Posts by Robert Long 1
754 posts • joined Monday 15th June 2009 06:53 GMT
Re: Waze ? for what ?
I suspect you're right about the patents but this is so obvious that I can't imagine the patent standing even in Texas. At least three people have suggested to me the idea of an app that is left open and reports back traffic to a central system which then feeds back to the app. I suggested it to someone as a way of getting up to date train delay news (although that had some problems as an idea). Anyway, even non-technical users can see how to make this work so a patent would be absurd, as would paying $400m for it.
Interesting
Given that Android is Linux plus an application set, this isn't as new as it seems, but it shows that there are possibilities other than just taking Google's application set or the highway.
I agree with the others here who think this explains a lot about Canonical's apparently pathological devotion to the Unity front-end. If they had released Unity as a "click here to have a preview of our upcoming mobile desktop" instead of making it the default on everything I think they would have saved themselves a lot of grief and market-share.
Re: ...spend “is not proportional to its effectiveness”
@Dany14
"Having an open Linux system would be tantamount to suicide from a tech point of view "
You haven't a clue what you're talking about. Like most teachers.
"Whilst open source is great in theory, it is only great if you have either lots of money to start with or lots of skilled staff"
Yeah, I'm always happy when I know that the Windows network I've logged into is run by unskilled staff. That never goes wrong.
My advice to you would be to get out of teaching before you do any more damage to the kids.
Subjectivity
Could everyone here stop saying that attractiveness is subjective? That's pretty well known (almost as well known as why women wear high heels, in fact). The whole point of doing statistics like this is to see if there is a pattern underlying the subjectivity.
Personally, I hate high heels and watching women trying to move around in them is more likely to cause laughter and contempt than arousal.
Now, a good pair of wellies? Now you're talking! Say "ooo-arr", darling...say it like you mean it!
Hmmm...no
In fact most of the problems with the public sector at the moment stem from the way in which the private sector is being allowed to access it as a cash cow. The fact that the private sector is then allowed to set up fake companies in Luxembourg to avoid paying tax on the money they're stealing from us via the NHS, the police, and so on just adds insult to injury.
Generally speaking, problems in large organizations most often are rooted in someone somewhere being unaccountable. It doesn't matter whether this is a public or private sector organization, and by and large, the worst excesses and wastes of money in recent years have been private sector companies rather than public. Go back to the 70's and it was public and mostly for the same reasons - people in charge making risky or plain stupid decisions which they knew they would never have to pay for if it went wrong. Look at HP for a nice example of this happening in your wonderful private sector.
The thing is, we want an NHS. We want a decent Post Office, and we want a train network that isn't a joke. And we, mostly, don't want those things to only be available to the rich. So we are all supposed to chip in.
Now, if you don't like that then vote for someone that will openly say that they are against these things and if they lose then shut up and deal with it or, alternatively, you know where the ports are. What we have had for decades now is a series of governments who say they are for these things but in fact hate them with a passion because they're not pulling in big bucks for the people who own the politicians. So they they are trying to "fix" these things but instead take actions specifically intended to undermine them, and then throw their hands up and go "well, we did our best, but the problems were too deep, so we'll have to hand the whole thing over to BigBloatedInefficientCorp to run. In completely unconnected news, I'm leaving to become a non-exec of BBIC next month by an amazing and entirely predictable coincidence".
Random executions of MPs is the obvious solution.
"It’s called capitalism" No it's not..
It's called fraud. The companies set up to launder the money have no actual purpose; they are not real companies.
Re: In other news...
"Exactly. It is not Google's fault our tax code was written by dishonest lawyers and dribbling morons"
Well, isn't it? Who's spending the lobbying money to get the laws written that way? It's not me; I doubt that it's you.
Re: It’s called capitalism. We are proudly capitalistic. I’m not confused about this
"Rape, slavery etc are moral issues which go beyond any technicality of law"
That was my point - being legal does not make them less evil.
Re: "Protest the funerals"?
"Yes, there are specific instances in the Bible of people being punished by God, but that's a far cry from saying that every bad thing is because you've offended God."
Actually, I said (and you even quoted correctly) "because you deserve it or because God just decided on a whim to make an example of you".
You can't have it both ways - if God is all-knowing and all powerful then anything and everything that happens to you is because that suited His plan in some way and you are wrong or misguided to oppose it. Which is exactly what the WBC are saying, and indeed what you are saying in your post too - God tortures us in order to keep us on message and only the weak in spirit break under this vicious and unjust treatment and complain about it.
"Protest the funerals"?
Are they protesting for or against the funerals? Or perhaps "at"?
