Posts by Grease Monkey

Government ads fail truthfulness exam

Perhaps

Perhaps it would have made sense if they'd consulted the universities before designing and implementing these diplomas it would have made more sense.

We have a government that for some reason wants everybody to have a university education* but seem unwilling to work with the universities and indeed schools to achieve this goal. A charitable man would suggest that this is because the (mostly university educated) people involved in these plans are simply too dim to take the long view and join up the whole process. A less charitable man may suggest that they are attempting to impose a system where everybody regardless of ability, desire or need will get a "university education" if they don't get a job upon leaving school.

My personal view of all this is that they have, once more, fucked up badly due to a lack of planning and consultation. The adverts were put out there to try to bolster the uptake of the diploma in order to justify the massive investment therein.

* The gods know why, university education is not suited to everyone and totally pointless for many. The latter group would include me.

Suzuki unveils fuel cell e-scooter

20mph Average

Sorry guys, much as I think this vehicle is a stupid idea, I have to take issue with your ridiculing the talk of a 20mph average speed. A 125cc scooter is a vehicle intended mostly for urban use. When was the last time you took an urban journey at an average of over 20mph. My commute is mostly extra-urban but I still don't get an average of above 30mph.

On the subject of stupidity however why take what is probably the most environmentally friendly form of IC powered transport and try to make it green? The average 125cc scooter achieves fuel consumption figures that would have most diesel car drivers green with envy. Lets deal with the heavy polluters first.

@The lot of you...

@Evil_Medic

"The Burgman is a 650cc heavy scooter, which in this case has been downgraded to 125cc performance?"

Not quite. The BurgerMan is available as a range from 125 to 650. Your statement is a bit like saying all Fraud Focusseseses are 2.5 litres because some of them are.

@Josco

The BurgerBun range are all four strokes and depressingly quiet at that, two stroke scooters have been on the way out for some time. The exhaust note is not unlike a prolonged, but subdued fart in the bath.

What?!

Stored at 10,000psi, wouldn't fancy that under my parts. Furthermore how resilient is this to fire? I'm just wondering what would happen if one of these was caught up in a garage fire, in a residential area. How long could the tank survive in a fire before it went pop?

Bloggers go ballistic over non-existent wireless tax

Er?

Businesses get taxed. What's new?

Historian slams 'absolutely crazy' UK time zone

The old ones are the best

I note that the argument has resurfaced that there are fewer road fatalities when we change the clocks in winter. This is a crock for two reasons; we don't change the clocks for winter, we change the clocks for summer; and in a few weeks time it will be just as dark in the morning as it was before we reverted to GMT.

We use BST to give us longer summer evenings. Justifications such as safety or the convenience of Scottish farmers in winter actually originate from the time when we dabbled in keeping BST all year round. At that time it was found that mid winter mornings were very dark and these arguments were used against retaining BST year round. They are not arguments in favour of changing the clocks at all they are actually arguments AGAINST changing the clocks.

BST is there for people who like long summer evenings. The further north you go the less important it gets because the days get longer the further north you are in summer.

History Is Bunk

It seems to be widely accepted that our switch between GMT and BST was there to aid Scottish farmers. That is completely untrue. As has already been pointed out farmers work to the sun, not the clock.

Remember GMT is "normal" time, that is to say the sun is at it's highest at noon. We actually change the clocks for BST when there's loads of daylight around, particularly in northern Scotland. God knows why it's called daylight saving.

The most puzzling thing about it is the fact that at any given location on any given day the length of the day is fixed. Nobody has ever managed to explain to me why changing the clocks by an hour (or two) so that sunrise and sunset come earlier on later on the clock actually achieves anything useful.

Man gets 3 years in clink for eBaying Adobe prods

A title is required, and must contain letters and/or digits.

"The attorney also proposed Adobe actually benefited for Fair's sales of outdated software because a user could then update the product and spend money that Adobe otherwise would not have received"

So the fact that fair made 1.4 million bucks from dishonest dealings is OK as far as his lawyer is concerned? Oh, hang on, of course it is. He's a lawyer, he makes much more than that by being dishonest every year.

Suzuki unwraps Mini-like plug-in hybrid

@h 6

"it will be a beautiful day when the city streets are free of automobile pollution."

Yet another selfish city dweller. So long as city streets aren't polluted you don't care about the rest of the planet? Lovely person you are.

