Echoes of Active Directory Group Policy control here
Where MS let you define which executables were "allowed" on target machines.
Tested that for a while, turned it off and went back to regular rebuilds of client machines.
Posts by The Cube
405 posts • joined Thursday 14th June 2007 15:06 GMT
fraud isn't significantly higher among the 230 alternative payment mechanisms
So to put it more honestly; "the utterly crap 'security' offered by the credit card companies has been at least equalled, if not bettered by the other 230 payment operators"
Who should be surprised that the absolute minimum level of "we pass all the costs back to the customers and they are not even allowed to report it to the police, fork them whilst I buy myself another Bentley" security is, in fact, the minimum level? What a shocker!
I, for one, look forward to even more competition from other companies who might actually be able to spell security taking more money away from the negligent fat tossers who run Barclaycrud and their ilk.
Please tell me you were missing the correct irony symbol
When you wrote "but this should not be a political decision even if patent politics has become endemic within the industry".
Because, if not, then you have clearly not seen how effectively ETSI and the ITU ensure that none of engineering, common sense, the best outcome for consumers, science or basic tenets of standardisation are allowed to get in the way of the politics those organisations were created to foster and support.
You might consider ETSI to be a sort of politics lighting rod set up to provide a discharge point for the enormous political charges that build up around telco operators and vendors where the in-fighting and back stabbing would make the Italian mafia cross themselves and leave quietly before they got hurt.
The wonderful irony of regulation forcing competition
Come on all you American and Tory party free market muppets, come and explain why it is that "the invisible hand of the market" is down your trousers stealing your wallet until the evil gubbernment steps in to regulate and only then do we see competition in the market driving prices down...
The key paragraph being;
"Come July 2014, customers will be able to shop around for the best deal and sign up for a separate mobile contract for roaming, the EC said. They can also expect to retain the same number under both contracts."
Which, when added to the cap on inter-operator charges enforces competition by letting operators who are not part of the price fixed cartel* offer customers their same service and number for less money than their existing operator.
* note that there does not need to be direct collusion or even intent to form a cartel, simple theory tells us that markets with high capital barriers to entry will always end up like this with customers being robbed because there is no benefit to any of the network operators in driving price competition, only a benefit to you consumers and you are a dairy herd to be milked.
Won't change anything for normal people
I'll bet the local plod still won't let you report a crime if it was in any way electronic, you'll still get the usual BS "report it to your bank sir" even though it is your bank or credit card company who are most likely responsible for the feeble security that allowed the non-crime to happen and will spend months dicking you about before you get a single penny back from them.
Cybercrime laws are there to protect rich companies and governments, not the people they are elected to serve, I won't be holding my breath waiting for this one to be any different.
If there is the slightest sign of this law being halfway decent then the banks and other lobbyists will be all over it like a rash to derail it before they have to learn how to spell "security". Here's a suggestion to make the criminals running the banks and credit card companies pay attention, whatever is stolen from their customers every year due to their feeble security comes off the personal bonus pool for the board of directors. We can apply this to the extortion scam that is "credit reference agencies" too, the total national losses from identity fraud where a "credit reference agency" sold credit check data to support the fraud without the permission of the person whom the data refers to should be paid by the "credit reference agencies". That would get rid of the leeches fast enough.
Posted in So, what IS the worst film ever made?
You can't leave out Michael Caine's crime
Little Voice
An unspeakable act which should be used by the American Torturers at Guantanemo Bay to make the prisoners talk. "Tell us where the dirty bomb is or we turn the sound back up on Little Voice"
I know Mr Caine is responsible for some great films but nothing he does can ever remove the stain of Little Voice from his history or my memory.
Please tell me this is a guest post by Sacha Baron Cohen
And that there is a spoof film coming up where Baron Cohen plays a tosspot from the wrong public school with not quite enough connections who thinks he "gets" "web2.0" and "social"...
Posted in TDK BA100 earphones
Re: Sorry but no
You've never had a set of balanced armature headphones have you...
The headphones you list are barely better than what comes in the box with most players. I used a set of CX-300 for about a week before moving on to something which did less mangling of the recording I was listening to.
