Unto the pure, all things are pure

Today, I installed a Windows AD domain controller while waiting in the line for lunch in the cafeteria. This was on a newly installed Windows Server 2008 R2. I started adding the DC role when I joined the lunch queue.  The longest decision making required was perhaps on choosing which functional level to install.  In the end I decided to go for Server 2008 R2.  When it was my turn to order the food, the upgrading was already in progress. I did all this using my mobile phone, a Samsung Galaxy Note and Jump Desktop's RDP client . I disconnected when I got my food as I didn't want to mix my lunch with dcpromo.  As I was busy after that, I found time to reconnect to the server almost half a day later.  As it turned out, the upgrading process completed beautifully while I was away. The wonders of technology! What I see on my cell phone

My apologies, but Thomas Jefferson was wrong, perhaps just this once.  Not [all men are created equal]. (I won't split hair over whether it should be all men are not created equal or all men are created not equal.) You must have heard of this anecdote before: if every possession in the world today were confiscated and then divided out equally among every living person, after ten minutes, the whole world will be unequal again, assuming everyone acts rationally .  There will be the Bill Gates'es who would successfully trade their bottle caps for medals.  There will be others who would give away their farms for something trivial, trivial as in trivial to you and me. The ugly and yet beautiful fact is that the world functions because of inequality.  If all men are equal, the world grinds to a complete halt.  Life freezes, and, if the equality is really maintained, everyone drops dead. Society works because everyone places a different value on the same thing....

These are my private laws of economics: Heresy #1: People respond to incentives Heresy #2: People respond differently to (the same) incentives, and this creates a functioning society. Heresy #3: Not [All men are created equal] . I have an advanced degree in Economics from the School of Hard Knocks.  I missed many classes.  But as there was no government in the School of Hard Knocks, I decided to award myself the degree anyway.

If IP owners want everyone to treat their IP just like any other property, then perhaps they should start by treating their IP just like any other property. First (not in any order of importance), the freedom to use IP should be similar to the freedom to use all other property.  When you buy a chair from Ikea, you can do anything you like to it.  Sit on it.  Put things on it.  Use it as fuel for a BBQ.  Even if Ikea does not sell chairs but only rent chars, you are free to do whatever you want with a chair, as long as you are able to return it, less fair wear and tear, at the end of the rental period.  But when you buy Mac OS, you are not permitted to install it on non-Apple hardware. Then, we should also be free to transfer ownership of the IP with the same ease to transfer ownership of other property.  If someone threw his old TV set out of his house to let the garbage collector pick it up, in most jurisdictions, people are free to pick it up and...

When I first heard the "Retina display" of the iPhone explained, the perplexed reaction I had was "what for?"  By the way, "Retina display" is just a marketing term for a density of greater than 300dpi. Display area is probably the most expensive piece of real estate in the world after the Disney Store in New York city's Times Square.  When you have a large spreadsheet to analyze, every pixel is priceless. Why would you want to waste 960x640 of screen real estate at 326dpi?  It's not about discernible (read snobby) people being able to tell the dots when the display density is below 200dpi. For paper printouts, yes, you would want 300dpi or better.  But for an electronic display which is refreshed at 30 times a second?  For an electronic display showing moving images or video? My main beef with high resolution displays on cell phones is that the density is too high.  The density should be reduced to make the display more readable when each...

Why do the specifications of smartphones still give the maximum number of talk hours?  And this is usually a huge fantastic number of half a month or more.  And there is no other indicator of battery life. As we all know, we use the smartphone more as a computer than as a (voice) phone.  If I had wanted a very good voice phone, I would just get a $20 Nokia simple phone. Smartphone battery life should be stated like laptops.  And no laptop battery can last a day.  Similarly, if you use a smartphone like a computer full time, don't expect it to last a day. From experience, on the first day you bought your smartphone, your usage will be abnormally high.  You discover that the battery life isn't that "good".  As the days go by, your usage drops to a more realistic rate and you will find that the battery can last about a day.

I predict that the iPhone 5 will have a much bigger screen, à la the Samsung Galaxy Note.

