Posts by fixit_f

To be fair.....

GMAIL is an excellent service with huge amounts of storage, a slick front end and it's completely subsidised by unobtrusive advertising. I've had one since the year dot and it's uptime and resilience have been excellent.

Given that it's a freebie, I'm not sure you can necessarily expect enterprise like levels of backup and speedy restores. If it was a paid service obviously you'd have every right to go mental about this.

All probably true

It has pretty serious effects on cognitive function the day after you take it though :-)

A bit of an unpleasant thing to say in an article?

"It’s slim, sleek and curvaceous, and like the best catwalk models, as light as a feather."

I'm surprised the moderatrix hasn't had her hackles raised by this.

Good

Wanker Nathan Barley types like that don't deserve electricity.

Security blunder is on their side

So they issue all new members with the same default password? Fail.

Excellent

Articles like this are the reason I still read the Reg, even if you have to sift through the dross about iPhones to get to them

Hmm

I'm a working IT professional. No really I am, not a teenybopper, not an ego inflated extrovert who wants everyone to know when I'm having a dump or a wank, just a normal bloke who understands the way the internet works and the pitfalls that are out there. I like Facebook. I think the format of it and the way it works is great, so I treat it as an email replacement tool - and a much richer one at that. Back in the day myself and my friends would check email, now we chat and organise through Facebook. Before email we used mobile phones. Before them we used to have to organise times and places and just be there on time. Before that - well I'm not old enough to remember.

Nights in the pub, kitesurfing sessions, days out blah blah you name it in terms of bringing people together Facebook delivers and in wanker management language "facilitates". This stuff you could do before through email or phone or word of mouth, but those approaches were clumsy and arcane by comparison and with Facebook you can do it with pictures and as other people who were involved remark on stuff you get a narrative. This is why Facebook (in terms of the concept) is better than email, it gives you flexibility. Also, in years to come when I'm old maybe Facebook will still be there and I'll be able to look through the archives and reminisce about my life when I was young. And see what I was doing day by day - like a diary that you don't have to be arsed to sit down every day and write with a silly pen and paper. Honestly, in terms of the format, I think it's great. Don't overuse it, don't get obsessed by it, lock down your privacy settings and don't reveal too much - beyond those common sense rules, it's a bloody good tool.

Accepted wisdom is that nothing is a freebie. Having said that, I've had a gmail account since they first opened for business and nothing bad has ever happened from Google having an email log of my entire life through several years. You know what? I think they have bigger fish to fry, so details of who I went for beers with or who I was shagging in the mid 2000's aren't that interesting in their scheme of things. They just got paid to provide me with a rich email interface with a few adverts, which I ignored. Perhaps it really is just about pay per click and these things are genuinely harmless freebies subsidised by advertising wankers. They offer rich interfaces, work well and for the savvy are just good tools that deliver genuine value to life for little or no downside?

So no, I won't be publishing my location anytime soon. But Facebook is a bloody good tool, and the naysayers might want to consider the idea that they are burying their heads in the sand - just like my grandparents, who avoid all the benefits of the internet just because they read in the paper that it could be "dangerous" sometimes. You carry a mobile phone every day that tracks where you are, and you probably have for one or even two decades. When was the last time that information was used against you? And as an example wouldn't that info be a useful alibi if you were called upon to determine your location in court if you were accused of something you didn't do?

If the founders of Facebook and Google want to use the information I've imparted freely (consisting mainly of my social calendar and variegated silly thoughts) against me then good luck to them. I have nothing to hide. I ignored their adverts but I found their tools genuinely useful. Slick advertising twonks in sharp suits paid for it, but I ignored them.

Just a thought. In 20 years I may eat my words, but somehow I just don't see it, large corporates have better stuff to do.

Eh?

I thought conventional wisdom was that public sector employees earn less in exchange for a more cushy life and (in the old days before the impending cuts) final salary pensions / more holidays / more job security ?

Do they really take more home on average too?

