How are the mighty fallen...

IBM used to create a 5-year-plan and keep it up to date, so they knew in advance what was going on and what to do about it.

But now they have fallen into the Wall Street disease, which thinks that knee-jerk reactions to three-month results are the right route to profit. Yes, but that's not a route to long-term profitability.

Bah, humbug.

Ref doghouse and "tenuous IT link"

Obligatory reference to Raspberry Pi. Camera driven by Pi, image analysis to ensure that the automatic dog-feeder that you install will feed the correct amount to the correct dog. You might as well get the R-Pi in its idle moments to record Radio 4 on iPlayer and play the programs back to the dogs time-shifted to Central European Time. And check the temperature inside the doghouse and spray water onto the roof when it gets unpleasant for the dogs.

A Point Being Missed...

Everybody is talking about suing the thieves. To do that, I have to know it has happened.

How will I ever know that has happened, except by chance? The images could be used anywhere, in any country, on any medium.

I will have to run searches to detect abuse of my images. I will have to run the equivalent of the Google spider with the TinEye image comparison built in. It's not practical., I don't have the resources. In the end, I'll get shafted and never know.

Mind you, if we all club together, build a server farm out of old computers, then run lots and lots of Google spiders, we can bring the web to its knees, and show the government that they can't expect the new Benefits system to go on working while they are simultaneously shafting the citizenry.

Not a word of truth...

This piece reads as if it is a rehash of a BT press release. Let's deconstruct it, using a few facts as crowbars to break through the layers of bullshit.

1. "home to thousands of engineers not just working on the frontier of boffinry"

No boffinry (in the meaning of basic research) has occurred at Adastral in the last 10 years.

2. "Thousands of engineers". there are around 4,000 people working at Adastral, of whom only 1500 are permanent UK employees of BT. The rest are onshore contract workers, mostly from the subcontinent, who are operations and support staff for the various IT services that are hosted there. The 4,000 is down from 11,000 in 2004, who were all permanent UK employees.

3. "the park hosts a £500m scale model of BT’s full global network". When Adastral is redeveloped, that will disappear. The building that houses it does not appear on the redevelopment plans.

4. "The team now has a full licence to invest BT’s cash in helping young Brits discover their creative spark " But it's Google that are buying Raspberry Pis for our schools, not BT.

5. "BT is now working on plans to create 2,000 new jobs and provision for up to 2,000 homes by 2025, by opening up areas of Adastral Park as a science campus." BT has never committed to creating 2,000 new jobs, and cannot even point to more than 1800 jobs that are already in existence on the site, even if they count the restaurant staff and the building maintenance people, none of whom are BT employees.

6."opening up areas of Adastral Park as a science campus" BT has been trying for at least 10 years to attract other firms to the park, without success. I know of at least one firm that tried it out, but left when they found BT could not provide a fast reliable broadband service inside their own science park.

7. The truth about the "provision of 2000 new homes" is that BT having inherited for free a large stretch of land that was bought by taxpayers for the RAF, is now getting the local council to alter its policies to allow BT to sell the land with planning permission, This will give BT a windfall between £100 million and £300 million.

One of the companies resident at Adastral, not listed in the article for some reason, is Huawei, who would dearly love to have a foothold in Europe. An established research park, with a company town literally next door, would be just what they want. Of course there would be no significant numbers of permanent UK employees - they'd be all imported.

Dave Wilby, you've been had.

Roaming charges not the only problem...

..on a Greek island, I unwisely connected to a Turkish provider, one call ate half the battery. This on the first day of the hols, having been allowed out by the missus with my bro on the strict understanding that I was to check in every night...and we were on a sailing yacht.. Recharge the phone every night? You must be joking...

We'll be celebrating on 8 Apri 2014..

...that Mickey-Mouse-rosoft has finally stopped screwing around with XP. Every time they touch it, they put more bugs in. Now, at long last, it will be stable.

If you don't understand what I'm saying, lend me your ears...

Q: What do you call removing removing bugs from software?

A: Debugging.

Q: What do you call putting bugs into software?

A: Programming.

Unisys - are they still alive?

I'm amazed. I thought they were dead long ago.

We should be told...

the day before they turn it up to full, so we have time to make tin hats for the family, write our wills, and kiss our arses goodbye...

Using Nexus 10 as USB drive from XP

Shambles, dear friends.