As another has already commented though, at this price you are close to a pair of Shure or Westone IEMs and the TDK will have to be very good to compete with those. I personally found the Shure 425 to be feeble and thin, great for female vocal but utterly useless for rock or anything with bass. The westone 3, if you can get a seal blows away anything I have ever heard from Sennheiser, Klipsch, Shure etc. etc. Oh, and please don't even mention "farty bass by Dre" those horrors should result in a criminal conviction for grievous harm to audio.
Posted in Apple iPad 3 packs LAPTOP battery
Got that the wrong way around
We could equally well say that what is lagging behind is the power efficiency and power management technology to provide the capabilities. If you look back over the history of battery powered compute devices such as mobile phones and laptops you'll see that most of the gain has come through reduction of energy consumption rather than increase in energy storage.
Re: New Math?
Not new math but Marketing Math where incoherent bullshit is presented as fact. In this case it probably is a typo but even with the "correct" number I still wouldn't trust it further than I could throw it. There are liars, damned liars, statiticians, politicians, police, lawyers, RIAA lawyers and marketers.
Fine but let's not teach them tech paleontology
No problem with educating the kids in something that matters but please, please, please don't let two dinosaurs indoctrinate them with non-transferrable skills specific to their dying monopolies. What we absolutely don't need is more budding network engineers who have only been taught how to waste money on mountains of Cisco kit you don't need and network admins who think that Windows server is the only choice.
Vodafone 25MB per day
Yes, this is a big improvement, it means I will use up to 25MB before switching to a local SIM, but let's remember they only did this because Ms Reding threatened them with the brown stick.
The problem for the robber barons at the mobile operators is the 1000x multiplier they are applying to the actual data backhaul cost between the remote network and their own network where they add the pointless crap their customers never wanted anyway and fiddle with all your packets.
The problem for the politicians will be that the mobile operators will threaten to egress the traffic locally in the country the phone is in meaning that the bottom inspectors won't be able to sift through all your data without a warrant any more. It will take several seconds for the excuse of terrorpaedos to come up and everything to go back to the way it was.
Re: Headlines
Chris,
I really do hope that G-Cloud works.
Having worked in places which fed from the teat of government programmes and seen how my tax gets spent I can vouch for why things cannot continue as they are. I am not just bashing the suppliers here, the fault seems to be fairly equally distributed between incompetent procurement on the part of the government departments who all want a custom everything because, you know, they really are a unique special snowflake and the suppliers who tend to be greedy and inept as an organisation. The rule of thumb was that if a government project needed "secure" then you charge 3 times what you charge commercial customers for exactly the same service. Again, not all supplier greed, the government customers will keep moving the goal posts and obstructing your delivery because they haven't got a clue what they actually need and can't write a service definition or specification.
As for not allowing individual SLAs, whoohoo! a voice of sense and reason is heard for once! Keep it up! I distinctly recall a project where the procuring department insisted that the service must meet a very high availability target to manage risk to life. I had to break the news to them weeks before go live that the contract they had negotiated and signed gave the requested availability excluding rather than including scheduled maintenance windows and that we would expect to see at least one less nine net service availability and maintenance outages of several hours.
Forcing the contract length down is another master stroke, no more low-bid and milk it all back with change request charges and additional fees over the 5 year lock in.
Again, I really hope you succeed with G-Cloud, buying IT services should not be stuck in the Victorian era, I do hope those who benefit from the current waste of public money don't manage to derail or distort the project too much.
I think you are missing some cultural telco issues Andrew
Telcos tend to be bloated bureaucracies full of unproductive staff who have very poor motivation levels due to an inability for anyone to achieve anything or to change the internal culture which stops them achieving. Many got this way by being a de-facto or royal chartered monopoly across large chunks of the globe and the mind set has not changed. Telcos are not a meritocracy where the innovative and productive get promoted, they are spat on and undermined by the herds of bovine wastrels who are still there because they can't get a job anywhere else and don't want to be shown up as useless and unproductive. The senior execs stay long enough to get a golden parachute and the good ones are gone well before it becomes obvious that their "changes" reinforced rather than addressed the underlying chronic issues.
In a telco, the investment case will be based on a 10 to 20 year lifecycle, the culture does not allow anything shorter than this, thus the need for uber standards that take ETSI or GSMA 5 years to bugger up, sorry, refine. You need standards like this if you are going to live with them for 20 years. This problem does not exist in the land of Twitter and Salesforce.
