Posts by IHateWearingATie 683 publicly visible posts • joined 2 Jun 2008
Wind resistance? I would have thought that the fan would be running in the wind tunnel is to ensure that the radiator and turbo intercooler get suffient breeze over them.
Can't see how it needs to overcome wind resistance as if it is on rollers it's probably tied down for safety.
I'd take a look at the way that productivity is calculated before assuming that the UK is 'worse' than France and less efficient, due to the way that the public sector is included in the calculation. The bigger your public sector, the more efficient your economy looks
I'm going to get downvoted to hell, but I don't think what Google, Washington Post etc are doing is wrong. I don't like adverts, but I also like visiting places like El Reg for free, and I can do that as they are ad supported. I see it as the cost of using these sites - I pay by watching ads rather than pay with money.
It's not theft as per the quote in the article (stupid hyperbole from that bloke), but it doesn't feel particularly ethical to visit a site like El Reg and deliberately block their method of getting payback for that.
I have a mild Clash of Clans obsession and I think its really very balanced, and a great example of how these kinds of games can work. There is nothing in the game you have to pay for, as you get given small amounts each week for free of the in-game currency that you can also buy. The fun of the game is slowly making your way up the levels and while splashing the cash can speed things a little, you'll never notice the difference when playing between the people who have spent a bit of cash and those that haven't.
To be honest, you need a while playing to learn it well and the game penalises you to a significant extent you if you rush one aspect far ahead of the others. The people you can tell have splashed a lot of cash are usually really bad at the game, and have hugely unbalanced bases which make them easy and well worth attacking.
As to how much I've spent? About £15 through 18 months of playing, which I think is really very good value if I think of how much the latest Call of Duty cost me. I'm on level 9 of 10 so pretty far through (TH9, level 20 heros, max troops and part level 10 and part level 9 walls for anyone that plays it)
Given my Win 7 desktop is rock solid (don't remember the last issue I had, despite running an overclocked processor and memory), I'll be waiting to upgrade that till next year, but I may be doing an upgrade on the family laptop over Christmas if it looks like it keeps improving.
No way I'm going to upgrade in the first two weeks of a new release of anything made by Microsoft :)
Deary deary me
The stock market is basically driven by fear and greed, but to suggest that Apple goes private is just stupid. For a start, who has the funds to buy the shares of the world's most valuable company (by market cap)? And who would take it private, and why, to what end?
Apple is not a person that can be offended by the change in shareprice. How do you think shareprices are set - by analysts grouping together in some darkened room and cackling over a (computer generated) cauldron? Or by pension funds, insurance companies, hedge funds etc buying and selling based on whether they think they can turn a good enough profit in the future for their investment.
I'm not saying that the capital markets are not without huge issues and have stepped far far beyond sense in a lot of cases, but this is one of the few areas that actually follows what probably should happen. Apple gives guidance on future results, analysts and others say what they think as well, the actual results are published and they are lower, the price moves lower to reflect the lower expectations. I struggle to see what the issue is. If you want to rant and rave at the stupidity of the stock market, go take a look at naked short selling, or the floatation of Box.
.... MS need to sort this out PDQ. The sign in process in Win 8 already is a bit weird with ODFB and Office, and the confusing prompts for a Microsoft Account (aka my hotmail log in which is what it will be for a large number of people I suspect).
It doesn't seem that hard to design a sensible single sign on for Win 10, but that woudl require their product team, heaven forbid, from working together for once
I don't just have payment cards in my wallet - I have cash (as not everyone takes cards - the coffee van that comes round to my client site for example), my card for the AA, my Tesco clubcard. I like the technology and where it is going, but I'll still need my wallet for now and so I don't see a great benefit (certainly not enough to make me replace my Android phone for an Apple one next upgrade cycle)
Seems like a sensible set of proposals to me. I'm not that bothered about Net Neutrality for the UK as most (to be fair, not all) people have a wide choice of ISPs and if one starts playing silly buggers others will soon start differentiating to attract customer.
