* Posts by P. Lee

5267 publicly visible posts • joined 4 Dec 2007

Visual Studio running on OS X and Linux for free? SO close

P. Lee

Re: some thoughts...

So, you're happy to accept the "Embrace" part then?

Does anyone else remember when Windows supported HPFS disks?

I'd be really careful about supporting organisations which have a vested interest in the destruction of my preferred ecosystem. If MS did not have an OS it wanted to push, I'd be happier, but they do. It would be beneficial for them to give the stuff away for free to stifle the market in IDE's and then gradually make it worse compared to the Windows product. Even if this were pure speculation I'd be nervous, but MS have form in doing this, so I think not.

Release the tools under a FLOSS license and I'll reconsider. Sell the tools off to a third party and I'll reconsider. Otherwise you can keep your wooden horse.

Why the US government reckons it should keep phone network kill-switches a secret

P. Lee

Re: Do we really need to tell the enemy what our plans are?

Yes, yes you do, if you want to have the moral high-ground and avoid death.

Troll-feeding aside its important to know the reasons why these things should be public.

Part of the reason for the first world war was a network of secret treaties where nobody knew what the consequences of their actions would be. Do you think Saddam would have invaded Kuwait if he knew what the US reaction was going to be? The cynical might say the US was banking on that.

These are not state secrets, these are not even secrets against foreign enemies. These are actions against US nationals, used against civilian protests against state force which resulted in someone dying.

What happens if someone like Snowden leaks the SOP? Does it negate the SOP? Will the have to ditch it? How does anyone follow it if they don't know what it is?

SOPs are there to ensure that everyone does the right thing. The procedures are thought-out and put in place when everyone has a cool head, rather than making decisions in a panic. Its actually there to stop things like the BART incident. It helps prevent wrong behaviour because everyone on the ground knows what they should do and that they will be personally held responsible if they deviate from policy. If the policy is secret, there is no policy, there is just "what we wanted to do at the time."

What happens when the journalists show up with satellite links and free wifi? What happens when houses around the area decide to have open wifi? Can they shut down all the cable & telco fixed lines too? If information warfare comes to the streets, how long do you think it will be before people start bringing police radio jammers to demonstrations?

'Android on Windows': Microsoft tightens noose around neck, climbs on chair

P. Lee

Re: Times change, business does not

It comes down to whether MS' value-add warrants using their products. This is different from using the OS as lock-in.

In other words, are Windows libraries that much better than Android ones, that devs will write to Windows APIs which are installed (possibly for free) on Android Phones?

For MS, its a question of, "we'd like to use our own APIs because our apps use our APIs." If Google keep pulling more and more stuff into Play Services, MS can expand the use of its own APIs and give devs the chance to run on Google and non-Google Android.

The multi-million dollar question is whether running MS' APIs on an Android phone will spoil battery life, and things like that. Probably, I would think, but MS have a lot of motivation to try to get it right and they may just focus on tablets, with larger batteries and write pure android apps for phones.

E-voting and the UK election: Pick a lizard, any lizard

P. Lee

>All too many people feel, ultimately, that their vote doesn't matter.

>A better electoral system is a must,

I'd favour half & half - half pure PR, half FPTP and one vote for each.

Keep the direct representation, but also allow the ability of smaller parties to grow.

What astounds me is the idea many people have that giving more power to the EU will somehow result in a more responsive electoral situation locally.

Free markets aren't rubbish – in fact, they solve our rubbish woes

P. Lee
Flame

> We're all used to the idea that one unit among 10,000 on a ship is worth less than one unit on a shop shelf

Someone hasn't been to Australian supermarkets where you have to check the prices on everything - they often bump the prices *up* per kg on the larger containers, presumably on the grounds that everyone thinks they should cost less and/or aren't paying attention.

Stop the war between privacy and security – EU data watchdog

P. Lee

Don't have to keep [presumably private] data in-country?

On which planet is that a good idea? Is he trying to create a jurisdictional mess so the EU can step in and "solve the problem"?

Apple Watch HATES tattoos: Inky pink sinks rinky-dink sensor

P. Lee

Re: Hardly a bug, is it...

>> Remember your body is a temple.

