Posts by TheOtherHobbes

Re: Satisfied customer here

The only thing wrong with Linode is that they don't advertise more.

If they did, they'd kill some of the so-called hosting companies in the UK that we've all heard of and perhaps done business with (until we got smarter.)

>I think I'd be more impressed if this was e-ink

150MPH and the full text of Pride and Prejudice on the bonnet.

That'll put the boy racers in their place.

Trrrrism is a red herring - as a proved in Iraq this week, where insurgents suddenly took over a city and everyone was surprised. (Was the NSA not listening?)

The real point of surveillance is dissident monitoring, political surveillance, and industrial espionage - just as it has been for more than a century now.

So when world + dog piled out of US-accessible cloud systems and started hardening their communications, and allies starting complaining that their calls were being monitored, the NSA's masters were not pleased.

It's debatable how successful some of these efforts have been, but they've certainly made some kinds of surveillance more difficult.

Re: Mike

>I hear the results from Saturday will be put into a paper of some sort.

It's been in the Daily Mail already.

Re: arehole

>You could force me to learn French. I was shit at it. I was certainly never going to make a living at it. So it stands to reason other people are the same with coding.

True but - the point of skool should be to find talent and develop it. You throw a bunch of basic experiences at kids and see which ones stick. You give the ones who are good at stuff extra time and training so they get really good at it. You keep a balance with the other subjects so they don't grow up with a lumpy brain where some bits are much more developed than others.

Does it work like this? Not in most state schools, because they don't have the resources for personal attention. Public schools are better at it, but they often go to the other extreme and hothouse the kids so they're good at stuff, but also insane.

Some basic coding at school for everyone is fine. No one sane (see above) expects everyone to be good at it. Some experience is enough.

What's not so fine is trying to train up a generation of coders who will lead the march into a glorious British capitalist future of economic innovation. That's moronic, because the real problems with innovation and business in the UK are social and political, and creating a generation of kids who know Python won't even come close to solving them.

It's also moronic because ten years from now coding won't look much like it does now. Twenty years from now it may well not exist in any recognisable form. Even if it does, it will be done better and cheaper in China, India and Vietnam (etc) than it is here.

But the political and social problems will remain. If Gove really wanted to make a difference he'd be teaching kids how to deal with those, instead of trying to make a generation of pliant useful little vocationally trained employees.

>Although the valuation is large, it isn't unreasonable as transportation via automobile isn't tied to fashion or in any risk of being displaced by alternative transports.

Google carbots?

And by a remarkable coincidence, wasn't Google one of the biggest investors in the previous round?

Re: Sandwich board-bearers: they missed a trick

But most of them would be complaining about Maven.

Re: Took ages to convince my parents...

>an electronic engineering degree was not a qualification for fixing Christmas tree lights.

I used to know someone who thought it was TV Repairman School.

To be fair, if people knew how IT worked on the inside - the solid state physics, the data encoding and encryption theory, the algorithm design, the metallurgy, the design psychology, the maths behind it all - they'd cower in the corner clutching their brains and screaming 'Make it stop!' over and over.

Re: Rustident Spaceniak Theoretically speaking, the article makes a perfectly....

>You mean there is a self-perpetuating insistence on victimhood.

No. Social mobility can be measured objectively. Levels of social mobility are not up for debate. They're not about opinion or story-telling about 'Someone I know...', or by throwing around emotive words like 'victim.'

It's been proven time and again that societies that are better at redistributing income are better at social mobility.

See e.g. here for a recent example: http://obs.rc.fas.harvard.edu/chetty/website/IGE/Executive%20Summary.pdf

If you want to argue against this, let's see you do some real research of equivalent quality.

Re: The new gear looks cool.

>Can't wait to see how this performs on a laptop.

The benchmarks I've seen suggest the 7600 Kaveri is comparable to an i5, with better graphics, for less money.

But it's only comparable. It's not awesomely better, and it's slower for some applications.

Re: Britain's got secrets

>They know perfectly well that the public will be incandescent when they fully realise what has been going on. They fear that.

I think you overestimate the public. Consider the number who voted for UKIP, apparently believing that a former commodities trader with a history of creative expense claims is a political novelty item.