Nuts

Let's assume the average wage in the UK is 25K - not sure what it really is, must be about that.

Let's use an online income tax calculator to find that's about £5800 per year. This is a simple example so we're not including all the other taxes that the average citizen pays, such as VAT, Road tax yadda yadda.

£1,100,000 / 5800 = 190 normal joes working their godforsaken soul crushing 9-5 jobs every year just to have their tax spent on one government department bumping it's name up search engine rankings? Not exactly a great use of that cash is it?

Mental. The people holding the purse strings clearly had no respect at all for us. Every one of those 190 normal joes could have done a lot with that 5 grand.

Agree, statistically completely unrepresentative

The sort of company that implements that sort of universal login system is I would imagine the sort of company that has a huge culture of never being out of communication. I've worked for one of those companies in the past, and was hauled over the coals for first of all refusing to have a blackberry, and then secondly for not turning it on/carrying it when they ordered it for me anyway. Under that sort of culture, many people feel like they're being lax for not continually checking their emails in evenings, at weekends, on holidays or even in the middle of the night - I've seen it happen to colleagues, and it's a really really shitty thing to feel pressured into. So it's no surprise that a company who sells that sort of system to those sorts of people will see high incidence of people logging in day and night.

"give people a standard platform - the Wintel PC - and punters will buy into its openness"

Back in the days before Visual Basic it was actually very difficult to develop for Windows, and the OS has never been particularly "open"

Well I'm quite impressed

It's just a test! Proof of concept. Doesn't mean they'd deploy it, and I'd imagine it'd be optional. Will probably mean in increase in the bandwidth used while searching, and would require more horsepower on the back end as the database is constantly scanning it's indexes based on the new key words as they appear - so there's a "cost" to both the user and to Google. Would make no sense to make it compulsory, and wouldn't be used on low bandwidth pages like the mobile search.

Worrying as Google are, you've got to hand it to them - they just batter away at producing betas of ideas, and every now and then some of them prove to be incredibly useful. This probably isn't one of them, but still a neat little trick, there's no need to reflexively shout it down like Pavlov's dogs just because it happens to be google doing it.

N-TRIG?

Has Dappy diversified into technology then? What an unfortunate name.

So if it's 5 of the seven..

.... and there's a Brit and perhaps somebody in Western Europe / Scandinavia, I bet the recent volcano thing and the closure of airspace gave them pause for thought about their approach.

I understand the principles of change management, but for Christ's sake flying seven people to a datacentre with Smartcards they need to physically have with them sounds like overkill. If some of the people are in Asia / Oz and need to fly you've automatically built yourself in a good 12 hour delay before you can switch to BCP just by getting them there, that just sounds a bit daft to me. Why would you design it this way? Somebody has been watching too many Hollywood blockbusters and just thought it would be cool.

Seriously?

Just fuck off, government. Really, fuck off. The more I read about this sort of thing the more I think the libertarians have a point.

Oh yeah, cos Terence Conran is a design genius

Didn't he design the interior of the original Land Rover discovery, turning a premium motor into one of the nastiest chunks of brown/blue plastic crap imaginable? OK he was constrained slightly by the Leyland parts bin, but you had to sit in one to realise how nasty and flimsy it was.

http://www.autoexpress.co.uk/front_website/gallery.php?id=280665

Eh?

What has cutting BBC 6 music got to do with the new Tory government cutting the public deficit? It's funded completely outside the tax system. It's not like they're proposing to make the license cheaper, or siphon the money off into government to spend on something else!

This isn't news - apparently exam invigilators do it all the time to relieve the tedium

So when they're walking up and down and across between the rows of desks during your GCSE's what you don't realise is that one of them is the nominated Pac Man and the others are ghosts. I can't remember the full rules though.

Yay

I was out kitesurfing in January and it was -1 degree even without factoring in wind and water chill - brrrr. Improvements in wetsuits can only be a good thing.

