Posts by thecakeis(not)alie

ebook reader

Why should an ebook reader be separate from a tablet/slate? Many current readers are Linux or Android-based. Just make a good tabpet, and a /GREAT/ ebook app. The rest will come together in time.

Such as?

The inability to think for one's self? The constant burning need for reassurance? The drive to conform? Sounds like a hivemind* to me!

*Hivemind in this context being an "intelligence" that requires the distribution of processing across many nodes. Descisions such as "do I look fat in this" completly overwhelm the processing power of indiviual nodes in the hive.

What's a bucker?

Also; didn't Sarah ixnay the popcorn?

Indeed.

Good luck to that guy. He's done some pretty impressive stuff in his life.

And in /my/ experience...

...no company thinks the laws apply to them. Corporatists, corporations and politicians all believe they are immune. Personally and professionally, the greedier and more self-focused an individual is the more likely they are to believe that laws are things "other people" have to follow. The reasoning usually goes something like "because of [X] I am entitled to [large amount of hocus.] Because I am entitled to [large amount of hocus] then other people need to be bound by these laws that don’t apply to me.”

Alternately: “I am smarter/more capable/genetically gifted/possessed of [quality] that is above average. Thanks to this, rules that should apply to the masses shouldn’t apply to me.” Now the way our society is structured, we keep selecting these people to run our corporations. We select these people to run our governments. We keep rewarding selfishness, greed and a complete disregard for the welfare of other people.

Shocking then that there’s “no laws for them, a large number for us.”

Steal hundreds of billions of dollars and send the worldwide economy into a freefall? Slap on the wrist and some time in a cushy country club “prison.” Infringe copyright on a couple dozen songs for personal consumption and the /judge/ makes jokes about “not dropping the soap.”

I really don’t think it has anything to do with the size of the company involved. I think there is probably a equal amount of selfishness and corruption amongst the brass in corporations of all sizes.

@Stevie

Thank you for the kind words. What we produce has been a physical product for well over a hundred years. Only very recently (mid-90s) did it become possible for any business to own the means to create this product digitally rather than requiring a physical medium. Now in general people prefer to take their digital copy and have physical versions created. The issue is that during the early aughties the shift away from the old analogue way of doing things into the new digital way of doing things introduced a few generations of really, (REALLY) terrible capture devices.

These terrible capture devices lowered the general expectation of the finished physical media and…*paf*…noone gives two hoots about quality. That means that an industry which used to be very important to people’s lives is now being torn apart on dozens of fronts.

The first being Wal-Mart: they offer a really terrible, low-quality version of what we do to the masses for about half the cost we could possibly manage. The second is the move slowly away from desiring physical copies because everyone now has at least one doohicky (usually more) that can cheerfully house and allow access to multiple digital copies. Lastly, we are under siege because the means to produce one’s own physical copies (albeit in terribly low quality) are cheap and easy to set up in one’s own home.

So with the “consumerisation” of both the capture devices and the end physical production devices the entire industry is dying. The professionally who used to capture the media are going bankrupt: winking out one at a time like an entire galaxy of stars slowly going nova. With their end comes the end of companies like the one I work for which take their work and produce high quality physical reproductions. It’s literally watching an art form perish.

I sympathise with folks in any industry going through this. There are seven billion people on this planet, four billion of which are of working age. There are only two billion jobs on this planet and the number of individuals is steadily increasing whilst the number of jobs diminishes. Eventually, our shortsightedness will lead to a revolution of the masses; but I may not be around to see it. There is a great barrier or apathy to overcome first. Still; eventually the masses will become tired of being indentured servants to a wealthy class that is less than 0.01% of the population and something new will be born.

My only single regret about any of it is that I probably own’t live long enough to see it happen.

Hypocrisy from a corporatist, politician or megacorporate entity?

Shurely shome mishtake!

Irked?

By popcorn? But I love popcorn! Hmmm. Popocorn.

Also good for movies are Triscuits. Alternately: a bowl of trail mix. Hmmmmm. Trail mix. various nuts, raisains, craisains and Smarties all mixed up.

