Posts by Dave Ashton

Steve Jobs' last words: 'OH WOW. OH WOW. OH WOW.'

Jeez

I'd be the last person on earth to enjoy apple products, but for fucks sake, you people are cunts.

IT shops rank servers on downtime

netware 3.12

I still remember visiting a council office somewhere in Chelsea, clutching a brand new windows 2000 server and asking to be pointed in the direction of the server room. We dont have a server room, or indeed a server. they confusingly replied. I found it a few hours later, the server that is, not the room. It had long since been buried under stationary boxes and books in a cupboard under a desk. The console fired up, and the uptime showed 6 years 11 months. I was sorely tempted to leave the site well alone. However, being council money, we had to replace.

UK obscenity law: Where to now?

Why Girls Aloud?

Surely there are much more deserving bands to dismember. I'd personally enjoy reading about the execution of say, The Kaiser Chiefs, for disservices to music. Girls Aloud I quite like.

Failed probation system 'masterclass in sloppy management'

eh

SOP for EDS surely. This is an outright success for them. Like they wont get more contracts from the goverment. Someones getting a bonus! 41 mill just to shut down! Genius.

O2 and Be customers suffer network congestion

Sigh

I miss Bulldog. Gutted they arent available at home. Yes they had the worst customer service known to man, but by god they didnt give a shit what you did. My usage logs from those days are astronomical.

Never thought I'd be moaning about the good old days when it came to internet speeds.

iPlayer chief pushes tiered charging for ISPs

jesus

christ these telcos/BBC are tedious arent they? Everyday, a new reason to carry on bittorrenting.

Mobile phones will 'cut off' Al Qaeda

Nice

Offload airline security to the telcos. I imagine literally nothing could ever go wrong with this. God bless the DHA.

Carphone Warehouse considers TalkTalk amputation

You gets

what you pays for. Or not in this case. I was horrified initially when the SO ordered it one day.

We pay f*ckall for TT, and its great. Decent speeds (although www is crappy in the evenings) but for P2P etc, I run it all day, they've never complained, I dont see obvious throttling, I've exceeded my 40GB allowance by about 100GB every month for 2 years and no major downtime. Service? Well I just dont call them. It comes back on after a few minutes if every now and then when the DSLAMS catch fire. I hope they change nothing.

The Jesus Phone NDA - No one cares but you

cockbite?

Are you the real news?

UK.gov says: Regulate the internet

History

Youre forgetting something. We have to rewrite history. Its full of HORRIBLE things. We should employ the unemployed to go through the old stuff, and cross out all the icky bits. I for one, do not want my children to read icky stuff. For them - its a steady diet of X-factor and High School Musical until they're 25 or so.

So government, please, clean up history for the children.

Carphone puts £60m tag on Best Buy Europe project

Best Buy = slightly glorified PC World?

at least thats what the BB's i've been in look like. Overpriced crap. In this econony, what could go wrong.

Then again, after watching the latest Jamie Oliver programme, I now feel that many people in this country are aliens from planet fat thick useless bastards. I predict a Best Buy WIN.

Stob latest: It was a cunning trick, says Open University

first course

I'm in the last 2 weeks of a forensic computing course. Its the first time its been run and on the most part its been excellent. Very hard, and challenging on levels I didnt even realise it would touch on. Its far too much for a 15 point course, and i spend 30 hours a week on it easily which is making me very tired. Toward the end the content tailed off and the final ECA (think:exam) is total bollocks in my opinion. The course content for the first 3/4 was fantastic.

It probably helps that it was written by Peter Sommer who seems to have an impressive reputation in the field and isnt OU staff.

From speaking to a friend who used work there, there is an endless "acdemics vs the business" environment. The course materials are often stunningly good, but at a cost. The academics refuse to budge on quality, the business wants to lower quality slightly to ensure they can keep running. I believe academics there have a sort of tenure, and rule the roost. The business is slightly more with the times and has to balance that against current economic factors.

Ray Winstone joins Mel Gibson at the Edge of Darkness

Sigh

why bother? That series was nigh on perfect with Bob Peck et al. And Joanne Whalley. Ummmm... Joanne Whalley.

Microsoft running on at least 220,000 servers

ah

from a 'number of servers discussion' to MS=WAR MONGERING BASTARDS in 19 comments. A record?

NZ judge saves girl from bloody silly name

Read 'Freakonomics'

It has a great chapter on this. It also mentions the parents who decided to call their kid 'Shithead'. Ironically, the books starts with the idea that crime in the US dropped because of Roe vs Wade, the case that made room for legalised abortion. The point being that the number of potential little hooligans were aborted before birth in the seventies and eighties, leading to less criminals in the 90's.

However, seems a few got through and decided to bestow their beloved with names like "Loser".

People are morons.

UK ISPs agree to menace their filesharing users

RIPA2000

IANAL but

s2(5)(a) and (b) of RIPA:

(a) any conduct that takes place in relation only to so much of the communication as consists in any traffic data comprised in or attached to a communication (whether by the sender or otherwise) for the purposes of any postal service or telecommunication system by means of which it is being or may be transmitted; or

(b) any such conduct, in connection with conduct falling within paragraph (a), as gives a person who is neither the sender nor the intended recipient only so much access to a communication as is necessary for the purpose of identifying traffic data so comprised or attached.

basically, cant look at the content. Only who was talking to whom, and when.

Cant prove what they actually downloaded.