The only way to really discourage people from producing pollution is to visit the results of the pollution upon the polluter. The supposed "zero emission" electric vehicle quite obviously is nothing of the sort, but city dwellers love the idea because it's zero emission as far a the driver is concerned an the rest of the planet can whistle.

The selfish ape indeed.

@Anton Ivanov

The only particularly powerful 660cc engines in Kei cars are turbocharged. Trust me I've owned a couple of Miras (a 2WD and a 4WD) and while the engine can deliver 85bhp (more with a new chip) it uses fuel like a bigger engine. Sure my Miras were capable of 0-60 in under 9 seconds, but that was because they were light.

That's the thing about internal combustion engines, it's not really the capacity that governs efficiency or power output, but the amount of air you can make it pump. You mix the air with fuel and burn and the more air you use the more fuel you need. So in other words if you make a small engine move as much air as a bigger engine and you will use as much fuel. Using a turbo will make a small engine produce good power and or torque at mid to high revs, but it will do nothing at high revs, but it won't work at all at low revs and because you need a low compression ratio to deal with the boost you end up with an engine that is even more feeble at low revs.

The end result of which is that in order to get reasonable performance at lower speed you need to use plenty of revs, which will be less fuel efficient than a larger engine with a similar peak power output.

Austin Rover tried to deal with this by using a high compression ratio. This worked to an extent, but limited the boost they could use. And also meant they needed some clever (for the time) electronics to limit mid range torque in order to protect the transmission.

Lancia and VAG have tried using a supercharger for low revs and a turbocharger. This sounds like a great idea. Indeed VAG claim their engine has the economy of a 1.4 with the power of a 2 litre, if this is the case why do they still make 2 litre engines? Because if they put it in a big car it would prove to use just as much fuel as the 2 litre engine. The other problem is that such an engine is much more complex and expensive to make than a conventional engine and of course more expensive to service.

The reason for the popularity of the 660cc engine in Japan is down to the Kei car regulations. Basically you are limitted in some cities to 660cc, along with power, speed and size restrictions unless you have your very own reserved parking space. So the engines have evolved to meet a niche requirement. If they were the solution that you seem to think they are, do you not think that Japanese manufacturers would be using them in the cars they sell over here?

Yup, they're great for powering a Copen or a TR-XX, but they just wouldn't do the job in something bigger.

Efficiency?

"A full battery charge will propel the car roughly 20km (12.5 miles), Suzuki said, after which a three-cylinder, 660cc petrol engine fires up to drive the electric motor through a generator."

Shirley it would be a lot more energy efficient to use the petrol engine to drive the wheels directly through a gearbox? Now there's a revolutionay way to save energy.

In all seriousness my neighbour gets fewer MPG from his Prius than I do from my similarly sized Lancer. So in what way are these hybrids saving the planet?

Apple preempts Win 7 with fresh iMacs, Macbooks

@FacePalm

"Because they are in business in order to make money."

On what evidence do you base this? I can see none.

FFS!

Are these cocks even vaguely aware that disposable income is in short supply the world over? The Mini is supposed to be there as an entry level machine to tempt people away from their PC. You can see it in their marketing where they point out it will work with the KVM of your current PC. So why the fuck is every subsequent version more expensive than the last?

Do the guys in marketing ever talk to the engineers? Do any of them talk to potential customers? Do they ever even look out of the window at the rest of the world? <insert windows joke here>

I know the fanbois like the kit to be expensive. I know that they don't want cheap Macs because then the great unwashed could afford them and the fanbois wouldn't feel special anymore. But why is it that Apple themselves seem to have the same attitude?

UK telly in coke blizzard shock

@Boris the Cockroach

Been watching Michael McIntyre have you?

He was described on popbitch as "the c**t's c**t". Probably the most accurate description of a standup ever.

Just Telly

What about Fleet Street?

Hell what about politics. Are but I suppose the commons don't need to be told about that.

There's a certain type of upper middle for whom coke is just part of life. It's just coincidence that careers that appeal to these pricks are the media and politics.

Kanye West death prank used to sling scareware

Joke!

" It seems almost inevitable that the imminent launch of Windows 7 will also be used to throw out scareware."

There are just so many jokes to be made from this that don't think I'll bother. Everybody can just make up their own.

Police make a mockery of data protection

Good Faith

"Or in other words, it does not matter whether data is relevant to the purposes for which an organisation has registered – so long as they believe it is."

In other other words yet another case where PC Plod can do whatever he likes as long as they're acting in "good faith". So tell me again, what's the point of our much vaunted legal system developed over hundreds of years if the police can overturn it at will?

