Gonna need more than an apology...

It's pretty criminal if you ask me to so carelessly identify users like that.

I'd expect not only a whopping great fine from the ICO, but a renewed debate on Net Neutrality for mobile (should be no different to fixed) and also a kick-back to all O2 customers with a smartphone.

Given that it is worth about $17 for a website to know the identity of a user, tripling this to $51 worth of kick back to all smartphone customers should be the minimum. I'd expect that should be some a break from monthly charges, though O2 will probably think some free apps or other totally useless 'value-back' will suffice. It won't.

O2 should be in real trouble here.

Wait a sec...

... both the status quo and the 'new' have it wrong.

First and foremost, the Gregorian calendar is wrong with the concept of a leap year. The earth takes 365.25 days to revolve around the sun. We can make an existing 'day' 1.00068493150685 days without too much impact. That fixes the February 29th every four years issue, and just never have it.

Now leap seconds. As has been said, the earth's spin on its axis around the sun causes the issue with leap seconds. The issue at hand is what 'time' sunrise and sunset happens. As we know full well in Britain, getting up in darkness and leaving work in darkness in winter is a spirit-sapping experience. The point being is while it will take a good 100 years before there is a noticeable difference, given that at some point in time in the future (granted, very, very far in the future) under the proposed no-leapsecond time you will go to sleep at 11 pm in the UK and the sun rises, it's not representative of 'time'. By this virtue, technology 'because it's easier' doesn't help solve the problem.

Personally, just state that at 12 midnight on New Years, the second that strikes is X+Y seconds, and if Y is a +2 second or we miss 1 second for a given year, it happens. The entire world is drunk out of their minds, so who the hell cares for +/- 1 second? Certainly not technology, if it's internationally proclaimed that all time is 'fixed' at a given point in the calendar, then technology can do what it's designed to do: serve humankind. And in the meantime, you and I can continue moaning about British winters, and in the meantime have to drink a little bit faster or slower by a matter of a second or two every New Years.

Does it matter? It's all relative. I say, cheers!

Larry not happy

...with profit warnings for Oracle and with the TomorrowNow settlement and SAP still posts well, one can only guess what is happening in the higher floors of Oracle Towers.

Not defending Intel, but...

It does work, they just didn't get Mooly's machine updated with the proper demo in time: http://www.anandtech.com/show/5359/intel-confirms-working-dx11-on-ivy-bridge

Registry

The actual domain name doesn't matter so much (though I agree that using a completely different domain like nwolb.com is just dumb from the bank's operations).

What actually matters is the registry that controls the .bank is not a US concern like the most untrustworthy entity of them all: Verisign. In other words, DNS and SSL need to be managed from a far more trusted source that is UK based, and one that has public oversight for this to be OK.

Totally agree

Generally if I see 'Computer Science' degree on a CV, especially if said person was in education after around 1995, then I treat them with a large barrel of salt.

I simply cannot fathom how CompSci grads can come out of university not knowing practically anything about the hardware or any system knowledge. How on earth can you call yourself a programmer if you don't know how to fully exploit the hardware you're given (in my case an absolute joy as we control the hardware we supply our systems on, not dissimilar to Apple - *this* is a luxury few devs can afford!)

These are questions CompSci grads couldn't answer in my interviews:

1. What is the difference between the heap an the stack?

2. How and why would you implement a semaphore?

3. What is a register in the computer?

Tell me honestly, are these questions ridiculous? Because the amount people I've turned away beggars belief.

Seriously, if you don't know a little bit of C++ to take advantage of say SIMD optimised matrices in addition to your general high level language, i.e. Java/C#/Python (delete as appropriate), then as far as I'm concerned you'd be a liability to the team.

So...

Will the spin off of the PC business be called Compaq or Digital Equipment Corporation or something nondescript like Lenovo?

Unlikely

As others have said, there's no need for Apple to do this, they have the licenses to the content already, it's just in a different delivery format. It's not Apple's business to stream ad-supported media like Hulu as there are no gigantic 30-40% profit margins in that model that Apple looks at.

