* Posts by P. Lee

5267 publicly visible posts • joined 4 Dec 2007

You'll NEVER guess who's building the first Ubuntu phones in 2014

P. Lee

Re: I'm excited! No, not really!

It's true, people attach status to all sorts of funny things.

Office itself is an abomination, with all sorts of weirdness, such as captions being just mark-up and not a component of the table or figure they relate to. That results in the oh-so-not-funny picture-included in the table of figures.

The amount of time I spend messing around trying to get table columns to line across different tables so it looks nice on the page isn't funny. Then there is the, "your table header background is not quite the same colour as the company standard" and the, "Your i7 quad-core still can't keep up with Word's requirements." I'm beginning to look at at vim and troff just so I can concentrate on content for a while. Don't even get me started on the unsuitability of Word as a source-of-truth repository for technical documentation.

Facebook pays $19bn for WhatsApp. Yep. $45 for YOUR phone book

P. Lee

Re: OTT?

> it isn't how any of us would describe IM apps on smartphones.

Think iMessage. It looks like SMS but with Apple's all-knowing eye understanding when both ends are an iphone (and therefore linked to its servers) it redirects the message over 3g data via its own servers, cutting out the telco.

The prize is unique id's - phone numbers are quite handy for getting a handle on who is where. Redirecting traffic to your own servers gives you more data to mine and if you are replacing phone services, reduces your users' costs. The reason VoIP doesn't do well is the complexity of gateways to PSTN and the need to sign-up to a service which duplicates one you already have. OTT providers can avoid the problem if they have a very large database of who is online. If they can link people over data then they know they can do that, otherwise they let the call go via PSTN, with no fancy extra service required.

That's why skype is so keen to get your address book too - they can also provide the gateway service, redirecting per-use revenue to themselves while putting the cost of providing the network on the mobile network provider. With a phone number identifier, they barely need you to create a hotmail login for id.

Bosses to be banned from forcing new hires to pull personal records

P. Lee

> Are my eyes deceiving me, or is this government doing something to protect people privacy?

So many members of the government now have criminal convictions that its becoming an embarrassment for a lot of people.

Seagate's LaCie touts a 25TB (not a typo) box o' disks for your DESK

P. Lee

Re: SMR

Coming to think of it, those kind of data volumes on the desktop are probably to do with bulk-increasing intermediate data (most likely video) processing. Perhaps a small graphics house where a designer/editor has a renderer which pulls video on his workstation, processes it and sends it back for the next stage of processing. It's likely to be a cache so that massive files don't have to traverse the network while being worked on, rather than functioning as a server.

It that case, speed and basic safeguards are probably sufficient, with data being backed-up somewhere else.

Having said that, I wouldn't like to do a time-machine restore!

P. Lee

Re: 25TB at RAID5? ...

RAID5?

Stripe, mirror and have a hot spare.

Big Data is like TEENAGE SEX

P. Lee
Facepalm

Re: A word with that sub, please

>"but for some decades now almost EVERYONE has been doing it."

>Aye, but I noticed you left 'correctly' out of that statement :-)

Also to note: teenage sex is stupid. The people pushing it are immature, irresponsible, selfish and likely to leave you with nothing but tears, an STD and a very expensive bump which you're ill-equipped to handle and which will drain your resources, after they've got what they want from you.

Mac Pro fanbois can rack 'em and stack 'em like real sysadmins

P. Lee

Re: Linux on apple hardware

> ... if you needed lots of Linux boxes, but wanted it to look real pretty

I wonder if you can cross-over thunderbolt, so you could get 10Gb/s cluster links, in this case, 6 per host.

SA Plods plonk boots on privacy principles with fingerprint scanners

P. Lee

Papiere, Bitte

Well, it appears to be ok, if its you and not the papers they want.

Better late than never: Monster 15-core Xeon chips let loose by Intel

P. Lee

I have two queries

Why has reliability collapsed since 2009? Is Intel trying to say that you should stick with your old kit because the current stuff is far more unreliable?

What happened in 2010 and 2011?

Lies and statistics, methinks.

Wii got it WRONG: How do you solve a problem like Nintendo?

P. Lee

Re: Wii failed

WiiU also tanked because the world had moved on.

Now many people have phones and tablet for casual gaming and they look much better.

The Wii has a lovely retro/cartoon feel to most of it - golf is probably where the graphics go really bad.

