* Posts by Pete 2

3483 publicly visible posts • joined 10 Jun 2009

Vintage wine laid down in 1600 BC was 'psychotropic'

Pete 2 Silver badge

Decant

> This wine's recipe was strictly followed in each and every jar

Surely the ancients were savvy enough to make their "special recipe" wine in a large batch and then store (or sell) it in more manageable portions. That's the simplest explanation for a consistent mix in each jar.

But I suppose when the researchers want to "big up" their discovery (basically, a load of empty pots), then any little helps.

UK defamation law reforms take effect from start of 2014

Pete 2 Silver badge

Re: What the law says makes no difference

> a comment can be stood up, so long as the commentard is willing to stand up and be counted

Yes, I appreciate that this law rearranges the responsibilities - much like rearranging deck chairs. But the basic injustice still stands. That mega-corp only has to send out a letter to effectively suppress any comments that they might / do / could decide were not wholly to their benefit. The problem is not so much who gets that letter posted into whichever orifice is open at the time (unless you're the hosting website), but that ALL IT TAKES to suppress a comment is the price of a stamp, as there is no practical or affordable alternative to folding.

No individual or website owner is in a financial position to defend their comment - even if they believe it is either relevant, not defamatory or can be backed up by evidence they actually possess. The cost of getting in to the game, let alone ante-ing up spells financial ruin for all but the most well-heeled. That's the reason the law makes no difference, because the law never has a chance to get involved. The law is still only for the rich.

Pete 2 Silver badge

What the law says makes no difference

... as website owners will never, ever be in a position to spend the money needed to defend themselves against something a pseudo-anonymous poster wrote. Merely the threat of legal action and the amount of dosh needed just to contest the simple, early complaint will be enough to make most websites cave with nary a whimper. In fact, pretty much the situation we have now.

So we'll still be in a position where any company that feels it's been the victim of the truth a smear, only has to bang out a threatening letter and .... whoosh! the comment will be expunged so quickly that Prof. Hawking will have to be called in to rewrite the laws of Physics,

Don't PANIC, but these SMARTWATCH-stuffed boxes are going NOWHERE

Pete 2 Silver badge

Stop. Watch.

When you stop to consider it, a wristwatch is a very poor concept. Half the time it's covered up by sleeves you always need to move your arm to see the watch face and it's often prone to that comedic staple: the cup full of coffee poured over the time-seeker.

So for a device, placing it on the wrist will always be a poor choice of location.

As far as the actual functionality of a smartwatch is concerned - did anyone actually THINK before implementing it? For example, the Samsung Gear has an LCD screen, so (like any phone or similar portable device) its display will be virtually invisible in daylight. The need to interact with the touch-screen means that to operate the smartwatch's functions, both hands are required: one attached to the wrist bearing the watch and the other to smear greasy fingers all over its tiny little screen.

Add to that the paltry capacity of the batteries severely limits the smartwatch's ability to perform useful functions (though why you'd ever want, need or use a camera in a wristwatch is beyond speculation). All I can think of is that these things were designed by people who were, as children, far too impressionable and had somehow imprinted the idea that 1960's TV "spies" devices were both cool and practical.

How wrong were they? (Ans: not quite as wrong as the technology analysts, who jumped on a bandwagon who's wheels have fallen off.)

Prime Minister David Cameron in Twitter gaffe

Pete 2 Silver badge

Cheap at twice the price

> prices of up to £800 an hour, which would seem expensive

Isn't that why MPs have expenses?

.... and I seem to recall Cameron himself being involved in a "cash for access" scheme a couple of years ago, He was charging a dam' sight more for his time then. Makes you wonder: who's really getting screwed?

3D printing: 'Third industrial revolution' or a load of old cobblers?

Pete 2 Silver badge

Re: Yes, a "solution looking for a problem"

> where are all these lasers

LASERs will (are?) like electric motors. Not something you own per se, but an "invisible" component inside something else.

