* Posts by Steve McPolin

65 publicly visible posts • joined 26 Aug 2007

Page:

Citrix drops Rush Limbaugh over 'slutgate' slurs

Steve McPolin
Childcatcher

Re: Not likely

Seems the Catholic church has a bit of a habit of paying for things it doesn't support.

[ for the impaired; thinking of the children here....]

Death to Office or to Windows - choose wisely, Microsoft

Steve McPolin

My desktop needs a keyboard

My tablet doesn't need one, but can use one. In fact, it uses the same one my desktop does.

Unlike my tablet, my desktop is a lionized TV when it doesn't have a keyboard.

Unlike my desktop, my tablet is quite functional without a keyboard; and even has an ad-hoc little keyboard emulator when I don't have a physical one handy...

Microsoft claims Google bypassed its browser privacy too

Steve McPolin
Facepalm

Interesting tack

After you have made a mess of things so badly and for so long, it would be nice if you just sat down and shut up. IE has been a menace pretty much from its inception until maybe a year or two ago. Its too early to go pointing fingers.

"Yes, we remember. We remember the past and its lessons, the past and its misfortunes, the past and its glories". Oh, and scratch the last bit.

Apple's new TV allegedly spotted... in Canadian office

Steve McPolin
Facepalm

apple history.

Apple hates leakers. As el reg can attest, Apple have a funny way of treating companies they hate.

For those not from the colonies, the Globe and Mail is part of the "Bell Family" of companies. Since the G+M leaked this story, will Apple take it out on Bell?

An NT-powered Windows Phone? Not so fast...

Steve McPolin
Windows

'VMS' + (1,1,1) = 'WNT'

Puts NT's lineage at about 34 years; or about 40 if you consider RSX as version1....

"RSX was a separate path at DEC and the progenitor more than anything of VMS that went to NT via Dave Cutler." — Gordon Bell, Vice President, Research and Development, Digital Equipment Corporation.

But being 40 is only a bad thing if your under 30. ...

Study links dimwits to conservative ideology

Steve McPolin
Holmes

oblig quote

I never meant to say that the Conservatives are generally stupid. I meant to say that stupid people are generally Conservative. I believe that is so obviously and universally admitted a principle that I hardly think any gentleman will deny it.

- John Stuart Mill

Dumb salesmen are hurting us – Nokia CEO

Steve McPolin

Is that you Stephen?

Surely it hasn't come to this. I don't know about the blinkered business, but I think your middle choice is pretty close to the mark.

HP outlines schedule for full WebOS open source release

Steve McPolin

hate to agree with you...

but your dead on. Shelf life depends very much on viability. WebOS is great, but suffers by comparison. In a few months it will be a head scratcher.

Potent proton pulse to BOMBARD EARTH Tuesday morn

Steve McPolin
Paris Hilton

Solar Sails

I'm sorry that my astro-physics is weak. I kind of understand that you can make a spacecraft go by pressure from particles emitted by the sun. Does this work like garlic - a little is good, so more is better? Can we make some sort of sail that takes advantage of these events? One day to mars is pretty intriguing.... Or would it just blow teensy holes through the sail and leave us ejecting the horses to try to get home?

Paris, because I don't have a clue either.

Steve McPolin
Coat

UTC - 5

Does that mean it will hit England first? Will we know we are OK if blighty makes it through the night?

Microsoft blames poor Windows sales on PC slump

Steve McPolin
WTF?

I don't get it....

Microsoft dives and Intel soars. I find that a bit of a head scratcher....

Boffins quarrel over ridding world of leap seconds

Steve McPolin
Holmes

Keep it relative...

Every day the sun should rise at 6:00, and set at 18:00, everywhere in the world.

There is no need to pretend that time elapses at some fixed period.

For people in the northern climates, this means that winter day-time clock would tick-tock faster during the day than the night, in order to fit a consistent number of tick-tocks into a significantly shorter time.

We can leave it to the pointy heads to make sure our little devices co-ordinate properly so buses will be on time, and planes won't bump into one another.

I prefer Pink Floyd to marching music....

ps: sherlock for his 7% solution

Ten... mini hi-fi systems

Steve McPolin

sony

Why did the CMT MX700Ni not make the cut?

Swiss-based Balesio takes the knife to PDF files

Steve McPolin

balesio reader

Maybe balesio could make a reader for their new format that isn't a malware nightmare. Saving a bit of rust is nice, but a replacement for reader would be awesome.

GCHQ spooks' code-breaking puzzle solved

Steve McPolin
Big Brother

Nice one, owen.

How do you think your next border crossing might go?

Something like an alien abduction, perhaps?

