Posts by theOtherJT 1334 publicly visible posts • joined 6 Jun 2013
Presumably they clock them down to trivial levels so they don't really make any heat in the summer? If they had a partner operation somewhere in the southern hemisphere this might make a bit more sense - otherwise their "cloud"* is going to be decidedly seasonal in its capacity.
*God I hate that word.
Surely the point of net-neutrality is that we don't want there to BE any specialized services?
The digi-veep also said he could live with some so-called zero-rated services - the practice whereby mobile operators do not charge for specified volumes of data from specific apps or used through specific services.
This is EXACTLY what net-neutrality is supposed to prevent. It leads to a situation where $TELCO can launch their own streaming video/music service at "zero-rate", but charge consumers for access to anyone else's service, damaging competition on merit between service offerings. Alternatively where $MEDIACOMPANY can throw $TELCO a massive stack of money in order to offer their service for free, and putting their competitors out in the cold.
Working for a higher education institution that will remain nameless, we've been forced to keep IE pegged at 8 and java at 6 (for which we have to pay for extended support) because a shit-ton of our admin software won't work with anything newer.
That would be bad enough were this "legacy" software, but it was purchased in 2012, by which time both of these products were clearly already end of life. Bad choices have been made all round.
Kinda what I was getting at with that last paragraph. The police seem to get told how they may and may not use the time they have. Actual investigations that might lead to important people ending up behind bars seem to be discouraged in favour of token gestures like this.
Perhaps this is my personal unease with regards to all attempted censorship coming through, but it does feel a bit like they might have missed the point here... and more worryingly perhaps intentionally so.
What they're saying - as far as I can tell - is that the national police forces of member states need to work harder to combat child abuse... fine, sure, but the focus on the internet seems... misguided to say the least.
"There is child abuse on the internet" - well, yes, I imagine there is in terms of people grooming children for abuse in chat rooms and the like, or blackmailing children into performing sexual acts in front of webcams, but I'm pretty sure that's not what they actually mean here.
What they seem to mean is "There are depictions of child abuse on the internet" - that is, pictures and videos of children being abused. That's also certainly true, but it does rather feel like the wrong part of the equation to be making a fuss over.
It's classic "Treat the symptom not the cause". Surely what we want is for the police (nationally and internationally) to be investigating, finding, and arresting the people who actually took these photos/videos in the first place. We want them catching the people who are doing the grooming, or the blackmailing, or indeed the straightforward raping and videoing. That would be the _cause_ of the proliferation of this sort of thing.
Trying to remove things from the internet is just an exercise in futility and we all know it. You can spend forever playing whack-a-mole with dodgy websites and peer to peer networks (whatever it is they're pedaling) but you'll never kill them all, and if you know that's not going to work, are you not better off doing something else?
I know it sounds heartless, especially with such an emotive issue, but the fact is there are limited resources available here. I fully agree there should be more. I think we'd be better off if the police had more time to spend protecting the vulnerable - which surely is what they are actually for - but whilst this sort of pronouncement sounds very pro-active on the surface, the more I think about it the more it looks like papering over the cracks rather than repairing the foundations.
Digging into the cause, however - seriously investigating the people who create this material - that would seem to involve the police looking in places that they are discouraged from doing so.
It might not be the best definition, but there's still an important difference between depriving someone of a thing they have (theft) and potentially depriving someone of something they might have otherwise had, but currently don't.
If I break into your house and steal your record collection, it's gone. You can't have it and me have it both. If you're a recording artist and I break into your computer and copy your work and then release it on the internet I have done something quite different - deprived you of future earnings, presumably from people who would have paid for your work who now won't.
Now, for sure that's A crime (and I agree totally with what you said upstream about the more correct response appearing to be paying a fine) but it's not the same crime, and it's not sensible to conflate the two. You really don't want the law treating "did" the same as "might in the future do"
One thing you didn't mention here is how claustrophobic the cabin has become. That centre console is HUGE and really eats into the space in the front. I'm on the tiny side, and I still found it intrusive. If you're a bit more substantially built I would expect this to be really rather uncomfortable in the front. The visibility is nothing like as good as the old one too, and that wasn't exactly brilliant. The whole car is much bigger than you think it is too - although that seems to be a modern disease that most cars share. Despite being quite cramped on the inside it's actually _wider_ than a MK2 Mondeo., never mind the old focus.
