Posts by P. Lee

Re: Oxfam

> Once the initial emergency phase of a disaster is dealt with, the way to fix famine is to give people money. Then, the entrepreneurs will find ways to get them the food.

Then the entrepreneurs will have the money and the people will be hungry again. I forget the exact details, but I remember when air-dropped food was being picked up not by starving locals, but by gangs with machine-guns mounted on pickups. "How much of your useless farm are you willing to sell to have some food today?" Do you gamble, take the food and run to the city in the hope of a job?

What you need is a way to make people productive (increase useful work=>income) and a way to prevent the redistribution of wealth from the low/middle to the top end. Along the way, you have to avoid the pitfalls of lagged production vs demand, political interference (warlords, taxmen), con artists and other politicians, natural and man-made disasters, ignorance, bribery, market manipulation and all these things happening not just locally, but in other places around the world.

Should be quite easy, right?

I suppose the point I'm making is that things are very complex, especially in economics. The robes of the various orders of the priests of Mammon don't indicate competence, only loyalty.

>I assume he has facts to back it up - you can't go just lying to investors.

People who have bought a very expensive phone, had a cheaper one earlier.

I care not one whit. I'll buy the phone that's right for me. Since I prize the ability to get at and use data on a phone as I please, that would be Android. My wife wants to press a button to play words-with-friends and has a mac & ipad from work - an iphone is a no-brainer.

I find it weird that people seem to love the fact that their phone company has managed to take so much money off them. Getting people to think like that about a product you can buy on any street corner... now that's innovation.

Re: Evolution?

>Noah put just one male internet threat and one female internet threat on the Ark, and here we are.

Gullible fool! Don't you know that the entire internet and its protocols came from /dev/random?

>You go-on considering them to be sad old duffers; I´ll continue to consider them a bunch of power-mad lying, thieving, tossers.

Isn't that what *most* of the Lords said (nicely) last time some government stooge tried this?

Re: "Hey, Camilla. What can I do for You?"

>Now, what do you suggest for people who use Windows-only accountancy packages, CAD suites, and play the occasional game?

There are quite a few games under linux. Steam is your friend.

Accountancy shouldn't be a problem - get VMware Player so you can move your software between hardware instances.

There are CAD programs from linux. GIYF. If this is a business the odd OS license cost is probably negligible next to the CAD software cost if you've gone Autocad. Apparently Chief Architect X can be moved to Linux if you have a windows machine you can borrow to do the initial install. Your VM might work there. YMMV since it isn't even that stable on Windows.

Re: "If a country's laws are crap, it is up to that country's citizens to get them changed"

>I'm sure the Saudis would love to hear your suggestions on how to change their laws when political parties are outlawed and you can be imprisoned and flogged for criticising the royal family who hold all positions of power.

But you don't know whether the majority of people love the king there. We have "sovereign nations" specifically to prevent international meddling, which leads to war. Otherwise the Saudis could claim that most Frenchies agree (they don't? how do you know for sure?) that Mohammed shouldn't be depicted so punishing Hebbdo with the death penalty was the right thing to do. Angry words get spoken, stones thrown, perhaps the odd missile and Shell.

The Americans in particular seem to have no concept of geography and restrictions on their jurisdiction. Just because you are right and someone else is wrong, does not mean that you should beat the living daylights out of them. We hold this to be self-evident, because we've seen doing otherwise starts a lot of wars and being at war is a lot worse than not being allowed to draw funny pictures of Mohammed.

So, we pass laws that allow us to speak more or less freely, but we don't go around the world saying, "What, your citizens can't vote? We'll bomb them then." At least we shouldn't. At least, we didn't used to.

As far as FB is concerned, it complies with French law and Turkish law, which is probably right.

Because you support free speech and condemn lunatics, it doesn't mean you go around breaking local laws in their jurisdiction.

Re: Communication equipment

>There is a requirement for all communication equipment commercialized in the EU that says the communications going trough it should be interceptable.

That's true I think on the network side - you can't set up a phone company where the kit doesn't provide interception capabilities. However, encryption is now happening at the application level in the client, since no-one trusts the telcos any more. So the requirement has gone from compromising the network, in one place which was relatively out-of-sight, requires physical access etc, to compromising every application everywhere, remotely.

As Schneier says, we can make secure systems, or we can make insecure systems but we can't make a secure system which can only be snooped by the "good guys."

Re: That'll please Google

Two ways to go here:

1) Brand proliferation. A non-Google Android will keep privacy advocates away from MS which might offer a more business-friendly, non-snooping option.

