Posts by Simon Greenwood

Microsoft vs. Google – the open source shame

What open source code?

I would like to see some proof of the open source code that Google has 'absorbed' without contributing back to it. Google has licenced products and turned them into their applications, has financed a large number of projects under their 'summer of code' and indeed has an open source website at http://code.google.com/oss.html. Google doesn't make everything it produces open source, and is perfectly in its rights to do so, and I think it's rather dangerous to imply that they use open source tools to make closed products without supporting the implication.

El Reg protests North Korean internet domain

Re: Evil

Jim - don't worry, there's enough spu.nk to go around.

Fujitsu Services seals £500m Reuters outsourcing gig

Replace 'Fujitsu' with almost any large outsourcer

In my experience anyway. The main issue generally seems to be that when customers buy the service, they really don't know what they are buying. It becomes evident a few days into the new regime. Need a password changing? You'll have to phone Kuala Lumpur, navigate through a six layer menu and then have to explain your requirement. Want to buy some new software? Create a requisition order, and you'll get a response in six weeks. Hardware? Add another month. There's little wonder that customers become dissatisfied, but in the end that's what they're paying for: globalisation and economies of scale are what makes outsourcing 'competitive'. The bottom line doesn't account for the time wasted in adopting these companies' methods.

Yes, I do have that t-shirt. Several of them.

IBM embraces - wtf - Sun's Solaris across x86 server line

Re: About time

Sun will be a hardware and a software company for the forseeable future. The T2 series processors will be a benchmark for enterprise computing when they hit the market and they will only run Solaris. That Solaris is now open source and freely available doesn't detract from Sun's software business - they make money through support and subscriptions.

Google gags Facebook code leaker

Soooo...

Content gets taken down from a Blogger site. Person then sets up *another* Blogger site with almost the same name... I don't think he's just here for the fishin'.

Unannounced Slingbox surfaces on the web

Original Slingbox on sale in Currys

At £99.99 it's worth considering, and that usually suggests that something new is due...

Porn company Perfect 10 sues Microsoft

Coming soon...

Perfect10 tries to sue Usenet. Oops, I'd better not say that, the fool will go looking for someone to take to court. Surely the rule is, never sue anyone with more lawyers than you?

Boots, House of Fraser not renewing IT director posts

Boots...

outsourced most of their ops to IBM three years ago. So they're probably just about to insource again.

Sacked PlusNet boss blasts BT sale 'stitch up'

Re: good ISPs

Sky used Easynet, which was why they bought the company a couple of years ago, primarily for their experience in unbundling. FYI.

VMware prepares Fusion dump for Mac crowd

I've been in the beta since it started

and Fusion knocks the socks off of Parallels. Parallels (and VirtualBox, an open source contender) hammer the processors when booting Windows, and indeed doing anything more complex than running Firefox, but VMWare just takes a share of the processor like any other application (about 20% on boot) and barely changes while running any application. Unity allows Windows apps to run on the OS X desktop with little perceivable hit to performance. To be honest I only use it for website compatibility testing but IE, Firefox and Opera all perform well. It's definitely worth $39.

UK watchdog calls for an end to 'piecemeal' e-voting trials

The mystery is how some of the trials were approved in the first place

Actually - no it isn't. The lowest bidder, a couple of weeks in Spain for someone in the council's electoral department and hey presto, something that runs Excel on Windows CE will be the arbiter of *your* democratic right.

Sealand seeks to cash in on online casino bonanza

Havenco are still in business

But will only consider large scale projects - they rent a fair proportion of Sealand as an offshore datacentre. This is probably more to do with them than the Bateses. As for banking, the Euro is a better looking prospect than the dollar these days anyway. I say good luck to the venture, as long as the owners aren't planning to visit the US any time soon.

NASA ponders manned near-Earth asteroid visit

Great solution

1. Name a Near Earth Object 'Al Queda'

2. Talk it up in speeches

3. Profit!

Techies sue Universal Media Group for overtime pay

Hard work is compensated - in stock

The Californian culture offers stock as an incentive to keep working stupid hours. In some places that's good, in many it's just another pile of toilet paper. I did some work there for a major networking company whose name escapes me about ten years ago the staff did all hours as standard in return for their stock vesting. Then again said company was (and still is) a good investment and it was something to work for. I think most people in IT would accept that there is a degree of overtime or out of hours working built in but that there should be some kind of compensation down the line. If that's not the case then there's always a market for decent skills.

The cold, cold heart of Web 2.0

@Steve Roper

Or as The Kaiser Chiefs said 'Everything is Average Nowadays' ;)

Recommendations speed a career? Discuss.

