Posts by Jim 59
723 posts • joined Wednesday 24th June 2009 19:13 GMT
Muzak
Play it in the elavators at El Reg, bound to increase productivity.
Compete
It's in our DNA too.
Politics
The govt maintains a complicated tax statute partly to enable tax avoidance, and it continues to add more layers of complexity every year. A tax avoidance industry is sustained, in which the sellers are the fig four accountancy groups, the buyers are large companies, and HMRC provide the necessary framework. The British govt also kindly provides protectorates, eg the Caymans, where tax laws do not apply.
The govt could stamp out all tax avoidance tomorrow if it wished, but this would be seen as too demotivating for executives. The govt can only work by maintaining large corporations as friends. To that end, the Chancellor will make anti-avoidance speeches in order to work up anti-avoidance feeling with the public. When public feeling is strong enough for long enough, the government can act against the corps, but keep them as friends by pointing to public opinion.
Flying car
The trouble is that flying and driving are just too different. Any car capable of flying is likely to both an awful car and a terrible aircraft.
Perhaps the best "flying car" would be a light aircraft somehow capable of carrying a small car. ie. Thunderbird 2
Re: All very true, but..
Has anybody actually tested it ? Presumably it can kill/injure st short range, despite the lack of rifling and overall power. The main worry seems to be invisibility to X rays & customs, unlike metal zip guns etc.
Re: SSDs, I believe, have now overtaken memory as the single most cost-effective upgrade
I agree SSD is bound to improve performance substantially. Good point about lan storage too, with the modern move towards home NAS devices. Putting a £60 SSD in sister's 10-year old laptop might turn it from e-waste into something useful.
Re: SSDs, I believe, have now overtaken memory as the single most cost-effective upgrade
Still too expensive. My 4 year old laptop has a 250Gb hard disk. Swapping it for a same sized SSD would not be cheap. For £50 on the other hand, I could upgrade to a 1 Tb hard disk.
Hey Vodaphone
Hey Vodaphone how much tax you paying out of that £2,000,000 ? Is it going through that empty office you rent in Belguim ?
"This meant communicating with hundreds of millions of people, upgrading all their mailboxes – equaling more than 150 million gigabytes of data – and making sure that every person's mail, calendar, contacts, folders, and personal preferences were preserved in the upgrade"
Mind boggling. You have to applaud MS here. Imagine the stress/man hours/grey hairs that must have taken.
MS gets slagged off enough in these forums. Today I say well done guys, and the free email service I have enjoyed for the past 15 years or thereabouts.
Re: Sad realities
MP3 players did not stop evolving because phones came out. Something like a Sansa Clip is small, cheap, capacious, high quality (especially with RockBox), and if it gets crushed in the gym, you won't cry. Get you to Amazon !
Re: Is this the same Eric Schmidt
Schmidt / Google needs a good old Thatcher-style hand-bagging. Obama should borrow Michelle's heaviest "purse" and let rip.
Next in line - London Banks, the British Leyland of the 21st Century. The should be hand-bagged with all available speed.
Sorry about the off-topic rant. But seriously, man.
IT is a big world. Although it doesn't say so, the article seems to be about software test & development only. Still good though.
Salaries have been depressed, and how. 20 years of offshoring followed by 5 years of credit crunch saw to that. Blighty has been particularly slow to recover, maybe that accounts for the better salaries on offer abroad.
Microsoft
No chance. Absolutely no chance. Microsoft will act fast to get this off the market. They have kept choice out of the desktop market for 20 years and they are experts at it. Right now, Ballmer will be heading round to the Dell head office with a garden gnome under his arm.
You WILL forcibly purchase windows with every PC.
Re: Face it, vinyl sucks
I disagree. I think CDs are better than vinyl in every way, and not just by a small amount, but by a huge margin. Eg the noise floor on a CD is so low it almost can't be measured.
Vinyl is still a lovely thing, but instead of being the best technical medium, it has become a work of art. Same goes for the equipment. My Goldring-Lenko GL-75 turntable, circa 1974, is in the loft but only because my house is small. It will be coming out if/when i get a bigger place.
