Posts by Ian

Phorm gets £15m lifeline

Thank the Gods!

If Phorm had gone under who would have stolen and then sold all my browsing habits? How could I be targeted with a million adverts for something I'd already just bought?

I do wish poeple could see just how wonderful and important Phorm is to the future of the Interwebs. I'd hate to miss an advert that I might potentially be interested in. I would gladly have my every action and thought monitored and recorded, 24 hours a day, to make sure this never happened, if it were possible, Phorm is definitely a step in the right direction.

Blog homeopathy horror hammers hippy herbalists

@Marvin the Martian

re: 4 houses - if it's in the Grauniad it must have been on wikipedia somewhere - check their revision history.

ContactPoint goes live despite security fears

A possible (though unlikely) solution

With systems like this, where a large number of SMEs (with no vested interest) seem to think there is a security problem, and various consultants, suppliers and politicians (with a large financial or political vested interest) think there isn't, the consultants, suppliers and politicians should be forced to assume some liability. How comfortable would they be, if those claiming that there is no problem would have to pay £100,000 for each and every security breach? I would be interested to hear why, when they claim there is no worry of breach, why the wouldn't actually put their own money in it.

Fetish club forces ID scanner climbdown

Is there a box...

Is there a box I can tick, stating that I am quite comfortable with the current rates of crime, and do not require any further protection?

To be honest I can put with quite a bit more crime before I'll feel need to have every pub, club and shop in the country store my ID everytime I leave the house.

Could the powers that be actually just fuck off now? Things really are getting just plain stupid. This is meant to be a nice, free, liberal country isn't it?

'Lunatic' Smith doubles ID card costs for Mancunians

what's happening to this country?

On top of all these ID card shenanigans, I read this yesterday:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/wales/south_west/8033442.stm

So now it's less 'If you've got nothing to hide, you've nothing to fear' and more 'If you've got nothing to hide, and full documentary evidence of where you got any of the stuff you didn't think you needed to hide, you have nothing to fear'

It's just not cricket, I tell you!

UK.gov to spend £2bn on ISP tracking

They're all mad.

Given that New Labours has a little in joke of appointing increasinly insane Home Secrectaries, and that has led us to Jaqui, one wonders where they can go from here. You get the impression that in Jaqui's head she can always hear a constant whispering of terrorists making their plans right behind her, but when ever she turns around they are not there. Maybe only through the IMP can she finally stop the whispering voices.

How the government uses dirty data to legislate morality

If you appear really busy, maybe no one will notice you are completely clueless.

The governments eagerness to introduce as much legislation as possible and criminalise just about everything the Daily Mail has ever worried an old lady about is well demonstrated here: http://tinyurl.com/555lag (from the Telegraph) and here: http://tinyurl.com/3cfxqj (from the Independent).

Maybe they figure if they pass enough laws, some of them are bound to be right. Maybe it makes them feel important. Maybe they just want to appear busy. I wish they'd stop and maybe actually take notice of little things like facts and real scientific evidence (or even public opinion) before deciding what we can and can't do. I guess that's to much to ask.

Second rogue Facebook app bewilders users

@Brian Whittle

Is that a typo, or do you really /live/ the word 'Scoundrels'?

Land of cheese adopts internet download tax

But won't someone...

think of the (probably almost impotent) New York Conservative Party leaders...

I think Michael Long might actually be more worried about how much more his left-handed browsing habit is going to cost him, and he won't get such a kick from his viewing if it doesn't seem as vile and degrading as it use to. Nothing like government legitimisation to take the zing out of your sexual depravity.

Spinning the war on the UK's sex trade

But won't someone...

...think of the Children!

Sirius satellite radio squashes 6-year-old bug

@Richard

I do indeed live in the UK, I I don't have a TV. I rather enjoy the threatening letters, but for all their bluster they still haven't actually turned up yet. I think /all/ licensing bodies should take a similar line. There are thousands of things that require licenses that I don't possess. If they all wrote to me often enough I could probably sell the letters for bulk recycling each month and retire on the proceeds.

Beaten to it...

"...costs satellite television providers hundreds of millions of dollars per year", and that's just the people who are watching without paying. The really devious bastards are the who don't pay or watch!. They cost these providers hundreds of billions of real dollars each year, and due to an unfortunately loop-hole in the law can't even be prosecuted!

Brit couple divorce over Sadville infidelity

Can someone explain...

