Posts by Adrian Challinor

Aziraphale and Crawley

I think it was in Good Omens that the M25 as a whole was designated a demonic symbol. Not just J9.

and you did it all on my birthday

PARIS RELEASE MECHANISM

My wife is really not going to understand why I found this so amusing.

Jolly well done, keep up the good work.

Nice idea - flawed assumptions

It is all very well saying that there are FOSS alternatives to Acrobat Reader. This is true if all you want to do is read a document.

I have several forms, some of which I need to send back to gubbermint departments (ok, the licensed bandits called HMRC since you ask). This use forms within the PDF document which requires a java script enabled reader.

Acrobat Reader works. I have not found a FOSS alternative (eg, evince) that actually does the work.

So, even as a strong supporter of FOSS, it is essential that you have the tools that do the same job. Sometimes being free (well, even Acrobat Reader is free) and open source, it does not make it better.

Mines the one with the tax return in the pocket

Multiple versions

If I fire up the KVM and install 64 Bit Desktop, Kbuntu and a server version does that mean I can compare the meerkat?

Mines the one with "KVM for rodents" in the pocket

And this review is costing what?

Most (all?) companies that have a successful web presence seem to do it without employing an quango wannabe. All Miss Lane-Fox needs to do is look at successful websites. Which are sucessfull? Well, go to few and you will see which work and which don't. Learn from the failures as much as from the success. Look at ones that have high ht rates (Amazon, BBC, ebay) - see how they do it and do similar.

Look at bits of your own site that work - for example, the car tax disk order section works well. Keep that, base the rest on how it works. Especially as other parts of the Gov want to close down my Post Office!

Stick to English. Simple, easy, written by people who speak it as their first language. It is the language of the country, after all.

The fact that they have to ask such questions means they don't really know what they want to do. This is just another example of how DirectGov has failed to understand its purpose.

After that, get some one (thats a person, not a consultancy company), pay them well, but on results, and JFDI. Its not that hard.

A good idea

I have always want to use a hand gesture of the damn compare the meerkat. Simples.

Mines the one with hacked iPad running Linux in the pocket.

We do care, and Monty is wrong.

Monty's position is that having Oracle own MySQL removes a competitor from Oracle, because he believes that Oracle RDBMS was a competitor to MySQL. This is very wooly thinking.

Oracle's potential customers may well have stated that they could use MySQL as their RDBMS as a negotiating stance to Oracle. This was either an empty threat that Oracle could ignore, or a statement of fact that they intended to save a lot of money. But in no case was MySQL ever a credible alternative to Oracle. Other than the comparison on costs, it is like comparing Apples and Oranges.

MySQL's main competitor was Postgresql - that is, another FOSS RDBMS.

Monty should remember that he sold MySQL to Sun for rather a lot of money. He sold the company, the code, the patents (yes, MySQL is patented), the Intellectual Property - the whole shabang. He then got a job with Sun. Nice work. He left Sun in a tiff because Sun management released V5.1 before Monty was ready - well, Monty, they bought the right to do this when you accepted that nice fat cheque.

Now Oracle have bought Sun, and they too have the right to do what they want. The purchased has been opposed, has done due diligence, been investigated and agreed. Game over.

The point of the story? If you want to keep control of your baby, then keep control. If you want to get rich, then sell it off. But you can't do both. Well, not often and not in this case.

All that is happening now is that developers will start ditching MySQL because of the FUD being thrown around and move to Postgresql or Derby. Oracle will realise that the customer base is diminishing, close down MySQL development altogether, and just go to the current customers with an offer to buy in to Oracle - and increase their sales. Nice one Monty.

In the mean time, it puts anyone else who wants to develop FOSS, build up a credible user base but with no revenue, and who then wants to sell the company on in a bit of a pickle - the buyers will start wondering if developers are "going to do a Monty on us" a little later.

So this is worse than Monty wanting to have his cake and eat it; he wants to do that but also stop anyone else having a cake for themselves.

PARIS

Yes, I want to see a piece of paper released in to space and make it self in to a paper aircraft.

It needs an RoTM tag.

Did I just bankrupt the country?

I visited www.ukti.gov.uk, which el Reg says costs just under £12 per visit. Not sure how you calculate this, but it sounds a little steep for what it gives you. Definitely not worth the price of a round!

Shut them all down - who would notice?

