Posts by P. Lee

Re: Think of the children... or not.

>>"...abstinence is the only answer"

>Not really.

I think they meant "abstaining from taking the pictures."

But your anaylsis is correct - pictures are generally taken and sent by those who haven't yet realised the value of their reputation.

Re: ISPs biggest beneficiaries of piracy

> ISPs have benefited from piracy indirectly as it gives users a reason to purchase access plans with greater capacity.

Hardly. The d/l caps have been increased disproportionally more than prices. The d/l caps are mostly about inter-ISP competition. Capacity-wise its a problem for the ISPs. When I say "problem" I'm talking about the disconnect between marketing and engineering which leads to "traffic management" requirements.

I've just looked up cinema tickets in the overcrowed SE of England (Winnersh Triangle) and the standard adult peak tickets are $10.05 - one austrlian dollar cheaper than the "special-offer-thank-you-for-being-our-customer" cinema tickets with which Telstra graces its customers. The Hoyts-Eastland (in Ringwood, so much like a mini-Reading that I often mix the names up) is over 40% more for Lucy if you book online, with no concessions for anyone. "Into the Storm" is over 100% more expensive at $21.10, but you'll be pleased to know a child can get in for only $16.10.

Price-gouging tends to reduce my sympathy, whether you have the legal right to or not. To paraphrase someone, the internet sees scarcity as damage and routes around it. Sometimes it does - I can't even be bothered to pirate Hollywoods latest and greatest. I wonder if growing up in a world saturated with media will make the next generation as apathetic as I am?

Re: Refunds are only sought for games that are not fit for purpose (i.e. don't run)

I suspect someone picked up a "still in development" game and doesn't like it.

However, an up front "no refunds under any circumstances" is quite aggressive.

Re: "my suspension of disbelief finally broke"

Actually, homosexuality is "deviant" in that it deviates from the majority practise. That's a good thing too - if everyone was gay, there would be no more people and the human race would end. The beeb loves to promote it, but I found it to be an eww! scene. By explicitly sexualising the moment, it rather hit you in the face with "how would that work?" which just wasn't a thought that was required and completely dropped you out of the story.

The show has gone from being entertainment to social engineering. Surely it must be possible to have a show which is just entertaining. My kids are still kids, they aren't interested in sex and I'm reasonably sure Dr Who isn't the best way to teach them about it. If I did have kids who were interested in sex (say a 15 year old boy) I'm also sure putting images of sex between a woman and a lizard woman in his head is also not a really helpful thing to do.

I don't let the Beeb or any other mass media do my kids sex ed - that's a parent's role. I'd kindly thank the mass media to stop it - I'm not convinced they are either competant or have my child's best interest at heart. In the mean time, the button is off.

Supply always meets demand - its just the price point where they meet tthat changes.

The problem with SE England is that its extremely difficult to increase supply - there isn't a great deal of land left where its (politically) possible to build. Supply is reasonably fixed.

The problem isn't McMansions, the problem is the unwillingness to see low house prices as a good thing, leading to the ever upward pressure. The reason rent control is attractive is that it discourages investment-buying of second and third houses. With less rental income, you can't pay for high mortages, with lower mortgages more people can afford the houses which already exist and everyone is left (after a painful re-adjustment) with more money in their pocket.

Of course, this assumes that supply is fixed (which it is, in the short term) and that there isn't too much externally sourced demand which will flow in offsetting the drop in domestic demand.

In short, if you want people to be richer - help them get rid of their debt. Debt is bad for individuals and the economy and the UK is less solvent than places like Greece and Spain.

Re: R2-D2 etc ARE combat robots by design.

If number 5 is alive - does that make him human?

Re: Cheesburgers and "The Cloud" !

> Given all of that I think it's safe to say that this is a product for people that are both rich and a bit stupid.

Or maybe you could shove it into a database server? That's assuming you don't need the other Xeon features.

Re: um

You are assuming reviewer accounts=reviewers

> Believe it or not, even people who work within a bank and have full access to their internal systems aren't able to do that!

