* Posts by P. Lee

5267 publicly visible posts • joined 4 Dec 2007

Fancy a new iPhone 5C or 5S? READ THIS or you may not get 4G data

P. Lee

Re: @ LPF - OK not a radio engineer

I suppose the its down to cost then. Radios used to have all the hardware installed and you pushed a button to select, something a GPS system might do for you in this case.

Apple used to be the king of simplicity who cared not for cost. Now we have a bean counter in control and its going wrong.

BING! Microsoft plants Xbox Music flagpoles in Android and iOS

P. Lee

BING!

MS must be praying daily for the demise of those who remember "Friends."

Peugeot 208 GTi: The original hot hatch makes a comeback

P. Lee

It still looks

fat & flabby.

Sorry, I always wanted a 205.

Calling it the automotive W8 might be too harsh, but "competent wrapped up in horrid" springs to mind.

Don't tell the D-G! BBC-funded study says Beeb is 'too right wing'

P. Lee

How is being sceptical of an organisation which seeks to centralise power across Europe, possibly in a manner which leads to German domination, being "right-wing"?

Makes about as much sense as "socialism in one country."

BAN THIS SICK FILCH: Which? demands end to £1.50-per-min 'help' lines

P. Lee

Re: Use the 'international' number

I live abroad and Natwest only put 0854 numbers on correspondence, despite requests to the contrary.

Microsoft's VDI deals make Windows Server cheapest desktop OS

P. Lee

Re: Buying in Virtual Windows Desktops is dangerous then

>So, right now you can do it with Windows Server, how long before MS notice and change the licensing rules?

Indeed, surely this is one of the best arguments for floss - fickle licensing. Yes, I know the desktop isn't as useful or well-managed as MS'. The question is, how high do the costs have to go before "it just isn't worth it" is the answer?

Perhaps this is also why the GUI has been split from the Server versions - it can then be removed entirely (or licensed separately), making this kind of thing impossible.

If I were a large corporate, I'd be mandating cross-platform code for new desktop apps, even if I were running it on windows at the moment.

Moto X teardown shows US manufacturing adds mere $4 to handset costs

P. Lee

Re: Why not use slave labor?

> Unpaid labor must surely be even cheaper than Chinese or Indian labor.

Not if its Chinese prison labour.

ISPs scramble to explain mouse-sniffing tool

P. Lee

Re: Seriously, what's the problem

What's wrong is that vendors and website operators think its ok to do unexpected things: it appears they are just offering a shop-window but it turns out they are using (or rather being used by) 3rd parties who snarffle far more information about you than you thought you were giving.

Its a bit like free phone ereader apps which pick up all your address book contacts and ask for global internet access and access to your phone state. One too-fast click-through and its all over.

Go-go noscript!

I think if I were Nokia/MS, I'd forgo all those free apps and google apps in my store and offer a resource restricter were resources (including URLs and files) are blocked by default and user-allowed.

Tracking gui usage is fine for gui development - but it should stick to being used in development, not in prod.

Microsoft shoehorns Skype into Outlook.com - we quickly kick the tyres

P. Lee
Facepalm

Re: An issue?

Yep. Though I suspect most people auto-login on skype.

12 simple rules: How Ted Codd transformed the humble database

P. Lee
Coat

Re: Ted didn't merely transform the database

He was the First to put it in its Normal Form.

British spooks seize tech from Snowden journo's boyfriend at airport

P. Lee

Re: Voting power

If all three major parties are equally bad, perhaps we should start voting by conscience. Strategic voting seems pointless at the moment. Vote for the independents who are less party-inclined.

P. Lee

Not guilty by association as he wasn't even charged, but "interesting by association" is mostly what spooks look at.

P. Lee

Re: He was lucky :-(

I'm pretty sure the only voters involved with the passing of the act were politicians.

I doubt it went to a referendum.

iPhone 5S: 64-bit A7, 128GB storage, flashy ƒ/2.0 camera, and...

P. Lee

Re: 64-bit, maybe...