What absolutely would make sense and become an absolute powerhouse to be reckoned with is a combined Hulu+Spotify. Hulu needs Spotify's European customer base and expertise and distribution mechanism, both services are complementary to each other, both are freemium services, and both have the blessings and indeed seen as the darlings of the content owners.

That would also take both services to the next level and compete with the AGA conglomerate (Apple, Google, Amazon).

Web Objects

But from another perspective, I don't think the hardware is the issue here - it really depends on what and how iCloud runs in terms of software.

I wouldn't be at all surprised if they were using some whitelabel servers running Mac OS X. After all iTunes is largely a web services platform running on Apple's Web Objects - not a bad platform but not exactly a hugely mainstream platform either... and really what is iCloud but iTunes store on steroids? Wouldn't it be ironic if they were indeed hackintoshes?

<3 Teradata.

meh

Blame Bob Crow :P

meh

In all likelihood, Apple wasn't exactly releasing Java updates as regularly as Sun did, and I think they've just given up the ghost on maintaining it themselves. Don't forget the most salient point of this Java update is that it allows for other JDK's to be installed in the process.

Seems to me that they just want to palm off the responsibility to Oracle and be done with it. As to whether they've given Oracle their Aqua integration stuff as well is entirely a different matter, but if I were Apple I'd do that and maintain the ability to run it.

After all the Mac is actually a really, really good platform to run Java on - intended consequence or not.

Hot countries are more eco friendly than colder ones

As someone who grew up in the mediterranean, we have oil heating (ie the most expensive type) for winter and we have air con in summer when it's cold. We also have water shortages aplenty and we have to think of ingenious ways to get rid of rubbish generally, because if left out in the sun it stinks to high heaven.

What's different between hot and cold climes is that while we have central heating and aircon, we NEVER use it ALL the time. We only put aircon on if it's above 35 outside or during a heatwave, otherwise simply closing the shutters and keeping the house dark is a remarkably efficient way of keeping a house cool in summer. Opening the windows wide open is possibly the worst thing you can do to keep cool. Similarly in winter, we don't need the central heating on at all. Just a few short bursts (2 hours between 6 and 8pm for example) is plenty heat for the entire night. Needless to say if you have the aircon on while in bed, you're pretty stupid as you'll wake up with a chill, and if you have your heating on while asleep too, your duvet isn't good enough or, quite frankly, you're not heating yourself up making passionate love. Yes, sex is a pretty good way of keeping warm!

Rubbish in hot countries has to be picked up within a day before it gasses the street. Seriously perishable stuff is usually biodegradable anyway, and mincing it up and putting it down the drain is a better bet (provided your drains can handle it). Then what's left is plastics, glass, paper and aluminium, which surprisingly is all recyclable and doesn't stink.

Furthermore, when I explained to my (English) girlfriend that there was a water shortage one summer, she balked at the fact I left the bathwater in the bath and scooped it up and threw it down the toilet instead of using the normal flusher. Old soapy bathwater is perfectly good enough to flush away last night's curry (and the soap helps ward off the nasty niff emitting skid marks left in the old bowl).

Finally practically everyone over there knows that heating stuff up is the most expensive thing to do. So the amount of crap that resides on top of an oven (because everyone cooks real mediterranean food needing HOURS of cooking) is amazing - kettles, hot water bottles, coils for outside hosepipes linked to the outdoor shower and so forth. Last but not least the ubiquitous solar panels to heat up water is almost everywhere.

The point of it all, is just using PLAIN OLD COMMON SENSE and a little bit of LATERAL thinking pays a huge dividends - that's why my typical energy bills come in on average at on average, one sixth of mates' bills, and I wouldn't particularly call myself eco-conscious at all (I certainly don't bother unplugging my stuff, and I like my light!).