>How on earth do Apple keep initiatives like this from leaking to the press for such a long period of time ?

Apple pretty much owns the LLVM team, which is not big anyway.

The only possible leaks would have come from the third-party game houses, and I doubt they had many people working on this.

So probably only 20-30 people were in on the secret.

It's also why Apple dumped gcc. (That and crap performance.) With LLVM as the back-end, it's easy(ish) to put a new parser on the front-end without alarming anyone loud.

Re: Going off the rails

>You kludge the application default choices and MAKE it do what you want it to do

This only takes a few days, on average.

Well worth the time.

Re: Identity Crisis

Only if it's £35.

Re: Rob me now!

>How about just walking infront of one of these things, waiting for the emergency stop and then robbing the hell out of whoever.

How about having a man with a red flag walking in front? It's the only way to make dangerous new technology safe for journalists.

Re: Sucks to be a creator

>Remember when the internet was going to get rid of the middle-men

As usual, it means you get a choice of middle man.

But I don't weep for Hachette, or any of the other big publishers. They've been screwing authors over for decades and doing less and less - i.e. nothing - for anyone who isn't a million-seller.

Amazon's 70% deal is very generous in comparison. At least Amazon track sales accurately and pay monthly - which is much better treatment than most authors get from the big pubs.

Will 70:30 become 50:50 in the future? Maybe. Even if it does it's still better than the ~10% of net authors get on a typical publishing contract, or the 25% of net they get on ebook sales, if they're lucky.

"Let the marketing flow through you. Good. Good! A ha hah ha!"

Re: How would you like to pay for your meal Sir?

>Or would Sir prefer yesterday's free leftovers??

It's Win 8.1, so the actual answer is that MS plants an aggressive knee in your groin every time you try to send an email or do a web search, while laughing manically like that bloke with the axe in The Shining.

Re: Translation

If you bothered to check how (e.g.) SETI@home is funded you'd discover that it receives a grant from NASA.

No one of clue doubts that NASA would love to have SETI back under its own roof, just as it did before Congress and that idiot Proxmire forced it to outsource the research back in the 80s.

Re: Couple of other things that help...

That just proves the point - they're exceptions, not rules.

There are a few in the US too. There's even a standard legal form of incorporation which includes social benefits.

But are they usual - no they're not.

And they could be - to (almost) everyone's direct benefit.

Re: "Surface ***3***. i.e. this is our 3rd attempt after 2 dismal failures"

>Should I continue?

No one cares.

Apple's failures are irrelevant to the failure of the Surface - which is a failure because it does absolutely nothing new or interesting in a market already crowded with form factors of all kinds, all of which score higher on affordability, desirability, and/or innovation.

The real problem continues to be Microsoft's inability to understand what customers want or to make stuff that appears cool.

'Hey look we made a small thin computer thingy' is not an interesting USP in 2014.

It'll never take off.

Re: Where have I heard all this before?

>We define innovation as the novel way of combining multiple, extant, inventions, or parts thereof, in such way that the assembly becomes something greater than the sum of its parts.

How do we define 'silly management fad'?

Who's going to be surprised when someone invents the 'on-site cloud' - fast, commercially secure full-stack locally hosted hardware with a third-party SLA and built-in redundancy for scaling - about 30 seconds ago?

Re: So it's not just me?

Thing is, it's not even a proper cloud service - it's just a crappy authentication server.

But they borked the db and built the system with no fall-back.

With hilarious consequences.

Re: Does anyone else invent their own words for t'theme?

Should have started shooting on May the 4th.

Re: After reading this article I have only two questions:

>I'd expect to read something like this at Heritage or CATO or maybe even National Review.

Er - that is the real Tim Worstall. 'Senior Fellow at the Adam Smith Institute' it says here. 'I quite like Cato' it also says here.

Why on earth the Reg keeps pushing neocon nutter politics while pretending it's giving everyone an education is something best left as an exercise for the reader.

As for what Adam Smith actually said, it looks like this:

"The subjects of every state ought to contribute towards the support of the government, as nearly as possible, in proportion to their respective abilities; that is, in proportion to the revenue which they respectively enjoy under the protection of the state."