I'd be doing it just to get some 64-bit arm experience under my belt. (I'm not sure that came out right...)

Run IOS apps on a mac and keep that haswell sleeping.

Card-cloning crooks use 3D printers to make ever-better skimmers

P. Lee
Facepalm

Re: The real problem

There's far more at stake in that issue than in bank fraud.

'But we like 1 Direction!' Rock gods The Who fend off teen Twitter hate mob

P. Lee

>Top 40 lists are littered with more talentless fluff than ever before

Its an industry, run by businessmen, not musicians. Return on investment is far more important than anything else.

Google goes dark for 2 minutes, kills 40% of world's net traffic

P. Lee

Re: Should the cord be stretched across the room like that?

Don't be silly - the internet is wireless.

More brutal PC numbers from Dell as revenues stay flat, profits sink

P. Lee

... and they're all made out of ticky-tacky and they all look just the same...

Give me a laptop with a hex (ok, quad might do) core i7 with a switch to turn off cores, a decent screen and a docking station with a 36-channel PCIe link...and a real serial port.

Just add creepiness: Google Search gets even more personal

P. Lee
Devil

Re: One must be a complete idiot

> One must be a complete idiot to ask Google to tell him what are his plans for tomorrow.

"Tomorrow you will be looking at an advert."

OWN GOAL! 100s of websites blocked after UK Premier League drops ball

P. Lee

Re: Lawyerbomb?

You sue the premier league for failing to differentiate your website from those in question.

Does that fall under libel?

P. Lee
Angel

Re: 3...2..1..Blame

Indeed.

Block legitimate content three times and you should lose your internet connectivity. ;)

Brits: We can stop trolling if we know where they live - poll

P. Lee
Headmaster

Re: "the less likely they are to use the internet full stop."

Yes, its located at the end of a DNS name.

Google follows Amazon with auto-encryption of cloud data

P. Lee

re: I am truly in exalted company

Indeed.

It isn't perfect, but its better than none.

Make or break: Microsoft sets date for CRUCIAL Win 8.1 launch

P. Lee

Re: Faith in humanity

But we already had a search thing in the W7 start menu. There is a "clear desktop" button too in case you want to have icons all over your desktop to start things. What I object to is the mental context switch of going from your current work to a completely new screen of stuff. 8.1 appears to address that to an extent, but the small menu at the corner is much better to work with.

As a much earlier poster said, its basically pushing MS' tablet UI so you'll find it natural to use/buy one of those.

Does Gmail's tarted-up tab makeover bust anti-spam laws?

P. Lee
Holmes

Re: Mail protocol not used

Indeed. If it comes from within exchange its just a database update.

No distro diva drama here: Penguinista favourite Debian turns 20

P. Lee

Ah Debian

The only OS I could find which runs MythTV on a G5...

Thank-you!

Deutsche Telekom launches 'NSA-busting' encrypted email service

P. Lee
Happy

Re: It's unlikely to be secure

> What we need is a new stack, a new protocol, which dynmically exchanges keys on every connection, each connection/session using a unique key.

Do you mean IPSEC?

Admins warned: Drill SSL knowledge into your Chrome users

P. Lee

Re: Useless certificate system

> Anyone got a better idea?

Don't always trust a CA?

If you visit an ssl site, bring up a message saying who signed it and ask the user whether to add it as an exception. Then if the cert changes, it gets flagged as unexpected (or maybe expected if the old one has expired). That helps prevent badly issued certs from automatically being accepted.

MS gets you hooked on Server 2012 Datacenter, jacks up the price for R2

P. Lee
Windows

Re: @AC 16:42GMT - MS has a big hole

> In the enterprise you need to be running the same OS across Dev / UAT / Pre-Prod / DR also or your testing isn't valid...

and with MS, you need to pay for all those license, not just pay for support on your prod systems.

Silent Circle shutters email service

P. Lee
Black Helicopters

Re: PGP-encrypted usenet posts (or similar)

You can use asymmetric encryption. It doesn't validate your identity (without a cert chain) but it does mean you can talk to people without needing a pre-shared key. Cert chains for individuals aren't that useful anyway.

