Posts by Nick 6

Bloggy thing signals iPhone FM radio

Help me

I'm sure that Apple will protect me from confusing and suspect radio stations which don't play music that I can buy from the iTunes store. I mean, why would I want to do that? Radio3 just plays old stuff with a dynamic range unsuited to tinny headphones, whilst Radio 4 is just people talking and that. As long as they can do a deal with Heart/Galaxy, that's all the music I would want to listen to.

Alternatively they can just buy their own bit of the spectrum and start beaming Jobsian jingles to the iPhone which I ought to be buying.

MySpace replaces disks with flash

No more HDD failures....

But some SSD failures. I think current MTBF is 2 million hours - that's 0.9% probability of failure per annum. And also the low MTBF quoted by moving spindle drive manufacturers is not supported by the observed failure rates of mass users in the data centre (e.g. google).

Nice move though, interesting to see a large user go in that direction. But beware of anyone suggesting "these never fail".

Merkel rips into Google Books

Means to an end

By putting loads of useful stuff available free of charge, Google plays with the UI, delivery model etc, and then starts offering publishing services to authors whilst pointing towards their experience and ability in that area.

Remind me what we're doing again?

And occasionally....

we discover yet another Microsoft Access 'database application' which the whole of one divison relies upon despite it never having been near any requirements or testing.

Flames, cos, they need killing with fire (.mdb files, not the users)

China bans foreign investment in online video games

But how

will I get a job as a gold farmer once the greedy corporate pigs have shipped my job over there?

yo ho ho, etc.

Alpha-male Ellison issues $10m Exadata challenge

Pick and Choose

Ludicrous nonsense, anyone with an ounce of intelligence can identify 10 ways which any 'comparison' can be weighted in which ever direction the organiser wants it to go.

IBM out-cheaps Google with web-based business email

Business versus consumer

Some companies who would go for webmail from an established business services company but who might only view Google as a consumer grade novelty factory. The former will go for the IBM offering I guess.

Ballmer says Big Blue hands in too few pies

Yeah but Steve....

it seems to be working for them so far....

And they are constantly developing new niches, some of which become products, others fall by the way side or are patented for later use. And when someone else identifies and develops in an important area which IBM want immediately, then they have the cash for an acquisition.

Britons warned of plague of the 'supercats'

Imagine the splash....

when you drop one of those in the canal.

Mainframe shops gush over big iron

@AC1

In the words of the Dilbert cartoon,

Here's a nickel kid, buy yourself a real computer**

**corrollary: licences sold separately.

US Bank dumps Sharepoint (to spend more time with Lotus)

@filing cabinets

If that's a filing cabinet, then Sharepoint is a skip.

Where I currently work, the on-going joke when asked where your document/presentation/spreadsheet/diagrams are is to say "they're on Sharepoint". Because the recipient hasn't got a cat in hells chance of finding them unless you can dictate a precise folder path off the top of your head. Search doesn't work, and it doesn't work very very slowly.

Human brain 'works like US presidential elections'

I can't believe

that my brain would ever vote for George Dubba Bush.

Southampton Uni slaps IP notice on FOI requests

@Mike007

Nice one, didn't realise that was the case, much better reaction than the general bitching and moaning about them trampling information which wants to be free.

Bad smell

Whether, in this context, the FOI act is a "good thing" or a "bad thing", and regardless of whether they have a right to control this particular material or not, it all smacks of cover-up and a continued attempt to control information which they are required to provide.

I'll remember this next time the legions of donation requesting phone monkeys attempt to tap me up for another contribution to the alma mater's coffers.

Oracle and Sun taunt IBM with Sparcs

May I be the first to say that

I for one welcome our new beardy twat hardware-newcomer underlords.

Google Maps Monopoly board folds under server strain

Boring game even if it worked

This is pretty tedious since there's no element of other players 'landing' on your property. You just take somewhere with rent and then sit and wait. Another idea is to pay me rent for beta testing this steaming pile.

Still its a good way of Hasbeens dredging up some market data about where to launch the future versions of Monopoly - e.g. which streets generate the most interest that aren't in existing boards.

I unfortunately think there will be a load of glitches which allow bots to gather huge amounts of cash and automatically buy and populate streets.

If Hasbro don't turn this around soon, its going to be this year's mainstream media story on how not to launch a website.

Xbox 360 'least reliable' console

Not much difference

The MTBF for XBox360 and Wii seem very similar.

Assuming constant failure rate, and time=mins per month*24, with a survival rate of 90% and 95% at 2 years, the MTBF is about 4200hrs.

Someone slap me and tell me why I'm wrong.

Duh

Oops, the wii mtbf is about 2x that of the Xbox. I assumed 95% survival when its more like 97.% at 2 years.

Incompetence a bigger IT security threat than malign insiders

What are you asking them for?

Why do these surveys ask the "top executives"? Even if they are CIOs who actually have any kind of clue about IT, rather than being trough feeding pigs at the executive bonus party, then they'll rarely see the reality.

Rather when they get told about some incident, after many meetings amongst the lower orders, the story will be one of inadequate procedures and accidental finger trouble by a slightly incompetent peon. This is much better than a sub-department team leader having to fess up that they were responsible for actually delivering a piece of swiss-cheese rather than fort knox.

Windows 7 Ultimate product activation hacked?

Consequences

People are going to 'jump' out of windows for this one....

Brit firm stops anti-tank warheads with cloth

I believe the technical term for this is....

....touching cloth.

that is all.

Man hooks home into Twitter

Just the presentation layer

Twitter is just a presentation channel. And its 'news' because its free to send and free to receive. Taking the more public example of the RedFunnel ferries instrumentation: Twittering it (sorry, OK 'tweeting' , arghhhh) effectively disintermediates the SMS services which would otherwise be happily charging you 50p for a service update message. Yes you could do the same by updating statuses on a web page, or fetching them from a webservice, but you may as well tap into a bigger general infrastructure rather than run that part yourself.

AFAIK not inviting/expecting others to subscribe, apart from those interested in the end-to-end solution - its definately not a "listen to the minutiae of my life" situation like most Twits. Focussing on the surfacing of the events to today's fad (Twitter) is just the media's obsession. Instead the real IT story is about instrumentation - more sensors than actuators but the latter will rise when you subscribe to a twitter channel in the other direction.

Most disappointing is the fact he doesn't have a dog called Gromit.

IBM launching American-only software support

But how?

I thought there weren't any skills available to IBM, HP/EDS etc....that's why they had to bring container loads of 'skilled' H1B visa fillers ashore to help us out of our jobs. So how are they going to fill the positions?