* Posts by drengur

20 publicly visible posts • joined 15 Feb 2011

Malcolm Turnbull's website makes funny Facebook fan numbers

drengur

Nice catch in the facebook likes thing, I noticed the same suspicious counts on the greens website this morning. I daresay it is an issue with the plugin they are using rather than deliberate, but still embarrassing for Mr. Broadband.

drengur

Re: The Liberals Just Don't Get It

It might help if the rental market has plenty of properties but that's rarely the case in my experience.

I doubt landlords will bother forking out a year's rental income to get a slightly better chance of renting when empty.

Terrible reception for Oz spectrum auction

drengur
Holmes

There will always be squealing....

when they think they can get a better deal; Threaten not to bid, force the price down.

Not like there's many serious bidders, one saying they don't need the extra spectrum so it's just going to be Telstra and Optus carving up the spectrum anyway.

Optus says age of mobile growth is over

drengur

Re: Customer retention means longer terms.

Sounds more like they are going to squeeze out the smaller players rather than extend contracts.

Sun daddy: 'Machines will replace 80 per cent of doctors'

drengur
Facepalm

He is right that more can done by machines, but...

replacing 80% of doctors seems like a bit of a call! As an IT pro myself and my wife being a doctor, I can't see the two living well together when things are voiced as this.

Computers certainly have the capability to be able to diagnose according to a set of symptoms, but my suspicion is they will only be able to do half the job. They will probably just list symptoms and suggest matching diseases to a qualified doctor - like all other medical diagnosis machines. The primary difference will it will replace the ritual of stethoscope, wooden paddle and blood pressure, delivering consistent result sets to GPs. Oh, and they are almost certainly going to be unbelievably expensive! I think where it will impact jobs is Triage nurses, who will become glorified machine operators.

What doctors do is certainly not voodoo, and using language like that is going to hinder development of these sort of machines.

Customs contradicts vendors over IT pricing

drengur
Trollface

p2p privateering

Gotta wonder about the 10% of non-infringing p2p piracy...

Should that segment be regarded as p2p privateering? Also, do you need a letter of marque to be a p2p privateer?

way too much 'Sid Meiers Pirates!' in my lifetime.

Election hacked, drunken robot elected to school board

drengur
Meh

Forgive me if I'm wrong...

but wouldn't running each voting location on an isolated network, handing in the results via encrypted USB key solve most of these issues?

Apart from the obvious, like changing the admin password :-S

lords, reminds me of an episode of Archer!

Apple orders PC builder to 'choose sides' in laptop battle?

drengur
Meh

re: How is this legal? Surel it isn't?

Legal where?

places like Taiwan and China have different legal definitions around this stuff.

It's likely to be fair game there.

What it is, is petty schoolyard crap. As for worrying about asus 'stealing' their design processes, aren't their zenbooks already rolling off the line? seems late to be making tweaks, plus judging from my Transformer Prime, they have the unibody finish down nicely!

As someone else pointed out, it seems to be a dirty trick to cost Asus some money retooling and maybe fear that they have made a competitive product.

Lost cities found beneath sands of Sahara by satellites

drengur

Not quite, they have used the same in Egypt, a country that has been picked over for the last few centuries fairly thoroughly. and found immense amounts of unknown sites.

drengur
Trollface

Indeed, the visigoths were essentially refugees within Roman borders... (it surprises me they haven't been brought up regarding the offshore processing debate in Australia.... "It's for your own good... do you WANT to be sacked and pillaged?")

They have mapped much of Egypt using the same tech, great stuff but ruins generations of Archaeologists who dream of stumbling across some forgotten tomb.

As for different religions supressing the past, it's really been a theme since ancient egypt, so the argument is completely moot. Tutenkhamun changed his name from Tutankhaten as part of his restoration of the old gods after his father had previously banned them all apart from his single god Aten.

After hack nightmare, Sony bars lawsuits with new TOS

drengur

There is also some good research to show that all-caps is quite hard to read. I certainly find myself glossing over all-caps without taking it in.

