Posts by P. Lee 5267 publicly visible posts • joined 4 Dec 2007
Indeed. It's like putting ms terminal server in a vm. Sure you can do it, but why? It isn't as though you can save on licensing if you need to spin it up on different hardware. Just run two (or more), for free.
Actually, given the easy of management, why not run locally and avoid the bandwidth dependency?
>Now, how could these things be done without immediate saving to iCloud
Over the local network?
Or get icloud to publish presence information so you can sync device-to-device? (torrent tracker?)
Or provide these options to the user beforehand? What if I'm working on video editing or I only have a small phone?
Will somebody think of the bandwidth?
I believe the sub reference is to a picture of a sub and what appears to be a dorsal and tail fin of something around the same size.
For extinctness, see "coelacanth."
Averaging guesses doesn't improve accuracy. When science is merely consensus, it becomes merely folklaw.
With teeth like that who needs lasers?
Who uses fear to motivate people? I think we know who does that the most. Who uses arms in pursuit of political and economic goals? The same people.
The TSA is part of a huge government bureaucracy. Their goal is therefore compliance not effectiveness. It is a bonus for them that they know security protocols are irrelevant.
... and the more technologically advanced societies are the ones diving the demand and consuming nearly all of the world's resources, producing all that pollution.
A problem with globalisation is that it tends towards megacorps and political systems which maintain the status quo. Large companies with excess profits borg or crush or outlaw competition before it can disrupt their profits. It is difficult to create centre of expertise in solar panels because there is almost no chance for a small company to compete commercially with the big boys. Predatory pricing, patent litigation and "co-marketing" funds for the channel mean you sell out, are sued out or are starved out of the market.
Global markets mean that cost cutting is the way to riches rather than making a better product. As long as the product lasts for a few years that's ok. It used to be a question of vendors selling products which were not quite as good as they looked. Now (at least in the tech world) they are deliberately creating them to fail, which produces economic activity and tax revenue which make us poorer. They aren't just cutting costs to increase profits, they are deliberately making sure you will need to by another one on a specific time-scale.
If you sell 100 cans of beans, cutting the quality of your sauce for an extra $1 profit isn't worth it. If you make 1bn cans of beans it becomes well worth it. That's a problem with globalisation - individuals become unimportant.
Another problem is that cheap products discourages, "mend and make do." That's great for economic statistics but rather bad for pollution. The hems on clothing these days are so small, that if the hem splits, you have no chance to restitch them -you throw the garment out and have to buy another one. If you rock on most dining chairs, the likelihood is that they will break. Kneel on the coffee table or drop a screwdriver on it and you'll break the legs and gouge through the ultra-thin veneer. It can't be fixed by most owners. If you had solid wood, you could just sand it down and re-oil it and off you go. So many items structural integrity is ensured by their completeness - break any little bit and the whole lot falls apart. This may be profitable and apparently wanted by consumers, but it isn't good for the environment.
Another problem is that selling a product is more expensive than the product itself. That means that buying wool to make your own jumper is probably more expensive than buying the finished product. This discourages skill development, encourages specialisation and the further entrenchment of the polluting status quo where wool is shipped around the world instead of being used locally.
I'm not sure there is a good solution for the West. Pretty much every improvement is going to make us poorer and disadvantage those in power. I suspect increasing competition at the price of "efficiency" (which these days means "efficiency of capital / ROI" not efficiency of the process being used to make something) might need to happen. At the very least, the government should balance its books (which will make us poorer now) because we are living beyond our means collectively. That will impoverish people, but I suspect it needs to happen and it might encourage quality at the expense of turnover and make locally produced (if less polished) product financially viable.
We need to stop kowtowing to the large corporations. If they make $10bn profit total (as reported to shareholders) and the UK is 10% of their market, tax them on $1bn. One set of accounts for the taxman and the shareholders. Let's see just how happy they are to overstate their sales when profits are on the line. If they won't provide sales unit figures, then let the taxman make his own estimate. This is not about bashing the rich, this is levelling the playing field for the smaller players who can't make the complicated financial arrangements the big boys can. This is about increasing competition between products. I want to see products competing, not competition between existing cash piles and marketing funds.