Grammar aside, WBC are no different from any other Christian sect except that they have the backbone to say in public what is implied by every copy of the Bible: if bad things happen to you it's because you deserve it or because God just decided on a whim to make an example of you, so if you're unhappy about it then you're unhappy with His will and will probably go to hell unless you grovel in the dirt and ask for more, sir.
Yes, it is disgusting and repulsive. But so is all religion when you strip off the veneer and look at the rot underneath.
Sort of true
He's right - the rest of the board were just as stupid as he was (and presumably still is). I don't know why he thinks that makes him look any better.
Re: It’s called capitalism. We are proudly capitalistic. I’m not confused about this
"It's not evil to follow the law."
This is so wrong I think my head might explode. The law is perfectly capable of allowing evil, whether it's slavery, rape of single women, or the gassing of minorities.
Google (and others) are acting fraudulently in a moral sense even if they are not breaking the law (as decided by some unelected oaf somewhere in a wig).
Re: Dead right
Stroustrup's book is the worst computing book I ever bought, mostly because he just isn't a good writer.
Re: C++ put me off programming
"All C++ does is try to do it 'properly' from pretty much just above machine code to the top."
Ah, satire.
"Programming is NOT easy "
Well, not in C++ is isn't.
"But learn your trade and don't blame the language for containing concepts you haven't got a clue about yet."
Why are you not using assembler? Too lazy to learn the concepts, eh?
Re: Fascinating but.....
"Dude, are you serious? Are you having a go at the Germans?"
Well, if you can't have a go at Nazi Germany who the hell can you?
I'm not sure what the Boer war has to do with justifying the invasion of Europe and the Holocaust but I think you need to look at your values if you think it does.
Re: Off you go...
"I look forward to reading all the comments from the people who were frothing at the mouth on the North Korean rocket thread, being similarly outraged by this similarly secretive threat to world peace and militarisation of space."
Well, I agree. Both projects are warmongering by people more interested in pissing matches than anything as unprofitable as peace. Screw them both, I say.
Re: Fascinating but.....
"Berlin, Hamburg, Cologne, Dresden, you name it, as that would not be particularly pretty."
Cry me a river.
As ye reap, so shall ye sow.
Re: Microsoft Lock In
OK; do you know any facts?
"all from distinctly left-wing sources"
Left from David Irving covers a lot of ground.
Re: Prior art?
"That someone demonstrated wireless power transfer does not mean a specific implementation is not patentable"
No, but it does mean a lot of the applications become "obvious" and therefore not patentable. In theory.
Couldn't stay awake, perhaps. Dullest "game" ever released IMO.
It's a pain in the ass; I have to maintain three Google accounts (none under my real name) just to do fairly basic stuff.
Re: When submitting a patent application ....
Well, it's a 1950's Sci-Fi idea, so probably, yes.
Re: Taxing revenue instead of profits ...
"Struggling households would certainly be killed by taxing businesses on revenue and not on profits."
But how low would that tax have to be? Clearly a lot lower than current corp. tax. I'm not sure that it would have a dramatic effect except on loss-making companies and I'm not convinced that the taxpayer should be supporting them anyway unless they are publicly owned and producing a service that we are happy to subsidize (like local Post Offices, for example).
"Then they would be highly unethical because they would be reducing the security of millions of people."
Not if it means they move off Windows. Everyone's a winner in that case.
"So what's to stop the various linux "manufacturers" (for want of a better word) negotiating with the OEMs to includes their keys in the UEFI firmware out of the box?"
The fact that MS will tell them that they will lose their status and ther MS keys if they try it. That's been their MO for decades now, so unless someone has evidence that they've changed I'd assume that's what they're doing now too.
"Am I missing something?"
Lots. The whole point of this is to lock out competition. That's what MS has been about from the days of Windows 1. Apparently you've missed not just an episode but the whole of seasons 1-7 and consequently are unable to follow even the basics of what's going on. Perhaps some boxed sets for Xmas?
Biz 2 years behind Public Sector
in getting a clue about marketing crap.
Just £2.7m was finally wasted by government IT bods on the first iteration of of its cloud computing framework.
KPMG are a joke. They build their client network from tax-avoidance and they're basically clueless about anything else. Much like PwC, in fact. Both companies are nothing more than devices designed to funnel money from taxpayers into private hands by one method or another.
For a lot of the old computers, a decent assembler was hard to get and we often had to write our own.
Re: What a load of crap.
"the International Electrotechnical Commission, the guardian of SI units, made this clear back in 1998. "
Who asked them, and who cares what they think? What do SI have to do with it? We know what K and M and G mean in computing and what they mean in some electrical lab somewhere is a different domain of no relevance.