And:

"It is not very unreasonable that the rich should contribute to the public expense, not only in proportion to their revenue, but something more than in that proportion"

But don't ask the Adam Smith Institute about that, because they'll deny he meant it and stick fingers in their ears singing lalalala.

Re: Absolute and total bollocks

> "Lots to do, but assuming this merger is completed, it'll be a fantastic platform for growth and job creation."

>How, exactly?

For Dixphone Carthorse manudjment.

Re: The Spiral of Deaaaath!

>because it is computing things for numbers between zero and infinity, no amount of memory will be enough.

Should have used functional programming with lazy evaluation.

"I'm sorry we don't keep track of program state, so we don't actually know where the planes are. But we can prove the code is formally sound."

Re: Who?

>in my experience a significant proportion of gays look obviously weird

Especially the family-values preacher types, eh?

Re: Zero compression

>Zero compression

>Nice

But very, very unlikely. Vinyl doesn't have the dynamic range to play bass and kick drum at a decent level without compression.

Re: If it's really 2015 we're stuffed no matter what happens...

>Renewables are secure, in that we aren't beholden to other countries, but they aren't reliable because they can't be despatched (scheduled to run on demand), and when they do run you can't store the power, meaning that they destabilise the grid and the market.

Er - actually you can.

What you can't do in the UK is build sustainable storage. Because markets. And drip-feed levels of investment, maintained for decades, as a tiny, tiny fraction of the tax breaks and investment benefits given to Dirty Energy.

And because of industry bigots who don't want anything to do with that hippy shit.

Meanwhile countries like Germany - not exactly in the tropics - are finding that renewables are beating all expectations, and decent mixed mode schemes, combined with efficiency improvements, smart grids, and storage, mean blackouts are as unnecessary as fracking.

Were your colleagues the same ones who decided to reduce the UK's gas storage to the lowest percentage of demand of any European economy (except Belgium?)

Were they the ones who pissed away the money from North Sea oil on gambling instead of using it to expand the UK's energy infrastructure?

Are you counting the millions in fines clocked up the enercos over the last decade - imposed by a largely toothless regulator, no less - in your hand-wringing about the dreadful costs of green energy?

How about the cost of the free market tax? Even Newbwerry and Pollitt (1997), which is trotted out regularly as proof of the success of privatisation, admits that most of the benefits were a direct result of two cancelled power station projects, and without them electricity for residential consumers became more expensive - a trend which has continued, to no one's surprise. (Except yours, I guess.)

Re: We could be in a simulation

>You, and everything else, might be simulated, but I know my thoughts are not.

That's what they want you to think.

Re: Right.

>the iSafaribook - although, of course, it will need a different name.

Like iPad, maybe?

It's kind of okay on a phone. Small screen. White space. Not so bad.

White space on a big screen - not so good. Need shades, ibuprofen, and regular days off.

At least it would be warmer.

That's 2MB of driver and 120MB of happy smiling crapware.

Re: surely

Am I the only one wondering why F&M's mydotlondon.com is not a .london domain?

>Everything that's not critical or valuable is connected already and the things that are critical and valuable shouldn't be connected anyway.

IoT is basically an O'Reilly hypegasm, created in a bid to be relevant.

The last time that happened OR gave us Web 2.0. And we know how that worked out.

If you look on OR Radar, you'll see lots of 'innovative examples' which are just plain moronic. Things like ovens that know when you put a chicken in them - because no one ever puts vegetables in to bake with a chicken, and RFID chips taste yummy.

And washing machines that know when you put your jeans in. Which would be great if they could also decide if your new black 501s should take precedence over your girlfriend's Very White Top in the same load - before war breaks out.

It's like reading a Disney World of Tomorrow thing from the 1950s. ("Creating Innovation for the Suburban Family of the Future")

I'm still waiting for an IoT application that's cheap, useful, and exciting. I suspect I may have to wait a while.

(It's probably not impossible. IoT just smells of WAP, and other technologies that were a solution in search of a thing that needed a different solution.)

Re: "He likes pizza and R&D. Presumably not together"

>Why the hell not, pizza and late-night R&D go together like nerds and over-earnest opinions on operating systems.

But Elop and R&D go together like Max Clifford and...

Er, I can't finish that sentence on this site, can I?

Re: Eh?

I think he meant buying it wrong.