In other news

Senior police complained that the Sarf London blaggers index wasn't accurate, with many criminals robbing banks without first obtaining a licence and registering with the police.

re: WTF is a Database company

A lot of copies of Oracle were running on Sun hardware.

When Sun goes away a lot of IBM, HP, etc salesmen are going to be visiting those server customers and they are also going to be plugging a switch to DB2, SqlServer, etc as part of the deal.

Oracle didn't fancy that

iPad is great for presentations

I hate to say it - if I can't get a bash shell it's not a computer - but the iPad is excellent for doing presentations.

First you connect it to a projector and it works !! No 10 minutes of messing around with Windows/laptop maker/graphic card makers incompatible setup screens.

Then it becomes a preview/remote control for the presentation, shows you thumbnails of all the slides, notes etc.

None of the projector showing your desktop for 5mins as all your corporate login stuff tries to work out why you aren't on the net, and then powerpoint startup and the powerpoint editing screen until you press f5 etc

Traffic solution

With enough compute power in the cloud you could have your own AI engine play your character for you. You simply pay for an Amazon EC2 engine to run an AI character and pay for the game also running on EC2, it regularly emails you to tell you how many orcs/ninja/gerbils/whatever you have killed and how much fun you are having.

And whats more you have lots of spare time to go out and do something fun instead

Japan doesn't need $100K

In case anybody on el' reg hasn't read it - an excellent account of the status from a programmer in Japan http://www.kalzumeus.com/2011/03/13/some-perspective-on-the-japan-earthquake/

Ending with :

"If you’re feeling compassionate and want to do something for the sake of doing something, find a charity in your neighborhood. Give it money. Tell them you were motivated to by Japan’s current predicament. You’ll be happy, Japan will recover quickly, and your local charity will appreciate your kindness."

Penalty

If convicted the company faces the prospect of a sternly worded letter

On the plus side

The limits on flights to Tokyo have resulted in much reduced radiation doses for lots of passengers

@FFS

Transatlantic fibre optic cables - but having to have a transmitter on one end and a receiver on the other doesn't make them clever ?

The signal processing to put that much bandwidth into and out of the steel with all the thermal noise, reflections, surface scatter, multipath effect from discontinuities / grain boundaries in the metal is clever.

British gov developing stuff

In a British patent you have to declare if you think it has military implications - in which case you get the patent but it gets classified rather than published. This was part of the row about the privatization RSRE/QuinitiQ - the buyers got 50years of every secret patent for the $40M

It gets tricky for an international team, the UK govt say it has to be revealed to them if there was a Brit on the team, the US say it goes to them if it was invented on US soil (or other way around)

Back when I used to do 3letter agency stuff I asked what happened if we invented it on a conference call? Withering look from legal people - just don't right !

If 80,000 people don't die

Have they considered the financial implications of 80,000 people not dying?

The pension costs of immortals are astronomical ! If people stop smoking and don't die, thus living for ever, it's going to cost a fortune in Werther's originals alone.

Great minds

So whats the difference between two huge multinational technology corporations employing 1000s of talented researchers and a pair of squabbling 4year olds?

... seriously - whats the difference?

Greetings from Norway

Apart form being a lot smaller than Heathrow, Oslo airport expects snow.

How much extra above the current 10quid/passenger landing fee would you pay for a bunch of snow moving equipment that might get used once per decade?

@Hang on a minute.

Snow ploughs don't remove snow - they move it to the side.

So if you have 10cm of snow and plough it - you now have 20cm of snow along side the plough.

Runways are typically 50m wide - so if you plough the snow off them into a 1m wide bank on the edge then 10cm of snow is going to be 2.5m high on each side. But you can't have walls of snow along the side of the runways in case a plane goes a bit off course. So where do you put it?

Then you have to clear all the taxiways and aprons and clear the grass between the runways for emergency access.

And the other guest

Served 6months for hacking and was banned from using a computer for 7 years.

Business case

The trouble is that it's not expensive for BAA to not have flights.

The airport makes most of it's money form the shopping and parking - it needs flights because otherwise people might not visit it's shopping centers - but it doesn't need any particular flights.

So spending 10X quid to clear runways for flights paying X quid in landing fees isn't worth it. Unless it happens often enough for people to stop flying there then it makes more sense to not bother.

It might even turn out that it made more money out of the delays than it would have done from the flights if all those stranded people bought enough meals and giant Tolberones

open source top talent

It depends on the area you work in.

If it's a cool new trendy field with high visibility then it';s easy to spot the top talent in Django or Groovy or cool_new_ruby_framework.

What if you need C++ or SQL people? How do you spot the top talent there?

