What?

Still no 'I'm not afraid of Bill Ray" t-shirt????

:)

Name and shame

El Reg - time for some investigative journalism....

Let's discover the names of these witless individuals at T5 and have their names and photographs posted. The public need to be given information to protect themselves from such idiots - if only so that we can be sure to avoid their queue next time we have to suffer the hellhole of Heathrow.

Bloody annoying is what it is...

And if you choose not to install Safari / iTunes the auto update nags you once per week - regular as clockwork with a middle-of-the-screen-interrupting-whatever-you-were-doing window. The only way to get rid of it (which I have taken) is to remove all traces of Apple software from my PC and I now run the free alternatives.

Shame to see Apple, who do so many things very well screw something like this up so very badly.

Free?

One area of this discussion that made me chuckle was the assertion that LAMP is free. Well that kinda depends on the kind of site you're building.

Yes - when building my own websites, I used LAMP. It did indeed cost me £0.00 and I'm very happy with it thank-you very much. The setup copes perfectly with the traffic it gets (not much).

However, if I were to spec out a major site, where downtime is measured in thousands of pounds per hour my choices change:

Linux - yes, happy to go with this. But I'm whacking on RedHat so I'm assured of service packs and support. All of sudden it's not free anymore, support = $1500 per year.

Apache - Love it to death, and as a "no brains", front end server it still gets my vote.

MySQL - Oracle isn't a shoe-in anymore, so yes, I'll stick with MySQL, however I'm now looking at Enterprise versions. These range in price from €480 to €4000 per server per year. Not quite free...

PHP - Am I going to build a large, complex application in PHP? Erm... No! All my business logic is getting built in Java (where I can find the skills) and is going on a separate application server. Again, I'm going to be faced with the choice of "premium" options of WebSphere or WebLogic or I'll go down the JBoss route from my friends at RedHat again, who will take another $4,500 per server per year off me.

@ Giles Jones - there are many "experts" willing to help me tune and tweak my LAMJ (J=java) as well, and those experts are no cheaper than the MS boys.

Count me as a fan of both LAMP and LAMJ, but for the "big stuff" it is certainly not free.

Bringing it back to the original article... Would I use any MS stuff in the above setup? Probably not (although I'd give SQL Server a serious look.)

Quality & Price

I've had a DAB at home for over a year. I can testify to the statements above about generally poor quality:

BBC stations *in general* are OK, but are often in Mono...

Independent stations (such as XFM) are only listenable about half the time, the other half suffers horrible digital breakup and everything sounding like it is being played through a Dalek.

... and I live in an area that the BBC says I am "very likely [to] have high quality coverage"

In contrast my FM radio in my car the reception is flawless.

My message to the select committee - "I don't care about having 300 channels, just improve the quality!"