Posts by P. Lee 5267 publicly visible posts • joined 4 Dec 2007
Put your TV out on the kerb for all to see and yes, people might watch it and it would be difficult to charge for it. If they deprive you of it, then they would be in trouble.
A brutal question would be whether we are a net importer or net exporter of such items.
I'm getting some popcorn and waiting for someone to reskin Windows and strip the titles from a Hollywood film.
You forget that there is nothing so disastrous in marketing as a fantastic product which so satisfies the customer they they never come back and buy again.
The music industry knows what its doing when it makes products it knows you'll get bored with shortly after buying.
I have to agree with Vlad on this one.
The tunes are often there mostly to support the drums.
The strong beat, single-level, high-volume (encouraged) and almost exact repetition seem designed to disengage the brain. It appears to be the audio equivalent of alcohol - numb the senses and blot out thought.
While classical music uses repetition, its (usually) done with enough variation on the theme that the change stimulates the brain into registering and engaging with the alterations found through the piece.
> Choosing ARM fixes those.
Yes, but not the need for speed.
How about ARM and x86 on the same silicon, both running dalvik with some power management, freeze/thaw code and a very high-speed virtual network between them to allow process migration?
I think I might go for that kind of convertible.
> IMHO the patents would not withstand a legal challenge, perhaps a good reason why MS have tried to keep specific details away from the public where it would face broader analysis and discussion.
Even more likely, "You sign a patent license deal and we will sweeten the xbox contract."
The aim is to to set precedents.for licensing and to keep alive the illusion of risk associated with android.
Mostly the problem is typing, so you could have a small-phone-sized on-screen keyboard which can be bound to an edge/corner of the screen.
Then you can then use just your thumb for typing and most of the problems of over-size phones go away.
The usual problem is rubbish keyboards which span the whole of the bottom of the screen.
Pat pend. ;)
An obvious PR stunt perhaps, but that doesn't mean that it isn't useful to more than just mozilla.
If criminals want to use SSL they can generate their own, non-snoopable certs. "Lawful interception" with or without TeliaSonera won't get you the cleartext for that. Indeed, most corporates do that internally because they can't be bothered to pay for certs.
The interception comes in where people are accessing "public" infrastructure, such as gmail, banks etc and the government wants to do man-in-the-middle spoofing. The hardened criminal will so sensible things like deleting all root certs and making an exception for that service from a "safe" net connection. However, as a general "let's snoop on the populace" tactic, skeleton root keys come into their own.
The problem is that TS is setting itself up selling security systems to keep things secret. If it then goes around selling imitation vaults, it can hardly expect vault users not to kick up a fuss.
That's rather the point.
Hopefully, when you've completed the work, you have a good understanding (or at least memory) of the material.
Interleaving is key. It gives time for the students to catch up and have a bit of a think about what they are looking at.
Education is about learning knowledge, skills and thought processes. Computers are used to remove the need for most of that.
Writing on a bit of paper provides the chance to scribble notes, scrawl arrows, underline and so on. Yes a computer can do all that, but not as quickly and rarely in such a free-form manner. Typing is generally faster, but typing is about presentation, not learning.
Not everyone holds cc or healthcare data, and the cloud isn't the be-all and end-all of computing, so that's a relief!
Actually, I'm not sure why you'd hold healthcare data in a flexi-cloud. If you don't know target data size in those markets, you've got bigger problems than governance!
>Of course, that's exactly what they would say, while they're quietly buying up an island in the pacific and installing their top secret "research facility / safari park" before anyone notices...
Somewhere near where they had the radiation leak in Japan. That would make sure no tourists accidentally landed there.
Also missing was the other article in the same publication: "A paradox in the evolution of primate vocal learning."
I only read the summary, but my understanding from elsewhere is that humans can't develop language if they aren't exposed to complex language. Its a bit of a chicken and egg situation. I think there's also a bit of a time limit to learn to speak "in the wild." 10 years IIRC.
I'm also a bit suspicious of the "evolution" tag. I'm not sure that Invoking The Holy Word That May Never Be Denied makes your research valid.
Not sure why you were down-voted.
MS' problem is that ARM is far less capable so they can't price at full-fat x86, but neither do they want to cannibalise Office and Windows x86 revenue by making ARM Office cheap.
My guess is that Office/x86 will eventually come with an 365 license bundled so that non-x86 Office can be priced to be recoup the lack of revenue without offending too many customers. i.e. Android/linux offers no price advantage so you may as well buy desktop windows. Non-Windows versions will also be feature-incomplete, as Mac Office is now.
