Posts by Naselus

Donald Trump dumps on Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg

Apparently, if you drive around San Jose of a morning, there's crowds of Mexican illegals hanging out on street corners offering cheap day-rate labour coding Java for Android apps.

Re: Good for Trump

Yes, damn those pro-business, anti-working class leftists. Helping billionaires at the expense of the poor is definitely what socialism is all about.

Windows 10 keeps Microsoft's odd desktop-as-a-service rules

Re: LTSP

"Meanwhile, The Linux Terminal Server Project marks 16 years of providing DaaS on shared hardware for the low low price of nothing per seat."

Yes, and it's achieved such market dominance in that time.

PALE, MALE AND STALE: Apple reveals it has just ONE black exec

Re: I don't like Apple...

"Pretty much, yeah. Amazing what being in the large majority, coupled with significantly better education and employment opportunities does for you. What? You wanted the easy way out for altering inequality, a nice quick fix? Rather than accepting that it takes 100 years to educate an entire population."

That's pretty much the point I was making with the rest of my post. This isn't Apple's issue - even though I despise Apple - but it is indicative of the continual failure of US society to address structural issues around both race and gender.

Re: I don't like Apple...

"Successful companies hire the best people for the job, they don't care what their sexuality, colour, religion or anything else is, as long as they do a great job."

And it just so happened that the best people for the job turned out to be white men for the 250th year running.

to be honest, I don't really think that it reflects on Apple, who I'm sure have a fairly typical company attitude to trying to hire minorities and women (i.e., we have to so let's get good ones for whatever role we can find), and does rather more say something about an industry which appears to attract a labour force which is 80% white and 95% male. While it's clearly a fairly big issue, I (for once) agree with Worstall on this - it's a lot more about the activities which women are encouraged to follow in Western culture generally than anything the tech industry does. By the time Apple's hiring managers are involved in the process, it's a good 15 years too late to do anything about it.

Hey, folks. Meet the economics 'genius' behind Jeremy Corbyn

"leading to higher inflation and the need to either make cuts or the temptation to keep on printing"

You did miss an option here - you can raise taxes and not spending. This has anti-inflationary effects, since money that the government receives from taxation is effectively destroyed (just as money that the government spends is not taken from the government, but rather pops into existence as needed). In a fiat currency system, it's largely meaningless for a government to borrow in its own currency. Moreover, taxes used in this way can take the 'surplus' money from where it's genuinely in surplus - those of us who spend less than half our wages one rent and food. Someone on 150k a year (the 45% tax rate) will be less hurt by a tax rise of 10% to cover the cash influx at the bottom.

Corbyn's team are not economic illiterates. They are clued up on the relevant theories and the literature behind them. The question isn't whether Corbynomics or MMT would work - of course it would work, any complete economic theory does; even 'Socialism in one country' made a crippled, backward Russian Empire into the second most powerful country on earth for forty years - but whether it would work better than the current approach for more people. Given how badly the current approach is failing the majority, there's a good chance it will.

"The Guardian are a Labour paper"

The Guardian are a NEW Labour paper. They think that a man who has caused party membership to increase 50%, and who has a higher appeal to the electorate than any of his leadership rivals, is a bad thing for the party. They're worried about infiltration by socialism, which is an odd thing for a paper which supports a socialist party to be worried about. They even wheeled Tony Blair out, for God's sake; and then had to wheel him out AGAIN when they realised that their readers hate him.

As to believing Corbyn's policies are bad or good - whatever. Who cares. We have elections to determine that. The risk of splits in the Labour party presently are microscopic; they may lose some Progress Ltd twats like Chukka Ummuna or Liz Kendall, but I doubt they'd actually follow through on threats to leave, since Corbyn will control their re-election funds at that point and Doug Carswell set a dangerous precident by insisting on contesting his own seat when he left the Tories last year. The the parliamentary Labour party has been dominated by the right for a long time, and is not actually a fair reflection of the base anymore; this has caused a haemorrhaging of 'old labour' support to UKIP and the SNP over the past decade and (since Ed's platform was largely 'austerity is the right course of action, but we want to do less of it than the Tories do') has left our political scene as 'do you want tory policies from the tories or second-hand tory policies from labour?'. The floating voters are now pretty much willing to accept a shafting from any leader who can eat a bacon sandwich without looking like a berk.

