>Another thing about the NBN costs is that many of the costs must be expended anyway

Certainly. From 2000 on, there was public debate about the forms this would take. Telstra suggested a fibre-to-the-node system, but wanted a monopoly. The then government told them that if they had a good case for a monopoly, they should take it up with the ACCC.

In 2006, the then opposition was successful in politicising this. Beazley made infrastructure spending central to his (Labour Party) policy, and proposed an infrastructure audit, but proposed that the new broadband network would go ahead regardless.

As a result of the politicalisation, any consideration of the details you list became irrelevant to the plan.

Calls for a business case justification, which would include the factors you list, have been condemed out-of-hand as troglodyte Luddite obstructionism, which hardly leads to rational consideration.

Re: I don't get it. How is this different to the PIN functionality from SS7

SS7 did not allow CLR or COM objects, only DLL's for extended stored procedures.

You knew that, right?

Re: Increasing number of sites inoperable in Firefox?

There is a known bug in Firefox, that it has problems loading objects where the size is not given by the providing website. For most people, this is flash objects. It has been a Firefox bug for at least 5 years, but it has apparently been difficult to reproduce.

NoScript behaviour has changed more recently -- it doesn't automatically refresh the web pages as agressively. Try to force a full refresh after suspending NoScript.

Can anyone find a link for the Punch Cartoon, with the employment agency offering the choice of the good looking nanny --- or the one you might prefer who has had the pox...

Re: I don't get it. How is this different to the PIN functionality from SS7

Yes. also, "In addition, stored procedures can be compiled to native DLLs for fast access."

I have to keep reminding people: when MS says something is a feature of a new edition, they HAVE NOT said that it is a new feature.

Re: Not what I would describe as a good move

There is no such thing as bad publicity.

OR

I don't care what they say, as long as they spell my name right.

Re: I want it NOW!

I find it amazing how copy sellers always defend copyright in terms of payment to copy creators.

It has been clear since they closed the first music sharing network (Napster) that the big companies aren't interested in payment for content, they are, and were, interested in controlling promotion and distribution. They realized even then that if they lost control of promotion and distribution, they would be obsolete.

So yes, technicaly, morally and historically, there doesn't seem to be any clear reason why they should control when and where you view content.

If there was an moral reason why they should control distribution and promotion, I'm sure I would have heard it now, instead of the suppression of file sharing schemes like Napstor, which offered the technical possiblilty of content payment without content control.

Re: Security

>10 minutes after the first "smart" meter is installed, the hacking community will have access.

This assumes that the first "smart" meter has not already been installed.

Which is complete childish ignorance.

Smart meters are already widely in use. Maybe not on your house, but on my house, my street, my city, my country.

And I see from posts here, already for some services in your country.

I can think of lots of good questions you could ask about what technology will be used and how that decision was made. But for the love of God, gaarrgghh.

Re: @Jaitch@AndrueC

I would have upvoted you, but for this throw-away line:

>(in theory) meter readings are always prompt and accurate,

In theory, meter readings by a massive new software billing system are flaky and inaccurate.

You may be different, but after 50+ years of computers I think I can say that any "theory" which doesn't take account of reality is completely and comprehensively busted.

In the old days they used to say that "to err is human, but to really foul things up requires a computer", so it's an old idea. More recently I've seen

New Phone Billing Systems

New Road Billing Systems

New Smart Meter Billing Systems

---and each has been introduced with significant problems and failures.

I've got a co-worker who didn't get a correct electricity bill for more than a year in his new billing system -- and then the company told him that they weren't going to worry about it because, under the law introduced to protect consumers using the new smart meter billing systems, he also couldn't make claims against old bills.

These massive software systems are always more complex than people think they will be. It all seems so simple. It is not simple. It can't even be made simple. Companies have tried that too: simplifying it by ignoring edge cases or removing edge functionality does not work.

Re: Costs

>development costs for a 60 point course at the Open University ... are on average £2m.

