Posts by Mountford D

Ebuyer's overpackaging is quite common

By the looks of things, Ebuyer does this sort of thing all the time. I have had a solitary SD card delivered in a box big enough to hold 50 3.5-inch hard disks and on a different occasion, a single cable arriving in a similar sized box.

The stupid thing was that the SD card was in a padded Jiffy bag which could have been sent in the post. I guess it keeps the courier in business and saves them the trouble of recycling packaging material by passing it on and letting the customer do the disposing for them.

Kodak giving up the fight

Everyone predicted the death of the vinyl and turntables when CDs came out. Look what's happening now - would you believe turntables are available at my local supermarket alongside CD players and the usual home electronics.

Film will simply become another tool in the photographer's arsenal and for Kodak to drop Kodachrome just means they are giving up the fight for market share. Other manufacturers will just move in to fill the gap. Most consumers will think it's a mistake but you can be pretty sure Kodak's bean counters would have had something to do with the decision.

Remember the C5?

Where are the pedals on this?

So where's the drama?

We live in a free society don't we? Free choice and all the rest of it except when it comes to the TV Licensing authority when you are presumed to have a TV and the onus of contrary proof is on you or risk being hounded for the rest of your life.

Providers like TalkTalk bundle broadband into your phone services anyway so it is "free". You don't have to use it, but the choice to do so by simply plugging in an Internet device is there.

Bring back Bill Gates?

Dare I say that???

Oh dear. Looks like Microsoft under the leadership of Mr Ballmer is heading for the rocks and lurching from one bad decision to another in the meantime. Time to sack the man in charge?

Thanks to its German roots

English has the capability of concatenating existing words to form new ones (as in Donau­dampfschiffahrts­gesellschafts­kapitän - Captain of the Danube steam ship company). Most of these however are transient and it does call into question whether some of these words should be included officially in the count until they have been in widespread use for at least 20 or more years.

Re: I will believe it when pigs fly

Ah, but they already have: Swine flu (flew).

Groan... Hat, coat, etc.

Horses for courses

The problem is Microsoft is mixing their business models. As Goat Jam here has suggested, corps do not like changes, least of all trivial ones, as it punches a substantial hole in any IT manager's budget.

In my IT career experience, the business market has always been made up of stable, long-term (5 years or more) systems with incremental upgrades that are 100% backward compatible. Suppliers adopting that approach has always been successful and a lot of them, dating back to the late 60's are still around and doing well. The same applies to the home market, albeit a lot have specialised into producing games, but that's only a natural evolution.

Microsoft on the other hand have tried to mix the two and yes, XP has been used successfully in the business environment but only because it has roots in NT which in turn, was hugely influenced by VMS. Because it had all the security features of NT, it can be locked down for the business environment while the home environment used it openly but painfully with the plethora of malware filters.

If W7 is to succeed, it has to be 100% backward compatible with XP but better. The question is how better? This the question Microsoft is not addressing or if they are, they are thinking better == prettier, hence more eye-candy and "better user experience". I can't speak for anyone else but my definition of better user experience is better response, crash-free sessions, no worries about malware, the ability run my collection of software acquired though years, to install all the software I can eat and having a system that just works. At the end of the day, an operating system, which is what Windows is, is simply a supervisor program that controls your hardware, not some all-encompassing mass that lets you play DVDs, surf the Net and fulfils your every desire at the same time... Can I mention Linux now?

Ulterior motive?

Microsoft is a money-making organisation. They will never give away their code unless it benefits them in some way. This is how it works: Give away something so that open-sourcers will start working on it and sooner or later, based on the infinite monkeys principle, a killer application will emerge. This will of course be based on some proprietary licensed layer and if you want the killer app, you have to pay for the licence. Microsoft sucks you in again. You lose again. Expect to be eaten if you play with sharks.

