Classic, just classic!

"If you haven’t utterly trashed your system multiple times in your comp-sci degree you’re just an arts grad who didn’t get laid."

Dominic, consider yourself nominated for QotW!

"Think different?"

'It's not "Think different," it's, "Think differently." Different is a comparative adjective. Differently is an adverb. You don't use a comparative adjective when you need an adverb. You're changing or qualifying a verb, so you use an adverb. It's wrong to use a comparative adjective to qualify or change a verb. Are you an idiot? You must be an idiot to use an adjective when you should be using an advert. [...]'

I'm not sure SAP is quite ready for what's to come...

Amen to joining the PCG

I have the full ("Plus") membership of the PCG. It costs me £220 (plus VAT, which I reclaim) per year. It's superb value for money. That extra membership tier provides really comprehensive tax investigation insurance. Second-hand accounts tend to suggest that saying to HMRC that you're a PCG member with full audit insurance somehow reduces the urgency, and subsequently the necessity, of the investigation. Frankly, it's worth it just for the very well produced template contract agreements and the IR35 advice. Without the PCG, it would have been a lot more difficult to discover exactly how IR35's being operated /this month/, and how to ensure you're not falling within its evil clutches.

Honestly - if you're a contractor, join the PCG. Just do it, and accept it as a necessity, in the same way as statutory insurances and accountants' fees. HMRC's attacks on contractors are becoming more aggressive, and it's your best armour.

Good.

Apple doesn't need another cock-up like the iOS 6 / Apple Maps débacle. Having someone who actually cares about creating good product, even if it takes a little while longer, in the driving seat is a good thing.

With hardware production, you have to pre-purchase components, reserve whole factories in advance, tool the casework machines, configure hardware pick-and-place component assemblers and gear up a production line. Delays cost fortunes, because the factory will still be charging you for the time the plant isn't making money elsewhere. If software is a little late, it's a lot less expensive. Production lines are much more generic and can be working on other products until the "gold master" is ready to press. If you're delivering electronically - which is far cheaper still - delays cost nearly nothing. Essentially, the costs of software delay are mainly deferred revenues.

Well done, Jony - seriously. Make it a good 'un, and let's see what Apple can do when its innovators are given the chance.

Well, duh!

""I ask students what is the first thing that comes to mind when they think of intelligence. Invariably the answer is: 'James Bond.' This is a sad state of affairs. Not only is James Bond fictional, [...]"

So go on then, show us all what intelligence work is really like.

Oh, right. Official Secrets. Fair enough.

Back to Bond, then...

Dumpster-diving?

Do supermarkets in Spain follow their English counterparts, and throw out perfectly good food just because it's hit a fictional smell-by date?

Foraging!

This time of year, there's plenty of spring growth going on, probably some early mushrooms (if you don't know your mushies, do NOT try this at home!), fresh roadkill's usable, and you might just be able to rustle up some rabbit or similar. Wild herbs transform a meal, and they'll certainly boost your bone stew. (Possibly "bone" in the military sense...) For a free, fragrant tea, steep elderflowers - there's a chance they'll be out by now, where you are. And it's all free!

Good luck!

(Icon: forgaging for forgotten sugar/ketchup/... sachets in jacket pockets...never find one when I need it...)

Damn!

I wish I could remember my login - I'd done some of the earliest articles!

Outstanding

""We've [...] offered our sincerest apologies as automated responses from banks should not appear on customer bills."

So what Virgin Media are really sorry about is having admitted that they knew why the bill wasn't paid. I don't see anything, anywhere, suggesting that they're going to stop charging dead people, just that they are embarrassed about being caught knowingly at it.

So malwarebytes ends up as malware.

Kinda ironic.

An interesting turn in the market

(Declaration of interests: I've consulted for Citrix, and have a lot of friends there.)

I've felt for some time that Xen would be better fit as an independent product, with the likes of Citrix layering products, services and consultancy on top of it; becoming, in effect, clients of Xen rather than holding ownership. To me, this is a great move. Once Xen has been properly established in an independent development track, and the market, rather than a single company, has been shown to drive development, this could mark a renaissance, and a solid alternative to KVM and VMWare.

That first photo

Bill Gates was Paul Allen's ventriloquist dummy. Who knew?

My tablet curses anyone who steals it, too.

I've got an app for that. Well - I wrote an app for that, anyway.

The funny thing is...

...how often do these tape archives ever get read back onto disk?

Exactly.

So you might as well use /dev/null, because your short-term backup covers the critical stuff for disaster recovery, and the longer-term tape archive is just a waste of space and money.

I can't wait...

..for the first "anti-radiation" mobile phone case based on this technology. It might actually work, this time...unlike the poor signal-deprived phone....

Bit of a shame...

...that, for all the innovation being done at AdAstral Park the bean-counters in BT seem determined to eke the last penny out of the existing, fossilised infrastructure and to resist rolling out high-speed internet. A pattern we've seen ever since they tried to resist ADSL for as long as possible, in order to boost ISDN sales.

Polystyrene? Bubble wrap? Aerogel?

