Posts by Arbiter

Pull up the Windows 10 duvet and pretend Win8 and Vista were BAD DREAMS

He's joking, you burke

Boltar was released without a sense of humour. As yet no-one has tried to upgrade him.

Windows 7 MARKED for DEATH by Microsoft as of NOW

Re: shell choices

I suggested this years and years, possibly decades ago. Since then I have changed my mind. You people are not average users. Average users are thicker than pigshit and can barely find the power button. Changing anything causes them to panic. Allowing them to fiddle with options is a recipe for disaster. Suggesting DIY shell configuration is a malware wet dream.

Why did it take antivirus giants YEARS to drill into super-scary Regin? Symantec responds...

Mulder?

Is that you?

The key insight here...

...is that government is organised crime.

Antarctic ice THICKER than first feared – penguin-bot boffins

Who says global warming is a bad thing?

The world changes. It gets better for some and worse for others.

It sucks if you live on a South Sea island two metres above sea level. If you're a lawyer with a substantial investment in waterfront property and a tree hugging girlfriend it's a disaster.

But if you live in Canada or Siberia a ten degree rise in average temperature means a huge increase in arable land. A return of its inland sea would be a godsend for Australia; a warm shallow estuary the size of France with natural protection from Indonesian and Japanese poachers. Water on both sides of the Great Dividing Range would mean reliable rainfall and a more temperate climate.

The world has been in and out of ice ages more times than you can poke it with a stick. It spends the majority of its time under ice, and every so often it thaws. This happens without any help from us - as does global cooling and the return to glaciation.

Possibly we are accelerating the warming. If so, hurrah! Ten metres of ice can ruin your whole civilisation.

Trips to Mars may be OFF: The SUN has changed in a way we've NEVER SEEN

Is that why they call it

The poop deck?

PROJECT ORION!

I can't believe no-one has mentioned this. For those who are too lazy for more than one source there's a good article in Wikipedia. I'm expecting the Chinese to do this. Their tech is nearly ready and they don't care whether the rest of the world approves.

Women! Worried you won't get that Job in IT? Mention how hot you are

The follow up study

Levitt and Dubner's study needs a follow up to find out whether having a total hottie as your legal rep gets you a better result.

Why US Feds and g-men kick up a stink about a growing smartphone encryption trend

Re: Effective?

300 tries in 900 seconds? Did you build some automation?

You're wrong BECAUSE you're right

There's so MUCH info now you can't see the trees for the forest.

Microsoft WINDOWS 10: Seven ATE Nine. Or Eight did really

Why every other is better

TICK - tech changes, rough around the edges, cognitive dissonance

TOCK - incremental refinement, cognitive resonance

Intel does the same thing (tick = new, tock = refined)

Bubble 2.0? Moneybags VC Andreessen warns profit-free startups: 'You will be VAPORIZED'

Frighteningly true but incomplete...

...it gets worse. Western economies are essentially pyramids schemes inasmuch as they depend on expansion. Having run out of frontiers they have been expanding on paper, but eventually some fool fails to realise that you can't call in those debts and triggers a Great Depression or a GFC. The ructions are going to get closer and closer together and I don't know what next but it scares me anyway.

You're 100% right and completely wrong

This is actually a rather tidy microcosm of why Linux continues to fail to take over the world: customers are a small subset of users.

Customers pay for product and services. Most Linux users won't pay for software and are therefore not part of any market.

When you're a FOSS developer, you develop software to please yourself. Perhaps you enjoy creating. Perhaps you want to raise the bar rather than admit that compared to its Windows counterpart a given piece of Linux software is unbearably awful.

When you're bored, broke or too busy with your day job/garden/exciting new idea you can simply stop.

FOSS quality control is optional. You may do it to indulge your sense of craftsmanship, or maybe some obsessive compulsive nerd will volunteer and do an incredible job until he achieves a specialised fame and finally acquires a girlfriend.

So it's pot luck as to whether the Linux version of something will be wonderful or rubbish. There are many examples of marvellous but unfinished and abandoned. Inter-platform support is equally variable.

Paid software has to at least be finished, and companies in it for the long haul maintain software well past the point at which it's no longer interesting. They don't stop until it's no longer profitable.

I'm not exactly ragging on Linux, more on people who cannot grasp that pot luck quality isn't good enough for some applications, and a freewheeling disregard for consumer needs earns their enmity, and poor discoverability through wildly inconsistent and frequently dreadful UI design makes it unsuitable for low-competence users.

Having lots of users will never get you market dominance because markets are composed of buyers and sellers. Deployment share is not the same as market share, and only market share matters.

CloudFlare ditches private SSL keys for better security

I agree wholeheartedly. It offends me profoundly that a private American corporation should vouch for sovereign powers. If anyone is a CA it ought to be the duly elected government of that nation. Not having CAs would be even better.

Murdoch to Europe: Inflict MORE PAIN on Google, please

In Murdoch's defense...