How much of that is bloat?

You may have seen recent discusion in the USA about rise in cost of a college degree due to rise in administrative costs. This is just a sample:

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-11-14/bureaucrats-paid-250-000-feed-outcry-over-college-costs.html

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887323316804578161490716042814.html

There hasn't been similar discussion in AUS because local students don't pay full fees, but it is just as much a problem. The university I am associated with just went through a classic consultant-led cost-cutting re-organisation, which resulted in centeralisation, higher administrative costs, and poorer administrative services. And the executive responsible has been re-contracted -- clearly he has top-level management skills at staying employed.

Re: Nudity-free Playboy?

Maybe now, but that's not what it used to be.

Maybe like hops-free beer. I found the pictures addictive, but damn, the articles were good.

Re: I've often wondered

..why some of these terror organisations don't rebrand themselves. It would cause much confusion.

Jemaah Islamiya. (In Indonesia). The phrase is both the name of an organisation, and a simple descriptive phrase.

Imagine a terrorist group called "The Christian Church". It's not specifically branded as anti-terrorist, but yes, it does cause confusion. The police and government would say things like:

/ "The Christion Church" is a terrorist organisation that must be stopped/

Re: Astounding

>bean counters would have collective apoplexy

Yes... and no.

They weren't building a computer: nobody had heard of such a thing.

They were building an accounting machine for the accountants.

And their core business was accounting. They weren't diversifying from their central business model. The shops were run by shop managers, but the business was run by accountants and bookkeepers, and they were trying to make an incremental change in their business process.

But they weren't that far off from using dip pens and gas lights (they would have been familiar with both from childhood anyway). There had been tremendous changes in society and organisation, far more than I've seen in my 50 years, so I think they probably were more open to change than many people today.

Re: Abusing the legislation

"We are putting in the essential infrastructure that will make UK businesses competitive".

The same line was used to justify the National Broadband Network in AUS.

And to justify TV, radio, and talking pictures.

And it's not like it should have been a total surprise: back in the 90's, when the internet was becoming popular, there was a widespread expectation that the primary use would be for entertainment, as for all previous technologies (including the telephone, prior to the introduction of radio). But we've just gone through a period where rightous indignation, and censorship, greated any attempt to say that high-speed-broadband is a replacement for broadcast televison.

But who cares now? .

The capital funding arrangements are in place. It's a big new TV system, and the proles are happy.

Re: Updates

The updater program has a /different name/ for every version. The executable is renamed every time.

This means that I can't give a fixed exemption in our firewall, which means that on locked machines -- the ones used for banking which require Java in the browser -- I have to go around, turn off the firewall, run the update downloader, apply the update, and re-enable the firewall.

What is the recomended solution for this problem?

Re: argh!

or maybe the content id's are dynamically generated?

Re: argh!

sadly, just a typo or server configuration change. &id=2065 takes you to the full membership page:

Re: Software piracy as a metric?

Oh **** *** *** *** ****

If you can't be intelligent, be polite.

Re: Using a default username and password isn't hacking

>I'm sorry, but people that don't secure their systems from this level of attack are part of the problem.

Which is why, in my area, it is ILLEGAL to leave your car keys in your car when you are absent.

Note that it is NOT illegal to leave your house unlocked. Cars are different. We can argue about which catagory computers should be in.

EPIC WINDOWS SECURITY FAIL

Yes, I agree. In the same way that this:

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/03/19/carna_botnet_ipv4_internet_map/

( Researcher sets up illegal 420,000 node botnet for IPv4 internet map) is an EPIC LINUX SECURITY FAIL. And any mention of CISCO at http://www.theregister.co.uk/security/ is an epic cisco security fail. (Anything with an installed base that big is epic).

Re: Not so fringe benefits

>seldom fully funded, totally unsustainable and a burden on future taxpayers

Hmmm... what country do you live in?

>southern European

????

