Posts by Colin Millar 1241 publicly visible posts • joined 7 Jun 2007
"CCIA ..... Google, Microsoft and Facebook"
Bet all those freetards are wondering how they ended up in bed with that lot.
If we give away our cultural heritage and dumb all creativity down to the level of youtube just to allow a bunch of global corporates to keep their share prices up I wouldn't be a bit surprised.
Openness of architecture comes from the OS - not the form.
The form itself (tablet) is what doesn't lend itself to customization - tablets are pretty much an evolutionary dead end with no discernable development since the first iPad.
Surface is a marketing ploy of some kind to be sure - anyone suggesting that MS are taking on apple in their own backyard is delusional - there is nothing about any of this which suggests a shift of that nature. All of this is to support Win8 because the picture hasn't changed for MS.
The real issue is what will you do today with the OS - and that will be the question for MS for the foreseeable future.
"What the customer wanted was the power of Exchange with a Fisher-Price-and-Crayons "
Yeah - we get that a lot - "Just give me the idiots guide to this"
My usual response?
If you are an idiot you won't be able to do this.
If the customer doesn't want to have to think much about complex technical stuff I really don't blame them. However they need to make a choice - either pay someone who can do the complex tech stuff properly or live with the inevitable fuck-up.
I do wish that MS would stop bloody flip-flopping on direction though.
Working out where the risk is in government contracts is easy - it's on the taxpayer.
And if a commercial director can't work out why a supplier with contracts with 10 different departments might act as if they had contracts with 10 different departments then I can only guess we've returned to the days of Caligula and appointing horses (arses) as public officials.
Article isn't wrong - her lawyers use the term "private prosecution"
Maybe the CPS will wake up and kick Mr Plod into action once the prosecution is launched.
After all - if you can prosecute people for making jokes about airports you should presumably prosecute them for real crimes too.
That's not the point - it is about controlling your work and how it is used.
Imagine a picture you take being used to sell something abhorent to you - the EU say that is OK so long as the user can find a country to declare it orphan and pays a fee if and when you manage to establish rights to the work. Imagine Sam Nzima finding his picture of Hector Pieterson was being used to sell - well anything really - and all the user had to do was pay him a fee to keep on abusing this iconic work - the fact that the fee would be quite big wouldn't be the point.
And don't think for an instant that anything will be protected. I can see the declaration of orphan works becoming big business in some of the more recent additions to the EU.
This is an amazingly ignorant proposal even for the terminally out-of-touch-with-reality EU.
Basically piracy is OK as long as you are doing it on a multi-billion dollar scale and have an army of lobbyists in Washington and Brussels.
Maybe if they don't like the effect of Amazon's sales model then they shouldn't sell stuff to Amazon.
And where did this moral crusade against price-fixing come from all of a sudden? Its been standard practice in most industries for as long as I can remember - the thing that is striking about the Apple et al agency model is how open is is about what it is doing.
Is he on the same planet as the rest of us?
Ah - Dutch - yes - I understand now - too much time in the cafes in Amsterdam and probably still in that mellow "there - I've fixed all the worlds problems and invented world peace" frame of mind.
Poor old facebook forced to an IPO?
What utter garbage - Facebook went for IPO cos the people who own it wanted to grab some cash.
Underwriters hemmed in by secondary markets? Complete drivel. Secondary markets on a non-public company don't make the underwriters decision for him - and if it does he shouldn't be cleaning the toilets anywhere near Wall Street - in fact - if he is shown to have done that then the people suing him will almost certainly win. It would be like saying he based his price on his horoscope. There may even be a criminal offence in there somewhere.
The bottom line is the people FB needs to even start developing a real profit line are getting their numbers back telling them that it doesn't deliver what they need - its just a bunch of people wasting time on the web and you are better spending your - what was it now? - oh yes - "comparative pittance of $10m" on "blaring ads generically on TV and billboards". The market isn't going to play nice with people with a vague idea to get into "the social conversation between friends" and maybe somehow make some money in about a hundred years. I suppose when you can lose £50bn in a couple of weeks £10m might be a pittance but hoping people keep making multi-million dollar bets based on no evidence at all isn't a business model - it's a gambling addict's mantra.
Yes - we can all see you take a worldly view from your first post:-
"... nobody gives a rat's ass about your tiny little monarchy."
I expect that an inbred Tennessee redneck could just barely exceed the carefully thought out worldly view which you display with all the erudition of a brain dead catfish.
Alternatively - don't bother and save the fees - if you're buying someting cos it says cloud on the packaging then you ain't going to listen to anyone's advice - you'll just sit there burbling "shiny - woot" and drooling down your tie. Either way - your pissing your money down the drain.
One crat passing tax-payers money to the next crat leaving the first crat with a financial hole that yet another crat will have to fill - what kind of cnut dreamed up this sytstem? Oh yes - yet another crat. I wonder if any of these people actually ever think beyond the end of their own desk?
Big brother would be watching you but he's too busy sharpening his pencils.
If there is more money to be made in ripping clients off because they are clueless twonks who get hypnotised by buzzwords and who consider that financial strategy means looking at price tags and always picking the lowest one then guess what - that's where the salesmen and consultants will go.
If you want someone to sell you three world famous bridges before breakfast then they probably will.
