Posts by Pete

superior size?

> Strike one benefit of using SSDs, but it still leaves superior size, durability, and battery life

OK, can someone please explain to me how a 2.5 inch SSD has "superior size" to a 2.5 inch SATA drive?

@Anton

> as the Chinese say: "Once the avalanche has started it is too late for pebbles to vote"

Kosh wasn't chinese - he/she/it/they was a Vorlon

by 2030 similes will be as dumb as a plank

Really, who comes up with these notions?

Don't they ever stop to think that maybe, just maybe there'll be a limiting factor that will kick-in before their conclusions are reached. Or do they just want to manipulate people with an eye-catching headline (hint: you succeeded, but I have no respect for your ability to draw conclusions and therefore for any of the "facts" you state). Worse, do they thnk that the general readership is stupid enough to believe this stuff?

we're a supermarket, not a computer company

Why do companies outsource? simply because they can.

In the "bad old days" there were no software houses, who would take your requirements and mangle them into something that bore no resemblance to what you wanted, needed a computer the size of the planet to run and was delivered - full of bugs - 18 months late. All these good things had to be produced in-house. Therefore any commercial enterprise of any size (J Lyons, anybody?) had to have an IT department churning out the software to keep the biz. running.

Later, when COTS software arrived, the IT dept. became customisers, tweakers and responsible for keeping the whole mess of incompatibilities more-or-less running. Later still, they became the people who pressed the button that took the backup, told the users to reboot their PCs and tried their hardest not to screw up the LAN - well, not too much anyway.

For all these changes, the one thing that has remained the same is the core business. Whether it's being a supermarket, a plumber, a bank or whatever - this is what makes the money that payes everyones' wages - not the IT element of the organisation. So when the opportunity presents itself to get shot of the whole kit 'n' kaboodle you shouldn't be surprised when the board of directors breathes a sigh of relief and signs a very large cheque.

So far as the perfect balance of resources goes, it's the same as always: let the people who do it best get on with it. In the IT world that means the specialist companies who provide the software, the design skills and the business analysis to tell you what you really, really want.

should'a increased the sentences

Any judge with a sense of humour would've handed out the jail terms and then said "plus an extra 17.5% for VAT"

would a paper dart in a following wind do better?

So he hitches a lift to 8000 feet or 1.5 miles altitude, then merely preserves a glide ratio of better than 1.5 / 23 = 15.3::1 (slightly worse than a 747) and claims a success.

There's a fine line between daring and stupidity - the only real difference is if you live to talk about it afterwards

that's one way to reduce energy consumption

Apart from asking the obvious question of why the hell would anyone want, permit or provide internet access to a country's electrical (or any other utility's for that matter) infrastructure, I'd still be more concerned about downtime caused by insiders - either maliciously or, more likely, by idiots.

Got the right country?

> The troops will be testing "a new modular package of nonlethal capabilities" for the first time. The BCT will be based in Georgia, the paper reports.

As one of the "other 95%" I am fully aware that Georgia is a country near Russia - it's also a state somewhere in the USA - though I have'nt a clue where. (Somewhere in the middle?)

As we sure that when the news bulletin announcing these troops will be sent to Georgia, they were referring to the american one, and not just trying to stir up more unrest in the region.

We're all criminals already, anyway.

It's worth baring in mind what the average european thinks of laws: especially people of a more southern-european view. It seems to me that it's a peculiarly british thing to get worked up about the possibility of infringing a law here or there. Most other places, you shrug your shoulders, pay the fine and carry on.

Just accept the fact that pretty much anyone who's using the internet breaks copyright laws on an almost daily basis. We probably write stuff that would insult someone's beliefs, somewhere if they knew about it and accidentally use trademarked terms without including the required acknowledgements. We may even use software that contains unlicensed patents - either knowingly or in ignorance and could probably be accused of using words that are banned by someone's government or refer to people, places or events that also carry some form of punishment. It's quite likely that somewhere on everyone's computer there is one or more images that have been downloaded - or pushed via a popup, advertisment or virus - that are against a local or national judgement of what's acceptable.

With all this already against us, what are a few more rules and regulations, he shrugged.

good - but personally, I want an ANTI bird-flu jab

And if they do succumb to the bird flu they were injected with, would anyone care?

just wait until it goes into reverse

and starts sucking us all in

one simple test for popular acceptance

No matter what the geeks think, it's no use in a domestic environment until I can plug my USB webcam in and just have it work

No messing about with download this, recompile that, search for another driver .. .oops, it's the wrong version - or only works on x86. Simply plug in and see my face on the screen.

