Posts by P. Lee

Re: So...

>You know what they say about people who assume...

Also... webmail? Yeuch! If you're going to do that sort of thing at least use google so you can use imap and easily create backups/archives.

Re: Muscle, not fat

Technically true, but the #1 premature killer in West is heart disease. That's mostly not from being ultra muscley.

Climate change may kill people in the future. Heart disease is killing a lot of people right now and will continue doing so in the future, so despite the rubbish method of reaching the conclusion, the conclusion is probably correct.

Re: See ...

The question is, why are we relying on Europe to protect the little man from Global Corp? Far better to organise politically locally and get the local laws changed. The EU may have some good laws but it is far less controllable by us. If we don't like something then we'd have to persuade the Germans and French that its a bad idea too. If you can't be bothered with UK politics, there's no reason to think you'll be bothered to act on European-level politics as that goes sour.

I'd hazard a guess that UKIP don't want out of Europe, but they do want to be out of the quest for "ever closer [political] union" because it undermines the value of UK politics. Its a bit like asking Westminster to take more powers off County and Borough councils because you don't like some of the local by-laws. Its a bad idea. You may get rid of a couple of things you don't like, but you're just giving away self-determination in return for a few legal baubles.

If you want to change things, get out there and organise. Don't think that being part of a larger voting area is going to make politicians more responsive to you - the truth is quite the opposite.

Re: Who benefits financially and materially*

Indeed. Fines should be taken from directors packages.

Re: Totally clueless

Terrorism was always around - we even have an annual celebration of the capture of a terrorist in 1605. Its a small issue not worth the time and resources devoted to combating it. More to the point, we're sick of the government removing freedoms, privacy and generally making life hard to combat an almost non-existent threat.

The stupidity of the police making a fuss around terrorist-inspired cyber attacks, as though the banks didn't already have cyber-defences in place, is palpable. The internet doesn't care about motivations and I doubt the Syrians are high on the list of potential internet-based troublemakers.

Quite frankly the banks have done far more to damage UK society than IS ever will. They've certainly cost us a lot more. Our own government has done far more to remove our rights and destroy our privacy than IS could ever dream of. They've killed more of our people by sending them to fight terrorism than the terrorists ever had. With the way things are going in Iraq, Saddam is looking rather like the least-worst option, which we knew before we went in there, because in 1929 our own military noted that the place was ungovernable, but history was ignored and has thus been repeated.

Thatcher got slammed by the Left for warmongering in the South Atlantic, but there was never a chance of the disaster Labour jumped for and the Coalition has meekly followed. Our politicians appear to be blind to the evil that they do and they dance as if controlled by an unseen puppet-master bent on wreaking havoc at home and abroad. They continually seek distraction of the populace from the disaster of the economy and they do it by spending vast amounts of cash on war. Its stupid, dangerous and downright evil.

Re: It would be good to see their weight thrown in

Better yet, go smaller and stack more on a card. 8G RAM, no GPU and iscsi disk would be my take on it. Make them small enough to not worry about ditching machine virtualisation and allow them to be powered on and off quickly.

First things first though - we need a common architecture to do uefi's/PCIe bus function.

Then we need a desktop version with GPU. Perhaps some monitors with USB3 interfaces you could plug a stick straight into to give KVM+USB capabilities.

Re: Solve this the same way companies do

>A nice idea but Apple, etc. probably have T&Cs which block that,

I wonder if that's possible? Doesn't a corporation "have all the rights of a natural person"?

Copy the MP3's off disk (you're not using just a hobbled phone are you?) or better, buy the CD.

Re: And instead you recommend

The proper way would be load-balancing.

Public-facing web systems are a little unique - most systems do not have very variable usage rates - but let's go with that.

Assuming you are using virtualisation (and you trust it!) you spread the load thinly across lots of servers, then a spike in demand for one application hits lots of servers a little.

One problem comes when you haven't got free software and you have to pay for all those instances. Another problem comes when you try to buy two huge stonking servers which have expensive engineering and little excess capacity. Go cheap and simple on the servers and get a couple of decent load-balancers. Hardware is relatively cheap, its proprietary licensing which normally kills this model. I'd rather invest in expensive *nix admins and extra hardware than software licenses.

What you really want to do is to cloud burst. You run your normal maximum capacity in-house and use the cloud only when you get an unexpected spike.

