Posts by Christian Berger 4851 publicly visible posts • joined 9 Mar 2007
The female bank robber sends out a message that of course women can take part in society in previously male dominated areas. And she is doing something productive, robbing a bank.
Bank robberies redirect money from investment banks to actual productive branches. They pay for the wages of your bakery or meat market, they pay for your hairdresser and plumber, and perhaps even your drug dealer. Bank robberies create and maintain jobs.
Well I wouldn't say "usable", but switching certainly turned Ethernet from "it's cheap" to "it's cheap and it works quite well".
I still remember my first workplace. They had some fairly nifty managed hubs, which could be segmented and connected to the switch we had. If only someone would have taken the time to properly re-wire the patch cables, there would have been a 8 fold increase in performance. But still, 20 computers hammering away on 10 MBit shared with file shares and dBase databases still worked acceptably well.
Rand wants everyone to be selfish and only follow their own goals because she doesn't understand that there is a difference between individual goals and the common good. Ethernet is actually a good example why she is wrong.
Ethernet works, because there are strict rules everyone must adhere to. If there is a collision you have to wait a random time. With each collision the timespan of that random number will increase. This rule throttles down stations when the network is full, to share the bandwidth more or less fairly between them.
Now an Any Rand network card would simply ignore the standard and re-transmission the packet right away. That way it will always give the card 100% of the network if it wishes to. However if more people act like this, there will _only_ be collisions. Once there is a collision, both stations will try again at the same time, they will do so until one of them gives up. Instead of sharing the bandwidth fairly between the stations, those few stations ruin the network for everyone.
Because Internet Explorer 10 recently got the seal "tested Software" from the TÜV, the German institution checking cars for road safety. (the TÜV is a descendent of regional organisations called Dampfkessel-Überwachungs-und Revisions-Vereine which checked steam boilers, it's also the testing institution you saw in TopGear with that mobile car test stand, with its own lobby)
So there's nothing to worry about. It's tested. :)
Having more radio resource blocks available means you can use more. So you could use simpler modulation schemes which can worse signal- to noise ratios enabling you to use less signal meaning less power.
TDD on the other hand has serious problems as you need to manage the timing very accurately and you'll always have dead times when you need between sending and receiving.
Well seriously, there's also a lot of time you would want to have yourself. For example NTP servers so you know the approximate time of day. Those are fun to play around with.
Then of course a mail server so you can send and receive e-mail. (useful feature for job applications as some more modern companies take them this way)
Then you may want to have a way of watching and recording television. This typically means setting up a VDR system on Linux as well as some storage. Granted you won't have a SAN for that at home, but a simple RAID and LVM as well as NFS isn't atypical here.
At university I had both my computer at home and in the dormitory. So I did need some form of replication and batch file transfer.
Those are all little things you'd do anyhow if you are into computing and/or engineering. Again that has nothing to do with money. Even though I can now afford having large RAIDs my previous VDR installations ran on fairly cheap systems. (consumer crap) Granted for many years I ran my mail server from a local box. First on an ISDN line, then a DSL one. This doesn't add any additional cost.
I don't think an employee should have to spend hundreds of pounds just to please its employer.
However I think that if you are working in a technical field, you should be informed about it. I believe a system administrator should run his own mail server. That's just common sense.
You don't necessarily do it for your job, but because you like to. For example I also run my own Stratum 1 NTP server, not because I'd need it on the job, but because I'd like to have the precise time. I find it cool that the computer which does my video recordings knows the time with an uncertainty of a microsecond. It's something I care about.
And this is what I would expect of an employee, to care about what they do.
What support? Seriously what support do you get with your phone. If you are lucky you might get firmware updates for a while.
If they wanted to support, they would have chosen to go for common hardware platforms so you can use common operating system images, just like it's done on the PC.
The people who were looking forward to Windows Phone were expecting it to be a bit more like Windows. Microsoft would mandate some common hardware standard and you could update your operating system independently of your hardware vendor. People expected that device to be independent of the "cloud".
However this has never happened. What's left is a system which is at least not much better than Windows CE, but carries all the cruft of a full blown Windows.