In a telco the management exist in a binary state of either;
a) No investment in new services, particularly non core, use all value added services to drive core network and billing traffic, that is our core business
b) We can't afford to be just a big dumb pipe, we must extend into the value added services, our pipes give us the competitive advantage over everyone else.
Clearly, these two result in an oscillation within the organisation rather than any sustained progress, any employee who could innovate and drive the dinosaur forward will leave in < 1.5 cycles or simply lose the will to live. Again, in an app store world this problem doesn't exist as the lean and agile app store vendor knows what they want to do and if they don't the other 5 just like them do and will out-compete them.
More cultural issues
To cap off the cultural problems with telcos;
There is no real competition in the telco world, just like petrol stations, banks and every other mature market they all know that reducing prices only benefits customers, not vendors. The telcos have armies of people who went to school, served with or otherwise know key government personnel and regulators to make sure no nasty surprises come from that direction (thus the true scale of Ms Reding's achievements). The telcos also work very hard to ensure that their pricing cannot be usefully compared to any "competitor" pricing by ensuring the plans are sufficiently different. This leads to a poorly informed customer base which produces the inefficient market they need and keeps the customers as the prey.
Combine this culture of ensuring that all changes are slow and gradual so that the big players going in are still the big players afterwards (this is what industry standards bodies are really for) and the tacit agreement that you can compete on everything but reduced price or margin and you get the modern telco market. The companies who control the networks have such vast sums of money locked up in them that they make real estate investors look high-risk.
What is asked for if the telcos are to survive this at all is for one or more of the players who own the infrastructure to change the entire culture of their organisation and even so, they'll still be too big to innovate at the speed of the small players. They'll try to do what the banks do and be parasitic in the payment stream but Apple has already demonstrated they can be bypassed for this. They'll also try to prevent really disruptive services from using "their" network but this will be a managed retreat from regulators. It will be a bumpy and unpleasant road with many pitfalls (for the customers and shareholders) but I really don't see a Telco making big enough changes to do anything other than slow the inevitable.
Data doesn't even need to be routed back to the UK ???
Unfortunately you are quite wrong here.
The mobile carriers have to route all the data back to the home network for two important (not to the customer) reasons.
1) So that your government can be sure they can snoop on you without a warrant or your permission, how are they going to do that if all your traffic doesn't go through a facility within their jurisdiction?
2) So that the mobile carrier can dick about with your data and do things like embed you mobile number in the HTTP headers so they can get in the billing stream. If they are not in the billing stream how are they going to keep their dirty little paws in your pocket? If you just "get to the Internet" then you have realised their worst fear and turned them into what they really are, just a dumb commoditised pipe.
The fix to this is easy, I have a wallet full of local PAYG SIM cards for all the countries Vodatheft want to rob me for (i.e. those that Ms Reding didn't fix such as the USA). I put the PAYG with the local number (which all the people there want to call me on anyway) into my "smart" phone and put the VodaSIM into a cheap Nokia dumb phone so people can still call my UK number.
"They'd better not be listening to it on a Zune" ??
I think you'll find your bought and paid for politicians have their campaign manager assemble a playlist of legally purchased media on the device of the largest sponsor of their election campaign. If that is Microsoft then I am sure they will apparently use a Zune if it is Google then I am sure it will be a streaming service....
Posted in Oracle inhales Taleo for $1.9bn
Cue mass exodus from Taleo before Larry bankrupts the customers
Yes, I can say "Sun Microsystems" I can also say "You have 12 months to get everything we have off Solaris" as most sysadmins were told. When even banks are terrified of what will happen to the annual cost when Larry the Vampire gets his fangs into them you know the price gouging is bad.
So now we get to watch 200 major companies decide if they are still able to migrate off this platform before the prices go all Oracle and if not decide whether they should just file Chapter 11 now rather than wait for the invoice from Oracle.
"it would only take 45 patents" ???
Erm,
If the royalty is 2.5% of the net selling price then, even by Apple's fantastic margins I think you'll find that it requires a lot less than 100% of the selling price to reduce the profit to zero....
Perhaps a semester of business studies is in order?
