Posts by Ammaross Danan

Also in other words

"We are not in that business," Schmidt said. "We are in the ads and enterprise software business - I don't think we'll go that far."

Isn't this the same line they gave about Android OS and smartphones? Of course, the turnaround for a googlephone was quite rapid actually. I wonder how long of a turnaround a googlebook would take?

Of course, one can argue that HTC made the googlephone, and thus Google is indeed "not in that business," but what's to stop them doing the same self-branding?

Thing is

The thing is, if you look at any computer maker's reportings, they say relatively the same thing. "Sales up XX% over same quarter last year." Intel and AMD are both shipping double-digits over last year, etc. Of course, last year was part of the the Great Recession... If we follow the chain, "Sales up XX% over last year, which was down X% from the previous year, which was down XX% from the previous year..." things must have just evened out a bit then?

Anyone?

Anyone else notice with each "new thing" to come out (IE Windows 7), our task is simply to ensure we can keep doing the same old things, but on the new system? Why do you think companies are still on Windows XP? It is because they know WinXP can do what they've always been doing. There are some bonuses for IT Depts in the new Microsoft OS releases, such as Printer Management, but all it does is replace scripting-encumbered auto-printer-mapping with a fancy UI.

1) Make sure the applications (still) work.

2) Make sure user shares and printers are available

3) Filter/Firewall/scrub p0rn, myface, youtube, etc from the corporate network

4) Read The Reg.

Sure, there's more, but this just about covers it.

@Where does all this money come from ?

I guess no one read the article relating to the settlement from Intel. It quite clearly stated that most of that settlement went to practically paying down/off all debts.

Programming

Facial recognition is limited by the programming put into it. Boffins are doing fairly well so far, but throw a bit of hair in the way, and it can confuse their software. I think we're more likely to get a vehicle that can drive down a road by "seeing" than we are to get a good "pick out a face from this picture and recognize who it is" program.

And, as a journo note, "curcuits", how did that even make it past a spell/grammar check? Do these articles seriously get written in a comment box with a submit button? Someone have a count of typos in this piece?

Title

We've done well with robot explorers, and I believe that is always the best "first encounter" with new environments. However, a human on mars could do more than a robot (at least the ones currently designed) could. For one, get unstuck. Perhaps clean/empty a testing container (soil sampler currently has only 6(?) testing chambers).

Of course, while we're still squabbling over who has to foot the bill for exploration and scientific progress, progress will be slow indeed. Just think of the progress that would be made if we knew, 100%, that a rock would smash Earth in 30 years. I guarantee one of two things would happen: 1) We invent/build some tech that will blow up/push the rock, regardless of global cost (yes, a global effort. funny huh?) or 2) the very wealthy would pool their money to life-boat themselves off until it is safe. (yes, I know, it sounds awefully 2012ish, but which is most probable?)

I for one vote for the original plan. Heavy lifters to get the crap up in the debris field known as LEO, construct the ship there, then ferry our happy, curious selves to wherever our propulsion can get us. Perhaps we'll have something akin to warp drives by the time those in charge finally figure it out. (I'll let you figure out which is more likely to happen first)

MIS

"Now many years into the real world I realize it is not how good your code that determines your rank in an IT org but how can you outlast everyone else by eating crap and being a yes man."

Isn't the "yes man" and "eating crap" classes part of the MIS degree anyway? I'll take a field-working CS-type for an IT Manager than an MIS person any day, since they actually have a concept of how things can work, rather than reading marketing hype to make their decisions for them.

@Gareth

Perhaps they are simply avoiding the inevitable sludge-fest of a Win-Mac-Lin bash?

Anyway, I'm wondering WTF The Reg didn't just post the top 10 and the bottom 5 (for the rest of us to mock of course), but instead direct us to a registration-required website?

The FAIL is for the lack of actual usable information in the report.

In Addition

I also know of another alternate: Kolab

http://www.kolab.org/

I have not actually implemented a test environment to see exactly how compatible the latest incarnation is though.

Ah ha!

"clusters to tap into vast amounts of latent processing capacity in Windows 7 PCs"

Ah! So that's why my Win7 is slower than WinXP! M$ must be tapping into my latent cycles to crunch search requests for Bing!

/mines the one with the tin-foil hat in the pocket.

BOFH

A personal favorite BOFH episode of mine is when the BOFH has to attend a training and when asked to log in using his username and password, punches in "root." He receives a reprimand of "No, log on with YOUR username" to which he promptly responds: "But root IS my username!"

Ah, it is all too true, especially in a Windows environment. I can't even have a shared USB printer on a Windows box without having to grant the user(s) on said workstation Power User status. Some software, as stated before, refuses to work properly/install without Admin privileges, however, if you "run as administrator" the crappy software throws the keys/links/etc into the administrator's profile rather than yours and now is broken. Only way to install? Give yourself Administrator privileges, install, then revoke them, and then hope it doesn't need admin rights to simply run the program. Shoddy software is probably a key cause of requiring we admins to sit in an Admin account for our daily work. I can't tell you how many times I wished I could "right-click -> run as administrator" items in the control panel.