However, just like electric motors didn't make an "industrial revolution", neither will LASERs or 3D printers. However, given time, they might be incorporated into things or machines that do gain widespread acceptance.

Pete 2 Silver badge

The post-stuff age

Ask any kid what they want for christmas and the answer is more likely to be a download, or a game, or something off itunes, People today are eschewing physical things in favour of the intangible: information and entertainment. So the draw of a 3D printer in the home is not so much in what it makes, but in the process of making. Just as we are well past the time of peak-paper in the home.

The same applies at work. Less and less printing is taking place and most information only appears on the screens of devices - sometimes desk-bound and sometimes portable. So far as workplace 3D printing, the needs will be for much more specialised, high-quality and better designed products. So commercial 3D printing will only be found on the industrial estate, in the workshop of the specialist prototyper or short-run fabricator. Never in the corner of the office next to the coffee machine.

So where does that leave domestic 3D printers? In the same place as those other tools for making things: in the workshop. Just like hobbyist woodworkers, who will spend many more hours producing something hand-made than it would take them to earn the money to buy off the shelf - so there will always be a place for people for whom the making is more important, or fun, than the having. However, just like the market for lathes, compound-mitre saws and drill presses is quite active (among the cognoscenti) so will be the market for 3D printers. However they will never be a 1-per-home item.

Men have LARGE APPENDAGES, are OXYGEN THIEVES: Science

Pete 2 Silver badge

Pinocchio

> males exhibit a disproportionate increase in nasal size

So it's not because men tell more lies?

Decades ago, computing was saved by CMOS. Today, no hero is in sight

Pete 2 Silver badge

The next giant leap

We already know how to improve the performance of computers by several hundred percent - possibly by some orders of magnitude. It doesn't involve any technologies we don't already have. Nor does it require any major changes so far as the users are concerned. Indeed, for them, the improvements will be pretty transparent - expect for the screamingly fast performance they will see.

What is this change? Not new hardware, just properly designed and written software.

It's time to toss the bloated, inefficient existing software - with it's mess of interdependencies, incompatibilities and patched patches and start teaching people to write clean code with low overheads and that does no more than is required of it. At present the world of software development works on the same basis that NASA used for its moonshots: waste anything but time. In this case, time to market.

So we have software tools that put programmer productivity before runtime performance, resource requirements and size - on the basis that technology will provide whatever is necessary to run this stuff. That's fine while the curve is still on its upward climb and hardware is getting cheaper all the time. But all "S" curves reach their limits, eventually. Sooner or later the hardware won't be getting faster every year and then we'll start to see push-back from users who won't accept the Minimum Hardware requirements and will look for software that runs on their existing systems.

We already get this on smartphones and tablets, where a typical Android app weighs in at a few megabytes, compared with the hundreds of MB needed for a PC (or Linux) based package.

You never know: the root-and-branch reworking needed to remove all the cruft that existing software has accumulated over the decades might even give rise to more secure designs and possibly even less buggy code (and will definitely obviate all the workarounds built in for backwards compatibility). It's unlikely that the corporate behemoths will want to play, since this attacks their fundamental existence. But that might just be another advantage.

Patent law? It's all about Apples, Newton and iPads

Pete 2 Silver badge

Seeing the good

> university education probably isn't a public good

Well, that kinda depends on the subject being studied.

We can probably agree that most degree courses these days involve adequately educated 18 year-olds leaving home (much to their parents' relief) and going off to study a subject they like, think they'll like or were coerced into by their secondary school's in a bid to improve their ratings. Most of those who survive the parties, house-sharing dramas, love affairs, exams and occasional spot of intellectual striving will soon be moving back in with their parents (if they didn't move house at the first opportunity and "forget" to mention that to their offspring), when they realise their qualification is no help whatsoever in putting food on the table, or paying the rent.

However, some degrees for some students result in "goods" so far beyond the average, mode or median (choose whatever statistical measure you like), that they are undeniably a public good. Take as an example any technological advance over the past 60 years. Almost all have been made by degree-educated individuals and would not have been made if they hadn't received their tertiary education.

