Posts by streaky

Re: Not taking sides but if, IF

"the SFO are duty bound to investigate any formal complaint that is made."

Not really, they can call the FSA and ask for a dirty opinion and tell HP to piss off beyond that. Also isn't much stopping the government taking them to court on behalf of the taxpayer either in the end.

Autonomy's profits before the purchase are a matter of public record and weren't very high. If HP failed to do due diligence or simply care they should look to recovering the money from the CEO at the time.

"That's what they said about Windows 2000 and it's still a solid operating system"

Yeah, no, it isn't.

XP has a broken SSL stack which will mean very shortly the internet will stop working for you. Windows 2000 I don't even know wtf is going on there. That's ignoring the endless list of sploits that outpost won't ever save you from.

Can't teach some people.

There's no open source products that would even consider supporting code that old, why Microsoft feels it needs to baby dumbness is anybody's guess.

Re: The customer defines value

"You might think my house is worth 20p; it doesn't mean I'm obliged to sell it to you for that"

Yeah but you can't download a house off the internet so the model doesn't actually work.

Re: Disagreed

"Morons like streaky are why screen resolutions haven't increased in 10 years"

Actually I believe you misread what I actually said. I want an ~8K 16:10/30" monitor like yesterday. Apparently I belong to a small group that knows it's already possible and the panel cartels are the ones stopping it.

I was arguing against a tiny screen being useful for everything ever. When Torvalds has RSI and is part-blind in 10 years and is bitching about it on the kernel lists we'll be having words. I remember these sorts of things.

Tiny screens aren't really useful for much, unless you really really need them. Anybody who writes lots of code and things they're super-useful patently needs their head testing.

Also not for nothing but when a government does an IT consultation it implicitly looks for people to consult who are lacking clue. Seems to be looking for Google to answer the question again.

Re: This is just part of a trend

They're talking nonsense anyway, they're obviously not going to get any love from Apple nor Google so Microsoft are probably laughing themselves out of their chairs.

"Others have mentioned amounts in the low hundreds of millions of dollars being recognised as revenue incorrectly"

Which could get you to 5.2Bn if HP are one of these stupid companies that value stuff on revenues (which bears no actual relationship to shareholder value). Which is possible.

How profitable were Autonomy claiming to be when HP bought them, that's the real question. Basically everything else is irrelevant.

Cheating here because I know that their profit in 2011 was $282m so they weren't worth a fraction of what HP *wrote down* much less what they paid in total. But then some people are stupid. My guess is they thought they were buying the technology and I guess patents, but here's the thing - you have no valid area of questioning when you ignore how much money the company is actually making and buy "at any price" to acquire it's tech.

"Part of me thinks that EA does it on purpose so that 'little' companies like Maxis go under and can be bought out cheaply for the copyrights"

EA already has ownership of Maxis and they're not little.

The good news, EA have behaved in a standard publisher fashion with the reboot as far as I can tell, expect much DLC but don't implicitly expect a nerfed, broken game like the new MoH.

Re: Or, you could, y'know, design you pages right?

Can't tell if OP is being sarcastic or not, but basically everything he said is junk. It's hard to even see where the problem actually is. XSLT is proven worthless so.....

If you have a problem with an automated system reading your pages for whatever reason, firstly don't use the internet, at all. Secondly this is what SSL is and third, they don't give a damn what's in your pages :)

P.S. I actually just always figured railgun was just riverbed kit by another name?

Re: Well

Oh, and Dataplex on the consumer end (it's just software but they only sell to OEMs? Get out..)

Self-inflicted harm regardless, I don't see how they'd have any legal redress.

I disagree, because now she'll be back to bitching about things people say to her on twitter to any TV station stupid enough to let her on.

Re: All true

"Should we make 2013 the year of the British Mobile Phone?"

No. Answered. Easy.

Re: Top work

We need more women in compsci. Genuinely don't understand why women don't find it interesting. Engineering not so much, complete waste of time. I say this as a male who used to be an engineer. Any women getting into engineering in the UK right now is going to be spending the rest of her life dodging redundancy and competing with Chinese engineers to the floor as regards to low pay.

Don't do it.

Ignore Dyson too. There are plenty of great engineers in this country and there's no work for them because of people like Dyson who want you to work for 10p/hour, so they send all the work to Asia instead because obviously you're not going to do that.

The government isn't turning tax screws it's just pretending to for the cameras (no court cases or bills sent yet) and also, in a situation where classical economics is useful - you might be right.

