Posts by Tom 13

Re: if you really care about your clients

If you really care about your clients you'll sit down with them and explain the current situation. Yes the switch to a non-MS product will probably be difficult for them and maybe you. But if MS wants to treat them through you like red-headed step children it is probably better for both of you to deal with that issue up front. Because support for you and your client isn't going to get any better if they opt to follow the MS cloudy route.

And you'll be the one the customer berates because MS isn't supporting you the vendor in the manner required.

Re: No surprise that MS want to force everything possible

Agreed. From the bean counter perspective it makes sense. From the customer standpoint it doesn't and for the same reason the bean counters want to change the model.

The thing is, somewhere in the company there's supposed to be someone with the sense to say "We can make X dollars at this lower price or between zero and .5X with a higher priced offering, because people won't buy the higher priced product."

Faced with the current MS roadmap, if I were actively supporting SMEs, I wouldn't be stocking up on disappearing copies of a product MS can kill the support on, I'd be beavering away on alternative solutions.

@AC 11 Jul 2013 10:45

Blanket statements are usually wrong.

Cloudy services are probably not a good solution form most companies. But there are some for which it is the ONLY thing that makes sense. For several years I helped a company that had a permanent staff of about 50 people who worked from home, a busy month in which temp staff ballooned to about 300, a customer base of 25,000 to 30,000 people and annual that grew from $1 million to $2 million dollars. Their most important business function took place in the cloud, except we didn't call it the cloud then just an outsourced IT function. The company had an official mail drop for legal correspondence and a different one for business correspondence. Once every other month they'd rent meeting rooms in a hotel to conduct business that required face to face meetings, but otherwise it was conducted by email, phone, and bulletin boards.

Yes, it was a volunteer non-profit, but it was still a business and most certainly an "anyone."

Re: Apple, knobs.

Generally concur, but having once been involved in a Trademark dispute and being aware of several others, I'll give them a pass on this one. The lawyers told them they had to, so they did. Few people in a board room have the gonads/are foolish enough (choose your preferred option) to challenge a lawyer on these pronouncements. Now the courts have rightly said, no.

Re: the judge

The judge is the moron who set the enormously high bail.

Re: penalty for a second offense

Dammit, I can't keep up with the memos!

I thought second offense was the drone attack that kills the rest of your family as inadvertent collateral damage.

Re: Even if that is true

Except it's not true. In Texas there's probably an option to try a teen as an adult depending on the severity of the crime. But even that determination requires a court hearing and more importantly, an actual crime.

Re: a blatant fool, armed with a gun an a sheriff's badge

This took more than one blatant fool. So let's go ahead and count them:

1. The Canadian woman who called it in as a real threat.

2. The deputies who showed up to investigate.

3. The sheriff who decided to take it to the DA instead of cutting the kid lose after the scare of running him into the police station in handcuffs.

4. The DA who decided to prosecute instead of cutting the kid lose.

5. The judge who set bail so high only Bill Gates or George Soros could afford a bond company to pay it.

6. All the idiots who elected idiots the idiots in items 2 to 4 who are elected officials or the idiots who appointed the non-elected officials in items 2 to 4.

We'll leave out the idiots on this thread who think the fools in items 1 to 6 are doing a good job.

Re: When are the adults going to intervene

When the hoplophobe stop electing morons to appoint even bigger morons as judges.

Given the postings I've seen on the pages of El Reg, it's gonna be a while.

I'd also note this San Antonio which isn't far from Austin. It's where libs congregate in Texas.

Re: be afraid

Did you note the bit where the idiot who made the initial complaint was a Canadian?

Yeah, so much for that common sense I read about so often on these pages.

Re: if the police had done nothing and he had of done something

Yo, brainless! Of course the police are supposed to do something. They're supposed to log the call, go to the parents house, asses the situation, and apply some common sense. With contextual evidence that the kid wasn't serious they give him a good stern warning about not doing it again and go back to the station to log the report. Throwing him in jail with a $500,000 bond on the basis of nothing more than a single FB post is beyond the pale.

Oh and all those victim suits would get tossed as soon as the were filed. The police departments have no legal responsibility to protect you from harm.

Re: Another for the WTF file

Oh, this article is leaving out the juicy bits. The kid has to be confined to solitary for his own protection. When they pull him out and put him back in the general population he gets beaten to a pulp. And bail has been set at a number even the bail bonds companies can't afford.

Re: "the Queen's selfies to the pool boy"

Yeah I noticed that too. I'd like to think it's the sort of remark that would set off alarms in a normal Brit's thinking. But apparently most of them are too caught up in hating on the US at the moment to see the bright flashing lights or hear the blaring sirens warning them something isn't right.

@ribosome

I've heard a similar tale in a different context. His claim was the reason the allies didn't "find" chemical weapons in Iraq is that the weapons Sadam was using were sent by the US military. So they couldn't publicly recover the crates as they'd have US serial codes.

These are the kinds of conspiracy theories you need to walk away from. Too many ghosts, shadows, and false fronts for somebody unconnected to sort out with logic alone.

Re: he seems to know a lot about a great many issues

Yeah, and that's when you should start doing a serious reality check.

