Posts by P. Lee

Re: Cheap as Chips?

> Look at how much they nobbled the atom platform (Netbooks limited to 2GB RAM) just because they were afraid of their low price experiment cutting into the desktop share.

This will continue to be their problem. The question is whether ARM will nobble them or whether they will nobble themselves. The two big phone makers are vertically integrated. Why would they want to hand intel a slice of profit? It's as much a commercial issue as a technical one - even if Intel became better, they will not accept the miniscule margins ARM holdings run on, so they will be more expensive.

Re: Awaiting politics.

Racism is a modern sin. Apparently its worse to treat someone badly if they look slightly different from yourself, if they have a darker skin-tone than yourself, than if they are the same or lighter.

I don't really get that. Abuse is abuse and I have no time for "grading" an evil action based on motivation. It is not better to beat someone in order to take their wallet than it is to beat them because they are foreign.

I don't care about your colour or your slave's colour. Slavery is wrong.

Re: Sony likes internal PSUs

Oooh, MSX!

There's a blast from the past!

Re: Too confusing - really?

+1 for KDE desktop looks but why would you hold drive mappings in the desktop rather than push it down to the underlying OS/file system?

I can see the samba share, I just can't get firefox to use it!

Gah!

Re: Utterly unrealistic

>Eventually, this laundry list will meet the democratic process in the (non-?) ratifying countries. I hope.

Nope. The government signs the treaty and then forces it through parliament "to meet its international obligations."

Re: Corporate PAYE

> This would be a tax on revenue but the UK operates a system that taxes profits.

That's fine, but with the profit to revenue ratio being so small, they have no reserves to cope with problems, which is the reason small contractors are usually excluded.

Don't tell me you are a stable company if you make tiny profits.

Re: Retina?

> Anything above that number is just nonsense for marketers who like to put higher numbers in spec sheets to suggest they are relevant.

Are the higher figures relevant to the short-sighted? ;)

Re: "UK's enemies rubbing their hands with glee"...

or indeed, at our getting ourselves so far into debt that we're likely to financially implode with no effort from themselves.

Re: Inori

I read, "Ignory" first off.

Do we still have browser fanbois? Chrome for research, FF for personal. IE for accessing microsoft.com and badly written intranets.

Re: Easy to avoid...

Cue ads at the pump.

Also, less "Minority Report" and more "Black Mirror."

Re: Enterprise Management

> 'IT Managers hate iPads'? Only those in the stone age.

So far they are mostly BYOD which brings conflict between the owner of the network and the device owner.

I recently had a client who had a policy of not providing kit to contractors (fair enough), but then they wanted to install their own management software on BYOD kit.

er... no thanks.

Re: Only if you can pry it from my cold, dead fingers...

It'll end up like Bluecoat - if your software is too old to talk to its authentication servers, it shuts down!

You thought you bought an appliance, but you only licensed the software!

Re: Huh?

Low-power, low-latency applications would be a prime application I would think. Call routing anyone?

What if Android takes off and you want android desktops but half the organisation has ipads? You run up remote desktops on headless, googleless android.

Re: Sheeple

> Only in gaming it seems, a *new* machine that is more restricted in function than the old... amazing.

Correction: Gaming consoles and Fruity-logo'd computers.

Re: Yay, new standards

Yes. The point being that a default on setting would be so ubiquitous that ad agencies would ignore it, rendering it pointless.

The idea is to offer a little bit of hope to those who can be bothered.

Personally, I suspect flashblock, noscript and always using incognito is probably your best bet.

Re: Great expectations...

> But why use the PI to do it?

The Pi's strengths are cheap/portable/electrical interaction with other devices.

You can hook it up to a motion sensor and doorbell and it isn't so expensive that you can't leave it there. It won't replace a pc for general computing but the level of general computing has risen so far its hard to inspire kids to compete with teams of hundreds of adults. The benefit is in little cool things where someone can say, "I did that!"

Re: How long

> Sure, getting wiped out of the processor market would hurt a lot, but Intel have many very well developed facets, so I don't think they'll vanish, although it is certain they will evolve. :)

The issue would be PC manufacturers putting cheap ARM chips into PC's as an "always-on" option. People might stop booting home PCs to check email, etc and it would drive desktop linux/arm application development, which might then impact intel quite a bit more.

Actually a c2d is more than adequate for a "family computer." I have a 2009 2.6Ghz 24" imac (with a dvd drive!) which runs email with 10k+ messages, web, MS Office, skype, video, voip, ebook server etc with no problems at all.

I did upgrade the RAM to 8G recently (/me thumbs nose at newer mac owners...) which made things run quite a bit better and the nvidia 9400 will never be for 3d games, but it is almost silent and a pleasure to use with snow leopard. I've got a network server running debian so I probably won't bother upgrading the disk (I rarely reboot the thing), but an SSD is an option. Perhaps it was the last of the decent "all-in-ones".

I don't normally upgrade critical machines unless I need to. That makes life more pleasant and things tick along just fine.

Re: Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?

The other part of the equation is the wire-tapping and use of international cooperation to get around your own laws. China can tap its own infrastructure, but asking the UK, Australia and USA to filter off traffic for it to analyse probably wouldn't get it very far. China's reach into critical parts of the internet is rather more limited than the West's.

When I was a lad, we found picking up the school Apple ]['s and dropping them back on the table from the height of a couple of inches worked wonders for fixing miscellaneous problems. Caused by dust perhaps?

In the office? Doom and Chess via MS Exchange.

Re: Eight rich people and a bar?

Who said Big Brother was a dead format?

Youtube gold!

As my Grandma used to say, 'There's no such thing as "being bored," its "being boring."'

Re: Evolution at work

You're confusing evolution with natural selection.

You don't gain immunity from trying, you merely kill off the non-immune dogs.

The genetic complexity has to already exist.

Re: Oh My God !!!!!!!!!

Overdone but basically correct.

Non-rich people are not mobile and they don't have mobile money. They are also the majority. Its the majority who pay tax because, well, people are taxed in general.

I'd be far more concerned about the disastrous amounts of debt the government is running up on our behalf. That has a great deal more certainty and is a lot closer than global climate disaster.