Posts by P. Lee

Re: The only use for java these days

Yep, although I do wonder how he managed to get incoming tcp connections through the router firewall... oh wait, upnp... another fine invention for malware.

We need something which is inherently less capable than java. You don't need to root a box if it can happily run a java web-server as a local user, or spend some time scanning your RPC services for exploits now or in the future or (I suspect is the most common) wait some time and then pretend to be a flash update requesting admin privileges to install.

Linux is a good model with its repositories. No per-application update systems please. Flash should never ask to install updates, the system should keep a list of updates which the user can check (or silently install). How often have we seen "posing as a flash update"?

I'd like to see further OS controls, especially for mobiles. Few applications need access to the internet, mostly they just need to talk to one domain. How about controls set during an installation which limit what an application can access? Should that be part of the standard application installation system? So the OS restricts flash to *.adobe.com for updates. Anything which wants wide or unusual internet access should be easily spotted. Hmm, why does that pack of emoticons need any outbound network connections, let alone access to the entire internet? How about path restrictions? Why not set the binary path and library requirements at installation and get the OS to prevent loading/execution of anything else?

Re: Doesn't the wiimote count as innovation?

It isn't that a wii controller isn't possible on a pc, the problem is that the games don't cater for it.

You need a hw/sw supplier to do both to help adoption, but what console maker is going to risk their margins by making a pc version which has the same controller has the lucrative console version? Why lose 30% on each game as people go for the pc version over the console version? Only someone with no vested interest in consoles would do that... hello Valve!

A couple of innovations I can think of. The original optical version of thunderbolt would be good. It may be expensive for a usb replacement, but if you can replace a console with your existing pc, then it pays for itself quickly. A DVI-optical-hdmi media bridge to allow long screen cables would allow pc graphics cards with multiple ports or multiple cards for dual/triple slot motherboards to easily drive relatively low-res tv screens for party games on multiple screens. Add a bluetooth system (common on laptops, but no so much on desktops) and your wii controller and off you go.

Keyboard & mouse are always going to rule FPS, but that isn't the only game in town. Even if a joystick is sub-optimal for flight sims and platform games compared to mouse & keyboard, a bluetooth joystick/gamepad in front of the telly could easily be a business winner for Valve.

Re: Trying to be both a laptop and a tablet

You could do both. ipad resolution is up to laptop res so no problems there. However, you need to switch to an ARM CPU in the screen when you detach so people don't run battery-killing software.

Don't try to do x86 tablets, just combine the expensive bits of hardware (i.e. screen & battery, wifi) so the company pays for it, but the user gets both. Integration between two OS's is probably too hard at this point, just get the hardware right.

This is a defensive play by MS. I don't think they are expecting profit, so that puts them on an equal cost basis with android. In fact, they'll probably subsidise it.

Re: I once had to bring my own device....

BYO main computing device is a nonsense. It only makes sense where the employee wants or has something better than the company provides and only wants one device - a phone for example. Actually, a phone is the only smart device I can think of. Other devices might be a decent screen, keyboard or mouse, but you hardly need worry about those.

So a smartphone over a dumbphone makes sense. Getting a calendar on your phone or tablet is ok and should be do-able. Email is trickier as you probably have confidential data in that. Webmail is probably the way to go there, but that relies on a constant connection and 3g isn't yet everywhere. However, mostly, when we want "on-the-go" data its things like contact details - things we need while moving. No-one wants to actually read stuff on a phone. If you need a tablet-sized device, get something like a small mac air and put a corporate build on it. Far easier than a real tablet and more capable. Just remember the AV will kill the CPU. Perhaps its time to dust off those VDI plans.

> Spend 0% of my working day on The Facebook.

So none of your time destroyed by the cloud :)

Server location only doesn't matter if latency is a non-issue and the data i/o is a drip feed.

Upload your blu-ray film collection to the cloud and tell me if location doesn't matter!

Re: Once physical access is granted

and we can see an admin reset your password. Red flags all round and you're off the hook for subsequent dodgy stuff. :p

Re: False premise

but no-one is complaining that facetime is slow or the video is poor quality - its an outright blocking of a particular protocol which (worse) is vendor specific. The whole "network management" argument is to prioritse real-time traffic above everything else. This is the opposite - it kills real-time traffic dead.

My speculation would be that AT&T went to Apple and said, "give us some cash/bigger margins" Apple said "no" and AT&T said, "Right, we'll start killing your phone's functions until you do."

How long until they start charging for access to gmail or google calendar? Hey MS, gives us some cash or we'll remove skype from our network.

Now we might see competition force AT&T to give up the plan or we might see an oligopoly effect where the other networks join in. Once the principle is established (with a small group of users and a non-critical system) it can be rolled out to other more profitable blocks and we'll be back to being charged for each type of data being transmitted over the network, as we currently are for voice and sms and video calling.

Long-term, I suspect we'll see VPNs on by default which kills all management. What is the likelihood that blocking the IP ranges for VPNs to iCloud is going to be legal?

Re: Who listens to the Greens?

Australians have the most expensive of almost everything in the world.

I think its a legacy of having a historically weak currency which has strengthened dramatically, a government which "blocks all imports if we can" and a culture of retailers ripping off people at any opportunity.

Petrol prices also jumped about 25 cents/per litre last week in Melbourne.

Re: "They get no more of my pennies for games."

F2P does seem to skew the games horribly and leaves a bad taste in my mouth.

Far better to offer f2p as a trial (time, character level or ingame-currency limted) with the option to buy the full game.

My guess would be that the publishers don't like the PC because the games market forces the prices down for PCs. They want you to "invest" in a console because having done so, you're more likely to spend more on each game. Publishers have to pay to play on consoles, so more console game sales helps amortise those costs. Also, console specs are lower (TV resolution only), more uniform and control systems are intrinsically less precise. PC's make games more difficult to develop and are less profitable.

