Posts by jeremy
553 posts • joined Wednesday 9th May 2007 18:07 GMT
5 years!!!
Happy homelife makes for happy worklife.... and it took 5 years to figure this out.
As studies in the ridiculously obvious, previously investigated and ultimately worthless (as it's not going to change anything) .. this FIVE YEAR study is really something.
I may ask my boss if that simple, obvious task that is on my to do list could be delivered in 5 years... i think i can guess the response.
Who pays these people and why? Silly vegatable.
date relevant
Google and Bing do not seem to get the date relevance of stuff.
E.g. if i search for a tech term on google or bing i may get a link to a forum that has not changed in 3 years ABOVE a more recent entry in another forum.
How relevant is not just a case of how many words match but how up to date.
Hmm.... seems like bing is just google in an iframe...
overheard on the bus
- 10-12 year old kid with his mum
kid to mum: " So did apple decide to make computers because everyone likes iPhones".
I sh*t you not.
"year's free identity protection"
which is worth er.... nothing atall really!!!
fees to me ?
In this age when the RIAA et all are not going to play the game of giving things away for free, why should Phorm expect me to give them my data so they can make money from it?
Seriously, offer me £10 for every company that benefits from my data and its yours.... offer me a lie (it will improve my browsing) and you assume that i am not happy with my browsing already..
I dont need a machine to tell me what to browse and where... i can google / surf .. as can most people.
Obvioulsy this is aside from the host of other immediate reasons phorm is bad as bad can be.
"two years" - waste of time
We can have a hundred 'guides' but without any legislation they are not worth the paper they are printed on.
cross reference...
Isn't a major IT news website running some stories at the moment about how the iPhone is to be put into service in Afganistan by the US military.... oh yeah it was el Reg... maybe joined up IT thinking outside of the IT dept is such a novel concept that no-one here can grasp it.
everyone's input
"reviewed the available literature and spoke to entertainment industry representatives and regulators" ... so they didn't bother to ask ANYONE who uses these p2p services anything, yet they can decide what and why we do it..
i could write so much about how stupid this study is, but i have to get over to PB and find the latest [insert your free download here]...
nothing new...
... been up and down and semi functional for over a year now... i'd like to like it, but nokia missed the boat.
free market?
As ever the concept of a 'Free market' as Europe is supposed to be, only relates to big multinationals who are free to do as they please...
Us little folk are only here to be sucked into their marketing spin and pay the silly prices.
I know no-one at Vodafone cares, but this kind of protectionist approach by large multinationals only undermines the whole basis of 'Europe' working.
Ms Redding just doesn't go far enough for me.
dear home office,
... we do not trust the government to store and keep our data in a safe and secure way so we doubly do not trust individual businesses to do it either.
@Lionel Baden
... and so the FUD goes on....
Ovi.. good luck with that...
Ovi has been bubbling along in an almost working state for some time. Only the vast investment in it has driven any need to actually go live (officially, my account was set up last august!!).
Its flakey and it not integrated with itself, let alone anything else.
Nokia had a great name and i have no doubt still has great engineers but sadly they lost their way a long time ago... too much indecision, n-gage or not to n-gage... no wait, we'll miss the market opportunity and then sit on our hands for a while so someone else can beat us to it then we'll make a half arsed attempt....
Yep that sounds like Ovi aswell... (wait for Apple to do it right, then offer a half arsed alternative).
Now i think about it, comes with headaches was there too... big corps = slow to do ANYTHING
transient workforce
Lots of you people telling us contractors that we dont pay as much tax... that sounds just plain wrong... i am a contractor and on average i pay 26% deductions.
Since i get no benefits such as sick pay or holiday pay, nor paternerity leave, i think it is quite fair.
I also pay for ALL my own training and my accountant. Sorry if you are not brave enough to go out there and try and make a bit more for yourself.
Besides we provide a valuable service. How many technical projects are less than a year ... for web stuff, just about all of them, so it makes sense for your company to hire me for 3 to 6 months rather than have the cost and tax burden of getting a permie who then sits on their hands for the other 6 months of the year and cant be fired easily.
Permie's are welcome to their life and often it is the security of a job they are after, well as we have seen recently, your job is probably less secure than mine!!!!
Stop whining and join us.
ask first?
Why is it so hard for companies these days to ask BEFORE they do what they like... because they expect not to get an easy yes...
Doesn't that tell us something, if we are not going to simply say yes without question, what makes you (google) think we will just accept it without permission... just because you own our governments?
Time for Google to die off, they are far too big for their boots.
how about purging some staff
... its not like ofcom are very useful or anything... just another quango / money pit for the taxpayer to pay for while ofcom's remit seems to amount to bending over for big business and government alike!!
@Some form of P2P [peer to peer] subscription service is the way forward
Nope... too late, the record industry has failed and failed again, we (the music listening and buying people) have had years to adapt to the fact there is little or no willingness by the record industry to engage in digital music.