Obviously, there is no way to predict which particular student(s) in which particular course(s) will go one to invent or discover something that will change the world. But we can say, that for certain types of course: lets call them "sciences", the more people who study them at a sufficiently high level, the more discoveries and inventions will benefit the world as a whole. Though the same probably can't be said for economics students.

Therefore it follows that for the world as a whole, it is a sound investment to promote, grow and even pay for these sorts of courses: the ones that as a numbers-game do create things that make our world better, safer, more prosperous and nicer. As over time, we will want, use and even need the stuff these people will go one to give us. Patents or no patents.

#ALERT! There'll be emergencies on Twitter for UK, Ireland

Pete 2 Silver badge

An untapped market

> Getting fast and accurate information to the public ...

One wonders what (future) advertisements would get linked to these emergency tweets? Medical insurance, fire extinguishers, bomb shelters

The ULTIMATE cuppa showdown: And the winner is...

Pete 2 Silver badge

> I'm confused as to how Typhoo took the top spot though

Familiarity. Most people train themselves to "know" what a decent cup of tea should taste like. That comes from comparing any new tea with what they're familiar with. Hence the most popular teas will (almost inevitably) get the highest votes.

The surprise being the Clipper Organic. It would be interesting to know if that is basically the same as the other top choices (just with the word "organic" added) or if it was actually different from the most popular tastes.

Pete 2 Silver badge

Taking the tea,

12 mugs is an awful lot of tea. Assuming they weren't filled to the 275ml capacity, that's still about 3 litres of tea per person. You' d hope that in the interests scientific rigour, the testers were't all given the same teas in the same order. You'd also hope that for their own well being, they weren't forced to drink all the tea, in every sample.

Eat our dust, spinning rust: In 5 years, it'll be all flash all the time

Pete 2 Silver badge

The disks may go, but the blocks will remain

Strange how things stick around.

Ever since spinning storage came into being, it's been based on blocks of data. Blocks make up files and directories. Block sizes change, the error correction associated with them also changes, but the concept has been remarkably resilient for 50+ years.

Given that almost everything else in the computing world, including memory word size, has changed during that time, shouldn't there be more suitable formats for storing and retrieving data than a mechanism devised for technology over half a century old?

Who will recover your data if disaster strikes?

Pete 2 Silver badge

Not just a technical problem

A "disaster" could involve staff, too.

For example, what if the canteen serves a dodgy lunch and all your network admins are off sick for 2 or 3 days?

How about if your star DBA leaves and takes his/hers/its sidekick to the new firm ... and another DBA starts maternity leave ... and the last one, sick of having to do the work of 4 people has a nervous breakdown? You can't train up replacements in the blink of an eye - and training them takes time away from doing the job, itself.

As with most problems that actually bite companies in the arse, it's not the foreseen situations that are the problem: they are the ones that will have contingency plans. It's often the ones we are blind to because they are so familiar that we can't even see them.

Smartphone addicts go floppy under the sheets, warns DOCTOR WANG

Pete 2 Silver badge

Not what you think

> It has reduced his sexual drive

Isn't that the HDD where you keep the porn?

Stephen Hawking: 'Boring' Higgs Boson discovery cost me $100

Pete 2 Silver badge

Re: I did 1,000 hours work at University

>>Not as much physics as there is now?

>Would you mind expanding on that?

Well, for a kick-off, one extra-curricular lecture we had was from a colleague of some guy at Cambridge who has some interesting ideas (not even theories at that point) about event horizons an' stuff. There's been a lot of work on cosmology in the past 30+ (cripes, that's depressing) years: string theory, branes, shennanigans just after the BB . Not to mention the discovery of most of the quarks.

Pete 2 Silver badge

Re: I did 1,000 hours work at University

> Couple of hours lecture a day and a few hours work outside that ... sounds about right.

<choke!>

My Physics BSc. course was roughly 30 hours of lectures and lab work a week. "Homework" on top of that.

