Posts by Blarkon
61 posts • joined Monday 15th November 2010 23:49 GMT
Re: Nice try
You mean WindowsToGo which already exists?
Pushing content to apps and off the web
If the EFF wins this round, the trickle of content off the web and into specific apps becomes a flood. Content distribution can occur directly to people's tablets, phones and PCs directly via apps written for that purpose. In the long run, good content thrives where there is revenue and the web so far has turned out to be a really rubbish medium when it comes to ensuring that the people who create the content get paid for it.
In a good course you pay to access the instructor's knowledge
If you've ever taken a course with a good instructor, what you're really paying for is access to their time over the course of a couple of days to have them answer any question you have about a specific technology. MOOCs may provide you with the basic content - but you can pretty much pick that up by looking at the product documentation if you've got the time. If you take an instructor led course on Exchange, the value is in being in the room with an expert on Exchange for a week.
You can figure out if the person presenting the course isn't an expert pretty quickly. If you do, you ask for a refund. If you sit on a course where you know the instructor is a muppet, you're wasting your time and whoever paid for the course's money.
Re: The buyer would be wise to check the serial number
Original post says his kids have one. Want to bet that's the "corp supplied" Surface RT and the one he's selling is one he purchased?
Re: Patents are a wondrous thing...
Patents predate the Renaissance and the scientific revolution, and there is some evidence that a similar idea was present in ancient Greece.
But sure - get rid of the system so really big companies like Google and Microsoft can copy novel technical ideas without paying the person that came up with that idea - or allow that person to sell the rights to that idea to anyone who finds it valuable (rather than forcing them only to be able to sell them to the big companies).
It's also possible to side-load your own apps on RT anyway - you just install the sideloading product key.
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hh852635.aspx
Would like to see Orlowski interview Jaron Lanier about these issues - which seem to be canvassed in Lanier's new book http://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/What-Turned-Jaron-Lanier-Against-the-Web-183832741.html
only makes sense for expensive unix consultants
Given how much a good UNIX/Linux admin costs on an hourly basis, this needs to be turnkey to the point of pressing a single button to beat the cost advantage of purchasing a Windows license. Good UNIX/Linux admins can cost 2 to 3 times per hour what a Windows admin costs.
Legitimate usage
That would be those hundreds of millions of Linux users torrenting stuff. Torrentfreak.com has a nice tracker of the most frequently torrented files. Pirate Bay has a list of the top 100
Go to that site and find the first item on that list of the top 100 that is legit. (to save you some time, all of the files are rips of copyrighted materials)
If you are going to write about copyright infringement - at least do it honestly.
Web Applications are the vector
Incorrectly configured web applications are a vector. Just because you're managing a Linux box doesn't mean that the developers who coded the web applications on the server haven't done something stupid. Those web applications don't come from repositories - they are likely developed either in house, or your organization has paid someone to develop them.
Against IP until they are for it
Don't you love these guys who rail against the "evils" of intellectual property law - until they suddenly decide that they like it.
Read Thurrott's twitter stream
I know that Gavin from Cuptertino isn't all about getting his facts straight - but Thurrott is on the record as saying that his comments have been taken completely out of context.
How to get Open Source conferences cancelled
This objection seems to apply to most technical conferences, and especially those of the open source variety. All someone has to do now is claim that conference X doesn't have a "representative quota of minorities" on the speaker schedule where "representative quota" is a malleable value (looks like Susser was going for 1/3rd of all speakers - so good luck with that guys)
Patent Troll = whoever is suing me at the time
While there are some bad actors, a lot of the screaming about Patent Trolls is coming out of the PR departments of very well funded companies that simply don't want to pay to license technology. For something that supposedly "stifles innovation" - we seem to have had an unprecedented level of innovation in the last 30 years.
It's sort of like how conservatives always go on about how regulation is harming their business when their real aim is to get rid of the very regulation that stops them from screwing over everyone else. The companies that go on the loudest about how bad patents are seem to be very successful already and don't appear to have been stifled to the point of choking. They just don't want to pay licensing fees and they are in the process of convincing enough people to go along with it to ensure that the next generation of people who come up with bright ideas - who might challenge the status quo - won't be able to benefit from those ideas and overthrow those that are currently at the top of the heap.