Obviously, if you do let your private key out, everyone can read everything - its a good idea to change it fairly frequently. You could sign your new public keys with the old one and post them all so people can validate the new keys come from the same source as the old ones.

PEAK iPAD: Slab looking a bit peaky, needs big biz to take more tablets

P. Lee

Re: Good god I'm no maths genius..

>Think I'd rather be Apple in the longer term.

The original mac was no less wonderful than the iphone but it didn't stop Apple spending years in the wilderness. It had a good idea which sold for a while but it priced itself out of the market.

With slab sales fading early, it appears the iphone is Apple's current good idea. Mac hardware is getting worse as they switch from "being the best" (not necessarily the fastest, but the most appropriate solution for their target market) to maximizing service revenue and forcing repeat sales. Deliberately making your products awkward to use to get people to buy more stuff is not a strategy the market will tolerate for long.

Apple do some nice stuff and they have a place - I just wish they would continue striving to be better rather than just milking the market to their own destruction.

Tax dodging? It's harder to do - and rarer - than you think

P. Lee

Re: Fiduciary duty

> Step 1) A telephone company changes the contracts for it's customers making the company vastly more

> money for than expected for a few years as the customers are trapped.

> Step 2) As the various customer contracts end, the customers leave and swear to never touch that company

> again.

Actually I suspect this is exactly what is happening in a lot of the larger IT companies which manage to push profits ever higher during an economic downturn. e.g. Office365. Lots of people are happy to sign up to more expensive deals because they know they have no time to search for alternatives. I suspect that down the road, things will start to get ugly.

The other thing is that bonuses are paid in the short term. So piling up profit in a tax haven may not be an effective long-term strategy, but it does allow the finances to look good, which benefits the executives who get large bonuses. Yes, it isn't rational from a shareholder perspective, but it people are often short-sighted and the canny executive can take advantage of that for their own benefit.

End of an era as Firefox bins 'blink' tag

P. Lee

>*We would have loved to honour HTML syntax and surround the word "blink" with angle brackets, but doing so risked making the story unreadable

So little has changed then.

Win XP alive and kicking despite 2014 kill switch (Don't ask about Win 8)

P. Lee

Re: More likely its the survey is trying to provide too many decimal places

How about... students leaving their "go to college" PCs at home hitting the beaches and businesses carry on running XP?

P. Lee

Re: Techies hitting the beach perhaps...

But why pay for a new OS on a low-power machine?

SuSE 12.3 on my 1.5G RAM centrino which runs as video/web client is plenty. I think it has XP on it too (I found a COA sticker underneath and thought I'd see if it works.) KDE is fine with all the bells and whistles though LXDE is my default for low-glitz.

Mmmm, old laptop.... 1200x900 screen, DVD, stereo sound: $100 and MS wants how much for an OS?

Gov: Smart TV bods must protect users from smut-riddled badness

P. Lee

Re: REGULATE...REGULATE...REGULATE...

Next up, no internet streaming without a TV license...

Peter Capaldi named as 12th Doctor Who

P. Lee

Re: the Doctor can take on any form imaginable...

We had a black, female (semi-)timelord in Mel for a while.

If that matters to anyone.

Qualcomm exec on eight-core mobile chips: They're 'dumb'

P. Lee

Re: Yes, definitely dumb

Once mufti-processing was introduced to android you have multiple dalvik processes running. With cheap simple cores, its easier to replicate them and spread your apps between cores than to juggle thing around, especially as a process might be maxing out a core. Is your email client busy processing email? No problem if your browser is rendering its current page on a different core, your ebook reader is busy rendering another xml page on a different core and you left a game running too. It is unsurprising that the ex-Intel man is pushing single thread performance. Intel did very well in the desktop market with single-thread performance. However, in that market, the CPU's were overpowered for most business use, with AV creating a very important race-to-idle situation when paired with a high-power CPU. In any case, 4 low-power/4 high power (normal use / high-power usage) is not really octocore.