I can attach the N10 as a drive on my XP machine, and my wife can't (it's her N10).

No clear source for drivers for MTP mode in XP. Vague hints that som USB hardware on PC will not handle MTP mode, and no clear defiinition of which hardware it is.

We regularly need to drop large numbers of large files onto the N10 for her to take with her, and we've ended up using the utterly crappy file manager apps on the N10.

Apart from that, it's a gorgeous gadget, better screen than an iPad, better battery life, and cheaper too.

Kate? Kate? You're joking

..Kate is is too close to vi, and only works well in the KDE environment.

Geany and Gedit are fine but don't go nearly far enough.

There can be only one, and it's Bluefish <a href="http://bluefish.openoffice.nl/index.html" target=_blank>here</a>

- mutliple windows for many files open at once

- syntax highlighting for many more languages

- code block folding (to make IFs or subroutines appear and disappear)

- tooltips for language reference

and lots lots more

Bluefish is also available on That Other Operating System.

Efficient and virus-free

1. Efficient

Last mainframe I worked on had 64 MB of RAM and was supporting 3000 users. In the PC world, 64 MB is the minimum to boot up Win98 for one user.

2. Virus-free

Buffer over-runs were impossible to exploit because memory was divided up in 4K "pages" which you either owned or didn't own. The hardware detected attempts to write to any page you didn't own and promptly stabbed your program in the heart. i386 and i686 architecture is a child's mindless babble in comparison to mainframe architecture.

Unfortunately it is nowadays common for the big software packages to insist (invalidly) on running in privileged status, because their programmers can't be arsed to learn how to write safe supervisor calls. Result? You could drive a coach-and-horses through mainframe security today.

Help on El Reg Units

Just what is the formal definition of the Jub? can't find the original article in which it is first described.

Weather Man at Port of Tilbury

...was Captain Gale, not so long ago.

Dinosaurs in Publishing

Giving away free copies of books functions as advertising and increases the sales of paper books, according to Cory Doctorow, who has been doing exactly that for years. His publisher, Tor Books, agrees. So DRM as usual screws the person most likely to cough up some actual dough for your main product, and is seriously counter-productive.

Any publisher who stll does not understand after all these years and all the experience, is a f***ing dinosaur and needs to be shot.

"current information suggests that the culprit was a ship's anchor"

Drunken or lazy captain with an anchor...that's the maritime equivalent of a builder with a JCB...and it happens frequently, despite the cable runs being marked on the bloody chart.

Now that's how to write a headline!

Congrats to those at El Reg who did that headline. You absolutely nailed it!

What YouTube needs is a reputation system

In the auto DMCA takedown system, those who complain should lose reputation for every false claim.

One strike and your complaints get diverted to be checked manually (and YouTube makes sure the handling team is small and slow).

Two strikes and your complaints have to be backed up by a sworn statement in front of a judge that you have checked properly that you are the copyright owner.

Three strikes and you lose your userid in the auto takedown system permanently, and all your subsequent complaints have to be written by a lawyer at vast expense.

Three strikes should also trigger a Small Claims Court case demanding immediate payment of all DMCA false claim penalties - in Small Court, the defendant (in this case, the false claimant) has to send someone empowered to settle or the judge will decide against them by default. The punishment here is not the $500, but either wasting the time of senior execs or spending money to send a lawyer to a hopeless case.

... the remaining trees of his forests will be so few that a child could write them down ...

And that, dear children, is why the land of Mesopotamia is a rock-strewn hellhole today...

Please copy all your comments to the Home Affairs Committee

at homeaffcom@parliament..uk

...in the slight hope that they will notice the shit-storm they are going to stir up by "welcoming" the UKBA idea.

Why don't they just go away?

This thing of fighting the same battles again and again gets really tiresome. We've told them firmly the first time. Why do they keep coming back? Are they hell bent and determined on getting the entire population riled up, to the point where everyone and her granma are in jail for ripping off music, photos, books? Come back Guy Fawkes, we need to tell them again!

Mainframe Forum: Where Indians Cavort

Check out this place http://ibmmainframes.com/index.php

Pick any forum on a subject you understand.

Check the poster's names, and the quality of their questions.

I wonder how many of these people are being billed out at full rate to western firms. People who cannot read the manual, look up an error message, or use the utilities that have been in the IBM environment for 50 years. My favourite is the guy in the CLIST & REXX forum who has written a REXX program to copy a file. Jesus wept.