Its a difficult line to walk. MS don't want to be caught out missing the boat as they did with the internet and mobile, but being too good at cross platform will destroy their own ecosystem. They need to be good enough to prevent people from jumping ship, but rubbish enough to steer people back to full fat windows. Full-fat windows currently means x86, but there isn't a reason why they shouldn't do ARM too, when that's fast enough. What they don't want is to provide full fat Windows/Office RT on ARM at a cheap price and then find that someone is selling an RT device with a pluggable (server/desktop) CPU, keyboard, mouse, external screen and a couple of gigabit ethernet ports. Windows RT licensing on a pumped-up Calxeda anyone?
The two-year wait is just fine with MS. A bit of uncertainty and doubt but close enough to be included in strategic plans. Stall a bit until the RT tech sorts itself out and they see if server ARM begets desktop ARM.
Long video cables are useful. Most video extenders are very limited in resolution. You could run one cable to your TV from your PC in another room and have a virtual "PC under the TV". It's silent with no-compromise on performance. The cable might be expensive, but not as much as a separate media server.
It makes sort-of-remote terminals with proper graphics possible. One PC can service a whole workgroup or house with full-speed video. Multi-seat PC's become a reasonable proposition, especially as multi-core CPU's become the norm, lowering latency problems. Again, you don't have to consider compromises, which makes the idea saleable.
The tech might also make it possible to expand clusters. Where two servers of the same sort are talking to each other, linking them directly rather than buying four 10Gb/s for the servers and four 10Gb/s ports on a switch might be rather attractive. The obvious application I would see is state-sync for clusters where speed is preferred over general connectivity options.
As has been mentioned, SAN is a nice option too. With these speeds, booting off a network SSD could be available to consumers and provide a boost without having to resort to a 20-disk RAID 5 system.
Proper external graphics cards might come into play. I don't think the current ones have particularly good performance (IIRC).
My ipod touch doesn't run the latest OS and apps which used to work on it no longer do I feel not just unsupported, but a bit angry that features have been removed. My wifes iphone 3gs has similar issues - it doesn't run the latest version of iOS and apps which used to work now just die when launched. Her iphone needs replacing because it has slowed down to the point of being irritating - it often takes 30 seconds to recognise a keypress. It would be nice if Apple would fix it, but I'm pretty sure they won't. W8 won't run on the same hardware Windows 3.1 ran on and Linus is busy clearing out i386 code. OSX itself doesn't run on a Mac Classic.
All things end up unsupported eventually, but claiming a device is obsolete instantly is silly because it is rarely accurate and the statement is designed to be misleading. Not being the latest version doesn't mean it isn't useful for its intended purpose. My galaxy S/gingerbread phone won't be upgraded unless it breaks or I really need it to have a feature it doesn't have. I don't change my phone to have a particular OS. Both the OS and the sum total of applications available for it are only vaguely related to the functions I use it for.
I've recently given my kids an old mobile dumbphone, no 3g or colour, never mind touchscreen. Its fine for what it I (they) need it for. You might call it obsolete, but that doesn't make it inadequate.
Not convinced.
Google's assertion is that cross-licensing deals can't be made with trolls. I'd humble suggest that cross-licensing based on MAD is an unfair game favouring the bog boys. It generally protects crucial items and as such generally non-crucial filers don't get to play.
Since a patent is government-provided monopoly, how about a percentage of patent fees going back to a "patent invalidation office" which checks to see if patents really are being awarded properly - a kind of inquisitorial system looking at the post prolific filers, standards-included rights and checking rights assigned to NPE's to see if the system is being abused?
> we the public have to also take responsibility for creating the situation that made cheap money becme a necessity.
I'm not sure the cause and effect is the right way around. Without the cheap credit, the demand would not have been there.
You should save first and then purchase. However, savers could never keep pace with the rising house prices fueled by cheap credit. It comes back to greedy banks (as we would expect them to be) and politicians who failed to regulate the credit market as they should have.
Worse was the structure of the mortgage market. The divorce between sales commission and risk was made even worse by the sale of debt and insurance against non-payment loss available to the lender.
The house-price bubble was always going to burst. It rose so high based on the current generation already having houses so rises is prices didn't actually impact them. When the next generation comes through, they have nothing like the purchasing power because they have no pre-existing assets, they can't afford to buy (or rent), demand drops and prices crash.
What the government should be doing is taking advantage of the crash and clamping down on credit. It will hurt, house prices won't recover, but it will free the next generation from crushing debt and the country will become a cheap place to live. It might even be cheap enough to actually manufacture things in the UK again!
