Posts by h4rm0ny

Re: Harry @h4rm0ny

>>"I've no independent knowledge; is Survation believed to be ideologically biased or merely highly adaptable based on paymaster?"

Well I have heard a couple of politicians (different parties) refer to Survation in much the same tones I would use to refer to Visual Basic so I'm partly drawing it from that. Note, this wasn't in an interview or public statement, it was just casual conversation. Politicians actually can be honest when the cameras aren't on them and they know their comments wont be used to attack them next week. It was just that "after hours" sort of chatting if you know what I mean. But the other aspect is their UKIP polling was definitely way off which I saw first-hand. And not in the way pretty much everyone's was off this election, but in a really suspiciously skewed way making it look like UKIP had chances of winning seats that they were never, ever going to come close to. I was suspicious when I saw it, but reserved judgement until after the results came in. It was, imo, definitely misrepresentative.

>>"i.e. I think it's worth repeating that the idea that a majority of people definitely want out but that our national politicians are the obstacle has no compelling evidential basis."

I get your point now. I may have misread your post. Yes, I don't know any compelling evidence that people would vote to leave in a referendum. However, something like this is notoriously hard to predict. It's actually harder to predict by polling, I have been told, than a General Election. And we saw how well that went. The Tories will do their best to stage manage any referendum and time it to get the result that they want as much as they are able. I am strongly against leaving, though on principle, I have to support there being a referendum, even though it would be nerve-wracking for me.

>>"I hear the same argument in Norway, but I fail to see the wisdom. "And then what?" is a question that springs to mind. You increase the population by immigration, and then... Ok, you have a bigger population, now who is going to keep things running, change bedpans, and so forth, for the next generation? You have not solved the problem, only postponed it (while increasing its size)."

Life is always a game of staying just ahead of the axe. Are you suggesting we don't deal with this generation's problems because the solution doesn't also deal with the next generations? Who knows what the answer is - maybe one more generation covered will buy us a bit more time to create robot servants and exosuits or improve health after forty for much longer. Who knows.

>>"I am not familiar with the situation in the UK, but in Norway we have long since passed the point where we can sustain ourselves. Our food industry is now a drop in the ocean and we are dependent on importing food in order to survive"

Norway has a very low population density. It could easily sustain itself in terms of food if it wishes. The reason it doesn't is because it has a highly educated population and is very modern due to fortuitous oil reserves and therefore it makes far more sense to simply buy in food from abroad. That's what trade is for - so that you can focus on producing the Opera web-browser or whatever it is you do over there, and via the wonder of modern money, exchange high-value exports for cheap imported food and have enough left over for one of the highest standards of living in the world. Do NOT make out that your importing of food is some sort of dire constraint that puts you on a knife edge. You import food for the same reason I buy it at the supermarket rather than grow my own. And if immigration adds to your country's GDP (which it has done by filling jobs the educated and affluent Norwegians done want to do), then that just gives you more money to import more food.

>>"and fwiw: I will happily sacrifice our liberal social security system"

I'm going to take a wild guess here and say that you personally don't need social security. So perhaps you should pick a word other than "sacrifice".

Re: Harry

>>"A Survation poll"

I'm not sure any polling company qualifies as reliable, but Survation bring a new low. I saw UKIP pamphlets backed up with Survation "figures" showing the huge numbers of people planning to vote for UKIP which turned out to be grossly exaggerated to how many actually turned out. Or if in some technical / wording sleight of hand that isn't what they were actually saying, it was certainly the impression that was deliberately created. I've also heard pretty bad things about their neutrality elsewhere.

Re: The UK can leave

>>"h4rm0ny - I think you might be violently agreeing with the OP."

Ah, you're right. I missed that they were talking from the perspective of someone outside the UK. That probably also impacts me correcting their grammar over the "more easier" part too. :(

Apologies to the OP. I misread your post as being from the British point of view.

Re: "how stupid will British economic policy be if it does leave the EU?"

>>"So why are banks so different?"

