Posts by Eddie Edwards 970 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Oct 2007
The point is - and this is so mind-numbingly obvious I'm surprised it didn't occur to your keyboard as you typed that - if all the source material ends up in the database no one will need to buy the book.
What it's actually similar to is the postcode database, or Google Earth's images, or the Ordnance Survey's maps, all of which are well-known to be subject to copyright.
Funny, EON wrote to me when their meter reader made a balls up (instead of reading 05454 or whatever, he'd read 15454). They didn't state the amount, they just said "mind checking your meter reading and giving us a call, you're due a large bill and we want to make sure it's right". Much better than the heart attack of receiving a 5-figure bill.
I ended up figuring out how much gas they reckoned I'd used, and it was half a gasometer's worth. You'd have thought they might have noticed that much gas going missing ...
Apropos of nothing, does anyone else find Chrome crashes with regularity *only* in the Register's comment form?
"Your bank or the police will never cold call you or email you and ask you for your login details, cards or PINs. If anyone does, they are probably a criminal, so hang up the phone or delete the email."
Except the banks will, regularly. They'll call you saying there's some problem with authorization on your card, and then grill you for personal information to make sure it's really you they're talking to. If you say, "uh, you called me," you get treated like some kind of obstructionist wierdo.
I'm not sure what the case is in London, but in my rural neck of the woods I've yet to see an NFC terminal in the wild.
Add to this the basic statistical fact that 50% of those on 2-year contracts now won't be renewing until iPhone 5 comes out (mine isn't up until June 2012, but I do plan to wait until the next release cycle rather than snap up a soon-to-be-obsoleted model).
Add to this the fact that Android users also have contracts.
I don't see a headstart of more than a year, during which the banks have to get around to actually rolling NFC into shops.
In other words, Apple is right on the money as far as the mass market goes (as usual).
"A DNA match to one in a million does not mean that it's a million to one against the bloke 'aving done it, m'lud. Rather, it means that in a population of 65 million that 65 people, based purely on the DNA, could have done it. Our DNA tests thus mean that we now have to go and exclude those other 65, or at least regard them as the prime pool of suspects, not convict our man in the dock purely on the basis that one in a million is beyond that reasonable doubt. Yes, these sorts of mistakes are made in the chain of reasoning."
Yes, they are.
THAT'S WHY WE USE BAYES' THEOREM. It's ONLY by applying Bayes' Theorem that you obtain paragraphs like the above.
Bayes' Theorem is not an "option", it is a necessity, otherwise travesties like Professor Sir Roy Meadow will happen constantly.
So what is the author arguing?
Don't be ridiculous. There are other free compilers, and other free UNIX toolsets (ever heard of BSD?). There are even, believe it or not, competing philsophies about open source.
Linux would be just fine without gcc, without the GNU toolset, and without Stallman's moralistic highground of bullshit - a platform you obviously subscribe to, seeing as you use the word "evil" in relation to the *software industry*, for God's sake.
To misuse the word "evil" in such a way is the absolute epitome of "first world problem" syndrome. The only issue I can see with the article is that the author fails to hit us with the double whammy of how ridiculous it is that someone dedicates their life to fighting a very very small point of personal preference regarding who gets to edit source code, as if it had some deep moral aspect or even appreciable impact on the average person. Stallman isn't an idealist, he's a self-righteous prick with a disturbing tendency towards absolutism, and a following that can only be described as cultish.
Meanwhile, the "evil" Gates tackles real problems, such as poverty, poor sanitation, poor education, and so on, with the mountain of money he's made fighting this philosophical bullshit with practical reality and actual useful software. Which is kind of the point the article is making.
We need a special triple-fail icon for people who still think Stallman is sane.
I think the idea is that it's the *software* that has the freedom, not the *user*. Otherwise, like you say, it makes no sense.
It doesn't work anyway. Digium (creators of Asterisk) use the GPL to beat around the head anyone who tries to make money from value-add in their market without paying them a royalty. It's anti-competitive, in that case, and that has nothing to do with freedom. It also restricts the freedom of their users. Ironic that I can sell an Internet Explorer plugin without paying a dime to Microsoft, but I can't sell an Asterisk plugin without paying Digium their "GPL tax". And Digium are in no way unique. Go freedom!
I've done entire Arduino projects in assembly - had to, to get precise timing for composite video output. I can't remember the details in their GUI, but basically you write assembly files and assemble them and link them in. The toolchain is all gcc-based so it's not rocket science at all.
Loving that clock speed and RAM.
Yes, the path of least legal resistance is to buy an HDMI decoder chip with HDCP functionality (e.g. http://www.analog.com/en/audiovideo-products/analoghdmidvi-interfaces/ad9381/products/product.html) and buy an HDCP key. What this device does is only impossible if you don't want to pay to play.
Maybe they're assuming you're NOT an idiot, and both know what a versioning file system is, and why you would want one.
