Posts by Pete

pig farmers in barrel buying frenzy

This stopped being an economic rescue package ages ago. It's turned into good old pork-barrel politics, with every american politician trying to get their pet projects and friends' companies attached to it - whether or not the projects will provide an economic stimulus. Mostly the projects will just be payback for the financial help their sponsors provided during elections, or as a down-payment on a nice, cushy job when they either "retire" or get kicked out of the political game.

@delboy

it's worse than that.

If the lappy gets infected, they have a good reason for not doing any work. Don't have to wait for the next (thin) covering of snow: "Sorry I couldn't submit my report on time, the laptop got a virus - yes I'm still waiting for the IT people to fix it. They say it could be days before they get to it." So now it's "bloody IT, why don't they pull their fingers out and fix my people's problems". While the indolent desk-jockey spends their days annoying their colleagues (thus preventing them from working, too" or "works from home" ahem.

Better yet. Didn't like the paltry pay rise? Get you own back & "lose" the laptop. That it appears on ebay the next week and makes up for the rise you think you should've got is immaterial. Or if the newbie gets a new, wizzy laptop and you want one too, well the same applies.

Oh yes, while I'm at it. @I got one two weeks ago ...

Just so's you know. *All* the users do this, all the time. You just discovered one, single instance.

arrests ... but how many convictions?

> leading to over 2,700 arrests for crimes such as murder, rape and assault

OK, basic statement of fact: being arrested is not proof of guilt. All it means is that someone, somewhere thinks there may be a case for you to answer. It could be a teenage plastic-piggie (ooops, they don't have powers of arrest - have to get a grown-up to do it for them). it could be from someone sitting behind a desk where your name pops up, or a completely blameless individual who just happens to share the mis-typed name of a possible suspect who might just be a "person of interest".

All it means is that the arrestee is put to a lot of hassle and delay - frequently leading to missed flights and ruined holidays, disappointed families and lots of unwanted stress. What would be more enlightening would be to know what the success-rate was. I.e. the proportion of people arrested who eventually end up being charged (even then, this is not an indication of wrong-doing) and then convicted of an offence.

If it's anything like the 2% conviction rate for terrorism arrests, this is figure of 2700 arrests means over 2600 people who were egregiously screwed around for absolutely no reason

@WTF! ...

> Could the BBC's illegal use of my IP address, coupled with my postcode, be alerting these dodgy companies to my physical whereabouts

Nah, sites like http://whatismyipaddress.com are quite capable of returning a reasonably accurate, sometimes scarily accurate (and occasionally totally wrong) location from a given IP address.

"facebook .... without maths" !!!

Riiiight, so how many mathematicians does Facebook have, squirreled away in head office performing research into differential calculus?

Yes, there are libraries of code at Facebook, based on mathematical algorithms. However even the newest (encryption) of these algorithms is years old and only took a few people out of the entire population of the planet to devise, develop and debug. Further, none of them are - or ever were - employed by Facebook.

I have a sneaking suspicion that what this guy is really talking about is basic arithmetic - adding-up and suchlike. Which also tells us that he doesn't actually know what mathematics is, so doesn't exactly instill much faith in his pontifications.

not wrong - just ahead of their time

The power of "may".

Not "will" or "does" or "won't" or "cannot" - there's no such thing as certainty, especially where lawyers are concerned (as they wouldn't make any money then). So everything contains an element of doubt: "might", "may", "could".

So the statement that Google puts out; "This site may harm your computer" cannot be denied. Yes it's unhelpful, tells nothing about the degree of risk and merely increased the levels of doubt and paranoia, but wrong? No.

Personally, I'd like to see this sort of disclaimer on everything. Something along the lines of: "this product is not guaranteed safe under every circumstance", or maybe better: "you might die after handling this item". if it reduces the worth of all the (already worthless) warnings, caveats and disclaimers we see every day, then people might, just have to start thinking for themselves and apply what little common-sense they have to assessing the degree of risk, and whether it justifies the potential gain.

Caveat emptor!

a screw-up like that should kill the company

Not just because someone made a mistake and messed up the database, but because their architecture (god, I hate that word .... I should've said "design") didn't allow for a single point of failure.

