Posts by Oh Homer

US judge Koh won't ban old Samsung gear, tells Apple: Your patents aren't that amazing

"Your patents aren't that amazing"

They're not even remotely novel. The fact that such insignificant and derivative things even qualified for patents in the first place, is by far the most amazing thing about them.

Apple investors fall for CEO Cook's product-presentation prank

Re: "Apple has become the biggest..."

...bunch of wankers on the planet.

FTFY.

re: "Mac Observer gave the true story"

What? An Apple fanzine gave this story a positive spin?

Shocking.

Sanity now: Gnome 3.12 looking sensible - at least in beta

Re: Linux is a fractured mess

Dear Slapper, real Linux users and developers squabbling with each other over the direction of one particular project is not a layman outsider's cue to inject FUD about "fracturing" or "fragmentation".

This "fragmentation" is actually Free Software's biggest asset. It's precisely what enables we real Linux users and developers to avoid those things we don't like, either by using those "fragmented" alternatives or creating them ourselves.

Moreover, not only does this "fragmentation" facilitate choices we wouldn't otherwise have, thus providing us with a greater potential to satisfy each of our respective unique preferences, but it's also an essential facet of academic progress, because many different groups pursuing many alternative solutions yields far more of the right answers, which cummulatively benefits us all in the long run, even if some of the interim results are utter crap.

Compare that to the monolithic world of proprietary "products", created only for commercial reasons, where it's actually in the best interests of the vendor to ensure you have as little choice as possible (lock-in), and where the vendor reviles progress or anything else (such as fixing bugs) that doesn't immediately derive profit.

If you want to think like a consumer sheep, perhaps it would be better if you didn't wander out of your pen.

Re: "a decent session manager"

Funny, but my window manager seems to get along just fine without either ConsoleKit or logind. So did Gnome 2 for that matter. So why choose a dependency that basically transforms Gnome into a single-platform project, via Linux-dependent components, when there are far more acceptable alternatives?

I think you're the one who's confused, son. I didn't claim Poettering developed Gnome, I wrote that he was one of those driving it. Poettering is a Gnome Foundation member who regularly holds (and often hijacks) talks on the subject, and given the degree to which Gnome is now dependent upon his garbage, and the extent of his invasive influence on Gnome and GNU/Linux in general, frankly you might as well rename it Poetterix® and be done with it.

And yes, it is a mystery how Gnome 3 can be so bloated and yet offer so little functionality. Maybe you can explain that discrepancy. Also the fact that it's riddled with bugs doesn't mean that Gnome Shell isn't touch oriented. That is one of its primary design goals, after all.

If you're going to QA this stuff it might help if you actually knew something about it first.

New day, same...

. Still a touch-oriented UI on a non-touch desktop

. Still missing 99% of the functionality of Gnome 2

. Still hard-wired to systemd (why does a DE have a dependency on a specific init system?)

. Still bloated beyond belief

. Still driven by sneering twits like Lennart "do you hate handicapped people" Poettering

Back to Cinnamon, then.

Microsoft asks pals to help KILL UK gov's Open Document Format dream

Re: "wrapper around a closed binary blob" @Oh HOmer

Dear anonymous Microsoft shill, if you're not prepared to believe "my guy" then maybe you'll believe Bob Sutor, Rob Weir and various Windows developers who have dissected the offending binary junk in some detail.

Thanks for playing.

Re: "wrapper around a closed binary blob"

Yes, hence my assertion that it's only ostensibly "open".

The reason I didn't mention it is because, at the time of the war between ODF and OOXML, various Microsoft protagonists (largely hired for the purpose) were keen to point out that ODF suffered exactly the same "binary blob" problem. Although again that was a highly disingenuous argument, because ODF's "binary blobs" are platform-agnostic standard filetypes, whereas OOXML's binary blobs can be any arbitrary type, typically dependent upon Windows libraries, and thus essentially tie OOXML documents to the Windows platform (as was Microsoft's intention, of course). This allowed Microsoft to disingenuously claim that OOXML was "open" whilst at the same time ensuring it was only really usable on Windows.

Hopefully the government is aware of that issue too.

Multiple standards

Microsoft is disingenuously presenting this as a question of choice, where those choices are both ostensibly open standards, but surely the issue is that there needs to be a single standard, so error-prone conversions between one and the other become unnecessary.

A more honest proposal from Microsoft would have been "choose OOXML", not "let's have multiple open standards". Of course that argument would have forced the government to choose between two open standards, only one of which is truly implementable as a standard, since apparently even Microsoft can't properly implement OOXML, so what hope does anyone else have?

Microsoft failed to consider the possibility that the government has already made that choice based on that factor, or more likely is arrogantly ignoring it and presenting this "choice" gambit to muddy the waters, by painting this decision as unreasonable favouritism.

