Posts by James Anderson

Tosh on top for laptop reliability

"Apple" and "Customer Satisfaction"

I am sure 98% of the clients of the Miss Whiplash Dungeon of Pain are "exteremly statisfied" by the services they receive there. It is hardly a recommendation for the rest of us though.

McCain: Keep Shuttle flying, don't trust Russia

RE: McCain is right on this IMHO

The more you look at the Ossetia/Georgia the more it looks like Kosova/Serbia.

A small cohesive and historicaly separate group of people dumped by an accident of history into a bigger state which totally ignored thier language and culture. The vast majority of the occupents of South Ossetia a political union with North Ossetia, and, are prepared to become a member of the Russian Federation and subject to Moscow in order to achieve this. The whole shooting match started because Georgia launched an invasion of South Ossetia which established de-facto independence from Georgia several years ago. So while they may be a bucnch of corrupt and thieving b*st*ds, and, thier motives were more opportunistic than altruistic the Russians are basicaly the good guys in this conflict.

As for extending the life of the space shuttle. Its already the most unreliable and expensive space vehicles in history and has been responsable for 14 deaths so far. If McCain wants to extend the service life of this expensive fire trap on his head be it.

Hackintosh maker bites back at Apple

Done and dusted

There were several Anti-Trust cases between IBM and various plug compatable manufacturers in the 60s.

IBM lost every single one of them. This ended in a supreme court "unbundling" ruling stipulating that IBM (and therefore any other hardware or software manufacturer) must sell the hardware and software as separate components to anyone who wants to buy them at the going market rate.

Some of the cases were so close to the Apple situation ( IBM refused to sell its operating system software to a plug compatable manufacturer ) that Apple will need to take this all the way back to the supreme court to get it overturned.

As for the "Apple being creative" comments its BSD unix with pretty windows, the only thing apple created was the bitmaps for the icons.

Paris because .. we'll always have Paris.

Council clamps down on 'man on the street'

@Dodgy Geezer

The "Fentipersons Arms" !!

Have you you respect for the lesser limbed among us you insensitive clods, or, the fellings of non-homo sapien creatures?

Should have been the "Fentibeings Appendiges".

Suicide squirrel knocks out Swiss TV

This has probably happened before.

Normal swiss german television is so boring that the vewers would probably not notice the screen had blanked out.

The plucky squirrel chose his moment of martyrdom exceptionaly well as it was one of the few occasions when there was anything worth watching.

Incidently does anyone know which organisation has claimed credit for our brave squiridea. The Red Acorn Faction, the Swiss Squirrel Liberation Organisation, the Squirrels Front For the Liberation of Zurich?

Sun attempts to whip BEA users out from under Oracle

Makes Sense for some companies.

It depends how much your developers really used the J2EE stack.

If you went heavily for EJBs and MDBs over several servers then I would stick with the proven Weblogic solution.

On the other hand if your developers (sensibly) ignored all the J2EE stuff and implemented mostly servlets and POJOs glassfish is a good choice.

Not sure about the price though, what do they mean by employee?

My current client could end up paying $800,000 to license a mostly open sourced product.

NASA's Ares V may crush Kennedy crawlerway

Units

Shurly the Reg unit of wieght should be the "Prescot" ( 95.2 kilos) in honor of "two jags" himself.

Handily this is about the same as the "Widdicome" which could be adopted after the expected Regime Change.

Royal Navy plans world's first running-jump jet

Altitude?

I would have though the altitude specidifcations for carrier landings were failrly specific and invarient.

i.e. About 1 flagpole above sea level.

JavaFX preview highlights critical weaknesses

Glad I am not a Sun shareholder.

Lets see thay have spent considerable resources to develop a product that thye cannot sell but only give away ( all in the best traditions of Sun's software "sales").

There is already a clear market leader in this area (Adobe) who offer a superb and well liked product for this niche.

And a company which spends Suns R&D budget on coffee for its staff has just released a fairly well finished competitor.

To say nothing of the folk memory of all those lame java "applets" that were going to revolutionise the internet. They are on to a serious loser unless the product was truly slick -- which it is not.