@MAC

It's a pain in the arse. You have to obtain a MAC for changing any kind of telecom provider. I believe it was originally conceived to stop fraudulent trading activities and fly-by-night businesses. In reality, when you ask for a MAC, you get hassled by the "Retention Department" (actually a local office and not one in India) who will try and convince you to stay with grovelling shovelled in spades, to which you tell them in no uncertain terms that if they treated their customers better, you wouldn't be having this conversation with them.

Reminds me...

Some time ago, if you had asked for directions from Lands End, Cornwall, UK to New York, USA, Google Maps would have told you to "Swim across Atlantic". Question is: Has Google removed that feature because too many potential Darwin Award candidates were being picked up by the Coast Guard? Shame, really...

Bad to worse

So BT is going to lurch from bad to worse with resource problems then? I'd better stick with TalkTalk.

Just to put my tuppence in, contractors are by nature, more focused on their jobs as that is what they are employed and paid to do. Permies on the other hand are involved with everything to do with the organisation from politics to managing contractors. Yes, some contractors are overpaid but by and large, contractors are paid fairly considering they have no holiday pay, no sick pay, no pension, no benefits, no job security and incur extortionate professional fees.

Having been on both sides, I know which I prefer - would you be paid £300 a day for 6 months living in a suitcase with all the stress of looking for a new job at the end of that or £36K a year with all the trimmings, job security and a home to go to every night?

Ever been to Poland?

Having Polish relatives in-law, I can vouch for the fact that Poland is certainly on par, if not ahead of Britain in terms of living standards. Since escaping the clutches of the Soviet Union, Poland has leaped-frog beyond recognition and has an economy and society based on the British model but that isn't saddled by debt, and a population that is kind, helpful, generous and honest. English is widely spoken.

Northern Poland looks like a cross between Britain and Swtzerland, still full of forests and lakes where daily life is safe and friendly. The thriving streets are as familiar as any British city/town except that they are clean and free of hoodies and drunks. And best of all, the trains run on time and do not resemble cattle-trucks.

I for one would welcome my Polish overlords (you could say I already have one) and would move over there without hesitation. The downside? The weather. -20 and lower in the winter is really quite unpleasant, which is, I reckon why the Poles are queueing up to come to Britain!

@Dave Morris

So you found him on www.IceAgeEbay.com as well?

Is it worth it?

If it's anything like British TV, we went from 5 analogue channels with passable content to about 32 channels of digital video quality of utter shite and repeats. Quite frankly my TV stays off more often than on these days and I suspect the American public who hadn't bothered will not miss anything either and will end up putting the radio on instead.

The answer: Licence ISPs properly

Let's face it: Anyone can set up as an ISP as long as they have enough dosh. All you need is about £1K a month payable to BT and you are an ISP under their wholesale scheme. Go into partnership with a spammer, recruit a few hundred spambots and you have a global spamnet. BT don't care as long as you pay them. If they get downstream complains, they'll simply pass it on to you as it's your responsibility to keep your users in check.

Surely the answer is to regulate ISPs and make sure providers are bona fide. Also bandwidth and pipe providers like BT should make sure traffic flowing through their pipes is not effluent and cut off the ISP if nothing is done.

ISPs are way too soft too. My mate's PC was turned into a spambot and all he had was a letter from his ISP telling him he had exceeded his quota and his machine could be sending out spam and he could be charged for usage. Big deal! His ISP obviously knew it was a spambot and should have therefore throttled his connection and terminated his contract if it wasn't fixed within a week. By the time I got round to have a look at it, he must have spammed the world several times over.

@ Hmm

User-hostile? What's so user-hostile about the KDE or Gnome desktop environment? You can even get to control the entire network from a GUI never mind just the local machine. It's looking more and more like a Mac these days. I wouldn't say it's user-unfriendly at all.

For sure it's different to Windows and you don't find the functions you have got used to after many years of Microsoft brainwashing but remember the time when you moved from pen and paper to mouse and keyboard? It's just a learning process.

