Posts by Henry Wertz 1

Maybe it'll help?

First, I see this having nothing whatsoever to do with Steve Jobs. Just saying.

Anyway, with that out of the way.. I see a few upsides and downsides. Will this work? I don't know.

Downsides:

* Possible lack of accountability, with just a head of the whole company and no divisional heads, projects could run out of control until such a time as Balmer personally notices them, sucking up time and resources for something that looks great to those working on it, but someone with outside perspective would see as a boondoggle.

* Excessive integration. This was one big problem they had with Windows 95 -- they had DLL hell from hell, with all these what should have been seperate components HEAVILY interdependent on each other. This caused them problems for years afterwards, even after WinME/2000 (when the Win95 line was discontinued in favor of the exclusive use of the Windows NT kernel based Windows line) they ended up with a mass of shell code and junk from this and it took them years to sort this mess out, and some of it still is not sorted out.

Upsides:

* COLLABORATION. I can't find any articles now that I tried to google it, but there've been plenty of historical articles about the hyper-competitiveness between Microsoft's divisions meaning that there's no collaberation -- people will KNOW there are two groups working on, say, the code for a menu, while due to being direct competitors they will be unable to share code or even techniques with each other. If they are taking radically different techniques, it may make sense to let both "finish" then either pick one or do a merge of the best of both -- but in general, it means duplicate effort for no reason, and two medicore to "OK" implementations when they could have gotten a better implementation done faster working together.

* Fewer meetings and overhead? Maybe.

*Ability to work on more projects? I listed "lack of accountability" as a disadvantage above, but if done right a nice "skunkworks" project may be more likely to be allowed to exist this way than with divisional heads as they had before.

Please don't let this reflect on the US as a whole. Texas is the most backward, ignorant, redneck-filled portion of the entire country and they seem to be proud of it.

It is frustrating...

It is frustrating. I know (even myself living in the US) if I *EVER* decided to do "cloud" anything, I would pick a cloud service provider that operated entirely outside the United States.

Legality and fractional amounts

"This would mean cops would have had to create their own Bitcoin wallet and forcibly transfer the alleged dealer's virtual dosh to themselves. Although El Reg can't confirm that this is what the cops did, if it turns out to be true the police may be a sticky legal situation, as Bitcoin's legality in the US is far from certain."

Probably not, in undercover and sting operations, the police do all kinds of things that are otherwise illegal. Selling drugs, buying drugs, solicitation of prostitution, to name 3.

This can run into embarrasing problems -- years back in Florida, the police did a sting, so they get to that point and say "freeze!" and their cops pour in. The other guys are like "No, *you* freeze!" and *their* cops pour in -- DEA, state, county, and local cops all start pouring in and pointing guns at each other. Yes, undercover sellers and undercover buyers spent something like a year and a half tracking each other leading up to "the big bust" where they all tried to bust each other. LOL.

On a tangent, I had no idea it was possible to deal in .02 bitcoins. How does a fractional bitcoin work?

Also...

"I guess more poor per acre near the Equator (several billion compared with a few million punters in remote areas of Russia and USA - or none in the Southern Ocean)"

Also, satellite internet services already exist covering USA (and AFAIK Russia.) In US we have Starband, Hughesnet, and Exede; Exede bought WIldblue and still operate Wildblue's satellite system as well. These are of course all GEO however. As for MEO, I thought several systems were supposed to launch but they all went bankrupt.

"sorry, but that's a life lesson right there. what are you doing letting her have her own iTunes account? does she have her own mobile phone contract? credit cards?

there really ought to be a license for being a parent that you have to apply for and pass a test to qualify."

This account was prepaid, not stuck onto a line of credit. I see nothing wrong with this at all, it's just like giving them $5 or $10 spending money (except it can only be spent iTunes). It was 100% Apple's fault for unilaterally extending a line of credit that was not requested.

