern of behaviour. As training proceeds, the reinforced pattern becomes more likely to occur, and, in due course, so do behaviours that tend to lead to it.

caveat this is 40-year-old knowledge, acquired at a time when my guiding principle was to do as little work as possible, so it may not be entirely reliable.

TiVo takes on Cisco in patent knock down

Re: What I want to know is...

Not really FF. Sometimes it just means record now+watch later, which isn't exactly cutting edge. It might also mean "pause live TV", which I guess is a matter of reading the early part of a file while the end is being appended to. If it was clever it could also treat the file as a ring-buffer so that you could do this indefinitely without running out of space. Dunno what TiVo think they have a patent on.