* Posts by Dave Bennett

59 publicly visible posts • joined 20 Apr 2007

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White? Male? You work in tech? Let us guess ... Twitter? We KNEW it!

Dave Bennett

RACIST

According to the latest stats, white male Earthlings represent a tiny 0.0000000000000000001% of the population of all human-habitable planteary bodies.

TWITTER YOU SHOULD BE ASHAMED!!!

So you want to be a contractor? Well, here's how it works

Dave Bennett

Re: Hidden benefits of contracting i.e. taking career breaks....

Indeed this article could well be a series of articles, much like any other topic in the world, aside from your poor grasp of numbered lists, I reckon we could cover that in a paragraph.

Frankly there would have been absolutely no benefit in listing out rates for certain roles in a given industry since there are way too many variables. Besides, the point about rate variance covers this well enough for the article. Dom wrote an excellent piece a while back on the relationship between income and ability (or lack of) - go and read that.

A debate on tax management, ex-pat opportunities and future markets are not at all what this article was about. I think you need to browse the many contractor forums to have these debates.

And as for point B; what are you on about? Sure you can take a year off and learn to play the guitar. You could also take 3 months off and train yourself to hold your breath for ages... I don't see what relevance this has to do with contracting? Anybody in any type of employment could take time out if they'd planned for it, and if they were as odd as you.

DB

Rolls-Royce climbs aboard Bloodhound SUPERSONIC car

Dave Bennett

Re: Re:proverbial brown stuff off a shovel

Hores? Good god man I hope you missed an 's' rather than a 'W'...?

El Reg drills into Office 365: What's under the hood?

Dave Bennett

Re: Eadon

That's actually a really good shout! Reg, make it so.

Dave Bennett
Go

Eadon

Eadon is basically the perfect example of the Dunning-Kruger effect. Someone who knows so little that they actually think they know it all. I love Eadon posts. I also love arbitrary numerical scales, so frankly the post at 12:27 was a masterpiece.

Nokia shareholder tells CEO Elop he's going to hell

Dave Bennett

I feel dirty

I feel dirty saying this, but the Lumia phones are starting to look like a very attractive option to me. My first (admittedly late) move to smartphones was to Android and I really didn't like it (This was possibly because it was a Sony device though). So to my shame I ended up getting into bed with Apple, and until recently I hadn't looked back.

However I've fallen massively out of love with them, despite being well looked after my 4S is having endless problems (unluckily the problems started just after the warranty ended) and I'm finding the lack of change a bit tedious. A colleague has Windows Phone 7.8 and when I have had a play with that I like it a lot, miles better than Android IMHO.

I think Nokia are missing a trick by not releasing a direct iPhone competitor - something all glass and steel and heavy, we all know that glass is a premium material, that's why my house is riddled with it. The 920 plastic feels pretty cheap to me, although saying that perhaps if my phone wasn't so 'premium' the power button would still be working.

In my very small sample of myself and 1 friend, who was previously a rabid Apple fan, we are both uninspired by their latest offerings and are likely to move elsewhere. For me it's unlikely to be Android again.

All that said, I don't see why Nokia don't release Android versions, aside from a bit of dev costs what harm can it do? It might keep Elop in a job for another couple of years... no doubt he's got some Faustian pact with Microsoft.

Dave xnox

Game designer spills beans on chubby-fancying chap with his stolen Mac

Dave Bennett

Re: Moron

Obvious troll is obvious.

London Boroughs join forces in mighty £1bn IT procurement framework

Dave Bennett
Pint

Re: Rock & hard place

David, the answer is staring them in the face!

It's David, David & Co - IT solutions. We're the one-stop shop for consulting, solutions and resourcing for any task, project, company or indeed council. Admittedly it's currently just you and I, but before long I'm confident we can scale up with a load of street hobos... errr... IT experts. We will make a killing by taking a modest 1% on top of the prices for kit which we'll get from <big online retailer>, the gov will save a fortune and all the actual work we'll just contract out to the hobos.

Let's have our first jolly... umm, team meeting... tomorrow?

Also, I think it'll be fun if we only employ people called David - or at least rename everyone David - it can be our USP.

Stephen Fry explains… Alan Turing's amazing computer

Dave Bennett

Re: "Most influential tech-tweet of 2011" title on the tweeter's site

Actually AC (11:36), in November 2009 the Scottish board of Scottishness ruled that Gillian McKeith is not Scottish, so actually she should be known as ‘Gillian Keith’.

Six months later the EU office of the chief commissioner of the ‘fisheries, fishing & fish returning to the sea’ department met for a series of meetings and, well, long story short they determined that Gillian Keith doesn’t have gills, so should be simply called ‘Ian Keith’.

