Posts by P. Lee

Re: target market is China – .. what .. Tim Cook calls the "junk part of the market"

>The same bit of kit on Western shores would have cost £500+!

Because the cost is not in the production but in the selling. This will be the West's downfall. We have already seen the high-street retail struggling because retail and marketing is too expensive.

The problem is over-production. We can saturate the market so now we have to reduce quality to trigger re-purchases and we have to spend millions stealing sales from other products. This is not sustainable. We need smaller suppliers who can grow with good ideas, not massive suppliers desperately seeking some way to foist "new and improved" on us to cover their marketing budgets.

re: Why the S2?

Because SII is like SIII which is a bit like SIIII?

I'm beginning to wonder if Samsung like this stuff. If you are at the premium end of the market, you don't mention your competition. This looks like vanity for Apple, I suspect they would have been better off dropping it and saying, "well, we still think they infringed and were in the wrong so we sued on principle, but they aren't good enough to worry us."

Hanging on to this makes Apple look like a loser, even if they win.

Re: Meanwhile...

The difference is that Apple makes enormous profits and can easily afford to do the right thing. As noted, the manufacturing costs are a tiny percentage of sell-price. It's those pretty shops and creepy staff that raise the prices, but even then, massive profits are still made.

Broom and toothbrush manufacturers, not so much.

For this reason, I'd be happy to buy such things online and convert the retail outlets to sell things I really care about seeing. Fresh food, for example.

Re: "...from my phone..." Really?

The question is, "what's the role?"

Visionary leader? Maybe. Don't let anyone like that near execution functions.

Apart from that, I'd be scared of anyone who thinks they can do that.

I had a look at an old surface system. I was surprised at how good it was for replacing a laptop.

That isn't what it first looks like. The truth is that most laptops I see spend their days docked, to accommodate a 2nd large screen, an external mouse and possibly a keyboard. If you do all that through one USB/TB connection, a tablet which is only occasionally used without those devices could well be an option. The one I saw was atom-based but a better CPU might make it more usable.

Many companies have hotdesks with the peripherals supplied so just taking a tablet to and from work and occasionally on the road is an option. It might even get MS back into the home (ok, I'm kidding there).

What MS have missed though is that the tablet is cool precisely because it isn't under corporate control - it is an expression of self. Take that away and its no longer desirable.

What will be interesting is to see if ARM can approach this scenario from the other end by giving people an over-powered phone which docks to a KVM. Phone graphics are already up there. Let's see if big.LITTLE / 64bit ARM can give us a single bit of silicon which can double up as a phone and PC. It should start at home with USB screen / bluetooth keyboard/mouse or a screen with a charging/docking station built in. I suspect this is what MS are desperately trying to avoid.

Re: Oh FFS

The perils of OTT services.

As I understand it, sender's iphones hold an addressbook entry tagging you as an imessage user and keep redirecting "messaging" (what everyone expects to be SMS) to apple rather than the telephone number. However, apple will have no way of differentiating between a flat battery and a migrated user.

I think this is seamless on setup. Therefore, this should be seamless on teardown - i.e. an "offline" imessage should revert to SMS. I suspect Apple will deny that their messaging app is primarily sms and user's shouldn't expect sms.

While I can understand how this happens technically. It is far too convenient for apple to leave such a bug in the system to make migrated users unhappy. They should be penalised for it. If setup is seamless getting you into imessage, the exit should also be seamless. If the destination imessage user is offline, it should tell the message originator app to immediately revert to proper SMS.

I'm not sure about the fine though. It seems to high for damages but too low as a punitive measure. It just looks a bit opportunistic.

Re: @Joerg

Maybe he used to be a game beta- tester?

Re: Many Monkey theorem

I'd bet that this is the chaos of MS' software interacting with random data to produce... random non-functional rubbish output. Even if it did replicate the entire sequence of bytes in order, without the applied intelligence and the context of a floppy disk boot mechanism, those bits have no meaning.

GIGO: unlike the moneys, this has some evidence.

Also, mow many many mips are expended looking for "stoned" on a daily basis?

Re: 1999 called...

Its worse. What's driving the stock market is pretty much zero interest rate which means there's hardly anywhere else for money to go - better a slim hope than no hope of return. At least this way, if you get out early enough you make some cash.

This time around, the economy is already completely shot with governments keeping interest rates down and printing money like its 1929.

Re: Of course the cloud will eat your lunch, time for a new diet

The Cloud isn't changing the game - that's just PR.

The Cloud is a reaction to a changed game. The problem is that we've pretty much finished IT development. We have networked pretty much everything that needs to be networked. We have storage to store the enterprise data we need. Our accounting systems, desktop productivity hosts, PLCs, email servers have already been bought and implemented.

IT has little left to improve. There are improvements to be made, but nothing like the gains of the last 20 years. Therefore, the prices of new kit and consultancy can no longer be justified, because the ROI isn't there. Companies stopped buying desktop PC's. Vendors have reacted by removing upgrade options. New laptops now have un-upgradable RAM, lower RAM limits and more stuff glued together to make them unrepairable.