It's a HORRIBLE engine in something the size of a focus. My mother just traded in a Mk 1 1.6 focus for the new ecoboost one, and the old one was infinitely nicer to drive.
It's fine when it's rolling, but moving off is a nightmare. Until the turbo spools up it feels like you have about 60bhp, at best, and the new focus is most definitely not a small car. Every roundabout becomes a bit of an adventure. You have to thrash the hell out of the poor thing to make it move and that just makes driving it tiring. It would probably be more economical with a bigger engine in it because you wouldn't have your foot buried in the floor all the time to make it get it's lardy arse in gear and move!
It's a notification area/button set that you press with the thumb if you're holding the phone in your right hand...
Any particular reason why we couldn't do that without a curved screen? Or make it configurable so it can go on either side, for that matter.
I mean, maybe that's a nice ui tweak, but I don't really see why we need special hardware for it.
Well, sometimes you do.
It seems mostly to be a matter of where the money is thrown. Giving money to actual poor people has a decent track record of solving poverty on a personal level - that is to say it often succeeds better in getting those individuals out of poverty and keeping them out than drip-feed type "support" programs.
What it doesn't address is the factors that caused them to end up in poverty in the first place of course, and no, throwing money at that seems to rarely help. It tends to just vanish into bureaucracy and/or corruption.
Perhaps. Perhaps not.
We order abut 100 machines a year, and were about to switch to Lenovo, now we decided not to. I don't see us going there next year either.
It wouldn't take so many businesses to do the same to actually hurt them. I mean, we're a pretty small fish, but there are people out there who measure their purchases in thousands of units who might be thinking the same way.
You let a "Designer" anywhere near it, they break it.
Ever since that dick Ive made such an enormous name for himself by dumbing down Macs, the mantra in design is "If I don't need it, remove it. If you need it, remove it anyway."
We had no end of things removed from our website in the last refresh in order to make it "Cleaner and more attractive" with the justification that they were rarely used anyway. Of course, no replacement was implemented for the few people who _did_ use them, no matter how rarely, because it would spoil the "look and feel" of the site.
Presumably it is precisely because they operate under the impression that the country is a business that they fail to run it well.
When you think about it, a successful business maximizes profit whilst minimizing cost. Ok, working out how to do that with any real business is usually pretty hard, but the principle is simple enough. People will pay you for whatever it is your business does, and your job is to do that as cheaply as possible to make the difference between what you're paid and what it costs as big as possible (and in your favour, obviously.)
So, to improve profits, you either raise prices - which in business would scare off customers, so that's a bad thing - or cut operating costs.
And here comes the problem. A government has costs which remain broadly static. There's a lot of expensive shit that _has_ to be paid for, and that's an end of it. The military, the police, national infrastructure, healthcare (what of it the US has)... all these things need paying for, and whilst for sure there's a shit ton of waste in the way the US goes about that, there's not so much that operating costs can really be made much smaller. Not without utterly ruining the product that is - which of course is what we generally think is happening when we look at the state that the US is in these days and what people are getting out of their government in terms of service to the public.
So, if you can't cut costs, you have to raise the price - and Republicans are ideologically opposed to doing that because they're still thinking like the government is a business, and raising the price scares off customers.
This is of course, nonsense. The "Price", when one is buying government, is "Taxation". Republicans like cutting taxes not increasing them but with a government, unlike a business, raising taxes doesn't scare off the customer because the customer has NO CHOICE but to pay them!
Every time the Republicans refuse to close a tax loop hole they're effectively letting those people making use of it get their product for free, which if you're in an actual business would be considered insane. Every time they lower the tax rate, they're reducing the price of their product - makes perfect sense if you expect price reduction to increase sales, but YOU CAN'T INCREASE SALES OF GOVERNMENT. It's a monopoly. It has a fixed subscriber base. Short of bulk immigration - something they are ALSO OPPOSED TO - there's no way to increase your total sales when your product is "government".
