Posts by SVV 1217 publicly visible posts • joined 4 Nov 2013
As my own sysadmin skills acquired in big hosting environments with complex infrastructures will probably become a "COBOL skills circa 1999" commodity in terms of contracting rates when the deficiencies of the cloud-will-solve-everything hype become manifest and I can expect to be treated as a rare genius for my ability to write shell scripts........ well, maybe in my dreams.........
Oh dear, what caused this to happen (apart from the amount of sponsorship cash they coughed up, which hasn't been disclosed, but of course everyone will become a whore for a certain amount of cash).
So what was a cool project in the grand tradition of garden shed boffinry with the added attraction of utilising the Raspberry Pi that could have inspired thousands of kids (of all ages) around the country has now suddenly become a "Look! Tits in Spaaaaaace!" sniggerfest for idiots who buy that remarkable work of journalism that is now sponsoring it.
I enjoyed a lot of the humour so far in this venture, but this just looks desperate and tacky.
"And then the second thing we did was really bring microprocessor technology in to the data center," Ballmer said.
REALLY?
What sort of technology do you think was in the data center before you came up with Windows Server editions? Mechanical adding machines? Yep, IBM used to make those about 70 years ago, wonder what that company has been up to in the decades since, and how they failed to bring microprocessor technology to the data center (or centre, if you prefer).......
A futile waste of time and effort really, all the government needed to do was set up a few servers and sell domains within the .corblimey.gov.uk domain and the problem would have ben solved.
And furthermore :
".london offers businesses and organisations in the capital a chance to be at the cutting edge of that change and show the world how innovative they can be" - so Lame-Fox now thinks that buying a domain name shows how cutting edge and innovative you are? Wakey Wakey it's not the year 2000 anymore!
They seem to think that with just a bit more elbow grease and marketing fluff they'll have a turd so shiny that people might actively want to buy it......
How long are they all going to remain in denial, for fear that stepping outside of the corporate groupthink might cost them their positions on the very greasy career pole that Microsoft operates?
Look, it's shit and everyone knows it, admit that you messed up and make a more optimized and functional version of Win 7 as a desktop OS and keep this Metro stuff just for the tablets and phones. And for the umpteenth time, give away your dev tools for free if you want developers to develop apps for your OSes : don't you understand that people might like to experiment first before coming up with what may be the concept for a killer app, rather than feeling that the investment required upfront is not worth the risk, especially as the reputation of your new platform in the market is somewhere near the "uncool and not pleasant to use" level.
Info : http://www.expatax.nl/tax-rates-2012.php
N.B Does not include local taxes, VAT, capital gains, health insurance premiums and many other taxes
Taxable Income Total Rate
< € 18,945 33.10 %
€ 18,945 41,95 %
€ 33,863 42 %
€ 56,491 52 %
So, that's how they support such high public spending : The ordinary working person coughs up loads more than the companies they work for. However, you get what you pay for, and that includes immaculately clean towns and cities, free public transport to and from work on a fast comfortable and comprehensive public transport system, exceptional healthcare and everything else that goes with living in a prosperous modern country. However the people are largely dour, money obsessed and boring and moan incessantly about everything they percieve to be wrong with one of the wealthiest places on the planet.
Technically, you cannot know with any certainty whether or not you will arrive too late to post a quantum physics gag on time. Only when you click "Post a Comment" will you cause the wave function to collapse and leave you in a too late or just in time to post your joke state, as clicking this button triggers the observation inside the box which contains the information as to whether you got your joke in on time.
However in the "many worlds interpretation", there may be an infinite number of parallel universes where you always get to post first, and thus gain all the early mod points.
"Smart glasses, it was suggested, will be the subject of serious scrutiny by business"
OK, team here's a box of presents for you..... your new google glasses, so we can email urgent messages directly to your eyeballs and let you into the office with an app installed on them : to gain access just walk up to the door wearing them and say "open sesame".
We will of course have access to the video camera and microphone on all of them so we can monitor exactly what you are doing and saying at any point during the day, and this will only be stored on our servers for a period of 10 years.
Wearing your glasses is mandatory at all times on company premises, and not doing so without my permission will be considered gross misconduct.
We will not at present require you to wear your glasses outside the office, unless you are on call or travelling for work. Thank you for your co-operation, now who wants their fun new toy first?
"The answer was somewhere in between, Perry argued, with a small dose of legislation and a lot of corporate social responsibility."
Yeh, because that same winning formula that you love so much was such a success when it came to the banking system wasn't it?
We certainly saw the triumph of corporate social responsibility over pure profit seeking in action there, as all politicians avoided regulation like the plague.