Fear the nasty foreign tehwworwists scum! We are nothing like them!

Re: "It undermines the rule of law if laws are unenforceable"

>Well, it's not odd for him to be saying it.

Indeed, it is true and he isn't the first to have observed this. Politicians just don't care because its all about the ratings which turn it into a gameshow.

As one (BBC IIRC) political analyst said, "Tony Blair passionately believed everything the focus groups told him."

Is there something new?

Not in theory, but in practice the PC world is used to being allowed to run software on faster chips to get additional benefit. Now we see what used to be general pc software (e.g. Checkpoint firewall-1) being priced out of usefulness and a substitute "appliance" range which could run anything down to a celeron. The also hobble not just features, but the number of cores used. That is new to PC's.

Worse, this isn't just some washing machine built-in wearing-out date. Things go "obsolete" when the vendor says so, not when they are no longer fit for purpose. Same software, but you need to buy it new again and the hardware it runs on, or you'll drop out of support and we'll charge you more than ever. Add a complex infrastructure which has its own lock-in of complexity and it begins to look like extortion.

Not only that, software is notoriously unreliable. Just look at the number of phone app updates. Hardware has to be right when it goes out the door because its hard to change. I know which one I'd prefer to use.

Re: (Understanding VFM)

I think people understand value-for-money, they just don't care about other people's money.

e.g. a manager extracts maximum value (i.e meeting his KPI) from his budget. The fact that he is dealing with an app which deals with other people's money is really irrelevant to him, especially if the work is outsourced and he can blame someone else if a vulnerability is discovered 1 year down the line.

It's why large companies tend to evil, aggregated systems devalue individual customers and encourage shaving marginal costs which simply wouldn't be worth doing for smaller companies.

Re: Excellent (quantum theory of socks)

> Sounds like a certain cat...

I've discovered a small-dog-shaped wormhole which redistributes socks (and indeed underwear) around the house and the garden. I've yet to fathom the "neat cables go into the bag, tangled ones come out" mystery.

Re: Why binary compatibility?

It's about Windows in the SMB space. It's about Oracle (Linux/Solaris), Linux, AIX maybe HPUX in the Enterprise space. It's pretty much Linux (and perhaps BSD) only in the ISP/hosting/cloud world which is where Moonshot is aimed.

Re: Human Nature

>Is said society then really free and tolerant, or is it just as repressive as the evil it claims to be saving us from?

The problem is that soundbite combative "never let it happen again" politics has conflated "toleration" with "acceptance." To be tolerant is to live along side those we *disagree* with without seeking their destruction. We might seek to convert them to our way, but we don't try to destroy them or to silence them.

I find modern society increasingly intolerant. Dissent is either made illegal or shouted down without coherent arguments being put forward. It is very difficult indeed to openly say, "I think you are wrong because..." Where there is wrong, people want to bring the law to bear, often where it can't or shouldn't. The law is trying to replace moral values and the law is a very blunt instrument which is becoming very intrusive. We are trying to safeguard freedom by building a barbed-wire fence and gun towers around it and every time we mark off one freedom as protected, we cut ourselves off from others.

Tech details

Not too relevant?

We already don't use high capacity drives (2-3TB) in many arrays because you can't get the data off them fast enough. The contention for the data is too high. That's why enterprise arrays have smaller, faster disks.

So its an archive/media drive? Great for the home market where I just want to mirror to drives in a small space to keep all my photos and er, DVD backups, and I really don't care too much about access speed. It would be nice to consolidate the 8 disks in my home server down into a much smaller box. Perhaps all those over-priced dual-bay "NAS" systems are now an option.

Re: It's unlikely to improve

There's a difference between Windows on a generic box and a Windows games system.

Do you think MS will want competition for xbox? How much does even an OEM license add to a system? Is it possible that Steam want an alternative to Windows because an aggressive Windows App Store could easily squeeze them out?

