Posts by Hugh_Pym 241 publicly visible posts • joined 10 May 2007
... we have to give up some of our freedom in order to protect ourselves from these threats, according to politicians. They should have kept the bas*ard in custody without charge for 60 days. then he might understand what the rest of the country thins to 'emergency terror legislation'. But oh noes.. I'm a politician these laws shouldn't apply to me.
hypercritical tossers!
"Earlier this year the firm launched a blitz to publicize the fact it was awarded £16,000 damages when a woman it accused of downloading the video game Dream Pinball 3D was found in default. She had ignored Davenport Lyons' threatening letters and didn't defend herself in court."
So if you don't go to the trouble and expense of defending yourself you automatically lose? Mine the one with the bogus lawsuit citing everybody in the world in the pocket. If I can get £16,000 for a failure to appear, the percentages have got to pay off.
... The sub 10 inch, SSD, linux netbook is going commodity and will be poured out in the millions by sweetshops. The market is established and the technology is readily available. Prices will hit rock bottom. Asus can't make any money in those markets so they are moving into the protected world of Microsoft.
I was just beginning to type something similar. Good point.
I suggest we form Company. Call it something ludicrous like 'AllRegCommentards' or 'BollocksRus plc'. Then, and here is the cunning part, use your comment as the digest and fill out to 500+ pages with lorem 'ipsum text (nobody actually reads these things so it doesn't matter) and offer it to the government as a 'new IT strategy consultation document' at the knockdown price of £10 million. That aught to be enough when spread around all reg readers. So...
...everyone down the pub. Pass my coat will you, it's the one with the £10 million IOU in the pocket.
... The global warming was created by carbon released by an earlier civilization of Horse riding Monkey men. These magnetic crystals are all that is left of the memory array of their Paleolithic netbooks. If only we new how to read them we could find out what Paleoporn was all about.
Take a moment to think about what future civilizations would learn from the contents of your hard drive.
I think a brief trawl of the history of the RAF scrapping home produced hardware in favour of US kit will show the price (and capability ) is NEVER what was quoted.
Wing shedding F111's anybody? Lovely Phantoms get 'em while the're outdated before the're delivered. The last decent 'plane the Americans let us have was the mustang and that was only only because it was a next-gen spitfire.
I hate Microsoft as much as the next guy but even I get bored sometimes with the constant griping at our Redmond overlords. BUT I am amazed at some of the apologist views espoused here.
Some people seem to be suggesting that if you got caught in this scam you should give a wry smile and say 'Hey Microsoft you got me good with that XBox 360 gag, here's some more money for another go'.
I wonder if it is there own money they are spending or if they are saying 'I can't be bothered with the effort of complaining and a few weeks lack of gaming, easier to get dad to buy me another one'.
Drop the containers (waterproofed of course) into the middle of the Atlantic where the temperature approaches Zero C and connect huge cables to a balloon in the upper stratosphere that would harvest wind energy from the jetstream and transmit the data to earth. Power and Cooling all for free. It would also have the added bonus of bringing down airliners mid-Atlantic and thus reducing carbon emissions. Win-Win.
The most efficient power usage would therefore appear to be to allow the server room to be as hot as possible up to the point that the chip heatsinks could not prevent the actual chip temperature climbing beyond around 70 degrees (or whatever) and thereby triggering thermal throttling.
If you ordered special chips that didn't start to throttle back performance until 5 degrees (C?) higher than usual you could allow the room to become hotter. Saving Aircon power usage without loosing performance. Perhaps this is what the Google-Intel deal is about.
I'm getting to the end of an OU computing degree and though there have been some downers (Anyone ever read 'Blown to Bits' for example). Overall the standards has been very good and the tutors I have had have been excellent. Being part time most have both industry and academic experience.
I must say that whenever the subject of training and education comes up dozens of 'I knew more than my tutor' or 'I was right everyone else was wrong' comments come out. Usually with 'that's why I gave up/failed' attached.
The problem I see is that money in the market is not 'real' money, it is more like play money or at best potential money. Might as well be WoW golds. It's only when you cash it in and convert it to currency that it gets any real value. There is a boundary between the real world and the market world. Somebody mines iron ore, somebody buys a car. In between lots of people make money. some of it through the market. BUT the money originates from the iron ore, or the oil or the cotton or the oranges or whatever.
