l give up.
I know its humiliating to have to ask but did anyone get the "uncle bob" and "puffing billy" references?
Posts by James Anderson
400 posts • joined Thursday 5th April 2007 08:59 GMT
the solution.....
Is not to have big projects. Whether its the public or private sector big projects are more likely to fail than not. Most "succesful" large projects have had "success" redefined beyond all recognition.
So the answer is to knock all grandstanding ego driven large projects on the head before they get any budget.
777 = 666 + 111
By my calculations this makes Larry the Beast++.
Be agraid, be very afraid.
beer
At five quid for a small bottle of tiger per you will need a really good package before you can afford a night out.
Re: Hmmm
Amazon actively supports lone. Authors and has a helpful easy to use system to allow authors to upload their books and sell them for whatever price they choose, including free.
Posted in IPv6 networking: Bad news for small biz
enterprises dont spend the money either
Its not just small companies that balk at the costs if ip v 6.
Most enterprise it departments have done the analysis. Cost high, disruption to business high, risk of outages high, benefits too small to measure.
thankyou google
Went to try this out and discovered my Android keyboard does not have < or >
UNDEAD
IDENTIFICATION DIVISION.
PROGRAM-ID. STILLHERE.
AUTHOR. WEATHERWAX.
PROCEDURE DIVISION.
DISPLAY 'I AINT DEAD' UPON CONSOLE.
STOP RUN.
Java -- J2EE worse than Y2K!
The mess that is J2EE presents enterprises with a worse problem than Y2K.
All those applications written to JE 2 3 and 4 standards are incompatible with each other and the newer cleaner JE standard. Worse still because JSP was "bad" (its still here, still backward compatible, and while it is slightly c**p, its still better than any other attempt at a JE presentaiton layer) architects favored abominations like STRUTS and FACES plus several home grown solutions. All these applications are stuck in rut cannot be upgraded to the latest greatest JE standards and will require a complete re-writes sometime soon.
Completely the opposite.
The highway operators prefer credit cards every time.
No cashier, no securicor van to pick up the 10 kilos of coins, no messing about with change .... no brainer.
The point missed by the EU and a lot of posters is that for the retailer cash is expensive and inconvenient. Consider all the extra work and expense:-
-- you need to keep a till full of notes and coins so you give change to all those shoppers with twenty pound note straight from the cash machine.
-- You need to pay someone to take your takings to the bank.
-- You need to spend hours at the bank counting notes and coins .
-- You become an obvious target for thieves so you require more insurance and need to spend more on security.
-- Worse you become a target for the Inland Revenue and the VAT who never believe anyone where wodges of folding are concerned.
The retailers accept high CC charges because a) its still cheaper than dealing with coins and notes, and, b) turnover increases as they don't lose out on punters whose impulse to buy coincides with empty pockets
Its a boring accounting system.
Not only is it a boring accounting system. Its an accounting system for a government department. It has no commercial value whatsoever.
''
The fact that the feds (over)spent $9.5 million on the software does not actually make it worth anything.
This would seem to be yet another example of Federal government prosecutors abusing there powers to boost there conviction numbers, get publicity and enough promotion to run for a better paying job.
For other examples take a look at:-
http://www.economist.com/node/21542772
http://www.economist.com/node/16636027
"capacitates" is errorational
Profits don't have any capacity so so cannot be capacited.
If you are going to use obscure English then at least make sure its correct usage.
Posted in Activist hedge fund Taconic ups CA stake
another CA price hike?
Most of CAs "enterprise" software is, to put it mildly, poor value for money. Doing tasks the base OS now does for free, or, saving MIPS that are now too cheap to be worth saving.
Hopefully another price hike will persuade management to allocate some resources to sunset the software so they can waste the license fees on something more trendy with a "cloud" in the name.
Oh yes it is!
Compared with the average IT activity which goes on in the UK.
Using a Chinese built machine with an American operating system to configure a German software package? We really are adding value to the UK economy there.
Sadly the games industry is in decline worldwide, pity they did not think of this before we sold our dear Lara Croft to the evil French.
... Thunderbirds should claim prior art!
gee Mr Tracy I er think we had the video calls first.
To be fiar to the Hungarian notary
He was part of the team at PARC which which wrote the excellent word processor that came with the venerable XEROX star machines.
This was one of the best word processors I have ever come across, they, just managed to get everything completely right first time around,
so what
Bluetooth is the most widely distributed but least used technology ever. I have owned six or seven devices that were with Bluetooth chips but never once used them. Apart from the odd phone headset I have rarely seen Bluetooth used in the real world. Why do we have to pay for all this unused silicon?
Posted in RIM stands, staggers, falls again
Am I the only one thinking....
.. a couple more of these high profile outages and no one will notice when our H/A and D/R collapse in a heap and leaving our customers without service.
Addressing the wrong problem.
So they are realeasing a "profile" with about 30% of the features of a standard php install.
