Posts by Darren Bell

Hacker 'Guccifer' extradited to US

Sounds like Gupters law of creative anomalies. Sound nicely made up. Tin foil hat time lol.

He has something they want back.

Future Snowden hunt starts with audit of NSA spooks' privileges

Oh The Irony

This just made me laugh. All the years of treating us like criminals and now the tables have turned and it's treating its staff as potentials as well. Deliciously ironic.

Crap crypto crackdown coming as FBI boss testifies to US Congress

Money

Follow the money.

There is no money in catching terrorists, but there is a shit load in helping the content industries and other big businesses. This is the real reason for spying on Americans.

TV sales PLUMMET. But no one's prepared to say what we all know

Hope my current TV lasts

Just hoping my current KRP500A lasts a little while. No speakers, 3D or smart stuff, just the best TV money can buy. Plasma too. In a few years you will not be able to buy a plasma TV although they are better :(

Instagram back-pedals in face of user outrage

Google has exactly the same:

They can sell your content if they wish to:

"When you upload or otherwise submit content to our Services, you give Google (and those we work with) a worldwide licence to use, host, store, reproduce, modify, create derivative works (such as those resulting from translations, adaptations or other changes that we make so that your content works better with our Services), communicate, publish, publicly perform, publicly display and distribute such content. The rights that you grant in this licence are for the limited purpose of operating, promoting and improving our Services, and to develop new ones. This licence continues even if you stop using our Services (for example, for a business listing that you have added to Google Maps). Some Services may offer you ways to access and remove content that has been provided to that Service. Also, in some of our Services, there are terms or settings that narrow the scope of our use of the content submitted in those Services. Make sure that you have the necessary rights to grant us this licence for any content you submit to our Services."

Mark Zuckerberg doesn't know how to use HTML5

Ads, Ads, Ads !!!!

If you have an HTML5 app that serves ads, then they can be blocked. But a lot harder if it's built into the app.

Maybe this is where Facebook is going with this.

Lossless music goes High Street

Ubuntu One Music Store ....

is backed by 7Digital. I'll have to keep an eye on this one me thinks :)

Tesco heralds 2011 as YEAR OF ANDROID

But its the apps...

Apps is where it's at though. If Android has more phones out there, then developers will target that platform as they'll make more money. I reckon that Android phones will outnumber iOS phones 4 to 1. Apple will still make more money per phone, but the App devs will target Android first. I just makes sense.

When your TV, PVR, car all have Android, the choice will be a no-brainer. I've seen a PVR that runs Android already and it looks sweet.

Do ERP projects ever end?

Gone downhill

We have been running on AS/400, iSeries and now Sustem i for over 20 years. We current run Mapics/XA on it. Mostly we swap the tapes in/out every day. Once a year we do a DR test which sees a complete system delivered in Goods-In. The latest save is then put in the drive. The test system then boots off the tape and installs the entire machine. Departments then sign off to say that all is ok and the test is done. This is all managed by 1 person!!!!!

We've had to put the DR into place twice and we have got back up in 10 hours from the initial call. This kind of stuff is critcal.

We tried to replace this with Peoplesoft a little while ago. We ended up with around 36 servers running all the apps !!!! We've never performed a successful DR test as it's running Windows and is an absolute pain to restore (if at all). This set up is managed by 15 staff in out head office and we have had more downtime on Peoplesoft in 1 year than we had on the AS/400 over 20 years !!!!!

I've just read the comment above. Guess what we are installing now? Yep you guessed it.... SAP.

Oh dear. Let me keep Mapics/AS/400 please. It just works. Not sexy, but works.

Ten years of .NET - Did Microsoft deliver?

What would you choose

If you are writing an application that has a client and server portion and you are going to sell it commercially. What would you say as your sales pitch?

"Runs only on Windows 7, and Windows Server 2008 and SQLServer only" or

"Runs on Windows/Macs/Linux/Unix client and Windows/Macs/Linux/Unix servers and any Database you care to mention".

Which one do you think will work the most?

The latter is where we are and guess what language we use? And the whole lot is written and deployed with open source software. Bang for buck, you bet.

Welcome to the real world.

Do not Pigeon hole

Hey there, I'm a Java programmer now, but I was brought up on PDP-11 using RSTS/RSX 11 M Plus/Vax, System 38, AS/400 etc etc. I've done C/C++ and know about writing performant code.

Any one can write really bad code in any language. I've seen some dreadful COBOL, C/C++, JCL in my time.

I've even done VB. Hmm, maybe I should not have owned up to that. I do agree though that .NET allows you to write very bad code very easily.

O2 Broadband puts brakes on BitTorrent

Time to ...

convert bittorrent to use HTTP port 80 :) This would be good.

World's nastiest trojan fools AV software

I know this may get flamed.

I use Windows (as well as lLinux) a lot at work and don't mind it, but made a decesion to use Linux only at home at home. This was one of the reasons.

Seriously, use Evolution. It's just as good as Outlook when you get used it.

Open-source .NET splits for extra Microsoft protection

Will make no difference.

Is it just me or is this useless? This will be like saying that if you use Java the language and the compiler you are ok, but use the APIs and we'll get you later.

The most useful part is the APIs which are not covered by this pledge.

I hope this doesn't pull the wool over anyones eyes, but I'm sure it will.