Anyway, how my quest, I know this was a young kid how bad do you have to be at Plants versus Zombies to blow through like £1,800 in one night?

x86 translation tech exists

"ARM should be able to come up with a way to run x86 code reasonably well and Microsoft should let them."

Solutions already exist to run x86 code well enough on ARM. Run Linux on ARM, and you can install x86 compatibility libs an run Linux for x86 apps as well -- this is using qemu as far as I know. I don't think this is highly optimized, but from what I've heard it's fast enough and good enough to run Skype, and most other Llinux apps are ARM native. LLVM would allow for higher performance (it supports various JIT optimizations and so on), and several companies specialize in high performance on the fly binary translation. Microsoft in fact bought Connectix (who made VirtualPC) so they even OWN a company that specializes in this! When Microsoft first announced WIndows RT, people just assumed an x86->ARM translation solution would be included, until Microsoft said it wasn't.

Hopefully if all these tablets are being forced upon ARM (as opposed to ARM actually wanting them..), they can wipe WinRT on them, put something useful on them, and sell them back off to the public. *shrug*

Ineffective

Indeed, a PDF or DOC file or whatever will have plain text in it. If you print an image and send that, it's just a nice clean printout using a font so I would think OCR would be 100% accurate once it's trained on the font once.

Sure is ballsy...

This sure is ballsy, I'll say that. I guess, if the notice arrived after the rise was permitted, there's no reason to get out of contract. But, T-Mobile really was willing to gamble letting EVERY. SINGLE. PERSON. out of contract if they were wrong? Stunning.

US party problems and polls

"And who could they have voted in that wouldn't stand for this behaviour from the NSA? If all the parties have the same stance on important issues like this, what has happened to democracy?"

This is exactly the problem. The Republicans and Democrats in the US act effectively as a single party, pointing fingers at each other for any problem while, on the whole, they have nearly identical views. Dems and Reps both prefer huge, expensive, and intrusive government. Both CLAIM they want to cut spending, and blame the other party for the excessive spending (but of course neither actually makes any move to cut spending even if they are dominant for a few years.) You seriously look at these parties actual behavior (as opposed to rhetoric) and they are nearly identical with just minor differences in their party lines. Both parties have now stood up to support the illegal and unconstitutional actions of the NSA. Don't blame me, I voted libertarian.

The big thing that needs to be fixed -- political polls. I have received two political polls over the phone. The first asked if I was voting Democrat, Republic, or undecided. Well, no, I wasn't voting Dem or Rep and I was not undecided, I voted libertarian. The pollster had nowhere to register my choice, I let them know they should tell their bosses the poll is invalid if it doesn't at least have a choice of "other" or "someone else". The other one was automated, and when I dialed "9" for "somebody else" it said my choice was invalid and hung up on me. These polls are then used by the mainstream media, to supposedly represent the view of the people, even though the poll is flawed. Too many people in the US pay too much attention to polls, and the polls will not even permit a third party even to show up. In a few cases, a third party candidate has gotten as high as 20% on properly designed polls, while of course not showing up (since they aren't an option) on the polls carried on the broadcast networks. I can't change people's attitudes -- people have said they really don't like who they are voting for, but they think they are "throwing away their vote" unless they vote for who they think may win. No kidding. I point out throwing away your vote is voting for someone you don't want in office, and they just look befuddled. I think this is pretty dumb, but nevertheless this means flawed polls deny 3rd parties any of these people's votes where they otherwise may have gotten some.

It's true though...

It's true though, if one is replacing a 2003 server anyway, and given Server 2012 is so different (it is, just 2003 to 2008 is pretty much entirely different and 2012 looks pretty dfferent from that...), then it makes sense to at least take a look at other options rather than just automatically buying 2012. You could save serious cash on software and server hardware too (I found Server 2008 straight-up bloated, hopefully 2012 has gone on a diet.)

