Posts by h4rm0ny

Re: This is a problem

Hmmm. I wish I'd read your comment before I posted mine above. I look like a doofus now, don't I?

The guy is a low-life who should be punished and as much as currently possible, made to recompense society. Spending the next decade in prison though, wouldn't discourage others any more than spending two years in prison would and would only produce someone who was accustomed to living in prison rather than free, at great cost to the taxpayer.

Re: Persian Gulf is fine

Changes of name from outside are usually a prelude to aggression. Seriously, whether that is enforcing English names on places in Ireland (as the English did when they first started trying to invade Ireland), or Israel giving their own names to various places or China's refusal to recognize what Taiwan calls itself. Before territory grabs, aggressors attempt to assert their right to the territory and dismiss others. Name changes have historically been a part of that ever since people started to demand justifications from their governments for why it was right for them to take control of somewhere.

Given how threatened Iran feels by the West and by Israel recently, it's not surprising they are touchy on this subject. But like you say, that's by the by. There's no reason we should change the name of centuries upon centuries because arab nationalists would like it to be called the Arabian Gulf.

Re: working fine from here

"Can a DDoS only affect certain routes? I thought the target machine would be the endpoint & therefore the server(s) under stress."

Simple answer, It can't and it would respecitvely, i.e. you're right. But the "Pirate Bay" is unlikely to be one machine at one address. There are probably proxies around the place which means if you connect from home (as in your case) you may be trying access one proxy, but if you connect via your VPN, you may be sent to a proxy for the site which isn't being DDoS'd.

More accurate answer, yes it can only affect certain routes because 2nd tier providers have smart folks working for them who will intervene in various ways to seal off the attack, but different routes may go through different 2nd tier providers.

"You have to move forward - the extra features of online play out-weigh the disadvantages - I prefer electric lighting to candles as well - but there could be a mains failure."

But there the change is an advantage, here there change is a disadvantage. It is not sufficient to simply point at the fact that both are change and say they are therefore the same. If you want to see DRM done right look at something like the Zune music pass or movie downloads from e.g. BlinkBox. I have my music on multiple devices for as long as I want, I'm not bugged by sign-in issues when I play anything I've downloaded (if I want to play streaming, obviously I need to connect to the servers because my phone IS NOT MAGIC, but I can download locally any of the music I want to). But with Diablo III, it appears that you are constantly dependent on their servers and it's in your face.

If DRM is invisible, people will live with that, particularly if they know it's a requirement for the seller to feel comfortable selling online in the first place. But if it gets in their way... they get upset. It has to work well.

Re: Great Move Reg !

"Yes, but look at it from those 6 people's point of view. They've chosen WP7 and so need as much access to technology news as they can get."

Okay. Offensive and inaccurate. But admittedly funny.

(Lumia 710 owner)

Re: Historical Cost of Nukes

"Sure nuclear plants are super productive NOW, but it took 40+ years to make that possible and only with massive government funding, one world war and one cold war."

You've answered your own question (albeit by trying to slip in the fallacious idea that nuclear power forty years ago wasn't profitable then. Hint: Fukishima was commissioned in the 1960's and has been providing Japan with electricity all this time until the earthquake and tsunami). Basically, if we've put 40 years of development into nuclear, we should be reaping the rewards of that. You seem to be using it as a reason to say (in effect), 'it took us forty years to get where we wanted, that's not good enough. Let's try getting here from somewhere else.'

You posit a false dichotomy when you say it is either nuclear power or research. Cheap power will lead to more money sloshing around for research than expensive power. And even if you're not a strong believer in AGW (I am not), the fact that fossil fuels are more polluting, rising in cost, finite and sourced primarily from nasty regimes in the Miidle East who exploit our dependence, it still makes more sense to get that cheap power from Nuclear than from fossil fuels until we can get the orbital solar stations going...

Re: Right, that's it

"The Japanese have a few unemployed nuclear engineers I hear. They thought they had a job for life too..."

And they should have. 40+ years without serious incident, using designs from the Sixties, commisioned in the Seventies and keeping a highly developed nation happily ticking over all that time. Then they get hit by a massive earthquake, followed by a tsunami and massively damaged infrastucture leading to an inability to lead power to the stations. And there was STILL minimal harm from radiation or pollution from the plants! The reaction about Fukishima is almost entirely manufactured by the media that finds scary stories sell more papers / get more hits. They should be ashamed of themselves for the fear-mongering. Nuclear power is one of our best hopes for avoiding an environmental collapse one day.