'Puzzling structures on surface' of YU55 spaceball

Steve McPolin
Paris Hilton

over simplifying

Too bad they couldn't have dropped a mars-rover type device on it as it passed by. I'm sure there are some horrendous difficulties, not the least the very low gravity, but a great chance to hitchhike around a bit, maybe look at its makeup, and see another part of the solar system.

Paris? The free ride obviously.

Ginormous sunspot spews solar guts towards Earth

Steve McPolin
Stop

bullets and canned goods?

meh, Dennis Miller (before he lost it and became a 'conservative comedian' - a contradiction in term) made fun of the y2k paranoids who encamped themselves with urine recyclers in the woods with the telling bon mot :

'I would rather die with the cool people'.

indeed.

HP Project Moonshot hurls ARM servers into the heavens

Steve McPolin

Moonshot?

How about Iceberg? Runs cool, and sinks Itanics. Marketing folk, sheesh...

Flashback trojan targeting OS X shuns virtual machines

Steve McPolin
Pirate

The beachhead....

On at least my mac, if I try to execute anything of unknown provenance - for example from a download, attachment, ... or unarchived from such- it pops up a little nag window at me.

That doesn't put it to bed, since if you opened something who's handler had a peek inside and ran say a shell script, there is nothing you can do. I believe this is the vector of Office malware, for example. But, you install Office and the like, you take your chances. Does Adobe's software do something like this?

Are the Fine Researches suggesting that this thing is able to spoof the provenance, thus run without warning? If so, that is quite something; if not its like blaming your car because you ignored the oil light.

This was the real trick in the endless array of stupid windows tricks in the past. There were so many ways to get it to quietly execute blobs that the poor user didn't stand a chance.

Sutter: C++11 kicks old-school coding into 21st century

Steve McPolin

A programmers dream....

It really is! Code written in many other languages goes stagnant over years of being ignored. Nobody can remember how it works if it doesn't require routine maintenance every few months. C++ has integrated mechanisms to ensure every bit of code requires constant touch up and frequent overhauls.

I recon that without C++, most of the regular programming work would have dried up, and we'd be forced to design new SCMs to keep ourselves employed.

Microsoft delivers fatal blow to yet another botnet

Steve McPolin
Facepalm

Kinda like plowing your garden

It must be be bittersweet, to work so hard to make such a lush and fertile ground for these seedlings to grow so well, only to cut them down without enjoying the fruit of your labour. sigh.

It is analogous to western governments putting the boots to despots they had readily supported. These were the truest 'strategic alliances'.

Jesus appears, acquires vast following, bitchslaps Justin Bieber

Steve McPolin
Coat

The Beatles?

Maybe the Beatles should get a facebook page and see if John was right.

Apple girds loins for 'obscene iPad sales surge'

Steve McPolin
Windows

An engineer that wants to run Word?

A train engineer, perhaps? Nobody in the field wants to run that trash; some are forced to.

Microsoft unveils file-move changes in Windows 8

Steve McPolin
Linux

Firefox rocks Antarctica

MS really dropped the ball on this. Great little gizmo for market share, btw.

Hey, Music Industry. You're suing the wrong people

Steve McPolin
Mushroom

shifting the focus

Presumably, the smarmy little shits have optimized the pricing models for the Western market. Decreasing the price won't generate a useful increase in consumption, but increasing the price will cause a harmful reduction.

A regional pricing model - where the item cost is priced differently around the world - gives rise to a grey market, where goods are purchased in the lower cost areas then transported for resale to higher cost areas.

So, what does that leave? Set the prices uniformly low around the world to increase the consumption in the lower cost areas. The likely effect is to shape the product to the tastes of the market you are attempting to attract, which some Westerners might be a little put off by.

Before long, that is an inevitable consequence, as manufactures switch to tailoring products to the new dominant markets, leaving the west to put up with the tastes of the rest.

Intel code guru: Many-core world requires radical rethink

Steve McPolin
WTF?

but you need more....

you need one core per gestured finger on every pane; its not like the core can do something else while waiting for input. Can it?

Steve McPolin
Thumb Down

maybe it requires a hardware rethink....

I think that 200 * mesi-protocol-latency as a potential memory latency might be a stopper here; that is about the dram speed of an ibm/xt. The expected could be much lower if everyone rewrites their software to suit a rather brain dead architecture.

At 100x memory latency, it is crouching in the field that that original virtual memory architects worked in; their solution was to surrender to the OS the scheduling of memory, and render in the hardware the necessary address translation to make it work.

The same thinking can be applied, but at the granularity of cache lines - let the OS be responsible for scheduling the cache, and implement a very hi speed link under program control to perform it. In this, the shared and remote memory becomes more like a storage device; and the machines really operate on local cache-like RAM.