Re: Vinyl
Chemicals in paper shouldn't matter. Vinyl disks always had a plastic lined inner sleeve, so could CDs.
The other thing is that 12 inch sleeves wouldn't fit through letterboxes, which would snooker Amazon et al. Perhaps HMV and others on the high street could do something there.
Vinyl
When CDs were introduced, I was always kind of surprised that didn't just sell CD in vinyl-style sleeves, instead opting for nasty little boxes. Arguably, a nasty CD box takes up more room (width-ways) than an LP. And we do so miss those covers.
Posted in The ten SEXIEST computers of ALL TIME
Coloured keys++
Big up coloured keys, eg on the Enteprise Elan and CPC464. Gotta love that red escape key.
@Evil Graham
"And whilst it's true to say that the unions had got out of hand by the late 70s..."
Out of hand ? Completely out of control more like. The dead left unburied, ludicrous rent-a-bully "flying pickets", over 300 strikes a year at British Leyland, where night shift workers were caught in sleeping bags, miners in Downing Street telling the Prime Minister what to do. Strike-ridden ship yards delivering ships so late the customers just went away. The union bosses had become public enemy number one. The shoeing they received from Thatcher was deserved, overdue and entirely necessary. Unfortunately it was also so severe that a lot of industry was destroyed and left desolate.
What a shame the previous labour government - under James Callaghan, didn't stand up the communist boot-boys sooner, when their behaviour was less extreme. Then perhaps the reforms would have been more gentle. We would still have a manufacturing industry and moderate unions. Instead we have very little of either.
Sounds nice lets have some tyranny
Language engineering, censorship, tyranny, will come in ways you don't expect. Through a back door, or dressed as something nice. Like a press law. Or an anti-genocide database. Crime will turn into "hate crime" which will then become "political crime". At first you will get by just watching what you write. Then what you say. Then what you think.
Student Grant
In the 80s, student grants were scrapped by the Tories. This was done partly to stop people opting for frivolous degrees while enjoying a (then fully funded) student "lifestyle" (cf Viz). In the 90s. New Labour brought in student loans, again to encourage "serious" degrees and save cash. By "serious", I mean marketable skills.
After that, Old Labour funnelled everybody in to uni, believing this was the way to social mobility. They did it by gradually ramping down exam standards, to give everyone A levels, while the Unis responded by offering a much wider range of courses, of which many did not imbue any skills of value to the job market.
The net result is loads of grads unemployed or working at McDonalds while trying to service their student debt. And more social immobility than ever. Unfortunately for the UK, other countries took a different route.
@madestjohn
Agreed. Makes you want to climb into the photo and move the computers into the right position, get Bill semi-sitting and hands out of pockets etc.
Stand back ladies, form a line
Right on dude. What woman could possibly be attracted to these billionaires.
zpool scrub == fsck
Excelent news, but Behlendorf's effusive contention that "...ZoL is ready for wide scale deployment on everything from desktops to super computers" just isn't compatible with the 0.6.1. version number. Love his enthusiasm, but admins should wait for 1.0 or higher before installing into production.
Regarding ZFS, it originally came with the absurd strapline "no known pathologies". Does that mean 100% bug free ? Unbreakable ? Perfect ? ZFS is none of those, and in practice seems no more or less stable than competitors like VxVM. Often a ZFS mirror will slip into "degraded" (unsilvered) state and the admin is none the wiser until he happens to type "zpool status". Repeated "scrubs" are then required to get the mirror back:
http://unixetc.co.uk/2012/01/22/zfs-corruption-persists-in-unlinked-files/ (my own blog)
VxVM and SDS show similar behaviour. LVM less often. ZFS is the future, especially once the dedupe features become generally available in Linux, and the performance hits of constant checksum calculation are sorted out. In some ways it's a shame that Sun marketing dept. ever pushed the "this system needs no fsck!" nonsense.
Done well
"...a byword for getting things done well".
No. That was never part of the mix. Even the Wipro marketing department wouldn't go that far, surely.
