Re: and and and.....

When I was working in industrial automation big tin, our shopfloor cabinets all had rounded corners for safely and forklift damage reduction. It hurts a lot less if a machine operator bangs his head on a rounded corner that a square one.

Really, the USPTO should have been paying attention that day. A rounded corner is not a design feature, it is a functional feature and as such cannot be patented due to prior art.

Re: Google

Google's core idea seems to be to get rich by indexing and making available all the world's information. Their preservation work is surely just part of it.

Whether it is a good idea or not will probably be discussed by future historians, but I have to say that Google frightens me a lot less than Facebook.

Re: Soot?

Why middle management? It's the people on over £200k a year that seem to have undefinable jobs in failing organisations.

You'd almost think if we got in some Japanese or European mainland management for a British workforce we could turn out world class stuff.

Oh wait, we do.

There is a book written by someone who survived the Wall Street Crash - "Where are all the customers' yachts" by Fred Schwed. It is still in print, I think. Read it. It is all there.

Basically at one point [spoiler alert] Schwed says that in Wall Street the highest paid banker knows no more than the lowliest office boy, the difference is the time scales on which they demonstrate their ignorance.

Re: Misleading headline

How? I don't have it, and now apparently if I were to use Twitter (which I don't) I wouldn't be able to use it for hipster identification.

Presumably now I will have to pay Zuckerberg for his list of self-important, gullible and technically illiterate people who wouldn't recognise a good photo if Ansel Adams explained it to them in person, with examples.

The WSJ has about 700000 subscribers who believe it gives them magical insight into the stock market. KRM obviously thinks that the same should be true in this country, but he hasn't quite worked out that he didn't buy the FT.

Re: The Times used to sell for 10p as a promotion

Absolutely. I loved the old Times which had ads on page 1 and every article seemed to have been written by God. My father threw a fit when Roy Thompson took it over. Fortunately nowadays he has the Western Daily Press (which is a surprisingly good newspaper).

Re: Better bargain still...

The Guardian has been losing money because of some perhaps ill-advised management adventures that cost them a packet so they had to sell half the profitable arm (that flogs motors) to a private equity company. I think the Guardian's main problem with capitalism is that it isn't actually very good at it. (Disclaimer: I am neither rich enough nor right wing enough to be a Guardian reader. I stick to the Indy and the BBC).

Re: fail both ways

HP is not the first, and it will not be the last, US company to overvalue something because they were desperate to prove they could inflate the share price through acquisitions. Remember Time Warner/AOL? MySpace?

Company valuation is extremely difficult. If what a company does is difficult and complicated - surely a description of the typical software company - then all accountants can do is tell you what happened in the past. Anyone familiar with the stock market is aware that a graph that is going up may at any second start to go down - look at the Apple price this year; when it reached $700 analysts were saying there was no reason it should not go to $1000, whereas it is now in decline at around 580. The only people who knew that would happen were a relatively small number of geeks with an in-depth knowledge of the trends in the mobile device industry, and they wouldn't talk to analysts even if the analysts knew who they were.

So yes, I would tend to agree except to note that there was probably no way that HP could have done proper due diligence on such a company. Tech companies should recognise this and simply stop with the acquisitions. Perhaps if they hired a few CEOs with more humility and the willingness to look at the business and take practical steps to improve matters - Thorsten Heins at RIM seems to be one such - there would be less boom and bust.

Re: People who

Er, no. I detect special pleading here. Paedophile does not include young adults - that is an ephebophile. And paedophilia does not come to the attention of the public until it turns into actual child abuse, but the vigilantism and newspaper slavering for circulation only applies to actual child abusers. Benjamin Britten had supportive friends who made sure that his tendencies didn't get him into trouble. He wasn't a child abuser. Charles Dodgson liked small children and there's reason to suspect that he was sexually attracted to young women - but he had extremely, some would say unattainably, high moral standards and never did anything about it.

Whether the NOTW under Brooks and Co. would have "outed" Britten if he had still been alive is unknowable, of course.

The newspapers haven't yet demanded that vigilante groups identify and drive out people who play violent computer games, because although they might like the idea of killing lots of people, they don't actually commit murder (usually).

Re: Facefcuk

Why is it pretty rich? There are over 60 million of us in this country and not all of us, by a long way, supported the police corruption and political corruption that allowed that to happen. We've now had an enquiry into it, and the Prime Minister is trying to protect the media in exchange for favours, so we have some way to go. But at least we are trying, and Facebook should have come in the scope of the Leveson enquiry.

