Posts by Henry Wertz 1

Brand new code?

On the one hand, Microsoft forgetting to renew their own certificate is a big fail, and I'm highly amused by it.

On the other hand, no, I do not expect them to manage this using technology just released for Windows Server 2012. a) (I doubt it but...) maybe they DID use this and it failed. b) If they did use this and it failed, people would give them even more grief and jokes than they are now. Like it or not, it is essentially new and untested code. c) Azure was out before Server 2012, I for one would not rip out and replace a SSL certificate server without good reason -- and they may have decided auto-SSL renewal was not a good enough reason. (Maybe they will re-evaluate that now.)

Search results reflect what is popular

What can I say? I'm sure Google did de-emphasize these pages. But, their very popularity re-emphasizes them, and apparently the are more popular than paying for the same files using proprietary software and receiving the file in a proprietary file format. (I'm looking at you ITunes -- if they are going to give people non-DRM m4a files now anyway, why require running proprietary software on a proprietary OS to do it? That eliminates me as a customer.)

Possible reason to get rid of BIS?

One positive of not being so reliant on BIS -- if RIM were to run into significant financial difficulties, it'd be pretty bad to have just shipped all these new BB10 devices that are completely BIS-dependent, only to end up shutting the BIS server down say a year later. BB10 as it stands, it sounds like just the BlackBerry Messenger would go if BIS shut down, the overall impact would be pretty minimal.

Oh, so like .NET?

Oh, so like .NET? Not the present-day .NET (Common Language Runtime and C#). Like .NET years ago, when they were going to have Server .NET, .NET web services, .NET programming language, .NET desktop, .NET ID stuff, Vistual Studio .NET (this one actually shipped..), Office .NET, and on and on.

I have nothing else to say really. Just, I've seen it before -- I guess they can go ahead and call everything "blue" if they want. It'll just make it all that much more confusing for people relying on Microsoft products and services.

Too expensive

"But then people start saying the same types of thing. 'Yes, but they're all crap.' 'Yes, but none of them have even _seen_ an Editor. Well, crap is a value judgement. But as soon as you start adding in costs like that Editor (or more likely Editors) - you start getting back to similar costs to paper."

I'm not expecting 99 cents or anything. But, when a paperback is under $10, it's no surprise that people aren't going to be happy being expected to pay $9.99, $12.99, or $14.99 for an E-Book. Of course, those publisher that do try to charge more for the EBook than the physical book are then just SHOCKED that those new-fangled E-Books don't seem to be catching on.....

I had this trouble recently with a sci-fi magazine. I considered switching from physical subscription to electronic... but, when I got an electronic copy, it was the same price as the physical magazine, while losing the formatting and most of the detail on the illustrations (and some illustrations were missing entirely.) No thanks!

Gimp has CMYK.

"I use GIMP and Photoshop extensively, predominantly GIMP. And the only thing I really need Photoshop for is CMYK image support. If GIMP had that then my entire design workflow could be completed with GIMP/Inkscape."

AFAIK, Gimp has CMYK now. I was as surprised as anyone to see it (and, I personally don't have a need for it.) It went from no color support to supporting normal, CMYK, s-RGB, and several other color spaces.

$499? Feh.

$499? Feh. Just put like $800 of hardware into it and mark it up to an even $2000. Look at THAT margin! But seriously, Microsoft has lost their mind; blaming OEMs for Windows 8's failure is a fail in and of itself. The fact is, the makers know what is selling, and it is the lower end machines. Why? They have enough power to do what most people want, and they'd rather keep those extra $100s in their pocket (or, to spend on food, electricity, and rent.) I got a netbook, and since I kept Windows far from it (it has Ubuntu 12.04), even the 1.3ghz one is fast enough.

What a nutter...

Nothing much more to say. Especially refusing to file his taxes until his W2 form number is changed. Oh well.

Chicken and the egg?

"What do the Apples and Samsungs say about this?"

