Posts by Patrick Mulvany

Oracle asserts non-existent open source trademark

@heyrick

Well they stand to gain bad feeling, headaches, employee dissatisfaction etc. Yes I would say they have something to gain the real question is do they really want to gain all that; :p

Windows to Linux defections to outpace Unix shifts in 2011

@D.M

Oh the fun of incompetence based promotions.

Don't move people sideways, just promote them!

Adobe to Jobs: 'What the Flash do you know?'

If Adobe pull the plug

If Adobe were to pull the plug on Flash support on Mac that would mean they would be pulling the plug on the Mac version for Flash Professional... Therefore all those Flash Coders using Mac's would be forced to :-

A. Become Windows users

B. Find an alternate to Flash

What a dilema... I think the graphic designers revolt would be such that Adobe's bottom line might get hit hard.

Vendor touts notebook as desktop server replacement

Re:UPS...

They are quoting the standard Laptop battery (Lithium Ion I assume) as a UPS, yet I've seen that with most batteries of this kind that continuous charging actually slowly breaks the battery causing it to store a lower charge, therefore not lasting anything as long as it's supposed to. So after a few months of use the UPS becomes pretty useless...

Or is that only on the really crappy & cheap Dell ones?

This is actually more of a design issue. Traditionally Dell laptops power up via the battery hence you can not remove the battery when the machine is on mains power. Hence Dell batteries have in my experience tended to run slightly warm even when the machine is on mains.

Most other laptops settle for a augmented supply configuration where the battery is an either/or option and gets charged via the mains when it is available. To me this latter configuration makes most sense for a UPS as a UPS should be able to handle a brown out as well as a conventional blackout.

However you do get problems with batteries when you cycle frequently my current laptop needed a new battery after 9 months of being power cycled twice a day but then most people don't need to work on a train for a stupid number of hours a day.

Lost HMRC discs pop up on eBay

@Martin Gregorie

Assuming this is a relational database backup you may not need compression. Address may just be represented by Postcode+house number lookup to standard external table. Sort code implies bank and branch which can bee another lookup.

There are other things that make me think this might just be spanned across the discs using a simple backup utility (which is probably included on the first disc ;)