Posts by Gulfie

Yet another Rooney

Fantastic idea, fantastic technology. Now somebody give them the budget to get an automotive stylist to give that ugly lump a make-over. That way we won't have to drive it with a paper bag on our heads...

@Steve

> They should both be fined and Phorm should be banned from operating in the UK

Better yet, BT should likewise be banned ;-) which is clearly not practical so how about breaking BT into three separate companies: wholesale/networks, business retail and residential retail. I'm aware that this distinction is already in place, all that needs to happen is for the competition commissioner to instruct BT to sell off any two from three, and be prevented from owning more than a minority shareholding in them for a few years.

It isn't just Phorm that needs to be hung, drawn and quartered for riding roughshod over UK and European law, and customer privacy.

@Sceptical Bastard

You obviously have no experience of working on Government contracts.

I did work on the revenue account for a short while and I think you need a few facts to hand. First, 80% of the staff on that account were TUPE'd across from the civil service and subsequently TUPE'd across to CapGemini when EDS lost the contract. Oh, and a fair proportion of the ex civil service staff were happy to cruise along until they reached retirement and that indexed-linked pension they were entitled to.

Having worked on other Government accounts with EDS and other companies I can confirm what others here have already said - that there are a lot of good people in the company and that on Government contracts it is frequently the customer that initiates changes that subsequently become large overruns. Changing requirements is a favourite - but then so is unclear requirements - why not take a look at the business drivers behind the NHS IT 'revamp' and the formal statement of requirements? Oh, and you can have a go at trying to get a Civil Servant to agree to something that could later be perceived as the wrong decision while you are at it.

CSA suffered from many requirements changes, and EDS capitulated where it shouldn't have done. Armed Forces pay was the largest ever deployment of the COTS software in question and turned out to be not as COTS as it was supposed to be.

Frequently you will find that the IT supplier isn't enforcing change control strongly enough to stop these problems but equally you will find that requirements are so wooly as to allow the customer to argue that work never envisaged is actually in scope...

I also worked on a successful project that was cancelled by a government department just as we finished acceptance testing because they decided they couldn't afford the support costs.

And finally... perhaps you could name me a large IT supplier that has a track record of repeated, successful engagements with UK Government, no delays, overruns, re-costings, legal action, lost data, bad headlines... until recently only PA Consulting seemed to have a clean record but they've lost that now as well.

I work hard to ensure that the work I do for UK Government meets requirements and is of good quality. All too frequently the fate of the systems being developed is sealed at contract signing or by weak project management, risk management or change control. I can't change the way Civil Servants approach their work.

Mine's the one with the open-ended requirements in the inside pocket.

About time too...

I'm sick of the car companies pushing out 'hybrid' cars that are, in effect, a normal car with batteries and motors added on. So you still have the cost, complexity and weight of a large four-stroke engine which just incidentally happens to need much more garage maintenance than a pure electric powertrain ever will.

In my book a Hybrid car simply needs to be one that can charge itself - and you can achieve that with a small generator - say an optimised version of the portable generators already available.

All the designers have to do is ensure that the power output of the generator exceeds the maximum power consumption of the powertrain - or if that is unfeasibly high, limit the car's available power to something slightly less than the generator can produce if the batteries are getting low.

You'd only need a small petrol tank - say two or three gallons at most - to supply the generator and we could still have the option of charging from the grid when the car is at home or in a charging-friendly environment.

Trouble is the mainstream car manufacturers have too much invested in both the use of hydrocarbon based power trains, and the servicing and spares that our complex engines require.

Inevitable...

... but I feel for my ex-colleagues, this is the wrong time to be cut loose. And not just for them, but for me too! I'll be looking for a new contract shortly, I can do without all those extra people in the market...

Black helicopters because by the sound of it, the first most people will know about it is when the axe falls... presumably these will be of the super-silent variety.

Medicine, taste, own...

Rearrange the words... yes I know this isn't quite the same but it is nice to see somebody trying to rip eBay off for once, as they have spent the last year rewriting terms and conditions, and charging structures, to rip off its own users...

Me Likee

Although I'm not so sure about the new icon set. They truly suck.

How to get new kit in quickly...

Check eBay and craigslist... they might even find exactly what they need, fibre included!!!

I prefer the alternate ending...

... watch it here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fSQMg3gc1r4

In any event yes I can see this is a scene setting ad but... that bit where Bill and the shoe fitter nod at each other is just tow-curlingly awful. I wonder what the yanks make of it? Definitely NOT an international commercial...

