Posts by Jonathan Larmour

BBC: We'll give FREE subpar-Raspberry-Pis to a million Brit schoolkids

Be afraid, be very afraid

Microsoft is one of the sponsors. Make of that what you will...

'Inexperienced' RBS tech operative's blunder led to banking meltdown

Re: no backup of the schedule?

"and the teams with the knowledge to run these overnight processes manually may not necessarily have been on call or available."

That's because they'd been made redundant months before. So yes, very unavailable.

Windows 8: Not even Microsoft thinks businesses will use it

Re: Metro IS the problem

You mean a 3rd party app for which they get a 30% cut? Or, more likely IMO, have a "premium" version in their app store for people to pay to upgrade to.

MS innovations always FAILed anyway

Pretty much everything MS has done which has been presented as good innovation has been stolen, copied or acquired from other companies. DOS, Windows, Word, Exchange, Kinect, X-box, they are all derived from work developed externally to MS.

Equivalently, many of the "new ideas" which have been big failures have been the innovations developed in-house. And normally the louder the shouting, the worse the idea. MS has never been good at developing new tech. They have never really deserved their success, and most of their revenue came from ongoing dividends from past anti-competitive practices, on the back of the old decision to buy QDOS to put on the new IBM PC. It seems that finally, thank goodness, this is the beginning of the end and there will be space in the market for alternatives.

National Security Agency beefed Win 7 defenses

"Now" Red Hat?

Red Hat, and by now all other Linux distros have had work contributed by NSA for ages now - it's called SELinux. Lookie here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Selinux#Overview

But it's all open source, so rather hard to hide back doors. Any security-related bug could possibly be considered a deliberate attempt to allow circumvention.

Microsoft talks turkey in Brussels

@AC "Hrm" and @Chris Miller

AC: 'So the main problem is the bundling of IE in Windows, so MS removes IE from Windows and therefore removes the bundling component, and still the EU are not happy?'

Well, duh, how would anyone be able to install a browser if there wasn't one (or more) available to be installed from the media? It's a catch-22 - if you don't provide a browser, you can't install a browser. Unless you think most people should get by with the text mode FTP client.

Also @Chris Miller:

CM: 'I bet if Dell announced tomorrow that they will offer all their systems pre-installed with Fedora, the blogs would be full of Ubuntu enthusiasts wailing "it's not fair"!'

Uh, Dell sells systems pre-installed with Ubuntu:

http://www1.euro.dell.com/content/topics/topic.aspx/emea/segments/gen/client/en/ubuntu_landing?c=uk&l=en&s=dhs

and before that for quite a few years they could pre-install Red Hat Enterprise Linux (like commercial Fedora). So there's an existence proof that you're wrong.

Cambridge congestion charge plans shelved

@@Cambridge public transport sucks

I think the most you can say is that it does indeed depend where you live and work, but for *most* people, they suck. If your service is that frequent and cheap, you probably have the luxury of a council-subsidised service. I have a 15 minute walk to my nearest bus stop, which runs every half hour and takes a further half an hour to meander into the city centre. I'm all of 6 miles from Cambridge city.

And this for a mere £4.50 return. Stagecoach are a bunch of w*nkers.

But hooray for you - you have a brilliant bus service, probably largely subsidised by my council tax. Yeah, that's fair.

Save the BBC - by setting it free

Beeb keeps the bar high (and @Sean B)

From TFA: "Indeed, a lot of the BBC's content is damn good - something it suggests it couldn't achieve in the market. Given that point, it's odd that most of its best content sells well globally and also tends to dominate DVD sales charts in the UK."

Well yes, but clearly that's a drop in the ocean otherwise there would already be no need for the licence fee, silly! The price of innovation is frequent failure, and for every roaring success there's a dozen "Meh"s.

Sean Baggaley writes: "By all means sell off the distribution side if you absolutely must have your pound of flesh-- a TV channel is just one medium amongst many now"

But there's no point having production if you can't guarantee distribution. What channels would buy innovative content unless there was a good chance of it being a good earner? You'll get what some suit thinks is low-risk solid TV that advertisers will like, and bingo, you've just invented American TV.

As far as I'm concerned, the beeb does a good job, not just for its own decent content, but because it makes ITV/CH4/5 work harder to compete. If the Beeb went commercialised (whether privatised or whatever), and its quality dropped, you could expect ITV/CH4/5 to get even worse than they already are.

Anyone who has seen the free market in action in the form of TV in the USA will know that we need the BBC, and for it not to be commercialised.

Vista aligned with good IT practice

It'll be all you can buy

Dax was spot on. Although expanding on his/her point: Since MS is going to be taking away the option of buying XP soon, an IT department _has_ to roll out Vista as it will soon be all you can purchase. You can't be in a position of not being able to procure new PCs. It's not an endorsement of Vista; it's realism in the face of MS's forced upgrade strategy.