>I have the body of a god.

>Unfortunately it's Buddha

"Your body is a temple" is a warning not to go sleeping around with the prostitutes from other gods' temples.

Now this is getting all very confusing.

Paranoid about the NSA? The case for dumping cloud's Big 3

P. Lee

Re: @Vimes

Put a proper IPSEC VPN in front. Don't go around relying on application security to do the job.

Your new car will dob you in to the cops if you crash, decrees EU

P. Lee

Anyone else wonder...

why the *EU* is trying to mandate this?

Is it a free-trade issue? Required for international cooperation? Are some countries put at a disadvantage due to the imbalance of car sim devices?

Whether or not its a good idea, I don't know why the EU is involved. It looks to me like self-important meddling in the affairs of nation-states. What number are they going to dial? Who exactly are they going to report to? Along with the sim device, will they need a GPS? If you're on the Belgian side of the border but nearer a French hospital, who's going to help? I see feature creep in the future.

Apple to devs: Watch out, don't make the Watch into a, well, a watch

P. Lee

Having a different app to tell the time would:

1. stop people from identifying it as an iwatch (bad for apple)

2. drain the battery (bad for the user, then bad for apple with unhappy users and reviews). I'd expect there is some ultra-low-power system for doing this normally

The whole iwatch thing is on pretty shaky ground to start with, so I'm not surprised Apple are trying to prevent problems.

Close encounter: Apple Macs invade the business world

P. Lee

Re: Maybe not a 'typical' business

I'm currently doing this (i.e Linux + Windows VM) for a year or so.

Quad-core i7 dell laptop running Linux and a Windows VM. Mostly its ok. Managing a large Checkpoint firewall ruleset in a Windows VM seems to be an absolute nightmare though. It runs like treacle. We're talking 5-7 seconds to page down. MS Office is fine though. There must be something which CP does which vmplayer does badly.

I also ran another checkpoint command line translation tool. About 3 hours on the laptop (i7-740 1.7G quadcore 16G RAM, SSD, not memory bound, running a single thread) but around 30 minutes on my 3.2G i7-3930k desktop.

It just goes to show a laptop isn't always a desktop replacement and just because they are both i7's, it doesn't mean the clock-speed is the indicator of power.

2016 might just be the year of Linux on the (virtual) desktop

P. Lee

>Not ready for the desktop? it's been ready for years, just some people are too lazy to learn something new.

Not ready for the diverse needs of the large corporate desktop. Let me know if there is a good alternative to Visio that I haven't seen. Even when licensing is free, the costs of migration (to from any OS) are significant. The costs of support are significant (for any OS). To lazy to learn perhaps, but its the business that bears that cost.

Interestingly, cloud and VDI move Windows apps to the server, making the OS far more vulnerable to server-side replacements than something installed/managed across a mobile/desktop fleet. The fewer desktop apps, the lower the lock-in. Server apps tend to be far more OS-agnostic than the desktop.

P. Lee

Re: An alternate Why?

>I have to ask Why?

Multiple users running SAMBA on the same host? You probably don't want to run X from the cloud, so the question is, how much better than VNC or some such thing is the citrix server/receiver? Can you run multiple citrix servers on the same host?

Its also probably easier to provision Linux VMs in the same format as Windows VMs than than the "proper" way.

Is there anything to stop you taking your linux VM and creating more users?

P. Lee

Re: Non-product

If its bundled in with a Windows VDI system, why not? Linux may not be a viable Windows replacement but Citrix is giving people the option to give it a go and see, which is entirely reasonable. Not only that, but it might be used as a test-bed for having a Linux desktop and Citrix-provided Windows apps. After all, if its does work, then Citrix is well-placed for either an on-premises deployment or cloud VDI.

There are also plenty of scenarios without an Office desktop + Visio a requirement and plenty of scenarios where Citrix is already the provider, so why would you install a local Windows desktop as well? Just PXE-boot linux and use citrix for application provision, regardless of the OS. Hospitals, banks, call-centres, retail all spring to mind.

Let downloads roam free, says ACCC

P. Lee

>Why do Microsoft think it's fair to try and force me to buy their software from an Australian site at an inflated Australian price

To be fair, pretty much everything in Australia is sold at over-inflated prices. That's why we have, er, inflation, or at least, that's why the $A has crashed.