@AC - 'bit bizarre'

The problems are only half in connection with the up-front public intent of Phorm. What happens if - when - somebody inside the company identifies individuals on the quiet and starts selling on information?

The point is that this is a large body of information that will be collected and there is an associated risk that some of it walks - with identities attached...

@Joe K

"would anyone really shed tears if the bottom line of eMusic (who?) and iTunes is hit?"

Yes. Because if you use any of these services you already know that no one service provider can sell you all music from all record labels. I use iTunes as my main music source but I also use a number of small classical sites which are either (a) significantly cheaper or (b) have recordings I can't obtain from Apple. I also download a lot of podcasts - both video and audio. Will my ISP be providing those too?

If ISPs turn around and say "it's our service or nowt" then two things will happen. 1. a number of restraint of trade suits from online media sales outlets and 2. as with the Phorm debate, a percentage of people who actively buy music online will resent being dictated terms, and will walk.

Imagine your local council sending you a letter: "Dear blah blah, yes you pay your council tax and yes we maintain the roads in your area using your money but from now on you can only drive to your closest Tesco for your food shopping. Food shopping from any other shop will result in punative fines and possibly the building of a large wall in front of your house to prevent you driving your car. At all.

This is all getting very, very silly. ISPs, encouraged by government and the media industry trying to legislate the unlegislatable because copyright owner and ISP business models have not adapted to the changing environment. Rather than trying to grab hold of and control/stymie the situation, companies should evolving.

I'm not talking about piracy, I'm talking about the legal use of a connection I have paid for, to do legal things such as watch catch-up TV, buy films and listed to or purchase music online. Get with the now, guys.

A nice little earner for Google

I used adwords for a couple of years for my sports website, as a way to bring in new punters and have to agree with AC above. From the (small)advertisers perspective I don't think the system provides sufficient value for money, and in the long term I'd expect Google's advertising revenue from each individual advertiser to drop. I was paying between 50p and £1 per conversion into a new account. With average yearly income from users of 10p it just wasn't worth it.

last year I started using adsense and despite AC's claims that everybody ignores the adverts I have to disagree. In the first six months of this year I earned £50 from about 500 click-throughs from 200,000 page views, a click-through rate of about 0.25% - every little helps!

That said, I will never return to adwords, I always regarded it as severely skewed in favour of the management. Have a look at the cost of showing adverts on content - non-google sites. Advertisers pay per advert shown on content, NOT per click - or at least that was the case when I last accidentally used it in 2007 (and it cost me half my advertising budget in just three days with just one sign-up). However as a displayer of content adverts I only get paid if a user actually clicks on the advert. And even then, the gap between the cost of the advert and the income to the content site is huge. In my case:

200,000 pages each showing two adverts at (say) 25p per page view is an income of £50,000. I received just £50 for the clicks, so a nice little earner of £49,950 for Google.

Of course things may have moved on since last year; maybe Google don't charge per ad in the content network anymore...

There are, in my experience, more effective ways for small sites to get traffic. I think where Google scores is that the bigger sites that have a marketing budget can afford to throw large amounts of money at wide-coverage advertising campaigns.

Looking forward to winter...

... when I can tout my iPhone's extra feature - hand warmer - yes mine gets quite warm too. Initially I though this was during charging (not surprising with lithium batteries) but no, its also during use. It must get __quite__ warm because I can feel it through the protective case I'm using...

Flames, well, because I hope I don't get any...

Just waiting for an SSH client

I've no reason to want to unlock my iphone as it does almost everything I need, but I can't deny that an SSH client would be very handy.

Paris, because she doesn't know how to unlock the phone either.

You've all missed the point...

... It is Orange Poland that thought of and paid for this gimmic, not Apple. The rest of these comments are just fanboi and anti-fanboi flames that have nothing to do with the fact that Orange, not Apple, decided to 'prime the pump'.

I've used mobile phones constantly since the early 1990s and various PDAs including Palm, Psion and Windows CE based for ten years, Apple has made an excellent job of the iPhone. Remember they've only been in the Market for little over a year. I find this constant repetition of extremist positions about the phone noting and unimaginative. And yes, this post was made from my iPhone whilst on holiday.

This is what happens...

When you run government IT on a shoestring.

Actually, PA are one of the better consultants working for the government - I've worked with them, EDS, CapGemini, Detica and Capita, all bid bargain basement prices so the service provided is straight from poundland...

The government is reaping what it has sowed...

After over 50 years...