In some ways C# is more open than Java

While C# is an ECMA standard, when MS submitted it, it also submitted the CLR to ECMA as well, so it's as open as the other big ECMA standard, JavaScript. Java on the other hand has it's JVM exclusively controlled by Sun and now Oracle, and has never been 'open' in the same way, so it does surprise me that Java is perceived as an 'open' language while C# is perceived as 'proprietary'. For once MS did the right thing there...

Sure, mono and other C# / .NET derived projects aren't quite as enterprise ready when used away from Windows, primarily because only MS and Novell really drive C#, while Java has Google, Oracle, IBM and practically every other house supporting and contributing to it. Similarly OSS foundations like Apache, while incubating some C# projects, haven't made all of their projects C#, and that's the only thing IMO other than odd .exe and .dll binaries on a *nix platform when using mono that really stall C#. Credit to MS for producing it, because it's truly a wonderful language.

On the flipside though since I mentioned Apache, they've proven to be a very good house for incubating and even things like the relatively basic apache commons project establishes Java as a richer environment than most. I say that Oracle hand over Java to ASF and be done with this nonsense.

Good idea but...

Try flogging that to someone needing to put a DC is a vaguely close proximity to an urban area or even in the city...

There are 2 flaws to this DC: first that the DC wings can't be attached together to create a larger floor area for servers (having several buildings is very wasteful), and second that they're not multi-storey. I know there are 2 problems with that, the air intakes and heat extraction through the roof, but while it's a worthy goal to reduce the cost of a DC, HP also need to minimise the area of ground the DC covers. Solve that, and I can bet you that they will sell several high-rise DC's almost instantly.

PWNED!

The Daily Star couldn't have got more owned than even if Murdoch saw reason to get involved with them.

I do wonder what kind of figure these 'substantial damages' are...

However, given how many submissions the Press Complaints Commission have had just in 2010 regarding virtually all of Mr Desmond's papers let alone the Star, I do wonder how this fool, Jerry Lawton, can even continue to have licence to practice any form journalism at all! Lies != Journalism. It's not even sophisticated enough to call it libel, it's just LIES!

It's all gone to me mwahahaha

As a developer of similar sites, the actual technology costs and costs of the developers building the thing for a project for govt is probably around 10% of the actual bill. Add in another 15% for creatives to fanny about and you still have 75% of the cost to account for.

What that's spent on is quite literally doing all the requirements gathering, research, planning, strategy, risk mitigation, strategy and all the other bumph, documentation and guarantees that adds a huge amount of man-hours and must be delivered alongside the site itself. Add into the fact that govt insists a small web business of 50-odd people has maximum indemnity insurance and you've got yourself the cost of a site.

That all said however, even a big CMS-driven site shouldn't really cost more than £100-120k to build, even with all those factors taken into account. Add in about £5k per year for hosting charges from even the most expensive (but best) ISP, Rackspace, and that's all I can really see as costs.

Invariably though there's some sort of integration or training issue to get these idiots to use it, and that also costs, but the main cost to building a site is quite literally getting the client to a) understand the business case of running a site and b) us learning how they run their business so we can consult and improve it for them.

After all, doesn't SAP, PeopleSoft and all that crap all cost *even more*?

Rather than change TCP, upgrade HTTP

HTTP is a hack of FTP basically, specifically tailored to ASCII content. For what it's designed for, ie transferring ASCII HTML pages over the network, HTTP is very good. About the only 2 advanced features of HTTP 1.1 that it can do is compress content with deflate and resume downloads. And that's it. For binary transfer it's useless, and while FTP is better, it's issues with NAT and firewalls with Passive / Active transfers don't make it compatible enough.

However nowadays, with so much crap (I'm looking at you, Flash, MP3 streamers, etc) also streaming over HTTP, it'd be far, far better to introduce a whole new transport protocol for the web, that allowed the usage of both UDP (for streaming) and TCP (for transacted items), then with the JPEG progressive format even images could be speeded up considerably by 'streaming' them over UDP.

