Posts by David Kelly 2
308 posts • joined Wednesday 10th June 2009 14:30 GMT
Re: nice speeds
Excellent question but what is described is a terrestrial system which should be comparable to cable TV latency. Possibly better as straight line to tower is shorter than wire. And speed of light through air is faster than through coax.
Speed of light through coax is about 60% to 70% of the speed through free space.
Barack Hussein Obama II
Nobody Will Find Them On Amazon
Amazon's steaming services have the 2nd worst user interface imaginable. As a Prime subscriber it is painful to watch an entire season as each episode must be hunted down with a search from the top. Especially painful under Yahoo! Widgets, which is how Amazon is often implemented in "smart" TVs.
The all time record worst user interface is used by Dish in their PVR 722 for Blockbuster streaming. Its so bad it makes Windows 1.0 look innovative.
Netflix's user interface is not necessarily good, but at least its not awful.
The Yardstick By Which Linux Is Measured
Have long stated Microsoft was the yardstick by which Linux measured itself. While Apple and FreeBSD were more concerned about making a better OS, better tools, than just making a better Windows.
Re: Chicken, Meet Egg.
Its not a good idea even on paper. Only works in wet dreams of armchair environmentalists.
$0.23/mile lease on battery is $11.50/gallon at 50 MPG. The Better Place "solution" consumes 3-4x the resources of less expensive readily available more flexible solutions. Consumers really are smarter than wishful thinking environmentalists. Better Place is proof that consumers are better environmentalists than environmentalists.
Leasing the battery only forces economic realization of the true daily cost. I can lease a whole Prius for less than Better Price's battery-only lease. Heck, I can get a Mercedes Benz M-class for less.
Until costs (and therefor resource consumption) is close to par for conventional (and hybrid) vehicles "solutions" such as offered by Better Place are no more than indulgences for the affluent.
DST Fee?
They forgot to charge a fee for the cost of administering Daylight Savings Time. It must cost something awful to have to change the clocks on all those towers nationwide.
Posted in Infosys vows to fight Indian tax claim
Quit complaining, sheeple.
Either we are free humans or we are sheeple owned, managed, and harvested by government farmers for the benefit of government.
Decide what you want to be, and work to make it so.
The Journal of Irreproducible Results
I think "The Journal of Irreproducible Results" would be *delighted* to accept payment to publish your papers!
I think they would be rolling on the floor, laughing.
Re: It's sad
"Many school systems lack the resources to hire quality teachers or pay reasonable salaries yet they find money to buy PCs."
Thats a Catch-22. If former-teachers now-administrators were of proper caliber in the first place they wouldn't misappropriate funds in attempt to buy machines to make up for teachers' shortcomings.
One can not pay teachers more to make them better teachers. One has to have the ability to hire and fire with ease so as to build a team capable of achieving the goal. In private industry higher pay comes with less job security. I'll pay you more on the chance you are worth more. But if you are not, you are gone.
In college I was hired as a sweat shop "educational" programmer. Paid $0.05 over minimum wage, every week we were given an outline of a "program" designed by PhD educators. We turned their drills into executable apps. Mindless drills. Slide shows. Very little interaction. Most complex was an "energy spreadsheet", one column of household energy consumers which one could adjust usage to see the effect on monthly energy bill.
The most useful educational computer tools to me have been word processor, C compiler, Unix, and spreadsheet. Word processor makes edits possible and practical that I simply would not undertake by hand. Much the same way as I lay out PCB's today I can push and shove things around to try which I would not have dared with tape.
Not Unpaid
Apple did not fail to pay taxes on earnings. Apple paid full due where the earnings were generated when the earnings where generated. Now foolish politicians want another 35% cut as penalty for bringing the bacon home.
The same fools who will borrow money from China and pay interest to finance a "stimulus" when Apple would bring money home and spread it around if only Washington would quit stomping on their toes and skimming off the top. Plus you know full well Apple can do more good with $1 than the Federal Government can do with $100.