Yes, I'm presenting this from a Windows point of view because, last I checked, coporate environments like to use Windows. In Windows, as an Admin, you need Admin privileges.

Capitalism

"Intel and Micron announced a 25nm process earlier this year and are using the lower cost per chip to increase their profits rather than lower prices."

Ah, capitalism at its finest. And of course, the inevitable next report (some months down the road): "Now, with multiple manufacturers releasing flash chips in the sub-30nm range, prices have finally started to fall [slightly] on the large-profit-margin Intel and Micron-based SSDs."

Greedy coporate pirates. :)

Title

"HP also kicked out a new small form factor workstation called the Z2000 SFF.... What makes this is workstation instead of a desktop PC in a tower case is not clear. Prices start at $739 for a base configuration"

I believe you had already answered this question above: "...executives think they need one because their egos demand it."

What better way to satisfy their egos than to hand them a "workstation" that is even the fancy SFF, and have it be just about as cheap as a regular old SFF business model?

But

I guess everyone is forgetting about the mole used in The Matrix III to penetrate "Zion." Of course, such a bunker-buster will probably be just as obvious and take just as long to bust through. Even using conventional drilling, it takes several hours to reach any reasonable depth. Post a requirement for human conveyance and they might as well hope for the mole machine from Core.

Wow

First post an M$ bash, second and third a McrappyFee bashing. Gone are the days (that never existed) of quality comments.

My vote would be immediate "responsible" disclosure and if a patch isn't released in 2 weeks, go public. Proof-of-concept exploit code is close to rediculous, considering it allows some script kiddie to just dump the exploit into their virii framework with no effort of their own. The problem with propriety systems is there's no incentive to secure their stuff in any reasonable timeframe because where else are you going to go? Don't like the M$ failship? Unlikely your corp is going to jump ship to *nix and still get vendor support for your Win32 software running under Wine. Apple is right-out due to no sensible [note use of word] companies developing business apps for that platform.

M$ clearly has the application advantage, even if their OS is riddled with holes worse than a discarded water heater in the backwoods of Alabama... It is no different than the iPhone and App Store. People still buy the outdated hardware to get at the software, even though the likes of the Nexus One are on the market. No apps? No use.

Figure my allegence with that one. /coat

Title

I agree the patent system needs reform/abolishment. However, since there would be next-to-no incentive to be the first to innovate if we did away with patents, perhaps make a requirement for "unique and novel." Yes, yes, it supposedly already requires that. But I'm talking, if someone invents a Warp Drive, grant them a patent. If someone invents coating the wires connecting to a warp drive with "identifying colors based on purpose" toss it out! Or perhaps "graphically displaying warp drive power graphically based on percent-of-maximum" crap. You get the idea.

Title

Perhaps we should simply force all mutli-core programmers to actually read a book about threading rather than develop frameworks that deal with threads "behind the scenes" and hope it works.

<insert "teach a man to fish"-type comment here and mutter something about understanding a concept>

Title

Perhaps the CRS-X naming convention is similar to open-source projects, where odd numbers represent "unstable" builds, and even numbers are "production" releases. They just don't want to admint their CRS-1 and CRS-3 systems would have versionings of "0.1" and "0.3" in the open source world....

Symantics aside, world-changing technology isn't what I'd label the CRS-3. 3x the bandwidth/performance is quite radical by any means, but the only "world-changing" impact they could muster from this would be if they gave it away for free (with an optional support contract of course. How else would they make money?).

Well

Last I checked, showing a degree was only proof that one had enough thought-power to do a list of tasks EXACTLY how one was asked, consistantly, over a long period of time. This is something that "self-taught" people with no Uni degree have no proof (and sometimes ability) to be able to do.

Now, as one of those that fall into the "self-taught" category, I've gone through the motions of getting a paper to back up my skills. When asked why, I merely reply "so I have a piece of paper backing up that I know what I know." Yes, it was an utter waste of my time. I gleaned perhaps one concept in each class that I did not know already. With years of field experience, it was no surprise. Now, the quality of work put forth by other students was quite another matter. You could easily see the "self-taught" students vs. the "normal" students. Their work (programming code, etc) spoke for itself. Self-taught students' code was varying degrees of atrocious, however it worked, and it worked well. The "normal" students had "standard" formatting, but couldn't even figure out how to loop through an array, let alone complete the assignment. And this is in a second or third year class! I always dreaded the "group projects" and specifically associated with the self-taught crowd for the fact that I could rely on their horribly constructed code to actually work its magic and all I had to do was decypher their class interfaces, rather than write the whole project myself just to make it work.

The education system, even in the US, fails miserably. Perhaps these dim-witted politicians want their progeny to have the "advantage" of the college education they failed to receive, at the cost of the quality of that education. It reminds me of a certain situation in border states in the US that had to "dumb down" secondary school exit exams just so more students could pass them.

Title

This is why Apple (supposedly) trolls your app code. I wonder if they build your code themselves and post it on the app store, or if they just take your binary file as granted....