Posts by foxyshadis

Chill out, biz barons... your new IT system might not look like the old one

Re: Examples are often useful

That'll probably be in the book deal wherein the whistle-blowers tell all and get a place on Stob's column.

Major new science: Women more nude, more often online

> There are men in SL playing women, but they are dead easy to spot. So if I, as a guy playing a male avatar can spot them, I'm sure women can spot them even more easily.

If you can't verify by meeting everyone on the other end, how on earth can you make this claim?

Perl programming language marks 25th birthday

Re: Better Than You Think

Well, Anon, if you branched out more you might know that Mechanize and its variants are available for nearly all current languages, all of them have multi-line string constant support, and multi-line regex via PCRE. (We all owe Perl that much.) Curly-brace vs pretty-indent is purely a stylistic choice. To be honest, choosing a language these days is more about your personal coding style than features anyway; every languages has the features, but they all have wildly different styles and quirks.

Heck, Perl in particular has both the old style unreadable, unmaintainable special variables, where it got the reputation for being indistinguishable from line noise in the first place, and the much nicer new named variables. You're given the choice to be a hacker or a polite coder now.

@BlueGreen, Mechanize is actually mostly a module to massage broken crufty HTML into a good clean DOM, which you can then run XPath or other queries on; the actual form-filling and browsing functionality isn't often used. It's basically a browser's "quirks mode" available to regular programmers.

Ethernet sales fizzle, but self-aware networks set to explode

The Juniper and Netgear stories are very appealing... until the price tag comes. The HP story isn't even appealing before the higher-than-the-competition price. At least with Cisco, you knew you were going to get reamed anyway. So yes, 10gE adoption won't heat up until ASIC makers bring the cost down significantly, or datacenters will just make do with bonded gE and leave it at that for now. You can significantly cut down on cable clutter with rack-switches that have extra 1gE or 1-2 10gE backbone links, at least, rather than the old "run everything to the core switch" paradigm.

Too bad a pair of 10gE backbone links more than triped the price for the juniper EX switches. They're so perfect in all other respects.

Outlook 2013 spurns your old Word and Excel documents

Contacts

The ability to import and export CONTACTS. I have no idea why this was left out of the article.

Copyright trolls, biz scum, freetards - it's NOT black and white

Re: Not terribly impressive.

That quote you picked apart was Trevor Pott's, the article writer's, not Spalding's or the Foundation's. You might want to read a little harder.

Senator threatens FAA with legislation over in-flight fondleslabbing

The FAA won't change anytime soon.

How hard is it to allow stuff while taxiing and once in the air, while requiring it to all be stowed during takeoff and landing? Stowing for 5-10 minutes isn't going to kill anyone, but 10,000 feet is typically 15-20 minutes, by which time any danger has long past. The FAA is notoriously unwilling to loosen regulations, though; look how long 787 certification took.

The 30-year-old prank that became the first computer virus

Re: Stoned

I came to ask if anyone had seen "Your computer is now STONED!!" every few reboots way back in the day. :)

Re: Geeks have macs too

See, the ignorance always comes out when you press for details.

Can't grow beyond 80 chars? You've really never seen the command window properties? It works almost exactly the same way as in *nix shells! No multitasking? The whole OS does multitasking and cmd automatically runs any windowed program or service in the background, or you can use start.exe to start a commandline script or program in the background, or you can start multiple cmd windows if you need multiple things done in the foreground. And all of that has been around since WinNT.

Before slagging off on something you're ignorant about, at least try to find out if you're wrong first.

But I will accept that the copy-paste behavior sucks.

'We are screwed!' Fonts eat a bullet in Microsoft security patch

Re: Oh, that

Ancient, long-dead software held onto by a vanishingly small old userbase is an interesting definition of "their competitors applications."

Visual Studio 2012 Update 1 arrives, first of many

Re: Is it just me...