Shares are (supposedly) based on a fraction of a real world enterprise. If you gamble in Futures you are betting on events in the real world and how they effect the world of the market. Short selling however never crosses into the real world. Pension fund manager A could short sell to B, B may later sell, A could buy from B and cover the original sale. If he's done it right A has made money.
A trading circle has been completed but nothing has happened in the real world. Except, and this is the important bit, Market 'Play' money has been converted into real money. Money has been taken out of the market without a link to real world events. If it where not a nett money making scheme nobody would bother so the generally the money is removed from the market by short selling. That money has to come back into the market somehow, sometime. I think that this is the money GW is trying to get congress to pay. This is the $700 billion that has come out of the market in the past few years and been spent on city bonus parties, cars, penthouses and huge estates in Palm Beach.
They say that if two antique dealers were marooned on a desert island with one Sheraton writing desk between them they would both make a good living. It's clearly absurd. What we now have is that two traders can be marooned on a desert island with nothing but a stack of B&B shares and both make an excellent living. somebody is going to pay sometime and it's us, now.
"Spend a little bit of time actually looking at what ISO does and realise how small a section IT has in the grand scheme of things."
Pre - f*cking -cisely. The ISO isn't that concerned with IT standards and clearly isn't very good at it. So.... set up a new body that IS concerned, IS open about procedures and IS some good at it.
The ONLY qualification for a standards body is that it is respected by the bodies in its area of expertise. they don't have any status beyond this. Not professional or academical and certainly not legal. They are in fact a de facto standard.
By ratifying two standards, one that works and one that MS wants to work. One that passes muster and one that passes as fast track (explicitly for existing de facto standards) even though it isn't actually implemented shows the ISO cannot be trusted. It has lost the respect of the community. They had a cance to redeem them selves and blew it.
They may be great in other areas but don't have the respect of the IT community therefore they are no longer a standards body. Get rid.
Everything the net does has, in the last few decades, been developed as an antidote to the Microsoft Business Model (Microsoft Business Model? = Software -> ? -> Money (tm)) . All those years ago Bill didn't 'get' the net because he couldn't see where the money came from. In a way he was right, there is no money. Not from software alone anyway. So why should they get involved?
Microsoft still don't see where the money comes from but they can't live on the desktop tie in for much longer so the net is the only game in town. Their only option is to copy an existing success, use it to set a standard that they control and leverage into licensing dollars (Silverlight anyone?). Everything they have done in connection with the net is the same thing. They keep failing but they are falling into a desktop shaped hole and have nothing to fill it with.
over 400,000 American gave their lives in WW2. Many of them in Europe. For their sacrifice I am grateful. They came to fight for freedom. they died as heros.
However the leaders that sent them did so for other reasons: Money; Political Power and Fear of the commies. Never forget that the US entered the war in Europe only after a) Pearl Harbour, when political capital could be made from war-mongering. and b)The Russians turned back the Eastern Front and looked like they could march right over Europe thereby threatening US interests. Also Britain has only just finished paying back war 'loans' to the US, the only country in the world to make a profit from WW2.
They will all want one to run their ridiculously complex excel spreadsheets on. That way they don't get laughed at when they ask the Geeks if they can make it better only to be told their accounts database app should do that for them (If they hadn't bought it on purchase price and give away shiny things).
Of course they could get an app written but the tied in Accounts app vendor wants a million Pound for ten minutes work and anyway they would have to specify what it the spreadsheet does and that would mean admitting to all the fudges and bodges they use to the get the bottom line to say what they want.
SO... The crap that you have written yourself in excel visual basic might be able to return an answer in less than 5 days just by spending $25,000 or so. No Geeks. No questions about the crappy accounts system you recommended. No questions about the various 'suspense account journals' around 'training weekend' expenses.
At least that's what Microsoft and Cray hope.
Last I heard the 'Special licence' that BECTA complained about meant that any computer on the school's network had to pay a MS licence even if it used no MS software. e.g the Design and Media dept Apple Macs still profit MS.