I don't care what Apple has to say; surprisingly I found my (CDMA/EVDO/LTE) Samsung Stratosphere actually has no Qualcomm hardware in it (the LTE chip is Samsung, and the CDMA/EVDO chip is Via Technologies.). But, Qualcomm in fact makes loads of chips, if they support TDD in 900/1800/2100 (Europe) and 700/850/1900/AWS (US) then so many phone makers just drop in a Qualcomm solution that phone makers could naturally follow, it'd be essentially a zero-cost option to support both FDD and TDD compared to now.

Anyway, any take off of TDD would necessitate changes of regulations on these bands so the cell co can use the band how they wish, as opposed to the current situation of having particular uplink and downlink bands. If that happens, indeed TDD should help use upstream spectrum that is likely rather wasted at present. At that point, the big question is, will carriers (outside China) actually decide to use TDD instead of FDD? That I do not know.

Wouldn't be caught dead in one...

Well, I wouldn't be caught dead in one. To me this comes off either as

a) somebody who is uptight as all hell thinking if they put some pants with that business clothing they are "casual". I'll tell you right now, you're not pulling it off and to me you just look like a suit.

b) Someone like me who was told they MUST "dress up" or "wear a suit" for something or other and actually believed it. I feel bad for you for having to wear that stuff. Also, joke's on you! If I saw you to begin with, you are probably there to meet with me, and you could have worn normal clothes.

I have a few nice gray or black (and a black with white stripe) button down shirt as needed, for meeting someone who might not like Hawaiiain prints and bright colors. But I impress people by discussing what problem they need solved and being able to actually solve it, not by dressing up.

What can I say?

What can I say? Apple has not made it a habit to pay dividends, and no matter how much money they have I would not buy their stock in the expectation of dividends. They aren't required to pay them, and you aren't required to buy their stock. You're certainly allowed to complain about lack of dividends, but here I am playing the world's smallest violin as you do so.

I've seen this app...

I've seen this app on television. I like Bjork but the app frankly looked rather silly -- she was using it to play the song, and it looked like there was just a lot of animation on screen and you'd prod various bits to play notes and sounds. The art and music are already in the app, 375,000 pounds sounds like a VERY high bill to port this.

Itanium met it's goals I think.

"Given that Itanium roundly trounced PA-8K in benchmarks from the beginning, I have a hard time qualifying the move from the PA-8K design as a bad idea. That being said, IPF is pretty obviously dead as a doornail at this point."

It didn't. I spoke with someone locally who was using PA-RISCs. They got a Itanium, and the Superdome they had ***SPANKED*** it. After a good year or so, the compiler improved enough so the Itanium was at least competitive. They basically got one, got all ready to return it, and ended up getting it for almost nothing so whoever at the company could show a successful Itanium sale.

Anyway... I think the Itanium met it's goal for Intel. It seems to me the goal was largely to get more vendors buying from Intel instead of using their own chips. In terms of UNIX systems? MIPS -- gone. PA-RISC -- gone. Alpha -- Gone. Sun didn't abandon SPARC, but got sidetracked enough to delay the SPARC by quite a while. IBM seems to be the only one who was unaffected and still making POWER systems for those who want them. Don't get me wrong, some of these chips were "on the ropes" anyway, but I think Intel may have more than made up for the huge cash investments into Itanium in additional Xeon sales.

One sentence quote and it's 100% wrong...

One sentence quote from this fine US'ian, and the entire sentence is wrong:

1) The Consitution doesn't explicitly list a right to privacy. That is simply a human right.

2) Yes, it does follow that since people have a right to privacy, they have rights regarding data about themselves.

Split supercomputer?

I find the idea of the split supercomputer interesting. Although this seems silly at first glance, I think it is actually sensible. The much lower bandwidth between the two halves* would absoultely cripple certain workloads (a weather model, for instance, traditionally each node would end up walking through a pretty large portion of system memory as it calculated, meaning a shared memory supercomputer is a must.) But, the reality is this type of system doesn't tend to run one giant workload anyway, the tendency is to have a number of jobs running on it at any given time, and also a lot of jobs would not walk through system memory the way a weather model would. Either one of these, this lets each university have a local resource with (presumably) automatic use of excess on the other university's system, which is great.

