Posts by Peter Bradley

UK.gov preps bonfire of the vanity websites

Tell me this isn't so...

http://toolbar.netcraft.com/site_report?url=http://www.ukti.gov.uk

Cheers

Peter

http://www.peredur.net

Volcanic ash grounds dozens of UK flights

Do you have a reference for that?

>>1783: 20% of the Icelandic population killed. 20,000 killed in the UK

I did a quick Google and couldn't find any such figures in respect of the UK, at least.

If you are referring to the indirect consequences, due to crop failures and subsequent food supply problems, you are probably making an implicit, invalid comparison. Today, the price of food might rise as a result of such an eruption; but it almost certainly would not become significantly scarcer - in the UK, at least.

Cheers

Peredur

BT names 63 more exchanges for fibre upgrades

Re: Upper calss first

I can only comment on the Sheffield and Cardiff exchanges:

Sheffield:

Ranmoor: Solid middle class. Some traditional working class and student occupation.

Beauchief: Solid middle class

Cardiff:

Llanisien: Mainly solid middle class. One large ex-public housing estate

Llanedeyrn: Some very exclusive bits, but mainly a massive, and quite poor estate

Of course, I'm only guessing at the actually boundaries of the BT areas and assuming they coincide with what local people people refer to when using the area names.

Cheers

Peter

Microsoft urges Flash makers to pay fat dollar for exFAT format

@Lars

"un-normal un normal, how does who spell it"

Abnormal.

Peter

'More than ever before' now studying Sci/Tech in Blighty

Those I have known

I've met many physicists, engineers and even computer scientists who were as knowledgeable about the arts and literature as most arts graduates I have met. I have never met any arts graduates knowledgeable to that degree in the fields of science and engineering.

I wonder why this would be? Is it the company I keep?

Cheers

Peter

Microsoft promises no patent prosecution of open-source .NET

Insufficient

As far as I can tell, the promise only covers the use of C# and the CLI, it doesn't cover the whole of the .NET framework. So, for example, I imagine that things like ASP.NET, ADO.NET, LINQ, WCF, WWF and so on are not covered.

These are only things I've ever been worried about.

So this doesn't go far enough for me, assuming I'm correct about coverage.

Cheers

Peredur

Spanish boffins develop bat-like sonar-vision superpower

Check your facts, guys

This is not something new. Some blind people have been doing this for the last 220 years or so:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_echolocation

Cheers

Peter

Stallman: open-source .NET 'danger' for Debian

There is a reason

Yep, there is a reason why many places choose Java and/or .NET over C++.

I write mainly Web applications using ASP.NET as the front end and .NET Remoting using the Web server as the client and an application server as the server. The database server is pretty much always somewhere else again. These applications don't care whether the Web server is IIS or Apache compiled with mod_mono: nor do they care whether the app server is running Windows 2003 or Linux - just as long as there is a suitable VM installed. So far, I've had no problems with that - although we're now moving to WCF and I don't think mono's caught up to that yet.

The same applies to Java. As long as there's a suitable JVM, the application will run.

Now it is admittedly a long time since I did any C++, but I hate to t hink what I would have had to do to build similar applications in that language. Perhaps things have moved on, but I've not heard anyone talk about C++ remoting frameworks or serialisers and so on. And I'm not aware of C++ being capable of transfer to other platforms where it will just run without recompilation.

Supporting multiple versions of a product for different platforms is expensive.

And finally, there are some very fine .NET byte-code to Java byte-code translators out there. I don't see why these couldn't be used to port .NET programs to Java should MS ever come on strong over patents.

Just some random and perhaps not very well thought out musings: but I thought I ought to enter them into the arena, at least.

Cheers

Peredur ab Efrawg

Student leader demands lectures be 'put against the wall'

Just read a book

Somebody once defined a lecture as, "A means of transforming lecturer's notes into student's notes without passing through the mind of either". I agree.

Just read/watch/listen to the notes. Better still, read a recent book. Most Uni lecturers I come across are still using notes that were, arguably, marginally useful ten years ago. Where I work, they teach programming using VB(!) and never even teach the students to get out of static context in the main() method.

Cheers

Peter

German lad hit by 30,000 mph meteorite

Equivocation

"... a pea-sized piece of rock which had entered Earth's atmosphere at 30,000 mph"

Hmm. So no info on what speed it was actually doing when it hit him.

"It bounced off his hand before embedding itself in a foot-wide crater in the ground."

But it doesn't say that the space-pea made the crater. Just that it landed in it and got stuck.

So the entire article is summed up with, "Boy hit by pea-sized meteor gets cut hand". Nothing to see here, folks. Move along.

Cheers

Peter

Libra freezes out Welsh legalese

They all speak English, don't they?

Yes. And we all get Windows on the computers we buy, but does that mean we should be forced to use Windows? Nobody should be forced to go to the trouble of supporting Linux boxes, should they? Or be forced to use standard document/media formats? Windows only stuff is fine. Everyone can use it.

For the record I speak Welsh, English, French and Spanish, in that order. Although I use English most, although not all of the time in my job, I use Welsh almost exclusively outside of work, and I know plenty of people who use either predominantly or entirely Welsh both in and out of work: my wife, for one. For them, speaking and reading English is something they do very rarely. The fact that some people on this board find that incredible says more about them than they'd perhaps like.