The bugtrackers of various compilers (gcc & microsoft connect in particular) would probably give you a heart attack. Even if most of the bugs involve compiler crashes rather than miscompiles, those still crop up from time to time as well, mostly in new features or new optimization methods. Stick to features that were in the last version or two, and you're usually safe.

Re: you can do it yourself

That's the same as saying "You shouldn't have to tweak a product for it to use my preferred brace style." It has no clue what your favorite color is, although at least on Win8, it could do a better job of matching your base OS theme color. Different people have different wants, some love it and some don't; as long as there's a way to change defaults, the world moves on.

Nexus 4 actually has 4G: But only in Canada, and potentially ILLEGAL

SX has never gone away...

They just changed the name to Celeron.

Assault on battery

Re: if i could be arsed

If only someone had created USB wall warts and power adapters....

Re: Don't buy cheap bluetooth devices

That's good that you lucked into a long-lasting one, but my experience is that they rapidly lose their capacity and range after a year. After two, even a full charge only lasts 2-3 minutes at 1 meter max.

Where were the bullet holes on OS/2's corpse? Its head ... or foot?

Re: The other part was the hardware mistake.....

ISA was originally proprietary to IBM! Though the license fees to access the spec were low enough that it barely mattered, and they were eventually openly published, but it certainly wasn't that way from the beginning.

MCA might have succeeded if it had followed the original path, but instead they jacked fees up like crazy and adoption never got off the ground. It was 6 more years before PCI was developed, sadly, a time when paying through the nose for MCA was the only alternative to the slow buggy mess that was EISA.

SQL database start-up flings out code peanuts to tempt biz

What were we talking about again?

Until the second-to-last paragraph I had absolutely no idea what the product was about at all, and there's nothing in here to differentiate it from other large databases. The content to fluff ratio was extremely small.

I'm quite firmly of the opinion now that this product is nothing but a potentially interesting small project encapsulated in buzzword bingo.

Flash is dead ... but where are the tiers?

Re: Electrical Engineers To The Rescue !

Or just screw all of that and keep anything used regularly on the expensive fast disks, while everything, old or new, is on the stodgy cheap disks. It would cost more in manpower for one person to enforce that for even a mid-size organization than to just add another disk. Why is it so hard to extend the flash-cache concept that hybrid drives use to entire storage arrays? Supposedly the NetApp I work with has 15K vs 10K vs 7.2K tiered arrays, but it never works without a ton of manual intervention, to the point that we just say screw it and put anything large on the cheap disks, important or not.

Re: Yeah !

The value is that it can be 10-20 times as fast even in the worst case scenario than your 2TB spinning 7.2K disk. You sound like you have no idea why anyone every bought 10K or 15K disks, either. Despite your proclamation of pointlessness for storing your torrent collection, flash drive sales are growing by an order of magnitude every year, to the point that external storage drives will soon be the only use for spinning disks.

Asteroid miners hunt for platinum, leave all common sense in glovebox

Re: Yet again - science story in bizarre mishmash of units

Metals are traded on troy ounces and pounds. That shouldn't be hard to grasp, and if it offends you, then the whole talk about markets is not for you at all.

Re: Fiat Currncies are Doomed.

The effect of dumping ten times as much gold on the market as currently exists on all of earth would be exactly the same as any country printing up ten times as much currency. The ability to mine precious metals off-planet while using them as currency would effectively make the metal a fiat itself, controlled by whatever governments or private companies control the mining and distribution. It would be no different from using diamonds as a currency, when DeBeers and the Russians can release as many or as few on the market any year as they want.

You fail, sir. No points are awarded for your attempt to fit an ideology into a completely game-breaking change.

Patent suit targets Formlabs and Kickstarter

Kickstarter probably won't be on the hook

The usual mode of operations in lawsuits is to fire them scattershot (the way the world is now I'm surprised that they aren't suing every individual user who contributed), even if most of the parties have no actual liability and will be dismissed with a simple response from a lawyer. It just sucks that they have to pay for one for no fault of their own.

