Posts by Tom 38

I thought the same as you, slightly annoyed new apps won't install, old apps might misbehave, but I did "fork out" for an upgrade; when I changed my phone contract from a iphone subsidy one to a cheapo contract (£42pcm -> £15pcm). Three offered me an ipad air for £30 upfront, £25 pcm, with 15GB/month data contract, so basically what I was paying beforehand.

Perhaps it would be cheaper over the long run to get a wifi ipad air directly from Apple, but that plays down the value of the mobile contract - 4G, GPS, plentiful data, free data roaming..

Re: I call shenanigans

I had a Logitech G7 that lasted me 3 years before the batteries started failing, followed by a G5 that lasted 4 years, but when I came to replace that I found they no longer make an equivalent mouse - they all have ridiculous grips, where is the classic "large logitech" shape of the mx518, G5/7?

Instead I went with the G400, which seems the current closest. It's cheap and nasty and breaks with any moderate amount of abuse. I've been through three of them in a year and a half (two warranty replacements). At least it is cheap, £25 or so.

Re: I'm not surprised they are increasing their prices

They constantly delivered them to me also, when I lived in places that they did not even serve.

Presumably, they must know what locations they serve, so why they felt the need to send me weekly invitations to sign up for the worst sort of broadband available to me at that location, a poorly managed rebranded WBC from BT Wholesale, I have no idea.

Re: Take a note from the US

Also resulted in the total collapse of the CDC's public network due to a sudden 10,000ish fold increase in incoming web traffic when it went viral, so it's perhaps not the best idea to emulate.

Call me crazy, but shouldn't the public website of a body that prepares for disasters be somewhat capable of sustaining a sudden peak in traffic, such as might occur after a disaster?

vim doesn't need to be re-written in a different language, it works perfectly as is.

Re: OCZ!!!!!!

Their new stuff is very nice - I bought some of their old stuff (Vertex 3 and Vertex 4) when it looked like they were going bust, factory refurbs with a 3 month warranty, scan were practically giving them away. I mainly use them as optional read caches, so it only degrades performance if they die.

Inevitably one bricked, inevitably right after 3 months. By this point Toshiba had bought OCZ, and they replaced it no questions asked with one of their modern Vertex 460, which has worked perfectly ever since.

Re: Erm...

Did you even read what you quoted? Fixing it would cost £97m more than it cost them to settle, ie £327 million. The clue is in the words that say that...

The companies that are paying for them don't go bust?

Don't worry, marketing is 50% about making up bullshit to sell your sizzle, and 50% measuring the effect of that bullshit so that you can spend at least the same again next year on more bullshit, so ad campaigns are well tracked for value for money.

Re: Not surprising

People are flocking to "containers" as though they are some magical new feature that has only recently become available, but they are no different than BSD jails, Solaris Zones - which themselves are not much more different than a chroot.

With Docker, although you get native performance, you still miss things like memory overcommit and IO management that you get with a VM and so you can get less performance from a single box.

Docker allows you to split up and isolate applications, but if you couldn't run all those applications on a single host without Docker, then you still cannot with Docker. With a VM you have more control over how IO resources are allocated so that all applications can be run with their desired performance profile.

Re: Maybe I'm reading that last set of graphs wrong...

It is global gender at Apple. So globally, 70% of people who work for Apple are male. This figure is then classified further, eg in tech positions.

Re: Please refrain from NAT66

The counter is specious - you do not need X because we have provided Y which is ideologically better but requires updating all your hardware and software and relying on a daemon on one box correctly informing everything else it needs to be updated.

Re: Mr Hawking – Over-rated - Big Bang Mythology

Don't fall for it, don't fall for it, don't fall for it, don't fall for it....

I remember the huge fuss, when some eminent Italian scientists said Einstein was wrong, a few years ago, I instinctively knew they were mistaken, turned out they had got their sums a bit wrong.

You cretin. They 100% did not say that "Einstein was wrong". What they said was "We've done this experiment, it was supposed to show us X, but instead we're noticing that it suggests Y. We've re-checked all our sums and measurements, and we can't figure it out - here is our data".

You've para-phrased that as "cocky scientists are always wrong and I can use my gut to say whether they are full of shit or not". Cretinous cretin.

Re: Don't talk to the police

OTOH:

You do not have to say anything. However, it may harm your defence if you do not mention when questioned something which you later rely on in court. Anything you do say may be given in evidence.