The function of the web (2.0 and otherwise) in the rapid development of new music and other forms of entertainment hadn't really occurred to me although it's patently obvious from the people flooding back into Manchester from the Arctic Monkeys' gig at Old Trafford on Sunday night. They are a case in point: less than two years from first single to headlining a two day festival via a Saturday night headliner at Glastonbury, but I don't think it can all be put down to the Internet. Twenty years ago the Monkeys would have probably just about graduated from the John Peel show to the early evening show on Radio 1. The cool kids at school would be into them but the breakthrough single might not have happened yet. They, like many of the other bands in the top 20 this week would be in that position, primarily due to the lack of exposure available.

Today, there's not just the web, but a surfeit of places for exposure: there's a festival every weekend in the summer and every festival is a televised or radio broadcast event. The phone companies all have their shows, and then the big ISPs have their events too. There are loads of 24 hour music TV stations on digital TV, plus the assorted community stations that fill space with music videos, and they all need content. Then there are the new radio stations, not least 6Music (a very good station, but I still blame them for making Keane big) and the changing demographic that has made us, the thirtysomethings with the money, bigger consumers of music than any adult generation before us. The providers have to feed that need, so they are compelled to follow the trends and throw money and bands at it in the hope that they stick. The Kaiser Chiefs lead to an invasion of West Yorkshire by labels in search of their own local band to sign in a way that hadn't been seen since punk. When the Arctic Monkeys made it, the cry will have gone up 'to Sheffield!' or at least 'find me our Arctic Monkeys!' and another cycle of bands get added to rosters, playlists, festivals and Myspace.

In essence, it's not just the web that motivates this rapid turnover, but the increased needs of the entertainment industry in general.

Revo Pico+ DAB radio

Re: Radio Alarm

I have a cheapy (£30) DAB radio that has an alarm function that I got from Maplin last year. There are a few on the market of varying utility, and if you search on 'dab radio alarm' you 'll find them, although you will also find one well known British brand name that it's probably a good idea not to but. Not naming any names.

Xansa falls to Steria for £472m

Simple

"We hire smart kids straight out of university in India, pay them £5 an hour, and have them managed by £60k a year ex-soldiers in Reading." Next!

BSkyB buys Amstrad

Yeah, but Amstrad...

Can we expect the next generation of set-top boxes to have built in Karaoke machines or e-Mailers? He's still got a lot of those in a warehouse somewhere.

Europe's floods and fires snapped from space

@Law: the canals worked in some places, not in others

The week after the really heavy rain that affected Doncaster and Hull (among other places), Salford Quays were full of rubbish that has been washed through the canals, including, oddly enough, hundreds of balls of various sizes. On the other hand, the areas around Doncaster flooded because streams and dykes that flowed into the Don, which is canalled and has some monumental flood defences, backed up because the Don couldn't take any more. You can't win, really.

Only 'major' EU countries to be in second iPhone rollout

Re: Bah

Or 'minor' = no telco that will bend over backwards for Apple's needs.

Web contract changes are just not cricket

The point is, they send you letters

Which is what TalkAmerica didn't do. If they had sent out an email saying 'we are changing our T&Cs, take a look at our website [link] for this information' they wouldn't have been in this trouble. As your bank sends you letters, you have every right not to accept their changes, primarily by not banking with them anymore.

Cat senses impending death

Senses dinner

Mmm... tasty granny's face.

Google in crusade against neckties

What about hair?

Everyone knows an executive needs good hair.

Got Sky but no computer? Book yourself a doctor's appointment

If I've got Sky but haven't got a PC

How am I reading this?

Jordan names sprog 'Princess Tiaamii'

It's good

but it's not Spudulike.

Google nabs aerial camera company

@kain preacher

When they win the wireless spectrum auction, of course. Then they will tap EVERYTHING.

BT to drag T-Mobile onto 21st Century

Great

Now my mobile provider has BT at the back end as well as my broadband provider. Again. We could have 100Mb ethernet to the doorstep if we wanted, like in Japan and South Korea, but noooo, BT don't wanna do that. 21CN is the network for the 21st century, or rather 2001.

AppleStore shut for 'update' - new kit coming?

Why yes

I really think Apple would be so stupid as to announce another version of the iPhone less than a month after the first one shipped. Do you people actually read what you're writing anymore?

A serious browser vulnerability, but whose?

What does the firefoxurl:// URI do exactly?

The only references I can find are to this vulnerability. A cursory test returns a warning that sources should be validated and there is a delay before a 'launch application' button in the dialogue ungreys itself. Running firefoxurl://notepad.exe and pressing 'Launch Application' generates a new tab with the warning dialogue. Not a good testing environment but it must take a bit of work to find these things out.