However, this isn't about that issue, it's a piece of boneheaded political populism of the "we must do something to protect the children" variety that is going to start us off down the road of an increasingly censored internet. How about making the point that parents have the responsibility to supervise and limit what their children do on the internet, in the same way they do in the real world, gradually allowing them more freedom and indpendence as they feel that their kids are ready to start navigating their way through the world themselves?
"Visitors to Bletchley Park will no longer be allowed to visit the Colossus machine in Block H and fences may soon be erected to stop them visitors wandering between the two attractions."
No doubt also complete with watchtowers, searchlights and guard dogs to make it that little bit more representative of the behaviour of the BP nanagement now that their lottery loot's come through.
"Yes, we must stop the public spending a small amount of money learning really interesting and fascinating stuff of massive historical interest that was done on this very site, as it could be better spent in our giftshop and cafe in order to increase our already substantial salaries"
"The former Sky exec......"
So, a massively predictable anti BBC ranting from a Murdoch shill advancing his master's wish to destroy the best thing about the UK media so that he can profit even more .......
Did this "idea" need such lengthy reporting, seeing as all the right wing media in this country carry exremely regular and predictable anti-BBC stories as a matter of policy? It's obvious that this would be a first step towards privatisation, leaving us with a much more impoverished choice of viewing and listening.
Who else would have made the gloriously bonkers new Vic and Bob sitcom that has just started and had me in tears of laughter, after switching over from an evening's high class music on Radio 6?
sat in government, it's only taken them how many decades and billions of ££s of public money wasted to realise that something needs to change?
Next stop, reform the ideologically driven bidding process so it's not just awarded to the lowest bidder, but favour suppliers who have a track record of successful deliveries (and don't let companies who have milked you for millions whilst failing ever bid again).
Finally, try and do some research on successful large projects in industry (they do exist you know) and learn from them. Read The Mythical Man Month. And finally start small with proofs of concept and scale up and build out as the project progresses, rather than trying to manage everything as one monolithic project from the start.
£13,482.00 incl. VAT
(http://www.microsoftstore.com/store/msuk/en_GB/pdp/Visual-Studio-Ultimate-2013-with-MSDN/productID.288656900)
(oh, sorry you're allowed a generous 4 tech support incidents for this money)
Talk about a Microsoft tax........ The cost of my development tools? £0.00 incl. VAT
should be sentenced to 10 years working on a Javascript heavy system.
I lasted 3 months myself, before quitting due to the insanely bad code that I had to work with and the fact that the only guy there who could comprehend the thing because he'd spent years writing it was always so busy sorting out the endless problems that occurred on a daily basis and needed to be solved instantly, that he never had any time to answer the many many questions I had regarding what all this garbage did. Of course he believed that all code is "self documenting" and anyone who couldn't scan through the 30000 lines of undocumented javascript functions in an average source file and instantly understand the whole thing was so intellectually inferior to himself the great genius and guru of the company that they deserved to be treated with nothing less than contempt....
If someone could show me just one clear fully realised javascript based system that is easy to comprehend, maintain and extend, and has clear benefits over other alternatives then I might just be persuaded to change my opinions, but for now the PJSTD (Post Javascript Traumatic Disorder) has still not healed completely.
It started simply enough for me with the "mail" command on unix multiuser systems.
Before too long I was operating full sendmail systems, and eventually after about 15 years succumbed to installing full Active Directory / Outlook Windows servers whilst at work, which drove me insane.
These days I still dabble about occasionally with self hosted mail systems on Linux for purely recreational purposes, but generally have grown out of it in favour of a manageable 2 web based mail accounts system for spam and real emails I want to read.
Why on earth would you have a "starbucks password" on your ayephone?
Are you such a fashion victim that you just feel so cool and with it as you swan into your tiresome chain coffee supping store that you feel defines your "lifestyle" as much as your choice of gadgetry and feel the need to flash your pricey gadget at the till rather than handover some coins or pay with your cashcard?
The damage caused by someone who stole your blingmobe being able to go and get as much free pretentiously named coffee as they want for a day or so before you disable your phone must be heartbreaking.
"error 80188309" on a Nokia (MS) consumer device running an MS OS when updating is totally unacceptable.
What sort of crappy cheapskate QA process do they have if this experience is possible?
I mean, a techically experienced person could probably navigate their way through the problems, as the author did, but yer average phone user?
If operating other apps during the update can cause it to fail, then DON'T LET OTHER APPS RUN DURING THE PROCESS!