Furthermore, multicasting would also be particularly useful for services like iPlayer as well - all of which HTTP can't actually do itself but has been hacked to do.

Then you could look at multiple connections built into the protocol so that a browser can open multiple concurrent connections.

Then the web server requires a Session cookie to track a user's path through the site however, that's used because HTTP doesn't maintain a connection. So make it keep the state and channel open to the server and the session can be built in to the protocol as well, thus saving the need for cookie support.

Lastly, a good, hard look at HTTP headers is desperately needed as the invasion of privacy and browser fingerprinting is at an all time high.

The problem is that by taking a good hard look at cookie support and HTTP headers, Google is possibly the most polarized WRONG sponsor of such a protocol as a result...

Young people

As the cool uncle, I'm always talking with my nephew about various things, and the topic of underage drinking and he showed me his latest 'fake ID'.

It turned out that it was one of these all-singing all-dancing ID cards that Labour were trying to push on us - and overage people were being paid by underage people to buy the ID card for them as a good proof of age.

So with all that news that young people found favour in these ID cards, it's true, but not for the legal and above-the-line reasons. It just goes to prove how out of touch the ex government was with society's feelings toward the matter. Well done Labour, and good riddance!

ZFS with multiple subsystems then?

Really this 'insight' is just ZFS but reincarnated with several subsystems working together in a higgledepiggledy way rather than one homogenous technology.

ZFS has it's famous ARC RAM cache. It can then be configured to use 'L2ARC', using the same ARC algorithm on SSD devices, and finally the actual data held on the disks itself. Add in extra features such as RAID-Z eliminating the RAID 5 goal, snapshots and the like, and it's a far, far more elegant solution than this...

TunnelBrick

OpenVPN client for Mac OS X, allows you to use an OpenVPN server without knowing anything about OpenVPN and just double-clicking on the .ovpn config file provided by VPN providers. In the days of increased spying activity - which even though Labour are out of government will still linger for too long, privacy is important.

TunnelBrick is free, while the better Viscosity (http://www.viscosityvpn.com) is $7.

What's a 'small' ISP?

This is need to know knowledge for anyone who cares about their privacy, more in response to this fine article than P2P snooping: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/04/21/google_data_censorship/

I think you'll find these 'small' ISP's will have a rather interesting proliferation of customers.

Insane

I have a couple of mates who work at direct gov, and their problem is nothing technical, it's just they've never had the mandate to force other government departments to transfer content to Direct Gov.

Regardless, this is a futile exercise that just won't work. Why?

The public sector is not a single institution, and there's no real cohesiveness to it - it is a sector of an entire economy. You would never get any site that is a hybrid of other sites in the private sector because of competition. In the public sector you don't so much have that kind of competition but you do have a huge variety of very, very different camps.

Given that Direct Gov has failed even to merge in 'soft' parts of the public sector - like the NHS - and really only has a bit of Home Office information and a bit of DVLA stuff, it proves that without coercion or mandarin support, such an exercise is entirely futile.

Furthermore, as many others have said above, while it's a pain for us as citizens to have to replicate information when applying to various different government bodies, at least it maintains control for everyone's information. Government departments were never usually allowed to share much information, and that right has been eroded heinously since 1997.

I think the real underbelly of this whole 'My Gov' lark is that Martha Lane-Fox after being appointed by Herr Brown as 'Internet Czar' or whatever pompous dictate he's bestowed on her has convinced Brown of the need to have a single sign-on, and merging of services altogether.

The problem is while Google and Microsoft provide single-sign-on across their broad array of services for practical reasons, there are services like OpenID already available that provide this without much work or expense to the taxpayer.

With all this in mind, I would continue to request the Register to contact friends at Outlaw.com and other sources to an investigative piece about the relevance of the Data Protection Act in 2010, as it seems to me that virtually every announcement this government puts out is in breach of one or other clause of the DPA. Furthermore has the Information Commissioner got any teeth or has he been blighted by the Number 10 Scurvy infecting any civil liberties part of government that doesn't toe the line of the Great Brown Puppetmaster?