...so far as Murdoch is defensible, he behaves as he does because you Brits keep buying his "gutter rags". To quote Yes, Minister "The people who read the Sun don't care who runs the country so long as she has big tits."

Being on a bandwagon doesn't mean you're wrong

Even a stopped clock is right twice a day. I think that big = evil is a fairly reasonable generalisation. When a company is publicly owned (ie you can buy shares) there is a decoupling of responsibility from profit. The only thing preventing most large companies from being overtly evil is ineffectual mediocrity shackled by enormous bureaucracy, and an inability to innovate caused by the same decoupling. They can't be seen to gamble with shareholder money, innovation is always a gamble, therefore they cannot innovate. Instead they engage in refinement of proven technology and call it innovation.

Google is dangerous because it is a freak amongst titans: it actually does engage in genuine innovation and it isn't ineffectual or mediocre. Because there is no coupling between profit and responsibility, if Google isn't evil now it's only a matter of time and changing circumstance.

Governments are arguably a kind of publicly owned corporation defined by national boundaries. I think my observations about bureaucracy and inability to innovate are even more applicable to them.

Re: Much as you may hate him...

I don't', I don't, meh, don't be silly, don't be absurd and you cannot live in a world unaffected by the internet unless you are capable of time travel. You might find some forgotten corner of the world where there's no connectivity but your world will nevertheless be affected by it, however indirectly. Significantly affected.

'Windows 9' LEAK: Microsoft's playing catchup with Linux

Using the additional pixels to antialias

I have Win8 installed on a MacBook Pro and I have reduced the resolution. It used the extra resolution to antialias. I find it implausible that Win9 doesn't also do so, given that it is an incremental update with no fundamental changes of technology.

FFS it's just a shell

If you don't like it, change it. Once upon a time I did this. You can probably still do it.

I'm sure all you MS-haters are about to say something asinine along the lines of "evil empire is oppressing us by making shell selection an undocumented registry hack" but the fact is that the average user is barely able to cope with one shell when everyone else has it too.

If they let people mix things up Windows would be a pig's breakfast like Linux. The people most likely to use this successfully are the people least likely to buy the product. So they hid it.

Legacy

If you change the UI to be in line with the rest of Office, they would please a small number of Office users, be ignored by most Office users and piss off the entire installed Visio user base. So they didn't. Lucky for the Visio users you weren't in charge.

Nokia Lumia 530: A Windows Phone... for under £50

WinPhone without the app

Sure you can use it fully without the app. Connect the phone by USB and it shows up as a storage device. You can move music on and photos off directly. In fact I find it more convenient to do it that way. I have found Windows Media Player a convenient tool for managing playlists and music.

Apple 'fesses up: Rejected from the App Store, dev? THIS is why

Number agreement

"Has finally" is correct. Apple as a company is a singular entity. It's one company. Number agreement in English therefore requires has rather than have, which is paired with plurals. "Manchester United have scored again" is grammatically incorrect, always has been incorrect and will continue to be grammatically incorrect no matter how many sports announcers say it. The company has, we at the company have. The government has raised taxes, those greedy pigs have raised taxes. This is basic grammar. Learn it.

I know I'm being a grammar Nazi, but you deserve it.

Re: Quality Over Quantity

If you want to split the difference and have basic quality control (rejection of crash magnets, checking for absence of malicious behaviour and conformance to UI design guidelines) and a genuinely free market with fairly good signal to noise ratio in the reviews then I suggest a Windows Phone. While I am picky in my choice of apps and have less than a dozen installed, I don't think I've seen an app crash in the last six months. My partner switched to WP based on her experience with mine, and you'd need an oyster knife to make her let go of it. Our kids (in their 30s) have Android phones that are perpetually failing in one way or another. Every now and then I consider developing for Android but the tools are so poor and the platform so fragmented that I just can't be bothered.

NBN predicts a million premises next year

500G over ADSL

That's exactly the contract I have. I used Telstra because there is exactly one option where I live, contrary to the opinions of the telemarketers claiming they can give me better options (I find it's quicker to pretend to buy and let them work it out themselves than to argue with them).

My consumption is highly variable, wandering from 70GB to about 400GB depending on... let's just say it's seasonal. Coming changes are likely to inhibit my interest, and when that happens I doubt I will ever use more than 100GB in a month. Nevertheless, I would really like low latency and high transfer speed, because it makes a hell of a difference for telecommuting.

For the man in the street, in the absence of entertainment torrents high speeds and large volumes are simply not useful.

Quite apart from this, government interference and corporate greed are the reason the nerd in the street hasn't strung his own short haul high speed cables. If every house had a gigabit cable to the each of the neighbours we'd have a network you couldn't bring down with nuke, and no one would have to pay for anything but the hardware and a little electricity. Instead we have a physical hierarchy that can be disrupted by a single backhoe, for no other reason than to allow the installation of tollbooths, supported by the government because they get a cut.