I suspect this sort of thing would work best as MAME-with-updated-graphics. Take the old simple games, many of which run in 64k and re-write them for multiplayer/party use. Keep the cartoon look but it needs to look good on HD. No-one was ever going to get a Wii for CoD, but as an alternative to watching NCIS repeats, I'm there! Horace and the Spiders, DigDug, Sword of Kadesh. Ahhh, such memories. Perhaps the nice people at Valve will take note, for their Steambox.

Oh, so you've founded a disruptive storage upstart? Do tell me more

P. Lee

Not sure about storage...

but take a look at Bluecoat for software running on underpowered hardware, apparently because normal server hardware would render destroy their market segmentation. Yes you can run it as a VM, its just license-crippled so you'll buy the hardware instead.

Or Check Point for core-crippled software and complete lack of QA on their own "appliance" hardware. If they actually did some testing on their own hardware to make sure it doesn't segfault, I'd be slightly happier. The hardware is just an excuse to force another license sale with an end-of-life and to increase the support fees, for hardware we didn't want to start with. I understand that you don't want to support every linux kernel version, so tell me which kernel version and which drivers you want to support on what hardware and I'll take it from there.

I suppose the point is that hardware these days is too capable. It's hard to milk the enterprise customer when they can run up a 24-core server with multiple 40Gb/s links to networks and flash arrays.

How long will it be until someone puts IP over thunderbolt, turning those oh-so-expensive $30 cables people whine about into rather cheap 10Gb/s links between nodes in a cluster?

If you want to use an appliance and something like dtrace so you can see exactly what is going on, that's great. If you make an appliance with a diagnostic tool which can't be run on production machines under load, you can go away until you do something which warrants that premium price-tag.

I've come to the point where I'm depressed about commercial software. Yes, its often better (for some metric of "better") than FLOSS, but the cost and license awkwardness is just mad. I think I'd get some genuinely cool stuff like F5 and use it to compensate for some less robust systems.

People consolidate to make use of expensive kit... and they have to buy more expensive kit because it supports so many systems they can't afford to lose. How much are you really saving by consolidating to the point of needing multiple 10Gb/s links to your servers? It seems some housekeeping would be a far better investment.

Russian cybercrooks shun real currencies, develop private altcoins

P. Lee

Re: Corp Scrip

Or indeed, Telstra dollars, which are bought at around 10:1 AUD and burn at over $2/min.

Its up there with the forcibly pre-paid systems used on Myki and road tolls for making me think, "wrong!"

PSST! New PCs with Windows 7 preinstalled are out there – and will be into 2015, at least

P. Lee

Re: What another story about end of life?

Some of this is that its fun to bash MS, some is the irritation of MS tying apps to kernels and then charging for both separately, as if they were independent and some is over the abhorrence which is the W8 GUI.

It is really unfortunate that after 13 years or whatever, MS haven't actually produced an OS which quickly wins converts from XP.

Here's my take on TIFKAM: there's too much context switching for my brain - do I move the mouse to the left or right, muscle-memory says left (no big deal) but if I go right I get very little idea of what functions hide beneath the couple of items presented. If I go to the home screen, visually, it completely takes me out of what I was doing. My brain screams that I only wanted notepad to hold some scratch data from a document I'm working on, I'm not actually quitting my previous task. Why did what I was working on have to disappear? It worse for linux users who are used to the highly functional lancelot launcher. KDE users are rather smug with the vast variety of search options which don't need such a horribly clunky interface as tiles or worse, live-tiles.

I want SDN and I want it now!

P. Lee
Trollface

SDN?

Isn't that just automated telnet scripts for your existing kit?

I think you'll be wanting some ipv6 to go with that.

'No representation without taxation!' urges venerable tech VC

P. Lee

Re: The poll tax

The tax was for council services, not social engineering/wealth-redistribution. Unless your house is the one generating the rubbish for the bin-men to collect, it seems reasonable to tax those who use the services. The tax system becomes overly complex when you try to make everything hit the rich harder.

The poor are always the ones who pay relatively more of their income on non-optional items. That's why nobody wants to be one of the poor. It's generally a bad thing to be.

The poll tax was simple to understand in concept, had a broad base and easy calculation. Despite its disastrous PR, it was actually a pretty good tax. Mrs T had just been in power for too long and had acquired too many enemies by the time it came along and it couldn't survive her. I'd swap those kinds of tax rates for what we have today.