"Since then the company has expanded into flogging a combination carbon-monoxide detector and "smart" smoke alarm, which phones you when your house is on fire"
<Cheesy ringtone>
<<Hi, this your Nest (tm) smart smoke detector, your house is on fire!>>
I can definitely see enough people rushing out to buy this to justify an investment of $3200000000
Maybe it'll post a message for you on your Google+ account and send an email to all your gmail contacts too : "Hi, I won't be available to answer emails for the next few days as my house just burnt down".
That without any evidence to go on, every theory advanced so far as to the provenance and purpose of this puzzle is simply wild speculation.
Boring, but true. Although I'd be pleased if the answer after a further series of tortuous redirections was "ever get the feeling that you've been cheated?".
Even better if every "congratulations, you have solved the puzzle" message turned out not to be true, but contained even more puzzles and they just kept going on forever, keeping plenty of hackers busy chasing their tails rather than devoting their energies to more harmful pursuits. The "keep going, the prize is $200 million" message at the 33rd level of redirection is a particularly good ruse in order to achieve this.
'A big challenge ARM has is what workloads are you going to run on it'
A bigger challenge for MS is probably the answer "well, I doubt that it'll be that bloated Windows Server 2013, Active Directory stuff you're peddling, maybe some proven Linux on ARM technologies optimised for specificly needed server tasks that will perform equal or better than your high temperature CISC Intel based stuff whilst requiring vastly less power for both running the chips and cooling which will reduce data centre costs significantly".
Should be food for thought rather than what sounds like an over the top and possibly scared blanket dismissal before the technology has had the chance to succeed or fail in the real world marketplace. Not a good image to be presenting right now for a "top Microsoft bod", indeed the arrogance may well be interpreted as a little desperate and only increase interest in the potential benefits of switching to ARM.
The users use the systems provided in the office. If the systems aren't good enough to provide all the functionality needed to perform their tasks easily, then you improve the systems.
Letting data out of the door on poorly secured laptops, etc is idiotic, you may as well just post it on the web.
And no matter how much users love their tablets, if they need them for work then the company must provide them, with an acceptable use policy, standard configuration, etc. Bring your own device may be a buzzword at the moment, but from a security, support, insurance and maybe even legalt point of view it's an expensive nightmare just waiting to happen if implemented as a policy in the office.
Ok, it might be not so big a deal if you work in a 5 man startup, but in corporate land? No way.
Sums up my first reaction to this very nicely too, it's a really smart move and it's nice to read some positive, constructive news like this.
I currently use CentOs for development testing and acceptance testing before deploying to a bare bones Redhat server for production, and there has never been a compatibility problem yet. (The CentOS systems run Gnome as it's convenient to be able to run Firefox and Postgres GUI admin tools on the test systems).
Getting the most up to date virtualization and cloudy stuff out to the community is going to increase adoption quicker than it otherwise would have, and the whole mix is going to be much more attractive in the corporate space which is where these products are really aimed.
And selling this to management who like to hear phrases such as "industry standard" and "fully supported" will also be easier (apologies to the fans of free desktop or other distros as usual, but this is the corporate IT world I'm talikng about here where "community supported" doesn't fly for mission critical).
http://techcrunch.com/2014/01/02/robocoin-the-bitcoin-atm-is-heading-to-hong-kong-and-taiwan/
TC: Tell me about yourselves.
SG: We are a small team of hungry, dedicated and determined technologists based in Las Vegas. Our team of 4: Jordan Kelley is CEO, John Russell is CTO, Chris Yoder (previously CTO @Cloudsnap) is our other developer and I’m our Chief of Growth.
Yep, a team of 4, all calling themselves chiefs (apart from the mysterious "other developer", but hey he was a CTO too before this!).
At least the fact they're based in Las Vegas should reassure people that this isn't a futile gamble.
Certainly for decently specced laptops and all modern desktop PCs, you should get this sort of functionality out of the box as standard in an easy to use and manage way.
So, on booting up you get a menu (easily custpmised in case you really never want to use anything other than Windows, which is becoming less and less likely as there are really great apps around on Android, even for free) and boot simply into Windows, Android, ChromeOS (not tried it so don't know what it's like), Linux, whatever. Make downloading / installing new OSes really easy and simple from this menu too.
Having gone the virtualization route myself. it's still too slow and complex to manage for regular consumer use, so a multi-boot partitioned system seems the only viable solution right now.
As so many people now also (or even mainly) use tablets, these Acer products look like the first step in the direction that people are starting to demand and I can see traditional single OS machines becoming a thing of the past, especially after the Windows 8 disaster.
So PC makers, stop whining about declining sales, get to work and get these things on the shelves asap.
