Posts by Blarkon

Status seeking drives out competence

All communities that reach a certain size end up being torn apart by those that seek status through social means. It's just easier to see in technical communities where introverted nerds get removed by extroverted status seekers. Social recognition becomes more important than technical contribution and the technical contributors eventually abandon ship.

A s*#t storm compared to the s*#t typhoon coming with Star Citizen

This is a mere s*#t storm in a teacup compared the epic dummy spitting that will be happening in the future when Star Citizen doesn't live up to the impossible expectations placed upon it.

Last reviewer missed the Tom Baker impression

Capaldi was doing Tom Baker's voice as the other side of the conversation where he was working things out for himself.

Remember when Open Source evangelists told us that the way that firms would make money creating open source software was through support?

I guess now "charging for support" is as evil as charging for software licenses.

Reddit owned by a big company

Reddit is ultimately a company with assets that doesn't want to end up getting dragged through court for providing a forum for linking to pirated material. If you started posting links to pirated content in the Reg comments section, you'd similarly expect to see it deleted.

Nerds, believe we can get to Alpha Centauri, but not create effective DRM

The FSF like the EFF have marginalized themselves by advocating the piracy of intellectual property as a right as fundamental as that of free speech.

Scorched Earth Pricing

It's scorched earth pricing from all three vendors - subsidize cloud to ensure other vendors can't get a foothold in the market.

Dropbox IPO

Bet DropBox is wishing they'd done their IPO a bit sooner.

Sysadmins - the new buggy whip manufacturers

That analogy isn't so much fun when we are the buggy whip manufacturers is it?

Running Chrome OS in the Cloud?

Given Google's Microsoftophobia ... guessing the only OS you'll be allowed to spin up in IaaS will be some Googly variant of Linux, Chrome OS, or Android.

No matter the price, Reg users will find an excuse to pirate

The average Reg commentard's attitude to piracy:

- Price your app low - you're indicating that it's rubbish so it's okay to pirate it.

- Price your app high - you're ripping off the customer and it's okay to pirate it

- Price your app a bit higher than low - you're not competitive because most apps are around $1 so it's okay to pirate it

- Give it away for free and charge for in app purchases. You're too greedy and it's okay to pirate the full cracked version.

In the long run the average Reg commentard can find more "valid excuses to pirate content" than Eskimos have words for snow.

Silicon Valley hates regulation when it gets in the way of profits, but loves it when it comes to protecting its business model.

Henry Ford

It's not about listening. As Henry Ford said, if you asked customers what they want, they would have replied "a faster horse". If you want to be innovative, you have to accept that you will fail occasionally.

Come out as a defender of net neutrality - and then abandon those principles. Decry patents, and then patent everything in sight.

How quickly we forget

The Google defenders around here seem to forget that Google themselves thought that the patents were worth at least 900 million bucks. What was Google going to do if they purchased them? Here's a hint. They weren't going to give them to the EFF and Linux - they were going to do exactly what this entity is doing to Google. Google was even invited into the consortium that purchased the patents - but wanted to go their own way.

Linux version of this ...

Is a fat bearded 40 something guy dressed up as a Japanese schoolgirl.

When Whitman says Enterprise Management she means Android

Now that HP has jumped off Windows, I'm assuming that by Enterprise Management she means Android or Linux.

EFF should rename itself "Anti Copyright"

For the EFF - "electronic rights" seem to come down to being able to pirate content without consequence. They've been muted to the point of whispering about all the NSA stuff and our right to privacy. You don't see them shouting from the rooftops about that - the only thing that gets them excited is if someone suggests stopping the torrenting of Game of Thrones.

One word. Licensing

Azure includes the Server OS license in the subscription price. I'm guessing if you want to run Windows Server in VMware's cloud, you (or VMware) will need to cough up licensing dosh to MS.

Google could release their own app

Google could release their own app for both Windows 8 and Windows Phone. Just like they have on other platforms.

So this guy leverages Nintendo's intellectual property to make some coin, and then gets upset when the revenue stream what he considers his own intellectual property gets diverted?

Pushing content to apps and off the web

If the EFF wins this round, the trickle of content off the web and into specific apps becomes a flood. Content distribution can occur directly to people's tablets, phones and PCs directly via apps written for that purpose. In the long run, good content thrives where there is revenue and the web so far has turned out to be a really rubbish medium when it comes to ensuring that the people who create the content get paid for it.