On another issue I really don't believe that the police think that there is any significant keeping data on petty crimes for a century, I think their real objection revolves around the cost of managing differing retention periods for different sorts of offence.

West Antarctic ice loss overestimated by NASA sats

Political Agenda? What an American Government Agency?

We keep reading stories about NASA exagerrating global warming and the effects of global warming.

This is interesting because if you look back a few years the US government and it's agencies were pretty much in denial about global warming, then at some point they not only embraced the idea that global warming is happening and is caused by human activity, but they started to blatantly fudge the figures to support the idea. Why on earth would this be the case?

Could it be that the Merkins suddenly realised that the idea of human influenced global warming could be used as a big stick to beat the rest of the world? Perhaps they have a problem with those countries with fast developing economies? Or what about trying to reduce the world's reliance on oil to reduce the wealth and influence of the OPEC nations?

It puzzles me that there is a headlong rush to reduce our "carbon footprint" (how I hate that phrase) and invest fortunes in sustainable energy when so far there is nothing even approaching incontravertable evidence that it will make a blind bit of difference the climate. Odd isn't it that thirty years ago many "respected scientists" were telling us with absolute certainty we were on the brink of another ice age. Science changes it's predictions as often as I change my socks (not very often then) but scientists expect us to take every pronouncement as gospel.

What puzzles me even more is that while good science teaches us to question and test everything, but politicians can make concrete statements based on science they don't understand at all. Did you hear Mr Brown's scaremongering speech?

Court kicks YouTube rant missus into touch

Ha ha ha

Proof that attempting to be tried by the media doesn't always work in your favour.

Auto thief foiled by guardian satellite

Yawn

The only news here is that they used something OEM to do this. Such security services have been available as add ons for some time.

New police crime-mapping system crashes on first outing

@AC - 21:11

"You go by PEAK traffic estimates, not AVERAGE traffic estimates... simples."

So lets say this site gets 50 times as much traffic day one as it would any other day*. Would you be happy for your tax pennies to be spent over speccing the system by that amount? Of course you wouldn't. In fact you'd probably complain if there was a story about some new government website having the hardware over specced to cope with day one demand.

* Believe me, having worked on stuff like this that's a conservative estimate, people read about it, think "that sounds interesting", click the link and then never visit it again. Worse still it's amazing how much traffic to these sites is internal. Every member of staff gets the press release by email and hits the link to see what it's all about. "Ooooh, let's look up my postcode." Pissflaps!

It's publicity that's the problem

They always make the mistake of launching these sites with a fanfare of publicity which means the site will get more hits in it's first day than it will in a normal year. So the techies have probably sized everthing quite sensibly for normal traffic, but then the press office make sure the site will get hammered on day one.

Anyway don't LA's publish this stuff anyway? So shouldn't this just be a simple aggregator? www.comparethecrimefigures.com? Simples.

Software update spikes certain Freesat set-top boxes

Welcome to the world of IT

I kind of like this because a whole load of ordinary Josephines have been introduced to a world where automated software updates break stuff and the supplier couldn't give a shit. Maybe those people will believe IT the next time they tell then it was an automated update MS or CA that broke their PC or application.

On the subject of Freesat or Freeview. What, really, is the point? I seldom see anything in the schedules I'd want to watch. And as for HD, if it's shit on an ordinary TV it's still going to be tedious annoying shit on HD. HD TV is the perfect example of a varnished and polished turd.

MS claims early success for freebie security scanner

@Steve Bush

I've found that Avira kicks Comodo, but there you go. Each to his own and all that.

Wikileaks publishes BNP 'member list' (again)

@Dave 160

If you really believe what you typed you will now post your full name address and telephone number on here. Of course members of other parties would mind their personal details being published on the web, as would you.

@amanfromMars 1

I thiought the last time the list was published it was concluded that it was a mailing list rather than a membership list.

So it's reasonable to assume that there are members on there (in both senses of the word) and ex-members, and that is fair enough. Unfortunately however it may well include the details of anybody who has ever corresponded with them in any way shape or form. Worse still, in common with most mailing lists, a lot of the addresses will probably be out of date so I can see this data being misintepreted by the sort of morons who would act on this sort of data.

On first hearing this story it sounds kind of funny and a Good Thing, but the more you think about how this data may be used it's probably a bad thing.

UK fatties demand 'hate crime' status for lardo-baiting

@The 112 Story

That's nothing.