Looking at non-Oxbridge university terms now, they appear to be about 10 weeks each. So as a rough calculation, my course took up about 1,000 hours in the first year alone.

What does grate is that when I was studying the subject, some decades ago, wasn't even as much physics as there is now.

BROADBAND will SAVE THE ECONOMY, shriek UK.gov bods

Pete 2 Silver badge

Govt. in the wrong business?

> would return £20 for every £1 spent

That would require those rural users to consume an awful lot of porn. Will HMG then start financing other errr ... "industries" to satisfy this demand from these newly connected folk (assuming their tastes are the same as their urban cousins).

Or will these benefits to the economy be more pedestrian and largely illusory? Such as being able to tell the estate agents that your house in the boonies has high-speed internet, thus increasing its value by 10 or 20 grand?

First the Yanks, now us: In-flight mobe use WON'T kill us all, say Eurocrats

Pete 2 Silver badge

Let the arguments commence

> Phones, tablets, ebook readers, MP3 players - ... allowed to stay on ...[except] “bulky” laptops, because of their size and concerns they might get in the way during an emergency situation

"I'm sorry sir/madam, you'll have to put your tablet away, it's too bulky and might cause injury in an emergency."

"But that guy over there has a much bigger device (guy turns to the camera, smiles and gets a "ting" star added to his upper incisor) and you've let him keep it."

And so the pre-flight fights start. With everyone else using their flight-approved devices to video the jerk¹ in question. Will we need the iphone equivalent of case-checking frames: small enough to fit in and you can keep it on. Too big or overweight and away it goes.

While I applaud the sudden and uncharacteristic attack of common sense, I can see yet more rows caused before take off, when everybody else just wants the flight to start.

[1] deliberately left ambiguous as to whether the jerk is the attendant or the passenger.

NAO: £4bn of gov work doled out to just 4 outsourcing giants

Pete 2 Silver badge

Good idea gone bad

On the face of it, you'd think it would be a simple matter for Invitations to Tender to stipulate that the bidding companies must not be currently under investigation (or that their parent companies mustn't be, either) for tax irregularities in their registered country.

However it would appear that a rule such as this would make it impossible for HMG to outsource anything to any of the "usual suspects". Whether that would open the door for a new generation of independent, squeaky-clean, contractors to pick up - or whether any new contenders would only qualify since they hadn't yet been given the opportunity to screw-over the taxpayer, is questionable.

Could the solution be a compromise where companies would only be barred from future government contracts if they were really, really corrupt? Or would that still disqualify all the exisiting players?

Netscape daddy's VC firm dumps $60m of Facebook stock

Pete 2 Silver badge

No mis-stake

> still has a stake in social network

What? Like Van Helsing had a stake¹ in Dracula?

[1] Actually, he didn't. He used a knife through the heart. But that would not make much sense (as if that was a criterion).

Personal web and mail server for Raspberry Pi seeks cash

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Re: Better storage

> You need an SD card made with SLC Flash

You could well be right. But doesn't that just delay the inevitable failures?

I appreciate that the Pi was never designed, nor meant, to be used in environments where reliability was important, but there doesn't seem to have been much work done with the Linux distros to mitigate what must be a very common failure mode.

Pete 2 Silver badge

Re: Better storage

> I need to look at the configuration a bit more closely to eliminate as many writes to the SD card as possible.

Yes, I've discovered the same problem. I have a Pi in a remote location (my Mum's house) that' is running 24*7. It used to burn through SD cards in a couple of months in normal operation. I diddled around a bit and put /var/log and /tmp on tmpfs . So far this card has been running for 6 weeks and no obvious corruptions yet. Fingers crossed.

But I'd never trust the Pi as the sole storage device for any valuable data. I don't even trust that it will run for months or years unattended.

BIG, CURVY Apple models: Just right for SLAP AND TICKLE

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uncritical acceptance?

> a new curved iPhone

Has anyone analysed the screens of phones (or monitors, for that matter) and come up with any functional benefits that would accrue from a non-flat screen?

