"of high profile law firm Steptoe & Johnson"

Brilliant thinking to add the "John"

(Non-UK readers may have to look it up, but it's not worth while.)

He was ad-libbing

What he was told to say that "All education is subject to UK law. Science and maths makes us all safer."

Not so much Mars colonisation...

...as Mars colon ionisation

Tux - 'cos have you ever been downwind of a penguin rookery?

History....

It seems to me that the issue was the old "convergence" chestnut. Comms/Telecoms people knew all about the weird, wonderful and most of all, unique, world of telephony with its specialist cards, cabling and who knows what else. It was proprietary heaven Then the world woke up and realised that telephony could be delivered similarly to general purpose computing and that it needn't be proprietary at all, leading to the possibilities of IP telephony. That led the telecoms world into the "discovery" of that their switches could function as general purpose servers, which they then invented in the image of their old proprietary model. No-one was going to fall for that one just as they were reaping the benefits of commoditisation. To be fair, some horror stories were also possible when general IT service delivery people tried to deliver the robustness of old pone switches, and made their own mistakes along the way.

So to me, it's partly timing, partly an aspect of re-invention, resulting in over-marketing of shiny-thing-of-the-month. What people really wanted from a phone all along was a dial tone.

Still worried

We have a LibDem MP to whom I wrote about this issue some time back. In his reply I was concerned that he seemed to leave the door slightly ajar by saying they would be looking at the details of what May/HomeOffice wanted before deciding. With the LibDems' record of saying "Those are our principles, unless you want us to change them" I thought they'd roll over on this, but I think they realise this is a fundamental to the LibDems' existence.

What gets me is how the guvmint talks up techno vapourware as the answer to the economic problem, but think that technology operates best in such a controlled atmosphere. Their idea of a free environment is one which includes tax kickbacks.

Odd for a kickstarter

This is of interest to me as we are off grid. However, given the choice of a passive chemical battery with no moving parts and something that has to run in a vacuum to close tolerances etc.,, I know which option I'll take. Now if they want to work on getting the nickel-iron battery into shape, that seems interesting. But as there is little patent potential (haha!) in it, as it was invented yonks ago, it's unlikely to be developed through the standard western greed model. See http://opensourceecology.org/wiki/Nickel-Iron_Battery

My requirements as one off grid are not necessarily the ability to store power for very long periods of time, just enough time when power from my few solar panels and my small turbine wane. Five days is acceptable. Given what I have learnt about the joys of running the mechanical wind turbine over the different joys of managing the passive lead acid battery, I know I would not choose a dynamic option such as a flywheel. By the way, my battery bank is a smidge over 15kwHrs.

I would much rather have a NiFe battery that can take un-ideal charge states when power comes in, and most of all, I would rather the battery bank did not deteriorate the way lead acid ones do, leading to replacement after 5-7 years even with careful management. I always laugh like a drain when battery how-to's talk about charging a battery using so-many amps at so-many volts when in the real off-grid world you're simply grateful for ANY amps at ANY voltage that flow in.

S

Other sources

I am a (rather mature) student of the University of the Highlands and Islands, which is described as a collegiate university spread across an area the size of Belgium. (They don't give the area in Waleses.) All lectures are delivered via video conferencing, so there are many years of experience in this teaching delivery here. One of the best lecturers I have had is an archaeologist, who has a three-part routine, some talking where you see him, some powerpoint, and then he stops to take questions. This little pause makes all the difference. While MOOCs may not be as interactive as we enjoy in UHI, there may be ways of replicating this practice.

They're right to think about lecturer technique when delivering via communication technology, though. Some lecturers are awful at it, but some really have a knack, just as in face-to-face lectures.

By the way, from a technology perspective, the "VC Masters," who for UHI are based in Shetland, have been utterly brilliant. In the early days, they even helped me to access their Tandberg systems using Ekiga, as I am not anywhere near a UHI college. I was expecting academic (or BOFH) preciousness when asking for something outside their supported environment, but I got a real willingness to help. I have learnt how important their services are to a good learning experience. When the VC is dodgy, your ability to learn drops markedly, so to students, their services are important. Interestingly, they're rather taken aback after getting a thank you email from me every semester.

Ah, the NeXT

The thing about the NeXT cube was not only the box, which sat there growling wonderfully at you from its SCSI disk, but also the screen and even the design of the printer. All utterly wonderful and oh, so out of reach. I was fortunate (no really - they were different times) to sit through a demo by Jobs of the NeXT in London in 1990, and the cube as a development station really was astonishing. I recall, at that conference, Gates was on after Jobs. He came on and simply said "Wow. How can you follow that?" How indeed.

