Posts by P. Lee

Re: I admit, I am Word Processor inept.

So true, have an upvote.

I'm constantly telling my kids when they sit down to do a school project, "Do not format anything. Gather your content and write the text. You can format it later." Formatting is a massive time-wasting distraction and you're likely to change it all before you finish anyway.

Also at work, the number of hours I've spent having to line up table columns between different tables on a page. Styles should be a boon, but yes, they breed and can easily over-run you. Mostly, I use them for headers / document outline functions. Paste "as text" or via notepad and woe betide anyone who tries to use Excel to hold table data before bringing it into Word!

I like libreoffice because its fast, cross-platform etc, but I find it ugly to look at. ARGH those icons! Menu fonts don't look quite right - indefinably messy. It feels primitive, even next to Word, though that might just be Suse's packaging or Gnome app running under unfavourable KDE settings. I find Word a real pain with its exceedingly dumb XML mark-up which can happily include the graphic in a caption and insert it into a table of figures. "Everything is just a style" seems to be the motto with no intelligence applied. At least WordPerfect had a "reveal codes" function so you could see and fix bad mark-up. I've just downloaded the Linux beta for Scrivener and while not having used it in anger, it does look very nice!

Re: And how many other root CA's on your PC can you trust?

Not just CAs.

The Australian tax return software asks for root privileges to install. Who knows what else its doing? This is one step further on from "if you don't trust this software, don't run it." I think we've come to the point where we do need to execute software which we don't trust, so we need some additional controls.

Its time to get a little more serious about security.

Some sort of EXEC <binary> --additional-data-dir --net-socket-allow --ip-domain-exclude=XXX --ip-domain-include=YYY to allow the OS to control things with process-specific firewalls and disk restrictions. A kind of "noscript" for the OS, with some sensible defaults. Maybe the docker chaps could help?

As a mockup, could the disk restrictions could be done with an ad-hoc user account and a union disk configuration? With IPv6 at at least, we can run up an application on its own IP address to make firewalling a bit easier.

This could be done without upsetting existing apps, to allow untrusted applications to run without requiring root installation privileges. Apps which comply and provide a manifest get a shiny badge and good karma for their efforts. Apps which don't comply get a warning siren and booing from the gallery. The idea is to get app makers to document requirements which makes things safer for home-users and easier to manage for corporate systems.

Re: VoIP is fine...

>Until you move out to the countryside, where internet bandwidth is at a premium, and ADSL reliability takes a nosedive.

You always still have a PSTN gateway, but you move as many people off it as you can. A slightly higher internet connection is going to be cheaper than multiple landlines.

For home users, Fritzbox looks cool. I've no idea if its any good, but ADSL, DECT and VoIP in one box? How good is that!

Re: What is it with advertisers?

Of course advertising works:

1) blanket advertising: the idea is to gain mind share and thus market share. i.e. buy cuke rather than pepsi, McDonalds rather than Burger King. Which brands have you heard about most? This is how x-factor et al work. The idea is not that they will make people buy who don't want it, but to exclude alternatives fromt the market, so someone in the market for teeny-pop doesn't go and buy the "wrong thing."

2) Blanket advertising: to tip those "on the edge of purchasing" over into buying. Just before lunch? There will be a fast food advert for you to get you to a fast-food restaurant rather than make your own food. Nobody needs chewing gum, adverts won't tell anything new about gum, but the reminder is there to get gum-chewers to buy it.

3) Brand positioning: This is the kind of person who drives an SUV. If you want to be this kind of person, you need an OUR SUV, not a hatchback and not an SUV for plebs.

Tell a big enough lie often enough and people will accept it even if they don't consciously believe it. Without advertising, consumption would drop overall and there would probably be more new entrants into the market.

>As if I needed another reason to nuke the entire preinstallation of any and all computers I buy

I think the point is that these system have OEM Windows with no installation media, specifically to allow this bundling mess to exist. Isn't MS great? It is so good of them to help clean it up.

So yes, if you want to buy another Windows license to replace the one you've just paid for which came with the PC, you can. Or put anything-but-Windows on it.

Re: telly?

Not sure what the downvotes are for.

UHD's last best hope is as a TV/Console/PC screen in the lounge. I projector is probably better, but might be too much fuss. As has been said, there's no point having hi-res when the compression pixelates the screen with any movement. PC's on the other hand tend to do things right, but even then, the graphics cards to drive PC games at those resolutions are not in Joe Public territory yet.

Still, it might be like HD is now - there's not much content, but may as well get the better screen if the cost differential isn't too much.

