* Posts by Jim

28 publicly visible posts • joined 7 Nov 2008

Ad watchdog gives thumbs up for female TV orgasms

Jim

pron

Orgasm or not we will all be fast forwarding over it with our PVRs. Telly advertising is in trouble these days, and the public will not be tuning in to see simulated orgasmic titbits, not while the click of a computer mouse can unleash a tsunami of multifarious porn.

Prof: Fat ladies don't get to be CEOs, lardy blokes do

Jim

pencil33

I'm with Brutus: do the blokes balloon out after becoming CEO, or while in middle management, or are they tubby to start with ? At what age should I start dodging the lettuce ?

IBM 'in talks' to buy Sun Microsystems

Jim

Go Sun

It's sad that a dynamic, innovative company like Sun may come under the dead hand of IBM. I don't think this would be good news for the industry as a whole. It's also sad that whoever is in charge of Sun has unearthed failure in (what was previously) a garden of success. On reflection, open sourcing Solaris was probably a bad idea, or was done too soon.

I am reminded of HP buying Apollo in the early 90s. Another terrific innovator crushed into mediocrity.

'Talking' iPod Shuffle spills guts

Jim

Worst. Ipod. Ever.

If the controls really are on the cable, then yes, it is a bit lame. If not, I would seriously consider getting one for the voice feature, even though it is half the power of the competition and double the price.

Royal Mail disses runaway post van man

Jim

pencil33

Bloke averts disaster, demonstrating presence of mind and physical courage. What's not to like ? He deserves appreciation, and a reward is the simplest way of showing that. If he did the same for my car, I would sure give him a present.

@Charles Calthrop: I dare say the bloke was driven to write by the silence of the Royal Mail. And he wasn't thinking about getting a reward when he acted.

UK IT should 'fire men first', says Kate Craig-Wood

Jim

Engineering

Men are gagging for women to come into IT and engineering. But women, on the whole, tend to eschew subjects such as engineering, physics and maths, which rather precludes them from employment in these areas. Is it because these subjects are in some way "manly", or difficult ? Why do women avoid them ?

In my A level physics and maths classes, the sex split was about 50:50. In my engineering degree class a year later, there were about 60 men and 3 women. I guess it is the same everywhere.

Perhaps there really IS a difference between men and women ?

Scotland Today in news nipslip outrage

Jim

Button

Rats. Yes, it must be a light through the button hole. Nipples do not point upwards at 45 degrees. Otherwise babies would never reach them. Also, RBS would hardly let her walk around the office in that state. Still, it was nice to receive a boner from bank.

Data Domain sticks neck out on deduping

Jim

Backups

It's a bit naive to say that deduped arrays will replace tape libraries, but Data Domain love saying it. A properly configured tape drive is faster than any disk, tapes can by cycled off site, hold more data than disks and are cheaper. And a dedup array means all your backup generations are depend one one physical copy of the data. Safe enough for backing up webservers, say, but don't rely on it for your business critical database/repository.

Linux to spend eternity in shadow of 'little blue E'

Jim

Closed shop

Windows is ubiquitous and that is why Joe Public knows it. The situation will not change unless pc makers start integrating Linux at the factory. Nearly all PCs made since 1985 have Windows factory integrated, to the exclusion of all other operating systems. That exclusion, and the contracts that support it, are what made Bill Gates the richest man in the world.

Linux is not more complicated than Windows, but the lack of factory integration makes it seem so. If you had to compile your Windows drivers, Windows would seem complicated. There is no complicated physcology here, just a monopoly.

Jim

Closed shop

What holds linux back from the desktop is the closed-shop agreement between MS and the pc manufacturers. It's as simple as that.

Shane Ritchie poised to 'reinvent' Minder

Jim

What a pen and ink

If the script is good, the show will be good. The script will have to be brilliant to match the wit of the original. I have recently be watching the old Minder on Freeview, and it still stands up.

Shain Ritchie is more of a celeb than an actor, but the biggest challenge will be for Shrapnel to pull off a sympathetic "Terry". Otherwise it will be a complete mons from start to finish.

Take a hammer to your hard drive, shrieks Which?

Jim
Thumb Down

Hammer time

Okay. If you have just one disk to deal with, it seems easier to dismantle it and break the platter than to buy, install and run wiping software.

BBC: Top Gear Tesla didn't run out of juice

Jim

motors

Face it, electric cars have gone from nowhere to nigh-on being catching petrol cars, as the Tesla review showed. Yeah there are drawbacks - prive, range - but we all know that is temporary.

As for your exige or whatever, forget it. In a drag race, a fettled electric car would thrash anything containg petrol for a whole load of sound engineering reasons. As they say, never race a tram. You'll lose.

Designer pitches solar-powered AA battery

Jim

Capacity

SOunds good to me. It all depends on the capacity of the battery.

Larry Wall on the Zen of Perl 6

Jim

modem noise

@ Anonymous Coward Wednesday 17th December 2008 01:18 GMT: I disagree. Unless the code is a pure hack, such as your deliberately obfusticated example, the "punctuation marks" make the language more, not less clear, just as they do in English.

Jim

skin a cat

@vision: The programmer will remember exactly how the code works, so long as he wrote it. I have seen portions of Perl I wrote 16 years ago, and I see straightaway how it works.