Offshoring was all about doing things as cheap as possible and *good enough*. Sometimes that's the wise course. Often it isn't.
CPU
Web TVs need *much* more powerful CPUs. Currently their grunt level is about half a Raspberry Pi and the user experience is like eating flour.
Oracle
Great to see the new systems and continued Solaris roadmap. It's just a shame how Oracle is treating existing customers, at least here in the UK. Some shops are transitioning to Linux just to get away from poor and expensive support. Not chucking Sun boxes out, just replacing them with Linux when it comes to refresh time. Others are buying OracleT4 kit though. (I've been a Sun admin for 20 years.)
Howler
Fry's explanation of the Turing Machine last week was for more accurate than his previous contributions to satellite navigation etc. It was a mistake for Reg to lampoon it and further articles should not happen unless he makes a genuine howler. Given that, I don't blame the chap for being overwrought at the injustice.
Fry is touted as a brilliant mind. His "brand" in TV involves amusing pedantry and the display of knowledge for its own sake. It is therefore amusing, and tickles our vanity, when he publicly gets it wrong in matters we would find trivial. Fry may be a brilliant mind, but even Turing would look stupid if he made pronouncements well outside his area.
Time for a Reg/Fry love-in I say. At least part of him wants to be an engineer. And after all, he is one if us, being a home computer freak dating back to the 80s. I look forward to a Fry authored article, long overdue in these mildewed pages, sprinkled with a few latin quips and hopefully the odd mistake to make him look human.
Wimminstruggle
She should have just politely asked them to shut up, which they probably would have.
The blog article carries some extreme views. Very extreme. Frighteningly extreme. All couched in a cool, monotonic new-speak in which old-fashioned ideas like friendliness, humility, reasonableness, cannot be expressed and therefore (for Richards) don't exist.
Reading it, I was dimly reminded of stories in which citizens of some totalitarian state are denounced to the authorities for tiny digressions which supposedly betray the perps as "traitors". She overheard a whispered conversation and just couldn't wait to denounce these chumps to the PyCon authorities, who took them away in a dark van to the salt mines. Meanwhile she posted their images all over the place, as an example to other citizens who may be thinking of making a joke or perhaps watching Benny Hill on YouTube. We have been warned.
ARM
"...doesn’t wrangle data and pass it off as a business model" - Apt comment, describes many web "businesses".
"Intel is throwing new Atom chips under ARM’s feet."
...meanwhile ARM is punching Intel in the face.
Folding stuff vs warm/fuzzy
It all depends how enjoyable the job is and the culture of the company, Working in-house usually beats consulting, but not necessarily. Some consultancies treat their staff as humans, others are just poorly run sweat shops with 50% staff turnover. In-house is warm and fuzzy, but can become a hideaway for problem individuals just biding their time.
A job you enjoy is obviously wonderful, better than $$$. And having a good manager is probably the best perk.
Take a big coat
You will be spending a lot of time in Scotland.
Just south of the border (I'm English), try these:
Newcastle (Steam turbine, Parsons)
Sunderland (Lightbulb, Swan).
Byker (reinforced concrete, Wilkinson)
Stockton (Steam locomotive, Stevenson)
@Alan Firminger
You are bang on about the Amstrads but they came slightly later than the Lynx. In those days 18 months made a world of difference.
El Reg has developed a nice line in these well researched retro articles. One small objection:
"The 128KB was pitched at businesses and professional users, though you have to wonder now how many of these potential buyers would pop into Laskys or Dixons for their office equipment."
- Lots of them. In '82, computers were well out of the reach of small companies. Business men were as excited about the prospect of "computerising" the accounts as kids were at playing games. 80 column text, CP/M and a "real" keyboard screamed "business!".
What a nerve
This guy had the audacity to crouch down and take obvious rude pictures, but not the nerve to just say "Hi" instead. Alas.
Re: When you need a diagram ...
Things are so complicated these days, a diagram is sensible even for your AV setup.
Won no Raspberry Pi ?