Perhaps Sun's management needs to go back to business school, hint businesses usually exchange "products" (something the customer actually wants) for "money" ( dollars and euros, remember back in 1999 when customers gave Sun money ).

Booze and breasts combined, finally

Yuck!

Liebfraulmilch at blood temprature!

Even a devout dipsomaniac like myself has limits -- pass the meths.

Paris -- cos she could do with a boost in that area

BSF programme boosts schools' IT spending

Re AC

" as only a few adventurous teachers will try to use it "

Perhaps you should take a step back and ask yourself why should any teacher be interested?

You advocate replacing a cheap and effective whiteboard with a complex unreliable and difficult to use electronic gizmo. On the face of it there are no benefits whatsoever for the average (or even above average) teacher. Perhaps there are some hidden benefits to the system but they would need effective marketing ( i.e. explaining in plain English what the possible benefits are).

Most larger corporations got beyond this primitive "computer shiny, computer good, buy lots" thinking years ago, it seems the public service and medium sized businesses have not got there yet.

You buy computers to do stuff. Before you hand over money you need to define what sort of stuff you want to do and evaluate whether the proposed system would be any good at it.

Mindless IT spend.

This looks like the NHS IT all over again.

The planning should go like this:-

Teachers would save n admin hours if we had x sysetm.

n hours is worth £y, system x will cost £z

if £z > £y then implment the system.

What actually happens is:

ICT makes us look modern and efficient.

Lets spend lots of money on IT so we can become modern and efficient.

In fact lets spend even more so we can call it a PPP and the bidders can buy us lunches.

This is so depressing, other than some admin and the actual teaching of Computer Programming I dont see how lots of crappy PCs will improve any childs education.

Still the availability of porn in the classroom is bound to keep at least half the kids quit.

Gag order lifted for students who hacked subway card

Not the end of the world!

Youve got to ask yourself whqts the competition.

Tickets -- ie bits of paper with unreadable print.

pretty easy to forge but nobody bothers?

Bits of cardboard with mag stripes?

really easy to forge -- and someone found a way to monetise the New York Ciry system.

Metal disks --

People in NYC used to make a nice living selling metal slugs.

The Mifare system is "good enough" for a public transport ticketing system - just because there is some encryption involved it attracts hackers and publicity which tends to ignore the economics of issuing a couple of million travel passes worth a few dollers each.

Having said that the MBTA acted like complete dickheads, and, the lawyers who advised them should be sued for malpractice and incompetance. The students demonstrated good faith by contacting the MBTA, furthermore they intended to hold back some vital details of the hack from thier defcon presentation to give the MBTA some breathing room. All the students research and the results were placed into the public record as evidence in the case -- so now the complete hack is available to any script kiddy.

Lords call for variable VAT to cut landfill

WHat is wrong with landfill?

I know the Dutch, Germans and Swiss have a problem with a lack of suitable sites but the UK is covered with big holes in the ground, to say nothing of the low lying waste ground around our coast.

Oh the greenhouse gas thing? Well if they produce Methane it can be captured and used profitably.

CO2 footprint? If you bury a ton of paper packaging youv'e just captured half ton of carbin for the next few hundred years.

This is just another example of the lack of any actual science behind the eco doctrines.

Most of the "green" policies fall into this "wear a hair shirt and save the planet" category.

Free the airwaves, cries Google

Do my voters have cable?

Is the question the politicos will ask.

And mostly the answer is yes -- only the poor and desparate watch broadcast TV -- middle class voters have cable or satelite.

So the airwaves will be free -- for google anyway.

UK.gov to spend hundreds of millions on snooping silo

Cant fit that onto a CD can they.

They will need to fit blueray onto all gov.uk computers.

How else would the users be able to access the data using the governments secure data transport, otherwise known as DHL.

Yelp 'pay to play' pitch makes shops scream for help

re: Only 3.5 stars and up can be Sponsors? BS

I think you will find that between offering 6000 bucks and Yelp accepting your rating will just happen increase to 3.6 or above.

