Posts by adrianww

Good grief...

...the more I read the comments on these kind of articles on El Reg (and elsewhere), the more I hope that climate change takes a massive turn for the worse and wipes most of the human race off the face of the planet.

Judging by the closed-minded, blinkered and downright unscientific attitudes often demonstrated by many of the commentards on both sides of this debate (and others) such a cataclysm is long overdue.

The great scientists, engineers and mathematicians of the past are probably all hitting around 1,000 RPM in their assorted graves.

Perhaps...

...if some of these companies put as much time and effort into developing decent products that people actually wanted to buy as they do in chasing real (or suspected) patent infringement, they wouldn't actually have to engage in patent-trolling whoever happens to be doing better than they are in the market at the moment.

Not that I'm saying that Apple (or anyone else for that matter) is squeaky clean in all this - things are never that simple - but the US Patent/IP protection system does seem to be fairly broken and open to gaming left, right and centre. And it looks like most of the rest of the Western world is hell-bent on going the same way.

What's that old quote? "First shoot all the (patent) lawyers..."

Several people...

...mentioning the (bloody awful) summary care records system here. And it does, indeed, have its issues and I must get around to opting out of it, however this doesn't necessarily mean that he used the summary cockup system to get the info. It could have come from whichever local patient management system was being used.

Or did the article mention that he used the SPINE/whatever they're calling it this week to get the info? (Apologies to all if it did, but it's well on the way to beer o' clock here and I'm tired...)

A touch of the Benny Hill?

Does anyone else think that the clip of the guys building the little flying boats should have Yakety Sax as its soundtrack?

But what about...

...any poor clowns who end up running away from home and joining a band of travelling accountants instead. That's even more scary.

Oh, it is to laugh...

Having very recently moved house, I've just checked the local exchange details in my new neck of the (back)woods and we're supposed to have around 1001 residential subscribers and 22 business/commercial.

Which basically means I'd have to go round and persuade everyone with a phone line to shout out for faster broadband just to make the entry requirement. Whether they currently have (or want or even understand) broadband or not.

Hmmmm...unlikely to get far with that plan I reckon.

Still, I'm not going to whinge about it 'cos I'm fairly happy with the stable 3-4M that I'm now getting. The old house was lucky to see 750-1250k. (Although, bizarrely, it seems that my old exchange actually has more subscribers - you'll only need to persuade about 3/4 of the local households there. Yeah, right...)

There are already cars with HUDs

Well, of a sort. A few years ago I was driving around Las Vegas in a Pontiac Grand Am hire car. One of the fun options fitted to this big chunk of metal (aside from a stonkingly big V8 engine) was a projected HUD that showed stuff like your current speed, which gear you were in and one or two other things (if I remember rightly). The display was projected out of a dark recess on the top of the instrument binnacle and appeared on the bottom edge of the windscreen. Legibility was good even in daylight and the display was well-positioned - high enough to be easily seen, but low enough not to obscure the view ahead. At night it was great. There was even an option to turn off the internal instrument lighting and use the HUD only, which was great for those Secret-Agent-Man style cruises down the Strip.

I don't know whether Pontiac still offer than option on their cars, but they should. It was fun!

Let's face it...

...what with the ludicrous price of tickets (already mentioned), the preponderance of irritating little chavs talking, kicking the back of your seat or spilling drinks down your back (already mentioned) and the godawful audio experience (usually caused by the whole thing being turned up to 11 because of all the racket from the aforementioned chavs et al), you've got to be some kind of masochistic lunatic to want to go anywhere near the cinema nowadays. Either that or an absolute, total and utter film buff who just adores the cinema and wants to see everything on the big screen in spite of the dank horror of the modern multi-screen fleapit.

And now they want to start confiscating expensive items of electronic equipment while you're in there as well? Even possibly mobile phones (such as the one that I always carry, that is kept beside my bed while I sleep and which is almost always turned on in case of emergency calls from my family)?

Er, no thanks chaps. Even if I hadn't already realised that the cinema was a complete waste of time and money nowadays, this kind of thing would have nailed the coffin shut as far as I was concerned.

As everyone else seems to be saying...

