Re: Beginning of the end?
I certainly buy "American made" as little as possible, such as tools, appliances and vehicles. For example, I now depend on my Japanese-made motorcycle instead of my American-made car.
Posts by Gene Cash
6875 publicly visible posts • joined 22 Mar 2007
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New US Apple factory will make INVINCIBLE sapphire glass for SHINY iThings
Late with your ransom payment? Never mind, CryptoLocker crooks will, er, give you a break
If it wasn't on Twitter, there's NO point talking to us: One in 10 Americans confess
Monday 4th November 2013 23:07 GMT 
It's interesting to see what's covered on cnn.com, what shows up on Google news, and what gets noise on twitter. For example, the flap in Texas about the abortion filibuster got tons of twitter movement, nothing on CNN, and Google had a mention 5 or 6 days later. I think it got more mention on El Reg than American "news" sources.
Our local paper is horrendous. The spelling/grammar is barely high school level, and they will have a paragraph directly contradict itself two sentences later. The top 3 (and usually only) comments to EVERY story will be a working-from-home spam.
That guy that shot a TSA agent? Our paper had a "whoo! the shooter went to an Orlando motorcycle repair school! we have a local angle!! whoo!" and you thought the "what IT angle?" guys were bad...
The Schmidt hits the Man: NSA spying on Google servers? 'OUTRAGEOUS!'
IBM menaces Twitter IPO with patent infringement BOMBSHELL
Google Street View goes INSIDE a Royal Navy submarine
RED planet, INDIAN mission: Space probe prepares for voyage to Mars orbit
Google and Samsung bare teeth in battle for LANDFILL ANDROID™
Saturday 2nd November 2013 13:15 GMT
Re: Value vs Features vs Price
> offered for $500 by the Canadian telcos
Greed, plus people's stupidity. I have a Nexus 4 I bought from Google, then bought a T-Mobile SIM for $3 and signed up for $30/mo service. And that's total, including taxes and the rest.
I have a ton of acquaintances on Verizon or AT&T or whatever for $90/mo to $160/mo PER PHONE and I tell them about this, and they say something like "oh that doesn't sound right" or "you always do weird stuff" and they keep paying their triple-digit fees.
People are stupid.
Have you reinstalled Windows yet? No, I just want to PRINT THIS DAMN PAGE
Friday 1st November 2013 15:06 GMT
HaI
I updated Debian Testing this morning and found myself no longer able to view PDF files due to an update of libfontconfig.
On the other hand, I've had a Brother laser printer since Jan 2007 and I just changed the toner for the first time this weekend. It's been hit by lightning so the USB no longer works, so I have a USB->LPT cable on it.
My worse printer issue was a Lexmark that would randomly fall off the USB bus, so I'd suddenly be unable to print in Windows for no discernible reason. In Linux, I have udevd scripts that play a noise when a USB device is added/removed, and I'd hear the sad-whoop meaning something just disconnected, and it would be the printer. The printer would be sitting there fully lit up and apparently ready to go. I tried new cables, everything. Finally it "accidentally" fell off the back of my motorcycle when someone tailgated me on the way home.
Fed up with Windows? Linux too easy? Get weird, go ALTERNATIVE
Friday 1st November 2013 14:53 GMT
Re: Ahhh, BeOs
Actually I don't think you can blame BeOS on Microsoft. They needed no help to commit suicide.
As I recall, they had an extremely proprietary and anti-hacker attitude. They were very modern Apple in that they wanted you to buy it and use it w/o wondering what was going on under the hood. If you asked how it all worked, they were "we don't need your type as a customer". Basically they alienated anyone that might have been a first-adopter. Jean-Louis Gassée had an ego the size of the Hindenburg and a my-shit-don't-stink attitude too.
I was VERY interested in the cool things they were trying to do so I was sad they didn't want to cooperate with anybody.
HP 100TB Memristor drives by 2018 – if you're lucky, admits tech titan
Google RIPS aside curtain, exposes Nexus 5 phone, KitKat Android 4.4 coupling
FREEZE, GLASSHOLE! California cops bust Google Glass driver
Thursday 31st October 2013 09:17 GMT
Re: For everyone saying 'good'..
Nope. It's the distraction of using it in the first place, not how you look at it.
I've gotten into issues with my TomTom when it popped up something like "do you want to disallow not excluding the ability to remove toll roads from the route?" (don't remember the real phrase but it was a triple-negative) and I was like "whaaaa?" and wandered around a bit on the road while my brain dealt.