If you're making a business of holding customers' data, it's *got* to be available ALL THE TIME. While outages due to external events - such as internet failures are a pain, anything internal to the business just reeks of amateurism. This shower should step out of the way and let the professionals do the job.

yup, both

When I started messing about with 'pooters, all we had were magazine reviews (actually, when I started there weren't any magazines - still have issue #1 of PCW somewhere +10 saddo points).

One memorable review I saw in *another* mag was for a device that they freely admitted didn't work - yet it still got 3 stars out of 5. Given that magazines are entirely self-serving and rely heavily on advertising and the goodwill of producers to provide equipment for review, I formed the conclusion that they are, shall we say, exceptionally generous in their judgements.

The one set of magazines I did like was in a spanish computer magazine, where they took the overall star rating they had assigned, and divided it by the price, to give a value for money rating.

Online reviews can be the exact opposite - extremely negative regarding all aspects of a product merely because the package arrived a day late. They can also be utterly uncritical of a product (cough, apple, cough) if the reviews are done by the good ole fanboys. You also have to be aware of "drive-by" reviews, were people simply click on a yes/no vote for products, based on their own biases without even using a product - GAOTD gets lots of complaints about that.

When all is said and done, I suppose the best route is to follow some of the more respected online reviewers. Plus, of course, knowing what it is you actually want the product to do.

How about a democratic solution?

Since democracy is supposed to be the best way forward - and worth sacrificing the lives (nearly typed "livers" there, ooops!) of thousands of people for, surely we should let the amercans and chinese vote on the situation: what could be fairer?

On the one hand, we'd have 300 million americans and on the other 1200 million chinese - I think the outcome should be pretty clear. Isn't democracy a wonderful concept - especially when a small group of self-interested people can choose to only apply it when the results will be in their favour.

The Arabs are semites, too

The term is a geographical/racial one - not a religious description. If the story is really about someone / something being anti-Jewish, that's completely different.

@Adam Foxton

> And @Pete: Yes, we don't know what the Americans will evolve into. But they're less likely to turn into things we don't like than China or Russia with whom there are already tensions.

I'd suggest that in the future we'll spend a lot more time and money kissing up to the Russians (who could / do turn off a lot of our energy supply at will) and the Chinese (who could turn off all our manufactured goods, equally at will) than the Ameriicans, as the worst they could do is stop selling us crappy TV programmes. As it is, I doubt that we'd rank particularly highly in the considerations of any of these countries either with or without nukes.

really a virus, or just plain stupidity?

Experience tells me that a virus is a very convenient scapegoat. Whenever a sysadmin does something stupid, it's much easier (easier on their careers, that is) to blame any damage on a mysterious, yet familiar and if we believe what we are told - ubiquitous, danger that infests every PC, all the time.

Almost always there is no-one, either on-board a warship, or in an office environment who is in a position to independently verify these claims. Nor can they get to the real root-cause. that makes it conveniently impossible to say if the "culprit" is a real virus, or merely carelessness or lack of ability on the part of those entrusted with keeping the stuff running.

Occam's razor would suggest that these systems are (hopefully) designed with the tightest security foremost, with up-to-date anti-virus, anti-malware and anti-intrusion layers. However they are still dependent on the same sys-admins who have only been on the same courses as everyone else and that this is the common element between failures on security hardened military systems and run-of-the-mill PCs found in every school, home and office.

Hmmm.

How about an MoD cell tower in afghanistan?

The military spends billions each year on communications - they even have their own dedicated satellite network. It should not be beyond the abilities of someone to connect a military groundstation to a cell tower (just like the phone companies connect a cell tower to a microwave link) and provide mobile phone access to service personnel on their "home" networks, using a small - very small - piece of the already in place and paid for mil-sat bandwidth.

the industry knew this 15+ years ago

The scalability of multiprocessors has always been a sticking point. It came into sharp focus (for me and others) when Motorola et. al. released the M88k RISC chips in the early 90's. The architecture inherently limits the speed that processor caches can be accessed by other CPUs (to see if one thread has altered a variable your thread wants to use), the way interrupts get handled and some other features that I've forgotten about over time.

Even then, none of this was new. IBM had run into issues of their own with mainframe processors - which still have significant flattening of the CPUs/MIPS curve as numbers go up.