Other people's Perl code can appear alien not because the language in unintelligible, but because they choose to skin the same cat as you, just in a different way. I don't think Perl is more abstruse than other languages. When someone says it looks like "modem noise" or "pure punctuation", what they really mean is that they just never learned it, and they wish to de-emphasize its importance.

The philosophy of Perl was a major strength of the language, certainly up to version 5. This same philosophy might have now have grown into something that hampers the language. Perhaps Larry and Tom should move onto other things. Remember, it ain't broke.

Native Client d**k-swinging met with fake Googasm

Jim
Pirate

Quality

Yawn. This article is poorly written, contains swearing, and there does not appear to be any basis for the statments made. I would like to comment on the content of this article, but I can't. Because there isn't any.

You think Google is rubbish and there were just 2 bored guys swinging their dicks ? Whatever.

Google OS gOS - if at first you don't succeed...

Jim

Windows

So the people are just gagging for windows ? Listen, the customer will take windows, and like it, because the customer has no choice. But many non-technical people hate using their PCs because of Windows. All those viruses, annoying pop up dialogs, and bundled nagware are enough to make the poor user pull his/her hair out.

Most non-technical people are unaware that don't, in fact, need MS, Word , Excel or any of that stuff to get their work done. Ted is unaware of it too, apparently. Most people just want to produce documents in peace, and they can do that fine with gOS.

Supersonic fighters could snuff out hurricanes

Jim

energy

And all the energy in the hurricane, where does that go then ? That wind has gotta blow somewhere. Even if it works, this plan will just disperse the storm, not snuff it out. Destruction to life and property might not be lessened.

Bring it on, though, if it gets Concordski whirling around.

Satanic net neologisms - nominations invited

Jim

Podcast. It's a ******* sound recording

Audio recording renamed. The sort of term Arnold Rimmer would use.

Wireless comms and the end of civilisation

Jim

Power still the same though

The program makers could have got around all this by just staging the remake in the 1970's, like the original. To make it realistic in a 2008 setting, they would have had to consult engineers and lots of other people usually overlooked by the "man in the street". And even the man in the street has a better grasp of engineering than the media types responsible for Survivors.

Nice article, but the summary is that all comms would stop a few hours after the national grid. Hopefully things will be different in another 30 years, when we will all have personal fusion reactors.

Enterprise storage is for the little people too

Jim

ZFS

I am not disputing the technical excellence of ZFS, but for privisioning a small storage server to an SME, it is probably no better (or worse) than many other file systems. This might change when ZFS gets dedpulication. Nice site by the way.

Lets face it, disks are cheap. The SME can buy a small NAS raid box for perhaps £500. Slow yes, but maintenance free and will probably last 5 years+

Small biz demands some relief from Darling

Jim

Labour was never the engineers friend

Pardon ? So Old Labour was the small biz / manufacturers friend ? Old labour loathed small bunsiness, and enterprise in general. Remember the power cuts / British Leyland / secondary pickets ? Coal gone, shipbuilding gone, car manufacturing gone, British steel in the record books as the biggest ever loss maker in the UK ?

Small businesses workers at the time could arrive at work to find their office beseiged by donkey-jacketed striking workers bussed in from miles away, not even a part of the same industry. Nice.

Jerry Yang - Slugworth to Google's Willy Wonka

Jim

Based on... ?

Fairly amusing article, but it is based on anything ? You spend the first page saying that Google employees are just much better than Yahoo! employees. What's the basis for that ?

Also you have a theory about how Google manipulates the vanity of its engineers. Again, how do you know that ?

Story withdrawn

Jim

Definitions

Where are the definitions, man, the definitions ?

Come my fellow surveytards, will somebody please post the necessary.

Oz driver pulled with todger in pasta sauce jar

Jim

Oh come on, we've all done it

Anyway it was the jar's fault for being so damn sexy.

Linux weaktops poised for death by smartphone

Jim
Stop

Weaktops

I would rather have matches put under my fingernails than write a letter to my accountant on a 2.5 inch screen. And I can't think of a reason to carry arround a PC in my pocket, sensitive personal data and all. No, smart phones are not practical. Smart phones are in fact bought by the same gadget enthusiasts you dismissed as the only customers for weaktops

Smart phones are the moden equivalent of of the digital watch pen. Back in 1982 people would stand around in groups and go "oooooh!" when shown a pen with a digital watch built into the barrel. Useless of course, but they had that aura of desirability.

Weaktops, on the other hand, have a real market among middle-aged folks who want to store their photos, and a few music tracks, in a place where they are safe from the kids who have already monopolised and wrecked the family PC. And they can be used, at a pinch, for home office computing, most of which could be accomplished on a 486. Like writing a letter to my accountant, for example.

Smartphones - really interesting short term, completely useless

Weaktops - really rather usefull, completely boring

Oh and it was nice to see wheeled out that oft-repeated and most devastating of Linux counter-arguments, viz. that the sysadmin smells. I am a sysadmin and I am wearing an ironed shirt, Lynx deoderant and a rather nice pair of Loakes. I thank you.

Gadget Show competition spews text spam

Jim

Raffle

I find the endless raffles on TV boring, and I am irritated by the way they are called "competitions" to get around the licensing laws. I would rather pay more license fee and have no raffles. But I guess they are fun for people who enter them, so where's the harm.

I like all presenters espcially the "bald guy". I am not really interested in gadgets but he is amusing. Not sure about Dallas, he os ok but seems out of place.