The epic efforts that the centre-right of the labour party have been going to over the past week or two to try and either prevent the vote, or prevent as many people as possible voting in it, has pretty much killed any chance of anyone but Corbyn winning now. Burham and Cooper (forget Kendall) are both too heavily associated with what seems an awful lot like an anti-democratic attempt to maintain control over the party and keep the staggering corpse of New Labour upright, despite it's comprehensive rejection by the electorate twice in a row (in the face of a Tory government that probably has the least amount of genuine talent in it since 1950).

This leadership election is pretty much the belated funeral of New Labour; if Corbyn had stood 5 years ago I think we'd have seen the same thing then, too. Whether that amounts to the death of the Labour Party is highly questionable. I'd suggest that it could go either way. But continuing the New Labour approach at this stage is even more certain certain to fail; the Tories can always say that New Labour policies were the ones that crashed the economy (even though those policies were supported across the floor), the Old Labour remnants no longer feel that the various Westminster spivs represent them and are fleeing to other parties, and the younger generation see all 'normal' politicos as the same.

New Labour and their highly choreographed politics of presentation is done. Whether Corbynomics is the replacement or not, doesn't really matter; the Westminster consensus of the past 30 years is over. You can bet that Cameron will face much harsher questioning from Corbyn than he ever did from Ed Milliband - Milliband was agreeing with half the things that Cameron was doing even as he attempted to push his buttons. Corbyn outright hates everything in the Tory agenda.

Re: interesting on Murphy's education

Well, he may not have accepted their lectures being put forward, but he did go to university, do an economics degree, and pass it. I'm not even sure if Tim has a degree in anything. A few 'net searches don't show any sign of a serious economics background; he's a fellow of the Adam Smith Institute, but that's pretty much meaningless - other fellows include a senior nurse, a bunch of right-wing journos, a history PhD student, and a mixed bag of CEOs who are rather obviously fans of the idea of not having to pay very much tax.

Given that generally when Worstall starts spouting analysis about most industres, those who work in the area usually pipe up to say he's talking half-baked twaddle, I'd see little reason to think his economics is any better.

So all in all, this largely amounts to a pissing contest between a journalist pretending to be an economist and an accountant pretending to be an economist, both of them attempting to use economics they don't really understand to justify ideological positions they arrived at beforehand. Tim doesn't like paying tax and thinks that UKIP is a serious political party, so I don't really rate his opinion any higher than the average man in the pub on matters political; Richard Murphy likes paying tax and thinks Tax Research LLP is a real think tank, despite containing only himself and his wife, so I' d take his advice with a pinch of salt too.

'I don't recognise Amazon as a bullying workplace' says Bezos

Really? The CEO and founder found that everyone at the office was nice to him, regardless of the claims that the workplace is unpleasant?

Well, there's no reason why people who were being twats to lower-ranked staff would behave differently with him, is there.

Hacking Team mulled stopping Ethiopia sales – because of idiot g-men

“The Hacking Team leaks show this industry cannot be depended upon to regulate itself,”

Are there any industries which can be?

Patching a fragmented, Stagefrightened Android isn't easy

Re: "it needs to push carriers to push over-the-air updates promptly after fixes become available."

"Whilst it's possible carriers have redirected this, most of them don't bother fiddling with the system partition,"

Actually, most of them do. I know at least half of the UK networks run the OTA servers for their phones in-house, and it's there that the updates push from; it's probably more than that. The device manufacturers are, after all, using the network provider's bandwidth to push the updates - and a 2gig download to 30 million mobiles is a LOT of bandwidth to allow someone else to randomly use whenever they feel like it.

Re: Google is taking the lead on revitalising the patching pipeline for the Android ecosystem

"I'm not sure that Google are entirely the problem"

To be honest, Google have been trying to get a grip on 'Droid fragmentation for at least the last couple of years. Getting handset manufacturers to recognize the problem helps a lot - since as little as six months ago most of them thought OS upgrades meant 'we can sell new handsets' rather than 'we should probably sort out setting these up for our current line-up' - but carriers are even worse; they see it as a massive use of their bandwidth with no rewards whatsoever.

I know, who'd have thought the people who run mobile phone networks are money-grubbing dicks, right?

