Re: And the funny thing is....
not to mention all those phones and tablets running linux with android on top...
Posts by P. Lee
5267 publicly visible posts • joined 4 Dec 2007
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'Dated and cheesy' Aero ripped from Windows 8
Australia rocks to Spotify
Tuesday 22nd May 2012 00:25 GMT
> Spotify’s seamless Facebook integration takes enjoying music with friends to a whole new level.
> Music has never been this social.
Is this editorial or an advert in itself?
Since when is sitting my yourself in front of a computer with all your friends elsewhere been classed as "social"? How about visiting your friends and playing a CD while having a game of something, go ice-skating, paint-balling, sailing, bowling or playing golf.
This is Newspeak worthy of Apple which advertised its ipod (loud music in your ear so you can't hear anyone/anything else) as being "social."
If my family and friends thought being social was writing on a wall so other people can see your scribblings, I'd be pretty depressed and sit by myself with a computer too.
Try experiencing people, rather than consuming things.
Creatives spin copyright licence that sticks to web
Monday 21st May 2012 07:52 GMT
Re: Bottom line ...
Indeed, not distributing via DVD and BR would go a long way to reducing infringement. Stick to cinema release/live concerts only and the problem pretty much goes away.
Yes, you'll get some camcorder usage, but that's generally rubbish and not worth the effort.
No physical control, no security.
Watchdog bites bar over 'offensive' Facebook ad
Friday 18th May 2012 01:39 GMT
Re: ASA powerless
The gay marriage thing isn't about rights, those are already equalised between hetro and homo.
It appears to me to be about taking a word commonly associated with "wedding" and understood as "one man, one woman, promising an exclusive relationship with each other til death, before god and the community," (at least as an ideal) and redefining it as an exercise in social engineering.
By redefining the word to include homosexual unions, you divorce the meaning from its historical religious heterosexual meaning. I don't mean just Christian-religious either. It may exist, but I don't know of any traditional culture where homosexual relationships are considered to be "marriages." I also can't think of a culture where marriage is traditionally a secular institution.
That makes me wonder why people who are mostly non- or anti-religious want to redefine a mostly religious term. It seems a bit churlish. "Partnership" seems to describe most homosexual unions quite adequately. That leads me to conclude that this is a political exercise to marginalise religion by legally redefining its vocabulary to void its meaning.
You can agree or disagree with the strategy, but I don't think this is about equal rights.
BBC deletes Blue Peter from BBC One
UK man to spend year in the clink for Facebook account hack
Pints under attack as Lord Howe demands metric-only UK
Thursday 17th May 2012 12:24 GMT
> Sack this out of touch idiot. Oh we can't, he's a 'Lord'
Yes, that's just what we want, another Commons. /sarc
You don't sack someone because you disagree with them. I vehemently disagree with Howe, but I'd rather he speaks his mind than have an elected "lords."
Its the Lords who stuck a broom-handle through the spokes of some of the worst ideas TB had and have been a far better counterbalance to abuse of power by the legislative than the commons is. They can be (and are) quite big on protecting the little guy precisely because they are not beholden to a national party system which provides funds for their election or can run a campaign against them.
Certainly, some of them are quite mad, but not "start a war" mad so common in the commons.
Thursday 17th May 2012 03:02 GMT
Re: Cars in.... Both...
and indeed the litre is too small for reasonable efficiency measurements, so you get kilometres per 100l.
Not that most petrol tanks will take 100 litres. 55 litre tanks don't appear to be particularly metric in ideology.
May I present a new buzzword: "wrong-sized: dumb measurement used for foolish consistency."
Thursday 17th May 2012 02:49 GMT
We should be progressing further!
I think its shocking that we have 60 second minutes, 60 minute hours, 24 hours in a day, 7 day weeks, 12 months in the year and 365 days (sometimes) in a year, not to mention a ridiculous 360 degrees in a circle.
And fractions! What's that about? What's that you say? Decimal is only an approximation? France tried a 10-day week and failed miserably? An inch is actually a measurement which is quite useful both on its own and in groups? Its actually easier to say "six-foot-one" than "183 centimeters" and indeed, just over 6 feet is easier to visualise than to 183 of anything?
What is so superior about base 10? It doesn't even work for counting fingers & thumbs without going to an extra significant place.
