Posts by Adrian Challinor 220 publicly visible posts • joined 28 Nov 2007
This just smacks of big brother, but in huge, massive letters. We are aready the most watched people on Earth. I heard a statistic today that said that although we have 1% of the worlds population, the UK has 30% of the worlds CCTV cameras. Has this led to a reduction of crime, killings, even arrest rates? No. Do we feel safer because of this? No. Joe Hoodie just pulls his hat down a bit lower as the knife goes in.
So why will having a massive database of communications make us safer? Did the NSA and Echelon stop any terrorists? Didn't seem to help New York.
Can you imagine the fun that hackers will have with this? Or the more sensational of the Sunday Papers? This will make the Child Benefit fiasco look like a mere comment overheard in the pub.
The only bit that makes this laughable is that the probability of the Government IT being able to deliver this is just not credible. The sheer size of the data store alone is going to be huge. This will make the Passport system, the NHS system pale in to insignificance. Managing this will be a nightmare. So, it will be outsourced. Then the data doesn't even belong to UK Gov Ltd anymore, it belongs to some vendor. With the management being done from the US and the coding done in India.
The Telco's will, of course, suggest that this is a "good idea", and for them it is: it puts the problem of storing all those call records, emails, SMS, MMS messages on to the Government. At a stoke it makes their problem move back to simply one of billing records - and billing, tricky and hard as it is, is a much simpler problem to also keeping the content.
I can see a few vendors wanting to get in on this act: Hello? EDS? Sorry HP? Are you out there? Seems I need to buy in to data storage firms and/or integrated delivery companies. They are the only ones who will benefit from this.
Paris - obviously, because even she wouldn't take on something this big
Is there no law we can apply that stops the yanks grabbing everything good in UK film and TV, re-writing it to make them seem like heroes, and totally trashing the original story Apparently this is to be located from London/Yorkshire to Boston (mass, not Linconshire).
Paris - because not even she is this dumb,
I have WIndows. I hate it with a passion I reserve for mass murders and child molestors. I have to use it at work. Its horrible. XP? old crap. Vista? New unstable pretty crap. Its all crap.
And whats more its expensive crap.
I moved to Ubuntu because once too often a Windows "update" hosed my system. It didnt install, insisted I reboot but wouldn't let me save my work, and then destroyed the partition table. That was it.
Decisions: Mandrake, RedHat, or Ubuntu? I chose Ubuntu and haven't looked back. I even chose to be an Alpha and then a Beta tester of Hardy Heron. Solid as a rock in Beta.
Ipod? Yes. Video? Yes. Development? Yes. In fact - easier to say what doesn't run. err. well, actually it isn't because I haven't found anything.
Print Server ? yes - free.
File Server ? yes - free
Web Server ? yes - free
Firewall ? yes - free
Do I miss anything? I suppose Visio was good. I miss that ... no I don't - I use crossfire!
Go Ubuntu!
... everything except where the bandwidth exceeds the ISP's ability to deliver it. Nice one Tiscali, I think you have just opened a huge can of worms. What next? No streaming media at all? Only email without attachments and web pages?
I seem to recall a company called Freeserve offering unlimited connection time for free in those heady days when 56K dial-up was fast. And nearly crumbling themselves and Energis (their network provider, sadly no defunct) when they realised that people might just take them at their word.
If I recall, didn't the Beeb talk about putting content servers closer to the customer, say in trunk exchanges? I thought that was jolly decent of them, even considering this. After all, all the Beeb needs to do is pay for their uplink service and have some decent servers. If they are doing that today (and after some tentative starting problems, they seem to be) then their oblighation is fully discharged.
How long before Tiscali start traffic shaping the iPlayer traffic?And then how long before someone takes them to task for breach of contract?
I worked in IT at Shell, starting in Wythenshawe. Despite the car park that looked like a Stasi torture chamber, I had a great time. Moved to Shell in London (Still in IT). I have very fond memories of my time there. I wonder if the outsourcing people will be as dedicated as some of my colleagues who tended the mainframes there? I wonder?
Coat icon, because its time to leave.
Well, iplayer here is saying "Downloads are currently unavailable" This is on O2 broadband in the UK, on a pukka windoze box (which I put up just so I could download the episode of the Last Enemy I missed due to being on a plane.
So, not only is rubbish, it broken rubbish.
What I love is that comments that the Beeb iPlayer techies come out with that this is new technology and bound to have a few teething problems... No, it's old technology and it is bound to fail. Even some member of the music publishers are finally realising this.
But, hey, Macroshaft have to have some where to sell their broken DRM. Wonder where they will try and sell it next?
Paris - because her videos have no DRM - in fact no protection of any sort
1) Ban all MP's for making blatantly fraudulent expense claims. If I tried anything like that I would have HMRC down on me like a ton of bricks demanding back tax, interest, etc. But being MP's, they are allowed to do this;
2) Can the ID card nonsense. The saving on consultants alone will pay for the short fall in the STFC funding hole.
3) Cancel the Olympics. No-one I know wants them. The chance of the current funding levels being even close to realistic is laughable, and these are, what, upto 10 Bn now? And all the time, projects like Merlin, JB, even my friend researching in to cancer and birth defects have had their funding slashed.
PH - she could run a country better than this load of muppets.
We finally managed to get head office approval to buy it. It had taken a long time. A very long time, and then we placed the order. This was delayed by the question, "Well, what color do you want it?". We had no idea there was a choice. We wasted three weeks deciding that black would fine!
After it was installed we started having loads of problems. It would crash, and the dump was always corrupted (yes, we used to get and read AND UNDERSTAND!) core dumps. The Cray engineer was baffled. His home support was baffled. The designers were baffled. Eventually we traced the times when it got trashed to when a certain female operator was on shift. She would walk past the machine and lovingly touch the side - only to earth the static from her nylon underware in to the machine. We had to ask that females kept away from the machine. The union went mad and complained that this was blatant sexist discrimination and that they would ballot for strike action. I just wish I had been in the meeting when the head of the data centre explained to the union rep what the problem was, and that the alternative was to have the duty sysop check that all the females were wearing silk or cotton underware! No, before anyone gets at me I am seriously not making this up, but I will protect the site from embarrasment!!!
I also remember being the client lead trying to hook a VAX 11 up to the Cray so we could load jobs and get back results fast. Up until then we had a serial line to a an IBM Mainframe, but the Vax was going to be Massbus connected. Imagine, as far as the Vax was concerned, the Cray was just a peripheral. On the big day when we wired everying up, it all went horribly wrong. As soon as the Vax tried to access the Cray, the Cray powered down. I had to wait until 2am to get a Cray senior engineer on site. I was well impressed when he had me connect a pulse oscilloscope on to the Massbus and we watched the signals going down the line. After 2 hours he took the back panels of the VAX and showed me where two pins on the backplane were a little bit bent and touched from time to time. Not enough to crash the VAX but enough to crash the Cray. Fixed with a gentle tweak by a pair of pliers and never a problem since then.
Overall I worked on Cray-1 and Cray-XMP. One of the other sites had a Cray-2 but I only saw it, never go access to it. We were talking about a Y-MP when I left the company. Ahh those were the days, when a super computer looked like a real super computer.
"I can't confirm the number and I'm loath to comment on any number."
Which seems to be shell-speak for "thats is an extremely accurate number, where the hell did you get it from?". I left Shell after their previous cull, called OVA or Overhead Valuation Analysis. Anyone one could suggest ways of cutting the overheads. Comments such as "Get rid of him, he's useless and I could do his job in my spare time" were positively encouraged.
To all my old friends still at Shell - I feel your pain.
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