Re: Anyone in the private sector who bought into Facebook at IPO ...
The thing about the stock markets is that everyone assumes it's just like buying things at a - well, market.
The people who bought Facebook shares probably KNEW it was going to end up lower. But if you watched, it peaked higher than they were initially paying. Thus, simple maths tells you that, in that time, you can make a very quick profit. They sensible ones probably were never INTENDING to hold onto those shares for more than a few minutes, and sell them as soon as the graph's gradient flattened. In doing so, they would not only make a profit but also cause the price to dip later (when everyone gets suspicious that these "wonderful new shares" are being sold all of a sudden by people who've only just bought them).
The profit on a share might only be a dollar or two. But buy a few million shares and that's a few million dollars. In the space of a day, if you know what you're doing, that's not a bad way to earn a living. Who cares what happens to it after you've cashed out and made a few million? Who cares that it's over-valued? If they thought they could make a profit and did, they were clever and (now) richer. If they thought they could make a profit and didn't, I have no sympathy particularly. If they didn't think they could make a profit, again, I have no sympathy for them buying in the first place.
Not everyone buys shares to hold onto forever until they slowly creep up to something above the original price (and those that did won't be worried about a few percent drop in value until it's a few years down the line and still hasn't recovered). Not everyone buys shares caring at all about what the company is, does, or makes, so long as they think there's enough people after them to raise the price quickly so they can dump them even quicker. Hell, a lot of money is made on the stock market by "betting" that a share price will sink very rapidly.
Playing the stock markets isn't like being sent on The Apprentice trip down to the local cash and carry. You can make money based on what OTHERS will do, and even by what others you expect to crash and burn (even your rivals at times!). The notion that everyone on the markets are there to make money in long-term, sound investment and never make a mistake is as ridiculous as assuming that someone who could make a million dollars in a few minutes won't take the opportunity to do so (legitimately or not).
He once said something like his character was "99% Doohan, 1% accent". I don't think he was that sad in the role he played, or would be disappointed with the way he was sent off (you honestly think he wouldn't have wanted his fans/family to say "The engine's cannae take it, cap'n!" on the first two failed attempts to launch his remains and have a good laugh about it?)
I'm not a Trekkie, I can just about tolerate TNG for an episode or two before I want to blow my brains out, let alone the earlier stuff, but I can recognise something there in the actor himself - he seemed happier to get kids into engineering courses from his influence than anything else.
I think I'd rather be remembered as a character like Scotty, or even better, an actor with Doohan's attitude, than not remembered at all. A lot more "famous" people do a lot less and make much bigger arses of themselves for the sake of money or a career.
I'd rather die with humour and parody following me than without. If I'd been the actor who'd uttered the words: "He's dead, Jim", they would have been etched on my grave. What a way to be remembered.
And the BBC provides in-class teaching materials by the shedload, not to mention there were magazines galore and it was the start of the home computing revolution so a lot of people had one at home and, because there were only a handful of machines, they were being taught it by their own uses at home too. Hell, there were entire programs on TV to teach teachers how to teach students on using the BBC Micro.
The RPi currently has zero focus on education, despite what you might think. When you can show me a set of lesson plans, or tying the use of the device into the relevant curricula, then you can say that the teachers will have something to start from. That doesn't just mean "You can run Scratch, here's the manual" but actually giving the teachers something to go on and provide for their use and work how out they can use the device.
The best teachers might be able to teach themselves, formulate lessons from it and teach a good lesson or two. But the best teachers handle themselves. You have to think of the THOUSANDS of teachers who have no clue even though they are teaching ICT (I've seen A-Level programming projects written using Excel macros - bad macros at that with 50-deep nested IF statements - passing with 'A' because the teacher was baffled by how much more advanced that work was than they could understand) and they need hand-holding.
If nothing else, the time element and the cost of knocking up even a dozen lessons on the RPi for a single age-group in a single school could easily make it impractical compared to, say, just buying an ICT Suite and doing things properly. Except most schools already have an ICT Suite to satisfy the legally-required computer-pupil ratios, and that can run Scratch just fine too. So why bother to touch the RPi who obviously have no interest at the moment in helping teachers teach it?
I work IT in schools. They need to produce, en masse, an awful lot of educational content that can touch all sides of the teaching curriculum. Currently, the Wiki has exactly 0 of anything that any teacher would consider "useful" when teaching them. So it's only the geek-teachers who could quite literally teach assembler from memory on a handful of PIC chips anyway, if pressed, who will touch them. And that seems to be exactly who they are roping in to do demos and press releases and STILL not producing anything in the way of teaching resources.
It's like being an accountant, and someone tells you that you can have a whole new way of accounting for your business with 50+ employees, 1000+ clients, £1m+ budgets, liable to the taxpayer, etc. And then all you do is shove a datasheet into their face and say "it's all there... somewhere".
The Pi can get, at most, 244Mb. That's if you use a basic, unaccelerated framebuffer. Other compromises are 128 and 192Mb that allocate more RAM to the GPU. Storage isn't a problem (SD cards). CPU speed isn't a problem (necessarily - of course it won't fly). Drivers might well be a problem but not unsolveable (binaries do at least exist for everything, even though they still need a lot of tweaking). The GPU is currently unaccelerated.
And before you know it, as discussed on the forums, you're looking at 2.0-and-before versions of Android at best. Maybe even pre-Eclair (i.e. pre-Bluetooth support in Android), let alone Gingerbread. I'm not even sure how much software supports that far back any more.
How many apps on the appstore would run? Nowhere near all. How many would run smoothly? Even fewer. How many would continue to run in the future? Fewer still. How many would be able to be run simultaneously or without running into memory problems at some uncertain point? Fewer still. How many of those would be useful to people on an RPi beyond just loading them up and looking at them? Fewer still.
Though I imagine we'll see it (just as we've "seen" Windows 8 on RPi via remote desktops, and no doubt some sadist will find a way to port some ancient Windows apps using Wine's ARM libraries), it's not going to be useful beyond one of those "Windows 95 running on an Android phone!" type demonstrations.
An Android port is in progress (apparently) but the problem is the RAM. Officially, you need more RAM than the Pi has to run Android (and sacrificing GPU RAM for system RAM is a bit of a lose-lose situation with something like Android) and the only ones that will reliably work are much older versions.
That said, the problem with that won't be getting Android running. It will be that the device is not an "Android" device officially, so that would mean that the Google Store is not able to be used (it can be loaded on any Android device that you "own or control", but the definition of that would probably exclude "hey, we slapped Android on a random ARM chip"). And there's no help from Google here yet, so it's unlikely to be updated, or officially endorsed, which means no Play Store (and thus, quite a lot of missing apps and point of using Android). Android is also "Java-based" in a way, and the Java performance of the RPi sucks. There's no help even in ARM's Java-acceleration instructions, either. And Oracle can barely get a simplified JavaFX running on it at the moment.
No doubt Android could be hacked onto the device but it will never run 1% as nicely as the cheapest, cheapy Android tablet out there (you can find them for £50 now, with touchscreen and wifi) which can run the Play Store and use the Android logo legitimately.
I'm not so sure than any media-centre use is any good for the RPi at all, to be honest. Everyone has bright ideas about doing it but even something as simple as playing a video can lead to a world of slideshow framerates and interrupted sound according to forums posts that I've read. X-Windows is still unaccelerated but even framebuffer access is pretty atrocious for playback of random formats. You'd be infinitely better off with just a basic Android device for that purpose, to be honest.
The RPi would be a good Arduino replacement, once they fix the problems and scale production. That's about it. Anything video-heavy, from desktops to media centres, you're going to be disappointed with.
Actually, we don't know what the problem is with USB or SD cards at the moment. Broadcom (who make the chipset and designed the RPi) don't seem to know either. I have just posted off a "non-working" SD card to a Broadcom employee who is going to post it to Taiwan so their "driver author" can have a look at it and (hopefully) fix the issues the RPi (and only the RPi) has with it. This is a card that I've used in about 20-30 other SD card devices without ever hitting a single problem, but the RPi can barely mount an ext partition from it in 1 try out of 20. They literally had to put a topic on the forum begging for cards that showed problems only on the RPi because they obviously don't have the testing regime themselves to discover them.
That *COULD* be software. We would hope it is. But if it's due to an electrical problem (e.g. PCB traces too thin can affect the capacitance / resistance of a circuit even if the PCB simulated perfectly and the circuit - in theory - works perfectly - see the OpenPandora project for examples of things like that happening!), or some bad design of the SD circuit, or operating slightly out of ranges then you're stuffed and won't be able to fix it in software. That means a complete reissue of 10,000 plus boards to get vaguely reliable booting with any SD card. Do you think schools will be buying the most expensive, brand new SD cards (some of which still exhibit problems with the RPi, but which are generally better) for every single student?
Similarly, the RPi drops USB packets *after* acknowledging them. That's PROBABLY a software problem, but something that only someone who understands ARM Linux kernels, the Broadcom chipset, the combined LAN/USB chipset used and can understand oscilloscope traces of a USB transaction would be able to identify, let alone fix. That's not to say those people don't exist, but we're not just talking a two-line patch to a bash script here. And Broadcom are not always going to work for free on things like that.
And that's just what we know. I listed at least 4-5 problems within 24 hours of receiving a board numbered "4011" (so, within the first "pre-order" batch). All of those issues are known in the community already and still not fixed (months after the pre-orders went live) and many have no reply to them at all except "wait and see if someone works it out". The troubleshooting forums and Wiki are horrendous and barely touch on most of the problems noticed. There are literally a handful of people (not associated with RPi) actually doing anything interesting with their boards or trying to solve those problems (after over a week, and given several HUNDRED reports of faulty cards, in the past etc. I was the only person to even reply to the call for SD cards!). Now go look at the problems of power supplies (there is no "official" power supply, and it's incredibly easy to get any amount of problems from no Ethernet to no booting at all to weird shutdowns, etc. with a power supply that looks/works perfectly fine on any other device).
RPi better hope that these things are fixable in software. But even if they are, it's going to take MONTHS to fix them. And virtually all the pre-orders are out in the wild and have been for months/weeks depending on what second of the 10-minute window the orders were open for you actually ordered in. Mass production is supposed to start soon. Going mass-production on boards that even the pre-orderers, two HUGE electronics distributors, and the company that designed it can't get working with perfectly-working, brand-new SD cards, power supplies and USB devices is a recipe for disaster.
Don't even get me started on how the default "recommended" distro is mis-configured and butchered.
People without one are blinkered about the device, but so are those who have it, and those who think it will impact general education in any way.
I have JUST this second posted off a letter to an employee at Broadcom (who make the main chips for the RPi) who is going to send it on to Taiwan where a device driver developer is going to look at the things inside (a bog-standard, fully-working 2Gb SD card) and try and work out why the RPi throws a fit any time it tries to use it. This is pretty much bog-standard basics and SD card interfaces are hardly difficult now. But they literally had to put out a call for "non-working" cards that passed certain criteria (i.e. it wasn't the card, or anything stupid, that was the cause of the problem) to random people with them in the hope that someone would send them a non-working example card so they could post it around the world for someone to tweak device drivers.
I'm also trying to get an answer to why random USB packets are just thrown out of the window which cuts off a lot of high-speed USB devices mid-transaction. Nobody's even bothering to answer that one yet. That's after the hurdles of things like the default setup totally lacking any iptables modules (on a 2Gb install? Come on... scrap some of the junk and install some of the vital components instead), numerous power problems, etc.
I have projects in mind for the Pi, and I'm an IT Manager at a private school in London. The two, currently, are not merging one iota, though. All my projects are personal embedded things as mentioned because I can just imagine the chaos of getting 20+ kids up and running with these things, even if they're cased and powered and SD-card'd properly. Hell, I'm scared to touch it because it's so damn fragile and numerous people have already broken off capacitors (casing will solve some of it but you think kids will be gentle when putting in an SD card or headphone plug? Their big education push is basically to say you can run Scratch on it. Slowly. Under unaccelerated X-Windows. Or you could just run it at five times the speed on your ICT Suite that the government insists you have to have anyway and has done for, what 10-15 years?
Sure, it fills niches but the niche it does not fill is the one it's plugged as filling - education. There's no documentation, few drivers (mostly closed-source), the entire Wiki section for lesson plans, etc. is empty, the demos consist of running the same basic programs as everywhere else (Scratch, Midori, Python, etc.) and there's no sign of exactly what you're supposed to do with it if you're NOT an IT and electronics expert (hell, I can make a circuit that talks I2C with it, but I doubt many others here could and the interface boards that exist and could be made commercial will cost as-much-again as the RPi and you'll have to program that damn things yourself).
The promise was this would be ready for schools in September. Schools would generally order in June/July (or even earlier) for September. As it is, general ordering is still closed. The "prototypes" (because that's what they are) that are in the hands of people like me are going to end up in personal projects, refunds, replacements and shuffling back and forth for several months yet. And in the end, it's NOT a PC, as advertised - far from it. It's an embedded board, no different from the end-users perspective to a STAMP or PIC or Arduino starter kit (without the kit!).
It's going to take AT LEAST a year of constant, vigilant work to get the documentation to the point where even a good IT teacher would be happy to risk more than one lesson on it. Like Intel QX3's and lots of other "fads" in education, at best it will end up in a cupboard somewhere after a year and never be touched again. At worst, there's going to be a HUGE call for refunds, repairs, replacements and, most importantly, resources. And that's the big, expensive, hard bit that you can't just lob an IT guy at if you want teachers to tie it into their lessons and curricula.
The RPi is nothing special. The GP2X was ARM-based, dual-core, integrated OpenGL ES accelerated, touchscreen, ran off two AA's for many hours, had a built-in LCD, ran Linux, had full drivers, stored on an SD-card, was "unbrickable", very sturdy, handheld and used for education in Korean schools. And that was YEARS ago and has had at least two successors in the meantime. The RPi is literally sending us backwards in those terms, not forward.
Personally, I see mine ended up where any other embedded board would end up. Doing one job all day long because it's simple to do and low power and convenient to have TCP access to the device doing it.
Great, so after you encase it, install the SD card in it, connect peripherals enough to make it access the network, have a keyboard, mouse, power button, reset button, etc. USB extenders and soundcard ports that the user can't break the port on (RPi is extremely fragile), add a reliable power supply integrated into the box, do all that, box it, ship it, and provide support for it when it goes wrong (they're having lots of problems with SD cards currently, and 100mbps Ethernet isn't the given you expect either, and you're basically running a full Debian distro to make it work properly which is booted from a proprietary GPU boot code that you have zero access to) then you might be able to get a basic "thin" (actually fat, but who cares about destroying decades-old terminology) clients that are in the same price range, power usage, size, etc. as other thin-clients and can spend the rest of your "savings" on Windows/Citrix licences.
Bargain. Except they don't exist commercially "yet" and there's no cases for them, so you'll be doing all that on your own, with the associated startup costs (or buying Nano-ITX cases, etc.). Or you could just buy any-old thin-client or even just desktop or laptop and have done the same anyway with ZERO performance concerns.
The RPi is good for several things. Thin-clients isn't one of them. Desktops is another area that it's horrible at (solved only by thin-clienting them). Hell, it struggles to play a simple MP3 from the command-line at the moment.
I'm making an in-car GPS / SMS monitoring device with my RPi at the moment - something I've done half-a-dozen times with everything from a full laptop down to Mini/Nano-ITX. The RPi has given me more headaches than anything else so far (can't even get it to hold a USB connection on a 3G stick, for instance, despite identical software to all my previous setups) and I've put it on a backburner until some of the issues are solved. That's a project where the size, speed, power requirements, capabilities, ports etc. are all perfect matches for the Pi.
