Posts by Is it me?

Sandi Toksvig puts the 'n' into cuts - on the Beeb

For those not old enough...

If Typhoo put the T in Britain who put the S in .....

It's so old I was a primary school when I heard it, and yes I knew the word, was naughty, just not what it meant.

Seagate, WD should put a gun to Brussels' head

Well spotted

Spinning Iron is on the way out, thus the number of volume manufacturers you can continue to support will drop. In fact a duopoly will be fine, and mean that the prices will remain lower for longer.

Both companies need to compete not only with each other for spinning iron, but also with all the SDD manufacturers, and at the PC level, just how many 1TB drives do you really need until Windows 9 comes along and needs it all on it's lonesome.

PS my Air does just fine with 128Gb, you only need bigger storage for multi-media, not a problem in the corporate market. Even domestically a home NAS can deal with that for the family's PCs, don't need to have it all locally.

Francis Maude goes back 110 years for cybersecurity strategy

It all depends on where you sit.

If you want a government service, it is not unreasonable that the government knows that you are who you say you are, in much the same way a bank would.

And taking the motoring analogy, the government has set the rules of the road, and has implemented a number of fixed and random control points to ensure compliance, but it certainly doesn't control the traffic or it's content.

The key difference is that with the Internet, you are using a privately operated set of toll roads, rather than a set of publicly owned and maintained roads, your ISP will set the terms and conditions of your access, and charge you. Part of that cost is your on-line identity with them.

Anyway, as the National ID card is dead, there is no-longer a mechanism for a national on-line identity, which would need to be certificate based, good practice says your identity can only be verified by Something you know, against something you have.

To reintroduce such a scheme would cost more than Fluffy Francis has available, it's doubtful he's prepared to pay for it in government, let alone anywhere else, unless it's self funding like the ID card. Oh and big brother on the Internet is also far too expensive for .gov.uk for itself let alone the public.

CEOP announces 'record results' in child protection battle

Careful now, say what you mean

That description might well cover the senior management of virtually every organisation I can think of, but certainly not the grunts who actually do the work, who work long hours for low pay, compared to us IT professionals.

Senior Management's knowledge of what their "Businesses" actually do, is inversely proportional to the size of their pay packets. They also like to boast about measurable results, without actually knowing what they are measuring.

Danish embassy issues MARMITE WAFFLE

Boycott Danish Bacon & Lego

If they won't take our Marmite, we won't eat their bacon, or build with their bricks.

And what about Carlsburg and Tubourg, Ha.

Journos 'risk charges' for covering Parliamentary debates

Hang-on

The footballer wants access to other people's emails to see if they have been talking about him.

Lets hope he doesn't get it because that would give him more rights than the Police have, and no duty not to reveal what he finds. Would you want a professional footballer or indeed any celebrity given the right to trawl your eMail, just in case.

Think granting that kind of injunction would be a breach of the journalist's human rights, not to mention the human rights of the people sending him email, and the people mentioned in the email.

Identity and Passport Service loses its website

Funny you should say that

But that might well happen as a part of the changes due in 2013.

Simply viewing Apple kit provokes religious euphoria

Indeed

The same applies to lots of things, car owners are particularly subject to this kind of behaviour, but also HiFi. Try and tell a BMW owner that a Merc is better, or vice versa.

Sadly, I'm not afflicted by this kind of behaviour, which actually makes buying stuff more fun, you can actually work out what's best for your needs.

Apple proposes even tinier SIMs for future iPhones, iPads

Good Old Nokia

You could buy an attachment for your Nokia phone that allowed it to carry two Sims that you could switch between. Great when you had to carry a personal and a work phone.

My 6310i is still going strong with at least 4 spare batteries from older ones.

Schmidt: Android will bring DEMOCRACY to the WORLD

Could we have

A rose tinted spectacles icon.

Yeah, ok provided you guys don't sell out by putting in national controls just to preserve your business, no no one would ever do that would they.

Intel: Windows on ARM won't run 'legacy apps'

Astounding

Who would have thought a change in CPU architecture would do that. But, mainly who cares, if MS Office, and desktop products are also ported, then it's only a matter of file formats.

I doubt ARM will be going for servers from day one, Microsoft didn't, and look where they are.

The real test will be the uptake of Windows ARM by other premium software vendors in business, but the success of iPads and Androids seems to indicate that might not be an issue.

Good luck to ARM.

When is a database not so relational?

Have to agree

Most OO developers really don't understand database, or efficient programming. Not so relational databases provide efficient low cost OO code, but compared to native C and API SQL calls, OO performance is S%^t.

But who needs efficient code crafted by skilled IT professionals these days.