I can actually cite an over-50 computer-illiterate user who had not used Windows before and I introduced him to SuSE and KDE a few years ago. He recently had a look at Windows and decided KDE/Linux was far preferable. I can also vouch for the fact that he is far from being a geek... or perhaps he IS one despite appearances!

Addiction gene

I thought I read somewhere that the addiction gene had already been found and that addicts, no matter what they were addicted to, carried this gene?

From a part-time Brummie

That's why most Brummies don't actually live in Birmingham and why the city boundaries keep getting pushed further and further outward at the destruction of beautiful Worcestershire, Warwickshire, Shropshire and Leicestershire countryside as the desperate Birmingham Council attempts to corral the ever disappearing population. They'd be broke from the lack of Council Tax otherwise.

Me? I have the good fortune to escape to the wonderful Cambridgeshire countryside in pursuit of my work in the week, returning to sample the delights of suburban Birmingham over the weekend. I've nearly lost the accent so one day I'll sever the link... one day...

Re: Don't give them ideas

No need. We introduced them originally.

Being one of our ex-colonies, we introduced British Law to the land in the not-so-distant past to which the Malaysians have simply continued on the model. Draconian laws like detention without trial and wholesale re-population of natural settlements into "New Villages" were in widespread use during the 1950s-1960 Emergency. Not surprisingly therefore that the current administration can and will introduce laws updated to be applicable in the 21st century based on the successful British model of the past.

A particularly interesting aspect of ex-colonialism is that we introduced the capital punishment of hanging and the Malaysians still carry this out in accordance with the procedure laid out by the British.

Let's hope Jacqui Smith doesn't decide to open her history books.

Standards and "Beta & dodgy maths"

Standards are standards. If you are not going to adhere to standards, why have standards at all?

If all browsers are standards-compliant from the word go, then every roll-out will be standards-compliant - IE8 or not. Having an option to toggle into a non-standards view simply takes the piss, something Microsoft are very good at doing.

As a developer, I need to code for all platforms (fact of life) and having to cater for a Microsoft-only platform only increases my workload, costs and pain. Rather than tying punters to Windows, which is Microsoft's objective in everything they do, they just succeed in pissing everybody off. That is why I (and others like me) hate them.

Vista for the uninformed

Vista has problems. You know it, I know it and MOST of the readers here know it. But does Joe Public know it? I frequently come across members of the Great Unwashed saying what a fantastic deal "PC RipOffWorld" are offering on such-and-such a laptop/desktop with Vista and they are going to buy/have bought one.

When I tell them that their shiny new laptop/desktop will work so much better if they "upgraded" it to XP, I am met with looks that resemble Santa's Little Helper (the pet dog in The Simpsons). Why should they take my word for it as opposed to a huge £million+ turnover chain like PC RipOffWorld?

After all they can always take it back and complain to the 18 year-old kids at the counter and rely on a Sale Of Goods Act repair while seasoned IT pros like me are too busy fixing the repairs done by the kids in between my day job looking after huge £million+ turnover systems with hundreds of users.

Do not underestimate the power of advertising especially when the cheques have "Microsoft" printed on them.

Really? Why is this news?

Not really unexpected is it?

Pre-cursor to invasion

Can we now assume that this is a Russian pre-invasion tactic much like the traditional artillery bombardment to soften up the enemy before the troops went in? So I guess we to be extra vigilant the next time we get a series of DOS attacks otherwise we might wake up the next morning having to learn the Cyrillic alphabet.

You are all missing the point

The National Programme was doomed from the word go as anyone in the NHS will tell you. The only people who didn't know this / refused to believe this / had some ulterior motive / knew this but saw it as a way of making a vast amount of money were the Government of the day, naive individuals who had a little knowledge of NHS systems and the usual vultures posing as contractors who could convince the Treasury to part with tax-payers money.

In reality, it has kept a lot of IT people in jobs, who otherwise will be on job-seekers' allowance or emigrated to better climes. It has kept Britain's IT skills in the country and provided a focus for a national IT skills strategy, whether by design (the ulterior motive) or just luck or a bit of both.