So far, my Pi is still having its backside kicked by a GP2X ARM Linux handheld console (that CAN run off two AA's by default for hours and play just about the same software but better), and that's YEARS old now and been superceded at least twice by newer models.
I've never seen that on a working mail server or client, but I'd be throwing it in the junk pile if it ever did such a thing.
I suppose there's nothing to a stop a mailer leaking that info but, come on, use some decent software. BCC has the B for one, sole, primary reason - so that NOBODY KNOWS who else you sent it to but the mailserver. Any piece of software that pushes the BCC data into the email or headers should have been consigned to the scrapheap years ago.
Re: Funny how a £16 Linux computer becomes £30.87 at RS...
Got my one the other day. Still dealing with lots of niggling issues after updating the default software and firmware to the latest available from git / apt-get.
USB is sometimes unreliable (recorded cases of USB packets just disappearing into the ether despite being acknowledged by the device - which hit me by disconnecting my 3G USB stick at random points while on 3G but no problem on GPRS, etc.), a couple of people have hit heat problems on the Ethernet/USB chip (hot to the touch when there should be no real temperature there), there are power problems galore because it needs such a regulated supply (and thus battery use etc. requires additional circuitry), SD cards are still a bit up in the air - ones that I've used for years in a myriad devices start spewing out errors and putting it into unfathomable boot loops (but then, next time, it just boots fine) and the online compatibility lists are a load of junk (too many false negatives AND false positives). I also can't get it to put out a composite signal that my old Sanyo 32" TV will actually see as a colour signal (strange that every other composite device works fine including brand-new DVD players, Wii, etc.)
That's AFTER you read about people breaking off one of the capacitors quite easily / accidentally, finding incomplete solder points on their new boards, etc.
The default (and recommended) Debian image is supplied with the iptables command but without any iptables modules, rendering it useless unless you feel like recompiling the kernel yourself. The default firewall is thus "ACCEPT ALL" while some people are demoing it downloading things in Midori (which is being universally commented on as "slow").
There's a lot that's nice about the device but it's far from ready for mainstream use yet, so the camera is the LAST thing to be worrying about.
Hell, I still can't work out how to get it to boot reliably from several of the handful of SD cards that work perfectly in every other SD device I own.
Again - how can Anonymous deny that they had anything to do with the attack on the military site if they don't have a) some kind of entry requirement and control over who's a member, or b) some kind of knowledge of who is and who isn't a member?
You could do anything and blame it on Anonymous and there is NO WAY for them to disassociate themselves from that action because of their policy that anyone can be a member and nobody knows who is or who isn't.
Anonymous are not a group. It's a moniker used by anyone that wants to do something nasty, brag about it and get away with it. They can no more say that "Anonymous didn't do this" than they can say "As a member of 'People called Fred' we can say that no Fred would ever do this".
Data out is certainly more interesting than data in. Just what incentive do the cloud vendors have to help you remove the data after you've threatened to move elsewhere? I wouldn't be surprised if most or all of them offer import "somehow" if you kick up a fuss but not export at all.
Do you really want to extend your contract by another month/year so that you can repeat the "guy on a plane with a NAS" trip in the hope of somehow getting all your business data back? Or spend quite literally weeks redownloading it all before you can move off to another provider? Or have to post them a huge drive array and wait for them to copy all your data out at their convenience and then pay to send it back to you?
Cloud is one of those ideas that STILL doesn't know what it's supposed to be used for. There are lots of use cases, of course, but none for which cloud is the "optimal" solution.
If you are storing PETABYTES of business critical data and requiring cloud-level redundancy and availability, are you seriously telling me that you COULDN'T buy servers yourself around the world and do it cheaper with your existing talent?
Given that schools are now starting to deploy TrueCrypt on staff laptops that go off-site, it's hardly a burden.
Instead of just turning the machine on, you type in a password for the drive. It then boots. End of story. Without the password, the laptop data is useless.
Cost: £0.
Performance loss: Negligible
Security: Virtually perfect (as perfect as you can get when people have to memorise passphrases, or carry two-factor authentication sticks at least)
Liability when something is stolen: £0.
Hassle to the end user: "Enter your password" (which they would have had to do to print out that data anyway!)
Allow me to demonstrate transparent proxying for you.
- You think you're talking DNS to 8.8.8.8 (Google's DNS server, as an example).
- Something between your application and the outside world (router, firewall software, anything that can sniff and modify packets en-route, basically, including software on the machine itself) sees that packet, looks inside, changes it to point at whatever server they want to and then sends it on its way.
- The DNS server it sends the query to sends a reply with whatever the hell they like (including redirecting your google searches to dodgy domains, etc.). Google listen out in vain silence for your (never-going-to-arrive) packets.
- When the reply comes back to your computer, you have ZERO idea which DNS server resolved that without checking thoroughly (which nobody does, not even web browsers accessing secure sites - DNS is assumed to be "authoritative", and only DNSSEC can fix this) but, hell, you TYPED IN www.mybank.com so it must be safe, right? (And, yes, SSL does have some fixes against this but NOTHING in the way you think - SSL is very reliant on DNS being authoritative)
There is nothing in the world that is going to be able to detect that until DNSSEC comes along. You know how I know? I run transparent proxies in work so even though everyone "thinks" they are going to www.facebook.com via their DNS lookup (and all their laptops have different settings for DNS), they are actually ALL going via OpenDNS and the school DNS filters lookup of the address. I can even turn all their images upside down or make paypal.com look like it's bbc.co.uk if I want.
DNS Changer literally adds itself to your Windows list of DNS servers and HACKS INTO common router models to change the settings on there too. Is your trusted DNS server that your network gives out via DHCP pointing to your broadband router at any point? 99% of home installations have a setup like that - anyone with a cable modem or ADSL router will use the modem/router as a DNS server and default gateway. This thing actually logs into your router via backdoors and changes your ROUTER settings to change the upstream servers it uses.
When was the last time you logged into the router interface and checked the DNS it uses, seeing as " all the machines on the LAN are configured to point to the router as the DNS source"? DNS is inherently insecure, interceptible and modifiable. Don't trust it. And certainly don't trust your local network to provide it without being VERY sure that it's all clean.
Saying that, they should just switch the damn thing off and let people moan. A few hundred thousand machines less on the Internet who are crawling with obvious malware is a GOOD thing. Their own Internet access is a secondary concern to not spreading that junk to all of us.
How can anyone say it wasn't Anonymous, given that Anonymous don't know who its members are anyway? This is the stupid thing I hate about that group. It isn't a group. Anybody and everybody can claim things in the name of Anonymous and there's no way to prove positive or negative.
So the assertion "we can be sure it wasn't Anonymous" is a lot of tripe.
Although you can see an easy measurement of ping, you can't see the other "hidden" lag.
The ping is just the time for a single packet (maybe not even a game packet but an explicit ping packet) to reach the server you're playing on (and return, I assume).
You almost certainly lose 1/60th of a frame no matter what anyway, because of screen buffering and game programming techniques. That's 16.7ms. Then your mouse is probably optical and USB - that could easily add on the same number of milliseconds between you moving it, it being sense, processed and got to the main CPU for it to act on it (but only when it next hits an event loop which could be half the above quite easily - so another 8ms or so!).
Then the time to send the image down the HDMI cable and the HUMUNGOUS time the LCD might take to process it (even a 5ms full-dark-to-full-bright time means nothing as a lot of modern LCD's "buffer" the screen updates even further inside themselves so although technically true, you could be 2-3 frames behind what you're think you're supposed to see - yet another 35+ms!).
There's more to responsiveness than ping time. A lot more. But ping time is easily measurable without any human bias at all. The rest aren't. There's no way to reliably measure just how long it takes you to respond to a screen change without taking a reaction test. And there the greatest error contributor is your brain processing and nerve response, which swamps all these other factors anyway.
I have run game servers (CS 1.6 etc.) for years. I consider 100+ ping unacceptable personally, and 200+ unacceptable on anyone entering the server. But my reaction times in even the quickest test of pressing a mouse button when you see a dot swamp anything that my PC could be waiting for from the network. What they are saying with the "150ms" measurement is that there's an awful lot of other stuff other than ping that affects perceived responsiveness in the average gamer's setup. But it still doesn't mean that they have solved those problems themselves or that their system isn't liable to that same 150+ms "technical" latency.
My experience is not so much of a puppy following me from site to site as advertisers wasting money on me.
I have a server with Tagadab (good company, don't get me wrong). I visited their site to log in to the control panel.
Three months later, every website with advertising I go to is still advertising Tagadab to me, including LWN.net and lots of big-name sites. Same advert, no special deal or anything, just a link to their website.
I know who they are. I'm a customer. But they (or, more likely, their ad campaign managers) are wasting their money by advertising to me again and again despite the fact that NONE OF THEIR COMPETITORS advertise to me in that same way. I only ever get Tagadab adverts. Similarly for when I bought a GoDaddy SSL certificate. I get advertised WORSE offers from GoDaddy than I can get just by going to GoDaddy's website and logging in. And I only ever see GoDaddy adverts for SSL certificates (and not, say, server hosting).
Similarly, I clicked on a picture of a garment (not even an ad) from Milanoo to show my girlfriend something. Now interspersed, I get the same 3-4 Milanoo adverts all the time on loads of different sites (and how they think I might want to buy a Zentai suit or a "Lolita" country-style dress, I don't know, given that I clicked on a pair of men's trousers). I have no intention of buying clothes online (hell, I can't remember the last time I bought clothes full stop!), but there's no way to stop them throwing their money away on me.
Seriously, given the amount of sites I go to, the length of time its been going on and the amount of advertising I see (I don't block it unless its obnoxious - some of those sites have to pay the bills), I must be costing those companies a significant amount for someone who's never going to be "swayed" by their advertising to do anything they weren't already going to do. Targeted adverts are really anything but targeted. And targeting an advert seems silly - surely the people who deal all day long in server hosting already know about server hosts, but may not know about, say, SSL certificates from you, or something completely unrelated to IT?
Facebook's ads are rarely relevant as it is. Even if you spend ten minutes going through their "all ads" page and marking the ones you're interested in and the ones you're not, you still always see the uninteresting ones. If I'd BOTHERED to tell you what sort of adverts I'm not interested in, at least take note, especially seeing as I took the time to mark individual adverts and not just "Not interested in anything".
In over 15 years of using the Internet, I've never once clicked on a single advert. I don't even mind adverts particularly because I can mentally turn them into whitespace even while speed-scanning a page and they keep some of the smaller operations running (my brother's Scout group gets a couple of camps a year and their hosting paid for by adverts on his Scouting website). But if you want me to actually click on them they have to be not only relevant, but interesting, offer me some incentive to click (not just "I can buy your product" but, say, "10% for me today because I clicked the advert and didn't just visit the site), and not spam me with adverts I've told you I'm not interested in, or adverts sent to me because I'd visited the page of a company that I'm already a customer of.
Adverts are about brand-building and getting people onto your site. Without some sort of incentive, it won't happen, and the brand-building can happen in a million other ways.
Though there was certainly a lot of misinformation, there was also a lot of legal calls to make sellers sell things only in metric.
The "Metric Martyrs", I believe they were called, of whom the owner of Trago Mills stores in Cornwall was quite vocal (my favourite shop, especially the Falmouth one!), used to put up posters to raise awareness of the issue years ago, and went to court for refusing to sell things in only one measure. I don't know the outcome but given that I can still buy spuds by the pound, they probably won or at least won morally.
There's nothing wrong with selling me 500ml of water, or a kilogram of potatoes. But there's also nothing wrong with selling 568ml of milk and advertising it as a pint, or 2lbs of potatoes and stating the measure in metric too, is there?
I agree that most operating systems don't. But that's no excuse if you're supposed to be making a "world-beating" operating system that's focused on security - because there's no barrier to making it work properly at all.
And MS is supposed to have their "system protection", etc.. How hard is it, precisely, to prevent certain files being deleted without being in a "system maintenance mode", or requiring an actual human's permission to do so (that was the whole POINT of the annoying UAC wasn't it?).
I'm really waiting for the day where your computer can be in either "usage" or a minimal "maintenance" mode and only in maintenance mode can you do updates, change bootloaders, play with critical files, etc. and only in usage mode can you log in as other users, browse the web, move files around, execute programs etc. And having NO PROGRAMMATIC WAY to switch between the two modes at all, and not have any processes survive the transition.
We have a sort of fake pseudo mentality that almost does this ("no running as root normally", "safe mode", etc.) but they never quite cover that the two modes of operation are distinctly different beasts.
Sorry, but pints of milk quite clearly state their "ml" value and have for years. All foods have their metric values on them.
There's a difference between showing metric units and FORCING ONLY metric units. The former is good sense. The later is just going to create hatred and alienate people and confuse who WERE brought up with the old system.
Nobody will reasonably object to you (as has already been done) putting "568ml" on your pint of milk. Or selling it in 500ml lots. Or selling potatoes by the kilo. Or any of the other measures. So long as you don't FORCE that to be the only way to mark it. What harm does an EXTRA marking of the imperial measurement do in a time of middle-ground between two measures? All children's exams nowadays - metric. All food measures - metric. All dimensions in the Argos catalogue - metric (and sometimes imperial as an indicator too). All rulers and measuring tapes have had metric on them for DECADES now.
About the only thing that hasn't changed over in any way is the roads. Every car advert has km/l (or more likely litres/100km) now as well as mpg, but you can't go through the roads and change the signs to km/h overnight. The best you can do is has a transition where you mark BOTH speeds with the appropriate units on all roadsigns.
And then? To be honest, nothing much else happens. Once the roadsigns are dual-format, anyone can understand them in any age of car (which are also all dual-format on their speedos) so there's no need to go any further. Will it stop people speeding, or stop them comparing fuel efficiency? No.
So you have to ask, what advantage do you get exactly from the changing last bastions of imperial measurement as opposed to merely adding the metric equivalent clearly next to them? And the answer is: NOTHING. Just a waste of public money from that point to make everything "metric-only" at further expense.
Nobody cares about metric or imperial. What we care about is not having to deal ONLY in metric if we don't need to. There's no reason for me to HAVE to buy milk that's only printed in millilitres when they could put both units on it. And I don't even care - if I ever do measurements or conversions, I do it by using metric equivalents because they are slightly easier to work with - I was brought up a metric child by my schooling, even though my parents are strictly imperial. But what I do care about is little old grannies trying to do 220mph on the motorway because they misread the sign, or alternatively 70km/h because they misread their dial.
Nobody sensible objects to metric units, metric signage, metric measurement or teaching metric (as has been standard since, what, the 70's?). What we object to is removing a perfectly useful piece of information for no reason at all instead of just complementing it (and, hell, put the imperial in small writing next to a big bold metric measure if you want, who cares?).
1) Don't test their updates against a single Windows PC before sending them out.
2) Don't have a whitelist of known-good checksums of critically important, unchanging and pretty prevalent Windows system files.
3) Don't have a way to safely undo mistakes.
4) Don't put out an update that only touches the minimum of what it needs and lets USERS flag stuff as bad or not because it knows better.
and Windows, apparently, doesn't have a way of stopping programs from bricking the operating system by deleting critical files. Nice to know. (And, no, I don't care if you ARE an administrator user or not - you shouldn't be able to do this programmatically without at least warning the user first!)
"As also that the product would ever be ready for mass educational deployment in September (which actually means having everything in hand by June/July). This really was never on.
To think so says something about you. I don't think I would want you running my IT shop. Sorry .."
Er.. This is my point. I never expected them to but they kept saying that they would and that was their target. And if they expected to and that was unrealistic (as I've posted on their forums in the past), then they should have revised their estimates or done *SOMETHING* about it.