Re: Not the first time

>Surely the solution is to lift the system several inches above your desk and drop it to reseat the chips. Worked for the Apple III.

That also worked the Apple ][+ and ][e, though I'm glad to find out at last why it worked - thanks!

Re: Fuck ads and all who serve them up

I like ads.

In very specific places.

For example, if I'm searching for a lawnmower on Amazon, feel free to sling me an ad on the same page for other lawnmowers which might be similar to the one I'm looking at, just as long as it doesn't impinge on the one I've selected for closer inspection.

If I come back and search for a DVD, however, I'm unlikely to still want to know about lawnmowers.

>What ever happened to the old saying "The customer is always right."

Apple generally has ridden on the idea that they know what the customer wants before the customer does. Generally, I'd agree with them there. The Lisa (lovely, if too expensive), Mackintosh, iMac, ipod, iphone, ipad all good examples of this. Apple stuff is lovely to touch, look at, hold - many people scoff at this, but it is an integral part of the experience of a consumer electronics item.

Where Apple fails is when the market moves on from this original bright idea to commoditisation. Its hard to keep coming up with good ideas, but inherent in finding a "new good idea" is that you know more than the customer. Being "totally customer driven" is normally code for "complete lack of imagination and effort."

Build-your-own-phone requires standardisation. Its a bit like shipping containers. They work well for economy and utility, but they are awful to look at and they will never be precisely what the customer needs unless they are shipping something which happens to be 8'x8'x40' - which is rare. Its an approximation to what the customer needs and always a compromise. You can compromise and rarely be "loved" or you can build something which will be loved, but only by a few.

It will be interesting to see how this plays out. I suspect it will depend on whether phones make the jump to more general compute or compute-access devices. The more general the usage, the more useful a compromise is. Not even Apple's billions will allow them to be "everything to all men." An iphone is a few-uses device and can be tightly controlled, a macbook is more general and can be less tightly controlled. Can apple keep people's faith in their goods, the cloud or drive a home-server purchase, or will they lose out to local infrastructure like an xbox or playstation or the fabled Steam machine? Using the cloud for settings and photo's is one thing, but the question comes as to whether a local host can provide CPU and latency advantages that the cloud cannot. Will tablets become fast enough to run local apps and will the devices attach to larger screens, keyboards and mice to enable better working?

It will be interesting to see where the "next big thing" comes from. We've now got portable computing to the point where we can have it anywhere. The question will be not whether we can have it, but whether we want it. Voice controlled appliances might look great in Star Trek, but Samsung TV's look less shiny. Star Trek never addressed privacy issues and Picard never treated his entire crew as criminals to be controlled and manipulated and spied upon at every opportunity, for fun and profit, even if the tech implied that he could.

Ives could be correct. A designer who makes no decisions isn't a designer, so he has abdicated his responsibility. However, that is assuming that choices have to be made by the designer, that compromises have to be made. That was certainly the case, probably it still is. Massively hi-res screens may be something customers think they want, but which negatively impacts battery usage. Giving the customer choice is nice, but its a good idea to prune that choice to maintain a good experience. That is what your brand does. You can also guide various customers towards particular options so that they don't make mistakes. Customer's don't want to have to make all the decisions - that's too hard. They do want companies to come up with a few good options for them, but when the market matures, more options can be taken as a "given" and more control can be given to the customer.

> "legally privileged material"

i.e. You are not allowed to tell people we spied on you.

Re: Snowballing

>One of the earliest things I do is compile a version of the kernel with unneeded code (almost entirely drivers) stripped out to reduce the attack surface.

Non-monolithic kernels go one further by taking running drivers out of "ring 0" so they can't interfere with the rest of the kernel or each other.

I theory, its far more robust and secure, but real-world need-for-speed tends to override that option.

Re: Debugging

>"Here's index.html, and I know what you'll ask for next, so don't bother: here's style.css, favicon.ico, and funny-cat.jpg."

The server could read all the content tags in a page and serve them up from a single page request, but I don't really want that. That means my browser doesn't get the chance to filter out things it doesn't want, such as flash, and save a bit of bandwidth by not asking for it at all. I might have style.css already cached too.

I don't want everything encrypted either. It isn't required. I like text rather than binary formats so I can see what's going on. I like it for the same reason I prefer text config file to the windows registry.

If the A72 is anything to go by, there should be large performance gains.

While I would like to see the S6 do well, I'm not so concerned about phones at this point - I'd like to see if putting them in a NAS is going to turn the NAS into a useful server for home-scale MariaDB. Take your tablet, remove the screen and add 8 SATA ports and a 1GB NIC or two. Can we use the graphics chip to improve RAID5 calculations? I'd have thought vector processing would be the thing for that. Keep a small battery to power a cache in case the mains power goes away.

