Posts by Dazed and Confused 2390 publicly visible posts • joined 12 Sep 2007
Of course, the real answer, as any Millennial can tell you, is the best office phone is no phone, you should be using IM (or email for this old fogey) instead.
While "chat" is great for some things, its a really crap replacement for talking to people. The problem with chat is there is no natural synchronisation between the parties, making the conversation slow and stilted. When you talk to someone, they hear what you are saying as you say it. The words are often only a small part of what is being communicated you pick up on many nuances from the way they speak. Adding the occasional smiley doesn't provide the same experience, besides smilies are fully under the control of the typist (give or take the normal shit quality of peoples typing in chat session) while the way that emotions affect peoples voice gives a much truer indication of what they are feeling.
Of course talking on the phone isn't as rich an experience as talking face to face.
A great many NAT systems don't provide that sort of logging and the logs would be horrendous in volume anyway. Each socket you open would need to be separately logged. Then there would be the issue of stacked NAT. You'd need to correlate the logs of each level to get a fix.
So are they going to enact legislation that bans NAT systems that don't automatically log each translation?
I run quite a few connections where we stick a Linux box at the front end and it'll do all the NAT you want, but adding a couple of lines to your iptables config ain't going produce logs of what packets originate from which of your internal addresses. Then there is the matter of identifying the internal addresses. My youngest managed to find out how to change the MAC address on his phone at the age of ten, in a vain attempt to get around his "bedtime WiFi blocking" (hopefully he's not reading this) but if he'd chosen to spoof to the MAC address of another device in the house he'd have probably succeeded.
I'm afraid the boy Clegg hasn't got a clue about what he's talking about. He's in the normal politician's state of mind where he is only hearing what he wants to hear. Add to that the fact he's surrounded by people who only get paid if they tell him what he wants to hear and we end up at the mess they usually leave us in.
I disagree slightly in that VPN may well be 'virtual' - but they increasingly fail to be 'private' as the ease of snooping the data using multipurpose 'special' PKI certificates
You're telling me that Enterprises can watch what's happening inside an SSH link?
I think a lot of people might like to have a little chat with you.
OK, the finger print reader on my laptop is probably shit, but it stopped working when I decided to undo a nut and bolt on my car by hand, thus scratching the end of my finger tips. I wonder how good their finger print readers are when instead of dealing with someone with a "desk job" instead they have to deal with someone who does real manual labour?
Of course the planning will be done by some Whitehall mandarin who's never got his hands dirty, but what about the real world?
The solution is to fix the patent system.
I agree completely, but this is even less likely to happen.
I hadn't meant to imply that you'd have to give free cross licensing, but that if company A owns a standards essential patent and company B owns some minor look and feel patent, that as part of company B gaining access to A's SEP company B must agree to license their patents used in the same product back to company A. So you can't have a situation where A is forced to license their work to B, but B can stop A from producing products that compete with B. My aim was that the owner of the SEP shouldn't be disadvantaged in the negotiation over licenses agreements as their work is considered essential.
The EU statement was that the need for competition trumps the right of return on investment of the owner of SEP. But this creates a very one sided playing field. Using this the owner of non SEP have a free hand to attack the owner of the SEP while the owner of the SEP can't attack back.
I guess all new standards which include FRAND terms will stipulate as part of the agreement any licensee must agree to cross license non SEP to stop the nonsense where companies that invent things can be forced to license their efforts to others, but then blocked from producing the products they're responsible for inventing.
I hadn't come across that, I guess its only for W8, some that's several million points against it to start with. Only seems to support a very limited number of devices which don't include any SSDs (is this the 21st century?). Microsoft have been so dead set against USB boot for years. It also looks like you need to own a Windows licenses for the any PC you want to run it on, although I'll admit I don't understand what the licensing rules are telling me, does the PC already need to licensed to run W8? In which case it isn't really very portable because no one runs W8.
I guess its a small step in the right direction, but they've taken long enough to get there. Knoppix has been providing live images of Linux for 13 years.
Maybe it would be easier to put the Windows into a VM in a Linux Live image.
