Posts by P. Lee

Re: My ideal phone..

I'm curious - is it the dumb phones that last the longest?

My guess is that simpler devices last longer. I had a 6310i for a very long time!

Re: Unlike, say, religion?

I suspect the reference is to the apparent addictiveness of porn and the fact that an often-repeated action is harder to stop. Porn provides a powerful reward system for the continued usage of (usually) women as pleasure objects. While all behaviour does rewire the brain, there are few behaviours with such powerful rewards.

While cause and effect are difficult to argue, there does appear to be a re-enforcing effect. If you cheat on taxes once, you are more likely to do it again. Every time you conciously choose not to smoke, it becomes easier to choose not to smoke again.

I would hazard a guess that "defining down" means lowering the bar for what is considered acceptable behaviour. There was a time in the relatively recent past when not breaking your promises to your partner to "love and to cherish, forsaking all others. til death us do part" was considered normal and a good thing. Now the reality is that "you'll do for the time-being." I fail to see how that cannot be degrading and is based on the selfish notion that love is something that happens *to* me, rather than being something I give to someone else.

There was plenty of war, rape & pillage around before the Church came along. The Vikings were somewhat famous for it. War, rape and pillage are the product of selfishness. Porn too is inherently selfish - its sex without responsability or the effort of a relationship. Is it any wonder that people give on the hard work relationships involve when it looks like fun is to be had without all that hassle?

While the Church shouldn't be defining decency, the Bible does stake the claim that it offers something better than secular society offers. Even talking purely of sex, secular experts suggest sex is better in a stable relationship, if slightly less adrenalin fueled. Random sex with strangers doesn't really cut it.

That said... dumb idea for a tablet...

Re: Here's a clue

True, Visa & Mastercard can do what they like.

But they have also been found to be breaking Icelandic law and will comply or be punished.

Good thing too.

That's why this is unlikely to go through. The UK would become a pariah as pirates strip copyright notices off and it then becomes legal to upload and host in the UK as an orphaned work.

I'm not sure we care too much about the actual temperature or climate.

What people worry about is how disruptive it would be to have the Thames burst its banks on a regular basis, leading to increased insurance claims. Our commercial desire for a static environment is what is at stake. In previous eras we would have just moved a bit further from the river. Now we have billions of GBP wrapped up in the river/sea level not rising and flooding.

Rather like the fact that we are hooked on house-price increases, we are hooked on property ownership which is difficult to move.

Re: Permitted inspection of SSL traffic?

> How does this Cyberoam device get to read the trafffic?

If you tell your browser to trust it (because its your own device) you end up accidentally allowing all other cyberoam devices in the world to decrypt your traffic. Anyone else would need to be in the middle to get your traffic. A corrupt ISP minion might be enough.

Re: Wait...

I see the problem as being a lack of server infrastructre. Having a client does not compete with MS.

We need direct integration with an always-on always connected server and we need more options. For personal use, that usually means google for mail and calendar. Kmail/Kontact/Kalendar does this relatively well. Mozilla could perhaps fork out for some decent aesthetics if they want to support that. We also need IM and voip - which often means google again and (diminishingly) skype, but really should be SIP.

What would be handy would be a VM with all this bundled - email, SIP/IM, calendar etc for those who don't want to use a public service or who simply want to run their own infrastructure. Some load-balancing options wouldn't go amiss either so that companies can just add more servers with the same image, perhaps organised by bonjour or linux-ha or whatever for larger companies. Companies also need some wiki-like system if you want to avoid sharepoint.

Then you need a client which integrates all these well. Outlook does it does look reasonably good, but outlook without exchange is probably not a great proposition.

Integration is key - people need a complete working system (or at least see a working one) before jumping ship from a large vendor.

Re: Audience reach

It isn't just tactical. Murdoch won't want a monopsony. You want competition everywhere except for yourself.

For most of Murdoch's customers a few pence at the railway station is a far lower barrier than handing over credit card details to a website.

Also remember that the newspaper's customers are the advertisers not the readers. He's more like Zuckerberg than a book writer.

Re: The problem is...

> The only way the Euro is going to work is if there is a "big government" doling it out to the national governments, and taxing the people,

True. One currency can only work with one government. However, it can fail due to many different forms of fraud and disagreements.

The French wanted the EU to promote trade so the Germans wouldn't invade them again - they'd have too much to lose. However, there isn't much point doing that if you then give the Germans control by allowing them to out-vote you in a democracy.

If you think the current Greek unrest is bad, just wait until you have blond-haired and blue-eyed soldiers sitting on tanks as they roll into Athens to enforce EU law overriding the Greek parliament.

Despite the EU's pretense and social engineering (passports, drivers' licenses, flags, money) and America's lack of geographical and historical knowledge, Europe is not a country, it is not one people and Europeans tend to have a healthy disrespect for all government, especially empire-building ones. I can't imagine a European vowing to defend the president at all costs. How many people even know the name of the EU president, much less what his politics are. Even the name is just an abbreviation. Use the full "European Union" in context of any news and it becomes a painfully obvious oxymoron.

