Posts by Chris_Maresca

Re: Good News Everyone...

Open source is a licensing mechanism used by the owner of the code in question. It has nothing to do with 'retaining ownership' since that is related to copyright, not license.

Whomever owns the copyright owns the code and no open source license gives away ownership of the code. And in some jurisdictions (e.g. Germany) copyright is a right you cannot give away, it's a natural right like liberty. That's why pretty much every open source project now has a contributor's agreement which assigns copyright to the project (or the equivalent legal mechanism in places like Germany), thus allowing the project to control all the code. This is mostly a result of Mozilla's difficulty in changing the license to the Netscape codebase because they didn't control all the copyrights...

Re: this is aimed at getting people to churn away from handset manufacturers the carriers don't like

Huh? How on earth do you figure that?

T-mobile offers handsets from every major maker and all of the popular/wanted ones - except the new Nokia 41mp camera phone.... I might actually move my account to T-mobile as they are significantly cheaper than my current carrier and they have a fantastic selection of phones....

Diplomatic immunity

I carried a diplomatic passport for a number of years and my wife is currently a consular official. Here are some general rules about diplomatic immunity.

1. The person, residence & vehicle of an accredited diplomat are considered sovereign territory of the diplomats home country. Entering the premises or vehicle is the equivalent of crossing a border. My wife technically commutes to a foreign country every time she goes to work and a different set of laws apply to her when she is at work.

2. It is possible for a diplomat to confer diplomatic immunity to another person even when not in their residence or vehicle. This can be done by holding on to someone. The West Germans famously did this when East Germans were scaling the fence around the West German embassy in Prague, circa 1989.

A couple of things to note:

1. To have full immunity, you must carry a letter of accreditation from the host government. Even without it, you have partial immunity, but it is much, much more tenuous.

2. The rules are just rules, there is no way to actually enforce them. Governments have ultimate and unlimited power (theoretically) over individuals and diplomatic immunity will not protect you if they go all out.

3. Heads of state generally have a different, higher level of immunity in foreign countries than diplomats. I'm not entirely sure what the legalities are, but I do know from personal experience that head of state status allows for things that diplomats could never, ever do.

I find this whole thing rather strange. If I had been in Morales' place, I would have ordered the plan to fly on as there was little that any government could do stop it short of shooting it down. It's a matter of principle as much as anything else, a sovereign head of state is just that, sovereign.

It's a disturbing precedent to say that if you are a relatively weak country your sovereignty counts for nothing. And searching a head of state's plane is pretty much the same as invading a country to look for someone/something. This whole thing reeks - it's a sad day when someone vocally opposed to the US can't find refuge anywhere and even sadder when states resort to violating sovereign immunity as a means to an end.

Re: They are probably using Samba, not Microsoft's code

Actually, it's highly likely Apple is using MSFTs code under license given that they released their own implementation a few years ago.

Otherwise, building your own SMB implementation from scratch would be a nightmare (as the SAMBA team found out early on...).

Which would also explain why they are favoring SMB over NFS or AFP. After all, they already have a license and a dev team dedicated to it.

Now if shares would just auto-remount after my Mac goes to sleep, it would be perfect.... (yes, I know all the ways this is supposed to work, but they just don't...)

One unique feature

of MyISAM tables is the MERGE table definition. It allows you to merge two tables, even if they are in different databases, so that they look like one table to anything querying the DB. Kinda like a view, but the difference is that you can then specify which table is writeable and all writes will go to that table only.

This can come in very, very handy if you have to do something like have common data in several DBs but can't change the application. I don't know of any way to easily do this in other DBs, although there are some things which come close.

It does have some limitations, like the tables having to be exactly the same and you need to make sure to avoid key collisions. But when your use case calls for something like MERGE, it's a good solution.

Re: Excuse me, sir...

Thing is in most jurisdictions, photo tickets are illegal in a variety of ways and very, very easy to defeat. BTDT twice. Most people loose in court because they are using some random excuse, not a technicality based in law. One of the easiest ways to defeat it is to do a discovery request on the contract between the municipality & the photo company. 9 out of 10 times this will be refused and your case will be dismissed.

Re: The Tree is Dead

I have the exact reverse - HP has always been much better to me (once even did a 2-day turn around on broken laptop over a weekend during x-mas holidays...) than Dell (my experience mirrors the above script...) over the last 20 years. So much so that I would never, ever buy another Dell, although I might buy an HP. That said, I mostly only use Macs these days which rarely fail and manage to retain their value for more than six months....