Border Agency monitors migrant ITers with inadequate IT

Ah well.

We need to import IT skills because we aren't training enough graduates with up to date skills because it's cheaper to train off-shore and then on-shore, than train existing UK staff with new skills.

Training existing staff means taking them away from their day job, so you incur lost opportunity costs as well as the costs of training. We like to sweat our human assets.

However if the government wants to train all those unemployed IT professionals for us, then we might think about employing them, but then they won't be as experienced as the cheaper overseas staff.

CSC locked out of new NHS contracts

Can I Just Ask?

Is there a good SI who knows what they are doing?

Probably not, so are they really the problem?

Broadband leads to drug abuse, say US boffins

So what did that really mean?

10% rise in a leads to 1% rise in b, Hmmm, so what were the base numbers then, are 1% of all broadband users drug addicts, or is it 0.001% of broadband users making on-line drug purchases have lead to a 1% rise in the numbers of drug related hospital admissions. This story in nonsense, without knowing the base.

Come on reg, dig a little and tell us the truth, oh wait that wouldn't be a story would it.

Give the Met Office £10m, says Transport Committee

Give em 10 billion

And it still won't stop the problem. Weather is very difficult to predict in the long term, but even if the Met Office could give an accurate forecast more than 24 hours in advance you would still need to have the infrastructure to cope.

90% of the problem for Rail south of London had nothing to do with the lack of snow ploughs and the fact that snow settles on third rails, and everything to do with the fact that in BR days they would keep trains running all night to keep the track clear using normal drivers, now Network Rail has no train drivers of their own, and has to contract them in, or persuade the train companies to run trains for which they have no financial incentive as they can write off days when the trains can't run with no penalty.

With air and road, try and convince an accountant to pay for a snow plough that might be used once in ten years. BAA have least excuse as they probably own theirs which is more than local authorities do now, used to be that my local authority's Bedford trucks all had plough frames on the front, the outsources service provider certainly doesn't. It's all down to money and being prepared.

Nothing to lose but your desktop PCs

However

The entry cost into VDI can be a turn off, as it's more than just a few servers and thin clients, especially if you want to project externally.

You really need to look at the VDI farm architecture carefully to right size, and ensure the performance.

Oh, and there are always going to be applications you can't sanely virtualize, or would seriously impact other users when run, so you need to have a robust architecture that supports the exceptions. Beware of heavily CPU intensive multi-threading graphics applications, and dongles.

What treasures will the US really find on bin Laden's hard disk?

Mind you

no one has ever said the virgins have to be female, and the evidence seems to suggest that the alternative might be just as acceptable.

One also assumes female suicide bombers are on the same deal, so the male virgin pool might be larger.

NHS Barnet reveals 187 breaches of personal data

Sense of proportion

The NHS is a massive organisation, it has people of many levels of skill and capability, and it's primary function is Health, not data security. As some of the more balanced individuals point out data security is fine right up until the point the data is needed to save your life.

As a customer of the NHS, I find it a pain in the bottom that I have to carry blood test results on paper from my GP to my consultant because my GP uses a different hospital path lab to my consultant, and the systems are not joined up. If the price of having all my note joined up, is that they might accidentally left lying around by tiered or busy Healthcare professionals, then so be it. I suggest that the commentator who thinks NHS staff are stupid, should go work in the NHS for a while, they'll find the stupid ones, actually don't have access to patient records, other than to push cartfuls from A to B.

I wonder exactly what it is the people are afraid they might have exposed, in any case, and who would be interested in their data. Ask yourselves this, who would want your data, why, what benefit would it be to them, and what would the cost of discovery be to them. Ultimately, health records are confidential, and the only people who might be interested are your insurance companies, the DVLA and your employer, if you have failed to disclose a relevant medical condition. The only people who might to worry are public figures, whose records are treated with a bit more care, but even then you are dealing with a confidential record, and its unauthorised disclosure would have consequences for the discloser as well as the source. The worst outcome for anyone, is that data loss might actually lose something that is not duplicated, and that affects your health.

Doctors, even your GP will also be involved in health studies, which are usually not part of the NHS's core IT provision, and are carried out independently by interest groups, with minimal funding, in their own time, and at their own cost.

Departments reveal mobile device spending

Doubt it

The costs covered will include the costs of managing the mobile devices, and I suspect they are bought, not rolled into a service charge, and then there's the BES servers, and encrypted phones, which ain't cheap.

TomTom sorry for giving customer driving data to cops

But...

Aren't the devices in themselves anonymous, so in fact Tom Tom would have had to match the device with the account. Monitoring traffic flow does not require personal details, like the account, just the device, location and time/speed.