*I don't know what the speed will be, but certainly below the 56GB/sec infiniband local to each half!

I wonder who the 5th company was?

TFA says there were 5 new companies in this program, then lists 4 of them.

Doesn't sound like the contract is a problem...

It really doesn't sound like the contract is a problem (although I must agree, I would have done it in writing.) It sounds like the estate is not disputing the 6%, but rather the cost of the yacht (which to me seems odd, I would think design would be flat rate, not based on what the tub ends up costing to make.)

FSF *did* protest at Apple stores, and Microsoft is a monopoly

"Microsoft got its "monopoly" just because PC clones were (and are) cheap. I couldn't afford a Macintosh or something like that when I was a student - I could buy a PC clone and thereby MS software. Blame expensive proprietary hardware/software - like Apple - for that, not MS."

Nope, Microsoft is not a multiply convicted monopolist just because PCs are popular; it's because of the nearly continuous anti-competitive behaviors they have shown, forcing their competitors (or marginalizing them at least) in one market after another. Illegal bundling. Contracts requiring an OEM to pay for Windows on ALL computers, whether they want to put it on all of them or not. Lowering prices when there is competition (to undercut them on price) then jacking the price back up afterwards. Making changes to intentionally break competitor's products. Using undocumented features to give themsleves an advantage over their competitors (see Windows 8 -- they allow their own Office and IE to use features that are not just undocumented like in the past, but that NOBODY ELSE IS PERMITTED TO USE.) The list goes on and on.

As for Apple stores -- FSF *did* show up at Apple stores in both 2006 and 2010. They are continously filing complaints against Apple for policies such as disallowing GPLed code in app store apps. I think you'll find FSF will not be showing up at Microsoft stores months from now either, it doesn't mean they are giving them a free pass.

Conflicted...

On the one hand, it is 100% none of Vodafone's business what people are doing off working hours. If they want to control their employee's 24/7, they can pay them for 168 hours a week.

On the other hand -- DON'T USE YOUR PHONE WHILE DRIVING! It's seriously stupid.

Seatbelt? It's stupid not to wear it but it doesn't affect anybody else. Speeding? From what I've seen of India traffic speeding is generally not possible. I would not be happy with my employer worrying about me speeding off-hours here in the states because many many roads have arbitrarily slow speed limits and arbitrarily bored cops (on the other hand, I have a radar detector so I don't get speeding tickets.)

Samsung and Nokia

"Why all the love for soul-less money grubbing, Apple copying Samsung?"

If you looked at the trial coverage, Samsung made SERIOUS mistakes at trial. 1) They fumbled some evidence filings so the fact that Samsung made a phone with rounded corners and etc. BEFORE the Iphone came out. If you claim copying just on what came out first, Apple actually copied Samsung, then patented those features and sued Samsung over it. (Or, the reality, neither copied the other, certain features were indepdently developed by both.) 2) They went for a JURY trial. So of course, jury people are susceptible to Apple's Reality Distortion Field (tm) and sided with Apple.

Personally, I wouldn't buy an IPhone for free, the interface on them is lousy (I know people like it and it's not inherently flawed but it's the exact opposite of what I want out of a phone interface), they are overprcied and pretentious. They tend to be between subpar and average as an actual phone. I'm not specifically a Samsung fan (I've had over the years Nokia, Siemens, Samsung, LG, Motorola, and now another Samsung.) I ended up with a Samsung becasue I wanted a phone with LTE *and* a keyboard, and the Samsung Stratosphere was the only one Verizon was selling. I may have gotten a newer LTE-supporting Droid but they switched it to a non-removeable battery which is REALLY stupid.