Go away and stop trying to change things which don't need to be changed. There is so much that needs fixing, but this shouldn't be anywhere near the top of the list, even if you think it would be a good thing.
Vixie warns: DNS Changer ‘blackouts’ inevitable
Thursday 17th May 2012 02:15 GMT
Moar options!
By default, on ISP sign-up you get a little panel to control your internet with recommended settings.
Like, block SMTP (in various manners), block DNS queries to non-ISP (all yours, those of other common ISPs, any) DNS hosts.
You don't need to force change, you just need to start with some defaults to help the clueless.
You can also put policy notes on the same web-page as your helpdesk telephone number, such as "You connectivity may have failed since 2am this morning. Click here to see why." and then explain the blocking rule and point to the control panel to change it back.
Pirate Bay struggling to get on feet after DDoS to the knee
New Apple keyboard patent may spell trouble for Android
Game goes titsup in Australia
Tuesday 15th May 2012 11:33 GMT
IIRC
They were selling CoD:BlOps for $126 AUD on release. I could be wrong, it might have been MW3 with CODBLOPS at $99.
I wonder why they went out of business?
Actually, I'm not sure its all their fault. They have a totally undifferentiated product with no physical substance. Who thought that would ever be a good retail opportunity?
HP Envy 14 Spectre Ultrabook
Tuesday 15th May 2012 06:37 GMT 
Getting there
It looks as though things are improving.
HP really need to do something about their logo though. The 70's called and want it back.
It's fine for servers and large cabinets with spinning reels on the front, but cool it isn't.
At least the screen res has finally improved... probably just before Apple raises the bar again.
My guess is that it still doesn't know what it wants to be - ultra portable or desktop replacement. I suspect Apple has it right by down-clocking its kit to improve battery life. Can we not have our "turbo" button from the 80's back for the best of both worlds?
To my mind, an "ultra" computer needs to be top of the line. That means battery life when I want it and plenty of speed if I have electrons to burn, coupled with the good aesthetics. I'd settle for speed only when mains connected if I needed to. It would save getting another pc for games.
At last the aesthetics are getting there. Fix the battery/clock trade-off and have optional discrete graphics and fix the USB spacing, that's a dumb rookie mistake.
Solving traffic jams with maths
Look out, Amazon Cloud! HP's on the warpath
Monday 14th May 2012 12:22 GMT
Re: The Cloud - When your Data is not really your data
I would agree that the problems are all solvable, the question is, has your cloud provider actually solved them.
Security is a significant issue issue. It isn't just about whether you got hacked or not. Security is about knowing the risks and accounting for them. Try setting up a PCI-DSS compliant solution using a public cloud and let me know how easy it is. It isn't just "we trust the provider" its "we have audit capability, we know who the admins are and we can show exactly who accessed what and when." Without that detail, you probably haven't gone through the rigour of designing a secure solution.
It is also a legal thing. You can't usually export banking data or personal data around the world. You will get fined. That is awkward and commercial suicide from bad design.
Facebook tests paid post promotion
Sunday 13th May 2012 23:17 GMT
Re: The Rise and Fail of a Social Network
> Sold for obscene quantity of cash to people that should know better.
The problem is that some bank will have underwritten the IPO and that bank "is too big to fail" which means that you and I will be taxed to pay for it.
Worse, the ring-fenced bad debt will be bought, or, the bank will be bought by the government and then resold quickly for a song without the debt.
So we the taxpayers don't even get a decent asset for the money we paid.
ISP kills off country-ban dodge after just 48 hours
Cameron's F-35 U-turn: BAE Systems still calls the shots at No 10
Enormous British PC mountain finally shovelled out onto markets
Ten... crowd-funded games from veteran devs
Best and the Rest: ARM Mini PCs
Friday 11th May 2012 02:42 GMT
Re: @Irongut
> Me, personally, I want an open, flexible ARM-powered netbook or ultralight laptop with a Pixel Qi display & a honking great battery - something that can run for a long weekend on a single charge. Tablet, schmablet.
Except a honking great battery means lots of weight, which doesn't fly well with most consumers.
However, a Transformer-style setup would be great, with extra battery in the keyboard.
I'd like to see more "add to your x86 setup" systems. Pop them inside your x86 case and hook up your disks to them for always-on file serving via ethernet and run thunderbolt for native disk-speed access for the local x86 host. Could the RPi graphics system be re-purposed for RAID operations?