Microsoft: Surface hub will ship from January 1, 2016

"Other than being massively expensive and having no real advantage in a meeting over a projector? Yes, let's design something that requires me to stand in front of it in order to interact with it, thus obscuring the display from the audience. Truly an idea worthy of Balmer (and apparently now Sadnads).

It might make a good novelty display system in the lobby of certain hotels or convention centres. However, that's a very limited market. A small specialist manufacturer might make a good, if obscure, business out of something like this, but as a division of a business the size of Microsoft it's pointless."

You have no idea what you're talking about, do you?

Firstly, it's around half to 1/3rd the price of similar display walls, while being considerably better quality. Secondly, anyone working in the construction industry can see the advantage of a multi-user touch-screen that is big enough to display A1 plans in full size. It's not really for show-and-tell powerpoint bollocks (though yes, many execs will probably user it as such). It's a productivity device that engineers and architects are going to go completely apeshit for. Anyone involved in Building Information Management workloads will be falling over themselves for this thing.

Re: but will it phone home?

If only one could buy some kind of device which could block unauthorised network traffic going out onto the internet. Something which produced an effect similar to a wall of fire. A 'fire wall', one might almost call it. And if only the idea was so simple and easy to implement that $30 home routers could ship with one built in. But hey, I guess that's not something anyone in the IT department of the kind of company that can spend £25000 on a huge piece of display equipment would be aware of.

I work for an architect, and we're certainly going to be getting a few of these; I'm certainly not worried about it moving anything out of my network without permission. It'll be set up to communicate with it's peer devices in the other offices and not a lot else. I don't really think it's the idea device for a spot of web surfing, so why would I need to let it chat to Microsoft.com?

Rise up against Oracle class stupidity and join the infosec strike

Re: will it really help?

"Fortunately, I don't have to make that choice. The Register is, in fact, working on HTTPS support (or so I have been told)."

Are the consultancy firm you work for doing so, too? Only, I just tried going to https://www.egeek.ca/ (free plug!)... and that doesn't work. Only http://. Same goes for https://Webreaktech.com, the firm's review website. Seems like you're not entirely practicing what you're preaching here. Seems to me, someone over at eGeek should really make a stand about this sort of thing, and withhold their valuable consultancy hours until management do something about it.

Labour Party website DDoS'd by ruly democratic mob

Re: It's £3.88 a month

"I suppose you could join, vote and then cancel. Are people actually doing that?"

The real answer is largely no, tbh.

The Labour party have cancelled the 'supporter' status of about 1200 people - most of them Green voters who left the labour party in the last couple of elections, and UKIPer's who did much the same thing. The labour party has just shy of 200,000 members, and about 200,000 more 'affliated supporters', so that 1200 people account for about 0.25% of the potential turnout for the vote. The nonsense about infiltration from the Tories and the Far Left is largely a desperate attempt to explain why no-one wants to vote for the three identical clowns opposing Corbyn; the same is true of the rather tragic attempts to postpone or cancel the vote because the wrong person might win it.

It really doesn't matter where your personal politics lie, tbh; this leadership contest has pretty much shown New Labourism to be ideologically dead ground. It's been discredited to hell and back, and largely leaves people choosing between voting Tory or voting for these guys who largely agree with the Tories but are very slightly nicer about it. You can believe Corbyn's economic plans might work (as many economists do), or you can believe they will be a complete disaster (as many other economists do), but at least it's an actual choice; back in May, the question was largely "Do you want David Cameron to screw you from behind, or do you want Ed Miliband to screw you from behind in exactly the same way?". Most older labour voters are no longer up for voting for Tory policies wrapped in a red hanky.

Re: Can someone answer this question?

"Looking at the parliamentary position, south Norwich (the university end) is a red blob in a sea of blue. "

Kinda sounds like Corbyn in the modern Labour party, tbh.

Oracle pulls CSO's BONKERS anti-bug bounty and infosec rant

Re: 2 hours into a support call ...

"The CTO, not missing a beat, replied "Because I have a 250 000$ check for our quarterly licence fees on the corner of my desk and I am not signing it until this is fixed""

I get the feeling he didn't miss a beat because he's had this exact conversation with Oracle a few times before.

Apple and Google are KILLING KIDS with encryption, whine lawyers

Sigh. Why don't the tech giants just each chip in a couple of million dollars and run a counter campaign asking if people really want the Chinese government to be able to read their medical records, or islamic terrorists to be able to access their children's school records? If the government are busy trying to appeal to the paranoid halfwit section of society, then you can quite easily turn that upside-down.