Until an O/S can do this (and exhibit a similar level of seamless integration for scanners and printers), it's not ready for the average user.

p.s. my first Sun experience: a 3/50 workstation, must've been around 1986 - been using them commercially ever since)

tomato chains

Taking the example about an illegal tomato grower. My (IANAL) reading of this clause makes it sound like they are addressing sub-contracting chains only. If company A employs an illegal and then sells it's produce to company B, I can't see that there's a sub-contracting chain there - only a commercial buy/sell relationship.

However, if company A is subcontracted to company B to provide it's tiomatos, then there IS a subcontracting chain.

No doubt some lawyers will get very rich on this one.

will they get free pr0n memberships, too?

Oh goody. Give the little darlings free PCs and internet access at home. Will they use ths to "help" with their homework, or will they be used for the things that every other child uses their PCs for?

If you want to let children use PCs more frequently, they'd be better off having them in schools - maybe they'd actually get some homework done, too.

@Combined Heat and Data

It's been done. One place I worked, we were replacing a mainframe, The new one was a CMOS job, compared to the old ECL hardware it used much less power. The prime selling point was that it would save the organisation £250k annually in power consumption. (N.B. This was back in the nineties, when by comparison with today, electricity was practically free).

In it went, out came half the chillers that had been necessary to keep the old unit from frying itself. The power savings were, indeed, impressive - until it was pointed out that the swap-out had been done during the summer - during the winter the excess heat had been channeled upstairs to help warm the IT centre which was directly above it.

someone's maths is a bit dodgy

> a full-sized A4 screen, at a decent resolution of 1024 x 1280 and 160dpi

Bzzzt!

A4 is 21x29.7cm and 160 dpi is as near as dammit 64 dots per cm. So 21cm needs 1344 pixels horizontally and 1900 vertically. That's off by a factor of two in terms of total numbers of pixels.

on an unrelated point

whatever happened to the "cash for honours" investigation?

It's amazing how many cri^H^H^Hinvestigations can get quietly dropped when left long enough

@Steve Roper and others

we are a touchy lot aren't we?

When you all calm down and re-read what I wrote, you'll see that my comments were aimed at cat OWNERS. They are the ones who are responsible (or at least should be) for all the mess that their animals produce. They realise that their cats range far and wide yet they have no consideration for the consequences. They put food into the cats - they must be made responsible for what comes out.

probably wrong

Linux is a fine operating system - it just suffers from egregious user interfaces. So long as the phone operators can hide the inner workings from the populace, things should be fine (Oh, and if they can get the latency down to acceptable levels, that would be nice, too).

However, once you have to start paging through obscure menus, full of utilities with cute but unhelpful names - all of which are minor variants of CD-burners or image viewers - then things go wrong very fast.

might as well paint a target on the bottom

Given the need to keep weight to an absolute minimum, there's no possibility of hardening this puppy against ground fire. Likewise, once you put a person in it, you remove the capability to kill people from a safe (though not safe for the intended target - or any unfortunates around them) distance.

While it may be faster than walking, at least the infantry has the ability to hide behind things if they come under fire - not much chance of that where there's nothing but air all around you.

That essentially rules out it's use in a combat zone. So you've not left with many opportunities where a good old jeep, or helo wouldn't do a better job faster.

how about protecting the world from bogus emergencies?

a hacked-off employee, insecure government networks and a fake phone.

Not exactly world-shattering events - unless of course you're writing a third-rate straight to video drama. Certainly nothing that counts as an "emergency" or would be worthy of a blue flashing light, come to that.

When you put these and the other events into the context of the number of people who die needless deaths each day (and I'm not even thinking about gun-crime victims, curable diseases or car accidents) then none of this amounts to a hill o' beans.

Maybe something a little less shrill would be more realistic and convey a real sense of what the job entails (such as endless paperwork). But then of course you couldn't swagger around as if you were about to save the world - or more importantly, get admiration from a bunch of credulous private-dicks with so little proper work that they can waste their time at conferences.

real reason to work in a cab

... is to stop the cabbie striking up a conversation.

No, I don't know who was in the back last week - I've probably never heard of them and I wouldn't care, even if I had. Stop talking and concentrate on the road.

roughly translated

Fans of ....are likely to react strongly to the announcement...

we hope they'll buy it, no matter how much we charge

...and slated for publication in October 2009 ...

just in time for the american holidays and full-priced christmas sales in the UK

...has the "full support" of Adam's widow Jane Belson. ...

who is already looking through the latest Mercedes catalog.

... My first reaction was semi-outrage ...

then I saw the size of the advance they were offering

.... I feel more pressure to perform now

so I can go for another one after this

... having sold around 16 million copies worldwide

and times are tough - with luck I'll be able to chuck this writing lark

and retire

@Joe

Thank-you Joe.

