> 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.
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?
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
> Spotify’s seamless Facebook integration takes enjoying music with friends to a whole new level.
> Music has never been this social.
Is this editorial or an advert in itself?
Since when is sitting my yourself in front of a computer with all your friends elsewhere been classed as "social"? How about visiting your friends and playing a CD while having a game of something, go ice-skating, paint-balling, sailing, bowling or playing golf.
This is Newspeak worthy of Apple which advertised its ipod (loud music in your ear so you can't hear anyone/anything else) as being "social."
If my family and friends thought being social was writing on a wall so other people can see your scribblings, I'd be pretty depressed and sit by myself with a computer too.
Try experiencing people, rather than consuming things.
Indeed, not distributing via DVD and BR would go a long way to reducing infringement. Stick to cinema release/live concerts only and the problem pretty much goes away.
Yes, you'll get some camcorder usage, but that's generally rubbish and not worth the effort.
The gay marriage thing isn't about rights, those are already equalised between hetro and homo.
It appears to me to be about taking a word commonly associated with "wedding" and understood as "one man, one woman, promising an exclusive relationship with each other til death, before god and the community," (at least as an ideal) and redefining it as an exercise in social engineering.
By redefining the word to include homosexual unions, you divorce the meaning from its historical religious heterosexual meaning. I don't mean just Christian-religious either. It may exist, but I don't know of any traditional culture where homosexual relationships are considered to be "marriages." I also can't think of a culture where marriage is traditionally a secular institution.
That makes me wonder why people who are mostly non- or anti-religious want to redefine a mostly religious term. It seems a bit churlish. "Partnership" seems to describe most homosexual unions quite adequately. That leads me to conclude that this is a political exercise to marginalise religion by legally redefining its vocabulary to void its meaning.
You can agree or disagree with the strategy, but I don't think this is about equal rights.
> Sack this out of touch idiot. Oh we can't, he's a 'Lord'
Yes, that's just what we want, another Commons. /sarc
You don't sack someone because you disagree with them. I vehemently disagree with Howe, but I'd rather he speaks his mind than have an elected "lords."
Its the Lords who stuck a broom-handle through the spokes of some of the worst ideas TB had and have been a far better counterbalance to abuse of power by the legislative than the commons is. They can be (and are) quite big on protecting the little guy precisely because they are not beholden to a national party system which provides funds for their election or can run a campaign against them.
Certainly, some of them are quite mad, but not "start a war" mad so common in the commons.
I think its shocking that we have 60 second minutes, 60 minute hours, 24 hours in a day, 7 day weeks, 12 months in the year and 365 days (sometimes) in a year, not to mention a ridiculous 360 degrees in a circle.
And fractions! What's that about? What's that you say? Decimal is only an approximation? France tried a 10-day week and failed miserably? An inch is actually a measurement which is quite useful both on its own and in groups? Its actually easier to say "six-foot-one" than "183 centimeters" and indeed, just over 6 feet is easier to visualise than to 183 of anything?
What is so superior about base 10? It doesn't even work for counting fingers & thumbs without going to an extra significant place.
Go away and stop trying to change things which don't need to be changed. There is so much that needs fixing, but this shouldn't be anywhere near the top of the list, even if you think it would be a good thing.
By default, on ISP sign-up you get a little panel to control your internet with recommended settings.
Like, block SMTP (in various manners), block DNS queries to non-ISP (all yours, those of other common ISPs, any) DNS hosts.
You don't need to force change, you just need to start with some defaults to help the clueless.
You can also put policy notes on the same web-page as your helpdesk telephone number, such as "You connectivity may have failed since 2am this morning. Click here to see why." and then explain the blocking rule and point to the control panel to change it back.
They were selling CoD:BlOps for $126 AUD on release. I could be wrong, it might have been MW3 with CODBLOPS at $99.
I wonder why they went out of business?
Actually, I'm not sure its all their fault. They have a totally undifferentiated product with no physical substance. Who thought that would ever be a good retail opportunity?
HP really need to do something about their logo though. The 70's called and want it back.
It's fine for servers and large cabinets with spinning reels on the front, but cool it isn't.
At least the screen res has finally improved... probably just before Apple raises the bar again.
My guess is that it still doesn't know what it wants to be - ultra portable or desktop replacement. I suspect Apple has it right by down-clocking its kit to improve battery life. Can we not have our "turbo" button from the 80's back for the best of both worlds?