I'll take a stab at this one otherwise Tim Worstall might reply with something I actually agree with and that would make me feel a little sick in my mouth.

There are two reasons that "banks" are different. Possibly three though the last is more arguable. The first and clearest distinction is that it is our money in there. I don't think anyone in living memory in the UK recalls a proper banking collapse. I'll put it succinctly: imagine going to your bank or cashpoint today and seeing a message saying "this bank cannot afford to give you your money. Your savings are lost". Literally, you cannot access your money because it no longer exists. And to those reading this who have debts, keep in mind that those wont be gone - they are assets that will be seized by the banks creditors and you'll now owe your money to some other entity.

Once you've got your head around the idea that your high-street bank simply vanishes with all your savings and what that would mean for many people, there's item number two.

Now purely investment banks don't necessarily tie into the first reason; that only ties into some of the banks. Reason number two applies to all and it is that the banks were viable businesses. What do you do when you see a viable business that is suddenly in crisis and available super-cheap? Yep, you buy it. At least you do if you have lots of money or credit. This is what the UK government did with those they bailed out (Northern Rock being an exception and an older case). The UK government is actually profiting from the RBS bailout. Effectively, they bought low and sold high. And that's because the nature of the banking crisis was not one of a business that was no longer viable, but one that had gotten itself into a crisis situation.

Now whether the bankers running those companies should have got bonuses is a whole different question and one which I imagine most people here can answer quite succinctly. But the principle of bank bailouts itself has sound underpinnings.

The third argument is the more arguable. "Too big to fail" is a dangerous phrase and as a capitalist, one that makes my skin crawl. But there is an element of truth there. The West's economy was teetering on the brink of a major slide. Worst case scenario, a catastrophic one. The banks that we're talking about, are a large part of the economy and if they collapsed it would certainly result in big repurcussions. Now I'm not going to strongly argue this one - look at Iceland. They let things collapse and have rebuilt. I'm inclined to attribute a big part of that to the fact that they have a small and very educated population which gives them strong foundations on which to rebuild. I'm not sure the UK would be so fortunate. However, there are good arguments for letting markets correct themselves and I'm kind of in favour of that generally. Otherwise there's a risk that you're merely delaying the problem and making it worse when it does happen. But I do acknowledge that there impact of their collapse would have been huge and resulted in a lot of economic suffering.

So to conclude, those are the principle reasons why the banks were different to other companies and why (imo) bail outs were justified.

Re: information free

>>two pages to say "we don't really know" and "it all depends".

Actually, I read it more as

1. "economists say that we'd be poorer out of the UK".

2. "but they concede that it's not a 100% certainty"

3. Therefore ignore it and leave the EU.

It's amusingly similar to climate change arguments a lá "they think a bad thing will happen", "they don't have precise and concrete predictions," "therefore ignore it".

Which is amusing because I'm actually a semi-skeptic of AGW so it's instructive to see myself from the outside for once. :D I guess it *is* possible to learn something from a Worstall article after all!

Re: Economist's predictions

>>"When was the last time that an economist's predictions for fifteen years in the future were correct?"

Economists make accurate predictions often (though precise is a different matter). However, for every economist there is an equal and opposite economist and they are selected by governments (and journalists) on the basis of which tells you what you want to hear.

Re: Human rights aren't EU

>>"The Human Rights Act, the European Court of Human Rights, this is nothing to do with the EU. Or at best, something only partially. They actually come from the Council of Europe (which is not the same thing as the European Council)."

This is sophistry. They are intimately tied together and either you have a very superficial understanding of this or you are deliberately misdirecting.

The European Council and the European Union are separate bodies, which is as you have stated. But the EU court (part of the EU) is expected to accede to the Convention on Human Rights (what we're talking about) and the Treaty of Lisbon includes binding by the European Council's court. They are meant to work together and this is explicit in the treaty. Signing the European Convention on Human Rights is now a condition of membership to the EU, even though they are separate bodies. One can sign up to the act without being a member of the EU, but the reverse is not the case anymore and has not been for some time.