That sort of thing would have happened no matter how the information was displayed.
iPHONE 5S BATTERY: It may NOT just be you, it may be RUBBISH
RIP Bill Lowe: Father of the IBM PC no longer reading drive C
Wednesday 30th October 2013 01:00 GMT
The IBM PC was a weird sort of sea change
We had all the computers running around at the time that El Reg has discussed in "This Old Box", and even though the reviews were mostly "meh" they also did say "... but it's IBM" and everybody went batshit about that fact. Even though the Apple was about the same at meeting a business' needs, everybody I knew bought one "because it was an IBM"
The amount of power and reputation that IBM had in computers isn't something you can really get across to folks nowadays.
Godspeed, Mr. Lowe.
You've spent $1,500 on Glass. Now Google wants you to sell more specs
Tuesday 29th October 2013 14:01 GMT
Gun... meet foot...
OK, if I like something, it's pretty damn hard to get me to shut up about it, and I can end up being pretty annoying.
However, if the company has a program like this, then I would end up feeling like a dupe and a shill, so it'd be pretty much the best way to shut me up about it.
In a meeting with a woman? For pity's sake don't read this
Monday 28th October 2013 08:59 GMT
Speaking of rudeness...
What about all the people that call in from the car, can't keep up with the meeting, hits everybody else with bursts of static and noise, obviously can't view the web conference with the important diagrams, can't respond intelligibly to questions they're asked, and in turn ask questions on items that were covered just 15 seconds ago.
That just gets my goat, in addition to the dangers they're posing to other people on the road.
Don't crack that Mac: Almost NOTHING in new Retina MacBook Pros can be replaced
Phantom Flan flinger: The story of the Elan Enterprise 128
NASA, start your torrents: 622 Mbps broadband link FOUND ON MOON
New leak claim: NSA saw hole in Mexican prez's email box - and hacked it
Keeping your endpoint data safe: some simple precautions
Tuesday 22nd October 2013 01:25 GMT 
"users happily clicking a link"
Education doesn't work here. Nothing happens. People roll their eyes and keep on sending out info.
What you do is forward a non-company-related domain internally to the security admins. Send an email to folks from that, asking for their sensitive info. People that do it, get a quiet chat. People that do it twice get a reprimand or worse. Word gets around and people shape up.
You don't educate employees to not mail out passwords. Loss of half a paycheck convinces employees to not mail out passwords. Same as everyone else.
iPhone 5S autopsy shows WHY it can't tell which end is up – dev
Alarming tales: What goes on INSIDE Reg hack's hi-tech bedroom
Friday 18th October 2013 17:05 GMT
Re: try your body clock
Sanctimonious git.
Sure, my body has a clock. It wants to go to sleep at 7am, and wake up at 3 or 4pm. It's been that way for over 40 years now. The moment the sun comes up, I get sleepy. Not a moment before. Unfortunately my employer (and most of the rest of the planet) disagrees with that schedule. At least they do understand enough to let me stumble in at 10am.
One problem is anything that awakens me roughly, with a nasty buzzer or bell, gets the fist of doom. I went through clocks at a horrendous rate.
I did find a clock that emits a nice soft church bell bonging as an alarm. It was so nice, I immediately bought 3 more to avoid the "only on the market 2 months" syndrome. The only problem was that hitting any of the buttons other than the snooze bar meant "alarm off" but this was solved by removing the button caps.
Microsoft plugs Xbox One consoles into its cloud - what could go wrong?
Friday 18th October 2013 02:36 GMT
Re: I want to know-- What happens when something goes wrong?
Even as high a profile gamer as Gavin Free at Rooster Teeth can't get his original XBL account fixed. It's got the authorization phone number set to a dead UK cellphone (he's in the US now) and XBL support told him to suck it up and create a new account.
Friday 18th October 2013 02:30 GMT
Re: Good.
They're helping. My crap Brighthouse "service" got me a nasty email from Bungie for "standbying" (disconnecting the cable when you're winning) and so HALO Reach was the last multiplayer game I played.
Then there was Microsoft renewing my gold membership, despite the fact that 1) my card had expired and 2) I had cancelled it. They're like "oh you're on the hook because you did this and that after cancelling it" and so I asked "well let's see what the FTC thinks of it?" and that ended that.
I'm now happily playing Kerbal Space Program and not missing a nanosecond of XBOX Live.
COFFEE AND DANISH HELL: National ID system cockup forces insecure Java on Danes
Run a server on your Gb/s Google Fiber? OK, fine, fine ... maybe a small one
Google's latest ad push gives LONE LAWMAKER the creeps
Laptops Snowden took to Hong Kong and Russia 'just a decoy'
Leaping SpaceX GRASSHOPPER ROCKET jumps 2,500ft, lands safely
Double-click? Oh how conventional of you, darling!