Privacy core to ID success, ICO warns

Not so unaware

As usual, the politicians just have to present the information. It isn't they who research the issue and offer the options, and those that do have a variety of vested interests for various reasons: the solution providers, whether they have a working solution or not, to keep their shareholders happy; the police, who have been so hypnotised by automation that they would like to apply it to all areas of their duty, and the unelected civil servants who want access to that data without the inconvenience of having to justify it to the public. In the meantime we are watched, gathered, sorted and filed in ways that we are not aware of, 'just in case'. Privacy has become an obstacle to be overcome to achieve ends, and one that just needs the occasional explosion to justify its circumnavigation.

Ebuyer.com runs on a Commodore 64

I am reminded

That back in the day Easynet's core routers were called things like Centipede and Galaxian, which made traceroutes slightly more interesting.

BT opens wallet for Brightview

Just as I signed up with madasafish

so that I didn't have to deal with BT directly. Two weeks for a phone line so far...

Catherine Tate to accompany Doctor Who

BBC playing golden handcuffs?

This smells like the kind of deal that ITV use to keep a hold of their talent, and then overexpose them in every vehicle going. Catherine Tate can do serious reasonably well but she's going to spend 13 weeks being Catherine Tate, and then turn out to be the Rani or something... hang on, there's someone at the door...

'al-Qaeda' puts on big shoes, red nose, takes custard pie

We're laughing but...

Practically every British airport has now banned cars from approaching the airport buildings, which creates another minor but significant irritation when travelling by air. These rules, which will be enforced by the same people who make you leave your bottle of water when you fly to Amsterdam, are where are freedom of movement are quietly being curtailed. If the bombers had thought, they would have tried to hit Glasgow Queen Street railway station and caused chaos on the entire UK train network, as unstable as it is, as every railway station would have to ban access to vehicles in the same way, even while the Home Secretary is standing up and saying that the terrorists won't affect our way of life.

Lawmakers worry over government network breaches

There's an obvious answer of course

Make it illegal to know about any security breaches in government systems. Job done.

Google abstains from blades, VMware and the rest of the hype

A redundant array of low cost computers

I'm not sure, but Yahoo could have been there first with their platform, which was huge clusters of BSD powered machines certainly eight years ago if not ten. A data-centric system with lots of parallel processing is the answer for any search engine, and getting the maximum amount of performance out of commonplace hardware seems to be the best way to get value for money. Google's approach has been pragmatic and revolutionary. Have a search for Google Filesystem, which is an entirely inhouse solution for the distributed storage of large amounts of data in a massively redundant way. This and the Googleplex are far more interesting to the engineering geek than the front end's voracious hoovering up of IP, and will probably be as important in the company's future development.

Apple buyout rumours circulate as iPhone launch nears

Sun? SGI? Cray? It's 1998 again!

The oldest merger stories going. The Snapple rumour dates back to the late 90s, when it just might have been possible that Sun might have benefitted from a true desktop presence. The current post-Sun incarnation of Cray is a niche supercomputer maker that doesn't have the funds to buy anything, and SGI makes incredible imaging software but has got well out of OS and hardware simply because it was easier for them to port to NT and Linux on Intel than continue developing Irix and their MIPS machines.

Post Office loses Amazon contract

I think the winner of the contract is fairly obvious

If you've had a large delivery from Amazon in the last year or so. The introduction of the new postal charges was probably the last straw for Amazon. RM's functions have been degraded considerably in the last couple of years.

My area was one of the first to go to the single daily delivery, probably because most of the population are pensioners, with weekday delivery coming at about 11am, yet at the same time the Saturday opening times of the collection office were shortened from 7am to 1pm to 7am to 11:30am, which is great way to treat your customers.

RM have lost this contract due to their complacency and also due to the amount of corruption in the delivery system in some areas - Amazon's management team's love of statistics is probably more telling of RM's performance than any public figures are. It has to be remembered that when Jeff Bezos was looking at setting up amazon.co.uk, he was looking around for a carrier for a delivery partnership and he couldn't believe that a carrier like the Royal Mail existed. The relationship has lasted about 10 years. These days he probably can't believe that a carrier like the Royal Mail exists.

Google cookie cuts $600m data center in Iowa

Distribution and support

Gabriele Bozzi is right - Google are looking to create a distributed system and in looking for locations need certain criteria: cheap land/property, ideally with government or state support, good connectivity and a work pool that is trainable or relocatable. In this respect they are no different from other IT companies that have truly globalised - AT&T come to mind, as do BT, both from personal experience. Google is different at the moment as it doesn't have the liaison issues that arise from such systems (yet), but I can see that as Google expands its product base, the 'cookie cutter' data centres will also become hosting centres, probably offering better deals than independent centres because they can be used for the thing that is at the centre of Google's business: the collection of information, in return for a payoff that will probably involve traversing voice menu systems in order to get a machine restarted...