Me: My wife and I have just been assaulted.

999: Is the assailant still there.

Me: No I fought back and he ran away.

999: You probably want to keep quiet about that, you might be prosecuted for assault.

So being beaten up is only a crime if you defend yourself.

Google edges closer to Mac version of Chrome browser

Impressed

Installed that version and it's a surprising improvement on the current "official" unstable release.

Farmer fined for ignoring cow's 'psychological needs'

@Aristotles slow and dimwitted horse

"I'm sure the farmer himself would not like to be subjected to the same conditions."

Except that of course the farmer has no electricity in his house, so those are pretty much the conditions he does endure.

And if you think that he does that by choice, you'd be right in so far as he chose not to pay the electricity suppliers thousands of pounds to run cables to his house.

The Twitter storm that saved freedom of speech

@Destroy all Monsters

"I didn't even know such injunctions were possible in the first place."

That's probably because the press aren't allowed to refer to specific injunctions, so it's very difficult for them to even mention their general existence. They used to be extremely rare, but it's only in the last decade or so that they have become common practice. I suspect this is because every time they work Carter-Fuck and their ilk become keener to use them. If they start to fail then they will become less popular. The best way for the press to defeat them is to publish anyway.

What would happen if one of these injunctions was served late one evening* and instead of pulling the story the editor broadcast it to every editor in the country? If the following morning every paper, every TV station, every radio station and every website ran the story what exactly would the courts do? Jail every editor in the country? And if everybody working on every news network stood up and said "I knew about the injunction and I was involved in publishing the story and I am, indeed, Spartacus" what then? Jail them too? I think not. And if the courts knew this was likely to happen every time would judges be so eager to grant these injunctions? I think not.

Unfortunately it's unlikely to happen that way. Journalists used to be hard nosed bastards who would stand up for what they believed. These days the vast majority are time servers who care more about their pension than the truth. Find me an old fashioned, principled journo working on a major UK newspaper. Go on, try.

*It makes it hard to fight them if you can't actually get hold of the necessary people. Often the main purpose of these injunctions is to buy time.

Business as Usual

Carter-*uck are famous for these super injunctions. The worst bit about them is that they even manage to ban the discussion of the injunction itself. So it's impossible for the press to even mention that an injunction has been brought without being held in contempt.

You would think these injunctions require a formal hearing in front of a panel of judges. They don't.

That our legal system allows this to happen is truly terrifying.

Liquid electrocar batteries could be replaced at pumps

Iceland?

Yes Iceland gets a lot of electricity and heat from geothermal energy, but it's a long way from being free. Even in Iceleand where geothermal energy is never far from the surface the plant still costs a lot to manufacture, install and maintain. Then there's the distribution network (for electricity or heat).

Infrastructure costs. It costs a lot.

How much of you electricity bill do you suppose comes from cost of the coal, gas or uranium? Most of it comes from the cost of the plant and infrastructure and the wage bill of the people that make it work.

In exactly the same way hydro, wind and tidal power won't be free by the time they reach your home.

The trouble with building a hydro electric dam is that you need geography on your side, so it will probably be a long way from the major cities where most of the electricity is used. Windfarms? Well they need to be somewhere windy, so well away from things like cities that interfere with the flow of wind. And people don't seem to like them near their homes. Nuclear plants? Well nobody wants one of those on their doorstep do they. So they end up being built is as remote a location as possible, preferably in what is already a safe seat for the opposition (what me? cynical?). All these things mean more expensive infrastructure to deliver the electricity to your home.

So don't get carried away with that green ideal that "sustainable" power is somehow cheaper. It ain't.

Here's an unrelated thought: What would happen if people's electricity bills were calculated based on the cost of getting electricity to their homes?

More like it...

This is more like it. Somebody is starting to think about this properly.

The problem with fast recharge batteries is current. There is no way to avoid that, if you need to stick in 100KWh of charge in in ten minutes than you're going to need either very high voltages to get the current down or very high current. The voltage is dictated by the battery, since you don't want to be carrying a big heavy transformer around with you, so you're stuck with high current.

There are two major issues with massive current outputs the most commonly discussed one is the weight of the cables. The second and more important is the infrastructure needed to deliver that power to the cars. A charging station might need to be capable of giving a couple of dozen cars a fast charge at the same time, imagine the feed you would need to the station to achieve that. Of course our current infrastructure is simply not able to deal with such massive bursts of demand. One petrol station owner was telling me that he does the vast majority of his business between about 5pm & 7pm. If that was all electric charging it would make the surge in demand at the end of Coronation Street look tiny.

