Posts by P. Lee

Re: I wonder why so many commentards came to exactly the same instant conclusion

>While the slow-down when using OneDrive might be the result of coders cutting corners working under time-to-market pressures...

Except that it isn't the use of a user-agent that's the problem, it's the lack of use of it. This is internet-software and they didn't bother to test it with browser? It looks malicious and that is a problem.

It is a two-edged sword for MS. There's a good chance that getting good one-drive for business access from linux would encourage linux use in the enterprise, but they want to be seen as the good guys.

So we are back to square-one: MS does something, badly: Linux chaps refuse to trust it, even if there a decent work-around. Management (rightly) does not implement a strategy that utilises MS-based linux facilities.

Bring on IPv6 and sshfs.

Re: bring back vi and assembler on command lines

>Did not we all use DOS DEBUG to write machine code into .com files once as an exercise ?

BSAVE <filename>, <start_address>, <length>

Apple products as they should be!

Re: Counterintuitive

>Actually it's not even for a terrorist group it's the Britain First YouTube channel

I suspect it is both and this is where it gets messy. I would guess that the video is an Islamic-extremist video (based on a very superficial assessment of dress and beards) reposted by Britain First as a "discussion point." How do you tell if a post is supporting the video content or is opposed to it?

We have a UK political group posting into which a Guardian advert was inserted. If that's the case, Google's algorithms seem to be working pretty much as expected. My understanding from this article and previous ones is that the US doesn't want to censor videos as it provides an opportunity to insert "counter-messaging," which is exactly what happened here. My message to the Guardian is, "that's what you get when you use a cloud-based AI advertising system from another jurisdiction. You have zero control." Maybe there should be a way for advertisers to manage a list of posts they don't want their adverts to appear in.

I do have to question if the BBC had done the same thing, would the Guardian be as outraged, or is this really about the Guardian being annoyed that it helped fund the BNP?

Re: Replacing the battery

>'Replaceable': I have an iPhone 4 that has had its battery replaced twice and still works well.

AU$120 to have my kid's iphone 5 battery replaced.

With laptop batteries from Dell coming in at $50-$100, $120 for a tiny phone battery seems... excessive.

It's the vendor's way of taking a slice of the second-hand market. There is no real need for sealed-in batteries. I was going to suggest that it is driven by the "thin and light" but I suspect it's the other way around: "thin and light" is driven by the vendors' desire to seal in the battery.

Re: The Dr. Evil picture is appropriate

>$100,000 is ridiculously cheap if they actually had a half billion accounts they could wipe!

The trick to getting the cash is to make sure its a no-brainer to pay, even if Apple think they probably don't need to.

But... I think they picked the wrong target. I don't think "paying other people" is Apple's style.

And even if you wiped the icloud data, wouldn't it sync back from the phone?

re: I have no interest in streaming or renting TV shows and movies

Agreed. Linux users are probably more anti-streaming/anti-cloud than OSX/WinX. Which is interesting since that's what the cloud is built on.

>how much of Windows 10 is reliant on cloud services?

Just the telemetry uploads.

Re: I'm sorry for my country.

>I doubt this is trump, even he isn't *this* stupid.

Stupid?

Ah, I see you'll be needing a touchscreen tablet with separate keyboard! Do I have an offer for you!

>Try not entering the password for a few week then remember it?

My inbox is littered with password reset emails.

Re: SBSA is the real threat to Intel.

MS' real problem is licensing. MS need to find a way of making ARM licensing as fair as x86 licensing without impacting revenue. This is difficult because ARM isn't as capable core-for-core as x86 but it might be capable-enough for many uses. Do they over-charge for ARM or lose revenue by scaling down the cost for ARM? Or do they make a single-user license free and bump up the CALs?

Windows may not be the future, but there is still a stack-load of profit in it. I think MS have miscalculated. If people are going to rewrite apps for the cloud, I think they are more likely to go AWS. What MS should have done is put effort into useful server stuff. Work with the vendors so that they can interrogate the power supplies in the servers and routers so data-centre power management becomes easy. They should have made some decent load-balancing - perhaps worked with Intel to build hardware load-balancing into NICs. They could have shifted their server pricing model to opex, rather than promoting cloud, which will eventually eat their lunch. They should have done "Automation for Small Business" (on-premise) where latency and accommodating legacy applications is key. Their server products focused on the large enterprise at the expense of making things "cloud-easy." A tweak to their licensing model away from per-core and per-cpu and they could have sacrificed performance for ease-of-use and made all those SaaS threats go away.