...the advertising of broadband speeds and services needs cleaning up across the board. They're all a bunch of lying poltroons taking advantage of what is, largely, a technically naive user base. Most ordinary punters in the UK wouldn't really understand the first thing about broadband speeds if you hit them with a stick, so misleading advertising is even more of an issue.

It's also really annoying to see this kind of advertising when you happen to live in a rural area where even 1 meg (or half a meg) is good going - assuming that you can get any kind of broadband service at all. Especially when you know full well that none of the companies involved in this particular circle jerk are ever going to want to provide any kind of better service ("oh no, we can't do that, it wouldn't be economical sir") and yet, at the same time, you have thick-headed and cloth-eared Government ministers wanting more and more unavoidable, official paperwork completing online (with no offline alternative) while the corporate world just blithely assumes that absolutely everybody has at least a 10 meg service straight into a major colo somewhere.

Insufferable tossers the lot of 'em.

Sorry, maybe it's just me...

...but this article just reads like a combination of Intel/McAfee PR-ish fluff (which may or may not be entirely true) and statements of the bleedin' obvious - or at least readily predictable.

Am I missing something or what?

Wow!

That oil spill would probably have reached my house. Well, so long as there was enough of the stuff to make the spill a good few hundred feet deep - we have a lovely view over (and, more importantly, down) towards the Boro area in the far distance. In fact, it used to be quite striking in the evenings if the various chemical plants and refineries were burning stuff off from their assorted chimneys and flare stacks.

For some reason, it usually made me think of the land of <Ian McKellen>Morrrr-dorrrrrr</Ian McKellen>.

Are we dealing with two slightly different situations here?

Given the absence of any charges, I think that the media publishing pictures in the second case described here is a bit out of order - even if faces were obscured. However, it seems to me that's more of a media issue than a Police one. I don't have any problem with the media being given access to Police operations (quis custodiet and all that) but if they take photographs of someone who isn't subsequently charged then I don't think those pictures should be published at all.

Meanwhile, the ASBO case could be very different - IF it is the case that the pictures were published after the ASBO had been granted. And the critical word there is the last one - "granted".

Whether you love 'em or loathe 'em, the Police can't just pull an ASBO out of their collective backsides. While there may not be a trial as most people think of one, ASBOs are still granted by the Courts. Although it is a civil process rather than a criminal one, the applicant still has to prove (to a standard that is essentially the same as that in a criminal action) that the person upon whom the ASBO is to be served has been guilty of anti-social behaviour and that an ASBO is an appropriate way to deal with the matter. Generally speaking, ASBO applications tend to receive careful consideration since they can be quite complex (sometimes involving hundreds of pages of statements and other evidence that must all be considered) and everyone in the Court tends to be aware of the Human Rights implications involved.

If the ASBO is then granted, it isn't unheard of for those involved to have their picture(s) published. That's part of the price you pay for doing the stuff that landed you with the ASBO in the first place.

In fact, given some of the - shall we say - "interesting" ASBO cases that the more muck-raking elements of the press sometimes rant about ("OAP given ASBO for some minor thing or other" etc.) I often wonder just how much of the story they have left out in order to make their political point du jour.

Of course, whether ASBOs actually work is a different question and I'm not even going to get started on that one...

I didn't know...

...that they now preferred to be called the Chartered Institute for IT (or whatever).

Unfortunately, I can't resist the temptation to shorten that to ChIIT (pronounced "Shee-it!" in the best tradition of Dodge-Charger-driving redneck good ol' boys everywhere). Or something like that anyway.

Ah...

...how fondly I remember that fresh flush of youth when, armed with a newly-minted degree that granted me full exemption from any BCS membership examination nonsense, I thought that joining up and being all chartered and MBCS-ish might be a good idea.

However, during the course of my fun and (largely) carefree postgrad days, I soon realised that membership of the IEEE and ACM were much more useful: better magazines; more respected journals and much higher potential for racking up a few peer-reviewed conference publications (and jetting off on international jollies as a result).

Of course, when I finally left the ivory tower, tempted out by filthy commercial lucre, I discovered that none of these august institutions counted for much at all in the "real" world. So I let the old IEEE and ACM memberships lapse and have been determinedly unattached (at least as far as professional associations are concerned) ever since. And, funnily enough, it never did me any harm at all in my career - such things were never mentioned by anyone, at interview or anywhere else, as far as I can recall.

