Posts by P. Lee

Re: Given that this could cause crashes

There's no reason for this to cause crashes. Test it out at 3am and make sure the other signals turn to red.

Re: £999

> Serious question - Can you install/run it without the GUI ?

I believe the OS is open source and can be freely downloaded without the GUI (which is not).

But my memory may be playing tricks on me.

Re: GAME?

I quite enjoyed the early CoD games, which I got for a song on Steam - $9.99 for the first 4 games I think.

MW2 was disappointing, Black Ops was simply not fun (and I bought it not in a steam sale) and I'm never getting another game from that franchise.

I'm going through Far Cry (1) and that's so much more fun. You at least get the feeling that there isn't just one way to win. Val doesn't take over and do all the work for you (unlike the AI in BlOps - see MrBungle on youtube) and you can at least pick your own path through or around the battlefields. There's still quite a bit of insta-death but eventually you learn to pick a different strategy. That's strategy, not just route.

I can't imagine ever wanting to see a CoD film though. The games have mostly collapsed into multiplayer slugfests with humour and interest provided other opponants, not the game.

Re: Are there ANY success stories?

>These bids are essentially random guesses since the spec is not written at that stage, yet the entire budget must be specified in detail

This isn't just a government problem - I've seen it many times in commerce too.

When the customer fails to provide a spec, things go down hill fast. Incumbant outsourcers love this sort of thing, smaller companies on fixed-price contracts have to have very good legal teams and keep the sales chaps in check.

The best thing to do is to get the spec written as a separate project. If done by an outside company, let them know they have no chance to even bid for the implementation.

Re: Easy

>Unfortunately that combo still needs a bit of a good polish.

Kontact & kmail?

Re: All that effort...

Google have millions of android devices which could double as STB's, they've got chromecast and you can bet there are plenty of phone+TV android devices in China.

IP provides a more reliable transport than RF, and allows for caching, so that makes sense. RF is far better than IP for mass distribution so that makes sense too. Until someone gets multicast working well through ISP's not much is going to change there. With Google starting ISP activity in the US, things may begin to move. If anyone has the ability to gather and sell your TV-viewing habits to marketers, its Google. Google can also do "web-scale" authentication which might be handy too.

Google is also not beholden to the content providers and they don't have existing profit margins or business model to protect in this sector which makes them a dangerous competitor. I'd be nervous too if my business depended on the goodwill of my suppliers not to go with a distributor who could provide much better feedback data and who is much larger than me.

Re: Count on it.

Redundency is the opposite of efficiency in normal operations.

It is the enemy of profitability and cheapness. Unless everyone pays for the same redundancy, you won't get what you want unless you do it yourself.

The law of large numbers of customers states that no customer is very important and even small cost-cutting procedures can result in large additional profits. If you want good service you need to be important. This is not like the car industry where a product defect is covered by a manufacturer's warranty and they will have to pay real money to fix it. Neither is it like the car industry where one manufacturer's product can be switched for another's with a quick call to a rental agency.

The upshot is: you must calculate the value of your data and not rely on third parties to get things right.

Re: New browser names:

> Bing is the lamest name in the history of IT

Also, in "Friends."

Re: Break it anyway with ABP, NoScript and DoNotTrackMe.

> What M$ ads?

The ones in skype (if you are unfortunate enough to run Windows).

and er... 40 fixes in a single patch?

Don't do that.

Re: This is why you *don't* want HTTPS

SSL maybe easy but the openSSL library people still got it wrong and the library is acknowleged to be a coding nightmare. It might be poor form, but it also suggests complexity in getting it done right.

Perhaps I should have included a troll icon, buy my point was that web browsers are massive overkill for the simple transfer of information. One way of increasing your security is to decrease your attack surface - smaller, easier to audit code of which an ftp client is a prime example. Pick wget or curl instead if you want, or use netcat and pipe the listener to a file for offline processing.

If I had some really sensitve things to hide, I wouldn't just rely on SSL if I thought goverment's were involved and I would assume that my ISP had been compromised. If my safety relied on it, I don't think I would rely on a Cisco/Checkpoint or whatever VPN. With all the shenanigins with the NSA, I'd be doing PGP with netcat to a VM, cut and paste the text to another host and wipe the TAILS VM.