They will barely manage to supply first-day pre-orders in time for the Summer, let alone anyone else. The number of schools (outside of those "specially selected") who will see a Pi this year is going to be near zero. And evaluating even what I consider the "prototype" device that I've been sent shows you have another good year of development before anyone will see them as an actual product.
That's not to mention encasement, packaging, shipping, board revisions, SOME SOFTWARE (other than a plain debian image), and - working in schools - most important of all: Some fecking staff training, or at least people trying to tie the device into the curriculum somehow rather than dump-and-run on the teachers. They're just dumping a Linux distro, GCompris, Python, Scratch and TuxPaint (which seems to be as far as they'll get at the moment) on people and saying "get on with it" which won't wash in schools except as a fad project, and all of the above they can do on their machines NOW - faster, cheaper (because they already have those machines) and more reliably.
A user-developed product is not necessarily a failure - but if there are next-to-no users and even less developers among them, then there's not going to be a product. There's no focus on that. There's no focus on schools. There's no focus on SELLING the product to schools. There's no focus on tying it into schools. It's a complete bandwagon device to hang on the coattails of the Government's "we need more proper IT" stance with nothing to actually help kids.
I don't care about the IT side as much (though I'll certainly find uses for it in my own projects) as targetting education with a dump-and-run scheme. When you spout off on BBC News, BBC Breakfast, Slashdot, The Register, and just about every tech-site, news outlet and newspaper about your marvellous release and what your plans are, you should make damn sure those plans are realistic, IT project or not, and certainly educational IT. And they didn't. Because airtime seems more important to them than actually fulfilling the educational side of this venture, and more than anything else.
My order was put into the RS website as soon as was technically possible (their website basically folded before the release time even arrived). I have *just* got a note from the Post Office that my order (number 4401 from RS's "half") of the release minute (I would say release day, but really if you didn't order in the first few minutes, you were stuffed) has finally arrived.
The release date was February 29th, by the way. March, April, May. So they just about delivered those orders from the first few minutes of release in 2 and a bit months after "release" (which is really a pre-order that I got suckered into because they kept telling us it was a "release").
The forums are pretty quiet on actual content - everything is either a two-line port from Debian archives, or some Hello World knocked up in Python. Sure, you can run Quake on it, but I didn't expect anything less given the specs. The troubleshooting forums describe myriad power problems which, yes, technically people should read the specs on but that's only going to get worse on public release. There's a couple of broken units (bad solder joints on things like the Ethernet port that had to ALL be redone because of a manufacturing cockup, broken SD card readers, HDMI compatibility problems, etc.) but there's no way to gauge how many are actually in the wild and being used at the moment (already people are just selling them on unopened). And the amount of people who say "I want it to do X" - media centre PC, emulators, etc. - and the answer is basically "It won't" show that it's being regarded as some general purpose device instead of a small embedded unit that's not suitable for most things a smartphone can manage.
So they still have a LLOOONNNGGG way to go to get to their goal of having these things just thrown into random schools. Sure there are Scout groups and schools posting about using them, but those are the geek-teachers anyway who do infinitely more interesting things than I ever did at school. But I think it's going to be way past this September, and maybe even the next, before they actually get them near to schools in general except as a fad item. Give it a couple of years and maybe some real educational company will pick them up and package them into something more useful but at the moment they are nothing more interesting or special than, say, a GP2X (and the GP2X was designed and used educationally in Korea, and has a successor already, and could do everything I've so far seen thrown at the Pi).
I'll be unpacking mine tonight to give it a run-through but, if I'm honest, the only thing I can see them used for is my own projects whereas I originally ordered on the hopes my school might be able to find some use for them (I was expecting there to be educational software, cases, etc. available on general sale by now but it's still just a bare ARM board at the moment).
Being on BBC News, all the tech sites, etc. and becoming a new buzzword is actually just annoying because hardly anybody's done with them what they were originally intended for, and hardly anybody's even been able to get one yet. It's not a release day, if people can't buy and get it sent out for delivery that same week. It's going to be a while before they're able to do that and even then, three-four months late, there's not much in terms of their original plan that you can use them for. Sure, you can boot Linux and play around in Scratch, but you can do that on any PC anyway like schools have in droves in their ICT suites.
The equipment isn't now, nor has ever been, the problem.
The problem is the cost to the end-user. Just what are you intending to charge me for it? Because if it's expensive, I'll wait until I get off the plane. And most people run scared of roaming anyway - there's a reason for that that's nothing to do with worrying about using foreign airwaves or interfering with the plane, or the slight delay in voice traffic. It's simply the cost.
So every time you equip a plane, you're expecting people to fund its installation by using it and making you a proportion of profit after you've connected via a satellite and talked to a (now foreign) mobile operator to terminate your calls. And then you price it so extortionately that the only reason people REALLY turn their phones off on a plane is because they're scared they'll hit roaming charges while they're not looking.
Seriously, people. Sod all the fancy stuff. Let me send texts and browse the web. You can cache that locally, send it at your own leisure, don't care about slight interruptions, can route via the cheapest method transparently (wireless / 3G while on the ground, switch to satellite once high enough in the air) and not bother me with people shouting "HELLO!" down the phone while I'm trying to sleep. Then you can price it more sensibly and shock, horror, people might start to use it. While things are still priced in pounds per megabyte, nobody is going to EVER touch the service except by accident or curiosity.
Nothing else, absolutely nothing else, matters but the cost to the end-user. If you charge me 5p extra to send a text message that you then relay over some hugely-slow but viable link back to a base in the UK that then sends the text message onwards from there, that would be useful. If you let me have available-but-slow wifi, that's worth a couple of quid per flight, maybe, if I need it. Anything else and no matter how much a captive audience you have, nobody will touch it. Real-time voice just isn't necessary - we're only amusing ourselves until the plane lands when we THEN do all the important phone calls anyway. Give us the most basic of data services at a *decent* price and you'd have an audience.
Mobile networks need to realise that mass volume of customers * a couple of pence profit is infinitely better than no customers * huge wads of profit each. This applies to roaming, data, data roaming, and airplane use. Drop your prices, see a rise in profits. Increase the prices to these stupid amounts, see a continued absence of customers afraid to even turn their phones ON abroad and instead buying a foreign SIM, thus netting you 0p profit.
£19,690. For a quite, bog-standard, ordinary car. The USB/iPod stuff? What's that? A £5 chip nowadays stuck into just about any radio you buy? Hell, the digital photo frame I got brand-new for £20 can play MP3's, navigate my folders, etc. on a 7" screen, so the entire kit can't be worth more than a £100 or so?
And then you get stuck with weird doors, a 1.6 engine, cramped legroom, no bootspace, stupidly tiny rear windows, and - just about - 45mpg.
Last time I fired up Torque OBD on my 1995 1.8 Mondeo, it got 40mpg on average everywhere I went. Now, sure, that difference adds up over time but this car cost me £300 and I've probably spent less than that again on it in three years, and mostly for worn tyres! Call it £700 to get the in-car entertainment to the same level, and that's still never going to make the money back in its usable life based on an old scrapheap of a car (which has passed the last two MOT's with "zero comments" first time). And yet I can put a shed into my car (I have done, and a lot more besides), seat 5 passengers comfortably (and 4 of them get a door to themselves), have total vision on the rear of the car, and have no more difficulty parking it than any other.
And yet, still some people call THIS a cheap and nasty car. The amount of money being urinated away on cars in this country must be phenomenal, not to mention the "4x4 to go 100 yards makes my kids safer" crowd.
What, precisely, is the attraction in a new car? No repair bills (I'm no mechanic myself)? Lower road tax (Seriously? Averaged over a year of use?)? All you seem to get is more and more expense (god knows what a dent costs on that thing, or a smashed tail-light, or the insurance, or the service costs to keep the warranty, etc.). What am I missing about cars that makes people want to buy junk like this?
80% for a grainy film, with pointless and bad extras, that you admit has awful sound, just because it ties-in with a pay-for app? And they can't even link the online content correctly?
Isn't this back in the realm of "pay me money, I'll give you a 90% rating"?
Someone please bring back proper reviewing, where "scores" can go down to 0 again rather than starting at 80, and people aren't afraid to say that a product is junk or you're probably better off with the previous releases unless you're an absolute collector freak.
Because the postal service is rubbish most of the time.
I do all my Christmas shopping online but I have to inform my neighbours that I'm sorry for the hassle in advance. I work during normal working hours, thus all my parcels go undelivered, especially if it needs a signature. The postman will bother everyone on the street rather than leave it (because that gives him/me liability for it, depending on who decides he can do that) and I end up with 2-3 red parcel collection leaflets a day in December between the various members of my household.
If the neighbours have taken it in, I have to chase round them all to find out who and where and hope they're in. In one case I had to initiate a lawsuit because Three said they'd delivered my new contract phone and tried to charge me for something I'd never seen (and try to hold me to a contract that I'd never signed because it was in that lost parcel!). If it's gone back to the depot, I am graciously allowed to collect it from there between the hours of 8:30-4:30 on weekdays (so, that's a "never" then, to anyone who works) and up to 1pm on a Saturday, from a depot that you cannot park anywhere near. Near Christmas, on a Saturday, if you're not there at 7:00 am to start queueing, you won't get your parcel. And I won't risk parking near it because you stand a good chance of getting a ticket if you ignore the markings because the traffic wardens appear out of nowhere on a Saturday when they know it's easy-pickings.
If you do manage to get to the front of the queue, it's a 50-50 toss-up as to whether they currently are trying to redeliver your parcel while you're there. If they are, you're stuffed and might as well come back tomorrow because you won't see them if you rush home, and you won't be able to queue again, and you can't wait for them to return because the customer service bit closes before they do. So, in effect, you just better hope that you get it before they send it back to the sender.
Do I live out in the sticks? No. I live in a large well-known town inside the M25, and the Royal Mail depot is only two minutes away (fortunately).
That, of course, is all assuming your parcel was sent by Royal Mail. There are myriad other companies who all do the same tricks, with depots in different places, one of which is miles from me through busy London streets (Hangar Lane Gyratory! GAH!). Last time something was delivered by them I ended up forcing them to phone the delivery driver and get him to drop off the parcel I'd come to collect by appointment that he'd taken out for delivery. I had to sign papers and argue like mad to get them to drop it over my garden fence so that it would be there after driving back (which took 45 minutes).
Then, of course, you have the times that things DON'T go according to those courier's plans anyway (lost parcels, customs charges, "we forgot where we put it but it's here somewhere", etc.) . About the only reliable company to order from is Amazon who seem to employ a company that consists of ordinary people in their cars who drive around at convenient times to deliver their parcels. They also operate a decent returns service that involves popping to a local newsagent who takes your parcel for them, so obviously they trust the Royal Mail and large courier companies as much as I do.
Online ordering is perfect. So long as you have a mail system that works, or are ordering things that are large enough for them to pre-arrange delivery. Otherwise, it can be easier to walk into town and get the damn things yourself. I've done my entire shopping for Christmas online for every year since 2000. It's steadily getting worse, to the point where I'm considering not to bother for some things. And it's nothing to do with the online stores, the payment, or anything else - it's to do with overworked, understaffed, useless, inconsiderate delivery companies that assume everyone is off work all day long every day and won't take responsibility for putting a parcel in a half-safe place (I have run one parcel over because they left it hidden on my driveway, and I've had one just left - with hundreds of pounds of IT equipment - on the doorstep for 18 hours in plain view with the name of the company visible, with even a "signed" delivery note shoved through my door that would cost a fortune to contest if it had gone missing).
Online ordering only works so far as mail-ordering works. When I have to catch my neighbours to warn them of an expensive parcel coming, mail-ordering is severely lacking.
Re: Apps for Android can be served from anywhere you can download an APK
No.
The device might not be "supported" (so boo-hoo if it doesn't work), but the only real restriction is that you have to do it on an "Android device". This device was Android, branded with the Google Android logo, or otherwise I wouldn't have bothered to install an app store for Android on it.
And given that it's incredibly easy to spot if someone's installed the app on something they shouldn't, I'd think that Google would have blocked it in a second otherwise.
"This license granted to you for the Licensed Application by Licensor is limited to a nontransferable license to use the Licensed Application on any mobile devices running Android OS ("Android Device(s)") that you own or control."
1) You can't capture a lot of this stuff. That's why we plan to de-orbit it before its even launched. The speeds involved don't bear thinking about (one screw in orbit can tear through the Mir Space Station like it was butter - how so you capture that?) You'll notice that it's incredibly rare that we ever dock with a satellite or other orbiting thing unless both are fully-working and we can use both their propulsions and PLAN IT METICULOUSLY. One wrong move and you kill yourself, de-orbit the satellite or add to the space junk ten-fold.
2) There's no value in them. Their biggest cost is launch, yes, but the actual satellites would cost hundreds of times more to capture and even more to repair than just binning them an launching another. Again, this is why we just de-orbit things into the atmosphere and let them burn up.
3) "Refuelling"? Seriously? Most of the "fuel" is either highly radioactive in the old ones, or solar in the new ones. The power isn't the problem. It's the cutouts, safeties, orientation to the Sun, etc. that kills off a satellites power, not it running out of juice. The Voyager spacecraft are still running at something like 50% power while on the outside the solar system 40 years after launch.
4) Who owns that stuff? Who will fund you to repair that stuff (much cheaper to just launch newer kit)? What if you touch a Chinese satellite by mistake? You could seriously start a war by just touching someone else's satellite, even by mistake, or causing debris from your operation to interfere with their kit.
5) Where would you repair it? In space? Via a spacewalk? The single-most-expensive venture that one man ever performs? You know the greatest risk while you're on a spacewalk? Getting hit by space junk that's so small and fast we can't track it. Are we repairing random bits of kit that were fabbed in semiconductor labs with the latest technology from inside an astronaut's spacesuit? Or would you take it to an in-orbit space station that would cost more to build and operate than it would ever cost to relaunch all those satellites put together? Or would you bring it back through our atmosphere at huge expense and risk only to be told that the technology was obsolete and that if they were going to have to launch it again, they'd rather do it with a new model or one that hadn't already broken once?
There's a reason all that space junk is called junk. It effectively is, because of the content, accessibility, and cost of going near it. It's like saying that 80% of the world's gold is in the ocean. It is. It will be. Until we work out a cheap way to drain and search the entire ocean for less than the difference between the total price of all gold on land and the total price of all gold in the sea.
The safest thing to do with space junk, even with politics and cost aside, is to push it into our atmosphere. But only to get it out of the way so the next launch doesn't hit it.
Re: Apps for Android can be served from anywhere you can download an APK
Indeed.
An Android tablet that I bought cheap from Maplin's did make my heart sink a little to see that it had no Google Play app store on it, but only some proprietary nonsense that wanted you to pay in "coins" for free apps. I was *this* close to taking it back to the shop to complain that it wasn't "proper Android", when I decided to take the challenge (MS had earlier been peeing me off that day by some ridiculous hurdles on installing a game that wanted GfWLive - and needless to say there was a little victory punch when I did indeed manage that on XP SP2 which isn't officially supported at all - so I was quite in the mood for some technical wizardry to bypass silly restrictions) .
I was quite disappointed to find out that all I needed to go was google for the Play store app APK file, download it, run it, and voila! Mum could buy and play Cut-The-Rope and Angry Birds. I didn't even need to use a PC or anything - I did it all from the tablet and hardly did anything technical at all.
Moral of the story: Restrict me and I'll send your product back or make it work anyway. Don't restrict me, but just configure things a little oddly, and I'll pay for the product and put it the way *I* like it anyway. Same with browsers. I don't care what comes pre-installed, but if I can't get my favourite browser on a level playing ground, I won't touch it.
