Posts by P. Lee 5267 publicly visible posts • joined 4 Dec 2007
Agree with that! If you want to watch a film, get a laptop which can sit up on its own. It's only a couple of hundred dollars more for a Mac Air if you want tiny and light.
My wife and I have ditched the big TV and gone laptop-only. It actually works quite well. Tablets are for short-term couch-surfing only.
For me, a better display is nice, but not purchase-inducing or even platform-swaying. I would rather have had a gps on the wifi model or a better forward camera or just longer battery life. Video won't be any better and stills at that resolution will need to be stored locally, in order to be loaded with any speed.
Call me when you've got thunderbolt - that is a real upgrade. Even better, lightpeak with an IP stack included. Maybe a 1gig wired ethernet port. I want to use my own storage, not icloud and at these resolutions, wireless is a bit slow.
Was the bees knees. It was a complete blast. My only criticism was that the it was relatively easy to work out what needed to be done (a bit like "Follow the lights" in L4D2. I'd like to have seen more options to play with the gels which didn't get you anywhere.) However, that ease may have been because I was familiar with Portal [1].
Loads of fun, great story, great ending, even if it couldn't quite match P1's end credits. Well done Valve and good call from the Awards.
Tux loves to slide
The issue isn't whether he is guilty or not, the issue is whether plea-bargains corrupt the judicial process. If 10 years is the appropriate, there is no way he should have been offered 600 hours service. If 600 hours community service is appropriate, he should not going away for 10 years.
Certainly, he's an odious and despicable person, but that doesn't mean the judicial process is ok. The punishment needs to fit the crime and 10 years is not a fit punishment for this action, regardless of the tragic outcome. This should have been a harassment/privacy invasion case. I guess that's hard to convict on when you share a room, but the answer is not to exaggerate the charges.
Personally I'm against the hate-law constructs. It bases punishment on motive rather than action. It is thought-morality legislation and spells the end of liberal society. We can no longer agree to disagree, instead we must all think the same. That is not liberal.
If you can infect a java system it is probably something that stays up for a long time and it you are better off re-infecting after a reboot than tipping-off AV or file integrity systems by trying to store something.
Probably aimed at small-medium corporate systems rather than the home pc or large-enterprise with IDS.
Of course, you restart your daemons regularly and use a SAN with r/o base systems and SAN mounted software installs so you can regularly check MD5 sums for malicious alterations, right?
Doesn't "staff" cover all the employees?
In which case, there would be an equal number of queues and staff.
Unless the purchasers get out of hand and start forming queues in different places. Is there a One True Till in an Apple shop, or are their many paths to Purchase?
I suppose one or more of the staff could have brought a staff into the shop, but that might mean they meant to go to a WoW convention. It does seem unlikely though - would you bring the Staff of Weirdness [+2 Clapping] to work? Oh wait...
I'm not sure what happens if the staff have a staff infection.
It's time to get my coat.
The screen is important, but not that important enough to upgrade - there's little increased benefit.
It is ipad 2 mark II, it isn't a new generation.
Thunderbolt, wired ethernet, more CPU and an induction charger might tempt me away from my non-apple product. Not enough premium function to justify the price, as far as I'm concerned.
The content creators have always been irrelevant because it isn't the content that makes money, its the ability to sell the content. CelebrityTalentDanceFactor is successful because it has enough capital to saturate the advertising market so that for a short period of time, it is the only thing being talked about. Its purely a question of pulling disposable income away from the alternatives, and you do that by massive promotion to drown out the competition.
As far as music goes, creating content is actually quite cheap and for no-names, usually done *before* a label picks them up. Nationwide billboard advertising, talk-show appearances and the 6:03pm play slot on all commercial radio stations is the bit indies can't afford and have difficulty coordinating.
Meh, because music is called "culture" but it is really a short-lived amusement, like a lollipop.
"Infiltrate"? Seriously? What are they, a terrorist cell? Is this an episode of "24"?