If SQLServer for Linux actually becomes a thing, it will morph into Postgres for Linux. First for the less critical applications (which will pre-package it) and then for for the more important stuff.

I smell the whiff of burning platforms. It is still quite a long way off, but it is there.

Instead, they were faffing around with Vista, Windows 8 and 10.

Re: Needs to be able to efficiently use multiple CPU cores before it's worth anything

>Now if it could scale across your CPUs, so your 8 to 16 core workstation can chomp through it in a minute or less

What about a graphics card?

Re: Please tell us

His name was "Dick" or, at the very least, "Willie"

Well, black and white, so, "Free Willy"

Re: well duh

>Probably because no enterprise in their right mind deployed Vista

and no back-ported, er, "Telemetry."

Re: Too gay for words

>Ok first of all, I thought Disney already made "Beauty and the Beast" which I still never got around to watching, because, hey I'm busy alright?

I think Disney only did an animated version. There is a beautiful French live-action version with Vincent Cassel and Lea Seydoux. As for the gay stuff, wow. Using sex to sell a film? How very avant-garde! How very... "reality tv."

The film's director, Bill Condon, has said Le Fou "is confused about his sexuality" and that the film shows a brief "gay moment". Punting sexual confusion at children? Not so good. Little girls like fairy tales because they love fancy clothes, magic, luxurious things, horses, castles and being queen, not snogging a queen. The handsome prince, kissing, getting married and happily ever after is just part of playing grown-ups - being like mummy and daddy. It is not an expression of eight-year-old lust.

And before I get on the wrong side of adult gender politics (ok, maybe that's too late) maybe those who think there is support for the gay community in the film, you might want to look up the French-to-English translation of "Fou".

For my money, the scene is a ploy to get adults worked up and to generate publicity for the film. Nothing makes a film popular like getting it banned. So they aren't going to get my money. Offer me a nice story and I might be interested. Try to manipulate me or punt sex to my children and I get resentful. If you want to make an adult version of the story, go ahead, but don't punt it to children. Without a scene like that I'd probably takes the whole family to see the film, but I dislike that kind of corporate behaviour so that film goes to the naughty step for punishment; which brings me back to Google. This is not their finest hour either. They've done it once, I don't trust them not to do it again. Duckduckgo is already in place. Time to NAT 8.8.8.8:53 to an OpenDNS server and plans are in place to kill off gmail.

Re: Why store them on a shared computer in the first place?

>Now I hate to be the voice of reason when we could be laughing at lawyers

It may not have even been shared. Maybe hubby was asked to do the IT maintenance and organise backups etc.

It highlights the problem that people still think they "have the internet on my computer" and that what is on my local screen is on my local hardware. It isn't your personal computer any more.

More importantly, what kind of backup system immediately shoves the content at a search engine?

More interesting than the barrister's name would be the backup system's name.

Re: Artificial stupidity

>I have a theory that the bots are set to make the price 20p more than the cheapest copy, but that two bots with the same rule then bid each other up to silly levels

I just assumed it was scammers going for those with one-click ordering turned on. Misspent MMPORG youth....

Re: Big Cable is why we DON'T have fiber to our homes

Companies are interested in ROI. Maximising return on investment.

They don't care about coax or fibre, they care about not spending money if they can get away with it.

Add some competition and they will match the service because if they don't they will lose business and future revenue drops to zero.

Competition is better than free trade.

Re: Fractal, innit?

>"Normal" matter seems to be distributed fractally all the way through from planets, solar systems, star clusters, galaxies, galaxy clusters, etc.

Not just those. Spiral galaxies, sea-shells, bodies, faces, sunflower seeds, bird flight patterns, fingers and hurricanes all made with mathematical precision around a single ratio.

http://io9.gizmodo.com/5985588/15-uncanny-examples-of-the-golden-ratio-in-nature

Of course the universe doesn't have consistent design principles. It just looks like it does.

