Posts by JimC
1046 posts • joined Tuesday 24th April 2007 17:50 GMT
Well hopefully
The increasing use of paywalls is a sign that we will get liberated from Big Advertsing being the only source of income on the net...
Re: They don't really need carriers either
Maybe its time to revisit the rubber landing deck?
Yep, it does seem feasible
That a major vandaliser of other peoples websites might get careless when hitting a small target which he/she thought unlikely to have the resources to conduct a major investigation, and thus leave more traces than when attacking a more significant target. Whether that's the case here of course, well I for one have no idea.
Re: Taxes? No thank you.
Isn't the whole point of tax that it takes money away from people who can afford it in order to pay for services for other people who cannot afford to pay for them, and also to pay for services that are considered necessary by the government, but otherwise would not be paid for. So its intrinsic that you are paying for services that you don't want...
As for simplified and flat rate taxes, I remember the last time a UK government tried for a major reform leading to a simplified flat rate tax. This was for local services, and was called the community charge. You may recall it was dropped due to a very effective propaganda campaign.
But has this data
anything to do with wikileaks? The only mention I can see is in the headline.
I think the lesson should be
That the climate is damn complicated, and simplistic politicians answers don't work...
Climate change will happen sooner or later, whether artificial or not, just like, sooner or later an asteroid strike will happen. In both cases, depending on scale, the effects could be catastrophic and we ought to be ready to cope with it.
The problem I have with the *A*GW fanatics is that they are convinced that there is only way to deal with climate change. That method is ferociously expensive and probably ineffective, and if the cause doesn't turn out to be what they would like to think it is guaranteed ineffective. That means there's an awful lot of losses, but not many gains. Its like betting that the next big meteor strike will come from one specific direction, and spending a fortune on a system that's useless if it comes from another direction...
Re: Is she saying that the UK's ICT workforce should be 37% Indian and Chinese?
I shouldn't be suprised to be told that it was - except that most of them live, work and pay tax in India and China.
But seriously, personally I think this is a significant problem.
At the most trivial you could say that its nice for sad old middle aged geeks like me to have younger women around the workplace because it improves the ambience.
Howver I do believe that women tend to be better at some types of role than men, and in any case its always a bad thing if your industry is putting off a significant percentage of good workers that are therefore lost to other industries.
Re: How things move
Yep... time for people top realise there is no "Big Content", its all about Monstrous (in more than one sense) advertising...
Its especially ironic when people talk about rights societies, which are basically just co-operatives for creators of all sizes, as supposedly being part of the mythical big content.
Re: Still a Bullet?
So long as it misses me I won't care what its defined as - and if it hits me I'll care even less...
Re: Re:Ongoing hypocrisy (not past) does render her arguments invalid
> Your logic is a bit warped here. On the one hand, you say a valid argument is a valid argument ...
> ...That's contrary to your first point, as you're taking the presenter into account to determine if
> it's valid!!
Sure. 2 + 2 = 4 (given an appropriate set of conditions), no matter who says it, and when the VAT rate was 17.5% then £13,572 +VAT was £15,947.10 no matter who said it.
However if I'd sung out across the shop "what's 13,572 + VAT", then I'd probably have got more than one figure, and there were some people whose answers I'd have more confidence in than others...
Were they to do this well
It would be great for system admins. Peer to Peer, done well, would be exactly the right technology we need to distribute all the patches, bug fixes, software updates and everything else we need on all those identical workstations around a company's infrastructure. Throttled properly to avoid soaking the network, decent costing etc so that you automatically distribute everything on all the devices with the minimum traffic across the WAN links, and no need to define a local server or device as a distribution point and make sure its turned on all the time.
I looked into this when bit torrent and the like first came in, but the conclusion I came to was that all the peer to peer software was very well adapted to ripping off creators, but pretty much useless when it came to optimising the distribution of legitimate software and data, especially in an ad hoc tiered distribution model. Sadly I lacked the time and skills to rewrite it to be useful.
> How was HTC to know that the component wasn't "freely" available?
Ignorance isn't a defence. You need to ask.