2) If I were MS, I might well consider giving up the phone market to concentrate on tablets where Office strengths lie. Do proper Outlook on Android (done), make sure there is a non-google android on the market which can host Outlook and pick up the license payments from Android phones. Its an ego hit, but MS already seem to have abandoned Windows Phone as a Tier 1 platform. This would be a proper "third place" strategy rather than continuing the emperor’s new clothes charade. They can always degrade the Android experience if their own mobile strategy takes off. No-one expects great things of office on a phone anyway, so not having Windows underneath is no great loss.

The downside to (2) is if phones take off as pocket computers with attachments to larger screens. MS can counter this by license bundling - if you have a Windows desktop, you get cheap android outlook. If you don't, you have to pay for a Windows desktop license on top of your Outlook license.

One thing is for certain, in the long term, you will not be able to save money by putting Linux or OSX under an MS application. That would be unacceptable to MS.

Remember Linux with multiple user GUI logins? That wasn't too hard was it? With those 8-core phones coming online can't we virtualise things? In-coming phone functions hold meta-contact lists (without slurp-send capabilities) and can check CLI data etc against both logins' phonebooks and the one with the matching contact data wins screen access. If both match or neither match, one login is designated "preferred" or "high security" and that one wins. Google needs to do this if it wants to get the business market. Each user doesn't need different security features, its just so users can allow one login to be managed by the company without giving up control and privacy (haha) on their phone.

Re: Fact Hunt!

>In the mean time, single interest, narrow-focus pressure groups are attempting not to increase the functionality, but to remove the use, in any context, of words they don't like.

That's a tall order. Words become offensive when they reflect the offensive intent of the users. It is the intent, not the letters or sound which is offensive. Until you can erase hateful people, you won't ever erase words full of hate. It works both ways though... "I hate your hateful words, therefore I hate you and seek to marginalise/erase you." appears to be the common moral-high-ground-surrendering response.

There do appear to be activists who seek out all opposition to their cause and try to destroy it by any and all means. They tend to be quite obnoxious, sad people. They remind me of present-day Nazi-hunters. Yes, the Nazis were bad people, but there is little to be gained from prosecuting 90-year-olds. If doing so would undo the evil they did, prevent future abominations or really even demonstrate justice in action I'd be all for it. At this point however, it just makes the hunters look like people who nurture spite and hate with an inability to forgive.

As has been said, tag the terms appropriately as colloquial, slang and.or vulgar. Job done.

Re: 64 bit?

The the CPU is 64 bits, you can do simultaneous operations on twice as much data.

e.g. comparing 8bit ASCII strings: 32 bits->4 characters, 64bits->8 characters per CPU op.

It isn't all about the RAM, especially on low-power CPUs.

Re: Truth in advertising?

>What a novel concept!

I think "oxymoron" was the word you were looking for.

Re: registry trust

Indeed, why would the company have the right to rescind?

It isn't as though a domain registration has intrinsic value or cost where it would be obvious that a mistake had been made. He wasn't buying a car or coffee machine. I also assume that the transaction was completed.

The CEO would have had better PR if he had said, "Our mistake, he did well." rather than "well we could stuff him up, but we choose not to... this time."

Re: OK, it's a personal issue, but...

I wonder how does your experience plot against MS needing others, such as Novell for networking.

I'm afraid most companies tend to behave like this in similar circumstances. Given Bill came from a legal family, I can imagine that winning was everything in his background ethos.

I just find Windows too hard and there is little advantage beyond Office file format compatibility. Unless I'm collaborating on a document, I don't worry about that anyway. I have a Windows VM on an SSD NFS share so as long as the laptop is on the network, I can execute the VM locally on any host or RDP to it, but I haven't fired it up in months.

I rarely reboot into Windows to bother playing games any more. I have a a reasonable number on Linux which keep me happy, despite a much larger library on Windows.

For all the ease of use MS has been trumpeting, yast seems easier. I don't actually feel the need to have a single look & feel across all devices. Its a different form-factor and I can handle that as long as there is an easy-to-find settings icon. I don't hold out much hope that the "unified app" thing is going to help them. It may even backfire as it encourages devs not to consider differences between form-factors.

Realistically, though, I like linux because it helps me do what I want to do. Free is a cash bonus and I believe open source helps keep application functionality honest. People involved in open source are trying to solve problems and provide features to do this. Companies behind closed source software try to prevent me from doing things, unless I'm paying them and even then, they tend to limit the functionality of their own products to segment the market and extract as much cash as possible. In the "olden days" I'd have no problem with that - you put your product out there and compete. These days, its all about killing the competition and manipulating customers' environments, not being the best and letting customers decide. That offends me.

