Posts by P. Lee

Re: Meh, I say. Meh.

When was RS232 and a green screen not a good idea?

Go on now, If you had pine, wp51 & lotus 123 for running under nix, how many users could you support on a quad-cpu hp with 192 Gig of RAM and some terminal servers?

Re: For those whining that Google's Maps app was "better"...

> I'm surprised they released it in this state.

Depends how they update it. If all the iphones are reporting their locations as they move, Apple can pick up the actual locations of roads very quickly.

Re: "Today, it's the norm for juries to decide patent disputes"

If the law cannot be explained in terms that those subject to that law can understand, you need to ditch the law.

It is utterly inappropriate to suggest that we should be governed by laws that we have no hope of understanding.

If there was a problem with an inaccurate understanding of the terms, time should have been set aside to explain clearly what the concepts mean and there should have been some concept checking to make sure the jargon is understood. The meanings should have been gone over again before the jury retired. The judge should have ensured this and should have noted use of jargon and pulled up the lawyers when they used it and made sure both sides agreed on the definitions - perhaps keeping a "cheat-sheet" available to the jury. We don't need to switch to an inquisitorial system for this, this is what the judge is for - to make sure things are conducted properly.

There will be times when justice is not well-served by jury trial and a "better" outcome could have been achieved some other way, but a jury trial is the mechanism by which the people keep control of the legal system. That is far more important than this one trial.

Re: Blue US Robotics Sportster....

> Oh you young 'uns. When I was a lad I'd be lucky to get a 300 baud connection.

300 baud?

When I was a lad, we 'ad an 75 baud acoustic coupler - and we 'ad to make the sounds ourselves!

an' we were glad of it!

Placeholder pricing perhaps? Perhaps Asus have no interest in MS locked-down devices being successful against their own android units.

>shouldn't they be making easier to port apps to the Android

Absolutely not.

Otherwise people will code for your competitor and you'll get the second rate port. Remember OS/2 & NT?

Re: ether reality ..sniff :('

Promiscuous mode is the least of your problems. You company has installed a cert into your PC which makes it look as though you have an SSL connection to your bank, when it really only goes as far as your proxy, where everything is decrypted (in a misguided attempt at data loss prevention) and then re-encrypted.

Re: Nothing to say really...

> hey even set up a Facebook page to fight the injustice.

So they're doomed then...

Re: “The time has come for us to build a bridge over the trolls."

Is the water underneath troubled too?

Re: Still haven't separated OS and Data

> Its not done by default in linux, just like it isnt in windows.

You must have been using a numpty distro. IME it is normal in linux distros, but it is a distro rather than kernel option.

It's been a few years since I've tried, but windows used to make a hash of it, since drive space was calculated at the "drive letter" level - directory mounted volumes appeared to be a kludge.

Also, separation is not as useful under windows, since the UIDs are unique to the installation and you'll end up with "unknown user" which isn't easy to fix (unless you've got central authentication running from somewhere else) since user data appears to be scattered all over the system - file and registry.

For example, I keep a spare partition so I can do a clean install to a different partition for a major upgrade and just remount the user directories. I made the mistake of trying to do the same thing for a windows install. I suspect there is a migration agent somewhere which will do it cleanly, but linux... well it's just less hassle. I also tried changing the "special folder" location - that didn't go well.

I'm sure all this stuff can be done under windows, it just seems like more trouble than its worth.

Re: Just to add

How true. You can change all sorts of things in kmail (which I love) but then you get things like text almost flat up against a border, which looks terrible. It looks as though underlying data structures have made it into the gui with grouping headers, boxes and lines around gui elements, and so on. It would probably be better to have fewer features and better looks. That's no bad reflection on the devs, but we do need some more influential aesthetic designers.

The gnome 3 gui may put off linux devs and tifkam may be a flop, but in the end its

about the apps. Put ms office on the desktop and the year of the linux desktop in business would be here. It isn't the features, its about risk and confidence.

Re: perhaps when my line speed is >=1mb

I haven't looked closely and I may be completely wrong, but if you use a wireless device, you can improve things with a local proxy (assuming http streaming). With a wireless device, you are most likely to need retransmits (++latency) in the last few meters of network. A local proxy *may* prevent the need to go back out to the internet for content.

I only tried this once and it could have been a fluke that when I switched to the proxy things got better, other commenters please chime in. Does squid do anything clever to improve things with streaming? Could it be made to pre-cache content and ask for the entire file as fast as possible, even if only a small bit of it has been requested?

Re: What counts as a tablet?

Well you could treat them the same and just develop TIFKAM apps, but no-one would buy them for the desktop. You could develop a cool app which needs gig-ethernet data speeds, but no-one would buy it for phones or tablets.

Its just PR drivel. Actually, its worse for MS. By setting up the expectation that tablet, phone and desktop are all the same, they are setting up both devs and customers for a massive disappointment. Got IE on a tablet? Great, but why does the website say I need to install something called "flash"? I transferred my 300 page document from my work pc to my tablet, but I find it quite slow scrolling down, why is that? Why can't I find my colleagues' email addresses when I'm at home on my phone?

If Apple did one thing that no-one else had done before, it was to completely change the expectations of users, by not having a physical keyboard or mouse or anything which looked like OSX on the ip*d. Managing expectations is key to a happy customer and Ballmer's doing it all wrong.