The problem is not the number of "features" in J2EE, but poorly designed API's, lack of coherency and plain difficulty of use.
I don't care whether a release contains EJBs or not, I never use them.
Posted in Zombie mobile Linuxes mate
Fell for the urban myth.
Betamax was not better than VHS.
It had better picture quality than early VHS but;
less capacity -- betamax -> 60 minutes (not enough for the average movie!) VHS -> 3 hours
expense -- early betamax machines were significantly more expensive (between 25% and 50% more).
why dont they just give the office to the highest bidder?
Why don't the skeptics just admit the election goes to the candidate with the most money and hold an auction instead.
The bids could be used to reduce the deficit. They wouldn't ha ve to watch all those an.lying advert, and, they wouldn't need to feel guilty about not voting for people they did not like if respect.
Posted in HP: Still choosing the wrong women
l am a CEO get me out of here......
All will become clear when next seasons top rated reality show goes prime time.
It is the only rational explanation.
not anything like a billion
When was the last time you rushed out and bought a Lonnie Donigan or Max. Bygraves?
The market share for 50 year old songs must be infinitesimal and pretty much restricted to soundtrack for the BBCs costumed nostalgia fests .
The industry is probably hoping to screw even more money from.their sixties hay day,
But the only people interested will be old grey and suffering from an income gap.
They are defensive patents.
IBM makes money out of licensing hardware patents.
It generally does not license its software patents. These patents were applied for to stop some shyster filing a patent claim for something IBM developed in an Eastern Texas court.
Not quite true!
If you want an IPV4 client to reach your IPV6 endpoint you can only do this if you IPV6 is on eof the very small subset of possible addresses. I.E. your old IPV4 address padded out with lots of zeroes to make it an IPV6 address.
They got it wrong, they should admit it and go back to the drawing board.
and why should they
There is no (as in zero, absolutely none) benefit in switching to IPV6.
The web sites you use don't support it, your ISP probably doesn't support it, and the little box in the corner doesn't support it.
The whole IPV6 design is broken as they provided no sensible migration path from IPV4. They have been working on this since 1998 and gotten nowhere. I think its time to pull the plug and rethink the whole thing before we really do run out of IPV4 addresses.
Weasel Words
"IPV6 Traffic was up 67%"
They held this IPV6 day because no one was using it and they didn't even manage to double the traffic this non- existent traffic.
Almost nothing + Almost Nothing * 0.67 = Almost Nothing
Posted in Smart Fortwo Electric Drive e-car
while on the subject of cost
How much will an overnight charge add to the leccy bill.
What insane group will your insurance company put this in.
Posted in Amazon jumps the gun on free clouds
normal exchange rate will apply
Expect the normal Amazon exchange rate of 1.00 USD to 1.00 GBP (plus VAT) to apply.
Absolutely
These are implementations of a very simple interface. There are thousands of ways a poor programmers or a room full of monkeys could implement this. But a good programmer using best practice and following the very detailed Java style guide would always come up with something very close to Suns original code.
exchange -- paradise lost
I used to birch about exchange till I switched jobs and got shafted with Lotus Notes.
couldnt agree less
Its much easier to amend a classic CICs Cobol DB2 system than one of these new dangled J2EE ,hibernate systems. And if its c++ then you may as well give up.
Posted in Attachmate gobbles up Novell for $2.2bn
3270 emulators
Do people still pay for thirty flaky terminal emulators and almost X servers?
If you syllable do then I would suggest you install cygwin X and get a superior product for free.
Oops
Oops. Didnt google sell a "google" branded Android phone at the Google shop?
Looks like it just passed responsibility to itself. They could try googling "better lawers".
DEC?
Erm I think you will find DEC predates PARC by a decade or so and was a spinoff from an MIT research lab on the other side of the continent.
Having said that I think the "XEROX invented it than didnt sell it" story is overdone. This industry does not reward pioneers and innovators. Osbourne created the first portable, VIsicalc the first spreadsheet, Ingress the first commercial RDBMS, CPM the first PC OS, ATARI the first dedicated games machine, Wang the first word processor , DEC the first search engine etc, etc, These innovators are all now defunct in spite of creating billion dollar markets which are domiated by MS, Sony and Oracle etc.
I acttually worked with a "Xerox PC" and very nice it was too, the word processor is still one of the best I have ever come across. However they were locked into a "multiple micro" 8 bit 8080 processor archictecture. They overcame the contemporary hardware limitations by designing an OS which used multple processors and mutilple address "segments" to overcome the 64K address space limitations. This approach lost viability when the 386 processor was released - It was simply too much work to re-write the OS for a single 16 bit processor.
Now (un)-improved i-Player
What a mess. Defaults to radio programs, takes about 5 pages to navigate to a given category, they need to get a new UI specialist.
Reveiving Calls on True -- worth it for the novelty value.
Ah, so you need to travel outside Thailand to receive calls on True.