I've found here in Oz the Windows version of Skype is too laggy - it spends ages hanging there while it loads adverts, apparently from a server in Siberia which is connected via acoustic coupler with LACP pigeons.
The linux version, however, is as yet unencumbered with such atrocities.
Fascinating. MS has given me another reason not to load their OS.
Fun though that idea is, you really don't want auto rendering of HTML in email, even though most clients will do it. MS reused explorer in Skype and forgot to disable JS. Oops.
Text (especially ascii) is easier, safer and more efficient to store index and search. Procmail with HTML? No thanks.
Nerds are nerds The 80's were a good time to be a geek, and Apple played a good part in that.
Linux leads gui features (if not innovation) now. Macs are just PCs and osx is NotWindows which still runs Word with a nice strong laptop case.
There is too much benefit in being compatible to allow too much innovation. I'm hoping ARM might pull something out of the hat, but I suspect the high cost of battery, screen and marketing will dwarf savings on a CPU.
>Just where is Admiral Ackbar when you need him?
Nadella is a an exec, so this is a PR thing. Those not playing with linux won't play with it just because Nadella says he likes it. Those who would play with linux probably have Windows as well anyway. It therefore makes perfect sense to pretend that Windows can integrate into a *nix environment (where it isn't already) just fine.
They're still hoping to get more windows in to replace linux.
Netflix needs to get its act together with proper caching rather than servers and massive virtual monopoly telco's need to stop whining about how badly done-to they are.
Raise your end-user prices. Competition is almost non-existent and you could then prioritise netflix for free.
What? That would make your own over-priced video packages look less attractive? My heart bleeds. Maybe you should get out of internet provision.
+1 for doing useful stuff.
It's worth making it compulsory in the lower age brackets because it teaches methodical thinking, solution approaches (object-orientation/procedural/functional) and a little bit of coding/scripting gives people tools to do things, even if they don't want to go into CS.
I don't really use my CS degree knowledge that much, but I've often used a bit of perl scripting to translate from Office-based templates to configuration database formats. I'm not really a programmer, but I often use vim, sed and regexes to reformat data.
Lots of things are not fun at school and we won't use them later - we don't need more gamification. I've never needed to dissect a frog since school. While there is some need to learn about things, its much more important to learn how to learn and to give (force) a wide tasting of areas to children who at least initially aren't interested in any of them.
>Apple must really hate Google.
Google is a competent competitor to Apple in the mobile space. MS... not so much.
Both Apple and MS are trying to end-run around Google by building search into the OS. Google is trying to end-run around MS by moving the intelligence/processing into the cloud. Google fights Apple using "we can keep our cloud up" and providing better results and Apple fights Google by having a more functional desktop OS.
Like political parties, all three of the major commercial players seem to be adopting the same strategy. Ironically, MS may come out being the good-guy here because of its stake in the business market. However, I wouldn't be surprised to see a Windows-Home Edition which is as bad as all the rest. Why are they all going the same way? My theory is that the desktop industry is dying. Desktops aren't, but to a large extent they are feature-complete, which has killed the upgrade market. MS locks (business) users into apps which require desktop upgrades, Apple has given up and gives its software away, relying on hardware refreshes. All three want a constant income stream that constantly selling user data provides, so the OS becomes a trojan.
I think Apple is making a mistake here. You can't market yourself as "premium" and sink to selling your user's data. They should have had a separate box for web search with the offer to combine it if you want. Tell people what the implications are and let them decide - that's how you maintain your brand. It isn't about "I can turn the option off if I want" its about integrity, respect for customers and the value placed on privacy. I'm sure Apple would love Google's revenues to add them to their own, but Apple is not Google and the brand would not survive doing things the Google way.
I'm sticking with KDE and Firefox. Not perfect, but pretty and functional. Mostly, I know how to organise my stuff and find it without search facilities.
>Yes, the laws already exist to punish people who threaten and cause genuine fear for a person's life and safety.
Indeed and rightly so. However, yelling, "You Nazi I'm going to kill you" in a twitter or facebook comment would/could rate as a troll but is not something to be taken seriously. That is the problem here, the government is turning all online interactions into sworn affidavits. I presume the aim is to be able to prosecute anyone they fancy after logging everything.