H1-B system was broken

"Unless of course large US companies want to outsource to smaller US companies which build their staff mostly out of H1-B workers. But since large companies do this is order to get rid of staff, there should be plenty of local talent for these smaller companies to use instead of H1-B workers.

Or am I missing something?"

You're not missing a thing. The H1-B system was intended to allow hiring workers for positions where local workers are not available. For instance, I hear that nuclear reactor techs tend to be shipped over from Germany along with the reactors they are operating, because there are not locals trained in operation of these systems. Fair enough.

The problem is this system is widely and systematically abused. They will list a job with, say, 10 years experience in Windows 2008, C#, Fortran, Cobol, and System/360 assembly. They will reject anyone who says "no" to any of these (even the physically impossible 10 years experience with a 5 year old product), and call the person out for lying if they say "yes". This job can be listed for 1 day in tiny print in 1 town newspaper (possibly across the country from the town the job is actually in...); they don't really want people to apply, they want to show that qualified people *don't* apply. Several companies have been caught out red handed doing the impossible interviews and odd ads, but the fines never come. Then they will claim they couldn't find anyone, and go hire H1-Bs (who don't meet their requirements either of course but are willing to learn -- of course, most of the people applying were willing to learn.). This was initially done to force down wages below what locals would work for, but now is so ingrained that there are people willing to work for the lower wages (the economy is bad) and they STILL won't hire them, because they are used to hiring H1-Bs. There's large amounts of high quality IT and computer science talent sitting unused in the US because of this system.

I'm shocked (Well, not really, the US political system is broken and ineffective)... Anyway, I'm shocked that it took this long for the feds to do anything about this broken H1-B program but I'm glad they finally are. Hopefully it's effective.

I expect these Indian firms to be outraged -- they may charge the firm receiving H1-Bs a "finders fee" for finding them employees, and may ALSO charge the employees they supply a "finders fee" for finding the employees work -- it's a cash cow for them and it's at risk.

"it reads like this was the loss from investing the money he embezzled from IBM"

If he was investing on margin, he could even have lost over 100% of his original money.

But...

But... Google doesn't require this though. I've seen "de-Googled" Android tablets aplenty and know there are phones like this too. It's Google Play/Maps/Nav/Gmail package that has these restrictions. I could see this be a bundling problem, but alternate markets, mapping apps, and mail apps do exist that vendors could use.

What Mage said...

What Mage said... this technoogy causes interference, pure and simple.

Initially they thought the equipment could assess the state of the bands on it's own, and this was shown to massivey fail in several different tests. Microsoft et. al. forgot the laws of physics, that is that radio signals have fadeouts and weak spots, so if your device is in one of these spots it'll assess a channel being clear that may even have a transmitter in the same town as you. This is pretty much what DID happen in the one test I read about, the test equipment obliterated not just some weak signal but pretty strong ones. This is why they are now using this database approach.

Three things:

1) If Qualcomm or whoever sublet their spectrum (Are you sure they can't do that? They can here in the US... it's called disaggregation, and can be done either by diving a frequency band into pieces, or by slicing a larger coverage area of a license into smaller areas, or both.) Well, how is that going to work? They'd want money for that sublet, so you'll end up with white space hardware that demands a monthly fee just to pay for the subletting.

2) What about the database? Is there a fee for this? And, what about devices that are not already internet connected and so cannot reach a database?

2) I just hope to hell they are quite conservative in the TV database. Here in the US, I'm considered part of the "Cedar Rapids" market, but the TV stations for there are like 60 to 70 milles away, and rubbish. I mosty watch ones from the Quad Cities (also 60 miles away) and one from Ottumwa (~70 miles away.) I have a large grey hovermann antenna and 20db amp for this. I can just see some crap database saying "Well, this is Cedar Rapids market, blast away!" and knocking out 7 of my channels just because.

Ahh, the "technically not lying" lie

"Though NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden alleged he could wiretap Obama from his desk, Alexander said he knew of "no way to do that" when probed by congress."