Re: Getting stuff on expenses

"What you did would have had you fired at pretty much every company I have worked for"

I actually anticipated a reply like yours and attempted to head it off by explaining I was aware of such issues, but I don't think you registered it.

I know what I'm talking about. This isn't about me short-cutting "proliant hardware in a datacentre" at a FTSE100 company for thousands of user. They weren't offering to do anything like that at all. They were basically asking for hundreds of pounds for an older model WinXP machine without backup, running VPOP3. Basically, the sort of no back-up jury-rigged system you are accusing me of deploying. The only difference is that I knew exactly what we did need and set up something cheaper.

When I started at that place, off-site backups consisted of one of the computer operators taking home an unencrypted back-up tape of everyone's medical records (stored in easily understood Interbase DB dumps) who would stick on a shelf in their kitchen and bring it back in if they remembered. (To be fair, she was very good at remembering). Everything I did at that place improved things. I appreciate you've just read a post about someone bypassing procedures to set up their own mail server and think I'm irresponsible, but actually I set up what was needed which was better than what they had, Debian with Dovecott is actually a pretty reliable platform (better than what they gave us) and the relevant point was that the solution they offered us would have cost hundreds more for something actually less suitable.

I wasn't even the IT person at that place - I was a manager!

Re: I recall a time in government service in the 90s,...

"and has enough backbone to correct the lunatic fringe."

When I was in the NHS Patricia Hewitt was the Health Secretary. She who was formerly on the board of Accenture who got a huge sum of money to do some small amount of development work (which they messed up) during her tenure.

The lunatic fringe is unfortunately the people running it and they know exactly which side of the bread is buttered. If the entire upper management of the NHS spontaneously exploded, everything would run a lot more cheaply and efficiently.

Re: Don't get it

"I get at least 5 phone calls a week from various box shippers asking if they can do me a quote for various bits of kit."

I used to get calls like that as well, when a sales person was clever enough to get hold of my number from somewhere. Mostly I told them I was too busy which was true, but I do recall having someone list off what they could get for us at what prices and approving of it. I took it to our Finance Manager and said: "this is cheaper. They're prices will vary from time to time, but it's always going to be cheaper than what we have." I can't remember what reason she gave for not buying from them. I think because I pushed, she took it to our current supplier and they said they would undercut. Which they may have done for all of a month or two before they put them back up again. The suppliers are out there. Many of them are even reliable and reputable.

But they think the people whose money it is are the ones they should be asking for it from. They're wrong. It's the people whose money it isn't who get to say where it's spent.

Re: that's a lot of money

I went the opposite direction and got a Lumia 710 for about £160. It's the same O/S and the performance is snappy. All that's missing is the better camera, some memory and a bit better battery life. I only care about the last one and it's still good enough, so I basically saved myself three hundred quid as far as I'm concerned.

Re: I think they understand

"If a product costs nothing to make and distribute then it effectively ceases to be a product and becomes an advert - effortless free publicity"

That only works if the thing you're advertising is worth more than the advert itself. It's non-sensical to give away something of siginficant value to advertise something that is not. E.g. how exactly does someone getting an exact digital reproduction of a movie from somewhere I'm not getting paid for it help me when the product I'm trying to sell is an exact digital reproduction. Your example is a Brazillian author who found sales of a physical print book increasing in a market where he had no presence (Russia) because of file distribution. You miss so many things in this. Firstly, copyright law doesn't stop anyone from doing this at all. If you really are touting this as a better business model, fine, you are free to distribute your work this way. So is Paulo Cohelo. So is anyone else. If it's that much better as a business model you don't *need* any changes to copyright law, just go ahead of legally distribute your books. What you are arguing for is that other people should have to use one particular business model, i.e. a reduction in choice. Secondly, this example is from over a decade ago when people still wanted physical media - he was happy because physical sales went up. That's not going to be as true today when eBooks are becoming popular and it's going to be even less true in the future as digital versions of books become the preferred option. And it isn't true today when music, movies and software are pretty much preferred in digital format. Once someone has the iso of a DVD, they gain nothing more buy actually going out and buying the DVD. The products are the same, unlike a print book and a bad scan over a decade ago being read on a desktop or 1997 laptop which actually are different experiences. Also what's true of an author who is unknown in a country is not going to be true of a current popular movie, etc.

