* Posts by P. Lee

5267 publicly visible posts • joined 4 Dec 2007

PC-makers hope for Windows 8 hero to sweep up sales

P. Lee
FAIL

Win8 Too little, too soon

At least for the desktop. Win7 is still running in many places and for those, (lagging) places, a new UI is not a feature, its a bug.

For those which have done the migration, doing another one probably isn't on the cards.

Where Win8 will go ahead is on consumer OEM PCs (no options given) and probably in servers where moving the GUI out of the kernel is a plus. However, companies which like that are probably either *nix already and just moving windows platforms - no hurry or much profit there.

The other place is the laptop-cum-tablet combination for home use. Requirements are simple and you save buying an extra (expensive) screen & battery. I suspect MS will put "co-marketing" funds into this to prevent the same hardware designs appearing with android.

Mostly business use involves clicking a a few desktop icons, one for each app. Employees are generally discouraged from using OS features.

The problem with the PC market is not the OS, its the lack of hardware innovation. Why does the best PC thing in recent years (thunderbolt/lightpeak) have to come from the most closed company? We want more connectvity and more availabilty. Faster CPUs and higher core counts only go so far. I've noticed recently that dual-gig ethernet seems to be disappearing from desktop boards. Bzzt, there goes AoE, decent iscsi at home etc.

Personally I'm mad at intel. I've got a socket 775 mobo. Since then, we've had 1366, 1156, 1155 and 2011, but a top end 775 CPU (Quad-9650) is about the same as a good i5, upper-middle i7 and costs the same (if you can get it). So much change, so little benefit. You might think it was all for the benefit of the chipset makers to prevent pure CPU upgrades.

Win8 won't save the pc market. The PC market just got boring. Look at all the identical PCs - that's the problem, no innovation. Has anyone seen a PC with an extra ultra-low-power core for when not much is going on? If anyone can find a high-power graphics card which can sleep while the PC is on, please let me know. I don't mean just put the screen to sleep, I mean turn off that loud fan on the GPU so I can sleep while downloads continue or while my wife streams video from it to her tablet.

France's biggest Apple reseller sinks: 'Tech titan crushed us'

P. Lee
Angel

Re: Bring on the clones!

er, you mean Gigabyte?

Microsoft crowd-sources next Win Phone apps using Android

P. Lee
Go

Re: No... what _does_ Microsoft bring to the party?

Sometimes what you want is simple and you can't find an app.

For example, I'd like to disconnect bluetooth from my car when I arrive home. At the moment, my car is so close to the kitchen that if I forget to manually disconnect, my phone rings in the car, which I can't hear. So that's a very specific WIFI network to look for and a very specific BT disconnect.

There probably is a simple way which I should look into, but perhaps this will encourage non-tcl users to play with their phone. A floss equivilent would certainly be handy on all those raspberry pies.

P. Lee
Thumb Up

Lots of good uses for this.

Cool and open source equivilent available in 3, 2...

Transit of Venus, live-ish from Australia

P. Lee
Coat

Cloud computing

I've had customers try using "the cloud" from Oz.

Mostly failed due to latency.

And if you had cloud cover, you, er, wouldn't be able to see the sun...

I know. Gone.

Is the Store Once Catalyst/B6200 8-node cluster a single system?

P. Lee
Trollface

Re: No - it's a federation of two-node clusters with hundreds of dedupe domains

But is global dedupe inherently useful?

Do you want to check your HR policy documents against your accounts receivable data? You might pick up some speed increases by not doing that.

As data volumes increase, so does the benefit from applying intelligence rather than mass-processing.

It will probably depend on your own particular circumstances as to whether you want to use machine time or human time.

How to give your applications a long and happy life

P. Lee
Holmes

How to give your applications a long and happy life

Make sure it does what it needs to do and does it well

When it is no longer needed, it will be discarded. That is the right thing.

