* Posts by Adam Azarchs

177 publicly visible posts • joined 28 Jul 2006

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IBM UK snuffs 'final salary' pensions

Adam Azarchs
Stop

Defined benefits plans

are unreasonable. Basically, whether it's defined benefit or defined contribution, the company has to take the salary contributions of its employees and put them in a pension fund, which is then invested in such a way as to pay out the benefits in perpetuity. The differences with defined benefits are 1.) if you die soon after retirement, your family gets shafted (your benefit/contribution ration makes assumptions about your lifetime) and 2.) if the market fails, the company gets screwed.

Sure, the company with a defined-benefits pension fund which got wiped out by a market crash could have invested in very conservative funds with low volatility, but those also get low returns, so more of the employees salary would have to be siphoned off into the pension fund. Isn't it better to give the employees a choice of what to invest in? Whether to accept low returns for low risk, or to take bigger risks for bigger returns? Basically, there are companies which are supposed to know how to turn defined contributiosn into defined benefits - we call them mutual funds. If they screw up, at least they don't take innocent employees' jobs with them when they fail. Why should a company like IBM be forced to be involved in that business?

Amazon affiliates nixed in two more states

Adam Azarchs
Unhappy

California

Isn't Amazon's headquarters in California? I'm sure they also have warehouses in CA. I'm not sure how they get away with not paying sales tax here... do warehouses and office buildings somehow not count as "physical presence"?

Regardless of how you feel about taxation in general, I think it's fair to say that tax evasion is morally unjustifiable, and Amazon is definitely aiding and abetting.

That said, asking online resellers to enforce these rules is difficult, as even within the state of California there's a ridiculous patchwork of sales tax rules on the local level. Maybe states should be forced to develop a common API for a "what's my sales tax?" web service to mitigate the administrative costs. Just throwing the idea out there.

Microsoft begins Security Essentials downloads

Adam Azarchs
Joke

"Microsoft Software Removal Tool"

That would be a shiny new Ubuntu CD, right?

Microsoft goes green to win IE 8 and Bing users

Adam Azarchs
Stop

That comparison site

is full of crock. Especially their "performance" claim. When I run the benchmarks, chrome comes out 350% faster, and let me tell you, I most definitely can tell the difference without "slow motion video".

Opera applauds scepticism on MS browser pledge

Adam Azarchs
Gates Halo

This is totally unreasonable

How can the EU really feel it's reasonable to force MS to become distributer of other people's software? This is like saying every book that's sold should be required to include a forward written by a random stranger, and the author of the book proper gets no editorial rights on said forward.

Just because MS used to do some questionable things doesn't mean it's fair to treat them this way for the rest of eternity - they've paid their debt to society already. These days the things Apple does (I'm not talking about Safari, I'm mostly talking about the iTunes/iPod linkage) are far worse than anything Microsoft did even at its worst.

Network giants reject 'buy American' Obama mandate

Adam Azarchs
Stop

"This is about creating American jobs - not Chinese jobs"

And what's wrong with creating crummy assembly-line manufacturing jobs for Chinese people as a side effect of creating skilled construction and engineering jobs for Americans?

Trade protectionism is always ugly.

Microsoft's Bing feeds you, tries to keep you captive

Adam Azarchs

Site preview

You could use Bing, or you could install Snap's plugin for Firefox. It's not a particularly original feature.

Taking a first bite out of Wolfram Alpha

Adam Azarchs
Stop

It's not a search engine

It's an expert system. Still an impressive feat, but calling it a search engine is just an attempt to jam it into the current fad about what computers should be spending their time on. It's not a way to interact with the internet at all.

Facebook denies denying Holocaust deniers

Adam Azarchs

Freedom of speech

Speech that doesn't offend anyone doesn't need to be protected. I hate to see people saying this stuff, but I'll still defend their right to say it.