The business model looks more like Capone 1.0 than Web 2.0.

Brown's website is Web2.0tastic

Networking!

Its a classic tactic if you think your next up for the P45 and security some security guard assisted desk emptying.

Scan the job adds to get an idea of the job market, contact your old buddies and start networking.

It looks like its already paying dividends for the jammy bastard -- he's picked up a good contact for a work experience placement fixing ambulances, plus, a lead on how he can console himself with some self-medication.

Hint to Mr. Broon, in the few months you have left in charge you could off-shore the whole gov.uk thingy to Bangalore, simple rebranding to "gov.uk.in" and a few hundred thousand redundencies would do the trick.

Philips Cineos 42PFL9603D Ambilight LCD TV

Whats the point!

DVDs dont do high def in fact most are distorted to fit into the olde worlde squarer format.

There is some broadcast high def content but having more pixels doesnt make "Around the World in 80 Gardens" or "Last Choir Standing" any more watchable. Although a bit of Tudor totty in HD might make it worth watching the collection of anachronisms the BBC calls historical drama.

UK.gov misses deadline on EU Phorm probe

"transparent meaningful user notice".

Reminds me of the scene in Guys and Dolls where the gangster insists on playing with his favourite dice. The are so old the spots are worn off but "Luckily I remember where they were, snakes eyes bad luck"

UK.gov pushes £50,000 fine for online copyright infringement

What exactly are they protecting?

The two watchable movies a year?

The realitty show winners retreads of motown classics?

All those best selling software packages produced in the UK like er well that local government accounting thingy?

All those realty tv shows about how much your house insn't worth, or, the DIY shows where you can watch paint dry live on TV?

One of the few money making "creative" industries left is computer games who generally have pretty good copyright protection in place, but, who are suffering because of the regressive UK tax system which expects smaller companies and talented freelancers to subsidise large corporations.

Hadoop: When grownups do open source

Java verbose?

I had a strange experience last year. Part of a project I was working on involved a fancy parser for strange and obsolete texts. As it was an add on to an existing php system the whole lot was written in php 5.0 and it all worked very nicely - another part of the organisation wanted to use this but insisted it must be written in Java -- so off I went and rattled the same piece of code out in picky verbose Java -- the surprise was that I ended up with about 2000 lines of code vs. the php implementation of 1800.

My conclusion is that in real life java is not more verbose just a bit more painful read. Also very revealing was just how well php 5 was suited to "hard" problems outside of its web page niche.

PS I thought "hadoop" was Geordy for "arrested and charged".

Killer Satnavs amok in 'Utah Polyhedron' phenomenon

Boring Alert!

A little bit of contextual analyisis reveles "In the same country" should probably have been "in the same county".

Is it Friday yet?

IBM solves world's 'paper or plastic' crisis

Denial of Service Attack?

IBM seems to be executing a denial of service attack on hte US patent system.

IU think the plan is to flood the patent office with dumb patents so that the real patent trolls cannot file any more "one click shopping" patents.

The poor corporate lawyers can than get back to filing motions at the golf club as god intended.

Is it Friday yet?

Nokia's Trolltech renews Windows mobile vows

You may as well say

Nokia does not make any PCs so it makes no sense for Nokia to support Qt on Linux.

IBM's Ubuntu deal favors the server

IBM should drop the Lotus brand.

The only point of having a brand is that the familiar name and logo should inspire trust and confidence and persuade the punters to fork out more money for a theorticaly equivalent non branded product.

For anyone victimised by the Notes user interface the name "Lotus" inspires horror and disgust and would persuade anyone to be anything else no matter what the cost.

For twenty odd years that the lotus developers have been telling people that the user interface is not horrible its just that you dont understand it, and, generally treating the end users with arrogant contempt.

In those twenty years some of those poor punters managed to work out how to "bcc" a mail, impress thier boss and get promoted --several times.

They would probably now be open to a low cost UBUNTU/OpenOffice solution as an alternative to the dreaded Vista upgrade except someone mentioned the "L" word. IBM may as well forget the whole thing.

