Posts by Jock Busuttil

Radiohead lets fans price new CD

Average payment?

Musical zealotry aside, I wonder how much people will pay on average when given the choice? An uncharitable view of human nature would seem to dictate that people will pay as little as possible in this situation, so we'd expect the average to tend towards £0.01.

However, statistical noise (no pun intended) will certainly increase the average, so how much greater than £0.01 will the average amount paid work out as? From a purely commercial point of view, this figure would be of interest to any other band or organisation thinking of adopting a similar distribution model.

Jock

Original thinking in a derivatives market

Great article - more like this please

Dominic - thanks for an engaging article. It's getting increasingly rare for journalists to sit down and explain current affairs to an uninitiated audience (speaking for myself, at any rate), AND in terms that the audience can relate to.

It's clear from the quality and quantity of comments above that this kind of article provokes sensible and intelligent discussion - more of this please El Reg!

Jock

US boffins demo steampunk artificial arm

Re: The idiocy of a bunsen of boffins

Given the powered limbs still need to be attached to the recipient's body somewhere, surely the ability to lift vast weights would be tempered slightly by the tendency for remaining organic parts to, umm, be crushed by large weights? Either that or the robotic limb would keep falling off, and that would just be embarrassing.

Motorbike crash man fails to notice loss of leg

Not noticing

Presumably he might have twigged something was afoot (or not - sorry) by his inability either to apply the back brake, or change gears...

Beeb exterminates Tomorrow's World rumours

Look Around You

I distinctly remember believing that the Tomorrow's World parody "Look Around You" was in fact a random repeat of the show it was spoofing. The point at which they conducted an experiment by sticking wires into someone's head began to raise doubts in my mind.

Speeding up the net - is it possible?

WAN Acceleration

While there is nothing inherently wrong with what Quocirca has published in their report - their recommendations are all common-sense, they do neglect to explore the category of vendors who concern themselves with WAN Optimisation and / or Traffic Management.

These vendors have typically evolved from providing relatively 'dumb' load balancers to much more application and network-aware management devices - think of the evolution in intelligence from network hub to switch to load balancer to application traffic manager and you're getting there. For an overview of the playing field today, Gartner provides the following handy report: http://mediaproducts.gartner.com/reprints/f5networks/vol2/article1/article1.html

The benefit for the consumers of these vendors' products is essentially one of making more efficient use of the network, hardware and software already in place, with the associated cost savings that this approach yields. As you'd expect, the vast majority of these vendors originate from the US, however there is at least one British success story - Zeus Technology (http://www.zeus.com). Zeus has taken a different approach to all the other vendors by decoupling the clever software required to optimise the application traffic from the network hardware. They now offer the choice of software, hardware appliance and even VMware virtual machines for a truly hardware-independent approach.

If nothing else, it's worth taking a look at this plucky and innovative British software company successfully marking out its territory against larger US competitors.

Jock Busuttil

Product Manager (formerly of Zeus Technology)