Posted in Cisco recalls suicidal UCS blade servers
"no no in the enterprise server racket"
And definitely when your "enterprise" tin comes in as the most expensive way to buy a box for an Intel chip by a huge margin with no real excuse. People who have paid through the nose for a commodity X86 server just to have a Cisco badge on the front won't be happy about components going bang.
I wonder how far down the field notice the warning about disabling the VESDA fire detection in any data centre with UCS installed is hidden???
Posted in The Register Comments Guidelines, 2012
What about the astroturf then?
Whilst I appreciate the issue that some people like Microsoft and others prefer Fruity tin and you don't want fanboy flame wars (that is what ZDnet is for) you cannot be seriously trying to say that there is no astroturf on el Reg?
I have read (and commented on) quite a few articles which look suspiciously like the stuff that my corporate PR agency pay "journalists" to write and then pimp round various outlets. These are very easy to spot once you are familiar with the method, they talk about a technology or a product category without any reasonable balance and in entirely credulous and uncritical terms (thinking of a particular article on retail payment tech here). The article will only obliquely name the sponsor, if at all, but will clearly be trying to create the impression that the sponsor's product or service is meeting a deeply important and necessary need and should be welcomed with open arms.
As for the infestation of "corporate reputation management" slime in the comments, it is well above zero and we all know this, when will el-Reg face up to this obvious reality and provide an astroturf icon for these posters to be clearly labelled with, tis easy, just add to the Vote Up / Vote Down a "Vote Astroturf" option then it takes a reasonable number of people rather than just one basement dwelling fanboy...
John, you've clearly never been involved in procurement..
In any large corporate or government funded org the way procurement works is that the sales gimp for the vendor humps the leg of the budget holder in the target customer until they give in and say "I need to demonstrate how this investment will yield cost savings". The sales gimp then goes round the target org and finds all the expensive inefficiencies they can and makes up completely unrealistic ways in which their magic tech could, in another universe, downhill with a following wind, reduce these inefficiency costs. These costs, by the way, are guessed at by the sales gimp because the corporate / government funded agency is completely unable to explain any of it's costs, it is too busy being an inefficient corporate (or in the case of the Met killing civilians and evading prosecution). The sales gimp then adds up the total guess (erm cost) and this is presented as the "saving".
Fast forward a couple of years and shock, horror! none of the savings have materialised but the sales gimp has his / her commission and the purchasing budget holder has moved on to another job based on the enormous imaginary cost savings they "achieved" in their previous role, having carefully legged it before anyone realised there was nothing behind the curtain.
The fact that the NAO finds any improvement should be cause for celebration for anything that has gone through government procurement, look on the bright side, they could have spent all that money with Capita....
Can't we just assume
That anyone stupid enough to give a toss what inane and irrelevant drivel seeps from these two pointless turds is also too stupid to know or care that they are the are being advertised at? Surely we should be celebrating that for a few seconds at least the single digit IQ brigade gaped slack-jawed at Twatter instead of some unspeakable "reality" TV show where amoeba compete with each other for who can be the bottom of the gene pool?
On the upside the turds are pictured tucking into something that looks very much like a......
Posted in News Ltd gets deeper into Arabia
What is the Farsi for "change your voicemail passcode"?
Just when the Arab spring promised to bring some freedom and democracy to the region along comes evil old Rupe to make sure that can't happen. Hang on to your voicemail lads because CrimeInternational is here to turn you into tabloid fodder and get into bed with your new "democracies" to make sure you can't ever rebel against your new corporate dictators.
Now wait for the lobbying for new laws to ensure that if you copy a news corp article you get your fingers chopped off....
Evil bloodsucking parasites.
Sad comment on the state of audio in the days of the iCrap
You see, the "journalist" thinks that any company which makes more than just iPod docks and squeaky little single driver speakers with nasty subwoofers farting out one note of bass must be "high end". Pity the poor plebe who has never actually heard anything "HiFi" in his life.
It only counts as a fake if
the video was recorded on different hardware. If the video was recorded on the tin he was demoing then it is arguably a lot less fake than any recent Apple advert (sequences fabricated to increase gullibility). I can see why a senior exec would not want a Gates BSOD moment and why the techies might not want to show the world how good their exec was at playing a game...
RE "which mobile networks have done for years"
Hahahahahahahaaaaa!
That's a good one, tell you what, why don't you SMS that to me on Vodafone and then sometime the next day when it finally gets delivered I'll read it.