Dual-screen, detachable and Windows 8 star at Computex

P. Lee
FAIL

Asus Transformer Book

So close, yet so far with a Windows tablet...

HP doubles down with dedupe speed record

P. Lee
Coat

Dedupe the answer to the wrong problem?

Where are the billions spent on not pointlessly replicating data to start with?

Have we given up on data normalisation and the correct use of caching?

I know, not a real-world question, but I get antsy when someone says, "buy a server" and then "buy this to fix the problems from incorrect use of the server."

Motorola adds THIRD SIM to Qwerty handset

P. Lee

or different plans from the same vendor

2 SIMs are easy (work and personal) but you might want another one for 3g especially if you are serving wifi to your laptop form your phone.

Often the low-end voice plans have rubbish data limits - pop in an ipad data plan and off you go.

Ultrabooks: objects of desire but just too darn expensive

P. Lee
Holmes

Re: should have bought a mac...

but probably only true if you run osx and if you are using it for the home.

ilife is good value, pages, numbers usually adequate for a scenario where compatability isn't required and NeoOffice will do fine as well. Apple has OSX and ilife as value-add to their shiney. Ultrabooks are just shiney with limited hardware, meh graphics and same-old same-old software.

Also, Intel chips appear to command a premium. AMD may not be as fast at the top end but are excellent value for money and is more than good enough for most people. Thunderbolt is a great improvement, but I'm surprised noone has really done full external PCIe x16 in a docking station for laptops to allow full-blown graphics cards. I'm happy to leave my gaming graphics at home most of the time, but I do want them and I'd rather not pay for a desktop and a laptop.

I think intel has got a bit fat and lazy with AMD not really challenging for the top end. Putting a thin pc in an aluminium case is nice but it isn't innovation, its branding. I want a pc in three parts - touchscreen with ARM tablet, laptop base unit/keyboard with fast x86 cpu and a docking station with fast graphics and an ARM server.

Strong ARM: The Acorn Archimedes is 25

P. Lee
Childcatcher

Re: As an Acorn fan girl...

> try still remembering 6502 instruction codes in hex!

Haha! Those were the days.

Who didn't enjoy hooking the reset key on an apple ][ to move an image onto the graphics page and display it?

At least for my A-level exams they had the decency to base questions on assembly. I know - they were soft on us!

BSkyB blocks The Pirate Bay for millions of Brits

P. Lee
Pirate

may I be the first to laugh?

hahaha

Vyclone

P. Lee
Coat

I'm crushed!

I really wanted to post a reference to http://xkcd.com/937/

Ah, done it anyway! :D

Sony PlayStation 4 will not be download only

P. Lee
Coat

Re: Sounds good to me

I buy nearly all my PC games off Steam for a fraction of their new price

Sorry - I couldn't resist.

But seriously, you don't need a gaming pc to play most of the older games.

My d/l just gained 1mb/s when Telstra replaced a bit of cable in the road after a tree fell on it, so I'm happy. It can still take a day or so to d/l stuff, but my trusty draytek has bandwidth control so I can even out the data over my off-peak period allowences.

I tend to get all the old stuff anyway. Less focus on visuals, more on gameplay. I'm not falling for buying another CODBLOPS.

Apple's Ping has fatal pong, says CEO

P. Lee

Re: Bloody Social!

Social is important because it brings a feeling of obligation to communicate with people, which brings page impressions which brings advertising revenue.

Realistically, they know we don't care enough to pay for such a service.

P. Lee
Pirate

Re: Spotify

Music isn't social, people are social. Listening to music through headphones or while sitting alone at your computer isn't social. A massive corporate keeping track of what you are doing and blurting it out isn't social, its just creepy.

WOPR knew the answer: "The only winning move is not to play."

John Lewis appears to punt Chromebook with Windows 7

P. Lee
Linux

> little interest- it's because they're so close in price to a real laptop!

Precisely. Put in a nice screen, ssd, battery and retail costs and the CPU counts for very little, especially when it turns out the CPU is rather feeble.