Windows 10 climbs to 3.55 per cent market share, Win 8.1 dips

Re: Bringing Up The Rear

Yes, there's like 4 billion linux desktops in the world which just never show up in the stats. Remember, this is at least the seventh year of linux on the desktop. It must be running on pretty much all devices by now, and any stats that show otherwise are clearly incorrect.

Nutanix digs itself into a hole ... and refuses to drop the shovel

Re: Testing shmesting ..

"I'm curious here .. do modern day storage tests accurately reflect what end users find valuable in products such as HCI? (genuine question - not cynical rhetoric)."

Depends who comes up with the test. I'm rather more inclined to think Storage Review will devise a test that comes somewhere close to matching my day-to-day usage profiles than the vendors' own metrics will.

If questions about the validity of the testing regime need to be raised, then those questions should be coming from the end consumers (i.e., you and me) telling the reviewers that the information they're providing is no longer useful, rather than from the vendors declaring that the metrics that they do poorly on aren't important anymore - especially when those vendors have no agreement on which measures are more important.

"I know you want to dismiss them - and HCI in general - as irrelevant. Too bad. They're not. Nutanix may be a pain in the ass, but they're here to stay. Saying this isn't "obsession", it's objective assessment of the facts."

I think you're misrepresenting my position on this (or maybe conflating it with the ACs who also joined the other discussion). I don't want to dismiss HCI, which is basically going to completely change how my job works. It's not irrelevant; it's the most important thing to happen in enterprise IT since virtualization, bar none. All that massive disruption that Cloud promised, which mostly never really happened, was nothing compared to where HCI is going, since HCI is going to change how we do things both on- and off-premises; data that I would never in a million year let AWS or Microsoft put in their cloud infrastructure, I will still migrate to HCI machines sat in my own server room. It will be huge. But that's the point - it WILL BE. It isn't yet. It needs 3-4 years more before it's truly ready, and I don't know anyone who's outright replacing their existing infrastructure with HCI yet; there's some dabbling, and there's expansion of existing infrastructure, but not one of Nutanix's customers has gone out and binned the ESXi hosts and replaced the netapp filers they already had. The Ultimate Infrastructure Machines are not yet synonymous with infrastructure itself, even though I agree that they will be by 2020.

As to Nutanix as a big deal, selling a lot etc... not so much. At least, not yet. They're the biggest fish in the HCI pond atm, but that pond is still in the process of being dug out, and the fish are all in their infancy, even Nutanix. They're not 2004 VMWare yet; a company that was not just doing something different, but that no-one else had the slightest clue how to do at all. Presently, Nutanix aren't offering much that, say, Simplivity don't - and the established players from elsewhere are in a much better position to jump on the HCI bandwagon than they were for virtualization.

In short, VMWare in 2004 or so was single-handedly disrupting the whole data center, with Netapp disrupting storage in a complementary way at the same time. We could all see that these two companies were going to be Big Shots for a decade or more coming up. Nutanix are not in that happy position - they're part of a coming wave of disruption, but that wave is made up of lots of companies fighting over the same space, and no one company can dictate the direction it's going to go (yet - if history is anything to judge by, then in six months or a year we probably WILL see one company ruling the roost - but it's not certain to be the current big dog). I don't think Nutanix are going to go bang and collapse overnight, but I also don't see them pre-ordained to take pole position in that marketplace as yet - the starting pistol has barely gone off in HCI, and trying to guess who'll be sat on top of the pile before half the companies have even brought their tech to market is premature.

...and that'd explain the slight obsession thing I mentioned in the other thread. I'd be a bit obsessed with any company that was this much of a pain in the ass on a daily basis.

Also, I do think you're entirely in the right on this one, obviously. Moreover, it's a bit surprising that Nutanix think they can get away with shit like this. VMWare less so - they're already sitting on an entrenched, dominant position in their traditional sector and can leverage that over the review sites in the same way that all the big players do, but Nutanix's only strong position is in the laughably immature HCI space, which might look entirely different within six months.

They really need to be winning sympathy and pointing to the old guard's cumbersome and demanding attempts to force reviewers into using metrics which are best for them, rather than actively competing to find out who can get away with being the biggest dickhead to the 3rd party bench markers that are, ultimately, going to make or break their product.