All of the above is verifiable fact and your attempting to portray them as distinct is dishonest. They are not the same thing, but they are tied together very closely. And UKIP (your party) has a stated goal of withdrawing from the Convention on Human Rights as well. You're posting things that are factually true but grossly misleading and stripped of context. Which is an increasing occurrence with you.

Re: Ha! Ha! Ha!

It's depressing that nine people so far have modded you up for that. You're looking at the Windows end of it (this whole thing is a tool for managing GNU/Linux from Windows). Go here:

http://blogs.technet.com/b/privatecloud/archive/2014/05/19/powershell-dsc-for-linux-step-by-step.aspx

Unless Yum has become part of the install process on Windows, this is where you should be looking for the GNU/Linux end of the integration. I mean I get the general superiority complex most technical people have, but seriously what was going through your mind? That MS had released a big GNU/Linux tool without stopping to check at any point if it would install on GNU/Linux? Did you really think that somehow they had missed this critical flaw which you'd just noticed? And for all the people who reflexively upvote gibberish just because it sounds like its mocking Microsoft, shame on the lot of you.

Re: System Requirements

>>"One of the requirements is a Win machine to extract the file. Why not a tarball? Is the source available? Upgrade fees?"

To quote a great woman: "Did IQ's just drop sharply, while I was away?"

It's a collection of Powershell scripts hosted on GitHub and you would normally obtain them via GIT. The link is right there in the (short) article. And if you're talking about the GNU/Linux client, you can install it with a package manager (e.g. Yum) and it's Open Source under a licence that is actually more permissive than the GPLv2 (basically do anything you want so long as you include the original copyright notice).

MS have been selling Linux boxes for a long time. Log into Azure, select a Linux image - voila. MS have always had one single goal: they'd like your money please.

MS want Azure to be the most successful Cloud infrastructure provider. Many customers want GNU/Linux in their Cloud, therefore MS have offered it for quite a long time now. And they actually do a fine job of it.

When I saw the headline, I thought it was about porting Powershell to GNU/Linux and was all set to write a post about how the non-OO nature of GNU/Linux makes PS a lot less worthwhile than on Windows (which is OO from the ground up). But actually this is just about rolling support for them into the standard tools which makes a lot of sense.

Re: *Whose* code? @ David Dawson

>>"I don't know what the definition of "theft" is where you are, but it certainly wouldn't pass muster here in the UK"

Most people's definition of theft is taking something that doesn't belong to them without permission.

--someone in the UK.

Re: Office 2007 is fine

>>"First, this is wrong, as I'm pretty sure the numbers after "row" and "col" are variable (one entry for each combination)"

True, but modern compression techniques handle that. If you have a sequence like the following:

Then compression will pull out the like parts and just preserve the sequence of the row numbers and how they fit into it. But it will actually go further. If it recognizes a simple sequence (e.g. incrementing by 1 each time), then it will codify that sequence instead.

The people who write compression algorithms are very, very smart. Both you and I could probably write something that does what I just described. So why expect someone who does it professionally not to? It takes a modern processor almost no time at all to expand a compression technique such as I just described. Compared to image compression, it's child's play.

The OP was very wrong to suggest that this was "bloated" because they'd completely forgotten that docx is a container format that is compressed as standard.

>>"Second, compression is not an excuse for something that could be solved by a less crappy format (Keeping the XML and adding a simple rule like "Saving : Empty cells are not be saved. Loading : If a cell is not defined in the file then it's considered empty" would do the trick)"

Have you actually tried this? I just created an workbook in Excel 2013. I put data in rows 1,2,3 and 5 and saved it. I then unpacked the file using 7zip and had a look.

Within the <sheetData> element are <row> elements each with an "r" attribute which is clearly the row number. I have enties for 1,2,3 and 5 but no row element for 4. So it seems it actually does do what you suggest. Probably there is something that the OP omitted to mention such as special formatting or references or similar. Or come to think of it, they're talking about Office 2007 which is eight years old and uses the very crap version of .docx that was rushed through ISO for marketing reasons. At any rate, modern versions of .docx omit the elements where possible - I've just checked.

