Posts by P. Lee

Re: New???

> it's easy to spot if you have a small battery next to a separate pack of something nasty in the cavity.

So then... just x-ray it? My Dell has two battery compartments...

Re: What's wrong with open WiFi networks

Indeed. Even my ancient little draytek does vlan'ed wireless and rate-limiting. Plus all the banking goes over wires.

Dual wireless is better - one for known devices inside the firewall, one for guests.

Re: Silly sod

He worked in AI. He had no chance of a decent job anyway...

Re: receiving a document in a proprietary format

Shunning proprietary formats is fine until you make money from dealing with them and lose money as all your employees convert to/from them to deal with the rest of the world. Security is a tradeoff.

However, there are several things which could change to help the situation and this is where I hold MS to account for not progressing the state of the art in OS and application design. Free *nix is one thing, but if I'm paying someone for the next OS version, I expect progress.

The OS arbitrates resource access. MS can do this rather badly because it pushes security out to the application/GUI. E.g. on many citrix systems, cmd.com is locked down - you can't see it in explorer. However, open Word:File->open and you can copy, paste the file to a different name and execute it happily.

I want a "flag on modification" option from the OS, along with "remember for this session" options. I want separate installation locations for user-installed apps and admin-installed apps. I want security manifests with each application & user context. If IE wants to provide http access to other apps, the OS needs to mediate that. When you install an app, there should be a list of resources the app needs. Word might want access to http://wordtemplates.microsoft.com, which is fine. Access to all the internet is not. The security manifest can be ok'ed at installation and after that any resource access outside that manifest should be flagged by the OS. The same goes for email. Inter-application communication needs to go through the OS, not direct. That way we don't end up with a hodgepodge of apps doing their own thing. We'll also need categories for "its a local proxy" not and end-point.

I want directory filtering for data providers. Yes, skype can use my address-book without asking, but I only want it to see names plus any data it adds. Words with Friends can ask to use my address book but may only see names. So much data is held in network stores but our OS's haven't really progressed beyond file-systems. I want the WAF, DBF and LDAP firewalls to come to the OS, not be the preserve of rich enterprises. I know security is hard to do for end-users, but MS and Apple have enough market share to make it happen. Sadly, along with Google, they have all jumped on the, "all your data are belong to us" bandwagon. Perhaps this could be MS' USP in the mobile market, "We'll give you decent access controls on your data." It might work better than the Win8 TIFKAM strategy.

Re: Surprise?

There are two issues with this.

1) Waterfront property is very expensive. That means lots of rich people lose money if sea-levels rise. That in itself will cause the powers that be to try to hold back the sea. If London and New York went under water, a lot of "wealth" would just disappear.

2) We've engineered ourselves into a highly lucrative but stupidly fragile economy. Until relatively recently, people could simply move over a bit and farm somewhere else and carry on. Now we've locked up all the land in ownership and (in the West) most people have no idea and no tools for growing their own food. If a company goes bust, not only do all the employees lose their income (and therefore food), all the feeder industries go down, and unrelated industries are hit too, from the battering of the centralised debt-carrying banks, stock market and pension funds. We have created a vast safety-net for ourselves by tying everyone together. The downside is that it hides problems until they are vast and (almost?) unmanageable. How much do you think Apple stock will be worth if people are desperate for food? The 1930's are really not that long ago.

Re: What I don't understand

We just don't plug our landline in - give out mobile numbers only.

Personal friends have plans with cheap minutes, but it raises the bar for commercial callers.

Re: Where do we complain

Except that sex on TV is nothing like sex in real life.

TV thrives on conflict, betrayal and excitement and drama and its all packaged up in a neat 40 minute block. Real life doesn't thrive on these things. Conflict and betrayal leads to broken relationships - split families and communities which often don't recover.

Even the medium works against real life. If a teen is used to having gratuitous nudity with unlikely-proportioned actors available on demand, what chance does a later real-life partner have of living up to that? Why should they even be expected to? The actors are pretending - its all fake.

Counting the number of almost instant hookups (even if only in time-lapsed TV land) leads to unrealistic and unfair expectations. Third date and no sex? What's wrong with you? It's stupid and damages people's ability to assess a potential partner's character before bonding at an intimate level. Not having sex allows you to extricate yourself from a relationship with far greater ease when a partner is discovered to be unsuitable. Emotional trauma makes great TV but a really sad real life for damaged children.