Wikipedia says that the "harm" may be thus:

Adverse inferences may be drawn in certain circumstances where before or on being charged, the accused:

fails to account on arrest for his presence at a place.

Keeping quiet is not always the best policy as they have you coming and going.

Re: Wait... what?

the police can/should do something about *Facebook*

Oh, I wish they could....

Seriously, running is optional - just eat less and move ever so slightly more and the weight falls off.

Running is not a necessary part of losing weight, but once you've lost the weight it is then good for getting fit.

Re: Gigabit fibre optic broadband

I think you have misunderstood what I was saying. For the cost of building a publicly subsidised high speed railway to Birmingham, we could easily pay for running lovely fibre to everyone in the UK. So:

But what about people stuck out in the countryside? Who's going to lay fibre to them?

Us, the taxpayer. We can make the operational costs by charging ISPs to access subscribers.

Re: I'm shocked

I'm shocked that you think they are doing something right, and not just parroting what their favourite Google lobbyist told them.

Re: What, not how

It's good that things like this still do come out of the House of Lords. When it was hereditary and appointed lords sitting (which I do not approve of), the ones that attended did so because they were interested in the topics and did (usually) give short shrift to political crap that comes up from the lower house, because although they were notionally arranged in to parties, they often did not toe the party line.

The new system gives us mainly politicians in the upper house, and mainly appointed Lords (which I definitely do not approve of). Because they are political, they owe their allegiance to the party, and you end up with them rubber stamping things if they think it will make their party more electable.

Re: Selectivity

Hypothesis

Test

Conclusions

The problem is that they are incapable of actually losing the plot - they make so much money from other parts of their business that they can continue to spaff it up the wall on projects that lose money, or at least use it inefficiently.

If I was an MS shareholder, I'd want the company broken up in to smaller chunks, and I'd sell everything that wasn't part of the enterprise cash cow. Bing, Xbox, IE, winphone, surface all are poor performing business, and they are allowed to under-perform because enterprise props everything up.

If Bing is/can be so good, spin it out so that it can grow without constantly propping it up. Time for the kids to move out.

Re: CPU

Why assume anything? If they had proved all their hardware was secure, would you have lead with "I assume they've proved their kernel is secure too"?

Even if they haven't, it is one tick box off on the way to proving every component is secure, which is note- and praiseworthy surely?

Re: [no payment was supplied]’

He's in the USA, and so he hasn't "paid for Sherlock". I'm pointing out he can watch them all, for a few cents per episode - and he says that's too much to pay. Do try and keep up.

Well done for ignoring the argument. He may be in the US; I'm not, and me downloading Sherlock to watch is just as criminal as him downloading it - it is an example to demonstrate the idiocy of the law.

If you take away freedoms we've enjoyed because technology has enhanced the utility of those freedoms, don't be surprised when we do not respect those laws.

This is true, if only somewhere in the EU made things.

Re: Common sense failure

Why stop there? Don't just fire everyone, also kill them, and burn and salt the bodies..

If you don't like the "work from home" example, say every Friday everyone knocks off 30 minutes early. This goes on for months, everyone takes part, suddenly 4 of them are sacked for skivving off work early.

Re: Seriously folks

I don't know about ebay, but paypal require the executor to provide proof of death, proof of executorship and identification, at which point they will issue a cheque in the deceased's name to form part of the estate.

Re: Are you implying...

I'm thinking of just saying "fuck it" and upgrading to 10 GigE at home. Pushing data around at gigabit speed when the source and sink will both read/write at least 4 times quicker is tedious.

Re: WTF

It wasn't a paper system, it was replacing an electronic system (which might also have used paper records I suppose, but it was an electronic system at heart).

The problem with government IT is there are hundreds of chiefs to keep changing what the thing is supposed to do.

Finally, something is produced, and it is put in front of the people who are expected to use it, and they find that they cannot use it efficiently because it has been poorly specified and somehow mutated to do something that was never originally in spec, and so they continue to use the old software, at least for some tasks.

This means that you cannot then remove the old software, and so instead of delivering cost savings, the project has delivered extra costs.

It all comes down to poor management and design processes, which still happen a bit in the private sector, but not as much - if you screw up, you probably no longer have a job - so in the private sector we spend a lot of money making sure that our processes are good and deliver continuous improvement.

In the public sector, train-wrecks like this happen constantly, and so it seems it is not such a judgement on someone who led/designed these failed projects, they seem to land another one immediately after presiding over hundreds of millions of pounds in losses.