Airborne killer robot destroys Libyan anti-aircraft missile

How 'bout

Remote control tanks, unmanned etc. or indeed snipers.

Which is why......

Our brave boys in blue are interested in them as well, cheaper than a helicopter, but sadly no air to ground armaments for the speeding Essex wide boy.

Pope says gravity proves technology can't supplant God

For a bit of balance

I actually have no problem whatsoever in reconciling my faith in God and science, and neither do the vast majority of my fellow parishioners.

And as I believe in God, I can't see why anybody would really want to be like him, would you really want to have to deal with all that moaning and grumbling from your believers. Ok it might be cool to zap your enemies with a thought, be adored by the multitude, create new and strange lifeforms and watch live sex whenever you feel like it, but just remember, if you can be god-like, so can everyone else, or at least the rich.

Ellison's Oracle washes hands of OpenOffice

Well, Perhaps

But then, how many normal office suite users actually use VBA, I use Open Office at home, and I can't think of any reason I'd need VBA or any scripting.

Optimising IT isn’t all about the cloud

It's one of those things everybody knows

<Grumpy old man>

The thing about things everybody knows, is that everybody is usually wrong, to me it's just another abstraction layer, that needs to be managed, and another layer of complexity to inexplicably wrong.

How I long for the days when it was either the computer, the OS or the Application, and where I started in computing even the OS was a layer of computing too much, just the processor and assembler, sometimes even straight machine code. And don't get me started on Glass Teletypes.

So what does your typical n-tier web app. need to run these days.

</Grumpy old man>

FCC launches AT&T T-Mobile review

Um

The whole of T-Mobile for $39 Billion, bit of a bargin that, why do DT want to get rid of it, oh wait maybe they want the 4G licences, cunning plan that, off-load the old and build new. AT&T won't be in the game because they will have spent their dosh on old tech.

Intel to pay OEMs to build Atom-Android tablets?

Anti-competative though

I think using it's overall market position to make an offer that no other manufacturer could match might count as anti-competitive though. If Atom is not generally as good as ARM and they are making it much cheaper by cross subsidising that market, I'd say it was at least unfair competition, based on the size of Intel over and above any ARM fabricator. Mind you it would be interesting to know what $10 per chip does to the relative pricing, how much does ARM differ from Atom in terms of pricing.

UK is 15th best place in the world to do IT

Hmmmm

Wonder how much of this is due to our general attitude that IT is a cost and not a benefit or opportunity. Part of the general British view that any infrastructure is a cost, me thinks.

Dixons whacked by profit warning

Be fair

How long would they last if they didn't forecast business growth. Next thing you'll expect is for executives to tell the truth, which I'll bet they knew.

120 Underground Wi-Fi hotspots will erupt in 2012

Deep Joy

Fantastic, yet another place I'm forced to listen to half of another persons conversation. The world will not end because you can't use your phone on the tube, nothing is ever that important.

Count me as one of the Silent Majority.

Ellison drops iceberg in front of HP's unsinkable Itanic

Just not that joined up.

We're trying to get Oracle to do a combined Hardware/Software deal, it's like try to pull hens teeth. We are still being offered a better price using IBM hardware and Oracle Software, go figure.

But then IBM global services sell more Oracle software than IBM.

The only way they'll do it is with the database, middleware and desktop appliance servers.

Oracle are not easy to business with, even £60m's worth.

Go figure.

NHS to share foreigners' data with border agency

However

The French health care system will not just treat you. They actually require you to show that you are entitled to free healthcare or can pay before they do anything. This is not the case with the NHS. We are all supposed to have an NHS entitlement card which we should be asked to show when using an NHS service.

I didn't know this until, on moving to London, my new GP issued me with one.

The NHS Delivery side doesn't feel it should police entitlement to treatment, so in the main you will be very unlikely to get asked for your NHS card. One suspects that id they did there wouldn't be a problem.

Illinois scrubs death penalty

The clue is....

The double negative.

"I never believed in killing nobody" means "I believe in killing everybody"

Engrish as wot she is spoke.

Ah

Obviously not that free thinking if you can't accept religious belief as being a free choice, or can't see why people might think their religious beliefs are not ridiculous. part of grown up debate is accepting that other people have a different opinion.

Spooks' secret TEMPEST-busting tech reinvented by US student

Not surprising

Once you tell the world you can do something, it won't take long for someone to workout how you do it and then reproduce it, and then how to counter it.

Better to publish and patent, and force everyone to buy your kit, both ways.

Bury council considers mass outsourcing

Want a cheaper service...

FIne, we'll do less, and that applies to IT, FM and just about anything else.