Nowadays, when the only time I ever hear about the BCS is when they seem to be going flat out to make themselves look like squabbling schoolchildren or emphasizing their apparent total detachment from what actually happens in the commercial IT world, I'm rather glad that that first flush of youth was so fleeting and didn't lead anywhere. I've probably saved myself quite a few beer tokens over the years...

Yawn...

...is anyone else getting a bit tired of all the iPhone/iOS 4 dead-horse-flogging in all corners of the press (yes, even including you, my dear beloved El Reg)?

Does the iPhone 4 have an antenna problem? Almost certainly.

Has it still sold like hot cakes? Looks like it.

Do all of the people who now have an iPhone 4 experience difficulties due to the antenna problem? Almost certainly not - in spite of all the reports and rants that I've read in the press, I've yet to meet an iPhone 4 owner who has suffered from it. OK, so I only know a handful of people who have an iPhone 4 thus far, anecdotal evidence, etc. etc. But...I have asked the folks I know who _do_ have one and precisely _none_ of them have reported any issues. At all, under any circumstances, grip-of-death or not. And that includes at least one person who lives/works in the same, occasionally marginal, O2 coverage area as me.

Can the iOS 4 upgrade cause problems on iPhone 3G and 3GS? It's looking like it.

Is it absolutely necessary to install the iOS 4 upgrade on your 3G or 3GS? Hell no - it's not as if it's bringing anything really breathtaking to the party is it? Whether you love 'em or hate 'em, the 3G and 3GS do what they do quite well enough for most people's day-to-day purposes just as they are.

Is it sensible to install the upgrade on your 3G or 3GS? Probably not, unless you're absolutely gagging and frothing for it.

Right, I think that covers all the major bases doesn't it? Can't we just talk about something else now?

To be fair...

...to the people commenting on the Daily Fail website, many of them seem to be seeing this as the fun and frolicsome thing that it undoubtedly is.

More importantly, someone on there has pointed out that the first letters of the first four items on the list spell out a naughty word.

I then noticed that the fifth item on the list was "Biscuits". Which follows on beautifully from the afore-mentioned naughty acrostic.

Then you get to the jam rags and pile cream.

Whoever came up with that shopping list is just going up and up in my estimation with each passing moment.

You must be joking!

For that kind of money you can probably get a very good set of nearfield or midfield studio monitors and do a decent bit of acoustic treatment on the listening space. I'd bet that the net result would sound far better for the same money (or possibly for quite a bit less). It's like buying B&O stuff - very pretty, but you can get much better results for the same outlay by buying something else.

The more I read...

...about the iPhone 4 hypefest, the happier I am that I took the opportunity to use the pending iPhone 4 launch to get a cheap iPhone 3GS upgrade out of my current operator. Managed to get one for considerably less than I paid for a crappy Nokia 5800 thingy last year and without extending my contract by any more than a couple of weeks. Result!

Oh but how I have regretted getting that 5800 rubbish over the course of the last 12 months. Come on Nokia - you used to make decent phones, but your latest efforts are damned awful! It's no wonder that people are frothing at the nethers over things like iPhones and Android.

Does seem a bit odd...

...given that you can get a mobile PDQ, on contract and fully maintained, from most of the acquiring banks/merchant providers for about the same cost (or less) than an iPhone. I'm assuming that you'd still need to go through all of the hoops of getting a suitable merchant account even with the iPhone version, so you're not saving anything there. Unless Square themselves are going to offer a full service, in which case I'm still prepared to bet that it'll work out more expensive than going direct to the banks since there'll be some additional processing charge involved (as with online/MOTO transactions through other payment gateways - SagePay, WorldPay, etc.)

So, odd all round really? And who would want a plastic Oxo cube stuck to their iPhone's bum anyway?

Was it just me?

Or was the whole Apple site on a go-slow for most of the last 72 hours (well, up until last night anyway)? In particular, images.apple.com didn't seem to be there and everything was held up as a result. Or if it was there it wasn't actually talking to anyone, presumably preferring to sulk in some basement somewhere.