End to end integrity is only useful within a user dependent time frame, if the Royal Snail deliver a letter 20 years late the recipient doesn't say "wow, you must have tried really hard to deliver that" they say "you useless bunch of &*£(&%(*£(" which is what I normally say to Vodacrap after sending an SMS saying "I'll be 4 hours late for dinner" and getting home before the message anyway.
asking too much of users to compare prices while they're travelling,..
Simple solution, force the operators to serve up their pricing plans on a standard web services interface and then we can have £0.99 apps which run and work out which roaming operator will rob us the least.
Much better solution available
Simply add to the transmission standard a mandatory notification of advert start and advert stop events in the transmission. Then those who still actually watch broadcast TV can buy televisions / decoders / PVRs etc which have sensible config options;
1) Program volume and Crapvert volume as separate settings, you could even set the default...
2) Do not record crapverts for PVRs
See, easy and it is even a commercial opportunity for equipment vendors so the Republican slimeball has somebody to take a bribe, sorry "campaign donation" from.
Yeah, so much stuff is like so yesterday
"What we see is that youth are pretty much fed up with oxygen. Everyone has the oxygen in the air, we are going to give them hydrogen cyanide instead, this will be really cool for several seconds until they realise why oxygen is so popular..."
Not that I am suggesting that Windows Mobile=Toxic of course.
They could start the machines up underwater
and the drives they delivered would still be more reliable than a Seagate....
Absolutely
The pointless pencil pushing waste of taxpayers money responsible should be fined and then fired for being a waste of oxygen. Wasting even more taxpayer's money paying a tiny fine which will in no way impede the bovine blunderer in their career plan of leeching off society for another 10 years before retiring early at our expense is doubly pointless.
We need a smarter incentive scheme for the vermin that infest our government and council services. Perhaps when they are caught out breaking the law they should be placed in stocks outside the town hall so that the people whose lives they have made a misery with their tinpot hitler act can pelt them with rotten fruit for a few days. I can think of more than a few home secretaries that should have spent a month on the lawn opposite Westminster allowing the people to pay them back for their service to the country....
We are tired of these parasites behaving as if they are above the law and getting away with it, perhaps setting up a few guillotines in town squares might serve as a warning to them?
Your "gateway" laptop
Is that the laptop you used even though the government warned you not to which turned out to be a gateway device? Did the dealer wait till you were hooked on the laptops and then sell you tablets too?
Oh, sorry, I remember, there used to be a computer maker called Gateway...
Well said
Shame that the media corps have already bought and paid for all the politicians (clearly Ms Kroes managed to stay off their shopping list somehow). I believe the dark lord Mandelson is the reference case of evil and in the pocket of evil here. We can no more expect any more reform on copyright than we can expect the Conservative Party to regulate the financial sector properly (turkeys don't vote for Christmas even once they are stuffed).
Just to be clear though, that doesn't mean I think shouldn't work to educate enough of the voters that the politicians get frightened enough to do something.
As for the unskippable parts of media I have implemented a simple solution, I stopped buying new DVDs years ago and have never wanted a PooRay disk. Anything that won't play in VLC doesn't get played and to be honest, if I want to see something like Breaking Bad then I just find a bittorrent leecher who has grabbed the files, no way I am going to wait 6 months for the release date in our "region" so the studios can stuff their pockets.
ASTROTURF
This article stinks of astoturf and is about as one sided as a speech by the home secretary, this is not journalism, it is an advertorial, please el reg don't ever accept an "article" from this shill again, or if you do make sure you are getting the money from the NFC vendor / bank who clearly paid for this horrid piece of fluff and put the vendor's name and the amount paid at the top of the page so we know how bent the article is.
May I suggest that as a balance to this BBC grade bum licking you send a proper journalist like A Orlowski to go and see the bods at Cambridge University Computer Lab and get a proper, independent, somebody might actually believe it, version of what improvements or risks the banks are now inflicting on their customers without their request or permission?
Still takes the b45tards months to give your money back though
And god help you if they have charged you some sort of "fee" thanks to account events which only happened because their "security" implementation can be broken by your average primary school students.
Posted in Eggheads crack open web troll brains
better at discerning these opinions and rhetoric from facts and descriptions?
