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Comment Re:RIM is probably on the way out. (Score 1) 114

I don't know anything about this EMM thing, but my iPhone responds to calendar invites just fine.

They arrive from MS Exchange (outside company), and hit our google-apps mail server. My iPhone thinks that Google is running an exchange server, and badda-bing, badda-boom, mail syncs, contacts syncs, calendar syncs, invites pop up, the whole nine yards.

I don't know if there is anything special in the google offering here or not, I don't really care. I just care that it works and is easy to set up. :)

Comment Re:Duopoly? (Score 1) 117

I live north of Kingston, and a CLEC just buried conduit from the pole in my front yard to the back of my house.... to go with the fiber that they strung on that pole last summer. I should have fiber internet Real Soon Now.

Thank God not all the small telcos were bought by Bell. These guys bought a mom-n-pop ISP and expanded instead.

Comment Re:They call this "greenwashing". (Score 1) 172

> Not a good investment. Even worse if the money is borrowed to fund the installation.

I agree that borrowing money is probably a poor choice for this stuff, but that's true in general for depreciating assets in general IMO.

As for "bad investment" -- not so fast. We do not have to convert solar to electric for all applications; there is a real possibility to make solar energy cost-effective when you use it to heat your home.

I'm currently looking at a product by CanSolair -- http://www.cansolair.com/productspecs.php. Their marketing literature says that a 1,000 square foot home can have its temperature maintained with 15 minutes of sunlight per hour.

Back of the napkin time --

According to their spec sheet, it can do up to 10,000 BTU/hr.

I have a 1200 square foot home, two levels (no basement), and an ideal unshaded south-facing wall upon which to put it (it will spill into the bedrooms' hallway) and a realistic outset. So, let's say I can get, on average, 40,000 BTU/day out of it during the heating season, which is Oct 20 - Mar 15 or thereabouts. That's ... 145 days or so, for a total of 5.8 MBTU in the season.

A cord of hardwood is worth about 22 MBTU. I burn 3 to 3.5/yr, at $300/cord. This makes my annual heating cost around $1000.

So, let's see, where was I... This means I use about 72 MBTU of heat a year, at a cost of about $13.6 per BTU. So this CanSolair thing would save me $74/yr, getting me to the break-even point in 40 years, assuming the cost of wood does not rise (which it will).

Jesus Christ, the numbers were much better when they were discussing them on the news. Can anybody see a problem with my numbers? Maybe they were comparing a more expensive fuel source than local hardwood?

Comment Re:IE on UNIX (Score 1) 246

I, too, remember this. I ran IE5 on Solaris for quite a long time, as it was more standards-compliant than the available Netscape alternative at the time.

I took a troll through the binaries once. It looked a hell of a lot like IE5-win running on some commercial WINE-like platform. Even had references to CONFIG.SYS in it.

Comment Re:There are real problems to solve first, Mozilla (Score 1) 257

> I bet Moz is using the crippler compiler.

You lose.

Mozilla uses gcc for Linux and related platforms, Visual Studio for Windows, and Apple's gcc for Mac OS/X. The Solaris contrib builds are built with the Sun Studio compiler (or whatever it's called these days).

x86_64 is regularly benchmarked, and you can see perf improvements/works on various platforms at http://arewefastyet.com./

Additionally, if you are aware of specific x86_64 performance problems, you should bring them to the attention of the folks at Mozilla (via Bugzilla).

Also, "runs like shit" does not count as specific.

Comment Re:There are real problems to solve first, Mozilla (Score 1) 257

> No, I am not going to upgrade to your latest major version[1]. I see
> no proof that you guys fixed the problem. That said, mozilla has improved over the years, thanks.

How are you going to see proof if you don't try the latest version? You clearly don't read Bugzilla, or you'd know there was a fuckload of a lot of work done on memory consumption after 1.9.2*

*using internal version numbers because you hate marketing ones.

Comment Re:The Governor General UpperCut (Score 1) 189

> I don't know why we should keep the Queen's representative or any other artefact of that era.

Without the GG, *all* of the executive and legislative power is concentrated in one individual.

Whether they are used regularly or not, I think it is important for checks and balances to exist in our system.

Do you REALLY think it's a good idea to give a single person absolute power?

Comment Re:!HTML5 Powered (Score 1) 151

> it is impossible to write a "true" ssh client using HTML5

Not so fast. Assuming you mean HTML5 + JavaScript, I think you could, provided you were allowed to hop through an HTTP proxy that supports the CONNECT method.

For those of you about to suggest that a crypto stack written in JS would be slow -- I don't think it would be as slow as the CPU in my 15-year-old Cisco switches.

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