Please, please, please...

...let this be the end. Let Darl McBrainless and his lawyers disappear up their own fundaments, having finally had it hammered into them that they're a bunch of clueless poltroons with no saving graces whatsoever.

Please!

I'm glad...

...that some people seem to be able to get decent DAB service, 'cos I know that there seems to be a fairly large area of south-west Co Durham where it's bloody useless. While FM, and even AM, reception is pretty fine and dandy.

Please let them replace this expensive cack with something better. Please.

And Stephen - shame on you for flogging this dead horse. Although I'll let it go 'cos it's just a job at the end of the day and everyone deserves to earn a living somehow.

DAB - Epic Fail (unless you're lucky enough to live somewhere where it works...)

I find that a bit sad...

...even though I haven't frequented anything nntp-ish for maybe ten years or more. I have some fond memories of first discovering the fun playground of the Usenet newsgroups back in the mid-to-late eighties. Feels a bit like a "passing of an era" moment, even if only in a very small way.

Now it all seems to be badgers.

Re: Ignorance (@AC 17/05/2010, 14:11)

OK, so shoot me for my choice of wording when I said "latest flavour of the month methodology"

However, over the course of a couple of decades in the IT game (before I got sick of it and bailed out a few years ago) I heard all of those things - and many others - being described as the one and only true way in which the software industry would finally be able to ensure that it produced quality products.

Now, I didn't necessarily believe this whenever I heard it because (a) I'd heard most of it before and (b) the person saying it was usually trying to sell me (or my employer) something, whether that was training courses, consultancy, books or some kind of gee-whizz development toolset.

Of course, all of those different things - development methodologies, software technologies, architectural development styles, call them what you will - can help you to produce better software. However, they don't guarantee it and, I'm prepared to bet, never will. I've seen hacked-up last minute fixes, produced on a diet of adrenaline and caffeine, that were still better designed, better implemented and more thoroughly tested than other bits of software that were supposedly developed according to all the strictures of "Method X" and which, basically, ended up as nothing more than extensively (although usually inaccurately) documented crud. That's just the way it is - give a good engineer bad tools and he'll still do a pretty good job, while a bad engineer can still produce complete abominations even if he's using the best tools in the world.

But that's not the main point here. My main concern is that we seem to have created a whole marketplace that operates in the basis of having the latest, whizziest bit of technological know-how in place as quickly as possible. Who cares if it isn't really ready for prime-time use? Who cares if we're not completely sure about whether it's really an appropriate solution to the problem? Some techno-dweeb has wittered on about it on his blog, Wired.com has picked up on it and convinced half the corporations in the western world that they simply MUST be using "Millikan's Magical Customer Extractor" or they'll be left behind in the ecommerce equivalent of the dark ages, so the accountants and sales-droids who are, basically, running the whole show on both sides go into a frenzied, collective orgasm of pushing the latest bit of lunacy on us all.

Meanwhile, it's the poor designers and developers who have to try to deliver the cock-eyed thing with insufficient time and resources. And it's the poor end user who has to live with the inevitable inadequacies when it all proves to be nothing like as magical as people were led to believe.

And, of course, thanks to the wonderful "Get Out of Jail Free" card that is your typical software licence agreement, it's the customer and end-user who ends up feeling most, if not all, of the pain.

That's the reason that I think that getting some software companies sued until the pips squeak might be a good thing. It might finally hit home with the management (i.e. accountants usually) that over-promising and under-delivering has really bad consequences for them, not just for the customer.

Mind you, better educated customers would probably help too. Having someone in a company in a position of authority who can look at the latest outpourings of the "next must-have technology!" brigade and say "Yeah, right, very interesting but we don't actually need it and we've got better things to spend our money on" is a good thing. If they also know enough to meet with the vendors who are trying to flog the stuff and say "No, you're talking bollocks and your system isn't really going to work like that at all, is it?" then that's even better.

This, interestingly, does appear to have been a slight failing on the customer side in this particular case. Although I still agree with the way that things went - until such time as software houses are made fully accountable for the quality of their products in the same way as most other companies are, there won't be a real incentive to get things right.

