Posts by P. Lee

Re: Surplus to requirements

>if you want to be able to spread the handouts around, the country has to produce more per unit of labour.

True, but we are producing less and less because it is more lucrative to own and rent than it is to produce. The problem with that is that we aren't even owning things, we are owning ideas. This is extremely fragile. The reason it is fragile is that you can't eat ideas or use them around the house.

In 1929 lots of people still had skills to make stuff. Now we just know how to shuffle paper and work databases. We are utterly reliant on large corps for everything because they own the data that knowledge workers work on. If they go away...

Re: One factor left out - The System

>The nearest to it is the Greens.

At this point it doesn't matter who the third party is. Just vote for them to break up the duopoly.

But the article author is correct: interest rates can't be raised without instantly bankrupting everyone, but soon the government will no longer be able to borrow due to unattractive interest rates and excessive risk. Either the public or the government must collapse. I think Money magazine covered this over a year ago, surmising that the UK is doomed to certain financial collapse. The borrowing figures are sky-rocketing irrespective of "austerity" talk.

Re: Targeted

To quote Flanders & Swan:

"He blows up policemen,

Or so I have heard,

And blames it on Cromwell and William the Third!"

At its base, people kill when they think their interest is worth more than someone-else's life. Are they correct?

> with no physical connection ... they won't be able to break in, and data can't get out.

If they can get the malware onto the tills, they might have had physical access - embed a small phone or wifi device somewhere in the case (data out by sms if required) or just compromise the network at the store level.

> Which cave did the examiner live in?

The one where the examiner's organisation gets revenue for issuing the patent and someone else (the courts) have to sort out the mess.

>But why should you have to buy extras?

It's about the ecosystem.

Think about all the places you see signs for iphone cases. That's free advertising and mindshare for Apple - "See, iphone is everywhere! Keep it safe - it is precious. " If it didn't need 3rd party protectors, they would miss out on that and have to pay for more advertising themselves.

/cynic

Re: Um are you possibly confusing

> 3D graphics, i.e. representations of 3D space on a 2D screen, or what 3D TV and cinema do, which is trick your eyes into seeing actual depth?

Either way, if the use-case is business graphics, I'm not sure adding lots of phone-screens into the mix is going to start a revolution. Ditto tablets. Sadly, I fear a web-based candy-crush embedded in a facebook page is where this is going.

Ok, it isn't all doom and gloom, if it makes for better web-apps in general then it will be a good thing. The main thing is that it enables better platform independence. I just think it will be useful on the desktop before the phone.

I'd forgotten about VRML - very cool in the day but before its time on the hardware front - too slow to have even a trivial use-case. In this case though, candy-crush can drive dev familiarity and hopefully it will trickle into things which are useful.

Re: I'm fine with Scottish independence if it's what they want.

I'm with bing on this one.

I'm sure lots of Scotch think independence would be nice to have but you really need to have a war to make the realities of making it happen worthwhile. Do they want to join the Euro? That makes them vassals of the Germans and the Greeks (and any other group large enough to outvote them in Europe) rather than the English. Whoop-dee-doo. If they did go it alone, they'll have to make some major concessions to Westminster in return for not being dropped like a hot potato before they have bought the infrastructure needed to run a country alone. That will spike tax requirements and it will be a bit like Ireland - beautiful country, but its cheaper to drive from Dublin to Belfast to do your weekly shop than to do it locally. Does Scotland have a database of taxpayers? That would be non-trivial to put together in a short time. What about all those English-registered companies doing business in Scotland? None of that tax revenue is headed North.

My guess is that they'll take the concessions offered by Cameron and say, "thank-you very-much... we'll stay." Then they'll receive some funding punishment from Westminster to even things up. Like mooting any divorce, relations will sour regardless of the outcome.

OS cost isn't an issue, but there are plenty of white iMacs with core (1) CPUs out there - 32bit only - running snow leopard.

Mac users tend to be split between must-upgrade fan boys and if-it-works-keep-it people.

The downside of a hw vendor giving a free os is that they will use it to try to get you to upgrade your hw.

Re: SLOUGH - if despond - easily the worst place in Buckinghamshire ... or anywhere?

>Having worked in both Bracknell and Slough, Slough is 100 times worse and I can't stand Bracknell

No stench of mars in Bracknell AND there is more than one way out.

Re: They want it both ways on globalization

Meh, conflation. Employees defrauding HP by doing an extra production run is HP's problem. Grey = importing when HP doesn't like it. It isn't illegal but it is due to attempted monopoly practises.

Any legal sueballs are HP's contract problems within the channel.

Re: Nintendo Wii mania

>The problem is, no-one has any hard facts to prove or disprove this theory

True. Once or twice looks real. Every time looks like poor logistics planning, or a stunt.

Re: Daleks

>Leaving aside their utter inability to cope with stairs,

Solved, turns out advanced war machines can fly/hover.

>they're continually thwarted by some bloke with a screwdriver and a phone box. Nowhere near hard enough for #8.

True, but only by the one bloke+gal and only for one day. Most of the time, they get by obliterating everything in their path.

Re: They won't let me have it.

