* Posts by James Geldart

23 publicly visible posts • joined 24 Oct 2007

Polar sea ice could set another record this year

James Geldart

sorry but...

Look, sea ice in the Antarctic is only a tiny fraction of the total, and isn't really significant as it's the land ice (which is there year round) which contributes most to the albedo. In the North, sea ice is much more significant as there isn't so much land ice.

There's a good, balanced article at http://www.skepticalscience.com/antarctica-gaining-ice.htm

Climate change is real, let's have the real discussion about what, if anything, we do about it.

Tesla X e-SUV to sport monster touchscreen on the dash

James Geldart

what happens when it hits 88mph....

E-gambling tax will spark web bet shop exodus - report

James Geldart

stop advertising?

Surely if the UK government banned advertising from gambling businesses which don't pay UK tax or comply with UK regulation, together with heavy fines for companies which carry that advertising (to stop Google, Facebook etc ads), offshore gabling companies would find it very difficult to compete against those who can communicate with their target audience? Granted if as a consumer you still want to go and seek out an offshore firm you'll still be able to, but in reality most people will go with brands they're familiar with and this is a competitive industry...

Amazon web services customers vent spleen

James Geldart
FAIL

hope the lessons will be learned

This whole thing is a major disappointment, especially for those of us who are big believers in and advocates of the benefits of Cloud software in the SME market. The people I most feel for are the software providers who have built a business model based on AWS and who will have been badly burned - I suspect a lot of their customers will have lost a lot of faith in the Cloud model.

Just hope that Amazon and their competitors learn from this and improve the resilience of their systems. Power outages will happen, hosting companies need to have tested DR solutions in place, as Amazon clearly haven't done here.

Death to re-keying (but not yet?)

James Geldart

Sage

This is not the first Sage ad, I've had comments rejected as well when I mentioned it......

Hosts with the mosts: Getting to grips with SLAs for the cloud

James Geldart

keep your customers informed....

Every system has downtime, and hosted services tend to be far more resilient than machines in a cupboard at the back of the office. But what's really vital is letting your customers know what's going on, as my host, 1&1, singularly failed to do during a recent email outage. No status panel, nothing anywhere on their website or management portal, nothing on Twitter, no explanation at all, just no SMTP and no webmail for about 3 hours.

All they'd needed to do was to post a status message saying, we are having problems with our email servers, we expect the problem to be fixed in X hours, and I could probably have lived with it a lot more easily than having no idea when my email was going to work again

Measuring loyalty 101: know what your customers bought

James Geldart
WTF?

Sage??

Second article today mentioning SageCRM, is El Reg now the Sage fanclub??

MPs' IT support costs £1.122m

James Geldart

Just under £33/user/month

Sounds fairly reasonable to me

Microsoft opens playpen for 'unstable' web standards

James Geldart

has to be a good thing

Look, whatever MS's motivations here, this has to be a good thing. If you put together all the developer hours wasted hacking sites to support the vaguaries of previous versions of IE, you'd probably be able to build a complete operating system from scratch so anything Microsoft are doing to address this has to be welcomed, even if it's long overdue.

Now if they would just either roll some of this stuff backwards into patches for IE6 and IE7 or just stop supporting those piles of cr*p so we don't have to worry about them any more, I would be really happy. Unfortunately we're stuck with IE6 until 2014 though......

Orange and T-Mobile splice customers

James Geldart

single network?

Is this the first step towards consolidation into a single national mobile infrastructure with the operators acting as bandwidth brokers in the same way utility companies do? That would seem to be the sensible way forward at any rate rather than the duplication of coverage we currently have...

Canonical: Ubuntu tablets due early 2011

James Geldart

compared to netbooks...

I'm sure the iPad will do streaming video much better than my £250 Acer. And it'd be nice sometimes to be able to sit on the sofa and browse the internet on a decent size touch screen rather than fiddling with a trackpad.

But personally, if I want a machine of that size, I want a fully-featured OS not the restricted, closed sh*te that runs on my iPhone, so I won't be getting an iPad but will be really interested to see what Ubuntu have to offer.

And, OpenOffice 3.1 is far easier to user than Office 2007, it's just that Microsoft hijacked the open file formats so anyone using it who doesn't know what they're doing gets files which other people can't read

Mountain View delivers Google Analytics opt-out

James Geldart

@Noscript

It isn't different, but the average user wouldn't have a clue what you're talking about: "not allowing google-analytics.com to run scripts". But they might manage to install a plugin from a webpage with a nice green button saying 'add to firefox' or whatever

take your point about not trusting a tracking co though...

Prysm pitches ultra-green laser telly tech

James Geldart

sounds great but...

who's going to want to go back to a big heavy square box after using nice thin lightweight flat screens?

Microsoft hit with lawsuit over Xbox memory card ban

James Geldart
Coat

What about Apple?

I hope they win this, it might set a precedent and stop Apple doing exactly the same thing. I was very annoyed when I discovered that £7 generic iPhone video cables are blocked by OS 3 and I need to fork out £35 to Apple for the same thing.