Your whole car analogy remains only that - an analogy in which you arbitrarily state that selling services and maintenance will recoup cost of investment and make more profit than actually selling the cars. In your analogy that is true, *because it is your analogy and you can say that's how it is*. It doesn't mean that the economic model actually works for any given product. Yet you want to force people to use that model without their consent. If I write a novel and anyone who wants it takes it for free, then I'm not going to make a lot of money on maintenance or offering support and I'm not interested in advertising *myself*. The only thing I'm interested in is advertising the novel. So I'm hardly going to want to give away the novel as an advertisment for itself am I? Because I am not a Brazillian author trying to break into a market where I am unknown and capitalise on print sales vs. ereader technology from the 1990s. And you do realize that without copyright, *anyone* can sell the physical copies of the books, movies, software, etc. without giving the creators a penny for it?

Re: I think they understand

"When you can download a Ferrari direct from the Pirate Bay to your 3-D printer and knock it out for the price of an old banger then Ferrari WILL have to change its business model"

Ahhh, car analogies. Is there any better tool for someone who wants to shift an argument into a woolly metaphor where they can gloss over actual details?

Once again, someone has deliberately focused on delivery and reproduction costs, rather than development costs. You could spend a year writing a piece of software and that software could then be reproduced and distributed for fractions of a penny. And by your logic, it should then be free because it only costs that tiny amount to reproduce and distribute. And once again, a pro-piracy apologist has set themselves up to say that they should be the one who decides how much things should cost rather than seller and buyer actually agreeing on the price through negotiation (aka the Market). The arrogance of people who declare that they should set prices when they had no involvement in producing the thing is astonishing.

Always we come back to two things: an a priori assumption that they are entitled to the results of someone else's work and a belief that they represent the customers rather than the people who are actually paying the money for products and whom the pirates freeload along with.

Not only is there no reason why either sex has to be better than the other, any difference there actually is, if there is one, is only going to be a tendency. The actual difference in ability would have to be HUGE in order for the utility cost of pre-judging someone by their sex to be worth while. I.e. If women are 10% better at IT than men on average, is it at that point worth assuming that any individual woman you meet is going to be better at IT than any individual man? No, of course not. And 10% is already a very large difference. Take it up to 50% (i.e. absurd difference levels) and mathematically it's still not efficient to make an assumption about any given man or woman.

Oh, and the "comedian"? He's just significantly diminished the chances that I'll source from Dell next time around. Because I'm all emotional and irrational like that. ;)

Re: Sir

Well, if they were pirating their own software, your comment would indeed be insightful. But given they are pirating Western products for the most part, your comment is merely ill-informed.

Re: With the BSA on your team...

Ironically (for Alannis Morrisette values of irony), the one time I had to threaten an employer with reporting them for copyright infringement, it was when they were trying to sneak some GPL'd code into their product without attribution and omitting the GPL licence and source. One more reason both I and they were happy to see the back of each other.

Re: Data?

They go into this in in their report. The prices are all below retail value. They are weighted according to sector, country, exchange rate, bulk purchases, etc. Piracy rates are calculated from survey data. They did research on about 15,000 business units. But because it's survey based (looking at their report, imo), if anything their piracy rates are going to be under-reporting.

It's fasinating how so many people are so quick to assume they know better than people who have actually carried out research. The report has a four page summary of their methodologies and they have been reviewed by two independent experts. They adjust for different sales prices (e.g. OEM, changing exchange rates for foreign bought software), they explain why the costs of a unit of software in their calculations is *below* what you would pay if you bought the software retail. The software load figures are based on surveys and because piracy is illegal, their estimates may well be *below* what they actually are in reality.

As to your doubt that the figure is anywhere "remotely like" an extra $1.2bn, the estimate legal spend on software last year in the UK was over US$5.5bn, so is a 20% rate of infringement so unbelievable?

Re: Nice but...