Well crap.

Now I'm hungry, and it's an hour until lunch time. It's all your fault, Sarah!

UAV online

That is fantastic. :D NEW CHRISTMAS PROJECT GET.

Not even remotely the first rat.

Simply one of the dimmest. The bright ones started to GTFO a couple years back. Ballmer is only now starting to realise his incompetence. Still, like a good CEO he'll pillage every last dollar from the company as he burns it to the ground. When the very last shareholder revolt occurs - the one that can't be appealed or danced around - he will have handed his successor a poisoned chalice. Five years from now even Steve Jobs Himself wouldn’t be able to steer the mighty ship Microsoft away from the rocks.

It will take MS a decade or more to tear itself apart and finally sink the depths of mid-90s Apple…but sink it will. Ballmer knows it. He can’t tie his own personal financial future to the company he’s destroying: he needs to diversify. Put his cash into companies that will actually make money.

It is time for a shareholders revolt at Microsoft. It’s time for new blood.

@Sarah Bee

Every scientific development is employed by some government (or corporation - is there a difference anymore?) for EVIL. In fact a great many of our technological advancements are because governments/corporations put time and money into trying to develop new tools - usually for EVIL. “How can I use this to oppress people/make huge wads of cash” is generally the primary motivator for research nowadays. It’s rare – and wonderful – when research comes along that has a different motivation.

Truth be told however, I don’t see the point of this particular process for EVIL. There are plenty of terrible things (like acids) you could use to dissolve someone that seem like way less work. Given they use a virus for dissemination, my guess is that it would form a great carrier (with some modification) for a highly targeted biological weapon. I am guessing that the boffins in question engineered out the virus’ ability to replicate very far; something that is hugely important in designing a bioweapon that won’t come back to bite you in the ass.

Even if you are using it only to produce vast quantities of blood for your soldiers, (something most people would not see as EVIL because it is simply trying to ‘save lives’,) the folks you are fighting against would probably view this as an EVIL application of technology. You are using technology to provide your side with an advantage (wounded soldiers not dying when you injure them) that the other side doesn’t have.

So technology being used for EVIL? Almost certainly! The question is…who gets to define EVIL?

@Jason Hall

I don't know about that, sonny. Got me an HTC Desire for $79 CAD*. You can get a hell of an Android phone for not much in terms of initial outlay...

Bear in mind that's the cost for a 3-year contract. Also bear in mind that if you bought your own phone outright and then put it on a contract the price would be the same. (There are no discounts in Canada if you bring you own device.)

Correct me if I am wrong here...

...but if you are up that high you don't have to be parked directly on top of your target. That means so long as they can see both sideways and down a fair ways they might well stay out of the range of the AA fire from some of the more primitive nations? Probably not going to help you if you choose to fight a developed nation...but might well be good against insurgents.

Also: wouldn’t this thing be useful if you parked it over an ocean? It could serve as communications relay as well as observation of an unfriendly shoreline for activity that is counter to your interests. Given time I am sure I could think of many other uses. I really like the tech behind this thing though. Imagine If you were a cellco trying to bust into a sewn up market (like say the US.) get clearance to run these buggers at altitude over the continent and *poof* instanetwork.

Hurricane hits your shores? Lost Angles falls into the ocean? Solar flare takes out the north eastern grid /again?/ Deploy a handful of these puppies to circle for the duration of the disaster and you have a floating emergency communications network with the ability to provide realtime better-than-satellite surveillance of the disaster zone. I think Canada should buy a dozen: they would be invaluable in protecting our interests in the North. Interests that since they conflict with those of countries such as the United States we are having to become ever more vigilant about.

Of course the British would probably just use these beauties to catch speeders.

Do you work for NASA?

That's a /very/ NASA attitude towards shuttle. Let me hit you with one from a different perspective: If we'd just taken our lumps and not tried to "safety engineer" the piss out of everything and anything going into space we'd be on Mars by now. Every major human endeavour costs lives. They know the risks when they get into it, and there are plenty of people who would be signing up to volunteer even if the odds of surviving were less than one in four.