Meanwhile the UK shouldn't complain because a lot of Apple's offshore funds are being invested in the UK where they were earned rather than in the USA.
The difference is that Apple adds value by brining product to consumers through iTunes.
Obama deserves none of the profits Apple earned in the UK. Apple's profits in the UK were earned and taxed under UK law. Done. To tax again before the funds could be used in the USA is plain stupid. UK companies are not taxed for funds they bring into the USA to invest so why should US companies be taxed to bring in funds to invest?
Re: Too much marketing information (for Apples peace of mind)
You think Amazon is losing money on ebook sales today with the intent of losing money forever? The instant they believe they have the market sewn up and the definitive only ebook reader is Kindle, prices will skyrocket. History has shown this time and time again. Amazon knows history and was looking to repeat.
On the other hand villain Apple enters the market in the only possible way so as not to lose money on every sale in attempt to steal market from Amazon. And clueless leftist government lawyers who know nothing of economics sue like perfect patsies for Amazon.
Slow
I have a 2.8 GHz Quad-core Intel Xeon Mac Pro 8GB and iWork is slow.
It has problems mapping fonts from one machine to the next. Complains when opening a document about all sorts of things and when you tell it to "just fix it", it doesn't.
Can't even open a document and view it without getting a message when closing, "This document has changed ..."
Government Has No Reason To Complain
Government writes the rules and should not be at all surprised or have any reason to complain when companies obey the rules. When companies find the rules say something the government didn't intend.
Why is Government Involved?
Government has no business dictating to vendors how to meter their product beyond assurance that metering is accurate.
If an electric utility wants to replace dumb meters with those which are remotely readable then so be it! Whether it is cost effective or not should be up to the provider and their skills at operating their services.
I have designed smart meters which are (or were, have no idea today) in service. One used a cellphone. Another used ethernet connected to a fiber terminal at the residence. Agree the security is crap, bosses "designed" the protocols, barely. Our devices had no inherent security. Depended on the cellphone or a private TCP/IP network managed by the fiber terminal.
All we shipped had all the electronics to cut off customer power. But few were shipped with the expensive 200A relay. Couldn't tell from outside whether one had cutoff or not. Our customers reported the remote cutoff worked very very well with problem customers who only had to be cut off once, sometimes twice, before learning the importance of paying their bills. We were told 5% to 10% were "slow paying."
iPad's Best Feature
The fact one CANNOT run MS Office on the iPad is one of its best features.
Also the lack of FLASH forces websites to realize just how worthless FLASH really is.
How dare you!
How dare you distract 3D printer fans with facts and analysis!
Next thing you know the internet will be useful for work.
Google Glass owners need not apply!
See how much better an iPhone than Google Glass? iPhone can wear panties!
Google Raspberry?
Perhaps Google is planing on hosting their cloud on Raspberry Pi's? :-)
Time to boycott Hawking
I'll fast forward over his guest appearances in The Big Bang Theory.
Re: One question
Those I have spoken to at Dish have a very honest Colorado/Nebraska accent. And they don't seem to be reading a script. It was sad how Sirius/XM's CSR's have to read a little speech after each step in their script. Even sadder when it didn't fit the problem at hand.
Re: Speed limits?
For lack of data it makes ASSUMPTIONS? Thats simply wrong. If it doesn't know then it would know more than it does now if it simply says "don't know."
Re: What will they do with the overseas assets?
Thats exactly what Apple will have to do if the government will not let Apple import their earnings back to the USA. The earnings are kept where they were earned, and taxed, and Apple (as with any other smartly managed company) is kept and reinvested where ever the greatest value is to be found.
Fools in government will borrow $785B to create a government-controlled "stimulus" but won't allow companies such as Apple to bring home foreign earnings without additional taxes. Apple could "stimulate" the US economy with $100B for no cost to the government or the taxpayer but for the fact the government is greedy and wants it for themselves.
Re: increased dividends?