Kickstarter has no responsibility to vet a project, only to stop selling it if forced by court order or agreement, so they're probably only named in order to pressure them into settling or so the court has jurisdiction over them. Clawing back a retailer's margin is significantly more difficult than infringing manufacturer's revenue, though the finer points of procedure escape me now.

German city dumping OpenOffice for Microsoft

I agree that LO makes a great free & easy replacement for Office up to 2003, especially for kids, who are more adaptable and use a much smaller subset of features. Unfortunately, they were at Office 2003 parity in 2006, and they're still at Office 2003 parity; even if lots of bugs have been fixed and the whole suite significantly sped up, the user still sees the same old decade-and-a-half-old interface.

They really need to dump that horrible Java-based Access clone with HSQLDB and remake it with a SQLite backend, which would be faster, simpler, and so much easier to use. That would instantly make LO the best SQLite administrator around, as a side benefit.

At least Apache is gearing up for huge modern rewrites, which Sun, the engineer's paradise, would never do.

Perfectly understandable to anyone who's used both.

OO and LO have no concept of usability, UX, or UI, and no one advocating or advancing them, and are extremely frustrating for new office suite users and transitioning users alike, while Microsoft continually hones their originally horrible UI into a very usable one. I can understand the reasoning. Office 2003 was just as bad as OO/LO about finding something you need, but newer versions make advanced features more and more findable. Yet I keep LO on my laptop, out of pride and moral support more than anything, I suppose.

For big customers like a city that would most likely volume license, Office 2013 is already officially available and supported. They might as well jump straight to it. Consumers will get it with an SP1 or rollup package baked in once the early adopters work the kinks out.

I'm just glad they didn't go with that 365 crap.

Why IT chiefs are irrelevant to Microsoft's Windows 8 strategy

Re: Yet another hack at pushing BYOD.

That attitude works right up until a senior exec hears about how this or that device is now business ready. Saw it happen in multiple businesses with iPhones and now Android while stodgy sysadmins were still clinging to woefully outdated Blackberries. It'll happen with Win8 too.

Better to at least experiment and have some kind of policy ready to go so you're not caught flatfooted the day the demands come down.

AT&T relaunches walkie-talkie style service Push to Talk

The only experience I've had....

With PTT was the infamous screen, "Use of PTT will incur additional costs. Cancel/Accept?" when accidentally hitting one of the unreassignable buttons on the phone. Somehow, I doubt that's going to change much, other than being an accidental app or swipe instead.

Survey: Win8 only HALF as popular as Win7 among IT bosses

Re: and win7 and assoc apps are ??

Awesome troll, but: Considering Office 2010 worse than 2007 outs you immediately (sorry, everyone in the world knows that 2010 fixed most of 2007's worst problems), and you talk about 8 clicks to do anything when you claim to be an old school UNIX admin and VT220 user; if you really were, you'd have long since stopped clicking and starting using the text-completion start menu beginning in Vista. I use LibreOffice at home and would never consider its insane menu-driven system to hold a candle to the Ribbon. Hope they fix that soon, and I hope it sticks in your craw.

I don't think you've ever used any of them, or even if you have, this post was pure troll.

Re: I for one

Tech blog readers are not the entire userbase of enterprise computing systems....

Getting people to click on the lower right corner when they need to do something is surprisingly painless. It's the same muscle behavior from 17 years of Windows, just invisible now, so it actually makes sense.

HP's ProLiant Gen8 control freakery

Boot up times

Five second boot up? Nice - but unlikely; boot times have been getting longer with each Proliant generation, to the point that G7 takes almost 2 minutes just to light up the screen and another 2 to finish its internal diagnostics and disk array initialization, then you finally get any add-on card BIOS startup times as well. I'd be glad just to see that cut to 15-30 again.

