Posts by Nuke

I've worked in the private sector and ...

They are soooooooo efficient. Wow, they are soooo efficient. Sooooooo efficient. I mean really really really efficient. !00% efficient ... no, 1000% efficient ... no 1000000000000000% efficient.

There is noooooo waste. I mean noooooo waste. Nothing is wasted. How many times can I say it ... they just don't waste a thing. No waste whatsoever.

Everyone works sooooooo hard. Really really really hard. All of them. 24 hours a day .. no 25 hours a day ... no 25 million hours a day.

Employees work for such reasonable salaries. really really reasonable. They work for nothing. The directors PAY to work - they pay £millions ... no, £trillions ... no, £gooleplex-brazillions.

The private sector always gets it right. Soooo right. They never make a mistake. Their judgement is perfect. They have their head so screwed on the right way you'd need a spanner to get them off again.

Good old private sector. Salt of the earth. Backbone of society. Pillar of he world. Key to the universe. It is an honour to top myself to relieve them of the burden of carrying me along.

Just So

I still have a MSDOS v5.0 / Windows 3.11 dual booting with Kubuntu on an AMD 64. I use the Windows occassionally as I have an old but fast scanner with drivers only for Windows 3.x or Win95. Win 95 will not work on the AMD 64, but DOS / Win 3.x are fine.

I've even tried playing the freebee DOS game where two gorillas throw exploding bananas at eachother, but each banana throw takes spends about 15 minutes in the air and when it explodes DOS crashes.

TFA misses the point

Sonds like TFA is missing the point. This isn't public bureaucrats enjoying a gravy train, it is private consutants ripping them off.

TFA concludes : "But with the private sector showing how to "do the web" much more cheaply and efficiently, the end of the gravy train may not be far away.

No, it is the private sector who are kidding the councils into paying too much. That's hardly "showing the way". It is not in the private sector's interest to show the way. Do you think they are going to say "Btw, you don't need to pay me £700 to get you a domain name, you can get one straight from www.lcn.com for less than a fiver"

Council staff just need spanking with a clue bat.

Stand by for the Streisand Effect (n/t)

Title says it.

I just don't believe it

I feel like shite after too much the night before. I can hardly bring myself to do anything, let alone do myself justice in an exam.

@ Censored & Ragarath

Censored wrote :

"Without knowing the reason why people are choosing other browsers, we cant call this a success. If people are blindly installing the first one on the list ...it simply swaps monopoly for dumb clicking without educating anyone as to what the choice means."

Fine, I'll go with that swap. Most people will always be dumb and they don't want your education. I call success anything that herds them away from IE.

Ragarath wrote :

"And how many just clicked on the first / a random one just to get rid of it?"

A random mix is just fine. Anything to remove the dominance of one, especiallly a bad one. That way we will see some more standards adherance because no single one can write (and keep changing) the "de-facto" standards.

... and "I agree that MS needed to be forced to get off their arse and sort out the browser situation out but I am not sure this was the right way."

Tell us what the "right way" is then, and dont start on about "educating" people - it never works. I've lost patience with governments, standards bodies and the rest of the IT industry pussy-footing around with Microsoft.

Pigeons come Home to Roost

"The UK bears the brunt of unlicensed downloads, reckon the academics, because of its high proportion of jobs in creative industries."

Mrs Thatcher and her stooges decided to destroy Britain's manufacturing industries (largely leaving manufacturing to Europe and the Far East) and switching the economy to service and information industries. It was assumed that Britain had an unassailable advantages in these sectors, such as banking and film-making.

But then the internet and other improved communications came along, allowing services to be outsourced across the world to cheaper labour and also allowing information and entertainment to be reproduced and distributed at negligable cost.

Of course, manufacturing can be outsourced and copied too, but not as readily as servcices and information can. It is much easier and cheaper to make and sell a copy of "Lord of the Rings" than a copy of a Land Rover.

Anecdotal evidence supports this.

Anecdotal evidence supports this. But the report sounds only about the workplace and not at home. Laziness in the younger generation is even more noticable there.

I am of the older generation and spend most of my waking hours working, including the hours outside employment. I am currently redecorating two rooms simultaneously (one involving re-plumbing), getting an overgrown one-acre garden under control, moving a large greenhouse and recovering the data from a failed disk drive. After that I'll be installing a hot water tank, repairing a roof, re-painting the house outside and extending a garage. As well as routine car and house maintenance, developing for a software project and running several web-sites. OK, those last are hobbies.

Having grown up with me, my daughter is shocked by the laziness of her live-in boy-friend - he does no jobs at home at all. Other younger visitors are gob-smacked by the scale of the work I do at home.

But a large proportion of men of my generation do similar, and did when younger too. In the 1970's most men under 25 spent their weekends "doing up" old cars and keeping them running. Now all the younger people that I know expect to buy new cars and not to open the bonnet.