To my mind, an "ultra" computer needs to be top of the line. That means battery life when I want it and plenty of speed if I have electrons to burn, coupled with the good aesthetics. I'd settle for speed only when mains connected if I needed to. It would save getting another pc for games.
At last the aesthetics are getting there. Fix the battery/clock trade-off and have optional discrete graphics and fix the USB spacing, that's a dumb rookie mistake.
In Melbourne, built mostly on a road grid with traffic lights, we don't even have sensors to see if there are any cars there. You often just sit waiting for the full light cycle (2-3 minutes) when only one road has traffic on it.
Re: The Cloud - When your Data is not really your data
I would agree that the problems are all solvable, the question is, has your cloud provider actually solved them.
Security is a significant issue issue. It isn't just about whether you got hacked or not. Security is about knowing the risks and accounting for them. Try setting up a PCI-DSS compliant solution using a public cloud and let me know how easy it is. It isn't just "we trust the provider" its "we have audit capability, we know who the admins are and we can show exactly who accessed what and when." Without that detail, you probably haven't gone through the rigour of designing a secure solution.
It is also a legal thing. You can't usually export banking data or personal data around the world. You will get fined. That is awkward and commercial suicide from bad design.
> Sold for obscene quantity of cash to people that should know better.
The problem is that some bank will have underwritten the IPO and that bank "is too big to fail" which means that you and I will be taxed to pay for it.
Worse, the ring-fenced bad debt will be bought, or, the bank will be bought by the government and then resold quickly for a song without the debt.
So we the taxpayers don't even get a decent asset for the money we paid.
> Me, personally, I want an open, flexible ARM-powered netbook or ultralight laptop with a Pixel Qi display & a honking great battery - something that can run for a long weekend on a single charge. Tablet, schmablet.
Except a honking great battery means lots of weight, which doesn't fly well with most consumers.
However, a Transformer-style setup would be great, with extra battery in the keyboard.
I'd like to see more "add to your x86 setup" systems. Pop them inside your x86 case and hook up your disks to them for always-on file serving via ethernet and run thunderbolt for native disk-speed access for the local x86 host. Could the RPi graphics system be re-purposed for RAID operations?
A cotton-candy style setup would be fun. AMD could build it into their graphics cards and sell them to intel customers... "Do you really need to power up your i7 PC?"
It seems that the PCIe format could provide power supply, negate the need for a case, provide SATA cable-length access to mass storage etc.
It's hard to dislodge incumbants such as intel, I suspect the way to succeed is to offer extra services rather than compete head-on.
Geoblocking is particularly annoying in nations beyond Europe and North America, as lower mobility and grey import laws mean content producers rip off consumers.
There, fixed it for you.
You'll still probably need a foreign credit-card to make this work properly for most people. Now that could be an interesting money-spinner for the ISP...
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891 posts • joined Tuesday 4th December 2007 14:24 GMT
Page:
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!"
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!
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.
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?
Re: woohoo free ADSL for everyone....
How long until the system is hacked?
Cos we all know how secure SCADA systems are...
Re: Smart meter
Is the little spinny thing going around slowly or quickly?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Re: "I'm entitled"
ditto to the corporates.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Re: Can't even cut and paste?
Surely you mean 4dW and p?
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?
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.
Re: 'Battling'...
> You mean 'waiting until the right moment' and then Intel will buy them?
Just before the market realises 64bit ARM is arriving...
Re: And the funny thing is....
not to mention all those phones and tablets running linux with android on top...
> Spotify’s seamless Facebook integration takes enjoying music with friends to a whole new level.
> Music has never been this social.
Is this editorial or an advert in itself?
Since when is sitting my yourself in front of a computer with all your friends elsewhere been classed as "social"? How about visiting your friends and playing a CD while having a game of something, go ice-skating, paint-balling, sailing, bowling or playing golf.
This is Newspeak worthy of Apple which advertised its ipod (loud music in your ear so you can't hear anyone/anything else) as being "social."
If my family and friends thought being social was writing on a wall so other people can see your scribblings, I'd be pretty depressed and sit by myself with a computer too.
Try experiencing people, rather than consuming things.
Re: Bottom line ...
Indeed, not distributing via DVD and BR would go a long way to reducing infringement. Stick to cinema release/live concerts only and the problem pretty much goes away.
Yes, you'll get some camcorder usage, but that's generally rubbish and not worth the effort.
No physical control, no security.
Re: ASA powerless
The gay marriage thing isn't about rights, those are already equalised between hetro and homo.