Then again, we wouldn't have over-inflated costs if we hadn't be subjected to general protectionist policies which combined with an isolationist mentality to create a pure "market driven" economy; and by "market driven" I mean, "everyone consistently tries to overcharge."

WHY can't Silicon Valley create breakable non-breakable encryption, cry US politicians

P. Lee
Big Brother

Re: Rubbish

>So it *can* be done, but it *should not* because it (still) is a very bad idea.

Indeed. Or you could force the CA used by your target to sign a dodgy cert for your mitm attack. Or all the CA's for that matter.

Which is fine as long as your target relies on large CA's, which they would be quite foolish to do. Of course, that would be commercial suicide for the CA, so the government would never suggest that they might already do that. Instead even intelligent and well-briefed personnel would probably loudly complain about unbreakable encryption so that.. oh wait...

Apple BIGGER than the U.S. ECONOMY? Or Australia? Or ... Luxembourg?

P. Lee

Re: They can't leave the money overseas forever.

>Firstly they can use the offshore money to build factories, buy raw materials, buy competitors - but this is pointless since they wouldn't pay tax on those anyway.

For capital assets, they would have to pay the tax and then depreciate them over time. I'm not sure about buy other companies - would that be considered and expense?

Regardless, keeping the the money offshore and tax-free allows it to grow much faster, pushing up the stock price and keeping the speculators happy despite the lack of a dividend. Investors have long since given up and sold their stock. All those with Apple shares can also use them as a pension. Save them up (no dividend-no tax) and wonder off to the Bahamas before selling them.

My (uninformed) view is that that large corps go multinational to keep governments "in their place." They don't have to go offshore because if governments ever got snarky, they can always threaten to leave. If they actually went, they would lose their influence. There are some small savings to be made which sweeten the deal too.

TURKEY-SIZED 'platypus' T. REX found by kid BAFFLES boffins

P. Lee

Re: What did it eat? Chili?

>Coincidentially, Scientific American just published an article on our bloody f(r)iend Tyrannosaurs Rex.

Paywall?

Have they worked out how T Rex could be a predator when falling over would kill him?

P. Lee
Coat

Re: Turkey-sized platypus

> What??? A 300,000 square mile platypus!!!

That's my joke... I'm sending you my huge bill.

MONSTROUS iPhone sales are CANNIBALIZING iPads, gabbles Apple CEO

P. Lee

Re: Cool

>As for Tim-nice-but-Dim, it seems that he hasn't realised that most that an iFan will need is one Mac, one iPhone, and one iPad.

Not sure about elsewhere but in Oz, the phone plans are skewed so that BYO costs you more than buying a phone on a plan. That means phones are replaced every couple of years when the plans expire and a new plan purchased, whereas tablets are bought and kept. The old phones are handed down to the kids. Essentially you have move to PAYG before keeping your old phone makes sense (at least with Telstra). Telstra have a good (for Telstra at least) PAYG option at the moment. Classic bait-and-switch, but I'll take advantage while I can.

Microsoft is BEATING Amazon's cloud revenues. Er, how?

P. Lee

>But they ARE cloud, so Microsoft are indeed now ahead of Amazon in Cloud. And are growing faster.

Its all about the intent of the figures and the reporting. Why are people interested in the subject?

To a large extent (as identified by the article as MS inflating its cloud with Office365 which includes local PC/Mac installations and licensing - that isn't "cloud computing", its mostly a download CDN) its about PR. The subtext is "whose stuff is better?" and the implication is "the cloud with higher revenue figures is better" though that correlation isn't rational. AWS isn't charging excessive licensing fees for client software, its selling what they call "IT heavy lifting" - its IT hardware infrastructure with an API, mostly using linux as the shell. AWS is mostly selling (mostly) server infrastructure, whereas Office365 is client infrastructure which includes non-cloud MS Office licensing. MS' "cloud" figures includes a lot of people moving to software rental for local installations rather than actually using cloud compute, so imagining that MS' cloud must be "better" because it has more revenue is misleading.