This isn't just a, "be nice to the linux desktop users" move, this is Valve making sure they aren't locked into an OS with a vendor well known for turning on its partners. It's also Valve providing a system which should be as easy as consoles to manage. The trick will be getting people to invest in the up-front costs of a steambox in return for the steam sales available later.

Re: 23 Years

>>And still waiting for it to hit the mainstream.

>No downvotes. no snarky remarks, just one simple serious question

>Why ?

Probably because its been asked a thousand times and is a boring troll.

That, and linux people mostly don't care - they have their own desktops and if someone else wants to use something else, that's ok. Linux is free - there's no commercial imperative to to push it. If you don't use it, we don't lose. If you do use it, we don't win. The fact that KDE or Gnome or LXDE aren't mainstream is not relevant to Linus and the article - he doesn't manage them. Linux is very much mainstream, from phones to tablets to STB's to GPS' to Intel86/AMD64 servers, supercomputers, Raspberry Pi's.

Re: Recent news on Page 2 @JeffyPoooh

> you're paying for but the knowledge behind it.

Except that the photographer has already admitted the selfie was an accident.

If I give my camera to someone who takes a picture of themselves with it, can I claim copyright? If I'm a photo pro and set up my friend's camera for his wedding, can I then license the photos taken with that camera?

Or are we just saying that copyright goes to the nearest human controller? In that case, what if a bystander yells, "yoohoo! over here!" Who is the controller then?

Its a difficult case, and hard cases make bad law.

Re: Oh no

I'm not sure the Aston analogy holds. iOS and Android are the fuel which powers the hardware. They are pretty similar. iphones may be slightly better built than S5, but S5 has better functionality. Slightly nicer curves vs more boot-space and room for the kids in the back.

Apple is obsessed with doing what they like. It could quite easily ruin them, as it almost did in the original Mackintosh vs PC days but I wish more coporates had the guts to do that. What I don't like is the more recent obsession with locking things down. Being the best is a worthy aim, lock-in is not. In the past, lock-in to the Mackintosh was a by-product of what they did, now it appears to be the aim - corporate efficiency at its worst.

As far as I'm concerned the Apple's download vs cloud model is good. Local execution is more reliable and much of the cloud apps don't need to be cloud apps. GPS/Maps is a prime example of the nuttiness of cloud where it isn't needed, as is music streaming over a WAN. Plus if there is a failure, its only for one person and you generally don't get bad headlines for it. That's simpler and better, and for the vendors' benefit, will drive CPU/new model requirements. Even better for Apple, driving tablet-based (or phone-WiDi) apps could give them a proprietary hardware edge where the bloat of MS Office fears to tread.

Re: the latest and greatest

> Seems like a good size/profile for SteamOS.

Without a dedicated GPU?

I guess "immersive" means, "on a big screen TV."

I've often found that Open/LibreOffice is much faster than Word and handles long documents far better. Formatting interchange issues are the only reason I keep a copy of "real" Word. Also up there on my list of peeves are things like document template macros - in one company I was at, the standard template ran off your personal profile on local drives, and thus failed every time a document moved from one computer to another since the username and thus template directory changed.

> Yep. In modern America the game studios play you.

FTFY

Re: There are a lot of studies about the US Great Depression - but how many about the German one?

Indeed, the Germans have an extremely vivid experience of what happens with QE. I thought the UK in the 1970's would be a timely reminder about Keynesian economics, but apparently people have forgotten that too.

The problem is that there are many who think that money and productivity are the same. There is also a problem in that Western economies are based on this fiction: value = the amount of money someone is willing to pay.

The problem with that idea is that willingness to pay is inherently unstable because we create markets based on speculation and the idea of ever-increasing productivity/wealth. I think it was Money magazine (I could be wrong there) which talked about an impending UK economic collapse because everyone has the idea that past growth rates must continue. The problem is that the past growth includes industrialisation and urbanisation, the introduction of power distribution, motorised transport, piped water/sewage systems. We've most recently seen globalisation made possible by the introduction of computer networks.