It appears to me to be about taking a word commonly associated with "wedding" and understood as "one man, one woman, promising an exclusive relationship with each other til death, before god and the community," (at least as an ideal) and redefining it as an exercise in social engineering.
By redefining the word to include homosexual unions, you divorce the meaning from its historical religious heterosexual meaning. I don't mean just Christian-religious either. It may exist, but I don't know of any traditional culture where homosexual relationships are considered to be "marriages." I also can't think of a culture where marriage is traditionally a secular institution.
That makes me wonder why people who are mostly non- or anti-religious want to redefine a mostly religious term. It seems a bit churlish. "Partnership" seems to describe most homosexual unions quite adequately. That leads me to conclude that this is a political exercise to marginalise religion by legally redefining its vocabulary to void its meaning.
You can agree or disagree with the strategy, but I don't think this is about equal rights.
Seriously?
If BP costs too much, you're doing it wrong.
How much does it cost to make a walkie-talkie from tin-cans and a bit of string?
Re: 12 months porridge for a FB 'hack'?
How about this message: "locking up people for guessing passwords is a waste of taxpayer money."
Note to Ms May: Not all "computer crimes" are equal.
> Sack this out of touch idiot. Oh we can't, he's a 'Lord'
Yes, that's just what we want, another Commons. /sarc
You don't sack someone because you disagree with them. I vehemently disagree with Howe, but I'd rather he speaks his mind than have an elected "lords."
Its the Lords who stuck a broom-handle through the spokes of some of the worst ideas TB had and have been a far better counterbalance to abuse of power by the legislative than the commons is. They can be (and are) quite big on protecting the little guy precisely because they are not beholden to a national party system which provides funds for their election or can run a campaign against them.
Certainly, some of them are quite mad, but not "start a war" mad so common in the commons.
Re: @Kevin Johnston
The ugliness of it is that it is too precise. Its like telling the time to 1/100's of a second - quite accurate and mostly irrelevant.
Re: Cars in.... Both...
and indeed the litre is too small for reasonable efficiency measurements, so you get kilometres per 100l.
Not that most petrol tanks will take 100 litres. 55 litre tanks don't appear to be particularly metric in ideology.
May I present a new buzzword: "wrong-sized: dumb measurement used for foolish consistency."
Re: The 'mercans seem to be doing OK with feet, inches and funny sizes gallons.
Except that base-10 has symbols 0-9, which is inadequate for the task.
Better to go to base-11 and keep them all in one significant place.
We should be progressing further!
I think its shocking that we have 60 second minutes, 60 minute hours, 24 hours in a day, 7 day weeks, 12 months in the year and 365 days (sometimes) in a year, not to mention a ridiculous 360 degrees in a circle.
And fractions! What's that about? What's that you say? Decimal is only an approximation? France tried a 10-day week and failed miserably? An inch is actually a measurement which is quite useful both on its own and in groups? Its actually easier to say "six-foot-one" than "183 centimeters" and indeed, just over 6 feet is easier to visualise than to 183 of anything?
What is so superior about base 10? It doesn't even work for counting fingers & thumbs without going to an extra significant place.
Go away and stop trying to change things which don't need to be changed. There is so much that needs fixing, but this shouldn't be anywhere near the top of the list, even if you think it would be a good thing.
Moar options!
By default, on ISP sign-up you get a little panel to control your internet with recommended settings.
Like, block SMTP (in various manners), block DNS queries to non-ISP (all yours, those of other common ISPs, any) DNS hosts.
You don't need to force change, you just need to start with some defaults to help the clueless.
You can also put policy notes on the same web-page as your helpdesk telephone number, such as "You connectivity may have failed since 2am this morning. Click here to see why." and then explain the blocking rule and point to the control panel to change it back.
Hack! Billions lost! Sue them all!
Oh wait... users just retry a bit later. DDOS doesn't bring the world to its knees after all. More like a traffic jam on the way to the shops.
USPTO
Are simply doing what all organisations do, maximising income while minimising (externalising) costs.
They don't have to sort out the mess.
That's what you get when you want government by managers rather than leaders.
IIRC
They were selling CoD:BlOps for $126 AUD on release. I could be wrong, it might have been MW3 with CODBLOPS at $99.
I wonder why they went out of business?
Actually, I'm not sure its all their fault. They have a totally undifferentiated product with no physical substance. Who thought that would ever be a good retail opportunity?
Getting there
It looks as though things are improving.
