Posts by Jon Nicholas

Dell offers XP option for £44k

You're too rich

Had a big laugh about that here. In the IT dept. we all hate VIsta but would not pay that much for XP. Clearly someone thinks it's worth it though.

We reckon that in the UK you just have too much money. And we are in Geneva, Switzerland.

The art of software murder

Bloatware is everywhere

I agree with every word of this article. The new Adobe "Reader" must be the worst piece of software of all time. Would you like to add comments to this text? Would you like to animate it, start your own blog? No, I just wanted to read a pdf document.

But I think the author is, like me, the wrong side of 40, and what he is seeing is the 21st century. And it doesn't just apply to software, look at the automobile industry.

A car needs one motor, which turns the wheels round. OK, maybe another one for the windscreen wipers. But a modern car has hundreds of motors to move the seats, to move the wing mirrors, to squirt water onto the headlights and raise the bootlid. It also has an entertainment centre, a navigation centre and a communications centre. It has Bluetooth, USB and you can dock your iPod.

But I just wanted to drive to the office.

Dell spills its Guts over Ubuntu gear

Ubuntu works

It really does work - even on laptops. I have become more and more fed up with Windoze but used it, as there was no alternative. Yeah, Debian is great for servers but not for a laptop and Suse is just as bad as Windoze.

And then came Ubuntu 7.10. The install is a breeze and after you've installed it everything works. You have wireless access, hibernate, email that works with Exchange (Evolution), media players that play anything and you don't get a pop-up reminding you that "There are unused icons on your desktop".

I can do everything I want with my laptop and Ubuntu. Watch films, organize my photos, talk to my family with Skype (video now works with Linux), except one thing (sigh).. there is no iTunes. So I have to have a Windows machine just to synchronize my iPod.

Lost HMRC discs pop up on eBay

25 million records on 2CDs - really?

According to the government the details are of 25 million families and includes name, address, social security number etc. This must be several hundred bytes per record, say 500.

That makes 12.5 Gig of data. If it is in Access or Excel there is the usual Microsoft overhead of at least double so we are talking 25G. How does that get onto 2 CDs? Maybe the government has done something very clever to compress it but I doubt it. Most of the entries are probably just blank...