Now there have been a lot of rumours, but I think it's still accepted she's basically female, and since Ian Keith is clearly a male name I find it misleading, I propose we simply call her ' '.

Dr David

Review: Renault Zoe electric car

Dave Bennett

EV lifetime vs ICE

I read an interesting study (can be googled, may have been bunkum) about the life expectancy of EV batteries and the average lifetime of a UK car... I think the batteries came out at 10 years expected (and £8k to replace) and the average ICE car life being 14 years. That's a fairly significant difference as I assume not many people would want to shell out another massive chunk after 10 years. The study also reviewed the carbon cost to build the car - which if I recall was a decent chunk of the entire carbon cost over the lifetime. Obviously if a pure EV has a greater carbon cost to produce and lasts less time than an ICE vehicle, then there is another mark against it.

Full disclosure: this study was quite old and used Prius batteries, things have no doubt improved quite a lot since then.

Ah, I also just noticed that you actually hire the batteries now, so the above issue of replacing them is worthless. Oh well, I've typed it now. ;-)

Dave x, nox

Wind farms make you sick … with worry and envy

Dave Bennett
Coffee/keyboard

Re: Sounds like fan death to me

MacGyver - you owe me a new keyboard. That is all.

Build a BONKERS gaming PC

Dave Bennett

Obligatory...

Yeah, but will it run Crysis?

Sparkfun takes roadtrip across US in campervan full of electronics

Dave Bennett

Re: "...starting in Hawaii....."

Well, if your project is going to get pulled pretty quickly due to lack of interest, Hawaii is exactly where you'd want to start the jolly. Ooops, I mean junket. Ummm, sashay. Etc.

Outsourcing your own job much more common than first thought

Dave Bennett

Hobo!

I don't see why so many commentards are questioning why the company is annoyed rather than pleased. This guy is a permie and was hired to do a job. *HE* was hired, not some unknown third-party. Of course, he's simply proven that he shouldn't have been hired in the first place, since he cannot be trusted. Damn you Bob.

I know I'd be pretty pissed if I gave my kid to a childminder, only to find out they'd been subcontracting the care of my kid to a hobo, on the cheap.

It would be doubly strange since I do not yet own a kid.

x, nox

Hydrogen on demand from silicon nanospheres - just add water

Dave Bennett

Re: Doesn't this defeat the purpose ...?

Hahaha, you have such a wonderully old fashioned view of all this!

Everybody knows that it isn't a 'new' energy source, it's the same one as yesterday! :) After the fiery sphere descends of an evening, it passes underneath the Earths disc, below the elephants standing on the back of the turtle and simply comes back up the other side. Scarab beetle indeed!

Dave Bennett
Happy

Re: Good thing this is the Reg,

Ah! It would have been good to know this months ago, for my ovariectomized model rats have fuck-all femoral bone to speak of.

I like that you've provided your reference* there, very thorough.

Davidoff

*Well, what the less-cautious among us would call a reference anyway.

BRITISH BIGFOOT ON LOOSE in Tunbridge Wells

Dave Bennett
Devil

Last month?

Last month? What, as in October, the month which includes Halloween?

I walk through the common every morning and evening and only ever see perverts and dog walkers. The giant fire-eyed beast is probably hiding near the cricket pavilion, I avoid that bit due to the dogging.

iPhone owners sue Apple for locking Jesus mobe to AT&T

Dave Bennett

Re: I always

@AC 14:31

More like having to pay Esso every month for 2 years, regardless of whether you actually use any petrol ;-)

It’s official: Google shrinks the world!

Dave Bennett

Comma chameleon

If this were a Euro vs UK / US convention issue rather than a mistake, then why would they have a zero at the end of the value?

In the non-EU version (in km) we'd say 11.19 km/s rather than 11.190 km/s right? I assume the EU is no different in this regard.

Please enlighten me fellow commentards :)

Is lightspeed really a limit?

Dave Bennett

If we are concentrating on travelling faster than light, surely we can come up with some inventive ways to massively slow down the light? So much so that we can perform an experiment where someone gets to the destination quicker than light. Thus, claiming the prize and the adoration of all

Alright, they subjects would be travelling through different mediums, but this is all about making spurious claims, not about fair tests.

Advice on how we can achieve this please science intellectuals?

x

UK.gov: Real time PAYE and new benefits systems WILL work

Dave Bennett
Thumb Up

HMRC

I get the impression that many of the public sector IT failures are due to the fact some twat stands up in parliament and says 'the new infrastructure project will be complete in 8 weeks and the kit will be made entirely from recycled cardboard'.