With this, you don't need a massive re-implementation of all the software in the world to take good control of these resources. You will want to pay alot more attention to locality of reference, however. an sparsely addressed list will chug along at 8086 speeds.....

What this doesn't do is permit a single app [ MIMD ] to span the entire processor set; rather you have to be content with numa-esqe islands of smaller, fully connected SMPs.

This is the architecture of the big-time super computers anyways [ unless Fujitsu made an 80000 node cache coherent interconnect recently ], and is the one with scalability.

Microsoft's WebGL claims bashed by own employee

Steve McPolin
FAIL

As safe as ActiveX?

That is reassuring.

Microsoft+HTML: The antidote to iOS and Android

Steve McPolin

2006?

Wasn't this the original iPhone story - no real apps, just weird little web thingies? MS has a habit of making stupendous profits duplicating older Apple technologies, but hasn't the ship sailed on this?

iTunes Match is iPiracy, claims loopy Oz industry troll

Steve McPolin
Coat

Leave Ken alone...

He is a "hit man" for the media cartels; what do you expect him to do. I'm surprised more of them haven't bleated the same story to endear themselves to the family....

ps: I think "hit man" is a pretty cool pun.

HP exec: WebOS tablet will trounce iPad

Steve McPolin
Happy

my buzzword bingo game exploded

Woo! Hoo! iPAD KILLER. Obviously it was the "O" that made the iPOD so death defying....

Nice work continuing to quote Eric after he had tipped his inanity hand; but did you have the decency to point out that 1+, while more than one, is actually not first place? Perhaps suggest "1-" as a way of inserting a platinum medal above gold?

Ten... fantasy gadgets you wish you owned

Steve McPolin
Pirate

Transporter rules...

First, the transporter renders most of the other gadgets useless. Want money; transport the bank vault contents to your basement. Want to be invisible; transport around continuously. Want to kill someone; move them 10ft underground. Almost any problem can be solved by the transporter.

Second, the Ray Bradbury clone+kill model of transporting isn't the only one possible - linking two points in space via space-time is a more compelling idea. You needn't clone anything, just superimpose the two points in space then remove the imposition leaving the payload behind. Zero time, regardless of distance. Maybe I should patent it.

Third, Holodeck is 80%? Are you serious? To say its in its infancy is to say that protozoa are akin to infant humans. Fuck, all Sony's game portal can figure out is how to broadcast private information all over the net ( Sony engineer: "the ftp logs are full of anonymous"; Shill: "we were attacked by anonymous" ).

Transporters for all.

Amazon cloud fell from sky after botched network upgrade

Steve McPolin
FAIL

The cloud of scalability...

The effect of amazon's stunning incompetence demonstrates how truly scalable the cloud computing model is. Simple errors are able to scale up to astounding outages that most data centres couldn't have dreamed of in the past. We'll have jobs for the rest of our lives; good work Amazon!

Revealed: Secret security plan should Kate leave Wills at the altar

Steve McPolin
Coat

weapon of choice....

"... a strategically positioned taxi, driven by an undercover SAS operative ..." - sounds vaguely familiar...

Amazon cloud still on fritz after 36 hours

Steve McPolin
FAIL

This is serious stuff.

The entire next generation of needless programming projects is at risk if customers become skeptical of "the cloud". That would be a major financial setback for the industry.

Server vendors and the dead hand of commoditisation

Steve McPolin
Grenade

speed kills

"In fact virtualisation, the work of VMware, was itself directly related to server disk I/O performance drag because earlier efforts to keep the server or desktop PC CPU busy when disk I/O delays caused it to be idle, meaning multi-tasking operating systems, were so bad at sorting out the problem."

You might want to ease up on the meth a bit; your babbling...

You also might want to sip or two from the knowledge fountain, because even after a bit of sorting, your claims in this are nonsense.

UNIX, and presumably windows, aren't crap at the scheduling problem at all. Of the many reasons to use VMWARE; performance, throughput and utilization aren't amongst them.

Intel on Itanium: 'It's all about the OS'

Steve McPolin
Coat

Itanium event

Are they marking the 1000th system deployed?

Samsung intros 'skinnier than iPad 2' tablets

Steve McPolin
Coat

nice one.

A big bonus is you won't have to sit on a waiting list to get one; BestBuy will probably have bins of them available next week.

Microsoft calls time on Zune media player hardware

Steve McPolin
Coat

a job well done.

Zune was the last of the iPOD slayers; well done!

Will it be reincarnated as an iPAD or iPHONE killer? You certainly don't want to lose the draw of that brand power. I bet, even today, the mere mention of it brings tears to the eyes of those who woke up one fateful christmas to find out they weren't getting an iPOD after all.

