Posts by Joe

Welsh mum amazed by Marmite Messiah

Its NOT Jesus

It looks nothing at all like the photo I have of him.

Oracle 'faster, cheaper' with VMware

Not a clue

Whoever wrote this ?the author? guy from EMC? has no idea what he is talking about.

You cant equate SE with EE because EE comes with a raft of additions, plus allows extra (payable) options that any serious DP shop will need, plus SE doesn't run on anything more than about (from memory) 4 cores, so if you need more performance than that its a moot point anyway.

And you cannot equate VM failover with RAC because RAC doesn't need to failover, it keeps running when a node crashes. In the meantime your noddy VM instance might be rebooted quickly, but crucially then you need to recover the database, rolling forward through logs etc. How are you meant to share trade, run your mobile network, process orders while its doing that?? Oh, you can't. So how is VM highly available then?Oh, you measure when the instance in memory restarts, not when YOU CAN ACTUALLY ACCESS YOUR DATA ??

A simplistic and highly misleading article for anyone who want to run a high performance highly available system, who wants partitioning for ILM and performance, Spatial data for geographic analysis,detailed performance monitoring and tuning, data mining and bit mapped indexes for data warehouses, encrypted data and segregated data access to prevent civil servants leaving accessible data on memory sticks or old disk drives, etc etc ...etc. All these are EE features not SE. But I guess the EMC blogger only sees data as a bunch of bits on disk and doesn't worry too much what you might want to use the bits for?

How gov scapegoats systems for man-made errors

150 letters to sign...

Anonymous Coward said "Please ... if you get 150 letters to "sign" are you going to look into the providence of each of them?"

And as I said, in my initial response, if there were so many letters you couldn't check them, e.g. if you are getting 150 letters to sign saying that the student has too poor an attendance record to attend the prom, (a) you might as well cancel it as most of the students wont be attending, and (2) you have such a massive issue with poor attendance it's WAY beyond sending out form letters

Human Error not System

It may not be correct as its in the Daily mail report I read, but it said that the letter was SIGNED by the deputy head. If that's true, what is he doing signing stuff robotically like this, there surely must be many reasons why attendance has dipped and to blindly accept what a computer says without checking on each pupil is idiotic. Surely there aren't that many letters going out that he cant check each one ? ( or if there are the school has another massive problem that wont be fixed by a computer ).

Amazon unveils Kindle 2.0

Flashing

Does the screen still flash irritatingly every time you turn the page?

Linux weaktops poised for death by smartphone

"cheap, underpowered laptop.""

"it's now "all you really need is a cheap, underpowered laptop.""

yep, that's correct, that's all many people do need when on the road. Though you should have added 'small but not with teeny tiny screen and keyboard (e.g. unlike like a smartphone' .

'underpowered is in the eye of the beholder, but who needs a 3Ghz battery munching chip just to read email.

Oracle support service goes MIA (again)

Wrong site?

Perhaps he is trying the wrong site. as per the previous poster,

http://www.oracle.com/technology/software/index.html

has all the downloads you could want, and is where I have always got downloads from

How to stop worrying and enjoy paying for incoming calls

Whats Bill Ray going to think....

.... about his idiotic* article if the day termination fees are enabled, El reg readers spend the next couple of months calling him to say 'sorry, wrong number' ?

*Idiotic, because, as pointed out by several responders, his Skype analogy only holds up if we also get a termination allowance of around 45,000 minutes per month.

Anatomy of a malware scam

A reputable site ....

"A reputable site will present you with product information and then leave the downloading decision up to you, not force it upon you."

Tried downloading the free version of AVG recently?

Nice article though I have been getting these 'warnings' for years. Whilst this one is a 'cunning plan' I suspect its probably overkill for the sort of person that thinks you can visit a website and it can really immediately detect malware. They are doomed anyway

Lag log leaks - Home Office contractor loses entire prison population

"How the hell does someone tot up six or more convictions in one year?"

Arrest burglar. Burglars home has much loot in it. Burglar "asks" for 74 other offences to be taken into consideration.

UK fraudster gang go PIN sniffing

Re WTF & why

The problem, "WTF", is that you can modify the reader to capture the PIN. Once you have card details, you make a 'replica' mag stripe, then use that abroad , because that ATM wont use C&P. It reads the mag stripe and asks for the PIN, which the fraudster has captured off the wire between pin pad and internals of the device. The PIN is NOT encrypted between PIN pad and guts of the machine.

The problem, "why?", is not that its difficult to get HOLD of the machines, its that its easy to open them up and tamper with them to tap off the terminal keypad. Some even have holes in the PCB boards which makes it easy to insert wires to tap off the pin pad,and they even have hollows in,w here for example, a memory device can be left logging all card details for hours or even days, and then removed at night or when no one is looking! Had they been tamper proof, so once opened, they cant be reused without factory reset (or perhaps never), it wouldnt matter if shop assistants could actually get one. Anyone can get one, you can buy them on eBay.

Scottish gov OKs Europe's biggest onshore wind farm

Solar power

"More could be done to encourage people to generate their own with solar for example but the energy companies wouldn't like that idea."

Neither would anyone with a brain as the environmental damage from manufacturing solar cells far outweighs the input you get from them in the UK, (and certainly in Scotland FFS) and they will decay to a point of non-usefulness far before they have produced more energy than their production consumed.

Nokia E51 executive phone

Whats the font size like?

Those of us of a 'grumpy old person' age find it difficult to get a phone where you can read whats on the screen, on account of it being designed by a 22 year old whose eyes can see font size 2 fine.

Can your mum read the screen?

Leaked email reveals civil service laptop rules

Start with the fundamentals - unlike this letter

How about 'WTF is there any personal data on laptops in the first place?'.

There are *very* few reasons why there should be original source data (as opposed to obfuscated) on laptops.

If they need personal details as part of a study it could (and should and *must* ) be changed so as to contain the same *type* of data, but none of the original details. And then encrypt *that* data. Its just a matter of time before some buffoon puts the key on a yellow sticky, as already pointed out.

Encryption gives them an excuse to store data they shouldnt be keeping to start with.

New taskforce to discuss why more people aren't turning to digital

Well a bloody great big clue....

...mIght be that people will buy a DAB radio when signal strength is enough they can get more than a handful of stations - here in Reading I get two.