Computer Chess: Geek, gaming and retro-tech movie of the year
Friday 11th October 2013 16:11 GMT
Re: There is a world of difference between a review of a film...
Spoilers? On a film about the '70s-'80s? Really?
I've never heard of him and I'm in the US, but the "review" certainly has piqued my interest. It would take El Reg carefully explaining that it's not another those-goofy-geeks movie to do so.
YouTube turns on dormant DRM, permits official downloads
Friday 11th October 2013 15:41 GMT
Re: Hmmm..... Good for watching cat videos on the commute....
Or just my desk at home.
My ISP (Brighthouse of Central Florida) is so poor that YT videos stutter and pause horribly. I have to buy a VPN account to be able to see the preload bar advance at all.
Why don't I change to a different ISP? There isn't one except for AT&T and Dish, who are even worse. AT&T does have better technical services but their sales & business practices are so predatory that I dropped my landline with them. They used to call my answering machine up to 6 times a day every business day, and since I had a business relationship with them, I couldn't complain to the regulatory agencies.
NHS tears out its Oracle Spine in favour of open source
NASA Juno probe HOWLS past Earth - and goes into HIBERNATION
Stallman's GNU at 30: The hippie OS that foresaw the rise of Apple - and is now trying to take it on
Monday 7th October 2013 16:23 GMT
RMS's biggest accomplishment
was the license. He's the only one to think of the legal judo of turning copyright law on it's head. Kudos to him.
His biggest FAIL was calling it "free software" knowing there was the "free as in beer vs. free as in speech" confusion. I knew a lot of sharp folks that dismissed GNU because "it wasn't something you could make a living at, you had to give it all away for free"
It wasn't until Red Hat 2.0 or thereabouts that "ohmigawrsh, you *can* make money off of 'free software'" happened, and the smartest move was the switch to the "open source" label, which RMS hates, but does clarify the situation in a way that no goofy "free as in speech" saying can.
Web Daddy Berners-Lee DRMs HTML5 into 2016
Monday 7th October 2013 15:54 GMT
Am I missing something?
It seems there's no decision on DRM going into HTML5, it's just simply that Berners-Lee has decided it's "in scope" to talk about. I assume he recognizes no matter how much DRM sucks, that you do have to talk about it and what to do about it. You can't just ignore the elephant in the room, no matter how much you want to.
Wacky racers – The Reg's guide to 2013's Solar Challengers
You put up with CRAPPY iOS 7. You can put up with Obamacare too, says prez
British support for fracking largely unmoved by knowledge of downsides
Boffins demo new holo storage using graphene oxide
Iranian cyberwar chief shot dead. Revolutionary Guard: Assassination? Don't 'speculate'
Tesco's new fondleslab winks at Apple's stealthy NFC assassin iBeacon
Bungie ’bois offered ‘early’ access to post-Halo FPS Destiny
Britney-obsessed Ubuntu 13.10 DUMPS X Windows-killer Mir in desktop U-turn
Wednesday 2nd October 2013 15:29 GMT
Re: Fork, fork. My kingdom for a fork
It has nothing to do with crashes, it has to do with some of the crap design decisions in X11.
I've been using X11 as a desktop since Debian "Woody", and I can categorically state that the X11 cut'n'paste "design" is a horribly broken abortion. There needs to be just one buffer/selection/method/whatever you want to call it, and that's it. This is the major spot that Windows has a leg up... cut'n'paste usually just works as expected on Windows.
Granted it was designed long before people knew their ass from a hole in the ground, GUI-wise, but there needs to be a patch fix things and to return the same damn thing no matter what the (broken) app asks for.
Ctrl-V & middle-click should return the same damn thing when pasting.
This will save my co-workers from "PASTE YOU MOTHERFUCKING PIECE OF SHIT" and similar howls of pain and agony.
I won't even get into the stupidity with which X11 handles multiple monitors and how most of the window managers manage to make all the wrong decisions all in a row.
A £30,000, 295bhp 4G MODEM?!? Must be the Audi S3 Quattro, then
Ubuntu 13.10: Meet the Linux distro with a bizarre Britney Spears fixation
Tuesday 1st October 2013 15:22 GMT
Real GUI improvements - predictive keyboard
So I've been using un*x for 20 years and the one thing I'd love to have is a predictive keyboard. I really miss Swiftkey on my Android phone.
Bash command completion in console is awesome when implemented properly, but I'm talking dictionary-based stuff in X11 apps like emacs, email, browser text fields, etc. that learns from the words/phrasing that you use most.
*That* would be a major desktop UI advance. Unfortunately I'm not a good enough coder to implement this myself. Maybe as a language input method hack?
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Biting the hand that feeds IT