I have a distinct feeling that this gimmick falls into the "because we can" category for the fashion conscious and could well be the next 3D so far as irrelevant and pointless technological changes (I nearly said: advances) are concerned.

If your bosses tell you you're 'in it together', don't ever believe them

Pete 2 Silver badge

If you're ever described as "core .... "

Just remember that the core is the part of the fruit that is discarded after all the nice, fleshy, bits have been consumed.

Feedly gets Greedly: Users suddenly HAVE TO create a Google+ account

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Cornflakes and beer

> Obviously we're not referring to anyone who works at Vulture Central

Why not? Don't they have cornflakes for breakfast?

Twitter #blabbergasm explodes as shares soar close to $50 on NYSE

Pete 2 Silver badge

Quite apt, really

Let's look at what we have here.

A company that has no tangible products has a share price that is at artificially high levels because it's trading on a market that is bouyed up by the continued "printing" of imaginary money (aka $1Tn per year of quantitative easing).

Why do I feel like I'm stuck in a gigantic game of monopoly, where the only losers are people with real, live, stuff you can touch?

You've been arrested for computer crime: Here's what happens next

Pete 2 Silver badge

There is no innocence

> God forbid you are innocent

The difference between being found guilty and not being found guilty (whether not being charged, or being acquitted in a trial) is only in the degree to which you are punished. In ALL CASES, irrespective of your guilt, bad things happen to you.

As the article says, even before you are charged, you are deprived of your freedom Every piece of electronic storage is removed from your house - some of which you may get back, though whether it would be after weeks, months or years is questionable. So how do you manage your work and your life while your "property" is gathering dust in a police lock-up?

The only solution is to buy replacements, presuming you are allowed to. So apart from the time you spent in a cell, you are also several £££hundred or thousand out of pocket - and still no-one's even charged you with doing anything wrong.

The problem is that our laws are based on the 18th century ideas of freedom and physical captivity. While you might be freed to walk the streets at some point after you finish "helping police with their enquiries", modern-day freedom requires a lot more than just physical presence. So all the restrictions and confiscations (whether temporary or permanent) exact a huge toll on ordinary people living ordinary, modern lives. Can you imagine a motorist having their car impounded for months while a traffic cop (possibly any given force's only qualified "forensic" traffic cop) plods slowly through the backlog of cases, for months on end, until they get to your 31MPH and only then decide not to prosecute and hand you back several car-shaped pieces of your vehicle? That seems to be on a par with the sort of thing that an IT accusation can bring.

Your kids' chances of becoming programmers? ZERO

Pete 2 Silver badge

Re: Fixing the wrong problem

> the real skill programmers lack is in business, rather than what business lack is an ability to understand software

The key point is that programming is a technical skill and business acumen (not necessarily through formal qualifications - I suspect that real-world experience beats an MBA every time) is an enabling skill.

Technical skills without the means to apply them are just as useless as being able to run a business but not having anything to "sell". As we all know, there is generally a chasm between the techies and the business people: they talk different languages and get frustrated with each others' inability to see that they are right.

The question is: can you teach techies to "do" business and can you teach entrepreneurs to write code? The practical world shows us that in most cases, the techy tends to end up working for the innovator, rather than being the one who runs the show - though that could be down to choice rather than drive. Hence giving programmers lessons in running a business would move them closer to self-generated success, than trying to get a successful business-person to understand objects, pointers, interrupts and GIT.

I suppose the ultimate goal would be to get the monkey to do the lot.

Pete 2 Silver badge

Fixing the wrong problem

> hordes of British kids embraced programming, as did many adults, delivering the most IT-literate workforce in the world

But almost none of them had any business nouse, whatsoever.

That is what was lacking - not programming skills. It's all very well being able to poke and push and type HEX into a Sinclair ZX80. But unless you can analyse the market, identify what products will be needed next year, persuade the banks to lend you the monkey and employ the right people to: (a) work together and (b) come up with the goods, then being able to write tight code is irrelevant.

