* Posts by P. Lee

5267 publicly visible posts • joined 4 Dec 2007

As WinXP death looms, Microsoft releases its operating system SOURCE CODE for free

P. Lee

Re: Are you insane?

> So the same as MS-DOS 1.1 then.

Yes. But without the joke.

P. Lee

re: WordPerfect? Or if you really better than Word (regardless of o/s), View?

How much would you give to be able to run an enterprise's productivity software on a single server?

Framework III anyone?

Windows 8 BREAKS ITSELF after system restores

P. Lee
Windows

Similar problem with W7?

My Win7 install managed to fail to install an update way back in the mists of time and to this day, every time it shuts down, it is haunted by its failure and tries to re-install the update.

Sadly, its too far in the past to revert to the patch just before the one that failed.

They want me to install CCTV to see what YOU did in the TOILET

P. Lee

Re: RE: Only temporarily.

Can we use those laser pointers that pilots go on about?

P. Lee
FAIL

Re: Better use for CCTV at work

Surely with the internet of everything, you just make the coffee machine a 4square check-in point which feeds off BT4 ultra-low power signals and/or NFC proximity signals to work out who put the pot back empty and then adds it to a twitter feed and updates its facebook status which is fed back into the abomination which is outlook-social media integration, to let the whole office know who didn't refill the water tank.

People wonder why the PC market is dying...

TV sales PLUMMET. But no one's prepared to say what we all know

P. Lee

Re: <stuff about inbuilt obsolescence>

I just bumble around in the dark.

Rather like my office job.

Bruce Schneier sneers at IBM's NSA denials

P. Lee

Re: I'm going to repeat my comment from elsewhere..

My understanding is that US law applies to all US people and companies where-ever they are located in the world.

Plus, the NSA can do what it likes overseas.

Of course, it turns out they all do what they like anyway.

GSMA: EU net neutrality reforms are the enemy of business

P. Lee
Mushroom

Not being able to make things worse hinders innovation and stifles business.

Then I think we all know what you can do with your business plans.

AT&T and Netflix get into very public spat over net neutrality

P. Lee

Re: Net Neutrality

> the arguments that stand on solid foundations need to be put forwards explicitly

He who pays the piper calls the tune. ISP's obtaining funding from places other than their current customers will slant policy towards those who pay lots. If Netflix pays... then the smaller video providers can't afford to compete.

Finally the network is funded and controlled by Big Players with QoS used to throttle all the competition. The users with their discounted fees and paltry contributions become irrelevant to the industry. Everything descends into a maelstrom of advertising and high-fees.

Remember that the costs passed onto Netflix by the ISP will just get fed back to the users in the form of higher Netflix fees. All that you have achieved is ceding control of the internet to the big players instead of charging users more directly.

Only the middle-men want this kind of deal. Netflix doesn't want to raise prices to cover the extra fees - possibly becoming uncompetitive. Users don't really want network performance manipulated by backroom deals - e.g. AT&T Mobile pumping in funds to de-prioritise skype so people give up on VoIP. Only AT&T like this model because they have nothing to lose from providing a rubbish service to users and don't care whether it is Netflix or Netflix's competition who pays them.

'Arrogant' Snowden putting lives at risk, says NSA's deputy spyboss

P. Lee

Re: NSA Deputy Director Richard Ledgett: Go To Jail. Go Directly To Jail…

Disband the USA.

Start again, legally and properly.

New WebCL toolkit hooks browser apps into GPUs – and that's not good news for Apple

P. Lee

Re: Silly headline

or a browser cache?

I suspect it's all moot anyway, the main benefit of the appstore is an easy way to pay without giving CC details to dubious devs.

It might push more business paypal's way if people opt out of stores taking 30% What I suspect you'll get is more free versions in the appstore with the premium version paid externally. Google might push this, as they have less of an interest in purchases and more interest in web-pages / high usage numbers.

Intel reinvents the PC as giant 'Black Brook' fondleslab

P. Lee

Re: All-in-ones are not for the desktop power user.

