* Posts by Jamie Davis

33 publicly visible posts • joined 8 Sep 2007

This Dianamania is a slur on Jobs

Jamie Davis
Pint

Buy this man a drink

If you were to look for "saying what everyone else is thinking" this article would appear.

All of these Jobs tributes are giving me diabetes.

Sorry he's dead. Don't wish it on anyone. Especially not like that.

However - More worthy people die every day unrecognised.

Man says he lost $500,000 in virtual currency heist

Jamie Davis
Black Helicopters

I'm not one for conspiracy theories but....

A highly publicised, non-verifiable jab at the embryonic bitcoin system on the back of a climate of recent hacking? You can't help but feel it would be in the interest of a lot of banks/governments. Even a hedge against the value of bitcoins would profit off the back of this.

Also. 4 cents now worth $20 a pop for something that has no intrinsic value? Why don't they just use virtual tulip bulbs and drop the pretense?

UK ICT classes killing kids' interest in tech

Jamie Davis
Flame

Mystery Solved

I recently received a speculative email from a job pimp offering a vocational ICT trainer position at the dizzy salary of £15k - seriously. Would anyone who knew their arse from their elbow take a job at £15k!? This job wanted a couple of year's experience as well.

You just know that whoever they get is not going to have a clue how systems work. They're going to be people who read out verbatim from the curriculum. No better than someone in a call centre reading from a script. They'll also fall down equally as hard when the path deviates from the script.

You wouldn't pay a medical lecturer £15k because they could get vastly more in the "real word". The same holds true for competent IT workers. They'll get their living from the same place. Until pay in subjects reflects the salary that the teachers could get in the private sector putting their experise to use, this won't change. Ever. It sounds simplistic but it really is first and foremost an issue with money.

I am a money gubbing, job hopping developer. Wage inflation in my industry is still high and a chronic skills drought is in progress. This lack of respect from the public sector really gets up my nose. Hence the icon.

/rant

Microsoft claims 'biggest' show-biz investment with Bing refresh

Jamie Davis
Thumb Up

Good good

Anything to bring back some competition into the search engine market. Although same may say I'm being generous with the term "competition".

Murdoch moves for full control of Sky

Jamie Davis
Thumb Down

Oh dear

I've made a point of not having Sky TV because I'm not buying into the "Fair and balanced" News Corp. behemoth. I was even going to have a crack at Virgin Media until I heard they were going to bring in Sky channels. Seriously, not a penny of mine is going to them.

In this age of globalization there should be some kind of multi-national monopolies commission. Murdoch's media presence, while perhaps not a monopoly in any one country is a worrying omnipresent threat to the freedom and neutrality of information across the world. The Sun already supposedly dictates who gets voted in. I appreciate that it's more likely they change allegiance to whomever they think is going to win. However, it's worrying that they even consider themselves to have this clout. Their ambitions are clear.

News Corp. have been migrating steadily more right in the political spectrum and more overtly political as time has gone on IMHO. My only solace is that the BBC pisses Murdoch off no end and I do not resent paying my TV licence for this reason. Murdoch can suck my chubby one.

P.S. I might have had an axe to grind there... could you tell?

Google renews vows with Chrome OS

Jamie Davis
Thumb Down

Brrr.

Sends a shiver down my spine.

Labour shock pledge: 16.8-meg broadband for ALL by 2012!

Jamie Davis
Stop

Seriously!?

Mandybill. The laughably open ended internet porn legislation? Fuck off Labour. Put the internet down. You can't be trusted. You can't even hold your own data without leaving it on public transport/toilets/areas like some kind of intelligence easter egg hunt.

U2 frontman bitchslapped by TalkTalk

Jamie Davis
Coat

Why is it so popular to use...

...Ad Hominem arguments!? Bono is a dick, this is as empirically true whether it was Jim Davidson or Mother Theresa saying it.

AICMFP

Month of Facebook flaws gets underway

Jamie Davis
Joke

@Gordon Grant

Please don't feed the troll. Thank you.

Serious business behind Microsoft's Silverlight-3 tease

Jamie Davis
Go

OK - cue the Micro$haft haterz...

Some rants are so easy to predict

America's second largest ethanol producer goes titsup

Jamie Davis
Happy

In a word... good

While the whole practice of making bio-ethanol has dubious value, corn is a pretty pants crop for making it. There are a number of alternatives both hardier and with a higher yield of ethanol per hectare.

Corn, at the end of the day is a valuable food crop and none of the husk goes to waste. Even the core is used to make HFCS - a major cause of obesity as it does not trigger the same "I'm full" feelings as normal sugar.

The momentum behind corn ethanol is basically the product of misled backing and greedy lobbying.