The new Atom server coupled with iLO sounds awesome - our power budget is already strained and adding new VM hosts is becoming a major chore. Networking is still more pressing than power for us, though; Procurve prices are still astronomical compared to competitors' better-managed equivalents.

Apple goes to European Commission with complaint about Motorola

Re: Any one notice the part

Thus this preemptive strike to the commission before the courts get around to ruling that the phone must be banned; if they can get a ruling that Motorola acted in bad faith it'll at least allow Apple to argue that any judgment should be stayed pending the immediate appeal.

Google plots Chrome web password maker

Re: LastPass does this, and more

Financial web sites in general all have the most painful and useless password rules, presumably under the impression that if they make it too hard for legitimate users to get in, there's no way an attacker would ever be able to. Banks don't and never have understood network security, they're still grappling with the idea that a vault isn't enough.

Even the most progressive ones still have absolutely asinine password rules, like you can't use any of one set of symbols but you MUST use at least one of another random set. Oh, and any customer service rep will be able to tell you it over the phone, of course.

Ah well, I love my Password Maker, and LastPass is about the same thing. At least they're available just about everywhere, unlike Chrome, and don't require a network connection, unlike most password keepers.

Don't reform copyright yet, begs publishers' body

And of course

When the current "framework" doesn't work, they'll already have a new one in the works, so that they can now point to that one to say, no, wait, we have to wait a bit longer to try THIS idea! And it goes, on and on forever.

Cloud proves that OldSQL is still cool

Another round of hype

The idea that NoSQL would ever kill RDBMS for all purposes is just another round of hype-driven ignorance. It's another technology that all DBAs and DBMS developers _should_ learn so that they can incorporate it into their projects where it's applicable, and relational where it works best. It fills a niche that was incredibly hard to work with regular SQL, and NoSQL grew out of the lessons learned there, but it will always be a niche more suited to analyzing metrics than building web sites and other perfectly boring uses that RDBMS works great for. (That isn't to say that something else couldn't come along that does boring data storage and retrieval better, just that NoSQL isn't it.)

Snaps confirm new CPU for Apple iPad 3

It's one thing

to complain about fragmentation between the current model, the 2 year old model, and the 3+ year old models; it's quite another to complain about fragmentation between the 4-6 current models and the boatloads of 6+ month old models, all of which excludes the useless cut-rate models constantly scamming bargain hunters. App devs can at least easily buy all the Apple platforms they care to support; trying to keep up with testing all Android platforms would be a nightmare.

It's like the console vs PC market: You might be able to buy into a better experience on PC, but you're guaranteed a certain experience on consoles without having to constantly tweak and fight untested setups.

Mac OS X ARM port by Apple work experience kid revealed

Same instruction set

So I'm sure it wouldn't matter what he went with, given that a 12 week project would never encompass NEON or snazzy graphics capabilities. Someone likely had an old test/dev board lying around that he could use, so that's what he built it on.

Blighty's PC market fell to its knees in Q4

Every quarter

Every quarter has a pat answer for why they failed or succeeded; at the end of the quarter they just look at the numbers and pick the answer that matches. There's never any kind of attempt at deeper analysis with these kind of conference calls and reports - investors don't even want to hear them, they just want a quick simple answer that makes them feel better that the money will keep rolling in next quarter or that the challenges will be overcome right away.

Real insight is the job of the Register and Anandtech.

Certainly the case here

My Acer lappy486 is nearing 6 years old, with only one hard drive and memory upgrade in all that time (though I did put an engineering sample Merom in it when I bought it); still works great with the latest OSes, plays most games, and of course browses the web. The desktop is only half that age, but same general situation, it just plays movies and occasional games, no need for a 6-core behemoth or 16GB of memory. (Just all the terabytes I can afford.)

At work, I need actual computing power, but I can't justify the outlay at home anymore, not when tablets are much less expensive and fill the niche beautifully.

2012: The year when smartphones become smart?

Most excellent!