Just because the MS revenue could be for cloud services doesn't mean that it is for cloud services. AWS revenue on the other hand, definitely is just for cloud services because they don't do anything else and they appear to pro-actively help you to identify cost savings.

While I can understand that the cloud introduces lots of latency and so on, I reckon there is scope for lots of new software development. Write cloud-specific apps rather than just sticking DC apps in the cloud. The advantage of starting from scratch is that you can avoid some of the more expensive licensing options from Oracle and MS. That means easier sharding, and you may be able to bring the app & data closer to your customers than if you were restricted by expensive per-instance licensing. Quite frankly, the enterprise-scale apps built on Remedy and so on are quite appalling slow anyway.

Money-for-mods-gate: Valve gives masterclass in how to lose gamers and alienate people

P. Lee

Misjudged things?

Yes.

But I like a company who has the guts to come out and say so plainly that they got the whole thing very wrong.

I wonder if Bethesda drove a lot of this project, as Valve are normally pretty good at "good deals."

Top Spanish minister shows citizens are thick as tortillas de ballenas

P. Lee

Re: Pedanting...

>Humans not descended from animals? Well, we *are* animals - we have not left the kingdom of animalia to become plants or whatever - so the apparent implication in that "descended from animals" claim that we're not animals ourselves is false.

Since evolution basically compares similarities and builds a "tree" based on that and we share 60% of our DNA with bananas and plants came first, it would seem that from an evolutionary science point of view, humans descended from a healthy, if possibly spider-infested, breakfast for apes and humans, in a time-travelling-paradox-producing way. Are we eating our parents?

Methinks science and pollsters think too much of themselves. Let's face it, the pollsters were engaged in original research which gets collated into stats and has been presented as "fact" about what people believe. It may be useful to reinforce prejudice regarding johnny foreigner, church goers and nazis but I'd go out on a limb and suggest that just because someone did research and collected data it doesn't mean that data reflects reality. As has been pointed out, other researchers have reproduced the same results in multiple studies, but even with consistently produced results like this, I'd be willing to bet, they doesn't reflect reality. If we take the scientific "consensus" approach to truth, if enough studies produce the same results, then it is fact, regardless of reality.

Celebrated Pakistani female online activist Sabeen Mahmud dies in shooting

P. Lee

"Religion" is not a constant, it is a variable with many contradictory possible values.

However, I would assess the effective values of this instance of class Religion to eq "bad news."

The class and variable names are unimportant, it is the data values which determine the results.

For a long period of time in the West, religion was a counterbalance to government; corrupted by it to an extent, certainly, but also providing checks and balances on governments' desire for ultimate control over everything. Having made a concentrated attempt to exclude Christianity from all parts of public and private life, we can observe the State extending its domain and tightening its grip; re-asserting the claim it made in pagan times to be the supreme authority over all.

NBN Co loses the “Co” for AU$700,000

P. Lee
Mushroom

It was inevitable

Now they've given up building a fibre network, they've got surplus money to spend on marketing.

I guess Telstra didn't bill them enough for replacing the degraded Telstra copper with, er, more copper.

No FTTH; no East-West link for Melbourne so you can get to the airport without going through the city centre - I hate all politicians.

No, Optus: don't try US-style net neutrality arguments in Oz

P. Lee

It's why I like iinet

They do the right thing and 'fess up properly if it goes pear-shaped for any reason.

Nice people to deal with.

The Internet of things is great until it blows up your house

P. Lee

Re: Um...

Or you could buy a duvet. Reduce your electricity bills, get rid of the chance of electrocution and stop "blanket-as-a-service-corp" from adding pressure sensors to get information about your sex life which they sell on to advertising corp, microphones ("for voice control") which can stream sound out to the "voice-recognition" servers - at pornhub, "gas-detection sensors" ("in case your oven gets hacked") which feed into your insurance company...

I don't need smart bedding. Even if I wanted an electric blanket, I'm reasonably sure I could accurately and consistently set a dial to 6.5. I'm sure thermostatic control doesn't require an IPv6 stack and a DC full of dodeca-core Xeons.

