Posts by Displacement Activity
199 posts • joined Monday 2nd June 2008 12:32 GMT
Re: Software patents in the EU?
Software patents have always been allowed in the UK, provided they meet various other criteria. I'm pretty sure that much of the rest of Europe is in the same situation.
Re: MS will be forced to refund extorted fees
There's no law (here, anyway) that says you have to defend your patents. That sort of law would be unworkable, anyway.
And, in the companies I've worked in, it's not the lawyers who decide whether something is interesting enough to patent. The engineers are asked to put forward suggestions. The engineering knowledge of the lawyer is irrelevant.
And the other patent offices have no problem keeping up with technology. In the UK, at least, the patent people are smart, and any search is far from cursory. Of course, they're helped by certain basic principles, such as "no perpetual machine machines, no Elephant-shaped buildings", and so on. I'm finding it hard to see how something as stupid as this Microsoft patent could have got as far as a German court, though. I thought they were fairly rational.
But, I do agree that US law needs changing. The range of stuff ("all the works of man") that can be patented in the US is far too broad. If you fixed that, then the rest of us could stop wasting our time filing pointless and stupid method and process patents, and all the rest of it, just in case someone in the US does it first.
@AC: $5-6?
Your analysis only works if the business is sustainable, and will generate at least the same profits for maybe 10 years, and if the company actually does distribute those profits to shareholders. If all this is true, then your share of the business will eventually start to make real money for you.
In short, even if FB was at a normal 'fair' valuation, you'd have to be incredibly optimistic to buy in at that price, given that there's no protectable IP involved, and the entire history of the web makes it painfully obvious that the FB product will get up off it's collective arse and walk off as soon as it finds a greener field to chew its cud in.
Which only leaves one reason to buy in at a stupidly high price - a belief that the market will expand enormously. There's absolutely nothing to indicate that this will happen. There aren't even enough people on the planet to make it happen. And most of those currently left over are Chinese, and nobody in their right mind would expect them to flock to FB when they can do it their own way.
Re: Trend are a bunch of idiots who dont understand networks or the chaos they cause
yup - perhaps it wasn't so smart telling them your IP addresses. It's nice to have an opportunity to slag off Pipex, but the real story here has to be that nuclear IP-block blacklisting is just moronic.
Re: My Pap Ex
> Thanks for the free Internet connection, Pipex. It partially balances all the stress you caused so
> many other customers by stealing money from their bank accounts.
That's interesting. I thought it was just me they screwed over. I signed up with them pretty much on day #1 (1992?), and was with them over 10 years.
I saw Peter Dawe at some sort of presentation a few years later, mumbling on about how the world hadn't kept up with his vision for IPv6. He was very, very, unimpressive.
Re: Pipex are still around?
I cancelled them 8 or 9 years ago. They invoked the 13-month small print in their "annual" contract, and took an extra month out of my Barclays A/C via D/D. I then spent 2 or 3 months sending angry letters to both Barclays and Pipex, but neither of them would back down. So, I cancelled Barclays as well. Tossers both.
Re: Instant means instant
Not so, I'm afraid. The effect is thought to travel instantaneously, but can't be used to transmit information, other than randomness.
@AC: Re: Where's the teleportation?
You're mostly right.The transfer doesn't happen like this, though. The actual information transfer happens by sending data bits on a classical comms channel, at or less than the speed of light. Effects due to entanglement do travel instantaneously (I think this has been experimentally shown to be at least several thousand times faster than c), but you can't transmit information at this speed. See my other reply for the actual mechanism.
And yes, the point is to prevent snooping, and yes, it's a one-shot deal. The measurements destroy the original entanglement. Back to C++ now :(
Re: Where's the teleportation?
> I don't know if I'm missing something, but sending a photon through a fibre doesn't seem like teleportation.