You'll be singing its praises in 6 months when it's saved your ass. Unless you disable it, of course, since it does seem to be a little "not quite ready for prime time" in implementation.
Has anyone done any analysis of how much App Engine costs *assuming you have Google Ads on your site*?
The link here [http://www.characterandwealth.com/public/319.cfm] suggests 3000 users/day translates into around $1,000/month in ad revenue.
3000 users/day, each receiving 10MB of data each and each performing 1,000 database queries on a single instance, still only costs around $10/day. Under the same model, at 50 users/day, or $15/month in ad revenue, Google Apps is free. There is an awkward place between having to start to pay and breaking even at around 200 users, but if you can't afford to inject $30/month of your own money to get your business through a teething phase, quit entrepreneurship now.
"So while we get all sorts of rhetoric from all sorts of people arguing that taxes should be higher, almost no one seems to think that it's their own taxes that should be higher."
The signatories to that letter are saying their own taxes should be higher, so what's your point?
That really must be the most mean-spirited piece of writing I've read in several years.
As the Transputer guy said just the other day, when will Americans get over the fact that you can't have a hundred cores all with the same view of a single shared memory system? ARM, you're going to screw your architecture if you kow-tow to this nonsense. Cell does just fine without coherent memory. Just put in fine-grained partial cache flushes and async notification of when they complete, and you're golden. Coherency costs - you spend silicon on it, you decimate your design space to achieve it, and then you use Watts to maintain it. Spend that silicon on something useful, and save the power.
That goes double for hardware that's going to be specialized to radio transmission using a given protocol anyway, and can be programmed once for all users.
It appears to be that Google's servers will ping DHL's servers regularly the day before delivery, presumably noting the time at which it transitions to (say) DHL's warehouse nearest your house, and from that estimating the time of arrival based on this data and no doubt terabytes of previous experience with DHL in that area in true Google style.
Stupider things have been patented.
"until the world remembers that natively-developed code runs faster"
Er, 1985 called and want their reason not to use productivity tools back.
In fact there is absolutely no reason in principle that a graphical tool couldn't produce code as fast as native C or even native assembler. The reason people don't use graphical tools, so they never mature to that level, is that a few lines of C translate into an A3-sized diagram, and no-one wants to wrangle an A3-sized diagram. Which is sad, because once you get above the low level to, say, integration of heterogeneous systems over a network, the diagramming approach should win out by a mile.
This is the same reason, incidentally, that most chip makers write VHDL or Verilog instead of making football-pitch-sized schematics. (Ironically, in that case, the people that do use football-pitch-sized schematics do so to get extra speed.)
My take home from this is that you can't open source stuff because it's legally problematic.
Leadership is unimportant - the project can stagnate but at least the code is out there. Leadership is important for a successful open source project but here we're talking about not having an open source project at all.
There's a strong sense of the legal department covering their asses here. Surely the whole "no warranty" disclaimer that you can copy from anywhere is the answer to this? Universities have legal departments too, and they seem happy with this approach.
The problem is then political - getting the legal department to give a shit. Having the CEO as champion may help here.
My 3GS has the jack on the curved part and you can see the metal. It's not as pronounced as on this iPad 2 but it's there.
Who cares anyway? Tony's suggestion that they bore a bigger hole is the dumbest thing I've heard today (and I read a Guardian comments section earlier). Make the port less useful for the sake of a minor aesthetic concern - yeah, great idea.
To call this a mistake is to ignore the design tradeoffs. One might prefer aesthetics over function (after all, one is an Apple buyer) but that can be taken too far.
"It stopped one-man service companies paying themselves low wages, with limited National Insurance payments, but stonking share dividends, which do not attract NI payments."
Way to mischaracterize the entire debate. That's not what IR35 did at all.
What IR35 tried to prevent was people doing the above *while effectively being in full-time employment*. IR35 looked at the contract between you and your client and tried to infer whether or not it was in practice an employment contract. If it was, you got seriously fucked over, and had to pay NI on your entire *revenues* (so, those flights and hotels you bought and expensed to the client - you're paying NI on that, sonny).
It was a glorious piece of FUD, in that some saps actually pre-empted the possible investigation and coughed to the extra NI. That'll be the 30,000 idiots mentioned in the article.
Meanwhile anyone who changed clients every few months, and wrote their contracts carefully, was safe as houses. These people continued to pay zero NI (not "limited" - if your salary is the right amount you pay no NI at all; I haven't paid NI since 2005, and it still counts as if I had).
"When used as intended by the manufacturer, tobacco WILL kill you"
Actually, no. Only 1 in 2 life-long smokers actually die from smoking, and that's ignoring those who quit at some point.
There's also a huge difference between smoking a few at the weekend and smoking 60 a day - which starts sounding like risk management if you're not careful. Oops.
Of course, the reason people smoke is that they're addicted to nicotine. I'm interested in your anti-addiction technique of calling people stupid, but I'm not sure it works in practice.
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