Yes I want an IPS, but do I want to have to give my IPS my SSL keys? No. That leaves me vulnerable to another set of potential bugs. Without the SSL keys, I can't do IPS. I want to see those get and put commands with TCPDUMP. I only want to encrypt the minimum secret data. Encrypting everything all the time makes it difficult to manage and troubleshoot and may leave you open to stats analysis. Plus, you can't cache the data in the middle. That's often a bad thing.

Super-secrecy may not be common use-case, but the context was government interference. I was merely pointing out that when banks need to move transaction records, they don't rely on transport tunnels and maybe we shouldn't either.

Re: Windows...the end date

>And if you can't keep up with the breaking changes in Windows - then use something more steady!

The megacorps have more leverage in this regard.

They could, for example, "suggest" that QT and some cross-platform options for the next major release might push them higher-up the preferred-vendor list.

If indie game producers can do it, so can the major vendors with long-life products.

Few organisations can do a major switch to linux, but that's why you have strategic plans where you push for stable products even before you gain savings from them.

Re: What am I missing?

I'd hope that all three signatories would be required to decrypt the data on behalf of law enforcement. I think they would find that any signalling is breaking the law - dead-mans switch or not.

The best thing is to have your local PGP client and not rely on the servers or transit infrastructure to be secure.

Some engineering is just too hard. Keep a USB key in one pocket and a very strong magnet in the other.

Re: Hang on a sec

> What a dumb idea to hang a business on

Not really - if a company buys a software license and asks a third-party to manage the operation of that software on third-party's hardware, that seems reasonable to me.

This kind of behaviour is why every business wants to own its own stack - Oracle trying to squeeze extra cash out of Rimini could impacting the Rimini's client's business.

It's why Apple insists on its own OS, Samsung loves ARM and almost no hardware vendor wants Windows on their phone. It's why MS trying to suck businesses into their cloud is meeting a rather lukewarm response from their own partners and customers and why almost no-one builds extensions to Windows. Any cool money-saving ideas will be scotched by a flick of a pen.

If a new word does gain traction, that's one thing.

If its obviously meaningless drivel pushed by mass-media companies as a parody of reality, leave it in the gutter to die, or better, kick it into the path of oncoming traffic.

Both curry and thug are derivatives of proper words and are usefully used to describe something.

Actually, I'm not so fussed as long as the new words are clearly marked "slang" and teachers enforce the rule that slang should never be used in school because schools are there to teach you to do things correctly.

Re: PS3?

My ancient HP NC8000 laptop also does this and a whole lot more.

It'll also stream games from my linux and W8 PCs

Re: Mork Calling Orson

> Probably about the same time we finally realize that suicide is a perfectly normal

> impulse/thought/wish to have and a sacred human right to carry out if one wishes to.

And the depression, is normal too? Perhaps we shouldn't do anything to upset the "normal" course of events by helping people out of such a state.

Anytime someone argues that the degrading and destruction of human life is a normal (implying "ok") thing, I get more than annoyed. What about the crushing misery he has left in his wake for his wife and children? I'm reasonably sure his family do not think that his death is either ok or normal. Death is not ok, it is an unwelcome intrusion into life. Depression is an unwelcome burden on life. The turning of a human being into something non-human is to be fought against. To portray suicide as acceptable is to devalue that human's life.

Accepting suicide also has practical ethical issues. It places an unacceptable burden on the those who cannot carry their own weight in society.

Re: Errm..

> SAS is going to remain cheaper for a while.

Unless we manage to get our data volume requirements down.

Most disks in enterprise arrays are small and fast because speed > capacity. That's why we have SAS with SCSI rather than SATA. Can we use smaller SSD arrays because they have extra speed?

Re: "devices with batteries that are half the size but deliver double the run times"

> my tab has an ARM CPU, not a power gobbling Intel room heater

For all the bluster I suspect Intel is is actually aiming at preserving its laptop dominance. Its issue will be that larger ARMs might move into the transformer/laptop space and it needs to get its power consumption tech down before ARM gets its performance up. All devices need screens, so it really doesn't matter to Intel if screens burn most of the battery, just as long as ARM doesn't gain competitive advantage.

If you have a work laptop which doubles as a tablet, are you going to buy your own ARM tablet? Intel need to cut the funding to ARM to strangle its development. I suspect that's a hopeless task. Vendors (samsung, apple, hp) like ARM for ownership (vertical integration) and Intel's prices will never be lower than ARM's unless they cut out the profit margin. Intel will have to be significantly better than ARM, not just match it, to win. Intel's problem is that ARM is good enough, being better delivers unneeded benefits, except perhaps in battery life which, as you point out, is almost moot.