I think MS are leading themselves to trouble here. This *STINKS* of deliberate anti-competitive behaviour and the EU still haven't forgiven them from the last time yet. Either IE has to stop using those API's (and thus shows itself up as being junk) or everyone else gets to use them (and thus IE shows itself up as being junk). Either way, all they've done is make themselves look evil when they could have just chose either option and merely looked incompetent.
An out-of-context quote but certainly not a misleading one.
An app with "route" in the title, for planning routes, that can't plan routes. And the bit it does show is pointless. And that's assuming it works when you take that route. And, I assume, the coupon-led bit requires you to "check in" along the route to show you've taken that route at a slow speed (otherwise they're just giving away coupons), so it not working is pretty critical to the function of the app.
A coupon-giving route-planning app to avoid carbon release that may not give coupons, can't plan routes and actually advises worse ways of travelling.
The Government IT slogan should be: "You couldn't make it up."
BT publish 0800 numbers for reporting faults (which will soon be free from mobiles too). Brand-new PAYG phones can be picked up for under £10 in any Tesco.
You're hardly *LOCKED* to a landline any more. The fault on your landline won't be vital any more. And reporting the fault is easier than ever because I can almost guarantee you that you have a mobile in your pocket right now, or are standing next to someone who does.
And how do you find those free fault-reporting numbers? Try any operator. Or Google. Or directory enquiries.
And, let's be honest, the situation's been the same since, what, the 90's? I can honestly say I've never used a telephone box in my life, and I'm only 30. Hell, when I move house, the only reason to have a landline is if I want ADSL or it comes free with the package. I couldn't tell you the last time it actually *RUNG* (and certainly not the last time it was rung by someone I actually wanted to speak to!).
Can't say I have much interest. They "invested" $333,333 (according to their page) just to buy the naming rights and are asking for more than that to actually write the game. That, in their own words, was all their profits from all their previous ventures.
They could have wrote that game with "the in-house tech that’s been in constant development at the studio for more than a decade" for that money and called it anything else (literally, anything else at all), but they've not even managed to get to prototyping the game because it *HAD* to have the same name. Half the entire game budget blown on the name alone doesn't inspire confidence. I assume they think "CoolGameX by the makers of, and in the style of, Carmageddon" would confuse people who wanted to buy it.
They've got a basic engine going (Really? That's all? Physics / 3D engines are ten-a-penny nowadays, the cost of the game is actually in the assets - level design, 3D texturing, etc.), they have minimal game assets ("start creating the initial game assets"!), they only have half the original dev team (Which half? What did they do? Have we got the people who actually made the game, or a couple of people who wrote a few lines in the prototype engine of the original Carmageddon?), but they do have 40+ hangers-on which weren't around back then ("We’re a modest-sized indie developer (around 50 trapped souls)").
Seems to be confirming the stereotype of all Kickstarter projects that I've seen so far. Throwing money at a poorly-managed dev-only project who couldn't get funding through other means and seem to want me to compensate them for the money they've already thrown away on tat.
I'd kill for a proper Carmageddon sequel. But this won't be it. And if it is, it'll be that sequel without my help (or anyone else's) anyway.
I only wish I could sit on my bum for ten years trying to negotiate the sale of a name and then slap it on absolutely nothing that I hurriedly knock up and make money from the whole business. It's a damn sight easier than actually creating a good game and then selling it no matter what the name.
Why would you need to store anything if it takes seconds to redownload the whole thing again? It would actually be quicker to stream it live, in that case, than save it to disk!
Sure, there's an argument for having your own independent copy of the data, but the more incentive for storage (i.e. lots of data and fast download), the cheaper it gets. Fact is that most people don't even use the 100Gb hard drive in their laptop any more. When I image people's computers onto their new laptops etc. it's rarely more than 30-40Gb and most of that is Windows, photographs and applications. People don't even save their email onto their computer any more, really. It's all done "live" with IMAP.
But with decent home broadband comes the incentive to provide decent networking gear for business (links across a whole factory site can easily have been Gigabit since 1999 and 10/100 since 1995, with self-installed cable, hand-crimped connectors and commodity hardware - so why does the exchange which is across the road to me barely get 8Mbps?), higher speeds, faster datacentres, faster international links, larger storage, more applications (video, VoIP, etc.), etc.
The bottlenecks determine the current technology. My drive isn't faster because I can't get enough data to put onto it that fast. You might fill an SSD once but you're not going to be running it at SATAIII speeds all day long. My drive isn't larger, not because we've hit physical limits (or I'd have options to put two-three drives into a laptop already, and although they exist, they are stupidly expensive rather than standard) but because we don't store that amount of data any more (a couple of Tb will more that satisfy more people at the moment, and that's a £100 Maplin's job to fulfill) and can't download that data even if we wanted to. My wireless isn't faster because it has to plug into a 10/100 Ethernet cable most of the time. Same as my optical media drive isn't SATAIII because the disks can't spin that fast anyway!
But home broadband bandwidth is a serious hurdle, especially upload, whereas any datacentre you choose can throw unmetered 100Mbit connections at you as standard. Increase that, and you get a boost in all the other computer specifications too. There's nothing stopping a gigabit-ethernet-to-the-door service providing those sorts of speeds except the costs of laying the initial cable. With that suitably rolled-out and planned, you can even go up to 10Gb without struggling once the time comes. It's a question of investment in something worthwhile, rather than still running new houses with manky old 2-core copper to an old exchange with nothing more recent than ADSL or so, and not even a "throw money at it" style problem.
Agreed, multiple storage failures, your cloud provider exploding because of the Large Hadron Collider or anything else are not an excuse for LOSING data.
Possibly making that data temporarily unavailable but the words "data recovery specialists" really translate as "whoops, we have no backup".
Even if the whole rack exploded - where's your backup from last week, last month, last year?
High availability and redundancy are no substitute for backups. I hope all the listed companies just cancel their contract and ask for a complete refund.
So while they were performing their usual routine (Windows Start Bar, VS colouring, etc.):
1) Break something deliberately obvious and stupid for no reason
2) Wait for everyone to shout.
3) Change back to what it was already "based on customer feedback"
in order to make you think they are actually doing something, what have they actually stripped out of the program or incorporated that people were too blinkered by the "it's grey" setting to find?
The day BT are nationalised or otherwise removed from the market, and made to do their job - sell connectivity to others and not hoard and price access to 50-year-old copper cables like they are gold-dust.
Hell, I always assumed we'd be all-fibre by now (2012, ffs!) and not bothering with anything over copper at all. USB over fibre is in the works, Ethernet over fibre has been around for decades, fibre-to-the-door is available if you're lucky with where you live... and none of it has any value to thieves.
But, apparently, no. We're still using the same cables that I ran my 56K modem off (and in some cases you could easily have used the same copper to dial-up at 9600bps right to ADSL2+, the only difference being the middle conversions and street cabinets).
ADSL standards were finalised in 1999. I was still at uni then. The same time before that: (1999 - (2012 - 1999)) was 1986. The progress change that ADSL would have been to ZX Spectrum users should have happened AGAIN by now. ADSL of 1999 was, say, 8MBps (ideal conditions, I know). ZX Spectrum modems were 1200 bps. By rights, with only LINEAR improvement (not exponential as normally would happen in a thriving tech market), we should have: 55Gb/s connections to the home by now (if my maths is right). With at least 10Gb/s usable in a typical installation. You'd hit your "traffic limits" for the month in a handful of seconds.
Instead, we have ADSL2+ (if you're lucky) which is ADSL at a slightly increased speed (2-3 times increase instead of nearly a 7000-fold increase) and available hardly anywhere, and the fastest connections are, shock-horror, fibre where it's been bothered to get installed.
"Groklaw's views always favour Google. You may want to read the other sources as there are there are other views."
If you'd read my comment, I do. Few of them link to entire court transcripts of the events as they unfold, and those that do - strangely - all have the same facts in them! After that it's just interpretation. I can ignore Groklaw's interpretation (the "we were right, aren't we wonderful" thing always gets on my nerves, actually, because anyone with a brain could tell they were right when they said it originally, etc.)
The problem here is not the interpretation (personally, I think Google are home and dry here and Oracle are facing a minor SCO-style slide into oblivion if they don't react quickly, others think otherwise and there's a whole spectrum of opinion on the matter - not black and white), it's the facts. Which this article, like Oracle, conveniently ignores in order to make their "case" sound better.
Copyrighting an API destroys large parts of IT. You couldn't do it, at least not sensibly or without everyone fleeing that particular country who has any interest in doing serious IT work. It would literally kill WINE, Android, Linux (POSIX API's remember!), Samba, every instant messenger program, etc. every Exchange connector, anything that "resembles" or works with SAP, etc. all overnight. But given that even Samba's use of API's, for example, is basically an enforcement and endorsement of the EU courts, that would be extremely tricky to resolve such a paradox and either such a ruling would have zero square metres of jurisdiction, or have to not exist at all.
Not copyrighting an API means Google have done nothing wrong WHATSOEVER based on the judge and jury's rulings and decisions so far. In fact, they have been pushing for motions to dismiss and mistrial BECAUSE of that fact - i.e. Oracle knew it never had a leg to stand on and it's only red-tape that's keeping the case going. Even a basic decision in this are is win-win for Google. But some people are interpreting that as "THE WHOLE IT INDUSTRY IS GOING TO DIE BECAUSE OF GOOGLE!" whereas, in fact, things are the opposite and the only one trying to apply for exclusive ownership of anything even vaguely resembling, replacing or interoperating with their kit are actually Oracle. Yet, their predecessor was more than happy about such things (as they should be).
Oracle here are on shaky ground. Shouting the odds about how a wonderful success has been achieved sends the wrong message. They just got their backside kicked, hard. They are looking at a bleak, empty, expensive lawsuit that only damages themselves. They are looking at shareholders taking a close look at what went on and where all that money went and why. They are looking at having to deal with copycat-Java's popping up everywhere and making them obsolete JUST BECAUSE of what they've done with this lawsuit (would you touch Java API code now?). A bit like they did with OpenOffice, but with real, legal implications - buy it, break it, try to crush the opposition when they make a replacement, end up not having one iota of influence on the entire product from that point on because everyone avoids working with you.
Much as I hate Oracle and don't-mind Google, this is a really-skewed opinion piece based on a poor reading of the case and the court transcripts. You can't stand in the way of facts. Oracle are gonna hurt on this one.
At the risk of being called a fanboy, you obviously don't keep up with Groklaw coverage or even looked at the case in question. To steal the summary from Groklaw's latest update:
"Recap of the day: Google won everything but the one issue that the judge has to decide anyway, the API SSO issue. The jury found, as they had been instructed to assume for the purposes of deliberation, that APIs can be copyrighted, the structure, sequence and arrangement of APIs, but that is by no means established. The same question, in a b) section, asked if fair use excused any infringement if found, and the jury couldn't resolve that issue. But the judge has to decide whether or not that is true, that APIs can be protected by copyright. That comes later this month. Meanwhile, Oracle prevailed only on 9 lines of code that Google admitted prior to trial to have included by mistake and then removed from current Android. Oracle's own expert, the judge pointed out in court, valued those 9 lines of code at zero. This is 9 lines out of millions. So that means, if we are looking at damages, that so far Oracle has won nothing. There is no liability. You can't have infringement without considering fair use, Google asserts, and there will be briefing on that. Somebody has to decide that fair use issue. And then the judge has to decide about the API copyrightability issue. If he rules that APIs can't be copyrighted, as the EU Court of Justice just ruled, then fair use is moot. And Oracle takes nothing at all from the copyright phase of this litigation, and this was heralded far and wide by Oracle people as the big ticket item, if you recall."
I don't claim to be a big Groklaw fan, but I do read their coverage to get a balanced reading on the issues at hand, like I did in SCO vs IBM, et al too. Basically, Oracle won nothing. Google stuck to their "fair use" argument (which is fair, because all they used is the API interface - which is DESIGNED to be "copiable" - and the "9 lines" are really worth nothing even if they came with comments that said "HAHAHAHAHAHA! WE STOLE THIS FROM ORACLE!" all over it).
But, strangely, so far BBC, Slashdot and now The Reg are somehow writing articles that claim it's the end of the world for Google and game over and Google were naughty. I can't really see that side myself at all, but I haven't read *EVERY* court transcript there is. There are strange parallels to the SCO vs IBM argument that "this standard .h file which you need to interface with POSIX applications has very similar 'code' (i.e. numbers corresponding to a list of constants) in Linux for the purpose of POSIX applications using it!).
I don't think this will do anything to the industry or Google at all but someone, somewhere, somehow, has managed to turn it into something that will dent Google's share price when, actually, Oracle - and anyone who parrots their claims - is looking extremely dodgy to me.
You got conned. Import duty and VAT shouldn't apply to product returns, warranty replacements, etc. I don't think, in either direction. They "sorted it out" by telling the customs people it was a warranty replacement. Didn't cost them a penny over and above their own administration costs.
Does mean that they probably didn't label the product properly on its return journey, though, or customs wouldn't have bothered to question it.
Filtering out images by skintone is like choosing which tanks to shoot at in a battle based on the average green colour of them.
Sooner or later, the "enemy" will start painting their tanks a different colour and/or spraypainting yours, or even just knocking up cardboards cutouts for you to fire at to your heart's content.
And the poor sod who just happened to be wearing the wrong colour shirt is going to be in for an awful big compensation payout.
Until we have a filter capable of human thought (and thus able to reason not only the contents of an image by something other than skintone / edge-detection / etc., like the entire computer vision industry has been trying since the 60's, but the intention, pose, provocative nature, age, gender, obscenity etc.) it ain't gonna happen. The only thing we have that does that is humans, and even they get it wrong so often that it's laughable.
---
IT Manager in schools. At a previous school, once had to report a site to RM's Filter people because, let's just say, it was not the "traditional" retelling of Little Red Riding Hood. ("My! What a big... you have!")
Didn't this always used to happen with older Windows anyway?
I have a whole bunch of CyberLink PowerDVD install disks and keys because every time we bought an 2000/XP laptop or PC, they didn't include the MPEG2 codecs and the workaround was that all manufacturers bundled "something" that would play MPEG2 for no cost - either with the machine or the DVD drive if you were upgrading. That "something" usually cost them pence in bulk and consisted of some DVD playback software that you didn't even install most of the time.
I still have the pile for our XP machines here, still have the problem that Media Player doesn't play DVD by default on a clean Windows XP install (you have to install that bit of software first or - my solution that bettered my employer's - use VLC and just make sure you can prove you have the PowerDVD disks, and hence MPEG playback license, somewhere). Then the whole EU software patents things went a bit up the wall and basically the Fraunhoefer Institute's patents meant nothing any more so we could just use playback software at our whim.
Isn't this just a return to an earlier policy rather than some shocking new omission from the OS?
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Re: Anyone in the private sector who bought into Facebook at IPO ...
The thing about the stock markets is that everyone assumes it's just like buying things at a - well, market.
The people who bought Facebook shares probably KNEW it was going to end up lower. But if you watched, it peaked higher than they were initially paying. Thus, simple maths tells you that, in that time, you can make a very quick profit. They sensible ones probably were never INTENDING to hold onto those shares for more than a few minutes, and sell them as soon as the graph's gradient flattened. In doing so, they would not only make a profit but also cause the price to dip later (when everyone gets suspicious that these "wonderful new shares" are being sold all of a sudden by people who've only just bought them).