What's more, I specifically named two media owners - Zuckerberg and Murdoch - whose organs have been guilty of privacy violations in this country. In the USA, you do not have a Data Protection Act and you are not signed up to the UNDHR. We are. We should not allow rich people to erode our protections for gain just because they are not enshrined in law in their home countries.

Re: Yes but

Well, N2, I suggest that you investigate the number of times teachers have been wrongly accused of molestation by malicious pupils. Perhaps in your wisdom you will tell us how, after your edict comes into force, you are going to replace all the teachers, social workers, nurses and police who will find jobs where they don't risk castration and death on the word of somebody who is probably like you - prone to violent thoughts and and a lack of empathy.

Re: Facefcuk

Facebook should be shut down in England and wales for contempt of Court. Whatever its faults, our judicial system still has a concept of fairness and we shouldn't allow Zuckerberg to try and downgrade us to US standards in order to improve the value of his shares. We've already allowed Murdoch to degrade our Press in the interests of Murdoch, and it's time we stopped letting them do it.

Re: Blight?

"Or those who beat them until they bleed? Where's THEIR registry?"

It's called the Eton College Year Book.

Re: They are doing it wrong these Pedophile's

Surely pedophilia is someone who has a kink about bicycle bottom brackets? If Americans must use words derived from Greek, couldn't they at least try to spell them by a closer analogy ( the root is παιδί. Greek used to be translated first into Latin and then into English, and the Latin equivalent of the Greek ai is ae, which is preserved in English, as in Caesar, the pronunciation of what was presumably closer to Kaiser than the usual English "Seeser")

Color, labor, fine with that. Pedo, a Webster too far.

Re: People who

True but the gp has the makings of a point. "Paedophiles" is the name they used to define themselves because it sounded better (remember PIE, the "paedophile information exchange", which at the time was considered legal?) It's like allowing burglars to be renamed as clutter reduction consultants.

Drop the word and call them "child abusers" which is what they are.

North Oxfordshire

There is plenty of space in North Oxfordshire and plenty of upper class persons who might themselves feel sympathetic, having had their collars felt by the defenders of public order.

Re: Quality over quantity

I don't know what people have against them, unless it is the US not liking any non-US company to be in charge of a smartphone system. Now that Nokia is just Microsoft's equivalent of Foxconn, RIM is the only maker of phones that use in-house software and hardware.

Perhaps that's why Obama continues to use one - there's a reasonable chance of no backdoors through to the Republicans.

Re: USPTO

No, that doesn't apply. It would only apply if (a) teleportation was obvious enough to be invented by a guy in a shed and (b) someone with proper resources actually invented and built a teleportation system, and he then came along and demanded that they pay for the privilege. The fact is, that of someone really did invent something as significant as teleportation, the world really would be beating a path to his door to licence it.

These cases are all about insignificant, unimportant things that could be independently thought up by almost anybody.

One company I worked for would only patent things from R&D relating to its "core business", so we in the electronics department used to submit all our possibly novel circuits to the magazines that existed at the time, so we could establish prior art and not risk having some bottomhole demanding that we pay him after he bought our kit, analysed the circuitry and then filed for a patent on it.

Re: stupid

They are not corrupt, precisely, but their mission is to grant as many patents as possible so that US corporations can sue the rest of the world (under WIPO). They have no incentive to find an application obvious or in prior art, because if the number of applications drops, so does their job security and pay.

Like a lot of well meaning systems, doing a really good job is often negatively rewarded because the real objective of the organisation is not what most people think.

Re: @ribosome

Yes, but I'm not falling for that one.

To get through the rigorous standards of nonobviousness of the USPTO, you would need to describe an email delivery agent and then add "implemented on a door".

Re: And still no overhaul of the patent system.

People should not keep citing this. When it was filed in Australia it was genuinely novel and Australians had not yet invented it. It had to be filed by the white invaders to prevent the native Australians from developing technology and kicking them out.

Re: 2008?

This is the US craziness of "first to invent". The idea is that you provide proof of when you invented it, and that is the date. This made sense in the early days when someone in Buffalo could have invented the wheel a year before they made it to the patent office through the Indians and the British Army, but not so much nowadays. Corporations loved it because a big corp had the resources in old stocks of lab notebooks and old pens that they could forge records to "prove" something was invented years before filing (I have worked for a US company, I have seen the piles in the stockroom...)