You don't have to be a nuclear, or any other type of scientist to have this knowledge. Just a little background in general purpose computing and the realisation that very little is novel - even in this field.

@"sunny day"

very true, my friend.

However, part, if not the major part, of the problem lies with t'management and their project planning. They usually consider a product ready for shipping when it fulfills it's functional criteria. I.e. it produces the correct output from the set of input data. The fact that it cracks right open if you miss out a decimal point, or type "*" when the database is expecting a number, simply doesn't feature: they get picked up in the beta testing (which, BTW is now commonly referred to as version 1.0)

Why these state of affairs is allowed to happen is partly due to timescale pressures - where the development cycle simply *must* produce 2 releases a year. Part of it is due to the way development is done: with stages like code, test, release (without the obvious interlude and time allocation between #2 and #3 of "fix the bugs"), and part is due to the lack of liability that the producers award themselves from the EULAs.

In practice, pretty much all of the 25 listed errors boil down to a single element: failure to design and code defensively, for a hostile environment. But of course, that wouldn't make any headlines as we all know that already.

site overwhelmed - what did they think would happen?

I know I shouldn't be, but it constantly disappoints whenever one of these internet "events" take place,that the host almost always bombs under heavy demand. Apart from reinforcing the obvious fact that the internet isn't really that scalable - or robust, it must tell you something about the lack of forward thinking on the part fo the organisers.

As soon as you advertise something as "free" it's pretty much guaranteed that there'll be a stampede to the trough, whether the people downloading it know/care what it is, or not. Didn't Microsoft have even the merest inkling that there'd be a frenzy and that maybe (just maybe) it might be a clever idea to add some extra capacity - or even just seed a few torrents and let the P2P kiddies do the heavy lifting?

As it is, I doubt that many of the people who download this beta release will ever get around to using it. Mostly it will sit around on people's disks, unused and unloved, until either they need the space or see the file - and can't recall what it was and just delete it, thinking "what was I doing?"

low flying sheep?

so far as the statement

> To hit two of the blades, any object must have been about 170ft long

goes, I suspect this assumes the "object" was flying towards the front of the turbine. However if it was flying in from the side, along the plane of the blades' rotation then something smaller but slow moving could've caught two of them, as they turned.

Just wait until -V i a g r a- becomes a codeword

What happens when the baddies start concealing their nefarious emails in plain SPAM?

Presumably the spooks won't want to follow up on the billions of offers that people receive daily for all these wonderful sex products. So on that basis, it becomes the perfect place to conceal sensitive data. Just imagine what a few simple substitutions could do, to turn an innocuous piece of junk mail into a call-to-arms.

However, the baddies would have to be very careful about which SPAMS they should take as orders, and which ones are truly just trying to get them to donate to con-artists, otherwise we could end up in the mother of all terrorist attacks.

and the next UK Mars mission?

will use elastic bands instead of a rocket

@Delboy @adnim

it sounds like you've never had any experience of hospitals - either as a customer or a relative to someone "inside".

The biggest boost to a patient is when someone comes to visit. The next best thing is when they call, or when the patient is able to call - and hear a friendly, concerned voice, talking to them about day to day stuff. It relieves the crushing boredom of being stuck in a ward 24*7, surrounded by sick people and gives them a link back to reality.

If you don't like them, do yourselves a favour and don't get ill. As it is, if you do find yourself in hospital, pretty much everyone around you will have their mobile on, and you won't be in a position to do anything about it - despite your huffing and puffing, so you'd better get used to the idea.

@Dunstan Vavasour

> a bunch of third party binary only drivers,

It's probably much, much worse than that. I would fully expect that a lot of the critical stuff is classed as restricted technology (or whatever the weasel-words de jour are) by the US govt. and are therefore not released in source to any third party, just as happened to the Chinook softs and another recent case that slips my mind (a fighter?)

That would leave us with a fleet of floating scrap metal, completely beholden to a foreign power and without the ability to remove it or make any changes to it. We would probably have to agree to some usurious software maintenance deals for periods of time so long that the hardware would be obsolete decades before the licensing agreement ended. Further, we probably couldn't even sell off the warships when they reach end-of-life, due to the end-user agreements surrounding the software.