Apart from that, the standard disclaimer applies - you will pay for what you use one way or another. I'd keep mission-critical things in-house where I control the risk/reward trade-offs.

Re: How many DPI is that?

>That makes it roughly *1* DPI!

And yet, still perfectly readable.

In yer eye "retina-resolution" phones!

Re: Security?

On the basis that no-one could be that bad at coding video codecs when its your main job, I suspect the frequent updates are a marketing ploy.

>Filibusters are just plain wrong... it is no way to run a democracy

Which is ok, because America isn't a democracy, its a republic.

The problem is that the people's representatives don't represent the people, they represent the people who fund them because the constituencies tend to vote for whoever puts on the most expensive advertising campaign. Plus, by the time a candidate is elected, they have sold out to so many interests, nothing new can happen. While people are still relatively wealthy, I suspect there will be little impetus for them to tear themselves away from the goggle-box and organise enough to swing the voting system.

If we were in France we might expect a revolution, followed by some croissants and a siesta. Bringing back the phrase, "no taxation without representation" might also be appropriate.

Re: Unfair Contract Terms

It does seem a little more pointed than a simple NDA.

Re: Secret mode?

As opposed to "evolution did it"?

I fail to see much difference between "god did it" and "it was random stuff we don't understand.". Advanced tech and magic comparisons spring to mind.

Isn't pansperia just an admission that the maths for evolution on earth doesn't work?

Re: Low bandwidth?

Low, unreliable bandwidth?

There's an app for that. *cough*torrent*cough*

I've found Mythtv has revolutionised my TV viewing. I record what I want to see and now I watch a whole lot less. Not even free content of dubious origin tempts me.

Interesting, the ability to skip adverts has resulted in lower TV consumption.

Re: Xerox, anyone?

Publishers are always saying that the cost is not in the paper printing.

So I propose that you always get a paper book along with any ebook which has DRM.

>Just use IPSec.

Says the person who's never had to do multi-vendor IPSEC inter-operability?

The major vendors use slight differences in implementation to make sure you don't stray from the fold.

The IAB is also internet focussed. What happens when you've got multiple 10G or 40G NICs in a box on your LAN. Do you still want to encrypt everything?

I'm all for encrypting internet traffic, but lots of people use internet protocols on the local lan where encryption can cause problems (e..g for troubleshooting), especially IPSEC tunnels.

I've got a little network based TV tuner. Do I want all the MPEG streams encrypted? No. It isn't required and its way too much complexity for the job.

What were they thinking?

We'll definitely be out of business if we don't get a deal, we might be out of business if we do.

It looks like they ran out of cash before development was complete and had to take anything they could get.

I still don't think its that smart of Apple though. Pushing your suppliers to bankruptcy isn't a recipe for success. What happens if they start doing the sapphire thing and then have to stop because production has disappeared?

>Any company with a US legal attack surface great than "nonexistent" simply cannot be trusted. Ever.

Any such company obviously is in league with terrorists and should be hacked forthwith.

Oh, hallo Iceland!

Re: eh???

I think the point has been missed. MS' problem is that it has lost mind-share in terms of being the only option. They are buying the bottom of the market so that "windows is everywhere." It doesn't really matter that its rubbish, they just need a presence and to be seen to there. Even if no-one buys that particular tablet, being seen in the shops has value for MS. I'd be surprised if there weren't "co-marketing funds" in play.

Its a bit like people who start out buying a cheap old ford car and as they get older and richer they move up the range. They are unlikely to switch to another brand.

Re: Biased?

>Read private eyes 'dumb Britain' series.

Its a US company - even at university the multiple choice is pretty "dumb" with the correct answer being the one phrased exactly as the professor's textbook phrases it.

Re: NetApp customers

Indeed. They seem addicted to "enterprise" pricing. $7k/Tb? Nah, I just think we'll buy a stack of disks and leave them in the cupboard for hotplug DAS systems. No expensive 40G switches (which become a bottleneck) required for that either.

I wonder if that's the reason they are losing out to server-side SAN?

Re: You're not joking: the Privacy Basics site IS insulting.

You know you aren't supposed to click through, right?

Re: The bible is a book ?

>Personally I thought it was propaganda, can someone explain the difference.

I'll get my primary school-age daughter to help you out, if you like.