Posts by janusz

Get whimsical and win a Western Digital Black 6TB hard drive

Love, Baby, see you on Alpha Centauri!

Apple’s $700 BEEELLION market cap makes it more valuable than Switzerland

Apples and Oranges

Ever wandered what is the total worth of Apple's tangible and intangible fixed assets? That's their buildings, furniture, labs, computers, licenses, etc. that they actually own. That is the real value of Apple, which I estimate at less than 2 bn USD. That's what they are really worth. Come a theoretical NYSE crash, and Apple is worth just 2 bn USD, provided there is a buyer.

Gay hero super-boffin Turing 'may have been murdered by MI5'

Re: CRYPTONOMICON

I would recommend to all those who want to have a better understanding of Turing's role in defeating the Nazi Germany and the Axis powers, a brilliant book by Neal Stephenson - Cryptonomicon. Turing, disguised in the novel as Waterhouse, is the BRAIN that helps to outwit the German war machine. The book, making a great reading, IMHO perfectly describes Turing's life. When I first read it 6 years ago, I had no idea he was treated like a criminal in his own country, instead of being knighted or otherwise rewarded for his role in WWII. Indeed, the news about his being pardonned now were a shock to me.

As a side note, those who read Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy by John le Carre would probably recall, that in the "intelligence" community routine interventions, called terminations, are just one of the basic ways of ending an agent's employment.

Cupertino clears Apple's Fruit Loop HQ - provided it coughs up more taxes

Cupertino, like all the other cities in the whole world, should enact legislation that would ban a company to claim its head office is in city where it does not pay the income tax. Apple is screewing all Americans because it produces its marvelous hw with slave labor and doesn't pay a cent of taxes in America. Such entity is called a parasite (i.e orchid).

1 in 7 WinXP-using biz bods DON'T KNOW Microsoft is pulling the plug

no updates from MS necessary

For the most part, receiving patches from MS is just annoying, if not outright disrupting - destabilising the system and slowing it down. Given the very nature of this software, i.e.the built-in universal open-backdoor architecture, that allows anyone privi to the right info a totally open access to the target system - why even bother with MS? If you patch one vulnerability, rest assured there are still hundreds that wait for discovery by all those who do not know about them yet. What you can really do is to first of all get yourself a good anti-virus, firewall at home and a good security framework for the enterprise. If you don't have that, MS patches are as good as medicine for a dead body.

Lawsuit launched against HP following Autonomy catastrophe

When a farmer goes to town

According to other reports, Mike Lynch indicated that after the acquisition, HP sacked the top 100 staff at Autonomy. I lived through 2 HP acquisitions of the companies I worked for and I can attest to their zeal in driving the post-acquisition costs down. In this case, a company dealing in sophisticated software solutions was bought by a company that basically lives off printer ink and laser printer fillings. No wonder they could not grasp the fact that it takes a little more to produce and sell the Autonomy solutions than their commercial acumen (knowing how much to give and to whom) and primitive mathematics.