Posts by P. Lee 5267 publicly visible posts • joined 4 Dec 2007
>smart phone is more than powerful enough for a word processor and the majority of business software.
I wish. However if this were true Apple would have practically phased out x86 MacBooks in favour of arm ones and Windows RT would have been a success.
>99% of the world doesn't need Admin as the main user account
It goes deeper than that.
What parts of the disk does Internet Explorer need to access? The OS should be able to enforce resource privileges based on application profile, not just user rights. Does EMET do this? If so, why is it not the default, or pushed out in a security patch, or auto-enabled along with, er, privacy mode?
>giving kids the tools to think for themselves, to actually rely on their own skillsets is [c]ertainly more valid than what you are writing above.
+1
There is a vast difference between co-operatively working towards a better solution, and blindly accepting whatever the interwebs think is best at the moment.
Outside of America (which seems to be obsessed with multiple choice), schools teach skills, not just facts. We teach children how to think and how to teach themselves.
As for the Mad Max scenario, what would happen if Spain and Portugal followed Greece into economic collapse? The UK has more debt than all of them. Australia has been very smug about its isolation from the GFC, but the value of its currency has plummeted and in our interconnected, always relying on someone-else world, that makes you poor.
We should share and share far more than we currently do, but it is not a substitute for hard work and deep thought. Contribute, don't just take.
I'm always amazed that large organisations like banks don't club together on things like open-source. With all the money they pour into things like security software, why would you not put a few million aside to ask the open source chaps to implement features you want? Yes, other people will gain without paying their "fair" share, but how many millions are you going to spend every year in order to keep things "fair?"
I think Matthew's electrical analogy is correct. Everyone gets (effectively) unrestricted potential (burst) usage but you pay for volume (data) consumption. When data limits exist, speed tiers only makes sense if you have variable terminating equipment costs, there's no benefit to turning down fiber speeds except for market/market segmentation.
As for 100 mbit services trending down, this is a major infrastructure project. You don't hobble it based on one year's data. We know speed and capacity requirements rise and we're planning for well in advance of current requirements. That's why it should be done as a government project and not a Telstra one.
>This is, of course, a good argument against Brexit - Brussels will probably torpedo this assault on our liberty, which our spineless parliament proposes to rubber-stamp.
Ah yes, nothing says "FREEDOM!" like having your local democracy torpedoed.
Fix your local democracy.
If you can't make your local democracy work, how will you influence a far larger one, where your vote counts for less?
>Counting from zero? IT angle - well an off by one error....
(4) Fail for revealing an abhorrent corporate culture to the outside world.
The "exploitation" angle isn't really about the girls involved. It's about promoting the general idea that sex can be bought and paid for and is therefore under my control, that it is all about me and what I can get, without reference to the other person. It's about getting (or providing) sexual satisfaction outside of a real relationship, in a way manner which a real relationship can't match because a real relationship deals with imperfect people, not an unattainable showcase, an idealised imagination, which never has to deal with the reality of dirty dishes in the sink and inconsiderate drunken remarks.
Fake sex and fake relationships have a surprising capacity to mess up real relationships. Of course it isn't an easily identifiable one-to-one cause-effect thing, but the one does undermine the other. It's downright disrespectful to real partners and would also lead to awkwardness for those in relationships.
>I don't understand why he would wait this long to comment on these watches, or why he'd decided seling a massively overpriced watch is silly but selling massively overpriced phones, tablets, and computers basically since the Mac came out was not.
Overpriced the i-stuff may be, not-innovative they may be, but they have pushed the market forward in terms of productisation of tech we don't need.
The watch, on the other hand, is not only stuff we don't need, but is also stuff which doesn't work that well for any purpose. At least a smartphone works well for reading el reg on the train home.
>At the end the guy swore at me and threw his headset down on the desk before cutting the call.
My record is 42 minutes, at then end of which the nice man from Windows support was not only swearing but sexually threatening my wife and children. Well, with that kind of attitude I won't be using their services again! ;)
>No free man shall be seized or imprisoned, or stripped of his rights or possessions, or outlawed or exiled, or deprived of his standing in any other way, nor will we proceed with force against him, or send others to do so,
Unless he's a foreigner in which case he clearly doesn't qualify as Human.
Also, if he is snitched on us to the people we rule. That makes him subhuman too.
So you magically lose the ability to comply with eu regs if the uk leaves? Why is that? How is meeting electrical regulations in the same way you do now for the same product you make now, more expensive than relocating your company?
No one is talking about leaving the free trade area. Are you sure you are keeping up with the 5000 new legal regulations coming out of Brussels every year which the law lords have difficulty keeping up with? Are there no costs associated with that?
The article seems to imply that if we exit the snoopers charter will get in the way of companies slurping your data but if we stay in it won't be a problem. Perhaps they are better off without us. It doesn't look good for us either way.
In principle, do we really want foreign nations overriding our legislative? We may have horrible laws, but I don't think overriding our democracy from abroad is the way to fix the problem. Sure it would be nice to have German-style anti-snooping laws but what if the issue were Greek-style accountancy practices? Are you going to be as happy then to have given up the right to self-govern?
