Posts by Alan Brown

@cloudgazer

I never had any trouble writing off kit which still had residual book value.

Accountants get twitchy about retaining stuff with no residual value because you can't use depreciation to offset taxable income. Do it right and you can run at a (paper) loss or low net income for years.

It's not tax evasion. Perfectly above-board and a good accountant will make things simple as long as you don't show up with all your paperwork in a shoebox (Mine setup everything in Quickbooks so that all I had to do was keep things straight and all he had to do was audit the output. End result was an accountancy bill under 200 quid/year)

Using thin clients is attractive for a number of reasons (lower hardware costs, harder for endusers to futz with, easier support) but I'll bet that the replacement cycles remain as-is, simply because of accounting structures which make best use of depreciation allowances provided by the Inland Revenue.

Mine's the one with the texts on double-entry book keeping in the back pocket.

Feel free not to give back...

...or to give away...

...but if you try to pass off my work as your own, I'll happily roast your nuts over an open fire.

THAT'S what GPL is all about.

FWIW $orkplace has contributed hard cash to a number of projects - but only because it's directly suited our interests to do so.

US Patent != UK patent

This was likely a design patent - which in the EU and the rest of the world is a Registered Design,

Even without wilful blindness this would have been prevented from being sold in the EU or most other jurisdictions (copyright and design violations) if that had been tried.

If the SEB unit hadn't been bought and copied Pentalpha might have stood a fighting chance of defending but as it stands I'm surprised they aren't being hit with triple damages for wilfull violation.

debulking?

It doesn't need it. Sure the source is enormous and all the modules add space but I can still run it on a 4Mb 486dx25.

Most of the bloat has happened in the UI area - and "strip" is your friend for those.

New Zealand....

...paid ~$120 million for a system to better detect benefit fraud about 15 years ago on the basis that there was about $250 million in fraud happening annually.

This involved data tie-ins from inland revenue, council, housing, etc

They found ~$35 million of fraudulent claims going on - the vast majority of which was carried out by benefit staff who'd set up multiple identities and were collecting the proceeds.

In the meantime, pension payouts accounted for 65-70% of all welfare payouts anyway (About $4 billion in all) and there are no means-tests or other checks on them (single vs married pensions are lower, but living together doesn't count as "married")

Yes, benefit cheats need to be outed, but the amount of publicity given is merely a smoke screen to allow shafting all the genuine claimants while getting public approval to do so.

Even if...

... all of these properties were returned to occupancy tomorrow there'd still be a shortfall of at least twice as much again.

It's funny that there's no simliar GIS layer for unoccupied council-owned properties.

WRT the pre 1919 houses, I live in one - it was an expensive bollox to insulate properly and it's still not as good as a decent new build could be. I totally agree about the tiny rooms thing and hate modern small places but developers build as small as housing laws allow - if lawmakers allow a return to slum-sized housing then they'll happily build it.

Force 9 quakes.

Perhaps not, but look at the risk (and predicted heights) of surges in the Severn wash and Irish sea caused by a collapse of one of the canary island volcanos.

On the bright side there'd be a couple of hours warning if this occured.

WRT flooding, there are 2 sorts.

1: the water rises and falls slowly, some silt/sewage damage, but not much else (eg, what's currently happening on the mississippi river)

2: the water comes through in a wall, knocks lots of stuff over and puts tons of silt across every square metre in the process (flash floods)

Nobody who's been in a flash flood would argue they're less of a problem than a tsunami. This is why nuclear plants are(should be) sited in areas which aren't vulnerable to this kind of thing.

At the end of the day the fact remains that Fukushima got hit with a double whammy far larger than it was designed for, things broke and the amount of radiation which has escaped into the environment is still pretty low. Pretty good for a worst case scenario...

This is the same Sony...

... which put rootkits on audio CDs a few years back.

You'd think they'd have learned from that little escapade.

In the absence of shareholder direction to the contrary, a company/corporation is required _by law_ to maximise profit for the shareholders.

The only way to do that is to behave in a way which in a human would be classed as "sociopathic". (Which does make you wonder, when corporations have "natural person" status in the USA). This in turn tends to attract sociopathic individuals into management positions. If they're not abusing people external to the company, then they're pulling a Ken Lay and maximising their own personal profit at the expense of the company.

I'm sure that Akio Morita and Masaru Ibuka are turning in their graves.

Black holes are very messy eaters

> Exactly why and how the colossal black hole emits these particle jets is poorly understood. Most of

> the matter it sucks in cannot escape, but some is thrown out with enormous violence even as the

> rest is crushed down into unfeasibly dense incrediblo-stuff.

Um... no. Most of the matter going into a black hole ends up jetting off. Only a small fraction goes over the event horizon (usually around 3%)

Think of them as giant Cookie Monsters going "Om nom nom", while spraying the room with crumbs.

Not just PLT

A lot (most, if not all) of compact florescent lighting splatters right across the spectrum.

It could be that OfHalfWits decided that PLT was emitting less than CFL so it's ok, but in 5-6 years time CFL will mostly be dead (LED prices are in freefall) and PLT will still be around. :(

porting delays....

diffulty porting?

Or flat out fear of the unknown?