It isn't. The 'teleportation' is the transfer of quantum information (a 'qubit') from location A to location B. There are complex reasons why this can't be done classically (ie. putting it in a box and carrying it, and so on), but there's a work-around. The work-around requires Alice to measure two quantum states, and send the results of her measurement as two classical bits on a classical comms channel (a satellite link, maybe) to Bob. Bob then uses these two classical bits, together with his half of the entangled pair, to regenerate the qubit that Alice wanted to send to him. The entanglement is destroyed in the process, but Bob ends up with something that has the quantum state that Alice wanted to send him. Voila, teleportation. Sort of.
Re: Falklands
Both Google Earth and maps.google.co.uk show a map of the Falklands labelled "Falkland Islands (Islas Malvinas)". You have to wonder who's running the mapping department at Google. Some sort of Argentinian redneck?
How would Matt Asay possibly know?
"Ford... reports great success with Facebook advertising". Matt tells us, though, that GM also reports that "Advertising on Facebook apparently hasn't worked. My question: how would GM possibly know?"
Just a little arrogant? Ford is smart enough to know that it's advertising has worked, and GM isn't smart enough to know that it's advertising hasn't worked? How would *you* possibly know?
Here's an idea for an interesting article. Tell us how many Facebook shares you bought, how much they cost you, how you can write an article like this without declaring an interest, and how many people are going to be wiped out when Facebook disappears down the plughole.
Ok, so far...
Been with them for a year, for a few non-critical sites. Bare metal + tty only, so I have minimal reliance on their support staff. Nasty problem to start with, when it took me a day to find out that their OS image had yum set to auto-update everything. Duh. Nothing since then. It was very cheap for bare metal then, probably still is. I think they've been trying very hard to get over their reputation problems - they ring every few months to ask how things are. +1 from me; I'll probably stick with them longer-term.
@someone-up-above: it doesn't matter how and where they do their backups - if *you* can't restore your server then you'll always have problems, whoever you're with.
Bollocks
If that's their analysis of what's wrong with the system, then nothing will have changed in 10 years, except that we'll have spent another £10B.
I've had the pleasure of developing some software for a small corner of the NHS over the past couple of years. Here's what I've found out, to save you all going through the same pain. Nobody bothers asking the actual end users - clinicians or management staff - what it is that they actually need, or what would make their lives easier. On the odd occasions when they do ask, they ask the wrong people, or they ignore the answer. "Interoperability", for one, is just irrelevant. I've never *once* met anyone in primary care who has any interest in this, and I've never found a significant problem that could be solved by better interoperability. Some of the big-ticket stuff - SUS and C&B - is important, but almost all the other issues are local.
The real problem is the vast army of no-hopers running the system, from top to bottom. Everyone from the lowly guy in IT governance whose only purpose in life is to stop you getting any useful information about your patients, by ignoring your emails for 2 months at a time and then making up totally spurious rationalisations and justifications, to the IT director who pisses away 750K by buying in software which I told him was going to be totally pointless, and which everyone now agrees is totally pointless, and which never had a specification or even potential users. I wouldn't have employed this guy as a cleaner - how did he ever become IT director at a PCT?
Their analysis is just stupidly irritating. We don't even need a "world-beating IT system", by any stretch of the imagination. We don't need younger programmers (WTF?!). We don't need "hack days". The "stewardship" stuff is just patronising right-on nonsense. If these people want to make a difference, they should move on and make way for people who know their asses from their elbows.
Re: Doomed
I couldn't believe this, so I looked it up. And here it is, complete with more on Crapita:
http://www.private-eye.co.uk/sections.php?section_link=hp_sauce&issue=1309
I smell a fish, though. Only a moron would interpret “fairness and equal, objective treatment” as a requirement to exclude past performance data.
An admirable demonstration...
...that there's one born every minute.