So far as quality and timely fixes go, forget it. Given how dearly the US holds it's ideas of democracy, you'd expect that their electronic voting systems to be the most completely debuggered software in the history of the planet. Given that they can't even get that right, can you imagine the amount of importance they'd attach to fixing bugs in systems that are operated by another country completely? Also, forget the idea that we'd have any leverage, either economic, military or legal - they've shown that they don't consider their military to be subject to the same international laws and agreements that everyone else signs up to.

but no-one drinks "alcohol"

and the term "alcoholic drink" covers everything from shandy to absinthe.

It seems to me that the first step towards educating people about the benefits and hazards of getting pissed, is to define what it is we're talking about. For that matter too, hopefully our nanny/overlords will have a sudden attack of common sense and start to realise that the effects on a 12-stone seventeen year-old will be vastly different from the effects of the same amount of booze on a thirty year-old size 0 (i.e. a woman who would've been considered "normal-sized" in the 50's) and temper their advice accordingly: that a "small sip" is right for some, but inadequate for others.

Alternatively, I wonder if it would, just, be possible for the govt. to take a mature and sensible approach to this. The first step would be to recognise that teens will get smashed out of their skulls (and probably not just on C2H5OH) but will get over it. The last thing they need is to feel demonised and isolated. If their families can be sensible and realistic, without the fear of being labeled child-abusers when they dole out a beer or glass of wine on occasion, we may even find that while the UKs kids will get just as drunk as their european counterparts, they will follow their leads and either sleep it off, start talking loudly or just have sex - rather than rampaging through town centres smashing the place up.

you forgot "netbook"

Build a low-spec laptop. Use the absolute minimum specification that will actually boot and run. Specify the smallest resolution, cheapest screen you can find - never mind the downright ludicrous resolution and aspect ratio. Slap in the lowest cost O/S and applications that are available (and forget to mention that unless you are a fully paid-up geek,, these puppies come with absolutely no support, upgrades, fixes or patches).

Give it a trendy name and flog 'em to people who's buying decisions are predicated solely on price and you've invented a whole new genre.

The press, of course, are eager to grasp at anything that could possibly help them shift copy. So they climb on board, too. Hyping this thing as if cheapo lappys are a new phenomenon and how this is "the future"

I suppose netbook is better than a more accurate moniker of "crap-top". Oh how we'll look back on 2007/8/9 and cringe to think that we actually paid money for these doorstops. In the same way that people got caught up in past fads, only to realise that beneath them lay ..... nothing.

so who's going to tell the tourists?

Can you imagine what would happen if guides like Fodor's started putting warnings in their books along the lines of "remember, if you take photographs in London, you could be arrested for any one of a number of offences" and then a gentle reminder that the police can detain anyone for up to 28 days without the need to charge them.

Apart from being a stark warning to the millions of visitors to the UK, it would be an extreme, if well deserved, embarrassment to the govt and would have everyone in the tourism trade screaming. Given the mangnanamous and caring image that the govt will be promoting for the olympics, something like this would act as a reality check of the worst kind, for every foreigner who was planning to come over for that event.

what could they possibly get?

Let's have a think about China.

- One of the three countries in the world with a manned space programme (possibly now one of two, since the yanks are stopping the scuttle)

- One of the few nuclear armed powers, one of the 5 permanent members of the UN security council

- One of the world's largest and fastest growing economies

- More internet users than any other country [source: internetworldstats.com]

I could go on, but it would get to sound like I was being paid by them.

And the aussies are frightened that the chinese might be stealing their secrets to gain an advantage? Not wishing to put the australians down, but I doubt they have anything the chinese need - or don't already have by other means, such as from the 600,000+ chinese living in Oz.

learned from eBay

Buy it Now price: $0.00, P&P $42 million

Vendor reserves the right to delay shipping, or to cancel the auction - if he chooses to keep the items.

... but you still have to speak the local language

don't be fooled into thinking you'll be able to explain to the emergency operator in english:

"oh please come quickly, I think I'm having a heart attack - yes, we're the third house down on the right hand side"

will still be met with a resounding "Que?". followed by ...... no ambulance, or fire service or police or whatever. The hardest and final part of becoming fluent in any language, is being able to speak to a native on the phone, Even harder if they're an official - who potentially could be put to a great deal of inconvenience if they make the mistake of "understanding" you.