If you want the profit margin up, you put the price up, not down.
"Sure Sadam Hussain was a ruthless bastard, and a lot of his people suffered under his regime, but I'm not convinced that Iraq "post-democracy" is a better place to live with the lack of security, rise of religious power, and enormous society & infrastructure damage."
Sadly it seems that there have basically only been 2 lasting periods of stability in that region for the last hundred years.
1: Under Sadam Hussain, because he had anyone who didn't do as they were told shot.
2: Under British colonial mandate, because we had anyone who didn't do as they were told shot.
Neither says particularly good things about either the people in charge or the realities of living there.
I'd be quite annoyed if MS's drive for universal apps made for universally crap apps.
It's a danger to be sure.
What it mostly demonstrates tho is the importance of separating the UI from the underlying actions, even when writing pretty basic apps. What they really need to be doing is promoting a Windows 10 API that defines how you write an abstraction layer. You write one back end, and then as many front ends as are required for different classes of device that just call your back end code.
It should be obvious to everyone that an interface for a 5" display with touch controls and an interface for a 24" display with a mouse+keyboard just _have_ to be different. "Write once run anywhere" isn't magic. Give us good tools to make crafting the UI easy on multiple devices and as long as the back end code compiles for all device classes we should be laughing.
Regardless of if they're actually the biggest selling of all time, 5 million units for what so many dismissed as a niche hobbyist product in 3 years is an astounding achievement.
I think we'll be finding pi's in unexpected places for decades to come - there's 4 here silently acting as serial -> network bridges for the machines that spit out the access cards for the car park!
The good news is that the Department of Transport has found £50 million "to ensure WiFi is available on selected services from 2017."
Really? Because I thought that would be for the train operators to fund. Why are we paying profit making entities to provide a service that apparently we're legislating into their contracts that they have to provide?
God ain't that the truth. The number of times I've been told "We can't shut it down for an update, it's a core system!" and had to get them to give me that in writing because I'm not carrying the can for what happens if we get screwed after a CVE has been published and then we didn't respond to it.
"A business problem is the challenge that in many cases the current servers continue to run fine, are reliable and haven't had a problem in the last 18 months... therefore why should they be changed now? Computers are tools and one shouldn't have to replace working tools."
The problem is that is only partially true. It's like expecting to use a Model T Ford as a long distance taxi on the motorway. Now a Taxi is a tool, and a Model T could be a taxi, so yes, it's possible and you could argue that it's doing everything you require of it vis-a-vis moving a small number of people from one place to another, but it would be seriously inconsiderate to everyone you're holding up and bloody dangerous to yourself and your passengers.
The trouble we have here - and I imagine the same is true in most places - is that we have a layer of management who can't wrap their heads around the pace of change in IT. A 20 year old car probably isn't terribly different from a brand new one in most cases. A 40 year old car is still recognizable and does pretty much the same things (albeit slightly less well). Even a 60 year old car could be reasonably expected to more or less work in the ways we're still used to... There's still plenty of Austin TX4's still on the roads being taxi's today, nearly 60 years after they were first designed.
By the time you get back to the good old Model T with it's weird controls, complete lack of safety equipment and hopeless top speed it's obvious that it's no longer fit for purpose - but we had to go back nearly 100 years for that. The idea that the same thing might happen in only the 12 years since Server 2003 was released just doesn't fit in some people's heads, and until something _does_ go badly wrong, they're not going to be able to accept that it can.
Absolutely. This is how we got screwed, and are still getting screwed. We have some "web apps" that only work on IE6 - you know, just trivial things like payroll and HR management. We've been operating a running retreat from these things for years. First by forcing people to use an XPmode VM, then when XP ended, RDP to a 2003 terminal server.
I have no idea what we paid for them originally, but the way finance talk about it it seems to be somewhere in the region of what it cost to occupy Iraq, and no one wants to even consider what it'll take to have them (and the now hundreds of gigabytes of arcane database back-end that they're connected to) re-written to something fit for the 21st century.