Re: PowerShell
Sorry, Trevor, I don't get it. I spend a lot of time writing C. Microsoft never got around to supporting the 1990 standard, but they still claim to have a compliant C compiler. When I write multi-platform code, I have to put in lots of hacks to support MS. This is symptomatic of MS's entire approach to standards: develop your own variant, subvert the existing standard, lock in the user to the MS world-view. We all know this, and we've seen it everywhere: Java, C, JavaScript, the net, IE, you name it. Give the customer a nice cosy feeling with a GUI and some Mogadon, and they'll forget about the outside world. So, MS is now claiming to be more open on its server products, and giving us a CLI, but who actually cares? (a) I don't believe them, (b) existing MS users don't care anyway, and (c) I've already got all that, it works, it works great, and it's supplied by someone who isn't out to screw me by developing myriads of pointless new stuff that has no value and only exists to lock me in. *That* is what distinguishes 'open' from 'proprietary'.
And I don't buy your "$750/5 minutes/works for the next 10 years" argument. But life's too short to go into that.
Re: seems a bit arse about face to me
What he said was "to get actual work done". He didn't say anything about a fast UI, which has got nothing to do with actual work.
A lot of us actually do real work on Linux "desktops", without being "geeks" (WTF?!), or without being involved in "Linux mgmt". In the (Electronic and Software) engineering world, an awful lot of people either (a) run a Linux desktop, or (b) run an X server from Windows to a Linux box (what I do), or (increasingly, and perhaps surprisingly) run Linux on a hypervisor on Windows. And I'm prepared to bet that a *lot* more people do this than run Linux servers.
@Trevor: well, Ok, I guess you do make some sense after all :)
Apart from Bing.
Re: Just a suggestion...
Don't think so. They should just add some more reverse gears.
Why?
I've got to say, after reading the blog, that these Kaspersky guys are really switched on. Almost makes me regret dumping Kaspersky for MSE.
But, Soumenkov doesn't give any insight into why this component was written in another language. Everything else was written in C++, so what's different about this bit? It seems to be responsible for network comms. He knows a lot about the structure of the code, but the 2 things that stand out (to me) are that it's very object-oriented, and it's event driven. This isn't a job for a roll-your-own language - it should have been written in C++ as well, if only to make sure that it blended in.
So, looks to me like the guys who wrote this component have screwed up and left a smoking gun. They used their own in-house or research framework, and someone out there will finger them.
Re: Wait.
> WHY would anyone expect to be able to figure out the grammar and syntax of a
> higher-level language by looking at the compiled code -- let alone try to do so?
Good question. Read the blog; it explains the answer.
Re: D.
They checked D. See the comments on the Kaspersky blog.
"Screw you, I'm not making it round!"
Great! I'll have to remember that one.
Seriously, though, Pong was just a rip-off of Odyssey, and the article actually says that. Bushnell and Alcorn weren't visionaries just because they got in on the action a few months before everyone else who ripped it off.
I played ping-pong on Odyssey (once) in November '72, in San Francisco, and it was probably the first time I'd ever seen (or heard of) a computer. I was 13. I still remember it clearly, and it was life-changing - my first computer was in the shops less than 10 years later.
@P.Lee
It's not about office packages. Most GPs will almost never use Word; that's what secretaries are for. The only MS product they use on a daily basis is Outlook. Retraining the secretaries would be trivial, assuming that the OSS alternatives actually work. I don't know about secondary care, but I assume it's much the same.
The issue is that the software that the NHS actually uses is written, in this country, by NHS suppliers, to run on Windows.
> Why on earth in this day and age does the NHS need Windows/Office licenses ?
In primary care, the main reason is that surgery systems (Synergy, EMIS, SystmOne, etc) must run on Windoze, so everything else has to. A fair number of the guys who write and maintain this code will pass by here, so they may like to comment.
On another note - as a frequent user of OpenOffice writer, I have to say that I am very impressed by some of its abilities. For example, it always recovers documents flawlessly after a crash. I test this feature on perhaps, oooh, one out of every two days that I use it.
And, on yet another note, people in this part of the NHS seem to have moved on from IE6. Everyone around here seems to be on IE7.
Well, I couldn't work it out in the couple of hours I gave it before finding the answer posted above. On the plus side, though, I now know how to write shellcode, which should turn out to be a lot more lucrative than working for GCHQ.
@havin_it
The guy can't think straight or speak English. That, to me, says as much as the article itself.
I'm on Vodafone...