Respecting human rights can be expensive. That's not an argument for not respecting them.

Welsh has been spoken in this part of the world for at least 1500 years and its usage is currently on the increase. If you think we're going to give that up just because of the linguistic prejudices of our nearest neighbours, you have another think coming. So you'd better get used to it or get over it. It isn't going to change.

Cheers

Peredur

MP wants Welsh text on ID cards

@ Nigel Callaghan

Dwi'n cytuno hefo pob dim oeddet ti'n ddeud. Mae ffasgiaeth amlwg y sylwadau yma wedi fy syfrdanu a fy siomi. Prysured y dydd pan fydd Llywadraeth Cymru'n medru penderfynu ar y materion hyn drosti hi ei hun.

Diolch am o leiaf un cyfraniad cadarnhaol.

Peter

Microsoft IE8 rolls out the astroturf

@Les

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Astroturfing

There. That wasn't too hard, was it?

Peter

MS plays catchup

The article says:

"It comes loaded with two modes for viewing sites. The default mode supports the latest web standards such as CSS 2.1, to help satisfy EU regulators."

Well, actually, CSS3 is upon us (although I'm not totally sure of its status, I have to admit) and most browsers include at least some features of the latest standard. Rounded corners, anyone? I guess IE will catch up some day.

Having said that, I checked IE8 RC1 on a few of my sites (all of which are xhtml 1.0 strict compliant) and they render just fine. I'm very relieved to see that. IE8 beta2 made a real mess of them - sometimes rendering the banner, sometimes not (alternate refreshes could pretty much toggle between the two states), and altering the banner's position seemingly randomly - although it was perhaps linked to whether or not the cursor passed over a link. So I was fearing the worst.

As for the astroturfing ... Pathetic!

Cheers

Peter

Microsoft expands languages with ESP

We use it

We moved from ASP.NET to ESP.NET when we discovered that managers expected us to develop for as yet unstated future requirements. I understand that this is not uncommon and therefore expect ESP.NET to become the language of choice for a large number of developers in the near future.

NetApp faces Sun lawsuit loss

WAFL

No. They can't have that. Sorry and all that, but my wife and I invented WAFL when my wife first took up the teaching of Welsh to adults. It stands for Welsh As a Foreign Language and is designed to be equivalent to the English TEFL. We also own TWADL (Teaching Welsh As a Dead Language).

Rhybudd joc rhag ofn bod aelodau CIG yn monitro'r Register.

Hwyl

P

Prison officers slam EDS data loss

VPN?

I've not heard a good reason yet why data is being stored on removable media (or on laptops). If people want to work on test data there's no reason why that data cannot be stored on a test version of the database and the database accessed remotely, via VPN I would think - and the data anonymised if appropriate.

The data would then have the same security as the database that holds the real data (and the VPN, of course).

This seems a lot better to me than carting the data about the place on 500Gb removable disks or other items easily left lying about or lost.

If someone could think of a reason why this might not be possible, I'd be glad to hear it. I've had a reasonably good think, and I can't come up with anything.

Cheers

Peter

Microsoft, Nikon release shutter on patents

Innovate openly

"Both parties will be able to innovate openly with each other’s technologies"

Does this suggest that they currently do so covertly? I can't think of any other reason for the qualifying adverb.

Peter

How can I run Windows apps on a Linux Acer Aspire One?

Several ways

The first way is to try using WINE. If this fails, I'd recommend downloading and installing the free VMWare server and then installing Windows as a guest application in VMWare.

Finally, if all else fails, you can dual boot.

Cheers

Peter

NXP sues to silence Oyster researchers

@Michael

From the article:

"NXP was sent a copy of the report for review."

Peter

King Arthur was English 'propaganda', French claim

English?

Ummm. English king? Fighting the Saxons?

Her general thesis is possibly correct, but I think she is confusing Britain and England. Is she American? The French don't usually confuse "les anglais" and "les brittaniques" in my experience.

Greetings from sunny Wales.

And a flame for all those second homes ...

Peter

Big TV flips ad blockers the bird

@ David Wiernicki

Sorry, I'm a bit late to this party, but why is this use of 'agnostic' anathema to you. It's from the Greek, and means, "Without [having the] knowledge". Seems perfectly apposite to me, and no travesty of Greek, or English either.

Cheers

Peter

Top Tory resigns on principle over 42 days bill

@ Ranty AC

"...how would you feel if the law hadn't passed and some "brainwashed" fundamentalist came along and blew up your office / town centre and killed innocent people and it emerged that hmm we could have gotten him if we had more time, we kept working and proved it but too late to prevent this..."

The same way as I felt when the Hungerford massacre happened. It was a really bad thing, but not an excuse to deprive every person in the country of some of their freedom.

Peter

Go for it!

Good on yer, my son. Not often I get to back a Tory, but for once one of them is doing the right thing.

Peter

Cornish lingo gets standard written form

@Liam

An infinitesimally small amount.

Good luck to the Cornish - and the speakers of other minority languages.

Peter