OK, so I tried it

I haven't used open office for years, so this article prompted me to download it. The idea was I'd use it for a few days and see how it felt, and if I liked it enough I'd think about dumping MS office.

First thing I did was open a 29 meg csv file that one of the trading systems I look after generates daily - oh look, openoffice has the 65k row limit that excel used to have, and it's slower to load files than excel to boot. That instantly renders it no good to me, but out of interest I persisted. I tried a simple autofilter - looks like there are too many discrete values so it won't do them or even open the function properly. So I had a look at pivot tables, tried to generate one against the 65k rows that it had deigned to open and the "data pilot" pivot function won't even run up - just hung for several minutes until I task managered it.

Now I'm a LINUX user at home and I like the principle of open source as much as anyone, but open office failed on the very simplest of tasks for me. There are people I work with who use excel for complex number crunching involving large amounts of data every day, and these people aren't rare. You can whine about backhanders and lock in all you like, from where I'm sitting people use excel because it is THE TOOL for for serious number crunchers and quants, there's nothing to touch it and no amount of ideology and goodwill will change that anytime soon. Lots more development and testing needed in the real world, not in some open sourcer's bedroom.

I'll try it again in another few years.

Bit sad really

"lower end users are more likely to be hooked into operator controlled experiences, since they are less web-savvy" - and they're going to base these handsets on Android. Greedy corporates making money out of stupid people isn't really what LINUX was supposed to be about, was it? So what they're saying is that they can use Android to drive down the initial cost of the handset so that it's within the reach of the unwashed masses, and then offer them premium priced ringtones, wallpapers and games that they could obtain for free elsewhere if they only knew how.

Still, was only a matter of time before some greedy feckers took an excellent codebase (developed largely for free by people with a sharing mindset in their spare time) and used it to rinse the proles out of their pennies. If I was one of the developers that spent so much free time working on the kernel in it's formative stages I reckon I'd be pretty upset that the fruits of my labour were about to go to the shareholders of big telcos.

Speaking as a dirty vegetatian animal loving wimp.....

.... I don't think launching several critters to certain death while streaming their death throes back to earth is all that "peaceful" but I guess the Americans and Russians did it too.

I hadn't heard about this

Another bit of entertainment for old biddies (sorry, "silver surfers") - virtual curtain twitching is born.

How is operating this service any different under the law to any of the webcams out there transmitted across the internet? The BBC links to some of them.

Awwwww poor camels

Rather than spending 27 grand on helicopters and bullets, couldn't they just buy them some water instead?

Not true

I'm based in London but use a proxy server in the Turkish office at the corporate I work for to get around the fact that the UK one is heavily websensed. No I can't get you tube, but I can see that comment page fine.

arse

Wonder what you have to do for a brown band then....

Childlessness is still the most effective answer in the mid to long term

Come on people (or at least the few register readers that actually DO get laid from time to time) put a bit of plastic on your pecker and in a couple of generations none of this will be a problem.

Taxidermia

I never quite understood how "Taxidermia" got through the censors - one of the wrongest things I've ever seen. Especially the bit with the pig carcass.

immigrunts

If you lot aren't careful this page will end up on "Speak your branes"

Somebody tell PETA what the phrase "Pet Shop Boys" actually refers to

That'll give them an example of really SERIOUS animal cruelty.

They were brilliant ads

Me and the missis used to find these very amusing, they were in all kinds of prominent places. The word "Sex" was in massive letters as well just to make sure it caught your eye.

I didn't vote for him, and he's a raging Tory nadsack.....

.... but on this occasion he's been one of the few public figures to take any interest in this farce and put some kind of perspective on it - well done him.

Blackheath too

I'm a keen kite landboarder so I check this site all the time - we were looking at 349mph on Friday morning....

My missis uses hotmail and I have it working fine under linux.

You have to look at the general.useragent.vendor parameter that your browser reports itself as. Needs to be set to "Firefox" rather than a distro specific version. This fixed the problem for us - although the problem was simply certain components (like the message pane) not working.

