Posts by Steve Knox

Bad idea

Rewinding this way (before hiring a new CEO) is a very bad idea. It basically tells your prospects that they will have no real power. This in turn makes it almost impossible to get an actually good person in as CEO.

This also makes the company look confused, eroding shareholder confidence and turning what was likely to be a minor dip into a nosedive.

If you do want to rewind, better to ask prospective marks^H^H^H^HCEOs questions that will ensure that you can choose a new head will do it for you.

Absolute Transparency

or, apparently, his own autobiography.

Yeah, but...

once you account for inflation, the price has actually gone up slightly.

"Let google run it and it will probably be ready by the end of the year."

Yes. In a closed-source implementation available only on Chrome. Mozilla will decry its lack of openness, while Microsoft and Apple will be in the process of filing patent, copyright, and just for the fun of it, wrongful death lawsuits. It'll come out in Beta by invite only, and you won't have to provide your real name to get it, because Google will legally change your name to fit their definition of what a name should be. Meanwhile, it'll remain slower than JavaScript, primarily because of its habit of logging all operations to an "application feedback" system at Google.

Yes we can.

"...surely there's no way you can agree with censoring him in Google search results yet condemn him for his stance on Clause 28/2A?"

Clause 28/2A is a government action and hence constitutes institutional censorship. Google is a private business and have the right to say or not say whatever they like (as does Sir Brian.)

You and Sir Brian assert that this is a "free speech issue." I wholeheartedly agree. The fact that he would actively campaign to constrain a private company (Google) to speak in the way he wants them to does a wonderful job of highlighting his true feelings on free speech.

Free speech is an absolute, and if Google doesn't have it, then none of us do.

Let's Play

Spot the Straw Man.

VERY limited appeal

"...only useful for sole traders..."

What about other fishmongers?

Thanks, Tom

That'll teach me to do math when I'm half awake and suffering from a cold!

The term "up to" ...

includes zero and even negative values. No lying necessary.

In fact, the only logical reason, given the accurate definition of the terms in the original sentence, for one to argue that T-Mobile was lying is if one were convinced that the LTE connectivity would, in fact, be good for downloads at speeds over 100Mb/s.

If that actually was your point, I apologize.

>"Pick your poison. The existing ones are all bad, evil, and wrong."

There are many poisons out there that are effective, and whether or not they are moral or appropriate surely depends on the situation.

@David W

Tracking != Advertising

The latter can succeed perfectly well without the former, despite what some incredibly greedy and short-sighted advertising companies would have you believe.

@AC: Feature request

Control Panel > User Accounts > User Account Control Settings > Never Notify

Any other features you'd like added? Perhaps a use for that right-mouse button?

Reread the article perhaps?

Since it was about an active US program to convert warheads into fuel, you may want to reconsider the second half your second paragraph -- or at least provide reliable references to support your "word on the street." For an example of a somewhat reliable reference, look here:

http://nnsa.energy.gov/mediaroom/pressreleases/doennsaafs81811

<-- The most common word on the street.

You got me...

I thought you were serious -- until you called Facebook a "private social network".

That's a good one.

Probability

"(It also means that statistically speaking, if you build 1e12 (1x10 to twelve power) nuclear power plants, one is bound to fail immediately...) "

No. It doesn't.

Let's talk binomial distributions for a second. The simplest one is the coin flip. A balanced coin has a 1 in 2 chance of landing heads, a 1 in 2 chance of landing tails. By your logic, flipping a coin twice would mean you're bound to get one coin landing on heads. Actually, you only have a 75% chance of one coin landing on heads. That's because each flip is independent, so you have a 50% chance that flip 1 is heads, and then after that a 50% chance that flip 2 is heads. In other words, there are 4 equally likely outcomes (H-H, H-T, T-H, T-T) and 3 of them have at least one coin landing heads.

Generalizing and skipping a bit, given an event of probability P, the odds of N attempts containing at least one occurrence of the event is 1 - (1-P)^N. Plugging 1e-12 as P and 1e12 as N, we get approximately a 63.2% chance of one of those trillion power plants would fail immediately.

Moore's Law:

"The number of transistors that can be placed inexpensively on an integrated circuit doubles approximately every two years."

Note there's nothing specifically performance-related there. Yes, in the desktop world those advances were often used to increase performance.

But in the mobile sector, they've been used as much or more for miniaturization, power efficiency, or adding functionality, which is why today's smartphones are smaller, and run longer, than an Axim x30, even though they have to give some of their battery life and space to the relative hog of the 3G/3G+ radio (not to mention the wi-fi, bluetooth, GPS, accelerometer, etc.)

Re your aside, I certainly hope so.

Noooooo, bad analogy

"Alive" is not a function of time, but a point-in-time attribute*. You are either alive, or not alive, at any given point in time. You do not become less alive over time.

"Broken", as used in crypographic circles, is a function of the time needed for an attacker to decrypt a cipher. If that time is the same amount of time as trying all possibilities, then the cipher is not broken. The closer the time needed comes to a practical span of time, the more broken the cipher is; you can call a cipher completely broken if the time needed is short enough to allow exploitation of the message.

* That's actually apparent in the subtext of the Python sketches about the dead parrot, and the corpse collector in Holy Grail.

How can one..

"...edit [ones] name to comply with our policies in the future.." if one doesn't know what Google's policies will be in the future?

Very Few

esp. since the 1986 IWC ban.

Positive.

It doesn't matter who developed the site, if you own it but don't take the basic responsibility of at least knowing someone who knows how to maintain it properly, it's your fault when your site compromises your customers.

There were no 8-bit CPUs in IBM PCs

The original PC used the 8088, which is a 16-bit CPU with an 8-bit external bus. Future models in the PC line used either the 8088 or 80286.

Worst-named Particle Ever

Physics is all about mechanics. Theology is all about motive.

They are two distinct fields, and those who believe the fields intersect are either short on sense or heavy on hubris.

Obviously

"Cost of contract = £30, cost of phone = £100

Cost of contract = £35, cost of phone = FREE"

That's not free as in free, that's free as in subsidized -- which isn't really free at all. And that was DrXym's point. His $1500 outlay was not an up-front payment, but the sum of the cost of the contract.

Now if you were to say that you could get the same phone free without a higher-priced contract, I'd call you a liar*. But that would be a free as in free phone.

* I'd probably use a nicer synonym, such as "marketer"**

** ( marketer : liar :: free : subsidized )