Posts by Tony Bryer 14 publicly visible posts • joined 20 Jun 2007
"An average UK home actually uses 22,795 kilowatt-hours of energy annually as of 2001"
I find this very hard to believe - at 10p per unit that would mean that the average quarterly bill was £552. My annual electricity consumption - a single person household, admittedly - has averaged around 2,000kWh.
"Windows 3.11 wasn't an OS. It was some flakey collection of graphics libraries and utilities. DOS was the operating system."
Surely that was 3.0/3,1, My memory is hazy, but wasn't it the case that 3.11 looked like 3.1 but bypassed big chunks of DOS for things like disk access: if not an OS half-way to being one.
But we (I use the word loosely) deserve this because of our insistence that 'something must be done': any government which turns round and says 'stuff will happen' will be pilloried for doing so. If the idea hadn't been tried and dismissed, then at some future date when something happens (as sadly it no doubt will) the tabloids would have fallen over themselves to cast the blame on those who were offered the chance to improve security and dismissed it out hand without trying it.
Another example of the pressure to achieve security at any cost is CRB checking, 3.6m checks this year. Today's Telegraph: "Beverly was all set to volunteer for her five-year-old daughter Mary's school party last March. She was shocked when she learnt from a teacher that she was not welcome as she hadn't been vetted by the Criminal Records Bureau." http://www.telegraph.co.uk/education/main.jhtml?xml=/education/2008/06/26/ftchild126.xml . As the article says, this desire for total safety probably works against those it is meant to benefit.
A bus spotter has decided to give up his lifelong hobby of photographing buses because people fear he is a terrorist and even a paedophile. ... In the last year he has been questioned twice by the police and had to give all his personal details after people who saw him innocently snapping buses on public roads reported him.
http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/news/article-23498006-details/Bus+spotter+forced+to+give+up+40-year+hobby+after+being+labelled+terrorist+and+paedophile/article.do
"it represents a real loss of $60bn in annual revenues to software companies."
Um, no. It represents a notional loss, which would only translate into a real loss if it were the case that every free open source user bought the paid-for commercial offering instead. Which, patently, would never happen.
There are valid reasons why DVLA should be able to do this, but IMO every such disclosure should be copied back to the person whose data it is. And perhaps this could invite them to tell HMRC how much in used notes they actually paid the firm which asked for the data. Al Capone got put away for tax evasion; I'm sure that more than a few parking enforcement firm bosses are just as deserving.
"Take this scenario for example, you have a married couple working alone as joint directors of the company. Both genuinely put 40hrs a week work in with one being the main fee-earner and the other being the behind-the-scenes person doing everything from accounts to phone answering and everything else that keeps a small company running"
There are lots of businesses like this - plumbers, vets etc - where there is a signficant input from both parties, and it would be hard on them if their respective contributions were not recognised. And if there was no partner the person concerned would have to employ someone as a receptionist/admin/bookkeeper for a significant number of hours for the business to operate.
But there are plenty more where one (usually he) is working on a contract basis for weeks or months at a time and the input from the other party is minimal. Their income splitting may be legal, but it puts two fingers up to the revenue, people like the ones you cited and those on PAYE who (school headteachers for example) probably get just the same input from their spouses, but unpaid.I suspect that on this subject those who make the most noise will be those least deserving of sympathy.
My software business's roots are with a PET: I took out a bank loan to buy one of the first 32K large keyboard models, and the program which has earned me good money since 1989 was first written on my PET (then moved to BBC then PC). Back c.1980 the UK Commodore Users Group used to send out magazines with code listings printed (IIRC) black on green - perhaps the world's first copy protected software!
Given that the Salvation Army run 50 hostels for the homeless, many of whom will have found themselves in that position through losing their money, homes and perhaps families in pursuit of one addiction or another, I'd suggest that they know far more about it that the vast majority of Reg readers ... or politicians for that matter.
Unlike anon I much prefer Lotus WordPro, old as it is, to Word 2003 with its endless modal dialogs to change anything.
I would be more tempted to look at Office 2007 were it not for the pricing: as we develop and sell software I do believe that we should abide by other vendor's licences, just as we expect our customers to respects ours. As a home user I can buy Word/Excel/Powerpoint for £78+VAT. As a small business wanting these I have to pay £285+VAT if not upgrading. Rip-off seems an understatement.
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