Posts by Jim 59

Digital photography sucks. Kinda.

Okay in engineering terms, it is far and away better than old fashioned "film" photography.

But that doesn't take human nature into account.

With digital, you end up with 10 billion photos, mostly poor, that nobody ever looks at. You back them up for your whole life. Once in a while you show somebody a tiny, shaky, upside-down image on your iPhone, while yelling at them how fantastic modern life is. You go to a party and all you see is cameras where there should be happy faces.

All is vanity

There is a tendency all industries to think we are better than anyone else, because we don't really know what other industries do. If they spent a while looking into the coding challenges behind running a power station, simulating a logic circuit with 2 billion transistors, debugging an air traffic control system, controlling CERN etc., Wall Street techs might have to re-calibrate their self image.

If it is like the City of London, then the inflated salaries offered by Wall street exist because of the market: the job does not require the best brains, it requires people who are willing to put up with the large drawbacks on offer: huge, unpleasant commute on dirty, overcrowded public transport, long working hours, poor treatment, unpleasant working experience, and a pisspoor quality of life. No wonder they drink.

"what they left behind was so convoluted, overly complex, and incomprehensible to anyone but themselves that the remaining team members, all highly skilled, had no choice but to scrap it completely and start from scratch — months of labour and tens of thousands of dollars (at least) up in smoke"

Wall Street doesn't know about basic software engineering ?

Recommendations

Samsung e1170 - about £20 on with Orange free airtime but can never be unlocked.

LG KG 225 - very small flip phone

IT Crowd

With a very few exceptions, women and girls are, on the whole, not interested in engineering as a career. In order to get more female engineers, you are going to have to get teenage girls less interested in horses and more interested in electronics. Good luck with that. Teenage boys on the other hand, can easily become obsessed with technical subjects, as did many Reg readers did in their youth. This is nothing to do with intelligence, it is just "la differance".

Neither should girls be pushed into engineering if they don't want it, or made to feel dumb if they don't become the next Linus Torvalds or Marie Curie.

Hear, hear

Couldn't agree more with this article.

Good

Interior looks really attractive. Satnav has the advantage of cheap map updates, maybe?

50 Mpg is a little poor. As others have said, for maximum MPG, go for a diesel Focus. Technology means you have to PAY for food fuel economy, as the smallest/simplest engines aren't the most frugal.

Sheevaplug etc

Doesn't seem to compare well with Sheevaplug, pogoplug etc. And if it has a spinning disk, it is not silent.

Daft

So the IBM is somewhat slower, half as expensive but 20 times smaller. That's a "hands down" victory only in the logic IBM's sales dept.

"Most OLTP databases are < 1 Tb"

Any examples ?

Department for the completely obvious

We are in the biggest ever global recession. Everything is slumping, from rockets to pencil sharpeners. Economies are sick around the globe. Greece could soon be starving.

And now shock news from Gartner: "...Unix market is in a slump..." and revenues are down at IBM.

Never owned a smartphone but

- comments like this put me off:

"And the battery lasts a full day with ease"

and in the Verdict:

"...outstanding battery life "

Well written article, good pictures.

"...likelihood of a civil servant leaving my 'strong' password on a USB stick in the back of a taxi or a sacked call-centre underling in Bangalore selling my 'strong' password to the highest bidder."

Passwords don't work like that. The Man does not have your password, so he can't leave it on a USB stick. The System does not store your password, so the underling can't sell it.

Declaration of interest

"Michael Keegan is Executive Director,Technology Product Group at Fujitsu UK and Ireland Region"

The author really should have declared his interest at the outset of the article. Could The Register please ensure that happens in future. As a reader I need to differentiate between editorial/comment/advocacy/advertising and what-have-you.

Given the Author's job, the tenor of his article is unsurprising. I have nothing against Fujitsu, but they don't want to lose business to SMEs, and the views here expressed are redolent of that old IBM slogan - "Nobody ever got sacked for buying IBM". Mr Keegan referring to himself as "We..." does not help matters.

Dear Mr Putin

Let's have less GLONASS and more GLASNOST from you m'lad

Artificial Intelligence

The only film I ever saw where the cinema audience audibly hated it. About 40 minutes from the end, the film seems on the point of ending. Audience relief is palpable and we are about to leave. When it didn't end, the audience jeered, only to be punished with another 40 minutes of tedium.

Films that employ the worn out "robot wants to be a real person" theme are tiresome anyway (except for Terminator 2). Basically remakes of Pinocchio. Why would a robot want to be a human? Did the director think of addressing that ?