According to the story his avatar was having sex with a Sadville call girl.So there are prostitutes in Sadville? People pay their Linden dollars to have sex, and other people create an avatar and charge other avatars to have sex with them? Are there pimps too? Are we going to see stories of Avatars being traffic'd and forced into prostition?

I'm getting to old for this modern living malarky.

(Aliens because this is all pretty alien to me.)

What is a Linux distro worth?

@James

You are probably right, but how much of a Unix distro falls under the 'usual for Open Source' bracket? Much of the distro is a collection of 'standard' open source packages. Some will be well tested and documented, but many won't.

20 lines a day is, I think, rather out of date, considering modern development and test enviroments - but then I write c# in VS, not c++ in vi :)

(My project is, of course, not tested/doc'd, it's a hobby project and aimed at developers. Chances are the number of lines will not change much now, but the testing and documentation will. I guess in four years I'll still have 16,000 lines of code but it will have taken four years - but it still won't be worth $336,000)

Eh?

Now according to my calculator if 17 million lines of code takes 4500 man years, that's 3778 lines a year, or if a developer does 200 working days a year that's 19 lines a day. Or 204.5 million lines taking 59,389 man years gives 17.2 lines a day. Now I've known some pretty slow developers but if I were paying $75,000 a year and got 17.2 lines a day ($21 per line) I'd be mighty pissed off, and almost certainly out of business. I just checked my own little open source project. It's been going a year had some major re-writes in places, all the work done in the evening while maintaining a normal(ish) family life - comes to 16,000(ish) lines of code as it stands. So that's 4.2 man years and worth $336,000. There is something very wrong with either:

a) those figures

b) my calculator

c) me.

(my guess is mainly a) with a dose of c).

HBOS could shift 2,000 IT jobs to India

@Dave

My comments were all sarcastic. If I try to write (or speak) seriously about outsourcing or offshoring I tend to descend into incoherent angry rage rather quickly. On an individual business level I think it sucks, on a broader social/political level I think it really, really sucks. A lot.

Must stop typing now, blood beginning to boil......

Stop being so negative!

Why almost every IT person I know has a positive story about how outsourcing helped them! I'm sure they'll find their costs halved and the quality doubled in no time! All these nay sayers are just scared of change.

Why, in my last company we found that a team of 15 outsourced developers with two permanently embedded British technology consultants and two full term managers in this country could easily do half the work of a four man team over here! And it would only take three to four longer (as long as we took over and finished it)

It's a wonderful idea thats proved its worth time and time again!

Hoorah for the bold and insightful management of HBOS, showing us once again that British Banking (the envy of /all/ foreign countries) is in safe hands.

UK etailer punts bovine coitus thumb drive

But...Damnit!

Now I've been sneakily Rick-Rolled by The Register directing me to someone else's Rick-Roll.

Ooooh, that's a low trick.

Bastards.

Sats blunder firm sacked

Aren't SATs are all a bit pointless really...

When they just give away 'A' levels in the end anyway.

COBOL thwarts California's Governator

Am I missing something here...

I was taught COBOL in the late eighties, as I remember it is a procedural programming language, with some fairly simple data types and rather crude data access mechanisms. If someone who fancies themselves as a bit of programmer can't pick up the ropes well enough to be able to read and maintain a COBOL program, I'd seriously question their aptitude for the job. Can't the youngsters handle a bit of data access without SQL or a ORM framework? or can they not handle a system without a mouse, menus and intellisense? I don't want to knock COBOL experts, but it ain't rocket science. Next thing people will be telling me that no one can write decent assembler code any more.........oh, they can't?

Be a composer

dé ja vu

Sounds exactly like what we were promised 4GLs would bring us way back in the late 80's early 90's, only doing for XML/JSP what 4GLs did for SQL/Green screen forms. Build your own apps. in days! Do away with expensive development teams! Yea! - please excuse my cynicism, but I think we've seen this before.

Analysis, design, and never the twain shall meet

A little rum...

It seems a little rum to complain about 'Agilists' and then promote ideas recommended by arch-agilist Scott Ambler in his book:The Object Primer : Agile Model Driven Development..., where he recommends robustness diagrams and detailed use cases; and from what I've read Ivar Jacobson is now an 'Agilist'. Agile shouldn't be an excuse not to properly gather requirements, but rather provide tools for dealing with changing/evolving requirements.