Itunes is not a big earner for Apple (except in sales of iPods)... we already have new ways to listen to music that does not involve the record companies... myspace for looking at new stuff (reviewing), facebook to chat to friends about what music to listen to (recomendations), last.fm for more suggestions and finally Pirate bay to actually download it.
The longer the music industry sits on it's fat hands, the more of Rome will burn in the meantime.
Here's a suggestion, look to the performance for revenue, (like Madonna), and like people have for the last 2 thousand years, instead of holding onto a limited business model inventing in the 50s.
MS - one bottle neck at a time.
So, they didn't think improving JS speed specifiically was a good thing... kinda like making windows cluster's and forgetting to do anything about the terrible disk I/O handling that brings clustering rather pointlessly to its knees..
MS don't see any bigger pictures than wanting to own the wold.. the bigger picture of a browser working well in all areas is lost on them.
IE 6 killed off any kind of faith in MS's ability to write web software.... which is why silverlight is still a plugin i don't want or need.
amateurish? Clued up i'd say
"Fleet Street insiders describe the deal at amateurish, mainly because neither the Daily Mail nor the Mail on Sunday, the two papers likely to pay the highest fees".
Err perhaps they didn't want the information dismissed as yet another "Diana / think of the children" story.
google tracking...
Aside from google analytics, the google tracking cookie that you get for using their search matches you to a number in the big google machine. This is recorded against any searches and potentially (we don't know cos google wont day) any sites you visit that use google analytics.
If you don't kill all your cookies after each session then google gets to know just about everything about you, bar your name.
That is certainly not how it is put in their privacy policy!!
Not a bad law, per se. Cookies had a small purpose which has been expanded by migrating cookies from domain to domain. Sorry el Reg, but it is not defacto that cookies are good.
@jonathon
Not being picky, i agree about Ubuntu, but my early experiences with Redhat 6 were painful on an IBM thinkpad.... that pushed me to Debian when Ubuntu was still a random thought in a not yet spacemans brain.
Debian was always surprisingly easy to run on laptops... maybe that is why Ubuntu is?
so the ASA has authority over emails now?
Their remit of what they have jurisdiction over seems to change depending on their mood.
good on him...
... really, too many websites take a lax attittude to many things that would not be allowed in the real world... only changing things when forced.
So twitter doesn't make any money... well its a fairly poor business then, but it does not excuse not acting like a real business and complying with real responsibilities.
If i went into a bank and declared i was Kanye West (not just called that, but claiming i was actually this angry, marginally talented american man) then that would be illegal. Simple.
p.s. twitter sucks... i dont care what some nobody is doing, nor do i even care what my friends are doing when i am not with them.
800,000 jobs?
Given that so many people in the broadcast industry are really only passing time before retirement (particularly at the BBC), the stagnation and 'dead mans shoes' effect is stopping new blood and new ideas getting into media as a whole.
Although i am not advocating getting rid of 800,000 jobs, perhaps this industry should get with the times instead of lobbying to keep their outdated and increasingly irrelevant business models.
Mr Rose at the BBC (the man who saved iPlayer from the BBC), is about the only new ideas man out there. The rest of the senior management of broadcasting just move around from channel to channel taking their ignorance with them.
Also Yay for europe, first with Phorm, now with this 3 strikes issue... perhaps we should just ditch the criminal muppets in westminster altogether.
CCTV and Neighbourhood can watch
... Survellience has not stopped any crimes, we can just make naff reality TV about it instead.
@20 minutes tube from Euston to King's Cross
you have not travelled at a weekend then! Every weekend this year most of the tube lines have some form of engineering work. There was no rush to this when the tube got it's PPP setup that Tony Blair forced on us, but now that the Olympics are coming and it might look bad there is a big rush to fix it.
What is rather silly is that often TFL will stop bus routes aswell on the same weekend (for fairly spurious reasons) leaving parts of central london with no public transport atall.
@Defiant
Eh? Has "MS Word" been correcting your language so much you have lost the ability to flame Linux effectively and coherently?
I didn't notice any nutty (or otherwise) linux geeks or comments here.
I find that MS search is pretty poor at finding things myself, and it is not the default search on any of my ilnux installations.
how long to get his hard drives bacvk>??
Isn't the current Police turnaround time for illegally removed hardware about 2 years or until it is no longer current technology (whichever is longer).
lessons learned
... i hate this phrase as lessons are Never learned by this lot since people are rewarded for failure.
Sack Jaqui, then the rest of them
more and more i want this womans babies
... Ms Redding seems to be the only person in all of Europe who has any concern for us individuals who unfortunately for us are not a big corporation so cannot get any consideration from our own government for hire.
browser wars
"RIAs have naturally attracted concern because they give PC users another opportunity to download and install potentially malicious code on their desktops."