Well, even if that were the case, perhaps that's exactly what's needed to balance decades of the government's unreasonable favouritism toward Microsoft.

The reality is that the government, or anyone else, will never truly escape Microsoft's grasping clutches until it has completely abandoned not only its software, but also its file formats and so-called "standards". That's something that's desperately needed for all sorts of reasons, not just austerity.

Imprisoned Norwegian mass murderer says PlayStation 2 is 'KILLING HIM'

Re: "not a sadistic mass murderer"

A political motive does not somehow justify murdering innocent children, nor would it account for his total lack of remorse and compassion for those he murdered.

Re: Atari 2600

A bit of foam on the floor?

Pfft, just let him sit on the cold, hard floor.

Oh, and take away everything, including his games and his bucket. Then board up his window, let him eat the putrid slops discarded by the prison kitchen, and hose out his cell about once a year, with high pressure, boiling hot water mixed with bleach.

This a sadistic mass murderer, not a boy scout, and he's supposed to be in prison, not a holiday camp.

We nearly MISSED OUT on iOS7 redesign: But someone snatched Jony Ive from the jaws of quit

The Reliant Robin factor

"You're not driving it right," as Jobs would have said.

Samsung leaps out of volume PC game as UK market crashes

Save the PC?

I'm a big fan of GNU/Linux, but I really don't think it'll save the PC, not because it isn't up to the task, but simply because nobody cares any more.

This whole situation with PCs is starting to feel a lot like the last days of the Amiga. A few die-hards are clinging to the hope that the next version of the OS is magically going to save it, but the fact is everyone's already moved on to something else, and they've long since lost any interest in the platform.

Bill Gates to pull a Steve Jobs and SAVE MICROSOFT – report

Here comes Bob 2.0

"So like I was saying, Steve, you click on Bob's hand and he opens the filing cabinet..."

Microsoft claims victory over second-hand software broker

Another "grey imports" fiasco

This seems like another abuse of trademarks to stymie grey imports, just like the one Levi hit Tesco with a few years ago.

Frankly I'm amazed that companies can legally use trademarks under such a weak pretext. Once the manufacturer sells the product, it rightfully belongs to someone else, and that should be the end of any legal entitlement the manufacturer has to it.

Although in this case the fact that the "product" itself is also "IP" somewhat complicates matters, the fact is no copyright infringement was claimed, only that selling something cheaply was somehow a violation of Microsoft's precious name.

What a scam.

Apple and Samsung STILL in bitchfight over banning ancient mobes

Re: Detracting from the main issue of ruining a perfectly good language: Colorably???

Fear not! That tireless defender of Americanese, the Oxford dictionary, will arbitrarily add "colorably" to the next beta release of the English language.

Re: And of course there is always this from Boy Wonder...

Maybe lawyers can distinguish between patents and ideas, but clearly Apple can't, given the number of stolen ideas they've patented.

Compounding injustice

So Apple won due to a ridiculous and corrupt legal decision, that concluded it had "invented" pre-existent trivia, and will now capitalise on that to further oppress any legitimate competition.

Welcome to the insanity of the American patent racket.

Re: "Samsung are even open shops now, I wonder who did that first?"

What? Are you claiming that Apple "invented" shops now?

Apple cultism at its finest, folks.

Fujitsu: PC market... doomed? LOLZ. NOT FOR US, pal

Net profits of $114m

And that's supposed to save the PC industry?

LOLZ indeed.

Amazon mints a BILLION BUCKS from its cannibal cloud

You misspelled "BEELION"

Just sayin'.

Ancient video of Steve Jobs launching the first Apple Mac found

Steve who?

Microsoft seeks patent for blade server chassis

Re: "enable various advantages"

Apparently you didn't watch the video I linked to, which clearly demonstrates Cisco "enabling" exactly the same "various advantages" that Microsoft claims to have "invented".

So Microsoft has just "invented"...

...something that Cisco has been doing for years.

Is this like those times they claimed to have "invented" sudo and the record button?

MPAA spots a Google Glass guy in cinema, calls HOMELAND SECURITY

In a nation owned by corporations...

...all corporate interests are matters of "national security".

Judge shoots down Oracle's Solaris support 'trafficking' claim

Re: El Reg now has a correspondent in Mongolia?

You're right, some of those pics are fascinating. There's one of a culinary dish made from what appears to be a penis, and another featuring a pregnant woman who looks like she's about to give birth to an entire football team.

El Reg now has a correspondent in Mongolia?

Sorry, I'm so stunned that I didn't even read the story.

US govt watchdog slams NSA snooping as illegal, useless against terrorism

"if there was another major terrorist attack"

"the public will engage in recriminations against the intelligence community for failure to prevent it."

Yeah, because their existing mass surveillance did such a great job preventing the last one.

