Posts by alain williams 2804 publicly visible posts • joined 29 May 2007
``I have a new policy of not mocking people for curious and strange beliefs, as I feel that someday I will be an angry old man moaning about the wifi-leakage from the blasted tablets.''
Yes, but as long as they are harmless. What would you think if you were the poor girl next door who just wanted to use her iPhone and had the anguish of several years of litigation hanging over her ? He has harassed others round him for his baseless beliefs. We should be able to insult others who harm others.
was showing the US military as incapable of even basic security - like changing default passwords. The USA claim that he caused them to spend millions of work fixing up after he 'broke' in. This is work that the idiots should have done in the first place. They should be thanking him, not castigating him.
McKinnon himself: he should not have done what he did, that is beyond doubt. But the penalty was too high; the USA would not have played fair.
Punnishing people because they have embarrased you is wrong.
There are 2 different processor cores, one powerful but energy hungry; the other slow but energy light. To the applications the processors look the same, the operating system can switch between them in 20 microseconds. The OS can also run both at the same time putting appropriate tasks on each one. You can also vary the frequency of the cores as needed.
See big.LITTLE Processing with the Cortex-A15 and Cortex-A7 Processors page 5 has a nice graph.
Brilliant!
THe funny thing is because MySQL is GPL, MariaDB has to make available everything it adds, and Oracle can incorporate if if it likes. And because Oracle is the MySQL owner, it can use its dual license and release outside GPL (and only the owner can do this...)
Not quite. Oracle is NOT the owner of any GPL code that is submitted into MariaDB. So it can use/release the MariaDB code in the GPL version of MySQL but not in the proprietary version. So Oracle cannot get it all its own way.
I suspect that, long term, Oracle wants to get rid of the ''free'' competition that MySQL presented and so doing what it is doing makes sense -- except that people will slowly jump ship. I teach Perl & PHP courses (amongst other things) and am now adding in PostgreSQL into equal coverage/prominence to MySQL (MSSQL & Oracle already there in a small way).
I hazard a guess that people are converting. If you google 'convert mysql to postgresql database' it finds 24,100,000 results. If you look for 'convert postgresql to mysql database' it finds 6,870,000.
Hmmmm
The USA and Israel have engaged in an act of hostility on another country. They have caused real damage and show no contrition at all. I doubt that the are going to even think about bringing those responsible for this outrage to book - in spite of their indignant expostulations when they think that someone has attacked them -- think Gary McKinnon.
This is highly hypocritical of the likes of Hilary Clinton. They have, in effect, started an undeclared war.
What is their justification ? Iran might make bombs and that Iran might start a war. If you look at the history of the USA in the last 50 years you will rapidly realise that this is the pot calling the kettle black.
The whole point of this is Apple showing the world that it has bigger, more expensive lawyers than the rest of them - so keep off what it claims to be its lawn even if others have a valid right to be there - otherwise Apple will cost them more in legal fees than it is worth it. Apple does not really mind if it looses as long as the Samsung legal bill is high.
It is not about who is right, but who is richest.
No reason why they should not try the same hardware with 2 different operating systems... other than pissing off Steve Ballmer. If the Android one does not sell - then Ballmer was right. Chances are that they will sell some of each, but which sells more would be interesting to find out.
Give them different names to avoid confusing the public, but that is about it.
and it was not 99% pain free then I would get howls of anguish telling me that they had made a crap choice and how Linux was incompatible with everything, why did they listen to me, no I cannot have any budget for redoing a few things .... - why could they not stay with MS Windows ?
But when it comes to upgrading from one version of MS Windows to another - they just accept the pain!
''it is still interested in the "low yield" of actionable intelligence that results from these tip-offs''. Ever heard of GIGO (Garbage In, Garbage Out) - if this is just rumours from curtain twitchers, what do you expect ?
I am not saying that they should not be looked into, but don't expect a ''high yeild''.
Yesterday I was amazed at Keir Starmer saying that the conviction rate for rape was too low. Maybe this is because the judge/jury looking at the evidence in the trials decided that they could not convict. Just because a woman makes an allegation does not make the man a rapist. You can't twist the evidence to suit your prejudices!
It is not hard to stop visitors seeing all, or part, of your web site until they have paid a fee. The Times does that (which is why after 30 years I switched newspaper - to The Guardian).
I get the feeling that someone is angling for a way of demanding retrospective fee -- you visited our web site yesterday: so cough up.
What next ? I pick up a newspaper left on a train and have to pay to read it ?
to find my kids getting off to something in a .xxx domain than something in a .catholic (or similar) domain. If they spent too long in one of the latter I would have concerns about their rationality and their inclinations to be nice to others and treat people on their own merits rather than the colour of their skin or mythological beliefs.