...that it doesn't come with the usual drawbacks. If you have 2 competing projects, chances are the teams are going to talk to each other and even share code and ideas.
They may disagree one some points, but they are free to agree on others.
Let's take a negative example of diversity, ARM SoCs. There are literally dozens of different SoCs out there and they are all different. Partly since they were designed for different markets (a router doesn't need graphics), but mostly to keep developers from switching to another SoC.
This is why, when you are an operating system kernel and find yourself running on an ARM SoC, you have no idea of how your system looks like. You don't know where and how large your RAM is, you don't know how to access the serial port or where it is in IO space. You are completely blind and can neither discover your hardware, nor blindly assume it's at well known addresses. That's why most resources of open source projects running on ARM currently go into supporting all the wildly different hardware platforms. While on a PC you might cope with not having accelerated graphics or a non-working WLAN chip, on ARM have to cope with non-working flash or no frame buffer access at all.
That is negative diversity: Trying to be different to make life hard for people.
Usually this works by having import taxes, making foreign products more expensive and therefore less attractive to the people in your country....
Now, the US doesn't produce very much, but they import a lot from the EU. I work at a fairly humble 25 people company and even _we_ ship a good part of our goods to the US. (via Canada where we have an associate)
And even worse, the US imports most of their machines used to produce stuff from the EU. So if they raise the tax on imports from the EU, their own products will become more expensive, making them less attractive.
If you don't want to use Wine, but still want to be multi-platform with native binaries, you can use Lazarus. It's a Delphi clone which can compile to at least Win32, Linux and MacOSX. I haven't tried the Android port yet, but yes it works on the Raspberry PI :)
It's aimed at GUI application and uses a fairly nice GUI framework which allows you do generate your GUIs via a designer and at runtime. And it can even scale your GUI to different font sizes without a single line of code. And you have native elements on every platform. (No idea how that looks on Android)
Well that's what you get from proprietary system. You will end up having to support some old stuff nobody else runs any more, but switching to something else is far to expensive.
We already see that with companies basing their software on VBA and Excel. We will see that with companies using Java, Sharepoint or Cloud solutions for business critical work.
If you want to buy new systems now, try to look into the future. What will happen if the vendor doesn't exist any more? Can you go on hiring your own programmer to keep it updated? Can you replace modules of it one by one without affecting the whole system?
That's actually where the smart money went. I have recently been camping at a festival with normal people. Most of them had various kinds of Thinpads, not only X-Series. I don't think I've seen any classical Netbooks. However there was about 10% macs (usually with stickers indicating they were company property) and there was even the odd Dell running some sort of Windows.
The reason why there was more progress in the past was, that there were more manufacturers. And those manufactures were even taking bets producting new products which never before have been there.
Today if you want to bring a new class of products to the market, your beancounter/investor will look at the sales figures and tell you clearly, that since nobody has bought that non-existent product yet, nobody wants it. They then suggest you to make a touch screen phone or a social network, since that's where the money is.
Look at companies like Grid which simply made a laptop, though nobody has proven a market for it.
Microsoft killed the market with really shitty versions of Windows like "Windows 7 Starter" demanding shitty hardware like limited display resolutions.
Another point was bad hardware quality. Since a Windows license still cost a relevant amount of money, the build quality of those devices sometimes was abysmally bad.
Of course screen bevels also were a problem, some Netbooks had a tiny screen in a gigantic case, taking up nearly as much space as a normal 12" Notebook.
1. A 30 megabyte blob of sourcecode + hardware dependent extensions probably contain lots of lots of bugs. Probably way more than the bit of assembler code in the BIOS.
2. Samsung doesn't have high quality standards, at least not when it comes to their own EFI extensions.
For me that means that for future hardware I will prefer one without EFI, because it will be buggy for the next 20 years. I also will try to avoid Samsung as they are likely to add more bugs and even critical bugs. (Although seriously, Samsung never has been on my radar for laptops, they never showed up anywhere where I was looking)
Now if I may gaze into the crystal ball to predict the following:
Eventually there will be bugs found which can brick the hardware just by a boot attempt from USB or an SD card. Since there's a service mode in modern CPUs the attack vector might even be USB at runtime or the managment mode of the Ethernet chip. (Intel offers extensive OS independent management over Ethernet with their chipsets)
This will even work for machines with "Secure" Boot enabled, making them somewhat less secure than their BIOS equivalents. Of course none of that will be patched. Some people will however still defend Secure Boot with their life, claiming that it's not just another vendor lock-in system to prevent Microsoft from completing with others.