Zune-II; slayer of iSPLAT?

The squirt was not enough - this beast will take a full fledged dump.

Retailer predicts death of Apple retail channel, eBay gets cozy with brands

Steve McPolin
Welcome

ahhh crap...

I was hoping somebody was finally going to pimp themselves as the "iTunes Killer". I have a little poster-board filled with "iPod killers"; and a smaller group that asserted they would be "iPhone Killers". So far, the "iTunes Killer" board is pretty lonely. I was hoping this was it.

Rock on, formerly unheard of and destined to remain, Rusian Kogan: your 15 msec is up.

Thunderbolt: A new way to hack Macs

Steve McPolin
FAIL

Elmer, the FUD guy...

The problem he is alluding to is a bug in some software which leaves the firewire dma controller unfiltered. That is, requests go straight through it to the system memory. This mechanism, Remote DMA, is a feature of other external busses, such as IB.

It has nothing to do with USB's brain damaged asymmetry, nor does OTG add a remote DMA feature to USB. It is USBs requirement that software intercept every transaction that keeps it out of this trap; however most USB implementations are sufficiently buggy that you can find other ways to induce troubling behaviour.

As for reading the disk, you would either need to have the aforementioned flaw in your OS, and understand enough about the system layout in order to reprogram the disk to dump its contents. Possible, but a bit odd. Elmer is likely referring to something like "Target Mode", a feature of Mac Roms since the original 128K Mac. By holding down <magickey>-T at startup, the computer becomes a Target Mode disk. The terminology is left over from SCSI, and permits a handy way to setup a new machine based upon an older one; or recover a broken machine.

Target mode is, of course, subservient to the ROM password; but Elmer likely knew that too. His scenarios are pretty lame.

Keep up the good fact checking; soon you'll be on par with Fox.

NY hookers cross street from Craigslist to Facebook

Steve McPolin
Coat

oblig

So, if I want a rim job I choose one with a blackberry?

Top CEOs agree: US is down the crapper

Steve McPolin
Grenade

corporate partnered education would be great.

Has anybody produced a little graph to see how this corporate largess has helped the education system? Didn't think so. Dumping excess crap on schools for the tax deduction just deprives schools of the better things - like pencils, crayons and paper.

Weeping CEOs conjures up such great imagery - perhaps of Crusty the Clown whining over the failure of his latest inane scheme.

How GCHQ keeps tabs on FOI requestors

Steve McPolin
Black Helicopters

Ask Julian

Once his version of the passion play is over, and he once again walks amongst us, he will be able to tell you. I don't really think much of the guy, but I hate that my country is on the side of the Romans in this....

'The New Kingmakers': Tech giants pay for the love of coders

Steve McPolin
Paris Hilton

'developers are a canny bunch'

Gotta call you on that one. An associate infamously told a customer one day 'If you pay us enough and we'll dance down the street in pink tutus for you'. Many developers are proud of their prostitution inspired business models, complete with pimps and bordellos .

Buying the bordello or pimp doesn't get you the developers. Unlike the poor prostitute, they are highly mobile and know it. Line up an endless stream of juicy customers and the box of chocolates, and they will knock on your door.

Paris, because she understands the model.

Apple’s iPad lead will face pressure from Google and Nokia

Steve McPolin
Welcome

ipad killer

At least they aren't flogging that poor beast this time around. What competition will iPad face from imitations? Price?

Maybe snoracle could squish a sun-ray setup into a tablet and offer a truly different entry, but otherwise its like pepsi - you only order it if you can't get a coke.

Apple's iPad is the hotcake of the 21st century

Steve McPolin

If it were to continue

indefinitely, it would squeeze out all the matter from the known Universe. It would probably stop somewhere short of that; so perhaps a bit of info about how long it needs to continue to squeeze out games and cell phones would complete the thought.....

Hotmail still not working? Use Chrome to fix it, says MS

Steve McPolin
Coat

Hello, I'm a mac

[other guy just stand there, not moving, not blinking....]

Microsoft rushes out emergency fix for critical Windows bug

Steve McPolin
Alert

it was being used to attack SCADA .....

Isn't it a tad more accurate to say that MicroSoft was the attack on SCADA; and the inevitable repercussion was SCADA systems that are vulnerable to all manner of compromise... The SCADA suppliers shoulder the blame as well; but it is hard to believe that many companies would make the decision to switch platforms had the inherent design flaws of Windows been admitted.

Microsoft issues stopgap fix for critical Windows flaw

Steve McPolin

Hi, I'm a PC

and little text boxes instead of pictures is my idea.

none: because graphics aren't appropriate

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