We're already being told our electric supply will not meet demand in a few years. How much will loads of fast charge EV's hasten that? However filling stations being able to recharge pump juice over night when demand is low would be an ideal solution. It would give all those nuclear power stations something to do in the wee small hours.

Twitter tells twitterers 'don't go changing'

@Matt 89

One of the things Ford Prefect had always found hardest to understand about humans was their habit of continually stating and repeating the very very obvious, as in It's a nice day, or You're very tall, or Oh dear you seem to have fallen down a thirty-foot well, are you all right?"

"If human beings don't keep exercising their lips, he thought, their mouths probably seize up. After a few months' consideration and observation he abandoned this theory in favor of a new one. If they don't keep exercising their lips, he thought, their brains start working."

Douglas Adams should have put this theory to work and invented twatter himself. This short passage puts tawtter in a nutshell.

The problem with twats is not so much that they want to tell the world about every pointless thing that they do, nor is it that they think they are so important that people want to read about it. It's that they all think that twatter is incredibly significant in the whole scheme of human existence when it is, in fact, a minor distraction at best. What twats need is keeping away from twatter in order that they may realise that there are more important things in the world.

The same applies to social networking as a whole and those idiots who can't seem to stop texting.

OK

Anything that can prevent twats from tweeting is OK by me.

Opera takes Unite for spin with browser beta release

@Tristan Young

Here we go. Try understanding how it actually works before you comment, please.

I've just had a look at the available plugins and none of them do what Unite does. I can't see a use for it myself, but it is a new idea.

Cue the haters?

It's not just the haters, but the haters who will deliberately "misunderstand" what Unite actually does in order to then pick it apart.

Child porn threat to airport's 'virtual strip search' scanners

Eh?

"A spokesman for Manchester Airport said he wasn't yet aware of ARCH's letter of complaint, but argued the scans did not amount to an "image" in legal terms."

So live TV is not an image until somebody records it? Cock.

Aerial laser gunboat 'burns hole in fender' of moving car

Smoke

How well would this thing work through a dense cloud of smoke? Quite a low tech defence but I suspect it would work.

Ex-GCHQ chief compares Iraq whistleblower to Soviet spy

What a twat!

To get a job like that you'd have to be well educated. So how did this idiot get the job?

It's behaviour you'd expect from some thick criminal when confronted with a grass. I'm sure that history will find the Iraq war to have been illegal (probably once Bush and Bliar have joined the choir invisibule) but twats like this will still be unrepentant. You'll note the usual implication that what mattered was that they were doing as they were told, not that what they were told to do was illegal. That orders matter more than laws or morals to these automata. What they need to remember is that they are not under fire on the front lines, even though they like to pretend otherwise.

I think Gun was very sensible, had she gone to her superiors no doubt she would have found herself locked up on some invented charges until after the issue had blown over. Followed, of course, by the charges being dropped and it all being a misunderstanding or some other civil service bollocks.

Great British beer moves county

A Title Is Required

@Citizen Kaned

Yes it is traditionally drunk from a half pot and there's a sound reason for this; To keep the head on it. There was a tradition in the pub where I worked that if you could kept the same half pot for a gallon you could take it home. The landlord didn't like it, but what the hell.

@TeeCee

I've never heard it's true fans refer to it by any of those names. It has always been Dog. At the start of the night the order would be Bottle a'Dog, by last orders BollaDog.

@AC - Yorkshire Beer

I know a pub where you can often get a pint of Imp and also Tetkey's dark mild. One of those proper city drinkers pubs where you don't dare look at some of the clientelle for fear of your life. Funny that those places always seem to have the best beer. Probably because the landlord is equally frightened of the customers.

Anyway Dog is one of those beers like fizzy keg and those smooth flow types of beer that comes from a requirement to produce a consistent product cheaply, rather than the best quality product at any cost. Beer by it's very nature can be a little inconsistent and the attempt to make a consistently good beer is as old as brewing itself. Just look at Bass' procedures to "Burtonise" water at all it's breweries. However big business long ago settled for producing a consistently average product for the lowest price possible.

Moon orbiter detects pole-plunge hotspots in dark bottom

And

"Exploitable reserves of water would be hugely useful for exploration of the Moon and perhaps for space operations in general. Water could be used to produce hydrogen for rocket fuel, and this could be important even for operations in Earth orbit - it would potentially be easier and cheaper for spacecraft and operations there to use fuel from the Moon, rather than supplies boosted up through Earth's more powerful gravity and troublesome atmosphere."