So, what they are essentially saying is that when you read anything about any product or company you have to be "better at discerning these opinions and rhetoric from facts and descriptions", this then would include;
1) Corporate advertising and "brand" where most of what is said is opinion or rhetoric and contains as close to zero truth as toothless regulators allow
2) Astroturfing by corporate lackeys on internet forums where any attempt to disseminate any real world experience or facts about the product is met by marketing speak, fatuous drivel and the pretence that the poster is a real customer
3) Actual customers (/victims) who are angry thanks to the extreme dissonance between the BS spouted by the corporate and the actual reality, hmm, wonder why they stick the boot in???
We already have vehicles for fat b45tards who can't fit in a BMW
They are called car ferries and have propellors and rudders for maneuvering.
They are even neatly equipped with a "roll on / roll off" system for the truly lardtastic who are so obscenely fat they can't even waddle any more.
(those in America can replace "Lincoln Flabbigator" or "Ford Waistline Excursion" or "Caddilac Expanded-Arse-Mobile" for "car ferry", they also have rudders for steering and take 3 miles to stop from their cruise speed of 20 knots)
Posted in German website offers custom cow killing
But how much for the Galloway?
Tell us! How much for a 5kg pack of pasture slaughtered George Galloway? Or did they not mean that kind of galloway?
They seem to be forgetting where the real money is
Cisco want this disastrous idea so that they can supply the UK energy companies with an absurdly overpriced network for the stupid meters.
The utility companies want it so they can mine your data and sell it to advertising slime to bombard you with yet more crap you don't want.
DECC want it because they have some halfwit idea that a "smart meter" will allow your rooftop solar PV plant (you know, the one they just halved the feed in tariff on) or your plug in hybrid (you know, the car you don't own and don't want) to "sell" energy back to the grid at times of peak demand.
The claim for the consumer is that the meters will support dynamic switching of tariffs, this would be true if the legislation was set up properly to prevent the utility companies creating lock in, just wait, the second month you have your "smart" meter some sales gimp will be ringing you up telling you that EDF have noticed you have an old, non heat recovering dryer type washing machine and they can sell you a new one at a nice price which they will spread across your bills for 36 months. The hitch is, of course, that you can no longer change supplier, you are as locked in as you are with the mobile phone vermin. This is not a new con, the con is old, look back at the early days of our national grid when the electricity board made a mint out of flogging electric cookers from their shops which customers paid for on their electricity bill.
Don't even mention the word "security", we know that the tosspots in government think security is killing brown people and taking their oil. As for the energy companies? They will make the banks look like they know what they are doing, been a victim of card fraud? You aint seen nothing yet.
The reality then is that;
Taxpayer money is used to prop up Cisco for a few more years
Taxpayer money is used to buy substandard "smart" meters which will be obsolete within 5 years and some russian will have written a worm for them in two, all of you kWh is belong to us
Utility companies get to dodge the whole "smart switching" by selling people shit they don't need on lock in contracts
Utility companies get to pass on short term spikes in price to unlucky customers and DICC will stand behind them because it is "demand management" which is obviously green
Taxpayers and "customers" (not that the energy parasites have to think of their hosts as customers) get to pay several times over whilst being invited to rub on the KY Jelly and grasp their ankles.
Nice one government!
I wasn't sure whether RIM was finished until I saw this
Despite business users dropping their Blueberries and all the Chavs toting them in tacky bling cases to organise looting with, despite the amazing unsuccess of the tossbook or whatever it is called, I still wasn't sure that RIM was utterly finished.
Now I see that they have "done a Nokia" and grabbed hold of the anchor chain of the sinking Titanic that is Microsoft, now I know they are finished. Perhaps they should order a massive print run of $9.99 price labels for their handsets now.
All that is left is for the bean counters to take over the company to "reduce costs and increase shareholder value" which in the real world equates to selling off the water tight bulkheads for scrap and then looking surprised when the ship goes down like a blackberry toting chav during sentencing...
Don't see much of a quandary here
There will be a few customers that will buy into the overpriced servers in an overpriced EMC box "vision", just like there were several customers who bought several units each of the Cisco UCS money pit and thought that it was a really good idea to pay twice as much per Intel processor from Cisco as you should pay from any of the server vendors. Presumably the habit of paying more than the network kit was worth was so addictive they wanted to do it for servers too?