IBM gets hip with 'cool' Ubuntu PC deal

Message to IBM

The "Lotus" brand name has negative value.

Too many people were exposed to the awful Notes UI for too long, and, for too long the Lotus marketing team denied there was a problem and kept up the "you just don't understand" mantra.

The "Lotus" brand is slightly more appealing than Chernobyl or Smallpox but a lot less than Lada or Arthur Andersen.

Time to cut your losses and dump the brand (along with all the arrogant f***wits who maintained they were right and all thier users were wrong).

Cuil feasts on Salmon of Nonsense

Who's thier venture capitalist?

I really want to meet them to discuss my revolutionary cold fusion powered flying car with unique web 2.666 user interface.

Feds accuse bank insider of massive data heist

700 bucks

Seems a bit steep for a list of people who cant aford to pay thier mortages.

Could you recoup the $700 by knocking people of your mailing list and saving postage?

Drizzle plans to wash away DBMS past

Need a small footprint fast database?

Look no further than SQLITE.

Full ANSI 92 SQL support, blinding fast, runs on any hardware/OS combination you are likely to blag or buy.

A truly excellent pice of software!

Home Office bankrolls plastic plod 'documentaries'

I'll sign your expenses - you sign mine.

Yet another example of the incestious relationship between the media and politics.

The basic equation goes like this you donote funds to the party and donate your time to the election campaign, then, we win the election and throw lots of taxpayers money in your direction.

Rich data: the dark side to Web 2.0 applications

Blame users for XSS?

If Joe User browses a blog that has been infected via cross site scripting how is it his fault?

He is probably a regular user of hte site and has not experienced any problems in the past, he has no opertunity to examine the source code of the site to ensure inputs are properly validated and there are no flakey dynamic SQL statements. He could possibly run a suite of test programs against the site to check for security vulnerabilities - but could face criminal charges for doing so.

The current crop of malware goes way beyond the "click here to see pictures of nude tennis star" in terms of sophistication and stealth.

And for all you smug apple/linux users most of these exploits will work on any standards compliant browser with javascript enabled.

So this one really is down to ISPs and web site deveoplers to get thier act together.

So far the only real protection you can get is AVGs nifty page scanner - the one that has ISPs and web site owners screaming because it scans links before you click them and doubles thier traffic.

Home Office minister gets tough, then gets stuck

Pathetic

If they really wanted to control illegals they would be tough on people who employ illegals.

But oops they are pale skinned respectable entrepenuers whose innovative labour cost reductions benefit the economy as a whole

and thay may even donate funds to the party.

So we will leave them alone then. Instead we will just re-cycle an old script from the Professionals and call it policy.

Perhaps the Sun could recycle thier old "For Gods Sake Go" headline?

Nokia E66 smartphone

Re: Eugene

I have mostly bought Nokias in the past. Last time I was considering upgrading to a smat phone I had a look at the various Nokia offerings, and, basicly gave up.

The profusion of slightly different E.. and N.. models means you need to scan the fine details of feature lists making sure it has what you need and trying to work out what each model has and whethere its worth hte extra -- OK so far this is just normal tech shopping.

The problem is that having done the research and choosen a model its probably not in stock so you have just wasted an hour of your time, or, if it is in stock and you get your hands on one the build quality is c**P and the UI is stoneage and none of the apps are usable.

I really htink they ought to spend the time on fewer better phones, and, spend a lot more time unclunking the user interface.

Another Nokia smartphone!

Nokia should concentrate thier design efforts on one or two smartphones that more than five people would buy.

Back of fag packet calculation:-

Total Number of Smartphones sold /

Nokias market share% /

100 /

Number of Nokia smartphones available

= 5

After all Apple seem to have done pretty well with just 4 models.

Alternatively why not open up a bespoke phone service. When you want a phone call up Nokia and have them send over a designer and an engineer who will build you a phone than fly back to Finland - makes more sense than the current scattergun strategy.

Microsoft to kill Windows with 'web-centric' Midori?

Virus breeding Environment

Sounds like microsoft have finally given up trying to run usefull applications and will provide an environment which only runs viruses trojans etc.