Ahh the "technically not lying" lie. If he has not been specificaly shown how to use wiretap equipment, he "knows of no way to do that". That's not the same as saying he knows the NSA has the capbility or not or any other meaningful statement, while being phrased close enough to being a meaningfuls tatement to trick most people. (Of course, those people probably don't believe it either way.)

I'm surprised

Tite says it -- I'm surprised. I knew the newer Intel chips were relatively low power, but did not realize they beat out ARM.

I hope Microsoft can be kept at bay enough to have some netbook-like computers on the market again to run Ubuntu or whatever on (as opposed to the over-priced, over-specced monstrosities like ultrabook that Microsoft wants in order to run Windows dcently.) I was waiting for an ARM based unit, but I realy don't care what chip it has in it as long as he result is low power use and decent performance.

"Even though this Apple-Intel interface love-in can be found on PCs too, albeit a rare sight, the range of peripherals supporting Thunderbolt is shockingly low for this two-year-old high-speed interface, which is capable of 10Gbps transfer rates, a figure that's set to double later this year."

Not surprising. While USB has standards for hard disks, cameras, etc. etc. to follow, thunderbolt really is just a video link (which, per reviews I've seen, doesn't even support the full HDMI bandwidth of current HDMI versions) and pci express... it is really rather a mess. For instance, for an external thunderbolt hard drive, the drive must have a thunderbolt bridge (which last I heard cost close to $30) *and* PCI Express SATA controller in it. And, since this is not like USB where there's just a USB hard disk protocol, it also relies on either having your OS have the proper driver for whatever PCI Express devices end up hanging off your thunderbolt cables, or having to install drivers for every device you install. USB? Couple dollar USB to SATA bridge chip, and no drivers needed (for any modern OS.)

"You're looking at this backwards. Many of us consider it worth £280 to not have these ports on the laptop. "

Yup they're called Apple fanbois. Everyone else realizes a computer missing ports costs *less*. I had a netbook with almost no ports on it. £280 extra? The whole unit cost under $400 (i..e under £280.) Oh and it still had a few USB ports and ethernet. There's no reasonable reason to not have those.

This Android fragmentation doesn't really matter...

I found this Android fragmentation to not really matter. I wrote an app compatible with 2.0+ and didn't really miss anything from not using 3.x and 4.x features, 2.0 already had all the functionality I needed. It's just not that big a deal.

Range

"You might as well claim an FM Radio station on 103 MHz has three times the range and quality of one on 100MHz."

It does, if there are dozens of other stations on 100. In the countryside it's no difference; in the city, 1, 6, and 11 are packed and people will put APs at 3 or 8 or 9 or so and these also get pretty busy. Each AP broadcasts at least every 100ms. The range is cut for sure due to a sharp increase in the noise floor.

What I want fixed...

What I want fixed in Firefox is on some pages, where firefox will just sit there and use like 10 or 20% of the CPU while doing nothing (I suppose the pages have some crap javascript ? ), and the CPU usage used while downloading is most excessive.

More wireless technologies?

I would think they should make more use of wireless technologies, VZW is using microwave backhaul agressively to upgrade backhaul to their cell sites. I could see running microwave to a cabinet that would serve data to those people in the local area who can't get anything via phone line (i.e. fixed wireless broadband.) Since the home wireless receivers have a larger antenna than a cell phone would, there's somewhat less problem with coverage.

"..doesn't sit right with me here.

Dude is apparently smart.

Dude works for CIA (well, a CIA contractor anyway).

Dude flees to a country with an extradition treating with the USA? WTF? If he wanted sanctuary in Iceland, why not just fly there?

So is dude actually a patriotic whistle-blower, standing up for the all-American public?

Or a foreign agent? Or a fool? Or something else?

It just doesn't seem quite right..."

I think it may be relatively easy to get lost in Hong Kong.

Apple always says everything they do is "revolutionary".