Writing was on the wall...

I was wondering when this was going to happen, the writing's been on the wall for ages now, with Schmidt being booted off Apple's board, Jobs telling Google's 'No evil' mantra being BS, Google making a phone to compete with the iPhone, and what I believe seems to have been the straw that broke the camel's back: a software update enabling pinch-to-zoom multitouch on Android devices.

Apple is going after HTC as the largest handset maker as well as the maker of the Nexus One to set the precedent that Android (which is open source and thus not sue-able) is fine, except that it can't be used in it's current guise on a smartphone. Basically, Apple are saying 'Use Android for nettops, not smartphones'.

Succeeding here causes the precedent to build an insurmountable wall in front of Motorola (Droid) and Sony Ericsson (Satio etc) with their Android-based devices. Furthermore it may also cause Microsoft to tread carefully with Windows Phone 7 too, but since there's no Winmo7 phone on the market there's nothing there to sue against, as will Palm with WebOS (again too small a company to be of a threat to Apple).

While a lot of bickering is going on understandably about who invented what, what Apple did with the iPhone is invent/combine* (delete as appropriate) a variety of technologies and get them working together to create what we now know as the iPhone OS as a whole. Nokia famously said at the time of the iPhone's introduction 'We could do all the stuff the iPhone does on a phone, we just didn't think about it', and that's basically what Apple is trying to protect in both its suit against HTC and Nokia.

This is one of the issues with patents, that the whole ethos/usage model of an entire system like the iPhone OS can't be protected, only the specific cogs within it...

I can tell you right now, Android won't die as a result of this. What the best Apple can hope to achieve (and what they want I guess) is for Android to develop it's own UI and semantics that doesn't follow the iPhone OS as closely as it does... which IMO is entirely justifiable on Apple's part.

The suit also says something about using a DSP (in relation to a camera I think), which is probably the digital image filtering to clean up a photo image since the iPhone has such a terrible camera. This is in relation to Winmo6.5 devices, but Apple have been so behind on the mobile phone camera technology I believe this is just a smokescreen to portray the suit as not being out-and-out against Android, but a general one against HTC. Regardless, this part of it is IMO baseless and irrelevant.

PS: El Reg, can we have Google Demon/Angel icons as well as changing Bill Gates to Steve Ballmer? A Google demon image should be tagged to this post ;)

6Music needs to be unleashed, not gagged

Here's a controversial statement: what really is the difference in the audience of Radio 3 and 4? One is classical music and the other is talk. Radio 1 is general rubbish and Radio 2 the rocker generation plus Wogan.

6Music is the only station that actually appeals to a wide audience and it's limited numbers are purely down to the fact that DAB is a stillborn technology.

My opinion? Think of merging more of Radios 3 and 4 together, and use those savings to keep 6Music and pump it out on FM. That said, Auntie will see Radio 1 figures decline, but 6 Music increase, which may lose Radio 1's influence over the commercial stations like Capital, but in doing so Auntie will get a big boost in their moral currency and relevance, both of which have waned drastically in recent years.

Precompiled executables cached from trusted CDNss

Mozilla has spent a good deal of time and effort with their add-ons database all provided under a Mozilla SSL cert and with full security checks. As such, with JS libraries like jQuery, prototype and MooTools as well as commonly used helpers like swfobject or scrip.aculo.us all hosted on a variety of Content Download Networks (CDNs, ie like google's: http://code.google.com/apis/ajaxlibs/documentation/ or the MS equivalent: http://www.asp.net/ajaxlibrary/cdn.ashx).

Given the above, then why doesn't Mozilla host precompiled executables of 'approved' common javascript library 'stacks' so that when referenced, they execute fully compiled bytecode instead of parsing the whole lot through an interpreter - especially since the 'custom' code usually involves just a few URL pointers and meta information commanding the stack to show the mojo it needs to. They could work like SSL CA's are managed in the browser, so that trusted libs, like trusted CA's are automatically updated.