Even worse, is when you discover that countries such as Spain actually have 3 different police forces (National, Local and Civil) each of whom deals with different aspects - and won't redirect your call if you phone the wrong one, even if you do make the mistake of calling them on 112.

So, having a single number is nice in theory, however for a brit abroad, don't fall into a false sense of security by thinking the system will work as it does in the UK - they aren't called FOREIGN countries for nothing.

organisations don't want innovation - they want low-risk and cheap

Talking about IBM, mainframes and the slow pace of change. The article implies this is a bad thing - it's not. One of the biggest selling points for mainframes is that you can shut down your system on a friday night, after the close of business, rip all the old hardware out, roll in a new box and be up and running on monday morning. Better still, no-one will know anything's changed.

Given the mess of versioning conflicts, incompatibilities, unexpected problems, licensing issues and sub-year obsolescences, it amazes me that so many organisations put up with the hell that is windows server upgrades. Maybe the best thing that could happen for them is that the big players don't release anything new for a year or two. I have a feeling that most organisations, for whom IT is merely a means to an end (i.e. to help make money), would collectively breathe a sigh or relief at the possibility that they could just get on with running their businesses., And that they'd love a year off, without having to spend millions just to keep their IT systems at the "minimum acceptable" levels that the constant changes from vendors, patches, forced-upgrades, shortened life-cycles and bug-fixes force on them.

It's not meant to be scientific

It;s meant to be a prop - something the govt. can use to divert the blame when they decide to raise more taxes (the only thing they ever, really do) by increasing the duty on booze.

As it is, saving £116 mil on the NHS is peanuts in the £90 Bn [source: The Independent] the govt. will spend on the NHS this year. The presumed "unemployed" who will be got back to work will just find a different box to tick, in order to keep claiming their disability and the number of people kept of out hospital is double-counting, as the NHS savings have already been declared.

I wonder what the effect on raising the tax of booze would do to the drinks industry? For such a compendious report, you'd kinda hope that they spent a lot of effort researching and analyzing this fairly obvious aspect too (mea culpa - 4 pages in El Reg? TLDR, get it down to 1 page, guys).

peanuts of mass destruction.

Take a real, but misunderstood problem. Remove any and all facts and blow it out of all proportion. Allow the panic to feed off itself, coupled with hysterical articles in the press and TV - who's only motivation is to produce enticing headlines to sell more product and you end up in the current situation.

As sonn as someone comes in as tells people that things aren't really as bad as they think, they're immediately demonised as being everything from insensitive to an agent of evil itself. All you need now are for the politicians to get in on the act, and promise the ignorant and the anxious that decisive action will be taken and you've moved the situation on to something that needs to have "war" declared on it.

Whether it's peanuts, terrorism, commies, recession, global warming or anything else doesn't matter. Once you've whipped up the rabble into a frenzy there are only two things to do: exploit the situation for all it's worth or go and bomb something. In this case I'd suggest remarketing peanuts as "happy nuts", nuking a few geographically remote - but weak and unrelated countries and blaming it all on the previous administration.

Problem solved.

first glimmer of common sense?

... if not maturity from the self-appointed great and the good who have taken it upon themselves to "protect" us from all the nastiness in the world.</irony>

The prim and proper guardians of the country's morals have given this particular image more publicity than it has ever had throughout all it's previous years, and it must be said, far more publicity than it deserves.

Maybe they'll turn their abilities of turning obscurity into a cause celebre to good use. The art world is crying out for more promotion of it's products - so maybe all these latter-day Whitehouse's and Longford's will start a crusade to rid the world of all these horrible, nasty nude portraits and statues. The ones which artists, since the dawn of time, have produced and then displayed in public - all without comment or concern from prudes throughout the ages.

Of course, they couldn't possibly corrupt the young, or impressionable - after all, it's art: innit.

confused about terminology.

OK, I understand the meaning of the word "private" - keeping things confidential and away from the observation and knowledge of others. However, I can't help but thinking that "public" means the opposite: in view of others and open to their gaze or scrutiny (my definitions, not from a dictionary).

So when one is in a public place - knowingly, how can there be any expectation of privacy?

You can't go up to people in the street and tell them to stop looking at you. Well, you can, if you don't mind them muttering "nutter" under their breath. Similarly, you can't go around chopping down CCTV cameras, just in case they happen to catch a shot of your face.