...you'd think they could get a simple rocket launch right by now. Come on guys, how hard can it be? Just pointbit skywards, light the blue touchpaper, and stand well back.

eBay rip-off

I'm an eBay seller. Mainly computer components that I've upgraded. When eBay upped their rates a while ago I stopped using them as my no. 1 sales outlet. When I posted a mild message about the price rise ANC the alternatives. I was threatened with my account (100+ rated) being suspended.

This is a step too far and I'll be looking for an alternate site to take my business. And an alternative to PayPal too.

wrong Tech

I've said it before and I'll say it again... This is the wrong way to return to the moon, we should be using this opportunity to develop new tech, not to simply re-use 1960's tech on a larger scale.

Waste of money. We need something that is (a) reusable and (b) less polluting.

@Roger Pearse

How typical of a god botherer to distort the ruling to their own ends. I am not religious but I'm happy to tolerate religious people who don't come out with statements that boil down to 'my god says back is white, and in defiance of all the facts, I agree with them'.

The point here is that the material used to teach did not present a balanced point of view, and I think the judge made that clear. You can teach all you like from a religious point of view but it still has to be balanced and take the facts as they stand into account. The course material quoted clearly failed to do this, as all reasonable people would agree.

As others have said, believe what you want but don't expect it to count when you apply for higher education.

There are plenty of C of E and RC schools in the UK that churn out perfectly acceptable science and history courses and there is no reason why this should not continue. Please don't confuse discrimination against a religion with discrimination against deeply flawed (educational) teaching methods.

Take the punishment or don't commit the crime...

Sorry, no sympathy for this man. Yes the yanks appear to be throwing the book rather hard, but then that is their way in a post-9/11 world.

Bottom line - be prepared to accept the consequences of your actions, or don't do it in the first case. Hacking was clearly an offence when this guy went alien-hunting, he should have thought about what he was doing and the concequences of getting caught.

In this day and age, hacking US computers from a UK network, the chances of being caught are probably something greater than 99%...

@heystoopid and @David Murrell

The OpenMoko was announced some months before the iPhone and the pre-production hardware has been available since the developer launch which was in early March 2007. HTC (the main sponsor) have not chosen to throw a bundle of money at the development of the hardware and software, hence the long gestation period between pre-production and production hardware.

And the CAD files have been available for months. If you visit openmoko.org you can even register your interest in one or more proposed alternative cases.

I do think the project has its problems, for example there is no over-arching look, feel and behaviour designed for the core applications - unlike the iPhone, which you can get to grips with inside 30 minutes.

@AC Again

...and you clearly haven't been on a UK motorway for several years, the *average* speed has been over 80mph for some time...

Hope your knowledge of ISP bandwidth management is a little more up-to-date.

AAAAArrrrgggghhhhhhhhhhhhhh......

No, please, use a dictionary...

Post-Modernist Irony

Clearly this is an expression of post-modernist irony, the iPhone owner is able to purchase a work of art and display it on his or her phone... the next version will allow you to choose your own images and it will automatically shuffle between them... no, hang on, that's called the Photos application.

But seriously, this merely demonstrates a flaw in the whole app store model - there is no 'demo mode' available unless the developer chooses to ship both a crippled and non-crippled version of an application. Perhaps Apple could have a time-locked demo mode for apps that are offered with a demo, the user gets a developer-defined period of time to try the app and must then purchase it to get further access.

I'm not buying apps, not because I don't want any, but because I have no idea how good they are.

Any suggestions as to how the bling app would have a 'demo' mode? A flawed ruby perhaps?

Paris, because even she can recognise a rip-off when she sees one

It's not just the police making it up on the spot...

... a jear ago I was trying to take photographs around the London Eye and the 'security' managing the queue to get on got very threatening for no obvious reason at all.

The strange thing was that they refused to give any reason for trying to prevent me from taking any photographs - and I wasn't even pointing the camera at the damn thing...

About time too. Is the language spec fixed yet?

Does this mean that Sun has put a stake in the ground and fixed the JavaFX language specification? I was at a demo earlier this week where the presenter had done a last-minute update to the lastest beta version only to find that half of his pre-prepared demo code no longer compiled.

And what of the much hinted at cross-platform compatibility? One language to describe the presentation layer to work on three different platforms - mobile, web and browser? We have foundations of the web/desktop compatibility through Java 6 update 10, but I want to see a J2ME runtime.

Sun has very, very nearly missed the boat on RIA but if it can allow us to write one presentation layer that will run in and adapt to all three environments, then they are really on to a winner, provided the drag and drop tooling is also available.