MBAs might be expensive, but not if you have to buy a laptop and a tablet.

High-power x86 laptop with android tablet in the (detachable) screen would be the winner for me. Being able to use the "base" as a wifi access point would be handy too. My wireless router doesn't reach through all the walls of my house.

HP boffins create net-zero energy data center

P. Lee
Coat

Iceland?

Geothermal for electricity, far north for cooling.

Volcano? What volcano?

Publishing barons: Free speech a 'cloak for tawdry theft'

P. Lee
Mushroom

Receive 3 letters -> go on a blacklist

No thank-you.

Convict, then go on a blacklist.

No end-runs around the legal system please.

Dell ARMs up for hyperscale servers

P. Lee
Go

4 sata, 2 gigabit and on a PCIe card

please!

Or match 1 gigabit-1 sata with interface bonding for a cheap, (almost) native-speed disk server.

Study: The more science you know, the less worried you are about climate

P. Lee
Boffin

Re: It is not profitable to think about global warming so we don't

Profitable for whom?

Scientists are finding it very profitable.

Alternative fuel providers find it profitable too. As are the tile-providers to that shopping centre. All those yummy subsidies.

Demand for oil is inelastic, so not much harm done to the oil providers, though they've always had a bit of an image issue. Nobody really likes heavy-industry dirt. With the bad PR from Japan, the main alternative to oil has been neutralised.

The politicians find it rather profitable, with the "we'll save you! (no really, the taxes are for the environment's sake)" message.

The only people it doesn't benefit are those inefficiently using energy, who will be castigated for it. People don't like being told they are doing something wrong.

In fact, there aren't that many reasons not to like AGW, without going anywhere near the science. That concerns me, because it means the science doesn't matter and wouldn't change what is going on.

The term "scientific consensus" disturbs me. The phrase calls on the reputation of the scientists rather than the science. It skims over the facts and says, you need to trust your social betters.

It appears to imply that "all scientists, whether or not they are involved in AGW research believe in AGW, so you had better shut up." It appears to be newly coined and new phrases like that I pop in the "Registered Trademark" bin until they have stood the test of time.

I'm happy to accept that AGW might be real, but the hard research appears to be rather thin. Its more of a collective feeling, a "consensus" rather than a well researched phenomenon. That's fine, just tell me that you don't have much data and the research is on-going. "The sky is falling, give us your billions," undermines your credibility.

Netherlands jumps off ACTA train

P. Lee
FAIL

Doesn't matter

The UK will still go with it

Agriboffins' site downed by DDoS after GM protest

P. Lee
Childcatcher

Spot the techie website commenters!

Here are some points against GM and they aren't all scientific issues:

Anti-GM activists != luddites. You can always shut down a factory when you discover that putting mercury into the rivers is a bad idea. It's very difficult to get rid of something which you've specifically introduced because it will be more successful than what was there before. Just ask the Australians about cane toads.

We already have enough food to feed the world. The reason people starve is down to politics and finance. If the issue isn't agricultural, the solution is unlikely to be agricultural.

Industrial-scale agriculture tends to increase the scale of production and tends to monoculture. Thriving eco-systems tend to be diverse. Assuming GM pest-resistance works, your pests may well be wiped out, just as effectively as using pesticides. The question becomes, have you accounted for wiping out that population (do any beneficial species need that pest), or do your accountants only look as far as the farmers? Could you end up with another pest because you've accidentally removed the food source for a predator which keeps it at bay? Again, ask the Australians how removing large quantities of conches has altered the crown-of-thornes population and its impact on the Great Barrier Reef.

GM can steamroll over other people's rights. GM is about ecosystems and not industry. Building a nuclear power plant next to a iphone factory does not affect the iphones. Planting GM crops next to a non-GM farm does affect the rights of those who don't want the "product" just as spraying pesticide from an aeroplane might affect people living in a house next to the field being sprayed.