As the user of a mobile workstation, most of the time its stuck in a docking station on my desk and hooked up to a 24" screen, but I do need to be able to take it with me when I'm not at home/office. The idea of a box like this appeals. If it could be a tablet when I'm just wanting to gaze at the Interweb or read emails etc. Then be able to use it as a real laptop when I need to type more than a few lines, and to be able to use it with a real screen, or preferably 2 real screens when I'm at base, but to be able to take my environment and data all with me where ever I go. This sounds great.
In practice though, I wonder how compromised it will be. It sounds heavy. The screen is the pathetic HD (lol) spec.
Perhaps if I could have a Window's live image, like any decent Linux distro can do, then I wouldn't need to worry about a flexible piece of HW. I could just have my little "SSD cartridge" perhaps 4"x2"x0.3" and weighing in at maybe 2or3 oz and I could then just easily switch between different dedicated bits of HW without the inevitable compromises. Just plug in where ever you go and run your own "home" environment.
Sadly it ain't going to happen, so something like this might be the best the world will offer.
But they aren't too difficult to find on eBay, for about 0.1% of the value suggested for this Apple.
One day I'll add one to my HP41CX and HP85. One day I might even find the time to play with those.
(OK, I'll admit it, I'm a sad git, but I owe the life I've lived to the HP85)
MY high school chemistry teacher showed us the thermite reaction.
How do you think he set fire to the fume cupboard.
No1 son was jutted when he heard that when I went to school the termite reaction was done live in the classroom. These days they're boring and watch a video, and they could find far more interesting videos on YouTube.
Who claimed to have blown the windows out of the science lab in his previous school.
In my lessons he managed to set fire to the top of the fume cupboard.
And there was the wonderful "OH SHIT THAT'S THE WRONG COLOUR" incident when dropping a piece from the bottle marked Sodium into the beaker of water. Lilac is such a lovely colour and no one died when it part of the experiment exploded several feet above the desk.
A) I never said that I approved of what they were doing, I just said that MPs write the rules, that is what they are paid to do. While company officials maximize profits, that is what they are paid to do.
B) "They are using trickery" No, they are playing by the rules, Saying they are using trickery is bit like saying using the Motorway to drive from London to Manchester at 70MPH is using trickery to avoid the 30MPH limit.
What you call tricks are things that the MP's, or the predecessors, have written into the law.
I'm all for these companies coughing up a reasonable amount of tax, but you can't blame someone for playing by the rules of they didn't write. If the lazy bastards want someone to blame they should look closer to home.
These MPs seem to be suffering, as so often, from a basic misunderstanding of the roles of those involved in this little charade.
On one side we have the MPs. There job is to write the laws which govern how much tax people and companies pay.
One the other side we have the representative of a public quoted company. Their job is to maximise the profits for their share holder (our pension funds) whilst playing by the rules the MPs write.
If the MPs don't feel that a company is paying enough tax then they should pass any evidence of wrong doing to the relevant authorities with a view to those authorities pressing charges for law breaking. Or if the MPs don't feel they are in a position to suggest illegality and yet still feel that Google aren't paying enough tax then they are simply standing there shouting at the top of their collective voices
"Hey Look Everyone, We're useless incompetents, we've not written good enough laws"
So guys, which is it to be?
When I used to work in chip research we were baking them on 3" diameter wafers of Sapphire back in the early 80s. SOS had some significant advantages if you're concerned with making stuff rad hard, silicon is for softies who live on the ground.
I thought the production side of the business was using bigger wafers even back then.
Typing Silicon on Sapphire into Google shows an ad at the top for 300mm wafers! So they could already make iPod/any chosen brand of fondle slab screens if anyone cared enough to try.
I remember finding a whole load of old 2" wafers in the back of an old cupboard and one of the managers taking them with the intention of making the world most bling lamp shade.
That there is no information on the contract as to what you will actually get. It just has a T-Mobile product name. So if they sell you one thing in the shop and you then find out your bills are massively bigger than you had agreed with the sales person it is very difficult to get T-Mobile to do anything about it. Even if the sales person in the shop remembers you and remembers checking with the then store manager that the contract you are signing gives you the deal you are expecting.
Still the fight goes on.
Now why doesn't either T-Mobile of EE's customer service departmental have an email address! Don't they want to join the 20th century yet? Let alone the 21st century.
> "how loud is the bass?"