While I would agree that CMI is overzealous, the issue comes down to presuppositions. Creationists pre-suppose the existence of the supernatural, despite the fact that you can't measure the super-natural using natural laws. Evolution (as portrayed by Atheists) pre-suppose that there is no God, despite the fact that science runs out of answers when it comes to "how did life begin" and the Big Bang, where natural laws, by definition, were not in play. They have blind faith that Science will find the answer one day, despite their protestations of objectivity.
There is a further problem. Evolutionists take on a religious fervour. They make stuff up to fill in the gaps, in much the same way that the Church did in medieval times regarding the earth being the centre of the universe. There may be mountains of evidence, but when a trial which got evolution into schools was later found to be based on fake "proof", when the half-dinosaur-half-bird from China turns out to be fake (as if we didn't see that coming...), when "Lucy" turns out to be very much like a tree-dweller and really not at all like a human, people feel cheated. When National Geographic provides artists impressions which combine human and ape features, which don't actually correlate to the evidence found, then we have a problem. When people are told the Grand Canyon absolutely must have taken millions of years to create, but then notice that you can get similar effects with large volumes of water moving rapidly in other places, then people do feel justified in questioning the science.
A classic creationist view of the processes evolutionary science uses is at http://creation.com/the-pigs-took-it-all I don't know if it is a misrepresentation and it doesn't make an effort to shoehorn the dating into 6k years. However, it does make the point that the dating is not as objective as is generally portrayed. There is something to be said for putting the caveats found in scholarly articles into the popular science representations. Otherwise you end up with situations like the climategate fiasco, which doesn't help anyone.
Its a price thing. Drives were cheap so home users started adding more. I have 3x2tb drives. Convert to RAID 5 and you're down to 4tb. If you want strip+mirror you need another drive. Allocate iscsi space for time-machine for your mac and you've lost almost another TB per mac. I record all my TV viewing on Myth which in Oz means mpeg2 at 2GB/hour for SD and 6GB/hour for HD. 108 Angelina Ballerina episodes in HD mounts up quickly. It's not just the time for the TV, I also add 20 minutes onto each broadcast because AU tv always runs late. Even SD video from my camcorder turns out huge files. I could compress them, but why bother? Transcoding for the tablet also takes space. Then I've got rather a lot of linux images, not just downloads but ones I've been playing at creating with Suse studio and the NFS images of mythbuntu used for netbooting my work laptop to a home-entertainment pc. There is the squid cache too. Did I mention the backup of my windows box which includes a large Steam game cache? I also run at least two OS partitions per computer so that I can install a new OS with a decent roll-back mechanism.
Essentially, at home, video (and digital photos, with version-controlled editing) eats disk space for breakfast. When it comes to business, emailing MS documents eats disk space, as do backups, which usually go to disk rather than tape these days. We also like to consolidate storage devices which means lots of (usually smaller) disks to get the latency down.
No, I don't have one and won't be ordering one. It is an ipad and does the same as the last one, which I also don't have.
But hopefully, it will push laptop makers to provide something other than rubbish screens. That would be a good thing and allow us all to say "Thank-you Apple."
They also missed a trick, thunderbolt sync, disk and display would have been very, very cool. I guess they only do one upgrade per version, though.
I hope that the laptop makers (Asus?) soon realise that putting and ARM CPU and battery on the back of a hi-res detachable laptop touchscreen is a good idea.
"Smartphones" are a major cause of ADHD in my wife who can't even watch TV anymore without also playing a game on her phone. She can't go for more than a few minutes of downtime (i.e. without a planned activity) without checking something or playing with her phone.
It really doesn't matter whether its a physiological issue or not, the constant compulsion for stimulation can't be good for your stress levels.