But that "where possible" is important. If you add custom rules as you suggest, then you can quickly reach the point that it is no longer valid XML and then you create interoperability problems for third parties. And one of the big deals with .docx unlike their old proprietary formats, is that it is a standard that is open and can be used by third parties. Having your formats be valid XML is a MAJOR boost to that. You can't just decide you don't want to represent some of the XML elements because you feel like it. And as pointed out, they have minimal effect on file size due to modern compression techniques.

Re: Office 2007 is fine

>>"I checked out the XML behind a bloated xlsx and I shit you not, in 2 sheets there were a million+ rows all coded a bit like this "<row 5><col 1>{empty}</col 1></row 5>""

The thing is, that's uncompressed. Once you zip that up, it's no longer a pile of characters, it's (in simple terms) one instance of that string with an integer saying repeat one million times. So what you're going "LOL" at is very far from what is actually being passed around as an actual .docx file being passed around. Remember that a .docx file is a compressed archive.

This sort of thing also is part of the reason you can have this as Open Standard. If it was pure binary, as the old proprietary Office formats were, that would be a lot harder.

Re: Someone won against Microsoft

Yes, but if someone comes along and tells you that you have to change the name of one of your most recognized brands just because, you're kind of put in the position of having to defend that. People don't invest in brand names just because they like to waste money - it can result in very material gain or loss. Let's face it, Kraft could produce generic knock-offs of most of Cadbury's line-up, but they were still willing to throw lots of money their way because that name guarantees them sales.

Anyway, this case isn't really about MS vs. Murdoch. It's really a judgement on how stupid we think people are. Confusing Skype and Sky because the first three letters are the same? I'm never letting anyone cook me Shitake Mushrooms if the verdict comes back that the humanity really has become that stupid.

Re: Hardly a bug, is it...

>>Now he regrets not listening to me because there are still people that think less of him and he has not gotten the promotions and respect he deserves."

The blame should lie with prejudiced people, not with the victim.

I would not have thought of it myself. But if I were an engineer working on this aspect of the watch and considering test cases, I think it would be entirely reasonable to have criticized me for not considering this. Tattoos are pretty common things, even on wrists.

Re: Hardly a bug, is it...

>>"Tattoos are just a naff fashion statement for trend sheep"

Oddly enough, I have never heard anyone judge a person they don't know for not having tattoos. It seems to be the preserve of a certain sub-set without who get to pontificate on the moral / intellectual / social status of others based on this.

And on principle, I tend to reserve my contempt for those that stereotype and judge others, not those who don't.

Re: Hardly a bug, is it...

It's like the Daily Mail in here, some days. They might as well have thrown in a reference to hoodies or that terrible music kids listen to, today.

Seriously - you're prejudiced against people with tattoos? Why?

Re: Pedanting...

>>"just as humans are different enough to be considered distinct from apes"

When did that happen? I was always taught (and considered) humans to be part of the group named "apes". Is that no longer accepted as standard view?

Re: You need to see the questions for context

Am I the only one who read the question and thought: "But humans are animals" ?

>>"On the other hand, considering the reach Debian and its derivatives has into the overall Linux user-base, they could have simply informed the relevant developers that systemd would not be supported so either the apps work without a systemd dependency or they don't work."

That's not really how Linux distros work. Whether they include it by default or not, systemd will be available as a package to install. They can't and wouldn't stop that. I mean they could do a sort of soft block by not including it themselves, but it would be trivial for someone to create a .deb package and share it. All that would be accomplished by that approach would be mildly poorer security (have to trust an extra unofficial repo). And like I said, it's not really the Open Source way to stop people installing software if they want it.

So systemd is available for Debian regardless. In which case, how exactly are they going to go round all those projects using it and tell them not to use it?

Yes, I agree that Debian was the last sane person in the kingdom and now they've thrown in their lot with the lunatics because it was increasingly impossible to fight them. But I'm not sure, without major and dedicated resource, they could have.

Unfortunately.