It seems that the only way they're going to get changed is _after_ something terrible happens and we get sued for some truly horrific data leak. Everyone seems to acknowledge that it's a matter of "when" not "if" but it takes 5 years just to complete the consultation phase of a project to change something this size around here, and there's no sign that consultation will even start until the deadline for change is in the past.
I reckon you could. Some of the claims made here are provably false, so at the very least it's false advertising. The cable _isn't_ directional, and you could prove that at the network layer. The same bit-stream is going to be delivered at either end no matter which way around the cable is.
You might be able to get away with saying "This particular woo woo makes music sound better!" because the claim is so vague as to be impossible to prove, but if you're saying "This particular woo woo makes music sound better because it does X" you better be able to prove that it DOES do X, and any half way competent networking engineer would be able to testify in court that it absolutely bloody doesn't.
At what point does selling something like this become fraud?
It's an ethernet cable. It has to be an ethernet cable, or it wouldn't work. At what point does describing it as a Magical Flying Unicorn that will solve all your audio woes with the Power of Rainbows* become legally actionable misrepresentation?
*Because that makes as much sense as what they've _actually_ marketed it as doing.
So, once again we respond to an attack on personal freedoms with an attack on personal freedoms. Always so successful.
When will people finally learn that the way to deal with the crazy isn't to pretend it doesn't exist? Stopping people saying things doesn't stop them thinking them. It's a good thing to hear people shouting about beheading infidels or whatever the particular stick they have stuck up their ass is.
Nothing is achieved by suppressing the shouting if the underlying sentiment remains. Trying to keep people from talking about it doesn't make it go away, it just simmers, until suddenly it's springing up unexpected from somewhere and the next thing you know some poor bastards are getting shot in the street.
Perhaps the ones talking about overthrowing the state have legitimate grievances (and if they don't now - start suppressing their right to speech and they soon will) Perhaps they're just nutters. To be honest I don't actually care, because the solution to the problem they present is the same either way:
Listen to them. Know who they are. Know what they want.
Then you decide if you need to either arrest them or possibly - just possibly - stop doing whatever godawful shit it is you're doing that is winding them up in the first place.
Either way, trying to keep them quiet is _never_ the answer.
Sounds like the tribunal was told what it was allowed to say to me.
"Ok, you can assert that a law was broken, as long as that doesn't mean we have to stop breaking it. Find some way to make the status quo legal, ok?"
How about, "It was only illegal as long as you didn't tell anyone?"
"Yup, I reckon that'll fly. Ok, you can release your report now."
I'd be very happy with my Z3 compact - in fact, as a physical device I like it very much - but I loathe the way that android is going the same way as consumer PC's with 4 million crapware packages installed when you buy it.
In fact, it's _worse_ than with consumer PC's because then at least you just do a fresh Windows (or Linux - or in my case usually both) install to scrape all that shit off, but you can't do that on here because Sony has baked the DRM keys for various bits of hardware into the firmware. Unlock the boot loader and bugger up the camera :(
Come on Sony, you're really close here, but please, PLEASE stop shipping things with pre-installed apps that can't be removed. I mean you even offer a method to root the phone straight off the bat so clearly you recognize that people like me really want access to the hardware we paid for. Take the last step. You know it's for the best.
I really don't.
The Pi has become a defacto standard for an emerging form factor. All these cheap single board ARM machines - ask anyone technical enough to be aware of them the name that is going to come most easily to mind is the Raspberry Pi. It's a very cool and widely spoken name in tech right now. Microsoft wants part of that market, and why the hell wouldn't they?
For their part, the Pi guys want to sell Pi's. Many people - particularly less technical people - like the idea of an uber cheap computer, but are scared off by having to use Linux. Windows on the Pi will appeal to those people, and why wouldn't the Pi foundation want a part of _that_ market? You never know you might even convert some of them to a *nix after they wet their toes using Win10.
This feels like a rare win-win to me.
"Let me turn this one upside down for a moment: what do you lose when you do away with a mechanical key?