The culture of fear and “everything must go absolutely perfect” have held NASA back far more than the operational record of Shuttle.

That said: Fair winds Discovery. Come home safe this one last time.

It's not broken!

There was a planned update that would have fixed this all in time. Unfortunately, the programmer responsible was a filthy spy, and mentioned another operating system in the comments of the source code for the update that would have prevented this. He of course had to be burned at the stake and his code erased lest it corrupt some innocent soul.

Apple is sorry that you didn’t get the chance to buy a Date Feature Upgrade (Now with proper scheduling and DST!) from the iStore, but you know how those iPhone police can be…

In the meantime, please consider this a feature not a bug.

Married to a chick 36 years his junior?

That doesn't make me feel better about myself. It makes me respect this guy a great deal. Even makes me a little jealous. Good job, that guy!

Maybe your false rage and upset would be less hurtful to you if you stopped being so damned judgemental. Just because you happen to see that amorous relationship as somehow negative doesn't mean others share your point of view. When you take it not as a snide attack but instead as something completely awesome the entire tone changes.

I don’t read this article as “rich guy bangs young gold digger and fails at life.” I read this as “dude did cool things early on in his life. Made a mint. Parlayed that money into convincing a woman to look past his age and (hopefully) established a truly amorous and caring relationship with someone very much his junior. Dude still does crazy – but cool – things involving technology regardless of any ridicule other people may fling at him.”

Or, TL;DR: This guy does what he wants, when he wants and doesn’t give a flip what you or anyone else thinks about him. He is far more awesome than either you or I will ever be. Commenter on El Reg got nerdrage over playful tone of article and called in the whaaaambulance.

Expanding your reach.

Why would I want to support Mac users? Disabled people I have to support by law. Mac users I don't. Why waste the money?

@The Cube

You have absolutely no idea what you are talking about. I've recently done a thin client migration. We did look at our average usages. We measured the increase in server consumption post-VDI. We attacked power from every angle. With only 75 desktops moving to VDI, we have reduced our desktop consumption by 70%. That doesn’t mean our thin clients consume 70% less power than the old desktops, (that’s closer to 95% less power in fact.) It means that after factoring in the extra load on the servers, the networking gear and the energy lost by having more systems on UPSes (which bleed some power off as heat) we are still eating 70% less energy.

The Thin Clients in question have no moving parts. I fully expect them to be around for the next 10 years. The servers are overspecced for the job; we’ll get another 4 our of them, and be able to replace them with something even lower power when the time comes.

VDI/thin clients absolutely 100% do reduce power consumption when compared to desktops. If you want to go toe-to-toe with laptops…that’s another story. Laptops are specced very close to their power envelopes, so you are going to be looking at only about a 20-30% efficiency when all the figures are in. You’ll still have efficiencies however.

Though I challenge you to get most modern laptops to give you 3-4 years running MS and then another 5 running Linux. Obviously you don’t work in an enterprise environment. What you speak is sheer madness. The only way you get a modern notebook to give you that kind of life is

a) Buy a very well crafted (and expensive notebook.)

b) Religiously (every three months) blow all the dust out of it.

c) Have replacement fans. (They WILL die on you. You WILL have to replace them.)

That is an incredibly manpower intensive way to maintain equipment. Manpower is costly. Thus everything your are suggesting makes no sense for business. Beyond that, using a laptop as a primary work unit is simply a no-go for many people. I can’t speak for employees where you work, however here we have a lot of older individuals. They absolutely will not work with anything less than a 22” screen. (They otherwise can’t see it.)

Do the research. Do the math. Thin clients save power. Gobs and gobs of it. If you won’t believe me, then I honestly recommend you call up Intel. Don’t ask to speak to a marketing droid…ask to speak to their head sysadmin. They have internally dome some huge virtualisation and Thin Client projects. They are perhaps the single most experienced company in the world at that game. Ask and you might well receive: but they will prove it to you. I’ve seen their numbers (in some impressive detail) and they correlate closely with my own.

Thin Clients Save Power.