I can see that if you are teaching the current crop of kids about Word processing then MS Word skills are what they would need but that doesn't mean all the software should be tied in to MS. that is what the current model seeks to do. My kids school showed them Web design on Front Page and Graphic design on Publisher for f**ks sake.
Teach the next generation about what they might use not what's Cheap.
At the point of entering the first TMA you would have been able to back out and get all your money back. Despite the dreadful start (and unforgivable tutor support) you completed the course and passed. Must have thought it would do something for you.
Did the course as a whole do you any good?
At the beginning of the mobile communications roll out virtually all of Europe got together and signed up to the same set of standards. In the US the various vested interests and bitter infighting lead to a strangled and fragmented service. That is why the US is so behind virtually everybody else in the world. Some of the poorer African countries are ahead of the US in coverage because of the benefits of cell phones in open country.
On this side of the pond the coverage, equipment and services available are far in advance of the US so simply stating data is cheaper in the US is not enough even if it were true. The US will not catch up for a long because the insular nature of US media does not show what they are not getting.
The so-called 'open market' is a poor model when strategic planning is required. There are some things the government should get involved with on your behalf.
Too much confusion here.
1. Chip and Pin is not the same as RFID.
2. (for our American brethren). Chip and pin cards are subject to much less fraud than magnetic strip cards and the biggest opportunity for the fraudster is letting the card out of your sight. If you want security on your card leave the chip, rip of the mag strip and signature.
2. Your PIN is not available from the chip. (that was on the first generation magnetic strip cards, but thats another story).
3. RFID is not a way of hiding information it's a way of making the information available.
4. the big story is not about security of credit cards but about how much information is already held on all of us gathered from RFID tags already used in food packaging, clothes purchases and electronic goods.
"The icon could do with being more meaningful"
I think you will find the icon is perfectly meaningful. They mean 'please, gullible user, assume this perfectly good, standards based page is in some way broken and only microsoft can fix your viewing experience. Don't trust those other guys no no no'.
They should have used a broken ie logo.
I think a lot of people feel that they bought XP for their old PC so why can't they continue to use it on their new one. If they read the EULA they would find they are not allowed to do much. They can't sell the PC with their windows XP licence and they cannot wipe the old machine and install it on the new machine (as most people get windows OEM). So what you get is a lot of disgruntled people who thought they owned something and don't.
It's like if you bought a nice economical little family saloon from you local Ford dealer and after a few years you went to sell it and buy a new one but the dealer said. 'you bought the car but only leased the ms-engine(tm), you can only sell it if you take the ms-engine(tm) out and throw it away. You can lease the new ms-engine(tm) which is much bigger and thirstier but no better than the old one or you can fit a different engine yourself but we will use any means fair or foul to stop the new owner using it including vague legal threats and abuse of market position to force all accessory makers to all dealers to only sell cars and parts for ms-engines(tm).
Anyway as we only make executive limousines to go with the new ms-engine(tm) you will have to buy one of those. What? you don't one of those? What does that matter?
I personally wouldn't trust the US legal system as far as I could throw it but having said that I am willing to believe that this guy is guilty beyond reasonable doubt.
HOWEVER mistakes are made, people have confessed to crimes they didn't commit, New evidence comes to light years later. I would be far more willing to say to a guy 'sorry you were in prison for 20 year and you were innocent' rather than 'sorry we killed your son and he was innocent' or based on what a lot of people here suggest 'sorry we tortured your son to death and he was innocent'.
Would a posthumous pardon really cover it for you if your Son or Daughter was framed by a corrupt cop/politician? Would killing the cop/politician make it all right again?
Er Gavin? When exactly did Microsoft carry the baton for innovation? Uless you where referring to innovation in interpreting business law.
And Mike. I have been using XP for a years on various different hardware and it works fine. I guess I chose the hardware well. but the point about Vista is not does it work but does it work well enough to justify the money required to set it. The cost and extra hardware might be cheap to some people but can you make a convincing case for me to spend the money on upgrading my stuff and buying Vista instead of keeping what I've got, which does everything I need, and spending the money something more important like strip clubs and Jack Daniels?