Snow Leopard kisses ZFS bye-bye

Oracle

I wonder if Oracle will now release ZFS under a Linux friendly license? If not we'll just have to wait for Btrfs.

Developers take Mac, Linux-friendly Chrome for a spin

Ubuntu PPA all the way

I've been using it on and off since pre-alpha stage. It's missing many features, but every day I can see extra being added.

The reason why I'm keeping an eye on it is that its FAST. I'm not on about Javascript as too many people get hung up on that. I'm talking about DOM rendering. This makes or breaks a large Ajax based application.

At the moment it's the fastest at this.

Go try it people its getting good.

https://launchpad.net/~chromium-daily/+archive/ppa

Firefox users flip out over sneak MS add-on

Can someone check the User Agent string?

that Firefox sends after this update is installed? It would not surprise me if Firefox is now reporting IE !!!

Channel 4 fails to open archives to Mac, Linux fans

HTML 5?

Don't these people listen to standards. Even Ogg Vorbis and Theora are mandated in that standard. They don't have to write anything and it'll even be support natively in the browser with no plugins. Hmm, except if you're on IE.

Silverlight and open-source Java love has its day

No way

I use Eclipse for everyday development. Why would I want to use Silverlight? I'm now playing around with JavaFX and GWT. We are not sure which we are going to go with yet. But, we can be sure that whichever way we go, we'll be targeting nearly all browsers and systems out there.

In this day and age and in this economy, you just cannot limit your target audience. It's suicide.

Portuguese open sourcers decry MS-only gov eProcurement

What the hell is AC on about?

"F/OSS brings with it massive (*MASSIVE*) overheads in training and support, orders of magnitude higher than for any comparable MS product"

Can I have some of what you are smoking? 90% of our PCs run windows with no IE but Firefox instead. These would also be excluded. As non-IE browsers now make up over 30% I cannot see how this scan be justified. The support costs for Firefox are no different.

"Users know Office, Explorer, IE, etc. They do not know KDE, HuggyBear, BouncingPanda (or whatever childish names the Linux apps have). Not only would you have to train end users on new OSs/applications; you would need to re-train or hire in new tech staff. That's just crazy. And that's before we get into hardware and the terrible support Linux has for a lot of what is out there."

Hang on, why are you on about training? We are on about making a site multplatform/multibrowser here. Just pick up GWT or equiv (in a day) and write an app that runs across most browsers. We've just done this with a team of 2!!!! It's not hard.

"Spending all that tax revenue to please a niche sector is plain stupid. Leave Linux in the web server farm and the geek's bedroom where it belongs."

You should keep your personal preferences out of this. This has nothing to do with Linux Mac Windows ... is best on the Desktop. This is about multiplatform apps.

In reality, they should be shot for this. Producing good web apps that work for eveyone is not difficult in this day and age.

Ubuntu shops believe in Ubuntu

[e-mail]

We run Ubuntu Server (No Pulseaudio btw). On it we run Apache which fronts 3 JBoss servers running Confluence, Jira and Fisheye (5 million lines of code) from Atlassian. This has been running now without problems for 4 months. Database is Postgres running on the same server.

Confluence has around 700 users and Jira about 500 all over the world. Response time is good. We have no complaints at all. We can adminster it from anywhere via ssh. Life's good and as an admin, I sleep well at night.

This is what it's all about. We test Disaster Recovery each year and all is well.

at use it swear by it those that don't say it's not ready.

So I am personally, through experience, am satisfied that Ubuntu is ready.

It all comes down to the same thing. Those that use it swear by it :)

Swindon embraces 4th generation

If it's good enough for Bond.....

then it's good enough for 4G :)

Windows 7 'upgrade' doesn't mark XP spot

Jaunty......

Will be my 5th in-place upgrade. PC just as good as when i installed it.

I think i started on Hoary Hedgehog.

First Windows 7 beta puts fresh face on Vista

Features new?

Well, I currently have Taskbar previews, DLNA, Flac playback etc. Explain why i should use Windows again?

Epson Stylus Photo PX800FW all-in-one wireless printer

Don't buy this if you run Linux

What an absolute pain in the arse and it still does not work. I know i should have checked first .... doh. Next printer will be HP.

Man threatens lawsuit after negative eBay feedback

Nuts

He's mad. His id is now buzzing round the interweb. This suit is going to do more harm than any negative feedback could. Anyway, he's had a total of 9 negatives. Why isn't he suing them.

Anyway, this is the whole point of the feedback system. Doh.

Finnish blogger amputates Google from Google

Google minus Shoppinf Sites

Now that would be cool.

US customs: Yes, we can seize your laptop, iPod

Jiffy

Before you get to the airport, put you hard drive in a pre-franked Jiffy bag.

Microsoft launches student Java and LAMP challenge

Why java?

Blimy. Java gets a really bad rap on this thread. We have many desktop environments in which we have to write software for. These include Macs, Windows (many variants), Linux and wait for it... OS/400 (or i5/OS). We chose Java using Eclipse RCP. We do not have to recompile for each platform incl i5/OS, which is fantastic!!

What other language/platform would you all use?

And, i started off with COBOL, yep! Then Pascal, then C/C++ and on to Java. This is along with SQL programming. Try getting your head around Common Table Expressions!!

Java really does have its place.