Intel's best hope is to get full-fat windows running well on tablet specs. They'll need to convert the laptop market to a tablet market (BYO keyboard/mouse). I'm not sure they'll want to do that. Even if they do manage it, they still have phones to deal with and the vertically integrated Apple and Samsung who are quite happy to do their own h/w development and HP which (hopefully) will be happy to put some work in on the server side. They've also got to deal with the consumer router market which also has CMOT Dibbler margins and appears to be sprouting NAS capabilities at the top end. About time too!

Re: @John Tserkezis

> The main expertise of telecoms companies is not telecoms, it is billing

Isn't this the solution (if they wanted one)? Tag all the messages with information about who you billed before you forward the SMS. Source-routing after the fact. That bypasses the CallerID spoofing dilemmas.

Re: WebGL is coming to Safari in IOS 8

WebGL use-cases are hardly those wanting to push the performance envelope.

Its all about platform independence, which is hardly MS' favourite thing. Without WebGL, all the non-MS tech looks better.

Re: Second highest paid CEO of a tech company

Larry has costs and has to pay for some skill. Don made a his fortune from nothing. % ROI for farmville should be approaching infinity.

Re: 50 ways to love your lever

Too late... the banks have already invaded and taken control of the government.

And back on topic, where is my duress PIN? That is the old way to deal with the, "I'll chop off your ear" threat. Perhaps to much "owner fraud"?

Re: Dunno what you can say except...

@numptyscrub & AC: I regret that I have but one upvote to give.

It used to be said that hard cases make bad law. Now it seems all are laws are based on hard cases and that is very dangerous.

While we can all applaud the removal of KP and subsequent prosecution, we really should not be building this kind of infrastructure. We may have caught one extraordinarily dumb criminal, but don't be fooled into thinking that this is an effective technical measure against the majority of cases. ZIP with a password would have foiled it. That being the case, I'm more than a little concerned about why this facility is in place. It looks like a trojan to me and I don't like what else it could be used for.

We have gone rather rapidly from a decentralised internet to one where a vast amount of our data is held by just four companies (MS, Apple, Google, FB) all subject to a single legal jurisdiction. You may have decentralised DNS, but your search and browser history is likely to be sync'd somewhere. What we need is a presence indicator and then properly encrypted comms directly between the devices we own. None of this, "save to the cloud" rubbish.

Re: It's a tradeoff

There are other trade-offs too. With IT in a slump it would appear that most people don't need Intel's "6" performance. At this point, there seems little harm in favouring cost over performance. It also helps develop the home market.

It is actually the right thing to do. Governments are there to enhance the good of the people in ways the market cannot. Pushing cheap tech development over more expensive foreign products, especially when there's little need for performance, seems like an excellent long-term strategy.

No need to be sarky. :)

Some people think all the tech in the cloud is redundent, therefore you don't need a DR site.

They don't always know that its rather like using RAID5 instead of a backup.

The problem is the cloud doesn't scale cheaply. When you push the limits of tech, things get expensive. When you add a third party, things get expensive. When you need serious uptime, things get expensive. When you put all your eggs in one basket, outages become expensive.

A third party has no interest in the value of your application uptime. Therefore, the (cost of) tech used is only really going to be vaguely appropriate.

> most people either want cheap Android handsets or premium Apple handsets

Not me. I'm fed up with Apple making things hard, but I want a nice handset too => nice android please.

Ok, there is the qualifier "most" in the sentence, but that's a weasel word. Most people want a phabulous fone but are only willing to pay for a cheap one. Therefore, mostly cheap ones are sold. Apple purchasers don't fit into the "most" catagory.

However, I want a good phone, not just the top of the range. I think the S5 is overpriced but I have yet to decide if that will push me to an S4 which is half price or the nexus (again, 1/2 price).

Sometimes I'm happy to overpay to get particular features - the jury is still out, because what I really want is just 4G and a decent sized screen running android.

Re: Not Good

What happens if the violent partner was an un-prosecuted police officer, or worked in the tax office, or an NHS hospital and was trying to track someone? The more you share, the greater the exposure and risk.

Efficiency of the system is not the primary goal. You act to protect the majority and then look at edge-cases where exceptions are needed. Blanket sharing endangers the majority by opening up vast of possibilities for abuse.