Anyway... they way people write off Nokia as dead, I was surprised they were number 2... I would have assumed LG and HTC moved more kit.

@asdf, I find that EXTREMELY unlikely. I see Apple buyers say that a lot, generally there's at least a dozen similar machines on the market. I won't hate on you for buying an Apple, the good news is you don't have to deal with Windows (or install a better-than-Windows OS on your own.)

Awesome

100s of people showed up to whup someone's ass for claiming they were sluts, and then just started wrecking stuff? That's fucking awesome.

notes on this type of attack

Re: "if they are capable of developing nuclear power and (alleged) a nuclear weapons program; surely they can knock up an OS of their own."

I'm pretty sure Seiemens developed their nuclear power. That said, as bad as running Windows for anything important is, hardy anybody likes to reinvent the wheel. Very few people start an OS and few of those reach a useful state.

Re: comments about FAT and such... first, FAT doesn't mean "Windows 95 or older", NT3.5, 4, 2000, XP all supported NTFS but also FAT installs. I've seen FAT installs of Windows 2000 (I don't know why). Secondly, though,from the description in the article this virus was deleting THE USER'S OWN FILES. So, NTFS, ACLs, and proper filesystem permissions, won't do dick against this particular type of attack.

Well... I feel smug now for using Linux... DEL *.* does nothing, I tells ya. Nothing!! Wait, rm -R *? I have no idea what you're talking about 8-). (But seriously, a .sh file won't run without the execute bit turned on. But, if I were running random executables under Linux something naughty could wipe my home directory if it wanted.)

grey market/tasers

Is there really an iphone grey market expanding in China? The other article said how the iphone5 is not really selling in China (probably since there's numerous better phones on the market, and for those who DO want an iphone there's like a dozen iphone clones that are much cheaper and generally have more features than an iphone.)

"Whilst I think the idea of non-lethal weapons is a good one, the problem is training - surely the issue here is that the guy went over the top - using a taser to shut a woman up because she's hysterical and a bit difficult to get handcuffs on sounds like a 1950's solution..."

He spent 10 minutes trying to get her to leave, another 5 (with backup!) trying to get cuffs on. That's not "a bit" difficult. Tasers ARE abused in the US but I don't think so in this case.

Bonding

"Said browser would (I'm pretty sure) try and use the same network interface for all of those multiple connections. The connectify program seems to just make those connections happen over a range of NICs so you effectively get more bandwidth."

Yup, and in Linux at least (see the AC's comment above), the browser WILL see a single interface. bond0 in the case of this example the AC has. bond0 just happens to spread out connections among multiple physical interfaces. I'm sure the OpenBSD solution (per Ru) also presents a single interface.

Anyway... AFAIK Windows *doesn't* do this on it's own, so good on them for having a 3rd-party app to do something like this.

"The only reason google got in the carrier space, isp/cell, was so that users didn't have an option to have their data collected and mined by google. Pffft, pretty easy to profile an advert target when you have ALL their data from the wire. Google has long passed do no evil."

Nope, it's because the asshats at AT&T wanted to double dip, they already charge their own customers for internet access, but thought that Google should ALSO pay AT&T because some amount of traffic was going between their customers and Google (especially Youtube.) Completely ignoring that Google already pays the standard fees at whatever peering points they are at, just as AT&T does. They were pushing congress to eliminate any semblance of net neutrality. So Google told them to piss off, and said if AT&T kept pursuing this Google would just start their own ISP, make sure to build out in all AT&T's wireline markets and take all their customers. After Google started building out, AT&T realized Google was serious and backed off.

As for these speeds.. the image incorrectly shows megabytes per scond, the one on netflix's blog now shows megabits. But, Netflix CAPS at 4mbps, so it's natural that these ISPs all show below 4mbps... it'll be a mix of 4mbps ratings and those times when the ISP is too crapped out to get that speed (or the user has other stuff going on on the connection). I.e. as they say the relative ratings should be useful (to tell which ISPs are either quite slow or overload a lot) but the absolute numbers are not real useful. The US broadband market is pretty bad (especially pricing), but no we don't order 20mbps service and get 2.2mbps or whatever.