@MinionZero

I'm not saying that your Narcissists/Histrionic analysis of the Facebook phenomenon is all wrong or anything, but your wording did start to remind me of the Pricks, Pussies and Assholes speech from Team America World Police at one point...

A more interesting figure...

...would be the number of those personal insolvencies that were, in fact, business related.

With banks and financial institutions continuing to be unwilling to offer finance to small and medium enterprises, but often being prepared to extend additional borrowing to the owners, directors or shareholders of such businesses, what we may be seeing here is the result of private companies, sole traders and partnerships having to wind up voluntarily without being insolvent in respect of their external creditors, but leaving the directors or owners incapable of servicing personal debt that has built up while supporting their business over the last two or three years of difficult trading conditions. If that is the case, then those personal insolvencies do, essentially, reflect business closures and insolvencies too.

Of course, there's probably no way to get those numbers - they would too readily put the lie to all the optimisic fantasies that are being touted by politicians and city analyst types who are trying to convince us that the worst is over and the recovery is beginning. Where exactly they're getting that particular line of horse doings from I don't know, but I do know that most of the SME business people that I have spoken to over the last six months have said that economic conditions have been worse rather than better and they don't see any great improvement on the horizon in the short term.

Of course, that's just anecdotal evidence - but the general gist of the anecdote is exactly the same in every line of business that I have had any contact with. Keep those hatches battened down, I reckon - the rough water isn't over just yet.

Obvious question...

...is Gordon still in there?

I wish...

...I could say I was surprised, but I'm not in the least. I don't know what's been happening on the project over the last few years, but during the couple of years that I worked on part of this monumental cockup in the early days, there was never enough time to test anything properly (if at all). Usually because some bigwig in senior management, the Department of Health or the Government had declared that some bit of functionality or other would be available by some particular date, regardless of whether or not it could actually be achieved (political goals and point-scoring trumping everything else).

Add to that the usual IT industry mix of inadequate requirements, myopic design decisions and poor project management at several levels and it's a wonder that any bit of the system actually works at all, much less does the right thing or, indeed, anything.

That's not to say that there weren't some decent designers, good engineers, capable project managers, etc. all busting a gut trying to make some kind of faux-silk purse out of this particular sow's ear. It's just that they were usually outnumbered, and sometimes outranked, by the hordes of inexperienced and incompetent numpties who had been recruited by a senior management that largely consisted of utter idiots. Or, as it's commonly called in Government IT project circles, business as usual.

Remember to contact your GP and opt out. You'll probably be safer that way.

@John Savard

You, sir, are either trolling or in dire need of a clue. Although a number of their predecessors were little better, our current government has been responsible for some of the most ill-conceived, badly-drafted and downright incompetent legislation ever to be enacted. Excessive police powers and the curtailment of civil liberties cannot be justified by raising the spectre of terrorist bogeymen or by wailing that we should "think of the children" or in any other of the countless ways that our money-grubbing political leaders and their lickspittle lackeys are relying upon to brainwash masses of people into sleepwalking towards a latter-day police state.

Having said that, I find it rather depressing to note that their tactics seem to be working anyway.

Big Brother, for the obvious reasons...

Funnily enough...

...while channel-hopping on the goggle-box last night, I happened upon an old episode of Live at the Apollo, with Russell Howard serving as MC. He did a very fine routine about people feeding their own misery by getting themselves all uptight, irate and self-righteous about this, that or the other bit of modern life.

How singularly appropriate that I should see this story so soon after seeing that.

I knew it!

Up until I took out a contract with T-mobile a couple of years ago, my main email address didn't seem to have made it onto any spammer lists and I didn't really get much in the way of cold calls or junk texts. Since taking out that contract, I've seen spam directed to my main email address, had various cold calls from various companies (in spite of TPS registration) and do receive the occasional junk text from various places.

I just knew they had sold on my details, but didn't have any proof. One of the cold-calling mobile phone brokers even claimed that they had got my number from T-mobile when I quizzed them about it. I wasn't sure I believed them at the time, but it seems like they were telling the truth.

Scum-sucking, bottom-feeding, sputum-drooling, malodorous little oiks, so they are.