As someone once said, Europe is like a mix of iron and clay. Its going to take a lot more than global financial collapse to fix that.

Re: A ban based on a design patent??

>If you get there first, I think it's fair you should have some sort of protection.

Only if you have done something unique and non-obvious. IMHO making an existing device design larger so you can see more on the screen is relatively obvious, given that desktop screens have been getting larger for precisely the same reasons for many years.

Re: Okay

Meh! Who cares about the underlying OS? (as long as we have bash, ssh and X available)

However, the GUI is a joy to use and knocks the socks off the two major tablet GUIs out in the market.

Did I say "tablet GUI"? They are really phone GUIs which have been scaled up.

The whole overlapping/sliding frame thingy would be great on a pc desktop too. Chrome? Is that you?

I have to admit that the apps are nowhere near as sophisticated as Android/IOS, but that's ok. The browser is fine, flash is fine (if you like that sort of thing), the screen is nice, the media streamer does pretty well with mp4/http.

I haven't found a killer app that would make me ditch it and I'm certainly not about to spend $850 getting a higher resolution device.

Re: partially bollocks

The direct costs would be: we can't afford a legal fight so we'll just pay up, despite the patent probably being invalid or non-applicable.

Since these are patents, its quite possible that the company did its own R&D which it paid for and then it had to pay someone else again for the the right to use its own research.

Re: And therein lies the problem...

Indeed, the tablet's strengths are "always on, ultra-portable and compact interface," (no keyboard, mouse) and that was only possible when Apple broke the "desktop" GUI paradigm which prevailed on computers (and attempts at smartphones) up until that point. But "no keyboard" is utterly inappropriate for typing 300 page tenders. Low power cpus are utterly inappropriate for WYSIWYG re-pagination of said documents. 10" screens are horrible for dealing with large documents or pulling together information from lots of sources.

Re: no backup of the schedule?

Its service delivery's job to get in the way until everyone is satisfied that all the information is processed. They are basically a fallback because we all know the documentation is not up to date. It also turns out that "getting things working" is not worth risking other revenue/services for.

The problem is worse with consolidated systems. I suspect more money is lost long term on management of consolidated systems than is gained by saving a few million on additional hardware.

Re: Not a big deal

Making things more expensive by default for some people is rarely seen as "good" by those people.

Customers nearly always hate differentiation. We like to think we are paying a fair rate, which is generally thought of as cost+reasonable profit.

Recently in Melbourne the "normal" tomatoes have looked rather unripe in the shops. However, next to them in the supermarket are some nice red mini-tomatoes at x4 the price/kg. I find it really unlikely that the cherry tomatoes actually cost x4 the normal ones. Given the massive pricing swings in goods in Oz, I suspect a bit of price manipulation or at least profiteering.

Sorry kids, we are having canned tomatoes, shipped around the world from Italy, which are organic and are still cheaper than the canned ones grown locally.

No-one likes to feel manipulated into paying more. I suspect that the big loser here will be orbitz, as iphone users stop using it.

That's what happens when you mine data - it suggests strategies you really shouldn't follow.

Re: Just a thought...

Precisely. Since you failed to abide by our laws while in your own country, we will arrest you as soon as you set foot in ours. In fact, you had better self-censor unless you are fluent all the laws in all the countries you might visit.

Ah! Isn't life peaceful now?

The Americans take it a bit further though, by trying to get other countries post them people they don't like so they can be prosecuted in the US.

Personally I prefer the import/export model. The "publishing" model is a flawed analogy and implies distribution for demand is known (like books/newspapers) rather than a copy sent only on request. If its illegal, go after the importer. However, as the RIAA et al have discovered, that's just annoyingly time-consuming and difficult.

Re: Are you kidding?

Worse is the implication that checkpoint can secure you against general threats.

There is no saving a fool with a browser and admin rights (or a buggy OS).

A basic firewall takes care of most incoming connections and how many people can spot a dangerous outgoing one in amongst all the torrent traffic, Steam updates or google suggestions?

Re: Hmmmm tough call.

£200 for MS Office?

Would you bother buying a windows pad without it?

Re: I bet Microsoft won't be giving-away Windows 8.

and you can bet Office won't be given away either!

> They were (and maybe still are) great in entreprise grade really big iron, but other then that ...

But that should be a profitable niche, were it not for the fact that some enterprises who used to buy their own kit now just outsource the whole lot - often to oracle.

x86 management is still rubbish in comparison. SPARC haven't been performance leaders for ages, but a consumer-grade x86 chip will also knock the socks off a server-grade x86 chip in terms of performance. Reliability matters in some cases, but as the volume of data grows the less important any one bit of that data is seen to be and it all gets swallowed in generic outsourcing deals at which point the people who really need uptime have lost control of the machine and all that matters are the SLAs.