Oh yeah...

also, good article, I enjoyed it! And read allt he old Delphi ones as well, also nice. What a saga.

Nostalgia aside....

Nostalgia aside... I did run Linux originally on a 386. But, that said, the hard memory limit on the 386 was 16MB (you could still have 4GB virtual memory...). So, shoving a 386 full of RAM to watch a newer distro crawl to a start is realistically not an option. Even most small distros (puppylinux, damn small linux) are not small enough to run in 16MB. Also most distros have been built for 486+ for years, the few new instructions 486 added over 386 ended up improving performance so significantly that distros dropped 386 years ago (and some are built i686 -- Pentium Pro -- on up.) So I'm not going to cry out over this.

I think cmpxchg (atomic compare and exchange) is probably why the kernel guys are jonesing to drop 386, not having this instruction would make spinlocks and mutexes much harder (these are used on SMP systems to make sure a given resource is only accessed by one CPU at a time).

"ped"

"however, your point is sound, that people confuse paediatrician with a paedophile are pretty stupid, but to be honest, perhaps we shouldn't have chosen words which sound very similar to describe very different things, I blame latin.....or at least, somebody down that road..."

They're VERY VERY stupid. Anyway, nobody choose words which sound similar to describe very different things... paed/ped means "child", so the words for child doctors and child diddlers both have "ped" in the name.

Rare Earth metals?

I wonder how this works out for other rare earth metals. I've read about how for indium, neodymium, niobium, etc. are in short supply to the point that researchers are already looking into how to make LCDs work without them. I honestly don't know, but the supply of these is much tighter than platinum, and yet they are not recycled like platinum (the quantity that goes into an LCD for instance is small but it is not recycled anywhere as far as I know.)

Also, somewhat off topic... re the article quote: "(why, says Mr Apple, “how nice to see you here Mr Samsung!”)", really it's more like "(why, says Mr Apple, "that's a nice phone you already have there on the market Mr. Samsung, I suppose I'll claim I made it first and sue you")." Keep in mind Samsung had a phone on the market BEFORE the iphone that had the features Apple claimed were copied from the iphone; they just managed to persuade the judge to disallow that evidence from being presented.

Database is necessary

"The suggestion that the devices check locally for transmissions seems sensible."

It's not. I am picking up TV stations from 70 miles away or more daily, because there are only a couple local channels. The little "rubber duck" on a access point would not see anything, let alone some wifi-device-sized client, and would gleefully blast signals right over my channels given a "device checks by itself" scenario.

I just hope that any database used is very conservative in determining what is freespace, not just assuming people will use the nearest stations and forget the rest. (I admit, I think this is different in the UK than here in the US, where there aren't just almost the same stations at each TV transmission site.)

Well.... no

First off, 100% correct, there's no tax evasion here, having free trade within the EU does have it's consequences, and one is that companies can operate out of whatever country has the best tax code.

The problems I see with this elimination of corporate taxes here in the US are:

1) You have here these investment firms, that rather than doing legitimate investment will use high frequency trading to put themselves between the legitimate seller and buyer and take a cut that they aren't really owed. The least they can do is keep paying taxes on this ill-gotten gain. They also must be within a matter of miles of the trading floor since they require very low latency. There's private equity firms, too, which buy companies not to rehabilitate and streamline them, but to max out the purchased company's credit lines, pay themselves loads of money while they brankrupt the company and screw over all those who loaned the company money. They should at least pay tax on this too. Businesses here get all kinds of services (FDIC; dairy, beef, and pork companies getting tax-paid advertisements, the list goes on and on), they can bloody well pay for them.

2) These same companies who don't want to pay taxes, have had no problems accepting bailouts and asking for various credits. I feel like, at least here in the states, if corporate taxes were eliminated they would "forget" to eliminate the credits and various payouts to corporations, rather than leaving the value at 0.

