Posts by Reg Torso

Police Scotland will have direct access to disabled parking badge database

Sorry, rant warning...

As a long time victim^H^H^H^H^H^H user of the blue badge scheme for one of our children I can agree that it is pretty badly broken and abused. As others have said, designated parking bays get abused by people with genuine badges who are not entitled to use them, dodgy characters with fake badges (I’ve seen a few, just get a colour copy and a laminator, and you can’t tell the difference through a windscreen unless you know what a real one looks like, which only genuine holders seem to be able to do), and the just plainly brazen gits who park in a disabled bay with no badge because they will “only be 5 minutes” or because it’s after 6.30, so disabled people won’t be out that late will they, and anyway everyone’s doing it and there’s nobody to check at this time of day.

The effect is that genuine holders are suspected and resented and ‘socially policed’. Being asked ‘are you disabled’ is fine - I ask other users if they are and am polite and honest when I am asked. To be told “oi, you’re not disabled” – well, things get nasty, and I give worse than I get.

Some other gripes:

Only being entitled to use a disabled badge and park without charge if you use a marked bay. If all the marked bays are taken, you have to pay, despite having a blue badge. Sorry, it’s too crowded for you to be disabled today, we’re already up to quota.

The bureaucracy to get and retain blue badge is flaky and sloooowwww. In our local authority getting a renewal has to be planned months in advance and chased up to prevent it from stalling or getting lost.

And a special mention for the arrangements at a well known hospital (think Jimmy Saville) where the ‘car park’ is a partially unsurfaced bomb site and the disabled bays are further from the building than the normal bays. You can park without charge, but to get out of the place on a free ticket you have to take your blue badge to the parking admin desk on the other side of the site (reminder: blue badges are for disabled people) and yet somehow simultaneously display it on your vehicle at all times. “Yes, we know it’s crazy, but there’s nothing we can do”.

Infosec bods rate app languages; find Java 'king', put PHP in bin

PHP is filth

After many years of working with most of the mainstream languages (I'm closer to retirement than graduation) before I encountered PHP I found it depressingly awful, but never spent the time explaining why. But then I found that others have:

http://eev.ee/blog/2012/04/09/php-a-fractal-of-bad-design/

How Music Got Free and Creatocracy

Suffering artists

I do get a bit weary of the cry that artists are exploited by the system (of whichever kind). I mostly don't care.

The problem with 'artists' is that they think they are owed a living for their art. Nope. The lesson for the artist who can't sell in a crowded market with massive oversupply and generally lousy quality is that the world doesn't need what you make.

Go get a job.

Ex-Windows designer: Ballmer was dogmatic, Sinofsky's bonkers, and WinPho needs to change

Re: Sounds like a Mental Health Institution

There's as much crap in OSS as in commercial software, but for different reasons. Most software isn't good, merely good enough. Commercial software must be good enough for someone to buy. OSS projects must be good enough to do whatever their author needed them to do.

The one difference (the original point here) was that the commercial world may kill off perfectly 'good' (and in some cases really excellent) software for non-technical reasons without giving users the opportunity to decide what was crap and what was good.

Re: Sounds like a Mental Health Institution

As someone who was surprised to wake up one morning and find that I'd become an old git (at least in tech terms) I have to break it to you that that's the way the world works. I've put heart and brains into products for half a dozen companies over the last 20 years, and the lesson I've drawn is that it will all get wasted.

That's the nature of commercial software. Software companies aren't in business to make software, they are in business to make *money*.

That's one reason why open-source projects attract devs who value their work for its own sake rather than for how it can be 'monetized', because it won't fall victim to this kind of perverse decision.

WORLD+DOG line up to SLAM Google after anti-trust case unveiled

What's the evidence of abuse?

I have to say I simply don't get it. What does Google do that harms me as a user? I'm not saying I love Google unconditionally, and if they are 'doing evil' then I'm open to evidence.

And I say this as someone who bitterly resents the way Microsoft has forced me to buy their products by virtue of the fact that Windows was bundled with PCs --- yes you could buy without but you were still paying the MS tax.

When MS used IE to distort the interoperability of the web we started to come close to an MS monoculture that would have required me to continue to pay that tax, both as a device user and service provider thanks to proprietary tech like IIS, Silverlight, MSWord etc. etc.

But when I sit at my computer or use my phone I don't feel I have no option but to use Google for search, or maps, or mail or whatever. I can switch away if I choose without penalty and use interoperable formats and protocols and this is in large part due to Google investing in tech that countered the MS monoculture (sponsoring Firefox, developing Chrome etc).

MS always used to say their critics were simply sore losers, and I'm sure that was true for some cases, but with Google's critics I really only can see sore losers complaining. No?