"Ever closer Union" is a political goal not an economic one. It's also driven by the same fantasy that suggests one world government would be achievable or good. Have you seen how the Serbs and Croats love each other? I'm willing to sacrifice the New Holy Roman Empire on the altar of pragmatism. I'd love it if we could all sit around singing kumbya but I'm not willing to push political integration for the benefit of business. If you want to see what importing unpleasant foreign laws looks like, look at the TTIP and TPP. What do these treaties have to do with the eu? Not much directly, but we can cancel safe harbour if it turns out to be unsafe. Extracting ourselves from Maastricht is quite a bit harder.
So perhaps a two tier system- gui generates scripts which can be reviewed and deployed.
Abstraction trades resources for admin/Dev time. It also often results in unintelligible cli configurations.
Guis work best when there are few parameters. That's not great for Cisco. If it's hard to represent the problem or solution visually, a gui probably isn't the best option.
Indeed, this looks like a Hail Mary to discourage on-prem ms database apps disappearing into Linux-only clouds with no ms services remaining.
I can't see any Linux people going for mssql by choice or ms bods hosting on Linux by choice. This is an "it will be easier not to port our db to Linux-cloud but public cloud is strategic" play.
Like os2 it may just provide an easier migration path.
>IOS 7 with its flat look had reached 90% coverage of all compatible devices in one year. Please explain.
Bundling of the OS with apps, click-happy users and a demographic obsessed with "new."
The benefit of flat as far as I can see is that it is fast to render and compresses well for download speed. It might actually be a good thing for remote program execution - but it is pretty ugly.
What's the evidence for human intelligence ever increasing?
Knowledge increases and we run to and fro more than we did, but... Donald Trump. Even if he's faking stupidity, those voting for him are not. Those politicians who have so alienated voters that they will vote for homecoming, are also not faking their stupidity. Or evil.
or, How I Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love the Bomb
I gave up fighting W10. I see no reason why I should run scripts or edit registry entries to stop it. I don't want a 3G download over my phone, but via my home connection? No problem. All *my* work and documents happen under Linux. I run nearly all my games under Steam on Linux, but I also have a Windows install which has no other purpose than to run Steam in case I have the urge to run some legacy games. As a GUI, W10 beats W8 by far and quite frankly, they are welcome to scan my documents directory and grab telemetry which should tell them I have no documents and I do nothing important with their OS, not even any significant web browsing.
If me having a free copy of their OS so that I can run some legacy games makes them feel important, bully for them, free W10 is simply giving me a longer time to phase them out of my life. I have a Work VM running W10... well, I get to look hip at the office and it does appear to be much faster than (I suspect a borked-by-failed-updates) W7. W7 Ultimate transforms to W10 Pro. Does it slurp? Dunno. In a corporate world which seems to accept the Cloud and MS' activities, I've given up caring. Again, not my data and personal stuff happens via the host OS (thanks Suse!).
So long, and thanks for all the fish.
Steam's doesn't, but I'm not a great fan of the i-Device store - it looks as though its full of junk, even if there's good stuff in there. It has been a great success for Apple, but it is interesting to note that the Mac Store has been less than successful. People want different things from a phone than from a PC. That doesn't bode well for MS who don't have a successful store of any kind to draw experience from.
Undoubtedly Tim Sweeney is correct. The fact that everyone knows they won't get away with such a maneuver should not make us complacent.
>this is a concern, but on monopoly/competition grounds, not neutrality grounds.
Agreed... unless of course, they start prioritising their own video over other types of traffic (or fail to provide equal prioritisation for at least the other major video services it gets tricky, but perhaps we could have some standard ports for video streaming...), keeping the IP network rubbish enough that their video service is the only video service it is worthwhile to use.
>Complexity is just a way of saying that at some point it's going to stop working suddenly and no one will have a clue how to fix it.
Mostly because we fired all the techies and outsourced to Elbonia. That didn't work but we don't want to pay for the right people so we have to live with this cloud thing and convert all our apps to https - the only thing that works without a firewall change.
It still boggles the mind to that people think unfathomable owa/https is better security than imaps through a firewall.
I was hoping they would too... until they brought out the slurping W10. I was hoping privacy would be their USP.
Now I hate them all and just retreat into doing as little as I can online and processing everything locally or off my home server.
Apple is like Disney world - looks lovely but is basically a big tiresome advert for tat you don't want or need. Android is the wild West. Windows is the wannabe and doesn't know which way it should go so tries a bit of both.
Trump is smart?
I think he's "Paris Hilton smart" - making a good living out of appearing stupid.
People are so annoyed with being lied to. The political elite say all the right things and change nothing. Quite a few people are willing to blow out the front door with a shotgun, just to get some fresh air. It may be damaging and cost to undo the damage in the long run, but the atmosphere inside is so fetid its making everyone sick.
It doesn't matter too much that he's unlikely to change anything. Voters just want to flex some muscle and poke some eyes. They could do it by voting for smaller parties, but they appear obsessed with money=success and won't vote for what they want in case they vote for a loser. Trump has money, therefore must be a winner and can be voted for.