??????

http://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/globalinfrastructure/#reglink-eu

Re: Or, maybe ...

Living here in Silicon Valley and interacting quite frequently with Googlers, I would say that this is spot on. It's like they don't even bother using their own search software to see if anyone else has already BTDT...

Google is a cult, at least for the people working there, quite a few of whom will (inadvertently?) refer to it as 'home'...

Re: Hey, Jack ...

Maybe he has 480v industrial at home, how do you know? Quite a lot of older converted buildings still have that...

Re: WebRTC==Wannabes encouraging boys Reacting To Crap

I start using new technologies when they solve problems for me

Er, that's exactly what I did - that was my point.

For some segment of the population, it's useful, just because you can't see that doesn't mean it's worthless.

Re: Err...

Sometimes it's management who isn't listening and you have to get angry for them to listen.

It's sometimes referred to as being 'passionate' but often dismissed as being 'emotional'. In some places, people getting angry is the ONLY thing management responds to....

But, hey, perhaps you've only worked in blessed places where this never happens.

Re: You actually use 19th avenue to get to the GG bridge?

SF had freeways. They ruined the city and threatened to fall down in an earthquake (see the Oakland freeway circa 1989), thus were torn down in the early '90s.

The real problem is all the people who think that living in Marin and working in Palo Alto is a good plan. Note, those are the same people who fought against extending BART to Marin because it would bring 'undesirable people' over the bridge.....

You need to architect for AWS

Reducing costs by hosting on AWS is not just about re-provisioning existing systems with AWS instances, you have to architect apps to take advantage of the way AWS works. This requires an understanding off all AWS services and figuring out how to map those to your needs.

I spent the last 5 months doing this with a client's application and we reduced hosting costs to roughly 10% of what they were compared to traditional hosting.... Of course we spent about 3 months re-engineering parts of the application, but in the end that work also made it more robust and scalable.

Also, if you have an app with spiky demand that needs to scale rapidly (e.g. customer facing) then AWS is a great solution - see http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/04/30/inside_pinterest_virtual_data_center/ for Pinterest experience in doing this and keeping their hosting costs to $35-$52/hr.

Re: We could try making some stuff ourselves

Not necessarily. GE is bringing back appliance manufacturing & cutting the price by 30%

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2012/12/the-insourcing-boom/309166/

Or you can get the best of both worlds....

Murfie will store both your physical CDs and give you streaming access to them through their service.

https://www.murfie.com/features

Of course, you can also have a local electronic copies of your music as well....

Re: Anyone else thinking...

Probably not. I remember reading that electricity in large internet co's is close to 50% of the operating costs (I don't remember any more detail than that and no link, sorry). In that context, any reduction in usage is pure profit.

I had a 2 lb laptop in 1995

It was a Fujitsu, don't remember the model. Minimal set of ports, 1/2 in thick. Came with a very cool docking station that had a full set of ports & a CD-ROM drive. It was actually lighter than the 1st gen Air (had one of those as well....), with roughly similar battery life (2hrs if you were lucky). Not as thin and all plastic, 'tho.

Apple is not the first one to build a minimalist light laptop, although I had a PowerBook Duo back in the day that came pretty close - it was replaced by the Fujitsu, then by an Acer of similar spec, but with a 14" screen...

Re: Why the NDA?

Of course, if it gets to court, you could file a discovery motion for all the NDAs.....

Re: What I'd be looking for in such a thing

I have an NV+, it's pretty quiet except when it wakes up and the fan goes full bore.

Had a Thecus, it was AWEFUL. The UI sometimes wouldn't refresh properly, it was slow, very loud, prone to burnt out power supplies and the fan was not adequate enough to cool the drives... It did run Linux on x86, which was nice, but there is very little in the way of community, which is important if you have a problem.

If I had to do it all over again, I'd get a Synology hands down. The NetGear ReadyNAS is nice, but Synology has a much better community & ecosystem.

Re: Management "strikes" again!!!

Building codes - EOM

Re: Just fix it quick please

Er, Chromium?

http://www.chromium.org/Home - Fully open source Google Chrome

http://www.apple.com/safari/ - If you'd like to give your data to Apple...

Re: Couple of questions

It's because cars typically have much higher compression ratios than industrial equipment. Industrial equipment is probably 8 to 1 and most cars are 10 to 1 or more.

Takes a lot more power to compress the fuel for starting....