Related: Retina display The word "resolution" has been so misused that the original definition, if I remember it correctly, actually bears little connection to how it is used nowadays. Let's start at the very beginning, a very good place to start. The first step in the communication process (from the screen to the person) is "visual acquisition".  Your eye must be able to acquire the image.  The image must be big and bright enough to trigger photosensitive cells in your retina.  Ignoring brightness, and just considering a single dot to represent the image, there is a minimum size for the dot below which the human eye cannot pick it out.  But this depends on how far away you are from the dot, so a better parameter to quantify this is the angle subtended by the dot to your eye. Figure 1 - Images of different sizes can subtend the same visual angle, depending on distance Obviously the minimum subtended angle that can make a dot visible varies from person t...

I have been looking for a good (and cheap) RDP client for my Android phone. I was about to pay $25 for Xtralogic's software when I saw the one from Jump Desktop for only $0.99. Having tested both, I find the Jump Desktop one better than the much more expensive one. Jump Desktop's price for Apple is $14.99. Better grab Jump Desktop for your Android before the price goes up. Jump Desktop's RDP client has the following useful and better features: It is both RDP and VNC. But I have not used VNC myself. It is a standard RDP client, but at the same time, if your host is on an internal network and you don't know its external IP address, you can configure Jump Desktop to go via Google for connectivity instead. I haven't tried it myself, but I think the host contacts "Google's servers" (according to the FAQ), your client contacts Google, and Google makes the connection. Neat if it works. It has two "cursors", making use on a small phone ...

I didn't want to describe my computer until I read this: http://tratt.net/laurie/tech_articles/articles/good_programmers_are_good_sysadmins_are_good_programmers. First, what I do.  I write code, some of it, everyday.  I administer networks and servers too. I develop Windows apps, about a hundred thousand lines of C# code so far.  I do ASP.NET apps, more than twenty operational but small web sites.  I do Silverlight too, a LOB one used by two thousand  users.  I have an unmanageable number of Powershell scripts, doing all sorts of funny things which most people would have written a console or Windows app to do, and this is possible because Powershell has full access to the complete .NET Framework class library.  I administer several PCs and about ten servers currently.  I install OS'es with my own two hands from a floppy/CD/DVD/thumbdrive, ie SYSPREP images strictly prohibited, in well over 100 machine instances from DOS 1.1 to Windows Server ...

Do you know of anyone who has an iPad but not another personal computer? Do you know of anyone who has an iPad but not a mobile phone? I think the answers are overwhelmingly no for both questions. Managing three devices is crazy, cloud services notwithstanding.  You spend more time managing the devices than using them.  It's not about enthusiasm.  It is just plain showing off. A tablet computer is a great, probably the greatest, computing device for the situations when you can't be sitting down.  When you are not sitting down, you cannot do serious work.  Hence, an iPad is just that, for not serious work.  It is an expensive toy, just like those expensive hand bags with names you can't pronounce. But what the heck, we need spenders like that to keep any economy functioning. Today's iOS or Android is essentially a single tasking system.  If you are reading a document, you can't be looking at another document to compare the two.  If you ...

Military Technology 2011-07-16 The Network Storm is here There you have it!  This is a reproduction mock-up of the attack software from the Electrical Engineering University of the People's Liberation Army: Distributed DOS Ctrl-D Select Attack Target IP Address of Attack Target FalungGong Network List: Falung DaFa Locations in North America: Alabama xx Region Falung Falung DaFa Network Minghui Network FalungGong Testimony Site (I) FalungGong Testimony Site (II) Attack     Cancel Watch the original video:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L_Wu1HlZbBk

A good teacher or an expert is someone who, after listening to you for five seconds, knows : what you know , what you don't know , what you want to know , and what you need to know in order to achieve what you want to know . Otherwise both of you will be spending unproductive hours going around each other repeatedly.  I am sure you have see this only too often, where two parties confuse each other on different frequencies. Hence, if you are offering advice, do take a step back and spend five seconds to figure out what the other person knows, does not know, and wants to know, so as to offer what he needs to know.