I'll also defend my right to, for example, deny employment to people who join such a group - free speech doesn't mean no consequences. In that context, I'd rather have these people out of the closet, so to speak.

US P2P bill aims shackles at browsers, IM

Adam Azarchs
Thumb Down

Bono's bill is designed to save such users from themselves

No, not really. It's designed to take away one of the more successful excuses for file sharing used to defend against RIAA suits in the past. That is, it's not protecting users, it's protecting the content holders from users who claim incompetence.

IBM pits Watson super against humanity

Adam Azarchs
Unhappy

Hard problem

I have a feeling this is a thankless job for IBM. It's a very, very hard problem, and the majority of the population probably doesn't understand just how hard a problem this is for a computer to solve. When the computer does respectably, but doesn't totally dominate the game, most people will probably laugh at the computer.

UK agent leaves secret drugs info on bus

Adam Azarchs
Stop

Re: Encryption

The article didn't mention whether the data was encrypted. The point is when you're dealing with information that could spell life or death to operatives, it doesn't matter - you have to assume that encryption can and will be broken eventually, especially if there's any chance that the loss was not an accident.

FBI docs out home-brewed spyware probes

Adam Azarchs
Thumb Down

Overuse

Overuse isn't just bad from a civil liberties / legal standpoint. It also increases the odds that someone will figure out how it works. This has come up before, but it seems obvious that no antivirus vendor worth their salt could leave the door open for this spyware, government sanctioned or not. So they need to keep it low enough profile that it doesn't get noticed by security vendors.

Infosys fires 2,100

Adam Azarchs
Stop

Why so shocked?

Many companies here in the states, such as GE, have always had a business-as-usual policy of firing the bottom 3% of employees every year. Even if you assume a zero-sum game, if every business is doing that, then all that happens is these people get shuffled around until they find a job they're decent at (or keep getting shuffled around indefinitely because they're incompetent and unwilling to reduce their expectations). It's only in countries that have a hard time firing people (like France, for example) that the risk involved in hiring someone who's been fired before is so high that being fired once means you'll stay unemployed for a long time.

Granted, in an economy like today's, getting fired is a much bigger deal. Which might be why they decided to do 3.5% this year instead of the 5% they claim is their usual. Really, this isn't worth reporting unless you have previous years numbers to compare too. Certainly it's ridiculous to accuse them of simply trying to avoid severance costs if you don't include previous year's numbers.

Worm breeds botnet from home routers, modems

Adam Azarchs
Stop

Re: Password Hasher

yes, and as soon as enough people start using password hasher, the password crackers will start running their passwords through the same hasher. It is, after all, just a hash. Much better to use a random password (as opposed to a hash, which only appears random to humans) and an app like PasswordSafe. Or better yet, public key login, which can be made arbitrarily secure by simply lengthening the key (modulo client security concerns. Yes, the private key password is still a concern, but if the attacker has access to the private key file you've already got problems).

Microsoft throws Silverlight 3 beta at Adobe

Adam Azarchs
Jobs Horns

Oh so that's what search-engine optimization means

"...Microsoft's also upped Silverlight's search-engine optimization (SCO) capabilities."

So now silverlight is being given the capability to sue Linux for copyright infringement?

iPhone 3.0 gossip lassos MMS, tethering, cut-and-paste...

Adam Azarchs
Thumb Down

Data rates

"Why should iPhone users pay more for moving that data over Bluetooth or a USB cable to a laptop?"

Indeed. And why does sending an SMS text message cost more per byte than downloading images from the Hubble space telescope?

They'll charge whatever they think they can get away with, which I'm sure is more than nothing.

CERN Proton-smashers: We are economically valuable

Adam Azarchs

Of all the things to spend money on...

Ok, I'm going to annoy any of my former colleagues who read this by saying this, but modern particle physics is about the least likely field of science to ever produce economically useful results. It's hard to argue otherwise. However, and this is a big however, even though the science itself (the search for the Higgs and super-symmetry and so on) is arguably worthless, the research into sensor and computer technology that is what the people at CERN (as opposed to theoreticians looking at the results) spend doing is undeniably incredibly useful. As mentioned, the internet is a prime example.