I'm currrently trying to encourage various researchers to look at GPGPU for various applications which should benefit from the technology but most of them are scared stiff if it aint 'x8.

This is _despite_ gpgpu modules being available for the software packages they use.

As an ISP....

(long time ago)

I used to tell people "The internet has some of the deepest darkest recessess of humanity on it. Filters often don't work and kids usually see them as a challenge to be bypassed. If you want to make sure they're safe, don't let them use the 'net unsupervised"

well......

They're clearly in the process of folding all the Linksys range into Cisco branding (same part numbers, now with Cisco labels, etc)

If they sell the brand, I suspect it'll be the name only.

OTOH the bottom end of the market is being creamed by cheap'n'chirpies - it may be time for Linksys to go upmarket a little.

(Looks at long-time competitors D-link and Netgear, now both selling gear which competes head-on with Cisco's lower end Enterprise range, with ZyXEL joining the fray too.)

ADSL gear might well be a dead end market for endusers. VDSL and fibre gear isn't exactly widely available for resale, nor will telcos let endusers connect their own kit (yet).

firewall?

Or simply unplug the fecking thing?

Ah, but....

Can 6 people carry it up 2 flights of stairs and leave it on the landing?

Mine's the one with the photo of the Fiat500 that got parked outside the 5th floor lab.

Time to....

... delete skype.

Useful while it lasted.

Bah

I'll stick with the Yeti voice.

FinFET and ARM

Only justifiable if it gives benefit. Will ARM save 50% on power?

WRT the comments about x86 bloat - remember it was AMD who put the 64-bit extensions into x86 whilst Intel was preparing to bet the farm on Itanium.

I can understand why AMD did it, but it's argueable that the net result has been a 5 year delay on PC architecture moving to more efficient CPUs

speed limits are artificial

There was a 20+ year study made on a section of road in the USA, where speed limirts were raised and lowered.

What was found was that setting speed limits near the road's natural speed resulted in motorists obeying them. Setting them stupidly low OR high resulted in motorists ignoring them and driving at the road's natural speed.

Similar research also showed the motorists are far more affected by perceived obstructions, etc and excessive laning actually resulted in people driving FASTER.

If you really want to slow traffic down NOW, increase the perceived road hazards (extra parking helps a lot) and link a speed detector to a red light down the road. No camera needed. Everything else is revenue gathering.

I'd like to see a renewed emphasis on driver ability - including heavy fines for holding traffic up, middle lane hogging and even more severe punishnments for tailgating (SUV and Mercedes owners are particularly bad for intimidating with their vehicle's size) - and _anyone_ trying to use "I have my kids in the car" as an excuse for bad driving needs to have their license stripped on the spot until they resit.

TT is ok when it works

But when it doesn't, getting help is kafkaesque, primarily due to an apparent culture of avoiding the customer - http://www.dilbert.com/fast/2011-04-30/

As for Brutish Telecon Openretch.....

Baby factories

At least one calf has been sucessfully gestated in a laboratory tank and then lived a happy life after "birth"

I believe the reason it hasn't been done with humans has more to do with "ethics" than with "technological ability"

Don't label any switches "Boot"

Enough said.

Tek War

The PDAs in those had flexible displays too, along with car-following video ads.

If they can do something about the terrible contrast ratio (akin to reading soy ink on cheap bleached newsprint - old school cheap'n'nasty paperbacks/comics) I'll think about buying one.

Possible killer apps for E-paper (when they get the contract ratio sorted) other than books:

Billboards, tube/bus shelter advertising displays (5-15,000 people in the printing industry immediately out of work)

Outboard status displays for your PC (USB or bluetooth updates?)

Supermarket shelf price displays (already happening) and similar applications.

Etch-a-sketch for execs.

The fake window sounds nice but they'd need a backlight. Oled will probably win that one, but McFly's roller blind will probably be embedded in the glass itself - the roller version will be for cheapskates (then again, that's McFly in the movie)

Personal favour??!?

That's a story worth further investigation. I wonder who's paying whom to stay schtum in canadian media? (Hint: It often happens with threats like "If you run this story we'll pull all our advertising")

stego, but slooooooooow

Enough said - and not particularly innovative, but that won't stop a patent being issued.

not just toffs

Anyone sensible enough to use NAME+suffix email addresses to enable filters to easily toss inbound mail into appropriate folders tends to find that a lot of sites don't like 'em.

Including a LOT of UK sites whose helldesks claim that + isn't a valid character in email addresses.

Mine's the one with the questionmarks all over it.

Lightning riders make lousy bus drivers.

20 years ago when I was doing my flight training it was widely recognised that ex-combat pilots are an extremely poor choice for transport aircraft as they are easily bored and take unnecessary risks, leading to disproportionately high levels of "incidents" in the transport industry.

That's WHY there are so many ab-inito flight training schools in existance now. Not because there aren't enough ex-military pilots available - among other things, flyboys tend to forget there are a significant number of other human beings riding in the back when in marginal flying conditions.

I won't hire Lewis Hamilton to drive minibusses when he retires from F1 either.

As for drones - they make a hell of a lot of sense. Air forces have been trying to go pilotless for decades as the onboard meatsack can't take more than ~10G whilst airframes can easily be designed to take 4 times that much.