"After all," he says cheerfully, "everyone should have more than one car anyway, for different kinds of driving. That's just common sense."
Of course this is common sense. I shouldn't commute 50 weeks in the Family Estate just because I need it for two weeks in the summer. I should have a town car (Not the Lincoln type) for nipping about and a Truck for when I need to carry/tow stuff. It could pay for the extra car just in fuel saving and depreciation due to mileage.
Its difficult to make the case against that except for the ridiculous Tax and Insurance system that expects you to pay for things you don't use...
...that and the lack of somewhere to keep two cars.
The burgeoning mobile market is being talked about in terms of which OS can suit the needs of the developer best. Any one of the current crop could do it. No one system will capture the whole of the market because there is no overwhelming advantage in one over another. No one system will become dominant enough to allow the manufacturer to use it as a lever to control its customers because there are so many viable alternatives. In the early PC market the cost of not doing what MS said was bankruptcy. In the mobile market it is a few months development and most manufacturers are keeping their options open to limit that.
What Linux has done is given us choice. It has already done it's job of preventing lock down. 'Winning' market share is a moot point. Keeping the market open is the battleground because that is what benefits us, the end users.
...s that the leaders are never around long enough to sort out the results of their f**k ups. Of course GW and his cronies will have taken the money and run (metaphorically or otherwise) before this problem finally has to be fixed and the cost of it falls on the US taxpayer.
Personally, I can't wait to find out what really happened when the truth comes out in 20 or 30 years.
Paris, cause she knows dirty tricks when she sees them.
... any 'free' offer will be abused.
When our local cable company started they offered free unlimited phone calls to other cable users. They withdrew the offer when people started putting a phone by the cot and calling up their neighbours house so they could use it all day/night as a free baby monitor when they visited.
What I want out of a 'fast' internet connection is to get what I want , when I want it - fast. I don't want to pay the same for my intermittent hgh speed downloads as Mr BitTorrent king who downloads everything in the world 24/7 just because he might want it one day and 'anyway it's free so who cares'. Why should I? The current system only works because the cost of the infrastructure will cope with average use. If everyone used it like the 'top' 5% they would have to upgrade the system and the costs would go up.
I mean, think about it how can unlimited broadband even exist. It's like saying a car can travel at unlimited speeds because it has not been artificially restricted.
I'd welcome pay per Gb service to stop me sponsoring these bandwidth hogs and freeloaders. Stop whining and pay for what you use.
Paris. because she downs every load she can.
... have the largest number of migrant worker/asylum seekers. I'm not blaming 'bloody foreigners' 'cus they we can breed our own crims quite well enough thanks. To me transient population = ready market for easily transported high value goods. It makes sense to me that thieving requires easily available resources and accessible markets. the movement of populations opens up markets no end. the number of city centre bars, especially true of Leicester, makes large number of mobe easy for light fingers.
Look at the fact the Cambridge is top of the list Oxford is nowhere.
... someone has been drinking neat hyperbolade. You want to take a bit of water with it mate!
"massive, ""eclipsed", "down a peg or too [sic]". Surely not the reasoned and sensible prose we expect of El Reg.
"A total of 926,000 copies of the game were sold between 28 April and 3 May" 6% short - 'almost' a million apparently. I could go with that but....
... "a massive 631,000 copies passed through UK tills on day one – eclipsing Chart-Track’s initial estimate of 609,000 copies." Under 4% out. I would suggest that that's not a bad guess but here it is ''eclipsing".
We all know it's a big game release, everybody loves GTA. But calm down guy, you'll do yourself an injury.
99% of the time a document emailed from outside the users organisation only requires reading or, at the most, printing. A subset of open office to just read an print ODFs could be made small, therefore quick and easy to install. It wouldn't upset people who have paid a fortune for a word processing package and don't want to believe that a similar cheaper option existed.
Like Acrobat reader it would just be seen by casual users as a 'document browser'. It is required that web businesses offer certain legal documents etc in a format that is available to all users. ODF documents and a link to reader offer the cheapest and only 'future proof' way of doing this (apart from HTML, which isn't ideal for the purpose). Once a critical mass has been reached where a significant proportion of users are prepared to open ODF docs then users will start to use the format in ernest.
