* Posts by Tom 13

7544 publicly visible posts • joined 10 Jun 2009

Free French app app booted by Apple, triggers 1m-strong petition

Tom 13
Devil

Re: Im guessing it will look very similar too

Nah, this one will have some seriously innovative re-engineering.

You know, like rounded corners.

Climate-cooling effect 'stronger than volcanoes' is looking solid

Tom 13

Re: So in other words (warning, Heretical thinking within)

If you mean real records, records like Tycho Brahe kept so that Kepler was finally able to deduce the rather simple equations which define the motion of the planets, then 'since records began' = 60 years for all practical purposes (and frankly being quite generous). Because you have to wait for the advent of satellite data before you get that sort of information.

Tom 13

Re: So what's changed?

What changed is this removes plausible deniability from the warmists denials that they haven't got a clue about what really happens with climate.

Tom 13

Re: "Fallen Angels"

Amusing perhaps, but mostly if you are the sort who runs (as opposed to hangs out at) sf conventions. Not something I'd recommend to an average Joe.

Tom 13

Re: Great news

We'll have a "full understanding of all the factors that control global climate" about 6 months after the economists have worked out the equations which define stock market prices and finally allow governments to control economic growth.

Tom 13

Re: Don't open the bubbly yet Lewis

And ozone at the surface level is considered a pollutant, while at the same time we are berated for our non-ecological attitude because we "made" a hole in the ozone layer.

Bogus gov online test tells people on dole they're just SO employable

Tom 13
Joke

Wait a minute!

Isn't a a sociopathic layabout who is violently opposed to work, totally devoid of intellect and incapable of treating other people with anything but venomous contempt exactly the sort of person The Register is looking for to write articles?

Major Dell investor cashes in ALL of its 24.5 million shares

Tom 13

So maybe Michael Dell is still nuts,

but not greedy as some had supposed when they though his bid undervalued the company.

Make cool shows, make money: Netflix's SHOCKING TV strategy

Tom 13

Re: cancelled by the big networks for no good reason.

It's always canceled for a good reason: the money for the new contract wasn't available from the usual sources.

It was sad to learn Eureka had been canceled, but when I saw them at Dragoncon right after it happened, the cast were philosophical about it. The upfront costs are huge and the money simply wasn't there because the venture people were funding other things in which they had more interest. Remember most networks don't pay for shows, they rent them from the companies that made them. The money has to come from somewhere.

Tom 13

Re: sad to lose a series which still had legs

And the absolute worst is to see a series with a defined set of legs compressed to less than it was designed for, then watch in shock and horror when they decided to expand it back out to its intended length, only to realize they don't have enough plot left. Yes TURNER I'm looking at YOU!

Tom 13

Re: Game the system

I've gamed the system in quite a few PC games. (an early Ultima game: create a party, go into town. everybody in party hands everything they own to one guy, save. Repeat with a fresh party 3 times. Delete all the critters with no money. Form a party from the four people who had everything. Go into town. Everybody hands everything to one guy. Repeat until you have 4 guys carrying as much as the limits allow. Now go on your first quest. Eventually find the gizmo that upgrades your stats for free. Since we've already proven gold is free, we now have stats for free too.)

This was gaming the system.

Apple fanbois' accidental bonking ruled too obvious by watchdog

Tom 13

Re: I don't mind the approval in the beginning

I do.

What is supposed to happen is somebody looks at it, decides whether a reasonable man would think it is obvious. If it is obvious, patent denied. Then you proceed to do a basic search on existing patents to make sure it hasn't already been covered. Then you issue the award.

What seems to be happening is they skip the first part, probably because rich clients have sued over the 'reasonable man' standard, and moved directly to the basic search. And when they don't find a 150 year old patent on a box with rounded corners, they approve the patent.

Tom 13
Devil

Re: ...who was plagiarising a bowl of petunias...

Now there's a whale of a tail.

Crypto guru: Don't blame users, get coders security training instead

Tom 13

@JG

Look on the bright side: at least you could crush them and throw them away. I've know people with a safe full of dead drives that can't be thrown away because first you need to be able to certify that they've been sanitized. They apparently don't have the money to hire the appropriately certified mobile van crusher to stop by the office and since the drives are physically damaged, they can't run the software they would otherwise use to wipe the drives.

Tom 13

Re: If you still don't know to question that dodgy e-mail attachment

The part that gets me is that I know people with great street smarts but when they login to a PC they go stereotypical blonde.

Hedge fund invests $2bn in Microsoft, thinks Redmond is undervalued

Tom 13

Re: This needs a citation badly.