Huawei was never interested in buying Blackberry

Pete 2 Silver badge

Au contraire

> the collective relief-sighs of spooks,

But spooks make their living from uncertainty and insecurity. Not from having a world that is happy, safe and secure. So if there was any unclenching being done it would have been from the high net worth Blackberry users (or mostly ex-users, these days) on hearing that their traffic data would not end up in the hands of an unknown entity. Though I do hope they don't unclench too much - that could be embarrassing.

The spooks however: not so much. From their point of view, a world with no worries means less need for their services. Although they are very, very good at stirring up FUD (Yes, there's a threat and we've categorised it as "a potential risk". No, we can't tell you more for reasons of national security. No, how we will deal with it is classified. You just need to know that we'll require an extra billion - no, better make that two - to keep you all safe.) and pressing all the anxiety buttons. So the lack of a chinese player in the Blackberry endgame? Maybe the sound is really that of sorrows being drowned.

Watch out, MARTIANS: 1.3 tonne INDIAN ROBOT is on its way

Pete 2 Silver badge

November 5th - done properly.

That's how to organise a fireworks display.

10 Types of IT managers from hell

Pete 2 Silver badge

Re: 10 Types of bosses

This year marks the 500th anniversary of the very first management handbook: The Prince by Machiavelli. Even if you don't want to be a boss, yourself: it's worth a read (and it has the added benefit of not being very long). That way you can identify the traits as described by an expert and wonder in the realisation that in the past half-millenium, nothing much has changed. With the possible exception of no longer being able to do away with your opponents.

Pete 2 Silver badge

AhIm

Notable in the opening few paragraphs is any mention of the female gender - although I have worked for three [ Edit: 4. Just remembered about my first IT vacation job while at university ], and more if you count "dotted lines", women in the past. Although some of them still fit into the descriptions offered.

However, my favourite worst boss was The Twister.

Whatever you said to him (and this one was a bloke) would be twisted into an unrecognisable statement and then thrown back at you. For example: "We've been delayed because the delivery from the suppliers hasn't turned up". becomes "So what you're telling me is that you failed to manage a third party who was critical to the project?".

It became so bad that we (the team) were only prepared to communicate with him via email, so there was written proof of what had been said. Obviously it slowed things down, but sometime keeping your arse covered is the overriding factor - and getting any work done comes in a distant second.

Adobe users' purloined passwords were pathetic

Pete 2 Silver badge

Re: Uh, hang on ...

> Some of us have clues

Indeed. Like the 95.5% of users who didn't have a password in the top 100. But where's the story in that?

Pete 2 Silver badge

Busted accounts - does it really matter?

Most people only sign up to websites in order to gain access to the trough of free downloadable stuff. The account being the "deal with the devil": you get a 30 day trial of their product, they get to spam you to oblivion with offers, discounts and deals (none of which you ever had any intention of accepting).

Whether or not you have the integrity to supply true and valid log-in details is also debatable. If you simply regard a vendor's attempts to get into your inbox as an annoyance you could well have typed the first thing that came to mind - I expect that a significant number of these stolen accounts list Afghanistan as the country in users' addresses, for that very reason.

You'd hope that the level of security surrounding accounts is a step or several below the security that contains any credit card info (though there should never be any CC data that's not behind industrial strength protection). So the value of all these accounts, probably with multiple accounts for each trough-feeder, should be very small. Apart from having simple passwords - matching the value that individuals place on these accounts - I wonder how many "users" have equally simple names. Maybe most of the 1.9 million "123456" passwords were protecting "Mickey Mouse"'s account.

UK.gov BANS iPads from Cabinet over foreign eavesdropper fears

Pete 2 Silver badge

Domestic suppliers - strategic advantage

> I'm sure the Chinese have had a good go

If I was running the country that made the chips, firmware and phones themselves I'd have many, many opportunities to add surveillance abilities right down to the level of the silicon. So if you really want a secure phone, there seems to be few options other than building your own - from scratch.

Shame we blew it.