So come on somebody, whip together a small and easy to install ODF reader!
No icon chosen as they do not adhere to an ISO standard.
Any known artist can make money from their music this way. Maybe not the untold millions they could from what the sex pistols told us 30 years ago was 'the great rock and roll swindle' but a good return on their efforts. After all should writing a half decent pop song entitle you mansions round the world and a private jet?
New artists are obviously going to require a platform of some sort but not one which is controlled by an industry whose only concern is 'how can we get the most for giving the least'.
I for one welcome a world where people like talentless self publicist Simon Cowell can become rich by hanging on the coat tails of those who actually create something.
my wife just left her job at the HMRC because of the re organisations required to get rid of the x,000 employees required by the government. The constant cost cutting, staff cutting and being told her jobs is moving to a different city every other week and general lack of any visible management eventually became too much of a joke.
On another note. Three meetings, 1.3 million, over £400,000 a meeting, where did they hold them? On Concorde! or were there 1600 people each on a £250 a day in a travelodge!
I choose Jobs because it is all about jobs.
So. It appears that professional qualifications count for nothing because they are just bits of paper. Experience doesn't count for anything because it just means you did something, not did something well. Manufacturer specified qualifications are just a way of promoting products and, if you take the overall view, Everybody thinks everybody else is crap only they 'really' know.
No wonder we have difficulty in being taken seriously as an industry. maybe there should be a professional body to oversee the qualification of IT/computer industry professionals. After to paraphrase John Benson. 'Would you trust a doctor who qualified at the Saint Regis University or who has a diploma from Pfizer or even worse the from the university of life?'
... in international law.
The Nigerians had plenty of opportunity to buy the Windows version and must have been offered a very good deal by MS at the time. They declined. They went for the Mandriver offer and then suddenly decide to buy Windows AS WELL. How can buying both be a better deal? If Windows were free it would still cost them to do all the reinstalls. So they must have been offered Windows and something else to make it worth their while. If Ballmer didn't directly bribe someone, and this is Nigeria after all <sarcasm>not the affluent west were no one ever takes a bribe </sarcasm> and buying somebody is relatively cheap, then MS must have agreed to do something for somebody, Build a dam, equip an air force, That kind of thing. Smacks of desperation to me.
I would LOVE to work in the MS accounts office to see some of these invoices come through. e.g.
From: Lagos Limousine Hire and Gvt Supply Co
for supply of transport for MS sales staff to/from logos international airport on the weekend of .......... $250,000.00
not practical. too many guns, too many borders, too many manufactures.
However the constitution only say 'Right to bare arms' with out specifying what arms are born. The gun lobby area prepared to 'protect the constiution' up to an arbitrary point. Being born in the US of US parents makes you a citizen as soon as you are born. The Constitution therefore protects the rights of infants to own field artillery and the right of any individual to own nuclear weapons. The far right, just like everyone else is arguing for a 'sensible' approach to what the right to bare arms means in the modern world. It's just their definition of sensible different.
Forget the theory look at the facts:
right to hold military weapons - Waco
right to bare hand guns - highest murder rate in the western world.
Death penalty - Prison population 5 times higher (per capita) than rest of the western world.
It seems to the reason most people want a gun is because they fear the other guy has one. Blind fear of the other guy is called paranoia <sarcasm>and who would want that? After all it would only divert peoples attention from real issues like government corruption, economic meltdown, disastrous foreign policy etc.</sarcasm>.
... my girlfriend showed me her breasts. Did she commit a crime. Will I be taken in hand by the Ohio state police? Will they put the squeeze on her to confess? When will this pair of felons next see the light of day? I feel myself weighed down be the enormity of these doings.
I will hold myself in readiness for the knock at the door.
... didn't there used to be a journo, Computer News I think, many years ago. Used to call herself Lisa Israel. Tech journalism was tough back then, you needed to work deep undercover, no-one could no your real name.
You Reg guy's have it easy now. There are so a few disastrous 'new age of computing' projects to laugh at these days back then there where hundreds; Lisa, OPD, INMOS, sinclair ST... the list goes on.
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