Also, AIO's are good for families where parents want to keep track of what the kids are doing on the computer.

The main advantage of AIO's is that they are essentially big-screen laptops and thus almost silent, which is nice.

Power isn't an issue in these scenarios, though I suspect it won't be long before we discover its ok to use an ARM chip for most of the time, rather than intel.

P. Lee
Trollface

Re: Water damage in 3,2,1

Well earlier, someone said it was potable...

MPs urge UK.gov to use 1950s obscenity law to stifle online stiffies

P. Lee

Re: The politicos said that grumble flick websites should require a credit card

Are you seriously suggesting that the smut industry may be less than reputable?

P. Lee

Re: In other news,

Are you suggesting that the wide-spread availability of the pill from the mid-1970's increased teen pregnancy and we're only now getting it back under control? ;)

I guess the social isolation induced by wearing headphones and using facebook is finally paying off!

In other news, only 185,122 abortions in 2012. That still seems like quite a lot to me.

https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/211790/2012_Abortion_Statistics.pdf

French novel falls foul of Apple's breast inspectors

P. Lee

Re: Why do people fuss about Muslims?

I wasn't suggesting that Apple was right to do what they did, merely pointing out that its a commercial decision - pretty much the same one Disney makes when it doesn't have topless women walking around with Mickey and Goofy.

While there certainly is a difference between nudity and porn, it is a relatively difficult one to police. There is a certain amount of subjectivity involved. It is far easier to say, "no nudity on display." It is a clear rule everyone understands and is easy (& therefore cheap) to enforce.

It isn't that a half naked woman is immoral. It is that a half naked woman on a cover (indeed on the internet) usually represents or is promoting immorality.

We don't live in a world of theory and idealism. What percentage of nudity on covers do you think is of the NatGeo type vs porn? It is a generalisation, a rule of thumb which holds true in the majority of cases (I suspect including this one) that nudity of covers is designed to trigger a sexual response. Apple know that a lot of their customers don't like that. That doesn't necessarily make the customers bigoted, it might just mean that they dislike advertisers (the cover advertises the book) trying to manipulate them into purchasing using sex. Some people like to keep sex as something special to share only with the person they love. Perhaps they think having advertisers trying to muscle in on their sex life is not something they want from their tablet, or that even just attempting to use sex to manipulate them into buying things is distasteful enough to warrant rejection of the device. Perhaps it is just a question of trust - if Apple don't demonstrate similar attitudes to decorum (ironically, all that is required is a veneer of restraint) as their clientele, they are less likely to be welcomed into their clientele's homes.

As far as childhood innocence goes, I agree that most very small children don't think of nudity as bad. On the other hand, just because children don't see anything wrong, doesn't mean its ok. I don't let my 11-year old walk the city streets naked. Nothing wrong with the human body? True, but that is deliberately misleading. Not everything is appropriate in every situation.

I found my aforementioned 11y.o. daughter (and her 9 year old sister) listening to Pitbull's "Timber" on youtube. She couldn't really make out the words (and hadn't really tried - she just liked the catchy tune). Damaged for life? Of course not. Utterly inappropriate? Most definitely. Even though she doesn't understand the meaning, I wanted it very clear that I disapprove and it isn't allowed. The reason it is banned is not that sex is bad, but because I don't want her to assimilate by repetitive listening, the rapper's attitude to sex. I want her to expect men to be respectful towards women and to be shocked and shun them if they aren't. That will be good for her. The catchy tune and thumping beat tends to switch off critical faculties and that is unacceptable, especially in a child with so much to learn.

Common-place nudity blurs the line between what is acceptable and what is not. In the NatGeo situation, what you aren't told is that often, while going topless is ok, something else (e.g. bare legs) is considered sexually provocative and is absolutely forbidden in those societies. That's not the particular culture I'm in though, so I don't worry about it.