There are two points here. One is that there are dis-economies of scale if you focus a nations efforts too exclusively on one scientific field. I don't really feel like going into detail as to why that is, but mainly it's that most good ideas come from cross-pollinations between disciplines, which is hard to do without a lot of disciplines.

The other point is that high-energy physics (as opposed to condensed matter physics or especially biology) has a much harder time getting funding from the private sector, because any useful results it produces are less likely to be easy to directly monetize. That is, better understanding of physics helps everyone live better, but mainly by allowing other people to design better technology. It's the other people who make the money, though. Unlike biology where whoever figures out what protein cures twitter addiction can directly market this discovery to drug companies. Physics funding is the standard public goods problem.

Microsoft disables automatic IE 8 downloads

Adam Azarchs
Gates Halo

Lots of things still broken (@David Eddleman)

I'm trying IE8 at home. It's very nice most of the time, but some websites see "IE? Oh, then I shouldn't be standards compliant" and break IE8. If IE8 pretends to be Firefox then things work just fine (oh, the irony. I remember when the reverse was quite common).

Anyway, it's a very nice browser, but sites which detect IE (rather than more generally non-standard behavior) do break it by thinking that just because it's IE it's not standards compliant(formerly a good assumption). Google Reader is a prime example of this, but there are others.

Google picks up third spot in spam-friendly shame list

Adam Azarchs

A little premature

Ok, so it sounds like one month google's not on the list, then next month it's on. So this is a recent problem. And they claim to be addressing it. Claiming google has chosen to be "part of the problem" because it's been on the top 10 list for all of a month isn't really fair, assuming they're able to clean things up again quickly.

That said, it does look like maybe google got a tad complacent with their previously good anti-spam rep.

Harvard prof slams US nut allergy hysteria

Adam Azarchs
Alert

Food allergies are serious issues

I have several food allergies, and I'd be upset if no one took them seriously. They can be a real pain, literally. True, many of them may be due to upbringing, but that's not the kid's fault.

However, "taking it seriously" doesn't mean "banning the offending foodstuff." I'd wager that for nearly every food ingredient out there, there exists at least one person who's allergic to it. I know people who can't eat any complex carbohydrate. Some diabetics can't eat simple carbohydrates without issues. Nearly every protein can have harmful effects on a some people. That doesn't mean none of us should be able to eat - just that people have a responsibility to be aware of their own allergies and take measures to protect themselves.

Of course, here in the states there's a major deficiency of self-responsibility. So we ban everything that might hurt someone, and pretty soon we'll all be eating some boring hypoallergenic white paste.

Comcast reveals it is protocol agnostic

Adam Azarchs
Thumb Up

Sounds good

This is the point of net neutrality, after all. If you're using too much bandwidth, they throttle you. If you want higher priority, they're allowed to charge you more for it. But they don't get to care what you're doing with it, which means you get to develop new and interesting ways to use the bandwidth.

Amazon flash mob mauls Spore DRM

Adam Azarchs

This was predicted.

http://ars.userfriendly.org/cartoons/?id=20080511

Quantum porn engine foiled by strawberries and muffins

Adam Azarchs
Stop

You're not paying for strawberries and muffins

You're paying for worker happiness, and by extension productivity. Some of the productivity boost will also come from being able to hire - and keep - the best employees. The doctor's visits cut down on time people spend out of the office for other appointments. The flexible hours tend to be made up for by people working longer hours.

Let's do the math. Strawberries and muffins costs probably a couple of dollars a day per employee. So at most $1k / year. A salary increase providing an equivalent boost to morale and the ability to hire good people would need to be at least 10 times that, at least for most of the people I know in the industry, including myself.