Soil quality and food quality. You might be able to increase production but does the food nourish you? Those nutrients have to come from somewhere, mostly the ground. If you increase production (by GM means or simply intensive cultivation) you've got more food with fewer nutrients. In a lab you can compensate for this, but the question is whether the farmers in the real world will. Are you just increasing orange production by increasing the water content of the oranges? "Feeding the world" is a noble aim, but in the real world, money talks and it generally talks in terms of kilograms produced and sold, not in how healthy the people are. This isn't strictly a GM issue, but GM can increase the problem.

Point-of-sale qualities. Everyone like nice red tomotos, correct? (Somewhat) Wrong. People like ripe tomatos and the redness is an indicator. Now imagine if you you could make unripe tomatos look red using genes from a fish. You would sell more than the mix of half-green and red tomatos in the next stand, "because the market wants it." In fact, the market has been lied to.

Do we need more? "Helping the 3rd World" is fine, but where are these innovations used? Do we need more corn, wheat or rice in the West? While more gluten in the bread is great for fluffy bread which is a boon for jam-makers and dairy farmers (less substance per slice=>more slices->more jam & butter) overly cheap wheat (corn/soy) makes its way into all sorts of things where it doesn't need to be. It thickens soups, as it is cheaper than putting in more veg or meat - that sold-by-weight thing again. Pretend your allegic to corn, soy or gluten/wheat and check your supermarket products to see what is left that you could eat. Seriously, we (in the west) don't need this stuff. The developing world doesn't need us dumping it on the world market, subsidised by our taxes either.

Nutritionists generally say "pasture-to-plate" in as few stages as possible is the healthiest option, because industrial intervention generally turns out to be not for my good. I dislike the idea of industry getting in there and messing around with my food. The problem with GM is that it tends to spread. Again, it isn't just a GM problem. Cows being pumped full of hormones to keep them producing milk when it isn't natural for them to do so, has been going on for ages.

I had to laugh (and cry a little) at some popcorn imported from the US. I looked down the list of ingredients, popcorn, pecans, corn extract,.... then I looked at the ingredients list the importer had to stick on the can. Sugar, popcorn, pecans... Yes, the original suppliers had sweetened the product with a variety of processed sugars (mostly from grain crops) so that each one was less than the ingredient they wanted to appear first. I don't trust agribusiness to look out for my interests.

The agribusiness corporates are the ones most allied with GM (despite the fine ethics I'm sure the boffins have) because any automation or simplification of the processing reaps great rewards for them. I might trust Foxconn to make a phone for me, but seeing their attitude to costs, profit and employees, I certainly wouldn't trust them with my food.

The issues involved are far-removed from networking and computing. There are no firewalls in the fields. We have the science to mess with the genes of a plant. We don't always have the science to know what the effects of the modification will be globally or in the future and we don't have a fine-tuned legal system which could prevent consumers from being duped into buying something they don't want or which is harmful.

We can't even prevent the banks from doing things they shouldn't. What makes you think we have better control over the food industry?

TiVo spits out monster 6-way Pace box for US eyes only

P. Lee

Re: What is the point?

+1

I have mythtv running with dual digital tuners but as time goes by, it becomes more of a cool toy as TV becomes more and more uninteresting. As Flanders & Swann said, "I never did care for music much, its the high-fidelity."

IBM bans Dropbox, Siri and rival cloud tech at work

P. Lee
FAIL

Re: Dropbox and security

What's the business need for dropbox?

If your IT dept can't manage to do this internally, you need to think about a new IT dept.

How to keep your money safe if the euro implodes

P. Lee
Coat

> many Germans I know are proud and happy when the Euro goes up in value.

Perhaps they remember what happened last time their currency rapidly depreciated.

Be thankful its the Greeks, Spanish and Italians who are in trouble!