Jeremy Clarkson tilts at windmills

Excuse

There isnt actually any excuse for all these reasons to speed or to get round the technicalities, your energy is misdirected. (Ironically JC probably came up with a much better way during last years season - half way, stop, pullover, read the paper for half an hour, then do 120mph past the remaining cameras). However, just try the bizarre excuses in court for a laugh ("i nipped off to do some offroading half way along the contraflow"). And of course, courts always let you off if you have an amusing story.

If you have to do 50 in a 70 for a few miles, so fucking what? Grow up. You'll get to your destination a few minutes later. Enjoy the few minutes of not having to brake every 3 seconds because the twat in front doing 85 wont get out of the way. Also, why not enjoy the few moments where the chances of killing a roadwork guy are drastically reduced. After all, they only put these averaging speed cameras in because there is a warehouse full of them somewhere and they're just gathering dust.

However, its quite entertaining, in a rather smug way, to watch the people who dont understand what 'averaging over a distance' actually means and who fly through at 80. On the M6 yesterday, doing 50, I must have been overtaken about 30 times by some very fast cars, in about a 3 mile stretch.

incidentally, I got home exactly 1 minute later than planned. Next time, I'm gonna mow down one of those guys who puts the cones out! That'll shave off a few seconds.

3G iPhone not ready for the enterprise?

arg

"I entered into a contract and spent vast amounts of my own free will and now something shinier has come along and now I want that one! Its not fair. I hate you all. Cant you make this all go away please daddy please?".

Is there anything worse than people whining about the contracts they entered into, blindly signing anything thrust under their noses, eyes transfixed on the shiny stuff?

£45 is fucking insane for a mobile contract IMHO. Reap what you sow.

IBM 'advises' staff to opt for a Microsoft Office-free world

Lotus Symphony

Loosely based on OpenOffice 1.0. And badly so. Its an awful product. Stick with just OpenOffice.

UK prisoners offered data cabling training

Easy option

Honestly? Easy option. Look, AC who worked in Retail, I'm fairly sure that society also divides people not only who those who think criminals should be either locked up forever or rehabilitated, but also those who have done time or not. Do you really want to have a prison record? I think your job prospects would actually decline a little. I think prisons should try to rehabilitate sure, i think everyone deserves a chance every now and then, but dont get pissed off at people cos they're in prison and youre not. Direct your energies into bettering your life outside. As you say, crimnals are criminals - youre not a criminal and you probably dont want that tag.

The buggery in the showers probably isnt all its cracked up to be.

Disgusting

All criminals should be locked up forever. What sort of a society thinks it can rehabilitate their prisoners? One crime and youre gone. It appalls me to think that should I have the misfortune to be locked up, that one day i might have the chance to feel that in some way I could make up for what I did.

When did Sun editors start commenting on the Reg?

Google kills Anonymous AdSense account

surely

if you join scientology, then fair play. If you were stupid enough not to check them out properly then you deserve everything you get. If you check them out before, and still join, well good luck. It's like those guys 'tombstoning' at the weekend. F*ck 'em, its basically Darwinism*. You get every thing you deserve. If you want to get pissed and jump of a cliff in to a couple of feet of water and you break your neck, deal with it.

*Which ironically, is probably not what the Co$ stands for.

(OoI, what is the Co$' stance on evolution?)

(also is the above apostrophe appropriate for pluralising a dollar sign that is replacing an S?)

Citrix boss wants data center 'dinosaurs' to evolve

dinosaur

"Go to the website, and get an update... a lot can change in a decade ..."

I have, I know my attitude to Citrix is old, but in the recent demos i've seen - including on the XenDesktop kit etc, each time we had app problems, it brought down the app for everyone - and that didnt seem to be the fault of the app. We demoed some kit and we just werent impressed. LIke many orgs, we have a variety of apps in terms of functionality/legacy etc but we're not unusual.

The suggestion from Vendors was to run more servers, with less sessions to minimise the impact of app crashes!! That poor in anyones book. If we sacked half the staff we'd only have half the problems as well!

For what it is, its expensive. I prefer to invest in good traditional client/server architectures.

On paper, XenDesktop looks stunning. I truly hope that one day it works for us.

is he having a laugh

Citrix? Jesus, I remember that off of the stone age. An expensive workaround for developers too lazy to write applications that work over a WAN or the net. 10 years ago I might have considered Citrix, now, no vendor gets anywhere my network if he so much as dreams about citrix. One recent vendor wanted us to buy their £400K "enterprise" quality application - "it works great in Citrix!". No deal.

Citrix is the dinosaur.

BT's 'illegal' 2007 Phorm trial profiled tens of thousands

I love

that 'they're going to ask'.

Dear Valued, and dare I say it, attractive customer.

We at BT care about you, hell we like you. We're going to make life easier and do something about those pesky advertisments you keep getting on web pages, dont you just hate them? We do. We have a shiny brand new system to try and make it better - its very complicated and sophisticated, dont worry yourselves over this, that's what we'll do for you! We would like you to choose from the following options.

1. Do nothing to your endless parade of inane adverts, you will possibly see more of them and they simply will not stop.

2. Enhance, simplify, beautify and focus your internet experience, making it more pleasurable, more sexy, and dare we say it, attractive.

Ignore this bit office use only. Very technical. Dont bother reading this, ofcom say we have to include this, meanies!!

fdah768r73hjkfda00dffdafdaf8da757fd8a6fd8afhhk68btusesasystemcalledphormandwill readeverypageyoueverbrowsefromnowonandpotentiallyrevealdamaginginformationtootherusersonyourcomputer ortheinternetandultimatelybenefitnooneexceptadvertisers79799333

(oh and nice hair by the way)