It's not profligacy - it's good business sense. True, it is relatively unique to California (I work in LA, and we do this stuff here too), but it's also true that California does amazingly well in the tech sector compared to areas which don't do these things. This isn't entirely a coincidence.

Microsoft hopes third time is lucky with XP SP3 update

Adam Azarchs

SP3...

I installed XP SP3 on my AMD machine nearly two months ago with no problems at all (and on my intel box at work). Granted I didn't have the frackup of a computer manufacturer that is HP burning my original hard drive image, but still, from where exactly is the impression coming that SP3 is only being released now?

Feds urge court to dismiss lawsuit protecting life on Earth

Adam Azarchs

As Dr. Hawking once said,

if a black hole was created in one of these colliders, it would evaporate almost instantaneously, "and I would get a Nobel prize."

Really, this lawsuit is a perfect example of a little bit of knowledge being a dangerous thing. Black holes of the size which could be created are completely harmless (unless you happen to be standing within about a foot of where they're created, which makes you a candidate for gene pool chlorination). As for the 'strangelets,' the fundamental thing missing from the discussion is that even the LHC won't be coming anywhere close to the magnitude of energies produced by astronomical events, some of which send extraordinarily high energy particles into our atmosphere. The universe is a very big place - anything we're trying to do with the LHC has happened before somewhere, and the universe still exists.

These people should go back to complaining about superman costumes not having warning labels instructing children that the cape won't let them fly.

Apple's carpet-bomb Safari flaw can wreak havoc on Windows

Adam Azarchs

Re: Windows fast fix?

"Apple could easily put out a security alert saying users of windows should stop using IE until the problem is fixed."

Yes, that's fine, as long as apple figures out a way to run windows update without IE...

As far as the "bug" in IE is concerned, the fact is some people actually use that to enable "active desktop" features. As has been mentioned by others before, this would be far less of an issue if safari set the "this was a downloaded file" flag in the filesystem, so windows wouldn't execute it without throwing up an "This file is unsigned and probably will mess up your computer. Are you sure?" dialog. Granted, autorunning things in a place like the desktop where so many other things live isn't such a great idea, but until Safari started dumping turds onto it, it wasn't a security problem.

Microprocessors are the new cigarettes

Adam Azarchs
IT Angle

What is this guy on?

He backs AMD because he expects Intel to face product delays, while simultaneously recommending all the players cut their R&D budgets. How exactly is that self-consistent?

Chip companies are not "stodgy" manufacturing companies. There's still lots of room for improvement in the fabrication processes (most obviously in the feature size). The first company to cut their research budget will find, a year or two down the line, that their competitor is able to offer a product with twice the performance at the same cost. Cutting R&D is an extremely short-sighted strategy in a market where technology progress is a virtual certainty. Tobacco hasn't been revolutionized since the invention of the cigarette. Chip technology gets revolutionized so often that we take it for granted.

World realizes Google home page is 'illegal'

Adam Azarchs

Ummm...

"We would also point out that if you search Google for Google's privacy policy, you've already given the company your IP address..."

Or if you connect to their home page. Or to their privacy policy page. Arguing that google's ability to log your IP address before you read their privacy policy is unfair is totally ridiculous in my book.

Microsoft urges Windows users to shun 'carpet bombing' Safari

Adam Azarchs
Stop

Re: Apple, GNU/Linux? No? Blame M$.

Read the article. This exploit works on Safari OSX as well.

Granted, on OSX any executable downloaded this way will be marked with an attribute which will warn you before letting you execute it... but Windows supports such a flag too. Safari just doesn't set it in Windows. No, this is Apple's fault.

Safari is the least secure browser in common usage in the world (see: Pwn2Own competition). Apple clearly doesn't take security seriously, what with outright ignoring threats like this, and suing other security researchers. Granted MS and others used to do that too, a long time ago, but they, and most observers, learned from the mistakes of that era.