...but I did get the phone from Phones4u. The guy at the Vodafone store told me they'd delayed it because they had an upcoming Nokia launch. Sounded like bollocks.
No volume glitch here, yet. Issues include no flash support - a big surprise, to me anyway - no manual (the website says it's on the way) - and no ICS docs. I think 'beta' is a pretty good description. I'm finding it hard to have much else to say about it without a manual. Still pleased with it, though, despite the flash problem, which is a major PITA.
@metaetc
Stuxnet apparently spread primarily via infected USB sticks. Duqu's infection method is apparently still unknown.
What?!
I can't believe (a) that anyone thinks that Intel isn't innovative, and (b) thinks that enough to downvote me. 22nm? 14nm next year? 3D? Yes, there's been lots of crap on the way - Netburst, for example - but all the silicon companies have produced crap, and many of them have produced much worse crap. It's completely irrelevant that some have been arguably "more innovative". Yes, AMD occasionally produces better x86's than Intel, on less resources, by being more innovative, or just smarter. I started by building bit-slice computers based on AMD, and they shafted me years later with one of their stupid new-chip-every-month-"Liberty chips" that didn't work. Every engineer has been shafted by some crap chip from some supposedly innovative company.
If you actually bothered to read my post I was pointing out that Microsoft and Intel were very different. Intel is innovative, Microsoft is not, in any real sense. If Microsoft hadn't adopted x86, Intel would have moved on, dropped it, and produced something much better. They made the best of a bad job and did something that we all thought was next to impossible, which was to produce a world-class processor out of a dog of an architecture. Good luck to them. And, when you've spent 30 years in real hardware design, come back and downvote me.
@Petrea
> Now I feel that when I need to provide a concise description of what
> my part of the world (western US) is like, I can confidently say,
> "It's like Australia, only with guns."
...and lots of big signs giving ORDERS. And cops moving you on. And beggars.
Intel?
They practically created the home/business/microcomputer revolution in the 70's and early 80's by inventing DRAM. I was building computers then (~82) and my recollection is that it was the 2112 (?) that kick-started everything. The processors weren't a big deal - memory was. As far as I'm concerned, Intel have always been innovative. It was Microsoft that forced them down the x86 route.
Ah... that's why they called me yesterday
Only just twigged. A marketing guy called me yesterday to find out if I was happy with them. I've had no outage on a Linux DS, unless I managed to miss it.
I've been with them about a month (don't ask), and my major problem at the moment is that I can't talk to any other FastHosts users. It turns out that they closed down their forums a few years ago, and haven't re-opened them. Any forums out there? I'm on webhostchat.co.uk occasionally. Please don't say twitter. Please.
Hmm. I'm on FastHosts and 1&1, and I'm not going to disagree. The problem is that the information isn't readily available.
What interests me is that the value of a company can be entirely dependent on the value of something as intangible, and potentially undisclosed, as a US patent. Surely this sort of thing makes it next to impossible to invest in a tech company? This isn't how the patent system was meant to work.
And it strikes me that Olympus missed a trick here. Why bother siphoning billions to the Caymans, when you can just buy a few dud patents? They should have called me.
Well?
Pull your socks up, Reg. Wired already has a review, of sorts, at http://www.wired.co.uk/reviews/mobile-phones/2011-10/samsung-galaxy-nexus-mobile-phone-review.
@flingback
Yes, it does look like amateur hour, and you clearly don't work on switches. BlackBerry has apparently said that a "high-capacity core switch" failed. Nothing to do with "IPV4/IPV6". And none of the kit and protocols I work on (LACP and MSP) "will provide failover at a millisecond's notice". A few seconds, maybe, if you're lucky, which BB clearly wasn't.
@AC
> A backplane scheduler chip had suffered an internal hardware failure and
> autonomously started > taking (and delivering) traffic from/to the standby
> fabric all without bothering to provide any external indication that it had done so.
I call BS. For an IC of any complexity to fail in such a way that it carries out a logical series of rerouting ops has got to be next to impossible. There might be hundreds of potential reasons why your switch failed, and this has to be the least likely. Sounds like the guy who wrote your report is invoking black magic to cover his ass.