There's nothing wrong with nudity per se, but neither is there anything wrong with defecating per se. Still, I don't want to see adults doing it on the pavement and neither do I want images of it pumped into my tablet where my kids are looking for Enid Blyton books.

I know in IT we strive for consistency, but I am still surprised that so many people fail to notice that life is extremely messy and edge-cases and exceptions abound. Attire for the beach is not right for a royal visit, but then again it might be if there is a volleyball involved and an Olympic committee-blessed judge.

There was a time when we mocked the Americans for their, "in order to liberate the village, we had to destroy it" attitude. Now it seems we have replaced liberal tolerance with militant permissiveness. The issue is not the content of our belief systems, but the viciousness with which we attempt to stamp out opposing viewpoints. We seem to be moving closer to Muslim regimes in trying to enforce everything we think is good and prohibit everything we think is bad. That might be logical with a religion (of the supernatural or political kind) where you are "saved" by how you behave, but not even Christians (should) think that, only with those concerned with controlling the behaviour of others.

P. Lee

Re: Why do people fuss about Muslims?

>the thought processes are the same and it's that we need to worry about.

Rubbish. There's no moral judgement here. We are talking about one of companies at the forefront of the push to redefine marriage to include homosexual relationships. Jobs was no Protestant and I can't see anything particularly Christian about Apple.

What we are seeing is a commercial decision by a company to not annoy a large number of its customers. This is about keeping the image of the ibookstore (and thus iphone/tablet) a child-safe place. We don't put pictures of naked women in children's bookstores and if little Johnny asks mommy why the naked lady has no legs, little Johnny isn't going to see the ipad again. That isn't what Apple wants.

As for raging against those whose decisions don't conform to your own morality as "bigots", I'll leave the reading of the irony-scale as an exercise for the reader.

Live and let live indeed. Stop trying to make me run my business to suit your moral philosophy.

USB cuts the cord, again, with WiGig-derived wireless spec

P. Lee
Coat

802.11ac anyone?

WebEx gets shiny Chromebook look

P. Lee

Chromebook-specific or linux in general?

It's slightly annoying to have to use skype to dial-in to webex. It isn't allowed through so many firewalls.

WTF is … the multiverse?

P. Lee
Trollface

Pesky second law of thermodynamics...

There it goes again, spoiling all our theories!

Morrisons supermarket hit by MASSIVE staff payroll data robbery

P. Lee

Re: Data Security??

> Most data stores are not improved by hashing or obfuscating them.

I know PCI-DSS is hard and expensive, but that doesn't mean you can't learn from how we deal with it. Tokenise the data and only get it out of the vault when you absolutely have to. In the meantime, encrypt in transit and encrypt at rest, so even the IT bods with a debugger and a copy of the data store can't see more than what is currently being processed.

A supermarket *can* afford that.

... and finally, surely this was infringement, not theft...

Not sure if you're STILL running Windows XP? AmIRunningXP.com to the rescue!

P. Lee
Happy

Re: Outdated?

Am I the only one to find the inclusion of a W8 laptop in the graphic of outdated items funny?

Mozilla takes Windows 8-friendly Firefox out back ... two shots heard

P. Lee
Windows

re :Mozilla takes Windows 8-friendly Firefox out back ... two shots heard

You are mistaken. Those weren't shots you heard, it was a hammer on nails. T.O.D. was much earlier.

Good idea to bring the garlic though.

Behold, the TITCHY T-REX that prowled the warm Arctic of long ago

P. Lee

Re: And this is filed under Security?

Depends if it suffers from the same, "if you fall over, you die" issue big brother had.

Google's Drive SLASH, secret 'big upgrade': Coincidence? Hardly

P. Lee

I don't understand!

IPSEC is not hard. Why restrict yourself?

I had an IMAP server pointing at my home directory instead of just my email directory - everything over email, for free.

Web inventor Berners-Lee: I so did NOT see this cat vid thing coming

P. Lee

Re: aaron c

It was all going so well.

Then someone invented facebook and the gods of the internet took ill.

