Posts by JimmyPage

Sounds fair to me ...

although I can forsee a slew of downvotes ...

The art of the bleeding obvious ..

This isn't the 90s, or even the 2000s. The market dynamic has changed - forever. Nobody (and I mean NOBODY) I know is in any kind of hurry for a *new* smartphone. I have my (works) Win7.8 HTC. My lad has a Nokia 5800, and wifey[1] has her HTC Android. The only person I know who does regularly update their phone is the (retired) mother in law. Who's drunk the Apple kool-aid, so will only get the latest iPhone.

So Win8, Win9, Win10 with four "M's" and a silent "Q" are a total and utter irrelevance.

It's the same for desktops. We're all running 4 year old machines, with Win7. Absolutely no need to upgrade.

There's a certain schadenfreude here. Your Microsofts and Apples et al had a field day when the IT landscape was new, unknown, and scary. But it's evolved into a mature market now, and all those old-fogies who were left behind by the tech rush are now your greatest assets, as they are much more familiar with working in a mature market. If you want to sell Windows8, you need to get someone who's successfully sold cheese, or pot noodles on board - they'd have a better idea than someone who's only ever done tech.

Slightly OT

but does anyone else get a warm glow at the thought of Rupert Murdoch being hacked ?

Prior art ?

The city centre PCWorld/Currys has a very similar look, only in dark, muted colours .....

Versions: does anyone remember Lenny Henry ...

years ago, he commented on the difficulty in buying a record[1] ...

"Do you want the 12", the the extended 12", the club mix, the extended club mix, the club house mix, the 12" club house mix featuring Sir Skankalot, the dub house mix ....."

"Just give me the one where they got it right."

[1]Ask your parents. Or their parents.

And yet ...

there are at least 5 cats that prowl around my neighbourhood. So why do we still see rats ?

Copy protection ? Really ?

I'm struggling to recall the progam (yes kids, we called them "programs", not "apps") you could get which would copy "copy protected" disks. Had "II" in the name, "CopyIIPC" ? rings a bell.

In those days, copy protection usually involved bypassing the BIOS to get the disk controller to access track 41 ? If I could be bothered, I'd dig out my MS DOS 3.00 programmers guide (which cost about £60). I also had a schematic of the FDC subsystem, with codes.

Could this be translated into sales ?

In the same way *some* people are willing to pay a premium for "organic" food, could there be a group of users who would pay more for a product guaranteed to be made ethically[1] ? Possibly by being built in the UK. Or US ?

[1]Yes, I'm aware there's the provenance of the raw materials ...

Darwin in action ?

fewer sperm = fewer mouths to feed = more likely survival for the rest ?

IANAB, but I'm sure that population reduction in the face of adverse environmental factors is one valid strategy.

Trusting trust

fascinated to read this, and it goes much deeper.

How can you know the actual CPU you are running on can be trusted ? How do you know there isn't some sneaky opcode which can be used to leverage an attack ?

To all those smug commentards who boasted about having the source code to a system: did you get a schematic of the CPU, and logic arrays ?

50+ posts ..

and no one has mentioned the best way to make something invisible ...

Cloak it in someone elses problem

(credit to Douglas Adams)

Ofcom, not ATVOD

or whoever ?

A thought provoking argument

and one that should be required reading for anyone who thinks wind and solar power are going to save us.

Kinda reminded me of the part of "Apollo 13" where they have to find the power to fire up the Command Module ...

A lot of wasted effort in all these comments

at the end of the day, telcos need people to make calls to make money. They will not do anything which reduces the number of calls made.

Have DEFRA released their report on how to make turkeys vote for Christmas yet ?

Suddenly I feel good to be British ...

The original letter was priceless enough, but to get such a marvellous reply ...

We need the odd story like this - and I would say it's worth a tiny bit of my tax money to cheer everyone up a bit. Maybe this can be included in Camerons happiness index ?

My 2p worth

When our lad was choosing his GCSEs in 2009, we had an open evening at school, where local Universities turned up to encourage pupils to think about choices that would lead to higher education.

One particularly odious character told us of a recent graduate who worked as a "political economist" for a US bank, earning over £40,000 a year (in the US) . He really didn't like me very much, when I put my hand up, and asked if he could give us an example of a graduate who (a) was helping the UK economy and (b) was doing something useful - like medicine, or engineering AND earning £40,000.

Priceless

Many years ago, a company I worked for had offices in a really out-of-town (nearest store 1mile) technology park.

One day we had a frantic phone call from the office manager. Thieves had broken into our offices, and then used our computers to break the windows into the office across the hall, and steal their computers.

Oh well

paws for thought

The day a site mandates using Facebook to log in

is the day I stop using it.

Oh great

every time theres a cert snafu, you get a rash of browser warnings which will (correctly) light up helpdesk switchboards for weeks. Then you have to explain to users it's OK to ignore the warning. And therefore weaken the point of the warning in the first place.