Re: Playing Devils Advocate!!

I'm a Windows only helpdesk admin. I have occasionally booted from a Linux distro disk to do something (usually resetting the password for the admin account on the Windows system). Even I recognize Ubuntu as a major Linux distro and expect Samsung should have tested this.

Re: every worked out well?

Back in the day it was how you found out how things worked.

Peeking and poking on a C64 provided days of amusement and learning.

Re: remove ourselves our Golden thrones,

That's what we do on our jobs.

This is El Reg.

It's where we come to not have to be above suspicion, let our hair down, and talk smack about any damn thing we want to without worry about real world consequences.

Re: early days of ACPI

It's not just Samsung, and it's not just Linux. Hardware vendors write a lot of stuff that doesn't quite meet published spec, but when released with a current popular OS works.

Back in the early Pentium days, before Linus had even started work on Linux there was a company that released a multiple CD drive that ran on the IDE channel. Beautiful part about was, under Windows 95, you could share each of the drives in the Caddy, and computers linked on a work group could read what was in the CD caddy. We had a client running some library software in a Windows workgroup configuration (connections to remote PCs were pretty much by modem in those days) and they depended upon this functionality. One day they had problem with an internal modem that fried the motherboard. CPU was good, so we tried to replace the MD and memory. Win95 would install just fine, find the device and initially you would see all the drives. Then you installed the Intel chipset for the MB to make all the devices accessible and all of a sudden the device stopped working. We spent hours trying to figure it out before calling the manufacturer. The driver didn't work with the new Intel chipset, and the company had no intention of updating the driver. They had even discontinued making the device, so we couldn't even just buy a replacement. Instead we had to install a SCSI card and a SCSI caddy, about tripling the bill to the customer (we discounted the labor since we should have called the vendor sooner than we did).

Years later I was in a different environment where they'd been using an IDE "tape drive" for ages to backup data from local PCs (don't ask what they were backing up, I thought it was epic fail at the time), but still in a 95 environment. But drive sizes were finally getting large enough to force us to install 98 on some systems, and the tape drives started failing on the 98 systems. Because apparently the manufacturer didn't fully meet the IDE spec for the drive.

Now, I recognize that sometimes specs come out with things that people don't really have a way to test at the time the spec was written, and that there are monetary limits on what a company can reasonably be expected to test. But cases like these always leave me scratching my head.

Re: Get real

I got Real once. But now I'm back to using my default media player.

Re: OMG! Twitter breached, I posted my life on it, I'm ruined #gulliblesademptytwat

At 140 characters per tweet, there is no way anybody could post their life of twitter, no matter how hard they try.

Re: BBC is thankfully not a "government agency"

I'm not a Brit, so I don't have to pay the Beeb govt tax, but my government tries to pull the same BS on this side of the pond. So I have a new functional definition of government agency. If you have to pay something or government types with guns will show up at your door, it's a 'government agency' regardless of what the nitwits in power claim.

Re: BBC Trust

Well that all depends on which meaning of "Trust" one is using. If the meaning is the one for the context or The Railroad Barons, then it makes perfect sense.

Re: part of me really wishes MS would do this with old versions of IE.

Umm...

If you run Automatic Updates, that's pretty much EXACTLY what MS does with old versions of IE. To the point that it's a royal biatch to be able to compatibility test for multiple versions.

What messes you up is that MS also released hotfixes that took the updates off the patching list and users never undid the hotfixes. Possibly because they run software that still relies on those versions we all wish were dead.

Re: remove things at your whims and break functionality

I agree with you, but you do need to remember this is LARRY ELLISON we're talking about.

Re: Sure retasking a sat isn't easy nor is access cheap

My recollection from the time is that the spooks had OFFERED the look see, which is what always pissed me off most about it.

Re: several minutes warning

Given the temps involved, I don't know that it would have been even that long in real time, but I'm quite sure it felt like hours in perceived time.

It was a truly sad day.