Re: Oracle a lock-in? How?

>Specially ZFS still has no working equivalent on Linux

These technologies are really good (on larger systems), but a major reason Solaris/SPARC is declining anyway is that some of the really cool stuff doesn't matter to business or it runs into natural barriers.

There was a time when the more expensive and reliable electronics in SPARC systems were critical. These days everyone who would spend extra to get that reliability puts in redundant systems & sites anyway... and then much of the need for enhanced reliability on one site/system goes away.

Don't get me wrong, I started my unix life on Solaris/SPARC and I like it, but the days of needing it to host the corporate services for reliability reasons, are over, not because the PC is more reliable, but because the architectures are more reliable. The reliability requirement has moved from the compute engine to the load-balancer. Oracle just use SPARC to push their services which is fine and is very lucrative for Oracle, but probably not needed elsewhere. Mirror your transaction journal and replay it if you need to. Yes DTRACE is very cool. Do you have the techies needed to use it properly though? Not many companies do. Not many companies want to.

Obviously there are instances where you really do want reliability in the compute engine. SPARCs and PowerPC etc are still there for the midrange and mainframes for the top end of that requirement. I think it makes sense for service providers (such as Oracle) because the enhanced reliability makes problems go away and you would have decent techies anyway. Problems are always more "catastrophic" when third-parties are involved than if your own IT dept messed up..

Perhaps its just me, but if I were planning and I had the choice of going SPARC or putting in F5's, I wouldn't be going with the SPARCs.

Re: Surface 2 with Win 8 RT-edition

Does RT allow full domain authentication?

The MacBook Air still looks like a much better idea, even if you just install Windows on it.

Re: Holy shit!

>"I don't understand what the threat and risk really is, but let me in my ignorance suggest that we pass far-reaching legislation to combat this threat that I haven't bothered to understand."

It works for Check Point, Cisco, Bluecoat and all the others.

Re: The Hodges biography

The Russians army may not have been as effective as General Winter, but they posed a threat which created war on two fronts.

Having said that, the German economy was shot before the war had even really got going. The war just allowed the politicians the excuse for greater hardship than the people would have otherwise tolerated.

Any similarity with present-day events is strictly coincidental.... etc. etc.

Re: Wedded to Legacy

>In order to keep the other two honest, I wish they would start a 'skunkworks', and throw out something new that would eat the old. Not going to happen. :(

That would actually be the best way forward for them. Their problem is that businesses need that legacy support and if they just ditched it, there would be cries of outrage - not from techies but from businesses who have to upgrade their OS to keep Outlook support, but then their browser-apps break. This is what happens when you tie your application stack to your OS and try to use the lock-in to force upgrades. IE6 may have crushed Netscape, but Netscape used to be a cost option - around $50 IIRC. At that time, I don't think anyone foresaw the rise of open-source in business and it made very good sense to code for the free browser that came with the OS everyone used. At that time, RFC's were for UNIX and UNIX was not the desktop with OSX barely out of beta, Linux 2.4 just released but hardware not up to running the Java-based Office suites.

Re-writing apps is very expensive and very annoying. Why re-write an app because the OS has changed? The OS should support the app, not the other way around. It comes back to tying the browser to the OS to force upgrades. Why could you not just set an environment variable to indicate the default browser? Then legacy application X can just have an environment variable set and can kick off the standalone browser app Y which it needs to run. There's no need for that browser to run for general browsing or by default from the command-line or GUI shell. Even if you want to go non-standard, pick a 3rd party which comes with all its own libraries. Then at least you are decoupled from other upgrades.

MS isn't going away as the standard business desktop environment any time soon, but IT directors need to seriously assess just how much Windows is costing them in support and change costs.

>There is too much competition in this space for Google to accomplish anything meaningful.

The point is, Google own the handset which makes things very different. Like iMessage for Apple, they can deliver services between handsets and fall-back to telco services in order to maintain reliability. You can do it with text messages which are async and time insensitive, but voice isn't really an option unless wifi-cellular hand-off is really good and there is no connection fee. That means that the phone is fixed in place -still a profitable area if you want to take a slice of the profitable business VoIP hardware market, but is Google ready to take on Cisco networking?

Re: Just radar, not police.

I think you give criminals too much credit. Any criminal who obtains that awareness is probably not worried by a traffic cop.