Also note that phones are a bit of a test-bed for arm development. Without being able to compete with intel in terms of fabrication and single-thread performance, ARM producers might like to use multi-core (much as AMD does) to provide overall performance. For the vertically integrated corporations, the marginal cost of ARM cores is very low, compared to buying off intel who lose a CPU sale as they add more cores to one package. If ARM producers are heading into the server market, they might look at high-core-counts over single-thread performance, even as Intel does with xeon and i7.

Geneticists resolve human dilemma of Adam's boy-toy status

P. Lee

Re: The most certain are the least likely to be correct.

Even if you put aside the question of truth, the question remains: "What are the implications of what you believe?"

The Crusades and the Inquisition both come from a corruption of values - the church institutions took on the values which were opposite to those of the religion. I suspect this was mostly due to the acquisition of temporal power, whereupon they became like all other greedy, power-seeking, money-grubbing organisations. However, at least the basic values contradict this behaviour. The old testament is full of prophecies of doom which God pronounces on his own people because they have become like everyone else around them.

The Muslims appear to have started out on the warparth and the Jews got lost in legalism, bringing down their own God's curses upon themselves. Buddhists will tell you that pain is all in the mind and Hindu's see little to be gained in interfering with karma - the universe's way of judging wrong-doing which ensures that whatever lot in life you have is deserved.

> Oh, and who said that you need a religion so you can have morals?

No you don't need religion to have morals, but to have morals as an atheist is irrational. In fact, if you believe in the genetic machine, your personhood is purely a product of your environment, like the sand dune shapes in the Sahara or the melting ice (or otherwise) at the poles. Any concern for your children's welfare in the face of AGW is just genetic programming and has no intrinsic value. You have no more freedom of choice than an ice-cream machine and even changing your mind is just a result of your genetic programming. Sure you can look after the poor and the homeless, but what is the reason? Surely that is going against evolution, the survival of the fittest - you are diluting the gene-pool with failed material.

I have to laugh with irony when people trot out the crusades as an argument against religion, conveniently disregarding the millions more killed during the least religious and scientifically advanced 20th & 21st centuries. Conveniently ignoring the fact that under atheism, there is no intrinsic curb on my hatred and greed. I fight for my genes to get ahead - sometimes I cooperate, when no-one is looking, I don't have to. I just throw it into the pot and claim its up to history to judge.

Terror cops swoop on couple who Googled 'backpacks' and 'pressure cooker'

P. Lee

>Which of course is just how the terrorists want us to feel.

Terrorists: those who use fear for political ends.

The ones with official power or the others? So far the ones with official power have cost more in terms of deaths of innocents, deprivation of freedom and non-required spending of cash than the others.

Bother, it was click-bait!

USB accelerates to 10 Gbps

P. Lee

Re: DMA

>Isn't the DMA aspect of Firewire a big security issue?

That depends if you trust what you are connecting to.IP/Firewire or IP/TB is a bad plan for general networking, but would be good for building a high-speed cluster interconnect for firewalls, load balancers etc.

You just treat it as a PCIe extension. It would be quite nice to see a switch which emulates 10G ethernet cards, so TB (or better, Lightpeak) gives you your physical link to a virtual 10G ethernet interface which is in the switch. It would be interesting to see how that would stack up against "normal" 10G ethernet.

How did Microsoft get to be a $1.2bn phone player? Hint: NOT Windows Phone

P. Lee

>The wierd thing is that no one is fighting. Its either cast iron, or so complex it would have both parties in court for decades.

3rd Option: Not signing threatens some other MS-dependent revenue stream / cooperative venture.

Really, Samsung? You don't want your drivers included on the Windows DVD? Ahem Foxconn, we are currently looking for an xbox manufacturer...

You're 30 years old and your PIN is '1983'. DAMMIT, biz mobe user

P. Lee

Re: Technology Which Should Die

Touchscreen begs for thumb-print authentication.

