Posts by Voland's right hand

He was the first "utility" to engage in predatory pricing too

He also priced per time of day and per customer in a manner which was specially designed to eliminate competition from industrial on-site generation. He was very good at it too. In a few years local factory generators which were the norm before he started became history.

The doctrine of sale in good faith depends highly from country to country and has changed over time.

There used to be countries where you were not at fault even if you have obtained stolen goods if it was in good faith (this particular legal anomaly in some Eastern European legal code has been fixed now). Similarly there are countries where you can always go after the end user as long as one chain in the contractual sequence is broken.

So even if the Apple acted in good faith based on their Quallcom contract, what happens next depends on each and every country legal code.

And your point is?

So how does this differ from the average sociopath in power elsewhere in the world?

As you pointed out - enough about Detroit city council

1£ of electronics, 70£ worth of IPR, rest is margin

Yeah, like Alpha was not a power hog in its hayday

Alpha was a powerhog beyond anything Intel produced in those days. As it was the only game in town in terms of 64 bit linux I had no choice but to use them despite the circa 100W CPU power consumption. While 100W does not sound a lot today, 12 years ago P3 ate 22W tops and K6 ate even less than that.

Not really

People will take 1h+ commute only if the drive is sane. 1h commute on an empty motorway is definitely less nerve wrecking than 10 minutes across London rush hour.

Similarly, if you are commuting for 1h you will chose a comfortable car instead of trying to save pennies at the cost of a headache from the buzzing of a 107 or Micra. These may be good enough for the 30 minutes navigation cross rush hour in let's say Reading or Milton Keynes. If you drive them on a daily basis for 60 odd miles one way you will find yourself looking for a Serie 3, A4 or something in that class very soon. It may be more expensive per mile, but it delivers you in a shape fit to work. As a result, rather unsurprisingly it also delivers less aggravation and you end up in better health.

And so on.

All in all - not surprising. Less adrenalin, less stress, better health. Causation nicely underlying correlation.

Never had that problem

Oops... Forgot... I do not use wndows :)

I have had some minor niggles from one out of 5 bluetooth dongles I have.In the days before WiFi became ubiquitous on high end phones I used to maintain my local port of the bluetooth channel for Asterisk as well as use bluetooth for presence to give info to home automation. It works flawlessly. But not with windows.

Why? The usual story - nearly all BT dongles are Silicon Radio chipsets that do not need any special driver. Similarly, most laptops use Broadcom. Once again it does not need a driver. All in all there are 3-4 types of Bluetooth chippery out there so no need for a gazillion of drivers. Microsoft however, instead of shipping a unified driver (and updating the device database for it) has chosen to allow people without a clue to ship their own.

Absolutely

I got some fantastic HP kit for some stupidly low prices this time.

Where will these bumbling morons work next?

It was designed to kill Via and it fulfilled its promise

Well, Atom was designed to destroy the threat from "cheap device which does what the punter needs". Which it did.

It was definitely not based on merit. It did it based on rock bottom pricing. Anyone tempted by the pricing had to take the poisonous pill of having their system specified to ensure that it will be crippled and non competitive. It is not surprising that the market is dead - that was by design. It is not surprising that this plot succeeded - if Intel joins forces with Microsoft the only thing that can stop them is WW3.

The job is done, Intel can continue to sell premium chips at premium prices even where they are utterly unnecessary. Microsoft can continue to sell bloated eyecandelicous bugware. Atom can now be confined to the CPU graveyard of history.

Forgot to add

We should be thankful to the EU that in their infinite wisdom they standardized the EU tow bar socket without a permanent 12V (you have to have the 2 socket aux rig to get that).

Otherwise every caravan towing twit out there would have had a 2.4GHz sender for reverse view which would have made bluetooth handsfree practically unusable.

In fact, the 2.4GHz non-license allowance should be revoked for vehicles period and a licensing regime instated which allows only the more well-behaved 2.4GHz tech. Otherwise in a couple of years time we will be without working handsfree tech.

It is not a question of impersonal

It is a question of realtime vs non-realtime.

We live in the age of distractions. It is difficult enough to concentrate as it is.

If it is MMS, SMS, email or IM I do not need to answer it immediately. I can answer it when and where I see fit (if answer it at all). It is a non-realtime communication. It can be as personal as a call or even more so, but it is not required to be immediate and not required to be realtime.

If it is a call (especially a video one) I have to actively bounce it or answer it which means stop doing what I am doing at that particular moment. It is realtime communication.

Who cares

30£, is 30W on for a year in the UK. At standard depreciation for consumer equipment this means that your standby power draw must be 45W+ for this to make sense.

Yeah... Right... Forget it....

Actually pop-up and buy an ebook reader

WH Smith has one _MAJOR_ advantage - it is present at all airports. If this gadget is on the shelf when I go with the family on holiday in few weeks time I am getting one.

For two reasons:

1. It will be only 70 quid

2. It will not be registered versus my Amazon.co.uk credit card so I can give it to junior or grandma without having any second thoughts.