A cotton-candy style setup would be fun. AMD could build it into their graphics cards and sell them to intel customers... "Do you really need to power up your i7 PC?"
It seems that the PCIe format could provide power supply, negate the need for a case, provide SATA cable-length access to mass storage etc.
It's hard to dislodge incumbants such as intel, I suspect the way to succeed is to offer extra services rather than compete head-on.
Three kingpin: Mobe termination-charge cuts can't hurt us
Kiwi ISP offers geo-block workaround
Thursday 10th May 2012 00:43 GMT
Geoblocking is particularly annoying in nations beyond Europe and North America, as lower mobility and grey import laws mean content producers rip off consumers.
There, fixed it for you.
You'll still probably need a foreign credit-card to make this work properly for most people. Now that could be an interesting money-spinner for the ISP...
Telefonica touts new free VoIP app to cut off rival Skype
Red faces abound as boffins build gamma ray lens
Understanding data retention in Australia
Wednesday 9th May 2012 01:42 GMT 
How much do you want to pay?
To take the London riots as an example:
Would the cost of all the data retention (which affects everyone) make it worthwhile to catch the few criminals who were using their mobile phones, or are we better off just leaving it to insurance?
This is assuming that the data collected could actually lead to the arrest of the criminals and that they could actually pay for the damage caused.
If you want to hide, just run p2p with encryption and let the police wade through the mountains of connections worldwide.
Finally, it’s the year of Linux on the desktop IPv6!
Chrome beats IE for a weekend
Tuesday 8th May 2012 09:49 GMT
Re: Chrome - the anti-drone?
> Why would corporate locked-down users all choose much the *same* non-IE browser for home use, and not a balance closer to the other browser's respective shares?
Probably not the case. Its probable that PC usage drops at the weekend. Most android devices have chrome-lite installed and phone & tablet usage make up the bulk of the usage at the weekend. They'll have the same absolute numbers during the week, but proportionally less when the corporate desktops are online.
I'm not sure what meaning we are supposed to draw from this. Chrome is included in android like IE is on the windows desktop. These are different markets so they aren't really competing, the swinging stats show that. Neither browser is likely to have been particularly chosen or favoured by the the user.
'ACTA is dead,' says Europe's digital doyenne
Tuesday 8th May 2012 01:16 GMT
Re: There will be new treaties
Jail time?
The issue with jail time is it that implies criminality and criminal law requires a much higher burden of proof than civil law. Identifying an IP address and an account holder won't be enough.
When so much effort has been put into avoiding civil law by making ISP's responsible so they cut people off based on an accusation, I suspect the industry lobbyists know that criminal cases are even more likely to be lost.
I suspect that a few case losses would perhaps push people away from centralised upload servers (where takedown notices are easily sent) and back to the torrents, where criminal-level proof is so much harder and costlier to find.
Indian callers could see bills DOUBLE after spectrum auction chaos
Apple to dominate tablet biz, PC market for years
Friday 4th May 2012 03:14 GMT
Re: WebOS
+1 for webos having a better GUI design. Enyo sliding panels are great. I hated the swipe-window-away feature at first but now I love it. Multiple window stacks on-screen are also good.
However, even gingerbread has better text editing/selection. The lack of mpeg2 decoding is a real pain. Not being able to dismiss skype notifications without calling the person back is also a bit annoying. Especially as notifications stack.
A great version 1 device. Its a shame it was sacrificed to MS licensing deals.
It does appear that you can get enyojs on chrome, so there is some transfer to android. I'm not sure how far it goes.
Bought a new Mac Pro? 1-in-100 chance it'll destroy your data
Britain prepares for government by iPad
'Oppressive' UK copyright law: More cobblers from IP quangos
Thursday 3rd May 2012 08:14 GMT
Re: Don't get it
> Seems to me the argument of A2K targets middle-men that add little value.
Right... and wrong. Most of the commerce is due to the promotional efforts of the middle men. They just don't participate much in the creative process.
So Susan Boyle sings at the local choral society. If you really value creativity, do something about it and support your local artists. There we have the creative process without particularly high reward. One Direction sings in a garage somewhere and perhaps posts the results to youtube. Again, not much finance involved, but the creativity continues.