Title says it. But, yeah, this sounds like Slacker except it'll only work on Apples. Won't revolutionize how people do whatever with music, since Slacker already does this.

Two points...

a) The terrorists have won. The goal of terrorism is to terrorize, and make those terrorized make irrational decisions and actions. Taking away the rights of US citizens and disrupting the economy is just what they wanted -- well, republicrats (Democrats + Republicans acting as a single party) have taken away our rights, and disrupted the economy.

b) Don't blame me, I didn't vote for these assholes. I voted libertarian. I think Ron Paul's idea of stripping out 5 cabinet departments in his first term of office is quite unworkable, but the checks and balances in gov't would have stopped that. He would have at least pushed to eliminate illegal NSA programs like this, though, instead of coming out in support of unconstitutional actions.

It was clear when Obama was running, that he was fine with spying on whoever he pleased, was not interested in getting out of any wars, or in trying to balance the budget. He sure fooled a lot of people but it was obvious based on his voting record when he represented the state of illinois that this was lip service. As can be seen from the article, the republicans + democrats are effectively now acting as a single party, they snipe enough about "the other party" to give the illusion of having differences of opinion, but if you look at their overall views they are nearly identical (in this case, both support spying on the public.)

Not a big deal...

So, if this is like the decoding on the older ARMs, it runs code on a DSP built onto the ARM that does the video decoding at almost 0 CPU load. so the lib that manages the DSP code is locked from access, and the video memory the video is written into would presumably be blocked as well. Nothing too draconian and invasive, I have not seen any Android app that would capture video like that anyway.

Except...

Except.. the same people that would not patch their individual computers would then instead have a private cloud with out of date, insecure software on it. Of course, even having secure servers, this overlooks what may be a big source of data leaks -- the servers are uncompromised, but the client system is compromised, and can then be used to pilfer data.

Won't get thrown before LTE comes out here...

Well, here in the 'states, they won't get thrown into the landfill before they see 4G. Iowa City is fairly rural, and I have a choice of two LTE providers now. I expect 4 out of 5 carriers will have LTE here in the next year or so.

Verizon has LTE over more than half their coverage area (which is quite extensive). They still claim this will reach 100% by this month (it covers around 2/3rds of my home state). I can't see how, but at the rate it's been expanding it should be done by next year (the main areas left to cover are western deserts basically.)

Sprint has some LTE (none in my home state.)

AT&T and T-Mobile initially just saw Verizon start rolling LTE so fast, and just decided they'd falsely claim their upgraded 3G networks are 4G so they could claim 4G coverage without, you know, actually rolling any 4G coverage. But, AT&T now is rolling LTE, and T-Mobile is rolling a bit too. (AT&T has no LTE yet in my state, and T-Mobile doesn't have any service in Iowa -- they have IWireless own and operate their licenses here.)

The regional carrier US Cellular also has LTE covering almost my entire home state.

Other regional carrier, IWireless, focuses on price. I don't see LTE from them any time soon, they got 3G here about a year or two ago (and most of their network is EDGE.) They joined in the same time as T-Mobile labelling their 3G service as 4G.

Indeed...

Companies generally look about 1 year ahead, possibly as long as 5. R&D, the "R" has indefinite payout, and the "D" costs a bit too. I mean, IBM got billions from the GMR (Giant Magento Resistive) hard drive head, and all companies (well, now down to like 3 HD companies...) use these under license and have for about 10 or 15 years. But, it took years of R&D to develop. This head takes advantage of a quantum effect, an insulating layer is put into the head, and these electrons that tunnel through effectively make this insulater act as a bit of an amplifier instead. in the current environment of minimal R&D, it would never have been developed.

Does it need Linux drivers?

Does it need Linux drivers? Most motherboards and systems I've gotten over the years did not ship with Linux drivers, the distro just supported the ethernet, sound, video, busses, and so on. Is there anything exotic in there that would require extra support?