Posts by peter collard

I guess a lot of visitors to Spain will have to revise their wardrobes

Are the Spanish police going to clamp down on all dodgy T-shirts? I thought that was the point of having a T shirt.

Surely a plain T-shirt is a vest (in UK that's an undergarment to keep you warm).

I guess in times or hardship the judiciary has to make sure the lawyers have plenty to do.

What's Larry smoking?

Database performance is directly proportional to specints (assuming other bits as constants) - any database person would know that - but Larry has never been good at detail. Just look at the tables if you want proof.

So what Larry is really saying is that Oracle databases on Sun will never match those on IBM unless Larry cripples the IBM version.

Web site performance

What a surprise! As someone who spent 30 years in IT doing performance and tuning as a specialist it always amazed me. How many times did I hear the phrase "the new processors/disks are so fast we will never have performance issues again" - yet I was still in great demand. The problem I found was that the focus was always on new functionality (which always excludes performance measures), so none of the programmers every really understood how to make a system perform. As a database expert who saved one investment bank 2m GBP in 2 years on hardware upgrades it doesn't surprise me at all that the web sites crash.

Most IT companies are one trick ponies?

Oracle - database, Microsoft - Windows, IBM - Mainframes, Compaq (who? - taken over by HP) - PCs, Lotus - 123, and Google -search, the connections are endless.

All companies have a primary cash-cow and try to find a second - and keep trying with varying degrees of success - its been going on in IT for 40 years that I know of.

Google have taken an interesting approach of accepting that that is the case, and building on it. Instead of trying to find an alternative revenue stream, they are encouraging people to use their existing one by removing competition to that stream. You can coexist with Google quite easily if you don't compete with their search and ads, but if you do compete they will take action.

Trust Google to change the game - they have a history of it!

Unfair to Amazon

As someone who uses Perl with the HTML::Mason framework, I think you could reconsider your slating of Amazon. They provided the Mason project with a great deal of feedback and improvements - both to performance and more importantly stability.

One of the biggest benefits a large user can have is to improve stability in a product. They tend to stretch the product to its limits and beyond. Perhaps this is where the open source community should give credit and encouragement.

Remember Hubble before slagging off British tech

Perhaps before going on about American tech Lewis might like to remember Hubble - someone managed to forget to allow for the curvature of the mirror in their calculations and it took years and a couple of refurbs and zillions of dollars to get it to focus correctly!

And as for using Windows - big mistake - even Microsoft don't know how it works, so can't fix it. I'm sure the Russians, Chinese and probably the Indians have got it hacked by now - you don't need to blue screen it - just get it to chew up memory and go into page demand mode so it takes hours to launch a missile rather than seconds.

Long term play

Google have a very clever strategy - which Sun kicked off many years ago with "the network is the computer" - their goal is to get people using the internet more so they can make more money. If you have Android - you put your contacts into Google, Email into Google and calendar into Google - docs (notes) into Google and they all sync so you can access them from your desktop and even let your wife (aka Social Secretary) book social activities into your schedule. It works - its brill - and I don't have to worry about my phone crashing/ getting lost and loosing my contacts. The maps work - my car sat nav crashed - leaving me in the wilds of Yorkshire trying to find Croft racing circuit - the Android gps got me there without any difficulty. I've given up newspapers - the saving pays my 15 GBP/month contract and I don't have to get out of bed to read the news.

WD are a load of rubbish anyway.

I had a problem with a WD 500gb green drive and a particular motherboard (AMD 780G), reproduced it in both Linux and Windows XP and 7, proving it was doing blocking ios, and WD didn't care less. Bought a Samsung disk and problems went away. Don't buy WD!

Is this guy sponsored by the US?

Obviously!

When we buy US weapons the government simply exports britsh jobs to the US. If we want to make upgrades - guess who we have to go to, so its not just a one off purchase - its a commitment to spend for years to come. Guess who sets the price for the upgrades.

As regards the delay - has no software integration project ever been late? Maybe it might be better to ask has one ever been on time. Having worked in the City, where a lot of system integration goes on, I would say not.

Snipers rule ok

Perhaps you've not heard of Corporal Harrison who took out 2 Taliban on a machine gun post with his L115A3 british made sniper rifle at a range of 1.54 miles - with only 2 shots.

The gun is rated at 1100m+ for first shot kill and the ammo costs the same as a pint of beer.

As it weighs only 6.8kg I suspect its a lot more practical for rapid deployment

Netbook with Linux surely

The xbox has a fundamentally flawed os - I think I would want a bit of reliability so would be using Linux. You could always replace X with a Java windowing system to give a faster and more flexible interface - whoops - I've just invented Android.

Torys get it right for once

Seems they have listened to people who know how to deliver projects on time and on budget.

-Project size, complexity and risk correlations were known about in the 80's but no one bothered to read the research as it didn't look good on the CV.

- Why pay M$ when you can get what you need for free - and the support is better too. If you need features adding, a small amount of money spent on it works wonders - eg Amazon & HTML::Mason