So they've wasted huge amounts of money finding out whether they'll be able to waste even more money. Lovely.

Sky News goes free

Twat

He really is a twat. He expects us to pay for his crappy TV stations and then hits us with more adverts than anybody else. No doubt this new attempt will be just as advertising riddled and then he will expect people to pay too. If his massive revenues actually produced any decent telly then I don't suppose people would object.

He constantly whinges that that the BBC are funded by licence fees, but Sky is no different really. Viewers pay a subscription, but where the BBC are not allowed to advertise about 50% of Sky's airtime seems to be advertising. There is a simple solution for the Dirty Digger, he can have his share of the licence fee *if* he stops advertising *and* stops charging subscription fees *and* opens his business to the same level of scrutiny and control as the BBC. He claims he wants a level playing field and that's what he should be offered. Bet he wouldn't want to play then. What he really means is that he wants a chunk of the licence fee and to retain subscription fees and advertising revenues and to retain complete control over the business.

The trouble is the tories continue to pander to him in return for popaganda, sorry favourable publicity. I just hope they have the sense to tell him to piss off should they win the next election.

Large Hadron boffin hit with terrorism charges

@HFoster

The real reason tourist organistions try to recruit well educated people in good jobs is for funding. A recruited doctor may keep on giving, they don't really want them to blow themselves up since that's a funding stream cut off.

Purely by coincidence a story has surfaced today about Al Qaeda being almost bankrupt. It's kind of funny that the powers that be seemed to be surprised by this, for most tourist organisations living hand to mouth is the norm.

@Cirby

Except that the bloke has been off sick all year so he's very clever if he can make a dirty bomb without going near any radioactive material.

Why the obsession with the fact that he was associated with CERN? If a man arrested on terrorist charges is a bin man or a check out clerk is any particular significance attached to his job?

Pirate Bay co-founders deny ownership of site

Spoiled kids

These guys just come across like a bunch of spoiled kids in trouble.

"Is this yours?"

"No miss I sold it three years ago."

"Oh really, who to?"

"Dunno, miss."

"Did you get a receipt?"

"No miss."

I don't recall them mentioning this in their defence before, even though if it were true it would be pivotal evidence. I suppose the dog ate their homework as well. How do they expect a court or anybody else to take them seriously when they spout this shit?

All along I've got the impression from these fucktards that they don't take any of this stuff seriously and think that somehow daddy will come along and make it all go away. At first Daddy was the Swedish legal system, but that daddy seems to have deserted them and run off with his secretary. Not sure who they think daddy is now, but if they do hard time I'm sure they'll end up calling somebody daddy.

Les Matthew thinks you get sex is Swedish prisons? You probably do, but maybe not like you're thinking. And these guys don't strike me as the sort who will end up being the giver.

West Midlands cops to roll out Mitsubishi EVs

It's a another excuse...

...for not responding to 999 calls in a timely fashion. "The batteries on the patrol car needed charging."

Large Hadron boffin arrested on terrorism suspicion

If it's the CIA...

...then it's just that he once went on his holidays to north Africa. If only they could tell the difference between terrorist links and tourist links.

It's the one with the Merkin-English dicitionary in the pocket.

'Amateur' IBM brings down Air New Zealand

Some Background?

I'd be interested to see some of the background to this.

What response do the airline actually pay for? It's amazing how many companies pay for slow response times and then shout when they don't get an instant response. If you pay 8x5x4 and the server goes down at 5pm on friday then tough, you're getting an engineer on monday.

Do they pay for the highest level of resilience? Again a lot of companies are quoted for loads of resilience (co-location, multiple generators and UPS, multiple network routes, etc) and decide it's unnecessary, then blame the supplier when a failure occurs that would have been prevented by the proposed resilient solution.

After a slating like that I hope IBM come back with a detailed response.

Ralph Lauren says sorry for incredible shrinking pelvis

No Title

It's funny that a lot of the discussion around this story in the last few days has proved something about advertising and people's perception of advertising. Essentially it seems that the public at large accept and indeed expect advertising images to be shopped, it's only when it goes "too far" that it becomes a problem. It seems that people expect advertising to be lies.

Does advertising work or do people at large know that advertising is a lie, but still allow themselves to be influenced by it?