Then someone invented twitter and they realised that humanity could not be helped with technology.

'Amazon has destroyed the unicorn factory' ... How clouds are making sysadmins extinct

P. Lee

Re: Sysadmins - the new buggy whip manufacturers

I'm not sure the analogy holds. Clouds still use buggy-whips, its just someone-else wielding them.

The point of the article was that the skills required to build the infrastructure are being sucked up by big tech and no-one outside that area is bothering to learn.

It's kind of like introducing Windows into the DC. Sure, it might be a good point-solution, but people will end up assuming email requires some very complicated and expensive software with relational databases and proprietary protocols.

Academic blames US for tech titans' tax dodge

P. Lee

Re: Oz still doesn't get any money

The case could be made that Apple USA is also just an importer.

This is just international trade. Perhaps it is the *reason* for much international trade.

Typically, the scheme only postpones taxes until shareholders demand dividends, but it is unfair to smaller tech developers without expensive accountants, who can't re-invest in development abroad in a tax free manner.

Microsoft chairman John Thompson: Redmond looks 'like IBM in 1990'

P. Lee

Re: Competition

I pick floss for hassle-free licensing and managability. The os cost isn't that large an issue. The cost of their whole ecosystem is high, however.

Their mice however are now rubbish compared to their old versions.

Apple 'hid AUD$9 BILLION' from Australia alone: Report

P. Lee

A rate of 40% on inactive corporate funds...

No, it would do nothing.

Apple Australia don't make anything. If I import stuff and sell with a low markup, most of the profit on the item isn't made by me, its made by the person in the country I bought it from. If I start buying Samsung phones in Korea and ship them to Oz for sale, that ATO doesn't get a bite at the profits of Samsung Kr. All it gets is a slice of my AU-based organisation profit.

Selling Apple kit in Australia isn't that profitable. Making Apple kit is profitable, but that isn't done here.

How would Australia like it if the US wanted to tax Australian firms because it thought it wasn't getting enough ta out of things from Australia sold in the US?

Windows XP market share GROWS AGAIN, outstrips Win 8.1 surge

P. Lee

Re: That has got to be embarrassing for Microsoft

Is even W8 a new OS? A new product, certainly, but how much of the kernel is new code?

Is it just a new GUI slapped on top of the old product with a new price tag attached?

Did anyone actually ask for something new?

Telstra 'snot boxes' challenge Turnbull's FTTN plan

P. Lee

5Mb/s?

That's my normal speed in the Melbourne's Eastern suburbs and that's after Telstra rewired from my socket out to the road.

Rain knocks me offline completely, as do high-temperatures.

Rain, shine - there's always an excuse.

Hey doc, what's the PC's prognosis? A. Long-term growth below zero

P. Lee

You don't know what you've got 'til its gone

Where do you think all those torrented films are located?

All those music tracks - you aren't going to stream them all from the net to your phone - you need something to sync with.

Photo's go from phone to fb - true, but mostly the unimportant ones. A lot of them go from iphone to... iphoto. Certainly anyone with any sense isn't using fb as a hard disk for their wedding photos.

The PC will stay, but it may will hide as a server or an AIO which doesn't appear to be used that much.

Google, eBay to Australian gov: 'protect us from our users'

P. Lee

Re: The Irony

I think you'll find they are paying the legitimate amount of tax. Otherwise, the ATO be having more than a few words with them.

Though I do agree, a little government funding to push FLOSS personal clouds along wouldn't go amiss and there is a case to be made that if you put your name on goods and services (including auctions) then you should be liable to some extent.

Hey, IT department! Sick of vendor shaftings? Why not DO IT, yourself

P. Lee

Re: Why couldn't the vendors be right?

No!

As it is for Sharepoint, so it is for Office. Office is not something you run an enterprise on.

"Thou Shalt Not Mix Presentation With Data" is the first commandment of data processing.