Re: Credibility Lost

>Hardly life-changing? Bieber on a loop? Good Grief!

"Ending!" He meant "ending"! Self-inflicted. With a spoon.

Re: Well, McNealy is right about market discipline

>a Canadian vibrator manufacturer is caught gathering data on its customers...

Oh, I'm sorry, did you think your <insert cloud-connected device here> was cloud-connected for your benefit?

Whenever someone says "cloud" it reminds me of Melbourne Metro's Myki "ticket" system. It isn't a ticket system, its a way of getting people to provide interest-free loans to the company. It also does a bit of ticketing on the side.

Re: Pretty sure Apple (and Google/MS) never allowed this...

and they never should.

Though, as I'm not a developer, I'm curious as to the patch procedures. Patches for things like skype always seem to be far larger and more frequent than I would expect. It is nice that the software is being maintained but the size and number of bug fixes indicates it has flash-sized coding issues. /usr/bin/skype is 35M. Typically IOS Skype patches are 75M. Skype for Linux doesn't appear to need bi-weekly upgrades, so why does the IOS version? I don't think even Skype for Windows gets the same patching as IOS.

Is there something else going on? Are they using patch downloads to boost their apparent popularity rating, classing it as a full download?

Re: "We need to promote women disproportionately, pay them equally or better..."

I spent a year at a US (ok, Texas) university and I have to say, "juvenile" is how I would describe it.

I also found it weird how social groups tended to be single-sex, almost as if everyone was fourteen years old. Having said that, I've found Australia to be similar - is it a big country thing or an isolated country thing?

IT is split into tech and management. The tech side requires extreme focus on details, long hours and pedantry. It basically self-selects for those veering to one end of "the spectrum" and these characteristics are somewhat damaging to relationship-building. The only people who can stick it out are those not interested in relationships. Only those people not interested in relationships can stick being around those people not interested in relationships.

I couldn't ethically recommend the industry to men, never mind women. In my experience, its women who hold the social fabric together, though I accept that may be from my viewpoint at the end of the spectrum!

However, I do have to come back on the article author. Smartphones are not about relationships. Bring up a copy of "Scramble with Friends" and then take a look at a on-armed bandit machine. See any similarities? It's about advertising and using gambling techniques to keep people using their phones so they can shove more adverts at them. My wife spends far more time playing scramble with the retired lady across the street from us, than actually talking to her. How many times have you seen families at restaurants all with their phones out, or at least with the kids on devices rather than the family talking all together? Is that a really good pitch for "the soft feminine side" of IT or is it "the soft feminine side" as viewed by a sociopath with an advertising plan?

IT is really, really rubbish at relationships. At its very best, it works as a telephone for videophone - that's when the computer gets out of the way. As soon as a third party starts injecting content, things go downhill, but that's not all. My family think I'm a broken record and maybe I'm old-fashioned but I think you should interact with those people who made the effort to be in the same physical space as you, rather than typing "LOL" to someone who is probably also ignoring those who are around them. I hate smartphones for that. They should go into a bucket as soon as you step through the door at home.

Am I the only one who's family is often so wrapped up in "social" media, that they ignore each other?

Re: I presume

>That as I'm being forced to watch adverts, the cost of all their services will be drastically reduced?

Haha! No.

It just pays for more advertising.

Re: Civil Litigation?

>isp metadata not telecommunications data

"The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which."

George Orwell, Animal Farm

Re: LDS Sure it will lower employer costs and promote an healthy workforce...

>For a company, pregnancies are not "a risk". They completely depend on them.

Too imprecise.

Your own employees getting pregnant is a cost risk. What you want is to externalise that cost and have other companies' employees get pregnant.

However, if this is entering your thought process, you are probably either in a business which is failing anyway or you think you are contributing to the business when really you are hastening its downfall by pushing policies that ensure all your employees hate you.

Re: Bing search..

>So, they're switching Bing search over to ARM and firing the team of blind monkeys with their dartboard that previously performed searches?

Yeah - without their dartboard pressure sensors group they've lost their IoT division at the same time...