@Mark_T

I agree with you.

When I passed my PPL, one of the tests was to wortk out the centre of gravity of my plane with a given load in the 'cargo area' and a given number of passengers and approx. weight.

If you put too much weight in the wrong place, the Centre of Gravity goes outside limits and you'll either be nose heavy (safest because you probably won't get off the ground, or won't be able to climb) or tail heavy (dangerous, you'll probably get off the ground but stall during climb-out or a turn).

Crash and burn, because that'll be the result...

No, fatigue _IS_ an issue

You can't say that "fatigue is not an issue". The FAA will disagree in a big way with this statement. Fatigue of flight components is always an issue because an airframe isn't completely rigid (ever watched out of your window on take-off and seen the wingtips of your 737 moving up and down in relation to the rest of the plane?) and those components that move around will start to suffer fatigue.

This is why all major aircraft components have a fatigue limit, and why they are replaced well before they reach that limit so as to avert a fatigue-induced airframe failure. I think what Mr Rutan is trying to say is that the designed-in fatigue limit is nice and high.

Incidentally fatigue limit (particularly on the engines) is the other factor, other than money, that will limit the amount of display flying that the recently returned to flight Vulcan will be able to undertake before it is permanently grounded.

Sounds good!

I like the sound of Apple extending their Product Red range although for mysel fI'm perfectly happy with my black second coming.

How long before you can remove the back of your iPhone 3g (those screws in the base) and send it away to have it airbrushed? Sounds like a market opportunity there, could also have it laquered to keep it scuff resistant too...

Whatever medication this guy is on...

... I want some. But he can keep his software ;-)

Menacing illegal filesharing, or menacing Bittorrent users?

There was a time when I downloaded copyright material, but thanks to iTunes I can now buy my favourite individual tracks without shelling out for a whole album, and thanks to the various catch-up TV services on the net I now don't need to download that missed episode of Doctor Who. And of course I have my digital TV card so I can record most of what I want to keep long-term straight on to my PC anyway.

My use of bittorrent these days is legal downloading - copies of VMWare OS images is the biggest slice. Will my ISP (plusnet aka BT) do some leg work to find out what it was I downloaded before hitting me with a warning? Of course, that would involve interception of my traffic and/or downloading the same torrent themselves - after all who's to say that a torrent named 'ubuntu complete archive 4' isn't actually Dr Who series 4 complete in HD? Or visa versa - something that might sound like an illegally shared file might in fact be legal - "Windows XP SP2" could be the entire OS (definitely illegal) or just the service pack (probably legal). Go wrestle with that one, ISPs.

All Bittorrent users are about to be tarred with the same, very large, brush because the alternative is commercially unsustainable - the ISPs would have to inspect every torrent and decide if it is legal or illegal. Cheaper to provide that extra bandwidth we were all told we have, methinks.

I don't think that this approach will work long term - once a couple of legal file sharers have been incorrectly pursued and then sue in return. Either the ISPs will stop. After all, they can't block unidentifiable traffic - for example running Bittorrent using SSL on port 443, the ISP can't tell what it is, the traffic looks no different to any other SSL traffic, just that there is more of it.

It's long past time that the copyright holders - here I mean mainly the music and film industry - move on from the outmoded licencing terms that they are trying to enforce. Copying and distribution will continue with or without current file sharing technology and the internet.

Cory Doctorow's "Little Brother" explores the concept of large-scale encrypted information exchange and the likely impact of attempts to control what information is shared via the net. An interesting read.

@joe

Your knowledge is clearly 1998 vintage, Java in is an excellent performer on the server and is used in many, many mission critical systems where scalability and reliability is important. Ask any bank in the square mile. You then go on to quote a hardware problem as a good reason not to run Java. And PHP would have fixed your fibre controller problem would it? I think not...

Mission Critical doesn't just mean that it 'just runs', it means that you can scale out horizontally across multiple servers, scale up within your servers, have failover, reliability, security... all of these features are core to Java Enterprise which is why it is used in so many back office systems. Know your facts before you flame... which is why I've not criticised PHP.

PS @Martin - JBoss is owned by Red Hat, I can't see Ubuntu adopting the JEE server of a rival...

Can we call the next one...

... "mining ship red", allowing us to have "mining ship red dwarf" enter a perfectly serious conversation between astrophysicists?

OK, not a very good joke and yes, a red dwarf is a classification of star, but come on, it's like NASA calling a shuttle 'Enterprise'...