The gigantic difference between today and say, twenty, years ago, has got to be Google Search. Before there was airplane travel, there were restrictions to what we can do to impact people far away.  It was worse before there was long distance telephone.  But with the near death of distance from cheap calls and fast jets, there was a boom in work that got done. With computers came software.  The difference in speeds between today's toy computer and the first super computer is often forgotten, but it is a mind boggling three orders of magnitude , in favor of the toy computer.  The same improvements to automobiles would mean doing 50,000mph instead of 50mph today.  Imagine every granny having such a car. Software on speedy computers is a super enabler.  But the super enabler is idling in waste 99% of the time while we think of things to make it do.  The limitations now, instead of being caused by vast distances, are caused by the smallness of the...

I use the quality of Windows Messenger as a barometer of Microsoft. In 2000, it was MSN Messenger.  It came after Yahoo Messenger, but surpassed it immediately.  The features were really convenient.  Those pleasant audio notifications when your friends come online or send you a message became the standard noises in the office.   Remote Assistance worked, and I used it to help troubleshoot the PCs of many friends located far away.  There was even a real telco connection and you could dial to real phones .   File transfer worked if the firewall wasn't too strict.   PC to PC voice was excellent. In 2003, MSN Messenger was the largest network, eclipsing AIM and Yahoo Messenger, with 30 million customers I think. The ability to make any animated GIF into an animated emoticon was priceless.  Pressing F2 you could use it like a walkie-talkie .  File transfer worked all the time.  So did handwriting , which was absolutely critical when ...

Today I helped a friend who had trouble connecting her HP Photosmart B210 to the Apple Time Capsule. The error message on the HP printer was not useful, something about MAC filtering being turned on at the wireless router.  This is patently not true as MAC filtering was not enabled and any other PC could just connect to the Time Capsule by entering the correct password. After two wasted hours, it was down to the type of encryption used.  The (old) Time Capsule was on WEP.  By changing it to WPA, it worked.

Everyone tells me gambling isn't directly defined in the bible. Here's my take. Gambling is not playing a game of chance. If it is, children playing Snakes and Ladders would be engaging in an act of sin. (Perhaps it is and I am unaware of some Christian groups out there who prohibit Snakes and Ladders.) Gambling is not placing a bet. If it is, a farmer who buy some seeds hoping to reap a harvest later in the year would be making a huge gamble that the weather would turn out favorable. Gambling is not gaining something without honest labor. If it is, a Boeing 747 pilot lifting 400 tons across the ocean with the mere effort of his fingers would be doing something sinful. And a person inheriting a house from his parents would be a born gambler. However, all the generally acknowledged forms of gambling are invariably games of chance and require placing bets. We will talk about honest labor later. What then is gambling? From what I have read from different sources, ...

Sometimes geniuses do fumble. Visual Studio is without question an engineering masterpiece. But the LINQ to SQL connection issue is really a silly mistake. Why would anyone want to compile a connection string, with password and all, into code? Anyway, the geniuses did provide a good alternative.  The problem can be solved easily without having to modify anything generated by Visual Studio. The DBML Designer generates a few constructor overloads for the DataClasses1DataContext class (assuming default naming). One of them takes in a, what else, connection string! So, when you instantiate your data context, just use this constructor instead. This is what I do for my particular application: DataClasses1DataContext db = new   DataClasses1DataContext ( ConfigurationManager .ConnectionStrings[" xxx "].ConnectionString);

The hardware engineers did a fantastic job. The way the specifications of Bluetooth are developed, with all the different profiles to cater to every conceivable application, shows the professionalism and brilliance of the people behind Bluetooth. The same cannot be said of the software people. Virtually every notebook PC comes with Bluetooth these days. But it is effectively useless. The dreams and aspirations of the Bluetooth creators are not, and cannot be, realized. It is a utter complete waste. The culprits are Microsoft and the driver developers of the device makers. If some of the original goals of Bluetooh were realized, everyone would be able, among other things, : To exchange files between notebooks instead of the hassle of a thumbdrive. To connect to the Internet on the road through the mobile phone in the pocket, seamlessly. To control a PowerPoint show, for example, with a pointer device using Bluetooth, instead of having to plug in another dongle. I had gon...

