Posts by The BigYin 3080 publicly visible posts • joined 25 Mar 2008
You don't need to prove anything if stating an opinion. So long as you don't stray into hate-speech or incitement of some.
"Les Miserables was a bad movie"
HALT CITIZEN! TO HOW MANY DECIMAL PLACES WAS LES MISERABLES A BAD MOVIE?
"Err...what?"
Not going to happen.
$999 is £770-ish (including taxes; no keyboard) add the keyboard and the device weighs in at a smidge under £900 (again with taxes included).
The ASUS Transformer Infinity (with keyboard) is around £715, but the Surface Pro has more juice.
A similarly spec'd Clevo would come it at £750-ish; but it's hard to get a like-for-like match.
For comparison, a Lenovo ThinkPad Twist is £940 with 128GB SSD, but a lower res screen.
So all in all, whilst it might be towards the high-side, the price isn't too bad for a mid range, enterprise ultrabook (which is what this is).
And the entire planet struggles to give a fuck.
Although...it might be nice to install GNU/Linux on to it (assuming drivers can be found) as the design of the hardware (if not the specs) is pretty nice. Being x86 based, it must be possible by MS's diktat to disable SecureBoot/add keys.
Company launches robot mining droids into space.
Mines an nice bit of iron.
Government demands tax on profit from selling iron.
Company points out that they can, at will, drop that iron from orbit on top of the capital city ("Project Thor" style).
Government whimpers and offers them knighthoods instead.
Lance Armstrong was a drugs cheat. We know this now.
But wasn't almost every other top-flight racer in his time also a drugs cheat? Wasn't the problem actually systemic rather than just a few rouges?
Are drugs still rife in cycling? I assume they are, but I genuinely don't know.
No system can be 100% secure indefinitely as over time a "secure" system will become insecure due technology progressing. So let's take "secure" to mean "invulnerable to the best-effort attempt available at the moment".
Ben Tasker gets closer to what I meant. I wasn't talking about F/OSS as such, just that security by obscurity is useless. It's useless because the user (i.e. the customer) is unaware what vulnerabilities exist and is thus unable to mitigate them.
Let's take a more mundane example. Your front door probably has a Yale-style lock. It is "secure"? As in, is it anti-bump, anti-snap, anti-pick and anti-drill? How do you actually know? From the packaging? Or from details on how the lock works and its design?
The former is security by obscurity, the latter is full disclosure. For example, anti-snap can have the weakening cur from the top to the bottom, or the bottom to the top. One of these designs is almost certainly worthless, the other is better; which is which? How can you know unless the details of how ant-snap locks work is in the public domain?
Now let's come back to Thales. If we know all the details on how the Thales system works, based on our knowledge of good security design and procedures which should all be in the public domain we can maybe say "I know how this lock/system works, and I am satisfied that when it engages it will remain secure". It also allows us to take mitigating actions should a vulnerability exist. Or you just believe the hype (*cough*Medeco*cough*). Luckily you can find out all about this (at the moment). Imagine how things would be if only the bad guys knew? And only the bad guys would know because the good guys would be too scared to discuss it in case they ended up in jail.
Oh and something else to consider, if you are relying on the packaging of your locks, your insurance might be invalid (even if it claims to meet the correct standards); so that £15 lock you just got from the DIY store might end up costing you an awful lot more.
"oh come on...*nobody* is proud to pay tax. Everyone resents it."
Newsflash - some people don't mind paying. I enjoy having roads, the NHS etc. Makes life that much easier. I am quite happy to pay my fair share (we can argue about "fair" if you like).
The thing I resent is our MPs spunking my cash into their pals' wallets through tax-avoiding PFI deals. All PFI deals need to stop. Now.
Maybe we need a campaign like "Patriots pay taxes", "Proud to pay my tax" or something.
Local traders could display it in their windows (or their websites) and the likes of Amazon, Google, Starbuck, Vodafone, Tesco etc wouldn't.
Of course, it would be better if MPs tightened up the tax laws to negate such chicanery in the first place.
Now I can ask my friends without needing to ask my friends?
Is it just me, or is Facebook trying to drive a wedge into norma human interactions. A wedge it can then copyright, patent and monetise.
I knew there was a reason I didn't have a Facebook account. I have this quaint habit of talking to people.
The patent should go to the Open Innovation Network, thus protecting other organisations from future threats (e.g. from the successful defendant). Basically...you troll, you will be open sourced.
If the court finds a patent to be invalid (e.g. poorly written or whatever) then the patent office should face censure, up to and including the people responsible losing their jobs. And if they can't be identified, you go to the management level (gross incompetence). And if you can't identify the managers, go to the executive layer.
All PFI is, is a way to take money from the poor (via taxation) and hand it to the rich. It should no longer form any part of any state enterprise. And all these "private partners being paid by results" need to go to; it's the same kind of scam.
As for wind power...utterly useless (expect in a very few cases) and it will remain so until we have a way of storing the power for when the wind does not blow. Liquefying air, making fuel from H20 and CO2, pumping water uphill or whatever; unless we can store it, there's no point in having it.
Unless we want to be like Germany and have to import dirty coal power.
And, of course, wind power isn't very green; just ask the bats.
...now I'm not. A battery life of 10 hours is utterly ludicrous. What is it with this obsession in making phones the size of monoliths? Have our hands and pockets trebled in size or something? The battery for these things has got to be measured in days, and weeks for standby. If it's not, then it's not fit for purpose.
I'm still looking for a new phone, but there is nothing on the market. It's like laptops - all 16:9 1366x786 glossy screens and thus utter shit. Wrong aspect ratio, dreadful DPI., wrong finish. 16:10 matte screens are the only sensible choice.