It's then down to the poor bastards on the project to build their 8 month project into an 8 week period and somehow spin something on the cardboard issue.

Also, I've been informed that the civil service is set up a bit like the military, so if you are a certain 'level' of manager - let's say 'F6 level' - then you are capable of managing projects in excess of £100m. Never mind that your previous 10 years were spent administering the stationary contract, you're now running the new massive IT gig. :)

My fave HMRC story is still HMRC Ambition:

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/02/18/hmrc_ambition/

PayPal is bleeding market share and it's all eBay's fault

Dave Bennett
Unhappy

Re: Paypal is pretty much a monopoly internationally

We as humans tend towards monopolies, because we are lazy fuckers. The vast majority of people simply cannot be bothered to search out an alternative to Amazon, Apple, ASOS, eBay, Facebook, Google, etc. Sure, there are better options in the respective markets, but if most of the people just go with the default then the competition have got a lot of work to do.

China fingered as lappie disappears from Taiwanese boat

Dave Bennett
Joke

Re: 'mobbie' may have one more syllable than the 'mobe' alternative

This comment reminds me of the joke in Predator.

'Gee you've got a big pussy. Gee you've got a big pussy'

'Why did you say that twice?'

'I didn't'

Or something along those lines. Or something along those lines.

Dave Bennett
Thumb Up

Re: It's called a laptop!

You sir, are a scholar and a gent. I would like to learn more about vocalisation please. Links?

David!

Scan co-jacking nets crooks '€40k in IT gear'

Dave Bennett
Meh

Re: 40K

Well they got the goods at trade price, so even if they sold on an auction site at that price they'd be undercutting retailers by a modest amount (margins not being great I assume).

Technically, there's nothing stopping them opening a shop and selling at RRP (unless the products are trackable in some way).

D!

Diablo III dev rolls 12d6, scores PC sales record

Dave Bennett

Re: Eh?

Right, so just because you have 'not once had any problems' that means no problems exist?

I've got the game and have only put a few hours in so far, but twice I've not been able to connect so just gave up after half an hour.

I'm not saying it's a big deal, I'm not saying it won't get fixed and I'm not complaining about DRM, I simply don't believe you should force everybody to play this way, and if you do, you'd better be prepared for the backlash.

Facebook updates data archive tool, upsets privacy warriors

Dave Bennett

Re: Where's my cut?

That was really harsh.

Oh wait, 'cut'. My bad.

Game chain sold

Dave Bennett
Megaphone

Why does everyone think retail games are dead?

Come on people, the console games market is alive and well. 44% of all physical media games were bought over the counter last year - in the States it's even higher. Yes Amazon is hammering the high street, but 44% is still a huge piece of the pie. GAME definitely need to sort their online offering out and should probably do a bit better on the PC downloads front.

But aside from the company's problems, the market still exists and is viable for a good while yet. If you really believe that the next gen consoles (or even the ones after that) from the existing players are going to be download only, then you are demented. If the XBOX was download only, then they'd lose a huge chunk of their customers in one go. Look at broadband penetration in the States, look at average download caps and also look at the number of internet connected consoles vs the number of consoles sold / in use. These figures will show you that whilst 'many' users will embrace it, many others won't... and you don't shut the door on a large percentage of business just for the sake of cutting out the retailers.

I'm sure there will be many more games 'available for download', and that'll definitely impact the game retailers, this is where they have to adapt. I'll also mention that the games publishers rely far more than you'd think on the retailers to hype their products. All those strange events the retailers lay on for midnight releases... not quite the same when it's a video of me getting my Amazon delivery. In my pants.

x, no x.

Revealed: Google's SECRET London office

Dave Bennett

Re: Bloody brilliant!

Clocks going forward means one less hour to get over my hangover :(

Still, i guess it's better for my twighlight peeping-Tom activities.

Game files for administration

Dave Bennett

Re: Happy?

Very true Corinne. They do sell some peripherals, the shite own-branded ones. The same sort of crap that any 2-bit supplier will give you as a freebie.

Dave Bennett

Re: My local shopping centre

:-D This is brilliant, almost spat my Lilt Zero all over the keyboard.

Dave Bennett

Re: Game sink even lower

LOL - that is awesome work. :)

Dave Bennett

Re: Same bunch in charge??

Joe,

I hope you're wrong here. I can certainly believe the piece about RBS saying no to having the same imbeciles in charge, but the UK portion of Game is profitable. We're talking about a company that turned over £1.6bn last year. This means it's a decent prospect for a pre-pack admin purchase, so long as you can ditch the shitty management. Of course, that shafts the creditors, but as long as they pay the suppliers they should be able to smooth everything else out.