My son is extremely "badge concious" and decided he wanted to blow nearly all the money he'd got for his birthday on a pair of Beat's headphones, about £220 quid was the cheapest we could find them.
They just seemed to crank up the base beyond all recognition. They might by optimised for the sort of music he's into but with my taste in music the base was just so distorted it was unlistenable to. With plucked double bass in Jazz they were horrible some other stuff was so bad it was almost funny.
I think the "how loud is the bass" think only works if its actually capable of making the sounds its trying to make. I found that faced with some heavy bass sounds they just rolled over and gave up.
He took them back yesterday having finally decided that image perhaps wasn't everything.
Generally MP3 is shit even to 50 year old ears, but it is really convenient. Audiophile quality Deutsche Grammophon vinyl records played through the sort of gear I never had sounded out of this world, but they were hardly the easiest way to listen to things.
I'm not sure that the iDevices would need to worry about VFAT, this is just a theory, but my tiny limit experience is that they don't show up as a "disk" when connected to Windows. The real killer that hits everyone else is the usage of removable memory. Owners expect to be able to remove the SD cards from their phones and just plug them into any old standard PC (which means Windows in practice). Therefore the format on the SD card needs to be something that Windows is able to read.
iDevices don't have removable storage. So no need to support FAT there.
iDevices don't show up as disks when plugged into a standard PC. So, again, not need to support FAT there.
Of course for the users that means no cheap memory expansion and means they need to run SW such as iTunes, but it should mean there was no need to ever go near FAT and MicroSoft lawyers which follow it around.
I thought the one bit that had raised its head above the parapet was the handling of long filenames.
Since this comes down to an interoperability feature, perhaps someone should try and get this added to the EU stuff forcing them to publish the APIs on the network to allow interoperability. Seems daft that they're forced to allow interoperability on network access to files but not on microSD cards.
But generally demanding money for unspecified lists of patents should be accounted as demanding money with menaces.
> Samsung may not be bothered about a massive legal fight
Since M$ is desperate for Samsung to make Winphones, any move to extract $ from them on the Android side of the house would almost certainly result in twice that figure being demanded as inducement to smooth the winmobes through the factory.
When's a monopoly a monopoly?
Google's share of the mobile business has gone from zippo to significant in the time its taken for Nokia to slip from world domination to also ran.
They'll hardly get the other mega power in the smartphone game to claim Android is a monopoly will they, neither will the other player want to see any definition of a monopoly less than 110% be seen in the legal world, less they fall foul of it themselves.
As to getting suppliers to use their services, well its hard to compete with free.
If Microsoft want phone vendors to use their services they could always try giving Windows away for zilch, but then hell would free over before that eventuality.
> And arm, and a leg, and the other leg and the other arm.
Guess that's what you're measuring as the price. $/GB I'm sure they're scary, $/IOPs they might be quite cheap.
Does the bigger advance in random write IOPs suggest these are heavily cache skewed figures?
Do they give any idea of the native IO transaction rate, just in case your IO pattern doesn't match theirs? Especially for usage cases with little reuse and data set sizes over the cache size?
Either that or we're both Nazis.
I told the kids as soon as they could understand a word I was saying that I was wicked and cruel and mean and nasty. I thought it would save time later when they wanted to shout at me.
iptables and cron, precisely. All Internet connections should be looked after like this.
OK, I've not been interested in online gaming for nigh on 25 years, but 99% up time is shit in a world where you need reactions. Even 25 years back I was killed seconds before I'd expected to achieve wizard ranking on a complex MUD, months of effort down the plug whole thanks to a sudden burst of latency at a crucial moment. Pooooooooof you're history those points are gone.
Back then online games were textual and you typed in your commands, so rarely split second stuff. But you still needed to be able to react.
Today's games don't seem to be like that. Watching the kids playing, many of the games they play online are split second reaction time jobbies. Even in an always connected world networks just aren't that good. I don't suppose these people have separate Internet connections of each of their devices, or that they run some sort of incredible QoS on the line to ensure the best latencies. So what happens when a big email comes in, or more likely when a big email goes out of your asymmetric line? What happens when the other people who live in your house start watching iPlayer, or surfing for pron?
Leaving alone when bastard parents like me, have cron jobs which cut all the kids network connections at set time of day.
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