$2.65 per share per quarter was the dividend announced last year. At $450/share that is 2.36%. Last week a $3.05 dividend was declared, 2.71% on $450.
Quality of Content?
Why bother with audiophile reproduction of unworthy content?
Wrong solution, as usual
The problem is not that online vendors do not collect sales tax but the sales tax itself is a problem. I have to pay income tax on the funds used to pay sales tax. Eliminate the sales tax, don't add Yet Another Tax.
I want an iPad iBeetle
iPhone on dash? Boring. How about a iPad, big enough to be seen?
Corporations are not taxed no matter how much tax they pay.
Corporations do not exist for the purpose of generating tax revenue.
When a corporation obeys the tax laws and just so happens not to pay much only means the government was successful in using tax law to regulate activities. One is taxed in ways other than cash.
Even when a corporation pays huge taxes, the corporation is not really taxed. Taxes are just a cost of doing business and are passed on to consumers. Who then pay VAT and sales taxes on top of the taxes the corporation paid and passed through.
Farm it out
Rather than built their own the way Apple did, Google is holding true to their progressive left centralized socialistic origins by demanding The Government do it for them.
At least they are being true to themselves. But the problem is that they are trying to foist their philosophy on others. Ethanol comes to mind as another faulty concept foisted on the world. Supposed to be "green" but is worse than doing nothing.
I have one of the free 10-user Apps accounts which was momentarily down this morning. Another gmail address w/o Apps was fine.
65 Year Old Pipelines
The only reason they were using a 65 year old pipeline is that environmentalists won't let them build newer safer pipelines.
Same reason Japan was using ancient nuclear power plants.
Re: Weebles Wobble But Energy Has to Go Somewhere
I agree, the energy has to go somewhere. If the flywheel flexes the energy to flex the flywheel becomes heat.
Suspend the flywheel on magnetic bearings? Permanent magnets? Else more energy lost.
Spin in a vacuum? More energy lost there creating and maintaining the vacuum.
What are you going to do in an earthquake? Vibrations in the floor used to be enough to disturb early hard drives.
Is it Mac compatible? :-)
Also, I don't think they purchased the pictured metal enclosure for only $200, including silkscreening.
$705 is just shy of $800?
Maybe $775 would be just shy of $800 but $705 is not close.
Capitalism and Free Enterprise
This is how capitalism and free enterprise works. If you think you have a monopoly and drive prices up thinking you are safe, someone will spend their own money to prove you wrong.
Re: Apple's problem with flash
Wrong. Disable FLASH and you will find YouTube works just fine.
Posted in Fukushima switchboard defeated by rat
Outlaw Rats!
Sadly I don't hear a cry to outlaw rats.
Is surprising this sort of thing hasn't happened more often as the plant was 45 years old, which means it was at least a 50 year old design. Back then we had no experience in nuclear power, and knew less than Sen. Dianne Feinstein knows about guns. Today we have lots of combat experience and could build much safer nuclear power plants than even 10 years ago, if only we were allowed.
Sadly the only state of the art nuclear plants being built are in China, by Westinghouse. And you know good and well once these reactors are finished and in operation China will clone them without paying foreigners or license fees.
Re: Self-inflicted wound
Serves them right for using Microsoft products.
A bit surprised more of this has not happened sooner. Then again smart parasites know not to kill their host. Stupid parasites kill their host and lose their home + life. That is the best argument I know supporting North Korea as the culprit. Not smart enough to know better than to make their presence known.
Good for Apple!
The more I read about attempts to retrofit this technology the more I like Apple's solution with two separate drives, one filesystem.
What I'd like to see is some mechanism to put both "drives" in one for a single laptop bay. Perhaps as others have suggested statically map the solid state storage to known block range to give control to the filesystem driver.
Nothing worth stealing
Was forced to listen to broadcast radio the other day in a waiting room and couldn't believe how bad it was. Was wishing for earbuds for my iPhone.
Believe Phish "Farmhouse" was my last purchase. Listening to classic Kansas as I type.