Re: they should start looking for new a vendor.

Yes, but I'm the lowly helpdesk dude at the bottom of the food chain. And somewhere up the food chain is somebody with what is effectively the force of law behind him saying we have to keep using the crap from that vendor. And no, it's not a minor program off in a basement office somewhere. Almost all the folks in the executive suite (or it would be the executive suite if it weren't government) have it (probably hate it too) and use it on a regular basis (at least once a week, with a fair number (more than 50%) living in the app).

Re: If this was the 80s. they would be called Yuppies.....

Actually I think they'd be DINKs: Double Income, No Kids.

Re: HOWMUCH!?

Actually $110/month is about what I was paying for my Sprint phone a while back. Minimal talk minutes, unlimited data, and hot spot so I could use the data connection on my laptop, which was where I really wanted the wireless. And it was one of the cheaper phones/plans available from the retailer at that level of Smart Phone. Verizon and AT&T would both have been at least another $30 on top of that.

Re: why so many people forego the cheaper American unlimited

Because even the more expensive "unlimited" deals turn out to be far more limited and cost more than advertised.

I had a Sprint phone for a while that was purchased with an "unlimited" data plan because I don't actually make many phone calls. About 6 months from the end of my contract the "unlimited" data plan was canceled. Soon thereafter I also canceled my phone contact and paid the fee to get out of rather than continue to part with more than a $100/month for something from which I was not getting enough use.

Some of it is truly higher costs. Some of it is limited competition. Most of it is the corruption of government granted monopolies, either back when AT&T ruled the US, or from the local fiefdoms from which the phone companies have to purchase land use rights to place their masts. Oh according to the laws on the books they are open for competition, but try running the paperwork if you aren't the current incumbent...

Re: option of reverting to the old style menus.

I concur that the Ribbon is a major PITA, but I expect trying to maintain both layouts would have been problematic for the programers. So that part makes sense to me from the MS point of view.

Re: shoe horn workarounds just to attach multiple emails to one email

I'd give you 20 up-votes for that statement alone if I could. The most bizarre part of that to me is that I have the distinct recollection I was able to do that a few years ago, but it is now nearly impossible. Most of the time we work around it with GASMO and Outlook, but yeah, as a corporate solution, I think GMail sucks.

Re: contract between the parties is sufficient to protect the data

I'm not aware that any private contact can ever contradict national law. So it seems to me that if you need to comply with British/EU regs, you pretty much need to stay in that geographical region.

And I say that as a US citizen who isn't quite as concerned about complying with that law as someone in the EU needs to be.

Re: needs semi automatic rifles.

And with that statement you discredit yourself completely as someone who doesn't even know WTF a 'semi automatic' rifle is.

Re: Profits = tax bills?

You forgot the important bits for US companies. For Apple in the UK they first have to pay the UK tax, then the company pays the US tax, and then the shareholder pays either an income (dividends) or capital gains (sale of stock, not indexed for inflation) tax. So that $100 in initial profit winds up being $1.25 to the US shareholder. Not really an attractive rate of return.

Re: dividend versus capital growth

So long as dividends and capital growth have equal tax treatment that is true. If the tax environment is such that dividends net a lower profit than capital growth, companies will prefer capital growth over dividends. Also on a practical level dividends tend to be paid by companies in mature markets whereas growing markets tend to attract capital growth companies (for obvious reasons).

Re: If Tim Worstall were here

It is a clear case of taxation distorting the market. In this case it isn't harming growth, it actually promotes it; but at the cost of clear market signals on the health of the company. At least that was the case pre-Obama. In the current environment of government confiscation of wealth I would say it is stifling growth and job creation because instead of opening new lines of business, companies are hoarding cash just like Apple is.

Re: Cashflow != ignore

You are conflating revenue with profit. Profit only occurs AFTER investment expenditures are accounted for. An executive can argue that cash on hand should be invested instead of being held in reserve or distributed as profit, and an investor can agree with that strategy. But it is a risk, and it explicitly forgoes profit.