However, it is Simon Cowell who buys up the advertising time, arranges premium rate SMS systems, organises "judges" for a faux-reality show and arranges time in a recording studio. Now we have massive economic activity. The creativity-that-needs-finance-and-thus-legal-protection is all Mr Cowell's and he is the one that reaps the rewards. The artist is Cowell, Susan Boyle is just the paint.
The question is, whether we think Mr Cowell's business should be given legal monopoly protection.
Wednesday 2nd May 2012 13:47 GMT
>In Malawi, harmful counterfeit drugs that injure citizens<
Obviously Orlowski believes the solution is to create a monopoly for the multinationals which naturally brings the prices of drugs down to a level that all Malawians can afford. /sarc
> we'll have a more-free society if we have fewer individual rights, and that in the long-term, destroying rewards for creators is both desirable and 'sustainable'.
Yes we will. Mostly because the "creators" (i.e. legal owners) are not usually individuals at all, but the consumers are and out-number the creators, so more people are more free - we have a more free society. Government "for the people" should ring a bell, even with Americans.
Destroying the extended reward system for creators encourages them to carry on being creative, rather than sitting back on their laurels after one success, snorting crack cocaine.
The basis for any discussion should be the "no law" state. From a state of having now laws, how far should we go, giving legal monopoly cover before there is detriment to society? It may not be arriving at the corporation from a government bank account, but how much tax-payer money should we give to that corporation? The profit is over and above what the market would support, so yes, it is state-provided taxpayer cash.
Personally, I feel there would be no great loss if One Direction disappeared into a large hole, pulling Simon Cowell with them. But that's just me. Pharmaceuticals deserve a few years. I probably wouldn't give films more than three years protection and so on. Perhaps there should be a "% of cost" trigger. You get three years if you recover your production costs. This is extended if you haven't recovered production (not marketing) costs.
Ideas are not property. They bear no resemblance to property. To call them such is intellectually dishonest. I'm not saying that there should be no protection (unlike Orlowski's "if you're not with use, you're with the terrorists" attitude), but the quid pro quo in return for monopoly protection, is public use while they are still useful.
Kaspersky: Apple security is like Microsoft's in 2002
Thursday 3rd May 2012 04:25 GMT
Re: Wow
>Russian security company? So, in your imaginary world, do they attack macs after having their baby in dinner?
Statistically, most money is lost to eastern Europe and Russia by security / social engineering breaches. Nigeria is up there too of course. So says one of the UK IT security police bods, I forget which.
Though casting aspersions on Kasperksi may be rather unfair.
They all pale into insignificance next to our own banking sector though. No really, shareholders need returns to counterbalance the risks they take.
HP elbows Apple off global PC throne
Thursday 3rd May 2012 03:32 GMT
Re: HP profit margins still suck
> Apple runs around 30 - 40% margins because they control their own OS-destiny. HP does not, especially since they gave up on Palm.
Not entirely. Its also because Apple sell to individuals who are typically only buying one item and are thus less price sensitive and the purchasers are typically the users, so having nice aesthetics is part of the purchase decision.
For the life of me, I cannot understand why HP haven't hired so design people and replicated iLife and made their consumer hardware a bit special. Decent software, decent hardware and windows for games, cloud services... Just change the logo to something cool and profit! Why is it that the software from hardware manufacturers (and phone manufacturers) is rubbish?
Oi, HP! Get your socks on with ARM, talk to Valve, do something cool. How about a "sleep" mode which drops your clock-speed and shuts off some cores and the graphics card, so I can leave my games machine on as a server?
Hellooooo, is anyone out there?
CPU and RAM hogs overstaying their welcome? Here's a fix
Thursday 3rd May 2012 02:48 GMT
Re: So let me get this right ...
> Gotta be better than the OOM Killier, aka "self-inflicted DoS attack".
If you are out of virtual memory as well as real memory, you're probably thrashing or something has gone badly wrong. You are probably I/O bound and nothing much is happening anyway.
People pay big money to VMWare to prevent apps from bringing down the entire host. This is the sort of resource management which should be in the base OS.
However, I'm not sure that the complexity of managing resourcing is cheaper than putting tasks on their own physical hosts. Time to bring on the ARM server chips & blades!
NZ erupts over Dotcom corruption accusations
Thursday 3rd May 2012 01:24 GMT 
What? Investing capital to gain residency?
That's just... that's just...
Oh wait, that's how its supposed to work. You have to gain a stake in the country and contribute something of value before they let you stay. Much like many other countries.