People are mean, especially when anonymous. Don't pour out your soul online - these people are not your friends. Your friends will be round at your house making you a cup of tea.
My sister-in-law has an optus wireless internet thing. She can barely keep a connection up, never mind download lots. This is in suburban Melbourne. Skype lasts a couple of minutes before dropping out.
My guess is a lack of towers and perhaps the Australian penchant for corrugated steel roofs.
I don't think data for information is much of an issue. The big hog is video, which is mostly unnecerssary and not that great on a mobile screen.
It doesn't matter too much - cables are better.
>>"And the biggest laugh is that if an Australian publication had written this article the writer could go to jail for up to ten years for bringing these bungling fools into self inflicted disrepute"
>Apparently not. Fairfax reports this
You don't think they'd use the stupid law as soon as it's passed do you? That would look bad.
The arguments for stability in embedded devices go away with an ever changing and exposed user environment. These are not factory-floor disconnected PLCs.
The mobile market is maturing. Sorry to the manufacturers but you need to overspec the hardware to cope with updates, run fewer models (so you can test updates), and push the OS updates through quickly.
But did you ever check out the myrealbox demo of their internet email system (not groupwise)?
200k accounts, 50k active users on a dual-core, two node cluster (was that the late 90's/early 2k's?) one node did smtp, the other imap, with failover each way. Very, very impressive performance.
Novell had terrible marketing and windows was being sold for 60 quid. Normal retail for Win8.1 in Oz is now $400 and its tied to your pc, it isn't an independent license! Ain't monopoly wonderful!
The NT memory protection was better and it had PHB, "its just like a desktop" appeal. This was a time when many companies ran on WfWG. Novell should have gone to *nix far earlier, before Windows got a foothold.
I'm still surprised Novell didn't take advantage of their directory for *nix app server configuration. Boot a new server, give it an IP and email "role" and it pulls all its config from the directory, updating DNS MX records etc. No messing with unix config files required - essentially running FUSE + directory.
re: Windows 2003 replacements
Fewer customers, but higher value, a greater imperative to update and easier to update. The revenue burn will be bright and short.
I for one am pleased at the industry slow-down. It means customers are happy with what they have and aren't putting their hard-earned cash into things which do very little more than what they already do.
It get even worse if you want to network boot or install windows.
I find windows just too hard to be bothered with now - if nothing else, licensing is just a pain. We have three laptops, two desktops and a server in the house. The laptops have XP COA's on the undersides, which are now not worthwhile. How much is that going to cost me to do Windows?
It isn't just licensing either. BCDedit? How did they manage to make that so hard? The Win8 GUI is bad bad bad. Click on the start menu and up pops the start screen from the bottom. Bother, I want to go back down to the desktop... click the arrow near the bottom of the screen pointing down... it scrolls down, but not back down to the desktop, it goes to an application selection screen. Oh yes, the desktop was up on the start screen as a tile, now, where is that up arrow? At the top of the screen (big mouse movement required). It's like being in Zork's twisty maze of passages all alike, where you can go north, then south and not end up back where you started. "Connect to Network" doesn't take you to your NIC settings! "Storage" doesn't take you to disk management! GAAAH! It's too hard. too unintuitive, too restrictive. I only use it for games, and one-third of all my games run natively on Linux anyway.
*Nix is designed to allow operators to do useful data processing. In windows, if there isn't a specific app for the task, you need a developer or a ported unix tool/language. In *nix, you can put things together yourself. Having said that, I could easily use Linux on a day-to-day basis without using the command line. The command line is there for doing clever stuff. Pull all the music from an iTunes library, filter out all the Apple-specific stuff and serve it out over NFS or SMB if required - dead easy. Airplay may be able to do it, but then I'd need a recent Apple devices everywhere, costing $$$ instead of recycling old kit acquired for next to nothing. I see no reason to pay someone else when I can do things myself.
Perhaps it would be faster if they tracked ISIS rather than spending time and resources tracking citizens of friendly countries.