I am lucky - I don't think that my neighbours would steal something that they took in for me. Many cannot trust their neighbours. so what happens when the parcel becomes ''lost'' ? The standard compensation rates for lost packages is not enough, quite apart from the hassle of having to buy another whatever, if it is indeed replaceable.
Making someone put a sticker on their door saying ''My neigbours are thieves'' is not acceptable.
What is the point of using only single threaded benchmarks on a chip with multiple execution units ? I really want to know how they compare with a desktop running multiple simultaneous applications/processes and some virtual machines.
Please can we have benchmarks that show how this millenium's chips perform.
The USA has shown that it cannot be trusted to administer the Internet in an impartial manner - look at how it has blocked countries with which it is currently waging war; and how it has grabbed domains that are legal elsewhere but upset some commercial USA interest.
The UN is far too political an organisation. It will be pulled to decisions decided on who short term expidiency. For one recent wacky example I see that it has made that butcher Robert Mugabe the UN leader for tourism!! See:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/may/29/robert-mugabe-un-international-envoy-tourism
The ITU is too sluggish and backward looking an organisation. Look at the dire mess of the ISO protocols that it was pushing for a few years - thankfully now a distant memory.
So who then ? The Unix greybeards who developed it in the first place ? Maybe a good idea, but they will be subject to pressure ... so choose those who ignore pressure and say what they think is right. But would we want the likes of Stallman to be in charge of the Internet ?
Like it or not we have problems living on what the planet can supply us with. So we either reduce our population or take less per head of what is sustainable. The arithmetic is quite simple. Unfortunately many people stick their heads in the sand and think that we can have both, it is rather like the Greeks thinking that they can continue to avoid austerity while also not paying taxes and staying in the Euro.
Spend 5 minutes here:
http://populationmatters.org/
Remember boys and girls that globalisation is for the big companies to take advantage of, not for the rest of us. It is, apparently, OK for the big boys to buy where things are cheap and then sell at different prices according to what the market can bear and so maximise their profits. They don't like it one little bit if we buy where it is cheap.
The use of GEOIP is much the same.
It is claimed that there is competition in broadcasting of things like football matches as no one company can have all of them -- but you still end up where one company will have the exclusive rights to an individual match. That is not competition -- if you want to watch the match you have to go to whoever has the rights and they can charge what they want.
Competition will only happen if the rights to every match must be available** to at least two broadcasters; then the football fan will be able to choose and presumably go for the cheaper. This will result in real competition and downward price pressure.
Until we have that: sports broadcasting competition will be a sham.
**available does not mean that the rights have to be taken up. There will be competition for the interesting matches, not all are 'interesting'.
Given that some MPs see *very* sensitive stuff we have to assume that this will end up on the ipads. Apple knows who the owner of these ipads are and thus the USA government also does. Since Apple seems to have total control over these things we have to assume that the USA government is not going to be able to resist the temptation to see what is on these machines and, perhaps, even 'borrow' the odd document or few.
Question: would the NSA let Obama have one of these unless it had a special build that had been crawled over by their top security people ?
I had not realised that spying had become so easy!
For plenty of people that question is a complete non starter, it implies that they have had at least 2 jobs ... what about the lazy arses who have never bothered to work ? Ditto cars - unless you count the ones that they have nicked, or even know who their father is.
I suppose that they do need to provide a list of questions, most people would not be able to come up with things themselves - although it would be nice for those who are more able.
Ensure that the Post Office check that they are not delivering any copies of Playboy/... unless the householder has signed a we-want-smut agreement. Then fix TVs to not show saucy material broadcast after the watershed.
Just because computers are involved there seems to be this cloud cuckoo notion that any controls are possible and should be put in place.
Or is it that now that the boys at MI5 will get to see what we are looking at they don't want them getting ideas and wasting time & government bandwidth when they should be spying on us ?
is because of the 3rd party apps. Most of these have only ever run on Intel compatible CPUs. The ISVs are going to have great fun getting them to work on a different architecture. It isn't that hard if you know what you are doing and have the discipline -- but I suspect that if you have never had to do it before then things may be surprising.
OK, you may also want to use MS Office, but OpenOffice is a credible alternative that is good enough for most people's needs.
I note that one of the 6 areas where it will be used is ''New material and energy creation''. If they can do that then the physicists would be *really* interested. All that they know how to do at the moment is to convert one form of energy into another form. If these guys would be able to bust the conservation laws and create new energy - that would be great!
"Twitter does not moderate posts/tweets so should be covered... theregister does moderate posts so would not be covered?"
The Register (these days) moderates post-facto -- most posts go straight up. If el-reg receives a complaint it then has to make a judgement and remove the item if it is illegal. That judgement is the tricky bit - how do the moderators know that the complaint is valid and not just someone trying to bury an inconvenient truth by hoodwinking them. Moderators will probably act on the cautious side to protect The Register from legal action.
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