Daily Mail punts Georgina Baillie filth

Jamie Davis
Thumb Down

Dear god

but I'm bored of this story.

(...but not disinterested enough to withhold my opinion)

Sony and the terrible, horrible, no good, very bad quarter

Jamie Davis
Heart

Nice one

"But if you're looking for actual, tangible cash here, the princess is in another castle."

Like it, that tickles my geek switch :)

How to beat AVG's fake traffic spew

Jamie Davis

Not convinced

To add that HTTP header to AVG would be the work of a few minutes.

To properly head off the traffic is going to be more difficult than that. The only thing I can suggest is to monitor the behaviour of a user... is their first request HTTP header to a site the same as all subsequent hits? I for one know that a lot of crap gets put in there having had to compile usage statistics for a site. The chances of your browser having exactly identical headers as the scanner are minimal. But this would introduce a fair old overhead on the server.

Not an easy nut to crack at first inspection.

Price cut fails to push Xbox 360 past PS3 in UK

Jamie Davis
Go

@Martin Saunders

Couldn't agree more!

I would hazard a guess at it being money driven, these things normally are.

Someone once told me that Proctor & Gamble paid supermarkets to put Sunny Delite in the chiller cabinets because it promotes a healthy image alongside the real fruit juices when, in reality, it keeps quite nicely at room temperature.

I would be interested if someone on el reg could tell us whether something similar is happening here. Either that, or is there more mark-up for the retailor for non-Wii games and thus it's in their interests to put a spread on.

For a console that has a "healthy" lead over the combined sales of its competitors, its shelf space is frequently less than half of the XBox and PS3. Also - anyone else notice how it's always at the back?

Creative threatens developer over home-brewed Vista drivers

Jamie Davis
Go

I think we should come up with a new term - lititards

noun.

Meaning those who act like they would rather sue than act sensibly about something esp. when this is patently not in their own interests either on a PR, financial or intellectual level. I would list some well known lititards but I fear their litigious wrath may be poured upon me. I'm sure we could all name some though.

Apple lags MS in security response

Jamie Davis
Go

Go on...

Really... you're just goading us now aren't you? I think I'll set up my deckchair here and watch the flame wars.

GAME ON!

China blocks YouTube

Jamie Davis
Coat

@xjy

"No tub-thumping English imperialist has any moral authority to lecture China..."

Not that I'm taking sides but your argument is ad homini. If we ignored arguments on the grounds of hypocrisy then alot of good movements would have been stymied from the start. There are those who say that Martin Luther was anti-semitic. Objectively, he could have been a paedophile, mass murderer and morris dancer: It wouldn't have altered the validity of his cause one jot.

Everyone has a right to say whatever they want, if you ignore those who might be hypocrites there'll be not arguments... hmmm, now there's a thought.

Your business communications are a mess

Jamie Davis
Stop

Not so sure it's a bad thing

I'm not so sure it's a bad thing. The concept behind ringing someone is incredibly rude. In the words of Stephen Fry, "It's like going up to someone's desk and banging on it going "Speak to me now! Speak to me now!"."

A lot of the time I just want to get my head down and work on something. There are an increasing number of people advocating the idea of only checking your emails 3 times a day, something I'm taking to heart. There's a reason my phone has a DND (Do not disturb) button on it.

Most importantly, most people can work issues out themselves. Think of the number of times you've gone halfway through writing an email and thought "Ah no! Why am I writing this? I know what to do." If anyone could contact me on a whim, they'd do it for the most spurious and banal reasons. I'd argue that the lag in communications is a good thing for it filters out such lazy crap white-noise.

I'll take things as they stand as opposed to the alternative - a short leash to be kept on and yanked back at will.

Billg quits Facebook

Jamie Davis
Happy

@John

And I joined... do you have any cool applications available? I would like to found out the percentage of chocolate my pet is made of or how many personalities by vase had.

Microsoft! bids! $44.6bn! for! Yahoo!

Jamie Davis

Hmmm

I would like a credible alternative to Google. I do actually like the idea of another big player... Yahoo! and MSN can't truly be said to be in the same leaugue in terms of revenue (that's MSN - not Microsoft as a whole). With any luck they may use the privacy angle to try and hurt Google. It would be nice if it wasn't horded in quite so an alarming way by Google.

On the other hand, I have a feeling that it will be a case of two sinking swimmers clinging to each other as they both drown.

Starbucks mocha clocked at 628 calories

Jamie Davis
Alert

Nuts = Calories? (@Anonymous Coward)

I could be wrong, no doubt someone here will correct me but...

Nuts are a bit of an unknown quantity in calorific/nutritional terms. I believe that the way the calorific value of food is determined is by essentially "burning" it in controlled conditions and measuring the heat given off. Nuts burn just lovely, they are covered in natural oil and made from dense cellulose based tissue. So the calorie rating is very high.