Your math is b0rken

Irish tax rate if memory serves me right is 15 (with most big players having long term breaks negotiated to reduce this further), Bermuda tax rate is inexistent.

Google pays 19 because it still has to pay for stuff it cannot avoid in the USA (32), UK (40), etc.

Dunno, there is no obvious way to deal with this. It will take fixing not just the US (or EU) tax code to fix this one.

It is not that imagintive

Some octopus species are known to play with various objects and "align" them into shapes. So that idea is not far fetched. The other parts however are.

1. The beak of an octopus that big will slice through vertebrae like razor through butter. If these were indeed victims of a kraken like creature where are the traces?

2. Large carnivorous invertebrates have to be pelagic as the Colossal and Architetis today. There is no way they can get their food by sitting in one place on the sea bottom. Pelagic animals do not bring their food to one place. They do not play with the carcass after it is done either. They eat it where they get it and get on.

Wrong bet

The right bet is "What are the odds that Samsung will open the folder with wireless and silicon patents and go nuclear".

That does not read like drunken

I read a couple and they are too coherent to read like drunken.

They are also funny only for a given set of values of funny. Ditto for insightful.

For example in his Weak/Strong type rant he misses the obvious fact that nearly all big "Weak" typed systems written in Ruby, PHP and especially Perl operate off database backends (usually SQL). This means that they are actually "Hard" typed. In fact they are "harder" than a lot of stuff written in C++ or Java and + persistence.

So much for insight.

A bit harsh for improving their PR ratings

That's a bit harsh for feeding the celebrity culture and keeping said selebs in the spotlight.

Benchmark in a loop

Same as with laptops - benchmark in a loop until the battery is dead.

I bet that most will be under 2h.

Unfortunately you may be right

The law is ass...

While A may not be patentable, B may not be patentable an method to combine A and B quite often can be patentable.

The question here is - did Haliburton demonstrate that they have combined A (software) and B (math) in an inventive manner. Personally I doubt it. Material science simulations are something the industry has been doing on a daily basis ever since computers have become available for general use. Even if it is inventive I would be surprised if there is no prior art.

I just choked on my coffee

If you like a grotesque monster which grows template warts and shi(f)ts to output all over the place - yeah... It is beautiful...

Which means that it is a perfect ringtone

Dare ignore your phone ringing?

based on this review

I might actually consider it.

Finally a game which is as abominably difficult to win as Nethack.

I recently had a funny dialogue with my wife about Nethack: "Q:How long have you played it? A: 20+ years. Q: Have you won: A: No Q: Why do you play?"

Well, the answer is - for the sheer perversity and variety of the ways in which the game kills ya. This one sounds like close enough to warrant some attention :)

Greece is nothing

The real unraveling has just begun. Greece is nothing compared to the debts which have been run up by local authorities across Europe. Dexia and its multi-GDP of Greece debts are just the tip of the iceberg. The defaults on credit lines to Spanish, Italian and other Eu local authorities by other banks are yet to come.

Do we like it or not - there has been no money to spend since the late 90-es. Do we like it or not our "elected representatives" have been spending like mad. It is yet another bit of history repeating. I saw this in the second half of the 90-es in Eastern Europe. 1000% annual hyperinflation and total collapse of the economy. Enormous debts racked up by local authorities on various folly projects played a significant role in that. Every city center was marble paved and marble clad. Monuments were raised and built no matter the cost. And so on. All of that on credit which at some point ran out. Even before that we saw it in Yugoslavia (it was not even ex- in those days).

Then the darkness descended. By the time the economy hit the bottom it looked and felt like Mad Max. This is just a repeat of it on a larger scale :(

Credit is nice, but if you have to take credit to pay credit this means that your predecessor should be in the dock.

Why the "albeit" ?

In order to be "One of the greatest minds, businessmen of the era" you have to be "controversial at times". Non-controversial people can never attain the "greatest minds" status.

It should be "One of the greatest minds, businessmen of the era, _BECAUSE_ he was controversial at times".

He may not do it gracefully, but he does it successfully

While the classic "Larry speech to Yale" is known to be an urban legend it is none the less an excellent definition of Larry:

http://www.snopes.com/quotes/ellison.asp

He may not do things gracefully, but he does them successfully. You may hate him, you may loathe him, but you have to give him a credit where credit is due.

Wrong example

Bayesian stats are misinterpreted for the double cot death vs double murder scenario.

Cot deaths are not stochastically independent. Bad heredity is bad heredity, so is bad environment and so are unfortunately bad parenting habits.

If you feed _ALL_ factors into Bayesian stats you will see quite correctly a very high probability of second cot death. If you do not, the second death becomes very unlikely and the probability of double murder seemingly exceeds the probability of cot death.

Coming back to Bayesian stats, the judge in this case may have more clue than we think (or has read more than we think). Bayesian stats require very _CLEAN_ data which has not been contaminated by a deterministic bias. If your data is biased (no pun intended), you Bayes will be way off because it will be revealing the bias in your data which you may interpret wrongly.