It seems that most people, especially present day young ones, have problems understanding my Apollo 11 illustration .  I will try again with another example. When the most well-known bank in my city had a million customers, it had 50+ branches.  Almost every customer operated a savings account where each was given a savings book.  Every deposit or withdrawal transaction was printed as a one-line entry in the book with the latest balance in the second last column.  (The last column was a comments field.) Every teller in the branch had an IBM terminal.  Customers would fill up and sign a form to withdraw money, or just present cash to deposit.  The teller would open the savings book to the page where the last entry was and insert the book into the printer next to the terminal.  She would push the book all the way in.  When she hit the key to print, the central mainframe computer would send out the exact number of line-feeds so that the latest tr...

Probably something like 80% to 90% of the new found computing power goes into the graphical user interface. This is on personal computers as well as mobile phones. The sleek graphics painted in a window that we take for granted require billions and billions of computing cycles, repeating and repeating every time something on screen changes. The graphical UI is obviously a great enabler. It allows lay people to use the computer where previously only trained professionals could. However, do not let this be a distraction. The fact that a small fraction of an iPhone powered the complete operations of a bank or sent men to the moon and back cannot be erased. And it is repeatable, with great ease.

(I will justify shortly that) to most people, the set of things in the world is divided as follows (not to scale): Things I do not know Things that I know Figure 1 For the past thirty years or so, I have always assumed that the set of things is as follows (not to scale): Things (I know that) I do not know Things that I know Things that I do not know that I do not know Figure 2 I spend most of my waking hours tranfering things from the yellow zone to the pink zone.  It is only too easy to lapse into Figure 1 thinking if I lower my guard. Why do I think most people think like in Figure 1? I draw this conclusion from the ridicule poured on Donald Rumsfeld from almost 100% of the press. Some thought it was poetry ! The BBC called it bizzare .  I don't know whether to believe that the British Plain English Campaign doesn't understand what Mr Rumsfeld was saying.  It appears that people do not realize there is a Figure 2. To me what Mr Rumsfeld sa...

For almost five thousand years, we were certain that the sun rose in the east and set in the west. People went about planning a day's routine based on this knowledge that the sun moved in the sky around the earth. No one was hurt or killed even though our understanding was badly wrong. Newton put forth many laws of physics that govern almost everything we do. We build bridges, skyscrapers and aeroplanes based on those laws. No one has been known to be injured or killed because any of Newton's laws were faulty. But 300 years after Newton, Einstein's theory on relativity showed that Newton's laws were wrong! Newton was right only if speeds were slow.  Luckily the rocket scientists had time to make the adjustments before sending people to the moon. So, we can be right but still be wrong, and be the none worse for it. We can be wrong in totality, but if our application of knowledge is restricted to the scope of what we know, it is possible that we can still be s...

Finally, today I see someone with similar views. See Programming is a Super Power . You might have discovered that I too started with assembler on 8-bits.  Survivors from that bygone era respect power, or rather the lack thereof.  Some of us are stupid enough to always optimize every line of code in the head, mentally mapping the compiler output to IL to Intel opcode, notwithstanding that the entry-level CPU is running at a billion instructions per second in each of its four cores.  Most of the time we are proven right, as any application beyond the trivial will become sluggish when one relaxes and indulge in "easy" code, no matter how BIPS you may have. With today's hardware and the enormously rich class libraries, I am continuously thrilled by the amount of heavy lifting that a single line of innocuously looking code can do.  It must be like flying a jumbo plane - little movements on the stick maneuver 350 tons just like that! After a while, it becomes addi...

IE9 is out today and web sites have sprung up benchmarking it against Chrome, Firefox, et cetera. 100 years ago, the lunch time conversation probably centered around who's got the fastest car, and if yours was 38mph and mine was 42mph I get the looks of envy and admiration. About 50 years ago, people forgot that cars came with a maximum speed limit. Because whatever roads there were, and whatever you wanted to do, every car could go faster than what the other restrictions impose. Here we are at IE9 on an entry level consumer PC with quad-cores and a billion instructions per second per core, who are these people talking about browser benchmarks, and what are their motives?