After that it's 'just' a case of slimming down to a reasonable number of stores and making some tweaks. There is no reason the business cannot be sustained through this and the next gen console cycle - say ten years. That'll give them time to react to whatever the industry does.

I note that a large shareholder is questioning the administration already - their duty is to get the best deal for all creditors. In reality I suspect they'll go for the best deal for the administrators :)

Dave Bennett

Re: Happy?

Mike,

I think you'll find they also sell DS styluses that look like pencils, angry bird alarm clocks, nintendogs pencil sharpeners, and all manner of other complete crap that just takes up space :-)

And good point on the pre-order... why waste space with case after case of pre-order items, especially when they don't even have artwork / screenshots on the bloody back! Honestly, my rabbit could have run a better show than these idiots.

Dave Bennett
Flame

Happy?

RANT

I don't think we should be happy about this. The problem is the useless management. In this admin situation, the company will be bought in a pre-pack deal - shafting a load of the creditors, the shareholders, half the staff. And then on Monday, the same twats rock up to their Basingstein Headquarters and take another stab at wrecking things.

Frankly the board of directors should be ashamed of themselves, they clearly couldn't pour shit out of a boot, even if the instructions were printed on the heel.

/RANT

Mobile gaming: battle of the gadgets

Dave Bennett

Re: Price, Price, Price!

@Blank Reg.

That's exactly the point though. As developers we* NEED the customer to get bored and move on. It's not much harder to get bored of a £40 game than a £4 game. It's just the next purchase is far less likely. Casual gaming is huge, hardcore gaming is niche - they both exist, it's just far more risky to serve the hardcore / AAA market. (Although Kickstarter may be changing that also)!

I'll hazard a guess that on the PC we'll start to see a lot more games come in at the £10 mark from the big studios, with DLC and features making the price up. You've only got to look at games like Minecraft, Magicka and Terraria to see that this model can storm.

Dave

PS: That's the royal we, I can't develop a Polaroid, let alone a piece of software.

SimCity to return after 10-year holiday

Dave Bennett
Megaphone

It's EA though!

Bear in mind this is EA / Origin.

So whilst there is a chance they won't wreck the game, they will certainly wreck the experience. So We can expect several conflicting and mutually exclusive pre-order bonuses, expect day 1 DLC, expect a collector's edition, expect promotional content that will only be available in some regions, expect tie-in products like mobile and Facebook games (which you'll need to buy to get in-game content for the PC). Basically expect to be scalped every couple of months for years to come. And expect to NEVER actually have the whole game until you've been bled dry.

I'm psyched, let's go build some shit.

Google Wallet PIN security cracked in seconds

Dave Bennett
Unhappy

their?! THEIR?! I'm disgusted with myself.

Dave Bennett
Holmes

NFC reason

Definitely being pushed out, the reason seems obvious to me, which means I'm probably wrong! The card payment industry are only interested in controlling more and more of the money moving about, currently the biggest gap for them will likely be small payments, things people tend to use cash money for. That's why the first adopters of NFC are coffee shops, doughnut fiddlers and their ilk.

Actually, the cpi are also interested in shifting the burden of fraudulent transactions on to someone else. In steps chip and pin! Ooooh chip and pin will be soooo much safer, loads less fraudies. Indeed, loads less fraud paid for by the card issuers... much more paid for by the fool who's been careless with their pin.

Still, maybe I'm wrong and their just trying to make our lives easier.

Chinese iPad 2 fanboiz in frenzied fight

Dave Bennett
Thumb Up

@ Fuzzy

--"why can't I buy something shiny which makes me happy for a few minutes a day?"

Heya, just a quick heads up - you can get on those websites from any old tatty laptop, no need to spend loads on a premium brand :)

Dave Bennett

I've just found my number two!

Mein schöner drei hund!

DARPA, NASA look to spawn STARSHIP enterprise

Dave Bennett
Go

Population smopulation

It seems some of us do not understand the exponential nature of population growth. If we ship off 200,000 people, yes that number will simply be born tomorrow... but those 200,000 we just lost would likely have had children, who may in turn have children, who also might have... and so on.

Not so sure on the idea of splitting planets by ideology, I expect that would just spell interstellar war. Plus, once we are all of the same ideology, we'd just argue about something else.

I believe that we should host a new version of 'Big Brother' and tell the contestants they are off to colonise Mars. Then as we fly low over the red planet, we simply jettison them out the airlocks.

Electric cars not as 'green' as advertised

Dave Bennett

Will somebody think of the kids!