Welcome to the argument that will enter the history books as the moment that the stupidity of bitcoin users reached its' zenith. So, it's not a real asset then, Mr bigtime drug dealer? Well, as it doesn't really exist you won't mind if you lose it then.......... as nothing minus nothing equals nothing.
Honestly, going up against the US legal system and saying "waaaah, you're not allowed to take my money off me because it's not really money even though I can buy stuff with it" is the most pathetic defence imaginable, but the faith of the true believers is still rather impregnable at the moment and this should set a nice little legal precedent concerning the true legal status of this dodgy pyramid scheme.
My first reaction was that this was maybe just an attempt to squeeze a little more out of their main cash cow, whilst they get hammered by Dell on the lower end commodity server box side and IBM on the high end integrated "don't open the box yourself" fully supported side.
However, having had a quick look at their site to see how they're promoting this, it seems like the pitch is very much for the guarantee of stability (well, as much as you ever can) combined with added value "intelligent" power management and efficiency........ in other words, cloud providers please fill your cloud datacentre with lots of these for these reasons, which sort of makes sense as a stategic decision.
Disclaimer : Use Redhat commercially, CentOS for home experimentation stuff, have dabbled in other distros to check out what's there.
Support in a corporate environment is an absolute essential : taking your example, using 10 installed servers would cost £30,000 per year : about the cost of a developer with a few years experience these days. And if you're running 10 seperate servers, you are processing a LOT of transactions, whether on the web or in your database, so your turnover would be such that this would be peanuts.
Redhat is utterly boring, straightforward and reliable, best used for application server and database gruntwork where it's highly efficient in a bare bones one task only per server configuration .That's their selling point, and in my opinion they really deliver on it.
This is the reputation that enables it to be trusted : try a "but you should use my favourite free distro instead" argument in an established business where their systems are mission critical and you will be told all this in no uncertain terms. Does that mean that you're wrong? Possibly not, but you need to learn why companies are risk averse in such fundamental choices.
This is a very subtle satire on all those journalists who earn an extra freelance paycheque at the end of the year by rehashing the writing they've already been paid for in the last 12 months into a "Review of the Year" article, which has been achieved through the medium of doing exactly that himself.
Not that I'm being critical, as I have never ever seen any valuable work done between mid December and New Year in the IT industry.
Should probably be good for a jolly Reg article if it does.
Unsurprising how the list has grown in scope so quickly (like they said it wouldn't), soon we'll only be able to access the Daily Mail at this rate.
And the scope widening to pander to homophobic prejudice is utterly disgraceful from both BT and the telecoms regulators who have let this happen, feels like a step back to the bad old days and I feel sorry for the kids who may be affected adversely as a result.
Also not happy as someone living in shared rented accomodation that my landlord may now have the right to censor my internet (well, try to anyway). Finally, is there a legal responsibility on the telcos to ensure that no unwanted content can make it through their filter? No, thought not, funny isnt it?
As in "ouch my fingers are burning, turn it off til it cools down!"
In another quote, "Microsoft attributed screen dimming to “extended, high CPU intensive actions – like gaming.”"
So, it's not suitable for gaming, which is lucky because nobody uses their tablets for gaming do they?
Roll on Surface 3, and keep those receipts safe if you've bought one of these.....
Having worked on a few sites that used javascript heavily, and seeing that the developers all thought that
a) var is the universal dataatype and dataatype conversion issues never become an issue, and
b) you must not document your code, because it's only javascript in a webpage and (horror of horrors) vast swathes of users might see your comments when they choose the "View Source" menu option, like most people normally do when visiting websites.
And there I was thinking that my Mac was like a Fisher Price toy that couldn't be damaged....
Unless they come with a manual that talks about the *nix teminal window and says "ON NO ACCOUNT USE THIS UNLESS YOU REALLY KNOW WHAT YOU'RE DOING" then although I despise this unfunny attempt to make non techie people's lives worse because of their supposed inferiority because, hey, they don't understand the unix command line, then Apple should admit that they make massively customizable personal computers that you can screw up royally if you do things you don't understand, just like all the others.......
"Gmail is number one with 425 million active accounts versus what Microsoft claims is "more than" 400 million such accounts for Outlook."
You know, this is funny as I have never received a single mail from an outook.com mail account. Whereas lots of people seem to be happy with gmail from my own personal experience.
Could it be that they have just converted all those millions of spam hotmail accounts in order to achieve this figure?
Anyway, it's only flipping web based email, and the fact that I can open every attachment I get sent with no problems, and some people only email me every year or so means that (like the great majority of gmail users I would expect) my response to this will be just like most people's response to most things Microsoft does these days : "Why should I move to this new thing you have when this old thing I have does everything perfectly well that your new thing does, and moving to your new thing will cause massive upgrade headaches"
Well, if their broadband infrastructure is being managed by their pro-cycling team during the cold months where no road racing takes place, who would be surprised at this?