Apple Mac Pro: It's a death star, not a nappy bin, OK?

P. Lee

I recently ripped a G5 MacPro apart.

The chassis is indeed incredibly lightweight, it is the massive heat-sinks/coolers which will cause back-injury to the unsuspecting.

Yes, Google can afford to lose $9bn in Motorola sale. But did it really?

P. Lee

Re: Losses are losses

>If Motorola made losses while owned by Google, those should be added to the costs of Google, since that money went from Google into Motorola. Right?

True, but they are presumably operating losses, which have been paid for out of earlier profits - otherwise the company would not have paid its bills and been rendered insolvent. The only way the losses would be carried forward would be if they had borrowed money which has to be paid back in order to pay their debts.

I think the article said motorola still had a cash pile, so they don't have a negative bank-balance for Google to take on.

WD My Cloud EX4 four-bay NAS

P. Lee

I keep looking at these NAS devices

... and then I I think... £300-odd for what exactly?

Even as a home user, I run a database for mythtv along with my disk server, so the benefit of low-power ARM disk-serving is scotched.

As a small business, surely you'd just direct-attach disks and use your server to handle those and your apps?

Has no-one repurposed an on-chip GPU to handle parity checks for RAID?

Has anyone benchmarked a core2 dedicated to file-serving vs one of these NAS boxes?

Rotten to the core: Apple’s 10 greatest FAILS

P. Lee

Re: Concentrating on things

I've always wondered why Apple didn't build their GUI on Solaris.

It may be in decline now, but it was the engineering workstation and app server of choice and with a decent GUI and Apple marketing, it could have wiped the floor and been both SPARC and x86 ready.

Alternatively, just do the GUI for BSD. I like using my wife's imac but I really dislike having the low-level stuff just be that much different from what I can put on non-Apple kit for free.

P. Lee

Re: Good to remember whenever you hear that "Apple can do no wrong" blah blah

What's the obsession with getting it right all the time?

Far better to try and fail and sometimes succeed and make a few billion.

Just as long as you have a sense of humour about your failures, you'll be fine.

Far more worrying is Apple's apparent retreat into closed/proprietary devices. Failures like Apple ///, Lisa are easily excusable as they were cool and better systems, even if they were too expensive. The iMac was arguably better than PCs of its time - the lack of diskette was replaced by something better.

Sadly, these days we are losing features and not having them replaced with anything better. $70 for a CDROM drive? You've got to be joking!

P. Lee

Re: Copeland, Taligent, BEOS etc....

> I suspect RT isn't long for this world!

The other nail in the coffin is that when a user puts W8 on an atom its his problem that the cost is high and performance low. When MS put RT on ARM, its their problem that the cost is high and performance low. They also don't want to reduce the price of W8/RT because that might cut revenue from x86 sales.

JavaScript is everywhere. So are we all OK with that?

P. Lee
Coat

Re: "too expressive in some ways, with features like closures..." @pjc158

> it isn't a strictly functional language; I buy that.

So what we need is... browser-based Miranda?

Microsoft claims victory over second-hand software broker

P. Lee

Re: Another "grey imports" fiasco

The software isn't sold, its licensed.

I know, if it looks like a duck... but I suspect this is in part driving the cloud thing - tighter control.

I suspect it will back-fire at some point. The fact that the terms are all undisclosed seems to indicate that someone was doing something wrong, but MS wants to paint it as something else.

The TRUTH about LEAKY, STALKING, SPYING smartphone applications

P. Lee

Re: Android is leaky by design

> But there's no motivation for Google to produce a locked down Android.

Perhaps not, but the killer app you can't get just write is GPS/Maps.

So why aren't Nokia doing a secure version which sandbox's apps to allow better control? They can do the maps and you can access the rest of google's stuff over the web. Or Garmin perhaps.

Someone could put together a store where you can buy apps with very restricted permissions monitored by the OS, or where there is a security patrolled API. For example, all accesses to the addressbook could be logged, all access could be logged, eg, app: mail-client, destport 443, mail.google.com, hit-count=x.

The tricky thing is, many apps rely on privacy-infringing facilities to do their job. You want tram information? GPS is required to find out where you are. Collect enough of it and you can track someone's likely habits; you want VoIP, it will need access to your phonebook.