The design spec sounds exactly like a description of a classic VB Script virus.

Alcoholic Malaysian shrews cast doubt on UK booze panic

Brits dont know how to behave

It just becomes a bit more obvious after relatively small amounts of alchohol that the average Brit is an incosiderate, impolite and aggressive.

Germans and Japanese are invariably polite and well mannered right up to the point where thay fall over. Its very difficult to tell whether a Spaniard has been sipping mineral water or just downed a bottle of brandy there is very little difference in behaviour. The French are rude, self centered arrogent bastards drunk or sober. Only the Brits use booze as an excuse for going Neadrathal.

Lets here it for european unity.

It's official: The Home Office is listening

UK run by civil servants

If you vote for one of the major parties its a waste of time.

Any minister arriving in Whitehall is like a lamb on an all expenses paid day trip to the abatoir. These guys have 300 years experience in flattery, coercion and deceit, the only weapon available to an elected polititian is budget cuts which is a akin to penis reduction for most of our elected representatives.

If you doubt this ask yourself, does Gordon Brown actually really want 90 days detention or ID cards? If so why? He doesnt seem to be able to explain it himself, but, he put his political carrer on the line over the issue.

So if you care about the political future vote for the Monster Raving Looney party. Its probably the only vote that would make a difference.

Microsoft Mojave 'outs' secret Vista lovers

SP1 -- just another bug fix pack.

Well I have SP1 installed on '''er inchagre's" PC and did not notice a blind bit of difference.

Still got the horribly slow bootup, still got the mysterious disk thrasing on a theoreticly idle machine, still got the absurdly erratic quick, quick, slow user interface response.

SP1 installed suspiously quickly (nice to no something runs fast eh!).

From all this I conclude that SP1 is just a fatter than usual monthly bug fix which has been relabled a "service pack" for marketing reasons.

Swedish spy agency sics lawyers on wiretap critic

Wierd.

Apart from a penchent for assinating Prime Ministers Sweden is one of the most law abiding countries in the world.

It would be difficult to think of a country less threatned be the evils of global terrorism.

In the past when faced with a real threat e.g. "the muppet show" the government acted quickly and decisively by banning it from childrens TV.

I personally think we should admire the Swedish "intellegence" services for bravely volunteering to read every e-mail in a country where nothing actually happens. Its not as if there will be many jokes to read.

Someone should commision research into how many beetroot salad recipes a secret policeman can read before adding another notch to Swedens famous suicide statistics.

P.S. Everything I know about Sweden I learned form a Dane.

Lateral thought saves sizzling server

re: eh

"So the server was randomly crashing and it took you how long to consider it might just be overheating?"

It was in Scotland! Trust me overheating is not the first thing you would think of!

Sun may or may not be about to obliterate Oracle and Microsoft

Threading is hard but.

The easiest way round this is to avoid it altogether!

Use a framework CICS, J2EE or ActiveX etc. that handles most of the parrallelism issues for you.

Use some of the very wonderful queue management software such as JMS, MSMQ to use queues to manage parrllel workloads (scales very nicely across multiple machines!).

Use Beowulf, or your "grid" of choice to impelment a MAP/REDUCE solution.

If none of the above work then you need to multithread, you need to learn how to do it properly, if possible use C and POSIX threads rather than Java threads, as C is a better language for this bit twiddling stuff and the POSIX libraries have more facilities and have stable (10 years plus) implementations.

Microsoft slams 'sensationalist' Vista analysis

MS must know the number of active installs.

The wife's vista box is forever interupting all the obviously unimportant user stuff to phone home and dowload the latest fix, patch, bodge, DRM kludge etc from Redmond.

Microsoft must actually know how many unique versions of the OS contact the mothership for instructions on a regular basis.

The suppliers of widely deployed apps like Adobe and FireFox must also have a pretty good idea of how many Vista boxes are out there.

Of course this only applies to home users as no systems admin in thier right mind would let Microsoft Update loose on thier network.

Was it just me.

I quickly scanned the article and read it as "only 11 machines installed" rather than the 1 in 11.