However I would expect that a lot of power cycling is currently taking place on servers and routers in their datacentre so maybe this isn't as outlandish an idea as I first thought.
So, £90 for a big ugly digital watch that needs recharging after 8 days. Versus a handful of quid for a digital watch from a market stall that will run for over a year off a tiny battery.....
Seriously, this thing looks like something Sinclair would have put out in 1983, and I'm struggling to think of any applications I'd like or need to use on a screen this size.........
I'm not going to give in to the temptation to repeat the famous Douglas Adams quote on such watches, but considering how easy it is to determine the time in our digital tech saturated world these days, and how most people carry smartphones with them which are better in every respect, this looks like a real xmas turkey.
It's here if you fancy a go yourself : http://learn.code.org/hoc/1
My verdict? Pretty good actually at introducing the basics, feels like solving little puzzles (which is what programming should feel like, lest we forget when spending another day wading through endless pages of badly written undocumented awfulness). I could imagine that the later exercises are at a level that some kids will find challenging and hard to grasp without more help, but overall it certainly does what it claims and shouldn't be dismissed lightly.
Be warned however that some of the sugary between-exercise video clips featuring Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg and sundry American nano-celebs may cause potentially screen damaging levels of computer rage.
Re : providing customers with help if needed, good stuff that they make some effort to do that, despite the fact that you have to book an appointment like it's the computer doctor.
Regarding the cringe inducing marketing (or "eye catching" as you describe it), I have also never asked for my money back when ordering "Sex on the Beach" at a bar failed to deliver on its' promise.
What on our dear Earth is this "Genius Bar"shit?
OK, I just googled it and the result can be found here if you are of a stout constitution : http://www.apple.com/uk/retail/geniusbar/
Basically, it's like the customer service point in Argos where you take your stuff to if it's broken. And the person manning it is called (I kid you not) a "Genius".
I would have expected it to have been a cool place for self described genius gadgetheads to hang out and congratulate themselves on their consumer choice in overpriced products and sip a cool beverage, but no, it's a complaints counter. A better name would have been "Fanboi Frustration Foyer". Or some more offensive alternatives I've just imagined.
Can we please at least ask why this app and "wearable device" are aimed exclusively at women, as these probably very svelte and not at all lardy American techies who are mostly male seem to have been paid to develop and publicise this risible idea.
And the app has a cartoon bird with a speech bubble telling you what to do that reads "Bird says". Are they unaware that in the UK, this has a colloquial meaning of girlfriend, and furthermore we do not like to be bossed around by our birds?
(OK, I lied about this not containing predictable puerile jokes.)
This was Ballmer's big philosophy that he loved to express in public.
However, in reality it was "Developers please pay a fortune to develop software for our OS" which was always offputting when it meant that I couldn't run my dev tools on my home PC. (I spent a good 5 years writing Windows software before escaping to a world where development tools are free.....)
Now they're basically admitting that in 2 years time, most of the software you've developed for these variously shaped windows will become obsolete and need to be rewritten (reminds me of a techie version of Playschool..... Which window will we look though today children? Through the Server 2013 round window!)
So good luck if you're thinking of investing the next couple of years developing for one or more of these OSes, with the knowledge that you'll need to rework everything once this ill thought out experiment in incompatibility has failed.
“Naked I came from my mother’s womb,
and naked I will depart.
The Lord gave and the Lord has taken away;
I am hoping that this wasn't referring to the author's state of dress and previous activities before arriving for and departing from a visit to the cathedral cafe, but it seems that the lord has definitely taken away what he had given.
OK, I don't drive so I don't need it in my car right now, but my home radio listening is all done through my tablet (and powered speakers if I'm in the living room) - magically delivered through the magic of a wi-fi broadband connection.
So, no need for DAB at all, and the UK only incompatibility problems are hardly likely to increase uptake. Plus ever increasing uptake of 4G and the ensuing decrease in price and increase in "unlimited usage" data plans that are already happening - as we all basically demand wireless internet everywhere - mean that DAB might be something that never really takes off.
Maybe the Wi-fi standard could even be extended to allow the frequency bands that are currently used for DAB to be used as a kind of nationwide openly accessible broadcast only wi-fi signal?
To the rest, keep piling your money in, it's a revolutionary new paradigm that will absolutely not end up like the previous episodes of revolutionary new paradigms like tulips or dogfood.com, no sir.
As for the guy who chucked away his laptop, how's that independence from the government and their dastardly guarantee of assets held in banks thing going?
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