I get the feeling Nutanix are getting a bit ahead of themselves. They're not the Microsoft of HCI yet, because HCI is nowhere near mature enough to HAVE a dominant player, and the other new boys in the space are only really behind Nutanix right now based on funding and time-to-market. First mover advantage is overrated, there's no indication that Nutanix has any real quality advantage, and their much-vaunted customer base remains tiny compared to real established players in established techs - they're celebrating 800 enterprise deployments on their website, ffs. If that's your big news, you're not in a position to start dictating the field. VMWare have 500,000 deployments and THEY aren't in any position to dictate the field either. Time for Nutanix to reel in the overgrown ePeen and grow up; a reviewer boycott could still put them out of business at this stage.

Sane people, I BEG you: Stop the software defined moronocalypse

Most people can relate to the idea of drink driving being dangerous. Most have been drunk, most can drive, and therefore most can see that doing the two at the same time is bloody stupid. Meanwhile, the general population do not understand the notion of attack surfaces, escalation of privilege, or IT security in general. Before we can even start to train the next generation of software developers to write secure code, we need to train the next generation of users in the basics of IT security. We don't need the CISSP to be put on the year 10 curriculum... but the GCSE Sec+ wouldn't hurt. Hell, this may even lead to politicians who understand that re-running the crypto wars is a Bad Thing.

Rather than a campaign against writing shit code, I'd sooner we had a campaign against running shit code. Writing shit code will dry up pretty quickly once the user base are culturally conditioned to refuse to use it.

Virtually no one is using Apple Music even though it is utterly free

Re: I don't really care about music...

"Something bad has happened to Apple over the last four or five years or so. "

Steve Jobs died just under 4 years ago. Just sayin'.

But seriously, I don't really agree. Apple hasn't changed. That's kinda the problem. Tim Cook is very much proving to be a caretaker CEO; all his success stories are just iterations of previous successes (iPhones, iPads, Macbooks), while his actual innovations are poorly-judged flops (Apple Music, Watch). He's doing very well at trading on past success, and very poorly at making new successes.

Once the competition starts to get serious about market, Apple tend to lose market share like crazy, retreat to the high-end luxury zone with massive pricing to keep their margins up, and eventually become marginal players trying to keep ultra-high end pricing against equal-or-better spec machines being sold for half the price, where upon their presence in that area is reduced to fanboy bait only. They simply aren't very competitive, because they're so reliant on high margins over market share.

This has gone quite well for them recently, but it's a high-risk, high-reward strategy. Jobs got it right about half the time, mostly toward the end of his life, and Apple pretty much exploded when it went well (but also imploded pretty badly when it didn't - to the point of having to go cap-in-hand to the Old Enemy at Microsoft in '97). Cook, conversely, appears to be terrible at picking winners, but remains wedded to the strategy of dominating new markets and then abandoning them to cheaper rivals the moment prices start to fall.

This is kind of a shame, because Tim Cook is a hell of a lot more likeable than Jobs ever was. I suspect that, while Apple isn't doomed, it IS entering a period of stagnation and decline now. They'll keep recycling the same few products, all of which are no longer really innovative or impressive, and all of which are starting to get displaced by rivals who are willing to cut prices to pick up market share.

This - where I work, we include iTunes on every desktop PC as standard now so that iPhones can hook up to them. It routinely crashes within about 20 minutes of logging in and takes the OS down with it... but every person working for the company has an iTunes account connected to their work email address, which uses nothing.

If Apple did the Right Thing and split all the functions of iTunes up, you'd get a far more realistic number of users who actually want to use it for music alone... which would appear to be around 11 million.

"and Apple at least seemed to be paying more"

Yes, they definitely offered to pay artists based on their potent ethical standpoint compared to the other services. Not because a 20-year old girl had to shame them into it or anything.

Re: a good proportion will be outside the target age demographic for this service.

"At what age do people stop listening to music?"

I thought all forms of joy were forbidden when you were over 25.

Apple goes to crapple in stock plunge kerfaffle: $113bn wiped off in days

Re: Don't Buy, Sell

"The whole "tech" sector suffers from ridiculous over-valuations."