In that light I could probably tell you where a data centre would be put in the UK, and would also tell you that it will be next door to an Amazon distribution centre. It's nothing new, just Google joining the big boys.

Minister: ID cards 'another Great British Institution'

There's more:

"Some UK nightclubs already use biometrics, taking fingerprints to stop under-aged patrons and persistent troublemakers. " Who gave them the right to take fingerprints? I didn't think anyone but the police could take your fingerprints for anything. I can see that it might be possible but I can't believe for a minute that a club would have bouncers taking dabs at midnight while a queue snaked around the block.

"We think checks that take four weeks today could take four days with an ID Card." Think? If I was paid to do a study I would have to do better than 'think'.

This is just another vague puff for the uncertain 'benefits' to you, the consumer, sorry, the citizen, get from the ID card. Mr Byrne is no political heavyweight and can be guaranteed to shill for whatever he's told to believe in.

US prof plans to send message back in time

It's obvious where he went wrong

DARPA: "After consideration, we can't give you an award for this research."

Prof: "How about if I need a giant ape assistant and a beautiful woman tied to a lab bench?"

DARPA: "Why didn't you say so? $30 million OK?"

Techies of Leeds unite

*NEXT* Wednesday

according to Yahoo. I might skate back home and check it out. Typical, just as I abandon Leeds for my Salford pied a terre during the week, something happens.

Fancy an earful? Click here for tech support

Sock puppet hardware store

To quote Mark E. Smith. It's probably a one man operation running a dropship service. It's the reason why I only deal with places like Dabs these days - a large number of equipment 'vendors' don't seem to comprehend the need for support or indeed coherent communication.

Jobs: one more thing... a browser war

It's all about Webkit

Webkit is a very neat way of implementing Web 2.0 applications. The most common use for it so far has been Dashboard in OS X, and I suspect that this is where Safari will be going on Windows. Take a step further from that and Webkit provides a portable API of the kind that Google has been talking about in the last month. Steve, as a showman, has to promote it in a desktop way though as that's the only way he can.

Safari itself is very underfunctional compared to Firefox 2, Opera 9, and even IE7. If Safari 3 has caught up with the features that make Firefox and Opera compelling, it will become a contender, but my feeling is that it will become an application platform that has an underused browser window but a ubiquitous rendering engine.

VMWare offers Windows-on-Mac tool at half price

Not an advert but...

Fusion is way ahead of Parallels in terms of playing nicely with OS X. I've been using the beta and it's very flexible and will run Windows, Linux or Solaris x86 out of the box. Parallels is very resource hungry in comparison too.

Don't be in a hurry to buy it though; as usual the company haven't updated their website yet.

Friction.tv: a virtual soapbox for the online masses

Just what the world needs

The video version of the BBC's Have Your Say forums (AKA SpEek YoR BraYnz). The site will be full of how gypsies affect house prices before you know it.

Crocodile tears for under-fire Microsoft MVP

Just take it out of Express, end of story

The bluster coming from MS is clumsy, made more so by the events that preceded it, so it makes the company look stupid. However, it makes Mr Cansdale look silly when it transpires that his tool depends on a hack to extend the capabilities of a free version of the software and that this is the point that he's digging his heels in for.

I'm not the first person to say this, but maybe he could rewrite the tool for Eclipse and advise people who use the free Visual Studio Express to use that instead, then Microsoft will be mollified, if not happy, and Express users will have a better, non-crippled IDE.

So what's in a URL? The Reg URL?

To quote another (nearly) former tech newsletter

Nasty, British and short - stay with the co.uk.

BT declares ceasefire in broadband speed wars

TINA

Phil Thompson asks where the startups are, and the answer is, no-one can afford the investment required to create a competing infrastructure, as has been the case since the UK needed a public data network. Virgin/NTL have inherited a structure that has been growing for 25 years through mergers and takeovers and it is still nowhere near as complete as BT's, which has of course had the best part of a hundred years to evolve. The only ISP to my knowledge to actively exploit the unbundling of the local loop has been Easynet in parts of London, and that was due in part to a relationship with Cable London which may or may not still exist. There are all sorts of semi-finished and unfinished projects around the country - a company whose name escapes me now laid fibre around Leeds and down the M1 a few years ago, but I can't find any evidence of whether they're still trading.

I have worked in the past for an US ISP-cum phone provider who could offer vast transatlantic bandwidth and international voice rates as a tier one provider but who got absorbed into one or other of the US phone companies and just disappeared off the public map as their parent company had another tier one provider in London all ready. In short, unless someone can pony up the money to create an alternative national data backbone and deliver it to the doorstep, There Is No Alternative. It's a perennial complaint, and one that won't end until BT itself is unbundled.