However...

The human body doesn't have the enzymes to break down the body of most nuts (there may be exceptions). The cellulytic enzymes required to do it, simply don't exist in us. Even those animals that can digest it have a hard time... Cows have multiple "stomachs" and chew it to pulp, rabbits eat their own pellets to give them another go round etc.

While the oil on a nut is undoubtedly full of calories and would make us fat if we ate enough nuts, it isn't the whole story. The actual absorbed calories are alot lower. Is there a way to get the calorie rating of what we can actually absorb?

As always, I humbly leave myself open to correction (abuse).

ISPs nominate UK record industry as top internet villain

Jamie Davis
Go

Caption

"...and after I burn the orphanage, I'll rent a foodwagon and drive it through Kenya... I won't stop, just drive it..."

"...I like big butts and I cannot lie..."

"I'm smiling now, but I'm going to have your mother's phone scanned for illegal ring tones..."

"I wish I could shit gold, that would be sweeeeeeeet."

"I really should get back home, that philipino sex slave will be running low on oxygen about now"

"I'm buying a Porsche for my dog"

"Mother, why didn't you love me?"

"I'm so proud, this morning my son made his first litigious threat"

(and from family guy... but it seems SO fitting here.)

"All you guys looks like ants from up here, oh wait... you ARE ants"

Social networking and pron - together at last

Jamie Davis
Coat

Domain name?

www.sitonmyfacebook.com?

Global warming not to blame for warmer North Pole?

Jamie Davis

@janimal

Not to be too much of a pedant but we have the Indians to thank for the 0 and pretty much the rest of the numbers we use today.

They're called "Arabic" numbers because Arab traders brought them to Europe.

That is all.

BitTorrent site Demonoid.com downed by Canadian record industry

Jamie Davis
Coat

@Andrew Sheehy

Yup, you're right.

We're all knocking out bad music. I defy anyone here to name an English-speaking country that hasn't produced an annoying artist/band at some time or another.

US - Justin T, Britney S, Pussy Cat Dolls

Britain - Girls Aloud, Spice Girls, Razorlight

Australia - Savage Garden, Rolf Harris (although he gets special dispensation because he doesn't actually take himself seriously) and numerous soap spin offs. *cough* Jason Donovan *cough* (depressingly the biggest selling artist in the UK in 1990)

Hmmm... New Zealand anyone?

I admit that people are going to download because it's free whatever the music. But... really... this kind of music has to be turning off a few people right?

P.S. Just checked Wikipedia. Thin Lizzy formed in Dublin in 1969. Although... that was from Wikipedia.

Macs seized by porn Trojan

Jamie Davis

@J

The user IS a hole. In more ways than one on a mac. But I digress, probably not the best word.

The point I was trying to make is that a large part of smugness that comes from the Mac crowd is indirectly derived from being a low profile group. Their profile is raised, a head comes above a parapet and now it gets shot at.

I read the article I assure you, a poorly chosen word on the part of "hole" (and "anthropomorphised")

Jamie Davis
Jobs Horns

What's that I hear?

Is that the galloping hooves of irony? (yes, anthropomorphised, irony is a horse)

Having Mac fanbois crow about not having a full user-base despite soooo safe. They now have a larger base, and look what's happened.

It shows yet again that all platforms have *some* kind of hole and that the scum out there who write this are just playing the numbers. Except now, your OS doesn't have the history and pedigree of AV programs that Windows does.

Congratulations. You became a statistic. I'm going to go horse riding.

Sick Brit yobs graffiti dog

Jamie Davis

I'm going to hell...

I haven't stopped laughing for 10 minutes. I know, I know... inexcusable. But really... it does look a child's daubings on some wallpaper. I was expecting tags or at the very least a primary school-like penis motif.

@Coward - your Gollum-esque comment has had people in the office staring at me strangely.

Scientists get bogged down about climate change

Jamie Davis

@Colt

How dare you!? Like you're some kind of expert on extinct reptiles!? Such arrogance...

...Everyone knows that Michael Crichton is the authority on dino crap.

Smiley celebrates 25th birthday

Jamie Davis

Best geek headstone...

I saw was plain granite with "</life>" written on it

3 Ireland's broadband stumbles to its knees

Jamie Davis

Not a lot new here

This is pretty symptomatic of 3 customer service as whole. I have never known a company like it. EVERYONE I have known use them has been screwed over by them.

My sister's handset went down and the call-centre told her she was a liar and that the account had never been used.

Many friends have had the handsets simply stop working while 3 are uncooperative or slow to act on it. Often replacing knackered sets with "refurbished" ones which are even worse.

I'm sure there are people who would vouch for the affability and supreme service. I wouldn't touch them with a bargepole.