Oh wait...

Here's a radical idea: maybe if the US dropped its invasive foreign policy, there might not be such attacks in the first place, and they wouldn't have any pretext "need" for mass surveillance.

Although, admittedly, that might not serve the grasping aspirations of America Inc.

El Reg preps relaunch of Cash’n’Carrion online merchandise emporium

Re: Tees and mugs?

. Reg-branded Lego sets, complete with a booklet of suggested humorous (or otherwise) constructions, and the (literal) heads of various well-known figures we like to poke fun at

. BOFH, Vulture and Special Projects Bureau t-shirts. May I also suggest a "Three Vulture Moon" t-shirt? Would a "Cockwomble" t-shirt be pushing things too far?

. LOHAN miniatures (plastic, metal or ceramic), maybe even Airfix-style construction sets

. A Vulture "bullshit button"

. An Orlowski "punch stress reliever"

Pay-by-bonk? YEP, it's an Apple patent now...

Apple's definition of "invention"

1. Copy existing technology

2. Flip a couple of bits

3. "Invention"!

Although I suppose the root of the problem is that's also the USPTO's definition.

Obama reveals tiny NSA reforms ... aka reforming your view of the NSA

Re: "If it weren't for the involvement of the US"

Supplanting one tyrannical empire with another, was probably not the ideal outcome we had in mind.

Apple badmouthing of court's monitor proves it NEEDS him - judge

Re: LOL

Apple must surely be the most recalcitrant violator in history. Watching it flail around, like a delinquent child having a tantrum, is both amusing and quite disturbing. It needs more than just a monitor, it needs a straightjacket, a padded cell and an antipsychotic injection.

KC engineer 'exposed unencrypted spreadsheet with phone numbers, user IDs, PASSWORDS'

Re: LOL

Even funnier is this nice bit of sophistry: "I can assure you that all of our laptops are encrypted, password-protected and fitted with tracking technology and the facility to remotely wipe data."

That's great, but irrelevant, because in this case unauthorised third party access is not the problem, it's the authorised operator's access to sensitive data he ought not be authorised to access.

Or in simple terms: "He works for us" is not good enough I'm afraid. I'm sure banks employ engineers too, but that doesn't mean those engineers get the keys to the vault, even if they're the ones who installed it.

If these numpties are representative of the sort of people responsible for securing sensitive data, I can understand why the ICO has such a difficult job.

NSA: It's TRUE, we grab 200 MILLION of your text messages A DAY globally

If they've done nothing wrong...

Then what does the NSA have to hide?

Modern spying 101: How NSA bugs Chinese PCs with tiny USB radios - NYT

Re: "China is a totalitarian..." blah, blah, blah.

It's even more extensive than that. It's also worth bearing in mind that the US spends over 17 times more on warfare, per head of population, than China.

Re: "China is a totalitarian..." blah, blah, blah.

Every criticism applicable to China is also applicable to the US ... ten times over. How many wars has China waged recently, for example? How many countries has it invaded? How many children has it murdered with killer drones?

If you want to rant about totalitarian regimes, I suggest you start with the worst, the one that represents the biggest threat to the rest of us, the one that, for example, has the dubious distinction of being the the only country in history to deploy a nuclear weapon in warfare. On a civilian population. Twice.

China is the least of our problems.

Tales from an expert witness: Prior art and patent trolls

Re: Very interesting read!!

Where did I claim the renaissance only happened in England? It ended, everywhere, not just in England, just as intellectual monopoly spread like a disease everywhere, not just in England.

The fact of the renaissance being a benefit to everyone, including rich people, is not in contention. Monopolies, on the other hand, are only of benefit to monopolists. Given a choice, I'm fairly confident I know which is better.

Re: Very interesting read!!

Agreed, however I feel some of the points need further scrutiny.

For example, can it be any coincidence that the renaissance mysteriously ended around the same time as the enactment of the Statute of Monopolies in 1624, and that the subsequent industrial revolution was primarily only of benefit to rich monopolists, leaving us with substandard yet still expensive junk, mass produced by low-paid factory workers and adolescent slave labourers in sweatshops, instead of high quality yet still reasonably priced goods that last a lifetime, made by properly rewarded craftsmen?

Sorry, but whatever the supposed "benefit" of that is, I must have missed it.

I also find it curious that mankind seems to have had no difficulty inventing, creating and discovering things for most of its history, prior to the point where it was mysteriously deemed absolutely necessary to monopolise such things.

Mountain bike mishap man suffers SEVEN WEEK stiffie

Nurse!

Fire up the de-stiffie machine!

(Oh Gawd, not anava one.)

FCC net neutrality blueprint TRASHED by US appeals court

Re: 'Capitalism is "Winner Economics": Economic Darwinism'

Or more honestly: Gangster Economics in a predatory society.