Take a look at the 'unlimited' debacle - it may have taken a bit of time, but there are mainstream ISPs offering properly unlimited access (for a price) if that's what you after. If you're not that bothered as you don't download a lot of data, there are others that will offer a cheaper deal. Virgin have gone a different way, with dynamic throttling rather than monthly download limits (I'm with Virgin - the dynamic throttling works very well for what I use it for). It wasn't fast, but it worked - I can see no reason why the same wouldn't happen without net neutrality laws if some ISPs started killing iPlayer bandwidth unless you / BBC paid them more money.
I can see in countries where certain suppliers have a virtual monopoly in an area this would matter much more - I understand this is a particular issue in the USA. But I don't live there, so they can do whatever they think is best.
At the time my route to work was walking through Tavistock squre, but that morning I and my wife had decided to go in early as we were both busy - quite a good idea in hindsight. The bus that blew up was on the route that she used (No30 I seem to recall) which went down the Euston road to Kings Cross but because of the tube bombs had diverted down to Tavistock Square that morning
Walking back to Euston later that afternoon was really very strange as all the tubes and buses had been cancelled, so everyone was walking. The streets were filled with people but it was very quiet with the mobile networks all still switched off. Walked up the other side of Tavistock Square on my way and saw what was left of the bus, before they screened it off.
Got one of the first trains out of Euston after they opened the station late afternoon - first and only time that strangers talked to strangers on London transport.
RIP
I think I;ve read before about people who say they have 'golden ears' and can tell the difference between very subtle increases in dynamic range and sampling rate.
I however have 'lead' ears, which means I've never really been able to tell the difference between rubbish and amazing, or any grades in between. Which saves me money, as I can happily continue on my merry way with my £10 bluetooth earphones and MP3 files and get exactly the same experience as if I had spent £10k on some crazy super kit.
Ignorance may not be bliss, but it's a hell of a lot cheaper.
This kind of thing has been standard across central government since FoI became law 10 years ago. You have to choose to save off the important stuff (and there are archive systems to do this) and then everything else is cleared after a specified period of time - No10 have 3 months but I think the rest of Gov have between 6 and 12 months as the limit. Remember,this stuff has been in place since 2005 - storage was really very expensive back then and Gov IT budgets are limited (remember they are funded by taking money away from you as taxes).
The FoI Act specifcially did not include a clause to stop people deleting stuff before a request has been received to allow removing anything unimportant / incriminating (delete as appropriate :) )
Of course, deleting stuff after receiving a request will get you in a load of trouble.
Currently working on a project with a private sector business where they have SMEs rather than a single big integrator. It's a disaster (which is why I'm here to try and help fix it).
Just goes to show that if you don't have the fundamentals of IT delivery right, things will screw up just as easily with an SME as with one of the big boys.
Being a former civil servant, I'm usually annoyed when people mention Yes Minister as real life in Government tends to be stupidly complex and has lots of very good people doing as good a job as can be done in difficult circumstances (certainly just as good or bad as in the private sector in my experience - you just don't see them being eviserated in the press very often).
However, this has all the hallmarks of the minister in question being throughly Sir Humpreyed.
"Welcome to your new office Minister. Just read this brief on how wonderful we are. Oh by the way, you have a select committee meeting in 3 days where you'll have no choice but to regurgiate our briefing as you don't know any better yet, and then you'll be stuck defending us forever more lest you be accused of a U-Turn".
... as I'm due an upgrade of my work mobile later in the year, buck sucky reception, no SD card slot and lack of a removeable battery come together to make a dealbreaker.
Shame really as I think my S4 is really very good (have had iPhones and Blackberries in the past) and I may be the only person in the entire world who quite likes Touchwiz and didn't find the S4 plasticky.
What annoys me more is that there is no longer a flagship android with a removable battery - using this as a work phone (with some games & podcasts added for my commute) I swap batteries more often than you would imagine and having to wander round the office talking on the phone while an external power pack is dangling away off the phone will annoy me.