Re: Criminal Act?
When your government builds luxury condo for unwed mother of 11, then why shouldn't the government bear all the burden of protecting his intellectual property?
I think both are wrong.
Its not as if he invented the windup generator or radio, its just a matter that he happened to put one on a radio. Unique aspects of how he did it is patentable, but not a broad claim to all windup appliances.
Plus, his origin is 1991, 22 years ago. Patent is expired and now in the public domain.
New Respect for Facebook
Good for Facebook, apparently they have competent management.
Politicians write the rules, perhaps naively, but need to learn that the rules are the rules. Complex rules will always come back to bite you. You know what they say about industry standards? There is one which says anything you want it to say. Same for tax law. The solution is not more tax laws, but fewer. The problem with the flat tax is it doesn't give politicians enough knobs to turn in the form of tax breaks.
Every dollar Facebook does not pay in taxes is a dollar invested. Government doesn't invest, government spends to reward supporters.
Re: The Balance Of Evidence @ Psyx
"In the article, the journo says that the wheels were the wrong size."
No, in the chat log the "journalist" was only guessing the wheels were the wrong size causing the speedometer to read 54 MPH for claimed 65+ which was logged. Skipping the fact the data log was reading speed from the same source as the speedometer. Skipping the fact he had no disagreement with the distance mileage. Or that he didn't notice any discrepancy in his indicated speed vs prevailing speed. Quite the contrary, he said he was blocking traffic at 54 MPH and the logs say he was driving much faster.
I have no love lost for EVs but I believe Musk is correct in that the NYT spun this "test". But sadly haven't we come to expect that of the NYT?
Denial For Cost of Policies
Those running the UK are smart enough not to hold this sort of monkey trial for fear of being outed. If Apple's hands are forced they will document exactly how government policy and regulations drive prices up.
Cradle to grave nanny states don't come free, or even cheap.
Posted in Electric cars stall in USA, Australia
Re: utter bollocks
Battery swap is a great idea but it demonstrates the folly of electric battery power: cost.
Electricity is almost free but wear and tear on the battery is on par with hydrocarbon combustion. BetterPlace is apparently ashamed of their pricing structure, I couldn't find it on their site. Other sources suggest 399 euro/mo is the going price in Denmark for a battery swap subscription. About $540/mo. My Prius fuel costs are about $7000/year for 9,000 miles in the USA. EV can not compete with those economics.
They say with production of the Nissan Leaf moving to Tennessee and the $7500 Federal bribe, effective cost of a new Leaf will be in the $22k range. That could get American's interest as a 2nd vehicle, but not as primary for nearly as many.
US Garage Doors
Most US garage door openers are on 315 MHz.
The French Are Stupid
Is obvious the government of France owns its citizens and as such is their duty to manage their citizens for maximum profit same as any other farmer managing livestock.
$100 per machine per year is a deal?
The only thing I find I need Microsoft products for is to extract the data written in documents created using Microsoft software.
$617m / 2m machines / 3 years = $102.83 each per year.
Posted in OpenTV slaps Netflix with patent lawsuit
Software Patents Are Protected
"Given that these are all software patents, and mostly just ideas, not relating to specifics, we suspect they are completely without merit once a court has taken a deeper look and that many of the patents will not stand scrutiny."
I don't disagree that some fool is probably trying to patent what other systems have been doing for an eternity and set top boxes have been doing for only a little less time. But the fact that an invention is implemented in software makes it no less worthy of protection.
Unimpressed With Samsung
Thought I was buying the best Samsung had to offer when I bought a UN46C8000 and matching BD-C6900. The TV was intermittent and required a new motherboard. The BD player quit playing BDs other than the one that came with it. Netflix on either gets confused spooling the feed and often flashes a black screen for a half second now and then. Fast forward to within a minute or two of the end and resume play will usually crash the TV.
Unimpressed. So I bought an iPhone. Can't help think if Samsung can not do better with their TV line that they are not going to do any better with their phones.