Answer: a kill switch."
I'm with you all the way. I don't like electronic parking brakes for a similar reason. I once had a brake cable snap on me and watched the pedal disappear into the floor. Scary. Fortunately engine breaking down to something sensible by sticking it in 1st and then gentle application of the hand brake got me to stop. I know things like that (hello '70s austin!) aren't supposed to happen any more, but that's not to say they absolutely _can't_
The more we "fly by wire" the less direct control you have over the oily bits that actually do the stopping, steering etc and frankly when I'm in charge of a ton plus of high speed steel I'd quite like options in the case something does go wrong.
"Laggards on an IT forum? why? you'll be complaining about multicore cpu's next!! Remember when all we needed was 640KB of RAM?"
I do and it was just better :P
In all seriousness tho, how is this an improvement on having a key? I'm really glad my car is full of computers. It means things like the ABS and ASC actually work properly, and that it starts when it's cold, and that it's vaguely possible to get miles per gallon instead of gallons per mile when driving in a "spirited" fashion... but why the hell would I want them in the LOCK?
Defeating a mechanical lock is hard and time consuming, even if you're good at it. No two are the same so it's not like you can just knock up a single use tool that's going to open every car you step up to.* Once a digital security mechanism is broken, it's broken for good and any idiot with a compatible transmitter and a mobile phone's worth of computing power can open it.
I'm all for improvement, but sometimes computerizing things doesn't make them better and this feels very much like a case in point.
*Unless that "tool" is the afore mentioned 8mm flathead screwdriver and the "car" is a ford transit... in that case the problem is more along the lines of "Why did you fit a mechanical lock that could be overwhelmed with a screwdriver and a hammer without even setting the alarm off?"
"Also recalcitrant floor traps and jammed RJ45 socket covers. Try that with a BMW fob..."
I use mine for the little twist-n-push fuse bar at the bottom of the PDUs. Turns out that a car key is an excellent alternative to an 8mm flathead screwdriver.
(Also to open the car from time to time...)
Don't we think that this is actually a really nasty, manipulative and on the face of it quite frightening thing to attempt?
Emotion is an integral part of our thinking ... Emotion creates the abiding commitments needed to sustain action on difficult problems, such as climate change ... appropriately framed emotional appeals can motivate action, given the right supporting conditions (in particular a sense of personal vulnerability ... and [a sense of] the support of others).
So what you're saying is that in order to make people think in the way the government wants them to think it should deliberately frighten them? I don't know, by - say - screaming about "Terrorism" all the time and responding to your own hysteria by pumping up police powers that the public were opposed to in the first palce? Never mind if there's any real chance of getting eaten folks, it's waaaay easier to move the herd when they're frightened of the dogs.
Nothing good comes of this sort of behaviour.
If it makes illegal moves, he's not really nailed it, has he?
Still, I've got to applaud the achievement here, even if it's not 100%. I've tried to write a chess program about half a dozen times at this point and - not being much better at programming than I am at actually playing chess - don't think I've ever managed a complete implementation in _any_ language in _any_ amount of code, so I still find this very impressive.
I completely agree. Distributed scale-out storage across many nodes is clearly the way we're going. Let the software handle where any given data block is written / read from and just keep feeding it disks and CPU cycles as necessary.
Breaks down a bit if you need to really slam a _lot_ of data down on the disks very fast because you end up IO bound by the speed of the network interface(s), but come on - in that case you're probably using some sort of flash storage on the local box anyway.
This is pretty much how CEPH works too.
You specify a set of nodes, tell it how much parity to data you want, and let it get on with it. Lose a disk? The data on that disk is re calculated from parity (or just redundant copies if you're doing what amounts to raid 10) and written to other disks across the set. Lose a node? Give the other nodes a moment to decide that it's actually gone and isn't coming back, rather than this being some sort of transient network issue, and the same happens but on a larger scale.
Half a dozen nodes with dozen disks each and this becomes really very robust and very VERY fast due to all those spindles being up and spinning all the time. You can also just throw more nodes at it when you want to increase capacity - which is just lovely.