Fail at the first hurdle

The very use of the term "Human Resources" should disqualify anything further from such a report. Utterly degrading term. One suspects that reference to people as "human resources" think they're being seriously hard-nosed capitalists, yet in "Wealth of Nations," so often used by these nutters as a bible, Adam Smith uses the example of work specialisation in pin manufacture to gain efficiency _as a warning_ not as a positive reference. His worry was that mindless work creates mindless people, and that this was an immoral outcome to create.

Anyway, anyone with any real world experience knows that in some jobs which some consider dreadful, others thrive in. It's the role of these so-called "human resources" morons to find the right people to ensure round pegs appear in round holes. At this they are spectacularly adept at failing.

Disclaimer - my wife worked in the personnel dept. at one company, when a new broom came in and demanded that the dept. now be called Human Resources. The rot soon set in, so she left as she could no longer do a decent job.

Discalimer 2 - After 20+ years in IT, I have gone back to Uni and am just completing an Hons BA. It's obvious to the Real World that here are few degrees that are merely vocational, so does it really come as a surprise when simplistic qualification matching algorithms don't work?

Araine 5 record

the note that Ariane 5 has had 4 failures in 68 launches makes it sound worse than it really is - The last 53 successive launches have been without failure - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ariane_5

Problem solved

Yes, we all have this problem, but I think I have solved it. I wouldn't want to charge neighbours for IT work, because I don't /want/ to do that type of support work. So I say, in all honesty, that I'll have nothing to do with Windows systems, but if they want to run Free Software, most notably a Linux distro of their choice, I'll happily help. Occasionally the offer gets taken up, and after an installfest which is usually not unpleasant, and a few phone queries, it tends to go quiet as people either become more self-reliant or just have fewer random issues. Happy to do this as a contribution not only to my neighbourhood but also to further the cause of Free Software, which has been good to me.

Sounds good

Speaking as one who may be on the receiving end of this, it does sound good. There are problems with fibre-to-the-home in our areas, such as "villages" not really being the centralised development one may expect, but are typically a strung out series of houses, mostly for historical reasons associated with landlordism. In our case, we're about half a mile from the road rather than just a few hundred meters from a nice central cabinet as one may expect in a town. In our parish, fewer than 1000 people are spread around 250 square kilometres, and the main village has fewer than a third of that total. Our "township" of about 50 residents (and three times that number of holiday houses) is strung out over a couple of miles.

But Internet connections has enabled my wife to set up a yarn business, with her online shop being a significant route to market. It's also allowed me to go back to Uni, attending lectures of the Uni. of the Highlands and Islands via VC connections over the internet. I've actually physically been to my college, Orkney College (UHI is collegiate) only twice in 3.5 years. These are significant enablers to us in these areas. That wonderful piece of magic, "the market" is unlikely to allow areas like ours to partake of modern digital life without central funding.

Gravity sucks - use it

The rocket will, if I read the drawings the right way around, be pointing upwards from LOHAN's mighty rod, will it not? If so, can't the contacts be made with a washer or similar flat metal surface on one, and a spring on the other, to maintain the contact held in place by the sucking action of the planet?

Bravo, Sir

"The long, dark teatime of the Seoul" Just wondering about how many journalist-hours of waiting it took for an opportunity to use that subline. Perhaps the less pure "The long, dark boot-time of the Seoul" may have offended St Douglas less? ;-)

Sniff

I was a Suse user from v5.1, and I've been tempted to go back now that kde is where it's at. But I'm fond of jfs as a file system, which for some reason Suse stopped supprting some time back. Glad they're back on track though and putting the Novell years behind them.

Good article

Those days, of creativity and innovation, really were interesting. The microdrives as part of the affordability of the QL, for what it brought to market, meant that I was able to undertake commercial work turning statistical information into graphical reports (wow factor at the time) at a fraction of the cost of other options available at the time, at a time when the cost of alternatives was so high s to be unavailable. So my "ql" sig pays tribute to the system that started my time making a crust from IT.

The microdrives on the QL could be used as a swap file for large documents. A couple of years ago, I fired up a QL and found documents from the mid 80s on microdrive could still be read.

S

If...

While I'm unable to agree with anything the idiotic and ideology-led rabble that govern the UK pontificates on, IF the result of downgrading IP and copyright legislation is fair and equitable across the board, you can see how it will be a resetting of the creeping of "rights" far past the time they have provided a recompense for the works' creators. But of course based on the ideology so far, this will inevitably be one law for the powerful and one for the rest of us.

The imbalance of rights is a real issue. I am involved with a local community digital archive, where we are very careful regarding copyright, but equally, fearful of the danger of the contents of the archive being hoovered up by the googles etc of the world. So the archive is not accessible via the net.