>We should question why no one else has bothered to enter those markets when there's so much money to be made by whoever can introduce cheaper/faster/better services.
Because few companies have the spare cash and the inclination to. The physical networks are expensive to set up. To succeed in an established business these days, you have to already have a vastly profitable other business to fund it. Google could only move into phones because Search was so lucrative. It could only move into infrastructure because Search is so lucrative.
At best you have to deal with lawsuits like this which aim to be a legal block. Small, less well funded competitors can be wiped out with expensive lawsuits alone, regardless of the outcome. Medium-sized competitors can be killed with a short-term price-war. Knowing that previous vast profits and profits from other geographical areas can fund future competitive efforts against new entrants, is often enough to stop anyone trying.
This is the problem with mega-companies: too much profit prevents small competitors from growing.
It isn't really a question of "the one phone," it is the events around it which raise a concern.
Was it terrorism? Really? The government said they were "at least partly inspired by Islamic State." That sounds an awful lot like watching a film "inspired by true events." It looks to me like a couple of nutters with guns, who are now dead and beyond the reach of the law. Mass murderers, yes, but "terrorists" is pure speculation. The massacre is what happens when you have lax gun control. Labeling them "terrorists" rather than mass murderers conveniently deflects attention away from the general problem of gun crime which is far more dangerous than terrorism.
So with these factors, I begin to question the FBI's motives. Do they also help out the Chinese who have the phone of a US citizen? While the court order is in place (and that is good), I would be concerned that things may expand. Is there any effective difference between the government having all the keys and the government having the ability to update the software?
Just because it is sad, does not mean we "owe it to the victims." They need to consider the implications of what they are demanding and the fact that it will not bring their relatives back and it will not provide "insights" which would stop it happening again.
This is definitely an instance of a hard case making bad law.
>Your local sys admin would have just as much down time running Exchange on prem as any cloud service, likely more time.
While you are correct, your local sys admin is very much beholden to your local management.
When you scale the customer base up, each individual customer becomes less important and you have no possibility to hire a difference sys admin. Worse, there is a loss of skill in the alternatives to O365... until the price goes up. By then... too late. That's the price of monoculture and monopoly.
What happens when MS has been using email as loss leader, driving alternatives out of the market and then a Lehman Brothers-style accounting fraud bankrupts the company? You can just watch your email cloud waft away, taking your "aas" with it.
At that point, try calculating your savings from cloud.
It is true that it is an inference too far unless it turns out Three is just playing a game and will let ads through... for a fee.
Are they just hoping for a payout from the ad-companies? Net Neut isn't about filtering per se, it is about preventing the economics of the internet being manipulated by companies who are supposed to be facilitating traffic but are instead trying to get people to pay for it. Routers turned tolls.
>Even if private ownership of an autonomous car will be possible, the rewards for people who pimp out their cars in their downtime
This will be marginal if everyone needs their own car to get to work, as everyone would have a car to pimp out - massive oversupply and little demand. The days of half the population staying at home to keep the household going are over, courtesy of deregulated mortgage markets. I suspect the largest impact would be on public transport, with demand for buses dropping to zilch due to some autonomous car/Uber combination. That's assuming you can easily remove all the soft furnishings and so on to prevent them being sloshed with beer, ripped off or otherwise rendered unpleasant by "the neerdowells who don't have a job."
It would probably kill off the courier market. Amazon's dream come true as you can send your car to the warehouse to pick the dongle up.
>All the progression in CPUs is in the field of efficiency / TDP properties
I'm waiting for some enterprising laptop maker to stick an external PCIe-x16 Gen3 external connector on their system to connect up to a proper-speed box for graphics. I want cool, quiet and mobile but I also want to put some zombies back in the ground every now and then. Hotplug-PCI with a power switch for each graphics card. That would be great!
I was just thinking the same.
I suspect correlation rather than causation when on-prem storage from EMC takes a nosedive and cloud is on the rise. Are people really moving their EMC-based data to the cloud? I don't think so.
Spending on EMC may have dried up and spending on cloud might be increasing, but that just means EMC has saturated its market, not that people are no longer using EMC. It is a mature market, not a dead technology.
>If the buggers are dead, then what's the point anyway?
Because they are dead there is no one to complain. Once the precedent has been set, the process can be automate do, allowing non NSA agencies to trawl for data. Yes the process only works for one phone. Hello Process, meet Mr Batch Job.
It isn't like employing a locksmith to get access in the same way torrents are not like lending a dvd to a friend.
>Has anyone ever seen any evidence of a QA dept. at Adobe?
'Twas done on a clean install of the OS, with only adobe installed. Realistically, it would be a pretty hard bug to find by symptom outside beta test/general release.
That doesn't excuse the coding flaw and (lack of) audit.
>That's the point of reading books. Which you can do happily whatever else you do with your life,
Or you can learn technical skills on the job, paid for by an employer, and get a leg up on what is important in life early on.
HR Motto: "Hire for attitude, train for skills."
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