@JaitcH
> The only real information they lack are the doctors detailed
> notes, although some doctors do 'share' them for money.
Do try not to be an arse. If a patient consents to a GP's report, then the GP will (for a fee of, I think, about £80) read the notes and write a (relevant) summary report for the insurer. If the patient doesn't consent, no report.
If, OTOH, you do actually know of a GP who shares "detailed notes" for money, then you should tell the police, instead of whining here.
@Lies
That'd got to be complete bollox. They've got iPhone as 1.65%.
@Errr
Dunno - might be right. I use Linux desktops continuously for work, but do pretty much all browsing on XP. This seems to be pretty common in engineering companies.
> What i mean is: FU environmental charlatans ... u don't know jack.
That's a bit of a generalisation. If you've got nothing on a charging mat, then you're obviously not pumping energy into whatever it is you're not charging. Then you're down to no-load losses. Maybe 1%, or a few hundred mW, at a guess.
So, are you saying that you think kernel.org ran Apache as root?
More masts != more safety
I haven't been in wireless for over 10 years, but my recollection is that your phone always pumps out the full ~2W when it's trying to establish a connection with a mast. It doesn't just know that there's a mast there. It stops shouting when the mast responds. Having more masts wouldn't make a difference.
@Tasogare
I've thought about this occasionally, but never done it. Setting up the server is trivial. The big problem is that users don't understand newsreaders; they're fixated on the crappy web forums.
Another issue is getting ISPs to carry your group, if your server isn't up to the job. This would be easy if you can get your group into the big 5 name hierarchies ('comp.', etc), but Usenet is actually 'run' (surprisingly enough) by a bunch of Anal Retards who make this incredibly difficult. That means that you're stuck with a slot somewhere in alt, which makes it hard to get others to carry your group.
Whoop-de-doo
So Nevada looks like a crappy desert. Big deal. I hate to be a party pooper, but I've found 30 helium balloons on an otherwise pristine sandbank off the North Norfolk coast since March this year. And a completely indestructible sealed plastic bottle with a message in it. On the plus side, though, at least I'll have something to put the crap in when binbags start falling out of the sky.
It's life, Jim, pretty much as we know it
Google Groups is great for indexing Usenet, but useless otherwise. You can't beat a good newsreader.
And there's no problem finding ISPs who carry your favourite technical group, despite what various others have said here. You'd be pretty hard-pressed to find one who carried the binary groups, though.
Wouldn't be arsed to reply, but...
Just in case anyone is put off trying out Usenet by this or any other post here...
Bollox. Usenet is alive and well. Pretty much my entire technical career has been based on being an "expert" (IMHO) in 4 different areas. The thing that really did it was the 4 relevant newsgroups. If you want to move on from being good to being an expert, that's the way to do it - get involved, ask questions, answer questions. I earn twice the (top-end) industry average (or work half the year), and the single most important factor in that was getting involved in the NGs. Ok, perhaps it's not what it was, but it's still invaluable, provided you can find a relevant NG that carries a reasonable number of posts.
Stackoverflow and the like are catching up, but they're not there yet. I find them good for the less structured stuff that you need to dip in and out of occasionally.
Yawn....
Those of us who spent several years watching SplashPower circling the drain aren't impressed.
Going off FF as well...
..encouraging my IE7 users to move to Chrome. For Linux development, I'm mainly on Opera, for the simple reason that they can be arsed to provide current binaries that run on both RH and Ubuntu. I've got a pile of old and old not-so-old Linux boxes running crap and obsolete versions of FF.
@bazza, etc.
It's 10 years since I worked on/at ARM, but the chip I was on had 3 instruction sets.
The instruction set isn't the primary issue on low power. There are all sorts of other things which are far more important - geometry, leakage, voltage, frequency, clock gating, powering-down unused sections, and so on.
I've got a curious feeling that I posted something almost identical to this a couple of years ago and got voted down... :)
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