Surely an enlightened society should aspire to something a little more compassionate.

Using Hadoop for data on Google's cloud? Google would rather you didn't

Proprietary or not

I'm sick of being Google's "product", and I'm sick of being the NSA's bitch. To Hell with the "Cloud". I'm keeping my private data right here, where I can protect it.

Twitter: It's JUST LIKE Elder Scrolls (no it's not)

Playing with sheep

Welcome to the Randian era of gamification.

UK 'copyright czar' Edmund Quilty quits as Blighty's Director of Copyright Enforcement

Re: "the moral low ground"

Surely the moral low ground is the argument that theft is perfectly acceptable, as long as it's not a significant theft. The idea that it's immoral to refuse to recognise that this stolen property legitimate belongs to someone else, just because the thief successfully used it for some productive but self-serving purpose, is itself morally inverted, and actually quite illogical.

Certainly there are cases where people are compensated, but there are many more where they aren't, and as you noted this compensation only applies to "significant" use, which again begs the question; how much theft qualifies as acceptable? Indeed there are even cases where clearly significant use is not compensated, due to legal technicalities.

I think you need to reconsider exactly who is ripping off whom in this scenario. The idea that person B is allowed to monopolise a derivative of person A's work, but person C is not allowed to do likewise to person B's derivative work, based on some unquantified formula that legally defines an acceptable degree of theft, is hypocritical, nonsensical and morally repugnant.

Better by far to simply accept that all such works are unavoidably derivative, and thus cannot be legitimately monopolised.

Re: "the bit that's original is what we value"

If I build a house from bricks, 1% of which I stole from you, should I rightfully be entitled to keep those bricks and call the end result "my house"?

Copyrighted works are houses built with many people's bricks, few of whom are ever compensated or even credited.

Is that fair?

Re: Excessive copyright term

Disney is perhaps not the best example to use in an attempt to justify the claimed entitlements of "creators", given that nearly everything it has ever "created" was blatently copied from folk tales and other works.

Mickey Mouse is indeed trivial, but the problem is not the significance of the material, it's the principle, the establishment of precedents which could so easily be applied to far more significant works.

Re: "because they own it"

Two apple growers may both own identical crops of apples, and yet both manage to sell them, without needing to ask for state protection to prohibit the other grower from selling his apples. Exactly the same applies to any other real property.

And no, real property ownership is not a monopoly, of the state protected variety or otherwise, because the essence of a monopoly is not about what you own, but about what you prevent others from creating independently for themselves, purely because it happens to be similar to something you own.

It should also be noted that the "IP" industry is the only one in which monopolisation is not illegal (e.g. the Sherman Act).

So again I ask, why should those in the "IP" industry be afforded this state protection?

And it's not like there are no examples of people producing ethereal things like software without resorting to such methods, and still managing to get paid handsomely for it, so clearly it is possible.

"get paid for creating and selling their stuff"

I wonder how every other company outside the "IP" industry manages to sell their stuff without needing a state-protected monopoly?

No sign of Half-Life 3 but how about FOURTEEN Steam Machine makers?

Re: "SteamOS is not a regular OS"

Steam OS is just Debian with Valve's fork of Xcompmgr. There's nothing very irregular about that. It will also ship with Gnome, and of course you'll be able to install any other window manager, just like you can on any other distro.

So clearly Steam itself doesn't need Ubuntu on GNU/Linux. I myself run it on an extremely minimalist Gentoo setup, comprising pure Openbox and not much else, and I don't remember having to do anything special to get it working either, Portage took care of all the dependencies for me.

Red Hat teams up with community-based RHEL lookalike CentOS

Re: No more SRPMs

That might be difficult for several reasons, not least of which because those GPL obligations demand corresponding sources, not just any old sources, but also because Fedora uses exactly the same set of SRPMs, indeed that's where they begin, so it would be rather difficult to withdraw them without also shutting down Fedora.

App to manage Android app permissions

Re: "different passports"

Nonetheless, the fact that we all share the same central government does not magically transform a Scotsman into an Englishman.

Moreover, your point about countries only serves to reinforce that point. Insofar as there is no longer any such country as Scotland, equally there is no such country as England, so deciding to call us all "English", on the basis that we all share the same central government, is wrong even by your own standards.

The country is called The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, or just the UK for short. If you want to refer to the people of that country then call them British, not English. Although technically Britain is only one island of the UK, so for example the people of Northern Ireland, Guernsey, the Isle of Man, the Shetlands, the Hebrides and so forth are not British, even though they are citizens of the UK. But there has never been a collective term for the citizens of the UK, and "UKish" just sounds silly.

Whether it's a country or not, only those in England are English, and even then only if they're English by birth. The rest of the UK is not, so please don't refer to us as such.