MAC TO THE FUTURE: 30 years of hindsight and smart-arsery

P. Lee

Re: "I think you mean mostly BSD bits with a smattering of Mach microkernel underneath"

Apple sell capabilities, not tech. The kernel is one of the more boring and backward bits of OSX. What, still no iscsi drivers? I doubt there's much special about Mach, but being a microkernel it might have helped them port between architectures.

This THREESOME is a HANDFUL: It’s the Asus Transformer Book Trio

P. Lee

Re: Just wish

I'm not sure integration is required - a rocker switch to go between displaying the tablet (android) and base (x86 OS) on the screen would be fine.

This is the kind of device I've been waiting for, though. Let's hope they resolve the base-station wireless thing.

Ancient video of Steve Jobs launching the first Apple Mac found

P. Lee

Brutal culling of Apple ][?

Hardly, the //c wasn't exactly a massive success and things just moved on - much like the 30pin adapter.

Loved my ][+ though. Back in the days when tech was fun...

UK internet filtering shouldn't rely on knee tappers, says Tory MP

P. Lee

Re: @ASDF

> special advisor on preventing the sexualization and commercialisation of childhood

They thought the internet is a problem?

The problem is almost exclusively TV/video. Adverts, even in the children's programming is also often inappropriate - even scary to the kids, not just deemed unacceptable by me.

More subtle are children's films. Check out "Let it Go" from Frozen on youtube. The lyrics are more what you'd expect from Bridget Jones and near then end the little Disney princess transforms somewhat. She acquires a sexy walk, a sparkly dress which in the final, triumphant bit of the song, has a split going up to mid-thigh.

I found it more than a little irritating that Disney is making my life more difficult by showing transformations where parental (indeed all) rules are discarded and out of that emerges a confident sexy woman in adult-type revealing clothes. It's not going to corrupt the children from this one film, but its very hard to discuss issues when its packaged up in a very cool song and when the same values are being pushed everywhere. It is also a lie - children generally feel far more secure when they are given well-defined boundaries than when they can do what they want. However, the pressure from media in general is all along these lines and children will ape the behaviour long before they understand what drives it.

Anyway, TL;DR: the values pushed by mainstream media do far more sexualisation and commercialisation of children than an accidental landing on kinkysex.com (I presume that exists, I haven't checked).

ARM lays down law to end Wild West of chip design: New standard for server SoCs touted

P. Lee

Re: Color me unconvinced

The demand may not be end-user driven. HP might want to punt ARM and take intel's slice of profit. I'm sure Apple would like to drop back into proprietary hardware if they could. I'm sure Asus would rather sell an ARM tablet than an Atom one.

It isn't always about performance, sometimes it is about controlling the whole stack or saving a few dollars on millions of devices. Think how many ARM-based ADSL routers + switch devices are out there. Now think how nice it would be if there was a standard architecture which allowed some SATA interfaces to turn them into NAS boxes too. Since these are SoC's you've got networking built-in and you could just have a socket for a NAS card, run by another ARM chip. Instant converged networking and storage for the home. You really want a standard linux install for something like that, not have every ADSL manufacturer try to ship their own linux build. It isn't DC, but it is server-based.

You may also have latency-sensitive applications such as voip which don't require much processing per user, but do require dealing with quickly.

Then there's the whole hypervisor thing. If your workload doesn't require a mega-server, might it be cheaper to dispense with the hypervisor costs and run smaller CPUs? If HP can take half of VMware's income and provide individual blades on its own hypervisor on custom (HPUX?) hardware, it would probably be quite happy. TCO might be in its favour when cutting out intel and vmware.

The iPad age is over: The time of the iPad Mini and phablet is upon us

P. Lee

Re: Cheaper and more expensive?

I suspect it should read, "Deloitte says the lower price of smaller tablets is the reason for their surge [in market share compared to their larger equivalents]."

"Deloitte says refresh cycles are slowing as punters hang on to their gadgets for longer, a reflection of their [realisation that the new ones don't do anything new.]"

A tablet's main attributes are instant-on and portability. The day-to-day perception of the quality of the hardware is based around screen quality, so people are paying more to get a good screen.

The cpu and storage internals don't matter that much and are unlikely to contribute that much to cost anyway.

More innovation is required. How about gesture control to move particular apps' display to different screens? Use Wii-like "sensor-bar" so the device can orient itself relative to the TV. Include it with WiDi STBs to make dumb displays tablet-capable. Of course, I'm used to the old HP webos with multiple windows open in a stack (complete with stretchy rubberband and angry-birds weEEEEeee sound effects when you flick them off the screen) - I'm not sure if ios/android have that sort of capability.