You're thinking of corporate raiders, not hedge funds. But then again so is the author, so I suppose I shouldn't blame you. Hedge funds take positions to balance risks. In theory they make money by recognizing trends more quickly than others and moving more quickly.

US Senate vote to add internet sales tax this week

Tom 13

Re: those two companies already KNOW the local tax rates

Huh?

Why?

Have you ever actually setup processing with them? They take a flat fee plus a percentage of your transaction. They don't care about sales tax.

Tom 13

@Notas Badoff

And that's just the level of complication when you assume it's static. Now add in the complexity of all 9,600 of them changing their rules whenever they want to...

Tom 13

Re: Long live...Die poor.

No, he's not. Having bought a car across state lines I can attest to the real world way in which car sales work.

This is the sort of mistake Progressives/Socialists/Communists with no real world experience frequently make. Because you think it is logical that the point of sale should always be the location at which the sales tax is collected you assume nobody has managed to lobby for special exceptions. Car sales are one of those areas, precisely because their unit cost is so high. If I have a dealership that's close to a state line and the other state has a 1% lower tax rate, I'm going to lose sales unless I can drop his rate by 1%. So I lobby my political critters to grant an exception. Since I've joined up with my competitors to ask for this break, and we account for 20-40% of the local economy, they give us the exception.

Tom 13

Re: vast majority of online retailers do far less

blah, blah, blah

The Income Tax was setup as a temporary tax on only the top 1% of income earners to pay for the Civil War/War Between the States. Seems to me it has been neither temporary nor limited since then. Even a Supreme Court ruling was only a temporary obstacle when there was money to be grabbed from the working people.

EC sends antitrust complaint to smart chip cartel suspects

Tom 13

Re: fix prices across Europe

Sounds more like a shakedown to me.

How do you tell the difference between a cartel and the market finding it's own proper pricing level? Yes, yes, you have all the theoretical economic academic stuff, but how in the real world do you tell if it is a cartel?

Answer: If you can prove meetings between vendors took place at which price points were discussed. If there aren't any such meetings, it's market, if there are, it's cartel. The problem there of course is nobody has perfect knowledge of whether such meeting occurred or if there were meetings, were they meetings to discuss interoperability standards or price setting. Which means if you are proving a cartel you basically have to have recordings of the discussions.

If you actually had the evidence of a cartel, why would you not immediately move to prosecute? You're insane if you think a negotiated settlement with no admission of wrong-doing would lead to anything other than a slightly smarter group of cartel conspirators. Hell even a conviction with hard evidence will be hard pressed to do anything other than make them smarter for next time.

Securing the Internet of Things - or how light bulbs can spy on you

Tom 13

Re: Perhaps nothing

Nah. I worked for an outfit that was trying to hawk something like this only under the home-owner's control instead of industry. Some of it was kind of cool, but none of it was the killer-app/I-gotta-have-this-for functionality thing that actually moves techies. Especially after you saw the price tag our company would have put on it. They are of course long bankrupt.

Tom 13

@Dodgy Geezer

Not entirely true. Electric companies had differential rates for power way at least as far back as the 1970s. My dad was no tree hugger, but we switched to it because it saved money. Off peak costs were about 1/3 of on peak, and we could do things like laundry in the off hours. He even put the electric water heater on a timer and insulated it, then timed it so it would be on during the off peak time and it would hold long enough to get us to the next off peak. On the rate occasion we needed to, we just went in the basement and flipped the heater back on.

These days, yes, it is mostly tree-huggers shaking down people.

Tom 13

Re: Don't fear the cowbell

If you're the opposing team in Beaver Stadium, ALWAYS fear the cowbell.

Tom 13

Re: existential fear?

No, but then I'm one of those bat-sh*t crazy 'Merkins you lot are always complaining about. I find myself repressing my natural instinct to use a high speed lead injection to remove the demon from the gene pool.

Tom 13

Re: a convincing reason for such connectivity then most people aren't going to be interested.

Bing!

I first heard someone proposing connecting a fridge to a communications channel way back in 1992. Of course the same person thought it would also be peachy keen to connect your washer, dryer, oven and vcr to the same communications channel. Now to some very, very, limited extent I could see the point of allowing these things to talk to an energy management console on the same internal network, but I never really saw the point of it being able to talk to much beyond that. Someone tried to claim it would be cool for the VCR to be able to talk to your phone because that way if you forgot to schedule recording for your favorite tv show you could call it in. Bloke never considered if you forgot to set the time, you probably also forgot to put in a tape. Granted a DVR changes the last one, but I still don't see the general need for appliances to talk to the internet.

