Posts by Mage

Cloud?

Did they simulate:

1) Almost all POS, Banking, Mobile Billing and corporate stuff outsourced to Cloud

2) Cloud being simply hosting of maybe six big companies

3) Some vital part of Cloud being a mono-culture, such that ALL of something goes down when a patch is rolled out (Pick any of: DNS, Edge Routers, Load Balancing, IP stack, SQL server, PHP etc)

And/or what happens if all terrestrial clocks using GPS (or alternate Satellite) are lost due to war, solar flare, SW bug on satellites. Such DVB, DAB, Mobile base stations, High Speed Trading, etc.

There is a book just out "No Silver Lining" that has this (a patch and monoculture, too much outsourcing and to few hosting). Though it concludes death from Flu is more in a typical year.

Or

Perhaps with OTHER smart phones you paid per Mbyte or per second and with an iPhone ordinary consumers could afford the data, subsidised by ALL the voice customers, which was either a large cap or all you could eat (fair usage in fine print).

That more than bought in Fingerworks GUI and Samsung SC6400 ARM was what made it a success. Plus Jobs' reality distortion field.

Nokia had lost the plot 3 years earlier, but even if they hadn't the "traditional" billing was strangling smart phone use. I know, as I had one from early 2002 and only it was paid by the company, I couldn't have afforded the data.

I call it misleading.

Two Billion real users isn't believable.

The World's population is 7 billion. A proportion are too young or sick to use the Internet or Facebook.

The approximate Internet users is 3.7M. But this almost certainly includes people appearing multiple times (phone, tablet, laptop. In the west many better off have more than one smart phone, penetration over 120% in many countries).

China (731 million users) doesn't have Facebook, so 3Million, not 3.7M.

How many Facebook accounts are sockpuppets (I have three accounts so as to validly, honestly and morally separate completely different activities)? How many Facebook accounts are bots selling stuff. The coffee bean weight loss scam with millions of automated accounts is no isolated incident.

Facebook isn't independently audited and has more than once inflated figures.

Their business is NOT providing a social media platform or news or information. It's selling adverts, so they have no incentive to remove fake accounts, bots, fake likes etc. Those increase revenue.

Their use of cookies, trackers, javascript on suggested F button for websites etc is probably illegal under EU law and certainly abusive. Their privacy settings are obtuse and can't be trusted.

So 75% of possible Internet "users"? I doubt it. No doubt too they count all accounts, irrespective of activity, even if their claim is remotely real.

Much of the criticism of abusive corporate behaviour also applies to Google. They are both the biggest parasites on the Internet (there are others) as between them they appear to have 98% of Internet advertising revenue.

People are conned into using Facebook when email would be better. Or their own blog, especially companies. Shame on large companies that promote Twitter & Facebook, yet often have a decent web infrastructure, or other bushiness that use Facebook instead of $100 a year hosting.

FCC?

Sorry, FCC, you can only approve TERRESTRIAL usage.

Satellite / Space usage requires international agreement. The UN became the umbrella for the ancient ITU which allocates frequencies.

Even with LEO (lower latency) it's going to be rubbish capacity compared to terrestrial services. Like all the existing struggling to make a profit (DTH TV makes a profit) retail satellite data services expect it to be only any use in not-spot areas and to cost lots, or else they'll go bust.

There is competition in LEO, MEO and Geo.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_communication_satellite_companies

I'm baffled

How are these ideas valid patents at all?

Education specialist Pearson

Or specialist at making money from Education, at high end, rather than Research Machines, Easons etc?

I'm curious.

Fines?

Perhaps 10% of turnover per month of non-compliance, or total share value. No point in basing it on "profit". Fines do NOT punish shareholders if they are merely a business cost and can be passed on to customers.

Perhaps fine the top executives 1% of worth per week... (Quango, Gov Agencies, Councils too?)

Fines do work, they just are useless if regarded as a cost of doing business or passed on to customer or taxpayer. They have to hurt the people in charge.

I think there is a lot of other stuff they need fined for too.

Field of view.

More than about 19" is too wide for reading, and especially reading glasses.

If you want to simulate a real desktop then you need about 1700 pixels high at 200 dpi, or about 2500 pixels high if 300 dpi.

About 133dpi is a minimum if you rely on sub pixel addressing at edges of fonts, but 200 dpi or higher with subpixel addressing on text off is better.

While we are at it

Can we stop Google scanning entire copyright works and poisoning search results with them and allowing FAR more than fair use to be viewed online.

Also PRIVACY? Single sign in to even non-Google sites using Google. Cookies, Analytics, Android. There is a TRUCKLOAD of stuff to sue Google for in most countries other than USA.

Irrelevant: The OCR versions of stuff Google thinks are public domain are not proofed. They are rubbish quality compared to Gutenberg.

This achievement seems a bit late.

Though it wouldn't be late if it really was AI. The Chess and Go winning programs are not AI, not in the sense meant in 1950s, 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, 1990s. Any "expert system"* with a big database is now called "AI".

(*Expert System really just meant the programmer tried to codify the expertise of a human expert, they never have been actually "experts", only like parrots remembering which shape is associated with the audio/vocal "doughnut". No parrot has language, they merely associate a list of tokens and objects.

The Oath portfolio includes

"The Oath portfolio includes HuffPost, Yahoo! Sports, AOL.com, MAKERS, Tumblr, Build Studios, Yahoo! Finance, and Yahoo! Mail."

Presumably also Yahoo Groups and Flickr?

Simple

The only poll that counts, are the actual valid votes cast.

Ban all polls once an election is called.