From San Franciso
I often wonder if the byline of some Reg hacks as being "San Francisco" should instead be replaced with either "Mountain View" or "Cupertino".
Windows 7 supported touch
ASUS EP 121 was a touch screen Windows 7 tablet. Windows 7 supported touch. It didn't do it as well as Windows 8 does, but it still did it.
Re: Bought a pile of them for a school
They created Buzz. No one used it.
Posted in Microsoft reveals Windows RT OEMs
Looks like the TF Infinity
Looks like the TF infinity - which is a great bit of kit - but Win RT'd.
Fixed with a fracking start icon
All it needs is a fracking start icon on the taskbar. The "wave the mouse in the corner" trick is going to be the operating system's downfall.
Like climate denialists
Love it around here - it's simply not possible that the figures might be fine - but that it must be some sort of insane black helicopter conspiracy to make Microsoft look good.
Google's Biz Model
In the long run China and India are going to do to Google what Google has done to everyone else. Bruce Sterling even had this in one of his novels - where China and India said "cool, IP doesn't matter" - and just steal it wholesale and wiped out the US economy as you can't have a knowledge economy without some sort of value on knowledge. Google doesn't believe that inventors should be rewarded financially for their effort and they are happy to destroy the emerging information economy pursuing the freetard jihad.
Chromebook - Emperor of the Galaxy of Cloud Laptops
The question is, can Ubuntu match the market share of the current reigning champion of the "Cloud is the Computer" - the Chromebook. We all know that the Chromebook can kick more buttock than a millipede with a headache, which is why it clearly dominates the client operating system market share stats.
Can an Ubuntu cloud computer going to be able to compete with the monolithic success of the Chromebook?
So what you are saying is that for every infringing item on a search engine, the person who created the work needs to go to court.
It costs roughly 10K-20K to pursue one case of someone posting a work through the courts. That's one case. If you have hundreds of copies of your stuff posted online ...
To put that in perspective, the average advance on a book is between 5-10K and most don't earn their money back. Taking one takedown through court is likely to cost more than most works earn and the only one making a profit is the lawyers. (well that and the advertising company running adds against the pirated content)
What *is* the problem with someone listed as the copyright holder on the work contacting a search engine and saying "can you remove these links to my work please"?
(the reality is that people on the search engine end don't want to do the cursory validation of "yes that person seems to be the registered copyright holder of that work")
There needs to be a way for creators to get this sort of thing remediated without it costing them thousands in legal fees.
DRM and Locks
I've seen the argument that given that a competent hacker can strip the DRM from a file, that it's pointless. I wonder if these people also don't bother locking their house as a competant lock picker can open those locks in just a few moments.
The jury is out as to whether or not this will cause a jump, a slide, or make no difference to sales. What it will do is make it easier to locate this stuff posted on pirate sites because just like locks on house doors don't stop the skilled, DRM free means that the barrier to "sharing with all your mates on the Internet" is a lot lower.
"Breaks The Internet" - Google speak for Competition
Anything that doesn't suit Google's business model is tagged as "breaks the Internet"
I love satire
Great satire is when you can't tell that the author is extracting the urine. Good job!
Posted in CSIRO patent-trolls ALL OF AMERICA!
Typical Ars Freetardism
Ars Technica believes that Australian science should be funded by the sale of tshirts. Because to Ars, all intellectual property should be monetized through tshirt sales.
Well the Reg has in the deep past published articles linking Autism to Vaccination - so this isn't too far out of it's contrarian "we know better than everyone else" editorial policies.
Posted in Qantas lets fly with 'net access
Across the pacific on one of the longest routes in the world is a bit more of an achievement than a cross country flight. Of course I won't fly them anymore because Alan Joyce has a Ryanair approach to customer respect and won't be sacked until a Qantas jumbo faceplants into Botany Bay.
Doesn't really matter
99% of copyright infringement occurs with works that are less than five years old. Freetards wouldn't stop pirating stuff if the limit was 10 years, they'd simply argue that 10 years was "an immoral eternity" and that content creators should get a new business model (code for "one in which we pay if we want and lets face it we have better things to spend our money on so maybe you could make a t-shirt or a kickstarter or something and continue with the free")
Probably rubbish
Probably bollocks seeing that 99% of Apps publishes in the Apple App Store make less than $500 in revenue. It's like "YouTube" jobs where there are less than 20 people making more than 100K in revenue on YouTube.