HP really need to do something about their logo though. The 70's called and want it back.
It's fine for servers and large cabinets with spinning reels on the front, but cool it isn't.
At least the screen res has finally improved... probably just before Apple raises the bar again.
My guess is that it still doesn't know what it wants to be - ultra portable or desktop replacement. I suspect Apple has it right by down-clocking its kit to improve battery life. Can we not have our "turbo" button from the 80's back for the best of both worlds?
To my mind, an "ultra" computer needs to be top of the line. That means battery life when I want it and plenty of speed if I have electrons to burn, coupled with the good aesthetics. I'd settle for speed only when mains connected if I needed to. It would save getting another pc for games.
At last the aesthetics are getting there. Fix the battery/clock trade-off and have optional discrete graphics and fix the USB spacing, that's a dumb rookie mistake.
lucky people
In Melbourne, built mostly on a road grid with traffic lights, we don't even have sensors to see if there are any cars there. You often just sit waiting for the full light cycle (2-3 minutes) when only one road has traffic on it.
WTB roundabouts
Re: The Cloud - When your Data is not really your data
I would agree that the problems are all solvable, the question is, has your cloud provider actually solved them.
Security is a significant issue issue. It isn't just about whether you got hacked or not. Security is about knowing the risks and accounting for them. Try setting up a PCI-DSS compliant solution using a public cloud and let me know how easy it is. It isn't just "we trust the provider" its "we have audit capability, we know who the admins are and we can show exactly who accessed what and when." Without that detail, you probably haven't gone through the rigour of designing a secure solution.
It is also a legal thing. You can't usually export banking data or personal data around the world. You will get fined. That is awkward and commercial suicide from bad design.
Re: The Rise and Fail of a Social Network
> Sold for obscene quantity of cash to people that should know better.
The problem is that some bank will have underwritten the IPO and that bank "is too big to fail" which means that you and I will be taxed to pay for it.
Worse, the ring-fenced bad debt will be bought, or, the bank will be bought by the government and then resold quickly for a song without the debt.
So we the taxpayers don't even get a decent asset for the money we paid.
But what's the leverage?
If you're being universally stuffed, what do you have to lose?
Pressure put on ISP peers to be uncooperative or did it just not work?
Perhaps itunes servers are locked to an ISP? So non-cooperation results in no itunes.
Re: £57million
> (jib supplied by BAE Systems, £1million quid)
and has four corners.
The redesign will cost another £1million.
Re: This stinks
We don't need any of it. We can quite easily nuke the french using trident.
Apologies to Yes Minister.
Re: Medion? Aldi?
Not sure about for PCs but in Oz, aldi seem to have a general no-questions-asked replacement policy and a decent warranty length.
I suspect its due to them not wanting to spend time/money on support personnel, but if you're happy with that, you should be ok.
Wingcommander!
My vote goes to the one who does the space sim running on RPi using one or two Wii controllers.
Ha, charge a bit more and bundle an Rpi with the game!
Free console with every game!
Put that in your ps3 and smoke it :D
Re: @Irongut
> Me, personally, I want an open, flexible ARM-powered netbook or ultralight laptop with a Pixel Qi display & a honking great battery - something that can run for a long weekend on a single charge. Tablet, schmablet.
Except a honking great battery means lots of weight, which doesn't fly well with most consumers.
However, a Transformer-style setup would be great, with extra battery in the keyboard.
I'd like to see more "add to your x86 setup" systems. Pop them inside your x86 case and hook up your disks to them for always-on file serving via ethernet and run thunderbolt for native disk-speed access for the local x86 host. Could the RPi graphics system be re-purposed for RAID operations?
A cotton-candy style setup would be fun. AMD could build it into their graphics cards and sell them to intel customers... "Do you really need to power up your i7 PC?"
It seems that the PCIe format could provide power supply, negate the need for a case, provide SATA cable-length access to mass storage etc.
It's hard to dislodge incumbants such as intel, I suspect the way to succeed is to offer extra services rather than compete head-on.
Awww, so naive!
> Originally designed as a sweetener to encourage digital networks, it later became a guaranteed money generator for incumbents
The networks are all digital. Telco's just price them differently because they can.
Geoblocking is particularly annoying in nations beyond Europe and North America, as lower mobility and grey import laws mean content producers rip off consumers.
There, fixed it for you.
You'll still probably need a foreign credit-card to make this work properly for most people. Now that could be an interesting money-spinner for the ISP...
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