Even if you did ask and were told lies I suspect you probably still lose the patent case, but you do have a good case against your supplier.
Re:Ongoing hypocrisy (not past) does render her arguments invalid
Nonsense. A valid argument is a valid argument whether its presented by Mother Theresa or Attila the Hun.
However if you are evaluating whether an argument is valid or not then certainly the past record of the person making it is something to consider very carefully.
> Now, we all know that doesn't mean
A point of view that's only useful if you make the assumption that the work the staff were diverted from was not revenue earning for the company.
Re: can someone wanted for international crimes
Sure, after all he's not been convicted for anything. That's one advantage of bail skipping and hiding: you're not actually convicted even if you do turn out to be found guilty if you are caught and tried.
Whose Freedom... Payforward
I think that's the point. GPL, and most especially GPL v3 is a license representing a highly politicised point of view concerned with Stallman et al's world view. It contains a lot that the creators see as vital freedoms for users, but at the price of heavily restricting what fellow developers can do with the code.
In my case, when I release my pathetic little snippets of code on line, I use the very liberal University of Illinois/NCSA license which puts almost no restrictions on other developers. You see I believe in payforward. Most of what code I produce I can only produce because other developers have posted examples and snippets on line. I can't pay them back for what they've done for me, but I can payforward by making the code available to anyone else who's after examples, snippets, inspiration whatever. To be quite honest I'm not remotely interested in user freedoms, and all the Stallman political stuff: all I'm interested in is to put a little something back to try and balance what I've received.
>better calibrate insurance rates.
Bearing in mind insurance works by spreading risks, I wonder if this could be taken too far...
- you are now parking in Cleveland, one of the highest rate theft postcode in the UK: please dial xxx to pay your extra insurance premium
- you are now driving at 90mph towards a multiple motorway pileup in thick fog. In order to continue your motor insurance for the next ten minutes please authorise payment of £75,000 immediately...
Re: A few notes
*No* degradation? That's pretty impressive life for all the bearings, associated motors generators etc...
There are all sorts of engineering challenges about this concept, and of course such things are soluble, but are they soluble for less cost of ownership than just regularly replacing batteries?
> but Rogue Anons
is there another kind?
Re: Is there a downside?
And the big boys know they only have to keep you hanging on with promises about how we'll definitely pay you and put it into production next week for a year, and then they can rip your work off and pay you nothing...
Re: As for the pilot being able to manually regain control
It also depends on the pilot being able to maintain situational awareness if his instruments aren't telling him what he expects, and not, for example, continuing to pull the nose up when the plane is in a stall.
Re: too many shareholders are too gutless
No, its worse than that. It means that the people administering the funds are themselves part of the executive class and have a personal interest in escalating executive salaries as part of the great money go round escalator, and it means that the people who actually depend on the income from the pension funds have no real say in what's going on. More pigs in the trough.
But actually
I don't recall this vast escalation increase in executive greed and executive salaries starting until very many years after Thatcher's reign ended.
And you know, as Thatcher herself said, there's no such thing as society, there are only men and women, and society or the government hasn't engineered this, the executives themselves, the individuals, scratching each others backs and sitting on each others boards have done each. Each individual shares responsibility...
Its no good the banks and the executives saying "the government should have stopped us being greedy irresponsible bastards": it was your own duty to be moral and responsible individuals yourselves...
Pigs in the trough...
the whole "executive class" is out of control...almost enough to make you a bloody socialist...
Re: North Korea's supporters can be listed on any quarter of a second class stamp
Agreed in one sense: China is a small word that fits on small pieces of paper. On the other hand as single supporters go its one of the best.
And the worrying part of it is that NK and the Korean War is a very big thing in the whole Chinese revolutionary psyche. No matter now irrational their government is being it would be emotionally very hard for China to watch them get wiped out by the Yanks. A lot of current Chinese folks grandfathers died stopping NK being wiped out by the Yanks (plus the rest of them, Brits, Australians etc etc) last time.
Re: that we are terrified of pointing out that some kids are more talented than other kids.
To my mind a bigger problem is the ridiculous status we put on some jobs over other jobs.