Seeing as current NAS vendors appear to be incapable of doing this at a decent price, perhaps Samsung or Asus or Gigabyte could make a PCIe-x16 card with these features. As cool as the technical progress is, I think Samsung needs to apply its nouse to getting decent ARM motherboard standards in place. Then it might have a larger market for its chips.

As much as I would like to see Moonshot do well, I'd have thought this would be the way into the market, rather than trying to take on Intel in the data centre.

>the current risk/reward equation in the stock market presents investors with all risk, no reward.

That's because the alternative (currency) is declining in value due to zero interest rates and inflationary money printing.

Re: What's the use case for 100 Gbps wireless?

Sure its faster than any one PC will need, but if you're looking at networking, you want to share resources.

Cross-rack traffic has been mentioned. There are security applications where you might want wireless, but you want to confine it geographically. You might want to have some high-speed networking in your bedroom which doesn't involve irradiating your head while you sleep. I might not want to turn it off in the rest of the house, but a simple cover (or sweaty t-shirt) can close it down locally. The 100G engineering might pay-off with smaller capacity consumer networking.

Re: A patch that breaks powerpoint?

Do even the luvvies want to see a video in a powerpoint?

The only use for that is the CEO saying how he values safety/diversity/staff in compulsory training courses.

Re: Yet another explanation

You fail at modern philosophy which says "modern = intelligent/good; old = dumb/bad".

I think its part of the cult of evolution. Pretty much anything/one before the 1960's is considered a bit primitive, which is slightly ironic given modern music's preoccupation with banging a wooden stick against an animal skin.

I find it curious that with the rejection of religion in the West, sex, drugs and rock-n-roll drumming - three major methods "heathens" use for communing with the spirit world - become increasingly central to the culture.

Re: I'm going against the grain here but -

The quality of relatively static output should be excellent, but I suspect that we're going way beyond laptop/slab "retina" requirements here.

If you want fast updates, you might need a Titan or two. Actually, that might mean that low performance gadgets are the place to put these things - It stops people wanting to play Battlefield 3 on it. You've also got the option of a DP port on your gadget which you could plug into a real monitor and span the graphics system. Just because the chipset supports it, doesn't mean you're going to have a single screen with it - chained displays with DP are also possible.

>It's pronounced 'copycat'.

It's an mobile phone, how different were you expecting? It wasn't so long ago that phone differences were, "rotary or tone dial."

There isn't much scope for differentiation in the genre. These days, its mostly in the quality of components.

>Just feels like a silly word for "Outsourcing" to me.

It is... almost.

But hopefully you get a load-balancer for everything. That's a great idea. So good in fact, they you should really buy some for yourself and put them in your server rooms.

Then you spread your services out. Rather than two boxes doing job X and two boxes doing job Y, you have four boxes doing X and Y so a load spike can be dealt with. That assumes you've got your resourcing right so you don't DOS the other jobs on the boxes. Then you have to buy four instances of all the licenses that you used to only buy for two systems. That all costs money and admin time, so its often easier just to buy more dedicated boxes. For example, VMWare price based on sockets in a box. Virtualising adds all the VMWare costs. Running four copies of MSSQL server is going to be more expensive than running two, even if you aren't processing more data. All this stuff works best with open source, because the licensing problems all go away.

Upshot - get yourself some opensource, some active-active systems and a decent load-balancing system and things will be easier.

Who'da thunk it?

Re: This reminds me...

>when the ape creature consumed a bunch of magic mushrooms; the narration went on to speculate that the consumption of halucinogenics could have been a precursor, trigger or catalyst for the evolution of primate minds

Yeah! Because all evidence points to that! Cows also ate the fungus... but, no opposable thumbs!

I think this says more about the film producers than anything else.

Re: The "HQ-UK" initiative is intended to showcase why Blighty

HQ might be a mis-nomer.

What it comes down to is which company owns the IP rights.

Companies are a bit of legal fiction. IP is a bit of legal fiction. If you want intellectual property to exist, then you have to put up with fiction. If you want British companies to be able to license IP abroad, you have to accept foreign companies doing the same. "Oh but they employ more people in London" has nothing to do with profit because a foreign company owns all the bits of value.

You want international trade? Lack of profits to tax is a result of that and no, big corporates not making profit locally is not the reason for the government running a stupidly high deficit which will rebound and cause a disaster. Neither will Google et al paying the amount of tax you've thought up fix your deficit. Stop spending more than you earn, especially on killing people abroad.