The profit on a share might only be a dollar or two. But buy a few million shares and that's a few million dollars. In the space of a day, if you know what you're doing, that's not a bad way to earn a living. Who cares what happens to it after you've cashed out and made a few million? Who cares that it's over-valued? If they thought they could make a profit and did, they were clever and (now) richer. If they thought they could make a profit and didn't, I have no sympathy particularly. If they didn't think they could make a profit, again, I have no sympathy for them buying in the first place.
Not everyone buys shares to hold onto forever until they slowly creep up to something above the original price (and those that did won't be worried about a few percent drop in value until it's a few years down the line and still hasn't recovered). Not everyone buys shares caring at all about what the company is, does, or makes, so long as they think there's enough people after them to raise the price quickly so they can dump them even quicker. Hell, a lot of money is made on the stock market by "betting" that a share price will sink very rapidly.
Playing the stock markets isn't like being sent on The Apprentice trip down to the local cash and carry. You can make money based on what OTHERS will do, and even by what others you expect to crash and burn (even your rivals at times!). The notion that everyone on the markets are there to make money in long-term, sound investment and never make a mistake is as ridiculous as assuming that someone who could make a million dollars in a few minutes won't take the opportunity to do so (legitimately or not).
Re: Split for Infinity
It's worse than that... he's dead, Jim.
Re: An there was me thinking that...
He once said something like his character was "99% Doohan, 1% accent". I don't think he was that sad in the role he played, or would be disappointed with the way he was sent off (you honestly think he wouldn't have wanted his fans/family to say "The engine's cannae take it, cap'n!" on the first two failed attempts to launch his remains and have a good laugh about it?)
I'm not a Trekkie, I can just about tolerate TNG for an episode or two before I want to blow my brains out, let alone the earlier stuff, but I can recognise something there in the actor himself - he seemed happier to get kids into engineering courses from his influence than anything else.
I think I'd rather be remembered as a character like Scotty, or even better, an actor with Doohan's attitude, than not remembered at all. A lot more "famous" people do a lot less and make much bigger arses of themselves for the sake of money or a career.
I'd rather die with humour and parody following me than without. If I'd been the actor who'd uttered the words: "He's dead, Jim", they would have been etched on my grave. What a way to be remembered.
And the BBC provides in-class teaching materials by the shedload, not to mention there were magazines galore and it was the start of the home computing revolution so a lot of people had one at home and, because there were only a handful of machines, they were being taught it by their own uses at home too. Hell, there were entire programs on TV to teach teachers how to teach students on using the BBC Micro.
The RPi currently has zero focus on education, despite what you might think. When you can show me a set of lesson plans, or tying the use of the device into the relevant curricula, then you can say that the teachers will have something to start from. That doesn't just mean "You can run Scratch, here's the manual" but actually giving the teachers something to go on and provide for their use and work how out they can use the device.
The best teachers might be able to teach themselves, formulate lessons from it and teach a good lesson or two. But the best teachers handle themselves. You have to think of the THOUSANDS of teachers who have no clue even though they are teaching ICT (I've seen A-Level programming projects written using Excel macros - bad macros at that with 50-deep nested IF statements - passing with 'A' because the teacher was baffled by how much more advanced that work was than they could understand) and they need hand-holding.
If nothing else, the time element and the cost of knocking up even a dozen lessons on the RPi for a single age-group in a single school could easily make it impractical compared to, say, just buying an ICT Suite and doing things properly. Except most schools already have an ICT Suite to satisfy the legally-required computer-pupil ratios, and that can run Scratch just fine too. So why bother to touch the RPi who obviously have no interest at the moment in helping teachers teach it?
I work IT in schools. They need to produce, en masse, an awful lot of educational content that can touch all sides of the teaching curriculum. Currently, the Wiki has exactly 0 of anything that any teacher would consider "useful" when teaching them. So it's only the geek-teachers who could quite literally teach assembler from memory on a handful of PIC chips anyway, if pressed, who will touch them. And that seems to be exactly who they are roping in to do demos and press releases and STILL not producing anything in the way of teaching resources.
It's like being an accountant, and someone tells you that you can have a whole new way of accounting for your business with 50+ employees, 1000+ clients, £1m+ budgets, liable to the taxpayer, etc. And then all you do is shove a datasheet into their face and say "it's all there... somewhere".
Re: Desktop performance is not surprising
The Pi can get, at most, 244Mb. That's if you use a basic, unaccelerated framebuffer. Other compromises are 128 and 192Mb that allocate more RAM to the GPU. Storage isn't a problem (SD cards). CPU speed isn't a problem (necessarily - of course it won't fly). Drivers might well be a problem but not unsolveable (binaries do at least exist for everything, even though they still need a lot of tweaking). The GPU is currently unaccelerated.
And before you know it, as discussed on the forums, you're looking at 2.0-and-before versions of Android at best. Maybe even pre-Eclair (i.e. pre-Bluetooth support in Android), let alone Gingerbread. I'm not even sure how much software supports that far back any more.
How many apps on the appstore would run? Nowhere near all. How many would run smoothly? Even fewer. How many would continue to run in the future? Fewer still. How many would be able to be run simultaneously or without running into memory problems at some uncertain point? Fewer still. How many of those would be useful to people on an RPi beyond just loading them up and looking at them? Fewer still.
Though I imagine we'll see it (just as we've "seen" Windows 8 on RPi via remote desktops, and no doubt some sadist will find a way to port some ancient Windows apps using Wine's ARM libraries), it's not going to be useful beyond one of those "Windows 95 running on an Android phone!" type demonstrations.
Re: Desktop performance is not surprising
An Android port is in progress (apparently) but the problem is the RAM. Officially, you need more RAM than the Pi has to run Android (and sacrificing GPU RAM for system RAM is a bit of a lose-lose situation with something like Android) and the only ones that will reliably work are much older versions.
That said, the problem with that won't be getting Android running. It will be that the device is not an "Android" device officially, so that would mean that the Google Store is not able to be used (it can be loaded on any Android device that you "own or control", but the definition of that would probably exclude "hey, we slapped Android on a random ARM chip"). And there's no help from Google here yet, so it's unlikely to be updated, or officially endorsed, which means no Play Store (and thus, quite a lot of missing apps and point of using Android). Android is also "Java-based" in a way, and the Java performance of the RPi sucks. There's no help even in ARM's Java-acceleration instructions, either. And Oracle can barely get a simplified JavaFX running on it at the moment.
No doubt Android could be hacked onto the device but it will never run 1% as nicely as the cheapest, cheapy Android tablet out there (you can find them for £50 now, with touchscreen and wifi) which can run the Play Store and use the Android logo legitimately.
I'm not so sure than any media-centre use is any good for the RPi at all, to be honest. Everyone has bright ideas about doing it but even something as simple as playing a video can lead to a world of slideshow framerates and interrupted sound according to forums posts that I've read. X-Windows is still unaccelerated but even framebuffer access is pretty atrocious for playback of random formats. You'd be infinitely better off with just a basic Android device for that purpose, to be honest.
The RPi would be a good Arduino replacement, once they fix the problems and scale production. That's about it. Anything video-heavy, from desktops to media centres, you're going to be disappointed with.
Re: Hardware issues
Actually, we don't know what the problem is with USB or SD cards at the moment. Broadcom (who make the chipset and designed the RPi) don't seem to know either. I have just posted off a "non-working" SD card to a Broadcom employee who is going to post it to Taiwan so their "driver author" can have a look at it and (hopefully) fix the issues the RPi (and only the RPi) has with it. This is a card that I've used in about 20-30 other SD card devices without ever hitting a single problem, but the RPi can barely mount an ext partition from it in 1 try out of 20. They literally had to put a topic on the forum begging for cards that showed problems only on the RPi because they obviously don't have the testing regime themselves to discover them.
That *COULD* be software. We would hope it is. But if it's due to an electrical problem (e.g. PCB traces too thin can affect the capacitance / resistance of a circuit even if the PCB simulated perfectly and the circuit - in theory - works perfectly - see the OpenPandora project for examples of things like that happening!), or some bad design of the SD circuit, or operating slightly out of ranges then you're stuffed and won't be able to fix it in software. That means a complete reissue of 10,000 plus boards to get vaguely reliable booting with any SD card. Do you think schools will be buying the most expensive, brand new SD cards (some of which still exhibit problems with the RPi, but which are generally better) for every single student?
Similarly, the RPi drops USB packets *after* acknowledging them. That's PROBABLY a software problem, but something that only someone who understands ARM Linux kernels, the Broadcom chipset, the combined LAN/USB chipset used and can understand oscilloscope traces of a USB transaction would be able to identify, let alone fix. That's not to say those people don't exist, but we're not just talking a two-line patch to a bash script here. And Broadcom are not always going to work for free on things like that.
And that's just what we know. I listed at least 4-5 problems within 24 hours of receiving a board numbered "4011" (so, within the first "pre-order" batch). All of those issues are known in the community already and still not fixed (months after the pre-orders went live) and many have no reply to them at all except "wait and see if someone works it out". The troubleshooting forums and Wiki are horrendous and barely touch on most of the problems noticed. There are literally a handful of people (not associated with RPi) actually doing anything interesting with their boards or trying to solve those problems (after over a week, and given several HUNDRED reports of faulty cards, in the past etc. I was the only person to even reply to the call for SD cards!). Now go look at the problems of power supplies (there is no "official" power supply, and it's incredibly easy to get any amount of problems from no Ethernet to no booting at all to weird shutdowns, etc. with a power supply that looks/works perfectly fine on any other device).
RPi better hope that these things are fixable in software. But even if they are, it's going to take MONTHS to fix them. And virtually all the pre-orders are out in the wild and have been for months/weeks depending on what second of the 10-minute window the orders were open for you actually ordered in. Mass production is supposed to start soon. Going mass-production on boards that even the pre-orderers, two HUGE electronics distributors, and the company that designed it can't get working with perfectly-working, brand-new SD cards, power supplies and USB devices is a recipe for disaster.
Don't even get me started on how the default "recommended" distro is mis-configured and butchered.
Re: And another thing...
People without one are blinkered about the device, but so are those who have it, and those who think it will impact general education in any way.
I have JUST this second posted off a letter to an employee at Broadcom (who make the main chips for the RPi) who is going to send it on to Taiwan where a device driver developer is going to look at the things inside (a bog-standard, fully-working 2Gb SD card) and try and work out why the RPi throws a fit any time it tries to use it. This is pretty much bog-standard basics and SD card interfaces are hardly difficult now. But they literally had to put out a call for "non-working" cards that passed certain criteria (i.e. it wasn't the card, or anything stupid, that was the cause of the problem) to random people with them in the hope that someone would send them a non-working example card so they could post it around the world for someone to tweak device drivers.
I'm also trying to get an answer to why random USB packets are just thrown out of the window which cuts off a lot of high-speed USB devices mid-transaction. Nobody's even bothering to answer that one yet. That's after the hurdles of things like the default setup totally lacking any iptables modules (on a 2Gb install? Come on... scrap some of the junk and install some of the vital components instead), numerous power problems, etc.
I have projects in mind for the Pi, and I'm an IT Manager at a private school in London. The two, currently, are not merging one iota, though. All my projects are personal embedded things as mentioned because I can just imagine the chaos of getting 20+ kids up and running with these things, even if they're cased and powered and SD-card'd properly. Hell, I'm scared to touch it because it's so damn fragile and numerous people have already broken off capacitors (casing will solve some of it but you think kids will be gentle when putting in an SD card or headphone plug? Their big education push is basically to say you can run Scratch on it. Slowly. Under unaccelerated X-Windows. Or you could just run it at five times the speed on your ICT Suite that the government insists you have to have anyway and has done for, what 10-15 years?
Sure, it fills niches but the niche it does not fill is the one it's plugged as filling - education. There's no documentation, few drivers (mostly closed-source), the entire Wiki section for lesson plans, etc. is empty, the demos consist of running the same basic programs as everywhere else (Scratch, Midori, Python, etc.) and there's no sign of exactly what you're supposed to do with it if you're NOT an IT and electronics expert (hell, I can make a circuit that talks I2C with it, but I doubt many others here could and the interface boards that exist and could be made commercial will cost as-much-again as the RPi and you'll have to program that damn things yourself).
The promise was this would be ready for schools in September. Schools would generally order in June/July (or even earlier) for September. As it is, general ordering is still closed. The "prototypes" (because that's what they are) that are in the hands of people like me are going to end up in personal projects, refunds, replacements and shuffling back and forth for several months yet. And in the end, it's NOT a PC, as advertised - far from it. It's an embedded board, no different from the end-users perspective to a STAMP or PIC or Arduino starter kit (without the kit!).
It's going to take AT LEAST a year of constant, vigilant work to get the documentation to the point where even a good IT teacher would be happy to risk more than one lesson on it. Like Intel QX3's and lots of other "fads" in education, at best it will end up in a cupboard somewhere after a year and never be touched again. At worst, there's going to be a HUGE call for refunds, repairs, replacements and, most importantly, resources. And that's the big, expensive, hard bit that you can't just lob an IT guy at if you want teachers to tie it into their lessons and curricula.
The RPi is nothing special. The GP2X was ARM-based, dual-core, integrated OpenGL ES accelerated, touchscreen, ran off two AA's for many hours, had a built-in LCD, ran Linux, had full drivers, stored on an SD-card, was "unbrickable", very sturdy, handheld and used for education in Korean schools. And that was YEARS ago and has had at least two successors in the meantime. The RPi is literally sending us backwards in those terms, not forward.
Personally, I see mine ended up where any other embedded board would end up. Doing one job all day long because it's simple to do and low power and convenient to have TCP access to the device doing it.
Re: I LOVE the Pi
Great, so after you encase it, install the SD card in it, connect peripherals enough to make it access the network, have a keyboard, mouse, power button, reset button, etc. USB extenders and soundcard ports that the user can't break the port on (RPi is extremely fragile), add a reliable power supply integrated into the box, do all that, box it, ship it, and provide support for it when it goes wrong (they're having lots of problems with SD cards currently, and 100mbps Ethernet isn't the given you expect either, and you're basically running a full Debian distro to make it work properly which is booted from a proprietary GPU boot code that you have zero access to) then you might be able to get a basic "thin" (actually fat, but who cares about destroying decades-old terminology) clients that are in the same price range, power usage, size, etc. as other thin-clients and can spend the rest of your "savings" on Windows/Citrix licences.
Bargain. Except they don't exist commercially "yet" and there's no cases for them, so you'll be doing all that on your own, with the associated startup costs (or buying Nano-ITX cases, etc.). Or you could just buy any-old thin-client or even just desktop or laptop and have done the same anyway with ZERO performance concerns.
The RPi is good for several things. Thin-clients isn't one of them. Desktops is another area that it's horrible at (solved only by thin-clienting them). Hell, it struggles to play a simple MP3 from the command-line at the moment.
I'm making an in-car GPS / SMS monitoring device with my RPi at the moment - something I've done half-a-dozen times with everything from a full laptop down to Mini/Nano-ITX. The RPi has given me more headaches than anything else so far (can't even get it to hold a USB connection on a 3G stick, for instance, despite identical software to all my previous setups) and I've put it on a backburner until some of the issues are solved. That's a project where the size, speed, power requirements, capabilities, ports etc. are all perfect matches for the Pi.
So far, my Pi is still having its backside kicked by a GP2X ARM Linux handheld console (that CAN run off two AA's by default for hours and play just about the same software but better), and that's YEARS old now and been superceded at least twice by newer models.
Re: bcc?
I've never seen that on a working mail server or client, but I'd be throwing it in the junk pile if it ever did such a thing.
I suppose there's nothing to a stop a mailer leaking that info but, come on, use some decent software. BCC has the B for one, sole, primary reason - so that NOBODY KNOWS who else you sent it to but the mailserver. Any piece of software that pushes the BCC data into the email or headers should have been consigned to the scrapheap years ago.
