Posts by Vic 5860 publicly visible posts • joined 7 Dec 2007
> If digital is worse why was digital TV better at picture than analogue.
It wasn't.
> BBC1 on 91 was noisy
Then you had a poor signal. Analogue TV will always degrade with signal loss, whereas digital can cover it.
But if you sort the signal out, the analogue picture quality is better because it is the same souirce, but uncompressed, whereas the digital signal has been through a lossy compressor.
Vic.
> At first digital was much better
No it wasn't. Digital TV has passed through a lossy compressor; the "gold standard" of that is to get it indistinguishable from the uncompressed analogue feed.
> then they started slashing the bit rate.
That makes it worse, sure.
Vic.
[Who has built quite a few digital TV systems around the world...]
> I wasn't talking about any particular industry
One of us said :
'Its only people who have no life outside work who require a job to be "fun".'
That's a sweeping generality, regardless of whether or not you intended it to be confined to any particular industry.
And, as I sid, it's wrong. There are people with a ilfe outside work who require their job to be fun. These are the people who are most employable. I'm sorry you have never met any such people, but that doesn't preclude them from existing.
> Your customers or your clients?
There is no difference. My customers are clients. My clients are customers. Which particular hair are you trying to split here?
> makes a mess then clears off 6 months later leaving the permies to sort out
No, I'm the contractor who gets called in when the permies have dug themselves into a hole they can't get out of. This is why I can say "no" to jobs if I don't want to do them.
Vic.
> No , were you?
I wasn't the one making sweeping statements about the whole industry.
> Nice dodge. Try answering the question next time.
The answer is simple: it happens when it happens. There is no "it will happen by age x"; there is no guarantee it will happen at all. But that does not mean it cannot happen; some of us are lucky enough to be in exactly that situation.
> You seem to have rather a high opinion of yourself.
Nonsense. It is not my opinion that matters; I do not sign the purchase orders that pay gfor my lifestyle.
> So what makes you recession proof then?
Having skills that my customers find valuable. "Not being a cock as soon as someone challenges something I've said" is high amongst those.
> If anyone needs a BS merchant you'd certainly get the job.
Resorting to the ad hominem? That's disappointing, even from you.
Vic.
> It is true for most people I've met.
Are you claiming that your personal experience is the sum total of all civilisation?
> Sorry , when is this point reached exactly? When you get to 65?
Just because you haven't reached it, that doesn't mean no-one has.
> Of course you do - the mortgage can pay itself after all.
If there is sufficient demand for your skills, the mortgage is paid by whichever organisation wants you the most.
If you haven't found yourself in such a situation, that would imply that there isn't sufficient demand for your skills.
Vic.
> I'm not sure how much difference he thought he was going to make developing spending reports
Actually, that's the one bit that really makes sense IMO.
If even a quarter of the reports of financial mis-management were true, someone generating real reports might have meant that the "reconstruction" money might actually have gone towards reconstruction.
And that would never do...
Vic.
> Which should be none.
Yes.
But at the same time, the number of applications running as root and exposing a command line on the network interface should also be none[1]. As we can see here, "should be none" is insufficient :-(
I despair of the number of applications that want to be installed setuid or with 777 permissions everywhere; it is almost never the right solution. But far too much code is developed by lazy coders[2] who can't be bothered to think through the security issues...
Vic.
[1] sshd is an exception, of course, but it needs to be set up witha good deal of consideration...
[2] And I use the term quite wrongly.
> they revolutionised it and made some big jumps forward,
Even if that is true - and I'm taking no position on that - any such improvement does not of itself mean that others may not make exactly the same improvements.
Apple may patent their own inventions. They may not patent someone else's inventions that they got working, although they might be able to patent the method by which they got them working.
Vic.
> you will squirt that crap when someone invents warp drive and the transporter
If someone patents a working method for warp drive, then that will be fine.
If someone patents *any machine that effects warp drive*, then that will be invalid because of the vast amounts of prior art.
So it is with Apple - patents on things they have actually invented are fine. Attempting to patent the tablet computer is not, because of all the prior art. Most of the Apple patents we've seen lately fall into the latter category...
Vic.
> have 3 OSs: server, IT and consumer
I disagree.
What Microsoft *should* have done - were they interested in their users' happiness - would be to have a choice of desktops - the "classic" style from W7, and TIFKAM. That way, users can pick what they want, rather than putting up with what they're given.
The various 3rd-party desktop replacements show how easy this could have been. That MS has chosen not to offer this option has several implications, none of which are especially flattering...
Vic.
> But passing on second hand books to people not as gifts is not
Yes it is. It's codified in most jurisdictions under names like "First Sale Doctrine".