Sorry for the skepticism

Companies with fancy sounding names have been selling small speakers that "sound just like big ones" since 1973. They *all* sound like small speakers.

Wise article

When it's at home, my laptop is attached to a 21" monitor and proper keyboard. The built in 15" feels restrictive by comparison. Even 21" feels too small nowadays.

Desktops are sexiest, most upgradable and generally better at every thing than laptops, which are better than tablets, which are better than smart phones.

Laptops good for DVD viewing ? If you like whirring, clanking, and sitting in an office chair to watch your films.

Oh Nokia

What the hell is a company like Nokia doing not being at the Android cutting edge. And getting into bed with an old dinosaur like MS ? It seems to go against all Nokia values.

I worked for Nokia '94-97 and it seems to be now the exact opposite of what it was then, in every way. The whole company seems to have gone through a crappification process.

Jack Tramiel

Never owned a Commodore but still remember that name from the mid 80s, when he was an easily recognisable industry figure. As C Hill pointed out, good picture at http://justclaws.atari.org/images/tramielf.jpg

Durham

Wasn't Edgecombe based on Durham (small) ?

collection of wafers etc.

Are you Oliver Cromwell or Henry VIII ?

Hey

Just pay your tax.

Jail

I watched the video and the guy's conduct is appalling. I am nontheless disquieted by the fact that you can be jailed in the UK just for saying some appalling words on a single occasion. Oppression is dangerous for all of us, even if it seems right at first. The guy is frightened when he realizes his mistake, even apologizing 7,8,9 times.

Not sure if the chap is a genuine racist or just a sweary dickhead, probably the latter.

Flight

I congratulate the guy for making an effective, fun and entertaining video. It may have fooled a couple of Guardian readers, but noone who studied a science beyond the age of 12. Any fule know humans can't power flight in that way for the same reason birds have proportionatly huge chest muscles. Look at a pidgeon - breast muscles bigger then your biceps.

Unless your breast muscles are the size of a car, you're not flying anywhere, not by flapping.

Snails pace

What a load of nationalised horlicks. Brings back memories of when BT was the GPO and the only phones we could get were grey. They are showing similar flair over this "rollout".

Tablets/pads

How do you hold an iPad ? Put it on a flat surface ? Hold it up and get a tired arm ?

To paraphrase -

"The law (established by the legal profession) says that you must engage lawyers under a closed shop to persue any percieved infringement in this field no matter how trivial or ill-founded, or lawyers at a later date reserve the right to jeopardize and confiscate your trademark."

The Hobbit

It would seem reasonable and fair to remove Wood's image from the loyalty card - that image is derived from the films after all - and otherwise leave the pub unchanged.

Unfortunately the legal profession seems to be about "how to make maximum money", and little else. It is certainly of no benefit to the Tolkien estate to rename the pub, nor is it in the public interest, nor will it favourably affect the copyright holder's fortunes in any forseeable way. It will simply keep lawyer's busy for several months at $300 per hour, talking about legalistic trivia which they themselves have enacted specifically to fill time. A socially useless closed circuit.

Radio

My FM radios are almost impossible to tune in for the last 3 months. I guess that's when the neighbours got power line networking. Just sayin'.

PC/Laptop, iPad, tablet and smart phone are complementary products in the ever expanding tech marketplace. One does not always replace the other. However, it is part of a senior marketeers job to say that they do, or will, to make a splash and get attention on his/her firm. That's fair enough.

Tablets are exciting, but the boring truth is that they are unsuitable to replace PCs because they don't have a keyboard.

Grauniad

Today's Guardian takes the expected view that these people are zorro-like heroes because they smash other people's computers. Why is a person a dick if they rob/vandelize property, but a hero if they trash other people's computers?

The terms 'genius' and 'brilliant' are bandied as usual, and the back story is also somewhat familiar: Disgruntled IT worker, a bit inadequate, unemployed, has a hack. Thinks he is brainier than the cops, his old boss, FBI, everyone. He isn't, and winds up in custody.

If anyone was clever here, it was the engineers at the FBI, but that idea is not something the Guardian could compute.

Lights

Hey look we stuck some lights on it

Seems dear

Looks a bit pricey compared to sheevaplug (£80) and others.

Hey Vodafone

Just pay your tax

TV

In some ways it is unfortunate that we are shoving unidirectional broadcast traffic onto a voice-optimized packet switched network. You end up with something not very goot at either and very overburdened.

Overboard

Samsung fell out of my pocket and overboard while rowing on a Lake in Milton Keynes. Afterwards invested in one of those waterproof pouches that keep your phone dry and float.