Even if you have to have a docking station for bandwidth, that sort of feature might be great for presentations and marketing.

UK picks Open Document Format for all government files

P. Lee

Excellent!

Mostly because it doesn't exclude MS, which would be the death-knell for a project like this. In fact, MS can't complain precisely because they support ODF. What it does mean is that interacting with government doesn't leave FLOSS users as second-class citizens because FLOSS is always chasing MS' own ever-changing file formats.

Meanwhile, back in reality, MS will find a way to exploit its own rendering engine to make sure Word doesn't quite render things in the same way that LO does.

A step in the right direction and very welcome too.

Facebook app now reads your smartphone's text messages? THE TRUTH

P. Lee

Re: Permissions creep

Indeed.

Given that this is android, you could get google to auto-file facebook SMS in a particular folder and then allow access to just that IMAP folder.

But that would defeat the purpose.

BTW how do you stop FB accessing all your two-factor SMS' messages?

Blocking BitTorrent search sites 'ineffective': Pirate Bay ban lifted for Dutch ISPs

P. Lee
Happy

Re: Still no legal TPB alternative

>What you mean there's some kind of entertainment after the scary warnings and trailers for films that came out 3 years ago?

You will need to return that policeman's helmet at some point...

The catch-up TV people seem particularly schizophrenic. Listen up Catch-up TV People:

If I've come to your web-site and I'm willing to stream a tiny, highly compressed video and watch your horrid-quality compressed adverts, I probably won't go looking through torrent-sites for the same content. I'm probably also happy to click on a magnet link on your site and watch that same content and the nice quality adverts in VLC. The adverts are so short I won't bother trying to fast-forward, or at least, not before I've at least seen what the product is. It's a better deal than advert-free torrents!

So give me a torrent link, save yourself some bandwidth and I promise to delete that episode of NCIS as soon as I'm done watching. Perhaps even before.

Despite your pride in your product, there is very little on TV which I'd want to keep and re-watch. Not even Game of Thrones. I really am only time-shifting.

I'm not suggesting this works for all content. A very few films I might want to keep, but you can choose not to provide those if you want.

Thank-you.

Yes, HP will still sue you if you make cartridges for its inkjet printers

P. Lee

Re: oh c'mon

So true.

While I abhor practises such as putting chips into things which don't need them, it does keep HP afloat - I think that is probably a good thing on balance. I'd hate to live in a Dell & Lenovo world.

AMD tries to kickstart ARM-for-servers ecosystem

P. Lee

Re: Would make a nice filer

Want to revitalise the desktop market? NAS server on a PCIe16 card with its own power supply. Then bridge twin Gig-E ports on the back of the card with a virtual NIC interface the host can use over PCIEx16.

Even gamers rarely need more than one graphics card and we've had several generations of mostly wasted extra PCIEx16 slots.

Add ARM to a graphics card and you could put android on the desktop without powering up the main computer. Not as handy as a tablet, but fine for always-on browser/email/twitface. No need for all that uber-3d stuff to be powered up, just a nice silent computer that does communication.

I really don't understand why manufacturers don't do more with their hardware. Surely those useless desktop touchscreens are just begging to be telephones too!

I know, the topic was servers, but unless you've got big.LITTLE for x86, I suspect it will be a hard sell. FLOSS shops can benefit, but licensed software is likely to be a no-go. Asterisk on ARM? Maybe - lower latency, cheaper farms, something like that.

Sinclair's ZX Spectrum to LIVE AGAIN!

P. Lee

Re: Promise the world

> It will also be interesting to see if this means that the original authors of the games in question will now start to receive some of the royalties

I suspect the rights are mostly owned by corporates which have long since vanished.

An interesting philosophical question though... if the owner of a game doesn't help maintain the platform and it dies, should they benefit from someone bringing it back? Is revenue 30 years on a reasonable expectation or should such work pass into the public domain as a "thank-you" for the previous government-granted monopoly?

Vice squad cuffs vice chairman of Bitcoin Foundation in $1m money-laundering probe

P. Lee

Re: Am I missing something here ?

and also begs the question, are bitcoins money?

There can be only one... fiat-currency-issuing private organisation on these American shores.