Also, "gibibyte" is a stupid word.
Re: Back up?
Well, the cloud offers some functionality (distributed access, mostly) too. But you have to plan for it not being there in the morning.
Re: @Robert Long
"Either way, it's an extremely recent societal change and evolution doesn't work on the timescale of individual lifetimes, it takes quite a few Grandfathers."
Well, it depends on the situation. If a virus kills everyone with red hair, that's going to have an effect in one generation, and if the lake dries up the lungfish will inherit the next rainy season. So evolution can be lighting quick at times.
Back up?
Back up to the cloud? That's the wrong way around. The cloud is what you back up locally. The cloud can go away at the whim of economics or weather, or botched New Zealand arrest warrants.
It's volatile insecure storage and if you think otherwise you don't know what you're doing.
"About 300 000 people in Athens, in total, and a handful of highly regarded writers and thinkers, all of whom had the advantage of having a single language to learn, a single small society to understand, and a very small field of knowledge so that anybody with the education and time could learn just about everything that was written."
Probably not true. But what is true is that those intellectuals had the advantage of a slave-based economy and didn't have to work.
Sparta is the extreme example of this - a whole nation's worth of people enslaved by a city that had to become a military superpower in case the slaves revolted, thereby largely throwing away the advantages of having the slaves in the first place (ie, relaxing and having fun).
Re: The guy's an idiot
"Even in modern human society, changes notably for the worse are still selected against (the mentally disabled tend not to have children) "
This is less true than it was 30 years ago. My brother was mentally disabled by an accident and I've therefore been around the mental health environment, as it were, for a long time and seen the changes. In the 70's there was a de-facto ban on people with Down's Syndrome having children. This is not the case, so much, today.
It's a distasteful subject, certainly, but the truth doesn't care about taste.
Re: Why they did it
"US export restrictions prevented versions of IE with 128-bit encryption from being distributed to Korea,"
So, don't use IE would seem to be a better solution.
It is to laugh
"The software giant is a notoriously Darwinian environment: the fittest thrive, the weak wither into the shadows."
The product line suggests the opposite.
New world record
The biggest pile of worthless shite ever accumulated under the name "data".
I totally agree - this has "free gift" written all over it. Or, it should anyway.
Hmm
I wonder what difference it would have made if they had moved away from Ruby to...a re-write from scratch in Ruby.
I don't think Java has much to offer here and I suspect the chance of throwing the old code away is what paid off regardless if they had redone it in Basic, Perl, or C++.
"Build one to throw away - because you will" F. Brooks.
Re: @ Robert Long 1
"By your argument you must refuse to shave your beard off for your sexual partner..."
Correct.
"Dilapidation has been practiced around the world for generations, and the primary reason was hygiene."
Wrong; fashion and religion have been the prime reasons.
"And while pubic hair may appear at puberty (hence the name pubic hair),"
Wrong way around. Puberty is so named for appearance of the pubic hair.
"removing hair alone does not make someone look like they've not reached puberty"
No, but it is enough for me to question their motivation.
"although the hollywood look is barren and boring"
Agreed. Like so much of Hollywood.
I agree
"The fruity firm argues that the Note 10.1 infringes on its intellectual property just as much as Samsung's other products in the case do."
Technically speaking, that's probably true.
Re: If my kids are anything to go by...
"Seems to disgust anyone under 40 - weird!"
I have to say that wanting your sexual partner to look like they haven't reached puberty is a great deal more disgusting to me.
Income Tax
Tax companies on income, not profit. Obviously, quite a low tax level should allow a similar level of revenue.
If companies are going to consistently take the piss out of the rest of us, then the government should bring the hammer down on them. Hard.
Re: Sigh...
"Please stop repeating this tired old meme. It's complete rubbish and shows up the people who repeat it as knowing nothing about Windows."
True. Windows 9 will be a pile of shit just like Windows 1 through to 8. There was a reason they had to get it included with the computer and why they still put a lot of effort into that particular packaging trick - they know they couldn't shift it any other way.
Re: Rights don't exist in isolation
"Copyright may well be a form of property"
I doubt it.
Posted in Apple turns off Siri’s potty mouth
Never mind Heinlein, More like Neville Chamberlain
"Appeasement" is such a dirty word these days. "Complying with local laws" sound so much more, well, polite, doesn't it?
Re: Oh dear!
"That's just about every single software company shafted then"
Only the shit ones. So, yes.
Re: The implausibility is what makes them enjoyable, no?
Skyfall has no connection with the previous two films; it's as if they never happened. Still a good movie and better than QoS but there's no sense of momentum or continuity from the previous Craig films.