I hope it was by design and the Government of the day is not as incompetent as they seem... What am I saying!!!!

Not quite the impressive photo

What an impressive photo I thought till I clicked on the link to the NASA site where in its full glory, is disappointingly titled "Artist concept".

He didn't have to DIY it himself...?

What? No DIY instructions from Dell on how to remove keys and rewire the keyboard??

When one of the F2 key hinges snapped after 4 days on my brand new Inspiron laptop, Dell sent me a replacement keyboard with a URL to some instructions on how to remove the keyboard and fit the replacement. The instructions involved dismantling the brand new machine and fiddling about with delicate-looking ribbon cables which I decided against. A tiny drop of superglue soon fixed the problem.

Not quite right

The problem I encountered was that the user had a sub-account alongside her main family account. She was registered as "MyFamily@btinternet.com" and her sub-account was "Mrs.Smith@btinternet.com". She tried to send mail as "Mrs.Smith" and the SMTP server at BT Yahoo! (or whatever they call themselves) could not verify her email address. When I changed her email address to "MyFamily" (with a reply-to "Mrs.Smith" so her contacts knew who it was), all her emails sent without any problems.

I have advised her not to renew her contract with BT when it finishes in July. I am just amazed a global company like BT can make a cock-up of this phenomenal magnitude. Do they pull people off the streets or take on anyone who completes an IT course as advertised on TV and promote them to project managers as soon as they complete their probationary period?

In-breeding

I've always said my in-laws were a bunch of in-breds. Now I've got proof.

Typical Malaysian premature press release

@greatwestern

Yep, having lived in Malaysia for 16 years, this sounds like a typical one-upmanship type of press release from the Malaysian administration. For historical reasons (a legacy of the good old British Empire) Malaysia has always been trying to outdo her slightly more prosperous neighbour of Singapore.

The main problem with Malaysia is the lack of continuity. How many times have I experienced some wonderful implementation of new technology only to see it go to ruin for lack of maintenance and a newer non-compatible system installed rendering the systems of the past couple of years totally useless. In my opinion, the building of a brand new city nearby to replace the existing capital of Kuala Lumpur is the ultimate discontinuity. No doubt Google will find itself replaced as flavour of the month in a couple of years' time if this ever gets off the ground...

I surrender!

I am not making a judgement call on Paul Burrell nor am I saying he is cleaner than clean, and no, I don't know him well enough on the single chance meeting I had with him but we did have an "ordinary" conversation much like the ones you have when you meet someone you know by sight in a pub.

I had a drink with him and we talked about the event we were at without touching any of the controversial issues surrounding him. On the strength of that I found him to be more decent (or appeared to be) than some of the people I work for/with. What he does with his life is none of my business and if he chooses to cash in on his former employer, that's his choice. He will probably never find employment in a confidential role again and therefore has to resort to doing what he does.

On the other hand, the Sados - I mean Saddos should still get a life and not make personal judgement calls on someone they have never met.

Novell are bad managers

For proof of this, look at the way SuSE us being handled just now. It wouldn't surprise me if SuSE fades away into obscurity in the coming years just like WordPerfect did.

@Hans @Glowing Organs

"Could you please give us more information about how much fun you are at the disco now, to enable us to make this "extra fun" assessment"

I guess @Glowing Organs has this genetic modification:

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/09/27/japan_boffins_breed_mutant_transparent_sunroof_frogs/

Check your chair!

Just heard my boss muttering something like "glue - chair - now the lazy bastards can't go home".

Look forward to it

Can anyone remember the spectacular display we had over the UK in the late 80's or early 90's? It lasted a couple of days and the emergency phone line were jammed with calls from people who thought the end was indeed nigh and God was about to descend from one of the glowing billowing clouds of solar particles. It was pretty incredible, and to see it again from the comfort of my own home instead of having to travel to the poles would make my life.