The Cloud is just moving workloads around, its unreliable and inefficient since the infrastructure isn't tuned for the jobs required. That provides a lovely new market for more hardware and more consultancy. It requires massive amounts of engineering to solve problems which smaller units simply don't have. How many times have I seen adverts about using the cloud to scale your email. Really? I've never met a company that didn't know how to scale its email. Before it was shut down, myrealbox hosted email was serving 250,000 people with a two node cluster for mail pickup and another two nodes for SMTP on *Netware*.

Once everyone had bought all the software they needed, they didn't need to go back for more. So now we have OS's which time-out and to which applications are tied. Software is moving to rental and will be upgraded whether you need it or not, simply because you don't need it. Supply has outstripped production which normally means vendors should go out of business, but with software legalese, you now can't have an asset because the vendors need it to be a liability for you.

You used to buy licenses to run software on a single computer. Now the software is hobbled to core counts, because a single CPU can serve a major enterprise and that is too cheap for the vendors. When that isn't enough revenue, they provide "appliances" running dual-core desktop CPUs to make sure you aren't using cheap hardware to get more use out of their software than they think you are paying for. The whole reason for faster hardware is being nullified with licensing and the hardware market has not many places left to go except consolidation. Once people have finished consolidation of major sprawl, server hardware vendors will be back in the same place that desktop makers are now.

It will be interesting to see how things develop with FLOSS. Just as Intel is supporting MongoDB, I'll be interested to see if other hw vendors begin pushing open source, just as a way to allow better utilisation of their hardware. Current licensing schemes are driving poor design, because you can't just spin up more instances / new hardware easily. Why not replicate lots of databases (with high read-to-write ratios) across lots of nodes and load-balance so that new applications have only a small overall impact to any one node. If I were HP, I'd be pushing postgres rather than oracle in order to sell more HPUX nodes. By "pushing" I mean putting in resources, not just encouragement.

This is the opening for new companies: software licenses are far too expensive. The downside is the big players wrapping up the industry in patents to discourage competition. As Google v Apple shows, you need deep pockets regardless of merit.

Re: Extreme Price Gouging, Extreme Nonsense

> until now, the content was never personalized.

^ This. Though "personalisation" is mostly "destination IP and time of consumption."

The problem is that everyone is desparately trying to centralise personal services instead of broadcasting and personalising at the consumer end. We can mostly blame the desire for DRM for that.

There's little technical reason not to have an STB which torrents content off-peak and then streams it locally. But no, they have to stream it directly from their servers, which brings up latency and peak-time bandwidth problems.

I go the broadcast route - Silicondust tuners with ethernet-out going to MythTV for local streaming. If Oz TV got with the programme and broadcast something other than mpeg2, the content could go straight to tablets as well as laptops. As it is, all the customisation for my TV viewing goes on locally, offloading from the ISP network and the provider. That seems like the proper way to do it.

Re: You wouldn't give him a hard time if he was using a typewriter

Its a serious arrogance and a logical error to assume modern is better than old.

He isn't typesetting, he just needs to record words. He isn't embedding spreadsheets into documents or designing network diagrammes. It's difficult to see what Word 2013 offers that Wordstar can't do.

I suspect vim would also work as well.

If what you have does what you need, there's little point wasting time learning something new.

He might have one of those nice old IBM clickity-clack keyboards too. :)

Re: But, but, but...

Sounds like the Australian power company who offer a service of going out and shooting some wild camels on your behalf, to help you offset your carbon footprint.

Re: £900 ???

> I'd need to buy around 40 games just to break even

This is where we meet the difference between PC and console. PC games last between generations, so its quite easy to acquire 100+ games, especially in the steam sales. I think I picked up all the CoD series up to MW for $25. I moved from a core2 duo with a GT 9800 to a hex-core cpu and GT680 (5-6 times the performance) and everything still works. Even better, I can also load up on my laptop and take the games with me. I've got Monkey Island, which I played in the 1990's. (I could go back to the 1980's with kings-quest though I prefer to leave that as a happy memory!) I can let my kids work on their problem solving skills in MI on whatever hardware I have - I don't need to keep old tech around or risk losing the game because some power supply with a proprietary connector has blown. I don't lose my games because the original game ran on something with analogue video hardware and now I can't get a screen that isn't digital.

Also, did I mention Steam Sales? Humble Bundle?

Re: Limited bit rate?

The real problem is with CD's.

Not their audio format, but the complete lack of metadata attached to each track. FLAC would be fine except for the lack of support in portable players. I want one solution which works, not having to transcode all the time.

The other thing the article neglected is that mp3's are mostly used in mobile devices with poor headphones, so again, audio quality is almost irrelevant.

I must be getting old. Mostly I listen to podcasts with only the occasional musical item from Mitch Ben, or to the old stuff of my youth as a nice trip down memory lane while I'm hoovering. Obviously I'm not cool because otherwise its, "pop a CD in the player" for a bit of classical instrumental or medieval-style vocals.