I'm not sure whether this particular study is is FUD or not, but saying "its no worse than coffee or pickled veg" is a rubbish argument for not doing research. The top killers in the west are mostly lifestyle diseases. Yes that yoghurt won't kill you, but a portion is half a tub and together with the packet macaroni cheese, and everything else, yes it will shorten your life. Eight shots of coffee is raising your risk of pancreatic cancer. Sure, nobody wants to find out that they've been damaging their unborn child or themselves for the sake of a facebook update, (and this study does seem to be a bit of a headline grabber) but I get suspicious when there are strong financial interests against even doing the research.
Let them have their beer-money. Its nothing against the billions the telcos and phone industry have invested in making you use your phone.
a) I ____ hereby grant the right for the attached artwork to be used to create a composite picture of the queen's face which will be displayed at ______ on the ____ of _____ 2012.
b) I also agree to allow the supplied image to be reproduced without compensation to the artist.
How about remote keyboard and screens? The return of the the multi-user computer, anyone?
The connections may not be cheap for plugging in your phone but spread the cost of a one pc across several users and televisions and things begin to even out. (Less so since the advent of cheap linux mini-systems, but you get the idea): Who wants a smart TV when I can put it on the end of a 100m optical link and back it with a 12-core mac (running linux obviously), which can also transcode, play games and run windows in a VM for different users at the same time.
How about plugging my dinky work laptop with rubbish GMA chipset into my stonking home system and just passing keyboard, mouse and video over lightpeak without involving the laptop processor. Then I can play on my home box's gaming graphics system with my work screen. Cool.
Just dreaming I suppose...
I would tend to agree except for the fact that aluminium does actually feel nicer to hold than plastic and these are hand-held devices. The aluminium is an important part of the user interface.
Still, very expensive. I'd like to see intel laptops with android in the detachable screen, so that I feel that I'm actually getting value for money. I would imagine the cost is in the screen, not the CPU.
The question is, can they get Office to work on low-power ARM chips to the point where people won't mind using it? Office probably is the killer app in terms of getting windows onto a tablet. Plug the tablet into a dock and all the storage shows up in MS's newfangled libraries. However, I'm not sure people care. Will the Windows Admin allow you to use a tablet for personal use and even if you could, would you want to use an office machine for your personal stuff?
I PXE boot the office laptops at home to turn them into home machines. It works well over 100mb ethernet, never mind gig ethernet. That makes sure home stuff never leaks into work.
I'm waiting for the PVR guys (Topfield?) to wake up and realise that they have an always-on device with lots of storage. Home server anyone? Android x86? LTSP with local apps?
As Twain (Mark, not MS) said, "It aint what you you don't know that gets you into trouble, its what you know for sure that aint so." In this case, the software decided that there's a hardware fault without actually having any hardware monitoring flag a problem. I've seen banks with whole mainframes dedicated to testing. They roll the clocks forward and backwards to test what happens over time with their applications before deploying to a live environment. It appears that MS doesn't run such tests. That's a little scary. They don't even check their hosted, must-be-up-at-all-costs cloud software for leap-year date problems.
Anyone can make date handling mistakes, the question is whether the testing is done and architecture is right and fault isolation (or even diagnosis) is baked into the design. I guess that's why people buy mid-range unix systems and mainframes. Better hardware design and diagnostics and a real reluctance to imagine that hitting the reset button is a valid solution. This might be ok in SMEs but it is just not fit for the enterprise.
Thank-you for participating in the MS "Train the Software Release Manager," "Train the Designer" and "Train the Coder" Programs. Your data is appreciated. Please hold.
The pad and the PC live in different worlds. Pads are used at home, PC purchasing is mostly business driven and in the near future, that means W7 upgrades from XP. The home PC has a vastly longer life-span than the office PC, though we might see a bump as people find a spec which transcodes video well for their tablets. The tablet is both more fragile and less mature, leading to a much faster turnover. Almost nobody swaps a pc for a tablet or buys a new PC every year.