Re: You have nothing to Fear but Fear itself

We live in terror, quite legitimately.

Oh wait, that wasn't right.

Governments live in terror quite legitimately.

That's better. Wouldn't it be so much easier if you could catch all those nasty leakers who cause MP expenses scandals, point out illegal spying by governments on their own people etc before the newspapers get a chance to print them?

It is so much easier to contain the problem when it amounts to "Lee Harvey Oswold was caught with terrorbytes of illegally stolen data from classified government systems" rather than, "A new scandal has erupted as evidence of government wrong-doing has been published by the Guardian today."

>The reluctance and hoarding of info (I'm looking at you, network, firewall and security teams) is like treacle.

<hand wave/> These are not the teams you are looking for.

Firewall rules are often far too lax and firewall logs are often not what you hope for. Do you go back over a year to capture all the "annual report" traffic? Was that server used for the same applications a year ago as it is today? Has any functionality been migrated to a different host?

There is no substitute for documentation. Your processes need to include new pages in your application documentation and service catalogue updates or the (firewall etc) change should not be approved. You should probably have changes tied to the application service catalogue with sub changes for network, firewall etc. Make sure the template forces people to do the right thing. Decommissioning a host? Did the firewall team get a note saying if the IP address had moved or was now free?

For micro services, I'd put together a micro-service catalogue and put different services on different ports. There is no good reason to put everything on port 80/443 and it will leave you with a massive indecipherable headache to clean up. They may not be well-known ports but at least you can add a modicum of differentiation. For discovery, netstat is your friend. You can get the firewall people to give you an idea of the hosts & services but it is the application maintainers who need to be the authority.

Re: Yeah

Flawless is one thing, but I see two things here.

Yes, code should not be self-updating, but also, why aren't there technical barriers surrounding allowed and restricted behaviour?

If premium rate dialling is a thing which is blocked on Apple's say-so during a code review, it should also be blocked at a technical level at execution time.

>FTFY.... I'm not seeing any adult conversation from any part of it right now.

I'm wondering if they meant a different kind of "adult" conversation.

For how much longer can US federal agencies keep up the charade? The BBC reports, "On Wednesday, the US officials - who spoke on the condition of anonymity - told US media that the criminal investigation was looking into how the files came into Wikileaks' possession."

How do they keep a straight face when they complain that telling people about security failures which makes them less secure, results in a criminal investigation? If the FBI and CIA know these problems, what makes you think the Russians and Chinese don't? What about all those TV's in hotel suites diplomats and industry executives might be frequenting? Did you sweep for bugs? Yes, but there's little which can be done about the hardwired TV which is always on... and listening.

Re: As an example of availability problems

Multiple subscription systems are the problem, not a solution.

Every video streamer wants unique content as a USP, but that's just stupid. Video rental shops did not have this problem.

BTW I just searched for Men in Black at findanyfilm.com. Not a terribly obscure work with a reasonably well-known actor. I got back one result for a TV show about traffic police and that was all.

We need a new model for video rental. Streaming doesn't cut it.

Re: Famous last words

>Up-vote for some quality trolling. But you forgot to mention Windows RT... :)

Not trolling I think. It was obvious RT wasn't going to work - not for technical reasons, but the licensing would be a nightmare. Customers wouldn't want to pay license fees for low-powered CPUs and MS wouldn't want to reduce license revenues when they could just kill the product instead. Add the lack of third-party products and an immature hardware platform and you have a doomed product.

On the other hand, Alpha/MIPS ports were killed because MS couldn't be bothered. At the time, these systems were at the higher end of the performance spectrum. Now notice that MS can't be bothered with Windows on ARM on portable devices and you'd be forgiven some scepticism about the product's longevity.

My guess is that this would be for Azure use where MS can control the whole thing and not worry about sales, but mostly it's insurance in case ARM takes off.

Re: About effing time -- But what about performance per watt?

>what about performance per watt?

Overall system (power) performance and pricing may be more important.

A few watts difference on the CPU may mean little if you are doubling up on systems. Twice the 40G adapters, power supplies, cabling, 40G switch ports and anything else which goes in.