Contributors to C++ standards committee? Authors of textbooks? Or just people with the funniest blog site name?

Big society

Sorry about the typo - should have been 'we run GCHQ' - even more sorry that the typo made the comment better!

Big society

Under the cutting of public services, sorry - big society - shouldn't we ruin GCHQ instead of the other way around?

If neighbourhood watch in Reading were given the feeds from all the electronic inteligence gathering then they could have predicted the democracy movements in N. Africa, the Iraqi WMD and the fall of the Berlin wall in the same way as GCHQ but cheaper

Weeelll

Unfortunately the US allows 'business procedure patents' and the patent on closing concentration camps is owned by somebody else and hasn't expired.

Good start

You can see the Eu ruling that the app store is an anti-competitive monopoly and Opera are just the people to push this.

Perhaps

>all of the appropriate drivers for the hardware type in question

Amazing - imagine including drivers for a machine WITH the machine. I bet some consultants worked hard to come up with that one!

> a suite of useful Microsoft applications and services, optimized versions of certain applications

So replacing the third party crapware and trialware with proper Redmond crapware and trialware

ITAR and Europe

ITAR does have some advantages. It effectively bans American companies from launching anything on Chinese or Russian rockets so Thales and Eurosat make a load of money building satellites that can be launched cheaply in China

@Good news

The power plants aren't supercritical - only the CO2 is.

It's like 'explosive' CPU performance - you rather hope that the only the performance is explosive - not the CPU!

Good luck

So having so successfully battled the entrenched special interests of doctors, insurance companies and pharma to overhaul America's health service.

He is now going for the softer target of lawyers, VCs, and large corporations !

What next - peace in the middle east before building upto settling the Vi / Emacs wars?

@Free Open Source does not have to be given away

Missing the point, if I use an open source package and give it to you then you have the same rights to give it to someone else.

Apple is saying that the user cannot share what they have downloaded.

Isn't this supposed to humour

And not just the minutes of rail track's meetings about automatic train protection system ?

Windows + voice

>Call 999

This requires administrator - do you want to restart with elevated permissions

> croaks yes

Restarting, say OK to continue

> faintly ok

Did the application restart correctly, say OK to continue

> even fainter yes

Do you wish to improve your Internet explorer browsing experience, say next or cancel

> c a n c e l

You will be prompted again in 5 mins

New updates are available, do you wish to install now?

> croak......

open source

>examples of open-source apps for iOS or Android,

Like iOS (BSD-Darwin) or Android (Linux) ?

Simple algorithm

The police wan't more money/staff/powers

Politicians want to be seen to be doing something about a problem.

So police create perception of a problem - present it to politicians - police get more money/staff/powers.

If politicians not convinced by problem add child porn, terrorism, WMD, witchcraft, cancer or drugs label to problem.

Sooooooooo.....

We aren't looking as daft as the Germans, they proposed the eurofighter to defeat the Migs of the East German airforce.

They are now looking at selling those same Migs to some dodgy third world dictator in order to pay for their slice of Eurofighters.

The answer is obvious ... they allow foreigners in Canada

Canadians are pretty well insulated - once you get outside Vancouver or Toronto

It's all a question of rigged statistics - a recent study showed that Vancouver had the highest life expectancy in N. America. Because of the healthy outdoor lifestyle said the politicians - no because of lots of Japanese grandmothers said the statisticians.

If you only compare people of the same race it's about average. You don't suddenly get healthier by moving to Vancouver - unless you also become Japanese and female.

Cole not Dole and Sukhoi

So it's vital that we subsidize defense jobs whatever the cost because they are vital for national security - but subsidizing the pits was a commie plot.

Now we have an expensive eurofighter that could possibly beat a Russian fighter - except the Russians can simply turn a tap and cut off all our gas (and soon oil) leaving us to launch the fighters with a tea light candle from Ikea and some AA batteries.

Can I propose an alternative in which we kept the pits open and bought SU27s. Then we could have a proper war with the Russians - which we would win because our chaps have better mustaches.

And because our currency would be up there with Canada's, Australia's and other coal producing countries - we could buy them for now't.

Authors vs Publishers

Authors get a fee each time their book is borrowed - I'm guessing publishers don't get a cut of this.

Whereas publishers get a big chunk of the cover price of a new book and authors get a small cut of this.

Especially a certain Dublin stout

Just look at the experimental results of Guinness on the recovery of senile dementia/ Alzheimer suffering CEOs

Important distinction

Wasn't a case like this already thrown out because it would have a much bigger effect on annuity rates - women live longer and so pay a lot more for annuities - if this case goes through then won't the same logic apply?

Still you should be thankful that there is competition in car insurance.