'Climate change' event dishes up sous vide supercomputers

P. Lee

I guess the problem is that global warming causes:

- flooding in some places

- drought in some places

- heat waves in some places

- more snow in some places

I presume it also causes the weather to be the same.

Now don't get me wrong, I'm certainly not saying it isn't true and I doubt its a government conspiracy, but I haven't yet seen anyone with any idea of how to fix the problem, assuming that it is actually a problem.

Pretty much all I've seen is "carbon tax" and and massive hikes in airline ticket prices. Quite frankly I don't think either of those are going to stop us drowning/desiccating/freezing/boiling, possibly all at the same time. It all looks a bit like the plan of the Australian energy company which offers you the chance to pay them to go out and shoot overly-flatulent wild camels in order to off-set your carbon footprint.

Give me a plan, the woe-is-us refrain isn't actually helping but it is tedious. I suspect the problems come from trying to fix an unfix-able problem because the third world is too busy trying to work out how to not die of starvation now to be worried about someone else dying in 80 years time.

While I agree we should do what we can - far better house insulation would go a long way - we also need to come up with a plan on how to deal with global warming. I don't see that happening, or if it is its being kept rather quiet.

UK smut filter may have sent game patch to sin-bin

P. Lee
FAIL

Re: Filters are folly.

Filters are not folly.

I put one at the top of the stairs which only allowed objects smaller than my child or much larger/stronger than my child through or over.

Few people thought I was stupid. I certainly talked to my children about the dangers of stairs. Despite understanding what I was saying, I didn't remove the filter straight away and we went on many training runs up and down the stairs together. If ever I was doing things upstairs, I'd often take the her up with me, close the stair-gate and pop her down while I got on with the jobs. I don't think it ever crossed my mind that I might be too lazy or stupid to remove the stair-gate and spend all my time supervising the child. I rather thought it was a good idea to let them explore the environment on their own, within certain prescribed boundaries.

Even after the star-gate was gone, she didn't have unrestricted access to the park down the road. Outside the front-door was out of bounds, for a while, regardless of whether she actually wanted to visit the park, or just sit on the doormat.

Pre-puberty, children don't really have a "sexual nature." It isn't something they really come up with except by imitation and the desire to "be grown up." To them, sex is just a bit weird and yucky and not interesting. An 8 year-old and an 15 year-old are not the same.

The (correct) proposal that sex is both healthy and natural rather obscures the fact that there is a lot of rather unhealthy sex available for viewing on the internet and on TV. The human race has managed to have sex just fine without the internet. The kids don't need it and it's generally unhelpful to their education. If my kids are going to the internet to find out about sex, I think I've probably failed in a big way. Sex on screen is rarely educational and almost always misleading. From the ultra-thin models, to the air-brushing and pristine hair, to the extreme expertise even of first-timers, to the constant ecstasy and the merry-go-round of partners. Sex on screen doesn't reflect real-life and even when people know that, the constant repetition of the lies is difficult to counter. Hence, no uncontrolled TV in the house. The internet is more difficult to control because it actually has a useful use, unlike TV, which doesn't.

It's worse when you introduce all-out porn. The sex on screen may be fake, but the sexual experience of the watcher is real. Sex becomes something conducted utterly at their own discretion with absolutely no need to consider anyone else. It is utterly selfish with any whim catered for at the click of a mouse. No real partner can or should have to live up to that. There are lots of subtle lies out there. When it comes to children, they have, by definition, not completed their training to be knowledgeable, rational and responsible adults. When you first put them on a bike, you hold it and take complete control. As they learn, you relax the controls. You don't give your 3 year old a sharp knife because they want to cut a piece of paper. You filter their access to the kitchen knives. They know they are there, they just can't reach them.

I would be the first to suggest that the way the government has gone about things with national network level filters is folly and to be utterly resisted, but there is no particular reason to suggest that the entire idea of filters is always wrong. It should be enabled by request on a per-account basis with real-time logging to an agent so you can tell what's going on when things mysteriously fail.

Sadly it appears that people are behaving like the government. They take a few nice sound-bite arguments against these particular filters and make an argument against any sort of controls in any situation, in much the same way as the government takes sound bites for some good ideas and turns them into a completely inappropriate argument for infrastructure which shouldn't exist.

Straw-man arguments on both sides obscure the issues and ruin the debate.

Nokia waves goodbye to device biz as phone sales continue to spiral

P. Lee

Free to compete?

They should do Android-with-Privacy.