Bad language is almost always abusive. I really don't get why you'd want kids to grow up thinking its normal to verbally abuse people. Yes they may do so at school, but that is not the same as including it in officially sanctioned entertainment. I simply don't understand the f-bomb. Why would you take something that's supposed to be really good and use it to describe something bad? Perhaps something a little less offensive, such as wishing someone would burn in torment, it isn't so bad is it?

We need to consider how long children (that is, people society considers too immature to make proper decisions) spend in front of the TV and how much they absorb as actually being normal.

Books and games are far better. They are essentially excuses to chat and interact as a family which solidifies relationships and leads to well-grounded emotionally stable children. TV is the opposite - it kills interaction between viewers. Plus the lack of adrenalin-fueled excitement allows them to get to sleep faster... which means more/longer sex for mum & dad.

Re: Another invalid patent on abstract ideas.

> Or the patent is "defensive". Essentially, Apple think they might want to do this - so they patent the idea, so if some product-less yahoo patents the idea they can't sue Apple for damages.

Surely if they tried, Apple would just point to their product and the date and say... "Prior Art."

I'm not sure that using GPS-awareness is particularly innovative. But then, we have "slide to unlock..."

Re: How does that work then?

> How do you increase diversity by removing one gender?

The same way as in physical sport. What if there were a difference between men and women? Heresy I know, but for example, what if men focus on one thing better and women multi-task better? I don't know if thats true or not, but I couldn't juggle all the tasks my wife does and she has little interest in dealing with tech. That seems to be common. If the games are produced by men (for historical reasons) and aimed at what men do best, it is possible that women wouldn't be represented at all at the top flight of an open-only arena.

Remember, this is an commercial event. Why make money only on one event, when you can make money on two?

> Where are the 6/8 core beasties...? Still sitting on my splendid 3930K hexcore.

Me too, although the 3930k's are less than 10% faster and use an extra couple of cores to get there. That's before you overclock though (Hello Water Cooling!) Since the 3930's have a much lower base clock, you should also get a greater percentage increase going up by 1Ghz.

I suspect the issue is that few people can use the extra cores. I got mine to run multiple VMs, so that works out nicely. I find that even with productivity software (I use the term broadly) such as Outlook, network/server latency is what makes it feel slow, as it tries to load all that social networking and IM presence rubbish. I'm not sure Word's rendering really takes advantage of multicores properly either. Transcoding on the other hand...

What makes me sad is all the architecture changes since the 3930k with so little performance to show for it. A cynic might say they might be using architecture changes to prevent piecemeal upgrades...

(Caveat - 3930k list prices are much higher - I just managed to get mine new for less than this new i7)

Re: History repeating

> It seems evidently clear that Microsoft just don't understand their customers.

MS understand their customers perfectly. They just prefer to look after their own interests which don't coincide.

They should have saved the billions they spent on 8.1 and ploughed it into making WinPhone/WinTab really good. Mobile market share is their goal, after all. They should have done an equivalent of iLife/iTunes, teamed up with Amazon for media purchases, Nokia (or old-school GPS like Garmin) for maps and written a WinTab emulation system so you have the option of running tablet apps on a touchscreen W7 PC. It would have saved them a world of grief.

You can't own the ecosystem when you're third in the market. You have to go best of breed.

Re: Dumb

Its nothing to do with prudery. I've never seen so many sex shops in average suburbs as I have in Oz (admittedly, Victoria).

This is all about politicians seeking to be seen as relevant, which is (ironically) the fast-track to being irrelevant.

Let them go ahead with a pointless, almost unenforceable ban and show themselves up to be irrelevant.

> What sane broadcaster would do anything but jump at this chance to extend their audience at no cost to themselves?

Ones which charge the cable companies fees rather than have people actually use FTA?

The cableco's are in competition with FTA they don't want it to exist at all. They also don't want DVRs to exist.

If the cableco's go out of business, a lot of people's internet goes as well, which means all forms of content provision disappear and the broadcasters are left with no audience because they haven't provisioned towers, they rely on cable.

None of this is an argument against Aereo. It is an argument to separate content provision from access provision - break up the cable companies. The retransmission argument is silly. I have an HD Homerun. I don't pay fees when I convert RF to IP and transmit them across the garage to my mythtv DVR.