Publishers might want such rights to go away, but they do not have the ability to remove them, even if they do say "all rights reserved"; in truth, they are only reserving those rights they already had, and the ability to prevent someone selling his own possessions is not amongst that list.
vic.
> Google will see its way clear to do Android Desktop for businesses?
Doesn't need to be Google. The code is available, you could do it yourself...
I won't be. I like my Android phone, but I wouldn't want an Android desktop (although Android widgets on the desktop might be cool).
Vic.
> That's not really giving the Kalashnikov much credit.
Ooh, ooh, ooh; want to learn how to defend yourself against Kalashnikovs, do we? Getting all high and mighty, eh? Fresh fruit not good enough for you, eh? Well let me tell you something my lad! When you're walking home tonight and some great homicidal maniac comes after YOU with a bunch of loganberries, don't come cryin' to me!
Vic.
I notice that all the monitors fall over simultaneously, but one PC seems to survive - until the monitor switches off again, then signal seem sto be lost.
But there is not a flicker from the lights.
This looks like they managed to interrupt the power supply, rather than the machines themselves...
Vic.
>>No. They are Linux distributions.<
> isnt that the same thing?
No.
> it seems to me linux fans are more obsessed with installing the OS not using it
You appear not to have met any.
There is plenty of traffic on the Web about installing Linux because that is what newcomers are scared of.
Once it comes to using it - well, it's all pretty straightforward and people just get on with it.
> my point is that *other* free software is not primarily distributed in torrents
So other Free Software that is an order of magnitude smaller than a full distro doesn't use torrents, whereas gert lumps of code several gigabytes wide do. Hmmm. Wonder if there's a connection in there somewhere...
Vic.
> lemme guess, they are unix variants?
No. They are Linux distributions.
> what is it with those guys? always sticking their OS's into weird places
Because they are useful.
> what stops other malicious idiots from setting up pretend torrents with bad stuff in?
Cryptography. All downloads are verifiable (and, by default, signatures are checked).
> You dont see any other open source peopl doing that like open office or GIMP
You do know that both Fedora and Debian are Free Software, right?
Vic.
> who the hell distrubtes open source software in torrnts?
Fedora
Debian
Those were the first two I checked.
> rather than for any sensible reason, eg lower hosting costs.
It's nice to see someone with true omniscience. Thank you for showing us what the above projects are actually thinking.
Vic.
> I personally hope never!
"There is a theory which states that if ever anyone discovers exactly what the Universe is for and why it is here, it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable.
There is another theory which states that this has already happened."
RIP, Douglas...
Vic.
> the jury chose to ignore prior art on all aspects of their judgements
This is because the jurr foreman apparently told the rest of the jusry that he knew the law, and they believed him. And his definitive statement - that prior art should not be considered so unless the code can run on the exact same platform - is abject nonsense; it is not self-consistent.
the foreman should not have made any of these claims, of course; he had explicitly promised not to. And this will likely worry Apple greatly; any *legitimate* win they might have had, over and above the nonsense stuff has a good chance of being thrown out because of this man's actions.
Vic.
> It really is cack isn't it?
Yep.
The big problem, IMHO, is that the broadcasters want to keep quite a lot of screen space for video / advertising, so there isn't actually much content per page. As a result, you get more page reloads than under the old Teletext system.
This seems to be caused by the enormous startup/shutdown times of the MHEG decoder, meaning that flipping back to video isn't as easy as in thje Analogue days[1].
I've worked on many STB designs. A core part of the specification for a great many of them[2] is that they do VBI insertion. Sadly, no-one seems to use this in the final product :-(
Vic.
[1] Although some do have a fast-blank capability.
[2] I don't know if it's all of them.
> "We're using the kit that you spec'd ..."
I *never* say that.
i always use something like "The kit specifically required by document <blah>". Then, when pushed on the question of "well, who wrote that document?", I have to mention that my memory is not what it once was, and I'd have to look that up.
All the time, the git in the corner who actually specified the crap is turning puce. It's about this point where he finally owns up (as he's going to get found out anyway...)
Vic.
> they couldn't guarantee that they would run a server purely in the EU. Which means American data protection laws.
Where the server is run is essentially an irrelevance; the Patriot Act means that the US Govt can demand the data anyway[1]. I can't imagine any US-based company refusing to comply with that...
Now you could argue that Data Protection is more than just protection from the government. And I would remind you which com=ountry we're talking about :-(
Vic.
[1] http://www.zdnet.com/blog/igeneration/microsoft-admits-patriot-act-can-access-eu-based-cloud-data/
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