Has to do with a words shape contrast being much lower. It feels to me that using caps in an EULA is akin to writing it in as small a font as possible.

The whole system of EULAs seem to become more and more intrusive and unbalanced as time goes on - surely there's a point where claims like 'you can't sue us in a class action', when violating... well... basic human rights in most democracies should be grounds for a class action iteself.

IT admin cops to crippling ex-employer's network

drengur
FAIL

... or use cash?

in fact, using the restaurant at all seems like a foolish move... next step surely is to look at security camera footage!

drengur
FAIL

and yeah...

seems to me they failed at basic security - stupidity on both sides. it's really akin to leaving the front door propped open with your 50" plasma screen.

The company should be held equally accountable - if they followed security 101 rules, this wouldn't have been possible.

Aussie carbon tax in actually-makes-sense shocker

drengur
Headmaster

Despite the vitriol....

Taxing landlords who don't improve properties is not a terrible idea. The amount of places that I've rented that had bled electricity... horrible old water heaters and horribly inefficient lighting has cost me thousands and currently there is no value in doing it to a landlord. Whats more, most are so broke from their two mortgages that they can't afford to fix anything else.

I would love to see more disincentives to owning more than one property and finally pop this house price bubble.

Apple pilfers rips off student's rejected iPhone app

drengur
Thumb Down

Daresay it was in the works prior to his submission

... however, the least they could do is throw him some coin for the code and written it off as a PR expense.

If he had no idea they were rolling it into their next release, it seems pretty harsh to penalise him for not knowing Apple's internal roadmap.

guess they won't be looking at his CV now that he's leaked it to the press!

Zuckerberg: Give me your children

drengur
Stop

As someone who has gone though this with their child....

what you are saying is pretty ill informed. Facebook is a real world system, much in the way online poker and playboy.com is a real-world system. Nothing wrong with either of those, but they require a certain amount of maturity that children under 12 lack the maturity to differentiate valid and suspicious behavior as a rule. While both of the examples are obviously adult systems, and I don't really feel facebook requires 18+, it certainly shouldn't be available to primary school students.

I'm sure he's looking at mcdonalds as a model.... get 'em young, get 'em addicted and they'll be a customer for life.

As for 'does it stop them':-

My daughters silly mum signed her up for facebook at 8 years old (daughter lives with me). Complete with pictures, likes and interests and friends... fully available to the public.

With info like that, children are prime abduction candidates.

Facebook had it down the next day once we alerted them.

It doesn't stop them, but responsible parents can monitor it to some degree. And your idea about parents monitoring/controlling access is assuming they use facebook themselves, and is pretty much, unworkable for anyone with a life outside of... well, monitoring facebook...

Australians can’t read or count

drengur
Grenade

as Mr. Disraeli said:

There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.

Single-patent lawsuit hits Apple, Google, Amazon, Priceline...

drengur
Grenade

Maybe I should patent...

Maybe I should patent 'using a patent to attack another company or otherwise tie up the legal system'

should be able to make a fortune in royalties!

Sony threatens to ban PS3 jailbreakers from network

drengur
FAIL

Spoilt Children running Sony?

Another case of Sony being childish - seems the company is run using schoolyard politics.

"If you don't play how I want you can't be my friend any more!"

I've not even thought about hacking my ps3 but this just rubs me the wrong way - in fact I'm tempted to hack it, use the bloody thing as a router/media server and forget about buying any more games.

Never thought I'd say it but I'll be buying an Xbox next time round. On top of this type of tantrum throwing and messing with the functionality of my PS3 I've had a heap of Sony gear die on me in the past 3 years.

Their build quality is about as good as LG now :-S

Can Oz compete in the outsourcing market?

drengur
Pint

Poor English? hardly!

Agreed, I would say our grasp of english is just as good as that in the UK.

I do understand however (as an australian) what they mean about the local idiosyncrasies - I would probably have missed the HRH thing.

the 'nutt sacking' quote was just pure gold - truly a shame they didn't run that one!