Now, who thinks that there is anything like these on the horizon to drive equivalent future growth? Is twitter or facebook going to deliver these real benefits? Is SDN going to equal the productivity leap forward of putting global networks in place to start with?

I'd suggest that we've done the great leap forward. There is little productivity to add when compared to the introduction of industrialisation, computerisation and networks. Everything from now on will be slow. What we considered normal growth in the past will be a bubble if it happens again. It could be a speculation bubble or it could be a fashion bubble, but we are already rather efficient at what we do. That is why IT is in such a bad way - it has little more to offer. Our large companies are so large that they can quickly saturate global demand, but then they struggle with over-capacity and expectations of growth which can't continue. We've seen it recently, with the IT companies hiding the drop in earnings by jacking up prices, "look demand is increasing, we've earnt more!" No, demand is falling and you'll earn less and less as we move from short-term ("we can't change anything so we'll have to pay") through long term ("some things can be changed") to very long term ("everything is changeable").

We've confused owning knowledge and rights with being productive. What happens when a city goes bankrupt and can no longer spend police time protecting IP rights? What happens when someone decides they'll just write a note on a bit of paper and post it, rather than spending $1000 on a computer, $400 on the OS, another $400 on some software to write a letter? In fact, the a flick of a pen any country can nullify all our "ownership." While intent on promoting profits from "innovation", we have grown fat on artificial scarcity of things people really don't need.to live. It was bad enough in the 1930's when the West produced things, now almost no-one has assets or skills to produce anything. It's all very well for MS to have an Office cash cow, but if things turn out like the 1930's no-one is going to be buying. All that "value" will go up in a puff of smoke, because it isn't really "value," its merely a price. Value is a far more ephemeral concept which varies from person to person and instance to instance, especially when it refers to intangibles.

I can't see how the future is going to be anything but messy and very unpleasant. All those poor third-world farmers shipping food to the West - they have very little to lose from keeping and eating their own crops. I suspect the escapades in Iraq will seem like a time of relative peace. In case you think it couldn't happen - it has happened before.

Re: I wish there was a game I actually wanted to play.

> Each generation we are promised "photo-realism" and each time it's a lie.

I guess it depends how good your camera is! ;)

Photo-realism is over-rated. Rather like 4k video, we could do it, but its far more effort than is required to produce something fun.

VR goggles however, now there's something worthwhile, though I suspect that like 3D representations of data, you'll still lose out to those who don't have to move much physically.

Re: Ho-hum - Brillian!

> It's the best argument in favor of slavery I've ever heard

Say what? I think you may have the wrong end of the stick.

Do I get paid for washing the dishes at home? No. I could employ people to do it for me, but I do it myself and no-one pays me.

Someone spends time and effort developing yet another torch app for mobile phones. Will they be compensated for their time and effort? Probably not. If we insist that they are, how would that work? How would we stop people expending effort on things nobody wants? Normally, by not compensating them.

Look at the tortuous lengths that are gone to make sure something that is not inherently scarce, such as a digitised song or film, is kept scarce. There is plenty of media (and indeed physical product) which only sells because it is shoved into people's faces. I'm thinking x-factor here. The "productivity" is not raw materials (singers & songs) it is the marketing plan to monetise them. If fact, it isn't much of a plan as far as I can see. Flood advertising to exclude competitors and a glitzy appeal to vanity and "anyone can be a millionaire" mentality.

Having said that, I do find kickstarter a bit use & abuse. I'd be happy to support for a share in the company, but I'm not doing it to get early access to the beta software and blue peter badge.

Re: Pointless until WebRTC fixes it's privacy/security invasive issue.

IP addresses aren't secret and NAT is a kludge to fix address-space/routing failures, not a security device.

If you open end-to-end connections, your vulnerable. If you don't want that, use a proxy. It's the application level which is nearly always attacked. NAT is rarely going to save you because to communicate, you have to tunnel through it.