I don't remember ever damaging clothes with an iron. I may have done, but not often enough to worry about and I'm certainly not going to scan QR codes on every bit of shirt. Mostly the risk comes from my wife's clothes where she has cut the tags out because the tags were annoying her and I'm not sure what they're made of. In that case, I leave them for her to iron - they're mostly synthetic anyway and don't need it. Why would manufacturers want us to stop destroying clothes anyway? If they wanted clothes to last, they could use decent cloth and pre-shrink the fabric so it can all go in the dryer.

Microsoft set to penetrate Cyanogen, promises app-y ending

P. Lee

Re: Cyanogen better be careful

>Goodwill could easily go flying out the window if they are seen to be fragmenting the platform for the sake of a hatful of money.

MS are targeting google, not android. The aim is to get a decent android distro with MS apps, because MS has little hope of growing winphone. MS' problem is that if they don't have a foot on the client base, people will will care less about having Windows Servers. If MS doesn't have proprietary protocols in use which keep people happy, they will lose the market. MS want people on Android to be able to access their existing work environment, rather than allow some android dev (google) to drive a replacement of MS in the enterprise.

MS is putting their apps on the dominant platform, which is fine. Cynaogen is probably ok in the medium term as I doubt MS will make many in-roads into mobile. If however, MS apps on android keep people on vanilla MS software and that drives winmobile sales, they're all outta luck.

Google has tested its speedy QUIC internet protocol on YOU – and the early results are in

P. Lee

Re: Google - if you want to speed up page load times....

I thought they had done that... oh wait, that's just me & my browser extensions....

+1 regarding pushing things out over UDP. UDP over a WAN seems like a really bad when you need all the data. You're just shifting the reliability problem elsewhere.

Personally, I like simple protocols. All these optimisations may benefit companies like google, but there's little for the end-user which can't be solved in a better manner and it raises the barriers to entry to the market and makes troubleshooting really quite hard.

It's like complaining about map load times on gmaps. The better way is not to load them at the very last minute. You could, pre-download them into some sort of portable device...

Gwyneth Paltrow flubs $29 food stamp dare, swallows pride instead

P. Lee

Re: The problem

Observing my own behaviour, I tend to load up on carbs/fat if my protein intake isn't high enough to keep me feeling full.

i.e. if I skip protein, I end up eating loads of bread & pasta etc which normally come served with other badness.

Add peas, beans & lentils to the mix and you stay full on much less food but that food takes prep time and quite a lot of getting used to. Perhaps they should teach proper cooking in school? Nah, we're talking about the country which officially classes pizza as a vegetable.

Sysadmins, patch now: HTTP 'pings of death' are spewing across web to kill Windows servers

P. Lee

Re: I'm in my happy place... I'm in my happy place...

>Erm - so back and running again in a minute or so then? Not exactly that much of an issue.

No, not at all, as long as every Windows license allows you to install on two machines at once, the extra hardware to run it on and a decent free load-balancer, perhaps the licenses for all the other parts of your application which need to be replicated too.

Don't get me wrong, it probably isn't the end of the world, no matter how many servers bluescreen. It just makes MS look a bit like Linksys: a bit dinky and not what you'd want in your enterprise. Then I see that they charge money for it and I begin to wonder at the sanity of those who pay. I see the ecosystems created by anti-competitive MS licensing which drives a lot of these decisions and I begin to loath the company, not because there was a program design error, but because of the business practices which twist the environment in an effort to get customers to choose them rather than a competitor, which has nothing to do with suitability of their software for the job.

Seriously people, validate your input. These are well known, long-established RFCs. \d+ isn't validation. Pick a number as your bounds. Really, its ok to say, "Sorry, our webserver doesn't transfer billions of gigs from a single file, unless you set this tuning option".

What's that THUD sound? It's your Lumia's best feature after unflashing Windows 10

P. Lee

>Why are manufacturers making phones that can brick?

+10

All you need is something that listens for DHCP requests from a client saying, "I'm a dead WinPhone, HELP!" from a boot rom and which then kindly uploads a known good image. Dual flash banks and you're all good.