This. Apple had the highest market cap in history. Between April 2014 and April 2015, their market cap went from their traditional zone of around $400bn to $700bn. It doesn't matter how cool you think the iPhone 6 is, that is a preposterous jump.

Vision? Execution? Sadly, omission and confusion rule Gartner's virty quadrant

Re: In the market for two years

"I don't think Nutanix belongs on that quadrant at all. "

Over the past few months, Trevor's become a wee bit obsessed with Nutanix. He brings them up at even the most marginal opportunities.

Google sneaks out new clip-on tech goggles for saddo Glassholes

"Artificially created and managed panics are largely to blame for the failure of Google Glass to date."

I suspect 'making the user look like a twat' was the bigger problem, tbh. We're culturally conditioned to think glasses aren't cool. They are artistic shorthand for nerd. Every Ugly Duckling movie hinges on the assumption that a breathtakingly beautiful actress can convincingly pretend to be a hideous troll simply by putting some slightly thick-frames glasses on. If you want to produce a fashionable piece of wearable tech that 'aspirational' middle-class people will buy, then glasses are not the model to build on. Sunglasses yes, clear glasses no.

HP insists 'we don't have a global dress code' – while deleting one from its website

Really, the dress code for tech companies should match the personality of the company. IBM should make everyone wear full suits at all times. Apple should require staff to wear completely new sets of cloths every day with different numbers of limb slots from the last lot to ensure no backward compatibility. Microsoft should copy Apple as best they can, but for legacy reasons never quite manage it. Google should wear creepy cloths which report back the wearer's location, date of birth, and sexual preferences every 25 minutes.

Windows 10: A sysadmin speaks his brains – and says MEH

Re: This says it all really

"Sorry MS but you (and you pals at CIA/NSA/GCBQ etc) have gone too far."

You mean the pals Microsoft refused to hand data over to, despite an extortionate daily fine? I'm not thrilled about Win 10 phoning home about everything, but credit where it's due - and it's not like you don't get exactly the same 'service' from Google and Apple products, both of whom are notably less interested in telling the NSA where to stick it.

Microsoft has RECORD quarter, in a BAD way - Sad Nad slashes phone biz

Re: Sigh

"So ... they made a loss. Which means they couldn't sell enough of what they needed to sell at the price they needed to sell it."

No, you said they were selling 'too cheap for them to survive on'. Which isn't true unless they write down at least $5.2 billion dollars on bad acquisitions every quarter from here to the end of time. You looked at a one-off write-down, and incorrectly inferred a non-existent structural deficit from it - which you shouldn't have done, since if you'd actually read the article, it made it pretty clear that this was a fairly decent quarter in terms of sales and revenues. Making a loss due to one-off costs is not a problem, particularly when you're sat on a cash mountain like most of the big tech players.

For all the 'Microsoft is doomed!' bullcrap, we're still talking about a company that has been consistently profitable for it's entire lifespan when 1-off costs are removed (and has been consistently profitable for 98% of it's lifespan when they aren't). I don't like MS any more than you do, but taking this as a sign that they're in any kind of trouble whatsoever is ridiculous.

Re: Sigh

"Microsoft lost money on all that selling; that implies it's too cheap for them to survive on. That they didn't sell as much as they need implies it's too expensive for the market. And therein lies a bit of a problem..."

Did you actually read the article, or did you just see it involved Microsoft and immediate came to troll the comments? They only made an overall loss from the write-down. Without 1-off costs, they're looking at a 5 billion profit for the quarter... which is pretty good considering it's the Q immediately preceding a major flagship product release.

BREAKING NEWS: Apple makes money

Re: Record profits yet Wall St says No

"If you were apple, which scenario would you rather have, 90% market share, but in the pits margins and revenue....or 10% market share but tops in margins and revenue share? Answers on a postcard...."

Dunno, let's ask 1985 Apple and see how well abandoning market share to Microsoft in favour of maxing revenue turned out for them.

Here's why Whittingdale kicked a subscription BBC into the future

Re: Flawed comparison

"Want cheaper, universally accessible TV? Require more sports to be free to watch."

Or drop sports from the Beeb's mandate altogether.

Assuming the BBC wins the rights to a hundred or so 90-minute games of football every year, that means it's spending half it's annual budget on just 6 and a quarter day's worth of TV time, which a considerable portion of the audience couldn't give a toss about or even actively dislikes. I'd rather see that money being put into documentaries and good script writing than being used to pad Wayne Rooney's salary and 3000 hours of Strictly Come Dancing being used to pad the shortfall.