I wonder if it would be different if the aerials and DVRs were sold rather than rented. The company then just sold the hosting facility?

Bother, I've commented on one of Andrew's troll pieces.

Re: What's the problem now?

Actually, there are victims. Those that are nearby when the space would have naturally opened up but now have to pay for it.

Initially I wasn't, but now I'm with the city on this one. Since the parking space was provided free, you shouldn't be able to charge to pass it on when it doesn't have value for you anyway.

It would be stupid for people to be hanging out in a mall waiting for higher bids on their spot, when they would normally have left and freed up the spot before then.

> Something like sharemyslingbox.com

http://thepiratebay.se/ ;)

(3) is the way of the world. With their large lobbying budgets it was always going to be just a matter of time before either there was a bad judgement like this, or the law was changed. The only way to compete these days is to make billions in an unrelated market and then move in on someone-else's turf. Innovation counts for nothing if you don't already have billions to back it. Doing it better/cheaper alone will always be beaten by predatory pricing. In my mind, this is reason enough to break up these large corporations, especially in non-critical industries such as entertainment.

Re: anonymized & agregate results

Could be worse. Check out the latest trend in credit card "tokenisation" from Protegrity. No vault for value-tokens used, each token is completely reversible.

"It's fast." I'll bet it is. But that isn't tokenisation, that's obfuscation.

Re: Here's an idea

> To most everyone else, "upgrade" means "new computer".

But that is no longer the case, which is why the industry is in such a mess - no-one needs to buy stuff. People don't need the CPU upgrades they used to, but memory is one thing which can usually help due to bloat.

I still have a core2 imac which is fine for almost everything. I've got a core(1) laptop which is fine for web and video. These days, the upgrade is mostly in pixel density and battery life, unless you're gaming. In case anyone hadn't noticed, portability is more important than power for many people these days.

> there are useful things to be had from it all.

Useful, yes. Worth the effort? I don't think so.

I can see if there is mold on the jam. It isn't worth adding all this complexity and possible spam sources (geddit?) to every fridge just so the odd one that breaks can let you know about it.

"Nothing complicated" is a light on the front, at a stretch, a serial interface. As soon as you add an IP stack, its very complicated.

Perhaps its time for a new physical standard of "secure but anti-social" where there are no receive wires in the NIC and data is broad/multicast. I fear that's just a slippery slope which isn't worth it either.

Re: Upgrading--interesting thing to take for granted

Firstly, Apple strategies do tend to be copied. Laptop specs / upgrade abilities do appear to be generally falling in the industry.

Secondly, even those who like Apple kit are generally sad that a company which once was uncompromising in putting the best into its kit (SCSI bus in a portable) is now deliberately making things far more rubbish that then need to be apparently to garner sales. At no time did we look at the original Mackintosh and think, "oh, they've made it a closed system that that if one bit goes you replace the lot, " or "they've included a rubbish CPU so you'll upgrade it sooner."

There are no space requirements in an imac which demand smaller components and they don't receive the rough treatment a laptop gets which shortens their expected life, or demands greater robustness that soldered on components provide. The SODIMMs are keyed to prevent incorrect insertion and you could design a tray so you can see which way around they go rather than inserting them almost blind. As for economies of scale leading to cheaper computers, don't give me that. This model is not cheaper because its designed around an MBA, its cheaper as a marketing tool.

Re: Colour me an idiot, but..

Perhaps he wanted a native android app.

I assume the source code is in java, but the bytecode is not.

It's been a while since A-Level Economics, but it could be that the price gouging is what is driving the high local wage costs.

If the profit wasn't there, wages wouldn't rise. My guess is that Oz is in for a bout of inflation. It isn't just tech. Food is horrendously expensive here.

Re: Mathematician vs. a "Real" Scientist...

All the science appears to be stats and computer models looking at past data and trying to come up with something which matches the figures in the past and therefore (it is assumed) will match in the future too. This would be obviously in the domain of a mathematician.

That's also why they keep getting the predictions wrong. No one understands how it works. There is no way to experiment, which you'd think would be rather critical for "real" science.

Follow the dutch model, build some larger dams. If you're going to build on a flood plain, at least sort out the engineering to take account of it, with some stilts or something.