In AUS, the government pension schemes are mostly, if not entirely, independent and fully funded

Except that some of the ex-government superanuation schemes (for example the education sector fund), have remaining fixed-benefit liabilities. This means that current (floating rate) members have to fund the fixed-benefit members if the market goes backwards.

That is, the scheme is fully funded out of existing capital, and future benefits for existing members may be poor.

Re: The VIP handler..

Of course the implication is that the employee was complicit, so if they weren't complicit, I hope they got a good payout.

My second guess was that the owners had, like the old Mob owners in the USA before the companies were allowed in, fired him/her as unlucky.

But on third thoughts, maybe he/she is on commission. Commission employees get dropped if they can't meet target, and this one will definitely not meet target.

Re: We want your skills but we don't want *you*.

Take a look at the job advertisements before posting such twaddle. The IT industry has been singled out, correctly, as being an industry where the 457 visa is being abused to lower wages for skills that are not in short supply.

I'm talking about basic help desk and network admin skills. Nothing fancy. No shortage of those skills in AUS. Just a shortage of people willing to work 12 hour shifts, 2 weeks on/2 weeks off, 40 hour week equivalent, for 25000GBP. I don't know if 25K seems a lot of money for help desk in GB, but in AUS 35K AUD is not enough to get married and buy a house on, and 12 hour shifts 14 days in row is a horrible way to work unless justified by money or status.

And when I say "just a shortage of", I'm being kind: there are believable allegations that the contract companies won't hire local even at these rates: they prefer desperate 457 visa workers that they can fire and deport. (Unlike the job advertisments, these allegations are not verifiable)

On the basis of the postings here, I can say that most of you would be unwelcome office pariahs, but that is only because you appear to be such ****heads. On the other hand, if you come over to work 12 hour shifts doing unskilled IT on a FIFO contract, you probably won't need to worry about that much.

To the author: you've set up a false premise, then attacked it. Next time you don't understand something, consider the possibility that the problem might be because you have totally missed the point.

Re: Historical quibble

You left uot the fact that (apparently) it did not 'become Unisys'.

If, as is alleged, a merged company became Unisys, your statement would be like saying that a sperm becomes a child -- an idea of reproduction that was once popular, but was later replaced by the idea that a fertilized egg becomes a child.

If this bothers you, you could have said "became part of Unisys". If it doesn't bother you, you could have noticed and ignored the correction. If you wanted to be nice, you could have jus thanked the contributer for the correction. Your forth option, defending the indefensible, makes you look much worse. I hope it was just because, like me, you were feeling tired and cranky.

Re: Intel and Broadcom...

We've had a few quirks with VMware dropping NFS connections at random. It's not restricted to Intel cards.

banking group’s disaster-recovery procedures

This was the bank where the disaster-recovery procedures went disastrously wrong.

I'm going to at least consider the possiblity that this time they were told they COULD NOT start a disaster-recovery procedure until everything was turned off and backed up.

ignore requests made by apps wanting to commit data

If true, not for the first time. When they went from Win3.1 to Win95 they did just that: the write-to-disk-now flag was ignored, to make applications faster. This magically made all database software alkaline.

The work-around, which you still see in use today, is to require people to shutdown Windows before turning off the computer. Nowadays, that has been implemented in hardware: when you press the OFF button on your computer, it sends an emergancy shutdown message to Windows, which shuts down as fast as it can, while the computer power stays up for as long as it can.

Anyway, so you are supposed to move all your database software off DOS/Windows 3.1 onto WinNT, using

"FILE_FLAG_WRITE_THROUGH", which writes through to --- the drive controller cache. So now if you want your database to be ACID, you have to have a battery-backed hardware cache.

But your DISK DRIVES now start caching -- so you need enterprise disk drives if you want to be sure, and your software CANNOT assume that anything smaller than the disk cache is truly written -- so you need to write everything twice: first to the log, then to the database, and on recovery you compare the two copies.

And the bottom line is, no matter how much you cache, your database writes are limited by the speed at which you can write to the spinning disk.