I was in a bit of a no-win. If I'd just said "british" I'd've expected comments about Scottishness, so I copped out with the and/or bit :-)

silver lining?

can you surf on a 12 foot (what's that in proper units?) storm surge?

as an alternative

couldn't they just start being nice to everyone else?

every journo should have one

how else can they eat their words?

(or just swallow everything they're told)

@The Blame game

> There is no law about moving data files around

There most definitely is: copyright law, official secrets, a person's right to privacy (ECHR) and even as you say yourself: contract law. I'd say that the problem was exactly the placing of data on a portable (and therefore lose-able) device.

@Andy Bright

Your story (plus others I have heard, directly from the victims) has led me to the conclusion that the guards at airports now consider the passengers passing through the security system as a sort of conveyor belt, carrying goods that they may, or may not desire for themselves. if they see something they want, they simply stop that person and confiscate the item with impunity.

I am not aware of any process that stands between confiscated items and the airport staff. In that respect I now regard it as simply another tax on travelers - in the same way as having your luggage ransacked.

old news is no news

Hang on, this story is from 2003.

We've recently had Google resurrecting a years old tale (about an american airline going/not-going bust), is this another case of a time-warp?

I thought IR35 stopped being newsworthy many, many years ago - most of us just paid the tax and upped our rates to make up the loss. Why are we hearing about this guy now.

To be fair, if the 'Revenue is squeezing him for £99K for 3 years work, then even with interest over the past 5-8 years, it does sound like he was paying zilch to the 'man and has finally been caught.

So far as I can make out from the story, there's nothing that hasn't/wasn't chewed over from every angle at the time. Move on now folks, nothing to see here.

@Ian S

you're kidding, right?

the price isn't too steep

£400 for 80GB comes out at £5/GB. Obviously amateur/home-users won't want to pay this, but it's not aimed at them. For commercial users, it compares favourably with the cost of enterprise storage (esp. when you consider the extortionate amounts they charge for proprietary cache-ram and controllers to make their slow old disks perform at anything like the required pace).

In fact at that price a 1TB database could be implemented for £10k - assuming duplication for resilience/backup purposes. It would also perform 10 - 50 times better than the equivalent spinning storage, take up less space, generate less heat and require virtually no administration, tweaking or tuning.

It's within living memory that STK Icebergs provided 77GB in a cabinet, at a cost of many, many times one of these puppies. Corporations were extremely happy with the price/performance at the time and would gladly install these, now. The only question would be regarding the reliability/lifetime of the cells.

no news like bad news

Maybe the reason the press (and meeja) is all over this project is that they absolutely revel in bad news: the worse, more spectacular, the better. Take for example the recent (well, a month or two ago) rise in oil prices. Seemingly every news broadcast told us how we were all heading for poverty and would freeze to death at the first sign of winter. Fast forward to now - the oil price is barely above $100/barrel and where's the coverage?

Likewise with the LHC. Every news programme was at pains to tell us that the world wouldn't end - well, they were right (hooray! for journalistic integrity) but managed to portray the CERN experiments as if they would happen today, preferably just before tea-time. No doubt the journo's will pack their bags this evening after having had a very nice jolly in Switzerland for a few days and that'll be the last of it. Even though the world won't end tomorrow, either.

No doubt when there actually IS some news: the culmination of many year's work and £Bns spent, it might just make the "and finally" section - unless of course it's bad news.

how about a mouse?

For the ultimate in covert storage, how about a thumb drive built into a USB mouse.

'corse if you're looking for geeky, then integrate the storage into a pool of green slime that leaks out of the USB port.

@Dave (@Charles)

> but a low-power laser is required for accurate enough targetting for the laser cannon.

Errm. I thought the point of making this a _boost_phase_ weapon was that you have a nice, easy infrared target during the 3 minute-or-less time that the rocket engine's firing. After that, aiming becomes a much more difficult proposition.

how secure are these guys?

If someone is a true believer then the views of others cannot move them off the path of faith. If I was to absolutely believe something - to the point where it dominated my life (and a religion - any religion, does this) then a few people who are not part of my faith but who disagree with me, would not affect me in the slightest.

From that tenet, you've got to ask yourself: what are these guys afraid of? "Faith" per se. cannot be argued from a logical point of view, so they aren't afraid of being disproved, or found "wrong". I can only assume that their extreme bullying and non-charitable stance originates in something more fundemental.

On an entirely unconnected matter. Consider an organisation that seems to have a huge financial investment, with massive assets and an enormous revenue stream that they collect from their "members". If I ran a concern like this, I'd be worried if a group of activists started poking holes in my business plan and telling the shareholders to take their money elsewhere. I'd also make use of the full arsenal of legal weaponry available to me to stop these people at any cost. This is where the practices of a religious organisation, set up to spread salvation and love, and a business organisation that is set up to extract money and profits diverge. Now which sort are we talking about, again?