So where exactly does this conflicted and inconsistent idea public privacy come from? Are we so scared that everyone we don't know is some sort of pervert, that every action they undertake should be assumed to be for the worst possible reasons?

I have a theory that none of this is actually about people innocently including passers-by in their photos (afterall, people only get annoyed when they realise they've been photographed). Anyone who lives in a "touristy" area is so used to the idea of being included - either implicitly or explicitly in other peoples' photos, the idea of objecting is laughable. No, it's more of a backlash against the overwhelmingly intrusive state. Since we are totally impotent to act against it, the protesters channel their dislike against the only subjects possible: normal people, legally doing something similar to what they object to.

Personally, I don't care who takes my photo. When I'm in a public place, I'm fair game. Likewise to anyone who films me for whatever reason. All I ask is that they spell my name correctly in the credits.

Ans: a meaningless tag for an ill-defined role

Along with "consultant", "manager", "designer", "specialist" and pretty much every other job title used in the IT industry. Usually these words are given to people instead of pay-rises, in the mistaken belief that they will give an individual prestige and respect - in the same way that third-world despots embellish their dictatorships and try to convey some respectability by awarding themselves other gratuitous titles and honours. The problems only arise when the recipients of these bogus titles start to take themselves and their honorifics, seriously.

In reality getting to be a proper architect is a 7-year training programme, just to get into the profession. Obtaining an honours a degree (which is a high-stress, demanding course, with a high dropout rate) is merely the first step in the process. You also have to enter a professional body and maintain their rigorous standards. As we can see, any similarity with the standards required for a software "architecture" job are purely imaginary.

not with a bang, but a sneeze

The chances are that the yanks are so focussed on the weapons they are willing to (and have) use that they wouldn't actually recognize a bio-weapon used by a terrorist organisation. You don't need high-grade plutonium, nor centrifuges or vast purification plants - all requiring restricted hi-tech. All you need are a few suicide carriers with the sniffles on some crowded aircraft.

If the goal is pure body-count, then there are many possibilities: not the least of which is bird-flu. Send your "agents" to somewhere infectious, then when they start to show symptoms pack 'em onto some jumbo-jets on nice, long flights - so everyone on board gets a good long exposure to the virus. Then, when they all disembark 10 hours later, you don't have just a few infectious people, but hundreds.

Now, I know that this has already been the subject of numerous films, dramas and documentaries, but the basic premise still stands. The only oproblem (from a terror PoV) is that there's no BOOM to draw attention to your cause and it could be a long time before recognition for the actions can be assigned.

for Dex - can't tell random data from encrypted

The interesting thing about having to reveal passwords is who is responsible for proving there is one, in the first place?

For example, take a disk partition and fill it with random data. Now you have a slice of disk that may, or may not contain an encrypted filesysytem. Unless you manage to decrypt it, you don't know if there's any data on it or not. Now, when plod arrives and seizes everything you own, they'll ask you for the password of the encrypted data. When you rightfully tell them there isn't a password and there's no encrypted data, how can you be found guilty of with-holding the password?.

Presumably they'll just find you guilty of something else: wasting police time, perverting the CoJ or just trump-up a kiddie-porn charge instead.

yawn

oooh, multitouch and some different eye-candy. Can't wait!

Someone should tell these guys that (aside from a few pundits, who make a living from being excited by the mundane, invisible and infinitisimally different) that operating systems mean nothing any more. Once you've got something that doesn't crash, is secure and lets you do what you want with the data you have, there's not really a lot of reasons to care.

Putting aside Clarkson (which would always be a good move), no-one is interested in the working of their cars - provided they get you to where you want to go reliably, safely and economically. So it is with computers - they do a job, that's all. Whether they run Windows 7, XP, Linux or anything else (if there is anything else?) is irrelevant, provided it gets the job done.

Of course we'll know that MS have nothing new to offer when they start listing the various screen pretties as selling points. Oh wait .....

mainframes, all over again

So we have three advertisements, sorry: learned papers, pushing their own brands of products, services or content. Presumably these are aimed at people and organisations who aren't doing any serious backups - or who want someone else to provide justifications for them to hop on the buzzword-de-jour charabang as it leaves on a journey to who knows where.