Yes, yes, I should remember to charge it while I'm at my desk or bring my charger to meeting rooms etc, but I'm sometimes too busy and forget. A quick battery swap is easily the most convienient option, now sadly not available if/when i upgrade and choose a flagship android phone.
Wasn't the Tower model all the rage in the late 2000s and Cabinet Office had now recommended public sector bodies to move away from it?
Unless the Beeb are way ahead of time and anticipating the inevitable pendulum swing back to it in 10 years time?
I think you're mixing up free trade and taxation of investments. The article is about taxation once a company has invested, though i think what's in your mind is protectionism in order to build up local industries in the way that South Korea and India did ( and the UK and US did much earlier). If youare interested in that aspect I'd recommend Ha Joon Chang's book 'Bad Samaritans' - he's a developmental economist at Cambridge.
Thinking about it, I'd be interested in Tim's take on that in a future article
It's not hardware that annoys me, its software. Now we get everything digitally, there are no more CDs to frisbee across the room in frustration.
Its a good thing iTunes never had a physical manifestation when I was using it in the past - an angle grinder would have been the least of its worries.
The first rule of the blacklist for crap suppliers...
... is that you don't talk about the blacklist for crap suppliers, lest their lawyers get wind of it.
"Of course you're a valued supplier, its just that someone else provided a better bid on this contract... and this one.... and this one.... and every contract we get a whiff you're involved in for the next 10 years...
... my usual option was:
j) Try and fix it and put in a worse hack than the original problem. After forgetting to check the code out and back in properly so some poor sap has to merge the code later.
Maybe that's why I'm not allowed near anything more complex than powerpoint these days.
... this really is the worst aspect of it, waiting not just for the handset maker but also the network (depending on your device) to bother to update it.
And my 2012 Nexus 7 has slowed to a crawl as I stupidly assumed that Google had tested its impact on on the Nexus devices before pushing it out. The upside is I did manage to use it as an excuse with The Boss to let me buy a Z3 Compact tablet which is great and give the Nexus to my son as a dedicated Minecraft tablet :)
While i appreciate I'm in a minority, the reason i bought a s4 was the sd card slot and removable battery. As a work phone, it's so much easier to swap the battery when it is running low than plug in and carry around one of those external packs while I'm trying to speak on the phone and there isn't a handy socket nearby. Similarly, work will only buy me the base storage version as any additional storage costs more and isn't really for work purposes (i have a 64 gb card with music, podcasts, games etc on it).
Quite sad as i don't think there is a flagship Android with a removable battery now.
It's time to give up on the idea of ever having central government IT functions unless the grade structure is changed. You just cannot recruit perm staff with the necessary skills if you are trying to fit into the civil service pay grades.
For example - bottom of the deputy director pay grade is somewhere around £50-60k (I seem to remember). A dep director is not a doer, he/she would be someone managing an entire IT project - the pyramid then flows down to the point where to fit in with the grades and salaries, anyone who actually does any work like cutting code or configuring development environments could be on a maxium of £30k ish (my guess is the old HEO grade in DWP, or Grade D in HM Treasury). In Central London.
Now, I'm not saying that you can't live on £30k in London, but anyone half decent could make more elsewhere.
.... as Scoobys and EVOs have been doing it for years and years. My track car was a 2003 Impreza that I fettled to 320hp. There are plenty being ragged around by boy racers (and slightly older racers like me) that are even older.
Wouldn't want to put that kind of power through just the front wheels of a car of that vintage though...
I've done track days with all of the major UK operators and visited all of the major UK tracks and never encountered an operator or a circuit that bans front seat passengers.
Timing, handheld cameras, back seat passengers, all regularly banned. But never front seat passengers. Sadly I had to sell my track car last year and haven't been on a track day for about 14 months, but I can't imagine things have changed so radically in the last year.
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