Apple with thier infallable nose for the worse local provider gave the iPhone monopoly to these jokers. So the missus was stuck with a shiny new full function iPhone with all sorts of wonderful Jobsian functions -- except the ability to make or receive phone calls on anything but an intermitent and temporary basis.
Android yes -- Nexus no
Just an HTC model and stick your SIM in. There is no need to involve the "carrier" other than negotiaitng the best data package.
My cute little "magic" phone supports both 3g and EDGE plus quadband voice.
3g has limited coverage where I live so I stuck with my old number and an EDGE connection. Other than establishing how to pre-pay for data access there was no need to involve any carrier.
Have you ever worked out what these "free phone" post-paid contract deals actually cost?
My missis had to sign up in order to get her fashion victim iPhone. It costs four times as much to run as my pre-paid deal and my "magic" was not only considerably cheaper than her god-phone its not actually as good as the HTC kit.
Posted in Lenovo intros ThinkPad X201 series
Apple fanboys eat your hearts out.
The Lenovo X series has been the best available portable for some time now lightweight, low power consumption and real processing power. Its comparable with a high end desk top for most tasks and runs cpu-eaters like eclipse with no problems at all.
The apple thin thing may look kooler if you prefer white to black and they are marginally thinner but they are s l o w.
Another World Record for NOTES
They can now add "longest time spent re-inventing the shared drive " to their coveted "Most hated software of the 20th century" and "Most hated software of the 21st Century" awards.
Will we be receiving hand written spam?
EXCUSE HAND RITTEN LETTER PLEASE, SOMEONE GIVING ME NICE PC WITH ABSOLUTLY AWFUL LOWTUS NUTS, AND I CANNOT NOW SEND EMAIL.
HOWEVER I AM HAVING 2,123,000,000,000,000,000 Scottish Pounds in MOST Royal Scottish Bank THAT I CANNOT ACCESS BECAUSE OF SILLY LOCAL LAW.
I AM KINDLY................
Why stick with such a tarnished brand name?
Consider that one of IBMs most succesful products in terms of cash revenue has had over 20 names over the years OS,OS/VS,OS/MVT.......OS/390, z/OS.
Even the venerable IEBGENER got rebranded to Tivoli.
Why do IBM stick with the hated Lotus Notes brand name?
DOJ -- Corporate Rubber Stamp
Well done "Steelie Neelie".
The EU seems to be the only organisation that take the job of preventing controlling monolpilies seriously.
When was the last time the DOJ blocked or even investigated a proposed merger?
I do think she picked the wrong battleground though. Oracles ownership of Java poses far more serious questions to the software industry as a whole especialy given Larry's history of "freinship" twoards the competition.
Think about it. IBM has an enormous suite of Java based software, Oracle has a few non core Java based products it picked up by accident during its buying spree. Why spend money developing a language tool that is mostly used by the competition?
Surely these ar ethe 2005 results,
Nothing on Dave is newer than four years old.
How could the Dave judges escape thier timewarp and comment on this years festival?
How could Dave viewers make the monumental effort to pick up the phone when they are too lethargic to change channels, or, are actiually engrossed in a six year old 'Have I got News For You' episode.
Life is full of mysteries.
Posted in Not now darling I'm twirping
Is it just me?
I get a gruesomly wonderful Google add for sheep killing machinery from somewhere in china at the top of the Google Adds.
Verity: I really liked your twerp about the Radhish in your teeth. Could you post a phota!
Posted in Larry Wall on the Zen of Perl 6
Re: Perl 6: the classic Second System Effect
Good point.
Except Perl 5 is way better than good enough so there was no great pressure to deliver Perl 6 early.
Its quite hard to make something good better, look at the vast "impovement " to XP that is Vista.
Plus you have got to remeber that Larry et al have day jobs!
Suing your customers
What a great marketing ploy!
Only makes sense if you are about to be bough by CA or on the way to the bankruptcy court.
Posted in 2008's top three touchscreen phones
No lens cover
Whats the point of a peta/giga pixel camera if the lens is exposed all the time?
These things live in pockets and handbags along with coins and door keys. How long before the lens is so scratched its unusable?
Posted in What the heck is an IT Architect anyway?
When you find out - let me know!
Its at the top of my job description. But mostly I just wander around chatting to people and placate various groups who are wedded to ancient technoligies.
BTW; Has anyone managed to get past chapter 2 in hte TOGAF book? I fall asleep after two pages so its taken me two years to get there.
Nice to see our MPs defending civil rights.
Pity they only speak up when its thier own privicy, priviledges and rights which are threatened.
Opinion
David McLeman
My 25 years of comical IT buzzwords
Tim Worstall
Time to take a sniff at the coffee, perhaps
Chris Mellor
Will they have to drag him back like last time?
Popular Stories
Features
Playing the SLA long game
More than just middlemen...
Applications must work for the cloud to float
How a Unix killer crawled from the dot-com bust