While AMD, Apple et al thrash around, chippery fat-cat TSMC is grinning all the way to the bank

P. Lee

Re: Racing to 10nm

>The rumors that showed Apple switching most of their production back to Samsung

But isn't that Apple's way? Play off the suppliers against each other and make sure you give enough revenue to each to keep them alive and competing with each other? If TSMC went under, there would be less competition and prices might rise. You have to keep them all hungry and dependent on your custom.

FCC hit with SEVENTH net neutrality lawsuit

P. Lee

Re: This just feels wrong...

It's PR by lawsuit. Throw enough mud and mud will be associated with the target, even if the mud doesn't stick.

"The FCC dragged into court again? They must have done something wrong."

Googley TENTACLES reach towards YOUR email

P. Lee

Re: Opt Out? Oh, but you can.

> (And if anyone has suggestions for email services other than Exchange that allow you to use different sender addresses and still use Outlook - yeah, I know - then those suggestions would be welcome.)

My ISP (Westnet) allows any email. I have my domain forward mail to google and pick it up via imap, which should work with Outlook too. KMail works fine, MacMail (Snow Leopard) too. If you've configured the sender address, both the latter options auto-select it for replies. As long as I authenticate the SMTP session (when out and about and not using my Westnet link), there's no problem and it doesn't do a google, "sent on behalf of..." either.

Exchange Server 2016 will be mostly Cloud Exchange ported back on-premises

P. Lee
Coat

Re: Did I get that right ?

Internet-based email?

'Tis a revolution I tell ya!

--

What is actually interesting is that with every app which shifts to a web client, the Windows desktop becomes a little less important. It will be interesting to see if a less important desktop makes the Windows server less critical. Perhaps Visio will never be cloud-based and MS is just making one less app require a desktop installation procedure to fend off Google defections. It will be a fine line to walk.

Microsoft's top legal eagle: US cannot ignore foreign privacy laws

P. Lee

>MS have one trump, that they sell a lot of the infrastructure behind cloud services - they could start selling Outlook.com and Office365 turnkey solutions to local providers,

They could, or they could go the licensing route, but both of those options mean the Microsoft name can't be on the product, which means it will be a much harder sell. It may be harder for all the tech companies, but now, most of them are competing against their customers - selling cloud vs customer-owned-on-site IT infrastructure.

The Walton kids are ABSURDLY wealthy – and you're benefitting

P. Lee

Externalities?

Lots of talk of external benefits, not much talk of external costs.

I'm not sure the "wealth is a motivator" argument holds true at all points on the curve. From what I've seen of CEO behaviour in general, the fun is in the winning, the dollars are just how you measure the winning. I suspect that's a quote but I don't remember from where.

I'm all for productive labour, but when 30% of your white goods are made by prisoners - is that slave labour? Does it drive law enforcement policy and/or implementation where it shouldn't go? What about tax incentives offered to the large companies to locate in a particular area, that's essentially moving money from people's pockets to the company via the tax system - is that being offset against the general "good" being calculated? Savings can only be offered by cutting costs - is Walmart doing things more efficiently in terms of process or are they just paying less? If they are only paying less, that's just shifting wealth from the workers to the customers and owners - there's no net gain.

Efficiency of process increases wealth. You get a new computer and one person processes twice as many orders in the same time period. That's good. You cut your staff's pay by 10% - that isn't increased efficiency unless you only think about ROI. You've reallocated wealth, but you haven't increased it.

Twitter yanks firehose from DataSift, other resellers

P. Lee

Re: Closed Systems are not eco-Systems

+1

That's why Apple, Oracle and even MS et al, want to own the whole stack. Not only does it ensure that they aren't the ones kicked out (ending up like Novell) but it also allows them to be the kick-er if they spot profit. It doesn't have to be an explicit kick, but controlling the platform gives you an edge.

Its also why so many have gone to Linux. It prevents anyone from pulling the platform-rug out from underneath you and allows you to control the platform as little or as much as you like.

PC sales dip below 2009 levels, with Japanese sales off 44 per cent

P. Lee

Re: Dell market share down ? Not a surprise !

They have taken a new interest in not serving you.

I notice prices have disappeared which may be considered a bit of a flaw.

The last time I looked, the successor to the $650 semi-pro monitor I bought was up at around $1250. I guess someone has to pay for that buyout.