Intel's homage to Raspberry Pi: The much pricier Minnowboard

P. Lee

Re: Devil's advocate

x86 is useful at the low end too. I have a Mac G5 but I can't run BSD because some stuff (mythtv) doesn't compile on a G5. x86 would be hassle free for BSD. Debian is fine, but I wanted to play with BSD too.

I thought Minnow would be more of a server to the Pi's client, but at 200 is way too much and one sata port? What's the point of that? Far cheaper and better to re-purpose a core2 system.

I'm still not sure why a GPU (even a rubbish one) can't be used for the RAID 5 parity checks and the SATA logic be brought on-chip.

It does appear to be aimed at more of the commercial embedded market, but if you wanted millions of the devices, surely you'd pick ARM or mips and save yourself a bundle.

New NSA tool exposed: XKeyscore sees 'nearly EVERYTHING you do online'

P. Lee

Re: Totally disgusting.

> So you want the web to be totally free but you reject the freedom of others to use it in a way you don't like?

I expect to be free offline , but I don't expect to followed around by the government, writing down everywhere I go, everything I look at and purchase in shops, everything I say to people, in a public place or when no-one else is around. I don't expect my house to be bugged or my telephone tapped.

On the other hand, if I were a criminal I would expect this and I'd take steps to foil it. Send stuff by real post, dead drops, encrypted messages on public bulletin boards etc.

Microsoft haters: You gotta lop off a lot of legs to slay Ballmer's monster

P. Lee

Re: Missing the bigger picture?

> Just who are MS's competition?

Anyone who can creep into their space. Monopolies generate massive profits and those attract competition. That means that Google Docs is competition, because they can do desktop-independent apps. Android is competition because that brings ARM mobile, which begets ARM server and ARM desktop with a cross-platform Linux or Android, not Win32 API. OSX is competition because the Director's Mac Air brings in BYOD and other non-windows desktop infrastructure leading to OS-independent Apps and infrastructure. Amazon is competition because they offer cheap always-on, low-power systems which is much of what companies use and they offer it with global reach. VMware are competition not just for hyper-v, but because the thin server infrastructure brings in linux skills to the data center. When scaling out, licensing costs become obvious and as data centres grow under hardware consolidation, the pressure to move to cheaper options increases while the web interface removes the UI/OS-specific skill requirements.

Defending a monopoly, it isn't really about competing with other products, its about killing interoperability so that other ecosystems can't get a foothold. Eventually, however, the profits to be made / costs to be saved become too much and the monopoly crumbles. Small competitors can be crushed or bought but well funded competitors bringing money from other markets (search, mobile) with little existing investment in the status quo are difficult to combat.

Google menaces Apple's 3-year-old toddler with its cheap stream tech

P. Lee

> This is nothing special and the AppleTV does this as well.

Yes, that's the point of the article. It competes with ATV but at around 1/3 of the cost and in a very portable form-factor.

I think its more like VLC running as a streaming server with a remote client than DLNA. You don't stream to it from the device with the GUI, you tell the dongle to go get the media itself. (If I understand correctly).

Australia threatens Adobe, Apple, with geo-blocking ban

P. Lee
Unhappy

Next up

Bethesda

REVEALED: Hungry termites nibbling at Oracle's foundation

P. Lee

Re: Postgres? No, thank you.

> like any tool if it costs a business more than it saves then the business will try to move to a different tool.

I suspect corporate inertia is deceiving many of the big software/appliance vendors. Ever increasing profits even in a recession? I strongly suspect its just taking some time to get other options up and running.

Like Oracle, I suspect MSOffice is going down the that road. Yes it is the most feature-full, but there is a massive group of people in corporations who just need approximate formatting for Word documents and who will never use VLOOKUP.

Once installation is quick and easy and the costs rise due to Office365 subs, the licensing friction is reduced and I suspect a lot of companies will push out LO by default and O365 if you need it. Centralise on Sharepoint and you can probably run scripts against your document store to see if LO is a reasonable alternative for user X.

It will be interesting to see how things develop.