... like the ADE 651
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ADE_651
or the Sniffex
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sniffex
although those are marketed as bomb detection devices, those work just as well on cyber-threats, and probably a lot better than AV software, no matter what vendor.
Well that wouldn't be a problem if they:
a) allowed you to update your browser independently of your operating system (not everyone wants to 'upgrade' to Windows XP or Vista)
b) allowed you to install multiple versions of the browser so you could use one for your old broken internal software and one for actual browsing
This seems to follow a general trend.
If you ask people why they use Windows, you typically don't get very good answers. The best you get is that they want to "rely on a strong partner", or that they are vendor locked. In many cases you even get the verbal equivalent of flung shit. There are quite a few people proud of never having seen anything else than the last few versions of Windows.
Linux people usually have more in depth reasons. For example the higher quality of open source software, the longer commitment to maintenance, or at least the lower cost. For technical people Linux has become the default solution. If in doubt install Linux, it'll do the job. Most Linux people also have more knowledge about Windows than most Windows people, even though they usually claim that they just have a very basic understanding of Windows.
Of course I'm generalizing here, there are also probably Linux fanbois flinging around shit, and Windows geeks who actually love their system for good reasons.
"Secure Boot could actually improve security, unless there are bugs in EFI".
I think this settles it. If there are bugs in EFI implementations that brick your hardware... there are most likely security critical bugs in there, too. (In fact bricking the hardware might be a security problem by itself depending on the scenario)
Office is one of the main sources of income for Microsoft. Therefore they need to bring out new versions to satisfy the upgrade market and to appear to be still "in touch".
Features and efficiency are irrelevant in that market. People who want that have long moved on to other solutions. Office software, no matter what brand or vendor, is inherently inefficient. It was meant to provide people who didn't want to learn about computers with the ability to turn their computers into glorified typewriters.
Office formats also were never meant to be document exchange formats. Take a look at 1990s Microsoft Office formats for example. They supported OLE. So you could embed a Corel Draw image into your Microsoft Word file. Unless you have the same software on the other computer, you simply won't be able to open that word file correctly. Same goes for different fonts. It's hard to properly open a file on another computer.
...also won't care when they are charged once per year and probably facing the prospect of Office 365 being canceled eventually, leaving them with a huge emigration problem.
If they did care about that, they wouldn't be considering Microsoft Office in the first place. They probably wouldn't be considering office products at all.
Actually my guess would be more along the lines of having some binary blob in there they lost the sourcecode for somewhere in the 1990s. Or some code which was writtein in the 1990s which does something, but won't work on ARM and nobody knows what it does.
Remember that's 1990s code, written by people who haven't seen SMTP back then. Back then code quality simply was way worse than it is now.
BTW, speaking of features, I'd be happy already if there was some way to properly reply to HTML mail. (in the sense of writing a readable reply, not the more obvious pissing the other person off)
Well, looking at my personal experience of Apple products and the rest, as well as the experience of others, I have to say that Apple used to have high quality products, but that kinda was phased out when Jobs came.
Slowly it was normal for an iBook to have a "logic board failure", even several times in a row, and batteries were glued in.
Apple has moved from a "workstation" company, producing decently engineered products made with high quality standards in the US, to a company selling consumer crap at professional prices. Just like Medion does in Germany.
I mean you could have some sort of algae in some industrial system where you could feed it with the CO2 and fertilizer, run it through some glass tubes under the sunlight, and you filter it out the biomass, either to be used as food, or for other uses.
Well back then, the question was, whether to have a slow computer with few parts you can afford, or a fast computer with many parts which not only costs a lot more to build, but also to run.
This computer was meant to be "affordable" replacing maybe a handful of human computers. It required next to no power and probably was quite reliable. It may have been cheap enough so everyone in the institution could just use it, without having to go through a lengthy permission process.
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