Might shut the conspiracy theorists up

Nobody, not even NASA, is going to go to the trouble of faking a largely corrupt 40 year old tape backup.

This bloke is the Clarkson of the IT press

Doesn't understand the nitty gritty as well as he likes to make out he does, but has a good rant nonetheless. Something we're all guilty of.

I'm no expert either, I'm just an average IT professional. I haven't tried Chrome yet (no time at work, and run LINUX at home) but it does introduce some new features such as the optimisation of processes/threads per tab and the properly implemented inline spell checker. FF and Opera can nick from them in the same way that Chrome has nicked their features.While it's not revolutionary, innovation (even evolutionary rather than revolutionary) is not to be sniffed at or discouraged.

I think they're within their rights here - and they're doing intelligent people a favour

For example - a trip to Dublin from London Gatwick/Stansted is cheapest with Dan Dare. None of the old school established airlines can compete with their prices providing you carry your stuff as hand luggage and don't buy food or anything else while you're in the air. Read and interpret everything on their website as you book, and de-select all the things they try to flog you that you don't need. Same principle with Sleazyjet. During the flight you will be subjected to constant advertising by the cabin crew for "stuff" and their websites default all kinds of extras that you don't need at the point of booking. So what, leave your headphones in and if the ropey stewardesses try to bother you don't buy anything, Christ they even try to sell you their own brand of scratch cards. However, ignore/deselect all of this stuff on the webshite and you get amazingly cheap flights, it's not rocket science. It's an opportunity for smart people to fly for basically f**k all and if the chavs want to fall for their tricks, well, that's a tax on stupid chavs and is to be encouraged because they're paying for the rest of us, the silly anti-Darwinian chav people. On a short haul flight you get a good price, ok the webshite might leave you feeling a little dirty, but so what - you're an informed traveller booking cheap flights with no extras. Use your brain. Dan Dare, Sleazyjet and Air Fungus are all examples of ways that people (like informed register readers) can get easy flights on the back of profits paid by Jeremy Kyle viewers. Let the chavs give something back by subsidising cheap flights by paying for horrible inflight meals, inflated duty free products and airline-specific scratch cards . It's about time us normal 40% tax paying people had something back off them.

That might have sounded a bit Daily Mail, can I assure everyone that I'm actually a Guardian reader. However my last Dan Dare flight was full of scum kicking the back of my seat and polluting the already thin air with their minimum wage humour, so I'm slightly jaded by the experience...... I'm not alone, surely?

Hang about....

.... there's another side to this argument many of you are trotting out along the lines of "we're taxpayers and we don't want council employees who effectively work for us abusing resources we pay for.."

Erm, public servants pay tax too? So you're telling THEM that they can't use a resource that they pay for :-)

Common sense - well said that man

This would mean there are less bloody kids about - that's a tangible benefit worth having, the carbon saving is a mere bonus. Charlie Brooker said it best

http://www.guardian.co.uk/g2/story/0,3604,1581501,00.html

As a species we're essentially a parasite, so less of us would mean less strain on the planet's resources. As the residents of the most carbon using per capita countries it's logical that we should be the ones that act first, children in developing countries are often seen as an asset that can be put to work so we'll struggle to convince them to put bits of plastic on their peckers any time soon.

While economists may talk about the problems of a dependent ageing population that's increasing in size, spawning more sprogs to pay for them is a daft idea and a self-perpetuating cycle. One generation is going to have to eventually take the hit and keep it's own size small while paying a significant chunk of tax for their elders to clear off with some dignity and comfort, and I guess it might as well be us - we've been stitched up by our parents generation plenty already (with things like house prices) so we're pretty used to it now.

Not fair

I'm sure this is what everyone is thinking but I'm up for a rant.