Future of Science like Future of Journalism
Cutting cost means cutting quality. No matter how clever people try to get, they never get around this. For science journals this simply means that they are going to go through what newspapers are going through. Peer review will become "fact checking" and will eventually become "outsourced community feedback". There are certainly people who want to put the boot into the Science Citation Index - I bet that's gone within 10 years as well.
As costs approach zero, the old soviet saying "You pretend to pay us and we'll pretend to work" will be proven true in another human field of knowledge.
Free Textbooks = Poorly Written & Edited Textbooks
There is more than author pay involved in textbooks. Fact checkers need to be as knowledgable as the authors are about the subject. The more complicated the subject, the more that expertise costs both at the authoring and the editing level.
If knowledge wants to be free - why are the educated paid a lot more than minimum wage?
I love it how people pretend that no file sharing goes on whatsoever. What's even more hysterical is that there is now legislation going through congress to indefinitely detain people without charge - but the real thing that has geeks riled up is the thought that someone might stop them from downloading movies and actually pay for their entertainment.
So Woz didn't go
Looking at his tweet stream, he didn't seem to attend.
Try Tennant Creek instead of Tennant Springs. Unless you go with Alice Creek instead of Alice Springs in the next update.
Great if you need to fry an egg
I've got a previous verision Qosmio and it looks like this one suffers the same problem - they just haven't designed it to effectively dissipate the heat it generates. I also have one of the monster sized ASUS gaming laptops that looks like it has big thrusters out the back. Say what you will about its aesthetics, the damn thing knows how to dump heat in a way that the Qosmio does not.
It's nice to see some more realistic executive compensation than the brazillians of dollars that CEOs that don't increase profit are awarded.
BitTorrent has already managed to wipe out almost all science fiction programming on TV. You can scream until you're blue in the face that content producers need to have a business model where consumers can get things for free and choose to pay for what they want - but the reality on the ground is that if it doesn't make money, it probably won't get made and when users are given a choice to pay (with the production of TV now treated more like Busking) the vast majority won't.
So someone anonymous posts on a blog - no one follows up to confirm - no one even knows if the anonymous poster was at the event - and suddenly something is true?
Posted in Windows 8 fondleslabs rock up on eBay
Works fine on an ASUS EP121
Win 8 Dev works great on the ASUS EP 121 fondleslap which is substantially cheaper than what these people are paying for a Win 8 touchscreen. Has very similar specs as well.
Cognitive Dissonace
So let me get this straight - the same people who for years were complaining how Microsoft put all these extensions into its browser and that they should just stuck with the HTML spec are now cheering for Google putting extensions into their browser and not sticking with the HTML spec.
Nothing will
Nothing will stop you from grabbing the book for free. But in the long run people who write books will go and do something else that actually provides some sort of monetary reward for effort. Which is fine if you don't think books serve any useful purpose to society.
The soviet system collapsed because people weren't paid competitive wages (though they were at least getting paid, so they bothered turning up to work). What do you think will happen to all those industries where you can just go and take the product without paying for it?
That's right. Gone.
We don't have to worry about the Book Burners from Farenheit 451 killing off the book - we've got the Freetards instead.
Lets see at Pwn2Own shall we
Lets see what happens at Pwn2Own at CanWest. I'm betting that someone walks away with a shiny new MacBook Pro far before anyone walks away with a Linux or a Windows box.
Code Word
"Elite" is a right-wing code word for "Liberal" or "Progressive". Sarah Palin and Glen Beck are always talking about the elites. The author is missing his calling in not working for a News Corporation publication.
Typical of Open Source
Can't create on your own, just copy copy copy - no wonder you bitch about patents. How about inventors get to earn a buck from thier ideas - but the typical Linux strategy is copy - copy someone's OS and give it away, copy someone's music and give it away, copy someone's movies and give them away.
Posted in Is the IT Dept failing users?
Going through personal laptop when user resigns
I wonder how happy users will be with the thought of the IT department having to scrub their personal laptop in the event that they want to leave the company. Or when the personal laptop needs to be seized for an unknown amount of time because of an impending legal discovery action.
Posted in Eight New Yorkers sue Baidu for $16m
What typically American behavior
What a typical American reaction to something foreign.
