@hamoboy
No it wasn't a review. It was a preview based on a hands-on at a launch event - the clue was in the it under the title. It would be really stretching it to put a score to that.
3432 publicly visible posts • joined 11 Jun 2009
In addition, my 2c:
1. Late to market with a lacklustre (albeit anecdotal) processor is a no-no especially when the current crop such as the ipad will be moving on to the next iteration not too far from now.
2. No SD, why? It is such a simple way to make the storage more flexible at little extra cost. You only have to look at the ipad lineup to know that it's only a simpleton that pays £80 extra for more space when £40-50 would get a high-performance (sandisk extreme pro 45MB/s) SDHC card with the same space or just over £20 for a lesser model. Make the slot SDXC and it's a real winner.
Some times I wonder whether these companies really want to depose the ipad or if they think they can just saunter in, toss up any old shit, and walk away with the spoils. Apple are control-freaks but I still haven't been swayed by what the competition is offering.
Bejeebus, at least where I am in Oz they only pay for the net i.e. if you use 90% of what you make then good on you but you're only getting paid for the 10% you export. Their tariff is also around 3 times the retail rate for feed in but that's only just over 50c (35p). To pay so much for gross production is truly heinous. If I lived in the UK I'd be replacing the roof tiles with panels that's such a money maker.
What's the payback period for say a 1.5 or 2kW system? Over here it is about 6-7 years on our house with our usage (11-14kWh/day depending on the time of year).
Townhouse, $, and Sunnyboy inverter - my guess is they're in Australia. In which case the systems are subsidised alright. $10k system for about $2.5-3k with FIT 3 x normal rate. That's a subsidy in anyone's book which is why I'm interested in what the UK payback period is for different sized systems on your average 3 bedroom house.
I'm not sure it's ever going to be environmentally worth while. I don't have any figures to hand but these things have tops 14% efficiency and probably take a fair bit of juice to created (hence the $10k normal cost). Environmental they ain't.
I would guess that the feed-in results in less being drawn from the grid locally. Seeing as pretty much every house has a fridge plus other items on standby there is always a localised need for power. Our base load is around 0.275kW, your mileage may vary, so times this by the number of premises on the local subnet.
If I were to have an argument with you in the street and beat the shit out of you (a bit of a pasting but no gbh) in front of your kids I'd probably be treated more leniently than this dude. Who would you rather was free to walk the streets? The whole response to computer crimes is OTT *when compared to* other crimes.
"It’s not going to be a “thin end of the wedge” in any serious fashion. "
You might not say that if you had an innocent site (and there have been some) on this shit-list that cannot be seen. It's utterly pointless, it's a shit implementation that any schoolkid could get around, and all it adds is latency.
"It is important to us that all Distribute.IT customers know the extent of effort to which Distribute IT have gone to rectify the damage. Distribute.IT had a very solid reputation – that comes from doing a good job for a long time."
I don't think having weak enough security for all your servers to be wiped and your online backups scrapped would count as "doing a good job for a long time". I would class it more along the lines of "pissing into the wind and eventually copping a face full". It would seem that circumstances eventually caught up with them.
"He had no material"
More importantly, he is not based in the US, his site was not hosted in the US and he did not host any infringing material thus:
1. What crime did he commit?
2. Where was this crime deemed to have been committed, and why?
3. How the fuck did you come to the conclusion US law applied and extradition was the answer?
"(It would be both tangential and unfair to point out that first, Australians pay over-the-odds for everything under the sun except coal"
I think we even pay over the odds for that. In the good old UK the current price per kWh excl VAT is 11.37p (17.43c) and in Australia it is around 19c/kWh. The UK doesn't really produce coal, may have nuclear, but I'm pretty sure imports most of its fuel. Australia has shitloads of coal and we still pay more for power. Nice! Resource rich and retail price poor. Lucky country indeed.
I cannot understand how, as the holder of a patent (shithouse one or valid one), you can go after the purchasers of an infringing item rather than the manufacturer. How is this legal? If I buy a device from company A how can I in any way be liable for any infringement it might make of company B's patents? Does the US not have any concept that the item is bought in good faith or does every consumer have to therefore check whether anything they ever buy is infringing on any patent that exists?
These sorts of legal actions should be dismissed at filing the filing stage. I can understand going after an importer to prevent the importation of an infringing device but not going after the user of said device. Utter fail.
From the point in the article, one of the main reasons that app discovery is so poor is that when looking you can browse or search by name but aren't presented with very good filtering opportunities. Sort by using rating or number of downloads, filter by price, filter by average rating etc. It may be different in the Android marketplace but the iOS app store drives me nuts.
"In your happy world of unicorn tear waterfalls and fluffy fields of marshmallow, any business that offers a service must offer it perfectly and indefinitely for free, or at least at no profit?"
No, and there's no need to be a patronising prick either. The point is you don't setup services and encourage users (or sheeplike followers with little real IT knowledge) to base their whole IT universe around them and then whip the carpet out from under their feet. It will bite you on the arse eventually and let's not forget this is a company that went tits up in the past.
"It's not as if Apple have given a years notice and given a FoC extention to current MobileMe users, or that there are similar services that are available for less, or indeed free, elsewhere is it?"
The point is that Apple make sure they tie you in to using their services and theirs alone. They know their user-base isn't the most IT literate which is why the people bought the kit in the first place as it is a damn site easier to use for the novice. Do you really think someone who uses iWeb and its hosting is going to configure a web server on a third-party host or know how to reconfigure the deployment? Is there any real reason they couldn't have kept things like the iWeb hosting part going? Really? Charge a little more maybe? No, they just couldn't give a toss.