And then the USPTO gets paid according to grants...and the test of "obviousness" seems to be to show the patent to a chimpanzee and see if it laughs.

The US is now moving to a "first to file" like the civilised world, but there are still trainloads of bad patents out there.

Years ago I filed a US patent. A real, genuine patent based on expensive and time consuming research which demonstrated that something believed impossible could actually be done, using ingenious technology. The patent attorney asked me "Is this a real invention?" and when told it was, remarked that he didn't see many of those; in fact, the last one had so impressed him that he had gone in with the inventor.

Re: IT Angle

The only thing in those statistics that I really care about is that, looking at the present state of the processor world, Sophie Wilson must rank as one of the most influential people in IT ever, having designed the original ARM instruction set.

Not a bad claim to fame.

You mean...

Google wanted something back in exchange for letting a competitor use one of their flagship programs!

The swine! Nobody else would behave like that. Boo to Goo!

Re: Wow - Holding folks responsible?

Given how many years Google and Nokia have been working on maps, how long it has taken for Bing maps to become acceptable, and what the Apple leadtime seems to have been, this seems something of a no-brainer.

Jobs may have been in many ways something of a bottom aperture, but he seems to have left a very large hole that is proving hard to fill.

Re: Offboard PSUs...? - printers

Thanks for the info, though I have to be honest and say I would never have recommended the CLP300 to anyone - it is actually very expensive per page.

As someone long involved with electrical safety, cost reduction and printing, my home printer is a large Ricoh gel ink printer, which uses hardly any power, is cheap to run, and is most unlikely to catch fire. But nobody buys them.

Re: they do dictate the car you drive

Been there, had to hire an Oldsmobile to visit the plant. It just makes you go away thinking "Would I buy a car from a company as childish and immature as this?"

Yes, but us webOS users (I have both a Pre2 as backup, and a Pre 3) are watching the browser slowly fade into irrelevance, which is annoying, and Open webOS won't be retrofitted. At some point the annoyance of this will exceed the pleasures of having an easy to use, efficient piece of equipment - but by then hopefully RIM will have got out its BB 10 phones.

By then, I hope that the EU Data Protection people will be stomping all over Facebook. With big, heavy boots.

Do not mock. That's probably Republican science. The other stuff will be cancelled to fund the tax cuts.

I'm pretty sure that during the US election Romney's recollection of what he last thought was stored in antimatter.

Re: Fine powder in flames...

Black and blue fire extinguishers are obsolete. They are all red now (in the UK) and CO2 extinguishers have a black flag on them with "CO2 " in white.

Flour is not advised because flour dust in air can cause explosions. The best things are sand or salt.

Re: Offboard PSUs...? - printers

Yes, I would, thanks. (I'm not being sarcastic, this kind of thing is how I earn money).

If you're worried about the horrors of our libel system, give me an obfuscated email or something here and I'll write you and ask. I don't use my real name so I can comment freely. I can't use Linkedin because they have 12 of you.

Thanks.

Re: Smoke and electronics

Thank you for the information

Re: Offboard PSUs...? - printers

The thermistor on the fuser trips, or the fusible plug melts. Printers are designed to deal with jams and fan failure.

Re: Buy a decent PSU, and have a suitable (NOT WATER) fire extinguisher handy!

You can buy kitemarked powder extinguishers at very reasonable prices from marine chandlers, as they are a legal requirement on boats.

Afloat they have a shelf life of 5 years because of corrosion and powder compaction due to vibration. Ashore, just checkweigh the carbon dioxide cylinder periodically.

Re: Smoke and electronics

There should be NO extreme reaction to another failure. Power supplies are a part of the system that are REQUIRED (sorry about the caps but I don't think I can do html here) to withstand electrical abuse. They are the guardians of the downstream equipment.

That said, repeated switch flipping can have unexpected effects. Sometimes rcbos trip because the suppressor capacitors draw too much asymmetric current at switch on. Because they hold their charge for a second or two, two flips in a short interval can sometimes get a shutdown ring main up without having to disconnect everything. But with many cheap PSUs, charging the live side capacitor can result in a large surge current. Even in the days of 286 and 386 computers, early computer PSUs could easily spike 40-50A during the first half cycle. Each time you switched the thing on, failure came a bit nearer. Since repeated surges through time delay fuses gradually weaken the fuse, it isn't that hard to design a circuit so that the fuse should blow before another component is likely to fail due to repeated thermal or magnetic field shock. And the capacitor should fail open or short; in the first case the thing simply doesn't work, in the second the fuse blows. Even if the capacitor blows up, the shrapnel should be retained by the case and if anything gets shorted the fuse should blow. Glass fuses can blow with a flash. So can some other overcurrent protectors.

