Posts by Red Bren

Compelling reasons

"part of the problem with the lack of OSS adoption is that the government's own IT people often struggle to find a compelling enough reason to ditch a proprietary product for an open source equivalent."

A compelling reason being a corporate funded junket?

USA

Land of the fear.

If you got a degree in the 90s

Then you didn't spend enough time playing Civ!

If they port freeciv to android, I'm going to lose my job and my marriage!

Alternative text message?

Gimme sum suga baby!

Sorry, I really shouldn't pretend to be in touch with youth culture!

A sinister question

What is this "right-click" people are going on about?

<- Paris, because she probably uses both hands

What does the UK bring to the party?

We have one of the most expensive, yet unreliable rail networks in the developed world. Are we there to provide a shining example of how not to do it?

Why use the full PIN?

Most, if not all banks ask you for a selection characters from your PIN password when doing online or telephone banking.

So why can't ATMs ask you for 3 random digits from your PIN. That way, the scammer won't have your full PIN or any idea of the order of the digits.

Alternatively, wash the keyboard with hot coffee...

Spy on your neighbours!

Win cash prizes!!!

Can't they collect real stats?

If only there was a portable RF device, possibly even hand-held that and could report its location and signal strength back to a base station? They could use the real-world data to build a map of actual coverage.

Or do they never wonder why no one ever makes calls from <insert rural town name here>?

Cause and Effect?

"London was mostly quiet last night, with several thousand extra police on the streets."

So keeping the police busy meant there were less people available for rioting and looting. Ergo the Met was behind the whole thing...

Is it even worse than the stats show?

How many non-IE users have spoofed their browser's user agent to fool MS-friendly website* into feeding them the correct contents? They're the really smart ones and they're going to boost the IE scores...

* You know, the ones that say they're only compatible with IE? or Netscape 4.?

Not quite what I expected

From the headline, I was expecting an app that helped you plan the perfect murder. Or give you the option to hire a local assasin through the in-app payment system.

No! No!! FFS NOOO!!!

If you've got a computer at your desk, why the hell do you need a piddling calculator? If you can't use a calculator app, you really have no business anywhere near a computer. In fact it should be a standard interview question - "Do you want a computer on your desk or a calculator and typewriter?"

Sorry for ranting. I once had a boss who insisted that spreadsheets were manually filled in with figures calculated on desktop calculators because he didn't trust the computer to give the "correct" answers, i.e. without the rounding errors.

Depression

I'm not surprised. I'd be depressed if I was facing gaol time.

@Martin Maloney & @ Magnus_Pym

@Martin - this was my apparently feeble attempt to emulate the rantings of a rabid, anti-BBC type, on hearing that the BBC might employ someone to do something other than the direct making of TV shows. I was quite pleased with the "pointless pencil pushers" pun...

@Magnus - I've been accused of many things but that really hurts...

Me=Fail because I had to explain it.

This isn't me, I'm not mechanical...

Mechanical Animals might have been more apt.

Astronauts' warning

"why didn't they realise the flag was back to font?!"

From the perspective of the astronaut nearest the flag, it's actually upside down! As we all know, this is a distress signal! They are trying to let us know that mothballing the shuttle program is part of our secret alien overlords' plans...<CLICK> No Carrier

Wrong song choice

Humans haven't set foot on the moon in my lifetime and I'm sad to say I don't expect them to.

UK Regulator begs not to be given teeth!

"any new requirements must be proportionate, setting out clear criteria and thresholds for reporting a breach"

Easy. Threshold for reporting a breach = an occurence of a breach. Clear criteria = any organisation, public or private that holds personal data, no matter how big or rich they are.

Of course a regulator with teeth might be expected to actually do something, rather than hand-wringing and waiting for a juicy executive post.

Existing consumer relationships

What happens if you consent to receiving specific marketing email from an company you trust and Yahoo sells your details to their biggest competitor? You get blitzed with marketing from the competitor which the trusted company can't match because they're bound by the Data Protection Act.

Big players won't be affected

I dare say the big chains that sell pre-owned games will be fine - they'll do some deal with Sony so they can bundle a new access code. Big Retailers will protect their margins by offering lower trade-in prices, Sony get a slice of the 2nd hand market. Consumers, small retailers and charity* shops will lose out.

What actually constitutes "owning" a game? If you sell/give away the original disk, can you keep a copy to enable you to use the access code you paid for and cannot transfer?

*Won't someone think of the children/animals/disabled/whatever?!!

Lack of granularity

These statistics are aggregated over too wide an area to be of much use, especially for choosing somewhere to live. It's no comfort to be told the average speed for your local authority area is an order of magnitude higher than you can get.

What I want to know is the average speed at street level and whether I have a genuine choice of connection providers. 10 different rebrands of Openreach ADSL is not real competition.

Helping with enquiries

Maybe it fell down the stairs?

Or maybe the network can't cope with the volume of personal data that the police would like to store on each of us?

Too late for this stable door...

Do Virgin Media, O2 (Telefonica) or any other EU companies listed on US stock exchanges have to comply with the Patriot act? They have comply with Sarbanes-Oxley...

Wash your mouth out!

"Nuclear power isn't a realistic option for a small instrument package."

Nuclear power is the only option for absolutely everything! At least I thought that was the acepted wisdom around here...