Being common is tragic, but the tragedy of the commons is still true

Re: Semi "voluntary" cooperation

"That sounds like the "Priesthood" approach, which is surely just a variant on the Government-controlled one? People with power (either physical or spiritual) lay down the rules, and define the punishments that will happen if they are broken."

Not really, no.

Firstly, we'd probably be better off thinking of government-control as a variant on Priesthood, rather than the other way round, since in the earliest large organized societies 'priest' and 'bureaucrat' were largely the same thing ('bloke who can read and write and is allowed to go up the ziggurat').

But secondly, custom and taboo lead to priests, rather than the other way around. Priesthood is pretty intimately tied to the beginnings of agrarianism (where you get large groups of people staying in one place for hundreds of years), while custom is largely present in hunter-gatherer groups. Most groups of people (even those with less than 20 members) will develop customs and taboos over time, but you don't start getting priesthoods until you have emergent hierarchies and fairly big societies.

Archaeological evidence suggests that notions of custom and taboo clearly date back to at least 20,000 years ago, if not 40,000 (judging from funerary behaviour and cave art - hell, even other hominids appear to practice some degree of custom); conversely, full-on priesthoods imposing 'the will of god' are unlikely to predate Gobeki Tepi and Catalhoyuk (around 9,000 years ago).

iPod dead? Nope, says Apple: New Touch has iPhone 6 brains

"Interesting to have the downvotes, but no counter-argument."

Not really, you made two fatal mistakes - you praised a Microsoft product, and implied it had any advantage over an Apple product. Frankly, it's amazing you only had 2 downvotes; you'll have pissed off the fanbois by saying something bad about iPhones, angered the Penguin God by implying Microsoft have done anything good ever, and you've probably infuriated samsung fans by suggesting anything other than a sammy has decent battery life.

Salmon Rushdie went into hiding for lesser thought crimes.

Feel like you're being herded onto Windows 10? Well, you should

Re: Life on the trailing edge...

"That's migrating from XP to 7 by the way"

I see, so you're working for OPM's security team and the hack's brought the date forward a bit?

Cisco spraying $1bn over the UK, hipsters set for well-earned cash injection

Wait...

David Cameron knows who Cisco are? Doesn't he understand that this investment is pretty much incompatible with banning encryption...?

'I'm COMING for you, DIRTBAG!': Ex-Sony chief Smedley to Kid Lizard hacker

"Also lets be honest, the reason most of these hacks work is because companies don't take their responsibility to security seriously. Most breaches are caused by unpatched estates."

Quite. Lizard squad didn't really do anything Lulzsec hadn't already done in 2011, and were clearly considerably less technically literate than genuinely dangerous hackers like Sabu, Tflow or Kayla.

It's pretty sad that anyone was still insecure enough to even notice them ,tbh. Basically, if someone was worried about Lizard Squad, then they either didn't understand the technical details of the attacks, or knew that their security infrastructure was criminally negligent.

Tech bubble? Pah. IPOs just return cash to early-stage investors

Re: BP, gone?? Noes!!!!1!.. hang on...

"I have it on very good authority that there is an (as good as) infinite amount of oil left, so why would BP disappear?"

Yeah, the Reg sponsored a lecture by some bloke about it, wasn't there... what was his name, Jim Walsall? Tom Wurzel..?

So... what you're saying is, you have a bunch of companies which don't actually make any money, and the late-stage investors money is used to pay off earlier investors with interest. And that's fine and dandy, and how capitalism works now.

Oh, wait, no, that was what Bernie Madoff was doing, wasn't it? Silly me. I get so confused between 'perfectly fine market operations' and 'highly illegal fraudulent ponzi schemes'.

Outsourcery has ‘greater flexibility to pursue opportunities’ after £4m Voda loan

Yeah; given his £250k salary, Piers appears to have managed to get a good £1.5 million or so out of Outsourcery without ever making a penny in profit since he took over. One might wonder what, exactly, is supposed to have justified that.

God knows why investors keep pushing money into the operation. I do kinda respect Linny for at least having the decency to drop his own salary before firing engineers, but really the whole operation seems hopelessly unprofitable - they've been running the 'cloud' element of the business for seven years and it's never made a profit, or even kept losses below 50% of revenue.