India and mainframes

I worked for Big Blue for many, many years. As far as I know, India had very few mainframes - Bank of India (AFAIK a central bank, not a retail bank) was the only one I ever heard of.. Late 70s- early 80s a change of government policy pushed many Western firms out of India, including IBM, just at a time when the role of the mainframe was being questioned. So India probably never had more than a tiny number of CA-7 installations, if any at all.

And that's why it made perfect sense (but only in the RBS dream world) to go to India to recruit a CA-7 scheduler with 5 - 7 years experience.

Elephant seals, a vital asset

We need to move on from the TV view of nature ("aaaawww, isn't the baby seal cute?") to the "web of species relationships" view. Every species we share this world with has a hand in keeping the world livable for us. Until we understand what's going on, and which species are keystones, we are playing Russian Roulette with bullets in 5 of the 6 chambers.

If we don't get it right, our children will end up living on a planet-sized garbage dump, fighting the seagulls and cockroaches for scraps of rotten food.

Why vending machines?

Vending machines have thin profit margins. Any efficeincy improvement goes to the bottom line

1. As BristolBachelor says, stock control is vital. An empty machine sells nothing. Sales figures are not regular and predictable even in a stable location like a train station. In say a sports stadium, being out-of-stock ruins the whole profit picture.. A visit to check on stock is an expensive hammer to crack a very small nut. M2M over mobile is much cheaper than a person+van.

2. Vandalism is an issue in quite a few locations. How about if the M2M device has the capability of taking a photo of the perp and sending it to the cops? Deterrence/prevention of vandalism also turns straight into profit.

I wonder how much Rupert Murdoch paid him?

..to write this obvious piece of astro-turfing, so biased you could open tin cans with it.

2016: News Headlines today...

- Online passport application service £2bn over budget, still not secure

- Black market flooded with fake British passports

- Passport Office not fit for purpose, says minister

Nominative Determinism?

Is Advocate General Juliane Kokott in her job because she is a tart? Kokott most likely comes from French "cocotte". See definition <a href="http://www.thefreedictionary.com/cocotte" target=_blank>cocotte</a>.

Our sweet Paris is of course a cocotte.

Oh to be a fly on the wall

in Steve Ballmer's office when that news came. I bet I would have learned some new swearwords. MS-Office is not going to be a cash-cow for much longer, and then the decline of MS becomes obvious even to the man in the street.

Any news on when Steve is getting his anti-aircraft missile launcher? I hear he wants to take out Larry's MIG while he's showboating in it...

[Paris, because she's both Libre and Gratis]

Not just corporate idiocy, but individual too

Lovely row recently, where a Microsoft customer service rep banned an Xbox Live user for the name of his home town, and refused to believe it was a real place, and refused even to look it up in an atlas or Google Maps. The name? Fort Gay, West Virginia.

"He was warned that if he put the location back on his profile he'd be kicked off Xbox Live and forfeit his membership fee."

The PR Microsuits have said "it was a mistake" and "we're going to make it right".. But no word on whether they are going to sack the homophobic asshole and tighten up hiring policies to exclude the wave of idiots that is engulfing the world.

Would someone turn Darwinian selection up to 11, please?

The Year of the Airship

I'm with Efros on this. It's been the Year of the Airship every other year throughout the decades, and it's never happened, for simple economic reasons - nobody can get the business numbers to work. The economic value of getting cargo to its destination quickly far outweighs the saving from cheap transportation. Which is why there's so many bloody container trucks on the roads, so little cargo on the canals, and so few airships in the skies.

Dream on...

>'Fresh fruit, vegetables, flowers and other foreign luxuries' will arrive like this. …<

Whoever wrote this line doesn't check the country of origin on the labels of the fruit and veg in the supermarket. For example, peas and runner beans - from Kenya or Ecuador - by airship? Not only won't it be fresh, but it is likely to be covered with hairy mould by the time it gets here.

Crap photo adds to embarrassing cockup

LuMan, you are so right. But that photo has been looked at and accepted for publication...hasn't it? Damn, I'm still making the assumption that the Beeb knows what it's doing. Now we know they have no content vetting process for their website - or possibly a vetting person who is as blind as a bat. [Yes, yes, I know bats aren't blind - it's a figure of speech, OK?]