> And playing is not a compulsory activity.
Something the producers haven't tumbled to. Professional managers treat all goods and services alike, but they are not. If a game is unpleasant to use, people will drop it faster than a hot potato, because potatoes are needed for nourishment.
I have a small collection of (free) android apps. They were updating on their own. Now I have all updates switched off because it annoys me that some of them have cost me money by waiting until I was on 3g before updating themselves (3 of them together) despite having been on wireless for hours. I've also got rather ruthless about deleting everything I'm not currently using. Even free does not outweigh a bad customer experience.
but if you ran the code locally rather than just having an interface to the game, you could run a hacked version on your own.
I'm going to track down the owners of all those 80's games, run them on an android emulator box for under the telly and sell bluetooth joystick controllers.
No, I want to do things.
I don't want to know what's on my friends' minds and they don't want to know what I'm up to.
I might want to call (operation) a friend (object), but I don't browse a list of people and then decide what to do with them.
That's facebook's model (designed for a large PC screen) and if its MS' phone's model too they can keep their phone.
I also didn't see much analysis of the option that the well-developed shark-fishing techniques in the 1800's may have caught the odd rare dusky which had strayed well outside its normal habitat.
Considering the complete lack of evidence for the quantity of "extinct" sharks in the sea around the islands and the complete lack of evidence of fishing technique for/impact on different species, the leap to "we killed them all with industrial activities" seems a little premature. Trendy, perhaps even likely, but premature. I note that overfishing in the 1800's by the islanders doesn't appear to be considered as an option.
While the original article was more circumspect than el reg's version, there was still far too much certainty of interpretation given the very large holes in what is known.
Unfortunately, this appears to be a common problem in what is often labelled "science." It is certainly research, but it would be generous to even call it "forensic science." It is a survey with some educated-guesswork.
Don't get me wrong, I'm no fan of industrial-scale fish-harvesting, but I don't think the conservation cause is helped by shouting about overly-simplistic and thinly-evidenced studies.
"It ain't what you don't know what gets you into trouble, its what you know for sure that ain't so."
> Apple only wants to prolong them
Here's the point that pretty much all commentards are missing: Apple knows that most of these patents are worthless. However, they do want to send a message: if you compete with us, you'll to compete with our product in the marketplace, but you'll also need to compete with our legal team supported by an enormous cash pile and frivolous patents covering everything imaginable. Samsung may win, but all you small fry don't have a chance, so you may as well not bother trying.
Its like rhino poachers killing rhinos which have been de-horned. The message is that de-horning doesn't protect the rhino, so there's no point doing it.
The comment was badly put, but when someone says their ipad is more reliable than their kitchen appliances, I begin to roll my eyes and wonder about the speakers credentials. I haven't had a service failure from my tumble dryer since purchase, over 10 years ago. Given the relative youth of the ipad, I begin to think that the windows expert must be rather young and/or inexperienced. Then I generalise the experience, including all the other windows support staff I've met and come up with a correlation (not causation)-inspired generalisation that windows people are not really enterprise-ready. In contrast, *nix people I've met tend to be to work on enterprise and carrier-class systems, but not even carrier-class systems run for that long without needing attention.
It isn't necessarily a reflection on the author himself who may have just had a bad-example day, or been unlucky with his white goods, but when you speak publicly, your speech reflects on "your kind" of people. Identifying himself as a windows person, associates him with other windows people and other windows people with him. Tarred with the same brush, rightly or wrongly. It isn't fair, but generalisation is how we deal large numbers of things.
So true... and yet so irrelevant.
ipv6 is the right way to go for these things. We aren't talking data centres, we are talking light bulbs for home automation hobbyists - probably the same whiny people who are programming their hobby boards.
Yes, one wrong firewall rule gives evil hackers access to your... lightbulbs. As does downloading one wrong "ahem" codec. NAT and firewall rules aren't going to save you from your own stupidity with upnp.
IPv6 is correct for the application (and for ISP-provided voip too) because they have limited need to talk to ipv4 networks. Unlike systems in data centres. IPv4 would certainty suffice, but you probably reduce your risk profile by dropping off the ipv4 internet.
I know, replying to myself is bad form but just to clarify, I don't want to hold onto the freedom to hate because I'm nursing some pet hates, but because:
(a) I just don't trust anyone else (government or newspapers) to exercise that freedom on my behalf.
(b) the policing mechanisms involved in individuals not having those freedoms are (IMHO) unacceptable.
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