Cloud computing hysteria paralyzed by bolt of reality

Adam Azarchs

Where cloud computing makes sense...

in theory, anyway, is that if you have loads which are very inconsistent, then it makes sense to off-load to someone who, by law of large numbers, can always fully utilize their servers. There are also some small economies of scale in other areas. For small buisnesses there's a lot in those categories - not every shop which wants a web presense has room for a server rack, for example. But yeah, no one has yet come up with the "killer app" for cloud computing.

A week in the life of Open XML

Adam Azarchs

OpenOffice

OpenOffice is supported by IBM, and derives a good part of it's code base from StarOffice, which is Sun. It is NOT really independent. Also, ODF might be a "standard" in the sense that it's approved by ISO, but if you go by what people actually use it's far less of a standard than even old-fashioned microsoft office formats.

Also, FYI, Office 2007 can read and save to ODF just fine, with a microsoft-supported plugin. And Openoffice can read and write OOXML. I really don't see what the big deal is. If you want to complain about there being too many redundant formats, why not look to the audio codec market first? It's a much more severe problem there.

Apple unleashes monster patch batch on Mac faithful

Adam Azarchs
Gates Halo

Comparison to vista SP1

Vista SP1 standalone installer is 435MB. That's a lot more than this. Of course, it has to deal with more than ~4 permutations of hardware. The windows update version is only 45MB...

Sun Java update creaks under weight of bug fixes

Adam Azarchs
Flame

Quit the flaming

For my job, I work with .NET all the time, including 3.0. I has it's flaws, sure, but so does java. At least on Windows, .NET has far, far fewer flaws and better performance. On linux/mac there's always mono, although I'll admit mono's support is sketchy at times.

I still haven't gotten java to actually run without crashing on my linux install... not that I've tried very hard.

Major HTML update unveiled

Adam Azarchs

Why do we need this?

Isn't (or shouldn't) XHTML more or less replacing html anyway? Why not just put old-fashioned html to bed altogether?

That objection aside, making more consistent a precise rules for recovering from parse errors is much-needed. Some of my web-design work has seen errors which Internet Explorer recovers from gracefully, and even produces the intended output, but which causes Firefox to just crash or go into an infinite loop.

Microsoft to eBay name for $1m

Adam Azarchs
Gates Halo

Stupid thing to do

These guys are grandfathered before MSFT came to portugal, sure. But anyone else who bought the name would not necessarily be afforded the same protection, especially since at this point MSFT would have a very good case that they name was bought simply to cash in on the Microsoft name. So basically no one but "Microsoft of Redmond" would be able to place any value on the name.

Apple keeps critical security fixes to itself

Adam Azarchs

The title is a bit of an exaggeration

I think there's a world of difference between "not being clear as to the importance of an update" and "keeping security fixes to itself."

Blah blah blah Apple not being honest about the security of their systems blah blah nothing new here.

Canadian cable giant slips Yahoo! name onto Google home page

Adam Azarchs

Copyright infringement?

Inserting stuff into someone else's web page is copyright infringement, last I checked, since you're modifying someone else's content. Net neutrality aside, I'd like to see them sued for this.

Verizon hijacks your browser

Adam Azarchs

Not the first!

Comcast (cable internet, also in the news for its bittorrent 'management') has been doing exactly this to its customers for at least 6 months (I don't know how much longer before that).

Of opposable thumbs and software engineering

Adam Azarchs

Re: video adverts

This is why I don't install flash, or if I have to, I disable it except on websites which actually need it (or I just refuse to point my browser to such brain-dead, or brain-deadening websites).

Supreme Court denies cert in el-Masri rendition case

Adam Azarchs
Thumb Down

Denial of cert != endorsement

Denial of cert just means that, like nearly 99% of cases sent to the supreme court, they won't bother hearing it. This is not at all the same as implicitly endorsing the policy. One might argue that they really ought to have decided to hear it, and I'd agree, but it's going a bit too far to equate refusing to hear the case with endorsing it, given how rare it is for them to hear a case in general.