Java still vulnerable despite recent patches

Tom 13

Re: If you can't create tech, criticize it

Nice rant, one problem.

I think the only app I ever installed that required Java was Open Office, and LibreOffice has mostly removed the requirement for that. Most of the time I (or more likely a client) need Java, it's for some web based application. Sometimes a vpn, mostly a POS accounting system. Which means on the user side of things, you're more likely to need Java FOR the browser than the safe install you developers keep talking about.

So at this point, it's not MY intelligence failure, or even my USER's intelligence failure that keeps Java on our machines.

Blackstone gives up on $25bn bid to snatch Dell from Mr Dell

Tom 13

Re: Put a stake in it

The shareholders who invested knew (or should have known) the risks inherent in investing in the stock. If they lose money, no tears here. If they make money I'll smile with them.

But if Michael Dell is trying to take it private, that means he thinks there is money to be made in it (possibly even lots of long term money), but not on the kind of quarterly (or monthly or even weekly) basis that public trading demands.

Google shakes up US utility with green power tariff

Tom 13

Re: Seems to have only gone up by 10%

10% for a 0.1% increase in production? Sounds damned expensive to me.

How much will Google pay to bring fiber to Provo, Utah? Try $1

Tom 13

Re: A bit erroneous...

Given that the loss was increasing not decreasing, the city needed to bail. They've gone from -$1.4M/year to -$2M/year with no signs of stopping let alone reversing the decline. Harrisburg, PA pulled that kind of crap year after year for 18 years on a trash incinerator plus other even more ridiculous costs trying to become a "museum tourist destination.*" Only a million or two here and a million or two there, but last year they were suing to try to declare bankruptcy (PA commonwealth law prohibits the specific path they wanted to take). So I'll at least credit Provo with having the wherewithal to stop the losses.

*yes if you are British have a good belly laugh about that one. I can't and for pretty much the same reason you can. The thought of a berg on this side of the pond that wouldn't even measure up to say Liverpool hoping to become an international museum tourist attraction... There really is nothing to say beyond that.

Dark matter researchers think they've got a signal

Tom 13

Re: Talking through a hole in my spacetime...

Please, don't try to channel amanfrommars. When he posts something we are forewarned and there is sometimes amusement to go along with the headache. Your attempt only gives me a headache.

Tom 13
Joke

Re: luminiferous ether (or is it aether?)

Ether (English, US)

Aether (English, UK)

Eather (English, AU)

[incomprehensible] (French)

Harassed Oracle employee wins case, cops huge legal bill

Tom 13

Re: should all be taken to somewhere where real abuse happens

I've often had the same thought.

Followed almost immediately by a small voice saying "Except they'd probably fit right in with the rest of the abusers, and might even surpass some of them with their vileness."

Tom 13

Re: Good!

Yes those kinds of women are out there. Based on what's been reported in this article, she doesn't seem to be one of them.

Tom 13

Re: Damages

Having dealt with "knowledgeable lawyers", no you won't. The one thing even the bad ones seem to have learned in law school is to add the disclaimer "but you never know what's going to happen when you take it to a jury" as well as the importance of making sure they can collect their fees.

I expect the earlier posters are correct: she was looking for the 'defendant is guilty as charged' part, which wasn't part of the offer. Without that, even with a substantially better payoff, there is a certain sense of 'because the defendant was filthy rich, he got away with it.' Also, once the company has made an offer, whatever small obligation they may have originally felt to contain costs is now completely gone. All they have to do is make sure they run up their end of the legal bill, and the plaintiff loses anyway.

I'm sympathetic to the "loser pays" argument I've seen floated so many times in discussions about legal reforms. And the reason given for it is that it would make parties think more carefully about their suites. I see the motivation behind the Australia rules as being the same one. The reason I haven't been able to support that argument is I foresee it having the same perverse outcome as we have in this case. The evil perps already have the best paid lawyers on speed dial, and after they're freed, the victim has to pay their legal costs too.

Ready for the car 2.0? Nvidia preps UPGRADABLE car system

Tom 13

@Neil Barnes

While I concur about the trend information, just because it's digital doesn't mean it can't present trend information. You might make it a digital dial on the dash board or display numeric information in a constantly changing stream. You might even graph something like engine temp from the time the car started. To me the major cause of concern would be the complexity of the sensor/relay/presentation interface. But, that horse fled the barn some years (possibly decades) back.

US House of Representatives passes CISPA by 288-127

Tom 13

Re: Sooner or later the People will make a line in the sand and say "this is as far as it goes".