Yes, there are some businesses that have stable long term potential profits against short term volatile costs. They are all highly regulated: banks, pharmaceuticals, oil and gas production companies. In fact they are so regulated I don't regard them as businesses, but quasi-governmental agencies.

Re: Countrywide

Countrywide I can understand making the list. They were defrauding the government and their investors. When you're doing that, you're probably good at keeping secrets.

But Facebook and Google? Yeah, that shows a fundamental problem somewhere, although it might be with the users and not the survey or its methodology.

Re: Sun HW + Solaris - no where but down. . .

I've heard similar stories from a friend who works in a government lab that does require big iron. Their first choice use to be Sun for new workstations. When Oracle took over they doubled the price of the existing service contracts. So all the new *nix equipment they buy comes from an outfit I've never seen mentioned in a Reg article, and whose name I can't recall at the moment. Granted the sales numbers are maybe $20K a year on a new server at the location plus existing service contracts, but I imagine that's happening at more than one location.

Re: back in the day HP produced some good kit

Agreed. I didn't work with their servers, but their printers and science lab equipment were killer. I worked for a company that pretended to compete with them in some of the science lab market, and privately our execs would admit we couldn't go head to head with them. On the couple of occasions when we DID come out with something better, HP were quick to ink a deal with us to either put their Brand on our equipment, or work with us to develop the product and sell a varient to which they had the exclusive license.

Re: HP

I don't see the HP-Sun synergy you do. From my perspective both were essentially hardware vendors who haven't got a good handle on service, which is where the cash is these days. I do see the Oracle-Sun synergy since Oracle was a service and software company. I concur with the poster above that this is bad for customers because Ellison basically rapes his customers (and I think if I had been on the government committee reviewing the deal I would have killed it based on the db segment overlap), but I do see the business synergy from the Oracle and Sun standpoint.

But then I'm in the commodity end of the business, not the big iron.

Re: ore than enough to know just how afwul Star Trek XI is.

I am a fan of the original series even with all of its flaws. And you've absolutely nailed the problem.

Star Trek worked because Roddenberry had a utopian vision of the future, but was tempered by the realities of making the show for execs who were anything but utopians. When Next Gen came out, they gave Roddenberry a blank check to do what he wanted to, and without the tempering of the hovering non-utopian execs who wanted fight scenes and love interests in every episode, it stank. Until they booted Roddenberry high enough into the ranks that he no longer affected actual production and it became a watchable show. Star Trek XI is what happens when the non-utopian execs make the movie without the structure the utopianist envisioned. And it stinks just as much as when the utopianist ran the show.

Re: Can't really do much worse...

Agree about EP1.

Not sure it's even worth a look at the trailers for the new one.

I heard from a friend that Lucas feels that no matter what he would have done, he would have pissed somebody off so he's washed his hands of it. If true, I'd tell him the one thing that was GUARANTEED to piss people off royally was to make an obviously derivative movie based on the first (episode IV) movie for the launch of the prequel. Yes there were bits of the movie that were fun, but too few and not worked well into the plot. I've been of the opinion he should have farmed out 1 to 3 because the defined story arc is something heroic writers are bad at: heart breaking tragedy. We knew it was supposed to be the fall of a Jedi into the dark side. And at the end of the 3 movies, I still didn't believe the character would have moved to the dark side if he were real. He only wound up there because the script said he had to. Sort of a reverse Deus Ex Machina plot failure.

Re: you're not including yourself, right?

Well, there's certainly no need to include the US or European nations as their birthrate is already below replacement level. China is working their way down too with their 1 child policy, but given their penchant for aborting girls, it's unclear what will happen when their overly male population actually gets restless. Now maybe they'll just expend themselves attacking the also "overly populated" Indian peninsula, but do you really want to bet your LIFE on that?

