Posts by Matt 356 publicly visible posts • joined 6 Jun 2007
Inappropriate calls are only a problem if they don't provide enough staff, which is probably what's at the bottom of this. They've massaged the figures up as high as they dare to try and cut costs, or have an excuse when they don't do their job.
In my experience the police aren't that interested in solving or even attending crime scenes which only effect non-celebs or can't be spun as terrorism.
I was thinking along the lines of real mice and then thought of the Python sketch where he use the mice in a Xylophone.
As for the first poster. My cats tend to play with the mice a bit first, which mostly leads to it's death. They will continue playing with it after it's died or even play with one another cat has killed.
The evil Woolies, naming a bed after a character no-one I asked had ever heard of! They must pay.
I didn't realise that paedophiles had their own community. I thought the truth of the matter was that most abuse went on amongst friends and family (which is what happens in the book if Wiki is to be believed)..
Perhaps they should re-name their web site to "Parents in search of the moral high ground to make up for the fact that they don't spend time with their kids" or something. Perhaps a little harsh?
On the other hand it's a pretty crappy name for a bed, or anything else for that matter.
While we're banning stuff, could we get rid of Barney the Dinosaur? It's enough to keep you up at night.... brrrrrr.......
I'm not sure I want to outlaw gambling but I am fed-up with the prices in the shops and my savings being effected by a bunch of ill-educated, responsibility shy, rich kids.
If they want to play, give them there own space but we need to insulate the real world from all of this nonsense.
To paraphrase Yes Minister, there are two kinds of potential borrowers, those who can pay their bills and those who can't.
Now, I feel better!
Nice article and the bit about Excel certainly matches with my experience in banks. Of course you also get the "my report doesn't work due to permissions problems.", to which I reply what permissions do you think you need?" to which I get "it's needed by the board NOW, so give me admin rights". When I protest I just get over-ruled............
I beg to differ. Sybase and DB2 are, in my opinion, superior products. Of course they're not Open Source.
It's true that at the high end MySQL can't compete with them but it's also true that a lot of people don't need that kind of high end performance or some of the more sophisticated Replication offered by Sybase.
One final point: Following this article I will re-evaluate my use of MySQL and see if it makes more sense to use Postgress.
More accurate strikes... hmmmmm. Well it'd be an improvement if the yanks correctly identified the continent, let alone a particular vehicle :-)
I'm not sure about surgical strikes though. Even a those speeds my car would have moved before they got the "shot" arrived and I may have stopped at lights if they try and predict my movement. Might also prove problematic if I'm not in line of sight. Or are you saying they can be guided? In which case they may be prone to jamming and heat problems.
On the subject of surgical strikes, wouldn't something hitting a car at Mach 5 be likely to pass through and hit other objects or spread pieces of car at high velocity? Obviously if the car was a Toyota pick-up you'd be OK but for normal cars it could be a problem.
On a more serious note. Isn't one of the problems of modern warfare that the country being attacked feels they can't compete with "cowards" attacking them from afar, so they resort to suicide bombing and so on? Just a thought......
I'm not sure we got a worse deal. I can play all my PS2 games (well the three I currently want to) and they run without any problems. The up-scaling doesn't make a great deal of difference but they run slightly better than on my PS2 and load times are better.
It's trivial to change the HDD, although 60GB is fine for me.
I agree that I don't want to be screwed in order to support other users (like I am for PC prices) but I can't see that I am here.
I've moved to using CSS as much as possible but it certainly doesn't separate semantics in any meaningful way. It could do if browsers were uniform in their implementation of the standard and if developers used it properly but neither of these seem to happen.
By the time you've nested your divs (or whatever other cheats you've used) to get, for example, equal length columns you've polluted your HTML with presentation directives to my way of thinking.
With regard to <em> my English teacher told me that resorting to bold or italics is a sign of poor grammar. Sadly I have to agree with her.
I thought the problem was what came out of the cows backside, as well as how any resulting pat decomposed.
I'd also head that mixing garlic wit the food reduced the amount of methane.
Just had a Viz moment: "Save money by giving cows a fag to smoke. Burns off methane and if the discharge is big enough you get an instant steak!"
Well, it's just a thought......
Other people seem to have had more luck over-clocking than you. I can't see why though.
I understand that most desktop applications don't benefit from multi cores due to their single threaded nature. I'd be interested to know if that was more true on Windows than Linux (without starting a fight :) ).
I'd also be interested to see benchmarks for something like Sybase or DB2 which are multi-threaded and scale well on four or more physical CPUs. Do you get better transaction throughput with, let's say 200 users with AMD's latest and greatest or are you better off with Intel's solution?
I use MySQL quite a lot and hope Sun look after it properly, especially keeping a reasonable parity with the dual licenses in terms of functionality and fixes.
I don't think Oracle will lose too much sleep as MySQL isn't really a competitor once you get a reasonably high transaction rate. On the other hand a lot of companies need less database power than they think!
Forgot to mention:
Before people from the UK get on their high horses about stupid laws, look at British licensing laws. In France you can get a beer when you want without Nanny needing to tell you how much is OK and somehow they seem to have less of a problem with drunks.
For those from the US, where do I start? Gun laws, health care, counting votes (or more to the point not), locking people up without trial, thinking that US law applies outside of the US, OJ Simpson trial, the fuss at what's-her-name Jackson showing her tit compared to the violent films Hollywood produces..........