In the meantime those customers who didn't get arrested with a hooker on their drunken night out with the sales person will sidestep this particular turd on the pavement (dog dung on the sidewalk) and buy non lock-in commoditised product where the server and the storage are cheap and leverage the same management software tricks you need to make the server in storage trick work to make the economic version work instead.
Pinhead indeed
The problem he is referring to is that very American process where special interest groups like oil companies who want to poison Alaska and the Gulf for a few dollars or the RIAA run TV advertising campaigns supporting specific candidates.
This is not a donations issue as donations are disclosed, this is the hundreds of millions of dollars spent by "friends of ...." to prop up whichever politico they have managed to buy or blackmail.
Fork me, did his trousers muffle his voice?
(that is did his pants hinder him talking out of his ass for Americans)
"Information is the oil of the 21st century"
No, it isn't you muppet, oil is the oil of the 21st century because you cannot substitute either information or money for energy, no matter how much the EU and US central banks and finance ministers might want to pretend that is true.
You might say that gas or coal or nuclear (that is nu-killer for Americans) are the oil of the 21st century, you might even say that wind (mostly caused by fatuous Gartner pronouncements) or solar are the oil of the 21st century because they are sources of energy upon which our ability to acquire, store and process information depends.
But then anyone who listens to Gartner gets what they deserve, they probably have shares in a cold fusion company which is "12 months from commercial production" and have religious books written by a bad science fiction writer on the shelf in their L Ron Cupboard....
Yeah, right, pin it on the consumer
Of course, we should all become prey to the racket operated by Experian and the other Credit Threat agencies.
"Regular checks of personal credit reports" - here's an idea, change the law and require Experian and the other bloodsuckers to provide this for free or lose their license to operate in the UK.
Here's another idea, when I am not applying for a loan or a credit card Experian I can tell Experian that my record is locked and nobody can get a credit check on me, that way no fraud as nobody can get a loan / account / card etc. without credit rating returns.
Of course neither of these will happen because they would protect the consumer and not the bankers who have bought and paid for the politicians, let's see how many weeks the Conservative party could run without their donations from financial services.
Bunch of self interested worthless tossers, I pity the poor plod stuck in the middle trying to maintain any pretense of upholding the law with both their hands tied behind their backs by the politicians.
Oh, an in memory database, of course!
That will be really cheap to buy, use no power to run and be addressable from a single CPU!
You might want to go and look at the relative size of the appropriate checksums (specifically your hash must be provably unique) and see how many GB of RAM you need for each 1TB of disk space.
Meantime I am off to buy shares in a RAM vendor ;-)
Future might well be Video but
It won't be on overpriced Cisco crap built to chinese quality with it's code written by teams of bargain basement off-shored workers who can't spell innovate and wouldn't recognise a unit test if it hit them.
The future of network gear is commodity ethernet, scaling out flat, not 5 layers of overpriced bandwidth limiting rubbish specified by the Cisco Certified Money Waster engineer.
The future of client devices is coming from Apple or Samsung and HTC, it won't be four times the price it should be with half the functionality and it definitely won't give a toss whether it has a Power over Ethernet port worth ten times the end device cost to run it.
Sorry Cisco but you need to face facts, the engineers all left that fossilising corpse years ago and it is just the bacteria (sorry, finance staff) left feeding on it's flesh.
Could be the start of a good trend
Once they have banned alcohol advertising (everywhere, not just on FB) and started to deal with that social menace we can move onto some more unwanted plagues on society. First, ban all McDonalds and other junk food advertising too as that is also a social menace and costing our economy a fortune.
Don't just ban it on ArseBook though, as others pointed out ban it on football shirts, buses, everywhere, no advertising alcopops or burgers to make any more fat, spotty lagered tossers making every town centre uninhabitable for humans from 18:00 Friday to 08:00 Sunday, burberry clad, blackberry toting vermin.
It is falling over north America
You have to remember that Americans are mostly obese and therefore cover a much greater proportion of the ground than other people, thus making it much harder for the flaming lumps of satellite to sneak between the bellies and bingo wings to actually hit the ground...
Ironic really
That it should be EMC-VMWare who shows the world why EMC is a dinosaur that needs to find somewhere quiet to lie down and fossilise. EMC, where data goes to die.
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?
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