SPECS cameras aren't new at all - there's been one on Tower Bridge for a good four years now. I know because I got clobbered doing 35 miles an hour over it at 6am in the morning shortly after it went in. The fact that it's a 20 limit is fairly unclear as is the fact that it's an average speed camera - apparently the City of London police have special dispensation from the Home Secretary to avoid "defacing a national monument" by putting up eyesores such as traffic speed signs of the correct size or "average speed camera" markings, while still keeping the penalty 100% enforcable in law. This special dispensation is of course in no way being utilised to turn the whole operation into a cash cow for the police - I got 3 points and a 260 quid fine, despite causing no danger to anyone at a silly time of the morning with a clear road and no pedestrians. They even had the nerve to make me fill out means testing forms in court and then the judges put static noise on over loudspeakers to stop me hearing them deliberating over how much they reckoned they could sting me for.

There's a lot of bl**dy awful drivers out there, but most reasonable people are capable of driving to the conditions. Such drivers might for example go slightly over a limit of 30 on a completely clear road in a not particularly built up area, but will perhaps judge it appropriate to stick below the limit of 20 when driving past something like the entrance to a school, or perhaps around a blind bend. It's common sense. Experienced drivers are capable of judging conditions for themselves and setting their speed accordingly, and the police themselves acknowledge this amongst their own officers:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/england/shropshire/4559173.stm

But wait a sec - let's imagine that you're doing 159mph down a motorway like that fella was, happily "testing his car out." What happens if somebody comes out of a blind sliproad and swerves across a couple of lanes of traffic without looking over his shoulder? I know it's unlikely, but it is perfectly possible - so logically that's an excessive speed to be doing on the public road and I don't see how any arguments over how highly trained he is make any sense. A situation that he couldn't anticipate or react to could conceivably have cropped up in just the same way that it crops up for the average Joe - in fact his training should have told him that in the first place. To take this further, I have heard first hand from police who assure me that it is pretty commonplace to speed through urban areas on blues and twos to get back to the station quickly for inappropriate reasons such as end of shift. I don't want to start some sort of daily mail "immigrants and swans" type rant, but the government and police are clearly taking the piss out of us here with double standards like these. Speed cameras are being used by some forces (such as the city of London police) to generate income and the safety benefits are pretty incidental to them. Having said that, most forces are pretty reasonable and SPECS installations (for example around roadworks on motorways) are clearly marked, but their safety value is debatable as your attention is drawn more to the speedo than the road.

I'm starting to sound like Jezza myself now. But we are governed and policed by pricks and I'm sick of it.

South Park is waaaaaaaaaay better than Simpsons or FG.

And you can get the US DVD sets imported for about a tenner from Amazon's new or second hand section.

Poor Staffies

What a shame. I feel really sorry for Staffies I know you can't generalise but in my experience they're normally absolutely wonderful natured dogs. Unfortunately the fucking chavs have spotted that they're muscular and look a little like pit bulls and so they're getting them, mistreating them, not training them and generally giving the poor things a bad reputation.

City of London police

This does not surprise me one bit, the City of London police are pretty much a bloody cult themselves. They're almost completely seperate from the rest of the police, and seem to be are at liberty to make up their own rules which are completely inconsistent with other forces. As an example, they charged me 260 quid for driving at 38mph over Tower Bridge on a clear road at 6am - anywhere else and it would have been 60 quid tops. When the judges in court were reading the means testing forms that they make you fill in they put on static noise over louspeakers so you can't hear them saying "how much can we sting this particular mug for?" - It was pretty much a kangaroo court worthy of any banana republic.

Seriously, there's something not right about them.

@Pete

Amazing mate - I'm sure you work in the same Bank as me. I'm hoping I'll survive because I actually run and administer trading/risk management systems, which are very directly used to contribute to the bottom line. I can't wait for the several tiers of lazy middle management tw**s and people in other such non-jobs (like you say, mostly compliance people and project managers who got put on particularly stupid projects) to be shoved out of the door.

Pot kettle black

Dr Boothroyd looks pretty filthy herself.