Android, mail client, their own maps and Store, where you can pay for apps (or add a bit to your monthly phone bill) in return for zero advertising and no data slurping. Any app caught slurping gets kicked for a year and an email to customers telling them what the deal is.

MPAA spots a Google Glass guy in cinema, calls HOMELAND SECURITY

P. Lee

Re: Yeah no offense to anyone but

> CE wants some stats that don't relate to the poor record with deporting illegal aliens

I suppose they reason that a Jack Ryan film makes piracy a terrorist related offense.

P. Lee

> Seriously though, Department of Homeland Security? Their losing their sanity in the old US of A.

The devil makes work for idle hands.

P. Lee
Facepalm

Re: Actually old boy,

>"Thomas Jefferson was an American."

>>He was British and a traitor.

>>>No, he was fully American: born and raised in Virginia.

... and that made him British.

Office 365 Microsoft's fastest growing business, ever - Microsoft

P. Lee
Holmes

Re: fuck off

I'm slightly surprised ISP's haven't cottoned-on to the managed service thing. Email is normal, VoIP is fairly common, just add calendaring and a free office suite. They have the low-latency capabilities close to the customer and no need to be nice to MS.

If MS does well with Office365 I suspect we'll see quite a few more attempts to steal that recurring Office license revenue. For the very small corporates who find O365 attractive, OO/LO is probably also sufficient. I wonder if MS is shooting themselves in the foot, putting profits before long-term interests, by losing the Windows desktop management ecosystem in moving the desktop to the network server where Windows faces stronger competition.

Almost everyone read the Verizon v FCC net neutrality verdict WRONG

P. Lee

Re: the people will not notice thing...

It wouldn't be anything so crass as blocked or degraded service.

What we'd have is "priority services" being offered for a fee. So Netflix jumps on board and grabs the top slice of priority. They have a subscription service and can easily afford to pay for it. They get 2:1 in the queuing system. Then the ISP decides to launch its own local news & video service at the same priority. To maintain service, we now have a 4:1 ratio of priority services to non-priority services. Document HTTP probably won't notice too much. Ironically, bit-torrent probably won't care too much either since it isn't time dependent. And so it goes on.

As the system expands, it becomes harder and harder for the smaller and newer players to compete. It becomes an effective barrier to entry which the larger players want to maintain. They don't mind shelling out to the ISPs because it prevents further competition and is a lot easier than innovation or providing better service. It's the broadband consumers who lose out, because they provide less and less of the ISP's income. They pay, but they don't pay enough to influence things.

Then the content provider's turn on the ISP's: unless you give is X:1 priority, you can't have our content at all. The ISP's have to comply because when new customers see the advertising checkboxes are empty, they won't even bother to call.

Net Neutrality is just a means to an end. It keeps the ISP's answerable to the broadband customer and prevents behind the scenes corruption. Companies do not seek competition, they seek to avoid it. They seek to take other companies customers and then prevent them from leaving. That's why we have contracts rather than allowing people to change providers on a day by day basis.

Amazon patents caches for physical goods

P. Lee
Facepalm

It sounds like...

a warehouse.

But I guess if it's loaded into a lorry, they can tag it with: "in a mobile device."

Look out, Earth! Here comes China Operating System (aka Linux)

P. Lee
Joke

Pinko-commie cancer!

I knew it! You just can't trust those Europeans! They're in league with the enemy!

Nuke 'em, that's what I say!

Marvell stuck with $1.17 billion patent bill

P. Lee

If they, ahem, played their chips right

They won't have made any money in the US. They could just file for bankruptcy and re-appear as something else.

Microsoft buries Sinofsky Era... then jumps on the coffin lid

P. Lee

Re: Sinofsky’s logic was that this would brute-force...

... but you look so cool when you get it right!

The real issue was that W7 upgrades were still going on and W7 has a better UI. No desire for an upgrade can be ground down over time, no budget for an unwanted upgrade is fatal.

If W8 had come after XP, it would probably have done well despite itself.

P. Lee

Re: OEMs lack of innovation

... and still no-one can bring themselves to add an ARM chip to a laptop with a little switch to flick the screen and keyboard/mouse between android and whatever is running on the x86 system.

Oi, Google, if you want people to use your cloud, allow them to migrate, don't force them to choose. Look how well that went for MS and W8. Android on a pcmcia card or whatever the kids are using these days.

Ah wait.. people don't want expandability any more, do they?