However, that's probably only true for the big-budget publishers. Portal, Limbo, World of Goo, Frozen Synapse, Defense Grid et al are all great games and rather cheaper and far more satisfying than the over-hyped latter CoD titles.

Re: The Usual Silliness

> it's inherent risks *can* be contained

Not true.

Nuclear is *inherently* dangerous - its a chain reaction which requires a great deal of tech to keep in check. Unless you built it way underground, away from any water sources, to the extent that if all your man-made stuff failed, it would still not affect people, animals or vegetation, *then* you have contained the inherent risk. I don't think anyone is proposing anything like that.

Fukushima was certainly a triumph of engineering over the natural elements which caused problems. That's nice for us, but what if the tsumami was a little larger? The engineering isn't inherently safe, its probably safe.

Risk is a calculation, something like damage x likelihood=risk. There is an assumption that everyone is happy with that definition of risk. I'm not convinced that they are. The issue is that while the likelihood is small, the damage is massive, to the point of being global.

Crossing the road is far more "dangerous" but that too follows the technical definition of risk. The frequency is higher but the damage is far lower *and* the individual can control the risk by looking both ways, using a proper crossing etc. The stats are skewed by those who are drunk, careless or wrapped in the iFog of death. Perhaps those with who have a "green agenda" are simply more careful on the roads to the point where the standard risk assessments don't apply.

Perhaps those opposed to nuclear power think its better to probably kill a few people than improbably kill millions and contaminate bits of the earth for generations. A non-nuclear power station is inherently safe (for a given definition of safe) because a total failure has a known and localised effect.

As far as the article goes, if the fuel costs are a tiny % of production, a new source isn't going to have much impact. It might be bad news for Australia but not much more. There are a couple of issues I can see: quality tends to drop as quantity increases, so lots more nuke stations may not be quite as safe as we might hope. Most of our industry is outsourced to China - I'm not sure we want the Chinese to embark on a massive nuke plant building scheme - it isn't politically correct, but I suspect we would far rather the Chinese kill their own people with pollution than risk killing us. The cost of building and running a nuke plant is huge - the fuel might be cheap and plentiful, but the overall cost is huge.

Unless you are looking for political independence from the middle east, or you want to kick-start your industrial sector by subsidising energy costs with taxpayer money, there probably won't be much scope for using this plentiful fuel. I doubt its going to happen. Governments typically get a lot of tax from oil sales so subsidising energy which might replace oil would be a major cost to them.

Personally, if you're going to spend billions, why not do more research and development of geothermal?

Re: Scroticus Canis

> Perhaps the skull was washed into the cave, and further dirt was then laid down in the cave by further water/wind/other means.

Possible, but the soil above and below it was different. It calls into question the whole technique of dating things by what is around them. Won't that wreak havoc? Assuming a uniform increase in error, if they are 46% out (43k-63k) over a few thousand years, wouldn't the margin for error when you get to millions of years be too large to use the technique at all?

Even without an increase in error, the fact that the artifact can be divorced from its immediate surroundings brings up serious questions regarding traditional dating techniques and assumptions about the association between items found together. In recent forensic science/law we have "circumstantial evidence." When its much older and the evidence slimmer, we (or at least popular reporting) call it "proof."

Call me a skeptic, but I think that's odd.

Re: Cost cutting and security measures now qualify as carbon abatements?

> Are there tax breaks for "carbon abatements" in play or something?

Pretty much. The Oz govt is taxing carbon emissions but each company can trade its emissions allowance if it doesn't use them.

Re: They have to say that they are doing this

> just to keep their corporate customers happy.

Probably more a leverage play to get deeper discounts on their server/desktop OS deals with MS. That probable makes them far more money than any tablet would. Or at least, its far more certain to make money than any tablet is.

Re: Dammed Lies!

> "God gave to man a dominion over the inferior creatures, over fish of the sea"

And look what a good job we've done with it!

Re: Synthetic vs. Application / Brute Force Benchmarks

+1 regarding the usage scenario, though it might be calxeda's fault for starting down that particular track.

While it would be great if arm won on ppw in all scenarios, would anyone be surprised if a power station provides more efficient power generation than your car engine?

Would anyone surprised that big iron is more efficient if you crank up the workload? There's a good reason that we don't put xeons into tablets. The point is what happens when you only need a little? You could virtualise with vmware (++license costs & resources) or some native linux vm mechanism (still adds resource overheads and management costs).

There's a market for both here and arm is only just getting going.

Re: "few businesses outside the Telco space require full Fault Tolerance"

They might not need it, but they still try.

I'm not sure how much these cost, but try adding a few F5's into the mix and see how big the price difference is.

I'm not sure about porting to x86 chips either. The problem is usually cheaper kit has lower manufacturing standards and is therefore more likely to fail. At this end of the market, if you need cheaper materials to survive, you're probably dead already - go for quality every time.

Re: Optical drive is still useful for me...

How about ripping CD's to itunes? Does anyone remember that that's how Apple got going again? Got any DVDs? You wouldn't be able to watch them on your Mac.

There might be some justification for it on an ultraportable, but on an imac? I don't think so. Having said that, there's no ethernet on a macbook.

The FDD/USB switch provided something better - Apple now seem intent on making things worse. I'm not setting up multiple WAPs around my house so I can stream mpg2 files over wireless, I just want a cable. If apple had brought in lightpeak with a network switch and made long optical cables cheap enough to use, I'd say they are driving something useful, but their current direction seems like a madness I don't want to join in with.

Until blockbuster rents on USB keys and music doesn't come on CD, I'll keep my optical drive thanks.