Funds flung at 9-inch fan-built Raspberry Pi monitor

Pete 2 Silver badge

Why wait - use existing solutions?

Both the Cubieboard2 and the Olimex A20 have LCD interfaces (not HDMI: raw LCD) built onto their boards. Both vendors sell LCD screens in various sizes and definitions than you can use on your projects right now.

Sure neither of those SBCs is a $25 Pi (but then, nor is a Pi - has anyone, anywhere paid exactly 25 USD and received a Pi? - ever?)

Some of these screens even have add-on resistive (yeah, I know) front plates you can add that work with Debian. There's even talk of a 15.6 incher coming soon. Now if I could just persuade zenity or yad to do what I want I could dump the keyboard and mouse completely.

Facebook fans fuel faggots firestorm

Pete 2 Silver badge

#IAMNOTAMERICAN

Time for a new hashtag, methinks.

Maybe when this starts to appear on the FB blabberings of the "other 95%" of the population's social media excretions, it might just "click" with some some of our parochial cousins that not everyone on the planet identifies with their vocabulary, ideologies, values hangups or even spellings.

OTOH, maybe they should be the ones flagging their posts, instead.

HP 100TB Memristor drives by 2018 – if you're lucky, admits tech titan

Pete 2 Silver badge

Re: How many tapes?

> rsync

Sounds like something Cheryl Cole would do.

Pete 2 Silver badge

How many tapes?

> that's 24,000TB

And how, exactly will you do an off-site backup of that?

Even if you just do a device - device copy and you have a 100GBit/s link to your beta site, that's 24 million GByte - and a frightening number of I-O channels needed to keep the connection running at 100%. So, running at 10 GByte/sec will take nearly a month to perform that backup.

Looks like the world will have to re-embrace a 1980's adage: never under-estimate the bandwidth of a van filled with CDs.

Forrester to Facebook: you're SHALLOW and a BAD FRIEND

Pete 2 Silver badge

Kill the competition

So let's suppose that FB accept this guy's recommendations. That they do manage to harness all the lies, wishes, flights of fantasy and misconceptions that FB-ers put in their profiles (and possibly their posts, too). What then?

They become the most success advertising platform the world has ever seen. The accuracy of their targetting produces stupendous results and advertiers eschew all other media in favour of FB. So all the world's advertising money stops flowing to newspapers, TV and magazines and they all go out of business.

Net result: one advertising monster, serving trivia to the world and bugger all print media, serious reporting, analysis, whistle-blowing or reigning-in (though if it kills off the Daily Mail all that might be a price worth paying). However, most of the quality TV that we import (let's forget about ITV and other commercial UK TV as lost causes and not worth their bandwidth) into the UK would be gone,too.

So maybe FB already know how to leverage advertising. Maybe their analysts have performed an in-depth analysis of the consequences and decided that while they could do that, it wouldn't serve their purpose (as they'd also kill off most commercial websites and ad-dependent searches, thereby destroying the attraction of the internet which they rely on) and therefore they choose not to dominate - primarily for their own benefit.

Sometimes you have to let the goose have it's freedom to continue laying those golden eggs.

Win XP? Your PLAGUE risk is SIX times that of Win 8 - NOW

Pete 2 Silver badge

One-sixth of nothing

... is still nothing.

Not every XP instance has an internet connection. Some are used solely for dedicated purposes and wouldn't recoognise a connection if it snuck up and inserted itself firmly in their ethernet port.

For boxes (or virtual instances) like this, XP is still perfectly good. In fact, once you remove, or never install, all the malarky involved with keeping the O/S "safe": a euphemism for working around all the security bugs and bad design, it's storms along, incredibly fast.

Just don't plug anything into it.

You're more likely to get a job if you study 'social' sciences, say fuzzy-studies profs

Pete 2 Silver badge

Re: soft is good, mostly

> I never want to think about rice production in the Po valley again.

OK, I'll bite. What on earth have the Teletubbies got to do with knowing about where countries are?