Re: Funny how a £16 Linux computer becomes £30.87 at RS...
Got my one the other day. Still dealing with lots of niggling issues after updating the default software and firmware to the latest available from git / apt-get.
USB is sometimes unreliable (recorded cases of USB packets just disappearing into the ether despite being acknowledged by the device - which hit me by disconnecting my 3G USB stick at random points while on 3G but no problem on GPRS, etc.), a couple of people have hit heat problems on the Ethernet/USB chip (hot to the touch when there should be no real temperature there), there are power problems galore because it needs such a regulated supply (and thus battery use etc. requires additional circuitry), SD cards are still a bit up in the air - ones that I've used for years in a myriad devices start spewing out errors and putting it into unfathomable boot loops (but then, next time, it just boots fine) and the online compatibility lists are a load of junk (too many false negatives AND false positives). I also can't get it to put out a composite signal that my old Sanyo 32" TV will actually see as a colour signal (strange that every other composite device works fine including brand-new DVD players, Wii, etc.)
That's AFTER you read about people breaking off one of the capacitors quite easily / accidentally, finding incomplete solder points on their new boards, etc.
The default (and recommended) Debian image is supplied with the iptables command but without any iptables modules, rendering it useless unless you feel like recompiling the kernel yourself. The default firewall is thus "ACCEPT ALL" while some people are demoing it downloading things in Midori (which is being universally commented on as "slow").
There's a lot that's nice about the device but it's far from ready for mainstream use yet, so the camera is the LAST thing to be worrying about.
Hell, I still can't work out how to get it to boot reliably from several of the handful of SD cards that work perfectly in every other SD device I own.
Again - how can Anonymous deny that they had anything to do with the attack on the military site if they don't have a) some kind of entry requirement and control over who's a member, or b) some kind of knowledge of who is and who isn't a member?
You could do anything and blame it on Anonymous and there is NO WAY for them to disassociate themselves from that action because of their policy that anyone can be a member and nobody knows who is or who isn't.
Anonymous are not a group. It's a moniker used by anyone that wants to do something nasty, brag about it and get away with it. They can no more say that "Anonymous didn't do this" than they can say "As a member of 'People called Fred' we can say that no Fred would ever do this".
Re: Teething problems, or something worse?
Data out is certainly more interesting than data in. Just what incentive do the cloud vendors have to help you remove the data after you've threatened to move elsewhere? I wouldn't be surprised if most or all of them offer import "somehow" if you kick up a fuss but not export at all.
Do you really want to extend your contract by another month/year so that you can repeat the "guy on a plane with a NAS" trip in the hope of somehow getting all your business data back? Or spend quite literally weeks redownloading it all before you can move off to another provider? Or have to post them a huge drive array and wait for them to copy all your data out at their convenience and then pay to send it back to you?
Cloud is one of those ideas that STILL doesn't know what it's supposed to be used for. There are lots of use cases, of course, but none for which cloud is the "optimal" solution.
If you are storing PETABYTES of business critical data and requiring cloud-level redundancy and availability, are you seriously telling me that you COULDN'T buy servers yourself around the world and do it cheaper with your existing talent?
Re: And then there is the weather
Spitfires were made of balsa wood.
I'd like to see you make a space elevator out of that.
Re: So many cores!
Barely one, depending on the level of simulation you require.
Re: Work away from office
And then you sack them, just as you would if they revealed that password to someone else, or left their papers on the train.
Why people are afraid of enforcing IT policy, I don't know.
Re: Work away from office
Given that schools are now starting to deploy TrueCrypt on staff laptops that go off-site, it's hardly a burden.
Instead of just turning the machine on, you type in a password for the drive. It then boots. End of story. Without the password, the laptop data is useless.
Cost: £0.
Performance loss: Negligible
Security: Virtually perfect (as perfect as you can get when people have to memorise passphrases, or carry two-factor authentication sticks at least)
Liability when something is stolen: £0.
Hassle to the end user: "Enter your password" (which they would have had to do to print out that data anyway!)
Re: What am I missing?
Allow me to demonstrate transparent proxying for you.
- You think you're talking DNS to 8.8.8.8 (Google's DNS server, as an example).
- Something between your application and the outside world (router, firewall software, anything that can sniff and modify packets en-route, basically, including software on the machine itself) sees that packet, looks inside, changes it to point at whatever server they want to and then sends it on its way.
- The DNS server it sends the query to sends a reply with whatever the hell they like (including redirecting your google searches to dodgy domains, etc.). Google listen out in vain silence for your (never-going-to-arrive) packets.
- When the reply comes back to your computer, you have ZERO idea which DNS server resolved that without checking thoroughly (which nobody does, not even web browsers accessing secure sites - DNS is assumed to be "authoritative", and only DNSSEC can fix this) but, hell, you TYPED IN www.mybank.com so it must be safe, right? (And, yes, SSL does have some fixes against this but NOTHING in the way you think - SSL is very reliant on DNS being authoritative)
There is nothing in the world that is going to be able to detect that until DNSSEC comes along. You know how I know? I run transparent proxies in work so even though everyone "thinks" they are going to www.facebook.com via their DNS lookup (and all their laptops have different settings for DNS), they are actually ALL going via OpenDNS and the school DNS filters lookup of the address. I can even turn all their images upside down or make paypal.com look like it's bbc.co.uk if I want.
DNS Changer literally adds itself to your Windows list of DNS servers and HACKS INTO common router models to change the settings on there too. Is your trusted DNS server that your network gives out via DHCP pointing to your broadband router at any point? 99% of home installations have a setup like that - anyone with a cable modem or ADSL router will use the modem/router as a DNS server and default gateway. This thing actually logs into your router via backdoors and changes your ROUTER settings to change the upstream servers it uses.
When was the last time you logged into the router interface and checked the DNS it uses, seeing as " all the machines on the LAN are configured to point to the router as the DNS source"? DNS is inherently insecure, interceptible and modifiable. Don't trust it. And certainly don't trust your local network to provide it without being VERY sure that it's all clean.
Saying that, they should just switch the damn thing off and let people moan. A few hundred thousand machines less on the Internet who are crawling with obvious malware is a GOOD thing. Their own Internet access is a secondary concern to not spreading that junk to all of us.
You have 10 million tiles on your roof? It might well be worth that much. Or possibly more.
How can anyone say it wasn't Anonymous, given that Anonymous don't know who its members are anyway? This is the stupid thing I hate about that group. It isn't a group. Anybody and everybody can claim things in the name of Anonymous and there's no way to prove positive or negative.
So the assertion "we can be sure it wasn't Anonymous" is a lot of tripe.
Re: I call bullshit
Although you can see an easy measurement of ping, you can't see the other "hidden" lag.
The ping is just the time for a single packet (maybe not even a game packet but an explicit ping packet) to reach the server you're playing on (and return, I assume).
You almost certainly lose 1/60th of a frame no matter what anyway, because of screen buffering and game programming techniques. That's 16.7ms. Then your mouse is probably optical and USB - that could easily add on the same number of milliseconds between you moving it, it being sense, processed and got to the main CPU for it to act on it (but only when it next hits an event loop which could be half the above quite easily - so another 8ms or so!).
Then the time to send the image down the HDMI cable and the HUMUNGOUS time the LCD might take to process it (even a 5ms full-dark-to-full-bright time means nothing as a lot of modern LCD's "buffer" the screen updates even further inside themselves so although technically true, you could be 2-3 frames behind what you're think you're supposed to see - yet another 35+ms!).
There's more to responsiveness than ping time. A lot more. But ping time is easily measurable without any human bias at all. The rest aren't. There's no way to reliably measure just how long it takes you to respond to a screen change without taking a reaction test. And there the greatest error contributor is your brain processing and nerve response, which swamps all these other factors anyway.
I have run game servers (CS 1.6 etc.) for years. I consider 100+ ping unacceptable personally, and 200+ unacceptable on anyone entering the server. But my reaction times in even the quickest test of pressing a mouse button when you see a dot swamp anything that my PC could be waiting for from the network. What they are saying with the "150ms" measurement is that there's an awful lot of other stuff other than ping that affects perceived responsiveness in the average gamer's setup. But it still doesn't mean that they have solved those problems themselves or that their system isn't liable to that same 150+ms "technical" latency.
My experience is not so much of a puppy following me from site to site as advertisers wasting money on me.
I have a server with Tagadab (good company, don't get me wrong). I visited their site to log in to the control panel.
Three months later, every website with advertising I go to is still advertising Tagadab to me, including LWN.net and lots of big-name sites. Same advert, no special deal or anything, just a link to their website.
I know who they are. I'm a customer. But they (or, more likely, their ad campaign managers) are wasting their money by advertising to me again and again despite the fact that NONE OF THEIR COMPETITORS advertise to me in that same way. I only ever get Tagadab adverts. Similarly for when I bought a GoDaddy SSL certificate. I get advertised WORSE offers from GoDaddy than I can get just by going to GoDaddy's website and logging in. And I only ever see GoDaddy adverts for SSL certificates (and not, say, server hosting).
Similarly, I clicked on a picture of a garment (not even an ad) from Milanoo to show my girlfriend something. Now interspersed, I get the same 3-4 Milanoo adverts all the time on loads of different sites (and how they think I might want to buy a Zentai suit or a "Lolita" country-style dress, I don't know, given that I clicked on a pair of men's trousers). I have no intention of buying clothes online (hell, I can't remember the last time I bought clothes full stop!), but there's no way to stop them throwing their money away on me.
Seriously, given the amount of sites I go to, the length of time its been going on and the amount of advertising I see (I don't block it unless its obnoxious - some of those sites have to pay the bills), I must be costing those companies a significant amount for someone who's never going to be "swayed" by their advertising to do anything they weren't already going to do. Targeted adverts are really anything but targeted. And targeting an advert seems silly - surely the people who deal all day long in server hosting already know about server hosts, but may not know about, say, SSL certificates from you, or something completely unrelated to IT?
Facebook's ads are rarely relevant as it is. Even if you spend ten minutes going through their "all ads" page and marking the ones you're interested in and the ones you're not, you still always see the uninteresting ones. If I'd BOTHERED to tell you what sort of adverts I'm not interested in, at least take note, especially seeing as I took the time to mark individual adverts and not just "Not interested in anything".
In over 15 years of using the Internet, I've never once clicked on a single advert. I don't even mind adverts particularly because I can mentally turn them into whitespace even while speed-scanning a page and they keep some of the smaller operations running (my brother's Scout group gets a couple of camps a year and their hosting paid for by adverts on his Scouting website). But if you want me to actually click on them they have to be not only relevant, but interesting, offer me some incentive to click (not just "I can buy your product" but, say, "10% for me today because I clicked the advert and didn't just visit the site), and not spam me with adverts I've told you I'm not interested in, or adverts sent to me because I'd visited the page of a company that I'm already a customer of.
Adverts are about brand-building and getting people onto your site. Without some sort of incentive, it won't happen, and the brand-building can happen in a million other ways.
Re: Also, does it matter ...
Though there was certainly a lot of misinformation, there was also a lot of legal calls to make sellers sell things only in metric.
The "Metric Martyrs", I believe they were called, of whom the owner of Trago Mills stores in Cornwall was quite vocal (my favourite shop, especially the Falmouth one!), used to put up posters to raise awareness of the issue years ago, and went to court for refusing to sell things in only one measure. I don't know the outcome but given that I can still buy spuds by the pound, they probably won or at least won morally.
There's nothing wrong with selling me 500ml of water, or a kilogram of potatoes. But there's also nothing wrong with selling 568ml of milk and advertising it as a pint, or 2lbs of potatoes and stating the measure in metric too, is there?
Re: Nice testing procedure
I agree that most operating systems don't. But that's no excuse if you're supposed to be making a "world-beating" operating system that's focused on security - because there's no barrier to making it work properly at all.
And MS is supposed to have their "system protection", etc.. How hard is it, precisely, to prevent certain files being deleted without being in a "system maintenance mode", or requiring an actual human's permission to do so (that was the whole POINT of the annoying UAC wasn't it?).
I'm really waiting for the day where your computer can be in either "usage" or a minimal "maintenance" mode and only in maintenance mode can you do updates, change bootloaders, play with critical files, etc. and only in usage mode can you log in as other users, browse the web, move files around, execute programs etc. And having NO PROGRAMMATIC WAY to switch between the two modes at all, and not have any processes survive the transition.
We have a sort of fake pseudo mentality that almost does this ("no running as root normally", "safe mode", etc.) but they never quite cover that the two modes of operation are distinctly different beasts.
Sorry, but pints of milk quite clearly state their "ml" value and have for years. All foods have their metric values on them.
There's a difference between showing metric units and FORCING ONLY metric units. The former is good sense. The later is just going to create hatred and alienate people and confuse who WERE brought up with the old system.
Nobody will reasonably object to you (as has already been done) putting "568ml" on your pint of milk. Or selling it in 500ml lots. Or selling potatoes by the kilo. Or any of the other measures. So long as you don't FORCE that to be the only way to mark it. What harm does an EXTRA marking of the imperial measurement do in a time of middle-ground between two measures? All children's exams nowadays - metric. All food measures - metric. All dimensions in the Argos catalogue - metric (and sometimes imperial as an indicator too). All rulers and measuring tapes have had metric on them for DECADES now.
About the only thing that hasn't changed over in any way is the roads. Every car advert has km/l (or more likely litres/100km) now as well as mpg, but you can't go through the roads and change the signs to km/h overnight. The best you can do is has a transition where you mark BOTH speeds with the appropriate units on all roadsigns.
And then? To be honest, nothing much else happens. Once the roadsigns are dual-format, anyone can understand them in any age of car (which are also all dual-format on their speedos) so there's no need to go any further. Will it stop people speeding, or stop them comparing fuel efficiency? No.
So you have to ask, what advantage do you get exactly from the changing last bastions of imperial measurement as opposed to merely adding the metric equivalent clearly next to them? And the answer is: NOTHING. Just a waste of public money from that point to make everything "metric-only" at further expense.
Nobody cares about metric or imperial. What we care about is not having to deal ONLY in metric if we don't need to. There's no reason for me to HAVE to buy milk that's only printed in millilitres when they could put both units on it. And I don't even care - if I ever do measurements or conversions, I do it by using metric equivalents because they are slightly easier to work with - I was brought up a metric child by my schooling, even though my parents are strictly imperial. But what I do care about is little old grannies trying to do 220mph on the motorway because they misread the sign, or alternatively 70km/h because they misread their dial.
Nobody sensible objects to metric units, metric signage, metric measurement or teaching metric (as has been standard since, what, the 70's?). What we object to is removing a perfectly useful piece of information for no reason at all instead of just complementing it (and, hell, put the imperial in small writing next to a big bold metric measure if you want, who cares?).
Nice testing procedure
So they obviously:
1) Don't test their updates against a single Windows PC before sending them out.
2) Don't have a whitelist of known-good checksums of critically important, unchanging and pretty prevalent Windows system files.
3) Don't have a way to safely undo mistakes.
4) Don't put out an update that only touches the minimum of what it needs and lets USERS flag stuff as bad or not because it knows better.
and Windows, apparently, doesn't have a way of stopping programs from bricking the operating system by deleting critical files. Nice to know. (And, no, I don't care if you ARE an administrator user or not - you shouldn't be able to do this programmatically without at least warning the user first!)
Re: Optimist!
"As also that the product would ever be ready for mass educational deployment in September (which actually means having everything in hand by June/July). This really was never on.
To think so says something about you. I don't think I would want you running my IT shop. Sorry .."