It's quite clear to most of us that there are huge parts of the picture missing here. And indeed that's likely to be the case with most studies on the issue.

So for a true comparison we'd need at least the following:

- The amount of energy used and emmissons produced in the production of the EV - including the battery and all logistics costs to get the finished vehicle to the dealership

- The amount of energy used and emmissons produced in the production of an ICE vehicle of comparable power

- The average life of EV and ICE vehicles (I beleive the average life of a car in the UK is 14 years... do the current batteries last this long? I heard the Prius batteries would last 10 years - but that may have been the warranty period?)

- The energy used and emmissons produced in providing the fuel for the total life of the ICE vehicle (including all extraction, refining, transport / logistics costs to deliver it to the vehicle)

- The energy used and emmissons produced in providing the electricity for the EV's battery (assuming the power is provided in the UK - since in this study this is where the vehicle will be used)

What else is missing from this list?

In my opinion, based on no evidence whatsoever, is that the ICE vehicle will have the lower production costs (energy and emmissons) due to the lack of battery, economies of scale and mature processes. The EV will have lower costs (energy and emmissons) to actually run the vehicle. However this may be offset significantly if the total life of the vehicle is a lot less than an ICE...? If your battery dies, do you replace it - probably at great cost, or ditch the car and get another?

We have to assume that EV tech has a lot more headroom to improve than ICE. So in the medium term I'd expect a lot of gains to be made, but as things stand at the moment, I don't 'feel' they are the green alternative to ICE.

Dave

Sex Offenders returns to iTunes

Dave Bennett
Big Brother

Upgrades!

I like this app. However for it to be truly useful they need to make the following modifications:

1. Allow a 'rampage time' to be entered (this is the amount of time you and your buddies have to go and get the evil sex offenders).

2. Allow a 'beats duration' to be entered (this is the amount of time each attack will take)

3. The system should calculate the optimum route for getting the maximum beats in, in the given rampage time.

4. A log of all the houses you have beaten, with a percentage indicator showing how likely it is you've actually attacked someone guilty of a real crime.

Also, as a bonus it would be handy if it could track people wearing those anklet things, that way you can take a small diversion to get another potential baddie.

BUILD IT NOWPLEASETHEN.

Ex-Googlers reinvent web search

Dave Bennett
Paris Hilton

@Daniel

I'm into 'hot lez' action as much as the next man, but you are quite right, it's wholly unrealistic. Especially the hot part, in my experience (in Zakynthos swimming pools) anyway.

HOWEVER, I for one, would rather watch the fakery, than get to 1,000 spins on meatspin.com

Dave

Paris cos... oh you know why.

Dave Bennett
Stop

Bring on the cockage

Working onsite at the moment and I brought up a google page when the local project manager told me to check out 'Cuil' - to my shame I'd not heard the news, so he explained and spelled it, repeatedly for me.

So I searched for my innocuous retailing phrase and got back a cock. I looked at him, he looked at me, we looked at the cock. Luckily nobody else saw us... I've only just gotten over the ribbing I got from looking up 'Micropenis' on Wiki. :(

I SWEAR TO GOD IT WAS ONE OF THOSE KNOWLEDGE TRAILS, IT WASN'T INTENTIONAL.

Dave

PS: Please stop calling me Mike.

Microsoft slams 'sensationalist' Vista analysis

Dave Bennett
Thumb Up

@Steve, @Chad H

Steve, your post was superb and as far as I'm concerned spot on. The majority of posts here are bashing something that 99% of the users don't give a fuck about. They just want it to work, if anything they want the newer shinier version because that's simply how our society works.

The obvious and clear reason that very few non-enthusiasts use Linux et al, is because it's shit. Vista has things in different places from XP, which is just dumb, but it's still a damn sight easier to grasp than Linux. Most businesses couldn't give a toss if Linux will run on hardware they cobble together out of toys, it needs to be easy for the USERS to USE.

Don't blame Microsoft for trying to make more money, they are simply doing the same as everyone else and were lucky to have the right product at the right time.

Oh and Chad, you can't claim that the understanding of a universal force that has been around since the dawn of fucking time, is anywhere near comparable as an argument to this situation. Plus, you don't understand gravity properly anyway. Things don't fall down, the Earth rushes up to meet them. ;)

D

Microsoft could go it alone without Yahoo!

Dave Bennett

@ Dangerous!

I didn't think so either, but I Googled it and lots of stuff comes up so maybe?

I like the sound of the 'Yahooligans' section.

Royal Mail sites hit by downtime cock-up

Dave Bennett

Simon...

Simon, who's icon IS that? I have seen it before but can't put a name to it!?

Thanks,

Dave

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