The Second is also important for DIY: "It is better to fail sometimes, obviously, and be cheap and simple than to strive to be 100% accurate and comprehensive and add multiple degrees of complexity."

There is a vast amount of data in Word which is handed to IT, who either copy to excel and then into csv, or straight into notepad. It then goes to a perl/sed/ruby script which maybe slightly tweaked to accommodate formatting variances and then through grep and wc piped to different files for sanity checking. Excel can be used to sensibly process data, but better to have column upon column of intermediate data than some incomprehensible code hidden behind some small cell.

Have skills in data processing. Non-interactive interfaces are likely to save you heaps and of programmer time. Procmail is actually quite handy.

But back to the article, it so true about vendors. The problems are hidden and you pay as you scale. It astounds me that enterprises with large economies of scale pay linearly or worse for facilities.

Anti-snoop Blackphone hits shelves in June: NOW we'll see how much you value privacy

P. Lee

Herein lies the real mountain of insecurity. It isn't the OS, its the apps we run.

What we want is a decent gmaps replacement and VPN back to my own home server for email etc.

Perhaps a better compromise would be a vritualised phone which pretends to provide your phonebook to the app but really gives the app nothing but a filtered view with the phone records and fields you say it can have. So maps gets addresses but not phone numbers, facebook gets nothing, skype gets skype id's but not telephone numbers, games get nothing. All the apps think they have access but there's just no data.

Child sex abuse image peddlers dodge UK smut filters and demand Bitcoin payments

P. Lee
Facepalm

Re: GCHQ! NSA!

Obviously you're talking about bitcoin users. We can't have that sort of scum around here!

Qantas' biggest problems are … Apple, Samsung and Google?

P. Lee

Anyone else notice?

It's more expensive to fly SYD->LHR return than the other way around?

If its clear to an IT bod as to what the problem is, why has the highly-paid CEO not seen it coming?

My impression is that Australia in general is used to having geographical monopolies and price gouging whenever possible. They have grown fat on this but now the internet is beginning to bite and the internal economy is struggling a lot to re-adjust.

But... you work in IT... Why aren't we RICH?

P. Lee

Re: What Facebook really gains....

It aids OTT services. This means facebook can pull an iMessage. You can get messages to anyone - online or offline, but it's cheaper if your friends join you on fb and stay logged in.

Not sure its worth that much though. I'd have thought google and apple have that sector sewn up by owning the devices and if google doesn't have all the android devices, they can step in and take it any time they want.

Apple, Symantec, other tech heavies challenge anti-gay legislation

P. Lee

Re: What am I missing?

As has been noted in the biblical quotes and as outlined by mainline Christians, it is the behaviour and not the person which is considered undesirable. Homosexuals should be welcome in church. Homosexuals who flaunt their sexual-behavioural preferences however, would be considered to be setting themselves up against God's explicit instruction in the same way a hetero having an affair would be. Under Christianity, everyone is expected to control their sexual conduct.

I doubt that there is an expectation that gays will be denied the ability to buy potatoes at a grocer's shop (though I realise this is the US we are talking about...), but those offering services where morality does come into play, should be different. The classic case is the B&B, where a UK couple had their business shut down. They had been denying service to unmarried heteros for years as part of their practise of not allowing their business to support behaviour which they could not approve of, but a gay couple took them to court and with their "protected" status forced them to close or go against their conscience. They closed. It is effectively illegal for Christians to run businesses in the UK in alignment with their personal beliefs.

This is not the same as racism. I've never heard anyone say that their religion tells them not to serve a different race.

It appears that liberalism is the new intolerant autocracy - we can no longer agree to differ, we must all agree or be banned.

Your CIO is now a venture capitalist and you work at their startup

P. Lee

"legacy systems effectively impose a debt on an organisation"

and change is massively expensive.

Whaddayaknow? Stuff costs.

Actually that's not true. I don't think these people know what a debt is. The older an app is, the longer you've had to amortise the cost leaving you debt-free. Once you've paid for the app, you have a sunk cost, but not debt.