Er.. This is my point. I never expected them to but they kept saying that they would and that was their target. And if they expected to and that was unrealistic (as I've posted on their forums in the past), then they should have revised their estimates or done *SOMETHING* about it.
They will barely manage to supply first-day pre-orders in time for the Summer, let alone anyone else. The number of schools (outside of those "specially selected") who will see a Pi this year is going to be near zero. And evaluating even what I consider the "prototype" device that I've been sent shows you have another good year of development before anyone will see them as an actual product.
That's not to mention encasement, packaging, shipping, board revisions, SOME SOFTWARE (other than a plain debian image), and - working in schools - most important of all: Some fecking staff training, or at least people trying to tie the device into the curriculum somehow rather than dump-and-run on the teachers. They're just dumping a Linux distro, GCompris, Python, Scratch and TuxPaint (which seems to be as far as they'll get at the moment) on people and saying "get on with it" which won't wash in schools except as a fad project, and all of the above they can do on their machines NOW - faster, cheaper (because they already have those machines) and more reliably.
A user-developed product is not necessarily a failure - but if there are next-to-no users and even less developers among them, then there's not going to be a product. There's no focus on that. There's no focus on schools. There's no focus on SELLING the product to schools. There's no focus on tying it into schools. It's a complete bandwagon device to hang on the coattails of the Government's "we need more proper IT" stance with nothing to actually help kids.
I don't care about the IT side as much (though I'll certainly find uses for it in my own projects) as targetting education with a dump-and-run scheme. When you spout off on BBC News, BBC Breakfast, Slashdot, The Register, and just about every tech-site, news outlet and newspaper about your marvellous release and what your plans are, you should make damn sure those plans are realistic, IT project or not, and certainly educational IT. And they didn't. Because airtime seems more important to them than actually fulfilling the educational side of this venture, and more than anything else.
Put it this way - they can only get faster.
My order was put into the RS website as soon as was technically possible (their website basically folded before the release time even arrived). I have *just* got a note from the Post Office that my order (number 4401 from RS's "half") of the release minute (I would say release day, but really if you didn't order in the first few minutes, you were stuffed) has finally arrived.
The release date was February 29th, by the way. March, April, May. So they just about delivered those orders from the first few minutes of release in 2 and a bit months after "release" (which is really a pre-order that I got suckered into because they kept telling us it was a "release").
The forums are pretty quiet on actual content - everything is either a two-line port from Debian archives, or some Hello World knocked up in Python. Sure, you can run Quake on it, but I didn't expect anything less given the specs. The troubleshooting forums describe myriad power problems which, yes, technically people should read the specs on but that's only going to get worse on public release. There's a couple of broken units (bad solder joints on things like the Ethernet port that had to ALL be redone because of a manufacturing cockup, broken SD card readers, HDMI compatibility problems, etc.) but there's no way to gauge how many are actually in the wild and being used at the moment (already people are just selling them on unopened). And the amount of people who say "I want it to do X" - media centre PC, emulators, etc. - and the answer is basically "It won't" show that it's being regarded as some general purpose device instead of a small embedded unit that's not suitable for most things a smartphone can manage.
So they still have a LLOOONNNGGG way to go to get to their goal of having these things just thrown into random schools. Sure there are Scout groups and schools posting about using them, but those are the geek-teachers anyway who do infinitely more interesting things than I ever did at school. But I think it's going to be way past this September, and maybe even the next, before they actually get them near to schools in general except as a fad item. Give it a couple of years and maybe some real educational company will pick them up and package them into something more useful but at the moment they are nothing more interesting or special than, say, a GP2X (and the GP2X was designed and used educationally in Korea, and has a successor already, and could do everything I've so far seen thrown at the Pi).
I'll be unpacking mine tonight to give it a run-through but, if I'm honest, the only thing I can see them used for is my own projects whereas I originally ordered on the hopes my school might be able to find some use for them (I was expecting there to be educational software, cases, etc. available on general sale by now but it's still just a bare ARM board at the moment).
Being on BBC News, all the tech sites, etc. and becoming a new buzzword is actually just annoying because hardly anybody's done with them what they were originally intended for, and hardly anybody's even been able to get one yet. It's not a release day, if people can't buy and get it sent out for delivery that same week. It's going to be a while before they're able to do that and even then, three-four months late, there's not much in terms of their original plan that you can use them for. Sure, you can boot Linux and play around in Scratch, but you can do that on any PC anyway like schools have in droves in their ICT suites.
Sigh
The equipment isn't now, nor has ever been, the problem.
The problem is the cost to the end-user. Just what are you intending to charge me for it? Because if it's expensive, I'll wait until I get off the plane. And most people run scared of roaming anyway - there's a reason for that that's nothing to do with worrying about using foreign airwaves or interfering with the plane, or the slight delay in voice traffic. It's simply the cost.
So every time you equip a plane, you're expecting people to fund its installation by using it and making you a proportion of profit after you've connected via a satellite and talked to a (now foreign) mobile operator to terminate your calls. And then you price it so extortionately that the only reason people REALLY turn their phones off on a plane is because they're scared they'll hit roaming charges while they're not looking.
Seriously, people. Sod all the fancy stuff. Let me send texts and browse the web. You can cache that locally, send it at your own leisure, don't care about slight interruptions, can route via the cheapest method transparently (wireless / 3G while on the ground, switch to satellite once high enough in the air) and not bother me with people shouting "HELLO!" down the phone while I'm trying to sleep. Then you can price it more sensibly and shock, horror, people might start to use it. While things are still priced in pounds per megabyte, nobody is going to EVER touch the service except by accident or curiosity.
Nothing else, absolutely nothing else, matters but the cost to the end-user. If you charge me 5p extra to send a text message that you then relay over some hugely-slow but viable link back to a base in the UK that then sends the text message onwards from there, that would be useful. If you let me have available-but-slow wifi, that's worth a couple of quid per flight, maybe, if I need it. Anything else and no matter how much a captive audience you have, nobody will touch it. Real-time voice just isn't necessary - we're only amusing ourselves until the plane lands when we THEN do all the important phone calls anyway. Give us the most basic of data services at a *decent* price and you'd have an audience.
Mobile networks need to realise that mass volume of customers * a couple of pence profit is infinitely better than no customers * huge wads of profit each. This applies to roaming, data, data roaming, and airplane use. Drop your prices, see a rise in profits. Increase the prices to these stupid amounts, see a continued absence of customers afraid to even turn their phones ON abroad and instead buying a foreign SIM, thus netting you 0p profit.
Re: Tell me...
Yes.
Did you read the final score again? 80% if that IS your conclusion?
Modern Cars
Can someone please explain to me:
£19,690. For a quite, bog-standard, ordinary car. The USB/iPod stuff? What's that? A £5 chip nowadays stuck into just about any radio you buy? Hell, the digital photo frame I got brand-new for £20 can play MP3's, navigate my folders, etc. on a 7" screen, so the entire kit can't be worth more than a £100 or so?
And then you get stuck with weird doors, a 1.6 engine, cramped legroom, no bootspace, stupidly tiny rear windows, and - just about - 45mpg.
Last time I fired up Torque OBD on my 1995 1.8 Mondeo, it got 40mpg on average everywhere I went. Now, sure, that difference adds up over time but this car cost me £300 and I've probably spent less than that again on it in three years, and mostly for worn tyres! Call it £700 to get the in-car entertainment to the same level, and that's still never going to make the money back in its usable life based on an old scrapheap of a car (which has passed the last two MOT's with "zero comments" first time). And yet I can put a shed into my car (I have done, and a lot more besides), seat 5 passengers comfortably (and 4 of them get a door to themselves), have total vision on the rear of the car, and have no more difficulty parking it than any other.
And yet, still some people call THIS a cheap and nasty car. The amount of money being urinated away on cars in this country must be phenomenal, not to mention the "4x4 to go 100 yards makes my kids safer" crowd.
What, precisely, is the attraction in a new car? No repair bills (I'm no mechanic myself)? Lower road tax (Seriously? Averaged over a year of use?)? All you seem to get is more and more expense (god knows what a dent costs on that thing, or a smashed tail-light, or the insurance, or the service costs to keep the warranty, etc.). What am I missing about cars that makes people want to buy junk like this?
Re: Tell me...
That's like giving Windows ME 80% because if you don't already have Windows 3.1/95/98/2000, it's great.
Tell me...
Did you used to work for a video games magazine?
80% for a grainy film, with pointless and bad extras, that you admit has awful sound, just because it ties-in with a pay-for app? And they can't even link the online content correctly?
Isn't this back in the realm of "pay me money, I'll give you a 90% rating"?
Someone please bring back proper reviewing, where "scores" can go down to 0 again rather than starting at 80, and people aren't afraid to say that a product is junk or you're probably better off with the previous releases unless you're an absolute collector freak.
Re: looking for a good time ? call ...
Try dating women in real-life.
Because the postal service is rubbish most of the time.
I do all my Christmas shopping online but I have to inform my neighbours that I'm sorry for the hassle in advance. I work during normal working hours, thus all my parcels go undelivered, especially if it needs a signature. The postman will bother everyone on the street rather than leave it (because that gives him/me liability for it, depending on who decides he can do that) and I end up with 2-3 red parcel collection leaflets a day in December between the various members of my household.
If the neighbours have taken it in, I have to chase round them all to find out who and where and hope they're in. In one case I had to initiate a lawsuit because Three said they'd delivered my new contract phone and tried to charge me for something I'd never seen (and try to hold me to a contract that I'd never signed because it was in that lost parcel!). If it's gone back to the depot, I am graciously allowed to collect it from there between the hours of 8:30-4:30 on weekdays (so, that's a "never" then, to anyone who works) and up to 1pm on a Saturday, from a depot that you cannot park anywhere near. Near Christmas, on a Saturday, if you're not there at 7:00 am to start queueing, you won't get your parcel. And I won't risk parking near it because you stand a good chance of getting a ticket if you ignore the markings because the traffic wardens appear out of nowhere on a Saturday when they know it's easy-pickings.
If you do manage to get to the front of the queue, it's a 50-50 toss-up as to whether they currently are trying to redeliver your parcel while you're there. If they are, you're stuffed and might as well come back tomorrow because you won't see them if you rush home, and you won't be able to queue again, and you can't wait for them to return because the customer service bit closes before they do. So, in effect, you just better hope that you get it before they send it back to the sender.
Do I live out in the sticks? No. I live in a large well-known town inside the M25, and the Royal Mail depot is only two minutes away (fortunately).
That, of course, is all assuming your parcel was sent by Royal Mail. There are myriad other companies who all do the same tricks, with depots in different places, one of which is miles from me through busy London streets (Hangar Lane Gyratory! GAH!). Last time something was delivered by them I ended up forcing them to phone the delivery driver and get him to drop off the parcel I'd come to collect by appointment that he'd taken out for delivery. I had to sign papers and argue like mad to get them to drop it over my garden fence so that it would be there after driving back (which took 45 minutes).
Then, of course, you have the times that things DON'T go according to those courier's plans anyway (lost parcels, customs charges, "we forgot where we put it but it's here somewhere", etc.) . About the only reliable company to order from is Amazon who seem to employ a company that consists of ordinary people in their cars who drive around at convenient times to deliver their parcels. They also operate a decent returns service that involves popping to a local newsagent who takes your parcel for them, so obviously they trust the Royal Mail and large courier companies as much as I do.
Online ordering is perfect. So long as you have a mail system that works, or are ordering things that are large enough for them to pre-arrange delivery. Otherwise, it can be easier to walk into town and get the damn things yourself. I've done my entire shopping for Christmas online for every year since 2000. It's steadily getting worse, to the point where I'm considering not to bother for some things. And it's nothing to do with the online stores, the payment, or anything else - it's to do with overworked, understaffed, useless, inconsiderate delivery companies that assume everyone is off work all day long every day and won't take responsibility for putting a parcel in a half-safe place (I have run one parcel over because they left it hidden on my driveway, and I've had one just left - with hundreds of pounds of IT equipment - on the doorstep for 18 hours in plain view with the name of the company visible, with even a "signed" delivery note shoved through my door that would cost a fortune to contest if it had gone missing).
Online ordering only works so far as mail-ordering works. When I have to catch my neighbours to warn them of an expensive parcel coming, mail-ordering is severely lacking.
Re: Apps for Android can be served from anywhere you can download an APK
No.
The device might not be "supported" (so boo-hoo if it doesn't work), but the only real restriction is that you have to do it on an "Android device". This device was Android, branded with the Google Android logo, or otherwise I wouldn't have bothered to install an app store for Android on it.
And given that it's incredibly easy to spot if someone's installed the app on something they shouldn't, I'd think that Google would have blocked it in a second otherwise.
"This license granted to you for the Licensed Application by Licensor is limited to a nontransferable license to use the Licensed Application on any mobile devices running Android OS ("Android Device(s)") that you own or control."
Re: recycle
1) You can't capture a lot of this stuff. That's why we plan to de-orbit it before its even launched. The speeds involved don't bear thinking about (one screw in orbit can tear through the Mir Space Station like it was butter - how so you capture that?) You'll notice that it's incredibly rare that we ever dock with a satellite or other orbiting thing unless both are fully-working and we can use both their propulsions and PLAN IT METICULOUSLY. One wrong move and you kill yourself, de-orbit the satellite or add to the space junk ten-fold.
2) There's no value in them. Their biggest cost is launch, yes, but the actual satellites would cost hundreds of times more to capture and even more to repair than just binning them an launching another. Again, this is why we just de-orbit things into the atmosphere and let them burn up.
3) "Refuelling"? Seriously? Most of the "fuel" is either highly radioactive in the old ones, or solar in the new ones. The power isn't the problem. It's the cutouts, safeties, orientation to the Sun, etc. that kills off a satellites power, not it running out of juice. The Voyager spacecraft are still running at something like 50% power while on the outside the solar system 40 years after launch.
4) Who owns that stuff? Who will fund you to repair that stuff (much cheaper to just launch newer kit)? What if you touch a Chinese satellite by mistake? You could seriously start a war by just touching someone else's satellite, even by mistake, or causing debris from your operation to interfere with their kit.
5) Where would you repair it? In space? Via a spacewalk? The single-most-expensive venture that one man ever performs? You know the greatest risk while you're on a spacewalk? Getting hit by space junk that's so small and fast we can't track it. Are we repairing random bits of kit that were fabbed in semiconductor labs with the latest technology from inside an astronaut's spacesuit? Or would you take it to an in-orbit space station that would cost more to build and operate than it would ever cost to relaunch all those satellites put together? Or would you bring it back through our atmosphere at huge expense and risk only to be told that the technology was obsolete and that if they were going to have to launch it again, they'd rather do it with a new model or one that hadn't already broken once?
There's a reason all that space junk is called junk. It effectively is, because of the content, accessibility, and cost of going near it. It's like saying that 80% of the world's gold is in the ocean. It is. It will be. Until we work out a cheap way to drain and search the entire ocean for less than the difference between the total price of all gold on land and the total price of all gold in the sea.
The safest thing to do with space junk, even with politics and cost aside, is to push it into our atmosphere. But only to get it out of the way so the next launch doesn't hit it.
Re: Apps for Android can be served from anywhere you can download an APK
Indeed.
An Android tablet that I bought cheap from Maplin's did make my heart sink a little to see that it had no Google Play app store on it, but only some proprietary nonsense that wanted you to pay in "coins" for free apps. I was *this* close to taking it back to the shop to complain that it wasn't "proper Android", when I decided to take the challenge (MS had earlier been peeing me off that day by some ridiculous hurdles on installing a game that wanted GfWLive - and needless to say there was a little victory punch when I did indeed manage that on XP SP2 which isn't officially supported at all - so I was quite in the mood for some technical wizardry to bypass silly restrictions) .