Apple should buy it...

I was discussing this on Ars Technica about it given Apple has hired an ex JPMorgan guy to find and buy companies with it's $40b cashpile. Personally I've always thought that Apple should've stepped in and bought SGI even when SGI first started experiencing trouble.

Anyway, I thought it'd be an interesting discussion to repost here:

I think there are 2, possibly 3 good options for Apple: SGI ($280m) and Autodesk ($6b). So for $6.25b, they get a metric sh*t ton of capability, and *still* have $34b in the bank!

Why?

- Apple would inherit the architecture (AutoCAD) and 3D (Maya, 3DS Max) markets overnight and complement their market leadership in video (Final Cut Pro, Quicktime) and audio (Logic, Digidesign) production software.

- Mac OS X would benefit immeasurably to the point it would probably be respected as the best UNIX OS out there. SGI's IRIX has XFS, far better than HFS+ (and given time can probably better ZFS), invented OpenGL which will complement Apple's OpenCL efforts, and if Grand Central Dispatch is the best threading optimisation Apple can do, the mind boggles at what SGI can do

- SGI know big iron. A Mac Pro is a nice machine but if you're in the market for a $25k workstation, a Mac Pro is a little anaemic. SGI's latest Octane is an enclosure housing 10 dual socket blades: 8 cores in a Mac Pro versus 80 cores in an SGI Octane. Think that's funny, you then have the servers: Try comparing an 8 core XServe with a 2,048 core Altix UV supercomputer! And they both use Intel.

- SGI know all about graphics. Both companies have a good relationship with Nvidia, but if Apple wanted to, SGI know how to make GPUs, especially pro ones. Apple of course probably wouldn't want to, but developing game-friendly hardware as a side-effect wouldn't be a big deal either. Did I mention SGI invented OpenGL? Needless to say it might be the right way to give Apple the kick it needs to provides decent graphics iron in their hardware. I mean A GT120 even being offered in a Mac Pro is just embarrassing!

- SGI has the envy of the geek in the same fashion as Apple is the envy of the consumer. While SGI's supercomputer business is totally irrelevant to Apple, supercomputers are profitable and the R&D windfall is worthwhile. Think of supercomputers as a racing team to a car manufacturer... let alone getting intimate knowledge of how spooks work (and helping the Apple secrecy cat and mouse chase And remember, Apple are developing OpenCL, and the primary beneficiaries of the unleashed GFLOPS from GPUs are precisely the same as supercomputer customers...

- Corporate IT depts would take ages (like a decade) to be convinced of using Apple hardware, even with SGI's credibility in big iron. But if Apple can sustain a business providing big iron regardless, then corporates might begin to swing in their direction over time. Instead of actively chasing it, Apple should nurture an ecosystem for corporate software to flourish on a combined SGI-Apple platform. They'd need virtualization (partner with Parallels or VMWare already closely here). They can offer storage through SGI, (but EMC who owns VMWare is better as a friend than an enemy), and they need to have hardware credible for a database. From those a corporate IT agenda might develop.

- In buying SGI, Apple would make me want to buy even more of their hardware :(

Two sides of the coin

On the one hand, Steve Wozniak did actually do something, and all credit to him for being a 'tech celebrity' despite the fact he's not done much since he left Apple. Unlike an infinite list of other celebrities (Uri Geller? Paris Hilton?) who have done absolutely diddley squat, he has got the decency to have at least one bit of credibility that he's done something.

On the other hand, the reason I love The Vulure is because it has the balls to do this, and fire up a discussion that may cause acidic hatemail from companies, readers and press and who ever else, and for that reason - even if it's unjustified in the court of public opinion - thank you for raising it as a debate.

No one's guilty here, neither Woz or El Reg. It's a discussion that had to be put out there regardless.

But the real wrath should be directed to the complete airheads, not people who do have even a hair of credibility, because even that's more than most.