Unless you use Office365 and you've got macros as your business process. Then you can have an old application and still have to pay for it every year. Whoohoo!

I reckon batch-processing is the way of the future. It's incredibly cheap because it is very efficient and very easy to programme. Massive amounts of money go on gui's for real-time apps. Just Say No! ;)

P. Lee

Re: self-serve checkouts example?

Worse is the voice-based gratuitous self-advertising: "Thank-you for shopping with ..." constantly being repeated by the checkouts. It makes me want to scream, "I hate you! I hate this shop now far more than when I walked in! I regret whatever impulse made me come in here!"

Boeing going ... GONE: Black phone will SELF-DESTRUCT in 30 secs

P. Lee
Facepalm

Surely you just use an Intel chip, a desktop OS and get the soldier to carry a backpack for the battery?

Another climate change myth debunked by proper climate scientists

P. Lee

Re: Consensus

So the question to be answered before we accept consensus is, "What would be the proof that global warming is not man-made or is not occurring?"

The permutation you pick depends on whether you care about the cause or just the results i.e. do I think I can fix the cause, or am I just going to deal with the results?

Vast amounts of cash and research appear to be going into, "is X caused by AGW?" (is there any research which comes back with "no" to this question?) and very little into, "how do we deal with the results?" The cynic in me thinks this might be SIG's trying to prove a point and politicians finding a convenient topic of distraction. How much interest would there be in the topic if warming was both real and natural, but just as disastrous?

The cynic in me also thinks that in very large groups, humans are unlikely to disadvantage themselves for the benefit of others for a sustained period of time. Mostly we would destroy large parts of the earth and fight over the remaining scraps. That appears to be the reality of history.

Linux-friendly Munich: Ja, we'll take open source collab cloud

P. Lee

Re: Ironic

Not just precedent, skills ecosystem and funding for refinements are also handy.

Q: Just why are AT&T, banks snubbing kit from Cisco & co? A: Control

P. Lee

Re: "Commodity Networking Hardware": Another way to fund the executive bonus pool.

It won't lead to ticket-price reductions, but reduced costs mean that the execs get their shiny new cars with a slightly lower future price-rise, which does put pressure on the competition.

Maybe.

Google kills copycat TfL congestion charge payment ads

P. Lee

Re: Agreed

>Passport renewal ones, too.

In Australia we get stung by the passport office. AusPost has a monopoly on UK passport renewals and you aren't allowed to use the UK application site (there's a little tick box which says, "I'm applying in the UK") to complete the form and send it in.

All they do is add a fat mark-up (I seem to think a couple of hundred dollars last time) and post it.

I"m not bitter. Really.

UK citizens to Microsoft: Oi. We WANT ODF as our doc standard

P. Lee

Re: Thanks

+1 for UTF-8

There are reasons to use both types of document though. Anything for long-term record should be in the simplest format, text. It should probably be printed too. I'd get really antsy if my title-deeds didn't have some physical reality. ODF seems fine if you are currently required to print and return the document.

If the aim is presentation with limited life-spans, then ODF with extractable text, if the aim is storage, then UTF-8 and paper.

Antarctic glacier 'melted just as fast Long before human carbon emissions'

P. Lee

Re: Heretics-

> Can't burn them any more. What is a true believer to do?

Compost them? Oh wait, does that create more methane?

The issue is a serious one. Even if everyone did agree that the worst-case scenario was true, what are you going to do about it?

Hands up all those who will unilaterally give up things made in factories.

Snowden journo boyf grill under anti-terror law was legal, says UK court

P. Lee

Re: Not quite the same

> our police officers are not trained lawyers

Here's a problem - if the police don't know what the law says, how can they enforce it? Worse, how is the man in the street supposed to stay on the right side of the law?

My take based on this forums is that the details of the case a less important to people here than the general disapproval of vague legal systems. The terrorists with bombs are few and mostly far away, but our own government is the one persistently using fear as a political weapon against the populace.