Why is technology racing forward on the one hand,but engaged full reverse in the other?
That German FO switch was more about politics (as there was a power shift in Germany) than practicalities from what I understand, especially given this from the story you link:
"All that despite McKinsey confirming in 2009 that the German Foreign Office had splurged less cash on its individual IT workspaces then any other federal authority in the country while running a Linux desktop shop."
Although understanding anything a government does is difficult at the best of times.
We can cite stories back and forth, but that doesn't change anything. Whilst people use MS only formats (e.g. Office Open XML*) and MS only code (i.e. anything that only runs on Windows); then MS have you by the balls. If organisations spec open standards and portability, they have a much better bargaining position and can keep their costs down (even if they ultimately remain on Windows).
*Before some Windtard chimes in, yes; I do know that in theory Office Open XML is an ISO standard and in theory an open standard. The actuality of that is, however, rather different (e.g. the "openness" only applies to a specific version of ooxml). The only true open standards IMO are those spec'd by OASIS (e.g. odf).
By "portable" I mean you can take yer J2EE mega app running under JBoss on Windows and drop it on to JBoss on GNU/Linux and it will just work. Unless some ass-hat coder has made explicit assumptions about file-paths and other resources.
If have been that ass-hat coder.
(Sorry about that)
If you are a customer and you do not spec portability...then you are spec'ing "Please lock me into one specific vendor who can gouge me forever more."
@Chris Miller - Yeah, one could save on licensing but I am going to bet that HMRC doesn't really use vanilla Office (if they use that at all for doing your taxes; the UK taxes managed in Excel? *shudder*); it will have custom apps (probably Windows only) and add-ons for Office (Windows only).
Whilst it would be nice for HMRC to be out from under the yoke of MS, the savings from licensing etc. probably don't give a quick enough return over the re-implementation costs. I don't know, I don't have the figures. Picking any solution purely on dogma rather than prudent considerations is almost certainly going to cause one problems.
What, maybe, HMRC could threaten MS with is moving their back-end away from Windows. e.g. Samba 4 instead of Active Directory. Or CentOS rather than Windows Server (assuming they aren't using SQL Server, of course). HMRC could push this even further by still running Windows etc, but commissioning new applications/services that can be migrated from platform-to-platform (e.g. JBoss, Apache or whatever instead of IIS, Java, Mono, Python etc instead of .Net). In fact, I would strongly suggest that engaging new projects in such a manner is the correct decision, as it make future negotiations that much easier.
And thus, F/LOSS does its job. Maybe not directly, but it makes it harder for the monopoly incumbent to gouge the customer (and thus us, in this case).
Did a run in a Windows VM on a different PC (I had upgraded the host from FF 17 to FF 18 already). Host is almost the same as above, save it runs Windows 7 and has a 3.1GHz Core 2 Duo
FF 17 - 263ms
FF 18 - 312ms (18% slower)
So I don't know where Mozilla is getting their "25% JavaScript speed boost" from, guess I should have held-off on the upgrades and checked out the V8 benchmark. Can someone else run these before an after upgrade?
...I hang up. If I get a human, I waste their time for as long as I can. Strangely enough, I don't really get any nuisance calls. Maybe I am on a "Don't call this number, the guy is on to us" list?
(WARNING: Incoming F-bombs)
What I want stopped, ***NOW*** are these fuckers texting me about PPI. Seriously, fuck off.
To add to AC, I have a TV that works (but is not smart). I can afford £30 if I want smartness, I can't afford £500+ and I do not want to be locked into the restricted services provided by the OEM.
Also, my guess is that devices like this will be hacked to provide even more functionality than a TV OEM would ever want to give you.
Just because the Sudan is bad, does not mean Israel is also not bad. There isn't some finite amount of badness that can exist in the world, us humans have an infinite supply.
The Palestinians have committed acts that are repugnant. This is without question. And so has Israel, this is also without question. Recognising that Israel has committed such acts does not make one an anti-Semite, it makes one a realist.
I am sorry if people who do not view Israel with your pious view offend you.
"Copies of the electoral rolls compiled constituency-by-constituency would all be stored unedited with the credit referencing agencies."
This is my data, that I have provided under threat of legal sanction. Do I now have to pay these private companies £10+ a month to be able to check the veracity of my data? Screw that.
"GDS have appointed seven "identity providers", one of them being Mydex."
So we need to ensure compatibility, security and reliability by demanding that the data and protocols used be 100% open (and I mean, free & open; not the MS patent-infested idea of "open") up-to and including a private individual being able to host their own, personal identify service (this is perfectly feasible by going down to, say, a post office and submitting the various keys along with primary ID). A failure to provide this is to disempower the public and have them held hostage to private concerns.
Want to check you data? Pay up or shut up, bitch.
Oh and one last thing; should any of these private companies be compromised, I want to see the executives held personally and infinitely liable for all losses suffered by persons breached and all fines levied. In the exact same way banking professionals are not. Why so stringent? Simple. These people only understand money, so the only way to make them behave and not profiteer is to put their wallets on the firing line.
But wait! No business will agree to those terms and the service won't be provided! Well, I have no problem with that either. We truck along right now quite happily.
Define "terrorism". Setting a bomb on the public street? Sure, we can all agree that that is terrorism. But our state goes much further than that and the laws pass (potentially) from protection into oppression. Sometimes that person saying the thing you don't like and don't want to hear is saying the thing you need to hear.
The Tories and Labour are cut from the same cloth; they want all the power for their rich Etonian friends, but none of the responsibility; is it any wonder the minor (and some rather repugnant) parties are gaining traction? The country is screwed because of Labour and Tory policies over the past 20 years (i.e. PFI), we know this; just be honest, swallow your party pride and fix the problem.
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