They would generate a lot less ill-will and a lot more sympathy that way.
Unless of course, the major threats are not ISIS, but people in the West who just don't like being spied on.
Share options and so forth are usually a tax-efficient sweetener, not a realistic way of providing an incentive to do well.
We do need to reduce the liquidity of the stock market (though that's another issue). Five years may be a little long. One day would be an interesting experiment to kill HFT. Five years minimum for vesting of exec options might be reasonable, though.
I'd have thought some sort of revenue / profit calculation would be used if you were doing things properly.
While shareholders do technically own the company, a company is not a real "thing" and split ownership is not comparable to property rights. Try repeatedly buying and selling a car within milliseconds. Limited liability is also a problem, of which the activist investor is only a small part. Abuse of both facilities is far too easy and more regulation is required.
The main home use I can see is if you want to combine your TV screen with a computer screen.
The TV needs to be large for distance viewing, the computer needs to be hi-res for close-up work.
Kogan has a A$999 55" 4k screen (sold out) so they aren't all in the ludicrous $4k+ range.
Not too fussed about the battery life if it can switch to a non-gaming mode an last for 10 hours. Actually, I'd like something that runs silent on my desktop.
I suspect its a bad idea to game with this thing nestled on your duvet.
If they've got something which can beat my 680 in a laptop, I'll be impressed and envious.
Well, unless she invested in the new rare earths companies. Then she might be destitute.
That's the problem with large companies with cash. They could (like the Chinese) just drop their prices and send you bankrupt.
We do care about the producers because the producers are funded by the rest of the financial system and in the end it always comes back to people. Companies are a fiction, only people matter.
I'd agree with allowing users to decide on upgrades iff they can downgrade if it all goes wrong. My 3G is far less useful than it was. The keyboard often freezes especially if maps is or has been used.
I see ios doesn't even report ram, which smacks of guilty embarrassment. I can cope without upgrades, but making things worse with no remedy is a culture I can't easily forgive.
Despite the downvotes, I suspect you're correct. Women will gossip to their friends, men turn to their computers from my (limited) experience.
Historically, we tried to protect both sexes from this kind of behaviour by saying, "don't have sex with someone who hasn't committed to you for life." It may not eradicate the problem (given the disdain for marriage these days) but it gets rid of an awful lot of it.
Do people want to follow that advice? No, they want to be "free." Guess what? If you expose yourself to someone, even in private, you've just massively upped your "attack-surface". Old fashioned morality wasn't created to spoil people's fun, despite what many people think. It's there because it's good for you.
Crying to Google to erase the consequences of your actions is too little, too late. Freedom cuts both ways. It's great, I'm all for freedom, but self-control has to match it or people get hurt.
>No, you're not. You're just not in the mainstream of people who buy mobiles.
I suspect marketing funds at play here. Otherwise we'd see phones with SD cards with the OS on them. Phones are too generic and marketing needs differences. It's hard to make up hair-commercial lies for phones.
> think the maket was for simple devices that access the net without the bother of Windows
Perhaps, but I suspect the cost is in the marketing, screen and battery. None of these things reduce when you take Windows out of the equation. RAM and CPU are relatively cheap.
> three bucks plus is quite a lot,
Indeed. Perhaps not on the S5, but on the far more numerous low-end phones, though it might be calculated as a percentage.
Far more interesting would be to know if it covers any real tech or if its just quid pro quo for Samsung getting a good deal in other areas - oem windows licensing perhaps.
Ok, I'd like gigabit and I don't care how it arrives, but I don't think its the people with cable connections who have the last-mile speed problems.
If they could do it over telephone wire then great, but if you're going to lay new cables, why not fibre? Are you going to put in new node kit and not go fibre?
>You plumb your phone into the TV, connect your BT mouse and keyboard, settle down on the sofa.... and then someone rings you up.
No, you plug your "apple tv" into the tv and mirror the screen over the 802.11ac network.
What they could do is have a touchscreen and a dedicated fullscreen OSX desktop for IOS apps running on an ARM chip inside a macbook. You do still have to deal with the greasy fingerprints though.
I doubt it though. They'd rather sell two devices and I think that's what people would rather use.
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