Strange thing is 11 was a much more believable figure than 9.8%.

Business Objects/SAP bungle leaves users in lurch

It's absurdly difficult to use and completely unintuitive

SAP must strictly apply thier corporate design standards even to internal systems then.

Home Office to order fingerprinting of air passengers

re Proportionate . . . I don't think so.

The actual figure for road deaths last year was a tad under 3000.

Given that every single terrorist incident dominate the headlines for weeks I would say 1000 was an overestimate for deaths caused by terrorism in the last thirty years for the mainland UK.

While the casualties were higher in NI its difficult to distinguish between terrorist victims, deaths from conficts between various terrorist groups and "disiplinary" actions within terrorist groups.

Perhaps more significantly apart from two sadly incompatent dimwits at Glasgow airport there have been zero (0) avaition related victims of terrorism in the UK - ever. So what excatly are we being protected against?

As far as I can work out the most serious danger is having Niomi Campbell spit at you -- but you have to buy a fisrt class ticket for that.

Focus plus excitement: Michael Dell talks turnarounds

As your listening Mr Dell

Could I have a reasonbale spec Linux laptop for less money than a Vista machine with the same spec at PC world.

Brits terrified of online fraud, but want magic cars, says BT

Fear?

There seems to be this wierd bug in homo sapiens phsycoligical makeup.

When there is something to be afraid of they make reasoned, informed descisions and in dangerous environments they take descisions which are not "risk averse".

When there is next to nothing to be afraid of (and statisticly in Western Europe the average individual has nothing to be afraid of except dying of old age and catching sight of Noel Edmunds while flicking channels) they get paranoid, become fearful and absurdly risk averse.

The Southern England is probably the worse place on the planet for this now. The molloycoddling of children, the Kafaesqe intricacies of Health and Safety regulations, the constant "water is bad for you" health scares.

We belong to a species that originated in Africa and populated nearly every part of the planet on foot or by dugout canoe. We can live in the waterless, plantless sharaha dessert or the constant snows of the Arctic.

Tigers, Lions, and Grizzly bears are afraid of US and were so when our technoligy consited of sticks and some not very sharp stones.

Get a grip, stop reading the Daily Mail and get a life.

Greenpeace: UK gov trying to strangle wind power

"Since fossil-fuel generation can shut down relatively quickly"

Not so.

Large conventional power plants operation consists of:

Feeding coal into furnaces.

Boiling water using the heat produced.

Using the high pressure steam to power turbines.

(at a constant speed).

Using the turbines to turn generators.

Condensing the exhaust steam back to water.

By design they should adjust to demand almost instantly.

This means they must burn enough coal to keep the generators

spinning at the required speeds at all times. Additionally there must be enough high pressure steam available to ramp up the output quickly

when there is a sudden demand.

While you can "switch them off" it will take about twenty minutes to turn them on again.

This is the reason for the "underbidding" at times of low demand. The power stations have to generate a minimum amount of energy, and,

they have to get rid of it somewhere, or shut down the generators and be unprepared for a peak in demand.

Wind power is a useful and efficient source of "spare" energy but it will never be the complete answer.

Given that Greenpeace originated in the "no nukes" campaigns of the 70s it is difficult to see how the Old Hippies could ever bring themselves to support nuclear power no matter how sensible an option it might be.

The nuclear track record is looking quite good -- one over hyped scare story in the US and one monumental screw up at chernobyl - over a period of 60 years doesnt look too bad, certainly when compared with the loss of life and health problems resulting from coal fueled power stations.

Apple is Fisher-Price of sound quality, says Neil Young

Right to criticise apple!

Not because of iPods because they are caplble of lossless high quality sound, but, ofr the iTunes store which sells you tracks at twice the price of a CD with half the quality.

The CD format was constrained by what could be achieved for a reasonable cost by the available technoligy twenty years ago.

It is ridiculous that twenty years later with no technical constraints

Apple are overcharging for tracks which are less than CD quality.

Admitedly they do make some tracks available as lossless ACC but then you must overpay even more for only CD quality.