My niece works full time so considers herself entitled to do no work at home. Her husband works full time too and does all the cooking and housework, but nothing else. (Dual incomes is the reason for high house prices btw). Any repair job around the house is done by a white van man. Wondered why there are so many white vans driving around? - there were nowhere near so many 20 years ago. On Saturdays he is entirely involved with watching football (including travelling for aways), and on Sundays he recovers from Saturdays. She reads magazines, shops and chats to friends all weekend.

YMMV, but historically, there *are* cultural changes between the generations.

Asbestos Jacket.

It's even Worse than that

I might be wrong, but understand that under the Telephone Preference rules anyone can phone you with a sales pitch if you already have a business connection with them. So BT can phone their own customers with impunity. They don't even need the "one-way-conversation" excuse.

Btw, who TF is Davina McCall? Is she what's called a call girl?

Two Types of Green

This story highlights the fact that "green" means two different things to two different groups of people.

(1) The more literal meaning: green fields, green trees, green views, wildlife, nature, rural England. This is the meaning that the Cotswold residents would support. Sounds like it is these that the CCB represent.

(2) The meaning highjacked by the "green movement": air free of unnatural gasses and particles, food and water free of man-made additives, and above all no increase in the natural level of radioactivity. This is the group to which Dale Vince belongs.

It is not clear how the colour green came to be associated with the second meaning and group. Perhaps like in the FoE, which started more Group (1) but became dominated by Group (2), as shown when their original policy of a reduced population was dropped.

The two meanings are largely opposed, or orthogonal in some areas. Other examples of the disparity between (1) and (2) are the Severn barrage (industrialising the estuary for tidal energy) and Chernobyl (the best thing that ever happened for Ukrainian wildlife). Actually, tidal energy is not renewable.

The journalist Matthew Paris once had the job of opening the letters adressed to the Prime Minister. He said that about 95% of them (can't remember the exact figure) were from people who thought they were being poisoned. Poisonong is the British paranoia, as Agatha Christie recognised. The green movement prizes "low density" technology so would cover what's left of green Britain with their solar panels, wind farms, hydro and tidal schemes to feed their poison paranoia.

I suppose they will go off to China ..

.. to be unpicked by an army of 8 year olds.

I hope they wear their goggles.

@ AC "Quite Right Too" (1st Post)

You asked:-

"If any company needs to increase it's revenues, it increases its prices. How is BT any different?"

Answer : BT weights its charges onto the standing charge and little on actual use. They make me pay a standing charge of over 50 quid a quarter for having a master socket that must have cost them less than a quid, and say a mile of two-core signal cable to the exchange that must cost less than a fiver Then a share in some light electronics at the exchange itself and the signal grade trunk cables. I use the line only for about an hour a day.

Call out costs? I've never called out BT in my life. YMMV.

My mother (too old to learn a mobile) had a similar standing charge and she only used the phone about five minutes a year.

Compare this with the electrical power supply system that involves heavy cables to my house, a meter to be read, the National Grid network of tens 0f thousands of pylons carrying power grade cable - at the end of which are mighty power stations that each cost billions to build. And I use power 24 hours a day.

Yet my electrical power supply company has ZERO standing charge.

On top of which BT make me pay an admin charge for paying my own bill!

BT are the jerks who send me leaflets with the "good news" that calls to Timbuctoo and Dhulali have got cheaper and by the way the line rental has been increased.

BT are the only utility that makes me angry. They are bar stewards.

@ ElReg!comments!Pierre - Antique Hw

@ Kevin 6 said he ran Windows 7 on same hardware as the Betas and, unlike the betas, it bluescreened

@ ElReg!comments!Pierre responded :-

>>That would be 1 year-old hardware then. .... if you're going to run modern software on antique hardware, you should expect problems. Stupid people trying to install the latest OS on obsolete hardware! Go buy another computer with Windows7 preinstalled, then you can talk.<<

Pierre, tell me you're having a laugh.

First of all no beta was released until about 10 months ago : so why does the hw have to be a year old?

Second, a feature of Windows 7 was that it was meant to have reduced hw requirements; in fact the stated MS requirements are broadly the same as for Vista.

Third, one year old hw is "antique" and "obsolete"?! How do you know Kevins hw was obsolete? As for "antique", the newest bit of my rig is about 4 years old. The swap file is on a dedicated hdd that's about 12 years old, and I have a fdd in it (but never used now) that came from my first PC of about 19 years ago. Sorry, but I didn't know I was supposed to toss a PC in the skip at least once per year - I thought we were meant to be saving the planet.

@ Bronek Kozicki

TFA : "Ironically, licensing specialist Black Duck this week reported 22 per cent of the average software product ... contains open-source code"

Bronek Kozicki : "who cares? There are plenty open source licenses much less restrictive than GPL"

The quote from Black Duck does not say they are infringing anything. They are giving a bare-bones statistic, that is interesting in many ways.

