Posts by Richie 1

Prophets of doom

> actually there are none – that like or encourage prophets of doom.

Except perhaps religious organizations.

I prefer the "Netflix stays independent, buys Spotify" argument

See

https://pando.com/2016/08/26/would-netflix-spotify-ultimate-modern-media-conglomerate/e75246272c9f4478a978943c3ef51a4973a3c814/

Chris O'Dowd, with Richard Ayoade as Q, and Katherine Parkinson as M.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0487831/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1

Is Sandra Bullock OK?

The documentary she made about space junk was terrifying.

How much of the $7M/day was in China?

I gather that that was their biggest source of cash burn, as they tried to compete with Didi Chuxing. Since they've given up on that idea, their burn rate ought to be lower now.

How is the company still in existence?

After the whole business model was outed as a scam in a high-profile way, who in their right mind would sign up for an account with them? Or am I underestimating the number of suckers in the world?

How does it work?

How do they intend to circumvent the Ad-Blocker software?

Do the ads come from the facebook.com domain, or somewhere else? If the latter, then they ought to be blocked by default using FireFox RequestPolicy addon (https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/requestpolicy/) or similar.

Why does the BBC still exist as a license-funded organisation?

There is plenty of evidence from around the world (including the UK) that privately owned TV companies are a viable thing, so why is a publically owned-broadcaster necessary anymore?

This is a shame

For people wanting a phone from a company that cares about security, the choices over the last few years have been Silent Circle, Jolla, maybe Blackberry. & all three of those are on the ropes financially.

Both e-cigs & nicotine gum illegal in GCC countries

e-cigs have been illegal here in the Gulf Cooperation Council countries (Saudi, Qatar,Kuwait, UAE) cor a few years, and nicotine gum was made illegal earlier this year.

Meanwhile a pack of cigarettes is ~£1.20 to £1.80.

The legislative process is a bit murkier here, so I don't know whose idea that was. I presume the tobacco lobby gave some wasta to the appropriate health ministers.

for those of you who don't do imperial units

3.48lb = 376mJub

Isn't it great to get away from it all. Now, let's try the city simulator.

What will be left of Toshiba?

If they exit TVs, PCs and HDDs, then that's pretty much all their consumer facing business gone. That more or less leaves it as a manufacturer of air conditioning units and gear for factories.

> Earlier this year, Microsoft acquired Revolution Analytics...

Oracle has its own R distribution for use with the Oracle Big Data Appliance, so hopefully Microsoft want to rip of this idea and have an R-inside-SQL-server feature. Access to databases from R is pretty good these days (particularly using the dplyr package), but you still have to pass the data out of the database to R, which doesn't make sense for big datasets.

There is an argument that Google's search business is non-contestable

The article rightly points out that competitors don't provide results that are of the same quality as Google's, and that if they did, consumers would move to the alternate service. This is the argument for it being a contestable monopoly.

However, the quality of search is to a large part determined by the quantity of data available to the service, which is determined by the number of existing users. (The algorithms for generating search results are mostly documented in journal papers and implemented in open source software, so they are available to all players; there is some skill involved in creating the search engine from these, but quantity of data is a huge factor.)

The fact that the size of the existing userbase determines the quality of the product leads towards a search market with a single dominant player. So there is an argument that Google should be regulated as a monopoly (though probably not to the extent that a natural monopoly is).

You can see a similar thing with eBay and auctions: more buyers and sellers makes selling and buying respectively more attractive on that platform, and the market again tends towards a dominance by a single player.

For those of you wondering, 2.05 = 7 ^ exp(-1)

where 7 comes from the "seven symbols [encoded] onto a combination of the orbital angular momentum (“twisted” light) and their angular position".

> Specifically, that's going to happen at exactly 03:14:07 GMT on January 19, 2038.

Being picky, doesn't the exact fail time depend upon how many leap seconds get added between now and 2038? Since leap seconds are unpredictable, we can't know the exact fail time until we get much closer to the fail date.

Ceci n'est pas une Higgs

as Magritte would say.

So of the 5 open source phone OSes

Sailfish and Firefox OS have been shipped in phones. WebOS is extinct. Tizen is now vapourware. Ubuntu is not quite vapourware but evaporating a little.

Hopefully they'll introduce tabbed Windows Explorer windows too

As seen in most Linux window managers for years.

The Google car business model

We already have an industry devoted to renting cars to take you on just the journey you need: they're called taxis.

The Google disruption to this industry is that autonomous vehicles make for cheaper taxis, since you don't need to pay a driver.

Call me paranoid

but it seems like a good a idea to add a few strangers that you don't know as LinkedIn contacts in order to obfuscate your true network.

The phrasing of the climate change question threw me

I largely trust the climate scientists viewpoint on anthropogenic climate change, but I had to reread the climate change question a couple of times to make sure it wasn't a trick question like the "supreme being" question.

The word "mostly" put me off. When you think about climate change, you mostly think about future changes: the warming that has occurred so far isn't huge, so it's hard to tell whether _most_ of it is caused by greenhouse gases.

I eventually decided that I was overthinking things, but in a telephone poll where they want an immediate answer, I suspect that some respondents would be less confident just because they've been asked a convoluted question, not because they don't believe in anthropogenic climate change.

v1.0?

The most recent version of SailfishOS is 1.0.3.8, and that's been available to Jolla users for a few weeks.

For almost all driving, the speed of the car is no longer limited by the engine. It's limited by road speed limits (enforced by speed cameras) and by the driver in front of you.

In my experience, the faster the theoretical performance of the car, the more frustrating it is to drive in real world conditions. A Ferrari stuck in rush hour traffic must be an excruciating experience.

Not all publishers demand Word

O'Reilly prefer you to write in AsciiDoc (or Markdown for short pieces). They have a very nice toolchain that tracks changes using git, and manages collaborators. Definitely the way writing should be done.

those combination car/boat vehicles

I think you mean "hovercraft".

Of course it didn't sell well...

Everyone knows that you need to wait for version 3 before Microsoft make something useable. I'm sure the third gen Surface will be fine.

He'll be sorely missed

I hope he's using his eight Feersum Endjinn style backup lives well.

Where you store your licen[cs]e

> 28 per cent only announced their licenses in a README file, as opposed to recommended filenames

> such as LICENSE or COPYING.

R packages allow many standard licences to be described in the DESCRIPTION file. A separate LICENSE file is only included for non-standard licences.

Betteridge's Law says 'No'

Agreed that biofuels are rubbish, but Europe has worse ideas, like Naziism.

Next week's news

Opera to switch their rendering engine to Servo.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Servo_(layout_engine)

Isn't this the plot of Greg Egan's Schild's Ladder?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schild%27s_Ladder