Re: Nothing New!

"At least in the US you can be born poor and then end up as head of state. In the UK that is decided by birth."

* but you have more chance of winning the lottery and an 8 year term does horrible things to institutional memory - everybody has to relearn everything ever 4/8 years.

Re: Filing patents has nothing to do with innovation

Moreso - a filed patent != a legitimate patent. Which is probably the reason, maybe we're just filing less frivolous stuff?

Re: An NRA spokespersons said...

"Cinema violence isn't what gets the censoring in the States in my experience: It's s3x... particularly anything homosexual. Name five Hollywood films where we've seen gay couples kissing"

Of course - though frankly - Gia, Boys don't cry et al. It's not homosexuality per se that Hollywood has a problem with it's male homosexuality. Then again maybe it's just that the movies don't have a huge mass-appeal on reflection. Plenty of movies about lesbians :)

Seriously though the number of movies that get a cut NC-17 in the US and later there's an unrated blu-ray release that's identical to the uncut UK cinematic release is starting to get a little shocking.

The big thing by the way in the US that you basically can't do ever for fear of the world ending is say "Jesus" in the profane. Child rape/murder is fine, so is chopping people up with a chainsaw, and rape but *you may not* say Jesus in the profane. Or not have an American flag appearing at least once in your movie.

Have a lot of friends in the US who thing the state is evil and cuts everything so I've done a remarkable volume of research on this in the past to shut them up. The BBFC will let you do basically anything as long as there's a point to it, i.e. it's useful to a plot. If you're chopping up kids for the sake of sexual gratification in your movie and there's not even a usable plot in there your movie isn't going to get a rating and shouldn't anyway. This is human centipede's problem - it's just stupid.

Re: @AC: The only reason anyone is angry at Bob...

"But your post might be the first post that I have seen on this site for which posting as AC is appropriate"

I've used it only once to describe something that happened at a "past" (honest!) employer in a certain condition which they might not have liked publicly broadcasting, thus avoiding me getting fired. Only time I've ever used it. Suspect that's what it's mostly for unless you live in Syria.

Re: Here we go again

"it helps promote the 3-year lifespan they seem to have in mind for all their products"

3 years? Bit much? 3 months if you're lucky (anecdotal experience of how often my flatmate buys a new macbook or iphone).

Re: Volunteering for the unknown

Well, native ipv6 and 6to4 NAT is the best deployable solution in this circumstance. Actually it's what ISPs should have done ~10 years ago.

All my stuff is pure IPv6 so I'm in a position to laugh in the face of anybody who has this issue.

Re: How many of those orphan works will actually be of value?

"there is NO standard of what constitutes a good-faith or diligent search"

Well it would be for a court to decide and given Berne they'd have to have a damn good reason on newish data.

Re: satnav blunder? Really?

"BTW, can anyone explain how you can traverse the Alps, without noticing that is not your typical Belgian landscape?"

Think she was distracted ;) Note she hasn't actually said what she was distracted by, maybe it was the GPS asking her where the hell she was going.

Re: Its more wide spread that you may think.. but it works

"Whitelisting is NOT a one way street, we don't pay a large sum of money and then get carte-blanche to spam people. Far from it, we have to run a whiter-than-white email system"

But here's the thing, why do you need then whitelisting? Doesn't make /any/ sense at all. If you're putting in that much effort, your emails won't have any issues getting through anybody's spam filters and you're extremely unlikely to end up on any blacklists..

@jonathanb

You don't mean to suggest these vans.. Don't exist! Surely not?!

Seriously though I thought it was just me wondering where the money is being embezzled.

Re: Too much touch stuff.

It's not even that so much as the system doesn't seem to be that usable *without* touch. If there was options a) it's basically windows 7 with a new kernel and new directx etc and option b) what windows 8 actually is, and you can switch between them - they might have sold more copies. That's my argument. But also yes to what you said.

Re: Go right ahead...

Argument fundamentally fails because these people all have people in India or China working for them. If they leave we can get some smaller British companies who are a) capable (which would be a huge improvement on the status quo) and b) local to do the job and thus would be an *improvement*.

"These companies are doing nothing against the law" - in some cases it's debatable but also, we are aware, and it's for the government to make it illegal.

If Starbucks suddenly said oh hey we don't want to pay tax on our profits as per UK law so we're leaving the UK market would a) somebody else sell coffee to fill the gap or b) there'll be a national coffee shortage and people raging at work all day? This question basically sums up my point.