Concern over gas guzzling software

Adam Azarchs

Re: google avoiding coal fired plants

Google is betting big on future carbon regulations. They're investing in solar power and other renewables. Coal might be cheep now, but if you're building a huge datacenter, you don't want to be exposed to the significant risk that the power will suddenly become much more expensive (or disappear altogether!) because of carbon taxes / cap and trade schemes. They've famously invested in Ausra, but other solar firms haven't escaped their notice (for datacenters. Their rooftop stuff was all contracted from a different company which isn't interested in the utility-scale stuff).

Geeks and Nerds caught on film lacking geeky nerdiness

Adam Azarchs

Not unique story

I remember a year or so back, an undercover reporter unplugged the power cable to their hard drive, and took it around to a bunch of repair shops. Only one of them was able to diagnose the problem (with a $200 flat rate repair...). Others either were baffled or tried to sell the reporter a new power supply.

CERN BOFH needs a bigger storage array

Adam Azarchs

"The previous collider wasn't powerful enough"

There's actually some debate about whether the previous collider could do it. Towards the end of it's run, a few scientists thought they saw it, however only at one or two standard deviations confidence interval (an interval which had previously caused false alarms). However, rather than delay the start of construction on the LHC, they shut down the experiment before those scientists could get their shot at a nobel prize. Thus they succeeded in creating a black hole (of bitterness), after all.

FCC wireless plan torpedoed by Google-loving mega-startup

Adam Azarchs

Wholesale requirement

The lack of a wholesale requirement is not the same thing as a prohibition on wholesale. The issue is not that the lack of open access requirements would force Google or whomever to lock things down, but that said lack would make the spectrum more appealing to Verizon and the like, so they could then easily outbid the Champions of Freedom (tm).

The point being that the last bit, about the lack of a wholesale requirement making it harder for smaller upstarts to share costs in a bid, sounds a tad absurd. Unless there's something I'm missing.

Brainstorm with Mindstorms

Adam Azarchs

Re: Lego? Pff...

I've seen a lot of fancy stuff in lego. It takes real talent to build a robust engineering solution with lego - anyone can do it with real industrial-strength metal parts.

Oh, and this book should be on the list, but because it's just too cool to leave out:

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1593271379/bookstorenow16-20

MIT student walks into airport wearing circuit board and wires

Adam Azarchs

re: Dumb and dumbest

Dumb: walking to the airport (not into a secured area, but still) with a circuit board with blinking lights.

Not dumb: Arresting someone with said circuit board (and play-dough)

Dumbest: not releasing her with a stern admonishment to not pull stunts like that as soon as they realised she was harmless.

Honestly, is it really my fault if the bar of soap I am carrying looks like a bomb to them? Do I have to label all my positions "not a bomb" just in case? (actually, that would be a really bad idea, but my point stands)

What annoyed me the most about this story is that the cops hailed this as a reminder that terrorism is a real threat. As opposed to being a reminder that most supposed terrorist threats are false alarms.

NBC unveils self-destructing, ad-addled anti-iTunes service

Adam Azarchs

When you say self-destructing,

you're referring to the service, yes? Basically they're offering a TiVo service which can't store stuff for more than a week. That seems... useless.

Light Sabre wars for your Wii

Adam Azarchs

The real question

Will one be able to do proper fencing, or will interaction be limited to "they wiimote moved, so the onscreen lightsaber should swing in a preset pattern"? My guess would be the latter - real fencing is pretty boring compared to choreographed swashbuckling in movies.

Ofcom moots the 900MHz boot for O2 and Vodafone

Adam Azarchs

Re: the price of peace

Yes, nimbys with billions of dollars to outbid the telcos. If there's people like that out there, willing and able to get rid of those annoying devices in their area, good for them.

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