Time for a change

I went to my polling station before 8am on Thursday. Even then, with only 4 people in the queue ahead of me it took 5 minutes to get a ballot paper. I could see then that there was going to be problems later in the day - and if I can see it, it is a monumental failure of the electoral clerks and returning officers that they didn't also see it.

So, the voting mechanics are as broken in Britain as they are in any third world country. Firstly, Britain has to stop preaching that "we know best because we are the mother of parliaments". The sight of voters locked out of polling stations shows we have the mother of embarrassments.

Why is it so difficult to get a proper, secure, computerized voting system? And no, I don't think that this needs an ID scheme to do it. Surely we can issue people with a voter registration system that depends on something you have (a voter card) and something you know (a PIN for example). You could go to any PC, enter the two items and vote - if this is safe enough for ATM's why is it not safe enough for voting?

After the fiasco of last night we would actually have been better handing the whole voting issue to Simon Cowell and do it one a telephone poll. Then we still get the muppets from Britains Got Talent, but at least we make the election in to cash generator.

Typo in the story

"Other polls however have indicated much lower levels of support, showing the public split on ID cards, and heavily opposed to the database."

I think you have an extra "l" in split.

Mines the hoodie with Obe-wan Kanobe's autobiography in the pocket. Something to read at the job centre,

Something doesn't ring true here

If the issue was really hard disk speeds, and you want to crack a password, why not simply load the tables in to RAM? 8GB is a lot, but it is not an unreasonable amount. Lets check this out against a 64 bit CPU with 12GB of ram.

Cruel

Cruel. True, but still very cruel.

Don't have a Roomba,

But the Lego MindStorm is running scared.

Seriously, this should be seen as a success. Spirit went up to do 90 days work and lasted for 6 years. The IT angle is that this is 6 years with the same hardware, no updates to graphics drivers or memory size. Not a bad design at all. NASA even changed the O/S a couple of times.

My hat goes up to NASA for this one.

Please check the text here ...

"Fingerprint biometric passports are due to kick in from 2012, at which point anyone seeking a passport can also get an ID card."

Do you mean CAN or WILL ?

Of course when Baby Minder Cameroon gets in, he will cancel the ID card project so he can pay for new labels on alchopops.

WRONG

"The BPI believes it is analogous to defamation injunctions, where publication and distribution of an entire work can be halted because of an offending passage."

Great - So they want to base a law on one that everyone agrees is wrong. The defamation laws in the UK are more draconian than any other country. Defamed in Australia? No problem, the publication was on the web, so you can sue anywhere - lets choose Brittain.

This is just silly and liable to get the whole act thrown out.

wait a moment....

Do no evil

and alienate the telco's.

The difference is what?

Good news at last

But image:

Peter Martin: Know what I would like? Best thing would be a pint of bitter, or a scotch, or may be a glass of chilled chablis....

Embassy Official: No, sorry sir, you have to have a discussion with the Foreign Secretary. And it has to be moving. Very moving, we have to get this in to the papers.

Peter Martin: Who is the foreign secretary, these days?

Embassy Official: No-one you have heard of, but just make sure it's "very moving".

The history of aviation

.. could have been so different if some jobsworth had turrned up at Kitty Hawk beach and asked "do you two have a license to fly that thing?".

This is happening in big, wide open area called the USA, not Police State Britain.

Good on you Marvin.

So how do I know ....

... if accidentally break the injunction?

Lets see. There is an injunction, but we are not allowed to say what has been injuncted, and cannot discuss the existence of the injunction even if we want to prevent ourselves being sued because someone else talks about the injuncted subject.

So if I mention something here (... mumble mumble ... woods .... mumble mumble .... had his photo taken .... mumble mumble .... ) and el reg prints my comments, who gets sued? You or me?

Wait, its me, I can see the black helicopters circling.

Now the dilemma, do I go for Black Helicopters icon or Paris (who surely had never had her photo taken like that).

No adds on my OpenDNS pages

Been using OpenDNS for years, I have a (free) account with them and no add pages.

What I do get is the ability to trap certain requests and send them to a blocked page. Its a poor mans firewall, but it does the job for the children.

So this is a solution to a problem that doesn't exist.

GSM GPRS

The spec on the Dept of Energy and Climate Change suggest that a GMS GPRS WAN is planned. So, all I need to do is put a nicely earthed faraday cage around the meters and they stuffed.