Re: I'd love to see them try this in Australia

Depends how you've trained them. We often took ours places and made them sit still on our laps without making a noise. It isn't easy, but it is a discipline worth developing. I don't think we've ever had a problem with our UK-Oz flights which we've done every couple of years.

If you routinely use digital to distract, that will be needed and a book won't suffice. That seems self defeating to me. Train them with the ideal state, not the one with the fastest results.

Re: Probably the death knell of the "industry"

>How about: "Not for sale or use in the United States of America"

Swifttech (water cooling) already do that and that's fine by me. Let the US stew in its own overpriced monopoly markets.

But I think this is different. APIs are a list of things which a language/library can do. Since software is infinitely malleable It seems reasonable that more than one language/library would be able to do those things and should be allowed to advertise as such. As has been subtly mentioned, printf is an API call. No, it shouldn't be copyrightable as a nod to common sense. Additionally, if fair-use is defined as a % of total code copied, the APIs will almost certainly fall in that scope.

The desktop/mobile argument is also flawed. Sorry Oracle, but the original idea doesn't make sense, especially if you allow laptops to qualify as desktops.

Personally, if I were the judge hearing Oracle's arguments, I'd throw them out as being deliberately nonsensical to the point of operating in bad faith. Let that be a lesson to those who say one thing for marketing/sales and then try to use small-print to implement the opposite.

Even if this went against Google, all you'd get is a phone from Samsung which boots up the first time with a ROM clever enough to download an install image from elsewhere. Android would be spun off to another company. But that won't happen. Too popular to stop is probably a reality and we all know how adept multinationals are at not making taxable profit.

Re: altitude overflow?

There was a design flaw but that didn't cause this problem. As described, it was a coding-time bounds-checking failure. The coding should reject parameters it doesn't handle. If you don't have a full spec and decide to use a 16 bit integers, you reject the input of anything outside that during input validation. That would have left the X2 unmanaged, but the rest of the system would have been stable. Hopefully, the feedback would have been sent back to the UI that the value was too high and the operator could have tried lower values until he found one that worked, which is still likely to be way above all the other traffic.

One hopes the radar tracking routine is a little more robust.

Re: They have learned actually

Not to mention that most of these games are aimed at children.

Not something which comes naturally to the LGT's and there are plenty of people for whom unusual relationships would place the game out of contention.

Did I mention games are aimed at children? Sexual relationships before puberty are irrelevant - why would you want to sexualise something aimed at kids? The natural environment for children is to have a male and female parent. It doesn't matter what laws you pass, children aren't really found under gooseberry bushes and that doesn't change.

Re: oncoming shortage = new higher price for exisitings services !

This.

Plus, once everyone pays to play, we are back where we started. At no point is there an incentive incentive for the ISP to increase bandwidth, as long as they are a monopoly. The "pay to play" control is the peering hardware connections, not links. This should be regulated. As far as content destined for an ISP network is concerned, there should be a regulated price/markup allowing anyone to connect for that price.

I'm happy for rich content providers to buy fatter links into an ISP but they must not be able to dictate QOS across someone-else's network based on source rather than content-type. The reason for this is that when the ISP end-users pay, rather than corporates, it help keep things above-board and transparent.

The technical problem is defining "content type." Usually we us IP ports, but we'll need broader catagories - realtime (voip/video calling), buffered (streamed video), interactive (http), non-interactive (SMTP), low priority (torrent) etc.

Let's also not forget that nearly all this low-latency requirement only exists to support a (somewhat failed) attempt at DRM by using streaming rather than store and play. As has been noted, torrent traffic is quite happy delivering massive amounts of video over congested links. Use the torrent protocols, add a layer of DRM (don't play before X; delete 36 hours after showtime) and save yourself a bundle of deployment cost. Infringement happens - why make it cost you more that it already does?

I know there are use-cases for provider-streaming, but for home use, an STB + local streaming is far better.

Re: there's a lot....

I don't believe it! Common sense and global warming meet!

However, I fear that you are missing the point of AGW. It's supposed require A WAR ON AGW with freedoms being given up, vast amounts of cash being spent on politicians conferences and the creation of a new market in carbon allowing particular kinds of people to get rich.

You can't go around spoiling it by telling people to use a dredge. Fortunately, that kind of common sense will be utterly ignored while we wait on the next study.

Humphrey, I don't think we should rush in until we have all the facts!

Yes minister.

Re: Isn't Beats Audio just a funky way of saying...

Up at either end, flat in the middle, and everything in between interpolated - if my 80's memory serves.

Also achieved by the "bass boost" option button for a cleaner interface (late 80's/90's).

"No option" is the latest version of a simple interface. It appears they have achieved Apple's requisite level of user interface design.

Actually, HP's original touchpad has excellent sound - knocks the spots of most laptops. I don't know if that was Dre-influenced. Personally, I've always thought that marketing HP and rap-influence together was an uneasy situation. Surely if HTC, HP and Apple all have it, it can't still be cool and fighting against the Man.

Oi Apple, an iscsi initiator would be far more useful. Anyone who is serious about sound is going to run things through an external amp and can mess with it there. By "serious" I mean, "at least vaguely interested in turning the volume up a bit."