How much your "lab" is virtualised and how much is cast-off enterprise hardware seems to vary. As a *nix systems administrator, I get by with vmware, plug computers and the odd Pi. Dusty hardware stacks are the fate of network/cisco admins, and Windows chaps need licenses.
Re: "concentrate on building great products that really help in their lives"
Baffling decision. GR is the best RSS reader out there and the Android App is great too. It saves me so much time and effort, use it for jobs, news sites, all sorts.
Sad. But on the upside Google will own us a bit less and that feels good already.
What RSS reader are we all shifting too ?
@J.G.Harston
I thought that was a joke before visiting http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hedy_Lamarr. In fact HOLY C**P!! That is amazing. And wonderful. Regarding the war effort and propaganda, was the War Office right ? I don't know.
Not comparing her to Admiral Hopper, but an article on Hedy Lamarr would be good.
Dare and Do !
Good article. An interesting woman and deserving winner of the Defense Distinguished Service Medal and Computer Sciences, er, Man of the Year (lol), among many honours. Wonder where she hung that last one.
Unfortunately the author walks straight into a trap of desperate overstatement with this howler:
"1906... an age where women were supposed to be seen and not heard.".
After that the article settles down in to good solid, El-Reg stuff, before weirdly ending on a bootnote so irrelevant and tendentious one can't help wondering how balanced the rest of the article was. Hopper's success stands on its own merits, witnessed by countless awards and her lofty rank. Any Fact-photoshoppery, even with the best of intentions, is an unnecessary distraction and does no service to the Admiral's memory.
Posted in Bacon sarnies can kill: Official
Cause <=> Effect ?
Could it be that very fat people tend to eat more bacon, and have a higher mortality rate for many reasons, among them the consumption of unhealthy foods, regular alcohol, lack of exercise, vitamin deficiency, tendency to diabetes, heart disease, allergies, internal organ damage, joint wear etc etc ? Isn't the report just stating the obvious, ie. some people care more about their health and some less, and bad habits will cluster round the latter group ?
How did they know the diets of the 26,344 deceased ? "Data" on the living was collected by survey - does that count as empirical measurement these days ? We all know people underestimate their calorie and alcohol intake, because it was in a recent survey, and...
flack wav
Any chance of selling uncompressed music ?
Re: And so?
No advertising = no capitalism = no job. We gotta have it.
But the most intrusive advertising ruins the medium it appears in. On TV, many people, including me, mute adverts the minute they appear, or surf away, or skip forward if possible. At football matches, those animated bill boards degrade the whole experience. On the mobile, almost any kind of ad is going to be too intrusive. Even when a page says "skip this ad...", I just skip the whole site.
Re: Music Industry
You make a romantic point AC and there is some truth in it. But the best music is professionally written and produced. Without the 'biz, we would never have heard of Elvis, or Fleetwood Mac or even Haydn (who was sponsored).
Same for film - who you want to watch, Daniel Day-Lewis in "Lincoln", or your local am-dram society filmed on a mobile phone ?
Good article
Very funny writing.
"...a bedroom in which the plucky oldster had decided to make his last stand"
and many other bits. I actually did lol.
Re: I'm no pro-animal-rights-maniac..
Agree. A pointless abomination. At first I thought they might be investigating nerve injuries but no, their ideas are more in the "perverted science" domain.
On the other hand, a flame throwing mind-melded reg-commentard beast would be a thing to behold. We could take over the world! Or at least make some pithy comments.
Music Industry
I'll cop a righteous down-voting for this, but I can't agree that bringing the industry to its knees will be good for anyone. Professional music will die, and we will have to listen to amateurs. Without the £££, Sting would now be a teacher nearing retirement. Mark Knopfler would be a carpet fitter, or whatever, doing pub gigs and busking weekends. And his music would be poor(er).
All I am saying is that professional is better than amateur. You want a free haircut from Lester Haines ? No. How about some free shoes made by your father-in-law ? This post is not as good as a professionally written Reg article, because it is amateur.
Yes the biz ripped us all off wayback but enough already. Demand free products and you get what you deserve.