Whose performance is more important to the company: the MD or the woman that cleans the toilets? Well, if you've got a typhoid epidemic maybe its the dame with the Dettol that makes a real difference if they do their job well or badly...
Re: Once a secret, always a secret.
Well, no actually. In the UK we have the thirty year rule, in the US I understand they have 25, 50 and 75 year equivalents when various categories of secret document are declassified...
Talk about desperate chases for press coverage
Here I am bravely "leaking" public domain documents...
> So we should really listen to this guys advice...
So who should you listen to - people who've learned from the past - or people who haven't...
That's what's so odd
From what I hear they have more than enough of them to be able to set up that sort of shot.
I suspect that what we are seeing here is just a lazy PR man making the photo look a bit better - a PR man who is probably now doing an in depth investigation of re-education camps. As forgery goes its just too trivial. Cock up, not conspiracy.
Goodness knows I've done the same thing myself a few times, when none of the photos I've got look half decent for a web report I've been known to get a bitmap editor out and recreate the photo I'm sure I would have taken had I pressed the damn button at the right moment.
Re: China and the USA can't go to war as their economies are so interconnected
You're being rather simplistic.
Its a question of not being able to fight a war with anyone your key suppliers are friendly with. For the US NK is an obvious example.
As another it could be argued that a key factor in the outcome of the Falklands war was that the US did supply the UK with more Sidewinder missiles, but France wouldn't supply Argentina with any more Exocets.
Posted in Lost CASSiE search moves up a gear
Re: Remember Steve Fosset - a month??
a month? I thought it was over a year.
Re: a few people will get killed
A lot of people in fact. My father was involved last time in the 50s. A number of his shipmates didn't come back. A lot of NK soldiers, soldiers disguised as peasants and peasants he bombed and shot up didn't come back either (there being no difference between an oxcart carrying ammunition and an oxcart carrying rice from a few hundred feet up in the air).
However even though they lost none of the NK leaders were deposed and the people didn't rise up. I find it hard to look on it quite as flippantly as you do.
There are also strategic considerations...
As history demonstrates, if you want to fight a war you had better be able to source the materials of war. What's more if you want to have any economy left after the war you had better have had sufficient production capability to maintain all your international trade as well as maintain the war production.
My theory
Is that right now, to get on in your management career, you must drive change into the organisation and be progressive.
Just doing things better is career suicide. And it seems just as true in private sector as public sector...
Not much of a quadrant
Since nothing is far from a straight line from bottom left to top R
So what does it actually look like?
What I'd like to see is some nice close up colour pictures to see what it actually looks like. Those are very pretty arty shots, but ultimately concrete is mineral grains in a matrix... If all those grains are highly polished I can imagine the resulting effect as being rather decorative - each different mineral grain reflecting separately...
I can then go on to visualise the same effect with something rather exotic as the mineral grains. For the really affluent how about diamond, ruby and sapphire grains in a metallic matrix? They must be reasonably available as residue from the process of cutting gem stones I should have thought...
Or is my imagination just leaping way beyond what this stuff would actually look like?
Re: good for the soul..
I don't believe they started as bundles: MS were responsible for that fad.
Aldus Persuasion was one I liked a lot that hasn't been mentioned so far.
Re: There's a hidden assumption in 'market forces'
Mainly what Apple want is as much money for them and as little money for the creators as possible. Like supermarkets with food producers they want to drive the price down so they sell more without reducing their margin per unit sold. And the result - well you find out that the meat is horsemeat and the music is horseshit and only the supermarket executives get to make a decent living.
Re: good for the soul..
What's rather ironic about that is that to a considerable extent you are playing Microsoft's game for them. When you look at how they've played their monopoly games over the years its pretty clear to me that one of their keyaims is to destroy competitors by denying them an income stream.
For example in the early days of Windows there were three or 4 good presentation graphics programs, all fairly expensive, but justifiable, and all earning money to pay for development. Microsofts, powerpoint, was cheaper, but lousy, and no-one bought it. So they decided to give it away free with copies of Excel and Word and call it Office. The result was that the competition was starved of income and disappeared, so now there's only Powerpoint.