Here when insurance was made compulsory the govt decided it must run it - so that it was available to anyone. So everybody pays pretty much the same liability part, somebody with 30 years experience and a mini pays the same as a 17year old who just got bought a Porsche by daddy. And although the insurance company isn't supposed to make a profit - it does have to cover government levels of operating costs - as you can imagine rates here aren't cheap.

Infiltrating the minds of kids

If the toys you played with as a kid really influence you - why aren't I Spitfire pilot?

Gates charity

Not wanting to be cynical - on the reg - but corporate charities (like IKEA or Welcome) are a little different from your local oxfam shop.

Gates and MSFT pay very little tax due to a lot of this creative accounting - yes he is giving away a lot of his fortuen - but what else do you do with it after the first $100Bn?

It also buys a lot of personal and commercial influence - they are currently being investigated in a few countries for large charitable donations being immediately followed by governments abandoning opensource and making big MSFT purchases.

The gates foundation also operates like any other US fund - and some of it's investments are a lot less ethical than many high street banks.

Sir Ives

Is British and has made a major contribution to industrial design

(well at least as much as any luvvie that gets on stage in the west end and gets a gong for services to art)

Nokia R+D spend

And everybody was complaining that Nokia spend 5x as much on R&D as Apple do - but could Apple come up with an invention like this ?

different in Canada

The difference in Canada is finding 200 minutes worth watching with their limited selection - how many times can you watch 'Broken Arrow'?

ps Free - Amazon prime customers pay $79/year to get free shipping, the movies are free on top of this. Alternatively of course it's $79/year for unlimited movies and you get the book shipping for free

Jury of peers?

I doubt very much that the jury in anyway represented his peers.

I'm betting the jury consisted of white middle class property owners on the electroral register who had the sort of stable jobs that they could take the time off and the sort of attitude that meant they wanted to be on a jury (it's ridiculously easy to get off one)

I would love all trials of police officers to have a jury of black teenagers - just for some balance.

Better go and hide my copy of "dambusters"

Posting a video of clips of British bombers destroying German cities is obviously OK - it's the staple of Sunday afternoon TV.

What if I posted clips of German bombers and the London blitz ? Since that's an act of terrorism would I be in trouble?

@Corporates

Worse over here in the land of ice and snow. You pay for incoming calls on your mobile!

My office uses a Voip system, a local call on the same area code from my office to my mobile gets charged as a long distance call from the city 3000mi away where the Voip system is registered.

@Emergency SMS

Is really useful - SMS messages will generally get through even if there isn't enough signal for a call. There have been a lot of people rescued from mountains and boats who texted a friend and asked them to ring 999 - it's nice to be able to text 999 directly.

Also be thankfull there is a vaguely joined up 999 service. We just had a hiker die on the local mountain, their family called the police when she didn't return home - but the mountain 2miles away is in another jurisdiction and the police in East Town didn't call the police in North Town - who run the mountain rescue.

fared much better in Washington courts

The laws for each state are different - California banning non-competes is allegedly one reason for the rapid growth of silicon valley.

The worst one is Massachusetts their courts have a history of enforcing non-competes so strongly, even when it wasn't part of the contract, that many companies have an unofficial policy of never hiring anyone who has been previously employed in MA because of the risk of a future lawsuit.

It's becoming a big problem for MIT spinouts, the students know if they go and work there then Google, Facebook, MSFT etc will probably not hire them.

Protecting Doctors

Or when I'm looking to hire somebody I can pay $5 to a US website and check their medical history - I don't want to hire somebody who has a history of cancer or heart disease or diabetes do I ?

Ultimately i suppose there will be an app-for-that allowing me to check out how many abortions/STDs/breast enhancements my prospective date has direct form my iPhone

Publishers

Are the police going to go up against a publisher probably owned by Murdoch?

Or a bookstore with a bunch of expensive lawyers making points about Nazi book burnings.

But getting a prosecution against a 'peado' with a jury should be easy.

Expect to see a lot more of this tactic. You don't want to put a Guardian or BBC journalist in court - instead you pick some loser blogger who is going to look bad to a jury - get a conviction and then have case law that the BBC / Guardian aren't allowed to report say police expenses

@That is all well and good

They also failed to find any link between Iraq and 911 or any WMD - but that didn't stop them

Greatest ever quote

You know, just once I'd like to meet an alien menace who wasn't immune to bullets!

@Software Vendors taking the michael

In theory yes - in practice no. The public and bandwagon jumping politicians would care about that - since it affects them, they don't care about B2B.

It could affect cellphones though if Apple decided you couldn't sell your fondleslab used.

Biggest effect is probably accountants and tax, if you can't sell software it's not an asset, so a whole bunch of depreciation stuff doesn't apply.