If you got German on the website, lucky you! I got mostly Arabic when I clicked, "Contact dell." I clicked on Intel processors - Learn More i5 and ended up on a page "2-in-1s Usher in A New World of Productivity and Entertainment". Its a complete farce.

Daddy Dyson keeps it in the family and hoovers up son’s energy biz

P. Lee

>you ever tried cleaning the guts of a computer with a Dyson?

>Total PITA

Stop it! you'll have noobs zapping their CPUs with 10,000v of static.

US govt bans Intel from selling chips to China's supercomputer boffins

P. Lee

Re: They're still at it

>Bad as it looks now, the US is STILL a huge sight better than any other country on offer. Including China, or they would've ALREADY demonstrated self-sufficiency

Unless there was no need to, until now.

Xiaomi's birthday present to itself: Flogging 2m phones in 12 hours

P. Lee

Re: Profit not volumes

>Oddly enough, market share seems to be really valued by a lot of big businesses. Never really understood it, myself.

Margin may be important, but absolute wealth is also important. It's a balancing act between margin and volume and when marginal costs are low, you can ramp up the volume until marginal cost = marginal revenue.

Brands (amongst other things) distort the theory by attaching value to ideas and image. Xiaomi appears to be putting its marketing budget into lowering price rather than direct advertising and allowing its customers to do the marketing for them. You can do that when you don't need to keep telling people how magical you are for them to believe you.

Australia finds $1 BEELLION to replace No-SQL DATABASE

P. Lee

Re: Won't somebody think if the Greybeards

Those lazy greybeards aren't going to cost anything like $1bn.

I don't have a problem with new tech, I do have an inbuilt suspicion of recent licensing agreements.

For $1bn, I'd say, "I'll pay for the work, but I want it open-source."

P. Lee

Not this then?

https://books.google.com.au/books?id=u7WbsmbttwYC&pg=PT192&lpg=PT192&dq=instant+recall+database&source=bl&ots=vQZyhDZU2L&sig=tdtoNqQF7CA2q2Fq3jzKpW-vQyA&hl=en&sa=X&ei=udApVeG2MsXRmAWX5YDQDA&ved=0CCcQ6AEwCQ

P. Lee

>Crikey - with that much they might even be able to afford Oracle's licensing.

Cue license change where everyone with Centrelink data is now an oracle "user."

All Mac owners should migrate to OS X Yosemite 10.10.3 ASAP

P. Lee

Re: Not for older MACs

That's true and it wouldn't be too much of a problem if Apple didn't clamp down on upgrades, which is a relatively new thing they do and the full effect of it hasn't worked its way through the system.

I'd love an MBA, but with an 8G limit there's no way. Its one thing to not be upgradable, its quite another to hold down the spec so you can't buy what you think you might need in the future.

I see Apple are still defaulting to 4G RAM. I wonder how many people are disappointed with their new mac? Oooh! A shiny new MBA with a 3.2Ghz i7 and ... 4G RAM? Non-upgradable?

P. Lee

Re: It Just Means

>[It Just Means] That Mountain Lion and Mavericks aren't really supported.

or that one of the patches in the "Yosemite" bundle for OSX fixes the issue?

Says the man still running snow leopard... :)

Videogame publishers to fans: Oi, stop resurrecting our dead titles online

P. Lee

Re: Expand this to all technology

>They won't be making any more money off of it, so why bother keeping it secret?

Probably because its rarely all their own work. What happens when the license a product/code which is still supported but the final software is not? Do the modifiers get an automatic license to use the included code? Can they redistribute it or does the product still die as the number of original copies dwindles? What happens if the product is obsolete but a portion of the tech in it is still valuable? E.g. what if XP needs killing because it is a flawed product, MS decides to give everyone a copy of Windows 10 but the NTFS code is the same in both? What if NTFS then needs a slight modification which breaks XP? Does the whole of the NTFS code have to be opened?

I'm not sure there is a good resolution to this. It is a can of worms which I suspect will stay firmly closed, mostly on the basis that customers will probably buy the stuff anyway.

Microsoft goes cloud KERR-AZY, chops Windows Server to bits

P. Lee
Paris Hilton

No local login?

Surely some mistake?