So, answering your point, PSUs can indeed fail due to external component failure but usually fail due to their own highly stressed components going wrong. But they should never fail dangerously.

Re: For a refund, natch.

It's worth checking the approvals on the case. If it is UL listed and you can read the logos of some of the approving agencies in Europe, it is worth contacting them and seeing if they want the PSU back for investigation. Test agencies really love having exhibits for their black museums, as it helps justify their existence.

Kick up a bit of stink because you should get a new computer at least out of the PSU supplier. Remember that even if a PSU is overloaded it is required to degrade gracefully - unless you actually stuck a screwdriver inside and waggled it around, there is simply no excuse for catching fire like this.

And yes, I have worked with approvals bodies in the past, and been involved in electrical safety testing. You probably have at least one product I have been involved with in your house.

Re: Honestly, too little too late

I think what we are seeing here is the difference in competence between two different IT departments, just as there are IT departments that make Exchange seem like the buggiest software ever and others that make it taken for granted.

Re: I ditched Blackberry ( after 5 phones )

Canadian post sounds amazing. All I get from our post lady is "Hello".

(Mind you I agree with the post. The outage was annoying, but it was just one of many foul ups, like Windows Azure on 29th Feb. and the O2 problem. The fact is that with the rapid upscaling of infrastructure everybody is going to have failures at some point. The important things is, do they acknowledge them and fix them?

Re: Split screen

They run two applications in half screens, don't they? This is something else entirely. The views can overlay.

Re: We just need RIM to be taken over by HP...

It wouldn't. HP would run through the cash of whoever took it over. HP would benefit from being broken up. Let the individual divisions sink or swim on their own. Some of them would probably do quite well.

(I suspect that goes for many large companies - once a certain size is reached it is hard to understand what another layer of management can actually bring to the table.)

BB 10 RAM

I believe the BB 10 developer phone has 2Gbytes.

Re: Virtuous competition

They are also Canadian, which means that the US Government cannot claim that by using their email and other services you place yourself under US legal jurisdiction. BB10 is now part of the only smartphone product line for which a significant part is not American owned, with the exception of a few older Nokias. Perhaps that's why they are getting so much flak from the US.

With the US/UK extradition treaty as one sided as it is, the case for avoiding involvement with US technology wherever possible can only be growing.

Re: > processors made of wattle and daub

Been there, done that! We were quoted £72000 to run the compiler and output the object code. But we did not hand code it - we wrote an assembler on an HP 85! It took a week and was an enormous cost a time saver.

The F100-L also had an engineer's panel that was needed at every boot to fix an error in the bootstrap rom. Happy days indeed.

Re: > processors made of wattle and daub

I do. They sneer at me.

I too used to be able to write down 8 bit machine code, and I built my first eprom programmers by hand, until I got a machine with big floppy drives and never looked back.

One eprom programmer ran on an 1802 and the other used an Intel embedded processor with built in eprom. to read punched tape or a keypad. The handmade 1802 machine was needed to program the first Intel machine, after which it wasn't needed any more because I could simply use the Intel processor to clone itself.

Re: Bonkers

Except that it looks like it will have to be replaced by something more expensive every couple of years.

Also, and yes I do like wooden floors, but top of the range vinyl lasts just about as long and is recyclable. And the big Afghan rug in our living room is, I am told, about 70 years old.

Movies on tablets

iPlayer on the BB Playbook is superb and I can route it through my TV. For a replacement, I want a tablet with a proper separate HDMI out (and a magnetic charger connector like the PB) so I don't overuse one connector.

Come on Samsung, magnetic power connectors and hdmi ports can't be subject to patents can they?

Re: "Adding more pixels when the iPad is already 'retina' seems a bit like doing it for the hell of

Standard laser printers are 600 dots per inch and that gives about as good a result as commercial print. 300 dpi printers are visibly inferior. My guess is that 600 dpi is where LCDs will end up, at a resolution that meets the norm established by the printing industry over the years. On a tablet with a 10 inch diagonal that implies a screen resolution of about 4800 by 3000, or one iteration up on the present level.

The "retina display" fails to take into account that people do look at things closer than "normal viewing distance".