I don't use any of their services, never have and never will, for just this reason but I at least acknowledge that there are less IT literate types that do and I don't have to belittle or patronise to get my point across.
It seems as if they don't even give a shit that a service they provided that users paid for is now discontinued thereby causing, in some cases, a shitload of woe. This sort of attitude to your customers may well earn short term record profits but long term will come back to bite you on the arse. The company went tits up before and may well do again.
As stated in the article...
""Google views the cloud as the central repository of apps, content and service intelligence into which device or browser can tap; Apple sees the cloud as more of way station between the devices it sells and the software it and its close partners have developed, to the exclusion of all others.""
Google want to search everything you have and display ads based on it and Apple wants to sell you lots of hardware and hope that by allow automatic device syncing they can sell you one of everything. Two different business models, two different approaches. Now if Google's offering was based around encrypted data whereby you hold the key then that may be something, but then they couldn't search it could they?
"NO. You missed the point."
"1. Say the x86 system mentioned costs $500,000 while the RISC system costs $1,500,000. If you bought two x86 systems and ran them in parallel, assuming a 10% overhead for synchronization, you could have the jobs run in under 3 hours and still save $500,000."
I'd say that in responding to the previous poster's banking example it is you that has unfortunately missed the point. These people aren't numpties sat there running sequential batches. I can assure you that where tasks can be run in parallel they are. However that only gets you so far after which you need to up the hardware and it is this fixed window issue that the original poster is referring to as if they could run a job more cost effectively then believe me they would as any spare cash goes in some fat bastard's bonus pool. Ergo throughput is still king no matter (within reason) what the cost is.
"Organisations that have Unix skills are similarly unwilling to move to a new server architecture and operating system at the same time (although if they are using packaged software and migrating to a new version, this kind of transition can be done less painfully than actually porting home-grown applications from a Unix box to a Windows or Linux system)."
The bank I used to work for moved their realtime risk system from Solaris/Websphere to Linux/JBoss due to the fact they could have many more machines to share the load and pay a lot less for the privilege.
To me the beauty of it (as well as cloning, snapshots etc), is the ability to have this hybrid hardware whereby you could be running Windows 7 desktops on a piece of server hardware by day then flicking over to Linux/Windows server by night for batch runs. The fact that some consultant monkeys are now spouting cloud this and cloud that is irrelevant. IT shops have been using this since before the snakeoil salesmen came to town and still will after all the buzz and bullshit has died down.
"Many of those who are concerned about the data security in the cloud actually I run servers in their own office, ready to be stolen physically, or be destroyed by fires or floods (you would assume that it's common sense not to put servers into the basement of building in proximity to rivers, but you're wrong there)."
They have every reason to be concerned about cloud data. It doesn't matter what certification Amazon have they've already lost user data with an outage so relying on the cloud is no different from relying on in-house hardware as you still need multiple copies of your data. At least in-house if you encrypt a backup then send it off site you know it's encrypted. Send it to Amazon and who really has it? Can a sysadmin there make a copy?
At times it sickens me as what I'd term a monkey-dev (jack of all trades but certified master of none) that I know more about IT than a lot of the sysadmins and desktop architecture guys I deal with. The reason being as you state that a lot just view it as a 9-5 (6-2, whatever) whereas I like to dabble to satisfy my curiosity of desiring to know how something works or whether OS A has more to offer than OS B etc. Another thing seems to be that they are interested in getting terms on their CV whereas I'm more concerned with getting shit out the door that solves a need/problem.
I think you'll find that these days people are downloading very good quality pirated music. Back in the old days of eMule 128kbps CBR mp3 was commonplace. Nowadays, as a previous poster mentioned, the quality is 320kbps VBR mp3 or FLAC.
If I were you I wouldn't worry about it as the type of person who downloads a 96 ain't ever intending on buying it so you should be grateful for the pennies that Apple may be dishing out as that particular freetard otherwise wouldn't be handing over anything. If you don't like that then I'm afraid it's off to court or supply a better business model i.e. don't use apple and so get more than pennies but don't ever expect a freetard to pay as it's not in their nature.
"Even for people who download 16/44.1 FLACs, they can still get a guaranteed, 10-device-synced version of the file for their iDevices and have it legitimately tied to their Apple ID as long as they pay the almost token sum of $25 a year."
Am I reading that you'd prefer them to pay for music per copy per device? If so then you are part of the problem of the music industry if not then can you explain how you'd like multi-device syncing to work?
Indeed the concept of Facebook being able to genuinely ID anyone makes the whole story seem as if it was meant to contain enough buzzwords and phrases such that the Government's press release scores top result in Google. Has the Government started trying to collect Google ad revenues on its sites?
"Right now, these are dark days for .NET, because Microsoft now seems to be positioning HTML and Javascript as the new universal runtime."
I can just see the enterprise - one of, if not, the largest users of .Net - switching from the .Net framework to some bag of bollocks based on HTML5 and JS. It may well get more people writing on the platform, it may even become a universal runtime (if they don't start putting proprietary/platform dependent hooks in it for speed), but it won't kill off .Net for the people that actually use it.
A certain Fawlty Towers episode where the Colonel discusses with Basil the time he took a date to the cricket. Certain terms were used in the description of the match participants that wouldn't be acceptable now but were on broadcast tv then so attitudes certainly do change. It's not as if she even used the actually word itself it is just implied. The complainant is clearly a puritanical twunt themselves.