So if people pirate MS products then no-one else is getting any income from them and Microsoft dominate the market and define the software ecosystem. MS then attack the pirates and reinforce their monopoly. So if you truly wish to see the end of MS dominance the most important thing you can do is to spend money with the competition in what ever way they get their income stream... Open source companies still need money from somewhere to pay the bills.
Re: sustainable pensions...
A lot of the stuff about sustainable public sector pensions is just finance industry propaganda because they want to get their greedy mitts on the pension fund money and raid it for commission. Given a stable level of public sector employment there's not really much point in hoarding away huge sums of money for government pension contributions. Much better to use the money for something useful and pay the pensions from the next generation's contributions and thus ad infinitum. Provided the sums are done on the basis of a stable employee base its no problem and its certainly not a Ponzi scheme as the naive or deliberately misleading would tell you. It would only be a ponzi scheme if the sums relied on continually increasing staff levels, not stable ones.
This isn't possible with private sector companies of course, because we all know that the companies wouldn't be there when it was time to pay out the pensions, unlike Governments, which tend not to offshore the income to Ireland or whatever.
That in turn means that the other bunch of people frenziedly claiming that such things are undesirable are outsourcers, since if government pensions are cheaper for the employers outsourcing is much less likley to be price competitive.
In fact there's really only one group that benefits if government pensions are paid from future income instead of current income, and that's the taxpayers, because huge sums of money aren't shunted away in pension funds, but instead are available for public services. But who cares about them?
Re: Fish
Poor Fish really doesn't altogether deserve the grief he gets for that. It wasn't a hurricane, it was a very severe storm. As a rule of thumb peak wind speeds in a storm are about double the average wind speed, and the great storm saw peak wind speeds at the same strength as average speed of a hurricane. The peak wind speeds in a real hurricane are far far greater. If we ever get a real hurricane going through southern England the damage will be unbelievable and maybe folk will appreciate a bit better what its like in real hurricane areas...
Posted in Time to put 'Big Data' on a forced diet
But which is more expensive
The hardware for extra storage, or the staff time required to reduce the hardware requirement?
No arguments when it comes to 275 almost identical windows server images and the like, but when it comes to the other stuff...
I for instance, keep all non-trivial email, and its saved an awful lot of effort on numerous occasions when I've been able to go back and find out what why or who on decisions made previously... If those who will not learn from history are condemned to repeat it then it makes sense to have that history available.
Re: This just in
Not to mention outsourced systems and all the rest of it... All makes me wonder if in the medium term the anonymous internet is doomed. I can't see the world being prepared to g back for private lines for everything, but if the level of threats becomes unacceptable then its going to end up with everything and everyone being identifiable and responsible... Look at S. Korea this morning...
Re: @LarsG
I suspect that to an extent at least she was also encouraged in her foolishness by the EFF's posturing. Perhaps if they'd kept their noses out the stupid woman would have called a halt long ago.
Posted in Are your servers PETS or CATTLE?
Dangerous territory...
IME of sheep farming the females in the flock tend to be just numbers, albeit with modifiers for those with notable personality/attributes(Fat 80, Little 6, whatever), but the rams (which there will be very few of) are known by pet names, which will normally be contractions of stud names (Sweetwoods Smart Lad -> Mart).
I kept thinking "where's the evidence"
I suppose a lot of it is because dumbed down TV just won't mention the detailed evidence, but I really had trouble with a lot of their conclusions... That the bluestones came out of the Aubrey holes seems highly probable, but a cemetery with exactly 56 gravestones, sorry that just doesn't work for me. It feels just to deliberately laid out. There must be something else going on.
Re: Urban Legend ...
Although I imagine the strory has grown in the telling, the "handy power socket" is certainly something I've experienced first hand in end user situations. I remember in one office having to go round labelling the appropriate dirty power sockets "vacuum cleaners only" in order to try and prevent the staff plugging IT equipment into them, thus leaving the cleaner grabbing any handy socket on the clean power system for the vacuum cleaner...