I wanna work for the other 30%

> The survey of 950 IT managers at large firms found 70 per cent were looking to negotiate lower rates with service providers.

Presumably the "other" 30% will now be targeted relentlessly by the "research" firms as they obviously have too much money. I find it hard to believe that senior managers (those who still have the power to make purchasing decisions) would fall for such a brazen attempt to phish for budget information.

Next up, we'll have the dodgy-geezer "security" consultants: "'Allo guv. We're doin' a survey of local businesses. Wot kinda burgular [sic] alarm have you got? 'Ow abaht internal security - innit. 'Ave yer got any card-entry systems? 'Coz we can send ovah a security guard if yer like - 'E's really good - gotta dog too."

The main job of a consultant

is to create more consultancy.

In this case, the obvious thing to do was to agree, that these routines were complex and needed a lot of time to complete. .... Sooooo. how about hiring one or our people to help out with the workload. Your guy might take 40 hours to do the job, but ours are much more highly skilled and could do it in ,,,, oh, 30 hours?

Once in the door, your guy gets to do all the juicy work - like writing the code while the incumbent gets to do the donkey work, such as documentation and testing. Testing is a particularly good job to give someone who you want to cast in a bad light. Since it's pretty much the last activity in a programme of work, it's obvious[1] that if any delays happen, it's their fault. Testing also uncovers the problems. While we all know that the problems are really caused by crappy coding or design, it's always the messenger who gets shot. Soon the permie will be associated with all the bad things that are happening: delays, poor quality code, more delays and budget overruns. Meanwhile your guy whispers in the right ears that maybe the company really should bring in an experienced tester - and your consultancy happens to have one available ...

[1] to the management mind, who only works by what MS Project says

why are we such suckers for a catch-phrase?

Call something a "divide" or portray a group as "victims" and immediately the population is manipulated into thinking "Oh those poor unfortunate people, we MUST do something to help them!". If animals are involved (provided they're fluffy, with big brown eyes) then being flooded with cash, help and headlines is virtually a certainty.

On the list of things people actually need, internet access is way down - alongside lemon scented wipes, chrome-plated cheese knives and fluffy dice. When compared with such things as food, shelter, medicines and education being able to google for pr0n doesn't even register. What we need is a bit more of a reality check and fewer guilt-driven vested interests.

Personally, I'm a victim of chocolate-poverty. I haven't had a bar of fruit'n'nut for weeks - please give generously,

If it's tuesday, this must be Belgium

So your critical application, you know: the one your company depends on for it's revenue and ultimately it's survival flits from datacentre to datacentre. With luck, the gigabytes (or tens, or hundreds of GB) follows along without corruption and with suitable backups in place, and without too many unauthorised copies being made by the less honest/regulated entities it happens to meet on it's travels.

Hopefully the "cloud" controller won't change it's location too often, as even a paltry 10GB of data will take some significant amount of time (downtime?) to squirt up a network to it's new home.

While I can see the appeal of those organisations that have admitted to themselves that they can't (or are not inclined) to look after their own computing, it does sound as if it's mixing the worst of outsourcing with the reliability of a T5 luggage handling system for corporate data: where did we last see that app?

shame they didn't do it a couple of months ago.

They could've made it an olympic sport.

How the interview went:

Scene the interview room at police central.

Good morning BT representative, I'm DI Plod and I'd like to talk to you about all this internet monitoring you're alleged to have done - especially the bit where you monitored people's web browsing habits.

Hello Di, pleased to meet you. Where would you like to start?

Can you give me some idea of the type and extent of the monitoring you were doing. please.

Certainly Di, take this example. It's from a Mr. D. Plod and it lists the "interesting" websites that you, sorry, he, visited over an extended period. As you can see, it would be very unfortunate if this sort of information made it's way to the subject's superiors ... Especially if they were employed in a sensitive public position.

Hmmm, yes I see what you mean. .... Do you have any other examples?

Let's see now, Di. Here's one for a Chief Inspector. It does look like he's been a very naughty boy. Here's another one - I believe this person is a judge, maybe you know her?

Harrrumph. <cough> well it looks to me as if everything's in order and I don't think we'll need to trouble you any more. Although, do you mind if I keep copies of these, as my promotion interview's coming up and , err, they'll be useful examples of the investigations I've been performing <cough>

Certainly, Di. And no doubt in years to come - when you've risen rapidly in the force we can talk about any other internet-related issues you may be able to help us with.

Interview closes with funny handshakes all round

surprisingly cheap for a govt project

At a cost of £2mil p.a. or thereabouts. I'm quite surprised by this, as I didn't know it was possible for the government to do anything IT related for less than 8 or 9 digits. Maybe when they start to implement security for our data the costs will skyrocket to the sort of astronomical overspend we're more used to.