Pity this isn't on Herschel

Not sure how long this kit lasts, but what a pity Herschel's finite life may have been improved with this.

GASP!

No Chuckie Egg? That's no yolk....

Ah, subversion

It takes IT folk to know that "git" and "subversion" are associated with change.

Why under?

Just wondering if it's necessary for the infrastructure to be under the road. Would it work in some form alongside the road, replacing the ubiquitous armco, or something like that? Don't really understand the technology, or at what point distance becomes too much of an issue.

Also, I can't help getting the mental image of Captain Shakespeare's vessel in "Stardust," deploying a net to catch the electricity.

The only trouble is...

whatever info you feed the program, the answer either comes out:-

One ring to rule them all, one ring to bind them

or

42

Real damage

While we on ElReg may relish a technical scrap with these forms of pondscum, do remember that there are real problems they create, like elderly folk becoming too afraid to answer the phone, either because of a previous ripoff or fear of a potential ripoff. When you think about it, using a phone impiles trust in fellow humankind, and the predatory nature of these callers destroys that pretty effectively. This isn't "just business" any more, even for relatively legit operations. The consequences are too often just not good enough to excuse. As others have pointed out, it's possible for these callers, even non-UK ones, to be controlled better, so why isn't this happening? Hidden victims, perhaps?

Idiot sexist

Sexist for obvious reasons that he thinks only blokes would have such an interest, and idiot for choosing to splash 870 a month on what at that rate is no longer a home lab but a personal obsession. I've run servers at home since 1995 but don't think they've run me.

Mixed feelings about the sentiment he expresses though. Many in technology are in it out of interest anyway and enjoy the pace of change, so doing extra-curricula stuff outside of work is more hobby than intended for the somewhat single-minded reason of making oneself saleable.

Whew, I feel old

The article pretty accurately describes the situation as lived through in those heady days. 123 V3 was so slow and demanded such huge resources at time when we put huge effort into scrambling for every byte of memory andf it felt as though the writing was on the wall. The financial services company I was with at the time lived and breathed 123, but when Windows 3 came along we felt the need to have a good long strategic look at the way things were developing. Up to then, you sort of just went with the flow, but PCs were now core to the business in the same way as the minis in the computer room.

So we went to talk to LDC and Microsoft. (You could in those days.) We came away with the conviction that LDC really didn't know what to do next, and had no clear plans, while Microsoft (it pains me to say this with hindsight of the monopoly we helped build) really were determined to provide a tools as good as 123 (and Multimate, the other standard of the day.) Based on their road map, which we could see they were achieving, we went wholeheartedly with Microsoft and Excel, a difficult process with the more conservative in the business.

The other memory at the time was running "As Easy As," a spreadsheet compatible with Lotus .wks files. It was shareware,. but uncrippled,. and unlike123, did charts without expensive add-ons. A bonus was that it used less memory and was even faster than 123's best offering, version 2.1. That experience made me realise in a fledgeling state that it didn't need huge corporations to develop excellent software, so that when I started noticing Linux and Free Software around 96 or 97, my acceptance of Free Software was eased.

Symphony had some die-hard users in those older days too. I was all for standardising on all-in-one options like Symphony or MS Works, spending extra money for those whose work demanded it, as some people were battling with MS Write and so on, but that was too egalitarian for the top dogs for whom technology was part of the ability to dish out sweeties to the favoured.

S

I sense a lawsuit

Potato scones have rounded corners. And what about the plainly restrictive practice of only serving raspberry pi?

Sniff - we are in a similar boat

We're off grid here, and I run two inverters, (both Victrons, as pointed out by an earlier poster.) One is just 350w, which powers the lights, telly, hifi, bijour serverette (24 hours) ADSL router, AP, and laptops as well as charging sundry tablets. phones etc. The other is a 1.7kW which only runs the little fridge. What? you say. 1.7kW for a fridge? Well, the fridge only draws about 50-60w but to get the thing started - that's horrible thump, and the only was of doing it is using a larger supply.

Agree re the LEDs - they are now fine and the prices are getting to be where CFLs were a few years back.

Re the other suggestions, I'd be tempted to set up a hybrid system with solar panels and the grid feeding a largeish battery bank, but don't go down the earlier suggestion of "loads of car batteries" for a number of reasons. Feed 48V into a 5kW inverter, and you're away, and coping with any black/brown outs too.

It's not hard to manage on a supply like this, you just don't have the luxury of not having to think about your power use, no bad thing IMHO, though Snr Orlowski will no doubt have puppies at that thought.

S

Are iPads the real story?