I could quit and subcontract my job out to my phone, with none the wiser, while I nip off for a quick thirst-slaker each morning.

iOS 5's iMessage chops carrier SMS routing traffic

This is more robust than BBM

But much less secure - if the phone doesn't get a delivery confirmation within a specific time period, 5 minutes I believe, it will send the message over SMS instead. You lose all encryption but you gain total robustness.

According to Apple

The entire conversation is encrypted end to end with shared public keys, similar to the way BBM works with their PIN encryption. I did verify that it's not completely plain text, with wifi packet captures, before turning it on in our organization... but I have no way of verifying how it's encrypted or how secure it actually is.

Supposedly

That's coming in a Lion update. I'll believe it when I see it, but I'm sure that was meant to be ready by the time iOS 5 was.

Another problem

It doesn't actually give up completely - my phone died and I left it off all weekend, hell I was tired anyway, and when I plugged it back in I had a rain of iMessage AND SMS text pairs. Apparently if it fails to deliver the iMessage within a given time, it does fall back on SMS - but the iMessage stays in queue, ready to contribute to messaging spam.

Kodak heading to Chapter 11

It's not unusual...

...for companies to start with Chapter 11, then never emerge and end up in 7 within a year. Now that they've sold of EVERY profitable or potentially profitable part of their company, they can only limp along for so long promising debt repayment.

Videogame piracy figures show decline

You must be new here

You seem entirely confused about what punishments pirates can receive in Western nations.

@FrankAlphaXII

You had a software firewall blocking traffic from the client, probably the built-in Windows one. When you moved to another port (wired instead of wireless) you probably switched from public to private or vice versa, therefore opening traffic or at least giving you the opportunity to respond. Too bad you blocked it or blocked everything at some point in the past and never thought to check and disable the block. Sucks for your lost day, paranoia defeats usability once again.

Virtual sanity: How to get a grip on your home PCs

It's not 2002 anymore.

Virtualization has a near-zero footprint for most tasks, and if you get a system with IOMMU/vt-x you can actually passthrough the GPU and other peripherals to your VM, leaving you with zero functionality loss. Occasionally you run into licensing restrictions with number of core of maximum memory, but free versions usually stay at most six months behind the consumer state of the art (right now, 8-12 cores, 8-12 GB memory, and a few VMs. More are switching to charging by VMs than hardware support).

If you're running an ancient computer with minimal or no hardware virtual support, like pre-2006, it might be worse, but in that case you won't have the horsepower to run multiple OS instances anyway.

If you have one of the insanely overpowered modern systems for web browsing and compiling, multiple instances not only won't impact your experience, they'll actually help you more efficiently use the hardware to its maximum potential by running multiple segregated services.

GPMC is that all in one

And has been since 2004. There are other ones, including gpedit.msc, rsop.msc, but they've been included in GPMC for so long that I almost forgot that there were once other ways to access them. The old ones are just vestiges - aside from gpedit's ability to edit local policies without installing the administration pack.

Apache lets fly Hadoop 1.0 data muncher

You misread it

Mahout is the add-on, Cassandra is an alternate data store. In case you're behind the times, yes, Cassandra can be used with Hadoop's MapReduce and other APIs for quite some time now, even though HBase is the most common data store.

Homeland Sec., RIAA Torrent lists published

Awesome

It'd be even more hilarious if it was discovered that DHS was running numerous open proxies or caching dumps of illegal files (for ratio purposes). Most likely it would be covered up, with no audit trail of who had broken in. DHS is an oxymoron if there ever was one.

Travelodge blames 'vindictive individual' for email database breach

Doesn't this

Fall under the California laws that require notice of a breach of privacy to affected residents? Will anyone sue, or will the AG go after them?

Looked up the laws, and no, it only applies if it involves name plus any of SSN, driver's license, or any financial acct number (including credit card number). So if anyone notices any fraud on their cards, report it to the California attorney general's office.