Yeah...

I also LOLed at the iPod claims (they really have rubbish wifi, and I took "there's no Android device at this price point" to mean none are that expensive). But, it's hard to argue with results if they had 1300 of them running on opening night and didn't have it all fall apart. I'm not even into art, but if this museum wasn't so far away I'd go to it.

pst? pfffft...

UNIX mbox all the way. I don't have some fancy archiving system, but I do have mbox files going back to ~1994 and I can grep them all I want.

That said, even avoiding the rather terrible .pst file formats, if I were interested in proper indexing and such this sounds like a good presentation to see.

Meh...

I think it is true that the comic market is not what it's used to be. But, I also think you are probably cherry-picking --- I've seen ample evidence of large quantities of 1970s-era comics that ranged from "meh" to absolute rubbish. I think you would find at least one or two current comics that would meet your every expectation, they are just buried by all the zombie and vampire comics.

In a similar vein, I could make similar complaints about the current state of science fiction, reminisce on the great books of the past* and how I can go to Barnes and Noble and find nothing good, the so-called scifi section just has rubbish fantasy novels with zombies and vampires and maybe some Star Wars books. But, the fact of the matter is, although what I say about the bookstore is true (the books are generally rubbish), there's plenty of great new science fiction being produced, waiting to be mail ordered.

*There's a truly amazing used book store in Madison, Wisconsin, Frugal Muse, which last time I was there sold their used books at original cover price... so I could pick up amazing sci-fi for like 50 cents a book or less.

A single change...

If Microsoft (or perhaps just some people there) didn't have such a massive ego, they could make one singular change that'd help sales -- give the end-user a choice between booting into Metro or booting into a more traditional interface. Even people who don't know anything about computers, have been advised by friends of theirs that Windows 8 is change for the sake of change, confusing, and different (not by me, I advise against Windows, period.) Those people who are buying a new computer now are seeking out ones with Windows 7 (or god forbid XP) for that very reason. If Microsoft gave a choice of bootup UI, a lot of them would get Windows 8 machines instead of actively avoiding them.

Well then...

Can't say I'm surprised. This isn't a Microsoft-bash, but if you've seen the ads, the keyboard looks like a floppy piece of rubber with solid bits shoved into it. I mean, I thought it'd last more than a week but it really doesn't look durable.

On an unrelated matter, the ads look dumb (the one people are just repeatedly trading keyboards and slapping them onto each others tablets). The other ones show people a) web surfing b) watching movies/tv and c) using an (actually somewhat fun looking) paint program. That's cool but I'm not going to buy a new windows machine just to web surf and watch movies, thanks.

Two points...

First, I do have two Android apps that do this. Wifi Web Login costs a couple bucks, but makes it so if you connect to an access point with a "captive portal" click-through page, you click through it once and wifi web login records the keystrokes, clicks, etc. you performed. Next time you connect, it auto-replays them. The system used by Star Bucks, McDonalds, Sams Club, etc., doesn't work reliably with Wifi Web Login (I don't remember what wifi "network" these all are); but sbautologin (which is free) works with these.

Second... although I don't take click-through licenses very seriously, wouldn't this solution mean these windows 8 phone users are theoretically being agreed to all sorts of use agreements they have not even had a chance to read? That seems potentially problematic.

Won't diss OSX too heavily

Sorry, but although I won't diss OSX too heavily. But.... 1) It's kind of function over form. I just don't like the appearance of almost every aspect of it, and people are allowed to not like the same things you do. I'm thinking Cody doesn't either. 2) It's not UNIX-based, it's a BSD-Mach hybrid, which actually has pretty strong performance consequences.

Apple's no monopolist (unlike Microsoft) so I'm not going to be all "Oh, Apple should be required to ship a blank system". Unlike the PC market, where... all I can say is I'm glad the State of Iowa kept their lawsuit against Microsoft up so I could get a $200 check from them for forced bundling and price fixing!