By his own admission he was only at the NSA for 30 days. Do you seriously think anyone could get these kinds of details on such a wide variety of data in only 30 days?

Intelligence data is compartmentalized. My roomie has a clearance and works as a civilian for the military. Not the really secret black ops stuff, just the stuff you wouldn't want the enemy to know about how you make equipment. Pain points for him are bad enough. Very rarely he deals with highly classified systems. If you get high enough into them, you get a phone number you can call. If some one answers "Hello" and gives the correct countersign you ask your question. You don't ask who answered. You don't wait for a response to your question. You just ask. More likely you'll get a recording device and you leave a message. Maybe they'll get back to you before the deadline for whatever you are working on expires. Do you really think the hard core black ops stuff we expect the NSA to perform in defense of our country is LESS compartmentalized than the process for building armarments?

Re: Another hard hittting article from...

So it is. So it is.

I rarely check the names on the buyline, just the titles. Although I do usually know when I headed into Lewis Page territory for some reason. Maybe because he's upfront about his bias.

Re: I'VE GOT WOOD !!!

It's only funny if you've got wood for sheep.

H/T: http://www.catan.com/

Re: are more out of frustration

No, it's deeper than that. I suspect most of the posters haven't quite crystalized the nagging suspicion into a thought. In fact, this one only came to me today as I was reading through the posts:

The so called "boffins" who peddle this sort of story to the press are like the IT sales guy we technicians have come to loathe. They oversell their possible breakthroughs and under-deliver on actual product. They subconsciously recognized the pattern even if they haven't expressed it. And at route the cause is the same. The sales guy is looking to pad his take home pay. The boffin is looking to fund his next round of research which also writes the checks for his take home pay. Now, there are probably lots of boffins out there who aren't doing that, but we don't hear about them because they are engaged in actual boffinry.

Re: Being slightly less cynical for a moment.

I didn't read that as cynical, I read it as a criticism of the author being lazy and not including a reference for comparison.

Cynicism comes with age. Mostly because when you get to be an old fart like me, you've heard at least one of these "breakthrough" stories each month over the last 30 years and none of them have come to fruition.

Re: When there is a clear profit to be made

There has always been a clear and substantial profit to be made in improving battery manufacturing.

Way back in the dark ages of computing (circa TRS Model 80-III) my high school chemistry teacher had just arrived from a gig in the industry. Between the weight, toxicity, and relatively poor performance of any battery, any company that could make a major breakthrough was going to make about half as much as Bill Gates (which given they actually manufacture stuff means they'd be shifting twice as much gear as he did). So they've always had really good people working on really intractable problems.

Re: You had to *Google it* ?!

In fairness, I'd search it too before posting the quote. Not because I don't know where it's from, but because memory sometimes plays tricks on us. And I wouldn't want to be doing a "Play it again Sam"* on a well known Star Wars quote.

*Correct quote is probably:

"You played it for her, you can play it for me," and "If she can stand it, I can! Play it!"

although it might be:

"Play it once, Sam, for old times' sake." After he feigns ignorance, she responds, "Play it, Sam. Play 'As Time Goes By'."

source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casablanca_%28film%29#Quotations

Re: In the end NOTHING will change...

We KNOW its out job to police the globe because every stinking time you guys get upset, you come wailing to Daddy about it. Personally I'd like to let the lot of you stew in your own juices since you never want to do the smallest thing to prevent it before it reaches catastrophic levels, but we're stuck in the stew too.

Re: all these countries spy on one and other.

except of course for the ones who can't because they don't have the means to do so.

To the extent the trade negotiations discuss spying, it will be kabuki theater to reassure everyone. They can't actually dig too deep, because they can't publicly disclose that for the first time in his life, what The Big 0 has been saying publicly is true: everybody spies on each other, even if the public proclamation is that gentleman don't read each others mail.

@Charlie Clark

You were doing so well. And then you blew all that hard work in the very last sentence.

Re: I'm confused.

I'm not.

The green case rests on the claim that by mining (including oil and gas well) carbon from out of the mantle we increase the carbon content in the troposphere which drives AWG. While you get secondary effects from cutting down too many trees it's the fossil fuels that drive it. So if you want to re-balance the carbon content you have to bury it back in the ground. Hence some of the proposals we've seen to inject the CO2 into the mantle in a sort of reverse, non-fracking drilling process (mind you, we still don't have the supply of unicorn farts to power this drilling operation, but I'll leave that aside for the moment and assume we do).

On the secondary front, trees may absorb carbon on net over lengthy periods of time, but they also produce CO2 as part of the respiration process. There seems to be a bit of debate about whether young or old trees capture more carbon for AGW braking processes. In any event it may be more of a wash than is generally admitted during the growing cycle. There is however no debate that once said tree is dead, it decays and pumps any temporarily captured carbon back into the troposphere.

@btrower

If you are ever so foolish as to run for office, let us know. If I can, I will vote for you. If I can't and it's legal for me to do so, I will send you a donation.

Re: You can't tax people higher in the UK

Sure you can.

Whether it would affect AWG is another question.

After that, whether it would be wise is yet another one.