It feels uncomfortable to defend the French, but at least attack them for something they deserve, like the quality of service you get in your average garage or the crappy food you get by the beach these days.
I think their towns certainly benefit from it, a much nicer place to be (ooh it hurts to say that).
To those who ask "why the French?". Well Belgium has some interesting laws too, most of which are derived from Napoleonic law.
So, for instance, it's illegal to dump in the market, so no selling at less than cost price. No phone give-away when you buy a mobile subscription etc.
Personally I admire the French for being different, it's about time the UK found an identity and stopped being a little America.
Isn't this like saying that out of all the crappy projects this is one of the least crappy?
I should also point out that Customs has had IT (or ADP to use it's old name) since the 60s. Their IT was rarely great, but it's interesting that the quality managed to drop in direct comparison to the amount of involvement of outside companies.
Of course a secure OS can be written. Any experienced programmer could do it. It may not be rich in functionality, it may hardly do anything at all, but it can be done.
The problem is that people are more interested in having the latest rather than the most secure, so security is sacrificed for new features. I'm not saying this is necessarily wrong but it is the way of the world.
Look at the Internet, it's plainly stupid for anyone serious about security to connect to the Internet but the banks do it anyway. They're more worried about being left behind by not offering a nice shiny web site than in protecting themselves and my money!
As of MACs,I've never owned one but every MAC user I've spoken to (the majority not being IT people) love it, don't have security problems and tell me things "just work" compared to Windows. Of course they may get a rude awakening!!!
I would be upset if someone was accused of making nuisance calls and their handset blocked without it being proven. On the other hand if the person receiving the nuisance calls blocked the senders number that's down to them, but doesn't fit what's being done here.
For the other chap who points out that they were already shut down once so must be illegal mafia types:
It seems the Russian government is quite happy with them now and there are loads of US companies that have been shut down and restarted, or been fined for crooked dealings like Microsoft.
Finally, "no gigs without CD sales". What a load of tosh. Musicians have performed throughout history, long before CDs, tapes or LPs. There would be less money for the recording companies, collection agencies and some musicians and yes some may give up the job but others would fill the gap.
I think there are more issues than you've picked up here:
1. Who gave anyone but my elected government the right to decide which site I may or may not see.
2. If these people are really mafia how is it that the Russian government hasn't acted as they've demonstrated that they're prepared to act in other cases. Last time I was in Russia it seemed that they were as law abiding as most other countries.
There were some Irish chaps in Guildford who were "known" criminals until it turned out they weren't.
Perhaps they are criminals, all I'm saying is that nothing has been proven, which is all you can say about the RIAA too :-)
If you need to read data fast then your DB's cache is probably doing a very good job for you and this technology won't help.
Generally the problem is with witting being the bottleneck. I haven't checked the link given by another poster but I read somewhere else that these devices aren't very good at concurrent random writes.
The BBC didn't need to spend more to make it work on other systems, if it had been built in from the beginning.
This is about the BBC illegally pushing Microsoft's products. Windows may be the majority but things like this prevent any new comer from competing, which in the long,g term push up my costs.
As for the nutter who posted:
"Having travelled the globe several times - I can confidently say that the quality of the BBC output ranks head and shoulders above any other media corporation on the planet and is something the UK should be proud of rather than taking every possible opportunity to bite chunks out of it."
I've travelled the world too, and what you say may have been true twenty five years ago, but isn't any more (with the exception of the US). The quality of journalism and shows has steadily fallen to the point where of embarrassment!
To be honest I'm a bit sick of the UK government acting as the PR department for Microsoft.
Course work should be devised so it's achievable via Linux, Apple or Microsoft. I teach IT courses and we always produce versions for at least Linux and Microsoft so it's achievable and not to difficult.
As for using Access, I'm lost for words. Why not use MySQL (if price is a problem) or Sybase, DB2 or Oracle with Java or C++. These are real world products, Access is rarely used by the IT department.
Last week my nephew told me he's been taught at school that MS Excel is a database...........
I agree, this guy was driving safely. I know it's hard for people to believe (well for those in the UK), but going above 70mph is not the work of the devil and you don't instantly die.
Let me modify that a bit, his last dash around the cars at 50 was a bit dubious but not enough to cause a fuss.
On the other hand I've seen the British police flash by me while I was doing 70 on a very busy stretch of motorway. Now that's dangerous.
I agree that Web 2's idea that everyone is a journalist is, well optimistic! I also agree that the original article Lester commented on was an example of where Web 2 leads you.
However, Lester's article itself wasn't really a shining example of good non-Web 2 journalism either. On the other hand he's got it out of his system now and is probably in the pub as we speak.
Couldn't agree more. In fact, the worst offenders are those driving screaming kids around. They're so busy trying to stop them fighting they seem to have trouble knowing which lane to be in.
There seems to be very little evidence that driving while talking on a phone is any worse then driving while talking to a passenger in the back seat.
If the person doing the talking has the sense to only be dealing with a short call and giving the driving part priority then there's little risk of an accident.
The problem comes when people try and conduct business while driving or anything else which requires a lot of thought. However this seems to be pretty much the same regardless of whether there's a phone involved, or what kind it is.
On the other hand they should ban any advert that may be seen by a driver. The whole point of an advert is to catch your attention, which isn't good when you're supposed to be driving.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