Is that dependent on having something later than snow leopard? As soon as I see a request for credit card details when I'm not in the middle of buying something, I hit cancel.

I'd look again, but then I'd have to care.

Re: Patching Servers

Linux patches are a little more descriptive too. Windows ones always seem to say, "this fixes problems, please jump through four more hoops and then I'll tell you what it really does."

/pet peeve

Re: The numbers don't add up

I'm not that bright, but would it make sense to have a local (VM?) server at each GP office and replicate back to the centre?

It would ease the performance requirements and reduce reliance on network infrastructure.

Re: How is it possible for Adobe's software to be so bad?

>> They patch it several times a month.

>That's *why* it's so bad

Certainly, but let's not overlook the fact that anyone who needs to patch so frequently hasn't put any thinking into the coding.

Personally, I also suspect they do just patch to keep themselves in people's minds. If anyone has a patch regime, the first thing you think of is, "how often do we update adobe?" I just say thank-you to Chrome and FF and don't bother installing at all.

Re: Is there an option to have more than one partition?

What distro is that?

/tmp normally defaults to swap and at least on suse, it defaults to a separate home partition.

In my experience, /var/log is going to fill things up long before /opt/application does, unless someone thought a small system disk should include apps.

I generally find 50G for apps and logs is plenty. The sneaky one is mysql which doesn't default to storing data under /home/x

Re: needs more tuners

Record everything all the time?

Might be nice if you a, er, "community based facility."

Let's calculate, $120/month foxtel x 5 users x 12 months and its more than paid for itself in one year. You'd need to add some fibre links and switches of course.

There are still cheaper ways of doing this though.

> So, hardware company states that software defined things are a passing fad.

Yes actually.

There's always hardware, the question is whether its generic x86/AMD64 hardware or custom asics. HP has the custom ASICs for switching/routing and generic servers as well so it could easily go either way. With everyone wanting to hype the next big thing because they make money from change, it is surprising that HP comes out and says, "actually, its a bit rubbish" because most companies go with the hype regardless of the truth.

SDx is generally going to have pretty poor performance next to custom hardware but we usually see systems developed on generic hardware and then migrating to custom hardware for speed, once the protocols and methods have been locked down. Sadly, that in itself stifles innovation because once the system is hardware defined, it becomes almost impossible to add new things because none of the existing kit can cope. That's why VP8 fails - there are too many phones and tablets which can't do it, so no-one will use it.

Re: It's the money, stupid!

>Eventually risky practices will be fixed

Now there's a bit of groundless hopefulness!

It won't be fixed because reward is divorced from risk. The best way to get paid a lot as a manager is to hide the problem while sucking the company dry. The company fails and you walk away nicely insulated. Salesmen sell subprime mortgages because their commission doesn't depend on the profitiability of the mortgage. That's madness. People can invest in companies, pull out a dividend and profit while the company is ramping up its liabilities in secret. As long as you sell your shares in time, there is nothing to stop you benefiting from the unethical practises - in fact, there is a driver for you to encourage unethical practises as long as you can get out quickly.

Simply, the risk accrued by the institution does not reside with those controlling it, and hardly with its owners/shareholders either who can ditch and run at a moments notice. No-one is liable. This is why limited-liability companies used to be banned in England at a time when ethics were more important than profit.

As has been noted, debt is seen as a good thing... because it enables faster cash accumulation through investment. Sadly, its almost impossible to stop its abuse and it is a complete millstone. It drives house prices sky-high for example. The economy would be far more solid if everyone had to save and then buy. Slower to grow, certainly, but far slower to fail.

Re: BS alternatives

My understanding is that today's requirements are not just limited to speed requirements.

There is also a requirement to replace the existing aging copper in many places. So, if we are going to dig it all up, FTTP is a far better replacement. What we don't want is to put in more copper, which basically benefits Telstra by keeping multiple tiers of infrastructure as the norm and provides for market segmentation.

As with all large infrastructure projects, FTTP is likely to cost more initially, but there are "network effects" benefits from having fast internet which makes it worthwhile. I have at least two relatives in urban and suburban Melbourne who can't get wired internet at all because "the exchange is full." Wireless is rubbish, made worse by colourbond roofing. Someone needs a good kick up the rear end to put new infrastructure in. Telstra isn't doing it, that's for sure.

Re: and on an unrelated note...

Most dual-sim phones have lower specs - the s5 dual-sim appears to be the same spec - at least as far as kogan.com notes things. I didn't know if anyone could confirm this.

Re: Whither Apple?

> naming all three major competitors to Nvidia's own Tegra tech.

... and there we have it - they want to own the mobile graphics space.

From the patent titles it all looks a bit thin.

I did most of this stuff in a computer graphics and supercomputing classes in the early 1990's. Moving the software to hardware is neither novel nor non-obvious nor is "... on a single platform" an invention, that's expected consolidation.

I suspect the chaps at Hercules who built graphics cards to put pictures on IBM text-only displays (well before nVidia was founded) might be surprised to hear nVidia invented the GPU. I'd be surprised if most micros from the 80's didn't have graphics chips for "lighting up displays."