So yes, granny might get a new ipad and let her old imac moulder in the spare room, but I'm not sure Cook's crowing is particularly relevant to anything. If anything, I would expect the challenge to the PC in business to come from racked windows ARM blades working as VDI servers or perhaps from a paradigm shift, if google ever manage to get NaCl doing something useful, or perhaps citrix can do something clever.
So we might be in a post-pc world in the same way that mobile games are the heart of gaming. Yes, its rubbish, but its the biggest market for non-business purchasers.
Most of Apples patents are for stuff that doesn't matter.
Rounded corners, slide to unlock. These are only an issue because they are a surprise, they are not a long-term problem. Unlike MS which has Exchange integation, Apple has nothing that Android wants, the patents at best could only work for short-term business disruption.
Generally I like Apple stuff even if I don't buy it. It looks nice and it helps drive the competition. I suspect they've just realised that they need to (and can) compete on product and that the legal stuff wasn't really getting them much cash, probably wasn't a long-term winning strategy and was losing a lot of goodwill.
Apple will compete as they always do, with iLife, a simple UI and products which feel nice to hold and look at. Cloud sync also looks like a winning strategy for them.
You must be mad! iscsi all the way. Ok, I have an imac and its wired, so I don't know about wireless iscsi...
Server host > timemachine and costs about the same, if its linux. Pretty much any old PC will do.
Server hosts are also handy for pxe booting your work laptop into something usable at home without getting into trouble. The mythbuntu livecd comes up quickly loaded over 100mb/s ethernet, or you can use LTSP for a more full-featured experience. The choice is yours, at boot time. Or more likely, the choice is your kids, as you've got the OSX GUI host :D
so they they can claim jurisdiction. No-one wants their own country's laws to be broken (libel) only to have the courts look silly because the Big Corporate is overseas. So we must claim jurisdiction, break the internet down and put up firewalls to limit badness done by Foreigners against our fair people.
Only then can "we the people" control this unruly series of tubes.
Is it just me, or shouldn't a "smart tv" basically be a linux (android, webos?) box with drivers providing particular hardware acceleration?
What would be handy is a cheap ARM way of transcoding so misc formats can be played.
And enough with the USB sticks already - give me ethernet and nfs & smb clients.
You are assuming the kids neither like nor respect each other and that divorce is socially acceptable. Could someone explain how divorce is any worse than getting someone pregnant and leaving them immediately?
The issue appears to come down to "How much am I willing to put my interests and desires above those of the other person." That's not just to do with getting teenagers pregnant, that attitude is key throughout any relationship.
The real old-fashioned solution is not to have sex before marriage and not to make it socially acceptable to have sex outside marriage. That actually solves the problem. It requires some restraint on the pursuit of [my] happiness (which is probably heresy in America) and requires I consider the long-term good of someone else. That means, even if consensual sex is offered, it is refused. And don't put yourself in a situation where sex is probable, because its unlikely to end well. Decide, commit and then go like bunnies!
It's just selfishness and proud assumption that I'm more important than someone else which is the problem. Pregnant teenagers are just a symptom.
Indeed, stop fudging the phone plans to hide where the costs are. They could go "all-ip" or provide voip-type services and charge properly for the network costs they incur.
Then you could pick your telco based on how good the network is vs price rather than some random subsidy on the latest iphone.
Not sure about the phone in question, but my Samsung makes it harder to misspell than to do it right. Misspellings bring up correction options which take longer to get rid of than swiping the proper word. I imagined that this was the case on most phones these days. I seem to think even my nokia 6310i balked at mispelt words.
Anyway, it makes the autocorrect website seem so much more believable now, which is comforting. :)
Anyone "purchasing" a US-controlled domain outside of the US should have it highlighted at the top of the agreement that you become liable to US law and extradition on failure to comply with US legal restrictions.
If you aren't advised of this, I would suggest that your local registrar is guilty of gross negligence.
Sue 'em!
The Balkenisation of the internet continues - and that is just what the politicians want.
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