Someone hasn't thought about atmospheric pressure at altitude! Bubble wrap will pop, aerogel will deconstruct, and polystyrene will be useless, as its cells will rupture, evacuate the trapped air, and won't be a whole lot of use as an insulator!

Certainly has its uses

We fabricated component parts for the STRaND-1 satellite using a 3D printer: far cheaper and quicker than sending the specifications to an engineering lab. If you find you then need to alter the design, the turnaround time is unbeatable - seconds from saving the CAD file to starting the print.

I don't think that 3D printing is the be-all and end-all - the materials are limited for low-cost printers, and the resolution is a problem for now - but it's great for prototyping and small-run manufacturing. Will there be one in every home? Not until the technology matures, and perhaps not even then. But there's a big potential there, and a goodly-sized market gagging for improved, cheaper devices, and I'm certain that market will be fulfilled.

Be happy, and enjoy your viewing!

This is a public announcement from Miniluv. Happiness is compulsory, citizen.

Ah. I see the mistake here.

You based your article on one from the Cambridge News website, that inarguably-accurate oracle of all things Cambridge.

Um, you might have spotted a little insincerity in those last comments... *grin*

So what's the total build cost then?

'Cos that'd be nice to know!

I like the analogy

...but it could do with extension. There are also cockroaches - virtual instances that keep spawning even when you think you've stamped on the last of the little b****rs.

Oh, and don't forget pigs: servers that eat data, whilst only ever outputting crap. And they eat. And eat. And eat. Eventually they either get culled or they die from their own obesity: either way, they only serve a useful purpose - being recycled into something tastier - after their demise.

Wonderful timing

What a great discussion to have on Red Nose Day...full marks to El Reg for bringing sysadmin dark comedy to the fore.

(Try working for a security-sensitive company and suggesting BYOD if you'd like a laugh!)

Elastic IP Address allocation

There's a lot made of the fact that Elastic IP Addresses (EIPAs) are released when an instance stops, dies, or is summarily killed off, but it's not that big a deal. If you're a heavy user, use CloudFormation to launch your instances, and include an EIPA allocation in the launch script. If you're a light (read: hobby or small business) user, create your own Amazon Machine Image (AMI) from a snapshot - it's pretty easy - of an EC2 instance that you've set to assign itself a named EIPA as it starts.

It's good practice to create your own AMIs (with auto-recovery built in) anyway, so that, if/when your EC2 instance terminates for whatever reason, it can be respawned automatically with no human intervention and little loss of service.

I'd love to "find something interesting to improve"...

...but I don't think Canonical would accept a patch that annihilated Unity and replaced it with a workspace that works nicely on a screen considerably bigger than a tablet's.

If they _really_ want to support a full range of devices, they could start by not forcing them all to behave like an Ubuntu wristwatch.

Only just joined VM...

...didn't expect to have to dump the SIM so soon. Fortunately, it''s just one a one-monther.

Windows 8 is killing their laptop and desktop markets

If consumers still had a choice between Windows 7 and Windows 8, there might be more movement in the market. Unfortunately, Microsoft doesn't see things that way: it's Windows 8 or the highway.

For corporates, Windows 8 is an answer begging a question. Who wants to carry the can for rolling out an upgrade to an OS that won't allow multiple document windows (the hint's in the name, guys!) on screen at a time? What's the point of those nice, new, high-resolution screens, with only one program showing at a time? Sysadmins would have to install a custom-rolled distribution with the "Metro" features disabled, and incur large expense for little benefit, and a lot of heartache.

Retail consumers view Windows 8 from a different perspective. They're chary of the unknown, aware of the increased hardware cost for Windows 8-compliant systems, and mindful of negative reviews and experiences.

Windows 8 or the highway? There's a big traffic jam, in the direction of tablet makers. By not really understanding their markets, and trying to brute-force them - no change there in 30 years, then - Microsoft appears to have inadvertently engineered the seeds of their own slow destruction. It's a shame: they've only just started to innovate properly, for the first time since forever, but it's too late, and too little, and often in the wrong directions. Apple's Mac line is also waning, but Microsoft-based new PC products are falling off a cliff.

I'm not entirely sure whose ideology...

...would be placated by hitting technology-education charities. Nor what an extortionist could hope to achieve. It just sounds like random, mindless vandalism to me.

Perhaps Anonymous might like to try to winnow out who was responsible, and give them the Good News instead. It's the sort of thing the Anons are good at...and it would certainly fit /their/ ideology to do that.

Absolutely correct.

I replaced the head-crashed hard disk in my daughter's reasonably new laptop with an SSD. From being fairly sluggardly (but light), it's now almost as responsive as my SSD-powered Zenbook. But that's still a long way from what's possible.

Firms like Steve Wozniak's Fusion-IO "got it" early: we don't need flash memory that pretends to be a hard disk, we need flash memory (or, better still, next-generation magnetoresistive or resistive RAM) coupled directly to the processor bus. RAM-speed reads, fast writes - in the case of (M)RRAM, near-RAM-speed writes with no "write wear" - and much lower power consumption.

I've argued it since the late 80s: moving-parts memory belongs in the same places as those who once invented it - retirement and (sorry) fond memories.