And its probably people like me they want on their network. I refuse to let wandering meter readers in to the house unless they have pre-booked an appointment 2 weeks in advance, with full proof of ID that identifies them from the company I get my power from. As all our readers come from some service company, they get sent away with a flea in their ear when I tell them that I do not have a contract with Accuread and that their having my details breachs data protection law (I always right that they may not share any of my details with anyone, ever, unless for each case they have a written approval).

I fill in my readings on line.

Oh dear

Who is going to release data from the DWP now, if EDS (sorry HP) are on strike?

And the word of the week is .....

"Jonson".

To open and move ones mouth whilst talking through your arse.

When used as a noun, as in "to be a total jonson", this means to Jonson, whilst also being spineless.

In polite circles, this is a sign of epic failure.

Complex setup - no problems

OK - No OS is perfect. All have issues.

However, this upgrade was actually flawless for me. I have a complex desktop with lots of extra drives, dual screens, video feeds, etc. And it just worked. Click install distribution, left it for 30 minutes, reboot and Hey - welcome Koala.

The server followed the next day. Needed two reboots in total, but everything came back.

Worst moment was O2 router ceasing to route in the middle of the update, but it even survived that!

Crisis - what Crisis?

Well, I suppose you you write news based on forums, you get TrollNews.

WTF?

Has anyone seen the size of these dogs? Damn, one of my cats is bigger than this.

Says something for a cheese eating surrender monkey that one can get savaged by something slightly larger than the average hamster one, let alone three times. Maybe the dog just likes the taste of aging Commies, or may be the dog is really a Merkan puppet.

@dave hands

>> Yup, I leave my computer running all the time and no, I don't give a toss about energy

>> consumption.

No, but like the rest of the techies round here, you probably do care about thermal shock. A pc left running will generally drop its power requirements and fan speeds to reduce the heat output. However, a PC started from cold has to sustain major thermal shock when it starts up - much more likely to fail then.

And anyway, if I turned off the PCs I would have to turn on the central heating. So the saving was what?

ha ha ha ha

I got as far on the article as "The irony is that once Vista had settled down over the course of the first year or 18 months, it turned out to be a respectable operating system; certainly fit for purpose, and potentially offering some significant benefits" and fell of my chair laughing.

Yeah right. That is a whole new meaning of "Fit for purpose" there.

Burden of Proof

We have seen far too often the New Labour have devalued the rule of law in this country by introduction of legislation that reduces the burden of proof and increases the sanctions available. There are many examples, and it is normally done in the name of anti-terrorism.It used to be that you needed to have used something to be convicted, mere possession was a slap on the wrist. Now, with creeping legislation, it is intent to use, and possession is described as intent, and that is a criminal offense.

Now we see that use of P2P is going to be illegal. Really? Well, I download my Linux distro (Ubuntu since you asked) by P2P. I download Eclipse the same way. And Java. In fact, all the big apps come down by P2P and very fast they are too.

But do I KNOW, before I hit the torrent, what the copyright restriction is on the stuff I am downloading? If its an application, then the license terms are not displayed until I try to install it. Suppose I download some application, lets call it Whinedoz, and try and install it and decide I don't like the license terms. I don't know this until I attempt to use it. What am I supposed to do then? By this time my torrent client has already started seeding and uploading. So I have no inadvertently distributed something I have not actually used myself, which I could not know was restructed before I tried to use it. What am I guilty of here?

Go further. The recording industry has long been known to seed torrent sites with false files. One case was some Madonna music (and I use that term in the loosest possible sense) that looked like it was a song, but was actually a rant against people who download her music (presumably this was at a time when she needed to buy another child). If I do download and keep this rant for my amusement, knowing it is a rant and not the actual music, have I broken any law? In order to be guilty the law would have to deem that I had intended to down load the actual music, but I had not.

Go futher. I support some indie music. In order to build a following they have put a number of songs online, via P2P, for people to download and comment upon. This is a legal use of the Internet to create a market. At a later stage, yes they will make this licensable, and will charge for it. But at this time, I am allowed to legally download their music. So not all P2P is illegal, clearly.