No they won't.

What we've had in the US and Britain for the last 200 years is a rare exception to the natural state of man. The two previous instances in which men were somewhat free lasted for similar time periods. Looking through history the natural state of man is to be ruled by despots wondering if you are ever going to be safe or have enough to eat.

Most any of what happened, when it happened, or how to fix it. Because most ignore a key factor in that quote: that the rights are granted by God, whose name is now verbotten in government and in many public squares. Until that is reversed the path will be ever downward.

Microsoft betting on smaller Windows 8 devices and subscriptions

Tom 13

Re: Build it and they will come?

When MS originally release DOS, it was like a license for them to print money. It was a decent product that did what people needed it to do. And since it was a new market, over the next decades they were able to innovate and build new stuff that like DOS continued to be a license for them to print money. The problem now is that they have become confused and think they own a license to print money instead of the right to go out and compete for customers. Until that is fixed all else is futile.

Tom 13

@MattEvansC3: So what you're saying is he's holding it wrong?

How very ....

Jobsian of you.

Bad Microsoft patch trapped you in a boot loop? Here's your fix

Tom 13

Re: fail**fail

Testing those sorts of things is far more difficult than most people think about. I recall someone once asking an Intel guy (around the P4 timeframe) whether or not he stayed up nights worry about how to test those billions of connections on the CPU. His reply was something along the lines of, 'the billions of connections no, the exponentially larger possible configuration and cycles on the other hand do raise interesting issues.' If the failure affected every system it would have been caught. It's only hitting thousands of systems out of millions so it wasn't bad. Problem is it wasn't perfect, or at least far enough out on the nines to be handled as expected troubleshooting.

Tom 13

Re: the ping of death

There was another odd one out there about some lockup at a fixed number of minutes. Most companies didn't hit it because if nothing else they'd normally reboot their servers to install patches before the time at which the lockup occurred (46.67 days I think it was but not with any level of confidence). My roomie became aware of it because they had a test that needed to gather data for 100 days and this was less than half way through the test. It was a major problem for them as the test involved pressure cycling an industrial container and the test was controlling the pressure in the container.

The fast-growing energy source set to replace oil: Yes, it's coal

Tom 13

Re: TOO MANY ******* PEOPLE

Finally, a greenie who admits his real prejudices: he hates human beings and wants to kill off more than 50% of them.

Tom 13

@Graham Dawson: I think the why

isn't 'why assume the technology exists?' it is 'why assume the Chinese have built it?'

Usually the increased efficiency comes at the cost of higher price. So China gets to ramp up more quickly if they build dirtier plants. Given what we've heard about their air quality, I would bet they are opting for the faster ramp up. Whether that's because they figure they can re-invest in cleaner plants later using their increased industrial capacity, or they just don't care if the kill of a few hundred thousand people from their couple billion population is left as an exercise for the reader.

Tom 13

@itzman

Don't worry, all they have to do to correct the model is add another epicycle right over there...

Tom 13

@Ledswinger: Look on the bright side

At least you have an Energy policy to joke about. I'm told all the time that our problem here in the US is we don't have an Energy policy.

Tom 13

@AC re:ROFL

Yep. It's always amusing when the tree huggers confuse weather with climate after accusing "denialists" of making the same mistake.

Tom 13

Re: only about 40 years of proven reserves left at the current rate of use

We've had "only about 40 years of proven reserves left at the current rate of use" since 1970. It isn't a function of how much is out there that can be harvested, it's a function of companies barely plan beyond 10 years so 40 years proven reserves = infinite for their purposes.

Tom 13

Re: America's problems with brownouts

America didn't have problems with brownouts from private electric companies until after the greens but the kabosh on building coal fired electric plants and stopped all nuclear plant construction.

Vint Cerf endorses software-defined networks

Tom 13

Re: Old Age

Italian Fascism was also left week, drawing most of its tenants from socialism, which is by definition, hard left wing. Fascism was regarded as right wing by International Socialists because Fascism was a nationalist socialism. Essentially, the national socialist just weren't pure enough for the international socialists.

There are totalitarian examples on the right wing, but they are monarchists. And Monarchists (as opposed to constitutional monarchists) have mostly disappeared from the world with the exception of a few regimes in the middle east.

Move over, Mythbusters: Was Archimedes an ancient STEVE JOBS?

Tom 13

Re: 2299th birthday, surely?

Worse than that, how many days are in the year you are calculating? We've been through a number of major changes, some of them more recently than most of us think. For instance was George Washington born on February 11 or February 22?

http://www.archives.gov/legislative/features/washington/