Top Facebook exec begs students: 'Click on an ad or two'

P. Lee
Mushroom

you had better get clicking....

because 100bn doesn't disappear without someone asking for a handout.

Probably not just FB, but there are banks, pension funds etc

It isn't all dumb VC and dumber grannies buying those shares.

You'll be paying for it with your taxes. Better to spread the cost around the economy so no-one goes down.

Oh the joys of "too big to fail!"

Mars rover Opportunity spots WALL-E in crater ramble

P. Lee
Coat

Re: That's not Wall-E

... and you can also see the shadow of a little green man getting out of a white van with an angle grinder!

Attack of the clones: Researcher pwns SecureID token system

P. Lee
Holmes

Re: Security? What? Where?.....

> the attack would only work on a PC already compromised

Which could be installed by any windows admin, who would then be able to impersonate anyone else when accessing other systems.

It isn't just about stopping access, its about being able to audit who has done what and is often used when the systems to be accessed have higher security requirements than the PC.

So you might use securid to authenticate to a firewall which allows a single TCP session to your mainframe. The whole point of the changing passcode is to defeat keyloggers and admins who might have control over the local host and be able to compromise a pin.

You don't give your windows admins access to everything, especially if admin is outsourced.

New smart meter tells Brits exactly what they already know

P. Lee

All change is handy

Provide different plans and tariffs for people to choose from and you can raise each one in s staggered manner and avoid a universal outcry. Didn't anyone see the $localCurrency -> Euro changes in the continent? Do you think the mobile phone companies keep all those plans around to amuse themselves?

P. Lee
FAIL

Re: woohoo free ADSL for everyone....

How long until the system is hacked?

Cos we all know how secure SCADA systems are...

P. Lee
Paris Hilton

Re: Smart meter

Is the little spinny thing going around slowly or quickly?

MPs wrestle slippery bureaucrats in intellectual property Jell-O

P. Lee
Go

Re: Why is your so anti-IP?

> Only the rich, eg trustafarians, can afford to work for nothing. Lucky duckies.

True, though the question then becomes, "who benefits in general from the IP laws?"

If it isn't the *people* who create, all we need to do is have the the laws framed so that costs (i.e. employee costs - salaries etc) of the corporation can be covered in a reasonable time-frame.

Perhaps all copywrite applications should include a supported valuation of the cost to produce. Then set the term to be costs + 100% or 7 years, whichever is sooner. Something like that.

Government is "for the people." Not for UK plc.

Where is the research that shows how much IP laws benefit the creative people? I want to see the mean, median and mode values please. Show me that the laws do what they are meant to do and I'll support them. If the laws don't do what they purport to do (as I suspect is the case) then my support will be less forth coming. The research also needs to be broken down by industry/sector so that we can see which IP laws are having an effect in which industries.

HP started then spiked HP-UX on x86 project

P. Lee
Terminator

Make it better

All the commercial guff hides the fact that you need to do things better in order to compete.

Regardless of the past, HP need to look to the future. If HPUX is a better enterprise system than others then leverage it, don't spend time wailing about what might have been.

Build some reliable hardware, stick HPUX on it. If you can do a better job with HPUX than with Solaris or BSD or Linux or Windows, then do so. Stop spending billions on lawyers and put it into development to make your own products / services better. If you want a stick to beat Oracle with, put development time into postgres.

Even if the courts made Oracle do what HP want, Oracle obviously will do the bare minimum, the relationship is shot and it won't end well for HP.

Why on Earth is Microsoft moving to Euro pricing now?

P. Lee
FAIL

Re: The trouble with the €

A single currency can't really work without a single government. The breakup of the euro zone re-unites political power with financial repercussions. That is a good thing, unless you want a single European government. Not only would a break-up encourage good behaviour, but it also helps insulate the good actors from the bad ones. The EU is not the same as the US but in a different place. Most Americans want to be American. Despite PC (pl)attitudes of non-xenophobia, most French are French first and European second. That's true for pretty much every country and it becomes exaggerated when the Germans are bailing out the Greeks and are demanding they severe financial restraints. It isn't that the restraint isn't needed, its that someone else is telling them what to do. Would New York be able to do that to California?