But how am I to KNOW , in advance, that a certain film or piece of music, can not legally be downloaded until I have downloaded it and I see that it is copyright protected? Take another example. The fan short piece called "The Hunt for Gollum", was created for fans of Lord of the Rings, bu fans of Lord of the rings. Fine to watch onlibe. But this one could be downloaded, but was not legal for distribution. How does that work with P2P? I can download and watch it, but I can't upload it. If I download the full Lord of the Rings films, I am breaking copyright, but I can't KNOW that before I have completed the download.

So the crime is now that I should have known the copy right restriction of each and every individual piece of media before I download it. Its not the act of distribution that is creating the crime, it is the act of choosing to download it, even though I can not know that this is a crime until I have downloaded.

I can see a few test cases coming here. It is normally the prosecutions task to prove that I have commited a crime. I only have to state that I could not reasonably have known that the media I was downloading was copyrighted in a manner that prohibits my downloading this in juristriction I am resident in, and that only by downloading this could I have known this. If I then state that I deleted and ceased uploading the material as soon as I knew this to be the case, then surely I have commited no crime.

Then you have policing of this. ISPA is not set up as a policing organisation. They equally cannot know what is copyright, and certainly cannot know the use to which the material is put. For what I pay a month, they are clearly running an efficient organisation with no excess. To impose a requirement to police the proposed criminal activity of P2P media downloaders would mean they need a new, huge, compliance team. Who pays for this? Well, I guess that we, the subscribers do.

But who benefits? Clearly the media copyright owners do. This is the same argument that was used when compact cassettes came it. Then it was the makers of compact cassettes that should pay a levy to the media copyright owners because people MIGHT use the medium for infringement. This time the cost of policing this should be paid clearly and wholy by the interested parties. That is, if the copyright owners (RIAA, MPAA, FAST, etc) want their products protected then they, and they alone, should pay the full commercial costs for doing this. Commercially, this is the only model that make sense. This way they get what they really want: a policed download policy, policed to the full extent that they commercially feel is justified.

Until then, this whole debate is just going to run and run.

Sorry if I want on too long here. Mines the copy of "Torrent Tracking for Profit" in the pocket.

Ahh justice alive and well in Sweden

"The shutdown was intended to disconnect TBP pending an outcome of a civil lawsuit filed by the usual gang of angry rights-holders"

Is this a clear case of:

1) Listen to complainants (who have been proven to be less than truthful in the past)

2) Apply sentance

3) Hold hearing, trial and appeal to make step 2 legal

4 ) PROFIT !

@Mike 119

Mike, If you have to ask, you probably shouldn't be reading this.

Paris, because, well, you need to ask that too?

Dazzled with rain

In London? With light pollution and constant cloud cover (the BBC recons we will have "light showers", kind of like the ones that caused widespread flooding last year I guess) you are unlikely to even see the moon, let alone meteor.

Anyone in London seeing a meteor either needs to lay off the sauce or get down to Spec Savers.

Mine the one with "Sky at Night" in the pocket

Priceless

"....which is either a cock-eyed health and safety campaign ...."

I can see the sales girls now "Is that a bikini-wax your after or are you do you want to ride my master blaster? "

Mines the one with "Rollercoasters for fun and profit" in the pocket

How much damage?

So, he ransacked the servers, Blackberry System, Voice Mail, phone system and caused over $5,000 of damage. I think we can assume that this is the most that charity can identify as actual damage.

Compare to Gary McKinnon, who goes looking for UFO files and evidence of anti-gravity and is accused of causing $700,000 of damage, without actually appearing to hurt any server at all (assuming we can take the embarrassment of the NASA SysAdmin as read).

Sounds a touch like double standards being applied here. Or is it post code justice (oh, you have a UK post code, welcome to Guantamano).

Reality to Redmond

Well hello there ... this is your wake up call.

Gotta love the fact ...

... That they publish her name and address, but don't give their own head office phone number.

Thats class.

Paris, because she is in so many peoples phone books

To be fair...

When I moved to O2, they stated quite clearly that I would not get the premium rate, they estimated my top speed, and made my expectations very clear.

My actual speed sometimes exceeds their estimated speed. It rarely goes much below their speed.

So why would I complain?

"...possibly armed..."

so, shoot on site then?

Fantastic - missed these over the last few weeks

Can I be the first to welcome our swedish muslim non-porn fire-breathing overlords? Oh, and its a pity that techidude doesn't know how to use google, or he would have found that he spelt "Teresa Orlowski" wrong.

Paris, because she may know more about Swedish movie making than all of us.