For example It is a suprisingly high, though plausible, figure And it gives the lie to the claims that OS code is "not good enough" for professional applications - claims that persist, despite Apache, Sendmail. OS X, etc etc.

@ Chris 68

You wrote :-

"Yes, another misunderstood feature, and in wade the expert commenters, all guns blazing, with the predictable comments about "switching to linux" and spelling Microsoft with a $. So if you don't want a themed desktop, don't download it."

Will anyone understand it until we see it in practice? The fact is Microsoft have got themselves into a position such that a significant proportion of us are deeply suspicious of every new project they announce. Microsoft have only themselves to blame for this serious breakdown in their public image.

The concern here is that these themes may be rammed down our thoats whether we ask for them or not. In other words the worry is that adverts may come with Windows whether you download a theme or not, as they currently do with most Websites (the latter is not MS's fault, just in case you think I'm claiming it is).

Eg : No downloaded theme? Then you get a stock theme with ads based on your browsing history."

As for spelling Microsoft with a $, that is not inappropriate in this context, which is about a spivvy money-making scheme. I don't make it a habit of it myself though.

@ Robert Hill (Viewfinders)

You wrote :-

"Umm, you people do know why an optical viewfinder isn't standard, .. ? That's because without a swinging mirror, MFT can't use the SLR trick ... meaning that it is impossible to design a single optical viewfinder that will work with all lenses (without really complex linkage systems)."

Ummm, yes we did know that. I still want an optical finder tough. It has been done with linkages as you say (Leica), or you can simply/cheaply have some lines in the viewfinder to show different lens coverages. Better than nothing.

Yet another Estimate

There have been many attempts by historians to estimate the numbers, based on various sources, and there are some wildly different results. What makes this estimate special?

@Neal5 @ Alexander Hanff 1

Neal5 : "What do you think a stamp is then, could you personally deliver a letter from one end of the country to the other, for the price of a stamp, and make enough profit to make a living?"

Yes. I admit I would take in van loads like RM do, not singly as you imply. Nice little earner.

It's like I read it costs c£30,000 pa to maintain each railway level crossing. You could keep a skilled fitter stood by each one for 2 days a week for that, even allowing for occasional spares. But have you ever even SEEN anyone maintaining a level crossing? I never have, so they must need very little maintenance. I'd like to maintain a dozen please, at that price.

Breasts not Sexual ... WTF ??

Don't know what's the matter with most of you lot, makes me wonder where the Y chromosome has gone. Translation of most of your comments :-

"Women's tits have no effect on me, women are really just the same as men, what's the problem? Anyone who objects to seeing women's tits in the street is religious/puritan/anti-women".

And John Ozimek's article says "Evidence of this blind sexualisation ... of breasts in any context is widespread."

Jeez, I feel sorry for poor John if he doesn't see women's tits as sexual. Hey John, you're missing a lot. And most of the rest of you sound like earnest theorists in mom's basements and have never seen a woman's tit in your lives - except hers thirty years ago.

I have seen a lot of women's tits, and they never cease to turn me on. I have taken quite a few photos of them too, some of which are here on the internet. But there is a right time and place to look at - and touch - women's tits, and that should be of my chosing. That makes me a puritan? And I don't want getting erections in public either thanks, it''s uncomfortable with trousers on and it makes you look like you are not getting it, even if you are. WTF is that got to do with religion? It's a practical consideration. Or don't you guys ever get erections?

You don't seem to get it that women like Gloria Stovell are basically taking to take the piss out of nerds like you - she's saying "Look! but you can't touch, Ha Ha!".

F#@k off, Gloria.

Human Trafficking

Before even more human trafficking, how about :-

1) Employing bright people from your own country.

2) Answer how it is not racism to perpetuate the myth that people from India must be brighter than those at hand in your own country (the majority of whom are not of Indian descent).

3) Consider whether countries such as India should really have their own bright people taken away from them.

Gate's real agenda is for cheap labour.

@ David Farrell

You wrote :

###>

If the EU spent half the amount of time and money on trying to find solutions to the problems that cause third-world poor people to want to find better lives in rich countries instead of trying to create ever more imaginative ways of playing with their big boy toys, perhaps we could stop wasting all of this taxpayers money.

<###

Well that should be easy then. Solve World Hunger - come to think of it they were going to show how that could be done in a Monty Python episode. I missed it myself, but it was to be the week after they showed you how to play the flute.

But what makes you think that making the Third World richer would make them less inclined to come to Europe? They would simply arrive Business Class instead in boats. The immigrants I know were all relatively well off before they came here, and some complain that they are now <i>worse</i> off ("Used to have four servants back in India!").

There is a plethora of cultural, historical and economic reasons why adventurers, vagabonds, go-getters, crooks, professionals, pimps, casual workers, and beggars tend to gravitate to what is seen as the "Centre", just as it was to Rome 2000 years ago and to London 200 years ago. Tossing money to the third world won't stop it but border controls can.