Think what the the US would be like if the civil war went on for centuries and not between North and South, but between every state and every state had its own very unique culture, language, clothing, religion and physical appearance. That is what Europe is like.

The problem with the Euro is that Europe isn't a country. Its just an idea in the mind of politicians who have failed in their own country's political system. This is where we find out that "too big to fail" is just Newspeak for "give us your cash," not a statement of reality.

Nvidia Kai to enable cut-price Android tablets for all

P. Lee
Facepalm

Re: bugger Ipod nano

As long as it isn't like Hawaii five-o. They constantly use a desk-based surface touchscreen to flick windows onto a wall display.

I wanna know how they get them back without walking to the end of the room, reaching up onto the wall display and flicking them back.

Chuck Exchange mailboxes into the cloud... sysadmin style

P. Lee
Boffin

For email, you can just do an imap drag & drop from google to a local host. Set up email forwarding and off you go.

If you go proprietary, you'd better be *very* sure that the functions required are provided.

Better to stick with open protocols. I seem to think OOo used to have FTP built in. Not great, but a cool idea in its time. If you run KDE/GNOME enabled apps on *nix you can probably use ssh/sftp as your file transport. That should give you SSO and decent encryption.

IT distributors: The only people adding value to the world economy

P. Lee
Headmaster

Perfect competition

Doesn't exist.

Most immediately relevant to this discussion is that smaller companies especially are run by people doing what they love. This model ignore the concept of utility derived from work rather than consumption. That means that the 8% monetary ROI is arbitrary and quite possibly does not apply. It is actually quite common that a small business will stay in business as long as it turns a profit (relevant to short or long-term) or the losses can be covered by additional investment.

Facebook underwriters accused of hiding forecast

P. Lee
Childcatcher

Re: Look on the bright side

Except that advertising will still be around long after the last iphone is thrown on the scrap-heap.

It does appear that FB was gunning for the "too big to fail" image.

Grossly overpriced at £38, still grossly overpriced at $30. Expect more pain.

I can't think of anyone without a vested interest in a large IPO figure or who was gambling on offloading to other suckers rather than looking at ROI, who would value the company at 100bn.

What's copying your music really worth to you?

P. Lee
Facepalm

Re: "I'm entitled"

ditto to the corporates.

VIA outs $49 Raspberry Pi-alike

P. Lee

mpeg accelleration?

Yay!

Here in Oz all FTA TV is mpeg2. I tend to go with recording SD channels as they are faster to transcode for my tablet and if the story is good, it doesn't matter.

VGA is also good as many monitors have DVI & VGA ports which means there's a spare connection for your hobby board.

I'd like something with slightly more oomph and a couple of sata ports. Will it network boot?

I too welcome our cheap ARM-hugging overlords.

iPad grabs lunch money from mobile PCs, pushes them in the stingers

P. Lee

Tablets are not taking over from laptops

They are simply gaining ground where laptops were inappropriately used in the past. :D

That includes being left lying around in the lounge for casual surfing and map and contact info lookup etc while talking on the mobile. It includes ebook reading.

Tablets don't really excel at any one thing, they just do lots of things reasonably well. Being a PC (as in computing things, cpu heavy data processing) isn't one of them. Conversely, PC's can do lots of things, but generally fail at looking neat and tidy in the lounge, being held in one hand while the other types while you stand in the kitchen with a phone between your head and shoulder; battery life (availability) without a wire, being light enough to give to a child to hold in one hand, having a decent rubber casing in case you drop it, etc.

Microsoft launches its own 'so.cl' network

P. Lee
FAIL

Re: If they want it to be pronounced 'social'

Worse, it doesn't even look like "social" as S0C14L might. There are few things more recognised than the full-stop, space, capital letter sequence which this breaks. Its like a poke in the eye.