I'm surprised to see you say that. When did you last use them? AMD released documentation for their chips quite some time ago and have worked with the Open Source Community to really help develop actual Open Source drivers, as opposed to Nvidia's binary blobs. Do you ever go to the Phoronix forums. There's a lot of information about them there and I have a lot of respect for AMD for trying to support Open Source drivers so much.

Re: What comparable Intel chip?

Good question. As far as I can see, the new AMD chips are ahead on graphics compared to anything close to their price range. I've actually been holding off from getting a new laptop while I waited to see what AMD would come out with. The Trinity chips are powerful enough for my laptop needs and cheaper and they have excellent integrated graphics due to the APU design. Quite frankly, Intel are undisputed masters at the high performance end, but in terms of most customer's needs (reasonable performance, good graphics, cheaper, lowish power consumption), AMD actually seem the better option to me.

Re: @AC

"Wow you are really going to post that clusterf__k of directions and pass it off as being intuitive. LMAO Fail. On Android you press one button and your keyboard comes right up."

I don't think you understood. You get the same on WP7, just tap the screen. The reason for the fuller explanation is because you can do more than this. Tap the home button and you're back to your normal interface without ever ending the call. As ShelLuser wrote, you can surf the web, go through your txts, play games, all without ending the call. And it's very simple. I think I remember you from a previous comment thread spewing a load of hatred at WP7. It is odd as given your confusion over basic facts like using the numpad or other parts whilst on a call, you plainly haven't much experience in actually using one.

"Great I am glad you enjoy your windows phone."

You don't give that impression. You give the impression that any success or positive commentary of the WP7 is a personal affront to you. And you seem to take great pleasure in finding anything you can call a flaw in the system (rightly or wrongly).

"After suffering with a Treo with WM5 or whatever was on there, I am once bitten"

Wow. You really are well-informed and up to date on your information, aren't you? You are aware that WP7 is a different Operating System to WM5? And that the Treo was a very early smartphone from years ago? I'd suggest you grab a Lumia and try it out for a week, but I don't think you like having your preconceptions challenged. You seem to love them too much.

After suffering with a Treo with WM5 or whatever was on there, I am once bitten

Re: @AC

"Who would buy a current WP7 phone when the upgrade path is very shaky at best?"

You get all the patches and security updates, etc. What more do I need? It already does everything I want. I paid £160 for it SIM free and I probably wont change it for years. Obviously I can't upgrade the O/S to the next version like I can with an iPhone or an Android device, right? But I don't really care. I doubt many do except for those looking for reasons to discredit it.

Re: Microsoft never did comply

"However he quickly conceded that it was as shit as everyone claims"

But people don't claim that. Various ACs and others on El Reg. forums do, but I own one and I like it. Lots of reviewers like it also. I wonder if you've actually used it. You will of course say you have, but I've been using mine for most of a month now and what you have written just doesn't match up with how it's been. For example:

"It's slow, super laggy, the apps REALLY suck"

Mine is very responsive. I'm not a big app user, but it has Word, Excel and One Note on it, which I consider great. It hooks into multiple email accounts neatly and lets me configure how I want to handle each of them. As a phone for getting things done, it's the best I've used. For the Apps I've wanted, I've been able to find them for it. There are fewer than with Android and iPhone, but I think 98% of apps are duplicates or rubbish anyway. But by all means, if a very large number of apps is what you require from a phone, go ahead and get an iPhone or Android device. I wont take the piss out of you for owning it (or accepting it, I'm not 100% clear on the hard distinguishing line). But equally, for most people, the apps are probably fine on the phone.

I've not noticed battery life to be worse than other smart phones. I've been able to have several long (1hr+) conversations on it in a day plus Internet and it's still going at the end. . I haven't actually let it get all the way to the bottom yet to see how long it will absolutely last. Anyway, it doesn't "suck". I think there was an O/S flaw early on that ran the battery down. At any rate, it was fixed in an update before I got mine.

"the worst being that you can't use the keyboard when using calls (like phone banking), as the screen is off, with no way to turn it off"

That's not true. I do this frequently and the screen turns on and gives me access to the keyboard straight away.

"it frequently needs a hard reset to get working again."

I really have to wonder where you're getting this stuff as again, I've never experienced this problem and have been using it for a while.

Maybe I'm holding it wrong?