I was quite disappointed to find out that all I needed to go was google for the Play store app APK file, download it, run it, and voila! Mum could buy and play Cut-The-Rope and Angry Birds. I didn't even need to use a PC or anything - I did it all from the tablet and hardly did anything technical at all.
Moral of the story: Restrict me and I'll send your product back or make it work anyway. Don't restrict me, but just configure things a little oddly, and I'll pay for the product and put it the way *I* like it anyway. Same with browsers. I don't care what comes pre-installed, but if I can't get my favourite browser on a level playing ground, I won't touch it.
I think MS are leading themselves to trouble here. This *STINKS* of deliberate anti-competitive behaviour and the EU still haven't forgiven them from the last time yet. Either IE has to stop using those API's (and thus shows itself up as being junk) or everyone else gets to use them (and thus IE shows itself up as being junk). Either way, all they've done is make themselves look evil when they could have just chose either option and merely looked incompetent.
Re: Re:Route sucks?
An out-of-context quote but certainly not a misleading one.
An app with "route" in the title, for planning routes, that can't plan routes. And the bit it does show is pointless. And that's assuming it works when you take that route. And, I assume, the coupon-led bit requires you to "check in" along the route to show you've taken that route at a slow speed (otherwise they're just giving away coupons), so it not working is pretty critical to the function of the app.
A coupon-giving route-planning app to avoid carbon release that may not give coupons, can't plan routes and actually advises worse ways of travelling.
The Government IT slogan should be: "You couldn't make it up."
Re: Don't knock the old phone boxes!
What's a landline?
BT publish 0800 numbers for reporting faults (which will soon be free from mobiles too). Brand-new PAYG phones can be picked up for under £10 in any Tesco.
You're hardly *LOCKED* to a landline any more. The fault on your landline won't be vital any more. And reporting the fault is easier than ever because I can almost guarantee you that you have a mobile in your pocket right now, or are standing next to someone who does.
And how do you find those free fault-reporting numbers? Try any operator. Or Google. Or directory enquiries.
And, let's be honest, the situation's been the same since, what, the 90's? I can honestly say I've never used a telephone box in my life, and I'm only 30. Hell, when I move house, the only reason to have a landline is if I want ADSL or it comes free with the package. I couldn't tell you the last time it actually *RUNG* (and certainly not the last time it was rung by someone I actually wanted to speak to!).
Post I made on the Steam forums about this:
Can't say I have much interest. They "invested" $333,333 (according to their page) just to buy the naming rights and are asking for more than that to actually write the game. That, in their own words, was all their profits from all their previous ventures.
They could have wrote that game with "the in-house tech that’s been in constant development at the studio for more than a decade" for that money and called it anything else (literally, anything else at all), but they've not even managed to get to prototyping the game because it *HAD* to have the same name. Half the entire game budget blown on the name alone doesn't inspire confidence. I assume they think "CoolGameX by the makers of, and in the style of, Carmageddon" would confuse people who wanted to buy it.
They've got a basic engine going (Really? That's all? Physics / 3D engines are ten-a-penny nowadays, the cost of the game is actually in the assets - level design, 3D texturing, etc.), they have minimal game assets ("start creating the initial game assets"!), they only have half the original dev team (Which half? What did they do? Have we got the people who actually made the game, or a couple of people who wrote a few lines in the prototype engine of the original Carmageddon?), but they do have 40+ hangers-on which weren't around back then ("We’re a modest-sized indie developer (around 50 trapped souls)").
Seems to be confirming the stereotype of all Kickstarter projects that I've seen so far. Throwing money at a poorly-managed dev-only project who couldn't get funding through other means and seem to want me to compensate them for the money they've already thrown away on tat.
I'd kill for a proper Carmageddon sequel. But this won't be it. And if it is, it'll be that sequel without my help (or anyone else's) anyway.
I only wish I could sit on my bum for ten years trying to negotiate the sale of a name and then slap it on absolutely nothing that I hurriedly knock up and make money from the whole business. It's a damn sight easier than actually creating a good game and then selling it no matter what the name.
Re: Bored of this product bickering...
Why would you need to store anything if it takes seconds to redownload the whole thing again? It would actually be quicker to stream it live, in that case, than save it to disk!
Sure, there's an argument for having your own independent copy of the data, but the more incentive for storage (i.e. lots of data and fast download), the cheaper it gets. Fact is that most people don't even use the 100Gb hard drive in their laptop any more. When I image people's computers onto their new laptops etc. it's rarely more than 30-40Gb and most of that is Windows, photographs and applications. People don't even save their email onto their computer any more, really. It's all done "live" with IMAP.
But with decent home broadband comes the incentive to provide decent networking gear for business (links across a whole factory site can easily have been Gigabit since 1999 and 10/100 since 1995, with self-installed cable, hand-crimped connectors and commodity hardware - so why does the exchange which is across the road to me barely get 8Mbps?), higher speeds, faster datacentres, faster international links, larger storage, more applications (video, VoIP, etc.), etc.
The bottlenecks determine the current technology. My drive isn't faster because I can't get enough data to put onto it that fast. You might fill an SSD once but you're not going to be running it at SATAIII speeds all day long. My drive isn't larger, not because we've hit physical limits (or I'd have options to put two-three drives into a laptop already, and although they exist, they are stupidly expensive rather than standard) but because we don't store that amount of data any more (a couple of Tb will more that satisfy more people at the moment, and that's a £100 Maplin's job to fulfill) and can't download that data even if we wanted to. My wireless isn't faster because it has to plug into a 10/100 Ethernet cable most of the time. Same as my optical media drive isn't SATAIII because the disks can't spin that fast anyway!
But home broadband bandwidth is a serious hurdle, especially upload, whereas any datacentre you choose can throw unmetered 100Mbit connections at you as standard. Increase that, and you get a boost in all the other computer specifications too. There's nothing stopping a gigabit-ethernet-to-the-door service providing those sorts of speeds except the costs of laying the initial cable. With that suitably rolled-out and planned, you can even go up to 10Gb without struggling once the time comes. It's a question of investment in something worthwhile, rather than still running new houses with manky old 2-core copper to an old exchange with nothing more recent than ADSL or so, and not even a "throw money at it" style problem.
Re: Hang on a sec...
Agreed, multiple storage failures, your cloud provider exploding because of the Large Hadron Collider or anything else are not an excuse for LOSING data.
Possibly making that data temporarily unavailable but the words "data recovery specialists" really translate as "whoops, we have no backup".
Even if the whole rack exploded - where's your backup from last week, last month, last year?
High availability and redundancy are no substitute for backups. I hope all the listed companies just cancel their contract and ask for a complete refund.
So while they were performing their usual routine (Windows Start Bar, VS colouring, etc.):
1) Break something deliberately obvious and stupid for no reason
2) Wait for everyone to shout.
3) Change back to what it was already "based on customer feedback"
in order to make you think they are actually doing something, what have they actually stripped out of the program or incorporated that people were too blinkered by the "it's grey" setting to find?
Re: Bored of this product bickering...
The day BT are nationalised or otherwise removed from the market, and made to do their job - sell connectivity to others and not hoard and price access to 50-year-old copper cables like they are gold-dust.
Hell, I always assumed we'd be all-fibre by now (2012, ffs!) and not bothering with anything over copper at all. USB over fibre is in the works, Ethernet over fibre has been around for decades, fibre-to-the-door is available if you're lucky with where you live... and none of it has any value to thieves.
But, apparently, no. We're still using the same cables that I ran my 56K modem off (and in some cases you could easily have used the same copper to dial-up at 9600bps right to ADSL2+, the only difference being the middle conversions and street cabinets).
ADSL standards were finalised in 1999. I was still at uni then. The same time before that: (1999 - (2012 - 1999)) was 1986. The progress change that ADSL would have been to ZX Spectrum users should have happened AGAIN by now. ADSL of 1999 was, say, 8MBps (ideal conditions, I know). ZX Spectrum modems were 1200 bps. By rights, with only LINEAR improvement (not exponential as normally would happen in a thriving tech market), we should have: 55Gb/s connections to the home by now (if my maths is right). With at least 10Gb/s usable in a typical installation. You'd hit your "traffic limits" for the month in a handful of seconds.
Instead, we have ADSL2+ (if you're lucky) which is ADSL at a slightly increased speed (2-3 times increase instead of nearly a 7000-fold increase) and available hardly anywhere, and the fastest connections are, shock-horror, fibre where it's been bothered to get installed.
Re: Misleading
"Groklaw's views always favour Google. You may want to read the other sources as there are there are other views."
If you'd read my comment, I do. Few of them link to entire court transcripts of the events as they unfold, and those that do - strangely - all have the same facts in them! After that it's just interpretation. I can ignore Groklaw's interpretation (the "we were right, aren't we wonderful" thing always gets on my nerves, actually, because anyone with a brain could tell they were right when they said it originally, etc.)
The problem here is not the interpretation (personally, I think Google are home and dry here and Oracle are facing a minor SCO-style slide into oblivion if they don't react quickly, others think otherwise and there's a whole spectrum of opinion on the matter - not black and white), it's the facts. Which this article, like Oracle, conveniently ignores in order to make their "case" sound better.
Copyrighting an API destroys large parts of IT. You couldn't do it, at least not sensibly or without everyone fleeing that particular country who has any interest in doing serious IT work. It would literally kill WINE, Android, Linux (POSIX API's remember!), Samba, every instant messenger program, etc. every Exchange connector, anything that "resembles" or works with SAP, etc. all overnight. But given that even Samba's use of API's, for example, is basically an enforcement and endorsement of the EU courts, that would be extremely tricky to resolve such a paradox and either such a ruling would have zero square metres of jurisdiction, or have to not exist at all.
Not copyrighting an API means Google have done nothing wrong WHATSOEVER based on the judge and jury's rulings and decisions so far. In fact, they have been pushing for motions to dismiss and mistrial BECAUSE of that fact - i.e. Oracle knew it never had a leg to stand on and it's only red-tape that's keeping the case going. Even a basic decision in this are is win-win for Google. But some people are interpreting that as "THE WHOLE IT INDUSTRY IS GOING TO DIE BECAUSE OF GOOGLE!" whereas, in fact, things are the opposite and the only one trying to apply for exclusive ownership of anything even vaguely resembling, replacing or interoperating with their kit are actually Oracle. Yet, their predecessor was more than happy about such things (as they should be).
Oracle here are on shaky ground. Shouting the odds about how a wonderful success has been achieved sends the wrong message. They just got their backside kicked, hard. They are looking at a bleak, empty, expensive lawsuit that only damages themselves. They are looking at shareholders taking a close look at what went on and where all that money went and why. They are looking at having to deal with copycat-Java's popping up everywhere and making them obsolete JUST BECAUSE of what they've done with this lawsuit (would you touch Java API code now?). A bit like they did with OpenOffice, but with real, legal implications - buy it, break it, try to crush the opposition when they make a replacement, end up not having one iota of influence on the entire product from that point on because everyone avoids working with you.
Much as I hate Oracle and don't-mind Google, this is a really-skewed opinion piece based on a poor reading of the case and the court transcripts. You can't stand in the way of facts. Oracle are gonna hurt on this one.
Misleading
At the risk of being called a fanboy, you obviously don't keep up with Groklaw coverage or even looked at the case in question. To steal the summary from Groklaw's latest update:
"Recap of the day: Google won everything but the one issue that the judge has to decide anyway, the API SSO issue. The jury found, as they had been instructed to assume for the purposes of deliberation, that APIs can be copyrighted, the structure, sequence and arrangement of APIs, but that is by no means established. The same question, in a b) section, asked if fair use excused any infringement if found, and the jury couldn't resolve that issue. But the judge has to decide whether or not that is true, that APIs can be protected by copyright. That comes later this month. Meanwhile, Oracle prevailed only on 9 lines of code that Google admitted prior to trial to have included by mistake and then removed from current Android. Oracle's own expert, the judge pointed out in court, valued those 9 lines of code at zero. This is 9 lines out of millions. So that means, if we are looking at damages, that so far Oracle has won nothing. There is no liability. You can't have infringement without considering fair use, Google asserts, and there will be briefing on that. Somebody has to decide that fair use issue. And then the judge has to decide about the API copyrightability issue. If he rules that APIs can't be copyrighted, as the EU Court of Justice just ruled, then fair use is moot. And Oracle takes nothing at all from the copyright phase of this litigation, and this was heralded far and wide by Oracle people as the big ticket item, if you recall."
I don't claim to be a big Groklaw fan, but I do read their coverage to get a balanced reading on the issues at hand, like I did in SCO vs IBM, et al too. Basically, Oracle won nothing. Google stuck to their "fair use" argument (which is fair, because all they used is the API interface - which is DESIGNED to be "copiable" - and the "9 lines" are really worth nothing even if they came with comments that said "HAHAHAHAHAHA! WE STOLE THIS FROM ORACLE!" all over it).
But, strangely, so far BBC, Slashdot and now The Reg are somehow writing articles that claim it's the end of the world for Google and game over and Google were naughty. I can't really see that side myself at all, but I haven't read *EVERY* court transcript there is. There are strange parallels to the SCO vs IBM argument that "this standard .h file which you need to interface with POSIX applications has very similar 'code' (i.e. numbers corresponding to a list of constants) in Linux for the purpose of POSIX applications using it!).
I don't think this will do anything to the industry or Google at all but someone, somewhere, somehow, has managed to turn it into something that will dent Google's share price when, actually, Oracle - and anyone who parrots their claims - is looking extremely dodgy to me.
You got conned. Import duty and VAT shouldn't apply to product returns, warranty replacements, etc. I don't think, in either direction. They "sorted it out" by telling the customs people it was a warranty replacement. Didn't cost them a penny over and above their own administration costs.
Does mean that they probably didn't label the product properly on its return journey, though, or customs wouldn't have bothered to question it.
Re: benjymous
Filtering out images by skintone is like choosing which tanks to shoot at in a battle based on the average green colour of them.
Sooner or later, the "enemy" will start painting their tanks a different colour and/or spraypainting yours, or even just knocking up cardboards cutouts for you to fire at to your heart's content.
And the poor sod who just happened to be wearing the wrong colour shirt is going to be in for an awful big compensation payout.
Until we have a filter capable of human thought (and thus able to reason not only the contents of an image by something other than skintone / edge-detection / etc., like the entire computer vision industry has been trying since the 60's, but the intention, pose, provocative nature, age, gender, obscenity etc.) it ain't gonna happen. The only thing we have that does that is humans, and even they get it wrong so often that it's laughable.
---
IT Manager in schools. At a previous school, once had to report a site to RM's Filter people because, let's just say, it was not the "traditional" retelling of Little Red Riding Hood. ("My! What a big... you have!")
Didn't this always used to happen with older Windows anyway?
I have a whole bunch of CyberLink PowerDVD install disks and keys because every time we bought an 2000/XP laptop or PC, they didn't include the MPEG2 codecs and the workaround was that all manufacturers bundled "something" that would play MPEG2 for no cost - either with the machine or the DVD drive if you were upgrading. That "something" usually cost them pence in bulk and consisted of some DVD playback software that you didn't even install most of the time.
I still have the pile for our XP machines here, still have the problem that Media Player doesn't play DVD by default on a clean Windows XP install (you have to install that bit of software first or - my solution that bettered my employer's - use VLC and just make sure you can prove you have the PowerDVD disks, and hence MPEG playback license, somewhere). Then the whole EU software patents things went a bit up the wall and basically the Fraunhoefer Institute's patents meant nothing any more so we could just use playback software at our whim.
Isn't this just a return to an earlier policy rather than some shocking new omission from the OS?
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