Eugene Kaspersky frustrated by Apple’s iOS AV ban

P. Lee

After having a brand new work pc

I have to admit that the cure does seem to be worse than the disease in terms of resource usage.

I'd be interested to know who has made more, the crackers, or the AV corporates.

Best to buy a second PC or run a live image off virtualbox for the important or dodgy stuff.

Review: Raspberry Pi

P. Lee
Go

Connections are key

What we need are some switches for the GPIO connections which can do things in the real world and some python/ruby modules to control it.

The joy of something like this is that it can provide a comms stack which is easy to get into. So you could get it to be a media extender just for audio if you wanted. That would be great if you can't get a bluetooth connection from your server to your stereo. Your phone could do the job, but that tends to wonder off at inconvenient times. A cheap permanent fixture would be better. It won't turn non-geeks to geeks, but it might turn those heading down the dark path of VBA back towards the light side and lead to lots of cool gadgets. A cheap baby monitor perhaps, which could be re-purposed later. Say hello to Mr Radio Controlled Battleship! Or a cheap way to feed the cat when you're away which doesn't involve a cisco switch.

Hopefully it will also prod the more commercial gadget makers into more innovation to compete.

P. Lee
Trollface

Re: Can't even cut and paste?

Surely you mean 4dW and p?

IP law probe MPs hunt for smoking gun, find plenty of smoke

P. Lee

Non-joined up thinking

Didn't the RPi chaps say that it was not economical to build the things in the UK (at least partly) because components attract import duty but completed computers do not. Do you wonder that we don't manufacture stuff?

The problem is that the vast majority of IP is not being generated by those most worthy of its protection. It's a horrible fog from the media and consumer electronics industries trying to maintain their status as gatekeepers. It leads to all sorts of nonsense because the world has changed. Production and reproduction is no barrier to entry - the physical production barrier to entry is broken and the licensing option cannot be enforced without being unacceptably intrusive and leading to gross profiteering.

Perhaps we need to consider that media doesn't "create" anything. It concentrates wealth rather than creating it. Designing a new production robot - that can create wealth if it can make things cheaper. Stopping patents on software creates wealth - because it reduces the costs of production of real things.

Things that make real things cheap are worthy of protection, but its difficult to stop being seduced by a the big £ signs which come from selling things with zero production costs. We should protect ARM because ARM chips make computing cheap which makes other things cheap. The next boy-band, not so much. Patents on unlocking a phone, definitely not. Not even if it is clever.

We need to have a clear idea of "value to society" as distinct from "money value". Its easy to make a company look valuable by firing employees, but the value is often a short-term illusion based on money. That isn't always the case, but I'd say these days its the norm. Government and the legal system should be about providing value for society.

As an illustration, bananas can't be imported into Australia. Excellent, we have protected the industry and have nice high prices, encouraging banana production. However, they are four times the price of bananas in the UK which means we don't consume a lot of them. The question is, are we better off as a society with wealthy banana-growers or cheap bananas for consumers? Who should government be working for?

3D TV fails to excite, gesture UIs to flop: analyst

P. Lee

smartphones/tablets

One *additional* remote to rule them all would be accurate.

The problem is, I'm not buying a smartphone for everyone in the house and people are inclined to take them with them.

Any STB/console maker has the potential to "do it right," but the problem is that what the customer wants and what the networks want and what the content producers want are all different so they have no vested interest is the perfect solution for the customer. Quite the opposite, in fact.

I'll vote for the device with all functionality exposed via a bluetooth control interface and a good app and an acceptable "traditional" remote. We'd need multiple pairs to the device of course.

Core Wars: Inside Intel's power struggle with NVIDIA

P. Lee

Re: 'Battling'...

> You mean 'waiting until the right moment' and then Intel will buy them?

Just before the market realises 64bit ARM is arriving...