The funny thing about tape backup (and mainframes, for that matter) is that it just won't go away. It metamorphosises every few years as technologies or processes improve but it retains the same basic form and disciplines. Now, everyone knows it's not the be-all and end-all of backups, and that it is only one component in a multi-tiered data preservation service. However, the emotions it stirs: whether due to it's "un-coolness" or cost, or the difficulty in getting it right, means that people keep talking about it.

Generally each generation, who thinks they know better, tries to rid the world of tapes - and replace them with whatever their callow teachers told them about. However it seems that the hidden benefits of tapes (if they weren't hidden, they'd be apparent and we wouldn't be having this discussion) keep coming back to haunt the organisations that scorned them - provided they survive the disadvantages of a non-tape based backup regime.

apples and oranges - books and tunes

The big difference is whether you need to physically store something, or if it's merely bits. Warehousing needs floorspace, floorspace costs money. You also need security guards, inventory management and people to package your sales. Contrast with selling (or renting) bits on a disk, practically free costs of storage, fixed costs for internet security, no packaging (tho' you have to maintain a website - same for internet book sales) and somwhat higher bandwidth costs to push the product to the buyer.

This makes the cost model for a physical "good" different from that of an internet good. As a consequence, long tales are pretty much cost-free on the 'net. However, try to apply the same model in real life and you can expect to go bust.

over or under reaction

This is one of two public rows at prsent - the other one being the baby that was battered to death while apparently under the "protection" of the local social services. However, the reaction of those in positions of authority in these two failures could not be more stark.

In the BBC's case of s a silly phonecall by two puerile presenters, a couple of senior managers resigned. In the infinitely more serious case where someone died, all the people involved are still able to sit around, pointing fingers and saying "nothing could be done".

Now I don't know if the beeb over-reacted with the sackings/departures, or if they just take themselves far too seriously, or lack the spine to stand up to the rabble-rousing of the tabloid media. However, it seems there is a huge and inexplicable in the standards of responsibility and punishment being meeted out here. We know that the police now treat any road death as a serious crime scene, maybe a similar approach is needed for deaths when social services fail, too?

85% adopted open source, the other 15% had, too

.... but just didn't know it.

Whether that's because G. spoke to the "leaders" who were out of touch with what the real people were actually doing, or (more likely) the OSS software had been delivered as part of a system from a third party. Perl and Tk/Tcl often get dropped in like that. It's very satisfying, when a caveman-ager rails against free software to say:

"we're already using it"

"WELL TAKE IT OUT AT ONCE!!!",

"we can't, it was delivered as part of <name of enterprise/database product here>",

"GRUMP (thinks: how am I going to explain this to the boss)"

riiiiight

" ... will be ... " " ... plans to .... " " .... up to ....." pardon me if I don't seem vey excited by what is, effectively, vapourware. Once this is in the shops and has been reviewed by real people (Clarkson need not apply - he probably couldn't even squeeze into one of these, anyway) on real roads, who've spent their own money to buy one, then I'll take a look at it. Until then, they've got nothing.

@N1AK

> Hypochondria has increased massively

I'm not talking about hypochondria - I'm talking specifically about where someone of professional standing simply doesn't know what they're talking about - or (worse) thinks they do, but turn out to be completely wrong, or out-of-date. The MMR vaccine debacle is a classic case - though not relevant to this.

Things that _are_ related to this, from personal experience are an ex-g/f who's daughter kept getting rashes, general illness etc. The doctor didn't have a scooby and kept prescribing ineffectual medicines. She did a little research and decided that the symptoms described lactose-intolerance. They stopped going to the doctor and simply stopped using milk products & got a result. Other cases where consultant surgeons (well, OK, _a_ consultant surgeon) who simply couldn't be bothered to talk to my old mum about her heart attack. We looked up a load of stuff on the web and that set her mind to rest - percentage survival rates, outcomes etc.

The same applies to the legal profession. Who's gone through divorce? Who had to correct a load of the "facts" the divorce lawyers were submitting (at £hundreds per hour) and then found out all the work had been done by an office junior? If people can empower themselves through the internet and raise the standards that these so-called professionals purport to uphold, then so much the better.

The only thing sadder than twittering

... is reading other people's tweets