(It's probably a good thing that I was told at age 12 that I couldn't do geography any more).

Pete 2 Silver badge

Advice given to an ex-colleague

He came out of university with a 1st in history. After a few jobless years he asked his university careers people. They suggested teaching. He asked his college mentor who also suggested teaching and added "if the worst comes to the worst, there's always computing". Which is how he ended up in an IT company.

So far as employing social scientists, this extract from the report is telling:

recruit social science graduates because they have the skills of analysis and communication that our economy and society needs

Though personally, I'd think that what "our economy ... needs" is people who actually make stuff.

Anonymity is the enemy of privacy, says RSA grand fromage

Pete 2 Silver badge

Executive chairman bites himself in the arse

> with "no risk of discovery."

Errm. That sounds to me like a very good definition of privacy, but has nothing to do with anonymity. You don't need to know someone's identity to catch them if they're performing a criminal act - just ask any policeman.

As for giving free reign to "our networks"? Well, no. You can still have security at the point of entry to the network - or even at sensitive nodes within it. However the privacy element still holds: that if someone wants to say or do something once they have been validated and allowed access, their right to do or say that privately can be upheld.

The problem is that the NRSA don't have the skills or ability to properly determine who are the righteous folk who should be allowed in and who should not. That's their failing to keep security up to speed with network development.

Of course, that doesn't mean people should be allowed anonymous access to sensitive, secret or vital infrastructure. But only a damn fool would permit those anywhere near a public network.

I am a recovering Superwoman wannabee

Pete 2 Silver badge

Success in IT

> the jobs are more competitive and demanding with long hours

It does sound to me like most of the pressure is coming from within.

My experience of working (some might even say: succeeding) in IT is to do what you say you will, at the time you have stipulated and with as little drama and error as you can muster. There's nothing wrong with saying "I can't do that" - except the injuries done to personal pride. You might even get thanked for saying-so up front, rather than your inability to deliver becoming apparent when it's too late to fix it (unless you have found someone else to lay the blame on). You will get the occasional arsehole of a boss who puts you down and belittles you for admitting to limitations, but planting some pr0n on his/her computer is an easy fix to that problem (and might even get you to fill the ensuing vacancy).

If you feel pressure to excel - one that my colleagues will testify that I have never felt - then that's something within you, as a person. Nobody else is driving you. Any demands you have (reasonable or otherwise) are ones you place on yourself: either though having agreed to someone else's agenda, or from some sort of self-image that requires you meet some sort of standard.

A successful IT person is a happy IT person. No more, no less (and you can probably scratch "IT" from that aphorism).

The Raspberry Pi: Is it REALLY the saviour of British computing?

Pete 2 Silver badge

Re: Bogosity @Pete

> And if you think an A20 is so much better, and the boards so much better designed, well, try some benchmarks

OK. RPi BogoMIPS = 700 or thereabouts

Olimex A20 BogoMIPS = 1800 a Cubieboard2 with the same spec scores bout the same, provided you have CPU clock scaling turned off.

root@A20:~# cat /proc/cpuinfo

Processor : ARMv7 Processor rev 4 (v7l)

processor : 0

BogoMIPS : 1816.97

processor : 1

BogoMIPS : 1823.52

Pete 2 Silver badge

Bogosity

Despite the oft repeated mantra about teaching children, it's clear that the Pi is completely inadequate for use in an educational environment. Especially when most UK schools (and that's what we're talking about, not some third-world location) have PCs coming out of their ears. If you want to teach programming, drop some educational software on a PC and just get on with it - with the kit you already have.

No. What we see with most of the million-sold Pis - at least the ones that generate publicity - is a split between children using them to play games, people trying to pimp their cars with an on-board "PC" and the home enthusiast who sees it as a cheap way to run XBMC. There are a small minority of experimenters who get an LED to flash and a smaller minority who write some original software - a tiny proportion of whom go on to contribute something new and useful to the community.

However, any serious home SBC-hacker will already have moved on to one of the A20 boards that are so much more powerful and better designed.