Re: we are also having issues with food

The 18th Century called, they want their Malthusian FUD returned to them.

We don't have food production problems, we have food distribution problems. Get rid of the green despots posing as saviors of the children and we can get things fixed up fairly quickly.

Re: Good FUD

Nova or supernova it doesn't matter. At 1AU we're all still dead.

Unless of course you get raptured before that.

Re: Do they honestly think younger people dont read?

Given a fair number of posts I see on blogs...

In a word, No.

Re: So Star Trek is fact now

One of the big problems with Trek has always been that the capabilities of the underlying technology changes depending on the needs of the writers. That violates the fundamental rules of both sf AND fantasy writing. You get to break the rules of the normal universe ONCE and work out the plot from there. For really good sf books and shows a fair bit of theoretical thinking goes into exactly how you are circumventing physics. And one of the more basic rules is that while you can play with alien psychologies, humans are pretty much humans no matter how long we've been around. So for example, if a typical human, upon finding a technology 100 years in advance of what he's got, would try to copy/understand/use that technology, then even in the future they'd do the same thing.

Re: a much bigger WTF moment

picking apart old Trek was a fun pastime for fans.

Picking apart the reboot isn't. It's more like dynamiting fish in a barrel. It leaves you wet and smelling of dead fish.

Re: Uh, JaitcH (was: Americans use such self-explanetory language ... once you learn the vocabulary)

Given that it's Florida (aka Retirement land for the USA) I'm betting "their son's bedroom" means the guest room that they keep for when their 30-40 year old son (and possibly his wife) come to visit and is otherwise unused. Or perhaps like my friend's parents who live in Florida, it is the room in which their 50 year old son who is divorced and a recovering alcoholic lives. It's the sort of media misdirect I've come to expect since they continue to report 18-21 year old criminals as 'kids.'

Re: in the US it's happened on average once a year

You must hang out with the wrong kind of people. Lived here over 40 years, occasionally driven through the wrong part of town (realized it when I saw the Lexan on the gas station attendant's booth) and never had a gun pointed at me in anger. Once or twice on shooting range until we'd properly trained an over-anxious noob, but even then it was an accidental bad movement of the gun, not a raised and pointed at me situation.

Re: Plea bargaining in one way or another is an essential part of the legal system

I generally concur with your post, but specifically disagree with your assertion that only the guilty accept a plea bargain. Also while recognizing that it is factually correct that the courts are over-worked, given that they themselves have contributed significantly to that status, I find it difficult to grant them dispensation for it.

Re: Old Linus missed that one eh?

IRQ =/= Linux Kernel. Linus reviews the kernel, not all the software in any distributions which might be made.

Yes, if you compare the Windows kernel to the Linux kernel and ignore the add ons, the two are roughly equally in terms of security vulnerabilities. The difference is, Windows sells what ought to be the add ons as an inherent part of the kernel, and further used that position as part of their legal defense for incorporating IE (which is clearly an app) into the OS way back in the dark ages of computing.

Re: your little theory on economics doesn't work

It's not his economic theory that doesn't work, it's your government thuggery which is keeping him down. Down with Government Thuggery! The time for Revolution has Come!

Re: And your kneecaps?

At last the inner thug is revealed! All set to break James's kneecaps and none to subtle about it either.

Re: Google didn't employ a single person in the Netherlands.

At a minimum they employed a lawyer to write their incorporation papers, paid the legal fees for the same, and paid some sort of taxes for monies passing through the country. That tax money employed government employees. If Google move their shell company, that work will disappear.

@Arild the economic illiterate: Re: Who pays the tax?

A company that has a reduced tax bill has a choice. They can pass along the savings to preserve market share or they can temporarily increase profits to shareholders. If they temporarily increase profits to shareholders, other companies will see and seize the opportunity to provide the same service at a lower cost, which either forces the first company to lower prices to match them, or to go out of business (particularly if customers perceive they were being gouged and will therefore no longer do business with them).