I live in Manchester, where Outsourcery is based, and they appear to have a colossal staff turnover; they've been constantly recruiting for the past several years despite offering permanent contracts on market-beating salaries with good benefits. That suggests a lot of staff fleeing a sinking ship.

China hacks 'everything that doesn't move' says Hilary Clinton

Re: Is there a definition?

"What are "the bounds of acceptable behavior" in spying and espionage?"

Funnily enough, there sort of is an 'acceptable' level of spying - for example, that Russian spy ring from a few years back. They were engaged in an acceptable level of spying, in that they had little access to any privileged information and mostly reported back dull cultural crap of next to no political use. This is why, when they were kicked out of the US, that was pretty much as far as the matter went. During the Cold War, both sides kept fairly long lists of known enemy agents who could be kicked out for diplomatic purposes - they even selected a certain number depending on how 'offended' they were by whatever was provoking the kicking-out.

It would be incredibly rude not to do any spying on another country; that would basically be tantamount to saying 'you're not relevant enough for us to bother checking up on you'.

'The server broke and so did my back on the flight to fix it'

"Yes, that part of the story seems a bit off"

The whole story sounds a tad fishy to me, tbh.

An Apple server on OS/X in a production environment running critical file storage? A CEO deciding to take his chief techy on a tour of a new site during a major server outage (after the techy has flown in specifically to look at that outage), rather than demanding that the problem be fixed immediately? No backups taken for 5 months? 3 slipped disks from a little air turbulence?

Yeah, having some trouble believing any of it, tbh.

Windows 7 and 8.1 market share surge, XP falls behind OS X

Re: A bit of a false comparison

"You can't really compare OSX as a single entity against multiple versions of Windows"

Well no, you can't. It's also not really right to lump every different Linux distro into one category either.

But the point is more that the number of users on each individual version of desktop Linux or OS X is meaninglessly small in a market that remains so totally and utterly dominated by Microsoft. Individual versions of unpopular Microsoft OSes have greater market share than the combined total of all versions of OS X. The most popular MS OS has nearly 60% market share alone. You could quite easily split the graph into 'Windows 7', 'Windows 8', 'Windows XP' and 'Other', and find that Other still struggles to come in third; if you lump all versions of windows together then MS are more dominant in the space even than android is in smartphones - and with less fragmentation.

Now I'm sure that pointing out this objective truth will get me a huge number of downvotes from Apple fans and Penguins, but really everything other than Microsoft remains effectively irrelevant in the desktop space. That's not a statement on relative quality - I like Linux myself, and even though I despise OS X I do see the benefit in that locked-down fisher-price interface for small children or attempts to communicate with chimpanzees and dolphins (so anyone in high level management). But the simple truth is, what we're seeing is the emergence of a world that wants Windows on its PC, Linux on its web server, and Android on its phone.

No-one really cares about OS X, and even Apple's enormous marketing clout from the successes of the past ten years hasn't really impacted on that. The trumpeting of all versions of OS X combined reaching parity with a 14-year old OS that's been out of support for over a year is frankly embarrassing. Meanwhile iOS is rapidly declining to the same small market share as its desktop cousin; Apple's approach to mobile is repeating pretty much the same strategic mistake it made in the desktop space back in the 1980s, surrendering market share for short-term profits; and you can see just how well that turned out from these very graphs.

Re: Now students, please use "free" and "Microsoft" in the same sentence.

"It's really hard for me to think of a single crucial feature since Windows 95"

Yes, the Win 9x architecture was famously an impenetrable bastion of security and stability.

If you wish to add a 'technical' argument to not getting win 10, then it would help if you didn't back it up with technically illiterate reasoning.

BBC (sort of) sorry for Grant Shapps Wikipedia smear reportage

Re: Not that he probably didn't do something to deserve it

"But how would you feel if you lost your job due to at best sloppy practises and at worse absolute lies on the behalf of 2 media organisations?"

I'd feel pretty hard done by. But then, Shapps might have lost his job not due to the allegations, but rather because he was a politically toxic little shit. He was essentially a laughing stock from the very true prior allegations of sock puppeting online; his various online business interests are extremely close to fraud in most cases; and he himself is pretty damn unpopular in the party.