Re: WTF.....- "supported lifetime"

I think what's going on is people are looking at this and saying, "if it seems too good to be true, then it probably is."

Dirt cheap upgrades from vista/7 to 8, free upgrades from 7/8 to 10. The question of where/when is MS making their money makes people really nervous, especially when we know they are keen on the subscription model. If they had said, "W10 will be free to buy for a year and include free support until at least 2025, the expected end of the support for W10." then things would have been rather easier. Don't tell me they haven't got an EOL date for W10.

Re: Don't Use Windows

It depends if the apps they need only run on Windows.

I seem to think an earlier article said Windows was mandatory - or was that for something else? Otherwise yes, if there's no onsite technical expertise, OS choice probably depends on who wants to support it, though an ssh session might be lower bandwidth than RDP. If FLOSS is on the cards, LTSP anyone?

Re: Read the whole thing...

> Gotta say I agree with this. Windows 10 free for life - great, I'll take two. Windows 10 free for a year - they can shove it: I'll stick to 7, thank you.

+1

Windows has two uses: work and games: Work Windows gets installed into a VM. Nice for moving it between hardware and, ahem, testing upgrades. Gaming Windows gets W7 or W8. It really doesn't matter two hoots, since Steam is set to start automatically.

There will be consumers who upgrade because it looks like a free upgrade and support is being pulled. That won't be me. Even if MS drops security fixes, it doesn't really matter because I have golden images for Work Windows and Games Windows doesn't browse except to very well known sites, it doesn't deal with email, IM (except Skype). Games Windows can also be re-installed if required. It's no big deal. All my important stuff runs on Linux or OSX.

For Small Biz it will be great to keep paying out for stuff they didn't upgrade for years. I'm sure they'll love it! Not. A lot of these places are not tied into the MS ecosystem. No Exchange or Lync to help drive upgrades. They use gmail and some Word/excel macros to generate invoices. Apps are the thing. Click on the "X" or the "W" or the "E" is all they need.

Medium Biz is probably in the same boat, except that they do have windows server products which drive upgrades, because externally connected servers do need patching. I'm reasonably sure they don't like to upgrade so frequently though and they are price sensitive.

Big biz will carry on as usual. There ain't no upgrades coming through until they've been tested. I'm pretty sure they'll resist because they never really did the 3-year windows-upgrade thing so they won't want a subscription model which is going to double their costs over 5-6 years. They still have to do all the testing so there is no pain-relief for them from MS here. Rolling upgrades won't fly. They won't want to move from 7 to 10 any time soon.

The upshot is, no-one likes upgrades except the vendors. Users like features. Hey Cortana, why is voice control very cool but slower and less reliable than other UI's? Hey Cortana, why is MS tying application features like games streaming to an OS rather than keeping them layered as applications on top of the OS? Why do they think streaming is a killer feature when Steam has been doing it for a while now and, quite frankly, it isn't that useful. Hey Cortana, do most browser-users think browsing is too slow and the reason is their local software?

Don't get me wrong, I suspect W10 will be better than 8.x and will have interesting things in it. I'm just not convinced that most users want to pay for their OS as a service, or indeed that it offers enough to make it worth paying for, again and again and again. Compute as service, storage as a service has had a difficult enough time with dirt-cheap providers. When compute as a service turns out to be more expensive than the other option, it will be a hard sell.

That's assuming it is an option. If MS has saturated their market and looks to increase revenue by charging existing users more, the value proposition begins to look shaky. Upgrade every three years instead of six or nine or twelve and you are seriously increasing your desktop costs. Home users might start looking more seriously at Apple. Lovely to look at, lovely to hold, free upgrades. Hmmm. When great uncle Albert's PC stops working because he didn't know he had to keep paying, some little pip-squeak is going to either replace it with an old mac or a linux installation. Maybe linux running on an old mac.

Re: I'm free! No, you're an idiot

>"upgrades" which create an asset of dubious value.

So then you depreciate the asset, which gives you your tax deduction?

Rental might be easier, but I know banks who were still running XP last year. I would hope a CFO might take a 13-year sweating of assets over paying four times that, just to get an easier tax deduction.

Re: And now we know

> Hopper does not store content at a third-party location"

I wonder what happens if there is a network accelerator with de-duplication?

Re: The Sun

Given that its from Herculaneum and given what we know of Pompeii, its likely to be a lot more graphic than page 3.

Re: proper link!?

>Why is it so hard for media outlets to link to the actual scientific article rather than just the home page?

Because media organisations hate "deep-linking." They want to show all the adverts as people bumble around their website.