In a good course you pay to access the instructor's knowledge

If you've ever taken a course with a good instructor, what you're really paying for is access to their time over the course of a couple of days to have them answer any question you have about a specific technology. MOOCs may provide you with the basic content - but you can pretty much pick that up by looking at the product documentation if you've got the time. If you take an instructor led course on Exchange, the value is in being in the room with an expert on Exchange for a week.

You can figure out if the person presenting the course isn't an expert pretty quickly. If you do, you ask for a refund. If you sit on a course where you know the instructor is a muppet, you're wasting your time and whoever paid for the course's money.

It's also possible to side-load your own apps on RT anyway - you just install the sideloading product key.

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hh852635.aspx

Would like to see Orlowski interview Jaron Lanier about these issues - which seem to be canvassed in Lanier's new book http://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/What-Turned-Jaron-Lanier-Against-the-Web-183832741.html

only makes sense for expensive unix consultants

Given how much a good UNIX/Linux admin costs on an hourly basis, this needs to be turnkey to the point of pressing a single button to beat the cost advantage of purchasing a Windows license. Good UNIX/Linux admins can cost 2 to 3 times per hour what a Windows admin costs.

Legitimate usage

That would be those hundreds of millions of Linux users torrenting stuff. Torrentfreak.com has a nice tracker of the most frequently torrented files. Pirate Bay has a list of the top 100

Go to that site and find the first item on that list of the top 100 that is legit. (to save you some time, all of the files are rips of copyrighted materials)

If you are going to write about copyright infringement - at least do it honestly.

Web Applications are the vector

Incorrectly configured web applications are a vector. Just because you're managing a Linux box doesn't mean that the developers who coded the web applications on the server haven't done something stupid. Those web applications don't come from repositories - they are likely developed either in house, or your organization has paid someone to develop them.

Against IP until they are for it

Don't you love these guys who rail against the "evils" of intellectual property law - until they suddenly decide that they like it.

Read Thurrott's twitter stream

I know that Gavin from Cuptertino isn't all about getting his facts straight - but Thurrott is on the record as saying that his comments have been taken completely out of context.

How to get Open Source conferences cancelled

This objection seems to apply to most technical conferences, and especially those of the open source variety. All someone has to do now is claim that conference X doesn't have a "representative quota of minorities" on the speaker schedule where "representative quota" is a malleable value (looks like Susser was going for 1/3rd of all speakers - so good luck with that guys)

Patent Troll = whoever is suing me at the time

While there are some bad actors, a lot of the screaming about Patent Trolls is coming out of the PR departments of very well funded companies that simply don't want to pay to license technology. For something that supposedly "stifles innovation" - we seem to have had an unprecedented level of innovation in the last 30 years.

It's sort of like how conservatives always go on about how regulation is harming their business when their real aim is to get rid of the very regulation that stops them from screwing over everyone else. The companies that go on the loudest about how bad patents are seem to be very successful already and don't appear to have been stifled to the point of choking. They just don't want to pay licensing fees and they are in the process of convincing enough people to go along with it to ensure that the next generation of people who come up with bright ideas - who might challenge the status quo - won't be able to benefit from those ideas and overthrow those that are currently at the top of the heap.

From San Franciso

I often wonder if the byline of some Reg hacks as being "San Francisco" should instead be replaced with either "Mountain View" or "Cupertino".

Windows 7 supported touch

ASUS EP 121 was a touch screen Windows 7 tablet. Windows 7 supported touch. It didn't do it as well as Windows 8 does, but it still did it.

Like climate denialists

Love it around here - it's simply not possible that the figures might be fine - but that it must be some sort of insane black helicopter conspiracy to make Microsoft look good.

Google's Biz Model

In the long run China and India are going to do to Google what Google has done to everyone else. Bruce Sterling even had this in one of his novels - where China and India said "cool, IP doesn't matter" - and just steal it wholesale and wiped out the US economy as you can't have a knowledge economy without some sort of value on knowledge. Google doesn't believe that inventors should be rewarded financially for their effort and they are happy to destroy the emerging information economy pursuing the freetard jihad.

Yup - new app even allows you to map Skydrive as a library in Win 7