Francis Maud take note, when we cut our rates we will also cut our commitment, the quality of our staff and so on because our shareholders still want their profits, and our CEO still wants to meet his profit and growth target.

BTW. Public sector staff could earn bonus payments for meeting and exceeding targets, but they have in the main been withdrawn because the Sun says tax payers are horrified that public servants should receive a bonus for such poor service. Missing the fact that actually the ones who received, what in the private sector would be considered derisory, bonuses, worked their butts off to get them, far harder in fact than private sector employees do.

Spooks want backdoor into your network

At least it's not

The Peoples Liberation Army who are asking, oh wait they already are. So it's fine for them to do it, but not GCHQ.

Think about this people, do you really think that if GCHQ want to listen to you they can't already, but do you know, I think they probably have better things to do with their time.

Crime UK site gets 400m hits, drives down property values

Enough Already

When you know the effort required in setting up a government web site, getting the data, hardware and accreditation sorted out, as well as bidding it, please feel free to comment on the cost.

Eurofighter Typhoon: It's EVEN WORSE than we thought

Ah a sensible point...

Airbus is in charge of it's own destiny, and has a stable go to market vision on continuous improvement on a basic design for a conservative client base who are risk averse, cost conscious, and safety minded for whom they can present a basic 90% complete platform, just like Boeing.

Compare and contrast this with defence aviation or UK rail procurement where even where you have a standard product, the MOD or DfT want to fiddle with it as infinitum and you have your answer.

If you want a cheap effective product, decide what you want upfront, don't change your mind during procurement or development, or just buy off the peg. The US by the way pay a number of defence contractors to compete for a design and then choose the best one. Sadly we only have BAE left. Hawker, DeHaviland, Avro, Handley-Page, Supermarine, English Electric and Bristol have all gone. But we could do it on a European scale. We do need BAE economically, sadly they don't serve us that well.

And Vulcans

Were Avro

Umm

BAE were not around for Phantoms and the Apache was Westland.

Think you'll find...

It was English Electric.

Google insists it couldn't have been British. Excuse me?

What is Cameron on...

And Tony the Blair for that matter, both seem to think throwing names like Microsoft and Google around the place are a universal panacea for something, though what they don't seem to be able to get a grip on.

Somehow I doubt there are many, if any politicians in the UK who actually understand IT, look who Francis Maud has to advise him.

DC likes Google, well so do lots of us but don't see what the point of sucking up to them is, nor do I see any benefit to UK PLC.

Totally agree that UK makes it difficult for innovative start-ups to grow an flourish, but mainly that's finance, ARM & Autonomy show it's possible, but an awful lot will get borged by US companies with better financial backing, and UK PLC is much happier selling out that growing a business over the longer term. in fact UK PLC is crap at supporting itself, to push more UK companies onto the world stage.

Copyright is a red herring, and the easier it is for Google to borg information, the better their revenues.

Ford punts prang-prompted auto cops-calling kit

I've used this, it's not bad

Last year I had the North America Ford Edge (Kuga but better spec and value) as a hire car for a few weeks, equipped with Sync and no problems with it at all, did not have anything to do with the safety side of the vehicle. Just the entertainment, communications and Sat Nav. Have to say if this was the Ford of the future, I'll buy, quality, drive and usability was all spot on, way better than the Fords I looked at early last year, and bought VW instead.

PS I'm UK based, and own a Z4 and a Golf, also an iPhone and iPod, in case you wondered about bias.

Government should extend agile development for IT

Trouble with Agile is

It takes the legal niceties to a place most suppliers and departments don't really want to go, with unbounded contracts that require both sides to trust each other. There is also a fear that if an Agile project goes wrong and moves to litigation, then both sides feel they won't be able to defend their position with a forest of paper that shows what was requested and so on.

At a technical level, it's blindingly successful, in my experience, at delivering pretty much what the customer wants when they want it. It helps concentrate the customers mind on what they really need and anything that's a nice to have or a personal desire tends to get sidelined.

iPhone 'Death Grip' effect is real, plastic cases don't help

The answer is iPhone 5

or at least a different set of problems, maybe, or it could be perfect, does that cover all bases?

Julian Assange™ applies to trademark himself

Can't we just

transport him to Australia as an undesirable alien.

Anon Mail commenters to stay anon

Where were the moderators?

One assumes that the the Daily Mail moderates their comments for libellous comments, don't they, or maybe they like to be sued as much as most of us like to see them sued.

WikiLeaks boss labels UK extradition order a 'rubber stamping process'

Why House Arrest & £200,000 bail

Come on Julian, you are a flight risk, if you can't see why you are as daft as you look.

You could always try and seek political asylum in the Australian embassy if you want.