Not just short memories but a complete inability to differentiate between fiscal policy and economic policy. From the 80s onwards we have used the former to cover up a complete absence of the latter - this has been true of every single Western nation. Keynes underlying point is that global economics is a matter of balance and that the never-never is something of a misnomer. It should probably be renamed the never-never-door-kicked-in-man-shouts-give-me-my-money-bitch-while-beating-you-bloody.
Keynes had more understanding of fiscal discipline in his little finger than those glorified book-keepers Walters/Greenspan et al had in their mantra addled heads. Read Keynes and Smith for economics, read Greenspan and Walters for book-cookery.
A tip for your sanity
If your hardware drivers need updating do it properly - download the driver, uninstall the hardware and reinstall pointing at the new driver. Never use any kind of inline update service. Networking controllers drivers are as notorious as graphics cards for not tolerating hot updating.
And remember - just because a newer driver is available doesn't mean you should install it. What was wrong with the old one?
As for .NET why bother. If you have .NET reliant apps and they work fine you don't need the update. Check the issues and download only if it fixes something you need fixing. If you don't know if you need .NET uninstall it. If something stops working check the documentation and get the right version.
If you are in business support you don't need MS to tell you that you have installed certain updates to certain machines as you will, of course, have your own logs and you would never, ever have installed untested patches to business critical machines.
> Why does it seem to be impossible for the IPO to take a reasonable position?
Because it is a government bureaucracy without effective political management. We will never know why quangos like the IPO adopt particular stances - it is usually to satisfy some powerful lobbying which they see as being in their interest. They are so far removed from political/public accountability that they see their interest as something distinct from the public interest. They are, however, exceedingly useful as political tools for ministers denying responsibility for anything.
Cameron and Whitehall - closet anarchists
As an unreconstructed old leftie I pretty much think that "property is theft" is a fairly safe bet - most physical property was nicked or strongarmed at least once at some time and the notion of exclusive ownership of land, major infrastructure and what should be the public domain is quite offensive.
The only exceptions, for me, would be the trivial amounts of tangible property which people could be said to actually earn by the sweat of their brow and stuff that came out of their own heads.
It is quite amazing that a UK government is actually supporting a position which, if succesful, would reduce the asset base and the turnover within our economy. Don't get me wrong - I was never a fan of the "if it moves - monetise it" school of economic growth - but to deliberately remove transactions where real value passes in one direction and real money passes in the other is and write-down (write-off?) the value held in major assets is lunacy at any time - never mind in the middle of a recession with another one on the way.
Replacing real economic activity with lolcats - actually sums up the economic astuteness of most western governments since the 80s. Now - where's my Chinese credit card?
And immediately the "cloud" loses its meaning.
If you have on-site and off-site copies the sensible way round is always going to be the off-site as the backup.
And then the "cloud" is shown up for exactly what it is - a marketing buzzword for a reinvented wheel.
If you thought that was pedantic:
The reason that "decimate" gets confused with "destroy" is that poorer quality dictionaries are loose with their synonyms - they just run a thesaurus scan and pick a few words. Now, "decimate" is perfectly legitimate as a thesaurus related word with "destroy" but you won't find a reputable dictionary giving it as a synonym.
"Destroy a significant proportion of" is the widest common modern definition.
In-house again - not a chance. The move in local government has been constant over the past 2 decades at least and there is no reason to think that there is any political will in any of the political groups to move back to large centralised infrastructure services. Quite simply - it would cost a huge amount to recentralise such a service once it has moved out and even if that kind of dosh were ever again available it would get spent on more high profile areas.
You need to remember that in politics just because something is broken doesn't mean it will get fixed.
Is just amazing. He can rant better than a fanbois on steroids. His specialities are being completely ignorant of whatever he is talking about and being 100% wrong about every "fact" he presents.. We should get him to do a guest spot on an apple/MS/linux story.
John Humphrys icon cos I can see the steam coming out of his ears whenevr he speaks - and thats a good trick on the radio.
They are not analysts - they are commission reapers. Their business model is recommending stuff that they get lots of kickback to flog. As part of this there is the necessity to release lots of crap newsletters written by the monkeys in the basement to give the suckers/customers the impression that they know stuff about stuff:
However it surprises them when
a) The market leader's grip loosens as the oppo ups their game and new products come to market
b) that EMEA trends below the US and ASIA on buying relatively new shiny despite this having been the way of the world since shiny took over from stuff and things as the consumer product of choice.
If that surprises them they're in for a shock when they find out that bricks don't fly.
"20 per cent time permitted for self-directed projects" for which Google would retain the rights
Are they really trying to say that they let completely unknown modules operate within a headline project like streetview?
The bosses either (a) knew what was happening or (b) they were incompetent. And you only have to look at streetview to see that (b) isn't likely.
Why is it that supposedly hard nosed tech types keep cleaving to these marketing mantras like "Moore's Law".
It's not a law cos it doesn't have a proof. Its not even a theorem because it isn't based on any prior established proofs. Moore himself called it a "trend" and its likely continuance for another decade a "prediction" but these days it is really just a marketing soundbite designed to promote the buying cycle.
As a statement it is tremendously inaccurate in its terms which relate to two variables in a multi-variable environment and it seems to assume "all other things being equal" without any real reason for making such an assumption - particularly as the original statement was made over 40 years ago and carried a caveat by the guy who actually said it.
I am constantly amazed at the ability of supposedly intelligent people to completely ignore actual evidence in favour of theologising their prejudices.
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