The only reason RIAs exist is down to MS's stubborn insistence on keeping it's browser technology in the 90s.
Healthy standards (which are followed) would have brought us to HTML 5 much quicker and it's new features such as canvas and chromeless windows, would have satified the RIA need.
'wot no star trek reference....
hang your head in shame El Reg!
too little too late
I have a macbook that i got cheap, and sure its nice but now i am thinking of upgrading, the product range offered by Apple is simply uncompetitive and very poor in flexibility.
I want a small powerful laptop, the mac book pro's dont come in small anymore and then to get a decent one is close to two thousand pounds.
Compate to the dell XPS (with all the whistles and bells) running linux, and you save near a thousand pounds. To top that, lets not forget that for that money you only 90 days of support, and apple still have not addresses the SMB issue in Leopard that stops it working in a commercial windows environment (i.e. most offices).
@AC
Free software has not hurt wages as it generally needs someone to maintain and manage that software.. my work opportunities have increased as a result of what you call 'Free' software.
Perhaps it has hurt your prospects, but its only the 'evil du jour', a few years ago, the internet was hurting because so much was moving on line, perhaps you need to learn to adapt.
Where is the big smiling penguin who has given me so much work... ah here you are...
personal liability
Until data loses are a case of personal liability and individual sanction as a result .. i.e. You Lost the data so YOU loose your job!
.. then the ICO will continue to be toothless.
no excuses... we have all seen bond films
"the agency was just being set up at the time"... . is simple irrelevant.
Anyone working with information they MUST HAVE KNOWN was a little bit secret, should be independantly able to figure out they should be careful.
Fired for gross misconduct (negligence).
However to follow the banking code in the UK, that would put you in line for a big bonus (loosing 100m).
doesn't tally with my experience
.. rates are up in contracting as companies want to get more skills in one person.
My current contract requires Perl, Php, windows, OSX, Linux, MS SQL, Oracle, MySql and then a whole bunch of front end web stuff.
'dont sue us' clause
..although i can understand the desire in these litigitious times, but seriously how can ANY company opt out of the rule of law with a "You can't sue us" clause.
More and more these days, consumers have to be lawyers to even be able to read the terms and the (often) unfair exemptions to basic rights they claim.
suddenly my 5gb cap looks small
... and although virgin are constantly telling they have fiber to my door, i have a sneaky feeling their throttling would hurt my viewing.
I normally have very little time for the BBC (and its tax on hardware), but i think this project and Mr Rose are good. Well done beeb.
nintendo DS????
First is such an over used word these days.
parents don't think kids are protected....
... like not giving them a mobile phone until they are older.
I am not a parent, (thankfully), but i do find it rather worrying that parents seem to take so little responsibility for anything to do with protecting their child.
Can't a parent monitor a kids phone (i.e. look at it regularly to see text and pics)... perhaps even use its removal as a punishment. Or use its use as a reward... i.e. kids cannot have their phone back until their homework is done.....
future competitive.
SO.. where shall i locate any blue collar jobs for my new global company.... er not France..
Well done to the french workers for reminding us all that the french will strike at the drop of a hat and demand any and everything....
Malaysia.. cheaper, less militant workers. I can see why they re-located there.
buddism is non-theistic
But is still classed as religion.
The office of national stats (rightly) recognized that 390k of us were trying to fudge the stats, as generally religion is divisive and taking the p*ss is fun.
details
This is an IT website so i dont feel geeky asking .. "What kind of server was it? "...
My bet is on some kind of HP proliant since they are everywhere.... but it would be interesting if it was something more esoteric... like a Cobalt raq4.
big business and governemtn coluding against voters interests....
... say it isn't so!
(isn't that the very definition of our current government... sell out to big business at the lowest cost possible).
Tiscali titsup fears grow
Fears?? Not here... joy, hopeful anticipation, excitment ... various adjectives come to mind, none are anywhere similar to "Fear" though.
Companies need to provide a service, that is the basis of the market.. Tiscali didn't so Tiscali are doomed and no amount of arm waving italiens will stop that. (sorry to suggest that all italiens are arms waving... but as a nationality you guys do wear your emotions on your sleeves)
ask your IT dept.
As most IT folk have been cautious about cloud computing, generally in my view and experience taking a balanced view that it can be of use, but its not the magic money saver that people think.
For some reason these days alot of IT decisions are made without any input from an area expert (an IT guy).... just MDs and Bean counters, who swallow the marketing rubbish hook line and sinker... like they did with outsourcing, the dot com boom v1, and the dot com boom v2, social networking having a business use and of course MS products being good value.
Nokia chasing Google's attitude to privacy
With this and previoulsy with Vine.
Taking the attitude that everyone wants to share everything with everyone is a little nieve and has been shown to provide virtually no real business model (facebook / twitter).