Mine's the one with the Android phone in the pocket......

MySQL's ex-boss demands Europe OK Oracle's Sun buy

James Geldart

Oracle needs MySQL

Let's face it, Oracle is a premium, enterprise level product with an associated price tag. By owning MySQL and integrating it into their product range, they potentially get a lot of future customers out of those who will start out on MySQL Community Edition and then look to upgrade as their business grows. Those are the same people who will currently be buying MySQL Enterprise. By putting an upgrade path in place, it gives Oracle a far better opportunity to get at the mid-market than they currently have, so I think they'd be mad to kill it

Android to invade in-home gadgets during 2009?

James Geldart
Thumb Up

Self serving prediction, but so what?

The Register ran the story, and now lots of people who've never heard of Touch Revolution have. And he's probably got a point, if they're using Android to do this for the reasons outlined, surely others will too. Interesting story, and I look forward to seeing what Touch Revolution have to offer.

Oracle reels in Sun Microsystems with $7.4bn buy

James Geldart

MySQL??

Hmm, for those of us who have built a business around MySQL, this is a little worrying. Is it in Oracle's interest to continue to have an open-source db like MySQL around? My feeling is that, if they've got any sense, they'll look at building a clear upgrade path from MySQL to Oracle and use it to broaden their user base. If they let MySQL die, all they'll succeed in doing is forcing those who can't (or won't) afford to pay for Oracle to use either PostgreSQL or MS-SQL, surely neither of which would be good for Oracle.

Interested in what other people think...

US Congress to vote on in-flight mobile ban

James Geldart
Stop

@ban babies

right, first, I take your point because before I became a parent I used to sit in airport lounges praying none of the little brats were sitting anywhere near me.

but, for all you bloody idiots, do you seriously expect that once someone has kids they should no longer be allowed to travel? How about people with family overseas, or people like us when we visited my wife's best friend in san francisco this spring (who is for ever making the effort to come and see us)? Believe me, taking a long-haul flight with a 1 year old and a 2 year old is not an enjoyable experience, especially when the airline insists on putting your pushchair in the hold (thanks BA) and you have to carry them, and all the many bags they require, all the way from the gate through immigration to baggage reclaim!

please, if you don't have kids, be tolerant of those who do. First, there's a pretty good chance it might be you one day. Second, even if you never have kids, the efforts of those of us who do will mean there are still doctors, nurses, engineers, IT geeks and (unfortunately) estate agents when you get old!

Think tank slams paedophile paranoia culture

James Geldart
Unhappy

Tabloids and New Labour

Very sad... and brought about by a combination of tabloid scaremongering and a government hell-bent on regulating every area of our lives

GCap reaches for DAB off switch

James Geldart
Thumb Up

DAB is great

I moved from London to near Bristol a year ago, and was worried about not being able to get my favourite radio stations, XFM (a GCap brand) and Virgin. But I can get them on DAB. Admitedly XFM's just launched in South Wales on FM and we can pick it up, but I really don't want to have to listen to them banging on about Wales beating England - I'd much rather have the London station! Also my wife can still get LBC, which she got addicted to ages ago.

So with that, and 6Music, and that you either have a signal or you don't (no crackling when you walk in front of the aerial etc), I think DAB's great...

Tracking down the Ron Paul spam botnet

James Geldart
Unhappy

do the decent thing?

Robbie, you have a point, but I actually don't think it would help. Firstly it would irritate the hell out of those (myself included) who legitimately run their own mail servers, although relaying via our ISPs probably isn't the end of the world. But I'd guess the additional load on ISPs' mail servers to do the relaying might not be insignificant,

The main reason, though, is that the spammers would quickly find a way around it. It wouldn't take much for a rogue ISP to sell mail server accounts to spammers - and if they're clever those accounts could be spread among cheap hosted virtual servers all over the world, making blocking them very difficult. And of course it would set up a market for stolen mail server logins - I'm sure it's not outside the bounds of possibility for a trojan to steal account details from Outlook Express, for example.

I think that as long as there's a market, there will be spam. And the market is generated by people who buy the products they sell, follow the stock tips etc. It's those idiots who need to be sat on - any ideas anyone??

EU TV laws are coming

James Geldart
Happy

mute button?

Re the mute button, surely if that is the case it'll only be a short time before the hardware manufacturers in the Far East are bringing out TVs and boxes advertising their ability to override 'enforced sound', or to automatically switch to another channel and then back once the 'enforced sound' signal has ended.

All these kind of things rely on hardware manufacturers playing ball, and if one won't the rest have to follow suit. Just look at multi-region DVD players.

Btw Big_Boomer, I think tak means yes in Polish (thanks in Danish)

GMail shakes IMAP out of coma

James Geldart
Thumb Up

It's the clients that's the problem

IMAP, despite a few idiosynchracies, beats POP3 hands down for reading email. The main problem is finding an email client that gives you all the functionality you need, most IMAP support seems at best buggy