I'm a (rather mature) student of the University of the Highlands and Islands, a Uni covering about 12 or 15 colleges over an area larger than Belgium (to be pedantically Reg-unit compliant.) I am over 100 miles from the nearest college, excepting the one 30 miles away across the Minch. All my lectures are over video conference* links, so students may be spread over multiple sites while the lecturer may be alone in a room somewhere. The geographic spread also means other systems need to support learning, and a "Virtual Learning Environment" is used to provide sources for lecture material etc. Even social networking is catered for.

The point is, these are all technology services that make it possible, not dependant the devices I use to access them. Regarding texts, a lot of my texts have been available as ebooks, but I have found it very difficult to use ebooks as reference material, when you want to browse to a particular place in the multiple books. Nothing beats the real thing for that, though if it's just books that need to be read, ebooks are a good alternative. The latest fad of ebooks from the library I find worrying too - the ebook vendors seems to me to be trying to take over the function of the librarian, but a faceless corporate service is not the way to dleiver such a service, from the students' perspective anyway.

* - I use a Tandberg 800 at home over an internet connection, but the VC admins were happy for me to use Ekiga on my linux laptop as an H323 client as well - very inclusive.

The difficulty is...

The CFO or "the business" sees these ELAs simply as the cost of running a business, almost like a tax, about which you can do nothing. The fact that there are structural or alternative product changes that can alter this is seen as business risk, easily managed by keeping up the ELA payments.

Mmm, memories

I still have a copy of OS/2 2.1 in the shed. I never managed to get it to do any work though it installed OK, as I recall. BUT, where OS/2 did feature in my life was in the early 90s. We had a branch network consisting of mostly 9.6kbps analogue lines used to access green-screen Pr1me applications. The network was incredibly expensive - a million a year if I recall. So when email started to become useful in head office, it was decided that branch managers should have email access. (Don't you love the way technology is used to consolidate inflated views of status? Rarely is early technology used to help actual work gettnig done.) Anyway,. my boss paid a wodge of dosh to a consultancy who tried to get MS Mail to work via a Netware connection using ppp. They scraped 1000bps on the 9.6k lines. A mate at Microsoft suggested I try Lan Manager's remote access server - RAS. To cut a lobng story short, test showed a throughput 8 times better than the consultancy, and I implemented, installed and trained the users of the entire thing, complete with horrid hand-soldered serial cables for the RAS board, for less than the cost of the consultancy. OS/2 1.3 as a server offergin seemed pretty good to me, but it was seen as a Microsoft, not IBM, product. On the basis of that, when Netware became surreally priced and just too weird, we sailed wholesale into NT.

Free but rich

These types of articles are helpful to convery just how rich the options available to Free Software users really are, and the comments also reflect the joys of their being options. My own list also doesn't include any of the above, but does inlcude:-

Zim - desktop wiki-style note editor - I have three "notebooks" which have years of stuff in them. Also usable as a daily journal with eth calendar plugin

Radiotray - uses the gstreamer plugin system to play radio streams - all the Beeb output, including 3Extra for us non-DAB denizens, and other streams around the world. Very convenient and unobtrusive.

gthumb - for photo management ans imple manipulation. Not as fully fledged as digikam, the absolute must-have for serious photographers, but adequate and reasonably quick.

Thunderbird with Lightning. Lightning works against a centralised calendar provided by eGroupware or Owncloud, two server-based must-have offerings.

But coming back to the article, it's refreshing to see how others have different needs or wants to your own and the fact that Free Software doesn't place anythign other than personal demands against use.

Good days,

> Sinclair’s Quantum Leap, or QL, flopped,

What? (see handle)

But really I wanted to retiterate heyrick's comment - they were interesting times. You'll probably still find Z80s in your nearest vending machine. At one company I worked, the local Arnold Rimmer, when refilling the machine, didn't believe me when I said the coffee was awful because of the Z80.

Wrong way round?

But there was also interesting research looking at the frequency of incidence of heart attacks, especially the ones that occur in the late morning, correlated against the fashion no longer to wear hats (I'm not kidding.) It seems baldies leave their warm homes, do their commute hatless, losing heat from their bonces and thickening their blood, then going in to a nice warm office, where a little while later their thickened arteries cause the attack. That woud suggest that the hirsutically unenvied have no insulation that the follicaly gifted have, and this contributes to the thinning of the herd as well as the head.

Gosh I'm bored....

Tux - make up your own reason.

Apple having it both ways

An interesting blog post here - https://plus.google.com/u/0/114476892281222708332/posts/246srfbqg6G - for those who can't be bothered, it's a report from a guy overhearing groups of people wondering, if Apple "proved" that Samsung's products were the same as Apple's why Apple was so expensive. No doubt the fanbois will say they're expensive because it costs to be innovative, but that neither addresses the issue not does it stack up that a rectangle with stripes is costly to produce.