Roll on IPv6 maturity when we can replace a culture of obfuscation with proper security.

Re: @Arnaut the less RE"......... but for the mass market it just costs far too much....."

> this device is deliberately aimed squarely at the enterprise sector

in which case it should have a non-glossy, probably 13" screen. You could get away with a couple of Dell 24"+ screens at work, but I think 13" is the minimum for any serious screen time with mouse and keyboard.

The use-case is a work laptop which gives you a freebie tablet when you're at home. Which would be fine except for the price - you want how much for an i3? Anyone with the clout to make that choice will already have a tablet from another vendor.

Re: Collective Delusion.

> Atheism is a religion in the same way that off is a TV Channel, Bald is a hair colour and not collecting stamps is a hobby.

"Worship" ("Worthy-ship") had the orginal meaning of "to kiss towards" - to what or whom do you give your ultimate allegience. It isn't about chanting or happy-clappy marlarky. Think more a vassel giving their service/allegience to a feudal lord. Everything they do is then in the service of their master. What do you put first in your life?

The question posed by religion is, "who do you worship?" or "to what do you give your highest allegience." Atheists are usually humanists, so they normally "worship" humanity (themselves or the collective) in that they put humanity or a human (normally themselves) first. Some atheists are animal-rights activists put non-humans first. Some might think that the stars are the key to life and so give the most credence to an astrologer who can let them know what is going on and what they should do.

When picking something/one to give your allegience to, I'd ask, "what are the values shown, expected and resulting?" and "what is your documented track-record and plan for dealing with the big problems I face?"

Re: Genuine question (and maybe that's not the point of the article).

Isn't the point that there is wrong on both sides?

Netflix is pushing out Tbits to servers (rather than cacheing properly) on the ISP networks each day and the ISP's are upping the peering charges for netflix in order to prevent competition with their own offerings.

It's easy to fix, have a single published peering-connection rate card for all peers, rather than allowing individual negotiations. Go on FCC, make it so!

That would stop the protectionism and push netflix into some decent caching.

Re: Western morality

> enjoying the land and resources it stole from the original inhabitants 66 years ago

Here's a question: how far back do you go? 66 years? That certainly doesn't take you back to the "original inhabitants." 2000 years? 3500 years? Should we still be fighting the Germans because the Angles and the Saxons stole land from the true Britons? Do we hunt down a long lost relative of the Czar and put him back on the Russian throne? The people fighting are not the ones who either lost or won a fight 66 years ago.

At some point you have to admit what the status quo is. Then you have to decide whether your morality allows or demands that you kill people to change the status quo. As long as there are people happy to kill others for gain there will be no peace. That was the case with the Bablylonian seige of Jerusalem (597BC) and it was the case with the invasion of Iraq by the US.

Without wishing to be too judgemental, I'm not sure what the Palestinians are fighting for. Their best case scenario is that all the Jews leave. Whereupon they would take control of scorched earth and the US is certainly not going to continue to pour money in where there is no Jewish interest. All that wealth will just leave and they will be left with just more of what they already have in Gaza. I suspect the temple of the dome would be blown sky-high as a parting gift, maybe even nuked, to become lethal to anyone who wants to take possession. Quite frankly, winning is never going to happen for them. History shows the Palestinians fighting and losing. At some point, you really need to consider walking away. When my grandfather died, the government took 97% of the land he owned. I'm certainly not going to kill or risk being killed to get it back.

There comes a point when you can't put wrongs right because there is no-one left in the right. It does no good to harp on about past wrongs, because they will never be fixed. You can either forgive and move on or you can continue to kill and be killed. In moving on, the worst case is that Palestinians accept the Israeli ethnic cleansing as reality and move as refugees elsewhere. Of course that doesn't make Israel's actions right but it does give those who do it the chance to start fresh and perhaps they or their children will prosper. No-one prospers living in a war zone, so the question is how much longer their pride will prevent them from taking the kick in the teeth that they've been dealt, turning away from the fight and progressing elsewhere.