Posts by Daniel B.

Re: ...

The solution is metered pricing, because like other utilities it charges people for what they use. Can you image the waste if people paid a fixed charge for water, electricity & gas regardless of consumption?

See, this is where the water & power utility analogy breaks down. Water, electricity and gas (CNG or LPG) are finite resources. The utility company has to buy that from someone else to give it to you, the more you use, the more stuff the utility company has to buy (electricity, gas, water, whatever).

Data, however, is sent through fixed "pipelines". Your ISP only pays for a fat pipe, with a fixed data rate and sometimes variable pricing on certain data rates (say, base rate covers up to 10 Mb/s, then you get charged per Mb/s extra up to the physical limit for that pipe being 30 Mb/s), but the thing is: they are paying the same as you are charged, by data rate. So it shouldn't be an issue if you're using 5%, 50% or 100% of your allocated data rate all the time because that is what the ISP sold you in the first place!!!! If ISPs want to get better data rates, they should upgrade their uplink pipes, increase pricing for home subscribers or reduce advertised speeds. The days of 50:1 contention ratios are over.

Re: Yes, actually, carriers WILL love it

there's only so much they can send on their little slice of bandwidth

This is why I consider all this "move to wireless" fad as incredibly stupid. I'm OK with having phat pipes on my smartphone, but some people want to go fully wireless as in using a mobile carrier as their ISP. This will backfire hilariously if it ever gets big.

Well...

I've once done the Excel to Access to Access-but-using-PostgreSQL-backend dance. A pretty nice lady from Payments had to do a big-ass cost analysis which involved call logs for the last 3 years. Back then, Excel had the 65536 row limitation. So I went on "hmmm… Access can handle this" only to find that Jet would start barfing somewhere around the 300k record mark. However, I had already done the whole DB query stuff, and found out about "linked tables" so I used that and ended up dumping all the data into Postgres. Then I just pulled a view from Postgres out to Access, then used that with my lady friend. Worked really good, and Postgres does the heavy grunt work in 40 seconds.

Re: Oh, please

But that isn't what the NoSQL guys are usually trumpeting around. They're mostly about the "NO SQL" part, killing ACID, killing all RDBMS concepts to implement their fantasy RDBMS-free world. It's sent the wrong message out there.

Re: Here comes the taxman!

Since BTC is, now, real money in Canada... buying/selling BTC for Canadian Dollars wouldn't count as "profit", would it? It should be counted as changing money. Shouldn't it?

Nope, the taxman in many countries will apply some rules on exchange rates that will apply on any BTC transactions. The usual method is that if you receive X quantity of "foreign currency", the exchange rate for the day the transaction was made is the exchange rate used for taxation purposes. I'm guessing Canada's taxman will follow the same rule with BTC.

Re: Colour me an idiot, but..

Baring in mind the underlying issue here, perhaps he could write a version in something that isn't an insecure malware magnet like Java? C# for instance would be a much better choice.

Nice try my dear AC MS shill, but you fail at comprehension. The ransomware's running on Android, thus coding is done in Java (though compiled for Dalvik, not Java). C# is an MS only tech and after all it's basically pirated Java anyway.

Re: is that Lewis's knee jerking?

well founded distrust of their government, a genuine lack of belief that this project made any sense and the refusal of their government to consider alternatives.

Distrust? How about "they got voted out of government in the following election"? I'm pretty sure the whole project is why Chileans preferred to vote Michelle Bachelet back into power rather than letting Piñera destroy their national park. It seems they learned that voting for conservatives is a huge mistake, something they should know better given their recent past.

Re: Users have trouble with new tech

The first time I heard the cupholder joke, it wasn't quite a joke, it was an actual support call.

Re: Self-defeating?

Why would the Brazilian authorities spend any kind of money defending network infrastructure that isn't even in their country? I doubt the sponsors have their stuff hosted in Brazil. What they do have in droves are script kiddies; most of my lastb entries for "root" or generic accounts like "mysql" come from Brazilian IP ranges. So it isn't even as if they're going to get more "hack" traffic than usual.

Most of the World Cup facilities are probably going to fall in disrepair again, that's what happened after the last Brazil World Cup and that's what's probably going to happen again. The media might not be harping on that, but at least one of those stadiums doesn't even have running water. They set up a big-ass tank to be used for the duration of the World Cup, I'm guessing that tank will rarely be used, if at all, after the Cup.

I suspect the reality is these are typical wallflower skiddies that were either too fragile to do sports at school or had no athletic skills. They resent the 'jocks' and their sports and therefore feel the need to throw a tantrum.

Brazil is basically the football country in South America, second closest would be Argentina. Brazilians are protesting the World Cup themselves, which shows it isn't just the "jock haters" who are mad at the event.

Re: Interesting!

Only if the buyer is an idiot. A smart dude will wait for the market to bounce back, and would sell them little by little instead of dumping all the BTC in a huge dump.

@Condiment

I'm guessing that Poe's law was in full effect. Even though given the article's topic basically guaranteed that someone was going to make a satirical comment on the topic.

hahahaha

Hah! I'm sure that's what they're going to do, and not just roll out CGN to their end users.

BAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA

The cable ISPs in Mexico have been doing CGN since forever. Those cheap bastards have done that to "save" on buying IP blocks. It also breaks a lot of stuff on the 'net. In fact, my first "experience" with NAT was thanks to those guys.

It's just another good reason for IPv6 to kill NAT forever.

Re: Its not suprising.. @Sandtitz

Mexico, sometime around late 2012/early 2013. Suppliers were insisting on Win8 because MS wanted that, company just plain put the brakes on purchases. They did eventually start buying PCs with the same agreement you've mentioned, where Win7 Pro was preinstalled instead of Win8. But a more obvious telltale of 8's rejection is that there was an XP to 7 migration project, and they didn't switch it to "XP to 8" even with the volume license discounts that MS was doling out. It could have saved them money, but they preferred to keep 7 as the migration path.

Interestingly, MS is giving out "XP to 8" incentives, but IIRC only charities have taken in those offers.

Re: Think of the children!!!!!

Mexico's El Universal managed to 1-up most panic headlines. The headline for the Heartbleed vuln mentioned "Most Dangerous Computer Virus Discovered!".