And funding fireworks! Oh, the horror! Its a good job that doesn't happen in the US, I mean, if Macy's were to sponsor a parade or something, that would just be outrageous. Corruption through and through!
I think the final straw is the discounted hotel room. Is there no end to this man's evil?
Cue influx of cash from the US to help "harmonise" NZ's legal situation.
Apple blocking Dropbox SDK over in-app buying
Thursday 3rd May 2012 00:22 GMT
Re: Children
I thought you are allowed to purchase on the web. You just aren't allowed to purchase in-app. Isn't "click the link, open safari to your web purchase page" allowed?
But yes, Apple appears to be walking a tortuous path.
I'm waiting for Samsung to pop a thunderbolt interface on a galaxy tab... that would be hilarious.
How politicians could end droughts forever But they don't want to
Thursday 3rd May 2012 00:04 GMT
Re: Why there is no investment in desalination
> Because there is no drought?
and if there was, rationing allows higher prices while reducing capital investment.
It is a utility, demand is inelastic.
There are few votes in, "with us, you'll still have water!"
And there is also the option of putting storage tanks in your garden and collecting all the water off your roof. Rather common in Oz, though they tend to have large metal roofs.
The Ethernet Alliance is thinking fast
Wednesday 2nd May 2012 13:34 GMT
Re: Stop pissing about and give us consumer 10Gb/s now
Its coming. Thunderbolt on consumer-grade intel boards, followed by lightpeak this year, (apparently).
Surely someone will write an IP driver for it.
I wonder if you have dual ports you can daisy chain computers together in a ring and use some sort of token-passing mechanism for network access...
Don't worry, I'm going...
Sony outs its first Ultrabook
Wednesday 2nd May 2012 10:57 GMT
Dreaming of the 1980's...
I seem to remember my PC clone with a NEC V10 had a 4.77 to 10Mhz turbo button.
Have we really lost the ability to do this sort of thing?
I want a 3.2Ghz quadcore laptop which drops its speed to 1.6ghz and switches off two cores at my command, which would probably coincide with running on batteries.
More FAIL for the screen - my 1500Mhz single core Athlon laptop has 1400x900.
Aus lags in cloud wave
Wednesday 2nd May 2012 06:22 GMT
haha
Clouds reduce opex by 25% and capex by 50%? Pull the other one, it has corks on.
What is more, the Australian market isn't huge so the need for massive scale is small. Not even the banks run with the redundancy that the larger clouds provide (and cost for). My internet link goes down whenever it rains hard. The traffic lights tend to go out in bad weather too. What makes you think the infrastructure is up for it?
I'd like to know where in the US there is 75% cloud adoption? Are we just talking a vmware license? Amazon? Office365?
Methinks the analysts have just looked around and thought, "who has money to spend? Ah, Australians! Oi, you! Your rubbish 'cos you haven't bought our stuff!"
What I don't understand is that "clouds" are supposed to be location agnostic. Yet, tell a cloud provider you want it all in Australia for legal reasons and they look at you blankly. As far as I'm concerned, if you can't manage it across the pacific links, I'm not using it across the pacific links.
I'm impressed that Ms Campbell managed to say the words, "adopt cloud computing and set a firm foundation" without cracking up. Well done!
RIM takes BlackBerry 10 out for a spin, forgets to bring phone
Wednesday 2nd May 2012 04:55 GMT
> Wow... the playbook interface was a copy of webOS. Now they've copied even more from webOS, the sliding panes look just like enyo!
Which is a good thing.
I think enyo has been ported to chrome so perhaps this is just a chrome browser :)
Actually, that may be a stunningly good plan (for BB) - sync to the cloud and have all your playbook stuff from wherever you have a chrome browser...
Or, develop for Playbook and deploy to any chrome browser.
... assuming llvm works...
Intel bakes palm-sized Core i5 NUC to rival Raspberry Pi
Wednesday 2nd May 2012 01:58 GMT
Re: It's a Mac mini
100 for the board alone? Add a case, power supply and cpu and you've hit normal desktop pricing. It is just a desktop board at an average price with laptop-class pcie and graphics.
That would be nothing to write home about. The inclusion of thunderbolt is nice though. It would make a handy stb device, with enough CPU for transcoding.
Pi references are forum-bait.
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Biting the hand that feeds IT
